Scott Rettberg

Communitizing Electronic Literature

Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.2 (Spring 2009) has been published. The issue includes a cluster of articles on finishing digital humanities projects, edited by Matt Kirschenbaum, a cluster of articles on data mining, edited by Mark Olsen, three articles including my piece “Communitizing Electronic Literature“, and a review by Johanna Drucker of Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

“Communitizing Electronic Literature” is a revised and expanded version of the talk I gave at the ELO’s 2008 Visionary Landscapes Conference. In it, I try to lay out what I think are the principle issues confronting the field of electronic literature today, and to establish what I think is at stake within it. In placing the article with Digital Humanities Quarterly I am implicitly arguing that the creative and critical practices of electronic literature are a vital part of the field of digital humanities. A version of the digital humanities focused exclusively on applying digital technologies to the literary and historical archives of the past, at the expense of any sustained attention to the digital cultural production of the present is a version of the digital humanities with no future and in effect no imagination.

Abstract

Electronic literature is an important evolving field of artistic practice and literary study. It is a sector of digital humanities focused specifically on born-digital literary artifacts, rather than on using the computer and the network to redistribute, analyze, or recontextualize artifacts of print culture. Works of electronic literature appeal to configurative reading practices. The field of electronic literature is based on a gift economy and developing a network-based literary culture built on the collaborative practices of a globally distributed community of artists, writers, and scholars. This article situates the development of the field of electronic literature within academe, some of the institutional challenges currently confronting the field, and its potential for further development.

The Unknown Reading at Columbia College, Sept 25, 2008

Reading of The Unknown at Columbia College, Chicago, Sept 25, 2008 from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Donna Leishman at UiB Nov. 5th

The University of Bergen Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies Digital Culture Research Group
is pleased to welcome guest lecturer Donna Leishman.

Wednesday, November 5th, 14:15-16:00, HF-bygget 265

Lecture open to the public: “Dissonance in Multi-Semiotic Landscapes”

Dr. Donna Leishman is Course Leader BA (Hons) Illustration and Deputy Head of Media Arts & Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland. Her work combines critical writing and practice-led research in digital art with a particular interest in the intersection of narrative with internet based interactivity. Themes in her research include developing and exploring the role of the participant in these exchanges and developing a canon of practice that questions standard paradigms of behaviour. Her works of interactive animated narrative including “RedRidingHood” and “The Possession of Christian Shaw” can be explored at www.6amhoover.com.

David Wallace

David Foster Wallace killed himself on Sept. 12th, 2008. I wrote a couple of short texts in response to his death — he was my teacher when I was a master’s student at Illinois State University, and he will always be an important figure in the landscape of my life. I’ll post both texts here, in reverse order. I wrote the first piece here a couple of weeks back for his memorial service at ISU, which occurred yesterday. It is included in a collection of remembrances that was bound and given to his parents. The second piece I wrote the night after I heard about his death. It is a bit rawer, darker, and perhaps in some ways angrier than than the one I wrote for his memorial. I posted that piece on Grand Text Auto, and a redacted version was also posted on the McSweeney’s website. It has been a strange process watching the world react to his death (in some ways getting to know him better through the fragments of his life shared by others, in other ways just shocked at the way his postmortem memory has taken on a kind of rock-star hagiography). I have thought about him, his life, his writing, and his end very often since.

So long, David

The first time I met David Wallace, about a week after I started in the MA program at ISU in 1993, I told him that I was excited about working with him. I told him that about a month earlier, I had picked up a copy of The Broom of the System at a used book store in Madison, where I was living at the time, read it twice from cover to cover and thought it was just about the smartest, most fun and engaging book I had read in years. He looked a little pained, made some sort of one-handed adjustment to his bandanna, and told me that I should never tell a writer I had bought his book used. He also said that he had written that book a long time ago, when he was very young, and that he had very mixed feelings about it — it was nothing like the kind of stuff he was writing now. I remember that he was on his way out the door, and he was juggling a tennis racket in one hand as we talked.

The first writing workshop I took with David met the first day of class in one of those awful interior classrooms in Stevenson Hall, a kind of musty box with no natural light and the hum of old-style fluorescents overhead. David hated those lights. The first assignment he gave us was to bring lamps to the next session of the class. When the next week came around, about a dozen students showed up carrying lamps, ranging from clip-on desktop models to things with ceramic bases and flowery shades that looked like they had been plucked from a 1970s parents’ basement. There were not enough plugs in the room, and we had to go to ridiculous extremes to balance the lamps on the slanted surface of the writing desks, so at some point David concluded there was no option but to convene the next class in the house he was renting. The rest of the workshop meetings, both that semester and during the following year took place in his living room. The first meeting he held in his house I remember being fascinated and troubled by the fact that on his bathroom wall he had thumb-tacked up a) a junior tennis circuit tournament chart and b) the wrapper for an Adult Depends undergarment. Being a bit of a smart-ass, when I emerged from the bathroom, I asked whether he was having any incontinence issues. He looked momentarily baffled, then slightly embarrassed, and explained it was just for something he was writing, that it was sort of like research.

I knew David from 1993-1995. We didn’t really stay in touch after I graduated. But I got to know him pretty well during that time. He was my thesis adviser and he taught me a great deal about writing fiction. I mention the fact that he had the grad workshops meet in his home because that’s sort of how he was in a general sense. He let you in his living room. Though teaching creative writing was by no stretch of the imagination anywhere near as important to him as were the thousands and thousands of words of Infinite Jest that he was writing and revising each and every day (his output during this period was insanely prolific), he was nevertheless a great teacher. He taught you to care about your writing on a sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word, comma-by-comma basis. He honestly thought that the project of the novelist was possibly the most important work he could conceive (and that with the job came a kind of terrible responsibility to humanity). Though he always emphasized the fact that he doubted most of us students would ever actually become writers (he suggested we not even begin to think of ourselves as writers until we had written at least fifty stories), he was universally respectful of any attempt to write a story that any writer took seriously. He himself wrote as if his life depended on it, and it probably did. He thought that writing was a kind of cure for loneliness, or at least that it could serve to make a person feel momentarily less alone, more understood.

I probably still haven’t written fifty stories, but I’ve written a few things in the years since I was one of Wallace’s students. Like most of his students I know, I’ll always feel a little like I’m living in his shadow. It is and will always be impossible to measure up to his example. I think of him nearly every time I write. I am grateful for all that I learned from him.

David’s death hit me like a freight train. As a reader, of course, I feel a deep loss. But also, selfishly, I had always thought that I would have a chance to meet David again, to sit down with him and talk, to reunite. I can only imagine what those closest to him, his parents, his sister, and his wife, have suffered in this time, and there is no sufficient way for me to express my sympathies.

