BURY ME UNDER THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

I am a gold coin

Wed, 08 May 2013 23:24:00 -0400

Allow me to admit proudly that I’ve spent most of my time in Istanbul wandering from purse to purse, and from sash to pocket, as befits an intelligent coin. My worst nightmare is to be stored in a jug and languish for years beneath a rock, buried in some garden; not that it hasn’t happened to me, but for whatever reason, these periods have never lasted long. Many of the people who hold me want to be rid of me as soon as possible, especially if they discover I’m fake. Nonetheless I have yet to come across someone who’ll warn an unsuspecting buyer that I’m counterfeit. A broker, not recognizing that I’m counterfeit, who has counted out 120 silver coins in exchange for me, will berate himself in fits of anger, sorrow and impatience as soon as he learns he’s been cheated, and these fits won’t subside until he rids himself of me by cheating another. During this crisis, even as he attempts to repeatedly swindle others, failing each time on account of his haste and anger, he’ll continue all the while to curse the “immoral” person who had originally conned him.

Over the last seven years in Istanbul, I’ve changed hands 560 times, and there’s not a house, shop, market, bazaar, mosque, church or synagogue I haven’t entered. As I’ve roamed about, I’ve learned that much more gossip has been spread, many more legends told and lies spun in my name than I’d ever suspected. I’ve constantly had my nose rubbed in it: Nothing’s considered valuable anymore besides me, I’m merciless, I’m blind, I myself am even enamored of money, the unfortunate world revolves around, not God, but me, and there’s nothing I can’t buy — all this is to say nothing of my dirty, vulgar and base nature. And those who know that I’m fake are given to even harsher judgments As my actual value drops, however, my metaphorical value increases — proof that poetry is consolation to life’s miseries. But despite all such heartless comparison and thoughtless slander, I’ve realized that a large majority do sincerely love me. In this age of hatred, such heartfelt — even impassioned — affection ought to gladden us all.

—

Orhan Pamuk / My Name Is Red

"Leave that boy at once!"

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:38:08 -0400

said a voice in the outer compound. It was Okonkwo’s uncle, Uchendu. “Are you mad?”

Okonkwo did not answer. But he left hold of Nwoye, who walked away and never returned.

He went back to the church and told Mr. Kiaga that he had decided to go to Umuofia where the white missionary had set up a school to teach young Christians to read and write.

Mr. Kiaga’s joy was very great. “Blessed is he who forsakes his father and his mother for my sake,” he intoned. “Those that hear my words are my father and my mother.”

Nwoye did not fully understand. But he was happy to leave his father. He would return later to his mother and his brothers and sisters and convert them to the new faith.

As Okonkwo sat in his hut that night, gazing into a log fire, he thought over the matter. A sudden fury rose within him and he felt a strong desire to take up his machete, go to the church and wipe out the entire vile and miscreant gang. But on further thought he told himself that Nwoye was not worth fighting for. Why, he cried in his heart, should he, Okonkwo, of all people, be cursed with such a son? He saw clearly in it the finger of his personal god or chi. For how else could he explain his great misfortune and exile and now his despicable son’s behavior? Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation. He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days, and his children the while praying to the white man’s god. If such a thing were ever to happen, he, Okonkwo, would wipe them off the face of the earth.

Okonkwo was popularly called the “Roaring Flame.” As he looked into the log fire he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? Perhaps he was not his son. No! he could not be. His wife had played him flase. He would teach her! But Nwoye resembled his grandfather, Unoka, who was Okonkwo’s father. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He, Okonkwo, was called a flaming fire. How could he have begotten a woman for a son? At Nwoye’s age Okonkwo had already become famous throughout Umuofia for his wrestling and his fearlessness.

He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smoldering log aslo sighed. And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply.

—

Chinua Achebe / Things Fall Apart

Girl

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:38:00 -0400

Only a few weeks ago,
the drawings you would bring in
were drawings of a tower with a fairy princess

leaning out from a high turret,
a swirl of stars in the background,
and bright moons, distant planets with rings.

Then yesterday you brought in
a drawing of a scallion,
a single scallion on a sheet of white paper—

another crucial step
along the path of human development,
I thought to myself

as I admired the slender green stalk,
the white bulb, and the little beard
of roots that you had penciled in so carefully.

—

Billy Collins / Girl

"Good morning," said the little prince.

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:14:07 -0500

“Good morning,” said the railway switchman.

“What do you do here?” asked the little prince.

“I sort the travelers in bundles of a thousand,” the switchman said. “I dispatch the trains that carry them, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.”

And a brightly lit express train, roaring like thunder, shook the switchman’s cabin.

“What a hurry they’re in,” said the little prince. “What are they looking for?”

“Not even the engineer on the locomotive knows,” the switchman said.

And another brightly lit express train thundered by in the opposite direction.

“Are they coming back already?” asked the little prince.

“It’s not the same ones,” the switchman said. “It’s an exchange.”

“They weren’t satisfied, where they were?” asked the little prince.

“No one is ever satisfied where he is,” the switchman said.

And a third brightly lit express train thundered past.

“Are they chasing the first travelers?” asked the little prince.

“They’re not chasing anything,” the switchman said. They’re sleeping in there, or else they’re yawning. Only the children are pressing their noses against the windowpanes.”

“Only the children know what they’re looking for,” said the little prince. “They spend their time on a rag doll and it becomes very important, and if it’s taken away from them, they cry…”

“They’re lucky,” the switchman said.

"Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang.

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 21:16:22 -0500

Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood.”

Everybody was willing. So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn’t eat and he mustn’t sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band. And nobody that didn’t belong to the band could use that mark, and if he did he must be sued; and if he done it again he must be killed. And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot forever.

Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said, some of it, but the rest was out of pirate-books and robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned had it.

Some thought it would be good to kill the families of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in. Then Ben Rogers says:

“Here’s Huck Finn, he hain’t got no family; what you going to do ‘bout him?”

“Well, hain’t he got a father?” says Tom Sawyer.

“Yes, he’s got a father, but you can’t never find him these days. He used to lay drunk with the hogs in the tanyard, but he hain’t been seen in these parts for a year or more.”

They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn’t be fair and square for the others. Well, nobody could think of anything to do—everybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson—they could kill her. Everybody said:

“Oh, she’ll do. That’s all right. Huck can come in.”

Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper.

“Now,” says Ben Rogers, “what’s the line of business of this Gang?”

“Nothing only robbery and murder,” Tom said.

“But who are we going to rob?—houses, or cattle, or—”

“Stuff! stealing cattle and such things ain’t robbery; it’s burglary,” says Tom Sawyer. ”We ain’t burglars. That ain’t no sort of style. We are highwaymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on, and kill the people and take their watches and money.”

“Must we always kill the people?”

“Oh, certainly. It’s best. Some authorities think different, but mostly it’s considered best to kill them—except some that you bring to the cave here, and keep them till they’re ransomed.”

“Ransomed? What’s that?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what they do. I’ve seen it in books; and so of course that’s what we’ve got to do.”

“But how can we do it if we don’t know what it is?”

“Why, blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?”

“Oh, that’s all very fine to say, Tom Sawyer, but how in the nation are these fellows going to be ransomed if we don’t know how to do it to them?—that’s the thing I want to get at. Now, what do you reckon it is?”

“Well, I don’t know. But per’aps if we keep them till they’re ransomed, it means that we keep them till they’re dead.”

“Now, that’s something like. That’ll answer. Why couldn’t you said that before? We’ll keep them till they’re ransomed to death; and a bothersome lot they’ll be, too—eating up everything, and always trying to get loose.”

“How you talk, Ben Rogers. How can they get loose when there’s a guard over them, ready to shoot them down if they move a peg?”

“A guard! Well, that is good. So somebody’s got to set up all night and never get any sleep, just so as to watch them. I think that’s foolishness. Why can’t a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they get here?”

