Hogwash

Terry Gross interviewed Paul Bremer on "Fresh Air" today. He made some half-assed argument defending his decision in 2004 to close Al Hawza, an anti-occupation newspaper in Iraq. He simply further revealed himself to be of an anti-democratic, imperialistic power. It was childishly transparent, his argument was.

That's it. No in-depth analysis of this, just a hearty acknowledgement of balderdash.

jem

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In junior high, I found it fitting to deliver an assignment on Guy Fawkes day in verse. In college, I turned my biweekly Humanities seminar papers into creative writing exercises: my assignment on the di Medici family gardens became an attempt to evoke the sensory experience of a walk in a labyrinth comprised of rosemary trellises.

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A short story, I've found, is fashioned from many things I love: the strategic juxtapositions of poetry, the sedulousness of academic writing, the character exploration of playwriting and acting; and yet, beautifully, it is its own medium too. When I am the reader, a short story leaves me with a haunting uneasiness, an ineffable longing - some vestige - more immediately than does just about any other art form.

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And I loved thinking about how to cleverly use words and arrangements of words to do these things. I began to read more, and for new reasons: to figure out how the author had constructed her work - When does she introduce an anecdote about her parents and why? Why does she use dialogue here but not there? - and to determine which choices, detailed or integral, made a piece powerful.

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I recently re-read Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. What I find to be most remarkable about the book is that each of its sentences is as deliberate and well-crafted as the line of a poem. The arrangement of passages is strategic, enhancing the reader’s emotive experience. The narrative flow yields to lonely meditations on the body in the middle chapters, enabling the reader to more perfectly empathize with the reflective and solitary narrator, estranged from her love interest at that point. The narrative voice is witty, searching, wise, alive, human.

*jem*

Floral slippage

Not sure why it works the way it does. When something is offered to me, why, in the past, I've felt afraid of it. And when it slips away, it reveals itself, or so it seems, as something I do indeed want.

Why the fear in moment of aloneness? When someone is gone, then there is danger? When someone is gone, then there is this diminishing sense of self? Existence doesn't persist in aloneness? Someone told me that if a baby isn't held enough, the result is an adult that feels very threatened by aloneness.

Can something that was offered for such a short time really be sincere? It betrays itself as my experience, as interest until interest is returned, and then, disinterest. She too, I think, feels the terror of aloneness. She too is terrified by feeling out of control. When the wound is opened, she needs to fill it with others, or else she may drown. Maybe I'm wrong.

When I was little, I was alone, always. I watched my parents closely as they preoccupied themselves with things other than noticing me. I think this is what I feel when I am left. I think I purposely make myself be left so that I can replicate this scenario, and try to get it right. It's hard to know what is right, who is right >>>>

>>>>>>someone who is patient and kind, who is not tricked by her own fear, someone who smiles in relief >>when the reversal comes, at last.

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Another dozen roses.