NEW WEBSITE:

http://evanfleischer.com

(Sorry, Nicole! Sorry, Meg! ... John?)

Notes: Passing Through Tufts.

Passing through Tufts one afternoon, I saw something chalked on one of the columns leading into the Campus Center. "Turtles," it said, and there was an arrow next to it, pointing up. I looked -- empty sky. Frowned. Walked on.

"That's funny," I thought. "Shouldn't it be turtles all the way down?"

The Last.

There are three veterans of the first World War left in the world. Of all the parts of the world that bubble on without you, of all the borders beyond the horizon, of all the paces, trajectories, characters, and stories colluding together in giant waves of 'now,' 'yet-to-come,' and then it boils down to three. It's not even the whole hand.

The rate, too, is surprising: eight years ago, there were 700 left alive.

Of those left, this: their names are Claude Choules, Jack Babcock, and Frank Buckles. Their countries of origin are the U.K., Canada, and the U.S.. Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and, now, we are left with three. When they were in the army and navy, they were led by men who were born in the 1850's.

Claude Choules: born in Pershore, in March, 1901. Notables of Pershore: the Abbey, which heralds from the 11th century. Located on the River Avon. His specialty -- 'blowing things up.' Moved to Australia. Sent to clean up a part of the harbor in Western Australia and came back with "a gift of pink slippers he had found" for his daughter. A 41-year career that spanned both wars. Used to "see hospital ships coming across and soldiers being wheeled off them." Witnessed the surrender of the German Navy in 1918.

Jack Babcock: enlisted in the army at 16 by lying about his age. Pilot's license at 65. Graduated from high school at 95. (In short: an early starter.) Received a birthday card from Queen Elizabeth II for his 109th birthday, remarking that she's "a pretty nice looking girl." When he got to Britain, he was deemed too young to "go over the top." Via the North Bay Nugget: "I feel guilty because I'm not a war hero. I didn't get to accomplish what I set out to do."

*

1.



2.



3.



Frank Buckles: the only one with his own webpage. Ended up with the ambulance service. When he tried to sign up, he was too young -- 18 -- and the recruiter turned him away. A week later, he came back with his Grandmother. "Same recruiting station, same Sergeant ... but I had increased my age to 21. He was very ... gentlemanly and gave me the test." England, first. Winchester. Drove a motorcycle around base and as an escort. Later upgraded to a Ford. Transported prisoners back from Germany. During his only leave: stayed at the Hotel de Pay in the Bay of Carcachon, where -- because of the water covering the ground -- the postman would deliver the mail on stilts.

Notes: The First Time I Met Kurt Vonnegut ...

... I was standing in line at the Met at 8 A.M. and heard my Dad exclaim, "Evan! Look! It's Kurt Vonnegut!" and I froze and watched him pass and my Dad mused aloud, "Where is he?" and I turned around and he was right there right behind me -- looming and glowering -- and so I kept on turning, my back as stiff as an arrow.

Let Me Tell You About Myself.

"Let me tell you about myself: I was thrown out of high school because I was short, or, rather, I was short enough that they could stuff me in a cardboard box, though that, too, isn't the capital offense I'm speakin' of.

I was thrown out of high school because I was short enough to be stuffed into a box, and since my friends and I were well aware of the fact, this box would be brought from room to room, and I would be introduced into the environment and whatever scene that was unfolding itself as 'supplies.' And since we were supplies -- one always needs supplies! -- I was let right in without a moment's hesitation, my friends left, and the scene continued. So I'd wait it out another minute or two, and then I'd pop up, say, Surprise! (Not supplies. Not. That.) Or I'd just yell!

Or I'd correct something the teacher had been saying, and everyone would yell themselves, leap in place, the sleeping kids would wake up (if only for that shining, briefest, welcome-back-to-the-world of a moment), and I would bow or dash -- or bow and dash -- my way out the door, I would rejoin my friends, and that was how we spent an afternoon.

Isn't this place great, by the way? I love the atmosphere. The lamps. The shades. The way you can spin the seats.

But that isn't how I got thrown out of school. I got tossed from the books -- though I'd never let go, and never have, so to speak -- because we repeated the procedure I'd just enumerated and elucidated, but when I popped out to surprise everyone, my environment, my mis-en-emerging-scene was a special needs classroom.

The result? Pandemonium. Fire marshalls. Bomb-sniffing dogs. But they didn't work 'cause they had a cold, so they brought in the cold-sniffing dogs to figure out which one of 'em got the cold first. Turns out it was the Alpha, a mutt by the name of Wynston, though why they go on and spell his name with a 'Y,' I'll never know. A helicopter was dispatched to monitor the highway, though no one was entirely sure why, and I was called into the office of the kind of man who read novels about British boys in private schools and always felt disappointed whenever the headmaster showed any semblance of emotion or didn't punish the children further the kind of man who if he had been a surgeon would have worn his ties backwards and upsidedown a small detail that would leave anyone extra-cautious regarding the upcoming possible and future procedure with the willies and that is how I was kicked out of school.

By the way, do you think there's any way I can get a drink here? I'd love a drink. Are you thirsty? Maybe a White Russian clogged with olives. Enough to keep the White Russian from even seeping through, at least. Because I don't like to drink. I never drink, and I'm not nervous. I'm sorry if I'm nervous. I'm not really nervous, I'm just ... well, so what if I'm nervous?

I suppose I can't recall when I first became a pyromaniac. You knew that, right? I guess I just believe in living with a bit of intensity, or, at least, that's how I like to imagine it in retrospect. When you're out there in Stow, it's just apple field after apple field, and that was my hometown. But I believe in being honest. If we're going to start something here, I feel like I should be honest right up front.

I mean, I've gone through five husbands already, you know? I murdered two, had some sort of medical condition where I couldn't keep myself from staring at the third -- like, it was a literal 'Attack of the Bug-Eyed,' a black and white sci-fi filled with operatic zither machines "Oh-ohhing!" I was losing sleep, I was finding it hard to eat -- and I asked the fourth to be conjoined with a possible fifth husband, and to his credit, he was patient with it up until he realized I was serious when I came home from Vegas with my fifth.

I sometimes miss my fourth. I hear from my then next-door neighbor that he's reached points on and off somewhere in one of those closets in the past where he'd get so lonely he'd go hunting in the half-acre, treeless expanse behind his house with a BB gun and his fat house-cat. I can't quite explain that. It just falls so far from the realm of what you'd ...

But, my goodness, I'm talking on and on. I haven't let you -- and you seem so nice. So very nice. It's so hard to meet good people. Tell me about you. Tell me about yourself.

What do you do?"

"Again, I'm the head of HR."

The Wire: Real. Authentic.

TEXT:

In 2008, the hit T.V. show The Wire came to a close.

It was praised as one of the most realistic shows on television.

And now it's over.

Or is it?

CUE: Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole."

NEW TEXT:

Coming in 2009.

CUT TO:

CAPTION:
The Wire: For Bears.

CUT TO:

Bears selling at the corners.

CUT TO:

"It really shows you the gritty side of life of bears in a major metropolitan city. It makes you care about the bears. As opposed to people. I mean, who cares about people?"
-- The Washington Post.

CUT TO:

Bears shooting up.

CUT TO:

"It just shows the real lives of real bears in inner-city Baltimore, and it makes us ask: are we doing enough?"
-- The Mail and Globe.

CUT TO:

CAPTION:
The Wire: Wheelchairs.

CUT TO:

A man standing on the sidewalk. A wheelchair rolls by. Then, another wheelchair rolls by with a gun taped onto its side, firing again and again. The second wheelchair passes. The man looks around, a touch confused.

CUT TO:

"An unblinkingly realistic portrayal of, uh, wheelchairs."
-- David Denby, The New Yorker.

FADE "Way Down in the Hole."

CUT TO:

CAPTION:
The Wire: Beethoven.

CUT TO:

A fully-wigged Beethoven on the corner playing "Moonlight Sonata."

CUT TO:

A few feet back from Beethoven. Two Red Hat Ladies pass by.

RED HAT LADY NUMBER 1
Oh, I don't like street music.

CUT TO:

Senator Clay Davis in a chair, facing the camera.

SENATOR CLAY DAVIS
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Holds up a picture of a sheep.

CUT TO:

CAPTION:
The Wire: Children's Reading Program.

CUT BACK TO:

SENATOR CLAY DAVIS
This is a sheee --

CUE: Tom Waits' "Hoist That Rag."

CUT TO:

"We are talking about The Wire, right?"
-- The Daily Herald Tribune Gazette Herald.

CUT TO:

CAPTION:
The Wire: We Tell David Simon.

CUT TO:

"You're doing what to my show?"
-- David Simon.

CUT TO:

The Wire: Real. Authentic.

Summer 2009.

Black.

The First All-Female Mafia.

The first all-female mafia was born on the outskirts of the Brooklyn Heights in 1955. It continues to this day. When it was founded, those few in the know thought it was an elaborate put-on, Andy Kaufman pretending to be Gloria Steinem, but those in the family had long thought on this, and they got good quick, and they haven't slipped since.

I wrote "continues to this day," meaning the New York I'm currently in now, at this moment, New York is the city of the moment (I hope this doesn't come as a surprise), perpetually jangling out of itself, a vibrating cocoon buzzing across the floor from one end of a nearby door frame to another, never quite explaining itself and leaving the man seated in the chair watching this mugging at a kind of quiet confusion. (Could you imagine the East Village becoming a vigorous retirement community in 50 years? Something like Chile and "The August Boys" transporting themselves North?)

I am here as historian. After sixty years, they had stories to tell, and they plucked me away from my teaching post in Montreal (history of chord changes in jazz and popular music from 1900 - 2006) to step off into the downtown to hear the grande dame Liz Weller recall her lawn care habits ("I mow the lawn at midnight." "At midnight? Isn't that --" "Dangerous? No. I take proper safety procedures. I call out, 'Anyone there?' and if no one says anything, I say, 'Well, here I go,' and hope I don't run anybody over." "I wasn't going to say 'dangerous.' I was going to say 'odd'), her pet care habits ("I got a fish tank filled with laser beams 'cause I got a competition going with some of my girls to see how many goldfish I can give epilepsy,") and many other things.

Gerald Tremblay had been re-elected as Montreal's mayor for a fourth term, and he hadn't wanted to wear a wreath. I laughed when I saw that. "Not today," he said. "Not today." Un homme qui refuse une guirlande est un homme qui refuse des voyages libres en Hawaï. C'est le phrase, n'est pas?

A bus driver has stopped the bus half a block away from me and is walking back towards an old blind woman, leans forward to ask something, she looks up at him in surprise, and after hooking his arm through hers like a date leads her back to the bus. On a nearby bench, sequestered under American elms: old Italian man with slicked gray hair half bent over a stroller with phone in hand. Hallo? Hallo? Yes, he is wet. I'm changing the papers now. A naked child in front of him, who, then, begins to cry. To the child: Please wait.

Liz Weller was pinstripe suits, couture-in-miniature hair, and a feral sort of tired. (One associate whispered in the corridor on the way to meet her that she was Frederick Seidel with breasts while I was in the middle of giggling over some of the photos I saw in the hallway, two of which I managed to later photocopy and place here below.)

Pencils still kept Ornette Coleman's time-card punched in on the side of the desk. When this was pointed out to her, Ms. Weller remarked that there were plenty more unnamed spaces for unnamed melodies. For a few years, purportedly, she would spend morning meetings carving jellybeans into the likeness of Ronald Reagan, Ol' Gippersides.

It would later be reported and then visually confirmed that a giant, displeased squid had ridden the F train and gotten off somewhere near Bedford Street.

*

Wake up, grab a cup of coffee, walk over to the window, place the forehead against the glass (always surprising when it's cool), and start to think.

*

Blanche Neige was a home of its own. Cote-des-Neiges. Cote-St.-Catharine.

Essay: The first thing ...

... you need to understand about Chocolate Cake City is that a lot happened, a hell of a lot, and who knows how many voices I'll be able to recreate, whether or not Dan and, say, Michael Lore somehow manage to consult everybody and they all come to the very specific and definite conclusion that this should be a banjo-based history and only that, and anything that doesn't come from that ought to be shunted off into the wings where they can burst like hand-claps of flour in our private hearts, because who am I to speak for these particular loves of mine? When you try and recreate an entity like this with one voice -- the kind of thing where strangers would come up to us and quote our sketches back to us -- are you allowed to get away with this? What if you want to jump ahead to other bits, like when Sarah asked, "Where's Dan?" and caught in a lull of complacency, I replied, "Oh, he went to pee outside," only realizing my error when I was hit with a bug-eyed, "What?" (the crushing logical inconsistency being that there was a bathroom right up the stairs) -- can I get away with that?

Perhaps because of a life-shift -- towards what, I can't explicitly say -- I've decided to put to paper some reports and incidents if only to share one of the knotting and unknotting strings of joyful chaos I carry in my heart. Now that most of those with whom I shared 2004 to 2008 have settled across the country while I continue to grind against the wheel of unemployment, I can offer this as an opening salvo to latter musings, missives, misgivings, remonstrations, an umbrella tossed up for us to latter gawk at at coming get-togethers, continuing friendships, healed breaches, or even just simply whether or not a physical copy of this essay could achieve some legitimate form of anti-gravity status -- whatever the case, whatever the result, all of these things are on the table.

A lot of the experience is, simply, in the performance, whether hidden or not, autobiographical or not, and outside of that, one feels helplessly reduced to either a series of anecdotes or an onslaught of clinical, analytical language, neither of which I want to immediately indulge, but I can offer this: what you see in these sketches has a direct connection to who we are. We are and are not our creativity. This thing/non-thing is explicitly there, interwoven into our lives, and when it takes a sharp form, then it takes a sharp form, and I almost wish I could say that that's all there is to it, and that it's as simple as that.

I recently "sat-in" with the troupe when they shared a performance with We Do Stand-Up at Yale, and while we were rehearsing "Poker Face," come the musical interlude that took us towards the climax, all four of us started doing a beatbox version of "The Final Countdown" (where we normally play the theme to "Rocky"), we ended up performing it that way, and -- to a degree -- that's what I mean by the above paragraph. It just appeared. It was a second kind of jazz.

*

*

And sometimes people didn't get this kind of thing. It's no knock against them, but it sure was strange to encounter a melody of things from peers your age, like, "Hey, Evan, I hope you're enjoying school and I just wanted to say that I admire you and everything you stand for!" and if you were eighteen and seeing that message for the first time, you thought, "Stand for? What does she think I've been standing for?"

Or a year or two would pass, and you'd try and make your way through a thicket of conversation like:

"Are you happy?"

"Yes."

"So, there's a problem?"

"What?"

Thankfully, these two parts of my life didn't start to grate against each other until another time mentioned in another essay. The only memorable time it did occurred in the winter of 2005, I believe, when Sarah had asked Steve and I for help with a Field Production class.

I can't remember too much about the day -- at least, not the amount I usually can: I remember it was bitterly cold, that I directed an illegal immigrant looking for help regarding his status to City Hall, and that Sarah tried balancing a single cherry atop a chunk of ice in an alleyway off of Hanover Street, saying, "Be beautiful, damn it."

After Steve's departure, Sarah and I went to Ernesto's and then Mike's Pastry, where we took almost as much joy out of warming up as we did the food. It was in Mike's Pastry that I ran into a classmate I had met when I first entered college, enthralled by the fact that I could come up with lengthy rhymes on the spot and had a fairly good handle on the French language.

"Evan!" She called, and came dragging a young man over by the hand. "This is my boyfriend," she said when she reached our table, not even bothering with the name. Turning to the boyfriend, she said, "This is Evan, the smartest man alive."

I tried not to outwardly cringe. "He's just unbelievably clever," she said, going on.

"Well," I emphatically said, hoping to put a stop to it. "If you ever want to solve the Von Neumann hypothesis or, uh, have someone help you commit tax fraud, I'm your guy."

By the way, one thing I will say about the "is and is not," challenge-the-X-Files-to-a-freak-out paragraph is that it certainly is an odd experience when you see a comedian start to speak in a voice that in some way helps you piece together the rest of their melodies, because that means that the moment where you will be able to weave the whole thing together is coming or on the way.

And sometimes the melody would manifest itself directly into the shows: people would sing along with every single set change song. They'd keep time clapping. Moses and the Israelites entered the stage to "Hey Ya" (my idea), cut the music in time with the opening claps, and then Jonathan bluntly shouted, "I'm Moses," and the sketch was off and running.

There Will Be Blood: A Christmas Special.

Green Screen.

Miramax Pictures.

FADE-IN:

A crowded room, full of commotion.

PLAINVIEW
Ladies and gentlemen ...

The camera pushes forward.

PLAINVIEW
Ladies and gentlemen ...

The camera finds Daniel Plainview. He raises his hand. Silence.

PLAINVIEW
Ladies and gentlemen, if I say I'm a Christmas Man, you will agree.

The slow dun ... dun-dun drumbeat starts.

CAPTION: From Writer / Director P.T. Anderson

CUT TO: Daniel Plainview picking up a Santa Claus costume in the dark.

CAPTION: A New Holiday Classic.

CUT TO: Plainview nailing a wreath to a tree in the dark.

DISSOLVE: Plainview in the parlor again.

PLAINVIEW
... I've traveled across half our state to be here tonight to see about this Christmas. I'm a family man. This here is my son and partner elf, H.W. Plainview. He's not an actual elf. The ears are removable, see? (He demonstrates.) Elf, not an elf. Elf, not an elf. Elf --

CUT TO:

Caption: There Will Be Romance

PLAINVIEW and MARY
Buffalo gals won't cha come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight. Buffalo gals won't cha come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moon.

MARY
You sure are a good singer.

PLAINVIEW
Don't pity me, Mary. What is it you want? What is it you want, Mary? The moon?

MARY
That would be nice.

PLAINVIEW
Well, you can't have it, it's mine, you hear me?

CUT BACK TO: The Meeting.

PLAINVIEW
I'm a true Christmas man. That's why I carry my very own North Star with me wherever I go.

Points out the window. The North Star waves back.

He doesn't mind violating the laws of physics. I'm an old friend.

CUT TO:

OTHER PROSPECTOR
You boys are a regular family business.

PLAINVIEW
You boys are a little late.

OTHER PROSPECTOR
What'd you find?

DISSOLVE TO:

MONTAGE: Plainview taking notes, observing Christmas traditions, i.e., watching one person give a gift to someone else, the gift-giver trying to explain the notion of giving a gift to someone, who then hands the gift over to Plainview, inviting him to try. Plainview takes a lighter and sets the thing on fire and offers it to the gift-receiver, producing panic;

Plainview taking notes alongside a mall Santa Claus, who keeps glancing over at Plainview uncomfortably. Mall Santa asks what Plainview's doing. Plainview throws up his hands to express innocence.

PLAINVIEW (V.O.)
Oh, I found some interesting prospects.

CUT TO:

Plainview highlighting all of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Camera zooms in on 'stole.'

Plainview's also making a map of Santa's in the region with the following names/categories written out on the map -- mall Santa's, store Santa's, school Santa's, and those whose names are 'Santa."

Also, to the side: a note that reads, "Hannukah? Kwanza? Later!!!"

