the Buenos Aires Review » New York

Ada Limón

heather — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:58:46 +0000

The Problem with Travel

Every time I’m in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I’d be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe
in the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we’re small
and flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I’m going, all over again.

* * *

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds

My ex got hit by a bus.

He wrote me in a text to tell me this.
____Now will you talk to me? I got hit by a bus.

He even sent me a link to the blurry footage on the news.
I never wanted to see him come to harm, or watch it.

Oh maybe a little cockroach infestation.
____Little aliens all over the clean, misleading counters of his life.

My ex, a few exes before that, died
____of a heroin overdose.

After someone hurts you, it’s easy to imagine
him fading into the background of the bad film’s revenge plot.

It’s the joke, right? I hope you get hit by a bus.
____I swear I never thought it. No seed of transportation deviance.
No tampering with the great universal brake wires.

I wanted this rusty mailbox,
out here in the boondocks, this man, and this dog,
a little money now and again, some good news.

I’m the hidden bug in the tall weeds,
lighting fires no one can see.

When we moved out here together, I kept apologizing
for everything, like a poor orphan in the film about my shame.

He had to tell me to stop. And for days, (maybe weeks?)
I’d hear it in my mind and have to hold it there,
stuck like a cockroach under a glass,
waiting for someone braver to kill it.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don’t.

In the text from my ex about the bus, he sounds almost funny.
____Like isn’t it ironic that I got hit by a bus, when all I ever wanted was to
disappear without a trace.

When the plane went down in San Francisco,
I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,
____the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:
The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don’t.

It was almost a year before I learned
that his brother was a pilot.

I can’t help it,
I love the way men love.

I used to pretend a lot. I’m very good at it.

I bought a creamy corn-colored rotary phone
and I was so fabulous.

I’d sit and tell you about my phone, but the truth was
____it didn’t work very well. It made me not want to talk to anyone,
but rather be in a picture, holding the phone, pretending to talk.

That’s not unlike some of the people I have claimed to love.

I’d rather tell you about them, stranger, in hot words
____than tug the cold satellites closer for warmth.

I imagine the insides of myself sometimes—
____part female, part male, part terrible dragon.

What I saw in the men who came before,
____sometimes I don’t want to say this out loud,

was someone I could hold up to my ear
and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into,
and have it returned in the inky waves.

Why are we forced into such small spaces together?
____This life in a seedpod.

I remember once, my ex and I, driving in his van.
He pointed out his ex wife walking.

She looked like me—not her blue hat, or her smallness,
but how deliberately she was walking away from the speeding vehicle.

Now, there’s a twisty summer storm outside,
and I desire nothing but this storm to come.

The calm voice on the TV tells us to stay safe.
Says, Stay safe and seek shelter.

* *

Image: Stacia Brady

Vincent Toro

admin — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 16:00:19 +0000

A circular path is carved through your front yard.

Pink sinkholes gather in your medicine

cabinet. You exalt busted blenders like sophisms

scrawled by retired scholars.

Your life has become a shy puzzle,

a canyon of foreclosures,

an abandoned fish market.

The world has accused you of not being a world,

of loving meaningless songs,

and you have responded by raising your children to unravel

spools of red tape across cities of wax.

The promise of a guilt-free purchase

congeals like gum

beneath a wooden school desk.

The world has accused you of not being a world.

You retort with an acceptance speech

scripted by beautiful gangsters. You live under

the thumb of contracts hoisted

like minarets. Landslides court you

with a hospice of deserted

checkout counters and comic strip altars.

Your young lungs constrict in the presence of cedar and ash.

The world has accused you of not being

a world and you respond by offering your guests

sliced cheese and snow globes.

You prod them about their holiday plans.

Your path is littered

with toll booths and subpoenas.

You dig shallow trenches around the kitchen table.

Sub-contractors install a wall of plaster

teeth in your bathtub. The sea has divorced you

and taken the dog. The world

has accused you of not being a world,

of unhearing the voices

that hold together the seams

of your jacket, and you have responded

with despondent sighs, the kind of sigh

that makes orphans of widows.

Soon enough you will inherit

the pollen of a thousand uprooted gardenias

as you wait for the sunlight

to learn your nickname.

Sorta Rican Book of Dreams (Free Sample version)

Computer
-With human hands that poke you when you try to type means you will forgive yourself
for a mistake you never had the sense to make.
-Singing to you like Hector Lavoe means that your oldest daughter will grow up to become
the Director of Shrubbery at a bankrupt amusement park.

Ladybug
-Crawling on the hood of your car means you will inherit a vast collection of incomplete maps.
-Swimming in a bowl of soup means you will forget your wife’s birthday after you forget
that you never married.

Mango
-Eating one while a chimpanzee folds your laundry means the IRS will mistakenly pronounce you dead and offer your mother a tax refund they’ll later ask her to return.
-One with feet that chases you through a botanica means that your wardrobe is outdated.

Pie
-Gigantic blueberry pies that disappear and reappear at random means that a building will be renovated on the south side of your block.
-A pear pie left out in the middle of a superhighway means a dead relative wants back the bottle of Presidente they gave you last Christmas.

Quicksand
-Sinking in quicksand that smells like burnt cauliflower means that on your wedding night the photographer will forget to remove his lens cap while capturing the kiss.

Rooms
-Painted to resemble a city beach means that you will get a big promotion for a job that doesn’t pay you.
-With the furniture on the ceiling means that you will receive an honorary degree for your research on the sleeping patterns of superstar DJ’s.
-A classroom the size of a football field (known by gringos as a soccer field) where the school janitor makes fun of you means that you will win an all expenses paid vacation to Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Squirrel
-A squirrel carrying a balloon with the face of Emma Goldman on it means that a calamity of bow ties will be left in your glove box the evening after next.

Water
-A glass of water means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-A muddy pond means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-An ocean means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-A plastic pool means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.
-A single teardrop means you want to quit your job to become a licensed figment of the imagination.

Fibonacci ekphrastic for “The Birth of a City” by Angel Rodriguez-Diaz

Your

map

is made

of burnt leaves

and woodpecker wings.

Decades levitate the counters

you scrubbed. Echinacea engraved across your breast grows

without roots to bind them. You breathe unwashed linens, never ask for keys to the convent.

Your

map

is scaled

down to match

your expectations.

Expelled from the geometry

of myth, rumor becomes crown and mask. You beautify

chicken wire and cracked drywall with heirlooms from Aztlan. What you possess you have reared.

Your

map

is strewn

with letters

home, dried apricots,

dented pick-ups, and tired men

who work too long and drink too hard. Cedar ash congests

the lungs you use to blow out virgin candles bought at the neighborhood botanica.

Your

map

is marred

by borders

that become a sieve

of history, straining the wild

from the willing. Missions and malls encroach your sun swathed

villitas where flowers battle and murals proliferate like thirsty brushfires.

Recursion Sonata for Piano and Feather Duster

Pink water above,

black sky recedes into

tilted highways and crimeless alibis.

Charred fingers prod at stained-glass eyes

confusing machine language for serenades.

Brokers and dealers wander inside

their own heads and disappear, hire

bargain basement seers to reveal

colors undiscovered. Illiterate scholars parade around

circus tents of obscure

facts made obsolete by

fiction addicts. Children rear

their parents to become a bazaar of scuffed

mirrors hiding from

the scrutiny of other mirrors.

They are

protected

once they declare themselves

defenseless, defenseless

once they declare themselves

protected.

They are

the scrutiny of other mirrors,

mirrors hiding from

their parents to become a bazaar of scuffed

fiction addicts. Children rear

facts made obsolete by

circus tents of obscure

colors undiscovered. Illiterate scholars parade around

bargain basement seers to reveal

their own heads and disappear, hire

brokers and dealers to wander inside

confusing machine language for serenades

charred. Fingers prod at stained-glass eyes,

tilted highways, and crimeless alibis.

Black sky recedes into

pink water above.

panting. sighing. an ankle angled over a thigh. you blush. a rush. lips spread like wings of a pigeon. skin harvested. fields plowed. a partly cloudy afternoon. a disrobing. an uneasy feeling. an unexpected heat. sweat beads like prayer beads. an imperfect curvature. a voluptuous wall. a matchstick’s red head rubbed on flint. an intent gaze. unattached. a nose entrenched in a chin. lotion applied to a calf. a calf slaughtered for the feast. a secret drawn in a fleshy fold. a promise unattached. a wrist rotated counterclockwise. a quivering. a trinket falls to the fall. two bells conjugated like a verb. your mercurial poise. a feline pose. lock and key joined. an unhinged door opened twice. oasis. water lapped by a dog’s tongue. silent rhythm. a heartbeat out of synch. an eyelash sculpture like a lone peacock. four legs woven into a wicker basket. sliding. ungraceful pirouettes. buttons sewn onto a turquoise vest. clipped nails and clipped beaks. concurrent currents of parallel streams. a distant pulse. subliminal sucking. breathe from a laugh, resurrected. your cheeks, pillows. a sliding door. a cracked inkwell. a cupped hand mistaken for as a safety net. a fumbling. a rescinding.

a whisper.
a squeeze.
a trembling.

a treble clef. a cleft heart, unattached. a broken circle. a mountain interrupted by
a valley. attached. unattached. attached. unattached. an attaché case stuff with ripe plums. a scent ascending. a symphonic moaning. a phone disconnected. a flexion. affliction. a tension. extension. torque and sweet thunder. a clenched fist. a bit lip. candle wax on a dead victrola. a flood. a flushing. a draught. an opening. a closing unrelated. cracked eggs on a kitchen floor. a well-timed seizure. a departure. the singed cuff of a smoking jacket. two car radios playing the same station. a refraction. an unfurling. an unmasking. a question left unasked. a contraction. a contradiction. an unveiling. a cleansing. a becoming. a breath, unattached. a death, unattached. a thumbprint on a pelvis. a promise, unattached. a bosom, unattached. a diamond heist hatched. a grape plucked. an orange, peeled. a puddle in the driveway. a pillow wrung. unattached. a fugue hummed. a trail of pink silt. unattached. a torpor. a pelt. a moth and a bruised flask. a singing matroshka. a riddle planted in a blue belly. a summons. a bewilderness. a plate of dried figs. a lost earring. an ebbing. an echo. a tremor.

An oil painting
In the den
Waiting to be hung.

