Tracks Literary Quotes

He would have died rather quickly to not lose track of his wife in the afterlife.

it is hard for us to be alone between school and our friends and our families and his track practice and my literary magazine. so this pause is heaven, feeling entirely open

I know now that a writer cannot afford to give in to feelings of rage, disgust, or contempt. Did you answer someone in a temper? If so, you didn't hear him out and lost track of his system of opinions. You avoided someone out of disgust—and a completely unknown personality slipped out of your ken—precisely the type you would have needed someday. But, however tardily, I nonetheless caught myself and realized I had always devoted my time and attention to people who fascinated me and were pleasant, who engaged my sympathy, and that as a result I was seeing society like the Moon, always from one side.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!

I stop in my tracks, turning to face Girl. She is limping across the grass. I can do this! Reaching out, I lift her in both my arms. She straddles her legs around my waist and leans her head against my left shoulder. Girl is heavy but I seem to manage. Finding my inner strength, I support her weight in my arms. My feet continue to pelt across the grass and onto the cement of the car park.

I was in full digression! far from the subject!...my colonel was losing track...rapidly, of my story! my story!...my own story!...the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven!...yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts!...I'd made him repeat them a hundred times!...enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me!...everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed!...they could just go fuck off!...drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles!...it was mine or theirs!...crawl or breastroke!...you understand!...the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not!...

Hardy’s poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many poems. Sometimes it involves creating a picture, as in ‘Snow in the Suburbs’, which allows the eye to follow the cascading snow set off by a sparrow alighting on a tree; or it employs the camera effect, as in ‘On the Departure Platform’, which tracks the gradually diminishing form and disappearance of a muslin-gowned girl among those boarding the train. However, Hardy is also a poet of social observation. His humanistic sympathies emerge in a variety of poems drawing upon his experience of both Dorset and London.

A little writer's block can be a good thing. Your inner-literary critic's way of gently letting you know you're really stinking up the joint. You're off track. Lost in the weeds. Need to go back and rethink things. Sometimes it's simply a matter of temporarily writing yourself out. Yesterday's slow 'n' steady 3 hour, 600 word quota turned into a 5 hour, 2,000 word marathon. The tank's suddenly dry. Take a breather. Let your subconscious work its magic. The words will come.

For all their shared boundaries, the experiences of fiction and nonfiction are fundamentally different. In the traditional short story or novel, a fictive space is opened up that allows you the reader to disappear into the action, even to the point of forgetting you are reading. In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you’re always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out. This is certainly true for the essay, but it is also true, I think, for classic nonfiction in general, be it Thucydides or Pascal or Carlyle, which follows an organizing principle that can be summarized as “tracking the consciousness of the author.” What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. “Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction” is one way of stating the formula.

ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.

I write because of the fragility of our existence. I write because it's my answer to impermanence. I write because it helps me stay connected to my heart. I write because we’re all different, and so much the same. I write because the world needs more tenderness. I write because I'm tired of secrets. I write because it’s my path to redemption. I write because I've forsaken those that I love. I write because I want to know myself. I write because I want to know you. I write because I'm drawn towards things I shouldn't do. I write because every flower is meant to bloom. I write because life is full of paradoxes. I write because I’ve had to leave friends behind. I write because it's my form of prayer. I write because, when I write, I lose track of time. I write because I've walked dark streets looking for love. I write because of the way the sublime slips away from words. I write because of the twice shy part of once burned. I write because it helps me learn. I write because there are plenty of people who have written, famous well-published people, literary figures, literary giants, and I didn't like what they wrote. I write because I'm always telling myself stories anyhow. I write because I don't know all of the reasons I write. I write for you. I write. I write. I write.

Reviewers of every ilk like to feel they are above a work of art. If it puzzles them or if they are intimidated, they are more than likely to trash it. Many artists are not intellectuals, but Burden was, and her work reflected her wide learning. Her references spanned many fields and were often impossible to track. There was also a literary, narrative quality to her art that many resisted. I am convinced that her knowledge alone acted as an irritant to some reviewers. I once had a conversation with a man who had excoriated her first one-woman show. When I brought up his review and offered a defense of her work, he was hostile. He was not a stupid man and had written well on some artists I admired. He had attacked Burden’s work as confused and naïve, the very opposite, in fact, of what it was. I realized that he had been incapable of a fair-minded appraisal because, although he prided himself on his sophistication, the multiple meanings of her carefully orchestrated texts had eluded him, and he had projected his own disorientation onto the work. His last words to me were “I hated it, okay? I just hated it. I don’t give a damn about what she was referring to.” That conversation has stayed with me, not as a story about Harriet Burden so much as a lesson for myself: Beware of the violent response and the sophisms you may use to explain it.

