singing to myself

In my attic room studying spanish like crazy. Its 93 degrees out, hotter in. In this heat the work of breaking language out of its music into infinitives and subjunctive clauses, into los estructuras de la lengua, is physical. Still, at times a single word soothes with onomatopoeia. Rascacielos. I can't speak the word without a tenor of passionate menace. Rasca- cielos. Sky scraper. But the music of individual words is partial, fleeting, two serendipitous notes stumbled upon while fiddling with an instrument you don't know how to play. Notes without the the melody of ideas, the virtuosity of emotion. My attention drifts from the text book and I stare out the window into the coolness of canopy, sing the few lines of the few songs that I can sing, over and over. The current cancion is 1842 by Sam Amidon. 

I gleaned these quotes from his tumbler. The first sounds like a line from an early Ondaatje prose poem, the second sounds like what I hope my writing does a little of, and what my favorite writers do a lot of.  

“A musician, if he is a messenger, is like a child who hasn’t been handled too many times by a man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain.”
-Jimi Hendrix 

“The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.”
-John Coltrane

Word Satori: The Dream of India

In India a year has two summers and two winters.

There are no adulterers there.

There is a race of people whose ears hang down to their knees.

In India there are roses everywhere- growing everywhere, for sale in the market, in wreathes around the necks of men and braided in the hair of the women. It seems they could hardly live without roses.

In India they have a class of philosophers devoted to astronomy and the prediction of future events. And I saw one among them who was three hundred years old, longevity so miraculous that wherever he went he was followed by children.

In India the wise men can produce and quell great winds. For this reason they eat in secret.

There are headless men with eyes in their stomachs.

There is a race of feathered people who can leap into trees.

There are warrior women with silver weapons for they have no iron.

And I saw far off the coast of that land a thing in the sky, huge as a cloud, but black and moving faster than the clouds. I asked what that thing could be, and they said it is the great bird Rokh. But the wind was blowing off the coast, and the Rokh went with it, and I never got a closer look.

                                                     
All of the imagery and some of the language are derived from works written in the five hundred years prior to 1492. India, of course, is where Columbus thought he was going. 

I excerpted these stanzas, and arranged them slightly differently, from the essay, The Dream of India.  By Eliot Weinberger.

little summer story

 by Molly Prentiss

Rio Carlos

Summer is finally here in Cambridge. Time for an evening paddle on the Charles river with my lovely Kristin. Terrence Malick shot most of his films during this time of day, taking a week to perfect one scene, in this kind of light, when the world softly bursts into clarity and contrast, edges are carved deep, colors are liquid, wet paint, shadows are black ink. 

Your Prose is Quite Good: Best Rejection Letter Ever

Two months ago I submitted a piece of fiction to the New Yorker, one of the most powerful arbiters of taste when it comes to contemporary fiction. Today I got the following rejection letter, the only such letter that has ever given me a confidence boost.

We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material.  Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it. Your prose is quite good.

Sincerely,

The Editors


Here's the story:

Bathroom Graffiti Iraq

She is wearing purple eye shadow the night before he will be deployed to Iraq for his second tour. He will remember purple eye shadow because she looks down so often as they sit across from one another in the diner booth. Jamie stares out the foggy window. He is soothed by the orange glow of a streetlight and the snow settling atop the roof of her old Volvo wagon. It’s hard for him to look at her too. Her hands are cold and soft as forest duff within his, almost as cold as the Formica beneath his knuckles. 

They order cheeseburgers and hot chocolate. Kate takes the curl of receipt paper and writes something in tiny meticulous letters then takes a photo from her purse and hands it to Jamie with the receipt. In the photo she lays naked on her side. The movement she made across the room after hitting the timer lingers in her pose. She is propped on her elbow, her eyes are distracted. She was already thinking about jumping up to review the picture on the camera’s screen. It was her third try. Jamie tells her the picture is perfect because the dim, grainy, red tinted light is the exact light he sees her in when he closes his eyes to imagine her.

He reads the poem written on the receipt. She tells him that it was her father’s favorite poem, that when he was a Marine, he kept it with him always.

During the flight to Baghdad Jamie copies the poem onto the band inside his helmet.

            I lived my days apart,

            Dreaming fair songs for God

            By the glory in my heart

            Covered and crowned and shod.

