Where You Will End Up, #1-3 /P

“If I believed in signs, I wouldn't have answered it. I would have buried my head under pillows and blankets until I couldn't hear it or the voices or the rain. I wouldn't have stumbled in my sleepy stupor to its obnoxious chirping, but eventually, though. Eventually I would have picked up after bracing myself, after preparing myself for the acid of emptiness that would cauterize my stomach. I could have eviscerated myself and made a few bucks on the black market.”
Bahaha, you seriously alluded to Tim Winton’s shifting shadow from “Cloudstreet”. I mock. I don’t like “buried my head under pillows”, it’s cliché and really it doesn’t fit the action as well as I’d like. “it or the voices or the rain” has good rhythm, however. Nice little alliteration, but I question your adjectives; ‘sleepy’ and ‘obnoxious’, seem sloppy from Mr Sonics, they don’t further the image they’re just filigree. “Eventually, though. Eventually…” – What the hell is that? You want to wander off and pause you break and spring for a new paragraph or stop wasting my wrath. The acid and the evisceration: nice casual gore, quite evocative.
“But I don't believe in signs, and I did answer.”
I’d cut these paragraphs more, as I said to make them more conversational. You are perhaps one of three maybe four writers who can pull off the protagonist directly narrating to the reader without being film noir, though.
“As soon as I heard her voice, I knew the words it was carrying. I didn't have to understand every thing she said to hate her. Suddenly, she was not my friend of seven years; her voice was not familiar or loving, but atonal, artificially buoyed by her fatalism for my sake, and insubstantial. It was a thin cover for the raw, animalistic, scathed-by-loss voice people should have.”
Turgid noise. Turgid turgid turgid noise. ‘atonal, artificially buoyed by her fatalism’, really? Empty pretty words, they do nothing to further the imagery, and ‘my friend of seven years’, self conscious exposition or what? I get that you’re capturing the impalpable, which usually you’re so good at, but the cover for the raw, I didn’t feel either. I’m putting you on adjective and adverb probation.
“When we hung up, the dialectic switched on me, without my knowing, until I drove my shin into the coffee table. That's what the dialectic was good for: reminding me that I am neither light nor dark but an object in their struggle, a word in a language I don't know. “
Which prompts the question, is there a whole synonym for dialectic, I mean, there are the shallower conversations, interchange, whatever whatever, but dialectic being more than that… it’s frustrating, because that’s why it’s a different word… sorry, off in my own little world. But dialectic doesn’t mesh within its context to create a more direct meaning like it should, you know, not when it’s repeated like that. Shin into the coffee table is good, as is the reiteration of the chiaroscuro, with the ‘a word in a language I don’t know’, that’s elegant and genius.

“Maybe if I believed in myself more, I would fling myself less to the moment and concern myself less with untoward activities like dialectics. [What, if anything, did Hegel really accomplish besides provoking two centuries of quibbling gentlemen?]. But I don't have content enough in myself for waiting—not even for idling—as Nietzsche would say.”
Namedrop namedrop. Although, bringing in Hegel with the dialectics is only fair, and everyone needs Nietzsche. Quibbling is awesome.
“So I move around constantly. Not physically, necessarily, but psychically I shift gears as often as my mind will allow: focusing like this for so long, to say so much and so little, is uncommon. I jump from one place to the next without realizing I've made a leap, and if it seems like a stream of consciousness, it's been polluted by my body. My body which, unlike my mind, is not an amalgam of free associations of particles pushed endlessly towards the salt point—where fresh water becomes salty, where the ocean begins and the river ends, and where neither exist for very long.”
That is glorious. Dear GOD use a fish analogy, you know you want to, oceans and constantly moving, leaping, he is a salmon in the stream of consciousness.
“If my writing (or breathing, as it were) is to liberate itself from the weight of my life and my body, then that liberation can only happen with a reader, to whom the story will attach itself forever. The moments of transference from my body to theirs, when the story is on their screen or in their shopping bag and yet to be read, is when it finally exists by itself. That freedom I rank as a miracle in the order of things.”
Vary the punctuation to air it out. Moments of transference, that whole concept is so delicious, and quite tactile. “That freedom I rank as a miracle in the order of things”: No.
“I wasn't sure what to do afterwards: if I should get my shoes or try returning to sleep. In some sense, I knew before I tried that sleep was no option; it was the way a static charge sat between my mouth and my heart and made my breathing tingle that I should have taken as indicative of my dilemma. But despite that, I curled up against the sheets feeling smaller than before and closed my eyes, which quickly became an arduous task. The weight that had rested upon them before was suddenly gone and holding them down was a miracle in itself.”
Good observation, good sense imagery with the tingling breath particularly. Watch for hysterical realism, but you’ve got an ironic check on it, I think. Makes me think of Jeff Buckley when he said, "Sensitivity isn't being wimpy, it's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom."
Further third to come.

Part three:

Uno:

You provide a very interesting definition of what it is to be homeless but it feels so distant and so intellectual that it doesn't quite touch the reader. In one instant it's a description of the people in the city but at the same time, it's just another thought and I felt a strong dislike for your narrator by the end of this paragraph. I can see how your definition thus makes him one of the homeless and to me, his constant musings and twisting of the world around him is beginning to feel selfish and he's starting to sound smug, talking down to the reader about how he knows what the politicians are really talking about. I don't know if that was intentional?

I think it would work better if you had another paragraph before this one, describing the city properly and working towards the discussion as to the definition of the homeless. I'd like you to give the reader a chance to develop their own opinion of the city before the narrator gives us his.

Dos:

I didn't like this paragraph quite as much as the previous but it was good. I found that the talk of ways became a little tedious (perhaps because I've discussed that before with my history class?) and the inclusion of seeing the Great Wall from the moon struck me as a bit random and a bit too ordinary a fact for your narrator to cite. However, I liked the insight into his religious views as I think that a person's moral and religious ideals is an essential part of their character and the infusion of 'real' events was good.

Tres:

This is good but I think you should add just another sentence or two linking back with what you've said previously: that each era dreams of the one to follow. That would fit in snugly. And other than that, I have no suggestions or criticism; it was nicely written.

Cuatro:

A good conclusion. Nothing in particular stands out as fantastic but it flowed nicely and it brought all your narrator's strands of thoughts together.

Brad!

Paragraph Eins

Grammar and First Impressions[/b]

The first frost from winter was breathing through the city like a [?] disease.

The cold stillness made the asphalt glitter black, [no comma] and forced the homeless into churches.

And clearly to be homeless, one need not be without a house or a job.

But to truly be homeless is a displacement: [s]it's[/s] It's the ordinary ordering of things which one day you wake to find unsatisfying and strange.

That's the crime of postmodernity: [s]time[/s] Time and space have been reflected against each other, and the victim is also the perpetrator.

Time, [no comma] and, with it, speed, [no comma] became important.

With the invention of the news channel—a development our language is unprepared for—events were reported as they happened, instantaneously.

Duuude. I told you there was a reason I didn't critique poetry. Poetry disguised as prose doesn't make it any better.

Anyways, the one critique I actually could notice while forcing my way through was the second paragraph. The jump into it was a giant slap on the face, and the paragraphs after totally ignore it. Smooth transitions are key.

Eh, yeah. I'm not helpful here.

You definitely make me think, and you have some amazing points.

PM me if you need anything else. I don't know if I'll critique anymore of this - I'm not helpful. Let me know if you want me to, though.

~JFW1415

Part two:

Uno:

There's some really clever trains of thought in this paragraph but I think it's a little too much. There again, it depends on who your intended reader is. If it's other writers then it's fine, in fact it's better than fine because the links between life and writing are interesting to people like you and me but I've got the feeling that if your average person read this, they'd find this paragraph a little wordy. There again, your average person might find the entire piece of writing too wordy and it's already constructed around quite a selective audience.

Dos:

This paragraph is absolutely genius. I love how beautifully it begins, just flowing straight from the previous paragraph and directly back into real life. I think we can all connect with the idea of losing a friend and the feeling that something/ someone's missing. And the idea of being a disconnected number is so chilling, it's just too awful to even try to imagine. And then, after that very sobering line of thought, suddenly you slip straight back into the comparrisson of life to different writing techniques. It's dizzying and at the same time amazing how you're able to represent your Narrator's mine and how it jumps around.

Tres:

A short but effective little paragraph. I'm glad you didn't expand on the Narrator's ideas/ view of religion: it's good to make your reader think and interpret in their own way every now and then.

Cuatro:

Some great imagery towards the end and the discussion about glass is interesting. I don't really have any comments to make on this paragraph. It's interesting, but at the same time, it feels like it's starting to drift a little. I think you should try to make the glass discussion sound a little less like a history lecture and a little more like a general, if rather philosophical, observation.

Cinco:

A nice little paragraph. Already the reader is starting to get a good feel for the other two characters.

Seis:

This paragraph starts a little jerkily, moving so suddenly from a character observation back towards the Narrator's inward thoughts but once there, it runs smoothly and covers all my favourites aspects of your style. It has the literary context, the reader awareness and the stream of consciousness and yes, the prose is much thicker than the plot but at the same time, your prose is your plot and it works wonderfully.

Siete:

This paragraph is so incredibly beautiful and real. It's perfect and you portray such a clear view of Marie and the Narrator's feelings towards her. However, I don't like your use of capitals for 'THE' because I'm finding it hard to place in my mind with someone speaking quietly. It makes me want to imagine the word as shouted and yet, you say the sentence is spoken quietly. Maybe use italics? That's just as effective for showing emphasis.

Ocho:

An interesting view of plastic surgery. Your Narrator continues to surprise me, he has such strange and yet such sensible thoughts.

Nueve:

(I'm counting the two disjointed lines and the next more substantial block of text as a single paragraph, just to make it easier for me to critique.)

You have a good description of body language and it's easy to imagine this, though in a distant way but that's a clever technique too because your Narrator really does seem to be distanced from the scene and I'm finding it so easy to imagine myself in the Narrator's place.

Diez:

(I'm including the next few lines of dialogue with this one.)

Turning is a kind of transformation: you are propped from the world you exist into some other kind of experience, and while there, your experiences may and most likely are different than what they are before.

The great many of them, for sure.

This one was actually pretty short.

1. As a random side note, I thought the description of the city was interesting to read, but I felt it kind of stepped away from the story a bit. Not in the bad way. Again, it gave insight to N's thoughts and developed him from those. Perhaps I'm just getting used to him, but while the thoughts matched him perfectly, there seemed to be less development than normal. I suppose it's due to the fact that, while we gained his viewpoints and thoughts, we failed to gain his responses to situations. You seemed to set the tone well, though, so that it was somewhat gloomy. Not that the story so far has been all pink and happy, but it seemed lower in spirits, for lack of better, than the rest of the story. I take the plot bit back though. I think, if nothing else, The city matches the story. I don't know how much it does to move the plot forward, but I thought the same about ch. 1. Also, it sets the tone for N's mood.


But yeah, definitely no longer than that.


2. I vote next chapter is posted either on its own thread or in reply to this... this post is becoming a monster to scroll through, and with all the long critiques on here, tapping the up or down arrow sends us several paragraphs above or below our goal.


Onward!

Where we think we're going is his home. What our bodies know and our minds don't is that the going always ends with another body.

What this means is that if God could see us before, he can't anymore.

It is both remembrance and amnesia. A monstrosity of human innovation which, in the harsh winter night, barely looks like a scratch on the earth.

3. is posted.

As a note, 3 and 4 were originally going to be chapter 3. However, I think splitting them and leaving 3 as a clearly demarcated panorama (of sorts) of the city will be advantageous.


Thanks to all of you who've taken the time to read and comment, as well--even when you do find the writing unsavory, the style terse and dense and (perhaps) misleading. The metaphor-upon-metaphor layering is no doubt a struggle for those not fond of poetry (and, indeed, it would be fair to call this a sequence of prose-poems, or a system of prose/poetry, but the lines are blurry). But I appreciate your perseverance and patience with the telling, even if it does, at times, seem slow and uncoordinated.

I'll post the fourth chapter ASAP.


Grazie,
Brad

Brad! I'm sorry for getting this up so late, but I had a few things needing to get accomplished within my life outside of YWS. It hurt me to stay away, and it killed me more when I was pushed critiques back. And back. Till I fell behind. So! You're first on my list!

Paragraph count won't last long.

Paragraph Eins

Grammar and First Impressions

I prefer to leave the loss unnamed; by which I mean, [no comma] or, rather, I prefer to leave him unnamed—once you die, you should not have a name.

, and I can only bear witness to the manifestations of my own life, which are mostly inessential.

I was trapped in a three-line sonnet, but you'd think it were a haiku if the syllables ever came out right.

What I should have done was break the plate. What I should have done was let the plate break me in place of holding food.

I didn't need food which would only pass through me like religion.

It isn't non-recognition; it's a recognition of form and only form, not of function.

The author acknowledges Marx, [no comma] since all language is bound to rise up against its oppressors and exploiters.

If the prose is thicker than the plot, that isn't my fault—this is to bear witness to a society loosed upon the constellation of itself, which can only happen in the present tense.

on the one hand, static, and on the other, a voice, an articulation, which could thus cut through the white noise in the same way an electronic voice phenomena device could pick up the voice of a ghost.

In the same way a dog can be trained to find a small child by smell—the eyes are unnecessary, [semi instead] what must be trusted is the invisible.

I mean looking in the mirror, [no comma] or at a photograph.

I look up at Tyler and Marie who are finishing eating.

Turning is a kind of transformation: [s]you[/s] You are propped from the world you exist into some other kind of experience, and while there, your experiences may, and most likely are, different than what they are before.

The question is whether, in the process of re-turning, the transformation restores you to your original form with new functions, [no comma] or a new form with the same functions.

I feel them reading this, and whether they acknowledge it or not, I'm them, too."

I nod. Something inside of my body is moving, and whether it's the lentil from the dinner—yes, the dinner which I didn't eat—or a fetus, I can't tell. I'm not pregnant, though. I'm not female. Right? No. I'm not.

"Stop stop stop stop, stop." He grabs my arm forcefully, sternly.

OKAY, so I only have a third of the crit, because the silly site ate it and I'm sick of typing it again, and it's midnight, and I have had NO sleep, middle of exam WHY AM I WRITING THIS NOW IN THE FIRST PLACE. Mutcha-futcha-puppet-show-curse-words...

But it is to be continued, when I'm less or more enraged.

***

"My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," "apocalyptic without an apocalypse."

First line pedantic as I am, I'd like to see how this would feel with a more concrete opening image. I like the line, and I'm not looking for bumper sticker characterization, but the younglings are frightened by the abstract and polysyllabic, you have to lure them into it with candy, cursing, maybe some boobs. No, really, "searing but unfocused", "radient if schitzophrenic", "apocalyptic without an apocalypse", isolated, they're genius, but in their first line they're a briar thicket. Refine. Heat the branding iron of rage, allow the apathy to breathe with the turpentine. Frankly, I do think it would wound your tone tearing it, but as it still feels like your groping up your persona sometimes, it may help make him more solid if you have to defend him with rapiers at dawn. 'Dashed' and 'atop'? Lightfooted that, immediately distinctive style.

" The comments were in general a note that I should concentrate and redouble my efforts at cohesion, and then resubmit them for another read a few months later. I tried to assimilate them in my practice—the procedure of erecting white space in mourning over the black specks along its flanks in such a way that the mourning weren't also a celebration—but nothing seemed to work."

Truly delicious imagery, schmick verisimilitude, you have the visuals but would a tactile sense kill you? Good use of lingual palate in orientation and establishing the protagonist.
Dashing dashes, they allow light into your phrases. 'errecting white space in mourning over the black..." is vivid. The persona's logic and language is reminiscent of Svevo's "La conscienza di Zeno", favouring character nuance over pandering to the audience.

"It was like a dialectic of light and dark, so that as soon as I moved towards one, I sacrificed the other. It was like trying to reign back the temporary lapses in synaptic transmission in favor of some other kind of lapsing. Probably the kind of lapsing that produces a soundproof narrative instead of a handful of phrases that echo against the words of others before effervescing into thin air."

Go for the full pretense. "...dialectic of chiaroscuro." Then involve the light and dark. You know you want to. I know, I go on about the opening lines and then push art vocab on you, but the little children aren't going to know dialectic in that context anyway, you may as well have some fun. "..some other kind of lapsing. Probably the kind of lapsing.." is awful awful phrasing, Awful. It's laboured and cumbersome and I hate it, I hate it so much I have to stay up all night because there are just not enough hours in the day to hate it so. Smooth it with your tongue. Why the sonic metaphors? They work well enough, although effervescing into thin air could be sured up, maybe with onomatopaeia to bend the sonic with the textural quality.

"But then, the air is never really thin here. Some times it's so thick I can feel myself choking on the dehumidified voices from the past: Hegel, Lorca, Auden, Eliot. Some times it's so thick with the sweat of my body and my own idle warmth. Most times it rains before I die, and I can feel the voices and sweat and humidity being pummeled to the soft ground. I am even deaf to those voices that cry out. I thank the liquid bullets that drop from the atmosphere and dissolve upon impact for that. I thank the foundation that supports the storm clouds and purports to bring them here. Thank you, Cherokees. Thank you, Paparuda and Perperuna. Thanks to you, I have only died twice in my life to be reborn as a poet, as this poet. A would-be poet, to be exact. Like our would-be war and our would-be marriages and our would-be families. Thankfully, I was reborn into this as well: a would-be world where threats hold as much if not more weight than actions, where words bear the responsibility of meaning, where language is not just a medium but a message as well."

And when you least suspect it, BAM! Setting! Or so I suspected. Lorca, I can understand, but what do the Brit and the Germans have that allows them to inhabit such heat? Amalgamate the sweat and the heat, one force, with the dry dead voices. 'Most times it rains before I die' is downright South American magic realist, 'pummeled' is a vivid verb of which I approve. "I am even deaf to those voices that cry out"- You're groping. The liquid bullets are tollorable. The "foundation" is an interesting little tangent. The shape of this piece is illusive. I like the transition between the high poetics back to the omphakepsis, "A would-be poet, to be exact". The musing beyond it, of the "would-be"s is eloquent if meandering. The language is an important point, can give that more room.

"My body knows all this, too. It realizes it is both an artifice for life and life itself, and the autonomy scares it. It wishes to be an aphorism or a baobab with a little prince to pull it by the roots. I prefer Beckett's response: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. It's advice some people should take more time to consider: after all, a we only know a thing works when it fails."

Yay for personified body, looking forward to its development within the plot. The body is good, it reminds me of this ancient housewife's cookbook, where it was talking about how you should memorize the cuts of meat by imagining you're a nihilistic cow. I know, I know, no tangents. Bless your socks for referencing "The Little Prince". Yay for Beckett. Give thy references roots and thy roots rain. "Some people" sounds rather directed, and tell me you weren't going to start singing Cyndy Lauper.... "Paved Paradise.." never mind. It's a good sentiment. Sentiments, though, so far it's all sentiment, it's all musing. Give us something small in the way of physicality, even if it is the continuing of the thread of the sweat.

"Like our hearts. Like our bodies"

What's that inherant? It's a bird, it's a plain, it's SUPERFLUOUS! Don't spell it out when it's already there, or it reeks of pontification.

"Nobody thinks they can love until they can't, when their heart is broken, and then they realize all their lives they've been loving and loving and loving this world and their families and the black night sky like a jeweler's velvet cloth."

I understand the passion of persona, but aphorism and then comparing the night sky to a 'jeweler's velvet cloth', do you really want me to dignify that?

"The seconds before and behind us; the seconds we take after dinner to get seconds."

From any other pen, cheap pun. In this, the rich, bitter-sweet mire of dark molasses, vaguely reminiscent of "the Body Artist"'s enveloping introspection.

"All of it moves through me. I am a temporary interruption of service, a broken phone line that stretches to connect here to there. It's okay. I'm not alone in my indeterminacy. Thankfully the entire twenty-first century is filled with ghosts like me. We move from one place to the next looking for what we don't have and are only faintly aware that our searching is the object of our search. Nobody even needs to leave the comfort of their homes anymore. I can search the globe in a few minutes on my computer; I can find someone to love me through a website. I can find a best friend and presence is irrelevant. I suppose that's the truth of it all along, though. We don't friend bodies."

This is glorious. No, really, this is glorious. This is exactly right. You know how ages ago you mensioned how no one had found the voice of our generation, no one had got it exactly right. This comes pretty damn close. I think we've all felt an incarnation of this. Change one iota, I light things on fire. Not kidding.

"Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even friend our own bodies. [That was actually this morning, after it had stormed all night. I pretended not to notice my slight start at seeing another person in the mirror, and I realized my body is always smaller than I imagine it in my head. Compared to the buildings of the city, the baobabs, the music on the radio, I am almost a sleight of light, a trick of perception. There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, for the most part. "

God knows I never recognise myself in the mirror. Stud, quit hacking into my naked spy camera. Where did the aside go, "[That was actually.." oh, hey, there's the end. I would be more inclined to break the paragraph before with a hyphen or something then have the aside separate, it's still too buried, it slips into the rest of the paragraph too easily. Yay for sleight of light and those baobabas again. Alethosphere is intriguing, it reminds me of (don't spank me for this) a passage in "The Raw Shark Text" about how arbitrary place and identity is when we hurtle at the speed we do through space. But yours is obviously better. Very lovely, ravishingly so.

