"Lost in translation, ya'll just lost in traffic."

Finished a story tonight. Posting it here along with a revision of the last thing I wrote:

One or Two


Sleep is No Mean Art


Had a fortune cookie in my mongolian yesterday: "Next week at this time, something good is coming your way." Is that right?

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eventually

Studying Engineering was difficult for me. The academic rigors were one thing (and I posit it as the most difficult undergraduate pursuit). But my mind was another. I never thought like an engineer, though I learned to incorporate its virtues into my experience. Learned the morality of function: a thing that does not work is of diminished value, it reverts to the sum of its parts. Learned to be critical of efficiency and logic: go on and pit your syllogisms against Gravity and Entropy. Developed a systematic approach to understanding things. And yet, I dreamed. I wrote poems. I read. I wrote two and a half novels in my time learning Statics and Calculus. And the hunger in my stomach was palpable, barking at the future. Demanding its share of time, its attention. Barking to keep one up at night.

And so, this kid (forget the chemicals and the altercations and the music and the slinking in the shadows). Walked down that windtunnel between limestone monuments, splashed feet in puddles limned with cigarettes, cut swathes through crowds of pigeons. I promised him that I would feed it. That when this Engineering thing fizzled (when I finally suffocated, see, and emerged) I would do whatever I had to do to learn my craft. To sharpen tools I thought I had. To find the truest way to transliterate the world I know into the world that is.

And so today I had this thought about the dim possibility that undergrad would extend another year, and I'd be another two semesters floundering around. Waiting for real concentration, waiting for real challenge. Writing, writing, but without the sobering sense of booktitle English accomplishments. And I just remembered myself walking in that wind, toward the library to rage over math problems I lacked the patience for, making promises. Making promises.

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random.

The Sad Truth About Relationships

Today I listened to my officemate discuss the details of his brother's slow death in another timezone with his sister on the phone. Brain cancer has destroyed an optic nerve, and surgery to correct the growth caused a stroke and complete blindness as well as hydrocephalus and short-term dementia. He wakes up starving from naps and doesn't know where he is or why he cannot see. The news has to be broken to him over and over again. His wife there holding his shaky hand. How can I write something fictive that matters after thinking of that? And how did I spend all day thinking of my personal bullshit?

Western civilization and technology encountered island populations in the South Pacific and even Indian Oceans long after much of the rest of the world was "settled". When westerners discovered Easter Island the few remaining inhabitants (they had cut down all of their trees, understand?) had been living under the impression that the universe consisted of their dying island and an infinity of ocean on all sides. In New Guinea, in the 1930s, a British official encountered a previously uncontacted village. After several days of trying to communicate with them, one villager strolled out to the air strip that had been hacked into the mountainside and lashed himself to the airplane there. He had to see where the thing came from. He was willing to die to see where it came from. There is an island in the Indian Ocean, Sentinel Island, that is occupied by a long dissociated collection of the Andaman tribe. No one understands their language and they have only seen other tribes and Westerners from a distance. What do they make of our helicopters and boats and airplanes?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

Barack Obama just gave an amazing speech about race in America. Watch it.

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Magic Realism

Reading Like Water for Chocolate

my distaste for magic realism grows. I have no problem with supernatural events occurring in literature, I'm far from a strict realist. But this genre, this device, is philosophically misleading. In Like Water for Chocolate, as in Midnight's Children, or many other post-colonial works, the inexplicable nature of life and our place in it is given a false order. A character is surreptitiously born during preparations for a feast (in fact born into the feast itself), and thus lives a life enchanted with food. She cries so much that when the tears dry, the salt leftover is enough to fill a ten pound sack. She variously cries and bleeds into many meals that have profound emotional effects on the readers. I'm hoping she shits or pisses in a pie before it's through.

So what, exactly, is my problem with magical realism? It is too easy, it is too allegorical, it is too clean. It suggests nothing of the anxiety that we feel towards the world's incomprehensibility, and replaces it with the suggestion that all is right and logical, so long as we bend the coincidences of life to their breaking point. Life does not make sense in easy terms. Magical realism is merely an attempt to usurp religion as the ridiculous cipher for this chaos. It suggests order where there is none.

And yet, I revere works of surrealism. Because Kafka and Beckett and Barthelme do not flinch, though their worlds are fantastic. They use the logic of dreams to characterize our anxiety and confusion. They hold up no answers, just questions all the way down to your spine. . .

Anyway. Everyone seems to love this stuff except me.

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Gravity

The iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total bastard. The iron will always kick you the real deal. The iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But 200 pounds is always 200 pounds. - Henry Rollins

That rebuilding requires destruction. That's what laughs me. That's what I smirk at when I smirk at signals and streaks in windows and solemn slow-suicides lingering in my periphery. I don't want it to not be cold at night, when I pace on patient concrete that waits for our world to end. I ain't sought resolution for this shiver, the slivers from the system I climbed. Let a thing bleed so the flotsam of memories can chunk in the asthma, in the far behind. And epochs ago we strolled thru weeds we'd named in our sleep. Collected rocks to be honed into the thin line between starve and ghost. Turned the nausea of stars into a history wrote. Now I blink slow, every second unfolds like a photograph, like smoke.

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