No Z.

Below is an embarrassingly ridiculous “story” I had to write for one of my classes. This was the product of a writing exercise “constraint” called a "lipogram" that requires the omission of a letter of the alphabet. Rather than omitting the letter I or E or anything like that, I omitted the letter Z and then sent the kids off to the zoo to see some zebra. That just seemed like more fun to me. The result - as you can see below - is actually surprisingly lame.

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African Equids.

African Equids

by james bezerra

"Well hello and welcome!" shouted the man in the tan hat and khaki shorts. He had the practiced joy of someone who spends a lot of time leading school groups of children, which is what he will be doing today. "Is everyone excited to see some animals today?!"

The kids did not say much. Maybe a half-hearted Yay??. They had gotten up very early, before the sun had fully come up, then ridden the bus for over an hour along unfamiliar freeways.

"My name is Mister Andy and today I am going to give you a tour of the ..." He stopped himself. He was tired too. He made less working here then he'd ever expected when he'd gotten his degree. He had expected that he would be doing real and important conservation work, maybe on those vast African savannahs that he'd dreamed about as a boy. Instead though, he'd found himself here. Mostly leading tour groups of disinterested urban school kids. Additionally, he found ridiculous the constraint that had been placed up on all of them. "Today I am going to give you a tour of this establishment which maintains a collection of wild animals ... typically in a park or gardens of some sort, for study, conservation, or display to the public. Who is excited for that?!"

Yay??

He led them down to see the gorillas, because those were always a big hit with the kids, but it was too early and they were asleep. He took them over to the reptile house, but too many of the little girls refused to go inside on account of a quickly-spreading rumor that inside the reptile house the snakes were allowed to slither freely in the shadows.

So he took them over to the Africa enclosure. It was big, almost half an acre.

"Mister Andy! Mister Andy! What are those?" A little boy was pointing at into the enclosure.

Andy had been dreading this. "Those," he sighed, "are a type of African equid. Notable for their distinctive black and white markings."

"Are they horses?!"

"Well, no." Andy said, "Not technically. They are very similar to horses though."

"What's an eqid?" A little girl with blond ringlets asked. "Are they called equids?" She looked up at him, in a way that was almost accusatory.

"Well no." Andy sighed again, "No one actually calls them that."

"Tell us what they are called." The little girl demanded.

"Well technically they are of the genus Equus. And of the subgenus Hippotigris. Can you all say 'Hippotigris'?"

"Those are antelope," one of the boys hollered while wiping snot on his sleeve.

"No," Andy protested, "those are not antelope."

"Yes they are."

"No, I assure you, they are not."

"Well then what are they?" The little girl was quite demanding now. 

"How would you all like to go see the porcupines?" Andy asked.

"No," the little girl insisted. "Tell us what those are."

"I told you already," snot boy said, "they are antelopes."

"No," Andy said, "No they are not. They are just kind of like horses, okay? You're fourth graders, how much do you really care?"

"Where are they from?" Blond girl asked.

"These are from ..." Andy stopped himself, "these are from the African nation west of Angola and north of Botswana."

"Where is that?" The girl was like a little prosecutor.

"Look kid, just go get a map, okay? Now how about some ice cream. How would you all like some ice cream?"

"We haven't even had lunch yet." the girl said.

"Well I won't tell if you don't, okay?"

Andy led them away toward the cantina as the African equids munched contentedly on the breakfast hay in their feeder.

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THREE HOURS!

I had to write another one of those infuriating “constraint” exercises for one of my writing classes.

This was the prompt:

Mapping the world:  Take David Shumate's micro-narrative/prose poem, The Bible Belt (below) and replace each of its words with one of your own (and of the same kind—nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, etc.) using a title taken from your neighborhood of Los Angeles.  

It has taken me THREE HOURS to get through the 135 words. I am not a happy camper right now. I have many very important other things to be doing right now!

Anyway, Shumate’s piece is below (his is actually quite good) and mine is in the next post (it is not very good and yet still required a whole lot of grammatical cheating.)

The Bible Belt

By David Shumate

It's a vast and fertile land. Soybeans and corn grow in this soil. Wheat and tobacco. A little sorghum. It's not dramatic terrain with ocean waves crashing against the cliffs. It's mostly gently rolling plains. Long stretches of prairie. You know you've entered it when the signs along the highway begin telling you what God wants you to do. Those who live here regard it as their duty to make these things known. Otherwise the rest of the country would be left in the dark. The bibles in this region are larger than elsewhere. Most weigh over a hundred pounds. It takes two strong men to lift them into a pickup truck to haul off to church. All the women dress up on Sundays. And all the white men shake hands.

