/lit/ - Literature

A cutting comes across the lawn

"Green grass is a thing of the past!" said Mr. Sassafras as he tumbled down the leafy stalks en masse.

We would mow the lawn in those days, with those sturdy old models that would make you sweat and have to change your shirt before dinnertime.Those days when I would not mow the lawn were the days I longed for sleep, hoping that the new day would bring some real work. It was an empty feeling, and would make me seep deeper from my wineglass at dinner than I was used to.

>>5968807
Scott L Wilton, an English PhD candidate interning at the University of Sao Paulo's Anthropology department, discovered in the department's library, a volume without any printing along the spine in the section devoted to natural history. Opening it to an arbitrary page, albeit carefully, as the book appeared in pristine condition, his eyes fell on a paragraph elucidating the gardening practices of a certain extinct ethnic group of the 20thC.

These people, known as the Whinglaxons, transported their field vegetables across oceans to carpet their properties. Even more curious, it was not enough to let the vegetation grow, they would periodically cut its length with a cylinder of whirling blades.

After an absorbed hour of reading, Wilton closed the volume, returned it to its place on the shelf where he found it, and left a note with his advisor. Scott traveled home by bus, and arrived home when the afternoon sun cast everything about his house in a saintly gold. Scott walked to his shed, opened it, and finding the very same cutting instrument he read about in the nameless volume, began to try "cutting the grass," as the Whinglaxons referred to the activity. He thereafter wrote a small entry for his thesis, which was eventually published by the University of Sao Paolo in an anthology on the natural history of the Whinglaxons. The publisher offered the University an option to print the cover of the book with a new gold lettering. The anthropology department didn't discover until later, unfortunately, that the gold lettering rubbed off with the most gentle brush of the thumb.

>>5968807
I tondue the lawn today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.

>>5968807
So we beat on, mower against the lawn, borne back ceaselessly into the yard debris bin.

1. I shall cut them off and down, sayeth thy DAD, that their bounty might diminish and their length be uniform
2. As a sign of the Pact between Me and My lawn, it shall be mowed before My sight
3. And that which is cut off shall be cast onto a compost most vile and putrid
4. For there I doth make new Earth, and where the Earth is born, there is life
5. Woe to the straws of Israel! Whichever grass is too tall will be cut down, sayeth thy DAD
6. And thy DAD is most holy, for he doth mow the lawn

>>5968943
gold

>>5968807
Jemand mußte Josef K. zum Feinde haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses erwartet hätte, wurde seine Grünfläche eines Morgens verhaftet.

>>5968960

>>5968960
Warum sind sie so schlecht Deutsch sprechen?

>>5968960
>Grünfläche

>>5968879
>>5968842
These are great

>>5968943
This destroyed my sides 10/10

>>5969184
>>5969223
Vater und Mutter sind Beamte. Das erklärt meinen Sprachgebrauch.

>>5968943
Brilliant.

Aleksey began to sweat, and grew a pale yellow, almost green. He paced the living room with his hands behind his back, speaking to himself as though in a fever.
"The lawn is unruly, beyond overdue, and I ought to mow it, but... say instead I didn't mow the lawn, what would become of me then? What should the neighbors say? No, I won't mow the lawn! Let them come to me and shout, I prefer it that way! Let them grow so irritable they mow it themselves, for me, so as not to have to bear the sight of my terrible lawn!"
And he collapsed in his chair with a brain fever.

The first day of his trip to visit his parents, in Florida, where he grew up, Paul was told by his mother, while she ate two english muffins with agave honey, to mow the lawn. Paul ingested six 30mg adderall and put on his 'Florida' playlist, consisting of songs that reminded him of home while he was living in Manhattan-where he downloaded the song files from his friend's Macbook onto his iPhone during a party.
'Mowing the lawn seems productive, I think'
Paul began to think of the lawn as representative of all natural occurrences and living things of Earth, who are ultimately, probably tragically, doomed to an existence of total helplessness to human desires of comfort, utterly indifferent to the advances of technology (such as lawnmowers, or Apple products) that we create.

>>5969468
who is this

>>5968807
Es wird von einem Wachstumsschub gemunkelt. Wir gehen zwei Tage früher an die Arbeit. Auf dem Wege passieren wir einen zerfallenen Geräteschuppen. An seiner Längsseite aufgestapelt steht ein doppelter, hoher Wall von brauenen Jutesäcken, gefüllt mit Gartenerde. Sie riechen noch nach Torf und Regen und Sumpf. Es sind mindestens hundert."Da ist ja gut vorgesorgt für den Sommer", sagt Müller erstaunt."Die sind für uns", knurrt Detering."Quatsch nicht!" fährt Kat ihn an."Sei froh, wenn du noch einen Sack kriegst", grinst Tjaden, "dir verpassen sie doch nur eine Schubkarre voll Sand für deinen grünen Daumen, paß auf!"Auch die anderen machen Witze, unbehagliche Witze, was sollen wir sonst tun. - Die Säcke sind ja tatsächlich für uns. In solchen Dingen klappt die Organisation. Überall vorn sprießt es. In der ersten Nacht versuchen wir, uns zu orientieren. Da es ziemlich still ist, können wir das Gras sogar wachsen hören, wie die Halme hinter dem nachbarlichen Hochbeet nach oben drängen, unausgesetzt, bis in die Dämmerung hinein. Kat sagt, daß sie nicht abmähen, sondern Dünger bringen, Dünger, Nitrat, Phosphor. Der englische Rasen ist gedüngt, wir riechen das sofort.

>>5969522
its written in the style of tao lin's 'taipei'

>>5969534
ohhh. he's your favorite? i havent read it but i thought it was an empty meme. is it actually good?

>>5968869
Who is this in reference to? Absolutely beautiful writing anyway.

>>5968943
And who is this? Wittgenstein?

>>5969575
wait................. what

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good lawn, must be in want of a lawnmower.

Lawn, land that I own. Down the field two-steps I walk with a faint tap tap and hands in the air waving and yelling "Beautiful!, beautiful!".
Mais je regrette, dawn is close and I shawn once and again since je suis très fatigue and can't mow no more. Back to bed I'll go with my fawn that lies in my lawn (op mère,his dad was a possum) to faire le con and sleep numbed by the faint of her fur.

Rattle rattle grass *slice* *slice*. How many much more time left of sweat foot stuck? Read about foot bloody stringy hot pain summer heat. Summer ends about twenty days solstice pagan holidays like Christmas?

This lawn is dank as fuck. I just want to take all these lawns and roll them up and smoke them. Yesterday I could not mow, it was a bad day. Today I will mow, I will live The Mowing Life. And so he mowed, and all was well with the world.

>>5969889
The other guy already did the bible.

>>5969575
Allah.

>>5968869
borges?

Humming [italics]alla decimo in contrapuncto alla terza[/italics]: the task gripping febrility, I daunt. Am I to push on ineluctably? Christ! Put on your shoes.

WARNING: DO NOT OPERATE PRODUCT BAREFOOT

Stephen was nearly halfway finishes with the front lawn. I am walking through an array of my own doing. Vrrrm, brrrr. Odor of novelly shaved sod. Jesus, breath it in. [italics]mahtdenrasen[/italics] for now and we'll have a merry appearance. Perpend.

Today, the lawn was mowed. Mamam asked me if I could mow the lawn. I told her it doesn't make a difference, but that I could if she wanted me to. I mowed the lawn as the sun burned my skin and sweat ran down my neck.

One must imagine the lawn mowed.

>>5968869
not sure is cervantes or borges

>>5969550

ha I was cracking up when I wrote that. I'm not as much a fan of Tao Lin's books as much as I am of his career in general. Taipei is my favorite book, his short story collection and novella are both good reads, but the rest is a little hit or miss. You'll enjoy him if you like the bleak minimalism of Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Raymond Carver, or Joy Williams. But yes, certainly do yourself a favor a read Taipei

>>5968943
I regret making fun of the Bible. I shouldn't have posted this.

>>5970947
faggot

>>5970947
Well, you should probably spend some time on your knees or say some Hail Mary's, depending on your color of religion.

The man mowed the lawn [1]

>>5970970
dfw

>>5968943
lmao

>>5968807
it was a bright cold day in april, and the clocks were striking thirteen. it looked like it was going to be a nice afternoon, so i was looking forward to getting my lawnmower out of the shed for the first time this year, and giving the lawn, which was looking a bit patchy, a bit of care and attention.

unfortunately totalitarianism stopped me

El pasto, en su abominable arrogancia, se multiplica y es voraz, tal como los hombres. Al igual que los heresiarcas, pondero el culminar su desaparicion con algun fuego purificador, o bien, encomendar al azar su proliferacion eterna.


shits weak, i know
ayy

>>5968869

nice borges m8. i see some cortazar too, in the utter description of the obvious

>>5969561
>>5970035
>>5970090
>>5971052
yes, borges. im actually a little proud of it, came out with only a few changes in wording along the way

>>5968853
nice joyce (?)

>>5968857
mccarthy?

>>5969457
celine?

>>5969613
Loving
Every
Laugh

On January 7, Maria Garcia Lopez was murdered while mowing her lawn. Her remains were found in the desert outside of Calle Hernandez, half-eaten by dogs. She was raped vaginally and anally.

>>5971169
Too easy anon. Roberto Bolaño.

I went to the shed to look for the lawnmower to mow the lawn and there were hedge-cutters in the shape of knives and there were hoes used to dig up the earth and there were gloves used with gardening worn thin by usage. Eventually I found the lawnmower. Please hurry up and mow the lawn, my dad said.

>>5971903
Doctor Seuss

>>5971908
i was trying to go for cormac mccarthy. didn't really work out though lel

>>5971917
I got who you were going for. Should have been in third person then it would have been bretty good.

The grass in the yard had been growing unchecked for months. After it was mown, I retired to my den, where, surrounded by the spoils of past conquests in Rhodesia and Ceylon, I sipped imported scotch, gazed into the bottle and contemplated my receding hairline. Age is inexorable.

>>5971917
should have described the landscape of the overgrown lawn and mentioned the mexicans doing the mowing

>>5971917
Should've finished by wiping the sweat off your brow with a tortilla.

It should be poignantly clear that if one wishes to mow the lawn correctly and to the most satisfactory degree possible in order to maintain his lawn, given the inherent challenges of a man wishing to mow his recently acquired lawn, he must make use of mercenary adjuncts won over by the promise of gold far in excess of those offered by the previous lawn owner. It stands to reason that should the new owner attempt to mow the lawn without first pacifying the indigenous populace within and around the lawn by way of taxation, control of critical supplies or military adeptness then he should expect a swift unrest and overthrow of his newly received lawn mowing privileges.

I was going to mow the lawn today but decided to cook pasta, talk to my cat and listen to jazz all day

The Grackdotolians wondered why I mowed the lawn. Cutting off life as it starts to grow for the sake of appearances. I am an American human and this is what we do to our grass. Why would I be the one to stop it?

"This is a very bad parody you're doing, anon," the grass said.

"I know."

"You'll kill yourself just like your mother."

"I know."

>>5970061
Camus

>>5972919
You forgot underage girls, cutty sark and talking sheepmen

All well-trimmed lawns are the same; each unruly lawn is unruly in its own way.

>>5972954
Tolstoy, too easy

A nice looking lawn [HexColor Value: #66FF33] that has exactly two million seventy thousand individual blades of grass cut at an average of 2.5 inches tall did not happen the way it did only by itself, it was groomed and maintained by Jimmy. Jimmy had a large head with two eyes, a nose, two ears, and black hair [HexColor Value: #000000]. Jimmy was 5'2'' tall and 2' even in width.

>>5972954
>>5972956
I have a confession though I've never actually read Anna Karenina, I've just read Guns, Germs, and Steel

still, too easy

At first I understood why I needed to mow the lawn. Its ideal of beauty is what kept me to such a seemingly endless task. Could I capture perfection and beauty once and for all by keeping this grass in the eternal blossom of youth? I could feel my effort seeping into the lawn whenever I did it. My thighs and glutes had grown muscular and perhaps acutely feminine compared to my more masculine upper half from my devotion to crafting nature. Every bead of sweat that glistened on my body was a reaching out to the sun and shining back, both of us complicit in creating the preservation of beauty.

However, my devotion to the lawn was coming under duress. My mother's newest companion, a former officer of the navy reduced to a sedentary life in the civil service, had moved in with us. He had grown tired of the navy life and wished for something safer. He was pathetic in my eyes. Especially when I watched him through the crack in my bedroom wall adjacent to theirs pump my mother without the full vigor of a real man. Her languid moans and the visible effort it took him to take them both to a lazy climax.

We did not get along. He had the idea to replace the lawn with a rock garden, and this made our relationship worse and distressed me greatly. I was unemployed and had no say in these renovations. I was going to lose the only beautiful thing in my life.

Tonight I will go out onto my lawn, and no longer spill sweat on it, but blood. I will open up my body with my deceased father's combat knife and water the lawn one last time. Each of us to die in eternal beauty before the stone-nothingness crushes our divinity.

...
Chapter 41: The Dirt and its Inhabitants
Chapter 42: The Greenness of the Grass
Chapter 43: The Grass' Blade
...
Chapter 204: The Rotary Functions of the Lawnmower's Blade
...
Chapter 573: Cutting the Grass - Part 1
Chapter 574: Cutting the Grass - Part 2
...

>>5968807
The freshly shorn grass has a mellifluous smell akin to an arse full of farts.

>>5972991
Noice

>>5972991
I have no idea who this is but i like it

>>5972991
who is this?
>>5973000
nth for joyce

The Proletariat has for centuries born the burden of cutting the grass; with each passing year earning less and cutting more. Meanwhile deep underground the evil bourgeoisie dances, every devilish step making the grass climb higher and higher towards the fascist sun.

I mowed the lawn on Sundays, usually early in the morning, though the grass was still damp and my mind still foggy, but the act itself was calming, and I would see the same people each of those Sunday mornings, Mr. Greene taking his usual stroll and always stopping to say "hiya Hem" even though he was as horrible a human being as anybody, and even worse of a neighbor. I would nod in his direction and in my mind say "hi you miserable piece of shit," and then Pauline would already be bringing me an ice tea, which was inappropriate for the a.m. chill, but I would drink it anyway.

>>5973014
Marx

>>5971917
No. No, it did not.

>>5973011
>>5973013
It's supposes to be Melville. Mostly Mody Dick, though.

I hit the green evil once more suddenly,
Then the eyes of sorrow looked upon me quirkly,
Then said I, "I mow, the pain in thee",
But then again, the agony was gaily.

>>5971917
i think it would have been:

son

what

mow the lawn

okay

okay

from "The Lawn", a post apocalyptic fantasy

>>5970970
Where was the man who said he'd come? He said he'd be here by now. The man who had been contacted about the problem concerning the length of the grass. He said he'd be here. A tiny insect in a shiny black shell was standing on the tip of a blade of grass, unmoving. The man had specifically said he'd be here to mow the grass, and thus the anxiety of his not being here, in this place, to mow the grass, the grass that needed cutting like just so badly.

It's true the lawn's grown past the point of acceptance, and I would gladly mow it on my own regard, if it weren't for that fact that I had not a shilling to spend on gas. What fate, to allow the grass to obtain sustenance from nature, while I do without. Maybe if, instead I chew upon the grass. Yes, I will chew upon the grass, oh why hadn't I thought of this earlier, as that will give me strength while I bring it to proper length.

In response to an aggressive rapping on the door, H. stepped outside into several feet of snow to greet two extremely well-dressed men, and could only think to himself how inappropriate, given the blinding snowfall and blustering winds, their suits and ties were. "Perhaps," thought H., "they have come from the south and were unprepared for the weather."
"Hello, Mr H.," said one of the well-dressed gentlemen. "We're from the neighborhood watch, and have come, as a result of several neighborly complaints, to ask, warmly of course, whether you plan to mow your lawn in the near future?"
"My lawn?" asked H. "It is buried in snow, if my eyes don't decieve me."
"Yes," responded the other gentlemen, "but we have recieved several complaints, as my partner has just explained. Thank you for your time, Mr. H., we'll be back on Thursday to follow up."
"My lawn?..." pondered H., shutting the door and rummaging through drawers for proper outdoor regalia. "I'll just need to find the key to the shed. If I could only remember where I placed it last."

