Archive for October, 2009
Happy Halloween!!
Below Ground
This little tale came from the legend that if a black cat walks across a grave during a full moon, the dead person will rise. Hope you enjoy. Pic by winterwillow89-photobucket
Below Ground
It has not been easy
you know….the wait.
We’d all been there too many times.
Waiting for the full moon…
waiting for the black cat…
Then it happened.
Barnabey, over there, plot 182
on that full moon in October
caught himself a black kitty,
that traipsed right across his goddamned
tombstone.
Barnabey hardly knew what to do.
Suddenly his arms worked
and his face muscles (well, what was left of them)
and he took a breath, he sneezed,
all that fifty year dust.
We all sent him messages, “GET UP!”
“GET OUT!”
He rolled over, which wasn’t easy in a coffin,
but Barnabey was a skinny guy,
and he pushed up with his back
and his skinny ass
busting through the rotted wood, and
the worm-worked soil.
It was a quite fresh and pleasant.
Scared the shit out of the cat!
“Now what?” he said.
God, he was so stupid.
Then the cat ran, ran, over more graves.
A regular celebration. Many re-births, many awakenings.
What a sight it was. Not for the faint of heart.
Mine was missed, yet again,
yet I was the loudest.
All the others got to rise up…
some dead only a year or two,
like that screwball drunk who killed
three people last year with his car…
he got up…he dug himself out.
Not me, dead for a century….waiting
for the precise conditions…
The moonlight still glowed.
“What do we do?” they were all saying, stupid idiots.
“What do we do?”
“Go get that fucking cat for me!” I kept screaming.
Then I waited…
Creepy Art by Louise Bourgeois
Parisian contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois. What a piece of work she is?
Photo of Louise: Maplethorpe Gallery
silly damned thing anyhow
A creepy poem by Charles Bukowski….
we tried to hide it in the house so that the
neighbors wouldn’t see.
it was difficult, sometimes we both had to
be gone at once and when we returned
there would be excrete and urine all
about.
it wouldn’t toilet train
but it had the bluest eyes you ever
saw
and it ate everything we did
and we often watched tv together.
one evening we came home and it was
gone.
there was blood on the floor,
there was a trail of blood.
I followed it outside and into the garden
and there in the brush it was,
mutilated.
there was a sign hung about its severed
throat:
“we don’t want things like this in our
neighborhood.”
I walked to the garage for a shovel.
I told my wife, “don’t come out here.”
then I walked back with the shovel and
began digging.
I sensed
the faces watching me from behind
drawn blinds.
they had their neighborhood back,
a nice quiet neighborhood with green
lawns, palm trees, circular driveways, children,
churches, a supermarket, etc.
I dug into the earth.
The Golden Suicides: the film
So it looks like it is a go. Just found this today…
Milk director Gus Van Sant will team up with Bret Easton Ellis to form their own non-literal suicide pact to write the screenplay adaptation of the Vanity Fair article The Golden Suicides by Nancy Jo Sales, which has been acquired by Palm Star Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams and K5 Film.
The Golden Suicides, for those who aren’t familiar, is the story about Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, a couple who both committed suicide in July of 2007, within one week of each other. Duncan was a blogger and video game designer, Blake an up and coming digital artist who had done the dream sequences for the movie Punch Drunk Love. The Wit Continuum will keep following up with any progress on this film: searching for film updates, casting, and release date projections. Right now it appears that what I had blogged before as the “talks” of this being written into a screenplay are now officially in the writing stages. Let’s hope these two have the chops to make it Duncanology worthy.
Links: Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis Team to Write Suicide Film
http://screencrave.com/2009-10-14/gus-van-sant-pens-the-golden-suicides/
Born on October 26, 1966
Talented video game designer, blogger, filmmaker, critic.
Write-on….where-ever you are…
Halloween Art
Artwork: Las Catrinas from Sokalife.com How would you like these creepies in your back yard? Maybe if she shared a smoke…
Vampires…oh, my…
Thought I’d get a jump on Halloween week with curious and creepy artwork called Vampmob by illustrator Richard Wilkinson. He has quite a nice collection he’s done for books and publications. View more of his work here.
“He was not sure what he had been looking for. He only knew that he had not found it, although there were moments, in the high ground, in the crags and waterfalls, when he was certain that whatever he needed was just around the corner: behing a jut of granite, or in the nearest pine wood.”
– from The Monarch of the Glen
a short story from the collection Fragile Things
by Neil Gaiman
Life in Utopia…or dystopia…
So, where is your mind at? Will we ever be heading for a utopian society? If we are, what in the unfathomable depths of your mind do you think it would be like?
