Definition of pusillanimous
: lacking courage and resolution: marked by contemptible timidity
Category Archives: Paffooney
Picking Pictures Pusillanimously
Spinning Wheels of Thought
I start today with nothing in my head to write about. I guess I can say that with regularity most days of the writing week. Sundays in particular are filled with no useful ideas of any kind. But I have a certain talent for spinning. As Rumpelstiltskin had a talent for spinning straw into gold, I take the simple threads of ideas leaking out of my ears and spin them into yarns that become whole stories-full of something to say. And it is not something out of mere nothing. There is magic in spinning wheels. They take something ordinary and incomplete, and turn it into substantial threads useful for further weaving.
Of course the spinning wheel is just a metaphor here for the craft of writing. And it is a craft, requiring definable skills that go well beyond merely knowing some words and how to spell them.
The first skill is, of course, idea generation. You have to come up with the central notion to concoct the potion. In this case today, that is, of course, the metaphor of using the writing process as a spinning wheel for turning straw into gold. But once that is wound onto the spindle, you begin to spin yarn only if you follow the correct procedure. Structuring the essay or story is the next critical skill.
Since this is a didactic essay about the writing process I opened it with a strong lead that defined the purpose of the essay and explained the central metaphor. Then I proceeded to break down the basic skills for writing an essay with orderly explanations of them, laced with distracting images to keep you from dying of boredom while reading this, a very real danger that may actually have killed a large number of the students in my writing classes over the years (although they still appeared to be alive on the outside).
As I proceed through the essay, I am stopping constantly to revise and edit, makeing sure to correct errors and grammar, as well as spending fifteen minutes searching for the picture of my mother’s spinning wheel used directly above. Notice, too, I deliberately left the spelling-error typo of “making” to emphasize the idea that revising and proof-reading are two different things that often occur at the same time, though they are very different skills.
And as I reach the conclusion, it may be obvious that my spinning wheel of thought today spun out some pure gold. Or, more likely, it may have spun out useless and boring drehk. Or boring average stuff. But I used the spinning wheel correctly regardless of your opinion of the sparkle of my gold.
How to Talk to Real People
While visiting in Iowa, I ran into an old high school friend at a local eatery. I remember how in high school and junior high, I played basketball on the same team with him, I listened to his exaggerations about a probably non-existent sex life, and helped him on one or two occasions to get answers on Math homework (even then the teacher in me wouldn’t let me just give him the answers, I always made him work out the answers step by step).
Now he is a judgmental and basically crabby old coot. He is a Trump supporter, hater of immigrants who take American jobs, and an unpleasant arguer of politics. And the sorest point about his intractable coot-i-ness is the fact that, as a classmate, he is the same age as me and I am, therefore, just as intractably coot-y as he is.
So, how exactly do you talk to a mean old coot?
Well, you have to begin by realizing that it is not like the dialogue in a novel or TV show. This is a real person I was talking to. So, I had to proceed by accepting that he thinks I am an idiot and anything I say and think is wrong. Not merely wrong, but “That’s un-American and will lead to a communist takeover of our beloved country!” sort of wrong. I can then laugh off numerous Neo-Nazi assertions by him, make snarky comments about his praises for the criminal president, and generally get along with him like old friends almost always do. I play my part just as furiously as he plays his, and we both enjoy the heck out of it.
We are both of us crazy old coots, likely to say just about anything to get the other one’s goat. Getting goats is apparently vital to the conversations of real people. But we have more in common than we have as differences. We don’t keep score in our world-shaking debates, nor do we count how many goats we get. And that is how you talk to real people.
Filed under characters, humor, insight, oldies, Paffooney
How to Read a Poem
Poetry is… well… whatever the Poet says it is.
If you know he or she is a stinky poet… hold your nose… and carefully read for anything worthy, and if you find nothing worth standing the smell of… then throw it in the trash before you let go of your nose so you never get a whiff of stinky poetry… that stuff can kill you.
If you know the poet is an average poet… hold your nose… just in case… and look to see if the ideas are crisp and fresh, bought in a farmer’s market rather than Walmart, and grown organically… not factory farmed. You should also check the quality of the protein versus the power of the carbohydrates… you don’t need too many calories in your poetry. Then let go of your nose… Why were you holding your nose anyway? Olfactory poetry is only for dogs and bad poets. Appreciate the nutrients in the verse, and ignore the effects of starvation that will set in if you never read any poetry above this level. The Rod McKuen and Joyce Kilmer level… well… if you only read this stuff, you deserve to poetically starve.
But then there is the Shakespeare-Sonnet level of poetry. No, get your hand away from your nose… this is not stinky-poet territory now. You are up in the stratosphere where if you get too close to the sun, you will get a Robert Browning, and if you swing too low over the Arctic, you may get a bit of Robert Frost. William Butler Yeats… Theodore Roethke… William Blake… John Keats… Emily Dickinson… they all will put wrinkles in your brain and silver streaks in your hair. You will find things you never thought about before… but wanted to know… needed to know… dared to know… but never before found anywhere else… because that’s what poetry is for… you read it… and understand a bit of the mind of God.
