Line Machine

Dan Chiasson, Natural History

2009-06-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

He tried on the confessional style for a while.

If people hurt you, tell on them: perhaps you'll heal.
If language hurts you, make the damage real.

("XV. Rnadall Jarrell")

Or is poetry picking the scarcest word

("'Scared by the Smallest Shriek of a Pig, and When Wounded, Always Give Ground")

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six in Six Million

2009-06-02T01:00:00.000-07:00

As we all started eating dessert, she turned to me and said, But how will you tell it? Before I had a chance to answer, she told me about some friends she had in New York, people her age, whose family had stories--terrible stories, she said--about the war. Now these people had a child, Alena went on, a daughter in her early twenties, who'd just taken a degree in literature, and who had written her thesis about her grandmother, the one who'd suffered those terrible things. Alena said that this young woman had given her the thesis to read, and while reading it she had been struck by something.

She said, It was like what she was interested in was not so much the story of her grandmother but how to tell the story of her grandmother--how to be the storyteller.

Terry Tempest Williams, River Music

2009-03-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

I am no longer content to sit, but stand and walk, walk to the river, surrender my body to water now red, red is the Colorado, blood of my veins.

Ryan Haberman, "Sleeping in Candela," Black Warrior Review 35.1

2009-03-12T01:00:00.000-07:00

Nobody had an interest in water following the floods. Mostly there were fires. The sky turned black. I fished and the fish didn't bite. For days, all I reeled in were lost fishing poles.

Brian Evenson, "Legion," Black Warrior Review 35.1

2009-02-26T01:00:00.000-08:00

The only way this will make sense to you is if I tell the story not how I understand it now, but tailor it to the way my research suggests you think. But then, if I am not careful, it becomes a story which, while starting to reveal something, will still always miss the point.

Be that as it may. Considering what our interactions are soon to be, we should make an effort.

Liz Countryman, "We Were Filled with Longing for the Previous Night," Black Warrior Review 35.1

2009-02-12T03:23:00.000-08:00

A naked guy with a beard salutes from a poster
and sometimes I talk to him, other times I don't feel like it.
Every morning the birds want something so loudly
it makes everyone get up.

[MFA Thesis pdf link]

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

2009-02-07T01:00:00.000-08:00

Could the tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?

Ben Mirov, "Sleepless Night Ghost," Caketrain #6

2009-02-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

If we are ever in a car together, I hope light pours through the windshield.

Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

2009-02-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

"But where does he get that spit," I would ask myself, "where does he bring it up from? Mine will never have the unctuousness or color of his. It will merely be spun glassware, transparent and fragile."

Edith Wharton, "Mrs. Manstey's View," The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

2009-01-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

On one occasion her feelings were racked by the neglect of a housemaid, who for two days forgot to feed the parrot committed to her care. On the third day, Mrs. Manstey, in spite of her gouty hand, had just penned a letter, beginning: "Madam, it is now three days since your parrot has been fed," when the forgetful maid appeared at the window with a cup of seed in her hand.

Mande Zecca, "Song," Caketrain #6

2009-01-27T01:00:00.000-08:00

If a beard of words.
A man moves his saw-arm down.

Stephen Graham, "The Gentle Art of Tramping"

2009-01-23T01:00:00.000-08:00

Upon seeing a bull you decide to pass him in the spirit of an escaping torero, or you make a rule to meet the danger. You take a bearing by your pocket-compass, and ascertain what tree or landmark you are naturally making for on the other side of the bull's field. And having assured yourself of that, you reach it by making a detour.

S.E. Smith, "Chapel of Teeth," Caketrain #6

2009-01-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

On Monday I learned about parasites that eat a fish's tongue and then pretend to be the tongue, lolling in the mouth cave and surviving on food bits. On Tuesday I began to wonder about my own tongue.

Ezra Pound, letter, "The MIND of Europe (or news in perspective)," The Virginia Quarterly Review 84.2

2009-01-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

Walter Chiari, despite heavy rain and tempestuous water cited a large sea tortoise, a metre and half in size, and rowed out with several companions, found the animal dead and conserved its shells as a trophy. Max Conrad, playing the squiffer or mouthorgan, crossed in 36 hours and arrived in Ciampine, hold it, 34 hours, as has doubtless been revealed by TV to his compatriots. Brigit Bardot wears a black wig in her last performance.

-Ez

Danielle Wheeler, "Star Arranging," Caketrain #6

2009-01-13T03:52:00.001-08:00

Also, I get hungry in the woods. I don't have a telescope, and miss much of the sky, and things were written on the ceiling of the cabin that I could not understand.

Peter M. Leschak, Letters from Side Lake

2008-12-13T01:00:00.000-08:00

Again and again, the ice sheet groaned. The rumble echoed off the trees, punctuated now and then by a sharp crack. As my ears adjusted I heard other, distant groanings—the expanding ice of nearby lakes. In deep winter the snow muffles the eerie music of the ice, but on this night all the lakes were cold and bare. I was listening to a symphony of freezing lakes, massive sheets of ice releasing the stress of their growth in heaving cracks that wailed slowly in birth. It transfixed me with its simple, awesome power. Nothing that any man could ever do would change the tune of the ice.

Cross posted: field | work

Barry Hannah, "Love Too Long," Airships

2008-12-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

My head's burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can't read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can't find work. My wife's got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I'm afraid she'll screw up and crash.

Ashley Gilbertson, "The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce," Virginia Quarterly Review Fall 2008

2008-12-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

Based on their surveys and tabulations from the NCHS’s National Death Index and the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System, Katz estimated that between 550 and 650 veterans are committing suicide each month. It is possible that the number of suicide deaths among veterans in 2008 alone will double the combined combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002.

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

2008-12-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

My mother looked curiously at me. "Why were you afraid of him?" she asked. "You could knock him over with one hand."

"Ma, he didn't look like that twelve years ago. Believe me."

She continued to stare after him as he shambled down Broadway, bumping into people left and right.

"You're growing old together," she said to me. "You and what frightens you."

Robert Walser, "Response to a Request," Selected Stories

2008-11-30T01:00:00.000-08:00

You ask me if I have an idea for you, a sort of sketch I might write, a spectacle, a dance, a pantomime, or anything else that you could use as an outline to follow. My idea is roughly the following.

David Wojnarowicz, "Spiral," Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction

2008-11-27T01:00:00.000-08:00

I can't abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have history attached to my heels. I am glass, clear empty glass. I see the world spinning behind me and through me. I see casualness and mundane effects of gesture made by constant populations.

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

2008-11-24T00:35:00.000-08:00

The gene gun is a strangely high-low piece of technology, but the main thing you need to know about it is that the gun here is not a metaphor: a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into a double helix.

Sara Levine, "The Fainting Couch," Caketrain #6

2008-11-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

I have wanted to lie down in the middle of a crowd before, but there were no excuses.

Miranda July, "The Shared Patio," No One Belongs Here More Than You

2008-11-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

2008-11-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated."