A Tidewater Morning, Three Tales from Youth, by William Styron

excerpts from: A Tidewater Morning, Three Tales from Youth, by William Styron, 1993 Vintage Books

p105

One of my last memories of her before she became bedridden for good was of her standing in her garden, amid the vivid May blooms and darting hummingbirds and the fidget of bees.

p142

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. Sometimes we can fantasize it out of existence. I recall repeating in bewilderment the words he commanded me to say—"Yet alone shall I prevail!"—while my mind composed such other words as would distract me from the moment's anguish.

American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates

excerpts from American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates, 1989 Harper & Row

p6

Though he never admitted it in public, but spoke of it readily enough in private, to his friends, Ian had always thought it rather terrifying that unrelated individuals, wholly unaware of one another, nonetheless cooperated in a collective destiny

p7

…they were, like Ian McCullogh, successes “in their fields,” well into middle age yet “still youthful,” comfortably well off beyond all dreams and expectations of graduate-student days yet still “ambitious”—though ambitious for what, none could have said.

p12

Ian, whose energy was drained by his work, whose imagination floundered when confronted by the mere prospect of cultivating a new friend, envied Glynnis both her will and her ability; …

p27

He had been a scared boy of twenty-two, skinny and round-shouldered and chronically perplexed, overworked in his graduate studies and exhausted by self-imposed deadlines and tyrannical dreams of perfection, prematurely weary of living, like a creature in whom spasms of life articulate themselves even as the creature sinks, ebbs, dies, like a pebble tossed carelessly into a pond: its very weight, its quidditas, dooming it to extinction.

p115

But he too had lost weight; his clothes felt pleasantly loose on him, like a stranger’s. The feeling seemed to him penitential and therefore beneficent.

p116

He had studied American political history as if reading a long, lurid, clamorous novel in which self-proclaiming figures contended, each isolated from the other yet citizens of the same enormous landscape. The American continent was large enough to absorb all, yet not so large not to be domesticated.

p133

She wondered why the soul could not make its own way after death, why it required a guide.  Why reincarnation—returning to the phenomenal world, getting born again, and again—must always be hell.

p137

And his voice trailed off, weak, faltering, for he seemed not to know what he meant to say (Ian had of late fallen into his old habit of failing to complete sentences, a mannerism of speech from which Glynnis had presumably weaned him, an infuriating habit, he knew, for it left his listeners waiting expectantly, never quite certain if he meant to continue or if, in fact, he had stopped)…

p174

Time was a sea in which a single enormous wave moved relentlessly forward, not bearing men and women along but simply passing through them.

Ian gave up the search within an hour. Glynnis’s things in her absence had become—mere things.

p179

Now he was posthumous; his life contained no future.

p184

“They look flat , too,” Ian continued. “But then, I suppose, if you look at objects hard enough, people as well, they begin to go flat. Into two dimensions.”

p210

He could not have said why he’d felt the need to escape the conference, why the desperation to flee that happy milling gregarious place where his hand was shaken at every turn, and warm wishes and congratulations heaped upon him: the fruition of his dream as a young ambitious scholar, hungry for advancement, praise, the adulation of his peers. But he’d felt impatient, restless, his nerves abraded by the sound of his won name: particularly in the mouths of strangers. It seemed to him that his life was being stolen from him, his blood drained from him drop by drop, and in its place…

p239

“…And you?—yes—you have bifocals don’t you? In my case it’s something else, as if, now and then, the light and color drained out of things, I keep glancing up at the sky, or an eclipse. Then there is a glowering hazy light, this light in fact, as if a photograph were overexposed. A scrim of bubbles, sparks, emptinesses, like black holes—except they are filled with light, blinding light, and not…nothing. I’m on the stairs and suddenly the stairs disappear, and I reach for the railing that both is and is not there; not that I stumble, exactly, because ninety percent of my life is automatic; I’m on automatic pilot like most of us, I suppose; but I know, and it’s disconcerting. When I read there sometimes seem to be patches of blank on the page, that are filled in, slowly, with words; or, if I manage to read quickly enough, at my usual pace, I can keep ahead of the patches of blank. Even my dreams are affected, sometimes,” Denis said, laughing, “fading out, blanking out, dissolving to nothing. Have you ever heard of anything more absurd?”

Ian said, “But didn’t the optometrist refer you to a—“

“Oh, yes. Of course. An ophthalmologist. I’ll see the bastard after Labor Day. But I doubt he’ll be able to help me.”

“Why do you say that?”

