Tag Archives: glass

Sawtooth Reflections

Posted on by Bill Chance

“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

Downtown Dallas, Texas

When I moved to Dallas, many moons ago, in 1981 – the city center was in a building boom (one of many). Reflective glass hi-rise buildings rose all around me as I walked from the bus stop to my work everyday. I’d go out onto the streets for lunch, eat greasy Chinese food in a little park (if the weather was bearable), and look up at the construction high overhead.

I was fascinated at how many glass hi-rises had curtain walls that were sawtooth-shaped. It easy to figure out why. That shape gives a large number of corner offices – which are loaded with prestige and command a premium price.

For the proletariat eating their egg rolls on the street – they also have cool reflections.

Short Story of the Day, Flash Fiction, The Exceptional Properties of Sea Glass, by Katy Madgwick

Posted on by Bill Chance

“These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.”
― J.G. Ballard

Chihuly glass sculptures in the creek, Dallas Arboretum

My journal entry from Thursday, April 29 1999, comparing the beach in South Texas to the one I had just visited in North Carolina.

Galveston vs. Carolina Beach

Carolina Sweet, thick iced tea, coming to your table sugared. Mint and Magnolia blossoms.

Galveston is a Mezcal town, Bitter and Crazy, with a worm.

In Galveston the seashells are common, piled in drifts. They are all bleached white. In Carolina they are rarer, but beautifully multicolored.

At Carolina Beach the waves slide in with a low rumble and a hiss, moving from glossy patches of reflected sunlight into green walls of translucent glass. They fall lazily onto the sand to fade as lines of white melting foam. Green waves – White foam – Amber sand, Undulate back and forth under the civilized Deep South Sun.

In Galveston the Gulf waves are angry, crashing, powerful violence – smashing with an incredible din. The sun beats mercilessly on it all. The surf stirs the fin dark sand into a gray soup carrying all sorts of flotsam and jetsam; salt smelly Sargasso seaweed, telephone poles, ship’s trash, detritus of the continent brought thousands of miles down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Texas seabirds are loud, insistent, relentless; packs follow a poor morning visitor with his breakfast muffin – cawing Hitchcockian mass of beaks, claws, and wings – waiting for an opening – a chance at a snack.

In Carolina even the gulls are polite and discrete. They float on the breeze or caterwaul in the distance waiting ’till they can eat in private. Maybe behind a dune.

And today’s piece of flash fiction:

The Exceptional Properties of Sea Glass, by Katy Madgwick

from Ellipse Zine

Katy Madgwick Twitter

Short Story (flash fiction) of the Day – Skylight, by Silvina Ocampo

Posted on by Bill Chance

Above the hall in that house with a skylight was another mysterious home, and through the glass you could see a family of feet, surrounded by halos, like saints, and the shadows of the rest of the bodies to which those feet belonged, shadows flattened like hands seen through bathwater.

—- Silvina Ocampo, Skylight

Damian Priour, Austin
Temple (detail)
2000 fossil limestone, glass, steel
In Memory of Buddy Langston 1947-2004
Frisco, Texas

 

Today’s short story is a piece of surreal horror:

Skylight, by Silvina Ocampo

From  The New Yorker

This story was translated from the original Spanish by by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. I’ve never understood why, but fantastic stories written in Spanish have a certain something that allows them to get away with words that English doesn’t – and, somehow, that certain something even comes through in translation. That is usually illustrated in works of magical realism (which are genius in Spanish but often twee and silly in English) but here is true in a story which… well, I’m not sure what is real and what is not – but it could be all real – relates to the horror of almost everyday life.

Greater Clarity Returned To Life

Posted on by Bill Chance

“After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth – clear skies; moist brilliant earth – greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The Cedars, Dallas, Texas

Congealed in the Dark Arteries

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo
Congealed in the dark arteries,
Old veins
That hold Glamorgan’s blood.
The midnight miner in the secret seams,
Limb, life, and bread.