Title Card: There Will Be Vengeance

PLAINVIEW (In Santa Claus costume, in the chair, at the mall. A young child in his lap. Plainview's brother stands behind and watches.)
Are you an angry boy?

BOY
Pony?

PLAINVIEW (Retreating into himself.)
Are you envious? Do you get envious?

BROTHER PLAINVIEW
That part of me is long gone.

PLAINVIEW (Coming out)
Well, if it's in me, it's in you.

BROTHER PLAINVIEW
... I don't think we're talking about the same Christmas, Daniel.

(Montage of Plainview offing Santa's and checking their names off the map, which include, but are not limited to: (1) Plainview getting Rudolph drunk; later, one Santa is found in a wreckage with a sloshed team of reindeer. Plainview plants a bottle of Jack on the sprawled Santa and sneaks away. (2) A car screeching to a halt, thugs throwing a bag over a Santa and pushing him into a trunk while Plainview stands in the background, pleased. (3) a dead Santa being rolled into the water (4) Plainview busting into a room at night to take polaroids of Santa in bed with someone else, Santa shouting, 'But I have a wife!')

PLAINVIEW (ctd.)

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. I -- just look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I see the worst in people.

Title Card: There Will Be Greed

CUT TO: Plainview sitting at the Sunday ranch table.

PLAINVIEW
I'm prepared to give you --

ELI
No. We have Christmas here. That's worth something.

PLAINVIEW
What would you like, Eli?

CUT TO: The Sundays sitting around a campfire.

FATHER SUNDAY
My son is a healer and a vessel for the holy spirit. He has a church.

Eli makes a church with his hands.

FATHER SUNDAY
And a steeple.

Eli makes a steeple with his hands.

FATHER SUNDAY
And look inside --

PLAINVIEW (Rolling his eyes, exhausted.)
What the f --

CUT TO: Oil Tower explodes candy canes.

CUT TO:

TITLE CARD: Daniel-Day Lewis.

CUT TO:

PLAINVIEW
There's a whole ocean of Christmas joy under our feet! And no one can get at it except for me!

Cut To: A whole field of people nailing wreaths to trees.

Caption: There Will Be Presents

CUT TO: A Holiday-themed room. Plainview and Eli.

PLAINVIEW
See, if you have eggnog --

CUT TO:

Plainview at a bowling alley. Eli is laying dead on the ground. Plainview looks around and walks off screen.

CUT BACK TO:

PLAINVIEW (ctd.)
-- and I have eggnog,

CUT TO: The bowling alley again.

Plainview is stacking Christmas boxes around Eli's corpse.

CUT BACK TO:

PLAINVIEW (ctd.)
-- and I have a straw, my straw reaches ... across --

CUT TO: Straw in different locations. A beach. The woods. The subway. Another beach. Heads under water. Plainview goes through one end of a car following his straw; a Mentos guy -- accompanied by the cheery theme song -- goes through the other way. Comes up on the other side behind Eli.

PLAINVIEW (ctd.)
-- the room and starts to drink. I -- drink -- your --

CUT TO:

Title Card: There Will Be Carols

CUT TO: Rockefeller Square at Night. Christmas lights. Christmas trees.

CHRISTMAS CAROLERS (singing the "Future Markets" theme)
Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum-bum.

The caroling plays over the rest of the scenes.

CUT TO:

CAPTION
There Will Be, Uh, Well ...

PLAINVIEW (Sarcastically)
Do you think your song and dance and superstition would help you, Ebeneezer?

SCROOGE
They were ghosts! And I thought they did ... alright!

PLAINVIEW
Oh, the spirits can do it all in one night! Of course they can!

CUT TO:

PLAINVIEW
And you'll sell Bailey's Building and Loan to me?

JIMMY STEWART
Wh-why, yes!

CUT TO:

PLAINVIEW
You call it what?

CHEWBACCA
(Roars.) Subtitle: Life Day.

CUT TO:

(Plainview walking away from a manger.)

PLAINVIEW
Nothing but a bastard in a basket!

WISE MAN
Language!

WISE MAN 2 (turning)
I thought you got him mur.

A lights shines down on Daniel. He looks up.

PLAINVIEW
What do you want?

CUT TO:

Title Card: There Will Be Blood: A Christmas Special.

FADE TO:

Plainview sitting in the dark.

He's covered by darkness.

The light reveals him again, this time in a Santa costume.

He's covered by darkness once more.

When the light comes back again, he's normal.

Black.

Write a Poem.

What to do with those who can't read a poem?
Write a poem? (Well, we'll save that joke for later --)
Do we offer them bread? A threnody of platitudes?

Watching people talk about Elizabeth Bishop,
I can't help but think of Christopher Guest movies --
'In the Waiting Room' shouldn't be this hard, nor
mysterious -- "She's talking about pairs of hands --
why pairs of hands?" And why not hands of pears
or bears or rickety rocking chairs? A, A, A.
Why is this so hard?

"The tear at the end of 'Man-Moth' is what
the artist has to offer," which, so, goodness!
What a boon to bear the inner-swoon!
Now I know what to do if I can't make rent --
Do you take tears in check form, sir or miss?
I hear what an artist has to offer is only this --
Book readings can be revived under the knife --
Cut through the onion, and what do we have?
A miniature Gunter Grass! Oh, what the hell.
Why am I answering this? What's the point
in yelling at someone who's not there? What
do we do with those who can't read a poem?
Write them a poem? Yeah. That's a great idea.

What Do I Do With You?

I'm not suggesting that you can't draw a map, per se --
The days may not be fair, Berlin-qua-Cohen sings,
may be grab-bag blindbursts of hand movements,
occassional fade-in's from white, and you've moved
either twenty or one hundred feet, and who knew?
I'm not suggesting you can't draw a map, but we need
to come to some sort of order -- that slow boil of fools
growing wise ain't found in the coffee pot, the tea,
mettle, or fettle jot, neither kneenicked towards moon-in
haze-cloud light, or floorwashed 'til the ground down
through to foreign feet is a clearviewed sight. But we need
something: the urbane Zeppelin with a three-story wine glass
hanging from the balloon, that breath of hopping ahead
a decade for friendship ... shall I lift the lithographs to life?

Book Review: Jonathan Lethem's "Chronic City."

Jonathan Lethem's new book, Chronic City, follows the life of a former young television star and the two-to-three people he manages to meet in the little hideaway bungalow that is New York City. It bears the dubious distinction of being one of the few books I've read that comes anywhere close to capturing someone I know in real life.

In some regards, I felt like and found myself running through some of the same feelings Mark Twain did in his reaction to Jane Austen. That said, there are obvious differences between the two of them then, and the two of us now.

Personally, I did not like the book; however, two things: the first is Samuel Johnson's perpetually quoted nugget --

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labor of learning those sciences, which may by mere labor be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

I hope it will give comfort to great numbers who are passing through the world in obscurity, when I inform them how easily distinction may be obtained. All the other powers of literature are coy and haughty, they must be long courted, and at last are not always gained; but Criticism is a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, who will meet the slow, and encourage the timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.

After all -- to add on to Johnson's quote above -- why add to a critique? This is something I go through every time I know I'm going to critique a book. The thing is already what it is, and why not leave well enough alone? It's an absurd sort of personalized fuss, one that I'm not entirely fond of (especially anything that smacks of excessive vengeance or theatrical aggression, especially in this day and age), though if it were a riotous Greek coffee shop in Lowell at the turn of the 20th century, the slow or wildly spinning top of a day, complete with audience and characters, flirtatious waitresses and boiling cups, I might feel more favorably inclined to talking about it, but that is something else, and we are here for the book.

To contradict myself -- and to go on to the second point kicked off from the first above -- if we are to take the notion of a chapter, scene, or even a paragraph holding and/or maintaining a rhythmic or melodic sensibility, this book often fails to meet that standard, and given how many books the author has already published, it might be beyond the point to even make a point of it, but it gets to be a tremendous bother, especially when -- after seeing a bit out of kink here and another out of joint there -- you end up with sentences like this:

Ava the pit bull greeted her roommate with grunts and slobber, her expression demonic, her green-brown eyes rimmed in pink showing piggish intellect and gusto, yet almost helpless to command her smacking, cavernous jaws: from the first instant, before even grasping his instinctive fear, Perkus understood that Ava did her thinking with her mouth.

...

Her mouth closed then, as it rarely did otherwise, and Perkus could admire the pale brown of her liverish lips, the pinker brown of her nose, and the raw pale pink beneath her scant, stiff whiskers (liverish lips? pale pink? scant stiff? Jesus, Jonathan -- Evan) -- the same color as her eyelids and the interior of her ears and her scar, and the flesh beneath the transparent pistachio shells of her nails.

...

Ava only had to grin and grunt, to strain her leash one front-paw hop in their direction, and every creature bristled in fear or bogus hostility, sensing her imperial lethal force, which required no trumping up, no Kabuki enactments of coiling to pounce, no theatrical snarls.

...

Perkus learned to invert a plastic baggie on his splayed fingers and deftly inside-out a curl of her waste, to deposit an instant later in the nearest garbage can.

...

... an apartment was only a container for bodies, after all, while a chaldron was a container for what under duress he called souls.

(pp. 315 - 322. Save "souls," emphasis mine.)

or:

Arnheim might in truth be many men crushed together, like a diamond.

The resonances and layers here are mysterious without being unduly impressed with themselves.

or this, which doesn't even make sense:

Riders sat with coats loosened, nodding in rhythm to earbuds or just the robot's applause of wheels locating seamed in ancient track.

-- and they drive you up the wall. Rhythmic elaborations are stuffed in for no seeming reason, and not even poetic, melodic, or logical reasons; and when this isn't pulp writing at its worst, the book produced an ugly flashback of a group of writers sitting in a circle in a gray room and lousy chairs, one saying to the author, "I really liked your, uh, metaphor here, you know?" And then the author would nod and say, "I was going for --" and then the ears would scatter like moths on a sweater ripped into the light.

*

Before I go any further, here are some of the things I liked:

Had anyone asked me to give the topic of the conversation I'd entered, let alone the names of the speakers, I'd have been reduced to clucking like a chicken.

...

In a kind of wardrobe shock, nobody could locate their January gear ...

...

... tackling the Internet as if it were a basin full of sudsy dishes.

Meanwhile, there are annoying end-chapter punch-outs -- i.e., "It was Perkus I meant to call home, not pigeons," "Perkus was the opposite of my distant astronaut fiancee -- my caring for him could matter, on a daily basis," and "So I learned how Richard Abneg, like Perkus Tooth, was someone who could uncover what hid in plain sight."

The chaldron and tiger are not effective Macguffins; as social satire, it frequently falls short of its target (my guess is, Six Degrees of Separation by way of The New York Trilogy,) sometimes substituting a literary-styled bend over a point of laughter and thinking that sufficient 'satire' (see: Sinclair Lewis having Babbitt poetically yearn for a dictaphone and the sculptor in this book speak of "atopias,") oh, and: even by the lenient standards established by Dickens and Pynchon, the names of the characters are revolting: Chase Insteadman, Perkus Tooth, Oona Lazlo, Georgia Hawkmanaji, Florian Ib, Strabo Blandiana, Anne Sprillthmar, and Laird Noteless; reading it, I couldn't help but wonder if this the first well-publicized novel to have characters named after having one's fingers blindly dicker about the keyboard. Will there be a sequel featuring Perkus Tooth and "Afewjfiewo Ajefoefe?"

Only when there are less than one-hundred pages left and the conspiracy is almost legitimized does the book become approachable (save what I'm almost positive is a passing thwack against David Foster Wallace -- 'Obstinate Dust?'), but it swerves away from this, jumps one major logical shark, and ends in a combination of a mess and swat-the-fly snideness.

And this review of the book nearly split my head -- i.e.,

"They will point, justifiably, to the exquisite wit and dazzling intricacy of every single paragraph."

That's noxious fellatio talk. This book could easily be written under the table. Easily. It sometimes strikes me as just, simply, an afterthought.

The Day the Declaration Arrived.

Hand to hand to broadsheet to horseback to public proclamation read over a square, flung to thump on the ground in front of the door, eyes racing over it in a private home: what can be said of the day the Declaration of Independence first arrived?

John Hancock was the man in charge of distribution. The outlet was the Continental Post Office. From there, it reached the hands of Washington, who was told to "proclaim it at the Head of the Army," which was done on July 9th, as well as other leaders.

Under Washington's orders, as Pauline Maier's American Scripture relates:

... with the British "constantly in view, upon and at Staten Island," as one participant recalled, the brigades were "formed in hollow squares on their respective parades," where they heard the Declaration read, as the General had specified, "with an audible voice." The event, Washington hoped, would "serve as a free incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, ... knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms: And that he is now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country." By raising the spirit of the people, the Declaration might also encourage men to join the army and so help American affairs "take a more favorable Turn," as Hancock and the Congress hoped. A call could finally go out for men to fight "for the Defense of the Liberties and Independence of the United States."

... The festivities as Philadelphia on July 8 began with members of the Committee of Safety and Committee of Inspection going "in procession" to the State House, where "the Declaration of Independency of the United States of America was read to a very large number of the inhabitants of the City and Country," who responded, a newspaper account said, with "general applause and heart-felt satisfaction." John Adams recalled that "the Battalions parade on the Common, and gave Us the Feu de Joie, notwithstanding the Scarcity of Powder. The Bells rang all Day and almost all night." In the evening, too, bonfires were lit and houses were "illuminated" by candles put in their windows, as colonists had done in earlier days to celebrate the King's birthday.

... in Williamsburg, Virginia, "the Declaration of Independence was solemnly proclaimed at the Capitol, the Court House, and the Palace." And in Savannah the document was read four times -- in the Council Chamber by those officials who first received the letter from Hancock; in the square before the Assembly House "to a great concourse of people"; at the Liberty Pole, to which civil officials and local militiamen marched in a formal procession, and where, "after the reading of the Declaration," the Georgia battalion "discharged their field pieces, and fired in platoons"; then, finally, at the Truestees Gardens, "where the Declaration was read for the last time, and the cannon of the battery discharged."

... to assure that the people were "universally informed" of the Declaration, as Hancock requested, provincial officials devised means of circulating the news through the rural countryside, where over nine out of every ten Americans lived ...

... Pennysylvania's Committee of Safety sent letters by an express rider "to the Counties of Bucks, Chester, Northampton, Lancaster, and Berks, Inclosing a Copy of the said Declaration, requesting the same to be publish'd on Monday next, at the places where the Election for Delegates are to be held."

... Virginia asked sherrifs to proclaim the Declaration each "at the door of his courthouse the first court day after he shall have received the same."

... Rhode island had the Declaration read in the state's several towns "at their next stated meetings."

... Massachusetts not only told sherrifs to "proclaim Independency," but also ordered ministers in the parishes of every religious denomination to read the Declaration to their congregations "as soon as divine Service is ended ... on the first Lord's Day after they shall receive it," and then to deliver the document to the clerks of their towns or districts so it could be recorded in local records and remain there "as a perpetual Memorial thereof."

... The North Carolina Council of Safety let recipients in that colony's towns and counties decide how best to reach the people, asking only that the Declaration "be proclaimed in the most public Manner."

... The Maryland Council of Safety also told "the several committees of Observation in each County and Distrinct in this Province" to proclaim the Declaration in whatever manner seemed "most proper for the Information of the People."

... The Declaration appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6, in the Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote -- in German -- on the 9th, and in no fewer than thirty other American newspapers before the month was over.

What do we learn from James Munves' Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence? That:

The publication was a rush job.

... Dunlap, either influenced by Adams or on his own, substituted the less frequently used unalienable for inalienable in certain unalienable rights.

... The following morning a copy was glued into the Journal of Congress and others were dispatched to the states and to the troops in the field.

... Jefferson remained annoyed at the way his Declaration had been edited.

It was published in the Philadelphia Evening Post on July 6th, and according to "Seth Kaller, Inc," "by the end of August 1776, the Declaration had been printed in at least 29 newspapers and 14 broadsides."

The publisher's name was Benjamin Towne, the only hint of whose life takes the form of a satiric pamphlet concerning his potential verbosity and willingness to change sides, as he tailored the paper to General Howe's arrival within the city during the course of the war.


It reached Boston on July 13th, a public reading was held on July 18th, and The New England Chronicle published a copy on the same day.

There are accounts of it being read to the Continental Army ("every where received with loud huzzahs"),

Essay: All The Dreams I've Written Down

Three friends of mine, only two of whom I remember, stand-up at the very front of a John Edwards rally while the man is speaking and begin to clap -- there is no melody -- "Yankee Doodle Dandy" simply because Mr. Edwards has been accused of witchcraft.

*

The conviction that the Harvey from Donnie Darko first appeared in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love.

*

The front-end of a subway car a simple platform. Standing with the 'rents. "This is how kids used to ride it." Pass a river. Watch people try and swim out to the train.

*

Space station. Asteroids hitting the force field, damaging it. Me: why don't you hit beat them away? And then I start throwing punches at asteroids thousands of feet away, knocking them away and to bits. Later, we're captured on a subway, but what starts off as me trying to save my friends from a middle-of-the-desert alien execution becomes me turning invisible in a blackbox theatrical production as those in charge run around yelling their heads off.

*

A baseball field, and a pinstripe thief cuts through the crowd across the way with a Venus de Milo on his back. No one seems to notice save myself. A voice: 'Gosh, Woody Allen's operatic tenor ain't half bad,'" and it was his face singing, but Loraine Hunt Lieberson's voice sailing out over the fences and back again and so I had to agree with the voice, though I wasn't entirely convinced it was Loraine's ...

*

A red-head kissing my right ear then thwacking both with large diving flippers.

*

An old friend wants to go. I don't want them to go. They go. A cafeteria: "Mony Mony" comes on, and one figure across the way nods in silent, Western-movie approval. Someone very old and very young discussing "hanky panky." Then a diorama of Beckett-like plays (one of which includes giant ballet slippers walking forwards,) one after the other, which eventually collapses in on itself.

Expansions: Thinking About "There Will Be Blood."

There Will Be Blood is a portrait-by-excoriation. It is about a kind of evil, though I can't yet tell you what I exactly think about evil.

But I can tell you this: that the mimetic reaction regarding milkshakes and scores of impressions of Daniel Plainview first made me lean towards the fact that this kind of cultural reaction was about maintaining a needle-gently-leaning-towards-the-positive atmosphere, something designed to keep the ridiculous in check (i.e., Matrix: Revelations, The Daily Show still sticking with its portrait of John Kerry as boring, even after he seemed to be one of the key tipping-point figures in negotiating an Afghan run-off), and that any art that aspired towards necessity would inevitably be lost in the whorl of the ever-producing moment, but looking at the film again this afternoon, I still found it a good film, thought again of this, and wondered again what this said about insta-comedy.

*

Would it be fair to say that Plainview's oil rig is the inverse of Andrei Rublev's bell-tower? To make the point a little more explicit, there is Elif Batuman writing in The New Yorker (April 27, 2009):

In the Russian Orthodox faith, bells are widely considered to be "aural icons," symbolizing the trumpet calls blown on Mt. Sinai and the sounding of the trumpet for the raising of the dead before the Last Judgment. Just as painted icons are not intended to be mimetic representations of a spiritual object but magical windows into the world of the spiritual, a Russian bell is not a musical instrument, but, as Father Roman puts it, "an icon of the voice of God."

