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About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
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Blogocentric Formulations
Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics).
Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:
Thanks for stopping by! 
January 24, 2014 at 9:58pm January 24, 2014 at 9:58pm
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*Written as part of "Invalid Item" 
Prompt: In high school my friend pointed out to me that humans can never create anything new; everything they create is a product of other created things. For example a unicorn is just a horse with a horn on it's head it isn't truly new, she argued. What do you think about this concept? Do you think she's right or wrong? How does this apply to you as a writer? (Remember that every story is just a different combination of 26 letters!)
I've always had a problem with the argument that "everything's been done before." Sure, maybe that's technically true if you break a story down into its simplest and most general narrative form, but then by that logic there's no such thing as a unique human being either, since we're all just the same basic molecules of carbon and merely different combinations and sequences of the same cytosine, guanine, thymine, and adenine (a.k.a. DNA) building blocks. 
I suppose the real issue here is that while the idea of creations being merely different reconfigurations of already existing things may be true in a literal sense, it's not necessarily true in a figurative sense. The law of conservation of matter (that's right, I'm getting all physics-al on you!  ) states that matter and energy can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed; it must always remain constant. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last time anyone actually created something from nothing dates back to the whole, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" thing... And so, in that sense, it's true from both a scientific and faith-based standpoint that you literally cannot create something new; the best you can hope for is a different combination of what's already in existence. Which I suppose is exactly what you get when Baz Luhrmann puts his own personalized stamp on the adaptations for Romeo & Juliet or The Great Gatsby, and what you get when Jay-Z and Linkin Park do a mash up of "Numb" and "Encore" for their 2004 collaboration album Collision Course.
However, there's also a pretty hefty weight on the other side of the scales. Well, maybe not as much as a law of physics and the power of God, but if nothing new is truly new... why does copyright law allow content creators to register their works as new works? When Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith re-imagined Shakespeare's classic The Taming of the Shrew as a high school story that eventually became the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, it was registered as a new work. They didn't need Shakespeare's permission to write it; they certainly don't have to pay Shakespeare a license fee or a royalty from their earnings!
"But Jeff, Shakespeare's work is in the public domain!" You say. Okay, fine. Look at any of those books that reference a specific, limited number of narrative plots in existence: Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots, Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, or the very simple four conflicts (man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself, man vs. society) referenced in Judith Simpson's Foundations of Fiction. According to those books, there are a finite number of plots out there and yet multiple examples of how each of these has been explored in different ways. At their heart, Stephen King's book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the film The Day After Tomorrow, and the current television show Revolution are all inherently a 'man (or woman) vs. nature' story, and yet the United States Copyright Office has ruled that each of those stories is unique, original to their respective authors, and none of them are guilty of plagiarizing each other or any similar works that have come before them. Copyright law considers them original, unique works despite having similar themes and/or conflicts.
So is someone who says "no one ever creates anything new" correct? Technically, on a very broad and generic scale, I suppose it is true. But that's not how creativity is viewed in modern society, including by the laws used to define intellectual property. Maybe the person who proudly proclaims no new creations can ever be created will win at the game of Pointless Semantics, but most people - including and especially professional writers - live in a world where originality is a legal concern, not a semantic one.
And with that distinction made, if someone still wants to tell me that the idea for my next piece of creative writing is basically a re-imagining of Faust in an updated setting, or that my song is basically just " Canon in D " in a slightly different chord or register, I would kindly remind you that (as long as it's not outright intellectual property theft), the powers that be in the world of intellectual property disagree with you. And as long as they see it as original and as long as the people paying me to write it see it as original, that's good enough for me. 
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January 24, 2014 at 7:43pm January 24, 2014 at 7:43pm
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*Written as part of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"
Day 24 Prompt: What is the most absurd or ridiculous thing that has ever happened to you while traveling?
If we're talking absurd in terms of expectations, the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to me was when my wife and cousins and I went on a trip to Spain and thought the time change wouldn't affect us. We woke up at 4AM Los Angeles time (thinking we'd exhaust ourselves and sleep on the plane, which left at 11AM). Unfortunately, we were too excited to sleep, so we spent ten hours between two flights wide awake (at this point we'd been up for seventeen hours), and we landed at 7AM local time in Spain. We then proceeded to try and stay up for the entire Spanish day and readily agreed to go visit my cousin-in-law's parents' (with whom we were staying) school to see their play at 3PM. By the time 3PM rolled around, we had been up for 25 hours straight and were literally falling asleep at the play. I can only imagine how horrible all these Spanish parents were that such rude Americans came to see their children perform a play and were literally falling asleep in our seats!
But jet lag is hardly an "absurd or ridiculous" situation, so I think the travel experience that really takes the cake would be the year that my wife and I went to Vegas for Thanksgiving. We decided to forego the family obligations that year (see "Day 22: "There's No Such Thing as Fun for the Whole Family"" for a general understanding as to why  ) and headed to Vegas to see a concert and spend a few nights at a fun hotel.
To fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that a normal trip to Vegas, even with moderate traffic in Los Angeles and Vegas... is a three-and-a-half to four hour drive tops. On a really bad traffic day if there's an accident or something, maybe five hours.
So we decided to beat the holiday traffic and head home early in the morning on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. While people were still enjoying their breakfast buffets and asking for late checkouts, we'd already be putting some miles on 'ol odometer. Unfortunately, we ended up taking a while to get packed up and ready to go, so we left around mid-day like everyone else.
Eventually, traffic ground to a complete stop. Like, people getting out of their cars and walking around the gridlocked highway kind of stopped. After waiting for two hours in the desert heat (this was during a time when I had a car with no air conditioning), things started rolling again and we eventually passed the cause for the traffic: a Japanese tour bus that had literally caught on fire. By the time we got there, all the passengers were (thankfully) out of the bus on the side of the road, but the bus was taking up one of the two lanes of the highway and was down to nothing but a charred frame.  I have no idea how that happened, but thank goodness everyone was okay!
We went on for a few miles at normal speed, then hit another slowdown. Apparently one of the few stops along the long desert had some kind of commotion going on and traffic was backed up for miles and miles. My wife had to use the restroom and it took us over an hour to move the two remaining miles to the off ramp where she could use a restroom. We at least got to stretch our legs and see what the problem was (some overturned car or something), then prepared to go the rest of the home. The highway patrol officer at the on-ramp, though, diverted us to a detour, indicating that we couldn't use the regular on-ramp. That detour ended up looping everyone back onto I-15 going the other way (back toward Vegas), so we - along with several other irate motorists - had to drive 30 miles back toward Vegas, turn around at the first available off-ramp... then go 30 miles back through the miserable traffic in order to get back to the place we stopped to use the restroom in the first place.
After that, it was regular holiday stop-and-go traffic headed into Los Angeles.
Remember early on when I said a regular trip to Vegas was a 3.5 to 4-hour drive, maybe 5 with bad traffic? That night, the drive back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas took us over 10 hours. By the time we got into the regular Los Angeles traffic, my wife and I were literally so zoned out and dead that I don't think either of us spoke for an hour at a time. It was easily one of the most ridiculous, absurd travel situations I've ever experienced. |
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