“Because it ain’t in the books so—that’s why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular, or don’t you?—that’s the idea. Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn ‘em anything? Not by a good deal. No, sir, we’ll just go on and ransom them in the regular way.”

“All right. I don’t mind; but I say it’s a fool way, anyhow. Say, do we kill the women, too?”

“Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on. Kill the women? No; nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you’re always as polite as pie to them; and by and by they fall in love with you, and never want to go home any more.”

“Well, if that’s the way I’m agreed, but I don’t take no stock in it. Mighty soon we’ll have the cave so cluttered up with women, and fellows waiting to be ransomed, that there won’t be no place for the robbers. But go ahead, I ain’t got nothing to say.”

Little Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when they waked him up he was scared, and cried, and said he wanted to go home to his ma, and didn’t want to be a robber any more.

So they all made fun of him, and called him cry-baby, and that made him mad, and he said he would go straight and tell all the secrets. But Tom give him five cents to keep quiet, and said we would all go home and meet next week, and rob somebody and kill some people.

Ben Rogers said he couldn’t get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday; but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday, and that settled the thing. They agreed to get together and fix a day as soon as they could, and then we elected Tom Sawyer first captain and Jo Harper second captain of the Gang, and so started home.

I clumb up the shed and crept into my window just before day was breaking. My new clothes was all greased up and clayey, and I was dog-tired.

—

Mark Twain / The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Collision

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:20:00 -0500


Away in the eyefar
nightrise over the sapwood, and one likes
under hooves the heatfeel after sun flees, heat stays on this
smooth to the hoof hardpan, part trail
part saltlick now as snowlast moults back
into the sapwood
to yard and rot
and one sees moonrise mounding
over a groundswell, but too soon and swifter
like never the moon one knows, no moon at all,
two moons fawned, both small, too hot, they
come with a growling and
hold one fast, so chafing for flight
but what, what, what, what
wondering----

and one can't move and can't although one
knows from backdays, eared and glimpsed
through sapwood  budwood  cracklewood  bonewood
flashes of this same Wolfing
                              now upon one, still
stalls the hooves on the saltlick and the eyebright
creature squeals    afraid?----and one somehow
uphoofed in a bound not chosen high as if to flee with no
trying, no feeling, fallen    flankflat, fawnlike
eyes above in the eyefar closing small
with the world

                and now from the stopped thing
comes what    its cub?    legged up on its hinds,
kneels low to touch, but in that awful
touch, no feel    no fear to feel
no at all--

--

Steven Heighton / Collision

Cassano was a guy with a crude feel for financial risk but a real talent for bullying people who doubted him.

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 23:25:56 -0500

“AIG FP became a dictatorship,” says one London trader. “Joe would bully people around. He’d humiliate them and then try to make it up to them by giving them huge amounts of money.”

“One day he got me on the phone and was pissed off about a trade that had lost money,” says a Connecticut trader. “He said, When you lose money it’s my fucking money. Say it. I said, ‘What?’

“Say, ‘Joe, it’s your fucking money’! So I said, ‘It’s your fucking money, Joe.’”

“The culture changed,” says a third trader. “The fear level was so high that when we had these morning meetings, you presented what you did not to upset him. And if you were critical of the organization, all hell would break loose.” Says a fourth, “Joe always said, ‘This is my company. You work for my company.’ He’d see you with a bottle of water. He’d come over and say, ‘That’s my water.’ Lunch was free, but Joe always made you feel he had bought it.” And a fifth: “Under Joe, the debate and discussion that was common under Tom [Savage, the previous CEO] ceased. I would say [to Tom] what I’m saying to you. But with Joe as the audience. A sixth: “The way you dealt with Joe was to start everything by saying, ‘You’re right, Joe.’

—

Michael Lewis / The Big Short

Down in the basement, at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker's Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights.

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:00:37 -0500

He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he’d formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had a rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.

