Perkosakata 2008

Seperti halnya saya, dua minggu yang lalu ada yang meng-add saya di friendster, namanya Princessa. Awalnya saya cuek, lha wong memang banyak yang nge-add kok akhir-akhir ini. Ketika saya buka, ternyata apa, dia cinta pertama saya waktu SMP. Wah, berbunga-bunga rasanya hati ini. Bagaimana dia bisa menemukan saya? Bagaimana dia bisa tau alamat email atau account saya? Sampai sekarang dia belum membalas pesan saya seiring approval yang segera saya berikan segera sesudahnya.

Begitu magical-nya ‘yang pertama’, sampai-sampai menginspirasi banyak karya seperti; Cinta Pertama (film karya Nayato Fio Nuala), Pandangan Pertama (lagu yang dipopulerkan A. Rafiq), First Love (lagu yang dipopulerkan Utada Hikaru) dan masih banyak lagi! Begitu juga dengan situs komunitas kemudian. com yang akan merayakan ulang tahun pertamanya, plus ada seminar dan workshopnya juga.[hp]

Untuk lebih memeriahkan eforia ini, kami ingin mengajak kemudianers untuk berbagi kisah ‘yang pertama’. Mari bermain dengan rasa dan aplikasikan ke dalam kata-kata. Ikuti lomba cerpen 100 kata dan puisi PERKOSAKATA 2008. Panitia menyediakan hadiah menarik dari kemudian untuk kemudian.

Tema:
“Yang Pertama”

Persyaratan:

• Tercatat sebagai member Kemudian.com
• Telah memiliki minimal 5 postingan cerpen/ puisi

Pelaksanaan:

• Cerpen/ Puisi diposting di Kemudian.com dan dikirimkan melalui email dalam bentuk body mail (bukan attachment) ke kopdar2@kemudian.com dengan subjek ‘LOMBA CERPEN’ atau ‘LOMBA PUISI’, paling lambat tanggal 10 Februari 2008, dengan format sebagai berikut:

[Nickname di Kemudian.com]
[Nama asli]
[Alamat lengkap, khususnya bagi domisili luar Jakarta]
[No. telp]
[Isi cerpen/ puisi]

• Pengumuman pemenang akan diumumkan di forum Kemudian.com dan blog Perkosakata pada tanggal 20 Februari 2008
• Bagi pemenang yang berdomisili di Jakarta, hadiah dapat diambil pada acara Bincang Kemudianers Perkosakata 2008, tanggal 24 Februari 2008
• Peserta dapat mengirimkan maksimal 2 karya cerpen/ puisi

Kriteria Penilaian:

• Karya yang disertakan tidak sedang diikutsertakan dalam lomba lain.
• Karya berupa karya asli member, bukan hasil saduran atau terjemahan.

Juri Cerpen 100 kata:
Sefryana Khairil
Nuke 'V1vald1'
Krisna 'Neko no Oujisama'

Juri Puisi:
T.S. Pinang
Dino F. Umahuk

Hadiah:



*Keputusan juri tidak dapat diganggu gugat
*Lomba ini tidak berlaku untuk panitia Perkosakata 2008

But I’m not gonna talk about language, it’s boring. Sure there are some awkward expressions, like ‘resisting my desperation to choke out loud’ (Cold November Rain) or ‘this whole ticket buying scheme had finally been mastered’ (The Bus Driver’s Wife), but you’d get that even in something written by a budding writer from Toorak, nothing that a good editor can’t fix. (If indeed it needs be fixed.)

The first story is actually nowhere near as horrendous as the title suggests—the infamous Guns N’ Roses operock video, though like the song, the story is also about unrequited love. At one page nowhere near as epic of course.

A woman sitting in a room in ‘depressing London weather in November, the unfriendly humid air poisoning my oily skin’ (depressing London weather is a bit of a tautology, but the real problem/the problem of the real in this sentence is ‘the humid air’, how could it be humid in London, in early winter? Is it the cheap Tesco heater that makes your hands and feet all clammy? Problem of verisimilitude. But why is this problematic? Or is it? I guess if this were a sci-fi short set in post-apocalyptic global-scorched London then I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid on ‘humid London November’, but as we shall see, this story is basically a realist vignette, and in a slice-of-life I guess it’s reasonable that we expect the life to be as we know it.), ‘wrapped in a dirty bath towel, chain smoking’, staring at ‘a bottle of painkillers’ on (probably) top of the sink.

So the woman is depressed. But she was ‘too wound up to care.’ Then it turns out that she’s too wound up because she cares too much. For ‘the motionless body next to me. A man’s body.’ They’d fucked two hours ago after he turned up on her doorstep and he: ‘I need you’, and she: ‘You need a place to stay.’ Funny. Then she: ‘I love you,’ then he: ‘Thank you.’ A bit more standard dark humour, but believable.

Then the answers for all the dark humour, the painkillers, the depressing London scene: ‘Will your wife come looking for you? Will you say goodbye and never come back?’ Like Axl said, nothing lasts forever / in the cold November rain, but perhaps, some things do, like a sob story set in grey London.

The second story, perhaps the most interesting, begins with the simple, short, sentence ‘The bus driver is my best friend.’ Which somehow sounds kinda depressing. Bus driver? What about a stripper? And it gets worse, ‘He is an old man nearing his sixties, … a Russian-Australian, … his Australian accent is very thick since he spends most of his life in Brisbane, … with a nametag that says Steve.’ Perhaps the most depressing thing is that nametag, what’s wrong with Stefanovich, why would you try so hard to fit in to Brisbane, land of tight stubbies and Bir Bintang singlets, why would you move to Brisbane at all?

