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I started re-reading Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From (but I’m going to put it down now that the Bizarro Starter Kit has arrived! Yay! Thanks Candice!) and found a passage I had to copy down for sharing. The following excerpt comes from the story “Nobody Said Anything” and follows a young kid of maybe 12 or 13, I’d guess, who tells his mom he’s sick so he doesn’t have to go to school. This chunk is about three pages into the story:

I waited until she had started the car and had it warm. I listened as she pulled away from the curb. Then I got up and turned the sound on loud and went for the weeds. I smoked one and beat off while I watched a show about doctors and nurses. Then I turned to the other channel. Then I turned off the TV. I didn’t feel like watching.

I finished the chapter where Tars Tarkas falls for a green woman, only to see her get her head chopped off the next morning by this jealous brother-in-law. It was about the fifth time I had read it. Then I went to their bedroom and looked around. I wasn’t after anything in particular unless it was rubbers again and though I had looked all over I had never found any. Once I found a jar of Vaseline at the back of a drawer. I knew it must have something to do with it, but I didn’t know what. I studied the label and hoped it would reveal something, a description of what people did, or else how you applied the Vaseline, that sort of thing. But it didn’t. Pure Petroleum Jelly, that was all it said on the front label. But just reading that was enough to give you a boner. An Excellent Aid in the Nursery, it said on the back. I tried to make the connection between Nursery — the swings and slides, the sandboxes, monkeybars — and what went on in bed between them. I had opened the jar lots of times and smelled inside and looked to see how much had been used since last time. This time I passed up the Pure Petroleum Jelly. I mean, all I did was look to see the jar was still there. I went through a few drawers, not really expecting to find anything. I looked under the bed. Nothing anywhere. I looked in the jar in the closet where they kept the grocery money. There was no change, only a five and a one. They would miss that. Then I thought I would get dressed and walk to Birch Creek. Trout season was open for another week or so, but almost everybody had quit fishing. Everybody was just sitting around now waiting for deer and pheasant to open.

I got out my old clothes. I put wool socks over my regular socks and took my time lacing up the boots. I made a couple of tuna sandwiches and some double-decker peanut-butter crackers. I filled my canteen and attached the hunting knife and the canteen to my belt. As I was going out the door, I decided to leave a note. So I wrote: “Feeling better and going to Birch Creek. Back soon. R. 3:15.” That was about four hours from now. And about fifteen minutes before [his brother] George would come in from school. Before I left, I ate one of the sandwiches and had a glass of milk with it.

I love the details, like two TV channels and the uncertainty over the Vaseline. And the point-of-view is so sincere and believable. This is what kids do and how they think. I love Carver’s writing. It’s  simple. It never spells things out. It lets you watch the scene and come to your own conclusions (and that has definitely inspired me). I find the text relaxing and gripping at the same time. I get lost in the words and I like how his stories affect how we view the larger narrative surrounding it — in this case, the kid’s parents are fighting and he’s obviously stressed on some level but doesn’t consciously realize it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it some more. Raymond Carver was such a great writer. I think I’m going to have to work through the complete collection.

A while back I posted the question “Am I a Commie?” not to create a yes/no scenario, but rather to propel a journey of self-discovery (magical, of course). That’s where the title above originates.

I’ve been reading a bit today on some of the “experimental” genres of fiction writing thanks to discovering a small group of publishers (with such awesome names as Eraserhead Press, Afterbirth Books, and Raw Dog Screaming Press). And while I feel like things on the classification front are moving, the details of these sub-sub-genres are more confusing than anything.

Some of it does make sense to me. For example, Carlton Mellick III posts that with classical surrealism, using the practice of automatic writing, we’re left with a product that resembles a dream. Written words mirror the subconscious. That is, I write every word that pops up in my head as it pops up. I had a writing course in high school that did this exactly (you probably did, too!). We were given 30 minutes or so to write something — without thinking about the rules of writing. And I loved it.

In fact, this is where it all started. This is where I wrote my first anything (outside of earlier efforts to use a similar thought process to create bad poetry and bad rock-song lyrics). I found it very easy to lose myself in the process, and reading back what I had written was enjoyably strange because I didn’t understand where any of it came from. (I think I’ve saved those old journals, but they’re with my dad. I should track them down.) It’s similar to how I write today (though I like to think I’ve evolved and refined the process substantially), and probably explains why I later fell in love with filmmakers like David Lynch and, specifically, the Salvador Dali/Luis Buñuel movie Un chien andalou.

But then Mellick dives into other classifications (like Irrealism and Bizarro) and that’s where he loses me. The stuff is hard to explain, so I’m not blaming him. And a lot of it strikes me as saying that this writing is like that writing, which is where that other writing over there comes from. If you don’t have a starting point, comparative language isn’t helpful. Finding free, on-line versions of their cited sources has been a little tricky, too; of course, I don’t want to buy a few dozen bad stories because I hope there might be some helpful connection in one of them, but I may, after a little more research, go in that direction.

All in all, at this point, I think figuring out some of these basics might be besides the point. I feel like finding this group has been the first step. They’ve been there and understand this. It gives me a point to jump from and figure this stuff out. I’ve been digging through their suggested resources. Once I finish that off, I’ll try posting at their forum to see what I can learn.