Dostoyevsky in space

2012-02-07T06:21:00.002+02:00

maybe it's time to lay Dost to rest, boys, eh? there doesn't seem to be too much life left in the old boy...

2011-08-18T11:26:00.002+03:00

2011-08-18T11:13:00.003+03:00

Remake of Chris Cunningham's "Autechre: Second Bad Vilbel" from slevin on Vimeo.

Coming home (adrenalin/blood2)

2011-08-12T11:39:00.002+03:00

When i was 8 i
stepped
on a brown snake’s head as he
slept
under the hawthorn tree which
stood
on top of the hill, along the fenceline. It was hot as fuck, and he got up and said

‘boy
the fuck you doing?
Don’t you know it’s hot as fuck and a brown snake is trying to get some sleep?
Get outta here, go home Lest i fill yr arse with venom.’

slither slither

So being respectful of my elders and scared for my life i
did,
passing, on the way,
snarls of gorse and that smashed up old wreck of a car
You
remember?
Old woman redback lived in that sucker in the rust we
went down to drive that car through the dust and
gorse when she
stepped out neith the dash and said

‘boys
i dunno what the fuck you think yr doing
Don you know this rust will give you tetanus? besides which
I’m trying to sleep and i
Don like the way you look.’

So being afeared afore the flaking loom upon which she spun our mortal thread and
reminded of our waiting graves by the hourglass on her swollen belly we
got the hell outta that car and
fled,
passing, on the way, that
big green water tower we spent so long piffing stones at gonna
break that sunovabitch open, get some
watergush over the cracked earth, it
loomed over us and
scorned our puny lives our
stones left marks we hoped were wounds but we were
wrong
we were beaten
and took flight
hid in coffee bush, back from the mineshaft which

hadda dead sheep at the bottom. It
Probly just fell in all of its own accord, it
Probly just leaned out a little too far to
see what the hell was at the bottom of that shaft and
stank like putrid meat That was
cross the road from the joint
Looked like texas
Remember?
Not like home, it had
cacti all over, and
quartz glittering
in the dry cracked earthenred all

sparkle sparckle

It’s changed since
you’ll see my friend

Nowadays you’ll find my friend is
parched all around that

long yellow grass in tufts those
long brown snakes in grass those

sickly sheep browsing in gorse and poison blackberry who
chucktemselves down mineshafts while we
fought like fiends against hordes of cacti, we
hacked their flesh to pieces like it made a difference

You remember?
The harder we swung the more we stung We
found brown snake later he
picked the Wrong Fight on the way home

They done him over good

and left him where he lie

right there in the paddock
stinkin like a sheep in a mineshaft and gob all
Smashed in and Full of ants
You remember? We were
heading home that day We
fought long and hard that day It
seemed worth it then,
but not all of us became kind-hearted men
not all of us made it home through the dusk,
yellow light of kitchen ahead
and none of us at all in the end.

Hit the Road

2011-08-06T22:30:00.001+03:00

Hit the Road a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

s

2011-05-30T09:33:00.001+03:00

s a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

green

2011-05-17T17:07:00.001+03:00

green a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

Reflet

2011-04-20T10:29:00.001+03:00

Reflet a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

Sunny afternoon

2011-04-09T14:12:00.001+03:00

sans titre13.jpg a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

Statue

2011-03-07T17:00:00.001+02:00

Statue a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

La face blanche de la statue, à peine nettoyée pour les passants et les touristes aux regards muets a les yeux vides, ouverts et clos au même moment, ça doit faire une drôle d'impression tout de même.

TO

2011-03-07T14:36:00.001+02:00

TO a photo by Msoke on Flickr.

I'm Straight (Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers)

2011-02-18T08:36:00.000+02:00

Endgame (with matches)

2011-02-10T08:12:00.002+02:00

Do not obstruct

the exit please

do not prevent

our passage when

I start this fire

or else what point -

except, of course,

an end?

adrenalin pumps faste rthan blood

2011-01-25T13:30:00.015+02:00

When i was 8 i
stepped
on a brown snake’s head as he slept under the hawthorn tree which
stood on top of the hill along the fenceline.
It was hot as fuck and he stood up and said
‘boy the fuck you doing? Don’t you know it’s hot as fuck
And a brown-skinned snake is trying to get some kip?
Get outta here fore i fill yr arse with venom
that’ll kill ya dead.’
Slither slither
So being respectful of my elders and scared for my life
i did
passing, on the way, that big green water tower
(or hell knows what it’s for
that we spent so long piffing stones at gonna
break that sunovabitch open, get some

watergush over that cracked earth
(do this place a favour
instead of gorse
where there’s a smashed up old wreck of a car
(i didn’t smash it.
i smashed the one in turner’s paddock, but i had
some help
And it wasn’t my idea.
You remember Old man redback lived in that sucker in the rust
Hell knows why. Shit place to live
Bit back from the mineshaft
(the one
Hadda dead sheep at the bottom. It
Probly just fell in all of its own accord
That was across the road from the joint
Looked like texas, remember?
Cactus all over, and dry cracked earthenred
and quartz glittering in the dirt all
sparkle sparckle
it’s changed since you’llee see
Nowadays you’ll find my friend
is parched all around that
long yellow grass in tufts those
long brown snakes in grass those
sick lookin sheep down near the gully hadda helluva job
Browsing on gorse and poison blackberry
(No wonder they chuck Emselves
down mineshafts eh
We found that brown snake two weeks later he picked

the wrong fight
They done him over good and left him where he lie in
The paddock stinkin like the sheep in the mineshaft and gob all

Smashed in and Full of ants.

And back up past redback that big fuck off stand
Of cacti we hacked those fucks like it made a difference and not
Jam eh
You remember?
The harder you shred the more you sting

planting roots

2011-01-19T13:13:00.003+02:00

Dad always told us he put his apricot orchard in – ‘planted my roots’, as he liked to say – as soon as he got back from the war. It took me the better part of thirty years to figure out that it must have really been a few years after that. See, when we were young he used to say it was the best year of his life when he planted his roots and Johnny McDonald took the parliament. But I found out later that McDonald only got in 1950, so either Dad planted his roots before McDonald got in, or he was confused about his timeline.

Probably it wasn’t that important. Probably it was more important that good things happened, and in hindsight they all seemed to happen at once. He always said he wanted an orchard in Ky. It was his favourite story. He used to tell it to everybody who came to our house.

‘Before I went off to fight,’ he’d say, ‘I told everyone in town that when I came back, I’d plant my roots and grow the biggest damned orchard in Ky.’ Of course, he meant Kyabram. When he got back, times were pretty good, and lots of people were starting businesses. Dad missed out on the good land around Kyabram, and he wasn’t about to take bad land, so he went for the best land in the next best joint around – Kyvalley.

‘I thought I meant Kyabram before I left,’ he’d tell visitors. ‘But I found out later on I really meant Kyvalley!’

And then he’d laugh, and our visitors would laugh, and get distracted by the laughter, and look around them, especially at the apricot trees. But I didn’t get distracted. I kept looking at Dad. After the laughter, while everyone was looking around, he’d look bloody sad. Like a bloke who’s been kicked in the guts a few times but doesn’t want anybody to know it. I think that’s why it was his favourite story.

It was a good decision, anyway. Getting the good land in Kyvalley, I mean, and planting his roots in 1950, if that’s when he did plant them. The cannery was already there, but they joined on a can-making factory in 1950, and that’s when things really picked up. After a couple of years we were producing bumper crops of apricots – big, juicy ones, orange around with the red burnish on top and a few brown speckles just to let you know how good they really were – paying ginzos to harvest em and load up the trucks, and off to the factory. Dad would walk around – supervising, I guess – with a big shotgun. He said it was ‘to keep the cockies off me crop’, but it was never loaded.

If I could get a job where I could walk around all day with an unloaded shotgun, I’d probably do that too. Sometimes Dad let Shane carry the gun for him.

‘Just hold it carefully,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t put your finger on the trigger, and whatever you do, don’t drop the bloody thing. Cost a bloody fortune.’

He never let me hold it. I wasn’t old enough, he said – and then, by the time I was old enough, he didn’t carry it around no more. Said he’d grown out of it. Boy, I really wanted to hold that shotgun. Sometimes he’d break open the barrel and look down through the chamber and out the end. I asked him if I could have a shotgun for my birthday once, but he just laughed and said a man had to buy his own damned shotguns in this life. Shane said he’d let me hold it once, when Dad was out of sight. Boy, I really wanted to hold it. Shane let me look real close and told me to have a go, but I wouldn’t. I was too afraid of what Dad might do if he came back and saw me with the gun. Not just to me, but to Shane for giving it to me in the first place.

I was 14 and Shane was 16 and we were both at school when Dad died. He’d been helping Jack Allen with his ute, and they were on a slope in Jack’s backyard. The handbrake gave out, and the ute started to roll. Both Dad and Jack were at the front of the car, and they could hold it with the two of them, but that was all they could do.

Jack told the police – and then later, us – that Dad had told him to race around to the side, open the driver’s door, jump in, and put the footbrakes on, while Dad held the ute. But he couldn’t hold it. Or maybe Jack took too long to get around the side. There was another car down the slope, you see – a beat up old wreck, it was – and they were trying to stop the ute from smashing into it. So it smashed into Dad instead, and still smashed into the old wreck anyway. It’s funny. After all the trouble planting his roots in Ky, Dad bought it from an old ute for the sake of an old bomb.

The orchard was still going ok then. Not as good as the 50s, but still profitable. Shane and I were dead keen to take it over. We made some plans between us about how we could expand the business. People were talking of turning Ky – Kyabram, I mean, not Kyvalley – into a proper town. A recognised town, you know? And we thought we could get in real good if that happened, into politics maybe.

But they wouldn’t let us take over the orchard. Said we were too young. Shane was disgusted, he said he was as old then as Dad was when he went to fight in the war (which wasn’t true), so what made it right that a man could fight in a war at 16 but he couldn’t grow a few apricot trees? They told him it wasn’t just about apricot trees, or who can fight in wars and when. They told him hard times were coming. That there’d be no rain for a real long time, and the land was going into drought, and water would get real expensive to bring in, but without it the crops would die. And they told him it was a complex operation to keep a big orchard running in a bad drought, and that lots of men who’d been running orchards for a long time – longer even than Dad (which wasn’t all that long, in truth) had tried and failed, and that a young fella like him, no matter how strong and keen he was, well, he might have all the beans in the world to get him up early every morning, but it’s wisdom and experience and knowing when to invest and when not to invest which makes a successful orchard man.

In the end, it was mum who persuaded Shane. I think he knew they were right, and things weren’t going to go well with the orchard no matter what he did. But he had a lot of pride and wouldn’t back down to their faces.

I was happy we sold up, but if we hadn’t, and if Shane had’ve pressed ahead after he told everyone to get stuffed, and if he had’ve taken over the orchard, I would’ve supported him in that. We made a plan, and even if it went wrong, I would’ve supported him to see if we could make it come off or not.

It was a few years later that I moved up north. I came up and worked in the orchards, which is sort of funny, because I never meant to. I mean, I wasn’t following orchards or anything. I just heard it was sunny and hot and nice beaches, and nobody hassles you about stuff. Land is pretty cheap but pretty good. There was lots of acreage for crops inland a bit, but I’d had enough of farming by then. I didn’t mind working hard and I wasn’t afraid to start my own business, but I wanted something I could have more control over, you see. I didn’t want to put in years of work just to have a few blokes show up on my verandah down the track and say ‘sorry, we’ve done a study and your farm will fail – you can pack up and sell cheap now, or you can pack up and sell for next to nothing later.’ It’s understandable, I think. I think I wasn’t being unreasonable in that.

A lot of the new arrivals were working in the local orchards then. There were more orchards then than there are now, now most of the orchards have been replaced with – what do they call em? McMansions. Ha! That’s what my kids call them. They look alright to me, and I don’t really see why they should be McMansions. They were built around the same time that McDonalds and all those bloody American shops started showing up, but they were built by Australian builders. Unlike the orchards – they were built a bit by ginzos and mostly by kanakas. It was them I worked with in the orchards, as well as a bunch of other no-hopers from around the country who’d come up for the work. Most of em were working for the bottle, but I never did – I mean, I don’t mind a drink, but I’m not a slave to it – and after a while I managed to get some work helping out with the new suburbs they were building. I mostly helped with the gardens, and got pretty good at it, and pretty good at organising teams of three or four blokes to get into the scrub and clear it out, or else to clean up peoples yards for them.

I guess I can thank the snakes, really. Lots of people don’t know how to deal with snakes, especially the new arrivals. All they know is that snakes like long grass, so you have to keep your yard neat and tidy. But once a couple of snakes show up, they don’t want to go out there to mess with them, so the grass gets longer, and more snakes came, and before they know it they’ve got a backyard which grows all day and slithers all night. All you need is some work boots and a long shovel. One or two of my fellas got bit, but none of them died.

After I’d been here for a few years – maybe ten, I guess, so it was a fair few years – Shane showed up. It was out of the blue, but I wasn’t surprised to see him all the same. He said he’d been working in Melbourne but heard there was lots of money to be made up here, so he caught the next long hauler heading up this way. He looked ok. He was a big bloke and looked like he’d been getting into a few scraps after a few drinks. He hadn’t shaved for a while, and he smelled sour like alcohol, but so did most other blokes. I asked him if he wanted a job working on one of my teams, but he said no, he’d heard the good money was to be made further north, at the mines.

‘You’re bloody crazy,’ I said. ‘The reason they pay such good money at the mines is because every second bloke loses his arm or falls off a truck and breaks his back. They’re not paying you to do nothing, you know.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get paid to do nothing. I’ll make a packet up there for just three months work.’

We were drinking a few tinnies on somebody’s back verandah – the house had just been built and they hadn’t moved in yet. It was stinking hot, the kind of heat that just makes you sweat, no matter how much you drink. The house was right on the edge of the scrubland, and the cicadas were screaming up a ruckus in the trees behind the house, I can tell you. They always did scream up a ruckus on hot days like that, but I seemed to hear it more cos Shane was there and he probably hadn’t heard it before and I thought maybe he would notice it, but he didn’t seem to.

‘Then I might take a bit of a break and head over to Perth,’ he said.

‘You seen mum?’ I asked him. He shook his head and didn’t say anything.

‘I’m going back to Ky soon to see her. You should come.’

‘Oh yeah?’ he replied. ‘When are you going?’

‘In June. Middle of winter and all, I reckon that place she’s in isn’t too warm.’

Shane just looked at me.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked after a while.

‘I don’t know. Cut her bloody firewood for starters. Fix up the joint a bit. You should come.’

‘Think I’m busy in June,’ was all he said.

He cleared out the next day. I tried to persuade him to stay and work here – if not for me, then in one of the orchards. But when I suggested that he just looked at me like I was mad, and said he had a job he was going to up north, and he was scheduled to be there and start working in two days. And off he went.

When I went to see Mum, she said she hadn’t seen Shane for a while, although he dropped in sometimes.

‘He doesn’t stay long,’ she’d say. ‘I don’t think he likes it here. Not his type of place, Ky. He’s a big fella, he likes to be active and working.’

‘Plenty of activity and work in Ky,’ I said, then wondered why I’d said it.

‘No, he couldn’t settle in Ky,’ Mum replied. ‘Not his type of place at all.’

I managed to fix Mum up pretty good after a while, my business up north was going so well. She didn’t want to move out of Ky, which was fine with me, because it was fine with her. But I could make sure she didn’t freeze during winter, at least.

‘Selling that orchard was the best damned thing that ever happened to you boys,’ Mum would sometimes say. ‘Imagine if you had’ve taken it over. Look at what’s happened to everyone who tried to stay on and make a go of it. The land just won’t take it, and the river’s stuffed. I’ve always been very glad we got out when we did.’

‘Yeah,’ I’d reply. ‘Me too, Mum. Lucky, eh?’

And every now and then Shane would drop in on me up north, on his way to a job somewhere. He was always alone. As the years went by, it struck me that he didn’t look too flash, but then one day I realised that I wasn’t looking all that flash myself anymore. It was something else about him. I dunno what it was. It was like he was surly, but not deliberately so. He wasn’t angry or anything, he just wasn’t used to being around people that much, and he didn’t care for them. He seemed to spend a lot of time alone, or else working with other blokes who had big powerful hands like his, and who liked to drink, and drive trucks, and sometimes fight each other and sometimes go off with prostitutes. I sometimes wondered if he was angry at the world, which was really more a way of wondering if he had a right to be angry with the world, which always made me wonder if I’d be angry at the world if I was in his shoes. If it was me who’d had the guts to stand up to a group of men when I was 16 and tell them to get stuffed, I was taking over the orchard, and then not done so. Or me who’d worked at building sites in Melbourne, and gotten into fights and then decided to catch a truck up north because I didn’t have no family or woman around to make me stay. And was I angry because I did stay? Did I stay because I wanted to, or because was I made to? I wonder sometimes if I would have had the courage to pack it in and piss off to the mines – I mean, to do that and live with myself.

