Ishman (2)

Getting lost in ones own wake. Traversing through the horde of paper, typed, handwritten, which I’ve accumulated over the years is a daunting task – and, of course, fitting to the fact that I’ve failed as a human being, writer and fortunate-one. And this is what failed ones do: they gawk at their past. They laugh at those who lie to themselves regarding what is and what is not optimistic. Yes, I’m the Al Bundy of writers. I am the antecedent of playboy centrefold dossiers. I can’t say that polyster pants are comfortable but I can say that optimism is the right hand of Hugh Hefner blondes that stick their hands in them.

Advice to young people (men): the chicks, playboy or not, really are out there for the money only.

The first “Ishman” post, here, was an attempt to turn the old typed words into flash-fiction. But it didn’t work. The pic below is another piece of “Ishman” I recently found in my pile of whatnot. I didn’t expect to find it. Yet I would not consider it a “surprise”. Can’t believe, though, that I actually forgot about it. This is an example of not preparing and organizing properly when writing. I suppose there are authors out there, yes, even published ones, who can sit down and just start writing. When they stop writing they have produced a work of art. There are few who can actually do that – Dan Brown is not one of them. (I wonder how Dan feels during each trip to the bank?) I used to love just sitting down at my old typewriter and typing. A great feeling. Ishman (both 1 & 2) remind me of that feeling. I should have let them be. (The feeling – even only to remember it – when I was young and frivolous was good but it was also a lie and I should have known that it was a lie…)

-tgs-

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Strange Family Epic

Just finished Middlesex. Oddly, I read most of it while visiting San Francisco (hence the lack of posts in September). It was my plan to carefully read this work – and I did. It is now easy to say that Jeffrey Eugenides deserves the Pulitzer – without a doubt. But…

Can’t say that I actually like the story. The writing, on the other hand, is magnificent. After reading half of the book I realized that I was in for a strange epic novel about a Greek family – which bored the hell out of me. JE’s writing is what kept me in the book. This is the first book I’ve read in a while where I think the actual writing is better than the story.

I don’t understand where the whole hermaphrodite thing comes into play for this novel. Nor did I get the juxtaposition of the “I” being in Berlin, Germany, and telling of his (a) life in Michigan, USA. My best guess is JE’s actually trying to say something else with the strange constellation of time and space. There’s really nothing to connect the now of Berlin and the then of Michigan. So why do it? I really thought he’d somehow come back to the now in the end. Instead he stayed in the then. Strange, indeed.

I also think JE’s writing a story in a story so as to make a point about America’s coming to terms with the realities of the sexual revolution and, perhaps, cultural orientation. This is great read if you want to get inside the head of people who are different and what they might go through. Beyond that, this book is just plane smart and full of an author who is even smarter. I wonder how long it took JE to get to a final manuscript. A tough write, for sure. But I guess that’s why JE gets the Pulitzer.

Here a few examples of Eugenides’ writing that caught me:

Priests shouldn’t have families

…Exactly what cars are supposed to be; they were extensions of their owners

…He was heading for the lawless, liberal hideaway to the north! (Canada)

Sex is biological. Gender is cultural

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind

There was so much love in Milton’s eyes that it was impossible to look for truth

…The essence of tragedy is something determined before you’re born

…The tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies

-tgs-

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Willie Epiphany

What a great title for a play. Willie Epiphany. I like that so much that I might just start setting the scenery up in my head. Wait. Naw. Forget that. Instead, how ’bout this…

Last night yet another lost epiphany. This will take its place as an entry in a notebook made by Moleskine. (Yes, an advertisement. A special advertisement: one to make a point, perhaps not unlike life in general; click link, go somewhere, buy it, initiator will get nothing in return. Oh well.) Anywho.

This epiphany is about the legalize marijuana conflict. How did I get to this epiphany? Well, I guess, at the risk of throwing myself into an abyss of speculative jean-gatefolds, it came to me while walking home along the Atlantic shores of Delaware. I was walking from Rehoboth to Bethany. Actually I would have gone to Fenwick Island but by the time I reached Bethany there was too much blood loss from both my feet and my heart. Anywho-who.

