Showing posts with label writing for writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing for writers. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
It's Getting Black Out There!
Fiction International is pleased to announce the winner of our 2011 short fiction contest (Blackness): "Rogues Gallery II" by writer Mary Byrne. Ms. Byrne will receive a cash prize of $1000.00 and her text will be published in the 2012 issue of FI (About Seeing). We'd also like to congratulate runner-up Dorothy Blackcrow Mack for her text "The Black Cradleboard" which will also be published in the 'About Seeing' edition.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
About Seeing
"We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are."
Seeing, Noun: Perception by means of the eyes, beholding, visual perception.
Seeing, Adj.: Having vision, not blind, being sighted - able to see.
Hurry! Only One More Month to Submit!
For an issue About Seeing: Addressing the Visual Arts (cinema, video, painting, photography, etc) Fiction International is looking for texts, stories, and visuals. Go to Fiction International for submission instructions.
"You gentlemen and ladies of quality who frequently don't know yourselves what Christian virtue and justice are, look at the sunken, deep-set eyes of the lower classes, where you can see all too clearly the sorrow and misery that weigh on their hearts. Not everyone who sees his grieved and martyred face in the washroom mirror in the morning is a murderer or drug addict." -- Harold Jaffe, excerpt from Death in Texas
Seeing, Noun: Perception by means of the eyes, beholding, visual perception.
"A presiding officer, even of an ordinary polling station like this, should, in all circumstances, be guided by the strictest sense of independence, he should, in short, always observe decorum." -- Jose Saramago, excerpt from Seeing
Seeing, Adj.: Having vision, not blind, being sighted - able to see.
Hurry! Only One More Month to Submit!
For an issue About Seeing: Addressing the Visual Arts (cinema, video, painting, photography, etc) Fiction International is looking for texts, stories, and visuals. Go to Fiction International for submission instructions.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Art as Cultural Activism
On September 5, 1981, the Welsh group that called itself "Women for Life on Earth" arrived on Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England. They had marched from Cardiff, Wales, with the intention of challenging the decision to site 96 US Cruise nuclear missiles on Greenham Common. On arrival they delivered a letter to the Base Commander which said "We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world."
When their request for a debate was ignored they set up a "Peace Camp" just outside the fence surrounding the Royal Air Force Greenham Common Airbase. This surprised the authorities and set the tone for an audacious, lengthy protest that was to last 19 years.
The protesters refused to allow authorities to enter the camp, which became known as the Women's Peace Camp and gained international recognition with imaginative images such as eggs, spiders webs and children’s toys with which they decorated the chain link fences and contested area. In the end the UK and US withdrew their attempt to site the cruise missiles in Greenham Common.
*
During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, a number of Chilean working-class women created complex tapestries depicting the harsh conditions of life and the pain resulting from the disappeared victims of Pinochet's repression. These tapestries, or arpilleras, get their name from the Spanish word for the burlap backing they used.
Working quietly and using traditional methods, the women's arpilleras came to have a wide influence within Chile and internationally. The tapestries preserved the memory of los desaparecidos and the dictatorship's brutality, as well as the unemployment, food shortages, housing shortages, and other hardships of daily life attributed to Pinochet's rule. Preserving this collective memory was itself an act of art-as-protest, but creating the arpilleras also empowered the women, many of whom experienced a liberation through their work and became involved in further protests against Pinochet's regime.
*
Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in Poland, emigrated to Canada, and currently lives in the US. He is particularly well-known for his guerrilla projections on official buildings purported to embody public values. Guerrilla, because his images were subversive and often projected without official permission. He sought, he explained, to unmask the buildings' existing rhetoric.
One of his first projections was a swastika on the façade of the South African embassy in London during Apartheid to implicate the British government and align them with the white Apartheid regime in South Africa. And to implicate the public building itself, which presented itself as an architectural emblem of moral value.
Later, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Wodiczko created a two-part projection in San Diego and Tijuana addressing the links between illegal immigration into the US and California’s economy, in which migrant labor plays a crucial role.
One projection is on the façade of a so-called Spanish style building in San Diego's Balboa Park, called the Museum of Man, which professes to be an anthropologically egalitarian repository of art and artisanry, but which Wodiczko sees as a muted celebration of western colonialism.
His projected image aligns a pair of white, male, well-groomed hands impatiently clasped, as if waiting for his meal. Above and to the right are two coarse outstretched hands -- manacled at the wrists -- but holding an ample basket of fruit, and, imprisoned as they are, ready to serve their colonialist master.
*
Rirkrit Tirivanija is a Thai artist. One of his installations consisted of the following: He bicycled around looking for space: empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, deserted K-Mart, abandoned Rite-Aid, haunted Burger King.
He rented the space and furnished it with stoves, cooking gas, freezers, fridges, microwaves, counters, bowls, cups, glasses, plastic cutlery, chopsticks, Tupperware, folding tables, chairs.
He purchased food: noodles, rice, potatoes, bread, soup, salad, tofu, fruit, green tea, bottled water, cocoa, curry spices. Comfort food.
