Week 10, Theme 3

Prompt: Use Joe Brainard’s I Remember as a model. Let the phrase “I remember” work as an anaphora (the opening phrase), creating a formula, or a kind of container, for your writing, a mould to pour your prose into. Write twenty or more “I remember”s. Experiment with the length of sentences and memories you include; think about the series they make. Where do your “I remember”s begin, and where do they end?

I remember last night.

I remember choosing the orange pants.

I remember remembering how they didn’t fit before the illness.

I remember showing my room to freshmen as I ran out the door.

I remember wondering if they were intimidated by me.

I remember the bus ride to the bowling alley.

I remember ordering a gin and tonic.

I remember telling Sarah that I got “so into gin and tonics during my recent holiday in London.”

I remember spilling a whiskey sour on my orange pants. No stain.

I remember spilling a whiskey sour on a white dress. No shame.

I remember the hurried flurry of napkin patter to the lace of the dress.

I remember bowling a 34.

I remember spilling a drink in the gutter.

I remember choosing the pink bowling ball and laughing.

I remember not taking any photos with the birthday girl.

I don’t remember the bus ride home.

I don’t remember texting him.

I don’t remember taking off the whiskey orange pants.

I remember staring at the dim screen at 3am, scrolling through photos of people I’d seen at the alley, judging them.

I don’t want to remember crawling into bed, alone.

Week 10, Theme 2

Prompt: Try a version of Perec’s vowel experiment. Write a theme in which you use the words that include the vowels on only one side of the keyboard: “a,” “e,” and “y,” or “u,” “i,” “o.” This will be difficult, and the theme can be quite short. See if you can write sentences that make some sense, or, see what sense the sentences you’ve written make. Can you think of a good title?

IOU

I look down on thou. Thus so, I sow rough troughs of puny insults, on your un-won points in school, on your untrustworthy mind. You will not miss this kicking I thrust on you, if you go. Or, if you will, if you grow. You must know, I point this out to you, out of worry for you. If you will hold on to good, you will not know of this wondrous pity I hold for you for long. No, if you grow, you will, point out to yours truly, humbly, “IOU.”

Week 10, Theme 1

Prompt: Your tutor will provide you with a sentence, without context of any kind. Use it as the first sentence of this theme. Recommendation: approach the prompt as the occasion for a free-writing exercise; take the sentence and spend twelve minutes (use your cell phone alarm) writing in response without a plan (or, a net to catch you). Then see what you have. Maybe you will be done already. Or maybe you will see a direction in which you want to revise.

I hadn’t expected this. The message from Inge had woken me a few hours earlier than I had planned; after showering, I threw on my heavy Barbour jacket, greeted the Berlin winter air, hopped on the U-Bahn at Rosenthaler Platz, and rode to Alexanderplantz. There, I caught the S-Bahn heading to Westkreuz. Sitting on the train as it passed the Reichstag, I looked at my phone again. Peter: komm doch gleich. Greta ist die Geburt eines Sohnes. Es gibt ein Problem.

“Peter: come immediately. Greta is giving birth to a son. There’s a problem.” I thought: what could be wrong? The preparations had been in place for weeks now. Yes, it had been a high-risk situation, but Greta had been presenting well in recent days and all seemed as if it was proceeding normally. We had all put so much into Greta; this birth was going to make us famous. After all, such a complicated procedure, such a special circumstance…

Lost in my visions of recognition and fame, I almost missed my stop. The speakers screamed: “Zoologisher Garten!” I rushed out of the train just as the doors were closing.

As I ran through the gates and to the polar bear enclosure, the din grew louder and louder. Hitting the boundary of the space just as the weak December sun peaked over the rock formation lining Greta’s living space, I saw the mother bear staring at a ball of fur ten feet away from her. Inge ran to me. Peter, du bist die einzige Person, die helfen kann!

“Peter, you’re the only person who can help.” I knew. I leaped over the railing and ran between Greta and her son. I had been Greta’s keeper for years; she didn’t attack. Instead, our eyes met for what seemed like seconds. The big brown circles looked at me with sadness before the bear turned and retreated to the rocks.

