Burro of Information & Culture

2011-09-25T11:42:00.000-04:00

2011-09-25T11:40:00.000-04:00

Reading Simic

2011-03-13T14:14:00.000-04:00

Reading a $6 used copy of Charles Simic's The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs from Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights. The juice bar across the street where we once got an astounding slice of key lime cake is gone.

Excerpt:

My father and his best friend talking about how some people resemble animals. The birdlike wife of so and so, for example. The many breeds of dogs and their human look-alikes. The lady who is a cow. The widow next door who is a tigress, etc.

"And what about me?" says my father's friend.

"You look like a rat, Tony," he replies without a moment's hesitation, after which they just sit drinking without saying another word.

The Uniform

2011-01-18T23:54:00.001-05:00

I came across a dead man in some sort of uniform and stripped him of his clothes for myself.

Most notable were the epaulets, which was a cross between a stripper’s waterfall shimmies and something a monkey would wear to solicit coins for its master.

The cut of the jacket pleased me: It flattened my stomach and cinched my waist. The material was wool, possibly alpaca, softer in some quadrants and riddled down the front with brass buttons.

But the trousers’ shapelessness troubled me; the pant bunched around my ankles like the sagging hoofs of a two-man horse suit.

To ascertain what, if any level of regard my uniform would illicit from the public, I proceeded down a well-trammeled boulevard lined with peanut sellers and souvenir carts hawking balloons and squeeze toys approximating the gutless cry of our most famous indigenous amphibian.

A man approached from the opposite direction. His eyes settled briefly on my person, then looked straight ahead past me, with the slightest realignment of his face and shoulders, as though he had scanned the executive summary of a report on my kind. Even so, it was impossible to summon his judgment, so quickly had it flickered before indifference set in.

You can trust a child’s stare to communicate the truth of your effects. On the subway, I caught three of them no higher than my knee eyeing me balefully, on the ledge of manners. When I wiggled my fingers at them I could tell that none wanted to be me.

13 Views of the Olympia Diner

2010-07-29T22:32:00.001-04:00

"The Happiest Moment of My Life"

2010-05-23T23:48:00.000-04:00

Reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence:

"In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come.

"Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: if a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so."

Laffy Taffy Tanka

2010-05-16T12:19:00.000-04:00

Sour cherry then 

inside, candy sparkle gems.

You allow yourself  

no more than three treats a day.

Good things are quickly ruined.

Dream: The Envelope

2010-04-25T20:09:00.000-04:00

I dream that I. calls a service to order a prostitute. When the prostitute arrives, I. tells her to sit in a chair and open her legs. A. leans over and began rummaging around her genitals, referring to them as an "envelope."

When I glance out the window, I see a middle-aged, balding voyeur with a pot belly look away quickly. He scribbles the words, "French Underwear" on a paper napkin, tips his head back and drapes the napkin across his face.

Later in the dream it becomes clear that the prostitute, whose eyes bulge slightly like Peter Lorre's, may in fact not be a woman, but a transvestite.

But if that is the case, A.'s use of the "envelope" metaphor would no longer make sense.

Sooner Than Time Thaws

2010-02-12T23:10:00.005-05:00

New York City is a pumping cosmopolitan megalopolis in the Collective States of America. The city was established in 1626 with 60 guilders of Director-General Peter Minuit. The urban district is situated on the Philadelphia/New England Patriots borders. The urban district stands exposed surrounded by alternate side parking with a whole population excessive of 8,300,000 as at 2008. This is the most populated bishopric in the Joint States of America.

New York City is controlled by both the Metro mayor and a legislative confederation called Metro Council. The Metro Council comprises of civil service seating which reach the top from the four burros constituting the New York metropolitan area.

New York City is the obligation to deify in if you are looking as a remedy for an above-top investment of wholesale baubles in the United States of America. The curtness of this city is radically improved with bicycle shipping and overnight industries being the excellent developed.

