#tell me why i just read whitman aloud... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

caffeinatedtimdrake · 6 years ago

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hey, congrats on your 200 followers, you write sooooo well!!!!! i wanna request #1 with jason :)

I hope this is okay, anon! You’re so sweet I wanna give you a hug.

1.5k of college student!Jason x reader in a bookstore because we know this boy is a literature nerd.

1. “Fancy seeing you here.” “I work here.”

Things change for Jason – and for you – on a rainy Thursday afternoon.

He’d busted his ankle a few nights ago and, begrudgingly, donned a clunky black boot per Alfred’s orders. He’s been insufferably crabby all week. He knew he could easily duck out of the manor and make his way back to his own apartment, but Bruce said ‘please’ when he asked Jason to stay and heal. Jason still struggles to find closure and meaning amongst cryptic yet caring actions, so he reluctantly agreed.

But he was surely going explode if he had to spend another dull day at the manor while Bruce and Boy Wonder III battled villains, so he tugged at some heartstrings and gained Alfred’s support in taking the car to one of his favorite spots in all of Gotham.

He doesn’t want to admit it to himself, but maybe he also misses asking to borrow your pens in class and making you blush when your fingers brushed. The only thing that might distract him is enigmatic 20th century literature.

You showed up on the first day of class in a whirlwind of sweet perfume and wrinkled paper, nestling comfortably in between him and the wall. He remembers watching you dumbly – something about your warm energy captivated him and cursed him. When you caught him looking, you didn’t shy away; instead, you flashed him a smile infinitely brighter than all the stars in the galaxy and tilted his world a little off its axis.

Jason adores the dingy little book and music store. It smells like old paper and coffee grounds and peace. He likes the old tiles that lay across the floor and the framed records that adorn the wall and the little record player in the front corner that sings Motown. He especially appreciates the old man who runs the store; he greets Jason with a weathered smile and nothing more, leaving Jason to traverse stacks of books and albums in sweet solitude. His hair is a little damp from the rain, but it doesn’t dampen his drastically improved mood as he hobbles around the shop.

It’s only natural that when he turns the corner, seeking wisdom from Thoreau, he finds you sitting cross-legged in the middle of the aisle, nose buried in a thick book.

Jason makes a funny, wheezy noise because for a moment, he can’t breathe. Something strangely sweet claws its way out of his heart, up his throat, and leaves his mouth in the form of, “Hi, Y/N.”

His voice is soft between wooden shelves and rows of novels and the letters of your name.

You look up at him, glasses perched on the bridge of your nose, and freeze for a few beats.

And then you smile so of course Jason has remind himself to inhale, hold, and exhale slowly.

Jason Todd is no stranger to your smile now, but you always leave him speechless.

“Hi, Jason,”

“Fancy seeing you here.”

You arch an eyebrow. “I work here.”

“Since when?” He wonders aloud, bewildered and giddy and dissolving into a flurry of butterflies and roses.

“Since three days ago. You haven’t been in class, otherwise maybe you’d be in the loop.” You say wryly.

This is undoubtedly his favorite place now.

He knows you have questions for him; to be fair, he did just vanish from Gotham University for several days and you prove your attentiveness time and time again, noting the displeased wrinkle in his forehead when the professor utters exaggerations about Whitman or his boyish smile when he gets to quote Emerson for the class. It’s only natural that you’re curious about his disappearance. If he was feeling really bold, he might even venture to call you a concerned friend (a pretty one that makes him feel like a lovesick puppy).

“What are you reading?” He asks and you show him the book, pleasantly surprised that he is the only patron in the store.

You don’t understand why he blushes – not that the reason matters, the rosy hue beneath his olive skin is almost painfully beautiful – until he rubs the back of his neck and laughs a little.

“I was just looking for Walden, actually.”

“Oh! You can have it! I’m supposed to be looking for a book by Whitman for our American literature class…but I have a soft spot for Thoreau and got a little distracted.” You tell him bashfully, standing up to hand him the book.

He starts to refuse but you simply shove the book into his grasp and start browsing W-row for Whitman.

“You know, there’s a quote in there that reminds me of you.” You tell him quietly, shooting him a sidelong glance and taking a tiny leap of faith.

He feels butterflies ramming against his ribcage and he hugs the book close to his chest, sapphire eyes attentive and impossibly soft. “What is it?”

You’re self-conscious but you swallow your hesitation, tracing your finger along book spines.

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

“Oh,” Jason breathes quietly, and you risk a look at him.

You adore him like this, wholesome wonder painted across his features. His hair flops onto his forehead a little bit, that tiny streak of wait peeking through a mop of inky black. His brows are raised slightly, framing those mesmerizing eyes. His mouth twitches a little before a smile spreads across his face, like the way the ocean pulls back a wave before she lets it crash upon the shore. It’s boyish and bright and it leaves you a little winded.

“Y/N, I…kind of love that.” Jason doesn’t think he could stop smiling if his life depended on it, bashfully tearing his gaze from you to fiddle with ancient-looking bookends.

He’s a stranger to this feeling, one that coaxes giddy laughter and elated smiles and warm blushes to the surface from a soul he thought he’d lost amidst the callous chaos of recreation.

He likes coming here so often because he can lose himself in literature. The world has changed, and he has changed, but the works of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Hemingway have remained constant – a fact that brings him comfort on his tougher days.

At the same time, he loves these collections of words so profoundly because their interpretations shift like the wind. A simple sentence can mean the world to two different people, but those meanings might be a world apart. There is such beauty in ambiguity.

There is also beauty in the way you’re looking at him. It’s ambiguous like the books, but it’s familiar – it’s like home.

“I’m glad you do.” You tell him earnestly. “Honestly, when we first met, I had no idea you were…”

“A book nerd?” It’s his turn to shoot you a sidelong glance now, but this one is almost sultry – eyes half-lidded and hair curling at the tips from rainwater and humid air, brow arched in question.

You duck your head a little and nod. The distance between you and Jason has gradually decreased as the two of you have casually tugged on novels and scanned the titles engraved into the spines.

He’s so close, you practically buzz with energy. He smells of cinnamon and aged leather. You want to bottle the fragrance and cherish it forever; the way you know you’ll cherish this moment in a bookstore on a rainy afternoon with Jason Todd.

“I am a book nerd…yes,” He starts slowly, unsurely, like when you start driving but realize you have absolutely no idea where to go so you have to pump your breaks and look up directions.

Jason really doesn’t have any idea where he is going with this, but he knows he has to go somewhere. He can’t continue borrowing those pencils with a clear conscience if he doesn’t attempt to share this piece of his heart with you.

“And I am a big fan of chocolate chip muffins. And The Supremes.”

You nod in agreement. You and Jason were facing each other now. He towered over you a bit, all toned muscle and broad shoulders. You could see the way vulnerability twisted his mouth into a pensive, nervous smile and watched his Adam’s apple bob.

“And I’m a big fan…of…you?”

You intend to respond with a loud exclamation of disbelief, but you choke on the air in your windpipe and end up doubled over in the classic literature aisle with Jason Todd patting your back, watching in horror as you have a coughing fit.

When you finally recover, watery eyed, something possesses you to grab Jason’s hand.

He looks like he’s been punched at the gut, gaping at your intertwined fingers. You glance up at him and wrinkle your nose a little. “So…you haven’t been talking to me just because I own a copious amount of writing utensils?”

Jason can’t stop looking at your hands. He shakes his head no, very much like a guilty child.

“It’s always been you. The glittery gel pens are just a plus.” He tells you quietly, flustered and grinning. He almost worries that you can hear how loudly his heart pounds in his chest.

