dead rats press

Move

2010-12-21T08:57:00.000-06:00

In an attempt to combine my blog and website, I've moved over to Wordpress, which seems to have more flexibility than blogger. The domain name lylerosdahl.com now points there, though the old web site is still up and Postcard Fiction Collaborative will still be on blogger (as well as SA Taprooms). Along the top of the new blog/site, you'll find static pages to things like my writing, photos and paintings. Hopefully I've got it set up so that you'll be able to see new posts from Facebook and Twitter.

I feel kinda dumb writing this, but I've been trying to promote my work a little more recently and I do like playing around with the technology some (very basically). So for what it's worth...

Just one thing...

2010-12-15T09:18:00.000-06:00

San Antonio Current writer holiday gift picks with pics. Mine's down at number five. Notice the charming, elegant hands holding the book up in the picture.

Science and Human Achievement

2010-12-08T10:41:00.001-06:00

From "The Truth Wears off" by Jonah Lehrer: "But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. ... In private, [Jonathan] Schooler [tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara] began referring to the problem as 'cosmic habituation,' by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. ... Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe." And, it appears, we still choose what to believe before the experiments are done and carry that through them. While not overtly stated, the desire for positive results from publications is partly to blame, the general aversion to being wrong is also a strong motivator. We also tend to gravitate toward positive results because they corroborate our pre-established beliefs (even when those beliefs are ostensibly innovative -- after all, isn't that inherently part of our belief system?).

From the preface to The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of the backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit -- but do so by surgically altering the libs of their customers [Procrustes, in Greek mythology, would put guests in a bed and either cut off the portions of limbs that hung over or stretched the guest who was too short]. for instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren [sic] through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse." This is the scientific method, after all. Tried and true. I love that there is such a wonderful Greek myth that correlates so perfectly to the scientific method as explored by Lehrer. Proves that we are still mythologically driven at heart as we, culturally, attempt to fit science into our guest bed.

Lehrer, Jonah. "The Truth Wears off." New Yorker. 13 Dec. 2010: 52-57. Web. 8 Dec 2010.
Taleb, Nassim. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.

Super Soldiers

2010-12-04T12:45:00.000-06:00

"'Matt [Wenning, world-class powerlifter] is a great America,' [Maj. Mark] Ivezaj [company commander in the 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment] says. 'What he did was take standard 185-pound guys and turn them into 205-pound animals who cold clear rooms and drag guys across parking lots. And the soldiers could do these things better and for longer periods than any unit in the world'" (145).

Super soldiers. What a smart, sophisticated way to redevelop weight training for specific types of Army deployments and units. A little frightening, too.

Interesting that he would mention parking lots. Seems oddly specific and rather Stateside-oriented. Lots of parking lots in Afghanistan?

"Protective Forces" by Rob Fitzgerald. Muscle & Fitness. December 2010. 139-145. Print.

Image-Art

2010-12-04T10:32:00.000-06:00

For "Husserl it is certain that an image is basically a modification: '[…] through its very sense as such, an "image" presents itself as a modification of something that, in absence of this modification, would simply be present […].'" (qtd in "The Neutrality of Images and Husserlian Aesthetics" by Christian Ferencz-Flatz)

Everything is image. Everything is art.

Ferencz-Flatz, Christian. "The Neutrality of Images and Husserlian Aesthetics." Studia Phaenomenologica 9.(2009): 477-493. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 4 Dec. 2010.

Some Observations about Shoplifting

2010-12-03T11:58:00.002-06:00

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin is a story typical of a mainstreaming apathetic generation of artists. This isn't a story in which nothing happens. Lots happen. There are consequences, just no emotional response to them. What do consequences mean when you don't feel anything? I'm not sure the novella answers the question, but it certainly brings it up. Events occur, people make decisions, but the reader is never told why. And that left me feeling disembodied, which is an unusual sensation after reading for me: "Paula and Matt were sitting opposite Sam and Kaitlyn. Sam called Paula's cell phone with his cell phone. Paula answered and Sam hung up. Kaitlyn asked if Sam wanted a drink" (49). These exchanges between characters who are identified only by first name and never in any context are meaningless and silly and string together to create a choppy, empty rhythm of events. Lin tells the reader what the characters are feeling instead of showing her, adding to the disconnect between what is happening and what anyone might be feeling or really thinking. "Sam thought 'voracious' and felt confused." The characters display "neutral facial expression[s]" (61) all of which creates a shallow, edgy, disconcerting novella. It is as if the characters are separate from their minds, their actions -- they are observers of themselves: "'Oscar Wilde said that a genius is a spectator to their own life, to the point that the real genius is uninteresting,' said Luis. 'No, Marissa has never threatened to kill me.' 'Oscar Wilde was stupid though,'" writes Sam in this rather lengthy Gmail chat exchange with Luis. Lin has managed to write exactly what Luis claims Oscar Wilde said*. And it is an interesting and mentally stimulating effort.

***

I wondered too if this wasn't really a book about Autism in a way. The fact that emotional response and human interaction is as important as say a shoplifted shirt.

***

Finally, the novella is intensely funny; the juxtapositions create humor in their disconnected deadpan. The screaming drunk in the jail cell or Brandon at a party who, after walking away from Sam, "came back and said the name of the string theory he believed was correct. The name was a combination of letters and numbers" (60).

***

I read this book very quickly because all of these aspects created a fascinating, perplexing story.
---
*I can't find anything (from a cursory google search) that exactly fits Luis' paraphrase, but here are a couple of Oscar Wilde quotes, the second of which could be interpreted to mean what Luis says.

"To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life."
"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin. Melville House: The Contemporary Art of the Novella collection. 2009.

Gimme Noir

2010-12-02T13:58:00.000-06:00

"I keep forgetting you're a man of principles," Nora Cameron says near the end of the novel (120). Though I'm only somewhat familiar with noir movies and novels, this strikes me as one of them for that exact reason. It is about a man of principles. When all else goes south, Sam Cameron still has his values. They're Hemingwayesque ideals, as is the language of the book: hard and good, which limns the action nicely in black and white. The dichotomy makes everything edgy and dramatic, but not overly so as I was afraid it might (at least not often enough to make it unenjoyable). And the use of specific sailing terminology (of which I know nothing) ratcheted up the allure for me. I love the way the sentences flowed, both sharp and undulating: "The darkness made a solid wall ahead of them. Sam let the sloop ghost forward under jib alone, straining to make out the dark bulk of Maquid Point. There was a smell of rain in the air, and the sea had an uneasy chop that slapped hard against the Holiday's bow" (86). While this sentence isn't as jargon-filled (and I use that term in the most appreciative way) as a few others, it does give a good sense of the novel. The perfect book that I picked up as a freebie at the San Antonio Public Library Book Cellar.

Million Dollar Murder by Edward S. Aarons. Fawcett Gold Metal Book. 1950.

The Mythology of Life

2010-11-30T14:33:00.000-06:00

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. What an astonishing book. I can't believe I haven't read it until now, but somehow, I also wonder if I would have been ready for it somehow.

Near the end: "The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must lie and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun" (216). Such sadness limned so beautifully by the mythology of Winesburg -- a place both real and imagined. And just a few pages later: "One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes" (222-3). Such a striking imbalance. In the language itself, too. The ironic certainty of a moment in the first quote (this perfect epiphany) gives way to a sort of confused nostalgia for life in the second one, a muddle of humanity -- such as it is. What a strange shift between "one," "his" and then "the eyes." It is a movement to mythology while at the same time away from it -- the "adventures" that happen throughout the book are not those of Odysseus or Gilgamesh, but of rural Americans living sad, lonely, uncertain lives so enchantingly in the fields planted with berries and corn and "set ablaze" by the afternoon sun. Such an apt description of the midwest, the human spirit and the mythology of life.

Wings Press

2010-11-22T12:21:00.000-06:00

An in depth look at San Antonio publisher Wings Press by the Huffington Post. This kind of foresight and passion makes San Antonio an important, interesting city.

To Catch a Drunk

2010-11-20T13:30:00.000-06:00

The man was drunk, but more importantly, banned from the library... So everyone acted nonchalant until the librarian in charge could make it up and kick him, very gently, out. It was an odd ploy, trying to keep him around so that we could expel him and it required just the right mixture of personnel (including security), deception and rigor.

I actually kind of felt bad for the guy. Just out of jail. Drunk at 9:27 in the morning. Not that long ago that I'd had a couple of beers by that time. So it's not like I can't relate. Still, don't forget that you must interact kindly with one another. Thou shalt not be drunk in the library (especially if thou hitith up others for moneyith). Thou shalt not abuse privilege, whatever that may be (especially if it is your right to).

Alas, perhaps we are too stony and not drunk enough as a culture. More Dionysus, less Apollo. Crash and burn instead of onward and upward. But let us also engorge ourselves on words -- congestion of inky sentences. Grovel in the musty tomes of wood pulp and leave the drunks, who we must join shortly, to their travails.

But I digress, drunk as I am on language.

The Bus

2010-11-20T12:47:00.000-06:00

While we were waiting, a cat fell out of the window above the bus stop. It did not land on it's feet.

A week later had done it no favors. Asphalt rocks showed through the holes in its skin and fur. The greasy outline showed where the cat had actually seeped into the parking lot. We still waited in the same spot for the bus, but now the "we" included the carcass. Everyday I would stare at the cat until the bus came (the number 8) and I felt like I began to disintegrate with the animal. At least my memory. I knew that the carcass was decaying, but I couldn't ever remember what it looked like the day before or that first day. It had no reference point except for my daily waits for the bus, which would pick me up and whisk me away to my dead end job at the zoo. And all those days melded together -- primordial ooze in my mind.

It's not like I hadn't seen dead animals before, of course, but they were always disposed of right away. Incinerated. (Sure the bigger animals were problematic -- sometimes taking all day to cut up and ship off to the incinerator, but that's the difference between an institution and the bitter, uncaring world in which the institution exists: people care what the institution does, but not about a dead cat on the street.) Soon (oddly, I seem to have a clear line of sight to the future, if not the past) the cat will be leathery fur and then just patches of fur and then I'll be all alone waiting for my bus, compounding myself into asphalt pastpresent future.

A Writer Is

2010-11-20T12:08:00.000-06:00

"A writer, some say, is a person who knows the names of things: the name of the tree and the name of the window through which the tree is seen; the name of the car parked by the tree and the name of the child who falls from the tree; the name of the bone and the name of the break. Then there's another view that holds that if names are powerful, then, like a boyfriend or the car keys when you really need to get to work, they'll be more powerful in their absence."
--from a review ("Engaged Detachment" by Dylan Hicks) of Firework by Eugene Marten

The Business of Teaching

2010-11-17T11:49:00.001-06:00

In teaching neither success nor failure is easy to qualify, despite Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant work to the contrary. Or at least it is for the teachers themselves. Or at least it is for me. You can take student surveys, but they don't really tell you much (the A students thought I was great, while the students who can't put two words together, rarely turn their work in anyway, and don't show up to class think that I was brutally difficult). You can fill out scantrons. You can get other teachers to come in and evaluate your abilities. But these are all flawed.

Not only have I never felt comfortable in the "authority" role (this is how you have to do this), but I never really knew if anyone was learning anything. I don't like the system of grading (though I use it fairly strictly with my students -- a C is average) and most of the students don't want to be in Freshman Composition to begin with (how do you motivate people like that -- which includes myself when I had to take it?). Both of these issues make writing less meaningful. They encourage dishonesty. And not only is it almost impossible to catch, but it reflects well on the teacher, albeit falsely. Students bring in drafts of papers that are grammatical train wrecks and then submit their final essay (two days later, no less) with hardly a word out of place. Turnitin shows me quite definitively (though I don't really know how definitively) that it hasn't been plagiarized. But how do I know that in actual fact it was written by someone else? I've chosen ignorantly blissful cliché (wow, she got it -- must have really buckled down and cleaned up her act) as a response or, more accurately, plain relief (I just can't stand to read one more of these stupid essays -- oh, look, this one has clear, logically progressive sentences: how great is this? [It's like slipping into a hot tub on a cold afternoon.]). It's this lack of quantifiable knowledge and the human desire for success (both cheating students who want that A paper and self-deluded professors [like me] who want those brilliant leaps of progress, which is all founded on their excellent teaching abilities) that makes me uneasy.

If all of this is true, then what am I really doing? Am I not justifying a flawed system? So I'm taking a semester off, mostly because I want to take some time to write (maybe not much of anything, but I'm putting my own words on the page), but also because I'm really starting to feel disheartened about the whole enterprise. I mean America's most lucrative business model is the criminal justice and health systems (humans as commodity -- quantity instead of quality). Is the higher education business really any different? Does anyone care?

