Reposted from my previous blog(s)

July 18, 2006
Nothing, Whatsoever

When I was a whole lot younger than I am now (yep, I feel old), my favorite weekend pastime was sulking and giving everybody that get-out-of-my-way look, barging into my room as if the rest of the house was on fire, plopping into my unmade, books-and-papers-and-whathaveyous-filled bed and reading myself to death, vegetating like a piece of broccolli (i love this veggie, by the way) left out in the sun until my eyes would droop and so would the rest of me (how convenient that a pillow is nearby and I can just get lost in dreamland and meet Eustacia Vye on her way to meet The Native, or, maybe, just maybe, the great Holden Caulfield himself). Whew. Long sentence, wasn't it? But where was I? Oh, Holden--no, dreamland? I forgot. Totally lost track of my thoughts. What was I writing about? Sulking, I think, or maybe something to do with being young? I am typing, typing, typing and I don't care if I am making sense, or not. Are the punctuations correct? Is my grammar okay? Whatever. The point is...well,the point is that I don't have a point. I am rambling and how I started would tell you what kind of a person I am. Or maybe not. I mean, the last book I read was like a week ago, and it's taking me ages to finish the great Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I remember reading Slapstick when i was thirteen years old and not being able to make heads and tails out of it. It was my dad's, by the way. Yep, the great Dad who boasts of not having gone through the Hardy Boys and going straight to Moby Dick, from whom I got my copy of Faulkner's Light In August which is still in my bookshelf to this very day, pages tattered and browning away and browning some more, and all. Where was I, again? Oh, yeah, Slapstick. Fast forward to seven years later: One of my favorite English teachers, Prof. Thelma E. Arambulo (she says she hates her first name, but a heck of a woman she was!) tells us, her English majors-- and by the way, Contemporary American Lit just rocks!-- that the great Kurt would write in bits of paper and compile them into a piece of work that is so incoherent it would have your eyes glued on to the pages until everything would make sense. Where are you, James Merrill! Theodore Roethke! You Beat poets! Adrienne Rich! Omigawd my punctuation is so downright sloppy but I don't care I'm writing can't you see. I wonder, why this difficulty with Slaughterhouse Five? I mean, I read The Hours, Mrs. Dalloway and An Invisible Sign of My Own (which I bought at a booksale for a hundred and ten bucks and turned out to have been autographed by Amy Bender herself!) in a span of, like, four days. Is it just laziness? Is my brain deteriorating into something awful? Is it Vonnegut? The answer to this is: I don't know. I really don't. And I still don't know what my point is. I have no idea what shape this entry is taking. And, really, why is it called an entry? Because you enter the words into the keypad and they pop out into the screen? Who first thought of calling it an entry? Did it have, in any way, a likeness with how James Joyce started using the word epiphany to mean something else other than the feast of the three kings (were they really kings?)? I am so lost. Other words/names to think about today: canon, pathos, incoherent, James Thurber (where in the world can I find a book by him, aside from the UP CAL library?), lunch (or breakfast first?), sleep. Yep, sleep. I think it's lack of sleep that got me started, lack of sleep that made me go on, and on, and on. Stop. This is so much fun I'm dozing off.

October 27, 2006
From Billy to Randall

Correction: It's AIMEE, not Amy Bender. Sorry for that. I happened to look at my bookshelf this weekend and saw the mistake I had made. A whoops! moment, right there.

Slaughterhouse-Five was a real blast! Yes, I have finally finished the book, and managed to swallow Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in between. Now, S-5 (that's what I've taken to calling it) is about this guy named Billy Pilgrim who's become unstuck in time (sounds so glamorous, doesn't it?) and gets abducted by the Trafalmadorians (hope I spelled that right) who, by the way, are a group of aliens who have taken a keen interest in the human race. Now, what the book implies(or what I have gleaned from it, whichever) is that Billy began to have these hallucinations (they could just as well have been real, for all we know) after he survived the 2nd World War (why does this phrase always have to be in caps?), the climax of which (in Billy's experience, at least) was the bombing of Dresden, Germany. Slaughterhouse-Five is the name of the structure which housed the Americans (Billy included), and which miraculously escaped the bombing (yep, it was supposedly that disastrous).

Now, what am I doing? I am boring myself to death. I didn't come out here to give a summary of the book! No way! Go and read it yourself! But why should you, right? Why the @#**#$% should you read a book written by some guy (sorry, Vonnegut fans. No insult intended, none at all) who had nothing better to do than write a book about some crazy war survivor who had, in turn, nothing better to do than walk in and out of time zones?

I am so incoherent. This is what non-writing (is there such a word?) does to people who used to write like writing was breathing. And so I have taken to coming up with patches of script that I am hoping would turn out to be worth this page, anyhow. Or your time. Now that was downright smug. I mean, am I really writing this with the thought that someone would even care to read it? But then again, there's always the zeitgeist, the invisible audience (reader, whatever) one has in mind when one is writing. I mean, come on, give me that luxury, at least! The only person I'm pretty sure would read this is the friend who gave the book to me. So, there.

Well, back to Dresden. Reading about the bombing made me remember Randall Jarrell, a contemporary American poet who was a fighter pilot during the WWII, who wrote about what it was like to be up in the air and just fire and fire away at a piece of geography (it mustn't have seemed real to them, at all, just a part of the map they were ordered to annihilate). That there were people being killed, living beings being shred to pieces by the ammunition raining like fire from the sky-- these would hardly have occurred to them, at all, at least while they were at it. What Jarrell's poem ("Losses," that was the title) seems to be pointing at is the unreality of what was happening, to them who were no more than just pilots with an assignment. What was real enough must have been what came after, that moment when the task is done and they land and hear about it from the news, look at the photo spreads of the ravages of war, the deaths, the shattered limbs, the ashes. And then they say, or think: Hey. That was me. Us. I did that. We did that. And then the sadness. The ache of guilt. And everything else.

I have no idea how to end this. A period would, I think, have to do for now.

So there.