12/22/99. It’s my eighteenth birthday. I’m a scrappy, melancholy goth-girl who is sure she isn't going to see her high school graduation. On 1/1/00, either Jesus is coming, or the computers will transport us all back to 1900. In hindsight, oh well…there would have been plenty of dark lace and Victorian velveteen for my wardrobe, and I thought I was still innocent enough that Jesus might swoop me up onto that white horse, black nail polish and all.
Not much happened.Now I’m within two semesters of receiving the next degree that I should have gotten a timely eight years ago. There are new Armageddon options.
The first few emergency texts from the University on my phone were bizarre, anecdotal. By the time I had missed three classes due to evacuations, two of them in a row, one of them after I had already paid a $10.00 parking fee, bizarre turned into bullshit.
It’s an hour into the Cathedral of Learning evacuation, approximately 11:30am, 4/5/12. I sit down in a benched quadrant on the opposite side of Forbes, in Schneley Plaza, just as a bulldog-jowled security officer comes by, peeking briefly into a black garbage can. Directly to my right, a gray-haired professor in corduroy sports coat is sitting on a wooden chair he must have borrowed from the food kiosk area, holding an impromptu class; he is addressing half a dozen students, his dress shoes hooked around the metal chair legs, his words carried away by the breeze. His students are catching and holding down flapping pages of their notebooks. Over my left shoulder, another small group of students are giving presentations. A thin girl stands poised, her right leg planted in the sandy substrate in front of her, reading from her notes about healthy BMIs.
Blinds are dangling out of a half-open window on approximately the sixteenth floor of the emptied Cathedral. On the vacant lawn, an island of red and yellow tulips looks as still as a landscape painting. On the corner, University service workers have gathered, stretching and moaning in blue uniform pants and clouds of cigarette smoke, trying to stay limber.
“Music building? There’s ‘bout three people that work in that building!” one of the guys scoffs. To my left there is limpid applause for a decent presentation.
A pigeon is slipping down one of the Cathedral’s neo-gothic cornices, flitting its slate-green wings to catch its fall.
A whistle blows, twice. The service workers return towards the mouth of the loading dock. A member of security personnel has just detached one end of the yellow caution tape, letting it go casually, as it lulls to the left behind him, like a kite tail.
4/10/11, 10:45ish am, my first time in the Cathedral security check line. I hold nothing but my ID, parking ticket, and debit card. The shuffling line stretches out into the intersection. The crowded island of tulips is swaying, blown open, the petals about to fall away.
Exiting after class, I pass a girl at the front of the line, dropping her book bag on the examination table like an anvil. “No lions, tigers, or bears here” she announces, with great confidence in her own humor. Behind me I hear the security officer respond,
“Nooooo? No gazelles, no lemurs…?”
Oh my. Everyone’s sooooo clever at the University level.
Mark Lee Krangle was the first publicized, possible suspect. Krangle’s incomplete manifesto, Revolution or Evolution, self-published on Authonomy,http://www.authonomy.com/books/28290/revolution-or-extinction/read-book/?chapterid=272959 details his belief that he has channeled prophetic knowledge about the fall of America in the new millennia. His first mentor was a Mafioso teenager, “Frankie”, who foretold the mortgage crisis and 9/11 to the then 5 year old Krangle in 1951. The pinnacle of Krangle’s life was his supposed meeting with Jimmy Carter at the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel, “on/or about April 11, 1976.” Krangle claims to have then discussed his 1972 doctoral thesis, “A Framework for Freedom of Speech”, applying it as a model for Middle Eastern Peace and other policy matters.
His thesis centered on a conceptual model based on Harold Lasswell’s Question of Communication Theory, “Who says what to whom through what channel with what effect?” Krangle posits:
“Who can say what to whom through what channel with what effect?”
He bragged endlessly to then current Pitt Professors and Chairmen, insisting on the gravity of that meeting’s dialogue. Krangle calls his eventual termination in January, 1977 from his teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh his “sour grapes.”