* *

Image: Constanza Alberione, “Chano” (2009), courtesy of miau miau

After Kenneth Goldsmith: an interview

heather — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:00:19 +0000

Michael Romano and Kenneth Goldsmith

I have a bunch of questions but they’re still pretty disorganized in my mind.

So let’s just shoot. It’ll all fall together on the editing board.

II.

I asked you something a few years ago, about whether you consider Ubuweb a work of art, and you said something interesting, but, you know, I lost the tape, and then I saw this book here, the Letter to Bettina Funcke.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Where you start off by answering that same question, and you say it is, that perhaps it’s the most significant work you’ll ever create, but then you veer off, plagiarize yourself and others, and it gets kind of crazy, and you don’t give anything like a conclusive answer. So I want to ask it again.

Well, I think Documenta didn’t really understand poetry, and they understood Ubuweb, and somehow they needed to legitimize me through Ubu, whereas they couldn’t quite legitimize me through poetry. They wanted me to claim it as an artwork, and I said okay, I don’t usually do so but I could go there if provoked. On my own, day in, day out, I don’t think about it, but it’s not so far from the concerns of the other stuff I do.

One thing I’ve always thought was interesting about Ubuweb was how it enacts the principles of the art it collects.

Absolutely. I mean, it’s all part of the same thing. Most of the materials on Ubu were never economically valuable, but floated freely from one person to another. They were shared, xeroxed, handed out, traded; it was this cassette culture, mail art, you know, all that weird ephemeral stuff that people tend to do. Most of it wasn’t meant to be sold or paid for. Most of the avant-garde was predicated on free culture, nobody ever assumed anything was going to be worth anything, and most of the time it wasn’t.

But at the same time it’s something more. You’ve spoken of cataloging and archiving as artistic endgames in themselves, and in your MoMA lecture, when you talk about the inversion of consumption, how we now spend more time organizing and archiving than engaging with content, I thought of Ubuweb.

Yeah, I mean, I have no idea what’s even on Ubu.

Ha.

I couldn’t consume it all. And this is something rippling through culture a lot right now. Even the data leaks from the NSA and Wikileaks, what they’re calling information vandalism, it’s too much to digest. And that was really the whole point of my Printing Out the Internet—it’s absurd, of course you can’t, it’s too much. There are new metrics of magnitude, of infinite. I think the web shows us, the 21st century, what infinite might look like, and it’s incomprehensible, mind-bogglingly incomprehensible, as big as the universe, that kind of big.

It’s big but we still hold on to these notions of cultural authority, of importance, entities we think of as important and authoritative but for obsolete reasons, based on the old situation. If you take a big institution like MoMA: obviously by most people’s standards a really important institution, but from another perspective almost completely insignificant.

Well, it depends. We used to think that those verticals were the ones that made the narrative and lived by it. Now most of the world doesn’t care about that because they have their own narratives, which are coming through online culture or meme culture. So the museum becomes not a space of authority but a social space, which is what I talked about in the MoMA lecture, how the role of the museum changes into a nightclub, or, you know, social, relational space. Most people don’t go to look at the art, they go to be with each other to show they were there at that monument.

You talk about some other interesting things in that MoMA lecture. One was this dynamic of how institutional critique, the critique of the institution, gets absorbed into the institution itself, becomes an institution of critique—that’s super interesting. The other was that idea of the institution as survival strategy for the artist, and the sort of inevitable drift toward institutionalization of the career of the artist. I thought that was interesting partly because I didn’t really buy it.

You mean the [Marcel] Broodthaers thing?

Yeah, you treat him as exemplary, but I mean … his case was interesting, but I don’t think his fate was inevitable.

Well, it’s enviable. He lucked out. I don’t know any artist who wouldn’t want to be crowned by the institution as being important.

Hm.

The institution has always acted as a filtering system; that’s what makes us pay attention to certain things and ignore others. All these people who critiqued the institution were then hoisted up by the institution and licked, not bit, the hand that fed them.

Haha.

You know? But that’s always happened. Everyone that’s claimed to be anti-art since the beginning of art has happily been embraced by the institution.

The part of the lecture about the White House was pretty amazing.

Yeah, that was funny.

You said something, I don’t remember the exact words, something like, The security is so tight there that it paradoxically becomes the most relaxed and welcoming environment, and I thought it was an interesting microcosm of, I don’t know, this idea that the institution of art can be so in control and welcoming of everything that nothing can really critique it or subvert it. Everything’s absorbed into it and there’s this kind of universal innocuousness.

Everything is relative. When I was the MoMA Poet Laureate, I did a series of guerilla readings, and everyone said, That’s not guerilla! MoMA knows about it! But I was like, Hey, man, within the rigid structure of MoMA, it’s pretty radical, haha. Of course they knew, of course they enabled, but nothing like this had been there before. It’s all contextual. All contextual.

When I was looking at those pictures of you in the White House I thought of how our word “parasite” comes from the Greek word for dinner guest. It referred to a professional class, guests of authority, who wouldn’t give anything but maybe a song. And there you were, reciting poems to President Obama. It’s such an interesting situation. And I thought of how your writing is always toeing this fine line between what is merely interesting or provocative and what is illegal or destructive.

Yeah, I’m trying to hit that line all the time, that’s what gets me in, into a place like the White House or MoMA or The Colbert Report, it’s this weird line between totally wacko radical and quite sane, complicit culture. It’s credible enough for the right so that it’s something they know, but it’s also breaking the law. Reading appropriated texts at the White House, they had no idea what I was doing, even though it’s more radical than getting up there and saying stop the war. I really like playing with that, it gets me inside a lot, to be able to mess around. And it’s the same with Ubuweb. People think Ubuweb is some big institution when it’s a total fucking pirate site with the institutional clothing of authority. I mean, it looks like the MoMA or something.

Yeah, totally.

So it must be very official, well-funded. No. There’s no money here at all. There’s no nothing. Even at [The University of] Pennsylvania, I teach plagiarism, they seem to think it’s great: teaching kids how to steal. I don’t say I’m not doing it and do it; I say I’m doing it and I do it, and they seem to love it. So I think that’s a very good definition, the fine line, I really like that. If it’s coming across that way, if it’s reading that way, I think I’m doing something okay.

I’m interested in where art becomes crime, and I think it’s interesting that you can do this stuff and not only survive in the institution but be endorsed and, you know, supported.

What I do really isn’t that dangerous.

No. Exactly.

I mean, no animals were hurt during the making of this movie. It’s harmless shit. People say Ubu is the Wikileaks of the avant-garde, but Wikileaks foments revolution, Ubu distributes abstract film. I mean come on, honestly, you can’t compare the two, it’s ridiculous, why would you? I’m dealing with poetry and avant-garde art, what the fuck, that’s not dangerous.

But that’s not what a lot of those avant-garde artists thought. A lot of them thought art could be revolutionary and subversive.

I don’t think it can from the outside, but I think it can change things from the inside.

Hm.

People screaming outside the walls of the academy are seen as insane and won’t get a chance to get in to change it; they never have and they never will. You’re going to be ignored. When you think of the most radical revolutionary art of the century: Warhol, super sane, Cage, super sane. These were not crazy people. Frank Zappa, super sane. Super straight, not outsiders at all. They were able to present a sane enough face to the world that they were able to get in and change the world. The outsiders never got in.

III.

Constantly toeing this line seems to boil down to a practice for you, a discipline. It’s like what you say in your essay on dumbness, where the state of smart dumbness is something you arrive at through smartness and requires skill and dedication to maintain.

Yeah.

And it’s the same with your writing. You touch on it in Uncreative Writing, and it can be inferred from your output, that your writing is rooted in a constant practice, less product-oriented even though it may materialize as a product from time to time. So this practice of being dumb and of uncreative writing, how does it manifest in your life? What is it like?

Well, I don’t have to be inspired to write, that’s for sure. I can do it anytime, anywhere, for ten minutes or ten hours, waiting for the doctor or in the airport. It becomes part of life, part of the rhythm. I don’t need inspiration. Though I do get inspiration. I get inspired once every eight or nine years and then I need years to get it out of me.

Inspired meaning you have, what, an idea you think is shareable?

Yeah, an idea that’s nagging at me, that needs to get out. I keep rolling over these ideas, testing them in my mind, and if one lodges in my mind and won’t leave while I’m working on something, then I think it’s probably worth spending another dozen years pursuing.

It seems like you had a moment of inspiration when you decided to do Seven American Deaths and Disasters. You wrote that addendum to your essay on boredom around then saying you were done with being boring and bored. How did you arrive at that point?

Well, I published Day, retyping a day’s New York Times, and it was constantly misread. Everyone thought the day was September eleventh two thousand and one when it was actually September first two thousand, but I thought, Hey, that’s a good idea, so I went and found the paper from September eleventh, not the twelfth, where you see the planes going in, but the day of, the paper everyone was carrying, and I retyped that whole thing, and it was very moving, everything was foretold in the paper, very ominous, very strange, and very moving, and I thought, Wow, I’m doing the same thing I did before but I’m working with hot content, hot material, and I’m having a whole different situation, this is amazing, I can do the same thing and get a different result. What if I start working with texts that are really hot, really loaded? So from there I went online and found nine-eleven air-checks from radio shows, broadcasting guys watching the towers fall, and I began transcribing those, and I thought these are good, very interesting, just transcription, which I love to do, and I thought, I should do a series of these, what else, what else would have that kind of emotional resonance?

That sudden fascination with dramatic, like you said, hot material, it does seem to, not contradict, I mean, it’s a perfectly natural development, but it’s different from your previous practice.

I was bored with that practice. I was bored with being bored. What could I do? Within uncreative writing there are legions retyping or data scraping the Internet and publishing books, but I don’t need to do that anymore, that work for me is finished. I did that for a while. Time to move on.

What are you moving on to?

Well, finishing the thing I’ve been working on for the last eight years, a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for New York City in the twentieth century. I just signed a contract to publish it and that’s what I’m working on now.

Are you nearing the end?

Yeah, well, now there’s closure. A manuscript of half a million words is due in two years, so I’ve got to tie that one up now. I’ve been working on it nonstop for eight years, and now I need to shape it and get to the finish line.

It seems like Benjamin’s been a touchstone for you.

