Upcoming Conference Appearance and...

Merry belated Christmas.

I'll be reading some or all of "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" at the 2008 CEA/PCEA conference in Pittsburgh this coming March. It'll be at the Omni William Penn--the same place where I stayed when I got sent down there for strike duty--it's a nice hotel.

In other news, we had a very nice Christmas down at Sue's sister's place in Bloomsburg. Molly learned how to say 'Yam' (Sue's sister is Aunt Yam and her husband is Uncle Spud). She also learned how to call kitties by saying "Meow." It's retardedly cute.

Morning Derail

I'm typing this with my laptop precariously balancing on one knee, while my daughter sleeps in my arms.

It's been a rough morning.
It's been a wonderful morning.

Let's start at about 2:36 AM. Molly starts crying--nightmare.
Sue gets up to rock her to sleep; no luck, brings her to bed with us, and Molly goes into "let me pick at your face and drill your nose with my razor finger, mama" mode. (Usually, I'd qualify all of that as a big long hyphenated word, but today, that sounds too complicated.)

So back to bed with her.

She cries.

We try to sleep despite the crying. All parents know that's a lie. In reality, the parents lay a room away from their crying child, eyes closed pretending to sleep and hoping the other will get up and care for the kid, or better yet, hoping the kid will just embrace the beautiful idea of sleep and, well, sleep through the night...maybe just once, but preferably every night.

So at 3:18, I get up, try to rock, and backrub Molly back into the land of sleeper crystals and whatever weird thing babies dream about.

Twice I make it to the door before tears.

At attempt 2, Sue offers Molly in bed with her part 2. By now it's 3:47, and since the alarm is going off in 13 minutes anyway, I relent, stay up, and head down to grade papers until my conscience clears me to maybe work on some fiction.

4:05 and Sue calls down; Molly drilled her nose good again (maybe I'm making that up for dramatic effect). Either way, Molly is standing in the bed when I fetch her.

So the routine begins. And this is the, my kid should be asleep, I want to be asleep, but the kid doesn't want to sleep, so let's do awake things routine.
1. diaper change. check.
2. food. She ate about 1/4 of a banana...so hunger wasn't the issue.
3. set up a sleeping nest in the living room--trick said child to sleep by having sleep be somewhere 'fun.' Check.
4. Let kid roam/play until the sleep demons take over....fail.

It's always the toughest when Molly continues crying when you've done everything you thought she needed. food, clean butt, not cold, has binky, George (her monkey, but not that Curious asshole--fuck him. I hate curious george. Molly's george is cute [for a monkey] and has a really weird outie belly button that's somewhat creepy and yet endearing.), place to sleep, and is eye-rubbing tired.

Change plans. We lay down together. This scares me. I'm still tired. I have the perpetual, sleep through everything important fear. I soldier through though. Stay awake, she doesn't. Score.

Wait...my reward is to grade bad revisions. Oh well, satisfying my concience. Grading begins at about 5ish.

During this time, Molly sleeps with a lot of restless in her. Butt in the air, creeping slowly off the nest until a face drag on the carpet is enough for me to try to intervene. But the best laid ideas are often dashed, right? My desire to help turns into a wakeup call, some more tears.

So we jump back to stage 4. Let her roam. She does this long enough for me to start grading again.

Then the cute starts. Her little tired self comes over to the couch and she lays her head on my keyboard, a feat that I'm still not sure how she pulled off, since I was sitting proper on the couch, meaning she had to kind of twist and stretch to get her head there. Either way, she ended up joining me on the couch in my arms, and I started to one-hand grade (I'm letting the kids submit essays electronically this semester, so I'm doing track changes).

As she nestles in, she grabs a shall laying over the couch and wraps it about her; I guess Sue's smell makes her more comfortable, and since she doesn't often sleep in my lap, I kind of stop grading.

This Molly sleeping in the lap thing is pretty common for Sue; they do it all the time, but I don't often get the honor of being a pillow, so I stop grading all together, and turn to her little body. Looking at her all curled into me, breathing smooth now, warm, wrapped in a shall, I have one of those great parenting moments. This is my daughter. She is tiny and beautiful and love and sleeping. Sleeping finally because I am her safe. I am her protection from whatever awful dream kept reoccuring tonight.

So my morning plans are somewhat derailed. I'm probably not going to check as many things off my checklist of overachievement. But instead I get something rare and wonderful. A small beauty, a moment worthy of reverie and experience.

So I'm going to stop writing now, and enjoy it for as long as I can.

Goalsetting

So, when I graduated in May, I said, "Self, finish this damn novel in stories by the end of the year. k. thx. bye."

Well, I haven't been doing all that well at keeping up with promises to myself. It all has something to do with timeflow. You see, there are only 24 hours in a day, and well, I can't convince my body that less than 5-6 hours of sleep a night is a good idea (despite my efforts). Plus too, Molly is cuter than buttons, unicorns, rainbows, and the entire cast of Morning Musuimi (Why I'm remembering a fabricated j-pop band that I only vaguely knew about around the year 2000, right now, I don't know). In any event though, Parenting is definitely high on the "need to do list."

In fact, there are a lot of things on the need to do list. Observe:

• Parenting (this one is worth 10x all others)
  
• Teaching
• Prepping for teaching
• finding insurance (or Why the fuck do we not have national healthcare yet, you government assholes?)
• fixing our basement (painting, organizing, remodeling)
• Downstairs toilet is broken
• Grading papers
• Recording Molly's cuteness via cameras/camcorders
• Prepare proposals for the PCEA conference very soon (I think it's a 11/1 deadline)
• Read and prepare materials for the Warrior Poet Group (I'm due to start teaching Nabokov's Pale Fire here soon)
• Oh and writing.

You know what I'm best at in life? Taking on more than I can handle. I'm downright awesome at that. And there are dozens of more things that need my attention that I haven't even bothered to list.

So,
I said to my self, "self, stop whining and do something about doing something." And so, I've decided that the best way to try to finish a draft of Not an Autobiography by the end of the year is to sign up for NaNoWriMo with the goal to bang out the last three stories or so that I feel need to be in the book.

Feel free to laugh at my audacity, stupidity, and plain ole inadvoidable ability to take on way too much at once.

Deconstructing Happily Ever After Now in Print

On Wednesday, I finally received my contributor's copies of Human Voices, an anthology put together by the folks that run the Kentuckiana Metroversity contest. It has all of the winning and runner-up essays, stories, and poems from the 2008 contest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a website for them, so I'm not sure how/if folks can get copies of it, but I'd be happy to shoot the story to anyone that wants to read it regardless. "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" took 1st place in the Graduate Fiction section.

"Everything Ends" now in print

This week I received my contributor copies of A capella Zoo, Issue 1 where "Everything Ends" was recently published.

It's a very slick production, and looks to be a fantastic journal for us experimental types.

A great sad blow to the world

On Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 we lost our dear friend, Judy Knapp. It's so easy for us to take life for granted, to spend too much time in front of the TV, to waste time, to let the days slip between our fingers. But Judy never did that. Judy was life. She, even on her worst days, had optimism that many of us don't have on our best. And she never settled for anything less than a life full of adventure, be it travel, books, or her willingness to try her hand at just about anything, Judy, of all the people I know, knew what it meant to be alive.

Her life force, her personality, and her drive inspired everyone around her. Her laugh infectious, her smile, contagious, Judy met everyone with child-like enthusiasm back with genuine interest. She always wanted to know about everything new and wonderful, but was there too when times were tough.

When I was small, Judy was my gum dispenser. She'd come over, and I'd race to her, pumping my little-kid legs as hard as I could, all the while chanting, “JudyJudyJudy!” When I got there, invariably my next plea was, “Do you have any gum?” Silly story, but when you're a little kid, gum is king. And growing up Judy continued to be a huge influence on me. She turned me on to reading and Edgar Allen Poe. She supported my writing, gave Sue and I countless vacation tips (and plenty of travel envy), and was a great friend and surrogate Aunt.

Judy's life spark was huge and bright. And never was it diminished by sickness. If anything, diabetes made her spark all the brighter, which is perhaps why her passing on Wednesday was so shocking to all of us. That bright ball of light and love, curiosity, intelligence, and laughter snapped away so sudden-quick. But it isn't gone. We have it now, all of us that have been touched by her wonderful soul. It's up to us to carry her spark now; it's up to us to remember all that is Judy and to never forget. We love you, Judy. And will miss you greatly.

“May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.” --Edward Abbey

The failure of the 2008 Summer Olympics

As I sit here watching fireworks that fired off in a 12 hour offset, I'm thinking that the 2008 Olympics, the first summer games I've ever actively paid attention to pretty much sucked. It didn't suck because China was the host, or I felt that there was some form of preferential treatment/cheating going on (though that I dea has crept into my head), it's the fact that NBC did an abso-fucking-lutely horrible job covering the games.

From the opening ceremony to the torch's last moments, I've had the games on durning primetime nearly every night (background noise as we played with Molly, really), and during that time, I saw: a tiny bit of fencing, bicycling, swimming, biking, volleyball, diving, more swimming, more volleyball, more diving, gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more swimming, more volleyball, a bit of running, more volleyball, a moment of trampoline, more diving, more gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more volleyball, more volleyball.

In all, I'd say 80% of NBC's primetime coverage was volleyball. And I have no idea why this was decided as the penultimate sport to display. Sue and I were stunned at the beauty of the trampoline finals--why didn't we get to see more of that? And what about Judo? I didn't even see highlights of that. And Tae Kwon Do? All I saw was a brief highlight reel about the Cuban kicking a Ref in the head, on purpose--that should have been prime time front and center.

