NOTED*

2008-09-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

Pigeon's Secret

Young pigeon,
Where is your nestmate?

Where is the drowsing huddler,
His curve your curve,

White down to down,
Gray flesh to flesh, one

Warm, dry, after egg's
Slimy solitudes?

Your hearts whirred
Like synchronized stopwatch's.

Each of you filled
The other's black eye.

You will fly up, pigeon,
You will perch and scan and peck.

He dropped, became a crooked scrawl
Of pigeon on his aluminum landing pad.

After eggs. White, round, the perfect
Thumbprints of emptiness.

A Little Logic

2008-09-12T19:39:00.001-07:00

**Transcribed (by myself) from Sarah Palin's interview with Charles Gibson. I apologize in advance for any incidental transcription errors.

**"I think you are a cynic, because show me where I have ever said that theres absolute proof that theres nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in that has had any effect or no effect on climate change."

Let's break this down.

Proposition A: You are a cynic if you cannot show me where I have ever said that there is absolute proof that:

2 sub-propositions:

y. Nothing man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect on climate change.

x. Nothing man has ever conducted or engaged in has had no effect on climate change.

Read statement y as equal to "Man's actions have had no effect on climate change."
And, by double negation, read statement x as "Everything man does has an effect on climate change."

Meaning, Sarah Palin has had no position on climate change.

And we end up with the simplified version of proposition A:

If Sarah Palin has had no position on climate change, then George Gibson is a cynic.

Well? To be fair, she's saved by the cunning "absolute proof" caveat. It would take a stupidity more monstrous than that of a mere backwater conservative to claim absolute proof of anything, ever.

"...we're gonna have to implement in Afghanistan a lot of the same successes allotted that surge solution that have been implemented and proven, proven to be successful in Iraq."

That's double proven for emphasis. But not absolutely, I hope.

Pigeon Song

2008-09-10T03:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, young pigeon, nested underneath
A humming air conditioner.

Young pigeon, your scrappy feathers.
What points lie along the line
Of your pigeon future?

A million pecks
Each a flaw
For diamond city.

Oh young pigeon,
May your criticism
Be constructive.

Oh young pigeon,
Your god is humble and wise.
Pray to him with your pink feet.

Do not forget
That you have found the promised land
Of crumbs and quick escapes.

Young pigeon, do not forget
The whole city swivels
In your orange eye.

Un-till

2008-09-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

UN-TILL

The ants should have come marching home by now...

There´s a baby carriage waiting, wheels grazing the damp tiles while mami rifles through a heap of ruptured trash bags. White shreds of plastic whisp through the humid air, above and around the eyes. A tiny head peeps from reams of recycled swaddle.

You -- keep walking on at the same pace.

...but they got stuck...

Stuff the metaphors (your fingers are crushed umbrella spines, the mind is a twin-headed worm, you are what you do, etc.) in an old shopping bag, tie it by the handles, chuck it in the street. It´ll get ripped, picked, sorted and carted away.

You -- don´t dally in the past´s pastoral, don´t linger in your reflection, posed over a glass display. Don´t unravel and re-weave canine confessions. Forget the details (passing headlights pulse like a bad headache, the double lollipop dismissal cast by twin lamp-posts, gossip laughter curling from candyland balconies, the batwing shadowpoints thrown by the green glow behind a doorgrate, sequined mannequins tinged glitter-jaundice); forget how to read anything but practical signs.

...on a dead duck.

You are not the ploughblade, splitting now from later from then. Get thorny. Contort. Smile like a cat, lick your lips. Calculate.

Un-till, eyes facing front, put the earth back where it was and walk backwards, happy from the untouched field.

Un-till up to the fangs of the city horizon.

My Mandarins

2008-09-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

It happens that I like my mandarins just so.
Orange. Juicy. Flavorfull, with white pulp.
But above all, silent. Secretive. Still.

I can't stand it when my mandarins talk to me.
I don't like their jungle stories,
Stories of blue parrots and coarse, dark hands.

I like to eat my mandarins on September afternoons.
I slowly ripen in the sharp light of my white room.
I'm here; my mandarins are here too.

I don't ask them how they got here.
Let them not ask me.

It's not that I'm in a bad mood.
I'm not malicious. But I will be myself.
Let my mandarins be my mandarins.

That's it. Oh yes. The orange silence.
The curves like smiles in my fridge.
There in their room in the sharp, white light.

A gun asks itself

2008-09-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

Is this what comes out of me when I squeeze?

Maybe I should load myself with dreams.

This is not a life experience

2008-09-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've been out of the country for a year and three months now, just about, and what people usually call a life experience is beginning to cross over into a life.

I get up in the morning, I review what I have to do in my agenda, I take the subway, and I do my job; sometimes well, sometimes, well, not as well as I should. Like everybody else, I guess. But, as nearly everyone I talk to, here and at home, supposes, I am not living. I'm having a life experience.

And sure, that's probably how I'll characterize it on future resumes. After I apply the exact P.S.I. to that future interviewer's hand (neither dead fish nor former marine) and tell him where I'd been teaching English for so long, I may even smile and affirm his chummy small talk definition with "Yes, yes it was" with a voice as slick as K-Y jelly.

But inside I'll be squirming with a question. When did you stop experiencing life? Is that what I have to do to start living?

When the bull says no it means...

2008-09-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

Advice to writers:

Everyone has a different metaphor to describe the writing process. And in the final product, if such a thing exists, traces of the process are always left over. Maybe for Conrad it was like trying to see in a dark room that gets darker at a proportional rate to which one's eyes adjust.

I usually feel like I'm trying to wrastle an angry bull. While wearing a superman costume and trying to look graceful. Better, I'm in a coliseum, surrounded by a herd of angry bulls. I have to choose my bull, but, as bulls can be deceiving, I mistake the least angry one for the angriest. A coffee and cream colored bull, lowering his horns and staring at me through one slitted eye. That's the one. There I go.

Most of the action, unfortunately for the viewer, is hidden by a dust cloud. The details are blurred; a toss, a rag-doll triple gainer, a face plant. Needless to say, our would-be hero is left face down in the dirt with his costume torn in an embarrassing spot, wondering what he is doing and hoping no one is watching. The bull stands off to the side, huffing a bit, but not very nonplussed.

Still, he gets up, dusts himself off, grins sheepishly at the crowd, waving his hands over his head for applause. None forthcoming. Oh well, its just him and the bull. Think like a surfer, he says to himself. Just be here now. Don't make it so hard on yourself. Come on, sprezzatura. It's just you and the board and the wave, man, and the wave, and the board, and the you, and the bull...

Oof. Well, maybe its the wrong bull. Don't get discouraged - there are many bulls in the... nevermind.

Anyway, I'm back.

The D-Bomb

2008-04-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

"Deconstruction is for those who find today’s pervasive (intellectual, philosophical, religious and commercial hype) inadequate, limiting and unbearable. The D-bomb is for those who would rather sense every leaf and every grain of sand rather than be mentally blocked into just seeing a predetermined tree or desert. Obviously there are those who prefer and even seek power by limiting your thought processes."*

*Ah, the D-Bomb. The real question here is why, on a Sunday afternoon, I feel compelled to respond to a comment lost somewhere in the trail of waste oozing off the bottom of a fairly convincing article on French Theory by Stanley Fish (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/french-theory-in-america-part-two/#comment-27729).
He contends that deconstruction does not and could not influence any kind of political stance. The first following comment is a pretentious howler. I skimmed over the rest, but when my eyes landed on some indignant and mystifying scrap, I couldn't help but feel like I was watching a kind of highbrow Jerry Springer show. Fish is praised, questioned, and scorned in varying tones. One commentator accuses his text of being "highly constructed." This vapid invective brought to mind one of the more striking contradictions that appeared to me in my very brief encounter with "the D-Bomb," namely, the trace of a (non[how I loath flagrant misuse of parenthesis])implication that constructivity (Christ, constructedness, constructiveness - how about construction?) might be avoided, when the cultural construction of all "truths" seems so decisively settled. I generally fall in with those that think that politically charged incomprehensibility is not an acceptable end or start point to any kind of discourse.

Anyway, this is a cautionary post for any Derrida virgins (though I didn't get any farther than a little awkward fingerplay) who, on reading the above post, might think that a heavy dose of the "D-bomb" will induce sudden and comprehensive awareness of the Buddha-nature. If you want to feel like you're aware of every grain of sand, I'd recommend LSD and a prolonged camping trip. While the epiphany that all of one's thoughts, preferences and favorite books are mere cultural constructions does have a kind of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure "woah" value, it won't last nearly as long, for the following logical question, "so what do I do," remains stubbornly unanswered. For me, pointing fingers at constructions does not de-do anything to them.

