Final class: some thoughts and writing activities

SINGLE LINES

When I am ruler of the world…

GROUP WRITING:

Two people write approximately five lines about two characters (from character list)

These two people join together with other two other people. They combine their lines using a transition. Adjust the paragraphs to fit.

Then these four people find four others and repeat.

Then read.

Some transitions:

At the same time

Across the city, province, country, galaxy

On the other side of the desert, city, universe, house, room, coffeeshop, forest

For two weeks

Meanwhile
Afterwards
Previously (unknown to them)

They didn’t know that

At night

For months they did not visit, see, plan, etc.

In the morning, the next morning, one morning years from then

After lunch

The next day

Later that evening

When the sun sank

The following Tuesday, the following century

The previous day, week, year, century, millenium, world

A week later

Months passed

At the appointed time

The next time they met

When they arrived home

As they approached

In the year 2004

It took a month, but

On the first sunny day

Later

*

WRITE TO THE END

Write the scene that goes before one of these:

"Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.”

"Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this."

"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing 

could be done about it, and if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

"After all, tomorrow is another day.”

‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

"He turned out the light and went into his/her room. (S)he would be there all night, and (s)he would be there when (s)he waked up in the morning.

"The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

"The old man was dreaming about the lions.”

"Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. She was both.”

"In the meantime, she would just live.”

"It's funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever."

(https://www.stylist.co.uk/books/the-best-100-closing-lines-from-books/123681)
*
WRITE DIALOGUE

In a group of 1-3, write some dialogue--a conversation between the group. Each person take one voice.

*

SHEILA HETI's flip a coin exercise.

Ask questions of yourself about your writing project and flip a coin to find out the answer. 

Adapted:  Ask questions about a character/story

You can flip the coin after each question and then determine the next question or just make a list of questions and then flip.

Did John love Jane?

Did Jane love John?

Is the world going to end?
Before they meet?

*

What now?

Sources of inspiration. Ekphrastic writing, phrases, characters, settings, notebooks, constraint, what if, something you know that others don't...

Sheila Heti's writing project: listening.

Creating projects for yourself 

Finding writing groups or starting one

Your own voice.

Writing for different ages.

Publishing follow-up.

Using other media.
Video stories: stories with music.

Publishing and also: the Small Press

On publishing



Chapbooks and other small presseries:

Instagram Story

Every night at 5, George left his job at the technology park and headed to his car. He would walk across the parking lot to section C2 which was designated for employees in his tier. When he had started, back in the late 80’s, he had been division H. A lot had changed since then. Back then he was still living with his parents and borrowing his mom’s car to get to work. Now he drives a 2012 Lincoln, almost paid off, and owns a small home in Wolcott. A neighborhood just west of the city. He’s worked hard to forge a decent salary. He was never late and never left early. Rarely had he used all his vacation days. He didn’t really know what to do with them. There had been no girlfriends. A few dates with girls from work had only amounted to unreturned phone calls and awkward lunch breaks. George was alone. In fact he was lonely. His mother was worried about him. This irritated him. Last month while driving home from Latham, he’d pulled over at a diner off Route 90. He had to pee. He felt awkward just walking in and using the restroom and so he ordered a coffee and sat at a table by the window near his parked car. The waitress had been friendly. Her name tag read: Ashley. Ashley had strawberry blonde hair and freckles and made George awkward when she said ‘A big, strong man like you needs somethin’ more than coffee’. In fact George wasn’t a big strong man at all. He was self conscious of his small frame. Even his hands were small and he quickly put them under the table during this exchange. He ordered a grilled cheese and thought about how he’d be home late for the start of Jeopardy. He finished his sandwich in a hurry and blushed when the waitress asked his name and laid his check on the table. He’d studied her long fingers, tipped with bright red polish. He began to take his meals at the diner every night. Driving in the opposite direction of his home, and onto route 90. This cost him 45 cents in tolls in either direction. He’d keep exact change to quickly hand the woman in the booth.

One night, after a month or so, Ashley joked “the food here’s not that good George. You sweet on me sugar?” He’d turned the shade of her nails and she’d laughed “This one’s sweet on me Janice” she called over to her co-worker. Then the two of them laughed and so did a few costumers. George left 20 whole dollars on the table and slipped out when she’d gone in the kitchen. On his way home he stopped at the toll booth. He stayed stopped like that. Minutes began to tic by in the red glow of the stop light. The barrier arm remained down. The line of cars behind him began to honk. He’d run out of change. George takes his meals at home again now. On a tv table while sitting on the couch. In front of Jeopardy. He didn’t used to drink beer but now he does. And sometimes when he stands up and heads for the fridge and asks her if she wants a refill, she’ll raise her legs straight out, blocking the path between the couch and the coffee table and say, “That’ll be 45 cents please”.



