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All birds and men are sure to die but songs may live forever
First up, the short story anthology Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter.
Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeon's fart.
-- He told me not to kill him. That was how he reminded me I could kill him, if I wanted to. Up till then, I had not wanted to but when he called me his murderer, I became so. He sealed his own fate. It was his own fault, what happened.
-- Before his sons' bewildered eyes, their father began to grow insubstantial. He unbecame. All at once he lost his outlines and began to waver on the air. It was twilit evening. Mama slept on the bed with a fresh mauve bud of flesh in a basket on the chair beside her. The air shuddered with the beginning of absence. He said not one word to his boys but went on evaporating until he melted clean away, leaving behind him in the room as proof he had been there only a puddle of puke on the splintered floorboards.
-- Did she die of the loneliness of the prairies? Or was it anguish that killed her, anguish, and nostalgia for the close, warm, neighborly life she had left behind her when she came to this emptiness. Neither. She died of the pressure of that vast sky, that weighed down upon her and crushed her lungs until she could not breathe any more, as if the prairies were the bedrock of an ocean in which she drowned. Bonus anecdote of me, laughing at one story having four pages of glossary despite being only a page long, only to see this two lines in:
Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneters cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums.
In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.
Second, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.
I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.
-- To them it was just my crazy grandma mumbling away again. But you and I could hear it. Eventually you put down your slice of pineapple cake—untouched, the glasses clinking as the corpses, fleshed from Lan's mouth, piled up around us.
-- The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself—and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn't me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother's womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around. Even now, as the cold creeps in around him, he feels it poking out from his chest, slightly tenting his sweater. He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It's receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.
-- The phrase with its sound of a boot step sinking, then lifted, from mud. The slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.
-- Something in him knew she'd be there. That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.
-- We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.
-- The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.
-- I never wanted to build a "body of work," but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work. Take it or leave it. The body, I mean.
-- I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine, but it didn't. His voice, it went higher and higher, and my hands, they grew pinker with each inflection. I watched my skin intensify until, at last, I looked up—and it was dawn. It was over. I was blazed in the blood of light.
-- Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can't, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.
-- The howl returns, the sound deep and vacuous, as if it had walls, something you could hide in. It must be wounded. Only something in pain could make a sound you could enter. And this is me trying to keep these brief. Both of them had a heck ton more that I liked
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last edit on Jan 3, 2023 6:32:27 GMT by gimmick
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