Truth in Fiction

I've been re-reading Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise lately, which is about a young man of college and just post college age about 90 years ago. It continually strikes me that things haven't changed much at all in 90 years, just electronified. Does not the main character's rant late in the book ring true of our current political situation? Try changing "newspaper" to "blog":

"We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in the Congressmen, countries try to believe in their states men, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any... party... can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy....

"And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads..."

This sounds like something a slightly more cynical, well, me might say, in the here and now. (That is, of course, if I were a literary genius like Fitzgerald.)

Books Over Vacation

I seem to have fallen into a possibly unfortunate reading pattern lately. It seems that if something I'm reading has a sequel, or a prequel, or is in a sequence of any sort, assuming I do not despise whatever book it is it seems I must read all the other books in the sequence as soon as possible. This may just be a case of me being too lazy to figure out what else to read, but if I'm not careful I might get OCD.

The first thing I read over vacation was Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, which consists of All The Pretty Horses,The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Its trilogic structure is very loose--the first book is about one character, the second about another, and the third about both of them. The trilogy contains unity of theme more than story. I may have liked Horses the best: McCarthy's writing is certainly better in it than any of his other works I've read, and at his best McCarthy is very powerful. The Crossing is excellent too, but overlong at times. Cities contains probably the most powerful story, despite the fact that its climactic confrontation is a bit of a cliche. Its epilogue rivals the end of No Country For Old Men in dreaminess, thematic appropriateness, and surpasses it in sheer understated power.

Next I read Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, which was awesome. A few of the awesome things about it:
There is a cult of evil librarians ruling the world.
Monsters made out of old romance novels.
A grandpa figure who has exclamations based on sci-fi authors.
Works Plato's Metaphor of the Cave into a YA Fiction book, a feat which alone deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The author, Brandon Sanderson, has a potted plant named Count Duku.

Then I picked up The Portable Oscar Wilde, intending to merely read The Picture of Dorian Gray, and ending up reading all seven works included in it (see? OCD!). A quick overview:

Dorian Gray is amazing, a Faustian novel as only Oscar Wilde could write it. Also, it has a Preface regarding art and the artist, which is amazing if somewhat incomprehensible. My mom and brother were arguing about what makes good art, so I read it to them, and it effectively ended the argument because they were trying to figure out whose side Wilde supported.

"The Critic as Artist" is a long essay which, having read only once, I can only really review as Interesting. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in art of any kind, especially art criticism.

Salome is a once-act play, which has appropriately been called more of a prose poem, regarding the temptress who had John the Baptist's head on a silver platter. As far as theatre goes, The Importance of Being Earnest is then a nice counter balance (it is, of course, one of the wittiest pieces of literature in the English language).

De Profundis, Wilde's prison memoir, is probably my favorite. If I really talk about it here this post will get prohibitively long, so I'll give the teaser version: Wilde reveals here a greater depth of understanding of Christ's teachings than many of the "great Christian writers," living or dead. He's nothing to a Luther or a Walther, of course, and he professes no interest whatsoever in metaphysics-rather, he understands Christ artistically, and he seems to have hit a lot of nails right or almost right on the head that way. This would be an excellent tool for what Craig Parton calls apologetics for the "soft-minded," that is, apologetics through art, myth, etc.

(I intend, some day, to write an essay or at least a blog post about Wilde's understanding of Christ.)

I didn't think a whole lot of Wilde's poetry, as included in this volume, except for "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," which reads a lot like a poetic version of "De Profundis" (it was written at around the same time). It, too, shows a remarkably Christian influence, in a beautiful and wholly unhypocritical way (or as much so as humans can muster). I recommend reading De Profundis, the Ballad, then De Profundis again. Seriously.

HOLY CRAP!

They're making movies of both Solomon Kane and (a new one of) The Picture of Dorian Gray! I just read the latter, and it is already one of my favorite books. The former is one of the best characters of pulp fiction, created by Robert E. Howard (who also created Conan of Cimmeria). He's a character with a bit more depth than Conan, so a movie about him might be a bit challenging to pull off. Of course, Howard showed character almost exclusively through action, so it may also be perfect for modern movie tastes.

Maybe 2009 isn't looking so bad for movies. We'll see.

