=dada prayer card=

[prayer]

[response]



::collaboration with Victor Jonez, Dartmouth, MA::

=abstracts 5 & 6=

=The Line-Up=

I'm called in to view a police line-up by mistake but no one wants to hear that. On the other side of the glass the men are paraded in. What a motley collection! All different sizes, shapes, and colors. I recognize him immediately, but I pause a beat or two just to make it look good. "It's him," I say, pointing to the third one from the left.

"Are you sure?" the lead detective asks.

"Positive." 

It's funny how you pick the same guy over and over and over no matter how often it ends in disappointment. It's a crime, really. Apparently he abducted me, held me prisoner for eight-and-a-half years, and made me his sex slave. Nearly all that time he managed to brainwash me into thinking I was happily married. What a monster! Lucky for me, he got careless. He blinked long enough for me to collect my wits and get away.

"You're not the only woman he's done this to," the lead detective says when he senses my certainty already wavering. "And you won't be the last," his partner finishes.

All the same, it's getting harder and harder to be so self-righteous and I'm beginning to think that the only reason I picked him in the first place is that he reminded me of the man before him and the man before that and before that and that they all probably reminded me of some kind of hermaphroditic mash-up of the old parental unit—mother and father fused together. 

"Don't even think it," one of the detectives warns.

"Why not?" I reply, defiantly, but I already know the answer.

I shudder. 

A mental images flashes in my mind's eye: a great red bull sinking to its knees in the amphitheater, exhausted from the fight, blood foaming around it's muzzle, it's thick skin quivering with picador darts, it's sad, sunken yellow eye rolling up to the pitiless sun, the blank sky. 

"He's actually quite innocent!" I shout, though the men on the other side of the glass can't hear me any more than they can see me. "They're all innocent!"

Both detectives frown. 

Meanwhile my poor heart is lying in a heap in the trampled dust of the amphitheater, shuddering, bleeding out, deaf, breathing its last.

The horrible crowd erupts in an orgasmic frenzy, shouting as one for the coup de grace. 

=asemic ink scrabble=

=book recently read: NW by Zadie Smith

This is the first book I've ever read by Zadie Smith. From what I gather, it's a bit different from her earlier books, less traditional. People who read and liked her earlier books and responded negatively to this one say that the narrative in "NW" is fragmented to the point of incomprehensibility and that "all the characters are unlikeable." 

To that I say, "Huh?!"

I didn't find the scattershot narrative in the main part of the book—185 short "chapters" in 155 pages—a problem to follow at all. The main storyline bracketing this middle section is neatly—perhaps even too neatly—tied up in the end. And though the characters were undeniably self-centered and self-important, I didn't find them to be particularly unlikable. They didn't seem any more or less unlikable than most people I know casually. Besides, how did this dumb idea creep into the collective mind of the mainstream reading public that the main characters of novels were supposed to be likable? You're not going camping for five months in the Himalayas with these people, for crissakes. You aren't having them babysit your children. 

Anyway, I don't have a ton of stuff to say about this book. It was okay. It was undeniably well-written. It's about two best friends—Leah (Irish) and Keisha/Natalie (Jamaican)—who grew up together in a rather drab section of London in the 80s/90s. They've more or less successfully transcended their grubby origins, but they feel a lot of guilt and low self-esteem that drags them at least halfway back to where they started. 

Ultimately, "NW" is a book about class consciousness and how hard—if not impossible—it is to completely escape your origins, how you never quite feel like you fit into the better world, the enriched life you've been taught to work hard and aspire to even if you should happen to beat the odds and "make it." 

As it happens, "NW" was nominated for a National Book Award (!) and was named one of the Ten Notable Books of the Year 2012 by the New York Times(!). Wow. I don't remember 2012 that well, except that, according to a misreading of Mayan prophecy popular at the time, it was the year that the world was supposed to end. That this book was considered one of the ten best published that year—or any year for that matter—rather surprises me. I mean, yes, it's smart, hip, and written by a literary "celebrity" with a very cool name (not the Smith part) but it really struck me as not much more than a very intelligent soap opera in book form. 

Okay, if that sounds a bit harsh, then let's say it's a novel of social manners, ala Martin Amis, perhaps, (without Amis's vitriolic panache and without, thankfully,  his tiresome male bravado) written as it is from the far more unique perspective of a woman and a minority to boot. NW therefore fills a double gap. But for me it just didn't pack the universal existential punch that I expect from serious literature. It is too much a novel of a particular time and place which, though I found it interesting in its particularly and "gritty" realism, just wasn't definitive enough, simply wasn't working on enough levels to make it memorable or moving on anything but a relatively superficial level. I'm always leery about "literature" that makes the New York Times bestseller list and "NW" more than anything else confirmed my instinctive distrust. 

=Have you seen me?=

=Lucky Me=

It's the most ungainly, unwieldy trophy I've ever seen and I'm apparently the winner. But what is it for? There is no plaque that gives any indication whatsoever. It's a complete mystery. The thing looks like a cross between a coffee urn, a mechanical crab, and a malignant fetish out of an H.P. Lovecraft tale. I might as well have been dead for most of my life and I would never have realized it  if the trumpet salute announcing the award hadn't finally woken me from my stone-cold slumber. What could I possibly have done while snoring my life away to have won such a thing? To have won anything? What kind of booby-prize is this, anyway?

Now that I examine it more closely it seems to me it's not a trophy at all. But what it is, I still can't say  It may not even be mine. For one thing, it hasn't got my name engraved on it anywhere. What made me think it was mine? Someone might have just left it with me, like an orphan. That can't make it my responsibility, can it? I don't have to think of it as my child, do I? Maybe I can leave it behind, too? Maybe I can find someone still sleeping, slip it in their arms, and sneak away before they wake? Then it can be their problem. Let them figure out what to do with it. Then I can walk blithely on and finally live the rest of my life without having to bear some awful mysterious burden.

=bimbo!=

::being Betty Boop's boyfriend when Betty Boop was a dog, and even for a while after she became human. Old habits dying hard, even when you're a cartoon character.::

=A Confession=

I have the ability to murder people in my sleep. I dream people dead and a couple of days to a week or so later—boom!—a heart attack, a car wreck, a random mugging in the street, whatever: out of the blue, they're dead. 

It's terrible because I really try hard to let go of old angers and grudges, to let bygones be bygones, but I have no control over what happens in my sleep. In fact, to look at me from the outside, you'd say I was  sleeping like a baby. Clearly there's a less developed reptilian part of me always at work, coldly going over the Book of Old Grievances like a Mafia don and systematically exacting revenge on those who've done me wrong. 

Sometimes it's a complete surprise—even a shock—who my dreams decide is worthy of death. It could be someone relatively unimportant in my life, someone who committed what I'd consider a minor slight, something I hardly even took notice of at the time, while someone who really did me dirty might go scot-free for years. Sometimes it's not even the person who deserves it themselves who's struck but someone close to them, as if the point is to torture the guilty first with  unendurable grief before finishing them off. 

I stare and stare and stare at this ugly, cruel, capricious thing inside me and still I can't figure out what it is or what to do about it. It's like a lightning-maker or a doom-machine or even God Himself. It's a murder weapon, really, but there's no deep quiet lake I can row out into at midnight in which to drop it. Still, for all that, I can put my head on the pillow at night with a clear conscience. I can see the stars above. I can love myself. It just goes to show you. But what it goes to show you is so completely open to interpretation that any explanation I've heard so far strikes me as essentially meaningless. 

=abstracts=