Look How Legit I Am!

I have a very short piece of flash fiction included in the latest issue of the very cool weekly literary journal Lit.Cat.

Here is a link for the whole issue.

Here is a link for just my piece.

I’m really happy this silly little piece of writing found a home.

.

.

.

Haunted.

I had to do a writing exercise for one of my classes. The prompt I went with basically required writing something that is “haunted by cinema”. This phrase “haunted by cinema” sums up an idea that is commonly discussed in writing classes: that movies have had a dramatic effect on the way that narrative writing works. There are things that movies do very well, like convey motion and action and the visual, things which written words do not do as well. Sometimes narrative writing tries to adapt itself to the strictures and functions of film and a lot of people would say that doing so undercuts the things writing can do that movies can’t (interiority, history, examination, etc.). So that is where this phrase “haunted by film” comes from.

The exercise below is not terribly good, but I tried to steer into the skid by invoking the logic of movies while using language that movies normally don’t have access to.

.

.

.

Sensory Map.

The other day my writing workshop met for the first time. The workshop is the core of a writing program like the one I am in. But since it was the first day, there was not much to actually do.

We talked a lot about the way the workshop will work and about feedback and revision and blah blah blah, a bunch of other writerly stuff you don’t care about. We also did a writing exercise using a “sensory map” and while I do not generally like writing exercises, this one was okay.

A “sensory map” sounds way more fancy than it is. Just imagine that you have a piece of paper and you divide it up into sections for each of your senses (sight, touch, taste, etc.) and you focus on writing something for each of those senses. The idea being that we make automatic, subconscious writing choices about which senses we use and often forget about the others. You know how Hemingway wrote a lot about how things taste, but how I always forget to? A sensory map helps a writer work though some of that. Usually the map is aimed at a particular prompt. Our prompt the other day was “fireworks”.

This particular map had the sense of ‘Touch’ broken down into subcategories: skin, nerves, internal organs, limbs, fingers. That was kind of interesting because I had never seen one like that before.

Below is the exercise I ended up producing. I don’t think it is particularly good or anything, but is a thing which exists now, but didn’t a week ago.

.

.

.

On Fireworks.

It’s the boom of the fireworks that make them both violent and fascinating. The sound that frightens our children and our dogs. The intense and invisible wave blooming out that shakes windows, that sets off car alarms. It is the unseeable forces that we actually fear.

It is the concussion and vibration that actually kills gunshot victims; the rippling shockwave inside the body.

It’s why we watch fireworks from far below or far away. Why we watch them and pretend not to notice the feel of our fingers brushing. Accidently. The first time or two. Faces turned up from a dark crows occasionally dappled with acrid greens and reds and blues. And our pinkies hook wordlessly together down where no one can see.

It is the sky we watch explode, because it is only the invisible things we fear.

.
.
.

City Council Resolution No. 5-104.

City Council Resolution No. 5-104
by james bezerra


This past Tuesday night the city council passed a resolution stating that all new concrete poured within the city limits may contain no more than 16% pulverized human bone. The resolution passed by a voice vote of 3 to 2.

.
.
.

Rothko.

This is a picture of Mark Rothko’s “Light Red Over Black” from 1957.

A red canvas and a light red rectangular smear hovering above a squarish black smudge floating over a more shadowy black brick.

This is one of my favorite things.

What can not be visually or abstractly or virtually understood - what thus far defies the digital reinterpretation of our physical reality - is the experience of being in the presence of a Rothko.

His canvases are huge.

18 feet tall, I think. 11 feet wide.

Each one painted on canvas made from the bleached hide of the last living specimen of an all but extinct species. A singular animal hunted across nocturne steppes in the dead of winter, stalked, killed, skinned just to this end. The blood still pumping warm through the heart, collected for pigments.

In every museum in front of every Rothko there is a bench because to be in the looming presence of a Rothko is to be cowered and the bench allows one the option to sit rather than kneel.

At the Tate Modern in London there is an entire room of them.

Ordinarily this is not permitted. Just as suspects are separated by police before questioning; just as the most irrepressible of prisoners are kept in a solitary confinement; just as the most powerful versions of gods are segregated into separate monotheisms; just as competing densities of gravity are stored on entirely separate planets; so too are Rothkos usually kept far apart.

