A child's foot doesn't know it's a foot yet
And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple
But then the rocks and pieces of glass,
the streets, the stairways
and the roads of hard earth
keep teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be a round fruit on a branch.
Then the child's foot
was defeated, it fell
in battle,
it was a prisoner,
condemned to life in a shoe.

Little by little without light
it got acquainted with the world in its own way
without knowing the other imprisoned foot
exploring life like a blind man.

Those smooth toe nails
of quartz in a bunch,
got harder, they changed into
an opaque substance, into hard horn
and the child's little petals
were crushed, lost their balance,
took the form of a reptile without eyes,
with triangular heads like a worm's.
And they had callused over,
they were covered
with tiny lava fields of death,
a hardening unasked for.
But this blind thing kept going
without surrender, without stopping
hour after hour.
One foot after another,
now as a man,
or a woman,
above,
below,
through the fields, the mines,
the stores, the government bureaus,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot worked with its shoes,
it hardly had time
to be naked in love or in sleep
one foot walked, both feet walked
until the whole man stopped.

And then it went down
into the earth and didn't know anything
because there everything was dark,
it didn't know it was no longer a foot
or if they buried it so it could fly
or so it could
be an apple.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
translated by Jodey Bateman (the original after the jump)

Continue reading Pablo Neruda's To the Foot From Its Child »

"The week before, when I'd arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was one of the most advanced places I'd ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses—each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, 'Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?' and this place had raised its hands and said 'Yeah!'"

More on Franzen's trip to China here (audio link).

Liao Yiwu has a knack for capturing stories from everyday people in China that manage to be both poetic and funny. I first encountered Yiwu's work via the Paris Review in this story about a peasant who in 1985 declared himself emperor of Sichuan province.

Yiwu has recently released a book titled The Corpse Walker which is a collection of interviews of people in the bottom rungs of Chinese society-morticians, lepers, professional mourners, etc. This short excerpt of an interview with a mortician is a good example of his writing:

An excerpt:

"Beauty doesn't last. It's bound to be destroyed. So many kind, good-looking people die each day. I work on their bodies, hoping to temporarily preserve and enhance their beauty before they are gone forever. I don't want to lose anyone anymore. The scariest part of life is not death but the loss that comes with death. My former boss died at the beginning of this year. He was not even seventy. I did the makeup for him. This guy had one hobby when he was alive. He collected wedding invitations when he was young, and when he turned fifty, he began to collect obituaries. His whole room was filled with his collections. He used to say that all obituaries sounded the same and that we Chinese people lack imagination in the use of language. He wanted his own obituary to be unique, so he began to compose it when he was still alive. He printed hundreds of copies and stored them in a drawer with his bank statements and his will. After he died, his friends showed one to Old Wang, the new Party secretary at the funeral home. Old Wang, who was going to preside over the memorial service, read it aloud to several people during rehearsal. Nobody could understand what the obituary was about. It was so archaic, it sounded like haiku. I didn't know half of the characters. It was handwritten. He must have read it hundreds of times before he died, hoping those would be the last words he left for the world. But the new Party secretary didn't think the obituary reflected the revolutionary spirit of the new era. So he composed a new one filled with modern political jargon, in a style that our past director had despised. Oh well, what can you do? This is China. You don't have much control when you are alive. When you die, you won't have control over your obituary either. "

Proust on his deathbed by Man Ray
I've long held a little theory (unpopular amongst my friends) that great artists have only one story to tell and once they've told the perfect version of that story they are doomed. Nothing they do from that point on will ever be as good, their story has been told. Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short...

Anyway, tonight I happened upon something by Proust that suggests he had a similar conviction, "The great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various mediums an identical beauty which they bring into the world."

Now he could have been saying that the great writers basically create a single universe, and that all his work is a shade of that universe, but given his other writing about the despair that comes from success I stand by my interpretation...

Don't know why I'm thinking about this at 3:14 in the morning. Enough. Goodnight.

