Ghostplank

Two slips dunked up and down in the harborwater. I hadn't touched either of them. Dark, greenish, black-and-blue water - poisoned by billions of journeys over the top - foamed white as my clipper cut through. Tiny pink capsules of seawater scattered at wake's edge. Once fully absorbed, there are brief periods of hypomanic calm. Warm sunbeams reflected earnestly off the harbor surface. The shimmering waves weren't close to as majestic as the battery skyline, which boasted a mosaic of horizon-stamped windows framed by dull limestone and oxidized copper. From my vantage I gazed down the barrel of Manhattan and eastdrifted. My socks were a little damp so I took them off - feet seeking fuzzy shelter.

Although man has relentlessly girded this landscape, carving deep into the ground to thrust higher into the sky, the encasing harbor remains a furious showcase of nature. My sail dug in, windwhipped to tears but stubbornly-driven and earnest - an authenticity at odds with the sunbeams, for my sail travels singly at sea. We don't rely on Friends.

Windwhipped to frenzy, I had no tac[t]. My spirit sunk low, faceplanting the deck. I thought of your dog face and wholly derivative life. You're right! There is cause for alarm!

Rance

My heart gurgled to a boil and I exhaled. I gawked oddly, in an odd eyeball configuration. I sat there and I saw him. I saw him and him and him and her. Thinking, the castle is built, swing around back. Fill the void and do so iron-clad. Do so with dumbbells and without oil. The mistake's been made. He said, "I ain't gonna fuck it up this time." The gauntlet has been thrown. How does that go? I sit and listen. A man and some dirt and a stylus.

The man sat up on a rainy urban day. He checked around. A mirror he found looked back at him. He saw the street and heard brakes and sat. "I remember how foreign it sounded to them, how they couldn't believe yuppies lived down there now." I mean, where did they think yuppies lived? Maybe they hadn't given it much thought. Maybe they had no need to. They had no need to. I saw twirling my thoughts like overcooked noodles. In the sense, in the season, I try and you falter. Which is an odd combination?

And then I realized I didn't care. I looked to the north and realized I didn't care, and the beat played on, and I oriented on myself, and I hatched a plan. I cracked through and lived differently thereafter for a time. And then I found myself awash in reluctance and regret. And then I found myself back. My cells flavorless and meek. Maybe the answer is a fresh start, a new beginning. So the log came back, as it always does. The torpedo drove towards my ship and I watched it panicked. I didn't care. The slanted eyes both drove me away and magnetized my heart, and the irony couldn't be more humorous. I slammed that dream on its head long before it mattered. I am embarrassed to be associated with certain correspondence; I am embarrassed to be associated with the Catholic faith, and with suburbia.

When the summer dresses you, you win. When the winter dresses you, I win, and in this balance, time flies. And such soaring, buzzing time passage makes me wonder, and it makes me downright symptomatic. I see a yellow tank and a, now I'm just giving up, I've surrendered. I saw a yellow tank with bum wheels. And this is just perfect: "Walk softly tonight, little stranger, into these shadows we're passing through, talk softly tonight little angel, you make all my dreams come true." Didn't even plan it. One of those mental/coincidental crossroads.

I stood there watching boat after boat embark up or out of the Hudson. It was raining and draining me and the city's spirit. I stood there at the base of the Manhattan Bridge. I stood and watched everyone disappear. I watched softly, and I talked lonely. I saw them leave and boats don't move very quickly. It's heart-wrenching, and it made the liquid in my heart boil. It boiled unapologetically. I saw the wind bully the rain procession on its side. The greyness was overpowering. There she goes with the clan: a toddler and a Queen. The boats went on and some had there own. I smoked a blunt. They're headed to the Caribbean. He's headed to save the world. She's headed somewhere she doesn't want to go. And then, in a most surprising twists, they're headed to heaven.

