I don’t write fiction. But if I did, I’d follow Kurt Vonnegut’s advice. To tell you the truth, some of his rules apply to writing anything at all. Like blogs for example.

Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

 Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

Found here

Procrastinating as usual, I found this site, that is essentially a web fridge with word magnets which one can arrange to one’s liking and make a poem. Somewhat encouraged by Vonnegut’s rules, I came up with this.

Do you think it’s easy? Why don’t you try it for yourselves and let me know what you came up with?

Blondie got me “The melancholy death of oyster boy and other stories” the other day and I have been reading it non-stop. Don’t buy it for your kid though. It’s twisted, macabre, strangely funny and best of all, written by Tim Burton. This is one of my favourite stories in the book. You can see a movie of relevant aesthetic here

I got a new screen. Suddenly everything is bright and big and clear. Your blogs look different. My blog looks different. I thought it looked okay until I saw it for what it was: totally out of proportion. The old screen was not really a screen at all, more like a button hole. I went to the dvd rental place to get my weekly load of silly movies and cartoons. Only this time I also wanted to get a PS2 game for my son. One of the customers was a 15-16 year old boy who freaked out when I asked for the “Monster House” dvd. “Are YOU going to watch Monster House?” he asked me, disgusted. “Yes, but it is mainly for my son”. “How old is your son?” “Eight” “He is not allowed to watch that! It is very scary!” “I am trying to interest him in the genre so we can watch Hellraiser together.” The boy shook his head and turned to go when he saw “Cars” for PS2, in my hand. “Are YOU playing PS2?!” Clearly he has forgotten everything about my son, he looks at me as if I was a pervert, the girl at the till is fuming and I am enjoying this rare moment in my life where I get to shock the unshockable: a 16 year old boy.

Photo by: Photocase

I would have liked to write about my weekend, my blogfriend who came to dinner and what a fantastic girl she is, about my son, about the food, about the sea. But I cannot. I saw pictures of the 34 children that were killed yesterday morning in the Israeli attack in Qana. I am speechless and anyway, I don’t think there’s anything left to say when children’s bodies are stacked in ambulances to make room for other little bodies that are brought out of buildings. I am going to translate boring blocks of text to numb my mind because I still can do that. Unlike the mothers and fathers in Qana.

My song of the day: The News by Jack Johnson, that my friend Barrett has so wonderfully sung to me.

Why don’t the newscasters cry when they read about people who die? At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes Mama said It’s just make believe You can’t believe everything you see So baby close your eyes to the lullabies On the news tonight

Birds on a wire outside my mum’s house

I have new addiction: Fonts. I have downloaded about 50 new of them and some of them you are about to catch a glimpse of (like the compass on the left), because they are not real fonts but collections of nice little drawings. I have another new addiction: Radio drama. I am hooked on it, especially BBC’s. And I also listen to the Woman’s Hour. It is very entertaining, I swear.

Another addiction is reading my horoscope from the Onion. Here’s why:

Pisces "Although Marlowe, Nick Carraway, and John Dowell are all fascinating men, more and more you find yourself wanting to be introduced to a narrator you can trust."

I signed up in the Hive, a service that allows you to bookmark things you like and present them on your page for others to see and for you to keep for reference. I mostly did this because I am such a shopaholic and some of my friends here are too, and we can’t really go shopping together at the moment. So I wanted to show you what I’d buy if we went shopping on a Saturday morning together. But my greatest addiction of all these days is the book I am reading: Sister of my Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the book my friend Dew sent me, along with a very beautiful picture frame. I read it wearing the black and white kimono she also sent me. The book is so exotic in its detail but it is not alienating. It is so close to my feelings about the lengths people have to go to protect the ones they love, and about friendship, especially between women. Here’s an excerpt: "There are other reasons why I can never hate Sudha. Once I made a list of them. Because she’s the most beautiful person I know, just like the princesses in the fairy tales Pishi tells us, with her skin that’s the warm brown of almond-milk, her hair soft like monsoon clouds all the way down her back, and her eyes that are the softest of all. Because she can put her hand on my arm when I’m ready to kick the world for its stupidity, and it’s like a drink of clean cold water on a hot day. Because she believes in magic, demons and gods and falling stars to wish on, the way I never could. Because she’s the best storyteller, better even than Pishi. She can take the old tales and make them new by putting us in them. Us, Anju and Sudha, right in there among the demon queens and fairy princes and talking beasts. Because I called her into the world and therefore must do all I can to make sure she is happy."

