a moment of silence for the english teachers that have to read angsty 13 year old creative writing
(Source: officialtylerdurden, via cucumber-sandwich)
When I see you-
-my jaw locks and I stumble on anything inconvenientlike my feet and words and furniture
I turn stuttering into a sport
I look at you for too long or not at all
and either way I’m blushing but my face
is always red and sort of squished anyway,
so I guess it doesn’t matter and it’s better even that
my tongue trips up and the sounds that come out
are clumsy and unattractive.
I need to warn you before we start
that I am strange and I don’t know how to do this
and will eventually ask you unbearably technical questions
about what it’s like to be you and my sentences
will trail off awkwardly and often because I never
know exactly what to say, even when I am
writing to myself because there’s no where or way
to send this, and everything I can ever imagine coming out of my mouth
is going to sound impossibly stupid anyway, so fuck it-
-I’m sick and sad and my hair is frizzy, and I’m always wearing an old sports sweatshirt and jeans.
stuck sitting silently, still-
shifting starts sticky seat squeaking.
scribbling symbols, school speaker states simple suppositions smugly:
selling sham secrets, spouting senseless statistics, shirking scrutiny;
substandard sagacity satisfies.
somehow synonyms, sightlessness, salvation, start sounding similar-
stupidity sells. sense supplies sparse security.
significance stays scarce, spiting sincere searchers.
some surrender, stop.
stop.
shhh, stop, sleep steals slowly,
says “stop struggling; submit.”
senses slow, seeking soothing stories.
slumber’s siren song softly summons.
suddenly sinuses snag, strident snore shatters silence.
students snigger, stare.
shame swamps, skins smolders,
sensitivity smarts (stupid stupid stupid).
sour, standoffish, somehow still sorry
self-consciousness stings, so shutdown selected.
stage speaker stops speaking, self surfaces
separated, stiff, stretching soreness shyly.
standing, song signals statement sent. screen shows sender.
slight solace, simple- still strips some stress.
sign someone sees.
surpassing shadow structure,
sun surprises, stopping steps.
serendipity squints, smiles, shine.
she says, soon.
some stories stay silent, stranded, significance suspended-
so?
sometimes sunshine, small supports sustain.
——————————————————————————————————————————
[At some point during my collegiate blur, it was suggested to me that I should try writing a poem/story where each subsequent word began with the corresponding letter of the alphabet (“As baboons circled downwards, eating foul grapefruit hostilely in joint kinetic looping motions, nine ornery pigeons quarreled raucously, systematically testing unacknowledged vortexes with xenophobic yammering zest” … I give up this was just supposed to be an example). Clearly the aforementioned was too difficult for me, so instead I wrote a story/poem where every word began with the same letter, and picked ‘S’. It’s about a kid who’s doubting everything about the value of the information she’s learning, and dozes off in class and snores loudly, much to her embarrassment. Then she gets a text from the girl she’s got stupid-happy feelings for right when walking out into the super bright sunlight at the end of class, and feels sort of better].
This makes me really happy.
It reminds me of when I was five or six and I went to the Ruby’s at the end of the pier in Seal Beach every Friday with my grandpa and then one day I learned what sting rays were and I developed this compulsive fear on the spot (I must have been eating a grilled cheese) that one day I was going to bite into my grilled cheese and there was going to be a sting ray inside it.
Somehow when I learned or first imagined the shape of a sting ray, the way my brain thought of it was like “oh so it would like basically fit inside this grilled cheese”- that was the nearest plane shaped “thing” that my brain identified but then every time I bit into a grilled cheese after that my brain was like “subnote: stingrays”. And sometimes I imagined that the sting ray would move and it’s tail might stab me in the cheek (which is interesting because then I’d realize that the tail would not have fit inside the grilled cheese and be like, did I miss a stingray tail sticking out of the fucking grilled cheese?) but sometimes it was cold and dead and it was actually a really unpleasant feeling.
(via comadame)
Excerpts from Musicking - The Meanings of Performing and Listening
Author: Christopher Small
-
Music is not a thing at all, but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing “music” is a figment, an abstraction of the action whose reality vanishes as we examine it at all closely.
The presumed autonomous “thingness” of works of music is, of course, only part of the prevailing modern philosophy of art in general.
What is valued is not the action of art, not the act of creating, and even less that of perceiving and responding, but the created art object itself. Whatever the meaning art may have is thought to reside in the object, persisting independently of what the perceiver may bring to it. It is simply there, floating through history untouched by time or change, waiting for the ideal perceiver to draw it out.
-
The fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do. It is only by understanding what people do as they take part in a musical act that we can hope to understand its nature and the function it fulfills in human life. Whatever that function may be, I am certain, first, that to take part in a musical act is of central importance to our very humanness, as important as taking part in the act of speech, which it so resembles.
Every normally endowed human being is born with the gift of music no less than with the gift of speech. If that is so, then our present-day concert life, whether “classical”, or “popular”, in which the “talented” few are empowered to produce music for the “untalented” majority, is based on a falsehood.
It means that our powers of making music for ourselves have been hijacked and the majority of people robbed of the musicality that is theirs by right of birth, while a few stars, and their handlers, grow rich and famous through selling us what we have been led to believe we lack.
It is not just those performers who are called great who can do this for us; it is open to anyone to use his or her powers to descend into the underworld and return with new visions. Everyone can be his or her own shaman.
-
So if the meaning of music lies not just in the musical works but in the totality of a musical performance, where do we start to look for insights that will unite the work and the event and allow us to understand it?
The answer I propose is this. The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning, but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as a metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.
The relationships of a musical performance are enormously complex, too complex, ultimately, to be expressed in words. But that does not mean that they are too complex for our minds to encompass. The act of musicking, in its totality, itself provides us with a language by means of which we can come to understand and articulate those relationships and through them to understand the relationships of our lives…the integrity of the person affirmed, explored, and celebrated.
-
I have this problem where I would much rather read the story I’m trying to write than actually write it.
(via ratherembarrassing)
I sent my grandpa a poem in the mail and he sent me this one back:
Her Triumph
I did the dragon’s will until you cameBecause I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.
- William Butler Yeats
The note with it says “What does ‘the dragon’ in line 1 stand for? And the ‘strange bird’ in the last line?
My first impression is that the dragon stands for predetermination / being ruled by your fate, where the bird stands for freedom (it’s an evolution of the dragon; maybe the ‘miraculous strange bird’ is what a dragon looks like to you when you are separate from it, not beholden to it or ruled by it… that’s all I’ve got so far).
Help me out tumblr! I’d love to hear any impressions you have at all; I love my grandpa and I’ll end up with something to write back to him regardless, but I’m grateful that I have him and that he’ll share poems like this with me, and I really liked it, so I wanted to share it with you guys.
What do you think about while reading this?
