“PENELOPE: It’s all a bit difficult, isn’t it? I mean, knowing what to say. And when to say it. It’s a mystery, isn’t it? One of life’s little mysteries?” Jennifer was at it again, working on the one-act play. Working on the dialogue (what the characters say). Piecing the lines together.
Anselm Bligh, A Collection of Miniatures.
Old Perry Mason paperbacks with cracked spines. The warm sweet smell of yellowing pages. A tidy little autumn. Dotted with words.
Vandalia Jenkens, The Utica Flood.
Larry didn’t want to find out about X. No, he already knew about X. And he did not want to mess that up.
Tristan Holyoke, A Tree Full of Monkeys.
Photographs are dangerous. And the more ordinary, the more potent. It is not making a photograph that steals the soul. It’s the looking.
Trent Bendix, Grieving for Margaret.
“I believe there should be more Huns in the world, not fewer. No, no, wait. I meant to say puns, not Huns.” And Delbert reinforced his belief by supplying the following: (1) Elision Fields; (2) Hairy Lime; (3) icon tacked; (4) borne again; (5) manic cure; (6) tone ail; (7) moanlight; (8) ore chasm; (9) apart meant.
Jason Starling, ed., Adventures in Narrative Parsimony.
A face model stares out at me. For second after second. Her eyes are a fictitious shade of blue. Simply impossible. A fearful cobalt symmetry. And what does it all say? “Believe in me. Believe in me. Please believe in me.“
Burdyce Goode, Philosophy of Vegetables.
“The answer, I am afraid, must be No. It must be the word No.” The reader should feel free to imagine any question. Any at all.
Ralston Dowd, The General Ghastliness.
Breakfast. The classic dry toast, butter, and jam. And a Brown Betty two-thirds full of strong black tea. The whole leaf. Showing a bit of flex, if you can find it. And with that familiar caffeine hum now in place, my thoughts turned to ale. As usual, dark English ale. Bottle after bottle.
Chadwick Graves, Maoist Struggle Session and Other Stories.
A modest proposal. Let’s make a master list of all the things that cannot be talked about, of all the facts that cannot be acknowledged. We could bury it in an old cookie tin, along with a moonstone, a Yogi Berra baseball card, and a few bird feathers.
Rollo Marquardt, Dwelling in the Cupcake World.
What do I want to see from today’s artists? Just the slightest hint of embarrassment that all we have is modernism (and its debris).
Crispin Trove, The Viewer as Pest.