When you bring his hand up to your mouth and press a tiny kiss to his palm, he squeaks.

It’s more funny than fancy seeing you here because lately, he sees you everywhere and there’s nothing fancy about how you leave him bumbling and blushing.

In potent black ink, your name is written beneath his eyelids and against his lips and across his heart.

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moodboardinthecloud · 4 years ago

Text

Transcript: Richard Flanagan in Conversation with Ramona Koval

Watch the interview here.

RAMONA KOVAL: Richard Flanagan, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the Monthly Book.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: It’s lovely to be here with you, Ramona.

RK: Richard, even though it is about lots of things, including war, sacrifice and courage, this book started with a love story. I wanted you to talk about the kernel of this book, the thing that got you thinking.

RF: Well, my parents used to tell this story of a Latvian man who lived in the town I was born in, Longford in Tasmania. He’d immigrated to Australia in the wake of the war. But at war’s end he’d gone back to his Latvian village, which had been utterly destroyed and with it, he was told, his wife. Everyone said she was dead and he searched for her there; he searched that hellish wasteland that was Europe, in the immediate postwar period, for two years – the refugee camps with the various organisations that were set up for displaced people. And in the end he had to accept that she was dead. He came Australia. After some years, he married a woman here and had children to her. And then in 1957 he went to Sydney; he was walking down the street there and saw his Latvian wife walking towards him with a child on either hand. He had a few moments when he had to make the most momentous of decisions: whether he would acknowledge her, halt and speak to her, and thus set both their lives perhaps on an irrevocably different path, or just walk on by and ignore her. He had to weigh up his love for her then, his love for her now, what that meant – a most extraordinary, I would imagine, avalanche of feelings – and come to a decision. I thought this was the most beautiful of stories because it spoke about love in so many ways. It was very much an image and a story that I built the whole book around. I always saw the couple walking towards each other on Sydney Harbour Bridge because when I’m in Sydney, I like walking across there. It is the most beautiful way to appreciate Sydney. There’s something beautiful, particularly in the afternoon, the way light and shadows fall across those vast ribs. That was the image: a man seeing a woman he thought was dead approaching him, with a child on either hand, and his realising his whole life comes to that point.

RK: So, many of the decisions people make, including those made by characters in the book, are those momentous decisions. Suddenly you’re faced with something: which way do you move? How do you summon up the courage or the strength to go one way or another, and these things can haunt people for the rest of their lives.

RF: Well, I think life’s like that, don’t you, Ramona? It proceeds glacially. Then there are sudden moments and we realise we’ve lived only for those moments, and in those moments everything in our lives is happening and we’re faced with choices. I think this is something not so uncommon to us. It’s just strange how the world proceeds, though, with the illusion of the tramline of progress, and we get off at all stations in equal time. It’s not like that; it’s like a glacier that suddenly carves an iceberg.

RK: In many ways, that scene could have taken place in many of your other books: the man, the villain, the past, the future, the present. What was it about this book that meant it was the nest for that scene?

RF: I really don’t know. I knew that these things were coming together in my mind over 12 years ago, that I wanted a love story. I knew it would be about prisoners of war, or it would have the prisoner of war experience at its centre, and I went up to Sydney and I spent a few days wandering around with Tom Uren, who was in the same camp as my father. I guess I had the whole feeling for novel in my head at that point; I just didn’t have the details, which would take me over a decade to assemble in a coherent fashion and led me through not drafts but really five different novels. There was a novel of linked haiku; there was a novel of haibun, which is a Japanese form, a nature journal written in prose with occasional haikus. I wrote a large Russian sort of war epic with a ridiculously large and impossible to remember cast. I wrote a family epic. I finished each one and then abandoned them because they didn’t work. But I had to write all them to write this final book. There are large elements, even of the linked haiku novel, in this one. So each one clearly had to be written in order for me to write this book, but I wish I could have written it far quicker.

RK: You grew up with some stories from your dad, who was on the Burma railway. What kind of stories did he tell? Of course, the book is dedicated to ... you say the prisoner number.

RF: Prisoner san byaku san ju go, which was number 335, which was my father’s number in the prisoner of war camps, which he taught us as children. We grew up very aware that he’d been a prisoner of war but he didn’t impose it on us; we sort of imbibed it. He didn’t talk about it all the time, by any means, but nor was he silent about it. He would tell these stories really in a querying way. They were gentle, often funny, stories, and there was about them a great humanity and pathos and love. He didn’t dwell on the suffering at all; he really disliked that. He would tell the stories and then think aloud about them, and I remember one time he said that he was very lucky, that they were the best thing that ever happened to him, to be in these camps, because they only had to suffer. He felt that to go to war as a soldier means for most people that you have to inflict suffering, and then, if you survive it, you have to live with the fact that you acted as an agent of evil. He felt they were in a situation where they would discover, not the worst of themselves, but the best. What’s that line of Whitman’s? “I contain multitudes”. I think he slowly came to feel that he contained multitudes, and it was that vast experience, that mad slave system that was this quarter of a million people working naked, or near naked, with tools that would have been used millennia ago to build this extraordinary folly, this railway through the unknown jungle.

RK: You talk of containing multitudes and that he was grateful he didn’t have to inflict punishment or pain on other people. You write in this book from the point of view of the Japanese guards as well because you are interested in the multitudes that were there at the time. Tell us about going to visit and meet some of these people who worked for the Japanese in the camp, which was part of your research for the book.

RF: I think that one of the things that was extraordinarily difficult for the Australian prisoners of war was that the violence in the camps was to them utterly arbitrary, without sense. There was no pattern they could discern, no reason why the violence would suddenly erupt. I think this is immensely spiritually and psychologically destructive for any human being. In fact, I remember years ago reading a study by a Salvadorian psychologists who were Jesuits, who were actually killed by a death squad in the end. They had done a big study on the uses of terror in Pinochet’s Chile. What they discovered was that initially Pinochet had used terror in a systematic way. That is, if you were an intellectual or someone whose politics differed from that of the regime, well, then, you would be picked up and tortured or killed. What Pinochet realised with the advice of psychologists, which was revealing, was that this sort of terror doesn’t frighten people, because they know that if they go silent, if they don’t stand up and oppose, they will be safe. Then they bide their time. It doesn’t mean that the whispering in their hearts ceased. Pinochet’s regime after a year or two, on the advice on psychologists instituted a regime of random terror. They would pick up an old woman, some children from a shopping centre, someone out of a car – utterly random – and their charred bodies might turn up in a gutter two weeks later. That terror, although statistically it was as unlikely to happen to you, really does terrify people because then you do not know when they might come for you. And that was one of the things that was terribly corrosive for the Australians in the prisoner of war camps because the violence seemed completely random. And yet it seemed to me that it would not have been that way to the Japanese, and I have a great love of Japanese literature, and I wanted to try to understand it from the Japanese perspective: why people would have done this. Near the end of writing the novel, I went to Japan to meet some of the former guards who’d worked on the death railway. To answer your question: how’d I meet them? Some Japanese women had come to my father’s house to say sorry to him some years before. They were part of a network in Japan that had campaigned hard to try to get the history curriculum in the schools changed to accurately reflect the reality of Japanese militarism. One of them was a journalist who had done very brave and extraordinary work exposing the horrors of Unit 731, I think it is, the Japanese small army in Manchuria, that did the most horrific biological experiments on Chinese civilians and prisoners. Through these quite extraordinary and brave women I was able to find these guards and make contact with them and go and meet them. I met one who had been the sort of Ivan the Terrible of my father’s camp, who the Australians knew as “the Lizard”. I hadn’t known until five minutes before I arrived at this taxi company in an outer suburb of Tokyo that this man I was meeting was actually the Lizard, and that rather undid me, I must say. He was hated by the Australians for his violence; he was sentenced to death for war crimes after the war; he had his sentenced commuted to life imprisonment, and he then was released in an amnesty in 1956. The man I met though was this courteous, kindly and generous old man. Bizarrely, an earthquake hit Tokyo as I was sitting in the room with him, and the whole room pitched around like a bobbling dinghy in a most wild sea, and I saw him frightened. I realised whatever evil is, it wasn’t in that room with us. I talked with him about his childhood, about the way he’d been press-ganged into becoming a prison guard at the age of 15, how he’d hated the training, which was incredibly violent, and wanted to run away back home. But he knew if he ran away, his father would be punished by the Japanese. He told me how he hated the way the Australians whistled and sang and seemed happy.