Denis shrugged loftily. “It’s a feeling I have.”

p275

…as Vaughn led them through his “poetics of space,” a magnum opus of some thousand pages, still in progress, of course, a work entirely visual in concept yet, here and there, amplified by words; but the words, at least to Ian’s confused eye, were of no language he knew: rather like hieroglyphics. Buildings…landscapes…cities…”temporal dimension”…”spatial hypotheses”: the drawings were architectural in execution yet fantastical in conception, elaborate—indeed, dizzyingly elaborate—composed of numberless fine filose lines, like a spider’s web. 

p275

The problem of course was that he did not know when it would be complete, or if. “A posthumous celebrity would be a melancholy thing,” he said slowly, in so neutral a tone that Ian thought he must be joking, and laughed; as Meika did, fairly dissolving in a spasm of giggles. She pinched her husbands’s ruddy cheek and said,” A posthumous celebrity is better than no celebrity, isn’t it? Just as nouveau riche, like us is a fucking lot better than no riche. Isn’t it!”

p301

The most articulate of these witnesses was a young woman friend of Sigrid Hunt’s who had attended dance classes with her in Manhattan, years ago, and was now, like Hunt, an ex-dancer “on the fringes of the dance world”: living in SoHo and working as a waitress in a Seventh Avenue jazz club. 

p331

They were talking about Maine, and the end of summer, and how abruptly, in this northerly climate, the summer would end: in another few days, in fact. “The seasons careen by more quickly all the time, don’t they,” Denis said, sighing. “It’s exactly as our elders told us: time accelerates near the point of impact. It really does.”

“Yet time is theoretically reversible,” Ian said. He had been silent for so long, the others looked at him as if he were obliged to say something crucial. “The mechanics of the cosmos, it’s said, can run as easily backward as forward, in the universes of both Newton and Einstein; the past and the future are allegedly fixed. But I have never understood this, and though I’ve had physicists explain it to me, I have never had the impression that they understood it either….”

Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., by Luis J. Rodrigues

excerpts from Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., by Luis J. Rodrigues, 1993 Curbstone Press

Title page/Frontispiece, a quotation from Jacques Rivière

“There is no absolute peril except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.”

p157

“An invitation to abandon illusions about a situation, is an invitation to abandon a situation in need of illusions.”

p237

I arrived at a point which alarmed even me, where I had no desire for the internal night, the buoyancy of letting go, the bliss of the void. I required more, a discipline as bulwark within which to hold all I valued, a shield against the onslaught.

p238

There comes a moment when one faces the fresh features of an inner face; a time of conscious rebirth, when the accounting’s done, the weave in its final flourish, a time when a man stands before the world — vulnerable, nothing-owed — and considers his place in it. I had reached such a moment.

p239

I recalled the old people who came here, the men in brown suede hats and canes, and black-shawled women with rosaries clutched inside vein-streaked hands. I recalled the mothers who had to be restrained as they lay across the casket, beseeching to be buried with their son or daughter. I recalled the working men with their calloused palms and sun-beaten faces whose hardened eyes were forged from the heat of foundries or from under the sun’s gaze— and I remembered the stream which emanated from those dense eyes, how it pulled something raw and smoldering from every one of us.

p240

The scourge of PCP — “angel dust” — had begun to grip almost every facet of barrio life. Whole neighborhoods became like ghost towns as increasing numbers of young people were hooked into this overpowering narcotic, easily manufactured in back-room laboratories and distributed widely and cheaply. Although PCP preceded the crack epidemic, it was enough to make blabbering idiots of once-vigorous boys and girls.

p 242

Along with all this, the neighborhoods also changed. What I had unknowingly conjured up in my teatro productions came to fruition as land developers, along with county and city officials, tore up whole streets to build new townhouses and malls and expensive condos.

p243

When I returned to Los Angeles, I moved to Boyle Heights and later to neighborhoods such as White Fence, Florence, South Pasa, La Colonia Watts and Gerahty Loma. I found work in foundries, refineries, steel mills and construction sites, which I would do for another seven years before pursuing the disciplines of journalism and literature.

p248

Government officials at local, state and federal levels proved they would not allow any serious challenge to the economic and political underpinnings of poverty in this country. They dispatched the National Guard and Army troops, who turned their guns against Americans — barely more than a year after the bloody (for the Iraqui people) Persian Gulf War.

p249

In the months after the uprising, police broke up as many gang “unity” rallies as they could, attesting truce leaders, and inflaming the ire of housing project  residents in which many of the rallies were being held. The LAPD told the media they feared the gangs were going to turn on them, possibly ambush them. Yet no police officer has been killed or severely hurt since the King verdicts — even during the uprising, although instances have emerged of police shooting several people, some of them in the back, during and since the riots.

p249

This is not the first time the federal government has intervened. It has derailed and, whenever possible, destroyed the unity which emerged out of the watts Rebellion, out of the Chicano Moratorium, out of the Wounded Knee protests. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, the Weathermen, Puerto Rican liberation groups, the Chicano Liberation Front— and more recently MOVE. the Republic of New Africa, FALN, the Black Liberation Army—every major organized expression for justice and liberation was targeted, its leaders killed or jailed, its forces scattered.

To challenge how power is held in America meant facing a reign of terror, some of which I witnessed over the years, most of which failed to reach “mainstream America—although this is changing. L.A. helped bring it home.

p250

Without definitive solutions, it’s easy to throw blame. For instance, politicians have recently targeted the so-called lack of family values. 