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

It was late when father and the Duke tracked me down feigning surprise that I was in the usual place every time as if it was a game they played, “Where’s Rose? Why, growing in her usual spot!

the Scandinavians—that is, the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians—even have a literary phrase to describe this tendency. The phrase is “the Law of Jante,” and it is shorthand for a list of ten commandments created by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. Sandemose’s ten commandments referred to the mentality of a fictional town called Jante, but the rules were immediately understood to capture the larger disposition of Scandinavians in general. The commandments are: 1. You are not to think you are anything special. 2. You are not to think you are as good as we are. 3. You are not to think you are smarter than we are. 4. You are not to convince yourself that you are better than we are. 5. You are not to think you know more than we do. 6. You are not to think you are more important than we are. 7. You are not to think you are good at anything. 8. You are not to laugh at us. 9. You are not to think anyone cares about you. 10. You are not to think you can teach us anything.

And now that mulch of dead imaginings beneath the feet of Temperance ladies, union-affiliated Vaudevillians and maimed men home from Europe has contaminated the groundwater of the upstart country's nightmares. Immigrants in their illimitable difference come to seem a separate species, taciturn and fish-eyed as though risen from the ocean waves that bore them in their transport, monstrous in their self-contained communities with bitter scents and indecipherable ululations, names, unsettlingly unpronounceable ensconced at isolated farms where beaten track is naught save idle rumour stagnant families nurse grievance, dreadful secrets and deformity in solitude; pools of declined humanity entirely unconnected to society by any tributary where ancestral prejudice or misconception may become the plaint of generations. Fabled and forbidden works of Arab alchemy are handed down across years cruel and volatile, trafficked between austere and colonial homes by charitable fellowships with ancient affectations or conveyed by fevered sea-captains, fugitive Huguenots or elderly hysterics formally accused of witchcraft. Young America, a sapling power grown suddenly so tall upon its diet of nickelodeons and motorcars, has sunk unwitting roots into an underworld of grotesque notions and archaic creeds, their feaful pull discernible below the weed-cracked sidewalk. Buried and forgotten, ominous philosophies await their day with hideous patience. Well! I think that's pretty darned good for a first attempt. A little over-wrought, perhaps, and I'm not sure about the style - I can't decide if its too modern of it's too old fashioned, but perhaps that's a good sign. Of course, I guess I'll have to introduce a plot and characters at some point, but I'll wrestle with that minor nuisance when I get to it. Perhaps I could contrive to have some hobo, maybe literally a hoe-boy or travelling itinerant farm labourer who's wandering from place to place around New England in the search for work; somebody who might reasonably become involved with all the various characters I'm hoping to investigate. Being a labourer, while it would lend a feasibility to any action or exertion that I wanted in the story, wouldn't mean that my protagonist was lacking in intelligence of education: this is often economically a far from certain country for a lot of people, and there's plenty of smart fellows - maybe even an aspiring writer like myself - who've found themselves leaving their homes and families to mooch around from farm to farm in hope of some hay-baling or fruit-picking that's unlikely to materialise. Perhaps a character like that, a rugged man who is sufficiently well read to justifiably allow me a few literary flourishes (and I can't help thinking that I'll probably end up casting some imagined variant of Tom Malone) would be the kind of of sympathetic hero and the kind of voice I'm looking for. Meanwhile I yawned a moment or two back, and while I'm not yet quite exhausted to the point where I can guarantee a deep and dreamless sleep, perhaps another six or seven vague ideas for stories might just do the soporific job.

We tend to understand our world through labels and through stories. Well, I love a good story. You know that. But... sometimes... I see folks getting themselves all twisted up over stories. I mean the stories we apply to ourselves. The story of our identities. Younger folks, older folks too, get anxious because they feel like their story hasn’t actually begun. That they are in a play and they’ve missed their cues and forgotten their lines. Or, they turn into literary critics of life and criticize their own character, looking for steady growth and rising action. A satisfying plot tying events together. Here’s the thing. Lives aren’t stories. They aren’t written to be tidy or to hang tight to a central theme or conflict. We consume a lot of carefully constructed stories and it can be easy to forget that life is not one of them. You aren’t headed toward a thoughtful climax and, so, you can’t be off track within your own narrative. Life doesn’t work that way. We live and then we don’t. That’s the simple truth of it. Our stories are happening now and if we get preoccupied looking for satisfying character arcs or a steady build toward some conclusion, well we miss what’s here in the moment and we will always fall short of our expectations. We can’t judge ourselves like we judge the protagonist in a book or movie. Life isn’t failing you because it isn’t delivering a cohesive story. You aren’t failing because you haven’t stuck to a clear and explainable hero’s path. Stories are a great way to understand the world, but they are paper thin compared to actual life. You, in contrast, are complicated. Make room for that truth and love yourself in all your messy complexity. (The Cryptonaturalist episode 39: Bittersweet)

