Epilogue

It is too bold for any scribbler to keep his scratch papers public to the world, nevertheless, all these small scraps of me on this blog look and read as amusing to me as they are embarrassing. Looking at the course of my transformation from an experimentalist stripped of his beloved native tools of communication which he had precariously improved over the years, is stunning to myself. The challenge of driving this newly built verbal vessel is inviting me for the new. Time to set sails for new shores.

Note

I am tangled up with routine, soon will find more time.

untitled

She was arrested and charged with resistance and battery around Hoover tower. They didn't let him in.

She switched from math to poetry. "May be it is better for you to pick up a job that leaves you a couple of minutes a day. A well paying job? That's how they get you."
They didn't get her. Just marked her with numbers. Took off her clothes and numbered her on her thigh.
"What is the point of self centered narcissistic writing?"
He didn't make it to Hoover tower because last Friday she sat and didn't stand up.

Cortazar

I ran into Hopscotch by Cortazar, not all accidentally, a friend of mine who is fluent enough in Spanish was carrying the book around and mentioned that it is an involved sample of Spanish prose.

Well, so I should tell you how I met this obscure surreptitious friend of mine, who ignored my cellular announcement of coming to the city. Later during an intermission, guess what. That's him in the crowd. In his dark green a la revolucion army coat, his tired eyes finds my puzzled face. He is more weathered than I was expecting. Hey where have you been? I know that he goes through hard times, but better than mine.

Cortazar like Borges has his own presentation of labyrinth, but his experiments rather remind of .html files. At the book introduction, he, ignoring the reader's bewilderment, advises two ways to read the book, first you can read it normally to the half and it will be finished, Or you start from some chapter, might be seventy something and at the end of each chapter he will refer you to a new chapter. This is the only novel in hypertext I know of out of the net.

Untitled

Sand and sky.
So you stay in town tonight? Why does anyone want to pick up a moist connection for a life time? what is the sharp connotation of passion in her eyes? Is it true that all of us is a new lost child after twenty five? Did you find everything ok?
No I didn't. You.
I was held responsible for the places and times I don't care about. Poor pair of lively hazel eyes. Aren't you mistaken.
I will collect all my pieces off your hand.
"Ok ok". You are off back to my madness. See everything is pretty here. Even you.

untitled

I destroy and build; keeps me busy for several weeks.

Melbourne

Tomorrow morning will hit the road from Melbourne to Adelaide. It might take 10 hours.
Forgetting is easy. I have forgotten the windy alleys of Lausanne. Also all clocks in my body are lost. Today with Ciamac toured the hipster corners of the town and fished for graphitties.

Blue Daydreamer

Houellebecq was in San Francisco last week and I got to see and talk to him. "Jim" is a professional photographer, whoever he is.

I am late, the room is packed. I drag myself in front of one of those giant abstract pieces of art hanging on the wall and look at the writer's face, who is answering the questions of a nice tommy boy American interviewer. His French accent rushes me in the face. Why women are all dressed up? Men in suit, I feel like being lost in a ball masque.

I am more interested in audience than the writer himself. I spot a "very" genuine listener. A girl in white with a glass of white wine in her hand in the second row who is apparently "very" much amazed by the charming frenchie gestures of the writer. Every time he mumbles a word in French, her eyes become round in a "very" compassionate way. She laughs with him and when he is uttering a word, she lip-syncs him silently. When her excitement mounts, she points to a friend in the same row, a few chairs away and with her index finger shows the writer to her, so as she hasn't seen him in the room before.

I want to talk to him, he wears a pair of too formal shoes for his loose jacket and baggy trousers. The remarkable point in his gesture is the angry, sad and smart glow of his eyes. I pull myself to the front and start the conversation.

-I finished reading one of your works last night and I want to tell you something.
-What do you want to tell me?
-Well, I hate you, because you hate everyone.
Pauses and looks at me, blue anger.
-Not everybody thinks like you do.
-They are afraid of you, that's why they want to see you with that hunger. All these women here fall for your orgy scenes made up by words. They want to see you as the one who says something they don't dare to say and do.
He is thinking,
-I found the hatred in your last book really cheap.
-I don't see why you are calling it hatred?
-Are the books autobiographical?
-No, not at all.
-But the descriptions are very good, how do you know those places in Thailand?
-Well, you have to be there to see it. That's enough.
I can imagine him as an outsider, watching the German and Americans having fun in tropics. A sense of mercy rises in me. I have done my part. Cameras are flashing and fans are asking for autograph, I left.

-Brant, look, This guy is like a little kid who gets pissed off and breaks all the windows in the house. I say.
-Come on man, It is fun to do so, isn't it? Not only I don't deny the Schopenhauer's influence on him, I am a Schopenhauer fan myself.
-Sadness in the movies and books is not bothering me anymore, I should say I have a more natural reflex to the violence which makes me sick. Really sick.

Adam tells me that there was supposed to be some protesters outside, told me UC Berkeley students had a plan.
-Don't worry Adam, I told him what you guys wanted to say. I said.
-Ah good, so you are the "protester"..
-Yeah you can say that.

I and Jim went to hunt down the translator, a small woman in her thirties who was the host. Jim is starting the conversation now it is her turn:
-Are you the translator?
We never can't hold ourselves in front of an open bar. We are loaded by almost a bottle of chardonnay,
-you know the previous translations were awful.. I think yours would be an exception".
-I hope so, she says,

Adam is showing me to a girl wearing a "central square" T-shirt.
-He is the protester, He told him that he sucks" ,
Jim pulls out another cigarette and asks for light, I don't have light, I see the writer dragging on his.
-Do you have a lighter, s'il vous plait? Writer pulls out the lighter and professionally lights Jim's fire.
I look at him again, isn't it amazing? His boldness which makes him a figure, why? Is it the decadence and tired hate and anger or is the left over of suffering in his eyes? What makes him a figure? His daydreams on paper? He probably enjoys other people's being cruel to him.
Jim met the translator's sister, a Yale hipster, and got her number. We are done and headed out through the mezzanine. Let's breath on "Mission" again. I drove back sober.

