Last night I watched this movie about MFA programs.  It was called Step Up 2: The Streets. It was probably the best movie I’ve ever seen.  If you ever see any movie ever again you should see this movie.  It was interesting because the movie mostly talked about the Brown MFA program which was kind of weird because I saw a lot of people I know.  For those who haven’t heard about this movie, its about this girl who is illiterate and her guardian wants to send her to Texas so they can teach her to read, but she says, “I don’t want to leave my friends.”  Then someone shoots her uncle in the face and she gets bit by a spider and turns into a guy and has to battle William Defoe because William Defoe thinks he’s a goblin.  Then the girl meets this guy at Brown and he invites her to poetry readings and they becoming very sexually attracted to each other because she pretends his poems are really good and he thinks she really likes his poems.  Then the movie ends and they kiss and it gets steamy (see photo).

This is another book I found on my parents’ bookshelf while staying at their house over the holidays.  So far I’ve read three books while I’ve been home.  Two of them are about African American males in jail for rape.  Coincidence?  Not really sure.  In If Beale Street Could Talk the African American male was innocent.  In the other book I read (Soul on Ice)…not so much.

Baldwin does some really great things in this book.  Here’s one line that jumped out, “And you carry that message to the Holy Ghost and if He don’t like it you tell Him I said He’s a faggot and He better not come nowhere near me.”

I don’t think Baldwin likes the USA.  He moved to Paris when he was young.  That was probably a good move.  Things are so much easier these days.  It’s easy to say, “I don’t like the USA,” and hang out and have fun in the USA.  I hang out in the USA all the time.  I like it.  I won’t knock the USA, but I understand who Baldwin might not like the USA he grew up in.

Anyway, I’ll probably read more Baldwin.  Professor Wideman mentioned him a few times in workshop in the fall.  He thought highly of him.

Am I retarded because I read this book today?  Should people after freshman year of high school read this book? Is the title of the post the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard?

This morning I woke up and it was Christmas and I didn’t want to wake anyone so I found this book on my mother’s bookshelf and began reading.  It was okay.  I think it would be a good book for a young person to read.  They would enjoy figuring out the puzzles each chapter presents. There is a chapter where it hints that the narrator’s neighbors is a prostitute.  Small children reading this book might get curious and ask, “What’s a prostitute?”  Their third grade could explain to them the service of sex in exchange for money.  I recommend this book to small children.

Also, maybe the short chapters or the length of the book reminded me of Brautigan.  It was Brautigan with zero weirdness.

I was hoping Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver would rip up my brain.  Cleaver once ran for President of the USA on the ticket, “Put the black finger on the nuclear trigger.”  Unfortunately, I felt bogged down by all the black muslim/politcal talk.  I wanted this book to tear me up, not preach at me.  It wasn’t until late in the book that I found some good nuggets, some real talk.

Much of the promise was lost when he barely grazed over the fact that he was a convicted rapist and that upon leaving jail for the first time his only goal was to go around raping white girls.  Cleaver probably felt guilty and avoided the details around his conviction or maybe he felt he was no longer the same person so there was no need talk about it anymore.  He wanted people to know he had changed.  So maybe the most interesting part of him was never touched upon.

The one venture into who he used to be came late in the book in an essay called, “The allegory of the black eunachs,” which was a kind of metaphor for his former self.  This section jumped out:

“…when I off a nigger bitch, I close my eyes and concentrate real hard, and pretty soon I get to believing that I’m riding one of them bucking blondes.  I tell you the truth, that’s the only way that I can bust my nuts with a black bitch. to close my eyes and pretend that she is Jezebel…”

John Edgar Wideman was my professor this semester.  Last night I had a dream it was the last class of the semester and he wanted to take us to Burger King.  The only problem was he couldn’t drive because he didn’t have a license.  So everyone piled into this van and John Edgar Wideman controlled the gas pedal and break while someone else steered the van.  We never made it.  Supposedly, Burger King was out of business.

“So Alec Baldwin just starts punching Cormac McCarthy in the face and I walk in and I ask the bartender what’s going on and he says, ‘Yeah, Alec is still upset that Cormac won the National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses. He thought Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina should have won.’”

-Phillip Seymour Kaufman

I went to Burger King and asked people how to write a novel.