Exquisite Corpse
Anybody up for a game?
Recently, I DM’d April Whalley who writes My Haiku Journey (well worth your time if you haven’t checked it before, both for the haikus and the fabulous photographs) this meme:
I was telling her how it reminded me about doing an “Exquisite Corpse” - a project I completed with my Writing Club twice, it’s so darn fun. I was encouraging April to do one in her stack with haikus (ala the meme above), and I thought, why not try it on my Substack too? I’ve done these exquisite corpses in other mediums like visual art and photography before. There’s something so satisfying in creating a bird’s nest of context, styles, worldviews, and personality with a life of its own.
I’m keen on doing it here. And since it’s the holiday season, what better impetus than that of the warm fuzzy feelings we get around the holidays?
So, how will this work remotely on this scale? I will start with the story below. I will write the exposition, setting up the scene and genre. Whoever wants to participate can let me know in the comments or my DMs. It would take five participants, each taking one leg of the story to complete and publish every week:
Week 1: Exposition
Week 2: Rising action
Week 3: Climax
Week 4: Falling action
Week 5: Resolution
You can absolutely participate if you don’t have your own Stack, but if you do, I will publish the story and/or link to your stack should you desire to publish in your Stack as well. I will also link to each part in subsequent posts for those who are coming into it anew. You can DM or let me know your interest in the comments. The first four people to confirm participation will take up the slots, with perhaps a swing who might fill in at the last minute should we have someone drop out due to unforeseen circumstances. The last person to complete the project will also provide the title for the piece and we’ll call it an Exquisite Corpse until then
Today is Wednesday, November 27th, 2024, and if we publish something every Wednesday, the resolution will be on Christmas Day. Which sounds too perfectly timed.
Thank you for taking a break from serious work to enjoy some holiday time. We’ll be back to our usual doom and gloom soon, I’m sure. But you know that story of the two warring sides who left little gifts for each other during Christmas before going back to killing each other? If they can take a break, so can we. In the meantime, I’ll take the month to organize my anticipated End of Year in Review Memelanche. Have a great feast tomorrow, friends! Between the election, the BTC rollercoaster, and the potentiality of WWIII, Thanksgiving’s bound to be lit!
Here goes.
[EXQUISITE CORPSE]
When the Choir Director swung his legs off the bed to slide his feet into his slippers, he had no idea that, soon, they would miss him so. After all, they were the frizzy, fuzzy, faux fur kind that were given to him by Charlotte from next door last Christmas, and he would have been thrilled to know that she had chosen them intentionally, not just as an obligatory gift, and that gave those slippers a sense of pride and purpose untraditional to ordinary houseshoes.
The Choir Director had a lot on his mind, so he didn’t think about his slippers (or their feelings) at all that morning, nor by extension, about Charlotte, which was unusual given that his mind was often preoccupied with his unrequited love for her in scenarios that fantasized about a little house with a white fence, family dinners with hot butter rolls, and steamy lion claw bathtub times while the kids were at school, constantly at play as a run-on thought inside his brain with not a period in sight -
-HONK!-
His phone alarm startled him even though he was already awake - he really must change that awful tone in his phone, there has to be something gentler and more welcoming of the morning to get him moving. This kind of alarm tone was underneath the dignity of a Choir Director, and he made a mental note to replace it with a sample of one of his choir’s best, perhaps something from the holiday selection even; he could always change it after the holidays.
The Choir Director shuffled into the bathroom, opened the toilet bowl lid, and stared at the generic wall art above his ceramic throne while the sound of the hot stream hitting the water below filled the silence of his apartment. The wall art was also a gift, this one from his brother, and it simply read a quote from Casablanca in pretty cursive letters with a few tiny mirrors embedded into the canvas: “Here’s looking at you, kid!” It was an odd saying to have to deal with in a bathroom, but somehow, the tiny mirrors made it ok and anyway, when else could he interact with that thought but first thing in the morning before his busy day would whisk him away and “here” would become an abstract representation of his reality. He brushed his teeth and turned on the coffee maker and fed the cat and watered his begonia and did all the routine stuff he habituated before looking at the sheet music that he had arranged for the big holiday concert.
It had been a tough year for the choir: grant funding had dried up, and with it, the touring component that brought everyone so much incentive to stick out the tough rehearsals, but also, one of the sopranos lost her mother recently and would break into tears every rehearsal, one of the baritones was going through a divorce, and the two altos that were dating had broken up just last week, not to mention, the three preceding years of “pandemic” that had dampened everyone’s inertia.
The Choir Director shuffled the freshly printed stack of music papers and coalesced it into a big binder, taking the time to look at each title and subtitle lovingly: arranged by Phillip Gar for the Gratitude Ensemble Choir, when he was startled by another
-HONK!-
This one to prod him that he was going to be late if he didn’t leave in the next twenty minutes, so he got up briskly while trying to close the music folder, hold his coffee, and put the frizzy fuzzy faux fur slippers on while his cat who had also grown fond of the same slippers and had nestled itself in there much to the left house shoe and Phillip’s chagrin, the latter now losing his balance and spilling his cup of joe all over the neatly coalesced sheet music bearing his name.
The next twenty minutes were utter chaos as Phillip went to print the file again, realizing halfway through that he was out of paper, then out of ink, taking too long to replace the cartridge, cursing several times, and then managed to stub his toe on the short walk from where he left his slippers to where he sits down to put on his shoes when he finally snagged the printed papers, stuck them uncoalesced and unbindered into his bag and flew out of his apartment.
It looked like the overcast sky was going to prove the local news meteorologist wrong yet again as an overwhelmed Phillip swung the front door of his apartment building ajar and jumped out, not realizing or seeing Charlotte on the other side returning from her daily walk with her tiny shih-tzu, for surely he would have, at the very least, said hello, instead of traumatizing her (and the shuh-tzu) by leaping into the busy street to catch the bus and
-HONK!-
promptly make an involuntary impact with a silver-green Prius.
The Choir Director’s body flew up into the air and landed with a thud on the windshield of the car that hit him, his freshly printed arranged music falling like deranged snowflakes as real sleet began pelting the scene.
Looking forward to seeing where this goes, Substack! Thanks for indulging me in some lighthearted fare!
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Hermes would be most pleased with these developments. Keen as a bean to be involved!
I feel so fancy reading this, it's so highbrow.
The last thing I read that was similar was a 100-word resignation letter that was composed by 4Chan posters. The resignation superman said that he would use it as his actual resignation letter and each poster in the thread posted one word at a time. You can imagine what those words were, and he actually submitted it to his employer.
I was laughing so hard that I thought I was going to have a heart attack.
Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzvGpC_jLuw
When Australian digital ID comes in, that is how I am going to write my Substack resignation letter.
I will be resignation superman, and there will be nothing highbrow about it.