The first love of David and Sophie. The beginning of summer in a town like Laguna Beach, California; he is about to graduate from high school and she still has another year. He paints pictures and she dances ballet. Almost everything is beautiful and perfect. Each time they see each other they go a little further.
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Author: koelke@hotmail.com
Dispositions
An Epic Fantasy, July 1986
A person walks, the beach, the desert, the city, the forest. The progression is thematic. The mind of a romantic exacerbated sensitivity, eroticizing whatever it regards. Perhaps on a quest, this is an epic after all, but for what meaning, what metaphysical sense? Or is it a beautiful virgin fairy forever lost in an evil world, and forever damned? In her struggle with Destiny does she finally give in, or is she pretending?
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Dispositions Futures
A Science Fiction Story, French Version, October 1986, Paris
Un petit conte qui lève l’avenir jusqu’à l’extrême de l’imaginaire ; action et amour avec une touche érotique, et une toile de fond de guerre dans les étoiles.
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Copacabana 1987
Récit, French Version
Un jeune homme arrive à Copacabana et rencontre des jeunes femmes très jolies et intéressantes : Daniela, Sônia, Selma, Ana, Marilha, Bárbara, Lúcia, Adriana, Kátia, Marli, Sulamita… C’est l’histoire de leurs aventures. Avec un bande-son de rock & roll Brésilien et en toile de fond les faits divers d’un Brésil en pleine effervescence, surréaliste. La fin de la dictature, les libertés retrouvées.
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The Dark Bridge from Dispositions to Los Angeles
The night stars flicker through the dock lights; the sea water gently lapping sparkles. I feel as if I’d fasted for forty one days, of emptiness. She comes to me, as though unveiling an ineffable dream, bare arms, parted lips. We are going to take a voyage, or perhaps I alone. She kisses me, allays my worries, motions to the vessel and says it must be ready. Her hair streaks black; I look beyond it in the shadows of the buildings outlined darkly, and then turn and take in the harbor, the wooden flooring of the dock, the thick wooden pylons, and the masts, still stripped of their sails, silhouetted against the night. I drag my foot along the coarse wood, walking now, the moist, briny air.
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Los Angeles (The Angels)
1990
A surreal apocalypse. A project for a revolution in Los Angeles. A mid-summer night’s dream. A long series of distorted, perverted vignettes. Everything that is familiar becomes slightly twisted with a little anguish, love and desire. Nothing will ever be the same again.
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Winter
A Prose Poem, 1994
Day after day the sky is completely overcast. Sight is lost in charcoal grey and brilliant white; sometimes a uniform silver grey across the entire expanse. One after another the masses of clouds sweep in from the ocean. On the ground, emerald blades of grass spotted with diamonds. And up above dense smoke colored vapor as far as the eye can see.
Exile
A Novel, 1994
Salvador is at the end of the line. A roman noir, really noir. A brilliant Argentinean, poet, ex-terrorist remembers some of his past as he tries to move forward, anguished and on the borderline. A tortured soul looks for a flower in the desert, and writes sonnets in his most lucid moments.
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Amores Decadentes
Eugene, Oregon, 1995
Como Salvador em Exile, tenho de ir embora. Mas antes de partir eu vou analisar bem a situação ao meu redor. Eu já sei como vai ser no Brasil – e cínico, olho aqui os EUA – daria para rir até chorar – mas que seres tristes e perdidos: Mary, a bibliotecária psicótica; Constance, a pintora frustrada e neurótica ao fim da linha; Sandy, a pastora, também frustrada e neurótica, abandonada pelo seu Deus; Susan, a feminista, amarga… Mas que talento desperdiçado… Tarde demais para elas todas, a vida já escorregou por entre os seus dedos – somente falta esperar morrir.
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Sex and the City
Recife, Brazil, 1996
Recife, in Northeast Brazil, the poorest area of the country – neglected by the government in Brasília, but with a rich history – the first explorers landed there… and a rich folklore… A people that has struggled and struggles still: see Dry Lives (Vidas Secas) by Graciliano Ramos, or The Queen of the Prisons of Greece (A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia) by Osman Lins. The background – but this is really the story of Mara, a girl from the countryside, and Bete, a girl from the slums. A character study, like Amores Decadentes, and beginning in Brazil just a while after Amores Decadentes finished in Eugene, Oregon. And like in the first story, tarot is used. Sometimes girls get crazy, and they themselves will tell you.
