Reluctant Gravities 6

Could it be that loss completes possession? Becomes, like the "with" in "without," a second acquisition, deeper, wholly internal, more intense for its pain? [90]

You think you are taking a clean sheet of paper, and it's already covered with signs, illegible, as if by a child's hand. [93]

The heart has its rhythm of exchange, she says, without surplus or deficit. Mine murmurs your name while conjugating precise explosions with valves onto the infinite. I take it down with me, in the body, to develop in a darkroom of my own. The way the current elongates our reflection in the river and seems to carry it off. [94]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

The inferno of the living

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." [165]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 5

Odd, he says, how the road to our neighbor tends to run parallel, past her, out into emptiness. I'd like a space where we would have to intersect. Or else be hyperbolically myself, alone and too tall. As a book may be a book only if, once the voice has abandoned it along with daylight, it is still worth its candle. I lost my father by following him at a mathematically precise interval. Given how young the universe, you could deliver a child and never recover it. [74]

Yet the eye's not a black hole, no matter what its color. Uncluttered by things, it sees inward, into the heart. Which of course may also be empty. [75]

I carry photos of my absent loves but don't set a place for them at the table. [80]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Suitable masks

I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." [95]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 4

If a pattern of life is the ground for using a word the way tree bark beds columns of ink, then the word must contain some penumbra, some pulp, some that is never born. [68]

Do I love your face because it is yours or because of the way it differs from circle, parabola, ellipse? [63]

And me almost bursting out of my skin, a drop of water, all surface tension. Now I spread more like a puddle, my body relaxing away from me, no matter how firmly I decline its offers of expansion. [60]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Transparent cities

"The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities tranparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins; cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness. [73]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 3

After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness. [41]

I can't distinguish gravity from grace, or other distortions of space. My now begins six billion years ago, when fish stretched their fins onto dry land, or forty, with breasts and monthly bleeding. Always already darkening, the way a sentence anticipates the period it will stiffen in. [44]

Eating from the Tree of Knowledge can't be undone. Only muddied, as by motivation. And the way you thrust out your belly as you walk, with almost shameless indifference, makes a void in the air, but no case for cosmic deceleration. [47]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Cities too probable to be real

"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real." [69]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 2

What I think strange: every photo of the old house shows wide open shutters when I remember breathing gloom, the light a mere trickle from a child's pail. Of course I know which one to inhabit: memory loves hunting in the dark. The added light only exacerbates the vertigo of inner stairwells. I see you still on the first step, plucking the word "now" out of the dark thick with resistance, as if time too had forbidden chambers. [27]

Measuring distances in the mind refracts emptiness. As if we could touch the infinite when all we do is study our fingerprints on the lens. And the pain, exacerbated toward the red end of the spectrum till we're left to howl on a cosmic scale. [30]

The tongue surrounds the mouth, so that you answer questions I failed to ask or pass sentence that has not been pronounced. The way radiation bathes the entire universe in a feeble glow and thought chases after the receding galaxies at such speed there is no question of a center and the squeeze of gravity becomes mere alibi. [32]

Hour of glass, pillar of salt. The words come to their senses. It is the lowest point gathers love. Doubt, sometimes called world. It spills your heart. [37]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

In silent conversation

A new kind of dialogue was established: the Great Khan's white hands, heavy with rings, answered with stately movements the sinewy, agile hands of the merchant. As an understanding grew between them, their hands began to assume fixed attitudes, each of which corresponded to a shift of mood, in their alternation and repetition. And as the vocabulary of things was renewed with new samples of merchandise, the repertory of mute comment tended to become closed, stable. The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and immobile. [39]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Zoe

In every point of this city you can, in turn, sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles. Any one of its pyramid roofs could cover the leprosarium or the odalisques' baths. The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts: he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. He infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves? [34]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 1

