Writers Unbound

Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason?

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist?

Muscular contains a single “A.” No one is aware of this.

Watch the interview of Al Gore on the May 24th episode of the Daily Show. You’ll see that, when he speaks, he certainly makes a lot of sense, but all of it sounds cyborg-esque. One of his “uhhs” reminded me of Max Headroom.

The Xbox Live service is essentially Mos Eisley: a wretched hive of scum and villainy. However, it is a modern interpretation, so that scum and villainy is mostly comprised of hormonal and not to mention sadistic teenagers jacked up on Mountain Dew and UFC bouts.

muscular, Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, cyborg, Max Headroom, Xbox, Xbox Live, Mos Eisley, Star Wars, teenagers, Mountain Dew, UFC

Describe and evoke a simple action (for example, sharpening a pencil, carving a tombstone, shooting a rat).

(Keep in mind, these prompts come from John Gardner’s remarkable book, The Art of Fiction.)

Take a look at these three versions of Lot’s Wife by the eminent Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. The differences between them in diction, tone and the like simply affirm that classic Italian phrase: traduttore, traditore!

And the just man trailed God’s shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
“It’s not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Like some great light, Lot turned and climbed away,
His shade a blot on Sodom’s last black hill.
But Grief addressed his wife, who heard it say,
“It’s not too late to stop and look back still;
To see the towers of the town for one
Last time—the places where you walked and sang;
The windows of the room you bore your son
In and the child bed there that shared each pang.”
Before she’d gone half-way, she could not see.
The blinding crystal she became burned bright
With hard, salt tears; the pillar she would be,
Transfixed by love, stood fast in clearest sight.
Now who will mourn the cities of the plain,
Or cry for her, Lot’s wife? The life she took
May be forgot, but I commend her pain
Who tried to see, and died for one last look.

The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife’s bosom cried,
Look back, it is not too late for a last sight

Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.

She turned, and looking on the bitter view
Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;
Into transparent salt her body grew,
And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.

Who would waste tears upon her? Is she not
The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?
Yet in my heart she will not be forgot
Who, for a single glance, gave up her life.

The sixth edition of the Roundtable Review is now up for your reading pleasure, along with my review of Kapka Kassabova’s Geography for the Lost. Enjoy!

Kapka Kassabova, Geography for the Lost, Roundtable Review, Poetry, Review, Bloodaxe, UK

Since I recently took the AP Calculus exam (although with surely disastrous results) and have officially completed the course, I was asked to write a letter describing the course to next year’s students and offering them advice.

I am a cynic. Here’s what I said:

2007 - 2008 AP Calculus Students:

A year from now, when you’re asked to write a letter like this one, you won’t be able to do it.

It will be physically impossible.

After all, you won’t have fingers. And quite obviously you’ll need fingers. You can’t type with just palms.

( I suppose you could, but the awkward result would be something to the tune of jksdfauhamhavtrhmuarv.)

Where will those fingers be, you ask?

Excellent question.

Well, you’ll have gnawed them all off.

They were causing trouble, you know, scribbling sprawls of unintelligible mathematical gibberish on your paper in some arcane process called “note-taking,” drumming and deconstructing every beat known to mankind on your desktops, occasionally pouncing on your eye sockets or your temples to clutch and rip out whatever they find in frustration.

It’ll just take one single mistake (say, drawing a line incorrectly on a slope field diagram) and you’ll snap. You’ll hear it too: a dry and brutal noise, like an old breadstick finally giving way to a maitre d’s shoe, splintering into starchy slivers as it hacks out a puff of granules into the air like a death rattle.

After that, the epiphany. You’ll realize: you need to savagely crush this insubordination so brashly enjoyed by your digits. You need to Stalinize the situation: iron fists and curtains, poster propaganda, gulags.

And when the time comes to finally do the deed, to dispense a little localized justice and punish your appendages for every murdered integrand and butchered derivative, don’t let Anna Akhmatova fool you. Every nationality of ground loves fresh blood and anyway it can get it, whether it’s trickling out like you forgot to turn a faucet that last inch to the left somewhere in your hand or even gushing forth, flood waters, violent and Biblical, ready to swallow whole any pebble-sized Noahs that might be loitering around.

But I disgustingly digress. And with good reason, mind you. This course will take everything from you: your sanity, your dignity, your sense of accomplishment, your ego, your money (AP testing fees, of course) and then, the final blow, your fingers and whatever other body parts you’ve room for in that pit of self-cannibals you used to call a stomach. You will be annihilated, utterly, unequivocally crushed into a fine and sifting “honor student” powder.

But maybe you’ll do well. Maybe you’ll actually learn something. Maybe, in the end, you’ll be glad you took the course.

Even with all those caveats, though, you’ll still have to lose the fingers. Best to accept it, you know, and move on.

Oh, and don’t get any blood on the textbooks.

You’ll have to pay for them if you do.

- Jason R. Wallace

A clumsy crest of snow scraped the air as she collapsed. The ground opened its cavernous jaws and swallowed her fingers whole like Ahab’s white whale. Flicks of winter spiraled on chilling gusts and latched onto her hair, now a black-velvet curtain hanging in the window of her face. She simply stared at that sea of white for a moment, her head bowed and trembling from the cold and the crying. When she finally looked up, every part of her face strained to make a sound. Her eyes screamed. Her mouth kept growing and shrinking, blossoming and wilting as she tried to eke out a yell, a yelp, a shriek or a squall, any noise.

But nothing came. I couldn’t hear her. Or anything. No wind, no weeping. Nothing at all.

Then a black hole leapt onto her throat. It was the size of a penny and it dripped dark water like a chink in Charon’s ferry. Everything stopped. She grasped for me with her eyes before falling face first into the snow.

I ran to her with my mind, but my legs didn’t come with me. It’s hard to be agile when you’re hunched over, I thought, and gutshot.

A clumsy crest of snow scraped the air as I was kicked over. A grunt jumped out of my mouth and I tasted a bit of copper. In a sideways slant, I could see the batch of roses I’d bought for her birthday splayed out on the ground, some brutally snapped in half from the struggle, some just shocked out of their petals. A hand grabbed the shoulder of my jacket and flipped me onto my back.

His eyes screamed, too, but it was a primitive thing like the minutes before, a spark of barbarism in the city. He thrust his face toward mine, but stopped a hair away. Then, gently and strangely, he put his finger against his lips and mine and shushed.

Flash fiction, Shushed

Here’s a Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch that cleverly reverses some of the old prejudices against writers:

Monty Python, Flying Circus, playwright, working-class

Take five days to write on the following prompt, then, come Saturday, show me what you’ve got by either linking me to your work or emailing it to me.

Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder.

(Keep in mind, these prompts come from John Gardner’s remarkable book, The Art of Fiction.)

Here’s a list of the books I’ll be reading in the next few weeks. Feel free to join me and follow along! You can post your thoughts on these titles via the comment link at the bottom.

John Gardner’s On Becoming A Novelist

Kapka Kassabova’s Geography for the Lost

Albert Camus’s The Stranger

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

John Gardner, On Becoming A Novelist, Kapka Kassabova, Geography for the Lost, Albert Camus, The Stranger, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow