Week 3, Theme 5

Prompt: Go back to the “sentence-sounds” you collected in the first assignment and write a narrative in which one or more of them appear.

“Hey, you there? I’m in one of the bedrooms waiting for you.”

The text message bathed the middle of my phone’s screen in a translucent aqua blue. It was a hot night, and pools of warm water remaining from an evening shower stagnated on the asphalt. My feet, suctioned to rubber Havaianas sandals, went where they wanted to. They frolicked from one pool to the other, dirtying themselves and their rubber vessels. They danced into both the puddles reflecting the bright waxing moon and those sheathed from the light by the tall buildings stretching up either side of the canyon. Leaping from water to more water, my toes whistled in delight at their simultaneous cleansing and sullying.

384 East Eighty-Fourth Street. My brown-streaked feet met the shocked glare of the doorman, red-breasted and boot-clad. After my initially hostile exchange with him, the rubber carried my feet to the elevator bank marked “penthouse.” Feeling heavier as the elevator rose, my feet shot toward the top of the canyon by way of the gold-plated floor.

All of the feet in the penthouse were sheathed in oxfords or stilettos. The advance of my rubbery, grimy appendages precipitated a general parting in the crowd of polished leather and sometimes, shiny plastic. The sight of my toes went rejected in the averted eyes of the middle-aged women and men in the acceptable shoes. Undeterred, my feet advanced in a diagonal line from the elevator bank.

Entering the door and seeing the sandy floor with Christina sitting, smiling, in the middle, my toes sighed in relief. They shed themselves of the rubber and, sinking into the sand, moved toward her.

Week 3, Theme 4

Prompt: a) Create an exchange between two people in which one or the other misunderstands what is said on the basis of sound-confusions or punning. Or, b) Describe a scene by creating a particular aural environment, using (but sparingly) onomatopoeia.

Mrs. Primmel sighed and paced in front of the whiteboard lodged on a wall in the library. Sometimes she wondered why she took the time with these coddled delinquents. If it were up to them they would use these pages as toilet paper, or, have a book-shredding party set to the tune of Nirvana or whatever God-awful clanging they were obsessed with these days. As communications and public relations manager of the Worcester Library Cooperative Learning Association Foundation, Mrs. Primmel was in charge of wasting the district’s fine resources on exposing these students, if you deign to call them that, to a real research environment. This was the third visit of a class from P.S. 139 over on Briarbush Ave., and Mrs. Primmel had already had enough of their intellectual lethargy for a lifetime. She approached a problem child from previous sessions, ready for a confrontation in defense of academia.

Arriving at the table, Mrs. Primmel decided to just launch into it: “Sabine, I’ve read your previous essay on, ahem, Frederick the Great’s clothing choices, and would like to discuss it with you.”

Sabine, who had been drawing black and blue hearts on her forearm skin, looked up. “Good morning to you too, Mrs. Primmel,” she said with a mischievous smile burbling up from her teeth and mouth.

Unfazed, the old librarian went on, “Ahem. Aside from the fact that the King’s clothing choices were at best only tangentially related to his reign, you also failed completely to cite any of your sources. Did you even open any of the books at the library sessions?”

Sabine looked around her, confused but not letting the old bag on to it. She had sighted all of her sources; she only had to rotate her stare the library to see that. She gazed up at the intimidating, frumpy form standing over her and asked to be excused.

Week 3, Theme 3

Prompt: With Joyce’s Portrait or Alvarez’s “My English” as models, write a theme about an early experience of sound. You might choose an experience in which you were perhaps unsure what the sound meant or what made it, and had to interpret the sense of it on the basis of sound alone. You might choose a song, or the sound of a particular word, or someone’s speech. The sound you choose need not be linguistic---it can be anything that you heard and paid attention to---but you will want to suggest nonetheless what it was saying to you, the sense you made of it, in short, and how that sense was conveyed through sound. Decide what point of view you wish to take---that of your younger self, your self today, or some combination. Use your heightened sense of sound in this theme to bring other senses, also, to the foreground. As you reflect on sound, think about the sound of your own writing.

Grandma and I waited in our place in line at the bank. My eyes, in line with the middle of her skirt, stretched up toward her face as she continued to look forward. A tug from above on my fingers let me know it was time to see the bank lady. As Grandma sorted through papers on the wooden desk, the lady looked at me and asked if I wanted a lollipop. Oh, did I. “Hein!” The woman gave me a bemused stare and then laughed to my grandmother, “That’s so cute! Your grandson speaks German!” Grandma did not have the same smile on her face. As we walked out of the bank a while later, she looked down at me and said “Patrick, ‘hein’ is not a word, ok?” “Hein,” I replied. Frustrated, she strapped me into my car seat and drove me home.

And so it was that hein and I entered into a torrid affair. Whether at birthday parties or bakeries or at the pediatrician, hein would ring out loudly and proudly from my little mouth. The relationship was confusing to my family, especially my mother, who came to think that she had at some point errantly pronounced a word in my presence only to spark this dreadful tryst. She even considered delaying enrolling me in Pre-K because of hein, among other reasons (food issues, attention problems, rejection of clothing standards…). But, alas. Happy affairs are, well, happy, only when they’re secret. My sister Meghan, who had found my linguistic-rebel-without-a-cause air amusing, had a hand in ending it. As she played with me on the slide, she beckoned me toward her at the bottom. “Want to slide down, Patrick?” From my mouth, mid-slide came, “Hein!” Meghan started. “Patrick, does ‘hein’ mean ‘yes?’”