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An Adjacent Metropolis.

An Adjacent Metropolis

by james bezerra

We are the hot and cramped stipmalls. Spray tan and mascara smear in this heat. Asphalt and concrete. The thick 101. This isn't Hollywood dreamscapes beneath palm trees swaying over our success. We’re usually quietly mourning something. Potential pornstars among the homeless. She thinks she’s making it because her agent down in Studio City starts convincing her that directors need her to strip. We that survive this scab over as our penance and exploit the amateurs casually. Patiently a anxiety in the periphery will be pushing on the heart. A BMW on these streets is better than grace. Many fuck away the empty feeling. We drive three clogged freeways to move ourselves through the gaping Pass while going broke on gas. All the water disappeared down into pools. But all the starving potential lies here.

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The Oulipos Made Me Do It.

I guess I should have warned you previously, but I am taking two (very) different writing classes this semester and a lot of the exercises I end up writing find their way onto this here blog. Well below is yet another of the weekly “constraint” exercises I’m doing for one of the classes. This is in the tradition of the Oulipo writers of the 1960s who - because they were French and hated themselves, or something - enjoyed imposing artificial constraints on their own writing. There are legitimately good things to be said about why these sorts of exercises are good for writers, though I’m still not entirely convinced that they are good for the writing.

Either way, here is the artificial constraint I was operating under this week:

Make a diagram of the house you grew up in and assign each of the rooms a letter.  Make little pieces of paper with each of the letters printed on them.  Make 10 each of these little pieces of paper.  Scramble them up and draw 25 of them. Then write a story moving from room to room in that order.

So that sounds … complicated, right? Well it was, but it also turned out to be kind of fun. I bent the rules some because this was supposed to be autobiographical and what I wrote is only mostly autobiographical-ish.

Between this autobiographical stuff and my creative non-fiction class, I am seriously getting annoyed with having to write about me. I have no interest in writing about me. What I like to do is this: I like to just make people up and then make them say and do stuff that I think is interesting. So yes, that is entirely about me, but in that situation I’m not writing about me. All I am doing there is bending a tiny fictional universe to my will.

If none of that makes any sense it is because I am very tired right now because I had a long day and I also spent almost an hour on the treadmill too! But I think I did have a point in saying all that stuff about writing … what was it? … thinkthinkthink … oh yeah!

Please remember that the piece of writing below is only autobiographical-ish. It is more true to tone than to fact. I would NOT submit this to my non-fiction class because I blurred things a little bit too much and borrowed a few too many details from people who are not me. Also, because of the constraints of the exercise I took a tact that is more atmospheric and interstitial than I normally would have otherwise. (BTW, I caually use the word ‘interstitial’ now, apparently. Thanks grad school.)

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Autoethnography.

Below is something that we fancy writer types call a “constraint exercise”. Basically some predetermined constraint is placed on a piece of writing and then you write in and around the constraint. I know it sounds arbitrary, but it forces you to think differently than you would normally. It is basically like stretching for your brain.

I wrote this for one of my classes. Here is the constraint:

Find your name in a dictionary--or, if your name is not there, find the place where it would be.  Then, take each noun that follows the place where your name is or would be and use it, in order, to title the sections of a piece of autoethnographic writing. Minimum, 10 sections.

It is harder than it sounds! And my nouns really sucked.

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Constraint.

Bezerra, James

Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1983

Beziers

My very last moment in France would have been that moment just before the tires left the tarmac of the runway at de Gaulle airport. In this I am not alone, as that’s how a lot of people leave France. I always consider us to be on the ground until that last lick of reinforced airline rubber ceases to be earthbound. Technically though being an inch above France is legally the same thing as being in France even if you are airborne. Everybody agrees on that. Interestingly, no one actually agrees on exactly how far up controlled airspace goes. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale says that you’re still in airspace up to 62 miles above sea level. NASA says that if you’ve gone more than fifty miles up you’re an astronaut, congratulations. Despite this confusion, from de Gaulle it is 220 kilometers to the English Channel, 204 to the Belgium border, and 374 to Germany, so if you absolutely, positively must get out of France as quickly as possible, going straight up is still your best bet.