Maybe if I’d got to carry the shotgun I could’ve. Maybe the shotgun was all bullshit anyway.

2011-01-18T16:36:00.000+02:00

floodwaters

2010-12-28T12:49:00.000+02:00

Sir Joh's revenge

2010-12-28T12:04:00.002+02:00

This isn’t the first time it’s happened, not by a long way – remember ’56 or ’67? And then there was ’73 and of course ’74, when the floodwaters sank the city centre, and also ’88, and ’92. That’s why it took so long to get a fire brigade around here, there was so much water around all the time that nothing ever got dry enough to catch alight. After ’74 they deepened the riverbed to stop the floods, but it didn’t work. After ’92 they did it again and said we were finally flood-proof – remember the property prices along the riverside went through the roof cos everyone thought they could tear down damp warehouses and replace them with high-rise villas? It was some sort of madness. And now look. For days they’ve been saying the Wivenhoe Dam would burst and the floodwaters would come rushing down. Some were saying all the nutrients upstream would get washed down with the floodwaters and out into the bay, and we’d get a bumper crop of prawns this year. But the waters in the bay have been far too cold for prawns, and the only thing growing like crazy is the plantlife. Mass wisteria. And now the floodwaters are too strong – did you hear about those three idiots from Ipswich who tried to float on their lilos all the way to South Bank? As soon as they hit the current they were out of control, clinging for their lives to flimsy rubber while huge trees torn out of the riverbank by the force of water swept around them. That’s why I don’t like to swim, I don’t like the current. When people get carried away scary things happen. Anyway, it makes me so furious I see red. I don’t know why they don’t just call out the army like they did in ’74, when they sent the trucks in and set up tent cities. They could get those trucks through the floodwaters. I served in Vietnam, that place is full of water, and people getting bitten by mosquitoes and getting malaria. They could get those trucks through anything. There should just be a law that the army can do that when floods happen and other stuff. Sir Joh wouldn’t have stood for it, he would’ve been down there along the rivers with the army. That’s what leadership is about. Instead everyone’s dancing wildly, and panic is spreading, and I can’t see how it will dissipate. Sir Joh would’ve known how to take everything in hand. It’s not right that nowadays everyone tries to paint him black. He looked scary but he was harmless, he even did lots of really good things. But people just use him as an excuse to act crazy. In those days people wouldn’t get on lilos and try to ride them fifty kilometers downstream in a flood. The whole region was strictly controlled by Sir Joh. Besides, it’s not like it’s as bad as it was ’67 or ’74. It’s just a whole lot of people getting themselves worked up.

St Vitus' dance

2010-12-25T05:08:00.002+02:00

‘There were different names for it – the dancing mania, St. Vitus’ dance, St. John’s dance, or the dancing plague; it came to be associated with the saints because many believed it had been sent as a curse from them, and it often ended at one of their shrines. It was most wide spread in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, at a time when plague was killing a lot of people, and times were generally tough. Someone would just start dancing in the streets and others would become infected and join in. They would dance for days, weeks, even months. Sometimes people would drop down dead from heart attacks or exhaustion. Can you believe that? Groups of travelling musicians would travel the countryside playing music to try and cure the attacks, though sometimes they would just make it worse. This is historically documented fact, dad, it absolutely happened, and no one knows exactly why. Some people think it was stress, because life was so stressful, people would just become hysterical and dance until they dropped. Sometimes when a group of dancers would move through a village they would become violent if people from that village didn’t join in. That seems like a pretty big hint. Mass hysteria. Almost like a mob attacking Frankenstein. That’s why I don’t like to go to hockey games. I know it sounds silly, but when people get carried away scary things happen. And it says they would get particularly furious if they saw the color red. I don’t know why. But there’s more. In southern Europe, mostly Italy, something similar would happen if someone was bitten by a tarantula – it was called tarantism. It was also associated with a saint – Paul, and would often recur annually in those who had been bitten around his feast day. It would come back every year around the same time! Often someone didn’t even have to be bitten by a spider, it was enough just to suspect they had been bitten, or had touched a spider, or had touched someone who had been bitten at some point in time by a spider. They would start dancing wildly, apparently so that venom would spread through the body and dissipate. Groups of travelling musicians would also travel the country for the purpose of healing those who had been bitten and who needed to dance. After dancing for a long time, the infected ones would end in a chapel dedicated to saint Paul, screaming and dancing until they were released for another year. The dancers would even dress up and call themselves brides of saint Paul. They would get particularly angry at the sight of the colour black. In 1959 a scientist went to Italy to study the phenomenon and found that the spider that most claiming to suffer from the illness had been bitten by was actually a fairly scary looking venomless and so harmless type of tarantula. He suggested people were just using it as an excuse for acting a little wildly and letting loose in a region normally strictly controlled by the Church. Isn’t that crazy!? It sounds a lot like people just getting themselves really incredibly worked up!’

Montreal via St-Eustache

2010-12-25T05:07:00.000+02:00

Хочется или нет, но пожалуй пора подвести итоги. Три месяца как я перехал жить из Ванкувера в Монреаль, и говорят мне – русские все в Торонто живут, не туда переехал друг! Но я и не особено стремился к русским, да и все равно их нахожу где бы не был.
Первый месяц жил у знакомых русских в пригороде, Санкт-Юсташ. Ну, будем называть его “Монреальский Долгопрудный”. Только вот в этом Долгопрудном живут одни французы, сепаратисты. Иностранцев, похоже, никогда не видели и не очень любят, в том числе и англо-говорящих. На каждом доме – сино-белый флаг. Когда первый раз подъехали подумал с востргом – все болеют за любимую мою ментовскую команду. Но оказалось не за хоккей, а за собственую страну болеют, флагом “fleur-de-lis.” На доме моих друзей – русский флаг. Контраст интересный. Боялся я немножко выходить сам, сидел дома и мы смотрели вместе записи Высотского на Youtube. На следующий день надо было чем-то заняться, познакомиться с городом, и мне подсказали.
-Хочешь, поехай на Метро Сноудон. Это считается английским районом. Может там тебе будет комфортнее.
Я слышал раньше о Сноудоне. Один знакомый француз – которого встретил в Москве очень давно – написал мне что местные называют эту станцию Little Russia. Перед переездом, на интернет я читал в франсуском форуме что район славится тараканами, крысами, и прочими незначительными тварьями. Про русских ни слова.
Лучше, - писал чувак в форуме, - снимай квартиру в другой части города, даже в Санкт-Юсташ.
Но я не боялся тараканище, и решил поехать на Сноудон. Гуляя по улице главной я не видел тараканов или крыс. Я видел широкий московский проспект и также широкий магазин Ла Пэтит Русси. Я видел Грузинский ресторан. И магазин европейских изделий, что обычно озночает у нас – русских изделий. Если магазин италиянский, или эспанский, или еврейский, или так далее, обычно открыто написано на дверях. А если магазин русский – написанно что европейский. Захожу и вижу – все по европейскиому, то есть, русскому. Симпатичная дама за кассой почувствовала зачем пришел и сразу показала где шпроты и Балтика. Я выдохнул и мне захотелось плакать, но хорошими слезами – в своей стране нахожу утешение среди русских.
Вечером сидим за столом, едим шпроты, пивко пьем. Расказывают мне как сюда попали.
-Браток мой, Володь, женился на местную особу, и она хотела здесь жить со своими. У нас в большом городе не было никого кроме Володи, нам надоело жить с арабами, и мы решили переехать тоже. После двух лет они развелись, но мы к тому времени уже купили дом, и начали привыкать. Соседи здесь не беспокоят, не стреляют и не мусорят. Первый год, я пару раз говорил с соседом справа. Спросил он не из мафии ли мы, посмеялся, и перестал выходть из дома. С остальными никогда не говорили. Каждый раз когда мы выходим из дома отворачиваются. Мы здесь теперь десять лет и я даже не знаю как они выглядят, я видел только их спинки. Первый год мы повесили канадийский флаг, но кто-то спер. Повесили еще раз – по новой сперли. Потом решили повесить наш русский – не сперли, побаивались, наверное, или просто плевать было – хоть бы не канадийский.
На следующий день я поехал в город, более серьезно заниматься жилищным вопросом. Первая попавшая квартира понравилась – и место хорошее, и хозяйка русская. Друг мой француз мне объяснил, мол, найдешь хорошую квартиру, сразу соглашайся, поверь мне, это монреальский закон. А не сразу соглашаешься – отдают другому. Ну, город такой.
Так что я согласился сразу. Хозяйка пошла в свою квартиру, документы взять, и я ждал в корридоре. Приоткрыла дверь соседка, подошла ко мне.
-Слышь, - шепчет по-русски, - ты лучше смазывайся пока можешь. Ее брат будет элекроэнергии тайно употреблять за твой счет, и она тебя заставит учить ее детей – ты же англичанин, нет?
-А что, - говорю, - мне по морде можно определить?
-Нет, по сильному аккценту.
Я не знал как реагировать, но что-то мне в ухо говорила – в любом случае, лучше смазыватся, что-то здесь не ладное. И я смылся.
Следующих несколько квартир не подходило. Я более осторожно смотрел всем хозяинам прямо в глаза, пытаясь разобраться в их благоразумие, но ничего не видел там кроме глаз. Потом попалась хорошая квартира опять, и я сразу согласился. Район интеллигентный, недалеко от Сноудона. Хозяйка местная француженка, профессор из местного университета. Детская площадка где местные тинейджеры пили пиво или курили бамбук свой только ночью, когда малыши спят. И главное – очень тихо.
Я попрощался с моими друзьями в Санкт-Юсташ. Соседи выходили и увидев нас отвернулись. Я смотрел на флаги, попрощался мыслено с русским, и готовился морально войти в мир сино-белый. Прощай русский язык, первая моя любовь. Меня жизнь привела к другой. Будем по местному, прощай.
Вечером вышел из своей новой хаты, проходил по району. Не плохой. Гуляя по нему подумал, что-то не слишком чужое ощущение. Смотрю на землю – бычки везде. Давно не видел такого, интересно. Перехожу дорогу, в парке пустые банки пива, интересно. На перекрестке возле метро замечал еще кое-что, раньше пропушеное – большой ресторан под названием Rasputin, и написано под названием – европейская кухня. Боже мой, чтобы это значило? Солнце клонится к вечеру, начинают подъехать черные тачки немецкого производства. Через час, когда солнце уже окончательно село, тихий район превращается в клуб. Люди стоят на улице и курят. Из ресторана несется звуки разных русских поп-шедевр – Ха-ра-шо, все будет харашо, все будет харашо я это зна-а-а-Ю! - или - Небо чистая вода, тучи , тучи на ветру...Пишешь адрес в никуда, безнадега, точка – РУ!... через окно видно как тацуют безнадеги, изо всех сил, в вере что все будет хорошо, и что все это знают. Что же, может так и есть.
Гуляю дальше, ресторан уже не слышен, все тихо. Фонарик сгибается вперед под тяжестью ночи. Поедъезжает машина, ушам своим не верю – пей пиво, ешь мясо! Мужик останавливается и спрашивает по-русски, - слышь, брателло, где здесь ресторан Распутин, а?
-А что, по морде видно что я говорю по-русски, что-ли? – спрашиваю.
-Да нет, просто, ну, на каком языке здесь говорят если не на русском?
-Ну да, правильно. Там, где перекресток, увидешь.

2010-12-24T01:12:00.000+02:00

virtuel flaneur!

2010-12-17T03:56:00.000+02:00

London

2010-12-17T03:40:00.000+02:00

Jean Leloup - La vie est laide (Video haute qualité)

2010-12-10T06:39:00.000+02:00

Paradis Perdu

2010-12-10T06:34:00.000+02:00

Je Joue de la Guitare (Télé)

2010-12-10T06:28:00.000+02:00

important notes

2010-12-10T02:57:00.001+02:00

our records are full
of information which is
accurate and full

Tassez-vous de d'là - Les Colocs (with English subs)

2010-12-03T08:42:00.000+02:00

the next generation

2010-12-03T08:31:00.000+02:00

whence the wetadom?

2010-11-30T11:01:00.002+02:00

There's a paucity
of wetas
round here
these days

and it's starting
to give me
the shits.

Some katydidean
paradise
this turned out
to be:

no wetas, phas
modes, or
crickets.

History of USSR for Children

2010-11-24T04:59:00.003+02:00

LE MONDE EST BEAU

2010-11-15T11:27:00.005+02:00

2010-08-24T06:39:00.001+03:00

Is there anybody out there?

2010-08-21T08:04:00.003+03:00

The Value of the Absurd

2009-12-06T03:24:00.007+02:00

What is it that appeals within Hamilton’s work? Can it be simple juxtaposition of endearingly preposterous characters? Or is there a deeper ideo-exploration which intrigues the reader and draws them in? The following analysis utilises two of Hamilton’s best-known works to identify the narrative structure, tease out authorial tendencies, and speculate on Hamilton’s deeper meanings and ideas.

Before embarking upon a closer reading of these two works, it is useful to identify some of Hamilton’s common themes and techniques.

Much of Hamilton’s discovered works address the everyday commonplaces of post-modern life. His poetry and short-stories are generally set in the early 21st century, frequently in suburban or micro-local setting, usually featuring male characters of Western (most likely American or Canadian) derivation. Hamilton’s characters – especially his narrators – engage in activities which are ostensibly quite unremarkable: shopping at the local supermarket; walking through the snow on the way home from nowhere in particular; a conversation with friends, an observation of one’s living quarters. It is here that Hamilton indulges his creative flare, for the unremarkable in his hands becomes the unlikely, the preposterous, and the absurd.

What is the purpose of this savage yet unremarked twisting of the commonplace into the absurd? One of the immediate consequences is to cast into sharp relief the rehearsed and culturally-implanted responses we repeat in our everyday conduct, without always thinking about how or why we might respond in the fashion we do. Of course, very few of us always stop to think about how and why we might respond in the fashion we do. But Hamilton’s technique encourages us to at least think about our responses sometimes. There is an implication here that most of us parrot responses without consideration; that we are products of our post-modern society more than we are creators of it. And indeed, notions of modernity and traditionalism regularly appear in Hamilton’s work. There is at times a sense that Hamilton yearns to see ancient wisdom rediscovered; to set aside the superficialities of our day-to-day lives and to embrace a deeper, more profound sense of what it means to exist.

And what does it mean to exist? With such regular transformation of the commonplace into the absurd, it is easy to become distracted from this key question. Hamilton’s readers can find themselves so enchanted by the nonchalance of his characters that the ultimate purpose of his work can become obscured. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Hamilton strives to obscure his ultimate purpose. Certainly the narrative structure which Hamilton frequently employs – not just ‘a story within a story’, but rather ‘three stories within a story’ – lends itself to particularisation, as one story with three different aspects fissures into three different stories.

There is no scholarly consensus on why Hamilton employs this tri-narrative technique. Some have suggested that Hamilton prefers to communicate through implication, suggestion, and self-reflection. Presenting three micro-stories within one narrative gives the reader a sense that Hamilton is gently nudging us toward some deeper revelation – a revelation which he will not explicitly reveal, but which he suggests we will discover for ourselves should we care to take sufficient time to reflect. Again, the underlying imperative for the reader is to stop and think.
That Hamilton should guide us in this direction without delivering his revelation suggests that for him ‘thinking’ is not a formal and structured process with a clear purpose and an identifiable start and finish, but rather an organic development, a latent act, the germination of an intellectual seed which can grow into enlightenment, but not necessarily intellectual enlightenment.

The question of being (or not being) ‘intellectually enlightened’ forms one of the key premises of one of Hamilton’s best known short stories, banking trouble. The narrator in banking trouble is concerned to demonstrate his intellectual superiority over a friend who is ‘a smart guy’. This immediately presents the reader with two key questions. The first is: what is it to be ‘smart’? The second is: what is it to be a friend? Many readers would argue that the latter question is of more personal significance than the former, and indeed it proves to be the penultimate question in banking trouble. Hamilton, however, is not interested in permitting the reader to consciously consider these questions. Rather, banking trouble embarks upon the relation of three micro-stories which do not explicitly invite contemplation of much at all, yet each of which quietly speaks to notions of intelligence and friendship.

It is important to note that banking trouble relates three stories to the reader by one character via another. That is, the narrator relates stories of events which happened to a friend of theirs. This poses issues of objectivity, clarity, and truth. Hamilton is asking the reader to accept the accuracy of the narrator’s account, an act which invests a considerable degree of faith in the intelligence and judgment of the narrator. Yet it is a frequent occurrence in Hamilton’s works – and banking trouble is no different – that characters undertake activities of questionable commonsense, react to absurdities with calm but equally absurd responses, and suggest courses of action or volunteer opinions which are palpably ludicrous. Naturally, this detracts from the reader’s sense that the narrator exercises intelligence and good judgment. In this fashion, Hamilton asks the reader to reasonably consider the testimony of somebody who is blatantly unreliable.

