yes I really did have to share this with you
So, in my Narrative Writing class, I got an assignment to choose a sentence from a list of given sentences, and then follow numbered instructions one by one to write each following sentence.
To give you an idea of how crazy this assignment is, here are the directions. I followed each one to the letter without cheating. I DID ALL OF THESE. WHY DID I? THE TEACHER IS TOTALLY NOT GOING TO CHECK
Here is the result:
This Is So Postmodern I Want to Kill Myself
No one knows what they are about or, for that matter, where they come from. It doesn’t matter, though. It has never mattered. There is nothing in this world that suggests it is a problem of how and why, much less what.
There is a place called Rhapsody Hands. It’s a downtown pub--a cesspool of bad characters and worse decisions--but there’s nowhere else to go. So it’s where the good, clean-as-the-white-driven-snow kids like you, Jack or Jane, go too: because there’s no class on Fridays at your state college and you don’t spend Friday nights on the deck, watching cyclists. At least, you don’t do that after the cyclists honked their bicycle horns and asked what you were doing with your life, weirdo, sitting on a deck alone and not even smoking pot, although that would be even more pathetic without any buddies to share it with.
Fuck them.
You are sitting too close to the other patrons of Rhapsody Hands, and you remember: you were convinced, back in your impressionable middle school days, that people could read your thoughts if they got too close. Thoughts are so loud; it wouldn’t be outrageous to figure that if someone simply touched your hair, on accident due to a careless finger, they would get a blast of information from your head.
If these people can hear your thoughts, you’ll have to leave. I can hear your thoughts just fine, but don’t mind that too much. There is a comfort that someone, benevolent or not, is listening--or so I’m told.
“Where you from?” asks the woman next to you.
You, Jack or Jane, aren’t interested in what she, sixty miles of bad road and infected piercings, has to say, but you consider being polite. She’s wearing hot pink sweat pants with Juicy written across the butt (pants you thought disappeared at the beginning of the decade), a zebra print tube top (which you thought disappeared a decade before that), and what appears to be a wrestling championship belt. It makes her look like two bubblegum wrappers attached by a wrestling championship belt, which is half accurate.
There is a chance that even if you try to be polite, you will fail.
“So not only are you dressed like a monk, you’re quiet as one--you from a convent in the mountains or something?” she asks.
“Monks stay in monasteries, not convents, Miss Juicy ButtPants,” you say into your beer. Polite: showing regard for others in manners, speech, behavior, etc; this is not you.
“Miss Buttpants is a bear in the ring,” she snarls. Her words are efficient, intriguing, and frightening.
You consider telling her, Miss snarling hundred and eighty pounds ButtPants to your hundred and ten pounds WaifPants, that wrestling is fake, but suddenly you care about being polite. You are not very eloquent under pressure, so you splutter something like: “I never would have guessed.”
“I’m just kidding, you know."
You stare at her; she’s kidding, but about what?
“Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck,” is what comes out of your mouth. You meant to ask her what she meant, or at least apologize at some point in your sentence, but you missed the boat.
“Did a wrestler eat your mother or something?” Her smile, ironically, is motherly.
She leans in to whisper to you confidentially (as opposed to those whispers that are not confidential). “I’m not a wrestler--the belt helps scare slimy men away.”
Your stomach explodes and contracts simultaneously.
“Why would you trick poor, innocent people like me, then?”
“Gee, could it be because you’re silent when asked a direct question, but you’re insulting and pedantic when completely unsolicited?”
“The lengths of these poor sentences are just going to grow and grow, aren’t they--these sentences will be like everlasting gobstoppers of hate that melt into a gooey mess.”
“The next one is supposed to be fifty words,” says ButtPants doubtfully, “but I don’t think a sentence can live that long without the guidance of Proust or Faulkner, or one of those other old stuffy dudes from late antiquity.”
“I believe it’s deceptive,” you say, “because as you can see, we’re doing just fine, and the only thing hurting is the plot and the narrative, and those don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, much like being the ten thousandth person to rip off Casablanca.”
The writer becomes frustrated by the assignment, then begins to mock it openly. What happens, what is the absolute result--absolute not referring to vodka here, although the idea is tempting--of a writer who revolts?
I will tell you (you the reader and not you the second person): a bar full of people disappears and becomes two people in space, and then it becomes no one at all. The bitter beer vaporizes off their tongues. The chatter of a Friday night dies down to the silence of an undescribed, invisible word-grave. The cold, wet glasses slide away into oblivion. Even the pungent stink of sweat fizzles out.
You get the idea: the ideas are dead before they hit the floor, and like all things unfinished, they lack a shiny luster. The stories that are born of frustration will be terrible. The story you finish reading at this moment is, unquestionably, terrible.