The Car Broke Down

We're hugging the curb of road outside of Cheyenne, my engine is doing its best impression of a steam-engine train that I've ever seen (choo! choo!), and my wife's wandering barefoot down the grass as I break out the maps to see if I can get us out of here in a safe and timely fashion.

Off in the distance satellite dishes are strewn like marigolds. Low-lying, warped fences frame balanced rocks. Thought I was on 130 after taking a turn of I-80, but it doesn't look like that at all. I hear tell that plenty of trains run back and forth through the land around here, but I haven't seen any yet.

Maybe if I take a turn by the Latin Quarter. Wait a second. This isn't right. This is the wrong map. Looking into the glove compartment, I'm almost overwhelmed at how many maps I have in the car, and how many of them are completely wrong, location-wise and time-wise.

My wife's wearing jean shorts cut in such a way that I can see the beginning curvatures of the ass. She hasn't kissed me since we stopped at a gas stop outside the Devil Towers and I went into the bathroom and came out with a moustache for the first time in my life. Hand to the all-something, that's the honest truth. She said it looked like something between Rhett Butler and Gregg Allman, or a slightly bushier Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil (or a moustache officer on his way to stop someone from committing moustache), of whom neither she approved. My first thoughts while clicking the razor on the edge of the sink was the overwhelming compulsion to buy a pack of cigarettes and begin a spoken-word rendition/recitation of "You Are My Sunshine."

... Her father was one of the men who put himself in the state's employ when Vermont decided it wanted to become the Skyscraper Capital of the U.S.

Honey, I said. Have you seen these maps before? She looked at me, said, Don't tell me you've never seen the country before. I know it's France, I said. But what's it doing here?

We're dragging a giant oyster in an attachable bed we picked up because we want to open a "Poetry and Oyster" outfit at the lip of the bay in San Francisco. It's my hometown, and all I can think of: on the BART, the city a sliding set of movie credits, the docks (or "ducks," if your handwriting is as bad as mine) you kick your foot on to send your boat out to sea -- names written on the sides of the buildings, pointing at the BoA, saying, "Cinematographer: Jake Smith."

All I can think of are the parking spaces with the individual artwork. The raccoons lining up to get on one of the 46th Ave. busses in a did-I-just-see-that? midnight hour. The light bleaching the body to black as you make a makeshift sun-visor with your hand to watch someone light a cigarette over half of Chinatown.

"I can't believe you want to be a lawyer," she said, "especially -- especially after all the work it took to get the oyster back there."

"Hello," the oyster baritoned.

"I mean, where is this coming from?"

"Maybe I want to become a lawyer just so there'll be one less brief in the world ending with 'in conclusion.'"

"Come on, now -- what's the story?"

"Community -- that, and I'm starting to get annoyed at the ever-spiraling gripes that don't engage in a tactile way -- you know, if you want to get Lawrencian about it."

Her mouth moved with a fluid and appreciate sense of JUSTICE, and she blushed furiously.

"Tell me, MR. CLYDE BRUCKMAN, do you believe in PLATONIC FORMS?"

The "Poetry and Oyster" racket would run on a simple carnival hinge: we'd feed the oyster in the afternoon, and if he liked what he heard in the evening, he'd cough up a pile of smaller oysters and the patron would sandal and barefoot their way through the sand to pick them up and bring them back to their tables.

Book Review: Anselem Berrigan - "Free Cell."

Anselem Berrigan's Free Cell is a book-length poem divided into three parts -- "Have a Good One," "Let Us Sample Protection Together," and "To Hell With Sleep." It is his fourth book of poetry, and it's published by City Lights. "Have a Good One" invokes Stephan Mallarme's "Un Coup De Des Jamais N'abira Le Hazard," even meta-name-checks it as the reader goes through the verse ("Production values / among other grandchildren / of Mallarme), where he encounters unexpected puns (Must we demand / of our pop tarts / a public crack-up / during war time?), jokes (Kingfisher sighting sparks / epic stroll), lines that strike us ("I'm micromanaging nausea," "Monolithic derelict fuck."), neologisms (droolsultory, public meltups), and then there are the thetic chunks (and my apologies in advance for not being able to directly copy the type-setting):

... when
zombies lose their appe-
tites can we rehabilitate

'em back into the game?
I sympathize with the
difficult people, why
should transitions be
seamless, Sylvie hates to
go to sleep, no she hates
the "go" part & so do I

awake, smiling toothlessly
at our anti-lyric non-concepts
our pro-war liberties, our
embrace of our own private
communiques besieged
for, like, happiness of
a minor place's kindling.

...

I don't want love or remorse to follow
I want them in the way, things to burst through
corollaries to be roped and tackled
by surprise, get killed, and thank you. One fate
transforms into another, but I won't
touch that bandaged story. I won't belong
to this scripted conversation, though I
may play along.

Outside of Mallarme, one possible suggestion for how "Free Cell" wishes itself to be read (as in, how it defines its aesthetic parameters; to say, 'This is where the text will go') is contained, simply, in this: "Liquify our symbols."

It is a book designed to be read melodically, in and of itself, and that is something a review can't fully convey.

And but, and yet, and still: this is a smart, strong book, and it's well worth your time.

Review: "Apres Lui."

Christophe Honore's Apres Lui (literally: "After Him") came to our attention at this year's misery-filled Cannes. It stars Catherine Deneuve, Guy Marchand and Elodie Bouchez, and it tells the story of a mother losing a son to a car crash, and then finding solace in obsession and obsessing over the one who was driving the car, her son's best friend. Almodovar's All About My Mother may come to the mind, but this is not an Almodovar film in the slightest: the colors are gray, and the jobs that are mentioned come as incidental asides. The film's focus is on giving a space to grief. There is tremendous poignancy in seeing Deneuve pick out clothes for her son's funeral, in posture alone quietly conveying the cumulative knowledge a parent gains from dressing their child day after day. And that works in the film's favor. There is one odd scene when Deneuve has a cello-filled montage of woe with the tree that killed her son in what I can only describe as pulling a "Lady Macbeth in reverse" ('In, in, damn spot!'), and when the film strays towards this, it's tough to take seriously, but when it doesn't, it is a fine portrait someone who becomes undone -- and stays that way.

The National Comedy Project Spends a Morning in Anchorage.

The National Comedy Project -- which was currently comprised of X., his sleepy friend Bill, and a man who was convinced he was John Dos Passos -- took the morning to walk around Anchorage, Alaska. They would have to head up Glenn Highway soon enough to do a show at a lodge in a town that was still debating what to call itself, alight with the possibilities of invention, but this moment involved X., Bill, and "John Dos Passos" leaning up against a stranger's car watching a moose rub his chin against the roof of their own car parked across the way from the bright-red neon of the City Diner, and this was the principal reason why they decided to spend some time walking.

They made their way towards West Fifth Avenue and the great expanse of water that lay beyond. Above the city lumbered a projection of a mountain range of clouds whose physical arrival was imminent, its peaks cut closely to the tips of the city's buildings. Men and women in costume were heading up and down both sides of the street, calling out to each other, My Lord Borealis! My Lady Borealis! They all carried staffs and frequently whacked them upon the ground. A beleagured Bill looked at X. What do they do with the winning couple, he asked, light 'em up and catapult 'em to the appropriately sensitive part of our magnetized-encircled ozone? They might just give them acid, X. remarked. Or say, Congratulations, you've won a screensaver. I'm glad they could afford it, Bill quipped. What's a screensaver? Dos Passos asked.

X. swirled his thermos of tea in his hands before taking a sip. Someone was unwrapping a piano from a blue tarp in the bed of a truck across the street. The piano was hand-painted. Someone was unloading a stand-up bass, too, their face hidden by the size and breadth of the instrument upon their shoulders. Jazz tonight? X. called. And every other night, was the reply. It's Bill Evans' Jazz Workshop tonight. The bass player turned around; a passing pedestrian ducked. You guys gonna be there? he called. We've a show, too, was X's reply. They exchanged waves like soulful business cards and went back to their paths.

You know who I really want to be someday? Dos Passos asked. Who? Bill said. Andy Warhol. And I'd work hard at being Warhol. I might even become a Workowarholiholic. Which river is that? Bill asked and X. pushed Bill because it was his job to keep the peace.

Simon Jakartis

An empty stage, save one stool. Simon Jakartis -- a well-tailored journalist -- enters.

SIMON JAKARTIS: Good evening. Or afternoon. And I'm not going to say, "Good morning," because who goes to see a play in the morning? There's "Dinner Theater," but there'd be an absolutely mutiny if there was "Breakfast Theater." So: good evening, and all the rest. My name is Simon Jakartis, and tonight, you will hear the story of my life as a journalist at the very beginning of the 21st century in America. You will hear about school dances, best friends, and a loving mother whose homemade apple pie was the talk of the town; however, there are some reports that I never knew my mother at all, that I was an orphan from Johannesburg, South Africa, and washed up on the shores of New Zealand reading a copy of Car and Driver in a Michelin tire. What the real story is, I cannot say, because that would be in violation of my journalistic ethics. But you can always count on the truth from Simon Jakartis, your number one source for the news you need when you need it. (As he reaches into his pocket for a BlackBerry, a cocktail waitress begins to cross the stage.) What's this -- Miss, can I get a scotch and soda over here? -- an e-mail from a reader already? You guys are the best. I love these things, don't you? By the way: is there an app. that lets you check to see whether or not your phone is -- oh, what's the word -- off? (The waitress brings over the drink.) Ah, thank you. (A sip.) Oh. That's good. Thank you. (She leaves. He puts drink on the stool.) Now: what have we got? "Dear Mr. Jakartis: I'm thinking of getting into journalism, myself. Can you tell me how you got started as a reporter? Sincerely, Herman Kory-Kory." I'd be happy to, Herman. I started out on the sports desk in South Florida, and I got fired because I have what is known in some circles as an "anger problem." After that, I got hired by a certain major television network because of that anger problem, so that worked out for me. I got to sound off on certain things that really got my goat, steamed my clams, and steamed my goat's clams, you know? Like free-parking on Saturdays. I hate that. Ha-a-te. It makes me furious, you know? Free? Parking? Parking that's free? Really? Seriously? It really makes me think we're living through -- and don't laugh -- the second coming of hell, which -- for those of you who don't know -- is in the Revelations section of the Upanishads, so don't you go trying to convince me that I don't know my Torah, okay? And besides, what's wrong with someone trying to make a buck? I thought we lived in a capitalist society. Since when did this become Burma? I'm not saying you weren't thinking about Burma, but what if you were? Are you now? How come you haven't denounced Burma yet? Since I haven't heard you denounce Burma before I started speaking does that make you a Burmese supporter? Keep it tuned right here for you latest updates on Burma from your number one source for all things, Simon Jakartis. If you're just joining us, I was being a number one source for all things. Is it gone already? (He brings the empty glass to his face and shakes it around.) Not even a drop. (Pause.) A drip-drop. (Pause.) De-luge. Luge for the deluge. (Pause.) Sometimes I think I'm running out of things to be mad about. (Pause.) Sometimes I wonder if I should start a sort-of "Wayback Anger Machine," you know? To see if you can be nostalgic about anger, or if you can still be mad about something in the same way today the way people were angry about it ten years ago. Not, y'know, Bosnia or Rwanda, but the important things, like gays in the military and de-regulation. Now, de-regulation is a very technical thing, and you don't need to pay any attention to that, but the -- another e-mail? Really? "Dear Mr. Jakartis: Hello! I'm a long-time audience-member, first-time --" (The waitress enters again.) Could I get another? -- " ... first-time writer. I wanted to know: how do you put together your hard-hitting --" (He gets the drink.) -- Thanks. (He takes a sip.) " -- ... your hard-hitting pieces? All the best, W.G. Krivitsky." Thanks, W.G. I bet that's short for 'What a guy,' eh? Well, when I worked in South Florida -- though there are reports that I started in the Baltimore and my parents wanted to name me M. L. Hencken -- when I started down America's own little Italian boot, we found that our viewers were so ... invested in the rest of the country that we just contented ourselves to pull all the clips we could find about sex scandals, explosions, bears dangling over babies dangling over cliffs, diseases with funny names that might turn your local mailboxes green and mucus-y, reasons why you should be concerned about your child's safety, your parents' safety, and just who, exactly, lives in your neighborhood, this coming to you from the man with the news, the person you should turn to again and again, who asks the hard-hitting questions, or, well, will ask a hard-hitting question eventually, like, 'Why won't you resign?' though I don't know who that's directed to, exactly, double though it sure would be something to see that have an effect and there goes a Postmaster or PTO member or two. (Pause.) Talk about your lightweights. (Pause.) It would be fun to become the memory of the popular press, wouldn't it? "Lusitania - Must- Resign." "Molasses - Disaster - Or - Tax - Protest?" (Pause.) Wouldn't it be something if we go twenty minutes before the viewer at home realized that they'd been looking at nothing but swooping graphics for twenty minutes? Or that "Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room" was also "Wolf Blitzer's Apartment?" (Switching voices.) "Let's see if John King knows what's happening with the milk situation." Then the camera cuts on over to John King, and he's there in his bathrobe holding the door open on an empty fridge. "Well, Wolf, as you can see, there is nothing, as none of us have left the apartment." The constant refrain of a name at the end of a report. "I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm someone with split personalities who instead of cutting to some footage we've already shot just decides to jump around with all the people we've got up here." (Pause. He looks at the BlackBerry again.) "Dear Simon: A few years ago, Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech on the media where he said, amongst other things, that there is, 'as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean' and 'opinion and fact should be clearly divisible.' Do you think this is true? Best of luck, Charles Goodness." Thanks for your question, Charles, you chaperoo. I suppose what Mr. Blair is referring to isn't the fact that stories have 'facts' and 'opinions,' but sides to a story, because who are we to determine what the frame of the narrative is or what the narrative is itself? See? I know some of you saying, "Isn't that your job?" We're not here to tell you the facts. We report them. Whether or not we tell you what the facts are or even tell you the facts when we say we're telling you the facts is another matter entirely. There is always the next level to an excuse. I'm getting a little honest, aren't I? Or ... is he? See? Easy, easy stuff, y'know? Let's keep this coming. "Why are there 24 hour news networks? Why does it keep going and going? Cheers, John Trudeau." (Pause.) Well, John, if you stop, people will go away. People have a chance to catch their breath and think about other things. Let's face it: I have no idea why it is or how it is I'm still on the air. I'm on record for saying that the Public Transportation system is the work of devils and socialists, for Pete's sake. You'd think I was a drunk preacher on the frontier of the Wild West some 200 years ago, or one of the guys circulating pamphlets as part of the Jefferson, Adams, and Burr campaign. But, no. I'm here today. I'm alive and I'm well. I even went so far as to say that Veteran Health centers were encouraging returning Iraq Vets to suicide, and, what, with Walter Reed, 1/4 of our veterans today homeless and suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress disorder, you'd think this would get some red flag, you know? But it doesn't. I just ... keep going. That's how it goes: you push me, and I push on, and everyone else is convinced that they're not capable of being the ones to stop this kind of thing. I'm sure there are good journalists out there. I just know that I'm not one of them. Of course, you'll take this to be an indictment of the entire profession: it is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial. I apologize for the accumulation of your frustrations. I'm sorry you haven't had a second Network, I'm sorry there aren't three Jon Stewarts, but what can I do? I'm just a guy. And, what, with the complete frothiness of our mea culpas -- "Oh, you mean that war?" -- and all this, "It's always the other driver, never ourselves" nonsense -- it makes my blood do the jitterbug, too, you know. (Pause.) If it's any consolation: it's not like the essential stuff doesn't survive; it's not like the great stuff isn't happening. (Pause.) I hope someone uses this when they're auditioning for Hair. Or Singing in the Rain. (Pause.) From zero to adult in sixty ... (He makes an "on and on" gesture with his hands. Lights.)

Monologue: (2)

Every time fall in New England comes around, I want to leave my house at quarter-to-twelve and drive to yours with blues-soaked radios stuck in every elm along the way. The State Fair hangs in the purple bleaching the night bridge permitting the folded napkin boats to pass and whisk back and forth. I am becoming a kind of eighty, ninety, one-hundred year clockwork. But good God, how does the clock work?

The Pulp Sonnets.

by Evan Fleischer.

"What just happened?"
-- Humphrey Bogart, The Maltese Falcon.

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I.

'Sonneteering for sale,' hushes the gale,
dockyward workers treating the crates with care,
its contents strictly for the healthy and the hale,
knowing that if released into the air,
it would bend the ring around the cozy
sound four-hundred years into this year's round,
boxing gloves gloving the blood, rosy
in the raw or tumultuous paw, sound
bouncing off sound seeking a ship to board,
drawing a navy onto the sea as sudden
and proud as if it were drawn from a sword,
mixing the water, the sky, the mud and
these, the boxes are left alone on the docks,
waiting for a ski-mask to come and pick the locks.

II.

What would the Russians want with a sonnet?
I don't know, sir. It doesn't blow anything up.
This is geopolitics run by an old lady in a bonnet.
Yes, sir. Shall I ring the kitchen for sup?
No, Simon. You've done enough for tonight.
Go home to your wife and your limousine.
Give a kiss to each: but: your wife, might
I suggest an article I published in this magazine?
I hope you don't mind I used our real names:
I'm trying get thrown out of office,
and making my hope for dalliances plain
assures me of nothing but moral profits.
I'll keep my eye on the situation.
For now, this train hasn't left the station.

III.

If there's danger, my surfboard hides a shark.
I wouldn't want the creatures to sneak
up on me while I'm spying in the dark
of Hawaii's tide and her mountain's peaks,
the shore's green rising and falling to make
me think I'm a drunk bird stumbling through all
directions of the air, seeking a path to slake
my General's thirst for the facts: no stall,
all action, no delay. What's the gadget
today? A Luddite for a spy? Oh, boy.
The growing to-do pile for a Piaget!
If only the Baron would flout his toys,
his nukes and servants of the undead,
I could go from shark to sea to land instead.

IV.

A ghost discovers that a ghost is ghost-
writing the former ghost's autobiography.
His editor at the Washington Post
wants to know why this habberdashery.
"I give you six weeks leave, full pay, and you
decide this is gratitude's true parade?
Where's the book? The young cub learning to spew?
What have you to say? Que charade charade?
This is a problem, and this should be fixed.
My paper's reputation is at stake.
If they learn a ghost is one of my tricks,
I'll end up penniless in the park, a wraith.
Oh, I didn't mean that. That came out wrong.
Forgive me. I've work to do. Move along."

V.

Listen, honey. Listen, toots. Listen, love.
Tell the policeman what you saw this morning.

I was down out at the docks shooting a Dove
commercial, see? Just me and the forming
trenchcoats by the fence, Larry (the director),
the lighting guys, and the clock hadn't struck
four when there was an explosion in sector
five, and our prop roosters began to cluck
like mad, and the cops rushed through our shoot
to arrest everyone in sight and see
if everyone was all right, the galoots,
all the while ignoring the boat at sea,
floating away one paddle at a time,
the larger act hiding the tinier crime.