I chose this selection for another reason, (besides the fact that I like deserts, and find the image of a solitary tree breaking a horizon compelling, be it predetermined or not) - it's final attack, echoing through university halls all across the country since this revolution got started. To those who would accuse someone of limiting their thought by not blindly accepting an academic trend- shame on you. Disliking the D-Bomb does not make one a power-hungry reactionary.

On a Headline

2008-04-22T16:07:00.001-07:00

"Hussein Henchman Has Heart Attack"*

*Ah, alliteration in the news. Goodbye, Chemical Ali.

Notes on today's Clarin

2008-04-07T08:13:00.001-07:00

Daniel Muchnik writes for Clarin -

"Since the devaluation in the midst of the 2001-2002 collapse, together with the taxes on credits and debts, the "retenciones" initiated in 2002 were a key instrument for the considerable elevation of tax revenue. They were never thought of as an instrument of distribution of revenue but as a collection tool to confront the payment of external debt, a problem that dragged on with persistence and official denial."*

*This change of policy sheds light on the administration's attempt to frame the discourse in fundamental terms. The Pink House (Casa Rosada, the center of executive power in Argentina) defended the export tax on the agricultural sector as a re-distributive intervention of the state, whatever the actual destination of the taxes might be. In framing the discourse as a battle between the state, committed to its duty to share the benefits of growth with the people, and capitalist farmers ,clamoring for a bigger piece of their pie (in Christina's already infamous phrase, "strike of abundance"), they have called into question fundamental issues at play in a capitalist economy together with a populist government. Within these boundaries, the fact that the funds don't go back to the provinces that generated them makes little difference - all must share with all. The ephemeral image of the "small farmer" remains an ambiguous piece of the puzzle. They represent a significant, if lesser, percentage of the producers exporting products, and have played a much larger part in the rhetoric of both groups than a strictly numerical interpretation would merit. Their plight, being hit harder by the export tax than anyone, and the fact that their numbers have been falling sharply in recent years gives them the romantic gloss of a dying breed, and shortly after the strike began, the Kirchner administration announced policy changes favoring producers with less land in an attempt to split the unified base of the protest. In place, these policies recast the principle players in their proper roles - populist government vs. big business. This model doesn't depend on the original intentions of the export taxes; public opinion is a fluid as the changing paradigms of official policy. That was then. However, the generalization inherent in the administration's definition may cost it more than it bargained for:

Alfredu Gutierrez writes for Clarin -

"[Roberto Urquia] is the owner of the 'Aceiteria General Deheza' (AGD), a powerful agricultural holding that supports an entire region of the south of Cordoba. He has investments in other areas and has the franchise of the railroad Central Argentino, the cargo train that moves its produce to the port of Rosario. At first, he took a position almost ambiguous, but all of his friends, neighbors and his constituency are from the area. They made a martyr of him - grafitti, scratches and even a fumigation plane that passed all day in front of his house with a huge sign that flew like a flag: 'Traitor Urkia'. In the end, he leant towards the farmers and asked the suspension of the new export taxes..."*

*Urkia, Senator of Cordoba, is a "kirchnerista". However, the manner with which the administration dealt with the problem puts him in a difficult position - he can stay loyal to his electorate and go against his president (which could have grave consequences for his political future) or he could ignore his responsibility to represent his district and man the party line (which could have grave consequences for his political future). At some point, refusing to deal with the complexities of the issue (not least of which is the presence of kirchnerist officials with strong political and economic ties to the agricultural sector) may not prove worth the rhetorical benefits of a simplistic, two-sided approach to the debate.

**The privilege of being able to frame the debate carries other benefits as well - defining the mainstream positions also defines what radical positions will be effectively excluded from public discourse. One thinks of the almost forgotten disappearing WMD's in Iraq, a cornerstone of the administration's official line. They are irrelevant to the debate on how to move forward with the war. That was then, this is now.

On: Tema del Traidor y del Heroe

2008-04-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

"From these circular labyrinths he saved a curious proof, a proof that will later amaze him in other more inextricable and heterogeneous labyrinths: certain words of a wanderer who conversed with Fergus Kilpatrick the day of his death, were prefigured by Shakespeare in the tragedy of Macbeth."*

*Borges writes of a historical murder solved by the great grandson of the victim. Literary and historical coincidences become the evidence on which the case turns, as Borges creates a crucible in which fictions mimic reality and vice versa, interweaving and inter-penetrating diverse fields of esotericism, literature, and history. The exact passage from Macbeth becomes clear with the passage below:

"Kilpatrick was ended in a theater, but he also made a theater of the entire city, and the actors were legion, and the drama crowed by his death covered many days and many nights."*

*An indirect invocation of perhaps the most famous (and most cynical) articulation of a popular Renaissance trope: life as theater. The contrast highlights the differences of context and vision apparent in the two - Shakespeare's metaphor personifies multifaceted existence into one actor, indicating perhaps an anthropomorphic vision or that the line's speaker referred only to his own life. In Borges' version, the metaphor is populated, the stage is a city, and defying Shakespeare's "hour", the drama extends through time. The lines from Macbeth -

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And his heard no more.

**I apologize for the clumsy translations.

Notes on the NYTimes coverage of the farm strike in Argentina

2008-04-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

Argentina -

For a decent synopsis of the historic stand-off between the government and "el Campo" (a unified front of farmers and agricultural producers across the country -- simple translations like "the farm" or "the country" fail miserably to describe them, so I'll stick to the spanish), click below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/americas/27argentina.html?fta=y

"The strike has led to shortages of meat and dairy products, paralyzed local grain and livestock trade and forced major exporters of Argentine soy products to renege on some contracts. Thousands of people rallied nationwide on Tuesday evening in support of the farmers. The protesters banged on pots outside the presidential palace after the center-left president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, said she would not give in to “extortion.”"*

*Strangely, the article failed to mention the more controversial event surrounding the anti-government protest. After the march arrived in the Plaza de Mayo, a counter-protest led by an ex-functionary of the last Kirchner administration named D'Elia, amassed and attacked the protesters. Fistfights ensued, and the original protesters were forced out of the plaza. It's rumored that the counter-protesters are on the government payroll. The next day, D'Elia publicly announced his "hatred" for the "bitch oligarchy" which he saw embodied in the protesters, who hailed largely from the historically upper-middle class neighborhood Barrio Norte. D'Elia was fired from his last post for being too pro-Chavez, and in this administration and the last, that's saying something.

"Argentina has been one of the world’s main beneficiaries of a global surge in commodities prices. But farmers abhor government measures like export bans and price controls, which are being put into effect to stem inflation and to increase revenue."*

*Alfonso Prat-Gay writes, for La Nacion (opinion) - "The technical sophisms with which the Government tries to convince public opinion must not hide the true motivation of the tax increase. Its been some time since the taxes left off being a financial redistributive mechanism for social policy and transformed into a weapon for the construction of power and political domination of the central government, at the expense of the provinces and in contradiction with our federal principles." Basically, that the money is being used as leverage over impoverished provincial governors, so that they stay within the official line. Why is the purpose of these measures published as a bald statement of fact in the New York Times?

"Ms. Kirchner has said the taxes help redistribute wealth in a country where nearly a quarter of people are poor."*

*Cristina Fernandez' rhetoric has vacillated between tones of recapitulation and outright invective. She has, in her own words, "humbly" asked that the farmers lift the strike; she has also accused the anti-government protesters of being aligned with defenders of genocide. In a charged speech to thousands of "kirchneristas" bussed to the Plaza de Mayo from all over the country this Tuesday, she related the current strike with the lock-out which paved the way for the military coup in 1976 that would assassinate some 30,000 political dissidents. More specifically, she accused "some people" of "wanting to go back" to that time. This did not sit well with the leaders of the agricultural delegation currently in negotiation with the government. Eduardo Buzzi of the Agrarian Federation of Argentina (FAA) responds, also in La Nacion: "And we [also] have exiles and missing persons, and people punished by this process, in Cordona, in Olavarria and in many other places. It's important that those in the Executive Power inform themselves well so that they can define with clarity who was in the coup and who they abducted and exiled."

**Today "el Campo" announced a thirty-day truce, and lifted the roadblocks early this morning. They have also warned that if the government doesn't meet their demands the truce will only be temporary; the Kirchner administration has said that it will not roll back the export tax to its previous level. Supercharged rhetoric aside, I think (I hope) that both parties are seriously invested in the negotiations. A protracted lock-out of basic staples would have wide ranging consequences in the Argentine economy, much more significant than empty meat counters in urban supermarkets, including layoffs and skyrocketing prices of consumer goods, which could cause serious unrest for a very large group of people. What is unclear at this point is whether, if the mass of Argentines effected by the potential lock-out take to the streets, they would fall on the side of the government, or reject it as the party at fault for not negotiating fairly with "el Campo".

