CONFRONTING FINAL CHAPTER OF "STRINGER"

Now to the point of resolution of the first draft of my short novel "Stringer" -- novella length I guess,  according to the chart below, about 24,000 words or so. Probably will end up about 120 pages, paperback length, unless revisions broaden or shorten it. Okay, enough anxiety. Time to get it on with what I think is the final chapter ...
Later ... Draft written -- now the next hard part, editing, revisions, assessments ...

Classification	Word count
Novel	over 40,000 words
Novella	17,500 to 40,000 words
Novelette	7,500 to 17,500 words
Short story	under 7,500 words

SYNOPSIS OF "POLITICAL GRACE:THE GIFT OF RESISTANCE"

Below is an extended synopsis of my book "Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance," available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble as well as other book sellers. Its web page is http://www.wildclearing.com/politicalgrace.html 


Synopsis (Prologue)
Philosophy and theology have increasingly turned to the problem of the rising numbers of people who live in extremely severe and abasing conditions of oppression, people who are surplus to global economic and political orders which the oppressed define as "neoliberal" and "neocolonial." This work, Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance, is part of that turning, through conversations with those who were and have been living under oppressive conditions, especially in Central America and Mexico, and through conversations with phenomenology, feminist theology, feminist jurisprudence, ethics, and liberation theology.
There is an assertion that divine grace, and the autochthonous organization of the "lifeworld" which phenomenologists discuss, act in concert to seek to enable and empower the flourishing of all things, including humans, who have the reflective capacity to understand, conceptualize, imagine, produce and judge.
The actions of grace and the autochthonous are in a sense the same as they move to privilege places and spaces where flourishing is impeded, to help mediate opportunities for flourishing.
What frequently occurs when people living under oppressive conditions seek to become aware of, or change their circumstances is a backlash by those who control political and economic conditions. This backlash results in resistance. Grace, thus, is the gift of resistance, political and economic, and for the author, nonviolent.There is also an assertion that there is emerging within creation a more intimate and deeper understanding of the connections within which humans thrive together and with the planet, a fragile emergence.
To characterize this emergence the author has employed the neologisms "transintuitivity," "transsubjectivity" and "transreflexivity," each described phenomenologically and theologically. Also asserted is a theology in which the divine is described as emptying itself entirely into creation, empowering through grace and its own risk, through flourishing, through enhancing connections, including those that are considered intuitive, subject-to-subject, and reflexive. These connections, especially present in such sites of resistance as Christian base communities throughout Latin America, can be seen in the daily lives of people who theologize about their circumstances as they seek to discover equitable means of survival within a global economy that has left them surplus.
-- Wes Rehberg

SYNOPSES OF "OPENING THE GATE" SHORT STORIES ...

Brief synopses of the five short stories in my new book “Opening the Gate” are available below. Kindly check them out:

The Enduring”: Two shotgun-bearing elderly sisters who have been forced to look after a disabled but violent teen nephew in their rural home encounter two significant visitors, an ex-convict who worked in forest lumber operations and another who has a plan for their property but runs into trouble.

“The Fog”: A 17-year-old New York City street kid reflects on encounters he had when he was 14, living in a three-room flat with grandparents, his mother and brother, his failure in school, his independence, and a new beginning.

“Scooter”: A scooter-driving drug user moves in with a dying elderly woman alcoholic after a meth house fire, much to the consternation of suburban neighbors.

“Tina’s Nicaragua Story”: A nonfiction recounting of a meeting in northern Nicaragua with a woman whose husband and daughter were killed when contras crossed the nearby border with Honduras and attacked her community.

“Jail Birds”: Offered in the first-person, a narrative told by a clergyman who reluctantly counseled murderers in a county jail and maximum security setting and had trouble in a divided church after a visit to Palestine.

Its web page is here: http://www.wildclearing.com/gate.html 

SALGO ADELANTE ....

Novel "Stringer" is progressing amid mixed publishing results with short stories and poems. Many procedurals demonstrate digital savvyness by the aged protagonist, contra the usual stereotypes laid on older people. (Larsson and other Scandinavian noir novelists influenced the inclusion of tech approaches).

BACK TO NOVEL "STRINGER" - and scoping literary outlets

Day of sustained work on "Stringer," my novel in progress. The POVs were haywire in the beginning pages so I redrafted the first 11.
Also looking at other outlets for two poems that have been "declined." Maybe I'll rework the rejected flash nonfiction piece "Fidel's Gift" too a bit, reconsidering the journalistic style I used. Got to think about the notion that such a style isn't considered "artistic," though.
There are more than 800 literary magazines out there.

