“According to [Henry] James, a short story was the analysis of a situation, the psychological phenomena of a group of men and women at an interesting moment. Given two, three, four different temperaments, bring them into a certain situation, and what would be the action and reaction? The story was a problem to be solved. Little was to be said about the characters: they were to reveal themselves, gradually, slowly as they do in actual life, by long continued dialogue, by little unconscious actions and reactions, by personal peculiarities in dress, manners, movement, revealed by a thousand subtle hints, descriptive touches, insinuations. Under such conditions the movement of the story must be slow: in some of his work there seems to be no story at all, only the analysis of a situation. The method requires space: James has stretched the length of the short story to its extreme…. Twenty-eight of the one hundred and three stories in Henry James’s final list are long enough to appear as volumes. Yet one may not doubt they are short stories: they are each of them the presentation of a single situation and they leave each of them a unity of impression.” — Fred Lewis Pattee (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book III, Part VI., Sec. 9 (emphasis in original))
“If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, and egotist, a bastard.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
“Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
“Hawthorne added soul to the short story and made it a form that could be taken seriously even by those who had contended that it was inferior to the longer forms of fiction. He centred his effort about a single situation and gave to the whole tale unity of impression. Instead of elaboration of detail, suggestion; instead of picturings of external effects, subjective analysis and psychologic delineation of character.” — Fred Lewis Pattee (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book III, Part VI, Sec. 4)
“The source of fear is in the future, and a person freed from the future has nothing to fear.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
In November of 1975 I was 17 years old and began writing poetry. The following year I had four of my poems published in two very obscure magazines. In 1978 I had another published in another very obscure magazine. It was another ten years before I had another poem published, again in an obscure magazine, this one in the United Kingdom. And in 1990 I had another poem published: magazine again obscure.
Those seven poems are the previously published works I’m posting this week. They were all written before I was twenty years old. Nearly everything else I wrote in those early scribbling days when the Vietnam War was still freshly lost and the nation was anesthesizing itself with drugs, sex, rock-and-roll and King Disco, has long since been thrown away and good riddance to it. I would hate to think someone would have to wade through that garbage to sort it out after I die.
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
“Any idea made public will sooner or later turn on its author and confiscate the pleasure he got from thinking it.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
“A vicious person can never relinquish his sinful habits—virtue never resides in the abodes of impious persons.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Aranyakanda Sarga 50
“Culture is a very fine thing, indeed, but it is never of much account either in life or in literature, unless it is used as a cat uses a mouse, as a source of mirth and luxury.” — Joel Chandler Harris (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book III, Part V., Sec. 2)
“Music is love in search of a word.” — Sidney Lanier (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Ch. IV, Sec. 32)
“The moment you believe you are entitled to something is exactly when you are ripe to lose it to someone who is fighting harder.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“Winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
It had been my plan to post my earliest published poetry this weekend, but last week I found in my archives one more previously published story I had overlooked and hadn’t posted yet. That story is “Tossing Baby to the Tiger,” originally published in 2003 by Salt Hill. It is what I posted this week. It’s much more interesting than my poetic juvenilia, which I’ll probably post next week, for I have no shame and I no longer care.
“One of the most dangerous enemies you can face is complacency.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.” — Troy Davis, September 21, 2011 (quote from BBC News)
“Success is the enemy of future success.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“A durable love is one that’s dynamic, not static; long-running, not long-standing; a river we step into every day and not twice.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (emphasis in original)
“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.” — Goethe (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“Nothing is more dispiriting than ‘And they all lived happily ever after,’ which means, in information entropy terms, ‘And then nothing interesting or noteworthy ever happened to them again for the rest of their lives.’” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
The Weekly Alibi is an alternative newspaper published in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From 1996 to 2000, it published a baker’s dozen of my poems in its annual Valentine’s Day poetry contest. It also published one of my haiku in its 2000 haiku contest. This week I’m posting those poems here on my blog. I’m not all that wild about them–in fact, some of them are at least a little embarrassing–but I’m not going to try to hide them.
Next week I’ll probably post my earliest published poetry, the stuff from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. There’s not as much of that, and there’s probably not any that may be as embarrassing as “Capitano’s Romance” or “Personals: I Saw U” or “Invitation to the Ball,” the last two of which were winners in the Alibi contests’ “Why I’m a Pathetic, Dateless Loser” category.
“Our legal system is adversarial, founded, like capitalism, on the idea that a bunch of people trying to tear each other apart, plus certain laws and procedures preventing things from getting too out of hand, will yield, in one, justice, and in the other, prosperity, for all. Sometimes this does happen; other times, it doesn’t. At any rate, it’s a terrible metaphor for the rest of life.”– Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“We hear communications experts telling us time and again about things like the ‘7-38-55 rule,’ first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from the tone of your voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose. Yet it’s that 7 percent that can and will be held against you in a court of law.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“A great deal of fairly recent developmental psychology and a great deal of research in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and so forth has suggested, at least, that the idea that there would be a true ‘you’ that comes into the world unaffected, unadulterated by the influence of the social environment in which you develop, is a myth. That in fact you are, as it were, socialized from the get-go. So that if you were to peel away the layers of socialization, it’s not as if what would be left over would be the true you. What would be left over would be nothing.” — Bernard Reginster (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“You question the assumptions of physics and you end up in metaphysics–a branch of philosophy. You question the assumptions of history and you end up in epistemology–a branch of philosophy. You try to take any other discipline out at the foundations and you end up in philosophy; you try to take philosophy out at the foundations and you only end up in meta-philosophy: even deeper in than when you started.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“Games have a goal; life doesn’t. Life has no objective. This is what the existentialists call ‘the anxiety of freedom.’ Thus we have an alternate definition of what a game is–anything that provides temporary relief from existential anxiety. This is why games are such a popular form of procrastination. And this is why, on reaching one’s goals, the risk is that the reentry of existential anxiety hits you even before the thrill of victory–you’re thrown immediately back on the uncomfortable question of what to do with your life.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“We must choose a standard to hold ourselves to. Perhaps we’re influenced to pick some particular standard; perhaps we pick it at random. Neither seems particularly ‘authentic,’ but we swerve around paradox here because it’s not clear that this matters. It’s the commitment to the choice that makes behavior authentic.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (emphasis in original)
“The Usual Story” is another of the stories I initially wrote about a dozen years ago and which was published early this year in Mad Hatters’ Review. It’s the last previously-published story I have in my inventory. Next week I’ll have to post something else. Probably poetry. There was a call some weeks back from one of my three readers for some poetry.
I’ll probably post all my previously-published poetry over a three-week period. Unless I chicken out. Some of it’s pretty embarrassing. No sense hiding, though. I thought it was good enough to submit in the first place, and it got published. Not in American Poetry Review or Poetry or The New Yorker or anything like that. I should be so lucky. It all showed up in little mags, some of which have long since passed away.
“What defines us is that we don’t know what to do and there aren’t any revelations out there for us waiting to be found. Profoundly disoriented and lacking any real mooring, we must make it all up from scratch ourselves, each one of us, individually. We arrive in a bright room, wet, bloody, bewildered, some stranger smacking us and cutting what had been, up to that point, our only source of oxygen and food. We have no idea what is going on. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go, who we are, where we are, or what in the world, after all this trauma, comes next. We wail.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (emphasis in original)
“The truest tests of skill and intuition come when everything looks quiet and we aren’t sure what to do, or if we should do anything at all.” — Garry Kasparov (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)