She tries to draw a strength she dimly feels out of the weakness she knows, as if predicting an element in the periodic table. He wants to make a flat pebble skim across the water inside her body. He wonders if, for lack of sky, it takes on the color of skin or other cells it touches. If it rusts the bones. [4]

He has put a pebble under his tongue. While her lips explode in conjectures his lisp is a new scale to practice. He wants his words to lift, against the added odds, to a truth outside him. In exchange, his father walking down the road should diminish into a symbol of age. [5]

And my body slopes toward yours no matter how level the ground. [11]

And when I say your name, do I draw water, a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion? [15]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Authenticity

It was a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood where such establishments are not yet celebrated. If it had been located in my part of the East Village, it would have long since achieved cultural-landmark status. I'd been living in Manhattan for five years and still had not adjusted to the large number of people who moved here from other parts of the country, and overlooked the spectacle of the city only to revere the mundane. One of my coworkers, herself a transplant, remarked that the coffee shop on the corner was authentic. In that they served coffee, I suppose that she was correct. [76-77]

McLoughlin, Tim. "When All This Was Bay Ridge." In McLoughlin, Tim (ed.) Brooklyn Noir. ISBN: 1888451580.

One desperate scream

And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream. [146]

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. Vintage Books, 1991. ISBN: 0679727299.

for Stefanie

Pair bonding

Productive only when wedded to another molecule, the protein relies upon this structure to play the role of matchmaker, embedding an advertisement for a soul mate in the loops, bulges, and trenches created on its outer surface by the folds:

"Are You My Better Half?" -- SFP (single folded protein) with secure position in healthy cell seeks compatible molecule with interest in chemical engineering, architecture, or communication for exclusive short-term relationship. Please reply with details of your chemical structure.

The molecule with the most compatible profile wins the date and enters into a marriage of convenience, arranged by evolution to accomplish a specialized task. Paired with a matching substrate, an enzyme speeds up a vital chemical reaction. A rotor protein and a flagellar protein conspire to move a bacterium. [13]

Niefhoff, Debra. The Language of Life: How Cells Communicate in Health and Disease. Joseph Henry Press, 2005. ISBN: 0309089891.

The conductor

His face was infinitely sad and yet his smile was kind, as though he waited to conduct her to an afterlife that was better than she deserved, yet not all she might desire. [9]

Crowley, John. The Translator. William Morrow, 2002. ISBN: 0380978628.

The world-wide call for men

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet on the platform. A number of lanky boys of all ages appeared as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the waiting room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove, or half-asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred them like the note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming home tonight, in his boyhood. [36]

Cather, Willa. "The Sculptor's Funeral." From The Troll Garden. Plume Books, 1971 (1905). ISBN: 0452250498. (Available free online from the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation.)

Casualties of The Battle of Britain

Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were demi-gods. Occasionally, I'd come home to a reenactment of The Battle of Britain in the front room. My beloved parents would be flying round like a pair of demented fighter planes, shrieking and spitting venon at one another. My father would be wearing his traditional uniform of socks and moth-eaten dressing gown and my mother her lemon carpet slippers and housecoat. My entrance would make no difference to their dogfight, but when one of them accidentally (and inevitably) knocked over a pile of books, they'd stop instantly and unite to examine the extent of the damage.

Life contined in this pleasant vein until the day my parents got run down by a newspaper van that thoughtlessly mounted the pavement in Islington High St. It sounds heartless, but looking back, I would say that this was my greatest salvation, because at 15 I was whisked off to live with my mother's stepsister in Totness, Devon.

Bantock, Nick. Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. Chronicle Books, 1991. ISBN: 0877017883.

Too reminiscent of the Stone Age

Frau Lichtenfeld shone in a gown of emerald green, fitting so closely as to enhance her natural floridness. However, to do the good lady justice, let her attire be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric splendor. At her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose features were effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and beard, and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate. This gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous attack upon his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of his accustomed toil. His eyes were small and deeply set, and his forehead bulged fiercely above his eves in a bony ridge. His heavy brows completed the leonine suggestion of his face. Even to Imogen, who knew something of his work and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed, to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life which he continually studied. [17]

Cather, Willa. "Flavia and Her Artists." From The Troll Garden. Plume Books, 1971 (1905). ISBN: 0452250498. (Available free online from the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation.)

