Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Faces(38)

(38) For the first time, her smile was light, her glance flighty, and her dimples had never before flickered so gaily on the shiny surface of her happily bulging cheeks.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

How lonely! Tonight beneath this
electic light
There is nothing but the cry of
passing vehicles
And an emptiness where no clock strikes

What a desolate banshee cry!

If you were here we would drink the bars of kingsland road
And in brotherhood, raise a glass...

Christ! D H Lawrence is dead. I only realise now the weight of those words
Auden
Dylan Thomas
Miller and Verlaine
All Dead!

The evening is buried
All sense stopped
And i try to call but..

When i think of everything that has ended in the last five years...
When i think of cool evenings in Buenos Aires
Or by the shore of the hudson, the salt tinged air and tango music and
my father driving away alone into the rain of kingsland road

And this cripling lonliness

If you were here i would
talk about the night poems we wrote on the roof
In the west village
The electric buzz of cockroaches
The river of traffic

When i think of Harlem Night Song, Langston Hughes
The fairy lights amongst the trees at Columbia University
Of buying bubble tea, hiding in libraries, or sleeping on college fields.... Oh! The bookstore on the corner of 115th, gone!

The light across the roofs of cornelia street, the sun dying -
Searching the corners of the room and dancing
Curtains sailing pinkly in the evening light
A stranger's piano
Carrying a painting the length of the 1 train the night after the bar

You gargling vodka the night before getting your tooth filled
Arriving in greenpoint on a summer's evening - children screaming from the park
Beer on the terrarce of Enids
Carrying furniture from an apartment on west end ave
Arriving home to find everything
So beautifully arranged on Prince street

Buying pizza near a plaza in mendoza
Stopping to picnic with our bikes and looking out across the fields

The henry miller museum

All cut short. Sudden as a breath.





Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Les Pensées (40)

Artaud had always loved the thrill of illicit pleasures so much that he confessed his shameful thoughts, to himself, then to everyone, until he had no more secrets to expose and he could only provoke other people with outrageous fantasies, until everything had become so normal that it bored him, and he could only find some final satisfaction in extracting the confession of a remote stranger, to whom he listened with the most sincere empathy and endless patience, reminiscent of an abandoned capacity to get excited by his own little common secrets that he had lost forever.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Opening idea 1

It began before the whispers of children and before a wine glass would smash an end to everything.

It began before her footsteps led a trail through new snow, ending in a pool of emptiness and warmed earth where she had lain.

It began with a train journey from New York City.

"Remind me what we are doing here?" she had asked.

Grand Central Station: late afternoon. The rush and echo of commuters against the marble walls. Camera flashes and chandelier light, the crackle of a tannoy and the steadiness of his reply:

"running towards who we really are."

"running away." she says in her Mother's voice. He shrugs.

"if that's what you want to call it, but i don't believe that's true."

Les Pensées (39)

Artaud was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's quote that we are who we pretend to be. Having pursued truth all his life, Artaud reflected now that he was no one.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Les Pensées (38)

A bright glare of light filled the room in the early brisk morning. Artaud felt uninspired.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (14)

Arnon started walking. He walked into the dark night and the bloated circle of colored lights. He was alone, but he barely noticed that he was while he kept on walking. It could have been snowing, or it might have been drizzling, or perhaps it was a clear winter night, he didn't remember. He did remember the blackness of the evening, the coat of dimness that isolated him and embraced him in one present gesture, and the brightness of the sparkles around him that amazed him. His eyes were drawn in all directions, drops of rain stirring a puddle of mud, and never lingered at one spot for more than a second. He couldn't form any prolonged ideas but only short impulses of thoughts. This state of mind itself fascinated him. It was not his nature to be caught up in such a stream of consciousness that constantly renewed itself. Arnon was more used to his own thoughts prolonging themselves and separating him from the distancing reality that surrounded him. The relation between Arnon and the world was vaguely undefined, absent perhaps in the eyes of some, at least not in a constant form that let itself be renewed easily. In what form the relation with the outside world existed then? Arnon thought of the world as a friendly enemy, a benign poison dripping into the hollow bowl of his soul until one day it would spill over and he no longer was himself. He kept on walking, alone, into the night.

