I have been chosen as a local Glens Falls New York writer to give a reading in the 7pm slot Thursday July 16 in THE THIRD THURSDAY ART WALK SERIES. I'm thinking I'll read two short stories, a few poems and an excerpt from my novel, depending upon the allotted time. I'll post the actual itinerary when I receive all the details. Hope to see ya all there.
L
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Me on Robert Brewer's Blog Poetic Asides through Writers Digest
When I was a kid Writer's Digest was my Bible. My mother purchased me a subscription from the time I was thirteen that I maintained into my early twenties. I watched the mag go through many incarnations. I loved Lawrence Block's monthly articles. I learned more about writing from his wonderful biographical essays and his Write for your Life program than any creative writing class or writer's group or conferences. His energy is endless and his prolificness is legendary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Block
His website http://www.lawrenceblock.com/index_flash.htm
I liked WD's back page Chronicle and the profiles of famous writers, oh, and the Grammar Grappler, although interesting, was usually beyond my limited abilities at the time as a grammarian, but still interesting. I keep all my back issues of Writer's Digest at my mother's house on a shelf in her basement with all of my back issues of Rolling Stone, my comic books and other periodicals from my youth.
I was delighted to be invited to share my opinion about writer's block with Mr. Brewer. I had no idea my opinion would be posted with other writer's opinions on his Writer's Digest Website blog Poetic Asides.
I'm thrilled.
Thank you, Mr. Robert Brewer
L
Here is Mr. Brewer's question and my response:
Poets Helping Poets: Breaking through a writing slump
Posted by Robert
"Last Friday, I tossed out a question to the members of the Poetic Asides group on Facebook: How do you break through a writing slump?
Whether it's been days, weeks, months, or even years, we've all been through dry spots. Well, as I learned from the response, most of us have anyway.
In my own case, I find that reading new (to me) voices is what helps the most. Though listening to the news or going for a run, both usually work as well.
The response was so massive that I had to be selective with the answers, but here's what some of the poets wrote:"
I write book reviews for various online and print mags, so finding time to write my own stuff is hard. When I try to balance reviewing, family, my money jobs and my own pieces, I find that writer's block doesn't exist for me anymore. Because the reviews are on a deadline and I want to continue to be paid, I have to force myself to be a professional and write even when I don't feel like writing. Normally, when I am 5-10 minutes into the piece it starts to flow.
The reviewing and journalism has put my own writing in perspective and has made me realize, that if you're a writer, you write. Because my time is limited, I take the time that I'm given to work on my own stuff as a gift. If I have an hour or so, I apply Cory Doctorow's 20-minute method. For example, I know realistically that I do not have large chunks of time to write my novel. I give myself 25-30 minutes to write a chunk. I literally set my PDA alarm to go off in 20 minutes. The time goes by so fast, and when the alarm goes off I am usually in a white hot writing frenzy and I stop in the middle and I cannot wait to go back to it the next day.
I apply this technique to all my writing: play-writing, short stories, and even poetry. When you have finite time to write, you learn to inspire yourself. The book reviewing also teaches me to have more perspective about my own stuff. I discover quickly what works and what does not work.
My advice: Write like there is no tomorrow, because there isn't. Don't worry too much about revision or research, that's later. Get that initial draft down and write your butt off.
-Lee Gooden
Here is the link To Poetics Aside:
casides/Poets+Helping+Poets+Breaking+Through+A+Writing+Slump.aspx
His website http://www.lawrenceblock.com/index_flash.htm
I liked WD's back page Chronicle and the profiles of famous writers, oh, and the Grammar Grappler, although interesting, was usually beyond my limited abilities at the time as a grammarian, but still interesting. I keep all my back issues of Writer's Digest at my mother's house on a shelf in her basement with all of my back issues of Rolling Stone, my comic books and other periodicals from my youth.
I was delighted to be invited to share my opinion about writer's block with Mr. Brewer. I had no idea my opinion would be posted with other writer's opinions on his Writer's Digest Website blog Poetic Asides.
I'm thrilled.
Thank you, Mr. Robert Brewer
L
Here is Mr. Brewer's question and my response:
Poets Helping Poets: Breaking through a writing slump
Posted by Robert
"Last Friday, I tossed out a question to the members of the Poetic Asides group on Facebook: How do you break through a writing slump?
Whether it's been days, weeks, months, or even years, we've all been through dry spots. Well, as I learned from the response, most of us have anyway.
In my own case, I find that reading new (to me) voices is what helps the most. Though listening to the news or going for a run, both usually work as well.
The response was so massive that I had to be selective with the answers, but here's what some of the poets wrote:"
I write book reviews for various online and print mags, so finding time to write my own stuff is hard. When I try to balance reviewing, family, my money jobs and my own pieces, I find that writer's block doesn't exist for me anymore. Because the reviews are on a deadline and I want to continue to be paid, I have to force myself to be a professional and write even when I don't feel like writing. Normally, when I am 5-10 minutes into the piece it starts to flow.
The reviewing and journalism has put my own writing in perspective and has made me realize, that if you're a writer, you write. Because my time is limited, I take the time that I'm given to work on my own stuff as a gift. If I have an hour or so, I apply Cory Doctorow's 20-minute method. For example, I know realistically that I do not have large chunks of time to write my novel. I give myself 25-30 minutes to write a chunk. I literally set my PDA alarm to go off in 20 minutes. The time goes by so fast, and when the alarm goes off I am usually in a white hot writing frenzy and I stop in the middle and I cannot wait to go back to it the next day.
I apply this technique to all my writing: play-writing, short stories, and even poetry. When you have finite time to write, you learn to inspire yourself. The book reviewing also teaches me to have more perspective about my own stuff. I discover quickly what works and what does not work.
My advice: Write like there is no tomorrow, because there isn't. Don't worry too much about revision or research, that's later. Get that initial draft down and write your butt off.
-Lee Gooden
Here is the link To Poetics Aside:
casides/Poets+Helping+Poets+Breaking+Through+A+Writing+Slump.aspx
Saturday, March 7, 2009
An Excerpt from my novel: The Uncertainty of Knowing
22.
A smell of steak cooking distracted Lisa from her thoughts. She and Jon sat across from one another at a picnic table in the park. The sun just setting resembled the top of someone’s head slowly traversing down a hill.
Pine and fir branches provided them with an ample cover of shadows. To their right on a dirt knoll was the play ground with a twisted helix of a slide, a beaten chipped "paint jungle gym and a geodesic dome constructed of a woven metal lattices like a spider web and children hung from the bars like happy blond spiders.
They held hands. The faded red pressure treated wood was cool against their skin. Hair on their arms stood up on goose pimples regardless of the summer. She pulled his hand to her lips. Her kiss was moist and gentle where the bones and veins joined and stood out like Japanese calligraphy on parchment.
Jon shivered.
No woman had ever done that to him before. He reciprocated by lifting her chin with the tips of his fingers with his other hand, loops, arcs, whorls and whirls that made his fingerprints unique connected to the matrix of her face.
Lisa quivered.
They reeled from a joining that probably should have happened a long time ago. He leaned across the table and kissed her. She kissed back. For an instant nothing existed except the wet fire where their lips met.
They didn’t say “I love you.”
No talking meant, no yes’s or no no’s. No words meant no confusion, no miscommunication, no misinterpretation, no hurt, no pain.
Night stalked the earth quietly and slid around the day like a satin sheet as they watched the sunset. Lisa spoke and broke the moment into tiny pieces. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something; been turning it around in my mind, examining it from one direction and then another.”
“Just say it.”
Lisa scratched her arm and rubbed her hand through her hair. “I wasn’t…I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“What?”
"This…you, me, it wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“I’m glad it happened.”
“I’m not.”
Jon stood abruptly to leave. “Okay, sure, I understand…”
"No, don’t go, you don’t get it. You and me…”
“I get it, I get it. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Interfered with your plans.”
"No Jon, please don’t be hurt. You and me are great, wonderful…”
“But?”
“But it wasn’t supposed to happen because I’m being transferred to San Salvador.”
“Central America?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s kind of extreme.”
“I’m kinda an extreme girl.”
“Yes you are.”
They looked at each other. Their eyes were inflamed with power and hunger they absorbed from the ether, from the residual energy of dormant elementals of the sky, water, fire and earth. Their appetite was fueled by their own abstinence and the ideas of consummations across time of couples loving secretly in the bushes, behind the closed eyes of curtained windows and the muzzled mouth’s of closed doors. The energy was frenzied and thick, like touching throbbing and humming wires.
“How long do we have?” Jon asked and they trudged up the hill into a grassy clearing. The moon was a wedge of pie above their heads, alamode with vanilla clouds.
“About three weeks.”
Jon nodded slightly and slipped his arm around Lisa’s waist.
No one spoke. No one dared…words…words that were more than simple sentences consumed too much time. Communication between lovers, or soon to be lovers take place deep in the roots, and bypass models of romances we have learned to fear, emulate and be ashamed,. When every successful relationship is somebody else’s failure, why speak? Why ruin the moment with giant incomplete thoughts and even bigger emotions compressed into grunts and groans, inept ramblings that fail to express the vast universes of love and hate? It might be easier to grasp water in one’s cupped hands than to try to verbally articulate around a mouthful of toes. As the feet are extricated from a throat already choking on unsaid words, that fire-thief time ticks away beneath all the baggage…the shoe trees and carry-ons and suitcases that are depositories for solitary confinement and the rationalized reasons of why endings must be endings.
