Time for Quality.

** RING! RING! **

ME: Hello?

VOICE: Hi, it’s me, the unrelenting forward motion of time.

ME: Oh, yes. We have met.

TIME: Could you spare a moment to take a quick quality assurance survey?

ME: …

TIME: You’re not that busy.

ME: Yeah, fine.

TIME: Great! On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being absolute certainty and 1 being full-blown denialism, how certain are you that every moment of your existence is leading unflinchingly toward your own death?

ME: I mean … 10, I guess.

TIME: Great! Would you describe your existence as more like that Toy Story 3 scene where everyone is getting pushed toward the incinerator? Or more like the act of falling to the floor un-movingly when a child enters the room?

ME: Um. Five, I guess, just straight down the middle?

TIME: I see, I see. That’s not what most people usually go with, but okay.

ME: Can I ask, what exactly is being assured by this survey?

TIME: Well, you know, time has existed a long time, but it is only relatively recently - for us - that we have had conscious, sentient beings to toy with. Most of existence we’ve been dealing with planets and space dust, micro organisms, that sort of thing, so the opportunity to get real time feedback is still pretty novel for us, so we’re just trying things out.

ME: You keep saying “us" as in plural … are there other kinds of time?

TIME: Oh sure, but you don’t want to get into that! It will break your adorable little biological brain.

ME: Oooooookay.

TIME: Moving on. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being total transcendence and 1 being soul paralysis, what is it like for you to wake up on a Monday morning?

ME: Did you say “soul paralysis”?

TIME: Hm, not familiar with that one?

ME: It sounds terrible …

TIME: I’m told it is quite bad.

ME: Well, I guess, I mean, maybe a 6 … I don’t like waking up on Monday morning, but compared to the lives most people have lived, I probably shouldn’t complain. All I do is log into a computer and do work for 8 hours … it isn’t the most rewarding thing, but probably it is pretty far away from soul paralysis, if I really think about it. And I’ve kind of accepted that most of life is being bored frequently.

TIME: Yeah, that’s why we invented forgetting. You should be thankful for that one.

ME: You invented it?

TIME: Could you imagine if you had to actually remember how much of your life you wasted? Watching TV or waiting for water to boil, that kind of thing?

ME: I guess that would be a lot to have to confront, existentially, I mean.

TIME: So, last question!

ME: Okay.

TIME: Do you want to know how much time you have left?

ME: Excuse me?

TIME: Yeah, how much you got left on the shot clock, as it were?

ME: You’re asking if I want to know when I’m going to die?

TIME: Exactomundo.

ME: … Well … no, I guess I don’t want to know that.

TIME: Suit yourself. It doesn’t really matter anyway.

ME: How do you mean?

TIME: To us, I meant.

ME: Oh, I see.

TIME: Well, thanks for taking the time — wink wink — to talk to me today. If you ever need to get in touch with us, just walk outside at midnight, point at the moon and scream.

ME: Will do.

TIME: Have a good rest of your day.

ME: You too, thanks.

*** CLICK.***

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Charming & Meta.

Recently I applied for a kind of interesting job with a media company. The type of company that might actually come and take a look at this here blog since part of the job I applied for requires that I be able to right order put the words in.

However, as you have likely noticed, I have not been writing very much here lately, largely and specifically because I have been feeling kind of down about not having a job … (to be clear, I am still tutoring at the local junior college and do still love it, but let’s be honest, it is not the sort of work I had hoped to be doing right now and while they do pay me, it is really just barely above an insult-level wage, but that is a rant about how America does not value education of educators that we will save for another time.) … Since I have been feeling down, I have not been writing much, which means there is not much activity here on this blog, which means that I am less likely to get this media job because of how little I have been writing. Which is basically to say: It is harder to get a job because I do not have a job. See: Logic, Circular.

Anywhoo, I’m going to post some older (but still recent-ish) writing here so that on the off chance that the media company people come creeping on this blog, there will be some writing content here. Now, I am aware of the inherent problem presented by this post. If the goal is to trick the media people, then why write this post? Well, because (1) if they read this post they will either (A) find it charming and meta that I wrote about them or (B) be annoyed by how charming and meta I find myself, and therefore (2) they will either hire me or not based on how charming and meta I am, and since I actually am that way, they will have a better sense of me than they would otherwise. This will help us all avoid any confusion later on.

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HEY EVERYBODY! Look at how fancy I am!

Go listen to the amazing No Extra Words  podcast, now featuring one of my stories!

Please follow them on iTunes and Twitter: @noextrawords

via Instagram http://ift.tt/2k9dFaK

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.

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Loosely.

I wrote some poems today. I have not written any poems in a long time.

Let me remind you that I use this word “poems” pretty loosely and with no concern whatsoever for quality.

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On Tom Waits.

On Tom Waits

By James Bezerra

Implacable American lovechild

Bukowski and Dylan

and gravel

lonesome;

growly ash

and noise gourmet

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On Smoking.

On Smoking

By James Bezerra

As with many things

it helps

if

while doing it

you are beautiful

and young.

