The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-- William Blake

and the neurons keep firing

things i have lost

* my wallet
* my work badge
* my religion
* my virginity
* the political radicalism of my youth
* my ambitious career dreams
* the lives of my loved ones
* the belief that i could do anything
* the belief that the world is slowly, steadily moving towards progress
* that there are rocks, things that will not move, to hold onto

I once had a teacher who said that human beings were onions--you could pull layer after layer off the persona, until you eventually reached a hollow core. This terrified me. I am sure this is a common enough experience for a first or second year college student, so common that it is probably recognized as a banal cliche by those more worldly than me. I did not admit my terror at the time. Now, I wonder, though, if he had terror too, and was not ready to admit it yet. I remember that he pronounced this bombshell with a great smile on his face, as though he were the one who had come up with the metaphor. Like some sort of community college Camus: "I know you've endured a barely literate education under the Bush regime, but it's time to wake up to the fact that life is without inherent meaning and so are you...now get over it!" I know that we did not get over it. You can ignore it--and most of us did--but you cannot get over it.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love brought back to me:
A pocket for my money.
A card for my labor.
A cross for my sins.
A stain for my filth.
A molotov cocktail in a starbucks window.
A nostalgia mixtape,
And an old photo album.
A self-help book,
And a shiny new candidate...
And then we got to work:

an opinion

If Lost Memory of Skin is a "canonical" work, then American literature truly is dead. Personally, I couldn't get through 50 pages of that treacle... Sapphire's The Kid is the more honest, moving and well-written version of this story, in addition to the fact that it actually goes there. Of course, this meant negative reviews and even accusations of perversion on Sapphire's part. Luckily for Russell Banks, America's literati much prefers the lukewarm liberalism and sexual fantasies ("Babes on Blades" !!!) of aging white dudes. 

random advice from Alfonso Cuaron via "Charlie Rose" (circa 2007)

Object: Character in a social context. 


Thus, no close ups. Always interaction between the foreground and the background. Don't edit for effect. Rather, long shots in real time. Create the moment of truthfulness in which the camera is just there to register that moment of truthfulness.


Deal more with theme than character or story.


Take ideas from everything. Even "Jerry Springer." Write down quotes you hear in everyday life. Keep a notebook at all times and write!

You cannot calculate a masterpiece. You will fail if you attempt to do so. You can only do the best you can. Just do it block by block in the effort to tell a good story.


Theme links all the elements of the story together. You do not need concrete joints.

a short story

Like a red morn that ever yet beckoned, Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds. Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.

-- Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

5 a.m. Overhead, the sky was still midnight blue, stars still visible. The horizon was blood-red cut in stripes by thin wisps of yellowish-white clouds.

She carries a digital camera to capture every moment. She has pale yellow hair, blue eyes, white skin. Dresses in red and blue with a star emblem on the blue.

It's funny, she muses. The Indians once chased my ancestors out to these islands and now I'm going the same way voluntarily.

Storm begins. Tide comes in too fast. Realizes she will have to wait it out on the island.

On the way home, after the sun has set, she slips and cracks her head open in the darkness. A trickle of blood down her white face, between damp locks of pale yellow hair. 

a favorite opening p

I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not that at all. I feel many things these days, much more than I was able to feel in the days when I was young and my brother died, and there are reasons for this more than the mere consequence of age. Therefore I shall not apologize but begin by recalling the facts as I remember them that led up to my brother's death, the events that put me in a position to write this account. For though the event of my brother's passing and the events of my story cannot be separated, my story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia's; about my mother's and Maiguru's entrapment; and about Nyasha's rebellion--Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle's daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful.


-- Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

circa 2004

not knowing why. not knowing how. not seeing where. like cattle. they are herded out of our sight and into our sites. into an orgy of blood and limbs and guts and screams. and finally silence, their preparation for their Higher Purpose: our consumption. puddles of blackened blood absorbed by the earth. extracted and pumped into cars and bombs. our cars. our bombs. not that car bomb that exploded Some Guy a few hours ago. Some Guy is the Price of Freedom. Some Guy was left in the street, his intestines spilling out of his belly like al dente pasta in tomato sauce, wrapped around the ripe sausage of his liver. those are our guts. they are not pieces of a man. they are the coins to put in the slot machine to get a prize. they are the ingredients of a delicious stew of civilization. his death is not death, but birth: The Birth Pangs of Democracy. it is not death. we do not eat their guts.

