Standing in front of the ‘new movies’ shelf at the local vid store, the serious writer wondered if watching flicks like “Last Day In Hell”, “Vikings vs. Aliens III” or “The Grand Rapids Sawdust Massacre” would help him understand plot and become a better writer or if they might short-circuit his already overwrought mental machinery.

After some deliberation, he finally settled on an indie called, somewhat obscurely, “Julia, Julienne, Jules And Their Incredibly Indelible Love Affair Between The Sheets Of A Greek Tavern In My Neighbourhood”.

This movie also ran in the local cinema, whose Art Deco exterior was modeled after the first Nanking movie house.

Entry for a contest at Metazen – Image to Text Conversion Experiment. Picture by Metazen – an online metafiction journal edited by Frank Hinton.

The serious writer looks back on a long and distinguished career as an herbologist. Her favourite bush grows in Central Park and is called Noah’s Ark by the residents because of the myriad of animals that it shelters. The serious writer has given a name to every leaf and branch of the Ark, and when autumn comes, her heart slowly withers, pondering decay as the shrub sheds its summer splendour and returns to the raw.
(published in elimae)

The serious writer lifts his ideas like limp lychees from anywhere and anyone. Anything and anyone crossing his path becomes material. He turns silly stuff into junk and junk into art. The serious writer will defeat his demons and crush them under his ferocious foot purely by the power of observation.

In good company the serious writer uses the cognomen  Watson. In bad company, he’s known as Professor Moriarty, and in haughty company, he appears as the cool icon of logical deduction, Mr Sherlock Holmes.

The serious writer hardly writes. When he does write, he uses a glass quill and fifteen different kinds of ink. He creates without getting his hands dirty, a God in his own house.

At night, the serious writer eats steak and smokes bamboo stalks. He washes the day down with a glass of scotch. His bed is a wet concern at the bottom of an iron lake where he tells himself lies, ambivalence-stricken, looking for true feeling, alone now, a ferruginous plant, watered by the people in his life.

(I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. See also my weekly blog entries at Virtual Writers, Inc. This is an excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” only. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 6, “Hearth”.)

As she walked through the entrance hall of her Chelsea appartement house, she glanced at herself in the mirror. This was an old movie trick, she realised, and one she cherished: the female lead, whose deeper motives would not become clear until much later in the story, needed to check in with herself, and the viewer needed to check in with her – not through one of those full-face-all-wrinkles-and-pores shots of the head, but instead by following her discreetly, as she, with the same degree of discreetness, glanced at herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw and she didn’t like it at once: a pale face looked at her framed by a black thing frazzled at the temples – this was her hair; the nose seemed to peek out of the dough-white mass like a periscope (perhaps there were little grey-uniformed men hidden behind it, who followed her around); the eyes, green marble-like eyes, were shadowed by too much mascara as if they were looking for an excuse not to shine. She held her head like a bird, slightly forward from the shoulders, at an odd angle, as if she were a bird threatened by extinction. Maybe she was. She felt intensely Napoleonic at this moment, and the mirror with its brown chiseled mahagony frame (what else!) and its glass, which had a foreboding of its coming blindness, underlined that sentiment from which it was only a tiny step towards Hestia’s secretly held, but strongly and boldly defended view that she might be the reincarnated counterdraft to Jane Austen. Jane Austen without the talent for writing, but with the soul of that most sinister sister of all women writers. That Austen had been sinister was the only rational conclusion that could be drawn from her novels: hadn’t she encouraged the females of her time to rebel against social injustice and relinquish a position that women had occupied for hundreds of years? Hestia saw herself as the keeper of the flame, the calm center of the household, the place to which the man, the hunter, could return when the elements in general, and his drive in particular, were beginning to overpower him. She viewed man as the crown of creation and herself as a willing helper and bearer of children, a heroine more like Goethe’s Lotte than Austen’s Lizzy or Emma. She moved on, past the historic magical mirror and, walking upstairs instead of taking the elevator, felt her barrenness constrict her like a tight, unadorned belt. She dreaded the emptiness of her appartement, and she wished she could stay home instead and await the arrival of her prince, no, her king, ready to bring him his slippers, take him by the hand, lead him to a set table and receive, in return, the praise and the adoration befitting a goddess of the hearth.

“It was all miserable: the weather, the health, the job, the relationship. everything seemed soggy and wet. I had  a cold. I couldn’t face one more day in the office or else. Nobody loved me or if they did, i had not met them yet.”

These were the first sentences of my 1957 novel “Misty Moods” for which I received 1000 Pounds since the editor, who had lost her man in the war, developed a crush on me when I entered her office waving my paragraph like the flag of an unknown, brave nation. But I could never get past the beginning … the 1960s rolled around, and throughout the decade, I had the most marvellous ideas where the story might go — never wrote them down, because I had so many ideas, you know. And I was busy building a writer’s life in Camden Town. Which included reading what I had already written (the famous paragraph that had brought me a contract) to big-eyed young women looking for artsy types between the pillows of this party or that and subsequently taking said women to bed for a night or for weeks, but never longer, because I was not going to be jailed between a marriage license and a mortgage. Like so many of us, hopeful ones, hopeless ones, poets and petty penmen, who worked as bartenders, librarians, substitute teachers, anything.

Forward arrow in time … at the end of that, I must say in hindsight, terrible period, I discovered, initially to my amazement, that I had not aged at all! When I looked in the mirror, my beard was full and black as it had always been, and my excesses had not left any trace around my eyes. My forehead was a little wrinkled from the continuous effort of thinking lasting thoughts, but these wrinkles I knew and they had been my trusty companions for many years. My body was trim and lean — only my spirit had put on weight over time.

I was looking for medical reasons at first but lacking the training (for anything, really, other than making it sound to others that I knew something that, in fact, I did not know), I got no further. Examination by specialists did not yield any new insights either — since I had not been a subject of interest to science before, no record of my state of health had been fixed, and science is nothing without record: it is, I must conclude, a human activity so dependent on fragile external memory and data as to be completely useless, at least when compared to the tangible power of spirit and the tender, but constant, pull of creativity that we feel with our whole being, not just mediated through tubes or borne away by bookishness, to rot on shelves.

So I found myself suddenly torn out of humanity because I would not age. And if I would not age, I could not fold my life up neatly near its end like old knickers, I could not die. And if I could not die, I could not look back at anything worth doing or at things undone and also worth doing in those last moments that we all anticipate unconsciously, all the time, awake or asleep. I had no longer a choice — short of suicide, my life might never end, so I had to give up nothingness and find something worth doing. This was only the beginning of my journey, the well from which my writing sprang like a yeasty fount.

(Published in Foundling Review.)