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.

October 17

http://ministryoffiction.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-long-and-short-of-it.html


Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner:

WAIT A SECOND PERSON

WHY WRITING STORIES IS IMPORTANT

Chris Hedges: 

''The assault of global capitalism is not only an economic and political assault. It is a cultural and historical assault. Global capitalism seeks to erase our stories and our histories. Its systems of mass communication, which peddle a fake intimacy with manufactured celebrities and a false sense of belonging within a mercenary consumer culture, shut out our voices, hopes and dreams. Salacious gossip about the elites and entertainers, lurid tales of violence and inane trivia replace in national discourse the actual and the real. The goal is a vast historical amnesia. ''

SECOND PERSON

“You”

—who is actually being addressed?

Second person: can use “you” or just imply.

“Go outside. Look at the sky. Now look at the beach,” 

1. 1. Can really be a stand-in for an “I”
   “you wake up and you’re covered in sweat. You don’t know what’s going on.
   
2. 2. Or it can actually be a second person that is being spoken to, a specific person.

In Kafka’s “Letter to My Father” he’s actually addressing his father.
“Dearest Father,
You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you.”

A letter form: epistolary novel: letters to someone, or letters back and forth.

What is the use of using the you? (i.e. second person)
It does give a sense of urgency, or urgent address, and/or intimacy

C. But more complex use of the “you” exists, complicating the relation between the narrator and the “you.”

EXAMPLES

Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveller

By foregrounding the reading experience, Calvino makes you aware of the artifice and the pleasure of reading, of the book, of story.

Diaz: 

-the “narrator” — takes the sensibility of the protagonist — the “you”

—uses the language.

—there’s an intimacy, a kind of empathy — even though the guy is a jerk

Lorrie Moore—“How to Become a Writer”

—using self-help language

—addressing the reader, but providing specific details from another specific life— but the reader might imagine the parallel details from their own life

—why second person here? To make relatable. 

-

Leopard by Wells Tower

—11 year old protagonist 

—second person which knows what the character thinks.

-“Don’t open your eyes. Stick out your tongue.”  

-the voice is like both 1st and 3rd person combined. Not exactly in the voice of the protagonist, but seems a bit closer than 3rd limited.

[Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad-

-Different chapters of the book use different forms or POV

-This one is in second person: Access to inner life of character

-Why 2nd person: creates urgency, but also makes the kind of  3rd person limited type of details and knowledge of character more believable, maybe making the narrator more intimiately part of the action, part of the crew.]

You shouldn’t do these You things.

-avoid beginning every sentence with “you.” 

-vary the length and structure of the sentences.

*

WRITING ACTIVITIES

1. 1. Text describing what someone else did or how they felt.

  To teacher, to partner/date, police, doctor, parent, brother, dog.

A parent telling their child what they were like as a small child. Peeping Tom decribing what
someone was doing.

Imagine giving eulogy: “You were always there for me. Your piano. Playing late in the night, you…”

Breakup letter, or love letter.

“It was always about you. First thing in the morning, you made coffee just for you. Toast. Eggs….”

“In that blue shirt, you looked…”

Or accusing someone (police, doctor, person on street):

“You looked at me like I was dirty. Dangerous. A thief.”

2. Self help story

“How to go on a date.” “How to difuse a bomb” “How to cook a goat.” “How to make someone love you.” “How to talk to my mother.”

-in describing “how,” you’re really describing how a particular character did this thing or should do that thing. “

or Instructions in a ransom note, an accusation.

3.  Address the reader. “Dear Reader, you’re

4. A short piece that is a letter (or text, or IM, etc.)
—why else do people write letters?

YOU KNOW YOU WANNA----SECOND PERSON EXAMPLES

“The Cheater’s Guide to Love” 

Junot Diaz
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/the-cheaters-guide-to-love 

YEAR 0

Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually she’s your fiancée, but hey, in a bit it so won’t matter.) She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you’re a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six-year period, but still. Fifty fucking girls? God damn!Maybe if you’d been engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita you could have survived it—but you’re not engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita. Your girl is a bad-ass salcedense who doesn’t believe in open anything; in fact, the one thing she warned you about, that she swore she would never forgive, was cheating. I’ll put a machete in you, she promised. And, of course, you swore you wouldn’t do it. You swore you wouldn’t. You swore you wouldn’t.

And you did.

…

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes, like you always swore you would, so that the two of you can dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak. And every hour, like clockwork, you say that you’re so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she simply sits up in bed and says, No more, and, Ya, and asks you to move from the Harlem apartment that you two share when you’re not teaching in Boston. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say you won’t go. But, in the end, you do.

For a while you haunt the city, like a two-bit ballplayer dreaming of a call-up. You phone her every day and leave messages that she doesn’t answer. You write her long sensitive letters, which she returns unopened. You even show up at her apartment at odd hours, and at her job downtown, until finally her little sister calls you, the one who was always on your side, and she makes it plain: If you try to contact my sister again, she’s going to put a restraining order on you.

For some Negroes that wouldn’t mean shit.

But you ain’t that kind of Negro.

You stop. You move back to Boston. You never see her again.

If on a winter's night a traveler (Section I—excerpt)

Italo Calvino

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won't hear you otherwise—"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone. Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed.You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

…

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

“How to Become a Writer”
by Lorrie Moore

http://www.sfuadcnf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-to-Become-a-Writer-Lorrie-Moore.pdf


Stolen by Lucy Christopher

“You saw me before I saw you. In the airport, the day in August, you had that look in your eyes, as though you wanted something from me, as though you wanted it for a long time. No one had ever looked at me like that before, with that kind of intensity. It unsettled me, surprised me, I guess. Those blue, blue eyes, icy blue, looking back at me as if I could warm them up.”