It is for this reason that he never delivered on his 1958 contract to produce an entire series of his dark totems to the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan.  

He painted them, but then distributed them far and wide, to the Kawamura Memorial Museum in Sakura Japan, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the nation-state of LA, to the underground Houston Texas bunker of the Rothko Chapel, and to the Tate Modern in London.

The thing which is most important for a witch doctor to know, is how much black magic is too much.

But the Tate Modern, in its enthusiasm to collect as many of the monoliths as possible, installed an active noise control system in its Rothko Room, using anti-noise wavelengths licensed from the city of Taos New Mexico to cancel the ultra low-frequency hum emitted by the paintings, which had been correlatively linked to mass hysteria and also - conversely - to a debilitatingly deep, unremitting existential solemnity.

The room is quite large, or perhaps not. In a Danielewskian happenstance, no two people have ever measured the dimensions of the room similarly. Most agree that the room is vaguely rectangular in shape. That it has a slatted wood floor of burnished yellow pine cut from trees so young that the cutting itself was considered very nearly obscene. Most agree that the room is dim, held in perpetual shadow, an unending dusk, but for the slim dry glow around the paintings themselves, which are not artificially illuminated.

Most agree that despite the fact the ceilings appear rather low, they must actually be quite high, as all Rothkos are 27 feet tall, 13 feet across, and 2 feet thick.

The room is what a Bronte would describe as glum.

Given the sound canceling capabilities of the room, it is completely silent. Should two patrons find themselves in the room at the same time - which has never happened - they would hear nothing, least of all the accelerated beating of their own hearts, as the vibrations up through their bones would instantly be countermanded by the negative silence of the motion activated sound transceivers embedded in the ceilings, the floors, the walls.

This is the room I will go to when I die.

I have no spiritual reason to believe this, but I believe that when we die we go - alone - to a quiet and lonely and empty and eerily beautiful place.

For someone else I imagine this may be a golden midwest field of grain bending preternaturally in the not-quite-silent but unhearable breeze. For someone, I imagine, this might be an oak panelled room decorated with the stuffed heads of dead animal's; antlers and those obsidian black plastic eyes taxidermists use because light glints off of them in just the right ways. For someone, I imagine, it will be the observation deck of the Empire State Building looking down into a completely motionless Manhattan. This is what all of those shots of sun-dappled blades of grass are about in The Thin Red Line.

This is the room I will go to when I die.

.

.

.

Short Cat Story.

Short Cat Story

by james bezerra

Cat: wants to go outside.

Me: let’s cat outside.

Cat: realizes it's cold outside, looks at me like somehow I’m an asshole.

.

.

.

Schadenfreude Scalpers.

Schadenfreude Scalpers

by james bezerra

A limited-run performance art piece. Each night the artist loses a finger in a Victorian-era loom. Tickets are sold out for night ten. Scalpers are getting rich.

.
.
.

Oh, Revision.

There are different types of writers. The most common is the writer who does not write. This type of writer is one of the most annoying because they always want to talk to you about the the thing they’re “working on”. Equally annoying are the writers who write way the hell too much. These writers, when you meet them for the first time will say, “Oh I have published eight novels.” The word here to be weary of is “published” because it implies that writing has gone through the ringer of editors and publishers, when in fact the process likely just consisted of some zinfandel and setting up an Amazon account.

Then there are those of us somewhere in the middle. Being in the middle doesn’t make us less annoying, I just want to be clear about that. Of those of us in the middle, there are usually two kinds. Those for whom writing is a grueling and painful process which is followed by copious and responsible revision. Then there are those of us who are simply in love with the generative process of writing and for whom revision is like pulling teeth out through our nose. I am this last sort. This should be obvious because I write a whole goddamn blog just for the fun of it.

I’m not so daft as to think that I don’t need to revise. I most certainly do, I just don’t find any joy in it. Below is a small example of the worth of the revision process. The first one is just a piece of flash fiction I had to write for a class. The second is a “Lou Beach” revision, which is limited to 420 characters. There is some debate over whether a proper Lou Beach is supposed to be 420 including spaces or not, this one is not counting the spaces.

I’m not suggesting that either of these is particularly good, just that the revision is better.

