Six Sentence Sunday, 8 April 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on April 8, 2012 by epbeaumont

The rain sluices down Hennepin Avenue and the bus to Utopia is nowhere in sight.  On the other end of that bus line, a crescent-shaped harbor looks out upon a blue sea, all the layers of color from sand-filtered emerald in the shallows to aquamarine out from shore, to the ultramarine depths and the indigo abysses at the horizon.  Ships sail into that harbor from the twelve points of the Compass Rose, archaic ships with billowing white sails and high poopdecks surmounted by castles, the ships of the time of Elizabeth and of Shakespeare, the ships of the Spanish Main.

Two teenaged boys listen to rap on their headphones, nodding along to the tinny words that Vera can hear from six feet away, their baggy pants damp with the rain.  The Number Six arrives and they pick up the folds of denim like nineteenth-century skirts and run for it, splashing through the puddles.  

Human beings will invent costumes that hobble and trip them.  

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Flash fiction: Bassoon in the corner

Posted on April 6, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such.

Prompt: The bassoon lay tattered in the lonely corner.

It was long since time to begin rehearsal, and they were still straggling in.  The dancers were already there, and looking disdainful as they stretched.  Dancers never sit still; they stretch, if there’s more than a minute or two to wait, or they do strength exercises, sitting on the floor and lifting themselves on their flattened palms.  They’re constantly aware that they’re in their bodies, which is why they’re so compelling to watch: their thinking doesn’t stop at the neck.

It was the bloody musicians who were the problem.  They’d taken lunch, the lot of them, and left the instruments behind.  There was the guitar, in its open case on the chair; the flute, sitting on the table on a sprawl of sheet music, like a detail in a Caravaggio still life; the set of hand drums sat opposite, holding down the corners, as if it and the flute were deliberating, in the absence of their players, as to how they’d manage this rather tricky passage.  The bassoon lay tattered in the lonely corner, its wood and metal still wrapped in fronds of leather and cloth.  A thoroughly makeshift case, I thought, and bloody typical of the fellow who’d brought it in: bearded, slovenly, a little fat, the sort of man who thinks that his genius overrides all considerations of precision or craft.

Yes, I’m judgmental.  It must come from hanging out with the dancers.

The actors are standing in their little klatch, finishing their coffee.  They have their own little rituals, and you can tell the ones who trained as dancers because they’re looking over there to the country from which they’ve been exiled, and remembering its rites.  Some of the actors are stretching; some are looking at their cell phones to see if they’ve got a text message, and others are looking at the script, already marking time, already in rehearsal.

That bassoon case—if you could call it that—really bothered me.  Rags and tatters, and that reminded me.  Rags and Tatters, the bar around the corner, our local outpost of La Vie Boheme, that’s where he’d be, among the trust-fund slackers and the drinkers with a writing problem.  Poseur central, and meanwhile I had a rehearsal to get underway.

Dmitri, the stage manager, looked at his cell phone, looked at me.

“Long since time,” he said.

“Rags and Tatters,” I said.

He rolled his eyes and sighed.  “Musicians,” he said.  “Dori!”

The assistant stage manager looked up from her notebook.

“They’re not back.”

She narrowed her eyes and then abruptly pursed her lips as if cutting off a curse word.  “I’ll go get them.”  Stupid bastards, I could hear.  Because I already knew what Dori thought of the lot of them, and I appreciated her grace in not saying aloud that she told us so about the rather conspicuous (to her) bad vibe of Hamisch the bassoonist.

She closed the notebook, pulled on her peacoat, and turned up the collar as she strode out.

(Process information: 10/17/2009 12:34 PM to 12:48 PM, 497 words)


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Summer NaNo: Novel Cook Pot, installment 1

Posted on April 3, 2012 by epbeaumont

Once you’re a writer, everything is a writing prompt.

This summer I’m going to do a NaNo novel. The formal challenge is to do a plot skeleton and play it in counterpoint against the character interview. The responses to the character interviews will be the first draft of the novel.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, here are the prompts:

From St. Oscar the Sarcastic, we have Basil Hallward, the painter of the Picture of Dorian Gray. (Spoiler alert) Basil dies in the course of the action, so we’re not going to use him. I have decided that he has a cousin, Leonie, who is a scenic painter or set designer in pre-WWI Greenwich Village.