Project Smiley

2010-10-27T22:39:00.001-05:00

Two Kinds of Writers

2010-10-23T11:49:00.000-05:00

"Let's lie and say there are only two kinds of writers I like, the caffeinated and the sleepy. Balzac exemplifies the caffeinated. He drank coffee to the point of a trembling hand -- something like thirty cups a day -- and then he'd masturbate to the very edge of orgasm, but not over, and that state -- agitated, excited to the point of near madness -- was Balzac's sweet spot, in terms of composing. Then there's the sleepy: De Quincey with his opium, Milton waking up his red-slippered daughters to take down verses that had come to him in a dream. We might also think of the method by which Benjamin Franklin purportedly came up with inventions: he'd deprive himself of sleep, then, exhausted, sit in an uncomfortable chair while holding a heavy metal ball in each hand so that when he'd nod off a hand would go limp and its ball would fall, making a sound that would wake him from his dreams. That was how he came up with his best ideas for inventions, basically asleep -- just not so asleep that he couldn't take down a few notes." Rivka Galchen in her review of The Microscripts entitled "From the Pencil Zone: Robert Walser's Masterworklets."

How many kinds of writers are there?

Babbler

2010-10-23T11:47:00.000-05:00

"But one can live quite well without excitements, can't one, only one ought to be endowed with a bit less poesie and the like, should one not, should one not? What a babbler I am, am I not, am I not?" Letter from Walser to his sister. "From the Pencil Zone: Robert Walser's Masterworklets" a review of The Microscripts by Rivka Galchen.

Bizarro Brilliance

2010-10-23T11:41:00.000-05:00

An article in Details magazine with book covers and some very basic information about Bizarro. Some absolute brilliant covers and descriptions. This is what I always thought of when I thought of Pulp... Can't wait to get my hands on some of these (I actually already owned one).

Random Cats

2010-10-22T15:55:00.000-05:00

"What's surprising is how well the human imagination takes to the extravagance of random order." -"The Web's Random Logic" by Jeff Porter, The Wilson Quarterly AUTUMN2010

The word "order" at the end of this quote is particularly telling. We always look for patterns. Some of us more stringently than others. Some of us are driven to find patterns already established by popular culture or academia. Some of us like the gray, empty areas, while others prefer the thick black connective lines between ideas.

I remember an article I read years: the author (who's name I can not remember -- those connections are weak for me) lamented the advent of searchable databases. He claimed that we wouldn't have the unexpected, delightful connections and surprises we used to when we would read a magazine for a particular article but stumble upon something seemingly unrelated on the next page -- we wouldn't be able to make those magical leaps between subjects and voices. But how different, really, are magazine articles in the same magazine anyway? The Journal of the American Medical Association is not going to have an article about flower arranging next to the one you just read about Asperger's Syndrome anyway. Granted that's rather extreme, but still... How much different would the succeeding article be in a magazine compared to what will (quite often randomly) turn up on a search engine or a database? And, after all, how much of it is us, our curiosity, driving the search engine, rather than the search engine driving us: "not that order comes from chaos, but the other way around." I think Porter does a nice job of showing that the cat didn't kill curiosity and neither did curiosity kill the cat (Shrödinger was right).

Do something else.

2010-09-22T20:29:00.000-05:00

"Large-scale, decentralized democratic societies are not very adept at generating neat, rational solutions to messy situations. The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah’s Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it."
-- Nicholas Lemann "Schoolwork"

This is undoubtedly true. I think it's an issue of giving students more options and making sure they know that college is not socially or culturally mandatory (which is how we tend to perceive it).

B Is for Beer by Tom Robbins

2010-09-17T14:39:00.000-05:00

"The older you get ... the harder it is to interface with the Mystery. Yet adults still thirst for that connection, that alternative to the unsatisfying reality men have constructed for themselves, and which they feel locked into like a dungeon.

"So, they resort to all sorts of things -- a few enlightened, many destructive, most ineffective, some just plain silly -- that might allow them even a breath or two outside the prison walls. To a certain extent, that explains the appeal of beer." (95)

This lovely "children's book for grown-ups" and "grown-up book for children" follows a precocious and imaginative little girl from Seattle through her adventures with beer. The story itself is amusing (it's Tom Robbins, after all) as well as being very informative, especially in describing the process of brewing beer. It certainly does fit it's epithet.

The masses rose up and they only had one thing in mind.

2010-09-06T20:43:00.000-05:00

Alterity

2010-08-28T09:53:00.002-05:00

defies a simple definition because it contains concepts like difference and otherness within itself

Claw

2010-08-19T13:07:00.000-05:00

Haiku by the Bayou by O'San

2010-08-18T13:20:00.000-05:00

An interesting collection of haiku. Though I feel like many of the miss the real quintessential nature of haiku:

Louisiana State
Wildlife Refuge
harbors many birds
in sanctuary

Where are the colors, the specifics? It's more like a title than a haiku.

On the other hand, there are some really interesting, surprising images:

cows wading
udders dipping
in the bayou

I never associated cattle with the bayou and this is a fantastic image -- without ever saying it, I can see the ripples made by the udders.

Story-a-day cancellation

2010-08-12T19:51:00.000-05:00

Wrapped up my story-a-day project with #42. A random place to stop and a delayed finishing considering it was for 7/26/10. Things got away from me and so it's time to stop.

You can read the stories or the shorter collection within the story-a-day called The Clara Wars.

It was a fun project and one that began to get into my general unconsciousness. The juxtaposition and POV and verb tenses were challenging and produced some really unexpected pieces.

Something to look forward to doing next year over the summer.

Einstein almost two decades later

2010-08-08T18:01:00.002-05:00

Quote from Detective Story by Imre Kertész

2010-08-06T16:29:00.000-05:00

"He had to have a reason for everything, even living. That type is still a child, not yet a fully grown man." (36) Detective Story by Imre Kertész

#42 Holy Milk

2010-07-26T19:43:00.003-05:00

The holy glass of milk has been missing now for two weeks. His holiness has become quite cranky without his glass of milk before bed. He claims it is the milk that gives him the connection to God (milk being the sustenance of life and all). And it was the glass that made the milk holy (something about the transubstantiation -- though we’re not Roman Catholics). So you can see that we’re in it now. His holiness can’t sleep, so I can’t sleep. I think this forced insomnia is making me closer with God, though. He told me (yes, God is male -- let me put it to bed) that a couple had stolen the glass. They must have been employed here because no one would have thought this glass (distinguishable only by the tiny tear shaped air bubble near the lip) would have been holy. Which makes me wonder: should I just replace it? Hasn’t he been dropping hints already? (“Where’s that glass, Victor? I’m sure I must have just misplaced it somewhere. It’s bound to show up any day now.”) But that would mean the whole thing is a scam. If I replace it and he’s connected again to God, then God is dead, or worse, nonexistent. And then I lose my connection. His disconnect is all I’ve got and I see it so clearly now. The children playing in the sticker bushes as opposed to his holiness dressing the Christmas tree. There is no innocence. The children are bloodied and scarred and filed with death. And we have been there -- the children, the thieving couple, the mad man -- but I am filled with the holy milk that needs no glass. It is high time for a new regime and our cups will run over with blood.

Prompt
42. (7/26/10)
A girl and her boyfriend are kissing on a bench
with a sacred glass of milk.
In the tender innocence of morning,
the children play in the sticker bushes;
while a madman sews popcorn on a Christmas tree.

#41 Scabs

2010-07-25T19:18:00.001-05:00

I remember the knock at the tavern door. Everything happened so quickly. Or rather everything was happening simultaneously. Or rather, I don’t remember objectively. I mostly remember the news and that everything else was happening around that. The two knocks I remember very clearly. Despite the things going on. KNOCK. KNOCK. Granted there wasn’t much noise. Silent ballerinas padding around in their slippers. Smoke -- quiet as death -- creeping into the tavern from the chimney. Must be breezy, I remember thinking. In retrospect, it all seemed rather ominous. I remember thinking about people who actually get mad about, fight against death. All of the things that have happened, that will happen, too much to bear on their mortal souls. I was thinking I might be persuaded to start thinking that way when I saw the girl eating scabs. Her eyes fleshed over and I couldn’t tell if she knew they were scabs or not. Even after the news, I can only wonder, the knock echoing in my memory, if she had been tricked or was willing.

Prompt
41. (7/25/10)
A schoolgirl is eating scabs in a fine restaurant
with eyelids like coins of flesh.
Smoke rises up from a cedar wood fire;
ballerinas are practicing for the show,
while the postman delivers the fateful news.

Sacrilege

2010-07-25T08:04:00.000-05:00

More sacrilegious than taking the lord's name in vain is not really knowing it, a la Homer Simpson: "Help me, jebus."

#40 Roasted Apples

2010-07-24T09:28:00.000-05:00

An apple a day
Sends the doctor away

Apple in the morning
Doctor's warning

Roast apple at night
Starves the doctor outright

Eat an apple going to bed
Knock the doctor on the head

Three each day, seven days a week
Ruddy apple, ruddy cheek

And so I add a loaded pistol to the rhyme: shoot the doctor and you’ll never hear from him again. You’ll get check ups in prison and probably the occasional apple, which will not keep the doctor away forever, mind you. Colon cancer will get you sooner or later or something else will, apples be damned. Do you remember when your father wept for you, you were so sick? There was a doctor then, too. That was a long time ago, but you almost died anyway. You don’t remember it. Outside your prison cell, the clouds hang tumescent and yellow. You pick at a mole on your arm. After your bout with deathness, you spent a lot of time outside. That’s where the mole on your arm came from. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it just showed up unannounced, uninvited because that’s how life is. There is no cause and effect. Nobody roasts apples anymore. This is your worst fear. Prepare yourself.

Prompt
40. (7/24/10)
Reword an old children's rhyme
with a loaded pistol.
The clouds are swollen and yellow;
the rabbi dances in a white silk coat,
while a father weeps in the dark hours of night.

#39 Story

2010-07-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Really, when did Adam and Eve not argue? It all began with an argument. Doesn’t everything? I suppose it’s fortunate. Arguing, I mean. That’s why we don’t hear about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Boring. Not the “without a stitch of clothing” part, mind you, but that’s a no-no, isn’t it? You know, the unbridled sex. Still, you have to wonder about bestiality, right? I mean if there were no boundaries, no limits, no names for God’s sake. Let’s stay off that track. It might ruffle a few feathers (they weren’t known as feathers back before the argument -- they just were, like silence is now). So really, it’s pretty fortunate that they had that argument. We wouldn’t have metaphors without that argument. How could we live without metaphors? Or similes? Such good fortune spills like milk from a ladle. That wouldn’t exist. Oh, and plot twists, right? I mean, it wouldn’t matter if a girl fell in love with her father in the Garden of Eden. I’m just touching on the bestiality tangent -- I’ll move along. (God, these people are touchy, but not you, eh?) You and me, we’re like pea’s in a pod. We are the defenders of life. Of language! Let us go, then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table -- do you recognize that? That is an argument with life. That is life. Come along then. Let’s leave these jugheads.

Prompt
39. (7/23/10)
Describe Adam and Eve in an argument
without a stitch of clothing.
Such good fortune spills like milk from a ladle;
a girl falls in love with her father,
while two cherubim block the way to the tree of life.

Question of Conditionality

2010-07-23T11:27:00.001-05:00

If alcoholics = ghosts, then what does "haunted" mean?

#38 Compelled

2010-07-22T16:39:00.001-05:00

The hot air balloon drifted up in the dry desert heat. Up. And then steady not going up any more. Soulless patch of sand. If we didn’t stay up here, we’d die. The girl in the basket -- our basket -- had soiled her underwear. She was asleep. We knew she did not die because she soiled her pants and her chest moved up and down very slightly. Getting her underwear off and over became an ordeal. We tried to keep feces off the wicker. We thought about throwing her over but we were too weak. And we were hungry. So many days we had been going over the soulless desert without food or water. We drank our own urine and the sleeping girls urine. Finally, too, we at her feces. I am not proud to say that. But I am compelled to tell you. We wouldn’t last an hour if we set down. No feces. Nothing. Our urine was getting very strong. The two of us could not lift the sleeping girl. Only her legs to take off her underwear. I have a map, but it looked wrong in the balloon. The lines looked like a man aiming to shoot his dog. We did laugh at that. The trade winds blew us off course as we skirted the desert. Blew us into the desert so that we could not set down without dying. I have written this in feces. I am not proud of that. I think the sleeping girl has finally died. At least we have eaten her. You will find bones in this wicker basket. And maybe one of us alive. Which one of us will sleep first?

