The new thing to fuel me is coming home drunk to write poetry. Maybe I'm turning into a high school sophomore and then i'll cycle up again, grow to 45, grow wings, write this damn thing. These are the things I put into the word doc, "rantzzz5":
In the apartment, even when there's no electricity
my hands still graze on the worthless switches.
It's as with your face and my thoughts of it--
there is something in me that will not learn or close.
How much more full-time can you get
than hating yourself. It takes all his energy--brick of days,
brickles--the slow tumble of the gamepiece as it hits the falling walls.
We shuttle through fonts, bogus and slow
and there are no other ways to say it than the way
we should have used already, "I'm sorry."
but what's with the sinking regret that I don't feel
long corridor walled in mahogony, some dark wood
that won't allow for escapes, or for light,
or for anything between the lathes but carpet, festered and deep,
a stream our lives are running into and over--delight of kitten heels
treading false grass. The coconut fronds, knit in mother's wool.
Like a latrine your heart wells up! Foolish mothers!
Keep your children from the door! There are men in the streets with pistols,
pistils, epistles, and they are here to ruin lives.
Carry your shoes in your hands.
Parlance of radio gods
in the earbuds and the alleys
hearable from far off. Through this heat
your coat is like a swimming pool which children eye;
delight begging drowning from the worried mothers
gathered poolside around the latest corpse--
always another child.
Just as the one you'll choose
is always another girl,
talking sweetly through mouthfuls of crushed ice.
Telling myself it's better that way:
You through the alleys are dully traceable
I can predict the next turn and the next
a system like heatwaves lapping eachother.
I'm thinking of that story, where we take a spaceship to a land like North Korea
where the people speak also, Spanish, and a mushy mix of Japanese and French
they call Hanguoren--the word I know in Chinese to mean, "Korean."
The problem when we get there is there is not any water
We have taken the ship so far and forgotten how to drink.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
A bad writing day... Broody Salter & the rainy feeling of Benadryl hangovers.
There were reasons that Leona came to number 82—reasons that she told herself, and reasons that were true. Out front—a tangle of cords held down with duct tape connected a brood of trucks—beige vans, a pair of trailers parked diagonally across the lawn as if they’d just stopped by for a second (they’d been that way for months). A single miata, cornflower blue, with a sucked-dry coffee cup tossed on the passenger seat, stood parked halfway through a hedgerow like a sprawled cat. Leaning against the scowling grill of a Winnebago, a stranger taking a cigarette break threw her a look aggressive with boredom, furiously un-curious, the look, Leona thought, all un-beautiful girls must grow used to receiving.
She could say she came here to get away from it all: Mess of film and mess of lawn, the cluttering fawns of high school girls, the thinset line of her mother’s lips or the oblong fade of the bathtubs into which she so often seemed to be sinking. But these were not the reasons. It seemed to her that when people said to get away from it all they so often meant to fly towards another thing.
The door could be opened with a push—15-year-old chewing gum sealed the front lock. The dark line of an umbrella against the bleached slats of the front hall; small marks of fingers around the switches; the smell of laundry in the upstairs bedroom—these were the signs of some past occupants never seen. The current tenants were easier to track—a flannel shirt balled-up near the fireplace, a bowl of ash and then candles—seven of them—holding down the center of a room, and a sleeping bag, stained and filthy, hung half-way out a window to dry. Her finger gently running against the molding of a bedroom’s threshold door, Leona looked out over the old bag, nothing out past it but the ocean. Bright blue of dusk and the water empty; Just a darkness bright enough to seem lit from behind, a sheet of paper held against a flame.
The back wall of the house facing the ocean, was now gone, spilt down the cliffside, soft rubble streaming down the scrubbrush and purplish soil. You could sit out at the room’s edge and stare down—the drop, 15 feet and then a roll forever, down to the surf. This was the spot she had seen Alan occupy, a book in his hands, his eyes on the words. And the blanket hung to dry, the shards of ash in a hand-thrown pot—these things were Alan’s, for it was Alan who came so often to 82, who had gummed down the lock, who had swept out the fireplace and left a flannel shirt dark with soot. She had seen him over the candles, two or three of his friends flicking down the lighter over the bowl, taking breaths and laughing out. When she came here it was less out of a desire to leave what she knew than a desire to run into him, to ask the silly question, “What are you doing here?” called for in film scripts that require motives stabler than the romantic tug of an emptied house, facing the surf, its structure gone, the scent of its walls humid as bread gone bad.
There were reasons that Leona came to number 82—reasons that she told herself, and reasons that were true. Out front—a tangle of cords held down with duct tape connected a brood of trucks—beige vans, a pair of trailers parked diagonally across the lawn as if they’d just stopped by for a second (they’d been that way for months). A single miata, cornflower blue, with a sucked-dry coffee cup tossed on the passenger seat, stood parked halfway through a hedgerow like a sprawled cat. Leaning against the scowling grill of a Winnebago, a stranger taking a cigarette break threw her a look aggressive with boredom, furiously un-curious, the look, Leona thought, all un-beautiful girls must grow used to receiving.
She could say she came here to get away from it all: Mess of film and mess of lawn, the cluttering fawns of high school girls, the thinset line of her mother’s lips or the oblong fade of the bathtubs into which she so often seemed to be sinking. But these were not the reasons. It seemed to her that when people said to get away from it all they so often meant to fly towards another thing.
The door could be opened with a push—15-year-old chewing gum sealed the front lock. The dark line of an umbrella against the bleached slats of the front hall; small marks of fingers around the switches; the smell of laundry in the upstairs bedroom—these were the signs of some past occupants never seen. The current tenants were easier to track—a flannel shirt balled-up near the fireplace, a bowl of ash and then candles—seven of them—holding down the center of a room, and a sleeping bag, stained and filthy, hung half-way out a window to dry. Her finger gently running against the molding of a bedroom’s threshold door, Leona looked out over the old bag, nothing out past it but the ocean. Bright blue of dusk and the water empty; Just a darkness bright enough to seem lit from behind, a sheet of paper held against a flame.
The back wall of the house facing the ocean, was now gone, spilt down the cliffside, soft rubble streaming down the scrubbrush and purplish soil. You could sit out at the room’s edge and stare down—the drop, 15 feet and then a roll forever, down to the surf. This was the spot she had seen Alan occupy, a book in his hands, his eyes on the words. And the blanket hung to dry, the shards of ash in a hand-thrown pot—these things were Alan’s, for it was Alan who came so often to 82, who had gummed down the lock, who had swept out the fireplace and left a flannel shirt dark with soot. She had seen him over the candles, two or three of his friends flicking down the lighter over the bowl, taking breaths and laughing out. When she came here it was less out of a desire to leave what she knew than a desire to run into him, to ask the silly question, “What are you doing here?” called for in film scripts that require motives stabler than the romantic tug of an emptied house, facing the surf, its structure gone, the scent of its walls humid as bread gone bad.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Experiment
When I read Marsha Pessl (Sp.) and thought--"This is too easy" part of what I thought was "too easy" was the voice. But wait, if I think something's too easy, why don't I just do it? I think I would HATE my book if it were present first person from Leona's perspective, but that also makes the most immediate sense. Here's a quick experiment.
“So how balanced are you?” Alan asks. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he's adjusting the position of the shoe on his bent knee, so that it does not tip. I ask him, "Which is how balanced?" and he gives the long-wise answer:
“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever. "
"Which is," I say hastily, "Unfeasable."
We're having the conversation we always seemed to be having, and he's doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. The dogged scent of a neighbor's cigarettes slowly filters into the room, smelling like it has passed through layers and layers of glued wallpaper.
“Whatever,” he says, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed. It tumbles once over and lands to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers. These are the shoes he has kept half-tucked beneath every bed he's occupied over the past two weeks.
“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” I say, ablasldkfjalksdfj
oh god i'm so tired. more to come post full time job week ajsdflkjasdf
“So how balanced are you?” Alan asks. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he's adjusting the position of the shoe on his bent knee, so that it does not tip. I ask him, "Which is how balanced?" and he gives the long-wise answer:
“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever. "
"Which is," I say hastily, "Unfeasable."
We're having the conversation we always seemed to be having, and he's doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. The dogged scent of a neighbor's cigarettes slowly filters into the room, smelling like it has passed through layers and layers of glued wallpaper.
“Whatever,” he says, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed. It tumbles once over and lands to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers. These are the shoes he has kept half-tucked beneath every bed he's occupied over the past two weeks.
“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” I say, ablasldkfjalksdfj
oh god i'm so tired. more to come post full time job week ajsdflkjasdf
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Leona's flight with Alan
I keep just writing parts I feel like writing instead of in sequence. I think maybe that's healthy. I think maybe reading Ann Beattie again makes my dialogue a Walt Disney'ish "Apprenticeship" of her Noel Coward.
“So how balanced are you?” Alan asked. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he was adjusting the position of the shoe on his knee, so that it would not tip.
“Which is how balanced, again?”
“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever and ever.”
“Which is what I’m saying,” Leona said. “That’s not a situation I would wish on anyone.”
They were having the conversation they always seemed to be having, and he was doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. Someone in the room over was smoking and the scent seemed to be seeping in. She smelled it more and more.
“Whatever,” he said, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed, tumbling over and landing to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers he had kept half-tucked beneath every bed he occupied in the past two weeks.
“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” she said.
He flipped on his side, peeking over the rumpled duvet to see where the sneaker had landed. He giggled, and then said, in the high, overeager voice of a child. “You’re smothering me?”
“This is the situation,” she said, pointing at the shoes. "It's like a Ouija board."
“Riiiiight,” he said. "It's the situation if you were a shoe. And if I drop you.”
“And if you were a shoe.”
“Which we’re not.”
“Right—because we have agency.”
“Right,” she said, “Which is why the forever and ever situation can never take hold.”
“Right,” he said, “Because someone will always move first.”
“Yeah,” she said, “Or you’ll lose your job. Pretend your dad gets sick and you have to get back to LA.”
“Mmmmm. I really want those curly fries they serve on Southwest,” he said. She gave him a look. He said, “I know I don’t take these things seriously.”
“Ugh,” she said, “Neither do I. Which is the whole problem—right?”
“If it’s not a problem with you, it’s not a problem with me,” he said. And he rolled to the edge of the bed, slipping his feet into his slippers, standing up, stretching with a crack of knuckles. “I’m going to go get us some ice.”
