Royal Beatings

Dear Fiction-ers & colleagues across the
curriculum,

“Her father was the king of Royal Beatings.”

[Not the other beatings: by the butcher,
Tyde & his polio-stricken dwarfed
daughter, Becky , their rumored incest
& disposable baby:--and the village
men who horse-whipped the butcher
in the nighttime snow at 4 degrees below.]

The ritual between Rose, step-mother Flo,
and father, always starts with some tweaking
between the two females and then builds into
a quarrel until finally the father is dragged in
to discipline, whips the daughter—step-
mother both gratified and dismayed, daughter
sent to room, step-mother coming round with
conciliatory cookies.


clash, crash, collide, slide

Mothers of Invention: pattern for humor,
discovery, art: it takes a pillage to raise
a child. Conflict. Converse Action.

Alice Monro’s story is exquisite in its details,
nitty gritty description: the toilet in the kitchen
surrounded by beaver board. The disconnect
between sounds exploding from within &
whoever walked out & away: finished business.
The dwarf’s twisted neck. Blue veins on Flo’s
legs, she: scrubbing. a linoleum floor. The
star of Venus, looking like an airship
across the lake.

I’m sampling. Ripping-off (a violence against)
from the whole.

How can we see the PATTERN thru
(& without getting stuck in) the details?

See Me, Hear ME, Touch Me, Feed Me:
the Primary Conversation going on & on
in this classroom and everywhere else
whatever the content, subject-object matter,
bottom line, whatever the token topic—war
in Afghanistan, Asheville homeless, So You
Think You Can Dance, mitochondria,
recycling, royal beatings, abuse, price of
gas, environmental depredation, less calories,
more taste, how ‘bout them heels? nice day,
what’s up: its all fiction fashioning faction
& facts of living: a PHATIC (empty)—
vehicle for See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me,
Feed Me

In other words (this is redundant):
IT’s never about what it’s about.
IT’s about what it’s not about
and if you think IT’s about what
it’s about—well, no wonder you
are dismayed on a regular basis.

IT’s about See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me,
Feed Me—once THAT is realized,
everything makes much more sense,
need we argue?

Read our Class Commentary, for example.
See what I’m saying?

You and I might be “communicating”:
(talking about, discussing, contending,
fighting over any XYZ), but what’s
actually going on is “communion”
called RELATIONSHIP: relays relating
ratios & rationalizing the 2 (or more) of
us ME-ing (seeing,hearing, touching, feeding.)

Each one of us: a factionalist fashioning a
fiction (story, poem, movie, lyric, song,
thesis, theory…): one point of viewing
throwing a perspective across an abyss
void (so to speak) to some OTHER
(person, people, peers, colleagues,
cohort, audience…) and between the
2 points:

the relay
the relationship
reciprocation
ratios rationalizing
rationalizations reason-ing. .

.......calibrating relationship
anyone all other
................blah blah xyz
........(Taking Care of Business)

Choose your attention efficiency level:

bottom line (vis-à-vis) or
.....................................,top (whole-y grail)

token details
topic, content
subject-matter or
..........................relays relative
..........................relationship
..........................pattern

Royal Beatings
(ouch, oooo, oofff, oops damnit…)

Did you think this course was about the
fictions? About stories one after another?

IT’s NEVER about what it’s about, true?
I mean: it IS about what it’s about, but not
only…and what it’s not only about counts
more than what it’s about, even if uncount-
able, immeasurable, yes? (Except in manners
of speaking.) Are we on the same page here?

xxxooo, Sam