A shadowy light of late afternoon was captive in the window wells. The furnace was cycling on often, the house leaking heat. Alfred’s red sweater hung on him in skewed folds and bulges, as if he were a log or a chair. His gray wool slacks were afflicted with stains that he had no choice but to tolerate, because the only other option was to take leave of his senses, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that.

Uppermost in the Maker’s Mark carton was a very long string of white Christmas lights coiled bulkily around a wand of cardboard. The string stank of mildew from the storeroom beneath the porch, and when he put the plug into an outlet he could see right away that all was not well. Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs - a substantia nigra deep in the tangle. He unwound the spool with veering hands, paying the string out on the Ping-Pong table. At the very end of it was an unsightly stretch of dead bulbs.

He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string. But the discount stores were mobbed at this time of year; he’d be in line for twenty minutes. He didn’t mind waiting, but Enid wouldn’t let him drive the car now, and Enid did mind waiting. She was upstairs flogging herself through the home stretch of Christmas prep.

Much better, Alfred thought, to stay out of sight in the basement, to work with what he had. It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally.

Modernity expected this designation and Alfred resisted it.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to fix the lights. He didn’t understand how a stretch of fifteen bulbs could go dead. He examined the transition from light to darkness and saw no change in the wiring pattern between the last burning bulb and the first dead one. He couldn’t follow the three constituent wires through all their twists and braidings. The circuit was semiparallel in some complex way he didn’t see the point of.

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season’s rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn’t work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn’t affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement…

Alfred’s hands were rotating on his wrists like the twin heads of an eggbeater. As well as he could, he advanced his fingers along the string, squeezing and twisting the wires as he went - and the dark stretch reignited! The string was complete!

What had he done?

He smoothed out the string on the Ping-Pong table. Almost immediately, the faulty segment went dark again. He tried to revive it by squeezing and patting it, but this time he had no luck.

(You fitted the barrel of the shotgun into your mouth and you reached for the switch.)

He reexamined the braid of olive-drab wires. Even now, even at this extremity of his affliction, he believed he could sit down with pencil and paper and reinvent the principles of basic circuitry. He was certain, for the moment, of his ability to do this; but the task of puzzling out a parallel circuit was far more daunting than the task, say, of driving to a discount store and waiting in line. The mental task required an inductive rediscovery of basic precepts; it required a rewiring of his own cerebral circuitry. It was truly marvelous that such a thing was even thinkable - that a forgetful old man alone in his basement with his shotgun and his sugar cookie and his big blue chair could spontaneously regenerate organic circuitry complex enough to understand electricity - but the energy that this reversal of entropy would cost him vastly exceeded the energy available to him in the form of his sugar cookie. Maybe if he ate a whole box of sugar cookies all at once, he could relearn parallel circuitry and make sense of the peculiar three-wire braiding of these infernal lights. But oh, my God, a person got so tired.

He shook the string and the dead lights came on again. He shook it and shook it and they didn’t go out. By the time he’d coiled the string back onto the makeshift spool, however, the deep interior was dark again. Two hundred bulbs were burning bright, and modernity insisted that he junk the whole thing.

He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn’t understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it.

And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.

You were outfitted as a boy with a will to fix things by yourself and with a respect for individual physical objects, but eventually some of your internal hardware (including such mental hardware as this will and this respect) became obsolete, and so, even though many other parts of you still functioned well, an argument could be made for junking the whole human machine.

Which was another way of saying he was tired.

He fitted the cookie into his mouth. Chewed carefully and swallowed. It was hell to get old.

—

Jonathan Franzen / The Corrections

On the other hand, online dating sites

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 22:37:00 -0400

are the only places I’ve been where there’s no ambiguity of intention. A gradation of subtlety, sure: from the basic ‘You’re cute,’ to the off-putting ‘Hi there, would you like to come over, smoke a joint and let me take nude photos of you in my living room?’

