Further Updates

I went to Celebrate Brooklyn last night, to see the Kronos Quartet play the score for Dracula (and watch Dracula). A heavy mist rolled over the crowd and turned greenish under the lights by the trees. Less than a third into the film, thunder started grumbling and the sky started blinking and flashing. The crowd kept applauding the sky's thunder claps (though they also showed Bela Lugosi some love) and gave the musicians a standing ovation when the concert was cut short due to torrential rain. It was a very enjoyable 20 minutes.

I've finally updated the writing links section of my website (see "me, elsewhere" link in the sidebar).

Twelve 55 word stories are up on the 55 words site. Read them, love them.

On Teaching Writing

I had a rude awakening in my practicum seminar yesterday. We talked about an article called "A challenge to second language writing professionals," by Ilona Leki, focusing on the claim that "Writing is personally fulfilling" and that that's one of the big reasons why writing is so important. Basically, Leki says this claim is bunk:

"The argument that learning to write is important because writing serves a few people so well is reminiscent of parents' argument to coerce children into practicing violin--some day the learner will be grateful. But we are not dealing with children, and we are not our students' parents."

The instructor asked how many in the room actually found writing personally fulfilling (we're a class of 8). Two or three including myself sheepishly raised our hands. Fact is, writing is not fun for a lot people, and torture for a lot of language learners-- a notion I never really considered but am beginning to understand. How can we ask them to see writing as "cathartic" if they're still struggling with the language (another question posed by Leki)?

So I was left with this dangling question: if students are not the creative type prone to playing with languages in the first place, do we not bother? Do we focus forever on English for academic purposes and business English and all-things-dry-and-pragmatic? That doesn't really lend itself to flexibility with a language. And that doesn't seem practical either. Hm.

First Lines Collage

Pure silliness. See if you can match the first lines below with their stories (choices below collage).

It was winter. A string of naked light bulbs, from which it seemed all warmth had been drained, illuminated the little depot’s cold, windy platform. Inside, Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. A spiteful scar crossed his face: an ash-colored and nearly perfect arc that creased his temple at one tip and his cheek at the other.

Running footsteps—light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches, following a stone’s throw behind. She was tall and slim, and though no longer young, had the strong firm breasts of the dark-haired woman. When he got on the bus, he irritated everyone. Poor Juan!

There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. As soon as she arrived she went straight to the kitchen to see if the monkey was there. The monkey, named Senator Onesimo Sanchez, had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life. He held his breath an instant, dug his nails into the palms of his hands, and said quickly: “I’m in love with you.”

Lines from:
G. Verga, "The Wolf"
T. Capote, "A Tree of Night"
J.L. Borges, "The Shape of the Sword"
L. Heker, "The Stolen Party"
M.V. Llosa, "Sunday, Sunday"
L. Valenzuela, "The Censors"
J. Joyce, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"
F.S. Fitzgerald, "Tarquin of Cheapside"
G. di Lampedusa, "Joy and the Law"
E. Hemingway, "Cat in the Rain"
G.G. Marquez, "Death Constant Beyond Love"

p.s. More stories are up on the 55 Words site! Updated weekly! Write yer own and tell yer friends!

Happy Bastille Day!

It's another sticky NY day and I'm miserably delighted with all the work I've got to do. Here are some updates (and shameless plugs):

-I've added new stories to 55words.

-I went to the launch party for Collectanea's summer launch party last night. Not as heaving a crowd as their debut, but a pleasant evening in from the mugginess, with some good stories to listen to. In case you missed it, my story "Bastille Day" is in their winter issue, with a podcast/radioplay version. I understand the summer issue will be up Monday.

-I started reading Flannery O'Connor's collected works and am thoroughly enjoying it. This winter I gobbled up Raymond Carver's Cathedral and quasi-gobbled Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats. School is making the gobbling-thing rather difficult, but at least short stories can be read in a single train ride. That's a real lifesaver. As much as I enjoy reading about how to make grammar interesting (I do!), sometimes I go through fiction withdrawal.