“Three weeks?”
"Yeah.”
“Okay, three weeks then.”
A smell of steak cooking distracted Lisa from her thoughts. She and Jon sat across from one another at a picnic table in the park. The sun just setting resembled the top of someone’s head slowly traversing down a hill.
Pine and fir branches provided them with an ample cover of shadows. To their right on a dirt knoll was the play ground with a twisted helix of a slide, a beaten chipped "paint jungle gym and a geodesic dome constructed of a woven metal lattices like a spider web and children hung from the bars like happy blond spiders.
They held hands. The faded red pressure treated wood was cool against their skin. Hair on their arms stood up on goose pimples regardless of the summer. She pulled his hand to her lips. Her kiss was moist and gentle where the bones and veins joined and stood out like Japanese calligraphy on parchment.
Jon shivered.
No woman had ever done that to him before. He reciprocated by lifting her chin with the tips of his fingers with his other hand, loops, arcs, whorls and whirls that made his fingerprints unique connected to the matrix of her face.
Lisa quivered.
They reeled from a joining that probably should have happened a long time ago. He leaned across the table and kissed her. She kissed back. For an instant nothing existed except the wet fire where their lips met.
They didn’t say “I love you.”
No talking meant, no yes’s or no no’s. No words meant no confusion, no miscommunication, no misinterpretation, no hurt, no pain.
Night stalked the earth quietly and slid around the day like a satin sheet as they watched the sunset. Lisa spoke and broke the moment into tiny pieces. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something; been turning it around in my mind, examining it from one direction and then another.”
“Just say it.”
Lisa scratched her arm and rubbed her hand through her hair. “I wasn’t…I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“What?”
"This…you, me, it wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“I’m glad it happened.”
“I’m not.”
Jon stood abruptly to leave. “Okay, sure, I understand…”
"No, don’t go, you don’t get it. You and me…”
“I get it, I get it. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Interfered with your plans.”
"No Jon, please don’t be hurt. You and me are great, wonderful…”
“But?”
“But it wasn’t supposed to happen because I’m being transferred to San Salvador.”
“Central America?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s kind of extreme.”
“I’m kinda an extreme girl.”
“Yes you are.”
They looked at each other. Their eyes were inflamed with power and hunger they absorbed from the ether, from the residual energy of dormant elementals of the sky, water, fire and earth. Their appetite was fueled by their own abstinence and the ideas of consummations across time of couples loving secretly in the bushes, behind the closed eyes of curtained windows and the muzzled mouth’s of closed doors. The energy was frenzied and thick, like touching throbbing and humming wires.
“How long do we have?” Jon asked and they trudged up the hill into a grassy clearing. The moon was a wedge of pie above their heads, alamode with vanilla clouds.
“About three weeks.”
Jon nodded slightly and slipped his arm around Lisa’s waist.
No one spoke. No one dared…words…words that were more than simple sentences consumed too much time. Communication between lovers, or soon to be lovers take place deep in the roots, and bypass models of romances we have learned to fear, emulate and be ashamed,. When every successful relationship is somebody else’s failure, why speak? Why ruin the moment with giant incomplete thoughts and even bigger emotions compressed into grunts and groans, inept ramblings that fail to express the vast universes of love and hate? It might be easier to grasp water in one’s cupped hands than to try to verbally articulate around a mouthful of toes. As the feet are extricated from a throat already choking on unsaid words, that fire-thief time ticks away beneath all the baggage…the shoe trees and carry-ons and suitcases that are depositories for solitary confinement and the rationalized reasons of why endings must be endings.
“Three weeks?”
"Yeah.”
“Okay, three weeks then.”
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Paul Harvey and American Icon
PAUL HARVEY, 90
Broadcaster Delivered 'The Rest of the Story'
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 1, 2009; Page C08
"Paul Harvey, 90, a Chicago-based radio broadcaster whose authoritative baritone voice and distinctive staccato delivery attracted millions of daily listeners for more than half a century, died Feb. 28 in Phoenix.
A spokesman for ABC Radio Networks told the Associated Press that Mr. Harvey died at his winter home, surrounded by family. No cause of death was immediately available.
Mr. Harvey was the voice of the American heartland, offering to millions his trademark greeting: "Hello Americans! This is Paul Harvey. Stand by! For news!"
For millions, Paul Harvey in the morning or at noon was as much a part of daily routine as morning coffee..."
article continues here:
m/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/28/AR2009022802096.html?hpid=topnews
Broadcaster Delivered 'The Rest of the Story'
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 1, 2009; Page C08
"Paul Harvey, 90, a Chicago-based radio broadcaster whose authoritative baritone voice and distinctive staccato delivery attracted millions of daily listeners for more than half a century, died Feb. 28 in Phoenix.
