. . .
“Barely awake, house quiet, coffee poured, blank page. Quick, first thing each morning, start writing. Keep the pen moving on paper, shoot for paragraph or two, no thought to where it’s heading, or if it will lead anywhere, or be worth reading, or embarrass you. It’s better if it does. The last thing it should seek, in any sense of the word, is to be good.
“Type it up allowing minimal edits for preposition or punctuation fixes. There’s always a word or two you can’t read and have to take your best guess at.”
Nog called them his sillies. No surprise, eventually we quietly on our own would get up to write them too.
Bry — January 31, 2021, 5:11 am
WOKE THINKING about Colbert and his love of Lord of the Rings, and how there is everything in the books—pastoral and pomp, courage and cravenness (word?), innocence and experience, life and death (but no birth) (unless does Sam have kids at the end) (but I’ve already deflated my point)—but there is no humor. There is the mirth of the hobbits, but it’s not wit.
In the movies, Gimli the Dwarf is saddled with the director’s instinct to leaven the tone, provide comic relief, and is made to gripe, mutter, belch, spill ale down his beard, and fall down a lot.
Colbert is much better at making us laugh as he takes on the overwhelming forces of evil four nights a week, five in election season.
a new rind-ition
Bern — January 30, 2021, 4:49 am
SEVENTIES ROCK at the liquor store, I see the Malbec bottles dance, gyrating at the hip as if they were made of jelly. I stand in the middle of the aisle. None of the other wines move or so much as tap their toes. The song is that one-hit Go All the Way love song—The Babies? Eric Someone?—and I see the hip swing of a particular Argentine Valle de Uco. I take her by the neck and thrust her in my cart, where she lies laughing and squirming on the metal mesh.
The vaccine can’t come soon enough. I can’t take much more.
Bry — January 29, 2021, 5:06 am
WE SHOULD have a page on the smallwhisky site for all the lines Bern cut from book drafts. No context, no order, just put them in. It would do him no harm to get the imperfect stuff out there.
Bry — January 28, 2021, 2:05 am (can’t sleep)
WHEN HE was fifteen, their RCA console unit, one of the first color sets to be purchased in Milwaukee, broke down. At the dinner table his father said, “Well? Do I get it fixed?” No one spoke up, oddly. For two years it sat silent. In that time, that extra time, of no pre-empting his own fancy—We interrupt our programming to bring you the stillness that precedes desire, the awareness of being that opens the bedclothes to the music of this thing and that—he began to draw. First he copied cartoon figures in zines; then he began aping the styles he found in old National Lampoons stashed in his brothers’ closet. Then he set challenges to himself: Drawn with Left Hand Comix, Drawn in Dark Bathroom Comix, Drawn on Moving Toboggan Comix. His skills did not develop in any representational sense, but he learned there was a way, one at least, he might sound out something that hadn’t yet exactly been in the world.
Bern — January 27, 2021, 5:16 am
NOG’S NORTHROP FRYE he loved so well divides literary genres into comic, tragic, and ironic, and romantic, with the last sometimes able to encompass all the others epically in a Grail quest or Hero’s Journey structure (encompass being a good word for it, as these lay out on cardinal points, Romance and Irony opposing, Comedy and Tragedy likewise). I see this easiest when I think of old rock bands. Ironic were Zappa and B-52s. Romantic were Emerson, Lake & Palmer and ( the epitome) The Moody Blues. Comic (which is less about funny and more about the happy marriage of conflicting forces and formed societies of truth, beauty, and goodness) would be Chicago and Sly & the Family Stone. Tragic was Goth and Heay Metal. Epic Romantic was Beatles, The Who, Simon & Garfunkel, Springsteen, anyone whose albums run the bounds of human experience.
no tears formula
Bry — January 26, 2021, 5:18 am
READ THIS SOMEWHERE, maybe the Betty Edwards book on drawing: if you draw five things a day for five years you will be an artist. I’m on year 12 and see now it’s a marriage to a part of yourself, a vow to be open to small arousals and hopes followed by acceptance of outcomes, of mild disappointments, but as well a completely new marvel or two from time to time. You stop and find a pen and sketch the hang of the dog’s front legs hanging off the front of the couch, then see one foot ended up 2x the size of the other, and seven years later you find the slip of paper, the dog three years dead, and you feeling its raised paw as you take it to shake.
