Superimpose

He doesn't look like a gymnast.

He's all button down shirts and frazzled grey hair that frames wire spectacles and a professor down to the frayed tips of his shoes, but he was a gymnast once, or so he tells us, and I believe him because he smiles a lot while he's chatting before class.

_____________

This image has been in my head for a few days. I think it will make an interesting story.

But which story? A story of a gymnast that became a teacher, or a student who has to reconcile their image of said teacher? Probably the second one, so I can file it under non-fiction.

There are two people that have been extremely easy for me to write about; one was a college friend named Bill and the other one has been Minnick. I don't know what it is that makes me see a character in a real person - there are plenty of people in my life, past and present, that could have interesting stories. So what made these two stand out so much?

I don't really have any answers for that. I can draw comparisons between them, and they are alike in some ways, but it's not really enough.

I guess... they just have this sense of life about them. With Bill, it's a sort of potential - he's going places. He'll have stories to tell one day. And with Minnick, it's the other way around - he's been places. He already has lots of stories to tell. And I just love writing about them, or at least my impressions of them.

But I've run off topic - I was trying to make a point about how at odds this notion is one of my professors having been a gymnast. I can kinda see it, but not quite. The man just looks every inch the archetype of what a college professor is supposed to look like. If I had never met him before and was shown a picture and told to guess what he does for a living, my first instinct would be "English Professor."

He's told us in the past that he once worked in a steel mill and for some reason that image never resonated as strongly. Maybe because that was a job and being a gymnast wasn't. I don't know.

Sheesh I'm rambly tonight XD

Characters are Difficult Things

I usually know what I'm doing with my writing. I have a general idea of where things are going to go, or at least what I want to accomplish. I'm not used to writing blind.

So these three pieces are proving very interesting. It's not often my characters write themselves for me. It's kinda nice not to have to do so much work, but I'm not entirely sure I like not knowing what's going to happen.

If the subject material were different, I'd probably just cut loose and have fun with it. But since I'm handling a more delicate subject matter, I can't not think about it. While I've written relationships plenty of times, it's never been... deliberate? Autonomous? I'm not sure what the word I need is. The point is, when I've written other relationships, even if I didn't know everything about the relationship, I knew enough. I knew what I wanted to communicate by writing it. This - this is out of my league. This is carefully constructing a relationship from the ground up, something I've never done before. And it has to be even more careful than usual due to the roles the characters have been cast in.

It's not like student/ teacher relationships don't have a long history (everyone knows about Merlin and Nimue right?), but it's a dodgy subject at best, even if only writing nothing more that friendship which is what I would like to do, but I've a terrible feeling these characters won't let it end there and I'll have to kill one of them in a car accident to keep it from going in that direction.

I'm going to keep writing them of course, but, again, I have no idea where this is going. I know where I would like it to go, but I'm only a backseat driver on this road trip. I can only hope I don't end up in an abandoned gas station run by a cannibal 150 miles away from nowhere.

Story Ideas

 I'm going to try and start using Twitter for real this time. Linked if you're interested I guess, though I don't expect anyone is XD Mostly I'm interested in trying to keep up with literature things.

I said I wanted to try to get all my story ideas in one place and I meant it. /determined.


1. An internet personality quiz with the ability to fundamentally change who you are. (MorríguTests)

 This is how the quiz will start:

"Welcome to the MorríguTests Personality Quiz. This quiz is designed to accurately measure your good and bad qualities, strenghts and weaknesses, likes and dislikes.  ALL results will be 100% accurate. Attempting to lie, cheat, or otherwise manipulate this quiz is highly discouraged.


YOU MAY ONLY TAKE THIS QUIZ ONCE."

I've been rolling this one for a while, but I can't get it to do what I want. Best to let it work itself out, however long that takes. If I ever do manage to get it off the ground though, I'd like to make a trilogy of sorts - have the same company release two more quizzes concerning when/how you will die, and a relationship quiz.

2. There are a few one-liners and prompts given to me by various people and random ideas from nights when I couldn't sleep floating around:

• A sentient door.
•  The life and times of a Professional Muse.
• The delay between lightning and thunder.
• Glass Delusion
• That ballet shoe poem I talked about a few days back. 
• Matadors. Matadors are cool.
• Re-use the characters from Seafoam and Ash.

 3. All the things I'd like to use in my Technical Romance series:

• Biology
• Botany 
• Business
• Chemistry
• Communications
• Decision (Game) Theory
• Genetics
• Geology
• Linguistics
• Mechanics 
• Physics
• Robotics
• Transportation

 4. There are several Fragments I'd like to expand at some point. May as well get them in one place too:

• I wanted to hold the thunder in glass jars and write long letters on faded parchment; instead I applied to retail stores to fuel my obsessions for the easily consumed and quickly forgotten. 

