stranger-study.m4a

Pandemic Final Draft

Pandemic

Should creativity be as simple as giving birth? I ask because I value art over procreation. In point of fact, art is a genre of procreation, one in which the mother must constantly decide whether or not to go into labor, one in which, in my case, the pain ceases when the printer ejaculates whatever text I’ve typed, be it the worst sentence ever written: “He said, “what’s up, Andrew” as if he didn’t know what “Up-Andrew was.”

On a recent trip to Italy, my father fainted upon seeing the David. My father, son of my Grandmother Red-Car, has never had any interest in bodies. The scale of that teenager converted Father. Should it be a coincidence that this light-headedness coincided with my Mother’s uncontrollable sensitivity to heat? They call this “David’s Syndrome,” and might well be the most officious disease in the world. I believe that, if caught in its most distilled form, this malady shuts your mind down as surely as the knee jerks when struck by a hammer. My father survived because he had of course seen superficial reproductions of the David before. He grew up, as I have, in the age of printer ejaculation.

My parents are my ultimate readers. My goal is to make them drop dead; heads in the Sunday soup, slumped between two pillows, tumbling over the balcony; aesthetic shock. I have chosen the English language as the appropriate, practical medium; because they read it and because there is no vaccine to language. The original will be burned so no temple can be constructed for it; there will only be identical, authentic, selfless printer ejaculations. What is an appropriate subject? What is the lethal theme? How can I fill my pen with cyanide? Send in your suggestions.

My parents are two creatures of different educations. Success would vary upon each. In the case of my father…

Geese were exploding in the backyard when I asked my Grandmother, “How old are you?” I imagined her responding, “depends on how much I’ve been drinking,” but she just looked at me blankly. Then she took a sip of chardonnay. She asked me how much I weighed, then later she asked me, “How much do you weigh?” Each time I said 300 lbs to make her laugh, but she did not, and each time she told me that she weighed the same now as she did when she was 14. She probably feels like she’s 93. Once she told us she grew up with a silver spoon, but I thought she said “slivered snoop” (as she souped up her gold cocktail). My older sister, careening into bulimia and disfigured by fashion, suggested we feed grandmother red-car sticks of butter, telling her it’s the latest diet trend. Curbs appetite or something. Her apartment featured a drawing; in one corner a swan and in another a thin mother holding a baby. A recognizable innovator of twentieth century art had signed his name at another corner, but my father told us it was a fake. Grandmother red-car wanted so much for us to believe it was real. I must admit I am on her side, although the effect of the painting might truly be lost if his name were erased or covered up.

A tangent, but I’ve stumbled over something. My father might consider my lethal masterpiece a fake, and then not have any reaction at all. His favorite author is Shakespeare; I couldn’t exactly sign it Shakespeare. Were those David look-alikes, insisting to no end that Michelangelo sculpted it, the cause of his fainting spell after all?

My mother’s brother taught me that feeding certain birds baking soda makes them implode. He used to greet me yelling “Up-Chuck, Up-Chuck, Up-Chuck.” And I’d deliver the pun unknowingly, and Anne, always brighter, would have to explain it to me (bruised by a comprehension of my family’s political values) after dinner, by the pool. These family gatherings meandered through the fall of the Episcopal church, the superiority of antebellum prayer books, grandmother red-car’s chair on the opera board, Lohengrin’s disastrous swan assassination…until everyone exclaimed as one that the children had grown seventeen feet tall. Then a refill on drinks. The maternal flank drank good southern bourbon. My mother, my Dionysian reveler, loves the ballet. A summer when an internship gave me access to tickets, I took her to see Romeo and Juliet. I felt like death had sprinkled the nostalgia of old age onto my eyelids. Romeo was so young and virile. Juliet was so biologically appropriate as his partner. How depressing they had to die! How sad! To my mother, the experience was one of those lady-like pleasures, like needle-pointing prayer cushions or politely declining dessert.

Striving for panache my amateur skills have been harsh on Mom and Dad. Their marriage has been prolific and their children have made their disparate backgrounds mutually exclusive. So I don’t need your empty voice telling me that art is or isn’t as difficult as labor. I shun your suggestions. Shoo, skedaddle, run off and await the kamikaze flock I just fed with arm and hammer. I know now how to enchant the printer with my pandemic.

