City

1.

The woman with the curly hair is sitting near the window of the coffee shop. Coffee. Caffeine. In

the morning. They all do this here in this city. All of ‘em. All of the responsible adults. On their

way to work. Office jobs in the city. The only problem with this picture is that she does not work

in an office. Nope, she will go back to her kitchen table. Balance the laptop on it somehow. Pen a

novel. And nobody will remunerate her. Yup, she is a shitty storyteller. (Pardon my French). She

is just not getting the hang of it.

2.

Still she is sitting in the coffee house. A construction worker is coming in. A woman with her

child. The woman with the curly hair hates going home to the laptop and the sentences that never

click. She will write about the city. City as subject matter. It has to do. City as protagonist and

antagonist. Buildings. Bridges. Buses and trains. Lots of times she takes the bus to the mall in the

other city. She watches people. Sometimes she talks to total strangers. Maybe their petty lives

will be fodder for a novel. But she knows that she could care less about people and their petty

problems. She prefers to write about inanimate objects. Describe them. Describe the city. It has

to do for now. People do not like to read about the street, the moving train, they prefer

whodunnits. Maybe love stories. Cookbooks. Anything but what she writes about.

3.

There are programs that teach fiction writing. They are expensive. They take forever. Time and

money and a substantial investment of both. She will not do it. She will just write stuff and hope

for the best. There is nothing else she can do here.

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4.

(302 words) The woman with the curly hair has 302 words here. 302 words on a morning at the

kitchen table. She wishes she was still in the coffee house. Writing there is easy. You describe the

different persons. The patrons of the place. The baristas. The cars outside. The music on the

overhead.

5.

The woman in the curly hair studied visual arts. That was her major. A little bit of everything.

But not enough to break through. After studying how to make stuff she ended up writing about

stuff. It is the natural course of art school. Academics will do ‘yer in. It happens to everybody.

Each and every art student. Once you start conceptualizing, you are done. You cannot possibly

produce stuff anymore. You can merely describe stuff and not very good. That is how it is, how it

is here.

6.

Maybe she can draw graphic novels. There is a market for those. But she is not good with

anything tougher than stick figures. So, no, graphic novels is out.

7.

Having coffee in coffee shops all over town. Flaneuse extraordinaire.

8.

How about poetry? Short. You just wax poetically. Read it to hipsters. In stuffy places after nine

PM. You wear black and favor turtle necks. You wear dark brimmed glasses.

9.

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The woman in curly hair has 526 words.

10.

The woman in curly hair is awake 45 minutes after one in the morning. On the telly, there is the

Paul Simon concert in Hyde Park. In 2012. They sell CDs. It is a PBS program. An informercial

for PBS. Nobody in her right mind is awake in the middle of the night. Norman Mailer did not

work like that, now, did he? George Orwell, Philipp Roth. The woman in curly hair does not

know that many English-speaking literary greats. It is not a good thing if you want to write a

novel. You should know the competition. You have to know what you are up against. But maybe

it is a good thing. You know that there are a lot of shitty writers. Celebrity does not make the

writing. Tastes vary. It is that simple, apparently.

11.

The woman in curly hair scours the web for online programs in creative writing. There are none.

At least no free ones.

12.

Paul Simon is finished. People clap.

13.

There are no good programs at fifty-four minutes after one. In the AM.

14.

CNN. The trailer for the documentary about Ruth Bader-Ginsberg. And now Anthony Bourdain.

RIP. It is in Italy. You get hungry just by watching it, just by hearing the word antipasti.

Antipasta, maybe.

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15.

Wordcount: 745.

16.

Monday, September 3. So the laptop says. The woman in the curly hair sits down to feed her

words to this machine. She went through the moves, the daily routine. Coffee house and coffee.

The Labor Day crowd. The stillness of the day. In reluctant suburbia here. Slow traffic. Cars

parked, glistening. Sun outside. Music too loud and too aggressive. For a coffee house. The day

before she came upon this app for writers. It simulates the noise in a coffee house. There are

actually two apps like that. One of ‘em is called hipster sound. Hipsters are the ones who churn

out novels in coffee houses, plays, scripts, dissertations. The chattering class, the creative class.

She has 866 words here.

17.

There are other realities. Realities that she should describe. Conjure up other people’s existences.

Lives fictional, lives non-lived.

18.

The city is still sleeping. Well, it wakes up at the fringe but because it is not that bright as of yet,

it seems that it is still asleep. If we go down to the bus station, we can be part of the morning

commute. The early morning commute, the one before the roar of the storm sets in. The quiet

before the storm. The woman in curly hairs is wide awake since five, there was coffee already in

the coffee house, the bigger one. All of these coffee houses around here, sprouting out all over

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the place here. Coffee houses as subject matter of a book, maybe not here. Let s stick to

describing the city here.

Today, schools open. Apparently here.

19.

1013 words.

20.

It is a Thursday. Actually, technically, it is a Friday. Twenty minutes after midnight. Friends on

the telly. The woman in curly hair was at the Fringe. A so-so show. Actually, it was really really

bad. Forty-five minutes of torture. But there were some good moments. Two to be precise in an

otherwise wasteland of incompetence. It could be rescued though with the right directorial input.

21.

1083 words.

22.

Watching a vimeo film about the futures of cities. Very nice, very informative. But, let us face it,

it is three minutes to one in the morning. Maybe sleeping is a better course of action or inaction

for that matter.

23.

Btw, 1128 words here.

24.

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I can read from it. My new book. It is called STRIP MALL. It is, what else, about the strip mall

near my place. There is a coffee dive bar. Nothing but coffee drinks. No alcohol, they do not

have a license. So, it all stays so very polite. The place away from home where oldsters hang out.