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On Procrastination.

On Procrastination

By James Bezerra

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow.

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On Writing.

On Writing

By James Bezerra

A most

difficult way

to choose
to starve.

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On Hope.

On Hope

By James Bezerra

It can’t hurt.

Much.

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On Sloths.

On Sloths

By James Bezerra

Sloths are quick

swimmers.

This is not

a poem,

but a delightful
fact.

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On Applying Karma as a Luxury Tax.

On Applying Karma as a Luxury Tax

By James Bezerra

Yachts

may not

carry

lifeboats.

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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.

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The Building in 6 Scenes.

The Building in 6 Scenes

By James Bezerra


In reality, the building is old.

Two stories of damp brick resting on a story of gray stone and masonry.

Pre-war.

Which war?

Who could know these things?

Which wars?

Twenty small units inside. The wood floors still original, largely. Inartful patchwork ribbons of wood around the radiators, which were replaced after one of the wars, but before one of the others. In 205, the second floor at the back corner, facing out at the rainy dog park, an obese cat like a roly-poly panther, weighs enough to make the floors creak as she trumbles over to the window, focuses up at the windowsill, tenses her girthy body. Leaps. Lands there, skitteringly. Plops her body and gazes out at the dogs; dashing, darting, leaping. Dogs. Idiots.

CUT

In the French New Wave story of the building, the aluminum sink - clearly not original - leaks. It drips. It drips. It drips.

It drips.

It.

Drips.

Drip.

The woman who lives in this entirely black and white apartment - 306 in the back, also facing the park, but in the center of the side of the building - is a typical femme. She leans against the soft old wood of the window frame. She gazes out, her small mug of black coffee in one hand. A hand-rolled cigarette in the other. Her silk robe drawn only loosely across her body. She is looking out at a man playing with his dog as she might once have with a child. He is simple in is good looks. He looks up and sees her looking at him. They share this gaze together. Because rain is tittering the glass of the window, he can not tell if she is crying, but he thinks that she is. He calls to his dog and he leaves the park.

CUT

In the Noir story of this building, the men wait in 301, third floor at the front right corner. From there they can peer down into the street at the parking spots below. The men have the lights off, so that she will not know that people are in her home. One of the men is tied to a chair. His own desk chair. He is bleeding from his face, which is pulpy, but this scene is not violent. All the violence has already happened or is about to.

The other two men - one of them has big bloody knuckles, the other has a gun - are smoking the cigarettes they found in the desk. “When does she normally get home?” One of the men asks.

“She’s not coming home tonight,” the man in the chair tries to weakly lie, which is brave in its useless way, because he knows it means they will hit him again.

CUT 

In the Horror film version, the camera is low on a dolly and moves frictionlessly around the halls, looking slightly up. It is the glide of a small ghost around the building. The shot moves through a door and into 108, first floor at the front corner of the building. Bars on the windows because these windows are at street-level. The building having been built back when such a thing was not terrifying.

The ghost shot comes slowly to rest on a blacked out corner of of the closet where there are small skittering animal noises. Rats fighting there in the darkness. Shrill little squeaks, aggressive. One rat dashes away. Slowly a larger, grislier rat wanders out of the dark corner. It is dragging something, a wet tendril of some kind. It wanders further from the darkness. The tendril is an optic nerve, a small pretty human eye dragging at the end.

CUT

In the American romantic comedy, the building always smells like cookies.

“I love my new building,” she says into her cell phone as she checks her mail, “it always smells like cookies.” She is exactly as young and vibrant and charming and plastic-perfect as she is supposed to be.

She reaches back into the metal shoot of her mail box and a quizzical expression passes across her face, “Did you send me a package?” She says into her phone.

She removes a small box.

“Oh,” she says, “you didn’t. It isn’t for me. It is for my neighbor.”

She knocks on the door of 205. The man who opens the door is exactly as young and vibrant and charming and plastic-perfect as he is supposed to be. The fall in love, experience some initial difficulties, then overcome them and everything is perfect, more or less, forever.

CUT

In the documentary, they open with an establishing shot of the building. It is two stories of damp brick resting on a story of gray stone and masonry. Cut to a lingering shot of the front door of the building. The door opens, a French woman steps out and puts on her very dark sunglasses. She moves left out of frame.

The door falls slowly closed behind her.

A young couple, clearly in love, enter from the right side of the frame, carrying grocery sacks brimming with fresh and colorful things. They pull the door open and go inside.

The door falls slowly closed.

It goes on like this for awhile.

Two large, hulking men exit the building, hands in their pockets, and shuffle hurriedly away.

The door falls slowly closed.

A couple of rats skitter through the corner of the shot.

The voice over begins:

V.O.

It is a pre-war building ...

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Earthly Delights.

Earthly Delights

By James Bezerra

Hell as television. This is the thesis.

We find the sins of others titillating, erotic even. We also like it when they’re punished for them.  

I had to fly all the way to Madrid to see this thing.

