Any moronic or odd thing you want to do if you’re an aspiring writer, you can chalk up to “gathering material.”
Archive for 2010
Best Excuse Ever
October 19, 2010Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark!
October 15, 2010
When I was a child, I had a three-book set of scary stories based on folklore. The books were compiled and written by a man named Alvin Schwartz. I haven’t met anyone else who had these books but I remember being completely chilled by their contents. Here is one story:
Cold As Clay
A farmer had a daughter for whom he cared more than anything on earth. She fell in love with a farmhand named Jim, but the farmer did not think Jim was good enough for his daughter. To keep them apart, he sent her to live with her uncle on the other side of the country.
Soon after she left, Jim got sick, and he wasted away and died. Everyone said he died of a broken heart. The farmer felt so guilty about Jim’s death, he could not tell his daughter had happened. She continued to think of Jim and the life they may have had together.
One night many weeks later there was a knock on her uncle’s door. When the girl opened it, Jim was standing there.
“Your father asked me to get you,” he said. “I came on his best horse.”
“Is there anything wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She packed a few things, and they left. She rode behind him, clinging to his waist. Soon he complained of a headache. “It aches something terrible,” he told her.
She put her hand on his forehead. “Why, you are as cold as clay,” she said. “I hope you are not ill,” and she wrapped her handkerchief around his head.
They traveled so swiftly that in a few hours they reached the farm. The girl quickly dismounted and knocked on the door. Her father was startled to see her.
“Didn’t you send for me?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
She turned to Jim, but he was gone and so was the horse. They went to the stable to look for them. The horse was there. It was covered with sweat and trembling with fear. But there was no sign of Jim.
Terrified, the father told her the truth about Jim’s death. Then quickly he went to see Jim’s parents. They decided to open his grave. The corpse was in its coffin. But around its head was the girl’s handkerchief.
Oooooo! Scary!
The highlight of this collection was definitely the illustrations by Stephen Gammell, though. See a few choice examples below:
Nice puppy.
When I downloaded this last one its eyes started moving and I screamed aloud in my room, prompting two of my roommates and my roommate’s boyfriend to think I’m crazier than they already knew I was!
UPDATE: AHHHH IT’S STILL DOING IT! I’M NOT NEARLY TECHNOLOGICALLY SAVVY ENOUGH TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN ON MY OWN SO I’M ASSUMING IT’S THIS WEIRD OVERGROWN BABY WITH STRINGY HAIR COME TO LIFE IN THIS FUCKING CREEPY ASS IMAGE!
Craigslist Poetry
October 14, 2010So I’ve been posting ads for a company on Craigslist and have compiled some of the security words they ask you to type in an attempt to collage a poem. It’s mostly nonsense, though. I kind of liked it better when it just sounded absurd, like, “make-up divorcing.”
Gibberish
(srog nosized
great bipanday
already onstora
you’re oticard
such hoading
speech fiticer
offiran matist
occafion unchirty
allound fahll
mallible (when
168 bustcat
aruire you’ll
because wooress
telers face.
ablinke reached
coffeecup stilist
Aquila lederred
commission corilk
the lorabs
English Only
Great already, you’re such speech, you’ll because face.
Reached coffee-cup commission.
Translation
ID has too much time on her hands.
Neologism!
October 14, 2010So I’m writing these silly e-articles that are lists of pop culture oddities, you know, like “15 of the Worst Celebrity Parents!” or “15 Most Baffling Unsolved Crimes!” And I think this genre, the list and the article, should be called a LISTICLE! (Also great cause it sounds like “popsicle,” and popsicles are delicious.
Follow Up To Le Petit Prince Tattoos
October 6, 2010Last Night
October 3, 2010A beauty mark drawn on by an eyeliner pencil way up on my left cheekbone, a friend’s tall, slim, Scandinavian girlfriend who has forgotten me, a glamorous, bustling, seventies-style event, something annual, a group and celebration I vaguely remember once feeling a part of but distinctly do not now.
Poto and Cabengo
October 3, 2010
Poto and Cabengo, otherwise known as Virginia and Grace Kennedy.
