Penny Hero (dot) Net

Tee hee hee hee hee hee hee.

I’m really really interested in the structure of fiction. Not just something so basic as knowing the difference between a framed and an unframed story. I’m really into tracing where the author chooses to shift in time between “present” time and the time of the narrative itself.

I’m also really into how a story can play with structure in a more physical sense. House of Leaves is a good example of this. The text itself is thought to be a collection of crap found somewhere, but the various narrators paint different, deeper histories of where that collection of stuff came from… and how it wound up published and in your hands. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is another one that plays with this kind of structure… it sets up the story as a story told on a late night orally, but the first narrator says that the text we are reading was actually given to him after that storyteller died, years later, and that he published it after that.

These kinds of structures displace the idea of “book” and “story” and cause the story or whatever you want to call it at that point to insert itself a little bit into our own world.

When an author does that, it’s awesome. If they can shake up the boundry between “book” and “me”, I practically orgasm.

So, I’m facinated by this. And thinking about these kinds of works has given me new ideas for cool structures that I could maybe someday make into stories. Things like, having two interlinear narratives… two different points of view seeing a story at the same time literally woven together line by line on the page. I know how it would look, and the kinds of effects it would have… but I don’t yet have the content to make it work.

Right now, I’m playing with a piece of fiction that on the outer-most layer is a fiction story (it has a title, but the title refers to the next “layer” in the structure), but it’s actually a story about a blog entry that recieves no comments, which is telling the story of the girl’s father’s death and how that effects her, which really turns out to be her trying to make connections with people in her life… It’s 4 pages long now, and I don’t know how it will end, or if I could get away with ending it with something bloggy like “but I have to go now, my mom just came in” or something.

I’m not sure that makes sense, because I’m writing this in “rambling blog style” instead of literary analysis-clarity style… but I’m really excited about some of these ideas. And for a long while I had my heart set on working on some of them with Gavin. But, I don’t think that’ll happen. I read a story by a classmate of mine yesterday, and I really admire her work. The only problem is that really working with someone on your writing requires a huge amount of trust and vulnerability and that takes time to build…

I guess I’ve got time though. I should start talking to more of my writing classmates. Some of them are really jozu.

Dream stuff:

1.) I went home to hawaii and my mother was pregnant. But since she was “so old” her skin looked like black nylons and the baby hung from her belly like it was suspended in a net. It was awake and conscious, and it looked at me through my mom’s skin. It sort of waved I think.

2.) I was in a hotel with a really big burly handsome man. We were trying to find a way to deceive everyone in the world so we could “have an affair”. For some reason it was very difficult. The hotel room directly above us called us and it was his friend. He told us something about a girl who died in our room. There was some confusion over whether or not it was a prank. I took him home and tried to “have the affair” on the back porch but both my mom and my dad came back with my brother and I had to introduce him to them. I remember he was huge. Tall, round, but handsome. Dark features and clothes. Warm.

3.) They decided to force Mt. St. Hellens to erupt and empty its cauldron under controlled conditions because it was a threat to portland. I only found out about it because my mom said something about “no, let’s go do X on tuesday because Sunday the volcano is going to erupt”. Then I asked for more explanation (perhaps I was only visiting). In the dream, I had an awesome view of the volcano and all the small compact bombs that they’d laid in a line around what looked like a zippered seam in the earth. They exploded in a chain reaction and the land opened up like a pussy moist wound. Lava looked like blood, bright and glowing earth guts. It seeped out slowly at first, then gradually it flowed faster. At one point pressure built up in some part of the “wound” and there was this massive volcanic explosion. The authorities started to panic. My view shifted and I skidded across the ocean and watched shrapnel fall sizzling into the water. (for some reason mt st hellens was located in a body of water/ocean and my house was on the other side of it.) Then, because it was portland, I saw views of freeways darkened by the ash in the air. In the end, the authorities realized their mistake and I “saw” (from the same point of view that had revealed that the eruption was a wound in the planet) that this was a fatal blow. They’d opened the hole in the cauldron too big and they didn’t know that it was directly connected to some important layer in the earth’s structure and they’d damaged things beyond human repair. Basically the world was about to end.
___

I don’t remember the order of these dreams. it was like they came all at once, but they were still separate. For some reason I woke up happy and relaxed… relieved even. But then I took a shower and remembered yesterday. I think it’s a good sign that dreams/sleep are relieving enough stress to let me wake up happy. I’m still feeling sick though.

I love Maiki. I love Yuu.

And I love everyone who really tried to give me long distance hugs on my livejournal in my last friends-only entry.

If I wrote about it, you wouldn’t read it. I’m ok now. because I’ve got friends and a reasonable mind. although it’s stupid-painful.

By the way. Today is my brother’s birthday. he’s 15 today.

I didn’t take a shower today. I sat around in greasy hair playing video games and reading.

And I had the shock of my… life? Ethan came back from Portland and asked me to help him get something from the car. I walked outside, and two Japanese girls jump out from around the corner of my apartment building… I looked at one, and then the other… and then back. I slowly slowly slowly realize I recognize her. Her eyes light up when I come out, and even before I start to realize that this is not just a familiar face, but that it’s HER face, I’m saying “oh my god oh my god oh my god” because she’s taking my hands, and I’m hugging her… and I still don’t really comprehend that it’s really her. I don’t believe it.