On train trips, Ernie always wanted the window seat. He knew the names of the trees we passed, and the clouds—nacreous, cumulus, nimbus. He was ever vigilant for animal life and appreciative of the tiny patches of humanity along the tracks that exposed the lives of the rail-side dwellers in such intimate detail. “I love sad houses,” he’d say, pointing to a chorus line of discoloured laundry waving at us, to an upturned self-propelled lawnmower, straggly gardens, leaky drainpipes, a rain-weathered pram that had been turned into a wheelbarrow. “The porch lights are on to keep the rats in their dens,” he’d said. To be a voyeur of decay at such close range was as much of an enthrallment as it was a validation of the scarcities in his own backyard. I knew exactly which days Ernie’s mum had had to choose between heating the house and putting food on the table. My mother had been there too. Before the Zipper had given her a leg up.

. . . stop being part of the social norms of writing and teaching, which then leads to the point, stop being a capitalist person, one who works for a salary to teach writing in a form that’s acceptable to capitalism, which then leads further to the point, exit social norms imposed upon you, do not have a lifestyle that requires living by capitalist rules even outside the teaching and practice of writing—which ultimately is the only way to a real literary community, which is based on real art, and you see how impossible a track I’m on?

And now that mulch of dead imaginings beneath the feet of Temperance ladies, union-affiliated Vaudevillians and maimed men home from Europe has contaminated the groundwater of the upstart country's nightmares. Immigrants in their illimitable difference come to seem a separate species, taciturn and fish-eyed as though risen from the ocean waves that bore them in their transport, monstrous in their self-contained communities with bitter scents and indecipherable ululations, names, unsettlingly unpronounceable ensconced at isolated farms where beaten track is naught save idle rumour stagnant families nurse grievance, dreadful secrets and deformity in solitude; pools of declined humanity entirely unconnected to society by any tributary where ancestral prejudice or misconception may become the plaint of generations. Fabled and forbidden works of Arab alchemy are handed down across years cruel and volatile, trafficked between austere and colonial homes by charitable fellowships with ancient affectations or conveyed by fevered sea-captains, fugitive Huguenots or elderly hysterics formally accused of witchcraft. Young America, a sapling power grown suddenly so tall upon its diet of nickelodeons and motorcars, has sunk unwitting roots into an underworld of grotesque notions and archaic creeds, their feaful pull discernible below the weed-cracked sidewalk. Buried and forgotten, ominous philosophies await their day with hideous patience. Well! I think that's pretty darned good for a first attempt. A little over-wrought, perhaps, and I'm not sure about the style - I can't decide if its too modern of it's too old-fashioned, but perhaps that's a good sign. Of course, I guess I'll have to introduce a plot and characters at some point, but I'll wrestle with that minor nuisance when I get to it. Perhaps I could contrive to have some hobo, maybe literally a hoe-boy or travelling itinerant farm labourer who's wandering from place to place around New England in the search for work; somebody who might reasonably become involved with all the various characters I'm hoping to investigate. Being a labourer, while it would lend a feasibility to any action or exertion that I wanted in the story, wouldn't mean that my protagonist was lacking in intelligence or education: this is often economically a far from certain country for a lot of people, and there's plenty of smart fellows - maybe even an aspiring writer like myself - who've found themselves leaving their homes and families to mooch around from farm to farm in hope of some hay-baling or fruit-picking that's unlikely to materialise. Perhaps a character like that, a rugged man who is sufficiently well read to justifiably allow me a few literary flourishes (and I can't help thinking that I'll probably end up casting some imagined variant of Tom Malone) would be the kind of of sympathetic hero and the kind of voice I'm looking for. Meanwhile I yawned a moment or two back, and while I'm not yet quite exhausted to the point where I can guarantee a deep and dreamless sleep, perhaps another six or seven vague ideas for stories might just do the soporific job.

