Matt Bell's Blog
December 26, 2009
Now I remember — she would get these things at special handicraft fairs to benefit some indigenous organization or other. That was part of the reason they were a little odd, kind of a mismatch to the person she was giving them to.
She chose my presents with me in mind, but twisting the facts a little, in an optimistic sort of way, thinking to herself, She'll find this useful to put things in, or maybe saying it to herself without admitting that, No, she won't find this useful at all. I think...
December 23, 2009
Sense. Feel. Beautiful words. Want to suck on them. Want to claim that there is no difference between sensing and feeling. Maybe the difference between words is sucked away when the words are sucked. Maybe the difference can be sensed. Or felt. What might the difference be. Maybe there is one. Maybe there isn't. Maybe they don't sense anything but do feel something when they get fucked by me. Maybe I sense something but feel nothing when I fuck the babies. Maybe I don't feel anything and...
December 22, 2009
By day, he waited patiently for them to find him and kill him. He was sure it was only a matter of time until they found him, although he had only the vaguest sense of who they were: a dark figure in a light coat, or perhaps a light figure in a dark coat, or perhaps somehow both at once. His memory seemed mostly to have deserted him, if he ever had one at all. He remembered a trip through the woods, his missing hand aching, his stump wrapped in an old shirt, a gash open on his forehead...
Superman is inert for most practical purposes. Only springing to life, as it were, under pressure of grave danger. Like, if you were making toast, he wouldn't be Superman for that. He would be Clark Kent making you toast, and maybe his glasses would fog up with the steam or something, but that's all. Or say a country in Africa has been without clean water for pretty much forever: he'd just be Clark Kent for that. That's already beyond the pale.
December 21, 2009
Two days before he was supposed to move to Cleveland with his mother and her husband, I took my son to the mall to buy his first winter coat. Gene sat quietly in the passenger seat. I could feel him building to another one of his questions. Lately he'd been coming up with impossibilities like, "What is funny?" or "Why don't birds have teeth?" We'd spent hours driving around, or sitting in parks if the weather was nice, discussing the answers. Just as the mall came into view a couple blocks...
The stories I write rainbow toward magical realism, which I think I most appreciate in literature, but sometimes an idea I have is based on a fragment of memory, a feeling or event which once was tangible or palpable, and, as an experience in real life, it maybe feels too pure to not document as having happened to me, whoever I am according to what I perceive as my life. I feel I should occasionally remind myself that I'm actively participating in that life, in what it does or doesn't mean...
The present tense rejects the future. It generates, but it generates excess without the ordering structures of lineage. It subsumes and consumes pasts into its present, erasing their priority. It's self-defeating; its rejection of survival into a future may be infanticidal. Without a concern with past or future it necessarily negates many of the values which come with Western literary tradition, including stability, well-craftedness, elegance, restraint, timelessness, humanism. It is...