A few more changes*

2008-04-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

What stared out as an idea for a kind of serial roman a clef has, for some time, been a completely different animal. For the sake of consistency, the layout and mission of the blog need to be redefined. Thanks to any readers who have stayed with me up to this point. I hope you like the new layout and incarnation.

Following posts will be centered around a textual... Well, you'll find out about the following posts, won't you?

Stay tuned.

A Sonnet

2008-03-31T12:33:00.000-07:00

A while ago, as part of preparations for a possible future entry into graduate school, I took it upon myself to make it through the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. Skipping none. Not even Amelia Layner (don't ask). As of this afternoon, I've made it to Jonne Donne, which means I've waded through a crapload of Love Sonnets, Shakespearean, Spencerian, and otherwise.

So here's my contribution to the genre. I'm calling it #1.

Shall I compare thee to a musty toe?
You'd shame a rotting corpse to diffidence.
Rank reeks do sometimes seep up through a shoe
Wi' a stink like Gorgonzola's recompense,
And some neglected feet will rear a mold
To make visible that which ere was smelled;
And every foot of which was ever told
Was at least once with foul odor befelled.
But thou - thy stench remaineth in the rooms
Long after your brief passing was forgot,
Nor bleach nor fire can purge the rancid blooms
Of pestilential clouds by you begot.

So long as men can smell, and lungs take breath,
This lingers just as long: your creeping death.

We'll talk soon, but please man, take shower.

2008-03-31T03:55:00.000-07:00

To my readers - sorry for the long absence of posts, but you'll have to excuse me. I'm in South America, a strange world where the poles of everything you have become used to as a constant become inversed. A place where the middle class is a radical margin to national politics. Where you hear screaming so savage, coming from the neighboring apartment, that you consider dialing 911 and reporting domestic violence, or some heinous new form of torture, until the reverberating shout "gol" makes you realize that its just someone cheering Boca - and they're winning. You understand if I haven't been able to be my usual ebullient self.

I said I was in South America. At the moment I feel like I'm lodged somewhere deep in Buenos Aires' eye. I say this because of it appears Buenos Aires is trying to weep me out with a stream of near boiling water.

A lack of hot water has always been a problem for me, as a person that likes to luxuriate in the steam, sometimes for upwards of a half an hour. So you can imagine my surprise when, after adjusting the silver knobs to the perfect temperature and beginning my "knees-to-shoulders" soap-dance, I was abandoned not by the hot but by the cold. The water starts to warm up slowly, which is not nearly so ominous as the water cooling down, but in a few short seconds is up to flaying strength.

A shower that runs out of cold water? Can someone please explain this to me? More bizarre than toilet water spinning in the other direction.

More posts coming soon.

Good point, Mr. Windschuttle

2008-03-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia on Philip Roth (reading Portnoy´s Complaint) to the Cormac McCarthy article to a website on current literary bickering on 3quarksdaily.com to another article there and finally, clicking on the hyperlinked text why is Said being revisited, landing here, at The New Critereon. Orientalis Revisited by Keith Windschuttle. What a name! I see blue fields and bright skies, a figure extending loom-chords from his fingertips into the black blue of space, a mystic, dew-speckled web humming the ethereal chords of the Spheres, a pair of arms and hands outstretched black against a sunset, diamondflashing shuttles dancing in warbling breezes... Anyway...

´´For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek’s analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault’s thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism’s picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them. ´´

-http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm

Back up a bit. It's early afternoon in Buenos Aires. I finished a soy sandwich (don't ask me why) in a cobbled park with puke green poured concrete benches arranged in circles under little copses of trees in the center. Though I conquered a "good night's sleep" the night before I get too bleary-eyed to concentrate. There's not enough time to go home and grab a nap before my next class, not enough time to do anything else. For security reasons, sleeping in public parks in the city center is inadvisable, especially for seven-foot blond Americans. I go to an internet cafe - wikipedia isn't quite sleep, but it's damn close.

The point is that I'm feeling completely void of energy. That makes me feel depressed (this isn't going to turn into therapy, don't worry). I click through a few pages before I land on the above article. Lo and behold. I lean in. An energy begins to crackle. I wake up, feeling a little more alive with every sentence. Why is this criticism of one of the hallowed heroes of multiculturalism surging through me like the first five slurps of mate from the gourd?

Righteous indignation! Take that, left wing establishment, right in your dignified, sorrowful, solar plexus! The article goes on to point out historical inaccuracies in Said's breakthrough obra, and Windshuttle (can't get enough of that name) remains even handed until a short paragraph near the end where he unloads a somewhat vicious indictment of self-victimization on the Columbia emeritus' head. His attack on the hypocrisy of Said's self-declared anti-essentialism is particularly on point.

Point: cultural relativism is incompatible with any kind of morality. This has been bothering since a "post-structuralist feminist" lectured me in college. The article brought to the surface a long-held gripe with the politically infused literary theory I gulped down in a starry-eyed lack of comprehension. And, to my credit, many of the texts were incomprehensible. If our values are purely contingent on our cultural context, than we have no basis on criticizing another culture's beliefs or practices. Even terms like value and morality reek of essence fabrication, that is, if I understand it, an imperialist project of creating universals to the effect that minorities can be relegated into a sub-human margin, and thus exploited. The project of the West with a capital dubya.

So please help me understand this point - if our moral imperatives are culturally relative, on what basis can we condemn female circumcision? Doesn't it boil down to cultural preference? Are we so civilized that we can condemn this practice as barbaric? Are we simply imposing ourselves where we're not wanted, passing racist judgment on peoples we have deemed backwards? If we don't appeal to some form of human universal, do we relinquish the right to condemn any behavior whatsoever?

What are we left with? An academy dominated by a self-evident politic of truism and croneyism. A dominant viewpoint is established and dialogue is occluded by sympathetic sighs, indignation and back-slapping. The reason? The academy needs a moral imperative to justify its existence, even if it has itself rendered the idea of a moral imperative incomprehensible and reprehensible. As Windschuttle points out in his critique, Foucault (another giant of post-modernism) asserted that knowledge is always power. As such, the academy of the past served not only to justify the evil of imperial products, but to enable them. Consequentially, if the search for knowledge is put in the hands of right-minded people, that power can be put to use for the greater good. How could it be otherwise? If we all thought correctly, wouldn't the world be a better place? Thus the trick, the hypocrisy of liberal academia - we teach free thought, but only if you think in politically correct terms. Challenge the establishment, but not in the holy walls of this classroom. The establishment is out there, it's the American monoculture, it's rural, and most of all, it's Republican.

I don't support weeping saints or flaming swords, regardless of whether or not they engender each other. It's the tone, that holier than thou, inflamed finger hanging in my face. Maybe it's why I developed the habit of gesticulating at dinner with a steak knife, so in between bites I could dice up that invisible appendage. Whether it's multiculturalism or the Department of Homeland Security, please get that played-out thing out of my face.

Granted, this is an amateur exercise. By way of admission, I did feel disenfranchised to learn that by my race, my class, and my sex, that my opinion was contaminated before I opened my mouth. That's where my righteous indignation comes from. I will also admit that the righteous indignation of a privileged white male holds water like a sieve. I don't want anyone to buy it. I want to get rid of it - righteous indignation by necessity leads to a sclerosis of the spirit. It leads to a closure of the mind. It feels great. I think it should be avoided in general.

P.S. Been watching alot of Twin Peaks. I'm at the point in the second season where the proliferating sub-plots start flailing about like unoccupied tentacles in a Hentai video. What a fall from grace!

True or false?

2008-02-26T10:26:00.001-08:00

Old hot dogs never go bad, they just get green and hard.

ON DECLINE

2008-02-22T13:30:00.000-08:00

Ah, nostalgia. One of my favorite topics. It just keeps poking it's hydra's heads out of the many gopher holes of memory. Man, I want to mallet the shit out of them. So here goes.

Nostalgia goes hand in hand with the idea of cultural decline. This connection is almost so obvious as to not merit its writing here. But anyway.

The gold old days are gone for good. The young, drunk on freedom they can't appreciate, don't pause to remember those warriors who fought and died to give it to them (this formulation can be as applied by any veteran, whether of a foreign war or the war on the home front of, say, the civil rights movement).