I don’t know. I mean, Benjamin people are angry about this project, I’ve gotten a lot of pushback from people who feel they own Walter Benjamin. A lot of people think they own him, and he’s an untouchable figure, and of course a saint on a lot of levels, so the fact that one would redo Benjamin and rethink Benjamin is blasphemous for a lot of people. I don’t understand Benjamin the way most people do. I’m not too concerned with Marxism. You know, media theory I like; the collecting stuff I like. I’m not a huge Benjamin fan. But I really love that book. I mean, I liked Benjamin before that, but when I saw about that book I thought, Man, I want to do something like that.

You’ve said it’s a nice book to float around in instead of reading linearly.

Yeah, I’ve never read the thing.

I’m interested in these new ways of reading, new strategies, and how they relate to uncreative writing. It seems like you’re proposing a kind of experimental reading, where reading in new ways becomes a practice as well, just like writing and archiving; that the three go together.

Well, I’ve said the new writing is not writing and the new reading is not reading. It’s moving information, parsing, bypassing. You can’t do the deep engagement, there are too many interesting things. I talked about that in Uncreative Writing, about Twitter, the headline, but you see it even more so today. I think the citation today is more relevant than the thing it is citing. The citation is more relevant than the cited. Sometimes I’ll tweet out on Ubu a four-oh-four, a page where I messed up the link, and before I even have a chance to fix it, it’s been retweeted two hundred and fifty times. That means not a single one of them has clicked on the link! It’s just a cool name, Wow, William S. Burroughs, I’m going to pass that along and get some cred. People just move this stuff around.

That’s funny.

And that’s the evacuation of content. Content is no longer king. It’s all the scaffolding, the structural stuff around the content that we care about, all the paratextual stuff. The text is the last thing we care about, the last thing you read. Nobody reads it. You don’t want to say nobody. People still read. But I think a lot of people use language differently than close reading. We’re living in a time of radical changes and that’s one of them, that we all have short attention spans now. And I think it’s a new avant-garde, the short attention span.

I want to talk about “The Death of the Author,” Barthes, how what you define as uncreative writing grows out of a lot of the things he talks about there, and also his vision of the reader, the rebirth of the reader, and what that could mean. You talk about the difference between an absorptive relationship to a work and a, what was it, generative?

Reflective.

Yeah, it’s really in S/Z that he gets into that, the readerly text and the writerly text, the writerly text is the executable file, you can go in and tinker with it; one is untouchable and the other is ultimately remixable. I think S/Z gets closer to those ideas, the real exploration of that article; it’s a great book. Yeah, you know, I tweeted out that Barthes was on Ubu, the Aspen magazine from sixty-seven, which was the first time “The Death of the Author” was published in English, and somebody responded saying, Wow, I remember when I used to really believe in those ideas, and how far I’ve drifted from them now. When you look at culture now, there’s no trace of Barthes, no trace of the death of the author, it doesn’t exist, it’s been so forgotten, you have authorial voices, unchallenged authorial voices, literary fiction, no trace of that in writing of people like Jonathan Franzen or even people who know better, like Jonathan Lethem, or the entire New Yorker, it’s all authorial, you know, the authentic. But I actually think those writers are somewhat irrelevant. I mean, they’re entertaining, but it seems so naive to me. These guys know this stuff, but they’ll tank their market if they start fucking with it; they’re slaves to their multimillion-dollar market; they can’t write the books they probably know they should be writing because they’ll lose those big advances; they’re slaves, you know? But I think for anyone who’s not like that, and who’s in touch with web culture, Barthes and his ideas are still valuable signposts.

IV.

So I had this weird Ubuweb moment recently when right before going to bed one night I was reading that thing Three Dialogues with Beckett and this guy I forget.

Yeah, Georges … I know it. I know of it.

They’re talking about modern artists, and Beckett is trying to give his vision of a new art, and at one point he says, What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?

Hm.

Then I closed my computer and went to bed, but couldn’t sleep. So I got up and took a book off my shelf, The Temptation to Exist, by E.M. Cioran, which has this great introduction by Susan Sontag. And the epigraph of the intro, one of the epigraphs, is that same Beckett quote!

It’s a good quote.

But it was uncanny, this really weird coincidence. And it’s been …

Rattling around.

Yeah.

Hm, interesting.

And I wanted to, I don’t know, just float the quote by you, because it seems like you’ve thought about Beckett a lot.

Hm, yeah. Well, writing that way is untenable. You’re never going to win doing that. Which is why Eugenides doesn’t do it. Clearly he wants to win. And yet, you know, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, like Beckett does. The untenable is also the utopian, that which cannot stand, for whatever reason. That’s why Ubuweb is untenable and yet it’s enacted, which is really remarkable, for all this time, it shouldn’t have gone on this long, it’s untenable. I’m going to break copyright law, that’s untenable. But it tests reality. And those are huge victories. Sometimes people give me things and sometimes I just post things and get away with it, and I get a much bigger thrill out of the untenability of breaking the law than I do making it more legitimate, moving toward tenability. The untenable is magic. The tenable, there’s nothing left to strive for. It’s not defeatist. You just try to live in a state of untenability.

I like that take. The Sontag essay with the Beckett quote is ultimately about John Cage. The other epigraph is from Cage: Every now and then it is possible to have absolutely nothing; the possibility of nothing. She talks about this kind of intellectual and artistic crisis mid-century, and how Cioran was the dark poet of the impasse, while Cage was really doing something new and opening new pathways.

Yeah, Cage opens a door. He doesn’t keep doing the same thing. He may use the same process but it’s a door out. An exit strategy.

And I wanted to ask what you think of Cage, what he’s meant to you.

I’ve found Cage to be very helpful at certain periods of life, philosophically, musically; you know, he had a beautiful ear; he’s been really important to me. But I found there were limits to Cage. He said anything could be music, but there were some sounds that weren’t permitted, sounds of violence, sounds of anger, sounds of hip-hop, most popular culture wasn’t permitted because it was violent; so his ethics, or what Joan Retallack would call his “poethics,” actually got in the way of him enacting what he really believed in. So then I jumped over to Warhol, who did away with that, who was a-ethical, not unethical but a-ethical, totally transparent and permeable for everything in a way Cage could only speculate about being. But it got ugly for Warhol, it’s really an ugly position, it’s real but it didn’t turn out well, and it turned out pretty well for Cage. Ethics helped Cage, but philosophically Warhol was truer.

This idea of the untenable reminds me of your essay “Provisional Language,” which forms this sort of coda to Uncreative Writing. Language waiting to be undone. It’s kind of utopian and apocalyptic at once.

Yeah, it comes off of Rem Koolhaas’s idea of provisional architecture, junkspace, the architecture of airports, the flimsiness: you go into Heathrow and realize the whole thing’s an ugly stage set. Everything’s so cheap but made to look really substantial. A Brooks Brothers shop in the Heathrow shopping mall is nothing but sheetrock you can punch your fist through.

Haha.

It’s architecture that wasn’t meant to last, and now it’s the same with language. Words come together temporarily, form constellations of meaning, and then are blown apart again. You take that into the digital world, the transferability of language in the digital ecosystem, it’s not that much different from busting down a sheetrock wall or reusing the wood in the store to build a hotdog stand over there. It’s all provisional. Language is provisional. This language wasn’t meant to stay together forever. The bound book is an absolute illusion. Words are splayed out, torrented, spammed, emailed. What are words worth now? They’re cheap. They’re super cheap.

It’s kind of like when you talk about how literary works and literary careers just pop up and spread like memes and then vanish.

Yeah, I mean, I see it. Like Printing Out the Internet, like, I actually became a meme, on Know Your Meme I was an official meme, and it was amazing, how it spread like wildfire and then died, bang, psh, fabulous. We generated six hundred pages of press around that fucking project, around the world. So I ended up enacting that scenario for real and it was fucking wild.

Can you step back and tell me about that show?

Did you see the pictures?

I saw the ones of

Of me floating on the giant sea of paper?

No!

Oh, go google that one up, it’s amazing, they’re all over the web. Anyway, yeah, it went really crazy. What happened was, I was asked to do this show as a tribute to Aaron Swartz at a big gallery in Mexico City and I began looking for artworks that materialized the quantity of the Internet. I came across some pretty amazing stuff, like a guy who made a book this high where he’d bound every picture of Natalie Portman on the Internet, and I was like, Wow, and another woman had bound every article written about the Iraq war, this high, seventy-two thousand-page volumes in this giant spread across a gallery.

Oh my god.

But each of those gestures seemed too small and too prescribed to get at the enormity of what Swartz heisted from JSTOR, or what Snowden was leaking, or Manning. And I started to think about how to deal with that quantity, that enormity, and I thought, Fuck it, let’s print the Internet, let’s crowd source it, there are ten billion pages on the Internet and six billion people in the world, if everyone sends in two pages, we’ll have more than enough!

Totally.

So I put out the call and by the time it was over I had ten tons of paper contributed by twenty thousand people from around the world, a giant pile in Mexico City up to the ceiling of a place like this. These boxes came in and I threw them into a big pile and that was it. It was pretty cool.

And is that all you really wanted to point to, the enormity?

Yeah, the quantity, the enormity, information overload, how little we are, how big everything else is, a scale thing, magnitude, the new metrics of infinite.

Something clicked in my head with Benjamin’s idea of the constellation, in this context of printing out the Internet at this one moment in time.

Where it can all constellate, come together, and blow apart again.

Yeah.

Yeah, hm, I like that too. I mean, I didn’t have much of an agenda, no political point, nothing ecological, not even much to do with Swartz in the end. It was a poetic gesture, like, Wow, what would happen if we fucking printed the Internet? Not a whole lot more behind it, but it triggered something I didn’t expect, a global conversation, it touched some kind of nerve I hadn’t intended. I was like, I don’t know, I’m a curator, let’s print the Internet! It was actually very stupid, very dumb, fucking dumb, no great idea, that was the dumb part, let’s print the whole thing, haha, of course it’s impossible, we don’t even know what it is, haha, so it was just a dumb idea, and it touched some crazy nerve, and vanished, poof.

Like everything.

Yeah.

VI.

Do you feel that, like Cage, you’ve opened doors for writers?

I think the work I’ve done points in a direction, not the direction; it’s some kind of bridge between. I look at some of these writers data scraping and publishing, you talk about untenable, ridiculous works, they’re publishing all in PDF and their publisher is Lulu, they can make the most ridiculous things; there’s this guy named Chris Alexander who made a work called McNugget where he scraped all of Twitter for every mention of the word McNugget and made like a six hundred page book.