"Not being perceived means you are not really reading this, which means I'm not writing this; I'm breathing it. There goes the humidity]. It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad."

Almost Calvino this little abstract line, grounded with the humidity. The phone. Genius.
***

TBC (no really it will be)

On to part II - I'm keeping the paragraph format

I. First sentence:

I had never truly lost anyone close before.

As if any man can control the forms of geography.

She looked away before I could understand her reaction.

If the prose is thicker than the plot, that isn't my fault—this is to bear witness to a society loosed upon the constellation of itself, which can only happen in the present tense.

It's just that sometimes the prose gets thicker than the plot, and then I'm drowning, but I keep trying to fill things in, to bring this together because I know somebody is watching me. I feel them reading this and whether they acknowledge it or not, I'm them, too."

eyes full of bewilderment

I want the mourning to stop. I want the morning to stop.

Tyler smirks

Part One

I'm afraid to read this. Really – I'm trembling in my… bare feet? Yeah. It's long. You have moderators critiquing it. And you *are* a moderator. All that together equals one terrified JFW1415.

But you asked for a critique, and I shall give you one. I don't know if it will be any good, but I can try? And if I ramble about stupid stuff, ignore me. I tend to be a little… eccentric in my critiques.

So, hopefully I will help, and hopefully these long paragraphs don't murder me before I post.

Nit-Picks

My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," "apocalyptic without an apocalypse."

Thankfully, I was reborn into this as well: a would-be world where threats hold as much if not more weight than actions, where words bear the responsibility of meaning, where language is not just a medium but a message as well.

My body knows all this, too.

I prefer Beckett's response: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It's advice some people should take more time to consider: after all, [s]a [/s]we only know a thing works when it fails.

I am a temporary interruption of service, a broken phone line that stretches to connect here to there.

Thankfully the entire twenty-first century is filled with ghosts like me.

It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad.

Maybe if I believed in myself more, I would fling myself less to the moment and concern myself less with untoward activities like dialectics.

What they sought to see in the darkness of my bedroom, I'll never know.

[Perhaps I should have believed in signs].

It said, "Mother of God, how the street lamp faintly flickered!" and I thought of him.

And then I thought of myself, and how without him, I would never see the same again.

Reader, you must know that what follows [s]follows [/s]only out of fear.

I wish the events that followed were only a fiction.

My body knows all this, too.
[...]
Maybe if I believed in myself more, I would fling myself less to the moment and concern myself less with untoward activities like dialectics.

I prefer to leave the loss unnamed; by which I mean, or, rather, I prefer to leave him unnamed—once you die, you should not have a name.

This is what I mean when I say that that the three of us were each suffering the violence of form. It was mostly our own, and, like the violence of all forms, it was a violence bred of absence. What was four became three. The violence was thus a specter that exacted its revenge in the brief, hollow space between our words. When asked how many would be sitting with us tonight, we would catch ourselves mid-sentence saying four and correct to three.

In the aftermath, I refused to remove him from my phonebook, my email, my picture frames.

"Are you OK?" one of them—who I recognized as Tyler several seconds after his voice had died—asked. I broke my stare at the plate in front of me and looked up at him.

I didn't need food which would only pass through me like religion.

I picked up my glass of water and fished the lime from its bowels before taking a sip.

"Are you sure you're OK?" Tyler asks again. His eyes move over my body as though something foreign has inhabited my skin. It isn't non-recognition; it's a recognition of form and only form, not of function. I nodded again, clearing my throat this time as though that explained something significant about my behavior, and noticed Marie's disconcerted, silent expression. She looked away before I could understand her reaction.

"I think love is THE abstract emotion. It's the one that abstracts everything the most," Marie was saying quietly. It fascinated me that in a place filled with such noise, being quiet actually made you louder than the others. Perhaps it was the difference in the form of the sound: on the one hand, static, and on the other, a voice, an articulation, which could thus cut through the white noise in the same way an electronic voice phenomena device could pick up the voice of a ghost. In the same way a dog can be trained to find a small child by smell—the eyes are unnecessary, what must be trusted is the invisible. On the other [s]other [/s]hand, which also holds my Bible, perhaps I heard her because her voice was forever scratched into my eardrum. Perhaps, if I were to stand outside on a still night, I could hear her laughing.

"Hey.[s],[/s]" [s]h[/s]His voice is unsteady.[s],[/s] "[s]c[/s]Can you come with me for a moment?"

He is still talking, but my mind gets hooked to the last sentence: We want you to come back.

I reach up to my face and feel water against my skin, which I hadn't noticed before.

"Stop stop stop stop, stop." He grabs my arm forcefully, sternly.

Okay, now where to start? The others have covered grammer pretty well and I feel like I can't do anything other than give you a few general observations because this, in my opinion, is just too well written to fault. But I'll see what I can do. Hmmm, well you've been given German and French so why not Spanish?

Uno:

The first sentence is great, it really draws the reader's attention and gives a brilliant insight towards what they can expect of their Narrator and this piece of writing. In fact, the whole paragraph or rather almost the entire piece of text does the same, drawing an analogy between how the Narrator writes and the piece of writing. The stream of consciousness style fits perfectly and the Narrator's awareness of the reader makes for an interesting phenomenon.

Dos:

At first, I was irritated by your use of 'Some times' as opposed to 'Sometimes' but when you used it the second time, I warmed to it. I don't know if you split the word on purpose but I actually rather like it like that, I love the uniqueness of your Narrator's speech pattern and his very disembodied, distant approach. I think it ends a little weak with the conclusion that language is a message rather than just a meaning because I was expecting something stronger than that, what with your talk of war and threats and action. I don't know what quite I was expecting but something more clever and less ordinary than language is a message.

Tres:

It's advice some people should take more time to consider: after all, [s]a[/s] we only know a thing works when it fails.

You have some absolutely amazing imagery in this paragraph and you really start to reach the essence of your Narrator. His emotion is conveyed beautifully and it's so easy to feel close to him and to feel close to understanding him, while at the same time, he's a million miles away, both in some of his ideals and in his intelligence. The reader has some difficulty connecting with your Narrator and yet, in this paragraph, that no longer matters because suddenly he's clearer and he feels so much more 'normal' because he's offering views that we can all understand and relate to. Your conclusion for this paragraph is much stronger than that for the other and really made me think so great work on this paragraph.

Cuatro:

The use of the bracket is clever and only a little disconcerting -- I must admit that I glanced down to check that it did end and where it ended -- but at the same time, there's something about the flow of this paragraph that I have trouble grasping. Perhaps it's because it's the first time you fuse his thoughts with the events of his life or maybe it's that he's talking about earlier that day in brackets and then, when he leaves the brackets, he again mentions an event from earlier that day so there's no change in the subject and it feels out of beat. I don't know how to describe it entirely but I think one change that would help is changing the 'It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone...' to 'It was also this morning that I...' which would, I think, emphasise the stream of consciousness style and make the transition just a little easier. Or maybe rather than have the brackets, you could change the beginning to something like:

Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even friend our own bodies. That happened this morning, actually. After it had stormed all night... and I pretended not to notice...'