My wife's a former Junior Olympics medalist in discus. There wasn't any coverage for that--and an American took gold in Discus. Sue syas though that they never televise the non-running sports of track & field. That's sad.

I remember in the past there were special channels you could order for the games, so that you could see more things....Hell, I'd expect at least that NBC would devote most of the day to the games, but no. Daytime TV garbage reigns over Olympic awesomeness. Not only that, but it's sad that the games didn't start until Prime Time. We should have had 24/7 coverage with only breaks for the news. All the other shows are completely unnecessary. We only get the Olympics ever four years; why limit our experience even more?

The announcers also need to shut the hell up. Especially during the diving. That woman announcer, I don't remember her name, constantly criticized everything anyone did, and almost always under-scored the athletes' scores compared to the judges. These people are the world's best, I don't want to hear how they fucked up a tuck or left their feet straight. I wanted to be amazed by a prowress I'll never know. I don't need to hear nitpicky garbage from some announcer trying to fill the tv silence.

Commercials. I swear NBC orchistrated the Olympics footage to be actually less air time than commercial time. Seriously, they'd show two dives, cut to commercial. Show another dive, cut to commercial. I know commercials are quickly overruning our TV land, but they were especially bad during the Olympics.

So what did I like? The atheletes. Everyone who competed was fantastic. China did a great job hosting (although they really spent way too much money putting it all together (I hope they don't let their Olympic grounds fade into decripitude like Athens)).

Well Enough wining for me. Here's to hoping that London's Olympics get better coverage, less fucking volleyball and more diversity.

The good news is that now that the Olympics are over, I won't be watching anything except movies again. Ahh Netflix, you are my friend.

Success in the job market

So Friday's interview went really well. In fact, it went so well, that Behrend offered me two sections of Comp for the fall semester. The pay's not quite good enough for me to leave my dayjob yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. I'm totally pumped; not only do I have a teaching job, but it's one at the ideal location, and now that I've found a job I can spend my mornings writing instead of job hunting. Good stuff.

Wish me luck

On Friday, I'll be interviewing at Penn State Behrend for an adjunct position teaching two sections of Composition. Wish me luck!

Publishing Update and the other two thirds

Publishing Update:

"Everything Ends" will appear in the inaugural issue of A Capella Zoo. It should be due out around October-ish.

As for the rest of D&D 4th Edition, overall I think things went in a real good direction. The Monster's Manual, especially, was great. They did a lot of things in it that make the life of the DM a lot easier: no more rolling HPs for monsters, no more guestimating monsters to match the level of the party, hell 4th edition even includes lore data. The artwork in there is pretty great too. My only real complaint with the Monster's Manual is more of a semantics thing--I don't care for the Demons and Devils concept; I much rather liked the 2nd ED Tanar'ri and Baatezu...but really that's a nerd-point that matters little in the grand scheme of things.

As for the new Dungeon Master's Guide, I didn't find it to offer much for the old Hat DM like myself. It has a lot on world creating, encounter creating, and even a little on crowd control (as in how to control your players at the gaming table). I think, had I found the book 18 years ago, when I was starting out in D&D, I would have become a good DM a lot faster. It's well put together, but since they dumped a lot of the former DMG stuff into the PHB (magic items and the like), there really isn't as much in the DMG that an experienced gamer needs to have.

So overall, D&D 4th is a clear triumph over the clunky garbage of 3rd and 3.5rd, but I still think WotC is missing the boat on the Role-Playing aspect of D&D. It was there before 3rd edition, and I'm certain that the miniature rules are what's currently destroying the Role-playing nature of the game, but mechanically, it seems like the game will run pretty clean. I just wish they would have included more non-combat related spells/powers/abilities, or Perhaps one thing that should have been in the DMG: a guide on how to create your own powers and the like.

A One-Third Impression

As most of you know (If you don't, welcome to the club), I've been a long time D&D nerd. At an age in my life where most of my friends have lost the time to play, my wife and I soldier on...adventuring on our nightly walks with Molly. Though our playstyle has evolved pretty far from the ruleset, I still get a kick out of new source books, and under such pretense, I picked up a copy of the new 4th edition rules. Since I finished plowing through the Player's Handbook yesterday, I'm going to offer up a 1/3 review of the new face of D&D.

Before I begin, let it be known that I'm somewhat old school. I came into D&D at the height of 2nd edition AD&D, and immediately hated and scoffed at all that was 3rd edition for its entire lifecycle (with the exception of the two Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance PS2 ports, to which, 3rd Edition rules worked wonders). In essence, I felt that 3rd edition was a dumbing down and a 180 about face to the 2nd edition rules: roleplaying opportunities decayed into infinite skill/power checks, and everyone wanted miniatures combat so they could use their silly feats. So, long story short, the few 3rd ed books I did buy, were mainly for the artwork, and ideas; I tossed all the rules and replaced with a bastardization of 2nd edition and my own house rules.

I was fully expecting to toss out 4th edition just as quickly, but I've seen several improvements upon 3rd edition, and what's more, an actual evolution that feels right for the D&D name. What do I mean by that? Well, originally, D&D 3rd edition was supposed to be a sort of simplification of 2nd Ed. AD&D rules (I guess the "Advanced" was causing WotC to lose customers or something). But, to all appearances, I think 3rd Ed. ended up being by far more complex than anything 2nd Ed. had done. 4th Ed. is a clear simplification of rules. It's also a very baseline release. WotC (that's Wizards of the Coast, the current owner of the D&D name), in its unending pull for massive amounts of money, drops several thousand hints to bigger and better things you can do for your PCs in upcoming books (that will probably also hit you at $35 per pop). I like that. 4th Ed. embraces the KISS principle in initial Racial/Class offerings. It also has a compact array of spells, powers, equipment, and feats so that anyone can sit down and whip up a pretty decent character on the fly. Content-wise, the new Edition is written clearly enough that a 10 year old initiate will be off the hook excited about it, and yet still with enough interesting stuff that old hats like myself can pull something out of the reading.

Instead of giant blocks of text, I'm going to break into list mode for things I like and dislike with the PHB:
What I like:

• The new powers working: At Will/Encounter/Daily <-- this is all very smart
• Wizards have become more versatile and less weak seeming--to some effect they can sling a lot more magic per day, and the At Will cantrips do a great job of making their minor magic abilities shine in ways I've always envisioned
• Finally, Rogues are not completely shat upon by the rules.
• Paragon and Epic tiers are well defined at the get go.
• Implements for spell casters (such as rods, staves, wands, holy items) are now integral and pretty slickly incorporated
• Overall magic Items have become somewhat more generic, but they serve as a good template for creating a lot of different items. Also, the inclusion of magic items in the PHB is smart.
• I'm so glad that they dropped the Threat rating garbage for monsters. Also, from briefly thumbing the Monstrous Manual, I see that they've added lots of flavor text, stuff for what you can learn based on monster lore, tactics, and finally, fixed HP counts for monsters. At a glance, all of this looks very accommodating for no-pre-planning DMs like myself.
• Healing Surges, though completely non-realistic are a kind of cool idea, and well implemented.
• The God-related Skills are a nice touch.
• Halflings have finally become something interesting (neither 2nd or 3rd edition could capture anything interesting for this short-statured race.) They're kinda Kender-like now, and I like that a lot.
• Dragonborn and Eladrin are pretty decent as far as new races go.
• Retraining is a great idea.
• Feats actually seem to fit into this edition in a non-clunky way.
  

What I don't like:

• Almost all the powers in the PHB are combat oriented. I want to see more full-figured powers. Alteration magic, for example, is almost completely non-existent currently.
• Some former spells have become rituals, and currently take too long to cast (seriously, ten minutes before your knock spell fires? come on.)
• miniature combat. Every time I've ever tried it, it destroys my mental image of the battle scene. I wish WotC would leave wargaming to the folks over at Games Workshop. D&D has never, in my mind at least, been known for its miniatures combat rules. I think 2nd Edition did the best at handling this--they kept it as a supplement. A lot of powers and feats now require squares and all that positioning garbage; I think it would have been easier to have some of that more vague, so that it could fall into the standard realm of DM describing the combat, and players reacting. We've never had trouble keeping all of it in our heads.
• Tieflings, though I love them, have really become very generic, losing all of their glorious chaos in appearance, function, and role. This makes me very sad.
• It looks like the beautiful 2nd Ed. view of the Multiverse, crystal spheres and the like has been shattered. D&D 4th ed. talks about a lot less in terms of primes, planes and the stuff in between. The Astral is super heavily built up, but the planes, seem, for all purposes non existent beyond the old Inner planes, now called Elemental Chaos. To supplant, they've added Fey worlds and I think the shadow realm, but I think overall, Planescape was one of TSR's greatest creations, and it saddens me that they're throwing out a lot of the beautiful madness of that campaign setting.
• The Open Gaming License is no more. WotC, you are a bunch of greedy dumbasses for dropping the OGL in 4th Ed. Shame on you for creating a beautiful 3rd party explosion with 3rd edition only to cut off that world with your new baby.
• Plate armor for only 50gp?! Madness I tell you.

I think really, that's about all I can say at this juncture. Overall, I think 4th edition is a big improvement over 3rd, and so far I like it enough to be willing to give up on the (now almost 20 year old!) 2nd ed rules.

End of an Age

So now I'm graduated. After two years, a lot of fun, hardship, and other bits in between, I am a Master of Fine Arts. How's it feel? Same as always, but different.

