to romanticize the stalker.

The silhouette of a man appeared in profile, so, simultaneously, did thousands. There really were thousands. He had just opened his eyes, and the teeming streets were seething, seething, too, were the men who worked all day. This particular silhouette emerged from the wall of an enormous, unbearable building, an edifice which looked as if it were designed for suffocation, and which was a bank. The silhouette, detached from the wall now, oscillated, jostled by other shapes, not visibly behaving as an individual, pushed and pulled in various directions, less by its own anxieties than by the sum of the anxieties of the thousands of people surrounding it. But this oscillation was only apparent; in reality, it was the shortest distance between toil and sleep, between affliction and boredom, between suffering and death.

The other man shut his eyes for a few moments, and opened them again just as the silhouette was being pocketed by the metro, and disappearing. There was a wave of silence, and then the intransigeant and its fellow evening papers started yelling on the boulevard again.

For years now, this same instant had been exactly repeated, every day, with the exception of Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. He had nothing to do with all this. He didn’t work, but he had got into the habit of coming here between five and eight, and not budging. Sometimes he would stretch out a hand and pick something up; that day, it was a silhouette.

The silhouette, meanwhile, was arriving at Obonne. Its wife had got the supper ready; she too worked in an office. The assistant manager was always maneuvering her into a dark corner, and so was the manager. No sooner had she got away from their hands than she became exposed to those of the metro. And no sooner had she finished work there than she began all over again here. The child was dozing under the lamp, waiting for supper. The silhouette was waiting for supper too, feeling its feet swelling, with one arm hanging between its legs, its hand gripping the crossbar of its chair, for fear the chair might run away. He was reading the Journal. Or rather, he wasn’t reading it. He was staring at the letter n in the word Ministry. He went on staring at it until the soup was served. And after a bit of cheese with a lot of bread, he hypnotized the letter i. The boy didn’t wait for the cheese to make his escape, and went off in a complete daze to live through numerous pollutions in his childish bed. The wife did the dishes and various household chores. And by 10 o’clock, the trio was fast asleep.

…
The first two pages of the Raymond Queneau novel, Witch Grass.

kid’s got rhythm.

There’s a new album coming out; we’ve got a new drummer. The implied read: the band’s personality will flip with a simple change of percussion. I like the simplicity. I like how the idea extends to people, too. That personal reinvention might hinge on something as simple as a percussive switch. That an individual has a very specific rhythm to their person isn’t a stretch. The medium man is irrefutably written to a four-four beat. The financial world keeps its people primed to two beats per measure, the stack of movable cash slapping tables; a rhythmic sublime. To their foreheads is penned the guiding signature of industrious greed, prestissimo; as quickly as possible. In another thought, the girl with the frills in her skirt, the slow and carefully articulated words that comprise her spoken melody; she walks like a waltz, her thoughts turning in throws of three. The boy across from her smiles, but a mismatched beat negates their start.

…

The Apple engineer has lost his fit, he’s hopped up on adderol and whippets. A four-four by nature squeezed into a two-four beat. He’s the sort of man who necessarily loses the rhythm of the piece; the fingers, arms and feet start spilling out, an eventual turn to a spiritual retreat (he finds god, family, or an unfortunate disease).

…

I met a girl who turns in two-four.
I know a boy who walks in six-eight.
I couldn’t follow the words of a woman who talked in two-two.
I listened to a couple court in three-four.

…

I never finish anything.

ibsenism.

“Romance is boring,” she intoned, adding as an after-thought, “I’m poly-something or other.”

Hands settled on her hips, the hardliner stance steadies the words, meets the rebuttal of his stare without care. James had always thought himself best settled into two, that it made sense to subvert the individual, to begin his sentences with the combination of he and she, “we’re swell, of course.”

She was less convinced, thought the world best suited to drifting through; fingers grappling at foul winds, the script negated, flailing about where the whim might bend. The method actor, merging scenes, swapping leading men where the papered landscape would tear through.

“But, you know, insomuch as regular coitus goes, I’m game,” she added, hurriedly, conscious of his sinking hair, the wear of emotions with its turns and curls.

“That’s enough, isn’t it?”

…

“i totally read that in high-school”

The red haired bookstore girl had me know she loved the book; a sly wink, the double click, sold.

Machiavelli on fortune: I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary… to conquer her by force.

you’re the bedroom dancing coward.

There was this movie, made with a man in a room; ordinary, white. He has his bedroom, empty, save for a mattress and a stack of books. There’s a window at the far end, opposite the door, leaking the ambiance of some street scene. The man in the room is slight, chopped hair trailing over ears and ends, and a body held together by the grace of stretched flesh. Leaning over to a corner, he shifts a book; a speaker revealed. Tearing open a wall socket he pushes in the chord. The light turns to green and the feedback burns, a chord played twice. From his pocket he pulls a joint; lit, taken to lips. His senses hush, the burnt paper trailing up; the crackle shifts with each pull. The man had his ambition spurned; had his intentions turned, sent home amidst a flurry of cussing queens. The man wakes up each morning, takes his face into the mirror, peers; speaks in jest, “You’re the coward I like best.”

The day done; he cuts the nine hours clean. And when it’s through he’s back where he’s always been; the man in the bedroom, high, shifting limbs to rhythmic whims.
…

hold that smile till i’m ready, will you.

On Javier Marias’s book Written Lives there is an essay on photographs of writers. Among the photographs reproduced is one of Samuel Beckett sitting in the corner of a bare room. Beckett looks wary, and indeed Marias describes his look as “hunted.” The question is, hunted, hounded by what or whom? The most obvious answer is: hounded by the photographer. Did Beckett really decide of his own free will to sit in a corner, at the intersection of three dimensional axes, gazing upward, or did the photographer persuade him to sit there? In such a position, subjected to ten or twenty or thirty flashes of the camera, with a figure crouching over you, it is not too hard to feel haunted.