Het Uur van de Wolf, Heb je nog steeds vrienden?

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Les Pensées (37)

Artaud held her hand, looked into the depth of her eyes fixated on his, and was pleased to watch her gentle smile, but he sadly mistook her unwillingly calculated New York utilitarianism for loving kindness.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Faces(37)

(37) Her pointy, little chin dangled from the broad, heavy branch of her round cheeks, from which two owly eyes peeked out into the evening, her nose a leaf floating in the wind, while the moonlight reflected on her white forehead.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Faces (36)

(36) His nose runs down along a long slope ending in a broad, fleshy bulb, his mousy eyes pushed up by the high white cheekbones to the top of his frowning, dark eyebrows, the whole face resting upon the hooked bones of his chin and jaws.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Serendipity (2)

it's a bright day, she smiles at me, she clinches to my mouth, a thoughtful answer, I look at her little straight thumbs in her lap, her brown wrinkled fingers forming a circuit of electricity, then she runs off, disconnects, but she comes back again, reconnects, and cuddling with a smile she says she loved the bright day we spent, and makes me happy on a dead motionless day with cold flowing love.
when the dark night remains, we sit inside a bar, outside a crying sky of aloof stars, a howling silence of murmur and simple conversations, of particles dancing between us, she sits and stares, her upper jaw of smiling teeth, she is full of inner love, she never stops punching back thoughts, i clinch to her words, my defenses low, but she folds her arms crossed in the rain, as we walk home, before her dearly flat chest, shivering and avoiding contact.
words and eyes, her long, thin limbs, a slim chest, all in a warm, brown gloss, she is a spider on the wall, a brief silence of admiration in which i can breathe and blink, of beauty and admiration, of the constellations of her web, i follow her rushing limbs, her flickering dark eyes that are like a falling star across the wall of the universe on the night's sky.
i can no longer distinguish between the sadness and joy i feel, between the light and dark i see, but the beauty of a moment of hope that crawled by in the hours of a long afternoon, blindly, now past us.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Serendipity (1)

Faces (35)

(35) Her hat slipped to her crown, the rim aligned with her eye brows as her forehead shortened, as she tilted her head back, her chin pointed up, and her eyes narrowed to a sharp glance, but her face never lost the gentle glance of her friendly cheeks.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Les Pensées (36)

Artaud smiled with resignation. Nor suffering, nor happiness was any more his share. What remained was a deep ache, a colorless and unfulfilled longing, some mistake for a passionate love.

Les Pensées (35)

Artaud placed his knees gently on the pebbles and sat besides the dark green, cast-iron little table. He took her foot and pressed his soft, cold cheek against the hard, warm shin of her left leg. Only now did Artaud feel the calm of sanity sooth his thoughts.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Faces (34)

(34) Her broad forehead was reflected in her wide smile, revealing a long row of perfectly white teeth in her tiny head, while her sclera was shining brilliantly, and her facial muscles danced like fluttering wings of laughter.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Les Pensées (34)

Artaud sat on an iron terrace chair and felt the heated metal press against his muscled thighs. He stretched out his feet to rest his heels on the stone wall, one foot crossed over the other, the brick edge cutting into his Achilles tendon.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Night Sketch: Freeze Frame with Looped Sound: a study of the night from the window of 118 Eton Hall - Looking Left

The harsh blue-white neon of the BT tower
against the dark purple of the night
Beneath that: 4 windows
In the centre both are splashed with the liquid light of TV blue
These are bookended by the warm yellow of lamplight
The building falls away from this
Windows are darkly mapped  against it

AUDIO TRACK: A plane engine moves like a skateboard. The Dull mutter of passing strangers. Footsteps. Keys rattling in a man's hand (LOOP) 

Night Sketch: Study of the night from the Window of 118 Eton Hall - Looking right

Fill the top two thirds purple
A pink wanting to be purple
Beneath that: tree shaped blacks
A tangled thick hedge of black
Closer to the window: two afro-dark trees
Squares of light and the blinking white-red of a new born plane
taking it's first uncertain steps 

Night Sketch: At the Window of 1 Highbury Place as the Day Fades

The trees are rushing with the last of the day's wind - busying themselves in last minute chores before the night draws in.

