John Richard Ahern writes,
Spring
“I will set a sword in every blade of grass to wound them and the very clods of earth shall be venom to their feet…”
I rinsed this morning’s sessile toothpaste from the sink
drowning it with high frequency percussive taps
hitting the ammonia baptized steel with splash
from the arc through three point polished nickel neck.
Regina rambles:
I shall give you a little story…
I was staying at a house with my siblings of a family from our old church, while our dad had his kidney surgery (and our mom, too…since she was giving one of hers to him) in Pennsylvania. While we were at this family’s house, we ate, of course, but, in a slightly twisted sense of hospitality, our hostess didn’t let us help with the cooking (I believe she did let us set the tables, though..I can’t remember exactly). If you have been to someone’s house, you probably know how this feels. You sit around awkwardly while the host and hostess work in the kitchen, preparing the last minute details of the meal.
L. M. Corinth writes:
Eight classes have effectively stifled my natural brilliance, so all I have to offer is a poem which I wrote during math class, and a translation of part of the Aeneid that I particularly liked.
Somnus*
Ella writes:
To Miss Prunella Pig, 234 Penn St.
5 June
My dearest Prunella,
How delighted I am to hear that your new house is completed! You must tell me everything about it. Have you chosen curtains for the parlour yet? There is a lovely print in a shop not far from my house: yellow with small pink roses. It would match your couch perfectly. And of course you mustn’t forget the wallpaper. Perhaps a pale yellow or pink will do best. Oh, my dear, I am so anxious to see it all. I have more things to remind you than I can write.
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Actually, the question for Ella is usually, ‘How much can I write today?’ She has just begun the second draft of her novel and is finding that her characters have acquired a strange tendency to play with words and speak in iambic pentameter. She suspects that this may be a side effect of reading Hamlet four or five times this year. She loves to read good literature, particularly Shakespeare and Vergil’s Aeneid (in Latin, of course). She plans to become a cruel empress–wait, a Latin teacher–and read Vergil for the rest of her life. For the present, her tyrannical rule is confined to her blog, where she imposes her passion for language and literature on unwary passers-by. She also despises incorrect grammar from the very depths of her being, and has Opinions on poetry.
When Ella is happy, she skips with an imaginary rope. She lives in an eleventh-floor flat in Singapore, with her family, two shelves of books, and a stuffed-animal moose. She is obsessed with organisation and can’t bear to leave home without her trusty backpack. If you agree to chop six cups of apples, she will make you an apple pie.
L.C. Russell writes,
I should preface this with an apology to the four or five people already acquainted with Amber. Please bear with me on this. For those who are not: I conceived this idea more or less a year ago, as a series of short stories concerning random interactions between characters. They all are/will be very dark, depressing, etc. Hopefully with some eventual conclusion and a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. It has remained for the greater part unwritten, and the “plot line”, if it can be called such, has undergone numerous revisions. I’d like to get it finished at some point, and to post at least parts of it on here. So anyway, here goes the first one…
Mark considers the nature of possession:
Homeowner awoke with a start. He had heard a muffled noise. Quietly getting up, he made his way to the door. Out in the hall, he heard the noise clearly; someone was downstairs. Wrapping his bathrobe tightly around him, Homeowner slowly descended the stairs, careful to avoid the squeaking step. Peeking into the living room, he saw a shadowy figure lurking in the corner. Homeowner was a pacifist, so the pistol he then pulled out of kitchen-drawer was not loaded. He figured that effect was all that was necessary; any sane burglar would flee at the sight of a gun. Homeowner shook himself, cleared his throat, and boldly walked into the living room, turning on the light as he went. The dark figure started at the sudden flood of light and spun around, “Blu-ray” player in hand, to see Homeowner.
Philip Hilton scribbles,
I have long been disillusioned with the idea that Scripture speaks for itself. It does not. Like all literature, it is interpreted by men to say what they want it to say. This involves all sorts of logical contortions and difficult readings, yet is never questioned. The heroes of the faith, by ignoring the text, find miraculous ways in which Scripture can be scientifically, internally, and historically correct.
Yet nobody in my circle has ever considered the possibility that Scripture, rather than the interpretation of Scripture, is in error, because they are all convinced that the Gospel is true, as am I. And that Scripture is infallible is supposedly a doctrine upon which the foundations of the Gospel rest. When asked why they believe in the Scripture’s infallibility, they quote 1st Timothy. Logically, however, evidence for the rightness of something must come from outside it. Scripture’s infallibility cannot be proved by Scripture. So what proves Scripture’s infallibility?
Day 1
I took the bus again today, and arrived at Terezín in the midst of a large group of American tourists. They were loud, and had little respect for the place. And when they first got there, they all made a pilgrimage to the WC. I wondered if they could even imagine having only two bathrooms for six-hundred people. I have with me no extra clothes—they didn’t get extra clothes, why should I?—and enough food to last me several weeks. The food that would “last me several weeks” is probably the amount of food they had for the whole five years. Assuming they survived that long.
I followed the tourists until we came to the tunnel system. The tour guide said that anyone who was uncomfortable with being underground for 500 meters could go around a certain way. I opted for that. And I hoped that she wouldn’t remember me as the one who had been so curious about the tunnel two weeks ago. She didn’t. View Full Post