The window closed, now housekeeping began. The process hadn't been particulrly democratic, but that's not reality. Ya know what else isn't reality? All the shit in the periphery, and my lovely herb garden. And my lovely spread out in the country. All the details hardly made a difference. All the darkness and coziness counted so much more than the adornments and craftsmanship, and the boat, and the riverboat, and the pocketknife stuffed slickly into a leather holster, correction, self-correction, regulation. Slap slap slap slap across the face such that the hand lands where it started, backhand to the right side of the face, my mirror gawked back. I lowered my head and smiled into the summer breeze. The warehouses passed by me, the planets past me. The zip code changed twice.

And I stood there like a dolt.

Konijn Grease

[A] lapine creature with grayish fur, a symbol lacking substance to this point, like ribs in a skeleton shaped like a harp, or a calf tattoo thereof, sought to fill some void in the Boney Silence, or at least, to finish off this sentence, bunnyspoke, "my muscles are amber," and steeplechased down a wooden plank or a red tower and [sopped] beer.

Which is to say, had I had it my way when I was cruising around the other day, I would have enjoyed a cold beverage in the hot sun on those old wooden planks down on Rabbit Island, which may soon be gutted. Despite a persistent sideshow, the place booms with life and playful melodies deep-fried in big bass notes from the 70s.

And if one is not moved to write or paint or sing or fuck while or after being there, I doubt they ever will; either that, or they have a serious problem weighing them down, the kind of problem that sits in the middle of their darkest brainroom. It sits there like a spiteful zombie on an aluminum chair. It sits there staring ahead intently, and that's it. No Amazonian river rat, headless pinup, plastic palm tree, mucosal half-shell, frayed-wire amplifier, rubber-wrap butt or boob fat, low-mast lonestar bandera, oily rubber tire, or Atlantic-Pacific pectocranial psychopath can stir an emotion nor budge the problem from its seated position, from its gilded throne pressing down, down, down.

From that skeletal device and its ribbed cords came a beat so bold it thundered out to Marine Parkway, and in the wake of its baritone, it blasted whitewashed paths visible without electricity, and planes flew south a touch two turns before touchdown. Would an outsider, some educated dolt, some landlocked potato five thousand miles from a body of oil, point out the "steep decline of nutritional rigor"? Yes, but even these types have a home here: like teepees on planes. If you look at anything in the sun your depth perception fades and your teepee can be on the planes: to your girlfriend or boyfriend, or whomever you'd like. Down here, there's plenty of room.

Inside Fate's plans for the island dangling by French trains and American crossties there is a freakishly large atlas of diagrams, and they're not really diagrams so much as they're outlines: simplified black ink drawings on what may have been white paper.

Tens of thousands of years ago, two lapine creatures fell into a hole with a box of crayons and some special seeds from the Sky World. A Left-Handed Twin sculpted a long narrow chunk of land, called it Manna-hatta, and plopped it down in a groove between what is today Long Island and the mainland. Dirt scattered all around and settled on top of the atlas. The Twin, who had already moved on to shooting clay disks, left his mess behind for his brother, the Right-Handed Twin, who saw the rubble and inadvertently knocked the two grey rabbits inside the hole along with the atlas. They procreated in an ultrachromatic frenzy beneath the soil for hundreds of years, exhausting the crayons and leaving a raw (and quite colorful), primordial scenery caked on the shorescape.

A chest filled with rubies soaked in hot oil tilted forward as if bound to a rickety old axle, and at a certain point I would have guessed was well after inflection, the whole chest lunged forward, emptied its contents, scorched hair, scalded scales, popped balloons, ignited the Coney underworld, and flash-fried a display cabinet. I saw it with my own three eyes.