He engaged the homeless as helpers.
Food prepared, he invited the homeless helpers along with the lined-up homeless to eat.
Continued through the day, into the night. Clean up, close for the night. Sleep on the premises.
Do the same thing for 60 days.
After 60 days he closed the space, got on his bicycle and looked for another empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, terrorized Rite-Aid, spooked McDonald's, gutted Gap, bombed-out Home Depot.
Select the space, rent it.
Feed the homeless for 60 days.
Close up, move on, find another space, repeat.
*
The preceding represents four examples of creating art in times of conflict. In every instance the art is problematic; not esthetic, as such; not even palpable in the instance of Tirivanija feeding the homeless.
What is the difference between art as it is usually constructed and what might be called crisis art, or cultural activism: the use of cultural means to effect social change or a wider social awareness?
Art that responds to a crisis is situational, hence created rapidly rather than painstakingly revised and refined.
Crisis art is directed rather than disinterested; more closely related to art as process than product.
Crisis art is keenly aware of text and context.
Crisis art often works best collaboratively.
Collaboration contests the auratic view of the artist? "Auratic," coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to the artificial elevation of the artist to a position above his or her fellows.
Crisis art is "immoral."
Georges Bataille insisted that the strongest art must function as an “immoral subversion of the existing order”; because "morality" is in the possession of the existing order, and as such is never what it professes to be.
Crisis art is (to quote a still fashionable term coined by the Russian critic Bakhtin), "dialogic".
The idea is not that the artist stands above the fray paring his fingernails, bemusedly observing his creations. Dialogic articulates the more humbling notion that the artist interacts, even integrates, with the community, on a largely equal basis, each affecting and affected.
Crisis artists must swallow the poison in order to reconstitute it. Expel it as art.
The poison, currently, includes our crazily spinning, electronic-obsessed, war-making culture and its profit-mad institutions; along with the rapidly worsening environmental crisis. The image of swallowing the poison and expelling it as art is shamanic.
But can art actually have any appreciable impact on the lives of humans who are oppressed, disenfranchised, struggling merely to survive? Can art affect cynical politicians and their corporate brethren?
There are precedents that were successful against great odds: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; anti-slavery writings during the abolitionist period; French writers and artists helping to end the colonial war in Algeria; Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of Stalinism and the Gulags; Act-Up's culturally activist response to the demonizing of gay men during the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s.
Do the kinds of strategies and calculations necessary for making and employing crisis art stand in opposition to the notion of the artist as dreamer, as creating from the deepest levels of consciousness?
Consider Goya, Blake and the French Revolution, the Mexican muralists, Grosz and Heartfield, Brecht, Picasso’s Guernica, B Traven, John Berger, Elsa Morante, Victor Serge, Clarice Lispector....
Surely these artists continued to imagine complexly, to -- as it were -- dream, even as they fought through their art against injustice?
Might socially activist art also be created for its own sake, its seeming ethical rightness, without calculating its effect?
If art of a certain strain is committed to process rather than product, it is especially difficult to sum up its final success. Was the art in the aftermath of Hiroshima successful? Was the art that characterized the takeover of Greenham Common successful? Were the arpilleras made by disenfranchised Chilean women successful?
Crisis art, dissident art, social activist art (largely synonymous) are perennial; one can't anticipate when an injustice or string of injustices, will invoke an art to register it.
But how will this art be appraised 40 years from now when the crisis that evoked it is no longer a factor?
Paradoxically, art produced rapidly under crisis conditions will sometimes have more lasting power and even esthetic appeal than the painstakingly created seemingly disinterested art that most people identify as quintessential. Crisis art has an energy and focus which more than compensate for its relative lack of refinement.
In the US there have been historical "moments" -- the Quakers, the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists, the Thirties Marxists, the Sixties counter-culture, Act-Up in the late Eighties and early Nineties -- but overall American writers have been contemptuous of socially-activist writing. It doesn't sell, it is more didactic than "esthetic." Moreover, why should artists be in a special position to address political crises?
Writers cultivate consciousness, contemplation, and in many instances learning. They view through a broader lens. If they have a reputation they can find a platform to make themselves heard and express their opinions precisely.
What good will it do? Wars, oppression, colonialism, profit-mania have been with us since human hegemony? And now authoritarian power is decentered, much less visible. Serious art of any kind has been rendered negligible in the market place, which in the US epitomizes the country's ethos.
With effort and intelligence, decentered power modules can be identified, as young dissidents and hackers have located and attempted to disable deliberately elusive nexuses of power and control.
Human history, however bloody and unjust, has not ceased; and, crucially, the planet we inhabit and have debauched is dying. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, with its people crammed into a delta of rivers that empties into the Bay of Bengal, which because of the Antarctic ice melt is behaving like an ocean, flooding ice paddies and entire villages. Animals and plants throughout the globe are becoming extinct rapidly. The sun, lacking sufficient protection from its ozone layer, has become toxic. Lethal bacterial agents set loose from leveled rain forests or industrialized seas migrate into the general population.
