a thesis proposal.

For a thesis project (my internet meetings list being another), I propose a collection of surrealistic short stories (or long prose poems) in first person about a young gay male living in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping into the desert. He is pretty much me; his experiences are based on my own. I’d say it’s fiction though, because in this world he can physically move from place to place the way one dreams or jogs through memories. He can wake up to find himself holding up the Watts Towers or sleeping under an Oprah billboard or lying naked in the middle of a salt flat. The narrator is constantly aware of time moving forward and the past and his memories being lost. The narrator can’t adjust to the static loop of Los Angeles: the businessmen, rush hour, the endless streets and suburbs, image culture, object fetishism, mass production and planned obsolescence.

Each piece/poem/chunk can work on its own, but the whole mass adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Each piece maps out the narrator’s relations with other people, himself and his own body through interactions with physical places, taking the reader on a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland journey though a shape-shifting, amorphous, dreamy landscape of Hollywood, Skid Row, the LA River, the LA Harbor, the 405 (as well as desert places) as they exist in 2008. In this landscape, one feels most public in front of their computer or TV, most alone in the middle of the city, most internal on a precipice ledge, most external in bed with someone, most grounded in an advertisement or product name. This place is realer than the real world. These ironies, commentary on present day urban life, are the argument of the piece. The narrator is sorting out the feeling that people seem mostly like empty drones going about their simple routine ad nauseam. When he finds himself in bed with another guy, communication is only physical. He and the person are mostly unable to communicate or have anything in common.

The piece does not move on a timeline, it only moves back and forth between the city and desert, maybe sometimes to Albuquerque and my (narrator’s) youth and the womb. The past and future are only objects of the present. As it moves between the desert and LA, it is never clear which is the real and which is the dream. The narrator is constantly feeling unfamiliar with the most personal things (his body, his own words, etc) and fantasizes familiarity and intimacy with the middle of nowhere—the post-apocalyptic deadness of the desert (Salton Sea, Truth or Consequences, Zion, Colorado City, Needle Mountains, the Taos hum, the Trinity test site). Issues of gender/masculinity rooted in his youth are laid bare in the toughness/ruggedness of canyons and rock formations.

The landscape is full of sex and bodies. and interconnectedness. Death and sex are not gruesome or emotional or “good and bad,” just real. The narrator is unjudgmental of his surroundings. The narrator does not question the reality of his experiences, even as they become impossibly surreal. Life is like a movie unfolding over his eyes.
Images, patterns and actions accumulate and develop the way characters would. This is the real narrative, maybe. Once certain themes are introduced, the way they recur can help the reader to understand their function in this reality.

The narrator doesn’t owe the reader much. Perhaps there is even a sexual tension between narrator and reader. Narrator is coy, sassy, seductive, a trickster, intentionally confusing, not always aware of what he’s doing, even as he says he is, trying to avoid the subject of his own existence. He is never fully serious and never fully joking. Bare and detached descriptions mix with wordplay, awkward humor, and unclear, passive-aggressive observations frame each piece with a sort of topic. He’s not optimistic, but complacent. He accepts a feeling of loss when it turns out he’s not who he thought he was. Irony and humor are at the heart of the pieces and how they are shaped.

A second character, “he”? Perhaps all men in his life blend together into one. The way two people can want to become each other without first being distinct things. The two characters are always busied in a sort of dance. The two characters might really be one person, or the “he” could be many different lovers. “He” is a travel companion, a cameraman, a caretaker, God, the only person the narrator can physically communicate with. He’s a fantasy lover that never develops into a complicated character. The narrator never opens up to him. “He” is more arbitrary while the ground is more determined. Narrator seems more alone the closer physically he is to the “he.” Other characters are hardly there, more like robots or places.

The narrator dwells in the happy failures of capitalism, work life, desperation for love, mass media culture, car culture. In much of the writing, the narrator is in a car but it’s unclear where he’s going. The grotesque and absurd are a means of escape. Pop culture references are clear and objective describing tools. Science is the only way the narrator can interpret emotions. Intimate human interactions in his mind are just like interactions between any objects. The narrator is happy to guide the reader through all this, a tour of his mind and how it put together its feelings towards the state of humanity he lives in.