In the hallway, a woman with extraterrestrial eyeshadow gave him a long stare. Her bathrobe was open at the collar and he peeked—breasts like mangoes, mushrooms, whatever grew toward the ground, he couldn’t remember how things grew. Potatoes grew under the ground, tomatoes grew on vines. Mushrooms were natural—a fungi—a different kingdom. The word he had wanted was mangoes, but there was something bizarrely exoticised and racist-sounding about a mango, even though most every country ate them now. The slippers were thin enough that he could feel the carpet beneath his feet—swish, swash. Its patterning showed zillions of monkeys, climbing zillions of rope ladders, woven of plants in endless patterns of locking diamonds. It was good to be in a hotel like this, it was nice, and nice to hold a bucket of ice, and nice to see the woman in the bathrobe with the hallucinatory eyeshadow. When they’d first started traveling like this, absorbing the stench of the hotels, all the other patrons always seemed to be traveling in schoolgroups; there had never been any icebuckets. Back in the room, she was maybe taking a shower, maybe reading—he had a few minutes. Past the ice-room, a second hallway veered to the right—more numbers listed on the doors: 1305, 1307. A roomservice tray, half-finished, left-out. He leant down and plucked a half sandwich, chewing it for a few bites before putting it out on the next tray. Hopefully there weren’t cameras there, watching him. He was a very sloppy guest. The hallway ended on 1349. The year of Columbus, he thought, and then remembered that was definitely not it. He seemed to be losing his grasp on his knowledge.
When he walked back, holding the ice-bucket, stopping to fill the ice-bucket, and continuing back to the room, he noticed the monkeys in the carpet—they were upside down now, having not been designed to be seen from the angle of departure, and he remembered how he composed the clever phrase he would use to tell her about it when he’d come back in the room. But when he came back in the room, with the ice-bucket, having just eaten the bites of that sandwich—chicken avacado—was when he realized she was gone. Her purse was still there, her phone, wallet—with the money inside, he later recognized—and a half-eaten cookie on the bedside table, the mark of her chapstick on the glass of tepid tea. The one note: A business card, left facing the door on the bright, creased white duvet of the still made-bed.
“Leslie Bennet,” was the name on the card. A mobile phone number had been circled, and in hand, writing said, “Call me.”
Alan sat on the edge of the bed. He flipped the card—its reverse was blank—and put it down on the bed. He didn't feel like calling. It could be a prank, a ruse, she could have just left a card on the bed and stepped out--maybe to deal with the woman next door who had been smoking. In the room was her stuff and the blank TV. He
turned on the TV. There were a few channels but there was nothing on. In a minute he would call the number, but for a moment, he just needed to do this. He could still smell her in the room—a citrus shampoo, worn sneakers, the damp bindings of the rain-soaked books she had carried with her. On TV, the newscaster smiled. He turned the TV off. He gave the number on the card a call, and flipped it over. With a complimentary hotel pen, writing on the blank side, he wrote down the time. An instinct he did not know he had told him he would need to remember this moment, and to try to trace it back from here. It had started at 12.04, in a town not West still of Jacksonville, East of the Union Jack bar they'd stopped in ironically and spent too much time uncomfortable under the uncomfortable flags. He thought, as a priest bemoans the death of a child who dies a virgin, of how she would now never make it to Graceland; It was a place he himself had no interest in going to, but its loss now struck him as a specific tragedy—palpable as dropped fruit.
“So how balanced are you?” Alan asked. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he was adjusting the position of the shoe on his knee, so that it would not tip.
“Which is how balanced, again?”
“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever and ever.”
“Which is what I’m saying,” Leona said. “That’s not a situation I would wish on anyone.”
They were having the conversation they always seemed to be having, and he was doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. Someone in the room over was smoking and the scent seemed to be seeping in. She smelled it more and more.
“Whatever,” he said, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed, tumbling over and landing to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers he had kept half-tucked beneath every bed he occupied in the past two weeks.
“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” she said.
He flipped on his side, peeking over the rumpled duvet to see where the sneaker had landed. He giggled, and then said, in the high, overeager voice of a child. “You’re smothering me?”
“This is the situation,” she said, pointing at the shoes. "It's like a Ouija board."
“Riiiiight,” he said. "It's the situation if you were a shoe. And if I drop you.”
“And if you were a shoe.”
“Which we’re not.”
“Right—because we have agency.”
“Right,” she said, “Which is why the forever and ever situation can never take hold.”
“Right,” he said, “Because someone will always move first.”
“Yeah,” she said, “Or you’ll lose your job. Pretend your dad gets sick and you have to get back to LA.”
“Mmmmm. I really want those curly fries they serve on Southwest,” he said. She gave him a look. He said, “I know I don’t take these things seriously.”
“Ugh,” she said, “Neither do I. Which is the whole problem—right?”
“If it’s not a problem with you, it’s not a problem with me,” he said. And he rolled to the edge of the bed, slipping his feet into his slippers, standing up, stretching with a crack of knuckles. “I’m going to go get us some ice.”
In the hallway, a woman with extraterrestrial eyeshadow gave him a long stare. Her bathrobe was open at the collar and he peeked—breasts like mangoes, mushrooms, whatever grew toward the ground, he couldn’t remember how things grew. Potatoes grew under the ground, tomatoes grew on vines. Mushrooms were natural—a fungi—a different kingdom. The word he had wanted was mangoes, but there was something bizarrely exoticised and racist-sounding about a mango, even though most every country ate them now. The slippers were thin enough that he could feel the carpet beneath his feet—swish, swash. Its patterning showed zillions of monkeys, climbing zillions of rope ladders, woven of plants in endless patterns of locking diamonds. It was good to be in a hotel like this, it was nice, and nice to hold a bucket of ice, and nice to see the woman in the bathrobe with the hallucinatory eyeshadow. When they’d first started traveling like this, absorbing the stench of the hotels, all the other patrons always seemed to be traveling in schoolgroups; there had never been any icebuckets. Back in the room, she was maybe taking a shower, maybe reading—he had a few minutes. Past the ice-room, a second hallway veered to the right—more numbers listed on the doors: 1305, 1307. A roomservice tray, half-finished, left-out. He leant down and plucked a half sandwich, chewing it for a few bites before putting it out on the next tray. Hopefully there weren’t cameras there, watching him. He was a very sloppy guest. The hallway ended on 1349. The year of Columbus, he thought, and then remembered that was definitely not it. He seemed to be losing his grasp on his knowledge.
When he walked back, holding the ice-bucket, stopping to fill the ice-bucket, and continuing back to the room, he noticed the monkeys in the carpet—they were upside down now, having not been designed to be seen from the angle of departure, and he remembered how he composed the clever phrase he would use to tell her about it when he’d come back in the room. But when he came back in the room, with the ice-bucket, having just eaten the bites of that sandwich—chicken avacado—was when he realized she was gone. Her purse was still there, her phone, wallet—with the money inside, he later recognized—and a half-eaten cookie on the bedside table, the mark of her chapstick on the glass of tepid tea. The one note: A business card, left facing the door on the bright, creased white duvet of the still made-bed.
“Leslie Bennet,” was the name on the card. A mobile phone number had been circled, and in hand, writing said, “Call me.”
Alan sat on the edge of the bed. He flipped the card—its reverse was blank—and put it down on the bed. He didn't feel like calling. It could be a prank, a ruse, she could have just left a card on the bed and stepped out--maybe to deal with the woman next door who had been smoking. In the room was her stuff and the blank TV. He
turned on the TV. There were a few channels but there was nothing on. In a minute he would call the number, but for a moment, he just needed to do this. He could still smell her in the room—a citrus shampoo, worn sneakers, the damp bindings of the rain-soaked books she had carried with her. On TV, the newscaster smiled. He turned the TV off. He gave the number on the card a call, and flipped it over. With a complimentary hotel pen, writing on the blank side, he wrote down the time. An instinct he did not know he had told him he would need to remember this moment, and to try to trace it back from here. It had started at 12.04, in a town not West still of Jacksonville, East of the Union Jack bar they'd stopped in ironically and spent too much time uncomfortable under the uncomfortable flags. He thought, as a priest bemoans the death of a child who dies a virgin, of how she would now never make it to Graceland; It was a place he himself had no interest in going to, but its loss now struck him as a specific tragedy—palpable as dropped fruit.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Sturdy Outlines
ACT 1--THE WORLD UNWATCHED - 40 PAGES
1. Leona is socially invisible in High School
1.5 The Oswegos in High School
2. Celia's presentation
3. How they get cast (ABC boy --> Father)
5. Family dinner, Mom admits to pre-interview
6. Guole arrives at the house--announces what's going to need to change (In car, art department) and thinks about buying the house crumbling into the sea
7. Alan/Margaret see Guole pacing outside
8. Leona opts to go literally invisible
***
0. THE HOUSE neighborhood history
3. The neighborhood reaction to the vans
2. Leslie Bennett's sweeping remodel
4. The first episode filming: Jareth meets cameraman
5. Sets up trailer in Alan's drive
5.5 Leona's hideout in crumbling house--finds stoner circle
6. End on Leona and Alan--something about how people see eachother
ACT 2: FAME, and PENANCE for greed- 60 PAGES
**"Recasting"**
1. The editors as fates
2. Celia as star
3. Jareth's new high school sex life
3.5 THE MONEY
4. Leona and Alan = Love of the unwatched
6. Margaret watching through glass
7. Bennett in his trailer, watching the dailies--Last Tycoon repetitions
**"Penance"**
3. House falling into the ocean
4. Celia cheating with the exterior shots crumbling cameraman
5. The cousin shows up on the stoop
5.5 Going to church--as a family
6. Swimming in Sunday Best
7. Pool party--Leona is given the opposite of what she wanted, Alan cannot love her
8. Crumbling house crumbling
ACT 3: THE HORRIBLY HEART-RENDING HEALING OF A WOUNDED FAMILY - 50 pages
1. Dad's roadtrip to fat-camp
2. Jareth driving
3. Steal the magazines from 7-11
4. The Madonna Inn's banana cream pie
simultaneously
1. Leona and Celia = Bernice and Marjorie
2. Mom and Cousin = Thelma and Louise
--All of them, Lynchian neighborhood scare, absurdism of Sunset Boulevard's Dead Monkey, some other plot point draws them down.
MARGARET
ALAN
LEONA
BENNETT? GUOLE?
SOMETHING NEEDS TO HAPPEN BETWEEN A SHOW VISIONARY AND A SHOW ACTOR...