Excerpts from a pretentious kid’s journal: Writers

06/03

Jorge Luis Borges

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.
— Jorge Luis Borges

His complex mind constructs dreadful labyrinths and myths, I have always thought of his blindness at the end of life as an essential help to this great imagination, I remember a short strange story about a young villager whose memory suddenly changed to a keen record, he could’nt sleep, he was always remembering the things in the past and was floating in numerous worlds, he could always tell the exact time, he had devised a new system for enumeration, he had named every number after a thing, for example ‘one’ was ‘chair’, ‘two’ was ‘ cup’ and … , the writer had a short conversation with the boy…

I remember another interesting tale about a Roman Soldier who drank the immortalizing water in the middle of the desert and was suffering a lengthy life through the mankind’s history. At the end he found a way to kill himself.

Italo Calvino

He can make complicated and allegorical labyrinths out of simple, pure and everyday ‘s usual objects all around us. His masterpiece ‘invisible cities’ is a mixture of bright mathematical thought, endless imagination and a great sorrow for lost scenes in the dust of centuries, Marco Polo describes to the Mongol emperor:

…

“From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you,” the Khan had said, “in your journeys you will see if they exist.”
But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.
“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.”
I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exists. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”

…

Is he describing land of the free?

”Cities & Desire 5

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city’s streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.
New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.
The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.”

His list of works includes some other remarkable novels like : If on a winter’s night a traveler , marcovaldo, The Baron in the Trees and more.

It looks elegant at the beginning of ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ . Starts this way:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice–they won’t hear you otherwise–“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky

words from his ”A Cloud in Trousers”

…

It happened.
In Odessa it happened.

“I’ll come at four,” Maria promised.

Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
…

Octavio Paz

Brotherhood

“I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.”

Operation Ira[n]i Freedom

The unilateral, so-called pre-emptive invasion of Iraq has opened a new door to the U.S. foreign policy. No good news for the other two members of the axis of evil.
Ever since Western values started to surface in the demographic pool of Middle Eastern societies, elite sects of traditionally religious communities started copying the Western model of gevernance, and secular pro-Western oligarchies, governed the illiterate masses that were still in the grotesque misery of feudality, from Egypt to Pakistan. The world of Islam, without experiencing the aggressive attacks of secular illumination and the defeat of religion as it happened in the Christian world during the Renaissance, faced new changes; continueing to the present. When this new wave reached the depth, the radical Islamic backlash roared across the region. But this is just one of the reasons Iran is an Islamic Republic.
Today, the Islamic Republic is in a delicate situation confronting the U.S. and allies over Iran’s nuclear plans, which were initially supported by the U.S. during the seventies when the country was a promising stronghold against the Red camp in the North. The U.S., not hiding the hassle, wants to see Iran’s case in the Security Council as soon as possible. Many years of sanctions against the un-favorite have not been that effective, since the European friends need Iran’s oil money even if the U.S. doesn’t. The new allegations against the Islamic Republic, aside from all practical considerations, show the Americans’ determination to pursue a similar policy towards Iran as they adopted with respect to Iraq. The United States’ push to forward the Iranian nukes case to the Security Council, and Bush and Rice’s frequent comments on Iran’s mischievous reactions towards the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), makes it clear that, for many reasons, the nuclear case can be a serious starting point to confront the firsthand trouble maker.
Technical issues of attacking Iran would be the last thing to consider. Iran’s being “much more vast and mountainous than Iraq”, which was especially hinted at after the release of the 9/11 commission report, basically shows the problem of politicians, who measure their difficulties in conquering a nation by counting the mountains and lakes.
The more interesting part is the benefit that the Iranian theocracy will gain in case of any minor offensive against the country’s nuclear facilities. A totalitarian regime like the Islamic Republic exists and feeds on hatred against a big enemy. Any harsh engagement makes it easy for the theocrats in Iran to reinforce their argument of the alleged great Satan and pound the already weary and shattered reformist activists including the students. It gives the conservatives in Iranian power hierarchy, a valuable tool for generating propaganda, something they have been longing for for a while; as it shows itself in the bold statements of the conservative part of the regime after winning the controversial parliamentary elections in February.
Any aggressive stand by the West makes it simpler for conservatives to excite masses using nationalistic and fanatic religious emotions; the realm which their legitimacy is based upon.
Normalization of intellectual trade between the West and Iran would accelerate the pace of change, and undermines the first principle of the theocracy: existence of the “wicked” West; which allows the regime to control the lives of all its subjects and to exploit them in the name of fighting for the good. Improving relations and peaceful negotiations will make the Islamic Republic’s claim much hollower.
Free exchange of constructive and liberal ideas would help to culminate what the Iranian youth are craving for: recognition in the international community. Updating the Iranian political movement is a necessity which comes to reality by exposure to current debates and developments. The reformist movement has suffered much from this lack of acquaintance.
At this stage with the European Union’s continuing talks with Islamic Republic, the US won’t win any milestone by taking crude actions against one of the remaining axes of evil. This probable action will strengthen the radicals in the country, and will awaken the flames of nationalism and vigorous religious atrocity. Even in the case of a united harsh action by the US and the EU, in the long term it would just make things move toward a dead-end, as it did in Iraq.
Angry games have only losers.