This recent article by Malcolm Gladwell on Operation Mincemeat in WWII is insane!
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Red Carpet
Here's a great article by the ever-esteemed Juan Villoro on the Mexican Narco situation:
http://nplusonemag.com/the-red-carpet
http://nplusonemag.com/the-red-carpet
All Across the Universe
After arriving in Prague A finds a second hand book store near the train station with a small English section where he buys a copy of Kafka’s The Trial. It has become a rule of his to buy a new book the moment he arrives in each city, read it, and depart the moment he finished. Books take away some of his responsibility to make choices. They inhibit the different versions of him that play out in different cities from bleeding into each other and make it easier to keep track of the ways he spends his time. His reading speed is the only variable left to chance, though typically he reads fast because he is unsure of what might happen if he were ever to stop anywhere long enough to feel at home again. This system works well for him because it keeps him moving.
Walking out of the bookstore, A feels charmed by the ancient cityscape. The beautiful façades adorning every building provoke a fairytale atmosphere that is unlike anything he has ever seen before. Up above the sky is a deep artless gray, the perfect weather for reading. A thinks about all of these things, yet none of these things as he walks into the Old Quarter of the city looking for a place to stay.
*
Much to his surprise A only gets a few pages into his new book before putting it aside. The following day the weather becomes much too pleasant to read Kafka. At first he tries to force himself to continue, but sun has an awakening effect on the city, one he wants to take part in. People pour out from every corner into the streets. A wanders aimlessly through the tendril alleyways running off Old Town Square and feels at home in the maze of cobblestones around him. There is a small café lacking a sign paces from the Astrological clock empty of tourists that he frequents each morning where he befriends the proprietress, a friendly German woman who is thrilled to meet A because she is trying learn English. In the afternoon often he sits in the middle of Wenceslas Square gazing at the façade of the National Museum. All around him traffic groans, but he doesn’t mind the sound. He likes this spot because the wide boulevard and the surrounding towers remind him of New York. Some days he sits there smoking, writing letters to the people he used to know and on others he just reclines back on the bench with his eyes closed letting the November sun pour into him.
*
Two days later the temperature drops and the gray clouds return so A slips back into his reading. He identifies with the struggles of Josef K and his inability to bring about any conclusion to his fate, though early on A thinks more than the absurd premise of K’s arrest Kafka’s masterpiece is really about the senseless ways man is forced to spend his time. When he is not reading, A wanders through the same streets he had walked the first few days but the frigid gusts that cut through the alleyways make it unpleasant to stop anywhere too long. No one he passes on the streets seems to want to be outdoors. Most rush by him, towards some interior where they will be warm again. But A doesn’t have anywhere warm to go, so he passes his time in a perpetual state of motion.
*
A few more days pass like this and nothing much happens. A tries his best to smoke less because he begins to notice a chest cold coming on. He drinks a lot of orange juice and spends more time in the hostel than he would like to. One morning at breakfast some fellow backpackers, two Brits who call him mate and two Canadians (he can tell from the patches on their backpacks), approach him. They ask A if he would mind if they join him at the table where he is eating, a request of course A obliges though he would have preferred to be left alone with his book. Not wanting to come across as insulting he closes his book and allows the scenario he had seen so many times before play out. He does not interrupt them as they offer him their friendship through stories of the places they’d been and the places they planned to go and the details from their sexual exploits with a certain French girl staying at the hostel who had apparently packed clothes that most backpackers didn’t pack. A does his best to act polite. He smiles and nods as they share the complimentary breakfast together, though A has no interest in anything they say because he has already heard these stories many times before. Most of the travelers he has met in the four months he has been on the road have either come to Europe to find life or death. It was always either a matter of indulging in some secret fantasy in order to come to terms with the death of the self that will come once they return home or a matter of killing off some reckless part of the self in order to prepare for the life that awaits their return. When it becomes A’s turn to share his own story, A does his best to keep things simple. Because he failed to understand himself it was difficult to explain himself to others. The truth behind why he had come to Europe, the messy web of disappointment and displacement that he had run away from, betrayed weaknesses that he wasn’t willing to volunteer to strangers, so instead he tells them the things they expect to hear. He offers them a loose catalog of the cities he had passed through and tells them a few dirty jokes and they respond to his stories with stories of their own and it’s only a matter of time before everyone seated at the table feels like old friends. They think A is one of them so they invite him to join them. Their plan is to sit on the Charles Bridge all day and get drunk. A declines and mentions he already has plans, though really he has none. But they press him, expressing interest in joining him if what he is planning sounds fun, so he is forced to deceive them. He makes up a lie from the text before him and he tells them that he has come to Prague specifically to see if he can find the tenement described in the first interrogation chapter of The Trial, which was said to be located on a certain Juliusstrasse. He explains that while many Kafka scholars didn’t believe that this street actually existed any longer, noting that when the Communists invaded Prague it was not an uncommon practice to change the names of streets, he believes that it does exist because it has been his life’s work to prove the existence of this street, his own personal crusade to further illuminate Kafka’s masterpiece. He makes up a Kafka scholar, allegedly his mentor, who had researched the location for over a decade and explains that it was his intention to spend his day wandering the streets on the outskirts of the city in the hills of the Lesser Quarter to see if he could verify the research of his academic friend and find the location of Josef K’s early torments. The elaborateness of his plan scares them off and once again he is alone. He sees the four of them speaking to that certain French girl in the entry way as he walks out the door. They wish him the best of luck and mention they will be around later. So perhaps it is out of a sense of guilt that A finds himself heading off toward the direction his lies prescribe, but then again it may have been just because he can’t think of anything better to do.