An Interruption

Excuse me, I just wanted to interrupt and say there would be no more interruptions.

Not to Embarass Anyone, But...

This is just about the coolest thing ever.

Oh, and Merry Christmas Eve.

Another Semester Older, Another Semester Wiser. ...Well, One Out of Two Ain't Bad.

Some semesters feel like Hemingway short stories: sparse, with a lot of pointless dialogue, and when you're done it almost feels like nothing's happened while it also feels like too much has happened to have fit in that short a period, and it makes you want to go back and see what you missed. This semester didn't feel that way. This one felt like a Dickens novel, with incident crowding upon incident and character upon character almost too rapidly to keep track of; some parts went too fast, while others went far too slowly; and story arcs that should have taken weeks or months to resolve only lasted a few days.

I fear I am being far too abstract. It was a good semester, yes, but my most trying so far. I have a general policy of trying not to regret the past, of seeing the lessons my mistakes have taught me, and were I to do it again there is very little about this semester I would change (an incident, perhaps, a stray word or two). So I am glad and thankful for this semester. I am just not sorry to see it go.

Fairly soon after getting home, I got (I thought) sick. My symptoms were:

1. Chills
2. Headache
3. Muscle Pain
4. Grogginess/tiredness
5. Irritability (though it's debatable whether this is unusual)

I figured I'd sleep it off, but then a bright idea occurred to me. I realized I had coffee, or tea, or Mt. Dew at almost every meal at school, and since coming home I'd had very little in the way of caffeinated beverages. I went online to look up the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal, and discovered that they included:

1. Chills
2. Headache
3. Muscle Pain
4. Grogginess/tiredness
5. Irritability

Hmm.

Otherwise, not a whole lot to report. In order to not get bored, I decided to launch a self-study course in film history, mainly watching a lot of the keystone films in various movements, etc. I emailed a couple film profs, and got a recommended list, and ran that by my mom who saved me (or tried to) from Italian Neo-realism. We'll see how this 'course' pans out; I watched Battleship Potemkin today (USSR, 1925) and, well... ugh. Hopefully other films have better results.

Book Challenge

So. There's this book challenge that I have somehow decided to sign up for. And yes, I know I'm in college and shouldn't be doing things like this. But what do you do at college? Well, to quote an excellent line from the movie The Great Debaters, "College is the only place where you can read all day." And all books apparently count. So really, this is just an excuse for me to keep track of all the books I read, a habit I got out of after high school. The rules can be found at the link above; my list will appear below.

Books Read, 2009:

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
2. Salome, by Oscar Wilde
3. The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
4. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
5. Poems, Poems in Prose, and a Fairy Tale, by Oscar Wilde
6. Anecdotes and Sayings of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar Wilde et al.
7. The Critic as Artist, by Oscar Wilde
8. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
9. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
10. This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. The Roots of African-American Drama
12. The Adventures of Hucklberry Finn, by Mark Twain
13. Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose [Reading for Class]
14. The Writer's Book of Days, by Judy Reeves
15. Creating The Accomplished Image [Partly read, for class]
16. The People's Bible Commentary: Romans
17. Wheelock's Latin
18. God's No and God's Yes, by CFW Walther [half-read, for class]
19. The Urth of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
20. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken
21. The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
22. Manalive, by G.K. Chesterton
23. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
24. Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
25. The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany
26. One More For The Road, by Ray Bradbury
27. Sailing to Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg
28. The Halfling and Other Stories, by Leigh Brackett
29. Our Town, by Thornton Wilder
30. Figures of Earth, by James Branch Cabell
31. The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
32. The Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
33. The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch
34. Coffee at Luke's, edited by Jennifer Cruisie
35. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
36. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
37. The Fabulous tom Mix, by Olive Stokes Mix [half-read, research purposes]
38. Nightside the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
39. Who is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain
40. The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
41. Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger
42. Dutchman, Amiri Baraka
43. Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller
44. Smoke, by Ivan Turgenev
45. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
46. First Love, by Ivan Turgenev
47. The Name Above the Title, by Frank Capra
48. The Story of Film, by Mark Cousins
49. A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne
50. Lake of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
51. Calde of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
52. Exodus From the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
53. Heroes of the Valley, by Jonathan Stroud
54. The Last Siege, by Jonathan Stroud
55. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
56. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy
57. Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today, by John Kleinig [Partly read; book klub]
58. Storeys from the Old Hotel, by Gene Wolfe
59. The Wolfe Archipelago, by Gene Wolfe
60. Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer
61. Rude Mechanicals, by Kage Baker
62. Black Projects, White Knights, by Kage Baker
63. Gods and Pawns, by Kage Baker
64. Dark Mondays, by Kage Baker
65. Questions of Truth, by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale
66. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, by Garrison Keillor
67. Carry On Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse
68. Either You're In Or You're In The Way, by Noah and Logan Miller
69. A City in Winter, by Mark Helprin
70. The Veil of Snows, by Mark Helprin
71. Swan Lake, by Mark Helprin
72. Believer Beware, edited by Jeff Sharlet et. al.
73. The Merchant of Venice, by Shakespeare
74. Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan
75. Richard III, by Shakespeare
76. Othello, by Shakespeare
77. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
78. The Laramie Project, by Moises Kaufman et al
79. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
80. The Tempest, by Shakespeare
81. Proof, by David Auburn
82. King Lear, by Shakespeare
83. Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
84. Sonnets, by William Shakespeare
85. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, the Restoration through 1800
86. Winter's Tales, by Isak Dinesen
87. Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger
88. The Controversy Between the Puritans and the Stage, by Elbert Thompson
89. Lost Worlds, by Clark Ashton Smith
90. The Taming of the Shrew, by Shakespeare
91. The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, various authors
92. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
93. Peace, by Gene Wolfe
94. Great Joy, by Kate DiCamillo
95. Much Ado About Nothing, by Shakespeare
96. Waverely, by Sir Walter Scott
97. Reading the OED, by Ammon Shea
98. Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld
99. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip Jose Farmer
100. The Fabulous Riverboat, by Philip Jose Farmer
101. How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff
102. Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison
103. Anecdotes of Destiny, by Isak Dinesen
104. The Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis
105. The Owl Service, by Alan Garner
106. Wizardry and Wild Romance, by Michael Moorcock

Stacking the Deck: The Failure of the MPAA Rating System

[Another composition piece, prostituted for blog material.]

"Mom, I wanna see Saving Private Ryan!"

I was perhaps ten years old. All the other kids, it seemed, were seeing the WWII bloodbath—arguably one of the greatest movies ever made—but I was not allowed to. Why? Well, in my mom's words, "Because it's rated R."

Of course, this was not actually the reason I was not being allowed to see one of the greatest war movies ever made. The reason was that it was filled with gore and violence on an unprecedented level, and my mom had decided that my ten-year-old mind did not need to be filled with such images. However, the short explanation she used was that it was "rated R."

An "R" rating means, of course, "Restricted." It is generally movie theaters' policy not to admit anyone to an R-rated movie who is under the age of 17 unless they are accompanied by a guardian of some kind. This is a voluntary rule, put in place based on the recommendations made regarding films submitted for review and rating by the MPAA—the Motion Picture Association of America.

The Motion Picture Association of America is one of the most well-known institutions in America. It is a pseudo-Hollywood institution, as it proudly proclaims, because while it is based around Hollywood and the movie industry, it claims to be completely outside of the authority and power of the motion picture industry (http://www.mpaa.org/Ratings_HowRated.asp).

The MPAA rating system is based on the recommendations of a "board of parents," who view each movie and try to apply a rating based on what "most American parents" would think an appropriate rating for that movie. Their ratings are "voluntary" —producers and directors are "free to go to the market without any rating" (http://www.mpaa.org/Ratings_HowRated.asp). However, in today's film industry, doing so would almost certainly mark a movie for controversy and make it a proverbial "black sheep" in the movie industry. So while submitting a film for MPAA rating is voluntary, it is the sort of choice anyone who doesn't want trouble is forced to make. It reminds me of my grandma's cherry pie that she would serve at Christmas time—you only took a piece if you wanted one, but if you didn't want one, you had better be prepared to suffer grandma's glares all day.