But the good news about the good old days is that their glorification is perennial. A generation past its prime (and obsessed with growing irrelevance) attributes its own obsolescence to general cultural decay. There may be hope for humanity in the mere fact that, despite our dizzying careen down the slippery slope of history, we're still here; still looking for solutions, still producing art worth looking at, still lamenting bygone eras.

The most recent example I've found comes from Beatriz Sarlo. She's arguing that the regurgitation of counter-cultural styles that occurs in retro revivals softens their edge, and in doing so, encourages a new generation to forget their real revolutionary symbolism. In short, a bold challenge to the existing regime becomes an attention-getting "fuck you dad!" A political act becomes "mere" style.

"A 'retro' relationship with the past diminishes its meaning: the miniskirt no longer speaks of the sexual liberation of the 1960; the decorative little rings that punks used to pierce into their ears and noses with gestures of insulting defiance no longer evoke the reactions that they did in the past; the bland ecology movement has forgotten the old libertarian vindication of nature and the body; the New Age does not remember the days when the business of expanding the senses went through physical, psychological, and moral experimentation that touched on all the limits. These forgotten things blot out some of the pages from our history that are really moving, heroic, or fanatic... It is impossible to hang a sign from each miniskirt that says, 'Invented by Mary Quant at the same time as the Beatles were inventing 'Let it be.'' But perhaps it is worth the trouble to reconstruct some histories so that all the ideas don't disappear, 'gnawed away by our habit of forgetting.'"

Beatriz Sarlo, "Postmodern Forgetfulness," The Argentina Reader.

Social movements disintegrate and return in the spiral of fashion, its arc the same but curvature a bit narrower. I think it's worth pointing out that the desire to re-edify the meaning of a past era has to, at some level, spring from the author's own nostalgia for the time when a miniskirt really meant something. So we've got good nostalgia ("history") and bad nostalgia ("retro fashion").

But that's really neither here nor there. Let's go back a few hundred years.

"He was evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect, which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed him.
'Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,' he thought."

That's Dostoyevsky doing Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov (sorry, couldn't find the umlaut) in a debate between a dissembling atheist (agnostic? hard to say) and a group of devout monks over the comparative roles of Church and State. Written in 1880. What I love about this one is that Dostoyevsky reveals his character's sententious disgust as vain attachment to his own accomplishments. Sound familiar?

I'll leave it to you to ask the question "just how ironic is it?" of the following lines from Pope, written (according to Wikipedia) in 1709.

Short is the date, alas! of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let them live betimes.
No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch wits survived a thousand years:
Now length of fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all even that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.

Taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, "An Essay on Criticism, Part II", lines 474-484. Apparently memory wasn't very durable in the early eighteenth century either.

Finally, I have to resurrect one more dead white man from the same anthology. Pope, at least, can still be found in collegiate English courses of 200 level and above - the following poet, I'm sure, is lurking only at the post-graduate seminar level. Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the river Lethe.

The Silver Swan

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
"Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."

That's Orlando Gibbons, lamenting the cultural decline of 1612. Can we see a pattern emerging? They certainly did have a way of putting things succinctly back in the good old days. But then, I've fallen into my own trap.

Maybe that fear that we will forget the past is well founded. Maybe we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors if we don't spend our youths combing musty tomes of Virgil and Chaucer, we will forget who we are and where we come from. Maybe when you arm your legs in a miniskirt you should take a moment to reflect on its once-militant connotations; maybe the next time you pop acid at a Phish reunion you might try to really push the envelope of your being instead of wandering around mumbling, ecstatic at obtuse metaphors, "Dude, the crow IS the sky!" But maybe the cycle of forgetting and remembering goes on, despite the frenetic acceleration of post-modernity.

Maybe we haven't escaped history just yet.

The next time you find yourself on the brink of opining that "contemporary hip-hop is too commercial, we need to get back to the foundation" or "there hasn't been any good pop music since 1994," remember that there's no reason to join the long gray line of wistful old farts quite yet. Who knows, a revolution, or a really great pop hit, might be just around the corner.

2008-02-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

The hotel district of Once.

"Jugamos?" (Let's play)

A subtle, purposed glance from under lowered eyelids, a husky whisper tossed casually from the throat. A prostitute's solicitation, unmistakable.

The heat, evoking an automatic sweat response and fatigue, has driven street people into the shade of overhanging balconies. Even the big chain supermarkets have pulled down and locked the metal grates guarding doors and windows.

I keep walking, eyes forward. Pretend I don't notice, get home. Check my downloads, emails, blogs.

Just like one guards one's change from beggars.

She walks languidly, arms bowing out at the elbows, describing an opposite arcs in the sway of her walk. Her hair's tied up into a bun in back. She's black, and at least six months pregnant.

Scorpion King; Coyboy dreams

2008-02-10T06:13:00.000-08:00

This is the Great Scorpion Charm against Demons. The image is from www.luckyscoprion.com, where you can buy it for six bucks. I have a problem with demons. They follow me everywhere in ridiculous disguises, tripping me in the street and forcing me to make unwise purchases in markets. The woodblock print is a charm or an amulet, of Buddhist origin, which is meant to be either folded, wound in string and worn on the body, ingested, or placed in a special amulet box. The following info is from Nik Douglas' "Tibetan Tantric Charms and Amulets."

"The mouth contains the formula tri-dsa-du / sa-na-ga-phu, the head the dharanis (1) ah-ya-ma-du-rur-chasa-na-zhamaya-hum and (2) om-ah-hum-artsig-nirtsig-namo-bhagawate-hum-hum-phat-phat. At the center and main extremeties are the seed syllables hum, dsa, hum, bam, and ho. The Tibetan incantation mentions the types of demons to be protected against and at the six legs, two pincers and sting is an inscription in Tibetan declaring that 'the demons will roar.'"

Artsig, nirtsig, namo. Hmm.

*

This Cormac McCarthy book I just read must have penetrated deeper into my subconscious than I thought. Or maybe that's a bunch of bullshit, I mean, that dreams are constructed by the unseen hand of the undermind. Psychoanalysts have their lists of symbols and situations, their rhebus's (rhebi?), their condensation and displacement. But the rest of us wake up, rub our faces in our hands, and think, "Shit, that was a fucked up dream I had last night."

Of course, dreams are bizarre by nature. After a lifetime of inexplicable scene changes and recurring familial tableaus, you'd think we'd get used to it. I don't spend much time plumbing them for deeper meanings. They're like B-movies about yourself, and you ge to sleep through them. Here's what I watched last night.

I'm riding across an plain on horseback, ahead of a gang of about 5. I've got one of those lever-action rifles associated with the Wild West with a sight on the barrel. The plain up ahead rolls up into a softly cresting hill, long grasses swaying in the wind. Down the incline and to my left lies a gully and a grove of pines, stunted cypress clustered around a single enormous redwood with a massive trunk. Over the crest of the hill comes the cavalry. They're uniformed in blue with white hats, red plumes ticking to the rhythm of the hoofbeats, armed with the same rifle I've got. I reign up my horse and take aim at a staggered line of horsemen galloping full bore towards my position. I shoot, one flips down off his horse like a vertical wind sock taken aback by a sudden gust. I raise my sight and trap another horseman in the tiny steel circle, circumscribing his fate in less than a centimeter, and fire. He tumbles backwards. They are getting within range of taking shots, but for some reason they don't. When they get too close for comfort I duck behind my horse, hanging onto the saddle as they rocket past. When they're passed me to a man I circle around and follow then, sighting and dispatching a few more riders.

Now we hit a blank spot where the action got murky, or a sudden scene change, or maybe I just can't remember the dream in detail. But I'm on the defensive, making for the pine grove. When I get there I'm confronted by a detail of cavalry, posted to stymie my retreat. I dismount, resigned to capture, but not yet resigned to defeat. Their leader is a large bearded man, ununiformed, who wears a fur trapper's motley assortment of pelts and leather. He looks at me with a knowing expression.

"We're taking you in, son."

"I can't face trial," I say. "I can't go back to the United States. I'm a bandit, and the only thing waiting for me is the gallows. Better to die out here."

*

The premise that you can't die in your dreams is well tried in popular movies and culture. You suddenly wake up before the concrete rises to flatten you like a bug. Hand in hand with this goes the premise that if you really die in your dreams you die in real life. I can now attest that there is a third option.

*

I swing my rifle and crank the lever to load another round, inverting the barrel and inserting it into my mouth. Unfortunately, the trigger is now out of reach and my booted feet will not allow me to toe the trigger. I eye the old man.

"Little help here? I'd be much obliged."

"My pleasure."

