Self-education: my comments on your imitations

Aaron borrowed Self's use of interesting, semi-technical words:
Everyone in New York City seemed to have a brownstone fetish, but to Leroy they looked like petrified turds.  Maybe it was a clue to some pervading scatology Leroy had yet to become privy to; maybe they were all coprophiliacs, or coprophiles, or whatever neologism they went by these days.  Legend had it that Hitler was a coprophiliac.  Maybe everyone in New York was Hitler.Leroy was lost, but he knew better than to ask for directions. No one in New York actually wanted to help anyone else. It was the kind of place where cigarettes were $14 a pack, drivers ran red lights as if eager to maybe someday get the chance to run a pedestrian over and cops didn't enforce law and order so much as try to find any way whatsoever to reach their quotas for the month. You were just another rat in the rat race, another cockroach in the dungheap. There were a lot of cockroaches at Leroy's local bodega, but he'd stopped noticing, instead choosing the path of least resistance, grabbing his coffee, paying and leaving, sometimes with his eyes closed the whole while.
Notice the self-interrupting character of this passage. Remember Burroughs' thing about using a cut-up style to evoke the way we think as we walk down the street - not in a linear fashion, but affected by everything we see. Self and Aaron have reworked this style, giving it a tongue-in-cheek, educated gloss. You must check out the music videos in Doug's latest post. And his Self-imitation.
They had successfully reached the five day mark. Five days, no heroin. I would never have imagined that I'd see Cynthia's pupils at an average size. Today also marks the fifteen year anniversary of both my friendship with her, and Ben. Out of the fifteen, they suffered five painful years of harrowing addiction. Five cycles of adversity. In their eyes, Earth looked like a massive Syringe. A syringe revolving around a colossal spoon, passing by a vial, and then rotating 180 degrees to face a brick wall. A brick wall that indented patterns on their foreheads when their score was dry. This is how I can remember Ben and Cynthia. Today, for the first time in years, I saw Cynthia's beautiful face restored back to default. She told me about her painful week.
One way this is not like Self is its emotive quality; it has feelings. It also has good details and creative phraseology: "her face restored to default." Computer lingo. The pupils; indented patterns; cycles: surreal details (colossal spoon). Unlike in Self, we care about the characters, there appears to be a relationship, problems, things getting worse. Tancrede's piece begins with this long sentence:
Christine was an ordinary housewife; up at seven in the morning to cook a scrumptious breakfast for her brute of a husband, a work out session wearing her favorite tangerine neoprene leotard in front of her beloved Richard Simmons at eight, cleaning up the muck, caused by her husband’s belligerent tendency of spilling his food at dinner and then playing soccer with it when the food was not up to his standard of deep-fried crispiness, around the house between nine and two in the afternoon, and spending the remainder of the afternoon gossiping with the local housewives till her husband returned home for another spell of tender beatings.
This is a crazy, hilarious scenario that captures Self's exaggeration and unrestrained use of adjectives to create a sense of intensity. The adjectives are playful - don't always fit: "her beloved Richard Simmons" - "another spell of tender beatings." Sharp and funny. Tyler's piece captures the conspiratorial sound of Self, as if the author is tapping us on the shoulder for a bit of juicy gossip.
Judy did not worry that she did not have the financial means or the time to care for a child; since her divorce 2 and a half years ago, she had been collecting alimony checks and was well taken care of. No, what Judy was concerned with was the fact that since her divorce 2 and a half years ago, she had not had sex. Not that Judy had not tried to have a fling, because she had. She spent every Saturday night for the last year and nine months putting on her tightest dress and highest heels, painting her face with so many powders, creams, and shadows that it even concealed her personality (conversation was not one of Judy's priorities).
This has a great tone, like the first page of Cock and Bull. It is snide and insinuating and pulls the reader somewhat uncomfortably in. Lexi's piece captures the beyond-omniscient narrator in Self:
The distraction of the blaring TV keeps her from realizing that I’m still watching. It always seems its the thing you knew was there, but weren’t expecting, that brings the end to the story. Sue thought herself a master and maker of her fate, and she was ready to end it every day. Though her tomorrow was no longer written on the sky, she couldn't stop looking out of the window of the diner, the page in front of her soon-to-be "sue-icide" still empty.
This has this great know-everything quality that would attract some readers and annoy others. The speaker knows what Sue feels, what's going to happen to her, what she thinks, what's coming in the story. Most "omniscient" narrators maintain the artificiality of the story by limiting what they appear to know and letting the reader fill in the rest. Wolfgang Iser wrote that that literary text were created by the reader, not the author. The reader fills in the gaps. Lexi and Self don't allow us any - and that's radical. Marcos' piece captures the clipped, tough-guy rhythms of Self's writing - which led critics to dismiss him as "art lad lit."
The sucker punch James dealt Jovin left him on his back still trying to piece together how he got there. With no time to recover from the unethical blow, Jovin remained immobile and vulnerable, left there on the floor like a flipped turtle. His helplessness made Jovin look more appetizing, more elementary, and more delightful to James. James, unable to resist, walked over to Jovin and hovered over him like a hornet teasing his target before piercing him with his stinger.
Despite Self's sometimes-fancy language - "micturate," he writes in short, clipped sentences. And anyone who can come up with his well-chosen similes can probably start a career. Marcos juxtaposes words that come from different kinds of talk - "unethical blow," and uses two great similes; the last one is the best, visceral with a sensory element. You can feel and hear the hornet. I didn't know what part to pick from Zeba's:
Robert, who in that moment lay in a bed wearing a black bathrobe and stained underwear, was a man that had done much in doing very little. He had tried his hand at poetry in college, but struggled terribly in thinking up a rhyme for "when love is lost," and so put down his leather bound notebook somewhere and hadn't looked upon the thing since.
