squirm

writing is the opposite of work

i wish it felt that way, George!

a deeper truth

When I turned around seeking an open pathway, I was surprised to find that the stream surrounded me on all sides. The serpent from across the way beckoned me with his tongue, unfurling it out over the water. The tongue almost touched my shoes "If you need to get across, walk over on this. But please walk gently, for if you don't you may slide and fall off, and no one will ever find you again."

From the corner of my eye, I saw the man from the mountain open his razored jaw and draw a poisoned needle from underneath his tongue. I watched the needle fly from his finger through my father's ear and out the other, turning all his fluids into ones of pure jade and stone. Then the foreigner strapped my jaded father to his back and continued to ride into forbidding wastelands.

I had no choice but to leave. Out, away from home was the only place I could go. The wind rustled the walls of our wooden shack, but neither my father nor my mother stirred from their deep slumbers. I put only a small piece of bread and a snippet of dried meat in my satchel, fastened my shoes, and quietly walked out of my home, our small wooden home, into the wind and fog that enveloped me into the night.

When I placed the needle I had taken on my palm, it moved in the direction where I needed to go. The bones taken from the ground shielded me from any harm.

Mother could not recognize the sound of my footsteps at the door.

A familiar gold and silken robe of dragon scales was placed in my hands on account of me killing the creature. For an odd reason I could not help but feel regret. The girl with the white hair and her foxlike sibling did not mean any real harm but only wanted to protect the mountain as the men of soil bade them do.

created with my complicity by the proppian fairy tale generator.

thanks for the tip, B!

Rio di San Vio

"...we set forth that dull cold afternoon on the top of a high tide and a flowing sea, from the Club, up Canal Grande past La Salute, turning off at the Duchess of Madrid's red and yellow posted palace with the gilded Florentine lilies, to go up Rio di San Vio. And then, just after you pass the Erastian temple, the Rio di San Vio narrows, and is crossed by a bridge, before it widens again into a very decent canal with quays for pedestrians on both sides of it. We had swirled through the narrow part and under the bridge, when the calamity occurred. I was rowing at the prow, and Emily was steering at the poop, the pace being my usual swift and hectic one. A big unwieldy barea of firewood came suddenly towards us, rowed by two of my former gondoglieri, Piero Venerand and Ermengildo Vianel, who had gotten a better winter job than mine in the firewood business of the latter's father. To avoid collision Emily precipitately twitched my barchets to one side without much judgement. I incontinently lost my balance; and, disliking the notion of crashing ignominiously inboard to sprawl among the oars and forcole, I made no ado whatever, but just gripped my short pipe more tightly between my teeth, and took a neat header into the canal, passing right under the approaching wood barge. As I shot through the air I saw all the hands of all the people on the two fondamente being flung to heaven, and I heard all their voices bawling, 'Ara, Ara! O Mariavergine! For pleasure here is an English going to drown himself fastidiously!' So as soon as I got under water, I told myself that the said English had better give these people something truly rare and wholesome to cough about. Wherefore I swam, submerged, about thirty yards up the Rio, passionlessly emerging (to a fanfare of yells) in a totally unexpected place, with a perfectly stony face, and the short pipe still stiff and rigid in an immovable mouth." Frederick Rolfe - On Cascading into the Canal, Blackwood's Magazine, July, 1913

progress marches on

i neglected to mention that i recently completed reading my first german language book (that wasn't meant for children or language students.) Everyday Life in the Rubble follows the calendar, the days and weeks of the first half of 1945 the hooks for these stories of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. the colors of the individual tales combine to form a fearsome mural of violence, hunger, displacement and loss. acts of courage and cowardice, of kindness and cruelty, against a background of nazi insanities and the relentless grinding down of the war. the stories find their conclusion in the first weeks of may, as germany capitulates, the allies begin organizing civil life in the destroyed cities and the trees bloom across the land. my german skills are increasingly adequate for reading nonspecialist texts, though having a dictionary (or LEO) at hand is always an advantage, and i have found that i can actually 'see' the meaning behind the endless articles, cases and conjugations. ever so slowly a door is creaking open, allowing access into the bejeweled chamber of the german language draped with rich tapestries and studded with treasures from the nibelung. of course in the meantime i am back to reading Der gestiefelte Kater....

