Saturday, February 23, 2008
when I pasted this all my footnotes disappeared. sorry!
Who is speaking? Authenticity in race novels
In a recent press conference, J.K. Rowling, declared that one of the main characters of her bestselling “Harry Potter” series, was a homosexual . Rowling made this statement well after the series was completed and there are few (if any) textual clues to support her proposal. Rowling’s declaration inadvertently presupposes and thus challenges the rights and abilities of the author. Who is J.K. Rowling to tell us about her characters?
The amount of sway an author holds on his or her own texts is a well-involved discussion and lies unresolved in the academic world. Michel Foucault, in one of his more involved essays, “What Is an Author,” tells us that upon completion of a text, the author becomes removed from the person who writes . In this moment, the writer loses ownership of their work in every way other than the strictly commercial sense. The power an author has over a text is abandoned the instant it is published; the writings become an incarnation in and of themselves.
The issue of influence over textual comprehension is vital when considering not only an author’s deliberate controlled influence, but also the aspects of influence they have no control over. These secondary aspects are innumerable, though they typically center on the view of the author’s person: who the reader understands the writer to be and where that persona fits in the societal stratum is a large portion of the perceived aspect of every work and is for the most part uncontrollable by the author.
Race is unsegregatable from modern American life. Every identity is conjoined with a defined race; one cannot even fill out a form without having to consign oneself to this arbitrary distinction. Authenticity thus has an interesting interaction with an author’s race: Can a white author write from the perspective of a black narrator? More broadly: can a member of any race truly understand what it is like to be from another?
Whether an author should or should not narrate or speculate on another’s race has bared little consequence on most Authors conceptions of writing. Many authors, including a good deal of those deemed to be “great,” have written largely speculative works focused on forms of existence that they have had no direct interaction with. Shakespeare’s works offer a perfect example of the ability to write authoritatively while being devoid of “authenticity” of perspective.
William Shakespeare, possibly the greatest writer in the western canon, first told humans much of what they know about themselves. Despite this, “we know almost nothing factual about the inner life of Shakespeare” . Shakespeare was the progenitor of an incredible amount of multi-faceted characters: Caliban and Prospero of “The Tempest” being among the most complex. These characters are heavily discussed in the academic world, but it is easy to draw much of them and their existences through nothing but textual clues.
Caliban is confirmed as a descendent of a woman from “Argiers , or more commonly, Algeria. Prospero describes Caliban’s mother as a “blue-eyed hag” . Burton Raffel, amongst others, argues that the descriptor of “blue-eyed” infers pregnancy, as this was a commonly used slang term at the time Shakespeare printed his works . Using Occam’s razor (the implication that the most obvious explanation should be assumed), “blue-eyed” should rather be directly interpreted; Caliban’s mother had blue eyes. Caliban’s mother is a person from Algeria who has blue eyes; one can presume her to be biracial, a significant distinction. Caliban, being her direct descendent, is thus a biracial individual.
Caliban serves as an example of the potential for authenticity across racial lines, as Shakespeare is assumed as strictly Caucasian. Caliban is a well-developed character; though he is a monster , he is capable of plotting against his captor and master, Prospero. However, Prospero is a much fuller and realistic character. Shakespeare, in depicting a former duke of Milan (an Italian/European city) manifests a much fuller and realistic portrayal of the human ego. Prospero, a European character, just as Shakespeare himself, shines with a polished reality that Caliban never quite achieves.
This is largely problematic; Shakespeare himself developed both of these characters, yet it is only the European that is made identifiable. While this does not completely dilute the argument for authenticity in his writing, it is nonetheless troubling. Surely, Shakespeare himself was never usurped and cast upon an island on which he plotted his revenge. We thus have in Prospero the semblance of the ability (on Shakespeare’s part) to create authenticity without direct experience. Caliban remains as a pin ready to deflate this theory in its application to racial transcendence: Shakespeare, in “The Tempest” does not completely profile across racial borders. Shakespeare’s flaw here may be that he is striving into unknown waters when he attempts to cross-racial boundaries.