RK: Because he was unhappy?

RF: He didn’t say that. He said some quite extraordinary things. He said, I am not Korean; I am not Japanese; I am a man of a colony. That’s how he understood himself, and he saw that his fate was a fairly wretched one and he sort of understood that he’d never be forgiven, and that he had to live with those things. These people are despised by the Koreans, who see them as traitors, despised by the Japanese because they are Koreans. They don’t belong in Korea or Japan; they have a very hard place to live in. These same people often had sisters who ended up “comfort women” for the Japanese. They were inculcated into a culture of extreme violence, and it was understood that if they didn’t in turn inflict this violence onto the prisoners, who they were made to believe were less than human in any case, they would suffer terribly.

RK: But he did stand out for your father and your father’s friends.

RF: He was monstrous. But I wasn’t there to accuse him or judge him. I was there to hear his story, to try to understand what it must have felt like to be condemned to death, to try to feel what he felt about his parents. Really what happened to Japan from the turn of the century up until what we call World War Two, which they call the Great East Asian War, I think a perverse death cult took over the whole society. That death cult meant, for example, the Japanese commandant commanding a section of the line that had to be built, if he didn’t get it built, he would have felt he’d have to kill himself out of shame. Everyone suffered in that death cult. No one’s life had any value. The Australians’ lives had no value, but neither did the Koreans’ and neither did the commanders’. It was an utter perversion of humanity and everyone became trapped in it. I still find it hard to comprehend: more people died on that railway than there are words in that book. More people died on that railway than died at Hiroshima. And yet really outside of Australia, it’s been forgotten. It’s been forgotten by those who were there, such as the Malaysian Tamils, the Burmese, the Thais. It’s an inexplicable story from recent times.

RK: You went back to the railway with your brother, I guess the same way you went to Sydney with Tom Uren. You like to make these sorts of journeys, it seems, on which something might happen, or you might see something? What were your thoughts when you were in the place where the Burma railway was built? Is it all jungle now?

RF: I think it’s very different now. My understanding is that it was much more teak jungle then, and Thailand had a pretty small population. The population has since exploded, and there are a lot of people living in these places now. It really was a fairly remote wilderness even for the Thai and Burmese people. But nevertheless, you still get a strong sense there was a jungly sort of bush there. The railway is mostly overgrown except for those places that have been cleared for the tourists, essentially. But we were able to find my father’s camp and we were able to walk the track through to the railway. We were able to work out where the cholera compound was, where the creek that brought the cholera into the camp was. Once that exists in your head you begin to absorb... I didn’t go there for sensation or cathartic revelation, I went there to feel the humidity, to feel what it was like to move in that humidity, to grab hold of thorny bamboo, to look at the limestone-rock cliffs and the mud and to try to understand what it would be like to walk barefoot through that. To look at the embankments and the cuttings and work out how you would use hand tools to create such things. I carried rocks just to feel what that was like in the heat. I realised the more I opened myself up to that sensory world, then I would have something to draw on when it came to write the book. I think it’s wrong to try to pretend that you can relive that experience or to know that experience. But you can open yourself up to the physical world of it. That for me is a very important tool because you’re writing truths about human beings but they always have to be embedded in that very real, concrete detail.

RK: I wanted to talk about the writing of this book because if I remember parts of the book, of the camp, or some of the engagement of war beforehand, I think of death and heat and hunger and suppurating wounds and filth and shit and sweat. As I read it, I can see that you’re right in there; I’m right in there as a reader, and I notice there are some repetitions of language, of words: death. But I’m not bored by it, I’m going along with you. It’s almost like they rhyme in some way; it’s a kind of poetry. You’ve got me bound, as long as those guys are down there. Tell me about writing that kind of scene and the language that you need to use. I suppose there’s a sort of limitation when it comes to the kind of language you can use.

RF: Well, I’m always interested in trying to make things more readable, and it won’t be news to the followers of your book club that repetition is regarded as very poor writing in modern literature. Modern literature frowns upon it, and editors are trained to strike it out. Modern word-processing programs make it so easy to – well, “global” is the term – global a word to make sure it’s not repeated. But really the great literature always uses repetition to build up rhythms and patterns – essentially the music – and I think we are very tuned in to those musical patterns, and it is those more than even characters or the progress of plot that allow a reader to enter the world of a novel and open up to it. Specifically, that means you might repeat an adverb three times in a paragraph but hopefully artfully enough that the repetition doesn’t strike people but it gives it a tone which is much closer to conversation, where we do repeat words and yet we don’t notice it. You were talking about “death”, and there’s a passage I know you were interested in where the words “death” and “dead” build up a drum-like marshal beat. In one way, it’s a little like the Molly Bloom soliloquy in reverse, but I was also very taken by the power of Paul Celan’s poetry and the way he creates rhythms with language, with his most harrowing of poems about his experience of the holocaust.

RK: He repeats: “Your hair, Margaret, your hair.”

RF: Yeah, that’s the poem. That very famous poem. It repeats the same three or four lines over and over, doesn’t it, with a slightly different patterning of the words, and slowly this universe of horror opens up to you because he manages to convey the sense of a marshal evil, drumming. Within is the doom of you and everything you love. And the drumming grows and grows. I think there is an idea of high modernist prose particularly common with people out of American creative writing schools that actually has lost the importance of those poetic cadences and tropes in the writing of prose.

RK: And you’ve quoted at the beginning Paul Celan’s “Mother”.

RF: Well, Celan was a German speaking and writing Romanian, who lost both his parents in the holocaust. He continued to write in German, and he wrote some of the greatest German poems of the century about the greatest evil the Germans had done. I felt, in a way, that spoke to the challenge I faced, which was to try to write about this great evil that the Japanese people were responsible for, but honouring all that is great and truly beautiful about their culture, and their literature truly is. And so that’s why I called the book, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”, which is of course the title of one of the most famous works of Japanese literature: A haibun by Basho, the great haiku poet.

RK: And of course the railway is the narrow road too.

RF: And throughout it, there’s a lot of very famous haikus reversed. So things like: “blow after blow, on the monster’s face, a monster’s mask”, which is Basho’s famous haiku: “Day after day / On the monkey’s face / A monkey’s mask”. There are many, many inversions of haikus, which those who know Japanese literature will see very clearly what’s being done there.

RK: Your father died earlier this year. What did he think about you writing this book. He knew you were writing it, you were asking him questions about his experience. He knew you went to Japan; he was worried about you going.