Cinco:

It ends beautifully but the middle isn't great. I think your Narrator concentrates too strongly on the build up to what this phone-call brought, talking and talking of signs and how I wouldn't have answered it if I'd believed but then I would have eventually and... I just think that this paragraph needs to be more about raw emotion like quite a few of your later ones. This paragraph needs to concentrate on the substance of the phone-call rather than dodging around with what ifs and maybes. I think that your Narrator needs to show us a deeper part of his personality here.

Seis:

I'm not going to even attempt to find fault with this one because I simply love it. That awareness of the reader is such a clever trick and it flows beautifully.

Siete:

I have no criticism of this, or in fact praise but merely an observation: your narrator has so many beautiful, wonderful phrases when talking of the abstract world but when it comes to something real, suddenly his voice is almost ordinary, it's close to cliche talking of flickering lights, and just a little mundane. To one extent, I love the humanity it shows and yet, to the other, I miss the narrator's wit and his wonderful philosophies. I both love and hate this paragraph which leaves me completely neutral.

Ocho:

I cannot say that I believe your narrator's philosophy but then perhaps I am too young to have experience of such and it's beside the point. This is a pleasant paragraph with nothing that I either highly admire or detest. There is nothing wrong with that. It's a filler paragraph and we all need those.

Nueve:

Reader, you must know that in that pre-dawn twilight there was lightning in my stomach as I stood at the window and listened to the lowing train in the distance, the sound like an old dragon just awakening.

This direct response to the reader is quite strange. Parts of it I like and parts feel over-dramatic but I think the whole of it works quite well. The first sentence I disliked, it just felt too over-emotional and rather feminine, it felt too much like a line from Jayne Eyre. But the second half, his address of the reader as a male and his confession, feels very real and tangible and works perfectly.

_________________________________________________________

I will pause here for the moment as I need to change and get ready for an event I'm apparently attending but I'll resume the review soon and have it completed before the end of tonight, hopefully. Meanwhile I hope you find this at least vaguely useful.

I don’t know how much of a comment I’m going to be able to give you. I’m really liking this. You end on a fantastic line, really. It’s not what Tyler would have been expecting and it’s not what I was expecting. Keeping your reader on their toes is important, and you do that well.

Tyler is much more grounded than the narrator. Yet, I feel that Marie might not be. She’s wavering on the sidelines. They in cahoots, she and Tyler, which I gathered from the look, but she’s not as solid as Tyler is. She has a fragile feeling to her, which I think I’m being completely on that one bit where he can’t discern her expression. So, I am suspicious but willing to know more about her. Suspicious because she is letting Tyler approach him when maybe she would be just as good, and because I almost think that she wouldn’t be just as good, because she‘s sliding away from reality herself. Although I doubt it is this one so much, she’s more solid than the narrator, but in limbo for real people so I don’t feel she’s lost base that far.

Then again, the narrator also has a hold on reality, if only because he can still function on that automated level. That’s still an indication that he’s still here. His fragility comes when he rants. When he rants and cannot seem to finish, or be willing to stop himself from letting the slide of words tumble out, even when Tyler is obviously uncomfortable, and needing his solidity. He feels like an anchor. Tyler says that they want him back, it’s ambiguous because he could mean back at a place, though he means back with them in the real functioning world. I feel as though they’re tired and scared for him, and they need him to be solid so that they can keep properly together. Tyler’s voice wavers, he understands but he doesn’t.

And I’ve probably just read way too much into this. ^^

I eagerly await the next instalment. I like the narrator and your style, Minx. Keep it up.

*Hearts* Le Penguin.

I had never truly lost anyone close before.

The sonnet is also a loss, though one we've come to appreciate, which is a shame: its violence goes without note because it is a violence of form and not a violence of function. When forms exhibit violence, we ignore them and look to their function. When states engage in war, they make no topography of desire or offense and, in so doing, retain their ability to quit at any time, to concede, to treatize, to conquer. As if any man can control the forms of geography.

I looked to the ceiling made of glass—glass which, through the 19th century, developed architecturally as a significant material. Despite this development, it was not until the following century that the social demand for it would meet its ability. Today, it is still considered a material with strong associative ties to utopia, to utopian societies, which is why its primary use is in places like this: as fascia fashioned to the roof of a mall, a restaurant, airports, train stations, skyscrapers. It is always omnipresent in places of a transitory nature where the only thing stationary is the structure itself.

In the same way a dog can be trained to find a small child by smell—the eyes are unnecessary, what must be trusted is the invisible. On the other other hand, which also holds my Bible, perhaps I heard her because her voice was forever scratched into my eardrum.

You're not OK.

Part 2:
Hola

This one seemed a lot more human but it got....eerie. Still love the narrator. He/she seemed far more vulnerable and it was kinda shocking at first and sudden. I didn't dexpect it. First he's this man that's ontop of his language, seems to have an unflawed(or possibly very flawed) view of the world about him and then, he just shut down and the stronger character was Tyler and he didn't come off as "special" I'll say, like your main character. He just seemed so ordinary next to him and so real, making the narrator seem almost...I don't know, crazy isn't the word to describe him, he's just twitchy and different and interesting... Maybe even broken, it's just coming to mind that since he DOES know so much about things, he's lacking in other areas and needs a counterpart *cough* schizophrenia*cough* And I didn't really understand Marie but...I liked how she was described.

Can't waiiiiiit for more! *cookies*
Must. Have!

~Rieda

Added #2.

One thing I like about your style is that you sometimes create a sort of emotional wind tunnel, the reader buffeted by both discomfort and fascination. This is a good effect; the reader wants to keep reading, but it’s a challenge. They have to work for it. It’s very post-modern Eco of you, and as a littérateur I love it.

The problem with this first chapter is that your narrator steps in, checks out the reader in his exhilarating wind tunnel, and gives him a big, fat shove into the “discomfort” zone. If the reader’s literary disquiet turns into literary alienation, you’re going to need an awful lot of fascination to counterbalance that—and frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of literature that offers enough fascination to cancel out my frustration with your narrator.

Une.

My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," "apocalyptic without an apocalypse."

I wouldn't have stumbled in my sleepy stupor to its obnoxious chirping, but eventually, though. Eventually I would have picked up after bracing myself, after preparing myself for the acid of emptiness that would cauterize my stomach.

[What, if anything, did Hegel really accomplish besides provoking two centuries of quibbling gentlemen?]

Not physically, necessarily, but psychically I shift gears as often as my mind will allow

My body which, unlike my mind, is not an amalgam of free associations of particles pushed endlessly towards the salt point—where fresh water becomes salty, where the ocean begins and the river ends, and where neither exist for very long.

If my writing (or breathing, as it were) is to liberate itself from the weight of my life and my body, then that liberation can only happen with a reader, to whom the story will attach itself forever.