A doesn’t make it too far towards the Lesser Quarter before sunlight breaks through the dense clouds. The possibility of pleasant weather makes him change his mind and walk north instead. He crosses the Vltava at the Czech Bridge and climbs up to the top of Letenské Sady because he has read somewhere that it has a great view of the city and he finds himself in the mood to see a great view, though he is not sure exactly why he has this craving.
Once he reaches the top he sits on the ledge and stares out at the cityscape. The Kafka sits on the ledge next to him closed. He is not sure what he thinks of Prague yet. He is not sure if he wishes to expedite his time there, so he is hesitant to read too fast. Something about the vastness of the cityscape before him makes his thoughts grow abstract and meaningless, nothing he could explain to anyone. He picks himself up with his arms and then puts himself down again and wonders if it would be possible for him to survive if he were to slip off the ledge. There is a book that he has read that takes place over the course of an hour where the protagonist contemplates his fateful flick of the wrist, though A doesn’t remember how it ends. He is at a loss to name the book or even exactly when it was that he read it and it occurs to him that it is just as possible that this is something he had imagined, a book that he would have liked to read. So strange, he thinks, the things that one finds himself thinking about when they have come somewhere to be alone.
He closes his eyes and lifts himself up again, then puts himself down, then lifts himself up and counts how long he can hold himself up before growing tired, but then he hears a bus pull up behind him so he puts himself down and turns toward it. It’s full of tourists. They filter out of the bus and it is only seconds before the clicks of cameras and incessant chatter overwhelm the scene. The spectacle of their arrival makes him want to leave, but before he does he thinks about what they would think if he stood up, greeted them and dove off the edge. Obviously they’d be shocked, he thinks, but really they wouldn’t care.
*
A starts back down the hill towards the Vltava. The sun rays reflect off the cobblestones and the light has a blinding effect on A that takes his thoughts elsewhere to other stops along the continuous stream of cobblestones that Europe has been to him, the same street he walked upon just two months before in Amsterdam along the concentric canals that Camus once compared to Dante’s concentric chambers of hell. The book was Rimbaud, Les Illuminations. A had gone to Amsterdam to find his own illuminations. The idea was to grow sick of himself. He wanted to see if he had it in him to become a degenerate in order to eliminate his degenerate impulses and see if eliminating these impulses would offer him something illuminating. He spent his days sitting among addicts in squares and his nights chasing skirts and drugs and whatever else he could find to chase. There was one square in particular where he would often pass his afternoons with some junkies he befriended watching an awful juggler try to juggle who always had a cute little whore by his side. A would sit on the curb and get high and make bets with the junkies on how long it would take the juggler to drop one of his balls. Loser had to score the next bag; winner got his fix for free. A must have spent at least two weeks doing this, just nodding out and watching the juggler. Eventually he came to understand that there was an arrangement between the juggler and the girl. It seemed that for a cigarette every 10 minutes she would stick around and watch him try to juggle. If there wasn’t a cigarette forget about it. A few times A saw her walk. Without her watching him the juggler preformed even worse. It was a curious arrangement and after awhile A began to wonder which of them had the better part of the deal. A wondered if it was better to be watched or if it was better to have something to watch. A’s first impulse was to side with the girl. At least she was getting paid for her trouble. A wasn’t sure what the juggler was getting out of the deal. One of the junkies thought that maybe having her around got the juggler off, but A didn’t buy that. A thought it was lucky for the juggler the girl liked to smoke and all it took was a pack of cigarettes each day to get whatever he was getting out of having her around, but in the end he never really figured them out. He finished Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations without finding any illuminations of his own and left the city and the junkies and the juggler behind. This was all Amsterdam had been to him, just another book he had begun with the highest of intentions only find that he was in just another place that was easy to walk away from. Just another stint of cobblestones among endless strains of cobblestones that were the same as the cobblestones he was currently walking on in Prague, the cobblestones in Old Town Square that were already thick with tourists even though it was barely noon.