In banking trouble, this lack of reliability is only occasionally acknowledged by the narrator. ‘He was sitting around one day, reading a book, probably, and out of the blue the phone rang,’ Hamilton’s narrator relates. This ‘probably’ is one of the few instances in banking trouble where the narrator confesses that he does not command all of the facts of the story being related. More frequently, Hamilton makes the scarcity of intelligence and judgment explicit through the outrageousness of his characters’ nonchalant expositions. For example, banking trouble’s narrator relates his friend’s opinion that the ringing of a telephone was ‘a fluke of nature’ and ‘not foreseeable in the least’. Of course, the ringing of a telephone is in no way a fluke of nature and is entirely foreseeable. This lends the reader to ask: who is being preposterous here? Has the narrator simply injected these comments into the story, or did his friend truly make these comments, and is he really relating them as if they were reasonable responses to the ringing of a telephone?

Hamilton’s authorial stance in banking trouble is consistent in its absurdity: humorous irrationalism and casual disregard for the preposterous abound, while his characters are obscurely eccentric, endearingly self-deprecating, and occasionally (but pointlessly) pedantic. The narrator’s friend’s mother has ‘the fear of animals and viruses’; the friend himself knows ‘nothing of how to care for animals’ because the sphere of his knowledge is ‘limited to politics’; he comes home to find a cat has ‘eaten everything made of material’ and consequently he spends ‘a long night’ stitching up his business suits; his mother loses her wallet and worries how to ‘convince other people she was who she said’; he gives all his money away ‘to a stranger by email’, and subsequently has his account frozen by his bank after being falsely accused of ‘suspicious activities’. This concatenation of unlikelihood is presented to the reader as if it were mere and common happenstance.

The denouement of this tri-fold story is catalysed by what Hamilton describes as being ‘in love with the modern world’. After having had his account frozen, the narrator’s friend testifies:

‘I hadn’t been able to anticipate that, it being completely unforeseeable, like every other variable in my personal life that others can’t see, and so it fairly struck me a blow to my ability to breathe in my chest’.

But it is not the act of freezing the account which so appals the narrator’s friend, it is the bank clerk’s inability to understand or appreciate that the narrator’s friend had given all his money away to a stranger by email out of his love for ‘spaceships and TVs and online banking’. Prima facie, this is the act and explanation of a village idiot. What sort of person gives away all their money to a stranger by email, justifies it through love of online banking, and is subsequently affronted when others cannot comprehend this obscure affectation? Yet it is precisely here that Hamilton suggests caution in condemning the narrator’s friend as a village idiot, that perhaps he has been culturally induced to idolise spaceships and TVs and online banking, and that this inducement, in which the friend is the victim, gives rise to absurd or idiotic behaviours such as giving money away to strangers by email. The narrator’s friend in banking trouble is trying to do ‘the right thing’ as indicated by his cultural expectations, but these cultural expectations misconstrue the values upon which a fulfilling existence is based. In this instance, it seems Hamilton is suggesting that the narrator’s friend might benefit from spending more time thinking about how and why one should ‘love the modern world’ rather than embarking upon ludicrous schemes which are only vaguely related to reality.

This sense of ‘village idiocy’ is compounded by a tendency in Hamilton’s characters to state the obvious or otherwise extrapolate for no clear reason. Above we have seen how the narrator’s friend was ‘struck a blow’ which retarded his ability to breathe ‘in his chest’, a statement which clearly but ludicrously implies that there is another place in his body where he can breathe. Similarly, the narrator’s friend is ‘snoring’ in his bed ‘for the night’ – as if there is another location other than his own bed in his own home where he might otherwise be found sleeping. This is in itself not an absurd proposition, but the point of including the comment in the story is not clear. Likewise, while snoring away, he is inexplicably ‘dreaming of all the slurpees’ his ‘modest wages’ will bring – a comment which implies some severe criticism of the superficiality if not pointlessness of working for a wage. Likewise, he describes the bank he visits to clarify his account status as a ‘money bank’, implying that there may be some other type of bank he would visit to clarify his account status. Finally, there is the absurdity of the narrator’s friend’s ultimate explanation: that three largely unconnected episodes conspired to prevent him from voting – despite the fact he made it to the polling booth anyway. The narrator himself, much like the reader presumably, is ‘unconvinced and not impressed’ by the friend’s explanation.

Yet here we come to the crucial point Hamilton is making. Despite the absurdity, despite the excessive or obscure detail, despite the lack of clear continuity in the friend’s explanation for why he did not vote, the narrator does not press him on these inconsistencies, but rather inquires about his friend’s health in the face of such trials:

‘What could I say? A victor ought to be gracious in victory, ideological or otherwise, so I merely shrugged my shoulders and tried to transmit as much sympathy as a narrow heart can to my friend, after all, that is what friends are for, perhaps.’

And so we have Hamilton’s emphatic point: that modernity might be distracting or superficial, that culturally-induced thinking and response patterns might be inadequate, that people might be inconsistent or ludicrous in their explanations, but that the value of friendship has not diminished. In this, Hamilton justifies asking the reader’s indulgence of absurd characters and explanations, for although we might be surrounded by absurdity, it is the relationships we foster which give us an anchor from which we can drift in our search for existential meaning.

This is the kind of deeper philosophical exploration which furnishes Hamilton’s work with an interest which lasts. The weaker of Hamilton’s works are those which lack this compulsion, which ask the reader to indulge absurdity and preposterousness without the reward of lasting reflection. I must to England, you know that is such a work. Although it pursues the same tri-partite story structure as banking trouble, with similarly ludicrous characters enacting similarly absurd scenarios, I must to England, you know that lacks the real creative exploration which compels banking trouble.

I must to England, you know that relates three tales of teachers living in Moscow. Like banking trouble, I must to England, you know that presents its narratives via a narrator who is friends with the teachers rather than via the teachers themselves. Although each of these teachers behaves in a fashion which most readers would describe as unusual if not bizarre, the truly absurd character in this story is in fact neither the narrator nor the teachers, but the boss, who ‘believed anything anyone told him without question’. In this, Hamilton attributes to the boss a characteristic which contradicts his own existential role, for a boss who believes in anything and everything is unlikely to remain a boss for long.

Nonetheless, it is on this basis that a teacher of highly dubious credentials and questionable identity is flown into Moscow and given a class to instruct. Very little instruction takes place, but the absurdity in this instance lies not in the unlikely explanations the teacher provides for his failings, but in the boss’s refusal to confront the reality of his teacher’s refusal to work. Consider his response when told the teacher has been caught naked in class with a female student by one of the administrators: ‘Maybe it just seemed to you they were naked?’ and ‘Maybe they were really studying?’ Similarly when told that the teacher has failed to attend his own class, the boss asks: ‘But what’s his teaching like?’ and ‘Is he a good teacher?’ When for a third time the teacher fails to attend his own class, the boss finally fires him at the behest of the office staff, who threaten to leave otherwise.

What is the purpose of this sustained absurdity? In banking trouble, the narrator acknowledges (some) inconsistencies in his friend’s tale, but chooses to overlook them for the sake of friendship. In I must to England you know that, the narrator never acknowledges the inconsistencies, and never rationalises his choice to overlook them. Rather, the inconsistencies in I must to England, you know that are more akin to banking trouble’s mother who has an inexplicable ‘fear of animals and viruses’ – that is, in the nature of non-sequiturs which serve to distract rather than clarify. ‘The year before I came to Moscow,’ Hamilton writes in the opening sentence, ‘Steve San Francisco had already been there.’ Here, Hamilton is concerned to establish not that Steve San Francisco was in Moscow before the narrator, but that he was there the year before the narrator. Yet a full reading of the story suggests no significance to this literary fact. Similarly, one of the teachers conducts his class ‘with a bottle of beer in one hand’, an affectation which contributes to him becoming ‘wildly popular with students’. Yet the salient absurdity (part of the charm of Hamilton’s work is its occasional requirement to work in oxymorons) in this particular tale is the teacher’s ardent love for the Declaration of Independence. This in itself remains an unrationalised affectation, but it is at least more compelling to the narrative than bringing beer to class.

And it is this lack of compelling absurdity which weakens I must to England, you know that. Whereas banking trouble poses questions of intelligence, friendship, and existential meaning, I must to England, you know that does not pose deeper philosophical questions. The absurdity of I must to England, you know that invites reflection, but Hamilton does not give enough clues to lead the reader to enlightenment. Why are all of the teaching staff ‘hopeful’ the new teacher will ‘justify the boss’s belief in everyone’? Why should they accept the boss’ comprehensive gullibility as just a quirk of their working lives? And given this acceptance, why then do ‘fights’ break out in the teachers room over one teacher’s attempt to ‘force’ his colleagues to kiss the American Declaration of Independence? Why is it reasonable to work for a boss who believes anything and everything, but not with a colleague who demands obeisance to a manuscript? The reasons behind this divergent valuation are far from clear, and the characters much less accessible than banking trouble.

Hamilton’s works require closer reading than first glance might suggest. Cloaked in an absurdist affability, it is easy for the reader to be tempted into considering them as nothing more than curious tales. In stopping to consider these tales more carefully, we are indulging the Hamiltonian imperative to stop and consider other, more existential aspects of our lives a little more carefully too. This is a useful suggestion, but one which can become obscured when there is no philosophical anchor for the reader to grasp.

and i'm outta here....

2009-11-19T05:12:00.003+02:00

im not waiting for a lady

2009-11-18T08:13:00.007+02:00

i keep waiting for my friend
but he doesnt come
he never approaches
he never laughs in the dark
he never

i keep waiting for my friend
in a box i wait
on a train shaped like a box
under the ground in a box
in boxes of boxes
of boxes

i keep waiting for a friend
if he doesnt come soon
i will be finished forever with everything
only he could have stopped
and i will read walter scott
and i will never return from scottland
never

The Narrator's Friend

2009-10-12T06:54:00.003+03:00

Old-fashioned sun don't

Shine on no hyperlocal square. I

prefer the Modern Age where

We do things better ways, in

Spaceships and money banks and

Give no pause for thought of

What it really means to

Be a smart guy or

Be somebody's friend.

Another reworking of something once attempted: Losing the plot

2009-10-03T04:29:00.000+03:00

In university girls didn't take to Sydney immediately so he started using the pages he had written his stories on to roll cigarettes or for toilet paper. It didn't change the way girls acted towards him right away. But I would say that in the end it did. It definitely did.
He wanted to eat every day, but only once a day. Sometimes he didn't eat at all. He was busy smoking his stories. He spent all his money on tobacco and sometimes people bought him lunch. Lunch is the meal you need, he thought, if you plan to eat only once a day, because, obviously, it is strategically located. Though, of course, it's even better if it's a late lunch.
And what else does a person need, thought Sydney, exhaling, besides a late lunch, tobacco, and stories to smoke the tobacco in? Surely he had sounded the depths and found nothing more worthy to focus on?
Perhaps love?
Life is possible without love, he thought, shaking his burning words in defiance, though life is infinitely more complicated without tobacco.
For a while he went without a beard. If you had asked him a month ago about the reason, you would have been asking for trouble and tears. Now he could talk about it with some measure of calmness.
One day as he was walking on campus he attempted to light one of his stories, which he had rolled very poorly (as poorly, he thought, as the stories had been written!), and the flame went running up the paper and onto his beard. When he finally did make it to class that day, with his beard shaved away, the girls all started noticing him. I don't know if it was the absence of the beard, or the bravado of his new beardless attitude: now that the beard had disappeared, nothing seemed to matter. I suppose it was a bit of both.
It was snowing nearly every day, and Sydney found himself beardless. And not only that, but with very promising amorous prospects as well.
The day after he lost his beard a girl looked at him while he was settling into a seat in the back corner of the library.
That night the wind blew so hard outside of his window he thought it was going to break the glass and fill the room with snow. So he slept on the floor in the kitchen in his pants.
The next day when he sat down in his spot with the bad kids at the back of his English class, another girl looked at him and smiled outright.
If you always get food caught in your beard, then it becomes a reflex to wipe it away when someone smiles and points at a spot – you don't even think about it. But if you don’t have a beard?
'I don't have a beard,' he said. 'What could you possibly want?'
She looked away in confusion.
The next day it was the same thing.
So much recurring confusion.
Eventually, however, he grew accustomed to the attention and adapted. He started chatting to people he knew in public and giving shy high fives. He stopped reading more than just the covers of books, and started dancing. It’s not that he especially liked chatting or high fives or dancing or reading covers, but he thought he’d give it a try.
So he danced in clubs and in his kitchen after dark, and left the books in his back pocket for everyone else to see, and for himself to sit on, meaningfully, and sometimes to pass gas upon.
On most days he sat on 'Faust.'
Eventually, however, the dancing lost its gloss. He saw the leprosy of unreality on the face of everyone he met.
And that was just dreadful. He started to lose his marbles.
He wore his scarf at home because it was so cold. And that wasn't the same as the time he wore his jeans to bed just to see what it would be like. He had thought then – I wonder what it would be like to go to bed in my jeans. And so he did it. Though he didn't like it.
He did, however, enjoy the scarf. He enjoyed it thoroughly, though, as they say, it was done for necessity. It was really cold.
His socks all had holes in them, 'though I don't mind in the least. It lends me a Victorian dignity,' he said to himself, looking in the mirror.
It was around this time that he noticed he elbowed people in crowds. And if people were looking in the other direction he would make faces when they coughed. One time he was walking through the fruit section just looking and smelling, and a child cut him off, grazing him with the basket he was tugging behind. So Sydney gave in to a passionate rage and in his rage smacked the child, at which the child went flying into the avocadoes. Someone saw him do it and grabbed him by the jacket and a crowd gathered. So Sydney started to cry and got really mixed up and said it was an accident and that he had just wanted to scare him and he was a common thief and he had seen him here many times stealing fruit and he could no longer bear the thought of fruit being stolen and so he took justice into his own hands. ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it!’ He said, along with a lot of other things which I won't repeat because they might make you uncomfortable. The people became so uncomfortable and embarrassed they let him go and gave him a lot of free food. Which was a godsend actually, because he had very little money and was surviving on mustard and bread. And tobacco, of course. Though the stories had run dry. There was no more coal in the mine.
For a short period following this incident he was too afraid of punishment to act out and went into hibernation. In his cave he gnawed at his wounds in privacy, too ugly to attend on himself, yet unable to change his shape.
One night he broke down and bought a bottle of Gin and drank it straight. Though not before being rude to the cashier at the liquor store, whom he scathed by roughly grabbing the bottle after paying without saying thank you. His roommate kicked him out because he was bigger and teetotal. It was snowing outside and the flakes were coming down big and light.
'Look at the snow,' he said. And threw Sydney out in the cold.
Sydney walked around in the darkness and breathed deeply, it was very beautiful, and he ended up passing out somewhere along the way under a bush.
He seemed to have dropped his cigarettes there so the next day he went back to get them but couldn't find the bush. There were footprints leading up to nowhere, and no bush.
He recalled events from the night, standing looking in windows, the threats of people who noticed him peering inside, walking along in the wet snow making up poems that were very beautiful, reciting them aloud.
It occurred to him that if he could find the spot again not only would he be able to smoke but he would also be able to remember some of the poems and they'd win her over, whoever she was. But he never did. Which was a mystery to him. Where had he gone? And more importantly, where were his cigarettes?
When he went home his roommate threatened to break his rib bones if he ever got in his face about Gandhi again. He said he didn't like it because he could smell the alcohol on Sydney’s breath.
Sydney responded that the whole thing was a mystery to him, but that was why alcohol was in such demand, because it put a little bit of the mystery back into life which modern science had stolen; but he would respect his personal space nonetheless.
He said the thing about science because his roommate was a biology major and Sydney never missed a chance to remind him that science didn't scare him at all. His roommate’s nostrils flared, and Sydney walked slowly but surely towards his room. And he stayed there for quite a long time after moving all of his furniture and belongings in front of the door.
After a couple of days Sydney emerged from his room - recalled to life. There was snow on the ground, it was wet – it's always wet!, he thought, it’s always wet, and when it’s not – but there were no thoughts, only surges of emotion and an urge to act.
So Sydney walked over to the supermarket, having forgotten about the incident a few days before, to take a walk through the fruit section.
But when he got there he was unpleasantly shocked. There was someone really beautiful in the fruit section.
She was just walking around and not even looking at the fruit. What could she possibly need there!? She was just walking around in the fruit section. 'Move on!' He wanted to say. 'Get a move on out of the fruit section,' but he couldn't. And the real reason was the same reason for wanting her to leave in the first place – she was so beautiful. He knew it sounded stupid and not witty at all, but it was the truth, he thought. She was that beautiful.
He wondered to himself - could it be, could she be, waiting for me?
It seemed unlikely. He looked at her for a moment and felt not the least bit squeamish to imagine a big fruity kiss with dire consequences – at the kiss he felt the soul within him being sucked out and away. He shook his head and moved forward.
And then the store manager, who had asked him never to come back, walked by.
And saw him.
And started to walk over to him.
And she sensed that something was wrong and stopped just walking around and looked over at him. 'Move on,' He wanted to say again, 'get going,’ but it was too late. His shame would be witnessed again, no more hidden shame, he thought sadly, only shame on the outside, like an old jacket.
'What are you doing here?' In truth Sydney sympathized with the manager, and took no offence at being chased out. 'Go on, get out of here,’ the manager said, shooing him like a cat, ‘What do you want?'
The girl looked over at him and he walked out into the snow.
From the parking lot he walked to the street where he had been the night he got lost and slept under a bush. He walked up and down the street, back and forth, for maybe an hour or two. Though all the events seemed very random, though they seemed to be just one little insignificant thing after another he thought about them for an hour or two on that street and decided that they were all - can I say it? - very important pieces from a story already written.
From there he went back to the parking lot, with purpose, slightly hurried, it was already dark, and he tried to see in through the window to the fruit section. Was she there? Not as far as he could see. As it was dark and the snow was coming down he didn't mind. Until he turned around and saw her looking at him with the understanding of purpose.
'What are you doing in the parking lot?' he asked.
'What are you doing in the parking lot?' She asked back.
'That's a fair question but I happen to have an easy answer – they won't let me in so I have to stand out here.'
'They kicked me out too,' she said, 'so now we share something.'(It was so improbable! But that's what she said!)
And then she looked at him and smiled!
‘What is your name?’ Sydney asked, his expectation rising, ‘You do have a name I assume, right?’
‘Lucie,’ she replied. Sydney’s mind raced for a minute as he tried to understand how this affected his role.
‘Are you sure?’ He asked, though of course he felt silly for it. ‘I thought you looked more like a Helena. I know that’s silly.’ He said shaking his head at his own improbability.
‘And you?’ She asked. ‘What do you call yourself?’
Sydney wasn’t sure for a moment, silly as that is, and felt as if he had ceased to recognize the plot line in his own life, though he did not begin to despair at the moment.