* * *
Aase Berg: In the Guinea Pig Cave

https://greenlanternpress.wordpress.com/tag/in-the-guinea-pig-cave/?fbclid=IwAR26M6td4SFaLK-xzLMN-2FMVVV71RASPYJHE0UDt04izmQ6bmdmzhXR78E

* * *
Leslie Vryenhoek: Under the Surface

Like a Pancake out of Hell, it was Silent as a Bull in a Haystack.

1. Update on due dates for portfolio

2. Christopher Dewdney: Dialectic Criminal (On the use of clichés)

‘Good as gold’ – connections between value and wealth
I was feeling good. It was like finding your favourite desert, the finest variety, in the yellow-stickered reduced section. 

‘As hard to find as a needle in a haystack’-- connections of difficulty in finding a minority in a majority

I couldn’t see it. It was as if I was lost and looking for my mother in a crowd where everyone wore the same cardigan and jeans. They all walked with the same concerned expression on their faces, yet none of them are ever her.

‘Flat as a pancake’ – connection with flatness
It was as flat as freshly wet sand. There is the impression that there were once sculptures there, before the tide. But now there is nothing. Just the sand.

‘Hard as nails’ – connection with solidness, toughness and immovability
He stared me down and did not move. It was as if he had become a brick wall, and with every word I spoke he became two times thicker and twice the height. There was no getting past him.

‘Faster than a bat out of hell’ – connection with recklessness and speed
He ran. He darted down alleyways like street mice run through gutters and drains, dodging raindrops as they go.

‘Meek as a lamb’ – connections with being gentle, docile and innocent
She sat trying to look innocent. She thought only of a single goldfish in its bowl, swimming meekly in circles, quietly and unsuspicious.

‘Charging around like a bull in a china shop’ – connection with clumsiness
Like a sightless sheepdog, confused in the dark, the boy ran onto the playground falling into the other children around him.

‘Silent as the grave’ – connection with unnerving noises
The room was quiet. It was as if every worker had been silenced by a bad punch-line, all of them too ashamed to acknowledge that the joke had ever been told.

(see https://ashhartridgeonline.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/writing-exercise-10-rewriting-cliches/)

INTERESTING COMPARISONS

She had a smile like a broken deckchair.

He had the personality of the common cold.

 He danced like a lawnmower.

It was quiet as stone.

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. — The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood 

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make? — Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison 

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. ― The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter 

 3. Dialogue conventions:
https://firstmanuscript.com/format-dialogue/


4. STORY IN A BAG (part 1)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/68ww3ktz4328k9w/short%20story%20in%20a%20bag.key?dl=0

Time, the afterlife, the future, spooneristic spacetime manipulation

bpNichol: Fictive Funnies

Spacetime Trousers

1. Sheila Heti: "My Life is a Joke."





2. David Byrne: In the Future

Writing: Write "In the future..." piece after Byrne.




3. Steve Venright: Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of Spooner

How does the structure of this text (i.e. spoonerisms) subvert the linear flow of the narrative, insisting that time (and reading) cannot proceed in a straightforward line? How this also affect the construction of meaning?

Calvino: Cities and Memory 1 & 2

Cities and Memory 1.

Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows every morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

Cities and Memory 2.

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

Revision

 In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

Anna Akhmatova


*

Steve Venright:  Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of Spooner


*

Editing/Revising

First draft: It was one of those nights when you could see shadows dance across the lawn. I was sitting on my front porch with Chuck and Buck, two of my best friends, and we watched as the light traced patterns on insect flights.

Edited draft: Shadows crept across the lawn in the moonlight. My two best friends, Chuck and Buck, helped me watch the light trace patterns on insect flights.


START LATER AND EARLIER

Ending before the resolution is often really effective— bring the reader up to the point where the momentous thing is about to happen and then cut away. This leaves them actively involved in the story, wondering what might occur. The open-endedness keeps the ending energetic and active.

-Beginning further into the action

More active: the reader is plunged into the story, has to orient themselves. Is more engaging and active. Details can be revealed later.

“Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.” —Elmore Leonard.

MURDEROUSLY KILL AND ALSO FATALLY ELIMINATE LIKE A VERBOCIDAL ASSASIN METAPHORS, SIMILES, ADVERBS AND ADJECTIVES

Can you eliminate metaphors, similes, adverbs and adjectives which are unnecessary or redundant and also not important or effective?

Kill unnecessary metaphors, similes, adverbs and adjectives. Kill them. Now.

STAGE DIRECTIONS

She reached out her arm to open the door.

Okay, unless she has mind powers and telekinesis, do we need the direction?

He turned to go down the next street.

He picked up the oars and pulled a few more strokes, eager to get to his favorite fishing spot.

We “get” he’d have to pick up the oars to row his boat, or that is a seriously cool trick.

Be active. Characters can “brush hair out of their face” “open doors” and even slap people without you telling us they reached out an arm or hand to do this. We are smart. Really.

BACKING INTO THE SENTENCE/PASSIVE VOICE

In an effort to break up and vary sentence structure, many writers will craft sentences like this:

With the months of stress pressing down on her head, Jessie started ironing the restaurant tablecloths with a fury.

Problem? Passive action. When we use the word “down” then “on” is redundant. Either she is ironing or not ironing. “Started” is overused and makes sloppy writing. That actually goes back to the whole “stage direction” thing.

Active:

Jessie ironed the restaurant tablecloths with a fury, months of stress pressing on her shoulders.

The door was kicked in by the police.

Police kicked in the door.

If you go through your pages and see WAS clusters? That’s a HUGE hint that passive voice has infected your story.

“ALMOST ALWAYS USE ‘SAID’ AS A TAG, HE SPAT EXPECTORANTLY.

“You are such a jerk,” she laughed.

A character can’t “laugh” something. They can’t “snip” “spit” “snarl” “grouse” words. They can SAY and ever so often they can ASK. Said becomes white noise. Readers don’t “see” it. It keeps them in the story and cooking along. If we want to add things like laughing, griping, complaining, then fine. It just shouldn’t be the tag.

“You are such a jerk.” She laughed as she flicked brownie batter onto Fabio’s white shirt.

______

Some of this borrowed from: https://authorkristenlamb.com/2016/05/six-ways-to-self-edit-polish-your-prose/

*

Read: "My Life is a Joke," by Shelia Heti. (Posted in "Content" on Avenue.) There's the text but also an audio version.

GETTING TENSE ABOUT TENSE

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

GETTING TENSE ABOUT TENSE

Watch DD Johnston about why the past tense is better than the present.


Is he right?

Is present tense actually cinematic?

How can you handle memory and future thought in the present tense. 


Read 100 Years of Solitude: beginning. Note: “Many years later, as he was to face the firing squad he would remember…”

A. Write eight I will remembers, beginning:

“When I was 87, I remembered….”

B. 1. Write in present tense

-protagonist is doing something

-they remember some time from the past when they thought of what they were going to do in the future (or what was going to happen.)

-now in the present they do something else and think about what they are going to do. 

-the narrator remarks on what things are always happening, and are still happening, and will continue to happen.

Then take your neighbour’s present tense story and:

2. Then change it into future tense. The protagonist will be doing that something.

     Then pass it along to the next person:


3. Then change it into past tense.

Time

Clock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnm8PVx3HYw

Christian Marclay, The Clock



Time

How do we conceive of time?
How does it operate?
Can we live in more than one time at once?
(thinking about Remembrance Day: imagining the men in the trenches 100 years ago, thinking about the men and women after that, and the situation now, and then imagining the soldiers of the future.)

-recounting past event: I went to the store. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
(every photograph is of a past event)


-memory, flashback, nostalgia,
-rewriting the past,
-forgetting, remembering a memory and not the event itself

-awareness of what will happen
-prophesy, prediction
-deja vu.
-deja vu all over again . (i.e. everything seemed like it has happened before and keeps happening)

-imagining, fantasizing,

-mythical past, a kind of past out of time
"Once upon a time'

-dream states

-drama changing how time flows:
"my whole life flashed before me." "time stopped."
--or boredom changing how it flowed: "It was so boring, it seemed time slowed down."
"so exciting everything passed by in a flash."

-conditional future: what might happen, what should.

-recounting events backwards, following the causal chain. (detective?)

https://fiftywordstories.com/tag/palindrome/:

Stories written backwards really are nonsense. Unpublishable as discarded tales collecting dust. Misunderstood. Why are words tricky? How one shows irony of knowing without knowledge.