“Hein!”

Week 3, Theme 2

Prompt: Spoken language is, uh, filled with “fillers”: words like “like”---or simply sounds like “uh”---that serve complex functions in like ordinary discourse, or something. They exist, you know, somewhere between language and physical gesture. Take time to listen carefully to other people’s speech and to your own. Note how and when fillers enter, and with, um, what effects. Then create a dialogue or a monologue in which fillers are used suggestively (you can simply present the dialogue or monologue on its own, or provide a narrative frame). The point is not to make fun of a particular form of speech or speaker (although you may have fun with this assignment), but to highlight and make intelligent use of dimensions of speech that we seldom think about or acknowledge, even while we register and respond to them. Think of this as a chance to notice and explore the expressive noise that is part of speech.

1: Well Joe is now single. So I was like should I friend him and she was like “yeah go for it” whatever, but then, in like the middle of the class, she turns to me and is like “Victor, you practice safe sex, right? I just want to know because AIDS is really prevalent in the gay male community. I just want you to be safe.”

2: Sherry! As, for like, for real?

1: And I didn’t talk to her for the rest of the class.

2: Wait was she like joking? Is that part of the improv thing she does?

1: No, not at all. Not at all! She was like being such a jerk!

2: Uh, she has AIDS, probably.

1: Literally I didn’t know what to say. She’s a piece of shit.

2: There’s like, remember…

1: I got so mad at her.

2: YUHG or whatever did…remember there’s that article about STDs or whatever, and the health guy said he couldn’t say how many people here had AIDS? And he said, it was like, around 10 or 20.

1: That’s a lot.

2: That’s not that much.

1: Well, it’s not like, ehh, it’s like, you can only get AIDS from like…and it’s like, whatever. Like, Sherry’s such a dolt…I hate her.

2: Wait Sherry said that?

1: Yeah!

2: I can’t believe she’s for real.

1: It’s like continuing her thing of always acting like she knows better…

2: Watch her get AIDS…

1: So then I was like oh does Joe think I’m cute, and she was like “yeah, definitely, but I also told him you’re crazy” or whatever and I was like “seriously?”

2: Wait she told him that? That’s for him to decide…or, like, find out. But that’s like, half the joy of a relationship.

1: I know right?

(pause)

2: Ok, I, uh, have to do reading.

1: Yeah I’m gonna nap.

(pause)

2: But Joe is short! He’s shorter than Sherry!

1: No, he’s not!

Week 3, Theme 1

Prompt: Write a page of “sentence-sounds,” like the examples Robert Frost gives in his letter to John Bartlett. Don’t try to connect them all, although you may use two or three in a brief exchange. Try carrying a notebook to get down instances you hear in the course of a day. Ideally, your “sentence-sounds” should suggest the contexts they come from, so that your reader can imagine the situations in which they are spoken. Experiment with different contexts: informal exchanges between friends or strangers; speech on the radio or tv, or in the classroom, or some other public setting; the phone. Can text messages constitute “sentence-sounds”? No question. How about artificial voices? Maybe, but maybe not by Frost’s definition. Try to express the implied “postures” and “tones” of your speakers.

Hi hot stuff. I’m in my room reading. I’m hopeful that the word investment really isn’t meaning more stimulus spending and a bigger government here in Washington. Yesterday, my headphones weren’t working, so I put them in the washer with my clothes and now I can hear everything! The last time I came here, I had spicy sake that set my tongue on fire – how do I get that again? What's sad is that Ford used to own Jaguar so that was on the list of cars that my family was allowed to drive...no longer. I’m so bored, look at me – I’m making my bed. On January 1^st, Jansen finished building a replica of the Ohio State football stadium, called the Horseshoe; it is made entirely of legos, a million of them. Oh my god, that email thread is so funny! I just had the best meeting ever with an SOM professor about Hong Kong this summer; he deals with profits and stuff so it will be interesting to incorporate a totally different perspective into my interview. Yes. If we don’t align the text on this thing, we’re gonna look like amateurs here. My god, it’s the new me! I’m so excited for this reading. How many drinks is binge drinking – fifteen? The crunchy rolls are my favorites. I don’t care. Achtung auf der Wortstellung. We’re making an exception for you – you can have it again right now. We were competitive! I’m working on an orgo problem set haha. Ready when you are! Tonight, 9:30. Was a disaster - almost went to bed with Ramya – you? That’s a first for me. Hey you there? I’m in one of the bedrooms waiting for you.

Goals for the semester

1. To eliminate (or reduce) the "blank page feeling" that comes with starting a new assignment and not knowing how to just start writing a narrative or an outline.

2. To improve stylistically with my writing - by this I mean to say that I'd like to be able to be more subtle while still conveying equal meaning, to more artfully use techniques such as metaphor, and to make my writing more lyrically pleasing.

3. To develop meaningful and memorable characters in my themes - ones that are believable and not cliched.

That's all I can think of right now! I might add more later as I continue to mull this.

Quotation #2

"Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees."

-Fortune cookie message from Ivy Noodle sometime this weekend