Prompt
38. (7/22/10)
Imagine a girl is falling asleep
with no clean underwear.
The moon travels over a soulless stretch of sand;
a master aims to shoot his dog,
while the insomniac holds a candle in the dark.

#37 Escape

2010-07-21T14:51:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of the Clara Wars¹ you tried to flee the city, irrationally, but rightly, as it turned out later. There had been some looting and the soot of fires clung to the bus, your wet rag cutting back only slightly on the acrid odor. Smoke clouded the buildings reminding you, for the briefest of moments, of the snow capped Alps that you’ve only ever seen in photos. Then the bus careens into the old Kress building. In the hospital -- your gurney in the hall -- two policemen came through the hall looking for someone². They show you a picture of a woman who you recognized, though you shook your head, “no” (your jaw was wired shut). That’s Clara, you thought. You had heard her name. You imagined that she was waiting somewhere. You should have told them where. She died many years later, part of the sickness creeping across the war torn continent.
________________
¹Only known then as “the assassination.”
²The police became agents of the new government very quickly, often before people even realized that there was a new government.

Prompt
37. (7/21/10)
As bombs fall in the hills you are riding a bus
with a wet rag.
Snowy mountains steep like wrinkled sheets;
two policemen enter,
in a nearby house, a girl is waiting for something.

Two Quotes from Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník

2010-07-20T18:17:00.000-05:00

"Anthropologically speaking, the attitude of women toward chaos is preventative: they clean so as not to. The logic may be debatable, but it does get results. On the other hand, the attitude of men is curative: they clean only when they feel directly threatened by chaos." (22)

"Mr. Platzek was right about one thing: human idiocy is the one thing on earth that offers us some idea of infinity." (107)

#36 Treatment

2010-07-20T14:40:00.000-05:00

That night she came for treatment¹. The line wobbled and weaved up through the mound of rubble, the alter below it², basking, rarely, in the full moonlight (usually the bomb smoke eclipsed it at least slightly). She didn’t get treatment³. Nor the next three times. And by then it was too late.
______________________
¹Due to the abundance of fish, several Christian sects -- part of a loose knit coalition attempting to form a majority tribal leadership (called The Majority Tribal Leadership or MTL) -- began using the rare canned fish: mysticism, a language of holiness contained irrefutably and sealed in -- leap of faith between word and what is actually inside -- the can.
²This was a specifically created shrine, the material culled from several destroyed churches and modelled to look like the sabotaged tower of Babel.
³The absolution process -- the ritual of healing -- proceeded as such: the “broken” lies prone on an alter -- stone -- among the rubble of a church during a full moon. They divest themselves of raiment (if the broken is male, as all the clergy are, they must cover their loins). The priest, one ordained by the MTL, which is comprised of a council of the three heads of the three main Christian tribal groups -- Burnt Offering, Gold Chalice and White Covenant* -- chants from the ancient scripts, charred, leafy texts, and holds the gleaming can of sardines aloft into the moonlight at which point the sardines are transformed into a holy viscous substance. The punctured, but unopened, can is then rubbed vigorously on the broken’s ailed area. Through the contact they are healed.** Success rates, according to believers, the only one’s allowed to be treated, is 100%.
______________________
*The rise of these three tribes has raised some linguistic eyebrows.
**Prolonged contact, however, is said to actually produce maladies, hence the long (no less than two years and up to five) vetting process by the MLT and the generally rare, though no less popular, healing ritual.

Prompt
36. (7/20/10)
The priest is healing all the believers
with a can of sardines gleaming with oil.
The sea waves lap on the nearby shore;
a street urchin is selling stamps
while the bombs fall in the hills.

#35 Conversation, Holy Symbol, Command, Holy Bible

2010-07-19T16:53:00.000-05:00

They joined a group of other children, orphans, run-aways, refugees. But they became lost on their first scavenging trip. San Antonio was not their own city and they did not know it, though they had once visited just before the war. The convention of exorcists¹, to which their father had belonged, met at the Convention Center. Conversation, Holy Symbol, Command, Holy Bible. A mantra. The sky began to bruise and they had been warned not to be out after dark. Seeking shelter in the old Kress building, an open corner not yet taken, they remained silent. In the gloaming, a man, dandelion drooping in his button hole, guided people, ashen gray, to they did not know where². The children watched the spectacle as the smell of saffron filled the air. And human flesh. Someone deep in the building played a long, slow note on an oboe. The air pressed in on them as the bombs began to fall in the hills. Conversation, Holy Symbol, Command, Holy Bible, they chanted under their breath, the percussion blotting out syllables: Con ... Symbol ... and Holy. They felt like this exorcism required the latter. But they had not had a bible for years.
_____________________
¹There is a convention of Catholic priests on record as having “swarmed the convention center” in 2002, about a year before the war began in the North.
²In actuality, these are public exiles or, as they are known to most, “Hermes guiding souls to the underworld.” Depressing and sometimes bloody affairs started by the Cross Ridden Gang when it was in full force (a mere several months), but never done away with.

Prompt
35. (7/19/10)
Hermes was guiding souls to the underworld
with a wilted dandelion.
The smell of saffron fills the air;
a satyr comes skipping with his jolly pipes a-blowing,
while two children, lost in the streets hear bombs fall in the hills.

#34 Insomniacs

2010-07-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

We are all insomniacs. Some of us have grown accustomed to the concussions of bombs falling. Some even soothed by it¹. Those silent nights are the hardest for them. So we are all insomniacs in the dichotomy of this war: explosions and silence -- what we call “Adam and Eve in an argument.”² Any dreams of glory or honor have been swiftly denied and we go about our business as best we can, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. Now our dreams have turned to hunters wandering in the forest³. Outside in the streets, the torrents of floodwater leave bodies stranded in trees. It is a lurid sight when the swollen water recedes. Especially in the silence.
__________________________
¹There is an entire generation, albeit young, who have known nothing but war and concussive thuds.
²This is a saying used by members of the Cross Ridden Gang.
³Most of the trees having been leveled outside of loop 410 (see note #1 in #33 Consistency) foliage and the idea of “forest” have become a common communal archetype appearing often in dreams.

Prompt
34. (7/18/10)
Describe Adam and Eve in an argument
with dreams of glory and honor.
The streets are flooded with torrents of water;
out in the forest, hunters are wandering
while the insomniac holds a candle in the dark as bombs fall in the hills.

#33 Consistency

2010-07-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

It is the first day of spring, though it doesn’t feel like it. It’s been hot since March¹. The grey-eyed sherpa² is coming out of the house across the street again. Must be getting pretty close to five³. She’ll be driving up in her cobbled together car⁴ soon enough. Then the lights will go off for the blackout⁵ and the bombing raid will commence⁶. I wonder what it means, this consistency. I close my curtain until I hear the car choke up the driveway, then I turn off the lamp.
____________________
¹The consistent carpet bombing from years two through eight created much higher temperatures for the area. Hills were bombed into rubble, trees destroyed so that there was only the flatness of the outer perimeter.*
²The Clara War brought some unforeseen immigrants. The world itself had been thrown off kilter with the war in the United States and struggled to recover economically and politically. As the war ground on year after year, a small group of people, mostly of Asian descent, saw an opportunity. One of them being the recent “legalization” of prostitution (see note #3 in #28 Before the Bombing)
³Business must close before five so that the few people who manage to find employment are able to get home before curfew and blackout. Even bars close at five, which has created a two headed beast.**
⁴Cars have not been in production in the South since the bombing began. However, car shops have opened all over the city. They splice cars together to basic specification. It is of the utmost importance that these cars are armored and have large tires to get over debris and bodies.
⁵The loose tribal coalitions had begun to solidify into a governing body -- one opposed to the regime in the North. This body sent edicts, usually transmitted through bullhorns by party members in cars. Mandatory blackouts are the first law of the city, though it is unclear if this is part of a treaty or general wariness. Action against those that break the ban is swift and deadly.***
⁶These nightly raids are as certain as the blackouts themselves to a point where the blackouts have been followed superstitiously. The general thought being that the blackouts keep the Federal Army from dropping bombs into loop 410. There may, however, be absolutely no cause and effect relation.
_____________________
*It has, so far, remained an unspoken rule (some say there was some kind of treaty signed, though that has not been validated) that, after the first wave of bombings that destroyed the near West, South and East sides, the area inside loop 410 is off limits to the relentless carpet bombing. While the actual roadway has been reduced to rubble, and aside from the occasional bombing raid, the pact has held.
**People either drink early or buy alcohol and have blackout parties. Or both. Nearly every -- or at least the new majority (called the “morale majority”) -- fit into one of these two molds.
***Exile and even summary execution.

Prompt
33. (7/17/10)
A man is cheating on his wife
with a girl with eyes as slender as pearls.
It is the first day of spring;
a man tiptoes past the closed door,
while bombs fall in the hills.

#32 Imagine a Nurse Enters with a Sleeping Pill

2010-07-16T11:21:00.000-05:00

I like this prompt. I like the image of a girl falling asleep with two lovers having a spat. I think its the “with” that makes it so appealing. How tired she must be. Or patient. Does she know them? Or are they neighbors at a motel with very thin walls? Do they always fight? To the point where she finds it relaxing? A habit of listening to sharp, quick language? Now she associates it with sleep. So much so that the couple fight for her. Go to sleep, sweetie. Don’t tell her what to do, god damn it, he’ll say. Don’t you yell at me, you son of a bitch, she’ll respond and this girl will begin to close her eyes. I wonder if the fight becomes real though. Do they hate each other? Maybe just temporarily. Out of love for the girl who cannot sleep without lovers fighting! Can you imagine, then, scoundrels outside -- this is early morning -- lining the wharf? They’re all looking for work. They all shift from foot to foot as I write this because of this prompt. Shuffle, shuffle. They’re shiftless and listen to the lovers fighting. They shake their hands up and down in front of their chests and whistle, eyes wide. But they don’t know, really, why they’re fighting. That’s what I like about this prompt. They don’t know like we do.

Prompt
32. (7/16/10)
Imagine a girl is falling asleep
with two lovers having a spat.
To tell of such times!...
the scoundrels line the wharves
while the nurse enters with a sleeping pill.

#31 Theives

2010-07-15T11:13:00.001-05:00

A line extended outside the leech-healer’s house into the woods due to the recent success she’d had and the (coincidental?) rise in foodborne illnesses (not that they knew what that was). Nearby, the leech-healer’s apprentice scooped up pond water, filtering out the leeches. The apprentice whispered to himself -- or so it would seem to the casual observer had there been one. In fact, a thief hid in the shadows and after a short time, emerged, dropped several coins in the apprentice’s hand and took a can from him. He quickly disappeared into the shadows once again.

This town does not have stories, only sickness, disease, death. This is no exception.

The pond had recently been poisoned with opium -- a mistress, fleeing from her abusive man, had stolen his opium pipe and thrown it in the pond. It was an unwitting mistake, one made out of fear as he chased her through the woods (her mangled body was found deeper in the woods, though this does not qualify as a story here because the people in the village only care about themselves). The unfortunate consequence -- or perhaps the suitable one depending on how you feel so far about the townspeople lined up, single-file and silent outside the leech-healer -- was an outbreak of opium addition. A smaller consequence was the sudden drop off of the leech-healer’s success rate (or larger one depending on how you feel about the leech-healer compared to the village people). The leeches, also addicted to opium, became listless and stopped falling off the people that lined up outside the healer’s home. This created the addiction, but also a more disturbing (depending on how you feel about addiction) side-effect. They gorged themselves until they finally exploded, leaving their suckers attached and a mess to clean up. The leech-healer did not make the connection (it’s that type of village after all) and the villagers, almost to a one, were exposed to the horrifying process. The opium dealer could not keep up with demand. And the thief disappeared into the shadows.

This is a recounting of events, not a story. Do not misinterpret it as such, lest you, too, disappear into shadow carrying with you something that is not what you think it is.

Prompt
31. (7/15/10)
A man's mistress is running away
with an opium pipe.
Clouds tumble across the sky;
the leech-healer bleeds her patients,
and the thief disappears in the shadows.

#30 Creatures

2010-07-14T18:19:00.002-05:00

The Kress building, mostly empty space, rubble and leaks forming tide pools replete with fish, provides you, and your grandmother’s box of medicine, refuge. Such a temporary state, refuge, you think. Kind of like the medicine in your grandmother’s pill box¹. As your eyes adjust, you notice that you are not alone. The sound you first took for running water (a broken pipe?) is actually a table full of men² who whisper, eyes staying on you as they direct their suspicions into the middle of the table with their mouths. Why suspicions? You can’t tell if they’re actually saying anything. Something about the way they move their mouths suggests that. As the deep gloom lightens ever so slightly with the boom, thud, of bombs in the hills (it really is as if the sounds are actually making things brighter), you see a woman by a door. Every time a bomb goes off she turns the nob and opens the door. “Hello?” she says time and time again. The bombing has been going on for months. How long has she been there? “Hello?” You mistook this, too, for what? An owl? There are so many creatures about anymore.
__________________________
¹Medicine had, of course, become scarce and, furthermore, dangerous as stocks expired.
²Many of the tribes who form loose coalitions formalize their power by meeting around tables and whispering. They meet incessantly.