Haha.

Now you can buy that book for 30 dollars, and I don’t know how many people will buy that book, but it’s wonderful, it blows open weird notions of authorship, poetry, publishing, code, distribution. I think a lot of the younger writers are moving toward this. But my production was always very prescribed, and when people criticize me for it, I take them and say, Hey, you’re absolutely right, but I’m 52 years old and I’ve been doing this for a long time. I think the next wave is really blowing the whole thing open. Things are changing really quick and you’re lucky to have a little window to work in before the culture moves on. One continues to work, but the game’s moved elsewhere now, beyond what I could ever conceive of.

Okay, so you feel like you have this window, you’ve imagined your own obsolescence. I’m just curious, looking into the future, if you feel like there’s some aspect of your work or something that you’ve learned that will continue to be relevant.

You know—if nothing else, I’ve tried to bring writing up to speed with things that have long been taken for granted in the other arts and never tested in writing. Copying was never tested in writing, never. I mean, it was proposed by Borges in “Menard,” but even that wasn’t retyping, it was an original work, this weird thing, kind of a magical realism. So that, wow, that’s weird, it’s weird that it hadn’t been done, and now it’s very natural, you know, with cut and paste and here we are in the digital age. Again, it’s so stupid, so dumb, that only an artist could do it, dumb like Duchamp is dumb, dumb like Cage is dumb. As far as the future, I don’t know. I see these younger writers data scraping and doing much wilder things than I did, it may just fizzle, there may be no legacy, it could be there was this weird moment of conceptualism in writing, and everyone’ll be like, Remember that? And everyone’s like, Oh yeah.

Ha.

Cage always said his audience was perpetually one of students, because people have the time and the open mind to embrace these crazy ideas, but the minute they, quote, “grow up” they reject them as a waste of time, because they have family to support. But he said, you know, Don’t worry, there’s always more students.

Nice.

So I don’t know if there’s a legacy to it, but I do know it’s been very much of its time, and I think that’s all an artist can hope for, and I think my writing does that pretty adequately, for writing, in this weird time, figuring that out. It’s of its time. But that time is moving on to another time.

* *

Image: Kenneth Goldsmith at Street Poets and Visionaries, Mercer Union. Toronto, 2009. Charla Jones/Globe and Mail.

* *

Kenneth Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb and teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published ten books of poetry, including Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001) and Day (2003), and the American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is also the author of the non-fiction work Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (2011). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art’s first Poet Laureate.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

heather — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:11:51 +0000

TO AN OLD FRIEND IN PARIS

I haven’t seen the ghost of your mother.
But I have seen your poems about the ghost
Of your mother as she brushes by you
Near the Seine, or as Linda Gregerson,
Or in the unseen acts guiding those poems
About the ghost of your mother, that chill
As you write that withers into something
Lithe, words for the weather suddenly flush
With lavender and salt, barked line breaks hush,
The poem opening like an ear pressed
Against the cold, clicking door of a safe.
Day comes to dark caves but darkness remains.
And the only way then to know a truth
Is to squint in its direction and poke.

LUCAS AND MARK

I sit sandwiched between two Chuck Closes:
Luckless “Lucas,” made up of small fat dots
Bursting against black-backgrounded colors,
His unkempt hair, unkempt beard, unkempt stare
Shot past the small bench between him and “Mark.”
No one in the Met has ever looked more eager
To be at the Met than “Mark.” Every pore
And razor scrape happens. His buck-toothed grin,
His out-of-focus neck and shoulders share
The running joke of being real with us.
Like Buscemi he is a look of love.
His plastic union-grade frames reflect lights
That he alone sees. In twos and threes
They pose with “Mark”s giant head: the orange
Italian girls in expensive peasant
Dresses throw up peace signs and then blow him
Kisses. Meanwhile, “Lucas,” left alone
On his side of the room, where he is real
From a distance, instead of the crazed pixels
He’s revealed to be up close, drops his eyes
To me, as though he knows I am watching
And hopes that I know he’s really a man.

THE PRIMUM MOBILE

O land of one tree, land of all as O,
Framing all fled feeling with first fire,
As I, the poet Rowan, laureate
Of phoenix nests and ash, never know you.

* *

Image: Myriam Bornand

The Mothers of Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Jorge Luis Borges Meet in Heaven

heather — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 05:31:25 +0000

Mary Gordon

An angel in a golden robe escorts the last of three ladies of a certain age into a well-appointed sitting room. It is tenderly lit; there are bowls of scentless cream-colored flowers on tables of a heartbreaking polish. Clearly arranged to the greatest possible conversational advantage are three upholstered chairs, covered in a lemon-colored silk. Two of the chairs are already filled; in one, a stoutish woman sits, an iron-colored bun on the top of her head, her hands folded quietly on her lap. Her face is contented; it would be wrong to say that she is smiling. The woman in the chair across from her has her hair done in a knot at the nape of her neck; threads of grey stand out in the chignon, but far fewer than her companions. The third, escorted by the angel, is tall, thin, wearing a straight skirt that comes two inches below her knees and well-cut shoes that the other women know instantly must be English.

“I would like to introduce you to Señora Borges,” says the angel. “Señora Borges, I have the honor to present Mme. Flaubert and Mme. Proust.”

“Enchantée,” says Señora Borges. “Naturally we will speak French.”

“I understand our sons know each other,” says Mme. Proust, who prides herself on her excellent manners.

“Yes, “ says Mme. Flaubert, “isn’t it strange that here, all books seem to have been written at the same time, and so although my Gustave could not have possibly read your boy’s books, and Mme. Proust, your son could not have possibly read Señor Borges, it doesn’t matter: they are reading each other now.”

“Good sons,” Señora Borges says, “and how they loved us.”

“Their lives were not easy, says Mme. Proust. “The life of a great writer can never be easy.”

“And my son was blind.”

“Mine was asthmatic.”

“Gustave suffered cruelty from his digestion. He was a very good uncle.”

“Marcel was a fond uncle as well. He worried that some of what he wrote might be disturbing to his dear niece. “

“Jorge adored his sister.”

“But not one of them a father.”

“Women were not good to Gustave.”

“Nor to Marcel.”

“I guess Jorge was the only one to marry. But the first one! Nightmare! At least he had the sense to come home to me. He was meant to be happy with the second one. I never knew her.”

“Marcel was very unwise in his choice of women. I believe that at a very early age he had his heart broken for good.”

Mme. Flaubert and Señora Borges exchange glances but say nothing.

“I suppose it was their love of beauty that led them astray,” says Mme. Flaubert.

“Probably what they needed was a sensible girl, but that, exactly, is what they could not bring themselves to want,” says Señora Borges.

“Of course, if we are honest,” says Mme. Proust (at this point Mme. Flaubert and Señora Borges look at each other uneasily, not knowing what to expect), “they lived for their work. It is the way of a genius, to sacrifice life for art.”

“How they suffered,” says Señora Borges.

“How they suffered,” says Mme. Flaubert.

“Cruel, cruel suffering, I guess they were happiest in their books. The ones they wrote, and the books of others,” said Mme. Proust.

“Gustave was a happy child,”

“Marcel as a child was very happy.”

“Jorge was a happy cheerful child. Our happiest hours were when I read to him.”

“I remember reading Marcel the novels of George Sand.”

“She was a good woman, a good influence on my boy. He was much better when he came from a visit to her.”

“I believe she is no longer much admired,” says Señora Borges.

“They think of her as the lover of a musician who coughed up blood,” says Mme. Flaubert.

“I believe that is because of the movies,” says Señora Borges.

“I have never seen a movie,” says Mme. Flaubert.

“Nor I,” says Mme. Proust.

“Jorge of course could not see them.”

“I think Marcel had taken to his room before the time of cinema.”

“What good sons they were. How they loved us.”

“And how we loved them.”

“No one understood them as we did.”

“No one could care for them as we did.”

“They were at their best with us.”

“With us, they knew they never had to worry.”

“They could be themselves.”

“I believe that they were at their happiest with us.”

There is the sound of infants weeping, wailing as if their hearts would break.

A door opens.

There are three angels, each holding a perfect baby boy.

The three women unbutton their blouses.

There is the sound of sucking.

And the angels smile at the sight of this perfect contentment, rare even for Paradise.

* *

Image: Vera Rosemberg

The Turtle & the Fox

heather — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 21:14:00 +0000

Debora Kuan

Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet

My first encounter with my colleague Ivan Fox’s house in Trenton was a small, late-summer dinner party. It was a balmy dusk. Another coworker, who lived a few blocks away from me in Princeton, picked me up at my apartment. As we drove, the ivy-swathed Gothic architecture and Tudor storefronts of our university town gradually gave way to stucco municipal buildings, one-room churches, chain-link fences, hand-painted signs, and rundown Victorian residences. On Ivan’s street, a group of black teenaged boys were standing in the road; they peered at us through the windshield, and then parted to let our car through.

The house stood at the corner of an intersection with a dead-end street, one side of it almost completely obscured by a 13-foot-high wall of overgrown rhododendrons. Through its open windows, Vivaldi was blasting.

When we went in, Ivan was in the kitchen, surrounded by trays of bell peppers, chicken paté, and sliced baguettes. He briefly introduced us to a middle-aged man, Sherman, who had cleaned the house that afternoon and was on his way out. Later, I would learn that Ivan often hired people in his neighborhood for small jobs around the house, a reputation that occasionally brought uninvited strangers strolling through his unlocked doors, asking for money. This was also how he had come to acquire some of his secondhand china—someone had simply walked in, offering a stack of it for sale.

As Ivan cooked, we wandered. The house had the deep, umber decadence of a Caravaggio still life: dark chestnut doorframes, tarnished silver trays of over-ripened fruit, tea-stained china, an extensive collection of seashells, reading glasses strewn everywhere (“ah!” Ivan would later exclaim, spying a wet pair, when we sat down to the backyard table by the pond he’d made, “my glasses!”). Lining the walls were heavy tapestries and dusty brass sconces. The keyboard of a rosewood grand piano, which had been removed from its frame, hung in the living room. At the foot of the stairs, an Arts-and-Crafts grandfather clock with a hammered brass face bonged the hour. But the most exciting discovery was to be made in the downstairs bathroom: a large turtle in the porcelain tub, its head pointed toward the drain.

“Ivan! You have a turtle?” I said, rushing out of the bathroom.

