| Fiction, Ltd. Story #085 | explanation and main page |
End-notes to pages 152-170 (cont.)
9. The sign in question read "Any sessions beginning after 8pm must be at
least one hour away from mealtime." As pointed out by Evans (1993b), the
structure of the commune's meals was such that this rule would have been
impossible to break! Whether this is the reason it was so often defaced,
and why some residents so resented the graffiti, are both unknown.
10. Joy Belinski wrote several poems in her journal that used this analogy
between rotting fruit and the residents expelled in March 1971.
11. This would have been the job of "T" as de facto leader. None of his
budgets in 1970 mention it at all except one line in November, later
rubbed out.
12. c.f. "Everyone here knows Peach is a narc. Unless T is too high to
notice." (1971 shared journal, note signed "FF")
13. Belinski had reserved the classroom for yoga.
14. Evans gained access to the house before it was renovated, and reports
that every unusual noise described here could in fact be produced by a
relatively ordinary set of activities in the attic. "Even the 'plonking'
sound assumed to be sexual by "T" is essentially identical to how a quick
gait in army boots sounded from the rooms below." (Personal
correspondence.)
15. c.f. "We can plod along like this forever, or we can devote our life
energy to each other once again and live by the rules we've agreed on."
(Spring 1973 shared journal, note signed "Heaven".)
16. For a more general treatment of business practices and norms inside
the counter-culture, see Dignam (2002).
17. "T"'s account of the trip is the most lucid, but does not mention
Harry or the expulsions except for this: "Harry merrily splashing in
puddles. Fifi, all ego, wants him to stop. Sounds like glass breaking.
There goes. Glass breaks because it is ordinary, or because we impose a
VOCATION on it." (Private journal dated 1-8/71.)
18. Kitchen records indicate that most of the commune's fruit was a "gift
from Mother" (grown in the house garden) or a "gift from Jake" (i.e.
stolen). Fifi's entries in the shared journal note with particular bitter-
ness that the April 1971 barrel of rotting plums had been paid for.
19. "Our Peach swells / Decay / Maybe today" (Belinski's journal, 3/3/71.)
Note that Peach was not in fact pregnant yet.
20. Shared house journals, passim.
written for M. Corwin in the upstairs room 7/25/08
M. Corwin's words: pleonastic, prosopography, plash, plim, plod, plonk.I had to look up some of those. Wikipedia says "prosopography is an investigation of the common background characteristics of a historical group, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable, by means of a collective study of their lives. I don't think this would mostly count, but that was the idea. "Plash" is the sound of splashing. "Plim" means "to swell or grow plump".
I've always felt okay writing around obscure words (using them implicitly,
not explicitly) but I never know whether that's what someone expected when
they chose the words. You do get a different story from "plash" than from
"splashing sound", for what it's worth.
- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal
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