Trying to get into the habit of writing, I thought I’d try an excercise with a bit of a random element:  write a poem for every seven letter word on page 393 of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow.  There are seventeen.  The first was “onstage.”

Then today I saw this exercise about writing with drama.  Seemed to lend itself to “onstage,” so here we are.  Sixteen more to go.

 Onstage

 Whatever you’ve come here to get–
Pleasure, catharsis, wisdom–
Just fuck off. Please.
I’ve got nothing to give.
I’m as empty and pathetic as you are.
Still there?
Have you come for a scolding then?
Alright, I’ll gladly oblige.
You’re a bunch of fucking, ignorant baboons!
How’s that?
You don’t know art from your own ass.
You wouldn’t recognize it
If it hit you in the fucking face like a two-by-four.
I spit on your pretensions.
Shall I piss on them too?
(Fourth wall be damned, eh?)
Yes, careful there in the front row.
Didn’t you get a raincoat with your playbill?
Hmm. You must forgive these opening night oversights.
I assure you it won’t happen again.
Just have a word with the ushers after the show.
They’ll arrange everything for tomorrow’s matinee.
That’s better. Now where were we?
Right, we had come to fuck you.
Fuck you for humiliating auditions,
For kissing directors’ asses,
For tedious rehearsals,
And for the nightly indignity of shoehorning oneself
Into some imbecile playwright’s bloodless idea of a character.
All for what?
So that you might experience the ersatz revelations of the theatre?
So that you philistines might congratulate yourselves
On spending an evening away from the TV?
(And still, of course, catch the late show.)
Wake up, why don’t you!
Can’t you see it’s all bullshit.
There’s no magic, no moonshine, no meeting of minds.
It’s a fucking racket, just like everything else.
Yes, here they come now.
I wondered what was keeping them.
Don’t be alarmed; this monologue was starting to drag anyway.
It’s time for act one, scene two: the boys in blue.
Whatever else you might think,
You can’t say you didn’t get your money’s worth of drama tonight.
I’ll be with you officers momentarily.
Just let me wrap this up.
No. Wait. You clumsy ass–I haven’t finished.
The bombs! The fucking bombs are falling!
Can’t you hear the fucking bombs!?

So the time to read all those moldy old novels has finally come.

I’ve got twenty-five or so lined up from the late middle-ages through the 18^th century.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries will come later, if all goes well.

Here’s my preliminary syllabus, subject to change of course.

Ought to keep me busy for a while.

Evolution of the Novel, Part One (Precursors and Early Days):

Petronius: Satyricon, 1^st century

Various Authors: Medieval Romances, 12^th-15^th centuries

Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur, 15^th century

François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532

Anonymous: Lazarillo de Tormes, 1554

Erasmus: In Praise of Folly, 1509

Thomas More: Utopia, 1516

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote, 1605 and The Deceitful Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels, 1610s

Madame de La Fayette: The Princess of Cléves, 1678

John Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678

Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, 1688

Evolution of the Novel, Part Two (The Eighteenth Century):

Anonymous: The Arabian Nights, first published in Europe in 1704

Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub, etc., 1704 and Gulliver’s Travels, 1726

Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders, 1722

Voltaire: Zadig, 1747 and Candide, etc., 1759

Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, 1742 and Tom Jones, 1749

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, 1760

Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766

Tobias Smollet: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 1771

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774

Marquis de Sade: Justine, 1778

Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liasons Dangereuses, 1781

Good stuff.
From Kundera’s new book (I’d like to read his essays, but I feel like I ought to tackle Cervantes, Fielding, and Sterne first. *sigh* One of these days.):

Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows “that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.”

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/2007/32390/

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/2007/32391/

Jitters motherfucker, that’s what that is:
Puking up his guts during the pregame warm-up.
It don’t matter though; he’s still gonna get his.
Twenty and ten—if you’re guarding him tough.
J’s right in your face. Money. Money.
Like you ain’t even there; like a game of horse.
But oh, those jitters… you know, it’s funny;
He’s a lamb in the locker-room, a lion on the court.

Somewhere a man is standing barefoot
In a cold puddle of water and piss.
His knees are bent; his neck is crook’d
Because he is taller than the height of his cell.
This is not oversight on the part of his jailors.
He is meant to go insane for lack of sleep,
And he is. He is meant to confess to
Acts he never imagined–much less committed–
And he will. Insomnia will do this to a man
Or woman, will flay their lives and stuff
Them with the dreams they were forbidden,
Or worse, with nightmares of dead ends.

A fat man enters a coffee shop.
What’s so funny about that?
His white collared, blue striped
Oxford and natty red silk tie
Can’t hide that gut. No mocked up
Smile or sham stern look can
Mask that gluttonous face.
A man of such small scruples,
Great appetites, and fastidious vanity,
Will do many laughable things
Which I will never see, and so I laugh
As he swivels his meticulously attired bulk
Through the coffee shop door.

The sound of the voices and the vehicles woke up a beggar who was sleeping on the steps of the church. The poor devil sat up, saw what it was, then lay down again, but awake, on his back, his eyes fixed on the sky. The sky was staring back at him, as impassive as he, but without the beggar’s wrinkles or his worn shoes or his tatters, a clear, starry, calm, Olympian sky, like the one that presided over Jacob’s wedding and Lucretia’s suicide. They looked at each other in a kind of judgment game, with a certain air of rival and tranquil majesties, without haughtiness or wretchedness, as if the beggar were saying to the sky:
“Well, you won’t be falling on me.”
And the sky:
“And you won’t be climbing up me.”

Translation by Gregory Rabassa

Yesterday I got tested.

48 crunches/minute

23 pushups max

Weight: 218 lb

Height: 76.75 in

Percent body fat: 16.7

That means I’m carrying around 36 lbs of fat. I can do without some of that for sure.

The trainer guy didn’t guide me through the 1-RM Maximum tests correctly. We never got to failure; I guess because he was concerned about injury. Fair enough. Now that I know how to do it on my own, I can get accurate numbers next time I go to a gym. These ones are low-balling it a little.

1 RM Leg Press: 275 lb

1 RM Chest Press: 165 lb

My primary goals are to increase upper & lower body strength, maintain core strength, and lose some fat.

Apart from the tests, I took it easy yesterday; so I’m due for a hard workout this evening.