Possibly the hardest factor for concerned younger artists to accept is that there will always be an incommensurateness between their imaginative efforts and the result. The primary obligation is to not avert your eyes; to bear witness.
Harold Jaffe is the author of 18 books of fiction, "docufiction" and nonfiction, including most recently Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Paris 60, and OD. Jaffe is editor of Fiction International.
When their request for a debate was ignored they set up a "Peace Camp" just outside the fence surrounding the Royal Air Force Greenham Common Airbase. This surprised the authorities and set the tone for an audacious, lengthy protest that was to last 19 years.
The protesters refused to allow authorities to enter the camp, which became known as the Women's Peace Camp and gained international recognition with imaginative images such as eggs, spiders webs and children’s toys with which they decorated the chain link fences and contested area. In the end the UK and US withdrew their attempt to site the cruise missiles in Greenham Common.
*
During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, a number of Chilean working-class women created complex tapestries depicting the harsh conditions of life and the pain resulting from the disappeared victims of Pinochet's repression. These tapestries, or arpilleras, get their name from the Spanish word for the burlap backing they used.
Working quietly and using traditional methods, the women's arpilleras came to have a wide influence within Chile and internationally. The tapestries preserved the memory of los desaparecidos and the dictatorship's brutality, as well as the unemployment, food shortages, housing shortages, and other hardships of daily life attributed to Pinochet's rule. Preserving this collective memory was itself an act of art-as-protest, but creating the arpilleras also empowered the women, many of whom experienced a liberation through their work and became involved in further protests against Pinochet's regime.
*
Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in Poland, emigrated to Canada, and currently lives in the US. He is particularly well-known for his guerrilla projections on official buildings purported to embody public values. Guerrilla, because his images were subversive and often projected without official permission. He sought, he explained, to unmask the buildings' existing rhetoric.
One of his first projections was a swastika on the façade of the South African embassy in London during Apartheid to implicate the British government and align them with the white Apartheid regime in South Africa. And to implicate the public building itself, which presented itself as an architectural emblem of moral value.
Later, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Wodiczko created a two-part projection in San Diego and Tijuana addressing the links between illegal immigration into the US and California’s economy, in which migrant labor plays a crucial role.
One projection is on the façade of a so-called Spanish style building in San Diego's Balboa Park, called the Museum of Man, which professes to be an anthropologically egalitarian repository of art and artisanry, but which Wodiczko sees as a muted celebration of western colonialism.
His projected image aligns a pair of white, male, well-groomed hands impatiently clasped, as if waiting for his meal. Above and to the right are two coarse outstretched hands -- manacled at the wrists -- but holding an ample basket of fruit, and, imprisoned as they are, ready to serve their colonialist master.
*
Rirkrit Tirivanija is a Thai artist. One of his installations consisted of the following: He bicycled around looking for space: empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, deserted K-Mart, abandoned Rite-Aid, haunted Burger King.
He rented the space and furnished it with stoves, cooking gas, freezers, fridges, microwaves, counters, bowls, cups, glasses, plastic cutlery, chopsticks, Tupperware, folding tables, chairs.
He purchased food: noodles, rice, potatoes, bread, soup, salad, tofu, fruit, green tea, bottled water, cocoa, curry spices. Comfort food.
He engaged the homeless as helpers.
Food prepared, he invited the homeless helpers along with the lined-up homeless to eat.
Continued through the day, into the night. Clean up, close for the night. Sleep on the premises.
Do the same thing for 60 days.
After 60 days he closed the space, got on his bicycle and looked for another empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, terrorized Rite-Aid, spooked McDonald's, gutted Gap, bombed-out Home Depot.
Select the space, rent it.
Feed the homeless for 60 days.
Close up, move on, find another space, repeat.
*
The preceding represents four examples of creating art in times of conflict. In every instance the art is problematic; not esthetic, as such; not even palpable in the instance of Tirivanija feeding the homeless.
What is the difference between art as it is usually constructed and what might be called crisis art, or cultural activism: the use of cultural means to effect social change or a wider social awareness?
Art that responds to a crisis is situational, hence created rapidly rather than painstakingly revised and refined.
Crisis art is directed rather than disinterested; more closely related to art as process than product.
Crisis art is keenly aware of text and context.
Crisis art often works best collaboratively.
Collaboration contests the auratic view of the artist? "Auratic," coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to the artificial elevation of the artist to a position above his or her fellows.
Crisis art is "immoral."
Georges Bataille insisted that the strongest art must function as an “immoral subversion of the existing order”; because "morality" is in the possession of the existing order, and as such is never what it professes to be.
Crisis art is (to quote a still fashionable term coined by the Russian critic Bakhtin), "dialogic".
The idea is not that the artist stands above the fray paring his fingernails, bemusedly observing his creations. Dialogic articulates the more humbling notion that the artist interacts, even integrates, with the community, on a largely equal basis, each affecting and affected.
Crisis artists must swallow the poison in order to reconstitute it. Expel it as art.
The poison, currently, includes our crazily spinning, electronic-obsessed, war-making culture and its profit-mad institutions; along with the rapidly worsening environmental crisis. The image of swallowing the poison and expelling it as art is shamanic.
But can art actually have any appreciable impact on the lives of humans who are oppressed, disenfranchised, struggling merely to survive? Can art affect cynical politicians and their corporate brethren?
There are precedents that were successful against great odds: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; anti-slavery writings during the abolitionist period; French writers and artists helping to end the colonial war in Algeria; Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of Stalinism and the Gulags; Act-Up's culturally activist response to the demonizing of gay men during the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s.
Do the kinds of strategies and calculations necessary for making and employing crisis art stand in opposition to the notion of the artist as dreamer, as creating from the deepest levels of consciousness?
Consider Goya, Blake and the French Revolution, the Mexican muralists, Grosz and Heartfield, Brecht, Picasso’s Guernica, B Traven, John Berger, Elsa Morante, Victor Serge, Clarice Lispector....
Surely these artists continued to imagine complexly, to -- as it were -- dream, even as they fought through their art against injustice?
Might socially activist art also be created for its own sake, its seeming ethical rightness, without calculating its effect?
If art of a certain strain is committed to process rather than product, it is especially difficult to sum up its final success. Was the art in the aftermath of Hiroshima successful? Was the art that characterized the takeover of Greenham Common successful? Were the arpilleras made by disenfranchised Chilean women successful?
Crisis art, dissident art, social activist art (largely synonymous) are perennial; one can't anticipate when an injustice or string of injustices, will invoke an art to register it.
But how will this art be appraised 40 years from now when the crisis that evoked it is no longer a factor?
Paradoxically, art produced rapidly under crisis conditions will sometimes have more lasting power and even esthetic appeal than the painstakingly created seemingly disinterested art that most people identify as quintessential. Crisis art has an energy and focus which more than compensate for its relative lack of refinement.
In the US there have been historical "moments" -- the Quakers, the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists, the Thirties Marxists, the Sixties counter-culture, Act-Up in the late Eighties and early Nineties -- but overall American writers have been contemptuous of socially-activist writing. It doesn't sell, it is more didactic than "esthetic." Moreover, why should artists be in a special position to address political crises?
Writers cultivate consciousness, contemplation, and in many instances learning. They view through a broader lens. If they have a reputation they can find a platform to make themselves heard and express their opinions precisely.
What good will it do? Wars, oppression, colonialism, profit-mania have been with us since human hegemony? And now authoritarian power is decentered, much less visible. Serious art of any kind has been rendered negligible in the market place, which in the US epitomizes the country's ethos.
With effort and intelligence, decentered power modules can be identified, as young dissidents and hackers have located and attempted to disable deliberately elusive nexuses of power and control.
Human history, however bloody and unjust, has not ceased; and, crucially, the planet we inhabit and have debauched is dying. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, with its people crammed into a delta of rivers that empties into the Bay of Bengal, which because of the Antarctic ice melt is behaving like an ocean, flooding ice paddies and entire villages. Animals and plants throughout the globe are becoming extinct rapidly. The sun, lacking sufficient protection from its ozone layer, has become toxic. Lethal bacterial agents set loose from leveled rain forests or industrialized seas migrate into the general population.
Possibly the hardest factor for concerned younger artists to accept is that there will always be an incommensurateness between their imaginative efforts and the result. The primary obligation is to not avert your eyes; to bear witness.
Harold Jaffe is the author of 18 books of fiction, "docufiction" and nonfiction, including most recently Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Paris 60, and OD. Jaffe is editor of Fiction International.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Need a Writing Prompt?
There are two types of writers: Writers who use prompts to navigate past their blocks and writers who don't. It's entirely possible that you will be both types of writer at different phases of your career.
If you are in the "need a prompt" phase, why not subscribe to Laura Davis? Once you subscribe you will receive a weekly email newsletter with a prompt that's partly psychological - to help you learn more about your particular blocks. Here's the latest prompt:
If you are not currently in the "need a prompt" phase of your writing career, consider yourself lucky,
If you are in the "need a prompt" phase, why not subscribe to Laura Davis? Once you subscribe you will receive a weekly email newsletter with a prompt that's partly psychological - to help you learn more about your particular blocks. Here's the latest prompt:
The Writer's Journey RoadmapLaura Davis is a professional writer's guide. Her Facebook fan page is here.
August 30, 2011
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Today's Writing Prompt:
What keeps you from writing that shitty first draft?
If you are not currently in the "need a prompt" phase of your writing career, consider yourself lucky,
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Hal's readings
Hal is giving a reading next week at SDSU and in San Francisco. He will be reading some (not many) 50- or 100-word stories from a very recent volume called Induced Coma, an extension and variation of his volume Anti-Twitter which was published in 2010.
"In Anti-Twitter I adhered strictly to 50-word stories. In Induced Coma it is either 50 or 100 words. Most of the stories are found texts which I’ve altered or turned -- to tease out subtexts and contradictions."