Forager's Fregola Soup

Fregola Sarda reminds people of Israeli cous cous, but to me there's no comparison. Fregola are densely packed, round pastina made with semolina flour and toasted. You cook fregola in boiling water (or broth) for about fifteen minutes and you get a great semi-soft, semi-tough texture with each tiny ball. Because the rolled flour is toasted, there is a slight nutty flavor to fregola. The "Sarda" part refers to Sardinia, where fregola originated. You can find fregola in specialty markets, in NYC I've seen it in Di Palo's on Grand Street, Dean & Deluca on Broadway, and some specialty markets in Brooklyn. The big corporate chains (Whole Foods) will start carrying it soon because it's becoming trendy and because whoever makes it over in Italy has caught on to the rustic-looking-packaging-800%-markup strategy. I paid about $6 for 1.1 lbs (500 g) at Di Palo and $6.49 for the same package in Brooklyn...not bad. Both times it looked like this:
You can make it for a cold salad like you would with cous cous but again it's not cous cous. Anyway, I prefer fregola in soup. My first experience with fregola was with a recipe for Fregula con Cocciula (Fregola with Clams), a golden soup prepared with small clams, small chunks of pancetta, thin slices of garlic, a tablespoon of tomato paste, saffron threads, and a toasted crostini (recipe: saute the first four ingredients for five minutes and mix into fregola that has been cooking in boiling broth for ten minutes, cook for five more minutes, serve topped with the last two ingredients - done).

The other night I mixed fregola with a woodsy soup recipe to great success. Woods, nuts, sage. This is a forager's soup.

Forager's Fregola Soup
Serves 4
10 oz Fregola Sarda
10 cups fresh chicken broth
20-30 oz cannellini beans (2 small cans, 1 large one)
5 oz baby spinach, washed, drained
sage, about 8 leaves
garlic, four cloves thinly thinly sliced

olive oil
white truffle oil
salt
pepper

1. Heat the chicken broth until it boils, when it does, reduce to a simmer and throw in the fregola, you want it to cook at least 15 minutes, stir occasionally.

2. Add the sage and garlic into a small pan and very slowly heat until the leaves and slices crackle (maybe five minutes).

3. Rinse the beans and then, in a food processor, or, with a fork, mash them into a paste.

4. Add the bean paste to the garlic, add a little more olive oil, and then add to the soup.

5. Five minutes before serving, throw in the spinach and stir it into the simmering broth.

6. Top with a copious amount of salt and pepper to taste. Serve with two brave drops of white truffle oil per bowl. Bless America. Bless Sardinia.

Mute?

7.5%/2666

I recently downloaded this wallpaper, because I think the best place for a calendar in this day and age is on your desktop. One of the first things I thought when I saw this was: "I like my bun toasted or grilled a little." This is a minor point, and I should've kept it to myself. I guess.

Bolaño continues to water-down superlatives unless they're trapped inside the critics' minds. It doesn't get old because superlatives these days need watering down. Superlatives should be felt, they don't need to be sloganized and piped into the sky. He delivers a dream-sequence in this section and a few random explorations. All of these arrive via the physically mute Morini. There's the principled London bum and the Messianic painter who cut off his hand to create the ultimate self-portrait.

I love the exposition of a "stilted" conversation between two intellectual acquaintances, neither of whom had much of a sense of friendship or loyalty but had fallen deeply in love with a younger, dumber, scholar who appreciated the mysterious Archimboldi by rote — an odd breed of passion that neither of her suitors give much thought to. Here's just a bit:

The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man...

He uses phrases like "or whatever," expands on how cruel and extreme the mind can be while the body is timid and restrained (Espinoza's fiery plane crash), compares Morini to Eurylochus, and includes a list of Italian desserts attributed to one Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun.

And in a small amount of writing, he's done the love triangle, the thoughtless woman as a stained-glass vessel for two middle-aged friends' base desires, the juxtaposition, the thoughts, the hopelessness, the attempt at normalcy, discussion on how long it takes each of them to come, and their pathetic abandon of basic manners in the face of what certainly feels like selfish attraction. He's done all this radically, and in a way I hope he turns it on its head even more, not because turning things on their heads is what gets me off or what I think should get me off, but because so far I'm getting a waft of splendidly fragrant sarcasm about their behavior, about their thoughts, and about the whole situation. This is an attractive aroma because really, is there a better option when you're ninety-ninth in line to take-off into the hellhole airspace of real adulthood, than irony? (which reminds of a conversation I had with a chess player in a chat room, see below).

