I’ve got a neighbor with a first-person-shooter problem. Well, it’s my problem, but his sub-woofers. I circulated this document to the folks in my building. So far, quiet. Maybe it’s because tomorrow’s Monday… We’ll see.
Still, it’s the kind of letter I’d like to receive if I were the guilty party. A bit funny, very clear in expectations, with just the slightest fillip of consequences. Feel free to distribute, but please don’t charge for this.
Forget JK, or JRR… I’d love to have something with the staying power of Dr. Who as my legacy. Well, we all have our fantasies.
Via: CableTV.com
I’m a regular contributor to Drash Pit, a Jewish webzine composed of snark triggered by Torah. This month’s issue was devoted to “shunning.” My poem is up there, on the DrashPit.com site.
I’m drowning under the increasing lists of things to do. To-do items are fractal: each produces subordinate or successor objects, each demanding its time slot, its focus, its ramp-up and ramp-down resources and time.
Apparently it’s good for the writing soul, since I’ve started writing poetry after more than an eight-month hiatus. (Okay, there’s no causal link, but I’m trying to make lemonade here.)
More later — too many people hovering overhead.
Great, a P.E.P. talk.
I haven’t written a good, solid poem (first draft, of course) in literally months. I get that way: in going over my record of about 550 poems (the edited, “finished” ones, not drafts or juvenalia) I’ve had gaps of over a year at some points. This seven month gap is the longest in at least fifteen years. The draft isn’t ready for sharing, but was triggered, the day a car was rammed by a local commuter train, by the smell of creosote warming in the 90+ degree sun off the railroad ties at a train station.
Smells are said to be our strongest memory joggers. What’s irritating to me is that they job the fact that I have a memory, but I can’t remember why that smell is a trigger to remember something. Ah, the joys of incipient senior moments. The creosote was a pervasive smell where I hung out in Riverdale, down past the “jungle,” by the train tracks on the banks of the Hudson River near the NYC/Yonkers border. It was a great place for me to be daring, standing close to the trains as they whipped by: cargo, commuter, passenger… and sometimes the repair trains with their cranes. I remember when they built an overpass so people wouldn’t have to cross the tracks directly. And I remember walking over a tiny, rusted footbridge that was the only way across before it was replaced. I can’t imagine letting my kids go off and do that. And I guess I shouldn’t wonder what my kids have been doing while I haven’t been hovering overhead.
More anon. Sleep, perchance a deep dream, tonight.
Took some time off Friday to have strangers plumb my innards. Bottom line: I’ve got nice innards. (I could have told ’em that.) I also decided to heed my body: even after an only 15 minute procedure early Friday morning, my body is still clamoring for attention. Slept more since then than I did the entire week before. Okay, maybe I needed more sleep, but 13 hours at a stretch? What a luxury! What a slothful rack of time!
I’m in the metaphorical saddle again, juggling the usual too many things to do, aiming to do a few. Only a few: otherwise I thrash around getting none done.
Today: a few little web site things…
In reading a bunch of space opera and humor/horror books lately (yes, it’s procrastination under guise of research), I’m realizing how difficult I make my writing life. My characters aren’t in a soap opera, they’re doing an ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ reshoot. In Induction, my main character goes through:
Multiple descriptions of places throughout. My character would have to have an accompanying travelogue for the novel to be vividly visually described (I like the writing, it’s very readable, go buy it!). It’s tough to situate a character in one place after another. The character doesn’t get to act as if they’re on their turf. The scene is a character, and how the humans interact with the scene is as much an expression of the people as their dialog.
So I’m going to write something (well, adapt an existing piece) with that in mind. And write with more luster, more… cowbell.
I’m going to take the high road and assume that someone accidentally purchased Consent, meaning to buy a $200 tome instead. And I’ll make that my final answer, since I didn’t get an accompanying lashing of a review.
{grumble}
I doodled on a Generation to Generation cover, and quickly realized that if my stick figures weren’t awful enough, stick figures in perspective, spinning back in time, arranged as a double helix certainly didn’t showcase any nascent talent I might believe I have in that arena.
Splitting today into cooking, finishing G2G and getting it up online, and continuing to work on a WordPress plugin to integrate Google Charts into a blog site.