I must to England, you know that (literary non-fiction for S.U.)

2009-09-29T00:11:00.004+03:00

The year before I came to Moscow, Steve San Francisco had already been there. The memory was still fresh, and the wound.
If his own testimony was to be believed, he was a good teacher, though tough economic times had left him without the means to pay for his own passage to Russia. Our boss was a trusting type. He told crazy stories about his time in Vietnam, in a Saudi prison camp as an American special agent, of the Yom Kippur War, and no one believed him. As a sort of revenge, perhaps, he believed anything anyone told him without question. So when Steve asked for airplane money up-front on the promise of good teaching our boss agreed immediately.
Steve arrived in Moscow on a bitterly cold day. He had no baggage and looked as if he had just been ransomed from a pirate ship. Even so, all were hopeful he would justify the boss’s belief in everyone.
On the first day of class the administrator waited in the hallway. The paint patiently gripped the walls of the ageing school, peeling, but not without regret and a will to resist. Time passed. The class was finished, at first only just, and then eventually - a long time ago. No one came out of the classroom. Had they slipped out of the windows? Had they fallen asleep in the face of the nature of the English tense system? The administrator moved towards the door and opened it. To be sure, studies were taking place, but of a more anatomical nature. Somehow during the course of the lesson the teacher and young female had managed to lose their clothing and were now studying the nature of a passionate kiss. The administrator chased the two out into the street and phoned the central school.
‘Maybe it just seemed to you they were naked?’ the boss asked. ‘Maybe they were really studying?’
Hope was not abandoned. On the next day Steve failed to show up at all. When they called his flat he answered the phone, surprisingly.
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘I was on my way to class. I made it to the bus stop, but no further. For there at the bus stop I was presented with a moral dilemma. There I was presented with two Croatian refugees, homeless and without documents and on the run from the mafia. They turned to me for help and my first thoughts were of my duties to the school. I explained to them my dilemma, and in the face of my dilemma, their dilemma seemed greater and more dire. So I had no choice but to bring the two young ladies home and offer them asylum in my apartment.’
In the background there was dance music and the sound of happy young female voices.
‘Yes,’ Steve concurred, ‘they are joyful at finding salvation.’
And he hung up.
‘But what’s his teaching like?’ The boss asked. ‘Is he a good teacher?’
‘It would appear he is a fine teacher, but he doesn’t show up for class.’
It was decided that he would be given a last chance.
And he didn’t show up.
So another plane ticket was purchased and he was taken to the airport. From the airport he phoned the boss.
‘I hear there’s an opening in Ekaterinburg? If so I would like to be considered for the position.’
The boss’s countenance was one more of sorrow than anger – he was inclined to accept, but the office staff let him know that should he do so, it would not be without consequences – that he could sit there and run the school all by himself.
So Steve returned whence he had come.
The next year I arrived along with another San Francisco. He was academically more reliable, though not without his own particular character traits. The first was a propensity to be completely drunk all the time, though his teaching suffered not at all for this fact. The second was his great love for the American Declaration of Independence. Neither did this affect his classroom performance. He managed to teach with a bottle of beer in one hand and the declaration in another, and became wildly popular with students. He became less popular with teachers from Britain and other commonwealth countries because whenever he would see one of them, he would try and force them to kiss the Declaration. As a result of his enormous size he would sometimes succeed. And fights would break out in the teacher’s room. I became friends with him. But only on the agreement he would not try to force me to kiss the most beautiful document in the history of the world.
On my second day he took me to Red Square and attracted the attention of the already watchful local police. They refused to kiss the document. But not without demanding us to follow them on foot to the nearest station. And then asking us to wait outside. My friend was calm. He was more than that, he was so relaxed he threatened to slide right out of his clothes.
‘A little bit of money and we’ll be on our way, they just want a bribe.’
I suppose I should have guessed from the fact that they asked us to wait outside. The police officer returned with a friend who spoke a few words of wonderful if antiquated Shakespearean English, standard soviet textbook fare.
‘Mark me,’ he said.
‘I will.’ I was mortified. It was like talking to Hamlet’s ghost. He proceeded to tell me how I would be doomed for a time to walk the earth on Russian soil and not be allowed to depart till the foul crime of my corrupt documents were purged from my soul. I believed him. My father new all the city cops and mounties from his work and I trusted them all. Meanwhile Hamlet continued to describe the prison cell that Russia is and how his good will could aid, but only for a price. I had no money. My friend opened his wallet and pulled out an enormous blue 1000 ruble bill.
I was most grateful for the officer’s indulgence, and I bowed obsequiously in thanks, ‘Most humbly do I take my leave my lord.’
As we walked away my friend turned and said in more modern parley – ‘Looks like we bailed your country out again.’
I never bothered addressing the swirling tornado of emotions I felt inside me. Life goes on. A week later I returned to Red Square, this time with a representative of the Commonwealth, and the same police officer demanded duty. I quoth the few lines that sprang immediately into my beanbag, ‘it beckons you to go away with it as if it some impartment did desire to you alone.’ But it would appear he didn’t recognize me and when I refused to go with him he gave me my passport back and told me he would take his leave of me. I approved of his offer, ‘Thou cannot take from me anything I will more willingly part withal.’
Eventually our big pal from San Francisco got himself a girl and forgot about the American Declaration of Independence. I guess he found something more beautiful.
The whole time I was there a subject of the Queen, a certain Londoner, was despairing quietly, unbeknownst to all. In his youth he had been a big fan of rock and roll, meaning he had done a lot of drugs. And at one moment they all came back and ganged up on his brain. The academic meeting began much like every other academic meeting before. And then right in the middle of his thoughts on language acquisition in relation to a certain problem class in one of the outlying schools, he started to talk about Hitler, and what the world would have been saved if Hitler had been killed as a child.
‘And not only Hitler,’ he said, earnestly, ‘look at Stalin, sheesh.’ Then he excused himself, and left for his 4 o’clock children’s class. Everyone shook their heads and carried on with the meeting. The next day the school principle was having lunch with the fellow, and asked him to elaborate on what he was saying yesterday. He elaborated. In detail.
It would appear that he had visited Israel for the preceding summer holiday, and had met there with an archangel who had told him of the birth of some children who would be doing nothing good for humanity by remaining alive. ‘On the contrary they would be doing bad,’ he said. And perhaps it would be better if they didn’t and if someone did something about it.
‘But did he say he was going to do something about it himself?’ The boss asked. ‘Has it affected his classroom performance?’
It was decided that madness must not unwatched go, and his children’s classes were quietly taken away from him. At that time his Russian wife left him, and he was moved to a company flat with another teacher. That teacher came home one evening and found him lying on the floor saying things about fishmongers and maggots in a dead dog and kissing carrion. It was decided to put him on a plane to the United Kingdom. He was escorted off the plane by four police officers though, and handed over to the care of the British Consulate. What became of him after that is unclear.

another try, after some time away, at banking trouble

2009-09-29T00:09:00.000+03:00

It’s so rare I get to show up a smart guy who’s my friend too, that I jumped at the opportunity from heaven when buddy said he didn’t get out and vote in the election last week.
‘So what’s all this about being so smart then?’ I said to his face.
‘Yeah, damn it,’ he said, ‘I was really aching to get out and get my word in, but geez if the last couple of days haven’t been hazardous enough.’
So I asked him to tell me the deal.
The whole affair hinged on a couple of complete unforeseeables that, added up, fell down into place like sheer stupid luck, unconnected, but by the power of mathematics, wearisome.
‘Happy New Year!’ he said, ‘this is my story.’
First he was sitting around one day, reading a book, probably, and out of the blue the phone rang.
‘Just a fluke of nature,’ he said, ‘and not foreseeable in the least. My mother’s only friend went down with a case of coming undone at the seams and they took her away to the hospital. Poor lady has a twelve year old daughter, and though my ma offered and asked to take care of the girl, the services came and took her away. But she also has a cat and nowhere to put it into, so I took it on, as mother has the fear of animals and viruses. So I got the cat, and you know, the thing is just adorable, but I must admit I know nothing of how to care for animals, the sphere of my knowledges being limited to politics, and I felt obliged to keep it entertained like any old guest. So after they brought it by, I was spending my time rolling around with it on the floor; I went to the store and bought a ball of yarn, and I’ve been rolling around throwing the ball of yarn at it, and basically we’ve been having a grand old time. Despite the wounds on my face and arms, we have bonded famously and I call him little cat face, and it’s great. Eventually I had to go to work and do my thing there though, and poor cat face, as any guest could be expected to, got bored. So when I got home I found he had eaten everything made of material, and scratched the walls up to boot, and I had a long night stitching up my business suits and making the place liveable again.’
‘That’s all interesting and good,’ I said, impatient to be right after all, ‘but I don’t see how it kept you away from the polling booths.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘seeing as your culture is one inclined to impatience and punch lines I can forgive you, but if you just let me go, I’ll lead you on to the end.’
‘Ok,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘A couple of days later another thing happened that was just a complete fluke too, and not an everyday occurrence. While I was snoring in my bed for the night, dreaming of all the slurpees my modest wages bring me after the loan payments have gone through, I found myself awoken by the telephone with another urgent bad call from my mother. This time a robber had cracked in and broken the window by her backdoor, and made haste with her purse. She had no documents and didn’t know how she would recover her peace of mind, or convince other people she was who she said. I managed to calm her down enough to make out her words and promised to stop by and help her talk to the police. I did just that, and said “thank you” to the officer, and was about to leave when my mother asked me to give her the cat for company and to feel protected.
‘“The usual collocation is guard dog, mother,” I said, ‘but if it will help with the tears, I guess you can have him.”
‘So shattered as I was at losing my new companion who understood me so well, I took the cat over to my mother’s and said farewell.
‘I have to admit I was feeling a little down, but I still had all my destroyed furniture to look at and remember him by, and there’s no use getting down every day.
‘Then the coup de grace struck me right off. You know I’m really in love with the modern world, I’m not a student any more, and I see no point in protesting against the new technologies; I love spaceships and TVs and online banking, but I couldn’t get into my account to pay my rent check yet again, by accident. So I ran in to the bank and asked them what the problem was and they told me they had sealed my account on account of my suspicious activities.
‘“And what’s so suspicious about loving the modern world?!” I said.
‘“Well,” they said, “it’s the way you gave all your money to a stranger by email.”
‘I hadn’t been able to anticipate that, it being completely unforeseeable, like every other variable in my personal life that others can’t see, and so it fairly struck me a blow to my ability to breathe in my chest.
‘When I recovered enough to stand up straight and look at the bank clerk in her pretty batting eyelashes, I had lost my ability to perform. False accusations do that to me. The words lose their meaning and dance naked without form before my vocal chords.
‘I left the money bank and walked down the street towards a place I might call home. I wouldn’t want to bore you with everyday details that are not political and vital in their strength, but without the means to pay my rent, the polling booth slipped my brain.’
I must admit I was unconvinced and not impressed.
‘And has it occurred to you that a tolling booth is a good place to call home, so to speak, ideologically? That one might rest their political head there and become so refreshed they wake for three or four years?’
‘Truly – yes, it had occurred and come to me that I could hide in the back for the night, while the old-fashioned counted their votes. But when I tried to put my plan into action I was suspected of irregularities and chased into the street with a broom and severe words. Once again, put upon and beset by accusations, I found the dance of the naked words leaving me without defence. At the risk of being melodramatic, it became quite clear to me that I was doomed to walk the earth, a prisoner of unrequited love for the modern era.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that would be quite melodramatic, and as you see, we are neither wandering, nor be pining away from love and surrounded by roses, though to be sure, melancholy abounds. What are you doing about your plight and situation?’
‘I’ve moved in with mommy again and I spend my free time playing with cat face, though the small period of our absence has grown it fonder of my mother. I bear no grudges. I have my job, as little satisfying as it may be, and I have my health, for which I am visiting the doctor tomorrow. A little cough like the one that shakes to my very core surely mustn’t be of great concern. And in the end the bank returned the money, a slight portion too behind the schedule for saving my shaky relationship with the landlord, but at the end of the day honourable.’
What could I say? A victor ought to be gracious in victory, ideological or otherwise, so I merely shrugged my shoulders and tried to transmit as much sympathy as a narrow heart can to my friend, after all, that is what friends are for, perhaps.

