carlsagansghost

[carlsagansghost]

“If you are a dreamer come in If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer If youre a pretender com sit by my fire For we have some flax golden tales to spin Come in! Come in!”

Shel Silverstein

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Preface

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Reflection

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Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

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If you can keep your head when all about you      Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,    But make allowance for their doubting too;   If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream���and not make dreams your master;      If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster    And treat those two impostors just the same;   If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings    And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   And so hold on when there is nothing in you    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,      Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,    If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,      And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

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My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare     As any she belied with false compare.

William Shakespeare

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S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

J Alfred Prufrock

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I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

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if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don’t do it. if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you’re not ready. don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

Charles Bukowski

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A Thousand Words

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” A thousand, in case your capacity for numerical reasoning is severely hindered, is a lot. Rarely, if ever, do we find ourselves dealing with a thousand single units of anything. We simplify our currency in to larger and larger values to avoid the hassle of lugging around and counting a thousand pennies weighing over five pounds total, opting instead for a thin piece of paper weighing in at about one gram. The average human head is said to have about one hundred thousand hairs on it, but I doubt any one of us has tried and succeeded in counting up to even one thousand of those hairs. Picture your parents in high school all of those hundreds of years ago, when “computers” were humans who did mathematical calculations, counting individual words when their teachers assigned thousand word essays. Even now, as I continually hit CONTROL, SHIFT, C to bring up a word count, I know that a thousand is not a small sum; we are just now approaching two hundred words. I checked, and most of my Writer’s Notebooks are about five hundred words long. So, yes, one thousand words is a lot. But is one thousand words enough to equate an entire picture? All of the possible descriptive adjectives in combination with all of the thoughts and memories and feelings that one picture alone can evoke must be more than one thousand words. Are the eight hundred words I have left enough to describe my last thoughts on the complexity of the relationship between our vision and out linguistic cognition? 

As this image hangs or is more likely projected before you, can you not think of more nearly thousands of powerful and emotionally evocative descriptions to relay your reactions, interpretations, and emotions? Okay, maybe not for this particular picture-- it turns out that while pictures can conjure words, actual words themselves don’t always lend themselves to pictures, especially when drafted on a plain, unexpressive Google document. But think about a beautiful sunset, a picture of a cute little puppy sleeping curled up, a dramatic shot of a racing cheetah. You could write so many about those images--beautiful, cute, exciting. Look at the picture for long enough, and it might seem that you could never really run out of adjectives. If every you managed to exhaust the words that take up over a fifth of the modern dictionary, you could move on to more personal, interpretive words. 

This outline may make you think of words of patriotism or songs of freedom and bravery. On the other hand, it might make you think of inevitable social, financial, and political ruin-- I’m sure any one of us could round up one thousand words to describe our feelings about this single outline. 

This child-like rendition of a flower can be described with more than green and red and pink-- is is the memory of crayons and construction paper, or meadows of wildflowers and picnics under shady trees. 

This lemon could make you think of your very own weirdly vibrant childhood memory, make you feel an emotion could easily fill the gap of a hundred words, or remind you of your own encounter with this sour fruit. For example, this single, simple picture of a half of a lemon reminds me of the time my cousin, Mike, dared my other cousin, Cara, to eat a lemon. Past even my own experience, I’m sure that simple synopsis (which I was hard pressed to shorten to just a few words) made you think of many different words that you could apply to this picture. 

This basic starfish reminds me of summer lazy days at the beach, and the guilt I felt when I proudly told my mom that I had found a live starfish in the sand and flung it into the ocean to save it, and she told me that it probably died because they are not deepwater animals. 

This simple snowman reminds me not only of all the joyful and miserable aspects of winter, but specifically...

 of the first snowman I ever made. His name was Ned, and he was more a tall pile of snow than an actual sculpture. 

Even these basic green hues can be seen as a kind of modern impressionism, an artist's interpretation of a lush forest, a patch of grass, a green swatch of fabric, the surface of a pear. 

Even this white screen, past the possible description as blank, even boring, if you want, could be as intricately abstract as a rabbit in a snowstorm. If you’re starting to get bored, I understand; we’re closing in on seven hundred words. I hope, however, that you have instead decided to become inspired. 

If you’ve ever been to an art gallery and wondered how the canvas with a blue square and a yellow square separated by a black stripe could be worth billions of dollars, I hope you now understand. It’s more than its face value, more than the artist’s name-- it’s the brilliance of everything out of nothing. At the very least, it’s laziness with good marketing, and even that could elicit a rant one thousand words long. So, sorry, even your likely annoyance and/or argument against me proves my point. I could easily have ended this conversation in under a thousand words, but when we limit ourselves like that, we rob the world of music, art, architecture, literature, even math or history. We all know from experience that Sparknotes can explain any classic story, but there is a reason people still read the full versions. There’s also a reason we manage to write exhaustingly long essays on single excerpts of stories and novels. Anyway, if I haven’t convinced you yet, maybe there’s no amount of words I could use to get you to be on my side. So I’ll put you out of your misery and leave off here, personally unconvinced that a picture is worth just a thousand words.