*
There was a sizable crowd gathered around a Mariachi guitarist playing beneath the Astrological clock that was still frozen from the recent flood. Up front A sees a wealthy American family whose youngest son, a boy not older than 5 or 6, was dancing to the lonely sounds of the Mariachi’s guitar. A smiles at the sight of the boy and nods his head in sync with the beat, as do many other people in the crowd. An old gypsy woman carrying a Polaroid pushes her way through the crowd near the guitarist and snaps a photograph of the boy from a low angle that’s sure to capture the dead clock behind the Mariachi. 100 crowns, she says waving the picture into the face of a well built American man standing nearby and wearing the same white tennis sweater as the dancing boy. His father, A thinks. The American turns his head from side to side and holds his hands in the air, as if he doesn’t understand what has been said to him, though the gypsy is speaking in English. A wonders if he doesn’t understand that she only wants $5, but then again maybe the American is just cheap. At his refusal the gypsy turns away from the man and holds the photo up to the rest of the crowd. An old Czech man wearing a bright purple sweatshirt steps forward and pays the gypsy for the photo. He holds it up in the air and waves it in the American’s face as the gypsy had done, though more to mock her than to be insulting it seems. After waving it he shrugs his shoulders and makes eye contact with the boy’s father as if to say where do people like the gypsy get off. Then he slips the photograph into his back pocket and disappears into the crowd. The Mariachi continues to play and the little boy continues to dance. The American looks away from them out into the crowd, but the man in the purple sweatshirt is gone. A loses interest in the scene and walks away.
*
The café is more crowded than it typically is at this hour of the day. On the left side of the small room six noisy Germans, tourists A thinks, sit around a table full of beer mugs. Five of six men in working clothes are slumped around the back bar. The proprietress approaches A from the back, greets him in English and motions for him to take a seat at a table on the other side of the restaurant from the Germans where he typically sits. A coffee, right? she says. Not today, A says, I think I’ll have a beer. It’s my birthday, he says, though it is not his birthday. It’s just something A says because he feels he needs to explain his request for a beer so early in the day, though as the words come out his mouth he realizes that it probably isn’t necessary for him to explain himself. She asks him what kind of beer he would like. A tells her that whatever the Germans were drinking would be fine. But she protests. I’m afraid I can’t do that, she says rolling her eyes in way A assumes is meant to be flirty, though she is at least thirty years his senior. A is not quite sure how to respond, so he maintains a neutral expression. Excuse me? he says. They’re tourists so I serve them Budvar, she says, but you my friend are a poor student, so why not let me serve you another nice Czech beer that costs half the price? A agrees to this and thanks her for the suggestion. It can be our little secret, she says, because we understand each other. A looks at her ass as she walks back to the bar and thanks her again when she serves him his beer.
A tries to lose himself in writing letters and entertains the idea of purchasing some birthday cards to send to the people he knows, only writing the notes inside the cards to himself using the voices of his friends. He could write what they might have to say to him if it really were his birthday. He likes the idea and starts to make a list of people he’d send cards to and jot down what he thinks each person might say, but once he starts thinking about the ways his friends might react to this, he decides that it isn’t something he wants to do.
Instead he opens his book. A tries his best to immerse himself deep into Kafka’s dreamscape and abandon his own troubles. He tries his best to become Josef K and adopt his troubles instead. He had read the book years before and recognizes the chapter he has come to. It’s the part when K’s uncle takes him to see his friend the lawyer, only K doesn’t end up listening to the lawyer’s advice on his pending case. After his uncle and the lawyer start talking, K slips out of the room and fools around with the lawyer’s maid. The chapter is all about K’s growing indifference, though not in the sense that K is indifferent to his uncle’s fury over K’s lack of social etiquette and arguable indiscretion (though clearly he is), but more so because indifference is one of the few freedoms K has left. The idea, A thinks, is to point out how absurd it is to have everything taken away from you but your right not to give a damn.
A likes this idea and wants to contemplate it further in terms of himself, but the table of noisy Germans makes if difficult for him to concentrate and continue these thoughts. He sees the proprietress speaking to them, taking their orders he assumes, so he tries to capture her attention by nodding his chin, intending to ask her if she’d mind asking them to quiet down a bit, but she only winks at him in reply. On her way back to the bar, she winks at A again and tosses her hands in the air. Her smile is a suggestive one, as if to say aren’t you proud of how easily it is for me to rip them off. Under the dim interior light her eyes are a deep murky blue set in a musk of stale yellow light like the reflection of the sun setting on the Loire he had watched when he had been in Tours with his friend S two years before.
