SPOKANE, WA–I’ve been teaching you to freshman and must now take issue with your posing as real news when you are in fact absolutely fake. You think you’re saying one thing when you are saying another, being clever. Yet you don’t, even just a little, give your beloved reader a clue into your true purpose. You would do better to dumb it up and give it to ‘em straight. Directness or directions, if you please, Articles from The Onion.

Could you please make an ounce of effort to publish just one article in which all the statements are true? In the forty billion articles you have published—and irreversibly retarded our youth’s understanding of current events—over the last twenty-two years, not one single percent contains all 100% of the truth. I find your articles deceitful, self-serving, and often a mess of silliness and immaturity. This CONFUSES our youth, dear Articles from The Onion, because they are already confused by the range of celebrity reality they see in the media, especially via the internet. You are perpetuating this problem, and should realize the error of your ways. Just sayin.

that I feel absolutely no shame–don’t even consider it–when I’m chatting with my colleagues, and I don’t use capitalization or punctuation? I still proofread my chats before I hit enter, but I don’t consciously notice the punctuation errors. As if it’s the fact that it’s my colleagues, and not anybody else, who make this crazy phenomenon possible.

Congrats Tom Wolfe, on your Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. I knew you could do it. Get down with your lifetime achievement of awesome and new-journalism. Ha cha.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOhBObw2jRE

I like characters with depth and so should you, it’s not just for fiction anymore. People have complex backgrounds that give them complex beliefs and behaviors. People are contradictory. Zombies are not so contradictory, which is why I hate zombie movies. (They would terrify me if they had personalities. What if the zombie knows it’s his lady and tries to save her in some way that reveals their individual relationship rather than kill! kill! kill! in I Am Legend?)

Moving along to the positive. Who are those characters who have good depth for you? I’m not a fictioner, so I have a short list:

I’m interested in narrators, because I’ll have to make myself a character in nonfiction. First-person narrators seem to have lots of potential for depth, but what about third-person or (gasp) omniscient narrators? I’d be interested to see an omniscient narrator with a peanut fetish/fear of smoke signals that isn’t explicitly stated, but overhauls his or her narration.

When we say we want to write Organically, what does that really mean when nature is so patterned and ruled by math? I get that organic = shuffling meter off the mortal coil, but I suspect we may not be saying what we think we are.

A facebook site says, Keep it natural. Ok, what about fractals? (It’s a beefy math-tastic formula in which you plug a number and get an answer, then plug in that answer for another answer. The Mandlebrot set is the Mother of these dudes, and when you plot the points on a graph it looks like this:

The important thing is that when you zoom in, the image keeps repeating itself. Scientists are using the Mandlebrot set to make calculations in nature that weren’t previously calculable. Measuring shorelines and estimating oxygen production in forests. So is writing organically might be writing in a structure that repeats itself on a sliding scale. Then what?

Another site gets wispy and teary about an arboreal metaphor: “Be the soil that your writing grows from…” Ack. I’m just saying that nature is much more patterned, mathematical, and precise than we remember at times. Nature’s got its bits under control—tight control.

Here’s where I get intimate with you all: I decorate my mother’s grave with stones. (See Melina’s post from yesterday–Jean Michel Basquiat.)

All the stones are from bodies of water. The first set came from the Wisconsin River about a year after she died. It seemed natural to sweep off her gravestone with dead grass and line up a handful of rocks. Then I’d talk (or not) and head out. Simple. Read more »

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3k5oY9AHHM

And Perpetua looks however she looks when you imagine her while you read Barthelme.

What say you?

Shakespeare apps, spin the bottle for themed poetry, rhyme finders, Frostisms (Whitmanisms??) poetry readings “enhanced” by reading along on a glowing screen?

I don’t know, friends. Internet on the phone with fancy apps and whatnot makes me believe I would stray farther away from poetry than I already have. Basically, I’m unconvinced by Bob Tedeschi’s argument. To me, it’s just more portable internet.

The apps don’t seem that impressive, or maybe they feel more for people who spring breeze through poetry than people who grave dig for poetry.

"I do love humor in poetry…"

Bookslut’s got a hugely interesting interview between Matt Rohrer by Ruth Tobias. It makes me want to meet him. I remember not being outrageously impressed with Rise Up, but I feel like I should take another look. He put out A Plate of Chicken in 2009, which is much more formally technical book and worth a look, and his newest, Destroyer and Preserver, comes out next spring.

In the interview, he names Creedence as his poetry’s soundtrack and responds to the “where do you see politics in your poetry,” question with, “Uh, yikes.” And says more charming things like:

“Nothing is more boring, because nothing is risked.”

“Well I love trees. And I think nature is great. Hooray for nature.”

“I always wish a poem were as emotionally direct and powerful as a rock and roll song… Lyrically, rock and roll doesn’t have to be anything special — it’s the emotion that the music imparts to the song that takes everything to the new level. Which is why I get so tired of hearing those conversations about POETRY and LYRICS, or WHY BOB DYLAN IS (or isn’t) A POET, and blah blah blah.” (This one hit me right in the heart like a high-five.)

Shira’s got me thinking about the parallels between creative writing and comedy. The major concepts are the same: think, write, workshop, revise, and get on the stage. I’m finding that I write much more for myself with poetry, much more aware of the audience for comedy.

The good news for me is that most of the comics in the general Spokane area are pretty amateur. Makes me think I can slide in more seamlessly. So, here’s where I’m at in the process.

I do homework. AKA, I netflix standup and take notes on joke structures. Notes might say something like: use simile to get out of a heckling retreat, or counting out the timing between echoing a previous punch line.

Then I write. Self-explanatory.

Then I workshop, which means trying jokes on friends until they reconsider being your friend.

Then you rewrite jokes, and practice verbal cues.

And then I land on stage in October. I’d appreciate it if you’d stop by. Also if you have patience while I’m imposing comedy workshops on ya.