Perhaps then, it is not an issue of the emulation of another race via direct narrative that is necessary to authenticity. The effects of racism can be seen by anyone with open, attentive eyes and ears. Authenticity of cross-racial characters can still be achieved, as long as the race of the narration aligns with that of the author. If a Caucasian writes from the perspective of a Caucasian while viewing African-Americans, he is still capable of authentically administering an atmosphere capable of shedding light on racism or other issues of social injustice pertinent to his or her contemporary life.
William Cuthbert Faulkner, in his book, “Absalom, Absalom”” deals with the issue of race in a unique way. Faulkner’s book is narrated solely by Caucasians, although there is a constant representation of African-American slaves and a minute presence of Native Americans, from whom Sutpen purchases his land. Aside from these initially presented non-Caucasians, the book reveals to us that Bon, who is initially portrayed as Caucasian, is the descendent of an African-American. Not only does this point out the arbitrariness of racial designation (that we have to be told and can not make this designation based on his character or skin), it also serves to highlight the racism and the importance of racism in the world contemporary to Faulkner.
Faulkner himself was a Caucasian from the South, as are a majority of the characters of his book. Faulkner is able, through his characters and his unique narrative methods, to highlight the issues inherent in race and racism in his book, “Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner, who lived in and wrote about the South, authentically recreates for the reader the circumstances that existed in the post-Civil War South, specifically those related to reconstruction and racial relations. In this way, he is able to manifest an authentic experience of the issues addressed by a race of which he is not a member. In this case, Faulkner lends sympathy to a foreign group, both through his text and through his readers as a proxy.
Sympathy is a very complex subject. Sympathy implies an understanding on some level between two individuals. For sympathy to exist, there must be a common feeling between two groups. For a common feeling to exist, there must be some commonality of feelings, which implies a much more base interaction between people. People must share not just something in common with someone they feel sympathy for; they must share many things in common, including emotions and understanding. Faulkner’s creation of sympathy for members of another race functions in a different way than that created by Shakespeare in “The Tempest”.
Shakespeare’s “thing of darkness” , Caliban, is something to be pitied. Pity is a form of sympathy that denotes only a shared feeling of misery. Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, declares her pity for Caliban because of his wickedness . Miranda has been shipwrecked on an island for a long time and surely as a result has felt miserable at times. This misery is surely incomparable to the misery of a free individual turned slave, who must abandon not only his island, but also his way of life, to a seemingly omnipotent controller in his captor, Prospero. Miranda’s pity is a sharing of misery as a type; she is able to understand what it is to feel sad, thus, she pities Caliban. Miranda’s misery is not a shared quality of Caliban’s misery, which is why it remains nothing more than pity; she cannot understand the slave’s plight on more than a basic emotive level. Shakespeare lends no more to Caliban’s character; we can only access him through his words and through the treatment of the other characters towards him. The reader is thus able to lend him no more than this same level of pity; one feels sorry for the monster, but cannot identify with him. In this way, Caliban is not complete in his authenticity. The reader is not granted enough about him to get at his “realness”.
Faulkner’s work creates a different level of interpretation. The reader’s emotions do not register as solely pity for Bon. Bon falls in love and is killed only because of his racial identification, which is applied to his character after his introduction and development. His story is tragic, the sorrow one feels for him transgresses pity and the reader is able to feel sympathy that involves a more legitimate concern for him. This occurs largely as the result of the accessibility of the character, he is introduced to the reader as one race and is later exposed, devoid of his own control and preference, as a member of another race. The act of racial revealing could happen to any member of society. The reader can identify with Bon because the reader himself could be revealed to have racial ties other than the ones they know of. In this, Faulkner gives a level of authenticity to his character by creating the ability for superfluous sympathy for him; the reader is able to imagine having their racial identification challenged, but can not immediately imagine having their freedom rifted, although upon close examination these two aspects are interrelated. The reader is constantly distanced from the latter possibility, as it is much more imposingly threatening.
The concept of empathy exists beyond pity and sympathy. Empathy is the ascribing of one’s own personal feelings and experiences to another thing. Empathy can only be felt for things one can directly identify with having experienced. Empathy involves no imagination (sympathy does), but results from real occurrences. Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man” creates the possibility for direct empathy in his character in this famed work.