By chance, Robert Coover happened to be in town the morning when we heard the news about David. Coover knew David, liked him, respected his work, and had invited him to come to visit Brown. Coover was deeply shaken by the news, distracted enough that he missed his plane from Bergen to London while we traded stories about David, and so we ended up spending the day together with my wife and daughters. It was a kind of Indian summer day in Norway with marvelous, sparkling light, everything around us shining, vibrant, and green. As I watched one great American novelist playing with my girls, happy in the autumn of his years, I couldn’t help but think about another, and all those books he would have written in his forties, his fifties, his sixties, and his seventies. All the joys he might have known. He was robbed, and so were we all. Yet if there is one thing you can say about David, it is that he did not waste the life he lived. He is present in the lives of his students, his readers, his friends, and his family. His works and his life still mean a great deal to the world, and he always will.

* * *

David Foster Wallace was a great teacher, in his own particular way, and he was a gifted writer who maybe got a little hung up on things, on interiority, on the prison of his own consciousness. He could write the shit out of you. He feared and was fascinated by the twisted. He knew grammar and could speak it very well. He knew theory and didn’t want you to try and teach it to him. He was so fucking postmodern that he grew sick of contemplating his own existence. He was not moderate. He wrote long and loved footnotes but hated the fact that he felt compelled to use them. He loathed that he loathed. He told tasteless jokes about death. He managed to write a monument and then he never could quite escape its shadow. He was a genius. He used smilely faces for grades. He was greasy. He would sweat. You would smell him in the room. He was conscious of his own body odor. He would scratch at the side of his face absent-mindedly but not absent of mind, if that makes sense. He would ask you if things made sense in a way that was both sincere and dismissive. The questions primarily rhetorical. He had a great desire to be a good human being. He had acne and feared it. He was athletic. He would see you and wonder if you had once played tennis with him. He had a very intense stare, you could say piercing but that wouldn’t be quite right, it didn’t pierce, it did something else. It worked in conflict with his body language. He loved writing and was humiliated by it. He was sympathetic to any creature in pain and sympathetic to anyone who caused pain. You need to wonder if he might have been better off if he had stayed on drugs. He was large and filled a room with language. He was complex and verbose and often right. He made errors. His eyes were evasive but he would work his way to telling you what mattered. He feared middle age and deterioration. He was a man of his time and he limited it. He feared the image. He loved the idea of celebrity in reclusion. Pynchon, DeLillo, Dostoevsky. He drank those carb milkshakes that bodybuilders drink. He read self help books in order to both help himself and to see how contrived and pathetic and self-indulgent the American mind had become. He confronted each of his addictions, one at a time. He never really learned how to dress himself properly. He sometimes wished he had become a philosopher instead. He studied sentences. He edited mercilessly, but found the text grew longer with each incision, fresh trees sprouting from every wound. He hated fluorescent light, and the buzz of technology. He loved his dog. He was a precocious child, and lonely. Humanity is a difficult subject, a dying life form. He told a string of jokes about the Branch Davidians. He wanted to make you laugh and cry at the same time. He thought that was the problem, that we could no longer get past our by-now-ingrained habits of looking at our own situations from a raptor’s-eye-view of irony, of post-deconstructive psychoanalytic abstraction, from a post which would make everything cool to the touch, that it had become impossible to feel. The need to be cool. The need to be cool consuming and leading to the failure of the heart. The heart has become impossible. The need to disconnect the brain from the heart. The dread. The sound of the tapping keys, the leaky faucet tapping, the reader, the viewer. The fear of the red pen. The jailer. The purpose of the novel to disturb and entertain. The impossibility of the subject. He wished he had chosen to become a mathematician, a physicist. He was devoted to the word and lived within the claustrophobic walls of its temple. He tried to deconstruct manhood. He was trying to explain something in way that even you could understand it. He could not explain. You could not understand. This incredible awkwardness. He feared himself, reclining by a pool, dripping with sweat, completely satisfied and empty. The reductive cockroach, the expansionist lobster. The most complicated problem you could throw at him. Eating a corn dog at the state fair. Interviewing porn stars with an awkward erection. Destroying the television because you are addicted to it. Never really leaving home. He wanted to save something. He thought that life was too short, or ought to be. The desire to find a humorous way to get to something real. The desire to extend. The understanding of the psyche of the man facing the firing squad, the desire to dwell on it. The impossibility of the word love. The impossibility of ending. The metaphor of getting into the ring to fight. The desire to remove oneself from the arena. The trouble with closure. Finding a voice. Finding a note. The decision of whether or not to leave. Recognizing that voice is a sentimentality. The sense of failure. Finally just tired. Leaving a tragedy. Did he think to erase his hard drive? Probably not, you poor bastard. Given the possibility of forensics. Burning the manuscript. Throwing the pages into the fire. The eventual film. The desert. The spider, the variety of it. Diseases that eat the flesh. This move across the dark room, this groping with alien fingers. What one does after being bitten by a brown recluse. Walking in the desert. Remembering the clouds. A ligature. Suspension. Constriction. The most common method after firearms. Read the footnotes. Have you read it, and yet you still don’t get it? The very long joke. The partial weight of the body. The sense of an ending. The conditions related to the event. The argument at hand. The desire to leave a little mess for pain but not so much as to trouble your love. Your sense of love. The awareness that your body will likely shit itself. The contemplation of that shit as you tender the cord. The awareness that you are loved and yet not able to de-abstract it. The occasion an excuse. But deep. You loathe the very idea of the sublime and you want to express it. The rise and the leap. You cannot ultimately communicate. See the notes. Finding the other and still knot. You hear yourself gag and you smell everything as your nostrils flare. Time is relentless and it will not slow for you now. Agency was had. A certain type of determination. A private novel on a machine of one’s own. No intentional fallacy. Flee from me. Reaching for the cord. To pull it away. To scratch at it. The survival instinct. Merciless. Cruel. Inevitable. Brave. Cowardly. Wanting. Full stop.

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe: UiB September 11-13th

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

2) To provide a forum for European authors of electronic literature to share, demonstrate, read, or perform their work.

3) To discuss and explore the foundation of a European research network focused on electronic literature, funding opportunities for such a network, and network activities.

The seminar will last three days and will include about 20-30 participants. The day-long meetings during the first two days will consist of short presentations of papers in panel format. Additionally, there will be performances, readings, and demonstrations of electronic literature in the evenings. The third day of the conference will be dedicated to proposing and discussing the formal establishment of a research network on electronic literature in Europe. Paper presentations should be in English. Presentation and performances of works can be made in English or in the native language of the presenter.