>>5973214
received*

>>5973214
Max Brod, right?

>>5973230
wait, really? i suck at this shit

my dostoevsky is celine
my kafka is brod

my life
>is turd

Mrs. Glass stood staring at the lawn, the blades a dull green, patches of crab grass peeking up among them. "It needs mowed..." she mentioned as her focus was brought to reaching in her gown's pocket, pulling out a king sized cigarette and lighting it with a flick. Not after a single puff did she look around the old porch for the ceramic ash tray, as she did time and time before. "You know you children ought to get more sunlight, I've read in the New York Times that..." An abrupt stop as Zooey snapped back. "You know, I don't really give a goddamn about that phony nonsense. Everyone's so caught up in building this oh so perfect facade of theirs. Making sure the lawn is perfectly leveled in their goddamn striped paths. Those paths are really telling of everyone need to be perfect." He reached for a cigar out of his ornamented metal case and bit it between his teeth as if to light it but continued on without so. "They've got to be so damn pleased with themselves and their lawns. Like their father taught them to mow it, just like their fathers taught them before. Can't anyone be bothered to stop with this phony business to see that it doesn't matter. Trying to live up to everyone else's expectations... Will you let me see a light already Bessie?" He motions to the pack of matches still grasped tightly in Mrs. Glass's hand. "You could be more pleasant to your mother, here. I'm not tell you to mow the lawn, I was just meant to say that it wouldn't hurt for you to take a walk or try to visit your brother once in a while. He won't even call nowadays." The first match snapped as he tried to strike it "Fine, I'll mow the goddamn lawn, you happy Bessie? You I'll make it nice a tidy for you to tell all your friends about during lunch" With another strike of a new match he puffs his cigar and walks too the shed and pulls out an out of style push mower than no one every cared to replace.

>>5973248
I was kidding, anon. It's obvious that it's Kafka.

>>5973259
But his celine is Dosto

>>5968960
>>5968943
>>5973214
These are excellent

The drone hovered inches above the lawn. Measuring each blade with it's effectors, it cut them one by one with it's fields, trimming them to a uniform length.
Watching the tiny machine diligently go about it's task, she found herself remembering the refugees in the killing fields. Remembering how the Kritarcrat's men chased them down and beheaded them with scythes, And how one small girl survived by hiding in the tall grass.

Her terminal buzzed and she shook the memories out of her head. It was the girl from the night before. One who had spent her whole life in this world of short grass and tall people, and never had to worry about Killing fields or Kritarcrats. The girl's affection for her was real, not just the usual curiosity Culture citizens (As far as such a thing could be said to exist) reserved for Special Circumstances Agents or Barbarians, but for some reason she could never explain to the girl, she would never be able to return that affection.

>>5973506
Iain M. Banks

Should have left it at the first paragraph, too easy with the second

>>5973529
It's not a contest to hide your inspiration. But yeah, the first paragraph was all I really needed. Juxtapose techno-utopia with genocide.

He had pre-emptively made up his mind to mow the lawn in the shape of a sinuous wave, as not only would it be the perfect representation of his misanthropic nature, it would also reflect how he felt right now, in regards to his reaching a self-perceived intellectual plateau, peak, apex. There was no real description for it, coming to terms with the way genius is supposed to be. Not the product of a working formula but an entirely new proof, applying revolutionary concepts in ways inconceivable to the average man. If mathematics was used to explain the natural phenomena of the universe, why not incorporate such elegance in his immediate environment? The most meta graffiti artist the world had ever seen...

And it all began with his lawn.

As is the usual course of events for those who resolve to break down social barriers most people don't even realise actually exist, he came into difficulty almost immediately, when his obsessive compulsive disorder and narcissistic/perfectionist natures kicked in simultaneously, upon realising the precision with which he would have to sculpt this masterpiece... the uncanny detail paid attention to exact measurements. No edges, perfect curves. And so he progressed, slowly, cautiously, carefully, not so much a mathematician as an artist, crafting his divine envisioning, not belonging to him or some deity... rather channeled through him by some force which transcended all known and unknown physical laws of the universe. His bodily actions the product of a reserved neurological autopilot mechanism, he turned to questions he had pondered before, but never dared ask aloud for fear of receiving an answer. Every step over each blade of grass, why, anyone or anything could have touched that before him, could have laid their telluric, terrestrial, earthly life if they resolved to... And perhaps they did, just as he was doing now, only for their clinging to the hopeless hope of immortality to be lost to the passage of time, to literal dust... Just as his equations would be too.

He stopped mowing immediately, hoping this epiphany would be ephemeral, something he'd forget about after a hot chocolate and an episode of Friends. He went back inside.

In Vienna, the lawns are altogether un-mown, but perhaps it cannot be helped, Anon said. You can go to any suburb, any neighborhood or community, and you will find, to your perfectly justified disgust, a festering pit of weeds and dead grass mottled with the dung of pets, the discarded toys of lazy children with lazier parents, and a nauseating composition of odors that is so wretched as to raise it, on a scale of foulness, far above the poorly kept lawns of other cities, Anon said. As a child I was forced to mow these lawns, for though father worked long and painful hours he could not make enough to afford mother's rheumatoid medication, and she would lay in bed howling obscenities with her adenoidal voice, her claw-like hands clenched to her breasts like a wounded bird, and when my father came home he would beat me over the head with a switch if I did not make enough money, which was often considering that I was paid in candies, little coins, and bits of melting Viennese chocolate, Anon said. It was the best these subhuman beasts could scoop out of their holed Viennese pockets in the sides of their over-sized, unwashed, Viennese trousers, but was mere pittance considering their lawns would always grow back in a day or two; yes, a day or two, Anon said. To full length. A nightmarish bloom that could not be pared by any blade, as if these lawns, having absorbed like rain the souls of so many wretched generations of odorous, stubborn, and undeniably subhuman Viennese families, had given birth to a kind of supernatural evil, and this evil, being made from the Viennese people, took on their characteristics, that is to say, a blind malevolence, a foulness too stupid to recognize itself, only able to suck the energy and happiness out of everything. This evil permeated the underside of the entire city, almost a second sewer, invisible and yet, apparent to the sober, un-Viennese sense of smell, and it was this evil that I battled with every time I mowed those lawns, I could feel it fighting back as I forced the mower into those mad tangles, fighting like some invalid refusing his medication out of self-pity, all through those turgid yards, which is why now that I have reached a ripe age I can no longer put pen to paper, this arthritis has warped my wrists, curved them inward just as my mother's were, Anon said.

Bump

>>5970075
lmao. who

>>5974262

>>5974267
gud 1

>>5974262
myth of sisyphus

To mow, or not to mow, that is the question.

The lawn was mowed today. Or perhaps it was yesterday.

He mowed the lawn slowly and the grass flew faintly through the universe, and faintly flying like the descent of their last end, upon all the gravel and the dirt

>>5974362
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"?

Really by now he approached the whole task as a kind of spatial problem, abstracted into path-of-least-resistance diagrams and schematic manoeuvres, which while not eliminating the deep-soul-level boredom that accompanied the looming tedium of anything chore-like was he reasoned at the least a way to keep a certain level of neuron stimulation, which to him seemed absolutely 100% like vital if he wasn't going to join the grimly press-ganged looking army of OAP suburban lawn-owners, their faces as bleached pale and shop-bought as their polo shirts and sneakers. Patches of brown were scoped out by him as zones of urgent attention. He reached for the NutriBlast fertiliser, interestingly the very same brand that made brief but flashy headlines on the local news network (a whole animated graphic kind of deal featuring some sort of cartoonish and radioactive Triffid) when a kid really kind of unbelievably tragically overdosed from a novel and goofily-named psychogenic compound made in like who-know's-which adolescent's amateur lab (the N.B. formula being pretty close to a much more well known but fairly unobtainable stimulant, close enough anyway to encourage the few relatively organic-chemistry-proficient adolescents to see if perhaps the suburban chemical world could be turned back on itself in a way that would at least occupy an afternoon) and so then as a result of the really kind of unbelievably tragic incident the few units of N.B. in circulation now had to be bought from the back of an amiable but no-sense-of-personal-space Polish guy's truck in the parking lot of SignorCrazees 24/7 Italian-Mexican fast-food joint, the astro-turf-perfect lawns in array under the sun today reading as a pretty effective testimonial to the formula's continued market domination.

woah that was fun.