He reaches down and pulled the trigger. I don't feel anything at first, and think the gun misfired. After a few seconds my mouth fills up with liquid, and I know that the bullet made a fine escape from the crown of my skull. Suddenly I'm wearing the brass-buttoned blue garb of the good guys, riding again for the grove.

*

There's a struggle with another bandit, some arguments about succession of the priesthood (a bishop was killed and a giant man with long black hair in a purple robe ascended to his place) and a stack of bodies, but it's now been almost an hour since I dragged myself out of bed and the order of events and their details lacks even the most basic continuity.

The point being that I like to write and talk about dreams. If you do too, put an account of an interesting dream in the comments section of this post. The most interesting dream will get some sort of prize. I haven't decided what it is yet.

Someone is screaming down the hall of my building, a hoarse throaty man's voice followed by a piercing child's scream. It's either domestic violence or a futbol game - it's often hard to tell. Or maybe its a demon orgy. Artsig, nirtsig, namo.

A few changes; The good old days; Scalping

2008-02-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hi folks. Sorry for the wait (yuk, yuk, sorry for the Farmsworth). I know, it’s been a while. I’ve been hiding out. But I’m back now, and I’d like to inform you of some changes that occurred to me in deep meditation in a solitary room in Buenos Aires.

First of all, the pretentious third-person dermis of fiction will forever be removed. What you get now is pure unadulterated Larry Farmsworth, his views, his needs, his tangents and digressions. It’s a lot easier to do and a lot less pretentious.

Second, I will no longer be committing myself to a set timetable. The blog will be uploaded on the following schedule – when I feel like it.

You know those things that suddenly creep their way unnoticed into our pantheon of underappreciated daily necessities? Things that maybe we can remember living without, or maybe our parents can remember living without, that vague sense of newness genetically passed on. I’m talking about high-speed internet access, which in the space of a few years has become a contemporary necessity. It hasn’t become so taken for granted that it doesn’t make it onto the list of necessities on your apartment hunting checklist (the list that never gets mentioned - does the place have electric light? gas? running water?), but it’s fast on it’s way. To the eyes of this jaded 23 year old, things to seem to be speeding up. Our grandparents would remember a time without cars and turn to their parents, eyes full of obsolete wisdom, to bequeath on them some patronizing phrase about the good old days. Our parents would remember what life was like without T.V., you know, when kids played outside and nerds did stuff like build toy models and radios, clad in coke-bottle glasses and high waters. And in a few years, say, at the ripe old age of 24 or 26, I feel like I’ll be turning to some young whippersnapper and say, “In my day we didn’t even know what a google was!”

I remember, vaguely, an anecdote about some woman commenting on the newly invented bicycle, something to the tune of “Man was not meant to travel at such speeds.” Perhaps man was not meant to have fingertip access to wikipedia. These days, contests of knowledge have a handy arbitrator, and I barely even bother with those long-winded, hard-headed but sometimes entertaining defenses of facts which I made up on the spot and subsequently convinced myself of their verity. Without a wiki, an argument doesn’t make sense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown my hands up at dinner and said “We’ll just have to wait until we get home to wikipedia it.”

But even our more primitive amenities, the ones that don’t make it on the list, have only been around, or been around for large numbers of people, for a few hundred years at most. While chewing on that cud, you may find access to a broader, more mysterious kind of nostalgia that supersedes any concept of experienced or inherited memory, nostalgia rough around the edges yet nostalgia nonetheless, some kind of amorphous race memory haunting us as we turn the corners of centuries towards the illusion of transcendent mastery of space and time. “I wonder how they lived like that,” you might think, “chopping down trees and planing boards with a hand tool to build their own houses, cooking over a fire on the floor of your one room cottage (which consisted of a tamped down dirt.)” Ventilation system = hole in the roof. I hate white rabbits I hate white rabbits. Little Danny is allergic to wood smoke, that’s why he sleeps in the ditch by the side of the road. I’ve been told that some people still live this way in another dimension, the name for which entered our lexicon at some recent point, a strange twilight zone of humanity called the third world. Scary, isn’t it?

There are some kinds of brutalities we’d like to think we’ve left in the past, things that really take the wind out of the noble savage idea, be your noble savage a pretty white couple in a too-good-to-be-true garden, or a long-haired Apache fading into a sunset in a ghost shirt. Of course, we’ve got our variants, our isotopes of a primal violence that only seems to be limited by tool at hand. We’ve got the curb stomp. For anyone who hasn’t heard of (suppose it’s a verb) curb-stomping, it entails having your enemy open his or her mouth to bite the edge of a concrete curb and then stomping on the back of their head, most likely (I’ve never witnessed one) resulting in rapid death. The term was introduced to white suburbia by the movie American History X. At least, that’s where I found it. (By the way, Edward Norton will be playing Lionel Essrog in a movie called “Motherless Brooklyn,” as I just learned from IMDB.com. Check it out. I just finished my second read of the book, and it’s well worth your time.) We’ve got styles of shooting. Execution style. Imagine runways with emaciated teenage girls in black hoods with three ghostly holes where their sunken eyes and puckered lips show through. But no, execution style involves (if my gangster movie memory holds up) having your victim kneel before you and firing point blank into his head with a pistol, preferably of a large and destructive caliber. Safe and certain. (Was it from The Godfather part one? “Two in the head, you know they’re dead.”) We have the real life examples, their reproductions in TV, movies, and video games and vice versa. There’s street scrapping and button mashing, input correct sequence to decapitate your enemy or find the carotid artery with your switchblade, blood on the streets and on your home theater system, but what really interests me today is scalping. Maybe it’s just because there’s never been a video game called “Scalp Hunter,” where a grisly crew of ex-cons ransacks Mexico for any hair pieces they can find. Or maybe it’s because I also recently was pulled by my hair (in the best way) through “Blood Meridian,” my second McCarthy novel.

I distrust the use of the word epic as an adjective. It’s like the adjective poetic, or it’s more gangly cousin poetical, words that denigrate the nouns they modify by excluding them from the category of the noun form of the word itself, Epic with a capital E, let’s say. Poetic to poetry, apocalyptic to apocalypse, prosaic to prose. (The adjective epic makes me think of that made-for-TV movie of “The Odyssey” we watched in high school as a kind of anti-venom to the soporific effect of Robert Fitzgerald’s verse translation on a class full of testosterone jacked teenage boys.)

"Blood Meridian" is the first contemporary book I’ve read that may deserve to be raised up to the category of the noun. The externality of the bleak landscape and of the character’s themselves, wandering outcasts, gives the book a hardened, durable surface. The sonorous, rhythmic prose and idiosyncratic syntax remove the rambling storyline from the historical events the book was based on and put it in that timeless void of prehistory, forcing a gap between the ostensible narrative and it’s masterful execution as storytelling. But that’s all pretty much beside the point. The book’s already been praised and printed, is well on its way to canonization or used bookstore obscurity and has no use for my envious evaluations. What I really wanted to yammer on about was one of the quotations sitting on the first page of the novel, because it challenged several theories I have been introduced to on the origin of the practice of scalping.

I suppose that before people bothered with unearthing a more politically correct history of the US and were more concerned with justifying our sordid western expansion, scalping may have been written off as a Native American practice, a vestige of prehistory to be eradicated by the more Christian method of bullet and smallpox. This supposition was challenged by an explanation based in the pre-revolutionary war history which asserted that it was introduced to the Native Americans by the French. According to this theory, the French were in the business of paying local tribes for the amount of English they killed, measured in ears. Because the Native Americans got into the habit of doubling their profits by taking two ears instead of one, the French started demanding scalps as a form of evidence that couldn’t be duplicated simply by taking two of them from one body. Despite the obvious holes (why not just accept left ears, or right ears? Or noses, for that matter?), my budding liberalism was drawn to this explanation, most likely because it sought to redefine what was seen as a savage’s degradation as the poison of supposedly more civilized culture on an innocent race. And I didn’t think about it much after that. That is, until I hit upon this introductory quote, so here it is.

“Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.”

That’s from The Yuma Daily Run, June 13, 1982, and thanks, Cormac McCarthy, for digging it up for me.

It doesn’t really prove anything either way. But it brings up the question, and made me curious once again about the origin of removing a fallen enemy’s domepiece by drawing a sharpened edge across his forehead and applying pull force to their hairdo. Let’s see what wikipedia has to tell us about the subject and consider our homework done.

The first reference comes from that undisputed lord of historical firsts, Herodotus.

“Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC: "The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together".”