He looked up from his cookbook and smiled, a look of deep satisfaction. He did not answer.

I felt foolish. As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized that the turtle was stuffed. I slouched back to the bathroom and studied the reptile’s uncanny likeness to life. The A Rebour air of the house made even the most far-fetched ideas seem plausible.

At work, Ivan’s cubicle was around the corner from mine, about ten paces away. We were the unprestigious and thankless scribes of American education’s most preferred whipping child, the standardized test. Ivan had been hired while teaching at Princeton in 1996, at a time when the company needed philosophers to work on the GRE Reasoning test. When the program became defunct, he, along with a handful of others, moved to the English Language Learning group to work on the TOEFL/Test of English as a Foreign Language.

Every morning, he arrived in the office with his gray curls wet and matted from his daily 6 a.m. swim. Even at sixty, he was likely in better shape than anyone in our entire building; there was no ounce of fat to be found anywhere on his frame. His lunch every day was a large aluminum bowl filled with raw vegetables and chickpeas, doused with balsamic vinaigrette, and a few large squares of matzoh. His tea came in muslin bags. He was tall, mostly legs, his olive skin deeply lined from a history of smoking, his nose long, hawkish, and sometimes wet, seemingly without his knowledge. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt from gardening, and his Oxford shirts often stained.

Ivan was always available, genial, and generous, happy to discuss anything. He did not have bad moods. I thought of him as a person governed entirely by reason, like the equine Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels, immune to emotional vicissitudes, in himself as well as others.

Once when I spied a copy of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient on Ivan’s desk, I expressed my shock noisily. He swung around in his chair. “A friend lent it to me. Why? Do you think I won’t like it?” he asked. “No, you won’t, you absolutely won’t,” I said, laughing. Before I could tell him, “Ondaatje is a High Romantic,” he cut me off, saying, “Because, if it’s in any way about the human condition, I’m not interested!”

Being cut off by Ivan was not unusual. Nor was being talked to after you had ostensibly ended the conversation and walked away. He had a tendency to pontificate—loudly, with theatrical modulation in pitch—to the point of your exhaustion. To make matters worse, it was often impossible to hold your own against him in an argument. A female colleague had once fled from him in tears. Mary, the head of our team, who had known him for an age, however, took him less personally. She once pounded on the conference room table, after repeated attempts to quiet him politely, and shouted, “Enough, Ivan, shut up!” to little avail. His skin was thick.

Ivan used to have lunch every day with a friend of his, a fellow philosopher in our department, until the friend left the company for another job. They would eat in the small library between his and my cubicles. Our whole side of the floor could hear them shouting their points and counterpoints behind that closed door, hashing out what I can only guess were issues of metaphysics and epistemology. Later, people would complain about the state in which they left the library after their infamous lunches—stray food on the chairs, tables, books.

To the gratification of many, Ivan’s unsanitary ways did not go without consequence forever. After nearly a decade in his cubicle, expired food items, soil, spilled loose tea, and other litter resulted in an official health hazard warning from the housecleaning staff. They tacked the notice on his doorway and strung tape over the cubicle. Unfazed, Ivan recruited a loyal intern to clean it.

When he reviewed my sets, invariably killing nine out of 13 of my questions and sending me back to the drawing board, he would stand at the doorway of my cube and present my defeat to me in a sheaf of printed pages, creased, stained, and scribbled over in heavy pencil chicken scratch. Then he would pull up a chair and go over with me what was wrong with, indeed, everything. He didn’t believe in leaving well enough alone; he wanted perfection.

If at times exasperating, that extra work we did together solidified our friendship. I liked the familial way he would walk into my cube, even if I was talking to someone else, and give me slices of his poppyseed bread or boxes of Kusmi tea. I liked that he would plop himself down on my chair, cross his legs, remove his glasses, and pick up where we had left off the day before. I remember one year returning from the company’s Annual Asian and Pacific Islander Festival with some Chinese calligraphy I had written on rice paper, which I gave to him.

“What does it say?” he said, tacking it up on his bulletin board.

I pointed to the two characters, hao ren. “Good man,” I said. “That’s you.”

Ivan had bought his house at the corner of Beechwood and Stacy in a state of disrepair for $110,000 at the end of 2002. One of the foundational beams was rotted. The electrical wiring was a mess. The kitchen was barely large enough to fit three people. But since it was a classic Arts and Crafts estate, and he had apprenticed himself as a carpenter during a hiatus from writing his dissertation at Harvard, he had hoped, with the help of his brother, an electrical engineer, that they could fix the place up.

He was shocked when he saw the deed. It asserted that the house had been built in 1930. “Built with gas fixtures—in 1930?” he said with brassy incredulity. “It also had electricity. In the hallway, there is this elaborately ensconced box, it has a brindle oak frame with decorative wrought iron bosses and a clear glass panel, and what was this? Was it a shrine or something? No, it was actually the original fuse box! But this was at a time when the mere possession and the mere novelty, and indeed the sophistication and so forth, of having electricity was something not to be hidden in a closet but to be given this forefronted exhibition!” The repairs that Ivan and his brother made were so extensive that, at one point, his house insurance got cancelled. Someone had looked in the window, seen the kitchen gutted and the living room in disarray, and figured no one could be living there, especially without heat in the dead of winter. He had had to call up his insurance company and assure them otherwise. The picture he sent me from this renovation period was of him wearing goggles, a gas mask, and a lavender crocheted hat with a chin tie, standing on a ladder and wielding an electric saw.

Of all the rooms in the house, however, it was his work in the kitchen that he was perhaps most proud of. He designed it with two wooden arches covered in stucco and elevated countertops to accommodate his height. He built the kitchen cabinets at unnecessarily complicated angles—in one place, resulting in an L-shaped drawer—simply as a construction challenge. His ingenuity is in evidence elsewhere too: The bulk of the furniture in his living room was made from deaccessioned dormitory furniture from the universities at which he had taught. A working glass chandelier hangs from a tree in his yard.

But, for a person who enjoyed throwing himself into complex problems and challenges, simply for the sake of it, he always seemed to me oddly incurious about digital artisanship. He did not own a television, and for a while, he did not own a working phone. Even when his phone did ring, he tended not to answer it. He referred to DVDs as “the latest ones” and VHSes as “the book-sized ones,” though he did not own either. When his computer at work would crash, he took great pleasure in saying that he and his computer were simply “trying to reconcile their personal differences.”

“Where’s your joie de vivre?” he asked me one morning, as I shambled to the coffee pot, brooding over something or other, It was a simple question, and I supposed, a more elegant way of asking me to smile—a prodding I normally despise, since it tends to be a gendered and patronizing request. But Ivan was not asking me to smile. He was not an old man needling a young woman in order to get a pretty expression out of her. No, his question was far more genuine than that, as was his use of the mot juste: joie de vivre, that quality of aliveness which he had in such abundance.

It was this aspect of his character—this joie de vivre—I suspect, that kept him from viewing his career at ETS as a failure of his original ambitions. He certainly didn’t see it this way. Instead he felt that he wasn’t suited to being an academic—“all the committees, networking, finding jobs for one’s students,” he wasn’t good at that. He was also, he fully admitted, unproductive in terms of publication. “I already had a sufficiently high opinion of myself so I wasn’t interested in making a name for myself,” he cackled. “Anyway, one doesn’t know what one’s destiny is. Now I see I was meant to be a test developer!” One of his favorite stories to tell was about how, as a kid, he had designed a test for his teacher to take. He had figured, if the students had to take tests, why shouldn’t she? Afterwards, he was surprised to see that she had answered all his questions correctly.

Ivan threw himself into the life of our department and made it his business to humanize its corporate culture. For Purim, he used to bake hamantaschen—poppyseed and prune—and deliver them to everyone’s cubicle. At the end of the summer, he organized the thank you picnic for the summer interns, cooking the food and directing games of Corn Hole—he found the scatological implications hilarious. And when I left the company for a new job in New York, it was Ivan who volunteered to throw my farewell dinner party at his house.

Last year, when I published my first book of poems, I emailed Ivan to let him know. He had always been supportive of my writing. He had come to my readings, and he had always wanted to hear what I was working on. Once, to my infinite mortification, he had emailed our entire department of over eighty people when I told him in private that I had been runner-up in a first book contest. So when I wrote to him and I didn’t hear back, I was surprised. Perhaps our rapport had changed now that I hadn’t seen him in so long, now that I no longer worked with him, I thought. But it still seemed odd. After all, when I had first written him with the news that my book was accepted for publication, he had written me back immediately saying how delighted he was and how he finally had a good reason to open the bottle of champagne I’d given him.

When I visited the office some time later and discovered that he had mysteriously not been to work for a month or more, I began to worry. I asked the people he worked with. I asked our mutual friend Paul, a historian in the social science department, who was one of Ivan’s closest friends—the two of them having started their jobs on the same exact day in 1996. Paul brushed my questions off nonchalantly, saying, “Oh, you know Ivan, it could be anything.” I let his insouciance persuade me that everything was okay, even though another part of me wondered why he, being such a good friend, wasn’t more concerned. In my mind, if Ivan were out on sabbatical or taking some kind of extended trip, surely he wouldn’t keep it a secret. There wouldn’t be any reason to. It could only be something bad—that was more in line with his independent and stubborn character, keeping people from making a fuss over him, or worse, from trying to lend a helping hand.

My intuitions were correct. Not long after I saw Paul and his wife for her birthday and asked about Ivan again, with no answers, I got a call from another friend of mine. It was Saturday. I was about to leave on a business trip. I have bad news, she said.

The cancer, when the doctors found it, was stage four. It had already spread from his stomach to his esophagus. He had done one round of chemo, on his doctors’ recommendation. It failed. When his oncologist asked him to try another, he refused, having demanded to see what drugs were included and declaring them all poison. In the month before he died, he insisted on one last trip with his family, to Yellowstone, which he had planned prior to the diagnosis.

Paul called me a few days after he’d passed to tell me that yes, he had known all along, in those months of mysterious absence. Ivan had sworn him to secrecy.

Naturally the memorial was held at Ivan’s. I ambled through the house after meeting his siblings. I looked in the bathroom, and my old friend was still there in the bathtub. On a table in the yard, Ivan’s siblings had set out some family photo albums. I flipped through them, looking at pictures of Ivan as a boy, dressed as a cowboy, and as a teenager, so young and handsome, with long curly hair and a set of headphones over his ears, messing around with his friends. Up until this point, I had seen only one picture of Ivan as a boy, which used to be tucked in the frame of his Harvard diploma. It was him, probably nine or ten, with a snake around his neck, regarding the camera with an expression on his face of pure contentment. Here it was again, in the album, next to his school pictures, Christmas and Easter photos, graduation.

