At last, by not-especially-popular demand, the post the ladies have all been waiting for:  The Bald Man Compatibility Quiz; or, Why I Remain Single, Part 114 of 114!!!

This is, as Serious Cat will confirm, a very serious quiz.  There’s a scoring system involved and tiered results and everything.  It’s just like Cosmopolitan, except not very cosmopolitan.  That’s how we protect ourselves from copyright infringement.

You can take the quiz today, and I’ll post the scoring system when the weekend comes around.  You’ll have to wait until next week to find where you fall in the bald man compatibility continuum.  Can you handle the suspense?  I sure can’t!

Without further ado, the most quizzical quiz you ever will see:

1.  Given your druthers, which of the following would you take to the annual fall ice cream social/sock hop?

            a. Westley

            b. Vizzini

            c. Fezzik

            d. Inigo

2.  You are the figurative cheese to the bald man’s metaphorical macaroni.  Which variety are you?

            a. gouda

            b. cheddar

            c. pepperjack

            d. brie

3. You are mackin’ in the back seat (or possibly the trunk) of your Daihatsu.  Which of the following songs is on the radio, setting the mood for your smoocheration?

            a. “Tubular Bells”

            b. “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”

            c. “Conjunction Junction”

            d. “The Linus and Lucy Rag”

4.  You discover the bald man’s reasonably unhealthy attraction to mimes.  You accordingly spend much of your quality time…

            a. trapped inside imaginary boxes

            b. climbing imaginary ladders

            c. walking against imaginary wind

            d. leaning against imaginary walls

5.  Based on your karmic performance in this lifetime, you will most likely be reincarnated as…

            a. desulforudis audaxviator

            b. mapusaurus roseae

            c. najash rionegrina

            d. helarctos malayanus

6.  The bald man, as we all know, is unnervingly androgynous.  From which gender-inappropriate cartoon character have you learned the most precious life lessons?

            a. Funshine Bear

            b. Ookla the Mok

            c. Barbapapa

            d. Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living

7.  The bald man is, as you might expect, a roller derby aficionado.  Which of the following bitchin’ roller derby names would you most wish to claim as your own?

            a. Abra Cadaver

            b. Clownsnack

            c. Eva Destruction

            d. Sadie Masochist

8.  Much to the chagrin of native speakers of English, the bald man makes up roughly 54% of all the words he uses.  Which of the following portmanteau words would you most wish to claim as your own?

            a. ouroborobotic

            b. ampersandwich

            c. curlicubicle

            d. nonsensual

9.  The bald man, as you may have noticed, refers to himself in the third-person with appalling regularity.  What would you choose as your own third-person nom de diablerie?

            a. the wiggedy minx

            b. the muscatel jezebel

            c. the woebegone amazon

            d. the tricksy vixen

10.  You just finished the Bald Man Compatibility Quiz!  How do you feel?

            a. squishy

            b. bewigginsed

            c. woozy

            d. reprobate

That’s it!  Tune in next time (“next time” here meaning one representative point in a possible future, not necessarily the very next time) for the results!

Today’s fun search phrase that will lead you to my blog:  “I don’t experience guilt.”   Sociopaths of the world unite!  Somewhere down the hall, if you don’t mind.

I had a lazy weekend, reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Northanger Abbey once again and otherwise slackin’ like a kraken.  This week I’ll kick off my fiction fiesta, which I hope will produce about six stories before Christmas, so I did a little preliminary planning as well.  Given the non-urgency of my existential scripting, I even went so far as to skip shaving my head, which means I’m looking a little like like Woodstock (the bird, not the lovefest).  I’ll spruce up before class, but in the interim I’m going to enjoy the semblance of slackerdom.

On the way home from the gym I conceived of my obsession du jour:  the challenge of reading aloud.  I’m preparing for a late October reading of my fiction, and I’ve got two very readable pieces to work with–one is something like a fairy tale, and the other features a speaker who (for reasons the story implies) seems to be caught in a state of arrested development.  In theory, it should be easy-peasey.  Since the plan was hatched, however, I’ve been listening much more attentively to speakers of all shapes and sizes, and that purposive eavesdropping has me a bit fretful.

