...

The death notebooks were laid in state between sheaves of accounts in the studio’s corner—and they were blessed by long tongues of light that slipped between the slats of the window-blind, to change their general hue. From night to day, from night to day, the death notebooks lay in state, at once mouldering, and accruing the gifts of a shut room; sources engendered by time’s advance settled in the paper’s weave. A continual torque was applied to the words. Each passing day registered in the death notebooks, the accumulating years were added; years that, having acted outside, crept into the room through its cracks and took shapes between the lines, talking in turn as they multiplied, their slated successors close behind. Discovered, distributed, carried now to a grove and now to a bench and now on a galloping train, they speak when read of the crying of their author, taking in their design her teary smears—the coughing out of half-capsuled words caught in their very breaking. The reader of the death notebooks at once knows dying, and his cells, her cells, fall out of jamb. Each cell indicates—the author’s evidence—seconded by each intervening year—“We will not press on,” they indicate. The reader may stop to consider, forced to consider assent.

Appendices On The Colon Of The Work

1. RESOLVED; THAT sewing together a collection of momentary enthusiasms and intuitive forays works as a means toward efficacious structures; that further activity at a certain remove joins such elaborated structures together at their points of concord; that the resulting superstructures function mainly by means of solid concatenation--that is, a baroque and wayward lump-nesting of woven enthusiasms and forays.

To misapply this sentiment, please see the models of Daina Taimina.

2. RESOLVED; THAT a name is best treated as an implement, since any observer will treat the assigned name as such (being an asset, a liability, apt, inapt, and so on); further, that adoption of a scrupulously fitted appellation is the best and shortest way to a more whole self (inner and outer). Mulled mauls of the present author's given name: ethnifications, plays on pre-existing lexical content, wholesale abandonment.

3. RESOLVED; THAT if one intends to treat of the relation between architecture and landscape architecture, one would do well to keep the "military crest" well in mind; and to keep at hand armies to move between "CAMPAIGN" and "QUARTERS". Remember, as the year stiffens and slackens, as they take to battle and flee to shelter: "CAMPAIGN" and "QUARTERS".

4. RESOLVED; THAT "the stoat may savage the shoat; but the serval shall avenge them both".

5. RESOLVED; THAT jackets should be fitted with single thin straps, with which they may be slung neatly over the arm (if the weather should take a favorable turn). Interested patent-seekers may contact me at this address.

6. RESOLVED; THAT the inherited lexical misdirection in regard to a royal's bodily person rankles; though it must be admitted that assigning all ownings to a separated and half-approachable majesty is a fine way to dignify said ownings (precisely through disassociation with the particular person and coupling with the held title).

7. RESOLVED; THAT dance is the proper medium for imparting majesty as immanent in the body; or then again for destroying such sentiments utterly.

8. RESOLVED; THAT the very worst thing, after so long of mulling what it is that you deserve, may be the thought that there is nothing particular that you deserve at all, one way or another.

"O' Sailor"

"Hello, sailor boy,
In from the sea!
Hello, sailor,
Come with me!

Come on drink cognac.
Rather have wine?
Come here, I love you.
Come and be mine.

Lights, sailor boy,
Warm, white lights.
Solid land, kid.
Wild, white nights.

Come on, sailor.
Out o' the sea.
Let's go, sweetie!
Come with me."

Langston Hughes, "Port Town"

C. 1860

"If I shouldn't be alive
When the Robins come,
Give the one in Red Cravat,
A Memorial crumb.

If I couldn't thank you,
Being fast asleep,
You will know I'm trying
With my Granite lip!"

-Emily Dickinson

Urbanism (Not Urbanism)

"NAVIDAD" URBANISM
Housing units go lot-to-lot, piteously pleading for "posada" (shelter). They are turned away time and time again by regretful local authorities. When their stock of hope is nigh-exhausted, they finally happen upon a worthy hospitaller who will heartily answer their call, and extend heris invitation.

SHELL-BEAN URBANISM
Encased by a steep snake-wall of solid kudzu, a line of tiny standalone specialty boutiques waits to satisfy the adventurous shopper. Suggested retail lines: designer housewares, specialty grocery, antiques.

ZITTEL URBANISM
If the suburbs are planets for the star-city, it follows that there must be asteroids as well. Erect among the far foothills small communities, lone ranches, and miniscule shelters, furnished with an absolute bare minimum of amenities. Hide dedicated visionaries here, couched in idiosyncratic design, clinging to steep grades--and watch the pilgrims come flocking. Also known as "Last Starfighter" urbanism.

SWEATER URBANISM
Put on a comfortable sweater and venture out on an average day. The sweater will lend you an air of trustworthiness and allow you to successfully approach any passerby you may meet with. Don't pass out fliers, don't make demands--just extend a hand. Community will be forged. Note: sweater cannot be black.

CONTROVERSY URBANISM
A series of electronic bulletin boards are erected at street level (roughly blackboard sized, black-on-green LED), one standing at the central crossing for each four-block area. They will broadcast fabricated controversies loosely predicated on standard neighborhood issues (an untoward odor emanating from below the hardware store; an epidemic of thieving magpies). Residents will congregate and carry on productive arguments based on the presented scenarios.

PLANT-CELL URBANISM
A planned community without streets, only a grid of variably-sized lots enclosed by fences. These fences appear to be composed of standard planking, but are outfitted with outlandishly advanced gates regulated by a complex series of protocols that follow each homeowner's personal preferences. To ensure free passage through neighbors' lots, residents must cultivate goodwill, or else risk an escalating loss of mobility. Kindly consult Deleuze's formulation of the "access society" for more information.

INTESTINAL URBANISM
Society is reconfigured into winding linear tracts. Residents spend their lives migrating forward--inhabiting each zone for a set time, and then being forcibly moved on. Wild whorls are visible from space, regulating land and motion.

Edits Pt. 1

A good edit preserves the traits it obscures. That is, it is a blanket covering a sleeping form.

"Crepuscular Boys"

The proposed video game would be something like this:

There are two players. They are human but it is difficult to discern anything further since the entire area they explore is enveloped in near pitch black (a midnight blue, I suppose). Most contours of foreground elements are discernable, if frustratingly sketchy. A fair number of stars and a sliver of moon are visible in the sky, along with an occasional plane in flight.

The playing area is defined by a loosely crescent-shaped roadway; the outside edge is roughly 3/4 of a mile long, the inside closer to a 1/2 mile. The outside edge is a sandy path paralleling a predominantly beachy seacoast (some rocks crop up to the south); the inner edge constitutes a portion of a local two-lane highway. The game begins near the northerly joining point of the two edges, slightly advanced down the outside edge. The game has no discernible end.

While the gameplay is largely of a piece, there are a few discrete areas to encounter. (These are not marked by thresholds of any sort beyond those supplied by the players' innate faculty of discrimination.) As one moves southerly and then northerly, one encounters the areas in this order:

• a snack bar (inaccessible) and some freestanding shower stalls (accessible, but no running water)


• a series of six small picnic areas, with tables, benches, and primitive grills, carved into the brush by the seaside


• a playground composed of one swingset (eight swings total) and one jungle jym, likewise carved into the brush by the seaside


• a large parking lot, roughly two hundred spaces


• an access road, linking the highway with the beach, with two entry booths (both inaccessible)


• a house by the side of the highway (inaccessible)


• a large motel (single facility, no outbuildings) by the side of the highway (inaccessible)
  

Areas outside the crescent area are blocked finally and definitely. Generally the blocking is implied by thick foliage; in the case of the termini of the highway or the ocean itself, further movement is simply disallowed, with no explanatory text.

The two players are equipped with health bars of a hundred units each; when all of the units have been expended, they will die. However, the possibility of being injured is exceedingly slim. A fall from a sufficient height will do it; however, there are only two places to fall from (two palette-stacks mysteriously left in the playground) and each fall saps a mere one or two health units. There is also a gigantic axe-toting minotaur (similarly sporting a hundred-unit health bar) that appears one time in thirty in the access road area; there is a slight possibility that he will injure the player, but most likely he will kill the player outright.

If a player dies, there is no possibility of resurrection. Furthermore, the other player cannot move from the scene of the death (making a double death, in the event of minotaur attack, rather likely). The game must be turned off first if further play is desired.

The actions of the players are chiefly limited to running, jumping, and item use. There is, it must be said, a certain paucity of usable items in the game. One can pick up a few pieces of driftwood on the beach, and toss them around. One player cannot injure the other, so driftwood-killing is not a possibility. Occasionally a sea skate will wash up (a one in fifty chance). There is a soda machine just outside the motel that will dispense cans of cola for 75 cents each. (A total of $1.85 can be found hidden in out-of-the-way places.) Drinking a cola will replenish twenty health units. Any of the above items can be thrown at the minotaur, for one to two points of damage; killing the minotaur, however, is out of the question, since his health points are regenerated every time he leaves the screen for twenty seconds or more.

The most exciting aspect of the game involves a pair of futuristic motorcycles leant against the house by the highway. These can be mounted and ridden by the two players. One even features a working machine gun, although as before one player cannot injure the other. The machine gun cannot be used to kill the minotaur either, since the motorcycles are confined to the highway and cannot enter the access road area. The machine gun will, however, create wonderfully realistic damage to the surrounding foliage and the walls of the house and motel, and will never run out of bullets. (Unfortunately, due to programming restraints only a limited amount of damage can be done.)

How to regale yourself within the constraints of the game? Look at whatever scenery you can discern. Race on foot, or on the motorcycles. Tempt fate by attempting to encounter the minotaur. Wait for passing planes and jump up and down.

12 Unasked-For Suggestions For A Proposed Prime-Time Soap Opera

1.
Include at least two heroes who work at cross-purposes. Not that they are opposed, or antagonistic, but simply that they have mutually exclusive goals. A nice sort of affective suspension results.