The largest free dating site in America is another algorithm-based service, Plenty of Fish, but in New York everyone I know uses OK Cupid, so that’s where I signed up. I also signed up to Match, but OK Cupid was the one I favoured, mostly because I got such constant and overwhelming attention from men there. The square-jawed bankers who reigned over Match, with their pictures of scuba diving in Bali and skiing in Aspen, paid me so little attention it made me feel sorry for myself. The low point came when I sent a digital wink to a man whose profile read, ‘I have a dimple on my chin,’ and included photos of him playing rugby and standing bare-chested on a deep-sea fishing vessel holding a mahi-mahi the size of a tricycle. He didn’t respond to my wink.

I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals being sent to us, let alone interpreting them?

—

Emily Witt / Diary: Online Dating
(full piece)

I'm heading for Africa, land of our ancestors, vast Africa,

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:47:15 -0400

where people have time to take a look at life even if life isn’t generous to them, where they still take a moment to do selfless things: Africa, cursed by the heavens, Africa pillaged by Blacks wearing ties, by Whites wearing ties, by monkeys in tuxedos, even by people who are sometimes completely invisible, but Africans know this, they don’t wait to be told what’s going on - I’m talking about Africa because its people have walked days and nights to get here, to Tangier, after hearing that Tangier was already Europe: you can smell Europe, you see Europe and its lights, you touch Europe with your fingertips, and it smells good, it awaits you, just cross eight or nine little miles and you’re even closer, or go to Ceuta and you’re as good as in Europe, yes, Ceuta and Melilla are European towns, where all you have to do is clamber over a barbed wire barrier - the Guardia Civil can’t keep an eye on everything, sometimes they shoot into the crowd, so dying in the frigid waters of the straits or on the asphalt of the border, take your pick, my friends, Africa is here and those guys think Europe has its border in Tangier, in the port, in the Socco Chico, here in this wretched cafe, and they arrive like quivering shadows, in a state of uncertainty, men drained of all substance, wandering the streets, sleeping in cemeteries, eating cats, yes, so rumor says, I believe it, some gratuitous nastiness, the Africans losing just a bit more of their souls, while we white Arabs (well, let’s say brown- or olive- or cinnamon-skinned), we feel superior, stupidly superior, thinking we’ve found in them men whom we can finally despise, with a racism that needed to get some exercise, although we were already mistreating the poor, but when the poor are Africans with black skin, we lose all control, we feel justified in looking down on them, we act like certain European politicians, looking down on you when in fact they don’t even see you…

—

Tahar Ben Jelloun / Leaving Tangier

Spring Azure

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 10:38:59 -0400

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so
  heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows--
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking--

don't seem enough to carry me through this
  world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings--
blue ones--
ribbons of flame.

--

Mary Oliver / From "Spring Azure"

If one listened attentively, it was possible to detect a constant sound coming from inside the mechanism

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 22:13:00 -0400

which went on repeating: ‘I must only find dead bodies or remains, I must only find dead bodies or remains, dead bodies or remains, or remains…’

Fortunately, there was one remaining drawback, as we shall see. No sooner did the instrument begin to function than people realised that, this time, it could not tell the difference between human and non-human bodies, but this new flaw, which explains why I earlier used the word fortunately, turned out to be an advantage: when the King understood the danger he had escaped, he had the shivers: in fact, all death is death, even the non-human kind, and there would be no purpose in removing dead men from sight, when dogs, horses and birds go on dropping before our eyes. And all other creatures, with the possible exception of insects which are only half-animal (as was firmly believed by the nation’s scientists at that time). Then a full-scale investigation was ordered, a Cyclopean task which went on for years. Not so much as a hand-breadth of land remained to be examined, even in places which had been uninhabited for as long as anyone could remember: not even the highest mountains escaped or the deepest rivers, where thousands of dead bodies were discovered; the deepest roots did not escape, sometimes entangled around the remains of someone higher up who had been trying, out of desire or necessity, to reach the sap of some tree. Nor did the roads escape, which had to be lifted in many places and rebuilt. Finally, the kingdom found itself released from death. One day, when the King himself formally announced that the country was cleansed of death (his words), he declared a public holiday and national rejoicing. On such days it is customary for more people than usual to die, because of accidents, muggings, etc., but the National Life Service (as it is called) employed rapid, up-to-date methods: once death had been confirmed, the corpse followed the shortest route to the great highway of corpses, which had inevitably come to be known as no-man’s-land. Having got rid of the dead, the King could be happy. As for the people, they would have to get used to it.

