Ian Says: Topple the Doppelgänger

Do you find yourself constantly finding yourself?

Do your socks routinely disappear with no explanation?

If so, you may have a Doppelgänger. There are certain measures to be taken in a certainly measured manner, and deliberations to be followed through deliberately, in order to rid yourself of yourself:

1. Abandon mirrors with reckless abandon. Without you, you will be lost.

2. Try not to talk to yourself. If yourself talks to you, nod and remain silent until you've stopped talking.

3. Neglect your dress, and frequently wear shoes absent socks. This will confuse and weaken your Doppelgänger.

If these steps are followed with sufficient zeal you will find success. One must apply oneself, especially in matters concerning one's selves.

Good luck to you.

(and to you).

Turgenev the Tables

So, here I am, 15,000 or so words into NaNoWriMo when an old romance between myself and a certain Russian author of the 19th century (who happens to be the critical whipping boy of literature professors everywhere, but who has securely won this author's heart) is suddenly rekindled. Before my steadily flowing narrative about a man and a hill - a sickly but determined love-child of Kafka and the Diamond Sutra - knew what hit it, I was leaping up the stairs to my bookshelf to draw, nay, to embrace, my volume of Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man.

By way of answer to the question posed by that admirable work, I resolved then and there to write my own work in the same format, illuminating the opposite reaches of the heart than were explored by Turgenev with his superfluous man. So, dear readers, I give you:

Diary of a Mellifluous Man

August 21

Today the doctor told me, “You're dying.” Feeling rather exposed at this revelation, I retorted, “Well - so are you.” Then he told me that he was giving me two weeks to live. I told him that if the situation were reversed, I would have been more charitable. We shook hands. Very grim business. His solemnity was infectious. I couldn't help but imitate his manner. For anyone looking on it may well have seemed that I was consoling him. A very courteous affair.

The stale light of the office was reflected in his shoes. It's a peculiar thing to stare at a man's shoes, but as a dying man is presumably allowed some extra latitude, I excused myself from his parting words and stared at them. They were solemn, too. Maybe they gave the doctor my two weeks for him to give me. The brown leather was very clean. Disarmingly clean. There's something about excessive cleanliness that is disturbing – there's a touch of malice in it. My own shoes are shot to hell, and I was relieved at that moment to be in them, whether they belonged to a dying man or not.

NaNoWriMo

That's National Novel Writing Month to you. It's that time of the year again, when writers everywhere hogtie their inner editor and rattle off 50,000 words in 30 days.

Your humble author counts himself among the participants and will update you, the reader, as to his progress in word count and substance, by way of quantified data and excerpts.

Day 1: 2,050

Dawn approached and the mouth of the valley opened a welcoming expanse, the soft earth underfoot a sweet relief from the punishing rock. In the distance the sound of civilization could be heard, mastering nature with adolescent awkwardness. To view life being lived from a distance is a somewhat morbid affair. There is always something of dying in living, and a farmer's hoe can seem to be digging a grave at least as much as digging a home for food. Or the infant's cry, which echoed through the valley, must after all be mourning something. Perhaps it was having been born in the first place. We who are alive are in receipt of the most gracious consolation prize in the universe.

Liebesträume

A big round red belly
glowing hot like iron
moving up and down
and up and down in a
molten slumber, much
at love with the noise of
beginning, smiling warmly
a peaceful mouth with
resting feet propped
wine dropped within reach

the red dirt under.

Hunger moves the feet, (modest steps
for a modest treat ) - some
dusty fruit, but inside
warm and well, a clean
bite now and back to rest

our fine prey is fell.

The bright moon spills out
across an earthen floor and
we are illumined.

You Don't Know Erasmus From Your Elbow

"Ms. Stamp!"

"Hello, dear."

"Have you used your stamp today, Ms. Stamp?"

"No, dear."

As research librarians go, Ms. Stamp rested comfortably and definitively at the very top, where no other could hope to approach. She was fastidiousness transcended, the non plus ultra of researchists, a veritable god of library science. Ms. Stamp was also rather gloriously unattractive, being so unfortunately shaped as to be reminiscent of an unhealthy pear. She carried her body after the manner of Christ carrying the cross, and every aspect of her physiognomy was, and would always remain, woefully unsung.

I often wondered where she went after the library closed - it seemed more plausible that she simply curled up among a pile of unsorted books, with a small ill-fitting blanket, rather than suffer the long walk home on some poor cracked sidewalk, offering no narrative at all, with each step meaning less and less until finally she arrived home, or, that is to say, nowhere.

"Ms. Stamp?"

She raised her head a few perfectly amiable degrees, revealing an uncommonly graceful neck, while keeping her eyes lowered on the desk below.

"How do you find Erasmus?"

"3rd floor, 2nd row left from the elevator," came the response, softly, anonymously, eyes still on the desk.

"No, no -" I said, fixing abstractly on a box of pencils, "I mean, what do you think of him?"

Time, we can all agree, is a thing noted primarily for its constancy, even in places like libraries, where silence and stillness and things untouched - Russian transliteration tables, Ms. Stamp - all conspire to make time more tenuous, to soften its inevitability. With that modest disclaimer I'm going to advance the rather immodest and no less embarrassing claim that, when Ms. Stamp lifted her eyes from the desk to address me, time stopped altogether.

Instead of her telling me what she thought of Erasmus, she looked at me and I knew I was looking back at him- looking at his gaunt cheeks, lined over long years of placating popes and bishops and defending his love of moderation, softly resisting Luther's love of immoderation, nursing a Utopian dream where only Latin, Greek and Hebrew were spoken, all - Ms. Stamp wasn't a librarian, no, nor did she suffer some mal-shaped body or a loveless existence, she was filled beyond capacity with love, and her voice, while unspoken, was that of a choir, endlessly numerous, singing the body of all humanity!

Love, O, I'm in love! Ms. Stamp! She who admires nothing, loves nothing, knows nothing, is everything! Darling dear, I devote myself to thee, my blood, my service, my soul!

" - Oh, I don't remember - how nice that you're interested in him, though! Is this for school? I had to do a paper on him once, and it was such a bore, but - oh, but I'm sure you'll just love him. Go on, we close in 15 minutes."