VI.

General Yevushimber looked up at
the monitors, replaying the tape as
morning broke like an exhausted clam that
could snore through a circus' razzmatazz,
the morning paper a moldy pancake
spreading itself thin across kept lawns,
all this making the General awake
to the past that popped into this the fawning
notes of an old Otis Redding song Pop
used to play on Sunday before they'd go
car-surfing on the Potomic shores, cops
letting us go when they saw the State Department's logo.
So Walt, Pop, and I would begin the day.
No reason why we can't see that in some way.

VII.

I choke the guard on shore with my knife, sand
muffling the screams and yelps; then: the silence.
The mansion's crystal chandeliers shine bland,
the General's orders suggesting violence.
I scuttle up the hill and, there, the window.
Nose above the sill. Victorian drawing
room, filled with seated tuxes (Zagat's? "So-so.")
pacing, pipe-wielding, and to maybe thaw in
or out the silence, I open it a bit,
and out come the words: "One of us in this
room is a cop." "What?" "Ain't that the pits."
"Thirty years of theft should have led to bliss."
"Have you robbed for that long, Chuck? Are you sure?
Shall we to our historian demure?"

VIII.

But before they do, a lady enters:
she is frocked with fox, two of them alive,
glaring, hoping the other will splinter
into the pot like self-defeating chives.
She says, "What are you doing in my house?"
"We're robbing the place, M'am, but we just need
to settle something first." "Egg. Now scram, louse."
"Not so fast, boys. There's still the guy whose creed
runs counter-clockwise to ours. We were just
going to consult our historian,
the one full of fake whiskey, quotes, and dust.
The present shall go moritarian
while the git tells us all about the past --
before the lady calls the cops. Speak fast."

IX.

"Our outfit has been together a while,"
dragging a tome from his jacket lining,
"every since 'Wall Street and the Crocodile,'"
all the bankers eaten not withstanding,
when Roger P. Portico and Simon
"The Simon" Simon met in the Upper
East Side, sat for tea, and discussed crime on
the highest levels before the cuppa
this and cuppa that were emptied out, night
speeding along like a Chinese Dragon
more on fire than usual, like a blight
running in reverse, the Welcome Wagon
powered by the internal monologues,
colors looking for frowning grays to flog."

X.

"I suppose the point is, night on its way,
the two of them set to work: filching all
they came across: wallets, pooches, and quays,
some tossed from boats to pedestrian malls,
not quite knowing how to approach the shore,
the boat leaving Michael to drown, I'm told,
and more: overhearing where there's a store-
house of 'squinto' Pintos in a foothold
out in the Meatpacking District, taking
them all and giving them to the world's ants;
foot-level global warming finds them baking,
now, and the car crashes have got their pants
down around their ankles, knowing the need
to care for this problem -- if not, to heed.

XI.

"What is British award show pablum like?
That just came to me now. Anyone know?
Simon Williams (from Upstair's Downstairs)'s mic'
once picked up the immortal words, 'Hello.
When the program was broadcast on the Beeb,
Yanks thought it was a documentary.'
Where was George Michael? Catherine Tate? Dweebs
like us would expect nothing less ord'nary
from a true-to-life TV show, just truth.
Maybe a dragon and a narrator,
but mostly honesty -- from God's lip's! S'truth!
It's true on both sides of the equator,
I bet. Now: where was I? Pig's jumped the pen.
Let me describe the history again."

XII.

The Baron was stabbed mid-heart attack
during this harangue of nonsense, purses
belonging to each all were poached, a lack
in lights led to stumbles, oaths, and curses,
heads knocked like unanswered doors into black,
unconscious, and when lights and kin came to:
perhaps send hounds after lost time to track,
Roger mutters, wetting his welt turned blue,
but neither is called for; neither needed:
the Lord snuck through the kitchen to surprise
the Lady. "My birthday," she conceded
a welterweight fight of tears in the eyes.
Thief to thief to hidden cop the crowd turned.
The dog too large for a rolled-paper spurn.

XIII.

The Ghost had a talent for drinking in
that he could not physically imbibe drink,
taking the term heavyweight for a spin
to leave his fellow patrons in the sink,
so if drunks wanted to challenge a ghost,
it was their game to lose -- from first to last,
the fedora-fond wraith deciding what most
required his attention and which to pass
on to those with hands in peanut dust,
thumb posturing as a Stonehenge column,
the yo-yo sway of sun from red to rust,
happy hour getting lost and solemn
in the 3 a.m. rush to crust the eyes
as cri-de-coeurs of hawks asterisk the sky.

XIV.

So the drinking came to bear at the bar
the ghost liked to frequent: his man's
tie, here, filled with faces of the Tsars,
who introduced himself by the name Stan,
whose job was to sell excuses to those who
wanted to opt out of the jury pool
where he heard a case "for you, Mr. Boo,
why, even just the details make me drool.
Ever since Claudius' flesh turned green,
Keats' nightingale got a bullet through
its skull: we've pulled the curtain back to dream
and raised a wall-to-wall caterwaul, pew
pulpits hiding some cold mendacity.
(P.S. This sonnet isn't the last of me.)

XV.

"To keep it short, my rant comes to this: some
self-interested spirits still think they
can skip morality's dance card, the drum
and timbre of the times, and so their way
gives way to their way, and that's fine. But my
real point: spirits use this as a cover,
a small band trying to do more than I
imagine, I imagine. Oh, brother.
If Wim Wenders hopped on a merry-go-
bender and spun out nothing but bastards
for the hour -- you get the idea, Snow.
They want to outlast the past. Disaster.
They're trying to deflower from beyond
a garden who thought the clouds long gone."

XVI.

Poking through the books tickled out new treats:
that the ghosts gave Van Buren hair twenty feet
tall, that any aspiring athlete
had to remove their limbs -- from head to cleats,
or, at least, that's what the rule book had said,
a copy passed among all the writers,
leading some to scratch the hair off their heads.
This was not what they had wrote. The spider
seeking who had taken its web -- and where.
Cities competed for distance despite pledged
dollars taking them straight to the cellar,
all bets off, all speculation unhedged.
A starting point in the constellation.
Orion's Belt will drag them to the station.

XVII.

"Sure my heart's been broken before. Screw you."
"M'am, we were only asking if you want
a ride home. Besides, the cars are new.
Thought that might provide a welcome counter-current
to the events of the day. You mentioned
the boat and the getaway, the trenchies;
if anything else comes up, my extension
here at the station. Thanks, Frenchie."
Door closed. Quietly behind the desk.
Flex the muscles of the mighty rolodex?
Do they still call it that? He'd have to check.
The accordion, bass, and the Tex-Mex
radio fuzzing across Petersburg square:
his patio. No real moment to spare.

XVIII.

"Am I really looking at penguins, George?"
"Keep rowing, Rowan. Row and don't look
left or right, not at the polar bears, fjords,
or the penguin's unearthly height. We took
the sonnets for a reason, one being
that money is always in season -- look
out!" "I can't drive the boat without seeing
what's going on all about. Nature's hook
could drag us offstage. This isn't good-faith
ignorance. This is only ignorance,
and almost nothing more." "Cash, I saith!"
"That's it. I'm rowing ashore. Forbearance
kept me from saying it plain: we're lost, fool,
and if we're to survive, we'll need some tools."

XIX.

"But there isn't a disco club for miles,"
George said, a smack of oar on the ol' head,
soon frozen, left floating like a hair style
for people fond of accidents with beds,
boats, and unused portions of aircraft fields,
the rumbling coo of penguins blotting
out the sun, the blue, the white, the cold yield
hallucinations of horses trotting,
hats whipped by one hand like lassos, nostrils
flaring -- or is it all a vision? Prelude
dropped from the cargo of the plane, kestrels
kippered out from a gunman's attitude,
the scrunch and twitch of a thousand-yard stare
literally plucking birds out of the air.

XX.

Looking at the picture frame of the long-
lost love, which would be lost if she hadn't
stole the frame, but whatever the damn song
will be tonight, thinking about Paddington
Station postcards lining the desk, pouring
out a glass for herself, wondering why
she spent a few years getting money, storing
up to vacation at a train station, sly
not the right word entering Frenchie's thoughts,
but it was close enough: the brewing chai
wouldn't tear her away from all thoughts fraught
with worry when she was standing by the trains,
hoping that she might find the picture frame.

XXI.

Stuart Kaminsky's file had come up once
again, the Hollywood detective whose
most famous file had in lore been ensconced:
"Somebody had murdered a munchkin," clues
piling up on Oz's movie set just
so, and now it was on the copper's desk,
the radio off, ready to go, bus
filling up with cops who look like Pete Best,
forgetting they had cars of their own, dragged
back by the Commish and sent to their cars
and copters and they turned the road to slag,
sending snow and beggar's bullets upward,
pedestrians parallel to the pavement,
speedometers jostling against containment ...

XXII.

... and as they tear around the corner, Cap'n
barks his orders over the 'com: "Hey! Tom!
You and Pyotr go to the shipmen
down by the docks: tell them that there's a bomb
in the shiphouse, so that they'll clear on out
and you can eat well, and those that stick around
can help you board the boats, which will stoutly
seek out the four corners of the planet round
our boat-based prey." "Nikolai! To L.A.
you're to go -- to that gotch-gutted piggie
Simon who works for a General Y -- hey!
Watching where you're walking! Mickey-
tumbling can't compete with flying metal
blocks, however quickly the brake pedal ...

XXIII.

... comes down. Martin? You're to Olympic
Square in Chicager. Do your best to find
out why -- after being so prolific
in asking for the Games, 'tis now, 'Never mind.'"
"But what does that have to do with the boat?"
"Everything is connected. Which reminds
me: after the Windy City, the gloats
will be sure to come: I want you to find
some drug busts to make up in Ottawa."
"But: jurisdiction --" "So what? Your record
grows, no matter where you are, ja?"
"But what of international discord?"
"Police work is police work, no matter
where you go. Beside, there might be patterns ...

XXIV.

... yet to be traced. Every Siberian
song carries the same weight in New Orleans,
pound for pound, snow for show, Liberian
chops to cello-carrying emporiums.
Let me tell you: I should have played music."
Answered by some clear radio silence.

George and Rowan running through excuses,
sickening to the cold, the myopic lens
zeroing in on survival, movement,
even just talking. George decides to start:
"Something to read would be an improvement."
"Why not read the sonnets? That's kind of art."
"You know what I'd like? Some pulp magazines."
"Adventure Stories? That kind of scene?"

XXV.

"What I loved most about the Dreadfuls was the --"
"The killings?" "No, the --" "Spicy and saucy?"
"No. The clouds." "What?" "Descriptions of clouds. Duh.
Some are 'dingy,' some 'purple and flossy' --"
"What's a 'dingy' cloud?" "Floats in the bath,
I reckon." But before he can finish,
helicopters come mumbling across the sky, half-
lost, possibly something from the Finnish --
'til they hear: "George and Rowan, you're under
arrest for the theft of sonnets, blowing
up property. Cast your gear asunder
and comes towards the craft; time to get going."
"Ask the penguins to arrest us at your behest."
"We will not comply with your little jest."

XXVI.

Penguins of this size do not respond well
to police intimidation, nor are
helicopters well equipped to dispel
any bird over a three/four meter bar,
so when it crashed into a ball of fire,
the two thieves rushed over to keep themselves warm.
"Regardless of what happens to transpire,"
Rowan said, "self-sufficient medals adorn
our future homestead." "To the fire, you fiend."
"What of the sonnets?" "Leave the ripping yarn
for the penguins, polar bears, and the wind."
"Not even to light the fire?" "You mean that barn?"

Morning had broke in California.
General Yevu drove up Astoria ...

XXVII.

... twisting the radio dial so far it knocked
the dial line on the cars next to him over,
DJ's having to put their records in a box
and move to new studios, explorers
here and there, broadcast interrupting broadcast
only to see the ear race away again;
then they panic, fish hooks ploddingly cast
into the thick, turgid air of bargains
broke and compromises made, knowing minds
dragging their canvas and brush as fast as can-
do's can before the rain's eye hat lasagna
the floating child in the Mexican patio,
the table perceived by the perceiver
as heard through the lobster receiver.

XXVIII.

We'd like to apologize for those lines:
John Ashberry came to our house and knocked
that "Mexican patio" bit of rhyme
out when he asked for the bathroom, door lock
sound and all. To continue:

Yevu stopped,
pulled over to the curb. The ocean waved.
A four-star general in his flip-flops.
Maybe that was the book title to save.
He pulled an Easter Sunday with his car
and started rolling down the sand dunes.

In a plane! Frenchie had gotten this far.
A past she was now ready to exhume.
She held the postcards in her hand's palm
knowing that she had been offered a false balm.

XXIX.

Before they had pulled into the driveway,
the Baron and his wife were discussing
the ranch in Wyoming: endless skyway,
rhythmically swearing, that is, 'percussin,''
word having reached them of what had happened.
They'd have to "tough it out" in Hawaii
for a few more months in this green back end.
Their neighbors thought they'd do a drive-by, see
if they were home and that was when they saw
all the fence posts had been knocked to the ground,
donkeys in the living room. They: "Hee-haw."
The report of what the police had found
was oddly detailed, and the two were asked
if they'd help them catch these crooks at long last.

XXX.

"Why isn't everyone in a porn-store thirty?"
"Because this isn't Ancient Rome." The plane
taking forever to taxi. This dirty
schmuck for which there was too much to explain
about the curve of life -- perhaps they could
take a taxi to where it was supposed
to taxi; 'til then she would Buddha
through the rest of the wait; the Russian Post-
Service would be her refuge of false love,
grabbing ... 'his' collar: "Have you seen the stamps?
They're like the bells, the red soul in the stove
that pumps steam to our culture. Its champion."
And with a touch of ever-present grace,
leaving the plane she hears --
"We've Gotta Get Out of This Place."

XXXI.

To create a diversion, Nikolai
surrounded himself with spies in the airport,
all looking out of newspapers, noses high
at the top of the cut of the page, "Sport,"
the game in question an unfinished score
watching Frenchie head to the streets --
taking an aimless left, right -- to explore.
Was there anyone here for her to meet?

Simon arrives at General Yevu's place
to find that the General is not in.
After landing himself in the chaise
and looking at worldwide situations
opts that now is a fine time to go break
the rules that had once bound him: so: he makes ...

XXXII.

... a phone call. "I thought we had a deal."
"I thought it was no deal." "But you said deal,
I'm sure of it." "I said there was no deal."
"I clearly remember you saying 'deal.'"
"Enough. You said you wanted me to get
the sonnets so you could build the Great Ring."
"That's right. And you can still get them yet
with our one-time only special branding
partnership with Kellog's Home Cereal:
be sure to collect all twelve boxes today.
Wrap each around your finger, Material
Boys&Girls. You'll have the same ring, too." ("Yay!")
"For the last time: no one's hands are that big,
and to force kids to wear that makes us prigs."

XXXIII.

"Nobody move! I'm a secret agent
that was hiding out in the bushes."
The Baroness and thieves saw a tangent
appear thus in human form, flushed
to the gills in exertion, but still real,
though before everyone has time to settle:
"I understand you have zombies concealed
here on the compound." "Just for the kettles
and kitchen-work, whatever we feel --
oh my God, Phil!" The Baroness ran towards
the kitchen door, which swung itself open
before she reached it, and coming forwards
in bloodied stock was the Baron-as-Zombie,
the corpse of what once was one Jim Thomie.

XXXIV.

"What is life?" asked the Baron. "Diverting
brain-eating strife? If to this my course be
right, then ribbon my hand anew; convert
me from one wife to you, you new Thisbye,
carnage-strewn, hollow-eyed, whose sockets say,
This is the way the world ends. Frustration
spinning productive entropy away ...
How I relish my new situation!"
Roger P. felt like a dirty puzzle.
"Why would anyone willing walk through
something like that? Which could put on the muzzle,
there goes your balloon, and that's all for you?"
"They were harmless!" The Baroness cried. "At
least -- up until now. Now I can't find facts."

XXXV.

But Nikolai found that Frenchie and he
wanted to find the same person: Simon,
at the bus stop, who heard a "Do, Ray, Me,"
turned, nodded politely, and the fly on
the wall, N., watched Frenchie's shoulders sink down.
She sung it again. "Can I help you, M'am?"
"You don't remember our song?" The mink gown
on Simon's shoulders shaking at this tram
buckling itself to his track. "A C Major
scale was our song?" "Simon?" "I'm sorry. I
don't know you." Down goes the escalator
in the blood stream. "You left our pie in the sky."
"I'm afraid you have the wrong Simon." "Says
who?" "Says I. Now get out and take your fez."

XXXVI.

Simon "The Simon" Simon stood watching
the Zombie-as-Baron sit in a chair,
and then all the undead saints come marching
in to serve everyone dinner, fairly
certain that the dishes would hold the words,
"Surprise! It's you."

"After the ghost's absurd
rewrite of the rulebook, we changed our views
towards problems accoringdly, which is how
we managed to spot this, prompting our call
to your boss, of which you must take a vow
of silence, too, nothing beyond these walls
must be made privy to our incidents;
if they are, it will be, "Coincidence ...

XXXVII.

... coincidence, co-in-ci-dence. Okay?"
"You have my word that your situation
will receive the utmost discretion. Jay
Treaties won't bind me here. Uluations
beyond our plain of sonic geometry
I see you have. But what else have we got?"
"Half of the atheletes -- like fruit on a tree --
or, almost on the tree, they're stuck in spots
of the air; they're halfway up the pole vault,
but they're not quite there, and I don't know what
to throw them if they get hungry, some malt
beverage? Do we drop soup from planes? The butt
of some joke, I feel like." "Again: don't worry.
They're half gone already. I wouldn't hurry."

XXXVIII.

How do you go about placating ghosts?
There are those that don't charge you with missions,
flash like lightning in the daylight; the most
Martin can advise to this one vision
is a grand swell of empiricism,
to hope the wave of microscopes will lift
its subject above the mysticism
so that when the wave drops away, the cliff's
edge passes behind the feet, the falling
bird of prey will turn the rabbit to pulp
in a thump of claws; the humane mauling
the gone-and-back-again; the one gulp
we take when the tilted compass gets a look
from too much love and too many books.

XXXIX.

But most ghosts don't care about that. There are
plenty beyond rationality's realm,
who can pick out weaknesses amongst stars
and for no reason at all take the helm,
as Martin can see when he takes the field,
waving his VHS Ghostbusters
back and forth, going, "Oooo!," hoping they'll yield
their grip on the floating Beas and Busters,
Tim's and Tiff's. No. He stops, then says aloud,
"What of your legacy to future ghosts?
Those with ghostly flying cars won't be proud
to enter your world and see that almost
all of you are carrying on like this.
Turn the mountain upside-down. Seek bliss."

LL.

And at that, sarcastic, begrudging words --
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
Vergine Madre, figlia ... how absurd,
umile e alta piu che creatura ... --
the athletes began to drop, and Martin
realized that he couldn't help where he could
all the time; that his role might be spartan
one day, and majesterial the next, good
some days, and others bad; too much, too much.
Best to focus on the facts. Help these folk
falling through the air like a flying Dutchman,
rowing them ashore; open the egg yolk
of safety to the boil of bad metaphor,
and ask the Chief what else is in store.