The view from the window is a study of the world in shades of green.

A wall runs up the garden - deep and brown and diagonal. Beside it a pink four headed rose is raised.

The blue of a neighbour's shed appears.

Water Colour Sketch of Chapel Market and the Holloway Road: July 13th 2011

At the Job centre on B---- Road near the Angel an old man asks a tracksuited teenager for a fag. The boy says no. Then changes his mind.

A man: Mid 20s (difficult to tell with the English working class, could be mid 40s) screams abuse into a mobile phone. He then moves as if to smash the phone against a wall but doesn't. We are walking through a tunnel of scaffolding on the Holloway road when this happens.

An estate agent - late teens. He is trying to grow a mustache.

An African woman screams into a phone on Upper Street. Unknown African language. Her aggression, as with the man earlier, is extremely boring.

At the Hope Workers Cafe: Wooden tables - dark polished. Arsenal banners. Polish staff. All builders and baked beans. Also water colours of local area.

Packington street has been closed off. Metal fences block it at both ends.

A cat lies asleep on a step leading to the blue front door of an apartment building. He is curled loaf-like, head drooped, fur dirty-white.    

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Les Pensées (33)

Artaud pressed his nose against the window and stared at the dry streets where a single pedestrian trailed his lap dog curiously sniffing the concrete, and realized his life was a sequence of unfulfilled expectations.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Faces (33)

(33) A round, scrubby and gray head bobbing on top of a fat, pear-shaped body dressed in a black rekel and topped with a black shtofener that tip-toed delicately on his crown of ruffled straw hair, revealing the side of a black yamaka, and two payots veering up and down along his worried sleeps on the rhythm of his scurried pace.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Les Pensées (32)

Artaud looked at the skeletons that kicked their feet out before them, swinging their arms backward in a single balanced and coordinated motion of what seemed to be living bodies, but so soulless, heartless and without opinions that they thought of it as simply very professional.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Faces (32)

(32) Her black hair was combed backward and touched her shoulders like a dry curtain that dragged over the stage, on which her thin chin tapped dapperly from left to right, as her head turned with her round tip-tilted nose and its wide nostrils, her dark eyes and half opened mouth, which reminded me of a domino stone's spots.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

desperate men poetry

welcome desperate men
men who cannot love
men who love despite
whose stomachs curl around
fish in troubled water
for shallow bites
men who hunger
yet who crave
no more than to hear
a word
men whose lips
are without a kiss
men who sink
who do not float
dark minds
with a pure heart
who take the spite
of guilt and innocence
of man
in discolored resignation
welcome men
welcome
who passed this gate
men with simple thoughts
simple tables
their guts done
and men
whom no one love
men in spite
welcome

http://youtu.be/Aztulcg9ipM

Saturday, July 30, 2011

black raven king

into ruffling fragments
the trunk breaks
and out of the bush of leaves
the flapping of wings escapes
slowly the body majestic
of a raven carries up
and drifts off
into the gray sky
out of the shadow cover
i elevate
yet thrown down
i drop like a stone
even if my limbs stretch
my suffering is joy
like the wild wind against the trunk
the torment beats
a spirit ravishing
broken plates
in this body, this trunk
i follow the pair of wings
that fly toward the sun
my heart wants to follow
but everything breaks into pieces
i see myself, i hear myself
but i don't want to loose it out of sight
by wanting to possess it
i cannot know
by not knowing
i possess it
the raven paradox
of torment
my loving raven

Les Pensées (31)

Artaud deeply moved by every breeze of air swirling around him, felt the radiance of equal beauty glistering, yet everything was a distant glance, everyone observed from afar, every thought a remote reflection that kept him from grasping the beauty around him and the glance was replaced by a dull sadness.

