April is the Cruelest Month

That Writing Course?

Anybody want to try that flash fiction course? It looks pretty straightforward. They asked for my name and email address, which did not seem too onerous. A prominent Unsubscribe option at the bottom of each of the three emails I have received so far. 
For where I sit, it looks pretty good!
Bill
https://learn.flashfictionmagazine.com/p/free-course

Okay, okay -- I'm sorry for the short posts

Man, reading this blog backwards has been a real eyeopener. Sometimes I find that reading a journal or old writing is like reading someone else's work. I don't know, maybe I'm not that person any more, or maybe once I've written it, it goes out of my head -- room for new stuff.

In response to your post, Bill, SEE ME FEEL ME TOUCH ME HEAL ME, I commented (not only on your lack of a cellphone) but about a story called "The Last Poet and the Robots" -- which has suddenly flooded back into my mind. Weird, what titles will do for you...  Anyway, you responded with the discovery that it is part of a serial novel written by 17 different authors, called Cosmos, which was published in a small Fanzine from July of 1933 to January of 1935 or thereabouts. And now there's a website for it called The Cosmos Project: https://cosmos-serial.com/

I don't know if we could get 17 authors to do it, but what do you think? Should we try a serial novel sometime?

Okay, I'm going to go read or fall asleep or something. Today was not terribly productive except that I got to talk to students and try to sell them on the beauty of Much Ado About Nothing. Did you guys ever read any more of the Hogarth Shakespeare books. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood kicked ass, and I have Jo Nesbo's Macbeth sitting here waiting to be read. Okay, okay... Good night.

I owe Tom some time...

I just went back and read a few posts I hadn't read before. Tom, I'm sorry that it took me more than three years to read your description of your trip to Ireland. It's quite beautiful and should be somewhere more public with the pictures and the video of you singing "Four Green Fields." Also, the comments from Mike in September and October of 2016, which is either right after or right before his diagnosis, are extraordinary in their prescience.

Sorry it took me so long to read all that.

I'll write something new soon.

Rob

Looking Backward

I remember the bars and the jokes, the stranger's eye caught once and never once again. The world I knew grown distant and strange, seen through transmissions increasingly delayed. I'd always wanted to try space travel.

Confinement

Confinement

Stuck inside

They say

For a few weeks

A month, a year

Missing touches

And hugs

Petrified sometimes

The time to myself

My own

The fan is on for company

Not as lonely as I thought—

Dreams and phone calls

March 29, 2020

Jackson Heights

Minor Revelations

Meanwhile, Wright got into a muddle with his boss at the Science Museum, Bromley, an “out-and-out bully,” who would allow Wright to work on the Mechanism only in his free time and with virtually no access to the data already collected. (“We don’t let children play with grenades,” Wright remembers a colleague scoffing not quite out of earshot.) This meant that while Wright’s wife would go on holiday with their children to exciting locales, Wright would travel year after year to the museum in Budapest, which contained the context that Wright thought essential to understanding the Mechanism. Eventually, after years of this routine, he and his wife divorced and soon lost touch.

Later, as Wright toiled in obscurity at a rural American university, he was delighted to learn that Bromley, much beloved and feted, was dying of rectal cancer. Wright flew to see him in Cambridge, and Bromley, as an olive branch from a dying man settling his affairs, handed over some as-yet-unpublished data on the Mechanism, insultingly minor revelations, they seemed to Wright, not contained in one of Bromley’s prize-winning monographs. Bromley was dead by the end of August, and the newly-invigorated Wright set about on his life’s work.

Back in America, he was able to work freely, albeit intermittently given his teaching load, through that fall and winter, despite the distance between himself and the Science Museum, between himself and Budapest. Although he lacked the energy of his youth and, indeed, suffered from a socially-significant chronic ailment (chronic, explosive diarrhea), he began to think of himself as the world’s foremost living authority on the Mechanism, an assessment not shared by anyone else. He considered that the Mechanism had been bequeathed to him by Bromley in some fundamental but unstated way.

In April, however, he learned of a new research team based in Bath and the effort to take a new set of internal scans of the Mechanism. Enraged, Wright saw this as an improper encroachment on his own turf. “There is a long-established, unwritten law concerning the study of pre-Anatolian antiquities,” he wrote in a blistering open letter, “which is that while one researcher has access to the primary material, any other researcher is denied access until the first has finished.” His letter remained unpublished and unacknowledged despite Wright’s best efforts.

In June, Wright hurried back—traveling agonizingly and with several changes of clothes—by car, train, bus, airplane, bus, train, and taxi to the Science Museum, a place he remembered ambivalently despite his seventeen years of employment. But he was too late; the Bath group’s fully-authorized tunneling positron scans had been completed ahead of schedule and the research team had already dispersed. Wright’s behavior and bedraggled appearance caused Museum security to follow him at a discreet distance; their official report stated that he seemed “a possible hazard to himself.”

He stayed on at the Science Museum for the summer, requesting and then subsequently demanding unsuccessfully the results of the Bath group’s scans, but the troubles with his digestion continued. He chalked it up to stress, but the CT scan he had waited for eleven weeks to have thanks to National Health’s byzantine triage process revealed advanced colon cancer. On his way out, he happened to run into a former grad school classmate whom Wright remembered may or may not have been hired by Bath. They did not have the chance to talk.

The cancer moved aggressively despite treatment, and Wright was dead before the end of August. The Mechanism, inscrutable to the end, consumed his final conscious thoughts.

A Reboot of This Old Shared Blog

Gentlemen:
Under the rules of quarantine, we are required to write and share creative pieces during this worldwide crisis. Hey, I don't make the rules...
So here is our old shared blog. I didn't need to make changes: you are all already contributors to it. That is, you can both post your own stuff as well as respond to the work of others (I hope).
I have asked you in emails about fiction in particular, but, as you can see from our previous work, we ranged widely and were mostly working thorough life stuff. So post whatever you want. How does that sound?
Bill