The noxious ingredient will be an apparent confession. I will never bear children, and if I do, they will be constructed from taut, implausible rhymes; studies of ancient incantations. They will follow me to the David, where I will stand erect and level with his toes. After pulling out a bludgeon and hitting his knee, they will catch my unconscious fall. And the extended description of this passage, complete with symbols, metaphors, clowns, villains, intrigue, perhaps a land battle, will do them off.

Pandemic Re-Revisited

Pandemic

Should creativity be as simply as giving birth? I ask because I value art over procreation. In point of fact, art is a genre of procreation, one in which the mother must constantly decide whether or not to go into labor, one in which, in my case, the pain ceases when the printer ejaculates whatever text I’ve typed, be it the worst sentence ever written: “He said, “what’s up, Andrew” as if he didn’t know what “Up-Andrew was.”

On a recent trip to Italy, my father fainted upon seeing the David. My father, son of my Grandmother Red-Car, has never had any interest in bodies. The scale of that teenager converted Dad. Should it be a coincidence that this light-headedness coincided with my Mother’s uncontrollable sensitivity to heat? They call this “David’s Syndrome,” and might well be the most officious disease in the world. I believe that, if caught in its most distilled form, this malady shuts your mind down as surely as the knee jerks when struck by a hammer. My father survived because he had of course seen superficial reproductions of the David before. He grew up, as I have, in the age of printer ejaculation.

My parents are my ultimate readers. My goal is to make them drop dead; heads in the Sunday soup, slumped between two pillows, tumbling over the balcony; aesthetic shock. I have chosen the English language as the appropriate, practical medium; because they read it and because there is no vaccine to language. The original will be burned so no temple can be constructed for it; there will only be identical, authentic, selfless printer ejaculations. What is an appropriate subject? What is the lethal theme? How can I fill my pen with cyanide? Send in your suggestions.

My parents are two creatures of different educations. Success would vary upon each. In the case of my father…

Geese were exploding in the backyard when I asked my Grandmother, “How old are you?” I imagined her responding, “depends on how much I’ve been drinking,” but she just looked at me blankly. Then she took a sip of chardonnay. She asked me how much I weighed, then later she asked me, “How much do you weigh?” Each time I said 300 lbs to make her laugh, but she did not, and each time she told me that she weighed the same now as she did when she was 14. She probably feels like she’s 93. Once she told us she grew up with a silver spoon, but I thought she said “slivered snoop” (as she souped up her gold cocktail). My older sister, careening into bulimia and disfigured by fashion, suggested we feed grandmother red-car sticks of butter, telling her it’s the latest diet trend. Curbs appetite or something. Her apartment featured a drawing; in one corner a swan and in another a thin mother holding a baby. A recognizable innovator of twentieth century art had signed his name at another corner, but my father told us it was a fake. Grandmother red-car wanted so much for us to believe it was real. I must admit I am on her side, although the effect of the painting might truly be lost if his name were erased or covered up.

A tangent, but I’ve stumbled over something. My father might consider my lethal masterpiece a fake, and then not have any reaction at all. His favorite author is Shakespeare; I couldn’t exactly sign it Shakespeare. Were those David look-alikes, insisting to no end that Michelangelo sculpted it, the cause of his fainting spell after all?

My mother’s brother taught me that feeding certain birds baking soda makes them implode. He used to greet me yelling “Up-Chuck, Up-Chuck, Up-Chuck.” And I’d deliver the pun unknowingly, and Anne, always brighter, would have to explain it to me (bruised by a comprehension of my family’s political values) after dinner, by the pool. These family gatherings meandered through the fall of the Episcopal church, the superiority of antebellum prayer books, grandmother red-car’s chair on the opera board, Lohengrin’s disastrous swan assassination…until everyone exclaimed as one that the children had grown seventeen feet tall. Then a refill on drinks. The maternal flank drank good southern bourbon. My mother, my Dionysian reveler, loves the ballet. A summer when an internship gave me access to tickets, I took her to see Romeo and Juliet. I felt like death had sprinkled the nostalgia of old age onto my eyelids. Romeo was so young and virile. Juliet was so biologically appropriate as his partner. How depressing they had to die! How sad! To my mother, the experience was one of those lady-like pleasures, like needle pointing prayer cushions or politely declining dessert.