RF: I told him I was going to Japan and that I’d be meeting some guards. Because it was such a vast project, I didn’t think any of them would be people who’d been at his camp; I didn’t think that for a minute. When I got back, I was able to tell him I’d met several guards that had been at his camp, or the death railway or the slave-labour camp he ended up in Japan, south of Hiroshima, that I’d met the Lizard, and that I felt they’d all said sorry. That they’d all, I felt, carried regret and shame. That although they weren’t necessarily entirely honest and that although I wasn’t sure it was possible that they’d ever quite reconcile their souls with what had happened in a fully honest way, I still felt there was something genuine in all this. That there was regret. He suddenly stopped talking and said he had to go, which was unlike him. His mind was still very sharp and he was interested in these things. And later that day he lost all memory of the prisoner of war camps. Nothing else happened to him: his mind remained very sharp and alert in every other way. He knew he’d had this experience – like being in the womb – but he could recall no detail of it. It seemed as if he was finally free of it.

RK: How do that make you feel, as a son and as a writer?

RF: It’s hard for me to talk about. This is really a book about love, written in the shadow of my father dying. I literally finished the final draft on the day he died. In our last conversation, he asked how the book was going and I told him it was finished. I don’t feel the events are connected but nevertheless it is a strange thing to have happen to you – that you would finish such a book and then your father would pass away. In the manner of books, particularly large novels like this, there have been revisions, consequent on copyediting, to be made, and I worked on them thereafter. But the book was done, and then he died, and that’s it. A large part of my life came to a strange conclusion, I guess.

RK: Was it a struggle to have to deal with such – I mean, there are passages of love and sex and fun in this book so I don’t want people to think it’s all very depressing – but tell me about getting down into the dirt, getting down into the mud. How did you manage that each day when you were writing those passages? Was it something you could leave at the end of the day and live your normal life? Did you think, “Oh, I have to go back into that room with these terrible images”? Actually they were images, weren’t they? They were sketches of camp life and cruelty? And there’s a character there who does sketch in your book. How did you manage the emotions of writing those things and living as Richard Flanagan?

RF: Firstly, I should say, to me, the book is an affirmation, strangely, of joy in life. And although it passes through a dark place, I hope it’s uplifting. And people who’ve read it tell me that they do find it that. Because it is really about the beauty of human beings in the most extraordinary circumstances. How did I write it? In the end, after I got back from Japan – I have a shack on a place called Bruny Island, where no one much is – and I went there. And I pretty well lived by myself; my wife used to come down at weekends, and occasionally some friends would turn up, but I was more or less alone in this place by the sea in the bush for the best part of five months. I rewrote the book top to bottom. I’d get up at five and be working by six and work through till I went to bed at nine or ten. I’d go for a swim; I’d do a bit of snorkelling in between and then I’d go back to the book. I had to do that because I had nothing else in me: it all had to go in to the creation of this book. Balzac said he only had one hour of the day to give to life, the rest was for writing his novels, and I didn’t even have that one hour; it all had to be for the novel. These things for most writers are an extraordinary labour; there’s no getting away from it. There’s a very slow crafting of sentences that just takes an inordinate amount of time, and you just have to slowly hew away at it.

RK: The sentence crafting: was that separate from the emotional tenor of the material you were writing about?

RF: I think it’s searching for an accuracy not a description of feeling. And that means then you have to be very disciplined about avoiding emotion, really. I think it was Chekov who said, If you want people to feel sad, never let a tear be seen on the page. You just have to try to accurately describe what your characters are doing and saying and so on, and that’s the labour. I don’t think it’s a case of working yourself into a joyous state or an erotic state or a miserable state, and then writing from that. It’s both simpler and harder: you have to think, how would you describe that particular feeling and how would you write it accurately.

RK: There are some memoirs that have come out of these experiences, that have been written. Which were the memoirs that you found most useful?

RF: I’d grown up reading them. I think the most wonderful are Ray Parkin’s, the greatest war memoirs that Australia’s produced. But I tried not to lean on them too much. Really my biggest influence were just the stories I grew up with and heard from my father. Only my family would know, but the ways in which they are torn apart and reassembled in strange order and strange mismatching would hopefully tell something of my father’s story and yet was a completely different story. The lead character is utterly unlike my father.

RK: The lead character is a person kind of like Weary Dunlop, or who had Weary Dunlop’s job, I suppose.

RF: Weary Dunlop was one of many doctors up there. It was a strange thing but the doctors were the leaders in the camps, and they were idolised by the men. Weary Dunlop is the best known of them. But there were quite a few: Rowley Richards, Arthur Moon, Kevin Fagan, to name just some, and they were all held in equal high regard by the men and performed similarly extraordinary feats as Weary Dunlop. So I was interested in a character who wasn’t seen to be a leader who finds himself in that role and then has to do things, extraordinary things, but doubts his capacity to do them, who feels in a way like a sham and a fraud but who ultimately still does extraordinary things because in a way he was actually being led by the men to do them. It’s a necessary thing. In the same way that Australians talk about mateship as something very simple, but I think it’s a very complex form of human survival, where the mateship in the camps was a system of incredibly strong bonds and loyalties. I don’t think it necessarily meant you even liked someone; it meant you were locked into a pattern of obligation that ensured they would survive, and therefore you had a chance of surviving. An enormous sense of self-sacrifice existed within that, and it’s an extraordinary idea of human behaviour.

RK: It sounds a little bit like Malinowski writing about the Kula Ring or some of these arrangements you find in Polynesia or Melanesia, where tribes are dependent on each other and obligations are built up, and you may not like this person but you trust them. You owe them and they owe you.

RF: Yeah, I think there was a lot of that. I think there was also acts of great altruism as much as there were harrowing stories of betrayal, failings and weaknesses on the part of the prisoners.

RK: You used the word “evil” before. “If evil was here, it wasn’t in this room,” you said when you talked about meeting the guard. Do you believe that there is evil or are people acting because of colonialism or they’re being forced to do this or that, or a kind of mysterious death cult that arises through history? I mean, you were a historian.

RF: I do believe in evil, yeah. I believe in goodness and I believe in love. I think human beings and human history are the consequence of these hugely irrational forces. Much as we want to deny them and corral them, these are the things that propel us, and we carry all of these – the worst things and the best things – within ourselves. I think it was Clint Eastwood who said, “Violence has consequences.”

RK: That great poet!

RF: [Laughs] It has causes too. It’s always wrong to focus on the moment of violence, and think that tells you the whole story. You have to understand what led to it, and what leads to it – my very limited understanding of Japanese history – is that you have half a century of a culture slowly being poisoned by ideas of militarism, of nationalism, of race, and a poisonous religious aspect, which crept in from Zen Buddhism, in the same way that we know so well about Christianity and Europe in the 20th century. All the wickedness and the evil goes back to those people advocating these ideas, and slowly seducing, press-ganging, forcing and finally shaping society in the image of these very evil ideas. Any society can go down that path, and than we all become the agents of evil. So, I think it’s always very important that these things are resisted early on and resisted for what they are at the beginning, because you can do something about them then. By the time you’re building a railway through a wilderness with a quarter of a million slave labourers, it’s a little too late to expect the jailers to behave with any humanity. It’s gone beyond that. But you still have to seek to understand what led to it. I’m not a historian and this isn’t a historical book but it is a book about the truth of human beings, I hope.

RK: Well, it’s a wonderful book, Richard, and it’s always great to talk to you. Thank you for coming in and talking to us at the Monthly Book.

RF: Thank you very much, Ramona. Thank you for everything.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/transcript-richard-flanagan-conversation-ramona-koval

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archerton84-blog · 6 years ago

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This Is Us Recap: Did the Best Man Win?

Need to catch up? Check out the previous This Is Us recap here.