Registration for the seminar is free. There may be a fee for a conference dinner only. There will be no simultaneous sessions, so the number of presentation slots available will be limited, but researchers not selected to present are also free to attend. Both electronic literature authors and researchers are encouraged to submit proposals.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Any paper topic related to the seminar theme is welcome. Some subjects might include:

- Close readings of specific works of electronic literature.
- Ontologies and definitions of e-lit forms.
- National or language-group histories (or pre-histories) of e-lit.
- Procedural literacy and electronic literature.
- Relations between e-lit and other literary and artistic forms and movements.
- Issues involved in translating electronic literature.
- Issues involved in recording, archiving, and preserving e-lit.
- Electronic literature in cultural contexts.
- Pedagogy and approaches to teaching e-lit.
- Proposals for research network activities (e.g. archiving projects, publications, establishing a journal, pedagogical resources, etc.).

Presentations of papers should last no longer than 20 minutes.

Researchers should send an abstract of approximately 500 words before June 20th to elit.in.europe@gmail.com

CALL FOR WORKS

Authors wishing to present works of electronic literature should submit the following before June 20th:

1) A 500 word abstract describing the work, how the author intends to present it, and any technical requirements and how long it will take to present your work (max 30 minutes). The title of the work and all authors should be clearly identified. The abstract should be sent to elit.in.europe@gmail.com

2) If the work is published online, the URL at which it is located should be included in the abstract.

3) If the work is a non-web application, is published in other media than the web, or is performance-dependent, three copies of a CD-ROM or DVD including the work or video documentation of the work should be sent before June 20th to:

Scott Rettberg, Associate Professor
Literary, Linguistic, and Aesthetic Studies (LLE)
The University of Bergen
Postbox 7805
5020 Bergen
Norway

What is Electronic Literature?

The term refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:

* Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web
* Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms
* Computer art installations that have literary aspects
* Interactive fiction
* Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs
* Poems and stories that are generated by computers
* Computer-enabled combinatory literary forms
* Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work
* Literary performances that use the computer or network to develop new ways of writing

CALENDAR

The deadline for abstracts and works is June 20th. A response will be given by July 25th. Final papers must be submitted by September 1st for online proceedingss that will be published after the seminar. A website with further information will be published later this summer.

REVIEW COMMITTEE

Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen
Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen
Phillippe Bootz, Paris 8 University
Maria Engberg, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Talan Memmott, Blekinge Institute of Techonology
Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä
Susana Tosca, IT University of Copenhagen

CONTACT INFO

Submission of abstracts and proposals should go to: elit.in.europe@gmail.com. Questions about the seminar should be directed to Scott Rettberg: scott(at)retts.net.

–
Apologies for cross-posting. Please distribute to anyone you think will be interested in attending.

Jessica’s first new media artwork

Jessica’s first new media artwork, originally uploaded by srett.

Shortly after he received the birth announcement, my friend the digital poet Jason Nelson made Jessica’s first new media artwork. Even better, when I showed it to her she stopped crying.

Jessica Ann Rettberg

Closeup of Jessica, originally uploaded by srett.

Saturday April 19th at 11:40AM in Bergen, Norway, Jill gave birth to Jessica Ann Rettberg. Our daughter weighed 8 pounds, was 50 centimeters long, and is 100% healthy and beautiful.

Lørdag 19.april kl11:40 fikk Jill og jeg en datter: Jessica Ann Rettberg. Hun veide 3655g, var 50 centimeter lang, og det står bra til med mor og barn.

Major League Lifestyle Improvement

Today I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, which has a much nicer backend interface and some smart improvements (though I can’t seem to get the media uploader to work). In the process I also found out my previous theme had somehow been spam-hacked, which explains the new look-in-progress. But the major technological upgrade of the day was my subscription to MLB.TV. We have a DV cable to put the stream through to the TV. At anything over 400K, the image stream is too jerky on my connection, but at 400K, it is a lot like like watching baseball used to be when I was a kid and broadcast television involved rabbit ear manipulation. Still, you can’t beat being able to watch the Cubs live from Norway. Great game, the Cubs beat the Phillies 6-5 in the 10th inning. Well worth $20 a month.

Fibreculture Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture Issue

Issue 11 of the online journal Fibreculture is now out. The journal features a collection of essays from the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture conference, including my essay “Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature“, as well as eleven other notable essays from the conference. Among the highlights: Axel Bruns on Produsage, Jim Bizzocchi on African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce on the Gendered Poetics of Space in computer games, Jaako Suominen on Retrogaming and more.

Frequency: Said (tasteful)

SAID (tasteful)

said no way

Maggie discussed her plans for a green burial with her father. This might have been a bad idea. He insisted that she would outlive him, to begin with, that this was just a passing thing and that she would outlive it, first thing. And second, he didn’t think this thing sounded tasteful at all. Her mother’s funeral had been done the normal American way, and that was how it should have been, wasn’t it? Then he was crying. Her sister was the executor, so it didn’t really matter. She just wanted to prepare him.

said way out there man

While he was as big a fan of fireworks displays as any other American, Roger thought that rolling big WWII artillery guns out into village squares and firing charges from them to celebrate the fourth of July was pushing the boundaries of what could be considered tasteful, particularly during wartime. Sure, it gave the local VFW octogenarians something to do, but you couldn’t help but wonder how it made the mothers of all those kids blown up by IEDs feel to see those guns blasting away in their front yard, not to mention the amputees just back home with regrets.

said what do you want

Jenny and Dave got into a debate over whether or not the army’s current recruiting campaign was tasteful. It bothered Jenny that the ads made it seem like joining the army was a kind of extreme sport, with lots of glamor and excitement but little danger. She wondered why they never showed flag-draped coffins or heroic amputees. And for some reason she found the idea that they were giving away video games in high schools particularly repellent. Dave was of the opinion that you can’t pass moral judgment on advertising, the sole purpose of which is to sell a product, or in this case, a patriotic career. Recruiters aren’t paid to give youngsters a well-balanced view of a life in the military. They are paid to recruit.

said what to my mother

Dave has his charms but tasteful storytelling isn’t necessarily one of them. The first time he was over at Jenny’s mother house, he was behaving like a perfect gentleman, talking to her mother about Ireland, until Jenny left the room to make coffee. When she returned, he had somehow shifted the topic of conversation to zoophilia, some crude anecdote about a legendary love affair between a young man and a dolphin off the coast of Galway. Her mother’s face was blanched and Jenny was tempted to pour a cup of hot coffee into Dave’s lap.

said who are you

If he had his way, Johnnie’s funeral ceremony itself would be a tasteful, subdued, and minimalist affair. There would be several moments of silence and many of the women from his past would be there, dressed in black, shedding tears at his glossy portrait while some ambient Brian Eno shit played over the sound system. No religion. Few words would be said as the pallbearers loaded his urn of ashes into a rocket and blasted it into the night sky. The party afterwards would however be epic, bacchanal, an American version of one of those Roman-style orgiastic festivities with pigs on spits, platters of exotic fruit, fine wines served from ornate golden pitchers, jugglers, fire-eaters, face-painting, sexual entertainers, and punk rock. The people he loved and freaks of all kind dancing all through the night.