*
A was composing a poem entitled J’adore le whiskey though he wasn’t drinking whiskey at the time. It was the summer after his sophomore year of college. S and him had spent the previous spring selling drugs in order to avoid another summer of working restaurant jobs and go to France instead where they had been bumming around for a month. Paris passed like an acid trip. The weeks they spent there were one long endless night nodding out from dream to dream. But in the end the city drained their resources, so they had to head down to the Loire valley to find seasonal work on vineyards in order to avoid returning to the States early. They were sitting on the riverbank on the north side of Tours splitting a bottle of cheap red wine when the auburn reflection of the sun sinking into the river reminded A of whiskey so he wrote about whiskey because it seemed that the universe was telling him to write about whiskey and back then that was all the motivation he needed to do anything. His thoughts were simple those days, and he was never ashamed of the things he thought to do because he never cared about explaining himself. S was smoking cigarettes one after the next and saying that all his life he’d been a chameleon in the same way smoke disappears into the air and is lost forever only moments after it is exhaled. In front of them a young man was riding a bicycle along the riverbank precariously close to the edge. Je suis immortal, the boy yelled to A and S, winking at them as he rode by. Je suis immortal, the boy said again and then he started screaming it, repeating the phrase over and over again as he rode on.
A was uncertain if the boy said these words to urge himself on or to entertain his friends, a group of French students gathered about twenty feet away watching the French boy ride and cheering on his intoxicated proclamation of his inability to die. A and S stood up to express their interest in joining the students’ party that would perhaps commence after the boy finished his ride. They passed their bottle back and forth and watched the French boy ride on. And at that moment A wanted to be the French boy; A wished that he had been born in France and was as drunk as the French boy and that he had the guts to ride a bicycle so close to the riverbank and was heading back to the group of students twenty feet away where French girls and a case of beer awaited. He watched the boy ride on with a mixture of pride and envy that made it easy for him to second guess himself when he saw the boy slip over the edge. But then there was the sound of the splash and A’s memory of peering down into the water when he and S arrived at the riverbank earlier: a 10 foot drop into the strong current below, then the sound of the girls crying out in terror and the sensation of being overwhelmed by everything.
*
A stands frozen. He watches S follow some of the French boy’s friends down the riverbank. He feels the fingernails of some of the girls clutching into him, the sound of their voices asking him things in a language he can barely understand. He thinks that he should go for help but he doesn’t know where to go so he stands still. He looks across the river and takes another drink. Out across the water a movie A never wants to end plays out before him. The boy emerges from the slick surface of the river near the middle of it still on his bicycle and rides into the sky away from the commotion he has caused. He levitates through the air that smells fresh with wine and the first hints of summer. It’s the most beautiful thing A has ever seen. Because he is dead there is no direction for him to go but forward, no reason for him to look back any longer and he doesn’t. A drains the rest of the wine and throws the bottle as hard as he can out across the water as he watches the French boy disappear into the gray horizon.
*
A few hours later A is on a train somewhere east of Prague enroute to Budapest but his thoughts remain in Tours. It is still a blur to him, but he remembers that the rest of the night had gone badly. Loud sirens and questions he doesn’t understand. The next day he and S caught a train out of town first thing. On the way to the station A stoped by a used bookstore and found a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the foreign section. He bought the book and easily entered into its the universe as the train sped off towards the south. S suggested they go to Bordeaux because he heard it was cheap and had plenty of jobs, so they went there. After working on a vineyard for a month they spent the rest of the summer living in modest room that had a television and a shower. They passed their time drinking the cheap wine, smoking cigarillos, and watching soccer. It’s the best summer A ever had. When the time came for him to go home he didn’t want to leave, but he didn’t have it in him to stay, the guts to ride out into a river and not give a damn about sinking.
A reaches into his bag for his book but he can’t find it. He must have left it on the table in the café in his rush to leave. He is frustrated by his carelessness because he was enjoying Kafka’s story, but reasons that he had never intended to take it with him out of Prague in the first place. He could always buy another copy in another city and pick up where he left off.
Outside the window it is too dark to make out any of the landscape. The opaque glass reveals only the reflection of his face. The black eye the German gave him doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. The cool feel of the window against his skin seems to relax the swelling. Beyond the window a world blurs by that he cannot see but knows is there. Hours pass by before A is able to get away from himself through distraction. The idea is for his only thought to be that he is sitting on a train enroute to Budapest traveling away from Tours and Prague and all the other places he has been. The idea is for A to think of motion in order to stop dwelling on his sudden departure from the café, which he eventually does, though he is uncertain if the ease at which his thoughts shift speaks positively or negatively of him. He doesn’t know if it is good or bad that it only takes him a few hours to get over the fact that there was nothing he could have said them, that there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done to stop them from beating him, nothing he could have said to the Germans that would have convinced them he hadn’t meant to throw his glass.
