Bev gives the best edit ever. Just appreciation of this thread and its denizens.
I, for one, wasn't looking forward to starting my day with a slaughter. Which, really, just goes to show how much I've grown
Anya ,'Sleeper'
The Great Write Way
A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.
Liese S. - Oct 14, 2002 10:17:23 am PDT #73 of 10001
"Faded like the lilac, he thought."
Rebecca Lizard - Oct 14, 2002 9:05:12 pm PDT #74 of 10001
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket
New poem.
FOGGY POEM
I'm tired of the incandescence of your smile. The air near me is heavy, humid, curling around the edges. Six days of rain and I can feel my humor wearing through with touch; my patience gumming from the persistent fogging of your breath. The sun is down for the count. I am riveted by your voice, and the new grass growing on the lawn. Soft shoots of green. You brush my hair: your clever fingers seeking out my knots. The rain returns. The blade is sharp. I click my fingers. Step away.
It has its problems. But I like it so far.
victor infante - Oct 18, 2002 1:49:22 am PDT #75 of 10001
To understand what happened at the diner, we shall use Mr. Papaya! This is upsetting because he's the friendliest of fruits.
Hey. This is more of the first part of an essay than it is fiction (in that it's not. Fiction.) But if anyone's up I wouldn't mind a little feedback.
I sit on the porch of my third floor, triple decker apartment and light up a smoke. Marlboro reds, the same damn cigarette I’ve been smoking since college. Someday I’m going to give it up, I tell myself, like I’ve given up so many other bad habits. Someday.
These days, my nerves are frayed a bit thin. It’s been more than a year since I left Orange County, traded in the prefab, cookie cutter unit for hard wood floors and a clawfoot tub, traded a vaguely aesthetic beige box for an ugly, monolithic old monstrosity built at the turn of the 20th century to house the families of factory workers.
Of course, there aren’t any factories here anymore, at least not many. The factories died-off years ago when America stopped producing things. They moved overseas, where malnourished kids would do the same job for a dollar a month. Worcester’s haunted by the old. The old folks on my street sit on their stoops like they’ve done for decades. At the newspaper I work for, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the old-timers get a wistful, sad look in their eyes when they talk about the old-style, hot metal method of printing the paper, as if all this cutting-and-pasting and computer pagination was an unseemly shortcut, like not doing it the hard way, the irrevocable way, were somehow less honest.
From my porch, I can see row after row of aging buildings. I can see the nearby corner deli, where the old guy that owns it sneaks a cigarette himself behind the counter. If I were to wander down the street a bit, I’d see row after row of bombed-out warehouses, where the goods they don’t make here anymore aren’t stored. Inside one of them, you can take a rickety old elevator that probably hasn’t been safety-tested since the Carter administration up to the top floor, and be greeted by immense metal sculptures of pyramids with piercing eyes gazing out of them. In another, a punk band thrashes to the smell of motor oil embedded in the walls.
Worcester is dilapidated and haunted, but it has its treasures, and for all its faults, its ugliness and its past-mindedness, it’s real. Real as this building, which has lasted a century, and will probably last another one if the crazy cowboy in the White House doesn’t start pushing buttons randomly. Real as the sadness in the voice of an aging newspaperman, nostalgic for days when printing the news could scald you. Where you had to get it right the first time.
I’m as impermanent as the ember of this cigarette, and if nothing else, I damn well know it. I’m from Orange County, and Orange County is about the electric crackle of the new. The buildings are new, the music is new. Even the Republicans are new. Orange County is a gamble built on ocean sand and adrenaline. It’s a metaphor for consumer culture, where even it’s self is worn and discarded before the next issue of Style is printed. And you can say what you want about its Conservativeness, but consider this: in most conservative places, the mindset is about retaining the past. In Orange County, it’s about shaping the future.