From the biography of John Sloan, author of The Gist of Art and luminary of the Ash Can School, we are borrowing, well, the character of Mr. Sloan himself, as well as the Secession of Greenwich Village. (It took place atop the Washington Square arch, one night in the teens of the twentieth century. Incidentally, folks, this bit is nonfiction, which should Larn All of Y’All about the real reason that fiction writers, especially fantasy writers, should read history: it’s full of bizarro things that you couldn’t possibly make up on your own.)

Obviously, this story is going to take place in New York City, so we’re going to throw in that other Notable New Yorker, Mr. Henry James. Specifically, his Jolly Corner, as well as the artist’s models from The Real Thing. And it’s going to be POV the models, not the snooty artist type who uses them in a lecture-demonstration on Art Vs Life. OK, London goes into the mix as well, because the latter tale takes place in London. Whether the ghost of Mr James will condescend to appear, we don’t know.

Emma Goldman, just on general principles, and because her circle intersected with that of John Sloan and the fictional Leonie Hallward. Maybe Red Emma herself in person, or some fictional avatar. For sure, she’s going to put in an appearance in my New York/Petersburg/Mexico City steampunk extravaganza scheduled for this November, so we need to start practicing.

Incidentally, Leonie has a painter’s gift or curse similar to that of her cousin Basil. What does that look like, when one is a scenic designer?

This fiction clearly will inhabit the bedeviled no-man’s-land between historical fiction, magical realism, and fan-fiction. (The Snooty would point out that when the canon material is old enough, it’s not fanfic but hommage.)

If the fates favor me, I’m taking a trip to the East Coast this summer, which will include a side-trip to New York City. (Research! Tax-deductible fun!)

Maybe John Singer Sargent, too, because he didn’t die until the mid-1920s. And so now we have both New York and London in the mix. If we want some ghosts, we can just flip through an art-history book. Maybe Walt Whitman, though properly that might require a side-trip to Camden, New Jersey.

Oh yes, and there are the bones that underlie the great city of New York, including the slave-revolt organizers burned alive back in colonial days.

Yes, folks, you read that right. Burned alive.

Not to mention the original inhabitants who got done out of that island in the first place. I’m going to follow up on the actual story about the supposed selling of Manhattan Island. I suspect that the real story is rather different from the anecdotal version. Real-estate swindle, though, is the foundation of the American Way of Life, not to mention the bones in the foundation.

Can’t get away from those bones… and London has lots of ghosts too. The skeletons in London Bridge, just to start…

OK, that’s probably enough for the cook pot now. Time to let it simmer down.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 1 April 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on April 1, 2012 by epbeaumont

No, she won’t think about that, because ten years and five children later (two of them dead in their first year) her blank-slate, lily-white ignorance is so far away and so alien that it might as well be someone else, a character in a book perhaps, who stood there in the bride’s gown with the flowers in her hair and took the vow… obedience its chief matter, she remembers, though she’s stateswoman enough to say, obedience in the larger sense, that is, she’s obedient to what Thomas would order if he had sense.  Which these days, he has less and less.  

But she won’t think about that.

Nor will she think about the matter of those revels, for it isn’t just whiskey and cards.  Thomas is generous to his friends, which means sharing with them the best of his household.  

Sarah is pregnant, and she hasn’t been given a slave husband.  

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Flash fiction: Too spicy to resist

Posted on March 30, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such.

Prompt: It was too deliciously spicy to resist.

He was not my type at all: skinny and blond, with very pale eyes, a color you’d call grey if it were anything at all, no discernible tilt to blue or green.  I find blue eyes strange enough, but this no-colored shade, closer to water than anything else, was unnerving.  And they missed, by only a shade, being as light as his skin—which would have taken some doing, given how pale that was.  The default human being has black hair, brown eyes, and medium-brown skin. And she’s female.

I can’t look at blonds (or blondes) without thinking, “Recessive trait,” without thinking, “Genetic drift,” without meditating on the eons out of the bosom of mother Africa, under dark skies and darker winters, that leached the color out of those eyes and hair and skin.  Like seeing a ghost, rather.  And this one was skinny, too, so I could see the bones moving in his hands as he rearranged the food on his plate.  I’ve met anorexic girls more often than boys, but this might be what I’m seeing: something listless in the motions. I see the tiny bones in his wrist rolling against each other as he delicately manipulates the chopsticks.

But I’m much too old to find broody and troubled particularly attractive.  I see it for what it is: trouble.  I stared, fascinated, at the moving tendons in the back of his hands, thinking about the beautiful articulation of the joints of the hand. The human hand is an engineering marvel, come to think of it, and watching his hands was watching it stripped to its Platonic essence.  Pale, clear, clean of line—like the black and white photographs in a good technical manual.

The food, on the other hand, glowed on the plate with all the life and energy he didn’t have:  sweet potato in curry sauce, with little curls of cilantro on top.  A Thai curry, golden spices dissolved in coconut milk.  There was more, in the waxed white box with its little metal handle, but he wasn’t anywhere near touching that.

He saw me watching him, and looked up.  Smiled a very odd smile, that sat strangely in his face—all angles and cheekbones, pure structure—the way that it suggested a dimpled cherub, using flesh he didn’t have.  Very delicately he took the chopsticks off the napkin in front of me, all the while looking at me with those no-colored eyes, wrapped his elegantly articulated fingers around them as if they were married, pinched a soft orange morsel off the plate with the enameled tips, twisted to wrap it in sauce, and extended it to me, so that it came within a breath of touching my lips.

“I know you like to watch,” he said, “but you really should try some.”

It was too deliciously spicy to resist.

(Process information: 10/17/2009 12:16 PM to 12:31 PM) 

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Summer NaNo: In the Good Ole Summertime (Unconventional Beach Books)

Posted on March 29, 2012 by epbeaumont

In the good ole summertime…

… It’s time to write a novel. That, and to lie around in hammocks reading huge books. My notion of a beach read is somewhat different from the usual: it’s books that require large stretches of time and concentration, such as is not available during the school year. In student days, my summer reads included Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two World Systems, which I read for the same reason as my schoolmates went to minor-league hockey games: for the fights. Another was Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy of Mathematics, which I can tell you should not be read while sitting out in the Texas noonday sun, even with sunglasses. (There’s probably a reason few philosophers hail from Texas–the sun is too bright.) And, during graduate school, by way of light reading, the Annals of Tacitus (in translation) and a stack of books on medicine in Nazi Germany. Once I was out of graduate school, I got caught up on my reading, which included one memorable summer reading the English translation of excerpts from Pierre Duhem’s Le Systeme du Monde, showing how medieval debates about infinity, eternity and the powers of God played out centuries later in the mathematics of transfinite numbers. (The bridge? The divinity-student-turned-mathematician, Georg Cantor, among others.)

Summer is also the time for leisurely travel to other worlds. During the summers of the late 70s, I read many of the New Wave science fiction novelists, particularly Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ, whom I count among my teachers. (The short-story Bodies, in Russ’s Extra(ordinary) People, was one of many fictional sources for Necromancer and Barbarian,with its setup of far-future civilizations re-animating people from our time. I replayed the scenario, with a near-future Germany and Iron Age Jutland.) The last few years, I’ve spent in the distinguished company of Octavia Butler, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. Some weeks of five different summers of my reading life were spent in the world of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

This last summer, I read the entire Dresden Files series (all twelve or thirteen books of it, one after the other) as well as the urban fantasy of C. E. Murphy and Tananarive Due. Oh yes, and then there’s Jacqueline Carey, of whom more in another post. My Brain Sister keeps me well-supplied with contemporary reading material, so that I may parse the mysteries of genre and figure out where I fit in the big picture.

The other magical time of the year for reading is the dark interval between Halloween and New Year’s and in particular December break. Even now, that’s when I catch up on fiction reading; in December 2008, the second month of my sabbatical year, I read or re-read: Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, the entire Harry Potter series, the novels of A. S. Byatt, George Sand’s Elle et Lui, and several Jeanette Winterson novels.