1. Leona is socially invisible in High School
1.5 The Oswegos in High School
2. Celia's presentation
3. How they get cast (ABC boy --> Father)
5. Family dinner, Mom admits to pre-interview
6. Guole arrives at the house--announces what's going to need to change (In car, art department) and thinks about buying the house crumbling into the sea
7. Alan/Margaret see Guole pacing outside
8. Leona opts to go literally invisible
***
0. THE HOUSE neighborhood history
3. The neighborhood reaction to the vans
2. Leslie Bennett's sweeping remodel
4. The first episode filming: Jareth meets cameraman
5. Sets up trailer in Alan's drive
5.5 Leona's hideout in crumbling house--finds stoner circle
6. End on Leona and Alan--something about how people see eachother
ACT 2: FAME, and PENANCE for greed- 60 PAGES
**"Recasting"**
1. The editors as fates
2. Celia as star
3. Jareth's new high school sex life
3.5 THE MONEY
4. Leona and Alan = Love of the unwatched
6. Margaret watching through glass
7. Bennett in his trailer, watching the dailies--Last Tycoon repetitions
**"Penance"**
3. House falling into the ocean
4. Celia cheating with the exterior shots crumbling cameraman
5. The cousin shows up on the stoop
5.5 Going to church--as a family
6. Swimming in Sunday Best
7. Pool party--Leona is given the opposite of what she wanted, Alan cannot love her
8. Crumbling house crumbling
ACT 3: THE HORRIBLY HEART-RENDING HEALING OF A WOUNDED FAMILY - 50 pages
1. Dad's roadtrip to fat-camp
2. Jareth driving
3. Steal the magazines from 7-11
4. The Madonna Inn's banana cream pie
simultaneously
1. Leona and Celia = Bernice and Marjorie
2. Mom and Cousin = Thelma and Louise
--All of them, Lynchian neighborhood scare, absurdism of Sunset Boulevard's Dead Monkey, some other plot point draws them down.
MARGARET
ALAN
LEONA
BENNETT? GUOLE?
SOMETHING NEEDS TO HAPPEN BETWEEN A SHOW VISIONARY AND A SHOW ACTOR...
Sturdy Outlines
ACT 1--THE WORLD UNWATCHED - 40 PAGES
1. Leona is socially invisible in High School
1.5 The Oswegos in High School
2. Celia's presentation
3. How they get cast (ABC boy --> Father)
5. Family dinner, Mom admits to pre-interview
6. Guole arrives at the house--announces what's going to need to change (In car, art department) and thinks about buying the house crumbling into the sea
7. Alan/Margaret see Guole pacing outside
8. Leona opts to go literally invisible
***
1. Leona's run in with Alan
2. Leslie Bennett's sweeping remodel
3. The neighborhood reaction to the vans
4. The first episode filming: Jareth meets cameraman
5. Bennett watching the Dailies in Alan's drive
6. End on Leona and Alan--something about how people see eachother
ACT 2: FAME
**"Recasting"**
1. The editors as fates
2. Pool party--Leona is given the opposite of what she wanted, Alan cannot love her
3. Dad at fat-camp
4. Celia cheating with the cameraman
5. the cousin shows up on the stoop
6. Hosing down fans
7. Stealing of 7-11 magazines on roadtrip
hosing down fans,
1. Leona is socially invisible in High School
1.5 The Oswegos in High School
2. Celia's presentation
3. How they get cast (ABC boy --> Father)
5. Family dinner, Mom admits to pre-interview
6. Guole arrives at the house--announces what's going to need to change (In car, art department) and thinks about buying the house crumbling into the sea
7. Alan/Margaret see Guole pacing outside
8. Leona opts to go literally invisible
***
1. Leona's run in with Alan
2. Leslie Bennett's sweeping remodel
3. The neighborhood reaction to the vans
4. The first episode filming: Jareth meets cameraman
5. Bennett watching the Dailies in Alan's drive
6. End on Leona and Alan--something about how people see eachother
ACT 2: FAME
**"Recasting"**
1. The editors as fates
2. Pool party--Leona is given the opposite of what she wanted, Alan cannot love her
3. Dad at fat-camp
4. Celia cheating with the cameraman
5. the cousin shows up on the stoop
6. Hosing down fans
7. Stealing of 7-11 magazines on roadtrip
hosing down fans,
Research Thursdays
Found during research. "I met Coco at a swimsuit contest, she said come in and meet Barry, and I was hired!"
"they pitch new families."
"Critical to their selection was finding a home with more of a feminine feel, a lovely pool, and a games and exercise room," explains Dirk. The house they chose also has five bedrooms, each with a balcony and tremendous views of Los Angeles. The six-women 'cast' share three bedrooms, and up to 10 production staff are on site at any one time. There is also space in the guest house for the crew."
"they pitch new families."
"Critical to their selection was finding a home with more of a feminine feel, a lovely pool, and a games and exercise room," explains Dirk. The house they chose also has five bedrooms, each with a balcony and tremendous views of Los Angeles. The six-women 'cast' share three bedrooms, and up to 10 production staff are on site at any one time. There is also space in the guest house for the crew."
I know I should start in the middle, as Angie says, but I also know that there's this mystery I'm obsessed with that churns out in the writing as the plot progresses. Even if I think I know what's going to happen, the reason I'm writing the story is to figure out how it's going to happen differently. What do these people want from eachother? What do they want to say to eachother? I want to write the perfect beginning, keep going, and be forced to re-write the beginning due to what happens. It would be easier, surely, to skip the re-write steps and just write the thing.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Location Scout
INTRO WITH WHAT HE’S SEEING OUT THE WINDOWS
Jerry Guole had always been a scout. In the fifth grade, wearing a badge that proclaimed it literally in embroidered writing above an embroidered tent and an embroidered firepit, he had led his fellow sufferers through the dry scrubbrush that held the San Bernadino county foothills from their inevitable slip into the ocean, and ended the hike at the Raffles Resort, its pool gleaming like a ring-pop dug up from the bottom of a box of Wheetabix. Slim mothers in jet-black one-pieces hovered poolside—dozing on chaises, leaning over tinkling drinks. The ratpack changed quickly from their uniforms into pajama tops, their bathing suit bottoms, and hid the uniforms, cans of cooking supplies, the fold-up stove—in the cavernous space between two rocks, a hiding space found by Guole when he had retreated to take a piss. The boys played the part of tourists’ children, strolling confidently through the lobby, spaced in groups of two and three. Martins faked a German accent loudly, Toby Briar carried the cell-phone his mother had made him pack in case of grave emergency, and the blonde boy Guole remembered admiring but whose name he could no longer recall, had patted him on the back as they walked past the concierge and said, “I love you, my brother” in the stilted English of the Spanish Conquistadors they had seen in the videotape played in history class. After long, leisurely swims—side-stroke, back-stroke, drowning matches and cannonball contests—the boys took naps on the chaises lined up along the platform—stealing sidelong glances at the women sleeping beside them under the brims of floppy sunhats.
In High School, Guole was the kid whose popularity, to the teachers, was non-sensical—seemingly based completely on his unimpeachable confidence. A gawky half-Chinese, half-Norwegian (son of a Military Pastor serving in Hong Kong), Guole was adept at mathematics (though he seemed not to try) and could memorize historical facts with forthright ease. In the cafeteria, Mrs. Logan observed him flirting confidently with Beverly Hills offspring, as though just another one of them—though after school Guole took a bus way out to LaBrea, to an apartment whose smoke-filled curtains kept his nervous mother in the dark all day. She worked at home making gift baskets—compiling soaps, muffins, jams and flowers—and cinching the tops with clear cellophane that came in rolls she’d unfurl over the kitchen floor, a layer of clarity over a muddle of 60s avocado, repaired with slabs of tessellating 70s stars. The father, a studious, religious man who in his youth had pioneered exploratory outings on in Hong Kong’s nearby islands, was dead.
Guole stayed away from home. He had an eye for glamour and his house had none of it. Later he would understand that he had simply found something he was good at, and stuck to it. This was the moment in the VH1 documentary about his life when his career took over his personal life. It was in High School that at scouting, he became unimpeachable.
Take what Guole still thought of as the shining moment in what would become a long career. A flirty girl, crammed beside him in the backseat of a friend’s Datsun, upon receiving a call on her enormous cell from an arrested friend who reported that the last party had just been broken up. Beneath a wave of blonde bang, Guole could see the girl’s oversized earring sparkle. She had said first, “I’m with Guole,” then over the other end of the phone line her friend had said something inaudible, then she had giggled and said—and it was this he would always remember—“It’s like he can smell cops. He can hear a party from miles away.”
Guole could not smell cops. He could not hear parties. He could see scenes. The slobbering boys on the balcony, hussling eachother about the keg—and forty feet away, the suddenly illuminated bedroom light of the nextdoor Beverly Hills mansion. He could imagine the husband, pacing in a bathrobe, placing the call. ENTER: Cops. At school, a whisper in Science Lab from the Lancaster girl—whose father, she had bragged to him at lunch, would be shooting a pilot in Venezuela over the weekend—to Justin Terraza, whose newly formed punk band was, according to LA Weekly, pretty good, was the perfect set-up for a late-night affair, and so that was where they were going in the Datsun, to the Lancasters, who would open the door at 1.30 and let the show start at 2.00, after Terrazza’s gig had finished up at the Bowl and he had enough time to get out of the Valley and a few drinks in him. START: Scene: Blowout party. Teens swivel, gyrate, hum. The band onstage is crashing xxxxxxx.
This job required these sort of earsx xxxxxxx the eyes for this job, the intuition as to what family on a block would let up a yard for a Claritin ad (look at the cars for a vanity plate) but he had also developed a new set of skills. Driving along the meandering routes that skirted the cliffs in the Pacific Palisades, Guole’s head was in two places at once. He still made visual tallies of the scenery on the ground, but now, given twenty years in the business, understood the city’s mapping. He could simultaneously see it all from above—the small black dot of the Lincoln Towncar as it snailed along the cliffs, following the roads as they wheedled around the lots of variegated mansions. There was the set where in 88, they had shot the xxxx scene in the David Lynch that had gotten Holly arrested. There was where the xxxx twins had xxxxxx. That was the xxxx and that was the xxxxxxx. The twenty years of footage to come from a single block, edited together, made in itself a kind of narrative that made a story that could only be understood coherently when the premise was, Here are all the dreams that America has of what kind of a thing could happen here. It was a topography of fantasy, built in layers through the years, cellophane replacing silt.
*****
The Oswego Mansion, at 83 De Pauw, was at the end of a very long block of history. The Pacific Palisades had long been the trough for the set-aside families of Hollywood’s creative minds—the type of men who needed space to think, as if the air up here—finally free of the smog from car grilles down by the beach—would be a help to those who sought to fill it with shrubs of smoke grown from the mouth-wet tips of weedy cigars. First had come the newly moneyed directors of the teens, orchestrating their homes with fantasmagorical precision. Butting from a scrubby cliff, a Yorkshire Tudor complete with brickwork that tessellated in the XXXXPATTERNOFGOLDSWEATERSxxxxx, had been dreamed up out of a mind that had never been further East than a car trip to Nevada; nearby, the quiet Mediterranean villa looking out over the sea sported wall torches of melded beach shells, a detail overseen by the actress wife of a Silent film director who had come closest to Greece in her role as Kalypso in the version of Homer’s epic, a remake which as sex-filled and violent as the original, with none of its other charms.