[carlsagansghost]

What Color are Mirrors?

There are two long mirrors hanging in my dining room. The handyman who hung them wasn’t as concerned with aesthetic appeal as my mother is, and let the nail and wire show above the mirrors. My mom carefully wrapped and tied light, almost creamy pink bows over the wire and nail to rectify the problem. One of the mirrors has a low, rustic white table with a lamp in front of it, and for that reason (and the fact that I have no full-body mirror in my room), I spent most of my vanity hours in front of the mirror closest to the back porch. It was hung on a part of the wall that jutted out to fit a small closet within the painted plaster, and to the right my mom had hung China plates of varying sizes. As I got older, and tall enough that I was a hazard, she would warn me not to brush against the wall, because the plates were loosely hung. But before, when I was too short to reach the plates jumping, and when even the dining room table was high enough to walk under, barely crouching, I ran through the house freely, cautioned to avoid nothing except the corners of walls and tables that could only hurt me. Usually I played by myself, as only children learn early to do. I didn’t have many playdates, not just because the house was generally too small to accommodate any more than one extremely hyper first-grader, but because my mom was a single working mother. I never minded, I was free to go over to my friends houses instead, or spend the afternoon at my cousin’s house, and I was as happy reading as running. But one day my mother must have taken off work, because my best friend of the time came over. She had pale skin and freckles, and dark brown hair that was almost always in a braid. I remember running after the tail of that brown braid as it disappeared behind a corner. As I rounded the corner, I found myself face to face with my reflection. I don’t know what I was expecting, or whether I was really expecting any particular face to greet me. All I know is that I stared into eyes I knew had to be mine, but in a momentary fit of prosopagnosia, I didn’t recognize myself. Race, which I had always been blind to. Race, a word that had not before existed. Race, the thing that separated me from everyone I knew. I had been colorblind, and made by some miracle or fate to see the world as it was. When I later tried to explain the sensation to my mom, I told her, “I don’t really see myself as white, and I don’t want to be white, but I didn’t realize I wasn’t.” I didn’t realize that there was anything to separate me and my best friend, other than that she was her, and I was me. Though it did startle me for a time, I didn’t dwell much on it; first graders have no capacity to dwell. I never forgot the encounter, though, and throughout my life it has become a more and more present memory, replaying like a home-video in my mind. More and more, my ethnicity has crept into my identity, and I realize how much I had been ignoring it. I had discarded it like an old stuffed animal or old blanket stuffed in the back of a closet, happened upon only when searching for something else. Usually, I wasn’t even aware it was there. When I pictured myself, I was a blank canvas of no race, no distinguishing features or colors or shapes to indicate any particular heritage, a picture I needed so rarely it often became blurred around the edges, tarnishing like silver from disuse. As I got older, I began to develop a more accurate picture of myself. This development was forced not only as part of my growing inclination to admire my reflection as a teenage girl, but my growing awareness about the world. I had never been terribly concerned with stereotypes; in fact I was often embarrassingly naïve to them. My innocence slipped away as the years wore on, and suddenly, as one begins to recognize adult jokes they were previously oblivious to as children, I found myself uncomfortable at the ways others occasionally talked or acted. Before, my first inclination to stranger’s odd behavior around me was to wonder if there was something wrong with them, but now, often, my first thought is to wonder whether it is not just their problem, but their problem with me. Each time something suggestive happened, I was struck with a clearer view of my own face. I would remember, “Oh, yeah… that’s what I look like-- that’s how they see me.” This was never accompanied by shame or any desire to be anything else, but an awkward sensation of confusion and lack of identity, or a ill-fitting identity like a starchy dress worn only on special occasions. For a while now, though I’m not entirely certain how long, that itchy dress has become a part of me, softening against my skin and molding to my being, or maybe I to it. I had to do a lot of stretching to get the outfit to fit, though, and trying to incorporate my race into my life often led to many unnatural and overstated expressions and acknowledgements of race. It made others even more uncomfortable than it made me, I found, but I that finding myself was worth the cost of their blushes. And the payoff, I think, meant little to anyone else, and has changed little in my life, but in my mind, everything seems different. Along with seeing my own race, I saw others. Like emerging from the world of Scout Finch, I lost my colorblindness. Colorblindness gave me a safe haven for a while, but I’ve found that the world is much more interesting in different hues.

