MFA — Surprise day 2 — Jennifer Knox

1. Possession — reader can see the subject everywhere in the setting
   • Tracers, Echoes, Reflections, Mutations
   • Seeing aspects of the subject in things around it
   • Visual synchronicity
   • Possession is a kind of synchronicity or haunting
   • Showing the subject who is elsewhere in the world, but you see them in the way the world moves
   • Intellectual dexterity
   • Transposition — manage to say the Name, then leaving it entirely
   • Explanations != necessary
   • Surprise = distance
   • Possession = familiar
   • body/shape
   • color
   • Sound/speech/diction
   • movement
   • history/age as distance
   • Context (high/low)
   • The penguin:
     • Too many suits move in too many lines.
       They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed,
       hunting crudites, canapés, bruscheta.
       Fingers ferry food — fish, perhaps — finding
       slack-jawed mouths already open,
       squawking at wayward children
       or bemoaning The Market,
       whatever that may be.
       At some point, who cares how long ago,
       death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again.
       Who knows how well they knew him,
       their backs turned, studiously
       deciding that he is no longer of them?
       one could never guess.
       We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps,
       that the room is tastefully furnished,
       the coffin silver, the bar, open,
       quite good, and none of them are drunk yet,
       or at least none look it.
       “Good man, good man,” they mutter,
       doing all they can to convince each other
       through well-rehearsed performances,
       that this must be the case.
       The silently bereaved already sit graveside.
2. Tigers and clouds
   • Specific vs nonspecific
   • Everything/everybody is a ratio of tigers to clouds
   • Attention suggests worthiness, power, love
   • Misdirection = conscious or unconscious
   • Surprise = expectations
   • The automatic brain says “That deserves
   • Fact: the more numerous your specifics are, the more likely they are to be wrong or a lie (paper)
   • Cloud-tigers — tiger combos that create crystal-clear impossibilities (specificities in weird combos: Rabid Raccoon Energy Drink)
     • January Nail Polish
     • Michigan moonstones
     • Black banana sunrise
     • Dodge Dart dance party
     • Citicard customer service penguin
   • Choose a less familiar character. Three details that should be tigers, three clouds (Tycho):
     • Clouds: accent/voice quality, body shape/size, age
     • Tigers: anxiety, walk, clothing
   • Switch clouds and tigers. Choose one new tiger and one new cloud and write a paragraph describing the character (bonus: cloud-tiger):
     • Codrin was not tall, and Dear certainly was not — the historian certainly stood taller than it — but every time he was near, Tycho felt that he dwarfed the two. He was tall enough that he could see clear over Codrin’s head, even above those flyaways that graced eir crown, and could easily have rested his chin atop Dear’s or True Name’s head without lifting it at all. “You, who have your head in the clouds and feet on the ground,” he remembered True Name having said about the Bălans, and the phrase had stuck with him. His feet were a steel-toed anchor, and though he towered above the others, he could never name the feeling of being that much closer to his beloved stars.