A spokesman for ABC Radio Networks told the Associated Press that Mr. Harvey died at his winter home, surrounded by family. No cause of death was immediately available.
Mr. Harvey was the voice of the American heartland, offering to millions his trademark greeting: "Hello Americans! This is Paul Harvey. Stand by! For news!"
For millions, Paul Harvey in the morning or at noon was as much a part of daily routine as morning coffee..."
article continues here:
m/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/28/AR2009022802096.html?hpid=topnews
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Sample of Friday the 13th Avatar Comcis Submission Script
FRIDAY THE 13th
REQUIEM
WRITTEN
by
Lee Gooden
PAGE ONE
(1 PANEL)
PANEL 1:
The night is illuminated by cold stark stars that salt a foreboding sky and a crescent moon tilted like an idiot's smile. There is something off about the night. We see the scene like the shots Orson Welles filmed of Xanadu in Citizen Kane; from the bottom up. We see a cornfield that has gone to rot after the corn season. There are dried corn stalks in random spots, the roots of the stalks are almost completely above the ground as if they were tentacle like legs that have tried to escape the earth. The stalks contain rotten ears of corn and fuzzy but black and grey corn silks. Jason is center stage. He is wearing a threadbare work shirt. The pocket is almost torn off. The sleeves of the shirt are ripped off just below the shoulder, showing Jason's considerable sized arms. His hands, arms and shirt are brownish red with dried blood. Jason is hefting a large blood stained machete. Jason's pants are ripped and frayed at the cuff. His boots are mud and blood splattered. His hockey mask is cracked in the upper left corner above the eye, revealing some blackened rancid flesh. This is Jason in all his frightful glory, Jason in his prime, a terrifying ass kicking Jason.
1-CAPTION
(On the top left side corner of the panel,)
THE NIGHT...
2-CAPTION
(On the bottom right side corner of the panel,)
...IS WRONG.
3-TITLE
FRIDAY THE 13TH
Bottom left corner of panel that stretches to the bottom middle of panel, (note to colorist: these letters are black, with tiny droplets of crimson to represent blood. I know, I know, cliché...but it works damn it.)
4-SUBTITLE
REQUIEM
(Directly below FRIDAY THE 13TH, some of the droplets of blood from the top have dripped down onto the word REQUIEM. And then more words below REQUIEM that read PART 1: DOORWAYS.
5-CREDIT INFO
(No dialogue)
PAGE TWO
PANEL 1
The panel stretches across the top of the page. Jason has reached the outside of the perimeter of the corn field. We can see the cornfield behind him. He has stopped his rapid walk towards his next murdering rampage, a ramshackle farm house, we can just make out the outline of the structure and rusty, beaten chicken wire fence is in the foreground. Framed by the wire is a crooked sign that reads, CRYSTAL LAKE FARMS.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 2
Cut to: A close up of Jason from the shoulders up.
He is a juggernaut of death. Behind him, near his shoulder we see the disembodied spirit of his mother whispering in his ear.
1-CAPTION
HIS FRENZIED RAGE HAS BEEN SPURNED ON FOR ALL THESE YEARS BY HIS MOTHER'S VOICE.
2-MRS. VOORES
KILL THEM JASON, KILL THEM ALL, MAKE THEM PAY!! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!
3-CAPTION
A VOICE SO COMPELLING, SO POWERFUL, A SIREN SONG THAT HAS BROUGHT HIM BACK FROM THE DEAD COUNTLESS TIMES, BACK FROM THE EDGE OF THE PITS OF HELL, TO KILL AGAIN AND AGAIN.
4-MRS. VOORES
KILL THEM! KILL! KILL! KILL!
(Until specified, Mrs. Voorhees spirit will be in every panel taunting Jason)
PANEL 3
Jason grasping the door to the farm house pulling it from its hinges.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 4
A rear view: Jason flying backwards away from the door. His body is bent at an impossible angle. His back is blackened and smoking from powder burns, rancid and raw meat bursts out from his body, including ropes of gangrened intestine; all of this is caused by the double blast of an over and under sawed-off double barrel shot-gun fired from inside the doorway by a stereotypical farmer dressed to the nines in stereotypical farmer duds; including, shit-kicker boots and bib-overalls. He has a big bomber joint attached to his lower lip. His face is covered with a scraggly beard and there is a wild look in his eyes as he peers over his granny- glasses, a ball-cap rests precariously on his head that reads, 'Git R done.'
5-SFX
BLAM! BLAM!
(No dialogue)
PANEL 5
The farmer reloads his shot gun. Both barrels are smoking.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 6
Cut to: Spent shot-gun shells falling to the ground.
