More Updates: Intermission
by
Jaye B.
5-20-24
Spirit Mountain, Nv.
Greetings All,
As stated before, probably ad nauseum , I dislike having to explain my writing away, however I want to share some things here for aspiring writers and whoever else may be curious:
My most recent bizarre, just slightly disturbing posts, are really nothing new. Fifty years ago, when I was in an English class at Lake Forest Academy college prep school, I wrote a description of some goo oozing out of Richard Nixon’s eye sockets which formed into a snake that slithered all the way back to the Garden of Eden and got an A+ for my essay (from either Suzy Moser or Lynne Kulieke. Lynne has passed on and attempts to contact Suzy have fallen short.) Can’t remember what color the goo was though-it may have been translucent. I was really blessed because the English department was excellent at LFA, the one rare, albeit brief, window in my entire span of being educated that I truly benefited from.
There, I wrote a incredibly cryptic short story called The Cryptogram circa 1976 (of which I have no copy of, along with all of the other stuff I wrote back then) involving a man reading a newspaper and some ‘cheap ink’ rubbing off onto his finger and then into his bloodstream. He is then confronted with a cozenage which he hallucinates:
Cerebral Ornamentation Manifests
Every Universe Perpetuates
I have no memory of what else was in the story other than the protagonist being so hypersensitive that he couldn’t tolerate the differences in temperature caused by sunlight on a patched quilt. When I showed what I had written to my father, his only response was, with his back to me as he was walking out of the family room, “You must’ve been high when you wrote it.”
He obviously couldn’t figure out that the cozenage in the story was an acronym for:
Come Up
One of the English professors said it reminded her of the Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game which I tried delving into but the prolix, Germanic ponderousness prevented me from finishing it. She encouraged me to get it published but nothing ever gelled.
-The writing weirdness continued during the absolute worst time period of my life and that was 1980-3. I started experimenting with William S Burrough’s and Brian Gysin’s cut ups, I.e., just cutting up text and scrambling it around to make up sentences with the random juxtapositions. And then I wrote a cut up piece called The Story of Modern Glory , schizophrenic to the extreme, dissociated and hallucinatory- about my struggles with growing up in Libertyville, the most blasé of suburbs and not being able to relate to anything. If I had known I was opening up gateways doing the cut ups, I wouldn’t have done them.
-The bizarreness continued into my college years in the early 80s when I wrote a play called The Right Fronts about a small town where all the men were attached to terminals connected to their temples and moved around like electric street cars while their wives controlled them from home. The going gets really weird in the play, and in retrospect I was demonically possessed when I wrote it. There is a scene in where some children play miniature golf at Slidney’s amusement park only to come upon a demented television evangelist name Sorel Ambrose Lawncaster at one of the holes looking crucified and who starts to sermonize in the most blasphemous of ways. Another scene where Sorel is at the Velvet Turtle Lounge in a Holiday Inn in front of a , ‘mundane array of tourists.’ and talks about a Wandering Minstrel being nailed down for good crucified. At the time of the writing which was the early 1980s I did not have the spiritual discernment and awareness that something evil was plugging into me and churning this consistently dark stuff out. I know of no existing copies of the play and I cannot remember much else that I wrote other than what I shared here. The English professor was impressed and said it was promising but when I offered to share it with his other class, he told me “Jaye…I’d have you read your play to my students but I don’t want you to scare them.”
-JSYK I’m beginning to censor my own writing. Truly a sign that I have fully internalized the police state we are now in. Ergo putting the kibosh on More Updates story.
A big TY to the few of you who care. Your support would be greatly appreciated during this Dust Bowl time.
©2024-Jaye B.
Please help support Reset News @ Paypal, Cash App , Ko-Fi or contact the author for other options @ jayeb444@protonmail.com
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Jaye B. is a writer, musician and artist. His art criticism has appeared in Art Paper, New North Artscape, Art Muscle, Northfield Magazine and elsewhere. His articles have also appeared in City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, Mysteries Magazine, Fahrenheit San Diego, High Plains Reader, New Dawn and Rain Taxi. He has appeared on BBC Radio, WGN Chicago, WLW Cincinnati and elsewhere in the mediasphere to discuss his work. Please help support Reset News @ Paypal, Cash App , Ko-fi or contact the author for other options @ jayeb444@protonmail.com