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Searching for Religion in Iced Tea
A Different Take on the Ordinary
by: Samantha Lê
Concrete – This morning, through the moon roof of my car, the sky hung heavy, mirroring the grayness of the concrete freeways. Caught in the middle world where gods won’t tread, flattened between dense, gray fog from above and hard, gray roads below; I looked for the first time at the landscape of my world. It is one made up of man’s gray ambition. Hard edges. Right angles. Concrete structures and walls stood silent; cities and roadways stretched farther east than my eyes could see.
Driving through the city, I was struck by the impermanent nature of this fabricated world constructed from concrete and held together by re-bar. Buildings that cannot be moved suddenly sprouted limbs before my eyes. From the malleable dirt, structures rose and fell, rebuilding themselves from the carcass of what came before, always with indifference toward the past. Freeways grew longer and wider while I slept. Concrete dried and hardened inside my chest.
Before skyscrapers, the clouds floated closer to our heads. Before freeways, we were embraced in the arms of mountains and nurtured by the tongues of rivers. But with concrete, we have created monsters whose tentacles pierce the sky and dig through the earth. They reach into the very soul of who we are. These are monsters we can no longer control. And one gray day, much like today, when we find ourselves pressed tightly between the dense gray sky and the impenetrable gray concrete, when we are surrendering our souls at the feet of these monsters, the roads, buildings, freeways and monuments will remain indifferent to our self-inflicted demise. Concrete knows that it will endure long after we decay.
My Back Pages
Lit’s 5-letter Dirty Word - A Case of Language Run Amuck
by: D.E. Kern
I write short. I specialize in poetry and brief nonfiction, namely columns. Sure, I take on longer projects here and there—I push myself past 750 words. But the short stuff has paid the bills for 15 years.
When you and your editor count words, you learn to appreciate precise language. Nouns and verbs are gold. Everything else is stainless steel at best.
I get perturbed when people supplement our rich language with made-up terms—such as playdate, greenspace, Vanagon—and when words that have served us perfectly well for decades suddenly have their definition, well, redefined.
Don’t worry; this isn’t the column where some old, white guy kvetches about variations in the use of the word bad or fly. My goal here is not to cut the knees out from under the hip-hop industry. Rather, my concern is with a word bantered around English departments under false pretenses—genre.
In the past, genre referred to a loose set of criteria used to classify compositions. In literature, the word described both the various disciplines of writing—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—and a set of categories assigned according to content—romance, mystery, western, coming-of-age tale, etc. Now, it’s a catch-all term for poor, hackneyed, or mass-produced writing—the bibliophiles’ invective.
Nuggets of truth rest at the heart of every cliché, and I’m sure most of us can pair an author with a mangled, murdered, and buried genre. There’s Danielle Steel and the romance; Tom Clancy and the espionage thriller; John Grisham and the courtroom drama; Michael Crichton and the biological nightmare scenario. But what of Stephen King and his sci-fi/horror/thrillers? His novella The Body—which inspired the movie “Stand by Me”—didn’t keep me awake at night. Rather, it’s a sweet story about childhood friends and their loss of innocence. Along with The Green Mile serial novel, it knocks the notion of King living in a rut right out of the ballpark.
Come to think of it, what’s the problem with a narrow focus? I don’t know of too many people who knock J.R.R. Tolkien and Ray Bradbury for being fantasy and science fiction authors. And what of James Michener? Didn’t he do for the Dickensian-sized epic focused on a particular portion of the American landscape (see Hawaii, Chesapeake, Texas, and Alaska) what Grisham did for the courtroom? I guess it depends on who you ask.
Art cannot exist as an entity unto itself, residing in a place where it’s set on a pedestal for the sake of aesthetics. Instead, literature, music, and visual communication must be brought into the real world where they’re subject to criticism. But, given that need, it would be nice if we could be kind and honest with one another. There’s a time and place for labeling bad writing as bad writing. Altering the language in order to give the literati its own dirty little word is just bad form.
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