A Joke/A Crime

BOOKS FROM 2009

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:28:27 GMT

1. The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. Pretty good, actually. It made me like Margaret Atwood a lot more, and the science-fiction bits were entertaining, since I don't usually read scifi.
2. The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond. This was okay, I guess, but the ending wasn't very believeable and the writing was... oddly familiar.
3. Uglies, by Scott Westerfield. My rating: I need to stop reading books for friends. Halie wanted me to read this one. It had a few big plot holes; the characterization was meh; things weren't clear enough.
4. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. (for class) The beginning was really good; it's one of those books with layers.
5. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. (for class) It gave me some really intense images.... I got a lot out of it, especially with all the discussions we had in class.
6. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (for class).
7. The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston (for class). All the books I've read by Chinese-American authors are eerily similar....
8. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (for class)
9. The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards.
10. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevky (re-read) (for class)
11. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (10/10) But I'm definitely going to have to read it again.
12. If you want to Write: A book on Art, Independence, and Spirit, by Brenda Ueland (nonfiction)
13. Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus. (More Greek plays!)
14. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson.
15. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (for class)
16. the ground beneath her feet, by Salman Rushdie
17. The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer
18. Exile and the Kingdom, by Albert Camus.
19. East, West, by Salman Rushdie
20. Fury, by Salman Rushdie
21. The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy (I'm getting to love these Russian novelists...)
22. Mind Scan, by Robert J. Sawyer
23. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
24. Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer (all this science fiction I've been reading lately made me realize the genre's not as bad as I'd always thought :))
25. Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (I really liked this)
26. 1984, by George Orwell
27. The Host, by Stephanie Meyers (Lourdes made me read this... somebody stop me.)
28. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
29. The Likeness, by Tara French
30. Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proulx
31. The Trial, by Franz Kafka (he's a crazy man, this Kafka guy....)
32. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
33. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
34. The Wall (Intimate) by Jean-paul Sartre
35. Into the Woods, by Tara French
36. Never Let me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
37. My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
38. Rant, by Chuck Palanhuik
39. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
40. The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
41. The Promise, by Chaim Potok
42. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe

I am reading: The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (which is shaping up to be excellent)

Writing Experiment: A Bedtime Story

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:07:27 GMT

A Bedtime Story

-

“Tell me the story.”

“It’s two in the morning Seth,” she answers, and I can picture her rubbing her eyes, maybe looking up at her Garfield clock. It’s one of those cheap, stupid ones, with a tail instead of a pendulum and big green eyes printed on the face.

“Please?” I ask. “I can’t sleep.”

Now she’s sighing – I can hear the hiss of breath through the receiver – and leaning her elbows against the counter. She’s in the kitchen, sitting on one of the barstools, toying with a whiskey glass left out from the night before. Her house is off campus, the kind people always rent out to college students like us – empty, no decorations, with old but sturdy furniture. The kind of house that seems terribly empty at night. All her roommates are asleep, of course; it’s just her up, alone, shadows stretching into impossible shapes and distances until it’s a huge, indistinguishable mess, everything blurred. Light and dark, shapes and space, morality and immorality….

It’s quiet….

“Okay whatever,” she mumbles, half under her breath. And she tells me the story. She tells me about how, when she was seven, maybe eight years old, she saw this kid get beat up on the playground.

“There was a red barn in the middle of our sandbox,” she says, “and it had all four walls, so the teachers couldn’t see into it.”

“A barn?”

“Yeah. I lived near a college with a lot of developmental science programs – child-rearing, things like that – and my mom sent us there because she didn’t like the public schools. They had a lot of alternative stuff, a lot of new-age theories. Like instead of giving a kid a time out, you should let him throw a fit because it would help the other kids develop problem management skills. Stuff like that. It’s kind of stupid, looking back, but I had fun.”

I can hear the smile in her voice.

“These two kids, Nate and… Josh? Jake? I can’t remember their names, but they cornered another kid in the barn during recess one day. He was one of those painfully shy kids who ends up being a phenomenal soccer player or something, but he was only eight then and not good at much of anything. I think his name was Samuel.”