Ellison, born in 1913, was in his late 20s in the 1940s, just as the main character of “Invisible Man” is. Both Ellison and “Invisible Man’s” unnamed narrator were African-Americans that lived in New York City during a particularly racially charged era. Thus, insights into the character of the narrator directly involve the potential of authenticity as the bond between character and author is one of empathetic possibility. The narrator is taking a subway and declares that he sees, “Negroes who hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists. They reminded me fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang” . This description can plausibly be attributed to the author. Surely, Ellison saw crowds of hurrying African-Americans during his tenure in New York City.
The application of authenticity due to empathy quickly becomes a slippery slope. Assuming Ellison did witness these groups of people moving in such a fashion, there is no way to conclude that he perceived them in reality as mimicking former slaves. His character and his character’s perceptions cannot be attributed to the author, as there is no authentic assurance that the narrator is anything other than a contrivance.
If it is not possible to prove direct authenticity of experience between a character that so closely resembles his author, then the identity of the author should bear little consequence on the reader’s interpretation of the character. Ellison paints a magnificently real personality in his book and the reader is given a nearly full scope of his personality, wants and desires as flawed as they may sometimes be. Even with all of this, the author remains separated from the narrator, there is no way to prove what exists inside a man: what he perceives or experiences. The reader is given only the characters and the narration.
Foucault supports this theory in conveying that it would be wrong to “equate [the author] with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission [of text and writer], in this division and the distance” . The reader cannot equate any operation of the characters or narration with the author or writer. Authenticity in authorship is thus immutably irrelevant; the author should not matter in a reader’s interpretation of a text.
Unfortunately, this proposal has yet to reconcile itself with day-to-day life. Academicians may argue and prove that there are many well-written texts that work across racial boundaries yet, this does not secure sales, a very real and essential aspect of writing. It is thus incredibly difficult to write a cross-racial novel, people will shy away from it, because its perceived authenticity is damaged.
Let the reader of this essay suppose that a well-respected Caucasian author wrote a narrative and the narrator of that text was narrated by an African-American. White audiences would avoid purchasing this book, due to the phenomenon of “white guilt;” they would be afraid of being confronted as racist for not instead purchasing a book written by an African-American who would typically be assumed able to create a more authentic experience. African-Americans would not purchase the book due to a phenomenon that would just as easily be labeled “black guilt;” African-Americans would be shunned by their own community for propagating the bastardization of African-American literature. This situation is not easily resolved.
Tom Wolfe, for his recent book, “I Am Charlotte Simons” received large chastisements for his lack of “authenticity”. This book is narrated b a female, Charlotte; Wolfe himself is male. The title of the book confronts authorship in that the declarative “I” informs the reader of the significance of the narrator and her interaction with the author; they are two different people. This went largely unnoticed by pop culture as Wolfe was chastised for his sexist depictions of character . These chastisements led to reduced sales from this world-renowned and well-respected writer.
What if Tom Wolfe had used a pseudonym? This question exists at the center of authenticity. If “I Am Charlotte Simons” had had a byline of Tammy Wolfe, it would have been interpreted, understood and received in a completely different manner than it was. What was once considered sexism may have been transformed to something so insignificant as to not be mentioned merely by blurring the gender line. What if a white man had declared that Ralph Ellison was his pseudonym, 20 years after the writing was published? The book, “Invisible Man” would likely have been read as racist and would not have entered the canon of Great American Race Novels. This is perplexing as now there is no physical proof offered to the reader upon finishing Ellison’s book that the person we know as Ellison wrote it.
The concept of pseudonym creation manifests the ability to challenge the necessity of authenticity of an author. If one is capable of reading a book, designating a character within it as an authentic interpretation, then nothing post-facto should be able to have an influence on that interpretation. “[The] aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection… of the operations we force texts to undergo” .
As a result, the authenticity of characters, no matter their race, should be derived only from textual clues. These clues should be devoid of any instructions given to the reader, whether from an author, a critic or anyone else. Commentary on books and other writings should serve only to open the field of discourse within the reader; the opinions of others should allow a more comprehensive view of a text within a reader, the opinions themselves should not be definitive of any text. “The author function… does not refer to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals .
J.K. Rowling had no right to tell us what her characters sexual preference is. Despite popular culture, the author holds no sway over their text after publication. After all, “What difference does it make who is speaking?”
In a recent press conference, J.K. Rowling, declared that one of the main characters of her bestselling “Harry Potter” series, was a homosexual . Rowling made this statement well after the series was completed and there are few (if any) textual clues to support her proposal. Rowling’s declaration inadvertently presupposes and thus challenges the rights and abilities of the author. Who is J.K. Rowling to tell us about her characters?
The amount of sway an author holds on his or her own texts is a well-involved discussion and lies unresolved in the academic world. Michel Foucault, in one of his more involved essays, “What Is an Author,” tells us that upon completion of a text, the author becomes removed from the person who writes . In this moment, the writer loses ownership of their work in every way other than the strictly commercial sense. The power an author has over a text is abandoned the instant it is published; the writings become an incarnation in and of themselves.
The issue of influence over textual comprehension is vital when considering not only an author’s deliberate controlled influence, but also the aspects of influence they have no control over. These secondary aspects are innumerable, though they typically center on the view of the author’s person: who the reader understands the writer to be and where that persona fits in the societal stratum is a large portion of the perceived aspect of every work and is for the most part uncontrollable by the author.
Race is unsegregatable from modern American life. Every identity is conjoined with a defined race; one cannot even fill out a form without having to consign oneself to this arbitrary distinction. Authenticity thus has an interesting interaction with an author’s race: Can a white author write from the perspective of a black narrator? More broadly: can a member of any race truly understand what it is like to be from another?
Whether an author should or should not narrate or speculate on another’s race has bared little consequence on most Authors conceptions of writing. Many authors, including a good deal of those deemed to be “great,” have written largely speculative works focused on forms of existence that they have had no direct interaction with. Shakespeare’s works offer a perfect example of the ability to write authoritatively while being devoid of “authenticity” of perspective.
William Shakespeare, possibly the greatest writer in the western canon, first told humans much of what they know about themselves. Despite this, “we know almost nothing factual about the inner life of Shakespeare” . Shakespeare was the progenitor of an incredible amount of multi-faceted characters: Caliban and Prospero of “The Tempest” being among the most complex. These characters are heavily discussed in the academic world, but it is easy to draw much of them and their existences through nothing but textual clues.
Caliban is confirmed as a descendent of a woman from “Argiers , or more commonly, Algeria. Prospero describes Caliban’s mother as a “blue-eyed hag” . Burton Raffel, amongst others, argues that the descriptor of “blue-eyed” infers pregnancy, as this was a commonly used slang term at the time Shakespeare printed his works . Using Occam’s razor (the implication that the most obvious explanation should be assumed), “blue-eyed” should rather be directly interpreted; Caliban’s mother had blue eyes. Caliban’s mother is a person from Algeria who has blue eyes; one can presume her to be biracial, a significant distinction. Caliban, being her direct descendent, is thus a biracial individual.
Caliban serves as an example of the potential for authenticity across racial lines, as Shakespeare is assumed as strictly Caucasian. Caliban is a well-developed character; though he is a monster , he is capable of plotting against his captor and master, Prospero. However, Prospero is a much fuller and realistic character. Shakespeare, in depicting a former duke of Milan (an Italian/European city) manifests a much fuller and realistic portrayal of the human ego. Prospero, a European character, just as Shakespeare himself, shines with a polished reality that Caliban never quite achieves.
This is largely problematic; Shakespeare himself developed both of these characters, yet it is only the European that is made identifiable. While this does not completely dilute the argument for authenticity in his writing, it is nonetheless troubling. Surely, Shakespeare himself was never usurped and cast upon an island on which he plotted his revenge. We thus have in Prospero the semblance of the ability (on Shakespeare’s part) to create authenticity without direct experience. Caliban remains as a pin ready to deflate this theory in its application to racial transcendence: Shakespeare, in “The Tempest” does not completely profile across racial borders. Shakespeare’s flaw here may be that he is striving into unknown waters when he attempts to cross-racial boundaries.
