Of the first week

So I started my first semester at UC Berkeley this week, and while it makes no sense for me to be blogging right now, the time sensitive nature of my opening means that I must post. Here are a few of the lessons I learned, in varying levels of detail...

I'm a failure...

..or at least, I have failed. This month I was planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), in an effort to push myself to explore non-poetic avenues. Things were going swimmingly, in spite of an oddly busy month of school/work/preparing for my first semester at Cal, I had a word count of about 13,000, and was planning to kick it up a notch, as I had felt like I was hitting my stride...
   ...Until about ten days ago, when I tried to open the file with my manuscript on it, and could not find the file. Regardless of the circumstances, my book was gone, every single, divinely-inspired word had disappeared. As things happened to fall, I needed to install a new version of Office on my computer, and that was a job that would cost me at least a day,(I had to find the torrent and whatnot). I then looked to see what my new pace needed to be, as I would not be defeated so easily, and discovered it was a healthy 2700+ words, tough but not impossible.
   Alas, I sat down to begin again (three days later, due to the busy month), and I was completely uninspired. Worse, actually, as I was repulsed by the idea of having to retread all the brilliance I spewed during the first ten days at a less leisurely pace. So, here I sit telling you that I quit. Not writing, or even that particular story, I still want to tell it, and I plan to finish it before next November, when I plan to participate again, I'm just admitting that life and November have beaten me this time. But rest assured, that next year, I shall wreak a fiery vengeance, the likes of which they have never seen!!! Though I have no idea how I would attack a month, but in a world where the Jersey Shore "kids" are famous anything's possible.

Whimper, Pt. 1

The following is a short story I wrote a few months ago. 

I saw a magician end the world once.  That sounds like it’s going to be a weird story to tell, and it kind of is. I should clarify that when I say magician I mean someone who was capable of doing something which defies my knowledge of natural laws. According to him, it was science, but I couldn’t tell the difference. Now, when I say ‘end the world’, the question comes up, “How are you and I here then?” The answer to that is that I didn’t mean apocalyptic, I just meant such a significant change, that no one can say anything is the same. Like, imagine an ice age instead of a giant comet crashing into Earth. So that’s what happened, a scientist started an ice age, metaphorically of course.

                It was about a month ago, and I was walking downtown to get some donuts. I was listening to my iPod in an effort to avoid all the havoc around me, the occasional ramblings of crazy people strewn in the air like so much confetti, the usual hum of a city’s commerce, plus all the visual flotsam of men and women in suits trying to get somewhere warm like mice in a flood. I heard a woman, whom I had dismissed as being schizophrenic or on some terrible drug, singing, “In the city is a great biggening beast, be afraid for when it wakes from sleep.” I heard this because my iPod had stopped playing for some reason. Amid all the havoc I looked down at my iPod and accidentally bumped smack into a guy.

                I apologized profusely, though I could tell I had taken the worst of the hit, he had continued to look at the device he was looking at which I thought must be some new kind of phone. Ordinarily, I would not be prompted to ask questions, but something about the way he stood transfixed to that spot made me curious. It was in stark contrast with the bustling fluid animal of the downtown which surrounded him, and it seemed for a moment, as though he were a skyscraper and all else was a field of grass brushed by the wind. To be clear, it is not that he was an especially handsome man, or that he had any other grand physical characteristic, but that he was possessed of a unique amount of focus.

                I asked him what he was doing, and he answered me thusly: “I am looking for the heart of the city; I believe I have found it”. Slightly perplexed, I told him that the exact middle of the city was somewhere in the city hall, having discovered this fact some years prior on a class trip. “Ah, I see where you are mistaken, you misunderstand me. You see, I am not looking for the center of the city, I was looking for its heart, and I have found it.” At this point, I was too intrigued not to follow up. “It is relatively simple,” he said, still not looking up, “Just as you and I have a muscle which pumps blood through our bodies and keeps us alive, so do cities.” Not willing to believe such a ridiculous statement, I posited a few reasons why he was wrong. “I don’t see why it is so difficult to believe, after all, Rio de Janeiro feels different from San Francisco, which feels different than London, et cetera.” I agreed. “Would it be a stretch then to believe that these are different beings?” I remembered a few things I had read, from Shakespeare to Neil Gaiman, realized that I might see something amazing, and pressed him for more information. “The answer to your earlier questions, and the reason I am here, is that the cities of the Earth have been asleep, this is why they do not respond to us in any way we would understand, though we have felt their nightmares and recorded the deaths of more than a few of them, Carthage, Pompeii, Hiroshima. I and the people I work with are trying to wake them from their sleep, and what better way than to- move to the left please- shock them in the heart?”

