2 Oct, 2006 in
Uncategorized by
KevinP
praxistheologia.com
Look Up.Alice isn’t her real name. The records have all the pertinent information. Born 15 years ago. Died last monday. A natural beauty, her future projected forward on runways in New York and Paris. Friends say she was smiling and laughing at school. They remember her perfume smelling like vanilla. Her friends spoke this evening about how they heard. During first period. From a teacher known for dead pan joking. They spoke of missing a friend an rage at thought of an ill timed joke. Rumors flew. Hanging. Cutting. Drugs both illicit and socially acceptable. But when everything was cleaned and disinfected she died due to a simple overdose of culture.
Told by the world to get good grades, to look beautiful and to do as many extracurricular activities as possible, all in the name of getting into a good college and finding a good job. The pressure to be perfect. Led her friends to cut herself. Solidarity in the cuts. small cuts at first. Physical pain to match the unnamable pain of never quite matching up to the ruler never seen. Larger cuts then, bleeding away the pressure of life. Finally, the bliss of pressures relieved tuned to the bliss of sleep eternal.
May all the saints who now from their labors rest…
What crimes have you commited, demanding such penance,
That couldn’t wait for five more minutes and a cry for help?
‘Cause this room is peaceful and this room is so quiet.
And I hate the silence, and I can’t walk the center aisle.
Nate | October 5th, 2006 at 2:01 am #
The second block of text is telling from a composition standpoint. The stylistic fragments, done more intentionally, could have worked. But look at their structures. You begin with a past-participle fragment modifying a pair of infinitive predicate nominatives. Then, without any warning, you drop a complex subject without a verb. Then you go to another past-participle, then four subjects-without-verbs. The fifth verbless fragment begins with a “Finally” that presumes a narrative that the fragments have not kept together, and the blessing formula on the end simply can’t punch hard enough to unify what came before.
Think structurally, even when you’re breaking conventions. The reader’s mental/interpretive energy ought to go towards the intellectual content or the artistic innovation. As it stands, your reader is going to exhaust herself decoding the spam-gram that clogs the paragraph.
B-minus for the second block. Good intentions but poor execution.