In his youth he had read many books, and saw many movies, and scrutinized many paintings, and in all of them he had offered a sort of cold admiration that weighed the banalities and immensities art as "just about the same." Here we hear the Self-styled snottiness: Robert weighed pedestrian or grand art as "just about the same." His lack of discrimination is expressed in the language he tends to use, which itself evokes the banality of the way he thinks, also expressed in his attempts at poetry, his consumption of various media - and dirty underwear. We and the speaker bond by looking down on people like this (but also see ourselves in these characters). Jordan's well-written and lengthy piece dared to be disgusting:
Like fish sticks drenched in chocolate milk and left out on a swelteringly hot summer day, her odor, her essence, her proverbial aura, could draw alley cats for miles in search of a delectable meal. A simple trip to the ‘gyno’ would have fixed this condition, but on some sick level, like getting a whiff of one’s own b.o., she derived a certain sense of pleasure from this sent that was all her own.
The pleasure is all her own and so is the scent - being a very personal scent. This is transgressive: offensive to some readers but funny; it mimes the characters' language a little, an essential Self-ism (gyno), and uses a great simile to talk about body smells. The word "proverbial" is great here; but I don't think Self would use "sick" - which shows an awareness of propriety, morality, etc. This passage, from Kerry's piece, uses repetition to forge a great ominous quality.
Donna smoked and leaned and imagined. Sam slept and sweated and foamed at the mouth. It was four in the morning and Donna hadn’t slept a wink. In fact, she hadn’t had a night’s rest in weeks, maybe months. She had lost track of time. Donna spent her days in their apartment, cleaning and brooding, while Sam answered phones and checked files for a drowning carpet company. Donna would often catch herself daydreaming while scrubbing dust off the shelves or vacuuming the rug, about Sam drowning too, stuck at the bottom of a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Sometimes she imagined him drowning at the bottom of their bathtub, but she always went back to cleaning.
The clipped, matter-of-fact quality, telling-not-showing, elevates Donna's sleeplessness and restlessness so it seems she's about to crack. We get the sense that something bad is about to happen to her and Sam. His carpet company is drowning too - presumably failing. The fact that Donna can't remember when she slept neatly evokes the dreary and unreal quality of her life. Anna's version borrows the conceit of transformation:
Two unfamiliar legs swung from under her floral duvet and delicately planted themselves on her carpet. As the immense quantity of fabric that was her nightgown followed suit, Brittany realized that those slender ankles were now her own. She held out her arms and pushed up ruffled sleeves to reveal smooth thin pale protrusions that ended in perfectly pointed fingertips painted her usual beigey pink. She used these hands and fingers to feel around her bed searching for wet spots, puddles, fatty chunks of flesh, reminders of the shape she was before she had fallen asleep.
A great move here is the disembodied quality of the body parts. Her "legs swung"; "nightgown followed suit"; "she used her hands and fingers." Her body parts act on their own. This mimics what's actually happened and the sense of self-alienation that results from it. Jessica's tells a transformation scenario in a fairly conventional narrative style.
No amount of lotion would smooth out the rough, greenish-grey skin. He tried, with an entire bottle. When that failed, he stood, staring into the mirror, contemplating with the strange calmness that comes after a serious shock. He certainly couldn't go to school or to work like this. He doubted if he could go out in public at all. He couldn't even go to the doctor. He wondered whether his physician made house calls. He wondered whether he would give his physician a heart attack, when the doctor saw that the young man strongly resembled a tortoise.
The passage is from the man-tortoise's point of view, without brusque intrusions from the author. It drifts into his thoughts too - "omniscent" mixed with third person subjective. What's the advantage of this style? It's that the situation has some urgency and we feel the character's bewilderment at becoming - a tortoise. Maura's piece, also not very Self-ish, uses a classic narrative technique I remember from every Stephen King novel. A sense of foreboding:
She went out to dinner with her friends, something that she normally would have enjoyed, but was so caught up in her bewildering anxiety that she mostly just sat there, quietly staring into space. She continually felt like someone had just told her that she had a month left to live, but of course, this was not the case. A week later, and nothing has changed. She can't shake this all consuming worry, nor its accompanying stomach pains and dull headaches, from her being.
Becca's piece, though short, actually captures Self's style well:
It was Wanda that never liked riding on buses, but somehow Rob got Wanda to set foot on a Greyhound.  She also never imagined she would be traveling to Cleveland to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Rob had a way of making Wanda feel so alone without him, that she followed him around as if on a leash.  Her dependency started when they met at a friend's party, back in 2003.  
"It was Wanda that" - the sentence structure is indirect and creates a distanced feel. It could have been "Wanda never liked..." The use of specific names creates a sense that this is happening in our world, a world we know. And the brisk way of stating complex relationships. Finally, J.R. evokes an unreal world:
His name was Max-a-million Horatio Brocker, and he loved to key cars. All day long he would walk along the parked cars on the hot dark avenue, house key in hand; scraping along he would whistle his car-keying song. Until one day he was whistling along and keyed the wrong car. You see, the car was a Lincoln, and nobody on God’s green America would hurt a Lincoln, not even the President… And it was MY Lincoln, that I mowed lawns all summer to pay for. The year was 2012, and Maxy and I had a little showdown.
Ridiculous name and flat characterization, signaling us that this is a made-up world. Inside joke about hurting a Lincoln... But the sense of possession and loss may be more emotion than we find in Self. On the other hand, "Maxy and I had a little showdown" is elaborately casual.