Varieties of Disturbance Read Free Page B

his knees and stuffing meat into my mouth and down my throat until I choked.
    The evening was over. A goddess had walked out of the movie theater and a small porter was left standing by the tracks—and that was our dinner? I am so filthy—this is why I am always screaming about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell—you think you’re hearing the song of angels but it is that other song. Yet I decided to keep on living a little while longer, at least through the night.
    After all, I am not graceful. Someone once said that I swim like a swan, but it was not a compliment.

Tropical Storm
    Like a tropical storm,
    I, too, may one day become “better organized.”

Good Times
    What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.

Idea for a Short Documentary Film
    Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

Forbidden Subjects
    Soon almost every subject they might want to talk about is associated with yet another unpleasant scene and becomes a subject they can’t talk about, so that as time goes by there is less and less they can safely talk about, and eventually little else but the news and what they’re reading, though not all of what they’re reading. They can’t talk about certain members of her family, his working hours, her working hours, rabbits, mice, dogs, certain foods, certain universities, hot weather, hot and cold room temperatures at night and in the day, lights on and lights off in the evening in summer, the piano, music in general, how much money he earns, what she earns, what she spends, etc. But one day, after they have been talking about a forbidden subject, though not the most dangerous of the forbidden subjects, she realizes it may be possible, sometimes, to say something calm and careful about a forbidden subject, so that it may once again become a subject that can be talked about, and then to say something calm and careful about another forbidden subject, so that there will be another subject that can be talked about once again, and that as more subjects can be talked about once again there will be, gradually, more talk between them, and that as there is more talk there will be more trust, and that when there is enough trust, they may dare to approach even the most dangerous of the forbidden subjects.

Two Types
    Excitable
    A woman was depressed and distraught for days after losing her pen.
    Then she became so excited about an ad for a shoe sale that she drove three hours to a shoe store in Chicago.
    Phlegmatic
    A man spotted a fire in a dormitory one evening, and walked away to look for an extinguisher in another building. He found the extinguisher, and walked back to the fire with