Super Old High School AP English Video Made With Windows Movie Maker, Marked By Very, Very Rough Editing

Super old high school AP English video made with Windows Movie Maker, marked by very, very rough editing and very strong convictions. My editing skills have definitely improved since. As for the beliefs, I sort of wish I still felt as deeply about things.  

“Marie sometimes did more than merely write. In 1999, in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.

This was the essence of Marie’s approach to reporting. She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents. ‘These are people who have no voice,’ she said. ‘I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. If journalists have a chance to save their lives, they should do so.’

The people of East Timor did not forget their saviour. At the end of her Sunday Times report about her Sri Lankan experience, she wrote: ‘What I want most, as soon as I get out of hospital, is a vodka martini and a cigarette.’ Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been ‘fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound’.” - The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade, on journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed by shelling in Syria Wednesday.

[Photo: Marie Colvin in the A&E documentary “Bearing Witness,” on women in war zones. Credit: A&E Indie Films via NY Times]

Sonnets 1-3

Here you go, Deepayan and Kai – thanks for your kind words. These are from a longer narrative collection of sonnets called "The Storyville Fish and the Prince of Cats," a love story.

***

1

Deep in the lurid dark of New Orleans,

Its streets awash with tar and summer sweat,

An old composer rose from halfway dreams,

Awoken by the sound of a cornet.

He peered out into the lonely streets,

Discovering he no longer knew his town—

Once French provincial homes with drooping eaves

Now shotgun tenements of ill-renown.

Down on the corner beneath a lamppost

A coal-wagon boy relaxed on the curb

Where he played a long note, low and morose—

The saddest sound the old man ever heard.

“That’s just the way the music’s gone,” he said,

Fed his fish, fell asleep, died in his bed.

2

The movers arrived the following day

At the Karnofsky family’s front door.

They said, “The last great maestro passed away

Leaving you everything he had, no more.”

“The fish and its bowl aren’t worth a lot,

But the piano, it’s quite a treasure.”

Mrs. Karnofsky agreed with a nod

And invited the movers to enter.

They set the piano down in the hall

And then they handed the fishbowl over.

Left by herself to consider it all,

Mrs. Karnofsky searched for some closure.

“Grandfather didn’t have much in the end,

But for me, his piano and his friend.”

3

The Storyville Fish heard her think out loud,

And was amazed she had been called a friend.

Unsure whether to feel humbled or proud,

She found she simply could not comprehend.

“Old man lived alone

Heart bursting of things unsaid

Fish lived alone too.”

Thus pacified, the fish turned on her tail

And traveled round and around her glass room.

She never tired swimming the same trail

For it was the path of the sun and the moon.

This home was not much different than the last,

She thought, brushing a fin against the glass.

Excerpt

...from a short story of 5,000 words called "The Severe Love of Sisters."

***

When wayfaring Viktor Pasternak drove into the sleepy town of Burr Ridge, traversing the shadowy foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the hell spawn-infested interstate to ask for Katherine Spencer’s hand, she instantly knew he was meant for her.

Or at least, that was one of many fantasies Anya and Katia had regarding the happy circumstances of their birth. Piecing together evidence from a handful of photographs and the lingering scent of lilacs pressed in the pockets of old dresses, the girls reinvented to their liking a history their widowed father preferred not to revisit.

In reality, all anyone knew for sure was that in Katherine Spencer’s many years of living and working in Burr Ridge, the shotgun-wielding auburn beauty had proven unquestionably capable of running a ranch alone. Yet when Viktor hitchhiked into town and persuaded her to hire him the winter of 1980, no one expected he would also convince her to marry him by spring. Small town gossip had it that Viktor poisoned Katherine within three years of their hasty wedding in order to inherit the ranch, but Anya and Katia knew they themselves were proof of their parents’ genuine love.

