tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-407058407753345083.post9036228505013445730..comments2014-12-07T11:04:05.115-06:00Comments on Postcard Fiction Collaborative: Dead EndAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15559084906353145855noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-407058407753345083.post-76554687906611619112010-05-01T17:34:57.001-05:002010-05-01T17:34:57.001-05:00Just a note on the process as a whole...I find tha...Just a note on the process as a whole...I find that it's really hard to establish and sustain narrative in these tiny footprints we're leaving here...so I move in and out of devices...little tools to make words sound and feel like fiction...but I must say that Beth's plot point about what the kids stole and the effects of their stealing really hit home like page 348 in a 350 page novel. A good moment for me.Alan Semerdjianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01312626695659048927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-407058407753345083.post-24051795475153251072010-04-29T15:57:59.612-05:002010-04-29T15:57:59.612-05:00These brought to my mind the sephira of Daath, the...These brought to my mind the sephira of Daath, the un-sephira, the place that isn't. It is the inverse place, the place where things are defined by what they are not, by what they lack, by what they can never be. "This is my home" - because it cannot be anyplace place. If the house were to make good its escape, it would cease to be the thing it is.<br /><br />Daath is the pit in the universe, an abyss we fall endlessly through, again and again. We are always falling in it, "repeating the pattern again and again."William Owenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18380003794402258523noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-407058407753345083.post-47376993852485471822010-04-28T12:32:08.786-05:002010-04-28T12:32:08.786-05:00The futility of most of these stories, the dead en...The futility of most of these stories, the dead ends, "without enough force to push" them (Nicole), contrasts brilliantly with the positive idea of cul-de-sac in Alan's story "Lovely." Happiness exists in memory as we grow older: "Lovely is the way we grow up and think back and reconsider and never leave." This bears some semblance to the exploration in Forrest's piece "Live Ends" in which a jogger deciphers signs and embryonicly pushes against solipsism: "I don't believe I've been regarded the same there before." In Bill’s "The Super Eights" a narrator accuses but also, attenuated, reaches out to a foregone generation of polluters. Dead end becomes a transitive verb here. Though the narrator soon conflates him/herself with the world -- part and parcel of the dead end: “hopefully we’ll have kept the lights on for you.” Signs symbolize the arbitrary nature of life, our choices notwithstanding, in Beth’s “Stealing Signs.” The inimitable, random branchings of our lives produce both a question and irreversible determination: “What can be stopped.” The grudging homeplace in Johanna’s “Dead End Dreams” sum much of the subject up. Dead ends don’t have to be death and sometimes they give life meaning, albeit through their unplesantness and absurdity (what home owner hasn’t felt that way?). The wonderful retelling of the myth of Sisyphus locates our dead ends (I mean that lovingly here) in where we live: “‘This is my home.’” Overall, each of these stories beautifully limn life, live ends, pasts and presents and inevitable dead ends.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15559084906353145855noreply@blogger.com