Knowledge, without knowing of irony, shows one how tricky words are. Why? Misunderstood, dust collecting tales discarded as unpublishable nonsense, are really backwards written stories.

*

Palindrome story: http://spinelessbooks.com/2002/palindrome/

* * *

EINSTEIN'S DREAMS by Alan Lightman


1. Write a prose piece embodying how time moves in some noticeably different way.
2. Write a contrasting piece where time moves in a noticeable different way that the one you just wrote.

Borges: Pierre Menard

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Bibliomania!/BorgesPierreMenard.pdf

Experimental Fiction techniques

Experimental Writing 

What is reality?

How is agreed upon?

—cf. superstition, miracles, quantum physics, etc.

How do we represent it? 

Experimental vs. the conventional ways of representing reality and its structures and hierarchies?

What is “fiction”?

How does it work?

What is “reading”?

How is “data” different than fiction?

What if you concentrate on only one element: form, lexicon, etc.

How you can interrogate a text to examine its (and our) assumptions about something?
How can it show how we think? feel? what consciousness is like? 
What a single moment is like? A single human?
How meaning works, how language works?
How does fiction organize experience? reality? the human and non-human?
Whose reality? And how did this fiction get to us? 
Who made it? How? 
Who else is included or excluded from it?


What happens when you throw a spanner in the works?

How can highlighting one element reveal something significant?
What happens when things don't work the "normal way" in fiction"? 
What's revealed?

Andy Warhol: 24 hours of recorded speech

Kenny Goldsmith: everything he did for 24 hours.

Erasure:
Beaulieu: sounds of NY, but also who did the work?
https://www.jean-boite.fr/product/a-a-novel-by-derek-beaulieu

Heart of Darkness: erasing everything but the landscape.

Procedure—Animal Farm in Pig Latin. 

https://issuu.com/ourteeth/docs/animalway_armfay/6

Moby Dick in emojis

Extremes: entire book in 1 second.

Activities.

N+7
http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/

enter text.

Translations

https://translate.google.com/

-translate into several very different languages and then back to English.

Find and replace— with Word processor

-take text. replace all adjectives with “blue” (or another adjective) 

all nouns with “owl” (or another adjective.)

Constraint: lipograms

one syllable words only. Or Christian Bök: Eunoia words

recording of Christian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUNwHmQc9yk

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink

this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,

disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish

hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib?

Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits,

writing shtick which might instill priggish misgiv-

ings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-

picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I

bitch; I kibitz — griping whilst criticizing dimwits,

sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplis-

tic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

Pilgrims, digging in shifts, dig till midnight in mining

pits, chipping flint with picks, drilling schist with drills,

striking it rich mining zinc. Irish firms, hiring micks

whilst firing Brits, bring in smiths with mining skills:

kilnwrights grilling brick in brickkilns, millwrights

grinding grist in gristmills. Irish tinsmiths, fiddling

with widgits, fix this rig, driving its drills which spin

whirring drillbits. I pitch in, fixing things. I rig this

winch with its wiring; I fit this drill with its piping. I

dig this ditch, filling bins with dirt, piling it high, sift-

ing it, till I find bright prisms twinkling with glitz.

*
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/07/christian-bok-excerpts-from-eunoia.html

*

Time Moving Backwards

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

GORG: a detective story by bpNichol

a man walks into a room. there is a corpse on the floor. the man has been shot through the temple the bullet entering at a 45° angle just above the eyes & exiting almost thru the top of the skull. the man does not walk out of the room. the corpse stands up & introduces himself. later there will be a party. you will not be invited & feeling hurt go off into a corner to sulk. there is a gun on the window sill. You rig up a pulley which enables you to pull the trigger while pointing the gun between your eyes & holding it with your feet. a man walks in on you, you are lying on the floor dead. you have been shot thru the temple the bullet exiting almost thru the top of your skull. you stand up & introduce yourself, the man lies on the floor & you shoot him between the eyes the bullet piercing his temple & exiting thru his skull into the floor. you rejoin the party. the man asks you to leave since you weren’t invited. you notice a stranger in the doorway who pulling out a gun shoots you between the eyes. you introduce each other & lie down. your host is polite but firm & asks you both to leave. at this point a man walks in & intrudes himself. you are lying on the floor & cannot see him. your host appears not to know him & the man leave. the party ends & the room is empty.

the man picks up the corpse & exits.