…

“There is a thing murderers always do in horror films: take their victims out on a long drive to a stunning location before they creatively pull them apart. It’s in all the famous films, all the ones with murders in the middle of nowhere anyway. When you woke me up that morning, the day after you’d nearly hit me, I thought about that.

“We’re going on a drive,” you said. “To catch a camel.”

It was very early. I could tell by the pale pinkish-white light and the cool in the air. I got dressed and put the knife into the pocket of my shorts. I could hear you moving and creaking around the house. Then you went outside and started the car. You were surrounding me with noise. I wasn’t used to it. I took my time getting ready. I knew two things: On the one hand, a trip like this could mean a greater opportunity for escape. On the other, it might mean I’d never return.”

“Leopard”

By Wells Tower

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/10/leopard

Good morning.

You have not slept well. Don’t open your eyes. Stick out your tongue. Search for the little sore above your upper lip. Pray that it healed in the night.

No luck. Still there, rough to the tongue, and though it’s very small, not even the diameter of a pencil eraser, it feels much larger. Your mother says it’s a harmless fungal infection, and she pities you less for it than she should.

A tiny hamburger is what the fungus resembles, cracked and brown and perfectly centered in the little fluted area between your septum and upper lip. Yesterday, in the cafeteria, Josh Mohorn pointed out the similarity before a table of your friends. A painful thing, considering how much you would like to be Josh Mohorn. He turned to you and said, “Hey, Yancy, do me a favor.”

“What’s up?” you said, excited by the rare pleasure of Josh’s attention.

“Could you take that seat down there?” he said, gesturing toward the far end of the table. “I can’t eat my lunch with your fucking burger in my face.”

Even you had to admire the succinct poetry of the line, which launched an instant craze of everyone jeering and calling you Burger King, or Patty, or All Beef, the name that stuck for the rest of the day and that will surely greet you this morning at school. You are eleven years old, the age that our essences begin revealing themselves, irremediably, to us and to the world. Just as Josh Mohorn is irremediably a soccer ace and a clothes ace, with feathered hair and white bucks, you are irremediably a fungus man.

Don’t go to school today. Play sick.

Your mother comes in to wake you. Around the house, she wears paint-spattered jeans and old T-shirts, through whose slack sleeves you often catch sight of her underarm hair. But this morning she is dressed for work in a blue sateen blouse and tight white slacks, clothes that speak of a secret life. “I don’t feel good,” you tell your mother.

“Where? In your stomach?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“Oh, God,” she says. “I hope it’s not that thing that’s been going around.”

“I don’t know what it is,” you say, panting shallowly. “It just really hurts.”

…

“What, you want to stay home?”

Swallow again. Close your eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.”

“O.K.”

Oral Storytelling

—storytelling that replicates how a storyteller speaks, an actual person telling a story, or story conventions which are derived from oral tradition.

IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth—so!

James Joyce—Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man 

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

*
Kafka's A Report to an Academy.
It's a speech.
"Honored Members of the Academy!
You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape...."

—Tom King — 

-indigenous writer

-brilliant satirist, particularly in terms of playing with settler stereotypes of Indigenous people

-interesting in how stories and how they are told convey culture, identity and convey how we think of other culture, of power structures

who is this story for? who's POV? sensibility does it channel?

-this is a “trickster” tale. also a origin tales (cf. Genesis)
-it refers to its own storicity as authority.

I heard this story once…

-transitions, beginnings that show ostensible oral nature of this story. 

cf. Come Gather Round while I sing you a song.

or the beginning of Beowulf. “Hark.” 

“Alright. You know.” “So.” “Anyway.”

 “How about a story, that one says.” “Sure I says.” — the way someone reccounting something that happened to them might speak as opposed to a literary reccounting.

    add to pacing, are a rhetorical structure — control how you hear the story, its pacing. put you consciously in “storytelling” style rather than just short story

-lists, parallel structures—repetition. “Alright.” (vocal mannerisms.)

older oral story telling structure. Think of the Bible, or a sermon, or a speech.

“ We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,

-tone — “slang”

-one good story that one

-slang terms, humour,—tense.  — it’s present not past

so I says to my buddy…

—length of sentences —- lots of fragments, or short sentences:

“All white.” “Too bad, those.”

often simpler tone and sentence structure in oral narratives.

—often folktales tell the origin story of something. How the Leopard got its spots.Why they call a certain place by a certain name.

—description—not a lot of description, more a reccounting of a plot, of what happened.

Meta — self awareness of this story

-do we believe this narrator? what shows us there’s an element of parody, and we perhaps shouldn’t believe the tone of the narrator

-self-aware/meta—-anthropologists with tape recorders & cameras, looking for an Indigenous story.

The Ending—“I clean up all the coyote tracks on the floor”

Riffing off another story

-this story retells the fall from the Garden of Eden. It make it Indigenous. It’s a speaking back to high culture. Oral story telling — variant versions, and also often told from the perspective and in the tone of the less powerful. “Myth & History” as opposed to “Folktale and story.”

Writing activity.

—imagine a stand-up comedian and how they tell stories.

what techniques they use.

—use a storytelling model. Idioms, slang, transitions, repetition, dialogue, plot

I’m going to tell you a story that happened to a friend of mine. 

A joke: a rabbi, a priest and a Lady Gaga walk into a bar…

The rabbi says….

This is the story of 

—my first day at school…the first time I….

 ______

If more needed: Guided Missiles story.

three terms to include in short story // three characters

ideas from class

(reference Calvino’s Castle of Cross Destiny.)

Dialogue.

A History of Awkward Silence.

Beth’s two client pocket dialing here. How does what they say convey who they are, what they are doing, and where they are. Write with minimum of details outside the dialogue. 

Oral Narrative. One Good Story That One--Thomas King