Children, Churches and Daddies

Editorial

A great number of changes come with volume 75, and for many reasons.
Last year, as I was producing bi-weekly digest-sized issues, I realized that this magazine was well-respected and enjoyed by many people, but the design was not giving the writiers the respect they deserved. And the magazine’s focus was also limited, covering only fictional writing. I tried to remedy that by beginning to add news stories intersperced throughout the issues, but it was only a start.
So now I give you the new Children, Churches and Daddies. It comes out monthly now, less often, but it definitely larger, as past readers can attest to. The pages are now twice as large (it’s standard sized now instead of digest sized), but the length is now closer to 100 pages, instead of 30 or 40. There are more ads, and there are more sections.
There is now a Letters To The Editor section. I would like letters from you, telling me what is good or bad, so we can all make this magazine a better one for our readers. There is now a section called Lunchtime Poll Topic (adapted from the movie Heathers, where weekly one group would ask everyone in the cafeteria a question, just to see the responses they get). Periodically I throw out a question to my email group lists (send me email at c.c.andd@eworld.com to get Poll Topic questions) to spark conversation and debate in this otherwise lonely society of ours. You may like some of the responses...
There is now a News Stories section, and a Political News section. There are still pages and pages dedicated to poetry and prose, and we still manage to get in a section called Info You Can Use, and another section called Philosophy Monthly, where some of the great (and definitely not-so-great) philosophical essays are reprinted.
Children, Churches and Daddies has always been a forum to learn about great writing from America, Canada and Europe. Now it is a forum for politics, philosophy, and more. Now it is a greater forum to learn from than ever.

letters to the editor

Dear Janet:
Received Hope Chest in the Attic today. It’s a handsome volume, but I am disappointed that you didn’t sign it as I requested. By the way, your poem, the pre-cursor to your magazine title, is very moving. I always wondered how you came up with cc&d. “Scars” is also an excellent prose poem. I have a 3-1/2 year old daughter and I kept thinking of her as I read it. Funny, when I first read Scars Publications, I thought the title was based on something much more insidious. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in your poem, it also represents courage (Rosco) and warmth (your sister), at least to this reader. Your stuff is good for fathers to read. We have such a responsibility to our daughters as male role models. My own father died when I was nine and my three sisters all went through hell with men because of his absence. I look forward to finishing your book.
Mark Blickley

Mark: Thanks. It’s an interesting take on the prose poem. I think men and women have a responsibility to daughters as role models. But then again, we have something to teach our sons, too...

Hi Janet,
The Window is intricate and intense - you have such empathy. In fact, when I first read “all men have secrets”, I’d thought you’d also been raped. You have the ability to crawl inside the skins of the women you worked with in rape education.
Thanks again,
Joan Papalia Eisert

Joan: Well, I’ll never refuse a compliment. Especially when I can say that The Window is still for sale, so get a copy today...

Janet:
Janet, my name is Jeff Morris. I program automation computers, write some and surf this box. I would like to congratulate you on the material you have in IN VIVO (or whatever the hell it is). I would like to congratulate you because its not crap. I looked through poetry and fiction on the net for 2.5 hours and yours is the first I’ve found that isn’t crap. Your work is very very good. It is fair and intelligent and interesting and I can tell you wrote it because you had something to write — not because you wanted to write something.
Please let me know if there’s somewhere I might read more of your stuff, and if you might marry me. You can check out a couple of my things at
http://execpc.com/~morris/world.html
and
http://execpc.com/~morris/boul.html
They are certainly not on par with your work (I’m not just saying that because I want you to marry me, either) but they’re not crap...just the same.
Thank you for preventing this evening from being a complete waste of time for me. I was beginning to wonder if it was me. It wasn’t.
Jeff Morris

Jeff: Yes, it is In Vivo, and it is a good publication...

Janet:
It seems my email was fouled up. If you were to reply to my last note (where in I asked where I might read more of your writing), it would go nowhere because my “from” info was all wrong. This one should be ok...but just in case,
Jeff Morris
Sorry. Hope this will not poorly influence your consideration of my request that you marry me.
Jeff

Jeff: Thanks for the offer, but only in Utah can you have multiple marriages (I’m working on changing that...)

Janet -
Again, you fill my mailbox with emotions, while unique unto yourself, are conveyed in the ways of the universal human experience. Now the biggest problem I have with your work is which to print first. Some comments I’ve gotten on your stuff is “really cool” - “I like the way she writes” - “puts me in a mood” - “you can feel what she feels” - there’s more but I can’t recall at the moment - rest assured, no one has had any negative comments on your stuff. Thanx for contributing - really special stuff.
Brian Johnson

Brian: My dear, you are too good to me. So I’ll have to remind everyone about your ad in this issue for They Won’t Stay Dead. Get it. Read it. Submit to it. (Was that a good enough plug, Brian?)

My dear Janet K,
You let me in too close all at once; too close to you, inside you. You scared me. I feel I’m going to be swallowed up in your openness. I’m afraid I will expose myself, some hidden parts that allow me to feign sane my longings, retain my cool.
Your honesty wakes me, you passions stir me to accept: “my check near yours, not touching but so close I could still feel your warmth, your desire”. Yes, I too will embrace the sublime “constant, nagging reminder that I still have to breathe”. I too will open to the pain, the nausea, to the surreal. I will feel the rock in my stomach, the ominous pressing on my chest. I’ll stop claiming, stop possessing it as my pain, my suffering - I’ll share it with you. I will play on your terms, follow your guidelines. I’ll play without rules. Make me examine my humility, the humiliation of being raped [yes, boys get raped, too] and I will no longer feel alone. Am I ready for this?

I will thank you for rekindling the reminders of the Mysteries of this Paradoxical Adventure we call day-to-day living. I will thank you for sharing your Hopes, Dreams and Joys along with the Pain & Confusion. I will do these things, then let them go and return home, here just where I am on a lazy, sunny, Saturday afternoon.
I really appreciate the vehicle you’ve created with Scar Publication - with your chapbooks, prose and poetry collections, et. al. I admire your courage, your self-honesty, your integrity in putting sooo much of yourself into your work, into your art. You are of profound service to me and I value our developing relations, godspeed.
Here’s a couple of Taggerzines, hope you enjoy’m. They are all copyfree so feel free . . . I’ll be sending you upcoming editions that include your writings. Till then, be well Robust Spirit - May all your Children be Laughing, All your Churches Blessed and All your Daddies Attentive, Loving, Nurturing and Wise.
Lovepeace, Dan

Dan: Man, you are just way too drippy with the good stuff. Are you always this filled with emotion?

Hello Koop:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Babe, thanks so much for the new cc&d, & especially for our chapbook, which looks much meatier than most I’ve seen. I’m looking forward to kicking back with it over the weekend . . . after I run the read, & then hit work, my guts & glory are gone, & a mellow day or 2 is prescribed.
It was very kind of you to send the cap; I know very well that your work costs you a great deal to produce, on a number of levels, & that 4 or 5 bucks would be a cheap contribution. The deathly truth is that I’m a living cliché; the starving poet. In fact, I am starving now. However, it’s my own fault; was working on a poem, & just didn’t get around to food . . .
I will get back to you & have more to say on the chapbook; I already like the look of it. Seems to me you’ve been doing what I’m starting to do — the denser prose-poem approach, rather than stringing short liens over a number of pages. I am having many pieces “suddenly become available for submission” simply because they fit on a page or 2, & are more practical to accept for publication. I have 1000 poems on disk; many fit this genre, so you ain’t seen nothing yet . . .
cc&d is so obviously a labor of love . . . I just have to smile when I go through it. You use your space & your poets to best effect, & the illos attest to your skill as a graphic artist. I was deeply pleased at the way you’ve presented my stuff; in fact, it’s difficult to express my appreciation on the level to which I feel it. Don’t say much for me as a writer, but hell, babe, sometimes I just get choked up. Seeing my work not only in print, but treated well and carefully, & illustrated with ironic electronic schematics, brings a balance to the pain with ironic electronic schematics, brings a balance to the pain it cost to produce. Funny that “Scars Publications” would have a big hand in beginning to erase my remaining scars form this 3-ring Trauma Circus and it’s always therapeutic to see my Olga Poems in print; I wrote many of them during the darkest hour of the darkest night of my soul, unsure of my status as an artist, sick in love, doubting myself to my guts and whenever the land on a page somewhere, it reinforces my choice to believe in myself. Thanks again, Koop. It was also gratifying to see D. Phillip’s work hanging out with mine; I believe in this man & his work on their own merits. He’s for real, if getting crankier all the time . . .
You have been the perfect example of editorial politesse; hanging back to let your poets shine; so now it seems right that the Koop gets her shot at the spotlight. I will have much more to say on your words down the road, and I said; most writers tend to be Feedback Addicts, & the only way I can pay you now is by paying close attention . . .
Koop, I’m gonna get out of your space & let you resume your good work. Thanks for looking at these new things. I’m having a blast working with you & I seriously appreciate the space you’ve given me. I can tell you’re very selective about what you present & you’ve been very kind to a journeyman poet. Go get ‘em, babe.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally yours,
C. Ra McGuirt

C Ra: People like you keep me going. Thx.

lunchtime poll topic

In the Movie Heathers, four snotty high-school women would come up with a weekly question, and poll everyone in the cafeteria for an answer. The called it the Lunchtime Poll Topic, and answers would be funny, bold, interesting - but at least they made you think. We here are Children, Churches and Daddies thought it would be a good idea to foster some discussions - or debates - of our own with a monthly version of the Lunchtime Poll Topic.
If you’re interested in being a part of the Lunchtime Poll Topic questioning, email me with your email address, and your answers can be printed here. If you’re interested in responding to a Lunchtime Poll Topic that you’ve seen in print, email or mail us and we may use your letter in the Letter To The Editor section.

Okay, okay, okay, so I have to get this question out of the way. (I promise I won’t bring this guy up again, I swear.) OJ Simpson was released in the fall, found not guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The country was divided when it came to his guilt or innocence.
After Seeing the results of this case, what do you think of (a) the result, (b) the justice system, (c) the police department, (d) racism as it may pertain to this case, or (e) sexism as it may pertain to this case?

Virgil Hervey, Editor
I wouldn’t want to trust my fate to a jury - especially in a death penalty case.
I think the racial divide is widening. I don’t see any solutions. We could pass laws requiring people to breed outside their own race, but the next generation would discriminate based on skin tone.
Cops like to beat people up. I love to watch “COPS” on tv. They can barely restrain themselves, even in front of the TV cameras.
Mark Furman made racism an issue. His racism, combined with the racial makeup of the jury, were two of the “big three” elements that sunk the prosecution. The other one was the inept crime-lab/coroner’s office.
I didn’t see sexism as an issue, since 10 of the jurors and the lead prosecutor were women. Maybe Marcia Clark made a mistake in feeling comfortable with the sexual make-up of the jury.
As a criminal lawyer, I could picture this scenario: OJ calls and says he’s been arrested for a double murder - wants me to represent him.
“I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that this is a DNA case and I am a documented wife-beater. The good news is that the lead detective is a documented racist, the police lab has mishandled the evidence and the coroner who did the autopsey won’t be able to testify, because he made over 50 mistakes.”
All the defense had to do was create a reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds. I felt they clinched a tie, when the prosecution dropped the ball in the jury selection. I felt they had it sewed-up when I heard that they couldn’t even call the M.E. who actually did the autopsey. Furman was the icing on the cake. I personally think OJ got away with murder, but I can see a jury refusing to convict on this evidence. The police screwed up this case and left the DAs hanging in the breeze.
Any reasonably competent criminal attorney should have won this case. I personally started drooling with envy, when I heard about the M.E.

J. Kenneth Sieben, Writer
I don’t have an opinion regarding OJ’s innocence or guilt because I did my best to avoid trial news. Had a been a juror, I would have paid attention, but I was not and therefore chose active uninvolvement.
But I could not avoid news of the trial as a spectacle. The conduct of lawyers and witnesses on both sides was reprehensible. They lost sight of justice as a goal. They were too concerned with image. If the trial had not been televised, it could have been conducted on a higher plane. But it was really a national disgrace involving millions of Americans losing sight of justice and demanding entertainment.
The worst result of the entire experience is an increase in racial polarization. But it’s foolish to expect rational thinking and behavior from people who get their kicks from garbage television, call-in radio, bigoted politicians, and sound-bite logic.
Perhaps I’m showing my age. There’s no going back to the good old days, but we could try to re-capture two things from the not-too-distant past—courtesy when dealing with others and a sense of humor concerning ourselves.

Dave Berk, Student
super huge lurch to the right. minorities do no get a fair shake in the courtrooms of america, and with the results of the simpson trial in it will be even more difficult.

Heather Hoffman, Editor
I think he had a fair trial. If you judge fairness by the skills and actions of the judge, that is. If you judge fairness by the matched/not matched abilities of the lawyers, or, more to the point, the tactics the defense lawyers used, then it wasn’t a fair trial.
Then again, to base fairness on the actions and attitudes of lawyers is a fairly dumb move in general...
I think it’s exactly how it was in “The Merchant Of Venice”. Persuasion is an art form. I also think it’s nice to know that the wheels of justice never really change.
Our society in general is changing! After all, white people pay high-priced lawyers to get out of murder charges all the time. This is a landmark in terms of how our society is built racially. Slowly but surely, the world is becoming color blind.
The police in this country are human, and want to see a killer named in a brutal case such as this one as badly as anyone else.
The defense lawyers used racism strategically and skillfully. The prosecution should have addressed it more openly, as the defense, in many instances, directed the tide of argumentation in the case. The prosecution tried to seem “above” the “race card”, but they should have at least tried to show that when pressed, they knew how to deal.
Was there real racism in this case? Absolutely not. If Nicole’s husband was white, he would have been treated exactly the same way by police. The prime suspect has to be the killer. I’m not saying the police were corrupt; they just wanted to make sure they got a conviction. And in doing so, they inadvertently got him aquitted.
It wouldn’t be the first time...
Sexism? OJ beat his wife, so N.O.W. publicized it to death. Again, it was not a central issue. This case was a very spcific, personal matter. While many activists have taken up the cause of Nicole’s beatings, your average man on the street does not typically extrapolate the domestic disputes between OJ and his wife to the larger picture of society.
Unless, of course, he’s being interviewed for TV.

Nick Lokshin, Student
Sorry baby, you’re not going to get any intelligent conversation out of me! Who gives a shit if he did it! I am just glad its over and I no longer have hear about it.
Alexandria Rand, Writer
I thought he was guilty, I thought the evidence was painfully obvious, but then again, I wasn’t in the jury, I didn’t pay much attention to it. I didn’t know that Furhor-man admitted to planting evidence in other cases and pleaded the Fifth to whether or not he planted evidence in this case until just recently, which sheds a whole new light on things.
I thought the jury was going to find him guilty. I was surprised with the verdict.
And I was angry when race was brought into this case, because I didn’t see it as a hate crime because she was white, so I didn’t see where race fit in. In Police framing him? Possibly... It made me more angry, I think that race was brought into this so heavily when the issue of sexism was so overlooked. He beat his wife with amazing regularity, and feel he should be punished for it (no, I don’t think this trial was enough of a punishment for him if he is innocent of murder, but guilty of the years of abuse he gave her). That was the card they should have been playing, that he wanted her dead because he didn’t have power over her anymore as her husband and he was a misogynist. At least on one level, a grave injustice has been done.

Camille Roberts, Marketing Director
A lot of people are pissed off because they think that OJ is terrible to beat his wife. But beating one’s wife is not proof of murdering her; it’s entirely possible to be a jerk without being a murderer too.
All the verdict really said was that the police screwed up and it’s impossible to determine whether OJ did it or not.
The racist cop thing was a valid issue, but it wasn’t nearly as important to the defense as the fact that the time line was screwed up (how could OJ take a shower and dispose of his bloody clothes and the weapon, all in 5 minutes), that a single person probably can’t kill 2 people with a knife unless the first one died from a single wound, and that the OJ had been seen wearing gloves on TV many times before the murder, so anyone who wanted to frame him would know what kind to get.
So why did the race thing get blown out of proportion? I think both sides were trying to inflame people. Racist cops piss off black people, and blacks complaining about racism piss off white people.
The solution? Teach all children that patriarchy leads to marriage (i.e., heterosexuality and monogamy), which is really a drag, and best avoided.

Michael Estabrook, Writer

where were you when the OJ Simpson trial verdict came in?

is the question
they’ll be asking one day
as certainly it
will be at least one of the biggest
trials of the century.
And I’ll say I was in California
at the Courtyard Marriott in
San Jose at another stupid
boring management
meeting which adjourned at 10 a.m.
so we could all go out to the lobby
with everybody else
in the hotel and watch the TV.
There were some gasps
as the clerk said “Not Guilty.”
Most of the women in
the room covered their mouths, shook
their heads, one even sobbed.
“Maybe the prosecution
should have played the Woman Card
like Johnnie Cochran played
the Race Card,” says one young
lady with blank eyes, while the guy
next to me says, “Gee what’s going
to happen to OJ now?”
And I’m thinking that this will go
down as one of the great
unsolved criminal mysteries like
the Lindbergh Kidnapping and who was
Jack the Ripper.

from a Law Student...
The O.J. verdict is still big news here. It really is amazing just how much it separates the races. I know only one white person who agrees with the verdict (“his son did it!”), and very few blacks who disagree with it.
I personally think it’s a tragedy: somehow we have forgotten that two (truly) innocent people were butchered last year, and all of the uncontested evidence (to say nothing of the contested evidence) fully supports his guilt. A good number of my collegues are disgusted and shamed by the verdict and what it says about lawyers.

Kurt Nimmo, Writer
What “justice” system? The so-called O. J. trial demonstrated — once again — that you can get away with almost anything if you are rich & famous. I don’t see this as a racial issue — I see it as a class issue. If O. J. was poor & living in the ghetto, he’d be in prison for life... & the trial would have lasted five minutes, not eight months. If Susan Smith had gobs of cash, do you think her trial would have lasted a nanosecond?
I think of ancient Rome... the Circus Maximus. Slay a few heretics — or put them on Jerry Springer — & the masses are placated for the moment.
Why are people surprised by the likes of Mark Furhman? I’ve run up against cops like him before... not racist — since I’m white & so were the cops — but FASCIST... it seems to be a job
prerequisite.
Racism wasn’t an issue — except for the media... & Simpson’s “dream team” of egotistical lawyers.
Not sure about sexism... what bothered me is the way Nicole & Ronald Goldman were minimized by the media — as if their murders were secondary to the personalities involved... O. J., the lawyers, the prosecutors, Furhman, even Maria Lopez.
the whole thing stinks... & everybody involved will write a book (or hire somebody to write
a book) or get paid tons to appear on HARD COPY & A CURRENT AFFAIR... or so sayeth Nimmo.

Gabriel Athens, Writer
I hadn’t put much thought into it, but then a friend was talking about it to me, and this is what he said about the racism thing:
That whether or not Simpson was innocent, if he couldn’t get off in the justice system we have, where money and power buys everything, then it would be because of racism. Often the rich big white guy gets off (William Kennedy Smith comes to mind) because he has the power, the money and the means. If it works for the rich white guy and Simpson couldn’t get off when he had the the power, the money and the means, then the black community would see it as just another hit against blacks in general.
I guess I can see that. But what does it say for our justice system?

Lorelei Jones, Art Instructor
How about how the media creates an event and manipulates society?

Ted Kusio, Editor
Have to say that I didn’t really follow this thing at all. I’m not much of a football fan, and the overall sensationalism really kind of scared me.
But what I did find fascinating after the verdict came down is:
1) Most blacks seemed to cheer happily, while most whites seemed to shake their heads in disgust. It’s too powerful for me to ignore. I mean, is there really something that I, Slow white X, am missing because of my skin color? Or ... ?
2) I always hate trials and second guessing verdicts because I wasn’t there for the whole trial. I was subjected to media and (uninformed?) commentary. Makes me wonder how *anyone* can really know what happened in this situation, or any other. My religious backgroud almost makes me think this whole “justice” thing is just an earthly pacification, with the real TRUTH coming at a later date.
Well, for a guy who has no opinion, I sure took a lot of space to say it!
Right now my persoanl big questionis: Should I find a way to move to Utah where I can be a reclusive artist finally able to create the next BIG THING? Or should I get a second job a Wendy’s and buy a bigger TV?
Hmmmmmmmmmm............

Brian Tolle, Film Director
i am sorry, but the only thing i really know about the oj trial is that he drove a white bronco fast on the highway. i must plead oj-ignorant.

Michael Wright, Graphic Artist
I don’t think he did it but I really do think he knows who did and is covering up for him/her. Perhaps his son?? I think that he probably had a fair trial, but the media coverage made our justice system look like a farce.
Ben Ohmart, Writer
I’ve always had a personal bias against the media. I’m not one of these people hungry for news all the time and “real” life. Real life sucks, so I like entertainment during the few times I whack the tv on. So. In view of the way the media have overblown this, I’m glad he got off. The media influenced too many people. Take my grandparents. Just because something’s on the news, they assume it must be true. There are many people like that in the world. They haven’t all died out yet.
Also, I’m not so naive not to consider that the media circus may’ve been egged on the defense, so that they’d get the sympathy vote from some people (like me?). It’s very possible. If it is, I applaud the defense for using the slug media to their advantage; parasites can come in handy!

Chad Maier, Sony Music Representative
i (to put it bluntly) just don’t give a hoot about the case, and i don’t really know what’s going on with it. he was acquitted? i try to ignore it as much as possible.

Daisy

Bruce Genaro

I am waiting for Daisy in the cocktail lounge of the hotel Nikko, a 32 storey glass, concrete and steel monument to capitalism in the middle of San Francisco. My fingers are rap-tap-tapping nervously on the black marbled bar of this overly designed room. It is noon and the room is ominously dark, almost foreboding. The bartender, a tall, slender blonde man with an air of superiority, eyes me suspiciously as I nurse a very tall, very dry martini. His one raised eyebrow suggests that it’s a little too early in the day for straight alcohol. He must be new on the job. And he hasn’t met Daisy, the woman who has driven, drives me, to drink. Thirty minutes ago I rang Daisys’ room from the white courtesy telephone in the lobby. She’d assured me she would be down in five minutes. By Daisy Standard Time, I’ve still have another twenty minutes of waiting. I have no doubt that Daisy could delay the second coming of Christ. Billions of people standing around wondering what the hold-up is. Christ looking at his watch, performing minor miracles to keep the crowd under control while Daisy puts the finishing touches on her makeup and wardrobe.
Daisy has always had the annoying capacity to push my patience and my bar tab to the limit. While the anticipation of seeing her is as heady for me as any drug (complete with pupils dilated), the reality of our rendezvous is more like withdrawal (vomiting optional). Daisy and I haven’t seen each other in a year and a half and I’m beginning to wonder il we’re going to see each other today. At least while I’m sober. I rom my seat at the bar I have a clear view of the bank of elevators that disperses people to and from the hotel tower. A bell rings and a Lucite triangle illuminates, announcing it is ready to make it’s return trip to the top floor. Each time the doors open the cabin disgorges an assortment of tacky tourists in matching jogging suits and sneakers or cookie-cutter businessmen in grey and black pin-stripe suites with white shirts and club ties. “When did San Francisco become so conservative?” I ask myself. Any day now I expect to be so influenced by the Republican right that I’ll go out and arm myself with an uzi on my way to an anti-abortion rally, stopping on route at a book store to pick-up a copy of “To Renew America”.
My heart leaps into my throat each time the bell rings, thinking this is it. It’s going to be her. But it isn’t. Considering what I am about to do, I can use the free time to reconsider. I had bought it only yesterday, surprising myself with a complete lack of deliberation. A two and a half carat yellow stone set in a platinum and eighteen carat gold band. I push the little green velvet box back and forth between my hands like a miniature game of hockey. I make hushed little noises in the back of my throat to imitate the sound of a roaring crowd. Rah! Rah! I catch myself being caught up in this little game and look around the room to see if I’m embarrassing myself, but the only other person in this alcoholic mausoleum is blondy. Anyway, all of the Sharks’ best men are in the penalty box and there’s no hope for a win, so I put the “puck” back into my coat pocket without opening it and I order another martini, double, no olives. I think about my fortieth birthday which is fast approaching and wonder if Daisy will be around to celebrate it with me.
When she finally does appear, Frosted blond hair, teased and spiked, moused and gelled, black Leather jacket and “Laura Petri” Capri pants, we embrace. She says how great it is to see me. I clench my jaw over her shoulder just barely able to reply “um-hum,” through my grinding teeth. She sits down on the red leather stool and orders a scotch and soda but not before sampling my martini. She does this every time. The woman can recite chapter and verse from 5 year old issues of Vogue, but can’t remember that she doesn’t like Vodka. As usual with Daisy, my anger, or rather frustration (which she is infuriatingly oblivious to) lasts for about thirty seconds and we are quickly catching up on all the latest gossip. We are almost finished with our cocktails so I ask her, “What would you like to do now that your lubricated?”. “Well, do you know any neat little boutiques where we can go shopping?” “ That’s all San Francisco is,’ I reply. “That and restaurants.” “Great,” she says “let’s go.” She jumps off the stool, and before I know it we were arm in arm, heading for the car.
Daisy is a burst of energy - a five foot four inch walking carnival. In a matter of minutes she has the capacity to make a complete stranger feel as if he is the most important person on the planet . She is evervescent, amusing and smart and she has lit up my lire for twenty years, although sometimes rather dimly. For fourteen of the past twenty we have lived on opposite coasts, our only contact being an occasional phone call, a brief weekend, or a quick cocktail in an airport lounge as one of us was waiting for a connecting flight to a vacation spot or a business convention. I have the pleasure (I think that’s the right word) of Daisy’s company today because she is in town t or a telecommunications convention. When she is not shopping or traveling she works as a sales rep for a Ma Bell spin-off headquartered in Burlington, Vermont.
Daisy and I met at a small private college in central Vermont. It was the summer of ‘75 and we were both acting in a repertory theatre called the Montpelier Players which was basically a woman’s group that raised money for local charities. She was Puck in “A Midsummer Nights Dream”. I was Murray in “A Thousand Clowns.” Our friendship evolved gradually, slowly over the course of a year. I have often wondered how we got together (and why) as we had very little in common. She was brought up in a poor working class suburb just outside of Detroit. She was a vegetarian, practiced yoga and wore earth shoes. My family was lower middle class (back when that distinction meant something) but raised me with the attitude that we were upper middle class, bordering on royalty. We lived in Boston, went sailing on the week-ends and wore Topsiders without socks year-round. I think what attracted us to each other was something more spiritual. Karmic. Or possibly it was a shared vision of the world veiled in guilt, her’s Catholic, mine Jewish. Our relationship has spanned two decades as best friends, brother and sister, lovers and sometimes adversaries. At times being everything to the other person. At times, not speaking for months.
Happy for any opportunity to show off this city I drive down Lombard street (the most crooked street in the world), out past the Marina, under the Golden Gate Bridge and finally up to Pacific Heights for a panoramic view of the bay and a glimpse of the building exterior used in filming “Mrs. Doubtfire”. It is a weird weather day, more Florida than California, warm and raining while the sun shines. After a Few more detours I turn on to Union Street (the straightest street in the world) and park the car in front of Starbucks Coffee shop. I grab an umbrella from the trunk, and once again we were arm in arm heading off into the world of high-fashion. I have been shopping with Daisy in the past and though I knew what was coming, I was helpless to stop it. I’m not sure wether I’m her shopping co-dependent or her clothing pimp, but it didn’t take long. Two jewelry stores and a bakery, and there we were in Lulu’s, surrounded by women’s fashions, flattering lights and over-attentive sales-girls.
Maybe she’s changed I thought to myself. Perhaps this time will be different. Maybe she’s finally learned the fine art of browsing. We are both older and hopefully wiser. Between the two of us, several well known psychiatrists will be able to send their children to the best schools and probably retire early. I haven’t we learned anything from all this self evaluation, Daisy? Are we going to continue to look outside of ourselves for happiness? Are we going to continue to look outside this relationship for some-one to make us complete? And while maybe we are not “in love” with each other, I know that we do love each other. More than that, I believe that for whatever reason, we need each other. “Why don’t we grab some lunch first?” I ask. “There are still some things things I’d like to talk to you about before you have to get back to the conference’’. “We have plenty of time!” she replies, “Besides, this is exactly the kind of clothing I was looking for.”
I stand in the doorway impatiently tapping the umbrella on the tile floor, but she takes no notice. I see her reach up and pull an article of clothing off a wall rack and her eyes glaze over as she utters the words I feared most, “Do you have this in a small?” Daisy is holding up a cream colored satin hanger with a halter top limply draped over it. She holds it up for me to see, her eyes sparkling as il she has just found a gram of cocaine in her back pocket that she has forgotten was there. “ this is so cute’’ she says, bubbling with excitement, “I just love the back.” “It doesn’t have a back,” I say deadpan, annoyed. “I know, that’s what I love about it.” the sales clerk, Tish, is now pulling every article of clothing she can find, size small, from the carousels and piling them into the fitting room that will bc Daisy’s home for the next three or four hours.
I plop myself down into a very uncomfortable but fashionable chair and start leafing through the ragged pages of ancient issues of Vogue and Glamour. Where do they keep the supply of Sports Illustrated and Esquire, for people like myself. Tag-alongs. Guarders of the purse. At least give me the Chronicle to read while I’m waiting. But maybe that’s part of the game. The humiliation of the entire male species. World domination through shopping. Trust me ladies, few things are more embarrassing to a male than to have to sit through a fashion parade, listening to “girl talk” and having nothing to occupy your mind except how long this is taking. But we do it. At least I do it. At least I do it every time I’m with Daisy.
Sitting here, I begin to have serious feelings of deja-vu. For some odd reason I act as some sort of spending aphrodisiac for Daisy. Maybe it’s the cologne I wear or the aura that my body emits that encourages these shopping frenzies. I have spent hours and hours watching her shop and I have never enjoyed it. Leather skirts in Soho. Bikinis in Fort Lauderdale. Jeans and tee shirts in Seattle. If she wore three different outfits every day for the rest of my life, she would still have clothing in her closets that she’d never have the time to wear. One would have to assume that she was incredibly wealthy. But I knew differently. Daisy is woefully insecure and suffers from low self-esteem. She goes shopping to alleviate the pain she still feels from a father who never quite gave her the attention she desired (deserved), and dresses merely to gain the approval and get the acceptance she never got as a child. I can only assume that on some subconscious level I realize this and so I tolerate it. I assume that this vulnerable, hidden side of her is one of the reasons I love her. I think that I could be the one to help ease the pain if only she’d let me.
Daisy bursts through the fitting room doors dressed in the white cotton halter top and a flowing white skirt. “You look like Marilyn Monroe’ I tell her, “except for the spiked hair. I half expect to see gusts of air billowing up through the floor boards, her skirt ballooning about her waist, the roar of a train passing by. She takes this as a compliment. I try to tell her it isn’t. “What’s wrong with looking like Marilyn Monroe?” she asks, confused. “Nothing,” I reply, “If you don’t mind walking around the streets of Vermont looking like a Hollywood icon that’s been dead for thirty years. You’ll scare the farmers.” Her response is to turn to Tish and ask, “Do you have this in black?” and disappears again, the dressing room doors swaying back and forth behind her.
Clothing drops to the floor. Hangers clack together. The sound of a zipper. A gasp. Daisy reemerges from the fitting room this time in a lace sleeveless turtleneck and a pair of crushed velvet bell bottoms that appear to be two sizes too small for her. She walks over to the mirror and spends five minutes viewing the outfit from every possible angle and vantage point. She looks great. She has obviously been taking very good care of herself. Exercising, eating right, tanning salons. 13ut I know she needs to hear it. Who doesn’t. So I tell her, by way of saying “Women aren’t supposed to get better looking with age, men are.” She tells me that she has started weightlifting and flexes her triceps to prove it. She is particularly proud of these. “Isn’t this great?” she says several times, pointing to her rippling muscles. “Yeah Daisy, great, just don’t hurt me.”
The rest of the afternoon is a blur of fabrics in the latest trend of muted colors and sound bytes from me. “That looks great.” “I liked the black one better.” “Too long.” “Too short.” Somewhere around the seventy-fifth outfit change I begin to loose consciousness. I have taken the day off from my job as a securities broker to spend it with Daisy. I am losing money and I’m bored. I keep thinking that I should bc at my desk, phoning clients, trying to sell them shares of stock in blue chips, mutual funds and limited partnerships. As I sit here nodding my head “Yeah” or “Nay” to Daisy’s parade of sweater ensembles, I start calculating in my head what this day is costing me in terms of dollars and cents. Not only in today’s market, but using the time value of money, what this afternoons tryst is costing me ten years From now. Twenty years from now and adding in the cost of the ring. Boredom has turned to hysteria. I tolerate it out of habit and because I know that she will only bc in town for two days and what little free time she does have she is spending with me. Too bad we are spending it separated by the swinging doors of a dressing room and the constant interruptions of Tish, who never runs out of compliments or garments in Daisys’ size. Having maxed out Daisys’ Visa card we leave Lulu’s with boxes of bodices, bags of blouses, sacks of slacks and Tish’s undying gratitude. It looks like Christmas!
We walk back to the c ar in silence. Daisy trying to regain her composure from her frenetic shopping spree, and me trying to make some sense of this on again off again bi-coastal relationship. I have come to the sad realization that Daisy is unable to comprehend the true value of things, be they clothes, money or friends. I have Spent hours torturing myself, trying to figure out what this hold is that she has on me. Half hating and half loving the uncontrollability of it all. Whenever she’s away, I miss her terribly. But when she’s here I’m even more miserable. I turn into the insecure nineteen year old that I was when this relationship started, fawning over her, trying to impress her. trying to gain the elusive love and acceptance that I never got as a child either.