Many people would have liked to have that option on 21 July 1209 when Catholic forces hunting Cathars laid siege to the city during the Albigensian Crusade. Beziers is 783 kilometers from Charles de Gaulle Airport, which did not exist in 1209. The Cathars - who did not call themselves that and who would not know what you were talking about if you said that word to them - are most well-known for being implicated in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as one set of keepers of the secret knowledge of the Holy Grail (which is not actually a thing that ever existed). For $159 you can go to Beziers and take the “In The Footsteps Of The Da Vinci Code” tour. Your guide that day will tell you about the beliefs of the Cathars as the tour bus delivers you to Chateau de Termes where you will have a prepared lunch of duck breast with mixed, fresh vegetables. A vegetarian option will also be available upon request.

Bezique

The logic of card games always tends to escape me. They seem to always have far too many rules which always seem to me to be far too arbitrary. Plus those rules never stick to my brain. If you teach me how to play Bezique tonight, you’ll just have to teach me how to play it again tomorrow night because I’m not going to commit the rules to memory. The only thing I like about card games is figuring out how to cheat at them. This is really the only reason to play a card game. There are few traditions in my family, but each Christmas we all come in from wherever the winds have scattered us and spend Christmas together because we all know it makes my father happy. His own family had all the warmth and love of the cast of King Lear but without Cordelia and with far more Fools. My family all crams around a table after dinner and we play the Mattel card game Uno which has a bunch of rules that I don’t remember right now. By the end of the night most of us are hiding the good cards in our clothes or around the house because having a couple good cards at the ready is a far better way to win than learning the rules.

Bezoar

King Lear is not the worst analogy for understanding my father’s family. My paternal grandfather James - for whom I am named - was first generation American. His father had literally stowed away on a boat to get to America. His family was Portugues by way of the Azore Islands. He descended from what historians seem to enjoy calling “The Secret Jews of the Azores”. Chased off the Iberian Peninsula by the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, they sailed west 850 miles to nine islands of volcanic rock where they took to raising goats and cows, growing grain and pretending to be Catholic. For reasons passing understanding, my grandfather’s father settled in the long, dry San Joaquin Valley of California where he took to raising goats and cows, growing grain and actually being Catholic. Eventually he sent away to the old country for a wife and pretty soon one showed up. As a boy, my grandfather James grew up in the exact same dirt that I did, out there 30 miles northwest of Tulare Lake, which was carved by a glacier during the Holocene epoch and which doesn’t exist anymore because we drained it in 1899 to turn the valley desert into farmland.

My grandfather grew up never far from the smell of cows and my father grew up never far from the smell of the descendents of those same cows. Cows are terribly dumb creatures that will eat anything. Often their stomachs will fill with things they can’t digest, things like hair (trichobezoars) or unripe fruit (diospyrobezoars). Often though they will eat metal. The last thing you want passing around in the digestive tract of a cow are tangles of baling wire. At the right angles a shaft of bailing wire is sharp enough to pierce the linings of a cow’s own organs. A dumb cow can stand there in front of you bleeding internally and you won’t even know it until it lays down and doesn’t get up again. It will just lay there in the middle of the coral and start making a low, deep, death knell moan. If the moan starts to sound wet - a little like a gurgle - the most humane thing to do is shoot it in the head because its lungs are already drowning in blood. To prevent this sort of situation, my father used to toss Alnico magnets into the feed. They are smooth silver magnets about three inches long. Errant metal will stick to them and the resulting pseudobezoar will usually lodge in one of the stomachs, which is better than the other option. My father used to call them “cow magnets” and we always had a few clean ones stuck to the fridge in the kitchen. Because they were fun to play with.        

Bezonian

A bezonian is a scoundrel and a scoundrel is a knave and a knave is a dishonest man who tries to trick you into giving him your money, which brings us back to Dan Brown.

Bezzant

I have no beef with Dan Brown, just a few bones to pick. He rewrites history to tell a story and I am all for that, but he is quite earnest about the truth of the “facts” in his books, which is ironic because he lifted the “facts” of The Da Vinci Code from the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which itself is based on documents that are widely known to be forgeries. The real truth of the Holy Grail is that it was made up by a Medieval French poet called Chretien de Troyes. He was from Troyes France, which is 186 kilometers from Charles de Gaulle Airport and 740 kilometers from Beziers. Chretien de Troyes made his living writing Arthurian legends but pretending he didn’t. It was the custom of Medieval poets to pretend they were just recording a story they’d been told by someone else and therefore they weren’t responsible for the veracity of the tale. In one poem, de Troyes claimed to have been told of the Grail by a minstrel whom he paid a bezzant for a story.     