– Rhondda Valley”
― Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems

 

Downtown Dallas, Texas

Almost Swear He’s Being Followed, Or Watched Anyway

Posted on by Bill Chance

But something’s different… something’s … been changed … don’t mean to bitch, folks, but, well for instance he could almost swear he’s being followed, or watched anyway. Some of the tails are pretty slick, but others he can spot, all right. Xmas shopping yesterday at that Woolworth’s, he caught a certain pair of beady eyes in the toy section, past a heap of balsa-wood fighter planes and little-kid-size En-fields. A hint of constancy to what shows up in the rearview mirror of his Humber, no color or model he can pin down but something always present inside the tiny frame, has led him to start checking out other cars when he goes off on a morning’s work.

—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Downtown Dallas, Texas

 

Such Recognitions Are Not Reversible

Posted on by Bill Chance

 At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening, the unmistakable smell of gas came to Pirate from a dark street lamp, and out of the fog ahead materialized a giant, organlike form. Carefully, black-shod step by step, Pirate approached the thing. It began to slide forward to meet him, over the cobblestones slow as a snail, leaving behind some slime brightness of street-wake that could not have been from fog. In the space between them was a crossover point, which Pirate, being a bit faster, reached first. He reeled back, in horror, back past the point – but such recognitions are not reversible. It was a giant Adenoid. At least as big as St. Paul’s, and growing hour by hour. London, perhaps all England, was in mortal peril!

—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Bank of America Plaza, Dallas, Texas

I moved across the cold, wet, foggy city after work. Tired, yet glad the workday was done and I had someplace to go, even if it was only a weekly bookstore discussion of the giant, confusing tome, Gravity’s Rainbow. As I walked from train to streetcar at the midpoint of my journey I looked up at the fog-shrouded tower and thanked the moment of beauty.

Open Your Veins, and Bleed

Posted on by Bill Chance

“You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”
—-Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith (and many others)

Our kitchen cabinets are filled with pint beer glasses emblazoned with local breweries – souvenirs of the visits to many brewery tours and keep-the-glass sampling events.

Deep Ellum Brewing Company – Dallas Blonde

One of these was a little too close to the edge of the kitchen counter when my son’s Lab was looking up there scouring for leftovers and knocked one off – breaking it on the floor – shattering the vessel into a thousand slivery shards. The first nine hundred and ninety are easy to sweep up. The last ten are invisible, sharp and hard, hard to find.

Last night as I walked barefoot through the kitchen to my room, intending to sit down and write for my hour… I found one.

There is an interesting pain profile as a sliver of glass pushes through the thick callus on the bottom of a foot into the tender, live flesh, muscle, and sinew beneath. I doesn’t hurt much… until it does. I hopped on one foot to a countertop and leaned while I searched for the glass. It’s transparent, crystalline and invisible, of course, so I had to feel for it, then pull it out. I glanced at the splinter before throwing it in the trash. It was longer than usual and was red-tipped – but I didn’t think much about it.

I suffer from a form of graphomania and, while most people complain of writer’s block, if I don’t get a solid hour of writing in each day it’s hard for me to go to sleep (writing something good… now, that’s another question – one for another day).

I sat down at my desk and lost myself, writing for an hour or so. I saved my work, and decided it was time to walk back and go to bed. But as I tried to stand up, I realized that my foot was stuck firmly to the floor. That was confusing and unsettling, why couldn’t I lift my foot up from the painted concrete – I was floored. Looking down into the murk under my desk I saw that my foot was centered in a dark-colored disk of some glue-like material that was intent on keeping it there. I had already forgotten what had happened only an hour before – so I guessed I had spilled some fruit drink or something and it had dried into a sticky trap.

So I redoubled my efforts and with a viscous pop my foot came up. It wasn’t until a few minutes later I remembered the glass sliver and realized my foot had been stuck to the floor by a pool of drying blood. I hadn’t moved my foot for over an hour, plenty of time to bleed, coagulate, and adhere.

Not much I could do, so I went to sleep. Today, I found dark crimson crescents of blood scattered throughout the house – I didn’t realize how much I walked around last night.

Time to get out the mop.

Glass from Wine Walk
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas

Lakewood Brewing Company, French Quarter Temptress, Special Glass, Brewed, Fort Worth, Texas

The Cracked Plate

Posted on by Bill Chance

“the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

cracked window, McKinney, Texas