Let’s look at it:

It is a triptych. A three-part painting on three wooden panels. Left, center, and right. The center panel is twice the width of the first and third panels. The first and second panels are odd green landscapes populated by many long naked figures as pale as ghosts. We take it all in from a distance, as if we are watching from a hot air balloon, something which didn’t exist in in 1490 when Hieronymus Bosch painted these. The first two panels are strange. In the background, something like a submarine rises from the water of a lake. At each corner of the lake sprouts a pink castle shaped like a lung, or a maybe gallbladder.  In the foreground, a nude man and woman sit in a clear bubble that seems to be formed from the mucus membrane of a flower. His hand rests on her abdomen, below her belly button. Her hand sits restlessly on his arm. Elsewhere, a creature like a white giraffe with a bird’s head looks down into another lake, at the center of the lake stands something that is either a spacecraft made of meat, or an armor-plated sea creature. The panels are very busy and border on indescribably weird.

The third panel is different than the first two. It is darker both in color and in tone. There is no blue sky here, no rolling green landscapes. At the black horizon there is smoke lit only by the glow of distant fires. In the center of the third panel is a figure my professor used to call “The Tree Man”. He is only the torso of a man. Oriented away as if doing a push up. His arms plant into the ground like tree trunks. His chest has been cleaved open and inside the dry cavity three red figures sit at a table while a milk maid tried to open a barrel of milk. The Tree Man looks back at us over his shoulder. His expression seems to ask, “Who are these people inside of me?”

Below him are scenes of bizarre and intriguing torture. A naked man flayed on a giant harp. A naked man whose throat is being eaten by cats with lizard tails. A naked woman being grabbed from behind by a demon that might be a tree - it is hard to tell - as it drags her into the darkness.

For most of humanity’s time on this planet, we did not have television.

That is the first most important thing that no one teaches in any history class.

The second most important thing that no one teaches in any history class is that for most of our history, water was a dangerous thing to drink. Beer and ale and mead and wine were much safer. During virtually every moment of our modern history, the key players were drunk. We make so much more sense once you know that.

Prior to the invention of television, we had inferior forms of distraction. Books, but you had to know how to read. Paintings, like this one, but that’s not what this really is. It is called The Garden of Earthly Delights and there is so much to it, some many small vignettes - so many people naked or suffering or prancing or touching - that the eye can’t help but move, to flit from scene to scene, to experience this moment then that one, then that one, then this one. It tricks the brain and conjures the quality of movement and you realize that Bosch invented the first television. And you are here in the Museo del Prado watching it and the only thing on TV is a Christian horror flick.

That churches and theaters have essentially the same floorplan is not a coincidence. Your living room is aimed at your television for the same reason.

We find the sins of others titillating.  

And we like to watch them punished.

In the center of the center panel is a round lake and dozens of very pale, very young women stand knee deep in the water. A human figure as black as night makes them balance apples on their heads.

At the bottom right of the right panel, a pig in a nun’s habit tries to kiss a nude man studying scripture.

At the top of the third panel a set of floating human ears wields a large knife.

On the plane crossing the Atlantic I watched a cop show about a man who murdered female joggers in Central Park. Then I watched a movie about a man who abducted a woman and wore her skin around his house.

In the center of the left panel the pre-incarnate Christ is presenting a kneeling naked Eve to Adam, who lounges leisurely on a hillside.

My hotel TV offers incredibly expensive American porn films that have been dubbed into Spanish. They have English subtitles.

The right side of the third panel depicts a blue bird-like figure swallowing humans whole and then shitting them out through some sort of pale amniotic sac. They pass through the lining of the sac and fall through a hole in the ground. Anguished and barely visible faces gaze up through the hole.

I sit here in this gallery staring at these three panels.

I can’t turn them off.

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A Very Boring, But Largely Accurate Poem.

A Very Boring, But Largely Accurate Poem

By James Bezerra

I am sick

and waiting for

rice to boil.

My life

this second inspires

uninspired poetry.

It is raining

and that affects my mood

not at all.

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An Odd Rainy Wonderland.

An Odd Rainy Wonderland

By James Bezerra

This odd and

rainy wonderland

of

sudden sidewalk

tent cities,

of

oddly expensive milk,

gas station attendants,

of

old pretty peaked homes

glimmering wet all day,

of

dense and ubiquitous forests

of tattoos on white skin

of

this place I feel

as I feel about Millennials:

envious, hopeful

quietly doubtful.

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I Think My Cat is Depressed.

I Think My Cat is Depressed

By James Bezerra

My cat

spends all day

sleeping.

My cat

experiences violent, rapturous

mood swings.

My cat

does not want

to talk about it.

My cat

glares at me,

claws back at my affections.

My cat

may be depressed.

Or is just a cat.

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Once Upon a Midnight Dreary.

I wrote a new story! Well, it is more a “story”. I have been tinkering with it this week. Below is my first draft. It is nothing special, but it is something I wrote! And despite the multitude of photos I’ve posted the last few months, this is after all a writing blog.

It is kind of dark, but that is just where it went; I promise my spirits are pretty good right now.

As you read it, imagine that you are turning the pages of a book and that each gallery is on its own page.

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