LLI.

General Yevu's car roared through the waves,
sending them arcing into the morning,
treads on the wheels being a rapid sieve,
the strength of the 50's muscle car boring
through the unsteady sand, the water threat
trying to reach the underside engine,
sea gulls whooping in surprise, jumps, and yet
nothing in their shouts speaks of derision:
this is a race of joy; no one out here,
no one to be seen. Down goes the pedal.

And the Chief throws down the brakes in some fear
when -- and for this, he should get a medal --
he realized his car had crossed the whole ocean
without extra long roads or magic potions.

LLII.

The Post Ghost had since de-possesed Martin,
hoping his name would now be cleared beneath
the margin.

Nikolai and Simon's bargain
was being dicussed over lunch, their teeth
chattering rapidly: "First we cover
up the Munchkin deaths with the Poppy Fields,
insisting they're high enough to smother
all sight of the bodies, and now you steal
sonnets from us? And for what, might I ask?"
"That wasn't me. That wasn't this Simon."
"What? Where are you hiding the whiskey flask?"
"Here. Touch this ring. Too long has this gone on."
And they disappeared in a noisy flash
which caused a zombie to drop his plates: crash.

LLIII.

The Baroness, thieves, cop, and zombies stared
as one Simon adjusted the contours
of his hair. Nikolai stood and saw two pairs
of selves in the room, twins, a fleshy encore
to the other. One thief stood up: "Well, look,
if things are going to take a turns towards this,
I should just say that I'm the --" "Well, gadzooks,
you're twins!" Nikolai says. "Something was amiss,
but I couldn't put my finger on it."
"He thinks I took the sonnets," one Simon
told the other. "But: Russians? And sonnets?"
"Don't be a bigot. We get our rhyme on
all the time. We were going to flood the market,
but: the nonsense: we didn't know where to park it."

LLIV.

"To you," Simon "The Simon" said, "it may
be nonsense, but to us, it's much, much more."
"I say," the Baron said. "Harrumph. I say.
I was dead, and then I got off the floor.
Isn't that interesting?" A pause. "Yes,"
"The Simon" says, "but, look: to us, it is
food for our eggs. Perhaps it would be best
if you touched my ring, just as a pittance."
And so they did, and so they ended up
amongst sand and sky, a ranch familiar
to the Baroness' eye. Phillip
M. thoughts flashed to Nikolai: the peculiar
sight of a third Simon riding forward
with empty horses looking for stewards.

LLV.

Having walked away from Simon convinced
that her heart was broken, but then ending
up in Hawaii then Nevada has since
repaired it some, but she had been spending
too much mental energy not to ask
from the back of the group where she stood,
"Which one of you is my Simon? Whose task
in my life was simple and true?" "If I could,"
Horse Simon said, "the places I remember
with you were fine and good, but none of us
are the Simons you were looking for. Dismembered
and disembled from a single alien goo-pus
far away, is who we are. Now, if you please,
I have some horses for y'all to seize.

LLVI.

"The plan is to ride out to the Great Cave,
which connects us directly to the North
Pole, wherein there are some sonnets to save,
being blown about by winds and so forth.
I promise: it'll be a hog-killin' time,
no one will be barkin' at a knot,

and

we'll get some Mormon Tea and alien slime.
I hope I'm not putting y'all on the spot.
There will be forlorn rivers and sunset
passes, wastelands to wander and purple
mountains whose colors don't need a set
of approriately colored glasses. Mirthful
I feel and mirthful I am to have you
read the poems to our eggs, Montesquieu."

LLVII

"Yeah. Hi, Alien. Secret Agent, here.
Question: if these Great Caves somehow link
up with the North Pole, conspiratory
or no, would it be within reason to think
that something from there might come here as well?
Also: regarding what you called us, you're
about 350 years too late." "Swell,"
Horse-Simon says, who then elects to pour
some bullets into his History of Earth
for Alien Conquerors. "And the worth
of your other comment does not give birth
to any reply. That's William Worsdworth."
When told it wasn't, he fired again,
then turned, screamed, and saw a giant penguin.

LLXVIII.

Is is about the journey? How it's all
in a day's work? That we bite the bullet?
Give the facts of life the cold shoulder?
Get to the bottom of the class with the mullet
at the top of the hill? Move to Boulder
to let the cat out of the bag? Get our
fifteen minutes of fame by a smoldering
freudian slip? Too hot to handle souring
tangos for two. Do we make it five? Six?
A lumpy romance? Under the gun of a
web of intrigue, we are met with a mix
and determined to boil it down to the
essentials: we end with a phrase that blights.
This one: "It was a dark and stormy night."

LLIX.

The penguin gave rapid chase to heroes
and villains alike, its foot crashing through
the wood of the ranch, bullets Nero-ing
through the air, bouncing of the flesh, the zoo
animals penned up in nearby counties
reassessing their daily relationships,
the beak picks up Simon the 'makeshift mounty'
and tosses him to the moon, persuasion's
ship sailing with fear tempting one to halt,
lots of shouts, incoming army copters
firing missles. Frenchie: "I don't know who to fault
for this Zane Gray Apocalyptic Moon Waltz.
The penguin need something to stop him or her!"
There's a screech and a kaboom. The car belonging
to the chief of St. Petersburg's police is buried
in the penguin's foot, who looks down, croons,
groans, and begins, slowly -- Frenchie looks
left and right: no Simon's to be found -- to fall.

LLX.

"Dude. Check it out. It's a free surfboard."
"For reals? Like, for real reals? Like, for really?"
"Totes magoats, Mr. Oats. Look at the sword
and other decals!" "Hey, dudes! What's the dealy?"
"Check out the new swag." "Oh my crapsicle,
how cool is that? When is the first ride?"
"Don't know, man. 'tis too fantastical
a thing to even consider that side
of things and events and the ... shit like that."
"What if I borrowed it?" Aw, come on, man."
"Just for a minute." "Don't be a lil' rat."
"Who's being a rat? Put it in my hands."
"No, man, I -- " "AUGH. AUUUGH.
IT BIT ME. AUUUGH. AUUUGH."

A (Very) Humble Suggestion for the Newspaper Industry.

Give yourself a tip jar. Internet widgets like this are easy to put together, and if the statistics from Clinton's Giving are to be believed (and we're no Dick Morris), then go ahead and do it. It's easy to assemble, easy for users to give as much (or as little) as they want, emphasizes the fact that the community paper adheres to the communal interests, would be not be obtrusive on the website, offers something to the four million online viewers who currently have an ostensible nothing, and whether or not it would bring you from the red back into the black, it's a productive step to take, it's something that can be done, and it does not involve a lot of hand-wringing, what-can-you-do? looks, David Simon's absurdly retroactive idea, and needless blame cast upon the internet.

Department of Corrections: The Tiniest of Quibbles

In Kurt Anderson's Reset, he uses Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" in the middle of a sentence as a tossed-away metaphor for something that's been given a slew of names -- affluenza, a certain sort of blindness, or heedless hedonism, if you want to be cute.

But look at the lyrics that don't invoke being "Forever Young": do for others and let others do for you, be righteous, be true, know the truth, be courageous, be strong, hands always be busy, feet always be swift, and to have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.

Those lyrics have no relation to Anderson's metaphor.

Where was I last night?

Here.

A REMINDER:

For the most part, Propylaea is being written in 'real-time.'

*

And if you want to check out EVERYTHING ELSE, click here.

via Reuters:

President Barack Obama plunged his presidency into a charged racial debate

What percentage of the budget has been devoted to it? Are any of the members of the cabinet involved? Any Ambassadors? The Vice President? Were any members of the Senate or House directed towards addressing the issue in any way? Were all current projects and initiatives stopped, and all those involved directed to take part in this matter of opinion?

and set off a firestorm with police officers nationwide by siding with a prominent black scholar who accuses police of racism.

Cambridge police. Cambridge. Not 'police officers' nationwide. And it was 'acted stupidly,' not 'are,' or 'have a continuous streak of being,' it's acted, an instance.


(link.)

The Best Laid Plans

(for Geoff Manaugh )

"As of this moment and this announcement, there will be a contest underway for designing architectural spaces way up there, way up in the air -- more prosaically, in the airspace owned by the Government of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, as specified by the longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates on your fact sheets, gentlemen. I hope you're excited. I hope you're ready. I know we are, and I know I am. The Czech Government invites architects from any culture, country, or economic background to submit their proposal to our assembled panel of judges, who -- after the cut-off date of August 3rd, 2009 -- will shortly announce their decision to the world."

Clev closed his briefing book, nodded a silent thanks to the cameras and cameramen perched in the back of the room, and left for lunch.

A young government worker quickly rising through the department's ranks. His best party trick: whistling all the parts simultaneously to Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2. What he did his best to avoid: the scrupulously slicked hair endemic to men his age entering government. Hair was hair, and that was the long, the short, and the bald of it. What he was carrying with him as he made his way to the Charles Bridge: a folder of accumulated information, covering -- in part -- historical precedents and geographic hints: Potosi (in Bolivia), Jules Verne-styled watercolors of jellyfish-like constructs of metal passing over stovepipe-hat picnickers and thoroughly embellished mountains, Quito (in Ecuador), Laya (in Bhutan), and Machu Picchu.

The point to his counterpoint: Alexandr Brankova. He was an avid technophile and -- despite the BlackBerrys and iPhones -- had given up his notebook for flip cameras. When an idea struck, the camera would come out of the jacket lining (hand-tailored off a cat-filled island in Greece, Brankova would repeat, with no cat-hairs to boot!), he would wander over to any corner of whatever room he was in -- leaving whomever he was conversing with in a state of raised-eyebrow pause, including Jan Fischer -- hunch his shoulders over the camera, and begin to whisper furiously.

Alexandr was waiting at the Charles Bridge. He waved with a manila folder of his own, and the two crossed; crossing, they saw a couple, back layered on back, lean across the edge to watch the boats, a young man twitching madly in place in a heroic effort to contain an orchestral blast of verbal abuses and lacerations as he listened to a grungy (flannel shirt out of tune with the pace of the warm weather of the day, unkempt hair, baggy jeans) man in his early twenties tell him, "See, I came to Prague to have an epiphany. I even brought a copy of Kundera? See? Kun-der-a. He's, like, your national flag or something, right? But the thing is, now that I'm here, I just realized -- you can't force an epiphany. You know what I mean? Which is a bummer in a way, 'cause I spent all this money on air-faire ...," and they spotted a photographer hard at work pivoting, pointing, kneeling, shooting and stopping for a moment to think on the shot he just took.

"Where are we going?" Clev asked. Alexandr was scratching at the beard on his chin, muttering that it was time to trim the old lion's mane.

"Shall we make it Bellevue?" Aleaxndr looked over and grunted his assent.

*

They passed a window stacked to the brim with TV's. President Clinton on David Letterman. They passed on. Had they heard what was being said behind the glass, they would have heard this:

Not personally, not politically, not psychologically has the human race yet mastered the complex issue of identity. Who are we? Why are we here? In order for me to know I'm separate from you, do I have to think I'm better than you? And we live in a world that is so interdependent, we really have to find a way to have what the game theorists call win-win solutions -- you know, where everybody comes out ahead. So: it's not like a basketball game with overtime or the football game with overtime -- where, you know, it's a contest: you're supposed to have a winner and a loser. We're living in a world where first we should look for ways to share the victories and share the responsibilities, because we share this little planet -- I mean, look at this climate change thing: most of the global warming's coming out of America and China. Australia got hit first. Africa -- according to the studies -- is going to get hit worse. The continent that's contributed the least to it. We can't escape each other, and yet we still haven't managed this identity thing. We're still under the illusion that if we were a little bit richer, a little more powerful, if we had a little edge over somebody, push somebody around a little bit ... that somehow we'd all be better off, and in the end -- maybe it's just because I've slaked my ambition -- but it's not so. I mean, if you look back on your life, what you really think of as important is who liked you, who loved you, what you cared about; how the flowers smelled in the springtime; whether or not you thought you did anything that was noble or decent; did you have a child, and were you proud of him or her? I mean, people in politics should think about all these things from the perspective of real people more than momentary political advantage. I think we're getting there, but we just don't quite yet have the consciousness we need to deal with these conflicts. (A pause.) We need to have a bigger sense of our identity and other peoples'.

*

"I feel like I have a hair on my face."

"You mean -- your beard?"

"No, no. Something else. Besides that."

"... A phantom beard?"

"I'm willing to consider it."

*

"This contest is a prelude. First this, and then, planet-hacking."

Planet-hacking -- two hundred years ago, what would it have been? 'Emptying out the planet's watch?' Still: a term is a term, and we must carry it to term. Hacking failed states. Smuggling Bhutan's Minister of Happiness into a country that might need it. Re-growing rainforests. Re-constructing refugee camps that've lasted longer than they were meant to. Attaching strings to all the leaves of all the trees, and -- come the cue -- yanking every leaf from one branch to the other. Floating the poles to keep them from melting and the oceans rising, covering the immediate land in a sulfurous gas, and turning the nearby ocean into monstrous columns, so animals would not be denied access from their longtime homes. There are vast fields of information stored in the magnetic fields of other planets. There are cities that are kept terrorized by a small enclave that sends earthquakes chasing after people and buildings, so the people and buildings have learned how to jump and turn themselves invisible. This is what we mean by planet-hacking.

"And why limit it to planet-hacking? Why not form a club to ensure that there are fewer deaths in this coming century than there were in the previous? Why not try and create a world where the flame at Hiroshima can be doused, and the world will be nuclear free? How many more years of mega-business slow-creep do we have to endure before it's only green motorcycles on the market? And are California, Hawaii, and Japan talking to each other about cleaning up that mess of trash in the Pacific? How quickly did we go after the toxins in Springdale, PA? How quickly did we tackle unemployment in Baraga and Camden? How will the culture, the laws, and the business of things shift when the price it takes to sequence one's genome takes its inevitable nosedive?"

*

*

I remember I lived in Copenhagen for a decade and one morning Bruce Springsteen was playing guitar in the middle of the street. I was sitting on the top of a bank of phones at the edge of the crowd, and sometimes those bee-lining to the phones would stop, stare at the back of the crowds, click their eyeballs from what-is-that to is-it-really?, look up at me, I'd nod, confirming it, they'd deliberate whether or not to go ahead with the phone call, and if they decided to -- and this only happened once -- just as they're saying hello, I'd pick the receiver from their hands into the air as the crowd offered its own, "Who - ho - hoa, I'm on fire."

I love that stadiums full of thousands of people can settle on a key to sing. I read a story somewhere -- I don't know if it passed your mental fishnets, Clev, the kind for catching fish, not schmucks -- but it was about how memory was made. And the neurologists likened it to a great big orchestral blast made in the brain. It makes me wonder about the space between a stadium singing and a brain doing it, or a group of photographers and painters trying it instead.

*

*

We wandered back through the center, where they'd put up a collection of odd signs from around the world -- Secret Nuclear Bunker off the A128, Turn Left for a Boring Oregon City, No Trespassing Without Permission, or Dead People Things for Sale.

*

The most popular name on the table was Krkonoše City, and it would be launched straight from the mountain that would give it its name.

"To think!" Aleksandr boomed. "It'll wave its little propellers and the base will rest its tip like a child about to tumble over the edge, and then ... they're off. Over Hradčany! Malá Strana! Nové Město! Josefov! The burst of orange roofs, like paper you pinch with your hand into a cone. Or thousands of tons of nuns habits made out of slate waiting to fall on an unsuspecting -- "

"Aleksandr."

A glass of water.

"Do you think theme parks ever throw a mascot in the wash that still has a person in it?"

"If I ran a theme park, I probably would."

"Drowned Goofy Land." Clev frowned, considering the name.

*

Tonight's Play (Audio Only.)

Tonights Play - Evan Fleischer

Interlude.

The View from the Afternoon

The uninterrupted flatlands. Green. Far-off clouds a miniature navy fleet in the midst of battle. The car carved its metrical path under the tumult. Somewhere, the car is being tracked by a poorly built GPS, and given the shoddy quality, the car hops back and forth between five or so streets in a repeating pattern that the GPS operator tries to whistle, thinking it might be a tune.

Above this, high up above GPS satellites, cars, skyscrapers, Redwoods, the mountains, and inches past the spot where birds caught vertigo and would latch onto each other out of fear before gravity dog-whistled for their return lay a pair of giants, seated, pants rolled up to their knees, legs sunk into the water, and they, too, were watching the scene unfold. Well-dressed, somewhat in the style of bankers at the turn of the 20th century, the giants watched the clouds ape this naval battle amongst their feet, Dutchmen flying over the tops of the topside arch of one of the feet, trying to avoid a pursuant grape shot from an enemy vessel. Their feet lay at the bottom of the ocean, their backsides on nearby islands, and once some of the clouds cleared, offering a passing frame, an opening, this is where they first spotted the car pushing its way through the gravel like blood pushing other blood out of the way to get to the heart as quickly as possible. This is what they saw, and this was the natural hurry of a spy.

The spy's name was Reginald Morey. His government was Australia. The road he was careening along -- almost as if he were an astronaut in training -- belonged to his country's western coast.

As a spy, his job had taken an indisputable turn to the meta: his current modus employ was this: to initiate a full-scale program to quarantine the spies that had gone mad, to discourage them from working in the world of counter-agents and cloakrooms and guide them towards proper psychiatric treatment and hopeful rehabilitation. This wasn't about villainous madness, or even potentially dangerous madness, but a clearing of the air. There was The Case, George Sadil, and the like, sure, but this wouldn't find its way into any paper or public hearing room, not if Morey could help it.

Twenty miles outside Geraldtown, heading up the road somewhere between East Chapman and Hawatharra, trying to find his point of destination: a shack. Details winnowed at high speeds, providing only stark, streaking impressions: dirt the color of steel boxing gloves that had punched and knuckled itself into rust, the monstrous feet that sat out in the oceanic distance, his radio flying out the dash of his car and tumbling on the road behind him where it continued to mutter to itself in now relative peace ("Sittin' on the highway ... left behind the adventure ..."), and what he would later determine to be a chin-high, quasi-archway of brush that marked a dusty path winding a mile or so to a patchy pile of unpainted wood he could barely believe was still standing.

On the porch was his man. He was thin and slouched in his seat and had wrapped himself in a raincoat and a brow-covering Cambridgian hat. Rather than carry on the hurry he'd flagrantly displayed on the way here, Morey flipped gears one-hundred eighty degrees and only opened the car door, a smiling, lime-green Chevrolet from the 1950's, stepped out, closed the door, and -- with the file in hand -- leaned up against the door and let his tie and the end of the man's coat about his raised and resting feet be blown in the wind.

A minute passed, and the man on the porch spoke.

"You ONA?"

"ASIO."

"ASIO? Figures."

