Day 8: Lydia Lunch, Elizabeth Hardwick, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Enjoying this challenge. Its not very feasible, but still, I will go as long as I can. Today I read two things I don't recommend, and a poem I liked a small bit.
Story - Lydia Lunch - Johnny Behind the Deuce (2004)
Hated this story. Wrote several paragraphs why, but chickened out on publishing.
Grimey pornographic ScuzzLit schtick.
Elizabeth Hardwick - On Reading, and On Reading the Writing of Women
Love Hardwick, but these essays feel very minor, more like critical meditations on a topic without any real focus. With such broad subjects, I didn't feel I gained any insights. Perhaps I could revisit.
Still, her sentences are ones to study.
Poem: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I have always wondered what ants feel when someone steps on their nest. Are the lost lives an abstract loss, like losing some units in a strategy game, or is it a tragedy for the anthill nation?
Every morning I kill several ants. I don't want to, but the ants have taken an initiative to be my alarm clock. At 10 oclock every morning, an ant moves across my queensize bed, crawls onto my eyebrow and bites, only to be snoozed with a hard smack until another ant comes to bite me ten minutes later.
I dont want to kill life. I believe in reincarnation, but biting me while I sleep does not encourage non-violence.
I have no idea where the dead ants go. Are they carried away, or do they turn into the kind of dust that has been giving me such asthmatic problems?
In this poem, the stanzas start so flowery and sentimental, but my ears pick up in the last four lines each time. What all the descriptions of nature show, in both the night and day, is that the world continues without our national tragedies, and that the world (arguably) keeps its beauty regardless of our laments. I don't know how much I agree with the worldview in the poem, but then again, national tragedies in the modern world are interlinked with all other nations, and from the current wars, I suspect a Mad Max future is coming.
I dunno. Whether I am correct in my worry, or not, I don't care. I can get out of it either way.