Zombie
Renner posted a lovely short fiction at Fictionaut.
An Uncertain Green
Spring, and the discovery that my coat was ten sizes too large. I knew the different rooms of it. A cavern of wet wool in rain. For months, there under a bridge, I could raise my arm from water and drink at my own breast.
I built nests for birds and waited, on into summer. A wasp examined one made of chopsticks and watermelon rind. A possum peered into the tangle of licorice and bright finishing nails. Then a mockingbird settled in a china cup set in a cat’s ribcage. I fought sleep.
A windy, no-thought day. Calculated my heart rate by barest touch of teeth. The city employed its vehicles in miniature vistas. A man came with the mood of one checking on some report of me. A patch covering one eye; his other gazing as a whale would a moment before slipping below. He must have seen no cause.
How then to populate a day with color, in rain, without bringing a bowl for the fire of it? The sea at this city’s edge marks a kind of hollow, always seeming to say we should be amazed by any dry land. The sharks at the aquarium rasp their gray skins against my sense of water, watching a vision of watchers. So, bird, come to my eye beak first—swim into me, find that avenue that falls through autumn to black bones where perch the reasons.
Mary Robison and Lish
I dig this blog look at Mary Robison’s first book as edited by Gordon Lish.
Marcella Riordan reads the Molly Bloom soliloquy
In honor of Bloomsday yesterday Tim Carmody pointed to this beautiful reading of the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Josh Rothman says:
In my opinion, the best audio recording of Molly’s soliloquy appears in the Naxos audiobook of the novel; it’s read perfectly by the Irish actress Marcella Riordan. As it happens, you can listen to the last few minutes of her performance on YouTube. Molly thinks about nature and God, recalls her childhood in Gibralter (she’s half Spanish), and relives the moment she accepted her husband’s proposal of marriage.
Spoiler
The announcement is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”.
quote out of context
The leader wore a button-down shirt beneath a buttoned-up vest: like the silence in whether, or
SCOUT #1: How do you spell parapraxis?
the reversal of h with w, but an h in whore takes over, replaces w, replaces the need for a shirt,
SCOUT #2: Don’t worry, he’ll spell it for you.
becomes the shirt with the r and the shit without, a merit badge for phonics, the unintentional
SCOUT #3: How do you spell perpendicular?
alliteration, a merit badge for noticing, for observance, for linguistic sensibilities, the abundance
SCOUT #4: Do you feed your mother with that mouth?
of merit badges disguising the boys beneath
FISHERMAN: I think it’s kiss your mother.
R.I.P. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)
‘A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’: Patrick Leigh Fermor in Saint Malo, France, in 1992. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Not unexpected. And he led a long and wonderful life. But I am tearing up. This is someone I never met who meant a lot to me in ways that are hard to explain just now. So here is the Guardian obituary. And I hope you will read at least one of his books.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom – anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.
William Eggleston, Draft of a Presentation
I consider a photograph interesting whenever a photographer’s view of reality does not double my knowledge of the world, but a difference between our respective perception occurs. The smaller the difference, the more intense is its effect on me. Thus, it’s less about a precise representation of reality than the formulation of the representation of the world. From this viewpoint and within the technical medium, we can talk about the photographer as an author who–on the basis of facts and by means of a minimal shift of perception–creates a fiction in close proximity to reality.
Thoughts on William Eggleston, and photography, by Thomas Weski.
The clothesline presents an opportunity for creative expression
My favorite memory of clothes on the line is sheets hung between two lines. The parabolic “u” it shaped. They were crisp on the bed and smelled like fresh air. Yellow jackets built nests inside the poles sometimes and came in with the laundry. The bag for the pins hung right on the line, didn’t it? And sometimes the yellow jackets would get in there, too. When I was little, I would hoist myself from one end of the line to the other, imagining a rushing river. Once I got to the end, bumped the metal pipe, and got stung about the neck and face. I fell in the river that time, running for the house. I vaguely remember running between clothes hanging like a maze. Mother had three lines, one higher in the middle. We would take naps there. Sometimes overnight. We started out ten. I woke up, eight. A couple of hours later it might be just sister and me. I grabbed her hand and we were headed for the back door. Later, they would say, “There was something in the woods.”
A Favorite Book of Stories by Lydia Davis
I have been reading the brief stories of Lydia Davis with pleasure for years, and one of her books I keep coming back to is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. Here is one of the stories in it that I have read often enough to hold now in memory:
Happiest Moment
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.
I hesitate to spoil things by speaking of what I love about this piece–but since when have I been able to keep quiet about such matters? I love the way the question is never answered–but is. The question evolves in the way that all stories do, given that connections between readers is what makes them live. We write about what matters to us; but who is the author of that? Even in the making of stories we are walking through the lives of others and finding our own words there. We are made of stories. And sometimes a very brief story can open upon the largest understanding we may hope to hold.
dream name
Austin Derwatt.
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
Amy said
You know, Deron, a big part of story is character. It’s not just who it happens to, it’s who happens it.
Bonus Amy said Update: Daryl can use that for his class if he wants to.
Story Starts
I always hated getting under the house until then I didn’t.
_____
“I wish she would quit bringing that bean salad. It always reminds me of how Bud kept losing his shoes.”