I actually had a premonition during the walk that Willie Nelson would be once again arrested for possessing marijuana. Low and behold, I get up the next morn, (I managed to sleep with one foot on the floor in a bowl of Epson Salt) my feet still aching from walking so far in flip-flops, I turn on the news and sure enough, good ’ole Willie is arrested.

When I have these premonitions I usually don’t think much of them, hence they get posted in a notebook that travels around with me. But this one? This was different. Walking the shores of Delaware at night, clear skies, stars abound, with the right touch of alcohol coating the belly and two joints coating the brain, is like finding the exact point on earth, or perhaps human existence, you don’t want to be – and yet – it was utterly beautiful – almost breathtaking. I suppose, for a short moment, I wished it would take my breadth away – all of it. But like Willie Nelson, I just don’t have that much luck.

The epiphany I had, though, was if you walk long and far enough in life, it doesn’t mean you go anywhere.

So much for stories with a morale.

-tgs-

Hard to believe that Samuel Beckett once couldn’t get published

-Is there hope for struggling writers out there today because of S. Beckett’s first try?
-What? Are you actually trying to compare…
-No. Of course not. Forgive me. Slap me harder now, please.

I do not miss Samuel Beckett. I miss Samuel Beckett. Let me state clearly now: I know so little about this man’s work. I guess that’s because I’ve failed to read “More Pricks than Kicks”. I have read almost everything else he wrote, even Acts Without Words I and II and Quad. Still, admiration can be dulled. The fact that he grew up privileged and yet shunned privilege for the sake of his work… I just can’t figure this guy out.

Reading anything Beckett while drunk on Guinness was one of my favorite pastimes – a great way to exit the confines and cave-corners of a hum-drum life. In the period of life when I did not read him, I was able to slowly but surely participate, without questioning, in the compulsive behavior world that was cubicle-hell. Oh, what a waste of time that was – since cubicle-hell won’t hire me anymore. No, there was no giving up on Beckett. His wild prose and indulgent wit made me feel as though I were part of this crazed humanity and not because of having four fingers and a thumb, the pillars of cubicle-hell, but instead because Beckett made my imagination fly.

Anywho. I dug out “Dream of Fair to Middling Women” the other day when I got frustrated reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I actually liked The Virgin Suicides. But Middlesex… This is the second time I’ve tried to get through this book and… it’s boring the hell out of me. My girlfriend keeps warning me that if I don’t finish reading it I’ll be sorry. “It won the Pulitzer,” she says. I guess I’m going to finish reading it.

I’ve since finished Middlesex. Here a short post on it.

Dream of Fair to Middling Women was rejected in 1932 and Samuel Beckett stored the manuscript away for rest of his life. It was first printed/published in 1992. Jeffrey Eugenides has written a few short stories (very good ones, of course) and two novels, the second novel earning him the friggin Pulitzer prize. I just don’t understand why a book like Middlesex can be so recognized and Beckett’s first work so bottled up.

I guess being a recognized writer is about the grammar and sentence structure and, for goodness sake, not challenging the friggin reader. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Here and here some other comments in this blog about Sam Beckett. Jeffrey Eugenides to come as I continue the struggle to finish Middlesex. Pic below the bland but very special cover of my FIRST edition printing of “Dream…”

Struggle on.

-tgs-

Visiting Siena

Going through stuff, stuff we happen to take with us while passing here and passing there. But do we really take enough? Remembering being here or there can be a wondrous Ereignis. But to really take the things we’ve walked over or trampled on… I mean, that is ultimately what we do, isn’t it? Our travels aren’t really travels at all – in these days of mobility and urgency and the miracle of…

The Right Now

I wrote a play once that I absurdly titled “Siren of Sea #8”. I can’t remember what it’s about anymore but it does deal with the idea of The Now. That is, people wanting – whatever they get – right now. Perhaps, like so much of my other work, it is a great mix of stupidity and alacrity – but a theatrical audience will never know that, eh? No matter.