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Carnival Nights
An erotic First Contact in the near future. It is a continuation of Exile, but it is very different in tone. The characters Salvador, Isabelle and Thérèse are present, and my children, Iuri and Bianca enter the story as well, Iuri as a crack NASA pilot, and Bianca as a molecular biologist. Iuri and Nathalie (daughter of Salvador and Thérèse) are in love.
Poemas para Meus Filhos
Although mostly written in Portuguese this collection does contain some pieces in English. For example, On Gaibu Beach, and a Theorem on Spirits.
Louis XIV and the Land of Love and Adventure
If this story seems like it has a thousand voices, there are; and they are set to the rhythm of the flow of their time.
We are entering a virtual and imagined reality for us, and a real and imagined world for them.
The Baroque space. The living Realm.
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See Kindle e-book and sample – Volume 1 to 1679
On Gaibu Beach
the waves on the shore
swirling, swerving,
haunting me,
the emptiness inside of me.
precious,
you left a yearning
you shouldn’t leave,
in spite of all,
devastating me,
detaching me.
so now, to one, as we pass,
who had passed me on the beach,
I touch my finger to my cheek,
and she melts into the sight of me.
the sound of a drum from the rocky hillside
rhythms the young men
playing soccer by the water.
comes walking towards me
another friendly flirt of mine,
with her sister and her mother.
seeing our separate paths align,
I watch in disbelief and then in awe:
they pass and near to me they stop.
it seems to me a kind of miracle:
I regard them while they talk.
her, her sister, mother, her,
our eyes touch,
we pinch our lips
and look away,
then look again.
her hair is tied behind her head,
a little red and white bikini top,
like a ribbon wraps her breasts.
a little yellow skirt
that when she runs
flits so playfully.
we’ve talked before, next time
I’ll have to ask her name,
say something cute,
tell her she looks an actrice
since she wants me to.
it would be like detonating;
she pursed her lips;
what is next?
we hold hands?
we kiss?
always ever so lightly.
white clouds in the sky,
then dusk coming slowly on,
waves swirling on the sand.
another moment passes by,
and I think of you again,
the night we spent with pixie dust.
precious, just another pretty fancy,
nothingness,
a fleeting touch of alchemy?
Theorem on Spirits
Theorem: a proposition that is not self-evident but that can be proved from accepted premises and so is established as a law or principle.
spirits
what is more decadent (or crazy) than analyzing phantoms?
at first glance neither their physical nor their metaphysical existence seem to work out, but let us construct an argument.
I was led to look into the scheme of creation where I had used the word ghost, and following this logic: urge = ghost = dark energy = incomprehensible switch. in creation I had “ghosts” everywhere so now I am seeking to eliminate, analyze and refine, defining in what the ghosts consist.
where does the spirit world fit in with genesis? was it created at the same time? if it is necessary, or possible, to include spirit in the metaphysics of creation. and also look at whether spirit could be the cause, or by-product of creation. there is a certain beauty to the notion of a spark of life (a spiritual spark) and spirit as the finality of evolution.
we can set off on this adventure with a common definition of spirit: “a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body.” (Wiki) but as we will see in the course of the argument, spirit cannot exist as a separate entity, unless it is reduced to being simply an urge or surge, in either case, not spirit, by definition.
can spirit exist in the interstices between being and nothingness? not likely because there is nothing intermediate in any of the acts of creation – there either is or isn’t, no half-life, and one can’t use spirit as an argument for half-life, because that is what we are trying to prove. so we see no instances of half creation.
or should we search for something else entirely, a “spirit world” (neither of being, nor nothingness) But then it would exist and so by definition it would be a part of existence. wood fairies, and my favorite, a brook fairy, and her dappled color, picked up from the shadows.
could spirits exist on the cuff, the cusp, of something, taking energy from one side and form from the other, and really not “existing” in either?
there is also the problem of interaction, between the spirit, which is not material, and the material – or between the insubstantial and substantial. here we also enter into a well known metaphysical quandary: the “interaction problem” in the philosophy of mind. I quote Wikipedia: “This is a problem for non-physical entities as posited by dualism: by what mechanism, exactly, do they interact with physical entities, and how can they do so? Interaction with physical systems requires physical properties which a non-physical entity does not possess.” the mind, having the body as energy source, can engender spirit; the mind, conscious of the spirit or spirits created, can more or less freely focus, distinguish, select, alter the spirits; reacting to, or interacting with them, pursuing their influence, etc.
and here we come to another much debated metaphysical question: the question of free will: we can imagine a continuum as such: brain – mind – spirit. in the terms of materialistic determinism as we move towards the spirit terminal we gain freedom as agents, free choice.…