"feathering the dust"
Munday: Pick two characters ... and tell us how they ... go.
"The girl is wearing navy espadrilles that are really wide. The rope that wraps around the outer edges of each sole is similar in rope-girth to what they might have used to tie the HMS Beagle to the dock in Valparaiso, Chile, back in 1834, when, so the story goes, the scientific passengers and crew all became 'naturalists of the night' on shore leave at Patty's Tórrido Rosa, on Agua de la Calle near the harbor."
Alice Franks pauses and looks up. Everyone's eyes are on her, which makes her twitchy. Twitchy is when, standing slow-to-weather rock still on two feet, you can also feel like a leaf blown just far enough out to sea to be caught up in the shore break. Up-and-down, up-and-down, crash, hold-your-breath-and-swim-TO-the-light, up-and-down, up-and-down ...
It's "Creative Writing 1800s," a creative course number Jasper Hoolabrew picked at random as a way of framing this semester's course in a prompt-century with enough distance before iPhones and Tweets that the students would be induced (elicited, obliged, coerced, compelled, forced -- he considered several words intended to express in a seductive, course catalog "come-on" phrase, what he really felt -- throttled till their little faces turned the purple of a weather radar thunderhead) to swim in creatively unfamiliar waters.
Alice gives a long breath sigh and looks back at the three pages of double-space she's holding in her hands. "'Chuck -- come see me, sweety-boo,' Yolanda Verde Cha-Cha says and winks at the notebook-padded, Darwin anti-christ. Chuck is tempted. It's been a long cruise on a boat without shuffleboards or a swimming pool and where, without email or websites to visit where both male and female, bad orgasm-actors can feel free to pretend they are making real, you are forced to self-matriculate your eros coursework with the aid of nothing but the theater playing in your head."
The students in the creative writing class are still all ears. They like the Alice stories because the Franks 'n sense often involves a lot of sex.
"'Oh, what the fuck,' Darwin finally mutters to himself and downs the remaining hard-wine in his tankard cup. 'She might be a girl with some knowledge of the local fauna.'
"Which, indeed, Yolanda Verde Cha-Cha was. At just twenty-two and no longer counting, she'd seen enough male, and female, human fauna to start her own zoological garden of delights. And she could show the anti-christ from London a thing or two about evolving means of procreation.
"'Ooo, you English are so stiffy-stuffy. How come?'
"'Never really thought about it,' Darwin answers.
"'No. "How come?" as in pigeon English for "How do you want me to make you come?"'
"Darwin looks confused. 'There's more than one way?'
"Which, one day, when people could actually conduct their own individual voyages of discovery without straying too far from the fridge, would be seen as a central under-theme of Darwin's writing: Sometimes you just need to get your head away from home, to find the woo-woo in the world."
[dearest moddles/ fellow lofters: actually, this is the result of prompt trolling, going through the prompts to find something that would sort-of fit and make something written before the fact of seeing a prompt, seem innocently inspired by it; which is also known as a) bending the rules, b) how word outlaws become outlaws, c) evidence of yet one more word slut looking for a reader, d) sad, just sad, e) _____ (reader fill-in)]
20120807 15:02 (505 words)
"The girl is wearing navy espadrilles that are really wide. The rope that wraps around the outer edges of each sole is similar in rope-girth to what they might have used to tie the HMS Beagle to the dock in Valparaiso, Chile, back in 1834, when, so the story goes, the scientific passengers and crew all became 'naturalists of the night' on shore leave at Patty's Tórrido Rosa, on Agua de la Calle near the harbor."
Alice Franks pauses and looks up. Everyone's eyes are on her, which makes her twitchy. Twitchy is when, standing slow-to-weather rock still on two feet, you can also feel like a leaf blown just far enough out to sea to be caught up in the shore break. Up-and-down, up-and-down, crash, hold-your-breath-and-swim-TO-the-light, up-and-down, up-and-down ...
It's "Creative Writing 1800s," a creative course number Jasper Hoolabrew picked at random as a way of framing this semester's course in a prompt-century with enough distance before iPhones and Tweets that the students would be induced (elicited, obliged, coerced, compelled, forced -- he considered several words intended to express in a seductive, course catalog "come-on" phrase, what he really felt -- throttled till their little faces turned the purple of a weather radar thunderhead) to swim in creatively unfamiliar waters.
Alice gives a long breath sigh and looks back at the three pages of double-space she's holding in her hands. "'Chuck -- come see me, sweety-boo,' Yolanda Verde Cha-Cha says and winks at the notebook-padded, Darwin anti-christ. Chuck is tempted. It's been a long cruise on a boat without shuffleboards or a swimming pool and where, without email or websites to visit where both male and female, bad orgasm-actors can feel free to pretend they are making real, you are forced to self-matriculate your eros coursework with the aid of nothing but the theater playing in your head."
The students in the creative writing class are still all ears. They like the Alice stories because the Franks 'n sense often involves a lot of sex.
"'Oh, what the fuck,' Darwin finally mutters to himself and downs the remaining hard-wine in his tankard cup. 'She might be a girl with some knowledge of the local fauna.'
"Which, indeed, Yolanda Verde Cha-Cha was. At just twenty-two and no longer counting, she'd seen enough male, and female, human fauna to start her own zoological garden of delights. And she could show the anti-christ from London a thing or two about evolving means of procreation.
"'Ooo, you English are so stiffy-stuffy. How come?'
"'Never really thought about it,' Darwin answers.
"'No. "How come?" as in pigeon English for "How do you want me to make you come?"'
"Darwin looks confused. 'There's more than one way?'
"Which, one day, when people could actually conduct their own individual voyages of discovery without straying too far from the fridge, would be seen as a central under-theme of Darwin's writing: Sometimes you just need to get your head away from home, to find the woo-woo in the world."
[dearest moddles/ fellow lofters: actually, this is the result of prompt trolling, going through the prompts to find something that would sort-of fit and make something written before the fact of seeing a prompt, seem innocently inspired by it; which is also known as a) bending the rules, b) how word outlaws become outlaws, c) evidence of yet one more word slut looking for a reader, d) sad, just sad, e) _____ (reader fill-in)]
20120807 15:02 (505 words)