Prompt
30. (7/14/10)
You are in an abandoned building
with your grandmother’s box of medicine.
A table full of men are whispering;
a woman waits for a knock at the door,
while the bombs fall in the hills.

#29 Meat

2010-07-13T10:48:00.001-05:00

The war was nothing to her because she had run away when she was twelve. Those streets were hard. Now she had all she could eat -- the fish flopped out of the waterways. She had shelter. She had friends -- people she knew she could trust because she had trusted them out on the streets; they travelled south together¹. They had eaten other people when they had to. Together. They shared the blame. The guilt. During the day they separate, move out to scavenge for food. They don’t have to steal anymore, as people die and there are more resources -- empty houses are resources (she savors this word, rolls it around in her mouth), not stealing, she tells the group, resources. She is the eldest at seventeen and their de facto leader. They do not eat people any more. Or at least they haven’t had to². They manage to survive and a little more. Enough to let her reflect on her scavenging. Enough to let her watch a butterfly alight on a flower, to watch its proboscis extend to suck in nectar from the purple trailing lantana. Enough to weep at what she’s done.

In the distance, in the hills, the rolling accusation of bombs.
_____________________________
¹The Influx brought man thousands of children, orphaned by the Clara Wars that had started up in the North.
²Something about the war accelerated death. Not murder, which is always accelerated during war time, but decomposition. Fish, once out of water, begin to rot immediately. The same happened to the human body. Flesh became rancid within an hour of death and bodies were pared down to the bone in days (some was due, truthfully, to insect activity -- there were so many insects -- but mostly it was something else). The small scientific community that remained could not find an answer, but there was talk about God (It is a sin to eat human flesh). Still that doesn’t address the rapid decomposition of other meat.

Prompt
29. (7/13/10)
Describe the adventures of a runaway
with a rotten fish and soiled pants.
Butterflies lick the flowers with their wings,
the scavengers are hunting for food
while the bombs fall in the hills.

#28 Before the Bombing

2010-07-12T09:54:00.004-05:00

Before the bombing really began in the South¹, the scene in the city was vibrant² -- dancing, drinking (lots of drinking) and prostitution³. Everyone had shoes and booze under the buzzing neon of downtown⁴. Paradise⁵.
_______________________
¹Infighting kept the arm busy for a time, less than a year -- record keeping by then being inaccurate and a dangerous vocation in DC.
²We felt safe -- the border just to the south of us* despite the recent refugee waves.
³The splintering of national and statewide government gave rise to tribal allegiances which were much more accepting and open-minded (barring, of course, the rather violent Christian tribes). Prostitution, without a “moral” majority, was no longer a legal preclusion, though the Cross Ridden Gang occasionally trapped prostitutes and their johns, summarily executing them after a quick Hail Mary.
⁴In retrospect it was foolish of us to leave our cars to rust in our driveways, an unintended consequence of market localization. We were unprepared for the bombs. Unprepared and ultimately alone. We scattered like cockroaches as the bombs fell in the hills.
⁵A woman was caught boiling children (with cockroaches no less) early into The Influx and the population became savage themselves as if the proximity to cruelty, such unbridled horror, nullified any and all constitutional or Empathy Rights (most of which had by then been revoked nationally anyway) and the woman was burned alive. Still children began to disappear at alarming rates.
_______________________
*Border crossing closures from the south of the Rio Grande were swift when they came. No one was ready. The general thinking is that the government -- a military oligarchy (Speaker of the House being named Supreme Leader) by the time of the border closures -- gave Mexico advanced notice of the bombing raids into Texas (and later the Southwest and the West Coast) thereby preventing the escape of political targets and refugees.

Prompt
28. (7/12/10)
Imagine a witch is boiling children
with a large brown cockroach.
In a vibrant scene of neon lights,
a crowd is cheering,
while bombs fall in the hills.

#27 The Effete’s Permission (b d f g h j k l p q t y a e i o u)

2010-07-11T15:32:00.002-05:00

Bed, he judged. The lippy lady, a hefty pig, flatly dug a toe out of pie. Huh uh, they huff (teeth, lip, belly). Fetid about, they tip toe about, tit about, hit flood light flip, flop. Death by (gulp) tie too tight. Blotto holy people belt out a ditty, a ballad, a lullaby. The lippy lady, befuddled by rotgut too, bedded by old, out of date dude, too quiet to babble.

Prompt
27. (7/11/10)
Describe a runaway working in a factory
with a fair young maiden.
Odors of sour milk are sweeting the air;
a clairvoyant draws a hanged man,
while the monks are drunk on wine.

A Lipogram in e from Mimi

2010-07-11T14:41:00.003-05:00

A long, long dynasty ago in a galaxy far away, musical mushrooms would blossom at all locations. Now, not a thing would grow. Blocking two of many suns was a gigantic horrifying clown. An old fish woman saw to it that this clown got crowds of sharp folks to crunch on for food and snacks. It was similar to a circus for this monstrous clown. And all of francialand was in a fog of dim fright daily.

#26 The Prisoner’s Constraint (a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z)

2010-07-10T00:07:00.003-05:00

in russia, a woman saw a nice monsoon. we came vivacious soon. a man ran over a river. in san marcos we move an ocean in our room. so we can see sonorous. suns or sons or moons or air or rain or mine. circus woman ran near an ocean. scare me, we announce. circus woman was mean cuz circus woman was a venomous cinnamon woman.

Prompt
26. (7/10/10)
A clown escapes from a circus
with no clean underwear.
Now we sit in a field of mushrooms;
a crowd is cheering “vive la France!”
while an ugly shrew prepares her son for marriage.

Done with my niece Sophia

#25 Ten

2010-07-09T00:00:00.003-05:00

Amid the clamor of the Clara Wars, you find yourself eating lunch at a French Bistro¹ with a serial killer who is also a fashion designer. He is very measured. He has killed ten people, he tells you, and this is satisfying to him. He has made clothes out of them. But he will not kill anymore because ten is a round number. He has ten fingers, he says wiggling them at you, perfectly manicured nails out.² What about your toes, you ask. He wrinkles his nose. Toes, he grumbles. No one sees toes. Besides, twenty is such a vulgar number. Repulsive. He spits on the ground to make his point. The clouds, trickling tears, blots it out before very long.

You will think about your conversation later that same afternoon. You will wonder why you didn’t ask him how he killed, why he killed. You will wonder what it was about the number ten that intrigued you. In the hill country, just at the southern edge where you will walk, you will see two lovers picnicking. You will watch them explode. You will count on your fingers, one, two.
_________________________
¹There are a few restaurants downtown for the brave, rich or desperate that buy your fish, always rotten, and raton with regularity in exchange for meals.
²When does he get them done, you think briefly before you ask your original, more pressing question.

Prompt
25. (7/9/10)
You are eating lunch with a serial killer
with a French fashion designer.
The clouds drip rain like eyes that cry;
two lovers are having a picnic,
while the bombs can be heard in the hills.

#24 A Man with Horns

2010-07-08T16:01:00.002-05:00

#24 A Man with Horns
Deep into the Clara Wars,¹ you are walking down Houston street. The bombed out and looted buildings offer only minimal shelter and those corners are taken. But that’s what you’re counting on. Fish, you cry. Fish² and raton³. Up ahead, the light pirouettes on the crest of the trees. A beautiful day. Perfect for air raids. While the bombs drop in the hills, someone with horns comes out of the old Kress building and approaches you.
_________________________
¹Originally named after the revolutionary guerrilla fighter who was part of the Dead Rats Bantam Group and who built and detonated the bomb that killed the president and vice president along with much of the senate and herself. Later it was used ironically in the Spanish to refer to the war’s utterly befuddling nature. Much of the city has been destroyed and the population turned out of their demolished homes. The government* considered San Antonio to be a hotbed of anti-government ideology, which residents thought to be racially motivated, a brought in bulldozers, levelling most of the West, East and South sides, witlessly driving most of the Northsiders out of town. When the government discovered the situation, squatters from the rest of the city, some years into the war, they carpet bombed the hills leaving the vast majority of San Antonians living in tent cities clustered around the parks (Shnabel, Brackenridge**, etc.) and along the river.
²A strange by-product of the war is the burgeoning fish population. They’re everywhere. Any bit of standing water. You fish in your own birdbath. The down side, though, is that they become rotten almost immediately.
³It is ironic, also, that the revolutionary group called The Dead Rats at least partially -- some say entirely, others say not at all -- created the conditions in which their consumption is necessary. You call them raton as a substitute (it helps people swallow their pride), like beef for cow.
__________________________
*The Speaker of the House became the Commander-in-Chief after the bombing having miraculously survived despite being part of the convoy and in the same car as the president and vice president with only minor shrapnel abrasions. He is notoriously racist and bigoted, though his mother was from Matamoros.
**Brackenridge later became known as a death camp rather than a tent city due to the unusual level of violence citizens inflicted upon one another.

Prompt
24. (7/8/10)
Imagine walking down Houston street
with a rotten fish and a basket of dead rats.
Light dances on the crest of the trees;
someone with horns approaches
while the sounds of bombs can be heard in the hills.

#23 (Cracked Cement)

2010-07-07T22:37:00.001-05:00

In the balmy sea breeze fig leaves rustled showing a flash of fishing boats. She sits up in the tree and wept into a rag, telling it secrets she had never told anyone. She has used he rag for a time, always on the brink of exhaustion, like she was.

the fig tree grew from a crack in the cement of the court yard and up over the wall. She liked to sit in the tree during the late mornings and watch ships. But that day, she hid from her husband.

He was dead. The room filled with mourners and emptied of mourners, but she did not hide from them. She hid from the visage of her dead husband, leering up from his coffin. There was still time to confess, but she knew her confession was lost, leeched into the soil like his skin would/will/was/is.

The hissing of the lunatics carried on the wind, thick as cream, in little packages.

She had finished weeping. Done weeping for lostthings, her confessions, herdeadhusband, herlife — done.

Prompt
23. (7/7/10)
A wife is committing adultery
with a wet rag.
Leaves of fig trees rustle in the balmy winds;
the old women hiss at the passers-by,
while a woman weeps over things forever lost.

#22 Sardines

2010-07-06T17:53:00.003-05:00

The pawn shop sits neatly in a clearing. There is nothing else around. Even the path is overgrown (perhaps nonexistent). An occasional twig snaps under the fleeing man’s feet and he stops now and then to look around. The woods are dangerous and filled with crickets. These things are not related. At least not in his mind. Men hunt him and he doesn’t know where he is. When he skids out into the small clearing, huffing and puffing, the red “open” sign buzzes amongst the chirping crickets and the no noise of the men hunting him. The sign flashes red — on/off, on/off.

If I can just get rid of the jewelry, he reasons frantically, his thoughts flashing before him like tadpole spots, his breath billowing around his head. He feels the men and their dogs pressing in around him though he has yet to see them or hear them (the crickets are so loud) or physically even feel them (that would be the end for him). He looks back at the pawn shop, oasis.

Inside his jacket he can feel the smooth lumps of pearl against his ribs on one side and the metallic edge of sardine can on the other. He’s so hungry. He hasn’t been able to eat because he doesn’t have a can opener. The door opening causes a bell to jingle and a man appears abruptly, as if he’d been waiting behind the curtain hanging in the door to the back room for years.

Yes, yes, he says.

I’ve got pearls, he says. There is a noise in the back room. The pawn shop man looks back and shushes into the curtain.

Pearls? he asks. What will I do with pearls here? But your sardines, he says.

The man knows that he can not survive without his sardines. He has nothing to eat, but there is nothing in the shop that can help him either.

In the end, he thinks, everyone dies.

Prompt
(7/6/10)
A man is pawning stolen jewelry
with a can of sardines gleaming in oil.
It is a cold and clammy November morning;
out in the forest, hunters are wandering
yet in the end everyone dies.

#21 Jack and Jill Story in 100 Words

2010-07-05T18:20:00.000-05:00

They had just come tumbling down the hill, Jack worse for the wear, while Jill, perky as usual, laughed and stared into the sky, blue-blue, cloudless, nothing to interpret. Jack regained consciousness and, realizing the root of his trouble — he was angry with himself, stupid supermodel, why didn’t he look where he was going? — glared at Jill. Jack, not knowing what else to do, yelled at Jill. He meant to accuse her of clumsiness but instead shouted, “vive la France!” Jill laughed. Jack no longer goes up the hill but does sew popcorn on Christmas trees. Nothing to interpret.