said do me another man

Charlie loved to take a drink at the top of a skyscraper. He was a sucker for any bar over forty stories high. The top of John Hancock in Chicago was a tasteful place to begin his last weekend with Helen. He arrived early and was halfway through his second glass of fifteen-year-old Macallan when the maitre d’ ushered her into the room.

said what up

What Johnnie loves most about New York is the rush and noise of Times Square, its cacophony and blur, its endless ability to distract, its lack of tasteful pretension. More than once he has wandered there, bombed out of his skull on something or another, and leaned back his head to howl into the night.

said you are the man

Though he’s not a churchgoing man or a believer in much other than what he sees with his eyes or otherwise rockets through his head, as he makes his way across the West, Johnnie praises whatever tasteful god or alien species or random forces may have felt fit to form landscapes so strange and sublime, places that he, driving, endlessly, alone, can begin to understand himself.

said the point is what you like

Tasteful assignations are not really Johnnie’s thing, and selectivity is not his strong suit. While it would be unfair to say that he will have sex with just about anything that moves, the fact that he had random hookups with three different women on three separate late night occasions in three public laundromats in three states during the course of one cross-country journey might be offered as evidence of a certain kind. Something about the vibrations of those industrial dryers aroused and comforted him.

said too much

Helen dated around a little at Google, but she had a hard time finding tasteful suitors among the engineers. She had one date with a multimillionaire programmer who let her wait twenty minutes in his living room while he sat in front of his thirty-seven inch plasma and finished wasting his buddies in some online first person shooter, “wielding” what he called his “BMFG.” He actually expected her to enjoy watching that. While the Internet might be responsible for many new forms of social networks, it had done little to advance the type of social graces to which Helen had been accustomed.

Frequency: Can (sending)

CAN (sending)

can you tell me why

Maggie never had children, but in this dream, she is standing on a white sand dune, and her daughter is running in the sand, running away from her. They are both barefoot and the sun is warm on her skin, the sky magically blue, painted with striated clouds. The child is running away from her but she is calm, even content, watching this life that came from her, reveling in the energy of her youth, sprinting away with the exuberance of one who has only just learned how to run. Maggie wakes in a sweat, wondering just what message she is sending herself.

can you just end it

For all of the intentional dissolution that characterizes his existence, Johnnie is not immune to the charms of stillness, to the appeal of solitude, an easy moment alone. Sunday morning, in a quiet café in Minneapolis, after a rough night of partying with some people he met on Craig’s List, whose lumpy stained couch he had surfed onto the night before, Johnnie is listening to an old man play soft jazz, an instrumental version of “A Wonderful World.” Johnnie feels himself breathing, the music is sending him somewhere. He’s all alone, drinking coffee, and he feels just fine with his place in the world.

can you not water it down

After he had sex with Helen, Johnnie felt momentarily victorious. He had a Leonardo DiCaprio King of the World moment and considered sending his older brother an email detailing the specific choreography of the act, but realized the ramifications that such an act of targeted betrayal might entail, the accentuated unpleasantness of future Thanksgivings, and so on, and decided to keep his counsel for the time instead.

can you make me well again

Charlie was in Rome for a week on business, sending Anna off with her sister for a spa weekend in Sedona. There were aromatherapy massages and a healing tour with a mystic shaman. It was a transcendent place and even if the chanting was hokey, Anna felt like it actually helped for a time, though when the plane landed back it in Philadelphia, it was like the spiders came crawling back in again.

can most of us live

Maggie was feeling more and more tired earlier and earlier at night, and she made a point of watching the sunset every night. During the day she spent time tying up loose ends and sending letters to old friends. She rarely mentioned the disease, preferring instead to recall shared times and memories, and in some cases to apologize for things she had done. She wrote up an old friend she had been forced to lay off when the company was making cutbacks, for instance, whom she had not seen since. She wrote a professor whose classes she remembered had inspired her, a cousin she had fallen out with. At a certain point she wondered whether she should restrict her correspondence to the living, whether it might be permissible to also write some letters to the dead.

can they get what we want

Kent talked Pete into meeting at a minor-league baseball game rather than at the bowling alley, for a change. The word is that the East Coast money is coming through, and they should be able to close on the distressed shopping center within the next month. They’re sending the paperwork Monday. Kent toasts their first foray into commercial property with a Coors Light. Pete somehow manages to snag a foul ball during the sixth inning. Kent should have paid better attention.

can we have a word before we part

The dream of the train again. The train pulling away, and the tracks ahead are broken. Charlie is waving his arms, sending signals to the driver, trying to stop it. The boy is on board. The train is pulling away. The train is moving. The train will surely go off the rails.

can we make it another year

Caught behind a horse-drawn Amish buggy on a two lane highway in the Pennsylvania countryside, Anna should pull forward and pass, but instead she watches the children in the back, watching her. The three children stare with the shock and wonderment of time-travelers. They make do with so little, the people in those communities, in denial of modern technology, plastic, and speed. Yet they seem to have enough. The simplicity appeals to Anna, in a way. What is that phrase about all unhappy families? The horse is clip-clopping very slowly along, yet she does not pass. Anna envies these country people, and she wonders what message she is sending Charlie, and if they’ll ever have a happy family.

can I go now

Charlie and Helen were arguing in the hotel room in Chicago, the same vertiginous argument that they would never quite manage to resolve. Charlie’s cell was ringing and he ignored it, sending it straight to voice-mail. He turned it off so that he and Helen could finish without heat. He would give her that. What could be more important? He didn’t find out about the accident until several hours later, when his secretary tracked down the hotel from his credit card charges.

can you help me with this

Charlie has always taken some comfort in the ability of the city to remind him of his own insignificance. He is only one of millions, all in it separately together. Any of us could be billionaires or die in traffic. You do the best you can to make your own luck and you deal with whatever the fates maybe sending your way. A story behind every one of those windows. Some will drop dead or catch fire in their sleep. Some will be blessed, some condemned. Some will rise, and others will fall from the sky. He gave up on trying sense of it all a long time ago.