Faces (31)

(31) Her lips were modestly thin, she bit her mouth bashfully, as she breathed in the cold evening air. A gentle white light fell on her face, I could just see the thick red curling line that ran across the soft pink flesh of her inner underlip, showing the imprint from the rim of her glass from which she had drunk a dark Italian red wine.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Les Pensées (30)

Artaud stared at the orange hoops formed by the folds in her knee high skirt, which ran around her waist, and realized that she could decide his course of life and that she never would, and he resigned willfully to the destructive indifference of the waves of emotions.

Faces (29-30)

(29) The curly wave of her lips that encircled her smile and her gay glance dancing on the motion of her words, softly spoken, gave her face a certain roundedness that softened me. (30) She pressed her hand to her forehead straight above her brow ridge, though she sat in a shadowed corner. Her eyes flickered from the sting of inner light, the surface of her eyeballs lay elevated above her broad cheeks, her swollen lips were tightly pressed together, radiating her inner agony.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Day Poem 072611

12.14pm - The Kitchen
Through the bleak ocean of day an aircraft begins its final plunge kettle-whistling from beyond the cloth damp clouds. In the near distance you hear lorries brake-hissing, wheezing at the lights. And a train rushes its body at the length of track - each shivering sharp clackity-clack curlicued by the creak of an ancient stair. And the clock rattles off the time till 12.15pm.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Faces (28)

(28) As he smiled, the creases in his fleshy cheeks split into carved cuts, and his eyes sank deep into the remaining cracks until only a distant pitch-dark pit was still visible, while drawing large circular lines across his face that sparkled by the rosy light and the dark curls of his beard and hair.

Les Pensées (29)

Artaud walked down Park Avenue as he did almost every morning, until the light hit his eyes as it had done yesterday and the day before on the corner of 34th street, and realizing so, he unlikely turned east along 32nd street, unlike yesterday.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Friday, July 15, 2011

Night Poem 062211

Here at the edge of
Highbury Fields
I hear machines
gasping in
the night
soft lost voices
rising in hushed questioning
tones and flowing out
into the night

BE STILL BEASTS!

Turn from thr type writer clack
of the banker wife's
high-click heels
turn from the hurling
drunk
and from the sirens
and from the plunging
dark
that seeps inkily through
the hours until the
wide bright world of morning
Flow gentle on
the night's river
be still
and greet the sea of morning as a
friend

Night Poem 071511

The window shakes
and a train passes and
the night boils with the sound of voices and with the
whip crack laughter of strangers and
with the ghosts of sunken nights
of murder and of
anxiety and of
loneliness and of
joy
and of the calm of sleep
and confusion

The Holloway road creaks under the weight
of so many welcomed bodies
and carries each calmly into the
waves of the sea of night

Flipbook Story (2): Cafe Noir (2)

Monday, July 11, 2011

Faces (27)

(27) The root of her nose lay well ahead of her eyebrow. Her fleshy neck softly rounded her jaw line. Yet, these notable features did not define her face harshly, as the rest of her face was so full of gentle form that she tremendously appealed to me with the kindest beauty.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Les Pensées (27)

Artaud looked down at the street through the cracks of the white blinds in the window, and only saw the flickering spots of head lights that jumped from one to the other black line like a child dancing over the crosswalk, and realized that from the outside in, a view through his window on his life must look not much different.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

About You

About you

This role requires a high level of disillusionment. Candidates must demonstrate a keen sense of feeling disconnected from their work and be able to demonstrate distaste for working with others under fast paced and trivial conditions. You must have at least 3 years experience of corporate disenchantment to apply.

About the Position

You will be required to carry out a series of tasks using a computer beneath strip lighting. Normal hours, which do not apply, will be from 9am - 6pm.

Knowledge of MS office is preferable.

Please note that due to the high number of applications we expect to receive, we will not be able to contact candidates directly regardless of whether their application has been successful or not.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Les Pensées (26)

Artaud decided not to undertake anything today and let himself be simply carried down the stream of his emotions without action until finally the evening would come and he could go to sleep and forget about the uneventful happenings of the day.

devil's day

Lo Tech - Matchbox Pinhole Camera Photography

Photos of photos taken with a matchbox pinhole camera.  We took the instructions to make this little guy from here: matchboxpinhole.com





Sweets balanced on the windowsill






Self portrait.  Tried a 5 minute exposure in a bathroom mirror.






