this week i

became a long time reader first time writer by entering my favorite leon gordis quote into savage lovekim jong un heralded a jubilee.  blurry beyond bloody mary says "citizens have been told to avoid contact with official games vehicles: if there is an accident, they warn, do not intervene"

 

captioned matthew's photo on arrival: as the monster takes its first steps, igor looks to the modern prometheus.  "my lord, what have you done?"

 

shake hands to circulate blood.  bulgarians unclear how sidewalk salt works.  i folded from end of cambrian, turtle fucks sneaker, asteroid incoming




 

watched broadside: emerging empires collide, new amsterdam surrenders to york, dutch ram underwater chainlink to burn british fleet near thames estuary.  the english duplicate themselves so quickly, like rabbits.  soon the whole colony will suffocate under the small turds of their anglo babies

 

read blood meridian, cormac mccarthy's candidate for the great american novel

there are already some fourteen thousand french colonists in the state of sonora.  they're being given free land to settle.  they're being given tools and livestock.  enlightened mexicans encourage this.  paredes is already calling for secession from the mexican government.  they'd rather be ruled by toadeaters than thieves and imbeciles.  colonel carrasco is asking for american intervention.  and he's going to get it

you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of these ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies.  a legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools

blood grouted the flagstones

aint that the drizzlin shits

they were foul and ragged and half crazed.  they'd been making forays at night up the arroyo for wood and water and they had been feeding off a dead mule that lay gutted and stinking in the far corner of the yard.  the first thing they asked for was whiskey and the next was tobacco.  they had but two animals and one of these had been snakebit in the desert and this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an attic tragedy

eitherhanded as a spider

viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.  some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths.  in their wigs of dried blood they lay gazing up with ape's eyes at brother sun now rising in the east

did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?

the desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died

what joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies

we have spirits of ether.  you wont need the whiskey

abuelita, he said.  no puedes escucharme?

shot the goddamned bear, said the barman

 

1/27

this week i

flew to sofia for winter proper, replicated my favorite still from planet earth, jodie foster, failed to grasp the contributions of chuck berry, aerosmith








watched ai weiwei's rohingya.  two hours without story beyond scenes of everyday life in earth's largest refugee camp

 

watched the exquisite illustrations of khan academy lectures on interest & debt and housing, including rule of 72: estimating when money will double


 

read men without women, hemingway's early collection of short stories

the edge of the cape was wet with blood where it had swept along the bull's back as he went by

 

his vest was ripped where he had not quite cleared the point of the horn.  he was happy about it, showing it to the spectators.  he made the tour of the ring

 

"'well,' said olz, 'when she died i made the report to the commune and i put her in the shed across the top of the big wood.  when i started to use the big wood she was stiff and i put her up against the wall.  her mouth was open and when i came into the shed at night to cut up the big wood, i hung the lantern from it.'

"why did you do that?" asked the priest.

"'i don't know,' said olz.

"'did you do that many times?'

"'every time i went to work in the shed at night.'

"'it was very wrong,' said the priest.  'did you love your wife.'

"'ja, i loved her,' olz said.  'i loved her fine.'"

"did you understand it all?"  asked the innkeeper.  "you understand it all about his wife?"

"i heard it."

"how about eating?"  john asked.

 "you order," i said.  "do you think it's true?"  i asked the innkeeper.

"sure it's true," he said.  "these peasants are beasts"


1st roman soldier - you see me slip the old spear into him?

2nd roman soldier - you'll get into trouble doing that some day.

1st soldier - it was the least i could do for him.  i'll tell you he looked pretty good to me in there today.

hebrew wine-seller - gentlemen, you know i got to close

 

looked up homologous: correspondence or similarity in form or function between parts (such as the wing of a bat and the human arm) of different species resulting from modification of a trait possessed by a common ancestor : similarity of traits reflecting common descent and ancestry

read she comes first: the thinking man's guide to pleasuring a woman.  a motivational hand-hold to encourage squeamish men to get over themselves

the clitoris..no known purpose other than pleasure

two out of three women on average are consistently denied their climax - good reason to start hiding the cutlery

during the tang dynasty, the empress wu hu ruled china.  she knew that sex and power were inexorably linked, and she decreed that government officials and visiting dignitaries must pay homage to her imperial highness by performing cunnilingus upon her.  no joke.  old paintings depict the beautiful, powerful empress standing and holding her ornate robe open while a high nobleman or diplomat is shown kneeling before her, applying his lips and tongue to her royal mound

even a sheet of saran wrap will do; just make sure you're using the nonmicrowaveable kind, as the microwaveable sort isn't impervious to bacteria

one interviewee commented that she likes to play ravel's bolero during sex as "it both captures and stimulates the process of arousal - the way the tension builds slowly, repetitiously...subliminally encouraging my boyfriend to slow down and wait until it all builds to a crescendo"

don't just pop off the cork and start swigging

think about purchasing a device called "the accommodator," otherwise known as a "chin-dong."  the accommodator is a strap-on dildo that fits onto the end of your chin and is secured with elastic headbands (like a catcher's mask)