_____
In the treehouse, above a sea of water hemlock, she said I could touch her if I wanted to. She said it didn’t matter. And so I did. And it didn’t.
Gallant (Dark Nights of the Pre-Pubescent Soul)
Inspired by riffing with Tiger, Tommy, and Susan about Goofus and Gallant and their nocturnal habits.
Goofus may eat saltines in bed, but Gallant keeps his hands under the covers. One wonders.
Read more
What would Flannery O’Connor have sounded like if she’d had a Twitter feed?
Twitter was founded just five years ago, meaning generations of legendary writers missed out on the chance to broadcast their witty thoughts to the world in 140 characters. The writers themselves may no longer be with us, but clever fans are impersonating them on Twitter, imagining what the scribes would have said if they’d had access to the microblogging service.
The Atlantic went looking, and one of the accounts they found is curated by our own O’Connor-loving auteur, Amanda Mae Meyncke.
Up With Jesus
“Pastor Jack, do we have a ladder that will reach the ceiling in the sanctuary? That Jason boy let go his balloon in there and it’s up at the peak over the pulpit.”
“What?”
“Do we have a ladder that will reach the ceiling in the sanctuary? That Jason boy let go his balloon in there and it’s up at the peak over the pulpit.”
“Balloon?”
“Yessir. One of those metal ones shape like a fat rocket.
“What color?”
“Well. Shiney.”
“Did you check with Dale?”
“About what?”
“About the ladder. He’s the one uses one to clean the windows.”
* * *
Pastor Jack looks up from his sermon book when Steve sticks his head in.
“Pastor Jack the ladders are locked up and Dale’s got the keys and he’s gone.”
“Well, we can’t have a balloon up there during Easter service.”
Steve prays for a moment, then looks up. “What about that pellet rifle you use for the squirrels?”
“In the sanctuary?”
“I bet two pumps’ll pop it and not hurt the varnish.”
* * *
“Good shot,” Steve says slowly as the punctured balloon motors around high above the pulpit. Exhausted, finally, it falls and hangs up on the crucifix, snagged by the crown of thorns.
“That’s not going to work,” Pastor Jack says. “Reckon we could twist some coat hangers together and get it?”
“No time for that. Service starts in a few minutes.”
The two men ponder the hooded Jesus.
Pastor Jack looks at Steve. “How tall are you and how much do you weigh?”
“I’m 6-2 and one thirty-five.”
“All right, get that chair over there so you can get up and stand on my shoulders.”
Steve blinks a few times and his adam’s apple moves up and down, but he fetches the chair.
“That’s it,” Pastor Jack says through gritted teeth as Steve gets his left foot up on a shoulder. He steadies himself by holding onto Jesus’s feet and stands. He’s reaching up when he hears Pastor Jack start to make a noise like a screen door opening.
And suddenly Pastor Jack is down and still, eyes staring, one hand clutching the black slacks he has pulled from Steve’s legs on the way down. “Pastor Jack?” Steve calls, clinging to the Redeemer’s knees. “Pastor Jack!”
* * *
Deacon Wayne runs through the gathered crowd to the double doors of the sanctuary and unlocks them. The congregation surges in. They all get situated on their pews and gaze up at the show—Pastor Jack sprawled in his camouflage windbreaker beside the pulpit and Brother Steve, pantless, praying into Jesus’s thighs. Mrs. Nash, in a front pew, fusses with her pearls and whispers to her husband. “I don’t see this in the program.” His nodding stops for a moment and then resumes. She leans in again. “This is a literal mystery.”
Storywoods
(Thanks, Alison.)
We were talking about writing about sex. It was 1993
From an article by Alexander Chee in Paris Review about sex in James Salter’s fiction:
This was before Viagra—you had to have an honest hard-on to shoot.
I thought about how something had happened in the dark that we couldn’t see, an excitement that couldn’t be in the film. It was probably better than what we would film, more interesting.
It seems to me I am always in pursuit of that.
She begins to strip like a roommate and climb into bed.
They have fallen asleep. Dean wakes first, in the early afternoon. He unfastens her stockings and slowly rolls them off. Her skirt is next and then her underpants. She opens her eyes. The garter belt he leaves on, to confirm her nakedness. He rests his head there.
Her hand touches his chest and begins to fall in excruciating slow designs.
He lies still as a dog beneath it, still as an idiot.
On its own terms, sex is information.
(via the browser)
quote out of context
DARPA says a discussion of narrative psychology will lead to a “better understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others.”
coming out of sleep
The Anvil & The Clown
Nurse Normal
“Nurse normal,” the swain says every time the baby cries. “Like the cows do.”
By Cooper Renner. In Once was blip.
from the archives: March 18, 2010
Damn, this was fine.
Like you’d expect, it started out good and the comments made it all more betterer.
searching for the house of Ruben Bustes
Daryl, Sheila and I saw something today we think is the setting for a story. Driving through an old Oak Cliff neighborhood, looking for the house of Ruben Bustes (that’s a story in itself), we came across a one story ranch on a corner lot. The back was fenced with low chain link fortified inside with cactus. Inside the yard was another fence, also fortified with cactus, that housed a small dog house. I think that’s all we’ve got. Please tell us what it means.
tweet of the day
March elimae
for your enjoyment.