2.
A five member action-grouping, as follows:

• The bland leader (for projection purposes)


• The melancholy second-in-command (the acceptable face of a rejected "other")


• The woman (a sublimated sex object, resolutely bubbly)


• The big man (the doltish foil, implicitly the despised flesh-body)


• The pixie (a memory of the infant self, indeterminate gender and all)

Younger audiences respond well to this configuration. Their elders will enjoy the quote.

3.
Exclude family ties as a working motivation. As an armature, a set of initial relationship positions, fine...but no intelligent viewer can be expected to sympathize with ancestries, or with rigid links that interfere with individual initiatives.

4.
Mine the great literary devil-visits...Karamazov, naturally, and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Any interesting person will be visited by interesting devils now and again.

5.
A conscious play of spatial concerns. Take it from a specialist, landscape is paramount! Any expression can be safely removed from the mouths of the characters and placed into production design. If you're planning on projecting into the near future, make a future out of untoward conjunctions rather than Swiss design. Likewise, even the movement of actors through space can serve as a tracery of allegorical propositions.

6.
Satyr-plays. Obsessively re-enact the main concerns of the narrative on a humorized micro-scale. No, I don't mean Johnny playing with a cap-gun as his mother ponders a loaded revolver. You can do better than that.

7.
Carefully scale all plot interventions. Consciously under-size or ill-fit the ostensible concerns--deaths, financial troubles, mutilation--in order to retain the essential physics of the narrative.

8.
If dealing with corporations, here's a thought--a corporation uncomfortable with its own heroics. A corporation that does good out of strict necessity, not caring to publish the fact.

9.
Characters who are physical travesties. They could at some far point be shocked into beauty; they may have already been altered irrevocably from their former beauty. For the moment, they are travesties and there is nothing to be done about it.

10.
Avoid a moral or realist take on drug use, instead striving to duplicate the moral-realist matrix of contradictory reactions and opinions typically present in the minds of drug users.

11.
Those currently seeking to bring the telenovela to the Anglophones plan to abandon the most vital attributes of the genre. Please remedy this and give these Anglophones what they really want: strongly emotive acting and reams of extraneous plot material.

12.
Plot for indelible acts and images, each wholly singular, rather than elaborated verbal confrontations. As characters meet, they silently fight and mate in ways heretofore unimagined.

Life With Menilmontant

“Menilmontant, why did you ski on discarded lengths of gutter?”
“Menilmontant, why did you golf with an iron compounded of stick, tin can, and twine?”
“Menilmontant, why did you at-bat on a field based by magazines, bounded by couches, swinging to knock out a pewter keepsake?”
“’Cause Papa told me to, my dear.”

Retractile Tourism

Jersey recently took some time to acquaint me with the wonderful Gowanus Canal and the quaint structures that grace it. Chief among them is the famed Carroll Street Bridge:



A mere twist of the neck and you catch this view:



Jersey had heard that the silage visible here was now con-dominial; a recent number of the New Yorker, however, appears to indicate that hootenannies are held there. Won't someone knock on the door and let me know for sure either way?

Humours

We arrived at this schema over the course of a long May night and several Rosicrucians (one part rosewater, two parts gin), deep in the KirWash neighborhood of Somerville.

Enjoy:

bile--brake fluid
blood--coolant
phlegm--transmission fluid
black bile--motor oil

Open Letter To The IIST

1.
One does no favors to the "infinitely small thing" by making it monumental--honor it by making it part of a landscape's legitimate physics (functionalizing it as a part in a machined assembly, or 'storicizing it as a narrative player).

2.
To increase a screw, then, do not blow it up to 6 feet--draw a diagram of its workaday action (repose in a mouldering box; cycloid patterns when kicked on the street; suitable locations for its use in the writer's home).

3.
A particular is never straightforward--contrary to geometry, only tight convolutions can join to build a working simplicity.

Specials At Johnny's

"Tide 4.99
Bumble Bee .78
Dancing Bull 7.99"

Local Marvels Of The Urban Fabric

1.

Pet Architecture has made it to the States.




2.

The Porterhouse is all well and good, but there are more subtle structural wonders.



3.
Come stay awhile on...the Owl Farm.

"They Queue All Day Like Dragons Of Disgust"

Volumes have been written about the flagpole of the Zocalo--but won't a simple picture suffice? (Courtesy Mr. Chop.)

Mail Call!

Reader "Crallspace" responded to the list in "Cornu" (way back on March 23) with an item of his own:

"5. Microstoria is a great minimal electronics project, containing half of Mouse on Mars and half of Oval. Their tones and buzzes are likened to groups like TV POW and their following has everyone from scientists to junkies.

---just adding my number to the list. Found you via a similar "favorite music" in the profile. Microstoria is awesome!"

I'm afraid you're on the wrong track. I'm not talking about "Microstoria" the band (they sound interesting, though!), but the work of Italian composers Piero Calpini, Barbara Turcoletti, Ambrosio Scherma, et al. Their works, for the most part short, flowery art songs paired with enigmatic quasi-fictional spoken texts, were theorized in the early part of the Twentieth Century as a sort of romantic leftist rejoinder to the Futurists. Such works are commonly referred to as..."microstoria".

Thanks for reading, Dan!

On a more serious note, reader Mr. Chop writes:

"Actually, I remember the center fielder fell down catching a fly ball and someone popped up a bunt. So much for fundamentals. I realize now that when I made the comment, I was simply repeating what people say about the WNBA: it's more of a team game than what you find in the thuggish NBA, etc. But women softball players definitely hustle. And group huddle."

Mr. Chop is referring, of course, to April 2's "Fast-Pitch". It's true: when men deign to take notice of women's sport at all, it is either to essentialize it as an ideal "other" that remediates the failures of men's sport through "feminine" modes of being (collaboration vs. show-offing, polite striving vs. self-satisfied entitlement), or to sexualize it sub rosa through the surreptitious operations of the male gaze.

I apologize for any errors in this regard and wish to simply state my support for any and all efforts to fully enforce Title IX.

Moving along, reader "Jen X" writes in regard to April 5's "Chapulines" post:

"wait, what does that mean? and if you blog less how will i pass the boring moments at work?"

Jen, me and "the boys" are still working this all out. It's important to do what's right for all of us.

If I have been prevented from posting on a given day, I would recommend that you:

1. Draw a picture
2. Chew a stick of gum
3. Sing a song
4. Look out the window for a while

These activities will occupy the same amount of time and prove equally diverting.

In regard to the same post, reader Elizabeth has this to say:

"Yay for eating grasshoppers!!! But honestly, I hope they're not still in your GI tract...."

I hope by now it's clear that they are. It's not all bad, really. Elizabeth also notes:

"Why so much security on your comments!?! I don't know if it posted my first comment or not! I'm going to keep using exclamation points until I find out!!!! [shaking fist]"

I want you all to know that this level of security is, in fact, strictly necessary. I wonder if you have any idea what that's like.


...In any case, your continued support is appreciated.

"The Fence That Skirts The Tree"

Some thoughtless folks build fences right through a tree. When the time comes for the fence to go, the extrication is painful, costly, and time-consuming. Here is a saner alternative.

Chapulines

A notice to our readership:

The grasshoppers living in our editor's GI tract have informed him that he is "blogging" too hard.

We will try to remedy this problem in the future by "blogging" less and "repping" more.

-Bill

I Will Abroad

"I struck the board, and cried, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I replied, My Lord."

-George Herbert, "The Collar"

Screenplay No. 2 (For Your Consideration)

Composed of shots rapidly going down a staircase. Staircase should preferably be one steep flight into a residential cellar. A sense of panic is desired, an impression of continuously falling down the stairs. Either a contraption can be devised for the camera to be pushed down the stairs in, or the cameraman can simply run down as quickly and manically as possible. Oh, a turn of some sort on the stairs is needed (an even 90 degrees would be ideal). The shots should be sequenced thusly: a shot fades in fairly quickly, at the beginning of its downstairs run. The next shot begins, fading in at the same speed, superimposed on the first image when near the end of the run. As the first shot reaches the end, it goes black for a moment and disappears. This cycles long enough to get the effect across but not long enough to become tedious; let the director exercise heris judgement. No soundtrack; B+W or poor-quality color stock.

Castafiore

"Ah! je ris de me voir
si belle en ce miroir,
Ah! je ris de me voir
si belle en ce miroir,
Est-ce toi, Marguerite, est-ce toi?
Réponds-moi, réponds-moi,
Réponds, réponds, réponds vite!
Non! Non! ce n’est plus toi!
Non...non, ce n’est plus ton visage;
C’est la fille d’un roi;
Ce n’est plus toi,
Qu’on salut au passage!
Ah s’il était ici!
S’il me voyait ainsi!
Comme une demoiselle
Il me trouverait belle, Ah!
Comme une demoiselle,
Il me trouverait belle!
Achevons la métamorphose,
Il me tarde encor d’essayer
Le bracelet it le collier!
Dieu! c’est comme une main,
Qui sur mon bras se pose! ah! ah!
Ah! je ris
de me voir si belle dans ce miroir!"

Extract From The New Revised Handbook To Valence In Anglophone Given Names

Abigail: freckled woman in disproportionately good spirits.

Benjamin: hale and hearty, strong as an oak. There is astoundingly little difference in valence between "Benjamin" and its offshoot "Ben"--perhaps "Ben" finds himself patronized a little more often?

Carrie: while the unfortunate association with telekinesis continues, the name has perhaps emerged the stronger from the ordeal. We all think a little longer before offending a "Carrie".

Damian: likewise carries a demonic tone--but only suffered as a result. "Damian" is universally supposed to be fiendish and disposed to malcontentment.

Eleanor: stately, in a word. Stateliness not being much in fashion, "Eleanor" is not much in fashion.

Frederick: distinguished, yet somehow irresponsible. "Frederick" has no doubt squandered his own best assets. Currently operating at a total disconnect from "Fred" (though not "Freddie").

