CHIAROSCURO




A Jeanne Mackin arrangement, photo by Stephen Poleskie

  an essay by

Jeanne Mackin

Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its brilliancy. There is no shade in a rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl – John Ruskin

LIGHT CAN BE SLOWED DOWN, can be made to reconsider its own path, its own desire for velocity. When light passes through glass, moving from thin air to that other more substantial material, it slows and makes a slight detour we call refraction. Refraction is matter’s way of saying: “Let’s rethink this.” Shine light through a diamond and it slows its speed by almost half because of the density of the crystal. If you lived inside a diamond, you would be twenty-five when your peers were fifty; you would live twice as long, and twice as slowly.

That Thanksgiving Day it was warm, and humid, so after dinner we went outside, full of a strange energy. In the western sky over the new-growth forest, we saw a triple rainbow. A double happens once in a while, but there were three in the sky that day after the storm, one inside the other, and we looked at them, knowing we would never see such a thing again, no matter how long we lived. The rarity of it locked us into silence; we grappled with the event the way medieval star gazers must have contended with comets or halos around the moon, with wonder and fear as well. Wonder and fear refract our direction, bend it into new paths. The wonder takes hold of us and says “I have caught you. The fear says “I am going to change you whether you wish it or not. From now on, up will be down, and inside will be outside.” But wonder cannot last. Colors fade, especially in a rainbow.

After matter emerged from chaos, the first miracle was the creation of light, and with light came time. With time, came shadows. When the triple rainbow began to fade, we came to ourselves, the way sleepers awake, slowly and with confusion. We went back indoors carrying new desires with us and I wished I had seen the triple rainbow when I was a child, not a grown up. I think somehow things would have been different. I cleared the table of our dirtied dishes and glasses and the vase of yellow garden mums.

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JEANNE MACKIN is the author of several novels and has published short fiction and creative nonfiction in journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and is an award-winning journalist. She teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Goddard College in Vermont.

“Chiaroscuro” is an excerpt from a text to accompany photographs by artist Steve Poleskie. The text and photo exhibit, titled “Light and Shadow” was shown at Bright Hill Literary Center in Treadwell, New York, in June 2011.

Links:
www.jeannemackin.com
www.stephenpoleskie.com

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Apple Leads Price Conspiracy

Judge Rules Apple Led Price Conspiracy, “Seizing the Moment” As Publishers Looked to Defy Amazon


U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has ruled against Apple in the Justice Department’s ebook price-fixing case, saying the tech company coordinated a scheme involving five major publishers that were looking for a way to challenge Amazon’s ebook pricing strategy. In a decision issued July 10, Cote said:

“The plaintiffs have shown that the publisher defendants conspired with each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy. Without Apple’s orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the spring of 2010.”

Apple released a statement saying it plans to appeal the decision.

“Apple did not conspire to fix e-book pricing,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said. “When we introduced the iBookstore in 2010, we gave customers more choice, injecting much needed innovation and competition into the market, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

Cote also called for a trial on damages, noting that the conspiracy caused ebook prices to rise, resulting in some consumers paying more, buying a title other than the one they wanted or forgoing a purchase altogether.

The publishers named as defendants settled with the Justice Department long before the case went to court.During trial testimony publishing executives denied that they colluded and Apple officials said they didn’t know whether publishers were communicating amongst themselves on pricing. In her decision, Cote rejects those claims.

“Apple and the Publisher Defendants shared one overarching interest — that there be no price competition at the retail level.”

Cote goes on to say that:

“Apple seized the moment and brilliantly played its hand. Taking advantage of the Publisher Defendants’ fear of and frustration over Amazon’s pricing, as well as the tight window of opportunity created by the impending launch of the iPad on January 27 (the “Lauch”), Apple garnered the signatures it needed to introduce the iBookstore at the Launch. It provided the Publisher Defendants with the vision, the format, the timetable, and the coordination they needed to raise e-book prices.”

Information for this story was supplied by The Authors Guild, 31 E. 32nd Street, 7th floor. NY NY 10016.

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How I Spent My Sunday



Terry shoveling in front of the barn

 flash fiction by Terry Mooney

You talkin' to ME? You talkin' to ME? You want to know how I spent my Sunday? No? Phooey on you,

I'm going to tell you anyway!

My friend's barn is at the base of a slight hill. When it rains, there is a stream of gushing water that pours through the barn and run-in. So, I am digging a water trench to divert the water to go to the side.

I am shoveling horse manure in a very hard torrential downpour and high winds, which lasted about 45 minutes! In my boxer shorts and crocks (the area is very secluded) so that I would have dry clothes for the drive home. And Tigere, the curious friesian, is following close by to make sure I did it right.

Not a pretty picture, but funny! We were laughing the whole time!

So, how was your Sunday?

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Terry Mooney is a former Senior Computer Control Specialist for NASA's Kennedy Space Center who lives in Aiken, SC

photo by Sasha Thurmond

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THE TURTLE TANK

A Short Story
by Thaddeus Rutkowski



THE  TURTLE TANK CAME into our apartment while I was away. Along with the tank came a turtle—a mature red-eared slider. My wife and daughter bought the tank while I was on a short trip. Maybe they didn’t want me to stop them.

