/lit/ - Literature

>>1987773

this is fucking great. itworks just fine as straight prose, to me.

i do feel, thought, like you're sticking to a sort of "universal theme". if you could turn that descriptive equipment on a specific story or set of circumstances i bet you'd have something really insane.

>>1987658

thought i think word agreements and overzealousness occasionally make this clumsy, i really like the physicality of some of the description. keep that broken-down quality but maybe try and simplify or smooth it over a little bit.

ex:

"Not only was he loud in comparison to the hushed tone of the tight-knit biker and truck community that were all sitting a good distance from the door on his entry, but his visage was queer for the area"

instead, maybe:

"Not only was he loud in comparison to the hushed tone of that tight-knit biker and truck community, all of them sitting a good distance from the door on his entry, but his face was queer for the area."

you could leave "visage" in, maybe. just not really my style.

>>1987745

ignore and soldier on, that's my motto.

i'm done. now to read other people's stuff. lessee

>>1987727
>>1987733

edit stuff like this together and you might have something. i'm totally serious.

>>1987731

What did she say to you outside by the plastic slide? what look did she give you as she coyly plucked a dandelion. You'll never remember. You'll try. You'll kill yourself trying. You'll kill yourself.

Not on purpose, no. You'll just use yourself up. Unless you can develop some kind of narrative cancer. Something that never dies. You have to metastasize yourself into your culture, or into your children, or something. Alternate versions of the same story.

This is what it's all for, in the end. This is why you're behind the wheel of this Toyota, going, going going, to get to the game. To play the game. You're playing the game right now.

Because really, where can you draw the line? You impress the boss by getting your emails out just like you impressed that girl by talking about books just like you ran the fastest in the junior olympics just like you beat your brother at Mariokart. Have you ever really stopped?

And now you're driving. And I'm sitting in the passenger seat, thinking, thank god, he's finally gone off his rocker. Thank fucking god. Because I was getting bored, and that's the only thing worse than balance. Boredom. They have this relationship.

You were wrong about the Tao Te Ching. It says all kinds of things about submission but nothing about balance.

>>1987721

yes, desperately.

here's more.


There's no real sanity and balance involved in driving an automobile like that. The purple scream of the tires, the quiet teen-sex of the chassis slamming into itself, there isn't anything non-bipolar about it.

I understand what life is about, and it isn't about balance. God no.

What do you think I want out of this life? To wear no makeup, to get no piercings, to guild no lilies. Not even Jesus Christ thought that was a good idea.

But you know, in the midst of it all, you still want me to dream of a wife, and kids, and a little house. In the middle of it all you want me to suffer the same dream you suffered. And to balance all the things I'm supposed to with all the things I'm not supposed to. To balance at all.

Well, there is no balance. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Conception at one end, shitting yourself and rotting at the other. That's about as fucking imbalanced as you get.

The trees outside, they look so still. They don't know about any of this. So know, and be pissed about the fact that you know. You get to be conscious for the whole thing.

>>1987702

k.

>>1987695

shut up and contribute toolbag

>>1987689

i'm fucking sending that shit to her. that's great. i mean, i realize you can do it with anything, but it's still hilarious.

>>1987686

This is the story I was drawn into, and the story I started living. Very difficult for my own life story to compete. Mine was so coherent. Small town, religious upbringing, rebellion, college, and then a career in public relations. I'm an artist, I guess. I make things. But not like she makes things. Her story, and her art, are the jagged edges of the human experience, real things. Wounds, and you don't pay attention to much else when you have wounds. What did I have to offer that was more important?

Right now, I have seven hits of LSD in my fridge. I've done mushrooms before, but never acid. I bought it because I want to lose my mind. Because the story has started to make too much sense. And because I miss her, and what she did to me. I want to do it to myself, but I don't know if I can.

