From a721d99dacf2ea8ba1f5f08ba87a1e781ad8bb4b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "prompt.ac/@jeffrey" Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:57:23 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] papers: collect sourced prose excerpts and poems --- papers/prose-platter/excerpts.md | 104 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ papers/prose-platter/manifest.md | 127 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 231 insertions(+) create mode 100644 papers/prose-platter/excerpts.md create mode 100644 papers/prose-platter/manifest.md diff --git a/papers/prose-platter/excerpts.md b/papers/prose-platter/excerpts.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..a6432ccab8 --- /dev/null +++ b/papers/prose-platter/excerpts.md @@ -0,0 +1,104 @@ +# Excerpts and poems + +Checked against the linked texts on 2026-09-21. Short selections, with links +to the surrounding passages or complete poems. The notes are editorial readings. + +## Tao Lin — *Taipei* (2013) + +> Two months into freshman year he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations. + +Silence becomes a habit. + +[Published excerpt, VICE, May 28, 2013](https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-excerpt-from-tao-lins-taipei/). + +## Ernest Hemingway — “Big Two-Hearted River,” Part I (1925) + +> There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was +> very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing +> could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good +> place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry. + +Repetition makes finishing a task feel like shelter. Then hunger brings the +paragraph back to the body. Read the preceding tent-making passage too: +the assurance comes after the work. + +[*In Our Time*, Boni & Liveright, 1925; text on Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Our_Time/Chapter_14). +Public-domain passage in the United States. + +## Ann Beattie — “Janus” (1985) + +> She had asked her husband to please not drop his house key in it. It was +> meant to be empty. + +A household request carries the attachment. The last sentence gives emptiness +a purpose without explaining the marriage. + +[The New Yorker, May 27, 1985 issue](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/05/27/janus). +Passage in the paragraph about keeping the bowl at home. + +## Tao Lin — “hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part three” (2008) + +> in the evening the hamster sits at the computer + +An animal in an ordinary human routine. Read through the final withdrawal of +empathy: the poem's reassurance becomes uncomfortable. Useful for writing a +machine as a character without making every line announce the device. + +[*Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy*, Melville House; complete poem at Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141815/hamsters-are-heads-with-little-characteristics-on-the-head-part-three). + +## Tao Lin — “thirteen of twenty-four” (2008) + +> react to disappointment by being quiet and nice\ +> and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated + +Advice that sounds reasonable until the line break leaves someone alone. +The surrounding absurdity matters: this is a comic, unstable speaker, not +a rule for how to behave. + +[*Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy*, Melville House; complete poem at Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141816/thirteen-of-twenty-four). + +## Ernest Hemingway — “Along With Youth” (1923) + +> A porcupine skin,\ +> Stiff with bad tanning,\ +> It must have ended somewhere.\ +> Stuffed horned owl\ +> Pompous\ +> Yellow eyed;\ +> Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig\ +> Sooted with dust.\ +> Piles of old magazines,\ +> Drawers of boy’s letters\ +> And the line of love\ +> They must have ended somewhere.\ +> Yesterday’s Tribune is gone\ +> Along with youth\ +> And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach\ +> The year of the big storm\ +> When the hotel burned down\ +> At Seney, Michigan. + +Complete poem. The inventory reaches loss through worn objects, then lands +on a named place. It also connects to the burned Seney of “Big Two-Hearted +River.” A useful model for a machine's history told through what remains. + +[*Three Stories & Ten Poems*, Contact Publishing Co., 1923; Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59603/pg59603-images.html). +Public domain in the United States. Line breaks and the spelling “biassed” +follow this edition. + +## Frank O’Hara — “A Step Away from Them” + +> A glass of papaya juice\ +> and back to work. My heart is in my\ +> pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. + +The metaphor has a physical object inside it: a book in a pocket. Read the +whole walk for how errands, appetite, and remembered deaths share one +afternoon without becoming separate speeches. + +[*Lunch Poems* (1964); complete poem at Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42662/a-step-away-from-them). + +These selections allow more than one register: long sentences, awkwardness, +humor, and named feelings belong here too. The ballad's rules in the +[manifest](manifest.md#digest) are choices for that piece, not laws these +writers always obey. diff --git a/papers/prose-platter/manifest.md b/papers/prose-platter/manifest.