I was in Siena, Italy, last spring. Northern Italy – in general – is a place to visit and not just for the sake of your partner’s lust for romance. Although the wine is good, it is also a place to step foot upon the history that has made western civilization – at least that which has been schooled to those born post nineteen forty-five.

It was my second trip to Northern Italy and accentuated the desires that were awoken by the first. The whole Christian iconography-thing that is viewable in every friggin town-atop-a-hill is utterly magnificent. I especially like the imagery of the feminine of a Christianity that has been long since forgotten – or is it misbegotten? Whatever.

The pics below are from Siena and…

L’Allegoria del Buongoverno

The Allegory of Good Government

Pax = Peace

The “Pax” chick is lying, quite lazily I might add, on the couch waiting for peace. The others in the pic are those offering governmental virtues – I guess that means they are good (virtues). What is not pictured here is the other half of the painting. It portrays The Allegory of Bad Government. (Go figure.) No matter. To think that fourteenth century artists had that kind of freedom. I mean, does the media that is freely available to the people today have… ANY freedom?

 

Golly gee, Batman!

-tgs-

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Ishman (1)

Way back when I would sit down at the typewriter and type nonsense it felt good. Just the typing felt good. Did it really have to matter what I typed? This is an example of what would transpire. Today, I suppose, it might be called “flash fiction” but I’m not sure. I don’t actually know what flash fiction is. The pic below the original. Oh well.

Ishman part 2 here.

Ishman and the Trade Fair

Flash Fiction by T Stough

I‘m reading Jack Kerouac and thinking about being a consumer and buying a BMW motorcycle and driving to Homestead, FL., to tell all the fathers of the world that they should be (and are quite deserving of) castrated but then come back to reality trying for a time to think of better ways in which I can utilize my time so that productivity will not be lost in the name of consumption but in the mind of a nothing-thinker who himself is lost forever and ever falling through eternity waiting to fall onto the highest mountain that lies dead centre in the united mistakes of America and is not polluted with bourgeois commodities forgotten in the wake of advancement…

Where to go at the end of the road?

I asked a person on the street if he could help me with directions. He wore a long uncombed beard that had flakes of bread stuck in it, round glasses with tinted lenses and a bright red jump suit. I could see that his shoes were worn out; they had holes on the sides where he must have had deformed little toes. He asked me where I wanted to go and then told me that he wasn’t sure where he was either. He pulled a neatly typed piece of white paper from a bag and handed it to me saying, “It doesn’t matter where you want to go they will follow you there no­ matter what.” He walked away and never noticed the people that stared at him as though he was an exotic animal in a zoo. The paper he handed me was titled, Bericht von Messtechnikern. It began so, “Wir suchen einen Sponsor, der sich mit unserer Messarbeit weiter beschaftigt.“ Or, roughly translated: “We’re looking for a sponsor that can work with our measuring systems.” The text continued along the lines of this: “There is a threat to mankind that the satellite system being so quickly developed is capable of reading the thoughts of the humans of the earth. The satellites can already read the thoughts of animals.

Yes, of course, Satellite’s can do just that, I thought. I also thought: So much for misplaced protest trade-fair literature.

I went my way down the Kö, searching for the bar Claudia Schiffer was discovered in. Such a nice person I’m sure and to be discovered in a bar on the Konigsallee, Düsseldorf, Germany, and to now have tourists search for it. Gee, it’s like going to Paris to see Jim Morrison’s grave. And Schiffer even speaks French. Whoopee.

I eventually made my way to the Altstadt and found an Irish pub and ordered a pint of Guinness. I lit a Marlboro and sucked the smoke deep into my lungs. Ishmam was to meet me in an hour near the Ulrige Kneipe where he would give me a map. The map is from a girl named Jasper who was once a lover of Andre. Jasper and Andre have been on and off for years. I was to put the map in an envelope and send it to Andre at the address of Paco in Bremen. Paco sometimes comes between Jasper and Andre.