Gail: not an easy name to apply to a child, for it is almost impossible to imagine a "Gail" who is not a mid-level career woman in paisley scarves.

Harold: associated particularly with the sportcoat. Even "Harry" retains something of this.

Ingrid: a deeply unattractive name universally applied to universally attractive women.

Justin: there is a rich "Justin" and a poor "Justin", but none in between. What the two share is a tendency towards an indistinct yet palpable weakness.

Katherine: imperious where "Catherine" is accomodating. The bold assertions of a "Katherine" often shade to passive-aggressivity in a "Kate".

Leonard: redolent of angularity and jaundice. As an escape from this, any "Leonard" can readily find a number of equidistant alternatives: the arthritic "Leo", the apish "Lenny", and tactiturn "Len".

Mildred: silent, appears vicious--but friendly enough if approached. No-one knows a Mildred, though everyone knows someone who knows a Mildred.

Nathan: unfortunate tendency towards obesity despite a healthy diet.

Oona: sheer feather-headed impracticality. Gains medieval cachet when spelled "Una".

Patrick: cordially disliked by his own friends, yet never goes friendless. "Pat" is worse still--but "Rick" is well-liked and nicely avoids any such problems.

Quinn: not actually a given name. Anyone claiming to be called "Quinn" has another, less fortunate given name that they will yield under intense questioning.

Roger: not overly predisposed to mate or rear progeny, and thus on the wane.

Sara: neutrality with overtones of hostile acquiescence. Adding an "h" subtracts IQ points.

Tobin: ragged t-shirts, unruly hair, a handsome face, and an unruly gut.

Ursula: psychic fragility ensures an opportunistic cycle of obscene jokes.

Victor: malodorous. Overly inclined to take his name literally.

Wanda: astonishingly few and far between considering the goodwill one can inspire.

Xavier: partakes of none of the strangeness of the "X"; a solid name with a twinge of heroism.

Yolanda: a solid mane of hair.

Zachary: beloved of his parents, neutral to the point of invisibility for anyone else. "Zach" helps somewhat, but "Zack" exacerbates the problem by removing mother-love from the equation.

Fast-Pitch

Engrossed in a women's softball game you happen to pass while strolling a park, several edifying reflections concerning "base" sports might suddenly come to you. They are hardly original--they are, perhaps, sentiments you have heard but had heretofore found no particular application for. You might marvel at the vociferous camaraderie, and note the contrast with a corps of still and spectating teammates stirred only by some particular voice. You might gape at the imposing windmill enacted by the pitcher--how that woman pitcher's furious vitality contrasts with the rangy, impassive hurl practiced by the professional male. You might spy in the flesh the "solid grasp of fundamentals" that you had not known enough to miss in the first place.

I encourage all of you to attend a local women's softball game.

Braw

"As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine today?'

'--In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain Knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

'Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pick out his bonny blue een:
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.

'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.' "

-Anonymous, "The Twa Corbies"

On Purgatory

While I'm on the subject of dreams, I'll tell you my dream about Purgatory. Purgatory, as my head would have it, is indeed leveled; instead of a screwed ramping, though, the levels are demarcated, one S.F-graded ridge on top of the next. There's quite a bit of them, too--maybe around 20? It makes for quite a mountain.

Purgatory is a city, certainly, a dense one. Many winding streets and drafty, spacious buildings that I'd date from the 18th century (not that I'm an expert). You will get modernization at several key points, mostly by retrofitting. Only light advertising. Not many people are out and about...maybe about the level of downtown Seattle early Saturday morning. All of the amenities are available, except if you want to be in a crowd, in which case I think you're out of luck.

It isn't as hard as you'd think--not really any fire or load-bearing. You have to learn lessons, which are imparted to you in any number of ingenious ways--simulated celebrities staff the cafes, for instance, and you have to take careful note of what casual pleasantries they choose to say. Why celebrities? The chance of getting to speak with them disarms you; you will take a message from them more readily, without the emotional charge speaking to an actual associate would give. Also, God is well aware that people want to talk to the famous while in the underworld; but how many times will an actual Alexander the Great consent to be trotted out? As for the lessons, I can't speak to their exact nature but I don't think there's anything as straightforward as "be charitable"; say, you buying a black-and-white frappe from Vic Morrow and him suggesting that you come by later with canned goods; the suggestions start at the far oblique, part of an exquisite battery of skillful means intended to motivate you along the path.

God will appear by various signs and wonders. Most notably, when God feels that you have finally learned the lesson of a particular level, a sort of light-phantasmagoria will appear 12 feet up and impressively report on your progress; you will then find yourself on the next level, with some more work to do.

Favorite Dreamed Landscapes (Without People)

1.
A sort of massive marine cave with some fallen little tree trunks and streams leading through it. A good place to sit and relax and not be bothered with questions.

2.
An open suburban field, the kind only used for youth sports--though about a block longer than usual. I ran a circle around it at dusk once; I had an errand to do.

3.
Another suburban field, this one directly adjoining a middle school. It was my first day, but fortunately no-one else was there. I got to roam around for a bit instead.

4.
Just the other day, I visited a wonderful airport area. Very long frontage hugging a bay; the grounds walkable somehow(?). An open hexagonal structure in three stories sat on a hexagonal island out in the bay; it was only beams and floors, no walls to speak of. Five or so planes were parked on the floors; this was, apparently, the TWA terminal.

5.
A slim clearing just off a country road, with very regular pines all about. A gingerbread-ish sort of house, the kind where all the walls are papered, sitting in it. I wasn't doing such a good job filling in the details so the impression was closer to being in a toy railroad set than being in a pine forest. (I will say that the whole was quite reminiscent of framed samplers and certain quarters of Attleboro.)

6.
An endless post-industrial neighborhood. You could leave a brownstone and walk down a street where the "industry" would increase by delightfully slight increments; sooner or later you would end up among this immense row of factories with wild high smokestacks. Brick retaining walls proliferated to an alarming degree; many pyramids of green steel piping also. Traces of grass for effect...no dandelions, though.

7.
A sort of ziggurat neighborhood whose streets would twist up and converge into one little peak after another. A bit like Worcester, with above-ground pools visible here and there among Little Tykes trucks, under-utilized boats, discarded Alexander the Grape boxes, and wonderfully excessive rib-level chain-link fencing. The continual action of grade and convergence lent a welcome air of "questing urbanity" to the otherwise prosaic proceedings.

8.
A California town where the residents had aimed for a "Mediterranean" feel and fallen wide of the mark; a piazza and its fountain had been copied with one eye shut from Tomie dePaola, while a lengthy dining arcade with Moroccan, Grecian, and Cypriot modes (complete with miniature charcoal pits) went untravelled. At night, Ionic motifs appeared around the windows and doors of downtown in dull fluorescent greens and oranges.

9.
A parched, flat desert, very red. Dwellings had been hollowed out from long, low rock formations, and fitted with bubble-windows. Inside, they were outfitted with thin rugs and spindly coffee-tables...some with geothermal baths tucked in corners. No separate rooms. The one conventional building was a convention hall...a comic book convention had just packed up and some stacks of flyers were still out here and there.

10.
A wintry day, and beachfront strips (kites, confections, five-and-tens) transplanted to the sides of an austere urban boulevard (rigorously shaped thick yew hedges, wrought iron, not much else). A fittingly austere and wintry locomotive serving as a commuter rail ran on sunken tracks down the middle of the boulevard; you could descend some rungs to board and sit in the plush white seats therein. Yes, the contrast was a little precious...on the whole still an interesting place to be.

There's A Window In My Heart

First, therefore, the precept which I conceive to be most summary towards the prevailing in fortune, is to obtain that window which Momus did require; who seeing in the frame of man's heart such angles and recesses, found fault there was not a window to look into them...

-Francis Bacon, from The Advancement Of Learning

To Crawl Beneath A Mulberry Bush

Why crawl beneath a mulberry bush? There could be several excellent reasons, mostly having to do with shelter. For instance, if it was cold and snowy and you wanted to be outside, you could crawl beneath a mulberry bush and it would be a bit warmer, and the snow would be slower to accumulate upon you. Conversely, if it was a hot day and you were mowing a lawn, you could leave the mower and crawl beneath a mulberry bush for shade. (You would, however, risk getting grass-stains on your clothes.)

The reasons need not be rational, though. Sometimes, the compulsion simply arises. At these points, you can calmly walk outside and curl yourself about the base of a mulberry bush, and lie there still and quiet. You may feel like a whip-poor-will sleeping in the fallen leaves.

Vast Spiritual Spaces

Situating yourself correctly in the dark, and seeing one electric light, it’s easy to see how the rest of the scene may proceed from what’s implied in the core of the light; that the arrangements of buildings outside it are developments on the actual constitution of one birthing light.

On A Proposed Sound, An Advance On "Concretes"; Its Implements And Practitioners Described

1.
PORTAMENTS—tools for wholesale changes in audible groups, along alarmingly single vectors. As simple tones are carried and changed, so are any more evolved tone pictures.

2.
DESK MEDICS—who take those precious “narratives” in sound and sew at them ‘til they’re whole and unseamed. Attacks and decays pared and sanded; so as to result, some rays of light, some grit on the ground. They will do all that is possible to ensure that the listener does not hear an urban, tropical, or otherwise-classed landscape. The listener will be forced to concede that they are hearing something composed of real events which does not exactly mirror any one picture that could be seen. A whole not droning, not surrealistic, nor after any other manner—instead exactly isomorphic to soul of the desk medic on duty.

3.
A Messaienic felicity, whereby the heads of divers birds poke unannounced through color-swaths.

4.
If painting, having vacillated by turns between—The Event! The Texture! The Conception!!—can find itself resting gaily on the interstice between the three...surely music, having navigated the same options in a different order, can find similar couching. So we have a mix field, where use-elements (wheat), useless-elements (burr) working-elements (bees), and pure elements (bloom) gang into a solid ‘scape, to be pushed and pored through.

