this week i

saw a roadside dentist while crushing prior records.   jim croce's you don't mess around with jim reinterprets the king is dead, long live the king!

toured shahidul alam's drik gallery, his writings in the 2019 chobi (photo) mela (party) photobook, last two mine.  others obtained at boi (book) mela

 

read sembene ousmane's ensemble cast of west african railway revolt along the dakar to bamako line, god's bits of wood

at the moment the eyes of the body closed, the eyes of the mind were opened

this business of the help we've been getting from outside.  i don't understand it.  the support from the french unions, for instance.  you have europeans who have come all the way from up there, just to break the strike, and then there are other europeans who send us money to go on with it.  don't you think it's odd?

you will all die of hunger.  this strike is a war of eggs against sones

'there is no water,' ramatoulaye repeated.  'we couldn't even bathe the dead'

'she is dead,' she said, 'and i am living.  and everything i did was done so that she and her baby would not die of hunger.  what will her family say?'

'they will understand,' mame sofi said.  'they will know that it was the will of god.  no one can live beyond this hour, and it is not you who are responsible.'  she had turned to the man who had brought the horse and cart.  'do you know where the compound of n'diayene is?'  and when he nodded, she said, 'take us there.'

as the little group formed to retrace the path the crowd had followed just an hour before, ramatoulaye went over to alioune, who was one of the men who had stayed with the cart.

'alioune,' she said, 'it can't go on.  if you won't put a stop to it for your own sake, then do it for us.  we can do no more, and there are too many dead'

alioune lowered his head.  'we must wait for the results of the meeting at thies...perhaps tomorrow...'

'lord,' he had said, 'oh lord who loves me, i am alone on the only road i know.  having suffered as much as i have, i am still at the beginning of suffering.  does this mean that i am damned?  lord, what are you doing for me?  you do not prevent the wicked from doing as they will, nor the good from being crushed beneath the weight of their misery, and by your commandments you stay the arm of the just man when he would lift it to repair the evil.  do you really exist, or are you just an image?  i don't see that you show yourself anywhere.  lord, you are a god of goodness, and you have given me your grace; is it i who have failed?  forgive me, and help me, lord, for i am hungry, i am very hungry.  do something in my behalf, oh lord, for i am hungry, i am very hungry.  do something in my behalf, oh lord who loves me, for i am worthy of your help'

cradling the baby gently in her arms, she asked, 'is she pretty - my little adama?'

penda looked at the sickly girl, whose eyes exuded a yellowish pus.

'she is a beautiful girl,' she said

the herculean boubacar

the women don't wait to have one before they're pregnant with another

the baby came out all right, but i had nothing to separate it from the woman's body, nothing at all.  do you know what i did?..well, i did it with my teeth.  that was the only thing i had, so i did it with my teeth

'it isn't serious,' she said.  'it's just the heat.  she'll have to inhale some urine.'

'all right, some of you sluts go and piss!' penda cried

bernadini put his foot on the old man's neck, like a hunter posing for a photograph.  'just look at how well he prays,' he said.  'he's a real saint, this one'

happy is the man who does battle without hatred

2/24

this week i

landed in dhaka for barbershop choir catfish, different from japan by green background only.  fazlul taught bangla, five written like a fortune cookie, verbs arranged a la yoda.  i regret sending clothes to laundry service, the wealthy endanger themselves straying too far from the rest.  what is a drone but an expensive selfie-stick?  asimov's artificial intelligence commandments ought to have mentioned enthusiastic and ongoing consent

watched trebek's final three months.  cash's ring of fire nearly a preparation h jingle, hannah montana nearly alexis texas.  orwell coined "cold war"

 

read vladimir nabokov's lolita.  raven leilani's luster paraphrased, "you see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go"

when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how i see lolita)

nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food

let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since i know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet

we had highballs before turning in, and with their help, i would manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother

the mangled remains of charlotte humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of miss opposite's lawn

like that tailor with his homemade parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the eiffel tower

as if i were sitting with the small ghost of somebody i had just killed

mission dolores: good title for book.  surf-carved sandstone festoons.  a man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in russian gulch state park.  blue, blue crater lake.  a fish hatchery in idaho and the state penitentiary.  somber yellowstone park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbow of bubbling mud - symbols of my passion.  a herd of antelopes in a wildlife refuge.  our hundredth cavern, adults one dollar, lolita fifty cents.  a chateau built by a french marquess in n.d.  the corn palace in s.d.; and the huge heads of presidents carved in towering granite.  the bearded woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single.  a zoo in indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of christopher columbus' flagship.  billions of dead, or halfdead, fish-smelling may flies in every window of every eating place all along a dreary sandy shore.  fat gulls on big stones as seen from the ferry city of cheboygan, whose brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake.  a motel whose ventilator pipe passed under the city sewer.  lincoln's home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings

has private jokes of her own, transposing for instance the first letters of some of her teachers' names

carry me upstairs, please.  i feel sort of romantic to-night

a conspiracy of poplars

a maniac's masterpiece

2/17

this week i

flew to salt lake for land enclosed sea seaview workweek, fox won't stand alone.  abutting airport where i discarded bowtie birdie, flamingos facing same way (mosque nearby) strike fear in hearts of sully sullenbergers, though not the only flying menaces.  swedish, greek, funny.  one more night of eating, drinking as we please.  ecowas requested return to barracks, maintain republican posture. norway owns one point five percent of world

