Return of the Sun

Odd Nerdrum http://www.nerdrum.com/

Jose Lezama Lima

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/lezamalima.html

Peppermint, Cloves and Lanolin

The harridan’s sister slept in a horsehair bed, the very same one she fell onto, sluiced out through her mother’s vaginal-cloacae, her tiny head coned and bloodied. Her mother’s grunts and angry protestations were heard far and wide, waking up the rector’s assistant, who promptly woke the rector who in turn shook awake the friar-cook, who was in a deep narcoleptic sleep, who called the constabulary to complain about the awful racket. She thought of working horsehair into the design of the jacket, but couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to make it subtle enough to accommodate the weave, in keeping with the overall integrity of the design, so sloughed it off as moronic and duplicitous. She did, however, use Popsicle sticks as collar stays, an idea that came to her in a dream, so she claimed. Remember, if you may, I am simply remembering all this for someone else, so I suppose these are really my memories, or things I have made up in lieu of memories, or memories of memories that I had even though clearly imprudent, laughable imprudence.

The midwife who attended the half-sister’s birth smoked Cameo’s and smelt of peppermint and cloves. She arrived in a hansom cab at exactly 12.27am, three minutes before the delivery, sleeveless and dressed in a midwifery smock and sandals. She never wore a blouse with sleeves as placental spoil and blood had a way of working themselves into fabric, and the midwife abhorred scrub-boards, lanolin and lye.

Danilo Kis

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kis.html

Pas Fini

Shreber's Cat

The harridan’s sister slept in a horsehair bed, the very same one she fell onto, sluiced out through her mother’s vaginal-cloacae, her tiny head coned and bloodied. Her mother’s grunts and angry protestations were heard far and wide, waking up the rector’s assistant, who promptly woke the rector who in turn shook awake the friar-cook, who was in a deep narcoleptic sleep, who called the constabulary to complain about the awful racket. She thought of working horsehair into the design of the jacket, but couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to make it subtle enough to accommodate the weave, in keeping with the overall integrity of the design, so sloughed it off as moronic and duplicitous. She did, however, use Popsicle sticks as collar stays, an idea that came to her in a dream, so she claimed. Remember, if you may, I am simply remembering all this for someone else, so I suppose these are really my memories, or things I have made up in lieu of memories, or memories of memories that I had even though clearly imprudent, laughable imprudence.

Bruno Schulz: The Mythologization of Reality

The essence of reality is meaning. That which has no meaning is not real for us. Every fragment of reality lives due to the fact that it partakes of some sort of universal meaning. The old cosmogonies expressed this in the maxim 'in the beginning was the Word'. The unnamed does not exist for us. To name something means to include it in some universal meaning. The isolated, mosaic-type word is a later product, is the result of technique. The original word was an hallucination circling the light of meaning, was the great universal totality. The word in its colloquial, present-day meaning is now only a fragment, a rudiment of some former, all-encompassing, integral mythology. For that reason, it retains within it a tendency to grow again, to regenerate, to become complete in its full meaning. The life of the word resides in the fact that it tenses and strains to produce a thousand associations, like the quartered body of the snake of legend, whose separate pieces sought each other in the dark. The thousandfold yet integral organism of the word was torn into individual phrases, into letters, into colloquial speech and in this new form, applied to practical needs, it has come down to us as an organ of understanding. The life of the word and its development have been set on new tracks, on the tracks of practical life, and subjected to new notions of correctness. But when in some way the injunctions of practice relax their strictures, when the word, released from such coercion, is left to its own devices and restored to its own laws, then a regression takes place within it, a backflow, and the word then returns to its former connections and becomes again complete in meaning - and this tendency of the word to return to its nursery, its yearning to revert to its origins, to its verbal homeland, we term poetry.

Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth.

When we employ commonplace words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that, like barbarians, we are building our homes out of fragments of sculptures and the statues of the gods. Our most sober concepts and definitions are distant offshoots of myths and ancient stories. There is not even one of our ideas that is not derived from mythology, a mythology that has been transformed, mutilated, remoulded. The spirit's first and foremost function is to tell stories and to make up 'tales'. The driving force of human knowledge is the conviction that at the end of its investigations, it will discover the ultimate meaning of the world. It seeks this meaning on the heights and scaffolding of its artificial mounds. But the elements which it uses in construction have been used once before, have come from forgotten and shattered 'stories'. Poetry re-cognizes the lost meanings, restores words to their proper place, and links them according to their ancient denotations. In the hands of the poet, the word, as it were, comes to its senses about its essential meaning, it flourishes and develops spontaneously in keeping with its own laws, and regains its integrity. For that reason, every kind of poetry is an act of mythologization and tends to create myths about the world. The mythologization of the world has not yet ended. The process has merely been restrained by the development of knowledge, has been pushed into a side channel, where it lives without understanding its true meaning. But knowledge, too, is nothing more than the construction of myths about the world, since myth resides in its very foundations and we cannot escape beyond myth. Poetry arrives at the meaning of the world anticipando, deductively, on the basis of great and daring short-cuts and approximations. Knowledge tends to the same inductively, methodically, taking the entire material of experience into account. At bottom, both one and the other have the same aim.

The human spirit is tireless in its glossing of life with the aid of myths, in its 'making sense' of reality. The word itself, left to its own devices, gravitates towards meaning. Meaning is the element which bears humanity into the process of reality. It is an absolute given. It cannot be derived from other givens. Why something should appear meaningful to us is impossible to define. The process of making sense of the world is closely connected with the word. Speech is the metaphysical organ of man. And yet over time the word grows rigid, becomes immobilized, ceases to be the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words through new short-circuits, which arise out of their fusions. The image is also an offshoot of the original word, the word which was not yet a sign, but a myth, a story, or a meaning.

At present we consider the word to be merely a shadow of reality, its reflection. But the reverse would be more accurate: reality is but a shadow of the word. Philosophy is really philology, the creative exploration of the word.

Translated by John M. Bates
Source: Bruno Schulz, "Mityzacja rzeczywistosci", Republika marzen. Warszawa: Chimera, 1993: 49-50.
©Dr John Bates, 1999

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

"Bruno Schulz - Żyd niezwykły" - przedstawienie http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/web/arts_culture/literature/fiction/schulz/link.shtml

Two Sisters and a Half

The Romanians, two sisters and a half-sister with roulettes’ syndrome, lived in a cottage with a dog, two cats and a three-legged chicken. The half-sister had lost all sense of balance, needing both half-sisters to help her get around, each taking hold of an arm, steadying her one step at a time until she reached her destination. She fell down often; both her half-sisters helping her regain her balance, then continuing their three-sister perambulation, knees knocking together like mallets. The man in the hat, lest we forget, was acquainted with the three sisters, having met them at the same church bazaar where the harridan’s sister had a table hawking things she made from scratch, Popsicle stick placemats and napkin holders fashioned out of toilet paper rolls and electrician’s tape. Unlike the bow legged man who met the sisters once, and having had a most unpromising conversation with them avoided them at all cost, even when it meant missing out on church bazaars and eight-pin bowling, which he was no good at anyhow, the man in the hat saw no harm in saying a cheery hello to them three whenever their paths crossed, which they did but seldom, but often enough to warrant an amicable salutation, seldom as they were. The harridan’s sister was working on the cut-out for a winter jacket made from lobster carapaces, using the pinchers for clasps, the soft underbelly for lining and the antennae for stitching around the pockets, both breast and kidney, which she had yet to figure a way of doing without disrupting the integrity of the jacket.