• It's not that he was complaining or anything, but if she pressed her mouth any harder to his, he was going to suffocate.

• The black umbrella was classy, but soulless – I much preferred the red one we shared.

• I've got a wealth of memories stored away but none of them ever compare to the real thing and people are so still in photographs, even people like you, people that naturally transmit their personality to film like it's second nature, a talent you could develop if you just keep practicing. You smile like nothing matters but the moment and that's what I love most about you.

• He didn't leave a note – there were no words. Only a permit receipt for a .22 pistol.

• There are one thousand, eight hundred and sixty steps from the street level to the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building. It took only one to get back to street level.

• I mailed you a box of seafoam so you could hear the ocean, but it leaked out the sides like the blood from your mouth as the ambulance carried you away from me.

• The snow crunched under their feet, soft and powdery. "I honestly believe," he scraped snow off the tree branches into the empty mug he was carrying. There was a gentle undercurrent of wistfulness to his voice that she'd never heard before. "That I can make the world a better place."

• I drove among the golden plains teeming with buffalo and pulled over to examine the wheat, to discover if it was as soft as it looked. I drove through the rain of the Pacific Northwest and inhaled the scent of pine, stopping only long enough to try the midnight diners and chat with the waitresses. I drove parallel to the sidewalk jungle of New York City, jumping in and out of pools of light and I passed by the entirety of humanity and still you weren't there.

 There are probably even more floating around in my various notebooks and files XD

I'm amazed some days that I get anything done.

Buy Your Own Shirt

I've been on a Irish/ Celtic music kick all day. This doesn't happen as often as it used to XD

I have a considerable collection in my iTunes library, though finding more has been rather difficult. I'm not sure what the count is off the top of my head, but I'd guess I have somewhere around 200 Irish/Celtic songs. [EDIT] - 158 in fact.

People generally have two reactions when I tell them about my taste in music:

1. "ME TOO!" :DDD
2. "Eh?"

For the most part, I prefer instrumental pieces:

 

 (This was my favorite song for... quite a while actually. At least year.)

But I've been building a greater appreciation for songs with actual lyrics in the past few years. And there are even some more modern bands I've come to love:

I dunno; I've always found something really appealing in how ancient and timeless Celtic music sounds. I enjoy the more modern stuff too, but it just doesn't evoke the same imagery of castles half hidden in the fog and acres of green as far as you can see. There's something tribal and evokative in the atmosphere it creates for me.

Which doesn't really segue into the story idea I've had floating around, but it's close enough.

Everyone always thinks of the Simon & Garfunkel song, but Scarborough Fair has very old roots, dating back to at least the 1600's, if not even earlier. And to be honest, the S&G version is one of my least favorites :/ The original version has possible connections to a Child Ballad called The Elfin Knight (Child #2) and was likely meant to be sung as a duet - most are familiar with the three tasks the man sets in his verses, but there are versions in which the woman answers back with three taks of her own. That's what I'm interested in.

I have seen a novel length version called Impossible by Nancy Werlin, but while it did have it's moments, I didn't care for the story as a whole. The idea of incorporating a family curse was a neat one and gave the plot a sense of urgency (no spoilers there; it's all on the back cover), but I could have seen it going in an entirely different direction. Honestly, a curse seems kinda unnecessary.

The tasks:

1. Make a cambric shirt without using any needle work.
2. Wash it in yonder well, where never spring water or rain ever fell.
3. Dry it on yonder thorn which never bore blossom since Adam was born.

The response:

1. Buy an acre of land between the salt water and the sea strand.
2. Plot it with a ram horn and sow with one peppercorn.
3. Shear it with a sickle of leather and bind it up with a peacock feather.
4. Thrash it on yonder wall and never let one corn of it fall.

THEN he can have his cambric shirt.

Maybe it's me, but I have a rather hilarious image of a fantastic love/ hate relationship between these two XD I like the idea of proving your love with small tasks and having them get bigger and bigger and more and more impossible and doing them all anyway while the other party foams at the mouth with rage.

A Dangerous Sense of Aesthetics

I should try having a productive day sometime. I still haven't gone through all of my papers like I keep telling myself to, or made much a dent in my reading list like I know I need to, or written much new stuff like I keep telling everyone else I'm going to.

So I'll ramble about this poem I've been working on and off of with for a few months now. The prompt: describe a pair of shoes in such a way to evoke thoughts of death. I'm not necessarily committed to keeping 100% to the prompt, but I think it's a good prompt. I decided to try it with a pair of ballet shoes. I have a sort of idea of what I'd like to accomplish, but can't really make anything work. In the process of trying to write though, I've learned quite a lot about ballet and ballet shoes because I can be rather gung ho about technical accuracy.

