Prose Archives | Giramondo Publishing

Julius, was the name of my first love at summer camp different rules applied, he & I were allowed to hold hands people smiled indulgently, called us ‘the couple’ ‘the camp couple’ on my part, guilty as charged

If you can’t see them any more, then I think I must really be dead. Record in the case notes which of my conjectures you can confirm or dismiss. Draw what you can; measure what you can. But first and foremost: sharpen your scalpels, gentlemen, so that you don’t make a mess of it.

Last year I found myself at Lingnan University in Hong Kong to speak at a conference on action cinema. What better place to reflect on the work of cinematic editing in all its forms, from the blazing guns and flying fists of blockbuster movies to the stridently flickering visual assaults of the avant-garde?

I put up my umbrella. Nothing else happens. I hold it above my head. I do this because it is raining. It is raining.

Fish can all turn and flit in absolute synchrony, iron filings will point to the pole, well we’re all arranged like that in a focus on the door, something has signalled to the herd that this is what we will do and we do it, we do not move even though the rain begins again and satins darken, shirts cling and faces mercifully run rivulets.

The electronic arts, video and television, have long been regarded as film’s poor relation, and despite the advances in technology which have rendered most of the negative comparisons invalid (the lack of clarity of sound and image and so on), this condescending attitude persists.

The farewells are what I remember. How thin and white R. looked beneath his shock of hair when I said goodbye to him for the last time and he nodded to me without lifting his head from the pillow, just briefly closing his eyes. How I didn’t go back to his bed, but simply closed the door behind me. The next day I had to pick up his things from the hospital, including the razor I’d charged for him the day before. The razor was charged, but R. was dead.

Through all the months of chemotherapy, what Rachel focussed on was reclaiming herself. Her hair came off in soft and strangely frightening clumps in the shower as if it had no anchor. Nothing whatsoever kept it where it was supposed to be, where it had always been. Her hair said more clearly than anything else that Rachel’s world had come unhinged, that her own personal physics had cut loose and was headed for parts unknown.

The pitter-patter of falling water echoed in my ears, as though I could hear the squelching of soap on women’s skin. Supple flesh, water, the sweet scent of soap. When could I go swimming again? I didn’t know. I had no way of guessing, understanding, exploring, or predicting my fate. My mind swam with question marks, the answer to all of these questions the three words ‘I don’t know.’

I was sitting on a park bench in winter waiting for my spine to register the chill. The sun was on the side of my face, and I could hear a soccer match. I tried to follow each player without looking at the oval; the players scattered and flickered, and I wanted to be the literature, the story – was sick of merely gusting at the side of it. I figured the first step would be to get cold, to be still, and yet activate a thought. To run my fingers.

Cameron called speed the laureate’s drug. I think Alan liked the connotation and he would not stop anyone from calling him The Laureate when he was running around bent and on speed. He even started promoting himself as The Laureate. Only when he was on speed though. When he was sober he was ironic and very modest.

When [Charles Wright] calls poetry ‘this business I waste my heart on’ (WTTT, 38), he is not merely making an elegant bow to an eminent rhetorical figure but acknowledging having followed a seductive and fatal path in life. And it is with this thought in mind that we notice that his relations with spiritual masters are not always ironised.

It is autumn when László sends his introductory message on the dating app. Seasonal is gripping on to their job while their life falls apart in a foreign country. They are not sure that talking to the world in this state is a good idea, but they don’t know what else to do while they are in free fall. They try to trust that this breaking apart is also a coming together.

Above all other obstacles, it was fear that had held me back in surfing and later, kept me out of the water. Fear of failure, fear of being an imposter, fear of being out of control. All these fears coalesced in the tell-tale corrugations of a big set looming out the back, that unstoppable phalanx of pure, liquid energy from which there was no escape.

All human beings, Hazlitt argued, have the capacity to both reason and imagine, and these abilities should not be regarded as separate. Nor should one be favoured over the other. They are complementary; the passions must bow to the moderating influence of reason, just as reason must not overlook the truth that is revealed by the passions.

We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought.

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Julius

Three Stories

My Back PagesAdventures in Pure Cinema

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The Marguerite Flower

Autumn SongJohn Conomos’s Work of Mourning

Things That Disappear

The First Minute After Midnight

Mourning a Breast

Two Stories

The Cuckold, and Me

‘La Poesia è Scala a Dio’On Reading Charles Wright

The New Violence

That Oceanic Feeling

Fire from the FlintWilliam Hazlitt and the Art of the Essay

Epimetheus, or The Spirit of Reflection