B-girl

There is an interesting moment in William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition when the protagonist Cayce Pollard (named for the American mystic Edgar Cayce) meets an attractive girl at Camden Market in London. Most nights the girl works at an upscale London bar flirting with rich international businessmen and encouraging them to buy more drinks. The businessmen don’t know that she’s on the clock though. Some nights she gets hired out by marketing firms to flirt with rich international businessmen and say things like, “You’d look so sexy driving the new Porsche Macan Turbo! Have you seen it? It has parallel turbochargers and respective charge air-coolers, so even when it is running hot it is still cool to the touch ...” It is interpersonal advertising and William Gibson didn’t make it up, it’s a real thing.

Bhabha, Homi J.

He is considered the father of India’s nuclear program. He studied with Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who fled Nazisim in 1943 and joined the British nuclear weapons research program codenamed “Tube Alloys” which was later folded into the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Fifty years later, in the summer of 1995 I had been spending a lot of time with my maternal grandmother. She didn’t bake but always kept packages of cookies in the oven. She would sit and play solitaire by herself and watch Headline News because Headline News was still a fascinating new development in television back in 1995. We were watching a short report about the fifty year anniversary of the bombings and the Headline News anchor was talking to a Japanese doctor who was saying that the children of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not have abnormally high instances of birth defects or Cancer. My grandmother - who had worked as a telephone operator while her husband was working the boilers of US Navy destroyers in the Pacific Theater in August of 1945 - stopped playing Solitaire and she said that she was glad that they didn’t have birth defects or Cancer. She said that she would have felt bad if they had.    

Bhadgaon

If you are standing in Charles de Gaulle Airport you will not be able to book a flight to Bhadgaon Nepal. Because no one calls it Bhadgaon anymore. Today it is called Bhaktapur. If you would like to go there, Turkish Airways can get you from Paris to Tribhuvan International Airport in 11 hours and 35 minutes, give or take. It will take about another fifteen minutes to get from the airport to Durbar Square in the heart of Bhaktapur. Lonely Planet is a great place to learn about the places that I probably won’t ever see. I visit their website quite a lot because the passport that got me onto and off of the ground at de Gaulle  is going to expire in 2016 and too many of its light blue pages are still blank. I keep a little box by my bed where at night I keep the things I keep in my pockets during the day: keys, wallet, small notebook, pen, phone. I keep my passport in that box too. I see it every day and it reminds me every day that the world is too big and too complicated and too fascinating to sit on the couch and eat tortilla chips. It reminds me that my great grandfather hid in a barrel - or something - in order to cross the Atlantic Ocean. It reminds me that a few hundred years ago a guy with some of my blood in him sat on a rocky crag on the island on Sao Miguel and watched his goats and looked at the sea to the east and Europe beyond and wondered if people were going to come kill him because of the things he believed. It reminds me to get out more.

Bhagavad-Gita

A few years ago I was on campus and a young white guy with dirty blond dreads wanted to tell me about Hinduism. It was totally insensitive of me, but he somehow reminded me of the white Hare Krishnas in the 1980 Zucker Brothers movie Airplane! and so I stopped to talk to him because I thought it would be funny. There is a very fine line between young American men who have truly found deep spiritual meaning in Eastern religions and those who are just Orientalizing so much that they just think they have. We talked for a few minutes and then I told him I had to go, because I wanted to go. He offered me a fat orange copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, which I took because why the hell not? And then he told me that it cost $10. So I gave it back to him and thus, have remained unenlightened.   

Bhajan

There exists a Youtube channel called “MIX - Super Hit Hindi Bhajans”. I want so very much to make fun of this, but I can’t quite stick the landing. Where is the joke in this? A bhajan is a kind of Hindu devotional song and I think having a Youtube channel of devotional Hindu songs is funny the same way that Baptist churches in strip malls are funny, or the way that it’s funny that the Presbyterian Korean church on Devonshire clearly used to be a Circuit City. I want to say something here about what happens when spirituality and technology collide like when they tested the first atom bomb in the desert of New Mexico and J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  I want to say something about what happens when the personal and the commercial collide because an attractive girl is whispering into your ear in a dark London bar. Something about when the eternal and the impermanent collide, like nations pretending that they could ever possibly own the sky. I want to say something here about how sometimes the true and the false collide and in doing so make a story; that’s how Dan Brown does it after all. I want to say something here about how sad it is that even when you are only an inch off the the French tarmac, you’re already on your way home and your passport is an inch closer to expiring.


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