There's a specific type of ballet shoe called pointe shoes - the type of shoes that allow a dancer to do that fancy move on their toes (en pointe). Pointe training cannot begin until at least 12 years old - the 26 bones of the feet do not fully ossify until 20 to 30 years of age - and the early years of pointe training are crucial.

Shoes are typically made of either satin (only worn for performance), canvas, or leather. Parts incude the box, shank, and ribbons; the box supports the toes while the shank takes care of the arch. The ribbons used to secure the shoe in place do not come attached - the dancer must sew them on herself after determining optimal placement on her own feet. A pair of pointe shoes will last for about 10-20 hours of wear - for professional dancers, a new pair can wear out in a single performance. Ballet companies often provide shoe allowances for their students.

That's a decent background, but what got me interested was actually learning about ballet life; there's a standard of beauty in the ballet industry called the Balanchine body, the ideal form a dancer is supposed to have. The Balanchine body is tall, slender, long, narrow neck and legs, short torso, small breasts, narrow hips, and little to no fat deposits. The desired type is traced back to George Balanchine who wanted to "see the bones" of his dancers.

The body type occurs in about 1% of the population naturally and is the cause of many an eating disorder in the ballet world. The average incidence of eating disorders in white, middle aged women is about 1 in 100. In ballet dancers, it's about 1 in 5.Personally, I'd save time trying to get such a streamlined body by just lying down in front of a steamroller.

Additionally, because peak dancing years occur in young adults, most dancers aiming for a professional career do not attend any sort of higher education - the pressure to keep such an unnatural figure is now tied to thier livelihood. A dancer that gains weight or becomes injured is a dancer out of work. Ballet companies are known to have "appearance clauses" in their contracts and ballet directors often percieve the amount of weight a dancer loses as a sign of dedication to the craft. The standard applies to all dancers, even as young as eleven.

Male dancers do have similar issues, but nowhere close to anything described above, mainly due to a shortage of male dancers everywhere. They have no weight or appearance requirements - by and large, ballet companies take what they can get with men. Female dancers cope with, or, if they've been raised into ballet, become accustomed to harsh criticism, competition, and accept being up to 15% underweight as normal.

In short, "Black Swan" is a documentary.

My obvious route is to use a pair of pointe shoes and somehow constuct a poem to imply the dancer who wore them died of malnourishment and starvation. If I wanted to go really depressing, I could imply it was a very young dancer at that. I can't figure out for the life of me how to get that to paper though :/ Ballet has a lot of potential for fantastic imagery (swans, ribbons, stagelights, empty theater seats, etc.) so I really do love the idea and don't want to toss it out until I've throughly exhausted myself with it.

Mimesis

mi·me·sis

 [mi-mee-sis, mahy-]

noun

1.

Rhetoric . imitation or reproduction of the supposed words of another, as in order to represent his or her character.

Put another (simpler) way, mimesis is all about art's imitation of life. Why am I giving you this definition? Because story ideas :D

I was purging my files, something I try to do before the beginning of every new semester and came across a note I had written to myself concerning the dichotomy of the actor and character in theater. Said note must have been written in a hurry, because that's all I can read of it, but I'm sure it was an interesting idea. Somewhere off to the side, I had "Hamlet" in quotation marks. I did write a paper on the metatheatrical nataure of Hamlet two semesters ago, which is likely where that came from and the tangent sent me back to the word "mimesis," which I think is a fantastic word <3 

I no longer recall what my original intent was, but thinking upon it, I have two guesses for what I could do with this: one, I could use the scene with the Players. Two, "The Murder of Gonzago." Both scenes are interesting on a metatheatrical level to me.

The strength of the first scene must come from the actors – the First Player must be astoundingly good if the audience is going to be able to take Hamlet’s following soliloquy seriously. The actor cast into the position of the First Player has a twofold role on two different levels: to impress Hamlet (in the theater level) and to make his reaction believable to the audience (the “real” level). This duality of character and actor can only exist upon the stage, where the world is not self contained. Unlike film, whose principal purpose is to create a world independent of the actors, the stage cannot escape its players.

Meanwhile, in "The Murder of Gonzago" we see another version of Hamlet within Hamlet (insert your own Inception joke here). In this scene, Hamlet has chosen to weaponize mimesis and in the process comment upon the power of drama. The fourth wall between the audience and actors, given the right production, can be very nearly or even completely dissolved by "The Murder of Gonzago;" as spectators to both plays, we become, in essence, part of the theatrical production.  We are even well rehearsed actors – even infrequent visitors to drama understand theater etiquette. 

I like the idea of writing a short story in which the audience becomes part of the production. Or rather, the entire audience is part of it, but one attendant gets really into character. Maybe I'm just a total nerd, but I find the concept fascinating <3

 Hee.