In the thirties, the Directors had moved Southward, choosing the overlarge manses of Beverly Hills closer to the studios, on the lots of newly knocked down farms. These were grander—they had grown wings, sprouted guest-houses, tennis courts, gardener’s villas and were close enough to the golf course so the children could bicycle there, before getting their licenses at thirteen and taking the parents’ Rolls to trundle to the beach for a day baking by the Santa Monica pier. Pacific Palisades were too far from the lawns, the surf, the parties and the strip of Montana where the restaraunts were at which you should be seen dining. Claro’s with its candles, Montego’s with the lace in the windows and the pretty hostess who had slept with Gable on the night that reached her pinaccle of fame.
The Pacific Palisades became that retreat of those who sought the “air” to clear their heads, but no longer the directors, for whom “air” had been a euphemism for grandeur. In the thirties, the houses were occupied by the writers. They sought here, in homes of overambition, overgrown by the climate’s atypical ivy—a mutty mix of bougeanvilla and forsythia nettles—if not placid stillness and total removal, the idea of that removal. They were aware that they occupied homes since abandoned; the best of them sought here an image of the shunned lover. They would take these homes and love them. Their wives—brought along from less glamorous apartments where they had felt “cooped up” felt this romance in a different way. These were the homes of the former greats, and now they were theirs to fix up and untangle. The long halls of guestrooms for the visiting dignitaries would now be occupied by children, who must be fed and bathed and kept out of their father’s study. The stillness sought, the placid silence, was now pierced by hoots and ballyhoos—children out in the pool, the domestic cries of “what’s thats?” shouted to wives trilling at the ends of long, corded telephones that they had brought out to the garden.
In the sixties, the money for these men was gone. Run like the hills still crumbling down to the sand. Some directors moved back here—artistic visionaries who pretended to shun the studios that fed them, seeking removal from systems—but the bulk of buyouts came from the pockets of actors, actresses, handsome men and women who cooed on tours given by chirping Real Estate agents in suits with padded shoulders, who after their clients had signed the contracts, thought to ask if they couldn’t also sign an autographed photograph. At home they threw long, fishlike dresses over the backs of settees. They fought in the foyer, ignored the missing top of the nule post after they had hurled it, broke the terracotta angels on the stoop with the drunken drive up the xxxxxxx with Barley in the frontseat after they had come from xxxxxx. The eaves filled with smoke—cigarette smoke, bitterer and brighter, coming from a sadder place.
It was here where Dietrich, Davis, Baccall and Russell had their most damning scenes—acting that was utterly natural, that came from no place. xxxxxxxxfights out by the poooooolllxxxxxxxxxxxx
Idea that to not act in the occupying place→ what scenes elapse!
A few blocks later and they had found DePauw street, spiking to the right, curving alongside the redrock hills that fed down into 200 yards of scrubbrush before a strip of coastline and the sea. Here, the mansions thinned out and grew wings, got room to grow like goldfish turned, by the size of their tanks, to koi.
Etched in 1907 to follow the meandering cliff, DePauw’s oldest homes stood on the side of the road furthest from but facing out toward the water, the former homes if not of Clarke Gable and Katherine Hepburn, then of their co-stars and, perhaps, directors. On the left-hand side of the road, as the car headed north, stood the wreckage of modern design, attempting not to falsify a more beautiful past, but to remain sleek and pale forever. Time, however, had taken a chunkier bite out of these more exposed homes, and cracks, black with mold, marred their skins. Windows, facing ocean winds, had in some cases been boarded with plywood. One home—a low, one-story ranch circa 1976, fitted-out for Bill and Joan Brady, had been sucked out, through one wall, to sea—standing now at the cliff-edge like a toy dollhouse—its interior bared, bars of golden light falling now across the tufty beige sand of its wall-to-wall carpets. The central staircase, gnawed by risen surf, was a white thing bruised like a man who had endured a scuffle. Bill Dean’s boy, the mop-headed smoker, had written, in the margin of his school copy of Call of the Wild, across from the sentence, “Nature does not abate the lives of men,” the note “Man v. Nature” (preparing as he well should have for the teacher’s tests) and aside to that written, “DePauw street is half gone.” The street wasn’t half-gone but it would be, and at the end of the curving tentacle of houses who could claim ocean-view, 1804 DePauw would be next, its fall inevitable.
*****
Guole watched the block unreel. First came the Dreyer mansion
Jerry Guole had always been a scout. In the fifth grade, wearing a badge that proclaimed it literally in embroidered writing above an embroidered tent and an embroidered firepit, he had led his fellow sufferers through the dry scrubbrush that held the San Bernadino county foothills from their inevitable slip into the ocean, and ended the hike at the Raffles Resort, its pool gleaming like a ring-pop dug up from the bottom of a box of Wheetabix. Slim mothers in jet-black one-pieces hovered poolside—dozing on chaises, leaning over tinkling drinks. The ratpack changed quickly from their uniforms into pajama tops, their bathing suit bottoms, and hid the uniforms, cans of cooking supplies, the fold-up stove—in the cavernous space between two rocks, a hiding space found by Guole when he had retreated to take a piss. The boys played the part of tourists’ children, strolling confidently through the lobby, spaced in groups of two and three. Martins faked a German accent loudly, Toby Briar carried the cell-phone his mother had made him pack in case of grave emergency, and the blonde boy Guole remembered admiring but whose name he could no longer recall, had patted him on the back as they walked past the concierge and said, “I love you, my brother” in the stilted English of the Spanish Conquistadors they had seen in the videotape played in history class. After long, leisurely swims—side-stroke, back-stroke, drowning matches and cannonball contests—the boys took naps on the chaises lined up along the platform—stealing sidelong glances at the women sleeping beside them under the brims of floppy sunhats.
In High School, Guole was the kid whose popularity, to the teachers, was non-sensical—seemingly based completely on his unimpeachable confidence. A gawky half-Chinese, half-Norwegian (son of a Military Pastor serving in Hong Kong), Guole was adept at mathematics (though he seemed not to try) and could memorize historical facts with forthright ease. In the cafeteria, Mrs. Logan observed him flirting confidently with Beverly Hills offspring, as though just another one of them—though after school Guole took a bus way out to LaBrea, to an apartment whose smoke-filled curtains kept his nervous mother in the dark all day. She worked at home making gift baskets—compiling soaps, muffins, jams and flowers—and cinching the tops with clear cellophane that came in rolls she’d unfurl over the kitchen floor, a layer of clarity over a muddle of 60s avocado, repaired with slabs of tessellating 70s stars. The father, a studious, religious man who in his youth had pioneered exploratory outings on in Hong Kong’s nearby islands, was dead.
Guole stayed away from home. He had an eye for glamour and his house had none of it. Later he would understand that he had simply found something he was good at, and stuck to it. This was the moment in the VH1 documentary about his life when his career took over his personal life. It was in High School that at scouting, he became unimpeachable.
Take what Guole still thought of as the shining moment in what would become a long career. A flirty girl, crammed beside him in the backseat of a friend’s Datsun, upon receiving a call on her enormous cell from an arrested friend who reported that the last party had just been broken up. Beneath a wave of blonde bang, Guole could see the girl’s oversized earring sparkle. She had said first, “I’m with Guole,” then over the other end of the phone line her friend had said something inaudible, then she had giggled and said—and it was this he would always remember—“It’s like he can smell cops. He can hear a party from miles away.”
Guole could not smell cops. He could not hear parties. He could see scenes. The slobbering boys on the balcony, hussling eachother about the keg—and forty feet away, the suddenly illuminated bedroom light of the nextdoor Beverly Hills mansion. He could imagine the husband, pacing in a bathrobe, placing the call. ENTER: Cops. At school, a whisper in Science Lab from the Lancaster girl—whose father, she had bragged to him at lunch, would be shooting a pilot in Venezuela over the weekend—to Justin Terraza, whose newly formed punk band was, according to LA Weekly, pretty good, was the perfect set-up for a late-night affair, and so that was where they were going in the Datsun, to the Lancasters, who would open the door at 1.30 and let the show start at 2.00, after Terrazza’s gig had finished up at the Bowl and he had enough time to get out of the Valley and a few drinks in him. START: Scene: Blowout party. Teens swivel, gyrate, hum. The band onstage is crashing xxxxxxx.
This job required these sort of earsx xxxxxxx the eyes for this job, the intuition as to what family on a block would let up a yard for a Claritin ad (look at the cars for a vanity plate) but he had also developed a new set of skills. Driving along the meandering routes that skirted the cliffs in the Pacific Palisades, Guole’s head was in two places at once. He still made visual tallies of the scenery on the ground, but now, given twenty years in the business, understood the city’s mapping. He could simultaneously see it all from above—the small black dot of the Lincoln Towncar as it snailed along the cliffs, following the roads as they wheedled around the lots of variegated mansions. There was the set where in 88, they had shot the xxxx scene in the David Lynch that had gotten Holly arrested. There was where the xxxx twins had xxxxxx. That was the xxxx and that was the xxxxxxx. The twenty years of footage to come from a single block, edited together, made in itself a kind of narrative that made a story that could only be understood coherently when the premise was, Here are all the dreams that America has of what kind of a thing could happen here. It was a topography of fantasy, built in layers through the years, cellophane replacing silt.
*****
The Oswego Mansion, at 83 De Pauw, was at the end of a very long block of history. The Pacific Palisades had long been the trough for the set-aside families of Hollywood’s creative minds—the type of men who needed space to think, as if the air up here—finally free of the smog from car grilles down by the beach—would be a help to those who sought to fill it with shrubs of smoke grown from the mouth-wet tips of weedy cigars. First had come the newly moneyed directors of the teens, orchestrating their homes with fantasmagorical precision. Butting from a scrubby cliff, a Yorkshire Tudor complete with brickwork that tessellated in the XXXXPATTERNOFGOLDSWEATERSxxxxx, had been dreamed up out of a mind that had never been further East than a car trip to Nevada; nearby, the quiet Mediterranean villa looking out over the sea sported wall torches of melded beach shells, a detail overseen by the actress wife of a Silent film director who had come closest to Greece in her role as Kalypso in the version of Homer’s epic, a remake which as sex-filled and violent as the original, with none of its other charms.
In the thirties, the Directors had moved Southward, choosing the overlarge manses of Beverly Hills closer to the studios, on the lots of newly knocked down farms. These were grander—they had grown wings, sprouted guest-houses, tennis courts, gardener’s villas and were close enough to the golf course so the children could bicycle there, before getting their licenses at thirteen and taking the parents’ Rolls to trundle to the beach for a day baking by the Santa Monica pier. Pacific Palisades were too far from the lawns, the surf, the parties and the strip of Montana where the restaraunts were at which you should be seen dining. Claro’s with its candles, Montego’s with the lace in the windows and the pretty hostess who had slept with Gable on the night that reached her pinaccle of fame.