Frequency: Your (tested)

YOUR (tested)

your sentence is so long

While most affairs are based on novelty, on the pull of the new and the danger of the illicit, Charlie and Helen’s adultery tested limits of all kinds — of their patience and that of their other partners and friends, of the very idea of romance itself. Charlie’s affair with Helen had been going for a much longer time than his marriage. It was like a song that would not end, a note held for an impossibly long time. It is a wonder they are still both drawn to it.

your word is not so much

It was a period in which promises were made, tested, and found wanting, a decade in which the world grew suspicious and cold. The sky, it turned out, was indeed falling.

your kind is not my own

Helen didn’t answer when Johnnie emailed her that he would be back through town. She had tested the hypothesis that he might serve as some kind of substitute for his brother, and found that it had a good many flaws. She had felt a little guilty about that night ever since, and she hoped that Charlie would never find out.

your America is not the world

Kent met an interesting artist and commissioned her to do a mural on his office wall. The mural was an abstraction of satellite imagery of the surrounding neighborhood, a kind of meta-mural. It would give him, he felt, a better perception of his place in the world. He tested his ambitions against the scale of the map.

your move was not kind

Jenny tested the extent of Dave’s loyalties in a variety of ways. She knew the nature of his work, and accepted that there were differences of political consciousness between them which would never be bridged, but she could make him pay for his work, and she had a certain degree of power over him. So while he might well have helped bring a species of tree frog to the brink of extinction, he had made significant contributions to the Environmental Defense Fund. While he worked for gay-bashing candidates, he gave money to the ACLU and had even attended Pride parades. He would do almost anything to quiet down her righteous anger, and truth be told, it helped him keep a sense of balance. Not that she could stop him from renewing his NRA membership.

your show will not end

Roger always considered himself a more conceptual than representational artist, though sometimes he tested the borders between. His “Rainbow City” consisted solely of one day distributing pastel chalks to three thousand schoolchildren, and encouraging them to draw on the sidewalks.

your play may need one line more

Although she was afraid of his reaction, Anna tested Charlie’s dedication to their relationship when she told him that she could not stand the sense of stasis in their lives, the sense that they had been frozen in a place from which they could not move. She felt like a statue, she said, and marriage hadn’t changed their lives in the ways she expected it might. They need to do something, to move, or to have a child, or join a new church. Something had to change soon. Charlie nodded sadly, suggested they could maybe move across the river again, or maybe she could go back to school or something. Maybe something even more drastic. They could move out West. He agreed something needed to change.

your boy is a mean one

Sometimes their ads tested the limits of tastelessness. In parts of the South, anything is fair game. They took advantage of a series of grisly murders along the Appalachian Trail to bring out the fact that the incumbent was soft on security, and that the state police were more corrupt than competent. The point was completely valid, but the thirty-second re-enactments of specific crimes were, granted, pushing the envelope of civility.

your animal must be put down

Charlie never seriously attempted to quit smoking, though sometimes he tested his willpower by abstaining for two or three days. He knew that he would likely die young, but young is relative. He had already outlasted his old man, and his boy was cheated altogether, even of his youth.

your letter was not kind

Though he was capable of more self-control than his brother, Charlie did sometimes make impulsive moves that he later regretted. Though he had not spoken or communicated with Helen for nearly a year, for instance, he was almost consumed with jealousy at the thought of the other men who were likely enjoying her charms, and one night after several heavy pours of scotch, he tested his hypotheses in a blisteringly accusative letter, going so far as to stumble down to the mailbox on the corner to send it without advantage of a morning’s reconsideration.

Frequency: When (rear)

WHEN (rear)

when did you know

Somewhere back in the rear part of her consciousness, Anna has always known things between her and Charlie would end poorly. Her friends had warned her. He wasn’t the faithful type, wasn’t the safe type, wasn’t the type who would fall into a normal routine, work normal hours, drive back and forth to work from the suburbs. He wasn’t like her father or her friends’ husbands. The thing was, she didn’t want that normal type of guy. Charlie was strong, dark, complex, tender, and mysterious. She never hoped to tame him, but she had hoped that they might one day come to understand one another.

when you said the word

Johnnie found himself in the back seat of minibus in the parking lot of a hamburger joint in Spokane, having sex with a red-haired woman named Annie Lovelace who had a tribal tiger’s-eyes tattoo on her lower back, just above her marvelous rear end. She was a connection he met through a friend and they had just visited a marijuana farm together, and Johnnie was newly in possession of a quarter pound of freshly-cured skunk. He didn’t really understand the significance of the tattoo, and he wasn’t going to ask her. It was a kind of spontaneous coupling. After two double cheeseburgers and strawberry milkshakes, she just stripped off her clothes and rubbed back into him with a kind of purr and said take me. The bouncing eyes stared up at him and he wondered what she saw in him.

when a little thing may turn large

Neither Dave nor Jenny understood the importance that dress-up was beginning to play in their relationship. Some of their routines were more perverse than others. He just loved the way her rear end looked in a plaid schoolgirl skirt, and she evidently had some deeply-rooted unresolved issues with her junior high school vice-principal.

when did you get so mean

Roger drives some old art-school friends who’ve flown down from RISD to witness some of Texas’s finer site-specific art up to Amarillo for an afternoon at the Cadillac Ranch. They absolutely insisted. Roger himself has never cared much for the place, ten graffiti-festooned rear-ends of vintage Cadillacs angled up from a wheat field in the middle of nowhere. When they get there after hours and hours of empty road, Rogers says he hopes they feel like they got their fill of junkyard kitsch. He remarks that he finds it to be a work utterly without social significance, and Lanie, a sound sculptor with whom he once shared a Providence apartment, asks him when he got so stuck up that he could no longer appreciate good old-fashioned Americana.

when we want more than we need

Howard thinks of the security apparatus as a giant beast of a Rube Goldberg machine, a kind of feral robot monster with millions of box-cutter-sharp teeth which might, at any moment, rear up and turn back on its creators with a great vengeful ferocity.

when will we be through with this

Maybe more than any particular drug, what makes Johnnie weep and shake in the Burning Man tent is that this year, the Burning Man is a woman. She is reaching for the sky, a beautiful sculpture towering over the Playa, and when the time comes, they are going to burn her alive. Some circuit in his rear brain loops the phrase over and over again, and he can’t stop it. Burn her alive. Burn her alive. Burn her alive.

when will you end it

Anna is sane enough to recognize that suicide would not be a fitting tribute to her dead son. Nonetheless, she often feels like she is standing over Pandora’s box, and the box is completely empty. Her treasure is gone, and the dark places in the rear of her consciousness sometimes call her toward the medicine cabinet, toward the sleeping pills or straight razor.

when the time has come

Roger is explaining the significance of “Memories of Our Last Roads” to an audience of high school art students, his sense that whatever environmental battle it was we are fighting is already lost, that the age of American empire is over, that we can only hope to land on our rear ends, at best, and at worst, to fall off into nothingness. Their faces are bleak and distracted, and he wonders if most of them aren’t stoned.

when will you change

Johnnie was an impatient child. He rarely won at games. He certainly almost never beat Charlie, who was patient, and capable of being very calculating from an early age. Johnnie took foolish risks, chances that would rear up and bite him in the ass. Of course in the end Charlie looked out for his brother. After Johnnie lost all of his marbles playing keepsies, Charlie would catch up to the dejected boy, storming away from the other children, and casually pass him a handful, just enough to get back in the game.

when will I see you again

Sometimes you say goodbye believing that you will see your friend again, in a week or two, or a matter of months, or perhaps a few years. You rarely consider the farewell as a permanent break. Human relationships are built around the promise of renewal. Sometimes, however, you part ways knowing that this person, who you were acquainted with, or who you knew well, or even loved, perhaps still love, will dwindle off into the rear of the horizon, will float away from you, never to return again.