I have decided that the noxious ingredient will be an apparent confession. I will never bear children, and if I do, they will be constructed from taut, implausible rhymes; studies of ancient incantations. They will follow me to the David, where I will stand erect and level with his toes. After pulling out a hammer and hitting his knee, they will catch my unconscious fall. And the extended description of this passage, complete with symbols, metaphors, clowns, villains, intrigue, perhaps a land battle, will do them off.

Second Braid Piece: bizarre, but not my best :(

Then said Buffalmacco, “It I be so indeed, we must cast about for a means of having it again, and we may contrive it.”

Hesekia looked around for his cat. Everywhere. The town hall, the library, the temple of Apollo — then he went to the schoolhouse.

“I am going to lose my marbles if these students don’t attend my class,” Miss Boccaccio said. “My stars,” she added with a sigh.

As Hesekia burst into the schoolhouse, he felt sure his cat had died there, and the stench was due to its languid decomposition. Oh, he thought, Miss Boccaccio always smells horrendous.  He took a seat in the back of the room to think.

Miss Boccaccio stepped into her classroom and saw one lethargic boy in the back row with a look of torture on his face. “My stars. I really have lost my marbles. My stars.”

At that moment a thing arched through the window, crashing with a thud on a table. Hesekia saw it, gasped, and in a moment of nervous frenzy froze in mid air.

Suddenly a dead cat colided with a desk, and then the worthless boy who had decided to attend class today was upon her, slapping her with ferocious lightness, sreaming, “You embalmed my protector! I knew you did it, I knew you were an animal torturer.”

“Why no dear child,” Miss Boccaccio howled. “It was most certainly one of those problem children, your bullies? Buffalmacco? He killed your cat, then probably created a contrived replica in hopes of deceiving you. He probably thinks cats can fly through windows, he’s that stupid, he infects the other students with his stupidity, that’s why he threw it through the window — in hatred of my teaching, and in fear of you!”

Group Braid Piece

If I were to ask a designer to design me a living room, I would only have stiff chairs, to facilitate attention.

Whenever a bird flew by my window I listened for the words of its song; it told me never to ask a professional translator.

Attention is the most important aspect of my life. Birds are distracting.

Translators are never distracted, and its being obsessed in the peripheral of my responsibility that brings me to new worlds.

The designer was named “Mr. Pebble,” a name which in its own way sounds like a plush couch, bane of my existence.

Mr. Pebble couldn’t translate. Mr. Pebble couldn’t listen.

A hellish monster in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, a giant owl, like the one that flew into my window, will consume him, then he will be forced to sit in my stiff chaired living room for detention.

In-Class exercise, 3.11

In the ballet Sleeping beauty, Aurora is saved by a prince, and at the end they dance and dance and dance, and some other people dance. Tchaikovsky wrote the score late in his life (?), and today it is subject to cuts and revisions by an unsophisticated ballet audience.

Friday afternoon I asked my supervisor if there were any extra tickets left. I asked for a second. My supervisor has a british accent that she could turn on when speaking of the ballet orchestra’s insufficiency. “You’ll get to see the Russian couple.” “Oh yes, the Russian couple — they’ve been getting a lot of attention haven’t they?”

The dancer dancing Aurora surely suffered from some severe eating disorder — her arms were a doe’s, and of a pale hue, as if she had emptied the blood from her body for dramatic effect. Her splits and turns were lethargically gorgeous  — if there was a white xylophone in the orchestra, her ribcage might be mistaken for it.