Then he will read a number of short narratives from Paris 60, a sort of journal-slash-travel log he kept when he was in Paris in 2008 to greet the translation into French of one of his earlier books.
Paris 60 is based very loosely on Paris Spleen, a series of prose poems by Baudelaire published posthumously in 1869. The “60” in Paris 60 refers to 60 days, one entry per day.
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @ Gough
San Francisco CA 94102
SDSU's Living Writing series
Love Library
San Diego State University
"In Anti-Twitter I adhered strictly to 50-word stories. In Induced Coma it is either 50 or 100 words. Most of the stories are found texts which I’ve altered or turned -- to tease out subtexts and contradictions."
Then he will read a number of short narratives from Paris 60, a sort of journal-slash-travel log he kept when he was in Paris in 2008 to greet the translation into French of one of his earlier books.
Paris 60 is based very loosely on Paris Spleen, a series of prose poems by Baudelaire published posthumously in 1869. The “60” in Paris 60 refers to 60 days, one entry per day.
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @ Gough
San Francisco CA 94102
SDSU's Living Writing series
Love Library
San Diego State University
Friday, January 28, 2011
Blackness. And Publication. What more can you ask for?
Fiction International is hosting a fiction (prose) writing contest in Spring 2011. The contest is intended to expose new talent to a critical audience of discerning, literary readers, and is limited to writers who have no more than two published books.
The theme is BLACKNESS (FI always has a theme), and there's a 2000 word limit for entries. The submission period is: February 1, 2011 - June 1, 2011.
Entries will be read by Fiction International editors and comments will be returned to the entrants. The top 20 entries will be read by FI editor-in-chief Harold Jaffe (who will select the winners). The grand-prize submission will be published in the 2012 volume of Fiction International and the author will be awarded a $1000 cash prize. There will also be two honorable mentions that will be published in the 2012 edition of Fiction International.
Winner will be announced Fall 2011. Go to http://fictioninternational.submishmash.com/Submit to sign up for the contest.
The theme is BLACKNESS (FI always has a theme), and there's a 2000 word limit for entries. The submission period is: February 1, 2011 - June 1, 2011.
Entries will be read by Fiction International editors and comments will be returned to the entrants. The top 20 entries will be read by FI editor-in-chief Harold Jaffe (who will select the winners). The grand-prize submission will be published in the 2012 volume of Fiction International and the author will be awarded a $1000 cash prize. There will also be two honorable mentions that will be published in the 2012 edition of Fiction International.
Winner will be announced Fall 2011. Go to http://fictioninternational.submishmash.com/Submit to sign up for the contest.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
How to not succeed in zine publishing
Fiction International is (naturally!) interested in publishing trends. This article from The Atlantic (of all places) provides a how-to guide for publishing gonzo zines, 21st Century style. Too bad the trio aren't as interested in distribution and marketing; if they were they would have a formula for success.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 5
In the final excerpt to appear on this blog, our wanderer (Harold Jaffe) spends an evening being civilized by a family of Parisians.
This is the last of the Paris 60 excerpts - to appear on this blog, that is. If you would like to read more excerpts from this amazing collection, go to his website and click the word "docufiction."
4.15 Deep River
Listening to Vivaldi's Stabat Mater on my iPod as I reprise yesterday evening with new friends.
This version of Stabat Mater features the Japanese contralto Naoko Ihara, which in turn reminds me of the Japanese Christian Shusaku Endo's last novel Deep River, about a group of Japanese pilgrims traveling to the holy Hindu city of Varanasi.
It is the homely, seemingly misbegotten Japanese who makes the final offering, carrying the dead and dying "untouchables" to the River Ganges so their immolated ashes might merge with those who came before and were yet to come.
Ynez and Guillaume Deveraux live in a spacious apartment on the top floor of a Haussmann-era building directly across from the Montparnasse Cemetery.
The apartment was donated rent-free for as long as Ynez continued her employment as manager in the state-run Ministry of Health.
Her husband Guillaume is an artist with a cramped studio in the apartment.
At my request he shows me electronic representations of his work -- impressive abstracts which resemble both Action Painting and the calligraphic paintings of Mark Tobey, who studied Buddhism in Japan.
They have two daughters, Celeste 11, and Marie-Jeanne 3. Celeste has Down syndrome and is a grand mal epileptic, though she hasn't suffered a seizure in nearly a year.
I meet Ynez for the first time downstairs by the elevator, 7:30 PM.
Slender, attractive, somewhat tense, she is only now returning from her job; I am the invited guest.
When we arrive in the apartment, Marie-Jeanne runs to greet her mother then stops as she looks up at the large stranger.
I stoop low to greet her and she kisses me on both cheeks.
Ynez then goes to the sofa in front of the bay window where Celeste is sprawled with her head turned to the side and the foot of a rubber doll in her mouth.
Ynez sits and takes Celeste in her arms, whispering tenderly to her.
I sit on the same sofa.
