On the Manufacture of Childhood Innocence

In this post, we present a quote by James R. Kincaid on the production of childhood innocence in contemporary culture.

The Author as a Child From a Department Store Photo Shoot (c. 1980s)

Few would question that the innocent child was manufactured by Rousseau, with refinements by Wordsworth and thousand lesser writers, interior decorators, and producers of greeting cards.

— James R. Kincaid

Source: Kincaid, James R. Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

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A Little Bit of Poetry: "Poem for a Trieb"

In this post, I present a poem I wrote inspired by a night of Scrabble where I felt the tug and pull of friendships and a desire to break through the mundane.

The author as a teenager —in Mandeville, Louisiana
at Georgette Pintado's house on Live Oak Street (with Amy and Jeff).

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I never venture to believe in avatars anymore
for they seem too
much like
superheroes,
like Jesus,
in his benign human nature, divine,
so I dismiss the idea of divine blood,
vouching for more a raw libido, exhausted
breaths, numbing existence,
mere existence —
The funny thing is
that
I

… when the coffee table
is cleared and Brian
sets up the Scrabble board,
David and Juniper
are determined to win,
so they joined in the fight to
beat us —

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Vocabulary Essay (Or, Short Brief): "On Bereft"

A very short brief on the word "bereft".
bereft (adj.) \buh-reft\
A state of loss, deprived. Often used with "of".

The face of a boy with a bereft look.

"Bereft" is a poetic word for it connotes loss without the slippery slope of s’s doubled in "loss".

The strong consonant sounds in bereft leads to a charge, tapering to a whisper, to a closure of the mouth, a word of leftover things, forgotten things, bereft things, a swallow of breath, exhaled, then exeunt.

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Setting Up The Scene: A Fight

Misè-en-scene of a too comfortable relationship:

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At Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library, beneath the colored dome, we fought; because we were tired and travel-weary, more comfortable with our ordinary looks and automobiles, than here, in this constant going and coming.

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Flash Fiction: Laundry

When you appeared to me one night as a heap of laundry ...

Looking up from underwater . . . 

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Once, I woke up in the middle of the night, warm beneath the covering, and I thought you were there, on my bedroom floor, your face resting on my naked foot. So, I called out your name but you didn’t reply. "Hey," I said again. But, nothing. Remained. And then I realized, after a moment, no one was in the room. I was alone. You were only an apparition. Like when I visited Georgette in her calloused age, I washed her tired calloused feet with hard, soapy water and she thought I was George, her son. The pain for me is more acute, because I know I am alone. More alive. But alone. I drift back to sleep. In the morning I see the laundry haphazardly arranged at the edge of my bed. And I realize it was the heap of clothes that I thought was you, come to comfort me.

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image source: ohaytv

Quote on Empathy

On Walking in Someone Else's Shoes:

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"There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths) and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it."

J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
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Quotation: Walker Percy on Bourbon Drinking

Bourbon, Neat

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth — all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic.

Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, "Bourbon", 1991

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