I guess the big thing that everyone says is, "well it'll feel different when you don't have to send out a packet." True. But at the same time, I have to keep going, keep writing, but now without deadlines, and that's (for me at least) the true test of my experience. To me, the only difference between a student and a "professional writer" is that students still feel the need for implanted structure; something to force them to do what they want to do--to write. Supposedly, by the time we graduate, we should feel that deep-gut need to write on our own rather than on someone else's timetable. Or at least that's how I see it.

In that vein, I think I'll probably be successful. I have a dedicated time of day (4AM - 7AM) to write every day, and for the most part, it seems to be working out. Plus too, there are other opportunities for "packets:" submitting stories, job hunting, setting up reading/lecturing gigs.

I guess the trick for me will be to keep my goals pretty high, yet attainable. Currently, I'm looking to finish Not an Autobiography this year. I'm also hoping to snag a teaching job before the year's out as well.

I'll end with some fun statistics:

Before grad school: 2 publications, maybe 4 rejections, 6 total submissions

During grad school: 4 publications, 68 rejections, 90 total submissions, 2 contest wins, 1 runner up, 1 Pushcart Nomination

For the visual folks, I paper my office's closet with all my rejections:


















And here are the acceptances:
So as you can see, it's a long tiring road, but that, I guess, is the magic of a graduate program like Spalding. Before I started, I wasn't writing all that regularly, and I wasn't seriously trying to get published beyond the couple stories that college workshops polished up all nice and pretty. But as I progressed through the program, I began to develop a stronger sense of my goals as a writer, as well as an academic. And I found as each semester waxed into the next, my neurosis about having to write and then going upstairs and staring at a blank screen slowly disappeared. So while I may be spending a lot less time in front of the computer, the time spent here feels a lot more productive than the time I used to spend here, and that, I suppose is a good thing.

So all in all, having a MFA isn't all that different, other than the fact that I can apply for a real career with it, and it's conditioned me into a more structured writer, and helped me net some publications, and meet wonderful new writer friends, and well, I guess it was a pretty good idea afterall.

Louisville, Kate Nash, and a smattering of random

So residency is here again, and though it may be futile for me to blog about Louisville since most of my readership is either currently here with me or recently graduated, but WTFN (as in Why the Fuck Not), right?

Although it's only Saturday, and I'm sure I'll be tired and cranky by Thursday, Residency looks to be very very well laid out in terms of planning and sluffing and overall interest in what's going on. Workshop this res for me looks to be particularly good--I really enjoyed all of the pieces, and they were all very thematically different. AND, I get to be workshopped first. Shut up.

Sue, Molly and the fam are due in Thursday and Friday. I'm a little sad that they'll all miss my readings and lectures

• Lecture: Structural Screwity: A Brief Guide to Reading and Writing Experimental Fiction
• Tuesday, May 27 @ 1:30 PM ELC Lectorium
• Reading: from "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" (2008 Kentuckiana Metroversity Contest Winner)
• Thursday, May 29 @ 1:30 PM ELC Lectorium

But, since the first thing everyone said to me at Residency went like this: "Hi Drew, How are the baby and Sue? Got any pictures?" I think everyone will be generally happy to see them, and I'll be happy to see my wife and baby (which I already miss terribly). Win-win.

On to new musics:
Thanks to the wonders of my favorite online radio, Pandora, I've found several new bands and other musical type groups that I'm very much obsessed with lately. Kate Nash is at the forefront of this new wave in my musical tastes. Kate's music reminds me a little of Bjork, a little of Anna Nalick, a little of the Dresden Dolls, and a lot of none of them. She has a very [for me] unique sound and sings in a lovely cockney. Her songs are pretty bawdy, and very story-esque. Normally I can't hear lyrics for shit, but because she uses the cockney accent, and because her instrumentation is pretty simple, her lyrics shine out. I first got hooked on her music with the song "Merry Happy," but since I've bought the album, nearly every track is fantastic. My favorites include "Foundations," "The shit song," "Birds," "Dickhead," and "Pumpkin Soup." I guess Kate also won best breakthrough artist in england for last year. I hope she sticks around, because I thoroughly love her music.

I've also, thanks to Pandora, been finding a number of more instrumental bands that I really dig: The Section Quartet (like Apocalyptica, they redo rock songs with their strings.), The Last Cord (very dark instrumentals), Matmos (kinda weird, but also good), and Tom Waits (probably some of the most miserable music I've ever heard. I love his voice and the misery).

Ok I guess that's it. I lied about the smattering of random. I'm sure you don't mind.

Publishing Update

Good News,

"Ice Dune, 1983-2007" will appear in the Summer 2008 edition of 94 Creations, a literary magazine run by Spalding Alum Adriena Dame.

Enact Social Change

Lately over at The Warrior Poet Group, Rod, Dave, and I, in addition to discussing the nature of literature and writing in general, have decided to take up the cross of social change as part of our mission. In addition to adding several groups to our website in the hopes of supporting them and raising awareness, we've decided to also start up a blog, called Warrior's Song. The focus of our blog is to act as, to use Rod's words,

a platform to enact change when we otherwise might not know how. There are a lot of things I'd like to see change in the world, but I'm not always sure where to start or what to do--a problem I don't think I'm alone in. The blog will 1) help us feel like we're doing something when we're at a loss of what else to do, and 2) keep action on our minds.

Our goal at WPG, then is two fold: ensure the advancement of literature despite heavy competition from marginalization and mainstream media, and do so while supporting institutions that value the earth, as well as humanity as a whole. Hopefully, our mission will infect all of our friends, and a true literary and cultural revolution can begin to take hold. So if you have a moment, add our blog to your RSS feed, and maybe you'll see something that will help either yourself or someone around you.

Resting on my hotel bed, I compose

myself after a 6.5 mile walk around state college. A walk that, according to my friend, Gmaps Pedometer, burned 1048 calories. Nice. Surprisingly during/after said walk, I never got hungry for dinner, so I'm guessing the lunch I had at Plyler's Buffet on the way to State college had a full trucker caloric intake of 10,605 calories. It was worth it though. Strangely enough, there were some English ladies (as in Tea and Crumpets not wah wah wah 19th Century Russian Lit wha wha wha). English ladies in Brookfield, PA was, well pretty strange, but also somewhat cool.

If I had an accent, I'd be an English one, and I'm not talking "cup 'o tea, with the missus kind", I'm talking "oi git y'r fookin' arse off me bumpa 'fore me garden breaks open y'r bib n' brace." When I'm alone in foreign places like I am today, I often consider trying to uphold an accent for all conversations....become someone else for a day. Unfortunately, my anti-social nature precludes me from most social interaction, and I generally don't keep up the charade outside my head.

In any event, I've never really been to State College Before. Sure, I was here once in high school with my physics class to look at their nuclear reactor, but we didn't really walk around. So the goal on my walk today was two fold: 1. find gifties for my wife and baby (because all dads have to come back with presents when they go to faraway places. It's a law of fatherhood) 2. observe strangers.

So I did a lot of wandering. I found that College and Beaver streets had plenty of shops and restaurants, so I kinda wandered around there for a while. As I looked at people, I noticed that State College is a lot like a big city; no one smiles, no one notices you; everyone is invisible. I like anonymity but, I really felt almost alien here. Perhaps it's because I'm a decade older than a good chunk of the population, or because I just don't think/act/like a college student anymore (did I ever think/act like a college student? <---maybe for a minute, week).

My observations: America is homogenizing. We're getting fatter. Cell phones are ubiquitous. I didn't feel bad for listening to my headphones because everyone else was doing the same thing.

I remember college being more divided, clique wise. Granted, I only walked a small area, but I'd say 90% of the people I saw fit into a general category of sameness. I saw only a handful skaters, and hippies, and no other groups. Where oh where did all the goth kids go? Punks? Emo? anything? Everyone had that Old Navy, Gap, Abercrombie shit look. Everyone drove expensive cars--I've never seen more Mercedes, BMWs, Volvos, and muscle cars...Isn't state college really expensive? Where the fuck are they getting money to shop for homoginity clothes AND have fancy cars?

We're getting fatter. In a way, I think this is a good thing, to a degree. I'm talking to you, girls. Thanks to all the friends over at Al Key Hall, there weren't all that many rail thin guys and gals floating around. Most people had substance. And I think that's good. It's good because I used to religiously watch America's Next Top Hot Model, and always rooted for the Plus Size model. I don't follow the show so much anymore because, well, the plus size girl never wins...and honestly 10 is not Plus! Fuck 10 is like the "don't go any lower than that, sister" mark for me. The last episode I watched, the girls were bitching at the one girl because she was a 0. A fucking 0. C'mon, who could fall in love with something so thin? That's why I love my wife. She's short. She's beautiful. She has curves, and she's not going to get rid of them because America wants her to. So bravo to all you other girls out there who don't believe that 2, 4, 6 are sexy. You can be healthy and a 10-12. You'll look good, feel good, and not count calories when Ben and Jerry come over for dinner, after dinner, and midnight snacks.

Cellphones: Jesus Christ. I hope someone develops a Cellphone Bomb. Hate em. 'nuff said. Got behind 3 people on the way from Erie to here that nearly caused accidents thanks to Cellphones--one near my house actually; he decided that while he was taking his call at the wheel, he'd also create a new lane to get from Rt 5 to 955; nearly ran me into the meridian. I think he was a priest. Fuck you Church.

