For three weeks, I used a random number generator to select one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1-154) and a line number (1-14) and I used that line as a prompt for some writing. This is the first one.
Andrew awoke with the sound of the wind whipping through the tarp he wrapped himself and his belongings in each night. There had been no wind when he’d gone to sleep. Everything was wrapped up so that he’d be awakened should anyone disturb his stuff.
He didn’t consider himself wretched by any means – he had clothes for the weather and books and a few regulars who tossed him coins and sometimes a sandwich.
His hard bed of a sidewalk kept his back aligned if he didn’t move too much in the night and he could sometimes even wash his clothes.
But today his carefully wrapped set-up was fluttering in a storm. The detritus of the street whipped about him and the storm whipped his skin, his hair and pieces of his life away. The book, wrapped in a zipped plastic bag that had been his pillow, was whisked down the street as soon as Andrew lifted his head. Now on its way down the street, he’d only had about twenty pages left of it to read. He knew of course that Miss Marple would solve the case of X and Y, but he was sad not to be able to finish it. It might have been the least of his possessions, but as his life flew away in the storm it was the most important. He also didn’t have another book to read.
What made him most wretched is that he’d have to pack up all his stuff in this wretched weather and find a shelter. Somewhere.All the other homeless on his block of downtown street were doing the same.
He started to hear the grumbling of the hard sleepers around him, but the wind tore their words away as soon as they were spoken. No one on the street said anything new anymore and even if this storm was real, it wasn’t making anything better and whatever the rest of the folks on the street had to say would differ in degree, not in actual content.
He went to work wrapping his possessions again, more meager now. He reined in the blowing tarp. And rolled a blanket and a metal plate and bowl and thought about the dog – Billiard, she’d been called – weird to name a girl dog after a game played with a stick and balls. But someone had lured Billiard away. Andrew knew about the dog fights that people gambled on, but pushed the thought of his gentle dog being used that way from his head and concentrated again on getting his gear into a form he could carry. Somewhere. Source
To kickstart my writing recently, I created a random prompt. I took two random numbers, one between 1 and 154 for one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and one between 1-14 for a line number. I’ve been doing this for almost three weeks, writing a page or a page and half in my journal based on the prompt. Sometimes the rest of the sonnet informs what I write, sometimes not. I have no idea if any of these will make it into larger pieces I write, but I’m amused by what has come up.
But that, your trespass, Molly, becomes a fee owed the corporation – you must ransom yourself to be again in our good graces. We must both consider what that ransom entails.
Molly sat back on the folding metal chair in HR’s austere office. The room had one big window with pulled metal blinds to let in the open plan’s lights, but also to let everyone on the floor know she’d been called on the carpet.
What an odd phrase – there was no carpet anywhere on the floor she worked on. Molly was torn between looking at the HR lady (who was probably a robot – who could tell these days?) and looking at her hands in shame. But what had she to be ashamed of? A minute’s distraction from the day’s work, a daydreaming look, a clattering of her pens, or paperclips on the floor? She was human (not ‘only human’ for as a human she was supposed to have more rights than this walking vacuum cleaner who represented corporate interests).
You are the face of the company, Molly, both on the line (They didn’t say phone anymore. When did that happen?) and to your fellows here on the floor. Surely you know that?
I know that because you tell me often enough that it’s true, but – and here was the sin in her heart – the only true compensation for that kind of representation was cold hard cash and they weren’t parting with that. Quite the opposite – they wanted to dock her, would dock her – for being human. Someone must be made the example. For a while Corporate made their weekly or biweekly examples in alphabetical order. All the Ms knew to be on their guard if an L was made an example the previous week. Corporate took an entire year to realize their employees had caught on to that plan. So now it was truly random. Last week had been a William and the relationship between William, his phone number, his badge number and his birthdate had been sanitized against all available information on the previous example. There was truly no winning or predicting anymore and Molly knew that her crimes were no different than the behavior of anyone else on the floor and she’d be docked more than she could afford no matter what. What with company stores and so on.
Molly suggested four hours and two meals. The HR lady replied ‘eight and four’ and stamped her file with a loud thud.
My colleague Stas posts a monthly entry of books he’s read with a bit of commentary. Deciding to do the same.
(Audio) Mel Brooks – All About Me. A lot of fun, great stories about making the classic movies. Hadn’t known that his company produced The Elephant Man and My Favorite Year. (The latter didn’t surprise me, the former did.)
Ken Krimstein – When I Grow Up. Graphic novel of several autobiographical stories submitted to contest for Jewish youth in the 1930s. The results were supposed to be announced on the day the Nazi’s rolled in to Poland. Long thought lost, they were rediscovered in 2017. Krimstein chose six for this volume. Very moving.
