It wasn't long ago. My sleep had been fine (almost telephone free) when, after a silver dawn had painted a pale light into my bedroom, I discovered the wild, crazy tiger. He was knawing on my socks!
It is enough to wake one up. Here I am now, in the lifeboat, on a fairly oily and cremulous sea, and mulling over my chances to arrive at a distant church although I can see its ancient spire above a hill. I have also placed my wild tiger into the lifeboat. The cat's tail seems to read my thoughts about the church and to navigate all at once.
My investigations of the island have been fruitful. My grandmother was a baker in town, and bakers, in this town, are very important. So much so that she had been given the only key to the town's only library. And so one night, when everyone was asleep or watching grandfather on television, my grandmother stole me past the bakery, past a yard for chickens, to a small, silver door on a blank, purple wall. Inside, it was madly dark, but she had brought matches, and a candle. My grandmother was pretty as a young woman, and dressed racily then as she does now. And so, as I crept forward in the dark, her hand pressed firmly to my lower back, I could smell the lavender in her clothes, in her skin, in my dreams of the tall, fabled church.
---
Justin Dobbs has work in elimae, 3:AM Magazine, and Billy Sauce's Fortune-Telling Blog. He lives in Seattle and New York.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The Formula by John Olson
Alfred Egmont was in a bad mood. It was 5:00 in the morning and still dark. Rain was falling heavily and he and his wife Linda were driving south on I-5 to Sea-Tac to catch a plane for San Francisco. They were flying to San Francisco to see an exhibit at the de Young museum, a collection of Baroque art including Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens and The Maids of Honor by Diego Velázquez.
Alfred had anticipated little traffic, but was surprised to find the freeway already bustling with trucks and taxis and buses and shuttles, all moving at perplexingly high speeds. Each time a truck or Escalade or Hummer sliced through the rain the leviathans created a rooster-tail which compromised all visibility. Alfred was tense. He was having difficulty making out the lanes. He repeated a phrase: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a life-boat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat. He turned it round and round in his mind like marmalade, a gooey mantra of soothing translucence. The phrase had been coined by a friend as an example of literary prescription, a formula for generating stories. Stories about boys and tigers. Stories about religion and survival. Stories about God and water. When Alfred’s mood began to darken in bile, or his level of stress rose from truculent to screaming, he ran the phrase through his brain as a counterweight, a bromidic equation whose arrangement had a certain buoyancy to it.
The source of Alfred’s bad mood, in part, was an incident that had taken place the day before. A crew of landscapers were working on the yard of the house being remodeled next to their apartment building. They had parked two trucks in the easement leading to their parking lot. Alfred had gone out to drive down to the store where Linda worked and pick her up but was blocked. He asked if they could move their trucks. The workers looked up and gave him a look of sour confusion. A man dropped his shovel, shouted something in a foreign language at one of the other men, and the trucks were moved. But when Alfred and Linda returned home, the easement was blocked with the trucks again. He was going to park in the street, but then Linda suggested she go and ask them to move their trucks. She worried about their car being stolen, or getting whacked by a negligent motorist as it had been clobbered already several times when it had been parked on a city street, and the perpetrators had not left a note. Why would they? Why give a shit, if it’s not your car?
Alfred could not figure out why the landscapers had parked in the easement. Neither of the trucks were in use. They were simply parked there. Once more, shovels were dropped, looks were exchanged, and the trucks were moved. But one of the trucks had chosen to occupy the spot that Alfred normally used to get their car turned around. He was forced to back in to their slot in a manner to which he was unaccustomed, and as he tried to maneuver the car around, the front end of their car knocked the dumpster. There was a kawhack, followed by the groan of metal rolling back on stubborn little wheels. He felt foolish. He got out to take a look and saw some dents and scrapes near their front fender. Had those already been there? He could not tell if they were old or if he just now caused them by knocking into the dumpster. This bugged him. He could not get the dents out of his head.
He repeated his mantra, anointing his rancor with his inner marmalade: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat.
But why a cat, Alfred reflected. The story in question concerned a tiger. Perhaps it was a matter of inclusion. Cat was more general. Tiger was very specific. That weighted the mantra. It lost its buoyancy. Cat preserved a certain level of abstraction. Abstraction equaled lightness. Imponderability.