(No dialogue)
PAGE THREE
PANEL 1
The farmer is standing over Jason's body. He is using the shot gun as a probe, pushing it into Jason.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 2
A close up on the Farmer's face. His grin is all yellow teeth.
1-FARMER
DAMN, IF YOU AINT ONE BIG UGLY SON OF A BITCH.
PANEL 3
Farmer pulls the trigger and fires both barrels into Jason point blank range. Pieces of Jason fly up into the air.
2- SFX
BLAM! BLAM!
(No dialogue)
Panel 4
The farmer hawks up a loogey from deep in his throat and spits phlegm and a gooey mouth full of chewing tobacco juice onto Jason.
3-SFX
HAAAAWK!
4-SFX
SPLOOCH!
Panel 5
The farmer has turned to go back inside. The door to his house is hanging from a single bent hinge. There is a blast hole through the door where the farmer fired. Jason has sat up, but the farmer is facing away from Jason.
4-Mrs. Voorhees
GET UP! GET UP AND KILL HIM JASON!
Panel 6
POV from inside the house looking towards the door. Jason's machete followed by his forearm bursts through the farmer's stomach.
(No dialogue)
Panel 7
Jason slices the farmer from stomach to the top of the head.
(No dialogue)
Panel 8
The farmer's body separates into two clean parts like an anatomical cross section. His brain is visible in both sides of his cleaved skull.
(No dialogue)
PAGE FOUR
Panel 1
Interior of the farm house: A rear view of Jason standing inside the doorway just across the threshold in a rustic foyer. A banister and some worn steps to an antiquated staircase can be seen through a large, gaping, dripping, hole in Jason.
(No dialogue)
Panel 2
Jason's POV: To the left of the staircase is a well lit but small hallway. At the end of the hallway is a set of large black steel double doors with a video camera moving back and forth. It is mounted above the upper frame of the doors.
(No dialogue)
Panel 3
Jason's POV:To the right of the stair case is a huge stuffed raven perched on a log. Think Poe and the Addam's Family.
(No dialogue)
Panel 4
Jason climbs the stairs.
(No dialogue)
Panel 5
Cut to: The black double doors spring open
1-SFX
Slam!
(No dialogue)
Panel 6
Jason pauses in mid-step on the stairs and leans slightly over the railing to see and listen in the direction of the double doors.
REQUIEM
WRITTEN
by
Lee Gooden
PAGE ONE
(1 PANEL)
PANEL 1:
The night is illuminated by cold stark stars that salt a foreboding sky and a crescent moon tilted like an idiot's smile. There is something off about the night. We see the scene like the shots Orson Welles filmed of Xanadu in Citizen Kane; from the bottom up. We see a cornfield that has gone to rot after the corn season. There are dried corn stalks in random spots, the roots of the stalks are almost completely above the ground as if they were tentacle like legs that have tried to escape the earth. The stalks contain rotten ears of corn and fuzzy but black and grey corn silks. Jason is center stage. He is wearing a threadbare work shirt. The pocket is almost torn off. The sleeves of the shirt are ripped off just below the shoulder, showing Jason's considerable sized arms. His hands, arms and shirt are brownish red with dried blood. Jason is hefting a large blood stained machete. Jason's pants are ripped and frayed at the cuff. His boots are mud and blood splattered. His hockey mask is cracked in the upper left corner above the eye, revealing some blackened rancid flesh. This is Jason in all his frightful glory, Jason in his prime, a terrifying ass kicking Jason.
1-CAPTION
(On the top left side corner of the panel,)
THE NIGHT...
2-CAPTION
(On the bottom right side corner of the panel,)
...IS WRONG.
3-TITLE
FRIDAY THE 13TH
Bottom left corner of panel that stretches to the bottom middle of panel, (note to colorist: these letters are black, with tiny droplets of crimson to represent blood. I know, I know, cliché...but it works damn it.)
4-SUBTITLE
REQUIEM
(Directly below FRIDAY THE 13TH, some of the droplets of blood from the top have dripped down onto the word REQUIEM. And then more words below REQUIEM that read PART 1: DOORWAYS.
5-CREDIT INFO
(No dialogue)
PAGE TWO
PANEL 1
The panel stretches across the top of the page. Jason has reached the outside of the perimeter of the corn field. We can see the cornfield behind him. He has stopped his rapid walk towards his next murdering rampage, a ramshackle farm house, we can just make out the outline of the structure and rusty, beaten chicken wire fence is in the foreground. Framed by the wire is a crooked sign that reads, CRYSTAL LAKE FARMS.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 2
Cut to: A close up of Jason from the shoulders up.