Genevieve Cogman – The Invisible Library. Cool fantasy/detective/bibliophile novel. Quite enjoyed it. A friend recommended the second in the series when Amazon had it for 99p. Turns out I had already bought this one (the first in the series) a couple of years ago. There are now eight in the series. Fun.
Agatha Christie – Curtain. The last Hercule Poirot. Good stuff. But most of AC’s books are.
MadeleineL’Engle – A Wrinkle In Time. Great YA fantasy. Christian/Western underpinnings are sometimes obvious, mostly not. Enjoyed the reread.
Madeline Lo – Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Oh man. This was *so* good. YA romance set in 1954 San Francisco. The daughter of Chinese immigrants falls in love with another girl at her high school. Beautifully done.
‘I know that intuition is a poor argument; I know that it is presumptuous to touch even the fringe of the Russian problem without cognizance, economical, political, historical, of all the facts;I know that intuition is a poor argument [].’ Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Tehran
In this discussion, I’m referring to four works: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Tehran, Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, and the album Lament by Einsturzende Neubauten. Red Cavalry is a cycle of thinly veiled short stories covering the Soviet-Polish War of 1920-1921. I say thinly veiled, because Babel did not change the names of the officers he showed in a poor light. In later years, these officers rose to prominence in the Soviet Union and in the Stalin years, Babel would pay for these portrayals with his life. In Passenger to Tehran, Sackville-West documents a journey she took from England to Iran in 1926. The purpose of the journey was to join her husband Harold Nicolson for the coronation of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Nicolson at the time was the chief of mission at the British embassy. Following the coronation, she returns to England by way of Ukraine, Russia, and Poland. (Reza Shah, a creature of both British and Russian interests, was placed on the Iranian throne as a puppet. Come World War II, The British and the Soviets combined to depose Reza Shah and put his more tractable son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi [the one later deposed by Ayatollah Khomeini] in charge.)
Ubu Roi covers a war in the same region, but he’s working on a more universal indictment of the warring classes. The intersections and divisions in how we talk about war and the waging of war are pulled into high relief when we consider the satire Jarry is trying to pull off. He names his main characters Mama and Papa Turd and Buggerlaus and has them engage in the most dreadful acts of murder. The fact that Papa Turd is greedy and incompetent is a reflection of the ruling class’ image that people already recognize. A century before Jarry, Europe fought the age’s first wars over the incompetence of the French royal family and continued for much of the century. While Jarry was writing before World War I, the path the various nations were on might have been clear. That the battlefield is Poland is key for what came next in the 20th century.
Barely established and World War I barely over, the Russians (or newly branded Soviets) roll in with a journalist named Babel who takes copious notes and writes some very popular stories about the Revolutionary takeover of Poland. And while Jarry and Babel are writing about the same place, at a remove of almost thirty years from each other, the dynamics of leaders and soldiers are the same. And shortly after that, a well-traveled English woman is waylaid in both Russia and Poland in the aftermath of that war, just trying to get home from a visit to Iran. Each has interesting words for what happens at the various levels of society in a battle for ‘a place that is nowhere.’ These words close Jarry’s introductory statement to the only performance of his Ubu Roi, a reference to the fact that Poland was partitioned into three sections belonging to Russia, Austria, and Prussia. From 1795 until 1918, Poland did not exist.
Sackville-West wasn’t sure what her journey home was going to entail. She traveled relatively easily from Teheran to Baku, Azerbaijan, but required intervention from the Persian consulate to secure seats on a train to Moscow. The intervention was the clearing out of a train car of those already aboard so that she might have an otherwise unavailable seat. “There is nothing further to be said in favour of the journey from Baku to Moscow, for it is exceedingly monotonous; the names of the Caucasus, the Sea of Azov, Rostov-on-Don seemed full of suggestion, but it very quickly evaporated: the Caucasus was reduced to a few foothills, the Sea of Azov looked much like any other sea, and of Rostov one sees only the railway station, unrelieved even by the presence of a Don Cossack.” Babel describes the region similarly in one of his diary entries. Ukraine depressed her, for she’d enjoyed its pre-war feudal elegance. This one paragraph is probably even more pertinent to what Babel describes of the Polish-Soviet War: “I remembered how before the war I had stayed there in the magnificent hospitality of Polish friends, riding, dancing, laughing; living at a fantastic rate in that fantastic oasis of extravagance and feudalism, ten thousand horses on the estate, eighty English hunters, and a pack of English hounds; a park full of dromedaries; another park, walled in, full of wild animals kept for sport; Tokay of 1750, handed round by a giant; cigarettes handed round by dwarfs in eighteenth-century liveries; and where was all that now? Gone, as it deserved to go; the house razed to the ground till it was lower than the wretched hovels of the peasants, the estate parcelled out, cut in half by the new Polish frontier, the owner dead, with his brains blown out, and his last penny gambled away in Paris. I had not realised that we should pass so near.” As it deserved to go. The reasons behind revolution are both unique and astoundingly common. After waiting a few days in Moscow for a train over the frontier to Poland, ‘civilized Europe again,’ Vita was met with the next aspect of the revolution. The train stopped miles from Warsaw where the revolution was in the streets. The waiting and the travel were simply difficult, but she, like those under the boot of the Red Cavalry, hadn’t planned on being behind the frontier. No one does, not even the revolutionaries.
