It was hot and the game was nowhere to be seen. It was still fashionable to shoot tigers, lions, and other dangerous animals, so Harry Black held his rifle tightly since he knew that the game was out there. Harry’s guide kept talking, but Harry was at a loss as to what Ozondjahe was trying to communicate. Ozondjahe was very tall, much taller than Harry was. When he laughed, which he did often, he showed the whitest teeth. They were so white Harry was lost for words. Ozondjahe carried a shotgun. The shotgun was Harry’s idea. At first Ozondjahe refused to carry the shotgun. Ozondjahe said all he needed was his walking stick, but Harry wouldn’t hear of it, for Harry the shotgun was better than any damn walking stick, after all, they were hunting tigers, lions, and other dangerous animals. Ozondjahe was deeply upset about having to leave his walking stick at the camp and carry a shotgun. The shotgun was heavy. Ozondjahe also had to carry three bottles of wine, a full meal consisting of roasted chicken, cheese, crusty French bread, and black olives. And the coffee pot, two mugs, and coffee makings. Ozondjahe led the way through the thick bush. The bush made a lot of noise.
Man, I love prompts. I really do. I think they can lead you down some wild paths, creatively speaking (and maybe literally, too, if you lose all touch with reality as some will and start walking). But don’t take my word for it, read Shake Away These Constant Days (Jersey Devil Press, 2012) by Ryan Werner. See, he started this collection on a really simple premise, write each story based on a song. Here, Werner himself explains, in acknowledging those who prompted him: “All of these stories are based on songs, most of them suggested by writers and musicians from around the world. Without them, there is no book.”
He greatly loved, he said later, `the words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance . . . I fell in love with . . . and am at the mercy of words.’ Poet and man of letters, Robert Lowell, called Thomas ‘A dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding.’ (Wikipedia)
Under Hitler’s ‘Thousand Years’ Third Reich (1933 to 1945), the Nazis abolished freedom of speech (1938) and persecuted anyone who spoke out against their barbarism. Among the political exiles was writer, Thomas Mann (mahn), whose Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 (citing his novels Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain) put him among Germany’s most celebrated Post WW I writers. He was also “the most violently debated figure of 20th Century German literature” (per Georg Lukas, quoting the anti-Marxist polemicist, Sidney Bolkosky); that `violently debated’ part being attributable to allegations that Mann’s supposed political equivocation when it came to Germany’s ruined economy played into the hands of her enemies, the Communists.
‘A screaming comes across the sky.’ Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, with that memorable opening line, captures a mixed bag essence of the devastating unmanned rocket attacks on England during WW II, the Blitzkrieg. Across a gamut of styles ranging from baggy pants whimsicality to the sober intricate prose of death and destruction, the novel stays true to its apocryphal underpinnings.