So apparently scalping does run deeper than the Wild West. How’s that for killing two birds with one stone? Handkerchief and war trophy in one. Here we are in ancient Europe –

“Scalps were taken in wars between the Visigoths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century according to the writings of Abbott Emmanuel H. D. Domenech. His sources included the decalvare of the ancient Germans, the capillos et cutem detrahere of the code of the Visigoths, and the Annals of Flodoard.”

And, by far the most relevant information, right there in good old North America –

“According to ethnohistorian James Axtell, there is abundant evidence that the Native American practice of scalping existed long before Europeans arrived. Axtell argues that there is no evidence that the early European explorers and settlers who came to the Americas were familiar with the ancient European practice of scalping, or that they ever taught scalping to Native Americans. Axtell writes that the idea that Europeans taught scalping to Native Americans became popular recently, during the 1960s. This idea quickly became conventional wisdom because it fit the tenor of the times of the counter-cultural 1960s, writes Axtell, but he argues that archaeological, historical, pictorial, and linguistic evidence contradicts this notion. Certain tribes of Native Americans practiced scalping, in some instances up until the 19th century.”

But before you get too self-righteous about your civilized European ancestry –

“Both Native Americans and American frontiersmen frequently scalped their victims in this era. It is believed that contact with Europeans widened the practice of scalping among Native Americans, since some Euro-American governments encouraged the practice among their Native American allies by offering bounties for scalps during times of war.”

And if your dreams of scalp hunting have been shattered by the soft culture of peace and prosperity of the first world, you just may have a loophole –

“In Canada, a 1756 British proclamation issued by Governor Charles Lawrence offering reward for each scalp has yet to be officially repealed.”

One more quotation from wikipedia, because I love when the reference loop closes, the six degrees of separation in the information age –

“Blood Meridian, the famous novel by Cormac McCarthy, is about a group of mercenaries making a living off of indian scalps, and features the activity extensively.”

In case it wasn’t already obvious, the above quotations were all shamelessly pillaged from www.wikipedia.org. There are some cool images of scalping survivors, too.

So there you have it, spurious historical anecdotes destroyed by the unquestionable authority of Heroditus, a dead Abbot, and someone named James Axtell, who’s obsessions with the closest haircut went and go far beyond my own.

In conclusion, when the presence of modern conveniences makes you feel like a cog in an impersonal machine, or a pixel in a screen playing in the dark for the audience of space, or a node in a network, be grateful that some stinking bearded Frenchman isn’t laying siege to your homestead with the object of removing your hair from your head. With that, I’m back to the world, and remember: if you don’t know, just wikipedia it.

MORNING; DEFENDING THE NATIONAL HONOR; WHERE YOU FIT IN TO THE STORY

2007-12-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

MORNING;

It was one of those nights when you turn around and the sky is thinning into bright watery blues. Now, he likes sunrises as much as the next guy, but after a night of heavy drinking, there`s always a mocking laugh in the birdcalls ringing through the air. That sunrise is endgame, and he hadn`t found what he was looking for. Sunrises are great when you wake up to see them, not when they silently sneak up on you and remind you that you are going to die.

But that, he thought, is how Buenos Aires nights go. Just leaving a protracted period of self-sequestering, the arrival of a friend from school had pulled him out into the infamous B.A. night once again. The people here start late and go long, usually drinking slowly into the morning hours. They take their time, rarely getting drunk like the palefaced northern european stock tend to do around 11 or 12.

He waited for his friends on the corner of Defensa and Estados Unidos. It was time to go home. Sensible people were up, walking to their jobs. On the other side you have the rest of which he was a part, one of the hordes of people, young and decrepit, beating the dead horse of the night into gibbets, then scattering the gibbets, then going out to look for another dead horse. He surveyed the tiles on the street. Square and white, ribbed with rows of shallow canals, smokey gray-blue in the thin morning air. Tree roots had burst up from the ground, stretching from a large tree with biege and leather mottled bark. Reclaiming terrain. This was happening all over the city, roots elbowing their way upward, cracking and breaking the tiles, forming ramps and leaving shards to be kicked or taken by passers by. Like earthy memories pressed prone under the tiles were pushing thier way upward to shake off moss and dust in the burgeoning sunlight.

Larry looked at his hands. At first glance he saw a uniform reddish pink. In a few seconds a shaded mottle of white, yellow and red, like a camoflauge pattern, revealed itself, flushed red at the thumbpad and at the base of his knuckles. He made a grate with his fingers and looked at the white tiles silvering, then at the red blood beating through his hands. He alternated between the baloon shapes of his hand and fingers and the shattered grid of the tiles. Everything would clarify in the light that was coming. Hands would fall on tools, feet would fall on tiles. The daily round reworked in it`s endless little varieties, crowds massing into and through bottlenecks on sidewalks and subway tunnels all over the city. The hand reddened. The tiles blued. Morning played it`s trump card, light, and he lived the day in a few seconds in his head, saw himself leap through the motions at dream-speed and crash-land into his bed. But he couldn`t go to bed tomorrow yet, he hadn`t gone to bed tonight.

He regretted telling off that Berkelely girl. But that was three bars earlier, already the distant past. He only regretted it briefly. As far as regrets went, he had bigger fish lurking under the lilypads in the mud pond of his memory. He`d had to do it. Someone had to stick up for good old North America.

Where the fuck are they? Who am I even waiting for. He wanted bed. The argentine, a 32 year old, who as far as he could tell worked in some paralegal capacity, had gone upstairs to look for his American friend, who had disappeared. He walked to the curb and back. They were friends, but they also had nothing to do with him. If he thought about it, he had no idea who they were and vice versa. What would happen if he just turned off his phone, got in a cab, and left? He was staying merely out of a sense of politeness. There wasn`t any obligation. Nothing held them together except for a few rounds of drinks. He spat on the curb, hitched up his belt and turned the corner, hailing the first cab he saw.

DEFENSE ON DEFENSA;

Of course, the worst attacks on his sense of National Identity didn`t come from Argentines. Well, that`s to say, those attacks were rare and, when they came, he could never be sure he understood exactly what they meant. There was the bald man in the black shirt who, when he noticed Larry`s broad, open shoulders and blocky walk, shouted ``CIA! CIA! Me das un cornelia.´´ He`d questioned his friend as to what the hell that meant, after grumbling Spanish retorts to himself for 10 blocks, but no one could figure out what a cornelia was.

The worst and most articulate attacks came from, of course, other expats. For some reason, everyone who used their passport had similar political reasoning. While it was easy to be against the war and smear George Bush`s name all over the world, those were a given, and Larry wasn`t going to step up and defend causes he didn`t believe in, causes to which he guessed he was opposed. But politics for Larry were always a matter of dissent. There was no viewpoint, there was only a stance from which one could attack another. If meaning was relational, then it had to follow that belief was relational as well -- one defined one`s viewpoint not by inherent merits but by what one disagreed with in others. If this was the case, than the only way to arrive at any kind of belief was to negate every belief one came into contact with. But that was just a flimsy rationalization. He did it because it pleased him to.

Anyway, living abroad aggravated his contempt for liberal elitism. Having supped on its sickly liquor once to many times in the US, now it`s mere fumes could produce an autonomic retching response. Al Gore`s pious face looking upwards towards the heavens as he recieved a Nobel Peace Prize, Hilary Clinton`s smiling as her cheeks struggled against their natural sag, promises, threats, all made him want to puke. So when he heard

`No, oh my God, you don`t want to go to Texas. Like, think texas, think of like, typical American, people who voted for Bush, like, ugh, consèrvative...`

His ears pricked up. She was right next to him. That distinctive nasal whine, the valley-girl turned international representative of the Democratic party. She probably went to American University, or Vassar College. Her sentences flacidly intoned upwards and trailed off towards the end like useless curliques flung off the ends of a teenage girls cursive. Blonde. He twitched, saliva rushed into his mouth. She had thrown a guantlet and she didn`t even know it yet.

He turned around, sliding his Gin and Tonic exactly two feet across the bar, squaring the traitorous slime who was badmouthing his native State. For, for the time being at least, he was going to be a Texan.

``You got a problem with Texas, missy?´´

``Excuse me?´´

His quarry turned from her local chat partner, who was wide-eyed and nodding to the loops and drops of her squeal with canine avidity. Her hair fell about her shoulders, shiny and blonde with the kind of volume that makes a hairdresser jealous. She had cut her teal T-shirt at the neck to reveal her shapely shoulders and cleavage for easy perusal. She was quite good looking. In fact, she was a hot piece of ass. But Larry wasn`t interested in that at the moment. He had an axe to grind.

