8:53 AM. Triptych: three black rectangles of anodized aluminum.
I am eight. I believe in dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or extraterrestrials, are huge bulging fantastic green creatures that can squash buildings, eat whole villages, and make a lot of noise. Dinosaurs are cool. Dinosaurs are so cool that I have to know everything there is to know about dinosaurs— all the different kinds, whether they are bipeds or quadrupeds, whether they are herbivores or carnivores, whether or not they had feathers, which ones fly, which geological timescale they come from and especially, when all these values are added up and considered, which dinosaur is the coolest. Previews for Jurassic Park...
The phoebe-birds, out-of-place swing on their hanging-balsam feeders like small pendulums
In quiet residential neighborhood of a small Alabama town, Georgiana, a white-paneled house bears a banner proclaiming itself, “Hank Williams Sr. Boyhood Home & Museum.” Inside, a back bedroom wall is devoted to photocopied newspaper clippings concerning the country singer’s death and funeral, as well as a crude, hand-drawn map showing the route of his last ride. This cross country road trip also features prominently in another room, one devoted to a large, handmade quilt entitled, “The Story of Hiram Hank Williams.” Towards the bottom of the quilt, a small panel offers a crudely stitched image of a blue car and this simple narrative: NEW YEARS DAY 1953...
I’ve always found “polishing” to be too elegant a description for the act of a writer’s revision, which can often feel more than a little violent. Over the course of a semester, my students in a fiction workshop simplified the famous, but also quite elegant, “Murder Your Darlings” to a more blunt “Kill Your Babies.” This, I think, adequately captures how it can feel for a writer when she is numbly staring down at page after page of words that look done, that even read as done, but godammit, they’re not done. The writer somehow knows this, even if she has no idea what to do next. This...
For Erik DeLuca 1. You are making a funnel but don’t go in. 2. Roll so one end’s wider. Do I tape this thing? 3. Yes. Now pierce the small end w/ your needle. 4. Allow half-an-inch to stay on the eye side. 5. No, it shouldn’t move. Tape. 6. Snap a pencil in half. In half? 7. That’s the tone arm or base (let’s call it the base). Are you in a car? 8. Yes. 9. Duct tape one pencil half (eraser end up) to the cardboard square. 10. No, so it stays straight up. Where...