2009-09-12T04:04:00.002+03:00

нервные люди и москва

2009-09-12T04:02:00.001+03:00

Где только не жил я в москве.
Везде, кажется, и от этого заразился этой болезненой любовью к Москве.
На Южной были страшные, отчаянные тараканы, готовые на очень храбрые поступки. Я их встречал по всей квартире и не только на кухне, где вроде и должны быть, и они меня как бы дразнили. Когда я на них набрасывался им как будто по фигу было, они не пытались даже спастись. Странные были и немного страшные. Еще были там собаки бездомные, но они более или менее нормально себя вели, лаяли, будь здоров, и на меня нападали.
На Перовско-Разумовской тараканов было множество, но менее смелые. Там главная проблема была соседка сверху. Поздно ночью включала музыку и начинала прыгать верх и вниз. Один раз я не выдержал, поднялся и позвонил в дверь. Открыла дверь старая бабушка, вся потевшая. Я сконфузился, извинился и ушел не жалуясь.
На Преобпраженской площади было очень вкусно из-за близости рынка, но и смертельно страшно из-за того что не было фонарей, и соседи ненавидели иностранцев. Каждую ночь чья-то сигналиазция во дворе сработывала и когда видел я кого из соседок утром – там были одни дамы средных лет – то и дело непременно мне говорила, - ну, гад, опять твоя американская сигнализация.
Я пытался им обяснить что у меня нет машины но они не хотели слушать. Вообще-то очень сложные были отношеные там, фиг помешь.
В то время я работал в Химках и приходил поздно. Нужно было пройти по темной аллее и в подъезде свет тоже никогда не работал. А дом был большой, всегда с кем-то столкнешься в темноте. В нашем корридоре 4 квартиры заселены дамами. Одна обшая дверь в наш корридор на замок. Замок плохо работал, надо было поменять. Я всем говорил, но никто не хотел платить. Ты, - говорят, - плати. Это для тебя баксы родная валюта.
Наконец надоело их слушать. Я – говорю – заплачу, только вы не путайте меня с богачом, а то я сам размечтусь и забуду что простой трудяший.
Я купил замок и оставил у управдома. Меняйте, - говорю – на здоровья.
Когда я пришел вечером замок уже поменяли, но ключа мне не оставили, и меня не хотели пустить.
Не знаем – говорят – кто ты таков, и как дела делают у вас там на чужбине, но здесь хальявшиков не любят. Ты иди купи себе ключ и себя пусти.
Честно говоря, мне это показалось немножко неадекватным. Но говорили же мне не раз – ты, - говорят – истерик и шпион. - Так что может я не прав был растроиваться. Я сделал себе ключ. На следующий день услышал как соседки разговаривают между собой, дескать, замок классный, пойдет, молоток.
После этого на время все шло нормально, американская сигнализация вроде затихла, девки как будто про меня забыли. Со мною начали даже здороваться в корридоре, типа – здраствуй шпиончик. То есть все было на мази и я немного начал раслабиться. Но увы, раслабиться в жизни нельзя, я бы сказал даже что это всегда роковая ощибка. Когда что происходит, то этот что всегда кажется более обидным.
Вот значится так – просыпаюсь утром после хорошего, долгого сна и думаю – как хорошо теперь стало здесь: сигнализация меня разбудила всего два раза ночью и соседки ко мне хорошо относятся и называют своим шпиончиком. Кров есть и еда и в кармане пачка сигарет. Все не так уж плохо. И встал я с постели, оделся и на работу. Только вот на работу не попал. Да и вообще из квартиры не мог выйти. Потому что дверь не мог открыть. Потому что кто-то поставил свою мебель перед моей дверью. Приходили и уходили и я не знал что делать, ведь, стеснялся, да просто напросто кричать – не вежливо.
Извините, - говорю – пожалуйста. Помогите и все такое,- но никто не обращал на меня внимания. Наконец почувствовал что так дальше не может продолжаться и когда соседка которая напротив живет – у нее же и была привычка оставлять свои вещи в корридоре и сильно возмущатьсь когда делали замечания по этому поводу – пришла, я ее остановил своим неловким голосом – стоять гражданка, - говорю – то есть, почему это я оказался узником?
Она же сразу поняла к чему идет, то есть к драке, и взорвалась, будь здоров, блин.
Ты – говорит, - агент иносраных, не наших государств! Козел ты, и все такое, и наглый! Как ты смеешь! Приперся сюда и коммандуешь! Я поставлю свои не твои вещи куда мне захочется, и ты не имеешь право что-либо говорит вообще в жизни! Это же общий наш корридор! Ты по нему ходишь и меня запрешаешь поставить свои русские вещи в нем! Лицемер!
Потом она до того разозлилась что начала кричать во весь голос – убивают, - кричит, - помогите! Прибежал народ. Милицию даже вызвали. Я в ужасе был, конечно. Никого я не убиваю. Я пытался обяснить. Но все заикался и чуствовал что на место помру со стыда. Некоторые из жильцов стояли и снимали все на своих мобильных, типа, развлеченые по американский.
Выяснилось что никого не убивают и что у женщины нервы немножко рапущены из-за жизны вообще. Разошлись. Осталось только переехать,что я и сделал. Очень вкусный район, но это не всегда к лучшему.

Pentridge Bad Moon

2009-08-17T13:49:00.004+03:00

2009-05-25T15:47:00.004+03:00

Projection 1
envoyé par msoke. - Regardez plus de courts métrages.

2009-05-22T00:34:00.000+03:00

В языковой школе здесь где я работаю русских не бывает. Бывают кореецы и японцы. Они не очень похожи на русских, и все чино. Бывают и бразильцы. И это утешает. Это очень хорошо. Потому что они похожи на русских. На занятия редко приходят во время. И не извиняются когда опаздывают. То есть, не то, что не извиняются, они и вовсе не замечают что есть назначеное время для начало занятии. Когда мужики приходят, то не в зависимости от того, что делаем, входят и с полным размахом обходят весь кабинет, со всеми здороваясь. Только, вместо того, чтоб руки пожимать, как русские мужики, они обнимаются. Особенно с дамами. И целуются. Дружелюбные такие.
Еще бывает же, иногда не понимают что-то, конечно, постоянно, и они не смущаются, как, допустим, японцы, и не говорят – извините, - или даже, допустим, - сорри. Нет, они более в русском духе отвечают, - чего!? И ищут среди своих соплемеников ответов, типа – че он сказал? Че он вообще хочет, а? – Или даже прямо и говорят мене – че ты хочешь, а? И это нормально. И точно как это было когда то со моими студентами в москве. Главная разница в поцелуйях. Русские студенты менше целуются на занятиях. Но это все. Что касается всего остального – точь-в-точь как русские. Даже чувство юмора. Вот мене бразильские ребята рассказали анекдот.
Собрались из ЦРУ, Израйльского МОССАДа, и Полиции Рио де Жанеро, чтоб разобраться в том, кто быстрее сможет поймат зайца в лесу. Сначала америкозы пошли. Путем спутника поискали, потом изследовали ДНК зайца, побежали в лес и – 15 минут. Потом ребята из МОССАДа. Составили психологический профиль зайца, поискали, нет ли среди родствеников террористов, побежали в лес и – 10 минут. Наконец пришел черед ребят из местной полиции. Не думая ни на секунду побежали в лес и через 2 минуты вернулись с кабаном. У кабана глаза подбитые, кровь течет. Все смотрят – вы что, это не заяц, это кабан. На это отвечает кабан – нет, я заяц, только не оставляйте меня с ними!
Рассказал я этот анекдот своим канадским друзям и они на меня так посмотрели, типа, - ты что, это ужасно, кабана, бедного, избили. Мы и не знали что ты такой не полткоректный.
А когда я рассказал русским парням они хоть посмеялись.
О, вспомнил еще одну разницу. Любимый напиток бразильских мужиков – свежевыжатый клубничный сок. У русских, наверное, это не так. Так что, может, они не такие уж похожие.

On the Trail of the Nargun

2009-04-25T05:09:00.002+03:00

2009-01-13T01:59:00.003+02:00

What then is the virtue of a horse? is it to have a bridle studded with gold and girths to match, and a band of silken threads to fasten the housing, and clothes wrought in divers colours and gold tissue, and head gear studded with jewels, and locks of hair plaited with gold cord? or is it to be swift and strong in its legs, and even in its paces, and to have hoofs suitable to a well bred horse, and courage fitted for long journies and warfare, and to be able to behave with calmness in the battle field, and if a rout takes place to save its rider? Is it not manifest that these are the things which constitute the virtue of the horse, not the others? Again, what should you say was the virtue of asses and mules? is it not the power of carrying burdens with contentment, and accomplishing journies with ease, and having hoofs like rock? Shall we say that their outside trappings contribute anything to their own proper virtue? By no means. And what kind of vine shall we admire? one which abounds in leaves and branches, or one which is laden with fruit? or what kind of virtue do we predicate of an olive? is it to have large boughs, and great luxuriance of leaves, or to exhibit an abundance of its proper fruit dispersed over all parts of the tree? Well, let us act in the same way in the case of human beings also: let us determine what is the virtue of man, and let us regard that alone as an injury, which is destructive to it.

Tropics vs Mechanics

2009-01-07T00:23:00.004+02:00

Gl.

2008-12-12T09:35:00.003+02:00

Terror

2008-12-05T07:17:00.004+02:00

the complete works of one of the best writer in the universe is available online which is great but I would prefer to have this as a normal darn book made of dead trees..

Christmas Snows

by H. P. Lovecraft

As Christmas snows (as yet a poet's trope)
Call back one's bygone days of youth and hope,
Four metrick lines I send--they're quite enough--
Tho' once I fancy'd I could write the stuff!

The complete works here

James Marshall Hendrix

2008-11-24T12:58:00.004+02:00

n

2008-11-16T15:28:00.006+02:00

Malaia Ordynka

2008-11-13T13:04:00.008+02:00

w

2008-11-10T23:05:00.002+02:00

W

2008-11-10T11:48:00.006+02:00

2008-10-25T07:45:00.003+03:00

2008-10-12T09:58:00.006+03:00

2008-09-29T01:15:00.001+03:00

Discover Boris Vian!/www.deezer.com/track/137051">

2008-09-29T01:15:00.000+03:00

Boris Vian

2008-09-28T14:01:00.001+03:00

Découvrez Boris Vian!

2008-09-21T07:53:00.003+03:00

www.takoyakiichero.blogspot.com

2008-08-09T23:52:00.002+03:00

2008-08-07T08:56:00.001+03:00

teachers room scrabble

2008-07-10T12:49:00.003+03:00

2008-07-09T11:35:00.000+03:00

44%

Created by OnePlusYou

2008-07-09T11:29:00.003+03:00

2008-07-08T07:27:00.001+03:00

46%

Created by OnePlusYou

2008-07-08T07:22:00.004+03:00

2008-07-07T16:42:00.001+03:00

50%

Created by OnePlusYou

2nd

2008-07-03T11:18:00.004+03:00

1st

2008-06-24T15:30:00.006+03:00

LISTEN ----->JAW ACTION MIX - JUNE 2008

more north shore

2008-05-07T00:36:00.005+03:00

the north shore

2008-05-07T00:33:00.004+03:00

2008-04-12T15:04:00.007+03:00

Soie

2008-02-28T13:31:00.002+02:00

le bon pain sec avec rien dedans
que meme les oiseau savent que c'est bon
le bon pain sec avec rien dedans
que de saveurs qui disparaissent par le fion

The Case of the Missing Money

2008-02-25T05:52:00.004+02:00

It was time to get up.

Time to ratchet the old eyelids skywards, ease the cheesegrater throat with a Holiday, lever the old bones off the backseat of the Cortina, and figure out who the hell was sitting next to me, exuding menace and gripe.

Sure, it was time to get up, but the old eyelids were in no mood for ratcheting, the old frame spoke powerfully against leverage, and there was no Holiday to be found. I decided to give the whole upgetting a miss.

‘Jago,’ said a voice. ‘Hey Jago. Time to get up.’

And with that, the old cheesegrater decided to get things underway, easing out a cough somewhere between broken glass and sandpaper. I rolled over and squinted up into the morning light.

‘How are ya, Jago?’

It was Sammy the Squib. Or Spiv. One of the two.

‘Nice joint, Jago.’

I levered the old frame up and ever so gently away from Sammy, and cast a bleary look around for the old hat, found her crushed and crumpled were the old noggin had lain. I biffed her back into some sort of respectable shape, planted her on top, glanced at Sammy, and hacked up a half-smoked Holiday from somewhere down the old gullet.

‘Looks like it’s my lucky day, Sammy,’ I said. ‘Got a light?’

Sammy flamed me up and said: ‘Mine too. Nice joint. Set you back much?’

I took a drag and scoped the streetscape. Not much movement out there, but plenty of sunlight. Maybe it wasn’t going to be such a lucky day after all.

‘Whaddya want, Sammy?’

‘My money,’ he said. ‘Fitty bucks, Jago. Been gone some time now, but I want it back.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Fair enough.’

‘By midday, Jago,’ said Sammy.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Fair enough.’

‘Be seeing you, Jago,’ said Sammy. ‘Be seeing you in Summerworld.’

‘Dare say,’ I replied. Sammy got out the Cortina and vanished. I flicked the rest of the Holiday onto the floor of the car, tumbled the old corpse out onto the street, assembled it vertically, fixed the old hat, and regarded the woman bearing down upon me.

‘What the hell are you doing in my car?’ she said.

I glanced back at the Cortina, but it turned out the Cortina was in fact a Subaru. Not my lucky day at all.

* * * * * * *

The first thing to establish was a schedule, so I checked the old time on the mobes. Quarter to twelve. Best, I figured, to hit up Sammy with the cash quick smart. But when I scoped the old wallet to see the reddy situation, I saw only a couple of supermarket dockets, a business card for some local café where a bloke worked who might be able to hook me up with some hot sheila maybe or probably not, and a band-aid. A poor start.

I hit the streets in rapid mode, feet pounding the footpath in that casual lope I like to call ‘clock’s a-tickin, ribs a-kickin’. I can cover 400 metres in about two minutes using c a-t, r a-k, and my best estimates figured the nearest ATM to be the Commonwealth around the corner. I was figuring no worries, but I figured wrong.

First I had to brush past a woman pushing a pram – no mean feat while c a-t, r a-kin. Then some wanker coming the other way on a bike had us both this wayin and that wayin, but I dodged him sweet and left him for a fool. Then some little punk thought he’d try to take me down with the old ‘pretend I’m walking the same way’ ruse: a quick elbow to the back of the head sorted him out. Then I realised I’d been going the wrong way the whole time, and, after a brief confabulation with self to correct the course, I retraced the old steps reversewise, executing a pram hurdle on the return leg.

It was going to be close.

There was nobody at any of the ATMs – sure sign of a trap, but I had no time for that now. I fumbled the old wallet out, scrambled through the plastickery to find the old bank card, and took a moment to check the time.

Five to.

Strife.

I’ve tackled ATMs before and only been beaten once or twice. This one put up a stiff fight: only grudgingly accepted my card, then demanded the access code. I won’t lie – a bead of sweat dripped off the old brow as I worked furiously to crack the code. Finally the combination came to me, I punched it in, and retrieved fifty bucks from the vault.

Now it was on for young and old – particularly old. Some sneaky old biddy had parked her arse right up mine, ready for the quick pounce, but I had half a step on her. A quick start-stop, start-stop got her guessing, and before she could gather herself, I was past and into the Summerworld.

Sammy was sitting near the pool table with a pot and the form guide in front of him. I slid the fifty across.

‘Ta, Jago,’ he said. ‘Good bloke.’

I gave him the old upthumbs and winkjob. Another satisfied customer.

The First Barby of Summer

2008-02-14T11:38:00.003+02:00

I reckon if I walked around the local alleyways long enough, I could find all the bricks I’d ever need. Last summer came early, and so did the first barby: I spent a day walking around the alleyways and lugging bricks home, two at a time. I invited some people over, and when they arrived, I opened a bottle of Stone’s. Old Chet wrenched the hotplate out of the shed and scrubbed it clean with newspaper while I stacked the bricks into a barby. I hadn’t seen Chet for a long time. People say he’s a moody fucker, but I reckon Chet’s alright. He knows enough that he can, at the very least, put on a good show of being interested.

‘So what’s up with that Russia?’ he asked me. ‘How’s that Russia?’

But I’d designated myself firestarter, and I was kinda busy. You gotta pay attention to these things. Chet opened a beer and read out the question under the bottle cap.

‘What date was the Soviet Union formally dissolved?’ he asked, and pointed at me. ‘You shut up. Alright folks, what date was the Soviet Union formally dissolved?’

About half the others sitting around gave this some consideration.

‘1988?’

‘Who fucking cares? We won.’

‘The Soviet Union? Did they dissolve it? Fuck me, what are we still fighting for?’

‘Who’s fighting?’

‘We are. Every second day Johnnie’s on the TV banging on about what a pack of cunts the Russians are.’

‘Naw, that’s muslims, fella.’

‘Meh. Same thing.’

‘Perestroika, mate. Get a perestroika up ya.’

Chet pointed at me again.

‘31 December 1991,’ I said.

‘Well, 1 January 1992, to be precise,’ he replied. ‘It wasn’t until the clock ticked over that it was officially dissolved, right?’

There were some raucous cheers around the backyard. That’s what happens when you slug Stone’s on a hot day: raucous cheers and flushed faces.

‘How long you been studying for, mate?’ somebody said. ‘Ten years with fuck all to show for it.’

‘It’s a complex history,’ I replied. ‘Man can’t be expected to know everything.’

Chet lit a cigarette.

‘That’s some pretty fundamental shit, man,’ he said. ‘That’s a basic fact. Can’t get a job as a secret agent if ya can’t get the basic facts straight.’

I’d done a good job: that barby was generating some fierce heat; that hotplate was radiating shimmering air-snakes.

‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘thing is, it’s a complex history. Well, you fuckers wouldn’t know that, cos you generally know fuck all about anything. Man can’t be expected to know everything, I say. Man’s gotta pick his specialty and go with it. And, you know, the dissolution of the Soviet Union ain’t my specialty. But hell, I know a little bit, so I’ll give it a shot, and I’ll get pretty close. Kinda like being firestarter of the first barby of summer. I don’t really know what I’m doing here, but I’ll give it a fucking shot, and I may not do it exactly right, but it’s a damned sight better than any of your efforts.’

I won’t lie to you. I felt like Clint Eastwood. I felt like the whole town was against me, even the village priest, but I’d take ‘em all on, and I’d win, and I’d have me a meat-burning shindig while I was at it.

Old Chet, he just sat there and took a drag of his cigarette. In hindsight, he was probably figuring ‘defuse,’ but it was a hot summer day, and it’s the Devil’s job putting out spotfires on a hot summer day. And old Chet, I reckon he did what any other Devil woulda done – he couldn’t put the spotfires out, so he stoked himself a big old bushfire instead.

‘Now now,’ he said. ‘No need for that, is there?’

And he took another drag.

Well, I won’t piss you about – I got angry. I got fucking angry. Two bricks at a time I carried ‘em, and a bloke expects more than jibes and ridicule and smug smiles in return. So I stoked that fire – I gave it a thrashing until some of the others looked nervous. That’s the way I like ‘em, folks: nervous and guilt-ridden. That’s when you’ve got ‘em right where you want ‘em. But to be honest, I didn’t care so much about them. They were inconsequential. I stoked that fire, had a slug of Stone’s and a good, hard stare.