Young baristas in green and black. All with the Seattle based chain’s logo emblazoned

somewhere on the apron. An apron for people in a restaurant. Reminiscent of mom’s apron. It is

there to market the homey feel. The well branded chain. Starbucks, there is a subject matter.

Because, let’s face it, what are cities without Starbucks? The theme of this book is cities, but

cities and coffee shops and strip malls intertwine. The li’l sub stories of the main narrative here.

25.

The women at fashion show. THE fashion show. The behind-the-scenes video clips. All collaged

together. No, better, to say, that they follow each other in rapid succession. Persons talking to the

filmmaker. Showing accessories. Their hairdo. The clothes. The cut of that particular blouse. The

woman holds her hair in a way that you can decipher the way the turtle neck is cut. Or maybe,

the back is cut with the extra flap, that cuts diagonal over the back, elegantly. The turtleneck is of

a clingy material, the flap is shiny silky. A picture is worth a thousand words, you cannot really

describe what is going on. But it is all so nice, so very behind the scenes. Behind the scenes of

the event. What is making the spectacular possible. You wish that you yourself were in New

York. You feel very far away from what is happening. Maybe you have to go down to the coffee

place in order to be all part of it. Part of where lights are happening. Neon, action. That kind of

stuff.

She still has her fringe membership. Live theater on the island.

On the telly, an ad for Myrtle Beach here.

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26.

1471 words.

27.

54 minutes ago she was at the laptop. And since then, watching fashion vloggers online and then

the real world, the coffee place at seven in the evening in September. A totally different vibe than

the same place in the morn. Three persons who are perched over their laptops and do not want to

go home. The baristas who are happy and socially interacting. All of the images of Seattle. New

posters about fall drinks. Stuff in pumpkin and foam. Mugs on the wall. The three coffee regions

of the world. Coffee growers. It is kind of askew. Your sense of geography is questioned.

Everybody looks down on a screen. Or a book. The woman in curly hair left her book at home,

something that she started in the morning and is already in, some thirty pages. A weird book. But

they are all weird until you can figure out what is going on. She ponders, what exactly was

Starbucks in Moby Dick. Who was he? Google it here.

She is now back home at the laptop, but she said that already. On the telly, American Ninja

Warrior. People who are so very fit here. In the back, the fashion vlogger, the window is still

open or at least the voice is open, is on. Somebody talking about “how cute”, exclaiming it

happily. NYC fashion week. These are all from February, not the new stuff. It is day three of the

fall fashion week, these on the other hand are archived You Tube videos. Heart shaped polenta,

and once more, “how cute”.

28.

1737 words.

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29.

The woman in curls has no story line as of yet. And maybe she never will have one. The inability

to fashion a story arc. A description of the vacuum. A mere amalgamation of descriptions of

coffee places, restaurants. People on the bus. A woman on the telly, running. Jumping, falling.

Swimming in the water.

30.

The day before she, the woman in curls, watched performances on the island. Two in a row. Two

days before that she had watched one. So, in total, she watched three performances over the

course of three days. With one day of pause in-between the days that she was part of an audience.

All performances were in the afternoon. One was at one in the afternoon, and two of ‘em were at

two in the afternoon. One was on a weekday and two of ‘em were on the weekend, on a

Saturday. One was on a sunny day and one was on a tad more rainy day. When there was rain in

the morning but sunniness during the day. These were all performances in September, by theater

groups from out of town. All were from down South, though one of them had done performances

in Australia and in England. These were all repeat performances. They had toured with the

Fringe. Or not with the Fringe, they had performed at universities in stand-alone performances

about the subject matter at hand. One was about beer drinking, one was about women in science

and one was basically a pantomime a la Marcel Morceau. One was a piece with one actor, one

had two actors and one had four actors, well, three and someone that played music. The

audiences were twenty persons once, fifty the next time and one hundred the other time. The

ticket price was half-priced twice and full-priced once. You had to pay a membership for being

part of the festival. So, all in all this cost thirty bucks Canadian for three hours of live

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entertainment. Pretty steep when compared to catching a movie. But ok for theater. Though one

can catch a free talk at any time in the city, though they are usually later in the day.

In the end, you clapped. At one of the performances, people stood up at the end and clapped

enthusiastically. On the other hand of the spectrum, the reaction of the audience was lukewarm,

and it seemed as if people wanted to leave but were trapped in their places. Nobody threw foul

eggs or tomatoes but it seemed as if they would boo at any moment. The reaction of the people in

the audience was either-or, totally polarized. Some people hated it and others loved it. There was

no in-between, the reaction was either-or, pass or fail. The other ones, the other shows were

entertaining for everyone, the controversial parts were in-between, not harsh enough.

Theater in 2018, what with all the free entertainment everywhere. Telly, a walk thru the city, a

ride on public transport.

Being entertained by total strangers. The history of theater. Which informs the performances. All

are basically experimental ways of drama, and all are loosely tied in with academic institutions.

One of the performers had a bachelor’s degree from NYU in experimental theater. His was the

worst, apparently, they teach a lot of academics but not enough ways of relating to an audience.

On the other hand, his work was very physical, he had worked with cirque de soleil for eight

years. Had been on tour. Which was kind of weird, the person who had the most severe academic

training was actually the most hands-on physical person, borderline acrobatic, it was like

watching the Olympics, you could see that this person was very well-trained, physically, that he

did stuff that was extraordinary, not movements that regular people can do. He was just very very

athletic. Extraordinary so.

31.

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