One thing was certain: as of Christmas, 2007, boys would begin taking tigers more seriously. Don’t taunt them, for instance.
Christmas Day, 2007, is the day Tatiana, a 350-pound Siberian tiger, leaped from her grotto at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a seventeen-year old boy and mauled two slightly older brothers. This story was in many ways more interesting than the story of the boy in the lifeboat with the tiger. A book which he, Alfred Egmont, had not yet read, but had only read about, and could not, therefore, pass judgment. Nevertheless, when fiction came up against reality, reality usually won.
What had those boys done to get the tiger so riled? The consensus among the experts, such as tiger trainer Rick Glassey, whose tiger Jake starred in 'Dr. Doolittle', was that it would take a lot more than yelling or urinating or throwing things to get a tiger so mad it would crawl up a 12.5 foot wall and go on the attack. Was that even possible? The evidence was there. Concrete chips had been discovered in the dead tiger’s paws. The tiger’s rage must have been astronomically intense.
What in the world had happened that night? Was it simply the misbehavior of three stoned kids taunting a notoriously cunning predator, or a combination of things, things that exceeded the range of human thought, human experience, things that could only be understand by a feline, a Panthera tigris, a 350-pound tiger confined to a San Francisco grotto? What emotions had been vulcanizing in the tiger for possibly some time, days, months, years? Had the constant spectacle of tourists and their loud behavior chafed against the animal’s sensibility? Animal intelligence--feline intelligence in particular--was a mystery. No less a figure than Michel de Montaigne was sure of a keen intelligence among cats.
The zoo was not on their itinerary, but the tragedy that had so freshly occurred seemed to have colored or imbued Alfred’s perception of the city, which had only just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love a few months ago. Each time he saw someone go by talking on a cell phone with a look of vacant self-satisfaction, or heard the tinny, abrasive singing from a Disney store pour into the street from a loudspeaker, he bristled. Did he and the tiger share a similar rage? A rage against what? Loudness, vulgarity, boorishness? This, of course, was silly. How could a tiger pacing back and forth all day in a zoo grotto have a sense of a fallen world? Was indignation within the purview of a tiger?
Before boarding their plane, Alfred had spent a few minutes browsing a bookstore at the airport. It was there that he had come upon Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi. He was tempted to buy it, but he was already immersed in a novel by Claude Simon called, simply, Histoire. He liked this book for its exquisite details, although he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. The book was all details. There were characters, but the external features of the characters had not yet been described. So far it was a world of hyper-detail, but a world in which no one’s actions or motivations had yet become plain or intelligible. Which Alfred liked. It was writing about writing rather than plot or character development. He enjoyed its stream-of-consciousness dissonances and absorptions, its churn of energetic associations, its agility and focus. There was nothing tame or predictable in it. The writing was unrestricted. Immoderate and wild. Which is not to say the writing was undisciplined. Quite the contrary. It was as vigilant and alert as any animal on the hunt. This was the way writing had to be if it hoped in any way to say the unsayable.
It interested Alfred to see what books were selling. It was comforting to think that enough people still read and enjoyed books to merit the presence of a bookstore at an airport. Each time he entered a Starbucks or Tullys he died a little inside to see everyone sitting at their table gazing into the pixels of a laptop computer. People seemed to know more and more about less and less. This disturbed him. There had once been a time, he thought, in which people like Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag made the news. Now it was people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. It takes critical thinking to keep a democracy together. No wonder the country had a dunce for president.
Alfred and Linda got checked into their hotel and took the elevator to their room. It was a small but tastefully appointed room with pictures of ferns whose fronds had been gracefully rendered, a spacious closet with a courtesy umbrella, and little bottles of soap and lotion in the bathroom.
They had requested a quiet room and the hotel had complied by putting them on the topmost 15TH floor. At home, they were frequently awakened by their neighbors who stomped around in the kitchen sometimes as late as three in the morning. The couple, still in their twenties, liked to go out partying. For reasons that utterly baffled Alfred, the couple would return home at one or two in the morning, slam the front door, stomp up the hallways steps, and head straight for their kitchen, which was directly over his and Linda’s bedroom. Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang.
