Instead of saying answer you should say questionment.

did anyone not get that the thing that I posted below (Mourning) was about someone who died and not something like a breakup?

Side note 1: you know you are a lit nerd when your favorite kind of gift certificate is to Amazon.com and you have memories of spending most of your Christmas money on books.

Side note 2: I'm posting one of my favorite poems below. Ironically enough, I saw it on the 1 train in New York one day on my way to work.

A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

When My Brain Left Yesterday

My brain seemed to leave yesterday, sometime during the hockey game, and all that was left was my heart, and it was trying to make up for the empty space inside of me by pushing itself into my throat. It only made things worse.

And this morning, amid all of the uncertainty, the only thing I wanted to know, but couldn't remember, was what was the poem I gave to my Dad for his birthday years ago-because my brain left, and my heart is working double-duty, and it only makes it worse, because hearts don't think.


Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

flimsy concrete

has anybody else noticed that when it rains, Lederle and the FAC look like they are made out of wet cardboard?

i think that this is the cutest, most whimsical architectural quirk about UMass.

Mourning

My computer crashed just as I was about to finish this. I cannot describe my frustration. Finally, I can write cathartically about something so important, and my computer crashes and I lose it.

Sigh.

Anyway, I'd like to request comments on it. People's reactions. Thanksabunch.



Mourning
~~~~~~~~

This is semi fiction.

It's kind of like a semi-autobiography. Maybe it's not exactly how things happened. Maybe it's something that you wish happened. Maybe it's something that happened just a little bit differently in your life. Maybe it's a few things, all mixed together, intermingling like the feelings in your head, and it's not exactly true, but it means so much to you.

You say "pie" when you hang up the phone because it's too difficult to say "bye," and it is really time to go now, it's been time for so long, you really have to be going, so "I miss you" and then in a small unwilling voice, "pie." And you tell yourself, I've only met this person once, a really good once, but it was only just once. But then you tell yourself, it was good, it was so good, I haven't felt this connected in years, I haven't lost myself so completely in anyone in so long. Maybe ever. And then you tell yourself that it helps so much with the other thing, with the death. And now you're having a conversation with yourself. But really, it's a conversation with her still. You're always having a conversation with her in the back of your head. The only time it really stops is when you see her again and you're talking to her for real. It's better than you remember. It's better than you remember because your memory can't hold it, can't contain it. But you don't need your memory to hold it because every time you talk to her, every moment in between when you even think of her, you feel it in your chest. It moves you. It moves you so much that it feels like your guts are actually shifting in concert with your heart. It moves you so much that when you do talk to her again you have to say "pie" because you can't say "bye."

I knew her for five years of my life. Five years of drifting back and forth. You can look at it two ways: I had a series of relationships, and saw her in between. Or, I saw her off and on again, and had a series of relationships in between. Really, it's both of those, and neither. Really, talking about it like this is missing the point.

It's two weeks now. Two difficult weeks. The other thing is helping. And it's the first time you can talk about her, even just a little. You miss little things about her, because you've known her for so long and so intimately. You can tell when you haven't spoken for months and you're hanging out again, you can tell exactly what's going on, the subtext is familiar and good. When she's touching her hair that way, it means she's hoping you'll kiss her. And a thousand other tender little things.

And in your mind you have a map of the landscape. It's not a topographically correct map. It doesn't have all the mountains or all the rivers or all the the towns. But you can see it clearer than you can when you try to think of one of those. It only exists in your mind. It's all the places that ever meant anything to you together. That place you went that time in the summer when you were young that you kept coming back to, exploring, mapping together, claiming. All the sites you saw and sounds you heard and things you said and things you did together. This used to be a wonderful thing. She always used to be there on this map, at a distance. You always used to be able to think that someday you'd find each other again against the backdrop of a chaotic life, even if just for a while.

I believe that all change is good. I try to. I try so hard. I tell myself that all change is good. I tell myself that I should be happy for all these wonderful memories. That I should be happy that she's so important to who I am now. That I'll take it all forward with me. And now I'm having a conversation with myself. But really, it's missing having a conversation with her. Will I always be talking to her in the back of my head? Will how good it was fade from my memory?

I think back to that time before I left. She told me that after those four weeks, those four glorious weeks, she was mine then. She was moving her hips to the music I gave her, and thinking about me all the time, wanting to spend lazy afternoons making love, wanting to be with me. I was moving to New York to leave everything behind, to start a new life. She told me, so much after the fact, when it wasn't important anymore, not in the same way at least, but so important in this other way, she told me that if I'd stayed, she would've been mine heart and soul. And I told her that if she'd told me that, if I'd suspected even just a little, I would've stayed. I've never meant anything more. And she cried a little, and I cried a little, and that's one of the last things I ever said to her.

writing about music

"you, you're a history in rust" by do make say think is just plain amazing. I mean, the individual songs are great... but I just finished listening through it the entire way for the first time in the five days that I've had it. After the last song faded, something seized my heart, and I could not move or speak or do anything: it was as if the happiest moment in my life had just brushed up against my chest, surprising me completely, stopping me, breath held, just before tears rushed to my eyes.

That is one good album.

As a multi-instrumentalist myself, I know that creating music with moments like that is difficult, let alone making an entire album have that effect. I feel like this difference can be likened to the difference between a really good short story, and a really good novel. I've been trying to quantify what I like about some writing more than other writing lately,and the best that I've been able to come up with is the idea of things that aren't said explicitly but are nonetheless received. For instance, throughout the album, there are little moments... for instance: a really pretty instrumental section coming to an end with people making funny noises with their mouths. Only you don't realize that it's people making these noises. And then all of a sudden they stop, and they laugh good-naturedly in the one second of silence before a guitar picks up the melody again. It shows the humanity behind the music, but it fits so perfectly. This is a poor example...

Also, of supreme relavence: http://xkcd.com/304/

Slightly wonderful?

Heroic Simile

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

-Robert Hass

I know this is poetry, but it inspired me- the language, the tone, the twists on perspective- I even recommended it to Lindsey in workshop today... Maybe you'll like it, too. :-)

Hello, I was just writing to see if everyone received the story I sent out last week and if they were able to open the attachment okay? I don't have microsoft word right now, so I wrote it in this strange word processor, I don't even know what it's called, and then converted it to a word document. So hopefully the conversion worked okay, but if anyone had trouble with it just let me know!

Andy

Swooning

over this:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20060320/flying-f.shtml

New story love.

Butler

"Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin."
a.) this seems like sage advice
b.) it seems like sage advice, for literary fiction writers, that is, there it is, Butler is fully admitting that this is what he's talking about, writing literary fiction. And yes, he's a snob who looks down on "genre" fiction like romance and sci-fi/fantasy, etc., but his advice will let your (if that's what you want to write, those of you whom I think of as wanting to write) "genre" work rise, like Kelly Link's, above it's little "genre" ghetto and be thought of as literature, and what writer doesn't want her/his work to be thought of as great literature? None that I know. Stephen King may like making the money, but he wants to be thought of as a serious and talented writer, I'm guessing, more than anything else in the world.
(The photo is of Robert Lax, poet, who went from NYC success to a hermetic life on a Greek island. For too long, I thought that this is what you had to look like to be a "real" writer, more or less.)

Yes, those of you who've somehow heard, I will be reading for about 15 minutes at Amherst Books this Friday, along with two colleagues. Show starts at 8.

George Saunders on The Colbert Report

Click here.

inspiration

a little exercise.

I don't have anything left to say. I'm hollowed out. I just want to stop, right here, stop hard and fast and hollow. Wait for my heart to stop pounding, and then to stop beating. And then just wait in the silence.