 

1/20

this week i

ate fireside tacos in a trinity, where ambulances say tattoo and some courts exist not for war criminals but simply for the naughty dutch.  disney released rabbits, accepted one leg, returned with a professional interpretation while i resisted the nft craze.  i'm not curious about your vainilla why are you curious about my canela?  in new boat sized for moritz and florence, hannes burnt down, re-wrote duckdb, presented natalie's private sauna


 



 

 

read hundred views.  degas said hokusai not just one artist among others in the floating world.  he is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself

 


 

read nausea by jean-paul sartre

in 1787, at an inn near moulins, an old man was dying, a friend of diderot, trained by the philosophers.  the priests of the neighborhood were nonplussed: they had tried everything in vain; the good man would have no last rites, he was a pantheist.  m. de rollebon, who was passing by and who believed in nothing, bet the cure of moulins that he would need less than two hours to bring the sick man back to christian sentiments.  the cure took the bet and lost: rollebon began at three in the morning, the sick man confessed at five and died at seven.  "are you so forceful in argument?" asked the cure, "you outdo even us," "i did not argue," answered m. de rollebon, "i made him fear hell"

i study him with a sort of admiration.  what will-power he must have to carry through, slowly, obstinately, a plan on such a vast scale.  one day, seven years ago (he told me he had been a student for seven years) he came pompously into this reading-room.  he scanned the innumerable books which lined the walls and he must have said, something like rastignac, "science!  it is up to us."  the he went and took the first book from the first shelf on the far right; he opened to the first page, with a feeling of respect and fear mixed with an unshakeable decision.  today he has reached "l"-"k" after "j," "l" after "k."  he has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from a work on tamerlaine to a catholic pamphlet against darwinism, he has never been disconcerted for an instant.  he has read everything; he has stored up in his head most of what anyone knows about parthenogenesis, and half the arguments against vivisection.  there is a universe behind and before him.  and the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left: he will say to himself, "now what?"

shanghai, moscow, algiers, everything is the same after two weeks.  there are moments - rarely - when you make a landmark, you realize that you're going with a woman, in some messy business.  the time of a flash.  after that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: monday, tuesday, wednesday, april, may, june, 1924, 1925, 1926

how can i, who have not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone else?

the trees floated.  gushing towards the sky?  or rather a collapse; at any instant i expected to see the tree-trunks shrivel like weary wands, crumple up, fall on the ground in a soft, folded, black heap.  they did not want to exist, only they could not help themselves.  so they quietly minded their own business; the sap rose up slowly through the structure, half reluctant, and the roots sank slowly into the earth.  but at each instant they seemed on the verge of leaving everything there and obliterating themselves.  tired and old, they kept on existing, against the grain, simply because they were too weak to die, because death could only come to them from the outside: strains of music alone can proudly carry their own death within themselves like an internal necessity: only they don't exist.  every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance

well, good-bye, monsieur antoine

 

1/13

this week i

woke up in agrigento for valley of temples, rocksplashes, mozarella blob, turkish stair sunset.  palermo served us fruits of the sea, three explosions


 



 

landed in spqr.  judith beheading holofernes numero due.  judith beheading holofernes numero tre.  caravaggio's next roman holiday?  colosseum, capitoline cappuccino, border crossing for: map room, drunk noah, charon's ferry, asp bite for all the world to see.  here, here they're just candles

 




re-read chronicle of a death foretold

you always have to take the side of the dead

"girls," she would tell them, "don't comb your hair at night; you'll slow down seafarers."  except for that, she thought there were no better-reared daughters.  "they're perfect," she was frequently heard to say.  "any man will be happy with them because they've been raised to suffer"

he returned to the social club with his silver-trimmed saddlebags, and on the table he laid ten bundles of thousand-peso notes with the printed bands of the state bank still on them.  the widower xius died two months later.  "he died because of that," dr. dionisio iguaran said.  "he was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart."  but not only had he sold the house with everything in it; he asked bayardo san roman to pay him little by little because he didn't even have an old trunk where he could keep so much consolation money

i didn't want to be blessed by a man who cut off only the combs for soup and threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage

"we killed him openly," pedro vicario said, "but we're innocent"

maria alejandrina cervantes had left the door of her house unbarred.  i took leave of my brother, crossed the veranda where the mulatto girls' cats were sleeping curled up among the tulips, and opened the bedroom door without knocking.  the lights were out, but as soon as i went in i caught the smell of a warm woman and i saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness, and then i didn't know anything else about myself until the bells began to ring

 

1/6