Prompt
21. (7/5/10)
Describe Jack and Jill in an argument
with a Brazilian supermodel.
Hungry locusts cloud the horizon;
a crowd is cheering, "vive la France!"
while a madman sews popcorn on a Christmas tree.

#20 Unwritten

2010-07-04T17:58:00.001-05:00

Molyneux had a problem. He was blind. That wasn’t what bothered him at that moment. He feasted on a pigeon, but it did not taste like a pigeon to him anymore. Perhaps it was the guitar, out of tune, that his fellow peasant played. It was much too loud to attempt to gain silence for this experiment, but he did voice his desire to the man next to him. He planned it out in detail. There is no rainbow, the man next to him said. Molyneux thought that might be true having never seen one. Hot dog, Molyneux said. This was a word that had never been spoken before. The man next to him gave him some meat that had been cooking over a fire and then relayed the carnage of battle. Molyneux knew that the ocean always whispered what was left unwritten.

Prompt
20. (7/4/10)
Describe peasants feasting on pigeons
with an out-of-tune guitar.
A rainbow is nowhere to be seen;
gaunt soldiers lie dead on a battlefield,
while the ocean whispers what is left unwritten.

#19 The Dragon King

2010-07-03T11:52:00.001-05:00

After the dragon king had come through town and the ritual of placation had finished, we retired, exhausted as we were every month -- dragon clockwork -- to the tavern. The cook served up his usual fair of stale bread and tainted meat, which we set upon immediately, breaking our fast. The basket of salamanders in the center of the table disappeared in the frenzy and when we were done, stomachs full of noxious foods, we drank in silence. The smoke from the cedar fire leaked in from the chimney just enough to create a haze that we had grown comfortable in. We felt safe again, free of the dragon king’s wiles. Temporarily. Already the stress built up inside us.

This has got to stop, someone said just as they always do.

And someone else said, just as they always do, It’s been going on longer than any of have been alive. There is nothing to be done about it.

The man whose daughter had been given sat steely in the corner. Impossible not to get attached to them, even though at birth we know there’s a chance they’ll be called on. That we’ll be called on again. That’s the kind of strain that we never get over. That builds and builds every month. Our village had been decimated. No one could love anymore because of the dragon king and his demands. We were waging a war of attrition and we could not leave.

No more children, someone said and we understood that this was not a cry for battle, but a statement.

I looked down at the child under the table. She had a rash on her thigh from crawling around on the tavern floor. No one noticed her. All I saw was the rash.

We all dreamed of provincial love, love localized and our own, separate from the dragon king, but it can not last. Neither the dream of love nor love that we might have once felt. That might have once flourished. Something beyond provincial love. Something wider. But then not even provincial love was enough. We were the only survivors and we continued though the end had already been written. For us. For the dragon king. We became more provincial. We became tiny and vanished into history, into myth.

Prompt
19. (7/3/10)
A cook is serving up stale bread and tainted meat
with a basket of salamanders.
Smoke rises up from a cedar wood fire;
a child with a rash is crawling on the floor,
while we all dream of provincial love.

#18 Roundabout

2010-07-03T10:59:00.000-05:00

"It actually happened backwards. Or the other way around. Or not in such a linear fashion. Roundabout, maybe?" "That's it! That's it!" a woman cries in the back of the auditorium. "Roundabout!" I was not prepared for such an outburst, so I began the story again:

It actually happened backwards, I said. The mother died in childbirth first. (Was this a lecture on history or a story about a lecture?) I raised my eyebrows for emphasis. First, I reiterated. Can you imagine? They had to pull the baby out, she died so early. His head had barely breached the, well, you know. No wait. (I was becoming confused and the audience was not particularly forgiving.) Boo, the crowd cries, but their hissing sounded like crayfish at a boil. No, I said, I remember. They both died. Or at least the baby died. Because that means something later in the story, when the cook serves, this is amazing because he does it all with a whip -- snap, a plate of food right in front of you -- stale bread and tainted meat. The meat is baby meat, I said. The boos were getting louder. But baby meat, I said trying to talk over the general hullabaloo. And a whip.

The first tomato hit me square in the chest and I thought, who brings rotten fruit to a reading? They must have been planning this. It wouldn’t have mattered what I said. I mean a man serving tainted baby meat with a whip! Backstage I opened my coat to assess the damage -- I think there were rocks in those tomatoes. The dead baby falls, rubbery, limp, to the floor. So it was the baby that died. Maybe the mother too. My mother? My wife? Maybe. I remembered the men whispering at a table in the tavern. I remembered my son’s empty casket as the whispering men looked on. I don’t remember the man with the whip. Was all of that part of the lecture? I don’t know. Everything is so roundabout. Such a closed circuit. My son lay on the floor, stale and tainted.

***
Prompt
18. (7/2/10)
A cook is serving stale bread and tainted meat
with a whip.
A table full of men are whispering;
a woman screams, "Ca y est! Ca y est!"
while a mother dies in childbirth.

#17 Bawdy Lipogram in a, i, o, u

2010-07-01T19:26:00.001-05:00

Heel, she presses. Feel the members, they beg. She sneers, Well, set. They perch between her feet. She tells the effete men (three present themselves, wheeze, wheeze) the decree: sex. They feed themselves fennel, be erect. They peer, leer, seek, greet, steer, pet, feel, meet, wrestle, vehemently expel, vent themselves. ESP, she yells, crest, end. Glee. Cede themselves. Weep. Testes settled between teeth. Spent. Then sleep.

They retch: the smell. They peel cemented semen between feet, eyes, neck. Everywhere. They ween themselves between themselves. Belted beer, even them fettered, enmeshed, serves presence, tendency. Precedent? Hell. Temper themselves dense, the steel bevy, the mess. Neglect rest, she mewls, erect the members. Mettle, mettle, they keen. Between never and endlessness, there be sex.

Prompt
17. (7/1/10)

Describe a concubine running away
with a plastic spoon.
The hills are green and littered with flowers;
the people fill their mouths with good bread,
in a nearby house, a girl is waiting for something.

Permanent Debt: A Review of Permanent Obscurity by Richard Perez

2010-07-01T12:11:00.001-05:00

Permanent Obscurity, fascinated me from the beginning. I didn’t know anything about it really, but when I read a quote from Richard Perez that said the novel needed some explanation, I was sold. That usually means that it’s raw and uncensored. Here’s what he wrote:

"It’s specifically an exploitation novel, written in that vernacular, which some might regard as “low brow” or vulgar. And it delves into BDSM territory with these two young ladies taking the dominatrix (exploitation) route."

But I’m not sure that any of that really matters. Or rather the question is not so much an issue of “low” or “high brow” but of pornography. How does one write a novel about pornography (at least in part), in this instance one female character taking on the role of female dominatrix?1 It is inherently a tightrope act and Perez’ balance is struck by couching the entire novel as a confession. The novel’s subtitle is “A Cautionary Tale.” So the “vulgar” parts are actually Dolores Santana’s (the confessor) retelling of a story written by someone else (the script, for example, of a femdom movie Dolores and Serena, her best friend, make) through Perez’ supposed recording. I like this. It’s pleasantly convoluted and allows Perez to be honest with the material, which means that it is not a novel for squeamish readers. But I was forewarned about the subject — not that it would have made any difference to me.

Juxtaposed with the story within a story point of view, is the tone of the story. It is written largely in dialog: quick, simple conversations that keep the story moving (a plot that the characters seem unable to escape, like fate). The prose between the dialog keeps that conversational patter (it is a confession after all), which gives an ironic lightness to the rather dark subject matter (drugs, sex, violence — the exploitation of both sexes). It’s fitting, though, to think about the off-handed way people often commit crimes and about the way that exploitation movies and literature and tabloids themselves are written. Sensational acts are often a result of habitual mundane activities. There are always reasons behind them and this is a story about that.

The characters pull the book through and keep it from becoming a farce or worse, pornography itself. It is about self-identification. It is about a fall from grace and redemption, in that Catholic sense of confession. It is about understanding the dark side of human nature through experience and coming away wiser through self-realization, which is the only way to improve ourselves. Raymond, Dolores’ boyfriend, tells her, “You gotta let people be who they wanna be.” That may be true to an extent, but there are boundaries and Dolores learns that the hard way. Life is difficult and unjust and filled with “truly perverse, heinous stuff” and self-doubt (even at the very end, she looks for guidance: “You tell me.”). And while she may have learned something about herself and those around her, it comes at a cost. We never finish paying it.

#16 Bawdy Lipogram in E

2010-06-30T13:31:00.004-05:00

In a subground bar, a bar maid, fair and young, spills out of a bra — lucky sighting as I walk by. Stop for a drink, I think: a sip of rum, a dram of vodka, a spot of scotch, a pint of hoppy bliss, a bit of slap and spit swapping. I rub my hands and climb down, bow my crown at a low door jamb and curl up on a bar stool. A huff of vino, I cry. A dollop of bourbon, my good, broad-back harlot. That turns a noggin or two and only four patrons to show in such a bar. My fair slut sally’s forth with a cup of milk and a grin. Vodka in that? I cough. Nay, my lord, the bitch sings. In my skirt, though, you’ll find what you want.

I cast a quick look around and cast my wayward hand up my trollop’s skirt.

No thong, I spit and smack a buttock that bounds up and down ringing throughout the bar.

An urchin hawking stamps stops for a look as our bawdy action rolls us off stools across hardwood floor boards and onto a rug.

Push. Thrust. Lick. Pinch. Fuck. Grunt. Oh my god. A butt plug falls and bumps my arm. Thrash. Tally ho! Finish.

Post coital flush on a shag rug. I sally forth again, a new trip, to put down my thirst, such has it grown. My saucy woman wraps up in a quilt and laughs to watch my milky butt bob in moonlight and vanish.

***

Prompt
16. (6/30/10)
Describe a scene in an old rathskeller
with a fair young maiden.
Such good fortune spills like milk from a ladle;
a street urchin is selling stamps,
while a woman covers her naked skin with a quilt.

#15 Dream

2010-06-29T18:08:00.001-05:00

So it isn't a dream, this dream. I thought perhaps it was. Had been? In the middle of the field of lilies, spilled in the Formica-grey evening, a tree rose up, knotted bark coughing flakes of skin onto the lilies. Under it, among the hoi-poloi of cheribum, an old woman, propped up on a gnarled tree root (the root itself stood at tall as a house), sleeps with a rotten fish sticking out of the top of her underwear (her dress has been tucked, drunkenly, into her nylons), which are soiled. She appears to be dead, but it is, I am told by a transient mothman, a spelled slumber (at odds with the wine, he says, tipping his thumb up to his open, upturned mouth). But the dusty eyed, perambulator continued, she's not alive either. Even under this tree, I wanted to know jerking my thumb to the mass of winged, baboon-toothed brethren in the immense shade. He offered me tea and icy apples while the cherubim covered the woman with a rotten fish and soiled pants in giant leaves that are not leaves.

***

Prompt
15. (6/29/10)

An old woman is sleeping under a tree
with a rotten fish and soiled pants.
Fields of lilies shine like spilt milk;
and we drink tea and eat cold apples,
while two cherubim block the way to the tree of life.

#14 Rust

2010-06-28T13:17:00.000-05:00

In this dream, I think this must be a dream, there is a child on a leash. Who would put a child on a leash, I think in this dream. When I look down, I see the leash extends taut from the kid’s neck like an eel and I follow it until it appears, suddenly, in my hand. It produces a shock and I drop it and the child runs off through the white lilies shining in the moonlight. The child disappears. Swallowed up like it might have been in the ocean. Why do I say “it”?

Later I see the child again. A man aims at him but I get there in time. The man is crying. The child has been leashed to a tree. It’s ill, the man says to me. But it does not look ill. I ask the man why he says “it.” The man points. When I look again, I see another child on the other side of the tree. He is tightening the knot tied at the tree. They are both small and fat, but when I approach, I see they have teeth like baboons. The man fires and I realize he has been doing this for many years by now. How had I gotten hold of one of these monsters?

The blood flowing through my veins feels hard like rust flakes.

***

Prompt
14. (6/28/10)

You find yourself in a dream

with a child on a leash.

Fields of lilies shine like spilt milk;

a master aims to shoot his dog,

while two cherubim block the way to the tree of life.

#13 Think of Sleep

2010-06-27T22:49:00.006-05:00

Again a dream of an African City. British Raj (India, I know, but dreams) and quinine and gin and tonics and, of course, malaria, and vast, rich, untouched resources. My dreams always leave me feeling paltry. Insignificant. Imagine if things had been different. Imagine if I had been part of this African City before it was a city.