Poland claimed parts of Ukraine and Belarus as part of its empire prior to its partition – though in 1896 Poland ‘didn’t exist’ according to Jarry. It’s a weird agglomeration of history and fiction, made even more relevant by the daily reports out of Ukraine and the assertions that Ukraine has always been Russian. Nearly a century later, Blixa Bargeld and his band Einsturzende Neubauten produced Lament, a kind of inquiry into the experience of World War I, and first performed on the 100th anniversary of that war’s opening salvos. In the album’s notes, Bargeld notes that World War II was a result of the unfinished business of World War I. Lament opens with a macro view of the war from the point of view of Tsar Nicholas and his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm. A family tree in the CD booklet reminds us that all of the European royal families were intertwined (in much the same way that monetary powers are today). Bargeld and band mate Alexander Hacke read the texts of telegrams sent between the two rulers, overlapping their words to the same degree that the telegrams themselves overlapped in transit. Another top-down representation of the war is a percussion piece simply called Der 1. Weltkrieg. The instrument is a set of pipes named for each country in the war. The powers are named as they enter and each day they’re in the war is represented by one beat. It takes 392 4/4 bars to represent the entire war. A rendition of Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind (Where Have All The Flowers gone) reminds of the human toll of war in terms of the people we may know, but as archetypes, whereas In De Loopgraaf, How Did I Die, and All Of No Man’s Land Is Ours tell war’s experiences quite literally from in the trenches. These take the contrasts between Jarry’s satire on war and Babel’s nearly amoral accounts of what was happening in battle and around it from the points of view of the people who fought and forge them into one song cycle.
The rules are inconsistent and contradictory. This is by design. Following the rules does not make it more likely that your life will be easy or consistent. (Likelihood decreases the farther away your are on various spectra from being a mediocre white male.)
Talking with my mother last night, we got on the topic of Novak Djokovic, stuck in a quarantine hotel in Australia because, per the indistinct chatter of social media, he refused to get vaccinated. The bigger picture, which best beloved mentioned over supper, is that Djokovic refuses on grounds that he’s already recovered from COVID and that he was granted a medical exemption. The Australian government, feeling that the exemption was a technical foul, has detained the player.
Part of the issue with the complexity of the rules is that it makes for stories like this one that distract us from the real news going on. As Frank Zappa once put it, Politics is the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex. The news (and social media, for that matter) is another arm of that entertainment industry. These stories keep our eyes off the matter of the defense budget (for example). We just came to the end of the longest war in US history and the defense budget still increased. No extra money for teachers and social housing and food banks, but Lockheed Martin and GE still get there share. We saw it happen in 1990 as well. Peace dividend? Please.
Of course in 1989, we went to Panama and in 1991 to Iraq. There’s always a war to wage.
There are other sets of inconsistent rules from top to bottom. Try being Black in America and your chances of ending up like Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor are rather higher than if you’re any brand of white. Try being trans and Black. That’s the next case of the rules, isn’t it now? The one in which the rules we know are written to be explicitly against certain classes of people. Try being female in a frum (pious) Jewish community who has an idea of not being confined to those roles. Or queer in the same situation, for that matter.
Tom Robinson and crew preaching on the subject.
Following the rules to the letter doesn’t guarantee your life safety. This is where If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide goes head to head with Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And Authority wins over Compassion every time. Every single time.
In the volume When I Grow Up, Ken Krimstein illustrates six stories written by Jewish teenagers in the period just before World War Two. (The tale behind this collection is fascinating in and of itself. Krimstein tells it in this episode of podcast The Shmooze.) In one of the stories, a girl tells of her father and all the worlds he opened up for her, and concludes it with how the elders shouted her down for daring to recite Kaddish for her father at his funeral. The rules for women in that place and time were different than in the conservative Los Angeles synagogue I was raised in. And such rules are probably why there are non-Orthodox denominations at all. Following them didn’t make you any more free, give you any greater intrinsic value. History is littered with those who claim there is more than one avenue to the divine.
And this brings us back around to the rules in today’s America. The vote is supposed to provide greater representation in the various legislatures. But the votes, for example, of a few thousand West Virginians steam roll those of millions of voters in other states, and provides akn object lesson in ‘why we can’t have nice things,’ as if we needed another. And this is before we talk about gerrymandering, the BS in Georgia and several other things. The right to vote, if you can exercise it within the increasingly arcane rules of the American franchise, doesn’t get you a voice.
Joe Jots 