Walking out of the bookstore, A feels charmed by the ancient cityscape. The beautiful façades adorning every building provoke a fairytale atmosphere that is unlike anything he has ever seen before. Up above the sky is a deep artless gray, the perfect weather for reading. A thinks about all of these things, yet none of these things as he walks into the Old Quarter of the city looking for a place to stay.
*
Much to his surprise A only gets a few pages into his new book before putting it aside. The following day the weather becomes much too pleasant to read Kafka. At first he tries to force himself to continue, but sun has an awakening effect on the city, one he wants to take part in. People pour out from every corner into the streets. A wanders aimlessly through the tendril alleyways running off Old Town Square and feels at home in the maze of cobblestones around him. There is a small café lacking a sign paces from the Astrological clock empty of tourists that he frequents each morning where he befriends the proprietress, a friendly German woman who is thrilled to meet A because she is trying learn English. In the afternoon often he sits in the middle of Wenceslas Square gazing at the façade of the National Museum. All around him traffic groans, but he doesn’t mind the sound. He likes this spot because the wide boulevard and the surrounding towers remind him of New York. Some days he sits there smoking, writing letters to the people he used to know and on others he just reclines back on the bench with his eyes closed letting the November sun pour into him.
*
Two days later the temperature drops and the gray clouds return so A slips back into his reading. He identifies with the struggles of Josef K and his inability to bring about any conclusion to his fate, though early on A thinks more than the absurd premise of K’s arrest Kafka’s masterpiece is really about the senseless ways man is forced to spend his time. When he is not reading, A wanders through the same streets he had walked the first few days but the frigid gusts that cut through the alleyways make it unpleasant to stop anywhere too long. No one he passes on the streets seems to want to be outdoors. Most rush by him, towards some interior where they will be warm again. But A doesn’t have anywhere warm to go, so he passes his time in a perpetual state of motion.
*
A few more days pass like this and nothing much happens. A tries his best to smoke less because he begins to notice a chest cold coming on. He drinks a lot of orange juice and spends more time in the hostel than he would like to. One morning at breakfast some fellow backpackers, two Brits who call him mate and two Canadians (he can tell from the patches on their backpacks), approach him. They ask A if he would mind if they join him at the table where he is eating, a request of course A obliges though he would have preferred to be left alone with his book. Not wanting to come across as insulting he closes his book and allows the scenario he had seen so many times before play out. He does not interrupt them as they offer him their friendship through stories of the places they’d been and the places they planned to go and the details from their sexual exploits with a certain French girl staying at the hostel who had apparently packed clothes that most backpackers didn’t pack. A does his best to act polite. He smiles and nods as they share the complimentary breakfast together, though A has no interest in anything they say because he has already heard these stories many times before. Most of the travelers he has met in the four months he has been on the road have either come to Europe to find life or death. It was always either a matter of indulging in some secret fantasy in order to come to terms with the death of the self that will come once they return home or a matter of killing off some reckless part of the self in order to prepare for the life that awaits their return. When it becomes A’s turn to share his own story, A does his best to keep things simple. Because he failed to understand himself it was difficult to explain himself to others. The truth behind why he had come to Europe, the messy web of disappointment and displacement that he had run away from, betrayed weaknesses that he wasn’t willing to volunteer to strangers, so instead he tells them the things they expect to hear. He offers them a loose catalog of the cities he had passed through and tells them a few dirty jokes and they respond to his stories with stories of their own and it’s only a matter of time before everyone seated at the table feels like old friends. They think A is one of them so they invite him to join them. Their plan is to sit on the Charles Bridge all day and get drunk. A declines and mentions he already has plans, though really he has none. But they press him, expressing interest in joining him if what he is planning sounds fun, so he is forced to deceive them. He makes up a lie from the text before him and he tells them that he has come to Prague specifically to see if he can find the tenement described in the first interrogation chapter of The Trial, which was said to be located on a certain Juliusstrasse. He explains that while many Kafka scholars didn’t believe that this street actually existed any longer, noting that when the Communists invaded Prague it was not an uncommon practice to change the names of streets, he believes that it does exist because it has been his life’s work to prove the existence of this street, his own personal crusade to further illuminate Kafka’s masterpiece. He makes up a Kafka scholar, allegedly his mentor, who had researched the location for over a decade and explains that it was his intention to spend his day wandering the streets on the outskirts of the city in the hills of the Lesser Quarter to see if he could verify the research of his academic friend and find the location of Josef K’s early torments. The elaborateness of his plan scares them off and once again he is alone. He sees the four of them speaking to that certain French girl in the entry way as he walks out the door. They wish him the best of luck and mention they will be around later. So perhaps it is out of a sense of guilt that A finds himself heading off toward the direction his lies prescribe, but then again it may have been just because he can’t think of anything better to do.
