Crewcut (Ellen Umansky)

Here is one of Playboy magazine's college fiction contest winners with a story from the October 1991 edition:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?dggu2ik7wsulvsx

Were I a fiction editor putting together an anthology of contemporary stories, I'd consider "Crewcut" in a heartbeat. References to the story on the web are scarce, so I uploaded my copy of it in PDF format. Umansky gets inside the head of the young female character, who is dealing with family dysfunction while discovering her own identity.

I have had the story in my files for close to twenty years now. I remember the hassle I went through to photocopy the story at the SUNY Binghamton library, brown-paper bagging the cover of the magazine, struggling to get the job done quickly. I'm glad I did.

I lived off campus that semester. This was one of magazines the guys had lying around the living room. One day I got bored and wondered if the actual words in Playboy were any good; sure enough, every now and then, they strike gold, as is the case here. I hope you enjoy the story as much as I did. Happy December!

Like the Scribes of Old, We Wrote

Though only a small percentage of Earth's population had George Kleinmeier as an elementary school principal, I feel compelled to share the punishment assignment that the bad children received in detention if they got caught having a food fight in the cafeteria.

First, some background. Mr. Kleinmeier, an old-school patriot and formerly an English teacher, had traditional ideas about teaching. In order to get us schooled in writing mechanics, he had every student write verbatim something called The Agenda, which explained "the parts of speech, the basic tools of communication." Each of us would write the whole thing down, in fourth grade, then in the fifth and sixth grades - three times, so not to forget. When the weather was warm, he'd take us out in groups in the morning to do jumping jacks, sit ups, and run around the track. Gym wasn't enough. He counted on his loudspeaker, and we hopped to action by our desks.

The bad kids who went to detention got a little something extra. Here is the text:

I AM THE NATION 

I was born July 4, 1776, and The Declaration of Independence is my birth certificate. The blood of the world runs in my veins, because I offer freedom to the oppressed. I am the nation.

I am 250 million living souls and the ghosts of millions more who have lived, fought and died for me.

I am Nathan Hale and Paul Revere. I stood at Lexington and fired the shot heard around the world. I am Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry. I am John Paul Jones, the Green Mountain Boys and Davy Crockett. I am Lee, Grant and Lincoln.

I remember the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor. When freedom called, I answered and stayed until it was over, over there. I left my heroic dead in Flanders Fields, the rock of Corregidor, on the bleak slopes of Korea, in the steaming jungle of Vietnam and the desert sands of Kuwait.

I am the Brooklyn Bridge, the wheat lands of Kansas, the granite hills of Vermont. I am the coal mines of the Virginias and Pennsylvania, the fertile lands of the West, the Golden Gate and Grand Canyon. I am Independence Hall, the Monitor, the Merrimack and the Challenger.

I am big. I sprawl from the Atlantic to the Pacific... more than three million square miles of land throbbing with industry, more than two million farms. I am forest, field, mountain and desert. I am quiet villages, cities that never sleep. 

Look at me; see Ben Franklin walking down the streets of Philadelphia with his bread loaf under his arm; see Betsy Ross with her needle; see the lights of Christmas and hear the strains of "Auld Lang Syne" as the calendar turns. 

I am Babe Ruth and the World Series. I am 200,000 schools, colleges and more than 300,000 churches where my people worship God as they choose. I am a ballot dropped into a box, the roar of a crowd in a stadium, the voice of a choir in a cathedral. I am an editorial in a newspaper and a letter to Congress.

I am John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and their fellow astronauts who whirl through space. I am Eli Whitney, Stephen Foster, Tom Edison, Albert Einstein and Billy Graham.

I am Horace Greeley, Will Rodgers, the Wright brothers. I am George Washington Carver, Jonas Salk and Martin Luther King, Jr. I am Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and Thomas Paine.

May I always possess the integrity, courage and strength to keep myself unshackled, to remain a citadel of freedom and a beacon of hope to the world.  

Yes, I am the nation. These are the things that I am. I was conceived in freedom, and God willing, in freedom I shall spend the rest of my days.