The difference between a utopia and a dystopia bring forth complete opposites. Yet, in our literature we see the idea presented on basic principles of utopia, which there on the page actually creates a dystopia. Utopia ia an ideal world, a perfect political state, a blissful way of life. Dare we wish it? All people equal, all cared for, regardless of race, religion, ideology (perhaps we’d all have the same), sexual preferences, moral values. Plato’s Republic was the first utopian work of literature. Thomas More wrote Utopia
in 1516.
Samuel Butler was another literary utopia writer with a work titled strangely, Erewhon. Published in 1872 this title is an anagram of the word “nowhere.”
Utopia literally means “a good place.”
In contrast, dystopia means “a bad place.” It is the exact opposite of utopia and this unpleasantness is brought forth in one of my high school English classic studies, the imaginary world of George Orwell’s 1984. We studied it more as a communistic parallelism.
But a dystopian favorite has to be Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which shows that utopia is possible…
but at what price?
More blogging…
More blogging…
The Wit Continuum is stretching her wings a bit and has opened a new blog over at blogspot for a change. Love the different text colors you can use (sorry WP!) This blog is dedicated to my study of fairy tales and fiction and is called Red,Snow, and Sleep. Visit when you get a chance, and I need followers!
Still working away on my own collection of fairy tale re-writes. Almost complete….just in time for National Novel Writing Month. Yes, Mercedes (hey baby lets write a novel together), I’m getting my fingers ready to type…I missed it last year, but in February I joined BIAM-Book In A Month Club and wrote a first draft of Red, Snow, and Sleep, my own fairy tale novel (which my new blog is named after). I had a marvelous time, met some cool people and wrote away. Ended up with 55,ooo words or so (in 28 days no less!). It still needs a total re-write, but it is there, complete, in my file and it feels damn good.
And so…next week is Halloween week! My kick off is on Sunday with creepy, enticing, hauntingly heartless posts, hoping to cheer the spooky heart in all of you…if you have one…a spooky heart that is…I’m sure you all have a heart, uh, you know what I mean. Spent some time and have some posts scheduled for next week already. I love scheduling ahead. Mmmmm…can’t seem to do that on Blogger….WordPress and Blogger each have their perks it seems. Hope you enjoy next week’s posts, and Halloween, of course, this Wit’s favorite time of year. Right around the corner.
Personal note: Teens are going as a bat (bat Skelanimal hoodie with makeup) and Werewolf (Team Jacob hoodie that says: Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? She’ll wear a werewolf mask and wolf paw gloves. I’ll be the human slave driving around a whole pack of wolves and vampire Vulturi from Twilight when all their friends arrive! Can’t wait!)
I leave you with a writing ‘wit’-icism: Re-writing takes time, patience, dedication, discipline, sleepless night….a bottle of wine (or two)…basically re-writing sucks! (except for the wine, of course…)
Peace…
“Wit”icism of the Week
Simple post today…
Usually I find that when someone says “to make a long story short”, they’ve been numbing your brain with their story for over an hour. (Brain cell pulverization applies here…)
Peace…and nice weekend to all…
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge…
The more I look into fairy tales…the more I love. I’m currently working on my book of fairy-tales re-told, but here’s a piece on the Little Red Riding Hood traditions from The Annotated Brothers Grimm by Maria Tatar:
“ The French and German titles for the story–”Le petit chaperon rouge” and “Rotkappchen –suggest caps rather than hoods. Psychoanalytic critics have made much of the color red, equating it with sin, passion, blood, sexuality and thereby suggesting a certain complicity on the part of Red Riding Hood in the symbolic seduction enacted in the tale. But these views have been rebutted by folklorists and historians, who point out that the color red was first introduced in Perrault’s literary version of the tale and that it can have political as well as moral associations. These days, a girl wearing red produces a nearly automatic association to the story, and advertisers ceaselessly exploit that allusion as they turn Little Red Riding Hood from a childish innocent into a red-hot femme fatale.”
Lil Red Riding Hood by Karri Klawiter www.redbubble.com
Nip Tuck Tonight…
Yes, I cannot wait for the new season tonight on FX…cheesy, I know. But those nice male bare butts, sexual situations, and some “should be on HBO” language keeps me interested on boring nights. Mr. Continuum left the audience last season when a woman lobbed off her breast with an electric meat cutter in our fair doctors’ reception room. Botox injected into a baby’s lips for modeling was another tactless teaser with questionable moral value. But this is what we tune in for, right?
When last we left our favorite plastic surgeons, Christian Troy, the “never a dry dick” character, had just married his long time female employee/friend, settling for her former lesbian self because he was diagnosed with cancer and had 6 months, give or take, to live. She was someone who he could trust to get him through, plus, she’s a nurse so his egotistic self was assured the best care possible. The last episode, unexpected yet expected, because, really, can they kill the main guy off?–featured Troy finding out from his doctor that his files had been mixed up–he was not dying, and his cancer was completely gone.
Can’t wait for the repercussions of this marriage dilemma. Did I say you could call me cheesy????????