I drank the pint of stout and ordered another and lit a butt. There was an Irish girl with long red hair sitting opposite me with a cup of coffee and a cognac. She had an open brief case beside her and was reading through some papers. She paused for a moment, lifting her head from the print and looked at me looking at her. She pulled a pack of Benson-Hedges from her case, put a butt to her mouth and just before she was to reach for her Bic I leaned over with a sigh and flipped my Zippo open. She gasped somewhat as the flame reflected beautifully off her pale red-ivory tinted skin. She inhaled deeply and said thanks. I asked her if she brought her work to the pub. She said no. I asked her if she was in a lot of stress. She said no. I asked her if she would like another cognac. She said no. I asked her if she could suck a golf ball thru ten feet of garden hose. She said yes and got up to move to the other side of the bar. It was time for me to go and meet Ishman. I drank the stout empty, paid the bar man and before I went thru the door I looked back at the redhead. She gave me a smile and shook her head. I walked thru the Alstadt and thought of Günter Grass, I don’t know why. I heard someone start-up a Harley and rushed around the corner. Two men, with suits on, just kicked over brand new Sportster. I shook my head as the thrill was gone, they couldn’t even start the thing, and they treated it as if it were a toy, a toy for rich boys. But of course, they’re working bourgeois-happy-people with no care in the world and they probably will never get caught without a condom although they are exactly the ones who should as all they do is hurt and lie and cheat and…

I delivered the papers to Ishman at exactly three o’clock in the afternoon. I was a bit tipsy because on the way I drank at least three more beers at different pubs. Ishman said thanks and offered to buy me a drink when the fair was over. As I was leaving I saw another red-head at the end of the bar.

-tgs-

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The Façade

Yet another idea that could be a… play? Here a blurp, blurb, glob…

Thousands of ideas. Most ideas written in various notebooks stacked neatly on shelves. Some are not so neatly stored away. Check this out. These ideas could be referred to as blurb or blurps. Here’s one, here’s another. Search through this site and you’ll find a bunch more. Anywho. If I lack the discipline to actually write then the opposite is true for coming up with things to write about. In fact, ideas haunt me. They are everywhere I am and I can pull them out better than the best magician a coin from behind a little boy’s ear. Of course, one cannot assume just because he walks or talks that he goes anywhere or says anything. Very true, indeed. Yet the ideas flow out of me like the mess from an AAD (or is it ADD?) child deserving of a swipe of the mouth. Here another example.

The Façade

(A play Tommi wants to write and this is how the writing of it begins. Expect thoughts and not grammar.)

A couple loving their new home. They have a family but the children are only scene in a picture. The ideal family? Living the good life. Friends visit. Formal and informal meeting of friends. Although the children are spoken of (and never seen), conversation often refers to them. Natural things, occurrences happen around them, usual things, just as in life – lightening strikes, thunder, snow storm and heat wave, fire, flood, famine. All think of the children but only as well as they are doing – not suffering like other children. All these natural things happen suddenly, sporadically, without warning and everyone except the couple panic. All the dialogue with the people other than the couple is sporadic and not very connected and leads to the question of order and neatness in the house. There is a strange connection to the house that everyone has. Something like: I wish I had a house; it’s so beautiful I feel it’s mine; I’ve always dreamt about… What is the house? As the story progresses, scenes change, the house becomes more and more dirtied, messy. There is talk from the guests about what they would do with the mess if they lived there and they turn to the couple and refuse to help them clean it. Schadenfreude? The couple are the last of a family who managed to inherit (a) house. Some of the guests become unruly. They are from the city (or the suburbs, something is moving people in or out). All the guests become some kind of municipal authority. The house is the last house and is being put up for auction. When the couple question the guests and their authority they get no answer. The neighbourhood was once a mess and will soon be cleaned up – according to a few of the guests. The façade. What is behind the façade? Where is the façade? Who wears a façade? Renewed reality. The poor are now rich, the rich are now middle-class and very afraid, inheriting a house they don’t really want, cannot appreciate, because under other circumstances they wouldn’t even look at it. The winner writes history. It was a house that belonged to a distant relative – one that survived the disease of exuberance. But is this a story about family? Or about something else? Family dysfunction? Families are all apart, never together, not like the past where families grew together – even under a king and queen. The people question what went wrong with the family that they came to visit. But no once knows what to say. Reality has been made an illusion. Guests become adversaries. The illusion becomes reality. The couple, after losing their house to the community, the municipality, the government, decide to take back what is rightfully theirs. We learn that they are Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. The play slowly evolves into a house being ram-shackled by the French Revolution.

