Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

A shot of Bombay,
a capful of Noilly Prat,
drops of olive juice.

This is what I’ve heard called a “dirty martini.” Noilly Prat is the vermouth. The olive juice gives it a wonderful flavor. Just thought I’d supply that as a potential prop for use in a story.

Al, u have a facebook? btw, that haiku is amazing!

Al, M, what a great Haiku set!

I have seen Red Eye with Rachel McAdams, and I did indeed enjoy it.


Red-eyed night reading
forgettable prose alone
on a plane from Rome.

Very nice haiku, Guy! “Forgettable prose” describes most prose I’ve read.

Thanks M & Al. Yes, the forgettable prose I've almost forgotten I've read.

I say 'feel' as one; where the 'syllabilzation' (is that a word?) gets interesting is when you add the hard/soft footie distinction that marks much of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. It's not the syllables but the iambs. Now that would put Haiku writing into a different playing field!

Where's the piece in space
that's expanded inwards to
where the stars are not?

Interesting blog, Guy! I hadn’t intended to take so long to read it. I must admit, it’s a peculiar coincidence that the name Paris popped up so many times in such a short space. Doesn’t synchronicity have to do with the meaning coincidence supplies with reference to the goings on of the unconscious? The multiple occurrences of Paris might be instances of synchronicity, rather than mere coincidence, if your future were hanging in the balance because of what was going on in your psyche--if, for example, you were in the midst of an agonizing attempt to bring up a repressed memory of something that happened in Paris, or trying to decide where in the world to go to leave the past behind and start a new life, and Paris was a possibility you had seriously considered. I can’t think of a good example.

When I saw that ad for The Ringer, I thought, “Be still, my heart! Is that Sarah Gellar?” She’s still great looking, isn’t she?

*



The stars glitter and
Twinkle, dancing in the sky
Myriads of love

So Sarah hasn’t gotten any better since Buffy, huh?


Boot-scooting with stars.
Driving Italian sportcars.
Doe-eyed girls in bars.

Al, I hope you don't mind, but I'd like to Haiku M's with

Kerplunking sitars
helps when ice fishing for gars
or smoking cigars.

Now for yours:

It is the vampire
in me that keeps me coming
back for more of you.

M wrote: "Interesting blog, Guy! I hadn’t intended to take so long to read it. I must admit, it’s a peculiar coincidence that the name Paris popped up so many times in such a short space. Doesn’t synchronici..."

M that is why I don't call them synchronicities. I used to call them synchronicity-petites (in keeping with the French theme) until I stumbled across the Japanese word fushigi which was translated by David K. Reynolds as meaning 'wondrous event'. Thus, a fushigi is something kind of amazing, but not meaningful.

However, I have been actively tracking these kinds of things for the better part of 20+ years. I filled 3 notebooks with them before I began blogging. (Some are completely preposterous and often times funny.) I came to understand that perhaps the best argument against writing off these strings of 'coincidences' as mere coincidence in an age of empirical skepticism is to engage rational statistics — write them down. At what point does a string of coincidences stop being a coincidence? So, the individual stat may mean nothing, but the entire might infer something.

To my great surprise this summer I read Jung say pretty much exactly the same thing in Conversations with Carl Jung & Reactions from Ernest Jones:

I never made statistical experiments except one in the way of Rhine. I made one for another purpose. But I have come across quite a number of cases where it was most astounding to find that two causal chains happened at the same time, but independent of each other, so that you could say they had nothing to do with each other. It's really quite clear. For instance, I speak of a red car and at that moment a red car comes here. Now I haven't seen the red car, because it wasn't possible; it was hidden behind the building until just this moment when it suddenly appeared. Now many would say that this is an example of mere chance. But the Rhine experiment proves that these cases are not mere chance.

Now it would be superstitious and false to say, 'This car has appeared because here were some remarks made about a red car; it is a miracle that a red car has appeared.' It is not a miracle; it is just chance — but these chances happen more often than chance allows. That shows that there is something behind it (104-5).

Who can say what that 'thing' is, of course? But there are hints of it in the string and superstring theories of modern physics, as well as some of the extended consequences of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the subtle consequences of relativity. So while they may not be meaningful it is possible that they hint at meaning.

But beyond that, I find them amusing.

At the next table,
a man ordered fushigi.
Mere coincidence?

lol. That was excellent M. Still smiling.


The coincidence
was a synchronicity
in the mind only.

Not quite synchronous,
what happened in Ohio
was di-Akronous.

The dichotomous
mouse of Akron bifurcates
diaphanously.

“The Mouse of Akron”
Wanted, Preferably Dead!
Gray hair, beady eyes.

Akron's Gray Mouser
sought for Fafhrd in the pens
of one Fritz Leiber.

*



It watches the mouse
Waiting for a chance to pounce
Cats always stalk mice

There is a grey mouse
that eats the grain in Jack's house
with a pinot gris.

Buster cursed the fate
of his prostate, and then swore
at the pinot more.

“Arnold,” said the doc,
“your liver is a Chevy.”
He scowled. “Like a rock.”

Petrified liver
fears not the toll of stiff drinks
but jumps at shadows.

With all the lights on
the shadows clearly became
all that much darker.

Sorry to read that you are spooked. As to death, I heard a funny joke about it. When the woman who was scared to die talked about it with a guru, the guru said, 'Relax! I assure you that when the time comes you'll do it just fine.'