The MPAA rating system rose out of a desire to help parents make informed decisions about the kinds of movies they want their children to see; though in some cases, such as R- and NC-17-rated movies, it has turned itself into rules for preventing certain age groups from seeing certain movies altogether. While this is a commendable goal, and perhaps a necessary one in our pluralistic age, its execution by the MPAA is thoroughly imperfect and could use improvement.
A case study, hopefully, will illustrate what we mean.

Take two films, both of which were released in 2007: Once and Live Free or Die Hard.

The first, Once, is an independent film that was released to a limited number of theaters and quickly gained a sort of cult following. Set in Dublin, it is a simple story of a busker and a Czech immigrant who meet and fall in love. They are both musicians, and the busker writes his own songs. They spend a whirlwind three days recording an album, but then, because of very subtle differences that are never really explicated but that don't have to be, they are forced to part.

Personally, I think this is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. I mean this not just aesthetically, not just because the music was brilliant and the acting was perfect and the composition and everything else about it fell perfectly into place, but I also mean this philosophically. In a normal Hollywood film about a "once in a lifetime" romance, the couple would meet and fall in love, and all the external conflicts would fall away or be made to go away and the couple would live happily ever after. The ending would be generic, and heart-warming, and trite: love conquers all.

Once's message, however, is more artistic and more nuanced. It conveys the idea that a once in a lifetime love need not have a happy ending. The idea that one can act decently despite bad circumstances. The idea that you can improve someone's life, and in fact be the best thing that ever happened to them, despite having known that person for less than three days. Love conquers all, yes, but the world is imperfect and the ending doesn't always go the way it ought to. But that's okay.

The critics seem to agree with my assessment of Once (see A.O. Scott's review for the New York Times, Peter Travers' for Rolling Stone, and Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times for more). Richard Roeper even went so far as to call it a film that "would make any twelve-year-old a better person."

Once was given an "R," or "Restricted" rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. According to that organization's website, this means that the ratings board of the MPAA thinks it is a film that "most parents would not want their young children to see" and that "May include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements." Once's specific rating was "For language," presumably the "hard" language mentioned in the above generalization.

One word is used repeatedly in Once, and it is the one word that, at least colloquially, is considered one of the worst of curse words. Once might actually be a movie many parents would not want their children to see, simply based on the pervasiveness of this word in the dialogue.

However, we will leave off discussion of this briefly, in order to look at our second example, Live Free or Die Hard.

This movie was released in the summer of 2007, and was the fourth Die Hard movie. It was rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of violence and action, language and a brief sexual situation.” The other three installments of the series, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Die Hard With a Vengeance, all received R ratings. The creators of the movie claimed they had scaled back the violence and profanity to receive the PG-13 rating.

According to the MPAA's web site, a PG-13 rating “is a sterner warning by the Rating Board to parents to determine whether their children under age 13 should view the motion picture, as some material might not be suited for them… A motion picture’s single use of one of the harsher sexually-derived words, though only as an expletive, initially requires at least a PG-13 rating. More than one such expletive requires an R rating, as must even one of those words used in a sexual context.” This seems almost self-contradictory. Words used as expletives are said to denigrate the things they refer to—think of various racial slurs. But using a sexually-derived word in such a way requires only a PG-13 rating. Using these words to actually refer to sex, that is, in a context where it is possible for them to be appropriate, automatically garners the film a higher rating.

But that is not our current point. Live Free or Die Hard is a violent, profane, and sexually oriented movie. Its central message, if there is one, involves solving problems by resorting to violence and an iron fist. As a college student, this sort of thing actually appeals to me for the pure escapism that it is; but when I put myself in the shoes of a concerned parent, the perspective changes. Any child can pay for and walk into this movie without challenge, simply because the movie cut out a few curse words and made its pervasive violence less graphic.

Once, as stated, is a movie about love and about realizing one’s true potential. It is a redemptive and, in some ways, a salvific movie. Yet to see this movie, a child under the age of 17 would have to pass through whatever restrictions a movie theater puts on R-rated movies, simply because the dialogue contains some language the MPAA does not approve of.

The MPAA makes a point of saying it does not exist for the benefit of artists or film makers or producers, but for “concerned parents in order to help them make informed decisions about the type of movies they want their children to see.” But how can “concerned parents” make such decisions when the MPAA’s ratings seem to be increasingly arbitrary?