New York City is coastally situated in the US Oriental Seaboard features foremost underground canals and tunnels linking well-thought-of burros across the Flatlands. It is also assisted next to a cavernous underdeveloped railway that is morals looking for shopping malls and Mastercard traffic. Wagerer silently, New York is nursing home to the New York immigrant bus authority which is an intercontinental bearing nucleus with in vogue wait service capabilities.

New York City is the hottest objective of off-track betting assuring your weekends historic and utmost of prosperity. The burg is served not later than a vibrant Facebook commune with prominent intercontinental networks and major crimes coverage. Parks and ethnic attractions are within the environs of fatty pork making it harmonious of must-go-before-I-die cities. Don’t stand by, scrutinize presumptuous and go to New York City sooner than time thaws.

A Dog and a Monkey

2010-01-23T22:17:00.019-05:00

Listen to me: I’ve been meaning to “mingle each other’s knees” for some time now.

I’ve tried talking sense to you before, but it was like “playing lute to a cow.”

But you’re ready to hear it now, aren’t you:

No more “seeing angels.”

I’ve always known your weakness for “hair-cream stallions” would get you in trouble.

And now you’ve saddled yourself another one. It’s “weasel’s play.”

Don’t you know: I’ve seen across to the other side of his heart. It is a “cat’s forehead.”

Him with that “face that cries out for a fist in it.”

You think it’s romantic, how he “lives like a maggot in bacon.”

Yet you are the only one who is blind to the “foxtail under his armpit.”

How his charm creeps on “snake legs.”

Don’t lie to yourself: it’s not only when he is “sleeping with the monkey” that his temper flares.

In fact, “the location of his worm is always bad.”

Even you have to “swallow a toad” on this one.

Jesus. Talking to you is “like scattering baby spiders” sometimes.

But don’t listen to me. It’s only a matter of time before “an autumn breeze begins to blow.”

He will try to “reheat the cabbage” but don’t you let him.

You “stamp on the mushroom” good.

You can love them if you can leave them.

“May God close his mouth” on that situation.

Asbury Park

2010-01-23T21:50:00.015-05:00

That night I dreamt I was playing an intergalactic version of Scrabble, populated by strange symbols I had never seen.

Yet I could not stop myself from rotating my tiles back and forth, anxiously making meaning.

Egghead pornography: I surrendered to the oligarchy of fingers.

I am more interested in the back of your building. Anyone can walk through the front.

I was once unacceptable, but I learned to be inappropriate until, at last, awkwardness was achieved. Now the years will take their course and return me to my rightful state.

Go home. Sleep her off.

Leave four free plays on the pinball machine in the lobby of the Empress Hotel in Asbury Park.

When we become ship breakers in the desert, remember the rain falling on the ocean.

Skateboard on Serra

2010-01-21T16:21:00.002-05:00

Met M. for dinner in Koreatown. He had been walking around the Chelsea gallery area earlier that day and snapped this photo of a skateboarder slooping along a Richard Serra sculpture in transit.

The End of Wax Town

2010-01-06T19:57:00.012-05:00

My wife is very ill. It won’t be long now, as they say.

One night as I was rubbing her feet, she said, A shame there won’t be a waxen of me. I laughed, more from surprise that she was still capable of manufacturing humor than at the joke itself.

Our town had long since abandoned the practice of making waxens. Indeed, most of the townspeople, including my wife and I, had abandoned the town altogether. Some moved far away; others to the neighboring town known primarily for its outlet mall.

We get a lot of our groceries at a store that sells discontinued items—unpopular soda flavors like kiwi-banana, or candy bars fashioned of tough nougat and packaged in the wrong colors. If you like an item very much, you have to steel yourself to the idea that you will never taste it again.

The first waxen in our town was created nearly a century ago when an important elder died.

His legacy wasn’t important enough for a statue like the town’s founder, who stood bronzed in front of city hall, his enormous left hand resting on the skull of a mastiff and the other on the shoulder of a native. The elder was the owner of the local hardware store, beloved for his buffoonery.