Why the kitchen? What is so enticing about a kitchen when one comes home from a party, ostensibly drunk or stoned? Wouldn’t bed be a more attractive destination? Alfred had spoken to them directly about this problem, explaining that the floor was so hollow that he and Linda could hear their microwave ding, but when they continued to make their usual noise Alfred had resorted to using a broom, whacking the ceiling hard enough to leave dents. This did no good either. The symphony continued: Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang. Their stay at the hotel would be a welcome relief.
But shortly after midnight he and Linda were awaken by loud voices. Someone was partying in the room next to theirs.
Alfred got out of bed.
'What are you going to do?' Linda asked.
'I don’t know,' said Alfred.
'Well I wish you’d stop pacing,' said Linda. 'You’re making me nervous. You look like some animal in a cage.'
Alfred dug some ear plugs out of their bag. He gave two to Linda, and stuck two in his ears. He felt the sounds diminish as the cotton wadding expanded in his ears. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat, the phrase returned. The lapping of water, the slop of the silly sea, and a tiger curled up for warmth at the far end of an inflatable raft.
-----
John Olson is the author of The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon, and Eggs & Mirrors. Backscatter, a collection of new and selected work, is just out from Black Widow Press. His work (essays, articles, stories, prose poems, and verbal aquariums) have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, First Intensity, Talisman, Bewildering Stories, The Raven Chronicles, and The Absinthe Literary Review). He lives in Seattle with his wife (and poet) Roberta Olson and their cat Toby.
Alfred had anticipated little traffic, but was surprised to find the freeway already bustling with trucks and taxis and buses and shuttles, all moving at perplexingly high speeds. Each time a truck or Escalade or Hummer sliced through the rain the leviathans created a rooster-tail which compromised all visibility. Alfred was tense. He was having difficulty making out the lanes. He repeated a phrase: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a life-boat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat. He turned it round and round in his mind like marmalade, a gooey mantra of soothing translucence. The phrase had been coined by a friend as an example of literary prescription, a formula for generating stories. Stories about boys and tigers. Stories about religion and survival. Stories about God and water. When Alfred’s mood began to darken in bile, or his level of stress rose from truculent to screaming, he ran the phrase through his brain as a counterweight, a bromidic equation whose arrangement had a certain buoyancy to it.
The source of Alfred’s bad mood, in part, was an incident that had taken place the day before. A crew of landscapers were working on the yard of the house being remodeled next to their apartment building. They had parked two trucks in the easement leading to their parking lot. Alfred had gone out to drive down to the store where Linda worked and pick her up but was blocked. He asked if they could move their trucks. The workers looked up and gave him a look of sour confusion. A man dropped his shovel, shouted something in a foreign language at one of the other men, and the trucks were moved. But when Alfred and Linda returned home, the easement was blocked with the trucks again. He was going to park in the street, but then Linda suggested she go and ask them to move their trucks. She worried about their car being stolen, or getting whacked by a negligent motorist as it had been clobbered already several times when it had been parked on a city street, and the perpetrators had not left a note. Why would they? Why give a shit, if it’s not your car?
Alfred could not figure out why the landscapers had parked in the easement. Neither of the trucks were in use. They were simply parked there. Once more, shovels were dropped, looks were exchanged, and the trucks were moved. But one of the trucks had chosen to occupy the spot that Alfred normally used to get their car turned around. He was forced to back in to their slot in a manner to which he was unaccustomed, and as he tried to maneuver the car around, the front end of their car knocked the dumpster. There was a kawhack, followed by the groan of metal rolling back on stubborn little wheels. He felt foolish. He got out to take a look and saw some dents and scrapes near their front fender. Had those already been there? He could not tell if they were old or if he just now caused them by knocking into the dumpster. This bugged him. He could not get the dents out of his head.
He repeated his mantra, anointing his rancor with his inner marmalade: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat.
But why a cat, Alfred reflected. The story in question concerned a tiger. Perhaps it was a matter of inclusion. Cat was more general. Tiger was very specific. That weighted the mantra. It lost its buoyancy. Cat preserved a certain level of abstraction. Abstraction equaled lightness. Imponderability.
One thing was certain: as of Christmas, 2007, boys would begin taking tigers more seriously. Don’t taunt them, for instance.
