24 January 2012
17 January 2012
16 January 2012
15 January 2012
06 January 2012
05 January 2012
MIRROR WORLD IV
I. 14 yr old Stephanie French, vanished walking home from her Berkeley junior high school. Her customary shortcut. Next seen several hundred miles from Berkeley, buried in a shallow grave in California's most northern mountains.
II. "I have to know about this" she said when I found her hiding under the covers of her bed in Malibu, stunned, disbelieving, flashlight in hand.
III. She was showing me the photographs Margaret Bourke-White did for Life of the ovens at Buchenwald.
IV. That was what she had to know.
Or ask the child who would not allow herself to fall asleep during most of 1946 because she feared the fate of 6 yr old Suzanne Degnan. Kidnapped from her bed in Chicago, dissected in a sink, and disposed of in pieces in the sewers of the far north side.
Or ask the child who 9 yrs later followed the search for 14 yr old Stephanie French.
V. Since the events surrounding the disappearances of both SD & SF occurred in circulation areas served by aggressive Hearst papers, both cases were extensively and luridly covered.
The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous.
To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did.
Knowing this is why children call Camarillo.
Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century-Fox.
Joan Didion Blue Nights (2011)
21 November 2011
HALF THE WORLD IS GASH
Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance.
They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates.
By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from "innocents" for their own good.
By pandering to this myth of the naif, we service our own legend.
Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas to ourselves.
Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blisfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss.
The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic.
What's a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia.
To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten.
No, they have sex, too.
In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut.
Lionel Shriver We Need To Talk About Kevin (2003)
20 November 2011
19 November 2011
18 November 2011
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