Happy Birthday Sam

The Pope's Hat

Empanada caught strep throat from the neighbour’s child, a sickly waif with a cowlick so big it looked like the Pope’s hat. When she complained that she couldn’t for the life of her see how someone could be so thoughtless as to allow their child free reign knowing they had the mumps and strep, she received such a harsh rebuke that she set fire to the neighbours car in retaliation, watching it burn like a Roman candle, the night sky sick with smoke and oil. Her great, great grandfather, had he had the opportunity to measure and calibrate the bumps on his great, great granddaughter’s head, would have diagnosed savantism, probably something to do with numbers and vectoring. As the DSM1V had yet to be written, simpleton or dullard were out of the question, so he stuck with savant, feeling it best described the majority of his family.

Empanada Del Amore (part1)

Empanada Del Amore fell madly in love with the butcher, a Basque Quaker who was never seen without a bloodied apron knotted lengthways round his waist. He chopped and minced, diced, cubed and decapitated legs, shoulders, torsos and heads, cleaning up the offal and gristle with a wire broom and a hose, sluicing the castaways and offs into a sewer grate he had built flush with the slaughter-room floor, which was built onto the back of the butcher shop. He had canary yellow teeth and a hooked nose that bridged the space between his eyes and perineum above his upper lip. She seldom kissed him, and when she did with eyes closed and lips clenched, their teeth clacking like castanets. Empanada came from Puritan stock, so saw nothing unfitting about a man who cared little for his teeth or went about unshaven, one suspect hair coiling from a mole that served as a spar between his two eyes.

Ignatius, the butcher’s uncle on his mother’s side, was a snake handler who worked for an Episcopalian mission in Macaw where he taught the Episcopal Bishops how to charm a snake without being bitten or en-venom-ed. The butcher’s mother gave up reptile handling after being bitten one too many times, the last leaving her with a palsied left hand and half a thumb. The butcher’s father was a stern Presbyterian and daft in the head, or marbled, as his mother never hastened to say, and had no patience for his wife’s evangelistic enthusiasm for snakes and cannons. Empanada wore smocks and knee-socks and white linen blouses with floral embossing on the collars and elbows. She seldom if ever wore anything else, unless it was a skirt, which she accompanied with black nylons and braid-over-braid sandals, gifts from her father’s father, a gunrunner with a Phthisis-pubis birthmark just below his eye and to the left of his cheekbone.

Her grandfather hated the colour green, advocating for a moratorium on anything that fell within the rubric of salads and side-dishes, even green ales or pilsners on the bicentenary of Parnell’s birth, which he celebrated twice, even though Parnell had come into the world but once. The butcher butchered everything he could get his hands on, pork, mutton, beef, hogsheads and horse meat, some of which was still twitching when it arrived at his doorstep, and was known to slice through a bull’s scrotum without blinking an eye, blood splatter and gore flying every-which where, bits of bone and cartilage collecting in the folds and creases of his butcher’s shirt.

Empanada’s great, great grandfather plied his trade as a phrenologist in the cafes and dime-stores in and around the hamlet where he lived with his wife, a failed seamstress (her fingers had been callused down to the bone) and a dog with three legs, one of which was peripatetic, moving in the opposing direction of the other two. He had an assortment of phrenological tools, many of which were made specifically for him, which he kept in an autoclave in the basement next to the boiler. His wife, now that she was unable to sew and hem, made sure the tools and medical implements were kept clean and sanitary, or his impalements, as she referred to them in salon talk. Empanada’s great, great grandfather knew where each bump, hillock, cone or indentation was situated on the head, and kept a cartographic foolscap of them in his desk drawer, the very same one where he kept an eyedropper and a bottle of liquid morphine. He kept his syringe, a glass one with a bendy rubber plunger with centigrade markings on the side, in a rosewood box stowed away underneath his desk, far out of sight of his wife and the dog.

Papal Phrenology (fig.1011)

Facial Mappings (figs.3&4)

Cranial Mapping (figs.1&2)

Phrenology1011 (fig.144)

Dutch Pleasantries

The Driver's Side Window

Out of the feral blue yon a cusp of sky so blue it seems impossible. Impossible things are possible when the mind removes itself from the appearance of things: a blue sky becomes a blue sky that defies description, and if it did, would seem meaningless and unimaginable. The harridan cambered her legs into a curlicue, knees bowed in at the meniscus, ankles touching, cartilage torn into lettuce yarn. She sat like this to encourage the blood to circulate in her legs and to discourage stiffness and rickets, which was an ongoing concern and none too irritating, even for a harridan. Her mother, long dead and rotting in some cesspit, the whereabouts of which she’d long forgotten, told her that were she to twirl and bend her legs into inhumane knots she’d end up with camber-legs and stretched ligaments, or buck-kneed and short on brains. This was reason enough to sit with her thighs abutting her hipbone, pelvis turned inwards and a smidgeon to the left, scheming up ways to further defy a mother she never cared much for, even a dead one. She remembered the day her father bought a new car, a shiny green Falcon with a turning-knob on the steering wheel, and the look on her mother’s face when he pulled into the laneway, her apron cassocked over her shoulder, a sternness that made her look more manly than womanly. She chastised and harangued him, then refused to allow the beastly motorcar in the laneway, or him for that matter, to which he responded by gravelling the car over the front lawn, his finger extended above the chrome of the driver’s side window. The harridan felt that she was doing her part to ensure that her father’s protestations, as small and ineffective as they were, were kept alive: his finger well above the chrome of the driver’s side window.

Trenching Tool

Now the alms woman carried a trenching tool with her wherever she went, toting it in a rucksack she slung over the hip of her shoulder and around her back, which she then cinched taut with a length of clothesline string and a copper nail, bent inward to serve as a clench, and to prevent the trenching too from jimmying around in the rucksack. She used the trenching tool to excavate and exhume things, things she found in back parking lots and alleyways, next to park benches and picnic tables, things caught up between other things, trees and bushes and prickly pears and shrubs with unorthodox flowers and spiny cropped stamen that seemed to defy botanical common sense. She scrapped the tool up against blocks of stone, marble and granite, chiseling back limestone and cobalt, and chipping away at great slabs of stone big enough to put off the most journeyed mason. She used it to block and true things, planning warps, beveling misalignments, things that caused her no end of worry and fretting.

