Robby Prenkert

1. Loss. The narrator of this story has lost his very best friend in the world, and this has altered the color of everything. Tragedy weaves its way through this narrative.
2. Redemption. Sometimes things come together for good. R believes that the redemptive work of God has woven itself into the very fabric of the universe; he has discovered glimpses of the redemptive in some seemingly strange places, like in books by those who claim they don’t believe in such things.
3. Mentoring. R gets by with a little help from his friends, some of which are books, some of which are not. Though this loving tribute is not exhaustive, one would have to be asleep while reading to miss that the central theme of this work is the impact that book mentors and other mentors have had upon his life.
4. Reading. It goes without saying that R likes to read. As his advisor, I know that he finds writing about what he has read an enormous chore, and yet through this chore he comes to conclude with some of his book mentors (Lewis, Tolstoy, the Christian mystics) that it is the “fire of suffering which will bring forth the gold of godliness.”[2] We suffer unto wisdom. R does, however, thoroughly enjoy reading and refashioning what he has composed. You will probably get the impression, as I have, that writing this thing was hard work. But, as he told me once in an e-mail, reading his own attempts at early drafts of its parts or of whole chapters or even the first draft of the whole began to give him more and more pleasure, especially as those drafts improved. He said he would much rather read what he has written than actually write it in the first place.
5. Rebellion. R has a love/hate relationship with his past. In part, he rebels against it; but in part, he also rebels against those who have rebelled against it, which leads him back to embrace it. He once told me that he woke up to Bob Marley’s “Soul Rebel”[3] virtually every morning while writing this dissertation.
6. Mysticism. R has confessed to me that he is a wannabe mystic, and that one of his narrators is a much more adept contemplative than he is. That is the voice you’ll hear when you read the “Letters by a Post-modern Mystic.”
7. Sports. R actually is an athlete, though I sense he feels something like regret that he is more athletic than mystical. I suppose we might as well add regret to the list of themes, as well.
8. The painfully obvious post-modernist device of the self-conscious or self-reflexive narrative. This work is narrated both in the first person and the third person. Hint: notice the use of italics. Those italicized sections are my favorites, I think, because he is at his most honest and transparent in them.
9. The unreliable narrator. Not many dissertations are written using this device, but let’s face it: all narrators are unreliable. It’s not so much that every teller of a tale always intends to be unreliable or misleading, but everyone is. Every sentence ever uttered leaves out a million other sentences needed to qualify the previous sentence’s intended meaning. There just isn’t enough time to clarify everything we mean to say. And so, our narrations end up being unreliable. That doesn’t mean they can’t also be true. But they are not the whole truth.
10. Hope. R never sheds his tendency toward optimism. When he expressed some worry to me about his work being so hopeful that it might be dismissed as “hokey,” I asked him where his optimism came from. He told me a story about playing in a college basketball game in which his team was losing 48-19 with about ten minutes left in the first half. And then they came all the way back and won the game. And then he said, “Did we win the game because my teammates and I possessed exceptional levels of hope, or did I come to have an extraordinarily hopeful outlook because we came back and won that game and more than a few others like it?”[4]
    

I trust this memo does not spoil all the magic of discovering these themes all by yourself as you read. If you are feeling right now like I have done what should be left up to you as the reader, just remember this little proverbial wisdom from Angela Carter which R scribbled on a little sticky note attached to a draft of a chapter he sent me early on in the process. “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. . . .You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”[5] I agree.
R has described a lot of the “re-writing” he has done in the pages that follow. Now I guess it’s your turn, Dean Pleasures.

My perfect reader of this blog…
his name is my name, too.
Whenever he logs out,
you will likely hear me shout;
“There goes an artist without peer.”

http://www.xanga.com/robbyprenkert

Nearly a month ago he remembered the time when the rasta-looking old man offered him “good-for-the-dingles” pineapple one day on a north-coast beach in Jamaica. When he remembers something like that, he writes it down in a cheap spiral notebook he keeps in the canvas book bag that accompanies him everywhere. The day he wrote that in his notebook he managed to misplace that bag somewhere and to this day he has not been able to find it.

He did, however, stumble upon a blog entry entitled “Pineapple” which managed to quote his own journal verbatim. What other secrets and lies will the thief of his spiral notebook reveal to the world?

He wears a wool cap of black and gold, red and green covering his dreadlocks, smiling, toothless. We make eye-contact; he pauses, displays the two whole pineapples he carries in a gunny sack, and offers the little baggy of freshly cut fruit for my approval.

“Pinapple, mon."

“Looks good,” I tell him. “But no thanks."

“Pinepple. Good for the dingles."

On the beach in Ocho Rios, long before there was Viagra, there was pineapple.

Memo

TO: Prof. Pranker

FROM: Dean Stimp

RE: Faculty Development Funds

cc: Prof. Paperclip; Dean Zerosinski

Your request for faculty development funds to cover your travel expenses to the North American Fast-pitch Association World Series in Iowa this August, while one of the most unique requests I’ve ever gotten, is probably outside what I would deem a reasonable use for such funds. I can understand what good playing a sport you love at a very high level does in terms of your morale as a faculty person, and we are proud that your play at shortstop and leading off for one of the favored teams in this tournament will represent our college well, but you are going to have to go with our blessing and not our financial support. This blessing is a significant one, considering you will be missing the final session of faculty retreat to travel to the tournament.

