Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Sharp Pains And 39 Weeks Pregnant

The number sense

September 11 event is inhabited by numbers: about 17,400 people who were in the towers when the attacks, about 15,000 people were evacuated. In the north tower, 1402 people died, including 658 employees of the firm Cantor Fitzgerald here this morning. In the south tower, 614 people died. 18 persons above the point of impact in the south tower had escaped. None in the north tower. In all, counting victims in the planes and Washington, 2819 people died. 77% of victims were male, 23% of women. Between 100 and 200 people would have fallen or jumped from the towers. 289 bodies were found intact in New York. And coroners have to study 19,858 human remains. In the case of 1717 families, there were no remains, no part of body to bury. Even today, 9 years after the attacks, the investigative work on the identity of the victims continues. In addition to two 110-story towers that collapsed in 102 minutes, 5 other buildings collapsed or were demolished because of the extent of damage. The attacks of September 11 have eliminated 124 million square feet of office space.

These numbers are both the landscape and the web 11 September: they refer to the magnitude of the event, human and property destruction. They recall the images seen and reviewed by a cloud of debris, flooding the streets. The weight of numbers is such that sometimes they are held up to stop the questions, doubts and questioned. To compel adherence: to thousands of victims and their family members, what can we really say?

There is also the symbolism of numbers: Is it really necessary to reiterate once again that irony planner that the date of the event which marked a relative failure of the emergency services phone number repeat these same services to the U.S.? Should we remember how the numbers when it comes to the Sept. 11, played an important role in the color given to the event? Now, some numbers can not exist alone, need a subtitle when they talk about something other than that morning in September of this one? Now the numbers are heavy, laden with the memory of the attacks, as if the events had also diverted surely as the planes were.

When it comes to numbers and numbers of 11, nothing seems to be truly free. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the choices made by the creators can not be free, the weight of numbers being as they are full participants in the identity of the event. Fiction raises the question of the truth when negotiating with a historic event: how to tell the real by having enough space to reinvent it? What, facts must be preserved and what can be changed? All, probably. Or maybe not.

Ian Monk, in his poem Twin Towers , works on the principle of enumeration: two columns, recalling the two towers, live on the page. The left column on most things, objects, located in the tower. The right column, it focuses on people, listing the different types of people inhabiting the World Trade Center (male, female, father / mother family, criminal, employee support, etc.). It is inevitable, looking the physical presentation of the poem, not to see the towers. The initial effect would be even more obvious in the version in the book Writing for the OuLiPo where the column widths would be reduced gradually, and where to end the top of one of the towers bend. With the version found online, I could not help but count the lines. Both the English and French versions of the poem of 112 lines. These two lines of "too much" trouble me. What do they mean? The number, too close to reality (110 floors) can not be free. The poet, he decided to add layers of towers? The number is it accidental? Is it really possible, reproducing the shape of the two towers, accidentally add floors?

I do not know. I'm intrigued by the poem, which I find rather interesting. But the numbers of September 11 haunt me, I know too much not to believe in intentionality behind this "error". The poet, he used false information? He looks behind these two stories to send a message?

Friday, March 26, 2010

White Discharge At 39 Weeks Pregnant

Contamination

To think much, spend so much time to think the morning of Sept. 11, perhaps it is inevitable that every airport I visit, each airplane in which I find myself either stained by the events of 2001. This morning, waiting for a flight to Toronto. While I try frantically to finish the lecture that I give in a few hours, a woman comes to sit near the window, like me. She has three children: a daughter in a stroller, two boys under 4 years who settled on the windowsill. The woman is a pro at airports in less than two, she opened the bag of children, and spread the floor a few toys: two books, a Pooh Elmo red a Nintendo, a blanket, etc.. Children are at home in this waiting area near the gate 47 from Dorval Airport. In a few minutes, we will enter all the plane, a Boeing 747 that will lead us in Toronto.

I look at this quiet family, the children well behaved, and I imagine them on the plane over Canada. Overlaps another image: the same children, one mother and me, somewhere along the Hudson River, preparing us to die somewhere in the World Trade Center.