wellredbaron73: you just didn't think during that match. i knew your 3rd to next move before i made my first. i would recommend sitting in silence and concentrating on something.
z911: haha, no i didn't. what is that like an exercise?
wellredbaron73: i guess
z911: that's a good idea i should try it, do you do that?
wellredbaron73: no, i don't need to. my attention span is fine, see my rating?
z911: yes sir, that's very good
wellredbaron73: well, nice playing with you, best of luck, and remember, try to focus and really think ahead
z911: ok

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34/898/2666

About form, I was sure, the author had paved his own path (or in less cliché terms, the author had employed a style all his own, not mimicking anyone else). It makes an interesting read, as it's fresh, and these days, unassuming freshness is hard to find, easy to detect, and frankly, difficult to reproduce. The style keeps you on your toes (or in less cliché terms, this unpredictable quality makes the reader quite attentive).

He also does this thing where he states something about a character, and then immediately after, he completely undermines it with a straightforward rebuttal to the initial statement. Well it's not really a rebuttal — it's not black and white like that. It's more of, here's some hot soup, oh wait let me throw an ice cube in it. Nothing is as extraordinary as it originally sounds, how the character wants it to sound, or even how the author first said it. Everything's kind of muddled, or, if not tempered entirely, exists in an extreme, useless state hidden inside the thoughts of a character, or in the ultimately subordinate, descriptive language of the story.

How do you begin to praise the 4-page sentence? It's unmistakable, when you turn to that spread of fully-justified type, it dawns on you that you've already been reading this weed of a thought for a page and a half, and that's the best way to describe what he does with the sentence about the Swabian. It's not a "stream of consciousness," which is the shit I try to do, it's a purposeful ramble. It's the exploration of a branch to its terminus, a steady retreat...repeat. It's a masterful stroke by a talented artist. I can't even identify the purpose yet, but overall I just don't see this guy as someone who does things for a reaction, or is experimenting — he's not. It also contains a story of a story about Buenos Aires in the 20s, the phrase "meat emporium," the phrase

...words that to the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange intensity, like eyes of a clumsy young butcher...

(how good is that!), and all of this a discussion that happened in the past, over a sparse German meal of sausages, potatoes, and beer. Good god Roberto, you've done it! Persist me to the 96th percentage, carry me Furiously onward! To the house.

I wanted to write a story about an urban professional who walked along the sidewalk late, late one night. Leaves rustled and the last lamp on the block went dark. A smallish man jumped out of the hedge and put a knife to the yuppie's neck and said, "give me your wallet." The miserable man quickly realized he only had $7 on him, so he gave him the wallet, crying, and then said, here, I have an iPod and a phone. The mugger thumbed the three bills and then caressed the shiny hard disk - content. He began running off in the direction the yuppie had just come from. The yuppie yelled after the man, and said, "Hey!" "HEY!" The guy turned around. "Hey come here. Can you do me a favor?" The mugger was twenty feet away from the yuppie's urine-stained slacks. The pathetic man rolled up his sleeve and said, "can you slice my arm?" The mugger ran off.

Taxi 2

One organization, the Rapture Fund, is offering a "Rapture Will" that provides terms by which a Christian can transfer his or her estate to the Rapture Fund in the event of the Rapture. The organization's website indicates that funds are to be used for publication of the Gospel during the Tribulation. Stop and go all day long, I see some old friends, I see my brother. Some have phones and some plain don't. It is a white cloud connection to into a foggy realm growing foggier with each denunciation. Both these worlds, one that no one inhabits and the one where I live, one where a few people make money and one where my value is similarly ludicrous, I am enchanted by the lures of the former. They are huge and romantic, in the sense that they are ego-driven. The core of our Earthball must be so stressed out these days - too much pressure. I am a half-step from the door. I have my left foot in a warm tub and my right foot is an inch from the outlet. I'm just trying to step through, I said. So I ran with copper armor clanking and a sense of dignity misguided. I am a karate kick away from having the abandon I wish I had. Death and war and loss and pain, I know them in abstract. I don't have a shortcut because I don't know the address. I wonder if I would even take the shortcut, and I feel I wouldn't. But it would be nice to get there.