/lit/ - Literature

15/03/27(Fri)08:06 No. 17409

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Hello, /lit/erates.

Could I have some constructive criticism? I accidentally wrote an overly involved thing while responding in a thread. It might have potential?

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I grew up in an extremely Southern Baptist household, which meant that I also grew up thinking that ritual cannibalism and live burial wasn't weird. You may take every stereotype you're now thinking of and then apply it to the first ten years of my existence. Young earthers high on Jesus, the Spirit, dodgy epistemology, and an ensuing even dodgier understanding of the hard sciences. We were the chosen few and demons crept in every shadow. Little hawks that knew it was the most noble to join the service of our country (for She was Blessed) or the Lord. Perhaps they were the same thing.

It was a gradual descent from this all-consuming light, but eventually when my eyes adjusted to the dark I was quite dissatisfied with the gaps in my knowledge re: reality. I hid textbooks I stole from the public high school in the ceiling of my church's youthroom. They supplemented and frankly surpassed my homeschooling on the four days of the week I was there. It was a simple matter to stand on stacked chairs and poke a ceiling tile aside with a yardstick. There was no insulation in that layer, which was fortunate.

I still love mythology. When people talk about their gods, they talk about themselves, except for when they talk about their government or dreams or truth. It's ugly and fascinating.

...

So, the homemade bomb club is a result of zero parental supervision, mutually enabling pyromania, and unscrupulous fireworks stands.

In the summers from the age of seven to thirteen, my friends and I would buy as many cheap fireworks as we could with allowance money, fake ids, and sad faces. It went double for after-holiday sales. Once we had enough raw ingredients stolen from construction sites, we would experiment with pipe and canister bombs. Good times. There was a nice green belt in one of our backyards where we set them off when the parents were gone to choir practice on Tuesday nights. It was a great feeling, drizzling different consistencies of decomposed styrofoam in oils and gasoline over painstakingly made and satisfyingly solid pieces of workmanship. Blood from careless seams and saltpeter in equal amounts, nearly. You would drizzle the styofoam in loops across the ground until you stood far back in the tall cool grass and fireflies droning unaware of the arrival their shorter-lived, wondrous cousins. You crouch against the shrapnel and toss a match underhand and then kiss your eardrums goodbye. Only pussies flinch.

It wasn't a bad life.

15/04/09(Thu)01:29 No. 17415

Psh, Pshaw! You Southern Baptists with your organized national structure and you're endless efforts to mollify the PC Psychos; how can you summon up the gall to actually classify yourself fundamentalists? Now, I grew up in a zealot Missionary Baptist household in the rural South, and my only contact with Outside Civilization was our trips to the nearest vice-filled City...a cotton-farming burg of maybe a thousand souls, sixteen miles away; we made this journey three or four times a year for the first sixteen years of my life. Yes, William Faulkner wrote stories about boys like me.

Which didn't mean that by the time I was fifteen I hadn't decided that all that religious fluffernutter that had been ramrodded down my throat was complete bullshit; I kept my incipient Atheism to myself until I was big enough and fast enough to outrun my Dad if he decided to kill me...and to whip him if he did manage to catch me. The folks never really accepted my (lack of) beliefs, though; vindictive people, Baptists.

As for a critique of your written account, I am really left not knowing what to make of it; how is growing up in a repressive, fanatical household (which I can sympathize with) have to do with your delvings into the exciting and colorful world of Improvised Explosives (which I can also sympathize with)? What we have is a beginning and an end (just like in the Bible, remember; "I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA..."), with nothing connecting the two. We go from Prayer Meeting to pipe-bombs. We need another two chapters, maybe more, to tie the narrative together into a whole.

I would be interested in reading the completed tale. I will leave you with words spoken to me often during the tail-end of my formative years, "Kill a Commie for Mommy" (for whatever reason, my Mom never developed any true-blue, red-blooded affection for this sentiment; Baptists...go figure.)

15/04/21(Tue)03:25 No. 17419

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Seems a little long winded. Know what I mean? The prose is good, nice and meaty. Add a dash a dash of youthful desperation, synthesize a story arc, maybe give it a little more scope. Your experience is a relatable one, to me and doubtlessly many others, so if I were you I'd attempt to add a bit of something. A sinister suggestion of unanswered possibility perhaps. Pick an experience out of that vast wealth of sensory knowledge and supply it with that acidity you felt when you were knee deep in it and see what comes.

22/08/16(Tue)21:50 No. 18279

bump

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