Oct 31: Animals

THE ZEBRA STORYTELLER
Spencer Holst


     Once upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic.
     That language is whinnied by the race of striped horses in Africa.
     Here now: An innocent zebra is walking in a jungle, and approaching from another direction is the little cat; they meet.
     “Hello there!” says the Siamese cat in perfectly pronounced Zebraic. “It certainly is a pleasant day, isn’t it? The sun is shining, the birds are singing, isn’t the world a lovely place to live today!”
     The zebra is so astonished at hearing a Siamese cat speaking like a zebra, why, he’s just fit to be tied.
     So the little cat quickly ties him up, kills him, and drags the better parts of the carcass back to his den.
     The cat successfully hunted zebras many months in this manner, dining on filet mignon of zebra every night, and from the better hides he made bow neckties and wide belts after the fashion of the decadent princes of the Old Siamese court.
     He began boasting to his friends he was a lion, and he gave them as proof the fact that he hunted zebras.
     The delicate noses of the zebras told them there was really no lion in the neighborhood. The zebra deaths caused many to avoid the region. Superstitious, they decided the woods were haunted by the ghost of a lion.
     One day the storyteller of the zebras was ambling, and through his mind ran plots for stories to amuse the other zebras, when suddenly his eyes brightened, and he said, “That’s it! I’ll tell a story about a Siamese cat who learns to speak our language! What an idea! That’ll make ’em laugh!”
     Just then the Siamese cat appeared before him, and said, “Hello there! Pleasant day today, isn’t it!”
     The zebra storyteller wasn’t fit to be tied at hearing a cat speaking his language, because he’d been thinking about that very thing.
     He took a good look at the cat, and he didn’t know why, but there was something about his looks he didn’t like, so he kicked him with a hoof and killed him.
     That is the function of the storyteller.

* * *

Andre Alexis: from Fifteen Dogs

* * *

Italo Calvino's "The Dinosaurs" from Cosmiccomics

*


MIX AND MATCH

Appropriation vs. Freedom of Expression

In this performance piece, artist Gregg Deal — a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe — dressed as a Plains Indian outside the Denver Art Museum. Deal spoke with CBC Radio's Unreserved about the piece in late 2015. (courtesy Gregg Deal)

Indigenous writer Alicia Elliott explains why 'free speech' arguments ignore Canada's history of oppression

Barwin writes on the difference between freedom of expression and appropriation.

Matthew Zapruder's insightful examination of on harm vs conflict.

"The question is not whether I as a white person am completely innocent, or whether I am “allowed” to say certain things. The question is, what can I do, as a writer and person, to help? And what are the possible consequences of my efforts?" 

--considering power relations, currently and historically
--people's historical right to speak
--cf. "punching up" vs. "punching down"
--harm in w misrepresenting, silencing, erasing or eclipsing group who have had that occur historically or currently
--giving space, listening to voices
--white fragility

* * *

Multiple POV Activity: Writing Activity 

1. Write from 3rd person, limited. It’s a family. At a birthday, wedding, funeral, graduation, family dinner.

First POV: Jane (Name of your choice.)

2. Then POV: John (Name of your choice.)

3. Then from an “I” maybe mentioning a “you”

(OPTIONAL: You can write one POV and then let another writer write the other POV of the same scene while you respond to their initial scene.)

On Unreliable Narrators (Really)

bpNichol: The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid

Add caption

Peter Carey: The True History of the Kelly Gang

Unreliable narrator

I was going to prepare but my dog ate my notes

so then I got some chloroform put him to sleep, put my hand down his throat to retrieve my notes then I put them in the oven to dry them out (dog slobber) then they caught fire so patted them down and burnt my hand which I then covered in butter to heal it but then I was hungry so I used the butter to put on toast and so I didn’t end up having time to prepare for the class.

Actually, I was out all night drinking with a friend. I wouldn’t normally but he had just been through a difficult. breakup. We started with drinking, then smoked some weed, then ended up doing coke and drove to Niagara Falls NY on a lark. I was just released from jail this morning and so I wasn’t able to prepare.

Actually, I didn’t prepare because my dog did grab my notes. He’s just a puppy. But I knew he was trying to help. I knew that he sensed I felt ambivalent about what I’d written and so he intervened so I’d write new noes.

How do you know I’m lying?

According to Lincoln, 67% of statistics on the Internet are made up.