The poet James Still once wrote, “Being of these hills I cannot pass beyond.” I’ve often felt like that about Orange County. Although I’ve left often, I’m always drawn back, as if by tides. When I was young, I thought that O.C. was no place for an anarchist-stealth-Christian-punk-rock-listening-pacifist-writer-and-poet. Too many contradictions brewing in my head, so many that it often felt like my brain was on fire, and none of the contradictions matched with the sterility surrounding me. I was wrong, but then, the young often are. You learn that after awhile.
I love Worcester, but I don’t belong here. Not really, or perhaps, not yet. There’s still too much ocean in me, too much of my spirit drawn westward, although I too have my ghosts, and I still, to paraphrase Rimbaud, wake with my head alight with flame.
I sit on my porch and smoke a cigarette and watch the people walk by—Blue Collar town in a way that Southern Californians can’t really understand. I sit and I smoke and try to make sense of the million nagging things that brought me here. Hold smoke in my lungs for a second, than exhale, and realize that I’m not the hero of this story.
Susan W. - Oct 18, 2002 10:27:04 am PDT #76 of 10001
Good Trouble and Righteous Fights
I like it, Victor--your imagery paints a vivid picture. I did get a bit lost in this sentence:
At the newspaper I work for, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the old-timers get a wistful, sad look in their eyes when they talk about the old-style, hot metal method of printing the paper, as if all this cutting-and-pasting and computer pagination was an unseemly shortcut, like not doing it the hard way, the irrevocable way, were somehow less honest.
Maybe chop it up a bit? Something like: "At the newspaper I work for, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the old-timers get a wistful, sad look in their eyes when they talk about the old-style, hot metal method of printing the paper. It's as if all this cutting-and-pasting and computer pagination was an unseemly shortcut, and not doing it the hard, irrevocable way was somehow less honest."
victor infante - Oct 18, 2002 10:29:41 am PDT #77 of 10001
To understand what happened at the diner, we shall use Mr. Papaya! This is upsetting because he's the friendliest of fruits.
That's a good idea. I think I'll do that. Thanks!
erikaj - Oct 18, 2002 11:06:15 am PDT #78 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!
wow, Victor. You rock. Go team Description!
Theodosia - Oct 18, 2002 12:26:37 pm PDT #79 of 10001
'we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon"
I don't suppose you can somehow work the very odd clothes-drying contraptions in your neighborhood into that. :-) Actually, they deserve their own damn column.
I honestly can't think of anyway to improve on what you've written so far. I come away feeling that it hasn't gotten to the end, FWIW.
victor infante - Oct 18, 2002 1:12:37 pm PDT #80 of 10001
To understand what happened at the diner, we shall use Mr. Papaya! This is upsetting because he's the friendliest of fruits.
don't suppose you can somehow work the very odd clothes-drying contraptions in your neighborhood into that. :-) Actually, they deserve their own damn column.
I have no idea yet how to describe that contraption. Think I must meditate on the subject.
I honestly can't think of anyway to improve on what you've written so far. I come away feeling that it hasn't gotten to the end, FWIW.
It hasn't. I hit a natural breaking point, and I wasn't sure how I felt about it, so I shared. I imagine the full product will be 2,000 to 4,000 words, which I'll probably shop as an essay. I then think it might be the introduction to a larger work. We'll see.
Connie Neil - Oct 18, 2002 1:26:51 pm PDT #81 of 10001
brillig
I was looking through some old poetry the other night, back from the early 80s. It's all still true, but I know so much more about writing now than I did then. I can't think of any way to polish it without losing the feel. And putting that much post-adolescent, possibly-pretentious writerly stuff out in public makes me more anxious than posting my first smut.
victor infante - Oct 18, 2002 1:30:05 pm PDT #82 of 10001
To understand what happened at the diner, we shall use Mr. Papaya! This is upsetting because he's the friendliest of fruits.
And putting that much post-adolescent, possibly-pretentious writerly stuff out in public makes me more anxious than posting my first smut.
If it's any consolation, I get that feeling when I see a copy of my first book, or even the "Selected Early Poems" that came out a couple years ago. Just can't even read it, and it horrifies me that it's still in print.