Here the picture I’d like to somehow feature in the play of the family – but, of course, never will.

(Translation: “Cheaper gas, more money for condoms.” A German gas-station advert from the nineties, I think.)

Trying to maintain a bit of humour in a play about the disgusting Marie Antoinette AND the French Revolution won’t be easy. Again, probably a reason I’ll never get to writing the play. Still the pic is motivating because it represent so much of the idea that although killed off, the west has created a bunch of itty-bitty Marie Antoinettes and Louis XVIs.

Jumpin’ gerbils.

-tgs-

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Old Words Can Be New Words

How’s that for an optimistic title to make you puke

Recently had something like an epiphany, I think. For those who don’t know, writing is a bitch. It’s hard sitting down and actually doing it, mapping it out, being creative, typing, and then the rest: proofing, re-reading, re-writing, proofing, etc. When you live in a country that has a different language than what you write in, this doesn’t help matters – just try to find someone to proof your work. Anywho. Of all the work I’ve produced and had rejected, I got the idea recently to try and re-focus on all the previous words I’ve written. You know, jump-start all those old ideas. I am getting older and running out of time to develop new ideas. With so many words collecting dust on my shelves why not try to make something out of them?

The recent rewrite of this story, for example, was a great experience. When I re-read the old text, which is more than ten years old, it still doesn’t make any sense, but, the magic is, I remember everything that motivated every word. I started re-writing and… Bam! It all started flowing again. Kind of neat, uh. Now if I could do that for Bela Kaan. This is the story I’ve probably spent the most time on since inception in the mid-nineties. I’ve written thousands of pages on this story. The pics below are just a small sample. I’m particularly fond of the small spiral notebooks that I filled while drinking Guinness. When that text pissed me off, I started over and wrote in hard-back notebooks. Yeah, choosing what to write in can be fun – but also beside the point.

Originally Bela Kaan was to be a play and most recently I’ve decided to write it as a novel. Of course, I’ve got LOP in front of it. And then there’s the twenty or so short stories, like the one mentioned above. One good thing about being Tommi, the failed writer, is that I don’t have a deficit of ideas.

 

-tgs-

 

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Text on Clothe

It’s unclear exactly when, but I’m guessing the pic below is from 1992, Documenta IX. It was very cool. There was a room in a museum that was filled with furniture, as though it were a room in some mansion, but everything, including chandelier, fire-place, just everything was covered with clothe that had quotes from famous authors. The clothe was white and resembled melting paper, as though the words were part of the room. The entire Documenta experience was a wondrous eye-opeing event. To this day I can easily call up memories of some breath-taking art – some of which you can still see if you visit Kassel, Germany. I usually don’t take a lot of pictures but I did of this. I knew then that this type of art exhibition couldn’t last long. Below is only one pic. It’s really a shame that Germany has cut back on funding the arts. Documenta as suffered greatly from this. But then, as a playwright, I have too. Oh, no matter, what the hell does the western hemisphere need art for anywho – can’t make any money with it and you can’t tax it.

“There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said.”
“Es gibt viele Weisen, in denen das, was ich vergebens zu sagen versuche, vergebens zu sagen versucht werden kann.”
-Sam Beckett

-tgs-

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Rewriting – Part 1

Go here for a related post, here for part 2.

I’ve been focused on a little project. I’m rewriting a story that I initially hacked out more than ten years ago. The pics/scans below are the original text.