He is a juggernaut of death. Behind him, near his shoulder we see the disembodied spirit of his mother whispering in his ear.
1-CAPTION
HIS FRENZIED RAGE HAS BEEN SPURNED ON FOR ALL THESE YEARS BY HIS MOTHER'S VOICE.
2-MRS. VOORES
KILL THEM JASON, KILL THEM ALL, MAKE THEM PAY!! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!
3-CAPTION
A VOICE SO COMPELLING, SO POWERFUL, A SIREN SONG THAT HAS BROUGHT HIM BACK FROM THE DEAD COUNTLESS TIMES, BACK FROM THE EDGE OF THE PITS OF HELL, TO KILL AGAIN AND AGAIN.
4-MRS. VOORES
KILL THEM! KILL! KILL! KILL!
(Until specified, Mrs. Voorhees spirit will be in every panel taunting Jason)
PANEL 3
Jason grasping the door to the farm house pulling it from its hinges.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 4
A rear view: Jason flying backwards away from the door. His body is bent at an impossible angle. His back is blackened and smoking from powder burns, rancid and raw meat bursts out from his body, including ropes of gangrened intestine; all of this is caused by the double blast of an over and under sawed-off double barrel shot-gun fired from inside the doorway by a stereotypical farmer dressed to the nines in stereotypical farmer duds; including, shit-kicker boots and bib-overalls. He has a big bomber joint attached to his lower lip. His face is covered with a scraggly beard and there is a wild look in his eyes as he peers over his granny- glasses, a ball-cap rests precariously on his head that reads, 'Git R done.'
5-SFX
BLAM! BLAM!
(No dialogue)
PANEL 5
The farmer reloads his shot gun. Both barrels are smoking.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 6
Cut to: Spent shot-gun shells falling to the ground.
(No dialogue)
PAGE THREE
PANEL 1
The farmer is standing over Jason's body. He is using the shot gun as a probe, pushing it into Jason.
(No dialogue)
PANEL 2
A close up on the Farmer's face. His grin is all yellow teeth.
1-FARMER
DAMN, IF YOU AINT ONE BIG UGLY SON OF A BITCH.
PANEL 3
Farmer pulls the trigger and fires both barrels into Jason point blank range. Pieces of Jason fly up into the air.
2- SFX
BLAM! BLAM!
(No dialogue)
Panel 4
The farmer hawks up a loogey from deep in his throat and spits phlegm and a gooey mouth full of chewing tobacco juice onto Jason.
3-SFX
HAAAAWK!
4-SFX
SPLOOCH!
Panel 5
The farmer has turned to go back inside. The door to his house is hanging from a single bent hinge. There is a blast hole through the door where the farmer fired. Jason has sat up, but the farmer is facing away from Jason.
4-Mrs. Voorhees
GET UP! GET UP AND KILL HIM JASON!
Panel 6
POV from inside the house looking towards the door. Jason's machete followed by his forearm bursts through the farmer's stomach.
(No dialogue)
Panel 7
Jason slices the farmer from stomach to the top of the head.
(No dialogue)
Panel 8
The farmer's body separates into two clean parts like an anatomical cross section. His brain is visible in both sides of his cleaved skull.
(No dialogue)
PAGE FOUR
Panel 1
Interior of the farm house: A rear view of Jason standing inside the doorway just across the threshold in a rustic foyer. A banister and some worn steps to an antiquated staircase can be seen through a large, gaping, dripping, hole in Jason.
(No dialogue)
Panel 2
Jason's POV: To the left of the staircase is a well lit but small hallway. At the end of the hallway is a set of large black steel double doors with a video camera moving back and forth. It is mounted above the upper frame of the doors.
(No dialogue)
Panel 3
Jason's POV:To the right of the stair case is a huge stuffed raven perched on a log. Think Poe and the Addam's Family.
(No dialogue)
Panel 4
Jason climbs the stairs.
(No dialogue)
Panel 5
Cut to: The black double doors spring open
1-SFX
Slam!
(No dialogue)
Panel 6
Jason pauses in mid-step on the stairs and leans slightly over the railing to see and listen in the direction of the double doors.
Priest uncovering beginnings of Final Solution
Priest uncovering beginnings of Final Solution
By MARIA DANILOVA and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers Maria Danilova And Randy Herschaft, Associated Press Writers – 2 hrs 25 mins ago
This file photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier AP – This file photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting an Ukrainian Jew …
KIEV, Ukraine – The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces.
Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.
"Shoah," French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's documentary, stands as the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust. Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.
Desbois says he has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union. The result is a book, "The Holocaust by Bullets," and an exhibition through March 15 at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Brought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years trying to document the truth, honor the dead, relieve witnesses of their pain and guilt and prevent future acts of genocide.
Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Another 550,000-650,000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140,000 in Russia, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly.
Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final Solution with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Desbois devotes his 233-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in August, to his work in Ukraine, where he says he has uncovered over 800 mass extermination sites, more than two-thirds of them previously unknown.
Since the book was written, he has expanded his search for mass graves into Belarus and plans to look early this year in areas of Russia that were occupied by the Germans.
Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women from poor Ukrainian villages recount to Desbois how women, children and elders were marched or carted in from neighboring towns to be shot, burned to death or buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of local Ukrainian collaborators and local ethnic German volunteers.
Even then, it was methodical, Desbois' research shows. First, Germans would arrive in a town or village and gather intelligence on how best to transport the victims to extermination sites, where to execute them and how to dispose of their bodies.
"It was done as systematically as it was done elsewhere," said John Paul Himka, an expert on the Holocaust and Ukraine at the University of Alberta in Canada, who is not connected to Desbois' work. "You can read as they're figuring out best way to do this, the best way to shoot ... it's absolutely systematic, no accident here."
Desbois' interviews and grave-hunting tie in to millions of pages of Soviet archives, heightening their credibility, says Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who wrote the foreword to Desbois' book.
Father Desbois' work is also having an impact on efforts to preserve Holocaust sites. In December, the 26-nation International Task Force on the Holocaust called on European governments to ensure the protection of locations such as the mass graves Desbois is uncovering, according to Shapiro, who helped draft the resolution.
Among Desbois' key findings is the widespread use of local children to help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals and remove gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies. His work has also yielded evidence that the killings were most frequently carried out in the open, in daylight and in a variety of ways — shooting victims, throwing them alive into bonfires, walling up a group of Jews in a cellar that wasn't opened until 12 years later.
Desbois' witnesses are mostly Orthodox Christian, and he comes to them as a priest, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, taking in their pain and trying to ease their suffering. Many have never before talked about their experiences.
In the village of Ternivka, some 200 miles south of Kiev where 2,300 Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her.
The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbors thrown into a large pit, many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on was a classmate.
"You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told Desbois in a single breath, her body twitching in pain, Desbois writes in his book. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."
Desbois, 53, a short, soft-spoken man with dark, thinning hair, says the stories give him nightmares. The most difficult is "to bear the horrors that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very kind and want to tell me everything," Desbois said in a phone interview while on a trip to western Ukraine.
"You have to be able to listen, to accept, to bear this horror," said Desbois. "I am not here to judge the people's guilt, we are here to know what happened."
Desbois' small team includes a translator, a researcher, a mapping expert, a ballistics specialist and a video and photo crew. He often joins his witnesses in their homes, leaving his shoes outside. He tends to a peasant's cow while the man tells his story.
Desbois has deep personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in World War II.
When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run from the site where the Jews were executed and of a dismembered woman hanging from a tree after the Nazis threw a grenade in a pit full of people. When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not hesitate.
"I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there."
The Holocaust is a divisive topic here because some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis. Jewish groups are grateful for Desbois' efforts and lament the lack of government support for his and other Holocaust research and education programs.
"As a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian historian it pains me ... that there is no policy of national remembrance," said Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies. "We are not responsible for the past but we are responsible for remembering."
Desbois leads a French association, Yahad-In Unum (the Hebrew and Latin words for "together"), which was founded by Catholics and Jews to heal the wounds between the two faiths. He believes that as a Catholic priest talking to Orthodox believers about the killing of their Jewish neighbors his work advances that healing mission.
"The book is meant so that people know ... that a genocide is simply people killing people," Desbois said. "My book is also an act of prevention of future acts of genocide."
___
Randy Herschaft reported from New York.
___
On the Net:
The Holocaust by Bullets book site: http://us.macmillan.com/theholocaustbybullets
Yahad-In Unum: http://www.yahadinunum.org/index.en.html
Museum of Jewish Heritage: http:http://www.mjhnyc.org
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org
By MARIA DANILOVA and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers Maria Danilova And Randy Herschaft, Associated Press Writers – 2 hrs 25 mins ago
This file photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier AP – This file photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting an Ukrainian Jew …
KIEV, Ukraine – The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces.
Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.
"Shoah," French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's documentary, stands as the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust. Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.
Desbois says he has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union. The result is a book, "The Holocaust by Bullets," and an exhibition through March 15 at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Brought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years trying to document the truth, honor the dead, relieve witnesses of their pain and guilt and prevent future acts of genocide.
Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Another 550,000-650,000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140,000 in Russia, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly.
Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final Solution with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Desbois devotes his 233-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in August, to his work in Ukraine, where he says he has uncovered over 800 mass extermination sites, more than two-thirds of them previously unknown.