Christmas Day, 2007, is the day Tatiana, a 350-pound Siberian tiger, leaped from her grotto at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a seventeen-year old boy and mauled two slightly older brothers. This story was in many ways more interesting than the story of the boy in the lifeboat with the tiger. A book which he, Alfred Egmont, had not yet read, but had only read about, and could not, therefore, pass judgment. Nevertheless, when fiction came up against reality, reality usually won.
What had those boys done to get the tiger so riled? The consensus among the experts, such as tiger trainer Rick Glassey, whose tiger Jake starred in 'Dr. Doolittle', was that it would take a lot more than yelling or urinating or throwing things to get a tiger so mad it would crawl up a 12.5 foot wall and go on the attack. Was that even possible? The evidence was there. Concrete chips had been discovered in the dead tiger’s paws. The tiger’s rage must have been astronomically intense.
What in the world had happened that night? Was it simply the misbehavior of three stoned kids taunting a notoriously cunning predator, or a combination of things, things that exceeded the range of human thought, human experience, things that could only be understand by a feline, a Panthera tigris, a 350-pound tiger confined to a San Francisco grotto? What emotions had been vulcanizing in the tiger for possibly some time, days, months, years? Had the constant spectacle of tourists and their loud behavior chafed against the animal’s sensibility? Animal intelligence--feline intelligence in particular--was a mystery. No less a figure than Michel de Montaigne was sure of a keen intelligence among cats.
The zoo was not on their itinerary, but the tragedy that had so freshly occurred seemed to have colored or imbued Alfred’s perception of the city, which had only just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love a few months ago. Each time he saw someone go by talking on a cell phone with a look of vacant self-satisfaction, or heard the tinny, abrasive singing from a Disney store pour into the street from a loudspeaker, he bristled. Did he and the tiger share a similar rage? A rage against what? Loudness, vulgarity, boorishness? This, of course, was silly. How could a tiger pacing back and forth all day in a zoo grotto have a sense of a fallen world? Was indignation within the purview of a tiger?
Before boarding their plane, Alfred had spent a few minutes browsing a bookstore at the airport. It was there that he had come upon Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi. He was tempted to buy it, but he was already immersed in a novel by Claude Simon called, simply, Histoire. He liked this book for its exquisite details, although he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. The book was all details. There were characters, but the external features of the characters had not yet been described. So far it was a world of hyper-detail, but a world in which no one’s actions or motivations had yet become plain or intelligible. Which Alfred liked. It was writing about writing rather than plot or character development. He enjoyed its stream-of-consciousness dissonances and absorptions, its churn of energetic associations, its agility and focus. There was nothing tame or predictable in it. The writing was unrestricted. Immoderate and wild. Which is not to say the writing was undisciplined. Quite the contrary. It was as vigilant and alert as any animal on the hunt. This was the way writing had to be if it hoped in any way to say the unsayable.
It interested Alfred to see what books were selling. It was comforting to think that enough people still read and enjoyed books to merit the presence of a bookstore at an airport. Each time he entered a Starbucks or Tullys he died a little inside to see everyone sitting at their table gazing into the pixels of a laptop computer. People seemed to know more and more about less and less. This disturbed him. There had once been a time, he thought, in which people like Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag made the news. Now it was people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. It takes critical thinking to keep a democracy together. No wonder the country had a dunce for president.
Alfred and Linda got checked into their hotel and took the elevator to their room. It was a small but tastefully appointed room with pictures of ferns whose fronds had been gracefully rendered, a spacious closet with a courtesy umbrella, and little bottles of soap and lotion in the bathroom.
They had requested a quiet room and the hotel had complied by putting them on the topmost 15TH floor. At home, they were frequently awakened by their neighbors who stomped around in the kitchen sometimes as late as three in the morning. The couple, still in their twenties, liked to go out partying. For reasons that utterly baffled Alfred, the couple would return home at one or two in the morning, slam the front door, stomp up the hallways steps, and head straight for their kitchen, which was directly over his and Linda’s bedroom. Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang.
Why the kitchen? What is so enticing about a kitchen when one comes home from a party, ostensibly drunk or stoned? Wouldn’t bed be a more attractive destination? Alfred had spoken to them directly about this problem, explaining that the floor was so hollow that he and Linda could hear their microwave ding, but when they continued to make their usual noise Alfred had resorted to using a broom, whacking the ceiling hard enough to leave dents. This did no good either. The symphony continued: Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang. Their stay at the hotel would be a welcome relief.