We all knew our daughter needed a pet, but I’d put my foot down about a cat. Our place was too small for a cat, I believed. But not for a turtle, at least in my wife’s and daughter’s opinion. When I came back from my trip, I was surprised by the sight of the aquarium, with its sun lamp shining and its air pump bubbling. In it was the turtle, treading water. It was a big animal, for its species. My wife and daughter had gotten the reptile free of charge because someone had abandoned it.

Of course, no one except for the turtle had any use for the tank. It—or I should say she—swam in it, ate in it and slept in it, until she had to lay eggs. When the time came, she would climb out of the tank and fall to the floor. It was a long way down, and I worried that she’d crack her shell. But I was never able to catch her—she fell so fast.

Somehow, if she landed on her back, she could wave her legs until she got traction and right herself. She would then look for a soft place, maybe among clothes on the floor, where she could dig a shallow pit for her eggs. She would scratch and knead with her hind feet. But the floor was hard, and no amount of scraping would dent it. Giving up, she would look for a window to escape through. She knew where the windows were, but she didn’t know how to climb to them. She was a turtle, after all.

The idea at this point was not to push her with my foot, that is, not to kick her. The temptation was there, however, because she was low to the ground. I didn’t want her in my clothes, or in my bedroom for that matter, so I wanted to nudge her out with my foot, then shut the door so she couldn’t get back in. But if I were caught by my wife and daughter while I was pushing with my foot, I would hear some screaming—some accusations of animal abuse. So I would bend down and pick up the turtle by her shell. If I were gentle, she would not panic and scratch me with her back claws, which were sharp, for digging.

It would usually take a week or two of her escaping the tank before she found an egg-laying place. Usually, it was not a good place. It was the hardwood floor, or the ceramic tiles in the bathroom. She would deposit eight to 10 eggs there. Some of the eggs would remain whole and perfect. Others she would step on and smash. Whether she meant to destroy them was not known, at least to us, her caregivers.

The tank stayed where it was, on top of a cabinet in the living room, until it was replaced by a bigger tank—one the turtle, named Mystic, might not be able to climb out of. But as it turned out, she could get out of the larger tank when she wanted to—or when she needed to. She quit the tank whenever it was time to lay eggs. Precisely when that time would come was the question, one that required mystical knowledge to answer. None of us could say.

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Thadeus  Rutkowski is the author of the innovative novels Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. He teaches literature as an adjunct at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and fiction writing at the Writers Voice of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan.

Thaddeus Rutkowski web site

I Say Stylist and Head for the Hills

An excerpt from the essay The Backlash Against the Novel

by Paul West

WHAT  IS THIS FICTION we are talking about? Surely nothing to do with best sellers and/or pulp “page-turners” or the old Dodd-Mead formula of one crisis every ten pages. No, it had to do with those deplored matters: formalism, interiority, the presumably ineffable unspoken, textural and plotly experiment, and structures flinched from the other arts. In my tousled head I carried a short list of practitioners, some of whom I knew: Barth, Coover, Davenport, Gass, Hawkes, Markson, Morrow, Sebald, Vernon, Hugh Nissenson, Poleskie, Joanna Scott, Jeanne Mackin, Janet Frame the New Zealander and Delia Falconer the Australian, plus James Hamilton Patterson, (Gerontion) and Michael Brodsky, a true heir of Beckett, and Claudio Magris, a picaresque heir of Svevo. There are others who will not now forgive me. I have trouble with the phrase “post-modern,” which always struck me as post-Renaissance, so I am aware of having flinched some post-modernists from that moldy ragbag. Asked to describe myself, I say “stylist” and head for the hills.

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PAUL WEST is the author of 50 books. He has received awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Prize for Fiction and the Halperin-Kaminsky Prize. He was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. He has also been a runner-up for the National Book Circle Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Odds of Passing a National Security Law - 17%

By highlighting journalists’ need to protect confidential sources and other information, the Justice Department’s recent seizing of AP phone records without notice may finally lead to passage of a federal press shield law. The Authors Guild, which has long backed the enactment of such a law, is part of a coalition of media organizations calling on Congress to use this as an opportunity to strengthen the First Amendment protection of press freedom. It’s going to be an uphill battle, says legislation monitor GovTrack.us.

Still, the moment seems right. Amid the uproar over the DOJ’s actions, President Obama has asked New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to revive shield law legislation that was shelved in 2009. Last week Schumer said he would reintroduce the bill, The Free Flow of Information Act, and Texas Republican Rep. Ted Poe introduced shield law legislation in the House. Here’s the text of the bill from THOMAS (Library of Congress) and an analysis of the bill’s sections by the Newspaper Guild.*

Revelations earlier this month that the Justice Department had used broad subpoena powers to secretly obtain two months of call records from 20 telephone lines, including to journalists’ home, office and cell phones, in connection with a leak investigation drew condemnation from Democrats and Republicans.

The Justice Department has defended its actions by saying they were necessary to find the source of leaked information that could compromise national security. Opposition to its investigative tactic is far from unanimous. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this week three attorneys who worked in the Justice Departments of previous administrations said the prosecutors were justified.