Babar's mom is shot and killed by a hunter. He runs away the city where the little old lady adopts him. She hands him a purse full of money and marches into to a department store to buy a green suit and derby. With his fancy clothes he becomes something of a dandy, popular at dinner parties. By chance, he runs into his young cousins Celeste and Arthur who have run away from the jungle and takes them back home. On the same day he returns the elephant king eats a bad mushroom, turns green, and dies. Cornelius the oldest elephant anoints Babar king. Babar promptly marries his young cousin Celeste. On their honeymoon they are captured and almost eaten cannibals (of course strictly speaking cannibals eat each other while in this case they looked like they were going to eat Celeste, but you understand...). The honeymooners escape but are soon sold into slavery in a circus. Luckily they are saved by the old lady. On returning home they find the elephants are at war with the rhinos. With Babar's help the elephants defeat and humiliate the rhinos putting them in small cages. Eventually Babar builds a city of elephants (Well mainly elephants, Cornelius becomes the old lady's gentleman friend). Eventually Babar's wife has triplets while he's out smoking his pipe and shortly after their births the children are a) almost choked, b) accidently sent over a precipice and c) almost eaten by crocodiles.

I cannot change them,
I am told by you people
who apply the rule of leopards
to the two-legged ape
who fancies himself better
then those who go about on four.

Why would I wish to change them,
though they do little to blend
me to the gray walls of my cage?
I am not gifted to ask
myself or others what a spot is
or what a spot is not.
We are given what we have
and left with what we've got.

by Paul Ruffin
From Issue 169 of the Paris Review

Gabriel García Márquez on marriage in Love in the Time of Cholera:

"Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."

Take a day off
While your sisters are working
Work on a day
When your sisters are taking off
Be bright in the kitchen
Be sullen in the pantry
Whey they listen to music, cough
Whey go to their lovers, be sultry
There is no solution
To being the youngest sister
The hottest summer day
To you is the most wintry
Take your shirt off
And read a while.

-Kenneth Koch

related: Maria Del Mar

"Well, to some degree I was speaking of all home towns. In that, to the person who comes from a particular place — let us call it "Town X" — it is the most unique and interesting and important place in the world. It’s where you first experience most of the common stories that we all experience in life. So it has something of a mythic, novelistic quality to it. But then as you get older, you realize that you share experiences with a lot of older people. You also appreciate that every town is not only the most interesting place on earth, but also the most banal place on earth. Because everyone, more or less, has shared experiences that they go through that make a town seem important."

The full Phoenix interview, Radar Interview
Related: Daily Show Correspondents on the web, Mongolian Death Worms

I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
and does not return.

- Octovio Paz

"Once, a mangy groundhog meandered across a hundred yards of barren lawn to arrive at the feet of my father, brothers, and our family dog. The dog was the last to notice the new addition to our party. When the dog finally growled, the groundhog let out a terrifying, human scream, slumped to the ground, and was dead before anything touched it.

The scream bothered all of us for days."

My friend JP plays an addictive little game coming up with phrases with post positive adjectives, adjectives that come after the noun, princess royal for example. As many of the phrases are of French origin, there is speculation the first of these were Normanisms that became an acceptable English form. Indeed many these phrases are legalisms which would make sense as many legal concepts became codified into English law shortly after the Norman conquest (The Normans added a hefty dose of bureaucracy and centralization to Anglo-Saxon legal affairs).

An interesting side panel on both the plural form and the proper hyphenation of court martial can be found in the middle of this page.

Some examples of phrases with post positive adjectives:

ambassador plenipotentiary
bar sinister
fiddlers three
judge advocate general
time past
mother superior
rhyme royal
chaise longue
moment supreme
battle royal...

Do any more come to mind?

I've been enjoying a bit of Hemingway tonight... A few first paragraphs...

Trout Fishing in Europe, November 17, 1923
"Bill Jones went to visit a French financier who lives near Deauville and has a private trout stream. The financier was very fat. He stream was very thin."

A.D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter, April 1934
"To write this sort of thing you need a typewriter. To describe, to narrate, to make funny cracks you need a typewriter. To fake along, to stall, to make light reading, to write a good piece, you need luck, two or more drinks and a typewriter. Gentlemen, there is no typewriter."

On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter, April 1936
"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue. Wine, when your tongue has been burned clean with lye, feels like puddle water in your mouth, while mustard feels like axle-grease, and you can smell crisp, fried bacon, but when you taste it, there is only a feeling of crinkly lard."

Square America has posted some fantastic vintage nightclub photos over at Swapatorium.

The images brought to mind "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" by Gay Talese which is often cited as one of the all time greatest magazine stories. The piece originally appeared in the April 1966 Esquire. If you don't know the article, I recommend first listening to Act IV of the This American Life show titled Sinatra featuring Mr. Talese reading an excerpt from his essay. Then when you are done, read the full article (pdf download, web version). Once you've heard Mr. Talese, you'll read the article with his rich voice and word cadence in your head. The article is fairly long so I recommend the pdf version.

Tonight I discovered the blog of Lisa Eisenbrey and I did something I rarely do which is read it all the way through. (Hello there Lisa if you happen to be reading this, you made me a) laugh b) miss Austin). The whole blog is great, but I was particularly taken by her Seutonius series (Caesar V, Caesar IV, Caesar III, and Caesars I & II) which distills The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius into amusing lists. (More on Suetonius at livius.org).

Often historians interpret these emperors' erratic actions as madness or inbreeding and of course that was sometimes undoubtedly what was going on, but my thought is this: Is it possible to look at the lives of these some of these emperors and not see madness, but a kind of extreme logic born of a life in which you are told you are a living god ruling over the known world. Aren't many of the extravagences and cruelties of these men simply the capricious whims of the id unchecked by the ego? Don't all ugly bald men like Caligula secretly want to kill the handsome well coifed men they encounter?

Two Worlds

In air heavy
with odor of crocuses,

sensual smell of crocuses,
I watch a lemon sun disappear,

a sea change blue
to olive black.

I watch lightning leap from Asia as
sleeping,

my love stirs and breathes and
sleeps again,

part of this world and yet
part that.

-Raymond Carver

Boing Boing calls Happy Palace, a blog of found images, music, and text hypnotic. I agree. The editor has a keen eye (and ear).

found in the archives:

Poem by Lawrence Raab, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Permanence

I can't remember how old I was,
but I used to stand in front
of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine
what it would be like to be dead.
I thought I'd have some sense of it
if I looked far enough into my own eyes,
as if my gaze, meeting itself, would make
an absence, and exclude me.

It was an experiment, like the time
Michael Smith and I set a fire in his basement
to prove something about chemistry.
It was an idea: who I would
or wouldn't be at the end of everything,
what kind of permanence I could imagine.

In seventh grade, Michael and I
were just horsing around
when I pushed him up against that window
and we both fell through -
astonished, then afraid. Years later

his father's heart attack
could have hit at any time,
but the day it did they'd quarreled,
and before Michael walked out
to keep his fury alive, or feel sorry for himself,
he turned and yelled, I wish you were dead!

We weren't in touch. They'd moved away.
And I've forgotten who told me
the story, how ironic it was meant
to sound, or how terrible.

We could have burned down the house.
We could have been killed going through
that window. But each of us
desereves, in a reasonable life,
at least a dozen times when death
doesn't take us. At the last minute

the driver of the car coming toward us
fights off sleep and stays in his lane.
He makes it home, we make it home.
Most days are like this. You yell
at your father and later you say
you didn't mean it. And he says, I know.

You look into your own eyes in a mirror
and that's all you can see.
Until you notice the window
behind you, sunlight on the leaves
of the oak, and then the sky,
and then the clouds passing through it.

I'm a big Sam Shepard fan. This is an excerpt from the Motel Chronicles, a book I reread now and then:

They caught him with a stolen print of a cottonwood tree. He was in the parking lot cramming it into the bed of his pickup. When they asked him why, he told them he wasn't sure why. He told them it gave him this feeling.