SUBMITTED, DECLINED, PUBLISHED IN MAY THUS FAR

A glance of what's happened with my work thus far in May
Four declines, five pending, two poems and a book published

(Chart as of May 14 - updates below)

Submitted again on May 26:
"Orbits" - Poetry - to The Pedestal Magazine
Declined on May 26:
"Orbits" - Poetry (Status change from In-Progress)
Declined on May 22:
"The Smile Hasn't Left" - Poetry (in chart above as In-Progress - status change)
Published:
Book: "Opening the Gate" via Wild Clearing: short stories, poems, on Amazon
Two Poems: "Alien Bones," "Tick Tock" in The Rusty Nail

NEW MORNING TO KEEP ON IN

New morning to keep on in.
I'm fascinated by the will to create, to write, to bring forth art.
So many songs sung by artists who compose them or cover them, fine musicians who ply the cafés, bistros, local scenes, side stages, online video outlets. Poets who publish their own chapbooks or in web literary magazines or just read in local settings. Storytellers who dramatize wherever some may listen. Visual artists and sculptors who may find a gallery, but if not, still persist and show in open markets. Actors, playwrights, dancers who use the streets or may find a stage. Craft people who find niches everywhere to display what they do. I imagine the profusion of those working and am awestruck.
This very moment even.
And I love to create, to write, to film at times, to photograph, to publish as well, so it goes on. The agony, the discovery, the journey, the connection with something within from which comes form and content influenced by what the senses have discovered exterior to me. That inexplicable will to shape something new.

AT THIS AGE . . .

. . . It's harder to be patient with traditional processes of authoring, especially when an array of self-publishing options are available. Not that these guarantee acceptance in a marketplace, or critically, or even get a reading.
The thing is to just keep on writing despite rejections, or fears of these. As one poet I know wrote, the demand for books, or any creative piece for that matter, is far lower than the output of works created by those who pursue their craft. Even in the digital era.

WRITTEN, SUBMITTED, PUBLISHED IN MAY THUS FAR

Written:
Three poems: "Orbits," "Looking," "Semblance"
Flash Nonfiction: "Fidel's Gift"
Novel: "Stringer" - in progress
Short Story: "Jail Birds"
Submitted:
Flash Nonfiction: "Fidel's Gift" to Flashquake
Short Story: "Scooter" to eFiction
Two poems: "No Wind, No Keel," "The Smile Hasn't Left" to Future Cycle Press
Published:
Book: "Opening the Gate" via CreateSpace (Self-published) short stories, poems
Two Poems: "Alien Bones," "Tick Tock" in The Rusty Nail
(As of May 14)


Notice on May 15
One poem rejected - "No Wind, No Keel"
Notice on May 20
Flash Nonfiction rejected - "Fidel's Gift"

ORBITS -- A READING -- NEW POEM

Trying something different, a reading of my new poem Orbits ...

"OPENING THE GATE" NOW ON SALE ...

Sales channels for my new book "Opening the Gate" are now open  and can be accessed at its web page
http://www.wildclearing.com/gate.html -- check it out --

Opening the Gate

Short Stories and Poetry by Wes Rehberg

Authored by Wes Rehberg"Opening the Gate" is a collection of five short stories and five poems by author Wes Rehberg, some which include fictionalized biographical elements and as well draw from his experience as a print journalist and social justice activist. Titles of the short stories are "The Enduring," "The Fog," "Scooter," "Tina's Nicaragua Story," and "Jail Birds." Two of the poems have appeared in the literary journal, The Rusty Nail. "Alien Bones" and "Tick Tock."

"OPENING THE GATE" PROOFS ...

Correcting proofs of my second book, "Opening the Gate," a collection of five stories and poems -- the mistakes I've made but seem to overlook until things get to a stage like this.

"JAIL BIRDS" REDUX -- FINAL DRAFT

I believe I now have a final draft of my short story "Jail Birds," written in the first person. The opening paragraph is below:

The guard brought me to a tiny room with a small wooden table and two chairs. He opened the door, showed me the button to push if I needed help and told me to take a chair. The guard then walked toward the county jail’s cells to retrieve an itinerant young man, accused of murdering a boy, 14-years-old. The charges alleged that the accused man killed the boy, strangled him, after he keyed a scratch on the man’s car door. I was there because he requested a jail minister. This was during a time I volunteered to do prison ministry. Now, years later,  I find myself musing about his situation and others I encountered in this work. Especially those that involved homicides. I’m also writing this as a way of thinking back on things. It seems appropriate now. ...

SYNOPSIS FOR "JAIL BIRDS"

Synopsis for "Jail Birds"
"Jail Birds" is a first-person fiction short story about a prison minister who reflects on encounters with men accused and convicted of homicides, his differences with church doctrine, his troubles as a church pastor, especially after a trip to the Mideast, and the realization he comes to - first draft completed.

TWO POEMS PUBLISHED ...

The literary magazine "The Rusty Nail" has published two of my poems in its online edition. The poems -- "Alien Bones" and "Tick Tock" -- will be published in its print edition as well. Link is http://www.rustynailmag.com/wrehbergpoems.html

SACRED CABIN, SACRED EARTH

Our cabin, sacred to us, sits in a clearing at an elevation of 1,800 feet on Tuscarora Mountain, a massive shale outcropping formed when glaciers halted their movement southward in the Ice Age. The mountain’s name is tribal, and long after the glaciers moved south, the tribal history began when indigenous people, the Tuscaroras migrated north to this region, eventually to be part of the Iroquois Nation. For we two here now, the iceberg and native history are still very present. Like a confluence - icebergs, Tuscaroras, now us, a place we in our lives have inhabited on-and-off for 21 years.