DRAFT

The Other Legends of Orpheus

by james bezerra

In his later years, Orpheus eschewed the company of any woman, so thick yet somehow so querulously tender was the scar tissue which covered his heart like a thin purple rind. It is said that he invented pederasty. It is also said that it was he who first conceptualized the windowless van. It is said that he composed on his lyre the tune which all ice cream trucks now play and which draws the children from their homes. It is said that many of the enduring mysteries of our time could be solved by prying up the floorboards of his house at the end of Eurydice Street, which is not actually a street, but rather a lane. He has never voted, put out his recycling, or opened his door to trick-or-treaters, with whom his porch is very popular once a year.  

REVISION

The Other Legends of Orpheus

by james bezerra

Later, Orpheus eschewed the company of women; so thick yet querulously tender was the scar tissue of his heart; thin purple rind. It’s said he invented pederasty, the windowless van. That he composed the tune ice cream trucks play to draw out children. It’s said that many of the enduring mysteries of our time could be solved by prying up his floorboards. He’s never voted, put out the recycling, or opened his door to trick-or-treaters, but he’s watched them from his window, shapes receding in the dark.

.
.
.

Wouldn’t It Be Surprising #1.

Wouldn’t It Be Surprising #1

by james bezerra

If David Caruso was cast in a one-man show based on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest directed by David Fincher and attended opening night by David Duchovny who sat all night holding hands with the ghost of David Carradine and no one thought that any of that was odd?

.
.
.

The Red Baron.

The Red Baron

by james bezerra

“Did you know,” Leslie asks as we lie naked in the bed, sweaty and passing an American Spirit back and forth between us, “that Red Baron Pizza was not named after the Red Baron, but by the Red Baron? He learned about pizza during the war and tried to make it back in Germany when he got home.”

I’m naked. She might not be, technically, her rumpled black panties still hanging around her thin and pale ankle — which clicks in a strange but soft way when she walks and which she swears doesn’t hurt and which she doesn’t even notice anymore — which  is dangling over the edge of the bed.

“Who was he again?” I ask because my brain is still fuck fuzzy, and that’s great because it had been awhile and so some of my higher brain functions have gone snowblind from the sensory overload of her wet skin on my skin and that kiwi smell in the tangles of her hair.

“He was that pilot. In World War I. Who shot all of those people down.”  

My brain starts to clear a little, like the sky over France on a cold spring morning a long time ago and Leslie puts the cigarette out and half curls across me and drapes one leg across my body and she nestles into me as though she loves me and there is something so very sweet about it and, yet, so odd, because it was just mini-minutes ago that she was the opposite of sweet; that she was salt in sweat and muscle and flesh and fold and grunt and teeth on my lips and twitch and slick and a little bit mean in the way her hips moved and I’d thought there in those moments, just before she came, that she might be able to break me.  Yet now her ear is pressed so delicately over my chest above my heart which is still thudding heavy and her small breasts are pressed so casually against my ribs. And so now it is so odd. The contradiction. Like the pretty blue cobalt sky clearing over the torn black scar of a French battlefield on a chilly but otherwise perfect spring day.

“I thought he died,“ I say. As I move my mind back into my own body and notice how sticky I am on my hips and thighs and while I let the tip of my finger trace up and back along the curved line of her spine.

“Oh I’m sure he did,” she says while wiggling her toes. “He’d be, like, a hundred and thirty years old now.”

“No, I thought that he was shot down or … no, he was shot be he landed his plane, I think. I don’t think he survived the war.”

Leslie’s whole body engages in a small shrug and her skin rubs her sweat into my sweat and I think about what we taste like together. I can tell, somehow, from the way her body slackens and her skin cools, in just the tiniest way, that she has closed her eyes and is drifting away from awake, “Maybe he didn’t.”

.
.
.

Wouldn’t It Be Surprising #2.

Wouldn’t It Be Surprising #2

by james bezerra

If the Dawson’s Creek reunion show was filmed using not the original cast members, but rather drag queens performing as the original cast members?

.
.
.

The Irrational Sorcerer’s Economic Policy.

The Irrational Sorcerer’s Economic Policy

by james bezerra

In line at the 7-11 the other day, one of the high schoolers said to his friend, “My bottle of water costs more than your soda” and he was right and he wasn’t even buying the fancy kind of water. The fluctuations of international economic markets might explain this, but more likely it has to do with something Marx said about how a society that has conjured up such means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. Most cola soda is 90% water.

