Little Shipwrecks

Little shipwrecks hunched at the bar, diamond in the nostril of night

The check casher’s eyes blink like digital clocks + camphor

I was forgetting to “feel better”

I was ready to tell you everything, like so much cold chowder in weeping parlors

Left my glove in the ashtray of your narrow pelvis, a ruse to earn your confidence

ESL will have to do at this hour + the candied instrumental

of a military dirge strung from the soft underbelly of a fungus

Let me put it this way, tenderly

a rotten yolk passed between two mouths

The Limits of Reading Over Sound

B. says a young couple in their 20s – he thinks Korean – moved next door to him a few weeks ago. Every night between 11 and midnight, he hears them having extremely loud sex.

At first he thought it might be titillating. But it quickly became clear it was “FOB sex.”

“Ever seen Japanese porn?”

“Oh, you mean it’s like” – I emit a series of staccato, high-pitched, mewling cries.

“Yeah. Except really loud. It’s not hot. Sounds like she’s in pain or being raped. He’s completely silent but at the end he always makes this sound: ‘Uh. Uuuuugh.’”

“When I lived on Spring Street my neighbor had really loud sex with his girlfriend. She was really loud too: ‘UuuuuuuUUUuuuuggggghh.’”

It was the longest syllable in the world.

Typee

Bought a 1923 Everyman Library's edition of Typee for 48 cents from the discount bin at the Strand. Just started reading it.

Why Melville is the shit:

"This item of information was imparted to us by a most extraordinary individual, a genuine South Sea vagabond, who came alongside of us in a whale-boat as soon as we entered the bay, and, by the aid of some benevolent persons at the gang-way, was assisted on board, for our visitor was in that interesting stage of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless. Although he was utterly unable to stand erect, or to navigate his body across the deck, he still magnanimously proffered his services to pilot the ship to a good and secure anchorage.

Our captain, however, rather distrusted his ability in this respect, and refused to recognize his claim to the character he assumed; but our gentleman was determined to play his part, for, by dint of much scrambling he succeeded in getting into the weather-quarter boat, where he steadied himself by holding onto a shroud, and then commenced issuing his commands with amazing volubility and very peculiar gestures."