I am pretty sure my punctuation throughout is a little nutzoid, but my eyes is dry and also exploding.
To give you an idea of how crazy this assignment is, here are the directions. I followed each one to the letter without cheating. I DID ALL OF THESE. WHY DID I? THE TEACHER IS TOTALLY NOT GOING TO CHECK
Here is the result:
This Is So Postmodern I Want to Kill Myself
No one knows what they are about or, for that matter, where they come from. It doesn’t matter, though. It has never mattered. There is nothing in this world that suggests it is a problem of how and why, much less what.
There is a place called Rhapsody Hands. It’s a downtown pub--a cesspool of bad characters and worse decisions--but there’s nowhere else to go. So it’s where the good, clean-as-the-white-driven-snow kids like you, Jack or Jane, go too: because there’s no class on Fridays at your state college and you don’t spend Friday nights on the deck, watching cyclists. At least, you don’t do that after the cyclists honked their bicycle horns and asked what you were doing with your life, weirdo, sitting on a deck alone and not even smoking pot, although that would be even more pathetic without any buddies to share it with.
Fuck them.
You are sitting too close to the other patrons of Rhapsody Hands, and you remember: you were convinced, back in your impressionable middle school days, that people could read your thoughts if they got too close. Thoughts are so loud; it wouldn’t be outrageous to figure that if someone simply touched your hair, on accident due to a careless finger, they would get a blast of information from your head.
If these people can hear your thoughts, you’ll have to leave. I can hear your thoughts just fine, but don’t mind that too much. There is a comfort that someone, benevolent or not, is listening--or so I’m told.
“Where you from?” asks the woman next to you.
You, Jack or Jane, aren’t interested in what she, sixty miles of bad road and infected piercings, has to say, but you consider being polite. She’s wearing hot pink sweat pants with Juicy written across the butt (pants you thought disappeared at the beginning of the decade), a zebra print tube top (which you thought disappeared a decade before that), and what appears to be a wrestling championship belt. It makes her look like two bubblegum wrappers attached by a wrestling championship belt, which is half accurate.
There is a chance that even if you try to be polite, you will fail.
“So not only are you dressed like a monk, you’re quiet as one--you from a convent in the mountains or something?” she asks.
“Monks stay in monasteries, not convents, Miss Juicy ButtPants,” you say into your beer. Polite: showing regard for others in manners, speech, behavior, etc; this is not you.
“Miss Buttpants is a bear in the ring,” she snarls. Her words are efficient, intriguing, and frightening.
You consider telling her, Miss snarling hundred and eighty pounds ButtPants to your hundred and ten pounds WaifPants, that wrestling is fake, but suddenly you care about being polite. You are not very eloquent under pressure, so you splutter something like: “I never would have guessed.”
“I’m just kidding, you know."
You stare at her; she’s kidding, but about what?
“Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck,” is what comes out of your mouth. You meant to ask her what she meant, or at least apologize at some point in your sentence, but you missed the boat.
“Did a wrestler eat your mother or something?” Her smile, ironically, is motherly.
She leans in to whisper to you confidentially (as opposed to those whispers that are not confidential). “I’m not a wrestler--the belt helps scare slimy men away.”
Your stomach explodes and contracts simultaneously.
“Why would you trick poor, innocent people like me, then?”
“Gee, could it be because you’re silent when asked a direct question, but you’re insulting and pedantic when completely unsolicited?”
“The lengths of these poor sentences are just going to grow and grow, aren’t they--these sentences will be like everlasting gobstoppers of hate that melt into a gooey mess.”
“The next one is supposed to be fifty words,” says ButtPants doubtfully, “but I don’t think a sentence can live that long without the guidance of Proust or Faulkner, or one of those other old stuffy dudes from late antiquity.”
“I believe it’s deceptive,” you say, “because as you can see, we’re doing just fine, and the only thing hurting is the plot and the narrative, and those don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, much like being the ten thousandth person to rip off Casablanca.”
The writer becomes frustrated by the assignment, then begins to mock it openly. What happens, what is the absolute result--absolute not referring to vodka here, although the idea is tempting--of a writer who revolts?
I will tell you (you the reader and not you the second person): a bar full of people disappears and becomes two people in space, and then it becomes no one at all. The bitter beer vaporizes off their tongues. The chatter of a Friday night dies down to the silence of an undescribed, invisible word-grave. The cold, wet glasses slide away into oblivion. Even the pungent stink of sweat fizzles out.
You get the idea: the ideas are dead before they hit the floor, and like all things unfinished, they lack a shiny luster. The stories that are born of frustration will be terrible. The story you finish reading at this moment is, unquestionably, terrible.
I am pretty sure my punctuation throughout is a little nutzoid, but my eyes is dry and also exploding.