Guillaume enters, shakes my hand, kisses Ynez, smoothes Celeste's hair, then picks up the three-year-old who is staring at me with a wild surmise.
Guillaume pours the red wine but Ynez is still caressing and whispering to Celeste.
Meanwhile, Marie-Jeanne has carried over her small, red and gold tin box and is making offerings to me.
She places a tiny pink bead in my palm, then an orange ribbon, then a chestnut, a silver bead, a very small bit of jade, another ribbon, a feather.
She delivers them one by one, carefully selecting from her box.
She has created an impressive still-life in my wide palm.
After nearly an hour of quiet talking, Celeste, who had not even turned her head to me, suddenly leans all her weight on me, reaches back and takes my hand which she grasps firmly.
Noting this, Marie-Jeanne settles her tiny self on my knee.
Ynez smiles.
She, the mother, looks lovely and weary.
The late sun slanting through the bay window lights her eyes and forehead.
This is the last of the Paris 60 excerpts - to appear on this blog, that is. If you would like to read more excerpts from this amazing collection, go to his website and click the word "docufiction."
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 4
One cannot spend any time in Paris - not one day, not one life - without attending the baguette.
4.11 Baguette
Van Gogh, who lived most of his fated life in France, shot himself in the chest, but somehow couldn't kill himself correctly.
He managed to stand and walk to his cot, where he died a few days later, head to the wall.
His whispered last words to Theo, his brother, were reportedly: "La tristesse durera toujours."
Sadness will last forever.
Consider the baguette which, it seems, has been with us forever.
Only in France; imitations can't rival it.
Perhaps the Italians come closest, though their "baguette" is prepared differently.
Unlike, say, Chartreuse, the liqueur composed by monks with its undisclosed ingredients, the ingredients of the baguette de campagne are eminently simple: flour, yeast, water, salt.
The alchemy is in the preparation, and perhaps the physical context.
A baguette purchased in the Montorgeuil quartier of Paris is not likely to taste the same in Glasgow, Prague, or Beverly Hills.
The baguette itself is rarely bagged.
Ordinary paper, even a strip of newspaper, wrapped round its center, or no paper at all.
Hot from the oven is best, but even unheated, the trick is for the purchaser not to devour it before reaching his apartment.
The admonition applies to children, adults, and seniors.
To bankers, gangsters, politicians, the unemployed.
Have your chauffeur lock the baguette in the limo's trunk.
Break it in half and stick it in your bicycle bag; make sure you zip the bag, and whistle all the way back to your flat.
Break it in thirds and fit them into your pockets.
Stretch it around your head like a halo.
(Un ange passe)
Light a cigarette and keep it in your lips until you reach home with baguette intact.
Make a vow to fast for the seven minutes it takes to walk from the boulangerie to your flat.
You're back home at last.
Sit at the plain wood table, such as Vincent would paint, and break bread with your lover or alone.
Have some vin de maison.
Like the young priest in Robert Bresson's 1950 Journal d'un Curé de Campagne, adapted from the Bernanos novel.
The priest, unjustly maligned by his parishioners, takes nothing but bread and red wine.
Imitation of Christ.
Contre la tristesse.
Sadness that will last forever.
Please tell me, pale reader, how Bresson's introverted young priest, with a sensibility much like Vincent's, rejected in his country parish, unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and soon to die, whispers these last words to a seminary friend: All is grace?
Thursday, April 22, 2010
D V 8
For an issue on DEVIATE (DV8) Fiction International will read fiction, non-fiction and indeterminate prose between 9/1 and 12/15, 2110. Submit hardcopy texts or visuals (with SASE) to:
Harold Jaffe
Editor, Fiction International
Dept of English
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-6020.
Harold Jaffe
Editor, Fiction International
Dept of English
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-6020.
Monday, February 8, 2010
One writer fights the Indian Wars in her own little way
This weekend the New York Times (enjoy it while you still can) printed an article about the effect of the Twilight books/films on the Quileute people. By using them in her books, Stephenie Meyer inadvertently renewed the 200-year-and-counting war which has been waged against all Native American cultures. Does anyone from Team Jacob support the Quileute with their merchandise purchases? Does Stephenie with her book sales?
"To millions of 'Twilight' fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty transforms young males of the tribe into vampire-fighting wolves. To the nearly 700 remaining Quileute Indians, 'Twilight' is the reason they are suddenly drawing extraordinary attention from the outside — while they themselves remain largely excluded from the vampire series' vast commercial empire.
Just last month, MSN.com issued an apology to the Quileute for intruding on its territory while videotaping a 'Twilight' virtual tour in September. MSN.com sought permission from the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Forks, Wash., but didn’t pay the same courtesy to the Quileute."
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Boys and their toys. Girls too.
Teachers know how difficult it is to persuade administrators to "allow" the use of technology in the classroom. It's perhaps a mark of envy that when I read "Don't knock blogging - it's an answer to our literacy problems" I knew it couldn't be about a high school in the U.S.A.
By the way, writing - online or offline - is a lifelong struggle for us all, which is as it should be.
