innerviews_werewolf_the_science_of_writing frAnk i noticed your recent return and celebrated by indulging in the pleasure of your finely crafted words, images so precise and definate that i shudder. a world, "like the first page of a mystery," that looks and feels like my own, but is another planet with two suns instead of one. your talent is astounding. dog! you're sick! the_best_lonliness things_that_backfire yellowed would i be correct in beholding something scientific in your writing? to me i sense a systematic knowledge that you have gained from uniting emotion with observation, a method of capturing thoughts gained by a certain training you have developed. what do you think? how do you explain it? 030313 ... werewolf well my writing certainly has changed since i became a pysch major. here, i'll give you a runthrough. i'm graduating this year....but...i started out as a physics major, then switched to journalism, then to creative writing and japanese as a double major. Finally, for reasons i won't bore you with, i switched to psychology. I plan on going to law school after this and i'm sure this too will influence my writing. The dominant schemas, or activated associations within our minds certainly do flavor even a kiss. When you learn that it's evidence, or that it may have hidden features, when you subject it to the rigors of distrust you reach startling new conclusions that are different, sometimes lamentably so, from those times in your life when it seemed your conclusions were reality, when your senses, as indirect as they already are, were not further augmented by doubt, and the only terms you thought in were gifts and injustices, that to avoid and that to clamor for. As you grow older or engage in scientific learning, you learn to look for more predictive qualities, for a reason for goodness or badness. This of course is helpful in life, but it also in some way separates us from the essential experience of that yes or no, digital approach to life which is a big part of childhood. Of course it's more complicated than that, it's a process not just something that happens in one day, and i feel in some senses it is inevitable, losing that exactness, that inability to separate an emotion from an experience or to separate the parts from the whole. Our memories from there become somewhat fragmented, we keep important pieces of things, but we lose the fantastic battles of places and people and time for love and hate in our lives when we are first faced with the essential strangeness of being in a place which once brought us joy in a time of great sadness. When we first learn to separate the components we learn that there are always more to separate and that our love or our hate are rarely logically justified but at best statistical approximations. This lack of faith in our own tendencies, in our intuitive graces, is one which cools our passions. The balance i find is that these tendencies, these passions, the uneasy combinations we make of whole and components and the decisions on where to put emphasis have helped us survive for thousands of years and should be trusted. Writing then to me seems the reconciliation of trust and mystery. It is filled with uncertainty, it is ever advancing like science (science and art, are after all just different proceedures in the same process), but also accepts its limitations, and reorganizes our world in a way not based on some unrealistic objectiviy, but rather in a way that serves us, that comforts us, that helps us make light of what was wrong or right in an experience, that helps us set ourselves away from a thing and observe it's uncertainties, its comforts and discomforts without laying our lives on the line. Everytime a writer writes they are putting out a hypothesis. The criteria is varied, not standardized: a sigh, a glance toward heaven, a pounding in the heart that will not recede. These criteria are often much harder to meet than making an atom dance, than navigating a rat through a maze. Writers bring us to the uncertain through the certain. The words we know are used to show us the words we do not yet, objects of sacred unknowability are put into context 030313 ... werewolf and so like science, the person who is shown it is given an experience of understanding, is convinced that they already knew this, because what is being described to them is as familiar as the air they breathe, and the tools for describing it are as familiar as the analogous used, the concrete world we have been grasping since childhood, the abstract world we've lived in since we first internalized the color or number of a group or blocks. Writing surely is the science most concerned with human dignity, with human emotion, and with all of those complexities which we would loathe to give up for a more certain world. 030313 ... werewolf i'm only doing this since i never responded to the whole lycanthrope thing...but know i'm running on like two hours of sleep after finishing a paper on whether or not the right to privacy is justified by constitutional language. Sounds pretty fun eh? 030313 ... ever dumbening "Writers bring us to the uncertain through the certain ... objects of sacred unknowability are put into context." nice 030313 ... j i am glad you returned as well 030314 ... z - 040409 ... oldephebe "No no baby..I mean Your Honor not a lie, it was just an incidentally erroneous expression of mistaken fact...clearly the standard of perjury does not apply here, errors of fact are inevitable..." I actually tried saying this once and it kinda exculpated me, that is before she had a chance to think about it for a awhile. Where do the worlds of imagination and creative rhetoric and legal legerdemain meet and sometimes copulate? Why of course in the arenas of our advesarial court system. A jerry-rigged jurisprudence. The wings of our Judeo-Christian informed jurisprudential rubric were and constinue to be blind to the obscenities of racial, gender, agist based inequality. Draconian counter-forces to the TRUE meaning of patriotism, the ragged tattered men who were willing to not just take life but surrender their own for the cause of Liberty, MY LIFE for the cause of human rights! have been vigorously and ingeniously set upon us like hell's three headed hounds. I don't buy Ms Rice's act for one minute. If you can stand in a courtroom and weild that kind of a force that can change the tide of a hearing, become a force that reaches into the imaginations of the jurors and your honor and your advesary and change the current so that the human story is told. So that the human story breaks out of the legal binders and arcane language, so that every honorable, noble impulse w/in the heart of the jury is exploited...s you know you can ultimately win. ... 040409 ... oldephebe wait. maybe i should go back and actually read what werewolf posted to this page... 040409 ... werewolf why bother? 040409 ... randomly recent ! 081023 what's it to you? who go blather from