She inhales, thickly.

“I’d climbed a tree that recess, I remember, and was sitting up in the branches. It wasn’t very high, but I could see through the window if I turned the right way. I saw the two boys go in, and….”

Another pause.

“They joked with him a little at first. And then they started pushing him, and kicking sand in his eyes. I remember the look on his face so clearly. He was so scared, so panicked; he kept looking at me....” She is silent for a long moment, and I imagine that she has held the phone away from her mouth, to hide her shallow, ragged breathing.

I remember darkness, and cool sand underfoot.

“They got him down on the ground and started kicking him – hard, like they were really trying to hurt him. Like he’d done something wrong, and this was all a punishment. I wondered about it, of course; I wondered if he’d done anything worse than existing, than breathing, than being there, but I never did find out. I never said a word about it to anyone, actually, and neither did he. The bell rang and he came out of the barn, I came out of the tree; we went to class, everything business as usual.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“I guess. I don’t remember feeling particularly torn up about it.”

“But you sounded –”

“Like I should sound. Like I’ve made myself feel. Back then I didn’t feel bad about it at all, only curious. I remember wanting to see if the he had any bruises, if they’d broken any ribs. She laughs a little. “It’s completely awful of me, I know, but that’s how it was.”

“It’s not awful,” I said. “You were a kid; you didn’t know any better.”

“I was eight. Hardly a kid anymore.”

“I guess, but still….”

I imagine her drumming her fingers against the countertop. I imagine her getting up to fill the whiskey glass with water, her small hands cupped around it. Of course, I don’t really know if she’s doing those things; maybe she’s in her bedroom, leaning against her pillows with her feet curled up beneath her, or maybe she’s out on the porch, smoking. Maybe she’s not even at home. Maybe I called the wrong number, and this whole conversation has been a bizarre mistake.

I almost want it to be. Everything she told me happened years ago, of course, before we’d really met (in high school, our sophomore year). I hadn’t known her then, hadn’t even known she existed, but it still feels like she’d betrayed me.

(When I see her tomorrow, will she have cloven feet? A third arm? A forked tongue?)

She sighs, shifts the phone in her hand.

“Well you got your story, Seth” she says, “I’m going back to bed.”

“Oh, yeah. Course,” I say, and we exchange a few more pleasantries. Right at the end though, as I’m about to hang up, she speaks again.

“Seth?”

I pause. “Hm?”

“…You know… I… oh, nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah….”

I hang up slowly, my fingers taking longer than usual to find the right buttons.

(What had I wanted her to say? When it was all silence, when she could have said anything, what had I wanted to hear? Something to make it better, maybe, to make it feel like she was still a good person.)

I close my cell phone and lay back into the pillows, and for a while it’s very dark, very still and silent….

I imagine her looking up at her Garfield clock – broken, now; you can only ever know the time in hours – and pouring a glass of whiskey from the bottle at her elbow. I imagine her hanging up the phone, her small, soft, sinner’s hands lingering for a moment against the cradle.

This, I've decided, will (might maybe could possibly) be one of my senior project stories.

Writing Experiment: Transience (Fog at Night)

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:36:09 GMT

I could put a hand through the world
It seems so thin, so
Surreal. Lights hang like islands, and fog
Obscures the distance.

Narrow streets shrink the city to microcosms.
We walk like strangers, awe-struck;
We wonder at the distance of
Feet from head

But these things too will fade away;
The memory will go
Like all the others:
Quickly.

