Incendiary Lit

HOORAY!!!

The program sounds really nice, its an Income Based Repayment (hence IBR) for student loans, which also forgives loans after 25 years, so you won’t be paying for your college textbooks with your social security (if that’s still around). So yeah, very exciting news for so many people, that their income calculator was overwhelmed and crashed temporarily. But it will be back soon.

Even though it has little to do with his fondness for poetry, (Robbie Burns isn’t a favorite AND I’m majoring in poetry) Craig Ferguson has long been my favorite late night talk show host, and yes that’s including Conan. Don’t get me wrong, I love Conan, but the format of Craig’s show just gets e a bit more these days. I’m sorry. I am glad to be shed of Leno (though until Jimmy Fallon gets his stride, its a step back. But Leno’s a leap back from Carson, and he’s still occasionally hilarious, so let it be). These asides are confusing even me. So let’s get to it. A little while back Jessica and I were with some friends and convinced them to change the channel after a number of consecutive Fallon awkward moments to Ferguson, whom they’d never seen (aside from the Drew Carrey Show, which I still feel is kind of like Carrottop. Easy to make fun of and laugh at secretly. Come on, they’re puns, and we, as word nerds, should love them). And randomly he not only spent the entire monolog talking about poetry (and making fun of poetry as a subject of higher education– and rightly so, I guess. But one comment that really helped set me in my ways was from a History professor, who interrupted tangents about the history of beer and of flipping the bird (of which he was writing a book about), to share a short anecdote about a good friend of his, with a PhD in history who happily manages a Pizza Hut. The anecdote was lost on me, but the concept was not. And I hated the idea, but still couldn’t shake my want to learn more about writing. So I gave in. What is this? This is an introduction to two Craig Ferguson Monologues about poetry. Kind of. Why Two? Because when I searched for Craig Ferguson poetry Burns, I get a link from 2009 and I almost posted it unwatched. It was from the very beginning of the year, a separate monologue, which focused highly on poetry. So I have to post them both. They make me laugh a lot.

via videosift.com

and
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The show we’d seen originally.
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Please allow me to slip deep, deep into geekdom here, I apologize in advance.

Read this.

Now, anyone familiar with the series, or who’s hung out with me while drinking SoCo and Coke (not SoCo and lime,  that’s my “The Jungle” adaptation rant I believe) knows that Robotech is the perfect source material for an Odyssey of a movie/live action series. But that is only after skewering away the fatty material of the series. Here are a few things you two had better do, or I will be a sad sad panda:

1) Fix Minmei. And I mean that like they fixed Luna before we adopted her. I’ve had unfixed cats, and they act (and sound) like the Minmei of the series. She was loud, obnoxious, screechy, and friggan obnoxious. But she had some honest moments where the obnoxiousness dropped away, like when she found out that Rick was MIA during the reconnaissance mission with Lisa Ben and Max. Don’t ask for an episode number, though I could look it up on IMDB, man… I don’t know if I could stand sounding like an even bigger geek than I’m going to sound by writing a list of demands for a badly dubbed 80’s anime… but I grew up on that show, damnit. Minmei should be modelled, mainly after Miley Cyrus I think… though by the time the movie’s made she’d be too old, and more importantly, we’re toning down the annoying, so please get someone more normal who can act like a whiny little brat on command, but still remain a sincere human being when the devastating occurs… not just a brat who can’t act. That’s the character, not the actor you want.

2) Roy Fokker’s death. Holy crap was that traumatizing as a kid. That should be a keystone moment, end of the first act. It propels Rick into his military career, and ultimately into the arms of Lisa. The two couples (Roy and Claudia, and Rick and Lisa) are a sort of parallel that can be drawn, the military hero couple that makes for legends, and what more do you want for the future fate of humanity than legendmakers protecting you? But this point was about Roy Fokker. He was the big brother. He was pulled away by a war he thought he was fighting to make everyone back home proud. But once you’re in, you’re in, so even after he discovered that the war wasn’t something to make them especially proud (as Rick says in the pilot episode (hehe, pilot) “you’re proud of being a killer?!”), he couldn’t leave the army… He feels like, though what he did was right, that he abandoned Rick, and he’s constantly trying to make up for it with grand gestures… his racer repaired, getting Min Mei to see him, saving him on the destroyed Macross Island during the initial invasion. Wow, geek overload on this point. Roy’s a conflicted, important character that you should latch onto immediately, and like terribly, then be pained terribly by his death, then glad that Rick’s finally beginning to step into his shoes. Period. Got that guys?