Music: One time, a long time ago, my friends and I were talking about superpowers. The first one I listed was "appropriate background music for all situations." I think this one is starting to come true, on an individual level. Everyone down here has iPods, earbuds. Tuned in, tuned out. I was doing the same, and I noticed that all the stores had their music up real loud, so you had to listen to what they wanted, unless, of course you turned your shit up louder.

Tomorrow the conference starts. I present on Saturday. I'm hoping to meet some old profs, and maybe find me a job. That would be the all time best experience. Either way, I'm looking forward to this weekend--especially since I'll get to see my wife and baby on saturday after the conference (I've missed them much this week).

I forgot to bring my camera cord, so I can't upload any of the photos I took today, but maybe I'll edit and add later.

Contest Update

My Story, "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" was announced the winner of the 2008 Kentuckiana Metroversity Writing Competition for Graduate Fiction. In addition, it will be appearing in Human Voices an anthology of this year's winners.

Zen and the Art of Revision

'some retarded code
public sub main()
dim CheeZtitle as string
dim nerdOmeter as integer
CheeZtitle="Zen and the Art of Revision"
nerdOmeter = 0
nerdOmeter = IncreaseNerdPower(CheeZtitle)
msgbox("Nerd it up to the power of " & cstr(NerdOMeter) & " nerd points.", vbInformation, "Nerd Power")
End
end sub
public function IncreaseNerdPower(byref BlogTitle as string) as integer
return BlogTitle.length
end function

I think that perhaps, I do need to stop coding so much. Anyway, over at my friend, Val Gryphin's blog, recently there was some discussion on Revision. I thought I'd take a few minutes and lay out my approach to an often groaned about aspect of writing.

Personally, Revision is my favorite place to be. I'm infinitely more comfortable fixing something I already have than trying to make up something new. As such, here are some tips, methods I use to help organize and get the most out of my revision process:

1. Give the story some time. Seriously. Once you're finished with a draft, forget about the story for as long as you can. Given the hectic nature of my life, 10 minutes usually works for me :P, but two to three days of non-attention is always better than going right into revision after placing the last period.
2. Start all Revisions as a new filename. I use a sort of Programmer's versioning pattern. I'll start a story out as Story 0.1, and with each pass, I'll Save As and increment the Version number. That way, I never lose any prior edits. Some programs have integral Versioning, but after playing with Open Office's Version handling, I found that making my own versions is much easier. Doing this will also free you up to taking bigger chances and changing things more drastically, because you can always go back to an older version if this particular fork fails on you.
   
3. Revise in layers. Don't try to do everything at once. You'll get bogged down after two or three pages. Pick a layer and do a full pass doing nothing but that layer. If you see something else that does need to be changed, make a note and keep going. Try not to break out of your current process.
   
4. When using layers, save the nitpicky grammatical bits for last. Your last two passes should be. 1. Read for grammar and 2. read aloud.
5. Find yourself a Sue. Sue, love me as she may, has no problem telling me EXACTLY when something I've written has turned to shit. This is important for two reasons: 1. it knocks the ego-maniacal bullshit out of your head, and 2. It helps you hone in on what isn't working. This is especially important for people like me who do write in experimental/postmodern forms because weird shit tends to piss off readers easily, so it absolutely has to pass the bullshit test. I'm sure that Sue would be your Sue if you pay her in chocolate and sweet cool drinks (maybe).
6. (Layer) Break your story down to its structural roots. Analyze how your story fits to the Freytag triangle of Dramatic flow. Plot out exposition, rising action, climax, denouement and make sure it all balances right. Rough approximations are Exposition up to 1/3, and very very very little denouement. This is especially important in postmodern/experimental works. If you aren't adhering to a Freitag triangle for your story progression, you have to have some sort of structural flow, and that flow has to balance out. If your structure is failing, your reader will either become lost or bored due to lack of tension and/or lack of an idea of what the hell is going on.
   
7. (Layer) Once you've analyzed your structure, start asking Why. Why doesn't Clare paint anymore? Why can't she stay in a relationship? Why does she hate her job? These why's should come directly from the characters' struggles in your story. If you can't answer any question with the text, do some freewriting in the voice of your character--see what comes up. This is a great tool for helping you figure out areas to cut from the story, because you can look at a particular section and say, "Why does this need to be in the story?" And if you can't find a need, then you know it's time for that section to go. I've used this method to cut several stories from 40+ pages down into the 20ish range.
   
8. (Layer) After Structure and analyzing for necessity, take a look at your characters. What are their core struggles in the story? How are they communicated through tension? How have you used elements of the story to make the reader care/not care about your characters? And are they balanced? No one should be black and white good/evil, so how have you added humanity to your villains and darkened your heroes?
9. (Layer) Take a look at the length of your story. Is it too short, too long? Most literary journals anymore seem to want stories under 8000 words. That's hell for longer story writers like myself. In this pass, look again at cutting unnecessary pieces, but also look at cleaning up language a bit.
10. (Layer) The language layer. I'm a HUGE advocate against passive voice and adverbs, and I dedicate at least one layer pass to clean up as much of it as I possibly can. Anything with "has, had, is, was, were, have, will, would" modified verbs is up for the chopping block as far as I'm concerned. I also really hate sentences that start with "It." But your language pass could be different, and don't just focus on grammatical faux pas, also take a moment to think about the story's narration. Who is telling/writing the story? Is the voice of the story consistent with this teller's voice? How can you make that voice stronger. In my case, each story in my collection is "written" by the central character, and as such, each character has his/her own writerly quirks. Clare tends to lean towards thicker more fluid language, heavy in alliteration and a sort of poet's mindset, while Johnny is all postmodern fuckery with a particular interest in pointing out every cliche that he uses. The narrator character takes a sort of middle ground between the two, since he's more or less a combination of them. Even if you don't name or have a narrator in your story, think about the language of delivery, think about diction. How can you amp up your presentation by improving the language?
11. (Layer) Look for repeated story strings. This is where you go through your story and make sure that all the things that your characters see and do have a chance to reflect throughout the story. If your character is a painter, this is the pass you use to ensure that somehow you work her painterly mindset into her daily actions (paint crusted fingernails, warped canvases in the corner, etc). Add in several small details throughout. Also look for things at the end of your story that have significance, and make sure that that significance is weighted throughout the story. Don't drop a bomb at the end without vaguely hinting towards it all along. Also, if you have any Red Herrings, kill them now.
12. (Layer) Do a grammatical hard edit. I've never been able to do this, but I've had former CW professors suggest that you try reading the story backwards--this will help break your mind away from the story so that you're actually looking at the page instead of reading from memory. It's a good idea, but I've never been able to keep my attention focused long enough to do that. This kind of edit is best done when the story is completely out of your head, otherwise it's hard to keep your mind focused on low-level stuff without starting to skim. This layer is also best done on a physical hard copy--current screen resolutions are significantly lower than what our eyes are used to when we read a printed text, resulting in as much as a 25% slow down in online reading speeds (I read that somewhere, but don't have a direct quote, so trust me that it's true-ish?). Because of slower online reading speeds, we tend to skim a lot more. So when you're doing the hard edit, do it on paper.
13. (Layer) Read your story out loud from start to finish. I can't tell you how many times I've found grievous problems by doing this. It really helps improve the flow of your language, and also it gives you the opportunity to hear and adjust the aural side of the story. While oral presentation isn't as common for fiction, I think it's just as important as it is for poets.

That's about all I can think of right now. Next time you do a revision, give a couple of these steps a try, and see if they work for you. I'd love to hear if any of them helped/failed for your situation.

Long Road to Ruin

Today, I kick off my post with a nod to the Foo Fighters. They've always been a band that I've liked and respected, but never listened to seriously until the local college radio station started playing "The Pretender" on heavy rotation. I can't get enough of the new album. Simply, they rock.

Work's been significantly horrific lately--I'm building a project that's guaranteed to waste money, piss people off, and take up a lot of time. But hey, I'm just a goon, and who cares about office automation that saves millions? Not my company. They like making employees feel bad on many levels.

But the point of today's blog isn't to bitch about work (hell, I could get fired for that), It's to talk about the chapter's end booming right up into the presence of my present: The end of Graduate School. In two months, I'll be a Master. Of words. And hopefully by the end of the year, I'll have a finished book.

I sent in my thesis on saturday, and now all that's left are a few things (with ridiculously short deadlines): 1. Workshop Piece 2. Prep for PCEA Conference 3. Warrior Poet Group Creative Assignment 4. Prep for Graduating Lecture and Reading 5. Comment on Workshop stuff.

The worst part? I'm ready to take a break. Yesterday. But I have till the 9th for the Workshop, PCEA, and Warrior Poet Deadlines. I'm sure Rod'll let me slide a little on the WPG (though he may break an arm if I slide more than a day), but the other two are pretty daunting at the moment. For Workshop, I'm taking this story, "The Poetics of Memory" and trying to fix the structural outer story so that it exists as a complete arc in its own vein to mirror the interior arc. Hopefully, the ideas I have tonight will help facilitate that. For the PCEA Conference, I have to condense a 33 page ECE into a 15 minute presentation, and a 23 page story into a similarly timed reading. I don't imagine that portion should be too rough, but it'll still take a couple of days.

Once everything school is done, I'm looking forward to a few days of doin' nuthin' with the family, demolishing my basement, and maybe even playing a little Rockband (the best type of crack/cocaine available).

That's the news from Erie, the city where the weather always sucks, and I like it that way.

Cloverfield Revisited

A little while ago, I posted my reaction to Cloverfield (Here). Since then, an interesting conversation has begun in the comments of that post. I'd like to respond to them, as well as put some more information forward.

In case you don't want to read TFA, my original essay said essentially this: Cloverfield failed in my eyes as a postmodern film because it turned its back on too many conventions without making appropriate adjustments to its structure to allow for the movie to stand on its own. Had the movie been direct to Avant Garde, I wouldn't have minded, but since Cloverfield was a major mass marketed hype machine, the movie failed to be truly accessible to the masses. Because it isn't accessible to the masses, Cloverfield is a prime reason why folks shy away from attempting to view/consume postmodern/experimental works. Cloverfield's broken structure leaves the audience feeling gypped, nauseous, and saying, "now what?" Any piece of art/literature/film/etc that invokes such feeling on a large scale is somehow failing. And in today's content-starved culture, I feel it's a travesty for people to give a movie like this good scores when they say things like, "I didn't understand it, but it was awesome."

So that's the gist of what I said earlier. Before I start, I want to establish a few things that I hold to be true for modern film:

1. All big production films are mass marketed, meaning that they are written, produced and directed to be accessible to the largest demographic possible for their genre.
2. Movie-goers spend a lot of money at the theater (~$30 for 90 minutes entertainment anymore these days), and thus expect to be entertained.
3. No one likes to be made to feel dumb, especially when they're paying to be entertained.

Having said that, BlueNight, has posted a pair of fairly detailed rebuttals to my basic premise. His argument is that Cloverfield is indeed a successful postmodern experience. While I agree that the movie is indeed postmodern, this movie is by far not at all successful.

A large part of BlueNight's refutation revolves around classic identifiers of modernism vs. postmodernism, wheras Modernism = enlightenment/immersion and postmodernism = denial of enlightenment/metafictive form. In this binary system of identification, Cloverfield is indeed postmodern. There is no big reveal, and since the movie is a movie of a movie archived by the DOD, we are removed wholly from the actual experience. However, simply being postmodern doesn't make it good. Here's why it's not good:

Metafictive nature:
Metafiction is a tricky bird to play with. If done incorrectly it will entail frustration, anger, etc from your audience. The reason behind this is this: metafiction forces the audience into a state of instability and unfamiliarity. By far, realist/modernist experiences dominate our mental processes, so when you are forced to reckon with the notion that you are watching a film of a film, your mind has to do extra work to keep all the balls in the air (granted, you could ignore the metafictive nature and receive the work as a mondernist experience, but that would be denying the full effect of the piece). Furthermore, metafiction breaks the ontological wall between reality and fiction, or in this case, reality and the movie. In Cloverfield, we are shown the exterior framing of the DOD stamps, which tell us that we are about to see footage relating to an event that has already happened. Since this event happens in a clone of real-world NYC, our minds kick into overdrive to create a parallel ontological sphere where our real world NYC can become destroyed by said monster. This framing is further reiterated throughout the movie by the cuts to "best day ever" and the obviously amateur filming strategy. In a modernist world, we would be able to accept this as "Truth" and get on with the story, but since this is very obviously a postmodern metafictive construction, we also have to entertain ontological questions in addition to the modernist's epistemological questioning. And my big question regarding the ontology of Cloverfield is "Why." Why am I viewing DOD footage of a monster attack on this ontic sphere NYC? I've been placed in this position metafictively, but the metafictive nature of the movie doesn't resolve itself. Cloverfield opened the door to this ontology, but it doesn't give me, Joe audience, any Idea of what to do with it.

Let me give an example from literature to demonstrate. In John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," from very early on you have an authorial intrusion setting up the metafictional status of the story. The first intrusion, "A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention." (Lost in the Funhouse p.72). At first glance, the reader is lost to the metafictional importance of this and several other authorial intrusions. All metafiction will cause initial confusion; it's an inherent danger of the form. The pay off comes when the metafiction resolves itself.

Here's another way to put it. Have you ever read a novel that was going along just fine, and then in the last 2 pages, one of the characters says, "and so that's why I wrote this book." Such a statement immediately throws the entire book into a metafictive state. We're reading a book written by a character within the book, but we didn't know this until the end. Usually when I encounter this, I end up walking away angry because the metafictive nature of the book was tacked on as an after effect. One that might make someone untrained in postmodern there say, "ooh a twist" but at the same time, this is something that is a grievous failure from the perspective of application and structure, because at this point, you've now made me say, "Why have I read this entire novel you wrote, without knowing you were writing it?" This is further problematized if the character-author wrote about him/herself in third person. Why?

In "Lost in the Funhouse," Barth slowly reveals to us that Ambrose, the story's protagonist is also the story's author. And in this slow, controlled reveal, we see that the writing of the story mirrors the structure and form of being lost in a funhouse, where funhouse becomes an allegory to both writing and life.

In Cloverfield, we've been given the same sort of "ooh a twist" kind of metafiction. Yes, it's framed by the DOD, but the DOD framing and the amateur filmmaking don't actively contribute to the structure of the movie. I'm not talking enlightenment, I'm talking structure. Structurally, Ambrose's authorial intrusions had to be there. I'm not entirely positive that any of the postmodern elements in Cloverfield had to exist. And my lack of confidence is brought on by all of the ontological questions left unanswered. Assuming that Joe Audience didn't partake in the alternative reality game, the movie offers very little content wise, but at the same time, it offers a lot of promise: Take this hyperreal NYC, add a monster, memories/fear from 9/11, and film it like Joe average would film an incident like this. Also take the DOD and slap some pre/post graphics to set up how this footage is relevant. Now, we've established this ontology. The failure here is that we have nothing to do with the ontology except to take it as it is delivered to us. By nature of the metafictive content, we are removed from the action, and we are also placed subjectively into a single experience of the attack. However, our viewpoint is objective because it comes from a camera's lens. Therefore, defying postmodernism, we are given "Truth" of what happened to that particular group. By referencing this "Truth" solely (i.e. we don't get anything else from the DOD but this amateur film), we are forced out of our ontological experience and back into an epistemological/modernist experience where we are immersed (save for the brief moments of "the best day ever") in the event.

I think it's pretty easy to see how things have "broken" in a postmodern structural sense here. If the movie were to retain it's subjective postmodern stance, it has to offer more subjectivity; we have to see others' struggles in the wake of disaster. Or, if that isn't available to us, we need to see Why this particular video is more important than all of the other experiences contained within the Cloverfield disaster. Why is this the most important event? Why is this the defining moment of the Cloverfield attack? What can we learn from it? What can we do with it in the future? All of these questions should have some sort of inkling to resolution for the ontic sphere of Cloverfield's NYC to be stable. Without these answers, we can't truly believe in the hyperreal representation of Cloverfield, and thus our connection to the world deteriorates.

BlueNight also challenged my interpretation on Cloverfield's dramatic structure. He contends that the movie follows Campbell's Mythic Hero Journey instead of Freytag's triangle of dramatic structure. While the story's protagonist does follow the pattern of the Mythic Hero, such a pattern is contained by the simpler Freytag triangle. Freytag's triangle has existed in drama since its birth with the Greeks, and is the de facto standard for dramatic interpretation. And the Mythic Hero cycle is just a more complex revision of the triangle (you still have exposition, rising action, climax and denouement in the cycle). But in truth, Cloverfield doesn't really prescribe to either form fully. It can't. The metafictive nature of the movie, denies a fully immersive plot arc focusing upon the protagonist (you'd have to throw out the DOD framing if you want to use the mythic hero). Since the movie opens with the DOD framing, we are forced to start our plot arc there. Because of the metafictive nature of the movie and its multiple temporal shifts, you really end up with three pieces on their own freytag triangles:
1. Framing elements: DOD stuff (largely unresolved)
2. The "best day ever" flashback arc
3. The primary action of Cloverfield
Each arc runs independently from the other, and this is where Cloverfield deviates from the structural norm. As we watch the movie, we constantly switch between each arc as they appear. Fortunately, we aren't too burdened by these arcs, as they all progress linearly, but at the same time, each arc is separate enough that there is a healthy amount of distance between them. While arcs 2 and 3 work in a pretty traditional flashback manner, filling in character details to aid the viewer with the present, the DOD arc remains problematic. It tells us only that we're about to watch a video of the incident. Once the video finishes, this arc closes without any further mention, rising action, or resolution. In essence, it is a dead arc, and combined with its metafictive failures, we're forced back to reality as the credits roll without any real notion of what to do with what we've seen.

I guess that's the overall difference, in my opinion, between modernism and postmodernism. In modernism/realism, you receive an experience and you walk away content with that experience. With postmodernism, you are forced to question the nature of an experience, and enlightenment comes out of successful questioning/analysis/interaction with the ontology before you. I can't satisfy my questions towards Cloverfield based upon the information given to me, and to me, that's a sign of postmodern failure. And furthermore, as an avid supporter of postmodern/experimental forms, I think it's a particularly spectacular failure because of the sheer amount of marketing hype that went into the movie. Think about The Matrix (just the first one). It had a giant pile of philosophy packed into it, and it was really hyped up. The result? A global hit with several philosophical endeavors stemming from it, as well as a universal sense of postmodern satisfaction/enlightenment.

With Cloverfield, most of the movie audience boo'd the ending. That's a disconnect. A failure. People didn't agree with some element of the movie. Granted, most of the people were likely looking for a modernist explanation/defeat of the monster, but I don't think such an explanation was ever necessary. All we really needed was proper structuring and usage of postmodern style. I think the movie would have gone over a lot better had the makers just gone a little farther in establishing good postmodern form, rather than sloppy "we're going to look so smart for invoking metafiction and nontraditional storytelling" elements.