A doesn’t make it too far towards the Lesser Quarter before sunlight breaks through the dense clouds. The possibility of pleasant weather makes him change his mind and walk north instead. He crosses the Vltava at the Czech Bridge and climbs up to the top of Letenské Sady because he has read somewhere that it has a great view of the city and he finds himself in the mood to see a great view, though he is not sure exactly why he has this craving.
Once he reaches the top he sits on the ledge and stares out at the cityscape. The Kafka sits on the ledge next to him closed. He is not sure what he thinks of Prague yet. He is not sure if he wishes to expedite his time there, so he is hesitant to read too fast. Something about the vastness of the cityscape before him makes his thoughts grow abstract and meaningless, nothing he could explain to anyone. He picks himself up with his arms and then puts himself down again and wonders if it would be possible for him to survive if he were to slip off the ledge. There is a book that he has read that takes place over the course of an hour where the protagonist contemplates his fateful flick of the wrist, though A doesn’t remember how it ends. He is at a loss to name the book or even exactly when it was that he read it and it occurs to him that it is just as possible that this is something he had imagined, a book that he would have liked to read. So strange, he thinks, the things that one finds himself thinking about when they have come somewhere to be alone.
He closes his eyes and lifts himself up again, then puts himself down, then lifts himself up and counts how long he can hold himself up before growing tired, but then he hears a bus pull up behind him so he puts himself down and turns toward it. It’s full of tourists. They filter out of the bus and it is only seconds before the clicks of cameras and incessant chatter overwhelm the scene. The spectacle of their arrival makes him want to leave, but before he does he thinks about what they would think if he stood up, greeted them and dove off the edge. Obviously they’d be shocked, he thinks, but really they wouldn’t care.
*
A starts back down the hill towards the Vltava. The sun rays reflect off the cobblestones and the light has a blinding effect on A that takes his thoughts elsewhere to other stops along the continuous stream of cobblestones that Europe has been to him, the same street he walked upon just two months before in Amsterdam along the concentric canals that Camus once compared to Dante’s concentric chambers of hell. The book was Rimbaud, Les Illuminations. A had gone to Amsterdam to find his own illuminations. The idea was to grow sick of himself. He wanted to see if he had it in him to become a degenerate in order to eliminate his degenerate impulses and see if eliminating these impulses would offer him something illuminating. He spent his days sitting among addicts in squares and his nights chasing skirts and drugs and whatever else he could find to chase. There was one square in particular where he would often pass his afternoons with some junkies he befriended watching an awful juggler try to juggle who always had a cute little whore by his side. A would sit on the curb and get high and make bets with the junkies on how long it would take the juggler to drop one of his balls. Loser had to score the next bag; winner got his fix for free. A must have spent at least two weeks doing this, just nodding out and watching the juggler. Eventually he came to understand that there was an arrangement between the juggler and the girl. It seemed that for a cigarette every 10 minutes she would stick around and watch him try to juggle. If there wasn’t a cigarette forget about it. A few times A saw her walk. Without her watching him the juggler preformed even worse. It was a curious arrangement and after awhile A began to wonder which of them had the better part of the deal. A wondered if it was better to be watched or if it was better to have something to watch. A’s first impulse was to side with the girl. At least she was getting paid for her trouble. A wasn’t sure what the juggler was getting out of the deal. One of the junkies thought that maybe having her around got the juggler off, but A didn’t buy that. A thought it was lucky for the juggler the girl liked to smoke and all it took was a pack of cigarettes each day to get whatever he was getting out of having her around, but in the end he never really figured them out. He finished Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations without finding any illuminations of his own and left the city and the junkies and the juggler behind. This was all Amsterdam had been to him, just another book he had begun with the highest of intentions only find that he was in just another place that was easy to walk away from. Just another stint of cobblestones among endless strains of cobblestones that were the same as the cobblestones he was currently walking on in Prague, the cobblestones in Old Town Square that were already thick with tourists even though it was barely noon.