[carlsagansghost]

Thoughts on “Gadsby”

Before you officially start reading, I just want to make it known that I will not be using the letter “E” during this Writer’s Notebook. Feel free to follow along and check me, and hopefully the reason for my omission of the letter will be made evident within the Writer’s Notebook, but I can sum my motivation up now in two words: for spite. 

Gadsby. No, not Gatsby, not that book our class just had hours of discussion on. Gadsby, G-A-D-S-B-Y, a book by a man who I will call “Wright”, his family’s  autonym. I find Wright fascinating for his unusual scorn of a symbol in our vocabulary’s most basic building blocks, which I brought up at a point past. Thus, in his honor, I am drafting this work totally without this particular symbol, which may justify my odd words and grammar. It is also why this work is kind of short. Anyway, Wright’s book is, in almost all ways, a totally normal book. It’s focus is not on this fact that it will not apply this symbol of abomination, although its introduction, which, should you pick this book to flip through, will discuss this affair with much duration. My fascination with Wright and his book, Gadsby, grows from my own disposition, which favors annoying actions that occur just to annoy. Much of my own animation occurs for this most basic ambition, which is to irk folks, pardon my hillbilly-akin form as I try to avoid a particular symbol. I snack on Kit Kats by biting into unsplit bars, which, as many of my companions can confirm, is a kind of mildly infuriating that annoys to no limit, much as song that follows roughly: I know a song that lands on all human’s whitish fibril cords that transmit stimuli to and from your brain and spinal cords. (As a slight discursion I wish to clarify that I would only do this in public, and to annoy; I would not dishonor my morals so much as to actually champion consumption of Kit Kats in this fashion.) Similarly, I only commit my physical stamina in running, which I do daily, if I am undoubtful that I will bug my companion by winning against said companion in a run, if only by an instant, who has a autograph I cannot commit unto this work. My triumphs, and thus many of my failings, occur as offshoots of my ambition to disturb. I know it is not a distinguishing factor to boast, but it is a basis of so much of my animation, I thought it might hurt and not aid voicing such a vital part of yours truly. I will in a forthcoming day, possibly try to right this childish wrong, but for now, I will allow my immaturity to spawn dictums about my actions. Rivalry is a commanding authority that it can allow anybody to act against his usual will, and is not far from basic mortal sin of grass’s color. I am sorry if this was a confusing composition to follow; just know it was arduous to draft, although it is a sound way to strong-arm anybody into finding a ridiculous amount of synonyms for common words. 

[carlsagansghost]

Avon-by-the-Sea

I was fifteen when I got my first job. I had applied sometime in the winter of 2014 to a small restaurant and snack shack called the Avon Pavilion in Monmouth County. It was planted right on the end of the boardwalk, just a few blocks from my grandparents’ beach house. I had been going for years, and had fallen in love with the perpetually sandy floors of the restaurant and grossly fattening cheese fries of the snack shack. Since before I could walk, my family and I would make the hard trek from the Garfield Avenue beach to the Pavilion snack shack on Woodland Avenue. The navy blue awnings could never quite scrounge up enough shade for the hordes of hungry beachgoers who all appeared around three in the afternoon, and the boardwalk in front was always spotted with the sticky remains of dropped ice cream cones. The worn white front faced the glittering Atlantic, and the marble countertops gave off a blinding gleam. It was a kind of third home after my Chatham home and my grandparents’ actual house, and had better food than either of the two. I had been toying with the idea of working there for some time; I figured could make money and spend time at the beach and with my grandparents. I finally got up the courage to send in my application, which was four pages long, and asked for extracurriculars, past experience, my GPA, and a personal essay. Months later, when I had almost forgotten, I was emailed a twenty page manual to memorize, and a time and date for a test, which was nine pages long and asked for almost a hundred item prices, proper attire and customer manners, and even the names of the owners. I was also summoned in for an interview, during which a loud ringing in my ears never subsided. The realization that the ringing came from my anxiety and not some radio malfunction only occurred to me hours later. My mouth was dry throughout, and my abilities as an orator had never seemed quite so pathetic. I went home and spent half of an hour staring at a wall and playing back in slow motion the horror of the interview. As I picked through every single stupid thing I said, I realized that, unless the Pavilion was looking for complete imbeciles, I would never get the job. A few days later, just as I had finally begun to forgive myself of my idiocy during the interview, they called to inform me that I had gotten an 90 on the test and a job. I’ve worked there for two summers now. The blue awnings are a hassle to bring in on windy days, and the sticky ice cream spots are never as cute when you’re the one who has to clean them up. The gleam of the marble countertops make my eyes sting after a few hours, and the three o’clock crowd tends to smile and laugh a lot less when they think you’re taking too long on their order. The concept of the Pavilion as a perfect, smoothly run, and spotlessly clean restaurant is all but gone in my mind as an employee, but my memories as a customer are ones I’ll never forget.