June 29, 2012

• A Writer’s Notebooks

  

  I had my notebooks out today. Thought I’d snap some photos of these 40 year old physical notebooks and provide some examples from them of “pre digital” writing, which was done on the medium known as “paper“. Above, a little left of center is the first existing example of my work. “Sunbeam”. It’s “printed” on a form of tracing paper my father always provided for the family. It came in rolls, and we cut it to size. I’ll forgo reprinting it. One of the lines which stand out is the cleverly written “spook time is gone.” I’ve spent a lifetime trying to escape the dreaded “spook time.” On the upper right, behind the note to myself emphasizing my insanity, is a detailed map to “Tjin-Mar” the setting of a planned but unwritten series set in a “middle earth” type setting. J.R.R. Tolkein was really popular in the late 60s.

  A character on a television show I watch just graduated from high school. As the camera lingered over her newly pressed gown and snappy mortarboard, with it’s gleaming gold tassel, I began to get nostalgic about my own absent gold tassel, which I had draped around my class graduation photo (Rosemead H.S. Rosemead, CA 1971) and which hung above my sofa for years . (At our high school  back in 1971, a few generations ago, the gold tassel was awarded to “sealbearers” in the California Scholarship Federation. There were about 30 of us in our class as memory serves. We were seated in front in the ceremony. The tassel meant something to me personally.) I began to curse myself  (again) for “losing” my gold tassel during some half forgotten and fully drunken stupor back in my 20s. (Or was it 30s?) (Somebody as I recall made some comment about me living in the past and first I threw a beer bottle at it, perhaps, and then things got hazy…)

  I love to be able to declare (and post photos on my blog) that I’ve saved a lot of the detritus of my life over the years. Both “stuff” I’ve collected and “stuff” I’ve created. A grand lot of the “stuff” I’ve drawn or written in those heady days before the “age of information” arrived is still around here someplace. (In truth, I’m quite anal retentive and know exactly where every thing is kept.) I’ve been able to lug around a 1000 piece vinyl record collection, 500 piece laserdisc collection, countless videotapes of all sorts of shapes and sizes, and over 10 heavy boxes of (just) my 1962-1987 Playboy magazine collection. (Checked on eBay. It isn’t worth the trouble it would take the photos and post  ads for them.)  I’ve moved over 20 times as I’ve been “saving”. During my last move (and presented in videos shown on my blog) in 2009 I got rid of a lot of “stuff” which didn’t matter. But some things seemed to matter, and the tassel was one of them.

  Then I realized. Hell, I’m almost 6 decades old. I had that tassel for an awfully long time. (It hung from the mirror of my 65 Dart during my college years, as was the practice.) It’s no great loss that I don’t have it anymore. I have the memory of graduation. In fact, back in 1977 I wrote about my high school graduation when it was still pretty fresh in memory for my first autobiography.

  There was a segue in my mind to my old notebooks, and I pulled them out.

   

  The copy of my first novel is not real. It’s another book with a handmade jacket cover. “Goin Crazy” is my 1977 autobiography (and I’ve serialized parts of it on the blog, and used it as a handy reference to enhance my “elephantine” memory, esp. as I get older, and seem to forget more “details”).  The covers like the one on the top right for the short story “After the Curtain Call” were created for when I passed around my work to the kids at school. All my stories, parodies, and poems “made the rounds” amongst my friends in the long ago “age of paper”.  

  Following are a couple of poems. The first has never before been presented on the internet, and it’s pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Writer’s write. Sometimes we write pretty good (I meant “fairly well”)our whole lifetimes. I’ve still got lots of “stuff” in the way of “ancient poetry” which has never been posted online, and still classifies as literature. In fact, if not for the obvious dating of the poem with the use of a ”record player” I could have written this yesterday. The second was dedicated to my sister. It’s on the ElectricPoetry site but I don’t think I’ve ever posted it here on the blog before.   

   

  “Reunion”
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  1971 (18 years old)

  Saturday night at Josie’s place the group got together
  Again after one year of separation.
  One solid year of wondering what had happened
  To each other – to the world – to life.
  And it started with a simple ringing of the doorbell
  And Josie said “hi” to everyone
  And they remarked about how she
  Looked better with her hair cut shorter –

  Everyone was gathered together in the living room
  Watching each other carefully –
  Everyone trying to remember just how the others were
  when they knew them.
  Felicia has a new boyfriend -
  Gee, that’s nice.
  And Harry got into another auto accident
  Hell, won’t he ever learn -

  They sat contemplating somehow failing conversation
  Everyone is different, yet it’s all the same.
  Josie turned on the record player and told
  Everyone they could dance if they wanted to.
  No one wanted to.
  The record player played music –
  Record after record after record.
  And in time everybody left.

  They all had a good time.

   

  “Mary Plus Somebody”
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  1971 (18 years old)

  You’ve been looking at him with your
  Yearning eyes.
  Trying so hard
  And so great to puncture him
  And let him know about
  That tender feeling inside your heart.

  Each day you almost come close
  To opening your mouth
  And saying those
  Three small words.
  And then you get to thinking
  That maybe he doesn’t even
  Care about you.

  Then comes that day
  You’ve been waiting for
  For so long.
  You’re right there with him
  Talking with him betraying
  Your feelings.

  Then something slips
  And you see the sparkle
  Adorning his eyes.
  And you don’t know how it’s happening
  As he confirms those
  Things he’s held back all along.

  Sun slaps into your brain
  The warmth slides
  Into your body.
  Your smile tells him your deepest thoughts.
  And he says your three words
  For you.