Perhaps then, it is not an issue of the emulation of another race via direct narrative that is necessary to authenticity. The effects of racism can be seen by anyone with open, attentive eyes and ears. Authenticity of cross-racial characters can still be achieved, as long as the race of the narration aligns with that of the author. If a Caucasian writes from the perspective of a Caucasian while viewing African-Americans, he is still capable of authentically administering an atmosphere capable of shedding light on racism or other issues of social injustice pertinent to his or her contemporary life.
William Cuthbert Faulkner, in his book, “Absalom, Absalom”” deals with the issue of race in a unique way. Faulkner’s book is narrated solely by Caucasians, although there is a constant representation of African-American slaves and a minute presence of Native Americans, from whom Sutpen purchases his land. Aside from these initially presented non-Caucasians, the book reveals to us that Bon, who is initially portrayed as Caucasian, is the descendent of an African-American. Not only does this point out the arbitrariness of racial designation (that we have to be told and can not make this designation based on his character or skin), it also serves to highlight the racism and the importance of racism in the world contemporary to Faulkner.
Faulkner himself was a Caucasian from the South, as are a majority of the characters of his book. Faulkner is able, through his characters and his unique narrative methods, to highlight the issues inherent in race and racism in his book, “Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner, who lived in and wrote about the South, authentically recreates for the reader the circumstances that existed in the post-Civil War South, specifically those related to reconstruction and racial relations. In this way, he is able to manifest an authentic experience of the issues addressed by a race of which he is not a member. In this case, Faulkner lends sympathy to a foreign group, both through his text and through his readers as a proxy.
Sympathy is a very complex subject. Sympathy implies an understanding on some level between two individuals. For sympathy to exist, there must be a common feeling between two groups. For a common feeling to exist, there must be some commonality of feelings, which implies a much more base interaction between people. People must share not just something in common with someone they feel sympathy for; they must share many things in common, including emotions and understanding. Faulkner’s creation of sympathy for members of another race functions in a different way than that created by Shakespeare in “The Tempest”.
Shakespeare’s “thing of darkness” , Caliban, is something to be pitied. Pity is a form of sympathy that denotes only a shared feeling of misery. Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, declares her pity for Caliban because of his wickedness . Miranda has been shipwrecked on an island for a long time and surely as a result has felt miserable at times. This misery is surely incomparable to the misery of a free individual turned slave, who must abandon not only his island, but also his way of life, to a seemingly omnipotent controller in his captor, Prospero. Miranda’s pity is a sharing of misery as a type; she is able to understand what it is to feel sad, thus, she pities Caliban. Miranda’s misery is not a shared quality of Caliban’s misery, which is why it remains nothing more than pity; she cannot understand the slave’s plight on more than a basic emotive level. Shakespeare lends no more to Caliban’s character; we can only access him through his words and through the treatment of the other characters towards him. The reader is thus able to lend him no more than this same level of pity; one feels sorry for the monster, but cannot identify with him. In this way, Caliban is not complete in his authenticity. The reader is not granted enough about him to get at his “realness”.
Faulkner’s work creates a different level of interpretation. The reader’s emotions do not register as solely pity for Bon. Bon falls in love and is killed only because of his racial identification, which is applied to his character after his introduction and development. His story is tragic, the sorrow one feels for him transgresses pity and the reader is able to feel sympathy that involves a more legitimate concern for him. This occurs largely as the result of the accessibility of the character, he is introduced to the reader as one race and is later exposed, devoid of his own control and preference, as a member of another race. The act of racial revealing could happen to any member of society. The reader can identify with Bon because the reader himself could be revealed to have racial ties other than the ones they know of. In this, Faulkner gives a level of authenticity to his character by creating the ability for superfluous sympathy for him; the reader is able to imagine having their racial identification challenged, but can not immediately imagine having their freedom rifted, although upon close examination these two aspects are interrelated. The reader is constantly distanced from the latter possibility, as it is much more imposingly threatening.