Somebody please find me the documentary Poto and Cabengo, twins with idioglossia, directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin! Or pay for me to go see it in Chicago at the Block Museum at 7 PM on November 17.
Revivals and Rediscoveries
| Date | Film | Time |
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| 10/29 | Demon Lover Diary | 7 pm |
| 11/17 | Poto and Cabengo | 7 pm |
In a new ongoing series, Block Cinema will screen rare and often hard-to-see American and international films—from revered classics to obscure curiosities—that deserve a second look. This Fall’s offerings include two landmark documentaries from the same year, 1980, which offer hilarious and fascinating portraits of odd pairs, including Poto and Cabengo, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s legendary study of 6 year old twins who become a media sensation after supposedly creating their own language, and Demon Lover Diary, Joel DeMott’s side-splitting, jaw-dropping portrait of Don and Jerry, two Midwestern factory workers who set out to fulfill their lifelong dream of making a low-budget horror film.
Wednesday, November 17, 7 pm
Poto and Cabengo
Co-Presented by White Light Cinema
(Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1980, US, HDCam video, 76 min.)
After his 1970s collaborative films with Jean-Luc Godard (Tout Va Bien, Letter to Jane), filmmaker and intellectual Jean-Pierre Gorin left France to teach at UC San Diego. Primarily a professor and writer, his filmmaking has been sparse, but his “Southern California Trilogy” documentaries have been recognized as classics in the genre. The first of those films, the remarkable Poto and Cabengo, interweaves the lives of two six year-old identical twin girls who seem to have developed their own private language, and Gorin’s own personal reflections on his adopted country. The result moves beyond the specific to illuminate just what it means to be human. New digital restoration from Janus Films.
DIY Home Decorating
September 29, 2010“When Kip called them, they walked out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stone balustrade, was ringed with light.
“It looked to Caravaggio like a string of small electric candles found in dusty churches, and he thought the sapper had gone too far in removing them from a chapel, even for Hana’s birthday. Hana walked slowly forward with her hands over her face. There was no wind. Her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if it were thin water. Her tennis shoes silent on the stone.
“‘I kept finding dead shells wherever I was digging,’ the sapper said.
“They still didn’t understand. Caravaggio bent over the flutter of lights. They were snail shells filled with oil. He looked along the row of them; there must have been about forty.
“‘Forty-five,’ Kip said, ‘the years so far of this century. Where I come from, we celebrate the age as well as ourselves.’
“Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as if she had put her arms away for the night, now in simple armless movement.
“Caravaggio was diverted by the startling presence of three bottles of red wine on the table. He walked over and read the labels and shook his head, amazed. He knew the sapper wouldn’t drink any of it. All three had already been opened. Kip must have picked his way through some etiquette book in the library. Then he saw the corn and the meat and the potatoes. Hana slid her arm into Kip’s and came with him to the table.
“They ate and drank, the unexpected thickness of the wine like meat on their tongues. They were soon turning silly in their toasts to the sapper –– ‘the great forager’ –– and to the English patient. They toasted each other, Kip joining in with his beaker of water. This was when he began to talk about himself. Caravaggio pressing him on, not always listening, sometimes standing up and walking around the table, pacing and pacing with pleasure at all this. He wanted these two married, longed to force them verbally towards it, but they seemed to have their own strange rules about their relationship. What was he doing in this role. He sat down again. Now and then he noticed the death of a light. The snail shells held only so much oil. Kip would rise and refill them with pink paraffin.
“‘We must keep them lit till midnight.'”
~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Insomnia, Part Three
September 28, 2010I’ve been staying up later and later into the night to read, into the wee-er, smaller hours, and since I’m down visiting my boyfriend in the nation’s capital and he needs to sleep so he can act like a normal person in the morning, I’m forced to use a little flashlight to get my fix, and the whole reading thing is supposed to help me sleep but it makes me feel so deliciously naughty, like a fairy tale little-me reading Roald Dahl fully aware I should be snoozing by then, but I can’t possibly shut the book now…
Word of the Day!
September 22, 2010Irrumator –– Latin, noun –– a man who forces another man to perform oral sex on him
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