Monday, February 27, 2006

a pessoa moment

Life is sad for LI. Yesterday, we were hot to attend a reading of the Khirgiz national epic up at U.T. Apparently it is a very long epic, not to be recited in a mere fit or two, and the U.T. group was going to simply engage in some samplin’ of those primordial Central Asian sayings. Alas, some fool stole our bike a couple of days ago, so we are reduced to footing it or public transportation. So we get out, trek to the nearest busstop, nurse a Marlboro – oh, just to cut a profile. In actuality, we haven’t even reached the piker's demi-semi-carcinogenic pack a month. Still, a Marlboro under the non starling or any bird delighting February heaven, waiting for a bus, going to the Khirgiz epic party – we were feeling classic.

Of course, public transportation dwindles, on the weekends, to an irregular dab of bus or two, none of them going where we wanted to go. So much for our classic evening. So much for contact with a place we only know from the great sections in Gravity’s Rainbow, the mysterious Khirgiz light and one of Slothrop’s alters, Tchetcherine – a name like a plastic – and his Chekhovian love affair with Galina, sent out to the land to help teach an invented alphebet to a people who had none:


“Here she has become a connoisseuse of silences. The great silences of Seven Rivers have not yet been alphabetized, and perhaps never will be. They are apt at any time to come into a room, into a heart, returning to chalk and paper the sensible Soviet alternatives brought out here by the Likbez agents. They are silences NTA cannot fill, cannot liquidate, immense and frightening as the elements in this bear's corner scaled to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more distant from the sun.... The winds, the city snows and heat waves of Galina's childhood were never so vast, so pitiless. She had to come out here to learn what an earthquake felt like, and how to wait out a sandstorm. What would it be like to go back now, back to a city? Often she will dream some dainty pasteboard model, a city-planner's city, perfectly detailed, so tiny her bootsoles could wipe out neighborhoods at a step at the same time, she is also a dweller, down inside the little city, coming awake in the very late night, blinking up into painful daylight, waiting for the annihilation, the blows from the sky, drawn terribly tense with the waiting, unable to name whatever it is approaching, knowing too awful to say it is herself, her Central Asian giantess self, that is the Nameless Thing she fears....”

I move among the mythologies I have chosen and those that have chosen me. The latter is the sad dented wreck of history I keep trying to pound into useable shape in this blog; the former is literature. I am always looking for the phantom intersection. I went home, after a while, my cig smoked, my mind so dull that if I could have taken it out and preserved it in some fluid and left it and come back after years, I could tell just by looking at it: February.

11 comments:

Roger Gathmann said...

Jon, I should somewhere. My email is rgathman@netzero.net.

I'm glad you appreciated that delectable Barnes-ism. Sometimes, there is a man for our time. Barnes is it -- a compound of utter cw nonsense. Shake well and sprinkle lightly on your next satire.

Anonymous said...

Roger--if you'd gotten all that Central Asian, we wouldn't have gotten that Texan. I'm sorry about the bike, but with all the embarassment of Central Asian riches I can have in some form here if I want it, I've never lost sight of the fact that a Texan on a lone highway in a Marlboro moment is still rarer...maybe some of those Wim Wenders colours in it that even made Houston look magnificent in 'Paris, Texas.'

Anonymous said...

sob. I lost my bike. Suck it up. Pussy.

Roger Gathmann said...

Port, I like the haiku like brevity, and the direct route from tears to pussy. But the reading skills definitely need an upgrade. Not lost. Hint: rhymes with 'bowlin'".

Anonymous said...

Of course, roger, the port the ever-so-virile dm is posting from is probably Basra, no? Such a manly man, such an exemplar of the Republican machisimo, must be posting from service in Iraq.

Roger Gathmann said...

Actually, I imagine mr port is fourteen, and is posting from a school library. I can't get too upset about that, and I admire the virtuosity of putting sob, suck, and pussy in ten syllables. However, I do wonder how "Pessoa" got that hit.

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. VD, where do you find these things??? Great, mindboggling link.

Anonymous said...

port could be in set decoration as part of the Swing Gang. Not trustworthy for Gaffer, Best Boy or juicer. Definitely not for Medic, where I'd sure want my pussy to be kept safe and free from Vermin, direct or indirect.

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. NYP, why do I feel like I am no longer master of ceremonies at this reference-orama?

The truth is, I've figured out who port is. My fantasy was that I'd finally hit paydirt with my post about silicon implants -- that the adolescent goldrush would begin, all those hotfingered google searches, all those hormones making crash landings on this site, and soon a thousand mockers would fill my comments pages. And slowly I'd consumate my dream of corrupting America's youth.

But... the culprit appears to be somebody I know. Foiled again! Back to the drawing board.

Anonymous said...

Roger, I google for these things maliciously while waiting for correspondents who never get back to me. Then I make webpages that I use to associate their names with the searches. Sometimes friends join in and we share a hearty chuckle. It's a variation on a habit I acquired while working for Rodential (get a piece of the cheese). When my career there came to abrupt halt, I took the expertise I had acquired and founded Vermin Direct, LLC, the brand perception engineers who get it right.

New York Pervert, I can understand your point of view. Please rest assured that Vermin Direct, LLC, the brand wranglers for any millenium, only infests when contractually obliged, and upon receipt of our fee.

Anonymous said...

'Mr. NYP, why do I feel like I am no longer master of ceremonies at this reference-orama?'

Because you have to take direction unless you know how to do your own tableaux vivants. You have not realized the money that can be made by bringing the 70's Marlboro Man back for longer periods of time. You'll be able to call a lot of the shots with Wardrobe, but actors don't always get the final cut, you know. You don't think the UPM isn't breathing down my throat too? I mean, even 5 minutes lost... so I'd even have to restrain my desire to slip off with the talent into the tumbleweed (in movie talk, it doesn't matter if there's no tumbleweed in Austin; the PUBLIC think Texas=tumbleweed).

From the Holodomor to Gaza: NYT softfocuses on famine - the spirit of Walter Duranty lives!

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