Maudlin Banalities

One of the most indecent things about OCD is the insufferable anger that it causes; petty annoyances, like fumbling to screw a cap back on a water bottle or light a cigarette, which takes so much energy that by the time its lit I haven’t the energy or lung-capacity to smoke it. My tolerance level is subnormal; at a level some would refer to as pathological or niggling. This constant need for order, things lined up in neat rows, books, slips of discarded paper, useless and droll reminders of my genius for maudlin banality. Should you have the patience, which I certainly wouldn’t, not for this drivel, this business of typing is merciless, a cursor-ous re-cursing cursor-ing, back-spacing ad nausea and with little regard for the gavel of my fingertips, none whatsoever. Just typing this nonsense has taken an extraordinary toll on my patience, tolerance and ability to stave off this persistent niggling, annoyance all lined up in neat perfect little rows, the tiers of my impatient niggling life.

Petrel-oil and Epaulettes

It rained so hard, and with such total disregard for hatters, that the man in the hat had to turn his hat brim-side up to ward off the rain and prevent it from splashing into his face. The upside brim served as a sluice gate, redirecting the rainwater onto the epaulettes of his jacket, where it formed goblets, not unlike those found on plants and awnings. He jaunted his way up the sidewalk, his leg picking up bits of garbage, odds and ends left behind by shoppers and gadabout’s, and stopped in front of the alms woman, who was seated with her legs crossed in front of the haberdasher’s. She told the man in the hat that her pubic-bone was out of alignment, and that the doctor had cautioned her against sitting on sidewalks and cement planters, or wearing fashionable shoes with steeple-heels and low arches. There had been a rumor spreading that a worm had been discovered in the crotch of a dead woman, the labia, major and minor, jumpy with night crawlers and nits. The alms woman had seen this very thing before, when she lived in the city of fester with her now decocted mother and a lapdog with no tail or left eye. The outbreak was dealt with swiftly by the local constabulary, who sprayed down all of the shanties and crude huts with a mixture of petrel-oil and gasoline. The petrel-oil was rendered from dead birds, and in its desiccate form added to mechanic’s grease and a solvent that stank like near-death. Once the outbreak had been controlled, the shanties and huts were burnt to the ground to prevent any further infestations, and as a way to caution those who chose dereliction and sloth over good manners and chirpiness to either shape up, or have their homes razed to smithereens.

Be My Dog

Shag and Jar

‘Albert Scrim is dead’, said the man in the hat, ‘died from leg sores and an affliction of the gout. Poor bastard, underexposure, imagine that, doctor said he was underexposed to food and proper lodging, had teeth worms and an ulcerous gut, rotten clear down to the large intestine, all putrefied and mollies, poor bastard. Never did much like the cunt, but he was a good fellow with the shag and jar, never one to say no to a hand-me-up.' The man in the hat tossed a handful of coppers onto the sidewalk where Albert Scrim petitioned for stuff that weren’t no matter or good for those that already had stuff that mattered, saying in a polite, whispering voice, ‘allow me, sir, to beg of your pardon, have you a copper or a half-nickel to spare, I seem to have forgotten my change-purse at home, in a rush I was this morning, out the door like a lick of speed I was.’ Albert Scrim left behind three shoes, two pairs of soiled underwear, a greatcoat, a pair of army issue trousers, a woolen sweater, fisherman’s knit with cabling, a green pullover chemise and three dollars and twelve cents, all in pennies, that he had stitched in the inside pocket of his coat, for safe keeping and to help redistribute his weight, his left side being slightly bigger than his right, which caused him to keel to one side like a channel buoy.

Fishcakes and Felonry

Sears and Roe, purveyors of fishcakes and treacle-sweets, an eye on the quick-and-run where less-finer fare is sold, to encourage a second hob at the can. I recall supping on genuine Indian craw, made form cobnut and brown stain; and the felon behind the counter scouting out greenhorns and wee knockers. His wife, so enlarged that the veins in her legs, right up to the thigh, bulged and crooked like a house on fire, her floral dress cowed round the drawl of her hips, a sight worse than buggery or hard-candy. She sat en-tooled as we rocked through the store, pilfering Pixie Sticks and Sipsacs and allsorts of odds and felonry. Her husband, hat in hand, penciled in racing stubs and smoked Uruguayan cigars that he stowed in a box behind the counter, a real five-and-dime operation. I met his daughter’s husband, a fast-chef at a men’s club, and recalled my youthful knocking-around, to which he replied, ‘she was a fat one, she was, all veins and blubber and those too-tight reading specs.’ She, the fat lady, a nickname I passed round like an alms cap, one even our parents used to refer to the poor woman, collapsed behind the counter one day while serving the ice-maker from the hockey rink, three-fingers, as we called him, as he’d had the others sheared off like cog-pins, her husband kneeing the racing barrier, track-stubs squeezed harder than hard-candy or algebra in his fists, while she took her last gasp of worldly air, the veins in her legs, right up to her thighs, bulging and crooking like a house on fire.

Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolano (1953-2003)

Roberto Bolano

Los detectives salvajes

2666

Roberto Bolano-1953-2003

Roberto Bolano, By Night In Chile

Aphasia en Travail

I forgot what I was going to tell you. But then again not much I remember is worth much, not even the thought it takes to remember it. I addle and confuse what most people take for granted, the everyday intuitive things of life, like making toast or turning on and off the kitchen faucet. I do these things with an eye for detail, an eye that sees the detail in the mundane trivialities of life, the travails that most people, or at least some, perhaps, do without much thought, leaving out the detail and eye. For example, I have never met, even bumped into, a man in a hat, let alone spoken with one. Harridans and alms women are pure fictions, mere images, rebuses of an overarching imagination, a segregation of fact from fiction, mere trivialities; dalliances. Bow legged men and the baker at the Cantor’s are make-believe, things I conjured up to amuse myself; frivolities. I myself am a trifling thing, something I conjured up to amuse others, an endnote to an insufferably boring spy novel, a bete noire, a game of snakes and ladders played in the dark, blindfolded and gagged for good measure. It’s at times like this, the times in between, that I truly wish I couldn’t remember, anything, not even this.

