In our city, the floodgates are kept shut by a machine powered on human breath. We call it the regulator. It listens to the lungs the same way a metronome listens to music. If rhythm breaks, the gates slip. Then the river takes everything.
Continue reading “They Say It’s Wonderful by Prin Sairungsri”
Why and how and what do we write? This question could (and probably should) be reordered and its verb could equally be changed to paint, sculpt, act, dance … Human beings do these strange things to make their mark, a little stand against the indifferent and inexorable passage of time, and have been doing so, it seems, ever since they could, as has been revealed in distant caves: stencilled hands in Argentina and pictures of pig hunting in Sulawesi. This brings to mind for some reason a discreet headline I spotted years ago in a once reputable newspaper: ‘Carvings twice as old as thought.’ Were they being done instinctively, or was the sub-editor mischievous or sloppy? But the original question was about writing. Does graffiti count? Seen by some as an ugly nuisance, by others as valid self-expression, it can be inane – Kilroy woz ere – or emotionally significant to the inscriber – Jack cartoon heart with an arrow through it Jill – and innocent enough as it competes with similar 2,000-year-old declarations on ancient monuments; the lovers are marking a moment in their own story (or stories if the imagined one takes a new direction). Maybe all writing is about story: the shopping list a snapshot of my diet and tastes at one time; the letter a revelation (or concealment) of how I feel about what’s going on in my life and in the wider world; even the essay exposes thoughts or beliefs that may change the next day. Or maybe it’s even more fundamental than that: the power and promise of the word, the uttering of a certain form of words in the incantations of religion and magic, the straining of a word in select company towards the ineffable. In the beginning was the Word.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever. An Essay – No One But a Blockhead Would by Stephen Silvester”
Before I forget, I’ll answer the riddle that I set on Week 602.
What completes the list?
sore
keel
cosh mark
???
The first three are anagrams of the National Symbols of England (Rose), Wales (Leek), Ireland (Shamrock)
So the fourth has to be:
The list
That is an anagram for Scotland’s (Thistle)
I was being a bit unfair as there was a distinct advantage from this side of the pond!
Continue reading “Week 604 – Inhaling Soot,I’ll Walk Next Time And Rob And Kevin.”
I wake up face-down on cold vinyl tile, my sweaty cheek glued to the gray-specked floor. My mouth tastes like someone juiced a cigarette, poured it into a rotten durian, and forced it all down my throat. For a second, I think I’ve died in a stranger’s apartment. Then I see my crusty Jordan 1’s stuck on the ceiling fan.
Continue reading “Bangkok, If You’re Listening by Prin Sairungsri”
I don’t like to complain.
When you live in a neighborhood, side-by-side with other home owners, there’s a little give-and-take that has to go on. On one side of us there’s the Cummings. The Cummings are in their fifties and almost every Sunday they have a little family barbecue, their two sons and their families come over and the kids, they’re still kids, and they make a little noise but Fred Cummings is a good guy and I don’t mind the smoke from his grill because what he’s cooking usually smells good. By seven o’clock, they’re long gone.
Continue reading “I Don’t Like to Complain by Russell Dupont”
I’m Lloyd Landover (aka Low), and this is the first day of high school for my twin sister Linda (aka Falling Down Girl) and me.
Our Mom is Lidia Landover, and she works with numbers for the federal government. She’s not a mathematician, statistician, physicist, astronomer, actuary, or accountant.
Mom doesn’t solve math problems. She doesn’t create theories based on math. She plays very intently with every level of math, and somewhere in the results are stuff the government really wants. She calls her work “math doodling.”
Continue reading “The Landovers by Frederick K Foote”
The cataract sky saw not, yet watched; the wind moved not, yet listened; God spoke not, yet instructed. The day simply was and would be until the last mind stopped thinking about it. A low slung blotch of scuzzy radiance, which Amy assumed was the sun, slouched west within the ashes.
Amy gazed out the living room window. Only a double thickness of glass lay between her lungs and the poisons of an imagined alien atmosphere
Continue reading “Amelia in Waiting by Leila Allison”
A moment before the horror begins.
Imagine two ruthless creatures, each a child’s worst—and often last—nightmare. The first fiend
is a shape-shifting monster. He terrorizes and devours children in the guise of Pennywise, an evil clown. Pennywise gained public attention in a book by a famous American author. The book is purported to be fiction, but this was a ruse to hide the author’s desperate fear of the main character, Pennywise. Alas, the child-eating clown is all too real.
Our second nightmare is the officially sanctioned kidnapper and imprisoner of children, the notorious Child Catcher. This greasy villain from the land of Vulgaria came to notoriety in the documentary film Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
An ocean separates these two terrors, and we must be grateful for this small blessing. For if these monsters should ever meet… No! It is too horrible to contemplate!
Continue reading “Penny Catch by Marco Etheridge”
About the Author
Hahn Moo-Sook (1918-1993) was a native of Seoul whose first artistic aspirations lay in painting, but she subsequently devoted her creative life to literature, publishing at least eight volumes of fiction during her lifetime and serving with distinction in the Korea branch of International P.E.N., in which capacity she brought many world-famous authors to the attention of a Korean audience. She is perhaps best known in English for Encounter: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Korea, translated by Ok Young Kim Chang with a Foreword by Don Baker and published by the University of California Press.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – On Cloud Nine by Hahn Moo-Sook”
As I write this, Elam, a weird looking Housefly the color of motor oil, but mostly of a golden sheen, has been tormenting me for the past half hour. Lucky for Elam that I’ve progressed into a philosophy that everything above a bedbug (notice the lack of a capital B there) is holy. Flies just make the cut, above the way they are as infants, yet below your basic Aphid (seems strange I should kill Flies as babies but not as adults–something Herod in that). Elam had no name until he just happened to rest where I left my eyeglasses. Greatly enlarged by one of my lenses, I noticed that one of his many eyes was droopy. It gave him a sinister mein. I do not have much more to say about the vexation called Elam; I do suspect he will still be bothering my screen as I write further, or at least until one of the Cats pinch off something more to his liking, but for those curious about his name, please refer to the clip at the bottom of this post.
This week our friend The Stream of Consciousness (SOC) makes an unasked for return. Now, this time SOC will be edited. No Molly Bloom goingonandonaboutwhatandwho flibberjittishness, nor weirdo spelling will appear after this particular sentence. No, this SOC will involve the current crash and thud of my little life as it unfolds on a dreary September morning that already has a touch of autumn in it. But not the good touch of crimson and gold (well outside the gold sheen of Elam), but the slightly fluey nudge you get when you cannot clear a nascent sore throat or rid yourself of the constant observation of skies of mildew and the certainty another war will break out today even though you are not up to fake caring for such matters because they never involve you. That of course leads to an astonishingly empty self admonishment. What about the new orphans? And then you hear Al Pacino’s voice from And Justice For All… berate you: “Dontcha’ care-yuh, dontcha’ care-yuh?”
Continue reading “Week 603: Once Upon A Fly Named Elam and the Bittersweet Return of Stream of Consciousness”