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..b7f736213d --- /dev/null +++ b/papers/prose-platter/manifest.md @@ -0,0 +1,127 @@ +# prose-platter + +Reading platter for the plain register: the writers @jeffrey reaches for when +a text should tell it how it is. Opened 2026-09-20 while writing *The Ballad of +neo* (`grants/culturehub-la-2026/macneopolitan/members/neo/ballad.md`), when +the direction was "more Hemingway, plain, just tell it how it is, less flowery, +but analogy and metaphor is good — Tao Lin, Ann Beattie. That type of prose." +Feeds [`VOICE.md`](../VOICE.md) (prose), the sung lyrics of the MacNeoPolitan +lane, essays, and any register decision later. + +Start with [the checked excerpts and poems](excerpts.md): Tao Lin, Hemingway, +Beattie, and O’Hara. Added 2026-09-21, with source links and reading notes. +Copyrighted works are represented by short selections; the complete Hemingway +poem there is public domain in the United States. Items below marked **verify** +remain descriptions or paraphrases awaiting a checked quotation. + +## Working register for the ballad + +- Declarative sentences. Subject, verb, object. The period does the work a + comma would otherwise be asked to do. +- Concrete nouns before abstract ones. The red box, the note, the disk. The + feeling is left under the surface, in what is placed next to what. +- Repetition allowed. A word said twice is a rhythm, not an error. +- No hedging, no throat-clearing, no announcing what comes next. This is also + [`VOICE.md`](../VOICE.md)'s rule; these writers are its lineage. +- Metaphor is permitted when it is plain and physical, and stated as a fact + ("It is a red box. It hears the room."), never as an ornament. + +## Shelves + +### 1. Ernest Hemingway — the declarative sentence and the iceberg + +- Ernest Hemingway, *A Farewell to Arms* (Scribner, 1929). Opening: + > "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that + > looked across the river and the plain to the mountains." + One sentence, one *and* chain, no adjective doing emotional work. The + register the ballad's Verse I imitates ("They put the system on me April + nineteenth. Nobody logged in for five days."). +- Ernest Hemingway, *Death in the Afternoon* (Scribner, 1932) — the iceberg + statement: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth + of it being above water. **verify** exact wording before quoting. + Application: the ballad never says "he felt bad"; it says he wrote a note, + and what the note says. +- Ernest Hemingway, *In Our Time* (1925), esp. "Big Two-Hearted River" — + procedure as feeling: making camp, cooking, the rhythm of doing one thing + at a time. [Checked camp-making passage](excerpts.md#ernest-hemingway--big-two-hearted-river-part-i-1925). + Application: "I do one thing at a time" as a refrain. +- Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants," *Men Without Women* (1927) + — dialogue that never names its subject. Application: Verse VI ("It is + about me. It is not for me."). + +### 2. Tao Lin — flat affect, exact quantities, the internet as weather + +- Tao Lin, *Taipei* (Vintage, 2013). Style traits, not a quotation: long + sentences that report perception in the order it arrives, precise counts + and dosages, brand names and interfaces named without irony, emotion stated + as data. These are reading notes, not quotations. + [Checked excerpt](excerpts.md#tao-lin--taipei-2013). + Application: the ballad's numbers are left as numbers ("May, two ninety-two. + June, four oh five. July, five eighty. August, six eighty-six.") and the + machine reports its own state the way *Taipei* reports a body's. +- Tao Lin, *Shoplifting from American Apparel* (Melville House, 2009) — + small events at full resolution; chat logs as prose. Application: "The + first word he typed was *cd*. It means go somewhere else." +- Tao Lin, *Leave Society* (Vintage, 2021) — the same flatness turned toward + care and repair; recovery as a list of adjustments. Application: Verse VI, + the note, "one at a time." +- Tao Lin, *Selected Tweets* with Mira Gonzalez (Hobart/Short Flight, 2015) + — the unit of one plain sentence that means more than it says. + +### 3. Ann Beattie — understatement, objects, the sentence that stops early + +- Ann Beattie, "Janus," *The New Yorker* (May 27, 1985); collected in *Where + You'll Find Me* (1986). [Checked house-key passage](excerpts.md#ann-beattie--janus-1985). + Application: an object stands for a relationship without saying so — the + Scarlett, the piano in the menu bar, the shelf. +- Ann Beattie, *Chilly Scenes of Winter* (Doubleday, 1976) — present-tense + drift, people who do not explain themselves, endings that stop rather than + resolve. **verify** — add a checked excerpt. Application: Verse XI ("I don't + know what that means. I know it is true.") ends by stopping, not resolving. +- Ann Beattie, *The Burning House* (Random House, 1982), esp. the title story + and "The Cinderella Waltz" — domestic detail as the whole emotional + register. Application: the ballad's Verse VIII ("Then it fills again. That + is the arrangement."). +- Ann Beattie, *Distortions* (1976) — the early stories: minimalism before the + label. + +### 4. Adjacent shelf (for later, unread here) + +- Raymond Carver, *What We Talk About When We Talk About Love* (1981) — the + Lish-edited minimal register; the closest cousin of Beattie's. +- Joan Didion, *Slouching Towards Bethlehem* (1968) — the plain declarative + turned essayistic. +- Lydia Davis, *Break It Down* (1986) — the one-paragraph story; precision as + the whole event. + +## Digest + +**The register, as a rule set** (what the ballad rewrite actually did): + +1. Cut every adjective that judges. Keep the ones that measure or name a + colour ("red box," "blue"). +2. Turn every "because" into two sentences placed next to each other. +3. Put the number in the sentence, not in a footnote. Say it the way it is + said aloud. +4. When a feeling wants in, replace it with the object or action that caused + it ("He wrote a note about it. The note says: one at a time."). +5. Let a line stop before it explains itself. The stop is the meaning. +6. One metaphor per stanza at most, stated as fact, physical, never extended. +7. Repetition is rhythm ("I get warm. That's all it is. I get warm and I keep + time."). + +**Before / after, one stanza** (Verse V of the ballad, 2026-09-20): + +> *before:* One night in May he asked too much: / ten browsers and a whisper +> and a film. / I swapped forty-four gigabytes on eight / and I went dark, +> and I took him with me. +> +> *after:* One night in May he opened ten browsers at once. / He also ran a +> movie and a transcription. / I had eight gigabytes. I used forty-four. / +> Then I stopped. He was there when I stopped. + +tools: the sung-lyric grammar (one token per note, `-` between syllables, +` / ` between phrases) in `grants/culturehub-la-2026/macneopolitan/bin/compose.mjs` +(`melodize()`), and the register measurement in `bin/register.mjs` — plain +prose sings better: short words, one stressed syllable per beat, stops that +land on the tonic. -- 2.51.2