How I Wrote This Drabble

Spent the previous four days procrastinating
Reread Laurie’s drabble
Took a shower to think about it
Spent an hour phone scrolling
Made a cup of tea
Cleaned off the cat hair from my office chair
Answered emails
Went pee
Read Laurie’s again
Wrote
Deleted
Wrote
Deleted
Played Candy Crush
Wrote 340 words
Had lunch while watching an episode of Deep Space Nine
Answered emails
Cut it down to 88 words
Put some words back
Now it was 108 words long
Cut 10
Added three
Hyphenated-something
Got it to exactly 100 words
Found an image at the very last moment
Posted

Inspired by Routine. Photo by Nancy of Daisy, the culprit who sheds hair over Nancy’s chair.

Nameless

I wrote a book that had a character a lot like me. He had many of my experiences. He lived in my neighbourhood. His family was a lot like mine. I knew people would assume he was me, that they’d see an anagram in any name I gave him. (“Hah! ‘Tom Ronson’ is really ‘Ron Thompson,’ right?!”) All the names I considered sounded false, so I avoided naming him at all. I completed the book without calling him anything. I found virtue and freedom in his anonymity. He was an everyman, a vessel, a doppelgänger who was and wasn’t me.

Inspired by Contemplating Fate & Destiny. Image by Dover Thrift Editions. The book I referenced is A Person of Letters. Let me tell you, it’s hard, and probably pretty dumb, for a first-time novelist to go novel length and not name his protagonist.  

While Disease Had Come to Live at Lowood

While disease had come to live at Lowood
     Death its frequent visitor
While gloom within the passages
     Steamed with hospital smells
While drug and pastille strove all in vain
     Against mortal effluvia
 That bright May shone

Unclouded over bold
     Hills and woodland out of doors
As the garden glowed, hollyhocks sprang
     Tall as trees, lilies opened
Roses bloomed red, little bordered beds
     Were daisy-blithe with pinks
Sweetbriars scented morn

And evening with their spice
     Of apples – treasures fragrant
Useless all
     For most of us in Lowood
Except to furnish, now and then
     A blossom handful
To leave inside a coffin.


Text based on Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. Image of Helen and Jane from tumblr.com. Posted to dVerse Poets.

Reading Ayn Rand in High School

I sit on the daybed skimming soft pages, tuning out Laverne & Shirley on TV. Like Dagny, the thin studious heroine, I miss Francisco d’Anconia, the childhood friend who’d returned in a smashy-tennis-leads-to-hardcore-sex scene. I’d eaten a roll of Butter Rum Lifesavers rereading it, poking my tongue through each to stroke surreptitiously along the inside of my lower lip. Hank Rearden, Dagny’s second boyfriend, gave her a boring green bracelet. No comparison. Now Dagny’s met John Galt. Whoever he is, he talks a lot. (Oh, Francisco.) At supper, my mother had said she despised Ayn Rand’s politics. Um, there’s politics?

Your Fountain Pen

You go to Laywine’s, because that’s where one goes. There’s a brunette behind the counter, because you’ve been reading Raymond Chandler. She offers you “torpedo” shapes, but they’re too Donald Trump. The next pens are ergonomic, with a ribbed grip that regrettably evokes condoms. Then there’s pearwood. Almost. But will it start to smell of fingers and pocket change? In the end, the answer is German:  matte aluminum, silicon-gripped, with a happy orange cap. The brunette offers to remove a tiny cardboard ring, which indeed says REMOVE in two tiny languages. But you say no. Because it’s your fountain pen.

Image: www.jetpens.com

A Hard-Boiled Bird

Another nickel, another crazed midnight with Cleotis Hammersley. She insisted, the way only the lace-gloved, silk-trained rich can insist, that she was being spied on; she wanted, the way heroines always want, to leave the mansion and draw the watchers out; and it was raining, a way it never rains in southern California. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance . . . I needed a night alone reading Raymond Chandler. What I had was a coat of feathers, a black feather hat, a headache like a gun. I put them on and escorted Miss Hammersley to the granite shores.

For other writings inspired by this image, visit Magpie Tales.

Mona Lisa’s Smile (Literary Judgement #2)

“Your manuscript,” Samuel Johnson was told, “is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”  “You just do not know how to use the English language!” someone advised young Rudyard Kipling. Orwell’s Animal Farm? Rejected, because it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” Kerouac’s On the Road?  Dismissed as “huge, sprawling and inconclusive.”  “I don't dig this one at all,” said one editor of it. And The Da Vinci Code? Rejected, because it was badly written. (Is this why the Mona Lisa smiles?)