Christmas and Easter? I looked up and asked the women who were looking over my shoulder. I thought Ivan was Jewish? An older woman whose name and relationship I never caught told me this wasn’t the case. Ivan had been raised Presbyterian. In fact, no one knew when he had converted to Judaism, or how, because it was only very recently that he had finally told his family he was Jewish. They were still dealing with the shock at the memorial.

This new bit of information certainly threw a wrench into my reading of Ivan’s life choices. The narrative that I had always assumed to be truth was that he was raised culturally Jewish and had, at some point in his adulthood, upon his own explorations, become more observant. Somewhere wrapped in this convenient fiction of mine were also my assumptions about his sexuality—which were, essentially, that, because of religiously motivated reasons, he had never found himself a partner. In my bolder moments, I had asked Ivan about his bachelorhood—I had heard about some relationships and some dates, notably, one very bad one with a woman he’d met at a bris—but for the most part, I felt I had to take his admissions at face value. I had one perfectly articulated sentence, which he had uttered the one—and now only—time he had visited me in Brooklyn. It is written in my notebook: “I am perfectly open-minded about sex until I am confronted with its particulars.”

I asked him once if he had ever wanted children. “God, no!” he’d spat out. He was not interested in taking on the tremendous responsibility, he’d explained, for how another human being turned out, since there was never any guarantee, no matter how conscientious a parent you are. But when we’d had our long discussions about his house, I felt sure I detected a twinge of wistfulness when we revisited the subject. He’d said, if he had had children, he would’ve had to look into the public schools in the area before purchasing his place. Then there was a long pause, untenanted by his usual stutters. “But I don’t, so…” He had trailed off.

In the wake of the news, those of us—especially the younger people—who looked up to Ivan as a mentor and scholar and even a kind of father figure tried to respect the fact that we had been in the dark while he was dying. This was what he had wanted, and we would never have begrudged him his privacy or his dignity. But that he maintained up until the end that he did not think he would be missed was a harder pill to swallow. Every one of us had harbored the humble belief that we mattered as much to him as he did to us. This was easy to believe: When his sun shone on you, you felt brilliant by proxy, worthy of his time and attention, singled out and unique.

If his death left us with doubt, then we now had to live with both.

During his last week, his sister Carla told us, Ivan asked his hospice nurse and siblings to move him into the sun room, his favorite room in the house, built with a recessed, pyramidal ceiling. From here, he could look out and see his garden and pond. At the memorial, another friend, who had also worked with Ivan, set her laptop up on the table where this last bed had been, and we watched videos of him giving his famous speeches at department functions, sending the whole conference room into fits of laughter.

On the way to the train station with Paul and Kate, Kate told me that when the company’s internal website announced the news of his newly published philosophical article, he had taken umbrage, for me, saying, “Mine was only an article, Debbie published a book! They should announce that!” That he had spoken of me at all felt, in that moment, like the only comfort I had. I clung to it like a slippery, tenuous reed—perhaps she was saying this only to console me, I feared—as we drove through the streets of Trenton, farther and farther from his house.

Then Paul told a story about how once Kate had dropped by Ivan’s unannounced, just to say hello. She came in—of course, the doors were never locked—and called his name, but he wasn’t in the kitchen, or the living room, or the sun room, or on the porch. Then she tried the backyard. She found him finally under a tree, with a glass of wine, gazing at the sky. “Thank God, you’re here!” he said. “I’m starving. Let’s eat!”

The week after he died, I scanned the Internet, looking for traces of him, and found virtually nothing–just a few of his papers for purchase on philosophical journal websites and his funeral announcement in Ohio. That was all? It didn’t seem right. Later that night I threw my windows open after a summer thunderstorm and blasted, as he had that first night, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” to the indifferent dark street. I thought the world should know what it had lost. A good man, one of the best I knew.

* *

Image: Yolanda del Amo

Victoria Redel

heather — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 06:11:15 +0000

BOTTOM LINE

As when my father goes back under
and the doctor comes out to tell us he’s put a window in my father’s heart.

At last! The inscrutable years are over. I’ll look right in
before the glass gets smudged, before he has a chance to buy drapes or slatted blinds.

It will be a picture window; I’ll be a peeping Tom.
Imagine the balcony of secrets, the longings: our future a window box of heart-to-hearts.

Then he’s awake, calling for morphine,
his pain greater than from the first surgery.

On the next rounds the doctor clarifies:
the window’s really more like a gutter so built-up fluids can drain.

And I remember my father on a ladder
pulling down leaves and rot, each year saying, Do I need this kind of trouble?

Saying, A new roof? You think I’m made of money?
Draw the shades. Let him rest. Let me sit beside my father in the dark.

* *

Image: Marisela LaGrave

The Birthday Card

heather — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:52:04 +0000

Dorothy Spears

An impotent man on vacation, so potent at work, keeps going at his wife every night, every afternoon. “I need to prove that I’m norm…I mean, that I’m all right,” he whispers, with coiled desperation.

The wife buries her face into a synthetic pillowcase, recalling a discussion they’d had a decade ago about a birthday card from George. He’d accused her of trying to ruin him, citing her need to discuss the birthday card as an attempt to undermine his confidence. It was only a few months after their wedding; he’d picked up her favorite wedding gift, a Navajo bowl, and smashed it against the oak floor of their apartment.

Today, after breakfast, and another failed attempt, she goes for a solitary bike ride. Down the road the workmen wave and grunt “Salaut.” They are splitting boulders into more manageable fragments, laying stones for a new wall.

With the exception of one, who has thick, dark hair and a sturdy build, the workmen wave again later, when the four of them are all together, a regular family, and the father is teaching the older boy to ride a two-wheeler. The younger one struggles to ride on training wheels. Whenever a vehicle approaches them on the flat horizon, his fear takes the form of wide-eyed paralysis, and his bike topples in the middle of the road, or, forgetting to apply his handbrakes—for it’s all too much to learn, and at three, he’s in such a hurry to keep up with his older brother—he crashes against a wall, or hurtles off the jagged edge of asphalt into a roadside ditch.

The cute workman scratches his neck, and silently returns to his stone splitting. The sun glistens on his skin. Her husband notices him, too. He starts calling him “the cute one.” He comes up with the idea when he’s jogging. He’ll pay the cute one to sleep with her. The idea arouses him. He shows her how hard he is, and starts groping at her panties.

The landscape is scorched, the fig leaves curled. Branches of eucalyptus click in the hot wind. Signs are in German. The essence of the island retreats. Olives wither on wizened branches, giving up, finally, after what has seemed an endless, centuries old struggle, to produce; to be productive.

The husband has been telling their older son about the various Greek myths. A few days ago there was Prometheus, to whom the husband often compared himself, who gets tied to the rock so his liver can be devoured by birds. Today, at lunch, he has hit upon Tantalus, who apparently, by some punishment of the gods, was refused the pleasures of fruit and water. Every time Tantalus reaches a little higher for a fruit, its branch withdraws just beyond his grasp. Likewise, when he lowers his head to drink, the water retreats from his eager lips.

As the husband recounts the Tantalus myth, it reminds her for some reason of George, his uncle. She imagines George with her husband when he is still a little boy, recounting the story of Tantalus. Perhaps it’s a way for George to address his own frustration at not being able to sample the fruits, so to speak, offered by his beautiful young nephew. She remembers her husband once telling her that George, his mother’s older—and far more exotic—brother, had seemed so fascinating to him and his sisters when they were kids; George told the best stories. She imagines the myth of Tantalus as George’s way of chiding her husband for being so tempting, while at the same time, so taboo.

The photograph on George’s birthday card, still vivid in her mind, depicted a greased up, muscle-bound man wearing a red string bikini. A big red heart obscured his crotch. Happy Birthday to someone whose heart is matched only by the size of his… read the front. The message inside, scribbled by dear uncle George: Take it from one who knows!!!

She’d torn the card up; her husband had slapped her.

The husband’s discussion of Tantalus leads to a discussion of tragedy, in general. She gathers the lunch plates and plunges them into a ceramic bowl filled with sudsy water. Her older son touches his puffy lip. “Is this a tragedy?” he asks.

The husband gives her a desperate look, as if his own tragedy is enough.

She frowns and scrubs a knife.

The day before, biting into a peach pit, her older son screamed in agony. His baby teeth had been slow to fall out; she’d suspected his pain had something to do with a loose tooth. But when she looked in his mouth, his whole upper gum was red and puffy. She’d driven him to a dentist in the port. The gum above his front tooth was abscessed. The infection had spread into his lip. She was amazed—and frightened—by the gravity of the situation, and the fact that she’d failed to detect it earlier. The dentist lanced the abscess, to drain the puss and blood, while her older son lay shrieking in his cushioned chair.

She tells the older son now, in no uncertain terms: “No. An abscessed tooth is not a tragedy. It just hurts, is all.” She reminds him that the antibiotics prescribed by the dentist seemed already to be kicking in; he has just eaten a baguette.

On one of their bike rides the mother and her sons have met a woman her age, Margalida, who lives nearby on her father’s farm. The mother tells everyone something Margalida has told her, that her mother died in childbirth with her.

“That’s a tragedy,” the mother says.

“Who’s Margalida? What farm?” asks the husband.

Their sons both ignore him. They already know from riding with their mother, that Margalida’s father owns the farm with the turkey. They hold their heads in their hands, lamenting the fate of growing up without a mother.

“That’s just terrible,” her older son declares. “We need our moms.”

“Her mom isn’t dead,” says the younger one, who tends to see the bright side of things.

“Oh, no?” she says.

“No.” He is shaking his head, vehemently. “She’s just working.”

“Really?” the mother says, smiling. “What’s she working on?”

The younger one mumbles something that sounds like “surviving.” But surviving doesn’t seem like a word he’d know. “What?” she asks.

“Keeping alive,” he hisses, indignantly.

A few days later, he says, “Mommy, don’t be dead.” And she promises him that she won’t be.

