On methods. While working through assignment, the class was tasked with choosing and imitating one piece of Bernard's work. I chose The Biggest, Most Beautiful Balcony in the World. I attempted to recreate the same chronological transitions, where Bernard begins by regaling us with a tale of his nieces development, in a list-like fashion incorporate a game that builds a frame of background for getting to what culminated in a wistful longing for better times. I also tried to keep detailing to my closest approximation of his work.
     He begins by creating a scene, "A lone balcony jutting out from a stucco apartment building. It over looked an alley and paring lot, the pavement potholed, lumpy and littered, flanked by trash bins painted a flaking industrial green and caution orange, like large bonded barges." I tried to use descriptive detailing describing an old swimming pool that my younger brother almost drowned in. "They had one of those large above ground swimming pools, the painted metallic sides and the slick polyurethane floor. A blanket of bright blue bubble wrap covered the shimmering thalassic basin, casting dancing patterns of sunlight off the cool metal railings." It was a peaceful scene, but the next second my brother fell in, while the lining was covering the water. I panicked, frozen, my neighbor who was a year older than I jumped in and saved him. That entire process took maybe one minute, but in my mind time warped, it took an eternity.
     Bernard's work typically follow some type of narrative arc, with a beginning, climax, and resolution. I've seen works by other writers that don't seem to have any concrete or definitive "end." It's easier to just leave a piece unresolved, a true master can make a complete work. Bernard does this. I will work to do this.

     Bernard. Is there existential value in a name? Resoundingly, yes, yes, yes. As a quality of human perspective, the existence of a thing is symbolically denoted by a name. The name generates and abstract cognitive perpetuation resembling the names physical likeness. If one is determined to bolster the global lexicon, then neologism is the incontestable avenue for which any mind should wander down. 

     On to other things. Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere, a collection of essays recounting events in his life explores the relationship he had with his parents as a child, and later as an adult. The first section Beacons Burning Down is a tribute to his mother, one in which he regales tales of his youth, and the constant dejection he felt towards his name, Bernard. He describes his name as "the connotations of myopia, introversion, and bookishness that my destiny has borne out." All the while he manages to string along a collection of stories ranging from a death defying headless rooster that his father comically represents in court, to a quixotic tale of his mother and grandparents swimming the Bering Strait (at its shortest point 51 miles across) to arrive in America, from Russia.

     The language Cooper uses ranges from a pithy colloquial evocation towards free verse that is at times writhing with heavy words. It may not be an easy read for all, keep a dictionary on hand, and partake in the journey. A journey laden with dread, "I can't possibly go about my business day in and day out, parting the curtain of space before me, with any greater sense of apocalypse than I already have." And yet a sense of mythical hope "For eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, those subaquatic octaves formed in my mind a conception of refuge so sweet, I felt as though I were living in Atlantis..." Exploring the vestiges of his memory before they are depleted.