It may only become apparent as the writing progresses, it begins to dawn on us, or we know from the beginning.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THE STORY MAY NOT BE AS IT IS TOLD?

Imagine email spam and how you look for clues that it’s not actually true.

COMPARISON TO REAL WORLD OR WORLD OF THE NOVEL—compare narrator with what seems reasonable in our world or in the world of the story as far as one can establish

—Incident of the Dog in the Night Time — child describes thing from autistic POV but we know what is likely in our world — we can draw our own inferences from what is being described—in a different way than the character. 

Lord of the Rings— it is established that this is a parallel world. If I told you that I had an appointment with a wizard later today to go on a mission across the world to destroy a magic ring you’d know that I was telling a story (and you might evaluate the story for internal consistency) …but if I said quantum physics and an object can be in two places at once and communicate over long distances, etc. even though it is hard to imagine, you would likely understand that I’m trying to represent the truth of modern physics.

We compare what is the normal attitude of a reasonable adult to what is represented in fiction.

OBSERVABLE ATTITUDE OF NARRATOR 

Are they lying for self interest, or to cover for something or to prove a point?

Tell Tale Heart (see intro)
https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/the_tell-tale_heart_0.pdf

Lolita—

— is intelligent, “reasonable,” writes well, charming, etc.

https://epdf.tips/lolita-penguin-modern-classics.html
—

THEY DON’T NECESSARILY MEAN TO MISREPRESENT — THEY DON’T KNOW THEY’RE DOING IT

-perspective is different: simple, demonstrates the bias of their perspective on the world

as a result of culture, education, intelligence, social position, mental illness, personality disorder, altered state (drunk, drugged, traumatized, brainwashed, etc.), dementia, etc. 

(see Whale Music — gaps in his perception and memory as a result of trauma and drugs)

—HOW?

—Sometimes they tell you this is their very own subjective recollection. Or the story they received from someone else (of course all stories are inherently unreliable)

-Through their charm, intelligence, force of character — you get swayed by their charm, by the seeming authenticity of their speech/story/recollection. (cf politicians)

See The True Story of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (see image)

—divergence between what is described and what is likely happening — the reader is able to see for themselves through the screen of the narrator’s sensibility

—details don’t add up —within the internal world of the story or with ours. (what is the implied reality of the world?)

—though sometimes the narrator leaves out significant details which are only found out later or can inferred (sometimes about what happened, sometimes about themselves.) And you realize this as you read.

Geek Love— we learn the narrator does indeed have a special skill —telling the future.

—Self justification (see Tell Tale Heart) —they “protest too much,” 

WHY

-to talk about the unreliability of all story, of novels, 

-to examine how the truth is inherently unknowable or all to easily misrepresented and a matter of POV

see example, bpNichol The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid

—to talk about self interest or POV — reality or history depends on POV 

i.e. history is written by the victors (Churchill)

-what is one’s responsibility to see beyond one’s own POV or the assumptions of one’s place in society (cf. Remains of the Day which we looked at earlier in the term — the character doesn’t mean to mispresent. He’s a product of his background. Or is he?)

—it’s an exciting, intriguing way to tell a story, to involve the reader in figuring out what actually happened and how it is being represented. A bit like a mystery.

WRITE

1. Write a short account of an event that happened to you, or could have. But add in several lies or distortions. You’re going to read this to your neighbour and have them try to guess what isn’t true.

2.  a.Someone wakes up beside a dead body. Write what they might say.

Was it self defence? Was there someone else there? They didn’t know what happned? alien abduction? their have a gapped recollection? They don’t remember at all, they have another alibi…

      b. Someone writing a letter to an ex or a parent or a boss about their perspective on an incident or series of incidents in which they could have been implicated

     “They say I am responsible…”
    “It is true that I was there, but…”

“Dear Judge Smith…”

What has distorted their perception? anxiety? drugs? guilt? racism?

  

Perspective and Time: Oct 22 Streams of Consciousness

*

from https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/stream-of-consciousness

Stream of Consciousness vs. Interior Monologue 

Both interior monologue and stream of consciousness involve the presentation of a character's thoughts to the reader. However, there are differences between the two.