I drive her back to the hotel and kiss her good-bye, thinking it might be for the last time. My hand reaches into my coat pocket and I feel the fuzzy box. I rub my thumb back and forth over the top of it as if it has the ability to grant me a wish. She stands on the curb looking back at me quizzically as if she knows that I have something to ask her but am holding back. This was not something I was going to do on the spur of the moment. But if I didn’t ask her now I never would. How is it possible to love some-one as much as you hate them? I couldn’t tell if I was angry at her for not giving me what I wanted in this relationship or if I was angry at myself for not demanding it. But standing on this street corner, an ominous dark cloud threatening more rain, it is painfully clear to mc that I will never know.

crazy

Janet Kuypers

This dialogue is transcribed from repeated visits with a patient in Aaronsville Correctional Center in West Virginia. Madeline*, a thirty-six year old woman, was sentenced to life imprisonment after the brutal slaying of her boyfriend during sexual intercourse. According to police reports, Madeline sat with the remains of the man for three days after the murder until police arrived on the scene. They found her in the same room as the body, still coated with blood and malnourished. Three doctors studied her behavior for a total period of eight months, and the unanimous conclusion they reached was that Madeline was not of sound mind when she committed the act, which involved an ice pick, an oak board from the back of a chair, and eventually a chef’s knife. Furthermore, she continued to show signs of both paranoia and delusions of grandeur long after the murder, swaying back and forth between the two, much like manic depression.
For three and a half years Madeline has stayed at the Aaronsville Correctional Center, and she has shown no signs of behavioral improvement. She stays in a room by herself, usually playing solitaire on her bed. She talks to herself regularly and out loud, usually in a slight Southern accent, although not in a very loud tone, according to surveillance videotape. Her family abandoned her after the murder. Occasionally she requests newspapers to read, but she is usually denied them. She never received visitors, until these sessions with myself.
The following excerpts are from dialogues I have had with her, although I am tempted to say that they are monologues. She wasn’t very interested in speaking with me, rather, she was more interested in opening herself up to someone for the first time in years, someone who was willing to listen. At times I began to feel like a surrogate parent. I try not to think of what will happen when our sessions end.
* Madeline is not her real name.
I know they’re watching me. They’ve got these stupid cameras everywhere - see, there’s one behind the air vent there, hi there, and there’s one where the window used to be. They’ve probably got them behind the mirrors, too. It wouldn’t be so bad, I guess, I mean, there’s not much for me to be doing in here anyway, but they watch me dress, too, I mean, they’re watching me when I’m naked, now what’s that going to do to a person? I don’t know what they’re watching for anyway, it’s not like I can do anything in here. I eat everything with a spoon, I’ve never been violent, all I do, almost every day, is sit on this bed and play solitaire.
Solitaire is really relaxing, you know, and I think it keeps your brain alive, too. Most people think you can’t win at solitaire, that the chances of winning are like two percent or something. But the thing is, you can win at this game like over half the time. I think that’s the key, too - knowing you can win half the time. I mean, the last four rounds I played, I won twice. Now I’m not saying that’s good or anything, like praise me because I won two rounds of solitaire, but it makes a point that as long as you know what you’re doing and you actually think about it, you can win. The odds are better.
I think people just forget to watch the cards. Half the time the reason why you lose is because you forget something so obvious. You’re looking for a card through the deck and the whole time it’s sitting on another pile, just waiting to be moved over, and the whole time you forget to move it. People just forget to pay attention. They got to pay attention.
You know, I’d like to see the news. I hate t.v., but I’d like to see what acts other people are doing. Anything like mine? Has anyone else lost it like me? You know, I’ll bet my story wasn’t even on the news for more than thirty seconds. And I”ll bet the news person had a tone to their voice that was just like “oh, the poor crazy thing,” like, “that’s what happens when you lose it, I guess.”
But I want to see what’s happening in the real world. I just wanna watch to see what, you know, the weather is like, even though I haven’t seen the sun in a year or two. Or, or to hear sports scores. They won’t let me have a t.v. in the room. I think they think that I’m gonna hot-wire it or something, like I’m going to try to electrocute the whole building with a stupid television set. They let me have a lamp in the room, like I can’t hurt someone with that, but no t.v. They won’t even let me have a newspaper. What can a person do with a newspaper? Light in on fire or something? If I had matches or something. But it’s like this: I’ve never been violent to nobody in all of the time I’ve been in here. I haven’t laid a hand on a guard, even though they’re tried too many time to lay a hand on me, and I haven’t cause one single little problem in this whole damn place, and this is what I get - I don’t even get a t.v. or a newspaper.
You know, I don’t really have a Southern accent. See? Don’t I sound different with my regular voice? I picked it up when I started sounding crazy. See, I’m not really crazy, I just know the kind of shit they do to you in prison. I think it’s bad enough here, I would’ve had the shit kicked out of me, Id’ve been sodomized before I knew what hit me. I think this voice makes me sound a little more strange. I’m actually from New York, but I mean, changing the voice a little just to save me from going to prison, well, I can do that. Here it’s kind of nice, I don’t have to deal with people that often, and all the crazy people around here think I’m some sort of tough bitch because I mutilated someone who was raping me. Oh, you didn’t hear that part of the story, did you? Those damn lawyers thought that since I wasn’t a virgin I must have been wanting him. And he wasn’t even my boyfriend - he was just some guy I knew, we’d go out every couple of weeks, and I never even slept with him before.
What a fucked up place. You see, I gotta think of it this way: I really had no choice but to do what I did. In a way it was self-defense, because I didn’t want that little piece of shit to try to do that to me, I mean, what the Hell makes him think he can do that? Where does he get off trying to take me like that, like I’m some butcher-shop piece of meat he can buy and abuse or whatever? Well anyway, I know part of it all was self defense and all, but at the same time I know I flipped, but its because of, well shit that happened in my past. I never came from any rich family like you, I never even came from a family with a dad, and when you got all these boyfriends coming in and hitting you or touching you or whatever, you know it’s got to mess you up. Yeah, I know, people try to use the my-parents-beat-me line and it’s getting to the point where no one really believes it anymore, but if a person goes through all their life suppressing something that they shouldn’t have to suppress then one day it’s going to just come up to them and punch them in the face, it’s going to make them go crazy, even if it’s just for a little while.
Society’s kind of weird, you know. It’s like they teach you to do things that aren’t normal, that don’t feel right down deep in your bones, but you have to do them anyway, because someone somewhere decided that this would be normal. Everyone around you suppresses stuff, and when you see that it tells you that you’re supposed to be hiding it from the rest of the world, too, like if we all just hide it for a while, it will all go away. Maybe it does, until someone like me blows up and can’t take hiding all that stuff anymore, but then the rest of the world can just say that we’re crazy and therefore it’s unexplainable why we went crazy and then they can just brush it all off and everything is back to normal again. It’s like emotion. People are taught to hide their emotions. Men are taught not to cry, women are taught to be emotional and men are told to think that it’s crazy. So when something really shitty happens to someone - like a guy loses his job or something - and he just sits in front of a friend and breaks down and cries, the other guy just thinks this guy is crazy for crying. Then the guy rejects the guy that’s crying, making him feel even worse, making the guy bottle it back up inside of him.
I think people are like Pepsi bottles. You remember those glass bottles? Pop always tasted better in those bottles, you could just like swig it down easier, your lips fit around the glass neck better or something. I wonder why people don’t use them anymore? Well, I think people are like Pepsi bottles, like they have the potential for all of this energy, and the whole world keeps shaking them up, and some people lose their heads and the top goes off and all of this icky stuff comes shooting all around and other Pepsi bottles want to hide from it and then the poor guy has no Pepsi left. And how can you do anything when you have no Pepsi left? Or maybe you do lose it, but you still have some Pepsi left in you, and people keep thinking that you don’t have any left, and then they treat you like you shouldn’t be allowed to tie your own shoelaces or you should be watched while you’re getting dressed.
Can’t you turn those cameras off?
I heard this story in here sometime about Tony, this guy that was in here for murder, and after he was in here he went crazy and cut off his own scrotum. I don’t know how a man survives something like that, but I guess he did, because he was in here, and from what I hear he was using the pay phones to call 1-800 numbers to prank whoever answered at the other end. Well, I guess he kept calling this one place where these women would answer the phone, and they got fed up with it, I guess, and traced it or something. They got the number for this hospital, and talked to his doctor. I think he told them that Tony cut his balls off, now I thought doctor-patient records were private, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, because we’re just crazy prisoners, killers who don’t matter anyway, but he told these girls that Tony cut his balls off a whole two months ago. And then he called them back, talking dirty to them, not knowing they knew he was a murderer with no balls and they laughed and made fun of him and told him they knew, and he hung up the phone and never called them back. True story, swear to God. Can you just imagine him wondering how they knew? Or were they just making a joke, or...
Did you know that I write? I figured that if they won’t let me read anything, maybe I could put stuff down on paper and read it to myself, I guess. I try to write poetry, but it just don’t come out right, but I’ve been trying to write a thing about what I went through, you know what I’m talking about? Well, I just figure that if other people that are in prison can get best sellers and make a ton of money, then so can I, I mean, my story is better than half the stuff that’s out there, and I know there are a lot of women who have a little part of them that wants to do what I did. I think all women feel it, but the most of them are taught to suppress it, to keep it all bottled in like that. But now that I think of it, what am I going to do with a bunch of money anyway? I’m never going to get out of here to enjoy it or anything. Anyway, how would I get someone to want to read it in the first place, now that everyone thinks that I’m crazy?
Sometimes I get so depressed. It’s like I’m never going to get out of here. I think I wanted to have kids one day. It’s easier, I guess, not having to see kids, I guess then I don’t miss them too much, but...
For the longest time they tried to get doctors to come in here and talk to me, and you know what they did? They got men doctors - one after another - and then they wondered why the Hell I didn’t want to talk to them. Amazing. People really just don’t think, do they?
I guess it’s hard, being in here and all, I mean. I was going to go back to school, I had already taken the GED and graduated high school, and I was going to go to the local community college. It was going to be different. Sometimes I wonder, you know, why this had to happen to me, why I had to snap. I really don’t think I could have controlled it, I don’t think any of this could have happened any other way. It’s hard. I have to find stuff to do, because otherwise all I’d want to do is sleep all day and night, and I suppose I could, but then what would happen to me? At least if I write a book about my life, about this whole stupid world, then maybe everyone would at least understand. It wasn’t really my fault, I mean, I think we women have enough to deal with just in our regular lives and then they keep piling on this sexism crap on us, and then expect us not to be angry about it because we were taught to deal with it all of our lives. Maybe this guy was just the straw that broke the camel’s back or something, maybe he was just another rapist, maybe he was just another drunk guy who thought that he could do whatever he wanted with me because he was the man and I was his girl, or just some chick that didn’t matter or whatever, but shit, it does matter, at least to me it does.
I know I’ve got a lot of healing to do, but I haven’t really thought about doing it. I mean, what have I got to heal for anyway? To get out of here and go to prison? Then I’ll just get abused by guards over there, have to watch my back every second of the day. At least here people watch my back for me. They think everything and anything in the world could harm me, even myself, so they’re so overprotective that nothing can go wrong, unless it goes wrong in my own mind.

Come Forth, Go Back

Greg Yoder

Steve’s lab partner, Beth, kills their rat. Steve doesn’t want to deal with it. It’s the last day of their lab class and they have spent the entire semester until today dealing with organisms that were too small to be seen without a microscope. Organisms with only one cell. They have killed these organisms, but only through a process that mirrored natural selection. They had added something in or taken something out of various culture media to find mutations of the organism that could live in the presence of an antibiotic or could get along without some nutrient that is normally vital to the existence of E. coli. It has never bothered Steve, or anyone else, that only about one in a million of the protozoans would survive the procedures. Steve has been indifferent not because the survivors would quickly reproduce to create an entire colony with an equal, or greater, number of organisms hardier than the ones they replaced, but simply because E. coli don’t warrant any sort of concern. One has to draw the line somewhere, and Steve, although he hasn’t decided exactly where he draws the line, draws it far, far above E. coli. He remembers the time one of the teaching assistants had seen them grinding up some E. coli as the first step toward purifying an enzyme and said to Steve and Beth, ‘I used to work in a hospital lab, and I think you should all be required, at least once, to culture E. coli from its original source,’ and when Steve asked, ‘What’s the original source?’ the TA had responded, ‘Shit.’
Ordinarily, the death of a rat would be at least a relief to Steve. He thinks back to the time last fall when the physical plant people poisoned the dumpster across the street from MacGregor House. On two successive days, Steve had watched a rat crawl slowly across the sidewalk, and die on the grass, only a step or two from where Steve stood, frozen.
But these are young albino rats, much smaller than the wild rats he’s seen; they’re almost cute. Fortunately for Steve, Beth has no sentimentality about lab animals, and she efficiently dispatches the rat so that the two of them can begin the dissection. Steve finds the dissection slow, difficult, and uninteresting. He regrets having decided to participate. It’s an optional session; mammalian dissection lies beyond the scope of the course. Other students are quicker and more ruthless with the dissections. Steve looks around at a woman who has single-handedly removed all of her rat’s organs except for parts of its circulatory and pulmonary systems. She is now alternating, with apparent glee, between making the rats lungs inflate and making its heart beat. CPR for entertainment.
At the end of the session, everyone says goodbye and have a good summer to people they may or may not see again in the fall. Steve and Beth are putting their dissecting tray and other materials away when one of the TAs announces that they have two extra rats if anyone want to take one. If no one takes them, the TA says, they’ll just be etherized. Morally, Steve had no discomfort over dissecting a rat, but it bothers him that two rats will die just because two of the students who’d said they wanted to participate failed to show up. Steve still believes in the concept of a meaningful death. Someone else decides to take one of the rats, which leaves a single doomed rat and, in Steve, a familiar feeling of guilty responsibility. When it arises, he knows that it’s absurd, but he also knows that it has him cornered, compelling him to act. Beth looks at him as if he’s crazy, ‘Don’t you think you should check with your roommates before you take that rat, LP?’ LP is short for lab partner, and Beth has been using this nickname for Steve for most of the semester.
‘Oh, I’ll just keep it in my room; besides, how much trouble can one little lab rat be?’
‘It’s going to get bigger,’ Beth tells him.
But Steve has made a decision, so he picks up the cardboard box that the rats came in and that now holds his one rat.
‘What are you going to call him?’ Beth asks.
‘Oh, I don’t know. How about Lazarus? It’s sort of appropriate,’ Steve responds, smiling.
‘You know, there’s some Chinese proverb that says once you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for him after that.’
Steve laughs, ‘Do you think it applies to rats?’
Beth smiles, ‘I don’t know; I’m not Chinese. Well, I gotta go. Have a good Summer, LP.’
‘Have fun at Stanford. I’ll see you next fall.’
‘I’ll write and give you my summer address once I get there,’ Beth calls to him as she disappears down a hallway. She has an MIT summer research grant to work in a lab at Stanford. Steve helped her rewrite her application after her advisor had said it wasn’t good enough. When she got the grant, she told Steve that the grant committee had praised the writing in her proposal. This had not surprised Steve: at MIT, most students think that their ideas erupt pure and fully formed from the creative genius; they don’t see a need to communicate effectively to others what is evident to themselves. Other students occasionally ask Steve to read technical material that they’ve written. If Steve says that something is unclear to him, other students invariably tell him, ‘Well, it’s intuitively obvious,’ and, having concluded that the defect lies in Steve’s intellect rather than in the descriptions, they don’t change what they’ve written, and they don’t ask him to read anything else.
Steve picks up the box containing Lazarus and heads for the dormitory. He has an old aquarium on a shelf in his room. His friend Paul tried to keep fish but gave up after a few months because of an algae problem that did not yield to a number of attempted solutions. Steve took the aquarium and has been using it as another place to hold his stuff; he worries about having more and more disorganized stuff than other students have, but sometimes it’s hard for him to throw things away. He cleans out the aquarium, shreds some newspapers for bedding, and puts Lazarus in. Steve goes to the kitchen and puts some water in a small plastic salad bowl, which he sets in front of Lazarus, who takes a few swallows as Steve strokes his fur. Steve thinks that Lazarus looks bored, so he picks him up and puts him down on Steve’s bed, where Lazarus walks mourned a little. Steve continues to pet him.
Paul walks into Steve’s room, says hello, and then, noticing Lazarus, ‘Where did that come from?’
After Steve explains the story, Paul says, ‘You can’t keep that here.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Steve responds ingenuously, has he continues to focus his attention on Lazarus.
‘Because you won’t take care of it, Steve. The aquarium will get dirty, the rat will get hungry or thirsty; pretty soon it will just die, and then you’ll have to dispose of it. Honestly, do you thank about these things before you do them or does someone just show you a rat, and you say ‘Hey, why not’?’
Steve sees Paul’s point, but, instead of addressing it directly, he responds, ‘Oh Mom, can’t I keep him? Please? I promise I’ll feed him, and I’ll take him for a walk every day, and I won’t let him chase the Wilson’s cats or run after cars on the highway, and I’ll take him outside when it’s time for him to make ka-ka.’ Steve picks Lazarus up and holds him toward Paul, ‘and isn’t he cute? Isn’t he, Mom?’ Steve feels a sudden dampness on his hand and switches to his Tweety bird voice ‘Ooooh, Wazawus, you just wee-weed on my wittle hand; I betta put you back in your wittle aqauawium.’
As Steve goes to the kitchen to wash his hands, Paul just looks upward, signs, and leaves the room. He knows that he’s done all he can: there’s no point in discussing if further, and when the situation will have proven to be more than Steve can handle, Paul will know that there’s no point in saying that he told Steve so.
Steve walks over to the east end of Cambridge, near Lechmere, where he remembers having seen a pet shop. He wanders around the store for a while, looking at the tropical fish, the birds, the kittens and the puppies. Steve thinks of his beagle, Max, whom he found lying dead in his backyard one morning last summer after coming home from working all night. For most of his youth, Steve had had a beagle for a pet, first Prince and then Max. They were both devoted to him, following him everywhere, always happy to see him. Steve spends some time looking at leashes and collars before buying a bag of bedding, some food, an exercise wheel and a water bottle for Lazarus. He brings them all home and spends a fair amount of time rearranging the aquarium until it seems more or less suitable. Not unlike the dorm room the aquarium seems a bit on the small side to Steve, but he figures it will just have to do. Steve sits on his bed, next to the aquarium, and for a few minutes watches Lazarus run on the exercise wheel. It needs lubrication.
Paul stops by after hearing the squeaking. ‘He looks happy enough, I guess.’
Steve stops looking at Lazarus and looks at Paul, ‘Well, it certainly beats being k-i-l-l-e-d by e-t-h-e-r.’
‘I don’t think it can understand what you say, Steve.’
Steve inhales, straightens his spine, and fixes Paul with a superior look, ‘Lazarus is an exceptionally bright animal, aren’t you Laz?’ Steve taps on the glass, Lazarus stops running on the exercise wheel, and Steve says, ‘Yes you are.’ Paul sighs again and goes back to his own room to play a record.
A few days later, Steve moves from B entry to a fourth-floor room in F entry for the summer. F entry is in the low-rise portion of MacGregor, and the high-rise portion, which has elevators and includes B entry, will be used to house alumni who attend reunions over the summer. Around MacGregor House, he became known as ‘rat man’, and for a few weeks people stop by his new room to see his rat. But since Lazarus doesn’t do any tricks, there isn’t much activity to see. There is, however, a good deal of Lazarus to see. The rat grows, with amazing rapidity, and as his bulk increases, Steve finds it harder and harder to consider him cute. The novelty associated with owning a rat also vanishes. Steve no longer lets Lazarus run on Steve’s bed, and he rarely picks the rat up or even pets it. He still talks to Laz occasionally, mostly when he’s giving it more food or changing its water bottle. It seems to Steve that he has to feed and water Lazarus, and change the bedding in the aquarium, much too frequently. Steve does try to keep the aquarium as clean as possible, but even with regular cleaning, a smell begins to develop in the room. It’s not identifiable the smell of any sort of waste product, but the smell says ‘animal’ all the same. Lazarus eats and drinks quite a lot, and he doesn’t exercise as much as he did when Steve first brought him home. Worse still, when he does exercise, it’s almost entirely at night, and even though Steve has oiled the wheel and eliminated the squeaking, he can still hear a low whirring as he’s trying to fall asleep. He has frequent dreams of begin accused and incarcerated for something he can’t remember having done.
Compared to the school year, the Summer is a time of freedom. Steve works from nine to five, and he has no homework, so his evenings and weekends are entirely his own. On Saturday mornings, he walks to Haymarket and spends an hour walking among the fresh fruits and vegetables and the low-price cheese shops. He experiments a great deal with cooking, mostly successfully, but with a few notable failures. He tells his parents that he still goes to church on Sunday mornings, but he doesn’t; he gets the Sunday Globe, spreads it out in the suite lounge, and reads it leisurely. He spends a lot of time in Harvard Square, buying too many books and going to revival movie houses. He reads for pleasure, and he lets the indolence of the Summer work away some of the anxiety of the term. He goes out to dinner with his friends. He saves less money than he’s supposed to save, but he doesn’t worry about it.
One evening, Paul tells Steve that one of the other computer scientists he works with owns a rat. Paul reports his co-worker’s opinion that the exercise wheel will soon be too small for Lazarus to use. The recommended substitute is for Steve to close his door and let Lazarus run around the carpet. Paul comments, ‘You’ll have to keep your room cleaner so that you don’t lose Lazarus among the ruins.’ Paul also tells Steve that it’s normal for rats to hoard their food, and that’s part of the reason why Lazarus appears to consume at such an alarming rate. Steve thanks Paul for the information although knowing why Lazarus’ food disappears so quickly gives Steve no comfort, and he certainly will not let the rat run around on the floor of his room. He want to keep it as shut up as possible.
Steve knows that rats don’t have emotions, but he senses them in Lazarus anyway. At first, he thought Laz was grateful, then happy, but after a few weeks, Lax seemed to slide through diffidence and into angst, or perhaps ennui: Steve could never entirely differentiate the two, and even if he could, he probably wouldn’t be sure which one he was imagining that Lazarus was experiencing. In the first days of living with Steve, Lazarus had seemed to enjoy being picked up by Steve, but now Steve thinks that Lazarus is looking at him in an odd way. It takes Steve a while to figure out what he thinks it means, but eventually he decides that it’s the look of terminal patient staring down a doctor who refuses to turn off the life support. Steve can almost hear Lazarus saying, ‘My life has become miserable, but I can still get some small satisfaction by lying here in pain and knowing that my very presence reminds you that you made me suffer like this.’ Steve realizes that his current guilt exceeds what he would have felt if he’d just let the rat die in the first place. Why had he listened to his guilt so impulsively instead of thinking through the consequences? If he had let the rat die, he thinks, how would have completely forgotten about it by now. It’s almost as if he fell for some vicious plot designed by Lazarus specifically to maximize Steve’s guilt as part of some unethical psychological experiment. Steve sees himself alternately as Lazarus’ oppressor and victim; he can’t decide which role he dislikes more.
Other students are only too happy to offer solutions to Steve’s problem, even though he hasn’t complained to anyone about Lazarus. The most common suggestion is ‘Nuke him, rat man.’ Some people have gone so far as to offer to take Lazarus to one of the microwave ovens next to the vending machines in the middle of campus and explode Lazarus on Steve’s behalf. Steve knows that some of these offers are sincere, but he pretends not to take them seriously. Aside from the oppressive barbarity of the suggestion, he knows that simply executing the rat would not be enough for any of these people. They would feel compelled to do something unusual (Steve decides not to imagine what, specifically, that might be) with the remains, and Steve does not intend to become an unwitting accomplice in yet another puerile MacGregor House practical joke. Besides, he doesn’t have any intention of killing Lazarus, he’s just got to figure out some way to make the rat a little happier. Maybe a bigger cage or something. He makes an effort to talk to Lazarus more, in a kindly manner, and he pets him every day. But Lazarus seems to barely tolerate the petting, and when Steve tries to pick him up, Lazarus backs away from him into one of the aquarium’s corners.
Despite his genuine attempts at reconciliation, Steve’s animosity toward Lazarus continues to grow. He rearranges the room so that the head of his bed is as far as possible form the aquarium. On some nights, he sleeps uneasily, aware of the other nocturnal presence which seems to be observing him, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes contemptuously; his dreams continue to become more troubled, and the lack of sleep makes him tired and irritable during the day. Steve becomes more and more sensitive to the smell; finally, he even begins to fantasize about humane ways to do Lazarus in. He would try to give Lazarus away (‘Free to a good home, large, emotionally troubled albino rat . . .’), but surely, he thinks, there aren’t two people on this campus foolish enough to take a condemned rat.
One Saturday evening, Paul and his girlfriend Rachel stop by Steve’s room to see if he wants to go to the on-campus movie with them. Steve goes, and they all have a good time. After the movie, they go to Toscanini’s for ice cream. They meet up with some other guys from the dorm. Some have dates, some don’t. They all walk back to MacGregor together, then head for their separate entries and suites. Steve says goodnight to Paul and Rachel. He’s in a pretty good mood, now, and he’s whistling something form the first movement of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. He’s trying, with pleasure but without success, to imitate a harpsichord trill when he unlocks and opens his door. The smell assaults him, and he stops whistling. He turns his head down and away in a moment of disgust. He cleaned out the aquarium yesterday, but the smell seems worse than ever to him. Still, he’s had a good time tonight and he manages to shrug off his annoyance and open his window, which should help. Steve goes to the aquarium where Lazarus is quietly chewing on a sunflower seed until he sees Steve and freezes. Steve sneers at the rat and pulls out the water bottle to refill it. ‘I ought to fill it with whisky,’ he mutters, but he’s not entirely serious, and he doesn’t think Lazarus would drink it anyway. Steve goes to the suite’s kitchen and fills the bottle. When he takes it back into the room he sees that Lazarus has not moved and is still frozen, looking at him. Steve looks away at once, as if he knows that he can’t stare Lazarus down. He replaces the water bottle, but Lazarus continues to pierce him with that stare. He knows that the rat isn’t really capable of contempt, but he feels it in the look anyway; it must be coming from somewhere.
Steve walks quickly out of the room and back to the kitchen. He’s shaken. He opens the refrigerator and takes out a large bottle of apple juice. It’s nearly empty and Steve removes the lid and drinks the last of the juice directly form the jar. He closes the refrigerator and leans against it, sighing. After staying in this position for about half a minute, he moves to the sink and rinses out the jar and lid. He’s steadier now, and he goes to throw the bottle away. From where the trash sits, he can look directly into his room. When he turns his head, he sees Lazarus, once again nibbling on the sunflower seed.
Instead of throwing the jar away, Steve takes it into his room and sets it on its side right next to the aquarium. ‘Come on, Lazarus,’ Steve says in a voice that tries to be friendly; it’s a transparently dishonest voice, but Steve doesn’t care. Lazarus puts up no struggle as Steve picks him up in both hands, turns him around, and directs him head first into the wide-mouthed jar. Lazarus crawls around in the jar, and when he gets to the bottom of the jar, Steve slowly rights it so that Lazarus is sitting on the bottom.
Steve picks up the jar with one hand and the lid with the other. He takes the jar to his doorway, looks carefully around to see that the doors to the suite and to all the other rooms are shut, and walks quietly to the sink where he sets the bottle beneath the faucet and opens the tap. The water pours into the bottle, slowly at first, startling Lazarus. As Steve opens the tap further and the water flows in more quickly, Lazarus floats toward the top until, as he is almost in the throat of the jar, Steve suddenly claps the lid on and closes it tightly. Lazarus is paddling to stay afloat, and Steve rushes back into his room, closes the door, and puts the jar back on its side on the shelf. He sits on his bed and watched intently.
Lazarus continues to paddle, faster and faster. The movement begins to look like the unconscious last struggle for life, but it keep going, churning the water inside the amber bottle, for several minutes, throughout which time Steve sits on the bed, clasping his knees to his chest in a chill of terrified glee.
Eventually, the paddling slows, and a few moments later, Lazarus stops altogether. His head sinks into the water and floats, motionless, as the water continues, briefly, to move back and forth over him.
Steve begins to let go of his knees, but before he can relax, a feeling - something nameless, something like dread mixed with shame but several orders of magnitude worse, something like the disapproving hand of God - descends on him. Without thinking, he jumps up, grabs the bottle, runs to the sink, dumps the water out, runs back to his room, wraps Lazarus in a towel and tries to rub him dry. He lays the towel and the rat on the floor of the aquarium. Steve is shaking again, but Lazarus remains still. He rubs the rat with the towel for another half-minute before he stops again, looking down on the lifeless body and thinking, ‘How am I going to live with myself after this?’
Another minute passes, and Steve begins to come to grips with the situation. He starts to think about the best way to dispose of the body when the body begins moving again. Lazarus shudders, sneezes twice, rolls over onto his feet and looks around him.
Steve’s head drops forward onto his chest. ‘Oh, no,’ he moans, thinking that this can’t really be happening. ‘Well, Lazarus, I guess you really have earned your name now,’ Steve says to the rat. He wonders if after Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, he ever looked at him and said, ‘Oh my God! What was I thinking?’ After Steve realizes what he’s just said, he worries about the consequences of blasphemy for a few moments, but his faith in the God of his upbringing is almost entirely gone; only the guilt remains. He puts some quarters in his pocket and goes downstairs for a long session of late night pinball.
After the juice jar incident, when Steve looks at Lazarus he senses fear, rather then contempt, from the rate and at first this seems to be an improvement, but a pet that cringes every time you approach it is as least as bad as one that hates you, Steve thinks. He keeps thinking about a quote from King Lear about flies, gods, wanton boys and killing for sport, and he realizes that he and Lazarus cannot coexist peacefully.
The next Monday evening, Steve sits in his room and tries to think of various ways of disposing of the rat, but he can’t come up with one that is satisfactory. He doesn’t really want to kill Lazarus; he just wants Lazarus dead, or at least gone. As he lies on his bed, not coming up with a solution, he grows more and more agitated. Agitation proceeds quickly for Steve, and after about fifteen minutes he’s had almost more than he can take. He sits up, looks at the rat, and says, ‘Why don’t you just go away?’ But there’s no response. Steve didn’t expect one, of course, but the silence makes him angrier. He goes to the window, opens it, and looks into the courtyard below.

Steve look back at Lazarus, shakes his head and sighs, ‘Damnation.’ He walks over to the aquarium, lifts off the lid, and reaches for the cowering rat. Lazarus continue to shiver in Steve’s grasp as Steve walks to the window and tosses Lazarus out. Lazarus disappears in the trees beneath Steve’s window and Steve goes to the kitchen sink and washes his hands. ‘I’m a coward,’ he thinks to himself, ‘but at least I’m a coward without a rat.’
The next morning, Steve walks to work, feeling better. He has a job for the summer in the MIT Student Employment Office. He spends his weekdays processing personnel forms for students who work on campus, posting jobs descriptions he receives over the phone, filing and doing other general office work. Steve likes the job: he has a nice boss and the other students who work there are fun to talk to. The job also represents freedom: because he works here, he doesn’t have to go home for the summer.
At about 11:30, the telephone rings and Steve picks up the receiver, ‘Student employment.’
‘Is this Steve?’ the voice on the other end inquires.
‘Yes, this is Steve,’ Steve responds, politely.
‘Steve, this is John at the MacGregor House desk. Is this your rat?’
‘What do you mean?’ Steve asks, just a little bit too quickly.
‘There’s a big white rat in the doorway between the house entryway and the courtyard and we were wondering if it was Lazarus.’ John sound bemused, but concerned. ‘I’m coming back at lunch; I’ll take care of it,’ Steve responds rapidly and hangs up the phone. The initial sense of panic has already passed and Steve just sits there, wondering how many tries it’s going to take before he gets this right. He’s been through the moral implications too many times. The situation has become so annoying that the question of whether Lazarus has rights has become irrelevant; even Steve’s guilt has become irrelevant: the only thing that matters is getting rid of that rat.
At lunch, Steve walks west to MacGregor House, where in front of a laughing front-desk staff, he picks up Lazarus, takes it to his room and puts it in its aquarium. ‘Don’t get too comfortable in there, rat,’ he says. Steve goes to the kitchen, opens the cabinet under the sink and pulls two large green trash bags out of their box. After he takes them back to his room and shakes them to open them up, he grabs Lazarus and tosses him into one of the bags. He grabs the plastic far down on the bag, so that the part holding the rat is quite small. He twists the top of the bag a few times and knots it, then he folds the open part of the bag back around the closed part so that the inside is out and he knots it again, pulling tightly. He places the first bag inside the second and knots the second bag. After he’s pulled the second knot tight, he twists the bag again, goes back to the kitchen and puts a yellow twist-tie around the outer bag. Then he leaves MacGregor House and walks to the corner. He waits until there is no traffic and walks across both directions of Memorial Drive and the wide median between them. When he is all the way across right next to the Charles, he places the package in a Metropolitan District Commission public trash can next to the river. He hopes that he has not been noticed, but his principal feeling is elation. ‘I will never see that rat again,’ he says aloud as he turns and walks back to the dormitory.
And he never does. For a week or so, a few people ask what happened to his rat, and Steve just says, ‘Oh, it’s gone,’ and changes the subject. After another week, Lazarus has been more or less forgotten by almost everyone. Its empty aquarium still sits on Steve’s shelf until one day Steve decides it’s time to get rid of it. When he picks it up off the shelf and walks to his door, Paul sees him and says, ‘I think you should keep the aquarium, Steve. It might remind you not to do something that stupid again.’ Paul starts to walk away.

Without missing a beat, Steve retorts, ‘Hey, maybe I should fill this thing up and get some fish!’ Although he’s usually proud of his quick wit, this time the humor gives him no lift. He returns the aquarium to its place on the shelf and sits on the bed to stare at it. All that agony over a lab rat. The longer he thinks about it, the less sense it makes to him. And he doesn’t really want to make sense of it; he doesn’t want to acknowledge the existence of whatever there is in him that could propel him through such an unfathomable stupid course of events; above all, he doesn’t want to think about how much he enjoyed playing God.

the trip to wilmington

short story by gary pool

It’s been almost two weeks now since Samantha took her leave without even so much as a single word. She’s gone to stay with her daughter in Wilmington. I know this because for a month, prior to her sudden disappearance, she could talk of little else besides going to Wilmington to take care of the baby for the second half of the summer while Margot attends classes at the university in Newark.
How very strange Samantha’s become, since the grandchildren began arriving a few years ago. They’re the entire focus of her existence now. One no longer talks of movies or politics or books with Samantha, or even shares local gossip, for that matter. In fact, it can hardly be said that one has a conversation with her at all. You simply receive news of the children, often the same news several times over. If the world is going to hell in a hand-basket it’s no particular concern of hers.
Being childless means that I am simply not facing up to “reality”, as she puts it, not cheerfully shouldering the relentless burden of the human race. “Come on, Sam, lighten up,” I told her. “I’m just doing my part to curb the population explosion. Besides, not everyone was meant to procreate.” That didn’t go down awfully well, but then, by her own admission, Samantha makes up “reality” as she goes along. So, she has to expect to take a few lumps now and then. That’s just what happens when realities clash.
In any case, if it hadn’t been for her most recent reality clash with Renaldo, none of this present trouble would have happened in the first place. She’s never liked Renaldo much, always sort of resented our friendship. Even though he’s been around for over ten years now, Samantha still views him as something of an interloper. She’s insanely jealous. But then she feels the same way about Margot’s husband, really, though she would never admit it. That’s because Margot and John are married and Sam’s bound to respect the institution, if not the man. Renaldo thinks it’ s because he’s a foreigner that Samantha doesn’t like him. I don’t know. He may be right. There is that rather jingoist side to Sam’s nature.
Sam used to be open to everything and everybody, back in the old days, before the advent of the grandchildren convinced her that conformity was a lot easier to explain and therefore the best of all possible examples to present to the kids. When I first met her she was always on the lookout for anything that was different, interesting, exciting, and especially, fun. Why, I remember Samantha when she had not the least compunction about employing a pair of binoculars to ogle a handsome young man through his bedroom window across the courtyard from the balcony of my apartment. She was a lot more fun before she started taking herself, and everything else, so damn seriously. Now, the mere mention of anything remotely sexual makes her cringe and too much exposed human flesh is liable to bring about a flare-up of indignant moral hysteria. Maybe its simply the times in which we live. Everybody seems kind of off balance these days.
Imagine, all this fuss because she thinks Renaldo sent her that silly catalogue, the one with the semi-naked men in lounging pajamas and sexy underwear. Why, a few short years ago she would have found it simply too charming for words. It’s a tempest in a teapot, if you ask me. She did ask me, as a matter of fact, and I told her just that. “It’s a tempest in a teapot, Sam,” says I. “Where’s your sense of humor? Can’t you see the fun? The least you can do is just forget it. Toss it in the trash if it bothers you that much.”
“But, what about the postman?” she indignantly complained. “It wasn’t even in a plain brown wrapper.”
“You talk as if we’ re dealing with something really disgusting here, like hard-core pornography.”
“Well, what else would you call page after page of young men wearing nothing but those little silk marble bags, and standing around in suggestive poses always leaning on each other?”
“Beats me, hon. A catalogue?” I replied.
“Don’t be so cheeky,” she fumed. “But then I suppose you’d defend Renaldo no matter what.”
“Renaldo is my friend,” I said. “Besides, he claims he had nothing to do with it.”
“And you believe him.”
“Of course I believe him,” I willingly admitted.
“Well,” she huffed. “I’m glad to know where your loyalties lie.”
And that’s the reason she left town for the rest of the summer without so much as a forwarding address.
Sam hates Wilmington, especially in the summertime. It’s hot and humid, and the apartment has no air-conditioning. She doesn’t like Margot’s cooking and John, having served his conjugal function by assisting in the production of little Katherine, she now finds something of a nuisance. To be near that baby, however, she will suffer all this and so much more. Her devotion is like a suitor’s.
Once, when we were much younger, Samantha and I took a trip to Florida. We rented a little cottage on the beach (in those days it was still possible to get near a Florida beach without owning it) and spent two weeks doing nothing but relaxing, taking the sun, talking and generally enjoying ourselves. Sam was still married to her first husband at the time, a cheerless, abusive man who often drank too much. He never liked me much and the feeling was pretty mutual. He didn’t accompany us to Florida, and it was Sam’s first real taste of freedom in almost ten years of marital hell. We had a glorious time and, though it would still take a few months to accomplish, I know it was then that she decided to divorce. She still longs for Florida sometimes, but has only been back once. It’s not the same there any more.
Such a pity it is that Renaldo didn’t know her back then. She had already stopped letting people enjoy her by the time he appeared on the scene. Middle age and two divorces had taken their toll. I guess the only thing that saved her from being consumed by bitterness was the arrival of that first grandbaby, an event which also condemned Renaldo, and me, I suppose, to a kind of limbo for people from alien realities. Now Sam has three grandchildren. Her son, David, who lives in Boston, has a boy and a girl, and Margot has a girl. They are all marvelous kids, and they are all great friends with Renaldo, even the youngest. They adore him. Renaldo comes from a huge family. He knows how to relate to kids.
After her second divorce, a ghastly and humiliating affair, Samantha announced flatly that she was never going to allow herself to say she was sorry for anything ever again as long as she lived. Sort of like Ali MacGraw in Love Story, I guess, only for vastly more complicated reasons. This fairly intractable denial of her humanity has since often placed Sam, and the rest of us, in some rather uncomfortable situations. Simply because she rejects apologizing does not mean she doesn’t do or say things she regrets. It just means she doesn’t have to admit it. The maintenance of her pride costs all of us, including Sam herself, dearly. Making up with her can often be a lengthy and excruciatingly agonizing process. For example, she will never apologize to Renaldo for screaming at him over the phone the way she did, and he feels he’s already surrendered about as much of his own pride as Sam is entitled to, over the last ten years. This is by far Samantha’s worst reality clash to date. I just don’ t think they are ever destined to live happily ever after.
My friend, Dee Dee, the radical feminist, thinks Samantha’s whole problem is men. But then Dee Dee thinks that everybody’s whole problem is with men — women’s problems with men, men’s problems with women, women’s problems with women, men’s problems with children, children’s problems with each other even men’s problems with men, etc., etc. I’m sure she’s got something there somewhere, and whatever it is, it certainly must apply to Samantha.
“Considering her two husbands alone we have to conclude that Sam’s judgment of the male character leaves a good deal to be desired,” I observed, trying on my most worldly style.
“Don’t be stupid,” Dee Dee remarked. “It has nothing to do with Samantha’s judgment. Men are brought up to exploit women. That’s all. Don’t you get it? It’s a matter of conditioning. They’ re all the same. They must be reprogrammed along with the rotten society they have spawned.”
Dee Dee believes in the strict separation of the sexes. She also led a fairly unsuccessful protest march and a boycott against the two lesbians who own the pleasant little coffee shop down the block. Dee Dee thinks the coffee shop exploits the lesbian community. I was a little confused on this particular point, especially since the only other place in the neighborhood is Spontini’s, which everybody (including the police) knows is a front for the Mafia. I didn’t let on, though. Dee Dee has a mean streak when she gets rubbed the wrong way. It’s better not to cross her sometimes. Besides, she’s bigger than I am.
I think I’ll go over to Samantha’s and make sure everything’s OK. I still have the set of keys she gave me several years ago. If I do this I’ll probably have to go by myself, since Renaldo won’t go near the place any more, and Dee Dee hates to travel, even if it’s just across town. I used to check on things regularly whenever Sam went away. I wonder who’s picking up the mail. Maybe she had the post office forward it to Wilmington. Dee Dee told me Sam boarded the cat at the animal shelter. I was always the one who took care of Waldo (as in Ralph Waldo Emerson) if Samantha had to be away. Dee Dee says Sam feels she’s lost me. I’m not quite sure I know what that means. A person isn’t exactly a ballpoint pen. How do you lose a person, anyway, and if someone loses you, how to you become found again? This is a very perplexing. I think Dee Dee made the whole thing up just to try and start an argument. She does that sometimes.
Renaldo wants to go to the lake this week end. He likes to go out there and rent a boat and spend the entire day floating around on the water. It reminds him of his country by the ocean, I think. It must be hard for him sometimes, living in this land locked place with its harsh winters and rather short summers.
Maybe two or three friends will go boating as well. It might be nice, if the weather doesn’t turn rainy. We could take a picnic, and make a fire on the beach in the evening and watch the stars come out. Samantha would enjoy that. When we went to Florida that time, she used to love to make a fire on the beach in the cool of the evening and sit there listening to the surf while the stars began to appear, one by one, above the sea.

It would be good to get away for a short holiday. I haven’t been out of town once, and the summer is already more than half gone. The days are becoming noticeably shorter. Before you know it the leaves will be flying. I’ve a feeling autumn will arrive earlier than usual this year.

a street called pain

b. benedict braddock

Carmine Stellano sat on his front porch and gazed down in the direction of Washington park. Some of the boys were shooting hoops while Johnny Pop made his daily quota. He was pacing back and forth across the parking lot, trying to ignore the crack heads that were pestering him for a handout. Every few minutes a car would pull up and Johnny would lean into the drivers window to make the deal. He had learned not to remove himself from the window until the cash was in his hand. They’d burn you every time they could on the hill. Carmine turned back toward the street and thought about Vinny. He was one of those guys you met and never forgot. If it hadn’t been for his habit he might’ve been something really big, something people respected. They had found him in a closet last Sunday morning. The police said it was suicide, but word on the street was there wasn’t a chair or ladder. The boy had gotten whacked. Johnny Pop was driving Vinny’s car these days. He had his stereo and gold watch too. Hell, he even had his girl. It was funny what crack would buy on the hill. Word was that some boys from the city had fronted Vinny an ounce of snow for the weekend. He had always been good before about paying his tab by deadline. He had made himself a name in the park, even cutting out Johnny Pop now and then. But not this time. He used the stuff himself. The boys came for the pay back, no money, no dope... then it was Sunday morning. Carmine wondered if Vinny really didn’t have the cash. He had never freaked and burned anybody like that before. Across the street Rita was searching through the tall grass for cans. If she got enough of them she would cash them in at the corner market and cop a nickel bag of off Johnny Pop. If not, she would be his personal sex slave for the whole night, and for probably the same amount of crack the cans would’ve gotten her. He watched the Jehovah’s witnesses over at Mrs. Reynold’s house. One thing was for sure, they wouldn’t stop and offer Rita one of their little booklets. They would walk right past her like she was a dog and move on to the next house. Bullshit.
Carmine hadn’t exactly found religion, more like just another chance. He wasn’t about to go preaching door to door, but he wasn’t gonna hang in the park anymore either. They stayed in their back yard and he stayed in his. Carmine watched his back if the boys passed on the street though. They didn’t let you out that easy. The way they figured it, if you cleaned up you were on the fiveO’s payroll. And a rep like that could get you into the closet next to Vinny. Mrs. Reynolds got tired of the religion freaks and slammed the door in their faces. They started to cross the street, saw Carmine, and changed their minds. Looking like he did had it’s advantages. He had changed his outlook, not his wrapper. The doorway preachers were apparently intimidated. As he suspected they walked right past Rita. She had tried to say hello but couldn’t talk. She was coming down hard as usual. Carmine called across the street to her. “Yo, Rita.” The girl looked up for a moment and then right back down to the ground. She was searching now to see if any of the boys had dropped a bag while walking to the park. They never did, but she always checked. “Rita.” She saw him now and started across the street. Carmine stood up. “Whoa, Baby. Watch out for the cars, girl.” Somehow she made it across without getting killed. Carmine reached into his pocket. “Here, Rita. Here’s five bucks. You keep hanging on the street and they’re gonna bust you sure as hell.” The girl smiled but still couldn’t talk. She grabbed the bill and ran down toward the park and Johnny Pop. It would last her five minutes and then she’d be right back searching for cans and viles along the street.
Carmine had only been clean for a few months, but it felt good, really good. It bothered him still being in the neighborhood and all. The hill district was no place to be when you were trying to kick the habit. Carmine saw Rita reach Johnny Pop down the street. The boy smiled like he knew he owned her. Carmine regretted giving her the five bucks.

philosophy monthly

Poetics
350 BC
Aristotle

1
I PROPOSE to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects- the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.
For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of color and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or ‘harmony,’ either singly or combined.
Thus in the music of the flute and of the lyre, ‘harmony’ and rhythm alone are employed; also in other arts, such as that of the shepherd’s pipe, which are essentially similar to these. In dancing, rhythm alone is used without ‘harmony’; for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement.
There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse- which verse, again, may either combine different meters or consist of but one kind- but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar meter. People do, indeed, add the word ‘maker’ or ‘poet’ to the name of the meter, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all meters, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of meters of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet.
So much then for these distinctions.
There are, again, some arts which employ all the means above mentioned- namely, rhythm, tune, and meter. Such are Dithyrambic and Nomic poetry, and also Tragedy and Comedy; but between them originally the difference is, that in the first two cases these means are all employed in combination, in the latter, now one means is employed, now another.
Such, then, are the differences of the arts with respect to the medium of imitation.
II
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life.
Now it is evident that each of the modes of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct. Such diversities may be found even in dancing, flute-playing, and lyre-playing. So again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music. Homer, for example, makes men better than they are; Cleophon as they are; Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse than they are. The same thing holds good of Dithyrambs and Nomes; here too one may portray different types, as Timotheus and Philoxenus differed in representing their Cyclopes. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
III
There is still a third difference- the manner in which each of these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration- in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged- or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.
These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation- the medium, the objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator of the same kind as Homer- for both imitate higher types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes- for both imitate persons acting and doing. Hence, some say, the name of ‘drama’ is given to such poems, as representing action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the Megarians- not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of Sicily, for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. In each case they appeal to the evidence of language. The outlying villages, they say, are by them called komai, by the Athenians demoi: and they assume that comedians were so named not from komazein, ‘to revel,’ but because they wandered from village to village (kata komas), being excluded contemptuously from the city. They add also that the Dorian word for ‘doing’ is dran, and the Athenian, prattein.
This may suffice as to the number and nature of the various modes of imitation.
IV
Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.
Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.
Poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the writers. The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men. A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited- his own Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The appropriate meter was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse.
As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation so he too first laid down the main lines of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to tragedy. But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger and higher form of art.
Whether Tragedy has as yet perfected its proper types or not; and whether it is to be judged in itself, or in relation also to the audience- this raises another question. Be that as it may, Tragedy- as also Comedy- was at first mere improvisation. The one originated with the authors of the Dithyramb, the other with those of the phallic songs, which are still in use in many of our cities. Tragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form, and there it stopped.
Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the Chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting. Moreover, it was not till late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, and the grotesque diction of the earlier satyric form for the stately manner of Tragedy. The iambic measure then replaced the trochaic tetrameter, which was originally employed when the poetry was of the satyric order, and had greater with dancing. Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation. The additions to the number of ‘episodes’ or acts, and the other accessories of which tradition tells, must be taken as already described; for to discuss them in detail would, doubtless, be a large undertaking.
V
Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type- not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.
The successive changes through which Tragedy passed, and the authors of these changes, are well known, whereas Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously. It was late before the Archon granted a comic chorus to a poet; the performers were till then voluntary. Comedy had already taken definite shape when comic poets, distinctively so called, are heard of. Who furnished it with masks, or prologues, or increased the number of actors- these and other similar details remain unknown. As for the plot, it came originally from Sicily; but of Athenian writers Crates was the first who abandoning the ‘iambic’ or lampooning form, generalized his themes and plots.
Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of meter and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit, whereas the Epic action has no limits of time. This, then, is a second point of difference; though at first the same freedom was admitted in Tragedy as in Epic poetry.
Of their constituent parts some are common to both, some peculiar to Tragedy: whoever, therefore knows what is good or bad Tragedy, knows also about Epic poetry. All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem.
VI
Of the poetry which imitates in hexameter verse, and of Comedy, we will speak hereafter. Let us now discuss Tragedy, resuming its formal definition, as resulting from what has been already said.
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. By ‘language embellished,’ I mean language into which rhythm, ‘harmony’ and song enter. By ‘the several kinds in separate parts,’ I mean, that some parts are rendered through the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song.
Now as tragic imitation implies persons acting, it necessarily follows in the first place, that Spectacular equipment will be a part of Tragedy. Next, Song and Diction, for these are the media of imitation. By ‘Diction’ I mean the mere metrical arrangement of the words: as for ‘Song,’ it is a term whose sense every one understands.
Again, Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves, and these- thought and character- are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends. Hence, the Plot is the imitation of the action- for by plot I here mean the arrangement of the incidents. By Character I mean that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents. Thought is required wherever a statement is proved, or, it may be, a general truth enunciated. Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality- namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of imitation. And these complete the fist. These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact, every play contains Spectacular elements as well as Character, Plot, Diction, Song, and Thought.
But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. The tragedies of most of our modern poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in general this is often true. It is the same in painting; and here lies the difference between Zeuxis and Polygnotus. Polygnotus delineates character well; the style of Zeuxis is devoid of ethical quality. Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents. Besides which, the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy- Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes- are parts of the plot. A further proof is, that novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot. It is the same with almost all the early poets.
The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.
Third in order is Thought- that is, the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances. In the case of oratory, this is the function of the political art and of the art of rhetoric: and so indeed the older poets make their characters speak the language of civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians. Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character. Thought, on the other hand, is found where something is proved to be or not to be, or a general maxim is enunciated.
Fourth among the elements enumerated comes Diction; by which I mean, as has been already said, the expression of the meaning in words; and its essence is the same both in verse and prose.
Of the remaining elements Song holds the chief place among the embellishments
The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.
VII
These principles being established, let us now discuss the proper structure of the Plot, since this is the first and most important thing in Tragedy.
Now, according to our definition Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.
Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long. As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily embraced in one view; so in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can be easily embraced by the memory. The limit of length in relation to dramatic competition and sensuous presentment is no part of artistic theory. For had it been the rule for a hundred tragedies to compete together, the performance would have been regulated by the water-clock- as indeed we are told was formerly done. But the limit as fixed by the nature of the drama itself is this: the greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous. And to define the matter roughly, we may say that the proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.
VIII
Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity. But Homer, as in all else he is of surpassing merit, here too- whether from art or natural genius- seems to have happily discerned the truth. In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of Odysseus- such as his wound on Parnassus, or his feigned madness at the mustering of the host- incidents between which there was no necessary or probable connection: but he made the Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, to center round an action that in our sense of the word is one. As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.
IX
It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is- for example- what Alcibiades did or suffered. In Comedy this is already apparent: for here the poet first constructs the plot on the lines of probability, and then inserts characteristic names- unlike the lampooners who write about particular individuals. But tragedians still keep to real names, the reason being that what is possible is credible: what has not happened we do not at once feel sure to be possible; but what has happened is manifestly possible: otherwise it would not have happened. Still there are even some tragedies in which there are only one or two well-known names, the rest being fictitious. In others, none are well known- as in Agathon’s Antheus, where incidents and names alike are fictitious, and yet they give none the less pleasure. We must not, therefore, at all costs keep to the received legends, which are the usual subjects of Tragedy. Indeed, it would be absurd to attempt it; for even subjects that are known are known only to a few, and yet give pleasure to all. It clearly follows that the poet or ‘maker’ should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions. And even if he chances to take a historical subject, he is none the less a poet; for there is no reason why some events that have actually happened should not conform to the law of the probable and possible, and in virtue of that quality in them he is their poet or maker.
Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity.
But again, Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follows as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.
X
Plots are either Simple or Complex, for the actions in real life, of which the plots are an imitation, obviously show a similar distinction. An action which is one and continuous in the sense above defined, I call Simple, when the change of fortune takes place without Reversal of the Situation and without Recognition
A Complex action is one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal, or by Recognition, or by both. These last should arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action. It makes all the difference whether any given event is a case of propter hoc or post hoc.
XI
Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. Thus in the Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect. Again in the Lynceus, Lynceus is being led away to his death, and Danaus goes with him, meaning to slay him; but the outcome of the preceding incidents is that Danaus is killed and Lynceus saved.
Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the Oedipus. There are indeed other forms. Even inanimate things of the most trivial kind may in a sense be objects of recognition. Again, we may recognize or discover whether a person has done a thing or not. But the recognition which is most intimately connected with the plot and action is, as we have said, the recognition of persons. This recognition, combined with Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those which, by our definition, Tragedy represents. Moreover, it is upon such situations that the issues of good or bad fortune will depend. Recognition, then, being between persons, it may happen that one person only is recognized by the other- when the latter is already known- or it may be necessary that the recognition should be on both sides. Thus Iphigenia is revealed to Orestes by the sending of the letter; but another act of recognition is required to make Orestes known to Iphigenia.
Two parts, then, of the Plot- Reversal of the Situation and Recognition- turn upon surprises. A third part is the Scene of Suffering. The Scene of Suffering is a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like.
XII
The parts of Tragedy which must be treated as elements of the whole have been already mentioned. We now come to the quantitative parts- the separate parts into which Tragedy is divided- namely, Prologue, Episode, Exode, Choric song; this last being divided into Parode and Stasimon. These are common to all plays: peculiar to some are the songs of actors from the stage and the Commoi.
The Prologue is that entire part of a tragedy which precedes the Parode of the Chorus. The Episode is that entire part of a tragedy which is between complete choric songs. The Exode is that entire part of a tragedy which has no choric song after it. Of the Choric part the Parode is the first undivided utterance of the Chorus: the Stasimon is a Choric ode without anapaests or trochaic tetrameters: the Commos is a joint lamentation of Chorus and actors. The parts of Tragedy which must be treated as elements of the whole have been already mentioned. The quantitative parts- the separate parts into which it is divided- are here enumerated.
XIII
As the sequel to what has already been said, we must proceed to consider what the poet should aim at, and what he should avoid, in constructing his plots; and by what means the specific effect of Tragedy will be produced.
A perfect tragedy should, as we have seen, be arranged not on the simple but on the complex plan. It should, moreover, imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation. It follows plainly, in the first place, that the change of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us. Nor, again, that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity: for nothing can be more alien to the spirit of Tragedy; it possesses no single tragic quality; it neither satisfies the moral sense nor calls forth pity or fear. Nor, again, should the downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes- that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous- a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.
A well-constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue, rather than double as some maintain. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty, in a character either such as we have described, or better rather than worse. The practice of the stage bears out our view. At first the poets recounted any legend that came in their way. Now, the best tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses- on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible. A tragedy, then, to be perfect according to the rules of art should be of this construction. Hence they are in error who censure Euripides just because he follows this principle in his plays, many of which end unhappily. It is, as we have said, the right ending. The best proof is that on the stage and in dramatic competition, such plays, if well worked out, are the most tragic in effect; and Euripides, faulty though he may be in the general management of his subject, yet is felt to be the most tragic of the poets.
In the second rank comes the kind of tragedy which some place first. Like the Odyssey, it has a double thread of plot, and also an opposite catastrophe for the good and for the bad. It is accounted the best because of the weakness of the spectators; for the poet is guided in what he writes by the wishes of his audience. The pleasure, however, thence derived is not the true tragic pleasure. It is proper rather to Comedy, where those who, in the piece, are the deadliest enemies- like Orestes and Aegisthus- quit the stage as friends at the close, and no one slays or is slain.
XIV
Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way, and indicates a superior poet. For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes Place. This is the impression we should receive from hearing the story of the Oedipus. But to produce this effect by the mere spectacle is a less artistic method, and dependent on extraneous aids. Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense not of the terrible but only of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of Tragedy; for we must not demand of Tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is proper to it. And since the pleasure which the poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation, it is evident that this quality must be impressed upon the incidents.
Let us then determine what are the circumstances which strike us as terrible or pitiful.
Actions capable of this effect must happen between persons who are either friends or enemies or indifferent to one another. If an enemy kills an enemy, there is nothing to excite pity either in the act or the intention- except so far as the suffering in itself is pitiful. So again with indifferent persons. But when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another- if, for example, a brother kills, or intends to kill, a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, a son his mother, or any other deed of the kind is done- these are the situations to be looked for by the poet. He may not indeed destroy the framework of the received legends- the fact, for instance, that Clytemnestra was slain by Orestes and Eriphyle by Alcmaeon- but he ought to show of his own, and skilfully handle the traditional. material. Let us explain more clearly what is meant by skilful handling.
The action may be done consciously and with knowledge of the persons, in the manner of the older poets. It is thus too that Euripides makes Medea slay her children. Or, again, the deed of horror may be done, but done in ignorance, and the tie of kinship or friendship be discovered afterwards. The Oedipus of Sophocles is an example. Here, indeed, the incident is outside the drama proper; but cases occur where it falls within the action of the play: one may cite the Alcmaeon of Astydamas, or Telegonus in the Wounded Odysseus. Again, there is a third case- [to be about to act with knowledge of the persons and then not to act. The fourth case] is when some one is about to do an irreparable deed through ignorance, and makes the discovery before it is done. These are the only possible ways. For the deed must either be done or not done- and that wittingly or unwittingly. But of all these ways, to be about to act knowing the persons, and then not to act, is the worst. It is shocking without being tragic, for no disaster follows It is, therefore, never, or very rarely, found in poetry. One instance, however, is in the Antigone, where Haemon threatens to kill Creon. The next and better way is that the deed should be perpetrated. Still better, that it should be perpetrated in ignorance, and the discovery made afterwards. There is then nothing to shock us, while the discovery produces a startling effect. The last case is the best, as when in the Cresphontes Merope is about to slay her son, but, recognizing who he is, spares his life. So in the Iphigenia, the sister recognizes the brother just in time. Again in the Helle, the son recognizes the mother when on the point of giving her up. This, then, is why a few families only, as has been already observed, furnish the subjects of tragedy. It was not art, but happy chance, that led the poets in search of subjects to impress the tragic quality upon their plots. They are compelled, therefore, to have recourse to those houses whose history contains moving incidents like these.
Enough has now been said concerning the structure of the incidents, and the right kind of plot.
XV
In respect of Character there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, it must be good. Now any speech or action that manifests moral purpose of any kind will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good. This rule is relative to each class. Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless. The second thing to aim at is propriety. There is a type of manly valor; but valor in a woman, or unscrupulous cleverness is inappropriate. Thirdly, character must be true to life: for this is a distinct thing from goodness and propriety, as here described. The fourth point is consistency: for though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent. As an example of motiveless degradation of character, we have Menelaus in the Orestes; of character indecorous and inappropriate, the lament of Odysseus in the Scylla, and the speech of Melanippe; of inconsistency, the Iphigenia at Aulis- for Iphigenia the suppliant in no way resembles her later self.
As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina- as in the Medea, or in the return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The Deus ex Machina should be employed only for events external to the drama- for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element the Oedipus of Sophocles.
Again, since Tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level, the example of good portrait painters should be followed. They, while reproducing the distinctive form of the original, make a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful. So too the poet, in representing men who are irascible or indolent, or have other defects of character, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it. In this way Achilles is portrayed by Agathon and Homer.
These then are rules the poet should observe. Nor should he neglect those appeals to the senses, which, though not among the essentials, are the concomitants of poetry; for here too there is much room for error. But of this enough has been said in our published treatises.
XVI
What Recognition is has been already explained. We will now enumerate its kinds.
First, the least artistic form, which, from poverty of wit, is most commonly employed- recognition by signs. Of these some are congenital- such as ‘the spear which the earth-born race bear on their bodies,’ or the stars introduced by Carcinus in his Thyestes. Others are acquired after birth; and of these some are bodily marks, as scars; some external tokens, as necklaces, or the little ark in the Tyro by which the discovery is effected. Even these admit of more or less skilful treatment. Thus in the recognition of Odysseus by his scar, the discovery is made in one way by the nurse, in another by the swineherds. The use of tokens for the express purpose of proof- and, indeed, any formal proof with or without tokens- is a less artistic mode of recognition. A better kind is that which comes about by a turn of incident, as in the Bath Scene in the Odyssey.
Next come the recognitions invented at will by the poet, and on that account wanting in art. For example, Orestes in the Iphigenia reveals the fact that he is Orestes. She, indeed, makes herself known by the letter; but he, by speaking himself, and saying what the poet, not what the plot requires. This, therefore, is nearly allied to the fault above mentioned- for Orestes might as well have brought tokens with him. Another similar instance is the ‘voice of the shuttle’ in the Tereus of Sophocles.
The third kind depends on memory when the sight of some object awakens a feeling: as in the Cyprians of Dicaeogenes, where the hero breaks into tears on seeing the picture; or again in the Lay of Alcinous, where Odysseus, hearing the minstrel play the lyre, recalls the past and weeps; and hence the recognition.
The fourth kind is by process of reasoning. Thus in the Choephori: ‘Some one resembling me has come: no one resembles me but Orestes: therefore Orestes has come.’ Such too is the discovery made by Iphigenia in the play of Polyidus the Sophist. It was a natural reflection for Orestes to make, ‘So I too must die at the altar like my sister.’ So, again, in the Tydeus of Theodectes, the father says, ‘I came to find my son, and I lose my own life.’ So too in the Phineidae: the women, on seeing the place, inferred their fate- ‘Here we are doomed to die, for here we were cast forth.’ Again, there is a composite kind of recognition involving false inference on the part of one of the characters, as in the Odysseus Disguised as a Messenger. A said [that no one else was able to bend the bow; ... hence B (the disguised Odysseus) imagined that A would] recognize the bow which, in fact, he had not seen; and to bring about a recognition by this means- the expectation that A would recognize the bow- is false inference.
But, of all recognitions, the best is that which arises from the incidents themselves, where the startling discovery is made by natural means. Such is that in the Oedipus of Sophocles, and in the Iphigenia; for it was natural that Iphigenia should wish to dispatch a letter. These recognitions alone dispense with the artificial aid of tokens or amulets. Next come the recognitions by process of reasoning.
XVII
In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies. The need of such a rule is shown by the fault found in Carcinus. Amphiaraus was on his way from the temple. This fact escaped the observation of one who did not see the situation. On the stage, however, the Piece failed, the audience being offended at the oversight.
Again, the poet should work out his play, to the best of his power, with appropriate gestures; for those who feel emotion are most convincing through natural sympathy with the characters they represent; and one who is agitated storms, one who is angry rages, with the most lifelike reality. Hence poetry implies either a happy gift of nature or a strain of madness. In the one case a man can take the mould of any character; in the other, he is lifted out of his proper self.
As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail. The general plan may be illustrated by the Iphigenia. A young girl is sacrificed; she disappears mysteriously from the eyes of those who sacrificed her; she is transported to another country, where the custom is to offer up an strangers to the goddess. To this ministry she is appointed. Some time later her own brother chances to arrive. The fact that the oracle for some reason ordered him to go there, is outside the general plan of the play. The purpose, again, of his coming is outside the action proper. However, he comes, he is seized, and, when on the point of being sacrificed, reveals who he is. The mode of recognition may be either that of Euripides or of Polyidus, in whose play he exclaims very naturally: ‘So it was not my sister only, but I too, who was doomed to be sacrificed’; and by that remark he is saved.
After this, the names being once given, it remains to fill in the episodes. We must see that they are relevant to the action. In the case of Orestes, for example, there is the madness which led to his capture, and his deliverance by means of the purificatory rite. In the drama, the episodes are short, but it is these that give extension to Epic poetry. Thus the story of the Odyssey can be stated briefly. A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight- suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode.
XVIII
Every tragedy falls into two parts- Complication and Unraveling or Denouement. Incidents extraneous to the action are frequently combined with a portion of the action proper, to form the Complication; the rest is the Unraveling. By the Complication I mean all that extends from the beginning of the action to the part which marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune. The Unraveling is that which extends from the beginning of the change to the end. Thus, in the Lynceus of Theodectes, the Complication consists of the incidents presupposed in the drama, the seizure of the child, and then again ... [the Unraveling] extends from the accusation of murder to the end.
There are four kinds of Tragedy: the Complex, depending entirely on Reversal of the Situation and Recognition; the Pathetic (where the motive is passion)- such as the tragedies on Ajax and Ixion; the Ethical (where the motives are ethical)- such as the Phthiotides and the Peleus. The fourth kind is the Simple. [We here exclude the purely spectacular element], exemplified by the Phorcides, the Prometheus, and scenes laid in Hades. The poet should endeavor, if possible, to combine all poetic elements; or failing that, the greatest number and those the most important; the more so, in face of the caviling criticism of the day. For whereas there have hitherto been good poets, each in his own branch, the critics now expect one man to surpass all others in their several lines of excellence.
In speaking of a tragedy as the same or different, the best test to take is the plot. Identity exists where the Complication and Unraveling are the same. Many poets tie the knot well, but unravel it Both arts, however, should always be mastered.
Again, the poet should remember what has been often said, and not make an Epic structure into a tragedy- by an Epic structure I mean one with a multiplicity of plots- as if, for instance, you were to make a tragedy out of the entire story of the Iliad. In the Epic poem, owing to its length, each part assumes its proper magnitude. In the drama the result is far from answering to the poet’s expectation. The proof is that the poets who have dramatized the whole story of the Fall of Troy, instead of selecting portions, like Euripides; or who have taken the whole tale of Niobe, and not a part of her story, like Aeschylus, either fail utterly or meet with poor success on the stage. Even Agathon has been known to fail from this one defect. In his Reversals of the Situation, however, he shows a marvelous skill in the effort to hit the popular taste- to produce a tragic effect that satisfies the moral sense. This effect is produced when the clever rogue, like Sisyphus, is outwitted, or the brave villain defeated. Such an event is probable in Agathon’s sense of the word: ‘is probable,’ he says, ‘that many things should happen contrary to probability.’
The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, in the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles. As for the later poets, their choral songs pertain as little to the subject of the piece as to that of any other tragedy. They are, therefore, sung as mere interludes- a practice first begun by Agathon. Yet what difference is there between introducing such choral interludes, and transferring a speech, or even a whole act, from one play to another.
XIX
It remains to speak of Diction and Thought, the other parts of Tragedy having been already discussed. concerning Thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs. Under Thought is included every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being: proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings, such as pity, fear, anger, and the like; the suggestion of importance or its opposite. Now, it is evident that the dramatic incidents must be treated from the same points of view as the dramatic speeches, when the object is to evoke the sense of pity, fear, importance, or probability. The only difference is that the incidents should speak for themselves without verbal exposition; while effects aimed at in should be produced by the speaker, and as a result of the speech. For what were the business of a speaker, if the Thought were revealed quite apart from what he says?
Next, as regards Diction. One branch of the inquiry treats of the Modes of Utterance. But this province of knowledge belongs to the art of Delivery and to the masters of that science. It includes, for instance- what is a command, a prayer, a statement, a threat, a question, an answer, and so forth. To know or not to know these things involves no serious censure upon the poet’s art. For who can admit the fault imputed to Homer by Protagoras- that in the words, ‘Sing, goddess, of the wrath, he gives a command under the idea that he utters a prayer? For to tell some one to do a thing or not to do it is, he says, a command. We may, therefore, pass this over as an inquiry that belongs to another art, not to poetry.
XX
Language in general includes the following parts: Letter, Syllable, Connecting Word, Noun, Verb, Inflection or Case, Sentence or Phrase.
A Letter is an indivisible sound, yet not every such sound, but only one which can form part of a group of sounds. For even brutes utter indivisible sounds, none of which I call a letter. The sound I mean may be either a vowel, a semivowel, or a mute. A vowel is that which without impact of tongue or lip has an audible sound. A semivowel that which with such impact has an audible sound, as S and R. A mute, that which with such impact has by itself no sound, but joined to a vowel sound becomes audible, as G and D. These are distinguished according to the form assumed by the mouth and the place where they are produced; according as they are aspirated or smooth, long or short; as they are acute, grave, or of an intermediate tone; which inquiry belongs in detail to the writers on meter.
A Syllable is a nonsignificant sound, composed of a mute and a vowel: for GR without A is a syllable, as also with A- GRA. But the investigation of these differences belongs also to metrical science.
A Connecting Word is a nonsignificant sound, which neither causes nor hinders the union of many sounds into one significant sound; it may be placed at either end or in the middle of a sentence. Or, a nonsignificant sound, which out of several sounds, each of them significant, is capable of forming one significant sound- as amphi, peri, and the like. Or, a nonsignificant sound, which marks the beginning, end, or division of a sentence; such, however, that it cannot correctly stand by itself at the beginning of a sentence- as men, etoi, de.
A Noun is a composite significant sound, not marking time, of which no part is in itself significant: for in double or compound words we do not employ the separate parts as if each were in itself significant. Thus in Theodorus, ‘god-given,’ the doron or ‘gift’ is not in itself significant.
A Verb is a composite significant sound, marking time, in which, as in the noun, no part is in itself significant. For ‘man’ or ‘white’ does not express the idea of ‘when’; but ‘he walks’ or ‘he has walked’ does connote time, present or past.
Inflection belongs both to the noun and verb, and expresses either the relation ‘of,’ ‘to,’ or the like; or that of number, whether one or many, as ‘man’ or ‘men’; or the modes or tones in actual delivery, e.g., a question or a command. ‘Did he go?’ and ‘go’ are verbal inflections of this kind.
A Sentence or Phrase is a composite significant sound, some at least of whose parts are in themselves significant; for not every such group of words consists of verbs and nouns- ‘the definition of man,’ for example- but it may dispense even with the verb. Still it will always have some significant part, as ‘in walking,’ or ‘Cleon son of Cleon.’ A sentence or phrase may form a unity in two ways- either as signifying one thing, or as consisting of several parts linked together. Thus the Iliad is one by the linking together of parts, the definition of man by the unity of the thing signified.
XXI
Words are of two kinds, simple and double. By simple I mean those composed of nonsignificant elements, such as ge, ‘earth.’ By double or compound, those composed either of a significant and nonsignificant element (though within the whole word no element is significant), or of elements that are both significant. A word may likewise be triple, quadruple, or multiple in form, like so many Massilian expressions, e.g., ‘Hermo-caico-xanthus [who prayed to Father Zeus].’
Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.
By a current or proper word I mean one which is in general use among a people; by a strange word, one which is in use in another country. Plainly, therefore, the same word may be at once strange and current, but not in relation to the same people. The word sigynon, ‘lance,’ is to the Cyprians a current term but to us a strange one.
Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion. Thus from genus to species, as: ‘There lies my ship’; for lying at anchor is a species of lying. From species to genus, as: ‘Verily ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought’; for ten thousand is a species of large number, and is here used for a large number generally. From species to species, as: ‘With blade of bronze drew away the life,’ and ‘Cleft the water with the vessel of unyielding bronze.’ Here arusai, ‘to draw away’ is used for tamein, ‘to cleave,’ and tamein, again for arusai- each being a species of taking away. Analogy or proportion is when the second term is to the first as the fourth to the third. We may then use the fourth for the second, or the second for the fourth. Sometimes too we qualify the metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative. Thus the cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called ‘the shield of Dionysus,’ and the shield ‘the cup of Ares.’ Or, again, as old age is to life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called, ‘the old age of the day,’ and old age, ‘the evening of life,’ or, in the phrase of Empedocles, ‘life’s setting sun.’ For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. For instance, to scatter seed is called sowing: but the action of the sun in scattering his rays is nameless. Still this process bears to the sun the same relation as sowing to the seed. Hence the expression of the poet ‘sowing the god-created light.’ There is another way in which this kind of metaphor may be employed. We may apply an alien term, and then deny of that term one of its proper attributes; as if we were to call the shield, not ‘the cup of Ares,’ but ‘the wineless cup’.
A newly-coined word is one which has never been even in local use, but is adopted by the poet himself. Some such words there appear to be: as ernyges, ‘sprouters,’ for kerata, ‘horns’; and areter, ‘supplicator’, for hiereus, ‘priest.’
A word is lengthened when its own vowel is exchanged for a longer one, or when a syllable is inserted. A word is contracted when some part of it is removed. Instances of lengthening are: poleos for poleos, Peleiadeo for Peleidou; of contraction: kri, do, and ops, as in mia ginetai amphoteron ops, ‘the appearance of both is one.’
An altered word is one in which part of the ordinary form is left unchanged, and part is recast: as in dexiteron kata mazon, ‘on the right breast,’ dexiteron is for dexion.
Nouns in themselves are either masculine, feminine, or neuter. Masculine are such as end in N, R, S, or in some letter compounded with S- these being two, PS and X. Feminine, such as end in vowels that are always long, namely E and O, and- of vowels that admit of lengthening- those in A. Thus the number of letters in which nouns masculine and feminine end is the same; for PS and X are equivalent to endings in S. No noun ends in a mute or a vowel short by nature. Three only end in I- meli, ‘honey’; kommi, ‘gum’; peperi, ‘pepper’; five end in U. Neuter nouns end in these two latter vowels; also in N and S.
XXII
The perfection of style is to be clear without being mean. The clearest style is that which uses only current or proper words; at the same time it is mean- witness the poetry of Cleophon and of Sthenelus. That diction, on the other hand, is lofty and raised above the commonplace which employs unusual words. By unusual, I mean strange (or rare) words, metaphorical, lengthened- anything, in short, that differs from the normal idiom. Yet a style wholly composed of such words is either a riddle or a jargon; a riddle, if it consists of metaphors; a jargon, if it consists of strange (or rare) words. For the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations. Now this cannot be done by any arrangement of ordinary words, but by the use of metaphor it can. Such is the riddle: ‘A man I saw who on another man had glued the bronze by aid of fire,’ and others of the same kind. A diction that is made up of strange (or rare) terms is a jargon. A certain infusion, therefore, of these elements is necessary to style; for the strange (or rare) word, the metaphorical, the ornamental, and the other kinds above mentioned, will raise it above the commonplace and mean, while the use of proper words will make it perspicuous. But nothing contributes more to produce a cleanness of diction that is remote from commonness than the lengthening, contraction, and alteration of words. For by deviating in exceptional cases from the normal idiom, the language will gain distinction; while, at the same time, the partial conformity with usage will give perspicuity. The critics, therefore, are in error who censure these licenses of speech, and hold the author up to ridicule. Thus Eucleides, the elder, declared that it would be an easy matter to be a poet if you might lengthen syllables at will.
To employ such license at all obtrusively is, no doubt, grotesque; but in any mode of poetic diction there must be moderation. Even metaphors, strange (or rare) words, or any similar forms of speech, would produce the like effect if used without propriety and with the express purpose of being ludicrous. How great a difference is made by the appropriate use of lengthening, may be seen in Epic poetry by the insertion of ordinary forms in the verse. So, again, if we take a strange (or rare) word, a metaphor, or any similar mode of expression, and replace it by the current or proper term, the truth of our observation will be manifest. For example, Aeschylus and Euripides each composed the same iambic line. But the alteration of a single word by Euripides, who employed the rarer term instead of the ordinary one, makes one verse appear beautiful and the other trivial.
Yet a small man, worthless and unseemly, the difference will be felt if we substitute the common words, Yet a little fellow, weak and ugly. Or, if for the line, setting an unseemly couch and a meager table, we read, Setting a wretched couch and a puny table. Or, ‘the sea shores roar,’ to ‘the sea shores screech.’
Again, Ariphrades ridiculed the tragedians for using phrases which no one would employ in ordinary speech: for example, domaton apo, ‘from the house away,’ instead of apo domaton, ‘away from the house;’ sethen, ego de nin, ‘to thee, and I to him;’ Achilleos peri, ‘Achilles about,’ instead of peri Achilleos, ‘about Achilles;’ and the like. It is precisely because such phrases are not part of the current idiom that they give distinction to the style. This, however, he failed to see.
It is a great matter to observe propriety in these several modes of expression, as also in compound words, strange (or rare) words, and so forth. But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
Of the various kinds of words, the compound are best adapted to dithyrambs, rare words to heroic poetry, metaphors to iambic. In heroic poetry, indeed, all these varieties are serviceable. But in iambic verse, which reproduces, as far as may be, familiar speech, the most appropriate words are those which are found even in prose. These are the current or proper, the metaphorical, the ornamental.
Concerning Tragedy and imitation by means of action this may suffice.
XXIII
As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a single meter, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to be constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be. For as the sea-fight at Salamis and the battle with the Carthaginians in Sicily took place at the same time, but did not tend to any one result, so in the sequence of events, one thing sometimes follows another, and yet no single result is thereby produced. Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets. Here again, then, as has been already observed, the transcendent excellence of Homer is manifest. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem, though that war had a beginning and an end. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view. If, again, he had kept it within moderate limits, it must have been over-complicated by the variety of the incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion, and admits as episodes many events from the general story of the war- such as the Catalogue of the ships and others- thus diversifying the poem. All other poets take a single hero, a single period, or an action single indeed, but with a multiplicity of parts. Thus did the author of the Cypria and of the Little Iliad. For this reason the Iliad and the Odyssey each furnish the subject of one tragedy, or, at most, of two; while the Cypria supplies materials for many, and the Little Iliad for eight- the Award of the Arms, the Philoctetes, the Neoptolemus, the Eurypylus, the Mendicant Odysseus, the Laconian Women, the Fall of Ilium, the Departure of the Fleet.
XXIV
Again, Epic poetry must have as many kinds as Tragedy: it must be simple, or complex, or ‘ethical,’or ‘pathetic.’ The parts also, with the exception of song and spectacle, are the same; for it requires Reversals of the Situation, Recognitions, and Scenes of Suffering. Moreover, the thoughts and the diction must be artistic. In all these respects Homer is our earliest and sufficient model. Indeed each of his poems has a twofold character. The Iliad is at once simple and ‘pathetic,’ and the Odyssey complex (for Recognition scenes run through it), and at the same time ‘ethical.’ Moreover, in diction and thought they are supreme.
Epic poetry differs from Tragedy in the scale on which it is constructed, and in its meter. As regards scale or length, we have already laid down an adequate limit: the beginning and the end must be capable of being brought within a single view. This condition will be satisfied by poems on a smaller scale than the old epics, and answering in length to the group of tragedies presented at a single sitting.
Epic poetry has, however, a great- a special- capacity for enlarging its dimensions, and we can see the reason. In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem. The Epic has here an advantage, and one that conduces to grandeur of effect, to diverting the mind of the hearer, and relieving the story with varying episodes. For sameness of incident soon produces satiety, and makes tragedies fail on the stage.
As for the meter, the heroic measure has proved its fitness by hexameter test of experience. If a narrative poem in any other meter or in many meters were now composed, it would be found incongruous. For of all measures the heroic is the stateliest and the most massive; and hence it most readily admits rare words and metaphors, which is another point in which the narrative form of imitation stands alone. On the other hand, the iambic and the trochaic tetrameter are stirring measures, the latter being akin to dancing, the former expressive of action. Still more absurd would it be to mix together different meters, as was done by Chaeremon. Hence no one has ever composed a poem on a great scale in any other than heroic verse. Nature herself, as we have said, teaches the choice of the proper measure.
Homer, admirable in all respects, has the special merit of being the only poet who rightly appreciates the part he should take himself. The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, for it is not this that makes him an imitator. Other poets appear themselves upon the scene throughout, and imitate but little and rarely. Homer, after a few prefatory words, at once brings in a man, or woman, or other personage; none of them wanting in characteristic qualities, but each with a character of his own.
The element of the wonderful is required in Tragedy. The irrational, on which the wonderful depends for its chief effects, has wider scope in Epic poetry, because there the person acting is not seen. Thus, the pursuit of Hector would be ludicrous if placed upon the stage- the Greeks standing still and not joining in the pursuit, and Achilles waving them back. But in the Epic poem the absurdity passes unnoticed. Now the wonderful is pleasing, as may be inferred from the fact that every one tells a story with some addition of his knowing that his hearers like it. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully. The secret of it lies in a fallacy For, assuming that if one thing is or becomes, a second is or becomes, men imagine that, if the second is, the first likewise is or becomes. But this is a false inference. Hence, where the first thing is untrue, it is quite unnecessary, provided the second be true, to add that the first is or has become. For the mind, knowing the second to be true, falsely infers the truth of the first. There is an example of this in the Bath Scene of the Odyssey.
Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts. Everything irrational should, if possible, be excluded; or, at all events, it should lie outside the action of the play (as, in the Oedipus, the hero’s ignorance as to the manner of Laius’ death); not within the drama- as in the Electra, the messenger’s account of the Pythian games; or, as in the Mysians, the man who has come from Tegea to Mysia and is still speechless. The plea that otherwise the plot would have been ruined, is ridiculous; such a plot should not in the first instance be constructed. But once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity. Take even the irrational incidents in the Odyssey, where Odysseus is left upon the shore of Ithaca. How intolerable even these might have been would be apparent if an inferior poet were to treat the subject. As it is, the absurdity is veiled by the poetic charm with which the poet invests it.
The diction should be elaborated in the pauses of the action, where there is no expression of character or thought. For, conversely, character and thought are merely obscured by a diction that is over-brilliant
XXV
With respect to critical difficulties and their solutions, the number and nature of the sources from which they may be drawn may be thus exhibited.
The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects- things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language- either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors. There are also many modifications of language, which we concede to the poets. Add to this, that the standard of correctness is not the same in poetry and politics, any more than in poetry and any other art. Within the art of poetry itself there are two kinds of faults- those which touch its essence, and those which are accidental. If a poet has chosen to imitate something, [but has imitated it incorrectly] through want of capacity, the error is inherent in the poetry. But if the failure is due to a wrong choice- if he has represented a horse as throwing out both his off legs at once, or introduced technical inaccuracies in medicine, for example, or in any other art- the error is not essential to the poetry. These are the points of view from which we should consider and answer the objections raised by the critics.
First as to matters which concern the poet’s own art. If he describes the impossible, he is guilty of an error; but the error may be justified, if the end of the art be thereby attained (the end being that already mentioned)- if, that is, the effect of this or any other part of the poem is thus rendered more striking. A case in point is the pursuit of Hector. if, however, the end might have been as well, or better, attained without violating the special rules of the poetic art, the error is not justified: for every kind of error should, if possible, be avoided.
Again, does the error touch the essentials of the poetic art, or some accident of it? For example, not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically.
Further, if it be objected that the description is not true to fact, the poet may perhaps reply, ‘But the objects are as they ought to be’; just as Sophocles said that he drew men as they ought to be; Euripides, as they are. In this way the objection may be met. If, however, the representation be of neither kind, the poet may answer, ‘This is how men say the thing is.’ applies to tales about the gods. It may well be that these stories are not higher than fact nor yet true to fact: they are, very possibly, what Xenophanes says of them. But anyhow, ‘this is what is said.’ Again, a description may be no better than the fact: ‘Still, it was the fact’; as in the passage about the arms: ‘Upright upon their butt-ends stood the spears.’ This was the custom then, as it now is among the Illyrians.
Again, in examining whether what has been said or done by some one is poetically right or not, we must not look merely to the particular act or saying, and ask whether it is poetically good or bad. We must also consider by whom it is said or done, to whom, when, by what means, or for what end; whether, for instance, it be to secure a greater good, or avert a greater evil.
Other difficulties may be resolved by due regard to the usage of language. We may note a rare word, as in oureas men proton, ‘the mules first [he killed],’ where the poet perhaps employs oureas not in the sense of mules, but of sentinels. So, again, of Dolon: ‘ill-favored indeed he was to look upon.’ It is not meant that his body was ill-shaped but that his face was ugly; for the Cretans use the word eueides, ‘well-flavored’ to denote a fair face. Again, zoroteron de keraie, ‘mix the drink livelier’ does not mean ‘mix it stronger’ as for hard drinkers, but ‘mix it quicker.’
Sometimes an expression is metaphorical, as ‘Now all gods and men were sleeping through the night,’ while at the same time the poet says: ‘Often indeed as he turned his gaze to the Trojan plain, he marveled at the sound of flutes and pipes.’ ‘All’ is here used metaphorically for ‘many,’ all being a species of many. So in the verse, ‘alone she hath no part... , oie, ‘alone’ is metaphorical; for the best known may be called the only one.
Again, the solution may depend upon accent or breathing. Thus Hippias of Thasos solved the difficulties in the lines, didomen (didomen) de hoi, and to men hou (ou) kataputhetai ombro.
Or again, the question may be solved by punctuation, as in Empedocles: ‘Of a sudden things became mortal that before had learnt to be immortal, and things unmixed before mixed.’
Or again, by ambiguity of meaning, as parocheken de pleo nux, where the word pleo is ambiguous.
Or by the usage of language. Thus any mixed drink is called oinos, ‘wine’. Hence Ganymede is said ‘to pour the wine to Zeus,’ though the gods do not drink wine. So too workers in iron are called chalkeas, or ‘workers in bronze.’ This, however, may also be taken as a metaphor.
Again, when a word seems to involve some inconsistency of meaning, we should consider how many senses it may bear in the particular passage. For example: ‘there was stayed the spear of bronze’- we should ask in how many ways we may take ‘being checked there.’ The true mode of interpretation is the precise opposite of what Glaucon mentions. Critics, he says, jump at certain groundless conclusions; they pass adverse judgement and then proceed to reason on it; and, assuming that the poet has said whatever they happen to think, find fault if a thing is inconsistent with their own fancy.
The question about Icarius has been treated in this fashion. The critics imagine he was a Lacedaemonian. They think it strange, therefore, that Telemachus should not have met him when he went to Lacedaemon. But the Cephallenian story may perhaps be the true one. They allege that Odysseus took a wife from among themselves, and that her father was Icadius, not Icarius. It is merely a mistake, then, that gives plausibility to the objection.
In general, the impossible must be justified by reference to artistic requirements, or to the higher reality, or to received opinion. With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible. Again, it may be impossible that there should be men such as Zeuxis painted. ‘Yes,’ we say, ‘but the impossible is the higher thing; for the ideal type must surpass the realty.’ To justify the irrational, we appeal to what is commonly said to be. In addition to which, we urge that the irrational sometimes does not violate reason; just as ‘it is probable that a thing may happen contrary to probability.’
Things that sound contradictory should be examined by the same rules as in dialectical refutation- whether the same thing is meant, in the same relation, and in the same sense. We should therefore solve the question by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.
The element of the irrational, and, similarly, depravity of character, are justly censured when there is no inner necessity for introducing them. Such is the irrational element in the introduction of Aegeus by Euripides and the badness of Menelaus in the Orestes.
Thus, there are five sources from which critical objections are drawn. Things are censured either as impossible, or irrational, or morally hurtful, or contradictory, or contrary to artistic correctness. The answers should be sought under the twelve heads above mentioned.
XXVI
The question may be raised whether the Epic or Tragic mode of imitation is the higher. If the more refined art is the higher, and the more refined in every case is that which appeals to the better sort of audience, the art which imitates anything and everything is manifestly most unrefined. The audience is supposed to be too dull to comprehend unless something of their own is thrown by the performers, who therefore indulge in restless movements. Bad flute-players twist and twirl, if they have to represent ‘the quoit-throw,’ or hustle the coryphaeus when they perform the Scylla. Tragedy, it is said, has this same defect. We may compare the opinion that the older actors entertained of their successors. Mynniscus used to call Callippides ‘ape’ on account of the extravagance of his action, and the same view was held of Pindarus. Tragic art, then, as a whole, stands to Epic in the same relation as the younger to the elder actors. So we are told that Epic poetry is addressed to a cultivated audience, who do not need gesture; Tragedy, to an inferior public. Being then unrefined, it is evidently the lower of the two.
Now, in the first place, this censure attaches not to the poetic but to the histrionic art; for gesticulation may be equally overdone in epic recitation, as by Sosistratus, or in lyrical competition, as by Mnasitheus the Opuntian. Next, all action is not to be condemned- any more than all dancing- but only that of bad performers. Such was the fault found in Callippides, as also in others of our own day, who are censured for representing degraded women. Again, Tragedy like Epic poetry produces its effect even without action; it reveals its power by mere reading. If, then, in all other respects it is superior, this fault, we say, is not inherent in it.
And superior it is, because it has an the epic elements- it may even use the epic meter- with the music and spectacular effects as important accessories; and these produce the most vivid of pleasures. Further, it has vividness of impression in reading as well as in representation. Moreover, the art attains its end within narrower limits for the concentrated effect is more pleasurable than one which is spread over a long time and so diluted. What, for example, would be the effect of the Oedipus of Sophocles, if it were cast into a form as long as the Iliad? Once more, the Epic imitation has less unity; as is shown by this, that any Epic poem will furnish subjects for several tragedies. Thus if the story adopted by the poet has a strict unity, it must either be concisely told and appear truncated; or, if it conforms to the Epic canon of length, it must seem weak and watery. [Such length implies some loss of unity,] if, I mean, the poem is constructed out of several actions, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, which have many such parts, each with a certain magnitude of its own. Yet these poems are as perfect as possible in structure; each is, in the highest degree attainable, an imitation of a single action.
If, then, tragedy is superior to epic poetry in all these respects, and, moreover, fulfills its specific function better as an art- for each art ought to produce, not any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it, as already stated- it plainly follows that tragedy is the higher art, as attaining its end more perfectly.
Thus much may suffice concerning Tragic and Epic poetry in general; their several kinds and parts, with the number of each and their differences; the causes that make a poem good or bad; the objections of the critics and the answers to these objections....

Nick DiSpoldo, Small Press Review (on “Children, Churches and Daddies,& #148; April 1997) Kuypers is the widely-published poet of particular perspectives and not a little existential rage, but she does not impose her personal or artistic agenda on her magazine. CC+D is a provocative potpourri of news stories, poetry, humor, art and the “dirty underwear& #148; of politics. One piece in this issue is “Crazy,& #148; an interview Kuypers conducted with “Madeline,& #148; a murderess who was found insane, and is confined to West Virginia’s Arronsville Correctional Center. Madeline, whose elevator definitely doesn’t go to the top, killed her boyfriend during sex with an ice pick and a chef’s knife, far surpassing the butchery of Elena Bobbitt. Madeline, herself covered with blood, sat beside her lover’s remains for three days, talking to herself, and that is how the police found her. For effect, Kuypers publishes Madeline’s monologue in different-sized type, and the result is something between a sense of Dali’s surrealism and Kafka-like craziness.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada
I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer’s styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.

Ed Hamilton, writer #85 (of Children, Churches and Daddies) turned out well. I really enjoyed the humor section, especially the test score answers. And, the cup-holder story is hilarious. I’m not a big fan of poetry - since much of it is so hard to decipher - but I was impressed by the work here, which tends toward the straightforward and unpretentious. As for the fiction, the piece by Anderson is quite perceptive: I liked the way the self-deluding situation of the character is gradually, subtly revealed. (Kuypers’) story is good too: the way it switches narrative perspective via the letter device is a nice touch.

Children, Churches and Daddies.
It speaks for itself.
Write to Scars Publications to submit poetry, prose and artwork to Children, Churches and Daddies literary magazine, or to inquire about having your own chapbook, and maybe a few reviews like these.

Jim Maddocks, GLASGOW, via the Internet I’ll be totally honest, of the material in Issue (either 83 or 86 of Children, Churches and Daddies) the only ones I really took to were Kuypers’. TRYING was so simple but most truths are, aren’t they?

what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don’t consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.

why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.

so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.

A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.

vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review (on Children, Churches and Daddies) cc&d is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist. I really like (“Writing Your Name& #148;). It’s one of those kind of things where your eye isn’t exactly pulled along, but falls effortlessly down the poem. I liked “knowledge& #148; for its mix of disgust and acceptance. Janet Kuypers does good little movies, by which I mean her stuff provokes moving imagery for me. Color, no dialogue; the voice of the poem is the narrator over the film.

Children, Churches and Daddies no longer distributes free contributor’s copies of issues. In order to receive issues of Children, Churches and Daddies, contact Janet Kuypers at the cc&d e-mail addres. Free electronic subscriptions are available via email. All you need to do is email ccandd@scars.tv... and ask to be added to the free cc+d electronic subscription mailing list. And you can still see issues every month at the Children, Churches and Daddies website, located at http://scars.tv

Mark Blickley, writer The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. “Scars& #148; is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)

functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen

We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.

Gary, Editor, The Road Out of Town (on the Children, Churches and Daddies Web Site) I just checked out the site. It looks great.

Dusty Dog Reviews: These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding.

John Sweet, writer (on chapbook designs) Visuals were awesome. They’ve got a nice enigmatic quality to them. Front cover reminds me of the Roman sculptures of angels from way back when. Loved the staggered tire lettering, too. Way cool. (on “Hope Chest in the Attic& #148;) Some excellent writing in “Hope Chest in the Attic.& #148; I thought “Children, Churches and Daddies& #148; and “The Room of the Rape& #148; were particularly powerful pieces.

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review: cc&d is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist.

Cheryl Townsend, Editor, Impetus (on Children, Churches and Daddies) The new cc&d looks absolutely amazing. It’s a wonderful lay-out, looks really professional - all you need is the glossy pages. Truly impressive AND the calendar, too. Can’t wait to actually start reading all the stuff inside.. Wanted to just say, it looks good so far!!!

Dusty Dog Reviews: She opens with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, “Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment.& #148; Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers’ very personal layering of her poem across the page.

Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA
Indeed, there’s a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there’s a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Mark Blickley, writer
The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. “Scars& #148; is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.

Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book or chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers. We’re only an e-mail away. Write to us.

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies’) obvious dedication along this line admirable.

The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST’s three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST’s SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does “on the road& #148; presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies’) obvious dedication along this line admirable.

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA
“Hope Chest in the Attic& #148; captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family.
“Chain Smoking& #148; depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. “The room of the rape& #148; is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

want a review like this? contact scars about getting your own book published.

Paul Weinman, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) Wonderful new direction (Children, Churches and Daddies has) taken - great articles, etc. (especially those on AIDS). Great stories - all sorts of hot info!

The magazine Children Churches and Daddies is Copyright © through Scars Publications and Design. The rights of the individual pieces remain with the authors. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Okay, nilla wafer. Listen up and listen good. How to save your life. Submit, or I’ll have to kill you.
Okay, it’s this simple: send me published or unpublished poetry, prose or art work (do not send originals), along with a bio, to us - then sit around and wait... Pretty soon you’ll hear from the happy people at cc&d that says (a) Your work sucks, or (b) This is fancy crap, and we’re gonna print it. It’s that simple!

Okay, butt-munch. Tough guy. This is how to win the editors over.
Hope Chest in the Attic is a 200 page, perfect-bound book of 13 years of poetry, prose and art by Janet Kuypers. It’s a really classy thing, if you know what I mean. We also have a few extra sopies of the 1999 book “Rinse and Repeat& #148;, the 2001 book “Survive and Thrive& #148;, the 2001 books “Torture and Triumph& #148; and “(no so) Warm and Fuzzy& #148;, which all have issues of cc&d crammed into one book. And you can have either one of these things at just five bucks a pop if you just contact us and tell us you saw this ad space. It’s an offer you can’t refuse...

Carlton Press, New York, NY: HOPE CHEST IN THE ATTIC is a collection of well-fashioned, often elegant poems and short prose that deals in many instances, with the most mysterious and awesome of human experiences: love... Janet Kuypers draws from a vast range of experiences and transforms thoughts into lyrical and succinct verse... Recommended as poetic fare that will titillate the palate in its imagery and imaginative creations.
Mark Blickley, writer: The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. “Scars& #148; is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing the book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.
Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book and chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers - you can write for yourself or you can write for an audience. It’s your call...

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA: “Hope Chest in the Attic& #148; captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family. “Chain Smoking& #148; depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. “The room of the rape& #148; is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

Dusty Dog Reviews, CA (on knife): These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding. Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Dusty Dog Reviews (on Without You): She open with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, “Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment.& #148; Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers’ very personal layering of her poem across the page.
Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada (on Children, Churches and Daddies): I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer’s styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.
Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA: Indeed, there’s a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there’s a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Children, Churches and Daddies the unreligious, non-family oriented literary and art magazine Scars Publications and Design ccandd96@scars.tv http://scars.tv Publishers/Designers Of Children, Churches and Daddies magazine cc+d Ezines The Burning mini poem books God Eyes mini poem books The Poetry Wall Calendar The Poetry Box The Poetry Sampler Mom’s Favorite Vase Newsletters Reverberate Music Magazine Down In The Dirt magazine Freedom and Strength Press forum plus assorted chapbooks and books music, poery compact discs live performances of songs and readings Sponsors Of past editions: Poetry Chapbook Contest, Poetry Book Contest Prose Chapbook Contest, Prose Book Contest Poetry Calendar Contest current editions: Editor’s Choice Award (writing and web sites) Collection Volumes Children, Churches and Daddies (founded 1993) has been written and researched by political groups and writers from the United States, Canada, England, India, Italy, Malta, Norway and Turkey. Regular features provide coverage of environmental, political and social issues (via news and philosophy) as well as fiction and poetry, and act as an information and education source. Children, Churches and Daddies is the leading magazine for this combination of information, education and entertainment. Children, Churches and Daddies (ISSN 1068-5154) is published quarterly by Scars Publications and Design. Contact us via e-mail (ccandd96@scars.tv) for subscription rates or prices for annual collection books. To contributors: No racist, sexist or blatantly homophobic material. No originals; if mailed, include SASE & bio. Work sent on disks or through e-mail preferred. Previously published work accepted. Authors always retain rights to their own work. All magazine rights reserved. Reproduction of Children, Churches and Daddies without publisher permission is forbidden. Children, Churches and Daddies copyright through Scars Publications and Design, Children, Churches and Daddies, Janet Kuypers. All rights remain with the authors of the individual pieces. No material may be reprinted without express permission.