While neither we nor the critics know the circumstances behind the prosecutors’ decision to issue this subpoena, we do know from the government’s public disclosures that the prosecutors were right to investigate this leak vigorously. The leak — which resulted in a May 2012 article by The A.P. about the disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner — significantly damaged our national security.

At a time when citing national security tends to trump all other arguments, passing a federal shield law that would prevent similar intrusions on journalists won’t be easy. GovTrack gives the bill a 44% chance of getting out of committee, and just a 17% chance of being enacted. On the bright side, the press shield bill is ahead of the game: GovTrack reports that only 3% of House bills have been enacted recently.

The odds of passing a federal press shield bill may not be terrific, but bipartisan outrage and cooperation have finally brought it within reach.

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This article provided by The Authors Guild, 31 E. 32nd St. 7 flr, NY NY 10016

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*Note: looking for the sticky wicket? It’s defining “journalism.” After all, haven’t Facebook and Twitter turned us all into newsgatherers and distributors? The bill deals with this (see definitions of “Covered Person” and “Journalism” in Section 4) by limiting protection to those who engage in journalism “for financial gain or livelihood.”

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A Photo That I Almost Died For . . . .

Citadelle Laferriere, built between 1805 and 1820 to protect Haiti from invasion.

STEPHEN POLESKIE

based on a true story

IT WAS MID-TERM BREAK. One of the advantages of being on a university faculty is that you also get the same days off that the students do. So we headed off to the Bahamas on a trip we had planned. The "we" was my wife and I and two of her friends and one of the woman's daughter. The daughter was thirteen and weighed only 85 pounds, which made her just the right size to fit into the fifth seat of my twin engine Piper Apache. Everyone else was told to pack light so the airplane wouldn't be over gross, after all we were going to a tropical island, how much clothes would you need any way.

The flight down was uneventful. We made one stop in North Carolina for lunch, and then headed on to Florida, where we would rent the required over water survival gear and spend the night, before hopping over to Grand Bahama. There one of the women had a friend who had let us have a house to use. Besides being free, the house was one block from the beach.

Now it sounded great. But after the third day we had grown tired of the beach, the straw market, and watching the drug runner's boats come in and out of the harbor. What else was there to do? We sat down at the dinner table and decided to find a more interesting location for our holiday. Pointing at the map someone said; "Look, Haiti's just over there, let's go?" The next morning we were on our way winging out over the Atlantic, being careful not to get too close to Cuba, which we could see clearly off our right wing tip.

We landed in Cape-Haitien to clear customs, but not after having to circle the field several times while men cleared the rows of 55 gallon drums from the runway. Why was the runway lined with drums? we asked when we finally got down. We were told that Haiti was at war with the Dominican Republic, the country they shared the island with, a war not much known about in the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Apparently their neighbors were known to fly over and land their airplanes and then rush out and shoot up the place with machine guns, or so the Haitian customs officer told us as we watched the barrels being rolled back into place. "Remove the barrels," I said, "we're going on to Port-au-Prince."

We had only just begun our climb out when I spotted the magnificent sight of the Citadelle Laferriere. I told the group that I wanted to circle to take some photos. I went around once, snapping as I flew. Maybe a little lower would be better, I thought, although I was quite low already. I could see the occupants in the convoy of cars that was heading up the steep hill to The Citadel. I made a second circuit, not sure that I had gotten the photo I wanted. "One more pass," I announced, "and we're on our way." I banked the airplane to head back. "Enough already," my wife shouted at me, "we're all getting sick from these steep banks. . . ."

That summer I ran into a former student of mine, Fred M, at an alumni function at the college. I knew that he was from Haiti and told him about our trip to Port-au-Prince and how interesting it had been. Fred informed me that he was working as an architect for the government and was involved in several restoration projects, including work on Citadelle Laferriere.

When I related to him that I had flown over The Citadel taking photographs, he stopped short. He mentioned a date, and asked me if my airplane had two engines and was white with brown and orange trim. I replied that was the date of my fly-over and my airplane fit his description exactly.

"And you circled twice . . . and then went away?" Fred asked incredulously.

"Yes. . . ."

"You don't know how lucky you were, professor," my former student said. "On that day I was in a convoy with Jean-Claude Duvalier, we were taking 'Bebe Doc.' up the mountain to see the progress that had been had made on restoring The Citadel. When your airplane began to circle us so low he became nervous. 'If that airplane comes around one more time, shoot it down,' the dictator had shouted to his men. And they had trained the machine guns in the truck in front and behind us on you. But suddenly you went away."

"And those were the vehicles I had seen below me on the steep hill heading up to The Citadel. Had my wife not stopped me from making another pass I probably wouldn't be here talking to you today," I said.

"Probably not," Fred replied. "Duvalier does not take any threats lightly."

I looked down. Both out glasses were empty; I put my arm on Fred's shoulder and lead him into the bar.

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STEPHEN POLESKIE is a writer and artist, he has published six novels and numerous short stories. His artworks are in many major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Galley in London. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.

 Stephen Poleskie's web site:

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