#writ large

[anoriginalderivative]

here is another little writing exercise i did today. it’s from the start with this podcast with joseph fink and jeffery cranor. the idea is that you go to a random number generator, write down ten numbers between 1 and 100, and each number is your word count for a paragraph

so my numbers were 42-60-3-98-37-9-54-59-18-57, and here is the little flash piece i wrote.

(it is kinda sad and there are themes of death happy halloween)

below the tree line. under the thick layer of moss covering the ground. trickling through earth heavy with the dispersing nutrients of dead things the spirit of the swamp envelopes the quiet ghost of a little girl. slowly, she opens her eyes.

a pack of furious ants march over her hiding place, preparing for violence. she watches in the way that ghosts do; inevitably. from below one can hear the muffled sounds of birds and the occasional deer scratching itchy velvet from its antlers on a tree, but here a busy ecosystem of worms, fungus, and human remains rage and dance silently.

the war begins.

the fungi don’t notice because they are wrapped up completely in the celebration following their discovery of a dead worm. there are visions of a future full of new spores and knowledge that is just inches out of reach. a living worm several feet bellow the exuberant fungus discovers a salt deposit that will utterly change the course of that worms life. the girl tires of the excitement and follows the line of a tree root up to a fox den where week old kits are sleeping with their paws pressed into the warm fur of their mother.

when the little ghost had first arrived in the forest the fox had not given birth yet. she would sit in her den, moving only to eat and drink water, each step labored. living seems so difficult.

death, she thought, is easier; much more straight forward.

one of the smallest ants rushes back to the ant hill to tell the others that the battle has been lost. he is missing a leg and is weak when he finally arrives. there is utter pandemonium at the news. they realize it might be time to move the queen to a new nest.

the smallest fox kit wakes up from a nightmare, though the little ghost can’t quite fathom what a week old baby who has never left the warmth of its fox den would know to be afraid of. when the kit falls back asleep the ghost notices an odd bubbling to its breathing that doesn’t bode well. everything ends eventually.

the little ghost doesn’t remember anything about being alive. maybe she has always been a little swamp ghost.

in the heart of the swamp a ghost closes her eyes. a queen leaves her home forever. a worm plunges into the mineral rich earth. a fox mother wakes to the sound of one of her kits whining. the sun warms the overstory and the light sinks into the world. who will tell them they are small?

[anoriginalderivative]

hey, i’ve been listening to a creativity/writing podcast that gives you prompts/assignments at the end and todays prompt was to write four lines of poetry with only one vowel. so there’s two little poems under the cut 💖

the red peeled beet

the men we meet

every ledge every seed

every peer we see bleed

wet when tested

free when blessed

her revenge be she freed

perfect end, pledge, creed

[karmaalwayswins]

Now Listening:

Writ Large Podcast “What Zora Neale Hurston Can Teach Us About Cancel Culture” (2020)

Zachary Davis and Joshua Bennett discuss Zora Neale Hurston and her book Their Eyes Were Watching God.

https://lithub.com/what-zora-neale-hurston-can-teach-us-about-cancel-culture/

[fierceawakening]

The other thing about “emotions aren’t part of the moral life, they’re orthogonal to it” that confuses me is

I’m not a neuroscientist and the plural of anecdote isn’t data, so i could be seeing a pattern where there are just a small handful of exceptional events, or guessing incorrectly what’s going through people’s brains anyway, or thinking someone is articulating their motivations when actually they are blanking because someone gave them a mic suddenly, or going wrong in any number of ways, but

I’ve noticed that when someone does something we see as sudden and heroic--say, for example, that boy who noticed someone kidnapping a young girl and followed the kidnapper on his bike until the kidnapper gave up--and the media interviews the person, there seems to be a... type of answer that people often give, which is 

“I don’t think of myself as a hero. I just saw something going wrong and tried to fix it. Anybody would! It’s the right thing to do!”

Which I was already personally fascinated with because actually “anybody would” is often not true--people feel nervous to be the first one to act, or worry they’ll get it wrong somehow, etc. There’s been back and forth about how intense the bystander effect IS--Kitty Genovese’s murder, for example, was misreported as if everyone ignored it when that wasn’t actually so--but there is definitely a thing where some people stand around fretting in emergencies rather than acting, and lose precious time.

So these people (ass-u-ming they aren’t just derping in front of a camera and having trouble explaining) are doing two things: typical-minding (assuming their action is not actually remarkable at all, because everyone is like them) and having difficulty explaining their motivation or their impetus to act.

It’s certainly POSSIBLE that what they’re doing could be something like emotionless, purely reasoned utilitarian calculus, but it happens so fast that they don’t notice they did it, like adding 2 + 2 in your head. But it seems to me also possible--and this seems TO ME, at least, like the more Occam’s Razor-y explanation--that they’re acting on some kind of moral instinct, and that this isn’t so much doing moral math in your head as it is being driven by emotion.