and this morning

snow. granted, i woke late after a silent morning interrupted only by the yawning of cats. seeing a glaze on the roof of a house on the corner i assumed at first that the night air had simply occasioned the frost, but spying a bit closer i spotted the tiny snow specks drifting down from our refrigerated sky. and now it has begun to lay a thin blanket upon the autos, the heaps of dirt piled up by workers and the abandoned bicycles in the street, the snow gods having decided that the solstice and christmas are safely past and the winter can begin in earnest. it eases my heart which had begun to doubt the possibility of snow in this greenhouse world into which we have shut ourselves - pulling fast the door and listening for that doomladen 'click' - like a lone child trapping himself in a dead refrigerator thoughtlessly abandoned on the street.
a few days ago i thrilled to see Unheimliche Geschichten (Tales of the Macabre) at the Babylon. Richard Oswald's 1919 film adaption of five strange tales (authored by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson among others) stars Conrad Veidt, Reinhold Schünzel and, most importantly, Anita Berber. I was especially excited to see the film since finishing Mel Gordon's biography of Berber and becoming better acquainted with this dark goddess of Berlin. Berber is presented as 'die Dirne' (the Harlot) in the film's introduction, her portrait hanging in an antiquariat between those of Veidt's 'der Tod' (Death) and Schünzel's 'der Teufel' (the Devil). At the stroke of midnight the portraits come alive, spring from out their frames and, after squirming about lasciviously, begin to read from the dusty volumes which are everywhere in the shop. The five stories which follow are tales of desire, madness and death. a man kills his wife, his crime only to be discovered by her lover, a mysterious lovely perishes of the plague, a man murders his friend for the attentions of a dancer, a mysterious club produces suicides in its members, and a baron is plagued by ghosts after importuning the delicate wife of a nobleman. Conrad Veidt is excellent as Death - his lank figure and skull like visage is bone chilling at first glance. Anita Berber is of course dreamy in this, her seventh film. She had already worked with Oswald several times and had played the lead in his film Prostitution. By 1919 she was the face of the erotic madness which was sweeping Berlin. Her naked dances were performed to acclaim (in the third tale of this film she is the dancer that drives men to murder, mad with desire, and we can witness her amazing talent), her scandalous personal habits were becoming legend, her life of drugs and drink had not yet taken its toll and her fame as an 'incarnation of the perverse' was growing night after night. Though in less than ten years she would be dead of tuberculosis, she was earning the lasting honors and fame which still attend to her memory and which still drive we humble imps of the perverse mad with dark desire...

what friends are for

good friend Ulf sent me this delightful poem by Gottfried Benn (from first book 'Morgue and other poems'):

Schöne Jugend

Der Mund eines Mädchens,
das lange im Schilf gelegen hatte,
sah so angeknabbert aus.
Als man die Brust aufbrach,
war die Speiseröhre so löcherig.
Schließlich in einer Laube unter dem Zwerchfellfand
man ein Nest von jungen Ratten.
Ein kleines Schwesterchen lag tot.
Die andern lebten von Leber und Niere,
tranken das kalte Blut und hatten
hier eine schöne Jugend verlebt.
Und schön und schnell kam auch ihr Tod:
Man warf sie allesamt ins Wasser.
Ach, wie die kleinen Schnauzen quietschten!

cold 'n hard like a side of beef in the cooler

Mickey Spillane - dead.

among life's simple pleasures

picking out the math, spelling and grammatical errors of others is a guilty yet strangely satisfying sweet. Even more so when the errors are those of the ink stained set - who are supposedly getting paid buckets of ducats to avoid just those sorts of mistakes. So whenever i encounter the conjunction of an obvious error and the means to provide the author or editor 'helpful feedback' my digits begin to twitch crazedly over the keyboard. to whit - the Guardian Review in a piece responding to the announcement of the Orange Prize shortlist this week asked sixteen authors to comment on their favourite picture from a new book, Reading Women. Now, I haven't read the piece enough to comment on the content - but my eye was immediately caught by the following sentence by AL Kennedy regarding Théodore Roussel's painting The Reading Girl (actually his model and lover Hetty Pettigrew)

'You shouldn't risk reading naked. You don't want someone else's words getting on your skin, lodged in those little crannies where they'll stick and pray on your mind, your sense.'

Aha! Well I immediately found the feedback form for the books editor and suggested that as much as i have often been tempted to pray on the mind of a naked woman (reading or not) that perhaps they had actually intended 'prey'. Not that I care what they 'right' - but an opportunity to point out the mistakes of the scribbling class is one that i try never to forsake...

Today's Unknown Friends

we receive a prodigious amount of spam at the office. for the usual products - sexual aids, college degrees and home mortgages - nothing special there. but the algorithm which produces the author's name (seemingly by looping through the dictionary prepending one word to another) often produces lyrical evocative names. So each morning i look into my inbox and find a window into oddly colourful world... Today's candidates:

Silent H. Scratches
Bitch L. Imbued
Chairperson Q. Spying
and the timely
Insurgency Q. Mandate

perhaps that provides a hint as to who is behind all this UCE...

loss of timelessness

i have been reading Sebald's The Emigrants, which i picked up last week after finishing his haunting masterwork The Rings of Saturn. As with the latter, The Emigrants is a evocation of memory and loss. Sebald devotes each chapter to an individual, displaced early in life who is forced to develop a new identity as they struggle to preserve the fragments of dissolving memory and while at the same time attempt to release themselves from the torturous reminders of lives forever lost. In The Emigrants however, personal history and character still provide centralizing influences - a repository or screen against which the individual's memories and history play out as a ribbon unwinding in a storm. The Rings of Saturn has lost even this personal historical anchor and the ghosts of the lost worlds find themselves free (or more accurately, condemned) to wander the wastes of time. This fragmentation and loss of subjectivity is reflected in the breakdown of Sebald's narrator as a consequence of his own wanderings - physically and psychically - through the landscapes of memory. I suppose i am senstive to these subjects due to my own losses - those chosen and those forced upon me - accompanying my move to berlin, but perhaps it is also due to my growing recognition of the relentless march of time which drags us all along with it, battering our bodies and souls against the immovable objects of fate...