I'm slow, but it's my own fault for forgetting all about you. Sorry 'bout that.

I really liked the wording of this entire piece. I think someone already mentioned how it was like a mixture of a story and your poem-writing skills. And despite the apparent lack of plot (except for the phone call, perhaps) I found it was an interesting piece. Which is odd, because I normally like for a piece to start off in the middle of something happening, and I like to know the plot before I get too far in. Or at least get the feeling there will be a plot soon. In this, I didn't get the feeling there would be any plot, any where. Until the phone call, that is, which was a really interesting paragraph. My favorite in the story, I think, just because of what is said about the character, and the words of the friend. How her voice was described. But the phone call was quickly dropped, giving us no idea what was said. I don't think you should tell us, though. I think the fact that you don't fits in with the story and the style of writing. I don't like how you just dropped it, though. It's not like you suddenly switched topics, because you did ease away from it and there was transition. I just expected something more to come from it, or at least have it mentioned later.

It was just a really good paragraph, and it seemed useful in developing the main character a bit more, though I'm not sure how. I just thought it would be a bit more important to the story somehow. It's the first bit, and so far only bit, of plot in the story, so it just seemed like it should have another mention somewhere.

My two-cents are gone, so onward we go.

Not physically, necessarily, but psychically I shift gears as often as my mind will allow: focusing like this for so long, to say so much and so little, is uncommon.

I tried to assimilate them in my practice—the procedure of erecting white space in mourning over the black specks along its flanks in such a way that the mourning weren't also a celebration—but nothing seemed to work.

Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even friend our own bodies. [That was actually this morning, after it had stormed all night. I pretended not to notice my slight start at seeing another person in the mirror, and I realized my body is always smaller than I imagine it in my head. Compared to the buildings of the city, the baobabs, the music on the radio, I am almost a sleight of light, a trick of perception. There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, for the most part. Not being perceived means you are not really reading this, which means I'm not writing this; I'm breathing it. There goes the humidity]. It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad.

My son, simply because you bothered me so often about this, I'm withholding all but the bare minimum--rearrangement. I think I'm going to develop a strange, cultish fascination with this piece, simply because it's so unassuming and yet a very strange medley of your poetry and some strange kind of prose that I can't place. Your main challenge is making it acceptable to prose readers (which I can ramble about if you like).

Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even befriend our own bodies. [That was actually this morning, after it had stormed all night. I pretended not to notice my slight start at seeing another person in the mirror, and I realized my body is always smaller than I imagine it in my head. Compared to the buildings of the city, the baobabs, the music on the radio, I am almost a sleight of light, a trick of perception. There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, for the most part. Not being perceived means you are not really reading this, which means I'm not writing this; I'm breathing it. There goes the humidity]. It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad.

If I believed in signs, I wouldn't have answered it. I would have buried my head under pillows and blankets until I couldn't hear it or the voices or the rain. I wouldn't have stumbled in my sleepy stupor to its obnoxious chirping, but eventually, though. Eventually I would have picked up after bracing myself, after preparing myself for the acid of emptiness that would cauterize my stomach. I could have eviscerated myself and made a few bucks on the black market. But I don't believe in signs, and I did answer. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew the words it was carrying. I didn't have to understand every thing she said to hate her. Suddenly, she was not my friend of seven years; her voice was not familiar or loving, but atonal, artificially buoyed by her fatalism for my sake, and insubstantial. It was a thin cover for the raw, animalistic, scathed-by-loss voice people should have. When we hung up, the dialectic switched on me, without my knowing, until I drove my shin into the coffee table. That's what the dialectic was good for: reminding me that I am neither light nor dark but an object in their struggle, a word in a language I don't know.

I wasn't sure what to do afterwards: if I should get my shoes or try returning to sleep. In some sense, I knew before I tried that sleep was no option; it was the way a static charge sat between my mouth and my heart and made my breathing tingle that I should have taken as indicative of my dilemma. But despite that, I curled up against the sheets feeling smaller than before and closed my eyes, which quickly became an arduous task. The weight that had rested upon them before was suddenly gone and holding them down was a miracle in itself. What they sought to see in the darkness of my bedroom, I'll never know. Perhaps they were waiting for him to come through the door, to stumble in and laugh, to signal the incredulity of the whole thing. [Perhaps I should have believed in signs]. It wasn't until I heard the voice of Lorca, or what I imagined Lorca's English voice to be, that I rose from the bed and moved to the living room. It said, "Mother of God, how the street lamp faintly flickered!" and I thought of him. I thought what a strange and exciting thing it must have been to be so genuine and loving as to be a part of the world of light and dark and to understand it, however faint, however flickering. And then I thought of myself, and how without him, I would never see the same again. The world would always be a little darker; my vision would always be a little narrower than before.

Based on paragraphs! ^^

1. Personally, I like this. You have a good feel of an almost stream of consciousness here. I think, considering the beginning references to the writing, the way his mind goes through its processes is clever, well done.

2. I believe someone must have pointed out along the way that “sometimes” doesn’t have a space in it? Least ways, not how you’re usin’ it. I’m not a fan of using “But” to start a sentence, let alone a paragraph, but it’s not a huge issue here, I suppose. You also repeat “sweat” twice within two lines. I’d try to find another word for the second, or first (I’d suggest first, the second use is quite fitting) I like your “would-be” here, the repetition does you well (there’s a term for the use here, but I’ve completely lost it)

3. This is a build up, it feels. The whole paragraph climaxes when you reach “We don’t friend bodies” and it’s brilliant. You could remove bits and pieces of this paragraph, and you would still come to the conclusion you do, but it would not be as fantastic as it is. The buildup is well done.

4. I’ve no issue with the parenthesis here, I don’t see as to why it needs to be a problem either. ^^ It does what it is created to do, and does it well. I found reading it easy and it aided understanding, it truly sounded like an aside. I dislike the word “TiVoed” < it’s just an ugly word. ^^

5. Here we get story. We’re (some would say finally) getting to the real events that push the narrative along. I like that you don’t forgo the entire feeling you have in your earlier paragraphs, we just get a lowered, more sedate form of the same. It’s intriguing.

6. I think that now you shudder back into the previous feeling. You skipped it for a paragraph, you see, gave the readers the break they thought they needed. Now that you pelt back in they feel affronted, you’re too much too quickly without justification. I, personally, love it. Can’t help but have a mind that enjoys the long solitude of an intricate body of work. But you’re marking this out for many people to read, and they’re obviously having some issue. Take a slow approach with this paragraph, I’d suggest, so you dip back into the speed in such a way that they don’t realize what you’ve done until it’s done.

7. Here you slip back again, you’re less intense in the language, with less to deconstruct. You’re helping out your readers again. And it pays off. It’s more story and we’re a bit further forward. I enjoy the glimpses of information between the words.

8. You’re even simpler, winding down, as it were. It’s working for you. Still, you keep a deep meaning. Your audience appreciates it.

9.You end on a fantastic note. It makes me want to read more.

At times you’re too much, I think, for your majority influence. Now, personally I can’t see a problem with an intricate, intense read. But it’s out of style now, you’re slipping into an introspective ideal that is no longer in mainstream reading. It’s setting the response of your work back.