According to all the data, Daniel Moseley and Rahil Thobhani ought to hate writing. Educational research shows that many British schoolchildren are struggling with this basic skill, and that secondary school boys from poorer city areas are among those who flounder most.Fortunately, we can assign blog writing to college students - who are also "struggling" with mastering writing. At the very least it will ensure they know how to do something other than play online games and copy-and-paste a research paper: Don't assume because they are twenty they are internet-literate (and don't assume because I'm fifty I'm not).
But these two 11-year-olds sit in their school library talking passionately about letting their imaginations run riot, and how you can use suspense and dialogue to craft a good story.
By the way, writing - online or offline - is a lifelong struggle for us all, which is as it should be.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Eduardo Galeano on Brecht
From Century of the Wind, the third volume of a three volume tome of the history of the Americas, called Memory of Fire.
1942: Hollywood
"Brecht"
Hollywood manufactures films to turn the frightful vigil of humanity, to the point of annihilation, into sweet dreams. Bertolt Brecht, exiled from Hitler's Germany, is employed in this sleeping-pill industry. Founder of a theater that sought to open eyes wide, he earns his living at the United Artists studios, just one more writer who works office hours for Hollywood, competing to produce the biggest daily ration of idiocies.
On one of these days, Brecht buys a little God of Lucky for forty cents in a Chinese store and puts it on his desk. Brecht has been told that the God of Luck licks his lips each time they make him take poison.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Empty Slate
I recently found myself between stories. I had written some long overdue work that now finished left me without any new big ideas. Several days had gone by without an epiphany. Sure, I had some revisions to finish for submissions, but there was nothing new percolating in the pot. It was a strange feeling. Usually my mind is cluttered with unwritten (and unwritable) story lines, but this week I was an empty slate.
There must have been more creative space alloted to those old projects than I realized. I'm glad I got them out, although success was mixed. Some were not all as interesting once written as I hoped. However, the last chapter I think has not been written.
The question now is: What’s next? Where do other writers turn for inspiration: newspapers, cocktail parties, the box of old journals in the garage? Should I play mechanic and weld together spare out-takes? Or should I just relax and let the ideas start trickling back on their own accord.
I've a number of Fiction International volumes whose edgy nature quicken the blood and strike the imagination. I also carry a skinny reporter’s notebook in my back pocket for unexpected thoughts and observations. That eases the burden from the mind to both create and remember.
So my net is cast. The store is open for business. Bring me your tired and your hungry, your ironic, your iconic, bring me complexities, allegories, and metaphors, bring me time travel, self discovery, sex and contempt, bring me redemption, bring me tragedy. Keep it messy, imperfect, and real. Bring me these discordant, beautiful misanthropes with whom I can play life and make music. Just be sure to jostle me if I'm lost in a daydream.
There must have been more creative space alloted to those old projects than I realized. I'm glad I got them out, although success was mixed. Some were not all as interesting once written as I hoped. However, the last chapter I think has not been written.
The question now is: What’s next? Where do other writers turn for inspiration: newspapers, cocktail parties, the box of old journals in the garage? Should I play mechanic and weld together spare out-takes? Or should I just relax and let the ideas start trickling back on their own accord.
I've a number of Fiction International volumes whose edgy nature quicken the blood and strike the imagination. I also carry a skinny reporter’s notebook in my back pocket for unexpected thoughts and observations. That eases the burden from the mind to both create and remember.
So my net is cast. The store is open for business. Bring me your tired and your hungry, your ironic, your iconic, bring me complexities, allegories, and metaphors, bring me time travel, self discovery, sex and contempt, bring me redemption, bring me tragedy. Keep it messy, imperfect, and real. Bring me these discordant, beautiful misanthropes with whom I can play life and make music. Just be sure to jostle me if I'm lost in a daydream.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Walt Whitman, Ad Man or Mad Man?
Here's an ad agency using Walt Whitman to sell jeans:
Can a poem sell? Of course. Should a poem be used to sell? Well, Walt's dead, so he has no say.
Teachers could see the ad campaign as a teaching tool, to sell students on poetry.
Can a poem sell? Of course. Should a poem be used to sell? Well, Walt's dead, so he has no say.
Teachers could see the ad campaign as a teaching tool, to sell students on poetry.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
meta-roles
We're workshopping a story today about a helicopter pilot in Allied occupied West Germany. It's filled with detailed descriptions of post-Nazi Germany, but also a twist which promises to get mixed reviews. The third person character, McKay, is also writing the story, which is being reviewed by his wife Suzan.
She is making various suggestions to McKay about revising the story. This is a meta approach attempting to make the reader an self-conscious party. The couple also discuss later details in the story, which foreshadows those events.
At the chapter's conclusion, Suzan asks McKay what she looks like as a character.
"Are we sitting down at a table? Are we drinking wine? Is it red or white? Do I look lovely tonight? Are you serious about sailing our boat to Hawaii?"
"Sitting down, red wine, very lovely, quite serious."