Consonant World

in this cloister
of words, a metaphor
an infinite regress, a conjecture
the missing vowel in a consonant world, drawn
from tears of mercy, and
inexpiable pain

The Great Maternal Chasm

I am remembering this for someone else, someone who wishes to remain anonymous, so if I fudge some parts, bear with me, I am remembering, too, and not always in the correct order of events, far from it. Perhaps I am the man in the hat, the shamble leg man, the alms woman, harridan and bow-legged man, perhaps not; after all memory is not always reliable, even when one thinks one has remembered correctly, gotten all the events in the right order. A blue sky can be a cerulean sky, a sky so blue that it seems black, a sky so cobalt, Prussian or azure, navy, indigo that it can be mistaken for something else, an ocean, perhaps, even a blue overcoat or a bruise. Sometimes bagels are a woman’s underwear, or the mouth of the great maternal chasm, the very same place I was pushed out from when I was too young to know the difference between a blue sky and an overcoat. As with most things, things we remember and things we forget, these things aren’t worth the bother, so I best leave it at that and get on with fudging the story.

Caudal Pins

The bow-legged man’s parents wanted to call him Jesus but the name was already taken. They decided on Harriman, finding the name unobtrusive and available. The bow-legged man, not wanting to grieve his parents anymore than they grieved themselves, dropped his Christian name when he left home and was old enough not to care anymore. Once his father finished chiding his wife for causing a birth defect in they’re son, he threw out all the sweets and Gin and started fucking the counter-helper at the Cantor’s baker next to the aqueduct behind the A & P. The bows in the bow-legged man’s legs increased in bowing until he could only walk at angles and with the aid of a cane, a rattan one with a silver swans head on the upside. When he was five years-old the doctor solder a pin between his legs, a three inch girthed piece of metal that kept his legs from meeting in the middle. The pin was attached to two plaster casts, one for each leg, that reached down as far as the top of his ankles, had they reached any further he wouldn’t had been able to walk at all, not even a trundle. He volunteered to play in-nets for the bantam hockey team, as he could cover the goal crease without having to move very much or exert much energy. Every Saturday his father drove him to the outdoor rink, dropped him in front of the clubhouse then drove across town to the Cantor’s Bakery, bought a dozen bagels, half poppy seed, half sesame, drove the counter-helper to the parking lot behind the A & P next to the aqueduct and fucked her in the backseat, the still-hot bagels steaming up the windows.

Proper Footwear and Cheese

The harridan met the alms woman at the church bazaar, who in turn met the bow-legged man who had run into the shamble leg man who was busy eating a smelt sandwich on pumpernickel bread, three slices, between each slice boned smelts soggy with fish oil. The harridan accused the shamble leg man of eating fish on a Sunday, a sin worse than buggery, and not wearing the appropriate footwear. The shamble leg man rebuked the harridan for being a sorry crone, offering what remained of his lunch to the bow-legged man, who was clearly in need of a proper scoff, even were it squelchy with oil and spittle. The alms woman removed her blouse over her head, catching her thumb in the selvage, and yawned, her mouth forming a perfect O. The shamble leg man said, ‘footwear and sandwiches and small oily fish, the makings of a fine and middling day indeed.’ The alms woman, having freed herself from the selvage said, in reply to the shamble leg man, but to no one in particular, ‘I much prefer sardines.’ The bow-legged man, with a hint of irritation to his basso voice, said, ‘Cheese, a Roquefort or a Camembert, aged cheddar or Colby, farmer’s cheese and anything blue, these I prefer, with smelts, of course, therein lies the key to a fine sandwich, smelts and cheese, any cheese, just don’t forget the cheese, dare I say, the key to a good…’ Before he could finish, the harridan, her sunbonnet sandwiched between her elbow and ribcage, yammered at the top of her lungs, ‘Shoes, for the love of God, what about proper footwear, have you no respect for the Sabbath, none at all, goodness me!’ The shamble leg man, not wanting the harridan to get in the last word said, ‘We, Madame, are Christian, not Jews.’ To which the alms woman replied, ‘Oh dear, a Jewish church bazaar, how strange indeed, indeed very strange indeed.’

Yvonne Petkus

yvonne.petkus@wku.edu Baggage, 2003oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk

Anthropomorphic Savant

There is a mercenary of birds milling about, flapping and tweeting in the tree outside my bedroom window. I like birds. Whether or not they like me is another point, one only an ornithologist or anthropomorphic savant could possible address. Our dog couldn’t speak, preferring to bark and yowl. My father traded it to a farmer for a shotgun and car fender, the left-hand side one if I remember correctly, which I seldom do; remember anything at all for that matter, so I guess being correct is moot. I put on my trousers this morning one leg at a time, just as I was taught. There was a time, not long ago, when this was not the case and I would try both at the same time, which caused me to hop and carom to one side or the other, which side is unimportant, suffice it to say I hopped and caromed and made a general nuisance of myself. A bird, a wren or a red--breasted pheasant just alit on my windowsill, its tiny clawed feet clutching the sill. My window is open, or a jar, so I can hear its warble and twitter with unhindered alacrity. I like birds, but I already told you that, so the point is moot, repetitive at best. It’s going to rain; I can smell it with unhindered alacrity.

Delousing the Muse

Four-twenty-eight in the morning and I’m thinking about the Husserl/Walser connection, or is that the Walser/Walser connection, it’s like being in a frigging windstorm, or is that sandstorm, seems rather silly to be cutting hares, so I’ve taken a sulpha, a pillory, or is that a poultice-sulpha, who knows, or cares for that matter, really. I have no idea what a pillory is or isn’t, nor care to, so I guess I’ll cut some hares and be done with it. Okay so we’ve got the log-legged Miss Jeffery’s kowtowing it down, maybe up, the middle-school hall, high heels clip clopping like a Bedouin on PCP, a Bedzin might be more appropriate, okay a Bedzin with a tasselled fez, that sounds good, clopping down the hall with a tasselled fez on, a ream of freshly mimeographed pluses and minuses and mathematical crap, insufferable crap, in her arms, cradled like a sleeping, okay, not sleeping but a jumping and wriggling child, a Bedzin child, a waif let’s say. This is going nowhere, the sulpha must be working, or is it the poultice, who knows, who really knows, anything, really, that’s the question really, when you separate the wheat from the shaft, my namesake in fact, that kickboxing blackjack wielding so-and-so, what’s his name, my name, my goodness me, I’ve forgotten my own name, maybe what I thought was a sulpha was actually PCP, a tincture of angle-dust, a seven-percent delousing, gosh, this is terrible, what would Miss Jeffery’s say, indeed, what would she say?

Husserl and the Walsers

One thirty in the morning and I’m thinking about Husserl and Martin Walser, trying to figure out if the latter was related to Robert Walser, the Swiss madcap with an ear for cant and Kant. There is a north-westerly breeze breezing through my bedroom window and the smell of rot and wither, signs of Spring and foul weather to follow; and as I have an arthritic neck, a titanium shoulder, hinge and mortise, and an encroaching headache the answer seems simple, more so, simpler than simple, simplest simple, yes, quite facile, hackneyed and banal: who gives a rat’s ass Werther the two were related, Husserl perhaps, but he’s dead, rotting in some lime pit, which by all appearances, has neither a middle, end or beginning, just one run-on sentence that reminds me of Miss Jeffery’s high-heels clopping down the hall in fifth grade middle-school, which had neither a middle, in between or centre of gravity, or was that a nativity scene, hayseeds and bootstraps and Husserl counting to one-hundred backwards, or was it forwards, the point seems moot, stupid at best, inane, perhaps. So there’s a breeze, an east-westerly breeze breezing in through my boot-room window, Miss Jeffery’s high heels clipping down the drainpipe spout, or is it the eaves, who knows, certainly not I, the I that is I but not I, the I-I, or some such nonsense. Oh yes, thank you from the bottom of my poetic heart Octavio, you were a blessedly grand writer, and take a good picture to boot, or was that bedroom window, maybe it was boot-room, I’m reaching here, spouting off at the ears, with neither a middle, end or in between, just one long sun-on my face run-on sentence, Miss Jeffery’s, well you know where this is going…one fifty-seven in the morning and I’m thinking about Husserl, carrot cake and the Walser’s, and not necessarily in the order, or Kant for that matter, which really matters very little now does it, I mean really, does it?

Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998)

The Romanian Busboy

Abraham Zimmer, awaking from troubled sleep, placed his feet nimbly on to the floor, pulled on his trousers, Kaki’s with cuffed bottoms, a shirt with blue twill stitching, double-tied his shoes and shot the dog. He’d been thinking about shooting the dog for some time now, but it was this morning, a morning like any other, that he did it. He made a fried egg sandwich, Turkish coffee with rosewater he’d bought the day before, opened the morning paper and began to read, taking small morsel bites of the sandwich, which he held to his chest on a small tea-set saucer, and equally small sips of coffee. His wife ran off with the busboy from the Romanian delicatessen, a rakishly short boy with an air about him that unnerved people, many of whom were Romanian. Abraham Zimmer, being of unsound mind and decrepit body, hated the idea that his wife was fucking a man much shorter than he, a busboy, at that, with rotting teeth and yellow eyes. The dog never saw it coming, nor for that matter did Abraham Zimmer, for whom life was a random series of reoccurring events, many of which reoccurred more often than he would have liked them to. It was either him or the dog, and as the dog had no common sense the choice was simple, quite simple indeed. Abraham Zimmer awoke from unsettled dreams and yawned, another morning he’d be late for work, another day figuring out ways to stop the reoccurring from occurring again. He’d dreamt that he’d shot the dog, or was it a Romanian busboy, the difference seemed negligible, so he placed his feet on the floor, nimbly, pulled on his kaki trousers, double-tied his shoes and shot himself.

Prohibitions and Latex

A pork shoulder grey sky severed just below the copse-bone. I am witness to nothing, said the man in the hat, at random and with little need for acknowledgment. Once the syphilis had gone, the Witness left behind traces of himself that would not be evident until well into the tertiary stage. Those who had been touched by the Witness’ hand now played witness to Bedlam, a scourge that flattened their foreheads and softened their brains. No amount of prayer or witnessing could abet the progression of the disease, lesions and wets and roily skin that itched and crabbed, and night sweats that soiled the bed with surge and boil. In the pamphlets he left behind there were prohibitions for sodomy and beastly sex, self-pleasuring and extramarital sex, and sex with lubricants and latex sheaths.

Black Kitchen Shoes

my grandmother
boiled potatoes and cabbage
in the same pot, ladling the fat from the simmer
with the same spoon she used to lay welts
into the corm of my back

she used the flat
of her hand to pit bulgur mewl
and a gar to well the crusts, the one my father
used to stave apples from the top
of the neighbour’s tree

my grandmother
fed us blood pudding and rice
barrowing cows’ tongue in cheesecloth, and wore
the same black kitchen shoes to church
summer through fall

Trumpeting Ass

Were I to sleep I’d ruin a perfect record of sleeplessness, and that I will not be privy to, not when the birds will soon be a-twitter and the sky bluer than azure stones. I will await the bluestone blueness of the morning sky, a blue that summons up moraine lakes and oceanic blues, a glacial blue, perhaps bluer. Furthermore, I have tasks and attendants to attend to today and sleep will simply encourage battlement and confusion, which I have more than enough of for one day, two perhaps. ‘And he made a trumpet of his ass’. Dante, my dear man, you have made my day yet again. You never fail to amuse me, something, I fear, I have little time or patience for, or battlements and addled thoughts, both of which, as you know, I have in vectors and droves. I think I hear a twitter, perhaps a shrilling; it’s simply a matter time before the sky turns a bluestone blue, perhaps bluer yet.

Lucien

Fen and Slough

Mired in thought I sit in front of you, not a moment’s reprieve from the thought that thought the thought antecedent to this thought, to and fro, back and forth, the seamless thought that thinks in the dark, awaiting the march forward that will bring an end to the mire and fen. I thought an answer, but I was sorely mistaken, the thought I thought, the one antecedent to this one, was mistaken, a thought, thought out of line, a thought without a thinker, mired in the slough and peat, such is my Gomorrah in life, my fen and spoil.

The Vanity of Thought

thinking
we have answers
to life’s atrocities, thinking
we have anything worth saying
at all, two breaths from
silence, we the vain
life’s alley cats
yowling

Curbstone Slush

A killing frost of Snow White white snow. A killjoy of snowy snowed snow. Kilocycles of snowed snow snowed then heaped in Snow White heaping heaps. Snow White sniggering credit card cants of snow white snowy snow mitered with a Visa, no, an Amex, with a curlicue beveled edge. Eyelids like moth’s wings, flypaper and velum, no, tarpaper, oily and sebaceous, shanty shack and unwholesome. Curbstone slush sluiced into mounds of slushy snow, not snow white or ivory caste white, but brownstone, blotchy and unseemly to the eye, the beholder of the eye-I. March snow is mercenary, white whitest snow clubbing it into a gored-red skin, seal pelt bloody red snow, an insanguination. Snow and blood are selfsame, cut from the same bolt, skinned from the same eviscerate. Bogspore: paella of castoffs and mealworms, bowels and tripe, intestinal linings and pancreatic slurry. Milt and pensile carrion, left to molt and scurvy into bread ends and black mold. Pennicillin for the sugar weary and insulin pale. It is snowing, yes indeed so it is.