5.
To example it—an exemplary work could want to recall a plum, in that a) the plum is (mostly) geometrically sound, b) that the plumskin bites, but the bulk of the thing is mellow, and c) that the plum recalls a human referent, the bruise with its mash beneath.

Cornu

1. The shofar is mighty and capacious, a flock-call bearing such heft as to forcibly re-constitute all spatial groupings as moveable herds.

2. The alpenhorn is long out of necessity; the meters it utilizes translate, via the intervention of conditioned lungs, into a bridging which seconds the linear kilometer-jumps between alpen peaks. The essential comedy of the alpenhorn, which is wholly consonant with the comedy of other local folkways, is of a more mysterious (and, daresay, ineffable) provenance.

3. The coxswain's horn both urges the rowing-team further and shouts the banks of the river aside. Anyone happening by might well wonder at the utility of this badgering bantam who can only shout on the effort, hindering and not visibly furthering the tense haul. Also, in its current iteration the coxswain's horn resembles a ghastly paper cup-enabled parody of the already-ghastly apparatus of a court reporter.

4. The cheerleader's horn is considered by most experts in the field to be chiefly decorative. HOWEVER, placing an amplified microphone at the narrower end results in a peculiarly pleasing form of feedback--a comical sort of hooting.

Five Places I Will Live When Humanity Has Been Decimated

1. METRO NORTH COMMUTER RAIL TRANSFORMER SHACK, WHITE PLAINS, NY

Cozy, brick, ample shade...a wilderness of smooth stones to calm tense feet. Regular visits from bindlestiffers following the tracks. I'll invite them in and we will enjoy hand-gathered tisanes together.

2. DRAWBRIDGE CONTROL ROOM, PORTLAND, ME

The view of the bay will transport me to a cheery and mythic 1940's of busy little tugboats and friendly-faced bulks of steam, whistling longshoremen in coveralls, brick reds, and more brick reds. I will make long and careful study of the manuals left behind, hoping to raise the old girl up myself. Probably won't work out. Calming sound of a few patched-together motorbikes puttering about at night.

3. COIT TOWER, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

I will gather up some afghans, drape myself in them, and brood at the very top. Will mournfully sing "Lights" to the seals below and mourn the glory that was.

4. SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY, SEATTLE, WA

In the course of a long and fruitful day, I will locate a Rascal with some charge left and ride the ramps. Yes, I might tear up some books...I'm justified after all this time. None of this Burgess Meredith horsehockey for me, though--I'll be sure to put my glasses away in a case!

5. MEXICAN PAVILION, EPCOT CENTER, ORLANDO, FL

Sure, this will be a popular destination for survivors. But my pipian will be better than theirs and thus I will be entitled to this prime piece of real estate.

The Star Of The Show

"The culmination of the summer, for Cage, and for many who were there, was the performance of Satie's short play Le Piege de Meduse (The Ruse of Medusa), which had only been performed once before. Poet M.C. Richards translated the text, and Cage performed the music. Buckminster Fuller, whom Cage and Cunningham had befriended, was enlisted to play the lead role of Baron Medusa, with Elaine de Kooning as his daughter, Frisette. Cunningham danced in the role of 'a costly mechanical monkey,' and student William Schrauger was Frisette's suitor. Willem de Kooning painted the sets. Fuller, although able to talk captivatingly for hours on end, froze when faced with the prospect of acting in conjunction with this extravagant gathering of geniuses. Nothing could deliver him from his crippling panic, until Arthur Penn was called upon to direct the production. Penn, a student, already had experience with Stanislavsky's theories before coming to Black Mountain and eventually taught a popular class at the college in 1947 using the Russian master's An Actor Prepares as the textbook. Realizing Fuller was afraid of making a fool of himself, Penn himself proceeded to do the most ridiculous things he could imagine. Suddenly, when Fuller saw this, and everyone laughing at Penn, it unlocked him, and from then on he was the star of the show."

-from Vincent Katz, Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art

First Chapters: "Den Of Thieves"

1.

Hi, I'm Den Greeley (the Den is short for Denise). I've been in trouble before...but never as bad as this!

Right now I'm hiding in a basement and there are some guys tearing my aunt's house apart. They're looking for a packet of really special seeds that a certain agribusiness doesn't want anyone else to have. The guys don't know that I'm here and that I've got the seeds in my jacket pocket--at least not yet. They think I'm just some dumb 5th grade girl--but I happen to be the dumbest 5th grade girl to have ever solved 8 MYSTERIES here in Montclair so far, single-handedly!

OK, I had some help from my principal, Doctor Pinkwater; my best friend, Hetchy; and my cat, Fitz. And I'm going to need their help now more than ever! Hetchy is on his way now on his bicycle, and if our plan works those agri-thugs are going to get more trouble than they bargained for!

[...]

More Brief Fancies

1.
Two ideas for future compact discs:

-An anthology of the greatest hip-hop skits of all time.
-An anthology of "big finishes" from live rock songs. You know what I mean: it's 1988, Eric Clapton and his band wrap up a cooking version of "Crossroads" and top off the excitement like so: "Dum do dum do dum do, do do do...(drums clatter away on their own for a bit)...DUM DUMMMMMM...(drums clatter away a bit more)...DUM!"

Garner around 80 of each of these things (shouldn't be hard), edit them out of their respective contexts, and string them together.

2.
"Oh, mailboxes are the loneliest, loneliest things...people just throw things at them and walk away...their friend is the mail carrier, and he steals from them...Oh!"
-Joanie

3.
My friends Will and Joanie are a riot. This weekend we had a great time! We played foursquare and went to "Tacos Lupita" for pupusas. Then we watched a movie, "Explorers". Cute kids!!!

4.
PROPOSAL FOR A THROWBACK VIDEO STORE
Find a cheap storefront and create your own independent video store; give it an outlandish name like JAZZY'S VIDEO or RAZZY'S VIDEO or something of the like. Advertise occasionally in the community paper, but NOT the main local paper or (God forbid) alternative weekly. Keep three employees, all male--outfit them with brown polo shirts and name pins. Use an annotated photo of Marge Schott in the back room to make clear that the dress code precludes facial hair or piercings. Bind all of your videos in improbably bulky plastic sheathes. Decorate the store with posters for Barfly, Amazon Women On The Moon, and Christine. Resist the urge to display anything having anything to do with Star Wars; in fact, do not stock Star Wars and point enquiring customers to Flight Of The Navigator instead. Of course, 20-30% of the stock must be in Beta.

5.
I couldn't find this information anywhere else on the Web, so I'll put it here: cleaning vomit out of a knitted cap might take you the better part of a week, and the better part of a bottle of Woolite. Help, Heloise!

Owl Drinks

Bubbly Owl Drinks are available at your local grocer. Each one features a prominent and attractive picture of a stylized Owl. There are several flavors.

One Owl flavor is strawberry-kiwifruit. Although some say that foods originating from the same region are the only foods that are complementary, strawberries and kiwifruit are from very different places that do not have much to do with each other. However, they do taste good together!

Another Owl Drink flavor is "roots". This is colored "Red, Gold, and Green". It is flavored with several different roots and barks, as well as medium-invert cane sugar (please shake before drinking).

Another Owl Drink flavor is bubblegum (marketed as "champagne cola" in predominantly Latin markets). Also, Owl Drinks come in chocolate, black cherry, mandarin orange, Ginger Spice, and blue raspberry flavors. "Lemon-Lime Sammy" is in the Owl family of products but is not technically an Owl Drink.

Owl Drinks are made for a natural environment.

...Thank you for your interest in Owl Drinks!

Brief Fancies

1.
Spotting another late 70's-vintage Free Spirit. I love my own very well and think of it often, its tires flattening ever so slowly in my cellar. It is my "dark brother", built while I was gestating. I do rather well and it does not. Oh, it tried to dump me time and time again. My feet couldn't push it up the hill. The moveable little anchor! Yes, I think of it when I see its mates on the street.

2.
Teddy Pendergrass singing. Like me, you'll laugh at the sound, and then realize how much larger it is than you. Not you, just anyone... If you put it on in a room, it will redefine the room for its own purposes. If you aren't making it, you realize you should be...if you are, you realize your inadequacy...no, not as a lover, your inadequacy before a distilled and flowing love.

3.
The prismatic sphere--oh, wouldn't you like one? How do they put those things together? I could look it up, but let's see how close we can get:

Red for fire
Orange for earth
Yellow for lightning
Green for gas
Blue for water
Indigo for ice
Violet for air

Write me, tell me how I did!

4.
If Johnny Damon fancies himself Jesus, it must follow that:

Simon Peter: Jason Varitek
Andrew: Doug Mirabelli
James the Greater: Manny Ramirez
John: David Ortiz
Philip: Gabe Kapler
Bartholomew: Bill Mueller
Thomas: Mark Bellhorn
James the Less: Dave Roberts
Matthew: Trot Nixon
Simon the Zealot: Kevin Millar
Judas: Nomar Garciaparra
Matthias: Orlando Cabrera

Hope that clears it up.

5.
The Reverse-Flash. In a perfect world, all oppositions would be comically strict binaries of this nature. No poles, no dynamics, just image-flips.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (For Jenifer Kaminsky)

"In a funny way, my work is really formal, but that formality is never talked about. People always glom right on to its abject nature, or blah blah blah blah blah. I've been typecast as some kind of mindfucker or something."

-Mike Kelley

Promotional Consideration

"Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints--without working one--one single miracle with them?"

-Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy

From "Further Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

"Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long"

Many such systems have been ideated after the fact; we have here, though, a living example of SYSTEMS THOUGHT IN MOTION, whereby the connection (via mere simultaneity) of a wineglass, amplification, a wail, and forbearance of any edit bring forth a singular sustained marvel. You cannot even interpret what you are hearing until you consult a proper reference work. The untutored view would hear an unprompted narcissistic plea for for swiftly fleeing attention, not knowing the actual conditions of NATIVE GENIUS SKIPPING GAILY UPON THE WILD EDDIES OF CIRCUMSTANCE. By retaining childlike perceptions of the circumstantial weather, the mild sage in his jute fabrics has achieved the sublimity of subjoining an unmoored "halloa and well-met" onto an unprepossessing lamblike hymn.

I ran as fast I could to Will's dorm room...it was 3 in the morning...he wasn't there, though! Will, if you're there, let me know what you think!

Essay On Erving, MA (With Ten Views)

1.

The billowing factory. What is it? All of the townfolk work there; the town services are provided by commuting members of ring-communities.

2.

It is wholly linear. You can see the entire thing from Route 2, given that you have the time and the leisure to swing your head around a bit.

3.

Parallel to a small river; and when I say parallel, I mean curved parallel--where the town zigs with the river's zig, and thus-forth. A pebbled fringe with some grass provides the constant blank buffer between the two.

4.

On the north side of the town, the ground-level undulates, leaping fantastically at 45 degrees or more. You wonder about those who might have to back their cars down such driveways in the winter, and how they ramp them back up again.

5.

Signage in many places not unlike that of the wealthy historical districts in large cities. Who among the citizens of Erving may have drafted zoning regulations stipulating such things? What is the heritage of Erving, anyways?

6.

The "Erving" logo may be spied on the factory, but seems more generally applicable to the town as a whole. (I imagine the same is true of Hershey, PA.) Strange as it seems, it is perfectly possible that the designer thereof is not even an Erving native, perhaps not even based in Massachusetts.

7.

Erving is a reward for strained travelers who have found themselves bored on the way west. For those heading east, it is a continuation of the glories of French King, and a final hail-farewell before embarking on the naught mysteriously found between Eastern and Central Massachusetts.

8.

A Koffee Kup cruller, noble and somehow silvery, may still be had in Erving.

9.

You may see a few slight examples of bridging that may brush against your very soul. You will never see anyone use any of these bridges, or remember (even having just seen one) precisely where they go. If pressed, you would say they prosaically went across the river and into the woods on the other side. Why there? For the hunt?

10.

There are no pedestrians, anyway, or any sidewalks for them to use. If you live in Erving, you might spend most of your day in the factory and then hopscotch from one little parking lot to another for your errands. Once a week you might try something in that retro-fitted diner that stands somewhat apart on a half-moon of land; you have your choice of churches and I suppose will generally keep to the one you like. Though you respect French King and wish it well, you won't dine or take your family there for an outing because it is rather loud and has rather the air of gaudy disrespectability (perhaps that's just the name).

Some Manifolds

"...the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence..."

-George Eliot, from The Mill On The Floss

"...the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers..."

-Christina Stead, from The Man Who Loved Children

"...a kind of Ten Commandments in vegetable-dye color printing..."

-Marianne Moore on Key West, from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop

To Brian Szente: 10 Proposals For Recording Projects

SANCTA FE DO NAZCA COMPLACADAO

Concept: We dress up as friars and write lyrical quasi-Iberian music with quasi-Iberian words. We perform the songs with two nylon-string guitars and keenly honed dual vocal harmonies.
Result: Acclaimed performances in local coffeehouses in the span of three months, followed by a sudden disappearance. In the wake, we post several distraught fliers claiming to be from fans seeking our whereabouts.


MOCK UP

Concept: We diagram out eight prototypical pop songs, with durations, crescendi, strata, etc. Rather than create acceptable sounds to drape on these skeletons, we construct the skeletons themselves with pure sine tones.
Result: A CD EP on a respected Belgian experimental label.


TAY-SACHS

Concept: You on vocal and bass, myself on guitar and drums. We spend months crafting one passable early 80's-styled hardcore song.
Result: A DAT; we relentlessly push it until it is placed on an appropriate vinyl compilation of like-minded music. We submit a photo of a fairly obscure band in the same genre as our own, which will ensure that our ruse is exposed, say in a matter of months.


CARMEX KIDS

Concept: Each one of us laboriously transcribes the first minute of each phone conservation we conduct over the course of May 2007. We meet in August 2008 to recite and record the results, with my voice in the left channel and yours in the right channel. We try to keep to the original minute-long timeframe. Your conversations alternate with mine.
Result: CD-R; hand-distribute to local record stores.


YURU CHARA

Concept: We are recorded with contact mics, writhing and grunting under two huge heaps of fluorescent yarn (purple for you, yellow-green for me) approximately three meters apart in the same loft space.
Result: A limited-edition 10" record, self-released and issued to each couple featured in the New York Times' Weddings section of August 5, 2008.


FOXHUNTER GUITARS

Concept: Lovingly craft an approximation of Joni Mitchell's 70's fusion records (The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mingus), with myself on fretless electric bass, you on Fender Rhodes, and five others, including a naive Joni ringer. We engineer a major label signing, but engineer our own disappearance on the eve of our first proper recording session. Splitting the advance money, I decamp for Vanuatu, you to the Canaries.
Result: A rough set of demos, for reissue twelve years later with much critical chin-stroking.


PLACEHOLDERS

Concept: We meet one night over a demijohn of Gordon's Gin, determined to write a single, wholly unimpeachable song. We exchange melodic ideas via humming. At each breakthrough, we record our results directly to cassette. By the next morning, we have recorded a single, wholly unimpeachable piece of blissful humming facetiously named "Hummin' Cummin' At'cha".
Result: A single full ninety-minute tape, circulated among our friends and associates.


JAMAISCA

Concept: We spend most of 2009 laboriously conceiving and recording a vision of what Jamaican music shall be in 25 years. We will present the results to the members of TOK, and convince them to lend their voices.
Result: We will sign to Astralwerks and put out three albums of descending quality, accompanied by a total of five (5) maxi-singles (including twelve [12] non-album B-sides), and ten [10] remixes for other artists.


LEN BIAS

Concept: Essentially a documentary project detailing the brief and tragic life of budding basketball star Len Bias. We combine audio reportage with Shepard Fairey-styled visuals glorifying man and myth alike.
Result: A gallery show in a mid-sized American city, with a limited-edition 7" record available at the gallery or through the artists' website.


WE JUST WANT YOUR HOLES TO USE

Concept: A snickering, condescending take on black metal tropes. We humiliate several giants of the movement by paying them exorbitant sums to parody themselves on record.
Result: One album on Matador, one album on Touch and Go, and many averrals of our complete sincerity and love of the music.

Black Rocks State Park And Recreational Trail

We nestled our feet among the Black Rocks and sipped wine. We poured the dregs among Black Rocks. We practiced “Body Fusion” within the groves—were they groves?—stands?—only single trees. Joshua Trees! We donned our unitards, striped with every color we could find—having moved HARMONIOUSLY, we shed them.

I then dreamt that wide lines appeared in the sky—they opened to holes—and from them, sweet milky falls did fall. I kissed my hands at the apparition—I kicked up my heels! The Black Pebbles sprayed back and glanced from your chest, your impregnable chest. But I, only I, had ‘pregnated it! —Bright babies of hope grew there!

From "New Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

"Gideon's Bible: Another Guise"

What is the secret key? The Bible averts hurts and downgrades significant threats. Drink makes for a reeling doctor. A reel at the piano may doctor the hearts of drinkers. These are first axioms, but not secret keys; no, not hardly.

By what means may a man turn raccoon? If he closes his paw around some kernel and will not release it, even though by the largening of this fist it cannot be removed from the vessel. He shall will the kernel to be consumed through the very act of seizure.

What settlements may be found in the Black Mountains? Black Rocks State Park and Recreational Trail, its few satellites. A wild gang of miners, just setting up tent. Lone lorn pioneers tracing snakeways up sheerness and sheerness, only to unroll a solemn blanket-roll. One shiverer high in a a flimsy blanket-roll, and so--

Can you believe that? It stops right there, just like it looks. Will and I freaked a little when we came up with this, like "Where do we go from here?" OK, more next week...

A Partial Chronology

778 AD: Roland ambushed at Roncesvalles
1905 AD: Binet-Simon test devised
1985 AD: Dian Fossey murdered
1853 AD: Matthew Perry lands in Japan
1972 AD: Jimmy Cliff rides a car through a golf course
1887 AD: Ludwik Zamerhof introduces Esperanto
73 AD: Siege of Masada
1598 AD: Spenser flees Irish rebels
1903 AD: Beatrix Potter writes The Tale Of Benjamin Bunny
1917 AD: Execution of Mata Hari
1973 AD: The Saturday Night Massacre
331 AD: Birth of Julian the Apostate

Cassiopeia

"...very early on there predominated in recurrent nightly visions the notion of an approaching end of the world, as a consequence of the indissoluble connection between God and myself. Bad news came in from all sides that even this or that star or this or that group of stars had to be 'given up'; at one time it was said that even Venus had been 'flooded', at another that the whole solar system would now have to be 'disconnected', that the Cassiopeia (the whole group of stars) had to be drawn together into a single sun, that perhaps only the Pleiades could be saved..."

-Daniel Paul Schreber, from the Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (tr. I. Macalpine and R.A. Hunter)

From "Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

"Listen To Julia As Quiet As You Can"

Spot a bare room. Bulb on if it's night-time, bulb off for day. Smoke only one cigarette. You've bought a $5 radio-recorder from Walgreen's. Dry goods and white cans, a clean old fixture.

A long white rug and creepers at the panes. Attention to your nails. Play "Julia". Listen to "Julia" as quiet as you can. Whittle the floor. Whittle the floor. Talk to a friend on the phone. Make plans for later. Wonder about that. Play "Julia" as quiet as you can. A game of checkers, cold beer, and smoke only one cigarette. No chairs are better when there's crates and felted blankets. I knew a silent Norse once. I saw friends there at the bar. A friend's band would play. I stopped by the store later and bought a bulb. "Charlie, Charlie," I called when I got home. That cat was there. The cat would play with the rabbit. The other roommate, the girl, laid there and played with her hair. She asks questions. Start playing "Julia" as quiet as you can. It's late, and someone else is sleeping!