"Oh," she said. "Will you pour me another glass please?"
Interesting technique. But does it fly?
She is making various suggestions to McKay about revising the story. This is a meta approach attempting to make the reader an self-conscious party. The couple also discuss later details in the story, which foreshadows those events.
At the chapter's conclusion, Suzan asks McKay what she looks like as a character.
"Are we sitting down at a table? Are we drinking wine? Is it red or white? Do I look lovely tonight? Are you serious about sailing our boat to Hawaii?"
"Sitting down, red wine, very lovely, quite serious."
"Oh," she said. "Will you pour me another glass please?"
Interesting technique. But does it fly?
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Regarding FI
Fiction International embraces the unique. That extends to various ways writers tackle narrative perspective. In the Freak issue, "The Dummy of the Ventriloquist's Dummy" is told through a dialogue between a ventriloquist and a pair of rebellious dummies. In "Haunting Your House," the narrator's benefactor is convinced his apartment is haunted by ghosts. We find that his apartment is indeed being visited, but by former Chinese tenants evicted and angry at the gentrification he represents. He just doesn't see them or their hatred, so they may as well be ghosts.
Thumbing through FI's Pain issue, I'm reminded that narrative can be told through letters and memoir just as well as third-person omniscient.
This is my first blog for Fiction International. I plan to make various observations on narrative process, which may be of interest to other writers. When I scribbled this out I was in a coffee shop with my reporter's notebook, also thumbing through some midnight story ideas.
One strikes me: a confrontation between two writers over proprietorship of written work. One is miffed when he learns that his colleague has annexed some of his material into one of his own stories. He essentially wrote through the scene. If one writer constructs a world, are others allowed to 'pass' through? I'll write it out and see how it develops.
Thumbing through FI's Pain issue, I'm reminded that narrative can be told through letters and memoir just as well as third-person omniscient.
This is my first blog for Fiction International. I plan to make various observations on narrative process, which may be of interest to other writers. When I scribbled this out I was in a coffee shop with my reporter's notebook, also thumbing through some midnight story ideas.
One strikes me: a confrontation between two writers over proprietorship of written work. One is miffed when he learns that his colleague has annexed some of his material into one of his own stories. He essentially wrote through the scene. If one writer constructs a world, are others allowed to 'pass' through? I'll write it out and see how it develops.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Can we make art with "fortunate failures"?
In the "Notes From the Underground" blog, James Curcio speculates about "fortunate failures":
You may set up a class on a div, and check it out in a browser and discover that it did something totally different than you had hoped, or you may apply a filter when producing an audio track, with similar results. Sometimes, those results are undesirable, and you backtrack. But other times, it drives things in a completely new direction.Actually, both are creative. It's not a contest. You now have two potential artworks and are free to pursue both to their conclusions. One is serendipitous and the other intentional, not one good and the other bad or one legitimate and the other false.
That for me, is creativity. Not the intention that got you started in the first place.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
We live in an age where satire doesn't work.
Satire is soooooooo Twentieth Century, given that it was invented by hippies and librul college professors and can't be understood anyway.
Satire said greed is good. And behold, it is.
Satire began with A Modest Proposal, which, if published today, would have inspired sales of cookbooks and a line of cookware suitable for roasting Irish babies.
Instead it inspired a generation of anti-abortionists, one of whom, while initially an ardent fan of satire, has now come to realize that satire doesn't work.
Satire, like leadership, is the ability to ignore and subvert the will of the majority while claiming to represent it.
Today people understand that if everyone in their social circle believes something, then it's true beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Today people propose modest proposals with a completely straight face, unaware that (once upon a time) a modest proposal was considered immodest.
And satire is just a synonym for wit.
Satire said greed is good. And behold, it is.
Satire began with A Modest Proposal, which, if published today, would have inspired sales of cookbooks and a line of cookware suitable for roasting Irish babies.
Instead it inspired a generation of anti-abortionists, one of whom, while initially an ardent fan of satire, has now come to realize that satire doesn't work.
Satire, like leadership, is the ability to ignore and subvert the will of the majority while claiming to represent it.
Today people understand that if everyone in their social circle believes something, then it's true beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Today people propose modest proposals with a completely straight face, unaware that (once upon a time) a modest proposal was considered immodest.
And satire is just a synonym for wit.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The Walls of Israel
Walls can be used to define Israel. Here's one, using a hole in the wall to suggest a besieged Israel:
Here's another Israeli hole in the wall, except this one suggests tyranny:
Jerusalem's Western, or Wailing, Wall is world famous, but how many people have seen its Eastern Wall?
The more Israeli archeologists excavate Jerusalem, the more walls they find:
Will anyone have the courage to tell Israel to tear down their walls?
Here's another Israeli hole in the wall, except this one suggests tyranny:
Jerusalem's Western, or Wailing, Wall is world famous, but how many people have seen its Eastern Wall?
The more Israeli archeologists excavate Jerusalem, the more walls they find:
Will anyone have the courage to tell Israel to tear down their walls?
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