Since the book was written, he has expanded his search for mass graves into Belarus and plans to look early this year in areas of Russia that were occupied by the Germans.
Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women from poor Ukrainian villages recount to Desbois how women, children and elders were marched or carted in from neighboring towns to be shot, burned to death or buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of local Ukrainian collaborators and local ethnic German volunteers.
Even then, it was methodical, Desbois' research shows. First, Germans would arrive in a town or village and gather intelligence on how best to transport the victims to extermination sites, where to execute them and how to dispose of their bodies.
"It was done as systematically as it was done elsewhere," said John Paul Himka, an expert on the Holocaust and Ukraine at the University of Alberta in Canada, who is not connected to Desbois' work. "You can read as they're figuring out best way to do this, the best way to shoot ... it's absolutely systematic, no accident here."
Desbois' interviews and grave-hunting tie in to millions of pages of Soviet archives, heightening their credibility, says Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who wrote the foreword to Desbois' book.
Father Desbois' work is also having an impact on efforts to preserve Holocaust sites. In December, the 26-nation International Task Force on the Holocaust called on European governments to ensure the protection of locations such as the mass graves Desbois is uncovering, according to Shapiro, who helped draft the resolution.
Among Desbois' key findings is the widespread use of local children to help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals and remove gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies. His work has also yielded evidence that the killings were most frequently carried out in the open, in daylight and in a variety of ways — shooting victims, throwing them alive into bonfires, walling up a group of Jews in a cellar that wasn't opened until 12 years later.
Desbois' witnesses are mostly Orthodox Christian, and he comes to them as a priest, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, taking in their pain and trying to ease their suffering. Many have never before talked about their experiences.
In the village of Ternivka, some 200 miles south of Kiev where 2,300 Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her.
The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbors thrown into a large pit, many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on was a classmate.
"You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told Desbois in a single breath, her body twitching in pain, Desbois writes in his book. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."
Desbois, 53, a short, soft-spoken man with dark, thinning hair, says the stories give him nightmares. The most difficult is "to bear the horrors that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very kind and want to tell me everything," Desbois said in a phone interview while on a trip to western Ukraine.
"You have to be able to listen, to accept, to bear this horror," said Desbois. "I am not here to judge the people's guilt, we are here to know what happened."
Desbois' small team includes a translator, a researcher, a mapping expert, a ballistics specialist and a video and photo crew. He often joins his witnesses in their homes, leaving his shoes outside. He tends to a peasant's cow while the man tells his story.
Desbois has deep personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in World War II.
When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run from the site where the Jews were executed and of a dismembered woman hanging from a tree after the Nazis threw a grenade in a pit full of people. When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not hesitate.
"I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there."
The Holocaust is a divisive topic here because some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis. Jewish groups are grateful for Desbois' efforts and lament the lack of government support for his and other Holocaust research and education programs.
"As a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian historian it pains me ... that there is no policy of national remembrance," said Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies. "We are not responsible for the past but we are responsible for remembering."
Desbois leads a French association, Yahad-In Unum (the Hebrew and Latin words for "together"), which was founded by Catholics and Jews to heal the wounds between the two faiths. He believes that as a Catholic priest talking to Orthodox believers about the killing of their Jewish neighbors his work advances that healing mission.
"The book is meant so that people know ... that a genocide is simply people killing people," Desbois said. "My book is also an act of prevention of future acts of genocide."
___
Randy Herschaft reported from New York.
___
On the Net:
The Holocaust by Bullets book site: http://us.macmillan.com/theholocaustbybullets
Yahad-In Unum: http://www.yahadinunum.org/index.en.html
Museum of Jewish Heritage: http:http://www.mjhnyc.org
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
John Updike has passed
Mr. Updike succumbed to lung cancer on January 27. He has left behind an amazingly prolific body of work in criticism, the short story, essays, novels, verse, a stage play or two and children's literature. The world will be a lesser place without him, but at the same time his work will keep him immortal. It will seem strange to me when I receive the next New Yorker in the mail and there won't be an Updike short story, book or art review or new verse. My personal favorites of Mr. Updike are his Rabbit and Bech series, the Karl Barth inspired A Month of Sundays and Roger's Version. I love, Of The Farm, The Poor House Fair, The Centaur, Pigeon Feathers, The Witches of Eastwick (currently reading the sequel, The Widows of Eastwick) Seek My Face and on and on, including his reviews and Non-fiction review and essay anthologies, like, Picked up Pieces, Hugging the Shore, and More Matter. I think his poetry was getting better, the poem, On Becoming a Senior Citizen was perfect. Recently he wrote a wonderful article in AARP magazine about becoming and aging writer. And so much more...He was always ready to offer his informed opinion about anything and he did it elegantly.
John Updike will be missed
L
John Updike will be missed
L
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