They used to drink tonic because of the quinine in it. And now we take the pills and up our prescription glasses and drink bootlegged whiskey that one of the other diplomats makes in his front room, windows pasted shut and aluminum foiled over. We sit around our octagonal poker table and I run my fingers over the felt, having folded my last hand. Queen and a deuce. I never float down the river. And I had already given most of my cash away and all of my quinine.

I think of Mali and the sweet smell of jasmine neither of which were necessarily related except in my mind (a queen and a deuce becoming a pair of cowboys), my memory, which I no longer trusted. In my mind dodo’s roamed freely with rattlesnakes and ostriches. When I get up to go to the pissoir, one of the chairs in the other room is occupied by my dead wife. Her lips open and I can see her cavernous mouth and hear her scream, That’s it! That’s it!

Ive been awake too long, (maybe it's the quinine) even in my dream of this African City and as I go to the bathroom in my mind (maybe it's the gin and tonics), my life flattens out like a map and I think about sleep.

***

Prompt
13. (6/27/10)
Describe a scene in an African city
with a bottle of bootleg whiskey.
The air is perfumed with white jasmine;
a woman screams, "Ça y est! Ça y est!"
while a tired man contemplates sleep.

#12 From Whence We Came

2010-06-27T17:07:00.005-05:00

I am riding in a gypsy wagon through Spain. Next to me, on the driver's box sits a gold-toothed thug. It's his left canine. He tells me that he lost it in one of the gypsy fights. Your canine? I ask him. It was a legendary fight, he says, and later he tells me the about it while we take a break in a field of mushrooms.

The ballerinas practiced their pirouettes, he begins, and then performed Rey aquien Reyes adoran XXXIII from Cancionero de Upsala, as it was Christmas and very cold.

But that's a carol, not a ballet, I interrupted.

He wags his finger at me and smiles in such a way that his gold tooth glints. Eerie, I think.

Not so, he says and then shakes his head. Not so.

My opponent sat across the dance floor slash ring from me, he continues, and we watch each other through the scissoring legs. An ear here, a half-smile there. We felt very festive that day, watching each other in cut-up pieces. Here he pauses, remembering, and laughs. A breeze, dips and weaves through the mushrooms which make a low humming sound.

When we got into the ring, he continued, looking sheepish, but smiling, I lasted all of one punch. Knocked my tooth right out, he says. Tap tap tap, he says. When I woke up I was alone in a field much like this one. He looks around and nods. The mushroom fields.

The gold I stole from a town just down the road, he waves in the direction from which we had just come. It is the town from which we had just been chased. I suddenly see him in parts -- lips, nose, ears, eyebrows, gold tooth.

***

Prompt
12. (6/26/10)
You are riding in a gypsy wagon through Spain
with a gold-toothed thug.
Now we sit in a field of moist mushrooms;
ballerinas are practicing for the show,
while a father weeps in the dark hours of night.

#11 Copout

2010-06-27T09:56:00.004-05:00

You have three hours left to live, the doctor monotones.
I’ll pawn jewelry, he cries.
Outside the trees dip low, expectant with fruit.
I love you father, a daughter says, shamefully
to the woods where the father hides out.

***

Prompt
11. (6/25/10)
A man is pawning stolen jewelry
with three hours left to live.
The trees are pregnant with ripe fruit;
a girl falls in love with her father,
while the king hides in the woods with a shameful secret.

#10 A Fine Line

2010-06-24T22:48:00.003-05:00

The path rounded a blind corner and became very narrow. Pebbles, strewn across the way, made the going rather difficult, especially because they were the same cinnamon of the path, which, again, was very narrow. Vague ruts, perhaps from carts, criss-crossed the path, making it that much more treacherous. It was the same color as the mesa next to the path itself. Only the sky was a different color. In fact it was very hard to tell the difference between the path and the mesa wall, as if the girl, who had slender, pearly eyes, was in a two-dimensional world. Perspective tricked the eye, but not the hand. The earth, if it could be called that at all, smelled one-dimensionally of cheese. When she ran her hand against the mesa wall and down onto the path in one swipe, without standing up, her hand also smelled of cheese. Not a specific type of cheese, but the smell that, had someone said, this smells like cheese, one would notice it. In that way.

The girl didn’t remember why she had run away or from where. An ancient city, perhaps. She remembered kissing someone twice, someone older? In an ancient city. It must have been. But why was she there and what ancient city? It was gone, her memory at once linear and impossibly thin — a razor blade through her mind. We had only remembered living in ancient cities, she thought. And suddenly her memory was then and then not, as if someone had turned a piece of paper on its side, making it invisible from a certain angle.

***

Prompt
10. (6/24/10)
Describe the path of a runaway
with a girl with eyes as slender as pearls.
The air is abundant with odors of cheese;
you are kissing someone twice your age,
while we remember the days in ancient cities.

#9 Untitled

2010-06-23T22:36:00.003-05:00

Prompt
9. (6/23/10)
Write a story about a drug addict
with a very pretty haircut.
The lake is frozen, it is January;
a spinster is playing Wagner
while a mother wonders about her forgotten son.

***

Response to your untitled creative writing project:
line 1: I asked you to write a story about a drug addict. I did not ask you to repeat my prompt. What that says to me is that you are not taking this class seriously. It will be a consideration in your final grade.
line 2: Show, don’t tell
line 3: This is a run-on.
line 4: Die Walkure, Das Liebesmahl der Apostel? What specifically is the spinster playing? And why is she a spinster? Character development.
line 5: What mother? Though the idea of a mother wondering about a forgotten son (logically impossible) is quite touching. Again: character development.

It just doesn’t seem like you’re trying here. All you did, as I noted in my comments on line 1, is take my prompt (which read, by the way, “Write a story about a heroin addict” — you managed to make it even more vague) and tack on nearly random semi-ideas. Even as a prompt about a prompt, it’s pretty thin. You’ll have to do better than that. Rewrite.

#8 The Out-of-Tune Guitar

2010-06-22T00:00:00.002-05:00

While a man, exhausted from his vigil (really a stakeout), keeps his eyelids peeled by drinking coffee and other caffeinated drinks, the telephone on the street corner rang. A breeze made the candles flutter and the vinyl flowers shake momentarily. The cold, clammy air in the wintery morning, still beetle black coursed down his jacket and the people that walked by and biked by stopped to look at the man and the letters and the flowers and the candles. The man looked back examining faces. They all looked the same to him because he knew who he searched for. The man's image burned onto the back of his retina.

Or was it a woman's? This was bad. Almost like the time that he had been staking out Mr. Yu. The ensuing vertigo laid him out for months -- he layed on the couch in his office, door closed and listened to people knocking and then fewer people knocking until there was silence and his vertigo went away. He never found Mr. Yu, and watching all those people, he claimed, had done it. But it was because he didn't know Mr. Yu. Didn't know himself well enough to know who he was looking for. And he knew it. Once his vertigo had gone he drank for a few days and then hung the "open" sign on his door again.

Some time later (he was still drinking), someone came and knocked on his door. Though he was drunk and didn't remember who had hired him, on his otherwise empty desk, an envelope had been laid. In it, a note: "Ghandi rides a bicycle with an out-of-tune guitar" and an address. $1000 dollars lined the envelope. Burn that image into your retina, he told himself. This is how I prove myself. And so he sat and looked for a man in a loin cloth on a bicycle with a guitar that he would hopefully be able to reach out and pluck.

***

Prompt
8. (6/22/10)
Tell of Ghandi's first bicycle ride
with an out-of-tune guitar.
It is a cold and clammy november morning;
the telephone rings,
while a tired man contemplates sleep.

#7 A Man in the Shadows Loads a Rifle

2010-06-21T00:00:00.003-05:00

Of course there is bone, but the rats were unexpected. So many in such a small space. The gristle shines on the countess’ lips. A tendon caught between her teeth trickles out of the corner of her mouth. Her neck gleams with the sweet fat of the dove, raised in a cage and fattened. Dappled with grease stains, her waxen smock, this was a homely affair, and not uncommon, clung to her ample bosoms disdainfully while her thin arms held flecks of meat like boulders on a mountain path. Under her fingernails, flesh clung with the vestiges of feather. But the rats in its ribcage, where the liver usually perched, her golden egg, were too much. And still alive!

She rolls the chewed up bird out of her mouth with her tongue and wipes the salivating organ on her sleeve once, twice. The piece of meat sits, balled up, in her lap and she looks down at it as much so that she doesn’t have to look at the rats as any grim fascination with her masticated chow. What’s happening? She wonders. The skeletal bird rattles on her plate. Her attendants seem not to notice.

Walking over to the window, she can’t get the clacking of bones against the pewter plate out of her head. The fact that the rodents fuel it horrifies her. Outside, amongst the happy cries of children, snow dots the ground. Much too early for snow. Someone must be playing a game with her. But the sound is still there. As she leans out of the window to look up at the sky she has a sense that she is leaving her body. Then she feels a firm hand on her back.

***

Prompt
7. (6/21/10)
Describe a countess eating a dove
with a cage full of rodents.
A gentle snow begins to fall;
the children play in the sticker bushes,
while a man in the shadows loads a rifle.

#6 Dawn

2010-06-20T00:00:00.005-05:00

Nairobi used to shimmer in the thin, cool air of winter. Bright white light shimmied over flowers coated in dew. Or bounced off the hard blue tin shacks at the shanty town markets. Not an ugly place, but a place of wonder. In those huts hung the fruit of labor — woven Rasta hats (where they still meant something more than fashion), bags, necklaces made from bone, the cracked and frenetic batiks, Masai machetes. Along side these were the fruit of the earth and sunglasses, plastic toys and, somewhere deep in the automatic darkness of the huts, guns.

Now we sit in the moist mushroom stillness of memory. Aged, gray-haired, moist-eyed — entombed in our minds, such as they are. Memories mushroom and hide their base, caps so much imagination. Days of youth, unhindered in the marshy mind, spring up in blue shacks and unseen weapons that must have been added later when we began to read newspapers. There is some truth to the tales, but it is hidden by the fleshy gills. A spinster among us can recite Wagner in her mind, lips pursed she spends hours clutching her lap, but what is she really remembering? Is it really Wagner? Does it matter? The only respite we have is the grey, doming of dawn and with it that little amount of sleep — no longer sailors on a voyage, we straggle, wearily onto shore.

***

Prompt
6. (6/20/10)
Describe a scene in an African city
with a fresh flower coated in dew.
Now we sit in a field of moist mushrooms;
a spinster is playing Wagner
while the weary sailor returns to shore.

#5 One Thing in Its Entirety

2010-06-19T00:00:00.007-05:00

The body contorted around the rock on the east side of the river near Rouen. I wasn’t first on scene but pretty close to it. Not that that mattered in the least. I’d long since given up on caring about these things. I looked around. Hair here on the rock. Loose tooth in the sludgy river deposits. Probably a fingerprint on his forehead. Liver temperature all skewed because of the river. A cloud drifted over the moon much like the one in Un Chien Andalou. That mattered as much as anything else at the crime scene.

Between his legs, and this actually got me a little interested, a can of sardines gleamed of oil. They had been half opened, like someone had sat down and started on them and then had been startled. A real clue, perhaps? I looked closer and saw a piece of paper had been wedged into the jagged edge.

Note: the overlap at age 14 is due to the relative sophistication of many girls at that age, and their ability to mingle effectively with the older girls.¹

A strange anthropological note and one I recognized. It had nothing to do with the case. No matter what I know now, it had nothing to do with the case. But recognizing that had nothing to do with the case either. And so the nothing continued to compile until it began to eclipse the body, cloudy it, make all of it irreconcilable.

The note was nonsense and he cut himself getting it out of the can. There were no hierarchies, rankings, infrastructures, measurements or sizes. There was one murdered man. One moon. One cloud in the sky, vast and empty. One moment of eclipse. One can of sardines. There might as well be one pair of lovers entering a garden, one apple, one ugly shrew ready to marry her son off. One story in its entirety.

¹ Laws of Order: A Book of Hierarchies, Rankings, Infrastructures, Measurements, and Sizes. Jeff Rovin. (1992) Pg. 28

***

Prompt
5. (6/19/10)
Imagine a murder on the banks of the Seine
with a can of sardines gleaming of oil.
Now fancy this…
the lovers enter the garden,
while an ugly shrew prepares her son for marriage.

#4 The Marriage of Cabbage

2010-06-18T00:00:00.007-05:00

You came to Bosnia originally to help. Orphans and bombs and other intentional catastrophes. You didn’t expect the corn fields but the dust — correction bus rides down long, dusty avenues, tree-laden. Where were the bomb cradles? The orphans and their dead parents? The madmen demanding marriage of cabbage?

