Monday, February 11, 2013

STUMP NOVEL



Come on, Pilgrim. If you set word count requirements and meet them don't you know a Greek chorus will rain blessings down on all of your job applications? And I say Greek chorus, I mean like modern-day Greek soccer players. Their chins like planks of wood – as irrefutable, as able to hold weight, corners implied. And this chorus will wear loin cloths so you will be able to imagine what Rodin and Michelangelo make a tad too plain: I'm talking bratwurst, tennis ball containers...

Look homeward, angel. Listen to the radio: it's When Yer Twenty-Two. Go and look up the words; it could be absolutely nothing but proof of God:
stuck in the perpetual motion (okay!)
dying against the machine (well I actually follow my bliss, so...)
the whole thing leaves you a nothing instead of a these (that can't be right, Lyricsfreak...)
the sun is black and the black halos fly (lost. Lost, lost lost)
The sound is so cute when you're twenty-two. When you're twenty-two.
Take a while. Think you get it. Get it, get up, get another Maker's Mark. It's 1:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, from here on in I shoot without a script.

The Project feels like it's disintegrating sometimes. Going back and reading The Project elicits mostly this face (Imagine a really embarrassed smirk) – it's your own cloying voice, so wound in on itself that it can't fly. It's your so-called “self-awareness,” which stymies in its way. It's Lena Dunham and all the other innovators making diary theatre and thinly-veiled confessions oh-so-trendy, oh-so-GROUNDBREAKING. It's too easy, what you reach for. You know who it's not? George Saunders. Riddle me this.

So maybe the trouble is to do with your brain. You ought to expand your brain. You should go to all of the museums and download all of the podcasts. You should read all of the newspapers, ponder world events at length, research those threads of history that articles imply. You know what you should do is practice guitar. You should read comic books and watch documentaries and try on different eccentric catsuits. Call these Von Trier-ian imposed limits: maybe in this skin, I'll get this character. I'll know this new thing about time and space and being a person in the world. You should listen to all of the music and read all of the fiction from the era you sometimes feel you ought to have been born into (magic): it's 1983 in here now! That makes you thirtysomething! Congrats, thirtysomething! The best part of being thirtysomething is being smug. You've kind of done it all, and you know that this trainwreck ends and apologizes and from its wiser ashes grow...

Can't even TRICK myself...Is it that yer twenty-two and trying The Project at all? A lot of things are de facto and inevitable: ignorance, ego, rashness, certain words and phrases, their overuse, self-pity, ampersands...

Other laurels include familiar phrases like 'harping coda.' So harping coda, go:

It's hard out here for a pimp.

Okay, go some more. To a secondary location! To the boy's house! To Girl's Night! To the comedy club and the movies! Go to places where you can sit down, at least, because you actually are a little bit of an old woman. Go like a metaphor. Go like a concept. Go fishing. Go away.

Philosophers are content with endings like this. So are people fooled by soundtracks. Don't you get the joke???

I laughed like I did, but between you me and the lamppost: Nosireeba.