>>5974370
Camus

>>5974412
DFW(?)

>>5974417
yeah Re. DFW
feel proud that I didn't use footnotes

Stillwood Crescent Drive curved leisurely north from Sunset Boulevard, well beyond the Bel-Air Country Club golf course. The road was lined with walled and fenced estates. Some had high walls, some had low walls, some had ornamental iron fences, some were a bit old-fashioned and got along with tall hedges. The street had no sidewalk. Nobody walked in that neighborhood, not even the mailman.

The afternoon was hot, but not hot like Pasadena. There was a drowsy smell of flowers and sun, a swishing of lawn sprinklers gentle behind hedges and walls, the clear ratchety sound of lawn mowers moving delicately over serene and confident lawns.

This is the best thread in ages

The main reason I'd left the grass unmowed was to give Tommy Donald something to do. As he worked sweat rolled down his chubby neck, segmented into rolls by a crisp collar. It occured to me that his mother starched his clothes especially for our visits. As he mowed he droned on until his voice became a pleasant hum. The last of the long grass caressed my feet as I watched his mower get close.

Constitude (stage left): Hark, fellow, methinks thy complexion art hearty. Befit ye it may to lay waste to mine own stalks of grass, plague me as they do.

Grantive: Ah, befit you so indeed, but vassal I am not. A piece of silver for this devil's toil, or goodly person thou art not.

Constitude: By God's big toe! This the weakness which I feel, it hath no cure nor sympathy from man. Begone, young fool, and pray I take ye not to sword.

Grantive: Such treachery! Great louse, I'll rack thee with my manhood. Your boyhole in'it and about.

- I ain't been droppin' no eaves sir, honest. I was just mowing the lawn under the window there, if you'll follow me.

>>5972933
?

The history of all hithero existing lawn is the history of grass mowing.

Lawn Mowing is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false fence gate to the backyard of life, a filthy piss-ridden little gardening shed nailed off by the illegal immigrants, but just deep enough for a young teenager on summer break to curl up from the grass trimmings and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

>>5975269
Palahniuk?

>>5975271
Thompson.

One of the negros from the county was showing some small boys a magic trick out in the town square outside of Captain Warren's shop when Jim Catton drove through in his beat up white truck. He stopped just nearby the negro who by this time had stopped his trick and turned to face Jim, already aware of the man's famous temper and thusly already making excuses.

Jim was a mean old man and we all felt sorry for his boy. Someone from out of state once said that long back in the Catton line was a French monarch, but that didn't make it too far through Jim's blood. His skin was too thick and his skull was too dense for that. Jim took no pleasure in the hard work of a day but took all the pleasure in letting you know if you slacked off. His situation was no good, either. The Cattons didn't own any land, at least that we knew of - they were sharecroppers.

"Boy," said Jim, spitting into the dirt inches shy of the negro's canvas shoes, "lawn needs mowing." Jim's boy hung his head. "Now, I mean," Jim quaked. Captain Warren said that by this point you could already see the veins in Jim's thick skin above his dense forehead. "But the trick," mumbled out the boy in his quiet manner.

It didn't take much to throw James Catton into a fit those days before the doctor came with his electric kit and his pills and his needles and took Jim away into Jackson in his long white car. Jim took one long mean look at the nigger with both their bottom teeth showing over their upper lips and Jim took one step back and gave the nigger a punch for the ages. Molly Chabon said you could have heard his nose broke from over in Y. County. Now here comes Captain Warren to pull Jim off this nigger he's wailing on, and he caught all hell in the stomach. Jim Catton is not a small man and Warren goes into the dust but soon the barber is there and he himself is a big man and with the help of his boy who by now is a decently sized young man and they pull him off but Jim is screaming to holy hell about how they're nigger-lovers and they ought to be ashamed and how he's going to let them have it. So Captain Warren on his feet now walks in his unsteady way over to the negro, who isn't breathing.

if I learn to find beauty in tall grass, I rid myself of work desire and suffering
instead of knees bending to be felt, the tall grass feels me

The boy set to his task when the sun was high as he was wont to do. He pushed the mechanism forward, scything down the Lilliputian forest that graced his property with an aura of prestige in precise, parallel passes. His movements were mechanical, like some archaic automation assembling stones to build a temple for one whose glory surpasses human comprehension.

The sun reached its zenith and the boy stopped his tireless assault on nature to press a white cloth to his chestnut brow, dampening the soiled fabric as if rain had been blessing the arid land for days on end. Keeping his hand to his forehead as to shield himself from the white-heat of the orb which hung heavily in the sky, he surveyed the land and contemplated, as he did once in a while, just for a minute as such matters were far beyond his wanting or capabilities or rights to know, why such a world would demand so much and give so little.

The gentle clink of horseshoes against the compact surface of the dusty road to the south forced him out of his moment of meditation. Atop a white horse was a man whose entire being seemed to serve only to reflect the radiance of the life-giving fire above. Under bleached leather boots and snow-white clothing was skin made of porcelain, hairless, and beneath the snow-capped Stetson glimmered eyes chiseled from ice and mouth filled with pearls that simultaneously resembled the gaping maw of some unfathomable cavern. The visitor tipped his hat to the boy and the boy nodded back.

Howdy.
The boy nodded again and turned back to finish his task. The sun was starting to set.
You know what day it is, son.
Que.
You know what day it is. Que dia es hoy.
No.
Today would be the Sabbath.
Que.
You don’t work during the Sabbath.

The boy, feeling ill at ease, continued to push forward with his back to the intruder. Felled blades of grass rose in the air and fell at his feet, nourishing the ground like the decaying corpses of fallen soldiers. The man insisted he stop. The boy did not listen.

Basta.

The boy stopped and turned to see a flash of silver in the man’s hand before thunder cracked and the white missile lanced his left eye and passed through his skull. A corona of crimson blossoms outwards for what seems to the boy an eternity, as what meaning does time have for those who no longer have the ability to comprehend it?

The stranger looked upon his work for a time after it had fallen to the earth, and then with a quiet apology to no one in particular he set off. He spurred his mare Westward, away from his rotting monument of sin, and towards the darkening scarlet horizon, a shard of light in deepening oblivion.


Nothing great, but it was fun.

"Slothrop" sez Bodine

"What?" sez Slothrop

"Mow the lawn" sez Bodine

It took almost four minutes for Bodine to realize that there was no one there besides himself. The paranoia was hitting him hard by that point, so he started talking about Negroes and defecation. Also rockets and random German words.

>>5975411

This could actually pass for legit MacCarthy.

>>5975411
That's actually pretty good.

If it was the beginning of the book then McCarthy would insist on pointing out how the bullet travels faster than sound

>>5969468

>six 30mg adderall
>six

google mown lawn by lydia davis

>>5976666
how long u been working on those quads brah

En un cesped de la villa, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía, un jardinero hábil, de los de tijera afilada, y abono medrador. Sacha más usada que nueva, siembra algunas noches, hoz y hazadón los sabados, reposo los viernes, y algún palomino los domingos consumían las tres partes de su huerto.

>>5976718

>>5969848
A hearty lol. Reading "Bend Sinister" right now, any thoughts?

I'll give this a shot.

>hen the rain that had lasted for 10 years stopped, the grass grew. After a day, it was the height of a small child, after two days that of a gorwn man. On the third day, when the grass had reached the height of a house, Juan Malnoche got out his lawmower and mowed. He mowed for three weeks without stopping, his huge shoulders and legs bulging under his tight pants, the grass growing tall behind him just after he had mown it. Thus he continued, for it was foreseen that Juan would mow the lawn until the day he died.

>>5976750

Nothing to say about this?

>>5976718
>>5976724

>>5976750

Is this some Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For sale : lawn, never mown.

