Go Go Gadget Gospel

So Paradise Lost is freakin' awesome. Seriously. I fully agree with Dr. Robertson when he says it's "the greatest English epic ever written." Satan is badass, the story is long and has deep, profound, and world-changing implications, and it's just cool. So I'm totally looking forward to getting a chance to read the whole thing. Definitely gonna be a good time.

However, it brings to mind thoughts about what it'll take for me to write something like that. It's not even necessarily a matter of quality; of course I want to write something fantastically good, but in some ways it's more important for me to write something that's remembered. There's no doubt in my mind that, for example, there were better poems from the 9th century than Beowulf, or better plays from the 17th century than Shakespeare's, but those, for whatever reason, are the ones that are remembered.

Perhaps a distinction needs to be made. My dearest ambition, and the one that's most easily stated, is to be the best. And I mean the best. I want to be, indisputably, the best writer of our age. There's a huge amount of arrogance that goes into that, I know, but there you go. At the same time, though, I want to be immortal in print. I want what I write to be remembered forever, to have my work read two hundred years from now just as Daniel Defoe's is and have everyone say, "This Heffers guy, he was something great."

I feel like the two are mutually exclusive. I can be remembered without being that good, and be the best but be forgotten. I guess what it comes down to is whether I want to experience my success, or if I want it to last forever. If I'm the best, I'll know it, and so will everyone... hopefully, anyway. But I won't know if I'm remembered in two hundred years.

Ideally I'd be both. Oh well. It's still a long way off...

Get Back

... Haven't started reading Gulliver book four yet. I should get on that.

Fiction is currently consuming my working soul. Gotta get my portfolio done by Tuesday... argh. I wanna read Gulliver, but it seems like getting to it is taking an assload of time.

Watching Supernatural is getting my excited for Paradise Lost, though. "Please allow me to introduce myself: I'm John Milton, a man of wealth and taste, and this is Lucifer, the most intriguing character ever written." Lucifer/Satan/The Devil is quite possibly my favorite character in anything, because I relate to him in a lot of ways. Pride is a very deadly sin (though my own personal sin is wrath), but it's also something that everyone has in some measure, and I don't feel like the things that happened to Lucifer were necessarily deserved. At the same time, he is, of course, the perfect evil, and that needs to be taken into account. "The deceiver," right? As a person who deeply advocates honesty and doing the right thing regardless of consequences, I've still gotta be like, "Well, fuck you, Satan!" I still feel bad for the pitchfork-carrying bugger, tho.

So, yeah. Getting through Gulliver so I can reach the darkness at the end of the tunnel. How I look forward to this...

I'm Not Down

Sick. Blagggh. Hopefully not the flu of piggish origin. Don't think it is, but stupid media still worries me. Not going to the Health Center unless I sprout a curly tail. Just gonna keep chugging Dr. Pepper and popping NyQuil caplets.

On to Gulliver and his travels. I'm a little bit disappointed in Book 2; it's still enjoyable, but doesn't quite hold up to the standard set by the brilliant Book 1. Mostly I think Swift got too caught up in Gulliver being really tiny and lost some opportunity for really good satire. I suppose, though, that it's hard to keep something brilliant the whole way through. Not everything can be, say, The Road.

I do look forward to discussing the book, but unfortunately I'll be missing class tomorrow. Dammit. I feel like maybe I was missing something when I read Book 2, and that's why it doesn't seem as funny... Or maybe Swift just dropped the potty humor. I dunno.

Come Sail Away

So. Reading Gulliver's Travels now. Jonathan Swift is my freaking hero. A lot of times, the sheer vulgarity of it gets me, like Gulliver's description of how badly he needed to take a shit. Other times, though, the footnotes make it for me, and reading how some idiot minister in English history is reflected in one Lilliputian or another just makes my day. Hopefully the humorous goodness will continue, though as yet I don't see an overarching point to all of Swift's sharp-tonguedness. (Sorry, it's late and I've had a long day.)

The Fool on the Hill

So. Assignment time. Excerpts from Friday's journal, once he figures out how to write in English.

April 5, 1684

Today master showed me how it is that he plants corn. I'm not sure how it is he expects me to learn after just one, but I'll do my best to help him. Master's been very kind to me, giving me a soft place to sleep, lots of food (though I still miss human flesh), and someone to speak with. I can't speak so well with him but he's teaching me, and very patiently at that. I truly miss my homeland, but sometimes it feels as if Master is trying to make me forget what it is that I have experienced in my life. I do not want to forget, not really, but he is insistent, speaking of his home and his ways as if they are right. Master is kind, but I'm not sure that he understands quite as much as he says.