The concept of empathy exists beyond pity and sympathy. Empathy is the ascribing of one’s own personal feelings and experiences to another thing. Empathy can only be felt for things one can directly identify with having experienced. Empathy involves no imagination (sympathy does), but results from real occurrences. Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man” creates the possibility for direct empathy in his character in this famed work.
Ellison, born in 1913, was in his late 20s in the 1940s, just as the main character of “Invisible Man” is. Both Ellison and “Invisible Man’s” unnamed narrator were African-Americans that lived in New York City during a particularly racially charged era. Thus, insights into the character of the narrator directly involve the potential of authenticity as the bond between character and author is one of empathetic possibility. The narrator is taking a subway and declares that he sees, “Negroes who hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists. They reminded me fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang” . This description can plausibly be attributed to the author. Surely, Ellison saw crowds of hurrying African-Americans during his tenure in New York City.
The application of authenticity due to empathy quickly becomes a slippery slope. Assuming Ellison did witness these groups of people moving in such a fashion, there is no way to conclude that he perceived them in reality as mimicking former slaves. His character and his character’s perceptions cannot be attributed to the author, as there is no authentic assurance that the narrator is anything other than a contrivance.
If it is not possible to prove direct authenticity of experience between a character that so closely resembles his author, then the identity of the author should bear little consequence on the reader’s interpretation of the character. Ellison paints a magnificently real personality in his book and the reader is given a nearly full scope of his personality, wants and desires as flawed as they may sometimes be. Even with all of this, the author remains separated from the narrator, there is no way to prove what exists inside a man: what he perceives or experiences. The reader is given only the characters and the narration.
Foucault supports this theory in conveying that it would be wrong to “equate [the author] with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission [of text and writer], in this division and the distance” . The reader cannot equate any operation of the characters or narration with the author or writer. Authenticity in authorship is thus immutably irrelevant; the author should not matter in a reader’s interpretation of a text.
Unfortunately, this proposal has yet to reconcile itself with day-to-day life. Academicians may argue and prove that there are many well-written texts that work across racial boundaries yet, this does not secure sales, a very real and essential aspect of writing. It is thus incredibly difficult to write a cross-racial novel, people will shy away from it, because its perceived authenticity is damaged.
Let the reader of this essay suppose that a well-respected Caucasian author wrote a narrative and the narrator of that text was narrated by an African-American. White audiences would avoid purchasing this book, due to the phenomenon of “white guilt;” they would be afraid of being confronted as racist for not instead purchasing a book written by an African-American who would typically be assumed able to create a more authentic experience. African-Americans would not purchase the book due to a phenomenon that would just as easily be labeled “black guilt;” African-Americans would be shunned by their own community for propagating the bastardization of African-American literature. This situation is not easily resolved.
Tom Wolfe, for his recent book, “I Am Charlotte Simons” received large chastisements for his lack of “authenticity”. This book is narrated b a female, Charlotte; Wolfe himself is male. The title of the book confronts authorship in that the declarative “I” informs the reader of the significance of the narrator and her interaction with the author; they are two different people. This went largely unnoticed by pop culture as Wolfe was chastised for his sexist depictions of character . These chastisements led to reduced sales from this world-renowned and well-respected writer.
What if Tom Wolfe had used a pseudonym? This question exists at the center of authenticity. If “I Am Charlotte Simons” had had a byline of Tammy Wolfe, it would have been interpreted, understood and received in a completely different manner than it was. What was once considered sexism may have been transformed to something so insignificant as to not be mentioned merely by blurring the gender line. What if a white man had declared that Ralph Ellison was his pseudonym, 20 years after the writing was published? The book, “Invisible Man” would likely have been read as racist and would not have entered the canon of Great American Race Novels. This is perplexing as now there is no physical proof offered to the reader upon finishing Ellison’s book that the person we know as Ellison wrote it.
The concept of pseudonym creation manifests the ability to challenge the necessity of authenticity of an author. If one is capable of reading a book, designating a character within it as an authentic interpretation, then nothing post-facto should be able to have an influence on that interpretation. “[The] aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection… of the operations we force texts to undergo” .