>>5976765
Yes. Skipped the anon who posted before me, because my spanish reading is slow and i'm lazy.

>>5976218
>>5976644

Thanks guys. I was running out of similes, but if it was recognizable then mission accomplished.

>>5974379
kek. Bastardized one of my favourite sentences in english lit.

>>5971023
lol'd

>>5968842
Who is this?

>>5976771

I a garden of the Villa, of which name I don't want to remember, not long ago lived a skilled gardener, one of those with sharp scissors, and top quality manure. Trowel used rather than new, sowing some nights, sickle and hoe on Sundays, rest on Fridays, and a little shit posting on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his lawn.

My English is probably just as slow.

>>5976767
kek

>>5976818
>Sundays
Saturdays

>>5976811
gravity's rainbow, pynchon

I am living in the country villa. There are no weeds here, and not a blade of grass misplaced.

>>5976843
Young Milla

And there was grass more than could be accounted for with the relaxation of the days ahead and those ones behind that never really struck the mind but still managed to occasionally rise. There was grass;- now there was and then there was as there had always been and he took the mower and he checked the gas and he pulled it three times and it started: started and went, cutting and slashing until it jammed and sputtered phosphorescent blood between the blades and some of the blades their flesh. "Ba God, ba God, jus lak David n' Goliath. Jus lak, jus lak."

He who mows lawns should see to it that he himself does not become a lawn. And when you cut into the grass, the grass also cuts into you.

>>5976884
Confucius, or some kind of circular oriental thinker.

>>5976884
>>5976899

i think it's ol' nietzsche

The ultimate malevolence of mowing, Gardener's Weekly said Mr. Nesbit's yard was evidence of.

Christopher McCandless, who so abhorred the domesticated state of nature found in civilization that he went off alone into the Alaskan wilderness.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

July 19th, 1987, the South Lawn was cut on.

The South Lawn.

Wondering when anyone last thought of Donald L. Elbert.

>>5968873
Shittiest camus

>>5976969
uh idk, Barthelme?

>>5976969
No idea what's going on here.

Esther was sitting on a garden chair; patiently watching her husband mow the lawn. She gazed off into the endless sea of green and allowed the water to wash over her head.

'CANNON TO LEFT OF THE CANNON TO RIGHT OF THE CANNON TO FRONT OF THEM VOLLEYED AND THUNDERED'

I'm half-tempted just to plagiarise revenge of the lawn

>>5968807
A persistent effort runs through a life. It takes decades, and its drive is always for something unattainably beyond, and when it at last fails, the man is broken and the measure of his achievements made clear to him.

In 1964, when Carol was working in Teve, Governor Quenti met with the representatives of an international group for the preservation of the environment and made an announcement. Human action had gone too far and intruded on the original order of nature, so from then on all citizens of Teve must not water or groom their lawns, to allow the earth to have its own way with its belongings. Quenti seemed small, then, pro-environment commentators have said, as if he had realized his insignificance next to the greatness of the planet, but I think otherwise. I think he seemed small because he had brokered the end of his efforts. He had abandoned his desire to order human life to his own iron will and had instead bent the knee to greater powers, to the desires of others whose primacy over his own will he had been forced to acknowledge.

Carol had refused to comply with these new laws and had gone on trimming her lawn and sprinkling water over it. The papers had asked why such a prominent writer and advocate of modern sensibilities would defy the Governor's authority, and then they had begun asking why she would not defend herself, but she never mentioned it in any public forum or to any of her friends.

One day, in the bookstore, she encountered a science magazine with the headline, "The Joys and Pains of Mice." She was intrigued, and she opened it, and she read the cover article, which was of course a study on the neurology of mice and how they experienced the world. And the next day, she had ceased caring for her lawn.

I would take a moment here to say that this encounter of Carol's reminds me of the legend of Orpheus, the surpassing musician, whose wife was taken from him by Death and who tried and failed to retrieve her. He had been the greatest of the Greeks in his artistry, but even he could not save a single person, even he could not achieve his goal with his effort. But I admire him, perhaps even worship, for he seemed to have done it. I admire the illusion of success, because that is all we can really hope to achieve when we strive for something real. He lived in his lies, in a sin that obscured all his others, and he imposed it on the world through force of will, and the moment it faltered was when he thought that perhaps Persephone was not behind him, for at that instant it was already decided that he should turn around and fall into reality once again.

And that moment of turning came to Carol when she saw the cover of the magazine, for then she considered that she might be wrong. As soon as she admitted of other possibilities, she stopped lying to herself, and her will was overthrown, and her ability to pursue her goals vanished like a mist.

>>5977048

Philip K Dick?

>>5971131
Not Joyce, I was aiming for Dr. Seuss but I reckon they've similar writing abilities.

>>5972989
My nigga. Mishima. Just finished the sailor who fell from grace with the sea on the subway ride to work.

>>5968807
Papa do we need to mow the grass?
There is no grass in this world son. Okay?
Okay.

>>5977070
3ez5me. Put the brook trout back in their streams and try again.

>>5977070
Based McCarthy

>>5977001
>>5977004
No, and you probably just haven't read the author, because it's in-your-face obvious if you've seen this style before.
>>5977055
No.

>>5977063
Not the anon who posted that but I also just finished it. The ending was amazing. The whole book becomes more affecting when you realize it's an allegory

>>5977095

That feel when you realize we're all destined to become ryuji
> mfw there will never be a great cause to die gloriously for
> mfw I will only superficially be masculinity incarnate
> mfw you don't have the dispassion and control over the internal order of things to bash a kittens brains out on a log

§ 1
He was hanging out by the gate, looking inward, ever inward, having at thirty-five never looked inward in quite this same way, his eyes crawling into his head, wondering how he could ever have come to this point, where he seemed so totally useless, to himself and everyone else, and where he had never seen it before, as though his eyes had always been so outward that they had never for a second paused on his own self, which had been so twisted by its own insistent refusal to bend that it became completely intractable to any reason or emotion, neither of which had power any more with him, and he contemplated the possibilities for forward motion from this point on, which were very few and all seemed so tortured to him that he might scarce have considered them save for the horror now pounding in his mind, telling him that if he did not choose, he would forever be trapped outside the yard, which could perhaps absolve his sins, those that the world itself had no power to forgive, though there was of course no guarantee, and absolutely nothing could save him after that point, which made him feel lost, spinning in the abyss, a vast blackness he had dug himself into and which was absolutely without order, and which he could only hope to control by the mowing of that lawn within the gates.

>>5975411
>>5975411
>The boy, feeling ill at ease...
>A corona of crimson blossoms outwards for what seems to the boy an eternity, as what meaning does time have for those who no longer have the ability to comprehend it?
>mfw the boy feared blood, more and more. Blood and time.

ON an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of his home in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards his lawn.
He had successfully avoided shoveling the driveway last winter. His driveway was more like a patch of concrete than a driveway.

i'm struggling to get Sir's lawn mower to work, it's already been five minutes, and every time i yank the cord with no result, i feel disgusted with myself. i'm useless. i begin to sweat, my shirt is completely soaked. i want Sir to come outside to watch me suck on the wet fabric while i masturbate. He'd laugh at me, and say i'm a fat worthless pig. i need to see Him. Now. i open the front door and ask Him if He could pump the gas while i yank the cord. There's no response. i walk inside, and find him laying face down in the kitchen. There's a needle sticking out of his arm. i get down on my knees and check his breathing. i realize he's not going to wake up. i begin to cry, as i'm crying, i slowly undress him while a jerk, still crying. Then i cum. i stand up and stare at the sperm on his lips. It's too late to care now. i reach into the sink and pull out a knife. i don't know where to start, so i cut out his eye first and shove that up my ass. Then i cut off his penis and put that in my mouth. i feel bizarre. I take His penis out of my mouth and put it into my pocket, stick the knife into his stomach, find the $10 he owes me and leave.

>>5977245
fee-fee dee

>>5977243
Is... is this a good thing?

>>5977048
I'm intrigued

>>5977291
>Is... is this a good thing?

>Finally you fear blood, more and more. Blood and time.
It's the epigraph to Blood Meridian, taken from some Valéry piece. I was just noting how your piece basically acted it out.