Do not be deceived by false obligation

For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so is peace infinitely more than the absence of war. Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive. He must return at last to a world as it is, however much in conflict with his hopes, and he must then do what he can to edge reality toward what he has dreamed, to change what he can change, to go beyond the wish and the fantasy. 'We had fed the heart on fantasies,' says the poet, 'the heart's grown brutal from the fare.' [...] I urge you to act. Having dreamed a marvelous dream, I urge you to step boldly into it, to join your own dream and live it. Do not be deceived by false obligation. You are obliged, by all that is just and good, to pursue only the felicity that you yourself have imagined. Do not let fear stop you. Do not be frightened by ridicule or censure or embarrassment, do not fear name-calling, do not fear the scorn of others. For what is true obligation? Is it not the obligation to pursue a life at peace with itself? [318]

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. Broadway Books, 1999 (1978). ISBN: 0767904427.

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Turner, Brian. "Here, Bullet", from Here, Bullet. Alice James Books, 2005. ISBN: 1882295552.

For Sarah in Kuwait, and everyone else serving far from home. Thank you.

What is to happen will happen

Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears - his satellite dish to the stars - and foretold my windowhood and exile. I was only seven then, fast and venturesome, scabrous-armed from leaves and thorns.
"No!" I shouted. "You're a crazy old man. You don't know what my future holds!"
"Suit yourself," the astrologer cackled. "What is to happen will happen." Then he chucked me hard on the head.
I fell. My teeth cut into my tongue. A twig sticking out of the bundle of firewood I'd scavenged punched a starshaped wound into my forehead. I lay still. The astrologer reentered his trance. I was nothing, a speck in the solar system. Bad times were on their way. I was helpless, doomed. The star bled.
"I don't believe you," I whispered.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. Fawcett Crest, 1989. ISBN: 0449219232.

You're hired

Q: I hear that this is your second encounter with book publishing. What was your first?

A: I worked for Persea Books, this truly fantastic independent press that in retrospect should probably never have hired me. When I said I was "proficient in Excel," what I meant was that I'd seen Excel spreadsheets on other, smarter people's computers. I'm pretty sure I only got the job because of my huge ugly coat, this trash-man coat that could double as a life-saving tent in a blizzard. My boss needed somebody who could walk through blinding snow to the post office, and after pinching the fabric of my coat, he determined that somebody was me. I could have sent that coat in on a hanger to my interview, and it would have gotten me the job.

From: A Conversation with Karen Russell, author of the forthcoming St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Marooned

To be a child in the tall house where I grew up in Statesville, North Carolina, was to live marooned on an island. [...] I did the things marooned children have always done. I made society ladies from kitchen matches -- impaled grapes for their heads, inverted morning-glory blooms for ball-gown skirts. An apple tree became a team of horses, its crooked limbs saddled with old newspapers and bridled with lengths of clothesline. At the beginning of World War II, there was enough soot inside the house chimneys to blacken the faces of a thousand commandos, and there were sharp kindling pieces in the pile to carry sheathed in the belt. There were godlike games to be played with the black ants living at the base of the oak; I blessed and cursed them indifferently, sometimes sprinkling bread crumbs near their hills, sometimes flooding their tunnels with vinegar water. And I fell in love with books. [1-2]

Betts, Doris. "The Spies in the Herb House." In The Astronomer and Other Stories. Louisiana State University Press, 1995 (Harper & Row, 1965). ISBN: 0807120103.

The prose and the passion

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man, With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of those outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.
[...]
It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. [158-159]

Forster, E.M. Howard's End. Penguin, 2000. ISBN: 014118213X.