The husband is so fixed upon the sexual issue that it’s become impossible for her to derive pleasure from even the simplest things. The view out the window, for example, as she lies in a pool of sunlight, applying moisturizer to her legs. The horse nudging apricots from a tree across the street, then lunging at the swarming pigs, so he can devour all of the apricots himself. The stooped old women gathering tomatoes in their aprons. The goats and sheep pressed up against walls, or baying from the umbrella-like shade of fig, olive and almond trees.

The steady sound of picks on stones.

The cute one has retreated with a wheelbarrow behind the neighbor’s house to mix cement. He watches her through a row of young cypresses. She dives into the pool and begins swimming laps. Back and forth she strokes, without lifting her face from the water. She emerges from the pool, gasping. Water drips from her body. She plunges her face into a scratchy towel—the linens at this place are crap—and collapses onto a plastic chair. The washed-out light of midday succumbs to the pinkish tint of afternoon on the faces of the Tramuntanya. In the dry breeze shells broken from some sort of small nut drop from the scraggly eucalyptus. She recalls the prickly pear, all of those little bristles she couldn’t get out. She feels used, she realizes. Her husband is using her to convince himself everything is fine. The truth is, it’s never been fine, not really.

One morning, Margalida, picks them up in her little red car and drives them to her favorite beach, the Platja Muro. She has brought another friend, Antonya, a woman in her forties.

“I have a feeling as strong as floor cleaner that the waves are going to be big!” cries her older son, ecstatically, from beside her on the back seat.

She only knows a few words of Mallorquin, but even in Castilian, she struggles with the translation for floor cleaner. Eventually she gets her point across. In the rearview mirror, Margalida smiles.

The waves at the Platja Muro are gentle. Lunging through the waist-high water along the shoreline, her younger son’s arms extend in an embrace that looks wide enough for all of them. “If the water is ice cream, then we can lick it!” he says, wiggling his pink tongue at her.

“What did he say?” asks Margalida. She’s picked up on the ferocity of this younger one, whom she pokes and plays with and swings in circles.

Antonya goes to look for seashells, and as the boys build a sandcastle, Margalida quietly explains that Antonya, once a distinguished psychology professor at the university in Palma, was also a rather famous lesbian. Following the abandonment of her lover four years earlier, Antonya has suffered total hearing loss. Since then she’s also suffered from migraines. A prominent gay rights activist, she’s been unable to work. Margalida says that apart from helping on her father’s farm, she, too, has been unable to find a decent job. The island’s economy, apparently, isn’t contingent upon a psychology degree, or even, for that matter, a college education. Margalida could move to the mainland. But she says she doesn’t have the heart to leave her father.

Actually, Margalida corrects herself, Antonya can hear, but what she hears is awful–the screeching grind of heavy machinery. Margalida imitates the sound of jackhammer. “EH-EH-EH-EH!—It’s really intolerable,” she adds, shrugging and frowning.

“EH-EH-EH-EH-EH!” her new friend repeats.

They exchange a sober look. Then, rather absurdly, they burst out laughing.

“No, but in all seriousness, it’s torture,” says Margalida, finally gaining control of herself. She explains that Antonya has recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital, after an attempt to slit her wrists. No one has been able to determine the cause of her suffering.

“It’s a tragedy,” her new friend agrees. She is watching her older son navigate the softly curling waves, hoping the salt water will soothe his infection.

“A tragedy,” repeats Margalida.

“A tragedy, yes. Tragedia, that’s the word. Isn’t it?”

They look at each other again. Margalida shrugs.

Back at the house, the husband is crying. “If it doesn’t stop soon,” he says, his voice drifting off. He begins to punch his body. It looks as if his fist is hitting his groin. She’s terrified.

“Stop!” she screams. She lays a cool wet towel on his back to calm him, and sits beside him on the bed. He sobs into the horsehair mattress.

She walks over to the dresser, where a wooden rosary dangles from the small mirror. As she unhooks it, she sees it is accompanied by a message in Mallorquin, requesting prayers for a deceased relative seeking release from purgatory.

“Say it’s a little better,” he pleads. “It was, a little. Wasn’t it?”

But now she’s angry. Of course it was better for him, she says. He came. But for her it was awful, his fist shoved like a stone between their bodies, as if to support his flimsy penis. His $20,000 watch scratching against her pelvis. “Why did you keep your hand there?” she cries. “Why didn’t you just let go? And that stupid watch always scratching up against me. No, it wasn’t better. I couldn’t even fucking feel you.”

The bedroom door opens. Her older son is backlit.

“Mommy, what do you think is the speed of seeing?” he asks, hovering in the doorway, as if afraid to enter. Her younger son peers in, his finger in his mouth.

In court, arguing his high-profile cases, her husband is the picture of accomplishment. There was, for example, a trial earlier that year involving an Internet predator, a 25-year-old man in a teenage chat room, who through flattery and promised gifts, arranged to meet and murder a thirteen-year-old girl. Her husband was persuasive, his face slightly flushed, his watch flashing with each emphatic gesture. “This is what we must address in this new age of the Internet,” he told the jury. “This could happen to your son, your daughter.” What he didn’t say, which he also knew was true, is that is that the predator can be someone you love, someone you’ve grown up with, someone you continue to see at Christmas. That the predator may still regularly call you at work and send you letters plump with newspaper clippings relating to everything that reminds him of you, (which is a lot). That the predator is, essentially, part of you.

Consulting his coveted watch, a gift from George, naturally, her husband informed the jury, “Right now, 85% of teenaged girls approached by an anonymous visitors to chat rooms eventually agree to meet those anonymous visitors. Our laws need to reflect these changing times. We need to protect our children.” He won the case. This particular sexual offender was banished. George, on the other hand, will clink glasses with him at his parents’ Labor Day party when they are home again next weekend.

She wants to send him to a prostitute. He can practice on someone else. He threatens to jump from a high rock at Deya.

On the last days of their vacation the workmen’s cheerful chorus of picks gives way to chainsaws and—worse—jackhammers. The noise is unbearable. The wife looks through her guidebooks and begins obsessively plotting day trips, far from the thunderous roar, of their rented house. to the remote lighthouse in Fomentor, where they hike around for an hour, eat lunch in a little café, and grab ice cream in the port on the drive back, or to the lush the Moorish Jardins d’Alfabia, stopping for lunch in one of the pretty rose-arbored restaurants of Valdemossa, followed by a visit to the chapel where George Sand and Chopin once spent the winter, and the purchase of horchatas—a local iced drink with crushed almonds and milk. But another kind of racket pursues them, so that wherever they go they find themselves huddled together in hangdog silence.

On their final evening on the island, after dinner, she takes a walk with her sons. The workmen are gone by now. The cute one, who has lost his allure on account of the noise, is probably home eating tumbet with his family. And now, to her great relief, dusk has brought a kind of pastoral quiet to the flat plain that she has begun to think of as a kind of interim home. The pigs grunt from within their wooden enclosures, their ears covering their eyes, as if they’re afraid of seeing something. A little lamb calls from the obscurity of its small shed. The moon is bright and nearly full. Her flashlight flickers and dies. As she shakes it she notices she can see better without it. The evening light reminds her of a movie’s day-for-night. Their bodies cast shadows. When she points this out to her sons, they share her shock and delight. In the city where they come from huge, bright-lit skyscrapers trump the moon, whose radiance is smudgy and ineffectual by comparison. The three of them begin dancing with their own shadows, lifting their arms, sashaying. Sharp, tilted peaks obscure the sea beyond.

The love she has for this place is like any sort of love, she realizes, impossible to fathom without some sort of event, a departure, a fresh set of eyes. Even a wrenching disappointment, she now understands, can heighten not the love itself, but her perception of it.

“How tall are those mountains,” asks her older son, who is six.

“About a thousand feet,” she guesses.

“Mommy, I keep telling you, mountains don’t have feet!” her younger son shouts.

Eventually they arrive at the parched property belonging to Margalida’s widowed father. Behind a cluster of silhouetted olive trees the house is dark. By now Margalida has confessed that her father has never spoken of her tragically deceased mother. He has never revealed to his own daughter the color of her mother’s eyes, or acknowledged anything they might share, like a laugh. The only picture Margalida has of her mother was shot in black and white. Margalida said her father once told her that he believes if he speaks of her mother, his own memory of her will fade. “He is trying to keep her close, so the wound won’t heal,” she said. “He’s afraid that if it heals, he’ll lose her.”

At the time, she said, “He’s a memory hoarder.”

But now she wonders if her husband is doing something similar, complaining of his own pain, as a way of deflecting hers, so she, inadvertently, will remain its prisoner.

The day before, when she came for dinner, Margalida admitted she wished her father would sell their farm to Germans. “They can build another idiot hotel,” she scoffed. A neighbor has convinced Margalida that such a deal would reap the equivalent of fifty years of poultry sales at the local market.

A dry wind carries the pungent stench of manure. The dark house looks haunted. It was a home birth, Margalida has told her. And as she gazes through the gnarled olive branches that frame the darkened windows of house, she imagines Margalida as a little girl, growing up with a grief-stricken father. She imagines the girls at school demanding where her mother was, the boldest one loudly whispering “Shhh…” and the rest immediately dropping silent. She imagines Margalida’s withholding, blue-eyed father, offering everyone eggs, and even a fresh-killed turkey, with the words, “Que vaya bien,” may it all go well, while also—discreetly, since it’s still considered women’s work there, and so many well-intentioned women want to fill the vacancy—hanging the laundry out to dry, doing the dishes, until Margalida was old enough to help, though she was never probably any good at it.

She is sorry Margalida isn’t home; she had wanted to say goodbye to her. Her hands feel cold, and she clenches her palms, half expecting her sons to read her mind, to feel her pain, which is no more or less than anyone’s pain, really. She wonders if the sight of Margalida’s house—a house where a baby was slapped to life while a mother bled to death—will cause the older one, to pursue further his expanding definition of tragedy, as it relates to his abscessed tooth, or if the younger will mention death, and his eventual loss of her.

But they have already spotted their favorite turkey.

“Tur-key, tur-key” calls her younger son, tenderly, plaintively.

“Gobble-gobble-gobble” answers the skittish turkey.

This turkey is nothing like the fat turkeys in America, whose perfectly coiffed feathers fan luxuriantly out. This turkey is scraggly and suffers from what looks like mange. Its dark shape scuttles among the tall weeds.

“Tur-key, tur-key!” her older son whispers, again, encouragingly, extending his hand.

“Gobble-gobble-gobble,” it says again.

