Appreciation of the written word has given me a source for philosophy,
story telling, and solace. The novel is my preferred form of the art of
writing, although I am starting to develop an appreciation for the music
of poetry. No literary critcisms will be expounded on this page. Instead,
there are passages that are personally significant, from writers that are
extraordinary. Instead, there are links to sites of specific artists, that
I've been able to locate. As always, feedback is welcome. If you know of
a site for a specfic author, or if you would like to recommend an author,
please feel free to e-mail me. Periodically,
new passages will be added. At some point, I hope to make this page interactive.
I hope you enjoy these particular passages as much as I do.
Steve Erickson
Truman Capote
Tennessee Williams
Samuel Delany
John Steinbeck
Tom Robbins
Maxim Gorki
Also included on this page are a few of my
own poems. Some of these were performed at the Andy Warhol Museum here
in Pittsburgh. Some really cool general literature
and bibliophile links can also be found on this page
Steve Erickson
The Sea Came in at Midnight
So Louise became something more profound than tormented: she became haunted.
Having traficked in the sort of memories people had spent thousands of
years trying to forget, and the sort of dreams they had spent thousands
of years trying to awake from,she had wandered at will and without accountability
on the apocalyptic landscape of the imagination. Now a stain spread from
the darkest center of the unaccountable imagination, becoming only more
confounding and unbearable with every moment, the question of when and
where the imagination becomes accountable by and to whom, beginning with
the one who imagines a nightmare simply for the thrill of its imagining,
moving to the one who renders it an artifact to be experienced in common
by others, eventually to the collective audiencethat chooses to watch,
for the thrill of watching, a girl actually being murdered in a movie,
to the individual man or woman who, before suppressing it in horror, entertains
a fleeting curiosity, dallying with the temptation to look, then finally
conforming to whatever sick social chic compels everyone at a cocktail
party to watch, like they would watch the home movie of a summer vacation
or a child getting his first bike. At what point, if any, in the exchange
betweenthe one whpo bears the fruitof the imagination and the one who devours
it, does it all stop short of being beyond the pale, at what point is everyone
complicit, at what point can one consider himself unaccountable for what
the imagination has wrought, right up until the moment that he is damned
by it?
Novels
and Other Works By Steve Erickson
Top
Samuel R. Delany
The Einstein Intersection (1967)
I blew two notes down, then shrill.
I started to clap my hands, a hard, slow rhythm. Imade the melody with
my feet alone. The kids thought that was pretty funny too. I rocked on
the table edge, closed my eyes, and clapped and played. In theback, somebody
began to clap with me. I grinned into the flut (difficult) and the sound
brightened. I remembered the music I'd gotten from Spider. So I tried something
I'd never done before. I let one melody go on without my playing it, and
played another instead. Tones tugged each other into harmonyas they swooped
from clap to clap.I let those two continue and threaded a third above them.
I pushed the music into a body swayer, a foot shaker, till fingers upon
the tablecloth pounced on the pattern. I played, looking hard at them,
weighing the weight of music in them, and when there was enough, I danced.
Movements repeated themselves: making dances is the opposite of taking
them. I danced on the table. Hard. I whipped them with music. Sounds peeled
from sounds. Chords fell open like sated flowers. People called out. I
shrilled my rhythms at them down the hollow knife, gougedsounds down their
spines the way you pith a frog. They shook in their seats. I put into the
music a fourth line, dissonant to lots and lots of other notes. Three people
had started dancing with me. I made the music make them. Rhythm buoyed
their jerking. The old man was shaking his shoulders at the blue eyed girl.
Clap. The youngster shook shoulder-Clap-to shoulder. The older couple held
hands very tightly. Clap. Sound banked behin-Clap-itself. Silence a moment.
Clap. Then loosed throught the room; like dragons in the gorse, wild they
moaned together, beat their thighs and bellies to four melodies.
