Words At Arm’s Length

Guh. Finally made it through Little Women. Well, almost. I’ve already had lectures on it and know how it ends, making the reading of it that much more of a chore. It’s continues to be a frustrating read for me as everything seems so unnatural and stiff, oddly even moreso in the second half where the story stops adhering to the “Pilgrim’s Progess” motif. I’ve read books like this before, where people “just don’t talk like that” or behave in such altruistic and didactic ways, but the levels to which Alcott seems to establish her characters through their moral lessons rather than focus more on actually making them human stops me in my tracks.

I really want to like Alcott. I do. I’ve read other stuff by her that, while verbose, kept my attention (“A Marble Woman” comes to mind). Unless someone can suggest to me a novel of hers that isn’t as maddening as Little Women, I’m putting her away for a loooong time (once this course is finished, anyway).

Kate Chopin, on the other hand, never ceases to impress. I’ve just finished “Athenaise” and I marveled at the subtlety of character and use of language. That’s not to say I didn’t have my problems with it, but they were more thematic than stylistic. I realize that Alcott’s book was meant for a different kind of audience, but good gravy, let your characters breathe a little bit. The literary choke-hold that Alcott keeps on her characters seems to prevent them from developing by any significant amount, reducing them cardboard cut-outs with absolutely no sense of mystery.

And since I mentioned Athenaise, there’s a scene in the story that gave me pause. At the beginning of the story, Athenaise runs back to her birth home after two months of marriage, feeling trapped and refusing to return to Cazeau and perform her wifely duties. Cazeau goes to fetch her and convinces her to go back with him, but as he follows her on horseback, is suddenly reminded of the time he and his father chased a slave who escaped from their Louisiana cotton plantation.

Now, hrmm. I think this is something I want to investigate further, and I’ll probably get the chance this term, and that’s this attempted link between slavery and marriage. In this scene, Chopin links them through Cazeau’s experience, perhaps showing that his supposed “ownership” of Athenaise is akin to his literal ownership of slaves. To me, in what little I know of the cultural context of the time, this link seems tenuous and problematic at best. I realize that Chopin is invoking the image of the slave symbolically, but it still gave me major pause to equate Athenaise’s experience to that of Black Gabe, although I find it incredibly fascinating.

Something to think about, I suppose.

It’s been another strange couple of weeks, as what usually is a time of settling in has been one of unrest. My lack of employment is causing me stress. In grand Paul-style, I of course shut down and busy myself with other things instead of attacking the problem head-on.

I outright refuse to debase myself in telemarketing jobs, nor will I attempt to crawl back to Shoppers Drug Mart and beg for 10 hours a week of over-priviledged retail hell. I can’t seem to find an environment that I’m comfortable working in. The closest thing I found was probably the Press last year, but I cocked that up royally, so on to other things.

Please, please, just let me find a job that doesn’t have me pandering to fucktards while I restrain myself from pounding my head against the wall. Even better if said job doesn’t start playing “Winter Wonderland” on an endless loop starting the day after Hallowe’en. Christ, I almost wish I could work retail in the States, due merely to the fact that they have Thanksgiving bridging the gap between the Monster Mash and “the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, thus effectively putting off the Christmas music for a precious few weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve been busying myself by writing, hanging out and watching Naruto. Yup, coming out right now. I’m an anime fan. Have been since I was a wee lad and remain staunchly so to this day. Say what you will about the medium, how it’s base, formulaic, ridiculous, but the imagination that the creators of these anime and manga series put forth to the masses leaves me in awe sometimes. Naruto, an incredibly popular on-going series in Japan, has been a favourite of mine because the hero of the story fucks up, loses battles, and still keeps on moving. He’s constantly looked down upon, mostly due to his impetuous behaviour, but continues to strive for recognition from his peers and, I think, from himself. The fact that it has ninjas just adds to the awesome really. And oh man, the melodrama. So much angst it puts every show on the CW right now to shame, and that’s saying something. And yeah, Naruto’s constant push towards his goal is something I’d like to mimic. I want to have that drive. It’s in me somewhere, and I can feel it sometimes…but I lose it just as fast and I flatline completely. So frustrating…

I’m just past the halfway point in Little Women for my 19th century American Women Writers class. It’s a fine line between love and hate, so I’ll just say “it’s okay”. The prose flows nicely and the characters are, while pretty flat, mostly fun. The constant moralizing makes me want to chuck the novel in a paper-shredder and be done with it, but I mosey along.

Oh yes, I’m officially not going to Korea for the moment. My adventures abroad will have to wait until I can cultivate something of meaning here at home. My brother and I will be publishing our graphic novels soon. Come hell or high water, I will finish the scripts for both projects and we’ll have a limited run, unless some publisher sees it and loves it and wants to option it out for a movie or something.