It's equal parts historical reminiscence and flag-waving - not a bad sort of thing on account of its emphasis on freedom and democracy, but still, it has that distinct ring of patriotism. Seeking to reclaim my own history, since I was among those who had to write it verbatim in detention, I began an Internet search for the text. The author is Otto Whittaker.

So much writing gets lost in time. If it weren't for the medieval monks writing down verbatim the Greek and Roman classics, we wouldn't have those to read. In a similar way, Mr. Kleinmeier kept this piece of Americana alive in my memory. Writing of this sort preserves the ethos of a generation, which in the present day gives us the ability to evaluate what matters to us most. As an example, let me share an old Etruscan temple inscription from the 5th century B.C., unearthed by Massimo Pallottino in 1964:

DEDICATION AT PYRGI 

This temple and this statue
have been dedicated to Uni.
Thefarie Velianas, head of the community,
donated it for the worship of our peoples.
The temple and sanctuary
and the consecration of their boundaries
in the month of Xurvar, were given
as gifts during his three-year reign.
This record together with the divinity statue
shall thus be buried by order of the Zilach,
that the years may outlast the stars.

We'll never know Thefarie Velianas, Uni, the month of Xurvar, or the Zilach any much more than as names on the inscription, but we do know at least that they were a proud people, eager to be remembered by ensuing generations. Nothing outlasts the stars, not even us, but hopefully we'll go on with the best we've got.

The Ever-Expanding List

Here is a list of books I'd like to read, with links to the Kindle edition or the Amazon marketplace, depending on availability. I can read books on my cell phone through the Kindle app, but for most of these I'll either wait until I get a Kindle reader for Christmas or head over to the library. Right now I'm reading The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross on my phone. Because the amount of text on each page is small, the book has around 14,000 pages. I'm halfway there.

I've heard in order to write well, one should read well. By that standard, I'm in a world of hurt. I usually read fiction at a horrendously slow pace. I made sure to list shorter fiction in a separate category from longer works, and put non-fiction material at the very top of the list. Learning new things about the real world is a big bonus for me. No poems here: I'm focusing on books with paragraphs to widen my reading horizon, or at least lengthen my attention span.

Non-Fiction/History/Science 

Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddharta Mukherjee
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare
The Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux
NurtureShock by Bronson and Merryman
Brain Rules by John Medina
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini and Lannon
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer
The Beekeeper's Lament by Hannah Nordhaus
Biophilia by Edward Wilson
Bonk by Mary Roach
Four Fish by Paul Greenberg
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
Freakonomics by Leavitt and Dubner
The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons
The Information by James Gleick
The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Written in Stone by Brian Switek
Lost to the West Lars Brownworth
1491 by Charles C. Mann
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Shorter Fiction (mainly ~250 pgs. or less) 

Post Office by Charles Bukowski
The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley
The Mammy by Brendan O'Carroll
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice
Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter
The Tent by Margaret Atwood
Stories by Anton Chekhov
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn
The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Candide by Voltaire
The Wild Geese by Ogai Mori
Hunger by Knut Hamsun 

Literature & Science Fiction 

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Max Havelaar by Multatuli
The Metamorphoses by Ovid - tr. Horace Gregory
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
The Children of Húrin by J.R.R.Tolkien
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Fourth Awakening by Pennington and Martin
Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Some of the Kindle titles listed above are free, and some cheap. Most are either $9.99 or $11.99. I have a bunch of the free titles on my phone already. This e-book idea might be a good thing for me. I need to give some of the paper books in my collection away, so I have room to walk around.

The Semantics of Nonsense

I have so far used three ways to create poetic nonsense, through imagination, mangled translation, and crafty manipulation of speech recognition software. I can't say which is more fun.