When I started writing I would just sit down and write. That’s it. Sit and write. I loved it. There was something about hammering out thoughts and places and characters that, ever since I can remember, would sweep through my mind everyday. I did this all the time. There were times when, of course, I didn’t do this. I suppose, like the rest of you, I was shitting or eating or looking at myself in the mirror. Some things motivated the writing – like an urge or need. If I didn’t sit down and write what was going through my head – I suppose, in a way, getting it out of my head – I would get a bit crazy and drink one too many and beat-up some pansy fellow from Manchester, England, that always had a stupid look on his face – you know the kind: the one with the arrogant, nothingness look on his face inherited from the brilliance of Liam & Noel Gallagher. That really would help. Other times I especially loved banging some bimbo and when I was done, instead of dealing with all that “hugging” shit, I got out of bed, washed it, and sat down at a typewriter and continued getting off, albeit this time with my mind. Eventually the bimbo would wake up and get on my nerves and ruin it all. But before she did that, talk about being free… Anywho.

What ever came to mind, I wrote it down. There was always an idea behind it, e.g. characters, setting, time, etc. Yet it took me more than ten years to realize – I lost friends over this – that what I had written was incoherent, muddled, it was all gibberish. I had the energy and the will to write but I had no idea how to write. And I have to add, I spent five and half years in college. I don’t think I learned a fuckin’ thing there. Nevermind. As I said here, I am a prolific writer (I have done some research since that post and have been humbled). Anywho. The most important lesson during the last ten struggling years is slowly realizing why I can’t get published. It’s not that I’m such a bad writer, see post about that here, here, but more that publishers can’t sell gibberish. Right? The idea now, since I’ve come to term with all this, is to not let go of all that gibberish.

I hear you: throw it all away you friggin loser!

This rewriting project has to do with a story about two guys and a chick in high school and how they all got kind of screwed up playing games with each other. It also has to do with the idea that the two guys ride their bikes a bit too much when they should be concentrating on something more important like getting some nookie. But there’s another turn in the story where one of the guys is, let’s say, a bit feminine and crosses paths the wrong way with the other who is not feminine. The chick comes into to the story with some neat drugs to help these guys figure out their “orientation”. On top of that she tells the story of a distant relative named Albert Hofmann and how he invented LSD.

The pics below are from the original text I wrote. The scenario that you just read might or might not reflect what is in the pics below. As I started working with the text and rewriting, the original motivation took a new course. I’m confident now that what has been achieved is not gibberish – the rewrite is now a short story of under 12k words. If anyone is interested in reading it, you can contact me at the info provided in the sidebar. Eventually I will probably post it here but I also want to send it out to some magazines to see if they’ll publish it. But if you want to read it I will send it along in .doc or .pdf. The only thing I ask in return is your name, age, where you live (not your address, of course), whether or not you’re a publisher or an agent, and the answer to the following question: What… is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow?

 

 

-tgs-

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What Does Worst-Writer Mean?

This website or weblog is not just about complaining and ranting – about being a failed writer. It’s even more than just the parenthetic. Seriously. It’s a great example of bad grammar, poor spelling and down-right misplaced vanity. If you prefer more of all-that then go here, here and here, or you can search the module at the sidebar.

The title of this site came to me during a drunken night when I laughed at all the techies who would not accept my idea that technology was a precursor to the industrial age and not vice verse. I’ve posted regarding that here.

I heard the term “worst writer” once during a technology seminar in Stockholm, Sweden. I understood the term referred to bad coders or programmers. I was a fancy, smart-ass, liberal arts technology project manager and the techies hated that because someone who was completely uninterested in all that stupid math they struggled with could still work with them and earn the same money. So much for things binary, eh! Anyway. The term referred to all the shit code out there. I thought: you’ve got to be friggin’ kiddin’ me.

All these high earners write that krapp…

So there’s not only bad writers (of novels and stories) out there but also bad coders. The difference is, the bad coders still earn lots of dough. So don’t all you programmer pansies stand up at once for (me) giving you shit. I mean, come on, the world really does suck when a computer programmer can earn one-hundred thousand dollars a year by just adding more bad code to already bad code and the rest of us who work just as hard can’t sell one friggin’ story or novel to buy tissue paper to blow our nose(s).

Seriously. I’m not a class fighter. I wish all those who work hard the best.

I know, the two things I’m failing to get at in this post have nothing to do with each other but… Ouch. I gave up ten years of working in the corporate world – so I could be (worst)writer – and things aren’t going well because there’s no going back.

Oh, I’ll pray to the salaried some-day.

Rant on.

-tgs-

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