(no subject)

[jfb]

Lauren Slater, "Repress Yourself", 2003:

While storying one's life is undoubtedly an essential human activity, the trauma industry may have overlooked this essential fact: not all of us are memoirists. Some of us tell our stories by speaking around them, a kind of Carveresque style where resolution is whispered below the level of audible language. Then again, some of us are fable writers, developing quick tales with tortoises and hares, where right and wrong have a lovely, simple sort of sound. If we are all authors of our experience, as the trauma industry has so significantly reminded us, we are not all cut from the same literary cloth. Some of us are wordy, others prefer the smooth white space between tightly packaged paragraphs. Still others might rather sing over the scary parts than express them at all.

Three New Orleans things: Allan Topol's "Lessons from Katrina". Fafblog's "Do-It Yourself Emergency Management Guide" (warning: funny). And another of the many organizations collecting donations for hurricane relief is the American Federation of Musicians, New Orleans Local 174-496.

Comments

[marm0t.livejournal.com]

Help help can't stop composing my life as a Carver story in my head. Lots of fidgeting with cigarettes and car keys and engaging acquaintances in seemingly banal conversations with heartbreakingly profound undertones.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

I, too, have had dates like that.

[marm0t.livejournal.com]

ahh, the lj objoke.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

In these difficult times, we Americans have to take our objokes where we can find them.