Bern — January 25, 2021, 4:57 am
SCREENPLAY IS SCENE whereas in a novel you get to expand and show (or decide to skip showing) the SOLILOQUY, where the character reacts to the scene-just-now and decides what to do about it. (Actually a screenplay can include this, maybe in a conversation, or a vignette where the heroine ripples her jaw muscles, opens the cupboard and takes out the Batgirl outfit, loads the shotgun, and sets off on her horse.)
What I see this morning is a third choice for what takes place after a scene (or before; you could start a piece with this), and that’s RITUAL. We see the character perform some brief but telling habitual act that shows us who she’s been and thinks to go on being. We may see this ritual as set in stone, or suddenly interrupted by circumstance, or overdue for change.
Bry pissed me off in the kitchen just now with his phone playing Afternoon of a Faun, which we all understand is bad manners: we’re all silent here for the first hours. I could have made the sign of the cross effectively forgiving him, or snapped at him to turn it off, or just gone away and brooded over what it is Debussy does for him these days, what in his head possibly needs it before he is fully awake, and why it drops me into despair, and how we both handle this sustain-pedal sense of loss.
Bry — January 24, 2021, 5:12 am
BLINKETY-BLANKETY-BLUMN, my either hand it wears a thumn. Others’ hands struggle with opposable thumns born to cause trouble, but mine are blithe and carefree, content to dance around each other, over and under, keeping time, killing time, an awareness of time being the chief occupation of those of us at the high-water mark of evolution, those with thumns.
open til 4
Nog — January 23, 1998, 4:58 am
EVERY NUMBER has its adherent. Tarot occultists like 78 cards to cover all human experience; we find 64 states of being when we consult the I Ching; much more manageable are the 28 human phases of personality and character illuminated by Yeats’s Vision. But for simplicity you can’t beat the 16 Myers-Briggses, twelve astrological houses, nine eneagrams; four humors; three figures of Freud’s psychic apparatus, two turtledoves, or the attainment of Oneness.
authoritarian
Nog — January 22, 1999, 9:04 am
IT HAD become a ritual, getting up before first light, taking lion’s mane on an empty stomach before throwing on layers to keep him warm in the basement. In the kitchen he filled a mug from the Stanley thermos solid like an artillery shell, the coffee black as anything can be, and went on down to his desk. It was in the corner underneath a dryer duct and it faced a waterheater. He turned on the brass piano lamp beside his laptop, set the cup on the commemorative coaster, and sat. He opened his notebook interested to see what the word elves had brought him in the night. They’d consumed the entire saucer of chocolate-covered espresso beans he’d left out for them. He reached the page. The penmanship looked erratic, as if they’d fought over the pen at each word, but the words tracked.
Bern — January 21, 2021, 10:20 am
THE DUCK WALKED carrying her invisible suitcases past his park bench. He was glad he’d stopped smoking, so he could keep his hands in his coat pockets, warm. The buildings before him were like mountains, a range, of which he knew only the tallest. He stood as he noticed her coming toward him, just passing the statue of Robert Burns. Her coat with the saucer buttons. Her face the sonsiest of faces. How could he face such a face such as hers? Perhaps she loved him for his utter lack of composure around her. “You said you’d not be involved,” she called out when she was still fifty feet away, “with someone newly divorced.”
“That’s right.”
“How newly?”
He looked at his watch.
look splendid
Bry — January 20, 2021, 4:48 am
HE WAS at the age where the most mysterious thing was the vanishing of the poo in the flush. They all lived down there somewhere, leaning their backs against the wall of a large room. They were sentient but just barely. They offered nothing to anyone. Even he could not feel truly sorry for them.
Today, as a nation, we say good riddance.
Nog — January 19, 2002, 4:55 am
DOGPADDLING where she might swim, barely keeping her head above water when she might feel the joy of a refined Australian crawl, Trudi moves through her day relieved to avoid drowning. Meeting the conditional requirement of the moment, fulfilling the demands put upon her in the situation, she paws at life rather than feel excitement, the desire to engage. This is why, she thinks, William Coddard made so much of The Desired Imaginative State. What is in us that resists even glimpsing what we want, and living out from it? Was every moment, every transition from this state to that, a challenge to slough off fear and feel anew her deepest need and reason for being? She had 10,000 feared states. She suspected they all would fall before one truly felt wish.
