I got the final report on my Master's Thesis today and I have been judged acceptable. I am adequate to pass. I meet the standard. I have neither excited nor offended. The reviewers, Jena Osman and Chip Delany, have passed their judgement.

But. let's be honest, as is so hard sometimes, this honesty, this looking at your own actions and saying, "Yeah, I deserved this." Because I did. And I have a million excuses - the fire, angst over ex-girlfriends, confusion over my own abilities, being hamstrung into writing a poetry manuscript when I wanted to be a fiction writer. Let's not forget that Chip Delany is a hard-ass and that Jena has no reason to like the tone my work. (I am honored and humbled that Chip even read my manuscript in the first place. Still so much to learn from him. Chirst, I hope I don't fuck this up. He'll be around next year and I have to stay in contact with him.)

Those are true, but really I didn't put the effort needed into getting a "Superior" mark. I wrote the last twenty pages of the manuscript over a seventy-hour period and it was rife with inconsistencies and syntax errors (not a surprise to my Clarion friends). Here is an interesting comment from Jena: "The narrative consciousness continuously attempts to achieve a position of dominance-usually over the women in the piece, and always over the reader."

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.


IN retrospect, I wonder if I didn't have too much freedom here at Temple University? I spent most of my first year floundering in self-pity and Indian-born ex-girlfriends. I wrote horribly. Stupid, insensate material that had only marginal significance to anyone.
This year might have been better without a fire and the random paranoia of others.

God Bless Clarion - the only significant writing atmosphere I've been in these past two years. Good people too, sometimes a little squirrelly, but good overall.

On the bright side, I now have a manuscript of imminently workable drafts of future stories. These are chunks of marble that must be sculpted, worked, finessed to publishable sculpture-stories. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. See the bags under my eyes.

Here is quotation that will be included in my Yeats-Burroughs-Ballard story: "Yeats wrote at length about Daemons, defining them as that which we continually struggle against yet paradoxically need in order to survive, simultaneously the source of our pain and of our strength, even in some sense the very essence of being. For Yeats, the Daemon is 'of all things not impossible the most difficult.'"

Would you believe that I discovered this in web article about LINUX?

HOW JOLLY! NOT EVERYONE GETS TO BE SO LUCKY.