Instead you’re arrested for possession. Some kind of set-up and you’re away. Gone. Like a puff of gun powder in a kitschy civil war reenactment. Then you’re the madman. Your demands unmet, unheard. You demand a lover enter a garden, quietly, tentatively. Unheard. You demand a file. You demand a bus ride. The marriage of cabbage.

***

Prompt
4. (6/18/10)
You are riding a bus through Bosnia
with a mouthful of dust.
The corn fields gleam like spilt honey;
the lovers enter the garden,
while a madman demands marriage of cabbage.

#3. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

2010-06-17T00:00:00.008-05:00

They settle into the shadows just outside the clean, bright restaurant, the brother and the sister and the little pigeon-toed, short-sighted kid with his pointer finger in the extra chunky peanut butter jar they’d just stolen. And it is late and every one has left the cafe except an old man who sits in the shadow the leaves of the tree make against the electric light. The pigeon-toed boy eats the peanut butter with gusto. They have nothing, this little boy and his sister and the pigeon-toed child. Not even each other. Under the street light, they look yellow. They look cold. When people walk by and see them, they walk by hurriedly. They think that there are other, older people lurking in bushes and in cars and in dumpsters. Tourists are afraid here. But they come anyway. They litter the beaches and cafes and and and.

And in the morning the little boy and his sister and the pigeon-toed boy search for somewhere else to sleep.

But their sleep is always the same. Fitful and interrupted by noises, by visions, by tremors — ambulances, fights, helicopters, transgressions, plagues and breezes.

They want a life of leisure and live a life of leisure. They load rifles if the money is right. The pigeon-toed kid is not good at it, but he hides well in the shadows and they survive.

Then.

Imagine air thick with meat and wine… That’s what the tourists come for. The three of them crouch in the shadows and watch the clean, well-lighted place as the old man is forced out.

***

Prompt
3. (6/17/10)
Imagine a little boy and his sister
with a near-sighted, pigeon-toed child.
The air is abundant with meat and wine;
the tourists are panicking,
while a man in the shadows loads a rifle.

Thoughts on Story-a-Day

2010-06-16T10:27:00.000-05:00

After having written the story yesterday, and having the new one on the plate, I thought I would mention what my goal was with these. Because of the sometimes extrodinary absurdity of the prompts (and their repetitions), I am trying to match a mood more than anything else. Brooding and dark (hopefully) in the first one, while perhaps a little lighter, pastoral in the second. It's about color rather than complete, narrative arches.

Secondly, I must attribute part of my rekindled desire (I tried a novel in which I would write one word the first day, two the second, three the third until I reached 175ish at which point the word count would decrease) for doing this to Scott Serafica, a San Antonio based painter, who does a painting a day (for the most part), which is, frankly, much more impressive.

#2 Nameless

2010-06-16T00:00:00.005-05:00

Numb from the cold, you pull yourself out of the Thames and drag yourself up on the raft. You made it from whitebeam but because it is so hard, it doesn't float very well so the water still laps up against your shivering sides and the soles of your feet like a loyal, cold-blooded hound. Your fingers feel like a side of deer hung in the cool caves of Chislehurst. Evening cusps upon the horizon, a bruised sliver. You watch the nameless (why nameless? you wonder) stars pitch and stumble into view as the sun winds down, step by step.

It is the time before Buddha and Christ, you think, still cold but comforted by the stars and your slow, faltering thoughts.

Then your head knocks up along a wooden pier. Pat pat pat pat — you mistake it for the sound of waves and then your concatenations. When you look up, a man stands aiming his rifle at something out of your line of view. Your cocooned expansiveness makes you curious but not startled and you slowly sit up to see where the man is aiming. Perhaps there’s one of those spectacles on the pier, as there is infrequently, and he’s a sharp shooter.

You had forgotten about the dock fair. You sit up, straight-backed and brimming. The man aims at his dog and fires. Nearby hunters hand the day’s quarry out for prizes. Rabbits. Some big as dogs. Women stand at arms reach with ribbons, buckshot and flowers still unnamed.

***

Prompt
2. (6/16/10)
You have just been swimming in the Thames
with fingers like sticks of beef.
It is before the time of Christ or Buddha;
a master aims to shoot his dog,
while hunters hang up their slain rabbits to show.

#1 The Drunkard's Revolt

2010-06-15T16:15:00.007-05:00

We watched the man come in to town. A basket in one hand, a cage in the other and a bundle of clothes pulled loosely over his right shoulder and back. He was obviously tired and we wondered how he had managed to get passed the guards at the gate to the city. We knew that no one was allowed in or out. We could hear the cries from outside as the government attempted to squash the revolution. It had come to be known, already, despite its infancy, as the Drunkard's Revolt. A chapter in a long and bloodied book of violence. We called him a snake charmer, less for his attire and more for the fact that he had gotten through the gates -- perpetually closed. We thought this was funny, but our laughter had become tight and slurred, the nervous, bleary-eyed laughter of sailors far from the ocean, though we were no sailors. And no one knew how far the ocean was.

When the snake charmer heard us laughing, he perked up and walked immediately toward us, as repulsive as we must have been even from that distance. We bathed in rum because of the water scarcity and it had begun to take it's toll on more than our aroma (we called it our bouquet). Abscesses occurred first and then the growths so that we resembled more the undersides of ships than people. We blended into the dilapidated wooden structures that once passed for houses, tanneries, taverns, brothels, liveries and opium dens. The planks of the board walk seemed to crawl with us. Still the snake charmer must have been alone for quite some time, the revolution making strangers of us all.

My fellow travelers, he said, which was strange, seeing as we had not been anywhere in many months. He must have seen our bewilderment because he motioned to the agitated rocking horse in the corner that seemed always to have just bucked someone from it. We nodded though we still did not understand.

He held up his cage to show us his mice, mottled and devoid of fur in places, their tails black.

We drank rum to wash down the snake charmer and his mice. We picked our hair and fur from our teeth and dropped mice tails in our rum to soften up. Outside the cries of war, of the dying, even the dead, washed over our walls inundating our ghostly town. We settled down for the night, laughing about the snake charmer and his wiles. We bucked the rocking horse. We sang.

***

Prompt
1. (6/15/10)
Describe the travels of a snake charmer
with a handful of diseased mice.
A violent revolution is underway;
and we laugh like sailors drunk on rum,
while a toy horse rocks in the corner.

Pure Crap

2010-06-15T12:11:00.001-05:00

I've been thumbing through Pure Murder by Corey Mitchell for a while now during commercials or when I wasn't really watching something. What happened to those two girls is horrifying, but that their story is told in such a poor manner compounds the horror by making it unbelievable. The actual events are so poorly told that it's almost comical: flat and unrealistic like violence on the Three Stooges. The note on the cover sums it up: Case seen on Geraldo.

Story-a-day

2010-06-15T00:00:00.003-05:00

The idea is to take the first prompt from Writer's Idea Bank (as a gadget written by ModeRoom on my iGoogle page) and write a flash fiction piece a day for the rest of the summer (500 words or less).

The process of insanity

2010-06-11T20:50:00.000-05:00

"In the late nineteenth century the process of adding a new symptom to the hysteria symptom pool would go like this: On the basis of a few new and exciting cases, doctors would publicly describe and debate and then codify the new pathological behavior. Popular magazines, newspapers, and journals would write about the new medical findings. Women in the general population would unconsciously begin to manifest the behavior and seek help. Patients and doctors would then engage in what is called "illness negotiation," whereby they would together shape each other's perceptions of the behavior. In this negotiation the doctor would provide scientific validation that the symptom was indeed indicative of a legitimate disease category, and new patients would increase the attention focused on the new symptom in the professional and popular press, creating a feedback loop that further established the legitimacy of the new symptom." (pg. 33)

Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters

Guilt and the Writer

2010-06-11T15:53:00.000-05:00

INTERN brings up some interesting questions and legitimate points in her blog post, Hardback Mountain. Always a pleasure to read INTERN's blog. Always thought provoking. Her wit and humor always make her posts worth reading, but this one spoke to me in particular.

I don't submit much work (ever or anymore). Partially that's because I don't really have the confidence in my writing, but part of me also thinks that writing should be more about passion than getting paid. Of course there is a wide gray area in there that deals with having-others-read-your-work. What difference does it make if you write when no one is ever really going to read it anyway? And I think that is closer to my unease with the writing community. A while back, I posted that people weren't even reading other people's work (after reading "The Death of Fiction?" by Ted Genoways). It's more important we read and be part of a community of writers and thinkers and generally decent people than fork out the big bucks for hardbacks. Community is the type of support I would like to have (if I ever really feel like I have something to put out there).

Still she makes a good point. There has to be some kind of circulation of currency to allow people to have the time to sit down and write something worth reading. But there are different markets. I suppose it matters where you want to end up. Mainstream fiction or stuff on the margins? That's why I support smaller magazines as well as the larger ones (like The Believer). A lot of interesting works come out of smaller circulating publications.

I wonder, though, about her point that people "who shop for used clothes don't feel like they're responsible for the Demise of Fashion Design." Do people who design clothes or who are trying to become designers feel like they are responsible for the "Demise of Fashion Design"? Maybe. But on the other hand, fashion design is something any idiot can be involved in: buy, wear, flaunt.

Culturally we, in the United States, value look good over thinking just as we value guilt over peace (guilt ridden, good-looking people are more productive; or so I've heard). And a lack of guilt wouldn't have gotten INTERN (or me) thinking about the whole mess.

Guilt your way to happiness

2010-06-05T11:37:00.000-05:00

Two quotes from different books on the same day. Both have to do with embedded Protestantism in Western culture. Work = happiness or at least less guilt.

"If I could only finish the Gorky. Then I could go and die and feel less guilty about it." Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (Coover)

"But Amina didn't assume a cause and effect between productivity and wellness. This goes against some basic tenets of Western occupational therapy, which suggests that the path to mental health can be found in productivity and participation in group activity." Crazy Like Us. (Watters) pg. 150

Lifeblood

2010-06-04T16:30:00.000-05:00

Ted Genoways, editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, argues, in his Mother Jones essay entitled "The Death of Fiction?", for both life and death. Writing, finally, he argues, is about passion, about life and death itself. Not about vocation. Not about money. And it is just that passion that is missing from the enormous amount of writing generated in this country. It is a cash crop. "Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000." And the people submitting are not reading. The suggestion is that people want to get paid for what they have to say (their genius), but aren't really interested in reading other people's insight. The other point is that all of this writing is perhaps watering down the writing pool: "You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it." There's more wading to do. The jump in creative writing programs add to the tank of scribbling (see The Program Era by Mark McGurl for a much more in-depth look at the rise of the MFA programs).

He also argues that though there is more writing, less of it has any real political, international, meaningful bearing (especially considering the supposed shrinking of the international community). "Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism." More news, less interesting, focused analysis. An intriguing subject: writing and politics. Something that I've always found fascinating, pushed by my own Program Era MFA advisors, Juliana Spahr (who's last blog was about why the modernists and Gertrude Stein specifically are important, why they matter, to the world -- or to readers/writers who care) and Rebecca Brown (passionate, meaningful writers).

It's always interesting to read thoughtful writers who are willing to look at their own quickly changing (in this case, the thinking goes, deteriorating) fields (for lack of a better term) and contemplate solutions. Genoway's speaks to how we, as a culture, define success: money. Not that I'm saying anything new here (or that I include myself in some kind of cream of the crop group of writers because I don't make money), but perhaps it's time to redefine ourselves: "Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood." Perhaps that will scrape off some of the bottom feeders.

Oblivion

2010-06-02T17:08:00.000-05:00

Jake Silverstein's book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, explore, among other things, what it means to write fiction as opposed to (or not) journalism. The fictional sections largely focus on who we can assume is a character based fairly closely on Silverstein himself, if we are to believe the factual parts. Though the threads of journalism are woven into these sections, they tend to be more character than idea driven. That said, the material gleans significance in it's similarity rather than its differences, especially in tone and in approach to the people (interesting backgrounds that seem so real because of Silverstein's brilliant attention to detail).

I love that the narrative arch is not really the focus of the novel/essay, but that the characters and events are, which, of course, is what the title means. We make what we can of events, though they are often less than ideal. And his self-deprecation and humor make these events insightful, exciting and marvelous reading.

Noting this, his "biography" in the back is telling. It's a simple three lines. It says, between the lines, read the book. Don't worry about what I do. This book is me and more.