>The boy is uneasy
>He is then shot
>There is blood
>it blossoms outwards
>then eternity happens

>I'm intrigued
Kundera (I should probably have worked in some sexual hijinks, too).

>>5975411
>mfw this guy is accidentally a genius.

>>5977258
Is that an author? I was going for Dostoevsky

>>5977340
fee-fee = fyodor

dee = dostoyevski

im autism

Legacy of Legalization on a Lawn when?

>>5977315
Blood Meridian is one of my favourite books, and the epigraphs immediately caught my attention when I started the book, but the allusion to that particular quote was, admittedly, purely accidental.
>Kundera
Gotta check this guy out then, thanks!

>>5977324
Sorry? But thanks.

Clock, falling just before noon, the man sets himself to his work. His labor is a hard one, not easily won on the backs of men throughout the neighborhood. The instrument, the mower, is drawn in threes to start the splendid cutting on the sides of leaves. His yard is large, and hard to handle, and the breadth of the land in time with the blade. It cuts and whirs, keeping rhythm through the day as the sweat falls off brow and new life springs. He crosses peaks and valleys with the mechanical companion. He sips his ice tea while he takes a small break, and thinks of violence done to man across nations of green and red. Back to the grind he feels less than satisfied in thinking the battles ever steady will continue and never end. He sets himself to the battle still left to stiffen his resolve and steel his will as across the yard he sees.

>>5977048
>Persephone was not behind him
I think you meant Eurydice.

OP, congratulations - this is currently the best /lit/ thread of the year.

>>5972967
Ulillillia?

>>5973017
Well, he didn't knew about fascism...

Can someone please do a GRRM for us? I'm lazy.

The lawn had to be mowned. As Ulrich watched the carpet of grass getting shorter and shorter, it appeared to him that nothing was there to be truly cut. Nothing, in fact, can ever be cut: since the subjective spirit of matter, wich originates itself in the difference between the moral and social variables of souls - the first being purely subjective and the latter deriving from the intricacies of post-romantic extrapolations - finds reason and meaning in itself, it could not be cut. Not only that, but given the social and interpersonals metaphysical implication of lawn-mowing-watching, it occured to Ulrich that in fact, he could possibly be the only spectator of such a metaphysical phenomenon. As a man without qualities the implications of the moral consequences of spiritual sickness, which he found to be ever growing around him - since the nature of all matter originates from four different social costructs, to which i will now dedicate the following 26 pages (feel free to skip to the next moonsbrugger bit if you so desire)...

>>5969457
C&P Dostoyevsky?

>>5977863
Sunset found her mowing in the grass, singing. Every blade was sharper than the one before, and chopped crisper. By the time the fence came up the machine was spewing out green turf. The more she mowed, the more it spewed, but the more she mowed, the thicker flew the spew, and her iPod sent her careening over the lawn to hack up more sod. When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she had balance enough to cut in a straight line. She dreamt of her dead brother.

>>5977892
Step up!

>>5977880
I made it so obvious that if noone recognizes it i'm going to be really sad

>>5977880
>Ulrich
Stopped reading there. Too obvious, no discernible quality.

Seriously, there's like one Ulrich in all of literature.

>>5977983
I acknowledged myself that it is quite obvius, but having it also subtly would make it almost impossible to recognize

>>5977997
Fair enough - you could have just had one sentence about him and then like three paragraphs explaining your metaphysics or something, and that might have captured it.

>>5978023
That's exactly what i did?

"O my son, I fear the same fate has befel the King and the Stubborn Lawn."
To which the son replied,
"Pardon me father, I have not heard this tale."
And so the father began.

It is known that on the pastures of the vast city of Vey, by the banks of the opalescent river, there was a King of Kings. He was a stout, ox-like man, full-bearded and with a strength of which no living man could match. He was immensely fond of his palace garden. Tales of its grandeur had spread across the Kingdom, of which the great poets describe it thusly,

"And I have seen no barren crop upon this mighty land,
Gilded with the gift of Life,
Immeasurable in its beauty,
Noble, yet immobile."

Sometimes you can spend all day tending to your lawn and some sonuvabitch will lets his dog take a crap right after you mowed the grass. That's the thing about caring for the lawn, no matter how hard you try to keep it neat somebodies dog will come along and crap right on it. That sort of thing always depresses me. Really it does. It's not that I care about my own lawn that much or anything. I just think that people should have some sort of respect for that kind of thing.

The first thing you'll probably want to hear about is my lousy lawn.

And O, my brothers, the only messel in my gulliver as I was giving that malenky dovtchka a bit of the ol' in-out-in-out right there on the lawn was that it would grazzy my platties real horrorshow.

>>5978213
too easy, anthony burgess

>>5978202
Salinger, easy.

Dipdie doodle diddle doo
I mow the lawn, that's what I do!

>>5973851
kafka

>>5975287
Twain

>>5974412
this was a superb DFW impression.

This is an excellent thread full of talented writers.

Someone should make a graphic for this type of thread, because it needs to occur regularly.

>>5978863
Do we want to start compiling these? They're a lot more interesting than "Dakota Fanning goes to fight Merzbow the lizard with Pynchon references."

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I MOVED IN THE BLOCK. THERE ARE 401 MILLION BLADES OF GRASS, PAPER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL THE LAWN. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF BLADES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR GRASS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

>>5978956
I have no mouth but I must meme

green slate
blue sky
red box

hand pushes box, box cuts green. Green becomes short like dad's haircut. Organized. Disciplined. Heat, sun yellow hot hand rolls sleeve up revealing white wetness. Completed, hand places red box in pastel pink garage. White-yellow figure emerges from pink house and gives clear cool wet to hands.

>>5968807

That lawns would be mowed was a matter of necessity; which lawns would be mowed, though, was a matter of circumstance.

>>5977863

THE GRASS, THE GRASS!
BESIDE HER ASS
THE GRASS, THE GRASS
AND THE UGLY LASS

Lawnmower for sale. Never used.

>>5979510
Lawnmower for sale. Never used. Fin.

There, now it's six.

The lawn was mowed today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.

"..I thought what Id do is pretend the lawn was dirt instead of grass. Cutting it would be easier that way..."

I'd never given much thought to how I would mow the lawn — though I'd had reason enough in
the last few hours — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this

>>5979542
That joke has been posted three times now.

Our last lawn mower broke unexpectedly last summer (two cats would hush their mewls), and left me with a thick patch of unkept grass at odds with that of the neighbourhood. After awkward glances by the Obesite family next door, I asked Mr Handyman across the drive to lend his grass cutter. Though he and friends were catching up, Mrs Handyman answered the door, large Ray Bands hide an odd purple birthmark around her right eye, no doubt she wore them to help her with the onions for that nights stew, teared so were her cheeks.

>>5978703

drug related photoshop art lol

>>5977082
can you say who it is because i want to know please

>>5973248
I recognised Kafka. In my eyes, it's pretty obvious. Well done.

>>5973478
lel

I looked at the lawn in front of me, my face betraying a very neutral attitude towards the state of the green surface, yet inside I was seething with a rage I felt that I was not justified in feeling, yet both my inner and my outer self agreed that the unfortunately common monstrosity before me had to be dispatched, not with prejudice, yet not without prejudice. Walking along the path to the shed, I gazed upon as many blades of grass as I could, quickly my anger with the disorderly nature of the grass turned to a sort of pleasure as I began to recognize each blade's uniqueness, and as such, each blade's beauty. My anger that I had felt before for the state of the current situation had then transformed into a sort of gloomy and dreary sadness for the future situation of the grass, when all uniqueness was dashed and replaced by a uniform length to which all patches and blades on the lawn were required to capitulate to. I had not noticed the inherent pessimism I had possessed at that moment until much later. Whether my focus was the future of the grasses situation or the present, my outlook would always be either that of sadness or that of frustration, and it was this seemingly mundane, unimportant calamity I faced that led me to finally come to the realization of my wanting for sadness, strife or anger in a situation rather than happiness, contentment and stability.

>>5980557
Mishima?