3)  Get the ages right. Rick and Minmei and half the crew of the SDF One are kids. 15-16. Why? It was a training academy, and it was in the midst of a long-raging world war. Populations were devastated. The standard age of soldiers (18-45) would have been greatly depleted, and the spaceship was still years away from being “ready” though the technology still decades from making sense (at least)… so it only makes sense that for this new ship the children would go study to work… I think it’s important to keep that the same as the movie. Many things that happened, and really had to happen, are because of immaturity, rashness, and lack of foresight, especially in non-combat. This is because they’re really just kids, many away from their parents and on their own at a very young age.

4) The Dinginess factor. OK, sorry, I’m a Firefly fan. But that’s kind of how I see the Zentraedi ships. They don’t know how to repair their ships, they don’t clean (except one sweeps up broken glass from Rick’s Veritech I remember), and the humans, the perspective is tiny, so they’ll see allllll the dirt and grime that a quick swish with a mop or broom wouldn’t fix. Gritty and realistic (despite being grand and ominous) are the Zentraedi. And they’re also a tragic race, really, created for one purpose and they’ve found themselves with purpose (the Invid) but losing the resources to even defend themselves… Holy crap. Geek.

5) Is this just one movie or two? I could see the first saga spanning two, or even three movies easily, and since the majority of the scenes are either internal or CGI (in the spaceship or out of it) with some Macross stuff that could be shot on a soundstage, because that would be how Macross actually was (great 4th wall potential there, especially with Minmei’s acting career), an outdoor scene indoors, it could probably be shot for a very modest budget… keep the actors young (but be get friggan good actors, not just cute teenagers for once in an action movie) and the budget should spread well, right?

6) Minimize the storyline with Rick and Minmei in the ship. Keep the essentials, the shower, the rat, the miraculously airtight pilot jumpsuit and absurdly large tuna (maybe have some inconspicuous explanation in early exposition about genetically modified fish that help feed the base or something) but Minmei is inherently annoying, and I think that little storyline which brings them together should bearas little burden of screechy/childish annoyance in the first run through as possible. There should be those flashbacks later, and they should show the more annoying side of Minmei later on in the Rick/Lisa storyline.

7)  Hire me. As a consultant or ’staff writer’ or producer or something. Please.

This is an interesting list of submission turn offs from the editor of The North American Review Vince Gotera. Those who are thinking about starting to submit their work for publication should check over this list, maybe even print it out. Those who already are submitting, look it over to make sure you’re not accidentally breaking submission etiquette. Everyone that has a Facebook profile should go here and friend “Friends of the North American Review”

Okay … for me, the “turn-off” is different for each poem I ultimately reject. Here are a few immediate turn-offs, in no particular order:

• Botched ending … forced, too explanatory, too “universalized”
• Clumsy use of form … for example, if sonnet or sestina, etc.
• Slow getting going … should rock from first line down
• Too much full rhyme … I prefer slant rhyme
• Uninformed line breaks … be aware of lineation effects
• Abstract or image-less … unless experimental
• Superficial topic or handling
• Obviously unaware of poetic tradition(s)
• Cover letter explains poem … inexperienced submitter
• Poem sent with vita or résumé … very inexperienced submitter
• Says “copyright …” … does writer think I’ll steal the poem?
• Centered lines … unless important for theme
• Badly edited … errors, typos, grammar, etc.
• Font too small … many editors are older and have old eyes
• Monotype font or font too fancy … hard to read quickly
• Pseudonyms … let’s back up our writing with our names, ppl
• Handwritten … usually from prisoners, though I’ve accepted
poems by prisoners.

There are other turn-offs but that’s all I can think of at the moment.

I do want to say that I don’t just drop the poem. My eyes touch every word. I read very quickly and wait for the poem to say, “whoa, you’re reading too fast.”

I almost called today’s Firestarter exercise “the morning after” but there are some negative connotations to that now. Thanks abortion pill– you forever stole 2 words. Which brought immediately to mind how “Here I sit” should be removed from the poet’s dictionary… well, strike that. They should be filed under the heading “DANGER WILL ROBINSON!” because no matter what your intentions, the next word that will pop into the reader’s head is “brokenhearted. ” and then they’ll think of bathroom stalls and poop and your reader’s mind is definitely in the wrong place. Well, depending on how crappy the poem is. YEAH! That’s right. A pun.  But seriously, as an editor I’ve read the phrase “here I sit” in at least five different pieces, and every time I finished the rhyme. Anyway, be careful when writing for those distinct, familiar phrases that call to mind very specific things like products (slogans), jokes, other poems… while an intention allusion is a completely different story, sometimes even common phraseology can take your reader, at least on one level, away from your poem entirely as the mind continues “came to sh*t / but only farted” despite the only similarity is “Here I sit.” Ya dig? Basically what I’m saying is, use your words with extreme caution.