The Pacific Palisades became that retreat of those who sought the “air” to clear their heads, but no longer the directors, for whom “air” had been a euphemism for grandeur. In the thirties, the houses were occupied by the writers. They sought here, in homes of overambition, overgrown by the climate’s atypical ivy—a mutty mix of bougeanvilla and forsythia nettles—if not placid stillness and total removal, the idea of that removal. They were aware that they occupied homes since abandoned; the best of them sought here an image of the shunned lover. They would take these homes and love them. Their wives—brought along from less glamorous apartments where they had felt “cooped up” felt this romance in a different way. These were the homes of the former greats, and now they were theirs to fix up and untangle. The long halls of guestrooms for the visiting dignitaries would now be occupied by children, who must be fed and bathed and kept out of their father’s study. The stillness sought, the placid silence, was now pierced by hoots and ballyhoos—children out in the pool, the domestic cries of “what’s thats?” shouted to wives trilling at the ends of long, corded telephones that they had brought out to the garden.
In the sixties, the money for these men was gone. Run like the hills still crumbling down to the sand. Some directors moved back here—artistic visionaries who pretended to shun the studios that fed them, seeking removal from systems—but the bulk of buyouts came from the pockets of actors, actresses, handsome men and women who cooed on tours given by chirping Real Estate agents in suits with padded shoulders, who after their clients had signed the contracts, thought to ask if they couldn’t also sign an autographed photograph. At home they threw long, fishlike dresses over the backs of settees. They fought in the foyer, ignored the missing top of the nule post after they had hurled it, broke the terracotta angels on the stoop with the drunken drive up the xxxxxxx with Barley in the frontseat after they had come from xxxxxx. The eaves filled with smoke—cigarette smoke, bitterer and brighter, coming from a sadder place.
It was here where Dietrich, Davis, Baccall and Russell had their most damning scenes—acting that was utterly natural, that came from no place. xxxxxxxxfights out by the poooooolllxxxxxxxxxxxx
Idea that to not act in the occupying place→ what scenes elapse!
A few blocks later and they had found DePauw street, spiking to the right, curving alongside the redrock hills that fed down into 200 yards of scrubbrush before a strip of coastline and the sea. Here, the mansions thinned out and grew wings, got room to grow like goldfish turned, by the size of their tanks, to koi.
Etched in 1907 to follow the meandering cliff, DePauw’s oldest homes stood on the side of the road furthest from but facing out toward the water, the former homes if not of Clarke Gable and Katherine Hepburn, then of their co-stars and, perhaps, directors. On the left-hand side of the road, as the car headed north, stood the wreckage of modern design, attempting not to falsify a more beautiful past, but to remain sleek and pale forever. Time, however, had taken a chunkier bite out of these more exposed homes, and cracks, black with mold, marred their skins. Windows, facing ocean winds, had in some cases been boarded with plywood. One home—a low, one-story ranch circa 1976, fitted-out for Bill and Joan Brady, had been sucked out, through one wall, to sea—standing now at the cliff-edge like a toy dollhouse—its interior bared, bars of golden light falling now across the tufty beige sand of its wall-to-wall carpets. The central staircase, gnawed by risen surf, was a white thing bruised like a man who had endured a scuffle. Bill Dean’s boy, the mop-headed smoker, had written, in the margin of his school copy of Call of the Wild, across from the sentence, “Nature does not abate the lives of men,” the note “Man v. Nature” (preparing as he well should have for the teacher’s tests) and aside to that written, “DePauw street is half gone.” The street wasn’t half-gone but it would be, and at the end of the curving tentacle of houses who could claim ocean-view, 1804 DePauw would be next, its fall inevitable.
*****
Guole watched the block unreel. First came the Dreyer mansion
Monday, April 14, 2008
sorry I haven't written in four days.
"Like all beautiful things it will make you suffer" she said to the boy, over gChat. They were talking about pollen. "That should be," he said, "the first sentence of your novel."
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
I wanted to take a nap but I kept thinking
How does Hardy do that thing where he shows you something from afar and zooms? I can't do that thing.
In the mornings the boy came out with the black dog, leading him down the hill, around the bend to where the park where the cliffs were, down to the gutter so often stuck with leaves. The next time anyone came out of the house it wasn’t usually until around a quarter to eight, when all three of the children piled into the dark SUV parked diagonally in the drive— the eldest daughter first in cropped hair, chirping and howling for the others to follow; then the youngest, wearing an outfit that that clung to her skin; and then the boy again, forgetting something in the house and jogging back in or perhaps looking down at the pavement, picking something up—one time, a leaf, fletched with disease, whose blooming coloration had seemed to him to be wonderful; another time in the joint of the curb he found a scratched CD, face-down, the victim of a quickly slammed car door that forever robbed the world of music.
In the house the parents sat out of view in dark shaded places. At the island in the center of the kitchen, a glass of half orange juice, half seltzer before her, Maude sat on a high stool, turning the page of her newspaper. In the basement Zed, clumsy at 60, bumped something—a microphone stand—and the stand fell, making a thick, metallic slam on the parquet dance floor she had installed in 1983 when the eldest, Leona, was just born and she had thought to shape up with the high kicks of step aerobics.
From the street the house seemed empty. A gardener would come by and pull his mower across the lawn in thick stripes, stopping at the West side of the yard to put his palm to the paper bark of the Oswego’s birch tree, lean and have a cigarette in the late morning shade. The mother and father would leave in their cars and return with bags or boxes or piles of papers. In the evenings, the spiffy small cars of guests would skirt the curbs all up the block and down by the cliffs, and at nine the lights out among the plants—buried like hooded mushrooms—would turn on and make, thought Margaret, the place look garish. Down the street there was often a powder blue stationwagon with deep, throaty scratch marks pulled by keys down its lean siding.
Alan was sitting in the kitchen reading Parade and he looked up when Margaret said, "Oh good it's the IRS out to get them for years of ducking." His mother was leaning against the plate glass window in the kitchen of the squat ranch house she had been renting for the ten years since the divorce. She was holding her right hand over her eyes. Out across the street, in the steep drive of the Oswego's stucco peach castle, silhouetted against the sunset was a long, black towncar against whose side leaned a man in a black suit, speaking into a cellular phone. The man wore sunglasses, shiny shoes, a tight toothbrush moustache--other than that, he might have been allright.
"Doesn't look like the Feds to me," Alan said, and told his mother to look at their vanity plate as he put down the copy of Parade (He hadn't wanted to read it anyway, it was just there).
In the mornings the boy came out with the black dog, leading him down the hill, around the bend to where the park where the cliffs were, down to the gutter so often stuck with leaves. The next time anyone came out of the house it wasn’t usually until around a quarter to eight, when all three of the children piled into the dark SUV parked diagonally in the drive— the eldest daughter first in cropped hair, chirping and howling for the others to follow; then the youngest, wearing an outfit that that clung to her skin; and then the boy again, forgetting something in the house and jogging back in or perhaps looking down at the pavement, picking something up—one time, a leaf, fletched with disease, whose blooming coloration had seemed to him to be wonderful; another time in the joint of the curb he found a scratched CD, face-down, the victim of a quickly slammed car door that forever robbed the world of music.
In the house the parents sat out of view in dark shaded places. At the island in the center of the kitchen, a glass of half orange juice, half seltzer before her, Maude sat on a high stool, turning the page of her newspaper. In the basement Zed, clumsy at 60, bumped something—a microphone stand—and the stand fell, making a thick, metallic slam on the parquet dance floor she had installed in 1983 when the eldest, Leona, was just born and she had thought to shape up with the high kicks of step aerobics.
From the street the house seemed empty. A gardener would come by and pull his mower across the lawn in thick stripes, stopping at the West side of the yard to put his palm to the paper bark of the Oswego’s birch tree, lean and have a cigarette in the late morning shade. The mother and father would leave in their cars and return with bags or boxes or piles of papers. In the evenings, the spiffy small cars of guests would skirt the curbs all up the block and down by the cliffs, and at nine the lights out among the plants—buried like hooded mushrooms—would turn on and make, thought Margaret, the place look garish. Down the street there was often a powder blue stationwagon with deep, throaty scratch marks pulled by keys down its lean siding.
Alan was sitting in the kitchen reading Parade and he looked up when Margaret said, "Oh good it's the IRS out to get them for years of ducking." His mother was leaning against the plate glass window in the kitchen of the squat ranch house she had been renting for the ten years since the divorce. She was holding her right hand over her eyes. Out across the street, in the steep drive of the Oswego's stucco peach castle, silhouetted against the sunset was a long, black towncar against whose side leaned a man in a black suit, speaking into a cellular phone. The man wore sunglasses, shiny shoes, a tight toothbrush moustache--other than that, he might have been allright.
"Doesn't look like the Feds to me," Alan said, and told his mother to look at their vanity plate as he put down the copy of Parade (He hadn't wanted to read it anyway, it was just there).
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Lessons I'm telling myself
ENOUGH of overwrought McKewan-y character description. I need to just launch into the story with an Ann Beattie-ish opener. She has this incredible deep awareness of every small detail of the scene, of where everyone is standing, what they're wearing, what sort of neighborhood this is, and yet she doesn't pause a second to give a single breath of backstory. It just goes. When I was on the short-story writing college schedule, this was what I always chose to imitate. There's no reason this project should be any different given its scope. Okay--assignment for Sunday. The 15 page opener--high school, Celia, no backstory, her introduction, father has no wealth, show will be picked up by ABC, Leslie & Guo swooping in on the lawn, Alan and Margaret see them from across street. End on Cynthia. Some chilling detail in the opener pops up in the end.
Make it loopy--Pynchon, Wallace, Antrim
Make it quick--Beattie, Fox, McPhee
Tell it straight--WRITE IT LIKE A NEWSPAPER STORY
This is what I keep telling myself as I keep getting more and more bogged.
Make it loopy--Pynchon, Wallace, Antrim
Make it quick--Beattie, Fox, McPhee
Tell it straight--WRITE IT LIKE A NEWSPAPER STORY
This is what I keep telling myself as I keep getting more and more bogged.
IN CHINA I CAN'T FIND THE BOOKS I NEED
AN EMAIL TO MY MOTHER asked her if for my birthday present, she can track down the following titles and send them to me in a mass package. This is a list of all the writing styles I'm missing in my apartment that contains only awful Roth, overdone P. Cameron, Zadie Smith's lesser works, and the heavy, perfected, drenching Atonement. Plus Hardy. Remember the story in "Like Life" about the poet who goes to the middle of America? There's a terriffic passage that I get in my head from that--
"It was like a dog's song, her heart, put in funny. Like a cab that pulled up shortly in the rain, to a curb, to stop there."