            Now God is in the strife,

            And I must seek Him there,

            Where death outnumbers life,

            And fury smites the air.

             I walk the secret way

            With anger in my brain.

            O music through my clay,

            When will you sound again?

Back in Iraq Jamie felt like he could breathe again. Back to Husaybah, Ramadi, Baghdad, Ramadi again, where bombing raids shrieked and thumped the night. With first light came mourning wails rising to frenzy with the sun that dissolved all hope of nightmare.

On foot patrol he learns to distinguish the different timbres and pitches of mourning. He watches fathers beat their chests until ribs crack, mothers tear out hair, knock themselves unconscious against walls. Wives shriek blades of resentment and anger. But for Jamie the lamentations of husbands are the saddest and most terrible because such tenderness in these coarse, chauvinistic men is so unexpected, and so near in quality to the withering germ of tenderness within himself. Siblings and children weep gently at first and begin their pain songs timidly as if reciting scripture, but soon they too are pulled into the whirlpool of grief as the tyranny of absence bangs through their soft minds.

In Baghdad, members of the Madi army wear suicide vests so that if injured in battle they can detonate themselves when American soldiers approach. In the past it was policy to leave the dead for Iraqis to clean up. Now it is Jamie’s job to arrange C4 explosives on their bodies and blow them like the dozens of front doors he blew while on routine raids.  Jamie voluntered so often that after the first week the commander stopped asking, “Whose gonna make me some of that pretty pink mist?” Jamie will walk through it, inhale it, taste it. He doesn’t think about why. It satisfies him like picking off scabs.

Bathroom Graffiti Iraq:

Above the dual toilet paper dispenser there is a horizontal black marker line angled on each end with vertical arrows pointing down at the two rolls. One roll hangs  unfurled like a thirsty tongue into a puddle on the floor where it soaks translucent. Above the black line is the heading: RE-ENLISTMENT PAPERS.

Facing Jamie on the inside of the stall door someone has written very neatly: Blackwater operative gets $30 an hour that’s 30x24x30x12= $259,000 a year. I’m in the wrong line of work.

In large slanted letters below this, someone wrote: You pussy fucking coward, where’s your dignity, what happened to the sacredness of duty, we don’t want you pussy fags here anyway you must be an army grunt. I ain’t dying for you no way. You don’t count here!

            

Next to this Jamie wrote:

Where death outnumbers life,

               And fury smites the air

I walk the secret way

               With anger in my brain.

Above this, with an arrow pointing down, someone wrote: WORD

Photo satori

Speechless

Peter Sarkisian: Dusted

A 3-dimensional cube nearly a meter squared stands alone in the darkened gallery.  Smudge marks appear on the blackened surface of the cube, indicating the presence

of two people, a man and woman, naked and slowly moving around inside.  As their bodies rub against

the soot covered interior walls of the cube, the dark powder transfers to their skin, so that while the cube

itself is slowly wiped clean, the moving bodies inside become veiled and harder to see.

The implied activity inside the cube invites comparison to the story of genesis, birth, and to questions of

physical and existential freedom. Simultaneously, the gestural material-play dominating the projected

planes of the cube opens a discourse on the role of surface in Sarkisian’s art form.  The projected video

relates to the illusion of pictorial space in a painting: just as with a painting, the viewer perceives depth

with the knowledge that the depth is merely an illusion.  As the figures wipe the carbon-like soot from the surface of the cube, abstract color fields of black, yellow and orange slowly transform through an

expressionistic manipulation of pigment.  Yet rather than moving from abstraction to clarity, the figures

obscure themselves, and the walls of the cube continue to ebb between worlds of materiality, impliedspace, and figure-ground relationships

The Great Amaxosa Delusion

THE GREAT AMAXOSA DELUSION

On 23 December 1847, the British Governor of Cape Colony, Sir Harry Smith, summoned together the chiefs of the Amaxosa tribes on the Eastern Frontier. He told them that their territory - the most fertile in South Africa - was to be annexed and made a crown dependency : British Kaffraria. After a while it became clear that the Gaika tribe and their chief Sandila were determined to offer the most stubborn resistance. Sir Harry Smith re-summoned the chiefs. Sandila refused to come. Whereupon Sir Harry deposed him of his chiefship, and in his place, as chief of the Gaikas, appointed an English magistrate called Mr Brownlee. Convinced that they had now dealt with the matter masterfully, the two Englishmen ordered the arrest of Sandila. On 24 December 1850 the force sent out to arrest him was ambushed and the Gaika tribe rose in revolt. White settlers in the military villages along the frontier were attacked and killed whilst celebrating Christmas. Thus began the Fourth Kaffir War : the penultimate stage in the Amaxosas' long defence of their independence, which had continued for sixty years.