*
There was a sizable crowd gathered around a Mariachi guitarist playing beneath the Astrological clock that was still frozen from the recent flood. Up front A sees a wealthy American family whose youngest son, a boy not older than 5 or 6, was dancing to the lonely sounds of the Mariachi’s guitar. A smiles at the sight of the boy and nods his head in sync with the beat, as do many other people in the crowd. An old gypsy woman carrying a Polaroid pushes her way through the crowd near the guitarist and snaps a photograph of the boy from a low angle that’s sure to capture the dead clock behind the Mariachi. 100 crowns, she says waving the picture into the face of a well built American man standing nearby and wearing the same white tennis sweater as the dancing boy. His father, A thinks. The American turns his head from side to side and holds his hands in the air, as if he doesn’t understand what has been said to him, though the gypsy is speaking in English. A wonders if he doesn’t understand that she only wants $5, but then again maybe the American is just cheap. At his refusal the gypsy turns away from the man and holds the photo up to the rest of the crowd. An old Czech man wearing a bright purple sweatshirt steps forward and pays the gypsy for the photo. He holds it up in the air and waves it in the American’s face as the gypsy had done, though more to mock her than to be insulting it seems. After waving it he shrugs his shoulders and makes eye contact with the boy’s father as if to say where do people like the gypsy get off. Then he slips the photograph into his back pocket and disappears into the crowd. The Mariachi continues to play and the little boy continues to dance. The American looks away from them out into the crowd, but the man in the purple sweatshirt is gone. A loses interest in the scene and walks away.
*
The café is more crowded than it typically is at this hour of the day. On the left side of the small room six noisy Germans, tourists A thinks, sit around a table full of beer mugs. Five of six men in working clothes are slumped around the back bar. The proprietress approaches A from the back, greets him in English and motions for him to take a seat at a table on the other side of the restaurant from the Germans where he typically sits. A coffee, right? she says. Not today, A says, I think I’ll have a beer. It’s my birthday, he says, though it is not his birthday. It’s just something A says because he feels he needs to explain his request for a beer so early in the day, though as the words come out his mouth he realizes that it probably isn’t necessary for him to explain himself. She asks him what kind of beer he would like. A tells her that whatever the Germans were drinking would be fine. But she protests. I’m afraid I can’t do that, she says rolling her eyes in way A assumes is meant to be flirty, though she is at least thirty years his senior. A is not quite sure how to respond, so he maintains a neutral expression. Excuse me? he says. They’re tourists so I serve them Budvar, she says, but you my friend are a poor student, so why not let me serve you another nice Czech beer that costs half the price? A agrees to this and thanks her for the suggestion. It can be our little secret, she says, because we understand each other. A looks at her ass as she walks back to the bar and thanks her again when she serves him his beer.
A tries to lose himself in writing letters and entertains the idea of purchasing some birthday cards to send to the people he knows, only writing the notes inside the cards to himself using the voices of his friends. He could write what they might have to say to him if it really were his birthday. He likes the idea and starts to make a list of people he’d send cards to and jot down what he thinks each person might say, but once he starts thinking about the ways his friends might react to this, he decides that it isn’t something he wants to do.
Instead he opens his book. A tries his best to immerse himself deep into Kafka’s dreamscape and abandon his own troubles. He tries his best to become Josef K and adopt his troubles instead. He had read the book years before and recognizes the chapter he has come to. It’s the part when K’s uncle takes him to see his friend the lawyer, only K doesn’t end up listening to the lawyer’s advice on his pending case. After his uncle and the lawyer start talking, K slips out of the room and fools around with the lawyer’s maid. The chapter is all about K’s growing indifference, though not in the sense that K is indifferent to his uncle’s fury over K’s lack of social etiquette and arguable indiscretion (though clearly he is), but more so because indifference is one of the few freedoms K has left. The idea, A thinks, is to point out how absurd it is to have everything taken away from you but your right not to give a damn.
A likes this idea and wants to contemplate it further in terms of himself, but the table of noisy Germans makes if difficult for him to concentrate and continue these thoughts. He sees the proprietress speaking to them, taking their orders he assumes, so he tries to capture her attention by nodding his chin, intending to ask her if she’d mind asking them to quiet down a bit, but she only winks at him in reply. On her way back to the bar, she winks at A again and tosses her hands in the air. Her smile is a suggestive one, as if to say aren’t you proud of how easily it is for me to rip them off. Under the dim interior light her eyes are a deep murky blue set in a musk of stale yellow light like the reflection of the sun setting on the Loire he had watched when he had been in Tours with his friend S two years before.