And I know I can't be getting it totally right and it's killing me.
1. Lorrie Moore - "Like Life" - Slim, grey volume with green bar on spine & on cover.
2. The World According to Garp (John Irving) -- believe it's a purple book with white text, could be in Alex's room (lent it to him a while ago)
3. The Book of Daniel - E. L. Doctorow (Blue, black and white--thick)
4. Oh, England England - Julian Barnes (thin red with yellow text on spine)
5. Park City - Ann Beattie (black and white with yellow text on cover--thick)
6. Desperate Characters - Paula Fox (slim purple volume)
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (bronze spine--**this might be too big for it to be worth it to ship**)
8. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad (I have two copies--one I know is penguin with a tiffany blue spine, the other is maybe dark brownish)
Could you buy
1. A collection of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Annnnnything. It's so good.
What's funniest to me about the list is how I know my mother will find them based on color, and how I know what color each of them is.
"It was like a dog's song, her heart, put in funny. Like a cab that pulled up shortly in the rain, to a curb, to stop there."
And I know I can't be getting it totally right and it's killing me.
1. Lorrie Moore - "Like Life" - Slim, grey volume with green bar on spine & on cover.
2. The World According to Garp (John Irving) -- believe it's a purple book with white text, could be in Alex's room (lent it to him a while ago)
3. The Book of Daniel - E. L. Doctorow (Blue, black and white--thick)
4. Oh, England England - Julian Barnes (thin red with yellow text on spine)
5. Park City - Ann Beattie (black and white with yellow text on cover--thick)
6. Desperate Characters - Paula Fox (slim purple volume)
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (bronze spine--**this might be too big for it to be worth it to ship**)
8. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad (I have two copies--one I know is penguin with a tiffany blue spine, the other is maybe dark brownish)
Could you buy
1. A collection of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Annnnnything. It's so good.
What's funniest to me about the list is how I know my mother will find them based on color, and how I know what color each of them is.
The Waeburn Pluralistic School netted its fair share of celebrity offspring. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, baked by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic.
In a school of 512, even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. At age twenty-three, their father, Zed, had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. And yet how difficult, how unfair, it was, to have a father so difficult to one-up. The three could only rebel in so many ways.
Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college in Northampton, Massachusetts. In music class, when handed a recorder, she failed to elicit the correct sound. The shrill, chirpy squeaks that after three weeks of half-hearted practice she managed to eek out could be heard ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls like the strained, peachy notes of a cat birthing its first litter. A stab at Chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D'Ambrosio (the only boy) and an overweight Chinese girl that the horrible pack of boys behind her called, "The Asian Tiger." When called out by the frustrated conductor as to whether she truly knew the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy," and asked to solo her rendition--Leona failed. The pianist reached her cue, and Leona Oswego chimed in, pitch-perfect, with the lyrics, "Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." She was not asked to return the following quarter, and spent the period in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
What Leona was good at--was very good at--was arguing. Around the school, she had made a name for herself by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches at town meetings the leader of a philosophy club that met weekly. The club was poorly attended. Toby was a co-founder, and brought with him three of his friends. "The Rub-a-Dubs," Leona called them to her mother, leaning forward on the kitchen island, picking at a snack, for something about them reminded her of the types in the children's song about some lone men, lost at sea in a piece of domestic equipment. These were the boys who, in high school, seemed only to buck and bray in social waves. They were forty-year-olds in seventeen-year-olds bodies, and all would go on to the Ivies--Princeton, Princeton, Yale--as she thought back on it, where, though she fell out of touch quickly, they would surely have similarly out-of-place girlfriends with whom they'd talk politics. But before all that, in High School, there was no one for them--a sea, and then there was Leona, the first girl to be half decent. Despite her frowsy dresses, her mushroom earrings, her pointed gestures away from makeup, Leona found she could not live in a world without boys' attention, and found she could easily convince herself that they were all in love with her. This was enough to get by.
Leona Oswego's previous teachers were disappointed when confronted with the second Oswego--one year younger, the shy and brooding Jareth. Mrs. Henry, particularly, an obsessive who taught English, Rhetoric, and a period (for fun) of French would often wonder aloud why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she was studying, of all unneccessary things--Greek.
Jareth Oswego was what they called, in the lounge, a dark horse. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He was pretty enough to have been popular--he had his famous mother's high, chiseled cheek bones, his father's lanky frame, the over-large blue eyes of two dawdling grandmothers, and the mussy, tousled hair of a farm pony. New girls to Waeburn were intrigued and, after a three-minute conversation, disgusted. He was sardonic, sarcastic, biting, and judgmental. He smelled of the sepia scent of pot, top-ramen, the salt of skin. In classrooms, he quickly ducked into corners, set up on his desk his binders and notebooks, crossed his arms, and tuned out. It was too easy to chalk up any rebellion on Jareth's part to the desire to be known apart from his sister. He simply saw High School in a way she had not--as a place where trying, in all its forms, was not appreciated. As a place where, whatever happened, was not part of the real world and would not have any ramifications.
What he was good at, he was good at. Jareth Oswego was good at music. He could understand quickly what did and what did not sound good. He picked up instruments as a good cook picks up tips. This was not surprising--he had the genes of his father to thank--and he did not give as much energy into band class, orchestra, and chorus (he sang, as well) as he would have another Waeburn student with his talents (the children of Judy xxx xnad xxxx were all five of them excellent at piano).
One Wednesday, over the sub-sandwiches delivered to the teacher's lounge, Mr. Gardner, the composition teacher who made it a point to wear each day a bow-tie, surprised his peers by telling them that the boy turned out to be particularly adept at playwrighting. Jareth, he protested, had style, had an ear. Other one-acts had concerned teenaged suicide, the use of a dead bird as a symbol for a dead relationship, a grandfather going slowly crazy through increasing alzheimers, but Jareth's play had simply been about two kids deciding whether or not to go to 7-11. "The boredom, the fury," Gardner said, picking out the last tomato, "it was all there."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.
In a school of 512, even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. At age twenty-three, their father, Zed, had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. And yet how difficult, how unfair, it was, to have a father so difficult to one-up. The three could only rebel in so many ways.
Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college in Northampton, Massachusetts. In music class, when handed a recorder, she failed to elicit the correct sound. The shrill, chirpy squeaks that after three weeks of half-hearted practice she managed to eek out could be heard ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls like the strained, peachy notes of a cat birthing its first litter. A stab at Chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D'Ambrosio (the only boy) and an overweight Chinese girl that the horrible pack of boys behind her called, "The Asian Tiger." When called out by the frustrated conductor as to whether she truly knew the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy," and asked to solo her rendition--Leona failed. The pianist reached her cue, and Leona Oswego chimed in, pitch-perfect, with the lyrics, "Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." She was not asked to return the following quarter, and spent the period in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
What Leona was good at--was very good at--was arguing. Around the school, she had made a name for herself by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches at town meetings the leader of a philosophy club that met weekly. The club was poorly attended. Toby was a co-founder, and brought with him three of his friends. "The Rub-a-Dubs," Leona called them to her mother, leaning forward on the kitchen island, picking at a snack, for something about them reminded her of the types in the children's song about some lone men, lost at sea in a piece of domestic equipment. These were the boys who, in high school, seemed only to buck and bray in social waves. They were forty-year-olds in seventeen-year-olds bodies, and all would go on to the Ivies--Princeton, Princeton, Yale--as she thought back on it, where, though she fell out of touch quickly, they would surely have similarly out-of-place girlfriends with whom they'd talk politics. But before all that, in High School, there was no one for them--a sea, and then there was Leona, the first girl to be half decent. Despite her frowsy dresses, her mushroom earrings, her pointed gestures away from makeup, Leona found she could not live in a world without boys' attention, and found she could easily convince herself that they were all in love with her. This was enough to get by.
Leona Oswego's previous teachers were disappointed when confronted with the second Oswego--one year younger, the shy and brooding Jareth. Mrs. Henry, particularly, an obsessive who taught English, Rhetoric, and a period (for fun) of French would often wonder aloud why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she was studying, of all unneccessary things--Greek.
Jareth Oswego was what they called, in the lounge, a dark horse. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He was pretty enough to have been popular--he had his famous mother's high, chiseled cheek bones, his father's lanky frame, the over-large blue eyes of two dawdling grandmothers, and the mussy, tousled hair of a farm pony. New girls to Waeburn were intrigued and, after a three-minute conversation, disgusted. He was sardonic, sarcastic, biting, and judgmental. He smelled of the sepia scent of pot, top-ramen, the salt of skin. In classrooms, he quickly ducked into corners, set up on his desk his binders and notebooks, crossed his arms, and tuned out. It was too easy to chalk up any rebellion on Jareth's part to the desire to be known apart from his sister. He simply saw High School in a way she had not--as a place where trying, in all its forms, was not appreciated. As a place where, whatever happened, was not part of the real world and would not have any ramifications.
What he was good at, he was good at. Jareth Oswego was good at music. He could understand quickly what did and what did not sound good. He picked up instruments as a good cook picks up tips. This was not surprising--he had the genes of his father to thank--and he did not give as much energy into band class, orchestra, and chorus (he sang, as well) as he would have another Waeburn student with his talents (the children of Judy xxx xnad xxxx were all five of them excellent at piano).
One Wednesday, over the sub-sandwiches delivered to the teacher's lounge, Mr. Gardner, the composition teacher who made it a point to wear each day a bow-tie, surprised his peers by telling them that the boy turned out to be particularly adept at playwrighting. Jareth, he protested, had style, had an ear. Other one-acts had concerned teenaged suicide, the use of a dead bird as a symbol for a dead relationship, a grandfather going slowly crazy through increasing alzheimers, but Jareth's play had simply been about two kids deciding whether or not to go to 7-11. "The boredom, the fury," Gardner said, picking out the last tomato, "it was all there."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Leona and Celia: The Prettier Sister
+ I think of my story when I'm swimming in the pool. There's a rhythm to the lines. But when I get out of the water, it seems that every two sentences need a thousand more between them. The "head-draft" had Celia's physical description popping up in sentence three so I think need to find a way to more quickly structure her in. Anyway, for Wednesday, I've given myself a 15-page assignment on Celia in High School which will be chapter 1. I thought the other night of, if this were a movie, what's the obvious first scene. The answer: I think it's Celia's show-and-tell presentation about the loss of her father's wealth, which leads Robbie, whose father is the president of ABC, to talk about it at the dinner table, which leads ABC to send G. Blandings (the location scout) out to the property alongside Leslie Bennett, to scout (Which will be seen by Alan and his mother, Margaret, who live across the street). This, I hope, is the start of that: The Oswegos in High School, before Celia's presentation. It also sets Leona up as our lensing narrator
Leona was incapable of being like her sister, Celia. A dose of Modernist fiction, ingested too early, along with the elbow-jabs endured on daily trips down hallways infested with Hollywood offspring had taught her to disdain all knowledge gleaned from surface. She hated shallow beauty, romantic comedies, the giggles trilling from the music rooms where the High School’s couples sloppily kissed. She was too tall, too broad shouldered, and posessed too plain a face—this she knew—and at heart simply feared the shame that comes of cold rejection. She had long ago succeeded in convincing herself that her refusal to engage in the flirtatious rituals of her peers—a capella, group luncheons, afternoons out at the megaplex bordering the school parking lot—was due to the higher knowledge that she could only love and be loved where there was a meeting of minds.