But in that case, it would seem like emotions do have a role in actions we consider profoundly morally laudatory, so the idea that there are “two tracks” that never overlap seems false. 

(Or perhaps all of these people are NT or at least not autistic, and so the likelihood of an autistic person being instinctively heroic in this precise way are lower--but I’m not sure that matches my observations of autistic people I know, and it sounds kinda judgey?)

So yeah that’s where my “that sounds fake but okay” is coming from.

[fierceawakening]

The reason I say “Make sure there’s both emotion and reason in your morality?” 

Listen to the guy laughing at those of us who keep emotion in it.

Then you might see what I’m trying to tell you.

No, hatred isn’t rational... but removing emotion from one’s moral sense is one way people convince themselves it is.

[lynellgeorge]

I can't wait to hold this in my own hands. Fresh of the presses! So happy and proud to be working with Chiwan Choi and Peter Woods at Writ Large Press. "Shifting Tenses" my "L.A. Daybook" is part of Writ Large's small print chapbook series (Volume 2). They will have a limited number on sale today at L.A. Zine Fest at the California Market Center, but if you can't make it there, you can also order yours via this link: https://squareup.com/store/writ-large-press/item/shifting-tenses

[taxiboys]

Sabine Reitmaier, Writ Large at Paramount Ranch 2

[jessicalanglois]

We Belong Together

Last weekend, Tía Chucha hosted its 9th annual Celebrating Words Festival in Richie Valens Park in Pacoima. It was the third of a cluster of springtime L.A. literary festivals, and well worth the drive from the 101 to the 170 to the 5 into the East Valley.

Here are the choicest bits from the mellow afternoon in the park, with hot-dry winds blowing across the stage and through the large square of puestos surrounding it.

1. Haikus with Yumi Sakugawa & Nicky Sa-Eun Schildkraut

At the Kaya Press & Writ Large lounge-style booth, we wrote about the heat, and then about love, on post-its, read them aloud, traded and then drew pictures of each other's poems. Lots of people wrote about food -- Popsicles, Twizzlers... Yumi wrote a poem about fences weakening & weakness being a good thing. Neela Banerjee drew my Haiku about the wind. I drew Yumi's & she asked my to autograph the post-it picture. I think I blushed.

2. Group poery with Vickie Vértiz

She gave us prompts, lines from her own poems, and we'd write one line at a time on colored construction paper with scented markers (grape, lime), then fold the paper over and pass it around to the next person. At the end, we each had a poem. They were mostly about tater tots, some about school, comic books, and divorce.

3. Hint fiction with Daniel Olivas

By now, we had a pretty core group -- Yumi, Nicky, Vickie, Daniel, Neela, plus Kenji Liu (who wrote about leaves vaporizing). We were getting better at coming up with things on the spot, less afraid of sharing with one another. Daniel read short fiction -- 25 words or less -- from an anthology he's published in. The stories were pretty ghostly or eerie, almost always with a twist. Start with a good title, he told us. Vicki & I had to go through some drafts; it was hard to get the whole rise and fall of a plot into a couple of lines. The group read stories about lynchings, divided families, and missions to Mars.

4. The kid who loved to write

The was one kid, maybe 12 or 13 or so, who did almost every workshop. He made a broadside with the publish booth next door, and then came to the little literary lounge to write about longing for winter and the meaning of love. Eventually, his mom came and got him. I loved that he wasn't shy at all, that he had things he really wanted to say.

6. Hood Sisters, RAC-LA, LA 4 Youth, Good Mexican Girl booths

I took a break from the Kaya/WritLarge booths to cruise through the square of puestos and see who else had come out amongst the community organizations, local merchants & artisans. I got vegan Mexican wedding cookies from Good Mexican Girl; talked to a young woman from LA 4 Youth about a rally coming up in front of City Hall calling for the reallocation of money from police/jails to community organizations; heard about Revolutionary Autonomous Communities Los Angeles' free distribution of fruit/veggie boxes every Sunday in MacArthur Park; got a look at the East Valley culture blog i am san fernando authored by April Aguirre of the feminist muralist collective Hood Sisters; and picked up an abalone bracelet for a dear friend's birthday present.

5. Slow songs with Dez Hope

Back at the Kaya/WritLarge booth, a local singer-songwriter, Dez Hope, came to talk about songwriting. I was getting sopas at the taco truck for part of it & when I got back, he was playing songs on his acoustic guitar. It was hard to hear over the high winds and the band performing on the main stage, so the five or six of us listening (including the kid who wrote about winter & love, who'd found his way back to the booth) all leaned in close. Dez played a cover of "We Belong Together" because we were in Ritchie Valens park and because the movie La Bamba had inspired him to become a musician. The song was so sweet and tender, and we all swayed to the notes, and it filled up that tiny space lined with carpets and chairs and hanging bookshelves and haikus on post-its, then swept over the drying grass of the vast park, ferried on by the wind.