It seemed a shame to simply banish him underground, so the townspeople had a wax likeness made and stationed it in front of his store.

In other towns it might had ended there with the waxen losing meaning over time: One day a sandwich board is slung around its neck to promote a 30% discount on sod, or it is made to wear special hats on holidays like an unhappy cat. But in our town waxens caught on. Everyone wanted one.

A minority of the townspeople preferred to keep their family waxens at home, but most wanted to make them available for public viewing. Extensions had to be built to our town’s historical museum to accommodate them; church basements were also cleared out for exhibition space.

Charitable funds and lay-away plans were set up so low-income people could have them, too. Even at the pauper’s grave in the unincorporated part of town, we erected a waxen itinerant with a sack slung across his back, though some found this to be in poor taste.

Assuming death did not visit suddenly, you could leave specifications for your waxen. Some very old people, for example, were content to have theirs resemble the grey stoopers most of us knew them by. Others insisted that they be memorialized as they most wished to be remembered.

My wife’s mother, for example, always a vain woman, wanted her waxen to mirror how she looked in her 20s when she was part of a female performance troupe that crossed the country in powder-blue Chevrolets to promote a brand of tinned meat.

Was that the purpose of a waxen, to preserve you at the peak of your vitality? If so, should your waxen be draped in the prevailing fashion of that day, even if you find the shoulder pads embarrassing? Was it important to be authentic about your scars? Your bad teeth? It was a lot to think about.

Baby Hall was the saddest exhibit space of all.

One year it was noted that the number of waxens exceeded the living. Uneasiness gripped the town. Limited display space had also become a headache. The solution of rotating waxens based on a lottery system had spawned a black market for winning stubs.

Waxens who lacked renown or who had no living relatives were taken out of rotation entirely and housed in a grain storage unit just outside town that eventually flooded.

Public debate about the possibility of replacing the waxens with some other sort of memorial consumed us. A movement to adopt oil paint portraitures emerged, only to be suppressed by a faction of liberals who denounced it as elitist. The notion of clay or plaster busts also got tossed about, but that, too, met defeat by a mulish contingent that banded under the rallying cry, No Ifs, Ands or Busts.

One woman who ran a sock monkey sewing circle at the senior center proposed facsimiles along those lines. But no one felt comfortable with that idea, even when she insisted they could be life-sized and made to sit in chairs.

Around this time, young people began leaning on their horns or muttering waxen under their breaths when an older person drove too slowly or took too long coaxing coins from their change purse. Husbands accused wives of being waxens in bed.

10.

Other inauspicious developments:

Outsiders started referring to our town not by its name, but as “Wax Town.”

The town appeared in tourist guides devoted to “Wacky,” “Weird” and “Off-beat” attractions, alongside entries for abandoned sanitariums and road side coffee houses shaped like hats.

The sock monkey lady molded a line of refrigerator magnet waxens and sold them at the Pump ‘n Save and on Etsy.com.

When the police blotter reported that a number of pet waxens had been defaced, the incident barely caused a stir. Most likely it was boys from the local high school on a prank; in any case, many of us found wax animals ludicrous to begin with.

11.

In the end, nothing replaced the waxens.

They did experience a brief revival after the leak at the chemical refinery. People were unprepared for the buckshot of grief, which engorged their desire for the physical proxmity of loved ones. But just as quickly, there was a backlash. It was as though we reproached the waxens for making off with the living under cover of night and were now pretending to be them.

Soon after, most of the families took their share of the settlement, left town and the waxens behind.

On top of everything else, we argued, there simply wasn’t any space to put them in our new homes.

12.

My wife sighs in her sleep and turns her head.

I had always imagined if nothing was left but her heart beat and her breathing, these would signal the end of things. But they are not signs, they are life exactly, terrible and slight.

The Miracle Worker

2010-01-03T12:01:00.009-05:00

Here’s what we’re doing tonight: I am the Miracle Worker to your feral man.

You had been captured and traveling with the circus for some time, but a kindly gentleman—a dealer in antique firearms—has purchased your freedom. But he is getting frustrated because you are crashing into furniture and stalking the livestock and now a sheep has turned up dead.