So the question, then, is why is this book written in a partially fictional, partially factual cross-hatch? Doing so lands it squarely in the libraries "fiction" section, though I would think it would be better placed in the 800s. Of course this is always an issue with any type of writing, though here it is given particular importance. Ultimately, it is about how we read and what we accept as fictional/factual. No one would argue that just because something is fictional, it has not merit. By having both, the blurred lines, much like the borders he traverses throughout the book, become the point. Again, as readers of the book, much like the writer, we have to make choices about what to accept and why. We follow a similar jagged line. Fact and fiction. Meaning and nothingness ("Oblivion," a character at the end of the novel says. "The word comes from ob, 'over,' and levis, 'smooth.' Smooth as the desert dust.") And finally we exist somewhere in the middle of all of this, by choice, through habit, just because. Take what you want from it.

Penis Snatchers

2010-05-15T10:28:00.000-05:00

Interesting cultural psychoses, this idea that someone can steal one's penis: "Usually the penis is felt to reappear upon examination, or it's replaced with someone else's, or only [only!] its "essence" is thought to be stolen, leaving a husk." This is a particular disorder found only in Africa and Asia (mostly, now, Africa -- Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo), where people are actually arrested and killed (lynched). That speaks to the reality of the problem.

I do take issue though that it is labeled a "culture-bound syndrome" by psychiatrist Pow Meng Yap. I believe, as argued in Crazy Like Us (Watters), that all "syndromes" are culture-bound. If this belief became widely known in the US, might it not happen here? I believe it would, especially in these trying economic times (that kind of overbearing collective strain seems to unconsciously bring issues to the surface, which, when they appear, do so according to cultural guidelines). Culturally significant. What do we have going for us right now?

Steampunk

2010-05-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

A lovely description of Steampunk from SteamPunk Magazine:

Before The age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Sinew

2010-05-01T09:25:00.000-05:00

Simon Evans. Symptoms of Loneliness.

His piece, Lemuel Gulliver, on a 3"x4" postcard acts as my bookmark. There are sinews in my book.

Line and point

2010-04-30T09:36:00.000-05:00

I had seen this a couple of years ago and came across a reference to it somewhere (odd how quickly I forget how I got from one page to the next -- there is just so little linear thought to it that I can't even retrace my steps). This animated mural is amazing. I love the remnants of the painting as it progresses: the lines where the arms or legs or spinal cord were creates a rich, thick canvas. The animation actually enters a building. Once again the medium is impossible to ignore and informs the subject brilliantly.

scribbling meaning

2010-04-30T09:09:00.000-05:00

Asemic writing is "text" without meaning. Though some of the "phonemes" in this meaningless (at least linguistically) writing/art appear recognizable, there are no linguistic signifiers even at this level. Of course as a piece of art, it serves as a signifier of whatever idea the viewer understands. Overall, it is a sort of discourse about the visual nature of our language, which is often overlooked, or ignored, or "seen through," in a similar fashion to what Ron Silliman argues in The New Sentence. In other words, readers, when reading mass market novels, for example, don't even see the words, but read to generate an image (or images), like watching a blockbuster movie (as opposed, say, to watching a Quay Bros. short, where one must address the action, ideas and medium -- they are, in fact, all tangled up).

The New Post-Literate consistently posts intriguing examples of asemic writing. That there is so much of it is testament to its visceral as well as intellectual character.

I can't sit still. I'll sit still.

2010-04-28T23:10:00.001-05:00

The Compleat Flea (1969) by Brendan Lehane is the itchiest book I have ever read. It covers an array of flea-y material including literary, circensis (I want so badly for this to mean "of or pertaining to circuses -- or circi), biological and historical. The naughty parts fascinate: "Flea pornography is aptly a microcosm of pornography in general," (pg. 55) while the somewhat racist parts just have to be made up, but in such a mid-civil rights era way: "Dressed-up fleas are still sold among the indigent majority of Mexican people" (pg. 56). Ahhh, flea art. A lost art, I'm sure, but at one point all the poor indigents of Mexico were doing it. Still, the quote of Signor Bertolotto, an eminent flea expert, about the worms, or larval maggots, that, deprived of food, will devour each other in the manner of Ouroboros, resulting in death for both, sounds like a human characteristic. I'll leave off, though, with a titillating quote: "Besides, [fleas'] motions cause tickles, incite scratches, reminding men of parts usually forgotten when clothed. Here and elsewhere fleas and lust live side by side. Further, the itch of a fleabite and that of desire have something in common" (pg. 48). It just reminds women of how disgusting men are.

Broken

2010-04-28T16:42:00.000-05:00

Quay Bros. mysterious stillness broken by movement broken by stillness and silence. Beautiful, mythical films.

Power and Violence

2010-04-28T16:38:00.000-05:00

Murder City (Bowen) pg 104 - 5 -- power structures and patterns of violence and further on 105 -- the need for stories to explain the violence.

Flood of fear

2010-04-22T18:52:00.001-05:00

"Under the Cartels" published in N+1 by an anonymous writer living in Mexico and "The Red Carpet" by Juan Villoro reiterates the theme of Murder City: Death and fear and silence. Severed heads on cars, bodies dissolved in acid, se lo llevaron, shootouts. Again, mostly in Chihuahua, Juarez. "Terror has grown simultaneously more diffuse and intimate," Villoro writes. What keeps it from spilling over the dry, tenuous banks of the Rio Grande?

A horrifying volume of blood.

2010-04-20T14:37:00.001-05:00

Murder City, by Charles Bowden, insists on the violence so rampant in Juarez. The violence is copious and incalculable like the blood cells of its victims. It is a machine of its own making, abstract and terrifying and entirely, according to Bowden, incomprehensible. That's not to say that people don't try to understand it, try to make it less terrifying: "the dead are dirty and the living are innocents." pg. 146. By overlaying a sense of 'they had it coming,' people make sense of the senselessness. "Death is blamed on the Americans who want cheap goods and so create warrens of slaves, who want strong drugs and so create cartels of machine guns." pg. 167. Though this is partially the truth, the truth struggles much more profoundly against its naming. It does not hold still and allow itself to be pinned down and the struggle and murder goes on.

Written in a sort of perpetual present, the book uses repetition (dust, blood, Miss Sinaloa) to tell the violent story of Juarez. "There is no future here, but a constant struggle in the present." pg 198. At first I found the amorphous, abstract repetitions a little tiresome until I understood that it is very deliberately used. The reader not only gets the story of the place, but the feel, the daily struggle of the place through the books repetitions and ceaselessness. "We are in a place without beginning or end and all the ways to tell the story fail me and repel me." pg. 200. The story of Juarez is always already a failure because of the violence of the story itself: the violence that perpetuates and consumes itself and anything in its path: "So you will die and be surprised, and yet you will die and expect to die. The explanations other people crave hardly matter to you because the cause of your death is just a detail. You fucked up, or someone wanted your business, or maybe just maybe, you looked too long and too hard at the wrong woman." pg. 215. Death comes in an infinite variety of masks.

Place

2010-04-19T12:54:00.000-05:00

"Rooted deeply in whatever is left of her brain, there is some [word illegible] attachment to this place." ("The Wind Cries Mary" by Brian Keene in The New Dead, pg. 132)

Place, as habit, becomes more than just memory.

Art & Video Games

2010-04-16T13:30:00.000-05:00

"And at the lecture he gave to mark the launch of his book, ‘The Many Headed Monster’ last week, Joshua Sofaer suggested that a determining principle of art, as opposed to craft, could be that its effects are not only felt at the time; they also grown on reflection." -from Open-Dialogues blog.

I think that this is a perfect definition, esp. when considering the idea of video games as art. Video games, as more or less defined by a short article in the current (Spring 2010) N + 1, are wish-fulfillment, not art. In other words, the character/players goals are basically one with the video game world's goals. "The logic (for video games) goes like this: It doesn't matter how beautiful your character or city or civilization is, so long as it dominates." pg. 16. The games bloom beautifully (I'm thinking of the few that I play like Modern Warfare, Assassin's Creed & Grand Theft Auto) and awesomely (in the original sense of the world), but that, in itself, does not make them art.

Art is something that exists outside of the observer. That's not to say that we don't participate, but we learn more than how to navigate a changing world.

April 15 in San Antonio History

2010-04-15T17:47:00.002-05:00

From the Texana blog at the San Antonio Public Library.

Art Pace: Musings about Nonexistent Books

2010-04-15T16:33:00.001-05:00

Four thought-provoking exhibits at Art Pace right now. My favorite is a project by Alejandro Cesarco called Index (2003-2008), which consists of three works: in 2000, he created Index A-Z, in 2003 came Index (A Novel), and finally in 2008 he revealed Index (a Reading). [He also has a video installation called The Two Stories in which the video suggests one thing while the narrative suggests another, encouraging the viewer to make connections.] These consist of indices to nonexistent books (of course, by calling it nonexistent, it exists at some level -- on a Platonic level, perhaps?: the nonexistent book as the perfect book).

This is exactly the kind of ideas I am interested in in my writing. I love seeing these exhibited as art. The gray area between art and "fiction" here is clear, if not defined. The one "painting" that I have completed works, in some ways, very much like this.

I wrote a sort of story and then cut it up drawing lines from pieces to make connections, though not the original (albeit nonlinear) connections of the original story. It's up to the reader to make the connections (either by trying to piece the story together via the lines or some other way), much like it's up to the viewer to figure out what kind of book belongs to the indices (and in a more involved way, what that book says).

The fact of a frame, rather than the title page and afterword, for example, is one of the main difference between an art exhibit displaying a nonexistent book and a book about a nonexistent book. The way we are exposed to the kin concepts is also different. The space in the gallery suggests the book is something to be plucked from the air, communally, while the book, unfairly at times, still suggests the solitary struggle of the reader to solve a crime a la Sherlock Holmes (or sometimes Inspector Clouseau).

The simplicity and depth of the piece makes it well worth spending some time recreating, with whatever knowledge you have, these airy, mysterious books. The pieces are about communication between the art and the viewer, but also about communication within a community. So bring someone along and discuss it. Life is not a hermetic journey.

Art Pace Exhibits

2010-04-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

Art Pace, as always, has some fantastic exhibits up right now.

Buster Graybill has a piece called Tush Hog. Graybill baits the ground around large, metal polyhedrons with corn and the objects become integral to the feeding ground as they are shoved, and used as shelter by the myriad boar and rams. Video and photographs of the experiment adorn the wall. The metal polyhedrons are also displayed, corn and all, in the large, cement space.

In the adjacent room, Ulrike Müller has baked enamel paintings, all somewhat phallic in nature. The exhibit is called Fever 103, a reference to Sylvia Plath's poem entitled the same.

Finally, upstairs with the Cesarco exhibit (information above), Klara Linden (Corpus de Ballet) created video art as well as interactive hanging sculptures, large rectangles covered in tar paper, as well as rolls of tar paper spread neatly along the floor. The videos, as well as the interactive sculptures, are interesting. They show the artist grasping different objects (the pillar of a loading dock, a light pole) and slowly, methodically climbing down. Surreal and mesmerizing, the performances suggest alienation and the strange, meaningful drive to belong (to the landscape, to the environment, to the city).

I love my job

2010-04-10T17:18:00.002-05:00

"The negative impact of discrediting on distractions, which absurd standard Aero, negatively impact on quality products." A student's thesis statement.

"Social service work is very demanding in the work load." Ouch! Right in the work load.

Habit

2010-04-08T13:06:00.000-05:00

"And you stop thinking, because there are things even stronger than the imagination: the habits that force you to get up, look for a bathroom off this room without finding one, go out into the hallway rubbing your eyelids, climb the stairs tasting the thick bitterness of your tongue, enter your own room feeling the rough bristles on your chin, turn on the bath faucets and then slide into the warm water, letting yourself relax into forgetfulness." (Aura, Fuentes, pg. 117)

I believe that habit is the root of all our actions. We can change only insofar as we can change our habits, which are momentous and vast. Culture is collective habit. And we take these habits for granted: our foundations are invisible and thus our problems are largely invisible. Homer Simpson understood this when he toasted, "To alcohol: the cause of and solution to all life's problems."

You in writing

2010-04-08T13:01:00.000-05:00

Told in second person, Aura, by Carlos Fuentes, is a oneiric novella about a man who realizes that he is or becomes someone else. At first, I found that I was simply replacing the second person with third. There is a certain authorial distance in place in the story between reader and character that the second person doesn't conflate. But I think that is the point. The reader is not supposed to be exhausted in the character. It makes the ending that much more surprising. In fact we feel, like the character ("you"), both part of the person ("you" and "the General") and separate from them. That means that the story attempts to conflate, really, four people: the reader, "you," the General and the narrator. Thus the last line of the story is a quote: we all hear it and are inseparable.

I wonder what it would read like as a third person narrative?