This is a song I have been listening to and I really wish you could listen too (actually, you can listen to a sample here if you click Nine Horses: 02). And this is a photograph Joe took and I MADE SO BEAUTIFUL in photoshop. I will be back tomorrow morning to tell you about two nightmares I had: one was last night (so no sleep) and the other one was about a week ago. No rest for the wicked.

It’s a wonderful world
And you take and you give
And the sun fills the sky
In the space where you live

It’s a day full of dreams
It’s a dream of a day
And the joy that it brings
Nearly sweeps her away

It’s a wonderful world
As the buildings fall down
And you quicken your step
’til your feet leave the ground
And you’re soaring above
All the sorrow below
And you’re falling in love
With those you don’t know

And your heart feels so wide
And your heart fills so strong
It was never a place
That you felt you belonged

It’s a wonderful world
Full of wonderful things
And the people fall down
And abandon their dreams

(I hear him, he’s talking out loud
Sometimes he whistles while walking
How could he know any better?
I weep for him, I weep for him now)

It’s a wonderful world
It’s a real crying shame
Cause she’s hurting herself
In a violent way
And there’s people she knows
That won’t even try
And they’re trapped in their lives
Feeling terrified
And it’s in times like these
That she promised to call
But the scale of our love
Is diminished and small

It’s a wonderful world
And she doesn’t know why
She wakes up each day
And continues to cry

(He’s sleeping his troubles away
He’s finding it too hard to bear
I’m with him every step of the way
I weep for him, I weep for him now)

It’s a wonderful world
And you take and you give
And the sun fills the sky
In the space where you live

Nine Horses (David Sylvian’s group) - Wonderful World

Quote of the day
A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world
(John le Carre)

After a little nap (I had only slept for 4 hours the previous night) I woke up in a strange and emotional mood. But it had nothing to do with sadness. Maybe it was chemical reaction in my brain. Here’s a favourite poem, by A.R. Ammons I found:

Hymn

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

A.R. Ammons

The drawing My son made this. For those of you who can’t read greek it reads: “Heart in formol”. Cute eh?

The list

If I had superhero powers

-I would fly in minutes all over the world to meet my friends.

-I would heal people in pain.

-I would carry people on my back and transport them quickly.

-I would build a house in a day.

-I would punish those who have harmed me and my loved ones by letting them stay on the top of a Giant Sequoia tree for 24 hours.

- I would make myself invisible and whisper nice things in people’s ears.

-I would clean the environment.

-I would bring food to all the hungry people (the yucky things I make).

-I would turn back the clock and be 10 years younger.

Going downhill

I spent one hour listening to Air Supply and Cool and the Gang.

The Quote

The aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. Henry Miller

The playlist

-Wake up – Arcade Fire

-I bet you look good on the dancefloor – Arctic Monkeys

-Alec Eiffel – Pixies

-Hey fuck you – Beastie Boys

-Love letter – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

-Hyperballad – Bjork

-So real – Jeff Buckley

-Blow by blow- Moloko

The lyrics

“And I have seen the world of dreams, and, fresh-flown through the trees then dropped off at the curb alive, have seen the world awake, and I don’t know which I deserve. So when sleep nightly comes to me, with all of these warm blankets piled on my back, I’ll hike to see the church of dreams, where all of the shutters are painted black.

And it seems like that’s real until the time I awake, and at midnight the moonlight reflects as the lake is shining at me, until night takes it away. There’s one world in the distance, one world in the way, and not one can stay. And I have seen the wood of dreams, carved grainless and clean with a sweep of one hand, and have been happy with the leaves on my body when laid under land.

So when sleep finally comes to me - because it comes for the sleek like it comes for the lame – I’ll sink beneath a weight of dreams so full and complete that I’m pushed from my name.

And it seems like that’s real until I fall asleep, and then we load up the car and drive far to some street where a new life awaits, until day takes it away. There’s one world in the distance, one world in the way, and not one can stay.”

Okkervil River – And I have seen the world of Dreams