April 16, 1684

Master tried to explain to me what he believes, but it was hard to understand. He said there was a monster of some sort that fights with the Creator, someone called God, to make people do things. I think maybe I missed something because my language isn't very good yet. But Master told me that God is good and the monster evil, and that if the monster wins I'll burn after I die. I'm not worried. I'll be dead, so why would burning hurt? But Master seems really worried about me, because he says he doesn't want my soul to burn. (I don't know what a soul is, either.) I helped plant corn today, and Master gave me good meat from a kid to celebrate. I cooked it very well for my first time, and Master approved. He still seems as if he thinks I know nothing... Maybe I don't know anything, but I don't think that Master should be quite so worried. I'll be okay.

May 13, 164

I was taken ill today and master seems sick, too, though with worry. I have a fever and am too week to even stand. Master has been good about bringing me fresh water from the creek and even giving me a piece of bread to eat every time I finish another. I do not entirely enjoy being on this island, especially with this fever and so much work to do, but Master takes care of me. I still wonder, though, as I've had much time to reflect on the things he's said. What if the monster is winning against God in Master's heart? What if all the things that Master has told me are tainted by the monster's evil? I can't believe that Master himself is evil, but if he's acting under that influence, perhaps I should be more careful. I am worried about the corn crop, because I feel I should be tending to it.

May 29, 1684

I have not spoken to Master much in the past two days, because he has been on an expedition of sorts, looking for more of my people on the island. I don't think he'll find any so soon, but he seemed very concerned. I just let him go and decided to tend to the goats. Master tends to be very focused on one thing and make himself very angry or sad over it, but I don't understand that. I think he might need to just relax a little bit, because he seems to be growing a little frail, even for his age. The goats are usually an easy thing for me to observe, and it seems to me that they are much like the people this island doesn't have. They organize themselves into big competing groups, and one of them is the king, much as Master is.

I am presently running out of ink, and I do not think that Master will continue to let me write. With help, though, I should find more ink and continue writing.

Wrong 'Em Boyo

I feel like the American memory is incredibly short. We feel absolutely traumatized by certain events and at the time we feel like it's killing us, drowning us where we stand without filling our lungs with anything, knocking us flat on our asses 'cause it seems like the problem's come out of nowhere. But then, so quickly, we move the hell on and suddenly it's like nothing ever happened, and we're left without even a scar to remind us of the wound we once had.

It's been eight years since 9-11 and I feel like the vast majority of Americans have already forgotten how they felt that day. Even my own generation seems to have lost a sense of how bad they felt that day, of how scared they were, of how it felt like the world was crashing down around us and this was probably the single most important event that's happened in our lifetimes that could have an effect on our psyches, not counting of course the fall of the USSR.

But 9-11 holds particular significance for me and the fact that people don't remember really bothers me on a personal level. My dad's a firefighter and, on that day in 2001, had been one for only about a year and half. Still, I know for a fact that he would have been one of the last guys in, that he would have kept going until he was sure everyone was out, and that, ultimately, he'd have been killed that day, if we lived in NYC. It's weird, you know? Having to deal with him as a father annoys the hell out of me, but when I think of him as a man, independent of my mom and my brother and I, I really respect and admire who he is and respect the things that he would do and has done. I even like to believe that, if I'd been a firefighter that day, I'd do the same things that he would have.

So now that people kind of disregard everything that happened that day, all the good men that were killed, and more or less feel disjointed from everything that's happened as a result of 9-11, I feel really, deeply pissed off. Do they have any idea what those firefighters and cops sacrificed to try and save the people that were trapped? Can they even imagine what the families who lost someone feel like now? Or have they stopped to thing how haunted a lot of people are by what could have happened but didn't, the near-misses that a lot of people suffered or how people like me might feel?

Probably not. And already, only eight years since, people are making jokes, like they never felt any fear or pain at all. The people of New York City will never forget, as Obama's fly over the Statue of Liberty in Air Force One proved. ... or maybe they have and they just don't like to advertise it, and only the people who saw something and lost someone really remember. I don't know. I can't really feel too optimistic on a day like this, when I've already heard people joke half-heartedly about it.

So, really, I'm stuck. I didn't lose anyone but I could have; I've got no real reason to feel this way. But maybe, just maybe...

In Response to Running With Scissors, Robinson Crusoe Corrects Writing Thusly...