BlueNight, I do agree that Cloverfield is postmodern, but I fail to see how it succeeds in entertaining the largest demographic audience possible. I don't really see it succeeding on a small demographic. I think it succeeded largely because mass marketing told us that it was an awesome movie, and anymore these days we listen to what we're told instead of making our own decisions--a point very accurately brought up by Susane's comment: "People want soo badly for something new and exciting that they are willing to accept CRAP just because it is different. I want good different.....not the crap."

And now that I've written a book, what's everyone else have to say on the matter?

Modern Fairytales

Today, Sue and I went on a date. In a blizzard. We went to a new [chain] restaurant called O'Charley's and had some fairly decent lunch faire. Then we spun tires through snow to the movie theater where we saw Penelope starring Christina Ricci.

I'm sure all of you remember the flaming explosion post I did on Cloverfield--it was quintessential film evil. Penelope on the other hand did a wonderful job as both a film and social commentary.

Here's a real quick synopsis: Old money blueblood family has a curse put upon it that the first girl born will have the face of a pig. Several generations of boys later, Penelope is born with a snout and pig ears. Her parents, freak out, fake her death, and Penelope grows up isolated in a hidden room of the family mansion. At 18, her neurotic mother starts trying to find a suitor, because the curse says something about Penelope needing to be loved by "one of her own." Well blue-blood old-money kids are all a bunch of whiney, stupid, mama's-boys looking to take over daddy's CEO chair in a few years. And once Penelope reveals herself, they bolt like little scared bitches. Long story short, one suitor decides to sell Penelope's existence to a tabloid, and that involves another blue-blood to act as infiltrator to get a picture of Penelope for the news, and well second guy and Penelope kinda fall in love through their daily conversations (with Penelope hiding behind a 1 way mirror). Rising action, climax, denouement from there.

1. It avoided many of the cliches found in romantic films
2. It handled the "this plot revolves completely around miscommunication" issue nicely, and though there was a fair amount of miscommunication, it was well done and felt natural to the story progression
3. Christina Ricci wasn't super disgusting thin; she looked normal, and healthy (and some how made a pig nose look cute)

Here's why I liked the movie: Our society places an incredible amount of attention and substance on outward appearances, and when we encounter something un-like our idealized vision of beauty, we react with revulsion and often surgical corrective measures. Penelope embodies several aspects of appearance that are considered unattractive in our standards:

• She is 5'1" tall. She does not have long legs, nor the chiseled man-body that is so popular on the girls these days
• She has a pig nose and pig ears
• She dresses in a cute, but conservative manner--longish skirts, stockings, no cleavage, etc
• She is a brunette
• She does not have blue eyes
• She is very intelligent

Even if you factor out the fantastical porcine appendages, the neurotic mother in the movie, would likely still have had a hard sell to get "unappealing" Penelope married to another old-money blueblood dipshit. These bluebloods are analogous to the trendsetting American elite--pop stars, etc. They influence what us commoners should believe. Their shallowness is readily apparent because they instantly turn out anyone unlike themselves--even if the dissimilar one is also old-money.

So what happens? (spoiler alert from here on) A commoner falls for Penelope, but circumstances keep the two apart for a good chunk of the movie. Still, even though the commoner was away from Penelope, her strength of character pushed him to stop gambling, and start playing piano again. She inspired him to clean up his act and do better, and even if they didn't reunite at the end of the movie, Johnny became a better person because he took the time to get to know Penelope, instead of taking her for her face value.

By the end of the movie, Penelope admits that she likes herself as she is, snout and all, and this breaks the curse. What a great message, eh? Learn to like yourself for how you are; don't just chop off your nose because you don't like it; embrace it, accept it, accept yourself.

By this time, Johnny has also accepted Penelope, though he believes she doesn't want to see him. On Halloween, she seeks him out with a Penelope mask on (her own curse is lifted, but the Penelope mask is the costume of the year). Once Johnny realizes who she is, he kisses her before removing her mask; he kisses her despite her deformity, demonstrating that he too is willing to accept her for how she is and not how she is expected to be. This acceptance is contrasted sharply with the blue-blood counterpart, who, a few scenes before was about to marry Penelope to help restore his name (the city found out he leaked the Penelope stuff, and by that time Penelope was a beloved local celebrity) and before the wedding he said to his mother, "the thought of kissing her makes me want to vomit." Also at the alter, this boy smiled his most genuine smile, when Penelope said she wasn't going to marry him and fled.

Thus, the difference between classes is fully established. You have a shallow, rich upper class interested in only money and appearance, and the working class proletariat that sees through the exterior facade and embraces the spirit of relationship and connection.

As Americans, we're all under great pressure to lose weight, exercise more, dress better, and ultimately emulate the celebrities that bombard us from every angle. Penelope breaks from that expectation, and asks us to think about the real important things in life: relationships, love, and acceptance. If you have those qualities, (even if you've been beaten half-to-death with the ugly stick) you're immeasurably better off than your rich, pretty counterparts. You have depth, and all the good stuff life has to offer, because we all know how fast money and beauty can fade.

PCEA here I come

I received word today that at least one of my proposals was accepted for the upcoming 2008 PCEA (Pennsylvania College English Association) conference coming up around the ides of April. I presented there once before in 2002 on an undergrad panel devoted to Edgar Allen Poe.

Since there are a number of professors from both IUP and Behrend attending the conference, I'm hoping that in addition to getting to present, I might be able to land a job somewhere.

I submitted proposals to read from my ECE, "Reestablishing Experience through Ontology: Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String" as well as from my story, "(Un/Re/I )Do"

It should be a good time to be had by all. More later.

Some words about Faulkner

When I started out as an English major in college, I was quickly enamored with William Faulkner's usage of language. Reading As I Lay Dying, I learned that fiction doesn't have to exist in a realm of plain language, but rather it can also incorporate the same type of dense language that you see being employed by poets. From there, I fell in love with other authors like Ann Pancake, and more recently Aimee Bender, Ben Marcus, and Ed Abbey. The dense language writing style, has led me to constantly look for ways to pare down my own fiction, cut out passivity, and make sure that every word's weight counts both aurally and textually.

Today's essay comes from Faulkner's collection of short stories. In it, I talk about his handling of death in two very different ways. What most impresses me with Faulkner's work in these stories is that he can express and capture the ambiguity of death in two very different ways (body and spirit) without sacrificing the power of each story.

The Mystery of Death in Faulkner's Fiction

The final section of William Faulkner's Collected Stories entitled Beyond presents itself with six stories exploring themes and topics either existing outside of his usual motifs, or revolving about supernatural occurrence. The theme of death reoccurs very differently in two stories from this section, “Beyond,” and “Carcassonne.” Both stories take the reader outside of the realm of the living and into a disorienting and distorted view of death and the beyond. Furthermore, each story focuses upon a different portion of the body in its post-death journey: “Beyond” explores the soul, while “Carcassonne” remains closer to the body itself.

Within “Beyond,” the main character, the Judge, dies in bed before the doctor, and transcends into a sort of limbo where other dead souls go to meet and spend time with each other. Faulkner carries the reader into this world along with the Judge without overtly mentioning his death. Rather, he meticulously feeds the reader context clues. At first he found himself unable to communicate to the others in his room as Chorly wailed over the death (Faulkner 782). Then as he left the house, his clothes magically appeared on his body: “he realized that he was still in his pajamas, so he buttoned his overcoat... 'Now, if i Just had my....' He looked down at his feet....He looked at his shoes...He touched his hat...He clasped his ebony stick” (Faulkner 782-783). And with the clothes magically appearing, Faulkner has established that the soul of the Judge has now separated from his body, and appears as he would in his own mind.

Furthermore, as the limbo scene develops, Faulkner controls the language in such a way that the Judge slowly surmises that he's surrounded by other dead people, but in the same sense, he doesn't let any character directly refer to themselves as being dead. The first man the Judge meets refers to his death in abstraction, “'I had to do it...I was late. That's why I was driving fast. A child ran into the road. I was going too fast to stop. So I had to turn'” (Faulkner 784). And then later, the reader is fully clued in to this limbo setting when the man says “'Look for him here'” to the Judge, referring to the Judge's long dead son (Faulkner 785).

Once the limbo plane is fully established, Faulkner establishes it as a place of infinite existence, where scores of souls remain, waiting for loved ones and spending time with them before proceeding on to their final fates. However since the Judge, “detested crowds,” “came here to escape someone; not to find anyone,” (Faulkner 783, 784-785), and realized that this land remained static and unchanging when he learned that his son's pony “was just the right size for him,” he returns to the corporeal realm; returns to his body so that he could “proceed” onwards. (Faulkner 795, 798).

Through “Beyond,” Faulkner establishes a direct connection between the body and the soul even in death. This connection further is built upon within “Carcassonne.” Within “Carcassonne,” Faulkner has created two narrators, each a different aspect of the same being. One, the skeleton of the man, and the other his mind and soul. The mind, believes itself “on a buckskin pony...galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world” (Faulkner 895), but the skeleton “beneath an unrolled strip of tarred roofing,” only groans at the mind's attempt to leave, thinking of the pony as “destinationless,” and traveling “toward the blue precipice never gained” (Faulkner 895). In essence, the man remains motionless both physically and spiritually, though both dream of being free of their terrestrial connections, and connection from each other While the spirit tries to gallop away from the skeleton, the skeleton dreams of “swaying caverns and the grottoes [of the sea], and his body lay on the rippled floor, tumbling peacefully to the wavering echoes of the tides” (Faulkner 899).

However, while they dream of being separate, they remain conjoined, the skeleton grudgingly assisting the spirit by supplying the word “Chamfron,” as the spirit tries to describe his escape (Faulkner 899). In addition, the skeleton, knowing that it has died because of “that steady decay which had set up within his body on the day of his birth” (Faulkner 896-897) is forced to constantly stare at the spirit on his horse. The skeleton is forced to watch a spirit gallop onward to nowhere, not realizing that the body has died: “He could see the saddlegirth and the soles of the riders stirruped feet...thundering along in two halves and not knowing it, fused still in the rhythm of accrued momentum” (Faulkner 898).

In a similar, but slightly different way, Faulkner communicates the necessary connection between spirit and terrestrial body during death within “Carcassonne.” Whereas in “Beyond,” The Judge spiritually left his body only to return later before accepting death, the spirit and skeleton of “Carcassonne,” seem all too ready to fly apart as fast as possible, but as the story draws to a close, and the skeleton helps the spirit “perform something,” by supplying “Chamfon,” the two unite so that they may travel onward to whatever eternity awaits them (Faulkner 898-899). Through both stories, Faulkner establishes that the spirit doesn't just float away from the body upon death, but rather it lingers, or tries to escape, before it realizes that it needs to return to the body to transcend through the final gate of death.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. “Beyond.” Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995. 781-798.
Faulkner, William. “Carcassonne.” Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995. 895-900.

Further Introspection on the Topic of Posmodernism

Last week, I talked about the failure of Cloverfield as an experimental/postmodern film. This week, I want to resurrect a nice little essay I wrote some time ago about John Barth's National Book Award winning Chimera. Like Cloverfield, Chimera uses a significantly different dramatic structure than our standard expectations, however, in this book, the dramatic structure sustains, and completes itself in a structurally and entertaingly sound manner, leaving us with a book that is both experimental and entertaining. Here's the Essay:


Narrative Schmarrative: Interesting Bits from Chimera

With a book such as John Barth’s Chimera, writing a paper examining its craft can become rather daunting. Which elements to choose? How can I relate through analyzing craft, the great feeling I get from reading a book so well written? Easy. Emulate his voice (But you’ve done that already--see “Self Serving [ ] [Another Essay I Wrote on John Barth {I tend to be very self referential at times}]”). Right. So rather than dive into emulation as a means of description, I think this time I’ll try to focus upon the narrative elements within this book, and hopefully avoid dropping myself into a large writing project. So narration it is.

About the book: Chimera, like the mythical creature is really three novellas, which are connected through one medium (which of course works in a couple of ways: self referral, connection to other works by Barth, and all appearing in the same book --> notice the three, chimera like aspect of the connections as well). Each novella examines some old myth, the 1001 nights, Perseus, and Bellerophon. However, in doing so, Barth examines these tales from different circumstances, such as from the point of view of Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazade, or Perseus at age forty looking back upon his life and wishing he was young and heroic again (likewise, somewhat, in the case of Bellerophon.) Therefore, though the stories told through the novel are largely unchanged from their original form (save that the language is spiced up), Barth tells the stories in a different manner in effect to revitalize an old lost form of literature, as mentioned in his essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” when talking about Jean Louis Borges’ Quixote (a novel where a fictional character authors Don Quixote). Barth describes this rejuvenating action because “[Borges] confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (31). Therefore we can expect to find similar with Barth’s treatment of these mythical subjects.

I guess what I’ll do here is devote a section upon his narrative actions within each of the three novellas.
SECTION 1: DUNYAZADIAD
The “Dunyazadiad,” as I’ve previously stated tells the tale of the 1001 Nights. However, the tale starts after Scheherazade has told the last tale, in the king’s brother’s bedroom, to be exact. However, the only indication that the reader is given alluding to the story starting after the end of the tales lies with the opening character, a set of double quotes—we are being told a tale. As it so happens, this tale starts on the 1000th night of Scheherazade’s storytelling. He narrates the tale in a kind of looping manner, making use of multiple narrators and viewpoints. Because of the looping story aspect of the novella, the structure of its plot is directly affected by its narration.
The entire first part of the three part novella is told as a massive monologue from the perspective of Dunyazade, which interestingly enough does not end with a complete thought: “Your brother’s docked; my sister’s dead; it’s time we joined them’” (38). Barth uses this open ending sentence as a sort of launching point into the next section and a more or less third person objective narration. Until the very end of the first chapter, the last lines to be exact, the reader has no real idea where Dunyazade is, nor does the reader know how far in the future this monologue is taking place. By doing this, Barth has set up a great deal of reader suspense, stringing us along, knowing that she is talking to Shah Zaman, brother of Shahryar, but not knowing the circumstances. Thus when we are revealed the location of the speaker, standing over Shah Zaman with a razor to his privates, we are interestingly justified for the great sense of suspense that has been building, a sense of suspense that would likewise be growing in Shah Zaman as Dunyazade neared the end of her story and likewise the possible end of his sex life. Thus the first section goes from the almost present (1000th night of the Nights) back to the pre-night days and then forward clear to the present—a large loop, with wavy bits in the middle (not all 1001 tales are retold).

The second chapter of the book follows a similar, yet slightly altered pattern. As I said, it’s told in 3rd objective, and the two argue back and forth during this middle section. However, while we do hear Dunyazade’s voice here, largely the chapter follows Shah Zaman’s tale concerning his role over the past six and some odd years with the raping/murdering thing. He then, like Dunyazade, loops back to the beginning and tells his tale to the present time, which of course has advanced some since the first chapter. In essence, Barth tells parallel tales in a strangely separate manner, which though Shah Zaman’s story is unwritten in the original publication of the 1001 Nights, its ending sufficiently meets the requirements of the original ending: “the royal couples…emerge from their bridal chambers after the wedding night, greet one another with warm good mornings…bestow Samarkand on the brides’ long-suffering father, and set down for all posterity The Thousand Nights and a Night” (55).

One of the rather interesting things that comes out of this double looping narrative is that it manages to create two almost equal climaxes in the story, of which the third chapter becomes the dénouement. The first climax comes at the very end of the first chapter and beginning of the second, as the reader is first shown the situation of Shah Zaman, and his impending and possible doom. Since he is allowed to tell his tale, we are again given rise of suspense, this time wondering if Dunyazade will believe him, which comes to its own climax at the very end of their conversation: “Good morning, then! Good morning!”--They had made it through the night without killing each other (54). In a sense, Barth has achieved double the efficiency out of the same setting and characters; he does this through using the first climax as a sort of springboard towards the second climax, creating a slightly different, extended, arrangement of the basic parts of the story: exposition, rising action, climax, dénouement:

Because Barth is employing a slightly modified story pattern he also uses a slightly different method to finish the story. The main necessity for modification here is required due to the skipping of the proper dénouement of the first climax, so thus both dénouements need to be picked up in the third chapter. However, the third chapter itself does nothing to further the story, so in a sense the story has no true dénouement (i.e. the small ‘e’ in the above diagram referring to the perpendicular line immediately following the climax indicates the true end of the story’s progression). The remnants cleaned up in the denouement chapter, therefore represent at once an authorial defense of the reasoning behind the novel and the end of the first triangle, which concerns Dunyazade. At this particular junction, Barth is at liberty to explain the need for Dunyazade’s story to end after Shah Zaman’s story, which
must end in the night that all good mornings come to. The Arab storytellers understood this; they ended their stories not “happily ever after,” but specifically “until there took them the Destroyer of Delights and Desolator of Dwelling-places, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins, and the Kings inherited their riches.” (56)

Without realizing the morning after, the story, thus cannot end, and therefore, this is why Barth’s slightly mutated plotting pattern comes into making good sense.
Although there are many other aspects of narration that apply themselves throughout this novella, I believe Barth’s use of narration to control plot in this unique manner is, by far, the most interesting aspect of the narration employed. Although he starts his story in a position that would not normally allow for a proper ending (the end of Dunyazade’s story would not lead to the good morning after in any way or form, thus breaking the Arabic standard), he uses an extended plot diagram, through controlling the narration of the story, and efficiently ties the story up without any real required denouement (save one to explain why he couldn’t stop the story with the end of Dunyazade’s story).

SECTION 2: PERSEID
-text missing-
SECTION 3: BELLEROPHONIAD
-yep, same here-
Works Cited
Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Atlantic. Aug. 1967: 29-34.


In case you're wondering, I believe we had a 5 page limit to the essay, so Sections 2 and 3 were never completed. Sadly, I rented this book out and never got it back. Going to have to re-buy it someday, as it was one of Barth's best.

The Failure of Cloverfield, Or, Why Experimental Art is Reviled

******HOLY SHIT! CLOVERFIELD SPOILERS! *******

Sigh. This will be long, but necessary.

I do love experimental art forms. There is something magical, to me, about the notion of taking an existing system, breaking it, rebuilding it and forming a new artistic experience out of the ashes of the contemporary form. However, doing so always incurs a certain amount of danger. When you break something, take it apart, fiddle around with the nuts and bolts, you always run the chance of fucking it up beyond repair...and then you end up with a piece of shit that will generally offend (on some level) everyone in the vicinity.