It is my opinion that the MPAA rating system is at best outdated, and at worst hinders parents in making the “informed decisions” it sets out to help them make. Were I a parent, I might easily prefer my children to see a movie with many swear words to having them see a movie with fewer swear words but with sex and pervasive violence instead.

As consumers and movie-goers, we should hold the MPAA more accountable for the kinds of ratings it gives to movies, and perhaps push for reform of the MPAA. Based on what I have said here, I highly recommend that parents and those in charge of the younger and more impressionable members of our society look at a movie’s content and, even moreso, its themes and message, and pay little if any attention to the MPAA rating.

Excerpts

At semi-random. The novel is still in its state of being quickly edited.

He said, “I see a flat land, a land that no longer knows distinct color but where the bronzes and the reds and the greys all bleed into one another and the black lies under them all. Creatures wander through it that would put Saint John's vision to shame, but they are no longer dread omens but death itself, and they no longer terrify any but themselves. They flee they know not what to they know not where, bucking and screaming and biting their own tails. They flee across the country and occasionally the people, naked men with skin the color of sunlight seen through smog and women half-clothed with skin paler than white snow, bring them down and feast on them, and they howl their pain and agony and rage at what they must do but they do it anyway because not to do it, I surmise, would bring them much more agony.”

Across from Tatiana and Julia sat the twins. While eating, neither of them looked up from their plates, but pored over them as if they were necromancers and the plates tomes about how to raise their dead loves from the grave. They ate in this manner as well, passing utensils back and forth while scowling at their plates. Every once in a while they would each skewer something on a fork, hold up their forks to each other for comparison, look at each other, nod, and continue eating. It was very strange.

“At least I don't try to ad lib Shakespeare,” I said.

“I don't do that, foolish boy!” she glared at me. “I try to ad lib Spenser. He's much superior anyway.”

And we went to sleep there, in our warm little cocoon, soft and warm and comfortable and secure. We awoke to the roaring of St. John's beasts and the feeling of hell and the flash of hellfire.

“Mom would never do something like that against her will. I know her, and you know her. She would wander the world, forever, alone, rather than stay with a man she didn't love, or with a man who had done something like... like that. Right?”

A long pause, then finally, “Right,” from Tatiana.

“Oh,” said Julia then. “How I wish I'd been there! We would know exactly who to believe.”

Bloody Done!

Well, it's been the most trying NaNo yet, but I bloody well made it! The novel itself stopped at 49,779 words (just to spite me, I'm sure), but I wrote 300 words of randomness and crossed the finish line at 4:35 in the morning! What sleep?!

I'm not sure, but I think this may be one of the best things I've ever written. Not that it doesn't need massive amounts of work; I'm just fairly happy with what I've written as raw material.

For the curious or the masochistic, I will be sending out a slightly cleaned up version of this very rough draft as soon as I finish slightly cleaning it up. Those who want to see a copy can comment here, email me, mug me, or otherwise contact me and I will email it to them.

Well, there's this new fad called sleep, and I think I'm going to try it, just a bit. Slainte!

Stormfield Can't Sleep, So He Goes Through Some Old Papers And Digs Up A Lot Of Sentimental Hogwash

Stormfield seems to be picking up Robin and Bob's bad habit of self-renaming and self-referencing in blog posts.

Hem. I couldn't sleep, so I ended up digging out the box that my loving family put all my desk papers in when they lovingly kicked me out of my room (after I left for school) to make room for the white man, er, my brother.

These are mostly papers from my junior year of high school and earlier, back when a large amount (or most of) my writing was, at least for first drafts, done by hand in notebooks or on loose pieces of paper. I have separated the papers into piles of Sentimental Hogwash (conference notes of various kinds, signatures, mementos--things I want to keep but only for the memories), Entertainment (stuff that's bad at this point but also entertaining), First Drafts (of works of wildly varying value), and a small pile of things I might actually use or refer back to.

The earliest thing I can find here is a printed copy of the journal I kept for a computer applications class I took at the local middle school in the year 2000. The longest entry is six simple sentences, most entries shorter than that, but they brought back memories I would probably never have revisited otherwise.

