For this post, Zelda shall continue her procrastination. But! Zelda is going to respond to a comment made by the Most Fashionable Marie on the Most Fashionable Vivienne’s recent Chimera of Fashion [which is, Most Fashionable Readers, the Most Fashionable Chimera Zelda has ever, ever seen. long live the Chimera of Fashion! long live Vivienne! hooray!]. The Most Fashionable Marie’s comment was as follows:
Tell me, if you please, how will you revise these various text-based creations? Do you have an endgame in mind? Because of the stringent parameters you set yourself, I wonder if these loosen later on… Or is there no later on, only TODAY?
Zelda would really, really, really love to hear what Vivienne has to say about this. Zelda is still too afraid to revisit her NaPoWriMoFa [National Poetry Month of Fashion] poems to see if anything can be salvaged, so she does not feel as if she can answer Marie’s questions right now. However! Zelda CAN offer the very first Chimera she ever wrote many, many moons ago as well as some revisions that were made to it.
For this Chimera, Zelda used a paragraph from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as her base text. She extracted verbs from Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse. Nouns and adjectives were taken from The Modern Conductor by Elizabeth A.H. Green (2nd ed) and Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934 by David E. Ruth.
The unedited Chimera is as follows:
Without intercourse, lodging as a cultural and generic woman, she heard a possession she had never expressed, as though she were remaining completely projected out by a particular thrust. This was far more colorful than the surrendering had been; while she was fucking there was no need to proceed, but now her spirit was acknowledged so that although she was extricating herself from all embarrassments for want of dominance, there was no way for her spirit to prove and receive, to detect the invasion that she must demonstrate. This was completely fragmentary — emanating influence while she succumbed to the creed and approached the individuals to answer them. She scoffed resistance, but her smiling fist couldn’t wait. She sprung — she was conducting in order to appear; her form was perplexed along with the physicality of her. Her obsession tried to celebrate; it gave a violent, contemporary inquisition, but it could not plead interpretation.
A later, revised draft:
The Female Conductor
Days since she last fucked, lights on
in her neighborhood after three a.m., hours until
the milk expired. She counted
and sprung, turned her energy outward.
She conducted in order to appear.In theory, it had always been more
colorful than surrendering. When she was fucking,
however, there had been no need for answers.
She could dominate social transactions.
She could remember to be cordial.But now that her own potency was acknowledged,
now that she’d extricated her self
from pressing circumstances to be
thrust into this
directly conscious life, there was littletangible progress. Only indifference. Especially
among her colleagues. She could not even sit
with them at lunch. She began to search
for surrogate institutions. She moved
her couch outside for a better view.
It still needed work after all those revisions, of course, but Zelda feels that it became a much stronger piece after the revisions.
And that is all, Most Fashionable Reader, for Zelda feels that she will take her Most Fashionably Fabulous Friend D’s advice and go to bed now.
Posted by zeldafitzgerald 
Consider Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Departed. Consider his perpetually furrowed brow. Consider his propensity toward violence. Consider his height and his scowl. Consider the curve of his shoulders. Consider that he orders cranberry juice at a bar, which suggests an attempt to refrain from drinking alcohol, which suggests a previous unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Consider that he has identity issues. Consider that he has many issues, period, but consider that he is still more mature than any man his age that this speaker has ever met. Consider that, after verbally sparring with his appointed psychiatrist, he asks her if she’d like to join him for a cup of coffee. Consider that she says yes. Consider that this speaker would say yes to a cup of coffee with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Departed, too. Consider the slim chance of happiness for this most fashionable speaker since the only man in the whole world she feels she can love is a fictional creation, one who doesn’t even make it to the end of the movie. Consider this, Dear Reader. Consider this.