Won't you go to sleep? To sleep? It's awful fine. I used the phone again. "I don't have a copy."

-My friend Will wrote this sophomore year. I thought this was really incredible. We decided to put together a "book of essays" called "On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album'". We're still working on it. I'll publish some more in the next few days.

The Road Goes Up By The Rope At The Edge

"Above the gorges, one thread of sky:
Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords.
High up, the slant of splintered sunlight, moonlight:
Beneath, curbs to the wild heave of the waves.
The shock of a gleam, and then another,
In depths of shadow frozen for centuries:
The rays between the gorges do not halt at noon;
Where the straits are perilous, more hungry spittle.
Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins
And the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright:
Branches weep as the frost perches
Mournful cadences, remote and clear.
A spurned exile's shriveled guts
Scald and seethe in the water and fire he walks through.
A lifetime's like a fine-spun thread,
The road goes up by the rope at the edge.
When he pours his libation of tears to the ghosts in the stream
The ghosts gather, a shimmer on the waves."

-Meng Chiao, "Sadness of the Gorges (Third of Ten)" (tr. A.C. Graham)

Primitive Vigor

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature, that inspires our dreams."

-Henry David Thoreau

The Band Of Sleepers...

...is composed of four young people who live in a rented apartment.

They perform in slumber-masks.

They do their terpsichoric chores clad in spruce new cotton-blend pyjamas.

They pitch pup-tents in parking lots.

They beckon walkers-by to spectate their false somnambulances.

On the course of their midnight rambling:

a snare drum falls from a lone wharf's ladder. And:

a guitar laid on a winding rail emits a wailing racket.

It Nauseated The Dogs

"At Carteia an octopus used to come from the open sea into the uncovered tanks of the fish-farms and there forage for salted fish. All sea-creatures are powerfully attracted to the smell of salted fish, and for this reason baskets used in catching fish are smeared with salted fish. In view of the continual theft, the overseers became exceedingly angry. Fences were put up to obstruct the octopus, but it used to climb these by means of a tree. It could be caught only by employing dogs with a keen scent. These surrounded the octopus as it was returning at night and roused the overseers, who were terrified by its strange appearance. Its size was unheard of, and likewise in colour; it was smeared with brine and had a dreadful smell. Who would have expected to find an octopus there, or to recognize it against such a background? They seemed to be locked in a struggle with something out of this world, for it nauseated the dogs with its terrible breath, lashed them with the ends of its tentacles, and then struck them with its stronger arms, which it used in the manner of clubs. After great trouble, it was dispatched with the aid of many tridents."

-Pliny, from the Natural History (tr. J. Healy)

Country Honey

"Julius Martial's acres--they're few,
but more happily situated
than the gardens of the Hesperides--
lie along the sweeping ridge
of the Janiculum. Broad
ravines slope upward to the summit
and the level, gently swelling top
opens to an untroubled sky
which shines with a light peculiarly
its own, even when cloudiness
obscures the curving valleys.
The dainty roof of the tall house
rises gracefully toward the clear stars.

On one side you can look out
on the seven proud hills and survey
the whole city of Rome, and the Alban
Hills and the hills of Tusculum,
and the cool suburbs nearby
the city: ancient Fidenae
and tiny Rubrae and the orchard
groves where Anna Perenna's
worshippers revel in the sacrifice
of maidenheads.

On the other
we can see the traveller driving
along in his silent carriage
on the Via Flaminia
or the Salarian highway.
His wheels can never disturb
our soothing sleep, which neither
the calls to the rowers or the cries
of the bargemen are strong enough
to break, though the Mulvian Bridge
and the boats as they glide so swiftly
on the holy Tiber seem so near.

The owner offers his country house
(if it shouldn't be called a town house)
freely to guests. You'd think
it was yours, it's open to you
so courteously and ungrudgingly--
with such gracious hospitality.
You'd think it the friendly house
of Odysseus' host, Alcinous,
or that of Molorchus, just after
Hercules repaid his kindness
with sudden prosperity.

But if you're the kind who thinks
all this still isn't big enough,
you're welcome to farm the whole town
of Tibur, or even Praeneste,
with a hundred hoes, or assign
the hillside town of Setia
to one overseer. For me
Julius Martial's few acres
are preferable to them all."

-Martial, IV.lxiv (tr. B. Mills)

Screenplay No. 4 (For Your Consideration)

"Mass. Ave"

This should be shot at dusk, just light enough to discern all of the detail here described. The view is anywhere on the first actual block after the bridge of the Boston side of Massachusetts Avenue (east side of the street). There should be a college-age couple, male and female—the male has a film camera on a tripod, pointed toward and above the film’s camera (which is approximately two lanes of traffic away on the street, perpendicular to the line of the road), the female a light meter around her neck. It should be made to seem that: a) they are in it for the long haul, b) it is the female’s film, and the male is helping her out. Preferably, he should have curly hair. Please, no acting, just waiting. Only soundtrack should be of passing traffic (sync not necessary). They should not be observed to speak; her view should be aligned at all times with the camera’s, while his may wander. One minute exactly; standard fade in and out.

Screenplay No. 10 (For Your Consideration)

Extreme close-up on a Windows calculator screen. With zero on the screen, 1/x is continually attempted. An error message is displayed. 15 seconds.

Ten Stereotypically Canadian Names

1. Kevin
2. Blaine
3. Russ
4. Marc
5. Geoff
6. Richard
7. Randy
8. Glenn
9. Brian
10. Jon

Note: These are all male names because Canadian women do not exist.

A Brief Life Of Rudolph Isenglass

Labored for 45 years in the employ of Chearing Medical. Each morning he would clamber into a cloth clean-suit sealed at its bends with tubes of black rubber, and nestle his scanty tousle into a hood with an inch-thick faceplate. That accomplished, he’d travel through several airlocks into the working space, with stations numbered on stand-up placards and divided by quite small (five-inch-wide, perhaps) conveyal lines, rolls of further black rubber. Stocking in, galumphing, he’d proceed to work at fabricating plascalpels, shaping them by means of a series of fiendishly detailed procedures he kept in his head. At his retirement he gave up any thought of this process—and set instead to tealife, watching out for hefty feeder-birds hopping through his half-a-chestnut tree.

Theme Bands (For Bored Musicians): Pt. 1, Covers Division

LAUCH FAIRCLOTH

Impersonate a blues band made up of suburban dads. Think: a white-on-black Stratocaster, an authentic "Lucille" copy, a five-string bass, Life is Good sweatshirts, backwards Black Dog hats, Ray-Bans, faded Lee jeans, white sneaks, ponytails (no goatees). Interminable, tremolo bar-heavy solos; all standard covers, with one generic original loudly announced as "Dave's Blues".

MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

Two people in boxy suits, one on guitar and one on "soft" electronic piano. They play jazz favorites sedated to the point of improbability. They play on a stage decorated with two potted palms, a water cooler, and a coffee machine. The audience is welcome to help themselves to water (the coffee is for the band).

HIDDEN WHEELS

All-dyke Rites of Spring cover band.

PRIDE AND JOY

Impersonate two natty old men via makeup and clothes (tweedy hats with dyed feathers help). Go to a local karaoke night and give your names as "Mr. Pride" and "Mr. Joy". Sing your selections as duets, in exaggerated Brooklyn accents with broad big-band inflections. Suggested songs: "Lovefool", "River of Dreams", maybe "Young Turks". Nothing too obvious!

THE BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN

Two acoustic guitarists. At the beginning of their set, they take three Percocets in full view of the audience. They proceed to play "The Bear Went Over The Mountain" for as long as they can.

Screenplay No. 12 (For Your Consideration)

"Damon and Pythias"

A series of 20 bucolic Greekish scenes—vibrant fields of yellow flowers, wave-lashed rock shores, cypress glades—each fading out of darkness and suddenly collapsing back into it—15 seconds each. This is a computerized backdrop to two live figures—the whole of it recallingl under-funded video art of the 1980s. The two figures are muscular young men, friends in real life, wearing white tunics and carrying round wooden shields and simple, broad, double-edged short swords. At each fade-in their sword arms are dropped and they are looking around, slightly lost—as the bucolic scene becomes visible they become excited, raise their sword arms, pace around a bit (but always with their faces towards the camera), and shout “Ho! Hooooo!”—lapsing again at the blackout. The figures should maintain roughly symmetrical positions throughout (if one moves left, the other moves right, etc.).

Ten Beat Groups For 2006

1. THE CREEPING PHLOX

This neo-psych trio is tearing up the Ho-Ho-Kus scene with their distinctive brand of "paisleyed rampage". Guitars, sitars, and dulcimers bang out a streaming, swirling brew. Debut single "More To Tell The Babes To Tell The Babies" b/w "Wild Carrots For Jodie" has sold more than 500 copies and a second pressing is on the way.

2. JOHNNY AND LUTHER HTOO

Despite the name, actually three sisters from Madison, Wisconsin with a winsome, folky sound all their own. Check out the high harmonies and witty wisdom of "Do I Really Look Like A Fox?", recently bleAT Quarterly's "Song of the Week".

3. ADVENTUS

A mysterious six-man collective, hailing from various points across western Canada. One moment, they're reciting mysterious "hobo poetry" over a sparse panpipe melody; the next, they're whipping up skeletal funk that owes more than a little to their countrymen in Tootle-Oo. A self-released CD-R, "A Joke On A Capture Of Perplexes", has been turning heads ever since it appeared late last year.