By 1853 the British, with their prodigious military advantages (the war cost the Colonial Office nearly a million pounds), were able to impose a military defeat on the tribes. In 1856 there followed what the British were later to call 'The Great Amaxosa Delusion'. This 'delusion' constituted the ultimate stage of the A,axosa nation's defence of its independence.

A girl named Nongkwase told her father that when going to draw water from a stream she had met strangers of commanding aspect. The father went to see them. They told him that they were spirits of the dead who had come to help their people drive the white men into the sea. The father reported to Sarili, an Amaxosa chief, who announced that the people must do what the spirits instructed. The spirits instructed the people to kill all their cattle and to destroy every grain of corn they possessed. Their cattle had become thin and their crops poor as a result of the land already stolen from their by the white man. When every head of cattle was killed and every seed of corn destroyed, myriads of fat beautiful cattle would issue from the earth, great fields of heavy ripe corn would instantly appear, trouble and sickness would vanish, everybody would be young and beautiful, and the white man, on that day, would perish utterly.

The people obeyed. Cattle were central to their culture. In the villages heads of cattle were the measuring units of wealth. When a daughter was married, her father, if rich enough, gave her a cow, an ubulungu - 'a doer of good': this cow must never be killed and a hair from its must always be tied round the neck of each of the daughter's children at birth. Nevertheless the people obeyed. They slaughtered their cattle and their sacred cows and they burnt their grain.

They built large new kraals for the new fat cattle that would come. They prepared skin sacks to hold the milk that was soon to be more plentiful than water. They held themselves in patience and waited their vengeance.

The appointed day of the prophecy arrived. The sun rose and sank with the hopes of hundreds of thousands. By nightfall nothing had changed.

An estimated fifty thousand died of starvation. Many thousands more left their land to search for work in Cape Colony. Those who remained did so as a propertyless labour force. (A little later many were to work as wage slaves in the diamond and gold mines further north.) On the rich, now depopulated, land of the Amaxosa, European farmers settled and prospered.

From John Berger, G. 1972

Jim Jarmusch "Steal from Anywhere"

A Writer's Prayer

I thought this posting appropriate since I will be pursuing a masters degree at Harvard Divinity School in the fall. I returned home last night from a week long visit to the open house for admitted students, during which I was haunted be an insidious realization: I want nothing more than to write very good stories. This means not writing essays, not reading 1300 pages of scholarship per week. However, the program is extremely flexible, I will design my own focus, a number of the professors are novelists, and the diversity and dynamism of the students is inspiring. Two of the New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction writers are recent graduates. And they're paying my tuition, and its fuckin Harvard. We'll see how it goes...

A Writer's Prayer by Wallace Stegner

“Lord, let me grow into such a man as has something to say! Let me be one of those that Henry James speaks of, one of those ‘upon whom nothing is lost.’ Let understanding and wisdom be engraved on my mind as deep as the lines of living on a wise and weathered face. Teach me to love and teach me to be humble and let me learn to respect human differences, human privacy, human dignity, human pain. And then let me find the words to say it so it can’t be overlooked and can’t be forgotten.”

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei documentary coming soon

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry  TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Word Satori

Haven't posted one of these in a while. Just started reading Hemingway after a decade of resistance. This compact vignette from the collection  In Our Time  struck me with its poetical innovation. It was written before 1925!  I'm only now beginning to understand the debt many of my favorite authors, and consequently I owe Hemingway.

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for  his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three  matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn't get the sword in. He couldn't hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand ang puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring. 

Chinese Contemporary

                                          Liu Wei

                                          Wang Qingsong

                                           Zhao Bandi

I came across these images while researching contemporary chinese dissident artists for a story. These artists however, are not necessarily dissidents.