And that’s courage for the next time. And the next time. And inch by inch, you drag yourself back. Mend the knife-marks until they’re silver scars. Mop the floors until the tiles are not longer stained, and you do that once a fortnight now, because their shitty off-whiteness that collects far too much dirt and dust won’t beat you. You fix the small bits, one at a time. When you look back, you see the trail of black, oozing sick that you’ve tracked from the pit, all the way to here. It’s been a long, brutal journey. And yet, looking around, you’re shoulder to shoulder with your people, who have the same tools and same luck as you. You beat the odds, inch by inch. You haven’t won, not really, there’s no such thing, but you’re alive. You get to keep going.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

I don’t know a novel like Charles L. McNichols’ Crazy Weather. I don’t think there could be one. It’s a book written out of a unique knowledge and life experience in a place way off the beaten track. Its singularity is both its virtue and its bane. The book that’s unlike any other has no ready-made niche in the shelves of the store, the library, or the mind of the literary critic. But such a book often has a unique place in the hearts of readers fortunate enough to find it.

One of my favourite poems // All my friends are finding new beliefs. This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees. In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew God whomps on like a genetic generator. Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine. One man marries a woman twenty years younger and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant; another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea, decides to die. Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees, high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt, sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being ... All my friends are finding new beliefs and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the new gods and the new loves, and the old gods and the old loves, and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives, and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness, and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends, my beautiful, credible friends.

Welcome to the Blackcastle Book Club’s official group chat!” “Seriously? You put a picture from The Land Before Time as the group’s profile picture?” “Why not? It’s a good movie.” “Dude, that’s so wrong. It’s a children’s film, and we’re reading about dinosaurs boning.” “It’s a good thing we’re not making them read the books, isn’t it? But fine, I see your point. I wanted to keep it a surprise, but since you insist on policing my admin decisions, I’ve changed the picture to the cover of this month’s book club pick. Gentlemen, prepare yourselves for **drumroll please** Shagging the Spinosaurus!” “We already guessed that was the book of the month. We saw you reading it the other day Aren’t you supposed to read it with the rest of the club? Why are you reading it early?” “Yeah, that’s CHEATING.” “It’s called vetting. Also, I’m the admin. I can do what I want.” “I tried looking for it at the bookstore yesterday and couldn’t find it. Donovan, what was the name of the store you went to?” “Uh… I don’t remember. Just some shop I stumbled on in the city. I’m sure you can buy the book online.” “I don’t understand. How do you shag a spinosaurus?” “The same way you shag a triceratops and a T-rex, genius.” “Oh, you sound so bloody confident. Are you speaking from experience?” “Gentlemen, let’s get back on track! This is a book club, not a fight club. Our first official meeting is on Wednesday. I want everyone to come prepared with at least one discussion question.” “Dibs on the ‘how do you shag a spinosaurus’ question.” “You can’t ask that. It has to be a THOUGHTFUL question.” “How thoughtful do you want us to be? We’re literally reading about dinosaurs fucking.” “And humans If you forget them, that’s human erasure.” “Fuck off, Donovan.” “Spoken like someone who doesn’t have the IQ to come up with a good question.” “Yeah? Let’s wait until Wednesday and see. I bet my question will be better than yours.” “You’re on. May the better questioner win.” “Okayyy. Moving on. Noah, since you refuse to participate in the LITERARY side of our club, you’re in charge of snacks.” “Fine.” “I’m thinking we could do a themed event with dinosaur crackers. Do you think they make custom spinosaurus ones?” “So we’re going to eat the little dude while we read about him getting it on? That’s so wrong.” “Poor Spiny. He deserves better.” “It was an IDEA. I don’t see you guys coming up with anything better.” “How about jungle juice to stay with the dinosaur theme?” “Dinosaurs didn’t live in the jungle.” “How do you know? Were you there?” “Lol.” “Don’t talk to your captain like that.” “You’re our football captain. You’re not the president of this book club. Also, I just looked it up and they did live in jungles, so you’re wrong.” “Wait, we have a president?” “Yes, it’s me. Anyway Noah, can you call the dinosaur cracker company and ask them for custom spinosaurus snacks? Hello? Noah?” Noah Wilson left the conversation.

Tears began to fall, hot and relentless, tracing tracks down my face. I didn't even try to stop them. I didn’t even know why I was crying. Maybe it was the pain. The tears kept coming, a relentless tide. My throat ached, my head pounded, and my body felt like it was caving in on itself. For a moment, I hoped that I might just pass out. Anything to make it stop.

the Cheka and the NKVD were ordered to take hostage peasants from those localities where the removal of snow from railroad tracks “was not proceeding satisfactorily,” and “if the snow removal did not take place they were to be shot.”7