The problem with writing is that, with practice, it improves. I went back to a really nice piece I’d written, intending to slap formatting on it and bring it up as an e-book short story. (As I did with Consent a few days back — thanks to all of you who’ve purchased it for the exorbitant, crazy price of under a buck!)
My writing friend JNE calls ’em ‘vampire words.’ They suck energy from scenes, dull down dialog… and the dang story dripped with them. ‘Began.’ ‘Felt.’ ‘Seemed.’ ‘Was.’
Rewriting is a recursive experience. One sentence leans on the next, paragraphs on their neighbors, and the whole short story on it’s scenes. The patient lies still on its word processing operating table, mostly put back together, but with yet a distance to travel.
Hopefully I can figure out how to create a cover for it — I really need to learn how to draw.
CONTEST!!! Speaking of publishing, with all the folks buying Consent there aren’t any reviews. Any and all would be much appreciated! I’ll pick a reviewer at random and write them into a story I’m just wrapping up. The higher the rating, the better the character in the story!
My mom spent eleven months in Auschwitz. She watched her parents get machine-gunned before her. Has bullet scars on both sides of her breasts. She survived the ghetto, and was one of the young people chosen to work in a suitcase factory until the ghetto was liquidated on September 18, 1943.
After the liquidation was completed (and I don’t know where she was during that time), she was forced to drag out all the bodies from the apartments in the town in which she was born and grew up. After all the bodies were removed, she, along with the other young people left, were made to take all the furnishings and belonging to the ghetto residents outside, to be loaded onto Nazi trucks and taken to Germany.
Before she lost the ability to be nasty and hurtful she talked about some of what she went through. Art Spiegelman used her for notes for Maus and Maus II.
She was angry and afraid and emotions I’ve never understood since the day I was born. She was easy in telling tales, tales I couldn’t stop asking about — and couldn’t block out of my mind.
I’ve thought about her scar, and the blurred blue ink underneath, since I was old enough to touch her arm.
I want your number, mom —
the number
first tattooed on your virgin flesh
then burned away
in a pique of freedom
I need the number
for a new covenant
to wear your shame as
my badge of memory
one star
one number
for each family lost
by each family serving
as a Ner Tamid[1].
This is no covenant
of secret mutilation
passing a livestock brand
from a time beyond memory
this –
this is our new brand
of bondage, body and
soul
to the strength and power we lacked
in ages past and present.
I claim this covenant everlasting
between me and my uncles and aunts
my grandparents and cousins
my parents and sister and children
This is a covenant between
we new priests of memory
and our havurot[2]
and temples
and synagogues
and shtibles[3]
and homes
and hearts
This covenant is to teach and remind
remember and relate
how god did not Pass us Over
and heard not the helpless cries from ghettos
truck exhausts rifle stocks bullets
boxcars camps
dry showers
This covenant is to preach
that a people of memory without strength
a people of knowledge without
wisdom
are a people doomed to repeat
a history well remembered
I pray for wisdom to battle hate
I bind my mind with t’fillin[4] of discipline of the hand
and love between my eyes
I mourn destructions and deaths in dirge and sirens
And celebrate Warsaw rebellions, Maccabean redemptions
Engage in pilpul[5] and hevruta[6] among
The untaught and unremembering
practice the arts of understanding
kindness
firmness
resistance
and war without quarter
or mercy
| Baruch anachnu hasordimba’alei zikaron k’dosheinu asher kidashnu et atzmeinul’sherut ameinu la’ad | Blessed are we the survivors masters and owners of our martyrs’ memories who have consecrated ourselves to our people’s service forever |
Amen.
Yom Ha’Shoah Ve’Hagvurah[7]
April 19, 2001
[1] Eternal flame, a light of remembrance
[2] Groups of students who learn together, or Jewish Reconstructionist congregations
[3] Small congregations of Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Jews meeting is small synagogues or family homes
[4] Leather phylacteries, leather straps and parchment boxes worn on the arm and head during daily prayers by Orthodox Jews
[5] Argumentative give-and-take used to understand and learn an academic point
[6] A pair or group of students learning together
[7] Holocaust and Heroism (Remembrance) Day