*
A was composing a poem entitled J’adore le whiskey though he wasn’t drinking whiskey at the time. It was the summer after his sophomore year of college. S and him had spent the previous spring selling drugs in order to avoid another summer of working restaurant jobs and go to France instead where they had been bumming around for a month. Paris passed like an acid trip. The weeks they spent there were one long endless night nodding out from dream to dream. But in the end the city drained their resources, so they had to head down to the Loire valley to find seasonal work on vineyards in order to avoid returning to the States early. They were sitting on the riverbank on the north side of Tours splitting a bottle of cheap red wine when the auburn reflection of the sun sinking into the river reminded A of whiskey so he wrote about whiskey because it seemed that the universe was telling him to write about whiskey and back then that was all the motivation he needed to do anything. His thoughts were simple those days, and he was never ashamed of the things he thought to do because he never cared about explaining himself. S was smoking cigarettes one after the next and saying that all his life he’d been a chameleon in the same way smoke disappears into the air and is lost forever only moments after it is exhaled. In front of them a young man was riding a bicycle along the riverbank precariously close to the edge. Je suis immortal, the boy yelled to A and S, winking at them as he rode by. Je suis immortal, the boy said again and then he started screaming it, repeating the phrase over and over again as he rode on.
A was uncertain if the boy said these words to urge himself on or to entertain his friends, a group of French students gathered about twenty feet away watching the French boy ride and cheering on his intoxicated proclamation of his inability to die. A and S stood up to express their interest in joining the students’ party that would perhaps commence after the boy finished his ride. They passed their bottle back and forth and watched the French boy ride on. And at that moment A wanted to be the French boy; A wished that he had been born in France and was as drunk as the French boy and that he had the guts to ride a bicycle so close to the riverbank and was heading back to the group of students twenty feet away where French girls and a case of beer awaited. He watched the boy ride on with a mixture of pride and envy that made it easy for him to second guess himself when he saw the boy slip over the edge. But then there was the sound of the splash and A’s memory of peering down into the water when he and S arrived at the riverbank earlier: a 10 foot drop into the strong current below, then the sound of the girls crying out in terror and the sensation of being overwhelmed by everything.
*
A stands frozen. He watches S follow some of the French boy’s friends down the riverbank. He feels the fingernails of some of the girls clutching into him, the sound of their voices asking him things in a language he can barely understand. He thinks that he should go for help but he doesn’t know where to go so he stands still. He looks across the river and takes another drink. Out across the water a movie A never wants to end plays out before him. The boy emerges from the slick surface of the river near the middle of it still on his bicycle and rides into the sky away from the commotion he has caused. He levitates through the air that smells fresh with wine and the first hints of summer. It’s the most beautiful thing A has ever seen. Because he is dead there is no direction for him to go but forward, no reason for him to look back any longer and he doesn’t. A drains the rest of the wine and throws the bottle as hard as he can out across the water as he watches the French boy disappear into the gray horizon.
*
A few hours later A is on a train somewhere east of Prague enroute to Budapest but his thoughts remain in Tours. It is still a blur to him, but he remembers that the rest of the night had gone badly. Loud sirens and questions he doesn’t understand. The next day he and S caught a train out of town first thing. On the way to the station A stoped by a used bookstore and found a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the foreign section. He bought the book and easily entered into its the universe as the train sped off towards the south. S suggested they go to Bordeaux because he heard it was cheap and had plenty of jobs, so they went there. After working on a vineyard for a month they spent the rest of the summer living in modest room that had a television and a shower. They passed their time drinking the cheap wine, smoking cigarillos, and watching soccer. It’s the best summer A ever had. When the time came for him to go home he didn’t want to leave, but he didn’t have it in him to stay, the guts to ride out into a river and not give a damn about sinking.
A reaches into his bag for his book but he can’t find it. He must have left it on the table in the café in his rush to leave. He is frustrated by his carelessness because he was enjoying Kafka’s story, but reasons that he had never intended to take it with him out of Prague in the first place. He could always buy another copy in another city and pick up where he left off.
Outside the window it is too dark to make out any of the landscape. The opaque glass reveals only the reflection of his face. The black eye the German gave him doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. The cool feel of the window against his skin seems to relax the swelling. Beyond the window a world blurs by that he cannot see but knows is there. Hours pass by before A is able to get away from himself through distraction. The idea is for his only thought to be that he is sitting on a train enroute to Budapest traveling away from Tours and Prague and all the other places he has been. The idea is for A to think of motion in order to stop dwelling on his sudden departure from the café, which he eventually does, though he is uncertain if the ease at which his thoughts shift speaks positively or negatively of him. He doesn’t know if it is good or bad that it only takes him a few hours to get over the fact that there was nothing he could have said them, that there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done to stop them from beating him, nothing he could have said to the Germans that would have convinced them he hadn’t meant to throw his glass.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Translation of Bolano's Infamous Heroin Essay online
That's right. Check it out. I don't care if it's fact or fiction. The cadence of the prose here is pretty killer.
http://www.eyeshot.net/bolanobeach.html
http://www.eyeshot.net/bolanobeach.html
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