I looked at my new son. I’ll call you Knut.

~~~

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_the_Bear

Week 9 - Week off!

There's a lot to do for Patrick after break, so this is the week that this blog will be silent. Till next week!

Week 8, Theme 5

Prompt: A journal entry describing a journey. What can---or can’t---you see along the way? How does your perspective change with the change of place?

I grabbed the black plastic trash bag as I stumbled from the lobby bathroom to meet Geraldo. Her shepherded me into el Taxi as I emptied out the contents of my stomach into my new bag. Frantic Spanish and a haggling over the price – always, the haggling in this country, always – eventually gave way to a four-block ride to the hospital.

The emergency room had the kind of puke green walls that hospitals are infamous for. I lied on a bed behind the curtain staring at the ceiling as the nurses muttered among themselves and at Geraldo in that dirty Dominican Spanish that I had so quickly come to hate in the last week. I needed pruebas – tests – done, and lots of them.

I shuffled to the bathroom, where I succeeded in producing the needed…samples. When I returned to my bed more needles and an IV, my first ever, found their ways into my arms. Staring at the fluorescent light above my eyes, I drifted into a daze. I wished that I had been able to go out with the group last night, that I had thought of somewhere better than the Dominican Republic to go for Spring Break, that I had some water. I really needed water.

In less than an hour a wrinkled man wheeled me up through the hospital’s bowels to the third floor. Inexplicably, I had been placed in the pediatric ward, with an image of Barney painted on the door to my private room. I thought of the framed Barney Fan Club membership certificate still hanging on the wall of my childhood room.

For the next fifty hours, it was just me, Barney, and the millions of cholera bacilli inhabiting my bowels hanging out in the pediatric ward of a hospital in Santo Domingo. Traveling sure has provided me with some strange bedfellows.

Week 8, Theme 4

Prompt: A journal entry that explores a memory that surfaced during the course of your day, and connects the memory to the situation in which it arose.

Batey Libertad, western Dominican Republic. Early afternoon. I sit in a thatched gazebo constructed by some church group in the middle of this impoverished community. As I read, a small Haitian girl, no more than one and a half years old, spins around with her back on the concrete floor. Her eyes are crossed. Her sullied swaddling clothes have stains from dirt and what looks like blood, and she wears no pants. Lying in a pool of her own waste and sucking on whatever she can fit in her mouth, she makes odd sounds. Ahh, ehh, gurgle, ehh! She sounds, to my horror, happy.

Swaddling clothes? My mind races back to my red rain jumpsuit. I recall the countless pictures of me as a toddler, my bright pink face and a few blonde locks spilling out of the hole in the suit, frolicking in street-side puddles. In these pictures, I sported a look of wide-eyed, open-mouthed, missing-toothed delight. Like the Haitian girl, I had no control over my clothing or my actions or the blabber coming from my mouth. Like the Haitian girl, I was exploring my environment, taking in the world around me, being a kid.

A Haitian woman whips the dirtied girl up by the arm to give her the bucket bath that she so sorely needs. I am sure that after my puddle exploring I, too, was taken to a bath by my mother. The only difference between the end of my puddle period and the end of the Haitian girl’s was that my bath was in a porcelain tub in Buffalo and hers was in a black plastic tub underneath the hot Caribbean sun. The only difference, but one that makes her so much farther away from me than the twenty feet that separate us.

Week 8, Theme 3

Prompt: Read some entries from a notebook, diary, or some kind of journal---either unpublished or in print, and possibly a diary of your own from the past. Then describe how the writer uses the journal, and the sense of self created in it.

The guy that I deified my Freshman Fall (and, oh, did I fall) was one for writing things down. His room in Morse was decorated with drawings from when he was five, snippets of thoughts he’d written down on napkins at a cousin’s bar mitzvah when he was nine, lyrics of a song from his trip to Jamaica years back. When things went south (our relationship, not Jamaica), I had a hard time letting him go. I missed him physically, but I also missed his influence – telling me what classes to take, what movies to see, what to do with my life.

