writing

Tuesday various

Erased from memory

Over the summer, Geist held an “erasure poem” contest, in which you had to take an excerpt from Roughing In the Bush: Or, Forest Life in Canada and, just by erasing individual characters, come up with a poem. I wasn’t going to enter — I like Geist, but, having entered other of their contests in the past, I wasn’t exactly aching to send them more money, even with a subscription renewal thrown in. And I’m not exactly a world-class poet. But I thought it was an interesting challenge, and before I knew it I had something I rather liked.

I didn’t win. But that’s okay. Like I said, I like Geist. And I probably won’t be entering their Postcard Story Contest this year — I understand the whys of the new “make your own postcard” rule, but I can’t say it appeals — so they can have this entry fee instead.

Anyway, like I said, I liked what I wrote…or, rather, what was left after I erased. And since I didn’t make the short list, I’ve got no reason not to post my poem here:

a week passed
the dark stranger and my husband
the same horror
attracted their attention and
they were delighted

I almost screamed
then followed intently
their dark eyes fixed upon the map

what strange hex of names
every lake and river on the paper
held hard my sorry eyes

I was consumed by a curious word
which had been given — a strange gift
to a glade fenced on three-sides

a moving snake
or a hideous image of god
conceived by the most distorted imagination

claws that formed hands
a face strange and awful
a wood of serpentine form

my name

I thought to demand an explanation
longed to flee

in the east, far over the great lake
there were bad prayers made of wood
and this was one of them

they said
that hideous thing
they had made with their own hands
were highly amused
and passed the word from one to the other
in spite or contempt

I was sorry to perceive this circus in their eyes

they regarded it with mysterious awe
for several days
then left vexed and annoyed
by the height of my curiosity

Sunday (blood drive-less) Sunday

What did I do today? I did the Sunday crossword and I wrote this in my weekly writing group:

The assassin analyzed the unlocked door, not so much frightened as puzzled by its sudden appearance and by the possibility — or threat — of what might lay behind it. There had been no door the first time she had circled through this room, perhaps only an hour earlier, she was certain of that, and all of the other doors she had encountered scattered through Benedict’s maze had been firmly locked, or had opened to brick walls, empty rooms, traps meant to deceive, distract, or kill. Benedict’s strange sense of humor showed in every one of them, and the assassin remembered, not for the first time, why she had taken special delight in the thought of killing him.

And yet she had been sloppy. She’d not taken him seriously; a madman, she’d accepted that, and the newsreel footage her employers had shown her would have been reason enough to end Benedict’s life, even without the mountains of other, even less palatable, evidence they had accumulated. But she had thought of him as just another target, and an easy one at that, and that, obviously, had been a mistake.

He’d trapped her in this maze of windowless rooms two, or maybe three hours ago now, and there was no reason to think he was even still in the building, still in the city. She knew him, or his file, well enough to know he’d want to watch; this whole basement expanse was obviously some kind of torture playground; just because she couldn’t see the cameras or Benedict’s laughing eye didn’t mean they were not there. But Benedict could be watching on the run, his private jet at the ready, perhaps already in the air. The sooner she got out of here, the better chance she would have of picking up his trail.

So the door. It was obviously another trap, or dead end, but she had limited options. She’d been drugged when they left her here — again, she’d been sloppy — and if there was any other way out, it had not revealed itself in the last few hours. She tried the doorknob, felt it give, but hesitated at pulling the door open. She knew she’d seen this room before — there were the notches she’d carved in the far column with her knife, the blade they’d for some reason left her. She’d been traveling in circles for twenty minutes before she decided to start marking her trail, but this room had definitely been along it. She remembered the columns, the gray walls, and lowered ceiling. She did not remember any doors, least of all this one, in this particular wall.

She was being foolish hesitating, she knew; Benedict was on the run and she needed to escape if she had any hope of tracking him, stopping him, killing him. She didn’t know where the door led, or how it had suddenly just appeared, but she knew she had to open it. She’d been everywhere else down here, and opening this new door was the only option left.

Opening it would turn out to be a huge mistake.

At the time, though, it had surprised her by being just like any other door, swinging open not to reveal any new danger or pitfall, nothing jumping out at her to find itself at the other end of her knife. It was just a door, and it swung open to reveal what was just another room.

But it was the woman sitting in that other room that caught the assassin’s immediate attention. The assassin could see the woman through the doorway, leaning back in a wooden chair against the opposite wall. The lights above the woman flickered, then came on stronger, perhaps activated by movement or the door opening or Benedict’s own sick whim. The woman was older, her thinning hair beginning to gray, but there was no mistaking who she was. She sprang to her feet when she saw the assassin, the chair falling to the floor beneath her, and raced over to the open door.

“Oh thank god,” the woman said. “I was worried you’d never come.”