``I said, you got a problem with Texas?``

``No, I don`t have a problem with Texas. I have a problem with the, like, idiots who live there, you know?´´

``Idiots, huh. Where you from?´´

``Berkely California. And that`s not like, even a part of the United States.´´

He noticed she was wearing a T-shirt that read `The Independent Republic of Berkely.´ That pushed him right up to the edge of saying something with more bite. He sipped his Gin, placed it carefully on the bar, and leaned in a little closer.

``OK, and where exactly do you think it is? What is your nationality? Where do you come from. And don`t give me that world citizen bullshit. Until they stop checking ID`s at the airport, we still live in a world with national boundaries. What made you hate your country so much you want to secede from it?´´

``I might be a little more inclined to identify myself with the US if it weren`t so full of close-minded assholes like you. What the hell are you doing here anyway, cowboy?´´

``I`m here in this bar looking for you, right now. It don`t explain nothin`for me to tell you why I`m here, or why I got this chip on my shoulder.´´

The porteño was cocking his eyes from face to face, trying to hear what Larry and his prey were saying to each other. The din from the downstairs room and the jukebox blaring Madonna hits threatened to swallow their argument. Larry alternated his gaze between the backlit rows of bottles, filled with neon liquids, red and green and pink, and the pretty face in front of him.

``I`m sick of city girls like you indicting people you`ve been sheltered from your whole life. What the fuck do you know about it? About close-minded, conservative America? Your country is a red and blue map on election years and what you read in the New York Times, and that`s it. No wonder you hate yourself, soaking up all that bullshit.

You grow up patting your friends on their backs for sharing the same ideas as you, you go to a College where they affirm what you always knew was true, and the degree you get is your badge to know everything about everybody. So you can`t reconcile what the nation does abroad. Instead of doing shit to change it, you whine about how fucked up the situation is. You don`t support the war. I`m sure you don`t. But did you pay your income taxes last year, or did your dad pay them for you? You might not support it, but you paid for it, and that`s what`s causing your identity crisis.

So you blunder around the world, stitching Canadian flags to your backpacks, whining about how ignorant people are in Texas and apologizing for things you have no right to apologize for. But let me ask you somethin´. What are you going to do, driving on the interstate, when your car breaks down? Some ignorant redneck is going to fix it. Ignorant rednecks built your house, paved your roads and put groceries in your supermarket. Ignorant rednecks drove the truck that carried your new outfit to Anthropologie. All you have is contempt for a people who´s ideas are more diverse and developed then your own, developed from experience, not from an immense vocabulary of bullshit it takes 4 years to digest and regurgitate. Yea, we`re the pimples on the ass of progress, brainwashed by Fox news. Go ahead and lecture me about global warming. But before you get all misty-eyed, dreaming about what a better world it would be without all of us normal people, ask yourself what the good old USA would like if it was full of useless educated fucks like yourself. If I´m close-minded, your just fucking blind.´´

Having purged the bullshit that was building up after weeks of hearing the same crap, Larry took a big swig of his G&T, slammed it on the table, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his denim jacket, smacked his lips, and went off to find his friends. They were smoking by the window in the back of the bar.

``Let`s get out of here.´´ He said, hitching up his belt. ``This place stinks of bourgeousie guilt.´´ He would recount what he said to the Berkely girl several times that night, and each time it would be a little more eloquent, well-worded, forceful, and convincing. By the end of the night, he was longing for a second chance to tell her off, because with the new additions and edits to his argument, he could do it in much higher style. But the opportunity never presented itself. The rest of the conversations he had were muddled back-and-forths in Spanish, all beginning with the response ``Estados Unidos´´ to the question, shouted and in English, always, ``Where are you from!´´

WHERE YOU FIT INTO THE STORY;

Beginning this again, I can`t help but think of Mark Z. Danielewski`s intro to his novel `House of Leaves.´ There waits on the first page the single sentence, possibly the most gnawing hook I`ve read, `This is not for you.´

Well, Honey, I`m going to start at the opposite end. This is just for you. This isn`t for anyone else. The best part, the sweetest revelation, is that you`ll never read it. Don`t kid yourself. Most likely you`re the wrong person, and have no idea what I`m talking about. Even if you are who I`m writing to, you`re not. I don`t know or care who you are now. You are yours. The adressee of this, whatever the fuck it is, is, and will always be, mine. And mine, and mine alone.

Who are you? You`re at my heels. You`re in the air. You`re circling around my head, obscuring minutiae I would otherwise be noting, a string of yellow pearls around a skirt of fat on an old woman´s neck, how the white lines of the crosswalk have been scraped away to almost nothing as I step into the street, the sun blinding out the traffic light in front of it. I don`t see these things. You`re shining behind them.

You`re the proof that everything I thought when I was 16 was dead on. You`re the sticky stuff, what I can`t get rid of, although I can see in especially lucid moments that I wouldn`t want to even if I could.

Because this morning I woke up bathed in your sweat, dominated by your dreams, and that afterglow hung on me through toast, coffee, a subway ride, work, and all the rest. Like a laughing squeezed through my innards, bursting the bolts of fittings as it passes, ping, pang, a steaming cloud cresting at the base of the throat. I swallowed the laugh and regained control. Because that control is something you gave, or something I took from you.

Who were you? You are an amalgamation of female parts, and memories of female parts. You are an argument I keep fresh with your image, words and responses, back and forth. You are the receptacle in which I try to put the last word. But I beat around the bush, and everybody knows what the last word is, and why it can`t be said. There is no turning to face the future.

You are at least two, that`s to say, your based on at least two true stories. I`m not sure what process I employed in your fusion, or why you continue to remain seperate in my unconscious. When you two synchronize the rhythms of your returns, you will be unstoppable.

So just when I think I walk with my own two legs, your white flesh falls over my dreams like a heavy snow. And I wake up loving like I learned to love you first, loving in silence, loving in shame. I tried a thousand things to stop it, I stretched you over another`s skin, but she rejected the procedure twice and limped away. You`re the donated organ that nobody wants, a heart on a bed of crushed ice in my closet. I made you into a cartoon and killed you in the traditional ways. I pushed you off of cliffs, dropped anvils on you, tried alien ray guns, pepperred you with bullets from the rubbery barrel of a tommygun. That`s when I learned that cartoons are almost impossible to kill. You could be elastic, a hole, whatever. In the end, I was the one who would end up being chased.

So where do you fit into the story? You`re not a muse. Please. If anything, you gave me obscure, sentimental poetry. When I try to write about you, I find myself surrounded by clichès, like the explorer in the tomb fighting off hungry rats with a dying torch. Those words will eat me like any other who`s been in love. They`re insatiable, and more durable than laws. I`ll love you forever. I think about you every day. You are my life, my heart, my soul.

The truth is, you don`t fit in. Anywhere I put you, something else important pops out. So I``ll leave you on the sidebar, scrolling down, separate and paralell, maybe meeting somewhere in the distant. Past or future, I guess we`ll never know.

AFTERNOON LIGHT;

What do you think the light looks like? He asked. I think it looks like melting butter.

Palermo lakes, 5 PM. The sun slipped behind the darkened branches of a huge sycamore, behind the curving lake. Plastic bottles listed with the swans and the ducks.

A slow funeral, she said.

COMING SOON

2007-12-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

Stay tuned for next week´s update: THE EXPAT POET DEFENDS HIS NATIONAL HONOR AGAINST SEVERAL PERFIDIOUS ATTACKS

THE EXPAT POET THINKS ABOUT WRITING A BLUE COLLAR SCIENCE FICTION HORROR STORY, BUT FALLS ASLEEP INSTEAD

2007-12-04T10:27:00.001-08:00

The idea first welled up when he saw a graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft`s ``Forgotten Manuscripts`` against the glass flanks of a kiosk as he walked down Av. Corrientes, just before the Pastuer station on the B line. He remembered loving Lovecraft as an adolescent, although his novels were a bit hard to follow. When he saw the black and white illustration of an old man with a longish beard fringe gaping his mouth-hole in utter terror, the whole Lovecraft aesthetic came rushing back, associated with certain other memories. He bought the book for 17 pesos and 90 centavos. The man selling the magazine seemed impressed with his choice, and said, ``No hay mucho de Lovecraft.`` He was right, it was the first time he`d seen any Lovecraft in Buenos Aires, but he`d seen stranger things. Looking down after taking his the blue plastic bag, he saw some other books stacked under the display racks, and while he couldn`t tell you the titles, he remembers illustrations of hooded figures cresting hills under enormous, pock-marked moons, broken-windowed towers leaning in darkness, and other horrific paraphanalia. It warmed him to think that a person who sold used car listings and porn had his own taste and interests. It gave him, he thought, character.