Of the Simpsons, and why I'm conflicted about it

I am, like most Americans and many people around the world, a Simpsons fan. Have been for a long time. I am however , fully aware of the shift that the show seems to have taken from being edgy, cutting comedy to being rather wholesome fare. I was relatively sure of this feeling until last night when I saw this:



In case you couldn't tell, that was the opening couch gag for last night's episode. Dark, huh? Also, it was storyboarded and directed by Banksy, marking the first time that an outside artist has designed the couch gag.

This causes conflict for me largely because, I had just been having a conversation about how the Simpsons was no longer as daring as Family Guy, but also because the episode which followed it was still pretty non-outrageous fare.

Now, it's not that I don't like shows like the one last night, (Professor Frink's line about baseball only being understood by the Poin-dexterous was great), and I do like having my heart warmed occasionally by ep's like last season's "The Squirt and The Whale", but I find it hard to hold them in the same esteem as Family Guy, largely because the shock value that standalone jokes provide is missing. The Simpsons still puts out 26 new well-crafted episodes a year, which is an accomplishment, but maybe the show has failed to shift with society. Maybe The Simpsons becoming a global icon, meant that they couldn't shock us anymore, because now we have the sensibilities of their writing staff. The Simpsons is preaching to the choir, which sadly means that Family Guy is on it's way there too. Oh well, things could be worse, and I'll always remember lines like this one from Family Guy's season premiere:

Carl: So in the bear world, are pandas like your version of interracial children?
Bear: Yeah Pandas are something I don't agree with.
Carl: They're cute though right?
Bear: Just when they're babies.

On the difficulties of blogging

The longer I persist, against all reason, to blog, the more apparent certain things about me become. Things such as my fundamental laziness. You see, this post was going to be in list form, because everybody loves a good list, but me being genuinely distressed by the idea of having to reach the five inches from my laptop to my mouse, decided I should just go paragraph. Sadly, I also know the html tags for lists, but again, in an effort to avoid superfluous typing, (made all the more ridiculous by my use of words like "superfluous") I figured I'd stick with the basic structure. So here is a minor gripe session about why I blog, and what I've learned so far.

And now, for something entirely different

Well, not entirely different, but I figured I'd take a break from what is shaping up to be a post-heavy month, to mention a few basic things about myself and why I started blogging in the first place.

• My name is Leonnie Dickens, which you already know, I feel no need to hide my identity as this isn't a terribly personal blog anyway.
  
• I don't think I'm a very interesting person most of the time. Now, don't misunderstand that; I'm a very confident person, and I think of myself as being very smart and very funny, I just know that I tend to be very excited by things which most people don't comprehend/ care about.
  
• I am preparing to attend UC Berkeley in the Spring to obtain a B.A. in English (w/ a minor in linguistics). Before people ask, yes I plan to teach. Hopefully, I can pursue my Master's at Berkeley too.
  
• I wouldn't be pursuing this degree if I felt that being a writer was a viable career decision, but clearly it takes a lot of luck to get Dan Brown rich.
  
• I obviously like to write, mostly poetry because it has always come easier to me, but occasionally fiction, which may pop up here if I ever finish one of the 20 stories I've started in the last 6 months(sadly, that's not hyperbole, I have at least 20 stories at various stages of incompletion on my computer right now)
  
• I like getting critical feedback on my work, and I haven't found too many places for that to happen out there on the interwebs, so I decided to start a blog where I could post most of my pieces without dealing with the hit or miss internet poetry scene
  
• I seriously dislike what I have witnessed in the past year while looking for people to share my poetry with. I appear to be much less thin-skinned about my writing than other people, although I just think that criticism is necessary sometimes if you want to improve.
  

So that's a bit about me and mine, and I'm sure that I'll elaborate on many of these points as time goes on, but for now, I think that those will suffice to explain my motivations, as well as to give an idea of the writer behind the writing. Oh and because I know how tedious all this text looks...

Image via Wikipedia

Banksy, I am such a fan