>>5977070
chaim potok

>>5968807
contoured around rocks, one line, bending blades against the sun, i ride. around, blades going to this time. around five more, i have a spiral measured and placed to show two tones in reflection, golf course mimicking. this is repeated, until the lawn is done, until the lawn is cut, and done again weekly when it rises again, grass healed and sharpness in its angle gone to a parabola. itll be limp again, and when winter comes, ill have fertilizer down and be waiting for another seasons chore.

>>5968960
Welcher Autor?

One morning, when Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams of waist-high grass, he found his front yard transformed in to a hideous concrete patch.

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

>>5981270
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

>>5972903
Damn. I wanted to do Machiavelli.

>>5974412
Love this one

>>5981264
Kafka.

The insect in Black fled across the grass, and the mower followed.

My mother is a lawn.

I mowed the lawn that day, and it was hot in the noon sun and sweat dripped into my eyes and I could barely see.

>>5982185
Faulkner
>>5982182
King
>>5982983
Camus

>>5981270
>>5981276
Beautiful. I've never been so moved.

>>5982185
Faulkner?

>>5983068
>moved
>not mowed
one job

>>5968807

Mowed my lawn today. Or yesterday maybe. I don't know.

>>5983107
Can you repeat the question?

>>5983097
Jesus, I didn't even think of that. Well obviously I'm not going anywhere, time to off myself.

>>5973135
my fucking sides.

>>5983139
Yes.

>>5977037
Woolf lol

In a little suburb in the state of New York, whose name I am legally not allowed to say here, there lived not long ago one of those men who wears a white shirt with a starched white collar and black tie to work every morning and reads The New York Times while drinking coffee before doing so. This constant reading of The New York Times filled the mind of our unfortunate hero with one of the maddest notions that ever entered a human mind: he decided that there was a vegetative crisis in the United States, and it was his duty to destroy all the grass in America which was growing beyond its bounds. Going into his garage, he took out his red, rusty, tiny joke of a lawnmower that must have been more than twenty years old and had no gas in it. Seeing that his lawn was already perfectly mowed, he moved onto his neighbor's lawn and drove the lawnmower back and forth in pointless paths, for, in truth, the lawnmower could not be turned on at all. The window of his neighbor's house suddenly opened, and his neighbor's face appeared in it, saying, "John! Is that you? What the hell are you doing?"

Our hero, who went by the name of John Quincy, temporarily stopped pushing his defunct lawnmower and shouted, "I am currently in the process of eradicating this base, lowborn grass, which hath had the presumption of growing beyond its bounds! You needs must let me be, for I fear if I even pause for one moment, it will overcome me!" With that, he continued pushing his useless lawnmower about the neighbor's lawn, until something astonishing happened, which will be recounted in the next chapter for the reader who has the patience to read it.

Out in front of the arcology, the lawn had grown up to the bottom edge of the plexiglass windows. A dull, heavy green, the thin lengths of organic photosynthesising plant life took life from the small amount of sunlight that forced its way through the heavy smog and tight gaps between the skyscrapers of ferroconcrete and burnished steel. The crack in the geodesics provided the moisture.
Too much.

He tried running the Hitachi Grasscutter across the surface of the lawn, expecting the titanium strengthened vibrating blade system would cut the grass to the regulation 5mm length but instead the damp, smelly mud got caught in the rotor, overloading the circuitry inside. "Fuck," he said.

>>5983286
pratchett?

The man looked at the boy.
You should mow the lawn.
Okay.
Okay.

>>5968869
I shall cradle the fantasy of getting to know you and nourish one of those english frienships that begin with taciturn games of chess and soon exclude all dialogue.

You face the lawn, an overgrown jungle of grass. What do you do?
- Mow the lawn: Page 25
- Trim the hedges: Page 55
- Go back indoors: Page 122

>>5983286
>>5983286

cervantes

good job anon

There are rumors and whispers about a growth spurt. We sharpen our blades and get to work two days earlier. The next morning we pass a lapsed hovel. On it's broadside is a big pile of gunnysacks, filled with garden mould. They smell like rain and swamp and turf. There must be at least one hundred of them. "They are well prepared for the spring!", Müller says surprised. "They are meant for us.", growls Detering. "Shut up you two!" bawls Hansen. But they continue their talk, and the others make jokes, obscene jokes - What else shall we do? During the first night we try to orientate ourselves. It's quiet and we can even hear the grass grow, sprouting stalk behind the enemy lines. They bring fertilizer, nitrate, phosphorus. The english lawn is fertilized, we smell it at once.

“Many months later, as he faced the wrath of the landowner at the door, Aureliano Petrovich was to remember the distant afternoon when his father instructed him to mow the lawn for the first time. At that time Burory was a working class town of a few hundred houses built on the bank of a dried river. The world seemed so recent that the streets and the dried river lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to use the shrine that many thought existed before the death of Abel as the reference point.”

>>5983421
Was Borges trying to describe Nabokov there or something? Because this is the only way I can imagine Nabokov being friends with anyone.

>>5975236
Faulkner.

Now in the summer the trees were full and the grass was bright green and it had grown for so long that on this Sunday it would need to be cut. Sunday came and I went downstairs and ate a breakfast of eggs. I drank a small bottle of chianti with the meal, had a coffee afterward with a glass of cognac, finished the paper, put my coffee mug in the sink and left the paper on the table for Mary to read. I did not suppose that Mary would read the paper but I left it on the table for her anyway. I walked out to the front lawn and saw the neighbor starting his own mower. His name was Walter Simmons and he was fat and looked shopworn around the nose and mouth as though he had hayfever. He had come back from a business trip and his lawn was unruly.
"Nice day to mow the lawn," he said.
"Quite."
"Yessir, certainly a beautiful day."
I asked how the conference had gone and he told me it was wonderful, simply wonderful, and that I would not believe the girls down there and did I ever see a sunset over the ocean and he had never had such wonderful italian food.
"I'm very glad it was so nice," I said.
"Yes, it was wonderful, just wonderful."
"Well, I'll be seeing you."
"Of course. Good-by."
"Good-by."
I walked to the shed by the side of the house which was painted a deep red that did not match the rest of the house and the elderly lady who lived next door frequently came up and asked me to repaint it and every time I would tell her that I would do it next summer and I never did. I opened the doors to the shed and took out the mower and started it and began mowing the law.

>>5976718
Obvious Cervantes is obvious.

>>5983667
I like to think old englishmen of the early 1930's and 40's were educated like that in the 19th century.

>>5983809
(Borges had an anglo-saxon education, for a while)

>>5983148

Another great DFW.

>>5973135
fucking A

Someone do Gene Wolfe

HE SALINAS VALLEY is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains.

From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer. The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled barns and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away. It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy brown water and carried them to the sea. Then when the late spring came, the river drew in from its edges and the sand banks appeared. And in the summer the river didn't run at all above ground. Some pools would be left in the deep swirl places under a high bank. The tules and grasses grew back, and willows straightened up with the flood debris in their upper branches. The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. Many lawns lie here. John cut his lawn here.

>>5987040
Keep writing this

For sale: lawn mower, never used

>>5971917
>not scalping the lawn

Im sorry. English is not my first languange.

Below me was the furry skin of earth himself. I stood on it, glaring at its countless green tentacles wich were trying to drink from the sun. I brought my face unto its hair, wondering what sort of ritual had to be performed for putting end to its lust of light.
"You lost something?" - Bob the Hillbilly shouted. I gave him no answer, for mother's emerald fingers were calling me to join them for my final sleep. But it was not to be this day, for i had gained experience and training from Marshall of K-Mart himself to deal with thesekind of situations. I bring my hand to the gas and mow the lawn.

>>5968869
This is how Borges reads in english? Seriously?It looks like a bad parody of DFW mixed with fucking Douglas Adams

i still kek'd tho

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father asked him to mow the lawn.

No. What do you mean? Have I mowed the lawn...
Yes. I mean are we actually mowing the lawn, or are we just...
No, we're just...
We're just “mowing” the lawn.
We're just cutting it. [pause] As a chore.
As a chore.
Yes.
We're not actually mowing it.
No.
Mowing it as...
No.
As gardening.
As “gardening”? No.

>>5968853
pinecone

Mr. Sassafras was a bit obvious. But so is "Mucho Maas."