—

José Saramago / Reflux

He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America.

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 12:42:55 -0400

Still they were all different places that had different names. They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?

Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.

It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big. He turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was!

—

James Joyce / A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Oh, misanthropy and sourness.

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:53:00 -0400

Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

Well, there was still the citizenry of America’s heartland: St. Judean minivan drivers thirty and forty pounds overweight and sporting pastel sweats, pro-life bumper stickers, Prussian hair. But Gary in recent years had observed, with plate-tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts. (He was part of this exodus himself, of course, but he’d made his escape early, and, frankly, priority had its privileges.) At the same time, all the restaurants in St. Jude were suddenly coming up to European speed (suddenly cleaning ladies knew from sun-dried tomatoes, suddenly hog farmers knew from crème brûlée), and shoppers at the mall near his parents’ house had an air of entitlement offputtingly similar to his own, and the electronic consumer goods for sale in St. Jude were every bit as powerful and cool as those in Chestnut Hill. Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity —

But enough, he told himself. A too-annihilating will to specialness, a wish to reign supreme in his superiority, was yet another Warning Sign of clinical D.

—

Jonathan Franzen / The Corrections

"It was a tragedy to my grandmother that none of us showed a talent for painting."

Fri, 25 May 2012 01:51:00 -0400

“Even at the end of her life, when I was in school studying business, she was telling me to try again. But it wasn’t something I was capable of learning. She liked to say my brother Dimitri would have been a great painter but that was only because Dimitri was dead. The dead we can imagine to be anything at all. My brothers and I were all excellent observers. Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don’t you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.” Fyodorov spoke slowly. He gave long pauses between his sentences so that Gen would not have to struggle to translate, but because of this it was difficult to tell whether he was finished speaking.

“It’s a lovely story,” Roxane said at last.

“But there is a point to it.”

Roxanne settled back in her chair to hear the point.

“It may not seem immediately evident that I would be a man who has a deep understanding of art and I want you to know that I am. The Secretary of Commerce in Russia, what would that be to you? And yet because of my background I feel I am specifically qualified.”

Again, Roxane waited to see if there was more of the sentence coming and when there didn’t seem to be she asked him, “Qualified to what?”

“To love you,” Fyodorov said. “I love you.”

Gen looked at Fyodorov and blinked. He felt the blood drain away from his face.

“What did he say?” Roxane said.

“Go on,” Fyodorov said. “Tell her.”

Roxane’s hair was pulled up tightly from her face and caught in a pink elastic she had been given from the room of the Vice President’s oldest daughter. Without makeup or jewelry, without her hair to frame her face, a person might have thought her plain or even tired looking if he didn’t know what she was capable of. Gen thought she was patient to have listened for so long, keeping her eyes on Fyodorov, never drifting off to stare out the window. Gen greatly admired her singing, that went without saying. Every day when she sang he felt deeply moved, but he did not love her. Not that he was being asked to. Not that she would have thought that’s what he meant, that he, Gen, loved her, and yet still he struggled. He had never thought of it before but he was quite sure now that he did think of it that he had neither spoken those words or written them, either to someone or for someone else. Birthday cards and letters home were signed please take good care of yourself. He had never said I love you to either his parents or his sisters. He had not said it to any of the three women he had slept with in his life or the girls in school with whom he had occasionally walked to class. It simply had not occurred to him to say it and now on the first day of his life when it might have been appropriate to speak of love to a woman, he would be declaring it for another man to another woman.

“Are you going to tell me?” Roxane said. There was only slightly more interest in her voice the second time she asked. Fyodorov waited, hands clasped, a look of great relief already spreading over his face. He had said his piece. He had taken things as far as he could.

