An excerpt from Lionel Shriver’s recent address to the Brisbane Writer’s Festival:

What stories are “implicitly ours to tell,” and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.

I’m hoping that crime writers, for example, don’t all have personal experience of committing murder. Me, I’ve depicted a high school killing spree, and I hate to break it to you: I’ve never shot fatal arrows through seven kids, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker, either. We make things up, we chance our arms, sometimes we do a little research, but in the end it’s still about what we can get away with – what we can put over on our readers.

Because the ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction. Someone like me only permits herself to write from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt. All that’s left is memoir.

And here’s the bugbear, here’s where we really can’t win. At the same time that we’re to write about only the few toys that landed in our playpen, we’re also upbraided for failing to portray in our fiction a population that is sufficiently various.

By the way, I am listening to an Arvo Pärtapalooza on WQXR right now (it’s his birthday), appropriately sober given that other event fifteen years ago, Hattin 2.0.

Might be good while you’re grilling up some brisket, or even with the sound of the game turned down.

From this story at the Dark Horizons website, it looks like we’re finally going to get that run of Tetris movies everybody’s been clamoring for.

But a trilogy?

For TETRIS?!? Am I the only one who see how big an aesthetic blunder this is?!?!?!

And of course such a whopping aesthetic blunder means many, many missed marketing opportunities.

We obviously need FOUR of these movies.

Tetralogy, people. Tetralogy.

Yeesh.

I ask again: why am I not running a major studio?

At the Very First 4th of July Picnic
The host announced to those about to eat,
“BBQ is served. Don’t dally! Napkins
are in short supply. Latecomers will need
to use their petticoats and galligaskins!”

At the Two Hundredth 4th of July Picnic
The host couldn’t drink enough to slake
his thirst after so much Shake ’n Bake.

Land of the Free: the Story of Stalking Cat
After talking it over with his Tribal Chief,
Dennis decided to follow the Way of the Tiger.
A psychiatrist might diagnose zoanthropy,
but this new kitten decided he was no man. So he
had surgeons do some work a la feline motif:
implanted whiskers, a bifurcated lip, pointed ears,
a lot of tattooed stripes (he didn’t buy fur),
and the final touch – teeth filed sharp as shears.

Vicious and Superstitious
An auger watching the flight paths of birds
might as well look at turds,
a haruspex can’t really see the future quiver
in bird guts or a sheep liver,
and determining guilt seems awfully chancy
in resorting to alphitomancy.

For the Union Dead

Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die–
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year–
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.