Thursday, May 22, 2008

Color and Videos!

So here is our toes in the water attempt at presenting our poems for you in video format.

We will be updating and improving as we go along. Enjoy!

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Almost Real

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 53

It has been slothfully hot the last few days and Ross has kept the Gelato shop open past hours and is giving us extra shifts. All the out-of-towners enjoying the romance of Powell’s.

I was reading the Cummings biography this morning and he used the word sequitur and when Christian came over I asked him if it was a “real” word and we looked it up in both my Oxford American and my Aunt’s trusty but ripped childhood Webster’s and it was not there.

On Google we did find a cool group of classical musicians putting together contemporary music concerts at unusual venues, the next one being in December at the Library of Congress.

I particularly like idea of the piece that is for bass clarinet and nine instruments as if it could be any instruments at all. Maybe a Chinese lute, a Pipa or a Didgeridoo and a Kazoo?

For a couple of open mic readings back a few years a guy used to come with a huge Didgeridoo and play behind the poets reading.

This press has come into the possession of a small easy to use video camera and soon very soon we will post a link to videos of our founders reading their poems. Reading with no uninvited musical instruments or espresso machines going off in the background.

Unfortunately, you are going to have to imagine me reading my poems because I, in fact, only exist on the page and in the fervid imagination of Audrey Elizabeth.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

The Shiva Moon

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 51

Is it the job of a fiction writer, I wonder, to be kind? When one is describing development in the life of a character, one has to first describe where the character was before the pivotal event or set of events occurred.

I have always appreciated that through the vehicle of fiction one is able to tell or apprehend a more authentic truth because the constraints of daily social intercourse are removed.

This week I’ve been thinking about two of my favorite novels. The first is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and his description of his character Rex Mottram as a “tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole”.

This line has stuck with me since I was a little girl listening to my aunt moon over Jeremy Irons while watching reruns of the BBC version of the book and my subsequent reading of the book borrowed from her library.

(Now Christian has wandered off with my copy.)

Rex was an inspiration in part for my character Duncan in the previous post.

None of the characters in the book are particularly likeable. They are more so at the beginning and Cordelia retains much of her appeal throughout the book. But the rest of the characters do change; there is development. In this case, in so many ways, a sad development but one none the less.

His characters were based on someone, or composites of people he knew. People we will only now remember through his beautiful clear words.

Why is it always okay I wonder to immortalize in fiction (a writer should be so lucky) a beautiful young woman with a drug problem as William Gaddis did in The Recognitions (The other of my favorite books) in his character Esmè based on the life of the real troubled young painter Sheri Martinelli?

Someone I know recently suggested that he felt that the only place you could find the authentic complexity of living breathing human beings was in memoir and I argued that the most skilled fiction writers like Waugh and Gaddis had much to say both about the nobility of human nature and the suffering that causes so many problems.

Ripples on the still waters of our lives that start out with so much hope and ambition and end so badly.