This mountain and others nearby are considered the high peaks of Broome County in upstate New York, in southeastern Broome through which the Susquehanna River flows on its winding journey to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Its terrain has been quarried for bluestone shale, including our 5-acre site, the quarriers often independent locals eking out a living. It has also been logged, though portions of the area are protected woodlands, and it now is the target of natural gas exploiters because it is lies within the northern sector of the vast Appalachian Marcellus Shale deposit, the gas reachable through the shale layers by the toxic drilling method called hydrofracturing, fracking for short.

Our piece of land bares its ancient history in the shale outcroppings that show through the soil, its native history in the sense we have that it feels and seems all too apparently to have been a worship site, a spiritual space, and its so-called American history in the dirt road that passes by, in the logging and quarrying evidence, in the nearby few neighbors, mostly of European descent, in the nearby dwindling dairy farms, and in the constant efforts of speculators to exploit its surface and depths for wood, stone and fuel.

Yet, and there is a yet, for our time here it will remain sacred in the presence of its history and what we still may be able to share and preserve, with it, in its transfiguration.

EARLY MORNING WRITER

STORIES OF COMPASSION AMID DESPAIR

I struggle with ways to tell these stories ... 

A refugee camp in Chiapas, in southern México, the year 1998 - the mothers and children here were survivors of a massacre by paramilitaries. We met them and accompanied them on one of our human-rights journeys. The prevailing attitude of those who cared for them - radical Jesuits - was compassion. Compassion in the midst of despair. Sometimes that seems so rare.

Survivor Photo (5) - Young Tzotzil Mayan women and children in a Chiapas, Mexico refugee camp, survivors of the massacre of 45 kinspeople in Acteal in 1997, whom we accompanied back to the massacre site a year later for a commemoration of those slain by paramilitaries. © Wes Rehberg

JAILBIRDS STORY, HEAVY METAL, MR. BOJANGLES

Writing my "Jailbirds" story, I wondered whether the chunks of sound of barred-doors closing influenced "heavy metal."
I also thought about Jerry Jeff Walker's song Mr. Bojangles, who liked to dance, and in his cell "jumped so high, jumped so high, then he lightly touched down ..."

BRASS ...

Just laid out a paperback-size book of four short stories and five poems -- like a brazen neophyte ...
Might add a couple of other pieces -- still in process

CUBA VISIT AND A U.S. PENALTY ...

I'll be writing a story about this at some time, too - nonfiction -- 

One of two intriguing visits ...

"JAILBIRDS" -- fictionalized nonfiction short story

   I've begun writing a fictionalized nonfiction short story drawn from murderers and events I encountered while doing prison ministry in an upstate New York county jail and a maximun security prison.
   Its tentative beginning is this:
   
   "The guard brought me to a tiny room with a wooden table and two chairs, opened the door, showed me the button to push if I needed help, and told me to take a chair. He walked toward the county jail wing where an itinerant young man was behind bars, accused of murdering a boy, 13-years-old. The charges indicated that the accused killed the boy after he keyed a scratch on the imprisoned man’s car door. I was there because he requested a prison minister ..."

    

"TINA'S STORY" draft completed

   Wrote a draft of "Tina's Story," a short nonfiction piece about a woman my spouse Eileen I met in northern Nicaragua in 1992 who shared leadership in a base-community cooperative there. This was a region that constantly faced invasion by U.S. supported "Contras," who were also responsible for the deaths of her daughter and husband during an onslaught into Tina's cooperative and a nearby village. About 1,000 words. 
   Read the story aloud at "Wide Open Floor" at the Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga, TN. It moved ...

"OPENING THE GATE"

     Thinking about putting together a book of fiction and nonfiction short stories and poems called "Opening the Gate" to try to launch my new effort in fiction writing and poetry and renew my nonfiction effort. The short stories are "Scooter," "The Fog," and "The Enduring." One of the nonfiction pieces is "Amanecera's Story." Two of the poems are scheduled for publication in "The Rusty Nail" electronic/print literary magazine. A curious amalgam, no doubt.
     The content may change as I work through this ... still very formative, especially the quality, but I'm learning, with help from the Chattanooga Writers Guild workshops.
     Also, I'm recirculating "Down Home With Dalton," 74-minute documentary film about Dalton Roberts, songwriter, performer, storyteller, and former Hamilton County county executive in Tennessee. This was filmed with songwriter-performers Martha Ann Brooks and Donnie Jenkins. This will be available shortly through Amazon.

PROCESS EQUALS ...

Perception ... imagination ... presentation ... arrangement ... representation ... rearrangement ... re-representation ... and on until, maybe, dissemination ...

THE CURSE ...

Creativity is a curse. I feel like I'm wandering in a maze of mirrors. On the mirrors are thoughts I convince myself to collect and try to make sense of. When (and if) I come out, there's supposed to be a finished work ... 

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

Passing stages and phases, hard to fathom how it goes. I've suspended work in video art and filmmaking, in the Video Curio Theater, my dimly-lit backstreet internet venue for the experimental work. Writing seems to be the creative thing, more intimate and integral, though why I can't say.

I mourn this transition a little because of the seven years I've invested, a couple of good documentaries filmed, some social issues exposed, experimental work I feel was innovative. I'm not a good judge, though, and it was becoming tiresome, both in the doing and the pondering.

I'm not sure about this course either, the writing. But here I am.

"RUSTY NAIL" TO PUBLISH 2 POEMS - BOOK IS ON AMAZON

The online and print literary magazine "The Rusty Nail" has accepted two of my poems for publication -- "Alien Bones" and "Tick Tock." Exciting news to me ... I'll link to them when it happens.

Also, "Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance" is now available on Amazon.com at this link ... Check it out please.

BACKGROUND FOR "POLITICAL GRACE" IS FIRST-HAND ...

These are scenes from a few of the sites of resistance we've visited that helped shape some of the background and reflections that are part of "Political Grace: A Gift of Resistance" ... scenes from Chiapas, Mexico; El Salvador; Palestine, in this view ... photos aren't in the book ...

To explore our human-rights work more deeply visit the Rehberg Institute web site.

"POLITICAL GRACE: THE GIFT OF RESISTANCE" NOW ON SALE ...

My paperback "Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance" is now available for purchase at this Create Space link and soon at Amazon.com -- Check it out ! ... Synopsis viewable at Create Space as well -- And, links for purchase and a synopsis are also viewable on its own web page here on our site ....

"THE FOG" - Short story -- first page ...

THE FOG -- first page - short story -- final draft (I believe) --

The fog. Enoch felt secure in its midst.

It muted city sounds. It was a cloak that left the sensation that he was connected, like with a visible spirit, yet separate, suspended.

He always seemed to himself a little distant, out of place. Yes, he played with others, stickball in the schoolyard, punchball, stoopball, roller hockey on the streets, was even good at it. But there was a division between all this and himself that he knew but couldn't fathom.

“Maybe it’s my name,” he thought, walking down narrow 208th Street to a corner candy store -- “Enoch Jubal.” Some his age would call him “Jewboy.”

“Or maybe it’s just me,” he’d think.

Actually, his Hungarian-born grandfather was a Catholic, his grandmother a Lutheran, and Enoch a skeptical communicant in the Catholic church. His grandfather had an Austrian name, Rothpauer, but his drinking buddies called him “Rummy.” “Rummy Jewboy,” the young boys would say, teasing maliciously, when Enoch let on about his grandfather’s nickname.

“Or, maybe I’ll never know,” he thought.

Walking in the fog that day, a wisp of mist rose from the street’s manhole covers. Sewer smell. It carried. He let himself feel enveloped by that too...

MAKING THE SONG ...

"The poet brings the words, you bring your life and together you make the song" -- Christopher Burns

Shared from The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry

"SCOOTER" OPENING - SHORT STORY

Below, in the hollow, Madelaine Krutcher adjusted herself on the floor where she fell trying to retrieve a bottle of gin from the kitchen inside her 40-year-old house, nested among tall loblolly pines, tulip trees, sweet gums and maples. She launched into a harangue as she tried to sit up.

"Hate this thing, what, quad cane, fell again, but no one’s falling for me, don't they know I'm a Red Hat girl, damn legs swollen,” she said as if someone was there. “Cat tripped me, Snookie sweet pup lick my face, Nippy, you're ignoring me - Now they want me to have a motorized wheel chair, little ramps on my hardwood floor."

She had fallen in a hallway alongside three uncleaned litter boxes. Her elbow was in one, part of her robe in another. She was barefoot.

"Feel me, feel my skin, feel it all - nobody touches me - I'm the nice one with cute little dogs, lots of cats. Doctor says at my age, what, I need a health care worker. If he's a man OK, otherwise, skip it."

Krutcher removed her arm from the cat litter with what she thought was a gesture of grace, pretending she was on stage.

"Drink, drink, drink, drink, I need a drink, a man too, Horace is gone, other one also, husband, what was his name? Age makes you forget but how could I forget that. Rusty, Rusty was lusty, dead too. Oh can't get up. Oh no, not Rusty . . . Russell! -- Damn I gotta get up, nobody's going to help me."

Her monologues like this became frequent, nasty in tone. She liked to hear her voice, thought she should have been an actress, a femme fatal. Never too late, she believed.

“Y’all see me out there,” she said to the living room uttering a laugh. “I’m a gonna get up. I expect applause.”

She managed to rise, stabilize herself uneasily on her cane, and reach for the bottle of gin on the black formica counter in the kitchen to return to the screened-in back porch where earlier she had carried a melting tray of ice, a tall floral glass and a bottle of tonic, now on an opaque glass patio table. She sat unsteadily in a lawn chair, filled the glass, took a long drink and shouted;

"You out there, you damn coyote? You the one who was jumping at the porch door for my little pup Nippy?"

A canine chorus of dogs had begun their nightsong of barking from other homes in the older subdivision carved into the steeply bounded hollow.

"Oh yes oh yes sing it sing it. You hear that Nippy, they’re singing to you and me?" Nippy made a little motion with his tail but otherwise didn't move. Snookie was off somewhere.

“Snookie,” she called. “Snookie, get out here and keep me company.

Coyote, you out there?"

Above, on the ridge overlooking Krutcher’s home, stood Billy Daisy, short, disheveled, in his 30s, eyes focusing and unfocusing in the fading late summer twilight, sweating in the heat in front of a double-wide mobile home where a couple inside was cooking enough meth for tonight and tomorrow, they said. ...

THE MAZE PHASE . . .

Intensive reading and writing are in process, and even reconstituting, just a little, a doctoral dissertation for self-publication that puts a book on Amazon, joining my documentaries there, which doesn't mean it will be bought or read but could get a little more exposure than it's gotten forgotten buried on my website along with other pages I haven't looked at in years.
One short story completed, a novel started as well as another short story and a large amount of Scandinavian and other noir reading plus Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Dillard, research into markets plus hooking up with the Chattanooga Writers Group and one of its fiction writers gatherings.
Style and character - and fearlessness, going forth with that in the foreground at the moment conscious of storytelling too but not formulaic. My voice, too. On paper... I know what it feels like, even imagine it complex, and am in awe at the way some authors can distill that complexity and unwind it in long lucid passages. Or defer it intermittently throughout a work thematically along with other themes similarly intermittent, woven.
So now it seems the first phase of this new way to me to be creative has passed. A slight pause to look at the maze from above, then back to it.

IN THE PROCESS OF PUBLICATION ...

BACK COVER TEXT:

Philosophy and theology have increasingly turned to the problem of the rising numbers of people who live in severe conditions of oppression, people who are surplus to global economic and political orders which the oppressed define as "neoliberal" and "neocolonial."

This work, Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance, is part of that turning, through conversations with those who were and still are living under oppressive conditions, especially in Central America and Mexico, and through conversations with phenomenology, feminist theology, feminist jurisprudence, ethics, and liberation theology.

There is an assertion that grace, and the organization of the "lifeworld" which phenomenologists discuss, act in concert to seek to empower the flourishing of humans to understand and resist the abasing conditions they confront.

What frequently occurs when people living under oppressive conditions try to change their circumstances is a backlash by those who control their political, social and economic conditions. In response, the spirit of grace, as part of the human effort to flourish, aids in the resistance against the denial of this flourishing.

-- Wes Rehberg

WAS SHE A "SUBJECT" OR AN "OBJECT"?.

"Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?"

-- Toni Morrison, "Beloved"

THE ENDURING

Completed what I now think is the final draft for my short story "The Enduring" - an excerpt is below - since revised a little in the latest version.

I'm not sure what to do with it at this point. Probably let it sit a bit. Exploring publication options. Though I've published nonfiction, this would be the first for fiction - a leap, for sure.

SCATTERED...

I read, write, create, envision in scattered ways, wrong side up, pacing through tunnels and over bridges that lead to unknown destinies, negotiating slippery rocks in a stream that seems to be rushing by too fast, so fast that I know I should have worn a life-jacket, following a character or an assemblage, asking: "What is it you're conjuring now? If we fall, will it be fatal?"

RANDOM REFLECTION ....

It's going to take awhile in this new fiction writing effort until I feel I've gotten a sense of rhythm, pace and phrasing. If I get there at all. Some of it now seems so clumsy ....

DRAFT PASSAGE FROM "THE ENDURING" - A Short Story

Draft excerpt from my short-story "The Enduring" ...

With winter nearing, Elijah occupied himself with the woodpile, often supplied by Malcolm, easily handling the maul, sing-songing a string of thoughts while splitting logs.

“Chop, chop, the chopping block. Mock me, sucker, I’ll knock your clock. No way, no way, you’ll get away. Chop, chop, the chopping block.”

He’d also unchain the dogs and daily walk with them in the woods, feeling like he set them free, himself free, feeling connected to something along the trails and long-abandoned logging roads that would settle him.

“Free, free, run for the sun. Dogs are gunning it on the hunt. This way, that way, anyway now. Free, free run for the sun.”

#

It wasn't entirely unexpected, a day in that looming winter that etched itself in Malcolm's mind as another defining moment in his life. It had a particular eerie vibration that chilled him, that he could feel sweeping across an ancient upcropping of tree-covered bluestone shale like a wild spirit in the wind. Still it seemed sudden, the sisters sensing it too, electric. They looked up at the sky, low dark gray clouds moving much more swiftly than the gray masses above them. Heralds of foreboding.

Both the sisters and Malcolm heard the vehicle coming up Claw Valley Pike, the tires in the loose gravel and dirt, coming from the direction of the Pennsylvania border. ...

PERSONA, PLOT, PROTAGONISTS

Intrigued by the development of a relationship between two persons into a persona-as-protagonist plus the use of two protagonists on parallel plot tracks - such as in Jussi Adler-Olsen's "The Keeper of Lost Causes."

Or, somewhat similarly, the use of two protagonists and their parallel plot lines in Stieg Larsson's "Girl With a Dragon Tattoo."

CHARACTER SKETCHINGS FOR "SCOOTER" - short story

Title - Scooter

Key Characters:

MADELAINE KRUTCHER - Hate this thang, what, quad cane, fallen again, don't they know I'm a Red Hat girl, damn legs swollen again - cat tripped me, Snookie lick my face, Nippy, you're ignoring me - want me to have a motorized wheel chair, little ramps on my hardwood floor - feel me, feel my skin, feel it all - nobody touches me - I'm the nice one with cute little dogs, lots of cats, and here I am fallen by the litter boxes, full, elbow in one, doctor says at my age, what, 68, need a health care worker, if he's a man OK, otherwise, skip it. Rhonda comes to clean, but not this week, only when she wants. Drink, drink, drink, drink, I need a drink, a man, Horace is gone, other one too, husband, what was his name. .. age makes you forget but how could I forget that. .. Rusty, Rusty was lusty, dead too. Oh. .. can't get up. Oh no, not Rusty, Russell.

BILLY DAISY - Floating, didn't need a license for the scooter in this state, feels like riding on rubber, frame liquid, flowing, rocking, rolling, what speed, who could tell, so high, shimmer shimmer, up to Cliff's and Samantha's, cooking it, smoking it, out again, book me, fuckers, I'm out again, nobody I am, nobody but the scooter under my legs, swirling. Could see that little lady down in the hollow from the yard where Cliff shot golf balls into the hollow, using an iron, where the hell did he get them from, he called them goof balls, funny man. Little lady on the back porch with a bottle, must be vodka, got to pay her a visit. Place might be warm, this one's cold, electricity water turned off, candles, love the flickering, what they doing now those two. Little lady want a visitor? I'm the one the swat team snared when I tried to kill myself after I scared off my lady friend in that house by the state park, shit, one year is all they took from me, then rehab, what fools, what a joke. Little lady, I got a rap sheet, I'm bad, you want bad?

RHONDA STILLMAN - Calls me her friend, tightwad bitch doesn't pay me enough to clean up all that cat crap, but she's a worry the way she's started carrying on, in a way I got to keep an eye on her, but I got enough troubles, don't need hers, she'll get what she wants, can pay for it, but what neglect, how could she not see that, downsliding like she is.

CLIFF BREADSWORTH -

SAMANTHA JENSON -

NEIGHBORS (to be named) -

SHELLY ROSE - neighbor - Madelaine worries me, no doubt needs groceries, bright lady bright eyes bright humor (is it an act? There's a dark side) - what a mess her place fine furniture, could be elegant, probably was once, wants to know about the revolver in her drawer.

CAROLYN CORTRIGHT - next door

ROBERT SKILLEN - property owner where meth couple lives

Firefighters etc -

EMTs -

Police -

THE CHARACTER IS PRIMARY FOR ME

Caught up in this - Some book characters that remain with me:

Carl Mørk / Merete Lynggard - Jussi Adler-Olsen
Annie Dillard - herself
Lisbeth Salander - Stieg Larssen
Harry Hole - Jo Nesbo
Janie Crawford - Zora Neale Hurston
Frank McCourt in "Angela's Ashes"
Deanna Wolfe - Barbara Kingsolver
Lew Archer - Ross Macdonald
Hazel Motes - Flannery O'Connor
Ignatius J. Reilly - John Kennedy O'Toole
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Lancelot Lamar - Walker Percy
Francis Phelan - William Kennedy
William Least Heat-Moon - himself
Annislee - Joyce Carol Oates
Anonymous
Elias Chacour - himself

Kurt Wallander - Henning Mankell

Meursault - Albert Camus

Others too - got to stop here ...

UPDATING BLOG - VIDEO CURIO THEATER & WRITING

Been awhile since I've communicated via this blog site. Two things I'd like to note:

1. I've now turned to writing, intrigued in some ways by the noir style, but not that exclusively - short stories and a novel.

Though earlier videos are posted here, the blog now will be mostly devoted to what's going on with writing.

2. My video work recently has been strictly experimental, fashioned in what I'm presently calling a video anarchist style for a blog site called the Video Curio Theater - at http://blog.rehberg.net - short video art works.

Reminder that our home page is http://www.wildclearing.com

Be back in a bit ...

EXCERPT - COA CHATTANOOGA BUS LINE HISTORY TRIP

An excerpt from Chattanooga Organized for Action's city history trip on a regularly scheduled CARTA bus, history offered by Mike Feely - 3 minutes - filmed by Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing

iPHONE EDITED - APISON TN TORNADO DESTRUCTION & AID

iPhone filmed & edited video of tornado destruction in Apison TN on April 27, 2011. Filmed while I and Eileen Rehberg sought to assess victims' needs for United Way of Chattanooga 211, Eileen the 211 director - Wes Rehberg

"ANOTHER WAY TO PUT" - title segment of video album

"Another Way to Put it" is a 2-part experimental short on a reflection on filming direction -- actors include Christy Gallo, Jennelle Gilreath, Randall Pennington -- 2nd camera was Megan Hollenbeck -- additional music by Donnie Jenkins and Dalton Roberts -- filmed by me, Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing - 6-minutes

"DOWN HOME WITH DALTON" - a video album documentary

"Down Home With Dalton" is a video album documentary about Dalton Roberts, singer, songwriter, storyteller and former Hamilton County, Tennessee, county executive. Features songs and conversations with Dalton, also with musicians Donnie Jenkins and Martha Ann Brooks. This video clip is an introduction to the video album - Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing - see www.wildclearing.com/dalton.html for more ...

"War Is Over" sung by The States ("When War Is Done")

"War Is Over," Si Kahn's song, is sung by The States in this informal take filmed by Wes Rehberg. The States are Janie Stein and Marty Bates - roving troubadour folk singers. Filmed inside their home, their RV ... © 2010 Wild Clearing (Also know as "When War is Done"

Bluegrass, Brakhage, Breakage and Brouillage Redux - a lens cleaner

Bluegrass, Brakhage, Breakage and Brouillage Redux - a lens cleaner - to keep the other eye open in the midst of doc shots and sketches ... my harkening way way back to when it was then ... 3 minutes

Y-CAP Juvenile Offenders Garden Work With Disabled Adults

Y-CAP began a juvenile offenders garden project in Chattanooga as part of work to help them develop positive behaviors and share their work with disabled adults who live as Orange Grove Center residents. This rough video excerpt from my developing documentary film sketch offers a view of that project. Four minutes, by Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing.

Improvisor 2010 - Andrea Centazzo (percussion) - Chattanooga TN

Improvisor 2010 - Chattanooga - Excerpts - Barking Legs Theater

"Uneven Surfaces: A Cuba Reverie"

This indicates a direction for my Uneven Surfaces experimental video series - Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing

Downtown Street Dancing - Chattanooga TN

Angela Sweet, Elizabeth Longphre and Polly Curtis dance improvisationally on East Main Street in Chattanooga in this 9-minute video filmed by Wes Rehberg of Wild Clearing. The Angela Sweet Dances have been a summer Friday night routine on city streets.

BROKEN PANES: A REFLECTION: REVISED:

Phenomena, Sprirituality and Design

Notes on Phenomena, Design and the Spiritual

I'm amazed amid all the devastation at the failure to grasp the extent of the intimacy of interconnectedness in the phenomena we share, as a phenomenologist (logos embracing both rationality and spirituality) and one who feels a kinship with what is loosely called the spiritual.
My rational self sees a design at work in the interconnectedness of phenomena as science seeks to comprehend the design and reason it out, work out methods and measures.
The design, however, is a priori, and as far as I understand design, it too has an a priori. Mutation is part of the design, the method - so is probability and randomness.
I can't escape the notion of design per se and can't explain how it, in itself, came to be. It's here that I make the Kierkegaardian leap, keeping in mind what he called "the cunning of oblivion."
So I try to value what is, as both immanent and transcendent, recognizing the gray matter limits -that valuing, to me, is "spiritual."

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

MAKE SURE THEY'RE CLEAN - an experimental video rant on injustices ...

"Make Sure They're Clean" is an experimental way to express complicity with injustices - filmed by Wes Rehberg of Wild Clearing ... 4 minutes

ENOCH'S DECISION: THE FOG

THE FOG

The fog, somehow Enoch felt secure in its midst. He always seemed to himself a little distant, out of place. Still he played with others, stickball in the schoolyard, punchball, stoopball, roller hockey on the streets. But there was a space between all this and himself that he knew but couldn't fathom.

“Maybe it’s my name,” he thought, walking down narrow 208th Street to a corner candy store. “Enoch Jubal.” The Irish and Italian young people would call him “Jewboy” while the neighboring Jewish community ignored him - he didn’t go to temple. Actually, his Hungarian-born grandfather was a Catholic and his grandmother a Lutheran and Enoch was a communicant in the Catholic church. His grandfather had an Austrian name, Rothauer, but his drinking buddies called him “Rummy.” “Rummy Jewboy,” the young people would say, teasing maliciously, when Enoch let on about his grandfather’s nickname.

In the fog along the street, a pungent mist rose from the manhole covers in the road, sewer smell. “Enoch!,” a boy’s voice called. It was Barry, a Jewish friend he sometimes played with, though Barry's mother didn’t approve. Barry was up in a maple tree. “Where ya goin’?” “Down to Dinks.” Barry couldn’t go so he said, “OK.”

This was well before the Long Island Expressway cut a channel through his neighborhood and just a little later than World War II, which Enoch followed somewhat in the news from third grade on, remembering Franklin D. Roosevelt's Day of Infamy speech on the radio after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. He also remembered the atomic bomb's first tests at Alamagordo, New Mexico and Bikini Atoll and the question about whether a chain reaction would uncontrollably erupt throughout the world. He recalled too the brown B-47 bombers flying low overhead in Queens en route to the war, the blackouts, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, V-E day when the Allies finally defeated Hitler's armies and neighborhood people ran out into the night to celebrate with shouts, banging pots and pans, and V-J Day, when Japan surrendered. It was also before the so-called Korean conflict and President Harry Truman's decision to deny World War Ii hero General Douglas MacArthur's trenchant desire to pursue retreating North Korea invaders across the 38th Parallel.

Though by now beginning to fail in school, Enoch knew all this and more in his young years. Homework was out of tbe question for him in the three-rooms he shared with his mother, brother and grandparents, especially the times when his grandfather came home drunk. These times became worse after the war when his grandfather was out of work when his job ended as foreman at the Farmingdale plant that built P-47 fighter planes. It would be a couple of humiliating years before he'd find work again, this time as a machinist in the Lilly Tulip cup factory in Queens. Enoch's mother Stephany, was the mainstay support with her cartoon job at Paramount during that difficult time.

So Enoch felt separate in the fog on his walk to Dinks. When challenged by other boys to fight, he wouldn't, to the hoots of "chicken!" He wouldn't steal candy bars at Dinks either, though he liked to look at woman's bodies in magazine and comic pictures, feeling a surge between his legs. "You gonna buy one of those?" Jim Dinks would ask. "No, I want a candy bar," Enoch replied. He first felt that surge in the park when he was shinnying on the angled bars that held the swings upright. "Don't you dare ever do that again" his mother said when he told her about the feeling. He thought, "You should talk," knowing how she'd be propped up reading in a sheer nightgown in her chair bed while he and his brother went to bed on a fold-down sofa in the same room.

Coming out of Dinks, Enoch saw the fog was dissipating. If he could only disappear with it, he thought.

© 2009 Wes Rehberg

ENOCH'S DECISION

ENOCH’S DECISION:

Enoch wondered why he never ran away. Sitting on the city park swing, he knew he had to go home soon, a couple of blocks away, a small house near his high school, where he and four others lived in a three-room flat on the second floor.

His brother would probably be home already. They rarely spent time together. His mother would be arriving shortly after a subway and bus ride from Manhattan, where she worked on animated cartoons. His grandmother would be making supper, maybe roll-em-ups from flank steak, bacon and parsley, with egg noodles, after a day of playing solitaire, drinking beer and reading romance stories. It was payday, so his grandfather would be at a tavern in the poorest part of Bayside, downing shots with beer chasers.

On payday, sometimes Enoch would have to ride his ancient bicycle to the tavern to tell his grandfather that dinner was ready. Drunk, his grandfather was unpredictably violent, so it was a daunting task. Enoch, isolated but maturing at age 12, would use the bike so he wouldn’t have to ride home in his grandfather’s old Dodge. “Gramps, it’s time to come home,” he’d say softly, to the still powerful and bulky figure seated at the bar. The answer would be a cackling laugh, sarcastic and angry at the interruption.

Enoch knew his grandfather’s violence well, having been punched hard enough to slam into a refrigerator so it would rock, and picked up and thrown against a wall. He also knew the man, now in his late 50s, had a sweetness to him, a contradiction Enoch tried hard to reconcile. But over and over he wanted to escape, to flee, sometimes taking the same route into Manhattan his mother used, riding subways into the Bronx, into Brooklyn, uptown and downtown, walking streets in “the city,” or pedaling his decade-old second-hand bike to Crocheron Park, to walk along the Little Neck Bay waterfront.

Another occasional escape was early morning bus rides to a city golf course, where he would take his small bag of clubs, a gift from Jared, his deadbeat father, and find some duffers to play with at a dime a hole. Enoch usually left the links with a dollar more than he arrived with, the other golfers surprised. He could break a hundred and probably should have stayed with the game but didn’t. The little bit of money he got from this, from shagging golf balls at a private course, and from schoolyard knock-rummy helped fund his forays, including his special solitary trips to a midtown Horn & Hardart’s Automat in “the city” to buy a pot of beans, a hotdog, a piece of pie and coffee, most all enclosed in compartments behind little glass doors that opened when you inserted coins. Enoch was a frequent truant from school.

On the park swing, Enoch said to himself, “Time to go home.” The swing, rocking slightly, stopped and he stood up and walked past Joe, the parkman, closing up shop, past the crabtrees he had climbed while younger, down the slope to the sidewalk where he learned to ride a bicycle, across the street where the Q28 bus was parked so he knew his mother was home, and down the working-class street of closely clustered houses, some two-family like his. Running away would be put off for another day.

His grandfather’s old Dodge was not parked on the street, so he hadn’t arrived yet. Sometimes Enoch, out after dinner, would return to see the sedan there and feel the radiator to detect whether it was still warm, which would mean his grandfather, drunk, would still be up and seated at the kitchen table, ranting. Enoch probably wouldn’t be doing the same thing this particular evening.

“Enoch,” his grandmother said as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. “Go get your grandfather.” He looked at his mother, at the kitchen table in a pastel blue knit dress, drinking tea, and heard his brother in the living room where all three slept, and said “OK.”

© 2009 Wes Rehberg

WIDOW OF POISONED NUCLEAR WORKER WANTS JUSTICE

Interview with Jan Lovelace, widow of poisoned nuclear complex worker Harry Lovelace, details the trials both have gone through to try get help through the Energy Employee Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000 (EEOICPA) administered by the U.S. Dept. of Labor. Jan also describes the extreme personal difficulties of Harry's illness, attributed to his work as a fireman at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Ten-minutes, filmed by Wes Rehberg, music by Paul Page, ©2009 Wild Clearing

Widow of Poisoned Nuclear Worker Wants Justice from Wes Rehberg on Vimeo.

Cherokee Forest Sketch: The Bald River Wilderness Area

This video sketch is from a few hours filming with Jeff Hunter, wildlifer from Tennessee Wild and the Southeast Appalachian Forest Coalition, for a documentary he's fostering on wilderness preservation throughout the Appalachian region. 5-minutes -Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing ...

Janine Anderson Dies After Championing Sick Nuclear Worker Cause

Janine Anderson died four days after launching hers and other sick-nuclear fuel plant workers campaign on April 28, 2009 for a National Day of Remembrance of those still ill from contaminants and those who passed on. She worked at the nuclear fuel gas diffusion K-25 plant in Oak Ridge TN. She was among several sickened workers I've interviewed in the past year - to view their stories and events, visit theexposed.net - This is a draft video © 2009 Wes Rehberg, Wild Clearing

"I Want His Justice" - Jan Lovelace - 18 seconds

Draft introductory segment of interview with Jan Lovelace regarding her husband Harry's death after working at the Oak Ridge TN nuclear complex, where thousands have won claims for toxic and radiological poisoning - 18 seconds