Month: September 2010

introduction

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Welcome:

I write. I read. I query. I campaign for writing across genres. I yearn for stimulating discussions about writing, narrative, politics, culture and whatever comes to mind. My desire to share my published writing nudged me into cyberspace. My name as the blog title is designed for easy retrieval for the interested person to find and read my mind. Once here please leave a comment. I have wanted a blog lone enough to seem like forever. 

My living room is my workspace and refuge (most times). The setting, a gray double chaise, sagging from versatility (my writing space by day, my partner’s workout bench in the morning, his respite when he arrives home from the office where he channel surfs until he rides gently to sleep) set next to the window with a view of the East River Queens’ transformation from industrial sprawl to an affordable alternative to Manhattan reflected in its glassine currents.

Light transits the sky; time told in the color of cumulus linings. Hot pink seeps into stout brick and mortar factory buildings, slides down spanking glass high-rises. The borough, in the setting sun, sits on a hill distant and seductive like a city somewhere on across the Atlantic. The neon red Pepsi sign floats on the evening sky a disembodied spirit of nostalgia. The United Nations building reflected in the mirrored column wall beside the window it façade dyed pink by the police critical response unit’s reds strobes blurred, in winter storms, by snowfall.

I dwell for short periods in a room of my own. The hours spent writing, reading, and researching, most often Phillip Glass playing in the background. Years have accumulated listening to the same playlist.

A MFA in Creative Writing from City College I luxuriate in solitary hours removed from the quotidian distractions. My literary quest for specifically counter-narratives was informed by Dale Bauer’s essay, “Kate Chopin’s: Having and Hating Tradition.” Edna Pontellier “lacked a mother tongue to express a specifically feminine desire.” What is a mother tongue? What desire is specifically feminine? My inquiry prompted by these two questions has liberated my writing practice.

Interactive Intertextual Narratives is a place opened to the discourse on writing, a place to inform narrative through literary theory particularly but not exclusively Feminist Literary Theory, a place to make a community from disparate complementary (argumentative) voices.

 

Nine Years After . . .

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The screen contains our public mourning. The names of the dead are read (again). The screen projects images of the dead. Nine years later how have the United States and the world been changed since that morning when planes used as weapons of mass destruction plowed into our collective psych and brought down along with The Towers ALL American’s “inalienable rights and liberty and pursuit of happiness.”

The political manipulation and exploitation of uncertainty has legitimatized hateful speak and division along racial and religious lines in speeches where “God” is code for White Christian (male). 

When will the vocal minority and White Anglo Saxon Protestants give up the delusion of proprietary divine right to this country and the interpretation of the Constitution as if it it was written as a mandate for their dreams and desires?

When will the vocal minority break free of Imperialist mindset carried over on the May Flower to become Twenty-First Century citizens of a democratic United States? True followers of Christian philosophy to love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (separation of church and state)?

When will the vocal minority realize their hate speak is UN-American? The fairytale they are fed about the “Founding Fathers” intents is 234 years old? That to survive peoples and countries must adapt, and those incapable of adapting to change become extinct?

When will the vocal minority that there is NO difference between their misappropriation of the Bible and the Islamic extremist misappropriation of the Koran? That Christian fundamentalism is as hateful of truth as is Islamic fundamentalism.

When will the vocal minority realize that bearers of guns kill ideas and progress in the exact same way the tyrants they fear do? Guns are not a democratic tool.

When will the vocal minority realize that it is better to love than to hate—better to mediate than to threaten—better to look for the positive than the negative—better to celebrate similarities than disparage differences, best to embrace diversity?

When will the vocal minority, the politicians, corporations, and financial backers (billionaires Murdock & Koch brothers) come out from behind hate to participate in rebuilding this country for the future generations that will carry the burden of their parent’s political and commercial exploitation that will leave a morally and intellectually bankrupt country as inheritance?

When will  the vocal minority realize they cannot not take back what has not been—a democratic government that cares deeply for the welfare of its citizens but is hampered by greed and false prophets who have come out of the wilderness for their own glory and power lust?

September 11, 2010 we as a nation can best commemorate that day by remembering the national unity and overwhelming global solidarity that overflowed between the attacks on the World Trade Center and  the Pentagon and the war in Iraq. By tapping into the potential that existed in period of solidarity, not only to bring to justice the perpetrators, but to heal open wounds.

The names of the 3000 victims are called out. Their families and friends are nurtured. Maybe it is over the top to make a ritual of commemoration but if we must then shouldn’t we also include the names of Iraq & Afghanistan war dead, all the war dead including the hundred or more thousand Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani civilians?

 

 

 


 

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I am preparing for Roshanna dinner I feel totally sideswiped into, although I would have loved to give my partner a real celebration for the Jewish New Year, the timing is off. I have a ton of reading I’d rather be doing—a paper and a novel I yearn to write—so much to explore and deadlines—school is in session.

I am tidying the house, cleaning off the counter tops to make a place for the spread of holiday food to be served buffet (except for the soup and gefilte fish). My beloved paternal grandmother’s cut glass perfume and powder set have been sitting on the granite breakfast bar for months, ignored by the housekeeper grimy with years of basement dust. One stopper edge has a corner broken off as does the powder top and base. I wipe the six pieces clean with Windex and paper towels, images waft off the slick and broken parts. Grandma’s iconic darken bedroom—a faceted plane gleams with votive candlelight lighting infamous saints with flickering light reflected in the large mirror attached to the dresser. I am too young to understand the complexity of the juxtaposed objects and space. I am not even aware of our family’s dysfunction. We are a pack of open ganglions, noisy and combative but always there, protecting and assisting, for each other.  I have not been a good caretaker of my inheritance, my older brother worst. The perfume stoppers and powder jar were damaged by my carelessness. I regret this since I dearly cherish my grandmother memories. I have realized in the last months, after decades of struggling to keep my beloved older brother I must stop clinging to my sentimental version of the past. The brother I grieve for (although he is alive and living well with his family) is closed off in an unreachable corner he has closed the door on.