4. TACKS NAILS NAILS

Spearheading the Avant-Boogaloo movement, this sibling tag team crafts playful fist-pumpers designed to provoke a dance party. Mandy Drollkin handles the beats, while brother Steve switches between rapping and a smooth croon. "Rascal Am I" is in heavy rotation on several Shreveport-area college stations.

5. THE FENCE THAT SKIRTS THE TREE

Bearded sage by night, travel agent (!) by day, Sasha Camforra is The Fence That Skirts The Tree's sole constant. His deceptively simple songs, usually plunked out on toy piano, alternate between cryptic whimsy and startling vehemence. The dark subject matter of "A Crabwalk For Cindy" has already spurred debate among the online community.

6. RON APE

A rebel-rouser of the old school--in the person of a seventeen-year-old Boston Brahmin! Mr. Ape (born Asa Ronald Strawfellow) leads his band, the Apiary, through twisty triple-guitar anthems that would appeal to unreconstructed Confederates. Catch him at U. Mass-Lowell this Sunday, on the Basquelieber stage--if you're lucky, he might play his local hit, "Burn Any Blackstrap Molasses (You Find)".

7. SATRAP

Two violinists, a violist, and a cellist...playing obscure 90's hardcore covers? Says Dana Charlap, the "low end" of the group: "We just think it's great music. People just hear the anger and the screaming, and miss the melodies". A nonpareil version of "I'm Back Sleeping Or Fucking Or Something" is currently streaming on their website, www.satrapstrings.com.

8. HIRSCH TWEMBLANT

Conshohocken trio pairs tricky guitarchitecture with eccentric lyrics penned by their "guru", local nursing home resident Jessie Varnedoe. Their recent double album, Shirrs Of Un Gilted Glass/Wombers Pas The Unterwolmm, is available on Twemblin' Leaf Records.

9. LIVING IN ARMENIA

The tragic events of September 2001 affected us all, not least singer-songwriter James Oren Catley. "With all that flag-waving, all I could think of was the song 'Living in America', except I changed the words in my head into 'Living in Armenia'," he explains. With a few dorm buddies on keys, bass, and drums, Catley (who is not of Armenian heritage) uses Living in Armenia to express his opinions on living in our society. Those in search of a "New Dylan" might want to check out his latest release, "Everyone Does...Alright".

10. MUMP

Two Sacramento composers (working under the pseudonyms MUP and PUM) have set themselves a difficult task--making an entire oeuvre out of a single 4-second sample from early teen comedy Lord Love A Duck. They have succeeded, and brilliantly: the surprisingly melodic "Purple Passion?" is proof.

How Young Are They?

"Sirs:

I have just read the article in the Aug. 12 issue of LIFE on Elwood, Wendell Willkie's home town.

I notice you say "...young girls drink Coca-Cola chasers with their whisky while planning to attend Baptist Sunday School next morning."

I happen to be the teacher of a class of young girls in our Baptist Church and no one, not even the Editors of LIFE, can say things like that about my girls without my fighting back. They aren't that type of girl.

You also said: 'The Golden Garden is Elwood young folks' favorite hangout.' That is unfair to our Elwood boys and girls for while it is a favorite hangout of a certain bunch we have hundreds of girls and boys who wouldn't go in that place, for it and others like it are a disgrace to Elwood or any other city.

You seem to have printed all the bad things about Elwood...

Elwood is a lovely little city and there are nowhere in America finer or more loyal, courageous people. Wendell Willkie has every right to be proud of his home town even as we are proud of him.

MRS. RALPH WILLIAMS

Elwood, Ind."

-found in the August 26, 1940 issue of LIFE

Tea With Adam And The Archangel Raphael

"Angel and man, when tete-a-tete,
Albeit, dialects compose:
A secret grammar, delicate
Declensions of poppy and the rose."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Sublimer and Sublimest" (tr. C. Middleton)

"Subhumans"

"Jack the Ripper's dead,
and lying in his bed.
He cut his throat
with Sunlight soap,
Jack the Ripper's dead."

-as collected by Iona and Peter Opie, The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren

Note: Mickey Mouse committed a similar deed with a ten-bob note.

Yi Gluck, A Life Of Her Written

Yi Gluck unfolded from her bedsheets one summery day. It was the first she’d ever been. Darling, most twice darling thing! She yawned, as though to sing “I salute thee, Sister Eos!” Her darling sister, fitly sung. She then did radiate—she did rayfully dissipate—to join hands with her sister beyond through the windowpane. Oh, then the parson came to quote Scripture, but Yi Gluck wasn’t there.

Yi Gluck started as a yellowy point, her volume like unto a shooting-marble. She nestled among the safe soft little hairlets, the pebbles and papers of an unkempt bed. She was fertilized in the night by a motion-sensitive lamp, switched on to confront a rampaging opossum; it spared one white ray to sheet further the bedsheets of the bed in question. Yi Gluck did gestate through the night’s short remainder, and escaped in the morning to join her sister Eos. The parson clambered hopeful up three flights of stairs to recite his Scripture, but she wasn’t there.

The parson thought his early 4:30 thoughts at 4:30 when he woke; in advance of Eos, he thought his unfit and disparsonish things. He thought long and hard on the peculiar humidity that lives between human legs. He wavey-waved those thoughts away. He trudged the city towards the intended flat, in advance yet of Ms. Aurore Eos. It was too late—his seeded intentions had already flown from one fleshly pupil-hole, and sped ahead of him to the site. These intentions formed a yellowy packet about themselves, and they quickened...to gain their goal, they caromed from the head of a sleeping mother opossum. You’ve heard the rest from there.

Minute Particulars

It may be the case that expansive thinking is aided by thought in words. While one would expect that the act of delimiting boundless experience to a set of signs would demean and skew it—it seems instead that any experience is mediated still further through the general culture-norm of the present day. Translation into the realm of words, each of which is a particular with a valence and a history, forces choices in the perception of the real field—this is an opportunity to establish wider clarity and definition. This need not be single clarity or a single definition—it need not establish a precise relation—instead,it fosters awareness of the consistency of precise and real relations—though particulars fluctuate, they always will remain particular and bounded.

Folkways Of Tampa

As the history of the fine old town of Tampa accrues, so too do its unique and charming customs.

ARGOT

"Kendy"--an attractive woman.

"Tomin'"--interesting, intriguing.

"Fallokin", "Fallahkin", etc.--friendly greeting.

"Ho ho co"--derisory call.

"Doppler"--a car. Popularized in the early 1990s by Mr. Soak's infamous single "I Just Killed Your Hypeman".

"Trimmers"--traffic lights.

"Don't come dawdle"--don't interfere with me.


CUISINE

"Boig"--equivalent of grinder, hoagie, et al. elsewhere. Pickled radish is a frequent add-on.

"Mobies"--balls composed of one prawn and one scallop, covered in cornmeal and fried. Generally sauced with green Tabasco; infrequently found in "boigs".

"Sweet Tree"--popular soft drink, half vanilla ice cream and half guava juice.

"Chore Boy"--bismuth cocktail infamous among the nightclub set.


GESTURES, GAMES, ETC.

In the Tampa Bay area, it is at this point more common to "flip the bird" with the ring finger, rather than the middle.

A common children's game is a variation of tag called "twink". If the pursued child can sing a doggerel song in its entirety,


Cindy, Cindy, tallin'-a-mink,
Coby, Casey, tillin'-a-twink!


the pursuer must leave off and chase someone else. The safe area is known as "the till".

"Choctaw"--a jargon of concealment--all vowel sounds are shifted, "a" to "e", "e" to "i", etc. Example: "O went tu gu ta thi ber." Usually spoken quickly, with a distinct nasal inflection.

"Dog funk"--local form of dog racing. Elaborately decorated homemade courses are set up throughout a neighborhood, with hand-operated rabbit decoys. Large cash prizes are awarded to the winner.

LGI

Do you understand the sloth-houses, Mopsus? Where hooks in the drywall are run by thin chain to the collars of shambling animals—counted on to one day breach that drywall, expose the wiring therein.

Do you understand the slaughter-houses, Mopsus? Where numeralled cleavers suspend from a frame of quick-weld slats—they waver and err among many cattle-necks, their courses depending on volumes of animal heat, and the vagaries of panic and panic-response (the varying heat, you see, will alter weak welds).

Mopsus, the sloth-houses—they are palaces to a quotient named LGI, that is, “Least Guidance Implementable”—what could be accomplished by any young person taken off the street and given a hammer is accomplished instead with a reasonably large financial outlay, an idiosyncratic initiative, and an absolute abhorrence for efficiency or celerity.

Mopsus, much the same could be said of the slaughter-houses. This is no quick way to kill cattle.

Favored Words (For A Future Questionaire)

Pinch, coxswain, blunt, cross, mainspring, calendar, ash, mock, sabot, alarm, boil, finch, rock, savor, blinders, mate, pixel, foglight, royal, mixer, home, flail, tugboat, rote, fissile, pictorial, gingko, mayflower, mount, bring, spike, tail, brinksmanship.

The 24 Hours Ranked By Preference

1. 19:00
2. 04:00
3. 21:00
4. 01:00
5. 10:00
6. 11:00
7. 24:00
8. 14:00
9. 23:00
10. 20:00
11. 15:00
12. 02:00
13. 13:00
14. 22:00
15. 18:00
16. 12:00
17. 09:00
18. 16:00
19. 07:00
20. 08:00
21. 03:00
22. 17:00
23. 06:00
24. 05:00

Screenplay No. 14 (For Your Consideration)

"The Marseillaise"

A group of seven large and jovial American men should be assembled at a banquet table, all facing the camera (be sure to include a whole roast fowl of any type and a clean white-to-yellow tablecloth). On the set, they should be thoroughly regaled, served by a team of waiters. They are all dressed in colorful quasi-Roman wear (drapery and garlands). They have all been taught the “Marseillaise” in rough phonetic French. At some point in the feast the director audibly orders the camera to roll. At this, the film starts, and the participants launch into chorus, looking at the camera and pounding their hands on the table in rough time. As they cease, the film ends. It is preferable that the film is timed so that an embarrassed waiter is caught on screen for the song’s duration. Camera perpendicular to the long end of the table; garish yellowy light. Fade in, fade out.

