Annotations by John Keene

Author:John Keene [Keene, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811225861
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

A CALL TO THE ANCESTORS, A CANTILENE

With each move we refashioned fresh and functional identities, imposed in part by the will of each new neighborhood’s children, influenced too in part by these opportunities to be reborn. The prisonhouse of cogito. Scenarios: alternately Friday and Crusoe, at other points Gallant or Goofus, most often one of the numerous TV characters like J.J. or Fonzie or Raj, but then there appeared that moment at the peak of yet another family crisis when he proclaimed himself the next Percy Shelley. They consequently decried literature as a guide to the life that one lived, as mere retreat, fool’s flight from the world’s true horrors, but instead he derived from these stories, those poems, maps to realizable liberty, and took in each finished text a step ever closer to the zone of deliverance. East Saint Louis. In Los Angeles and its environs, scale appeared to warp itself, for they drove and they drove and they drove some more, yet they still had not gotten there. What he noticed first were the palm trees hovering above, the heat’s white shuddering at the horizon, the waves’ soft churning as they lapped upon the shore, the sparkling mazes of the supermarkets. Out of earshot, shouts and whispers. So much to tell which they concealed from the children, convinced of their inability to cope. One’s mouth is the runway from which the possible taxis, alights in words, or the hangar in which life’s verities, lies lie dormant. Left alone you marched through all of the Dr. Seusses, then shocked them by declaiming passages aloud. “Keep reading in this dim light, you’re gonna lose your eyesight,” a warning unheeded before the promise of so much prose. We could spend hours in the upstairs stacks just wiping dust from the spines in order to examine the titles better. Who recited the four main rivers that feed the Missouri in Missouri—the Gasconade, the Osage, the Locust, the Chariton—though the Cuivre River flows into the Mississippi. Your memory is transformative as opposed to eidetic, which best serves the purposes of literature or lying. Other times the jones they traded could have filled their own dictionary, which led him to indite a mini-lexicon. Klactoveededstene. And so we never, under any circumstances, experienced a dearth of interesting material, nor did we ever presume we might be wasting our time. Back at home, in the waters of the Northlands pool, he began his training to become a “dolphin,” which the traumatic event at the Tiny Tots school would disastrously interrupt. She placed her heel on his best friend’s head, daring either to cry or to climb out of the water. A terrible wailing, a scream from below. Myth or mendacity, depending on how you tell it. After the hurling into the deep end your confidence returned, so that as you swam for the bobbing buoy you considered only the mirthful aspect of that moment. Still, when one speaks of ethics one is implicitly speaking of actions, and when one talks of morals one is talking about beliefs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.