Dogsbody Toting an Ashplant

The air is miserable with it, flying rats and juice heads with anemic sucks for faces and indents for cheeks, not a bone or railhead in sight. This is no man’s land, the paper doll cut from cardboard and crape. You live here, perhaps O, or E or I, but we’d be damn hard pressed to admit it. I live in the cave with the guano and mice feces, a welter of a dam place it is. And he him with the purple scold on his face yowling rice paper. Shreds of the stuff, like fucking millet, fucking papyrus and end bits and nugatory. Never a dull moment, so Seth the rector rectum. Rams’ bladder, some say, with onions (skins boiled on) and dead men’s finger nebs. Fancy that, a dogs’body toting an ashplant with a cherry on top. Dogs lick each other’s rectos in the hopes of discovering something new and savory about themselves. Fucking curs and bowwow knockabouts, not a brain amidst ‘em. Who in their slight of mind would think such things? I, for one, would be hard pressed to admit it, of that IOUE can assure you.

Tight Skeins

moment’s wound
into blankets and throws
early winter solstices

the spoon burnt
blackened like the bulbs
under her eyes

An Early March

chaffing millet from bone
gutters with ox mallets and pike

separating skull from hank
the talisman, they say

of an early March slaughter

bridles of hair sheared white
dunning axe and razor cut

fratricide culls the bone
from chaff and marrow

life takes root in mud
not wine or dry biscuits

millet and bone separated
from host and shoulder

the Talisman of a rising
or an early spring slaughter

Burgees Curative

I am deteriorating, a corpse with organs, viscera decomposition, an inchoate otherness that creates its own misfortune and drudgery. Skin loosening around waging and neckline, halter-skin, made from cow’s hide and smear, clove oil, Burgees curative; waiflike: sherbet lollopped into outstretched bowls, shaky-hand and jimmy-legs and a woman with a rebus of my six-year analysis on the primal screen of her forehead. Tomorrow is another day: repetition ad nausea.

Fetal Clinch

In Sarajevo they found a children's body burned beyond recognition, stickle with gasoline and shrapnel. The mother couldn’t identify the body, the child’s body, bowed into a fetal clinch, singed black like oilman’s tar, the eyes gout with flies and ash. What had he witnessed before his death, before the flares lit up the sky, and burning gasoline clung like a fever to his skin? I will never understand the war, she said, or why they left the body out in the rain like a dog, the eyes bloated with flies, the smell of gunmetal, and his feet pulled tight into his chest.

Temperance and Prohibition

Should you care to listen, I will tell you about the grisliness of alcoholism, the Dantean declension into hell. I have been there, crawling like a child on scabby knees, without a Virgil or a poet to show me the way back up and out of the horror of Dis’s hell. I climbed on the back of a behemoth, a monster, an obsession to repeat, to become again that which I feared and reviled, the colossus within, the ogre whose thirst is never slaked. I am here to tell you the story, the story of my ascension into hell, my fistfight with the beast, the colossus that seeks revenge for temperance and prohibition

Clabber and Free-base

I am the excrescence that fills the void, the syphilitic ulcer that skirls the skin of your lips, the gonorrheal wetness at the back of your throat, the skimpily dressed debauchee with the machicolate smirk and wee misshapen feet. Why are you like that? She said, so crudely indifferent to feelings, people’s feelings? I’d rather, I’d much rather worry about upsetting an animal, I said, a beast, than a people. People heal, beasts don’t. You’re an imbecile, she said, her lip curled around the chisel of her teeth, whiter than free-base and bed sheets. I know, I said, that I know, perhaps nothing else but that. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held my breath, her breath, hers that she held, not mine, pitted with a soft almost imperceptible wail. I murmured something, something lilting, into the conch of her ear, her ear, not mine, and closed my eyes. Life’s a waste of time and time is a waste of life, I said, nothing more. I said nothing, nothing more. That means nothing, she said, her waist clabbered in the shank of my arms, my fingers, not hers, but mine, tightening, cinching in around the manse of her hips. Fecal nonsense, she said, and not very good at that.

I loosened my fingers around the camber of her waist, not mine, but hers, and opened then closed my eyes, once, then a second time, then none. What if I were to pickaxe my eyes, these, I said, pointing at my eyes, not hers, mine, and be done with it? Like Oedipus, the bad and mealy son. Would that make you happy, change things, as they are, make things more, better than? I opened then closed my eyes, her eyes, not mine, remaining open, not shut, all the while, for the while, while I closed and reopened mine. Maybe, she said. Maybe it would, it would and wouldn’t hurt, couldn’t hurt, would it? Now you see, I said, if you were an animal, some beast, I would pay you more respect, care more, at all, for you feelings. As it stands, I could care less, less than more than less. I hate you and your, you and… I kissed her softly, with a passion broaching on madness, on the cant of her head, where the front of the head meets with the eyebrows, and whispered, softly whispered, I know, yes, I know. That I know, perhaps that, but nothing else.

Blackmail Here on Earth

The man in the hat as a boy didn’t understand witnessing or handing out guides to heaven door to door. If there was a place called heaven he’d find it on his own, without the aid of pamphlets, choirs or snake handling. He thought about pilfering the Witness’ pencil case, but couldn’t put himself up to it, even if the Jehovah was wrong in the head and full of fire and homilies. The Bible his grandmother kept in the Crown Royal bag in her bedstead table, the very one grandpapa stole pages from for roll-your-owns, was something he feared worse than death, even though dieing, so the Bible said, was a good thing, a reward for all this nonsense and blackmail here on earth. The way he saw it the Bible was blackmailing those it was suppose to save, telling them that all this sinning and frigging around wasn’t their fault, but something handed down from the Garden of Eden, so really none of their business anyways. The Bible was like that, full of half-stories and false witnessing, and all those places and dates and consonant names. His grandfather burned a bush once, but with a stray roll-your-own he’d snuck behind the back shed while grandma was busy washing one of his grease-shirts. After the Witness left the man in the hat burned one of his pencils in a grassfire in the copse back of the mile-fence, then stomped the burnt up lead and wood into the dirt with the heel of his boot. He witnessed very little of importance after that, or chose not to remember whether he had or not. Fear does that to a young boy, more than a Bible or a snake handler with one thumb and a missing eye.

Blotches and Flay

The midday sun cut a furrow in the man in the hat’s head, just below his hairline and above his brow. As it was ten past eight, he stropped his razor against the scabbard of his trousers, and holding his face in the palm of his left hand ran the razor a hairs-width from his face. When he was a boy a Jehovah’s Witness told him that shaving encouraged hair growth, so if he wanted smooth skin he best put off shaving until he was well into his twenties. The man in the hat, thinking this incurably stupid, and having little time for witnessing and handing out pamphlets, shaved until his skin was red, and then applied a balm that claimed to do away with irritableness, flaying and blotches. The Jehovah’s Witness left behind a Bible, a wooden pencil case and three dollars in nickels when he left to go witnessing again. He stayed in town for a fortnight preparing pamphlets and waiting for the shoemaker to remove a nail from the heel of his shoe. He had to shift his pamphleteer’s bag from one hip to the other, mindful of the nail in his shoe, leaving him little time for homilies and witnessing. He claimed that Birkenstocks with Mayflower buckles were for the modest, preferring a two-eyelet loafer with perforated wingtips and calfskin liners.