In short, she believed she could only convince someone to love her back through cleverness.
Such opportunities were rare. The boy at the videostore who shared a fetish for pre-code Paramount releases—she had gone to coffee with him. At a summer program for prospective art-school applicants, she had kissed a fellow malcontent whose mixtape ended on a long, slow song that burned wordlessly forever. And then there was Toby, a dark-haired fan of philosophers long dead (he was really a “fan” in the full sense of that word) who was too short for her at 5’6", but who proved, in his devotion, that somewhere, sometime she would be loved for her biting wit, for the very strangeness she cultivated.
Celia, on the other hand, skipped-over the same world with the extra-terrestrial grace of a gazelle in a Wal-Mart. Her long, tawny legs drew stares in the grocery store, as she lazily pushed the cart down the lean aisles walled with cans. She had the air, at fifteen, of needing nothing, of eating nothing, of loving nothing--not really, that is. Leona was a talkative complainer, a hater of the world's unfair systems, an arguer and a spoilsport. Celia was all silence, speaking to the boys who stared across classrooms in what they interpreted as a coded language of gestures: her long, sweeping blonde hair could be pulled back behind an ear with the use of only a single finger; her desk could be tapped with pale, hard nails, in patterns of morse code; her legs could cross and uncross with the rhythm of waves lapping the hull of a retreating ship. Celia smelled good--her soaps were fruit-flavored, purchased at specialty shops, and in the messy bathroom off of her messy bedroom, cluttered every surface.
Leona was adamantly unkempt; on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, her mother, with whom she had shared a bedroom and who had carelessly forgotten to bring along a comb, was shocked to find that her daughter had not only brought none, but that the girl protested to not even own “one of those things.” (Celia, of course, had several.) Even in high school, Leona wore purposelessly sexless garb: navy knee-high socks, loafers worn down from years of sloughing through streets, dresses culled from the four-for-a-dollar piles at the Estate sales of washed up actresses who, after being elbowed out of manses in the hills, had wound up in the chock-block suburbs of the valley, their possessions spilled out onto dry, Bermuda grass they could no longer pay anyone to water. Chunky, vomit-colored bracelets of bakelite, bauble earrings the size and hue of mushrooms, the dark high-collared dresses of widows in mourning—these finds Leona shelled out her father’s money to buy, running her fingers over their cigarette-stained, fork-flecked surfaces, sitting beside her on the passenger seat as she sped North up the 405 in the soft-edged, smog-hazed grey-blue of an LA dusk.
Later, Leona would perhaps realize a disease of vanity in the loving of only that which society had discarded, but at the time she could not see what she did as anything but natural. She loved the beautiful, unloved—this was what she told Richard, the short, dark, philosopher who’d sit out with her and smoke in the public park at night. She liked to think of the past lives of her finds, of all the sad, Grey Garden women who’d worn the things before her. There was a type of immortality in it. She loved, she’d say, not that which made her beautiful, but that which was, innately.
Her mother would agree: the clothes did not make the girl beautiful. They bulged at the hips, they gave the girl broad shoulders, thick ankles. They were evidence that Leona “did not make an effort,” she’d say, to their father in bed, wondering if she should be concerned. “It’s the same as I was at that age, Maudy,” Zed Oswego would reply (to many of his wife’s queries), flipping to the next page in whatever he was reading, letting her talk on. “Leona’s not Cee,” he’d say.
“That,” Maude would say, chuckling, “Is for sure.”
Maude and Zed Oswego often wondered aloud how they had produced a daughter like Celia—blooming with a natural beauty that must, they exclaimed aloud, have come from somewhere. The same musings were not left for Leona. In short, Leona was not the pretty one, and they knew that her life would not be less happy, but it would be harder, and that was something that mattered. If no where else, it mattered in High School.
The Waeburn public school netted its fair share of celebrity offspring. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, baked by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. In a school of 500, even among the children of stars, whose faces against all light reminded their watcher of a mash-up of their two strange parents, the Oswegos still netted stares. Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had made a name for herself aside from her strange garb, by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches as the leader of a poorly-attended philosophy club that met weekly. Her previous teachers, when confronted with another Oswego--Jareth, one year younger--would always wonder why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she claimed to be pursuing the most useless and backwards of disciplines--Greek.
Jareth Oswego was a dark horse himself, but not like his sister Leona. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He preferred the corners of classrooms, and spoke up only when called on to deliver a cutting, sardonic reply. He was adept in Playwrighting, Mr. Gardner told the other teachers over subs one day in the teacher's lounge. The boy, he protested, had style. As Leona had carved a way for herself to stand outside of the light thrown off by her father, Jareth's soft ways were designed to slip under the radar. He did not seem, given Leona, to be an Oswego. Teachers called students like these "Space Cadets." They were always losing their backpacks, calculators, watches and receipts. They showed up late to gym classes without even modestly crafted excuses. On test days, they forgot pencils, and yet when tested showed to have somewhere, at some time, actually done the homework. Their passage through the grades seemed at each juncture like a miracle, and other students admired their spirited lack of trying. Jareth Oswego was clearly a stoner, though no adult had ever willed to catch the boy. xxxx
And he was nothing like Celia.
If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.
Leona was incapable of being like her sister, Celia. A dose of Modernist fiction, ingested too early, along with the elbow-jabs endured on daily trips down hallways infested with Hollywood offspring had taught her to disdain all knowledge gleaned from surface. She hated shallow beauty, romantic comedies, the giggles trilling from the music rooms where the High School’s couples sloppily kissed. She was too tall, too broad shouldered, and posessed too plain a face—this she knew—and at heart simply feared the shame that comes of cold rejection. She had long ago succeeded in convincing herself that her refusal to engage in the flirtatious rituals of her peers—a capella, group luncheons, afternoons out at the megaplex bordering the school parking lot—was due to the higher knowledge that she could only love and be loved where there was a meeting of minds.
In short, she believed she could only convince someone to love her back through cleverness.
Such opportunities were rare. The boy at the videostore who shared a fetish for pre-code Paramount releases—she had gone to coffee with him. At a summer program for prospective art-school applicants, she had kissed a fellow malcontent whose mixtape ended on a long, slow song that burned wordlessly forever. And then there was Toby, a dark-haired fan of philosophers long dead (he was really a “fan” in the full sense of that word) who was too short for her at 5’6", but who proved, in his devotion, that somewhere, sometime she would be loved for her biting wit, for the very strangeness she cultivated.
Celia, on the other hand, skipped-over the same world with the extra-terrestrial grace of a gazelle in a Wal-Mart. Her long, tawny legs drew stares in the grocery store, as she lazily pushed the cart down the lean aisles walled with cans. She had the air, at fifteen, of needing nothing, of eating nothing, of loving nothing--not really, that is. Leona was a talkative complainer, a hater of the world's unfair systems, an arguer and a spoilsport. Celia was all silence, speaking to the boys who stared across classrooms in what they interpreted as a coded language of gestures: her long, sweeping blonde hair could be pulled back behind an ear with the use of only a single finger; her desk could be tapped with pale, hard nails, in patterns of morse code; her legs could cross and uncross with the rhythm of waves lapping the hull of a retreating ship. Celia smelled good--her soaps were fruit-flavored, purchased at specialty shops, and in the messy bathroom off of her messy bedroom, cluttered every surface.
Leona was adamantly unkempt; on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, her mother, with whom she had shared a bedroom and who had carelessly forgotten to bring along a comb, was shocked to find that her daughter had not only brought none, but that the girl protested to not even own “one of those things.” (Celia, of course, had several.) Even in high school, Leona wore purposelessly sexless garb: navy knee-high socks, loafers worn down from years of sloughing through streets, dresses culled from the four-for-a-dollar piles at the Estate sales of washed up actresses who, after being elbowed out of manses in the hills, had wound up in the chock-block suburbs of the valley, their possessions spilled out onto dry, Bermuda grass they could no longer pay anyone to water. Chunky, vomit-colored bracelets of bakelite, bauble earrings the size and hue of mushrooms, the dark high-collared dresses of widows in mourning—these finds Leona shelled out her father’s money to buy, running her fingers over their cigarette-stained, fork-flecked surfaces, sitting beside her on the passenger seat as she sped North up the 405 in the soft-edged, smog-hazed grey-blue of an LA dusk.
Later, Leona would perhaps realize a disease of vanity in the loving of only that which society had discarded, but at the time she could not see what she did as anything but natural. She loved the beautiful, unloved—this was what she told Richard, the short, dark, philosopher who’d sit out with her and smoke in the public park at night. She liked to think of the past lives of her finds, of all the sad, Grey Garden women who’d worn the things before her. There was a type of immortality in it. She loved, she’d say, not that which made her beautiful, but that which was, innately.
Her mother would agree: the clothes did not make the girl beautiful. They bulged at the hips, they gave the girl broad shoulders, thick ankles. They were evidence that Leona “did not make an effort,” she’d say, to their father in bed, wondering if she should be concerned. “It’s the same as I was at that age, Maudy,” Zed Oswego would reply (to many of his wife’s queries), flipping to the next page in whatever he was reading, letting her talk on. “Leona’s not Cee,” he’d say.
“That,” Maude would say, chuckling, “Is for sure.”
Maude and Zed Oswego often wondered aloud how they had produced a daughter like Celia—blooming with a natural beauty that must, they exclaimed aloud, have come from somewhere. The same musings were not left for Leona. In short, Leona was not the pretty one, and they knew that her life would not be less happy, but it would be harder, and that was something that mattered. If no where else, it mattered in High School.
The Waeburn public school netted its fair share of celebrity offspring. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, baked by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. In a school of 500, even among the children of stars, whose faces against all light reminded their watcher of a mash-up of their two strange parents, the Oswegos still netted stares. Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had made a name for herself aside from her strange garb, by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches as the leader of a poorly-attended philosophy club that met weekly. Her previous teachers, when confronted with another Oswego--Jareth, one year younger--would always wonder why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she claimed to be pursuing the most useless and backwards of disciplines--Greek.