But finally, there is the unknown level of poetry. You go in with eyes wide open… not knowing if you will encounter the Goddess Aphrodite… or a monster… whether you will find love at first sight… or be hideously devoured by something wicked. This is where the horrible poetry of Mickey is most likely to abide (because unlike you, most people are wise enough not to read him,) and where the greatest poetry that Mickey has not yet read resides. Definitely enter here at your own risk.
So, that is the way Mickey recommends you read poetry. Aware that you may encounter rapturous particles of the heavenly ether, or die a death by dreadful doggerel verse.
The Education of Poppensparkle… Canto 5
Canto 5 – Across the Open Arcanum
The next morning Tod and Flute invited the girls to look at the map with them.
“We are here, just south of the Troll Bridge and about to enter into the beanfields of the Arcanum, west of the Slow-One Fortress called Duffy’s Farm.” Flute pointed to the spot in the center of the map. “We have to cross the bridge, and cut across an expanse patrolled by heroes from Demarceaux’s Hero Tree, but controlled mostly by the Unseely Court, surfacing from Castle Stoor over here. Gobbuluns like Wartoles and Cyclopes mostly, but a few other wicked creatures as well.”
Looking across the gravel road of the Slow Ones, they could see the old bridge of metal and wood and gravel.
“There are Trolls beneath?” asked Glittershine.
“Possibly, but more likely they are sleeping during the day and will not bother us in the sunshine far above their sleeping holes under the bridge,” said Tod.
“Perhaps we should go quickly now, as the sun is bright this morning,” suggested Poppy, not wanting to risk encountering Trolls. She had hated serving them green slime in the kitchens of Mortimer’s Mudwallow, and here there was no powerful necromancer to stop them from eating a butterfly child they happened to catch out in the open.
As the roosters crossed the road, suddenly the smell of rotten, moldy flesh told the group of Fairies that Trolls were on the bridge.
“Tod! Spur your rooster and make it run!” shouted Flute.
“I see the trolls. They are lying dead in the road, slowly turning into stones in the sunlight.” Tod pulled up to a stop beside one of the three Troll bodies. Poppy could actually hear the Troll-flesh crackling as the sunshine cooked it and made it into rock.
Flute pulled his rooster up too, and he and Glitter dismounted to look at the bodies.
“These bodies show signs of sword cuts,” said Glittershine.
“Yes. A Fairy sword. Possibly the Fyrehandle, the great sword of Lord Lancelot himself,” said Flute.
“Who is Lord Lancelot?” asked Poppy.
“He’s a great Fairy war hero, a Storybook Fairy since the time of the Slow One’s King Arthur,” said Tod.
“The son of the immortal Lady of the Lake,” added Glittershine.
But before they could do anything more, one more Troll was lumbering towards them, smoking from Troll sunburn and moaning in an angry way.
“This one is yours, Poppensparkle,” said Flute. “Use your polymorphing spells to turn the creature into stone. Put it out of its misery.”
Poppy could call the spell instantly to mind. But when she pointed her power finger at the Troll, her stomach began to churn, and she couldn’t make the spell kill the Troll. Not after she had seen the Necromancer kill Fairies and laugh about it afterwards. The White Stag had taken those memories away from her. But the situation now brought it back.
“I… I can’t do it!”
“You have to, Poppy! Before it reaches us!” shouted Tod.
She tried to control the swirling sickness in her guts as she wrestled with killing the poor thing. And then the spell came out of her pointer finger in a cloud of orange smoke and enveloped the Troll. And that was somehow not right… because the smoke was supposed to be smoky-colored, not orange.
“Oh, no…” She fell to her knees and emptied the contents of her stomach on the gravel road.
The cloud dissipated, leaving behind a… small sylph boy? He was naked and crying. His brown skin still was dripping with the leavings of the magical orange smoke.
Flute approached the weeping child. “Who are you? Did the Troll eat you, or something?”
The child looked at him with frightened eyes.
“Am no Trollz food! Am Schtinker! Am baby Trollz!”
“Whoa! Poppy? Did you turn the Troll into this sylph boy?” Flute gasped.
“I couldn’t turn him to stone. That would be killing…” Poppy had to stop there and throw up some more.
“It’s alright, Poppy. This Schtinker is still a Troll on the inside, but the new form is far less dangerous,” said Tod.
“Danger-us? Schtinker no know danger-us. Am no killah! Dat nite be doe killah!”
“What did he say?” asked Poppy.
“So, what do we do with him? If we just leave him here he will go back to the Unseely Court and be evil.” Tod shook his head sadly as he said it.
“We could kill him here and save him the trouble,” said Flute.
“No! He’s just a child!” said Poppy, horrified at the callousness.
“We can take him with us and teach him to be good,” offered Glittershine.
“That would be too much work,” said Flute.
“How do we decide? Take a vote?” asked Tod.
“We let Poppy decide. She created him, he’s her child, her responsibility,” said Flute, looking her in the eyes.
“Well, that’s it then. We take him. I will take care of him.”
Flute looked at her with eyes she thought showed great intelligence. And then he smiled.
