Manhattan Summer

White dress, languid grass. Popsicles lie here licking ambient music dripping red sugar as far as the day is long. A brown reed draws a permanent marker stripe from her chin to her kenes on her eggshell silk dress, erupting into a cattail-brown flower. Her lover, friend, or otherwise colloquial companion shares this space between her arms on the Washington Square lawn. Children, adults, girls, boys, dogs sprint solicitously through the orbed-fountain, the visitors in their summer informals. No one is a tourist here. Flourescent bikins make an entrace. Breezy kitch and drop-gap curiosity arrives from the artistry of neo-human hipster decoration. "Look over there!" A baker's chocolate-burn: a tall young man in 19th century garb waits for attention, receives it, and proceeds into the falafel house across the street. Rock music rolls out of ice cream vans and violins from Italian restaurants: where is Benito Mussolini when you need him? Veni veno viti. When does one begin to recall Mozart's Austrian organdy of rash ornateness, a genius life shortened by excessive work that bites at the quick of my subconscious youth? A violin conjures Kabbalah demons of Saul Bellow, Chaim Potok's curly-sided chasidim, and their collective archaic movement of striving-to-all-odds soaks the humid pages of a discovery of Judaism in America. At the intersection of Macdougal and West Third Streest, a Taiwanese man an a Bostonian take cold water and iced cofee at an Italian cafe. A fat man with oily brown skin croons to a hummingbird. The studded ukele throws up dust, bicyclists, hot oil, women in colorful summer sheers, roast shawarma. Fine-fingered Ash tosses white light in various forms of smirk across stuccoed residence-shops. Without purpose. A man walks by. Shouts to a couple across the street, sidwalk. The burnished orange taxis and chain-slung bicyclists green him tangentially. A carful dance ensues.

A puzzle, a spot of sushi. Sometimes the body needs to take its time. She falls alsoeep in a couch facing Heldstrom street, watches people kiss, a woman wating for the bus in front of a five storey green facade, a rush of burnished orange cabs forming beads of orange juice from under a blinking light. Neitzche does not live here. Where exhaustion is now just a state of mind of chronic becoming, she wanders through the MIT museum and midnight cross-word puzzles at Toscas. The girl on the couch does not notice her chest, which has for many hours now presented a pool of water. Her thoughts are focused on the continuity of events. Nothing tastes like orange juice here.

The Paragon Carousel in Hull

The horses roll their eyes, the whites like the froth of the sea below. Some hold their mouths open, baring teeth. I wonder if the children are frightened by the carousel horses – their stiff lacquered manes and ears. Nothing soft about them. The wooden floorboards creak as the next round of people walk the circular platform picking stationary or bobbing horses. For the placid mothers, there are upholstered carriages that do not move.

One white horse has a row of teeth like checkers, maenad hair, and two front hooves raised in martial posture. Fiercely flowered, with colored bit and bridle. The greens and reds and blues are as bright as maypole colors and as steady. How many licks of paint have the carousel horses had in their hundred years?

The attendant rings the bell, and they are flying. They circle and circle on their metal poles. Children look at the carnival lights and mirrors on the center column. They look at the painted panels with rose-cheeked girls, country apple scenes. The riders move with grace, feet swinging or placed on the metal stirrups.

Below the beach keeps beating time to the organ music. Clouds grow dark and low, but the tide rises and falls as it has to with a percussion that the walkers on the boardwalk can hear. They walk parallel to the ragged hem of the sea, but they keep their feet dry. They walk in fours and twos, straggle with ice cream. Despite the cool and the heavy sky, they walk.

Close readings of fake novels (part 2)

.......On a first glance the reason behind this short feat was a test of will and a test of style. With sentences like “George licked the popsicle with exuberant glee. The hot air in Italy rendered the pale-handed man a sweltering sprinkler. In George’s snow-white palm, the popsicle had no choice but to give in to the greedy purpling tongue,” the author believes a tango-line of epithets superior to any possible application of “he, she, it, etc.” It’s a peculiar way to go, but as I got into the story (filled with action, suspense, cliffs, and mystery ice cream!), I found I didn’t miss the little buggers, and for a time I even began referring to my friends by their proper names:
Me: “Did you hear what Laura said! Laura said that Jerry met with Laura’s brother, and Laura’s brother and Jerry are planning a surprise party for Peter, but Peter already asked Jerry and Laura’s brother and Laura over to Peter’s house for cake and booze that night, so Laura is worried that Laura’s brother and Jerry will allow Peter to have two birthday parties, when Peter only deserves one after running over Mr. Winkle’s cat Mr. Winkles Jr.”
Listener: “who did what in the who now?”
On the other hand, I found another novel written by a 45 year old woman who works at a Laundromat, where her novel disregards all names in place of pronouns. Hers is an erotic novel, with lines like, “He licked his dripping popsicle roughly, taking the time to rub his base as if he were drying him off from a quick swim in a pool; a pool, that is, of his semen,” that remind me of an Oroboros.

