“What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told. — And now I have told you all that had prepared it.” Andr
Events That Led to My Divorce
7 thoughts on “Events That Led to My Divorce”
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Allegory of pop culture on your personal experience? Is that a stupid question? 😐
I’m sometimes not sure what’s heftier: this sort of heavily crafted work or the real scoop.
Not at all a stupid question, since it now strikes me as rather cryptic, and I didn’t explain it or post it on Friday like I said I would do with “fun”/fictional stuff. But, yeah, I was trying to play with the lines between personal and impersonal — as silly as all the alt-history stuff is (a lot of it comes from some surrealist exercises in a course I co-taught this Spring, like with found syllogisms: we wrote down quotations from magazines like “these shoes can make me fly” and “that gown suits your figure just fine” and shuffled them into if/and/then syllogistic form), I tried to make it as impersonal/reportorial and large-scale as I could, so that the vague yet personal title and last line would have to carry a huge amount of signifying work, in saying to the reader, “All this other stuff means something.” And I was hoping that all that other stuff, as patently unbelievable (Stalin at 112?) as it is, would suddenly get its own little push towards significance/weight/believability from the piece’s two brief “personal” endpieces.
OK, so that’s the long, navel-gazing, arty-farty-aren’t-I-smart version. 🙂
The short version: nope. Never been married. But I really had fun writing it. Does it work?
ha ha ha. Yes it works. I was totally fooled. I’ll come back later and re-read your explanation but I had to give the belly laugh credit.
Re-read. I only minored in rhetoric and boy, did I slam syllogisms out of my mind just as quickly as I could (I only recall pages and pages of explanation on a subject that didn’t seem that complicated but perhaps I missed something). But still, I believe I follow. I AM glad that you explained the sandwiching of the impersonal/surreal between the purported personal facts because I’m not sure I would have recognized that as a tool.
I think it does work. But I’m unsure if the personal bits can be credited. For me, it’s the structure: the flow, the rhythm and also, the interspersing of the pop culture and political worlds. The overlap of suggestions of history into your created future here (i.e. Madonna singing for the President reminds me of Marilyn, assume that was intended) caught me going “tee hee, how clever”. It’s also very effective visually since one can so easily envision these people and thus, events.
Oh hell, I just liked it. 😉
Thanks: nice to have positive (or any) feedback on the fiction/”fun” stuff. Like I’ve said before — you so rock. 🙂
Damn, that was good!
Thanks, Curtiss. Does this mean you’re back? Your writing’s been missed.