>>1987683

That's what her studio was for. It was a beautiful place, on Sunset, and she put so much work into it. She made it feel homey, hip, and mysterious. There was always tea brewing, it always smelled lovely, there was always a black cat around. There were the paintings and the comics she drew, her work and the work of people she loved. There were even quilts, beautiful ones, from her mother.

A lot of her work was about women, terrifying women, battered women, killer women. Women doing things, terrible and wonderful things, stepping outside the boundaries of both traditionalism and feminism to thrust their bloody issues in your face. They put their fists into your guts and looked you in the eye and said look at me, no don't look away, this is what it's about, we bleed too, and we can make you bleed. Beautiful, awful creatures, populating fairytales simple in form but terrifying in implication-- what did it mean that this woman wanted to eat her father, or that this one wanted to be roped into submission by a cowboy, or that this one had committed murder with a hatpin? No explanations, just the truth, but the truth as a story, as a picture.

This is how she found the plot, and how she made me see the plot, of her own life. Often, she was just as open as her paintings, and almost as violent. We didn't fuck or make love so much as we did both at the same time. When I was inside her, she always wanted me deeper inside. She would grab me and grip me and scratch at me and I'd retaliate with force and passion until I would bump parts of her I really wasn't sure sure I was supposed to be bumping. She always liked it, always came when I did that. She wanted to be impaled. She wanted to be wounded. I found it at first mildly terrifying and then addictively erotic.

>>1987676

Her mother sat us at the table and smoked some weed and said that this man, this Dennis something, was hacking into her brain using satellites. He lived in the UK and he wanted to destroy her. He had connections, this man. He said he was involved in alternative energy but she didn't believe that for a minute.

This man made her feel pain. He projected terrifying images into her head, of him living in a filthy house, smearing the walls with feces, torturing people. He had all this sophisticated equipment. He'd designed it himself. She's talked to experts about it. It was theoretically possible. Understand, she said. She lives in hell.

I sat there, suddenly uncomfortable with the tea I was drinking, and slowly coming to terms with the fact that my girlfriend's mother is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic. A functional one, to be sure. She worked as an operating room nurse for years. Don't even get me started on that. But I thought things were pretty clear. I looked to my girlfriend for reassurance. She was focused on her mother.

Her father, too, was a problem. She and her mother were both convinced he'd committed a murder that her grandfather, his father, had taken the fall for. They showed me newspaper clippings. It was possible. I didn't know what to believe anymore.

The story, as you can see, gets twisted when you deal with crazy people. It starts to sound like a movie. How can we make the story make sense?

>>1987667

So why did we break up? I was trying to trace the reasons, to understand the logic of the situation, but it kept shifting beneath my feet.

Ostensibly it had something to do with her mother.

The first time I met her mother, we went to her apartment, right across the street from the La Brea tar pits. Her mother was obviously distraught when we came in, hunched, tense, bustling around and making tea. My girlfriend hadn't mentioned what was wrong; said her mother was just having a tough time. The apartment was huge, the location was extravagant.

Her mother's eyes locked on to me, as soon as she saw me. She had an unbroken intensity of focus I'd seen before, and I was trying to figure out where.

She introduced herself and immediately started saying, this person, this awful person, she's so sorry she's feeling this way, she's so sorry I have to be dragged into this. She suffers every day. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her to explain. I wanted to help. Eliza looked uncomfortable.

>>1987668

yeah, but suicide's a pretty common theme. the more specific the better. doesn't have to be chemical castration, you know whatever.

This is what you get for dating an artist.

I'd said that to my friends a million times, sort of ruefully playing it off. I thought it again while unwrapping the painting in my living room, the one she sent me in the mail, with the note on the back, “I don’t know what to do with this.” I’d paid for it. If I’m going to be honest, I really want it, even though we’ve just broken up. Even though I've just broken up with her.