Beginning of non-fiction piece, will return to later

Pandemic

On a recent trip to Italy, my father fainted upon seeing the David. Now, see, I’ve ruined it for you, already. How could you have fainted from my first sentence? Now on my fourth, I feel I have to make it up to you. It is called David’s syndrome, named after the aforementioned sculpture. In its most distilled form, if caught, your whole being shuts down. This is the most dangerous disease in the world. Apparently, you and I are immune. My father survived only because he has a marginal amount of superficiality left within him.
My parents are my ultimate readers, and my goal is to make them drop dead; heads in the Sunday soup, slumped between two pillows on a couch, or tumbling over the balcony; aesthetic shock. The question is, what is an appropriate subject? My eventless childhood, my insolent adolescence? Of course not, it would have to be something entirely invented, taking place on the Riviera, with a romantic love tryst of impossible complexity that resolves…ecstatically. Could that work to my advantage?
As I come to thinking of it, my parents are not one entity, but two creatures of different educations. My artistic success would be different for both of them.
My father is the son of my Grandmother. Geese were exploding in the backyard when I asked my Grandmother, “How old are you?” I imagined her responding, “depends on how much I’ve been drinking,” but she just looked at me blankly. Then she took a sip of chardonnay. She asked me how much I weighed, then later she asked me, “How much do you weigh?” Each time I said 300 lbs to make her laugh, but she did not, and each time she said she weighed the same now as she did when she was 14. “She probably feels like she’s 93.” Once she told us she grew up with a silver spoon, but I though she said “slivered snoop;” as she souped up her gold cocktail. My older sister, careening into bulimia and disfigured by fashion, suggested we feed grandmother red-car sticks of butter, telling her it’s the latest diet trend. Curbs appetite or something. Her apartment featured a drawing; in one corner a swan and in another a thin mother holding a baby. A recognizable innovator of twentieth century art had signed his name at another corner, but my father told us it was a fake. Grandmother Red-Car wanted so much for us to believe it was real. I must admit I am on her side, although the effect of the painting might truly be lost if his name were erased or covered up.
A tangent, but I’ve accomplished something nevertheless. My father might consider my lethal masterpiece as a fake, and then not have any reaction at all. His favorite author is Shakespeare, but I couldn’t exactly sign it “William Shakespeare.”

Stranger study, no. 1

does the switch in tense work for you at the end?

This stranger exists with the sole purpose of making my life more complicated. He quits his table and treads past me, giving me a look. The look: vapid judgment, as if my sitting here with my eyes and my hands and my pen were in some way not in keeping with his environment. Rather than seeing my word, he imagines a definition. Now he sits far off.
His clothes spell out his being. He wears flannel because he considers it naturalistic, therefore original. In his hideous pants is his wallet in which he as a fifty. He pretends he has nothing by the way his clothes are draped. By the way, he pulls out from a cavernous sack a sandwich, which he gnashes on. He puts the sandwich down. And now to his hair: washed in almond soy juice, then bedraggled by an oozing agent. Hair that would be complimented in this type of coffee facility, then found in the coffee itself. The blonde takes another bite and this munching coincides with pen scratching. He probably plans to write an arid memoir of his drug habits.
We both look up. He smiles in spite of himself and I smile athwart back at him. He pulls out an inhaler and takes a desperate breath.  He parents walk through the door. He shakes his hands but she kisses him on the cheek. Seeing this mature simplicity, I asked to pity the patch of pieces I dismantled from myself to arrange neatly on the page.

Stranger study — just dipping my toes

Pretty stranger, beauty has a peak and it seems you have reached yours. Beauty travels like a ball thrown over a cliff; before we know it you will be ugly, wishing the trajectory of your beauty was a bridge through time. Who threw you?

I, like a dog, burst forth to retrieve.

Three settings exercise

1. field, loneliness

A vulture circles and hardly a breeze blows. An approaching storm threatens the stillness. The vast trunks of a vast forest shades needles on the outskirts of the meadow, in perfect ambivalence.

2. kitchen, lust

Ruby red dishsoap tints the sink bloodlike. The voluptuous wedding stone is left beside the oven, and the handles of the refrigerator are rendered insufficient to any appetite. Clothes are strewn about the room. The table is hungry.

3. shore, satisfaction

The lighthouse rises indifferent to the monotony of indulgent waves, the sand that once was is now engulfed by water, crashing ecstatically against rocks. The tide has reached its nexus, and starfish and seahorses alike are thrust forth.