Antigonish Review

The Antigonish Review has published my story "Reunion: Recovery," in its Spring 2006 issue (#145). Yipee!

55 words

So I'm now the editor of the guest stories portion of Rosemary Mosco's website. There's a new email address for submissions: 55gueststories at gmail dot com. I hope y'all will try writing one--55 words, no more, no less. They're oodles of fun. I put one of my own up on the site (Ro originally had it on her livejournal). Take a peek .

Nausea

Ride through the sickness. That's what she had to do. She leaned against the red wall and shut her eyes from the milling crowd and ambient, amniotic lights. Her eyelids shielding her from the flashing bulbs and the photogenic smiles.

She leaned against the wall and against his reassuring torso, standing behind, and listened to the lulling acoustic music, the music that spoke blue in the face of the all the red, that was the peppermint for her nausea. A tranquilized cover of "Eight Days a Week" almost droning, but beautiful in some narcotic way. She couldn't see the musicians if she tried, stuck there in the back on the stool the bartender had pulled out for her. She shivered once, twice, curled up into the music beneath her eyelids and rode it out.

Harvest

(another story snippet)

On the balcony Luda dreams, feeling the morning air on her face. British women, she has heard, have beautiful skin, because of the moisture in the air. She thinks about this and lets the dew seep into her pores. Brown and white pigeons ruffle their feathers in a coop in the corner, coo-cooing at her and each other. She holds a butcher’s knife, idly twirling the point on her calloused finger. Which one will be for dinner?

Suddenly, a great white bird alights on the ledge, bristling, head cocking curiously. Luda stares at it. The cockatoo reciprocates. She fears it will speak, it will reproach her.

“Come in, come in, sweet bird,” she says, opening the door to the apartment. She'd love it as a pet. Would like to teach it to speak and sing. Pissou the cat looks out from under the kitchen table, two green eyes in the shadows, his black tail switching stiffly back and forth. The cockatoo has other plans: no apartment block for him. He leaves as abruptly as he came.

Luda shrugs. She puts the knife down on the ledge and opens the pigeon coop, selecting the plumpest of the bunch. She holds its body in one hand and delicately, lovingly, uses the other to break its neck.

Rockhurst Review

My story "Lemon Tree Palace" has been published in the nineteenth edition of the Rockhurst Review (Spring 2006). It's a journal based at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri and it's printed on really nice paper, which is good for the color art section at the back. It's a lively mix of stories and poems, if I do say so myself, and a mere $5.

If you're interested in getting a copy, send the $5 to:

Patricia Cleary Miller
Rockhurst Review
Rockhurst University
1100 Rockhurst Road
Kansas City, Missouri 641100-2561

Comics

This weekend I went to the MoCCA Art Festival to see my friend Rosemary and her new comics. I picked up her lovely, boldly-inked, and educational Mid-Cambrian Morning, about some crustaceans (?) living in a wacky period of evolution, 540 million years ago.

I also picked up a copy of Heart & Brain: A Turning Story, by Fay Ryu, as I naturally gravitate to pictures and stories about those (and other) internal organs. It's a wordless story of, you guessed it, a meeting between a heart and a brain in a garden. I won't give away the ending but it's both touching and devastating.

Finally, on a related note, Teachers College is having a gallery opening called "Learning Inside (and Outside) the Box". It's a show devoted to the combination of creative thinking with traditional literacy skills and it exhibits original comic books by children made over the 2005-06 school year. Follow the link for details.

3-Day Novel

This sounds like horribly good fun. I'm somewhat tempted to enter.

Escribir

(silliness)

This is a cop out of a post. So I'm taking beginner Spanish at TC's Community Language Program. Below is a short absurd story I wrote with my limited knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. It is also probably completely incorrect.

Hoy, los gatos toman gotas de girasol. Pero el pinguino sordomudo, el gerente de la gente, toma cerveza. Los gatos y el pinguino son de la ciudad de las luces. Por cierto, la derecho de la ciudad es linguistica aplicada. Hasta luego!