Delany's
Home Page
Samuel Delany
Author Home Page
Top
Tennessee Williams
Portrait of a Girl in Glass (1954)
There were three pieces of dingy ivory furniture in the room, a bed a bureau,
a chair.Over the bed was a remarkably bad religious painting, a very effeminate
head of Christ with teardrops visible just below the eyes.The charm of
the room was was produced by my sister's collection of glass. She loved
colores glassand had covered the walls with shelves of little glass articles,
all of them light and delicate in color. These she washed and polished
with endless care. When you entered the room there was always this soft,
trnsparent radiencein it which came from the glass absorbing whatever faint
light came through the shades on Death Valley. I have no idea how many
articles there were of this delicate glass. There must have been hundreds
of them. But Laura could tell you exactly. She loved each one.
The Tennessee
Williams Page
Top
Truman Capote
Music for Chameleons
Conversational Portraits: A Day's Work
MARY: You sure you don't want to try a couple of tokes? You're missing
something.
TC: You twisted my arm
(Man and boy, I've dragged some powerful grass, never
enough to have acquired a habit, but enough to judge quality and know the
difference between ordinary Mexican weed and luxorious contraband like
Thai-sticks and the supreme Maui-Wowiee. But after smoking the whole of
one of Mary's roaches, and while halfway through another, I felt as though
seized by a delicious demon, embraced by a mad marvelous merriment: the
demon tickled my toes, scratched my itchy head, kissed me hotly with his
red sugary lips, shoved his fiery tongue down my throat. Everything sparkled;
my eyes were like zoom lenses; I could read the titles of books on the
highest shelves: The Neurotic Personality of Our Times by Karen Horney;
Eimi by e.e. cummings; Four Quartets; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost)
Truman Capote Discussion
Board
Truman capote:
a black + white tribute
Top
John Steinbeck
East of Eden (1952)
I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes
taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose faces we do not
know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but
because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is
true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build
automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory
is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all
are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to
get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time
mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics and
even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective
for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension
in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and
confused.
Steinbeck
Research Center
SJSU - Center
for Steinbeck Studies
Top
Tom Robbins
Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
They say that February is the shortest month, but you they could be wrong.
Compared, calender page against calender page, it looks to be the shortest
month, all right. Spread between January and March, like lard on bread,
it fails to reach the crust on either side. In its galoshes - and you'kk
never see February in stocking feet - it's a full head shrter than December,
although in leap year, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's
nose.
However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels
longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more
cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a
time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into
every gullible face, behavior that grows qickly old.
February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals
on its page add up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved
for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the
flat champagne of of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that
our ancestors pinned Valentine's day on February's shirt: he or she lucky
enough to have a lover in frgid, antsy Februaryhas cause for celebration,
indeed.
Maxim Gorki
Fragments From My Diary (1940)
(translated by Moura Budberg)
The silhouette of the fire among the black trees changed like a kaleidoscope,
and the dance of the flames was tireless and relentless. Here a large red
bear of fire rolls out on the meadow, jumping clumsily and turning somersaults;
losing tufts of his flaming hair, he crawls along the trunk to gather honey,
and reachingthe top of the tree, hugs the branches in the hairy embrace
of his crimson paws, balances on them, strewing pink needles in a rain
of golden sparks. Now he heaves himself lightly across to the next ree,
while on the one which he has left numerous blue candles light up on the
bare, black branches;purple mice rush up and down the boughs, and by their
rapid movements one can see how capriciously the blue ringlets of smoke
dance; hundred of fiery ants climb up and down the bark of the tree.
Susan Constanse
Chance Encounters
Paper Horses
Dog Party
Summertime
Tick Talk
Raymond
Top
Literature and Bibliophile
Links
Avon Books Homepage
Welcome to booknet-international
ABAA booknet/rmharris_ltd
The Advanced Book Exchange
Carnegie Library
of Pittsburgh Foundation Center
The 1999 national poetry SLAM!
daddio
Top
