WRITING PROJECT by EMILY SLOTTA
October 21 2024I can guide you through the beats of this, it’s pretty simple.
First pretend you’re girl Hemingway in Bushwick. Take a sip of hot black coffee. Write the sun also rises in miniature, over and over again in small concentric circles, but do it without any war.
Here’s how it sounds. Short sentences interspersed with a few run-ons, integrating the traditional and the sensitive in fragmented pieces across your observations of modern everyday life. I’m bedazzling a telephone pole, gluing mirrors to a gas pump. I’m touching lightly on abjection or gore. Some people do this better than others. The iridescent oil in the parking lot is so beautiful to me. I saw God in the sweaty eyeball of the dog in the hot car. I wish my English teacher was my mom but in an Oedipal way. I watched a real man beheaded in a ten hour loop and I’m 0-0. I am changing my Green Day Frutiger Aero Gummo Bath Spaghetti Life into a Francis Ha Girl on a Metropolis High like Phoebe from Friends Smelly Cat Love Song. I shake a thesaurus so it rattles and wish to god you hear me.
I’m in touch with ‘real history’ ‘real beauty’ ‘real feelings’ in these dismal modern times, facade over facade, veneer over veneer. Swag. I’m smearing the greasy paste we have made from the culture of the 20th century underneath my eyes, filling a canteen with 10 highly caffeinated calories, and sitting down in an ergonomic chair.
The beauty we have lost is so felt within me. I remember childhood. I remember when the speed of my own mind was dictated by my own thoughts- and am unsure when that changed. Things become trite at nauseating speeds. Oat milk is sooooo disturbing if you think about it. I am customizing my character. My life is made up of images I’ve seen and images I dream of. I am a magazine collage of other people's lives and dreams. I want to be a movie star. I want to be a barbie doll. I eat raw lambs brains and sun my testicles for health reasons. I want to be a coquettish cross-wearing small black shoe french tip fall air high rise post-mid century modern cigarette advertisement sans buccal fat. I love to see other people be these things. They are very very beautiful. I’m the feeling of seeing them. I like to agree with them, and I disagree with them in ways which agree with them. There is a vital, animal fear of being truly subversive- at the same time being subversive is what is in style, yes you can, no you can’t, yes you can.
Posting is beautiful isn’t it? You are so right. You are so right. The whole world is open like a glittering cave, a laughing mouth, a true friendship, and a cleanly bleeding wound. But wait. Shut up. Genuine expression tends to reveal itself, escape the time if you can, its a whirlpool circling forever art’s deep black water. There are no more romantics wearing romantic clothes. How badly I wanted to be someone who could ___. We should be plainly ashamed of the space we give sadness, of the ways we have danced inside our gaseous self indulgence like it were a warm ballroom, of the ways we have denied it expulsion and instead rolled in it, given power to it and exalted in it. Writing has never been easier because you can say anything. I take any small bitter feeling and dress it in a plastic bag and a couple somewheres’ sun baked memories. I write a sentence, take a cast of it and put the cast in a display case to bow at for the next few weeks. I make whores of small joys. This isn't poetry, the thing I am doing. I have started to drool this.
When the day ends and I have soberly considered the life of a friend, and determined a flaw in them which I will never reveal, I goodnight kiss all that which in my own life I play pretend to love and tip it to tumble into a hollow valley. I will fear no evil. For you are with me.
Emily Slotta is a writer from Chicago who can also sing and dance. She has been published in Apocalypse Confidential and writes a personal newsletter “Out of the Heartland.”