An Award for Living Life

Some people are really good at life. Tchaikovsky was really good at directing ballet, Mozart really good at composing classical music, Marylin Monroe was really good at acting and singign, and the Cohen brothers are really good at directing movies, PHilip Glass was really good at Composing Minimalist classical music, CHarles Bukowski was really good at short stories and poems, and Judge Learned-Hand was really good at writing unprecedented judicial decisison. According to many, these people shoud get the award for the skill of livng well, because admit it, some do it better than others. SOme are famous geniuses (ahem, Einstein?) and some are homeless bums. Some suck at living life. If so, do they fail out, gean F, a slap on the writs, a letter inked onto paper? Or, if ew fail at life, is it always as significant (or insignificant) as death? Does natual selection take its course for those of us stupid enough to get ourselves selected out of this particular time or ways, this flicker of time reminiscent of television channel flipping?

Close readings of fake novels (part 1)

There are certain modern texts to consider before the naïve author attempts to carve out of her/his short lifespan that primitive creature known as “the first novel.” As books reviews are shaven down in newspapers to three paragraphs and a parenthesis, and talk shows reserve their author interview spots for memoirists, historians, political junkies, former junkies and make-believe politicians, the history of the contemporary novel has not only gone underground but evolved rapidly. They say if a group of animals are separated on an island from their predators on the mainland, they then speciate widely and freely according to this new environment. With that in mind the American novel has struck ahead in its invisible corner for the last two decades with only minimal notice from a dozen websites which themselves have populated in the air like pollen invisible to the human eye (re: average American consumer), far from Google or Yahoo. Certain reasons for this mess: bad marketing and publicity on one hand, and the small press market which lack the colossal arms of the larger publishing groups. That, and the slow destruction of any business model for marketing books towards the general population.
But putting that behind us it’s up to the critic, or the first time novelist, to search out these lost books from across the country. Several interesting books have already surfaced. One book, Finding the Lost, was a heist fest where the goal is the original plates of the Gutenberg Bible, where the author wrote a consistent 350 page novel without a single pronoun.......

breathing

I have to breath. When I first started to consciously inhale and exhale, it reminded me of a soft walk. After a few blocks you begin to forget you are walking. If you just turn that part of your mind off and concentrate instead on a street sign, the museum of science architecture the girl walking up there, then you don’t notice the decision to walk. But I’ve lost automatic breathing. There are some stretches of obliviousness. Until that ultimate, terrible, panic-striking fact that I have to remember to breath, breaks through my thoughts like a stroke. My muscles tingle. Since my thoughts are stunted, like a stalled train, I have grave difficulty with simple activities like remembering which street leads to the convenient store, remembering to watch for a red light, or where I placed my phone. On top of that I cannot sleep. Let us be honest now, this is giving me a stunted life expectancy. Four, five days maybe. Where are my glasses? Wait, if I stop breathing they’ll come back to me. On my head. This is no way to survive.
I had no reason to drive through Boston on the last leg of my trip. Except to see Naoimi. And doesn’t she have all the luck now, she’s got the winning lottery ticket and could cry for joy! Except that is it, she cannot. The disease has given her permanent indoor voice. She can’t shout, or yell, or scream, only speak in a dull, banal volume only a note above a whisper. While I’m satcheled with brain death and suffocation; and to think, just last night I was having a wonderful dream about the first crush I ever had, a girl with short cropped hair, jewel eyes and a bountiful rack, meeting me on a train here in Boston. My alarm clock broke us up. I wanted to see where we would go next, and I hoped to returned to that dream tonight. I’ll only see her again when I’m dead.

Swim 5

Back in the hotel room, Jack brushed his teeth, watching himself closely in the mirror. How hyena-like he looked with his teeth bared as he brushed them, his lips pulled back enough to show the gums. And how neat the hotel room was. Everything in his place. Plastic Dixie cup with strange-tasting, almost sweet, water. Hotel soap, unused and wrapped in paper on a little dish by the sink. He liked clean hotel rooms—they way they looked wrapped, and complete, and contained. Particularly hotel bathrooms. Endless clean white towels, a paper strip over the toilet seat cover. He hated removing that paper strip. It seemed to sully the room in a way that could not be changed.

He was not used to staying in hotel rooms alone. When Sarah was alive, they took a few trips a year. Sarah liked to find bed and breakfasts in Vermont or New Hampshire. Places with floral curtains and high piled beds. She loved old places that smelled of cedar and mahogany. Fireplaces in the dining room and the owner’s black lab in the garden. The room he was in now was nothing like those places, but he liked it. He liked the wrapped soap and starched towels and the tightly made bed. His own clothes he had folded away in the dresser, everything in its own compartment.

Sleep came quickly and as he lay in bed he felt the pull of the ocean at him as the edges of his mind grew quiet and everything got dark.