*

SUBJECT: MURRAY, JAMES. AGE: 73. PLACE OF BIRTH: MELBOURNE. COLLEGE: UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE (B.A.), LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS (PhD.) HISTORY: SUBJECT JOINED ASIS WHILE IN LONDON UNDER GUIDANCE OF MI5. UPON RETURN TO AUSTRALIA, LEFT ASIS FOR ASIO. PERFECTED FORMULA TO TURN KANGAROO MILK INTO IRISH WHISKEY. SUBSEQUENTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR UNPRECEDENTED, UNREPORTED AMOUNT OF KANGAROO-RELATED DRIVING ACCIDENTS.

*

Was it a runway to cross? To prove Auden and the crowded painting wrong? Was it a decoy?

*

Melvin Maragato spun away from his wall-monitors and knocked over a cup of coffee on the parallel side of the room, this, too, lined with monitors, sending its contents running down the desk and operatives leaping from their seats, lifting clipboards and keyboards and shouting obscenities and Melvin for his lack of composure in relation to every object in the room, in which his sarcastic estimation they were unvarnished, untrammeled experts.

Melvin and the organization to which he belonged were interested in contaminating the intelligence community with psychopaths, not because they held a lingering admiration for a certain kind of romance fish-hooked to a certain kind of madness; they wanted to have more agents wiretapping bird's nests and hearing morse codes everywhere they went (one zealous listener attending a symphony with J. Cortazar in the 50's and heard a timpani drummer tap out 'I hope your warts are better, sweet' in the middle of Mahler's No. 2); they wanted to have more of these so the basic and salient things would seemingly seem out of reach, just 'beyond,' and in the 'beyond,' they could try and leverage international intelligence to their advantage. To them, this was a simple world -- that is, without the giants.

Morey himself they wanted to make narcoleptic. Morey had lived in a comfortable bungalow whose attic had seemed to have become overrun with gray squirrels, no matter how many times he patched up the woodwork around the foundation or upper-edgings of his house. He couldn't sleep, and so moved to an apartment provided by the agency, but it soon became a nigh-parodical assemblage of parties, dish-throwing fights, and would-make-a-female-tennis-player-blush bouts of sex. This led him to exploit a provision of the ASIO's powers, and he spent most of his nights sleeping on department store mattresses, breaking into his temporary lodgings well after doors locked and eyes closed.

*

The giants were on the move. Sending a cavalcade of fish, whales, and boats into the air as they'd raised their feet from the water, they were on land in a single step, cautiously seeking where to place their feet next.

*

Morning came to Perth on the backs of a gaggle of black swans attacking the glass of a public newspaper box, trying to get at a fish flapping amongst the pages inside. Ringneck parrots angled off an invisible page over King's Park.

The memory of a city left behind: trading this for the other, backwards through the baggage claim. Gradually accumulating the walker's knowledge. The first meal when he was britches-high, and they couldn't understand his father's accent: "Dub a Dub, will you, love?" (The waiter leaned over and whispered in his mother's ear. "No, that's not what he's asking," she said. "Besides, that would require a sponge.")

Up and down Moore Street. Mum was a Sydneysider who had hopped up for a vacation-sized pint and wound up drinking the whole country in. A passport, some water, Fodor's, and a ragtag group of dog-eared bits, her affectionate nickname for The Decameron.

There was DART (as well as DARTBART, which took passengers to and fro between Dublin and San Francisco,) the free museum, and more.

Eber was a Mexican ex-pat whose sarcasm came in thick brushstrokes, the sarcasti-paint gloming onto the brush.

"Once upon a time, mi cabrones, a pinata walking through a small village decided to spontaneously explode. This frightened all the children."

The crowd chuckled.

"No one had seen such a thing before. Most pinatas willingly sacrificed themselves to crowds of those shrieking -- oh, what are they called?"

"Children?"

"Children! Yes. That's it. Those devils of glee."

A lost word. Up and down a series of stairs. To these ... spectators: milons. Or is that 'sparrow?' Mirlos? Milons? Mirlos y milons.

Recuerdo: la viejo cancion, "Mirlos y milons." Para qui? He said it slow, like a villain just discovering something unpleasant from a subordinate.

He remembered his aunt unfurling a screen in his home's patio, looking up and asking someone to turn off the sky, and then there was a hero dimple-smirking his way through a scene. Cross-legged. A piece of chocolate caught in an aluminum sculpture by his knees.

The two played at a thread. One would go up to the other and say, quietly, "How am I doing?" And the replies would vary -- "Good. You're doing good. How am I doing?" "These past two years were clearly bronze-medal work. You know you can do better." -- and this carried on for years.

When they returned to Australia, they opted for Perth, and when they came to Perth, they moved in next to a pair of old Greeks who were recently able to gain access to their pension.

The wife smoked cigars and did a terrible Winston Churchill impression while the husband made tray upon smoking tray of loukoumathes that he'd bring out to the beach shore on summer mornings, his bathrobe trailing behind him like a muppet wedding gown, the local gulls suddenly caught in the food's gravitational pull, and "Mighty Reggie" as he was then called would take his lumpy up-and-down walk over the sand towards the porch to try a few.

*

Morey looked at Murray's file again.

There he was in the library, studying. Heels of the shoe visible, resting over the arm of the chair. Hand lumping up the flesh. The book on the table is Nostromo. The book in his hand is William Beveridge's Full Employment in a Free Society, having just finished The Beveridge Report.

"Do you want any coffee?" the un-photographed Murray called from the kitchen.

"Do you actually have any coffee?"

"Not really," Murray said, returning. "I usually just like shouting off names until somebody says yes."

"Can we talk about your work?"

"No."

"I fancy myself something of an expert in economics."

"You're probably not."

"I mean, let's just say we imagine a graph --"

"Stop it."

"And on one side -- X1 -- it's unemployment in the United States during the Great Depression: 25%; on the other, it's a rank of cultural figures based on some sort of tabulation of achievement -- "

"Some sort of -- ?"

" -- and let's say that gets us Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, the WPA Guides -- "

"Sly and the Family Stone."

" -- and the idea is: if economics is, what ties us together? then you have to ask: does an economic engine stick around long enough that some people mistake it as a kind of fate?"

"Jesus Ch --"

"Because the last thing you want is for everybody to share the same crappy car."

"Son of exploding fruit bats. You wouldn't know Lausanne from Chicago from Wang goddamn Anshi. Give me that." He snatched the folder away.

He flipped through a few pages --

That was 1969. Right outside the front. What was the conversation at the time? It was in a circle with George, Raitsman, and they were talking about a record.

"He does 'Fur Elise' on the banjo, and the girls think it's the second coming of Elvis."

"That is sexual mystery. And mastery. I think."

"Does he do it note-by-note, or --?"

"No. He just strums it as chords."

Reset: he flipped through a few pages, and while looking at it, he said, "I'll say this: I may be crazy, but I know where I cross the line. I mean, really. Humbert Humbert did a terrible thing. What's-his-name from the Sopranos --"

"You mean, Tony Soprano?"

"Whatever. The audience just kept cheering him on until they had to be given the kiss-off. The pockets of irresponsibility some people zero in on and dive right through. Let me tell you something: the time has come for the crazies to take care of themselves, but don't tell Reagan, okay? Because he might cut the funding."

Expansions: More Conflict

One of the first things Clinton mentioned when I put the question to him was Richard Wright's Non-Zero.

*

But the question begs a review of the thought put to the question.

Notes: Birthday

One year upon the occasion of my birthday I received the gift of a potato. One year later, another potato, from someone who had never seen nor heard of the previous potato. The year after that: a 50 pound bag of sugar, one gallon of half-and-half, capped with the grandiloquent presentation of a single cup of coffee.

Monologue: (3)

The first night in Brooklyn is tying your Windsor knot with doo-wop. It is the basic stuff. Hello, neighbor. Welcome to the neighborhood. It sings, Carry me home, boat. Bob me around the street corner, head. Lay me home upon the waters. Sound the dog whistle, Captain.

The second night in Brooklyn is when Flannery O'Connor breaks the air conditioning, shirts are ripped, and we end up tangled like bridges, sharing rivers and notes on comedy, the future, ideal picnic composition, which states we have passed through and when, where our silence steps in tandem and we listen to the neighbors, who sing, Teach me a time where the hands of pianists stuffed into cuckoo clocks would pop forth every hour to pose on the 7 and 9, the 12 and 6, the eight and the three ...

Come away with me, feistball. Darling whose language I don't have to name, invent or reinvent, come away with me through morning walks, floating hamburger smoke and the rumbling subway caw-caws migrating north and south for micro-winters and summers. Let me compliment the mess you are every morning.

Our pores are hungry for this country and yours, friends and lover-to-be. Will you come away with us? We are good travelers. We fast, we stroll, and we bring maps that we snatched from the Library of Congress. (They're not AAA, but assume it will do us some good.)

Our radio will brag for us, say, We know patience, we know impatience, we know how to dance politesse -- out-Oxford Comma Simon Schama. We know how to weather storm-clouds latching themselves onto our backs, trying to bend us double. To this, we say what we've always said: I will find you, freedom. Check your doorbells, because they'll be the first and last thing you hear before we blast through door after door after door after

Monologue: (1) ("Boston's Tenth Man Could Not Be Wrong.")

Every time a bus rushes out of the tunnel into Harvard Green and Mass Ave. air, I wonder how your accent blossoms when it returns to roots, the Carolinian twang coming to your shoulders like a raincoat in the rain, the kind of beauty that slips the strictures of aesthetic delineation and honeys itself into a swell-the-chest humming.

There are faces and sunlight on the bus, a woman quilting and a grandmother warbling up the steps with bending shopping bags -- It's a club of How's your wife's? (Mormons be advised of the apostrophe.)

The never-ending Boston Marathon of lovers breaking into a run, a stroll, a sarcastic king-of-court commentary on the bus swaying on its engine through Berklee towards the South End: Look at this mook, eh?

Passing one street vendor asking the other, Do you have enough ice for today? I invoke the right to bend the city to my feet.

This is the city of the never-ending run, the camera across the street, the frame folding its clarity into a joyful blur, the mutual raucous ringing: Why does this city have the best songs? Sinatra is stuck on t-shirts 'til the end of time, London has a murderous barber, but we have dirty water, skinheads on the MBTA, drivers announcing the score over the intercom, all standing because David Ortiz is coming to the plate, visiting Peruvian poets spotting a fellow countryman busking folksongs and joining in chorus across the divide, kids in expensive bear suits making a show of fumbling for the morning paper, the slow, scattered pocket of students discovering in that quiet J-curve that they can hang upside-down on the Red Line late some pass-over-the-Charles night, that montage of trees along the esplanade snapping back and forth between drybone winter and snapping-flowers-out-of-the-sleeve foliage, cannons pealing over the Charles sluicing through the vibrating microtones of the calvary of bells on the charge and lift the lungs to swing from the rafters of the clouds.

At first I thought it was a bee having a heart attack in my coat jacket, but it was my heart and you the city, shouting, Boston!

This is the Boston where horses once plowed into cows on the Common in the middle of the night, flinging the driver to his death, the Boston where Lowell thought on ghosts, his letter to Ezra half-finished in his pocket, folded, C.K. Williams sat in the library, folded in a book, and Updike watched another Williams, where assholes tried to use the flag as a javelin, where commuter rail riders use their tiny tickets as fans, despite us offering something a little larger, like a napkin, where the Jenny Lewis look-a-like bartender in North Station watches the TV all by her lonesome, and antennae skitter atop brother buses skittering across the city.

I came to Boston from California -- and might go there again, feet-depending -- willingly embracing all roots, gargling patois, and thin-lined nasal snits. How can you refuse as a home a place that calls itself the Hub of the Universe? The Athens of the East? This is a land where revolutions begin and nations are set in motion.

Boston's third man is Jonathan Richman, who knows he's crazy, so what's the fuss of fussing over this? Boston's fourth is statesmen and the state looking for men to trot up the steps to Beacon Hill. Boston's fifth is the soldier: already marching, yes, on our way.

Oh, Boston, why the singing? Though before we say why let's kick this off with how we fly our wordy flag -- two-three-four!

Propylaea

"Without willing it or knowing it, Chaplin helped men live; later, when he became aware of it, would it not have been criminal to stop trying to help them even more?"
-- Francois Truffaut

Index:

Monologue: (1)
The View from the Afternoon.
The Best Laid Plans.
Monologue: (2)
The First All-Female Mafia.
Let Me Tell You About Myself.
A Collection of Blasts
The Car Broke Down.
Monologue: (3)

Propylaea: Welcome. from Evan Fleischer on Vimeo.

(July 13, 2009 -- )

The Boxer

Suzie Valedon approaches the night like a boxer. Her left hook is stuffed with non-sequitors and puns, while her right is brimming with enough energy to grab your own hand and run through the city streets, which she and I do almost every night.

She works at a patiserrie, seen in the photo on the right, and she's a beautiful confusion to almost all of her customers. I go there to sit and watch, listen and laugh. When a white mustachio'd walrus harrumphed that he wanted a pancake, she went into the back, and -- don't ask me how -- came out with a cake in the shape of the god Pan. These and other stunts are some of the reasons cited when she's fired again and again.

Her wallet is full of two dollar bills. When she buys me coffee and asks how my jokes are coming, the waitress looks at the greens in her hand then down at the drawer and doesn't know where to put the money. Lines back up and out the door after we pay.

The third time I met her I thought I was playing chess again: the same way you could see the pieces four or five moves ahead and feel the haze of something unfolding you could classify time with her.

I play the lawyer -- I am a lawyer, but I like to play one as well -- I get an extra large suitcase, buy remote controlled cars and dressed them up like ambulances, just to keep my track record high -- and usually walk in when she expects to be fired, hand over a card, and say, "This woman is represented by an attorney." The card reads, "Being the man who just gave you the card. Me."

I try this joke on her: "We all know Mark Twain is the father of modern stand-up. He's famous for the words, 'My name is Huckleberry Finn. What's the deal with that?'" -- and she laughs, and so it's going in the routine.

*

We play soccer in the elevator on the way up to a party one night, and a few hours later, the host leads us into a room where a man's shirtless and on the floor and so far gone that Suzie suggests now might be the time to claim to be owners of a company that needs investors ... He'd been dumped, and drank himself into a stupor, and so kept repeating "Why can't people love? Why can't people love?" over and over again and after a few "Well, they do's" and we realized he wasn't listening to what we were saying, I started to riff out responses, like --

1) They used to, but agape kidnapped eros, philia, storge, and thelema, and since they killed the first two hostage negotiators, there's no knowing what'll happen now.

2) Love? Who said anything about love? I said Godzilla. Get up! He's coming! Run for your life! Or, uh, stumble!

3) Error 404, probably.

4) In the name of love, I know that your heart will go on, and even though I'd do anything, I wouldn't do that?

5) Hey, how can you tell when a turkey's done? It flushes. Am I right? Who wants to high five? Come on, lift your arms.

And she chides me for making fun of the poor guy, -- "Have some empathy, for goodness sake" -- until he says, "Don't you think women's bodies are like drugs? Your body looks like a drug to me. A good drug," and she sighs.

"Oh, come on, now --" I say, and move to take charge but she stops me and says, "Like you've had the privilege of dealing with a parade of schlups all your life," and I laugh, having sat behind my friends as they've composed countless letters and e-mails in the poorest of tastes (a friend of mine studying philosophy thought it would be funny to begin his missive with, 'My dear, allow me to discuss the eschatology and tautology of thine nips, as they are, indeed, the last word,' and you could almost hear the eye-rolling groan/scream at her apartment across the town), seeing the earnestness behind these crash-and-burns, and marveling at the laugh from both sides of the coin: the horror and sincerity.

*

One night I'm up onstage and tell the crowd, "All right, there's a secret joke hidden in here. If anyone can find it, I'll pay for all your meals." Then I read a poem.

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But now the theory goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose
But were always a rose.

And there's a long silence but Suzie's laughing and when everyone looks at her, which you would assume to be the communal narrative, but, no, she's looking at their faces -- that's the joke -- and goes, "What? This is hilarious," as even though both of us are soaked in enough irony to break a sponge, we know what the silence means, as I'm sure you do, too, and we relish it so. The birdjoy of the joke. I pay for their meals.

*

She spends a week traveling with the Lowell Division of the Hell's Angels inquiring after their favorite children's literature. Some say the Redwall series, while others broach Madeline L'engle, The Pushcart War, Roald Dahl, sharing which ones they read to their children and which ones they keep for themselves. She gets a whole bar counter's worth of bikers to toast each other as mice and badgers and hares with absurd cockney accents, and tells me this with pride, glee, and I'm struck by her easy access to that batch of emotions, easy enough to almost call it a talent, rendered both proud and a grainular-sized sort of sad.

She goes on: one of the motorcyclists talks about a loop-de-loop highway, and they took her on a tour that afternoon: "I told them I hated the notion of all that gas going sploosh" -- arm gestures accompanied sound effect -- "but they have giant hot air balloons with these weird fan-nets they said were environmentally friendly, and when we were at the top of the loop, we were within arm's reach of the balloon guys. Man. I really should get them something for the next holiday we make up."

"I'm losing track of the holidays!" I said. "Can't November have Thanksgiving and, y'know, only Thanksgiving?"

She grinned. "Silly, please. That's why we have November Awareness Month."

"How could I forget?"

*

But I forgot to mention one story: I left The Comedy Studio one night, met her in front of the Zine Library -- dinner was to be had; her shoes had fallen off the porch, and the legs were still kicking the feet, and she called, "Los Soludos, Muchacho!" though she knew every language in the book but Spanish and I'm struck by a wave of heat, and I have to sit down.

She raised an eyebrow. "What's up?"

"Have you ever thought about the fact that Bottom's dream, a bottomless one, might be dreamed best by two people? You know, vaudevillians of the mind? 'I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours?' Two people taking imaginary cigarette breaks? All those songless songs the old poets talk about? That sort of thing?"

And just then a quarter fell out of her ear, and she frowned, giving it a look.

But with the money I got from passing the hat at the club, and what she got from selling her Hell's Angels article, the nightly haul came to enough cash for us to bus to the city zoo downtown, where we could watch tiny hedgehogs explosively transform into flocks of parrots, and, this being much more fun, watch scientists bang clipboards against their heads, going, "But how? How?"

And so we set off to dinner in the middle of the road, as we were tired of how small the sidewalks were, and we heard a car beep behind us. "I'm sorry!" I called. "We thought we were cars." They honked the horn again. "Don't you think so many troubles of the world would be solved if cars were able to have polite conversation like this?" Another horn. "No? Well, gosh, that's too bad," and we walked back to the sidewalk. We doppler past two men playing chess --

"Can I tell you a story?" She bites my shoulder. Yes. "When I was six, my Mom told me to throw some rock-solid bagels outside for the pigeons. So I go to the window with the trey of peanut-butter and seeded bagels, open the window -- there's snow all over the backyard and fort -- and I flip the bagels off the tray, and they disappear, and they never came down."

"Secrets of flight," she mumbled, then fell back to sleep. I spent a moment making sure my nose wasn't engulfed by her hair -- she'd pushed it out of the way, curled it beneath her neck -- then returned to sleep, too.

-- but manage to hear this much of the conversation:

"Look at them," the old man said to his friend. "They bring out the life in each other. Doesn't that make you sick?"

"Real sick."

And then we go faster.

