Tuesday, May 5, 2015

I Asked Him How He Sustained Himself in This New Free-Market Situation When Even the Human Species Suffered from Malnutrition





  • Dennis the Peasant is 72 today.
  • Gramsci: "I hate the indifferent."
  • Vote for Death.
  • Inauguration.
  • Jim's joint gets an unscheduled face lift. (I... fuck it.)
  • Attention, if you please.
  • This is true: I made a third good faith attempt to knausgaard his struggle and failed again. A small fraction of that failure is my inability to digest overtly autobiographical fiction. I don't know that I've read autobiographies in decades, since school required. And it feels like cheating to me, no matter how ingeniously conceived and brilliantly executed. In Knausgaard's defense, I hated the fuck this time within minutes, I've learned when suddenly clutched with such a visceral hate it's because the object of that hate reminds me intensely of something I hate about me. There was a paragraph roughly thirty pages in when Knausgaard, remembering an incident in his teen years, listed in his head, typed into the manuscript, road-by-road, the route of a truck from his parents' house to a distant city. WHAT KIND OF SICK FUCK DOES THAT?
  • Secret Boxes: so now I'll try Galeano, hope to be shamed to have needed his death to learn of his writing. I jinx no matter how I type this sentence, but so far so b(s)a(u)n(c)g(k)o.
  • So a bleggalgaze on hating bleggalgazing, w(b)o(e)r(s)s(t)t s(l)i(a)c(s)c(t)e u(n)n(e)t(x)i(t)l.
  • Hey, Frances is back from Ecuador - unrelated to Ecuador, recommends a novel.
  • Zombie sees Replacements.
  • The Beerfoot Servants.
  • Experimental Fiction Now.
  • You, me.
  • Scifi short fiction, for those of you who do.
  • Notes toward a remake of Сталкер.
  • My second favorite Palin skit:








A PORTRAIT OF A DOG AS AN OLDER GUY

Katia Kapovich

When his owner died in 2000 and a new family
moved into their Moscow apartment,
he went to live with mongrels in the park.
In summer there was plenty of food, kids
often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff.
He didn’t have a big appetite,
still missing his old guy.
He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him,
and he didn’t burn calories chasing them around.
Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park.
The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him
but the minute he started rummaging in the
overturned garbage container, a voice
in his head said: “No, Rex!”
The remnants of a good upbringing lower
our natural survival skills.

I met him again in the early spring of 2001.
He looked terrific. Turning gray became him.
His dark shepherd eyes were perfectly bright,
like those of a puppy.
I asked him how he sustained himself
in this new free-market situation
when even the human species suffered from malnutrition.
In response he told me his story;
how at first he thought that life without his man
wasn’t worth it, how those
who petted him when he was a pet
then turned away from him, and how one night
he had a revelation.

His man came to him in his sleep,
tapped him on his skinny neck and said:
“Let’s go shopping!” So the next morning he took the subway
and went to the street market
where they used to go together every Sunday and where
vendors recognized him and fed him
to his heart’s content.
“Perhaps you should move closer to that area?”
I ventured.—“No, I’ll stay here,” he sighed,
“oldies shouldn’t change their topography. That’s
what my man said.”
Indeed, he sounded like one himself.



4 comments:

  1. Seriously, who does that? Dude stole your meme, huh?

    On a more serious note, BDR the site seems back in form; best set of links since the last and until the next.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I link the non-link posts - I like not feeling obligated to link-farm. And there are fewer links to farm anyway these days.

      Delete
  2. last night on tv i saw the longhaired blond teenaged boy with the hat sing 'take me to the river'

    looking at what youtube has to offer of performances of this song, i found one from Vietnam Idol - sung in English

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxWnHwODDMQ

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sawyer fredericks of fultonville, ny

      http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Sawyer-Fredericks-moves-on-6244559.php

      Delete