Yesterday's goofing around made me realize three very important things:
1) It is fun to write a Milleresque narrative. It's all gritty and exaggerated and colorful and abusive to the English Language. Makes you feel powerful.
2) When I start to have fun and really put myself into writing, I get compared to Jack Kerouac and told I'm writing beat poetry. I must read some actual Kerouac and see what this means. Maybe I'm some sort of throwback to the Beat Generation. (What's weird is I think that's my father's generation -- Mama's a Boomer, but he's quite a bit older than her.)
3) That fucking cat came right out of a Frank Miller book. He whines, he scratches my carpet, he scratches my long-boxes, he scratches my shortboxes, he scratches my arms and waits while I walk to the bathroom and back until he gets a good chance to lunge at me and bite my thigh (he only does this when I'm not dressed yet, so that he gets the flesh and draws blood). He gets annoyed whenever I change anything in the apartment. He sits in my chair. He sleeps on my bed. He stinks up the place. He lies in my footpath. He's sleeping on top of my monitor right now, dangling his damned tail in front of the screen. He does everything he can to inconvenience me.
And when he's not inconveniencing me, he's sitting somewhere and staring at me, trying to intimidate me.
That furry bastard is out to get me.
If I disappear, you'll all know why.
You mean your cat's a dirty big man-avenging prostitute? Cool!
ReplyDeleteMine just has diabetes...
Oh, your poor kitty!
ReplyDeleteSince he is sleeping on top of your computer monitor, I guess it's safe to say you don't have a LCD monitor? :)
ReplyDeleteIf you want to keep him off the monitor, try placing a piece of aluminum foil on top of it. Cats hate foil. You could also try attaching some to your comic boxes. Maybe tape some foil strips to where he scratches.
One of our cats likes to chew on comic bags. She prefers comic bags to the actual cat treats we give them. She just loves them.
Kerouac was the guy with all the run-on sentences. I think they were trying to write the way we think, instead of changing their ideas to fit conventional grammar forms. It was called "automatic prose" - a friend of mine had a game of it recently by getting her livejournal friends list to pick a number, go to one of those random quotes pages, take the last few words of the quote corresponding to that number and based on that just write whatever comes into your head, no edits, no punctuation unless it comes automatically, all that.
ReplyDeleteIt was great, it was really surreal. Then her boyfriend fed all our responses into Megahal, the AI, so now whenever I want to talk to someone on an acid trip I can just open it up and have a chat about melting tulips in seven red dresses while pockets remain in solidarity with one another. Good fun!
...and that's why I like Kerouac :P
Writing all Milleresque is so much fun, that even Frank Miller is doing it on All-Star Batman and Robin.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously...
Cats are weird. My cat Fang, just sits and stares at the wall. The WALL! Drives me nuts.
I found our cat, brought him home, convinced my wife we should keep him. I feed him, clean his litter-box, etc. etc. He ignores me and spends all the time he can in her lap.
ReplyDeleteGranted, she is cuter, but still.
Oooh! Oooh! Do James Frey next, please!
ReplyDeleteMy favorite review of James Frey's writing.
An even better review of James Frey's writing.
Your cat reminds me less of Miller than of Peege's cat in Justice League Europe (especially the JLI Quarterly stories by DeMatteis & Rogers).
ReplyDeleteI confess that I was taking a stab in the dark when I mentioned Kerouac -- I haven't read him yet, either, but I couldn't think of any other Beat Poets.
ReplyDeleteChandler, though... wow, that guy's stuff screams to be read aloud. He was a poet before he went off to WWI and came back to invent the "hard-boiled detective".