I'd like to think that my particular vein of experimentation sides with the audience in mind. I want to do some structural screwity, but I want to do it in a way that I don't leave people standing a quarter mile down the road, scratching their ass and saying, "Do what, now?" What I'm getting at, is, I think the difference between Avant Garde kind of experimentation, and a more blue collar type (for lack of a better term). Avant Garde experimentation operates on the following notion: "I am doing something artistic, and it is awesome. If you are too stupid to figure out why it's awesome, then you aren't a member of the cool kid club." I've read some of that stuff, and some of it is good...if you're willing to lay down a lot of effort to become a member of the cool kid club (I think Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String would be a pretty decent example of this kind of writing). The cool thing about Avant Garde, though, is that it's fearless.

Cloverfield, too is fearless in design (in the movie, everyone is pretty fucking terrified). In addition to being fearless, it was surrounded by an incredible amount of hype (which should have been a clear warning sign). Cloverfield is an example of an Avant Garde art form, but it is also a flawed experiment in theatrical form. It used a lot of good ideas, but it alienated its audience. And with movies, far more with books, you can't ever alienate your audience. For the rest of this post, I want to illustrate the experimental attributes of the movie, as well as how these attributes led to the the movie's failure instead of it's success.

First, let's identify what I would qualify as the "experimental" elements of Cloverfield.

1. The entire movie is shot on a home video camera.
   
2. It uses a framing structure that insinuates that the home movie that you're watching is part of some Department of Defense project
3. It uses a modified version of Freitag's triangle for its establishment of dramatic structure.
4. It avoids standard, Hollywood, events and structures
5. The movie presented itself in a metafictive situation, ala the Blair Witch Project's "this is real" argument

Now, let's establish some things we take for granted, things that come as standard equipment for movies, and literature in general:

1. There is an identifiable beginning, middle, and end
2. The protagonist character struggles against some form of antagonist and either succeeds or fails in his/her struggle
3. somewhere between the middle and the end the climax of the protagonist's struggle is reached. The character is forever changed from this point on.
4. The nature of the artform is transparent (the author is invisible); focus is placed upon the action/plot/characters of the story rather than the story's construction
5. the purpose of the artform is to entertain its audience
6. the artform is accessible to a large number of people

The big experiment in Cloverfield is to distance the audience from many of the assumed trajectories, and create a new kind of monster movie. If done well, Cloverfield could have launched a new wave in cinematic style for monster movies. And if you look at what a lot of people are saying on RottenTomatoes.com, they're saying exactly this, that Cloverfield has breathed life back into the dead monster movie genre. The problem is that Cloverfield is making such a big scene, and getting good reviews, because it's different, not genius. Cloverfield is really a kind of Avant Garde monster movie, and since the masses can't quite figure all of it out, they've decided that it must be good because they can't understand it. You hear the same thing when folks read experimental literature for the first time. I've seen a lot of people pick up John Barth and give the same kind of reaction to a story like "Lost in the Funhouse." They'll say it was great, or that it blew their mind...but since they've never seen anything like it before, they lack the cognitive ability to analyze the work to see if it, well, works. And coming from the creator of Lost, I think Cloverfield is banking on people going with the "I liked it because I didn't understand it" mentality, because, Lost operates in the same manner. Not only that, but Cloverfield has a very extensive Alternative Reality Game attached to it, so moviegoers that didn't get involved in that are further made to feel inferior, leading them to assume that "they're just missing something, and that the movie must be better than what it is."

Sorry folks. You're not missing anything. Cloverfield is broken on the structural level, and because of that, it cannot aspire to be a complete movie. I wouldn't be surprised if Cloverfield 2 came out in six months from now (with Cloverfield 3 coming out six months after that).

Let's start with the framing. We all know the framing motif in movies: movie starts and is framed by another ontological layer of existence. Think of The Princess Bride--it's a movie of a grandfather telling his grandson a story, and then we go into the story, which becomes the movie. At the end of The Princess Bride, we then shift back up one ontological layer, and finish with the grandfather finishing the story. This is a well established gimmick, and works with varying degrees of success. In Cloverfield, the movie opens with an interesting Department of Defense reel, as if the movie is part of some manner of collection. As part of this reveal, it seems to suggest, also (by the titling) that there are other such videos/clips available, and to appear in the movie. However, we only get the one video. Once the video starts, we remain with it to the end of the movie. Once the video camera dies, we get maybe 10 seconds of Department of Defense do not copy footage and then end credits. The framing element, then, really does nothing for the movie. It suggests that the army found the tape amid the wreckage of New York, but it doesn't explain why it's being shown to us.

A frame, in the best sense, always should act as an element that defines the purpose for the thing it contains. This frame really doesn't provide any useful depth to the story, nor does it explain or otherwise validate the film it contains. In short, the frame was used as a flashy way to roll opening credits without "making it look like a movie."

Since the frame doesn't give us a true sense of purpose to the film, we turn to the content itself--a horribly shot (My God, if you go to see the movie, take Dramamine if you have ever gotten motion sick in your life) home movie of a party and then four friends trying to survive in the aftermath of the monster attack. It doesn't explain why the monster attacked, what the monster is, or even if the monster was finally destroyed, nor should it do any of those things--this camera is tied to the viewpoints of the characters that control it. However, by putting the audience in the hands of unreliable narrators, the film makers have sacrificed a large portion of audience appeal; they've sacrificed the reward of finding out "what really happened."

Had the movie included multiple viewpoints from several sources, not only would the frame be more strongly defined, but also we would be able to view the incident from several viewpoints, and thus be able to piece together "what happened." But the movie makes no amends to explain any of those things--this is a purely avant garde move. People don't like not knowing what's going one, ever. If you're going to withhold information, you better damn well come up with it later, otherwise, you're establishing a Red Herring, because your audience will spend the entire time trying to find out "what happens," and they hate it when they can't get some form of resolution. Remember how pissed off you were when you never found out what was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction? Things like that eat at you. We're wired to want to know why. This movie not only keeps the answers from us, but it punches us in the gut at the end when the lead character says to the camera, "If you're seeing this then you probably know more about what's going on than we do."

I think if you asked one of the makers of Cloverfield why they chose not to reveal things, they'd probably say something like, "it's not about the monster; it's about the characters' relationships, and coming to terms with their love for each other." And deep down, Cloverfield is exactly that: a love story about friends who are about to be separated (the guy is going to work in Japan), and they just realized they love each other. The climax of the movie following this model is when Guy saves girl from girl's apartment--they have united in their love for each other and forgiven each other for the fight they had at the party. But this is a monster movie, not a love story. However, only the love story gets any sense of resolution; the characters do change, and their dramatic arc is upheld. And since this is a monster movie, the audience gives less of a shit about the protagonist and his girlfriend, and a lot more about identifying the monster, and seeing how it gets killed--such is the nature of monster movies. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the monster. We don't know what it is (alien, water creature, other). We don't know why it attacked. We don't know why it isn't being harmed by FUCKING TANKS, BAZOOKAS, and BOMBS. Nor do we know if the military managed to kill it.

So, structurally speaking, Cloverfield also departs from the standard scheme of dramatic structure to it's very own modified version. Now let's take a look at Cloverfield's Dramatic Structure
First look at the standard dramatic structure model. Line AB represents a story's exposition. BC is the story's rising action, which climaxes at point C. CD is the Denouement of the story, which should be resolved relatively quickly. This model of dramatic structure is the standard model used in most forms of art and film; it's predictable and we expect it.

Cloverfield uses a modified model. In Cloverfield, AB is the party scene--this is the portion of the story that is wholly exposition. Once the Monster attacks, however, the movie's true plot takes off, leading on a steep incline of increasing tension. The reason Cloverfield's BC line is so steep is because Cloverfield abandons the traditional pattern of building and releasing tension throughout the progression to the climax. The tension levels in Cloverfield continue to rise, because the danger never abates, nor is a resolution met. Essentially Cloverfield is all rising action that climaxes with the characters' deaths at point D. Notice how there is no Denouement here. Denouement is important, and though it should be kept short, it shouldn't be left off unless it is well justified. Had the movie made use of its framing structure, the denouement could have been relayed within the frame--much like the Princess Bride.

Also notice how Cloverfield's climax isn't really the climax of the film. Point C in Cloverfield represents the point in which they save the girlfriend from the tower. But since no one is safe, nor is anyone irrevocably changed, point C isn't the true climax of the film--it's more of a subplot climax, and within the subplot climax, the characters are finally together again, but they're not safely out of the city, so while the love plot is more or less resolved, it's still contained by the larger, unexplained arc of the monster plot.

Cloverfield uses its alternate dramatic model to keep viewers interested by overloading our sense of tension. We feel anxious and afraid, because for 84 minutes, we are constantly on the edge of our seats. Unfortunately, this model fails because it offers no real resolution at the end, and such an unresolved ending leads to audience dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction because we expect to gain some sort of reward for sitting through a movie made with bad video footage, and ultra-high tension. We get nothing. And because we get nothing, the movie fails in it's only true goal, entertainment.

It's unfortunate that many movie-goers think that this movie is too clever for them. It's not. It's unfinished, and it doesn't live up to our expectations, especially considering the hype surrounding it. And though most of this post seems to advocate a more mainstream approach, it's not what I'm calling for. I want to see more experimental films hit the big screen, and I have seen several that do a great job: Crank, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch all come to mind. But Cloverfield is not the new vein of monster movie. It's a failed attempt. And while it might garner some better copycats, its own nature is flawed. The movie has broken its bond with the audience, and did nothing to help restore that bond.

Those are my two cents; hopefully future film makers, fiction writers, and other creative types (including myself) will heed these paired pennies and make way for a future in experimental art where the masses aren't afraid to sample the weird, the strange, the unexpected.