No, the assassin thought, there was no mistaking who the woman was, but there was also no way this could possibly be. This was some kind of trick, Benedict’s worst yet, and she readied her knife for whatever would come next.

The woman staring desperately at her now was the assassin herself.

Not the most eventful day, but that was Sunday.

All the news that fits, we print

Today was an okay day.

We had another of our regular “brown bag” lunches at work, this one with Robin Pogrebin, a journalist with the New York Times, who talked about her own history with the magazine, the general state (and likely future) of print journalism, and answered some of our questions. It wasn’t as interactive as last month’s improv session, but it was interesting.

This evening, after work, I took the subway downtown to the NYU campus to hear novelist (and NYU professor) Zadie Smith talk. She wound up mostly reading from her novel-in-progress, a novel she’s apparently been working on for the past six or seven years — and which is quite good, from the sound of it. Afterward, she took questions from the audience. I stayed for most of that, but sneaked out a little early near the end. Smith’s a funny and engaging presence, but I had me a train to catch. (I also had yet to have dinner, and it was already half past 7.)

All in all, a pretty okay day.

Falling back

I made almost no use of the extra hour the return to Daylight Savings Time afforded me today. I certainly didn’t use it to sleep in, which is unfortunate. I worked on the Sunday crossword, which I didn’t like, and which I didn’t finish. And I did finally get around to watching the end of Torchwood: Miracle Day, when I noticed it was now available on Netflix streaming.

And I was reminded why I haven’t gone out of my way these past few months to finish it. The series started off okay, got rather bad, rallied for one genuinely very good episode, and then sunk back into awfulness, ending on a very weird note and all but screaming “there’s a sequel a’comin’!” It’s almost a master class in how not to write a television series…which is even more a shame considering that it comes from several people who up til now I thought were pretty good at that sort of thing. (Even Davies, who has some bad habits he can sometimes fall back on.) And I’m just talking at a basic level here: heavy exposition that explains everything and yet nothing, idiot characters we care nothing about, guest stars with half a scene of screen time, laughably terrible characters from other guest stars — seriously, Marc Vann has never been worse — and terrible, terrible dialogue. It rallied just a little near the end, rising with a few good ideas to a level of mediocrity, but ultimately the show was a huge disappointment, worse even than the often quite dire first season.

My thoughts line up pretty much with Zack Handlen’s review:

I had high hopes for Miracle Day, which quickly became hopes, before finally evaporating into long, aggravated sighs. I suppose the odds were against the series from the start; no matter how good Children Of Earth was, it didn’t suddenly mean that Davies had mastered the tics which are such a distinctive part of his style. Miracle Day was full of Big Moments, and attempts to yank on the heart strings, as well as attempts to shock us with sudden darkness. Sometimes these attempts were successful, but most weren’t, and without any strong sense of purpose, those failed moments led to a permanent impression of emptiness. Great shows—great art—can convince us there’s more than what we see; but all I got from this Torchwood was less, and less, and less.

I’m still quite fond of the second, and Children of Earth is terrific. So, try as they might, they can’t take that away.

And that was pretty much my Sunday. Oh, and I wrote this:

If truth be told, Father Gregory had not believed in ghosts, nor in witches or devils, but there was no use denying that what stood before him now was some mixture of all three. Faith in God is all-important, Father Aleph might have said, but His enemies depend on no such faith for their existence. What Gregory did or did not believe was beside the point. Demons and wraiths were deadly all the same.

“You forget your catechism,” Aleph did say now. “A novice such as yourself has no business conjuring up a quantum summoning. But I suppose in your pride — ”

“It wasn’t pride,” said Gregory. “I — they shouldn’t exist. The Church erradicated them all centuries ago. I thought — ”

“And I suppose you don’t believe in time travel either,” said Aleph. “When that’s clearly what the quantum summoning is. When without it our faith would be nothing.”

He stared at the machine, the dark host shimmering in its still open field. “It’s a useful tool,” Aleph said. “The machine. Useful for historians, hunters. You don’t think ALL the dread beast’s minions have been destroyed, do you?”

“I didn’t think — ” said Gregory.

“Unplug the machine,” said Aleph with a sigh. “And then run the standard exorcism rites. These…things will get put back where, and when they belong.”

Was it really that simple? wondered Gregory. Demons ripped from the distant past, the twenty-first century if the flashing read-outs on the machine could be believed, and all of it undone with a simple reboot?

“Just be glad you didn’t accidentally summon the Dark Lord himself,” said Aleph. “I’ve seen more than one novice, and even a few adepts, ripped apart by the horrors that can bring forth. If it was up to me, you certainly wouldn’t have access to the machine.”

Again he sighed. “But His Holiness wants all of you trained in the rudiments of time travel, for the war, and that’s what I’ll do. Just — don’t touch anything without asking me first, all right?”

Not quite sure what’s going on there, or what to do with it, but…well, there it is.