The dad sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the suburbs, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it—straight across suburbs it went, cutting through a dozen lawns and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the mowers, the monster that sent the mower out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the lawn. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was nothing. If the young thrusting grass withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the mower.

Rattle rattle grass *slice* *slice*. How many much more time left of sweat foot stuck? Read about foot bloody stringy hot pain summer heat. Summer ends about twenty days solstice pagan holidays like Christmas?

He pushed the mower in the afternoon as did every week that came before. He toiled sudoric and shirtless beneath a sultry sky titian tinged in the naked brimstone glow of the sun which squatted low and formless upon naught but a mirage horizon like a flame hewn sultan or pagan idol driven out of some some amaranthine and infernal dream. The lawn commenced below both he and that empyrean void in a verdant mass swaying uniform broken only by the shadow of the man stretched like a lanky fuliginous spider crawling wafer thin and pitiful and hunchbacked and its only companion the tool just as black upon which it labored.

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a lawn full of grass.

The lawn was growing very high and so Elijah Wood, 27, wearing sunglasses and a plaid shirt which he kept open in order to keep from getting too hot, mowed the lawn. It was hot that day and Elijah was glad that he kept his shirt unbuttoned because it kept him from getting too hot. The lawn smelled like grass and after he finished mowing it, he smelled like grass. When he was finished the lawn was a lot shorter. He went inside a took a shower. After he took a shower he didn't smell like grass anymore.

Afternoon. The lawn. Thomas with the mower (diaphoretic). Mechanical droning. Strong smell of grass. Father came out on the porch.
The grass, mine. My beautiful lawn, it grows and is cut down by my decree. Cycles of nature and all that. Externalization of my infinite tidiness, command over my property, godhood, patriarchal rulership of the homeowner and all that said the Father.
Yes, yes, it is quite a great lawn Thomas said, Rather green, though.
What said the Father
The lawn is rather green
Green?
Green.
Anger of the Father (subdued). Labor of Thomas.

It was the best of lawns. It was the worst of mowers.

>>5989825
Lermontov

And what about the lawn, Yes, I know, you want it neat for our guests tomorrow, Well don't you think it's gotten a bit overgrown, Yes I suppose you're right, it looks perfectly fine to me, but what others see, that's another matter, it's easy to forget that it's not every man who enjoys the wiggle and curve of untamed nature, Don't start with that again, just go out and cut the grass, there's plenty of wiggles and curves without our lawn joining in.

He went to the shed to drag out the old mower, only to find it buried near the back wall, behind a mountain of junk and tools. Illuminated in the dusty light were old tires, bags of empty bottles, a bicycle pump, several broken birdhouses, a shovel, a hoe, garden shears, milk crates, tennis rackets, a wheelbarrow, matchboxes, postcards, a garden gnome, gas cans, paint cans, and a calendar from ten years earlier celebrating twelve months of gardening, during the winter months the calendar suggested envisioning the garden to come, making sketches in a notebook, here goes the broccoli, here goes the kale, January's caption suggested wistfully gazing out onto the snowy fields with a cup of tea, it's like they say, wisdom comes from all quarters, there's no telling where the truth might crop up, what's true for gardens is true for us, there are times we must lie fallow, wait, and dream, otherwise we have no hope to grow new shoots.

someone do a dylan thomas, Under The Front Lawn

>>5988852
Nice.

Do not go gentle into your backyard,
Old lawns should be cut at close of day;
Mow, mow against the growing of the grass.

>>5968807
Indeed, a beautiful lawn doesn't happen by itself: it requires someone being there to ascribe the label "beautiful" to it.

>>5990653
José Saramago?

>>5992487
yes. i love him so much

>>5992728
I really enjoyed reading that anon. Thanks :)

>>5968807
A gentle mower was cutting on the plain
Ycladd in mighty armor and silver blade
Wherein old dints of deep wounds did remain
The cruel marks of many a grassy field

Stevie "Sissy Fuss" Windsor worked hard.

Mow the lawn. Lawn. Mooo-n, lunar! Could wait till night. Much nicer at night. Wake up the whole neighborhood for sure. Best do it now. No need to anger father. Enjoy the guttergreen groggy sungrown grass. Chip chop chip chop chop. Guillotine the grass. Futile. What good did it all do? Cutting the heads of the brass and the tops of the grass. Not tops...blades--cutting blades. Funny, futile. Chop chop.

He had lied to his father. Slumpshouldered, grimfaced, he toiled in the filthy fields of the front yard. Poor Stevie, petulantly pushing the mower, perhaps perpetually? The thought depressed him. Maybe I am a sissy? Just a liar. A liar who got caught. A filthy factfondling liar, the lawnmowing liar. Forever.

>>5993275
What is the author known to all men?

>>5993275
joooyce

Among the grass on the ground there was a lawnmover. Not wild, overgrown grass, filled with weeds and insects, nor yet an empty, featureless backyard with nothing to grow and admire. This was a noble's garden, and that means luxury.

Listen.
For two years, Stuart Henning Jr. mowed the lawn with his grandfather's old clippers every other weekday. And when the clippers ceased to work, Stuart followed. So it went.

>>5993310
Who's*

>>5969468
perfect

It was a Thursday like any other, and Major William Wilson stepped off the patio, in loafers and khaki knee socks, to make do with his morning smoke. His wife never liked it when he did it indoors, after all. He sauntered over to the toolshed, which stood, almost hesitantly, by the willow which hung over the pool. The leaves at the tips of each twig caressed its surface. He felt almost uncomfortable. The morning breeze had a scent to it. He couldn't place it.

Knew I shoulda called it in, he said to himself. He exhaled, and the smoke from his mouth raised gaily above his head in the morning brightness. Dammit. He plucked a crushed beer can from between the bluegrass and the dandelions. If only he had forbidden his son, Gerard, to bring more friends than necessary to the party last night. His head still ached. Shouting at his son had never worked anyway. The thumping music they played. Was it really necessary? Was any of it necessary?

He sighed. Wearily, he unlocked the toolshed, and removed the lawnmower, and got to work. He thought about leaving his wife as he trod back and forth, holding the growling machine in front of him. Maybe he'd feel something once he was free.

He returned to the bedroom, and his wife sat naked, facing away from him. Her scent was bewitching. He held her tightly in his arms as he gently pushed her onto the bed. She had only recently rewallpappered the bedroom and there was something about it that made his heart kick. Perhaps it was the dedication. Perhaps he loved her best when she was busy. Her eyes were always his favourite, bright green, apple green orbs. He buried his face in her busom. As she combed his hair with her deft had, she whispered to him, nobody cared till I put on damask. And he knew it to be true.

It was a pleasure to mow
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, see things trimmed and changed. With the lawn mower in his hands, with this great goat spreading his insatiable gluttony upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of cutting and trimming to bring down the grass and roots ruins of history

>>5995498
10/10

>>5977892
Kek

>>5973015
Henry James?

The little cocksucker's fingers were trembling as he clutched the handles of the strimmer as similar to the memory of his daddy doing it as he could. This snotty little shitbag, with his mousey brown hair and his skid mark coloured eyes that were now fixed on the overgrown mess his mom called a garden. He looked down at the jagged green garden, blades of grass meshing together to form one big ugly mouth that was going to swallow him up. It had been years since anyone had given it any attention, and it a hideous way it mirrored his own treatment. As he set to work, strimming the excess off this shitty little hideaway, he wondered what his mother was doing inside the cabin. His sugarcoated little brain pictured the strange men his mother talked about, the doctors, the lawyers, the people she called evil. He pictured her drawing moustaches on their pictures, and black eyes on all their wives. This little spunk thought they were evil too, they took her away from him. This time she was back for good she said, but the little cocksucker wasn't that stupid. He was nearly finished now, and one day as an adult he would realise in all that time he was thinking about his precious mommy, she was only thinking about herself. No one ever truly loves you.

>>5968807
Tuesday night, under the light of the blob-ish, waning moon--slowly retreating into its secret spot, its little hideaway--Jim, 42, grinned and pushed his lawnmower across the grass, watching them fly through the air in contained, little arcs, like waving, like they were waving him goodbye.