Frequency: We (tended)

WE (tended)

we know who you are

Like everyone who worked in his department, Howard tended toward paranoia as the best defense, particularly when traveling abroad. While he would never be as desirable a target as a diplomat or an agency operative, the enemies would surely rather kill him than some random American tourist. He was certain his name was on some lists. It did give him a certain edge, the idea that at any moment he might be within a sniper’s scope, the notion that at any moment he might be struck down. In the end he was just another bureaucrat, but sometimes when nobody he knew was around, he’d order a martini shaken, not stirred.

we know where you come from

Howard tended to be prepared. When it rained, he had an umbrella. When the restaurant didn’t take credit cards, he had enough cash. He had a living will. He knew how his resources would be divided and under which conditions the doctors would be legally obligated to pull the plug. Though he had grown up in California, he retained his grandparents’ sense of middle-American pragmatism.

we know what you did

Though she understood Charlie’s deep sense of guilt about the loss of his child, Helen tended towards a more Zen-oriented interpretation of the events and her personal involvement in them, and wished that Charlie did too. Though few worse personal catastrophes could be imagined, was the universe not also freeing him, in a sense, as well? Was it not an opportunity for him to make a clean break with his attachments to Anna and the East Coast and his work, and a way to make a new start, perhaps, with her? She realized how ridiculous this sounded even as she verbalized it and breached the topic with him only once. Nevertheless, she wished he’d lose that hangdog look and see the open sky in front of him.

we must ask you why

For the rest of her life, Anna tended to avoid beaches, and to regard people in flip-flops and bathing suits, carrying their aluminum folding chairs, oversize sun umbrellas, coolers, and boom-boxes to the sands as so many lambs being led to the slaughter.

we need you to be different

On assignment overseas, Howard tended to adhere to protocols strictly limiting interactions with the native population. He was enough of a loner to begin with that the rules didn’t really bother him. If nothing else, it gave him an excuse for his solitude. Still, sometimes a woman would turn his head, and he would wonder what it might be like to talk with her, or even to kiss her lips.

we could learn from you

What Dave tended to admire most about the Europeans was what he’d call their “freshness.” Their food had no preservatives and yet it was rarely spoiled. They made fresh loaves of bread every morning. And even though their countries and cities and institutions were older than American ones, they somehow didn’t seem trapped in them. People were out in the streets, walking around, and trying new things. The people seemed somehow younger, more colorful, more new.

we are your America

While most things in his own life were going fairly well, with good reviews, new commissions, travel around the world, and opportunities to reconnect with friends, Roger tended to think of the past decade as the saddest time he had known, as a period in which idealism was finally and irretrievably lost, or at least in America.

we can try

When it came to relationships, Helen said, Charlie tended not to see the forest for the trees. She said things like that when she got angry with him. Charlie didn’t really dispute that, though he never knew exactly what she meant — if the trees were meant to be people, or relationships, or concepts, or whatever, in her analogy.

we need a hand

Charlie and Anna tended to avoid confrontation, while for some reason he and Helen often had heated arguments, often in public places. The strange part was that he felt closer to Helen after they had argued, while the muted agreements and silent daggers Anna would sometimes shoot his way only made him feel like he was living in a gauze-covered world.

we need you with us

Though he tended to avoid unnecessary human contact, Howard did sometimes go on dates. He recognized that the saddest people on the face of the earth are those who die alone, and he enjoyed sex as much as the next guy. He wasn’t the best at approaching people, that’s all. He tended to do better at making conversation in libraries, where brief quiet exchanges are encouraged, than at bars, where people tend to favor brash garrulousnesses and tall tales.

Frequency: Were (restrictions)

WERE (restrictions)

were you there when they came

A colleague in the French Ministry of Defense tells Howard that the rapid changes in airport security restrictions remind him of the bureaucratic practices of occupation France, when the Nazis would post new regulations nearly every day by hammering edicts into lamp-posts all over the city. He understands, of course, that this is different, but it is frustrating, this rapidité, this impulse to constantly change the rules, is it not?

were you the one

To live a life free of restrictions, unencumbered by debts, or contracts, or gravity. To be faster than a speeding train, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, wealthier than a hedge fund manager.

were they here before us

Howard has an engineer’s fascination with gadgets of all kinds, and follows with great interest the new security technologies. For all of the money that is wasted, some of the research yields new devices that any boy would love to play with: solar-powered surveillance planes that can stay aloft in the upper atmosphere for months at a time without ever refueling, man-killing drones that use global positioning and face-recognition technologies to pick their targets out from a crowd and deliver a fatal payload without the least bit of human intervention. He’d seen video of a Palestinian terrorist dispatched in this way. Once the device was programmed, no one even had to push a button to make the kill.

were two or three one too many

Johnnie recoils at the idea of restrictions of any kind, on his movement, on his behavior, on his consciousness. It’s unlikely for instance that he could ever tolerate marriage, or hold down a nine-to-five office job. He can barely even stand to stay indoors for more than an hour or so.

were my people there

Roger experiences the capitals of Europe as a kind of dream. Governments there are happy to spend money in ways that are unthinkable in the USA. While America will spend billions to develop a better battle robot, for instance, the idea of spending a few extra thousand dollars to designing an aesthetically appealing escalator is completely foreign in country where function almost always precedes form. The Parisians put more thought into public spaces, and design without the kind of budgetary restrictions that cripple public art in America. They have a different idea of what it means to be a great city, a better one.

were they kind or mean

In Tahoe, Kent pays a private instructor to teach him how to ski. While he is a little embarrassed to be out there on the bunny hill, surrounded by preteens, it gives him great satisfaction to be working against the restrictions that growing up comparatively poor had placed on him, to be able to spend money learning the leisure activities of the rich. He’d already hired a golfing instructor willing to work with him on a public course, where he was sure he wouldn’t embarrass himself in front of any of his new country club friends.

were you any different

What Johnnie loves about a good rock concert is the sense of being immersed in a throbbing mass of humanity, free of the general restrictions imposed by society on the individual, free, in a sense, of any individuality at all. It was a sense of being part of an audience, a thing bigger than oneself, a thing that does not expect you to articulate or distinguish yourself, a thing that expects little more of you than to rock, dance, shake, and scream out loud, a thing that expects none of the complicated fore-brain stuff from you, much more of the primal.

were you there to ask them

While Kent’s mother had been bound by the affordances of her 9-to-5 administrative assistant life, his father was a wheeler-dealer, a con man who tolerated no restrictions of any kind. He had abandoned the family when Kent was five years old, though he sent postcards from various exotic locations: European capitals, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, the Alps. Kent was always thrilled when he found one of these postcards in the mail, though he knew his mother would have rather seen child support payments.

were you down all day

Anna is leaping off the high dive, and for a moment her body is in free fall. She is moving without restrictions between the sky above and the water below. Time slows down. She does not want to feel the splash, does not want to penetrate the surface. When the alarm bell rings, Charlie is out of town again and the house is empty and cold.

were you just a boy

There was some story Charlie read when he was a boy, he can’t remember the title or the details, but some story about hobos riding the rails during the Great Depression, which has always made him envy that life, rough and gritty, but without restrictions, free of obligations to society, success, or family. A wanderer in this world, bound only by the rails, tomorrow an open question, around the next bend. He would never feel that free, and he would always love the sound of trains.