I like the character, and I love the way you’re setting him out. You layer information between the words, as it were. We get a new bit of something each time.

I really do look forward to more, Minx. This is good.

*Hearts* Le Penguin.

Hi!

Incandescence wrote:My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," "apocalyptic without an apocalypse." The comments were in general a note that I should concentrate and redouble my efforts at cohesion, and then resubmit them for another read a few months later. I tried to assimilate them in my practice—the procedure of erecting white space in mourning over the black specks along its flanks in such a way that the mourning weren't also a celebration—but nothing seemed to work. It was like a dialectic of light and dark, so that as soon as I moved towards one, I sacrificed the other. It was like trying to reign back the temporary lapses in synaptic transmission in favor of some other kind of lapsing. Probably the kind of lapsing that produces a soundproof narrative instead of a handful of phrases that echo against the words of others before effervescing into thin air.

**Very colorful. I love how this begins. Understandable and yet full and wordy, in a good way mind you. I loved the very last sentence, but mostly when you said "It was like a dialect of light and dark...."

But then, the air is never really thin here. Some times it's so thick I can feel myself choking on the dehumidified voices from the past: Hegel, Lorca, Auden, Eliot. Some times it's so thick with the sweat of my body and my own idle warmth. Most times it rains before I die, and I can feel the voices and sweat and humidity being pummeled to the soft ground. I am even deaf to those voices that cry out. I thank the liquid bullets that drop from the atmosphere and dissolve upon impact for that. I thank the foundation that supports the storm clouds and purports to bring them here. Thank you, Cherokees. Thank you, Paparuda and Perperuna. Thanks to you, I have only died twice in my life to be reborn as a poet, as this poet. A would-be poet, to be exact. Like our would-be war and our would-be marriages and our would-be families. Thankfully, I was reborn into this as well: a would-be world where threats hold as much if not more weight than actions, where words bear the responsibility of meaning, where language is not just a medium but a message as well.

**Just as colorful. It would be overstimulating to have all of these analogies and metaphors and all over vibrant language...but for some reason it isn't here. I think it's because you narrator is so crazy that it makes it okay? I'm not sure.

My body knows all this, too. It realizes it is both an artifice for life and life itself, and the autonomy scares it. It wishes to be an aphorism or a baobab with a little prince to pull it by the roots. I prefer Beckett's response: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. It's advice some people should take more time to consider: after all, a we only know a thing works when it fails. Like our hearts, like our bodies. Nobody thinks they can love until they can't, when their heart is broken, and then they realize all their lives they've been loving and loving and loving this world and their families and the black night sky like a jeweler's velvet cloth. The seconds before and behind us; the seconds we take after dinner to get seconds. All of it moves through me. I am a temporary interruption of service, a broken phone line that stretches to connect here to there. It's okay. I'm not alone in my indeterminacy. Thankfully the entire twenty-first century is filled with ghosts like me. We move from one place to the next looking for what we don't have and are only faintly aware that our searching is the object of our search. Nobody even needs to leave the comfort of their homes anymore. I can search the globe in a few minutes on my computer; I can find someone to love me through a website. I can find a best friend and presence is irrelevant. I suppose that's the truth of it all along, though. We don't friend bodies.

**" It's advice some people should take more time to consider: after all, a we only know a thing works when it fails. Like our hearts, like our bodies." I like this line. It makes so much sense. I didn't get it until I read it the second time but, it really is completely true. The ummm....what was I going to say, oh the "a" before the word "we" doesn't belong there I don't think. That was the only error I found in the whole thing . Also, just a thought here, the narrator seems...otherworldly? Not really out of this world but I guess just out of our general mindset and moreso superhuman? I'm guessing this is where the schizoprenia comes in to play. I guess I'm just catching how he talks about himself.


Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even friend our own bodies. [That was actually this morning, after it had stormed all night. I pretended not to notice my slight start at seeing another person in the mirror, and I realized my body is always smaller than I imagine it in my head. Compared to the buildings of the city, the baobabs, the music on the radio, I am almost a sleight of light, a trick of perception. There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, for the most part. Not being perceived means you are not really reading this, which means I'm not writing this; I'm breathing it. There goes the humidity]. It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad.

**My favorite paragraph. I was sitting here thinking for a while, not because I didn't get it but because this brings up a lot of good points. Though, when the narrator is talking about his reflection, is he saying all of this metaphorically or literally? It's a little hard tryhing to defuse the two when the language is so sparkly

If I believed in signs, I wouldn't have answered it. I would have buried my head under pillows and blankets until I couldn't hear it or the voices or the rain. I wouldn't have stumbled in my sleepy stupor to its obnoxious chirping, but eventually, though. Eventually I would have picked up after bracing myself, after preparing myself for the acid of emptiness that would cauterize my stomach. I could have eviscerated myself and made a few bucks on the black market. But I don't believe in signs, and I did answer. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew the words it was carrying. I didn't have to understand every thing she said to hate her. Suddenly, she was not my friend of seven years; her voice was not familiar or loving, but atonal, artificially buoyed by her fatalism for my sake, and insubstantial. It was a thin cover for the raw, animalistic, scathed-by-loss voice people should have. When we hung up, the dialectic switched on me, without my knowing, until I drove my shin into the coffee table. That's what the dialectic was good for: reminding me that I am neither light nor dark but an object in their struggle, a word in a language I don't know.

**I am so incredibly curious about this conversation it kills me 0.0. I want to know what happened toooooo. Tell him to share.

Maybe if I believed in myself more, I would fling myself less to the moment and concern myself less with untoward activities like dialectics. [What, if anything, did Hegel really accomplish besides provoking two centuries of quibbling gentlemen?]. But I don't have content enough in myself for waiting—not even for idling—as Nietzsche would say. So I move around constantly. Not physically, necessarily, but psychically I shift gears as often as my mind will allow: focusing like this for so long, to say so much and so little, is uncommon. I jump from one place to the next without realizing I've made a leap, and if it seems like a stream of consciousness, it's been polluted by my body. My body which, unlike my mind, is not an amalgam of free associations of particles pushed endlessly towards the salt point—where fresh water becomes salty, where the ocean begins and the river ends, and where neither exist for very long. If my writing (or breathing, as it were) is to liberate itself from the weight of my life and my body, then that liberation can only happen with a reader, to whom the story will attach itself forever. The moments of transference from my body to theirs, when the story is on their screen or in their shopping bag and yet to be read, is when it finally exists by itself. That freedom I rank as a miracle in the order of things.

**There was so much I liked out of this paragraph I couldn't list it all.

I wasn't sure what to do afterwards: if I should get my shoes or try returning to sleep. In some sense, I knew before I tried that sleep was no option; it was the way a static charge sat between my mouth and my heart and made my breathing tingle that I should have taken as indicative of my dilemma. But despite that, I curled up against the sheets feeling smaller than before and closed my eyes, which quickly became an arduous task. The weight that had rested upon them before was suddenly gone and holding them down was a miracle in itself. What they sought to see in the darkness of my bedroom, I'll never know. Perhaps they were waiting for him to come through the door, to stumble in and laugh, to signal the incredulity of the whole thing. [Perhaps I should have believed in signs]. It wasn't until I heard the voice of Lorca, or what I imagined Lorca's English voice to be, that I rose from the bed and moved to the living room. It said, "Mother of God, how the street lamp faintly flickered!" and I thought of him. I thought what a strange and exciting thing it must have been to be so genuine and loving as to be a part of the world of light and dark and to understand it, however faint, however flickering. And then I thought of myself, and how without him, I would never see the same again. The world would always be a little darker; my vision would always be a little narrower than before.