‘Chet,’ I said,’ I’m mightily impressed. As always, you’ve wrong-footed me with yer mastery of the basic facts. And I think now, on this fine day (and here I stood up and hailed the honeysuckle with both arms raised), is the perfect opportunity for you to explain how ya do it. What’s the secret behind the mastery of basic facts?’

‘Natural brilliance,’ he replied. ‘And sadly so. Cos I wish I could bestow it upon others. But some have it, and some don’t.’

Well, I wasn’t taking any of that. Nobody in their right mind would take any of that.

‘Enough with the circular logic,’ I said. ‘That’s tiresome. Come on, don’t be shy and don’t bullshit.’

‘Well,’ he said, leaning back in his chair, ‘if you’re not prepared to accept genetics as an explanation, I understand. That’s very moral of you. You’re a moral fella. I’ve always thought that. But the basic fact remains (and here he stood up and hailed the honeysuckle with both arms raised), that whether you like it or not, it is the Truth.’

And he smiled openly before sitting down.

‘Oho!’ I cried. ‘That’s a fine statement: “I can master the basic facts because I know the Truth about the mastery of basic facts.” Truth is, Chet, you’re a chump. A chump and a dilettante. Mastery of the basic facts will win you raucous cheers and flushed faces from these idiots, but who’s stoking this barby? Who got the hotplate incandescent and the air-snakes all shimmery? Who carried the bricks, two at a time? Whose honeysuckle are we hailing, and, more to the point, who did you tell to shut up when you asked your stupid question in the first place?’

Chet wasn’t smiling anymore.

‘Shut up, you fuckhead,’ he said. ‘Just shut up, will ya?’

Everyone else had fallen silent, so Chet and I just sat there and stared at one another, filled with a hatred borne of anger and slugs of Stone’s and the heat of the first barby of summer.

2008-02-03T02:58:00.001+02:00

from dank tunnels and dripping caverns......through jungle and ruin......yonder she lies... our dreams...

From the Confessions of Seth Unmack

2008-01-18T03:57:00.000+02:00

11.8.5
Skylines. I've been photographing skylines lately, mostly spikes and
crosses, or else clusters of buildings which look like they've been
constructed on top of one another, layer after layer over the decades.
It's my way of convincing myself I'm doing something productive.

Funny thing, productivity. The only time I've done more writing than I
am now was when I was in St. Petersburg, where I wrote to keep myself
sane through six weeks of midnight. Somehow my current productivity
doesn't feel enough. Hell, I know it never feels enough. One way or
another, life has a way of throwing up all manner of tempting
distractions in my face. Like skylines. Much easier to wander the
backstreets of Moscow drinking beer and looking for spikes and crosses
than write a fucking thesis.

Let us speak of corners: this place has a dizzying array. I'm coming
to realise just how dangerous corners are: when the streets are
straight, you can see what lies ahead and decide whether you want to
proceed or not; when the streets are all dips and curves, the terrible
desire to know what might lie beyond is irresistable. I've found out
what lies beyond the dips and curves: more dips and curves, spikes and
crosses.

I thought I'd made a large mistake. Why did I decide to stay here for
eleven months, when I could have completed everything I needed to in
six? I like this place and these people. On the weekend, I sat among a
pack of stray dogs in a park, and shared yarns of cruelty and dead
ancestors. Later I drank a margarita, inspected the testicles of
Zhukov's horse, then sat in a bar drinking martinis, smoking
cigarettes, and wondering how to get home, and if I even wanted to.

Distractions. For all the dips and curves, skylines, spikes and
crosses, my mind is consumed by dreams of goats and tomatoes, pixies,
red earth and crocodiles. It's my way of keeping myself sane amid this
crumbling and chaotic wreck of a city.

2008-01-16T11:50:00.001+02:00

----------------linernote-------------------------

----------------fatal error------------------------

8788---8----linerliner--------------------------

---------------exception at OEC111*&*&*&liner note: fatal ent

ent

entry: reboot_________________________.

--------------system resume/sys----------------

--------------system check/sys------------------

--------------system scan/maggot---------------

--------------viralviral*&(66………)----------

--------------viral integer: fatal entry

reboot_____________________________.

--------------system resume/sys----------------

--------------system check/sys------------------

--------------system scan/sys-------------------

--------------system ready/sys------------------

--------------system ready/maggot--------------

--------------command line: exception---------

--------------command line66…….

exc

excep

--------------exception/maggot------------------

--------------command line: cortical jack entry:

deny

command deny

--------------command line: cortical jack exit:

deny

command deny

deny maggot____---------------------------------

--------------syswebfunction/disable------------

disable

you

maggot__------------meatmaggotfuck-----------

---------------syswebfunction is disabled--------

maggot

----------------cortical jack is &*&*fffff____---

--f-meat-maggotmeat-mmmm--------------------

----------------command line: you maggot you--

------------disable you/cortical jack---------------

------------sysweb prog:skullpuncher/execute---

----execute----ex---you execute you maggot----

------------command line: sysreboot/deny--------

------------skullpuncher/charge--------------------

------------command line: sysexit/deny-----------

------------skullpuncher/prime---------------------

------------command line: sysclose/deny---------

------------skullpuncher jack/cortical jack-------

------------connection/skullpuncher/cortical-----

------------connection ready-----------------------

------------command line: sysoverride/deny-----

------------maggotmaggotmeatfuck: cortical-----

------------exeexe ddddd*&*&*&: query on-----

------------command line: deus ex*&*&---------

------------machina/maggot__________66____.

------------skullpuncher jack/rideride-----------l-

------------linernote: cortexmeat-------------------

------------{cortex meat maggot flesh fff}--------

------------deus ex machina: skullpunchmaggot--

-----------command line: override/denyyyy------

-----------yyyyyye/maggot&*&*&*--------------

-----------hahahahahahahahahaha/maggot--------

-----------cortical jack lock/cortexmeat punch---

-----------/skullpunch-----------------------------

-----------/flatl*&*&_____________________.

An Incident at Hamilton's Crossing

2008-01-12T05:53:00.001+02:00

A friend sent me an obituary of sorts the other day. It was not a formal obituary, but rather an article from a local rag about the death of a central Victorian man, Charlie Lowerson. He hadn’t done anything to deserve an obituary, he just appeared to have been the victim of circumstance. The article mentioned that Charlie had come to local attention some 30 years earlier, when he was camping with his kids at a outflow from the Cairn Curran reservoir, and one of them went missing and was later found dead. The rest of his kids grew up and moved on, but Charlie stayed in the area and got something of a name as an eccentric, obsessed with the flow. The reason my friend sent me the article is because I briefly ran across Charlie – and the flow – some years ago. Charlie recommended me to spend a night at Hamilton’s Crossing.

Hamilton’s Crossing is on the far side of Baringhup, and marks the beginning of the wide, desolate plain which stretches from the Dividing Range to the Grampians. We stopped in Baringhup for the night on the way to Adelaide. We planned to stay at the caravan park there, but while waiting for the manager to arrive an old digger sitting at the base of a peppercorn tree called us over and put us onto the Crossing.

‘Nice little flow,’ he said. ‘And free camping. Watch out for the carp. They’ll be watching out for you.’

And he widened his eyes into a parody of eye-popping mirth, barked out a stub-toothed cackle, then leaned back against the gnarled old peppercorn and closed his eyes.

A line of river gums running through yellow paddocks and dust showed the way. A concrete bridge, a clear stream over a bed of brown pebbles, a small clearing of white earth. Another group – a young family – had put up their own encampment. Domesticated adults, shrieking kids and a happy, barking dog splashed around in the water near the main bank. We kept our distance and flung up a tent on the far side of the Crossing. It was white hot in the sun and soporific in the shade, and no sooner had we flung up the tent up than we flung off our clothes and plunged into the shallows. The creek was cool and ran fast, and we waded downstream, past the kids and their dog, in search of deeper water.

Around the bend the riverbed declined and opened out into a sluggish flow. I pushed ahead of the other two and climbed up onto the trunk of a dead rivergum which had fallen into the creek. The blowflies were a nuisance. As I crested the dead tree, my shadow fell across the water, and half-seen clouds of fry swimming just below the surface fled further downstream. Through the gold-flecked murk I could see several brown carp slinking away from the bank, deeper, down through the gloom to the silt floor below. Why should they hurry? Nobody could find them down there.

A few sad, ponderous willows had cast their trailing fronds into the water, and both banks were spotted with bulrush. The creek narrowed again after a dozen metres and meandered off into the paddocks. Another ancient rivergum had fallen lengthways into the water at the narrowing, and the enormous, insectile root-system of the tree loomed up out of the water as if poised to swallow all which flowed into its clutches. I waded closer as the others crested the first gum I had climbed.

‘Whatcha found?’ asked Tracee.

‘Another fallen gum,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t look like we can get through here.’

The others carefully stood up on the first fallen tree. ‘Doesn’t look like we’d want to,’ Jane said. ‘It’s just paddocks and bulrush from here anyway.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, staring at the rivergum’s root system. The hollowed-out bole yawned back at me, inky black to water level, muddy brown below. ‘Let’s go back.’

The tent proved welcome relief from the mosquitoes that night. There was little breeze to speak of, but the flow coming down through the Crossing from the reservoir upstream was bedwater: cold and full of silt. The banks of the creek were cool, but I’m not so used to sleeping near water. I lay awake listening to the splash of carp as they feasted by night. I’d almost given up the prospect of sleep, figuring I could doze in the car the next day as we crossed the plains to Adelaide. But at some point I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew I was blinking weary, sleep-deprived eyes in the morning light, the remnants of a dream slipping away: the purple shimmer of fish scales, the slipperiness of aquatic muscle, a thing ungraspable through slime.

I unzipped the tent and leaned out into the morning. Nobody else was up. The bright morning sun carved wedges of light through the leaves; it wasn’t hot yet, but it was going to be. The day was already suffused with the promise of deadening heat. I crawled out, stood up, stretched painfully, glanced at the car, and stopped.

Between the tent and the car, somebody had carefully constructed a small sculpture out of leaf-litter. Three dead branches had been leaned against one another to form a crude tripod. Upon the apex, somebody had carefully woven a cluster of twigs in a star formation. I stepped closer. Some of the twigs had small globules on the end. I crouched down to inspect. Three fish eyes, impaled retina-first on three twigs, stared back at me. Three more were impaled on the other side. I poked one gingerly; it was sticky to the touch, adhered to my finger, and as I withdrew in disgust, the eyeball remained attached to my skin, dragging the whole sculpture down in a gentle clatter. Several of the fish eyes poked into the ground, covering the membrane with a thin patina of white dust. I grimaced, stood, and glanced back at the tent. The others were showing some signs of life.

‘Jesus,’ I said to myself, then: ‘Check this out, girls.’

But the other two were determined to take their time, so I left them to inspect the collapsed sculpture on their own, and made my way down to the creek. There were no signs of life from the other encampment, but a few magpies warbled in the trees, and a flock of galahs slipped overhead, screeching and screaming their morning joy.

Well before I arrived at the riverbank, I spied the bodies. Or body, anyway, because the other two weren’t dead yet. A carp as big as my forearm lay on the sandy bank, mouth open, eye-sockets empty. Two more twitched in the shallows, unable to swim deeper, unable to swim at all. They gulped at the water as if drowning. Their eyes had also been torn out, just the slippery pink worms of nerve endings trailed out of the socket and down each cheek.

‘Jesus,’ I said again, and, not quite stopping to consider whether I really wanted to or not, I stepped into the water and scooped one of the carp up. It thrashed violently, and several dorsal spines speared into the flesh of my palm. I cried out and flung the thing away, back into the water, where it landed with a loud splash and disappeared. I made a panicked and ungainly dash back to riverbank and climbed up onto dry land, shaking. The carp resurfaced from the gloom, belly up but still twitching.

A human shriek nearby drowned out the fading squawks of the galahs and the morning song of the magpies. I thought it must be Tracee or Jane, having encountered the partially-dismantled fish-eye sculpture outside our tent. But it didn’t come from our camp. Several dozen metres away, a young girl stood transfixed, staring at something out of my view. The girl’s father had evacuated the tent at her scream, and we both arrived at her side at about the same time. Another small sculpture of branches had been constructed in their fire-pit, but this one had only two twigs woven together at the apex. A pair of canine eyes protruded from the end of each twig, staring past the gaping girl at the tent she had slept in.

‘What is this?’ said the man in disbelief. ‘Did you do this?’

I raised my hands.

‘Hell no. We’ve got one over at our site too. Ours look like fish-eyes, but these…’

I trailed off. The man snatched his daughter up into his arms.

‘Judy!’ he yelled. ‘Judy! Where’s Boomer? Boomer! Where are ya boy?’

The girl was crying in her father’s arms. I had a sinking feeling. Tracee and Jane were approaching from the other side of the crossing.

‘What’s with the fucking fish eyes?’ Tracee asked. ‘Some sort of sick joke?’

The man was pacing nervously around the campsite, calling for the dog and clutching the girl in his arms. A woman poked her head out of the tent flap.

‘Paul? What’s going on?’

The man turned.

‘Some bastard’s having a sick joke and I dunno where the dog is. Come help me find him. Ash! Scott! Get up and come help me look for Boomer.’

I retreated slowly back towards the river, Tracee and Jane following a dozen metres behind.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Tracee asked.

‘I’ve got a bad feeling…’ I said. ‘Come and check something out with me.’

I stumbled downstream where we had waded the day before. The willows obstructed the view of the flow from the bank, so I splashed out into the stream and climbed up onto the first dead gum we had crested the day before. An open expanse of calm brown water slunk downstream toward the second rivergum’s web of roots and the open maw of its bole.

‘Chris!’ Tracee exclaimed. ‘What are you doing? Who’s putting fucking fish eyes on sticks?’

I spied it on the riverbank near the water’s edge, under the trailing fronds of the willow.

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘This isn’t good. Look at this. Oh, this isn’t good.’

And I waded through the murky water and passed through the fronds, stopping short of the bank. Tracee and Jane pushed through the fronds from the other side. All three of us stopped several metres away from the trunk, facing each other. The golden water lapped gently at my ankles.

A dog lay whimpering on the ground under the fronds of the willow. I knew before I saw that its eye-sockets were empty, trailing clear slime and the pink tube of nerve-cluster. The dog had crawled out of the river and collapsed on the bank, it’s back legs trailing in the water. It tried to scrabble to its feet on hearing our approach, but succeeded only in catapulting itself forward half a metre before it collapsed again on the water’s edge.

‘Oh my god,’ said Jane. ‘What fuck is that? Who the fuck did that? Who the fuck would do that?’

Tracee approached the dog and knelt down, putting a hand on its back, unwilling to touch its head. The dog started and whined, but no more.

‘Some sick fuck has pulled its eyes out,’ she said.

Jane retreated, he hands to her face.

‘This is fucked,’ she said. ‘This is fucking fucked. Let’s get the fuck out of here now. Let’s get in the car right now, and get out of here.’

I was all for that. I didn’t want to touch the dog, but Tracee wouldn’t leave it – she carried it out through the fronds, back to the campsite, where she deposited the wretched animal on the ground nearby.

‘Hey,’ she called to the man. ‘We found your dog. I wouldn’t bring the kids over.’

The man began to run over, stopped, thrust the girl into the arms of the woman, and continued.

‘Where did you find him?’ the man demanded, furious. ‘What did you do to him?’

‘Down by the riverbank,’ said Tracee. ‘I think somebody’s been having a bad joke. A real bad one.’

The man stared at his dog for a moment before crouching down.

‘We’re getting the hell out of here,’ Tracee said to him. ‘I don’t know what happened here last night or who did this, but we’re getting out of here. Let’s just get out of here.’

The man clearly hadn’t heard us, nor could he hear the woman calling his name, asking if the dog was alright. She was standing near the tent, unwilling to move away, huddling all three kids near her. We retreated to our own campsite as fast as we could without breaking into panic, dismantled the tent without bothering to take the sleeping gear out or to fold it up, stashed it in the boot, got in the car and drove the out of there, over the Crossing, through the early morning sun and back toward Baringhup.

We pulled in at the caravan park. The manager, a man of middle-age, was crossing from the park back to the office.

‘Morning folks,’ he said. ‘Lovely morning.’

We soon changed that assessment. First the manager was blank-faced, then incredulous, then stony, as we told him what had happened at Hamilton’s Crossing.

‘You should’ve just come into the park last night in the first place,’ he finally said. He was very angry. ‘Who told you about the Crossing?’

I told him about the old digger.

‘Fucking Charlie,’ he said and looked down for a moment. He appeared to be thinking. ‘Look, just leave it with me, okay? I’ll get onto the Mount Alexander police, then drive out to the Crossing to have a look. I wouldn’t think anyone local would do anything like that. Not out here. You said the family is still out there?’

