My new character from the new WIP writes a 24-word chorus about how she feels about her ex. Imagine a speed-punk sound welded to a cut-time reggae romp. No? Do your homework.
Twenty-Nine
Deaf dumb and blind heaven, where are you?
Is there a cloud there, not colored blue?
Can I get a bootless note to save me mind?
When will the bootless boy kiss me behind?
My fiction combines autobiography, short parables for children, history, travel writing, and poetry. It is related in this way to the Haibun form of 17th Century Japan. The Japanese poet, Bashō, known mainly for his haiku, was a writer of haibun. Haibuns may use a scene in a descriptive and objective manner or they may occupy a dream-like space. Realistic scenes may be faded into parabolic ones such as this which follows a paragraph of standard prose:
I am your mother. I give you life, I hold your life up, I give you life on your own. The last gift is the hardest to give. I caress your title page as it leaves my hand. I can’t imagine not giving you a little sister. It’s the third gift.
Rest in peace, poet Jack Powers, founder of the Stone Soup Poets. He was the Lou Gehrig of poetry readings—giving a stage for voices of thousands of poets.
My first reading was at his Stone Soup reading in the shadow of the old Charles St. jail. Better to shout out poetry, than to shout down a policeman and end up in the jail. Thanks, Jack.
Here is a photo of a page in a book that speaks of the importance of stories. The photo is by Anne Abrams. The link to her photos is on the home page of this blog.
Book about the importance of stories
When a 12-year-old California boy’s attempt to run away from his abusive home is thwarted, he defies the police, and wages a war of words against his father. At first he escapes by jumping onto a freight train bound for San Francisco. He wants to start an imaginary baseball team, go to an imaginary school, and become a real writer. But when cornered by the police and angered by the lies his father tells to the newspaper, he uses his wit and humor to fight back and he publishes his own truth for his teammates, his girlfriend, and his father to read. He’s a polio survivor and a Mexican adopted by a white family in the 1950s, so his fight for his truth becomes more than a struggle to survive life on the street—it becomes a struggle to find his own identity.
My short story, Late Night Waitress, has been accepted by Wilderness House Literary Review for September. Julia Carlson, the fiction editor, asked for a bio and said I ought to include the info about the music that relates to the story. This story evolved from a ejected chapter from my novel, Blues Pizza. I hope to publish the novel with the songs on CD so readers can listen and read. The story is built around a songwriter who’s in New York for a session gig and who also has written a song for the band in cutting the record. The actual song, Choosers, is a song I’ve written and recorded. I just put it up on YouTube.
Here:
My novel-in-progress, Tardy Son, is in no direct way an homage to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I do, however, refuse to read it again until my novel is finished because Twain’s story is lodged deeply in my own subconscious. Freedom is a theme no American writer can avoid. The Concord Public Library, however, once tried to avoid that theme and the one about free speech. See below.
“The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
—from Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Duke University Press. pp. 2. ISBN 9780822311744.
Today the Concord library lends forty-four versions of the novel including digital, tape, DVD, and a manga/graphic novel version.
Why did William Golding’s novel, “Lord of the Flies,’’ shift the blame for human savagery from adults onto children? Because we are all children at heart in selfishness? These questions are not answered in the new biography. We will have to ask ourselves these questions, and maybe that’s the point with Golding.
“Did the fear of nuclear annihilation or the start of counterculture make this novel of schoolboy savagery seem particularly apt? What about it spoke to the college generation in the lead-up to the Vietnam War? This book rarely addresses this type of broad question.
“Fans of “Lord of the Flies’’ will be intrigued to learn both that Golding disliked his most famous work (he dismissed the fortune it made him as “Monopoly money’’).
“William Golding (no doubt to the despair of modern fiction-writing teachers everywhere) almost always began his novels with an intellectual concept, rather than a character, in mind. We also learn that despite setting much of his fiction in times and places unfamiliar to him, like ancient Egypt, he rarely did any research, preferring his imagination to factual accuracy.
—From the review in the Boston Globe by Alison Lobron.
William Golding: The Man Who Wrote “Lord of the Flies’’ By John Carey
The Mendocino Coast Writers Conference is held on the scenic northern California coast. I know, I learned to write and swim there (Fort Bragg, CA). Its faculty has included: Barbara Kingsolver, John Lescroart, Ronnie Gilbert, and Gary Snyder. It offers scholarships and contests and nature hikes. I wish I could be there to see Glass Beach, Noyo Harbor, and Pudding Creek. It’s held this year in late July. Check it out at http://mcwc.org.
davidkrancher.com 