But shortly after midnight he and Linda were awaken by loud voices. Someone was partying in the room next to theirs.
Alfred got out of bed.
'What are you going to do?' Linda asked.
'I don’t know,' said Alfred.
'Well I wish you’d stop pacing,' said Linda. 'You’re making me nervous. You look like some animal in a cage.'
Alfred dug some ear plugs out of their bag. He gave two to Linda, and stuck two in his ears. He felt the sounds diminish as the cotton wadding expanded in his ears. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat, the phrase returned. The lapping of water, the slop of the silly sea, and a tiger curled up for warmth at the far end of an inflatable raft.
-----
John Olson is the author of The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon, and Eggs & Mirrors. Backscatter, a collection of new and selected work, is just out from Black Widow Press. His work (essays, articles, stories, prose poems, and verbal aquariums) have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, First Intensity, Talisman, Bewildering Stories, The Raven Chronicles, and The Absinthe Literary Review). He lives in Seattle with his wife (and poet) Roberta Olson and their cat Toby.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
A Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat by Brandon Scott Gorrell
"Can I tell you where you will predict me," the boy said. "You will be right probably."
"Do you know where we are?" said the cat.
"What does it matter?" the boy said.
A wave happened, and the boy fell into the cat's chest. The boy rested there, in the cat's chest, inhaling the smell: a tiger, something alive, something affecting him, a little.
The boy was nothing and all things and the lifeboat existed in an array of situations which the boy had both processed and would eventually be willing to process. The cat sat beside him, analyzing.
"That wave there," the cat said. "Its crest seems different. Is there brown on that crest? What does that crest mean? What about the wave? Does that matter? What is the relationship between the crest and the wave?"
"Yes, there is brown on that crest," the boy said.
The lifeboat shifted to a new wave.
"All crests seem the same," the boy said. "I'm not sure."
"What's going to happen," the cat said.
The boy looked at the cat and at the waves and at the crests. The lifeboat swayed and rocked, and the boy could think of nothing beyond his immediate situation. The cat couldn't, either. The boy and the cat and the lifeboat drifted.
Over mountains underneath water. Above a constantly shifting gradient. On a never ending moving walkway.
"Everything's certain," the boy said.
"Everything's certain," the cat echoed.
The lifeboat waited for something to happen.
----
Brandon Scott Gorrell lives and works in Seattle as a freelance writer. His work can be found or is forthcoming at Pindeldyboz, elimae, 3:AM, Lamination Colony, Dogmatika, NANO Fiction, and other places. His first poetry book, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is forthcoming from Muumuu House. He blogs here.
"Do you know where we are?" said the cat.
"What does it matter?" the boy said.
A wave happened, and the boy fell into the cat's chest. The boy rested there, in the cat's chest, inhaling the smell: a tiger, something alive, something affecting him, a little.
The boy was nothing and all things and the lifeboat existed in an array of situations which the boy had both processed and would eventually be willing to process. The cat sat beside him, analyzing.
"That wave there," the cat said. "Its crest seems different. Is there brown on that crest? What does that crest mean? What about the wave? Does that matter? What is the relationship between the crest and the wave?"
"Yes, there is brown on that crest," the boy said.
The lifeboat shifted to a new wave.
"All crests seem the same," the boy said. "I'm not sure."
"What's going to happen," the cat said.
The boy looked at the cat and at the waves and at the crests. The lifeboat swayed and rocked, and the boy could think of nothing beyond his immediate situation. The cat couldn't, either. The boy and the cat and the lifeboat drifted.
Over mountains underneath water. Above a constantly shifting gradient. On a never ending moving walkway.
"Everything's certain," the boy said.
"Everything's certain," the cat echoed.
The lifeboat waited for something to happen.
----
Brandon Scott Gorrell lives and works in Seattle as a freelance writer. His work can be found or is forthcoming at Pindeldyboz, elimae, 3:AM, Lamination Colony, Dogmatika, NANO Fiction, and other places. His first poetry book, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is forthcoming from Muumuu House. He blogs here.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Tiger in a Lifeboat™ by Matt Briggs
The main problem was that the tiger would either eat the child in the first half-hour of the show, or the tiger would act like a big house cat until it starved to death. The desired effect of the show was that the cat would behave like a house cat with the inevitable, intended promise that it would eventually, freak out and eat the boy. The boy through cunning and guile had to survive -- not that the boy would survive because he had bonded with the cat. This was the problem they had uncovered after going through several hundred test boys -- that is boys without any clear identifying information that they had bought from the homes on the streets of LA. Four hundred bucks could buy a functional seven-year or eight-year old. They preferred English speakers, but many of the boys spoke Spanish. One boy spoke a haunted babble they could not identify but thought might be Linear Pict X. Thirty of the boys died within minutes of getting launched in the test lot with the tiger.