According to NBC affiliate WPXI, Krangle was escorted off a plane in Pittsburgh and charged with harassment and terroristic threats involving recent emails to Pitt professors. He also claims to have met the person(s) responsible for the recent bomb threats. He was detained at 1:30PM, April 11, 2012, exactly 36 years after the Carter exchange.http://www.wpxi.com/news/local/someone-connected-to-the-bomb-threat/nMXR
In chapter 7, Krangle outlines his belief that he is a victim of “brain-programming” by US government operatives/cooperatives, some of whom he thinks are also faculty and administrative members of the University of Pittsburgh. According to his unidentified government sources, high school massacres such as Columbine are often a direct result of “brain programming” by federal agencies eager to institute martial law.
So, impetuous acts of the brain dead aside, I should have that diploma, right around my birthday. Oh, yeah, but then there’s this issue of the Mayan Calendar stopping the day before my birthday. The world could end then. On a more banal note, the Mesoamericans also anticipated that earthly existence may halt anytime 2 of their 3 cyclical calendars coincided, which is every 52 years.http://survive2012.com/index.php/mayan-calendar.html
Krangle’s first Doomsday mentor, “Frankie”, told Krangle that the human species was only capable of planning fifty years in advance, max. Krangle’s chapter 11, “Utopia or Oblivion”, is one of many in revision.
Why worry. If it is the end, I’ll wish I would have tip-toed through those tulips on the Cathedral lawn more. And wherever I have to go, I hope that place is devoid of the seemingly eternal vibrato of ENS.
Heinz’s “Death of a Racehorse” and Jones’ “The Things That Carried Him” are quite different in structure. The former is a story told in real-time action, with an ironic twist on the element of suspense. The later narrative is grouped in snapshots of action, laid out to beckon a lingering, expansive reflective mood.
In Heinz’s work, the horse “Air Lift” is part of a structure set within the larger narrative structure: his lineage, the champion bloodline of winners of by-gone races designates his presence as one of importance and expectation. “Air Lift” was onward-and-upward bound in every sense at the start of this, his very first race, especially in the imaginations of the racing community. He was until he became “a horse stopping”, as quickly as it all began.
There is very little use of scene here, or physical/personality descriptors of any man or horse involved. “Air Lift” is teeming with potentiality, then he is nothing more than a casualty. The only stalling of narrative pace is found in the thin-strung dialogue after the injury, between stable hands and veterinarians and owners and trainers. A reader thinks there may, indeed, still be hope. There is foggy indecision, a reluctance to accept the hopeful’s terrible fate; in the imaginations, again, the horse’s prospects momentarily outran the reality of his injury.
Thunder and lightning appear as the natural forbearers of solemnity that they often stand for. The downpours upon “Air Lift’s” still body conclude the sorrow, along with the eerie, ringing reminder of where and who he came from.
Jones’ article, by contrast, is laboriously dense with detail. The narrative’s structure is broken into a trilogy, each section crawling backwards in a reverse chronology. Jones hooks a reader slowly, layering vivid and intimate character portraits throughout, enlivening them through their own actions and reactions, until the reader is almost unconsciously invested in that character’s future.
Pacing is often intentionally agonizingly slow, as in the long procession down the highway, or the flag folding, or the work of the pallbearers. Charged, slowed moments make up the greater long, long journey of Sergeant Montgomery back home.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
"The death of the self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll" Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Hersey weaves his individually collected narrative threads in Hiroshima to form a vivid patchwork of the first hand accounts of atrocities suffered during, and long after, the bombing.
The character sketches and brief personal introductions each begin separately, and urgently, just before the explosion. Despite their terse nature, dominant personality traits are offered immediately as a foundation to build upon; a struggling widowed mother, a young idealistic medical student, a seasoned physician on the brink of retirement, two morally conscientious priests (one Japanese, one German), and a young female factory worker. In this narrative, if not in actuality, their lives become intertwined at the poignant moment of atomic impact; this turning point is a marked private memory for each, which then propels them into the paths of each other.
