On facebook, Laura Ellen Scott says, “Interesting novels have stuff in them.” She suggests that rather than advertising our texts with formal reviews, we make lists of the stuff inside them. So here’s your activity for the day: In the comment thread, let’s make stuff lists. Could be your own book, could be one you really like. Then maybe when we’re done we can like, I don’t know, come up with something to do with all that stuff.
I guess I should start us off or something, right?
Okay, here is some stuff from a recent project of mine:
sequins
stuffed animals
feces
starched dresses from Talbot’s hanging in dry cleaner’s plastic
sled dogs
movie theaters
children’s torture games
erections
anal retention
public restrooms
middle schoolers
field trips
houses and cars
OK… have at it!
Okay, I’ll play:
magic bubble gum
tall people
short people
singing
fire
flatulence
Hmmm….interesting.
Love it. From my current project:
Puppets
Rare white rhinos
A Biplane
The 1919 White Sox
Whiskey
Wilt Chamberlain
A gold-plated tie pin
I’m also a big fan of Microsoft Word’s Autosummarize feature. Here’s a taste of what my novel in progress (43,000 words) looks like when compressed to a few sentences:
Clara asks. Clara focuses her attention on Nia Patterson. “Nia?”
Nia looks up with pleading eyes.
Nia’s eyes turn from water to ice. “Nia?” Clara prods. Nia mumbles something, crosses her left leg over her right. “I don’t know,” Nia says. This surprises Clara. Clara prefers it in many ways. Sometimes Clara feels like nothing changes.
Linda shakes her head. Clara nods, watches the fresh coffee drip into the pot slowly, so slowly.
hehe this is a fun activity.
the novel i’m working on:
kidney stones
pearls
bloodied eggs
incestuous sisters
adolescent queer obsession
mother-ghost
hysteria at the grocery store
my chapbook c. exigua:
wandering tongues (literally)
the ocean
the chicago kiss (open mouth kiss without tongues, contrasted with french kiss)
mass waves of public vomiting
sarcastic redemptive hetero narrative
childhood female friendship
color hallucinations
head injury
orality
the video poem that’s taken me a year to get going on the soundtrack part:
shadows
walking
short-wave radio
overheard conversations
urban experience
winter
whenever i write anything, i always start with a list of generative signifiers, or a scrapbook. here’s the scrapbook for my book in progress:
http://esotikafilm.com/internet/HOTEL/
electric birds
tuna casserole
trombone
jelly tears
mason jar
pirate costume
comet
pheromones
doorknobs
bear mittens
http://www.mudlusciouspress.com/nephew
from two new poems:
gravestones
collarbones
fountains of bleach
chicken thighs
labial scales
starfish arms
neutral spooning
face-holes
burnt steak
sad sad veal
rolls of twenty dollar bills covered in lotion
laces and straps
tilapia
and more than one flock of sheep
These lists are so fun! Here’s some stuff from the first few pages of my upcoming book:
an asphyxant
vacuum chambers
interstellar space
an extremely dangerous but aromatic book
electronic adolescence
a nodule of unrepentant significance
the “æsthetic space age” of the dead
Writing this while food-poisoned, weeee…
Novel I wrote:
Sappho and Aphrodite as illegal Turkish girls in Europe 2007
Manic postcards from detention center in Europe addressed to women of Sappho’s poetry
Foreign-girl-ness of Audrey Hepburn, esp. in Roman Holiday
Discothèques
Fake German passports
Justin Timberlake’s Futuresex/Lovesounds album
August 2007 issue of Vogue Paris with Claudia Schiffer on the cover + interview with Carla Bruni (just before Sarkozy)
Luxury hotels
Voracious eating, constipation
Shopping-terror at H&M
Prostitutes and hotel maids
Ovid’s Tristia, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty +++
English and German grammar/idiom guides
French translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Caryatids
Ominous architecture
Food poisoning
Race riot
Book of poems I’m writing:
Bad translation of Voltaire’s Candide
Candida, the internal and rhizomatic fungal infection
Mail-order brides
Sex slave camps
Sugar
Tortured monsters in Greek myth
Masturbating in Versailles
A cover of Hirata Toshiko’s poem “A Woman’s Life”
Disappearance of Anna Lee Skarin of the Latter Day Saints
Washing one’s face with menstrual-bloodied panties to ensure a lifetime of perfect skin
How a homeless woman in Paris spit on me, then called me dirty, when I tried to give her a meringue
Bad guest as revolutionary figure
Radical refusal of sacrifice in Sailormoon
Anti-palinode
Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody”
Nicki Minaj’s “Blazin’”
Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On”
Let me say first, the list of stuff in Laura’s forthcoming novel sounds really great. I won’t attempt it, but hopes she posts about the dying wishes.
From my forthcoming novel, The Snow Whale:
Office cubes and desk doodles.
Past lives and ballroom dancing.
The oldest continuously settled town in North America.
The eating of raw bacon.
A Russian sub.
A top secret Navy sonar station.
A bowhead whale migration.
Global warming.
A DNA ancestry test.
A Bennigan’s.
An Inupiat chief with a glass eye and a grudge.
A seventeen-year-old aspiring filmmaker.
A white whale.
A dream sequence.
An REI.
A last line copped from Chekhov.
Atticus Books – July 2011.
corsets
capes
rats
wish phantoms
wine
elvis
the wrong elvis
clouds
song bison
coffee
the blues
Donna D. V.
Death Wishing/Ig Publishing/ Oct 2011
Stuff my short story chap-mansuscript, six stories:
kiwis (yup, kiwis the strawberry-banana fruit) as weapons
orgies
lungs clogged with powdered sugar
diet soda as aphrodisiac
fitting room fantasy
tender young girly-feelings
brown ripped abs, late August
wounds
love
OK, my current novel project, which I don’t think is the shiniest example of this sort of thing:
werewolves
nomadic family groups
spelling bee hosts in bad bee costumes
homo-erotic wrestling matches
french fries flavored with human spit
a full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice
a bald man in a Santa hat who may or may not survive to the next draft
chase scenes
death-defying leaps
more fight scenes than I can currently figure out how to choreograph
a biologist in black and white striped stockings
a car crash
a midnight race
unanswered questions