Back and forth this goes, over and over, her sons calling, “Tur-key, tur-key,” their voices sing-songy, and utterly comforting, the turkey answering, “Gobble-gobble-gobble,” until eventually, the three of them are giggling uncontrollably, their stomachs cramping, as they collapse in a heap onto the prickly ground.

* *

Image: Lucía Vasallo

Tufts of Dark Hair Attached to Indeterminate Bodies

admin — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:50:55 +0000

Lincoln Michel

The wind whipped salty air against Silas Woodrow’s face, but his daughter was nowhere in sight. She was always doing things like this.

Silas walked slowly back to the station and wiped his neck and face with napkins from the café counter. His leg ached. He sat in a chair and looked up at the menu. The doctors had told him he couldn’t order espressos or anything acidic. He wondered if there was anything tasty he could eat in the whole damn country.

A man in a tightly tailored suit kept opening and looking into his leather briefcase. Silas figured he was in the mafia. The briefcase probably contained drugs or money or cut-off pinky fingers.

Silas tried to remember why the wedding was in Italy anyway. Someone on one side of the damn dentist’s family must have been born here.

Silas dragged his bag out into the road. He got into a cab and tried to pronounce the name of the villa. The cab driver turned his head. Silas said it again, louder, and pointed at a computer printout he’d made before leaving.

“How much?”

“Thirty Euro.”

They were rounding up a hill overlooking rocky beach.

“What?” Silas said. “I’m not paying thirty dollars to go into town.”

“Euros. No dollars.”

“That’s bullshit. It’s right up this hill.”

“You want to walk?”

The cab driver grinned and pulled over. Silas got out and lifted his bag from the trunk.

“Okay,” the driver said, leaning out of the window. “For you, twenty.”

Silas grunted and moved to the side of the road. The cab driver stayed there a minute, then shrugged. He made a U-turn and went back down to the station. Silas pulled out his printout and looked at the map. He started walking up the hill with his cane out front and his bag behind. It had wheels, but they didn’t work well on the grass.

Silas thought about how angry his daughter would be that he didn’t wait for her, and how angry he was that she was late and he was walking uphill on a gimp leg. He wondered who would get to be angrier for the next few days.

One of the bag’s wheels hit a rock and the wheel popped off. The bag twisted out of Silas’s hand. The road went on up for a long ways. It had been five minutes and his shirt was already heavy with sweat.

“Dammit,” Silas said. He hit the suitcase with his cane and walked over to a set of old stairs that headed down to the pebble beach. He held onto the steel railing with one hand and used his cane with the other. It took him twenty minutes to get to the beach.

When he got to the bottom everyone was naked. Only a few children kicking a green ball had suits on. He sat on a large rock near the staircase. A woman twenty feet away from him was rubbing oil on a man’s buttocks. Silas could see the coarse hairs in his crack.

Silas felt excited and angry. He looked out at the different flattened and oily breasts. The nipples on all of them were very dark. His throat felt dry and he reached around into his pocket and pulled out a small camera.

A tall man with bushy hair pushed down under a baseball hat ran over.

“No, no,” the man said. “Nessun foto.”

The man was clothed and carrying a tray of empty glasses. He had a server’s pad in his other hand.

“How much for a diet soda?” Silas licked his lips.

“No, no, no. Nessun foto.” The man was shaking his finger. Silas put the camera back in his pocket.

“Quanto for a Diet Coke?”

The man shook his head now. “Che cosa?”

“Screw it,” Silas said. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The hot, salty air moved over him. When he opened his eyes there was a young girl looking at him. She must have been about twelve. She wore a two-toned blue bikini and large dark sunglasses.

“Americano?” she said.

“What?”

“I could tell.” She sat down a few feet away from him and stared out at the waves. “I like practice English.”

The beach was made of small rocks and Silas’s legs and butt hurt. The girl looked almost like his daughter when she was a teenager, at least as he remembered her. Same sharp mouth.

“You look sick. Okay?” The girl pressed the backs of her thin fingers against his forehead.

“Excuse me?” he said. “Don’t you have parents?”

“They sleep.” She waved at a pair of people lying on their backs. From this angle they looked like two clumps of dark hair attached to indeterminate bodies. Silas could make out only their toes and two other tufts of dark hair, one of which had a small penis curling out of it.

“You wait,” the girl said and stood up and walked to her sleeping parents. She came back with a glass of dark wine. The wine was warm but rich and helped his throat. He cocked his head at the girl.

“You shouldn’t be talking to strangers.”

“It is okay. I learn new things.”

“Don’t they have pedophiles in Italy?”

The girl gave him confused look and then asked him his name. She tried to pronounce it and told him it sounded funny and he grunted.

“I am Portia,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

“Why all your clothes?” The girl waved her hand like a salesman over all the naked bodies.

Silas finished the wine. It was so hot his clothes felt like they had melted onto his skin. A few of the nude people were looking at him and the girl, whispering. He wondered if being clothed in this backwards country made you look like a pervert. Silas put his watch and wallet in his shoe and covered them when his socks then covered those with his pants. The girl was lying on her back and seemed to have her eyes closed. He scooted his underwear off without standing up and rolled them into his pants’ pocket.

His skin looked translucent. He knew it would burn quickly. The people were still looking at him, but no longer whispering. He lay on his stomach with his shirt under his crotch and belly.

“How long in Italia?” The girl sat back up and looked at him.

“Hopefully not long.”

Hot rocks and sand and dirt pressed into his skin. He could feel a cool wind moving over his buttocks.

“And where you come from?”

“North Carolina.”

“Ah,” the girl said and made gun fingers and shooting noises. “With the cowboys!”

“No,” he said. “Not with the cowboys.”

He rolled onto his back and put his shirt over his crotch. Up at the top of the cliff he could see people moving around. They were shouting something. He squinted, then turned away.

“How is the water?”

He watched the browned bodies of strangers dipping in and out of the waves.

“Very nice. Always nice in Italia.”

Two people were coming down the stairs now. One was carrying his broken bag. People on the beach were turning around to look up the staircase. A woman stood up in front of him and he could see her private lips beneath the hair.

“I’m going in,” he said.

“What is that woman shouting?”

“She sounds crazy,” Silas said. He felt an unbearable weariness flowing through his bones. He didn’t want to deal with this now or ever.

“Wait,” the girl said. “Sea-less. That is you!”

His daughter kept coming down the stairs and shouting. Silas stood up with his cane.

“Let’s get away,” he said. “Listen to that woman scream. She is obviously an insane person!”

He looked out at the rolling waves. The water was bright blue and looked good enough to drink. He wanted to wade in until the water went over his head. He could stay down there in the warm depths with the fish and the seaweed, suspended by the bright sea, all the sounds of the land drowned out.

He gripped the young girl’s hand and began moving toward the water.

* *

Image: Pola Oloixarac

John Freeman

heather — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:35:36 +0000

THE HEAT

At night as the heat’s
warble strummed to
a ticking silence,
and the crabgrass
turned blue then green
then black, the branches
above would relax
and gently pluck my
window-screen, like
the dark-haired woman
who, years later, would
scratch to be let in.

UNKNOWING

Your father was born after the earthquake & fire.
Began work at four, buried his mother at six.
Summers he picked prunes in the valley,
the sun searing spots onto his narrow shoulders.
He lost an eye. Blew out his left ear-drum
in a packing plant accident. These things
were what one expected.

He never made friends. They were a luxury,
he could not afford. He smoked for a decade,
through college, when he worked full-time as a
teacher. Nights he dedicated to numbers. Found
pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known
world. You were a gift, born at the end of the
depression, to his German wife—unaware of
the rubble from which you emerged.

You were a child among the many thousand trees
of Sacramento. Imported to give a desert
valley town some shade. At sixteen you were
given a ’57 Chevy, which you rolled twice
on the way home from football games. Your
license was never suspended. It was too easy
to make such things go away. Your father,
mid-climb into the airless summit of his
unexpected career, did not attend your games.

You had to learn the sting of failure
unobserved. Davis, then Berkeley, then
seminary, where, among closeted homosexuals
and anguished penitents, you felt, in God,
a familiar sense of bruised neglect.
You dropped out; worked as a prison
guard with teenagers put away
after knife fights and bar-room brawls.
One year. Your peripheral vision and drop-
step adjusted, never softened.

We were born in Cleveland, where you had moved
for yet more school, and where you sensed the sinkhole
developing. My mother, cute as a young nurse,
from an Ohio land-grant family which paid her
credit card bills. You lived in the ghetto,
wore zipper boots and drove a dropped ’69 Mustang.
A brick thrown at your head on a passing bus
reminded—you may be an outsider, but your
skin was white.

It took years to conceive. Your gratitude for children
immense. At nights, in Long Island, and then
Pennsylvania, your lips on our heads, were
so kind as to be Unnoticed. We slept unbroken.
I do not remember once having dinner after six.
Our biggest complaint, the wait before we could
race out into the humid falling dark, to hear
the ball’s pop against our new mitts.

Thirty years after you left we returned to Sacramento.
Your mother long since dead. Your father’s two
decades of world travel underway. The sun poured
down on our backs at the swim club, scorching
spots onto our broad shoulders. We trained
like professional athletes. None of us failed.
You provided in your artificial poverty by
adopting an actuarial budget. Everything
would be recorded. We started work before
our tenth birthdays.

We woke to mists, to tinny clock-radio top
forty hits. Slept-walked to the garage, klieg-
lit in the gloaming, where at five you stood
counting newspapers, sprung from their plastic
binding like newborn news. We pedaled
out into the fog as if back into our dreams.
The only sound the squeal and crank of our
wheezing bicycles.

Half-way through the route, our bags like sagged
breasts on our chests, we would come upon your car,
rear-gate agape, classical music aerating the silence.
A light-ship docked among the palm fronds
of an indifferent neighborhood. You fed
us another forty papers, packed roughly and
quickly so that we never finished later than
six. It took me far too long to understand
this was love.

OSLO

I’ve been here
before, the hotels
in the bluish light,
squares of ice.
Outside the
opera house
taxi tires crunch
across pavements
of salt, the first
departures. I begin
a letter describing
it all, knowing you’ll
never see it. Later,
I’m down there among
the commuters,
and, for an instant,
it’s as if
you were here. Ice,
lights, the wind’s
knowing sere.
It’s been two years.

* *

Image: Sofia Flores Blasco