I am like so totally showing off.
Jan. 31st, 2008 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackshoegazerOddly enough, I do not remember some of the important milestones in my life. I do not remember when I learned that Santa Claus is not real. I do not remember when I started shaving. I do not remember when I learned to read or who taught me. I do remember arriving in kindergarten, for one, surprised because I thought it had something to go with gardening, and two, fully literate and almost bored because I had to wait while many of the other children learned their letters. I tore through spelling and grammar exercises with voracity and ease. Subsequently, I spent quite a bit of that year alone, often sitting under the back stairway on a beanbag, reading or doing math problems by the phantasmagoric display from a LiteBrite. I assume my father taught me to read, but I have no memories of lessons or exercises or even of him reading to me. I know my father was a consummate reader; in fact I have few memories of my formative years where he was not either reading or working on the family car. Perhaps, in a monkey-see, monkey-do routine, I picked up the habit. Oddly enough, I also do not remember reading before kindergarten either. Perhaps I merely thought I could read and made up all the stories in my head.
The first real love affair I had with a book was The Swiss Family Robinson, or at least, it’s the first one I remember. It was late in third grade and I walked into the library and was struck with the idea that I would read the fattest book in the library, a giant feast of a book. I wandered for awhile and was generally discouraged by the slim volumes available. As if looking to God for inspiration, I gazed toward the ceiling and lo and behold, the biggest book I’d ever seen was staring me in the face - The Swiss Family Robinson. I rushed to the librarian and asked her to retrieve it for me. Those few moment of anticipation seemed to last longer than my agonizing search mere minutes earlier. As she handed me the book, I felt its dense weight in my small hands. I think now of how I felt when I received it, and I imagine that’s how Moses might have felt when receiving the Ten Commandments, the something important and magical had been bestowed upon me.
Over the next few months, I read it (and nothing else) with relish, cherishing every page - the action, adventure, and most of all, a loving family. As a child in rural Indiana, I had plenty of action and adventure, in a Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn sort of way. I spent my days exploring the woods, following creeks to streams to rivers, getting lost, finding my way, catching fish, turtles, frogs, and crayfish, falling through thin ice, and swinging like Tarzan from thick vines. However, I was cursed with an archetypal evil-step mother, straight out of Cinderella, who doted on her own children, and dished out disdain and chores to myself. My father was intensely unhappy at this time, working night, ten to twelve hour days. He was a magnificently ugly ogre to compliment my fairytale stepmother. This, in retrospect, is probably the reason I spent so much time away from home, deep in the woods.
Of course, the reading was slow-going and before I knew it, the year was over and it was time for summer vacation. I’d only finished half of the book! What happens to them all? Do they get off the island? Do they get to go home, start anew? Will they merely be content where they are? What of the pirates? I spent the whole summer pondering these questions and reenacting quite a few scenarios from the book in my childish play in the forest. When summer vacation finally began to wind down, the days grew longer, night came sooner, I started preparations for the grand adventure of fourth grade. My first day back, I got off the bus and went straight to the library and picked us The Swiss Family Robinson and continued right where I’d left off. Oddly enough, until I watched the movie version last year, I couldn’t remember a single thing about that book, except for the premise.
I continued to read throughout my education, often and continually out-stripping my classmates in pronunciation, vocabulary and comprehension. My teachers praised me often for my writing even though other grades were not so exemplary. I failed seventh-grade social studies because I spent my time writing a B horror movie in the form of a book. (I was the kid who snuck downstairs in the middle of the night to watch horror movies starting in second grade. Now I don’t care for them at all.) I wrote the story of a cop-turned-writer, who was writing his memoirs following his run in with a serial-killing teacher. The narrator’s son is the one kid who escapes and the teacher is killed in a shoot-out with the police. The story continues when the teacher’s crazy brother uses black magic to attempt to raise his sister from the dead to bring vengeance on the cop and his kid. He summons a powerful demon who takes possession of the teacher’s body - however – the teacher’s soul is so rotten and evil, she takes control of the demon and his powers and kills her foolish brother, and goes after the cop and his kid. I still have the old Apple II-GS disks this story is saved on and wish I could access it. There was an old program called GhostWriter that would evaluate the reading level of your writing. I was especially proud that it rated my seventh-grade writing as tenth-grade.
These projects continued and I pray I knew where they all were to see where I’ve been in my style. In high school I wrote more poetry than anything, soothing my savage, angsty, teenage rage. Post-high school however, I spent most of my time reading everything I could get my hands on. That is the time period when I think of myself becoming literary. Or at least, that was when I became conscious of it. As noted, I oddly do not remember such milestones. I started thinking of several of my favorite authors and the quest to write the Great American Novel and that idea haunted me for quite some time. When I sat down to write, rather than deep analysis of what it means to be an American, and the American Dream, silly sci-fi profundities came out, which eventually grew into my first novel, entitled Complex Psyche. It was actually an exquisite corpse experiment performed with a good friend, in which one of us wrote one chapter and the other the next and back and forth until the novel was finished. We did not let the other see what we were writing but we had a basic cast of characters to share and we allowed the other to read only the last paragraph of the previous chapter. It turned into a 260-page sci-fi fantasy farce, but with a profound psychological underpinning, hidden underneath the absurdity.
Since then, I have been sort of dry. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block, because I have no problem writing, but it’s that my writing style is going through a sort of metamorphosis. The modus operandi of my style has been vanishing. Gone are long sentences of alliteration and a loping rhythm. Something more solid and structured is emerging from my ethereal youth and I’m both fascinated and frightened by it. My friend, the astrologer, would say that it is because Saturn is returning to the place in my horoscope it was at during my birth. This Saturn Return is heralded by a crystallizing force in one’s life, in which those things that are real in you are solidified, like a ladder of rope suddenly coated in steel. Those things that are fake or invalid are destroyed by the crushing weight of structure. I think the fanciful bits of my youth, the inexperience that let me to be flippant, is sloughing off and what will remain will be more serious and if I am lucky, a style that is prepared to communicate what I’d idealized so long ago, the Great American Novel.