Q: What do This Is Us‘ Randall Pearson and the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot Gritty have in common?

A: They both hit it big — and quickly — in the City of Brotherly Love.

Yup, this week’s episode reveals that Randall managed to eke out a win in his contentious campaign for Solomon Brown’s city council seat, no matter how impossible that outcome seemed the last time we saw him. And he’s able to do so without completely obliterating his marriage to Beth… though at one point, it’s a close thing.

RELATEDPost Mortem: This Is Us‘ Sterling K. Brown Talks Randall’s Big Political Victory, Teases Goran Visnjic’s ‘Passion’-Filled Role

The hour begins on Election Night and then rewinds to seven weeks earlier, which allows us to watch Kevin and Zoe navigate the rocky channel of cohabitation and then stumble on a major clue in the Uncle Nicky mystery.Read on for the highlights of “The Last Seven Weeks.”

ELECTION NIGHT | At Randall’s campaign headquarters, Brown is only four percentage points ahead of Randall: The race officially is too close to call. Rebecca and Miguel are on hand to wait it out with the candidate, as are Zoe, Kevin, Beth and the girls. Things are weird between Kevin and Zoe, and when she says “I can’t do this” and hands him a key ring featuring a photo of John Stamos from the Early Katsopolis era, the mood between the two is even more strained.

SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION NIGHT | On the morning immediately following the events of the fall finale, Beth is incensed to learn that Randall plans to continue his campaign, despite her insistence that she will no longer support him. He claims to have it under control — he even ordered an audiobook by Ellen DeGeneres’ mom in order to better understand Tess’ burgeoning sexual identity! — but Beth isn’t swayed one inch. “You cannot audiobook your way through our daughter’s life,” she replies, making it clear that he is on his own. Randall has a flashback to when he and Jack visited Washington, D.C.. “What a great life you’re going to have. What a great man you’re going to be,” the elder Pearson tells his teen son.

Kate tells Toby that she’s ready to turn their office into a nursery, “so you have to sell all of your toys.” (She’s referring to collectible action figures and the like.) He looks slightly pained.

Kevin and Zoe return from Vietnam with a ton of questions — Did Nicky ever return to the United States? Did Jack know his brother wasn’t dead? Was this a Dick Whitman-type situation? — but that gets tabled when Zoe casually refers to his apartment as “home,” prompting Kevin to invite her to move in. She’s hesitant, but then she agrees, and he hands her the Stamos key ring. (In case you’re wondering: It was a gift from his Full House-obsessed nieces.)

FIVE WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION NIGHT | Randall is still 10 points behind Brown in the polls, despite his volunteers’ fervent efforts (hi, Chichi!), and he’s been staying overnight in Philadelphia more often. As you might have guessed, Beth is still not on board with this plan. In the flashback, teen Randall worries about balancing his future family against his future job, and Papa Pearson good-naturedly teases him about it.

Thanks to some unclear box markings and an overzealous Kate, Toby’s full set of 1977 Star Wars action figures have been sold for $10 to a fellow student at her college. “They’re just toys,” she reasons as Toby fumes, but he sadly says that they’ve been with him forever and he wanted to pass them on to his son.

At the Veterans’ Administration, a clerk says she can’t release Nicky’s records to Kevin without documentation — though getting a VIP to authorize the release would probably do the trick. (Side note: I love how thoroughly uncharmed the woman is by all of Kevin’s attempts to charm her.) Zoe says she might be able to help: She dated a congressman for a while.

THREE WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION NIGHT | On the drive back to Alpine, Randall hears Brown point out that Beth and the kids haven’t been seen much in Philly lately. So he’s super angry as he returns home and demands that his family join him for events. She’s wrapping Christmas presents and points out that he has no idea what’s in the boxes because he hasn’t been around much for weeks. Then things get ugly. “Are you really mad at me, Beth?” he asks. “Or are you mad that I got something that I care about right now and you don’t?” DAMN. Then, he points out that he stayed at home with the girls all last year and didn’t complain. Beth wisely exits the room “before you say something else you’re going to regret.”

Zoe’s ex, it turns out, is still quite angry about the way they broke up after dating for a couple of years: She sent him an email, and that was it. The congressman agrees to help release Nicky’s records, but he’s not real happy about it.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION NIGHT | On New Year’s Eve, Jae-wan runs into campaign headquarters with a gift for Randall: Proof that his political opponent was arrested for driving while intoxicated years ago, but paid off the cops and the local press to bury the incident. They’ll deliver the goods to the media the next day; for now, Randall heads to a diner to buy a blueberry pie, because eating blueberry pie at midnight is one of their family traditions.

Only problem: The diner he stops at is fresh outta blueberry pie. But Reverend Hawley happens to be sitting at the counter, and his brief inquiry about Randall’s life leads Pearson into a monologue about how “I’m starting to think it might be harder to be a good man than a great man.” He also vaguely mentions that he’s sitting on something that could “change the whole game,” but he doesn’t want to win that way. Hawley listens, then offers up some advice he’s honed after years of attending to his congregants’ death beds: “Act in a way that’ll make you smile when you’re old and gray and lying under a pale pink nursing home blanket, thinking about the life you’ve lived,” the older man says. “You do that, you’ll be the man your father wanted.” Then he takes pity on Randall and hands him the blueberry pie he’d bought to take home. On the way out, Randall crumples the envelope of evidence incriminating Brown and tosses it into the garbage.

Back at home, Beth is icy to Randall but thaws as he interrupts their New Year’s Eve revelry to apologize for everything he’s missed in the weeks prior. “This family is what makes me special. You four. You’re what make me great. And I’m sorry if I haven’t done a good enough job of showing you that lately,” he says. Then he pulls out the pie, and it appears that Beth is willing to forgive her man.

Kate tries to play the “I’m pregnant and my house burned down and my dad died and I have nothing from my own childhood including the replica of Three Rivers Stadium that my dad made me to give my baby” card, but the college kid she sold the Star Wars toys to is unmoved.

Nicky’s file reveals that he was medevac’d out of Vietnam in 1971, sent for a psych evaluation and eventually signed his discharge papers “Clark Kent.” But Kevin is pissy when Zoe wants to talk about it, and that’s because he can’t shake the feeling that she’s going to leave him like she left the Congressman. After all, she hasn’t even unpacked her boxes at his place yet. Feeling attacked, Zoe counters that she only moved in to make him happy and that he’s pushing her to do things she’s not comfortable with.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE ELECTION NIGHT | Upon realizing that Randall plans to skip Rev. Hawley’s service the Sunday before the election, she tells him he has to go — and she’ll go with him. “I will not let you forget who you are. I should’ve had your back. You need to finish this campaign,” she says. And it’s a good thing, too, because during his remarks from the pulpit, Hawley calls Randall “fundamentally decent” and tells the congregation that Philadelphia would be in capable hands with either Randall or Brown in office. (Hawley also makes mention of Randall’s two-hour-one-way drive between Alpine and Philadelphia, and we feel seen.)

Beth surprises Toby with replacements of his action figures, but he’s still bummed that they’re not his action figures. She tries to cheer him up by saying, “I know with every part of me that you are going to be our son’s favorite thing.”

ELECTION NIGHT, AGAIN | In California, Toby calls Kate into the nursery to show her the finished decorations… and the replica of Three Rivers Stadium he commissioned a dollhouse maker to create in order to replace the one she’d lost in the fire. She cries a lot, but she’s touched. “For the record,” Toby adds, “I’m going to be our kid’s second favorite thing. You’re the first.”