That’s it for now folks. Time for more precious stories about the precious March family and their precious fucking lives (but really, I don’t hate the book. Just a lot of it).

Whereabout I was in the cityscape
Is where I was when I breathed your dust
You cautioned me about the taste
Lime-green bitters served on glass
To be chased away with morning dew
But left to sit upon my tongue

It shivered there upon my tongue
in the stillness of the cityscape
before the dawn could bring the dew
I filled my lungs up with your dust
and took in sights beyond the glass
so thinking wouldn’t mar the taste

I couldn’t get beyond the taste
that sat there seething on my tongue
and made me look about the glass
while the twisting of the cityscape
shook off its populace like dust
to mix with morning-after dew

I longed to wash with morning dew
but found the asking in bad taste
I settled in the cracks like dust
and thought it best to hold my tongue
to cancel out the cityscape
that slipped about my eyes like glass

I sighed it out upon the glass
and words formed on the stone like dew
and hardened on the cityscape
I saw you longing for a taste
to have it dance upon your tongue
and settle in your brain like dust

My face is blackened by the dust
and now I cannot see the glass
that moves so gently on your tongue
and rolls about your lips like dew
I try to find you by your taste
and lose you in the cityscape

(My first attempt at a sestina. This form boggles me a bit, but I like the way it twists.)

What Love Could Be

In open air three starlings set a course
And of them, two would form a squabbling pair,
Deny affection ’til their throats were hoarse
But in the silence find each other there.
Defenses down, a tenderness takes hold.
A cradle formed that sets two starlings free.
The flicker in my heart that makes me bold
Observes the peace in the periphery.
Their hands entwined, a stunning work of art,
My words, the bramble crawling ’round the frame
Send shooting pains into my lonely heart
Straight to its husk and smoldering remains.
I had abandoned hope of love for me
Until I looked upon what love could be.

(For A&B)

Totally called the Agent Till freakout yea-yea.

Episode was a downer but goddamn can they ever do cliffhangers on this show.

SIGH I guess I’m in for another season.

The following made me a happy panda this week:

1. ) Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton on SNL. And they fuckin’ spiked it. Both of them. A lot’s being said about Tina Fey as Palin, but the comic chemistry between these two women is astounding and I lawled repeatedly. Poehler’s Clinton still impresses me every time I see her perform.

2.) Californication pre-airs leaked. This season is lookin’ good so far. And David Duchovny is as shirtless as ever. Booyes.

3.) Rock Band 2. Bikini Kill, Interpol and “Psycho Killer”? Sold. Also not having to create a new character for every instrument you play is a nice new feature.

4.) Leaks leaks leaks! TV on the Radio, Gang Gang Dance, Detektivbyran and Annie, to name a few. My iPod is crammed with goodies now. Avoiding small talk with school acquaintances on the bus just became that much easier.

5.) Speaking of goodies on my iPod, I downloaded Joni Mitchell’s entire discography, as well as Joan Baez’s. I’ve been on a folk kick recently (you know, just the past 3 years or so) and great googly-moogly why did I never download these two ladies before? Here’s a taste of Baez doing “Sweet Sir Galahad”. I tried to find the Woodstock version, but I could only find Flash video on some Asian site and couldn’t figure out how to embed it. But, regardless, that voice, oh that voice:

Could make a man weep, I tells ya.

hush now
shut out the light
with your heavy lids
and sleep the sleep you’ve earned
sleep the sleep of dreams and nightmares
that cannot hope to stir you
Sleep sepulchred sleep
Of stone or sorrow
or other weighty things
wrap your arms around your lonely frame
warm your cold and lonely frame
and beg for sleep
call for it across starlit expanses
pay it reverence
assert your need
and sleep the sleep of empty caverns
beyond love or hunger
let it come
wind the thread on the spool behind your eyes
let it come
put down your pen and let it come

**SPOILER ALERT FOR WEEDS SEASON 4**

I’m not an avid TV watcher. There are very few shows that I follow regularly, and I usually download them so as to avoid commercials. As such, I only really stick to shows I really love, and one of those shows is (or was) Weeds. In the first few seasons, the skewering of upper-middle-class culture was superb, and the performances, especially from Mary-Louise Parker, were a treat to watch.