The Reinventionists IV: Hotel W62

Dead dogs and concrete blocks splayed across the floor with the ear cells singing their valediction to the outside world with what I imagine to be kerchiefs if only because a stack of papers on top of some collapsed cubicle walls is blowing away now like a deck of cards, just like that, or the spin of a rolodex, or ... my leg. My leg's crushed underneath a rock. It's just me. All the other narrators and costumes are covered so that I only see fragments -- legs, arms, a grin and a frown. So, it's just me.

And the suitcase. On the inside, it reads, "A man once stood in front of a tank ..."

While I may not leave the rubble and walk out onto the plain, the great fields of nacht-Dasein and unconnected vacuums with a knife in hand -- a knife isn't the basic unit of survival in America, it's Dasein! Dasein! -- maybe I'll leave with another person, a you. Perhaps you, yourself. Come, put the book down. Further bulletins will come as invents warrant. Look up. I'm right here. Let us introduce ourselves.

The Reinventionists III: The Kids Don't Stand a Chance And/Or Are All Right

"Does it allow all of an individual's efforts to be expressed?"
-- Walter Benjamin, The Life of Students

Today some twin bores -- twins only in the fact that no one could stand them -- Ropeswick and Markos -- took us down to the Met. I'm ten with a copy of Kafka in hand and all the college-age waitresses keep flirting with me because it's something they're reading themselves strikes them as just the right sort of incongruity but I like the turns of phrase he sets spinning on the page so I keep it (going and going) and am amused.

They're training you to take over the desk. You're gonna work at Narrational Musings. Well, what if I want to roam the country? I'm too young for tie-or-no-tie general generational struggles, I say. Point taken, he replies. What if I want to test the feet-on-street sound ratio the way kids fill up glasses with varying levels of water and tap, tap, tap away to judge the sound? They're training you to take over the desk, someone else says. In a battle-like sense? I ask.


They lead me around the office and some of them look like telemarketers (though not Telemachus markers or Telemachus Makers, nor Markers to Make us or U.S., and on and on), all with headphones, shoes that'd been keyed down the sole, and parts of the desks stacked with VHS tapes to a wobbling height, tapes they kept calling Antecedent Tapes -- and they lead me to a door and a wall and I smirk and say that I've seen this before so I sink into the floor and come up through the other side while my handlers just come in through the door, sighing, and they set me down on the rug with others my age and start handing out pads of paper and pencils. I grab the smallest, say, well, I guess you're going to eat me. I'll go get the basting oil. But nothing. Then there's a loud sigh, a key rattle, the door opening, the teacher entering, the door closing, and another sigh.

Twelve years of study: first is oblaire, meaning I've learned 7 stories. And they keep me in a grim piece of dank stone they dragged up into the building. (What are the seven stories? Sometimes they're crystal clear, and I snap them off the tongue like someone who's just stepped into speaking French, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, or German for the first time. But then I'm not so sure. There are days walking around here where I'm convinced it's the chakras. Other times I'm just as sure it's in sad-old Schopenhauer. Some days I'm cynical and think it's just an accumulation of rhythms, and that grating you feel when the heart in the ribs meets the geometry in the brain ... I used to think it was the Jacques in As You Like It. The Seven Ages of Man. But now I like to say to people that the first is knuckle-cracking, that the second is youngsters approximating what someone thirty years older might might funny about thirty years further down the road from his own self, and the bit about the heart is broken into three parts, and the eighth is about a waitress who wears boxing gloves, and then I'm in the mood to change it all and start all over again, but I'm interrupted by a cacophony of other voices.


H.J. complains that he's overworked, that he has to teach comedy writing, list-making ("How is that hard?" Markos -- his assistant teacher -- asks), that he has to take speed to have the time to take all the sleeping pills a study needs of him.)

And then I strike my knees out to the side but keep my toes straight and and go

You can step on my shoes,
Run over the Tsar,
Send a knife through the cadillac bar
You can do anything that you want to do
but don't you go singing Blue Suede Shoes
'cause there's a copyright -- on that song,
so by inference, you're gonna have to follow along.

I continue to boop out a melody line -- side-shuffling my feet -- as Ropeswick hands out papers to those who're sitting down.

Ropeswick spends a whole day telling us why we should terrified of ice, starting with Dante, then dropping lines from The Romantic Dogs; then he starts telling us that the first time he saw Burns and Allen, he felt like he was being encased in ice -- I've always been afraid about being eaten by ice, he says, ending up splayed on the pavement but my chalk outline is time -- and that's why I've always been looking for the people who surprise, as you all have done, and there's a pause, and then we're released to a batch of other kids.

"I'm sorry. Why are we talking about whether we prefer showers or baths? Doesn't that strike anyone else as a personal question?"

"Well, every time I turn the shower on, it knocks me over."

"My parents say I'm going to grow up to become the Pope."

"I play marbles with a hand full of live bees."

"I want to be a Life Coach for landscape artists, so I can say to people, 'I want you to visualize success,' and they'll go, 'But that's Kilimanjaro,' and I'll go, 'No, it's success.'"

"We're talking about showers versus baths."

I leave to explore, and push one of the doors to the bathroom.

There's graffiti on the bathroom walls: DR. SEUSS + WODEHOUSE = HORTON HEARS A WHAT-HO.

*

I leave the stalls and take my stack Wall Street Journals with me. Someone just came in, muttering little phoenomes to himself, it sounded like -- and I have to meet with some parents to review this. This. To think: I have to teach these friggin' kids. Flush. Why am I still working here? I haven't written anything since Kendron. And take Joseph: he hasn't written a book in years. His continued employment at this place remains something of a mystery, the details of which he always seems perpetually reluctant to describe. All he does, now, is spend his time flashing car and bike mirrors out the window at birds and other windows. To the mirror. Wash. Another flush. Turn the head. Oh, Monkey Christ. It's this kid. Droton Hoop. Name's almost as bad as mine. It's like all the mothers that led to everyone here decided to have some sort of perverse contest.

"Hey, H.J., nice to see you!"

"Shut up to see you, too."

"What?"

"Listen -- do you want to know why I got fired from my last job? The Kindergarten class of 1998 graduated to the Bulls theme, is why. I hired an announcer, too. God, why do you get here so early?"

"I like it here."

*

"We live on a farm."

"Oh? Do you?"

This is Parent #1.

"Indeed. But we sold the cows because milking time is cocktail time. Which is all the time."

*

The next parent wasn't much better. Haughty and imperious.

"What are my daughter's weaknesses?"

"Well, nothing that I'd worry about. She has some good strengths, and if you focus on that, I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised."

"But what are her weaknesses? I want to systematically eliminate her weaknesses."

"Uh, well -- have you tried Jenga?"

"Sorry?"

"Nevermind. Just make sure she doesn't get too listless. She sometimes gets listless."

"Did you say -- ?"

Another parent entered. "Mr. Ropeswick?"

"Welcome, sir! Come in. Have a seat."

"But there's a woman there."

"H.J., your 3:00 kids are here."

*

"Should I change my shoes?" H.J. said aloud, though it didn't seem to be to anyone in particular.
The 3:00 is where I officially come in. We're meeting at Battery Park today, along with my other classmates -- one of whom is sitting by her sister on the river bank with nothing to do but endure the soft head-battering from her two cats, one white, the other black ... another a young man with short nearly up to his neck.

"Watch," H.J. said. "They're going to fall in love in three days."

"What? Are you kidding?"

"Just watch. They will."

Three days later, they did.

"How did you know that?" I asked.

He laughed.

*

These kids wore t-shirts that reflected a musical taste far outside their ability to have -- Bill Haley and His Comets (who plan to play a reunion show every 76 years, regardless of quality or state of composition), Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, and rockabilly folk, too.

During the middle of a lesson, one kid asked the inevitable.

"When are we going to use this in the real world?"

H.J. paused. "... Did you ever leave it?"

Sam stood on the edge of H.J.'s desk, hands in pockets, squinting hard at the far-off window.

"What're you doing, Sam?"

Four-year old Sam replied: "Practicing quiet dignity."

*

George is in his office, trying to figure out the quarter's budget. A knock at the door.

"H.J.! What's up?"

"I'd like to propose a class," H.J. says.

"I thought you didn't like the idea of teaching neighborhood kids, H.J."

"Right, but, something just came to me."

"I don't know, H.J. What is it? You're doing fine with what you have."

"I want to call the class, The Adventure. Or The Impulse. I haven't settled on a name yet. I want to do it with my 3:00 kids."

"And?"

"And the class will be devoted to curiosity. And that's it. Every other class has a curriculum, numerical sections, a series of specific tests, and that's all well and good -- honestly, it is; it teaches a certain sort of manageability -- but what about liveliness?"

"I think you're fine with what you have."

And like any good ignorer, H.J. spent his classes on How to Write the Poem instead on this, The Impulse, or whatever it was he was going to call it. Ovid the Piano? Nah. Something would come. He taught rockabilly harmonies, opened up and dusted off some of the earliest speeches from the British parliament, made a slideshow of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi, Bauhaus groups, WPA-sponsored buildings (and asked them to describe a day in that home --), compiled examples of ridiculous architectural requests ("We can move that bridge, right?" "Who cares if no one's around for what it was designed for? That will come."), and then we spent a week teaching people how they used to be taught -- in the 1500's, 1600's, 1700's, 1800's, and so on, in this country and others -- and we tried to see what was different (one student tried to ban H.J. from the classroom for making heretical remarks about the pope; H.J. rejoined that it was just a webcomic, and that those didn't exist during Pope-banning days); one kid was looking out the window and said, Look at that bird! And so we all stopped what we were doing and wandered outside to look at the underside of the bird flickering over the edge of the branch that held the nest; we grabbed some binoculars and it reveled in the texture of the talons -- large, yellow, dirty, a very believable part of the bird in something otherwise completely amazing ... we started with some of the more impossible portions of mathematics and worked their way backwards from there ... they tried to apply the painterly aspect of Arabic poetry to English ... we break our toys, look at the parts and what makes them what they are, and see if we can make new ones ... we open the windows and shout phrases and quotes at the neighbors: "Never give up!" "If we were Eugene O'Neil, we'd tell you what we really think of you" ... H.J. tells us that they can't choose their nicknames -- that theirs will find them some day, be it Viceroy of the Hats or Crocogator and Allodile ... we composed a play, all the students -- parts were written up and distributed -- there was a love dragon, and it was called The Revenge of Magus, and it was about a tentacled space monster that descended from some The Day the Earth Stood Still steps and I played a cockney man named Smudge who lived in the sewers with my pets, man-sized rats, called, Ma, Ca, Ren, and 'A.'

*

I'm called back into George's office.

"H.J., I've broken down. I've caved. You can do something different with your kids, and I think we have the money for it, too. Take them on a field trip to do writerly things."
Saying nothing, I took them to the Met.

*

The real reason for H.J.'s harried look had to do with something called Antecedent Tapes, he told me. They were being jacked across the country. The head of R+D managed to save some from his lunchtime ventures, and boy, he was glad for that.

"Can you imagine what it would mean if dangerous ideas kept coming back? That's why we hold onto them."

"What's an Antecedent Tape, anyway?" I ask.

"This."

He pops one in:

... the camera floats to the side, finds Charlie seated at the kitchen table in the other room, and it pushes in, slowly, the older folk speaking of their car's mile-to-the-gallon-hood, and have you seen the thing they do with the seats, now? But Charlie is inserting his spoon into his bowl like a record needle and once he does, he starts bopping left to right to left, and, quietly, his Uncle, seated there, watching him, begins to reciprocate, too, and it's eleven miles to the gallon, now? You don't say!

*

... just lassoed the hedges outside his house but where did he get a lasso? ... a dapper man wearing an alien mask with a fedora ...

*

. .. singing along with Sesame Street over and over and over again (where my Grandparents do a bit of the, 'Oh, he's just like the rockers!' 'What do you mean just like? He is one!'), and at the end of, say, the fourth, my Grandma goes, "You sure follow along well!" And I put the record back on, and she goes, "Wait, doesn't he have another record?" And then I start singing, and she goes, "--, that's the same song!" And I keep singing. "That's the same songggg!"

He pops it out.

The air has turned grim. Most of the writers in the office are gathered. The toppers, too. Pinel and the others.

"Do we have any Antecedent Tapes left?"

"Outside of this -- " H.J. gestured at a pile -- "No."

"How many AT stations are left?"

"Not many."

Markos coughs. Attention to him.

"The intelligence we've collected on the group is scant at best -- it's freakishly coordinated ... We have counter-enforcement groups racing to re-organize all remaining AT stations, but it's not looking good."

"Weren't we working on new AT stations to encourage continuity and safe storage? I thought that's what the lights on the model r+d cities were for."

"We're only just starting to figure out how to work AT's in the city, H.J. They're fragile stuff. You know that."

"Well, we'd better see what we have left," Pinel said, pointing at the bloated domino pile. "Let's go."

This tape is about intimacy -- who we keep close, who we push away, and why. The Rembrandt-styled silence we sit in when someone enters a room: how she raises her arms and seems to be walking on her tip-toes along a thin line of carpet even though he feet remain hidden; our easy bewitchment with the angles hair takes, the shifts of strands; this is about accidentally brushing your leg against someone else and getting home to see a pages-long email waiting to be read, detailing the virtues of "personal space"; about popping the balloon of that hyper-formal language that takes command of us like a ghost, or knowing when to hide your hands in your sleeves, raise your arms and say, "Judge, I'd like there to be a mistrial, as my hands seem to've disappeared"; the purr, What do you like?; this is about avoiding the faces that mistake you for someone you're not, or worrying about whether those faces are true or not; this was about leaning into coats as the winter wind came snarling down into the subway, prowling, looking for someone to take a whack at; it's about dealing with what passes for someone else's formal language when you no longer know the person (do you like it? dislike it? bow to it? play with it? start pretending you're in the middle of one of China's national epics, like Luo Chanzhong's Romance of the Three Dragons?); about overhearing someone on the train see no comparable difference in their "intimacy issues" between their boyfriend, ex-husband, kids, two cats, and neighbor's hypoallegenic dog ...

During this, H.J. excused himself, visibly uncomfortable. I followed. He went to grab a drink of water. Suzie was there, taking a sip. H.J. approached.

"Listen: my body's starting to go. Want to bring it back?"

"Plans. Have them. Sorry."

He returns to the desk in a well-learned silence. Sensing an opening, I grab a tape.

I pop one in:

1,500 acres. Early July. Fort Necessity. Zing of musket fire. "Take heart, lads. Fifty years ago, the British would have never even given the order to 'aim.'" Jay. Pickney. Cares, labors, and dangers.

I pop it out. I pop one in:

We're going to start off simple: what if you're walking along and you want to entertain --

I pop it out. I pop one in:

According to police reports and lead investigator Dick K. Mystery, John Time, editor-in-chief for the poorly named and even more poorly placed New York Time was murdered on July 14, 2005, when a series of bombs leveled Time's apartment, and Time along with it. Why on earth does a man invite murder? What was untenable about Time's position? Answer: the clocks. Acres of clocks. And kalachakra wheels he'd been hoarding, some even attached to model cars. Investment-wise, the Time was moving money towards opening up an international publication that has yet to arrive -- the international edition was one, long sheet of paper, and test issues wrapped themselves around the city -- cafes, Oxfams, Barclays -- like a Chinese dragon waking up after a heavy night of drinking. And was this the last bo --

I pop it out.

"Look," Pinel says. "We need to talk to strategy. My office, everybody. Now."
The crowd leaves, save H.J. and I.

I pop one in:

We almost had New York. It was almost ours. Then something happened -- strange things -- and it's no longer ours. We were close. Tomorrow we'll try again. That's all. (A pause.) This is Pinel Tuke.

I pop it out. I pop one in:

"This is a tape about necessity. The -- "

But H.J. stops the tape before it goes any further.
"That," he said. "That's a secret. For now, that's a secret."

There's a triangular-shaped park down by a hulking Starbucks somewhere between SoHo and Greenwich Village, and that's where H.J. and I are taking a coffee and juice break with a small group of students.

"The two-way lines -- that I'm my age and I'm going this way, but I'm also pointing my arrow toward you, and yours is coming this way, and it's the latter I'm curious about."

"I imagine the forward stuff gets pretty easy," I said.

"Maybe not 'easy,'" he said. "But you learn, and you get good at it, and then it goes back and forth, those two. I keep thinking of the tones the administrators used in some old video footage of Berkeley, and I worry about avoiding that. A certain sort of cyclical grace. I mean, how shall this go --" He drew a line between the two of us with his hand -- "between you and me? Shall we shake hands? Slap each other?"

"Slapping is terminally silly. Let's shake."

And -- unprompted -- we begin to boogy.

"Rosa-lita!" I shout.

"How do you know that song?"

We make our way back to the office up the elevators we whoosh and he's greeted by Laura who insists that she cover his face with hands and H.J. grinning in that Uh-oh facial posture said, "What's this for?" but he lets them guide him, anyway, and Laura takes her hands off H.J.'s face.

There's a sign hanging over his cubicle: Happy Retirement, H.J.!

"But it's my birthday."

"You're not retiring?"

"It's okay. Not many people can tell the difference."

"Yeah, this happened last year."

"You're not retiring?"

"Nope. I am still in a classroom. With students."

"Teaching, right?"

Another writer enters, singing his question, bearing a coffin atop his shoulders.

"Guess who has a coffin for someone's career?"

"He's not retiring, Sam."

"...What?"

"And is that what I think -- "

Sam opened the coffin. "Robert Baker Hall, 35, depressed acupuncturist, delicious -- " Sam closed it. "Yes and no," he said, " ... depending on where you were going to take that question."

"But you're not retiring."

"No. I am celebrating my day of birth."

"Which is the polar opposite of coffin-hood, I'm told," Markos said, casting a pointed look at Sam.
"You're still teaching comedy writing?"

"Knock-knock."

"Who's there?"

"Yes."

"Yes who?"

"The answer to your question was yes."

While digesting this nugget of wisdom, everyone pops out, because not only did they not give the signal, so they figured they might as well go ahead anyway, but who doesn't like throwing confetti and surprise retirement parties?

"Surprise! Happy Retirement!"

"Guys! Guys!"

Silence.

One begins to sing, and the rest fall in: "… Happy Birthday … Dear … Oh … What’s … " They snap their fingers and continued on in (an awkwardly atonal) song. "Starts with a “b.’ Bill? No. Bob? No. Brandanburger? No, that's not right. Oh, it’s on the sign. And it's H. It starts with with H. Happy Birthday To You. H.J. Guy on the Sign."

"I was wondering why you had me make that sign."

Silence.

"Weren't you guys strategizing, anyway?"

Some yelps. "Presents!"

Everyone begins rummaging about, handing over things that were on their desks.

"Alright," a voice calls. "Does anyone have anyone they want to say to H.J.?"

"H.J. is the common denominator so I don't have to be."

"I wish you wrote about wigs, like David Byrne."

I wander off again. It looked like it would take awhile, this confrontation-like thing. Another classmate of mine is knocking his head against the water cooler.

"Aren't you parents coming to pick you up?" I ask.

"Actually," the thing replies. "I'm not a child."

"You're not?"

"Why do you think I'm wearing a trench coat?"