The arms dealer retains my services because of my reputation for taming large beasts, lions, gorillas, etc. But I haven’t been the same since an assistant was mutilated on an expedition. I was not a coward but I blamed myself, so I accept this new assignment with some trepidation.

When we first meet, you sniff me all over. I hold very still, fathoming the work I have to do.

When I hand you a pair of underwear, you sniff it, then wrestle it on your head. I take it off and mimic putting my feet through the leg holes. You put your arm through the crotch hole. I indicate how dirty and bad it is to not have a garment separating you from your clothes. You nod and wipe your face with it. Finally I lift my skirt above my head to show you my underwear. You are fascinated and pluck at the elastic around my waist like a bow.

Obediently, your eyes never leaving mine, you put on your underwear.

We sit at a table and I show you how to use a fork. At first you pull the fork back high into the air as you would point a spear, but learn to lower it. You stop wiping your mouth with the corner of the tablecloth. You learn to accept very dead meat.

Language is next: milk, chair, sleep, hunger, orange the fruit, orange the color, desire, city, pain, love, night.

One day we are watching television and you become animated because on the screen is a swath of jungle which is being stripped by a logging operation. You pull on my arm and jab at your chest, then at the television. Yes, yes, I say.

Later I find you crouched in the closet wearing your underwear on your head.

Year of the Tiger

2010-01-03T00:23:00.005-05:00

In Siam they use the tiger's docility in following his cruel instincts to lure him on to a bleating lamb over a deep ditch in which he will then perish, fuming with rage at having stupidly let himself be found out by little cowardly bastards so inferior to him in very way.
-- Henri Michaux

The Companion

2009-12-31T12:03:00.013-05:00

Last night walking to the subway in Astoria, I came across a review in the window of a Thai restaurant by a food critic who was my life for a brief period in the 90s.

The newsprint was faded; the tape that held up the article by the corners, yellow-toed.

It was not common for me to stumble across a review in which I was mentioned as the critic’s “companion.” Most of the modest, ethnic restaurants he covered set up shop in neighborhoods like Brighton Beach or Forest Hills, where I was not likely to traverse with any regularity. On top of that, the recession had leveled the fortunes of many restaurants where we ate in those days.

When I first met him, I was a poor university student, unhappy with the boy I was seeing, a demoralized actor who elevated his esteem by purchasing organic produce and revitalizing creams. We no longer asked for the other’s point of view on anything, so irrelevant was it to our interests or the outcome of any decision we might make.

Perhaps you’ve seen him: he is the go-to talent for telecommunications commercials when they want to cast a Buddhist monk manipulating a cell phone or handheld device.

I wrote the food critic a letter asking if he would take me to the next restaurant he planned to review and included my vitals. We hit a Senegalese restaurant in East Harlem the week after.

It was his habit not to take any notes during meals, the better to cloak his identity.

That was me, lamenting the lack of fire in the ma-po tofu at Sichuan Palace, or the sodden defeat of an apple crisp. As one who was already invisible in all things, I enjoyed deriving influence from anonymity.

My opinions weighed heavier on the desserts because he said he generally didn’t care for sweets. I suspected he also circled them with some wariness to manage his middle-aged gut, though I found his girth erotic, the distention of his worldliness.

There will be some who murmur, I’m very sorry, and others who will snout after the reasons for the end of things. At our very best, we love each other earnestly, clumsily, with imprecise instruments.

A trick: the ones who are magic in our lives vanish. This one ended over an unmemorable meal, one of those restaurants reinterpreting comfort food by serving chicken in tiny skillets.

I had hoped secretly that our rupture would prove so distressing that he would not be able to meet his deadline. But that following Wednesday, his column appeared on pg. 43, absent any mention of a companion, my poof.

Within time, I began noticing the appearance of a new companion in his reviews, a she.

