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"They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezed the breath out of each other, saying son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together,..."
The DRUGS: I'm looking at voices, too. BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT is fiction, but written in two first-person voices, so where better to learn than from powerful memoirs? This last week I've reread James Frey and Augusten Burroughs, two of my faves, scrutinized their narratives (ever realize how A MILLION LITTLE PIECES reads so fast, in part because everything is left justified? Brilliant.) I just finished Anne Kaysen's GIRL, INTERRUPTED, a kind of comp to mine because she and Ben share a touch of insanity and a stint at the same loony bin (Mclean Psychiatric Hospital). The entire book, really a series of essays, questions that blurred border of crazy and normal. My kind of read, especially her wry observation on psychiatric medications:
"Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium: the therapists' friends. The resident could put us on that stuff too, in an 'acute' situation. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it.
"You're doing so well," the resident would say.
That's because those things knocked the heart out of us."
The ROCK-n-ROLL: Still reveling in Radiohead's latest, IN RAINBOWS. Every few days, a new musical infatuation; this week, it's Jigsaw Falling into Place. With lyrics like "words are a sawed-off shotgun" and "before you're lost between the notes" coupled with fabulous percussion, how can you go wrong? The song reminds me of a scene in my friend Jimmy's novel DARK SIDE OF THE SOUL, where two souls dance on an angel's keyboard. Really.
The WRITING: It's going, it's going. Finally have a first chapter I like. A lot. At last. So much for our mutual sabbatical... though between poems and query letters, I'm writing PURE and LOVE SONG. Maybe just mixing it up is what I needed. Peace, Linda