Across Oceans

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:08:54 GMT

Here are the best of the Europe pictures. Finally :)

<!--

	On a Hill in Florence from left to right: Alex, Jennica, , Jessica, Will, myself, Cameron, Will, Matt
	Alex: The travelling girl
	Carpy and Fo-fo!
	A street in Madrid From left to right: Alex, Cameron, myself, Jennica, Mr Carpenter (Carpy), and William.
	Barcelona William and I in a market in Barcelona. We both bought cactus flower smoothies - they were very good. I hate the look on my face D:
	Cameron (in makeup) They did this to him in Madrid :P
	From left to right: myself, Jordyn, Cameron, Ali, Jordan, Jennica, Alex, William, Elyse.

	group shot in front of a church near the leaning tower of Piza
	the Pantheon More natural, more raw and primitive than anything else on that trip, and beautiful because of it.
	skeleton built into the wall of one of the churches in... I think it was Florence?
	in Spain A restaraunt we stopped at for lunch in Barcelona. The food was excellent - mixed fish or chicken and rice platters. They have a special name I can't remember.
	one of the 'street performers' in Barcelona, Spain
	in England
	telephone booths! It was so cool to see one of these!
	in England the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham palace.
	bus ride Alex and Jennica on the bus.
	I don't remember where this was....
	in the Louvre yeah, the famous inverted pyramids.
	in the Louvre us on some stairs in the louvre.

	lunch in Paris this was a neat little resaurant behind Notre Dame. I had escargot and frog legs, and they were SO good - especially the escargot.
	Campagne The campagne tour in Campange. A very tourist-y stop.
	london the London syline from our hotel on the first day.
	the group in mirrors
	a drowned girl (painting)
	a personal cathedral for a king of France this is so beautiful....
	Notre Dame
	the Eiffel Tower
	Fou-Fou and Carpy by some puff-trees in Germany
	mother-child zone (a street sign) I thought this was so cute.
	The White Cliffs of Dover taken as we were leaving for France, by ferry. We played a lot of Mao on the trip.
	in Germany at the music and beer festival
	in Italy
	in front of the Roman ruins William, Jennica, Cameron, me, Alex, Ms. O'Neil
	graffiti in italy there was an entire tunnel covered like this....
	Jennica, while waiting in line for a museum
	a cool street sticker, in Rome
	in Florence, Italy Matt, Will, Jessica, talking about the Catholic kids
	a statue in one of the Greece museums I've a thing for lion statues... :)
	the plaza in Spain (Madrid?) Jennica, me, and Alex
	the plaza in Spain (Madrid?)
	Jessica and Will, her boyfriend this is one of my favourite pictures :)

Writing Experiment: Madness

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:57:58 GMT

Light splits the hills, and
Colour comes spilling out:
What suddeness!
Riots erupt in the hills;
Insanity sweeps through the trees.
Rooted, helpless,
They resist the slow death,
The months-long death
As they slip, unstoppably,
Into blue chills and ice.

We can only endure,
Slow-stepping down
Sidewalks slicked
With the possibility of accidents.
Melancholy, we wait
For winter to flee this
Sad, silent place, full of crackings.
Black birds clutch at their perches.

(Notes: I'd written a little bit as we were driving home from Oregon the other day, but only a few lines. And then yesterday, as I was reading one of my Plath books (I'm doing my research paper on her from my senior project), I started to work on it again, and the whole thing came out in less than fifteen minutes. :))

Writing Experiment: Πυθία

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:06:48 GMT

Dark room in which I meditate,
knees crossed, eyes closed,
patient as Pythia.

But where are the gases?
the divine visions,
the inspiration?

Time passes;
only Nothing
comes.

Writing Experiment: Accident-Prone

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:44:46 GMT

Vodka removes masks and loosens tongues;
It clears my vision, and
I find the brains I catered to, childlike,
Are rotting.

Once-smooth limbs move jerkily,
Stupidly;
Shrieks rip from calm throats.
I have stumbled on someone's mistake.

Please, please,
An excuse, Sir, a pardon:
We are only human,
And accident-prone.

Writing Experiment: Pills and Guitar Strings

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:33:01 GMT

I tried to sew myself up today;
Using books and guitar strings
I reached down to fix the wound,
A self-doctoring of
Internal bleeding.

Please sew me up, shut me up,
Stuff me with pills.
Put a stopper in me please, sir undertaker;
For a week I’d like to die.

EDIT: Alex laughed so hard when she realized this was about periods.... : )