Tendrils of shadows
lurked until Velda approached,
then ran for their lives.

Al, that is the only computer war game I've ever played. I'm old enough to have played the Avalon Hill war games with tiny little cardboard squares.

Speaking of the frightful dead, I watched 'Constantine' again last night. Don't know why, but I thoroughly enjoy that movie, even with Reeves' leaden acting. Don't know if it will help, but knowing that Constantine is out there keeping the evil dead in their place might be of some comfort.

Running on empty
the boar chased down Attila.
His hunger was gone.

Alex, are you an avid gamer? I never was. I played Dungeons and Dragons one night with some veteran players, but I couldn’t see what they got out of it. A friend of mine had a board game called “Source of the Nile.” After playing that for about an hour, I didn’t care whether I found the source of the Nile or not. I just wanted to leave.


Here’s his pith helmet.
Here’s the tusk that gored Nigel
late in the Boar Wars.

War, death, blood, disease, and the devil in a designer suit. Alex, what an imagination you have! Though I’ve never eaten it, just the thought of sauerkraut potatoes and sausage makes me hungry.

Guy, I enjoyed the guru joke! I remember Avalon Hill, the game manufacturer, though it’s a name I haven’t thought of since the days of reel-to-reels and rotary phones.

Her heartbreaking voice
and a melancholy sax
on reels turning slow.

Al, I hope that a little homework was competently accomplished between your flights of imagination! Great fun to read the struggle to rein into cohesiveness your imagination.

M yes, I laughed out loud when I heard it too. And yes, Avalon Hill was in the time of rotary phones and reel-to-reels. The Betty cartoon had a great joke in this vein. The son comes to her and says 'I just read that if you had monkeys working on a typewriter long enough, eventually you would get a Shakespeare play.' 'Oh,' Betty says with obvious excitement, 'you want to know how that could happen?' 'No,' he said, 'I was wondering if you could tell me what a typewriter is.'

Nice haiku M! Smooth as a nice single malt after a fine dinner.

Melancholia
covers the blue skies' lost stars
with the ache of her.

I ached, when young, from
nights in joints. Now my joints ache.
It’s hell to get old.

When I was in grammar school, I begged my parents for a typewriter. I love typewriters. I’ve owned several. When I was in seventh grade, my parents bought me a refurbished Royal office typewriter that had been made about 1952. I still use it on occasion. My advice about typewriters is not to buy anything you have to plug in or that has any plastic parts.

If you get one, you’ll never use it, except maybe to type checks or envelopes, which is what I use mine for. You’re used to a word processor, where you can rearrange sentences or paragraphs, copy and paste from one document to the next. With an old typewriter, there’s only one copy (unless you use carbons), no rewriting without retyping the whole page, and every typo is visible as a strike-over or a blotch of correction fluid.

Not very good, but here goes:


What I cannot bear
is how the truth of being
rests in your bare skin.

I myself loved using the IBM Selectric. Now that was a typewriter. Of course, it was electric and needed repair, and weighed a ton. But oh... how sweet to the touch!

Thanks, Al. I thought it was kind of funny too. And of course, I am curious what you wrote!

Al, you need to visit Canada! That was tame by our standards. Mary Murphy from 'So You Think You Can Dance' has actually turned red from what is for us dancing that doesn't even raise an eyebrow in 'So You Think You Can Dance Canada'. (If you can track down some of the shows, the Canadian dancing is amazing.)

And, your Haiku is kind of goth kinky S&M. Très amusant!

Me, a bad influence?

“If I were the earth,
that would be prairie,” she said,
looking down her shirt.

M wrote: "“If I were the earth,
that would be prairie,” she said,
looking down her shirt."

M I really liked this! Nice!

Thank you, Guy! And it’s nice, by the way, to find someone else who appreciates the Selectric. My sister bought me a Correcting Selectric II in 1989, when the company she was working for went out of business. I used it for years, in my office at a foundation, then in my office at a clinic. I used to get it lubricated and adjusted every couple of years. I had it serviced last in 2010. When I depended on a typewriter every day, I kept a spare Selectric tied up in a plastic bag (to keep dust out and the lubricants from evaporating) on top of a filing cabinet.

Fingers on the keys,
she typed, “My fingers, the keys
to man’s happiness.”

Wow! Your Haiku's are on the ball, rolling along like silver! This is also very fine.

Thank you, Guy and Alex. Don’t worry, Al. The best writing comes of moments when one can think of nothing but nonsense. Office haiku! We’ve invented a new kind of poetry.

Who would not respond
to a leggy blonde between
carbon sheets and bond?

My Janelle. To think
I once dipped strands of her hair
in India ink!

*



Hair as black as ink
Blood red lips; perfection, and
Skin as white as snow

On the dwarfs’ advice,
Snow White threw out her Apple
and got a PC.

When she turned it on
the Queen bug infected her
and she fell fast asleep.

Folk gasped and wondered,
was she dead or compliant
with Energy Star?

From the screen saver
awoke the prince of darkness
who almost saved her.

He was disabled
and charged with interfering
with a warcraft game.

Alex, Mossers is MINE. His nose is so... pretty! :D
Ok, here goes.

The dark sea rumbled
and Mossers' tummy grum grum.
Rum rum in tum tum. :)

This isn't just my doing. ALEX. hem hem

Snow White stirred and sighed,
“When you have a prince like this,
who needs Sominex?”