Gen swallowed the saliva which had pooled over his tongue and tried to look at Roxane in a businesslike manner. “He is qualified to love you. He says, I love you.” Gen framed his translation to make it sound as appropriate as was possible.

“He loves my singing?”

“You,” Gen said pointedly. He did not feel the need to consult with Fyodorov on this. The Russian smiled.

Now Roxane did look away. She took a deep breath and stared out the window for a while as if there had been some sort of offer and she was now weighing it out. When she looked back she smiled at Fyodorov. The look on her face was so peaceful, so tender, that for a moment Gen thought perhaps she loved the Russian in return. Was it possible that such a declaration could achieve the desired effect? That she would love him simply for having loved her?

“Victor Fyodorov,” she said. “A wonderful story.”

“Thank you.” Fyodorov bowed his head.

“I wonder what became of the young man from Europe, Julian,” she said, though she seemed to be speaking to herself. “It’s one thing to give a woman a necklace. It comes in a small box. Even a very expensive necklace isn’t much trouble. But to give a woman such a book, to bring it all the way from some other country, I think that’s quite extraordinary. I can imagine him carrying it on the train all done up in wrapping paper.”

“If we are to believe there was a Julian at all.”

“There’s no reason not to. It certainly would do no harm to believe the story she told you.”

“I’m sure you are right. From now on I will remember it only as the truth.”

Gen’s head was filled with Carmen again. He wished that she was waiting for him, still sitting on the black marble sink, but he knew this wasn’t possible. She was probably on patrol now, walking up and down the hallways of the second floor with a rifle, conjugating verbs under her breath.

“As for the love,” Roxane said finally.

“There is nothing to say,” Fyodorov interrupted. “It is a gift. There. Something to give to you. If I had the necklace or a book of paintings I would give you that instead. I would give you that in addition to my love.”

“Then you are too generous with gifts.”

Fyodorov shrugged. “Perhaps you are right. In another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous hand for one second while you stepped into your car after a performance. But in this place I hear you sing every day. In this place I watch you eat your dinner, and what I feel in my heart is love. There is no point in not telling you that. These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?”

“And what if there is nothing for me to give you?” She seemed to be interested in Fyodorov’s argument.

He shook his head. “What a thing to say, after all that you have given to me. But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way to think of gifts. This is not business we are conducting. Would I be pleased if you were to say you loved me as well? That what you wanted was to come to Russia and live with the Secretary of Commerce, attend state dinners, drink your coffee in my bed? A beautiful thought, surely, but my wife would not be pleased. When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view.”

“Americans have a bad habit of thinking like Americans,” Roxane said kindly. After that she smiled at Fyodorov and everyone was quiet for a moment. The interview had come to a close and there was nothing left to say.

Then finally Fyodorov stood up from his chair and clapped his hands together. “I, for one, feel much better. What a burden this has been to me! Now I can get some rest. You’ve been very kind to hear me.” He extended his hand to Roxane, and when she stood and gave him hers he kissed it and for a moment stretched it up to hold it against his cheek. “I will remember this day forever, this moment, your hand. No man could want for more than this.” He smiled and then he let her go. “A wonderful day. A wonderful thing you have given me in return.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen without a word to Gen. In all of his excitement he had forgotten Gen was there at all, the way a person can forget when the translation has gone very smoothly.

—

Ann Patchett / Bel Canto

"You know who really killed Lumumba?" Master said, looking up from a magazine.

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:00:00 -0400

“It was the Americans and the Belgians. It had nothing to do with Katanga.”

“Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. He wanted Master to keep talking, so he could listen to the sonorous voice, the musical blend of English words in his Igbo sentences.

“You are my houseboy,” Master said. “If I order you to go outside and beat a woman walking on the street with a stick, and you then give her a bloody wound on her leg, who is responsible for the wound, you or me?”

Ugwu stared at Master, shaking his head, wondering if Master was referring to the chicken pieces in some roundabout way.