A Roman a Clef…
Ah, now here’s a woman. The mistress of the composer, Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, wrote under the pen name Daniel Stern, a roman a clef, in French it means ‘a novel with a key’, called Nelida. A roman a clef is a novel in which the characters and events of the story represent actual people and events, though often exaggerated. Marie wrote 
about her life with Franz, which was tainted with numerous infidelities on his part. Franz was quite a looker in the day, a real Musical “Idol” much like what we have today. He had his female fans to cope with I’m sure. Marie bore him two children before finally leaving him.
Her book has been translated from the French by Lynn Hoggard. The name “Nelida” is an anagram of “Daniel.” Bernadette Peters played Marie in the film, Impromptu.
To be nobody but yourself…
“To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
—-love this quote from the so-totally cute and cool, e.e. cummings
Brain Candy – Word Play
Found a cute list of Dumb Questions at www.corsinet.com. Here are some I especially liked:
Sexual harassment at work – is it a problem for the self-employed? –Virginia Wood
After they make styrofoam, what do they ship it in? –Steven Wright {love SW, saw him live years ago!!}
Since Americans throw rice at weddings, do Asians throw hamburgers?
Are female moths called myths?
Since there’s a speed of light, and a speed of sound, is there a speed of smell? {I estimate this as about 10-15 seconds}
Are part-time band leaders semi-conductors?
Are there any unguided missiles?
Was the pole vault accidentally discovered by a clumsy javelin thrower?
Are you telling the truth if you lie in bed?
Can a stupid person be a smart-ass?
Can fat people go skinny-dipping?
What do people in China call their good plates?
What do they call a French kiss in France?
What do you say if you’re talking to God, and he sneezes?
What happens if you get scared half to death,…twice? –Steven Wright
And my favorite:
Crime doesn’t pay…does that mean my job is a crime?
Art That Looks Back at You
Surreal bronze eyes double as park benches in Lafayette Square, New Orleans. by Louise Bourgeois
Turning-A-Blind-Eye from Studio8e9.com
Eye Candy Sculpture by Rosanne Palumbo
Here’s to looking at you, my dears…
Culture 101
“Have you ever read a great novel, or listened to a great symphony, or stood in front of a great work of art, and felt–absolutely nothing? You try to open yourself to the text, the music, the painting, but you have no power to respond. Nothing moves you. You are turned to stone. You feel guilty. You blame yourself, but you also wonder if maybe there’s nothing there, and that people only pretend to enjoy…because they get good marks in Culture 101 for doing so.” —Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures
________________________
Personally I had this experience a few years back in NY in a nice gallery in Soho. My friends were raving over these ridiculous sculptures that were so ugly I felt like vomiting. I was thinking: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I see the beauty here? Am I the stupid one…or are they? I politely excused myself, caught a nice looking cup of coffee and met up with them later. They were still chatting about the artwork, and I came to realize: They were faking it! When I found this piece in the book The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga (which should be on my favorite book list) I jotted it down, because it said exactly what I felt that day.
(By the way, this was not the gallery we were in: those two drab whores are not my friends, and I’m not the pudgy queen-want-a-be in the blue dress. Or am I?– Love those shoes!)
Iconic and Controversial
One of the most controversial women of the century, essayist, novelist, and philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir has changed millions of women’s lives, awakening us all to the mystique of being a woman by authoring her most famous work The Second Sex. Though Simone, herself, was uninterested in being a mother, she had become known as “the mother to us all.”
She “was the vanguard of French intellectual life for nearly forty years,” and became notoriously “the most public sinner in all of France.” Her life-long unmarried relationship with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was the source of this. “After we had decided what our relationship was to be, we were both embarrassed that we had even briefly considered the most bourgeois of institutions, marriage, to be the answer,” Beauvoir recalled. Ah, yet another marriage without papers.
Beauvoir and Sartre were known as “the writing couple” who were together nearly every day, at work at separate desks or cafe tables…
Together they participated in rallies, visited heads of state on almost every continent, exchanging ideas with the greatest artists and writers of their era.
Simone has become the ultimate feminist icon, always “deeply committed to her work yet always ready to put Sartre’s first.” She had other love affairs on the side, both male and female, to which much criticism has been raised, and one longer ill-fated relationship with American writer Nelson Algren, to whom she wrote many love letters. She always insisted that their relationship would go no further, for her committment to Sartre and his intellect was undeniable, even though her affair with Algren was physically satisfying.
I had always thought of Simone de Beauvoir as this great, scary woman, independent of men, though not a hater of men (as some feminists have become), but one who sincerely did not need a man. Yet, in reading her biography, I find that most of her financial “freedom” came out of Sartre’s open pocketbook. Curious…isn’t it. For a most admired feminist icon, she was surrounded by many men, the key to which, I feel, was their respect for her as an equal of intellect, and a contemporary in philosophic thought with all life matters.