They tested five tigers -- and this became a problem, too, because the tigers that learned to kill continued to kill (and got better at executing the boys) and so the producers learned that once a tiger did the kill, it would keep killing. And this became part of their thought process in putting the boys in the boat with the tiger. They would have to have a supply of tigers, as well.
Of course, all of the boys had to die because no one could know how they had perfected the show. It had a lot of problems, this show. It was a delicate balance to get it to work.
Yann Martel had to be contacted and he threatened to sue if they went ahead with the show. The public domain idea, he said, was a boy and a wild cat. A boy and a tiger in a lifeboat, I have that copyrighted. If you do this, my lawyers will contact you. So they paid him a half-million dollars for the rights and threatened to say they would call it “Yann Martel’s Tiger in a Lifeboat,” playing both to his ego (like anyone even knew who this guy was) and his pretension, what kind of literary guy was he if he’d originated a reality cable show?
Reality was played out anyway. This was a latch ditch effort to get some interest behind the show. Early one morning in a warehouse in Burbank, they launched the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat, and waited.
------
Originally posted at Semantikon (along with an MP3). A version with music provided by Christopher Chaplin was posted at MacJams.
They tested five tigers -- and this became a problem, too, because the tigers that learned to kill continued to kill (and got better at executing the boys) and so the producers learned that once a tiger did the kill, it would keep killing. And this became part of their thought process in putting the boys in the boat with the tiger. They would have to have a supply of tigers, as well.
Of course, all of the boys had to die because no one could know how they had perfected the show. It had a lot of problems, this show. It was a delicate balance to get it to work.
Yann Martel had to be contacted and he threatened to sue if they went ahead with the show. The public domain idea, he said, was a boy and a wild cat. A boy and a tiger in a lifeboat, I have that copyrighted. If you do this, my lawyers will contact you. So they paid him a half-million dollars for the rights and threatened to say they would call it “Yann Martel’s Tiger in a Lifeboat,” playing both to his ego (like anyone even knew who this guy was) and his pretension, what kind of literary guy was he if he’d originated a reality cable show?
Reality was played out anyway. This was a latch ditch effort to get some interest behind the show. Early one morning in a warehouse in Burbank, they launched the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat, and waited.
------
Originally posted at Semantikon (along with an MP3). A version with music provided by Christopher Chaplin was posted at MacJams.
Introducing A Boy, a Cat, and a LifeBoat
This blog is a series of short stories based on the public domain idea of a boy, a wild cat, and a boy stuck in a lifeboat. The idea became an international open source idea when the Canadian Yann Martel retold a story by Brizilian writer Moacyr Scliar as The Life of Pi. Martel hadn’t even read Scliar's work. However he had read a review in the The New York Times Book Review that Martel mysteriously attributed to John Upike. (Updike for his part, does not recall having written this review.)
In turn this blog is a sequence of stories based simply on the idea of: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat. Just as Martel didn’t read Scliar, I am not suggesting that anyone read Martel. The open source idea is: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat.
If you are interested in contributing a story concerning a boy, a wild cat (such as a tiger), and a lifeboat in any style or form that pleases you, it be my pleasure to receive this story at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail so that I can post it here.
My own story, a Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat will be released in a collection of stories called The End is the Beginning on April 16th, 2007 by Final State Press.
In turn this blog is a sequence of stories based simply on the idea of: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat. Just as Martel didn’t read Scliar, I am not suggesting that anyone read Martel. The open source idea is: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat.
If you are interested in contributing a story concerning a boy, a wild cat (such as a tiger), and a lifeboat in any style or form that pleases you, it be my pleasure to receive this story at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail so that I can post it here.
My own story, a Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat will be released in a collection of stories called The End is the Beginning on April 16th, 2007 by Final State Press.
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