  

  I wrote all these in high school. “Conflict of Mar-Ven-Earth” is a short story dealing with events mentioned but not included in my novel “The Sands of Time” written when I was a sophomore. “The Count’s Blood” predates the True Blood and Twilight franchises by a few decades.

  I wrote a novel set in a suburban high school back when I was in high school. It is called “Hinsford, School of Hallowed Love”. Following is a short excerpt taken from Chapter 3.

  Pamela Markham slid her cotton dress up past her hip, revealing her smooth left thigh. She lifted her eyes across the aisle to James Todd, a slender youth of 15. His eyes grew wide as he gazed at her leg and she gave a nod.

  James reached across the aisle and touched her leg, sending an electric spark throughout his body.

  Pamela smiled as James stroked her leg.

  Sam Rogers, who sat in front of Pamela, accidentally dropped his pencil and it rolled along the floor beside Pamela’s desk. The teacher looked up. James drew himself back into a writing position at his own desk while Pamela swiftly covered her leg with the dress. Sam reached back for the pencil and felt Pamela’s hand. She gave the pencil to him.

  “Sorry” he sarcastically remarked, as anger boiled in Pamela’s face. James continued writing answers on his test paper.

  Carl Leighton, the teacher, thirty-six years of age, with dark blond hair and thick rimmed glasses, bowed his head again. He was working on the grading scale for the test his class was taking, a “group examination for Sophomore English students.” This was his third year of teaching Sophomore English, but something strange struck him about most of these students. They were certainly normal, and acted like all of his previous classes, but one thing stood out, most or at least some of them seemed to be too outwardly antagonistic against him.

   

  Of course all students nowadays are confused. The riots in many schools are caused by confusion. This thing they call “the generation gap”. It touches everyone sooner or later, but Carl never could quite think of it coming to Hinsford.

  James Todd didn’t look like a troublemaker. He was slender, with black hair and wore expensive clothing. But could it be he is defying me? Carl Leighton thought. He peeked up again to find James Todd touching Pamela’s exposed leg again. What could he do? Get up and forcibly stop them? If he did, they’d most probably just start up again. He dismissed it as uncomfortableness of the first week of school. When he started giving real work in his class, the students would straighten up. It happened that way every year.  

  Here’s an excerpt from an unfinished short story also written in 1971. (The bud of writing which began to bloom in 1967 really opened in full flower by 1971. I’d already written a novel, over a dozen short stories, and a couple hundred poems.

  And when she got up every morning she used to look around her clean pink and white room, lusciously taking in her small cubbyhole, savoring the thought that all of it was hers – every doll she had ever owned adorning the shelves, her posters and cut-outs, her beloved diary which she used to keep faithfully, her ancient tattered teddy bear, everything she would look at over and over again.

  But not this morning. The ritual of living began, not with her customary glance about the room, but with a singular concentration on one item. As soon as her wide, round eyes opened, she turned her head and fixed her gaze on an envelope sitting atop her dresser. With a wave of her hand in front of her face, she gathered her black hair and threw it around her shoulders, then sat up on the edge of the bed, still gazing at the envelope. The sheets fell from her light form as she go up to walk over to the dresser. She felt the softness of the carpet as each foot took a step, yet this was unconcious. Her mind, alng with her eyes, was resting upon the envelope.

  “Elaine” her mother’s soft but somehow grating voice called to her.

  “I’m up, Mother” she unconciously replied, fingering the envelope. It was a light paper, sensuously stimulating to her hands. She threw the comment at her mother unconsciously because she wasn’t thinking of breakfast, or her mother, but of one thing. The envelope.

  Hope you enjoyed these poems and prose excerpts. I’ve written a lot of “stuff.” The gold tassel may be gone, but the words I’ve penned and typed (on paper!) still exist here in my place, and sometimes I take pleasure in reading them again. I’ll attempt to post some more excerpts from my “writer’s notebooks” here on my blog shortly.  And I really DO have a new piece of fiction in the “blogstory” vein (short story written for a blogger’s attention span, in other words short, not long like usual.) (Ed. I thought to “correct” the incorrect word “uncomfortableness” into discomfort and then decided to leave it. Shakespeare made up words. LOL.) (Further EDIT. 6/28/12 5:39pm. I’ve often thought that if I ever lost everything, the thing I’d really miss would be my “volumes” as I’ve always referred to my three ring binders full of my early work (back in the age of paper). Now, in the 21st century, most of the “good stuff” has already been converted to digital files, and I made sure I was on the cutting edge before it could slice into my nascent creativity. I was transcribing my poetry to a Brother electronic word processor on 3.5 inch floppies (not the earlier 5″ real floppies mind you) two years before I got my first real “computer” in 1997. There is something definitely interesting about looking at my early work (say it with me…on paper) cause I used to proclaim that the poem “existed” as I wrote it. I don’t have a lot of edits in my early work. Don’t have a lot of crossed out words or moving of phrases. The poems usually “came out of me” right on ”paper” as I thought of them. The poem ”existed” in my mind and on the ”page” at the same time. Now of course I shift words around like so much cotton candy, have multiple thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries running on the same computer on which I’m composing the poem, in order to find the most pleasing phrasing or rhythm right on the puter screen using the ol’ copy/paste and search function. Took me a long time to grasp the idea of “digital” anything as art or literature, however, in the “early days” of digital…post paper. Now I wonder if something fries the world so much that all the data is lost, did anyone think to save an analog version of the text on something…like…paper! MFN/ppf

  Posted: June 27, 2012 8:34 PM

  • 11:40 am
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