Interni

Last Monday my father took me to some design parties in Williamsburg as a part of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) and follow up to his trip to i Salone del Mobile di Milano. We parked on N.6th and Kent Avenue; traipsed over potholes and broken glass, passed empty riverside lots to look at the yellow-dotted scrapers against the red-purple sky, and listened to corrugated metal fences whine in the wind.

I complained of the cold so back we went and started at Fresh Kills where we drank Perroni and wiggled past clumps of hipsters to look at the ice-sculpture arm chair (cleverly drained by tubing snaked into a nearby grate in the floor) and a linen-covered Taschen tome on anatomy and surgery (I’m guessing its about $500 and I’m hoping someone will save up and buy it for my quarter-century birthday—only 9 months away!). My father touched every surface of every interesting piece of furniture: marble coffee tables with geometric inlays, dangling lamps of translucent glass. Fresh Kills was small, crowded, and not on his agenda. He was eager to move on, so we chugged the cold beer, eyeing the crowd (shaven heads and circus skirts with potato-sack pockets, dreads of all varieties, people really into design, people really into being into design). And out we went.

At HauteGREEN, my father marveled at the space. This was a workshop, he kept saying. I was here two days ago. Where are the saws? Where are the forklifts? It had become a hip party space, white-walled and minimally filled with items of green design: corrugated cardboard recliners, cork arm chairs, used tea bag wall hangings, book cases made of books. He wiggled the cork and the cardboard furniture, assessing comfort level. He ran his hand along bamboo plywood—“this is nice”. A tactile playground for an artist/craftsman.

From there to a boutique of Dutch and Finnish products. He was disappointed at the lack of Dutch beer.

“More Perroni?” he offered. “Shame on me, feeding my daughter a liquid dinner.”

We could hear the strange ululations of Finnish schmoozing. He gave the glass top of a coffee table on upturned skateboards a twirl. I pointed to an arachnid chandalier, made of black desktop lamps and he shrugged.

“That’s easy and cheap,” he said.

Next to the “big party” for Core77, at a large tapas/mezze restaurant next to empty warehouses, where men in amorphous gray felt costumes gave us 3D glasses. The crowd inside was an immovable blob so we looked a bit at the vibrant photos on the walls nearby (pink pigs with strangely textured skin, almost shingled), looked a bit at the pretty people, and left.

I was ready to call it a night, but dad wanted to hit one more spot. We went to the Altoids Living Space, ducked under film crews recording hipsters in linen cowboy shirts murmuring about gentrification, were disappointed by the cash bar, and stuffed our pockets with free tins of altoids.

“Licorice?” my dad offered. I crinkled my nose. “It’s good for you,” he admonished, before putting the black tin in his brimming pocket. We shuffled back to the car, mints clinking with our steps.

Summer

I do have new posts in the works but my new schedule for summer (12 hours at school on Thursdays) means a shift for MLP, probably to Tuesdays. Stay tuned for posts on design parties, Spanish, theories of learning & adult development, and of course short shorts, story snippets, and links/info on stories I've got coming out this summer in other publications. And if you're reading this, thank you!

Gowanus

I've been obsessed with Gowanus for some time. Lucky for me, my SO, Michael, is also obsessed with Gowanus. He just had an article published in the Urban Review, about the impending transition from industrial to residential, and is a prelude to his much larger research project on transitioning/gentrifying industrial neighborhoods and the implications of pushing industry to the outskirts of cities (p.3). Another very interesting and well written article in the UR is a brief history of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, tracking its move from country road to architectural playland (Victorian to Art Deco and Art Moderne), its post war decline and optimistic future (p.1). (Click Vol. 3, Issue 2, to download the .pdf)

Ditmas Stroll

I “write” a lot in my head. I compose as I go on a neighborhood walk, thinking about a letter I want to write to a friend or an imaginary post that never goes up on this blog (or shouldn’t). Often I come up with somewhat ambitious ideas that I never do anything with, like eating my way around the world and writing about it. Then I realize I probably won’t get to eat my way around the world literally, but of course I could give it a try in New York. Write about a meal I’ve had in each neighborhood of each borough. How delicious.

