"Just"

In high school, an underclassman complimented my writing. I was a junior or a senior and he pointed out how well I incorporated a quote into what I was writing. The quote was cited but if it hadn't been you wouldn't have necessarily known I was quoting anything. I'm not sure this is the best type of writing, but it is something I miss when reading students' writing these days. When I taught at the college level, I saw how often students would drop quote without any sort of introduction. I've done that a fair amount in this "radioheadhead" series but that's for artistic reasons. In good writing, at least in my opinion, you introduce all your quotes. For example:

1) Thom Yorke sings, "You do it to yourself."

2) Kurt Vonnegut writes, "Strictly speaking, I was rewriting an old play of mine. But that old play had been written by a right-handed stranger fifteen years my junior."

It's funny what making this an important part of writing prioritizes. Suddenly, you want to know every possible way to say "says." If the person is doing something else than just saying something, you use that. So they sing or they write. In less fanciful moments, they state, they consider, they relate, they find. It's a weird thing to focus so much time on but it feels important.

After writing "You," I had my dad read the prose poem. It's very compounded. It's saying a lot of different things at once. I think it's good and expresses how I feel about things but my dad's reaction was "Oh, it's a poem? That makes sense then, I don't get poetry." I wanted to take "radioheadhead" back in the other direction here so this is what you get.

"You"

This is the first one of these I think I've done that essentially includes all the lyrics of the song. It's also full of other quotes and references. I guess I felt like it was okay to have very little me in something called "You." I got tested for COVID-19 today so I'll know if I really do have it in a few days now. If you think you have symptoms and can get tested, do so. And everyone, wear a mask! It's for everyone else's protection! ("And why should I believe [protect] myself, not you?")

"Morning Bell"

THE ROOF is on pause. When I returned to the blog for this play I found a poem that I had forgotten I'd written so you're going to get that tomorrow. Thom Yorke had a very different and yet similar experience with a Radiohead song once so I thought what I'd do today was something I used to do and riff on those song lyrics to talk to you all.

"Nude"

"We are only what we always were, but naked now." When does John Proctor know he will die? Proctor, an antecedent for John Tucker Must Die? And I hear today that John Wick is responsible for real murders. Inside I say, "Don't get any big ideas." I fret, I worry, I think "they're not going to happen." John lies, "you paint yourself white," and he thinks John Dies at the End. The hint of DeLillo, the return of the Lynchian refrigerator buzz, my friend saying he just deals with the cognitive dissonance, "the dude abides," yet I "fill up with noise" and feel like I must scream... John dies and goes to... Hell? The want for change. Be the Change. UC* in the world. Penny thoughts, momentary notions, liminal writing, "his gi was so thick, I couldn't get a grip on it." "Mind is thinking."

*"UC in the world" besides an obvious pun is a reference to a realization I had when my dad and I both were members at different forums with the initials UC.

"Everything in Its Right Place"

I'm so sick of the taste of cough drops! "Yesterday, I woke up sucking on a lemon." It's just red and yellow back and forth, back and forth, reaching in my pocket wondering which flavor it'll be... "There are two colors in my head." *cough* *cough* Hey, I didn't catch that! (Sorry, coughing!) "What, what was that you tried to say?"

I write song lyrics annotations as @pandrio on genius dot com.

"Karma Police"

"History repeats ... first as tragedy, then as farce." The thought of myths as perfection, blame all the problems on kids these days. One thought on The Lobster*: people take over karma and they muck it up. On screen, the karma police oppress the unattached; in life, they attack the whistle blower who "buzzes like a fridge." People are abused or abased, but hey, make fun of their "Hitler hairdo." Lock her up. It's always a slippery slope, because no one wants to look for safe handholds. Your support, "it's not enough," it must be unequivocal. "I've given all I can." "Then kill yourself," Obierika says. You're "still on the payroll." If only, "for a minute," if only. "How am I not myself?"

*not my idea, but a friend's!

"Identikit"

Detective work is essentially telling a good story. Researching your topic, finding the pieces, making them fit, keeping it all realistic. Not in the sense that you catch the wrong guy (though, sure, that happens), but in the sense that other people are invariably unknowable. And though I can only truly know (and truly dislike) me, myself, and I, life happens among us. So the cops catch the criminal--he is just as known, as real, as true, as the reality show star. The crime is solved, the craving is satiated. Both are "sweet faced ones with nothing left inside;" an identikit--a drawing reproduced from witness testimony--stands alongside the picture on the television, leaving us with positive thoughts: the streets are safe; boy, she's pretty! The mug shot becomes an odd liminal space where one becomes the other. (Auto-correct wants to say "imaginal" instead of "liminal." I look it up--"imaginal," relating to an image, as I'm talking about reducing a person to their picture, to what we see when we look in a face.) Ultimately, in industrial, suburban society, this is what we have: "pieces of a ragdoll mankind." The oddity of it all being that once we have that empty picture, that identikit, we know, we can't undo it. Thom says "when I see you messing me round, I don't want to know," because to know who his lover is with is to know the lack of infidelity; without a culprit, though, he needs to think such thoughts. It's almost saying something about Eyes Wide Shut, where another Tom can't help but imagine his wife's infidelity, daydreaming about it constantly, and yet he saw* the man she desired, but can't remember him. There is no face, no image, no identikit. It drives him crazy to know without knowing. "I can't read it--there aren't any words on it!"


*or, yes, could have seen

Edit 6/12/2020