He unbuttoned his trench coat, and he was right. Underneath the child was a man.

"Hello, Droton," the man said. "My name is Bernard. Shall we walk?"

"To the window? Sure."

On the way there, we pass another class, this taught by an old man.


"You fought in World War II, Mr. Danley?" A young girl asks.

"Yes."

"Who won that war, again?"

"... Sorry?"

"Who won that?"

Hempsey Danley later likened it to the scene in Macbeth when Macduff learned that his wife and child were dead.

Bernard and I continue on our way. "Did you see that?"

"See what?"

"How she forgot who won the war? There's a reason for that. And it has to do with these tapes." He points at the stack we'd been going through.

I told him what H.J. said.

"Why would they want to hold onto them? People might think something up and not know any better."

"Huh."

"The real fight is over who'll be able to retrieve the AT's -- and for what. The coding in AT's is self-generating and ancient. They're part of that always-on earth-lightbulb, if that makes any sense. There's a lot there. N.M. uses AT's for their work, and that's it. That's where the flow ends. And we think that's wrong. Narratives shouldn't just be limited to narratives."

"What?"

"To their own end -- their own means. A narrative has ... contours. And they should be done away with, or pushed away until they're out of sight."

"Why are these tapes better with you?"

"They might not be. Here's what we have going for us, though. We don't know our own numbers -- I know, I know -- but if one of us loses a tape, that's a good thing. It will get somewhere else and bring something new. It circulates."

We circled back to the birthday crowd and H.J. Pinel and the toppers had emerged from their office.

"Pinel!" H.J. cried.

Pinel looked at the sign. "There seems to've been some sort of a misunderstanding."

"Right. Retirement/birthday -- we cleared that up."

A pause.

"If only it were that easy. Look, uh, yesterday when you went home, H.J., I told your employees I was throwing you a 'surprise retirement party,' and they seem to've taken it --" He looks around. " -- well, this just teaches me that I should stay clear of euphemisms: H.J., you're fired."

A voice called. "Who?"

"Him! This guy! Right here! You know, the one where half of you don't even know his name? But what do you want me to do? He smells like a bed."

There was a long pause.

Finally, H.J. spoke.

"Just so we're clear: the AT's -- was that an excuse to get me out? To set all this up?"

"Oh, no. That's still very much a real problem."

H.J. nodded in resignation. "All right."

*

Suzie made her way down Broadway. She hailed a cab that was walking past. It lowered itself to the ground. Suzie climbed aboard.

"Where to, M'am?"

"Port Authority."

"Ri -- oh, god!"

"... I'm sorry. Did your mustache just fall off?"

*

I'm helping H.J. pack up his things. He's ranting -- kind of.

"I wish I was a better teacher, but they're firing me, so that's your 'Thanks for playing' right there. I had a pupil who didn't speak any English, and I thought he was bilingual and just being angry about it, since, for one thing, he refused to shake my hand when I introduced myself, but he really didn't speak any English at all. Whoopsy Kronkite! Frankie speaks Spanish. I could've asked him to come over."

"Are they really firing you because you made a bad call about a kid?"


"I don't know why they're firing me, Droton."

"You've been Koalaopped."

"I've been what?"

"When you know the punch is coming for a long time, and yet you still do nothing about it."

"Ah."

*

Suzie got off the cab amongst the phalanx of humming busses. The nearest to her -- BOS to NY -- was just disembarking: a large contingent of passengers set to grabbing their suitcases -- most largely identical. Without waiting for the drivers to change or the seats to be cleaned (or 'cleaned,' in some cases), Suzie got on. Twenty minutes later, the bus left for Boston.

*

In the office, the lights begin to thrash about.

"A fire drill?"

"Do we have to go?"

"Remember when the fire department got mad at us last time?"

Bernard pulled me away from H.J.'s desk.

"You have to go, Droton."

"Go?"

"You have to remember this, okay?"

"Okay."

"No. Don't just say, 'Okay.' You have to remember this. Even if you don't -- or think you don't -- find a way to remember this, okay?"

"Okay. Remember what?"

"This. And, this."

"A suitcase?"

"Take it." Bernard hugs me. "They're waiting for you outside."

I went to the elevators. When the doors opened on the ground floor, there they were. They gave me names -- Blow-In, Harold, Simon, and others. I took my suitcase -- incrementally smaller than those sequentially taller than I -- and -- after a silent volley of exchanged looks with those around me, those who had been waiting, suitcase-carriers, all -- began to run.

*

Where was Droton? He was helping me with the desk, for chrissake. I was carrying an empty box back to my desk with the coffee maker I'd snatched and was swinging it up by one hand onto my chair when I noticed a man waiting for me in my office.

"Hello? Can I help you?"

"My name is Charles Kendron, Mr. Ropeswick. I've a package for you."

"Oh? Thanks."

I take a look at the side. 'Mr. Proust.'

Charles stood, clutching his clipboard. Halfway through opening it, I look up.

"Do I have to sign something?"

"Sign? Ah, no."

"Then why are you still here?"

"Do you think I could have another go at --"

"No. That's all, Mr. Kendron."

I continue with the package. Kendron hasn't moved. I look up and lower my glasses.

"I said, 'That's all, Mr. Kendron.'"

"Yeah, but, what's the package?"

"Something called an 'Emergency Storytelling Kit,' apparently."

"What's it do?"

Notes from a Rock Club

"It was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live."
-- Ralph Ellison

Prospero's Cave is an over-rosewooded bar buried behind some placards selling photographs to tourists on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, NY. It's a favorite of writers, comedians, and far too many puppeteers. For a brief period of time, Prospero's Cave tried hosting musical acts. These are some interviews with the patrons who attended those few shows.

Jessee Holkins, 26, Puppeteer. June 12, 2006. Yeah, I usually order with my puppet -- so what? What's it to you? Would you rather I order with something slightly less non-puppety? Sometimes it's just the small ones. Other times I bring out the ceiling-pushers. You've to be careful with those guys. Hands big enough to knock over a table. Either way, I'm not the only one who orders with their puppet. I wouldn't call it a crutch, no. A crutch to what, first of all? It's not like there's any sort of confusion as to what's going on here. There are people and there are puppets, and a distinct line that separates the two. Anyway, I order with my puppet what I'd order in real life. Scotch, soda. Bowl of peanuts. If I feel like throwing the peanuts at somebody else, then I can do that, as it's, y'know, just a puppet.

Double anyway, that's how I started off the night when I saw I Bet You Can't Remember Who Else Was On Ed Sullivan When The Beatles Played (Sullivan Doesn't Count.) I was having too good a time. They were playing a song called Elephant, and after, the singer said I got brownie points for irony. I'd forgotten how much I love small-venue shows like these. Just unabashedly love, man. Nothing blocking my way. Ah, man, man. There were only some twenty or thirty people on the floor, and that was it! None of that rote learn-one-joke-that-several-thousand-people-can-understand business. I sat atop the speaker with my puppet and both of us just head-banged -- don't you love how it's bang? like you're expecting something to go ka-pow while you're doing it? like you're all set to break a board and get your blackbelt? -- through most the rest of the night. But: sitting atop a speaker! With a puppet! And everyone else was dancing around them! That groundswell feeling. Man ... You do realize that if you publish this the way I think you're going to publish it, I'll end up looking like I'm talking to no one, and, therefore, pretty crazy, right? You're fine with that? Well, aren't you nice?

Molly Houseboat, 23, Musician, June 28, 2006. I played Prospero's Cave sometime in early May with a very, ah, 'Keith Richard'd' Keith Richards. The best way to sum up the evening? I introduced the next number as something by Paginni and he started doing "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Just goes to show you, I suppose.

Maxwell Robertson Kossak, 31, Writer, June 31, 2006. Sometimes I forget how much I love silence. I just love silence -- how, bit by bit, like stagehands dismantling a set, all the things that are noisy can just be carried away, scooped out ... Can I tell you about how I once fought for silence, and how it felt once I won? ... I'm there eating dinner one night, and I just can't stand the noise. I couldn't tune it out, for some reason. So I get up -- I'm there with Theresa and Ken -- and I start taking the forks and knives out of everyone's hands, indicating that they should mime their meals, because -- and I point back to M. and T. -- both of them are sleeping, even though they're not, and everyone complies, even the band playing that night -- so it was an easy battle, yes, yes, though maybe battle was the wrong word, or the enemy was something else, something elsewhere; the battle was just the act of passing through the telescope, that's what it was: everyone miming their dinners, the musicians their instruments, and the bartender an invisible glass, and the three of us, strangers to nearly everyone ... scooping pockets of noise ...

Keele Stoneward, Musician, May 8, 2006, Banned. My rhyming dictionary is now demanding royalty checks.

George Rorschon, Owner of "Prospero's Cave." July, 3, 2006. Bandroid was a three piece outfit -- a drummer, a guitarist, and a cellist. They did a panoply of stuff, but one surefire thing you'll probably hear them doing again -- at least, judging by the crowd -- was the blues. A cello doing the blues has something rusty in it, like a church choir/ plant hybrid growing up through a covering of disused pipes ... There's a late-night Tennessee train crawling on all fours quality to this. Their best song starts off like this:

Woke up this mornin'
Got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my face
and found that I had no head.
Oh, babe, why's bein' king got to be so hard?

It's called, "Louis XVI Blues."

Chesterfield Hortonwit, April 10th, 2006. There's a jazz pianist who's been trying to get a show on the road so long we started calling him The Ever Ending Tour. His name's Theo, and he wears a trenchcoat, fedora, and sandles in all sorts of weather, and I kind of want to ask him why, but I haven't yet. He has this friend, "Ben Franklin," or Ben Franklin, depending on who you're talking to, who's always carrying around this giant sack slung over the shoulder that he says is filled to the brim with the heads of dead Presidents, and whenever he or Theo need any advice, all he needs to do is dip their hand into this talking, elected apple barrel and out they come. I've yet to see this in action.

This afternoon, the two of them invited me along to the Antique Store to get some ice cream. You must be kidding, I said. We're not, Theo replied.

George Rorschon. I mean, there are plenty of kids who'll just shout dance in the middle of their meals, then get up and start jitterbugging and cockroaching or pogo-sticking or whatever the hell it is these kids do these days.

They tried couches for a while. They took everything out onto the street corner -- the tables, the counter, one passed out customer, everything -- and they brought in couches. The bartender just put all the drinks and glasses on the trunk in front of him until the density of the glasses and the variety of the heights ... it made for a nice Wizard of Oz homage, a city of glass, a light store yet to be opened up, turned on, tuned in, tuned out, Ram Dass'd, and all that.

Maggie Nist, Bassist in "Brandroid." Simon played guitar on the walk home. He's never without his art. He started to play 80's hair metal. He laughed. That look: why are we doing this song? We sung it anyway.

George Rorschson, Owner of "Prospero's Cave," May 31, 2006. I don't know what just happened. -- was playing tonight. A chandelier of empty roadside diner coffee pots hung from the ceiling. "Roadside Diner Night." Anyway, they're a nice band. A nice, simple punk band. Everyone's all around the band, thrashing themselves about, when, next thing we know, the audience pushes all the members off the instruments and out the door and started doing the songs themselves. I'm wondering if we should call somebody.

Theo, Pianist, "Brandroid," April 1, 2006. They first met at an apartment warming / birthday party for a mutual friend, where everyone brought along giant trashbags filled with things the givers didn't want -- AOL cd's, old newspapers, magazines (already scissored), earlier drafts of this story, cardboard coffee cup holders -- and all the gifts had been "opened" and now everyone was driving slowly through the party with their wine glasses at the helm (passing through floating dialogue like, "This wine is kosher, right?" "There is no pig in this wine" and "Just because I ride a horse on a yacht doesn't make me a WASP." "While that may be technically true ... " "Look --" ) and Kenny Burrell guitar sailing off the turntables when Simon overheard a man who had filled his glass entirely with olives -- hereafter referred to as Mr. Olives -- proclaiming to Maggie, "Hey, you're an architect?" -- She had studied it in school, still put in hours at a firm in Williamsburg -- "Well, you know what they say: 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'" Then he smallbarked a laugh, and Simon's patience evaporated in a poof! and he interrupted.

"Why not?"

"What?"

But before Mr. Olives got the chance to demand an explanation from Simon, he was hit with air guitar chords (E to B7, if you want to play along at home), then heard the following song:

I was sittin' in the shadow of Gehry's sundial
Doin' everything the man advised
Thinkin' 'bout structuralists, oh man,
It could only bring tears to my eyes.

I was seriously thinkin' about continuing the song
when the -- joke broke an' got old.
I'm saying things I can hardly believe
I really need some editorial control.

And the rest of the party joined in on Radio, Radio! while Mr. Olives kicked a piece of trash in frustration.

Chesterfield Hortonwit, April 10th, 2006. "George Washington's Mum used to write him letters that would send him to bed with crippling migraines."

The sack ruffled in protest. Adams grinned.

Mr. Olives, 2006. Mr. Olives has just bought a forty-year old nylon-stringed, classical Aria, slightly chipped, but with enough color on it that it could blend in with the houses of Mexico. He strummed a syncopated beat, varying the bass notes at the bottom of some chords. The 5 a.m. tune-up: winter cars and winter guitars aren't too far apart for him -- get 'em good, get 'em started early. He started this when he was young, too. Open strings: childhood. Like a fishing bob, that thing, rising up, percolorating the clouds.

Maggie Nist, July 5th, 2006. What's the most practical way to live on the moon? I have this stack of books at home about the World's Fair and the Home of Tomorrow, the Whole Earth Catalog and all these Asmiov books and books about Robert Goddard and Oppenheimer, and, still, nada. I mean, I'm sick of all this retro-future posturing we've been going through for the past few hundred years, nor am I insensitive to the rain of geopolitical negotations that will come, but what's taking so long? What's the first step? What's the second?

I read somewhere that a nation's language exerts a 'gravitational pull' on the structure of its music. Think about all that language buried in the earth and floating through the sea. But that's sure saying something about the musicians they put on that satellite and shot into space. ("It was in the air and it was in the books.") Who's next, I wonder?

George Rorschon, Owner of "Prospero's Cave." July 5, 2006. The band stopped. Simon kept a beat. "Alright," Theo said. "Now it's time for a magic trick. I'm going to need twelve volunteers." Twelve stepped forward. "Pick a card," he said. "Any card." He handed them out. "Alright," he said. "Ready?" They nodded. The band continued playing. After a few minutes, they dropped the cards and rejoined the crowd. "Alright, here's our latest single -- it's, 'Did Malcolm Lowry Really Just Punch A Horse in the Face?' Here we go!"

The rest of the songs that evening: Monkey Monkey Monkey Monk, A Mandolin Often Disappears in the Pneumatic Tube of a Thunderclap, Would You Ever Sneak Into Your Grandmother's Room in the Middle of the Night and Beat Her Over the Head with a Canoe? Zane Gray and the Apocalyptic Moon Waltz, Please Stop Calling The Hudson River 13th Avenue, and Fuck the Police (Where Are They?)

Chesterfield Hortonwit, ctd. Bushes of roses tongue-loll outside the windows, now. It's nice.

Frankie Riddleson, June 20th, 2006. Theo doesn't grunt or sing or half-mumble-sing the notes when he's at the keys, but she does, and she plays bass. -- was from (neighborhood in Brooklyn), and she was first drawn to the stand-up bass because she could spin it. Her voice flies up like banners over an ancient city, sneaks to a hitherto unwinkable part of the car -- she sometimes works the bass like a third hand at the piano -- sometimes as a quiet buzz for those scrips of piano chords to half float out of and re-settle down upon -- oh, sometime's it all too much.

The Antique Store. The ice cream was three-hundred years old, vanilla, and had calcified to a dark olive.

It was kept in a see-through cooling tank and also contained ear-rings -- "Ear rings?" Franklin asked. "Have any ice cream truck drivers ever tried to buy it off you?" Theo asked. "A few. But none of them for the right reasons." -- Franklin was thinking of pointing at the cone, saying, I was wondering where I left it, but there are only so many jokes we can say out loud, however much we love making hurricanes, and the only reason this one is being shared is out of a quiet, friendly affinity, and there's an old frump of a woman perched on a stool behind the counter wearing chain glasses and watching the Cleveland Cavaliers on TV.

"I tell my husband this, I says to him, Lebron makes the players-turned-sportscasters want to retire. For chrissakes, just watch! He's one of the few I'd actually believe could actually phone in a shot from home."

She mimes throwing a shot out the window. A passing, sarcastic bird mimes being hit.

Chester, ctd. ... and Franklin takes TR's head out of the bag and it's already in mid-sentence saying, Just because I'm decapitated doesn't mean I can be any less productive. (I can blow my head up to the size of a mountain, you know! -- Why is it all these editors for the weekly magazines can't seem to catch a break when they try and write a book? Zakaria's is circular, circular, circular and --'s missing an apostrophe for my boy Franklin in the first paragraph -- and then because Franklin's finding it hard to shove TR's head back into the bag, he brings out another head to shut him up, reaches down and the man is saying, "For the last time, Doris, that's all I kn -- " And he stops, looks around, and TR stops immediately.

The second head's eyes shot back and forth, examining the terrain.

"Does Doris know I'm here?"

"Who?"

"No? Thank Providence. Maybe I can have some time to myself."

"Are you talking about Doris Kearns Goodwin?"

"Yes. It's funny: I remember how the project began. I was hidden away in the kitchen cupboard, and the author had some friends over for a dinner party. It was in Western Massachusetts, I believe. And someone asked her, 'What are you working on now?' and you could hear her put the fork down and say, 'Well, I'm very excited. I've just started working on a book about Lincoln.' And the woman said, 'Why, isn't that wonderful? We've always loved living in Lincoln, and now there'll be a book about it!' And there was a pause, and another voice at the table said, 'Think about the person seated across from you.'"

July 5, 2006 - Chaz Perrault.

I came late to the show tonight, but what I heard when I entered was this:

"Yo, fuck the police!"

"Fuck the police!"

"Fuck the police!"

"Fuck the police!"

"Wait, wait, did you hear that?"

"I heard that, too."

"Did you guys hear something?"

"Shut up! Shut up!"

"..."

"Alright, I think we're --"

"Fuck the police! Fu --"

"I think I just saw a blue light."

"Clean up the cans! Clean up the cans! I'm here on scholarship!"

"No. Wait --"

"Fuck the police! Fuck the pol --"

"Guys, guys, guys, guys!"

"I'm starting to think these peach schnaps were a terrible idea."

*

I grab a seat next to Olives who's restringing one of his guitars.

"What are you up to?" I ask.

I can't hear Olives' reply over the singer introduces the next song.

"This is a song about waking up next to one you love. This is a song about knowing everything's going to be okay. This song is 'Sunday Bloody Sunday.'"

"Did he just --"

Olives gets up. "Let's move where we can talk."

And we finally grab a table with Theo, Maggie, Olives, Chester, Gaby Dunn, John Barrett, and a few people I've never met from a place called N.M. further up the street.

"So, Chaz," Theo says. "What can I do you for?"

Whereupon I throw down a copy of this story -- in this book! -- and say, "Jam on this."

What they came up with you wouldn't believe.