**...So...gah I'm insanely curious. I know what I think...but I'll save that for after I find out a little more.

While I know there are men and women out there who shine just as much, I also know it wouldn't work. You see, after a certain age, you have to live with the friends you've made. After that age, which might really be the transition to adulthood, you never make friends the same way. Your new friends are your colleagues, and more than any personal affections are your professional ones. You forget that friendship is more resilient than love because friendship also liberates the body and its actions from our persons, whereas love is such a strong current towards the body. A man can drown in love or be carried far from his home. A friend requires only that you keep in touch and, from time to time, send your love.


**So very true. I guess...well it's almost slightly depressing but, true.

Reader, you must know that in that pre-dawn twilight there was lightning in my stomach as I stood at the window and listened to the lowing train in the distance, the sound like an old dragon just awaking. Reader, you must know that what follows follows only out of fear. Fear for myself, and fear that I will always be a shade or shadow in someone else's dialectic. I wish to acknowledge my reader for his kind support in setting me free. I wish to acknowledge the blood in the kitchen sink as something greater than depression and loneliness. I wish the events that followed were only a fiction.

**Blood...in the kitchen sink...so...I'm connecting things that are perhaps a trap to look too closely at. I need to just read the next one, yes? So...I want the next one. *gives more cookies!* They'll just keep on coming. In other words, your narrator is awesome, the language is beautiful...I'm confused but I assume that I'm supposed to be. Hopefully.

Keep writing!
~Rieda

Okay, so as you already know, I don't really like this for a number of different reasons. The narrator is creeeeepy and I hate him. Usually, I am used to narrators who can communicate easily about their lives and, although a flaw is obvious, they are doing their dandiest to overcome this flaw and become a better person. This is not so for this guy. There is no fatal flaw about him, nor does he reveal one directly. Instead, there is something wrong with his style that grates on me--although he speaks in a comprehensible manner, it is apparent that there is something inherently wrong with him. I don't like it that he spends so much time listening to Lorca and his other band of happy authors. He seems to be living in an abstract world and, although he sometimes references the concrete world that he lives it, he seems so distant that he appears to be slightly sociopathic, if that makes sense. Although you didn't say that he was schizophrenic directly, it is clear that there is something weird going on with the person's reality. So yeah. He definitely is crazy and I am not really liking him at all.

[That was actually this morning, after it had stormed all night. I pretended not to notice my slight start at seeing another person in the mirror, and I realized my body is always smaller than I imagine it in my head. Compared to the buildings of the city, the baobabs, the music on the radio, I am almost a sleight of light, a trick of perception. There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, for the most part. Not being perceived means you are not really reading this, which means I'm not writing this; I'm breathing it. There goes the humidity].

It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad.

Brad! I feel honored you asked me for a review! I shall do my best to give you a full-out critique of which I promised.

I'm going to copy Smorgishborg's crit format and go paragraph by paragraph with grammar and overall impressions.

Paragraph Eins [1]

Grammar and First Impressions

My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, [no comma] or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," [and/or] "apocalyptic without an apocalypse."

The comments were, in general, a note that I should concentrate and redouble my efforts at cohesion, and then resubmit them for another read a few months later.

I tried to assimilate them in my practice—the procedure of erecting white space in mourning over the black specks along its flanks in such a way that the mourning weren't also a celebration—but nothing seemed to work.

It was like a dialectic of light and dark, [no comma] so that as soon as I moved towards one, I sacrificed the other.

[s]Some times[/s] Sometimes it's so thick[,] I can feel myself choking on the dehumidified voices from the past: Hegel, Lorca, Auden, [and/or] Eliot.

Thankfully, I was reborn into this as well: a would-be world where threats hold as much -- if not more -- weight than actions...

It's advice some people should take more time to consider: [semi instead?] after all, [s]a[/s] we only know a thing works when it fails.

Nobody thinks they can love until they can't, [dash instead] when their heart is broken, [dash instead] and then they realize [that] all their lives, they've been loving and loving and loving this world and their families and the black night sky like a jeweler's velvet cloth.

We move from one place to the next, looking for what we don't have, [s]and are[/s] only faintly aware that our searching is the object of our search.

Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even friend our own bodies.

[That was actually this morning, [no comma] after it had stormed all night.

There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, [no comma] for the most part.

There goes the humidity.]. [no period]

It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, [no comma] which I should have known meant something bad.

I wouldn't have stumbled in my sleepy stupor to its obnoxious chirping, but eventually, though. [dash instead] Eventually I would have picked up after bracing myself, after preparing myself for the acid of emptiness that would cauterize my stomach.

I could have eviscerated myself and made a few bucks on the black market. [semi instead?] But I don't believe in signs, and I did answer.

When we hung up, the dialectic switched on me, [no comma] without my knowing, [no comma] until I drove my shin into the coffee table.

Not physically, necessarily, but psychically I shift gears as often as my mind will allow:

My body which, unlike my mind, is not an amalgam of free associations of particles pushed endlessly towards the salt point—where fresh water becomes salty, where the ocean begins and the river ends, and where neither exist for very long.

But despite that, I curled up against the sheets, feeling smaller than before, and closed my eyes, which quickly became an arduous task.

The weight that had rested upon them before was suddenly gone, and holding them down was a miracle in itself.

Your new friends are your colleagues, and more than any personal affections are your professional ones.

Reader, you must know that in that pre-dawn twilight, there was lightning in my stomach...

Jack Kerouac, ladies and gentlemen.

***

There were parts of this that were fantastic, and parts that were complete garbage. I loved and hated this thing, which means that nobody will ever read something they 50% hate. I don't think there's anything I can teach you about writing skill, nor will I even bother to disagree with you philosophy or explain why I would despise your character in real life.

I just want to talk about the style. (Paragraph by paragraph)

1.
It all starts out well, I enjoyed the irony of the rejection comments, and their dismissal and summary. But you just keep talking, it all evolves into a confusing metaphor. For example:

It was like trying to reign back the temporary lapses in synaptic transmission in favor of some other kind of lapsing. Probably the kind of lapsing that produces a soundproof narrative instead of a handful of phrases that echo against the words of others before effervescing into thin air.

Nobody thinks they can love until they can't, when their heart is broken, and then they realize all their lives they've been loving and loving and loving this world and their families and the black night sky like a jeweler's velvet cloth.

and if it seems like a stream of consciousness, it's been polluted by my body.

The moments of transference from my body to theirs, when the story is on their screen or in their shopping bag and yet to be read, is when it finally exists by itself.

I understood none of that but it was good anyway.

My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," "apocalyptic without an apocalypse."