Posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 9:16:22
In reply to Re: fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3, posted by Jai Narayan on August 28, 2004, at 8:19:45
Well, I told you my mind and emotions were all over the map when I was writing this. You're right; it was written in three sessions on three separate days. In part one I can see the pure melancholy and existential dread that was so dominant in my way of thinking at the time. And in part three I see me wrestling with my inner demons and ultimately losing; the highly cynical ending with the narrator unapologetically taking the moral low road gives a pretty good idea of what I thought about the human race at the time. But somehow, in between the two, I generated this character, Fulgencio, who has accepted the harsh hand that life dealt him with grace and good humor, and displays immense compassion. Though a ghost, he is, in fact, more alive and more human than the narrator, who has become a monster by the story's end. Some small part of myself that hadn't been warped by the out-of-control illness surfaces in the guise of Fulgencio, only to fade away (as he literally does in the story, although that thought hadn't occurred to me until this very second) when I sat down to write the violent struggle and moral failure that wrap things up. In retrospect, this story is interesting to me as a way of looking back at the way my malfunctioning mind was cycling at the time. If I were to write the story now, I think it would be mostly about Fulgencio as a kind of urban spirit guide. He did seem to come to me pretty much full-blown. I can't explain why I decided to make him Cuban, but how he looked and what had happened to him all came in a flash. I went online to Google up an interesting, non-stereotypical Cuban name, and loved the musicality of "Fulgencio." It suited him; I knew it was the right name the moment I saw it amid a list of Cuban male names. As for the carnivorous sidewalks and the odd relationship of the various "organs" that make up New York City, well, if you're surrounded by this environment your whole life, you start to see it as being a kind of gigantic living organism. At least I do. And now, back to poetry. :) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:383249
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040828/msgs/383280.html