Frequency: All (berlin)

ALL (berlin)

all we have is time

Maggie wonders what it had been like for the East Germans who somehow made their way over the Berlin Wall, not knowing if they would get shot in the attempt, not knowing much about the world they would find on the other side. She wonders about the boat people at sea, and the aborigines on walkabout. That aimless journey away from the known, toward the darkness or the light.

all we need is water

When Charlie lived in Philadelphia and Helen lived in New York, they were just as likely to meet for a weekend in Paris or Rome or Berlin as they were to meet in New Jersey. Sometimes Charlie could tie it in with a meeting with the exporters he worked with in Sicily. The ocean crossing and the added expense lent the hotel room assignation some extra allure, an exoticism that they both enjoyed.

all went away from him

They never recovered the body, and that as much as anything else destroyed the both of them. The uncertainty of how precisely the boy perished, how he disappeared from their lives. That bobbing thing could have been a dolphin or a boy. There were so many unanswered questions, and their marital bed was as divided as Berlin during the Cold War.

all must know where to go

Maggie made a list of places she had never been to she might like to go: Machu Picchu, Everest, Madagascar, Berlin. And things she might like to do that she had never done: hang-gliding, scuba diving, macramé. Finally she assembled a list of things she had done in her life and enjoyed enough to do again while she still had time. While her high school boyfriend was no longer available, she could still go horseback riding.

all my air went out from me

After Charlie was married and at the height of the turmoil in their affair, Helen once wrote that she was living in her own private Berlin, and she was waiting for his airlift to come. They were both prone to that type of rhetoric, for a time.

all must part

At his mother’s deathbed, Kent reflects that one of his greatest regrets is that he didn’t have enough money to support her properly while she could still enjoy life. Sure, he got her into one of the best convalescent homes in California once she started to go, but all through the nineties she lived in an apartment complex in LA that reminded of him of nothing so much as one of those East Berlin tenements they built during the Soviet era. He hated visiting her all that time. It shamed him that his own mother was living there.

all must go home again

The same moon is full tonight in Austin, San Francisco, Malibu, New Jersey, Paris, and Berlin, and while it is true that it is the same moon, and all of our characters find a moment to look at it this night, it is not true that they see the same moon. To Anna, the moon is blood red and threatening, while Kent sees a pie in the sky, and Charlie sees a woman’s face, while Roger contemplates putting an enormous neon sign there as an ironic gesture, and it reminds Maggie of a long-ago summer night, while it makes Helen think of a blues song, and Howard thinks about the asteroids that have pocked its naked surface. For some reason the moon makes Dave think about sex, and wonder why he and Jenny have never made it on a beach.

all turn away

In addition to the fact that it is so difficult to gather reliable information there, Howard opines, people just don’t want to know how many civilian casualties there have been in Iraq. We just don’t want to know about that. That’s how it goes with war. The victors alone are allowed to grieve their dead. How often do you think about Dresden, or the fire-bombing of Berlin? The bombing of London, sure, the horror of Auschwitz, of course, but who grieved for Berlin? Someone points out that it’s in poor taste to compare the United States’ war on terror to the Nazi genocide, a just war with a crime against humanity. Howard shuts up and orders another pilsener.

all play the same way

A shuttered window frame in Tuscany, an ornate door frame in Berlin, a view of ant-like traffic from a Chicago skyscraper, the smell of freshly-ironed sheets in a Paris hotel. Helen remembers certain still-life moments of a long affair.

all ask why and find no answer

Roger would like to construct something for the present moment like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, something massive that reflects the deep and persistent fear, the emptiness he feels all around him in the middle of the American mind.

Frequency: What (sensible)

WHAT (sensible)

what do you have for me

How Dave talked Jenny into an Italian vacation with four nights in Venice and some “eco-tourism” in Tuscany with plenty of good food and wine as a substitute for the Antarctica cruise is anyone’s guess, but in the end she agreed it was a sensible alternative, and they both agreed the gondola ride was romantic.

what can I do for you

They were talking about how the medieval monks led sensible lives, if you think about it, making wine and their own food, no negative impact on the environment, lives of quiet contemplation. The quiet, the stillness so beautiful, and they were all alone, and had never made it in a place like this before, so soon they were rutting, standing up, her back against the archway. A perfect moment until that brother came walking by in his chastising cassock.

what need have you of us

It seemed like a place where nobody knew about global warming or cared about the latest polls. Not a Wal-Mart in sight, not a McDonald’s for a hundred miles, a place where they had lived the same sensible way of life for centuries. Only problem was Dave’s fucking Blackberry wasn’t working. His clients would be pissed off if he didn’t get back to them by the end of the day.

what does it mean in the end

Dave loves old places, places with monuments that have outlasted generations upon generations of men, places where people had built sensible institutions of power, and architecture that didn’t fall down for centuries after its makers died. This kind of place humbles you, with your petty passing concerns. He loves watching Jenny in this kind of place, her passing beauty in its prime, her wonderful body moving in the light filtered through the dome overhead. He could have been in love.

what kind of play is this

Anna wanted to believe that there was a world beyond the sensible, that there would be a doorway, a shining light, a place where souls could be reunited, a place where the boy still lived, a place where her loved ones were waiting for her to return.

what have you found

Helen tries to live in the world of the sensible. She takes long drives in the Northern California countryside, content with her loneliness, taking in the Republic’s remaining beauty, smelling the fruit farms, basking in the light. Work keeps her busy enough that she hardly thinks of Charlie any more, intensely but rarely. And she can drive on when she does.

what would you take back if you could

It is not sensible to dwell on what is lost. It is not sensible to be afraid of water. It is not sensible to want to cover mirrors. It is not sensible to weep after sunset nearly every night.

what is your read on it

Roger was trying to make a wall of light, a kind of visual equivalent of Spector’s wall of sound. He asked for lasers and the funder approved them. The results were stunning and expensive. It seemed the less sensible the request, the more likely it would be approved. He worked on a proposal for space art through the European Space Agency. He wanted to do something with space junk and reflective paint, to make pollution in the upper atmosphere twinkle in the night.

what you want

Every kid can be a brat sometimes. Charlie found himself regretting things he had said in anger, things that had seemed sensible at the time. If you don’t get up and come with Daddy right now, I’ll leave you behind.

what hand is this so old

Most of the trip was absolutely wonderful, good food, friendly people, la dolce vita and all that. Jenny loved it. Dave thought the Italians were sensible people, good souls who knew how to enjoy life. The only time he really got an anti-American vibe was when he tipped a street violinist with a ten-dollar bill. The guy gave Dave a look like he’d just pissed in the case.

