Recently in writing Category
A saudade é arrumar o quarto
Do filho que já morreu.
- Chico Buarque, "Pedaço de mim"
"Saudade" is to arrange the bedroom
Of a son who has died.
-Chico Buarque, "Piece of me"
There was a woman whose hand would cease to be her hand when she heard music from the pampas. Songs from a gaúcho with nothing but horse, cattle, campfire. Sometimes a row of palm trees would interrupt the endless green. It was beautiful, wild land, but who to share it with? He longed for citrus-scented hair, lace skirts swishing around honey-dripping legs, but had only guitars to fondle like old lovers who try to keep warm when there's no feeling left. Saudade. His music poured through Rita's ears like liquid gold and she'd shiver, reminded of the feeling she had leftover from the one who'd left her.
Poof. A breath, an explosion inside her, to golden tingling dust. It filled Rita with a smile that spilled across her face, like cool spring dawn drawn across the sky. The tingling always settled in her left hand. She'd look down at it and it would be thicker, heavier somehow. She'd blink and her knuckles would have hair creeping over the back of her hand, poking up out of her pores, curious new sprouts over the wider wrist. Fingers thickened and lengthened, the nails much shorter now and with the familiar cracked cuticles she now realized she'd forgotten. Resting on her knee. It was Renato's hand. He reached for her skin through dark Levi's.
"No," she'd think. "Don't do that, it isn't possible." Her right hand would move to shove it away and the left hand, Renato's hand, would clasp onto hers. Warm, like being wrapped up in his tangy green sheets and watching the tension coiled in between his shoulders as he jumped from cyberspace to cyberspace, searching for meaning in the virtual threads connecting Rita to comics about robots to flying spaghetti monsters to Renato to articles on the evolution of digital surveilance to that old gaúcho and his namorada, long gone. She'd rise and kiss him right there, in between his shoulder blades, and know they'd never feel the isolation of the pampas because they'd always have wifi.
Looking down at the hand now fondly stroking her right arm, Rita wonders if that gaúcho who'd sung about saudade to his cattle so he could sleep at night would ever look down at his hands and wonder if he brought her to life again by missing her so.
vs. 
I am so torn up about the recent clash between Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin. The former being a newly-discovered favourite author of mine; the latter being a staple in my inundated-by-scifi upbringing. A few months ago, Doctorow posted a paragraph Le Guin had written to the fanzine Ansible, operating under the Creative Commons assumption that
reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.
The paragraph by Ms. Le Guin is a deliciously snarky short story in her own lyrical voice, and was written in response to this particular comment from a review posted on Ansible in May 2007:
'Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)
I won't post the paragraph here, obviously, but here's a little taste:
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.
Basically, Doctorow posted the whole paragraph and felt he had the right to do so under fair use. I'm with him. Le Guin posted the paragraph to her blog and she doesn't appear to charge her online readership for access to her posts. The letter of the law states "single paragraph," which happened to be the entirety of that particular work. At least Doctorow wasn't an ass about it. He could have posted everything but the last sentence or something along those lines.
From what I understand, this became an issue after the San Francisco Chronicle printed the entire work without permission from Le Guin, possibly because Doctorow's post on BoingBoing skewed the intent of the copyright on Le Guin's site. You can read Le Guin's recount of the conflict here, and Doctorow's apology to her here. Doctorow's been criticized for being self-serving even in his apology, but to me, Le Guin comes off the worst. I understand she feels cheated out of $200 or whatever, much less by some upstart young blogger-activist-SF hack with a penchant for Disney World and Digital Rights. So I won't criticize her for her condescending online rebuke of Doctorow. But I will ask, was it entirely necessary for her to turn into a 13-year-old with that last sentence there? "This letter is not copyrighted and may be excerpted or copied entire."
Really?
I dunno, I'm just a disappointed fan here.
(Photo of Cory by Scott Beale; Photo of Ursula by Marion Wood Kolisch.)
Today is a day for ice cream,
Today is a day for tshirts,
Today is a day for wrapping my arms around you and
pulling you to the grass
between giggles.
Today instead I sit below ground,
Today instead I watch the world through a square,
Today instead I zip up my sweatshirt and my arms mimic yours,
your arms folded skeletal
between cement slabs.
I started this piece a few days after finding out Gabriel, my boyfriend of 1 year and 3 months, had been killed in a car accident. I opened up the file today and saw that it was a lot better than I remembered it being, but needed an ending. Now it's got an ending, but I think the whole thing could use some polishing. So, your comments are welcome. Thanks.
After the jump are some pictures of us. I'll never forget everything he gave me. I'm so happy for our time together. I wouldn't trade this life for anything.
Thank you, Gabriel. Te amo<333
***
Monday morning, couldn't sleep. Opened my eyes and returned to a consciousness I didn't even notice I'd left behind. Inexplicable emptiness, and rawness chafing my insides to numbness, a lack of warmth. 4:27 AM. No messages from you. I don't understand.
I press for the light to come on and tumble downstairs to feed my chirping little cat, flicking lights on as I go. I lower my eyes to the floor against their yellow warmth. Drop a small handful of x's and o's for my cat. "Pigeon," I call her, mumbling, continuing my tumble down to the office, never ceasing the shuffle of my feet. Flick. Flick. I turn on the hall light, and only one light in the office. Outside the window, perfect white fluffy snowflakes fall parallel to one another, straight to the ground. I flip up my laptop lid.
Nothing new logged to last.fm. No emails from you. I'm breathing deep. My cell phone is still in my left hand, but did I remember grabbing it at all? 4:29. And still no messages from you. No, you didn't try to call. I set it aside.
You aren't on AIM, or MSN. You haven't left me cute messages on any of my blogs, or flickr, or last.fm. Not since I went upstairs before the snow, feeling anguished and more hollow than the white rustling sound taking me to your voicemail. 4:32, and I need to call you again. It'll be 7:32 for you. You're probably in your bed, sleeping...I'm feeling uneasy for no reason.
My ears strain through the crash of each snowflake falling to catch your voice. No one answers your phone. No, dammit. Not again. White flakes continue to stack in silent determination as I watch. I press the call button again.
Someone picks up and my heart jumps out of the numbness. But I shouldn't be hearing your dad's voice answering your phone. "Gabriel?" I insist.
"No, this is his father. Who is speaking?"
"It's Kris. Is Gabriel there?"
"No, Kris..."
My bewilderment is stubborn. "But this is his phone."
"Kris, Gabriel is dead."
***
There is a certain point in the evening where you realize that if the word "carelessly" looks like you've spelled it wrong when you've spelled it the same way you've been spelling it all these years (and you won a school-wide spelling bee once, gosh darn it!), and the fact that it seemed to be misspelled seems so hilarious that you actually start to giggle out loud in a Tim Horton's, it is time for sleeping.
Unfortunately, you have to have this piece written by sometime tomorrow so your creative writing prof can tell you if it's any good or not, so that you can turn it in on Friday for publication in the school's award-winning (if my four a.m. memory serves me correctly) literary magazine.
So you stay up, and you keep at it. And eventually you end up making this sort of stream-of-consciousness post-modern rambling tidbit for your blog instead.
Four a.m., four a.m.
