a factory of noise. [day 15]

Postcard to Solita

I would tell you to come back but that’s my jacaranda talking. You have followers now, and you wield coarse weapons with grace. I read your latest dispatch in a pamphlet hidden inside an American romance paperback, your fury pouring out and out. I felt a little ashamed at not choosing the way you did. The novel has several stained pages but what I can decipher is good. // I read about the ‘aqueduct’ op in the paper. How strange to hear people talk about you like you were a character in a story. I remind them of our acquaintance. Then they talk about me when I leave the room. But I’m proud to know you. I’m happy you can be another spirit in an army of invisible troublemakers. // This card will be late. I guess you’ll have a new address.

Constructed from the words of Kimberly Alidio, Ching-In Chen, Pia Cortez, Jai Arun Ravine, J. Pluecker, and Robert Whymant on Maria Lorena Barros.

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Prompts:

Anino Shadowplay Collective’s ‘Bukidnon Myth of Creation:’

Kimberly Alidio:

Where am I in this landscape: import, displacer, gulping too much water? In Austin, I drive my car. As I write this, a machine washes my clothes and I watch the trees for birds. I hang my clothes on a drying rack. I marinate beef for Vietnamese steak. I write poems and watch the weather.

Why won’t the Waxwings come this year? Will it be another drought year? Will invader and native interplay?

— Hoa Nguyen

Ching-In Chen:    ”These roads are emblems of narrow and nothing.” - from Bryan Thao Worra’s “Our Dinner With Cluster Bombs”

Pia Cortez:

Before you go on to projects like, building galaxies, say, or managing a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, factor some advertising into your budget so that people can actually see the wonders of your universe. If you just broadcast the existence of your newly invented universe to all and sundry, people will likely see you as a crackpot, so we don’t recommend that. Instead, try the poetic approach, e e cummings-style. Whisper to your companion, “Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.” Worry about where exactly “next door” is when the time comes.

Make sure, too, that your universe has its own laws of physics. Keep them hidden so that any future scientists who evolve in your universe can have the joy of discovering them. Everybody loves a good mystery.

You should also decide if you actually want anyone to know about your universe. There’s a lot to be said for having your own secret universe. Those people you see on the bus smiling while listening to their headphones? They’re probably smiling about their own secret universes too.

—Daniel Hudson

Jai Arun Ravine:

On Easter Sunday afternoon in 1967, James Thompson, the renowned American from Thailand, vanished into the jungled mountains of Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. His vacation companions at Moonlight Cottage assumed that he was off on one of his frequent solitary strolls, but they grew alarmed when he had not returned by nightfall. The authorities were alerted, but their search parties failed to uncover a single trace.

- William Warren’s “The Legendary American: The Remarkable Career and Strange Disappearance of Jim Thompson”

J. Pluecker:

From what has been lost, from the irremediably lost, I just want to recover the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grabbing me from the hair and pulling me up when my body would not want to hold anymore. (Significant, said the foreigner.) To the human and the divine. Like those verses by Leopardi that Daniel Viga recited in a nordic bridge in order summon up courage, that way shall be my writing

- Roberto Bolaño, as translated by Natasha Wimmer

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Housekeeping

Please post in the comments section of this blog entry with: 1) your writing in response to today’s writing(s) and 2) a prompt or question to share for tomorrow.

And if the comments are down, feel free to send your work to arkipelagirl [at] gmail.com, and I’ll post for you when the comments are fixed. 

Full info on the process and this project can be found at this page.

Dear Collaborators, yesterday we hit our two week mark on this project. You all are amazing! THANK YOU!