That being said, I am very disappointed with the last few episodes of the latest season. Gone is the hilariously suburban setting of Agrestic, in favour of generally racist interpretations of a coastal California town on the U.S.-Mexico border. The knowing jabs at SUVs and “keeping up with the Joneses” have been replaced with inept commentary about the struggles of Mexicans trying to reach the U.S. in an attempt to realize the American Dream. If it was handled with any kind of tact or realism, I wouldn’t have a problem, but the storyline is so amazingly ethnocentric and amateurish, relying on racist jokes for cheap laughs, that I can hardly handle any of the scenes involving the two “coyotes” (people who lead others over the border, for those not in the know), Doug and Andy. Sure, Doug and Andy were culturally insensitive beforehand, but their bluntness used to be charming, and they were so often brought down a peg by their own stupidity. Now, both characters are completely vile: Andy because he has no personality anymore, and Doug because he’s a whiny asshole. Enough with this storyline. Try something else.

The OTHER thing that bothers me about this season? Queer representation. Okay, we’ve got Sanjay, who I find funny for the most part (probably because he plays Jonathan in 30 Rock). I was pretty unimpressed with the whole forcing him to have sex with a woman so he could “have the gay fucked out of him” and subsequently getting her pregnant thing. But the Clinique/Sanjay moments have been humourous (if horribly stereotypical, both in its representations of gay men and African American women). So far, not so good. Now, this season, we have Capt. Roy Till of the D.E.A. revealed as a queer character, and we are then introduced briefly to his partner (in a professional and romantic sense), Agent Shlatter (no first name given). It the most recent episode, Agent Shlatter busts the Mexican smuggling ring that Nancy was helping to front, with Nancy being the one to disclose the location of the tunnel through which the drugs, firearms and young women were being transported. The Mexican drug ring, displeased with this turn of events, proceeds to kidnap agent Shlatter and then torture him horribly by removing his skin with a power-sander. Once he rats out Nancy (and I imagine that’s how he’s going to be perceived, being a minor [minority] character that leads our portagonist Nancy to her doom, and being a cop that betrays his informant), the man torturing Shlatter, Cesar, executes the agent.

Really? REALLY? Fuck you guys.

The writers of this show introduced Shlatter and Till as lovers in an “OH MY GOSH HE’S GAY” moment as a lame character development shortcut for Shlatter, because they had to create some sympathy for him in the brief time he appeared on screen. So yeah, let’s do so by making him Till’s lover instead of flexing our writing muscle and giving him some fucking personality. Then let’s fucking fridge him. I can pretty much guarantee that this will set Till off on some insane rampage that will probably end with him getting killed too, but even if he doesn’t, it’s the Women in Refrigerators trope with artificial gay flavouring.

Oh, but it could have happened to a straight character, you say?

It didn’t.

And it doesn’t.

Queer characters in performance art; stage, film, television or other; are disproportionately victims of violent deaths and this is just another Tara from Buffy or Martha from The Children’s Hour. Just add Agent Shlatter to the list of queer characters who get killed in a particularly brutal fashion, ’cause really, that’s all that he was there for.

I will watch the season fimale to see how it pans out, but this show is spiralling into some seriously damaging cliches. And the fact that Mary-Louise Parker is given practically nothing to work with and her scenes have displayed her as some near-catatonic headcase and we have a trifecta of bullshit that is making it hard to tolerate this program. If it doesn’t pick up by next season, I’m out.

And so begins another semester at Brock, officially, although the relative ease of the one class I’m actually taking has allowed me some downtime to write and socialize a bit. I can’t help but feel optimistic when summer ends and fall rolls around. It always feels like I could become that version of Paul that I should be rather than what I am. Fitter/happier, as it were.

Of course, I’m also in perpetual fear that due to this semester’s low demand, I’ll just slip into the same patterns and not improve myself at all.

There’s gotta be a way to change, right? Fundamentally alter oneself to meet the demands of your life on a physical, psychological and intellectual level. Well, the physical part I’ve done once, but in spite of that, I still sometimes feel like I did in high school: cowardly, sad and perpetually defeated.

I’m considering adding a weekly blog update that will track my progress (with numbers!) as I figure out a workout schedule, a writing schedule and eventually get a new job. What I’m doing right now on a day-to-day basis only passingly resembles a routine and I have to get myself organized.

Blargh. I need a vacation.

Forever ago I was a sleeping giant
And now forever am the mote of dust
that clings to the lash of the dreamer’s eye
Would that I were the lively one
among the gnawing vermin
I could chew through concrete and spoil my supper
I could flap my wings and spores would fly
and land discretely ‘neath the feet of the cackling legion
I am that which weaves between and touches nothing
The static beneath the sound
The time between heartbeats
I once believed I was the seams
But, afraid, I frayed and pulled apart
My thread already weak for lack of use
And now I rest upon a single hair
To be blinked away in the morning sun