read purity and danger by mary douglas, a treatise on the idea of dirt and contagion..there is no such thing as dirt

the yoruba cult of a smallpox deity, for example, requires the patients to be isolated and treated only by a priest, himself recovered from the disease and therefore immune

the nuer treat monstrous births as baby hippopotamuses, accidentally born to humans and, with this labelling, the appropriate action is clear.  they gently lay them in the river where they belong..the existence of anomaly can be physically controlled.  thus, in some west african tribes the rule that twins should be killed at birth eliminates a social anomaly, if it is held that two humans could not be born from the same womb at the same time.  or take the night-crowing cocks.  if their necks are promptly wrung, they do not live to contradict the definition of a cock as a bird that crows at dawn

any young man can plausibly accuse of sorcery a reactionary old incumbent of an office which he himself is qualified to occupy when the senior obstacle has been removed..if sorcery beliefs really serve as instruments for self-promotion they also ensure that the ladder of promotion is short and shaky

freely available sorcery is a form of spiritual power biased towards failure

the sagas of the norsemen are full of crises resolves when a man suddenly discovers his luck or finds that his luck has deserted him

the dinka cut the beast longitudinally through the sexual organs if the sacrifice is intended to undo an incest; in half across the middle for celebrating a truce; they suffocate it for some occasions and trample it to death for others

pollution rules can serve to settle uncertain moral issues

the nambudiri brahmins of malabar are a small, rich, exclusive caste of priestly land-owners.  they have remained so by observing a rule forbidding the division of their estates.  in each family only the eldest son marries.  the others can keep lower-caste concubines, but never enter into marriage.  as for their unfortunate womenfolk, strict seclusion is their lot.  few of them ever marry at all until on their deathbed a rite of marriage affirms their freedom from the control of their guardians.  if they go out of their houses, their bodies are completely enveloped in clothing and umbrellas hide their faces.  when one of their brothers is married they can watch the celebration through chinks in the walls.  even at her own wedding a nambudiri woman has to be replaced in the usual public appearance of the bride by a nayar girl.  only a very rich group could afford to commit its women to a life sentence of barrenness for most and of seclusion for all

a garden is not a tapestry; if all the weeds are removed, the soil is impoverished

it is thought that animals are naturally fecund; they reproduce without pain or danger and their normal births occur in couples or in larger litters.  when a human couple produce twins or triplets they have been able to break through the normal human limitations.  in a way they are anomalous, but in the most auspicious possible way.  they have a counterpart in the animal world, and this is the benign monster to which the lele pay formal cult, the pangolin or scaly ant-eater.  its being contradicts all the most obvious animal categories.  it is scaly like a fish, but it climbs trees.  it is more like an egg-laying lizard than a mammal, yet it suckles its young.  and most significant of all, unlike other small mammals its young are born singly.  instead of running away or attacking, it curls in a modest ball and waits for the hunter to pass.  the human twin parents and the forest pangolin, both are ritualised as sources of fertility.  instead of being abhorred and utterly anomalous, the pangolin is eaten in solemn ceremony by its initiates who are thereby enabled to minister fertility to their kind

 

2/10

this week i

watched philharmonic "sit wherever you like" then swan lake (three intermissions, happy ending).  bulgarians say bravo, merci, i forgot how to clap

 

tried stepping through the national museum of military history without the barrel of a gun pointed my way

 

aim to look as good as jacques-louis david's socrates when time to drink the hemlock.  he chose death over exile to bulgaria, nowadays it's lovely

read amy schumer's the girl with the lower back tattoo

i look like a blond shrek in the a.m.

if you're a true introvert, other people are basically energy vampires

now i could have a short luncheon with smoked fish and bagels and take my closest friends to medieval times in new jersey.  just as god and golda meir intended

i have an innie, not an outie (talking about my vagina)

outside baltimore, maryland, crab cakes are 99 percent bread

we got in bed, we got naked, and i couldn't have been less present.  it was like what i would imagine pat sajak feels like at this point on wheel of fortune.  if you look deep into his eyes, he is a full-blown zombie

in college, my roommate denise couldn't leave her food lying around because i'd come home from class or the bar and find a box of twinkies and eat the whole thing.  she'd make a tray of lasagna, and i'd slowly, square by square, eat the entire dish.  i'd wake up like garfield to her screaming my name.  i had to tell her to start hiding it from me.  i couldn't even know it was in the house.  she started running out of places to hide her snacks because i would always find them.  i would ransack my own apartment like the gestapo.  one night she brought a guy home, and he found a box of devil dogs under her pillow.  he was really weirded out.  she was totally embarrassed and blamed me, but i of course acted like i didn't know what she was talking about

pilates was developed by joseph pilates, who worked with soldiers during world war ii.  he created his method to help very wounded soldiers get back into shape.  now it's mostly used by housewives who want child-soldier abs

thank god i'm a very very pretty crier

a viking funeral.  the body of amy schumer will be transported to the beach by horse-drawn carriage, because she was "worth it," and will be laid to rest in a tiny boat.  the boat should be set on fire with a flaming arrow and gently pushed out to sea

2/3