BumFiction.com

Today, I’ll give you a snippit of a story I like by the late, but great, Ray Carver. It’s called Why Don’t You Dance? from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Arms about each other, their bodies pressed together, the boy and the girl moved up and down the driveway. They were dancing. And when the record was over, they did it again, and when that one ended, the boy said, “I’m drunk.”
The girl said, “You’re not drunk.”
“Well, I’m drunk,” the boy said.
The man turned the record over and the boy said, “I am.”
“Dance with me,” the girl said to the boy and then to the man, and when the man stood up, she came to him with her arms wide open.

(more…)

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Here is one of the most honest book reviews I’ve ever seen on Amazon. Not so surprisingly, no one found his review helpful.

You Are Fat, And You Are Probably Going To Stay That Way, June 9, 2006

Reviewer:

Dasein (San Leandro, CA) – See all my reviews

Look, no self-help diet book is going to transform you from fat to thin. Your metabolism is what it is. You already have a poor self-image; don’t make it worse by giving a snake-oil salesman your money.

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I’m migrating to another weblog and taking my best stories with me. I don’t know what it will be called and I don’t know how often I will post there, but it will be more often than now, and there will be no spam and it will be some of the most honest writing you might never want to see. As some of you know, I am and have already faced a couple of major transitions in my life.

FYI, my booklist includes: Bernard Lewis’ The Crisis of Islam, the late Stephen Vincent’s In the Red Zone and, in an effort to get in touch with my roots, Simon Winchester’s Korea.

I’m dreaming of new projects to fill my time. The funny thing about my creative time is that I am very Walden about it. I cannot write at home for some reason. I’ve noticed that I tend to feel inspiration when I am traveling. Some of my best material came from my last trip to Bonn.

After watching Steve James’ Stevie last night, I came to the conclusion that I want to get back into documentary production. I will need to research and purchase equipment, however, I need to produce a couple of treatments first. Unfortunately, as an occupant of Europe, I am without a support/peer group for my works.

So, it is time to become the fabled “invisible eyeball” of the forest. More to come.

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From The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien:

What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don’t make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you’re risking something. The endorphins start to flow, and the adrenaline, and you hold your breath and creep quietly through the moonlit nightscapes; you become intimate with danger; you’re in touch with the far side of yourself, as though it’s another hemisphere, and you want to string it out and go wherever the trip takes you and be host to all the possibilities inside yourself. Not bad, she’d said. Vietnam made her glow in the dark. She wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper in to the mystery of herself and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving.

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Dante find himself in Limbo, which is the first circle of hell reserved for the unbaptized. Virtuous pagans unknown to Christ occupy this place: Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Dante’s guide, Virgil. Dante asks Virgil if any have left this place based on their own merit. Virgil claims that only those that died before Christ’s descent to Hell were eligible to leave.

After meeting the five great minds of Limbo, Dante claims that “they honored me for they made me of their number, so that I was a sixth amid such intelligences.” I am unsure if Dante is claiming that 1) the spirits are kind enough to make him feel at home or 2) the spirits endear themselves to Dante because they believe he is truly one of the six great minds of history. Dante’s self-aggrandizement is obvious and the footnotes of my book mention that Dante was never recognized as a modest man.

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Canto 3 was enjoyable. The language was very descriptive and I thought I would highlight this quote from Virgil’s character:

“My son,” said the courteous Master, “those who die under God’s wrath, all assemble here from every country;

I am not sure I understand how Divine Justice changes fear into desire, especially if there is only suffering waiting for them on the shores of Acheron.

If these are spirits were men that “fear(ed) not God,” how have they become fearful now? Is it the realization of the afterlife and their fate at the hands of the demon ferryman, Charon, they fear?

Furthermore, what is it they desire that encourages them to step onto the ferry with Charon?

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I’m reading this Pulitzer Prize winning novel; it describes itself as: a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Here is a thought provoking quote:

People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a windowpane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds – more evidence for the same? It is not all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably find a statement such as, “there are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about precise statements like that, when the concepts” language” and dialect” are themselves fuzzy.

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So I rarely post anything about The War or The Press. But this post by Chrenkoff is worth your time.

Many people around the world (including myself) write about Iraq, far fewer people get to write from Iraq, and only a very few are able to give us their picture of Iraq that emerges from extensive personal travel throughout the country. Steven Vincent is one of those very few, and his war-zone travelogue “In the Red Zone: A journey into the soul of Iraq” provides a fascinating glimpse into the realities of the post-liberation Iraq.

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I am currently reading The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. I am on page 130, right about where Pinker starts lambasting the neocons and creationists. “Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is ‘the opium of the people’; they add a a heartfelt, ‘Thank God!’” (more…)

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