Earth, Wind And Fire

"The struggle against cosmic terror in all its forms and manifestations did not rely on abstract hope or on the eternal spirit, but on the material principle in man himself. Man assimilated the cosmic elements, earth, water, air, and fire; he discovered them and became vividly conscious of them in his own body. He became aware of the cosmos within himself."

-Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (tr. H. Iswolsky)

Cold Clear Light Of Day

Pollexfen had once been a “desk rebel”, but had put those clothes away as he aged and moved in a finer society. He met a friend’s niece one day, and was flattered and favorably impressed to see that she was dressed much as he had been wont to do. Penyez (for such was her name) soon got together a band and named it “Cold Clear Light of Day”, and would stand on the stage calmly enumerating the misdeeds of all her immediate forbears, dressed in the very shirts that they had worn. This impressed and delighted Pollexfen, who soon brought his influential friends. Shocked at first, they would sit together wordless at a cafe table and listen and watch. Soon enough: the band was in the newspapers and Penyez was a known quotable.

Support The Institution Of Verse!

Our plot is to do away with discursive length, and introduce in its stead quick parcels—composed of some happy sentiment, some rhetoric of the entry-level, some profundities climbing out through the surface. A reading public will be induced to adopt for its own what it accepts as flatteries—pocket-posies, phrased out by the round lips of a piebald noble.
Support the institution of verse! Follow a past example—a new currency at the court—sporting pursuit, open to all. The flooding ensues—we can all, we can all do this. This is the necessary spreading of soil. Basic, common, yes: anything to raise flowers outside the hothouses.

Working Method

Compelled to work (by what-you-will), the worker finds at once a furtherance, reason, and refutation of heris labor in the continual devising and revision of a whole method.
But I fear that if any reasonable method is reached—be it skeleton, vocabulary, diagram, for any whole or bounded part thereof—a grave loss’ll be incurred. Not because the method is necessarily wishful or ill-applied, but because method commits the self, commits to the self, too far. The spectral influx finds a prism of a sudden, and hunkers into one white bore. The canal, made in constraint, has only one use; the river is stronger, and marshals some hundred intentions to some hundred uses.

A History Of Death-Marches

Bataan is the clear favorite among them. They may be evoked with propriety by anyone who has already walked nine blocks or more (this allowance is more generous where children and senior citizens are concerned). The death-march is chiefly applied by one civilization to another. There are always survivors at the end of a death-march. The first death march is reputed by Pliny the Elder to have begun in Syracuse in or around 530 BC, and to have tromped back and forth to the eastern shore for the next four months. The “Trail of Tears" is generally considered to have been a death-march, though it is often mistaken for a trail in the recreational sense.

To Wesley Miller

They give you the broken mold, and not the first bust. And you sigh (louder than you ought). You want that ingenious plaster-mass—its corners are sharp or seamed, but when it speaks—it speaks with a mouthful of marble!

You bear the wax scraps down a balmy street. Soon the likeness is lost; it has been obtruded upon by the stoop-sitters, and the game of double-dutch. Dejected, you climb to your basement hutch. You boil, and pace, and prance, and steam, and circle over the deposited remnant. Suddenly, a notion! You pour the hunks into a stripped coffee can; you unearth a single-coil heating element, connect it, and wait for some fifteen minutes. You place the can atop the mystic red spiral. You wait as the wax slumps its shoulders (so to speak). You lean to it, poised with a stiff paintbrush to stir. Canful, a bust made of wax!

52 Girls

1. Sirathe D’Alencon: first cultivar of the domestic pear.
2. Lara Corbits: in a billowy dress with green flowers.
3. Rubi Mardner: one-time Kossovar—rubicund, altogether.
4. Diane-Teals Manassa: “cool as a cucumber”.
5. Judyth Paynter: youngest housewife on record.
6. Gaby Barton Croft: initiated many into the Nitrous Mysteries of Ho-Ho-Kus.
7. Poll Clyde-Davie: little-regarded muleteer.
8. Derwin Turnipseed: my first, my last, my Alpha and Omega.
9. Helga Blum: will be a comfort in his wretched old age.
10. Becka Sandlewood: never more than three meters in stocking feet.
11. Larissa P. Damon: has inherited a home-inspection business.
12. Glebe Marks: self-styled “Afro Queen”.
13. Mandy Drollkin: doats on her two daughters.
14. Jennifer Chun: esteemed as “fearless” among her friends for...what?
15. “Blaise Starrkers”: known in some circles, not in others.
16. Apple-Drella Boteach: a common HUSSY, i.e., a VIXEN.
17. Bao Ho: sister of Minh Ho of Bucks County, PA.
18. Danielle Chambers: sole resident of a rambling Colonial.
19. Lilian Grolle: conossieur of pulled pork, in all its manifestations.
20. Tandy Cendrars: many uncomfortable silences.
21. Liv Conkling: smacks her lips at something sufficiently sweet.
22. Toi Crowninsheld: doctors the iced tea of her aunts.
23. Tif Hansen-Johansson: at pains to distinguish herself from her peers.
24. Deborah Coors: the glass is always half-full.
25. “Brandy” Alexander: raised (sad to say) among the Tamil Tigers.
26. Hendries O’Toole: adopted the cummerbund for everyday use.
27. “Mixtec” Gale Clough: easily distinguishes right from wrong.
28. Kendy Ste-Marie: glossy skin, and matte nails.
29. Cherrie Barten: mocks the youths who gather near her subway stop to perform skateboard tricks.
30. Rahula Connell: researches her genealogy (to no great end).
31. Mika Fleischmann: on an epic quest, spanning three continents and thirty nations.
32. Chondra Fanning: “a woman of distinction”, if Thackeray is to be believed.
33. Elisabeth Jumblies: often described as a “roisterer”.
34. “Budnitz”: at parties, surreptitiously turns out the lights and tumbles among the dismayed guests.
35. Maribeth Quan: studies to be admitted to the bar.
36. Sue F. Corbineau: cordially greeted by fellow patients—“Hi Sue! Hi Sue!”
37. Louisa Semple Docharty: a crackerjack shot, a wolfish whistle, a wonder at whist.
38. Lorette Daws: the angel of the Local 118—but a devil at 41 Mt. Hope St., J.P., MA.
39. Daphne Pimm: regal bearing a stratagem that succeeds in attracting others.
40. Daffney Georges: envies that Daphne Pimm...
41. Carolyn Preiss: age does her proboscis no favors.
42. Haven Bartos: over-applies Liquid Smoke when cooking (no great fault).
43. Delilah Saberhagen: looks askance at most accepted forms of charity.
44. Liesl Soapenhau: a double-double OK?
45. Lady Juana Marks: a muse to the masses!
46. Margot Van Der Waal: hidden as we speak below that bean-bag chair.
47. Cyd Corcoran, MD: scorns the sort of honor that goes untempered with mercy.
48. “Sweet” Dilsey Brown: doyenne of the “Big Boxes” along Route 77 in Camden.
49. Sheila Avakian: ice hockey or field hockey?
50. Flor Hockfeldt: “exceedingly sapient”, says one likely professor.
51. Aglaia Foss: safe to say that she’s keeping her cards close.
52. Leora Galt: very like a strawberry.

The Test Actors Of America

We know that they are perpetually aggrieved. Although they are paid a regular, competitive salary; although they receive a level of public attention that is arguably beyond commensurate with their abilities; still, they find their duties odious.
They are regularly visited with calamities, of a severity not wholly vitiated by short duration. They are informed by telephone of the deaths of their spouses; volatile elements are stealthily added to their dinners; their furniture is eternally subject to seizure and removal. They are charged with devising and demonstrating appropriate human responses to such circumstances; since they can rarely be sure of the exact provenance of the trials they undergo, their stated craft mingles with their native sentiments. Naturally, they do not invariably play the Job; they are also visited with romances, a farrago of riches, fulsome winds of acclaim. But this, to them, is pasteboard, and vanity; each plaudit, each asset, dangled by a childish providence that’s apt enough to snatch it back.

Screenplay No. 6 (For Your Consideration)

"See?"

Featureless white space, with a man sitting on a wooden stool in the lower left quadrant. He has an electric guitar (Fender or Gibson, true school not new school). He is dressed in stylish semi-casual. He is meant to suggest a distinguished improvisor, but should have no background whatsoever in music. Have him improvise frenetically for two minutes with his head bent down in concentration. At the two-minute mark the director will audibly shout “Mark!”—at this, the improvisor will angrily lift his head, look directly at the camera, and shout “See?” Glossy cinematography.

A Souled Work

A souled work’s completion is warded off by the pique of the bored. A soul, involving multiple redundancies, unnecessaries, and false equations—the yet-undigested still nestled in its organs—shall not be borne, saith the worried fabricator. Who could say if the worry will itself come to fruit? The fabricators in question might also hold a tinge of this boredom with the selfsame work of flesh. They will balk at the hours taken to form a loop of bowel, and pinch out a length of appendix from spite.

Let’s double back now. The works we really want, in our nested heart of hearts, take too long to read. They repeatedly wander to places where we do not want them to go—a sentiment, on our parts, less out of compunctions and qualms than unalloyed impatience, the desire to have the damned thing accomplished and solved. Such works could not be souled and whole, I repeat, unless they had been painted piebald with marks, blots, and implicit crossings-out. I admit—I’d attribute this less to intrinsic formal advantage, or necessary moral acumen, than an unacknowledged disinclination on the human’s part to engage with anything that does not share, in some imagined way, its own characteristics/failings. Minutiae are intolerable, save when they are isomorphic (or at very least isometric) to one’s own; kinship in particles fosters kinship in attitude.