OK, so my taste is eclectic, and I was forever marked by my time as a student. But weren’t we all.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 25 March 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on March 25, 2012 by epbeaumont

It was quite the rage in her parents’ circle to educate their daughters at convent school, for all that none of them were Roman Catholic.  It produced a demure, innocent and unworldly debutante, properly obedient to duly constituted authority, but nonetheless more than ready to take the reins of a large household.  Curious thing that, though truly she had already served her apprenticeship by the time she got her scanty few years of education…

Thomas, well, Thomas was an education of another kind.  All that she hadn’t known, and to which books only alluded sidelong… well, the drinking and gambling, that was spelled out quite plainly, even in Vanity Fair if you read it with a knowing eye, and in Balzac without too much obfuscation at all.  Novels were an education in life, so no wonder they were banned at the convent.  

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Flash fiction: The air was crisp

Posted on March 23, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such. This particular sprint gave me the opening scene of my 2009 NaNo novel, The Reincarnations of Miss Anne.

Prompt (and title): The air was crisp.

Rain, soft rain, had fallen all night long, and great swags of underlit cloud had swooped over the city, blowing wind and fluttering streetlights.  By dawn, it had blown over.

The air was crisp.  The sun rose, razor-edged, and the wet sparkled on parked cars, on crisped leaves, on the edges of rain-gutters, on the glittering asphalt.  Vera woke up and stretched, with that familiar feeling of having fallen a thousand feet out of her dream into the warm, rumpled bed.  Fallen from a great height.  That’s her picture of waking.

In her dream, she had been flying, wrapped in drapery like a Renaissance angel, in the arms of someone who was destiny itself, sometimes a man and sometimes a woman and sometimes, Vera suspected on waking, the apotheosis of the world spirit moving in history.  Well, that’s what comes of eating cheese popcorn and reading Hegel right before bed.  There was cheap glitter on the drapery, so whatever world spirit it was, it definitely was on a budget.

So was Vera, who looked out the white eyelet curtains onto the grey street punctured with light: gold and red and green leaves, sharp-edged maple, brown leather oak, dried and curled up species-unidentified.  The squirrels are getting fatter all the time; there’s one rooting around in the dumpster just now that is truly worthy of Rubens, that is if Rubens painted squirrels.  And if he did, he’d better hurry up before this one keels over of a stroke from hypertension.  It’s not just Americans who are fat, Vera thought, even their animals are fat.  Even the vermin in the dumpsters are fat.

Hell of a country.  But the air was crisp.

(Process information: 10/17/2009 2:44AM to 2:50 AM, 280 words, made it up as I went along)

 

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Six Sentence Sunday, 18 March 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on March 18, 2012 by epbeaumont

“Thank you, Araminta,” Charlotte said.  She prided herself on the good manners of her house servants, Araminta and her sister Sarah and the footmen, Scipio and Hannibal.  Thomas liked his male slaves to have names out of the classics; it amused him.  When they bought him, Scipio had been Tom and Hannibal had been Frederick, common names, and in the case of Tom’s, a mockery of his own.  He didn’t need the neighbors to think there was kinship where there was not.  Though it was the very devil getting the boys to answer to their new names, and it had taken a bit of Thomas’ own work with the rawhide to impress that on them.

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Flash fiction: Going home

Posted on March 16, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such.

Prompt: I want to go home.

She put the pitcher of water down on the wooden table, and next to it the tumbler. He poured himself a glass of water and looked at her gratefully.

“Not much here,” he said.  “This tastes like wine—like the best wine I ever had.”  He licked his lips.  “Amazing how we didn’t appreciate any of that when we had it.”

She sat down and nodded ruefully.  “Indoor plumbing, the roof over our heads, the books…”

“Getting up on a Saturday morning and sitting out on the porch to listen to the birds.  Even if we were worried about money or the hassle at work.”  He wiped his eyes surreptitiously.  “The little cat that used to come and visit the yard.”

She hid her face, then looked at him—almost like a baby playing peek-a-boo, but a great deal sadder; it was more of a matter of seeing the same disappointing world that was already there.  That she knew was there.  “I want to go home,” she said.

He nodded, leaned over, and kissed her.  “We are home,” he said.

(Process information: 10/15/2009 3:20-3:24 AM, 180 words)


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