Literary Judgement

Opinions on literary merit tend to be blunt and cruel. Early on, Earnest Hemingway was told by a publisher that publishing his first novel “would be in extremely rotten taste.” Writers themselves can be catty towards other scribblers. “Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, will go down,” said the impeccably-discerning Lord Byron, the father of his own niece. “He has no invention as to stories, none whatever.” Even the established Hemingway, survivor of scathing putdowns himself, scathingly put down the young Norman Mailer. “The whole book’s just diarrhea of the typewriter,” Papa said of The Naked and the Dead.

Tracing the TASER

The 1969 brainchild of NASA scientist Jack Cover, the TASER is named for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle”, which was gleefully deployed in a series syndicated by juvenile fictioneer Edward Stratemeyer.
     I maintain the Syndicate’s 1910 invention was itself triggered by the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue, 1908. On its 208th page, alongside wet-or-dry-battery Miniature Fruit Lamps in peach, cherry, and pear, the Magneto Electric Thriller beckons. A device that “affords great amusement”, the Thriller vows to “make a strong man tremble.”
     A Mister James Keeline has thrown down the gauntlet, attributing the invention to Jules Verne.
     We duel at sunrise.

Ernest Hemingway on Drinking in Pregnancy

Our mothers drank and smoked their way through pregnancy and we came out fine. Nice and small too, 7 pounds, 2 ounces, none of today’s turkey-weights. Why, in A Farewell to Arms, Catherine’s even told to drink beer to keep her baby small. So, okay, she loses the baby, but arguably that’s because Ernest Hemingway lacked afición for babies. Their sentences are too long. He must’ve liked kittens, though; his Key West estate houses Charlie Chaplin, Ragamuffin, a pocket-sized Audrey Hepburn, and many another cat with extra toes. Nowadays they’d be saying he gave their great-grandmothers little dishes of whiskey.

Image: Almost Famous Cats

®

I am on record as advocating the branding of these hundred word stories as “Centimots”. I adopted this controversial proposal to fill my hundred word quota for a rather lame piece themed on the “%” sign. Don’t ask; I had a deadline. So to meet deadline on yet another symbol theme, let me extend my proposal. Why not protect the newly-established brand with a trademark? Centimots® won’t make anyone rich, but the term now connotes both artistic gravitas and commercial substance. More important, beyond notions of intellectual property, by promoting this initiative I have successfully filled my hundred word quota.

Uruguay, República Oriental del

The Republic lies to the east of the Uruguay – River of Painted Birds. Beware! Their tongue glitters sharp with indignities. For example, consider its two forms of we:

• Ore, the exclusive we: Say the Violet-Capped Woodnymphs tell Plush-Crested Jay, “Ore are flying to Milan for Fashion Week.” Ore tells Jay they’d spurn his company. Maybe he could feed their cat. 
• Ñande, the inclusive: Were ñande chosen, Jay would be bundled along, willy-nilly, to see the latest fascinators.

The bland, grey English we invites more mutual soundings of intention (“Ooh, Milan?”), permits a fonder farewell (“You crazy kids, enjoy!”).

Image: K. Bischoping collage from Wikimedia Commons images.

Some French Guy

“What’s the first thing that attracted you to me?” she asked, head resting on my shoulder.
     “Your mind, of course,” I lied, knowing where my interests lay. Why did she struggle with her looks? She was a committed feminist who would not be made prisoner to them, yet she obviously enjoyed their effect.
     “Beauty is a precious gift,” I ventured diplomatically. That set her off on the oppression of gender roles in patriarchal society. “‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’,” she said, quoting some French guy.[1] Typical. That sounds just like some French guy.

[1] Simone de Beauvoir

Little Houses

What’s a mass-a-cre? Mama stops ironing and asks what am I reading. Little House on the Prairie. I have to know what it is before the Indians do it to the Ingalls. They don’t, but then there’s The Long Winter. Monique Lebel and I fight over who gets to be Blind Mary, floundering through the drifts, hanging on Laura’s arm. Monique’s other game has us all trample out the floor plan of a convent in the snow. She says she’s the bad nun, who wants to do it with the priest. Do what, I wonder, dreamily mitten-polishing my little cell.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Interrogation Bang Bang We Love You

My father grew up under Nazism, my mother got the best deals on the black market because she cried the saddest. Their notions of age-appropriate were hit-and-miss; their efforts to modulate our reading by placing the loftier stuff on temptingly-higher shelves, convoluted and desultory. I didn’t finish the upper-shelf Genet or de Sade. By 12, I’d torn through the lower-shelf Ian Flemings. Thunderball had a hole in the cover. James Bond got tractioned. Interrogation was torture. That Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sprang from the same pen amazed my mother. Regarding atmosphere, she was rightly interrobanged; plotwise, there was little difference.

Image: 1.bp.blogspot.com