The Two Berbers

These are the times in between, the not quite days, the days left out and forgotten. He lived in the days in between, those days that never amount to anything. There are days that go unnoticed, remain outside. The man in the hat lived in such days, too many to remember. When the shamble leg man told him about the tortoise shell, which he did the next time they met, he said, ‘I’ve seen my fair share of porch roofs’. To which the shamble leg man replied, ‘me too, but I’ve forgotten most of them, or so I remember.’ The shamble leg man told the man in the hat that he knew a Berber who shaved two-by-fours into toothpicks. The man in the hat told the shamble leg man that he, too, knew a Berber, but this one made sailing ships out of toothpicks and ate nothing but tinned sardines on dry toast. Both men acknowledged the other, and shaking hands went about their business, the one to buy sardines, the other to find the Berber who made toothpicks out of two-by-fours. Such are the days in between that amount to nothing, and even if they did, would be quickly forgotten.

Tortoise Shell

The year his grandfather gave him the fifty cent piece the shamble leg man found a tortoise shell latticed into the sewer grating behind the aqueduct. It was emerald green with flecks of opal and brittle round the edges where it had run up against the wire fencing. He kicked it with his boot, releasing a hackling of flies that have woven themselves into the soft underbelly. He kicked it again and the flies scattered, a coil of intestine snaking round his ankles.

Nana Mossoro

Night fell on the shamble leg man’s head. He felt the pressure building up in his ears, the stirrups hardening, calcium pressing in on his ear drum. There was much in the world he didn’t want to hear, like bawling children or old people complaining. He cared little for symphonies and choral arrangements, detested opera and jazz, flugelhorns or anything played on a trombone or alto-sax. He hated Edith Piaf and Nana Mossoro, and men who used pocket combs and hair salves. An elm tree grew behind the Waymart. An oak tree grew beside the apothecary. Three bushes grew next to the grocers. A hedge grew along side the aqueduct. A blue spruce flourished in front of the post office. The shamble leg man counted the change in his pocket, three dimes, two nickels, seven pennies and a fifty cent piece his grandfather had given to him when he was twelve.

The Surplus Value of Rainwater

The alms woman sat in the rain with her tongue out wishing she was somewhere else. As she had nowhere else to go she stayed put, calculating the rate of precipitation against the surplus value of rainwater. When she tired of this, she did pluses and minuses and divided roots into fractions. When she tired of this, she recalculated the surplus value of rainwater, counting out the dividends in her head. Her thoughts crowed in the part of her brain that processed mathematics and common sense. She remembered her uncle Jim cleaving his arms around her like snakes, his breath bitter with pipe smoke and humbugs. His porcelain eye was wet, even though the ducts had dried up and the socket was pushed inwards. The sky cawed at her, a black crow with yellow eyes that follow her every move, even when she sat still doing fractions and calculations in her head. Her uncle Jim lost a finger whetting a grass scythe, a spurt of blood stinging his good eye. He tamped his pipe with the nub end, the one he kept on a string attached to his shirt pocket. He had no mind for fractions, square roots or common sense. He preferred mumbly pegs and cards, things a man could do without having to think too hard or pretend he could read.

Sty-gate

Bailing Wire

He pulled the spliced end of rope through the crown and fastened it to the halter. With his free hand he swung the felling-hammer over his hip and across his chest, snagging the flap of his shirt pocket with the claw-end, the shirt grandmamma had washed and pressed for him the night before. He hankered down, freed his right hand and swiped the felling-hammer across the top of the cow’s head, taking it out at the knees and hobbling it to the barn wood floor, its head split clear down the middle. Grandpapa never once made any excuses for the felling-hammer, even when he missed the mark and shored off the side of a cow’s head, or it took two swings to bring the animal down. The man in the hat never felt the need to fell dogs, even when the hunger ate away at his belly like a cancer. He remembered his grandfather yarning bailing wire around wet hide and the smell of hurried death and fright. He used catgut to shore off the weight-bags, flaps of skin and muscle settling to the bottom. He sold the innards to a pig farmer who lived beyond the one mile fence. He ground them with millet and dry suet, heaping bucket-loads of it over the hopper and into the sty pen. He preferred the lower guts and bowl as they stiffened the blend, making it easier to hoist over the sty-gate. The man in the hat’s grandfather used the money from the weigh-bags to buy whisky and Indian shag, and rock candy for the children that came round to watch him fell cattle. The pig farmer traded his manure for credit at the grocer’s, where his wife bought food, winter blankets and lantern oil. The man in the hat never spoke to the pig farmer, and never once saw him smile or unlock his jaw.

Felling-hammer

Grandpapa rolled shag and tuck that he bought from the K-Mart across from the Waymart. He tamped the shag slaving it between the gummy fold of the paper with his thumbs. The paper stuck to his bottom lip, a clot of blood and skin poled to the shag-end. His dentures clewed the tissue around his lips, giving him a clownish look, his cheeks bellowed with smoke. The man in the hat’s grandfather wore crepe-soled boots with metal catches. He wore chain mail gloves with railheads sewn into the palms to engage a better grip on the felling-hammer, which was swung over the hip and across the front of the chest in one unbroken parry, ensuring a clean even cut back. The man in the hat’s grandfather stood knee-deep in gore-house offal, his waders bled through to the lining. He never once blinked an eye or winced, as he was too busy correcting his swing or rebalancing his footing. He preferred the older cattle to the greenlings, as they felled easier and lost breath quicker. He wore a woolen cap with earflaps to keep the bone and gore from liming his head.

The Strep is Upon Us

There’s no such thing as double-knots and thrombosis, or shoes with colic. These are images of someone else, a person with too-tight shoes and hobnailed feet. I regret to inform you that the strep is upon us and accounts for much nausea and poor stitching. Poor mama aside, these are things that tighten my throat, round the collar and up into the shoehorn of my breastplate, a double-knotted ascot that cinches and nips. Grandma stove the Crown Royal bag in the closet beneath a brigand of shoes and leggings. For safe keeping, she said, but we suspected it was to keep grandpapa from stealing pages of the Bible for roll-your-owns and toothpicks.

Grandad's Rickets

The moon is like salted cheese, a Richford or Blue, perhaps a Camembert or Brie, thought the man in the hat. I prefer Jesus milk in my mourning coffee, ashes to ashes, a creamery of sin and contrition, and poor mama stitching together hems and cuffs and seams that wouldn’t stay shut. I have things to do today, he thought, too many to account for or remember on such short notice. Poor mama would remember, as she always did, reminding me when to brush my teeth and how to double-knot my shoes. She said the colic was coming, and if I weren’t careful I’d get the strep throat, which would have me bedridden and full of aches and thrombosis. Granddad’s rickets put him at odds with God and prayer and reading the Bible that my grandma kept in a Crown Royal bag next to the bed.