The vantage point of each character is unique from the outset. Each persons individual position and distance from the impact site is different; however scattered, they soon become part of an anonymous crowd of agony and desperation. For Mrs. Nakamura, “everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen”, for Dr. Fujii, the flash was a “brilliant yellow”, for Father Kleinsorge it was reminiscent of a meteor impact, and so on. That one traumatic starting point marked a particular, peculiarly personal moment in time when the lines between organized private and public selves and functions were annihilated.
Certain characters embody the chaos differently. Reverend Tanimoto represents action; he is panic in motion; even his visual perspective above and throughout the city on foot build the scene in its necessary scope. The two women and children are buried; one can free herself, the other cannot. The horror of hidden immobility is Miss Sasaki’s, the representative voice of the thousand others trapped and helpless in their own desperate circumstances, overlooked. Dr. Fujii flails in the river water, which will claim many others unable to move to safety. Father Kleinsorge finds himself alone and nearly naked in a garden in an ironic biblical twist. Dr. Sasaki is a prisoner within his own hospital, held captive by both critically ill patients and corpses alike.
In the midst, they meet, most at Asano Park, some as acquaintances-come-refugees. Later Miss Sasaki becomes the forlorn patient of Dr. Sasaki, and is later consoled by Father Kleinsorge, who wrestled with his own complications from radiation sickness.
As a collective, these individuals are emblematic of the greater Japanese culture; they are compassionate, steadfast, and stoic individuals of remarkable endurance. People afflicted with the most disfiguring burns and wounds maintain social graces of extreme gratitude and concern for their family and neighbors to a staggering degree of humility. As an American reading these accounts, the sense of inherited responsibility is marked.
Then, the knot of close-kit threaded stories begins to separate again, unraveling back into more obscure private lives. The mundane day-to-day is always marred by scars and sickness physical/psychological. The spiritual is a constant though, also, especially in the convert Miss Sasaki’s case. Lives trail off into newspaper headlines about new nuclear experiments, ominous stitches stretching into the future, building on and bleeding away from the survivors of the past.
Rearrangement. The inevitable fade of even color-fast fibers overtime, tamped down, subdued by familiarity. Impressions left by furniture’s burdens, the cavernous cistern outside always hiding some stage of emptiness or fulfillment.
We are sitting in the room which used to be my teenaged father’s bedroom. It has been a living room as long as I can remember however, from the times of my childhood when the carpet was a short, sheared green, and multi-colored woven rugs, soft as old t-shirts, rested in front of my grandparents’ recliners.
“Does October 19th mean nothing to you?” my father asthmatically wheezes, glaring ahead at the TV screen, swaddled in his housecoat.
“Well…” my mother scoffs at his dead-pan condescension, tucking her straightened auburn hair behind her ear “she wants to know the first time we met…that’s not the first time.”
She and her family had moved in next to my father and his parents in 1972. Separated only by young Maple saplings and the winding gravel driveway, her family soon sauntered over for a visit. They sat in what is now the dining room on that Sunday afternoon in August, my mother nervous because she had brought the family dog along, a wily Scottish terrier named Elfie. My paternal grandmother did most of the talking; my father had to be coaxed out of his adjoining bedroom, being marginally sociable for only twenty minutes or so.
My mother looks over her shoulder into the room. She volunteers, pointing, that there may have been a loveseat there; maybe there were slip covers; maybe the carpeting was the same as the archaic remnant still in the hall closet, olive green and blue and yellow, splotched by geometric shapes. My father squints, square-jowled, not moved to contribution or even correction.
He mutters something about the time they first saw each other, pre-formal introduction, if she remembered that. She does.
It was May, 1972. My mother was standing at the bottom of her parents’ driveway, waiting for her friend Maria to pick her up for high school commencement rehearsal. It was pouring down rain. My mother was wearing a neutral knit cap with a brim, protecting her brown locks that she had curled around empty orange juice cans the night before. Then my father came speeding by.
He was driving the 1954 two-toned green Chevy, baring patches of primer paint in spots where his handiwork was incomplete. He craned his neck, tugging the wheel in a double-take. He said she had a sweet, innocent look, and he said, that’s the one for me.