As a result, the authenticity of characters, no matter their race, should be derived only from textual clues. These clues should be devoid of any instructions given to the reader, whether from an author, a critic or anyone else. Commentary on books and other writings should serve only to open the field of discourse within the reader; the opinions of others should allow a more comprehensive view of a text within a reader, the opinions themselves should not be definitive of any text. “The author function… does not refer to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals .
J.K. Rowling had no right to tell us what her characters sexual preference is. Despite popular culture, the author holds no sway over their text after publication. After all, “What difference does it make who is speaking?”
Friday, February 22, 2008
Glass
Gauged ears
Size zero
And a dream you’re slowly awakening
From
Scrupulously scrimshawing a destiny
For yourself, far away
From
All the bullshit and towards a
Future in Antofagasta
Read about in that intro to something or other
Class you took as a freshman
Somewhere where you can dance with
maybe LIKE the locals
People who won't care
About who you were or what
Your parents are like
Somewhere that you wont have to be ashamed of
Familial monies.
Stacked up, your prison bars. The sweet scent of lilacs holding you in place
Chile will save your soul
You’re quite assured
And I
I wouldn’t doubt it
It’ll do you good
To breath the air of hibiscus
Kiss those sweet boys on the cheeks
And kill a few memories with a bottle or two of red
A habit you picked up
Your freshman year
Size zero
And a dream you’re slowly awakening
From
Scrupulously scrimshawing a destiny
For yourself, far away
From
All the bullshit and towards a
Future in Antofagasta
Read about in that intro to something or other
Class you took as a freshman
Somewhere where you can dance with
maybe LIKE the locals
People who won't care
About who you were or what
Your parents are like
Somewhere that you wont have to be ashamed of
Familial monies.
Stacked up, your prison bars. The sweet scent of lilacs holding you in place
Chile will save your soul
You’re quite assured
And I
I wouldn’t doubt it
It’ll do you good
To breath the air of hibiscus
Kiss those sweet boys on the cheeks
And kill a few memories with a bottle or two of red
A habit you picked up
Your freshman year
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
I've been listening to too much Tegan and Sara
In real life
I'm a baker
A candle stick
maker
but otherwise
I'm a pedantic pissant with little
or nothing to add
to anything
but
In real life
I'm a big risk taker
outside of that
I manage money accounts
and deposit dollars by the fistful
into market accounts
or something
IRL
I'm in a successful long term relationship
or
I can't con a date
I always forget
which one
I'm a baker
A candle stick
maker
but otherwise
I'm a pedantic pissant with little
or nothing to add
to anything
but
In real life
I'm a big risk taker
outside of that
I manage money accounts
and deposit dollars by the fistful
into market accounts
or something
IRL
I'm in a successful long term relationship
or
I can't con a date
I always forget
which one
foul of sound and flurries
an uncomfortable car caress
in my town
without any alleys
just slick uxorious husbands
bowing to kowtowing wives
who skimmed I Ching
their livingrooms with all the photographs facing northward so that the flow is
to lay my head
on silken semetic sheets.
a tithe for a tristesse.
in my town
without any alleys
just slick uxorious husbands
bowing to kowtowing wives
who skimmed I Ching
their livingrooms with all the photographs facing northward so that the flow is
just
right
I ran that stoplightto lay my head
on silken semetic sheets.
a tithe for a tristesse.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
the floor was not cold
and it was a new year for me and no one else
letters were scrambled on the board
but not in my head
i didn't speak them anyway
and i guess you knew what they were
that day we made a silent pact
but i knew you would not keep it
we have no future
and i will be gone sooner than you'd like
i'm ok with it
but that's moot
you're free spiraling
and i'm holding a steady landing pattern
and it was a new year for me and no one else
letters were scrambled on the board
but not in my head
i didn't speak them anyway
and i guess you knew what they were
that day we made a silent pact
but i knew you would not keep it
we have no future
and i will be gone sooner than you'd like
i'm ok with it
but that's moot
you're free spiraling
and i'm holding a steady landing pattern
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