In Philadelphia, it becomes clear that the official election results won’t be in until after midnight. So Randall thanks everyone who worked on his campaign and sends them home. Outside, Zoe tells Kevin that he’s one of the only people who knows about her dad and what he did to her, and that it’s always been important for her to feel she has her own, secure space. But she does want to live with Kevin, she says. “I think I like what you’re pushing for. I’m in love with you. And I want John Stamos back.” Kevin smiles at her and hands the key over, then they go home.

Later, as they’re unpacking, Zoe finds a postcard dated 1992 in a box of Jack’s Vietnam paraphernalia. “Jack, Last one. — C.K.” it reads, along with a return address we recognize as Nicky’s trailer in Bradford, Penn. “My dad knew Nicky was alive. Why would he lie to us?” Kevin wonders aloud.

In bed that night, a very sleepy Randall ruminates on how “sometimes it feels like there’s been a plan for my life from the beginning.” Then he gets a call. After he hangs up, he turns to Beth and somewhat dazedly gives her the news: “I won.”

Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Hit the comments!

Source: https://tvline.com/2019/01/15/this-is-us-recap-season-3-episode-10-the-last-seven-weeks/

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limejuicer1862 · 5 years ago

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

David Graham

has published three full-length collections of poetry, Magic Shows, Second Wind, and, most recently, The Honey of Earth (Terrapin Books, 2019). He’s also published four chapbooks, most recently Stutter Monk. He is also co-editor of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (with Kate Sontag) and Local News: Poetry About Small Towns (with Tom Montag), just published by MWPH Books. He retired in 2016 from teaching writing and literature at Ripon College, where he also hosted their Visiting Writers Series for twenty-eight years. He has served on The Poets’ Prize Committee and the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and was a Resident Poet as well as faculty member at The Frost Place. Currently he is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual, where he also contributes a monthly column, “Poetic License,” on poetry and poets. After retiring he returned to his native upstate New York with his wife, the artist Lee Shippey.

Website: http://www.davidgrahampoet.com Amazon Author Page: David Graham My Terrapin Books page: Honey

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

There are many honest answers to such a question, I think, and depending on my mood, I might stress this or that factor more heavily. Tomorrow’s answer might differ. But as far as I can recall, I began to write seriously at about age sixteen, knowing nothing about the art of poetry except that it seemed a good way to express the inexpressible flood of emotions that a boy at that age feels. Before long I learned that it was also a way to impress young women. At the same time, I was listening to music seriously for the first time, and my adolescence happened to coincide with a great era in popular music. So lyricists like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and many others were among my first deep poetic influences. Yet it’s equally true that long before that I absorbed a great deal of poetry in church every Sunday—in the form of the glorious King James version of the Bible and the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Hearing that wonderful Elizabethan language read aloud surely inspired me, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Likewise, my mother used to read aloud to me when I was a boy—her love of A.A. Milne’s poetry in particular was infectious and certainly must be added to the mix.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Aside from my mother’s love of Milne, I did have the usual public-school exposure to traditional poetry, and for the most part I didn’t much care for it. I was a bookish teen, though, and eventually discovered a number of poets who weren’t being taught in my classes, poets such as Richard Brautigan, Diane Wakoski, E.E. Cummings, Denise Levertov, and others. I should mention here one of my high school English teachers, Ed Brennan, who by being open to the poetic powers of musical lyrics, was an important early permission-giver. Then in college I was lucky enough to encounter some very gifted teachers, including Sydney Lea.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Depends on how old I was. In college and graduate school I gradually became aware of what we now call PoBiz, the making and maintaining of reputations, the “anxiety of influence,” in Harold Bloom’s phrase, damaging labels like “major” and “minor,” and so forth. The older I get the more I realize that worrying about such things is pointless. Honor your elders, do your work, seek out community in the poetry world, and let matters of reputation be decided by others, as they always are in the end.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I have written poetry daily for many years, and haven’t missed a day since 1993. When younger I liked to claim the quiet hours around midnight as my best time; as I aged I could no longer stay awake and alert enough to write after the day’s other chores were done. So I switched to a morning routine, which seems to work best for me. Ideally I write as soon as possible upon waking. But on those days when other obligations prevent that, I fit it in wherever I can. I work on poetry, generally, when I am freshest. Later in the day I often work on prose.

5. What motivates you to write?

I can’t improve on something I once heard Shelby Stephenson say when asked this question: “Why, to defeat sin and death, of course!”

6. What is your work ethic?

Richard Hugo’s wonderful book The Triggering Town contains an anecdote that pretty much says it all. When I was teaching creative writing I quoted it to every class I taught. The story goes that the golfing legend Jack Nicklaus once made an amazing shot, and an onlooker commented, “That was a lucky shot.” Supposedly Nicklaus replied, “Yes, it was. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.” Or, as Louis Pasteur explained his success, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” There is such a thing as luck, magic, inspiration, or whatever you wish to call it. You can’t explain it or call it forth at will. But it does tend to arrive more often when you work at it.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I imagine they’re in there somewhere, always, even if I’m not consciously aware. Of the poets I’m aware of as continuing influences on my work, I would single out Walt Whitman, Robert Bly, James Wright, Philip Levine, William Matthews, and Richard Hugo as particularly important early influences. There are also many I admire and wish I could be more heavily influenced by, but who remain impossible for me, anyway, to imitate. One example would be Emily Dickinson.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

That’s an impossible question, of course. There are hundreds I admire fiercely.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

Whether by habit or for some other, ineffable reason, writing has long since become necessary for me. You could call it an addiction, in that it makes me feel good to do it, and bad if too much time passes between doses.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

My answer is the usual one: you become a writer mostly by writing a lot at the same time as you are reading a lot. They strike me as two sides of the same coin. If you’re lucky you will also find good teachers, mentors, and a peer group to offer critical suggestions and moral support. Such things can aid enormously, but they cannot help you if you’re not writing and reading enough.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I’ve just published two books—The Honey of Earth is a new collection of poems from Terrapin Books; and Local News: Poetry About Small Towns is an anthology of contemporary poetry that I co-edited with Tom Montag (MWPH Books). At the moment I’m mostly engaged in promoting those. So I have no large projects underway currently, but soon I’ll begin thinking about my next collection of poems. In the meantime, I write a monthly column about poetry and poets for the online journal, Verse-Virtual called “Poetic License.” For three years now I’ve been reflecting each month on what a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing poetry has taught me. I invite you to take a look: http://www.verse-virtual.com

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: David Graham Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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gypsygrimoire-blog · 8 years ago

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Memorable quotes for The Notebook