Argentinean Soda Bottle. (Looking up)






Mandolin






Our Apartment (This was once Walter Sickert's Studio)





Letter Box.





Phone Box





Tree in Highbury Fields





Bottle of Essential Oil





Double Exposure of a pond on Hamstead Heath








Saturday, June 25, 2011

Faces (25-26)

(25) Not a harsh angle in her face but gentle curves, like rivers in a landscape carved out by soft force, the cavity of her cheeks eroded over thousands of years beneath the cheekbone, a captivating smile, her tiny black eyes like lanterns drawing nothing but kindness along. (26) The corners of his eyes and his smile flowed like the waves, all connected by invisible strings and moved by the muscles stretching from the ears, and modeled around the nose that bend like the stern of a ship across the facial front.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Highbury Painters Group: June 2011

Photos from the Highbury Painters Group monthly meeting.    

1.
London Street Scene: Man hunched at Betting shop having lost on the horses


2.
Water Jug with Basil


3.
The Artist is Christ


4.
Bolivian Street Scene: The Church at Potosi


5.
Portrait: Eyeless in Highbury


Thursday, June 16, 2011

Les Pensées (25)

Artaud hardly looked where he was walking, he followed the stream of faces toward their source at the end of the long road, hollow, bony faces, fat, full faces, only every now and then, but rarely, a charming flower bobbed by.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Flipbook Story (1): Friends (1)



Flipbook Stories are mini comic books passed from friend to friend, each friend adds 1 page of text or drawing, passing it on to the next friend. Friends only. Add your email in the masthead in the back, send a picture of your page to me, and the last person mails the flipbook story back to me again, for a show of merdisme.

Monday, May 2, 2011

André Derain's Fauvist London

André Derain (French, 1880–1954). London Bridge, 1906. Oil on canvas.
André Derain (French, 1880–1954). Charing Cross Bridge, 1906. Oil on canvas.
André Derain (French, 1880–1954). Saint Paul's Cathedral Seen From the Thames, 1906. Oil on canvas.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Night Poems: 2 Night Haikus

1.
A passing headlight
finds leaves lost against the night.
And a pissing drunk.

2.
The clothes-wash crashes
on the silent shores of night.
Look! Clean underpants.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Bowling with Sisyphus: Suicide or Revolt?

Vague thoughts on Cory Arcangel's 'Beat the Champ' installation at the Barbican in London

As you enter, the installation curves away to the left with panel after panel of computer bowling games projected against the far wall.  The games are ordered chronologically with the first dating back to the 1970s and the last 2001.  Each game has been rigged to play on a loop with each bowler launching the ball into the gutter at every throw.

My first thought was of Sisyphus and his own particular bowling game doomed by the gods to failure.  Arcangel has had all his games rigged, committing each computerized bowler to share Sisyphus' fate.

What does it mean for each computer bowler to be condemned to a failure inescapable despite technological advancement?  What of the gamer seeking meaning in the computer console?  Is Arcangel's message entirely pessimistic?  Are we, in a desperate search for meaning, doomed to repeat the failures of past generations in spite of seeming progression?  In realising the impossibility of escape, is it correct to argue, as Carmus does, that "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." ?      

As I left the installation room, walking back from later to earlier computer programs, I noticed a bowler from an old Atari game quietly knock down one of the pins.  I'm still not certain that this was actually part of the show -  all games were supposed to be rigged to fail.  Did one rebel?  Was the seed of revolt more powerful that that of suicide?

   

Friday, April 22, 2011

Philosophies of Insomnia 2: Eli Siegel


1)
Love and Jobs
At rest 
On her breast, 
He lay. 
And he thought 
Of his job 
Next day.

From Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems (Definition Press)
© 1957 by Eli Siegel


2)

Letter From William Carlos Williams to Martha Baird - November 3rd, 1951

My dear Martha Baird: 
     
I cannot adequately thank you for first writing me and then sending me the copies of Eli Siegel's poems. I am thrilled: your communications could not have come at a better time. I can't tell you how important Siegel's work is in the light of my present understanding of the modern poem. He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists. That he has not been placed there by our critics (what good are they?) is the inevitable result of their colonialism, their failure to understand the significance, the compulsions, broadened base upon which prosody rests in the modern world and our opportunity and obligations when we concern ourselves with it...

...You say Siegel is alive and working. Greet him for me and tell him of this letter. I congratulate you on the intelligent direction of your work and the heart behind it.  


3)

















4)

The Philosophy of Insomnia 
By Eli Siegel 
(Extract)   

There was a person who told me he was troubled by insomnia, among other things. Sometimes he got angry with people. Sometimes he felt he was the most persecuted and most intelligent person in the world. Insomnia was one manifestation of the dislocation he had made between what Aesthetic Realism calls Self and World. He'd been having insomnia for a long time. His family doctor told him it came from a recondite kidney ailment. A neurologist of the advanced Freudian school told him he couldn't sleep because he had the death instinct. A psychoanalyst, somewhat less advanced, said he wanted to kill his mother.



In my work, one way of looking at the self has been through sentences. A person has been given two words, standing for matters crucial in his mind, and been asked to write a sentence with them. I gave this man the words magnificent and bed. The sentence he wrote was: “I am magnificent in bed.”

He unconsciously saw himself as most important in bed. He had trouble with his brothers, his father, his mother, the foreman where he worked. In bed, he said to hell with all of them. The tendency to be a king or queen or emperor or (more conservatively) a lonely duchess in bed, is tremendous. The loneliness of bed is used against the things seen and endured in the street. When you're in bed, the world is yours. This person had seen bed as a place where he could get back at everyone who had ever annoyed him.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Philosophies of Insomnia 1

1. Halfway up the Holloway Road

My thoughts come in squat brick-like chunks.  Each as incoherent as the next, but each showing promise!  They could lead to something?  Could they lead to something?

What am I saying?

I am frog marching myself toward the Holloway road, shoes clicking fast against the pavement, collar up, hands pushed hard into broken pockets.  There is no sound except my heels.  No, that's not quite true:  There is the wave crash of distant cars and the passing threat of motorcycle engines.

Is insomnia something to be feared or celebrated?

I should be doing some of my best thinking now, in this free time gifted to me - a time oceans from the clock time of commerce.  but here the clock sounds off the seconds like a broken piano.  The key is struck and I feel rather than hear its tick.  Thud.  Like a falling body.  Deep behind the eyes.

Some houses flicker with the blue of tv screens.  Why am I walking?  Why not wrestling with this thing in the safety of my own bed?

How awful that I can't drag anything close to poetry from this private time, when whole sleeping worlds seems to belong to me and me alone.  Shouldn't that be everything?  I embrace the feeling a moment, lifting my head high a step or two.   But then my body asks: what are you doing halfway up the Holloway road?  Why cast adrift like the walking dead?  Where are you?

In three hours it will be morning.  Light's lines will trace across the walls and everything will begin again.     

Sunday, April 10, 2011

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (13)

Arnon entered Lucien on first and first and asked for a stool at the bar. He looked at the menu without much appetite, then finally ordered the foie gras maison with the cheapest red wine at twenty eight dollars per bottle. It was the first time that Arnon felt comfortable in a social environment for months. He had concluded that his preference to stay at home and read, was a mental condition that he needed to break through, and diligently he had made reservations at nine. He drank his first glass and poured a second, drank a second and poured a third. There was no reason to his thoughts, he was not thinking, just realizing that he had not been thoughtful in many weeks. There was no purpose to his existence, cause there was no thought worth considering. This was the New York life that made New Yorkers unwillingly distressed, irritated, hasted. You traveled two hours south to Washington and life let you breath again. Arnon pondered only how this city with so much stimulation and diversity, managed to create such a uniform lack of thoughtful relevance. Was it the immigrants who came from poverty, sacrificed themselves to offer their children a better future, and like a maelstrom of ambition, they dragged Arnon down with them into their gutter toward just the same empty future. The thought itself made Arnon hate immigrants. He poured a fourth glass and measured the bottle to be half empty. The room seemed to detach itself from the street and the building in which it was located, and started floating in the night, tables started dancing, voices started conversations and faces looked at Arnon with a friendly smile. The waiter offered him not only a broad grin but complemented him with a pear liquor that went down smoothly with the foie gras without purpose or thought.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (12)