It’s a female nude, the outlines done in this minimalist style she lifts from Japanese calligraphy. Japanese lit was her major and she speaks the language. She’s white as can be, with red hair. I used to tease her about it. I was always secretly impressed. The nude girl is wearing black fingerless gloves, blood on the knuckles, and she’s staggering back, squinting and wrinkling her nose, with a bloody mark of impact around her eye, a future shiner.

She'd made it one weekend awhile ago, when we'd broken up and then gotten back together. Over those few days she painted this and posted it on the internet. She doesn't fuck around.

It was extreme, everybody thought so. When I showed my therapist a picture of it his eyes widened. He understood why we broke up. Unstable situation. This kind of stuff can be overwhelming.

I wanted to punch him in the face and say, no, dammit, this is what I love about her. This isn't why I want to break up at all. She made this beautiful painting about me. Who doesn't want beautiful paintings made about them?

>>1987633

"I looked at her from across the room and felt my instincts kick in again, my stupid instincts, with their stupid evolutionary goals. More pain, oh good. I sort of wish I could just castrate myself. But I can't really control my mind in situations like this, so here it goes, conjuring a shared history, a marriage proposal, a kiss, a few steamy minutes of totally fictionalized sexual intercourse."

"I know this is going to follow me around for the rest of the day. I guess that's good. I guess it'll eventually push me to, you know, actually mate with somebody. And it drives my imagination; I get to imagine these pretty, satisfying stories. But sometime I wonder if it wouldn't be better if I just got myself chemically castrated."

how about a little honesty. either that, or a little more life experience.

>>1987615
also, this is great.

piling on flowery bullshit does not spectacular writing make. words like "residing" and "beckons" and clauses like "beckons him to realise itself" should, at this stage, be disregarded in favor of describing something compelling. show, don't tell. Read some Miranda July. Understand the fundamental awkwardness of the human condition. The world isn't coated with fucking fairy dust. Make your characters sound weak and flawed. People respond to that because people are weak and flawed. "no dice will be rolled today" is a masturbatory, self-congratulatory way to describe insecurity and the inability to relate to people, and deep down, everybody know's that shit's a lie.

You're welcome.

>>1936229

dude. chill.

you don't read much poetry, do you?

go buy The Wasteland or something.

everything has a philosophical message

>>1896195

There is no nihilism. Nihilists have no worship; they have no great love, they have no great hate. They have a small idea of nothingness, an impotent conception of meaninglessness. They find comfort in this smallness, in this impotence.
You must embrace the scream. It is the goat, it is the engine, and the symbols are its static. You cannot believe, or disbelieve. You must despair, and continue to despair.
This is not for you to be strong. You are strong only so you may despair at your eventual weakness. This is not for you to be weak. You are weak only so that you may despair at your failure to be strong. You do not worship rest and bliss any longer. Come into the noise.
Feel the eternal gap and feel fear. Begin to babble. From this babbling, forms will arise. This will be your new scripture. This does not exempt you from study. You will study the babblings of those before you with rapt attention.
The final revelation is not that this babbling is meaningless. The final revelation is instead that this is the only source of meaning there is.
Do not dare to die. Dare to live, to know what this means, and to be, to the core of yourself, terrified.”
David S.

Mother Goat Society: Trona Summit

Excerpt, Opening Lecture, 2010

“Animals in multitude eat each other, forming a face.
This is the face you must worship, for it is the only face that exists.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the goal of our order is the weakening of the individual. No, we aim to strengthen the individual until he becomes superfluous, a hulking and obsolete artifact, a sculpture of nothing.
There is no quiet beyond the mind. The prophets of the East and West teach of a great light, beyond the individual, a grand unity, and an eternal bliss. This temptation is anathema to the growth of the creature, a final acquiescence to the need for womblike comfort. We believe that terror is the only reality, we believe that there is only tensile force, and that the true final form, destruction or apotheosis, sees the ego either violent within or violent without the screaming, the ripping of the veil, and the awful laughter. You do not understand the joke until you realize that it is on you.

>>1874326
>>1874354

sheer brilliance, that's what.