He told them he saw himself inside this picture lying on his back underneath the cottonwood. He said he recognized the tree from an old dream and that the dream was based on a real tree he dimly remembered from a long time ago in his childhood. He remembered lying down underneath this tree and staring up through the silver leaves.

He remembered voices from those leaves but he couldn't remember what the voices said of who they belong to.

He told them he was hoping the picture would bring the whole thing back.

I'm not much on poetry, but I found this one cut out from the New York Times Book Review dated 2/16/91. I had used it as a bookmark in a dictionary (it was in the W's) and I kinda like it.

Crayola

My favorite in the box of 64
Was Prussian Blue, rich with its hint
Of green, blue enough to suggest
An exotic 19th-century
Militaristic world.

I'd have colored everything Prussian Blue-
Except tree trunks, hands and faces -
But it had to be carefully rationed
Lest, its paper cover stripped away,
It would wear down to nothing.

Without it: prosaic Umber and Sienna,
Yellow-Green, the all-but useless White.
Adult life, I assumed, is when you own
All the Prussian Blue you'll ever need
To color anything you want.

LEWIS GARDNER

I found this picture today of my grandparents, my dad and his sister on vacation in Tampico. Nobody looks like they are having much fun, but I remember my grandmother talking about this trip with great fondness despite having to endure many meals with the smell of fish. My grandmother, a product of the desert and inland ranchers, was a great hater of fish.

Does anyone else find it sad that these types of photo places with painted backgrops are dissapearing? Like drive in movies and a good malted they are tokens of another age.

Here is another one of these images, one of my favorites, a famous one featuring Lorca and Buñel. Lorca appear to be rather serious. Perhaps Buñel bullied him into posing.

There is a poet I like named Kenneth Koch. He has a long series of short poems called Aesthetics. They are all just a few lines... for example:

Aesthetics of Saying Goodbye to a Friend

Walk her to the place
Where she can get a taxi
And say good-bye
If she is wearing
An overcoat
Place one hand
On her shoulder-or if she is not
Shake hands, embrace

Aesthetics of Harshness to a Horse

You should never be harsh
To a horse. A horse is always doing
Its best. Otherwise it is a bad horse
And harshness has no effect.

Aesthetics of Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca stands alone
Luna, typewriter, plantain tree, and dust
The moon is not just watching him, it is watching over him.

I was scanning a children's book I picked up in Mongolia for some of the illustrations, when I began to notice that the images taken together give a portrait of a somewhat harsh life:

. . . .

Similarly:

Notes on the Bashgali Language by Colonel J. Davidson of the Indian Staff Corps, Calcutta 1901, a collection of 1,744 common Bashgali sentences with English translations. The sentences give a disturbing impression of life in Chitral at that time. I originally came across these in Eric Newby's excellent travel adventure A Short Walk in The Hindu Kush.. Chitral is in current day Pakistan/Afganistan.

Some of the sentences in Notes on the Bashgali Language

-If you have had diarrhoea many days you will surely die.

-Don't drink water; a snake will grow in your bowel.

-I saw a corpse in the field this morning.

-Thy father fell into the river.

-I have nine fingers, you have ten.

-The dwarf has come to ask for food.

-I had an intention to kill you.

-A gust of wind came and took off all my clothes.

-An eagle came down from the sky and took off my cock.

-You are a very jabbering man.

-Why do you kick my horse? I will kick you.

-Why do you push me? I will kill your son.

-I will sleep now. If you try to kill me I will curse your children's children.

-How long have you been a leper?

The book ends with a short section of dialogs. They also are slightly unsettling. An example:

-I have seen your yellow dog by the river.

-My dog is spotted and is scared of water.

-That spotted dog maimed my child.

-Your child is stupid and should not have provoked it.

A recent issue of Harpers turned me on to a book titled Sebastian's Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca. I happened to find an advance copy. While Surrealist writings don't usually do it for me, Lorca's lecture "Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion" alone is worth the cost of admission.