They’d become friends because when the narrator, a girl, moved to Australia, she was ‘dominated by fear and loneliness’ (in Brisbane, wouldn’t blame ya girl), and Steve likes to chat about his sad bus-driving life, bad pay, unhappy wife, the usual sob story. But the narrator thought Steve was ‘very different. … unlike the other grumpy bus drivers who shout at foreigners.’ Aha! Maybe because Steve was a foreigner himself! A depressed diaspora just like the narrator!

Misery loves company especially when it’s a young probably pretty Asian international student. Or a granddad who happily listens to a pretty Asian international student’s stories of her ‘need to get away from a very bad breakup’ and her subsequent loneliness (girl on the rebound!). Then one night Steve told rebounding girl he was gonna quit his job, wife was leaving him because he was, yes, a total loser, and he might just as well pack his bags and move back to Russia.

Nyet! thought rebound girl.

‘I’m just an old man, what do I have except a rusty bag and a passport?’
‘You have love.’
‘No, dear. We have memories.’

And as if the thought of soldiering on in life in snowy Ukraine with a bag full of memories of hot summer afternoons in Brisbane verandahs was way too depressing, this story ends with Steve’s wife getting on the bus at the last stop as narrator girl gets off. Reconciliation.

‘What am I to know all about love? I do not even have love. My ex boyfriend is an emotional abuser and I have given up on love a long time ago.’ (Narrator girl’s monologue, all in her head.) But girl, from the ending you’ve given us, looks like you really haven’t.

The third story, ‘Five Minutes’, about a man who, accompanied by a kid, observes and bitches about people in a park ‘in the heart of Melbourne’, and the kid turns out to be the man’s imaginary friend and the man turns out to be a geriatric granddad suffering either from Alzheimer or multiple sclerosis that has left him ‘unable to speak and move, all I can do is feel,’ (some people have all the luck) I thought must’ve been written by the same author who wrote ‘In the Cold November Rain’ since both titles were accompanied with the date of writing ‘January 2007.’ Not only that, in ‘Five Minutes’ the author wrote that ‘people scurry through … to get to the tube station.’ But the tube is in London, in Melbourne it’s the train. (Or the tram if you wanna be all romantic and olde-worlde.)

That problem of verisimilitude again. Perhaps the author mixed up his/her memories of London and Melbourne and the two cities merge into one. (After all, Melbourne is the one city in Australia with European pretensions, though it’s Paris they aim for, what with the parks, the sidewalk cafés et al., and it rains there the whole time too.) But I imagine a Melburnian would object to see his ordinary train station be written as ‘the tube’, and this brings me back to Laksmi Pamuntjak: so why shouldn’t I complain that she calls Hotel Grand Menteng (say) with the pissweak appellation ‘love motel’? We’ve already got ‘check-in place’, why not use it? What is wrong with the more real?

The imaginary kid disappears and the story ends. Which makes me think: these are all depressing stories, but I like them much more than the sugar-coated inspirational stories millions of people bought in Andrea Hirata’s Edensor. (About his student days in Paris dan sekitarnya.)

• Sms-sms bertaburan rayu dan canda berterbangan.
• Jadikan lamunan bertepi harap akan temu.
• Ini bukan lagi mimpi tergusah ketika pagi menjelang, melainkan keterpenuhan begitu erat.

Keinginan penulis untuk menyusun kalimat-kalimat yang puitik dan menyentuh justru membuatnya tersesat (tak puitik dan tak menyentuh).


La Preghiera oleh KD

Paragraf-paragraf awal cerita ini tak menarik. Aku (pembaca) merasa dibodohi—tentu ini bukan maksud dari si penulis. Penanaman informasi yang seenaknya sendiri yang membuatku, sebagai pembaca, merasa direndahkan.

Baca:

• Baru saja ia selesai menyisir rambutnya. Rambut? Ya! Tentu saja dia memiliki rambut.
• Ia hanya mengikuti dress code yang ditentukan. Benar! Setiap penampil pada malam ini harus memakai pakaian bernuansa hitam

Terbaca sebenarnya bahwa penulis memiliki banyak hal yang ingin diceritakannya, tetapi malas mencari jalan menceritakannya. Informasi demi informasi berloncatan begitu saja, hampir-hampir tak tertata. Asal-asalan. Asal pembaca ngerti. Titik.

Baru ketika memasuki tubuh cerita, aku mulai bisa menikmati. Meski tetap saja aku merasa si penulis sangat pelit dalam membagi ceritanya. Mungkin malas, mungkin tak lancar berbahasa. Agak aneh juga, tukang cerita tapi malas bercerita.

Bagiku La Preghiera belum menjadi cerita. Ia masih kerangka cerita.


Surga Aku Mau!!! oleh za_hara

Sebagai sebuah cerita Surga Aku Mau!!! cukup menarik. Sayang, si penulis tak cukup serius dalam menggarapnya. Bagiku menulis adalah sebuah pembacaan atas kenyataan dan menyatakan kembali kenyataan tersebut. Menulis bukan mengarang, asal aneh, asal nyentrik, asal-asalan.

Cerita ini memiliki potensi dalam memotret kenyataan yang belakangan ini memang sedang mencuat: agama baru, nabi baru, kepercayaan baru. Sayang, cerita ini ‘hanya’ menghadirkan kenyataan itu begitu saja. Tak mengolahnya. Tak memperkayanya. Cuma sepenggal—masih mirip dengan kabar angin. Selebihnya adalah karangan, imajinasi liar, fiksi yang tak kuat.

Benar, cerita pendek adalah sebuah karya fiksi. Tapi fiksi di sini adalah fiksi yang mengungkap kenyataan. Bukan hanya fiksi.