And so I went home from the sadness of New Haven to the dark, cold confines of Buffalo. Still miserable on New Year’s Day, and missing Him, I thought of ways to bring Him to me in my personal tundra. I decided to start writing daily in a Word document. I named it “Diary.” I wrote about Him but also about the guy who I’d replaced Him with, and the guy from Buffalo that I’d substituted that guy for, the girls with whom I went out with for dinners and to art galleries but who, after four short months, already seemed so different. I wrote about revenge and Kobe beef and “self-indulgent poppycock.” In five days I covered a lot of ground.

And then, after January 5^th – silence. It made me wonder what had happened on the 6^th, the Day of Three Kings; had I been too drunk that night to come home and write? Had I convinced myself that there was more to life than Him simply by writing about my other goings on? Whatever the reason, my project abruptly stopped, as could be expected from the failed New Years Resolution that it turned out to be.

Today, I wrote a new entry in “Diary.” There’s a new boy and a new plan, but, somehow, the link between the Freshman and the Junior is stronger than one might expect.

Week 8, Theme 2

Prompt: A journal entry about your habits or rituals of writing.

Star-words

I write the best pieces when I get there before 8. Most of the winter this meant that the windows were still frosty but now, as New Haven warms, they are already crystal clear when I arrive. Anthony greets me curtly – I’ve never been friendly to him and he has no reason to pretend we’re buds – and takes my order for a medium (God help me if I ever say the word “grande”) coffee. No room for milk. It’s $2.07 with tax, but I usually don’t have enough energy to unfold the cash so I pull out Visa instead. I walk over to the sugar station and empty one and a half brown packets of “sugar in the raw” into my cup.

I’ve been told that the store on High and Chapel is a “high priority” Starbucks franchise for corporate; makes sense based on the revenue that must come from all of the rich blonde girls ordering Venti Skim No Foam Extra Hot Caramel Macchiato Lattes. Certainly not a medium black coffee. But to each her own, I guess. Anyways, the high priority status affords the location a new design: two imitation vintage converted shuffleboard tables, large expanses of varnished wood, dominate half of the room. They are flanked with heavy red chairs and lend the place a cafeteria feel, with everyone and their laptops sitting at the same table.

Usually, when I get there, no one is sitting at the first long table. I take my place in the third red chair from the left facing away from the window (must not be distracted) and pull out a nice, inky pen and a piece of plain computer paper. Writing in the raw. What goes on the page is always different – sometimes words, sometimes equations, sometimes German words. Whatever it is, though, is always completed by 10:20. Productivity in the raw.

When I think of myself as the formidable, unfriendly undergrad drinking black coffee and writing furiously on computer paper, I smile. I’m a character just like the flower lady, or the guy who always brings trash bags in. I don’t mind if they all think I’m crazy – it works for me.

Week 8, Theme 1

Prompt: A journal entry describing a single day written by another person actual or imagined, contemporary or historical. (This might take the form of an imitation or parody of a famous diarist like Woolf or Boswell.)

Jamesday

Today was normal. I woke up at 4 and grabbed an orange, then started in on a few books of Chaucer. Vince – best agent ever – called me at 5 and told me that Dior Homme wanted to do another shoot, that the sweat on my forehead was “beading up oddly” in the first set of photos. Shrugging, I maintained concentration on Chaucer’s use of onomatopoeia. I decided to do an art project in which pages of books that use onomatopoeia would be suspended in a wind tunnel into which would be piped classical music. Refocus: at 6:30, I woke up the blond still sleeping in my bed and told her to shoo. Throwing on my heavy, patched cotton jacket and making sure that my eyes looked tired but not exhausted, my hair messy but not greasy, I walked out of the Study and to Starbucks and ordered hot water. I caught a cab to Union station and took a quick train over to RISD to check on my paper-mâché project. I remembered that I had a flight out of Logan at 10. Ahh, commercial aviation: the airline companies had repeatedly rejected my requests to conduct a live-art project where I arrange their schedules to fit my daily routine. By 1pm Pacific time (4pm James Franco time) I was at LAX. Vince picked me up and reminded me that I had to practice my lines for the Oscars. I ran them over once in the car but soon lost interest. I put on a tux that Vince gave me and then hosted the Oscars with this non-blond girl. Midway through the show Perez let me know that people didn’t really like my performance. I decided that I wasn’t feeling LA, so instead of going to the afterparty I’d been planning, I hopped on a United flight on standby. I fell asleep in seat 19B in the company of little pretzels and Chaucer.