The fact is that photographers arrive for a shooting session with some preconception, often of a cliched sort, of what kind of person their subject is, and strive to substantiate that cliche in the photographs they take (or, to follow the idiom of other languages, the photographs they make). Not only do they pose their subject as the cliche dictates, but when they return to their studio they select from among their shots those that come closest to the cliche. Thus we arrive at a paradox: the more time the photographer has to do justice to his subject, the less likely it is that justice will be done.

…

An excerpt from the JM Coetzee novel, Diary of a Bad Year.

the idea.

A year before he died by his own hand, my friend Gyula spoke to me about eros as he knew it in the autumn of his days.

In his youth in Hungary, said Gyula, he had been a great womanizer. But as he grew older, though he remained as keenly receptive to feminine beauty as ever, the need to make love to women in the flesh receded. To all outward appearances he became the chastest of men.

Such outward chastity was possible, he said, because he had mastered the art of conducting a love affair through all its stages, from infatuation to consummation, wholly within his mind. How could he do that? The indispensable first step was to capture what he called a “living image” of the beloved, and make it his own. Upon this image he would then dwell, giving breath to it, until he had reached a point where, still in the realm of the imagination, he could begin to make love to this succubus of his, and eventually conduct her into the utmost transports; and this whole passionate history would remain unbeknown to the earthly original.

[...]

I think of Gyula and his harem of images. Is it one of the consequences of growing old that one no longer needs the thing itself, that the idea of the thing suffices — as, in matters of the heart, the entertainment of a possibility, called ideal love by Gyula but more familiar to ordinary people as flirtation, may become a substitute, a not unwelcome substitute, for love itself?

…

An excerpt from the JM Coetzee novel, Diary of a Bad Year.

the emergency.

It’s him in the emergency room. Five circles stuck to his chest, trampling, twisting hair; wires intervene to reveal his beep. The nurse tweaks a knob, glances down, exclaims, “O2 stats are concerning. Breathe.” He’s in a small room, one of many; three beds on each side, a frail curtain dividing the plot and scene. To his right, the panicked wife, moaning in a manner not dissimilar to a sound he’s heard before–”I’m dying, I’m dying! I can’t take any pills, the pills are killing me.”

The doctor is bundled into her room by a series of buttoned pleas.

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve been crying. You’re hyperventilating,” he insists, plain faced and with a disregarding ease. From his palm comes a poke that has her calmed, and to his nurse he winks as he slides out.

There’s a nurse assigned to our boy’s bed, Joy. A chosen name, he assumes. Asian and stern, a heady face that corners hard–at odds with the etiquette of a practiced voice that asks, “Well hello dear, you in any pain? We can give you some pain medication that’ll make you feel very good!”

The frown defies the chipper sound.

A new man gets wheeled into the booth to his left. He never gets the face, but the voice is deep and coarse, a beautiful thing. Imagined attached to a white man of seventy, thick glasses that rest easily on a sumptuous nose, the framing set with wispy white hair that’s kept its hold. The discourse with the nurse reveals his role in the piece, lymphoma and on chemo for three treatments so far. He tells her he’s had an episode tonight, at dinner, where he became dizzy and started losing words. The wife, a meager voice, concurs.

“It’s true doctor. And he’s gone hard of hearing, he has.”

Through some exchanged giggles, the husband explodes, “Honey! I just realized, this is the third time you’ve taken me to the ER! We’re about even now, right?”

“Gosh, you’re right. You took me in three times too. We’re both dying right on time.”

For an hour they go quiet. Then he pipes up with a bladder plea, “Close the curtain honey, and grab that pot, I’m going to need to take a tinkle.”

As the trickle starts splashing the pot, giggling between the two of them starts, with her shouting out in teenage glory, “Oh dear, honey–you’re getting it everywhere! hehehe, this is what those kids mean by water sports, isn’t it?”

Settling back into his head, he guffaws a few last puffs, then adds, “Nigger cock.”

The wife, audibly startled, enquires, “You’re not making any sense, dear.”

And again, he blurts, “Nigger cock! I mean, if I had another six inches that wouldn’t have happened, darling. I just didn’t have the reach for the blasted bottle.”

“Oh dear! Well, your little fella has worked just fine for me, dear!”

…

it’s just not hypersensitivity pneumonitis.

I put on fifty years last month. My pants are loose and my limbs clatter about like an old woman’s wind chime. The crackle of my cooked lungs adds some wear to a contemporary quiet. The only music I care to hear is bluesy stuff that ends with old men in stetsons swinging from ropes tied to ceiling beams. I’ve had Bob Seger looping today, singing about them night moves. His dry wailing romanticizes the cough, that wheezing hack that cuts a conversation with a hearty pause. A broken heart and busted liver would have him sucking smoke and pushing whiskey glasses for a fill. That’s not the kind of man I’ve been; I’m the bedroom dreamer. The mirror shows up some broken self, his eyes look like shit and that hair wears the indent of a quashed pillow. He wonders what it’ll be like to have the nurse wipe his ass, to be helpless in a bed with tubes, surrounded by the scented fumes that quell the smell of dying fools. He likes to dwell on the rock ‘n roll.
…

i’m fine thanks, and you?

They have always interested me, these exchanges between human beings when the words have nothing to do with the traffic of thoughts through the mind.
…
An excerpt from the J.M. Coetzee novel, Summertime.