Bill Cheng's Blog, page 3
July 14, 2015
is there a time when we’re less– when our thoughts are unkind, and we are miserly with our...
is there a time when we’re less– when our thoughts are unkind, and we are miserly with our thanks and forgiveness and every slight sets a boil in that slow sluggish organ of your outrage? i have eaten too much, been too much out of doors; crave a Hard Reset. You ever look for something in the dark? You’re walking around, trying to map the space, wary of the furniture. You touch with tentative hands, feel for shapes, edges– a hardness, a soft. Once upon a time you were young and you knew where everything was, where everything needed to be– what you didn’t have, you could get and who you were was the same person all the way through.
Well forget it, there is only one path through these jungles and it is forward.
June 30, 2015
robot surgery
Spent this past week replacing the graphics card and power supply unit in my old computer. There’s something about being sprawled on the floor in your boxers, legs cramping, digging through wires and stubborn hardware; fingers on circuit boards, diodes– wrenching out the guts of this old machine. I slide out my hard drive, remount it then punch through the DVD-rom case to clear room for the new PSU. I swap wires, monitor lights. I position, reposition. I turn it on and the screen stays blank. No video input; no keyboard input. I start over. The carpet is a killing floor. I curse my fat fingers, the engineers, curse the rules of time and space. In the dark of my mind, some small piece of brain mulls over the return policy, over finding a repair place and how much more this is all going to cost.
But that’s only a far-off noise. Mostly it’s quiet. A processor ordering itself, abstracting, kicking at all the struts.
A RAM chip has been knocked crooked on the motherboard. I release the clamps, free it from the slot, then re-insert. When l hit the switch, it’s like a miracle; everything does what it’s supposed to do: the beeps are booping, the screen lights up, the vents do not smell like burning plastic.
I am Purified.
June 28, 2015
Small Towns
More from the late great Kent Haruf:
“Most of my life I’ve lived in small towns. In small towns you expect to have some kind of relationship with everybody you meet. You cannot ignore anybody in a little town because, because they are friends of your friends or they’re not– I don’t know everybody in this room but I know the guy that was just here, I know him a little. The people that were sitting there, I know. The waitress is our neighbor.
Now, I don’t like all these people and they sure don’t like me, but I want to have a feeling that somehow I am in relation to all these people.
So when I walk down the street in New York City, I’m sort of exhausted by the end of the street because I’m trying to pay attention to every person that I meet and wondering about them and thinking about them. To me it looks as if there are fifty dramas going on in a single block of New York City that ought to be paid attention to whereas in a little town like this, things happen, not slowly, but sort of infrequently where there’s enough space between each happening that you get to examine each thing and pay some attention to it. That appeals to me tremendously. I like that. I want to live a life in which I’m paying attention.
The point is that I don’t know if this is the way America looks but this is the way America looks to me right now in my life. This is the part of America that I want to save. And we’ll see what happens.“
Counting Deer
I’ve been thinking about Kent Haruf a lot lately. I only met him a couple times, the last in 2009 when I went to Colorado to interview him. I never did place the interview, but something I was talking about w/ my class reminded me of this part of it:
My routine is to sit down at my desk. The first thing I do is write in my journal for a while. All I’m doing is probably maybe two or three paragraphs. It’s nothing fancy. I’m not trying to make a literary journal out of it. I start with saying how many deer I’ve seen that morning. I always walk the dogs every morning and there are very few mornings, particularly in fall winter and spring, that I don’t see deer.
So I make a point of paying attention to all the deer I’ve seen and it’s a way of concentrating, a way of teaching yourself to pay attention. If you’re trying to count deer.
June 22, 2015
erikaswyler:
erikaswyler:
THIS IS IT. 6/23/15. 7:00 P.M....
THIS IS IT. 6/23/15. 7:00 P.M. Barnes & Noble, 86th & Broadway, NYC.You’re invited, and so are your friends. So is your friend’s friend, Dave, who you met that one time. Yeah, the one who smells like Fritos. He can bring his friends, too.
