Cioran
11-24-2012, 08:45 PM
Hello, all, this is the brief opening to a new novel I started writing today. Another novel I'm writing, Eternity Invasion, just exceeded 80,000 words. I posted the opening of that work earlier in this forum. A third novel, Galileo Is a Dish Best Served Cold, has hit the 10,000-world milestone. Anyway, this amused me and i thought I'd share it. Thanks in advance for any constructive feedback. :nod:
This Is Their Story
(Draft Opening)
I. The Jury Empanelled
The Old Courthouse was in a section of town that had deteriorated over time, with commerce (and lawfulness) having mostly decamped uptown. It was surrounded by peep shows, massage parlors, pawn shops and bars infested with prostitutes and their pimps. Crime thrived in the shadow of its grotesque dome.
The edifice had been designed in the Greek style, and resembled an awkward parody of the Parthenon. Its Doric columns were entwined with sculpted ivy, suggesting not so much erudition as erosion: a temple slipping back into the vinelands of the jungle. The bas-relief frieze on the pediment depicted a ludicrous procession of frolicsome wenches half-clad in billowing robes, the anonymous sculptor having lavished special care on a strategically placed naked breast here, an exposed buttock there. The wenches grasped symbolic totems of the judicial profession: a gavel, a powdered wig, a pair of handcuffs.
The wench at the center of the frieze, standing dramatically upright as the others gamboled about, held aloft the iconic Scales of Law, balanced above one naked breast peeping out from the figure’s robe that had fallen athwart her left shoulder. With her other hand she held a sword, pointed downward toward the entrance to the courthouse between the two central columns. Like the Sword of Damocles, it hovered precariously over the heads of those who were unfortunate enough to have to enter the courthouse on some sordid business or other.
The central figure grasping these icons was blindfolded, intended to suggest (along with the scales) the impartiality of the Law. But the blindfold, in conjunction with the figure’s naked breast, the sword, the bared breasts and buttocks of the other figures, and the handcuffs, conspired instead to connote a bacchanal of sadomasochism.
Many years after the completion of the original structure, a monstrous wedding-cake dome had been added to it. No one knew why. Perhaps at some time in the distant past, the city fathers had deemed the original edifice insufficiently pretentious. The dome, which had been erected hastily and never properly maintained, was green with verdigris and constantly in danger of sudden catastrophic collapse. Petitions to have it dismantled were periodically circulated and summarily rejected by the mayor, who suffered from bipolar disorder and maintained that God was contacting him via radio transmission in the fillings of his teeth.
The original courthouse, sans dome, had been designed by an Argentinian architect of dubious provenance. Its interior housed a labyrinth -- a bureaucratic maze. Most of the maze's corridors terminated abruptly in legal dead ends. Sometimes these cul-de-sacs were symbolically decorated: In one, for instance, a bust of Kafka –- wan, dreamy-eyed and tubercular -- was set atop a pedestal. Another displayed framed copies, side by side, of the Ten Commandments and the United States Constitution. When a jury was empanelled, prospective jurors had to navigate this maze for important bureaucratic reasons: fingerprints and photographs had be taken, paperwork needed to be filled out, credentials had to be examined and interrogations conducted. By the time twelve exhausted jurors and six alternates had been thus been harrowed and winnowed, they felt that they themselves had been tried and convicted. They were like the survivors of a particularly onerous rite of passage on a barbarous reality TV show.
The jury room was at the exact center of the bureaucratic maze. A stele affixed to the wall behind the judge’s bench depicted the Minotaur.
One day, twelve stalwart jurors and six doughty alternates were assembled in this august room for a special trial.
This is their story.
This Is Their Story
(Draft Opening)
I. The Jury Empanelled
The Old Courthouse was in a section of town that had deteriorated over time, with commerce (and lawfulness) having mostly decamped uptown. It was surrounded by peep shows, massage parlors, pawn shops and bars infested with prostitutes and their pimps. Crime thrived in the shadow of its grotesque dome.
The edifice had been designed in the Greek style, and resembled an awkward parody of the Parthenon. Its Doric columns were entwined with sculpted ivy, suggesting not so much erudition as erosion: a temple slipping back into the vinelands of the jungle. The bas-relief frieze on the pediment depicted a ludicrous procession of frolicsome wenches half-clad in billowing robes, the anonymous sculptor having lavished special care on a strategically placed naked breast here, an exposed buttock there. The wenches grasped symbolic totems of the judicial profession: a gavel, a powdered wig, a pair of handcuffs.
The wench at the center of the frieze, standing dramatically upright as the others gamboled about, held aloft the iconic Scales of Law, balanced above one naked breast peeping out from the figure’s robe that had fallen athwart her left shoulder. With her other hand she held a sword, pointed downward toward the entrance to the courthouse between the two central columns. Like the Sword of Damocles, it hovered precariously over the heads of those who were unfortunate enough to have to enter the courthouse on some sordid business or other.
The central figure grasping these icons was blindfolded, intended to suggest (along with the scales) the impartiality of the Law. But the blindfold, in conjunction with the figure’s naked breast, the sword, the bared breasts and buttocks of the other figures, and the handcuffs, conspired instead to connote a bacchanal of sadomasochism.
Many years after the completion of the original structure, a monstrous wedding-cake dome had been added to it. No one knew why. Perhaps at some time in the distant past, the city fathers had deemed the original edifice insufficiently pretentious. The dome, which had been erected hastily and never properly maintained, was green with verdigris and constantly in danger of sudden catastrophic collapse. Petitions to have it dismantled were periodically circulated and summarily rejected by the mayor, who suffered from bipolar disorder and maintained that God was contacting him via radio transmission in the fillings of his teeth.
The original courthouse, sans dome, had been designed by an Argentinian architect of dubious provenance. Its interior housed a labyrinth -- a bureaucratic maze. Most of the maze's corridors terminated abruptly in legal dead ends. Sometimes these cul-de-sacs were symbolically decorated: In one, for instance, a bust of Kafka –- wan, dreamy-eyed and tubercular -- was set atop a pedestal. Another displayed framed copies, side by side, of the Ten Commandments and the United States Constitution. When a jury was empanelled, prospective jurors had to navigate this maze for important bureaucratic reasons: fingerprints and photographs had be taken, paperwork needed to be filled out, credentials had to be examined and interrogations conducted. By the time twelve exhausted jurors and six alternates had been thus been harrowed and winnowed, they felt that they themselves had been tried and convicted. They were like the survivors of a particularly onerous rite of passage on a barbarous reality TV show.
The jury room was at the exact center of the bureaucratic maze. A stele affixed to the wall behind the judge’s bench depicted the Minotaur.
One day, twelve stalwart jurors and six doughty alternates were assembled in this august room for a special trial.
This is their story.