Castor Oil and Apple Skins

The elderly woman rebalanced herself and went about her market. The shamble leg man watched her disappear up the sidewalk, her handbag clutched to her chest; his thoughts on corrugated skin, castor oil and legs rubbed clean with ointments and soaves. The pool ball headed man skipped down the street, stilts striking the asphalt like diving rods, his legs bucked and crabbed inwards. The shamble leg man recalled eating applesauce stewed in a double-boiler with cinnamon and allspice, his grandmother pinking the skins off the simmer with a fork, the meat falling away from the cores like flayed skin. His mother gave him castor oil for colic, pressing the curved end of the spoon against the roof of his mouth. She claimed it went down easier that way, but it stung the insides of his mouth and made him feel clammy and out of sorts.

The Stilted Man

This is tedium, thought the shamble leg man, this not quite being anything or anywhere. A man with a pool ball head scramble passed on high stilts affixed to his trousers with brads and twill. His legs bucked at the knees and crabbed inwards. The pool ball headed man rubbed his leg with the flat of his hand, corseting to one side like a flagstaff. An elderly woman with a spoiled apple face lost her balance and faltered to the sidewalk, her handbag clutched to her chest. The stilted man shinnied over her, his face pawned to the left, clacking his stilts together like castanets as he went.

Lucien Freud

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Freud at Work

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Lucien Freud

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Lucien Freud

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Freud at Work

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Freud at Work

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Freud at Work

FREUD AT WORK

Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson http://www.hh-h.com/exhibitions.htm

Plums and Shale

The harridan’s sister, Flora, had Dalmatian skin and a birthmark in the shape of a thumbprint on her forehead just above her eye. She spoke Esperanto and ate over-ripe plums and gypsum, her teeth yellowed and frail from the stones. The alms man hated the harridan’s sister, and made no bones about it. He liked plums and shale, slivered into knife-size shims, and found her fondness for gypsum and soft plums distasteful.

The Moments in Between (for Mary)

in the chattel of your hair, fingers touch unspoken words, of skin, of breath, a sigh uttered, an ache to be quelled, and I whisper your name, a poem, the ache of untouched skin


a tangle of blue sky, a lost child playing in the willow of your hair, and I reach out for your hand, russet with cold and fallen leaves

Her Mother's Sewing Box

These are the moments in between, the ones yet to be. She had an overbite that cut into the crop of her jaw, a sinewy colossus that made her appear sideways and off-centre. The harridan wore frocks stitched from burlap sacs she’d found in the dustbin behind the haberdasher’s. She hemmed and cross-stitched odd strips of broadcloth with the bone needle she’d stolen from her mother’s sewing box, the same one she kept a hatcheck stub and a quail’s foot in. A taffeta dress; a broach with a cameo-face and a swath of pale blue linen, these are the things, cross-stitched and hemmed in between.

Odd Nerdrum

http://www.nerdrum.com/

Odd Nerdrum

http://www.nerdrum.com/

Odd Nerdrum

http://www.nerdrum.com/

Odd Nerdrum

http://www.nerdrum.com/

Odd Nerdrum

http://www.nerdrum.com/

Olga Sinclair

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Antonio Bonilla

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Rafael Trelles

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Delmer Mejía

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Vladimir Cora

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Pablo Weisz-Carrington

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Claudio Luchina

http://www.lacgallery.com/index.htm

Switch Off the Current

Thanks, old chap, the man in the hat cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you? The shamble legged man frowned and clacked the light switch off with the heel of his hand, the one he used for rubbing balms and soaves into the rickets of his leg. I regret to tell you that I have the rickets, a bowing in the seams of my legs. Such as it is I will be unable to attend your birthday party, much as I would like to. The man in the hat felt that all births were the same, careening headfirst feet twisted into whalers’ bind, thighs wet with exhaustion and bad thoughts. His own mother pushed him out like a skink liver, an unwanted organ fen with wither and rot. His father, his hands reedy with tar, sat in the car heaving quarts of home-brew that he kept hidden in an apple crate at the back of the garage. The man in the hat thought that if he could conjure up someone worse off than himself his thoughts would stop, even were he to think himself senseless in the process. So by conjuring the shamble legged man he could throw himself headfirst into the day, his thoughts indifferent to rickets, palsy and clacking.

Chilean Nights

For some writing is a reawakening. When I think of Roberto Bolano I think of a cold Chilean night. When a writer writes he or she lives within the moment, away from a voice that faults and encourages penitence. Perhaps all writing is a form of penitence, contrition, an apology for sins never committed. If this is so, and I believe it to be so, then the writer is a penitent, a waking child who survives, flourishes, when the inside becomes the outside, the hidden the revealed. But this self-disclosure has a cost, and many are unable to shoulder the weight of contrition, the apology for sins never committed. A child believes, takes to heart a parent's voice, even when the absurdity of that voice is deafening. It is from this very deafness that the inside becomes the outside, the hidden the revealed, the voice bellows and cries. For some writing is a reawakening, a revelation, a wailing into the night.

Roberto Bolano (1953-2003)

Happy Birthday James

The man in the hat awoke and ate a peameal sandwich with raw onion and Macquarie’s mustard. ‘INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI’ he said to no one in particular, ‘DEI ALTARE AD INTROIBO and good riddance to you all’. He felt the rickets in his legs again this morning. He much preferred mock chicken, sometimes Porker’s bologna or a mild capriole, but the Hasidic butcher where he bought his meats refused to sell anything cloven or un-bled. The man in the hat’s father ate pork sausage and tripe, wingtips of blood clowning his face. He once ate a cow’s head, the ears curled like prepuces, a dead fly balled in the seam of its eye. His father told him that gypsies ate calf’s testicles, boiling the scrota in the same pot as the potatoes and cabbage, a placental hash that encouraged vitality and good hair growth. ‘GOD BE WITH YOU ’he hollered, ‘DIEUS EX PLURIBUS IN HASIDIA’. He shook the worms from his legs, a mischievous grin on his otherwise dower face, and climbed the stoop leading up from his lean-to.

Spent Matches and Sulfur

She hooked her legs round his neck and wailed into the trove of his ear. The gypsy woman smelled of orange roughie, creel and roe. The heels of her feet were bricked with calluses, a plagiary of hard skin that caused her to keel to one side like an abandoned ship. He tried to push her from his chest but she heeled upside his kidneys, so he shook his head from side to side hoping she’d declutch and leave him be. When this didn’t work, he boxed her ears and whispered, ‘you gypsies are a miserable bunch, all this wailing and plagiary', and threw her to the ground, an odor like spent matches and sulfur bricking the air.