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.