Gossip was one reason why invitations to barbeques and birthday parties always got lost en route to the Pasternaks’ mailbox. Viktor’s outlandish upper arm tattoos — which he said were a reminder of his Russian Orthodox faith — was another, and the remoteness of their ranch was a third. In any case, fantasy was an inexpendable occupation in the sisters’ early years. When they had only each other, theirs was always an equitable utopia, an impartial fairy tale in which Prince Charmings came in identical pairs and there was never a single fairest of them all. 

Excerpt

Archetypal city scene-setting, based largely on this Hyde Park/Shanghai hybrid of my imagination. 

***

Bensonhurst was an analogous neighborhood as ever there was one. Along the route they walked each day, Roman recognized the residences of politicians and movie stars, gangbangers, university students and corporate warlords all situated within sugar-borrowing distance of each other. Where one red, white and green-clad street ended, another overlaid with idiographic signs declaring dim sum availability began. And while homeless peddlers of progressive rags lay sleeping in the alleys behind five-star restaurants, gated communities stood downwind of El Burrito Palace. Down in Bensonhurst, the squirrels and the pigeons had more meat on their bones than the people.

Roman inhaled the carcinogenic air of his home, exhaled noxious particles of himself. He recalled when he was younger, he would feel his way about Brooklyn in the dark, roaming the streets on Saturday nights binge-drinking, pot-smoking, painting ideological murals on the sides of cargo cars until the early hours of Kubla Khan. Consequently, he would spend most Sundays in bed with the curtains nailed shut, moaning and groaning to the ravages of pickaxe psychedelic organists on his nerves.      

But then once he had grown up, had rebuilt his damaged synapses and experienced sufficient heartbreak, Roman woke before dawn most days and started recognizing the city for what it really was without cover of the euphemistic dark.

It was then he started to take notice of the layers upon layers of dust clinging to the sides of iconic skyscrapers, waterlogged American flags heavily hanging on their posts. He started seeing construction scaffolds on every corner, industrial backwash running in the gutters, factory emissions bleeding a graded wash into the empty expanses of the sky where webs of telephone wires, public transport cables, street lights and neon signs coiled like a great wire cage. He liked the idea of it all being a cage—the premise thus implied that people could fly if they wanted to. 

Excerpt

A passage about distraction from "Samsara," a short story of about 5,000 words written for class. 

***

Since her daughter entered college, she had a lot of time on her hands. What had originally been a text message a day turned into a word only every once in a while turned into nothing at all. And nothing was the worst. In many ways, no word, no trace was worse than the worst thing that could ever happen to a young woman living on her own for the first time.

There were tall hedges by the side of the house. These Lois cultivated religiously. She cut them down to size in great spiraling designs, with lampshade silhouettes, pear form. During that period when the police called every day to inform her about the ongoing missing person’s investigation carried out in her daughter’s name, Lois got creative with the yard work. She stood out on the lawn and routinely sculpted them—really just trying to maintain her domestic sphere—until the day her husband called out from the porch that if Lois didn’t leave the hedges alone, there would be nothing left.

Lois’s husband had a good job. A good job was a stable one, and a white-collared, briefcase-carrying, financial analysis managerial position with an investment firm on the Street was stable. It was constant right down to the late hours he worked on the odd days of the week, the sultry Dior he carried home on his sleeve to a wife feigning sleep in the dark.

On the weekends, Lois’s husband stayed home. With his jackhammer and chisel, he took it upon himself to break up all the cement surrounding the den, dig several feet into the foundation of the house, and reroute the water lines. After that, he patched everything up with fresh concrete mix. Then he needed to throw out the fireplace. Replace the carpet with hardwood. Repaint the walls.

Lois didn’t read the news, only cut vegetables for the slow cooker beside the kitchen phone. Down by Stony Brook, students made ribbons and buttons and put up fliers. Pressured for real information to release to the public, the press ran stories about the candlelit vigils, the classmate testimonials, and SUNY’s history of violence.