But “family” is a farce among the propertyless and disenfranchised.Too many families are wrenched apart, as even children are forced to supplement meager incomes. Family can only really exist among those who can afford one. In an increasing number of homeless, poor, and working poor families, the things that people must do to survive undermines most family structures. At a home for troubled youth on Chicago’s South Side, for example, I met a 13-year-old boy who was removed from his parents after police found him selling chewing gum at bars and restaurants without a peddler’s license. I recall at the age of nine my mother walking me to the door, and, in effect, saying: Now go forth and work.

People can’t just consume in this society; they have to sell something, including their ability to work. If decent work is unavailable, people will do the next best thing—such as sell sex or dope.

Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon

excerpts from Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon, 1982 by Harper & Row Perennial Library

p12

There were no other pictures, an effect of poverty or superstition that might have been a lingering whisper of the biblical injunction against graven images.

p14

 He was a royal baby, his birth a gift of immortality. He was a miracle, a sudden kindling of cold ashes stirred by God's hand. All privilege was his. Year after year my grandmother had produced girls and only girls, a few stillborn, one or two victims of diphtheria or scarlet fever, but five or six thriving as big, marriageable maidens. The menopause years were approaching while my embittered grandmother muttered over the cholent (a stew of potatoes, carrots, meat, and prunes) that she shoved into the oven on Friday afternoons to cook slowly through the night and provide a warm meal on Saturday when no stove might be lit. She mumbled angrily while she ironed, spitting the dampening water as if it were venom. Someone, maybe an old witch who envied her her good house, her gold watch, her silky new shaytl, had cursed her with the Evil Eye, depriving her of a son, a Kaddish to pray for her after her death. The girls' prayers, if they prayed at all, counted for nothing; like animals, they had no souls and no voices to God's ear.

p21

The last doctor my mother saw in Warsaw, made blunt by the misery he could not remedy, shouted at her, "Leave the boy, he's going to die anyway. Take the girls to America while there's still time Or do you want two sit with two dead children in this graveyard city.

            We left for America. My brother was two and a half.... I was four, grown silent and very capable. I could lift him to the pot, clean him, and take him off. I could carry him to bed and mash his potato. I knew where he might bump his head, where he might topple, how to divert him when he began to blubber. It was a short childhood. I had my first baby at not quite four, better trained in maternal wariness and responsibility than many fully grown women I later observed. At four I also knew one could intensely love and as intensely hate the being who was both the core and pit of one's life.

...I am sitting with my brother on my lap, in a room full of heavy dark furniture that I have never seen before. I am telling him that our mother went to buy food and will be back soon. I hope that she will come back, but I'm not sure; over and over, in every dark dream, I am not sure. I don't say this to him but wonder what I will do, where we will go, if she doesn't come back, as our father didn't.

p38

The boxes bore the noble letters, MACY'S, a legendary world where no one else I knew had ever wandered.

p47

In none of my assiduous eavesdropping on the street did I ever hear any mention of unhappy marriage or happy marriage. Married was married. Although a Jewish divorce was a singularly easy matter except for the disgrace it carried, the Jewish women were as firmly imbedded in their marriages as the Catholic. A divorce was as unthinkable as adultery or lipstick. No matter what—beatings, infidelity, drunkenness, verbal abuse, outlandish demands—no woman could run the risk of making her children fatherless. Marriage and children were fate, like being skinny,  like the skeletal Mr. Roberts, or humpbacked, like the leering watchman at the hat factory. "Es is mir beschert," "It is my fate." was a common sighing phrase, the Amen that closed hymns of woe.

p52

Why didn't my mother minde her own business, what the hell did these people, these foreign ingoramuses, mean to her? The answer was short and always the same, "Es is doch a mench," yet these are human beings, the only religious training we ever had, perhaps quite enough.

p58

Summer was another country whose fathers had, suddenly, bare, shy arms, whose mothers padded like cats on bare feet. Time was still summer air, as slow and round as pregnant women. In the mornings, time sat quietly, waiting for me as I commanded it to, watching me think, shape, arrange the world. ...

...Cloaked in the royal robes of omnipotent childhood, I went down—it was very early—to check the condition of my domain and my subjects. I was the queen of my block. No one but I knew it and I knew it well, each morning making a royal progress on my empty street, among my big garbage cans, my limp window curtains, my sheet of newspaper slowly turning and sliding in the gutter, my morning glory on Mrs. Roberti's porch vine, my waiting stoops fronting my sleeping houses; my hat factory on the corner of 179th Street, resting from its hours of blowing pink and blue and purple dye smoke; my Kleins, my Rizzos, my Petrides, my Clancys safely in bed, guarded by my strength and will.  Even after I had been heavily assaulted with school proofs that very little of the world was mine, that history existed of itself and not as a huge crowded stage hurriedly arranged the day I was born, I maintained a deep interest in my subjects, moving out of absolute control to the more subtle control of observer and critic.

p152

I had to finish a stuffed doll I was making for her in school and finish hemstitching a camisole; I would never wear it, I didn't know what it was for, but the orderly stitches becoming a pretty row had become as satisfying as drawing.