Jareth Oswego was a dark horse himself, but not like his sister Leona. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He preferred the corners of classrooms, and spoke up only when called on to deliver a cutting, sardonic reply. He was adept in Playwrighting, Mr. Gardner told the other teachers over subs one day in the teacher's lounge. The boy, he protested, had style. As Leona had carved a way for herself to stand outside of the light thrown off by her father, Jareth's soft ways were designed to slip under the radar. He did not seem, given Leona, to be an Oswego. Teachers called students like these "Space Cadets." They were always losing their backpacks, calculators, watches and receipts. They showed up late to gym classes without even modestly crafted excuses. On test days, they forgot pencils, and yet when tested showed to have somewhere, at some time, actually done the homework. Their passage through the grades seemed at each juncture like a miracle, and other students admired their spirited lack of trying. Jareth Oswego was clearly a stoner, though no adult had ever willed to catch the boy. xxxx
And he was nothing like Celia.
If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
The House: Setting up the 2nd chapter description of 82 DePauw
They started playing bizarre 60s french music that sounds like Insane Clown Posse at Drum&Bell, otherwise the following would have actually maybe made sense. I'm rushed for time. More to come later tonight. Control + F for "Milk Dud."
Kind of thinking of how I can set up an insane EM forrester howard’s end length description of the mansion… Also how I can develop Jareth. Am thinking about giving him a male baby-sitter who he esteemed but father hated.
THE HOUSE
In the house where Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone. In the fourth grade, severe, dark Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—had passed out sheets of blank paper. A twenty-something Midwest transplant, Gloria would get tired by the end of the day and would sit out of the light thrown by the Eastward facing windows in the early afternoon, kneading her temples. She had retired to the too-small, plastic chair behind her desk when Emily, a serious, twittering girl in pink spandex, had asked what they were to do with the sheets. Gloria, slouching, twiddling in the desk drawer looking for her cell, had paused a moment to think, and said, “Just draw a picture of your house, okay?”
Emily asked whether or not they were to include portraits of the family. Gloria assented—“Sure.” But Joey, whose parents were divorced and who could not be fairly asked to draw two separate families, protested. “You can,” Gloria said, “do whatever you want—but include the house.” A few minutes of quiet drawing elapsed before a second question from Emily: “How do you show a room that’s always in the dark?” Gloria asked for clarification. “I mean, what if you have a home theatre and you don’t know what color the walls are?”
It was maybe mid-project that Gloria found she had stumbled on what any other girl, drawn to the teaching position in Malibu of all places for the glory of those chalky mansions, biting into the California scrub-brush hillsides like a mouthful of loose teeth left in a corn-cob, should have long ago assigned. She took a meditative moment, checking the phone for calls—there were none—pushed back a bit from her desk, cleared her throat loudly, and explained to the class how what was “really important,” was to show the size of the thing, the schemas and space. She wanted the strange shapes of Malibu pools, the light thrown from the sliding glass doors that shut the home office off from the sunroom. Behind the blank doors students had squared-off to represent garages, she wanted to know about the cars—if you did not know the year, model, and make, you could just try to draw it.
Over the hulking, over-large frame of Maybelline, one desk to his right and already busy filling in flower boxes on a boxy, triangle-roofed cottage quite different from the nearby apartment he had seen her walk into—Emily began to sketch. The girl shied away from the crayons at the center of the table, took up a mechanical pencil, and eeked out a measured pseudo-blueprint of a typical Malibu mansion: a shell-shaped staircase swelled up to a second foyer, on which Emily had gone so far as to designate the space taken up by her mother’s Nordic track and a potted aloe vera, whose presence was noticed, heretofore, only by the Peruvian maid assigned to water it daily. What was labeled “Emily’s Room” was the shape of two-business cards, placed in an L, and took up airspace that walled the potted plant, between bedroom A and bathroom 4A. She inspected her drawing—the window-seat, how could she have forgotten!—and looked over, past Maybelline’s hog-wash fantasy, to her family friend Jareth’s, to see if she might have missed anything he had included. (Were pipes or wiring necessary? Did they really have to use jarring colors?) The boy lived right down the block, and she had seen his home, been mystified by the koi swimming loosely in the front pond.
On Jareth’s paper could be seen only a square box, containing twelve more boxes—six on each side of a slim hall, and nine of them unlabelled. These were rooms, it could be presumed, which must be entered via swinging, shell-shapes he had sketched to symbolize doors. The doors opened into nothing; Lids swinging into blank space. Eyes batting shut. Emily pointed to the empty rooms—her pointer finger walking down the hallway, turning right—as if moving a piece on a Clue gameboard, and said: “What’s in here?”
Jareth did not know. These were the rooms in the house into which he had simply never been. Brass knobs which he had never opened—they might be pantries, closets, the bedrooms of sisters not yet born.
Gloria herself had ended up in a flat overhanging a garage, sharing a living room with an older woman whose smoke clogged the drapes. The two bonded over squalor: Gloria was allowed to leave dishes in the sink if the other woman did, their magazines pooled around the overstuffed armchairs in the living room, the severed faces of starlets winking in the light splashing out of the TV during the older woman’s required evening viewing—Lives of the Rich and Famous coupled, sometimes, with Cribs. Gloria would drink diet cokes through a straw and think of how lame this was, all this was.
It was like a personalized version of Cribs, she thought, scanning the sheets. “And this room, what’s this?” she asked Emily, who said, “It’s for billiards. But I never go in there.” Gloria could have been a xxxxxxxx thief. Boyfriend would want to know hahahahahhahahaha he can break in steal all their shit.
So yes, all right, she wanted to see how the other half lived. In which case, the paper of the boy next to Emily—a nine-year-old Jareth Oswego—must have been the greatest disappointment. For some, the drapes will never be pulled aside, the smoke will never clear. It was this way for Gloria, a forgettable girl who was given nothing before she fought for it, and on whose fridge today hangs the drawing—blank as a tray of ice-cubes, cornrows of dead air.
Kind of thinking of how I can set up an insane EM forrester howard’s end length description of the mansion… Also how I can develop Jareth. Am thinking about giving him a male baby-sitter who he esteemed but father hated.
THE HOUSE
In the house where Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone. In the fourth grade, severe, dark Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—had passed out sheets of blank paper. A twenty-something Midwest transplant, Gloria would get tired by the end of the day and would sit out of the light thrown by the Eastward facing windows in the early afternoon, kneading her temples. She had retired to the too-small, plastic chair behind her desk when Emily, a serious, twittering girl in pink spandex, had asked what they were to do with the sheets. Gloria, slouching, twiddling in the desk drawer looking for her cell, had paused a moment to think, and said, “Just draw a picture of your house, okay?”
Emily asked whether or not they were to include portraits of the family. Gloria assented—“Sure.” But Joey, whose parents were divorced and who could not be fairly asked to draw two separate families, protested. “You can,” Gloria said, “do whatever you want—but include the house.” A few minutes of quiet drawing elapsed before a second question from Emily: “How do you show a room that’s always in the dark?” Gloria asked for clarification. “I mean, what if you have a home theatre and you don’t know what color the walls are?”
It was maybe mid-project that Gloria found she had stumbled on what any other girl, drawn to the teaching position in Malibu of all places for the glory of those chalky mansions, biting into the California scrub-brush hillsides like a mouthful of loose teeth left in a corn-cob, should have long ago assigned. She took a meditative moment, checking the phone for calls—there were none—pushed back a bit from her desk, cleared her throat loudly, and explained to the class how what was “really important,” was to show the size of the thing, the schemas and space. She wanted the strange shapes of Malibu pools, the light thrown from the sliding glass doors that shut the home office off from the sunroom. Behind the blank doors students had squared-off to represent garages, she wanted to know about the cars—if you did not know the year, model, and make, you could just try to draw it.
Over the hulking, over-large frame of Maybelline, one desk to his right and already busy filling in flower boxes on a boxy, triangle-roofed cottage quite different from the nearby apartment he had seen her walk into—Emily began to sketch. The girl shied away from the crayons at the center of the table, took up a mechanical pencil, and eeked out a measured pseudo-blueprint of a typical Malibu mansion: a shell-shaped staircase swelled up to a second foyer, on which Emily had gone so far as to designate the space taken up by her mother’s Nordic track and a potted aloe vera, whose presence was noticed, heretofore, only by the Peruvian maid assigned to water it daily. What was labeled “Emily’s Room” was the shape of two-business cards, placed in an L, and took up airspace that walled the potted plant, between bedroom A and bathroom 4A. She inspected her drawing—the window-seat, how could she have forgotten!—and looked over, past Maybelline’s hog-wash fantasy, to her family friend Jareth’s, to see if she might have missed anything he had included. (Were pipes or wiring necessary? Did they really have to use jarring colors?) The boy lived right down the block, and she had seen his home, been mystified by the koi swimming loosely in the front pond.
On Jareth’s paper could be seen only a square box, containing twelve more boxes—six on each side of a slim hall, and nine of them unlabelled. These were rooms, it could be presumed, which must be entered via swinging, shell-shapes he had sketched to symbolize doors. The doors opened into nothing; Lids swinging into blank space. Eyes batting shut. Emily pointed to the empty rooms—her pointer finger walking down the hallway, turning right—as if moving a piece on a Clue gameboard, and said: “What’s in here?”
Jareth did not know. These were the rooms in the house into which he had simply never been. Brass knobs which he had never opened—they might be pantries, closets, the bedrooms of sisters not yet born.
Gloria herself had ended up in a flat overhanging a garage, sharing a living room with an older woman whose smoke clogged the drapes. The two bonded over squalor: Gloria was allowed to leave dishes in the sink if the other woman did, their magazines pooled around the overstuffed armchairs in the living room, the severed faces of starlets winking in the light splashing out of the TV during the older woman’s required evening viewing—Lives of the Rich and Famous coupled, sometimes, with Cribs. Gloria would drink diet cokes through a straw and think of how lame this was, all this was.
It was like a personalized version of Cribs, she thought, scanning the sheets. “And this room, what’s this?” she asked Emily, who said, “It’s for billiards. But I never go in there.” Gloria could have been a xxxxxxxx thief. Boyfriend would want to know hahahahahhahahaha he can break in steal all their shit.
So yes, all right, she wanted to see how the other half lived. In which case, the paper of the boy next to Emily—a nine-year-old Jareth Oswego—must have been the greatest disappointment. For some, the drapes will never be pulled aside, the smoke will never clear. It was this way for Gloria, a forgettable girl who was given nothing before she fought for it, and on whose fridge today hangs the drawing—blank as a tray of ice-cubes, cornrows of dead air.
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