Lust_Control_-_The_BigM.mp3

He had forgotten all about this delightul little punk/thrash band and this happy little number until by some strange coincidence he read THIS and found himself searching for the song. Such nuance. Such subtlety. This, he thinks, is art.

Bulla elbowed Phillip, who was holding him in the post area. Two times down the court later, Phillip punched Bulla square in the left cheek. Then Bulla hit Phillip on the head with a five-foot, inch-thick tree limb that happened to be lying courtside, breaking it into two jagged pieces. Phillip scooped up the smaller of the two and, as a matter of fact, the sharper of the two, and raced after Bulla to stab him. But the white man’s paralyzed, slack-jawed stare must have been the most laughable image of the entire ordeal.

Crap. There goes my once great idea for a novel.

The Last Novel - David Markson - Books - Review - New York Times

What truths do the fictions that the Bush administration propogates reveal that reality obscures?

Annals of National Security: The General’s Report: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical."

Simon liked gooey, fruity candies. Tropical flavored Starbursts. Green apple Airheads. Skittles warmed in his pant's pocket. Tonya preferred her chocolate chilled. Refrigerated candy bars with almonds or peanuts. Neither flossed regularly. The toothache both woke up with that Tuesday morning brought them together in the dentist's waiting room. And they lived happily ever after.


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PAW PAW, Mich. – A 21-year-old man was taken on a wild ride Wednesday afternoon when the wheelchair he was in became attached to the grille of a semi-truck and was taken four miles down a highway at about 50 mph.

The autobiography I had been writing was organized around certain events in my life that either a) mysteriously matched the experiences of characters in great books or b) happened to occur at a time when I was reading some novel or story and made some connection or personal application giving me the tools to deal with my immediate reality. About 175 pages in, I got stuck. It seemed I’d run out of interesting facts to share about life, and facts are everything in autobiography. So I went to work looking to live some more and to read some more, hoping to find or even manufacture more material–more experiences of literary characters that matched my own or instances in novels that I could connect with and apply. I read and I read. One morning a couple days ago I read these lines.

"Every man has within his own reminiscences certain things he doesn’t reveal to anyone, except, perhaps, to his friends. There are also some that he won’t reveal even to his friends, only to himself perhaps, and even then, in secret. Finally, there are some which a man is afraid to reveal even to himself; every decent man has accumulated a fair number of such things. In fact, it can even be said that the more decent the man, the more of these things he’s accumulated. Anyway, only recently I myself decided to recall some of my earlier adventures; up to now I’ve always avoided them, even with a certain anxiety. But having decided not only to recall them, but even to write them down, now is when I wish to try an experiment: is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth? Incidentally, I’ll mention that Heine maintains that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to lie about himself. In Heine’s opinion, Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself in his confession and even lied intentionally, out of vanity. I’m convinced that Heine is correct; I understand perfectly well that sometimes it’s possible out of vanity alone to impute all sorts of crimes to oneself, and I can even understand what sort of vanity that might be" (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground).

This was the inspiration I needed. What this was saying was that an autobiography need not be entirely free from lies. I was perfectly free to make things up. At least I think that’s what this was saying. At any rate, this is what it was saying to me.

I keep a blog, as well. A few minutes ago I stumbled upon another blog by some guy somewhere in Indiana who claims, and I quote, “all blogs are fiction.” He seemed to suggest that each blog entry begins with the creation of a narrator. I think he may be on to something. I had been confused about this in my autobiography. You see, all along, I had been thinking of the “I” in my book as actually me–the author. But the “I” is, in fact, just the narrator I’ve created to tell a story. This truth has set me free.

I must, since I can’t write dead Dostoevsky (or his narrator), send this blogger a note thanking him for setting me free from the prison of writer’s block and the hell of facts.

Typically, he jumps rope a few minutes before stretching and then taking his jog. He runs for a set number of minutes, then turns around and retraces his steps along the country roads of Baugo Township. Today’s set number of minutes was twenty; he turned around at a nondescript point in between a corn field and a soy bean field on C.R. 22., and ran home again. That makes a forty minute jog.

Normally he does not rifle stones at the back windshields of passing cars, but the wildly grinning wiseguy showing off for his girlfriend made the mistake of pretending to swerve at him just as he – this minding his own business jogger – happened to be passing a gravel driveway. He saw it coming; made eye contact with the driver, even noticing his goatee. Of course the driver had no intention of actually hitting him, just a hardy-har-har near miss for poops and giggles, hoping to get a flirtatious smack from his girl in the passenger seat.

The jogger was already bent over and grabbing an egg shaped rock as the back bumper of the blazer whizzed past him, missing him by a foot or two. The driver could not have known that he – this shirtless jogger – had pitched in the minors for a couple years and was known for having “a lively arm."

An egg shaped rock traveling at 78 mph (had his arm been warmed up, it might have been more like 90 or 91, had it been warmed up and ten years ago during the middle of baseball season, 95 maybe) thrown at an SUV traveling at 40 mph in the same direction but with a 30 or 40 foot head start doesn’t have the force to smash through the rear window of said vehicle. But it has enough to get the attention of the driver. That is, if the thrower of the rock has an accurate arm.


What might have followed had this former lively arm also had pinpoint control is anybody’s guess. This toss, like far too many others in his too short career, was just a bit outside.



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