Arnon sat down at the bar of the Mexican restaurant. He was the only customer. Three men with slick black hair combed backward and tanned faces were preparing shift. It was noon. Arnon had walked out onto the street, breathed in the spring air that had broken through, and realized the tension that had gathered in his chest. It wasn't the city, it wasn't the people, but there were certainly some who annoyed him without end.

His tolerance, or his capacity to wash away the bitter taste of the infringement of human bodies out there in the world, Arnon revolted against. Not now, he whispered and took a gulp from his Brooklyn ale. Was it really that simple? The muscles of his body relaxed, he floated away from the mediocracy, the lack of meaning, from the sense of obligation and responsibility as they called it. This awful sense of obligation that those poor people kept struggling against.

It wasn't exactly sure what they gained from it. Arnon tried to reconstruct the conversation. Jokingly, my father would kill me, she replied. The odd reasoning of man while they throw themselves in the abyss, losing their lives, their dreams, their being. And in place of the exaltation of freedom of their youth comes a flat saturation of content, they call happiness.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Faces (24)

(24) The soft curves of her face drew me in, with a few controlled strokes of a brush I could draw her gentle face except for the sharp splatters of her irises, that lay deep in their sockets, observing me with care.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Faces (23)

(23)She swallowed her words, which cluttered in her mouth and shaped her highly cheeks full and round, like a broad bridge across her face, while her black eyes had turned sweet and inwardly, light like a little star barely visible and without constellation.

Monday, January 17, 2011

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (11)

"Don't you grow tired by your own disquiet?"
"Sometimes," only to add at the last moment,"perhaps."
Such a settled question, Arnon thought. Only an old man, whose years have worn down his body, sees struggling and making efforts as a burden. To the vigor of a youth, being challenged feels like an elevation of the mind, to which he looks eagerly forward.

"But then you also run from deadline to deadline."
The interviewer's questions started to irritate Arnon, realizing that this man's decay was printing itself on his mind and thus polluted his lust for life. The interviewer seemed to suggest that it was all too much, that this restless inspiration needed a break, take some time off, lay in bed and do nothing for a whole day but fetish itself in lazy dinners.

"Yes, but everything that has a pattern, is easy, and I don't forget."

While Arnon heard his own voice say the last lines, hearing himself, he realized already did the gray haired, saggy face with the coarse scraping voice affect him. He reflected on the absurdity of the answer, embarrassed by the apparent habit of himself that he displayed in public. This pattern of routines was what tired him, not the exerting demands.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Les Pensées (24)

Artaud had always remained Artaud, or in other words, he never had really been Artaud.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Identity in Stasis

John was a member of the Luo tribe, according to his passport he was Kenian, though with a permanent residence in the United States, where he practiced as a Harvard trained general practitioner and he had lived the last ten years of his life in Boston. He was one of the proudest members of the Luo, and the tribe was at least as proud of him. When I met him, Obama was president for two years, while John was elaborating on his theory of self identity and advocating the importance of the tribe. He had not asked me about my tribe, he knew of course, there was no such entity in western society. I wasn't sure if he had immediately guessed my Dutch origin, but I was pretty sure that he was not aware of the tensions between the westerners, the southerners, the easterners and the Frisians, in the Netherlands. I of course am a member of the Heracleitian tribe of thought, and I do not believe in the concept of identity, or it would be in my persona as an anarchist deliberately trying to disturb all my pre-existing attachments and ideas like a Nietzschean lion. The main argument I tried to make against John's was based on Marxist principles however, where identity is the superstructure of my class origin, which is determined mostly by technology and ownership of capital, but this is a very typical belief for someone of the middle classes, and a very white and western notion, which he refuted of course.