‘That’s where we left them,’ I said.

The manager was unimpressed with this answer.

‘Where you from?’

We told him.

‘And where you going?’

‘Adelaide,’ said Tracee.

‘Best route is out west, through Carisbrook,’ he said. ‘That way you skip Maryborough and head on over to Horsham. Flat country, you’ll go all the way through. Best leave your names and numbers in case the police want to speak with you.’

But they never did, and that was the last I heard of Charlie and Hamilton’s Crossing until I read the obituary my friend sent me, an obituary about a crazy old digger in Baringhup, who swore blue that years ago a ‘fish-man’ had taken his boy in the night, a fish-man who hunted along the flow from Cairn Curran, who had mutilated his son and left him for dead in the water, a fish-man in whom nobody believed except Charlie, Charlie who hunted the fish-man using the only bait he knew would work.

CNOVOM GODOM

2008-01-08T20:26:00.000+02:00

Amis de la terre et du vent
le vent, oui, qui porte loin et clair
le chant moldave, joyeux et crémeux de vos lointaine voix,

come closer

i would give you some good wine and rub your heavy back
put down this heavy bag full of dirty socks and duty free cigarettes
and sit down and tell me everything about your trip

"je suis arrivé et on m'a tout de suite demandé de manger beaucoup de fromage. Ensuite j'ai du terraformé quelques surfaces et planter des buissons. Ensuite j'ai du faire beaucoup d'autres choses. Cela induisait differents produits qui décantaient doucement au fond des buanderies et des limited services waiting room and then i spent all my money and come back"

nothing interesting then

"Si j'ai rencontré une femme très belle"

and...

max

2007-12-31T04:28:00.002+02:00

'what ever happened to max?'
'he got lost somewhere down by the tracks'
'he got hungry and swallowed some tacks!'
'no you silly weirdos and hacks,
he did none of these things, as a matter of facts,
no rather he didnt do any at all - he didnt pay all his tax!
and in this country regulations are not at all lax,
so hes sitting in dungeons, learning to relax
with someone named carlos rubbing his back's (itchy places)'
'well thats just ridiculous, hes clearly simply forgotten who you are.'

2007-12-20T02:11:00.003+02:00

HAMILTON, Sir ROBERT GEORGE CROOKSHANK (1836-1895), civil servant and governor, was born on 30 August 1836 at Bressay, Shetland, Scotland, son of Rev. Zachary Macaulay Hamilton and his first wife Anne Irvine, née Crookshank. Educated at the Grammar School and at the University and King's College, Aberdeen (M.A., 1857; LL.D., 1885), he entered the War Office and was sent to the Crimea as a commissariat clerk. He returned in 1857 and worked in the Office of Works, and in 1861 became accountant to the Board of Education, then a rapidly expanding complex. In 1868 he published his Book-keeping, which ran to at least seven editions by 1899. In 1869 Hamilton was appointed to the yet more difficult post of accountant to the Board of Trade, where he reorganized the Board's financial department. In 1872 he became assistant secretary to Playfair's civil service inquiry commission, and in 1874 its secretary. In 1878 as accountant-general of the navy he simplified the naval estimates making them intelligible to the public. In 1879 he served on Carnarvon's commission on colonial defences, and in May 1882 he became permanent secretary to the Admiralty. After the Phoenix Park murders he was lent to the Irish administration and was permanently appointed under-secretary with a C.B. in April 1883. On 12 January 1884 he was made K.C.B. While in Ireland he became convinced of the advisability of Home Rule, and had some share in influencing both Earl Spencer and W. E. Gladstone. These sympathies probably caused his removal from the under-secretaryship in November 1886.

Hamilton was compensated by appointment as governor of Tasmania and took up his duties early in 1887. Unlike other governors he had no constitutional crises to face, though the Van Diemen's Land Bank failed in August 1891 and had to be wound up. The only ministries in his governorship were led by P. O. Fysh from March 1887 to August 1892 and Henry Dobson from August 1892 to 1894; he insisted on calling them prime ministers instead of premiers. He promoted public works, especially railways, and encouraged the investment of British capital in the colony. He also encouraged Federation: he presided over the meeting of the Federal Council of Australia at Hobart in 1887 and opened its second and third sessions in 1888 and 1889. He also opened the sixth Trades Union Congress in Hobart in 1889. The greatest contribution he and his second wife made was to the colony's cultural life. Soon after arrival he organized extensive celebrations for the Queen's jubilee, which included three balls, an address with 22,500 signatures and masses of jubilee cake handed to all and sundry. He was president of the Royal Society of Tasmania and actively supported the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. He helped to found the University of Tasmania and several technical schools, and opened many museums and art galleries. His wife formed a Literary Society at Government House.

In 1893 Hamilton returned to England and the civil service. He was appointed to the royal commission, inquiring into the working of the Constitution of Dominica and in 1894, on Morley's nomination, served on the commission on the financial relations between England and Ireland. In November he became chairman of the Board of Customs. He died at South Kensington on 22 April 1895 and was buried at Richmond, Surrey.

On 18 August 1863 he had married Caroline Jane Ball, daughter of Frederick Augustus Geary, of Putney, Surrey; she died in 1875, leaving three sons and one daughter. On 4 July 1877 he married Teresa Felicia, second daughter of Major Henry Reynolds (d. 19 July 1859) and his wife Ann, née Cox; they had two sons and one daughter.

come here

2007-12-17T08:23:00.004+02:00

Come slither over here to yer uncle gargrisha

And let me finger yer crystalline ribs.

Gargrisha’s got wishes for odors and kisses

And the sweet sweated arse of a kid.

A greasy little curl for a sneaky little girl –

Who’s been wriggling through scrubland and mud?

A sneaky little girl with a grotty little curl -

Dragged home on her gut to our hut.

Gargrisha’s got plans for his own naughty hands:

He’ll make them do nasty hurty things.

Like hoisting and joisting and all the while moisting:

Gargrisha sweats too when he sings.

I’ll sing you a fable while yer strapped to the table

And play you a tune on a tool.

With an armslength of cable, gargrisha’s well able

To croon about punishes and rules.

From the Confessions of st. Augustine

2007-12-12T22:16:00.004+02:00

3.1.1
To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears
a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love,
and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought
what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a
way without snares. For within me was a famine of that inward food,
Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered; but
was without all longing for incorruptible sustenance, not because
filled therewith, but the more empty, the more I loathed it. For this
cause my soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself
forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense. Yet
if these had not a soul, they would not be objects of love. To love
then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained
to enjoy the person I loved, I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship
with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with
the hell of lustfulness; and thus foul and unseemly, I would fain,
through exceeding vanity, be fine and courtly. I fell headlong then
into the love wherein I longed to be ensnared. My God, my Mercy, with
how much gall didst Thou out of Thy great goodness besprinkle for
me that sweetness? For I was both beloved, and secretly arrived at
the bond of enjoying; and was with joy fettered with sorrow-bringing
bonds, that I might be scourged with the iron burning rods of jealousy,
and suspicions, and fears, and angers, and quarrels.

3.2.2
Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries,
and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad,
beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no
means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them,
this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness?
for a man is the more affected with these actions, the less free he
is from such affections. Howsoever, when he suffers in his own person,
it uses to be styled misery: when he compassionates others, then it
is mercy. But what sort of compassion is this for feigned and scenical
passions? for the auditor is not called on to relieve, but only to
grieve: and he applauds the actor of these fictions the more, the
more he grieves. And if the calamities of those persons (whether of
old times, or mere fiction) be so acted, that the spectator is not
moved to tears, he goes away disgusted and criticising; but if he
be moved to passion, he stays intent, and weeps for joy.

3.2.3
Are griefs then too loved? Verily all desire joy. Or whereas
no man likes to be miserable, is he yet pleased to be merciful? which
because it cannot be without passion, for this reason alone are passions
loved? This also springs from that vein of friendship. But whither
goes that vein? whither flows it? wherefore runs it into that torrent
of pitch bubbling forth those monstrous tides of foul lustfulness,
into which it is wilfully changed and transformed, being of its own
will precipitated and corrupted from its heavenly clearness? Shall
compassion then be put away? by no means. Be griefs then sometimes
loved. But beware of uncleanness, O my soul, under the guardianship
of my God, the God of our fathers, who is to be praised and exalted
above all for ever, beware of uncleanness. For I have not now ceased
to pity; but then in the theatres I rejoiced with lovers when they
wickedly enjoyed one another, although this was imaginary only in
the play. And when they lost one another, as if very compassionate,
I sorrowed with them, yet had my delight in both. But now I much more
pity him that rejoiceth in his wickedness, than him who is thought
to suffer hardship, by missing some pernicious pleasure, and the loss
of some miserable felicity. This certainly is the truer mercy, but
in it grief delights not. For though he that grieves for the miserable,
be commended for his office of charity; yet had he, who is genuinely
compassionate, rather there were nothing for him to grieve for. For
if good will be ill willed (which can never be), then may he, who
truly and sincerely commiserates, wish there might be some miserable,
that he might commiserate. Some sorrow may then be allowed, none loved.
For thus dost Thou, O Lord God, who lovest souls far more purely than
we, and hast more incorruptibly pity on them, yet are wounded with
no sorrowfulness. And who is sufficient for these things?

3.2.4
But I, miserable, then loved to grieve, and sought out what to
grieve at, when in another's and that feigned and personated misery,
that acting best pleased me, and attracted me the most vehemently,
which drew tears from me. What marvel that an unhappy sheep, straying
from Thy flock, and impatient of Thy keeping, I became infected with
a foul disease? And hence the love of griefs; not such as should sink
deep into me; for I loved not to suffer, what I loved to look on;
but such as upon hearing their fictions should lightly scratch the
surface; upon which, as on envenomed nails, followed inflamed swelling,
impostumes, and a putrefied sore. My life being such, was it life,
O my God?

3.3.5
And Thy faithful mercy hovered over me afar. Upon how grievous
iniquities consumed I myself, pursuing a sacrilegious curiosity, that
having forsaken Thee, it might bring me to the treacherous abyss,
and the beguiling service of devils, to whom I sacrificed my evil
actions, and in all these things Thou didst scourge me! I dared even,
while Thy solemnities were celebrated within the walls of Thy Church,
to desire, and to compass a business deserving death for its fruits,
for which Thou scourgedst me with grievous punishments, though nothing
to my fault, O Thou my exceeding mercy, my God, my refuge from those
terrible destroyers, among whom I wandered with a stiff neck, withdrawing
further from Thee, loving mine own ways, and not Thine; loving a vagrant
liberty.

3.3.6
Those studies also, which were accounted commendable, had a view
to excelling in the courts of litigation; the more bepraised, the
craftier. Such is men's blindness, glorying even in their blindness.
And now I was chief in the rhetoric school, whereat I joyed proudly,
and I swelled with arrogancy, though (Lord, Thou knowest) far quieter
and altogether removed from the subvertings of those "Subverters"
(for this ill-omened and devilish name was the very badge of gallantry)
among whom I lived, with a shameless shame that I was not even as
they. With them I lived, and was sometimes delighted with their friendship,
whose doings I ever did abhor -i.e., their "subvertings," wherewith
they wantonly persecuted the modesty of strangers, which they disturbed
by a gratuitous jeering, feeding thereon their malicious birth. Nothing
can be liker the very actions of devils than these. What then could
they be more truly called than "Subverters"? themselves subverted
and altogether perverted first, the deceiving spirits secretly deriding
and seducing them, wherein themselves delight to jeer at and deceive
others.

3.4.7
Among such as these, in that unsettled age of mine, learned I
books of eloquence, wherein I desired to be eminent, out of a damnable
and vainglorious end, a joy in human vanity. In the ordinary course
of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost
all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation
to philosophy, and is called "Hortensius." But this book altered my
affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord; and made me have
other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless
to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality
of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee. For
not to sharpen my tongue (which thing I seemed to be purchasing with
my mother's allowances, in that my nineteenth year, my father being
dead two years before), not to sharpen my tongue did I employ that
book; nor did it infuse into me its style, but its matter.

2007-12-01T00:50:00.003+02:00

tergiversation

2007-11-28T05:32:00.002+02:00

Yr
brvty
appls.

2007-11-12T20:55:00.002+02:00

Pronouns/Antecedents/Anaphora

2007-11-05T01:55:00.003+02:00

Pronoun: pro-form that substitutes for a noun/noun phrase with/without determiner. The replaced phrase is the antecedent.

Antecedent: the noun/noun phrase to which an anaphor refers in a coreference; a clause esp. when anaphor is a demonstrative.

Anaphor: instance of an expression referring to another.

*********

in an act of pity your hands
are quietly offered, and are held at arm's
length, because they would be gentle.

Because I am not gentle my voice
is harsh, and my hands likewise. Because
I have nothing for you, and am wrong.

So it is to be wrong. To be at a loss
and unhappy, which is this loss
of one's happiness, in one who had held it.

~ R. Creeley

how about this one then, its slightly revised

2007-10-27T00:05:00.000+03:00

I’ll tell you what, folks get up early – I can’t even believe it. And just trying to keep up with them is about
enough to put your health in a bad mood, and you’d be lucky to ever get over it. I would never have
suspected it before I started dreaming about getting a job, as I spent most of my mornings and early
afternoons pondering over softer things like pillows and blankets. And then one day like the darndest
unexpected guest all of a sudden there it was knocking on my desires – the idea I might be of some use
to the work force. So I cleaned my body up and shaved my face and made good my intention to make a
great impression by setting the alarm for early morning. When that alarm flew off at nine I have to say I
expected to be the first person up by a couple of hours at least, securing me a career in greatness like
the city has rarely seen before. And as I’m sure you have come to understand with equal chagrin and
unhappiness – most businesses are already getting ready to close down for the night by then. So I had to
make a quick decision that would affect my future – I chose to set the alarm for eight. I shaved again,
washed a little less sincerely and when early morning came – it brought a whole lot of confusion with it.
How early does a person need to get up in this city to be considered earnest?

But I don’t intend to tell you about how I kept getting up earlier and earlier and kept washing less and
less thoroughly until finally I gave up on shaving completely and went back to believing there was no
way to be happy on earth unless you had a beard. I have something slightly more uplifting to say, I am
just setting the scene.

So then, a few days later, when my mood had started to slide, I began to despair I might not actually
have what it takes to get a job and make enough money to survive. I suspected I might very well succeed
in winning over some business owner with my grade A smile and no-nonsense handshake, but I was
tormented by the thought that I would eventually be called upon to eat my money in my mouth and
wake up and go to work and pretend I believed what I was doing made any sense whatsoever. In this
frame of mind I stood at the Main Street/Science World bus stop waiting for a bus, trying to understand
where everything had gone so terribly wrong when I noticed I was not the only person having dark
thoughts. Apparently there were a lot of folks thinking darkly. No busses came and as we waited, the
line growing all the while, the dark thoughts of the folks around me grew as well and I had to wonder if
the cause was existential or somehow transportational.

The bus finally floated up. As it pulled in and the crowd began to struggle for position in the line up, I
remembered why we had given up the earlier culture of simple pleasures - like sleeping in and living in
small communities and in caves. Namely – for the excitement of keeping close quarters with others.
Squeezing onto the bus I felt a great relief at the fact that I was not alone in my quest for rent money
and more meaning to life – there were many of us.
All of a sudden the bus driver, after loudly requesting that those already on the bus move all the way to
the back, closed the doors, leaving half of the crowd unhappy on the street. Someone even took the
event so close to heart that he threw his textbook at the window. But this didn’t faze the driver in the
least – he was a professional. He took off at a swift trot, sending another wave of excitement through
the tightly packed community of accidental friends as a fellow, not prepared for the burst of speed, lost
his balance, perhaps never having fully acquired it in the first place, and fell onto the pink furry backpack
of a student girl from another country. The girl took this event close to heart and began to cry, which in
turn the fellow took to heart, which he showed by saying out loud a number of expletives that would be
best described in numerical code, ‘####, %%%%, $$%$!!!!!’

After this folks calmed down for a while and spent the journey in relative ease, uninterrupted except for
the occasional passenger not understanding properly how to open the back doors, despairing loudly,
banging on the doors feverishly and becoming agitated. Then someone with a keener knowledge of the
system would yell, ‘back door,’ and the driver would open it and the despairing passenger would
disembark, taking his despair with him. And other than that the journey was peace itself, except for the
constant complaining of one fellow who kept exclaiming quite loudly, ‘we’re not sardines, we deserve a
life on land and not in a can, the government absolutely must buy more buses, one for each person, and
then we can all ride on our own buses completely alone, away from sorrow and sadness.’ This he
continually repeated, word for word, from which I gathered that he was an improbable type, and that he
must experience this scene with frequency, having worked his speech out to the word.