I found what are sort of the three touchstones of my "early" career, by which I mean the time when I was thirteen and started writing regularly (and this without conscious decision, really, I just started doing it). The first is a play I wrote, involving a disastrous mixer recall. The second a short story that took me from 2002 to 2004 to finish; it is about a small town in Iowa in which is represented every religion, sect, and cult in the world. Strangely enough, the story itself was not about this aspect, but about several other equally strange things. The third is The Passing of the Anars, the novel that came out of my attempt at creating a Tolkien-esque fantasy world, which I worked on from 2002 to 2005. I was looking through it; it's awful, but the notebook containing it has a really kick-ass cover (thanks to the artistic talent of a friend of mine, whose drawing ability far outshone my writing). Actually, the plot I had outlined (I abandoned it a quarter of the way through) is still, I think, fairly good if it could be written well; it's symbolic on several levels, and... y'know, stuff.

Actually, adding to these early touchstones, I found a Composition Book filled with radio scripts I started writing at age twelve.

I found the first draft of The Fall of the Kingdom, the short story I sent to Merlyn's Pen (a student writing magazine that published one percent or so of its submissions) that Merlyn's Pen told me they would totally have published--had they not just gone bankrupt.

I found the story I wrote from the perspective of Grumpy the Dwarf, a character with whom I have always sympathized.

I found a lot of cryptic notes and messages to myself, which I can only assume made sense at one point. For example, an entire sheet of blank white paper devoted to the question: What happens to Gon? On the other hand, I encountered some notes I took with the thought of writing an alternate history, and only realized after reading them that not everybody would see the phrase "cheese-eaters" and immediately know it meant "French."

In view of recent discussion regarding opening lines, I would like to reproduce two I found written on the same sheet of paper, during what I can only imagine was a trying time for me:

Small animals crawling over the walls is never a good thing. But drunken shirtless frat boys with baseball bats trying to kill them is actually worse. And this, I knew from long experience of my sister's parties, was the high point of the evening, the point from which things only got worse.

Bad enough. But, printed as though it's the very next paragraph though apparently it isn't, is this:

When Ella sat down at the table, her hair was waving and her cheeks that dark red color that it used to be only I could make them. But that was back before I decided to be gay, and before she decided to sleep with the boss.

Eep! I have a feeling that if my sixteen-year-old self had known these would see the light of day, he would be very embarrassed.

As a general note, it seems the general arc of my early writing (with the exception of the attempts at Tolkien-ism) has been to de-Twain-ify. My early pieces smack of attempted Twain, while as they progress they become more modern and only throw in phrases like "discommode" or "cogitate" once in a while, for effect.

Also, as a further general note, I now distrust my ability to edit my own poetry. I found several first drafts of poems I had edited and posted various places, and about three quarters of the time found I liked the non-edited versions better.

On that note, I'll end by throwing a couple newly re-discovered poems up here, as they will serve as much purpose here as they will once they're back in my box of papers. These were written before I thought I could write poetry. They are unedited.


The water on the shoreline takes me back to the land where my allegiance lies
The water on the shoreline takes me back to the time when we were young
The water on the shoreline takes me back to the dry country
To the place we used to play in the time before you cried...
--

Spiral of years
Spiral of tears
A much-maligned cacophany
Of wishes, hopes, and fears
What's it all mean, then?
Was there a plan, then?
Or did you pick me up to let me drop?

All my doubts and
My malcontentment
Wash over in a
Flood of resentment

I've not enough faith to pass
I've not enough faith to last
I shall surely fall by the way-side

I nailed Him to a tree
Whose only crime was
Loving me
Surely I am the basest of
All men

Thought, word, and deed
I've naught left but to plead
And hope His grace will cover me

Christ came to me and said,
"Fear not my son,
The battle's already fought and won..."

He took me to the River
Dunked my head
"Fear not my son you're
No more dead..."

In the middle of my night He came to me
Proclaimed his victory on the Tree
Robed me all in white
Bathed me in water
Fed me with bread

Two Opening Lines I Want Use For Novels, Based on Recent Events or Actual Quotes

"The angel was protecting us, but then he lost his head."

"On the downside, I'm completely broke; on the upside, I have horseradish sauce."