Dead Darlings

In which our favorite writers share precious little bits that didn’t quite fit. I’m probably not the only writer in the world who, prior to killing his darlings, tortures them. For months, they bounce in and out of a CUTS folder, which works like a self-storage unit, holding things until I can admit they belong in the trash. And not because they are trash, intrinsically, but because the project simply refuses to contain them. The mercifully euthanized darlings that follow are from my forthcoming novel, Panorama City, narrated by a curious, openhearted, binocular-toting, bicycle riding, six-foot-six, twenty-eight year old man named Oppen Porter. Believing he’s on his deathbed after a terrible accident, Oppen attempts to put onto cassette tapes everything he knows about the world for the benefit of his unborn son, Juan-George. To do so, he records over the only tapes at hand, an audiobook of the King James Bible. The Dead Darlings that follow are from my forthcoming novel, Panorama City, narrated by a curious, openhearted, binocular-toting, bicycle riding, six-foot-six, twenty-eight year old man named Oppen Porter. Believing he’s on his deathbed after a terrible accident, Oppen attempts to put onto cassette tapes everything he knows about the world for the benefit of his unborn son, Juan-George. To do so, he records over the only tapes at hand, an audiobook of the King James Bible. Right now, he said, my thoughts are clouds, they must become icicles. I’m only now starting to realize more bits and pieces of philosophy, at the eleventh hour, as they say, at the twenty-third hour, they should say, I’m only starting to realize now that a tape recorder is the worst possible device for all of this, it’s all I have, it’ll have to do, as they say, but a tape recorder goes on and on, always forward, you can’t jump from one spot to another and go back when you remember more, you can’t add a piece of philosophy to something that you recorded two hours ago, the tape recorder moves forward, like time, not all over the place, like memory.