“But you need more than that to make a story, don’t you?” my mother winced, adjusting her legs folded beneath her on the brushed blue couch.
October 19th, my maternal grandmother nudged both my mother and Elfie through the orange-crowned Maple trees onto my paternal grandparents’ property, where my dad was cruising along on the riding mower. She pretended Elfie had gotten loose; she needed my father to catch him. That’s when the real conversation began.
Two other sources:
"TALK; The Money Trail", 11/21/10, New York Times via Byliner
"Travis the Chimp: The Wild One" 12/23/09, New York Times via Byliner
Michael Paterniti's stylistic strength seems to come from his haunting double-take of particular scenes of importance. The quaint, fog enveloped shoreline near the plane crash featured in "The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy"pulsates with the green, electrical surge of the lighthouse eye and presumptuous dread in the opening; by the end of the work, it is a place more imbued by mystery and sixth sense than before.
In Paterniti's brief summation of the tragedy of Travis the Chimp, the incident of bloodshed is rushed through, head-long (and no pun intended, but just like the plane crash of the aforementioned article), a torrent of action after which the real reflection and impossible task of reckoning may begin. Paterniti writes "Afterward, the ghost of Travis appeared everywhere", much like the billowing white clothes on the line where the souls of the crash survivors still seemed to hover. The inescapable scene that seeps into witnesses consciousness and refuses to leave here is inside the home of Travis and his "mother": "The silence was like a primal thrum, the eerie frangibility of everything -- the window curtains, the reflection in the mirror -- hung in the balance."
Paterniti's "chosen" voices, or voices of his choice, are authoritative, formal, fringe elements who are at once distant from the story, and gradually become saturated by it. The degree and rate of saturation seems to progress with the reader's level of continued immersion and involvement with the story. In the esquire piece, these characters continue straining through emotional torment, as the story sums them up in tiny, incomplete blurbs; "The Father", "The Medical Examiner", and even "A Split-Boulder Monument." This ending emphasizes, without melodrama, that the stories of broken people are unresolved, and no reporter can bandage them together. Travis is described by the chief detective as a criminal, whose motives and reactions could climax in unfathomable possibilities.
The author is inclined structurally towards lists, altered and amended to fit the mood of the particular piece. In "TALK; The Money Trail", lists of ski-trail types, luxury car models, and celebrity names outline a resort in the French Alps. A hilarious aside of listed "douche" options Paterniti imagines are whisperingly recommended to him by God herself shows a delightful sense of humor (and that Paterniti is not merely a philosophical ghost hunter). These lists are in sharp contrast to the quickly unraveling and unnerving affect the mental checklists of the plane pilots have as they dissolve, a last grappling, before impact.
Paterniti's reporting is based on keen sensory observation. Objects are found within objects; bones are forced into coins; personal articles become artifacts, even if their retrieval is denied by family members. Things exist, even if they are not present at this moment. The sense of the fleeting is permanent for Paterniti.
The Kopchak family had lived in this same spot for many years; the road was named after them. This Kopchak, a retired grade-school science teacher, admitted that his knowledge of lion behavior was limited to warnings: don't look them in the eye, don't run from them. He considered the quick step that he and Red assumed as his only compromise. When he turned to look back, the lion was standing statuesque along the fence, frozen with potential threat.
The five of them were then called to the southern edge of the property, where more cats prowled. Their first target was an african lion crouched in Terry's junkyard of rusted vehicles. Riding high from the trucks vantage point, they fired multiple shots upon another group of big cats slinking down a hillside. Kanavel's target was always the head, and when this did not bring immediate results, his scope stretched on along the length of each animal's body. "I was sick, shooting these animals, because they didn't ask to be there," he says. "And, you know, I'm a cat person."
"Dolores"
Mrs. Kopchak answered the 991 operator with trepidation, realizing that the seriousness of the situation did not call for her oft used nickname, "Dolly." She thought of her son, who just then stood peering out of the barn window, watching wild animals loping across his field of vision.