Who will be there? Me.Who will also be there? Maris Kreizman. Yes, that’s slaughterhouse90210. Yes, you should be starstruck. I am.Also: I will be wearing sequined shoes with gold bunny sculptures for heels. Come.Share, like, reblog, do what you do. I love you for it.
(Also, hey, those are the US, Australian, and UK covers!)
Reblogging because THIS IS *TOMORROW*!!!! Please do come and say hi.
You know what to do to clue me that you’re a tumblr.
“I like your shoelaces.”
You will have the satisfaction of hearing an author say, “Thanks. I stole them from the President.”Or, you could just say hi and tell me you’re a tumblr. That works too. And yes, I want to know your tumblr name. The more ridiculous, the better.
June 18, 2015
scottcheshire:
New Writing Workshop starting in July, in...
New Writing Workshop starting in July, in Manhattan Beach. Sign up!
Cheese, booze, and story talk with Writing Workshops Los Angeles
poetrysince1912:
Cheryl Pope’s Just Yell: From Within opening...
Cheryl Pope’s Just Yell: From Within opening reception on June 11 featured the performance WALK WITH ME #3 featuring Phenix Military Academy Poets.
In the performance, young Chicago writers carved poems into the surface of school desks in this interactive installation that speaks to systems of power and violence. Representing an average Chicago Public School class size, 32 students from Phoenix Military Academy performed in collaboration with Just Yell / Poetry as Self Defense and Project&. Viewers were invited for a walk with students in which they shared a spoken poem during an intimate one to one exchange.
The exhibition is up at the Poetry Foundation through August 28. In Just Yell: From Within, Cheryl Pope and a group of young poets from Chicago public schools activate various places and spaces of the Poetry Foundation through installation, sculpture, and spoken-word. Borrowing themes and tactile relics of American high school culture, Pope and the young poets address issues of violence as they plague the city of Chicago at a rapidly increasing rate.
See the exhibition 11AM–4PM Monday–Friday.
Part of the exhibition will be available for viewing during our evening events.
June 17, 2015
The Joy of Throwing Away An Entire Novel
“It occurred to me in that moment something that I’d long held to be
true: What makes us writers is as much what we throw out as what we
keep.”
June 13, 2015
June 9, 2015
once there was a man who had too many books. He had books on motorcycle repair, books on fishing,...
once there was a man who had too many books. He had books on motorcycle repair, books on fishing, books on 17th century monastic practices; there were books where the main characters were dukes and knights and warrior queens; books that took place in Ancient Egypt, & in outer-space, in the deep troubled logic of a human mind– books that had found its way to him over the course of a lifetime, adding small pieces to the great monument of his identity. There were books given to him by ex-lovers, by friends, and his parents. Books people thought he would love; or that would speak to him. Some did and some did not. But still he kept them because he saw his life as a totality of his experience. But there were, as I said, too many books. They crowded in around him until his thoughts lay like a web– spectral and oppressive. So he gave them away, one at a time. To friends and lovers and children. Row by row and shelf by shelf, his library dwindling. He made choices, cut out pieces of his flesh. This is for you, world. Take this and go with god. And soon he was down to one. He looked at it alone on the shelf. It was the book that he held the most dear of all other books. It’d spoken to him the way some 17th century monks were spoken to. He’d read it a long time ago and it seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. On occasion he’d thumb it on the toilet, or waiting for the bus. It was the kind of book that had meant a lot at one point, and the more of the world he let into his life, the more the book seemed to grow with him. Sometimes he’d talk about it to total strangers and he’d find himself woefully unable to express the thing the book had lodged inside him. The man took it into his hands. He touched the cover, the pages; the waveforms of a lifetime of moments collapsed into this single riffle along the edge of his thumb. He took it under his arm and went into his closet. Then he wrapped it around a jacket and stepped out into the world.