To be fair, I couldn’t be certain that it was the same woman each time. Even so, I read about her with great interest: what she ate, the things she said. She seemed much more particular about service and decor than I had been. This, I was certain, was all wrong for him.

He used to watch my expression studiously whenever I took my first bite of anything. No one has watched me eat this way since, or will do so again.

Sat Oct 31

2009-11-02T23:45:00.004-05:00

Overcast afternoon + halloween + coffee at Ethiopian joint.

Salvadorans ran the kitchen at the Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph where I worked one summer in college. It's shuttered now.

Later in the evening waiting for our clothes to dry and S. to arrive for a late dinner, reading Richard Wright's haikus:

How lonely it is:
A rattling freight train has left
Fields of croaking frogs.

The Radio at 4 a.m.

2009-10-16T22:00:00.006-04:00

From 1979 to 1982 there was a show on pirate radio that could be heard on Sundays from 3 am to 4 am in Richmond and El Cerrito and spasmodically on the car radios of drivers along the Berkeley and Oakland border. The show was called “Numbchucks” and featured interviews with subterranean writers, filmmakers, first-edition book dealers, organic farmers, and former boxers.

The most riveting segment on each program was when the host, who went by the name of Smedley Yi, opened up the phone line to callers. There was ever only one caller, who Yi referred stubbornly to as “caller” as though to cloak the man in the possibility of multitudes.

Yi and the caller had an antagonistic relationship from the beginning, according to long-time listeners. The caller would come out swinging about some position Yi had staked minutes earlier about Octavia Butler or Nam June Paik. Their voices would puff their chests out, then duck and weave looking for a weak spot.

When Yi reached a pitch of exasperation with the caller, as he often did, he would interrupt and insist that they needed to go to a commercial break. Then he would swiftly cut to himself aggrandizing about a regional brand of potato snack or delivering a hushed public service announcement about what to do in the event of an earthquake. He was most adamant about spare batteries, which seemed irresponsibly magnified beyond keeping a reserve of bottled water, for example.

Is there anything as simultaneously intimate and remote as the voices of a live call-in radio show in the early hours of the morning when you are awake? Are they not saving your life?

The show eventually went off the air. But five years later, reports came in that Yi was once again on the airwaves, roughly in earshot of the same coordinates, but on Wednesdays from 4 am to 4:30 am. Also, he was calling himself something else and the format had changed. Each segment involved his calling an 888 sex line and asking for a maid, or a professor of Eastern Religion. The segment would follow their stomach worm conversation, which was about 30/70 sexual.

The show was called “Numbchucks.”

I used to wait in another room, listening to the voice of my husband talk to other people as he made his way toward me. I would make no effort to move or otherwise make myself known. I could say I wanted to anticipate him with every one of my senses. Or I could say the truth, which was that I wanted to be found.

Reading House of the Sleeping Beauties

2009-10-12T21:20:00.004-04:00

I was reading Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties in bed. An old man visits a secret brothel that specializes in girls who are heavily drugged so old men who have lost their virility, but not their lust or longing for young minxes, can fondle them freely as they sleep.

Beside me, he said he was tired; his lower back hurt.

Repeatedly the old man flirts with the idea of violating the house rules by forcing himself on one of the unknowing virgins, naked and milky beneath the blanket in that room swathed in crimson velvet.

He even imagines strangling one, and wonders if that act of violence would be enough to wake her.

I ran my hand down his front and pressed my breasts against his back. He rolled on top of me and spread my legs.

On the old man’s second visit the proprietress says the girl he will have that evening is more experienced than the others. The old man speculates that perhaps the girl had long ago stopped thinking of the men who lay beside her, and leave their impressions on the sheets in the morning.

Kawabata writes, Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

In the end, the most the old man does is place his finger in the half-opened mouth of a slumbering girl. He wipes the paint from her lips on the strands of her hair, and docilely swallows the two white pills the proprietress offers each night to sink him into his own oblivion.

I thought you said you were tired.

I was. Then why did you touch me?

Because you said you were tired.

What are you, one of those sleep fuckers?