I. Imagination
This piece is like an ancient creed,  its rhetoric quite noble -

The Code of Sirinthia 

The notion that by still grace we are made holy,
     is like kneading liquid turnips without butter.
Correct ungodly mayhem in steadfast devotion to cheese.
Knowest thy mercy leadeth all righteous manner
    of tumescence into the word inviolate,
    of spoons making chordless cheddar sounds through a tuba,
    of live piquant tamarinds in fish sauce painting mangoes,
    of dew-riddled salamanders speaking prickly lawnmower slang.
We, who sit in majesty, waken joyously
    to the reincarnation of rutabagas
    and recall the blows of those
    who never ceased to call, ever mightily,
    upon the liver of penguins.
By right conduct we uphold the breakfast meetings once held
    by the mighty sleepwalker kings,
    as the plundered princesses
    carry the grand makeshift cycle
    of the psychic pimple to a head.

Here is an example of crafting the utterly ridiculous without the aid of electronic software. The poem's inspiration was a friend of mine, who was asked what he believed in. His reply: "I'm a Sirinthian. We believe in the reincarnation of rutabagas." Soon after I crafted this to codify the tenets of said belief system. I posted it a few years back on craiglist, of all places, and got very useful feedback. A gentlemen suggested using the word uphold in lieu of behold, because it makes more sense semantically. I took the advice and learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes you need to make sense in order to be demented.

II. Mangled Translation

This is a piece inspired by a friend who suggested taking lyrics and running them back and forth through an online translator called Babel Fish -

Babel Fish Translation of Stairway to Heaven

German to Spanish to Russian to English (Edited) 

Sure, the lady has one! First she has reliably everything:

the sparks of gold and the purchase of stairs to the sky.

If purpose holds it there, if entire memory with the word is closed,

she stops and obtains that it has arrived.

And the stairs, she buys them to the sky.

It gives the instruction on the wall, but she wanted to be safe,

because sometimes words, they have two reasons.

In the shaft next to the flow, which the bird gives,

will be all our misgiven thought.

            Sometimes, form is a miracle. Oh, form, it is a miracle.

It gives sensation, which is received if I glance to the West

and my alcoholic stupor, which is necessary to go away into smoke rings,

is made longer by the jaunty ego of thought than by the shafts in question.

Form expresses miracles. Oh, form, it is a miracle.

And it is whispered that soon, if we all conduct the melody,

the Piper will order that we conclude.

There will be a new day for dawn,

against which they who desire resound,

and the forest will have an uproar of laughter.

If it is precipitated in the hedgerow,

what is alarming you now will require pliability

when the May queen sufficiently completes her job.

Yes, two clean roads, which can be exchanged

for the changing road they set on fire.

And it gives formation to the miracle.

When your head snores, you do not know

that the Piper is connecting to it.

Lady, can you hear the wind burn, and did you know

the stairs to your bed are whispering in wind?

Then as our road coils downward,

the curtains go more above our souls.

We give one lady we entirely know

the chance to show, in her white light intensity,

that everything returns to gold.

And if you pay strong attention,

the melody will finally arrive.

When one and one is everything

then by rock and by roller…

… you will not purchase stairs to the sky.

I actually did more than the title suggests, using the translator to put it from English to German to English to Spanish to English to Russian to English. Each time the words became more and more removed from the original, so that "a tree by the brook" became "the shaft next to the flow," etc. I like how the translation added the word not to the last line. Of course I then edited the end result some. Try your own song. It's actually a fun thing to do with friends! 

The overall resulting mess needed heavy editing to achieve a rhetorical effect. Just as with the poem before, the writer needs to consider the piece as a whole and how the words lead up to one another - semantically. So long as the work possesses some form of internal logic, an audience has a greater chance of appreciating the inanity.

III. Manipulating Speech Recognition Software (and Xtranormal)

I was pleased Windows 7 comes with speech recognition software, but irritated that it doesn't understand what I say as often as I like. I turned the whole thing into a game, shouting nonsense into the program, watching 60 % get misunderstood, and editing the end result. I then took the text and ran it through the Xtranormal Movie Maker and had a robot narrate. Here it is on YouTube -

It's all about the delivery. I think the robot does a nice job, plus it helps that I added special effects at key moments. Certain phrases get repeated. Repetition is a useful poetic device. Here the repetition emphasizes the deeply meaningful idea that St. Stephen is not the rain. I think that about sums it up.

Daily Office

You made it. Thanks.