A local advertiser, for example, does not seem to realize that his normal speaking voice sounds like that of Droopy Dog, so much so that I initially thought the commercial was a lark.  The news reader for an area radio station cannot make it through words over three syllables without garbling them; her botched readings and re-readings were so infuriating that I actually changed the station.  And at Friday’s department meeting I found myself catching “ums” and other verbal interference much more often than I usually do.  I’m no toastmaster myself, but I work at a reasonably polished, seamless delivery.  I had the good fortune to teach speech classes a couple gigs ago, and it’s helped me to monitor my own articulatory tics when I’m lecturing and improvising.  Reading expressively from the page, however, strikes me as a little more daunting.

My apprehension was exacerbated when I scared up some clips of some poets and authors reading their work.  Some, of course, are old pros, and they deliver their lines with lively inflection and expert pacing.   Quite a few, however, exhibit all the habits that worry me in my own presentation.  Some stumble over their own difficult words; others settle into a neatly clipped monotone, which is great for catching line breaks but not so great at conveying rhythm or tenor; still others mumble or sprint, which always strikes me as the reading syndrome suffered by those who would rather be anywhere except behind the mic (we call this “projection,” my Freudian friends).  I don’t know where I fall on this continuum–some people quite like my voice, but it sounds terribly odd to my own ears.  When I read aloud at the computer to pick up my own rhythms, I also tend to use a softer speaking voice, one I don’t often use in public.  Accordingly, I think I’m going to have to log quite a few rehearsal hours before I take the stage.

…

Speaking of which, I just timed out the two stories I plan to read; they weigh in at 23 total minutes, so apparently I’m going to need to mix in a third piece.  One of my stories is quite literally unreadable–it’s predicated on a word that no one can actually articulate, so I’m thinking I’ll have to rule that one out.  That means I’ll have to match for tone or else pick for range; ah, the many delights.  Perhaps a nice Lovecraftian rant to show off my range?  If nothing else, I deliver crazy talk with conviction.

Still, my lower reading register isn’t too bad, and with a few practice runs I trust I’ll be able to jazz up the inflections.  I got by without too many gaffes, so there’s some hope for me yet. 

But if I crack under the pressure, I’ll put James Earl Jones on speed-dial, just in case.

Today is a double-dutch bloggery day; some days it’s not worth fighting the impulse.  While I would like to profess inspiration, some effluence of esemplastic élan that drove me to the keyboard, I’m actually just clearing the docket for tomorrow, which I hope to commit wholly to finishing a story.  If I can muster a little diligence over the next few weeks I’ll finish the summer session with an empty desktop and the option of devoting myself to poetry (and my annual report) for about 75 days.   I haven’t quite overcome my obsessive need to fixate on the future, but at least I’m back in the current calendar year.

In the minor triumphs department, by the bye, a small success:  when I sat down with my checkbook to smear my outstanding credit card debt with a dollop of dollars (as I mentioned on Wednesday), I actually managed to go big when I pulled the trigger.  I know that’s no too momentous by human standards, but when you’ve spent two decades fretting about empty coffers with no fallback options to speak of, the sense of security that comes with a rainy day fund is hard to let go.  Even so, the prospect of being entirely debt-free (student loans notwithstanding) by the end of 2008 sounds mighty sweet to me.

In a related lame-to-you/exciting-for-me turn of events, I also found a magical sandwich shoppe.  When I began to approach the prospect of writing more seriously during my last summer in Auburn, I went to Panera every Friday evening with a volume of poetry and a notebook for a little self-inflicted quality time.  When it comes to writerly work I’m a bit of an introvert, but too much quiet finds me conjuring excuses to stray from the keyboard.  A little subdued bustle tends to be good for my antisocial soul, and I found that my trips to Panera (coupled with Auburn’s excellent holdings of contemporary poetry) routinely refreshed my perceptions.  We have a world class sandwich shoppe here in Mount Pleasant, Max and Emily’s, but when the university is in session it tends to be a little too hectic for my meditative mojo.  I went there today, however, and I recaptured a vibe that I didn’t realize I’d been missing so much.  My sedate summer session suddenly looks much more promising.

As you might expect, I’m dwelling on these none-too-momentous turns of events because I’m shirking work, which brings me to my somewhat topical material for the day. 