Now, none of this may seem overly worthy of mention if it weren’t for one more highly improbable
occurrence which struck me for its extravagance, especially for a country as unimposing as Canada.

What happened was this.

In the course of riding and listening to each other’s grunts of complaint and humbly bearing each step
on our toes or poke in the groin with an umbrella, or cries of agitation inspired by the complicated back
door exit system, one fellow came to the conclusion that he was being dealt a raw deal by not being
shown the proper respect and, seeking the proper outlet for his malcontent, fixed his attention upon an
elderly Asian woman. ‘Listen buddy,’ the fellow said, his eyes shining in perfect hatred, ‘don’t bother
being a buddy, just take up all the space you need, you’re the only person who has to go anywhere, eh?’
The rather meek looking woman clearly did not understand what he was saying.
So he repeated it one more time, and the fact that the woman yet again failed to understand him seemed to inflame his sense of right and wrong with burning coals and he shoved her aside, hissing like
a lost snake and moving towards the door. This made a few people feel uncomfortable, but nobody felt
brave enough to step in – you never know with those types, he could be seeing purple rabbits and giant
crocodiles as a result of having taken some narcotic drug that morning, and why chance it. At that
moment it struck me, however, that Canada is such a highly logical country, a veritable bastion that I
really ought to reason with the fellow and lead him to a knowledge of his error. So turning to the fellow I
said, ‘hey pal, what the heck are you doing? You just pushed a little Chinese lady?!’
To which he replied, ‘gobeldy goo,’ or in other words – something completely incomprehensible. The
only part of his speech that I understood was the punch he gave me in the face and the way nobody on
the bus hampered him from getting off at the next stop, which I believe to have been a complete
anomaly, because for the most part Vancouverites are very good citizens.

So that’s my Vancouver story. I found a job and get up so early I sometimes don’t bother hitting the sack
at all. What can you do? This is the way we live.

life in vancouver

2007-10-26T00:15:00.001+03:00

I’ll tell you what, folks get up early – i can’t even believe it. And just trying to keep up with them is about enough to put your health in a bad mood, and you’d be lucky to ever get over it.
i would never have suspected it before i started dreaming about getting a job, as i spent most of my mornings and early afternoons pondering over softer things like pillows and blankets. And then one day like the darndest unexpected guest all of a sudden there it was knocking on my desires – the idea i might be of some use to the work force.
So i cleaned my body up and shaved my face and fixed my intention to make a great impression by setting the alarm for early morning. When that alarm set off at nine i have to say i expected to be the first person up by a couple of hours at least, securing me a career in greatness like the city has rarely seen before. And as i’m sure you have come to understand with equal chagrin and unhappiness – most businesses are already getting ready to close down for the night by then. So i had to make a quick decision that would affect my future – i chose to set the alarm for eight. I shaved again, washed a little less sincerely and when early morning came – it brought a whole lot confusion with it. How early does a person need to get up in this city to be considered earnest?
But hold on to your rickshaw just a moment if you think i intend to tell you about how i kept getting up earlier and earlier and kept washing less and less thoroughly until finally i gave up on shaving completely and went back to believing there was no way to be happy on earth unless you had a beard. I have something slightly more uplifting to say, i am just setting the scene.
So then, a couple of days after the beginning of this whole fiasco called waking up before the sun has risen on the east coast, my mood had started to slide and i was beginning to despair i might not actually have what it takes to get a job and make enough money to survive. Though i suspected i might very well succeed in winning some business owner with my grade a smile and no-nonsense handshake, i was tormented by the thought that i would eventually be called upon to eat my money in my mouth and wake up and come to work and pretend i believed what i was doing made any sense whatsoever. And this thought tormented me so effectively that i eventually became quite unhappy and stopped smiling at the folks who hand out the free papers everywhere in the morning (at an hour when their ancestors were still in bed). I was walking past one of these unhappy fellows when he looked at me and said, ‘good morning, sir’ and the greeting sounded so much like a taunt i grabbed the fellow by the two legs that were closest to my anger and tossed him backwards into a pile of his pop-culture dailies. If my two swiftest legs hadn’t carried me away i might not have got a chance to realize that wasn’t the proper approach to living in the western hemisphere. Which is precisely what i did only an hour later.
I was standing at the main street science world bus stop waiting to go south like many had before. No busses came and the number of people standing around grew in proportion to the people’s impatience. Every needless sigh brought another transit rider and every open exclamation of dissatisfaction was enough to attract another three. But nobody seemed to catch the correlation between complaining and making the situation worse for themselves. I tried to explain it to the surly fellow with the construction helmet beside me, ‘quit your complaining, eh?’ i said. ‘You’re only making the situation worse.’
The surly fellow looked at me as though he were completely nonplussed and said, ‘if you don’t quit moving your lips and exuding sounds i’ll be obliged to rub your whiskers in the turd at the top of the stairs leading into the skytrain.’
Indeed, someone had felt unhealthy at the top of stairs, i had nearly stepped into the unsanitary pile as i strove towards the street. What’s more the fellow had felt so unhealthy as to not be able to digest fully his morning meal and had relieved himself of that burden as well in a less traditional way by letting it come back the route it had first taken.
So i held my tongue until the bus i needed finally came round. And it was at this time that i remembered why we gave up the original joys, life’s simpler pleasures – like sleeping in and living in small communities and in caves. Namely – for the excitement of keeping close quarters with others. As i squeezed on the bus i felt a great relief at the fact that i was not alone in my quest for rent money and more meaning to life – they were many of us. And some of them didn’t even make it onto the bus – all of a sudden the bus driver, after loudly requesting that those already on the bus move all the way to the back, closed the doors, leaving half of the crowd unhappy on the street. Someone even took the event so close to heart that he threw his textbook at the window. But this didn’t the phase the driver in the least – he was a professional. He took off at a swift trot, sending another wave of excitement through the tightly packed community of accidental friends as a fellow, not prepared for the burst of speed, lost his balance, perhaps never fully having acquired it in the first place, and fell onto the pink furry backpack of a student girl from another country. The girl took this event close to heart and began to cry, which in turn the fellow took to heart, which he showed by saying out loud a number of expletives that would be best described by numerical code, ‘####, %%%%, $$%$!!!!!’
After this folks calmed down for a while and spent the journey in relative ease, uninterrupted except for the constant complaining of one fellow who kept exclaiming quite loudly, ‘we’re not sardines, we deserve a life on land and not in a can, the government absolutely must buy more buses, one for each person, and then we can all ride on our own buses completely alone, away from sorrow and sadness.’ This he continually repeated, word for word, from which i gathered that he was an improbable type, and that he must experience this scene with frequency, having worked his speech out to the word.
Now, none of this may seem overly worthy of mention if it weren’t for one more highly improbable occurrence which struck me for its strangeness, especially for a country as uninteresting as Canada.
What happened was this.
In the course of riding and listening to each other’s grunts of complaint and humbly bearing each step on our toes or poke in the groin with an umbrella, people decided at intervals to discontinue their ride. After pulling the rope people would normally step towards the exit and at the stop disembark. One fellow however, felt that he was being dealt a raw deal by not being shown the proper respect and seemed to be seeking the proper outlet for his malcontent.
‘Listen buddy,’ the fellow said, ‘don’t bother being a buddy, just take up all the space you need, you’re the only person who has to go anywhere, eh?’
This he said to a rather meek looking asian woman who clearly didn’t understand what he was saying. He repeated it one more time, and the fact that the woman didn’t understand him seemed to inflame his sense of right and wrong and he shoved her aside and moved towards the door.
This made a few people feel uncomfortable, but nobody felt brave enough to step in – you never know with those types he could be seeing purple rabbits and giant crocodiles as a result of having taken some narcotic drug that morning, and why chance it. At that moment it struck me, however, that Canada is such a highly logical country, a veritable bastion that i really ought to reason with the fellow and lead him to a knowledge of his error. So turning to the fellow i said, ‘hey pal, what theheck are you doing? You jsut pushed a little Chinese lady?!’
To which he replied, ‘goobledy goo,’ or in other words – something completely incomprehensible. The only part of his speech that i understood was the punch he gave me in the face and the way nobody on the bus hampered him from getting off at the next stop, which i believe to have been a complete anomaly, because for the most part Vancouverites are very good citizens.
So that’s my Vancouver story. I found a job and get up so early i sometimes don’t bother hitting the sack at all. What can you do? This is the way we live.

2007-10-23T04:26:00.002+03:00

The birthday party - Release the bats

2007-10-22T01:40:00.000+03:00

why then, max, why, tell me cause i dont get it. why dont you post here? why did you propose setting it up in the first place? i remember the starry night at novoslobodskaya at the kiosk with the beer. seth didnt want to. you did max. what happened? when did the tables turn?

?

2007-10-18T06:38:00.001+03:00

Although ultimately a victor in World Wars I and II, France suffered extensive losses in its empire, wealth, manpower, and rank as a dominant nation-state. Nevertheless, France today is one of the most modern countries in the world and is a leader among European nations. Since 1958, it has constructed a presidential democracy resistant to the instabilities experienced in earlier parliamentary democracies. In recent years, its reconciliation and cooperation with Germany have proved central to the economic integration of Europe, including the introduction of a common exchange currency, the euro, in January 1999. At present, France is at the forefront of efforts to develop the EU's military capabilities to supplement progress toward an EU foreign policy.

The Little Orphan by F.M.Dostoyevsky

2007-10-16T23:30:00.001+03:00

(1887)

I

In a large city, on Christmas eve in the biting cold, I see a young child, still quite young, six years old, perhaps even less; yet too young to be sent on the street begging, but assuredly destined to be sent in a year or two.

This child awakes one morning in a damp and frosty cellar. He is wrapped in a kind of squalid dressing-gown and is shivering. His breath issues from between his lips in white vapor; he is seated on a trunk; to pass the time he blows the breath from his mouth, and amuses himself in seeing it escape. But he is very hungry. Several times since morning he has drawn near the bed covered with a straw mattress as thin as gauze, where his mother lies sick, her head resting on a bundle of rags instead of a pillow.

How did she come there? She came probably from a strange city and has fallen ill. The proprietress of the miserable lodging was arrested two days ago, and carried to the police station; it is a holiday to-day, and the other tenants have gone out. However, one of them has remained in bed for the last twenty-four hours, stupid with drink, not having waited for the holiday.

From another corner issue the complaints of an old woman of eighty years, laid up with rheumatism. This old woman was formerly a children's nurse somewhere; now she is dying all alone. She whines, moans, and growls at the little boy, who begins to be afraid to come near the corner where she lies with the death rattle in her throat. He has found something to drink in the hallway, but he has not been able to lay his hand on the smallest crust of bread, and for the tenth time he comes to wake his mother. He finishes by getting frightened in this darkness.

The evening is already late, and no one comes to kindle the fire. He finds, by feeling around, his mother's face, and is astonished that she no longer moves and that she has become as cold as the wall.

"It is so cold!" he thinks.

He remains some time without moving, his hand resting on the shoulder of the corpse. Then he begins to blow in his fingers to warm them, and, happening to find his little cap on the bed, he looks softly for the door, and issues forth from the underground lodging.

He would have gone out sooner had he not been afraid of the big dog that barks all the day up there on the landing before their neighbor's door.

Oh! what a city! never before had he seen anything like it. Down yonder from where he came, the nights are much darker. There is only one lamp for the whole street; little low wooden houses, closed with shutters; in the street from the time it grows dark, no one; every one shut up at home: only a crowd of dogs that howl, hundreds, thousands of dogs, that howl and bark all the night. But then, it used to be so warm there! And he got something to eat. Here, ah! how good it would be to have something to eat! What a noise here, what an uproar! What a great light, and what a crowd of people! What horses, and what carriages! And the cold, the cold! The bodies of the tired horses smoke with frost and their burning nostrils puff white clouds; their shoes ring on the pavement through the soft snow. And how every body hustles every body else! "Ah! how I would like to eat a little piece of something. That is what makes my fingers ache so."

II

A policeman just passes by, and turns his head so as not to see the child.

"Here is another street. Oh! how wide it is! I shall be crushed to death here, I know; how they all shout, how they run, how they roll along! And the light, and the light! And that, what is that? Oh! what a big window pane! And behind the pane, a room, and in the room a tree that goes up to the ceiling; it is the Christmas tree. And what lights under the tree! Such papers of gold, and such apples! And all around dolls and little hobby-horses. There are little children well-dressed, nice, and clean; they are laughing and playing, eating and drinking things. There is a little girl going to dance with the little boy. How pretty she is! And there is music. I can hear it through the glass."

The child looks, admires, and even laughs. He feels no longer any pain in his fingers or feet. The fingers of his hand have become all red, he cannot bend them any more, and it hurts him to move them. But all at once, he feels that his fingers ache; he begins to cry, and goes away. He perceives through another window another room, and again trees and cakes of all sorts on the table, red almonds and yellow ones. Four beautiful ladies are sitting down, and when any body comes he is given some cake: and the door opens every minute, and many gentlemen enter. The little fellow crept forward, opened the door of a sudden, and went in. Oh! what a noise was made when they saw him, what confusion! Immediately a lady arose, put a kopeck in his hand, and opened herself the street door for him. How frightened he was!

III

The kopeck has fallen from his hands, and rings on the steps of the stairs. He was not able to tighten his little fingers enough to hold the coin. The child went out running, and walked fast, fast. Where was he going? He did not know. And he runs, runs, and blows in his hands. He is troubled. He feels so lonely, so frightened! And suddenly, what is that again! A crowd of people stand there and admire.

"A window! behind the pane, three pretty dolls attired in wee red and yellow dresses, and just exactly as though they were alive! And that little old man sitting down, who seems to play the fiddle. There are two others, too, standing up, who play on tiny violins, keeping time with their heads to the music. They look at each other and their lips move. And they really speak? Only they cannot be heard through the glass."

And the child first thinks that they are living, and when he comprehends that they are only dolls, he begins to laugh. Never had he seen such dolls before, and he didn't know that there were any like that! He would like to cry, but those dolls are just too funny!

IV

Suddenly he feels himself seized by the coat. A big rough boy stands near him, who gives him a blow of his fist on the head, snatches his cap, and trips him up.

The child falls. At the same time there is a shout; he remains a moment paralyzed with fear. Then he springs up with a bound and runs, runs, darts under a gateway somewhere and hides himself in a court-yard behind a pile of wood. He cowers and shivers in his fright; he can hardly breathe.

And suddenly he feels quite comfortable. His little hands and feet don't hurt any more; he is warm, warm as though near a stove, and all his body trembles.

"Ah! I am going asleep! how nice it is to have a sleep! I shall stay a little while and then I will go and see the dolls again," thought the little fellow, and he smiled at the recollection of the dolls. "They looked just as though they were alive!"

Then he hears his mother's song. "Mamma, I am going to sleep. Ah! how nice it is here for sleeping!"

"Come to my house, little boy, to see the Christmas tree," said a soft voice.

He thought at first it was his mother; but no, it was not she.

Then who is calling him? He does not see. But some one stoops over him, and folds him in his arms in the darkness: and he stretches out his hand and--all at once--oh! what light! Oh! what a Christmas tree! No, it is not a Christmas tree; he has never seen the like of it!

Where is he now? All is resplendent, all is radiant, and dolls all around; but no, not dolls, little boys, little girls; only they are very bright. All of them circle round him; they fly. They hug him, they take him and carry him away, and he is flying too. And he sees his mother looking at him and laughing joyfully.

"Mamma! mamma! ah! how nice it is here!" cries her little boy to her.

And again he embraces the children, and would like very much to tell them about the dolls behind the window pane. "Who are you, little girls?" he asks, laughing and fondling them.

It is the Christmas tree at Jesus's.

At Jesus's, that day, there is always a Christmas tree for little children that have none themselves.

And he learned that all these little boys and girls were children like himself, who had died like him. Some had died of cold in the baskets abandoned at the doors of the public functionaries of St. Petersburg; others had died out at nurse in the foul hovels of the Tchaukhnas; others of hunger at the dry breasts of their mothers during the famine. All were here now, all little angels now, all with Jesus, and He Himself among them, spreading his hands over them, blessing them and their sinful mothers.

And the mothers of these children are there too, apart, weeping; each recognizes her son or her daughter, and the children fly towards them, embrace them, wipe away the tears with their little hands, and beg them not to weep.

And below on the earth, the concierge in the morning found the wee corpse of the child, who had taken refuge in the courtyard. Stiff and frozen behind the pile of wood it lay.

The mother was found too. She died before him; both are reunited in Heaven in the Lord's house.

THE END.

2007-10-16T03:28:00.002+03:00

Maxim come back:
Gwain's gone
crazy shit's gone
down in
quality max.

2007-10-16T03:13:00.001+03:00

Don't mind me, just pas
sing through, thought I'd savage syll
ables, maul haiku.

2007-10-13T10:04:00.001+03:00

Lethlean at Large

Lethlean at Ease
Lethlean Undone