Mickian Art…70’s Style
Most of my novel stories have lived in my head since the 1970’s. I began recording the ideas in a notebook that I called the libretto. I drew illustrations to solidify the characters and some of the plot elements in my mind. But the basic natures of the characters and the style of my artwork grew from these original artistical notations.
I got better at art over time. And the characters benefited from my teaching experience in that I was able to depict numerous characters with nuances and details gained from students and other people I hadn’t met yet when I drew these pictures. Dorin Dobbs, for instance, is based in large part on my eldest son, who wouldn’t be born for another 18 years when I drew these pictures (He’s the yellow-haired boy in both of the first two pictures.)
Francois, the singing sad clown from my book Sing Sad Songs, is based on a student from the 80’s who was actually Spanish speaking and of Mexican-American descent.
I drew this picture of him in 1976.
I taught the boy in 1983.
I wrote and published the book in 2018.
The inter-dimensional traveler, the Man-Cat, is an idea from a story I have not written yet, and probably never will.
Disney-Michael Stewart and his gang of Milk-Lovers is another story I haven’t written yet, and though more likely, is still probably a novel I will never get to.
Invisible Captain Dettbarn and Francois ended up in separate stories from this picture. The other three boys in the picture were babies or not yet born when their stories happen.
So, today was a chance to look at and re-evaluate the past. All of these drawings were done in the 1970’s. All I did was scan them with a good scanner and crop them a little to make them better compositions. And they allow me to keep track of where my mind has already been, that I might successfully chart the future of where it is going.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, old art, Paffooney
Being Prosaic
I admit it. I am prosaic. I think in sentences. I speak in paragraphs. I write in 5-paragraph essays. I should stop with the repetition of forms and the parallel structures, because that could easily be seen as poetic and defeat my argument in this post. I write prose. Simple. Direct. Declarative. But those last three are sentence fragments. Does that fit the model of prose? How about asking a question in the middle of a paragraph full of statements? Is that all simple enough to be truly prosaic?
Prose is focused on the everyday tasks of writing. It seems like the world thinks that the mechanical delivery of information in words and sentences should be boring, should be functional, should be simple and easy to understand.
I don’t mean to be pulling your reader’s mind in two directions at once, however. I need to stop confusing you with my onslaught of sentences full of contradictory and complex ideas. I should be more clear, more direct, and more to the point.
So here is my thesis, finally clearly stated; The magic of writing prose, it turns out, makes you the opposite of prosaic.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
Simply stated; I am a writer of prose. I am too dumb about what makes something poetry to really write anything but prose. But I do know how to make a word-pile like this one that might just accidentally make you think a little more deeply about your writing… that is, if you didn’t give up on reading this three paragraphs ago. I find it useful to examine in writing how I go about writing and what I can do with it. I try to push the boundaries in directions they haven’t been pushed before. And hopefully, I learn something from every new essay I write. What I learned here is that I am prosaic. And that is not always a bad thing.
Old Art, Odd Art, Openly Goofy Art
Would you buy insurance from this man?
Why did you make this man a Texas Senator?
Characters From Superchicken
These are a few of the main characters of the old story which is now my newest novel.
Superchicken is Edward-Andrew Campbell. He is basically a me-character. His embarrassing nickname, from a Jay Ward cartoon that used to be on TV Saturday mornings, was actually my nickname in junior high and high school. Many of the emotional changes he goes through and the embarrassments he endures to be a super hero were based on my own experiences. But he definitely embraces the nickname as his superhero name in a way I can only wish that I did.
Brent Clarke is the outgoing athlete sort of kid who was definitely not me. He becomes leader of the Norwall Pirates because he pitched for the softball team, and because anyone who met him naturally assumed he was the most important kid in the group. Others look to him for leadership even when they don’t need it. Making friends with Brent is one of the most difficult and important tasks the Superchicken must undertake.
Milt Morgan is the wizard of the group. He is obsessed with magic and imagination. And though Brent is nominally the leader of the group, all their evil plans and hair-brained schemes come from Milt’s imagination. The picture of Milt is drawn from me as a boy, but in reality he is the other Mike from my childhood, the one with a rather tough life and a heart of… well… maybe not gold, but at least silver. He is also the one who insists on making Edward-Andrew part of the gang.
The Cobble Sisters, Sherry and Shelly, are a pair of identical twin girls. They are both nudists at home on the farm place and at the nudist club in Clear Lake. They are problematic for a shy boy just discovering girls, but Sherry definitely pursues a crush on the Superchicken and tricks him into a family camping trip at the nudist camp.
Sherry at the Sunshine Club
Anita Jones is the shy girl who has a crush on the Superchicken. And he secretly has a crush on her. But she is also the girl who becomes, completely by accident, the first girl that Edward-Andrew sees naked. Love and hate, embarrassment and attraction, she is the one girl whose opinion seems to matter most. I, of course, will never reveal the real life girl she is based on. I could never live that down, even though we are both now more than sixty years old.
So those are a few of the main characters that make this novel work for me. They are real people to me now that the novel is written, just as they were once real people when I was a boy and living the nightmare of being a mere boy in a world that needs heroes.
Filed under characters, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, nudes, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Catch a Falling Star 
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will made that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
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Tagged as Sing Sad Songs