.
.
.

The Inimitable Hodgman.

I think that for some odd reason today my brain must be set to John Hodgman because I have been writing odd little untrue factoids all morning. The ones below, silly as they are, are the few that are un-silly enough to even bother sharing with you. The Hodgman is inimitable, which must be why I’m failing so badly as a writer today.

.
.
.

Liquid Cocaine.

Liquid Cocaine

By james bezerra

It is little known, but still true that at the height of his Fame Elton John personally funded a project to seed the clouds over Oklahoma with cocaine.

It was believed by some that this would produce liquid cocaine rain, however that theory was disproved by the complete failure of the project.

It is regarded as the most expensive privately-funded cloud seeding project ever undertaken.

.
.
.

A Traveler.

A Traveler

By james bezerra

One Christmas vacation I was in New York City and I had received as a gift Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler which I had started reading Christmas morning but which I did not have with me on the subway two days later when I got on the Green line at 96th headed Downtown, which is when I saw a strikingly pretty young woman with curly jet-black hair wearing a gray wool skirt standing at one end of the car holding a pole with one hand while reading Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler.

My feeling of excitement was immediately replaced by a deeper feeling of sadness -- or perhaps instant loss – when I realized that here I had this connection to a complete stranger yet could in no way substantiate it or prove it or birth that connection into that cold urban Christmas. It was an incomplete circuit. What good ever is a potential connection to another human being?

She, The Reader, got off at 77th and I never saw her again and likely never will, given the size of the world.

Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler is a mishmash book made of chapters of several books, none of which are eve really completed or realized. In this way, The Reader and I probably did live out our relationship as fully as we could have.

.
.
.

Rules for Marbles.

Rules for Marbles

By james bezerra

          

When playing marbles, it is best to know the rules as well as to have a basic understanding of physics. 

When I say “playing marbles”, what I really mean is “when existing in the world” and when I say that what I really mean, of course, is “When attempting to navigate this too-brief lifespan of ours and accomplish all of the things you will ever accomplish all in the blink of cosmic time between when you are birthed and when your body ceases its standard biological functioning; all the wandering, the learning, the falling in love, the working, the moving from one empty place to another, the packing up over and over of all your vinyl records that you keep promising yourself that you will one day buy a player for, the surviving of illnesses, the making of soup for yourself those times when you have the flu and no one in your life who loves you enough to even heat up canned soup for you, the buying of rugs so large that you have to carry them rolled up over your shoulder like someone carrying a heavy burden or a rescued princess, the having your heart broken again and then mended again and then inevitably broken again, the sitting in a sun beam in a summer park and closing your eyes and seeing that the blackness that usually covers the back of your eyelids has been replaced by a faint but warm yellow, the paying of taxes, the writing of your will, the watching of fireworks from the last hospital window you will ever look out of, it is best to know the rules and to have a basic understanding of physics, or, at the very least, gravity.”

.
.
.

Orwell’s Linguists.

Orwell’s Linguists

By james bezerra

In 1984, George Orwell created “Newspeak” which is a language designed to prevent its speakers from being able to think for themselves by depriving them of the mental vocabulary required for abstract thought. 

This would have required, at some point prior to the year 1984, teams of linguists working together to design a language which would make it impossible, at some point after the year 1984, to then design a language.

.
.
.

Carnivorous Plants.

Carnivorous Plants

By james bezerra

You probably know this already, but there exist on the planet Earth carnivorous plants. Just think about that for a second: 

Carnivorous.

 
Plants. 

Plants which are carnivorous.

 
Stephen Hawking says it would likely be catastrophic for humanity if we ever did encounter aliens.

    
If they do arrive, perhaps we could show them our carnivorous plants, of which they would be terrified, and rightfully so.

 
Unless of course the aliens are themselves carnivorous plants, in which case I agree with Stephen Hawking.

.
.
.

More Information Concerning Plants.

More Information Concerning Plants

By james bezerra

George Lazenby is the only actor to play the role of James Bond who only did so in one film. He is also the only actor to play James Bond who was previously a professional boxer but also held an advanced degree in Botany.

 
He is said to have grown a small jungle of potted plants in his trailer while filming On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which he would nurture like children and to which he would whisper things that no person was ever allowed to hear. He is not the only actor to play James Bond said to have done this.

.
.
.