Frequency: Not (manufactures)

NOT (manufactures)

not what we need now

Charlie is well aware that he manufactures reasons to move further and further away from Anna, to fail at what may be the most important challenge of his life. He may have already failed, might have been trying to fail from the get-go.

not from what I can see

Roger manufactures synesthesia, at least he tries to. He longs for colors that you can smell, frozen frames of city life that burst with cacophony, textures that press against your cornea.

not made for your little hand

In the weeks after the accident, nearly everything reminded Charlie of the boy. It seemed that every object he saw reminded him of a toy he had given the boy, or would have given the boy, or wished he could still give the boy. The world manufactures the most workaday objects in the shapes it remembers from its childhood.

not because I want it to end

That Christmas is a bitter one for Helen. As Charlie manufactures yet another excuse to see her one more time to explain that he can never see her again like this, probably, she feels a simultaneous desire to give him whatever he wants, whatever he needs from her right now, and a sad repulsion from her longtime lover, who is beginning to take the form and attitude of a broken man. All the Santas and elves and caroling and window displays did nothing to lift her spirits or her deep sense of inner conflict.

not only because of you

Maggie manufactures a pretense to visit an old boyfriend, Tom Wilson, in New York. Married now, bald, two kids, round around the middle, making decent money in the insurance industry, nice little house in Connecticut, and a country club circle of friends. He shows her pictures, he buys her a couple of drinks. She indulges in a little nostalgic tourism. She doesn’t mention the illness. When he asks her if she’s happy, she doesn’t know what to say, instead she sort of half-laughs. Neither one of them can really remember why they decided to break up. It was so long ago. He pats her hand, and says not to worry, that he’s not really happy either, but it goes how it goes. And then, Maggie adds, it’s gone.

not one to ask why

Johnnie has a chemist friend who manufactures LSD variants in a basement lab in Queens. He stops in a for a visit, and later finds himself weeping on a highway bridge, reciting poetry by William Blake and watching the lights stream by.

not in my name

Howard hates demonstrations of all kinds. He manufactures reasons to get out of teams working on security preparations for political conventions, WTO meetings, anything of that nature. It’s not that he disagrees with the protesters. They are often more right than the government that employs him. It’s all of the variables involved, all of the opportunities for the wrong thing to happen. It makes him hyperventilate just to think back to riding the subway during the Republican convention, sweating in a blue pinstripe suit, profiling everyone in sight, not to mention the risk of a common airborne virus.

not for us to know

When asked what does for a living, Roger sometimes says that he manufactures daydreams for a market of people who feel a need to be distracted from banality of their lives.

not time enough to tell you

Out for a night at a superb sleazy mud-wrestling joint with an old punk rock friend and recent responsible parent and who now manufactures a line of baby toys, implements, and apparel for hipster babies (batik tie-dyes, pacifiers that say “boob man”, steal-your-face blankies, leather onesies, and things of that nature), Johnnie reels off lists of new cocktails he has tried, designer drugs he has sampled, and varieties of sexual encounters he has engaged in since their last meet. The mud-wrestling is pretty hot, serious grudge match fantasy material. No, Johnnie tells his friend, no kids yet, nothing like that in the cards, at least as far as he knows.

not what you long for

Howard lives in a country that cyclically manufacturers and consumes its own dreams.

Frequency: But (honor)

BUT (honor)

but you would not say the word

Charlie discovered how difficult it is to honor both your wife and your mistress. It involves a lot of subterfuge, secret meetings, and discrete text messages on two separate accounts.

but I need to think

Howard’s theory is that when you back people up against a wall, honor is the first thing to go. Values mean nothing to you when you feel that your life is in danger.

but I still want an answer

Helen was living in Park Slope when the planes came, and though she wanted to honor the sacrifice of all the brave souls, and she doubted that any other place would every feel like home, and she would miss the neighborhood dogs and strollers and deli, it wasn’t long before she was looking into the Bay area job market. She and Charlie would soon be finished anyway, and she had no firm commitments to anyone or any place. It took two years before she actually packed up and moved out, so you couldn’t say that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but when she did have nightmares they often featured thousands of reams of charred documents, floating down in clouds of soot.

but we still have time

Charlie maintains that there is still some honor among thieves, at least those of the old school, while in Johnnie’s experience, most of the robbers he’s met would steal your four year-old kid’s bike for a baggie of crystals. Different circles they move among. They rarely share their stories with each other. For brothers they don’t know each other very well.

but we must still try

It was a difficult conversation, the first time Charlie dropped the news on Helen that he had made a commitment he would need to honor, a commitment that would have to take precedence over what he and Helen shared. The vase of flowers missed his head by a foot and the window of her apartment by an inch or two. It could have been ugly, but it ended in the sweaty angry kind of lovemaking at which they had always excelled, and at the end of it nothing much had ended or even been resolved.

but this is not the end

Maggie bought tickets for a weekend in New York and repeated an itinerary she and her mother had laid out twenty years before, when she was dying and had wanted to do something special together. Maggie went back to all the same places. The show on Broadway was different and the Plaza was closed for repairs but the walk in Central Park was still the same. It was kind of a way for her to honor her mother’s courage, or at least to try and pull something from it.

but our time is not long

He would not be able to honor their commitment to go to his mother-in-law’s sixtieth birthday because the snowstorm was so bad that he would be stuck in the city for at least another day. He was deeply sorry, but the roads were so bad, he was sure she would understand. Sorry Anna. Awful weather. Give her a hug for me.

but you read another line

It is too easy to confuse honor with strength, or security with responsibility. The orders coming down sometimes made Howard feel like he was living in another country. Freedom didn’t have the same ring it used to.

but I know there is another place

Kent likes hanging out with builders and architects, men of honor and vision, men who can see a scrap of land and imagine a housing development. Men who never ford a river without dreaming of the bridge that ought to be there. Kent understands the boundless spirit of manifest destiny, and believes that spirit has never died.

but I have not found it

Kent was tired of the joke, of course, but the truth was he kept a stack of Superman comics under his bed until he was well into his teens, and he considered it an honor to have a name that reminded the other kids of the Man of Steel. It gave him a role model, something to aspire to.

Frequency: Word (holds)

This is just a placeholder. I wrote this set of ten but then left them in Bergen on a flash drive. I’ll update the post after I return to Norway in February.

WORD (holds)
word could not be still
word before sentence or page
word as the work of man
word after sound before line
word to give what you think form
word more than picture
word to make you think
word that you had said
word is all we have
word is not much