Young Noah: Will you go out with me? Young Allie: What? No. Young Noah: No...? Young Allie: No. Young Noah: Why not? Young Allie: I dunno, because I don't want to. Young Noah: OK, then you leave me no other choice. Young Allie: AHHHH Young Noah: I'm gonna ask you one more time, will you or will you not go out with me? I think my hand's slipping. Young Allie: OK, OK. Fine I'll go out with you Young Noah: No, don't do me any favors. Young Allie: No, no I want to. Young Noah: Say it. Young Allie: I wanna go out with you. Young Noah: Say it again. Young Allie: I WANNA GO OUT WITH YOU! Young Noah: All right, all right we'll go out. Young Allie: [lying in the middle of the street] What happens if a car comes? Young Noah: We die. Young Noah: Get in the water. Young Allie: No! I'm scared. Young Noah: [yelling] Get in the water, woman! Get in the water! Young Allie: [looks at him, puzzled] Young Noah: [calmly] No I'm sorry baby, please just get in. Young Allie: [hesitates] Young Noah: [once his friends start yelling again] GET IN THE WATER! Young Allie: Painting. Young Noah: What? Young Allie: You asked me, what I do for me... Young Noah: What now? Young Allie: I love to paint. Young Noah: Really? Young Allie: Mmm-hmm. Most of the time I have all these thoughts bouncin' around in my head... but with a brush in my hand, the world just gets kinda quiet. Young Noah: Unbelievable, Unbelievable. Young Noah: You don't know me, but I know me. Young Noah: It's not about following your heart and it's not about keeping your promises. It's about security. Young Allie: What's that supposed to mean? Young Noah: [yelling] Money. He's got a lot of money! Young Allie: You smug bastard. I hate you for saying that. Young Noah: You're bored Allie. You're bored and you know it. You wouldn't be here if there wasn't something missing. Young Allie: You arrogant son of a bitch. Young Noah: Would you just stay with me? Young Allie: Stay with you? What for? Look at us, we're already fightin' Young Noah: Well that's what we do, we fight... You tell me when I am being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you are a pain in the ass. Which you are, 99% of the time. I'm not afraid to hurt your feelings. You have like a 2 second rebound rate, then you're back doing the next pain-in-the-ass thing. Young Allie: So what? Young Noah: So it's not gonna be easy. It's gonna be really hard. We're gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, for ever, you and me, every day. Will you do something for me, please? Just picture your life for me? 30 years from now, 40 years from now? What's it look like? If it's with him, go. Go! I lost you once, I think I can do it again. If I thought that's what you really wanted. But don't you take the easy way out. Young Allie: What easy way? There is no easy way, no matter what I do, somebody gets hurt. Young Noah: Would you stop thinking about what everyone wants? Stop thinking about what I want, what he wants, what your parents want. What do YOU want? What do you WANT? Young Allie: It's not that simple. Young Noah: What... do... you... want? Whaddaya want? Young Allie: I have to go now. Young Allie: When I'm with Noah I feel like one person and when I'm with you I feel like someone totally different. Lon: Allie, it's normal not to forget your first love but I want you for myself. I don't want to convince my fiancée that she should be with me. Young Allie: You don't have to. I already know I should be with you. Fin: [after Noah and Allie kept saying 'You look great.'] [to Allie] Fin: You look great. [to Noah] Fin: You look great. And I know I look great. Martha Shaw: Look, a woman know when a man looks into her eyes and sees someone else. Young Noah: Now you know that I want to give you all the things that you want, right? But I can't, because they're gone... They're broken. Young Noah: My Dearest Allie. I couldn't sleep last night because I know that it's over between us. I'm not bitter anymore, because I know that what we had was real. And if in some distant place in the future we see each other in our new lives, I'll smile at you with joy and remember how we spent the summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that's what you've given me. That's what I hope to give to you forever. I love you. I'll be seeing you. Noah Noah: I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who's ever lived: I've loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough. Young Allie: Why didn't you write me? Why? It wasn't over for me, I waited for you for seven years. But now it's too late. Young Noah: I wrote you 365 letters. I wrote you everyday for a year. Young Allie: You wrote me? Young Noah: Yes... it wasn't over, it still isn't over [kisses Allie] Duke: That's my sweetheart in there. Wherever she is, that's where my home is. Duke: How's it hangin' Harry? Harry: I keep trying to die, but they won't let me. Duke: Well, you can't have everything. Young Noah: You wanna walk with me. Fin: What are you guys doing? Get in! Young Allie: Yeah. Young Noah: We're gonna walk. Fin: Do you guys love each other? [Young Noah snickers] Fin: Oh I get it, you guys do love each other! Young Noah: Okay. Goodbye. Young Noah: So it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be really hard; we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me... everyday. Frank: [Allie painted Noah a picture] Now that's a damn picture there! Young Noah: What am I gonna do in New York? Young Allie: ...Be with me. Lon: Should I be worried? Allie: They fell in love, didn't they? Duke: Yes, they did. Young Noah: It's not about keeping your promises, and it's not about following your heart. It's about security. Young Noah: [to Martha] You know I want to give you everything you want. But I can't. It's broken. Young Allie: Now, say you're a bird. Young Noah: If you're a bird, I'm a bird. Frank: [Allie painted Noah a picture] Now that's a damn painting that is. Young Noah: [raising fists in air] Dad! God... I stammered! Frank: Stammered, stuttered... what's the difference. You couldn't understand a damn thing he said. [Allie laughing] Frank: Anyway, I got him to read some poetry aloud and pretty soon his stuttering went away. Young Allie: Well, that's a good idea that poetry. Duke: I was just going for a walk. I couldn't sleep. Nurse Esther: You were going to see Miss Allie. Now you know you're not allowed. It's against the rules. You go back to your room. And as for me, I'm going downstairs to get a cup of coffee and won't be back for a while. Stay out of trouble. [Duke walks over to Nurse Esther's counter and sees a full cup of coffee] Young Noah: We can just finish out the summer and see what happens then. Young Allie: Please don't do this, you don't mean it. Oh why wait until the summer ends? Why don't you do it right now? [pushes Noah against car] Young Allie: Huh? C'mon. Do it! Do it! [repeatedly pushes Noah, starts hitting Noah, Noah starts hitting himself] Young Allie: You know what? I'm gonna do it! It's over. Okay? it's over. Young Noah: [opens his arms for a hug] Come here. Young Allie: Don't touch me! I hate you! I hate you! Young Noah: OK, I'm going. Young Allie: Why don't you just go then? [pushes Noah in the car] Young Allie: Get out! Leave! [kicks Noah's car] Young Allie: Go!... No, no, just wait a minute, we're not really breaking up are we? Come on. This is just a fight we're having and tomorrow will be like it never happend right? [Noah drives away] Frank: Well, Mr. Calho... What am I? *Old* or something? You can call me Frank. Allie: Do you think our love can make miracles? Duke: I do. [last lines] Allie: Do you think our love, can take us away together? Duke: I think our love can do anything we want it to. Allie: I love you. Duke: I love you, Allie. Allie: Good night. Duke: Good night. I'll be seeing you. Frank: Say, how would you like some breakfast? Would you like some breakfast? Young Allie: Breakfast? Frank: Yeah! Young Noah: Dad, it's ten o'clock. Frank: Well, what's that got to do with it, you can have pancakes any damn time of night you want! Come on in, you want some breakfast? Young Allie: Sure! Young Noah: You're gonna kill me woman! I need sleep, I need food, to regain my strength! Duke: They didn't agree on much. In fact they rarely agreed on anything. They fought all the time and they challenged each other everyday... Young Noah: [Allie and Noah are fighting] Don't push me! [Allie pushes Noah anyway] Duke: ...But in spite their differences, they had one important thing in common, they were crazy about each other. Anne: She is out foolin' around with that boy until two o'clock in the morning and it has got to stop! I didn't spend seventeen years of my life raising a daughter and giving her EVERYTHING, so she could throw it away on a summer romance! Young Allie: [Screaming] DADDY! Anne: She will wind up with her heart broken or pregnant! Now he's a nice boy, but he's... Young Allie: He's WHAT? He is what? Tell me! Anne: He is trash! Trash! Trash! Not for you! Allie: Did you write that? Duke: No, that was Walt Whitman. Allie: I think I knew him... Duke: I think you did too. Noah: Summer romances begin for all kinds of reasons, but when all is said and done, they have one thing in common. They're shooting stars, a spectacular moment of light in the heavens, fleeting glimpse of eternity, and in a flash they're gone. Young Noah: [humming] Bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum,bum. Young Allie: [laughing] You're a terrible singer. Young Noah: I know. Young Allie: [laying her head on his shoulder] But I like this song. [they continue dancing in the street to I'll Be Seeing You] Young Allie: Whattaya want? [asks after he tells her he needs to regain his strength after making love all day] Young Noah: I want some... pancakes... and some bacon. Noah: ...He got this notion into his head that if he restore the old house where they had come that night, Allie would find a way to go back to him... Anne: 'Cause I might know you a little better than you think. And I don't want you waking up one morning thinking if you'd known everything you might have done something different. Young Allie: What's going on? Anne: We're going home. Young Allie: We're leaving now? Anne: Mm-hmm. Young Allie: No, we're not supposed to be leaving for another week. Anne: Get dressed, come downstairs and have some breakfast. Willa will pack your things. Willa: Why, I'd be happy to pack your things, Miss Allie. Young Allie: No, I don't want you to pack my things, I don't want you to touch my stuff I'm not going! Anne: Yes, you are. Young Noah: When I see something I like, I gotta... I love it. Young Allie: You gotta be kiddin me. All this time, that's what I've been missin'? Let's do it again. Young Noah: [at the Carnival] Who's that girl with Sara? Fin: Her name is Allie Hamilton. She's here for the summer with her family. Dad's got more money than God. Young Allie: This place is gigantic! Young Noah: Yeah, a gigantic piece of crap! Young Noah: I'm Noah Calhoun. Young Allie: So? Young Noah: So it's really nice to meet you. Edmond: Allie, who is this guy? Young Allie: I don't know, Noah Calhoun. Young Noah: I'm not usually like this, I'm sorry. Young Allie: Oh yes you are. Young Noah: I could be fun, if you want. I could be pensive, uhh... smart, supersticious, brave? And I, uhh, I can be light on my feet. I could be whatever you want. You just tell me what you want, and I'm gonna be that for you. Young Allie: ...You're dumb. Young Noah: I could be that. Young Noah: Come on, one date, what's it gonna hurt? Young Allie: Mmm, I don't think so. Young Noah: Well what can I do to change your mind? Young Allie: [Noah is about to lie down in the street intersection] You're gonna get hit. Young Noah: [Looks around for oncoming cars, there aren't any in sight] Uhh, by all the cars? [first lines] Nurse Selma: Excuse me. Come on, honey, let's get you ready for bed

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chwrpg · 8 years ago

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Welcome to CHW, Bella!

A NOTE FROM ADMIN C: It's been just about a whole century since we had a Scotty, and you really brought all the parts of him to the table. Now we get a stellar character and Reece King on the dash. Win-win.

OOC NAME/ALIAS, PREFERRED PRONOUNS, AGE & TIMEZONE: bella, she / her, 19, aedt.

DESIRED CHARACTER: scotty meeks.

HOW ACTIVE WILL YOU BE? 7 / 10

SECONDARY CHOICE: –

DESCRIBE THE CHARACTER: scotty was an unsolvable algebraic problem, an incomplete puzzle. for which the last, ending pieces were never made, and the first were slotted and shaped by parents and teachers without pause. he was a book with the last few chapters torn out. a question he toils he’ll never discover a definitive answer for.

scotty the scholar, the brainiac. the sensible young man, who keeps his shirt tucked neat and his head sturdy on his shoulders. who wielded furrowed brows around the classroom, staring down at his neat text book whilst the other boys ripped their’s apart and launched introductions to the ceiling in scrunched up balls of waste. there was a time, perhaps, before an odd and elating medley of young poets became part of his life when this would be enough. he’d had his almost rebellion, strong armed his way to a normal school. and there is a world where that would be that. he’d finish school, settle into the mould his parents carved for him.

but then, there was ‘ oh me ! oh life ! of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless. ’ there was those boys, tom, nathan, knox, gerald, chuck. their confidence, or nervousness, or perhaps the two were the same. the unspoken questioning amongst them, of who, what, why they were going to be. nonsensical nights gathered in a cave, words belonging to remarkable, passionate men centuries gone passing their lips. there was ‘ o captain ! my captain ! ’ and ‘ carpe diem. ’ and amongst the foundations of scotty the scholar, raised up by a sense of potential emanated by the others, grew something else.

scotty that blazed joints and grinned ear to ear, his tie around his head and his thoughts racing a million miles a minute. scotty that stepped, stupidly, brazenly between a fist flying straight for his friend’s head, and caught it with his own nose. there came a scotty that dreamed of more, of beauty in the place of good sense. yearning to live the words they recited, feel what they felt. and he can’t tell if it’s the best thing to ever befall his once predictable life, or the worst.

being so close to wonder, sprinting across the field in the darkness amongst his friends clasping to torches and whitman, shakespeare, byron, tasting the words these extraordinary poet kings spoke. allowing himself to dance this close to greatness, it’ll only hurt all the more if it slips through scotty’s fingers.

SAMPLE WRITING:

‘ we’re not in kansas anymore, hey old boy? ’ scotty mumbles from the corner of his mouth.

if knox heard him, he wouldn’t know about it. the other boy’s attention lay with a gaggle of girls by the keg, pretty and giggling and so far out of his own reach he didn’t even bother to embarrass himself with another glance their way. rosewood youth stretch themselves across the large room like a renaissance painting of teenage debauchery. jocks play beer pong and woo girls with a charm that scotty can’t analyse into either theory or practise. they talk, and grin, and laugh like hyenas.

scotty just stands. knox slips into the fold, and still, there he remains, glued to the safety of the wall as he did whilst each of the other boys dissipated. anxiousness eats away at his insides. ‘ oh — uh, that’s… i’m alright, thanks, ’ he mutters awkwardly, when a brunette whisks around him with a second beer in her hand on offer, and immediately regrets even these so few words he spoke. this isn’t the cave, the dead poet’s society. this isn’t the place where he stands before his friends, chin high, reading aloud the words of whitman with all the nobility of a president and all the bravado of a rapper.

this is reality. and it’s jarring, and frightening, and scotty is a palette of bleak colours that has no place amongst this vibrant scene. he wishes for a single bitter moment, watching the brunette offer the next kind face the beer, that he’d never challenged his parents. that he’d stuck to the course, and never allowed himself the maddening notion that there could be more to scotty meeks than academic prowess.

‘ WHAT THE — ’ the pause of anticipation is never met with the swear word that should’ve followed, but by the cold, thudding sound of a fist colliding with a face. scotty, like all the warm bodies standing or slouching in the room, twist to the noise. there is gerald, stood in the midst of it. ‘ holy shit. ’

scotty’s stomach dropped, jaw too. he can’t decipher who threw the first punch, or if the one he heard was even a second. can’t fathom the image of gerald pitts hitting anyone, or even more frightening the backlash of it to come. he’s frightened. but stronger than the fear, is the sense of duty. be brave, he wills himself, feet striding without his full permission toward the gathering. be brave, he repeats, speeding up when the senior begins to pull back his arm. CARPE DIEM, the boy chants inwardly, angling himself toward the fist meant for gerald’s face.

his nose collects the impact of it entirely. adrenaline dizzies his thoughts, the pain of it too numb to presently consider. he ushers gerald toward a way out, motivated by the terrible thought that the jocks might be in chase. he’s hit so hard light dances in his eyes, and scotty thinks, with the beginnings of a stupid grin on his face, as blood dampens his ironed dress shirt and gerald tumbles out the door before him — this is what they mean by seeing stars.

ANYTHING ELSE? 1985. reece king as a member of dps this is the blessing i never knew i needed

#accepted #submission

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