Blue Platitude

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
-- Barbara Bush

"None of us have beautiful minds. We all have bloody minds now, and bloody hands."
-- Joyce Marcel

terrible lie

I first thought about killing Lucy Bowen...on the night that I murdered her. No, that's not true, and there's no reason to lie anymore: I first thought about killing Lucy Bowen at XXX School on October 3, 1995. Time of day? It's kind of important. Alright: in the A.M., at that one moment, about half past 10. Most of us fifth graders had been politely unimpressed with the whole spectacle, only humoring Sister XXX's insistence that today was "a major historical event" in hopes that she would forget about a scheduled spelling test ad, of course, because it meant we could watch TV. Not surprisingly, the only gasps in the room upon the unanimous "not guilty" came from our enthralled teacher herself as she fainted upon the cold classroom floor, resulting in an undisclosed head injury that would keep her hospitalized and then bedridden in the convent for the next three months.

The End

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

-- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Circles

The body was promptly identified as Mary McDonald upon its arrival at XXX Medical in 1984. Sister XXX had picked out the name months in advance. A good common name was needed--the other foster children had been named after saints of a more esoteric pitch: Agnes, Benedict, etc. She had grudgingly allowed that her newborn charge would take the surname of her disgraced unwed mother. She really would have preferred that the honor go to the almost-as-guilty father, but, well, he was nowhere to be found and several embarrassing paternity test results later, it was determined that it would be best for all parties involved that the inquiries be dropped as the financial and emotional funds necessary to test the entire fertile male population of the state were far too costly. Besides, it too was a common enough name. No one would notice.

Twenty years later, doctors at a secret military base stationed outside of Juarez performed a similarly swift identification of the now fully grown female figure. Their nurses, like the nurses of XXX Medical, happily rinsed the desert sand from her skin like superfluous amniotic fluid, dried her gently and coaxed her into consciousness.

***

Like all the children, Mary loved the dark man in the long brown robe, who pretended to visit the school to chat quietly with the teachers, but who really just wanted to play with the children. He was no sooner sighted in the schoolyard than he was covered in the bodies of children in an ecstatic pigpile. But Brother Mark was not all fun and games. He could be very serious--but not in the way that the principal was serious when they were caught copying each other's homework or sticking wet gum underneath a desk. No, Brother Mark was serious in the way your best friend is after she promises to keep your secret. Like a dog or Jesus. Mary never forgot the advice he gave her that one time she spoke privately with him over a particularly gnawing problem.

"Remember," he told her, "as you get older, you will realize that life is composed of many hopelessly complicated dilemmas and that you are right to remain forever in curious humility before them. Interestingly, it is these questions that the fools who run things try to make appear quite simple. And yet, occasionally you will come across an issue that could not be more black and white in its moral implications. People will try to tell you otherwise, but never allow simple matters of right and wrong to be obfuscated."

It was the last time she ever saw Brother Mark. In June of that year he was transferred to the capitol where he took over as head of a Franciscan monastery.

Wren

It would come back to her in flashes. She would be at her desk, writing something silly, imagining calling one of her highschool friends out of the blue, when the memory would strike. An image of flesh. The little dark, curly hairs on the back of her captors' hands. Falling. Then it would vanish as quickly as it had appeared, and Wren was left once more with only the mundanity of her present life. It was torture.

She found a suitable distraction in food. The air was too hot and she was too lazy to bake the sweets she craved. Her mind would wander to her childhood and her mouth would water as she recalled half moons with thick, goopy chocolate and vanilla frosting fresh from the bakery. She would sit in XXX park on a summer afternoon, leisurely licking the frosting off her half moon cake, watching the Greek widows stroll by in their black veils and long wool black dresses.

She looked in the freezer. Her mother had purchased a sole pint of low-fat vanilla frozen yogurt. Wren polished it off in 15 minutes. She rinsed the empty cardboard container and placed it in the recycling bin. Then she returned to the fridge to see what else she could find.

Wren began to experiment with plain and vanilla-flavored cold sweets. She added food coloring and exotic fruits to frozen yogurt. She mixed aspartame and peanut butter with ricotta cheese. She ate Nutella on everything. By the end of the summer, she had gained 40 pounds, which, she realized during the morning of reckoning on the scale, averaged out to over 13 pounds a month.