“Lumumba was prime minister of Congo. Do you know where Congo is?” Master asked.

“No, sah.”

Master got up quickly and went into the study. Ugwu’s confused fear made his eyelids quiver. Would Master send him home because he did not speak English well, kept chicken in his pocket overnight, did not know the strange places Master named? Master came back with a wide piece of paper that he unfolded and laid out on the dining table, pushing aside books and magazines. He pointed with his pen. “This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.” Master picked up the paper and folded it, so that one edge touched the other, leaving a hollow between. “Our world is round, it never ends. Nee anya, this is all water, the seas and oceans, and here’s Europe and here’s our own continent, Africa, and the Congo is in the middle. Farther up here is Nigeria, and Nsukka is here, in the southeast; this is where we are.” He tapped with his pen.

“Yes, sah.”

…

“I will enroll you in the staff primary school,” Master said, still tapping on the piece of paper with his pen.

Ugwu’s aunty had told him that if he served well for a few years, Master would send him to commercial school where he would learn typing and shorthand. She had mentioned the staff primary school, but only to tell him that it was for the children of the lecturers, who wore blue uniforms and white socks so intricately trimmed with wisps of lace that you wondered why anybody had wasted so much time on mere socks.

“Yes, sah,” he said. “Thank, sah.”

“I suppose you will be the oldest in class, starting in standard three at your age,” Master said. “And the only way you can get their respect is to be the best. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sah!”

“Sit down, my good man.”

Ugwu chose the chair farthest from Master, awkwardly placing his feet close together. He preferred to stand.

“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers. I will give you books, excellent books.” Master stopped to sip his tea. “They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger. That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long before Mungo Park’s grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park.”

“Yes, sah.” Ugwu wished that this person called Mungo Park had not offended Master so much.

“Can’t you say anything else?”

“Sah?”

—

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Half of a Yellow Sun

Delta

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:02:51 -0400

If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking though it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread

—

Adrienne Rich / Delta

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:07:00 -0500

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

—

Wislawa Szymborska / Cat in an Empty Apartment

I Was Reading a Scientific Article

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:41:00 -0500

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

--

Margaret Atwood / I Was Reading a Scientific Article

He was with his dog.

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:39:34 -0500

The two of them have been inseparable for eight years. The spaniel has a skin disease - mange, I think - which makes almost all its hair fall out and leaves it covered with brown sores and scabs. After living together for so long, the two of them alone in one tiny room, they’ve ended up looking like each other. Old Salamano has reddish scabs on his face and wispy yellow hair. As for the dog, he’s sort of taken on his master’s stooped look, muzzle down, neck straining. They look as if they belong to the same species, and yet they hate each other. Twice a day, at eleven and six, the old man takes the dog out for a walk. They haven’t changed their route in eight years. You can see them in the rue de Lyon, the dog pulling the man along until old Salamano stumbles. Then he beats the dog and swears at it. The dog cowers and trails behind. Then it’s the old man who pulls the dog. Once the dog has forgotten, it starts dragging its master along again, and again gets beaten and sworn at. Then they both stand there on the sidewalk and stare at each other, the dog in terror, the man in hatred. It’s the same thing every day. When the dog wants to urinate, the old man won’t give him enough time and yanks at him, so that the spaniel leaves behind a trail of little drops. If the dog has an accident in the room, it gets beaten again. This has been going on for eight years. Céleste is always saying, “It’s pitiful,” but really, who’s to say? When I ran into him on the stairs, Salamano was swearing away at the dog. He was saying, “Filthy, stinking bastard!” and the dog was whimpering. I said “Good evening,” but the old man just went on cursing. So I asked him what the dog had done. He didn’t answer. I could barely see him leaning over his dog, trying to fix something on its collar. I spoke louder. Then, without turning around, he answered with a kind of suppressed rage, “He’s always there.” Then he left, yanking at the animal, which was letting itself be dragged along, whimpering.

—

Albert Camus / The Stranger