eSCENE: Where Literature and Neuroscience Intersect, Sort Of

If you're reading this, you probably know that Web del Sol is vast. The upside of that vastness is the sheer quantity of literary goodness to be found within its electronic confines. The potential downside is that you can get lost (hello? *ello* can anybody hear me? *ear me*) in that vastness. BUT another upside is the sheer variety of the content. It doesn't matter what mood you're in--dour, poignant, noirish romantic with a dash of the surreal--it's all there. So today I give you links to three different pieces, all culled from the eSCENE page on Web del Sol, that will stimulate three distinct regions of the brain (and these are real regions because I once took an anatomy class, how dare you doubt my word).

1. THE POETIC REGION: "Desert," by Annie Boutelle (from AGNI). This fine, brief poem imagines Mary Magdalene becoming a desert hermit like John the Baptist. Her sexuality is married to the stark asceticism of the desert by means of the sensuality that all humans share:

Wind is her lover, the slim moon
her torch, scorpions her servants
with their wily calm, their armor—
she longs for such armor.

2. THE PROSE POEM REGION: "What We Tell Girl to Do with Us Brothers If We Ever Stop Making Mud," by Peter Markus (from Double Room). This piece exemplifies what I love about prose poems: some sense of narrative is combined with a poet's sensitivity to the music of language, all in a form where the unit of meaning is the good old sentence--capital letter, subject, predicate, ending punctuation, you know the drill:

Bury us brothers here. Cover us up with the mud of this river. Let this muddy river run up and over us brothers, let it run its muddy waters up into the insides of our mouths. Let the fish of the river, let the mud too, nibble and gnaw us brothers down to bone.

3. THE SHORT-SHORT NONFICTION REGION: "Snakes," by Ron Arias (from Brevity). I believe I've already talked about how much I love Brevity, partly because the journal's foundational concept is so cool: nonfiction of 750 words or less. Just about any piece from Brevity is a good read, but here's a snippet of Ron Arias's account of the time he interviewed the president of Nicaragua, while jogging:

Suddenly Ortega jogs into view. He's accompanied by seven big men in running sweats, all carrying Kalishnikovs. Next to these guys, the comandante, who's wearing a shirt and shorts, looks small. He hurriedly shakes my hand, barely slowing his stride. "Let's go," he tells me in Spanish. As we trot up an inclined fairway, behind the Jeep with Harry in the back, I ask him how often he jogs. I'm holding up the tape recorder so that it's only a few feet from his face.

Now, remember, your brain does have other regions--the absurdist theater region, for instance, or the Victorian ghost story region. To ensure a well-rounded brain, be sure to take regular doses of eSCENE.