Right now I’m trying to whip a story, a bit called “The Third Mercy,” into shape.  I’ve had this piece on my desktop (or in my “On Deck Projects” folder) for a few months now, and I think it’s ripened long enough.  In defense of the dilatory method, various delays have rescued the story from a spectacularly lame title.  Much to my chagrin, however, that same slow progress has revealed a truth at once pleasing and problematic:  “The Third Mercy” is a prose poem.

Attentive readers may have noticed that my propensity for assonance and alliteration has become a little more rambunctious than usual.  I don’t like pointing fingers, but the story is clearly to blame. 

What I’m attempting is, in essence, the story of a people, and “The Third Mercy” moves all the way from a creation myth to the narrative present, to a pivotal moment in their history (yes, I’m cribbing from my Myspace blog; this is what happens when I double dip).  After an exploratory paragraph or two, as I attempted to pinpoint the tone I was going for, I realized that a tale of that nature would probably sound a lot like the product of oral tradition.  As a result, the piece has gone from being something of a narrative experiment (I wanted to try something a little less character-driven than usual to see what it would look like) to a full-blown exercise in rhythmic reading.  I’m writing the story as I would write verse, and that has made the process a lot more labor-intensive.

When I’m finished I hope the rhythm will occur as a subliminal effect, making the progress from passage to passage much more memorable.  I don’t wish to hammer the reader with iambs, but I’d like to give the piece a kind of bonfire unity, a structure that mirrors the mechanics of a live fireside telling.  It’s been an involving process, as I’ve had to reread and revise time and again to make sure I preserved both the narrative sense and the verve of the verse.  It’s a kind of challenge I enjoy, thought I’ll be awfully glad when I’m done.

Better still:  when I’m writing that annual report, explaining to my peers how I see the several facets of my work informing one another, I’m going to have a really vivid example to show them.

Why yes, I do choose my post titles so students Googling for free term papers wind up reading my blog instead.  Don’t you?  Sorry to all the youth of America looking for insight into Robert Herrick over the past few days.  You’ll find no insight here.  If you look carefully, however, you’ll find veiled allusions to JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenberg today.  I take away with one hand, but I slap you with the other.

Thanks to some unwholesome diligence (I started working in good earnest at about 8:30 AM and kept the wheels turning until about 7:30 PM), I was able to wrap up my semester yesterday evening.  I’ve got a meeting today at 2:00, but after that I will turn to the Bald Man Slackin’ Plan, at least for a week or so.  The last couple of days were peppered with good news–my mother’s recent collapse was due to pneumonia (which sounds like pretty rotten news, I know, but strikes me as one of the better eventualities available), a good friend got engaged (again, a little on the bittersweet side, but she deserves all the happy she can find), and I learned I have $1250 in professional development money to spend (which should just about cover postage for the last year’s poetry submissions)–so I’m feeling pretty peppery as I head into the siesta.

The area will be swamped for graduation over the weekend, so I’ll also be laying low for a day or three.  I’m going to gussy up my online personae, and I may kick up a LiveJournal and Facebook site  while I’m at it.  Those, however, will be purpose-driven sites (the former to make contact with an editor or two, the latter to give students a virtual self to touch base with), so I hope I won’t be spreading myself too thin.  I need to work my low-maintenance mojo.

The best news, however, is this:  the plan for a volume of poetry is now perfectly clear in my head. 

I’ve had an overarching theme to work with for quite some time, and I had originally divided the book into two sections fit to encompass some published pieces, some unpublished pieces, and some works in progress.  The problem, however, is that I was haunted by the Spectres of the Unsaid (which sounds likea nifty title, and you’re welcome to steal it), pieces that clearly fit into to the big picture but were poorly adapted to the two-part format.  I had set aside those poems in a separate wing of my mind, and over the past week or two their collective integrity (give or take connections I’ll need to make with a few pieces yet to be written) began to take shape.  As it turns out, I needed a third wing; like “The Woodspurge,” my vessel has three cups in one.  That’s good value by any reckoning.

That should make for a pretty exciting summer:  I’ve got an article to write, a manuscript to assemble, and plenty of time to fill in the nooks and crannies with some stories I’ve kept on the back burner.

As for today, however, I’m slackin’ like a kraken.