My Possessions, with their Luster, are organized onto my Bookshelves, which themselves are Lustrous; with Cans, emptied of their Contents, without their Labels, their Skin possessing Ribs and Polish, which I wish was of a Golden Glow; with my Rings, those of Mexican Descent and great Age, for I came to posess them in my fifth Year; with Photographs of pleasing Jewelry, taken from my many, shiny-Paged Magazines, pasted to Boards and propped up so that I may gaze upon them; with a Spoon, which my dearest Grandmother gave to my Dam and Sire upon their Marriage; with Silver that, though my Mother despises its appearance, shares its Space with my Abundance of Coins of the Nickel and Copper Varieties, all of them having been Boiled and Polished, so that they may be deeply Lustrous, in a Process which took me much Effort, which I succeeded in after many Trials, most of which tooka Process consisting of...

(This could go on for days.)

As a strong proponent of the whole "simple and clear" writing style used by Hemingway, Vonnegut, Golding, Heller, McCarthy, Thompson, and pretty much anybody else of worth in the past seventy-five years, I hereby propose that Daniel Defoe and other writers of the Early Modern English style go fuck themselves. Way to completely lose the point in telling a story, guys. Oi.

I think I may have to go read some Hemingway now just to detox. Jesus.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

... Or, perhaps "Friday, goddamn Friday."

Not entirely sure why the poor guy would pledge himself to Robinson Crusoe just because he saved his life. You pay him back, not serve as his slave. Not to mention the fact that Crusoe, as an ex-slave himself, should, you know, be possessing of basic human traits like, say, sympathy and empathy and be like, "Oh, being a slave sucked, I won't make this guy my slave, that'd be wrong."

Oi.

So about forty-five pages left to read as of writing this and I kinda still hope Crusoe gets eaten by sharks or floats away on a porta-potty or gets crushed by a boulder while holding a conch. It'd be nice to see somebody in literature who deserves it get their comeuppance for once. I suppose I'll have to just wait and hope The Satanic Verses delivers or something.

Sympathy for the Devil

Currently homework is consuming my life. Slowly. Very nearly pushed me to shred all my books, burn my papers, and go to hide in the forests around Susquehanna to live like the Unabomber without explosives. School is such a joy.

Anyway I need to continue reading Robinson Crusoe because if I don't I'll be so behind the rest of the class by tomorrow morning that I might just give up and start reading Gulliver's Travels early. heh.

I do, incidentally, feel rather bad for Robinson, because he tried the whole "get off the island in a raft" thing that Tom Hanks tried in Castaway, only it didn't work. I mean, yeah, Tom Hanks lost poor Wilson ("Wiiiilson! Nooooo!") but Robinson couldn't even get himself out of the currents around the island. The poor, downtrodden sod. Maybe if he had a pet volleyball he'd be better off, too. Or if a FedEx plane had dropped useful things like a box and tarp to be able to use. ... or the porta-potty that showed up. I dunno.

Robinson also evidently has a parrot. Perhaps it is the reincarnation of a jealous husband...

... So apparently Robinson Crusoe found a dog on his island. News to me. Huh.

Anyway, I'm a little bit disappointed in the narrative thus far; there've been little nuggets of profundity here and there throughout but they've been separated by at least twenty pages each of long, boring descriptions of his parrot, what objects he's dragged from the ship, and how he's organizing him goddamn corn field. Dunno if authors were being paid by the word yet in 1719, but if not then Defoe's got no friggen excuse. Oi.

On the upside, he's not as much of a jerk as he appeared to be at first, so at least I'm not getting "Catcher-in-the-Rye" syndrome from the thing. I'm just really... really.. bored. Oh well. Paradise Lost, where are you?

Listen:

Hey, everyone. I'm TJ Heffers, 19, madman and Sophomore Creative Writing major. I'm very much excited for this class and can't wait to get into the some of the classics and, even if I hate every minute of them (Robinson Crusoe is already getting to me, though I'm definitely sticking with it), I'm going to do everything in my power to take what I can from them and use it to make myself a better writer.
I took German in high school but it seems like it hasn't done me any good because the things I can remember to say are either obscenities or involved in some way or another with giving directions to the Post Office.
My strengths in writing, as a prose writer generally and fiction writer almost always, are voice and character creation, which I can usually pull off without thinking much. My weakness, definitely, is plot development and metaphor, which probably will cause problems in the near future. However, since while at school I'm nearly obsessed with improving my writing, I don't anticipate much of a problem.
I haven't read much that was really awesome on my own in a while; I started Dr. hunter S. Thompson's great "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" over the summer but got wrapped up in other things. Last thing I probably read of my own volition that was really good was either Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" or Kurt Vonnegut's "Timequake." Vonnegut is, incidentally, my favorite writer.
I also saw "District 9" the day before coming back to SU and loved it. Definitely worth a read. Though the South African main character in that has made me wonder where Dr. Retief's accent has gone...


... My first assignment for Novel, with the exception of having to read Robinson Crusoe. No biggie. It's a good class so far, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses.