My hair grows in the fields, grows colors, my eyes clap up thunder purple, fingers cow-crease onion skin, boots lamb-warm lie down in spare grass, warmth stealing on me as a pheasant’s breast, my butt round as a bridge duct, body thick as a silo. I go headlong into a newspaper’s noise and the slipping fucking wave-lick lipped-green tuft-cunt sea, young chin spreading gnarled bristle flat out on the razor blue foam sky. My flaccid third thumb whines for a roundhouse. Fall, when my shoulders ache in a leaf-curve and my gut-hunk of beef lumbers and blathers and hunches up to work its kink out with blood and acid through winter-fearing limb vein in tunnel in fall forever. Checked dun my flesh this body shot up with cud and gossamer in exile at Hastings on the sea.

Emerson, Greenough, Berenson, Reinach, Adams

After meeting the artist Horatio Greenough, Emerson wrote in his journal: “Greenough wittily called my speculations masturbation; but the artist life seems to me intolerably thin and superficial. I feel the reasonableness of what the lawyer or merchant or laborer has to allege against readers & thinkers, until I look at their wretched industries, and find them without end or aim.”

Fifty years later, Berenson could not get interested enough in the lives of the painters whose paintings he loved and studied and marketed and wrote about to write, also, about their “loves and broken love affairs.”

“They shrieked at me,” he wrote in his journal, “when I came out with ‘tactile values,’” and then recorded the anecdote of his friend and patron, Salomon Reinach.

When Florentine Painters was published in 1896, the book in which Berenson introduced the phrase “tactile values,” Reinach, full of enthusiasm, took Mary Berenson aside and said to her, in French, “Tell me now, about these things which your husband has written—do you think one can explain them to little girls?”

But Berenson also liked to tell the anecdote of Henry Adams, who, having poured himself out in talk to a friend’s daughter, said to her: “Do you know, my child, why I talked? I was confident you would not understand a word of what I was saying.”

Berenson never seems to have thought of touch as other than “a desire for joining, love for the ‘thing in itself,’ of ‘itness,’ as I call it.” As a reader of Emerson, and even more as a connoisseur whose livelihood depended on making attributions, Berenson was bent on finding and making identifications between the paintings that touched him, which he could look at, and the painters who may have painted them, whom he could not see.

He understood that it wasn’t exactly the eye that troubled our responses to art.

Gillian

I walked into Tavistock Square, in the vicinity of University College London, where I was studying European history in 1979. I had seen it from inside the History library, and from the yellow door of the library, but I had never gone in. I picked a red leaf from a tree whose name I couldn’t remember, a red leaf for Gillian. I looked back into the library and saw the ladder I used to get up to the High Middles Ages section of books. I saw the fat head of the President of the History Society (I was a member of the Literary Society). I could see the blue door of the Linguistics department, a door by which I never saw anyone come in or go out. I wanted to use the yellow door and the blue door, but this was not, apparently, done. I picked two fat roses for Gillian. I watched two history students turning pages on the grass and making notes with blue pens. The black gangster cabs sped by, stopping always at the zebra crosswalks if anyone was near them.

I walked out of the garden gates and turned down the road Gillian lived on. Gillian had asked me to have coffee with her. I thought it meant she loved me and wanted to find out why. She liked the red leaf, thought the roses “extravagant.” I pretended to like the dusty coffee.

Weeks later, when I was very drunk on bitter and stout from The Sun on Lamb’s Conduit, I went to Gillian’s building on my way home and positioned myself below her window. I bellowed out a line from A Streetcar Named Desire, changing the name to suit the occasion.

She did not respond, and never spoke to me again.

A Visit to The Tactile Dome

Before you go into The Tactile Dome, you are told you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face—“which,” the woman says, “is a pretty weird thing.” She adds: “It’s always best the first time, even though the first time is a little creepy.” “Creepy” is a good touch-word.

The next thing out of her mouth: “There are no bugs, and there’s nothing squishy or slimy.” You can tell by the way she says this that she’s been asked a thousand times about bugs and other squishy, slimy things. First, total darkness; then, sticky things.

The realm of the tactile is yet again placed in a visual context, or the lack of one: if you can’t see, you don’t know where you are; if you don’t know where you are, you’re scared. If you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you’re lost.

The woman says one other thing before we go in: there’s nothing sharp among the textures we’ll be feeling our way along the surfaces of. We won’t get our eyes poked out, and we won’t cut ourselves.

It is our hands that will go before us. They’ll “tell” us things; they’ll get us out of the dark. Absence of sight, presence of touch: both are infantile states, marked by crawling, by bugs, squish, and slime. Feces and lipstick. Syrup.

We talk of avoiding contact, shrinking from contact. We can also puff up through contact; we can begin to itch. If we have too much contact with ourselves, we can become smug. We are smug, most of the time. By which I mean, we keep to ourselves largely because we prefer our selves to other selves, our bodies to other bodies. We must; otherwise we wouldn’t apologize for bumping into someone, brushing up against someone; we wouldn’t resent contact with another, however incidental and unintended. Maybe we can never see touch as incidental or unintended. It always seems a declaration of intention, which is what an anthropologist has recently interpreted grooming in monkeys as. Out of this grooming comes language—“grooming-at-a-distance.” Speech is more efficient touch.

Why the difference between driving something and causing something?

Are reference and reverence usually synonymous?

Is my pattern of error, even, mine?

How many of us haven’t so much “been through” something terrible as we’ve done something terrible, and are still in some sense implacable?

Do we spend a seventh of our lives on each day of the week?

Why isn’t there a scene in which people are giving a ton of money a bath or a shitload of money is taking a shower?

Are you quicklikeable?

Is the vocabulary of it the it of it?

Do we all save ourselves for the finish, even the speed demons?

What would there be without absentee ownership?

How many uncountable nouns can “an uncontrolled, unsegregated plurality of variables,” as Justice Macklin Fleming called “crime” in 1976, be an elegant variation for?

How much “vast living organism” is dead matter?

Are we purpose-built?

Leaver, chancer, trimmer, equalizer—will the English never shut up?

If all the world’s a stage, then where is the house?

Of two people trying to make themselves understood, which is the interpreter at any given moment?

How many of us know when we don’t have an idea?

A cadaver can’t have cancer, can it?

Can a fact be fine-grained, granular, or nuanced?

Are there more ways to be than around it, across it, or about it?

What do the unurinated care?

Rare earths? Isn’t one enough?

Are there as many tanning styles as there are mattress collections?

Was she fabulous in the role or flat-out fabulous?

What is time for but to be on?

Why aren’t “always remember” and “never forget” the same command?

Is the psychiatrist to be considered the agent or the patient?

Was it explained earlier that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed?

Can a cynical and mistrustful institution be singled out?

Which is the main prayer-hole?

Do you know what you want?

Do you need some time?

Do you need some more time?

What can the tongue tell about the difference between broken pecans and slivered almonds?

Why is the difference between “Let me grab” and “Let me get” and “complex situation” and “complex moral situation” worth complaining about?

Where does agency come into it on an airplane in economy class when the passenger in front reclines all the way?

How is watching the cartoon movie listening to the cars talk to each other unimaginable?

To what extent are problems and sages the same in a society?

Does it click, snap, buckle, or attach?

Didn’t Thomas Hardy write “Hey Jude”?

If there are more cars than people, and excluding all trucks with four back tires, and all trucks with more than two axles, is that about four times more rubber than people?

Does Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Everything’s Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar take up Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”?

What is one thing that isn’t between?

Should every apology that doesn’t say exactly what it’s for be declined?

How do aspirational and delusional differ?

If none teaches none learns. 
Paris spoiled the Blackthorn.
Breathing Beamish, three stout catholic languages 

(bottles chink in the greatcoat’s pockets), 
he’s Irish to the girls of the sorrows, 
speaking French.

Lance anthrax, pus hurls his energy 
out of a neck boil. This is early on, 
on top of flu, cold, bursitis, chills 

from mother, stout. Go walking out,
out in always the very same figure. 
Home, full stop. First stop. Final.

See if other lives have been this happy, 
how commonplace idealism. Take up 
a name, a color, one in the other: 

Colorado. My father was three 
in a basement then, your headaches 
severe and dark in there too: Cooldrinagh.

He flips a Spanish book’s page, 
adding more catheters to his lick. 
He thinks of the Grand Canyon, 

of down climbing and not getting 
quite in or out of it. The beating sea 
at Dalkey in his door, his stuck wastes. 

Suffocating, sweating, he stays in his open eyes 
for fear at night of doing anything else. 
Coddle some eggs for father, 

he’s ill, you’ll feel better, life’s disease.
"I am Jesus whom thou persecutest; 
it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks,"

and rigid to piss. What control! Too much. 
Too little too, young still, he takes 
Jung up on his errand and turns
 
back to gaya scienza, Chopin, higher geist.
He hunts in his speechful mind 
to live in a haze of perpetual Septembers, 

to make films, study with Eisenstein, 
fly, drop writing soundly to swim all day, 
take sleeping pills.

In the autumn of 1933 Jung lectures. 
Sam hates London but listens and figures 
he was not quite born, not with nice 

discernment anyway. Not being 
completely born— 
cloacal, melding, Murphy.

Gone the Kerry blue bitch, the greatcoat, 
books and money, thirty years in his mother, 
hawked for a stout. 

Ego Smith cogitates the universe: 
a huge head with scabs exuding pus—
but the bog thank heaven continually flushing.

Cogito, suicidio. Fango è il mondo, 
and Proust had a bad memory.
Another year for the professors.

Turns into a Nazi hotel, Nuremberg, 
needs bath and bed. Fluently 
his German gets him out the door.

Ten pages is a start for human wishes. 
The stone that Samuel Johnson kicked 
Samuel Beckett mouths and worries until it multiplies.

Then a pimp stabs him in the heart-side, 
and a woman all at once at his ribcage staunching. 
Why? None knew later neither way.

Dive from a Sussex shore and swim 
and keep swimming, Oblomov, 
odd and out there, stern smith of gold.

Chamberlain chats up Hitler in a birch garden, 
umbrella swinging. 
In the mirror and summary of France 

with a handful of sand, the other explaining the one, 
smoke passing up the side of his nose, 
he squints, the pen stops: 

a million Frenchmen no longer on reserve, 
the German museums close.
Beckett opens: 

Ireland was the land of my unsuccessful abortion. 
He goes into a pocket with his fag-like fingers. 
Eccolo! The Liffey limestone that feels like a Joyce eye. 

He has to have it. Joyce is taking the war personally, 
which is also in progress, but what is Czechoslovakia 
to Finnegans Wake? It will rupture his duodenal.

Still, there’s time for an endgame with Duchamp. 
Stephen can buck out plurable discords on the piano, 
and over his shoulder: 

What’s the use of this war? 
Has anyone in Dublin read it? 
Damn those dogs! 

Where are my stones?
“Only Jews,” someone says, 
“this Kafka from Prague.”

Picking up matchbooks, menu corners, 
tatters, wrappers—this bitch of an earth!—
Beckett begins to translate.

And kept on going on 
with it, 
the good man.

Why is it that most romantic indicators seem to be very positive at the moment?

Do you have a way shape or form?

Why expectorate? Why sneeze? Why bear the risk?

Where is this frog that boils in the water but doesn’t notice the boiling?

What do deathbed zones teach us about living?

Shall we roll it back or walk it back or push back against it or double down on it or think it through?

Is it possible not to want a fling or a lifetime partner?

Life is beautiful? Compared to what?

Does anybody choose a hotel because it plays music in the corridors 24 hours a day? Or 12? Or 8? Or from 8 am to 9 pm? Does anybody think, “The thing that makes a hotel attractive is background music that you can hear the low and high notes through your door in”?

Does a $50,000 watch tell a different time?

When does the end when the beginning begins begin?

If everyone has a voice now, does everyone have exit and loyalty?

What have I seen being “fiercely contested”?

If “life is too short for fun and games,” isn’t it too short for their opposites?

Is it to be true’s to be secret?

“Take your temporary lovers”—. And what would that leave?

Now and then you get out to walk but nature doesn’t talk, and why take your phone to remind you you’re alone?

What’s different about being on time, in time, and timely, if any?

Would it be good to know beforehand if anything’s worth more trouble than it’s worth?

Do you remember telling a secret you said you wouldn’t tell, and forgetting who you told it to?

Why does putting our own data in front of us sometimes compel us to act, or compel us to act ten percent of the time, or ten percent more of the time?

Does pregnancy play out?

How is the weather communicated?

Why are people who write talking about embarking and navigating?

Can things be “thought through” without multiplying through them by negative 1?

How can we not have it both ways? How can we?

Can anything be rethought?

Are friendships a good idea?

What’s wrong with the assurance that I’m a cog?

Which store carries the grapes of wrath?

It’s no use to sit and sigh but who doesn’t?

Would some concern be more concerning than another?

Has a cat in history ever clawed its own face until it bleeds?

Do you become ill while cooking chicken soup?

How many men would tell another man that they don’t cook when they’re by themselves but like to cook when they’re cooking for someone else?

Why “at a lower price point” or “lower price level,” and not “at a lower price”?

Who wants people with increased humility and decreased confidence, with more I don’t know and less I’m going to do it?

Metaphor? What phor?

What are we, as we are? Inner-directed, other-directed, self-directed, undirected, misdirected, directionless?

How do you handle a falling hammer striking you?

Does it taste moral? How tasty is that?

Whatever else I am, I’m 85.2 kilos, or was yesterday. I’m 86.2 today, but can’t be, can I?

Didn’t Carl Sandburg write a book of poems called Cocksuckers Smoke and Steal?

When I die, will people consider me a breath of fresh air or a knotty problem?

Who am I to say your prose is well-judged?

Have you booked your place at the top of the table to go through?

When are they going to give me agency?

Do you have any issue passions?

Do you know how I can find my way back to the private sector?

Have I achieved total trackability and consistent violation?

Who bounded rationality?

How much did you give away to illustrate your value proposition?

What have you unpicked, unpacked, or unwound today?

Why don’t the contents of the sandwiches of Japan and Korea touch the edges of the bread?

Did you create a narrative around your story or a wedge issue?

Is there any proposition that can’t be described as a “risk-reward proposition”?

Ridiculous.

But what are we trying to do when we put something into words? What does putting whatever it is into a sentence do for us?

“The best is yet to come.”

That makes me feel better, think less, mean more.

On the other hand, is the best yet to come?

Does everything happen for a reason?

Does everything happen for a reason?

To make a short story long . . .

Short story long . . .

Short long . . .

You’ve already revised this six-word to three-word to two-word demonstration of the Law of Abbreviation, or the Law of Least Effort (Zipf), so that it reads:

To make a long story short . . .

Long story short . . .

Long short . . .

How much story do we need? Why do we make a long story short? Why do we make a short story long?

To what extent does any aphorism—any definition—sum up, abbreviate, or even imply a story?

I like aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, maxims, apothegms. Such wise sayings ask that “all partitions of knowledges be accepted rather for lines and veins, than for sections and separations,” as Francis Bacon wrote—making “knowledge” knowledges, as we now make intelligences, musics, logics, rhetorics, breads, and soaps. And then, having made that big ask, they section and separate with a vengeance.

Aphorisms are rhymes and refrains, choruses, returns, points and turning-points. They stop gaps and make gaps. They open, advance, and close arguments. They step on the gas and slam on the brakes. They’re hubcaps that show off fine wheels.

Aphorisms front for and represent such massive things as love, war, death, morality, vanity—life itself. Such massive things, so hard to put into words, don’t like being cut off, and so such sentences, such rulings, as do try to stop them in their tracks, invite “perpetual amendment and addition,” as Emerson said of Bacon’s essays. But the best aphorisms prove hard to amend and add to.

“Just because you have something don’t mean you have something.”

—Billy, 2026

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

—Lord Acton, 1887

Bacon told King James in 1625 that of all his writings, his Essays were the only ones that had “most come home to men’s business and bosoms.” Then in their third edition (because, Bacon told a friend in 1609, “I ever alter when I add”), the essays were mostly aphorisms, short-cuts, after-dinner after-thoughts of a man who, like Thomas More before him and George Herbert at the same time, had “forty businesses in hand.”1 The essays gathered scattered occasions, dispersed them, and moved on.

But life is only occasionally scattered. It’s almost never true that we never know what to expect. We almost always know, more or less, what to expect.

Would it hurt to say that an aphorism is a densely crowded gathering place that doesn’t look very busy? “No woman is an island.” “No man is a horn section.”

Aphorisms assume authority, or institute it, or incite it, equally probably with resistance to it. They’re stump speeches in search of recorders, colds or fevers gotten out of the head.

Aphorism isn’t for the reader. The reader can go fuck themselves—and what reader won’t keep reading after being told to do that? Aphorism doesn’t cop an attitude. Aphorism is a cop. Read my badge, the aphorist says, and weep.

Aphorism scatters—smears—life and death. Aphorism hates what Bacon called “the show of total,” but is itself such a show. Anyone can be, and everyone more than once in their life is, an aphorist. The aphorist is a breaker of words, as Achilles was a breaker of horses. The aphorist can turn words on a dime and stop them on a dime.

The aphorist is a manager of chaos. But “I feel like as if” may be the suppressed opener to every legendary and every unknown aphorism, as “in bed” is the supplemental closer to every fortune cookie legend.

I was the one who encouraged the use of what they came to call 
        her “short” words (we had a laugh over that). 
They would write that her dress was often to be found around her neck. 
        I couldn’t see her neck; I was her midget.  
But when she was riggish, a constant whim with her, my gaze, 
        stationed at her quim, saw the punchline first. 

Her leading man had just come off stage, her legs were spread, her maid 
        stood by, holding a tray with one
condom, an appetizer. (Even sitting, Tallulah upstaged me.) Embarrassed 
        as much as bored, the actor hurried 
to touch himself up before curtain-call; Tallulah stayed. I whispered 
        the dream I’d had of her the night before. 
“We got down on our hands and knees. You were very small, 14 by 15. 
        I said I couldn’t follow you 
because I was 33. You said I was foolish, that half that is about 16. 
        I told you I was afraid of small places,
but you took me in. There were pictures of you, your hair 
        in ringlets, banded in black silk. 
‘I used to do this,’ you said, ‘and that.’” Without turning her head, 
        she got up to receive what adulation 
the audience had in store that night (the run was almost over). Offstage, 
        she found me harder to see than on.  
“You’re small fry,” she said, “and I have bigger fish.” 
        Then she practiced her handsprings 
over me, the trick that had made her notable in London, 
        along with her sluttish remarks. 

 My stature agreed with her wit. Tableau on tableau she devised 
        with me in mind, an erection armed and legged. 
Unattached, I floated free, stood anywhere, as long as the attention 
        I drew on enveloped her waist. 
The English had already cut her off at the neck; it was for the Americans 
        to cut her off at the hips—they were glad to—
where my crown was. And though I followed her as eagerly as any empty
        Cockney girl or war-starved maiden, 
I never made the papers. Reporters would no more mention me than print 
        her short words, not in those days; 
there was something too grotesque in pairing my face with her cunt, 
        which, like one of the good doctors 
she knew in England, was also “wonderful at abortions.”

Nobody who skates on thin ice will be noted for anything but speed  
        when it breaks. Tallulah talked fast 
and broke a lot of ice. No one could keep up (I was no one). 
        The escort I replaced wished me well: 
“She can’t stand up,” he said, “and she won’t sit down.” 
        With me, she never had to: I was, 
as it were, assiduously hers. And when, as she rarely failed to, 
        she got out of hand, slapping men 
and women, daring them to hit her in the belly (never the face), 
        I was posted to ward off the blows.
 
She came home to the Depression, and it returned the favor. 
        In England, there was talk of her being 
“an Elizabethan,” but that meant nothing here, where she was 
        never mistaken “for that awful lesbian,” 
Tallulah Bankhead, from Alabama. England had had enough of her—
        the cocaine, the drinking, the disrobing—
even though the public there, like the public here, had never witnessed 
        any of it. Wanting to have been there
when Tallulah stripped, the public, as usual, hadn’t been. 

I was never part of the public. I know the difference between an item 
        and an experience. One is never larger 
than one’s reputation—which was all Tallulah had here, a fact 
        Vanity Fair featured 
in comparing her to “the little threads of red that run through the dull gray 
        pattern of a Persian rug.” Better than anyone, 
Tallulah knew she’d been stepped on. When Winchell met her, he said 
        he’d heard a lot about her. Imagine 
her reply. And who’s to say that all of it wasn’t? It needed to be: 
        her rival now was Garbo, and Tallulah 
had yet to make a movie. They met at a party she threw in Hollywood, 
        where she smashed glasses—she liked the sound.  
Garbo took an early leave: “That’s a girl to keep away from.”

I knew then that I had to get near her, this “Exotic of Exotics,” 
        with her filthy fame. She flopped six times 
in two years: Tarnished Lady, My Sin, The Cheat, Thunder Below, 
        The Devil and the Deep—and, my favorite, Faithless. 
I met her on the set of Something Gay. She stopped rehearsal the first day. 
        “I don’t want to,” she said, “I’m not in the mood.” 
What did she want? “Two bottles of champagne, a big double bed, and” 
        (pointing to her leading man) “Hugh Sinclair.” 
I stood up at that. But when she told a stringer she hadn’t had a man 
        in six months, she got a call from her father,
the Senator from Alabama. The studio that had given the public Dietrich 
        now gave Tallulah back to the theater, and to me.

I had a bit part in her triumphal return: that’s when she waited in the wings 
        for the shy actor playing a Reverend; 
that’s when, on being asked what she thought of love, she said, 
        “I don’t understand what you mean, 
my dear. Do you mean fucking?” I may have wanted her to mean it with me, 
        but she was not that wayward a girl, 
even if she did tell Eleanor Roosevelt she was the most wayward girl 
        the First Lady would ever meet. 
Needless to say, her taming by Lillian and Dorothy, the Gotham Bitches, 
        followed soon after. And then the critics.

People laughed and applauded equally when, as Cleopatra, 
        she “barged down the Nile and sank.” 
To Mr. Brown’s remark, Tallulah said, “I am bloody but unbowed.” 
        You couldn’t teach her a lesson, 
but then she couldn’t teach you anything, either: that’s what people 
        forgot about her, even those who, 
like Miss Parker, should have known better. There were days 
        when I was the first to feel
her automatic carelessness (she never wore underpants; she shit 
        with the door open) and, when there were 
no more glasses to smash, the last. (“I suppose,” she said, wiping 
        herself, “you think Garbo craps orchids.”) 
A day away from Tallulah was indeed like a month in the country—
        but who wanted that? I wanted hers.  

Tallulah, having spent her hoard of short words one night,
        heard Miss Parker say, “Has Whistler’s mother 
finished?” Which was Dorothy’s prelude to having the last: 
        “She’d give you the shirt off her back, 
even if you didn’t want it.” I did, but she never offered. Oh, she was 
        nice enough, when she needed her things
picked up. “Take them away,” she’d say, “don’t put them away.” 
        The publicist who called her 
a “frequently destructive tenant of hotel apartments most of her adult life” 
        knew how little she had of that. 
She called her house “Windows” and she threw stones—her wittiest 
        remark, in my opinion. An adult demands of others 
what she demands of herself. Lacking that status, I sympathized 
	with her tyranny over servants, and the free reign 
she allowed her pissing pets—a marmoset named Senegas, after Bernhardt’s
        hairdresser, and a lion cub, who shall go nameless. 
I kept the green velvet gown Senegas pissed on. “I’m your stain 
         remover,” I told her that evening. 
“No,” she said, rummaging for another dress, “You’re my stain.”

How could one be bored by such a woman? But they were, or began 
        to say they were, and that, as they say, 
was the kiss of death. Her triumphs in Little Foxes and The Skin of Our Teeth, 
        the award she won for her performance 
in Lifeboat—not enough to captivate a country gearing up again for war:
        closed or open, Tallulah’s legs were scrap. 
Even at Cukor’s garden party, when she wore nothing but violets 
        on her pussy, the band played on; 
Town and Country fawned instead on her five dogs, the mongrel last. 

But Tallulah herself was bored—with growling, with stripping, 
        covering an eye with a hat. Before uttering 
a printable word for Town and Country’s hack, she indicated 
        the portrait Augustus John had done of her 
“a thousand years ago.” He gazed. “Eli,” she said, “fix the man a scotch.” 
        I did, and brought her a Coke with ammonia. 
“Since Dunkirk fell,” she lied, “I haven’t touched a drop. And I will not 
        until that defeat is avenged.”

The part of Senator’s daughter was now her only legitimate role. 
         “Talks incessantly,” the little man wrote, 
as if he’d discovered something. “Can’t keep her mind on one subject”—
        a note too long by three words. 
I’d heard it all before: Waking up at dawn to make movies drove me mad. 
        My rudeness is their fault. 
 I never miss anyone. I hate witty people. I let Dorothy be witty once, 
        and I was witty once. I had a violent 
temper as a child; they would throw water on me and say, 
        ‘Well, we can’t kill her.’ And so on—
until the man showed his hand with a question Tallulah trumped. 
        “You mean like ‘fuck,’” she said, 
covering her mouth. “Eli, bring me another Coke and him another scotch.” 

During lunch, for which Estelle Winwood, by then as permanent a guest as I,
         joined us, the scribbler tried again 
to elicit words he could not have printed had she said them. 
        When he stopped his note-taking,
Tallulah took her cue. “Estelle,” she said, “I’ve hired a Harlem waiter 
        for the weekend. He’ll serve us all our meals 
in drag.” “Oh, dear,” Miss Winwood said, as if they’d rehearsed, “all those
        feathers in the soup!” He wrote that down, 
as Tallulah knew he would (they had rehearsed). Then, having gotten 
        his attention, she added, “The fucking 
Communists want to come and take my fur coats away. But Daddy’s 
        coming up for re-election this year, 
and I want no goddamn swearing in this piece.” The columnist excused 
        himself—he had interviews to conduct— 
 and promised to return. She saw him to the door. “I’ve done 
        almost everything I’m supposed to have done,” 
she said, nodding at the pen in his pocket, “but not at the time and place 
        I’m supposed to have done them.” 

The man never asked me a thing, but he managed to talk to too many 
        of Tallulah’s few remaining friends. 
It may have been that she would have been easier to write about if, 
        as Miss Parker said, someone had invented her. 
But then Dorothy thought only one could play at her table. 
        That Tallulah was generous and vindictive,
had no illusions but herself, was resilient to a fault, and beautiful, and funny; 
        that, while alone in almost every other respect,
she was not alone in being unable to distinguish Communists from Fascists, 
        (or Democrats from Republicans),
or in lying about her age (by one year)—this meant nothing to the town 
        or the country. The man had come 
to report to a public never short of words Tallulah’s short words only. 
        And these would be cut 
from his genuine article. What else could Tallulah do but invent herself?

The reporter returned from his interviews, expecting lunch. 
        He was embarrassed. Tallulah 
sat on her bed. He turned the pages of his notebook, stopping at one: 
        “Can you read a book in an hour 
and remember it in detail for a long time?” “Yes,” she said, “but most books 
        are dull.” He turned another page. 
“Did you say to Kate Smith, ‘You big tub of lard, are you going to tell me 
        how to make an entrance?’”
“Of course not,” she said, “I’m a lady. But I’ll tell you 
        how to make an exit.” 
The man stood up. “And what about your quarrel with—” 
        “That woman is a cunt, 
and you’re a son of a bitch. Eli, call him a cab.”

        Of course, the article was never published. 

Billy Budd and Gulliver’s Travels are hardly inter-illuminating, even though Billy Budd and Claggart are sailors, and Gulliver is a sailor, and even though Claggart and Gulliver both read (Gulliver even writes). Logistically, too, the comparison collapses: Melville calls Billy Budd a “moral phenomenon” and says that Claggart is one of two onboard the Rights of Man who could understand Billy as such; so that if Claggart and Gulliver are compared, the entailment of the comparison would have Billy Budd, whom Melville once likens to “a young horse,” be a Yahoo. Gulliver never speaks of the Yahoo as a “moral phenomenon.” But he never speaks of himself as one either. And, though Melville’s narrator doesn’t take part in the story, as Swift’s does, his narrator being Gulliver, he yet admits that at the time the story being told took place, when he was younger, he didn’t understand what he now does. Gulliver never admits to not understanding something and then understanding it. He never asks the question. He is too busy learning things about the world and human nature, especially languages.

Nor is there any appeal, by the narrator, to the author of Gulliver’s Travels. But Melville’s presence is felt fairly often in Billy Budd, especially when his narrator is establishing the origin of Claggart’s antipathy to Billy Budd. There Melville discusses romance and realism and the quietude into which the Gospels have fallen in his time. But Gulliver is just suddenly full of contempt for, and disgust at, the sight of the Yahoos, discerning in them a mirror image of himself. Gulliver finds no irony in this, which may or may not be ironic, because he is too busy being disgusted at the Yahoos or fawning before the horses that talk, the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver, so ordinary and docile, who talks only about the extraordinary and the aberrant, would rather get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

It is Gulliver’s teachability, and his identifying reason with “docility,” that keeps him from learning and from being reasonable, and causes him to fall, in the last sentence of his narrative—the longest and most exploded period of the book—into the very pride he hates so much. Still under the influence of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver, like Claggart, finds himself, or is found, “with no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it.” Claggart’s and Gulliver’s rational demeanor is monomaniacal.

I gave my brother Billy Budd to read, knowing he didn’t like to read much. He loved the stars, even in Hollywood, in Marplot where he lived. I thought he’d see himself in Billy, and learn to watch out for Claggarts, and keep, like the starry Vere, a few books near. But he was struck down before he touched it.

In his life of Swift, Thomas Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s father, unfolds Lord Bolingbroke’s two-word summation of Swift’s character:

He had, early in life, imbibed such a strong hatred to hypocrisy, that he fell into the opposite extreme; and no mortal ever took more pains to display his good qualities, and appear in the best light to the world, than he did to conceal his, or even to put on the semblance of their contraries . . . Lord Bolingbroke, who knew him well, in two words summed up his character in this respect, by saying that Swift was a hypocrite reversed. (1784)

We are photographed. In Sheridan’s day, we were “paragraphed” (The School for Scandal). We are still being paragraphed. “We news-writers,” Horace Walpole wrote in 1780, “cannot always warrant our goods; nor are falsities a discredit to the profession. Paragraphs of news are like roasted chestnuts; not one in twenty is sound. They are like mottos too, wrapped in sugar, which every body breaks, finds nothing worth reading, and yet goes on cracking.”

“Behaviorism is a call to seriousness,” said Gertrude Ezorsky. I wished for half of Jeff Bezos’s net worth this morning before breakfast. I wished to have been his wife, and to have divorced him and gotten that settlement, and given it away, as she did, keeping $10 million for myself. And then I wished to be me now, as I am, only 40 years younger. That was nearly six impossible things. Did I want any of them? Absurd. So I write them here, which shows how unserious I am, and what weakling regrets I have, in all their strength, in all their subjunctive past conditionality, “for we cannot undo the past.”

Marie Antoinette ate her cake and had “more back,” as the Pennsylvania Dutch used to say. Our thinking, if frivolous, isn’t wishy-washy. But what are our wants up to? I want I were dead may have been said before, but I wrote it. More radical measures and greater deals of behavior are needed. If they don’t know how to distinguish their wishes from what they aren’t, people can’t be said to know what they are, for they think they are what they aren’t. Did I know “I never want to see you again” was a momentary wish when I said it? I refuse to bury my positions in disclaimers. I can’t think it would be important now to read a biography of Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard, or Swift, but I want to.

When Harold Pinter was asked the leading question—by his Paris Review interviewer—“Why do you think the conversations in your plays are so effective?” he answered, “I don’t know. I think possibly it’s because people will fall back on anything they can lay their hands on verbally to keep away from the danger of knowing, and of being known.” In their falling back, Pinter’s characters lay their hands on speech of touch in order to stay unattached and self-contained.

“Speech of touch towards others should be sparingly used; for discourse ought to be a field, without coming home to any man,” Francis Bacon wrote in “Of Discourse” (1612, 1625)—fully aware that discourse was seldom what it “ought” to be. More often, discourse comes home to every person who speaks, listens, and listens in. In Bacon, Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Locke, Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Eugene O’Neill, and Pinter, speech of touch holds a finger towards the continence, duplicity, sexuality, dominance, and submission of others. It gets into what Melville in Billy Budd called “the deadly space between,” and it moves the boundaries of ownership around.

Words are creatures, but not necessarily human. They are more like things, “manual things.” And yet they are our inventions, and Pinter dramatizes their creatureliness. The hand is given in declaration, in greeting and parting, in testimony and matrimony, in alliance and severance, by oath, pledge, plight, curse. We can make manipulation persuasive, compelling, subtle. Most of the time, manipulation is so obvious it’s invisible. From the phlebotomist to the server folding napkins, what seems to be routine may be a battle for survival—people taking up “anything they can lay their hands on verbally to keep away from the danger of knowing, and of being known.” Does Pinter’s answer to the question of why the dialogues in his plays are “so effective” answer? Who said the conversations in his plays are “effective”? How? And from whose point of view? Are they affective? If audiences fall back on their own handy things for keeping from themselves the danger of knowing and being known, what then? Between the ears of the actors, the playwright, and the audience, a lot must be going on. I think it was Swift who said that revolutions take place in the ears.

To the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, on December 7, 1928, George Bernard Shaw said: “The way in which the stage will find out every single weakness that you have got, every vanity that you have got, every folly that you have got, every little slip in self-control that you are subject to, is really very terrible.” Modern dramatists from Henrik Ibsen to Pinter were anatomizing the processes—social, psychological, familial, generational—that discovered the weakness of human beings, the puny-ness of human aspiration and achievement. Modern drama made listeners out of the audience, which is nothing new or special. But it made listeners out of its audience in despair of their being able to listen, to pay attention, to understand, to concentrate. And then it drastically reduced the amount of business to watch, and the space to watch it in. Ibsen’s Hjalmar retouches photographs; Samuel Beckett’s Hamm sits; the rest do as little as possible. Pinter reminds us that there’s apprehension, and then there’s apprehension.

In 1986, I wondered if there was a connection between Punk music and Restoration comedies (1660–1710). In Love for Love, Valentine is uneducated. Angelica tests him to see if he loves her. The testing of Valentine by Angelica is the action of the play. He isn’t educated; he is tested. He neither develops nor changes during the test. He is tried to be tricked, or his trial is a trick. Testing is tricking. Angelica is the one who learns. She comes to know what she didn’t know at first: that the marriage will work. Testing teaches the teachers, not the students. Students never learn, never change, never develop—never, that is, by means of the tests. They do their developing by means of other students and of biology.

Jeremy Collier, in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), was one of the best readers of the plays of the 1690s. He often brought out things in the plays he attacked that didn’t support his case. He often reported scenes and dialogues without commenting on them. When he was commenting, his irony and sarcasm were vigorous. His questions exclaimed, his exclamations questioned. Sometimes he had to double back, in case his irony was too subtle. Sometimes he sounded like Swift in his Tale of the Tub.

Kenneth Burke said that Swift attacks in others “the weaknesses and temptations that are really in himself.” That observation, that premise or inference, that idea, is deathless. The main practical findings of modern psychology were known to people for centuries before 1869. Three of them stand out. Two are “cognitive”; the third is “behavioral,” by way of guarding against the embarrassments of 1. and 2.

1. What we say of others characterizes us. (Projection)

2. What we accuse others of we are guilty and ashamed of. (Denial)

3. “Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.” (“And why . . . considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”)

I gratify the vice in me by punishing it in you. The honorable senator calls out the honorable senator for “playing politics.” Girolamo Savonarola, Burke said, made a bonfire of other people’s vanities. Everybody knows this now, at all levels of brow. Pythagoras told us not to eat our heart out (“cor ne edito” or “cor non edito”). What good does knowing things about ourselves do us? “I see the better way, I take the worse,” Ovid said. It’s more gratifying to say so than to do so. When I see the better way, there’s neither past nor future. This time is when I fuck up, next time is when I don’t, and last time is when I did.

Joni Mitchel said: “Bob Dylan is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. Taylor Swift? All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.”

Individualist enterprise, Burke wrote in 1945, is imaginatively symbolized in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and conceptually symbolized in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But what of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels? With the possible exception of Gulliver’s Travels, none of those books is funny, none is a comedy. Has anyone laughed while reading Gulliver’s Travels? But are they all imaginative symbolizations of individualist enterprise? Is any of them? Smith’s “invisible hand” is always managing it so that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “all beings play into each other’s hands.” But nothing momentous is going to happen. Everything is gradually working to maintain equilibrium, which rarely appears, at close range, to be other than chaotic, unjust, out of control—or boring.

“Reality is not inconsistent with pretence, and a man without a penny in the world can pose as being poor,” wrote Stephen Swift, in a 1912 review of the reissue of Arthur Ransome’s 1907 Bohemia in London. Swift quotes:

when work was scrappy

And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint,

When we were angry and poor and happy,

And proud of seeing our names in print.

Swift ended his review: “The reason why one does not usually like books of this kind is that they hardly ever are books of this kind. Most of them are written by donkeys or maggots; this one is written by a sane man.”

“Everything is what it is because it got that way.” That sentence, famous to Kenneth Boulding and Daniel Dennett, and attributed by them to D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, isn’t in the 1917 edition of Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917 [793 pages], 1942 [1116 pages]). Nor does the word “selves” appear in the book, and the word “everything” only twice.

As Dennett learned from Swift and Lewis Carroll, if you shrink yourself small enough, everything is external. Almost. But tell that to a cell, which goes on making a wall and defining a boundary. Inside and outside—as fundamental as, Alfred North Whitehead said, past and future.

B. F. Skinner told one interviewer, “I love to think.” That’s what we read when we read Skinner—a man who loved to think. On the other hand, according to Vilfredo Pareto, “At bottom what people want is to think—it matters little whether the thinking be sound or fallacious.” “Life,” Emerson had written, “consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” Skinner really wanted to think soundly and be read. To think was to behave, and when on his best behavior he was verbal. He arranged things so that he could behave verbally. “Writing a paper in the silence of my study—that is the only verbal behavior I can really trust,” Skinner wrote. “Get a bunch of words alone in a room, and you make them say anything you want them to,” wrote Robert Frost.

Skinner was a translator of English “into behavior.” He cut up a copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, “pasted one at the top of each page of a notebook, and under each one wrote a ‘translation into behavior.’” Examples follow, with La Rochefoucauld, in quotation marks, in F. G. Stevens’s English:

“The clemency of princes is often nothing more than a political artifice designed to secure the goodwill of their subjects.” Translation: Rulers often withhold or moderate punishment because their subjects are then more likely to support them and less likely to revolt. “Such clemency, though hailed as a virtue, is the product sometimes of vanity, sometimes of insolence, not infrequently of timidity, and generally of all three combined.” Translation: They sometimes withhold or moderate punishment because they are then praised, sometimes because they thus avoid work, often because punishment would have aversive consequences for them, and generally for all three of these reasons combined.

Skinner had to insert “because.” He wrote:

I thought the translations were as close to what La R. was saying as the English versions, but the apparent wisdom and profundity had vanished. Compared with the human mind and character, human behavior was superficial stuff. And that was doubly unfortunate because, where La R’s inner forces remained forever out of reach, my translations pointed to things that could be changed. Translation soon became perfunctory and I lost interest. La R’s insight into the causes of human behavior had, however, impressed me.

Skinner went on and lost interest too in “The Dictionary,” which was to have been his version of Swift’s Polite Conversation, and he lost interest in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas and in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

Skinner had the sensibility and the sense of humor of a satirist. Some of his entries were: sacrifice, sarcasm, satisfy, search, seduce, shun, sorry for, stoical, stress, stubborn, suggest, supercilious, surrender, suspect. He was also tired of the jargon of behavioral analysis, and liked “disaffected” and “disenchanted” for describing people “no longer under the control of a particular social environment.” He looked at the etymology of “docile” (a word Michel Foucault would single out for use) and asked why the Latin “minari,” meaning “to drive cattle by threatening,” eventually came to mean “to lead” (Fr. mener), “as if the stick had become the carrot.” In 1961, Skinner was disgusted with commencement-address-speak (Harvard, Boston College, Yale): “The preoccupation with confidence, spiritual commitment, and moral power obscured the social conditions responsible for current problems and offered no help in solving them.”

Skinner stopped translating La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, but he didn’t stop translating into behaviorese. Noam Chomsky concluded in 1959 that Skinner’s entire science was probably nothing but an elegant (cruel) variation on a perfectly serviceable existing lexicon, a re-description of a description, a scratching where there was no itch, a fixing of what wasn’t broken. For instance, “cognition” was “a fancy word for ‘knowing’ or ‘thinking,’” which Skinner “had defined in Verbal Behavior . . . as one kind of ‘behaving.’” Undaunted, Skinner, in 1964, at 60, tried rewriting Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch by “replacing references to feelings with references to the actions from which the feelings were inferred.”

It is as if, had Skinner had his way, Harvard would have had a “Verbal Behavior Department” instead of departments of “English” and “Linguistics.” “Operant conditioning” and “programmed instruction” would have replaced “learning and teaching,” and we would be discussing “behavior” instead of “cognition,” “knowing,” or “thinking.” But did Skinner ever take his own commitment to histories and contingencies seriously? And did Frost ever catch himself, the many hundreds of times that he did so, using a visual vocabulary for his sonic “insights”? Had they, their bodies of writing, having gone against the vernacular, against seven centuries’ control of verbal behavior across a dozen languages, at least two “classical,” would have been satires worthy of Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, or Laurence Sterne.

Skinner wrote poems, plays, and stories, and showed a few of the latter to Frost, who liked them. Skinner was a tinkerer, a builder of contraptions. He was orderly and fastidious. His body of writing was a reduction of literature to its elements, with a consequent reduction of the author-function such as Roland Barthes, Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others would make. He saw the end of literature-writing in Gertrude Stein. His Verbal Behavior (1957) took revenge on literature. Its writing is often as witty, funny, straight-faced, and wild in its detail as Swift’s, Alexander Pope’s, William Empson’s, and C. S. Peirce’s.

Frost had an unusual capacity for noticing things and making nice distinctions (e.g., as between a happening and an occurrence). Frost was equalled in all three by Skinner. I have sometimes thought that Skinner was what Frost would have been had he gone into science, and Frost what Skinner would have been had he gone into literature.

Skinner wrote in the first volume of his autobiography: “I was interested in human behavior, but I had been investigating it in the wrong way. Alf Evers had said to me, ‘Science is the art of the twentieth century,’ and I believed him. Literature as an art form was dead; I would turn to science.” Skinner had read a passage in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop in which Dickens asked, “How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it himself?” Frost asked the same question of Catullus, when Catullus used the phrase mens animi. Did Catullus tell a truth without seeing it? Did he know what he was saying? Frost gave his answer to his question in his 1959 Paris Review interview. When asked by people about his “inspiration,” Frost said, “I tell them it’s mostly animus.”

There are more distemporaries in any given period than contemporaries. Sigmund Freud and Max Planck, for example; Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno. And there’s no contemporary like a distemporary, especially in literary history. Dante more than John Donne came home to T. S. Eliot, and a dozen others were more to him than Ezra Pound. Eliot couldn’t get over the Elizabethan dramatists, but he was trying to break into the ranks, and the Elizabethan dramatists were on other people’s minds and in other people’s books. He had to make John Webster more of a contemporary than Shakespeare, jockey others’ horses for his own positioning. James Russell Lowell had the idea of “dissociation of sensibility” in 1870 or 1880, in his essay “Shakespeare Once More,” and Hugo von Hofmannsthal gave Eliot the image of it in his “Lord Chandos” letter (1902). Eliot was more alive to the dead than to the living, and this seems to be the general case in literature.

Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” may as well be called “Constant and the Variables.” In the 1919 essay, Eliot said that reading is the most direct form of experience (a claim that E. R. Curtius would make clearer than Eliot had made it), and that reading writers of 300 years ago—all dried up—is the best way to get a handle on your own material and your own time: add water and stir. What you get is your “precipitate,” to use Eliot’s word. The writer now is the rehydrator of the writer then. Machiavelli preferred the dead, too, as Petrarch did before him, denying the gulf between him and Cicero, as Dante before Petrarch had denied the gulf between him and Virgil. What was the result of Eliot’s chemistry experiment? Many of his readers found his experience more entertaining than their own. Samuel Johnson in his “Life of Addison” had said what Eliot said: the dead are what we know. We are their, they are our, zombies. Without Addison, you can’t attack Addison, Johnson said. We dig our graves, and we conduct our exhumations.

The opposite of success in Edmund Spenser isn’t failure but shame. Maybe Melville, reading Spenser’s 1590 poem “Muiopotmos,” found in Clarion, who meets the “marplot” in the fair plot, a herald of his Billy Budd, who meets Claggart on deck. His portrait you can essay, Melville says of Claggart, but never hit. Animus, the mystery of iniquity, grows in the garden too, and the poet loves a little taste of that.

“Shakespeare’s sonnets are hard to think about. They are hard to think about individually and they are hard to think about collectively.”

—Stephen Booth, start of Chapter 1, “The Critical Dilemma,” An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Yale UP, 1969

Poetics are cared about. Stephen Booth cared about them.

Sick as a parrot, how poetic language operates on and in audiences, gadflies at this point, no air apparent atop, if you believe some of the reports, in the sense that markets care about stability.

It’s hard to say broadly something flat out, in public, using the tongue, the grid, the rollbacks. You know, frankly, this is a huge issue, if marine life’s suffering. We do see an awareness, but business happens in the short-term.

Some people really enjoy playing bridge. And then the question is, what is the goal of that?

Close reading has never gone completely out of style. Can’t we just make up another name under this umbrella? Some of the people who should have known are just beginning to give their accounts, part owners of the thing. A mean business.

“I felt like lots of smoke.” I think I need to touch on this vacuum. I don’t want to be too hyperbolic or blind-eye on all of this debating, suing—the sheer numbers becoming the fabric of the place.

You live with ugly furniture so long that concentric circles are going to explode. We’ve seen this before.

It’s crazy how influential it is, widening by the hour.

But Booth’s approach is microscopic reading hung up on meaning, which is no more than habit in the uncertainty caused, the myriad currents, the hearing of the diplomatic staff.

Cicadas Cuba has, Japan has, and ideational patterns at play involve third countries. It’s a complicated situation. Could cicadas really do something like this? Some are large and loud enough in some parts of the world, seeming to come from many directions while sitting in the tent.

Water on the tongue is talkative, but you have to be close enough. That’s hard to believe, inside a home. As it happens, I listen to the sound.

If the people who had these difficulties could have been accused enough, if enough of them had been singing up in these trees, I’d be prepared to believe it.

Every nation’s cicadas are absolutely the most devastating. You remember them definitely. They come out, background to foreground, consistently.

Music, sound, and punishment can be weaponized to enforce rules. (Barry Manilow, the theme from Friends—but we won’t get into that, heart and soul.)

Normality starts with law. Here’s an example:

On our side like the tokened pestilence

Where death is sure.

Spain responded by dismissing water evaporating from a plate. It might have no place to work.

An explicit poem is a momentary flash, and then it’s over, like a pun, a flavor, or a retort.

Ora Retort? I used to date a woman by that name. About getting together she would say, “When were you thinking?” but never add “of getting together,” and soon the entire question was only “When?”

The middle of the ocean may as well be shore as offshore, all or nothing being there. Hundreds of enthusiasts watching, they’ll file for administration in August, “when we will cut off our chains.” When will we?

But first, the dramatic turn of events. It has to be today, there’s no other day, its sound, its sense, its potential senses, their homonyms, their cognates, their synonyms, and the antonyms of those.

The same kinds of “substantive nonsense and non-importing patterns” have been warned. Europeans, awarded new powers that pop up in slang, jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes, wait nervously to see what happens next.

Explosions of disobedience take control, those dense networks of patterns to sort of demonstrate “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.”

To all intents, I suppose we’ll have found out, taken on extra duties: the so-called silent majority will have been at play here. Today has come as a real shock. The report includes priming—when, after hearing a word, we recognize words related to it, expectation being the depth of the processing of our engagement with a statement.

(Shallow processing explains whether a brother be allowed to marry his widow’s sister.)

There it’s a question of motion for an asteroid to comment on. We can fit an orbit around the sun.

Can we assume, what, ejected material? It’s going to take a “that’s weird” first, then more of a “that’s neat,” before we can. There’s a set of rules in place, but to decide how this new one’s going to be named—here there are no rules. All we now know is a little bit more than we knew before.

Just think of the things that you read, hear, or say every day that, despite not adhering, you understand perfectly, as the Kennedy motorcade made its way toward Dallas.

A security check is carried out under lock and key. More transparency is still a long way from close. As a black box language goes in, comprehension comes out, for all the wrong reasons, and relieved of command with no impact on current operations.

All have a no-touching rule. A judge announces sentences that simply teach a lesson. Many welcome them. Many complain, seriously and equally. More recently, dynamical cognitive linguists began to use physics and calculus to get inside, explaining shifting in terms of interacting.

For the first time in over two years, dynamicists on and off the pitch emphasize that language happens in time, like cricket or any other game. So the message is, forget cricket, football is the future. Is this a defining moment? Still a long way to go, history tells us. Booth too. Tough stance.

In the jargon, it’s called “cat primes dog quickly.” Expectations slow, more arbitrary connections for the breakaway authorities make themselves felt, but on the argument of force, there’s no relationship between animal words and office words.

If I put you on postcards, stickers, and more—you with a series of animals followed by desks—will you feel an imposition of direct rule?

Self-style has failed to determine its own future in about two seconds. Following a desk with a cat won’t help you sink in as strongly as a trouble-maker (ever since the first Christians came here). Martin Luther played a key role in that book. He was a Methodist. I’m not going to stand here and wait. (I know I do a lot with hymns, but I got that from my grandmother, who memorized poems.)

And then there was the transition, and then a problem. I have to say this: certain sentences are especially good, and everybody would bear their own sense if—if there were buttresses because of one sentence.

Has anything changed?

“The child rushed through the doorway fell” got into a syntactical dead end, the circle of concern, the garden path, so to speak. No, no, that can’t do. There’s something the matter. Overtly.

Where are the works of the mothers?

Until you said, wait a minute, what role did Christianity play in all this? I saw more than I could hear. But you never hear all you hear, and that’s the end. The one who’s cutting the path doesn’t know that it’s crooked behind.

Are there enough voices to straighten the posters? Then more will come, which isn’t what God wanted. The whole enterprise needs a little encouragement. I will do it myself. Why should others shut up? Nobody ordains a woman. You just have to brush aside the thoughts in men.

Similar ambiguities in Shakespeare’s sonnets not only tolerate but celebrate uncertainty. They don’t notice themselves doing it. “They stay so that say so” is a component of poetic richness. Full stop.

Things like that I think are just your foot on my foot, momentary confusions. “I grant, sweet foot, thy lovely argument, deserves the travail of a worthier pen”: just so, take it off. The forced telling we started by, me telling you to force what they’re wondering—it’s good, at the end of each day. Can you help make it? You have to live up to that, the language that will make others do it: two states of mind at least have to experience glamorized images of the latest news and postulate something wrong.

And happening!

Shifts occur when parts are switched unexpectedly. Shakespeare’s “He childed as I fathered,” his “hearts that spanieled me at heels,” notice something odd, make sense of it, and put on more unusual activity. His motive remains unclear. A bomb attack has killed one policeman.

Who is behind this spirited bidding, and barriers are high? In real time, in a hurry, we manage a deluge of information, never treating sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and meanings as language. Who has choked on language?

When it comes to small and medium enterprises that rely on the multi-level interactions that characterize Shakespeare’s verse, our brains are fluently bombarded. And rather than being wounded or killed, or feeling “overload,” or asking too many questions, this complexity, this mess, we are really cool about. An even heavier flow of blood can actually chill the activity across the board.

But what is ironic, a smoother circuit than a hexagon.

Here’s an idea. Fictive motion, when we describe things that can’t move, like “the road runs through the desert,” “The valley was bumpy and uneven.” Government is playing a role, I’d like to add. This effect disappears when the road is “in” the desert. So it’s everywhere, however nascent, in a courier or a career, a male or a female, even though I disagree with those gender norms.

According to Booth, the greatest tragedy occurs in the audience, giving us several chances to switch our moral allegiance, to step out and realize we can, or to realize we can and step out. Either way, entrepreneurship, authorship, craftsmanship, oneupmanship, it’s a tough journey, however available and trending.

So why don’t we?

Shakespeare doesn’t want us to, that’s why.

To begin with, our responses never seem quite appropriate. Our tone of small talk can’t be removed. Our syntax isn’t maddeningly contorted, our pace isn’t tortuous, and there aren’t enough adjectives and nouns coming to us to satisfy his lust for the walk-me-through-it he always had time for.

But we, despite being players and welcoming “an effectively miraculous experience,” not mouthing “the inherent limitation of the human mind,” Booth argues strenuously, don’t.

I was with Groucho Marx at times, and a half-man, half-eagle at other times. I asked people to look at the eagles flying overhead, but they didn’t believe they were eagles. Up ahead, an eagle came to the ground and I went ecstatically to it. The bird turned into a man in front of me, a very hungry man who had blonde hair and acne. He asked for food, so I gathered all those around me into a line. One by one they came forward gawking at the eagleman and dropping food. Most of it was candy and sugar-ridden. The eagleman took the food, gave me his address, thanked me, and turned eagle again. I then went to Groucho’s house, way downtown in a plush but crumbling neighborhood. There were chicken cages in a garage behind his house. We found him there. He took us inside. While he was talking to others, I went looking through his book collection. I stole a book called 55 Cracks for the Home Party, about twenty dollars, and three large gumdrops, one red, one green, one orange. Groucho entered and caught me; I pleaded, and he let me keep what I’d stolen. There was something about attending a party with him, but he either died or had run out of cigars and money to buy them, so I played in a football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Denver Broncos. It was a grudge match in the snow. I played for the Broncos and we lost. After talking with my father at home about the game—he was very upset and couldn’t believe that we’d lost—I was in a car driving back up to that cold snowy field with a couple of faceless, nameless gentlemen. They drove extremely fast on icy roads with smiles on their faces and beers in their hands. I told them to slow down and give me a beer. When we could drive no farther the driving really began: exactly vertical up an ice mountain was where the field was. I got out of the car and was at home with my brother. He told me that I missed the best part of the drive. My mother woke me up.

We gathered and heard President Carter speak about going to fight, asking the volunteers to fight in Thailand—to fight in Iran—a little group like a gospel meeting—and I wanted to go—I was the first to clap—the others began to say “No No No.”

Sleep with a fortress of rats and deal cocaine through my friend Winston Churchill. “If you don’t talk to me, you’d have to talk to the British.” Winston gestures. A concert with Ella Fitzgerald, Arnold Palmer, and St. Michael and the Underpants. We go fishing for beers that seem to multiply in the mud. The little shack that everyone plays in soon disappears. Churchill makes a speech to the English or American civilians or police about justice, while we are passed the cocaine, and he laughs with us. Arnold is rocking at the mic, hilarious. I keep trying to drown the rats, and they won’t drown.

I’m on a high tower with a friend, then Arthur Koestler, and when we look down in the water, the head and torso of the Statue of Liberty can be seen, her head on the bottom, very clearly. We get ready to go down. I begin to be afraid. Koestler needs some paper to do some work. I get a letter out of my pocket and give it to him. He writes after smiling a little when I tell him he can either send me back the letter or keep it, it doesn’t matter. He writes three words in Hungarian. I fumble with my notebook and drop it off the tower—my full yellow one, gone. I can’t start down for fear of falling, but Koestler is almost hopping from rung to rung, swinging around. When I get the New York Times Book Review later, Koestler stares me in the face.

I saw T. S. Eliot. He was funnier than I thought he’d be. His lecture didn’t quite end. He smoked. Nobody went up to him, so I did. He told me of a version of The Waste Land, printed in Independence, Missouri. He said he preferred it above all other Eliot, as most Elizabethan, most dramatic. Someone had a copy of it, he said; I said, I had read that someone did. I told him that I’d be facing questions about him in my orals. He smiled. He asked if I had one of those notebooks that he could write my parents’ address in. I handed him one. As he set it down to write in, someone poured a bowl of soup on his head.

I walked with Robert Frost and Richard Poirier. Frost has read my two Raritan poems, and he likes one of them, “Accumulations”. I tell him “But shame on us” in the other one, “The China Syndrome,” is like a tone in his “Once By the Pacific.” He says nothing. He’s big, vigorous, strong. He walks ahead of us. He has a pocket notebook like mine with poems in it. Later, Frost and Poirier and I are standing in a hallway, waiting to see Gertrude Stein during office hours.

I spent last night with Marlon Brando. He lived in at least one hotel. He had expensive tastes. He wanted to butter me up. He wasn’t too fat. He liked me. He hurried me. He hated to wait. The corridors were long. He had eyeglasses and a fur coat on. I thought he’d spent all his money. He got me in a dark room.

Joni Mitchell coaches a soccer team I’m on. I can’t play. The diagram she made has me set up to go get food, but I play and I’m bad at it. I see skiers change skis. They hitch rock formations that enable them to go through waves. Joni comes out and says, “It will help you to feel your envagination.” I go after her. “Is that an invitation?” “Yes.” “I’d like to.” “Then I’ll make an appointment.”

I sang along to the radio with Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman and mistook Jagger’s last fat joint for a cigarette and smoked it.

I’m with a girl I met in middle school. We’re brushing our teeth. Into the bedroom comes President George H. W. Bush. He’s happy to see me, puts a lit joint in my nose, burning end first. I laugh, he laughs. He wants me to have some. I take a hit, give it back. He takes a hit. I tell him I’ve seen him in a couple of movies lately, one that begins with a W, and then I can’t name the other. My mouth gets cottony. I say thickly that I “admire” him.

Last night, with Will Ferrell in a wild, exhausting course of gorilla theater and film, sometimes a movie, sometimes a film, or the changes came so fast it seemed impossible that this could happen in real time. I was in it, though, hanging out with Peter Falk on a movie set. He’s in Columbo, and he’s in another, playing with other actors. We’re in a car together. We’re getting drunk.

A long dream of being with the Kennedy family, and getting very angry because they’re behaving terribly. When I did the same during tennis they got angry with me. Then I made a speech defending myself and my father thought it was excellent. I got set up with the sister, Caroline, and had some fun with her. I used the word “prelate,” and it seemed the two Kennedy boys were “crown princes.”

This morning, in the margin of an anthology, Kenneth Boulding wondered who wrote “One Art.” Why hadn’t the edition identified the author? I had never heard Boulding raise his voice before. Then I heard that I too had left town.

Rosenstock-Huessy is in a hostel in London on April 27, 1980. He’s very old, but walks with a backpack and a bedroll and notebooks. I ask, Where is he? He’ll be back, everyone says. He doesn’t talk to you if you’re not English-speaking. He’s a pain in the ass. I go out, get lost, ride back in a Datsun 240Z with a thin young Black man who finds the hostel. We get out and wait. Someone is suddenly washing his car—two men, with gas station uniforms on. One guy pulls out a police whistle. There’s a gathering at the car. The gas station attendant says, “Sorry, I chipped some paint off it accidentally.” We repainted the place and washed the car. “That’ll be $30.” And the guy pays him. But I never saw Rosenstock-Huessy.

With a poet in the house of a poet; with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem—a bowl full of the finest brown sand, more like dust, and in the bowl a stone face, small, a woman’s face, sinking and rising in the grains of dust; and Bishop was there to answer the man’s question: did she feel that any of the poems in this collection had not aged well, seemed even to have aged already when it was published? Bishop thought for a while, and smiled dryly, surprised, and said no; then left the room. I took the bowl in my hands, having never known of this collection, this book of Bishop’s; and up surfaced the stone face, and the grains of sand played over it, and I thought it was magnificent; and the man, a poet who had praised my poems so highly, down the road when I was leaving, in front of the two women, was now annoyed with me for taking up the bowl and playing with it; and Bishop’s other friend was too—a woman; and, as I played, knowing they were annoyed, but wanting to see for myself how the poems had aged; and, taken by the way the stone face swam up and the grains of dust coated it and slid off, revealing now this feature, now that, realized that the sand was emptying into my lap, was on my pants, in the material of my pants and on the floor; I said, “Surely I’m not the only one this has happened to”; meaning, in reading this collection, to see if anything in it has aged; and, as I said it, I was sure I could get all the sand back into the bowl and certain, at the same time, that there was already more sand in my lap than had ever been in the bowl; and sure that my reading had been a faux pas, and registered as such by the man, the poet, who had not so long ago praised my poems so lavishly; and now he was done with me: and now he and Bishop’s friend had seen that I would never get it all back in the bowl—some was still on the floor, some still in my pants’ material. I tried to get it all back in; and came away thinking, here was a way to use all my broken poems: choose material, like paper, on which to place a few stanzas or lines, bits, and publish them as prints of things, because after all the woman who was Bishop’s friend had given me a print of hers, made on the spot, that I rolled up to take with me, as one does a print unframed; but that was before; and then I woke up to write this down—colored dust as fine as nutmeg.

I met one of Seals and Crofts. They both did music in high school, and both were now secret millionaires, but one less so than the other. One couldn’t sleep and captured mice. I said hello to him, first Seals, then Crofts, in case.

Last night in L.A. with Cher I couldn’t decide which shoes to wear.

I was with a friend of my brother Craig, down in Denver, where Alameda starts and ends. This friend of Craig’s was the son of Phil Spector and Ronnie Spector, and he was a musician. Like Craig, he was good at a number of things—cooking, making friends, organizing a small living space. Lots of creative people around, including a group from Sicily and a guy from Chile. I talked to them in Italian. The day waned. In came a group of the Sicilians and lay out on the ground two halves of something large, with hair or fur. The halves trembled on the ground. What are those? Is that a camel? A llama? A goat, sacrificed. A huge goat! It had just been killed and cut, and they were preparing to cook it. I looked back at Spector’s place and it was all closed up, neatly, like a box. Above, people were getting into a bus to go on a trip. One was a police, with a gun. There were other police around, but they weren’t arresting anyone, even though there was pot being smoked and sex being had in the open. Spector had wanted me to see him cook after I’d praised something someone else was doing, but I didn’t get back to him fast enough. Upset, he didn’t show me what he was going to show me, even though there were bowls of sauce and fruit laid out as in a kitchen on a cooking show. I was amazed that he’d been able to get things together so quickly. There was a couple with a son in the house, too, and the son was retarded but also very intelligent, intuitive, demanding. He was nestled up against me at one point, and he said something profound. I couldn’t stay close to Spector after that, though I tried, but I also wanted to speak Italian with the Sicilians. My Italian was rusty, I told them, using exactly the sentences I use when I meet Italians on the street now. I said the one bit of Sicilian dialect I know, which means, “What can you do?” There was an art exhibit—paintings, sculptures, mobiles—and lots of people milling around. The guy told me they were sacrificing. “A camel”” I asked in Italian, “dromedaria,” not knowing if that’s right. No. “Llama?” No, a goat. I’d never seen such a big goat with yellow hair, hair more like a llama’s, and curly and long. I went back outside to find Spector. He was climbing up this slag heap where a road dead-ended, and I followed. I couldn’t quite reach him and his friend. I wondered if they were going to smoke pot, but I slipped, kept slipping down and back, and never quite got there. Later, I found Spector near his place and he told me about Craig, how they’d once been “intimate” but weren’t before he died, because Craig had done something wrong or bad, and I couldn’t believe Craig would be like that. He’d taken something, and he’d spoken in anger, and I was surprised to hear that. Craig was there for part of this, but I didn’t get to talk to him. Our mother was there at some point, too, making up a single bed for me after the larger bed had been sold. That bed was dressed in jeans, and a guy wanted to buy it, but it had been sold. The bed that remained to me was little and narrow, and my mother was making it as we spoke. Cherry trees were being cut down next door to be moved elsewhere as garden decorations. Why didn’t they dig them up, I thought or said aloud. How can they decorate if they’re dead? They were so beautiful, too, blossoming, pink, and they were cutting them down. They seemed to be parts of trees with much larger trunks than I’d ever seen on a cherry tree, and had already been cut down from the top. They’d been topped, but they were alive, and now they were cutting them above ground to haul off. That didn’t make sense.

Shit was in my hair, the Lemons were there. Small planes landed, passengers deplaned. They swam to my houses. I rinsed in a dirty pool. My partner had an appointment with her guru. I suspected a rendezvous. We had a party to go to, to meet Shakespeare, and I liked him already.

“The porch is an integrating metaphor for those who were in Vietnam,” Barbara Walters said the other night. “Walk me through that,” I said. “Because they all sat there.” Then she stormed off the set.

With Walter Matthau last night, and I became a hunted man in his house, the cops looking for me, as I told him about a movie I saw him in, in which George C. Scott was his nemesis, but I couldn’t recall the name of it. Matthau told me about having wives, and how the thing was to subdue them a little. He had prints upstairs, made through a process that his cohorts had developed, as cops swarmed the ground, searching for me. I drank Matthau’s booze. He was just like he was in the movies, really—in Hopscotch, for example. My clothes were in a duffle bag on the lawn. My brother was outside looking for me. He’d scraped his knees. I felt so bad for him, outside Matthau’s house, and I couldn’t see him.

I asked William Blake if he had really dined with Ezekiel and Jeremiah. He said: “The answer to that would benefit neither of us.”

Last night I met Harold Bloom’s friend of thirty years. We were eating artichokes and oil, and his friend, who was the father of the bride whose wedding I was attending, forged a declaration I had to sign saying that he was my father. I didn’t think it would pass muster, but he was sure it would. It was a formality. Bloom’s friend, David someone, didn’t like the present company, and I wondered how David, who seemed fairly inarticulate and crude, could have stood Bloom’s company for any length of time over thirty years, or Bloom his. Neither was aptly developed for the other. What was I doing there with a woman I can’t remember? I was finally going to meet Bloom, and could now approach him saying that I’d met and talked with his friend of thirty years, David something. Or David could introduce me, by letter or in person. There was way too much food, and nobody ate much of it or cared that so much was wasted. Everyone at the table was aimless and selfish. It seemed to be the way famous or important people were when they got together. Everyone talked and nobody listened. Nobody was paying attention, and I was disappointed. Should I do something to get a conversation started? I had my answer in this gathering.

Stepping down a hill of thick grass to a white house with green trim, I walk in a talking door calling someone’s name. Hearing sounds, I turn to see Chairman Mao making love. He hides the woman’s head and barely turns to me. I’m embarrassed and on my way.

Dante appeared to me like a large, fat cook in a diner, screamed at by waitresses being screamed at by customers who couldn’t see anything but his fat face. He wasn’t lovable, and nobody loved him.

Frost was lying chest down with his weight on his hands. He arched his back and looked around. “The desolation is so beautiful.”

Getting Michael Jackson or Smokey Robinson to perform “Tears of a Clown” and another song: had to go and set up extension cords and outlets so that a sound system would work. Couldn’t do it. They were cleaning the room already. It was over and it hadn’t happened. The big deal was to see if someone losing their temper is an event. It’s just that. Not tears of a clown but anger. Really? You wanted to stage all this to ask or see—that? Isn’t it obvious?

At the critic David Bromwich’s house with his mother. David comes over. We don’t talk. He plays piano. Someone comes to the door. A young woman is outside gardening with David’s mother. David and I can’t find anything to talk about, but it’s not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be with him. I’d called before I went over—they’d hired me to work—and asked if I could come early. Why? So I could read up on some things.

On Needing Things in Verse 

As if the blackbird had had to caw it, 
a beer’s as good as anything now. 
Morning, he says, and the others follow. 

They weren’t there, a minute ago. 
It was just you. A beer’ll do. 
It used to do better. 

But I didn’t know then what I know now. 
Grammar made me think I did, 
and I drank to use it well. 

That song wasn’t there, an hour ago. 
The day’s lighting itself up, 
the gradualist, the swallower, 

suffering language to be new, 
or at least to give new names 
to some old ways of feeling 

carrots cut their teeth, 
skies like blueberry skin, 
piss like Special K. 

The birds weren’t there a year ago. 
Fuck them! Neither was I. 
Sweet things! All of a 

cadence, all day long. 
But I lost it all for a decade, 
their redwing, cattail song, 

the rooster down the street, 
out of joint with dawn, 
and Bear, 

that dog with one blue eye, 
licking the loss of his leg 
and howling at us still. 

Still, if the ear can say 
what it knows, 
and the tongue wear down a pill, 

no beer can beat this band 
of blackbirds joined by crows, 
where nothing plainly has its way 

or sings how anything goes, 
or sings how anything goes.


Still Life 

The plums get heavy 
in themselves. 
They weigh the table down. 
Bananas grow like leopards 
and formica disappears. 
The last peach gets antsy 
at its bruise. Spores form 
in teal. The summer-blue stems 
whose tags are on them still 
catch dust in their bulbs. 
The gas station bonus glass 
touches the loving cup 
and the recipes 
cut from the news.
The pantry has two cans.
This is the life.


Fruit Country

Certain fruits, like bananas and crabapples, 
record everything that happens to them, 
and this is called “getting ripe.”
But I am too late or too soon, 
and this banana I take a knife to 
when I can’t talk in time, 
takes in what I give off 
and gives it out again. 

Experts say bananas are best black, 
become fruit then when their starch 
has been converted into sugar, 
and we want to throw them out. 

At Fruit Country, only one man, 
a retired pilot, asked us to save him 
black bananas. He seemed always on the point 
of bleeding dry right through his pores. 
His watch slid down to his elbow 
when he’d hold a bunch up to the light. 

A picture of perfect health is rare, 
in spite of all the scenarios there are 
for becoming one, the clubs and spas 
that promise the body of an excellent 
white wine, a buttery nose, a clean finish. 
But who’s to say this brown and spreading blotch 
I pressure the crabapple into making, 
this nick’s assimilation in the pear, 
isn't a blow struck for beauty? 

The peach sweetens in its bruises. 
Ripeness owns its uses.

EVENING. DINNER TABLE. Several friends have finished eating and started talking.

BILL

Don’t you love this? The guy’s a doctor, but he quits to become an actor. Great story. But it isn’t the story. The story is, the guy has friends from Yale, Harvard, and everywhere else who are producing and writing and making careers of it. He did some acting. He’s described as cocky and innocent. They get him to do stuff in one of their movies.

SARAH

But it’s as improbable as Aristotle says some of Sophocles’s plots are.

MARION

How so?

SARAH

Well, Bill’s saying that the story the reporter wants to tell sounds like a story of choice. He quotes the doctor talking about his dream, about not wanting to live with regret. He makes him sound like a guy who’s going from a sure thing to a chance. Aristotle found the chance in the tragedies, in their plots, and said it spoiled the effect.

BILL

Yeah, but here the chance is the guy’s connections. He didn’t put in twelve years in LA or NY looking for work, agents, gigs, showcases. He didn’t have to get four or five sets of headshots. He just called his friends in the business, or they called him. And that story gets into the piece, but only peripherally.

DAVID

Unless it has readers like you and Sarah. You’ve been to graduate school. Nothing’s boring to you.

MARION

That’s what Sarah and Bill have to hide, though. I mean, now they have to hide it. Bill uses the word “peripherally” instead of using the word “marginally.” Otherwise we’d all know him for what he is: an ex-Derridean.

BILL

I was never a Derridean. You can’t be a Derridean. Derrida wasn’t even. He just read particular things and said particular things.

SARAH

And the people who came after him made those things peculiar because he made them particular.

DAVID

But Derrida must’ve have good connections.

SARAH

Paris is a good connection. Paris works. And Derrida had other things working for him. So many things.

MARION

Like what?

BILL

Too many to bother counting or listing, which was Derrida’s whole point: it isn’t that there isn’t an origin, or even a single trace that would lead to one. It’s that there are too many to bother with.

SARAH

So you look to the margins, the edges, the things that get assumed and taken for granted. Like Aristotle’s discussion of metaphor. Aristotle spends very little time on it; therefore Derrida has more room to work. He can say more because Aristotle said less.

MARION

I see. Aristole’d been talked out. People had been hitting his major points for a few thousand years.

DAVID

They weren’t interesting anymore. Derrida found Aristotle fascinating, but he had to make others think he was at least interesting.

SARAH

Something like that. The point is—if there is a point—that the main point of any story may not be the story, and that the thing just touched on could be the beginning of a more interesting story.

BILL

That’s what I’m saying about this doctor-turned-actor. It isn’t a story of choice. It’s a story about knowing the right people. That story is also boring—as boring as the slightly heroic tale in the write-up.

MARION

You’re saying it would be better not to write anything at all.

BILL

No, but I am saying that to tell both stories is a better way to tell one story.

DAVID

I think you’re just pissed off because you’re an actor and you never made it. And you don’t know what you are besides that.

BILL

I’m a moderately gifted actor. At best. Second-rate. And I think there’s a lot of room to tell the stories of the second-order people, of what Vonnegut calls the moderately gifted people. The red ribbons, the silver medals. Frederick Barhelme, for example, or John Belushi’s brother, or Frank Sinatra, Junior, or three of the Baldwin brothers, or two of the Kennedys, or the elder sister of Nicolas Cage’s wife, or the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, or the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola.

DAVID: I think you’ve said enough.

Collars

You can cock them too, 
as if they were berets. 
Fold them over, turn them up, button them down. 

Some you can knot with ties. 
Each affords movement and constraint; 
none makes you over in the looker’s eyes. 

I shuddered and stretched my neck once 
in and out of the clerical collar, 
but the conflict had stays.


A Lock to Pick

The other day the lock forgot its combination.
It had been a long time since it tumbled. 
Rains had come and rusted the hasp. 
I read it its rights and its left. 
I hooked it with my index, pulling up. 
The holes gripped. I yanked and jimmied. 
It had been some winter; 
maybe it was an apprehensive spring, 
if locks have springs.
I clocked it once around again. 
I reread the combination critically.
I had the text there with me. 
I was right. 
The lock had either freed itself
or locked itself in 
or some combination of the two.


The Second Person

Sometimes I’m alone for an hour. 
Sometimes I’m in a room when this happens, 
a boiler room, cogitating a room with an hour in it,
refusing vaguely to perish in it. 
I stand in the corner 
the way I used to have to 
when I was in the dog house, 
and I accuse the punisher, 
then let myself down 
and side with the floor. 
When I finally get up, 
I embrace myself 
the way James Bond does 
when he’s in for it,
when he needs a second,
when he’s out of room.


Plumber’s Putty 

I smell the plumber’s putty I used to crawl around.
It holds the porcelain crowns 
that cover the bolts that anchor the bowl 
to the oak floor, carpeted brown. 

I’d pick off the crowns and push the putty 
over the bolts, uncovering why they’re covered, 
then push the crowns on back down 
until the putty’d squeeze out around the bowl’s base, 

my fingerprints on it now. 

There are five ports of love, one for each sense. That’s what the Neo-Platonists thought, and they wrote treatises about the senses and the ports of love. We know all of them. They’re in the songs and the sayings we listen to and use. They’re in the advice kids are given today about sex, but the Neo-Platonists were honest about them. They could be pretty dry, the Neo-Platonists, and they weren’t very talkative about the fifth port, which led to the sixth, which is when their treatises ended.

The first port is the eyes—love at first sight. You see someone. You’re attracted. You try to make eye contact. You do. Then what?

Port can mean a few things: carriage, entry, opening, station. You may like the way someone carries himself or herself, the way he or she walks. “I love the way you walk,” as the song says. But once you’ve made your entrance by sight, then what?

We talk about pick-up lines. The second port is the ears, the sound of the voice entering the ear canal. “I love the way you talk.” We might say that’s the mouth, but the mouth came later for the Neo-Platonists. Second port—sound entering the ear.

The other day, a colleague and I were sitting in front of our building having lunch. A couple came up. After they asked us a few questions, they went in, and then we talked about the woman. Was she cute? She was—until she opened her mouth. We had to hear that, and we didn’t like what we heard, a woman with a little girl’s voice.

She didn’t get close enough for us to smell her, to take in her scent through the nose. That’s the third port, or portal, the third place on the body where something in the course of love takes place. Shakespeare said the course of true love never did run smooth. Looks good, sounds bad. Maybe she smells good, has a nice scent, wears a nice aftershave. They said that Caesar’s sweat smelled good. Some people’s skin smells good.

Depending on which Neo-Platonist you read, ports two and three can switch places; even the fourth port, the mouth, which is also the lips and the tongue—the teeth—can switch places with the nose and the ears. When we get to Freud, he’ll say that sight is really touch.

Aristotle, who was probably more familiar to the Neo-Platonists than Plato, says somewhere that no creature is born without a sense of touch. Current biology and microchip manufacture bear him out. Every cell, we say, has a wall that marks inside and out. That’s what touch does, distinguishes what’s in and what’s out.

People who like to touch and be touched we tend to think of as more open, more intimate; people who don’t like to touch and be touched we think of as standoffish, closed, cold. So, for some, even among the ancients, the five senses were easily collapsed into two: sight and touch. And based on the idea that all the senses involve some form of contact, we get the one sense, touch.

Now, at what port of call were we? The third: smell. It’s a ticklish matter to tell someone that he or she smells good. But it’s equally awkward to say that someone has a nice scent. “Odor” is worse. In fact, our smell vocabulary is pretty meager, and most of it is associated with unpleasant things, chiefly shit. Or, to be fair, shit on the one hand, roses on the other; the worst and the best, the extremes. “I smell something” usually means something bad, something out of place.

Ports themselves can be smelly places, and someone’s smell is more likely to be an immediate turn-off than a turn-on.

“You know you could have been some perfume,” as Smokey Robinson sings in “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”

The fourth port is the mouth, the sense of taste. Smell and taste were most often collapsed into one, for obvious reasons: just think of something that smells so bad or so good you can taste it. The mouth is responsible for many things: speech, the smile, the frown, the grimace; eating, breathing, drinking; hiding or showing the teeth and the tongue, which is the chief organ of taste. But the mouth as a port of love concerns the lips, and so the kiss.

You see, you hear, you smell: at this point, you and your object are closer. As we get closer to the fifth port, things become more complicated. With each port entered or reached, the distance between you and the other decreases. And the tension increases as the inverse of the distance—if I have that right. How to break the tension? How to keep it? How to heighten it? With a kiss. Lips meet lips. That’s the fourth port.

The fifth is touch—and you can already see why the Neo-Platonists thought the game was pretty much over once you got that far. For us, kissing is first base; for those Renaissance philosophers, kissing was halfway between third and home. Why? Because two bodies were in contact, and bodies were not to be trusted. Contact was mindless. The mind is a distance learner, a distance commuter; it acts at a distance. The body can’t do that. Kissing starts something—hugging, embracing, stripping—that’s hard not to pursue to the finish, to what the Neo-Platonists considered the bitter end.

The fifth port is touch. The hands come into play. Our second and third bases—chest and genitals, shirt off and pants open—are to be found in the fifth port. Here, too, depending on which treatise you read, there is room for distinction. Touch may be all that comes after kissing and before intercourse, or it may include intercourse, or it may point to and lead to intercourse—the sixth and unnamed port.

As Bonnie Hayes wrote in “The Letter,” a song Bonnie Raitt made into a hit, “Touch will come to love.” Where we say love, the Renaissance said coitus, or fucking, and thought, or pretended to think, that fucking was dangerous, bad, immoral, base, animal. It was, in any case, always represented as a descent to earth from heaven.

“Look, don’t touch.” Fantasize, but don’t act out. Read the menu, but don’t order from it. They tell the kids not to kiss or touch, because it’s very hard to stop once you’ve gone that far. It’s tough to be stranded on first base, in sexual relations as in baseball. Kisses should not be entered into lightly.

Once you dock at that fifth port, or host a caller there, you’ve gone all the way; you’ve carried it as far as it can go.

As Maria Muldaur put it: “‘Cause if you feel my leg, you’re gonna feel my thigh, and if you feel my thigh, you’re gonna go up high, so don’t you feel my leg.”

So the next time someone says to you, “Let’s get in touch,” and you agree, you’ll know at least one thing: neither of you is a Neo-Platonist.

I have few friends I prefer to socialize with, and often one.
One close friend, she calls herself, asks if I feel “so lonely.”
She thinks I must. I say I don’t.

The Fiji Shark Lab, where 184 of us live, 
may be the most peaceful place
in the most peaceful place in the world.

I don’t do much active avoiding of certain sharks.
I like the certainty of certain sharks
until I get too close to their certainty
and then I’m more certain than usual 
that I prefer best friends to casual
and strangers to the range of social cultivation.

I’m 66. I’d say I have 60 years of observations, 
but don’t remember any before my ninth year. 
I have fewer than 500 friends on Facebook,
and none of them isn’t sexually mature. 
The largest group is of advanced-adult, 
though I’m told I could still have children—
give rise to children?—by some in the adult group.

I want my broad-scale associations measured.
I want a friend to swim in parallel with.
Sometimes I want to lead and sometimes follow.
Sometimes I like to tell and sometimes be told.
I like to think I know the difference.
“Scale” with fish and weight I understand,
but “broad-scale” and “fine-scale” 
make only rough sense.

I might have predicted this, but could I have proved it?
In my paltry experience, adults go with adults, 
sub-adults with sub-adults, and so on,
because birds of a feather flock together. 
But then what would children do without adults, 
and vice-versa, for eighteen years or so?
My mother died twelve years ago, 
when she was 84 and I was 54, and still I miss her. 
My father swam off unparallel 
when he was 90 and I was 61, and I miss him.

I think I lead a relatively rich and complex social life, 
but I’m mostly by myself. I mean by that that 
I’m usually the only shark in the space I’m in. 
It’s a retired or semi-retired life. If it weren’t, 
and I went out more, I would be, or would I be, 
richer and more complex. Often I feel as if I’m 
only beginning to understand, or beginning not to, 
or losing, abruptly and gradually, the understandings 
I used to have. I don’t know where I’m likely 
to gain benefits, and I doubt I’m learning new skills—
what were my old skills? what are skills?—
but finding food has never been difficult. 
It can be time-consuming, but that’s a problem 
you like to have, as my father used to say. 

Finding potential mates has also never been hard,
but I’m still without a kinetic one. 
As Filipinas say, “you must be choosy.”
I know many males who have nothing remotely near   
more social connections on average than females.

The world is the largest ecotourism site in the world, 
and diving is rarely done in it, but capitalizing often is. 
Large numbers don’t bother many sharks, 
but repeated study of individuals 
by large numbers and by individuals 
bothers most of them every time, 
and no one gives unless they’re able.

 

 

But conflict, a principle of tension or balance, is inherent in the nomenclature— contrapposto: the idea being that we cannot accomplish a movement without one muscle initiating it and another supporting it by working against it. If you stand, for example, then sink slightly back, knees bent, you can feel a tension in your quadriceps and a slackness in your posterior thigh. The agonist is active, the antagonist passive. In moving, you have to stop or slow down to feel this principle at work—or you can feel it after you’ve done a lot of moving and, the next day, feel you can no longer move. That’s where massage therapists or bodyworkers come in.

Massaging Janet today, I felt the beginnings of an erection. Where does an erection begin? I think it was somewhere in my anus, or in that organ or gland better known for its relation to middle-aged men and cancer than for its erogeneity: the prostate.

Janet was prone to my touch, and I to hers, though passive. I stood holding the baby-blue sheet, half cotton and half polyester, while she stripped behind it. I averted my eyes, knowing that, back-lit by the afternoon sun, she could be seen through it.

Janet raised her arms toward the ceiling and nodded. I wrapped the sheet around her and clenched it behind. She moved toward the table and lay down on it, supine, then hiked herself over on her side. I was to do a longitudinal release on her erector spinae and then work her Latissimus dorsi.

This was a far cry from the Swedish sequence I’d been practicing.

I warmed the skin on Janet’s back with the flat of my hand. I began to roll her skin, freckle by mole, across the scale of her rib-cage. Her upper-back was small, the small of her back smaller. “Small”: that has to be one of the most sublime of our translations from the Latin. I don’t know why massage therapists have to refer to the “low back,” when such a word exists, but they do. Nor do I don’t know why they have to say “low back” instead of “lower back,” but they do. Everyone abbreviates.

Cervical, thoracic, lumbar: I warmed and rolled my way down her back in preparation for the specific work on the erector. Janet’s eyes closed once or twice. She said I had a nice touch. I could not return the compliment, but I did tell her that she had warm hands, remembering their presence on my body from an hour before.

That’s one of the best things about massage school. I’ve been in school all my life. I’ve heard lots of lip-service paid to “hands-on” experience; I’ve heard lots of talk about “teamwork.” But there’s nothing like learning how to give a message by giving one and then getting one, or getting one and then giving one. Reciprocity like that is not to be found in law or business school—not even, from what I’m told, in MFA programs.

Under the “Deep Forest” music that played, I heard Janet say something that none of the other students could hear. She said: “You can kiss my ass.”

I was in a position to do so, but I knew what she meant, so quickly can we move from the literal to what is actually meant. Had she said “my gluteus maximus,” or “my gluteus minimus,” or “my anus,” a place much harder for the lips to reach, someone would surely have taken notice. It’s the vernacular that makes us not take the body seriously.

Janet’s vulgar utterance started my erection. When a born-again Christian says “You can kiss my ass,” you have to take it seriously. I asked her if she was all right, knowing she wasn’t. She was retaliating for being ganged up on by the rest of the class. They wanted to listen to the last game of the World Series during the session. Our instructor had said that our vote had to be unanimous; Janet was the lone dissenter.

She must have felt in my touch, at least at first, how I sided with her. Anyone who sticks by her guns when all are against her deserves admiration. And what more pleasurable than the feeling of admiration? My erection grew.

I noticed Janet’s eyes for the first time. She could be Lebanese, I thought, or Portuguese (her surname, Lima—that’s Peru; Peruvian, then). Beautiful, hurt eyes. She was not relaxed.

Bodyworkers know, not by name, not by the heroic empiricism of medieval grammarians, but by feel. I do not refer here to “gut feel,” but to something more superficial. When a man says, as I have not heard a man say in a long time, “Give me some skin,” he does not mean two things: 1) flesh, and 2) what he says. As a pound of flesh weighs more, in the imagination, than a pound of skin, so there is a tangible difference between the two materials. A massage therapist cannot penetrate the skin to get to the flesh; only a torturer would do that, or a surgeon. I doubt that the phrase “a pound of skin” would have had the same striking effect that “a pound of flesh” has had—if you are struck by Shakespearian things.

That said, a massage therapist who goes no more than skin-deep will not build up much of a clientele: we are not in the business of applying lotion. On the other hand, there is something faintly grotesque about the phrase “deep-tissue work,” and I am told by a woman with a thousand hours at her back and twenty regular clients in her Day Runner that eight of ten people who ask for “deep work” soon find it painful and ask you to ease up. As I understand it, after only 120 hours of study, you cannot in any case go deep without at first being very tactful on the surface.

I inserted a pillow between Janet’s legs, fitting it carefully between her knees. As I was doing so, I paused: to petrissage a healthy calf, a calf that has been shaved, with the thinnest layer of oil between the surface of your palms and the surface of that calf, is a great pleasure, a pleasure worth having a theory about. I could not do that today. The task today was a longitudinal release on the erector spinae, the muscle that made us Homo erectus.

Janet had adjusted another pillow under her head, and was placing yet another in defense of her breasts. As she did so, the sheet slipped and flopped over, and I saw one of the two things, both cleavages, that I was not supposed to see.

The room was quiet. The fetal position had infantilized half the people in it.

I started my slack, sink, and move manipulations on the most medial part of the erector, the spinalis. Score another one for the genius of medieval monks! Their inspired nomenclature makes me believe that there is truth in wine, mead, and cider. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that our classical heritage will have its fate decided in the medical schools and Classics Departments, where the last scholars of Greek and Latin are to be found, did they but know what they’re doing.

“Tradition,” from the Latin, by way of the Greek: tractatrice, the hair stylist whose gossip suggested that the relation between hand and mouth had more than an economic and nutritive function. As information begins to look more and more like gossip—my hands moved along Janet’s spine—gossip looks more and more like information, and we find ourselves becoming traditional once more. Even the resurgence of crookedness in hairstyle—cut in acute angles against the cowlick, stuck against the way it wants to fall by expensive unguents—is a Roman recrudescence, circa Caesar. (I leave tattooing and piercing to the tribal element, knowing full well that the Greeks and Romans had their gang-bangers and neighborhood gods.)

Janet’s spinalis was ropey. The intent of my hands was to soften that rope by separating its braided fibers under the skin, in that lubricious medium of tissue, the anterior inner surface of the skin, called the fascia—the skin’s skin, as it were. It is, the skin, the largest organ our body possesses, and Janet’s slid and rolled beneath my hands like a puppy’s.

What revulsion there would be if we were flesh only! More than we put up with now, surely, if we saw the underlying structure from inside out.

I’ve been doing massage for a month and a half now without incident. The other day, though, in clinic, I had three clients in a row. The first was about thirty and black, with thighs like a fullback’s and follicles as big as nipples. My hands were Lilliputians walking over Gulliver. This woman insisted she had no “pain,” only “tension from stress.” She stressed that. You know how important what we call things is when the body below you protests too much.

My next client was about twenty-five and yellow, but her skin was white, pure white, and its surface uninterrupted, so far as I could see, or feel, by a single pore.

“It’s been a bad day,” she said, as I escorted her into my cubicle. “Work is hectic, and I started my period. Is it all right if I leave my underwear on?”

My erection started with her, my first. It was alarming.

“What beautiful skin you have,” I kept wanting to tell her. Her frankness had disarmed me.

This morning, having repressed that involuntary incident, I chose boxers; I should have chosen jockeys. As my penis hardened in the inferior direction (footward, not headward, which the classicists called “superior”), it threatened to exceed the quadricep hem and show its cold, dry face.

Fortunately, Janet was turned away from me. I invited her to join me in some deep breaths. Overcompensating, my reinforced thumb bounced off either her illiocostalis or her longissimus—a novice, I couldn’t be sure—and I found myself doing two things a bodyworker should never do: think, and lose contact. Among other prohibitions, an erection is chief, and so I had my hands full.

I was reminded of the best explanation I’d ever read of Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection: that we know things so quickly we can’t imagine ever having had time to learn them. In the field of physiology, an erection is the Platonic form of proprioceptivity: it experiences itself in space immediately and solipsistically, but has no idea where it’s going—only the urge for going.

My hands left Janet’s frame to move my stiffened member in a more medial and posterior direction, but I stopped in mid-motion: I had to reestablish contact. Once you’ve introduced your touch to your client—and been complimented on it!—you take leave at your peril.

Back in the lumbar region, two cun (an ancient Chinese measure, one cun equaling a finger’s width) above the iliac crest, nearing the quadratus lumborum, I noticed the superior hem of Janet’s underpants. Perhaps she was having her period, too, like my client of two days before; perhaps she was modest. Not normally receptive to the blandishments of lace, I had to admit—or my erection, proceeding apace, had to—that today was not normal.

In a sexual advice column I had been reading earlier that morning (I read two a week), the advisor, a woman, had diagnosed her correspondent’s problem with a shocking conventionality: she wasn’t getting any. Janet’s bald utterance (“You can kiss my ass”), her lace fringe, the fastidiousness with which she’d marked herself two minutes late on the honor-code roster, her born-again Christianity, her strange vocation—it all added up: not only wasn’t Janet getting any, but Janet had never gotten any.

And just as I was in a position to give her some, so she was in a position—an interesting one—to receive some.

I backed away from lumborum toward Latissimus dorsi, rhomboid, and trapezius, that bumper-to-bumper interchange on the freeway of stress, and asked Janet once again to breathe. I would do a passive stretch of some sort, but there was nothing to push against. The Greek tragedy of the musculature—agonist and antagonist—was not yet sufficiently known to me. And despite Plato’s theory, I couldn’t recollect what I did know, orient myself in its detail, and do some effective work. Distracted by my own flesh and blood, I was simply pushing skin around.

The other day, when this same tumescence began to disturb me, I was massaging my third client. She was eighty years old and white. Her complaint was sciatica, and she dug her fist into her left buttock to indicate the likely source of relief. Ten minutes later, there I was, taking a hard look at the buttocks of experience in extremis: I found them wonderful. And I imagined—I was constrained to imagine, given the sounds I heard coming up from under the face rest—that she found the pressure of my relaxed fists equally wonderful.

“I think that’s it!” she said happily. “My, you’re so strong.”

With an ejaculation, this woman had strengthened my faltering resolve to continue the 720-hour program in massage therapy. Was not the Institute’s motto, “Have work you love”? It was. And had I not always felt love and shame almost simultaneously? I had.

But now, not eight hours of course-work later, Janet’s utterance, and the erection occasioned by it, caused me to question both my fitness to be, and my motives for becoming, a bodyworker. The sensual, the sensuous, and the voluptuous were no longer distinct; their roots, even in language, seemed suddenly confused. The problem was beyond the reach of a dictionary.

As Janet flinched under my determination to do the work despite my distraction—as I petrissaged her lumborum, deep to the Latissimus, from my lunge position—I found myself in the classroom of Professor Kay MacNamee, twenty years earlier, sitting next to my friend Tim, trying to work out how the word “scruple,” which once designated a small pebble, had come to mean what it meant. Tim scribbled something and showed it to me.

I have a scruple

In my shoe

Giving me doubt

About what to do.

Shall I walk

Until I hobble,

Or stop now

And take it out?

As I laughed at Tim’s doggerel, Professor MacNamee glared and called my name.

“Mr. Ritter, suppose you explain the difference between the next two words on our list.”

The words were “sensual” and “sensuous.” I had not done my homework.

At some point during this recollection—and thanks to it—my body mechanics began to fail; I lost touch with Janet once again. As I rejoined her, hoping that my instructor had not seen my faux pas, a sympathetic spasm pinched my lumborum and, pain being for me a great deflator of desire, flaccid I finished the release.

Education: finding out how little you know about almost anything and how little that really matters.

*

Words are referrals.

*

You get so you can really see the bright green of the tea adhere to the bone of the bowl.

*

Imagination of yeast acts as faith.

*

Vanity causes mouth cancer.

*

Japanese students see you.

*

I’d like to chat with an achievable person.

*

What loss and which losses can I write off?

*

–I rode to work.

—On what?

–A business cycle.

*

Don’t rate me. Situate me.

*

Of all the marks of mental austerity and insanity, I don’t know of one greater than the stubborn conviction that the little family was chosen to be the headquarters of life and all other bodies, fire or ice.

*

“All my children are boxers,” said a tight-fisted Grab driver.

*

Don’t believe anyone who says they’re still figuring it out.

*

Remember who our ancestors intended to be you. It wasn’t you.

*

—”Here’s a list of some of my obsessions. Walking. Stand Up Comedy, and Mental Health Awareness.”

—Here’s a list of some of mine: walking, standing up, and mental health.

*

Don’t choke your fingers holding the bag.

*

Why build up pockets of resistance and not resistance per se?

*

Filipinos tend to use the fork to load the spoon. The Japanese, Filipinos say, are “very disciplined people.”

*

She’s a well-laid fire no flame has come to.

*

He would drive potatoes home after they’d been at the bar.

*

I am greatly irked. Another is greatly stirred.

*

The present defensiveness of my scorn is indefinite.

*

Are you susceptible to mathematical analysis?

*

Synagogues were transcended, churches gotten beyond, temples and mosques surpassed and coldnoodled.

*

“I have lots of empathy and self-reliance.”

*

Is that what you’re doing? It can’t be true.

Don’t you have anything better to do?

There are many things better than that—

Yes, but I, I have nothing better to do.

*

Every book can become ridiculously meaningful. Matthew 5, for instance, or Economic Analysis of Property Rights.

*

Annihilism

*

The extravagance of fate is its determination.

*

If it doesn’t east, it doesn’t exist. Everything that exists easts.

*

The faculty of judgment, the finality of it!

*

How many words can you make out of a machine?

*

A reaction is an on, not an off.

*

All oral argument is oval.

*

There is no meter or thyme.

*

Born in print and in person, writers either work as short stories or don’t work at all.

*

I could have sworn I wrote about my time in Archer City, Texas, in 2009. I stayed in a B&B, each room of which was named after one of Larry McMurtry’s books. It was owned, I found out, by a high school friend of his. As it happened, my visit coincided with one of McMurtry’s visits to Archer City, where his bookstores were (he lived in Arizona). As it happened, he was staying in the room across from the one I was staying in. He wasn’t inviting of or easy with conversation, but he was with holding forth, and I listened to him do it, in front of the fireplace, with the owner and two of her friends in the living room downstairs, and me, a few steps further back, for an audience. They later told me that Larry was like that, and I didn’t tell them that I’d seen the “here-he-goes-again” in their faces. I did talk to him a couple of times, and he told me things about Irving Swifty Lazar, his agent, and Hollywood, and pointed out that his Oscar for the Brokeback Mountain screenplay (with Diana Ossana) was on the mantle above the fireplace. (I checked: there it was, like a high-school football trophy.) He was most comfortable when I told him, the day before I was leaving—we were outside one of his four bookshops, and he had just given or was going to give a little talk—that I wanted to visit a friend in Houston, and might he tell me the best way to drive there. I had a map in my hand, and either he or I spread it out on the hood of a car parallel-parked there in front of the store. He went right down over the map and started talking, easily and in detail, about how I would go and what I would see. I know I wrote this all down once, but I can’t find it anywhere, and I’ve forgotten everything he said to me in the B&B and in his shop at the counter. Another thing I remember writing is that while I stayed there, which was six days, McMurtry drove back to Arizona and then back to Archer City twice. The owner of the B&B told me he couldn’t sit still and he couldn’t be alone. He couldn’t be with others either, it seemed to me, unless he was the one doing the talking.

*

I meant nothing by it. It meant nothing. I didn’t mean it. It didn’t mean a thing.

*

We were full of what we thought was life at the time.

*

I’m going to degrade your capability to.

*

There’s fact-checking and fact-choking and fact-joking.

*

It hurts. It plays. It works.

*

The liquidity crisis will be followed by the lubrication crisis.

*

The agency has provided terror to four generations of the displaced.

*

Are you making a large claim, or a small claim look large?

*

Do I like lamb? If it tastes good after it’s cooked.

*

The difference between humans and other animals is that other animals are safer to generalize about.

*

Christianity is all about curiosity. That requires free speech.

*

The Pauline doctrine comes all the way down through the Police to Sting on the radio: “We are spirits / in the mutterial world. / Our spirit’s / in the mutterial world.”

*

When you’re sitting back, in your goat-skin Cadillac

*

Other writers? They’re influences on my originality.

*

Nothing is perceptibly being something. Nothing is always there, perceptibly being something. Something is never there, being perceptibly nothing.

*

He brought fitness to bossa nova. I called him a sandwich to congratulate him.

*

We’re all about plain wrong. We’re all just about plain wrong. We’re all plain, just about.

*

People who can do no wrong. People who can do wrong. People who can do only wrong. Or can only do wrong? Which is it? Who am I missing?

*

A running back named Gainwell, a judge named Severa Edge.

*

Who doesn’t have a bit of naive set theory?

*

I’ve come to the place where it all began

to speak as simply as I can.

*

A beard is just more vanity to curate.

*

Philosophy is a gift, not an exchange.

*

How much of the world models?

*

Even matter won’t matter, as far as mattering goes.

What powers, he wanted to know. And as for standards, were there any that held across the board? Where was the board? He had his own standards, he thought, and none too high. A real man never goes out at night wearing shorts, no matter how hot it is. Nobody wants to see your legs at night, and civilization depends on taking other people’s views seriously. But men went out at night wearing shorts, and Curt was powerless to change that.

Dancing, too, no longer made sense. The kids were doing it inside themselves somehow, arms tight against the torso, which was humped up, pointed; they moved staccato at toe and heel, in a brief circumference. The body was pressed, twitching, flexed. An intensity seemed to be on display, but it read as tensity only, and it was deaf to the music. Arhythmic tensity. He had seen Dave Matthews sucked up to the microphone stand, pigeon-toed, howling with strict passion: that was the dance the kids were doing, the Dave Matthews. Eddie Vedder did a version of it, and so did Michael Stipe, and now John Mayer was doing it. Jeff Buckley was the voice of it. The strain of authenticity was too much.

Maybe Boulder was the wrong place to re-enter his country from. And maybe he hadn’t changed in a Chinese year. He still wanted into the pulsing cardboard of a woofer. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what there was to go into.

At Vic’s coffee shop sat the pony-tailed part-time instructor, in his black t-shirt and faded jeans, wearing no socks with his soft black loafers. No wonder professors were held in contempt. And who was this? A younger, less shapely, less silver version of the teacher? A computer salesman. He wrapped his pony-tail in a black leather sheath that snapped. He wore a wide black belt and square-toed black boots. His dark sunglasses sat on top of his head, probably all day long. His coffee cup, or mug, or canister—Curt wondered what he called it—seemed to be his prize possession. It was stainless steel and he wielded it more than carried it. Curt hoped that the top, which the guy took pains to screw down, would come off, and the coffee stain his unpressed white button-down.

Some men strike you as motherless, as this mannerless man struck Curt. Manners, if he had ever had them, had been sheared from him, leaving only the pony-tail of his immodest masculinity. “Let’s workshop that,” Curt could hear another man saying at a business meeting. “Let’s dialogue it.”

Curt couldn’t get over how much a part of the game exposing the game had become. But “the game,” that name for what was at least a third of most people’s daily life, had been an open secret for a few thousand years. People seemed happy to say the most terrible things about the game they could think of, covering its rules, its procedures, its aims and outcomes, and then keep playing. If there were any other game in town, they seemed to think, we wouldn’t keep exposing this one.

But then again, did the Yankees really have any secrets the Indians didn’t know? Were the Redskins in the dark about the Colts? Not with all that film, all those cameras, the scouting reports, the turnover among teams, the friendships between players from the same colleges, the statistics, the percentages. Play the percentages. There could be no enforcing of a non-disclosure agreement. Who would be outside the game enough to see where the game stopped and whatever else there was beside it began?

Everyone even remotely interested was interested for the same reason. Nothing like money, not even the rumor of something free—which amounts to the same thing. If it’s free, everybody knows there must be a lot of money behind it. Anything given out for free exposes the game as a money-making scheme. And those always have to be paid for immediately or eventually or monthly.

In a time when accountants argued that prepays were not a trading liability, lawyers signed off on deal structures, and credit-rating agencies remained sanguine about off-balance-sheet debt, Curt took a drive to get a sash fixed. When he got home, he realized he had seen nothing outbound or inbound. He learned one or two things at the window company’s office, though, while talking to Lars, the proprietor. The color “blue white” didn’t sell in the western United States, so all the stock to make blue white sashes was worthless; it was going to be sent out to be ground up. Cream white was the color people west of the 100th meridian wanted.

“Timing is everything,” Lars said to Curt, as they walked onto the shop floor. “If you’d brought your brother’s sash here next week, we couldn’t help you. I mean, we could do you a cream white sash while you waited, but it would look terrible with the blue white.”

When they got back into the office. Curt asked how business was. He liked to ask that question, and he’d been asking it a lot, if only to get a rise out of the flat economy.

“Well,” Lars said, “it’s picking up.” He got going on a long explanation of how his business had arrived at this point. Lars talked as if Curt knew the window business from California to New Jersey, major and minor players, brands, the trend toward agglomeration, or condensation, or aggregation; Curt had lost Lars’s term. He appreciated Lars’s lack of condescension. But the problem that Lars was trying to solve, Curt was familiar with, and Lars knew he would be: lousy customer service.

“In the case of your brother’s sash,” Lars said, “there was no service. So I take care of it and bill the headquarters. I hope to make a few new customers out of it.”

Curt’s business was the science, or art, of relationships. His question was: why did so many people want them, knowing how practically difficult they were to get, have, grow, and maintain? It was always someone’s pleasure to reduce the richness of any relation to the bottom line or to cut from it to the chase: ‘What it comes down to is, we love each other.”

Some such phrase took care of it. And why not shear off the boring bulk? Daily life is tedious. Who could give an account of his or her daily life? Probably many people could, but there was no demand for it, and where demand is lacking, supply is nil.

Most people carry on a number of relationships all the time—the daily global volume of email would be good evidence for this claim—but the fixation on the one big relationship everyone’s supposed to have (family) guarantees that these brief, evanescent, commercial, superficial, by-the-way, one-off, inconsequential relations (now Curt had it: there are relations, which take up most of our time, and relationships, which we wish we had more time for) don’t count or get accounted for.

When Curt had his book come out, he learned a thing or two. Single people and people in relationships lived on different planes, levels, planets. Paired people had no time for keeping up with or re-connecting with old friends. One of Curt’s colleagues sat him down one day to ask him what it was like to get in touch with a friend he hadn’t seen for eighteen years.

“I’ve wanted to do that with an old friend of mine,” Jim said, “but I never do it.”

Curt sat back in his chair, excited by the topic. He was trying to hold off a philosophical approach. He began his attack instead on a circle closer to the thing itself.

“Can a person you haven’t seen, talked to, or exchanged a letter with in eighteen years be called a friend?”: that seemed almost heartless.

Jim wanted to know what it was like to be face-to-face with the ghost.

Three years later, when Curt himself was feeling that it was too much to keep up with anyone, he began to understand why Jim never called on his old friend. First, you can put eighteen years into one email. Second, the flush of recombining, as it were, lasts for an even shorter span. Am I going to spend another thirty minutes on the phone with this stranger? Why am I writing yet another word? A month later, or a week later, you have to answer the first response to your original phone call or mail, but there’s nothing more to say. The past is the past. But if you get beyond the first, into a second or third, you quickly feel that you have no time for this. What’s to be gained by it? All you have to talk about are two distinct sets of memories, with very few members in each set and almost no intersection. Three months later, you have emails in your inbox you need to get rid of.

An 18-year gap that took a day to close ripped an unseemly hole in the tight fabric of your life. And what did you have to show for it?

Curt was struck again by the littleness that clings to human things, as some nineteenth-century playwright had put it. For the illustration of this, Curt didn’t have to scare himself with his year of recombining, or with the recombinations he’d engineered in hot flashes over the past twenty years. He had only to go running for the thought to occur to him. “I saw Tom Stephenson the other day,” a guy says to a friend who also knew Tom in high school. “Really? Yeah. How is he? I’d like to see him again. It’s been ten years at least.”

Curt’s friend had just seen Tom, thought of him, liked to see him. The only thing he hadn’t done, didn’t need or want to do, and would rather never do, is see Tom again. So powerful is the mind’s eye, Curt reasoned, that it never shuts or even blinks. In that ten-second conversation, Curt’s friend thinks of Tom and sees him again. But that’s rich, that instant; it’s not meaningless, it nothing to shake a stick at. What we do in those seconds must be what gets most of the connecting in the world done: we say someone’s name, we think of someone, we see someone. And then we go on with our lives. Why call or do a search? We’ve just had our relationship with them, had our way with them. And they, now and then, in the same flash, have their way with us. It’s nice to be thought of.

Why trivialize and feel guilty about those ideal relationships, Curt asked himself, out of allegiance to the muddy ones we do have. As he was thinking this through, unsuccessfully, a woman smiled at him in the café. She might as well have been an Olympic gymnast getting the go-ahead to begin her routine, there was such a depth of sincerity in it.

In a sense, we’re all accountants—those of us who are aren’t accountants by profession—and we keep at least two sets of books, informally (and legally, most important of all). Accountants by choice and profession are not allowed, as far as Curt understood, to keep two sets of books. They may keep two, at least two, like the rest of us, but they can only turn in one. And so can we. One set of books. Curt was trying to figure out how many books are in one set. He knew from ninth-grade algebra that a set can have one thing in it or an infinite number of things. A set can even have nothing in it, a null set. But most sets have at least two things; otherwise, why not call it by the name of the thing in it, instead of calling it a set of that thing—as in a hand set, otherwise known as a phone? We never used to say, “answer the hand set,” “I have to use the hand set.”

Curt was an accountant by force of circumstance. He had to make a living, and the living he made didn’t afford him enough to hire an accountant. He learned it by doing it. He kept accounts for his mother’s interior design business (she’d lost her memory). But the first lesson he’d learned was the massage therapy business class: it was is that $50 an hour quickly becomes $17 an hour, if that. The second was that accounting remains fairly simple where the numbers are never large. His sister-in-law was a trained, licensed, certified public accountant for ten years. She got tired of it and wanted out. So she studied feng shui—just as the economy tanked. Only the very rich could afford that luxury, and she didn’t know a lot of rich people. She had to go back into accounting, which she did indirectly, by buying a small business. Small business ownership ran in Curt’s family, in the same stream as alcoholism, skin cancer, and a weak form of autism.

To get the bad taste out of his mouth and stop thinking so much, as he was often told to do, Curt left the cafe at about 9:30 and went to dance at Redfish. A pretty good blues band could be counted on to be playing there on Friday and Saturday nights, and Linda, who liked to turn her ass to him, would be there, and Liz, who sang in one of the bands but wasn’t against listening to the others, and the Texan, Barbara, who was in her mid-sixties, and Janet, from Miami, whose father had once owned the Miami Dolphins. She had nothing good to say about owning a football team, but the money that purchased it and survived her father’s term of ownership had set her up for the rest of her days, and she spent most of her weekend nights dancing at Redfish. The red-headed Ellen was there, too, getting drunk and looking for a man, neither desire in her quite squaring with her need to believe in Jesus Christ.

Curt never asked any of his old friends to go with him. Dave wouldn’t, even if asked, because he liked to be as alone as Curt did. Dave couldn’t sleep, but wouldn’t talk about it. Dave couldn’t sleep, Curt guessed, because he’d stopped drinking and taking pain pills. His body, his system, was undergoing an adjustment. There was nothing to be done. It would pass, and he would be able to sleep again.

Curt had been keeping his chin and his Chinese up since he got home. “I had a great time in China,” he’d say to people who asked how his year was, but “Great” didn’t do it justice; “amazing,” “incredible,” and “awesome” he refused; but nothing more than “great” was wanted. That was the problem. He wanted to give more than he could come up with in time, and people wanted nothing more than a word to go away with. So little is expected. O, to live in a time when avoiding triteness at the risk of becoming paradoxical meant something! Of course, as a practical matter, it has never been good to be paradoxical, not even at a party where everyone is drunk, or in a quiet moment, when everyone is stoned and profound. Better to say nothing than blab.

Curt, when feeling sorry for himself, managed to complain into the ears of an upbeat, optimistic, hopeful friend. “You can sing. It’s never too late,” Christine said. Bullshit. Sing like Michael McDonald sings one syllable for Steely Dan in “Peg”? What did his friends take him for? What did they take themselves for? Was it fine to sing badly in our cars, where no one could hear us but our ideal selves? “If you start learning piano today, just think what you’ll be able to play in twenty years!” Well, she had him there. When he was sixty-four, he could play “Borrowed Tune” in the sound-proofed second bedroom of his condo, but he’d still be teaching “Writing in the West” on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and “Shakespeare for Non-Majors” on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Curt had been born and then he studied. From birth to bachelor’s degree in two lines. None of his Chinese students, in asking him a question, had said, “Foreign Expert of English, why do we have to read Shakespeare’s plays? Can’t we just watch the DVD?” There were days when he’d wanted to correct them, when they’d addressed him as “Professor,” but he thought better of it. Most addressed him without name or title. That was fine, too. But for the purposes of his resume or CV, strict dealing was in order, and so: “Visiting Assistant Professor” here, “Adjunct Professor” there, “Lecturer” and “Part-time Lecturer” elsewhere.

“So you’re a teacher, I think you remember you told me,” Janet said. She and Curt were both waiting for a song they wanted to dance to. He paused, as usual, wanting to instruct his interlocutor that “teacher” was good for someone who stood nearest the blackboard in classrooms K through 12. But he taught, and he’d never heard himself or any of his colleagues say they “professed.” He’d rather say he was a massage therapist than a professor. “Yes,” he said. “You have a good memory. But I almost became a massage therapist.”

And he almost had, but he quit after 150 hours, when he realized that his teachers were all part-time instructors, either because they’d injured themselves by doing too many massages or hadn’t gotten enough clients to maintain a practice. Janet listened to him say that and laughed a little. “I never got certified to teach English either. I only had a PhD. But I’d say I’ve taught about 1200 students over the years.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Janet said.

“Now, here in Boulder,” Curt went on, “if I had my certification, I could get a job doing bodywork quicker than I could get a job teaching Shakespeare.”

The next song was too slow for both of them, but so was the conversation. Curt wanted to say he preferred to both occupations the nicer one of being a massage client. Though much more costly, receiving was better than giving, when it came to both massage and teaching, and not only in parlors and classrooms. Most of his students, in any case, had never wanted anything more from him than a massage, in effect. Or a tan, even better. But Curt didn’t want to get started on his Tanning Salon Model of Education.

He said good night to Janet and headed for his car. In that, he could pick the music he he wanted to hear. Guy Clark was singing about Baton Rouge as he drove along the turnpike, thinking of Aurora as the last frontier. Being east of Denver, it gets the dawn before downtown does, and then it’s light all over—dawn goes down to day, as Robert Frost put it. Spring is to dawn as summer is to day, as Eden to the twentieth century—his century. An air-conditioned nightmare? What should one feel in July and August but heat? It isn’t a personal insult.

“Make note of all good wishes,” sang Guy Clark, right before Curt got off the freeway, and don’t get killed, don’t get caught. Then Ronnie Laws came on and put it like this: “When the posse’s riding out, I’ll be riding in. You know what I’m talking about.” Curt did. He was his own posse, very ineffective. Something had to give. He cut his credit card up into seven pieces when he got home.

2. The Japanese playing of, if not liking of, the music-box sound. What does that say about the importance of listening in Japan? It says that what is often to be heard in public, commercial, and clinical spaces in Japan is well worth protecting your ears against.

3. Ichi o kiite ju o shiru: “one heard, ten understood.” Or: one heard, ten ignored.

4. Could it be acts of intended misunderstanding? To emphasize English is itself to intend misunderstanding. On the other hand, the Japanese, who don’t use the second person singular pronoun with anything like the frequency English speakers use it with, easily fall in with the use of “you” while talking and writing English. It is a great relief for the Japanese to be able to fall in with the easy, even sloppy and sometimes contemptuous, use of the English second-person pronoun. Similarly, it must be the case that the original English accent was American, given the ease with which a host of English actors drop into American in Hollywood: such a relief from having to perform the English accent at home.

5. “Case by case”: another case of a habitual translation that fits the self-image of the Japanese, but is in fact not indicative or typical of the unpragmatic and non-situational way life operates in Japan, with its unsurprised and well-regarded norms and rules. The Japanese try hard not to have or make cases.

6. The same goes for moreover, for example, and so on, that’s all, topic, and grade. These are now colloquial Japanese, or Japanese English. Today, several of my students found out for the first time that gyaru was originally English—gal or girl. They were unaware of this, taking the word to be Japanese. And they are right, practically speaking. They are certainly right, practically hearing.

7. I realize daily, as a teacher and a citizen, how narrow, local, and under-informed I am—and how deeply, despite this realization, I hold to my little notions.

8. Cover your mouth with one hand while you pick your teeth with the other, but brush your teeth in front of anyone. What remains in the mouth after eating is to be picked out of it discreetly, but may be washed or brushed out of it openly. What remains in the mouth after we speak? In the ear after we speak? In the ear after we listen? After we hear? How can we wash out our ears?

9. Japanese excel at combining bland, neutral, or mild flavors—tofu, cucumber, rice—that vary in texture—tofu, cucumber, rice. Each element in the combination is to have a different mouth-feel, to eat differently, but anything like a strong flavor isn’t welcome. (In the ear, strong tones are not welcome, nor are hot ones.) A slice of carrot, two leaves of arugula, a disc of zucchini—again, no flavor in these of much consequence, but color and texture abundant by comparison, even loud (as the Georgians say, “they eye eats and the eye drinks”). The flavor comes from outside the food, in addition to it, in the ponzu sauce, in the wasabi, in the soy sauce—and much of that flavor is saline or saccharin, salty or sweet. A diagonal of pea unshelled; a slice of sweet potato; a wedge of daikon (radish); a cube of konyaku (hard jello); a rectangle of koya dofu: again, no flavor to speak of in these, but each bites differently, is differently colored, shaped, and textured. And the liquid at the bottom of the cup or dish they’re served together in is sweet. Japanese seem to favor spongy, springy, tensile material that resists the teeth just a little.

10. Americans like individual rice; Japanese like group rice.

11. Japanese is a language you can speak with a smile and nothing else. You can say anything and keep smiling.

12. There’s the belief that a Japanese speaking to others in a classroom-sized room must be amplified. Same on a street-corner or from a vehicle. Overamplified. There’s a high tolerance for noise in Japan (and in China), or for volume, as a sign of energy, if not of sincerity, particularly when it comes to voice. But where the voice isn’t amplified, as among students in classrooms, it is nearly unprojected.

13. The Japanese will cry out in public like town criers, if they’ve been hired to and told to (and sometimes handed a megaphone). I’ve never heard a town crier. Japan has many, though, barking and hawking to passersby. Owners of businesses here make some of their employees stand and cry out their products. But I can sit in a classroom with my head 12 inches from two students in lively, continuous talk with each other and not hear what either of them says, not a word of it, unless I lean in even closer to their mouths.

14. Japanese, if they don’t start an English sentence right, will back up and try again, and again, and again, like threading a needle, until they get the first words right, before they go on. Some of my students might stutter their way into five or six repetitions of the same two or three or four words before they get going. I never hear them do that in their language. I have never done it in mine, or witnessed Americans getting into an English sentence the way Japanese do.

15. Talk isn’t cheap in Japan. A room full of administrators in a university or a city office is painfully quiet. Japanese speech is reticent, careful, inhibited, formulaic. Japanese keep their distance when they speak, but when they take pictures, they’ll put their lens almost on a clump of moss or a cherry blossom.

16. The listening behavior that Laura Miller doesn’t mention in her article on aizuchi—which is really about vocal behavior on the part of the listener—is silence, is pause, is waiting. After a speaker speaks, in a conversation or a faculty meeting, Japanese will sit in silence, having paused to be sure the person has finished. They also seem to be performing consideration, or what some might call deep listening—taking in. In a presentation situation, on the other hand, Japanese will say “That’s all” when they’ve finished.