duhpursuit

Excerpts, notable quotes, etc…

Was it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those stoppers, thingamajigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalistic puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires, to censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitary, so slick and frolicsome, so casual that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them? (14) Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve got your boots on. The music is playing. The lights are dim. You’re western wear came “hand-crafted” to mimic the classic, time-worn feel of rough riders. And it has been a rough ride, you are sure. So even though you have a fear of horses and have never set foot on this particular dance floor, you feel justified in ogling the swift turns of the seasoned regulars, a breeze of confidence sailing past as you take another exaggerated drag on your cigarette. Leaning against the railing with your best impression of a fatigued cattle-rancher, you try to appear disinterested in the fluid coupling of hands, hips, heels and instead maintain a steady plan of drunkenness to get you through the night without two-step dancing to yet another broken-heart love song.

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list poem

procrastinate: alphabetize, make lists, vacuum, do a load of wash, call your mother, start projects you have no way to finish, create secret identities and hide, develop bad habits (nail biting, theft).

feed your denial: chocolate (bitter) (dark), gin and tonic X 3 with lime, reality TV.

say goodbye: close the door, switch off the light, don’t look back.

You are someone else, and somewhere, and the memory of the journey, the lingering smell of travel that inevitably follows you off the plane, the ticket stubs, itemized receipts, the hangover, are missing like your luggage in some vacant airport for someone else to claim.

You paint over the old fingerprints on the stairwell, noticing the frayed carpet, the dust piling up in the corners, the dried up spider crumbled and still clinging to the pieces of fiber caught in her web. All these small endings transpired beneath you as you stumbled half-blind with sleep up the stairs, narrowly avoiding a broken leg as you side-stepped the cat.

Somehow you lose a whole year of your life. You wake up and suddenly that lie you’ve been telling wipes them out. All three hundred plus days. The memory of them should be somewhere, perhaps behind the sugar in the pantry as you spoon it into your coffee, but the only thing you know for sure is that there are not enough filters to get you through the week.

Evidence is hard to come by, but you believe the lies despite yourself. Even the setting seems unfamiliar. You can’t place certain mementos, card stock, magazine clippings, advertisements, within the context of your so-called life, and so they are thrown away, submerged beneath the detritus of torn envelopes, a record of an inane and abandoned existence.

So, I had this idea, right? I thought, let’s write stories–ones that matter. Let’s talk about the questions we have about life, the things that don’t make sense, and use fiction to attempt an answer to those questions, to reach toward a resolution, an understanding, of the “whys” that no one can give us a clear explanation for…

I had my darlings read this, and then asked them to come up with their own BIG questions. Today, I passed around a sheet of paper and told them that if they had some BIG questions they wanted to ask about the world, they could write them anonymously on the paper, and then we’d post them around the classroom so that maybe they could help each other decide what questions to answer in their fiction.

In the order in which it was written, this is what they asked:

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