The other day I went on one such stroll, from Kensington into Ditmas Park. I didn’t end up eating anything because I couldn’t stop myself from wandering. I followed the old routes of my childhood. Maybe now the ambitious plan would be a psychogeographic memoir. Some of the things I love to read are about places and lives in those spaces. So why not try that.

Here is the house I grew up in, on Beverly Road, second story of a 3-family. Here, across the street, the ancient apartment buildings that gave me my boombox lullabies. Both structures are gray and dingy. Broken glass still on the sidewalk, just as I remember. Children playing whiffle ball on a brown, balding lawn between concrete walkways.

Firecrackers would swoop up onto our roof on the night of July the 4th, crackling smoke in the windows. My father would rush out through the window in his underwear and, with invincible flat feet, kick the offending pyrotechnic back into the street where it was launched.

I cross Coney Island Avenue, past the 11-7 and the former Kantacky Fried Chicken (most likely sued by Kentucky Fried Chicken across the street). I enter the green zen of Beverly Square and Ditmas Park. Rows and rows of enormous trees line these streets. Unlike Kensington, where people lop off branches and chop chop chop (we need sunlight, they say, or, the next storm could send these trees crashing down, they say). In Ditmas Park no one chops trees. No one squints in the light. There is a coolness here, amongst Victorian houses in various stages of renovation or disrepair.

I wander passed lawns bedecked with pink flamingos and plaster-cast lions. Houses renovated in the ‘80s by Park Slope expatriates, and houses renovated by Flatbush’s upwardly mobile. Porch swings, silver cats, magnolia trees. Columns at each intersection proclaim each street name with British regality: Marlborough, Stratford. Argyle. Dorchester. Remnants of 19th century moguls.

More interesting to me are the houses still in ruin: relics of a past and food for a darker appetite. A green house with musty brown shards of windows; mummified in plastic; shutters hanging askew off their hinges. A copper plaque on a porch column by the steps reads the name of a doctor, an orthopedist: ancient doctor for an ancient generation. All gone. A dusty sign written in careful block letters pleads, “DON'T PLAY ON THIS PORCH…” the rest is unintelligible, but the warning is clear: the porch steps are broken, a ragged hole. Collapsed where some small child may have played, fallen through and eaten by some slithering monster underneath.

Next door, a house with new stucco and two slender saplings of cherry trees, fresh-blossomed and swaying in the spring breeze.

Jane Jacobs, RIP

I read "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" this summer. I enjoyed it, for the most part, and recommend it to anyone interested in cities (especially the first two or three parts). I've had some psychogeographic mental bubblings of late and may start posting things of that nature soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, a bit about Ms. Jacobs.

Games

Just in case there are people reading this that aren't also reading my brother Victor's blog, here is a link to his great, fun, inventive take on traditional video games. He had an exhibit at the Salone del Mobile, in Milano, which has just closed shop. Which shows how up to date I am...

(Just as expected, the more work I should be doing, the more posts end up here. This does not bode well for productivity.)

Greenpoint Blues

I went to see my friend Euna's band Greenpoint last night. They performed at the Manhattan Korean-American Association of Greater New York, for amateur band night. Euna rocked the electric harpsichord while the front man resurrected Jim Morrison, Ray Charles, and Bob Marley in throaty blues songs with a touch of Mick Jaggeresque dancing, wagging his teased tea hair, his sunglasses glinting in the lights . The Doors covers riled up the previously sedate, seated crowd (save the one fellow up front who periodically danced in circles ecstatically, and the occasional silhouette of a head-banger for the punkier rap-metal band prior). Greenpoint sparkled as the last act and put a smile on my face. Fun was had by all.

Fiber

My good friend Eric just started a knitting blog, recording progress and product of various projects. Crafts like knitting are so much warmer and fuzzier than paintings and sculptures that you can't touch. Partake in the warmth.