It didn’t sink in for a good three or four minutes of just gawking and hugging… I cried. She introduced me to her younger sister. It still hasn’t sunk in. I’m still feeling like I’m about to cry.

Even now I don’t believe it. The voices in my living room aren’t theirs. It’s crazy. How could she have come here from Japan without me knowing? How could they have kept it a secret for 3 weeks?

So much has changed since she left. I’ve got anxieties about how I’ll (not) fit in with the group we all hung out with. How she may or may not meet my literature-nerd writing friends.

I want to cry again. I’m so glad she’s here. And I’m partly mourning the crazy adolscent-ish life I had my sophomore year when I was infatuated with only asian bilingual men… and I hid that I liked academics from everyone except her.

Her sister is a shy sweetheart. And she plays video games. :)

These next two weeks are going to be the most difficult and the most stressful and most awesome and most :) :) :) :) :) :).

If I can keep from going insane, I will. I’m so glad she’s here.

IT’S MINE IT’S MINE IT’S MINE IT’S MINE!!!

photo taxed without permission from the auction I won.

I rule I rule I rule I rule!! Now I’ve got all four of them. God damn how long it took me to finally find this one! (You suck at life if you don’t know how awesome this is.)

John Milton, from Areopagitica

“…for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as the soul that whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

Isn’t that fucking awesome?

a character descriptor: politely clueless

Tell me if you think that results like this would be statistically significant at all…

Let’s say that researchers were studying a certain species of insect. These “tidal bugs” were observed to have very elaborate feeding cycles that peaked regularly, and for SOME individuals, the cycle was in sync with the tides, even for those that did not live near the ocean. However, most individuals’ cycles ranged quite a bit, so that only about 30% of the population was “in sync” with the tide cycle.

Researchers want to know if there is any correllation between high tide and their cycles because high tide is an “urban myth” explanation for the elaborate feeding cycles and they want to see if there is any scientific evidence to back up that kind of correlation.

They studied the 30% of the total population that had a cycle with equal or less than 1/2 hour difference from the tide cycle and found that the feeding cycle peak happened within 6 hours of high tide in 69% of the population studied.

My question: Does this statistically reveal a correlation between high tide and the peak of this species of bugs’ feeding cycles? Why or why not? If you need more information, I’ll try to find it and answer specific questions about the study or the statistics themselves.

I’ve got my analysis happily hidden in a jabber chat log conversation with a friend… but I’d really like to know if I’m the only one who has come to these certain conclusions about this study.

Note: The study is real. And it totally wasn’t looking at bugs. I’ll tell you what I’m really talking about later… and that should make it clear why I’m interested in getting a third, fourth and seventeenth opinion on this analysis.

The panels are mostly amazing. The questions are mostly awesome too. I’ve only gone to one panel that was a pretty big dissapointment.

My favorite so far was the first one we went to about the short-short story, prose poetry, or “flash fiction”. Some writers read some of their work and then there was a great discussion on the genre itself, how it resists definition, a little about how to navigate editor’s expectations in order to get the work published. One of the most interesting conclusions one person drew was that prose poetry seems to really explode and blossom in the face of whatever criteria or definitions are sometimes imposed in a classroom because it gives a writer something to push against, to resist, and to subvert. This genre might be my favorite ever.

Another really interesting discussion was about how people seem to see the form differently if they are coming from a poetry background or a fiction background. To poets, the form is very new and very strange. To fiction writers, it is less of a shock, but it is still strange and very difficult to publish in fiction journals.

At one point, when someone mentioned that the internet seemed to be a perfect market for prose poetry, I almost had a mental orgasm, because I’d been thinking the same thing, and thinking about livejournal, thinking about the stuff I’d write and post on my crappy website back in high school that no one read.

I really think I’ve found my favorite form. I had no idea it was so much bigger than just little writing games writers played. I write so much of it all the time on the backs of scraps of paper in the writing center and in my notebooks as brainstorms for bigger stories that I never am able to write.

In Other News: Absinthe is FUN. fun fun fun fun fun. holy cow fun. And it’s fun to get it in a bar, where they light the sugar on fire right in front of you and everyone looks at your three flaming glasses not without a little envy but thinking either “stupid americans” or “stupid rich americans”. (it’s a bit spendy in the bars)

We tried it the other night in a bar, and it was a little fun. I drank much less than Dave and Gavin because the taste was so strong and I’d been drinking martinis and vodka stuff earlier. But they went for it. Both had two. I had about 3/4s of one and then ordered a guiness. Yesterday Dave went out to buy booze because bars were sucking down our funds like nothing (we’re spending about $45 a night on alcohol. It’s nuts), and he found a variety of absinthe for $50 (instead of the usual $150). It was probably much weaker, and also made with a slightly different root, but that shit was potent. We didn’t light anything on fire in the hotel room, but we drank all of it. ALL of it between the five of us. I took a lot of pictures, but now my camera is missing. I hope it’s not lost for good. I think there’s an awesome shot of gavin picking me up just before accidentally whacking my head against the wall (awesome). Not to mention the shot of me, dave, and gav in the bathtub posing with the absinthe bottle.

So last night i felt like my head was filled with helium, and I couldn’t stop laughing. But this morning I was pretty pukey and I missed the early panels. I’m much better now though, and gav bought me veggies. I’ll make it to the 1:30 stuff for sure. Fuck if I’m going to drink again on this trip though. I think I had 4 glasses of the green fairy goodness last night. FOUR. Maybe I’m actually partly dead right now. ha ha.