So the idea was gaining momentum as he skipped down the subway stairs and got in line to buy a ticket. A horror story. He`d write a horror story. That was it - no more of this autobiographical crap. He`d always liked that mood, that vibe, that horror aesthetic, and he`d always regarded H.P. as a cut above the rest of the horror crowd. Like, in Edgar Allan Poe`s league, except with out the French stamp of approval. His demonic halucinations had inspired entire genres in cinema, music and video games. No one talked about him much in Lit. 101, for sure, but he was much more widely read than some of the bizarre texts he`d been obliged to read and write about. What was that one, that terrible book for Intro to Modernism? About a fat immigrant woman in NYC in the nenteenth century? Some slavic name. He thought about the descriptions of her body, this giant solid earth-mother type body, and how he imagined her as white and flabby; then he thought about the insane, flabby, putrid Cthulu wading out of the sea in the story bearing the monster`s name.

As the subway`s windows slow-scrolled by, obscuring the other side of the platform, he looked at his own body to see if his gut was noticeable underneath a white button down shirt. Yep, like the slavic woman and Cthulu, he was a rack of bones for hanging disgusting white flab. Oh well. He crowded up with the others, blocking the path of three passengers trying to get out. They pressed their way through the impatient wall of flesh and faces and limbs in front of them, and he got on the train, leafing through his recent purchase.

The idea was now swelled enough to be given a name, but it also started getting mixed up with his massive insecurities and vanities. The story would be the one. The break out story. He`d finally have found an audience. He`d write a best-selling collection. He`d laugh at all those hacks pumping out magic realism that thought it was surrealism, or vice versa, in thousands of MFA workshops across the country. The book tour, the interviews, the lit groupies. His dramatic rise to literary fame fell step by step into place in his mind as the electric womk announced the closing of the subway doors and it slurred out of the statioin.

There was also Claudia. She`d read it and fall in love with him and be his. They`d get married in the States at the family lakehouse and he`d convince the old man to bankroll her immigration and find her easy employment. He saw himself getting a blowjob in the bathroom of the family estate in Westchester, then her legs cocked and hinging in the air as he plugged away, taking pot shots at her squirming, furry darkness. Yea, that was it, a horror story, already a collection of horror stories, and a novel besides. He knew a promising film maiker in NY, a friend of his from school, yea, he`d love the idea. They`d collaborate on a screenplay, which of course would sell for millions. There was nothing to it. Get the aesthetic right and it`s a done deal. He was tired of writing about himself. He wanted to write something different, to create something out of nothing, a story that could live in a self-sustaining universe. The subway coasted into Puerryedòn. He tucked the book under the transparent sweat splotch in his armpit.

The heat was unreal. It was viscous, draining, like a vampire fog bloating itself on the energies of the people. Womk. The doors hissed open.

He got out and pushed his way through another sweating wall of humanity, massed up with the crowd in front of the escalator. Jesus Christ, he thought, why doesn`t anyone use the stairs. Fuck. If you ever touch... But the idea was getting even more tangled up and swollen as he skipped the line and two stepped up the stairway twenty feet down the platform. A blue-collar horror story. That, he thought, was original. He`d had another idea a few weeks ago about telling the working man`s story. No, not some Marxist polemic shoved down the poor guy`s throat, a genuine approach to the problems of working class America. But he hadn`t settled down to write that one. Maybe he cound combine the two. A working class horror story... In the future. Now that would make a great screenplay. He was getting ahead of himself. He emerged into the swampy chiaroscuro of the streets, Puerryedòn, crowded with the workers going to work or leaving work or working in the streets, but he didn`t see them, absorbed in his idea.

He ducked past two business men strolling and chatting at the pace of sun-bathing crocodiles, and his train of thought was interrupted by an involuntary ejaculation; outofmyfuckingwaydon`ttouchmemotherfucker. But he just mumbled ``permisso`` and stretched out his stride as he got in front of them, feeling free and agile as a cat. He banked right on Boulonge Sur Mer and then crossed left, between a white van and a taxi, carefully timing a running spurt to the other side of the street, and rounded the corner onto Lavalle.

A plotline. That`s what he needed. An event. A happening. An occurance. He didn`t have much experience with plotlines. In fact, he had no idea where to start. The idea of a plot put him in mortal fear. The only thing he`d ever been able to do was write short, obscure prose tracts he vainly called ``stream of consciousness.´´ He defended this lack of ability by arguing with himself that real life didn`t come in tidy plotlines - that if you asked someone to tell you their story, you usually got either a blank stare or a sparse list of achievements: graduations, stints in the army, first jobs, deaths, and weddings. No, he was after the salient moments, when the incredible richness of the world broke unexpectedly through the glaze of quotidium. These moments were characterized, for L.F., as moments of bright color, complex patterns in buildings, broken concrete, or clouds, and other things he found impossible to describe. He was jealous of photographers, visual artists and sculptors.

He didn`t want to say ``a rusted tugboat on the banks of the river.´´ He wanted you to see that particular tugboat in that particular bank, the unique dapples and orbs of chemical-cheese-colored rust, and the rotting wood on the decks: the image, in total, of a thing. Right down to the details. Rusted iron hoops through which ropes once passed, the heron, black beak like a thorn in profile against the sigh of blue behind the boat, expiring into purple darkness.

But he`d always run into insurmountable problems. One, his vocabulary was woefully inadequate for the kind of detail in the things he wanted to portray. There were innumerable items lurking on the tugboat, and he would need a duden to name them all. But of course, that wasn`t the only problem. He didn`t just want to list the different parts. He needed to have an apposite metaphor or simile for each one. And he was already running short of similes in his brief career as a unpublished expat writer.

Yea, he thought, the stream of consciousness stuff was alright, and he could always hide a lack of content behind ``formal experimentation´´ or an ´´aesthetic,´´ but the chances of connecting with an audience by using tricks like those were slim. He walked under the lifeless stare of the manikins behind store windows on Lavalle. Lifeless manikins. Yea, there was something salient about that. He should put that in a prose poem. Or maybe a story about manikins coming to life and going to clubs in Buenos Aires. A man pushed a cart stacked high with recyclables, swearing as passing cars honked at him. Hmmm. Manikins. That was surreal. Nah, to clichè. Forget about it.

What he needed was a real plot. He jogged up the stairs to his first floor apartment, which was next to a Jewish community center, flipping the keys on his finger so he`d remember not to put them in his pocket and have to fish them out 30 seconds later when he got to his door. He unbolted the deadbolt, undid the lock, threw his backpack on his chair and stripped off his shirt.

A plot. He needed a plot. His notebook lay laughing on the desk, awaiting his afflatus. He yawned and farted. Should he start at the last event and work up to it, or start at the beginning and improvise, working out the details in revisions? He wasn`t sure. It wasn`t writer`s block. That was a myth for the lazy, he just really didn`t have an idea, besides that he wanted to write a blue collar science fiction horror story. Ok. Start with a bricklayer in his chevy. Smoking a cigarette. He pulls over to go into a rest stop and it`s closed, so he walks up to the edge of the New England forest to take a whizz. But how much should he say about the bricklayer? Will they even lay bricks in the future? His pen stopped its rasp on the paper. He scratched himself. What was his name? Buzz? Frank? Did he live in a trailer, or a duplex? Did he vacation in Maine? Maybe, instead of smoking, he should be a dipper. That was better. He should have a fat wad of tobacco in his lower lip at all times. As he gets mauled by a gibbering space demon. No. Getting mauled by a quivering demon jelly was an unacceptable endpoint to a plotline. That story could be told in a few sentences, saving the reader pages of useless meandering. And though he thought he could describe a decent demon from another dimension, he didn´t think that literature should consist of bricklayers being slain by the undead whilst urinating. No, it wouldn´t do. Fuck. He needed something else. He needed real plot.

But if there was nothing literary to fill the gap between Buzz the Bricklayer taking a piss and being hewn limb from limb by a formless mass of howling mouths and razor claws, he knew he was lost, because that was all he could come up with at the moment. He was starting to feel ridulous. The whole idea had already balooned and deflated, and there he was, lying on the floor, watching the ceiling fans blur and shake around the nipple-like glass bowls. He was hot and tired and chafed. No, there was no point in even getting started. He might as well have started his law school apps right then.

On the other hand, the nipple-light wobbled stupidly, throwing back the shadows of the fan onto the ceiling, and if he stared at it for a few seconds, the spinning shadow blades appeared as a pulsating asterix. Maybe, he thought, there was something salient about that.

A plot.

He passed into a sleep haunted by noises of buses and cars on the floor.

His bananas had achieved a state of turgid putrefaction in a plastic bowl on the kitchen counter.