Dreams on a midsummer's night

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: "There is an aged aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer." This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said "Years." [96]

Crowley, John. Little, Big. Harper Perennial, 2002. ISBN: 0060937939.

Pilgrim, briefly

The high creek doesn't look like our creek. Our creek splashes transparently over a jumble of rocks; the high creek obliterates everything in flat opacity. It looks like somebody else's creek that has usurped or eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer. [151]

Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips." [167]

Learning to stalk muskrats took me several years. [192]

Tulips had cast their leaves on my path, flat and bright as doubloons. I passed under a sugar maple that stunned me by its elegant unself-consciousness: it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea. [249]

A chipmunk was streaking around with the usual calamitous air. When he saw me he stood to investigate, tucking his front legs tightly against his breast, so that only his paws were visible, and he looked like a supplicant modestly holding his hat. [251]

A monarch in flight looks like an autumn leaf with a will, vitalized and cast upon the air from which it seems to suck some thin sugar of energy, some leaf-life or sap. [257]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

Obsessions

I have noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine. [134]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

A holy curiosity

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?" If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine; but since I've seen it I must somehow deal with it, take it into account. "Never lose a holy curiosity," Einstein said; and so, I left my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye. [123]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

If I fell in a forest

Some trees, like giant sequoias, are, practically speaking, immortal, vulnerable only to another ice age. They are not even susceptible to fire. Sequoia wood barely burns, and the bark is "nearly as fireproof as asbestos. The top of one sequoia, struck by lightning a few years ago during a July thunderstorm, smoldered quietly, without apparently damaging the tree, until it was put out by a snowstorm in October." Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear? [93]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

A freely given canvas

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space and time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color-patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. This second of shattering is an augenblick, a particular configuation, a slant of light shot in the open eye. Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the augenblick, "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the augenblick isn't going to verweile. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. [84]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

What I do is me: for that I came

for Sven

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

From Gerard Manley Hopkins' "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame".

I had been my whole life a bell

When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. [35-36]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

I am the arrow shaft

I am an explorer, then, and am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooded shafts of their arrows. They called the gooves "lightning marks," because the resembled the curved fissure of lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. [14]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

The Pirates' Conquest

In Weitiki Valley, almost everyone is a descendant of the Inland Pirates. Our great-great-grandparents sailed along the glacial river, burned their thieving boats, and then moved inland to meet the locals. The Moa were a peaceful, stationary people who killed only one another. And then our pirate forebears arrived, swilling brandy and sneezing mainland diseases all over them. "The Pirates' Conquest" is a tribute to those invaders, performed every year at the Winter Concert. It's our local anthem, these squirrelly arpeggios that celebrate our forebears' every offense. Verse one: The quick extinction of the Moa's sacred red penguins. Verse two: The depletion of their greenstone quarries. Verse three: The invasion of their mothers' bodies. And what did we bring the Moa in return? Grog and possums. Quail pox. Whores. These are weird things to harmonize about.

Russell, Karen. "Accident Brief." The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

Lunatic music

It seems rare to read a writer, particularly one who is just starting out, who is so confidently playful with language. Are there writers who have been an especially strong influence in this regard?

When I was a kid I had short legs and weak vision, and I quickly discovered that it was a lot easier for me to play with language than, say, the soccer ball. I'm grateful to the writers who extended my ideas of what was possible in fiction: Mark Richard, Flannery O'Connor, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, García Márquez, Aleksandar Hemon, Katherine Dunn. I love their prose because they each play their own kind of lunatic music, strange and funny and sad, often lyrical, sometimes scary.

"Island Girl." Q&A with Karen Russell. The New Yorker [online only], Issue of 2005-06-13 and 20; Posted 2005-06-13.

Heaven and Earth in Jest

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we wake at all, to mystery, rumors of of death, beauty, violence.... "Seems like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and doesn't nobody know why."

These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you're lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing. [3-4]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

recommended by Amanda