Moving on

I moved! to here http://delitescence.wordpress.com/ feel free to visit!

The artist, if he or she wishes to be considered as such, must come to terms with the terrible responsibility of having to produce. He must produce. He must always be creating something. It is his or her duty, just as a person in the military is charged with protecting their country, or a Doctor is sworn to protect life, the artist in his or her chosen medium must be constantly striving to produce something of value. In some cases he must offer up his very flesh and bones to do so, and the artist must realize that no price is too great. Ever.

Playing the Game

A little thing...

Before the Flood
By Chris McGuigan

A late New Jersey afternoon, and I am sleeping. I dream of a boat, its dimensions seemingly (a peculiar specificity of dreams) incalculable. I begin on its deck, am led downward by someone (I am unaware or do not remember who) one wooden staircase after another. Fresh, crisp pine smell, glowing wood just spliced from ancient trees put together so recently that the beams have not yet bent concurrently, and it is the golden afternoon sun slicing through cracks and divots in the planks that light our way. I am led down more flights of stairs, down long slightly curving hallways. Ropes, lanterns, pots line the walls and strew the floors and walls, a nautical theme encroaches. I am dimly conscious that I am on the outermost perimeter of the boat- that is, on my one side is the hull, the other side I know is the birth, a massive, hulking span of empty space which I can feel the emptiness of in my bones. More flights of stairs. An Astrolabe in a corner. We are nearing our destination...I awaken, alarm going off.
I can only assume, my knowledge of very large wooden boats being so conspicuously limited, that it was Noah’s Ark that I briefly toured through. The place so foreign yet so familiar. If I may hazard a guess as to its metaphysical origins, I can only shrug my shoulders and point- perhaps we inherit a collective memory, the well spring from which every last mortal soul draws its desires, wishes, dreams. It is our hands that hammered the final nail into the bow of the Ark, our voice that summoned the animals to salvation, our grief at seeing nothing but water for 40 days, our redemption that seemed so tenuous, improbable and undeserved.

Back?

As if its any surprise...

Anyway, this commercial for Jay-Z's new album is pretty sweet, photographically and musically...

I am very unreliable narrator

President Obama will be speaking at Vorhees mall on the 16th of July, 2009. My first inklings of a destiny (heartbroken and destitute as it has been) as a writer were supplied to me in that mall. An essential matriculation occurred there, specifically within the pilgrimage route I and many other dormers took to get to class from the Quads area, and Hegeman, the dorm in which I lived a brief, happy life. A year ago Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao came out, singing the praises and poetics of living in Demarest. I lived there once too. Hegeman was across the way from it. The place just had that kind of literary charm. Once upon a time I was a rather zealous reporter for the Targum, the student paper. I wrote seven articles before I quit, had interviewed some incredible writers. I was very proud of that. I managed to make a fool of myself to most of them, a few of them I impressed. Thus was my brief, checkered career as a reporter for the school newspaper. There was once a town across the Raritan from Rutgers. It was called Raritan Landing, and I like to imagine that it was a lovely town. Its gone now, underneath the park thats there.

I took several creative writing courses at the English department in New Brunswick. There were a fair amount of very pretty, very young teachers who taught in a program called Writers House, a subdivision of the English department. They make a rather large deal about removing the apostrophe in Writers House. Bravo, for them.
Anyway, I got A's in all of them, and it has only occurred to me just now that maybe that was a clear sign that I should try to creatively write. I never got A's. I always just chalked it up to those teachers wanting to be nice, though. Actually, I still chalk it up to those teachers wanting be nice. Nobody should ever think they're a good writer if they get a good grade in creative writing.
What really made me think about writing was delivering my Uncle's eulogy in mid May. The semester had just ended and he died that Wendesday, so we drove down to North Carolina right after I got back from Rutgers. I wrote it a few hours before the funeral. I was terrified of public speaking, but it was one of those things you know you'll be doing before your mind catches up with itself and asks you how, why.
Anyway, a few weeks later I thought, heck, if I could writer a eulogy and stand in front of a bunch of strangers and deliver it why couldn't I write a story or two that was rolling around in my head? Then I tried, and I did. And that was my beginning as a writer.