Not that I make the flight anxious. Instead, over time, I become increasingly calm and confident air. I am surprised this morning to pack my bags in less than two, and I spent security checks with an efficiency that is comparable to that of George Clooney in Up in the Air . This is not fear that this happening again. It is, rather, as if I saw us, preparing us for an airliner, as well as those who left Boston a September morning.

Lately, I sometimes dream about the next book, to design her in my sleep subject. I wake up, and I forgot everything. Leaving only the current book, this collection filled with characters some of whom, like me this morning, waiting for their flight in the anonymity of an airport lobby. Contamination, it is this: there can be no question that this tour are those of the World Trade Center. He can currently be no question of an airplane without it that I see allow me to continue to imagine the passengers of four flights on September 11. Perhaps this is because the project'm still whole. Perhaps it is because my reinvention of September 11 is not yet complete.

As for trucks that can no longer, after the death of my brother and my own accident, be innocent, perhaps it is also, finally, that September 11 has confirmed what I already knew: a Once aboard the plane, settled more or less comfortably in those seats, we must make, we give up, and know that no matter what happens, we can do nothing.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Can Gelmicin Cream Be Used On Cat

Time Teaching strategies

I think a lot of new these days. We say that this is another way of not writing. Maybe. Except that I wonder. Since the beginning, I took the party to follow my characters at the heart of September 11, as near as possible. In other words, I do not give them an overall perspective on the event. Not interest me nor war, nor even the reconstruction, at least for the news. The idea was to stick the characters, what they saw, lived, met, to avoid some pitfalls that I spotted among others: the glorification of the characters to begin with, because it seemed that what would each disembodied victims or survivors. In a conference last week, I spotted three processes: the heroism, always because let's be honest, this is the strategy most common among both critics and writers in the tendency to press hard on the incommensurability of the event, as it was impossible to tell, to invent, and the latter strategy, which goes with the other two, which is to exonerate the state, the country, the army, the victims. I thought it was going with the binding of critics and journalists on the blue sky, as if when it's so beautiful, it was impossible for something to happen. "Out of the blue" totally unpredictable. Three strategies, therefore, working the event, give shape, color. And determine the look that you wear, the verdict: victims become martyrs, basically.

I chose with the new, so keep me closer to my characters, to avoid making heroes. I wanted to explore them through the event in its intensity before it really takes shape, before its form, its meaning has been determined, crystallized by the speech. It seemed, and seems always a good idea. Especially through the new form: my texts, very short, after one, two characters in a very precise moment, as fragments of perception as long as they live.

is a question of scale, "said BG after my lecture: the novel, fiction, to an event of this magnitude can not help but to rebuild it by characters, by their point of view. In other words, I might add, it is to see the event with the human, and not from above. Be at the bottom of the towers nearby, and not over in a helicopter could only see because it is too far away to really feel.

What is the problem?
Complex. I Again, this may be a ruse, a way of procrastinating when I feel the end of the project (yes, I finish, if I'm honest, I can only see: the thing forward, surely, is form. There is still work to do, but I do not think I can add another character, another voice, this fresco). I know my tricks for not writing, to torpedo the writing.

The question, cons, is this: am I against time? The code should be published in fall 2011. 10 years after the attacks, my point of view, keeping as close to the "trauma" (I am wary of this word, He directs the play too, he played) that my characters live, does he not against the tide? Should I not suggest anything other than this precise moment in their history, this moment of the event? Am I not, myself, now forcing the event, the trauma, to crystallize, as if there was no life, future after September 11th?

how much I love Siri Hustvedt handles the event in Sorrows of an American : it is there in the horizon of the book, but not central, because all around, life continued, and other tragedies were added to one. The characters, from time to time, turned their gaze to the absence of the towers, then resume their march.

This is not what I do. My characters are, and remain, September 11, 2001. Even those who tell the post are still there. Do not offer an overall picture is there a way to perpetuate forever, the shock of the event? Wanting to avoid the glorification, am I went to throw myself into the lion's den of incommensurability?