Bry — January 18, 2021, 5:00 am
WITH GRIEF we become locked into a single perspective, that of a CCTV camera fixed on a corner of an empty room. We watch for movement that surely must come, for TV screens show drama, something about to happen. Which then dutifully happens. We long for it, not this long view of a vacant space. This can’t go on. Who wrote this show? Can we at least have the camera pan? And still we can’t look away.
Bern — January 17, 2021, 10:08 am
GREETINGS FROM lonegunmen.com! You and your fellow forgotten failed compatriots are welcomed with open arms to this new watering hole on the internet. Here you’ll be sorted into crack units, each with a name, a flag, a mascot, and your own special instructions to prepare for the Day of Uprising.
Take the Lone Gunmen Vow to remain ready but not act until The Signal, even should The Signal not come for years. Until then, be strong, stand back and stand around, we’ll let you know. As a cover, take up a hobby like woodworking, model railroading, ice fishing, watercolors, tropical fish. Volunteer at food bank, the hospital. Shovel snow for the elderly. Keep busy, keep low, don’t call attention to yourself with outrage. Be sweet to others, especially when you don’t feel it. Don’t let on, ever, you’re a Lone Gunman. Act like just another a loving member of the community.
Maj. george fielding Eliot cited in the caption below disavows knowledge of the product shown and has referred this matter to his attorneys. we await their letter; at this time we will take no action to remove the claim.
wine made in
northern california
Bry — January 16, 2021, 4:48 am
HE COULD NOT DRAW with anyone looking over his shoulder. He could feel them looking at the whole drawing while he was putting down a part of a single line; they could see the worth of the piece, they got to entertain judgment while he had no choice but to immerse himself in the form of a single contour, no idea whether it all would come together. He found, however, that he could draw more freely as soon as he sensed someone looking over the shoulder of the one looking over his shoulder, looking at the pinpoint on the page, but also scrutinizing he who judged it, and he felt his shoulders relax and the pen move as if its point were pulling his hand after it.
Nog — January 15, 2004, 5:05 am
THE WORM IN the apple stops and tries to remember what it came here for. Not as you’d enter the kitchen and ask what you’d meant to do here. More as if, sweet crisp of pulp in its mouth and down its length, it was seized by the bright certitude that This is not All, this is a part of All, and there is More, an infinite purpose in which I play my part, before I depart from the stage, this being an apple.
Which shortly it did, with more dignity than you and me, who desire bigger parts, and for whom what we have, and will have, may not be enough still, and yet rightfully so.
hail fond vagabond
Bern — January 14, 2021, 11:01 am
AH THE THWARTEEN, a crack group of specialists, each practicing his or her arcane method, each with a bent for genius, or a bent genius. Thirteen and a half outstanding talents, including a man who specializes in owls, a woman who knows drum surfaces and timpanis (so far we’ve got Hoot’mon and Drummer Girl), an expert on spices (Dr. Cabinet), a master of trucks (WideLoad). [Can I stop now?] [Yes.] They go around the country conducting grassroots organizing seminars aimed at constructive and inclusive community action.
Nog — January 13, 2000, 4:50 am
DIAGRAM DRAWN FROM Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism seems to say there are six arts, arranged as such. Each draws aspects from its adjoining neighbors.
Thus writing (Poetry) has aspects of Music and of Painting: some writers are remarkable for cadence, etc., while others are known for visual richness. Architecture relies on Sculpture and Mathematics. Music for its part makes use of lyric (Poetry), while melody relies on Mathematics.
And writing this I realized I know next to nothing really about Music or Mathematics. For all I know Mathematics has major and minor keys.
Nog — January 12, 1996, 5:12 am [25 years ago this morning]
SHE WAS five or six when she recognized others did not have selves divided into boroughs. Adults and children alike went around like sloppy nation-states, some ruled by warring parties, others tightly managed by a central administration. She herself moved between states and knew when she was in them: in her Manhattan she sent out orders and requests; in Queens she pushed against herself, or the world; in Brooklyn the [storm? stone?] broke and she let it carry her; in the Bronx she either reigned herself in, or let it all burst out in desire; on Staten Island she took it in and made something new out of it, or like new. When she was in a particular borough she knew it. And she knew when others were, too, though they would maintain they were only of one place. And they looked at you one way if they saw you as one of theirs, and otherwise if you were alien, foreign. If you were not from their borough, you were a caricature; they saw you as cartoon-like, and she took care to match her words and actions to others’ boroughs to help them feel at home.
(began posting these January 12, 2021)