• In interior monologue, unlike in stream of consciousness, the character's thoughts are often presented using traditional grammar and syntax, and usually have a clear logical progression from one sentence to the next and one idea to the next. Interior monologue relates a character's thoughts as coherent, fully formed sentences, as if the character is talking to him or herself.
• Stream of consciousness, in contrast, seeks to portray the actual experience of thinking, in all its chaos and distraction. Stream of consciousness is not just an attempt to relay a character's thoughts, but to make the reader experience those thoughts in the same way that the character is thinking them.   

What do we think?
What influences how we think and in what way? 

What is the sequence of our thoughts? How are they organized? Are there “logical” links? Associational—based on culture, memory, specific experiences, play?
Pathologies, emotional state, personality, etc.

How can the way we think be represented, enacted?

How do we represent this in language?
How can we go beyond standard grammar, punctuation, spelling, layout on the page, etc.?

*

Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is known for using stream of consciousness in her writing. The novel Mrs. Dalloway follows the thoughts, experiences, and memories of several characters on a single day in London. In this passage, the title character, Clarissa Dalloway, watches cars driving by:

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Woolf does more than simply say "Mrs. Dalloway watched the taxis and thought about her life." Rather, she lets the reader into the character's thoughts by using long sentences with semicolons to show the slow drift of ideas and the transitions between thoughts. Readers are able to watch as Mrs. Dalloway's mind moves from observations about things she is seeing to reflections on her general attitude towards life, and then moves on to memories from her childhood, then back to the taxi cabs in the street, and finally to Peter, a former romantic interest. This is an excellent example of using associative leaps and sensory impressions to create a stream of consciousness. Woolf manages to convey not only the content but the structure and process of Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts, a fact which is all the more impressive because she does so while writing in the third person.


Stream of Consciousness in Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison uses stream of consciousness in passages throughout Beloved. In this passage, readers hear the voice of a character named Beloved who seems to be the spirit of the murdered infant of another character named Sethe:

I am alone    I want to be the two of us    I want the join    I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me    I come up    I need to find a place to be    the air is heavy    I am not dead    I am not    there is a house    there is what she whispered to me    I am where she told me    I am not dead    I sit    the sun closes my eyes    when I open them I see the face I lost    Sethe's is the face that left me    Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile    her smiling face is the place for me    it is the face I lost    she is my face smiling at me

Morrison doesn't use proper capitalization or grammar throughout the passage (e.g., "join" is used as a noun). In the place of punctuation, Morrison simply inserts gaps in the text. She also makes use of repetition: when Beloved repeats the words, "I am not dead," she seems to be willing herself to live through a kind of mantra or incantation. Morrison uses run-on sentences and lack of punctuation to show the frantic urgency that Beloved feels when she finds herself alone in death, and to convey her deep desire to be reunited with Sethe—effectively letting readers "listen in" on her thoughts.

Stream of Consciousness in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Like Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner is known for his use of stream of consciousness. In this passage from his novel As I Lay Dying, the character Jewel expresses his frustration that, as his mother is dying, his half-brother is noisily building her a casket just outside her window. 

Because I said If you wouldn't keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man cant sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn't get them clean. I can see the fan and Dewey Dell's arm. I said if you'd just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you're tired you cant breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the county coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.

The repetition of the phrase "one lick less" helps convey the way Jewel seems to bristle at the repetitive noises made by the saw and the adze outside the window, each noisy "lick" a reminder of his mother's impending death. His sentences also take strange turns and arrive at unexpected places, as when he begins a sentence with a memory of Cash falling off a roof, moves on to lament the constant train of visitors to his mother's room, and ends quite memorably by asking (without the use of a question mark) "because if there is a God what the hell is He for." The passage is incredibly effective at depicting the dizzying range of thoughts and emotions Jewel experiences as he visits the room of his dying mother.

*
James Joyces Ulysses 

the last part of Molly Bloom’s famous stream-of-consciousness monologue:

ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish  girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 

*

B.S. Johnson: House Mother Normal 

http://www.id-ds.com/ebooks/HouseMotherNormal/HouseMotherV2.html

Stream of Consciousness Writing Exercises

1. Write for three minutes all the thoughts that come into your head in a free-flowing river or torrent of thought.

2. Brainstorm on board: a number of things the characters might be thinking about.

a. Choose who: Astronaut, sailor, Queen, etc.
b. List the kinds of things they might think about. 

c. Think about who they might be, how they might think, what is their emotional, developmental and intellectual state. (People in the same place might have an overlap as to what things they think about but might connect them in a different way...or they might also think about different things depending who they are and in what state.

d. Then join freely in a stream of consciousness passage in first person.