Il commence à faire très chaud.

"I read him all I had written in my journal about June. What is happening? He is deeply moved, torn apart. He believes. 'It is in that way I should have written about June. The other is incomplete, superficial. You have got her, Anaïs.' But wait. He has left softness, tenderness out of his work, he has written down only the hate, the violence. I have only inserted what he has left out. But he has not left it out because he doesn't feel it, or know it, or understand (as June thinks), only because it is more difficult to express. So far his writing has only issued from violence, it has been whipped out of him, the blows have made him wail and curse. And now he sits and I confide in him completely, in the sentient, profound Henry. He is won.

He says, 'Such a love is wonderful, Anaïs. I do not hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I see it so well. Read, read--this is a revelation to me.'

I read, and I tremble as I read, up to our kiss. He understands too well.

Suddenly he says, 'Anaïs, I have just realized that what I give you is something coarse and plain, compared to that, I realize that when June returns...' " (86).

"In the thick of such complex science, it's important to step back and appreciate that the goal, at the end of the day, is simply to make a better form of fat. You need fat in a cake to make it tender, light, and delicate, and, as in all foods, to carry flavors and nutrients. Butter may have better flavor, but it doesn't leaven as well as our favorite heavily processed soybean product.

The primary advantage of shortening is that its high melting point and crystalline structure ensure an airy cake or a flaky crust. But shortening offers another advantage: it makes cakes tender by coating the flour proteins with oil, keeping them from absorbing moisture, and 'shortening' (hence the term) the gluten strands. Try tearing a piece off a crusty boule of peasant bread, which has plenty of gluten, and compare the heroic effort with the effort needed to tear off a piece of cake. Twinkies are so tender, the hardest thing to tear off is the wrapper" (102).

Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

A Talk by International Bestselling Novelist Isabel Allende

La Maldición de Malinche - Amparo Ochoa

The Curse of Malinche, the Aztec woman who loved and translated the route of Cortéz...and damned her people to extinction. Isabel Allende's book discusses the ongoing conversation in novel form about the continued extraction and exploitation of Latin American countries by the West in the form of trade agreements, tourism...

The Spanish surnames and conferred identity can be expressed in a metaphor of conquest closer to America's heart: every transported African slave has lost his or her indigenous identity forever with the last name of an owner...a "White" or "Williams"

Del mar los vieron llegar
mis hermanos emplumados
Eran los hombres barbados
de la profecía esperada
Se oyó la voz del monarca
de que el dios había llegado.
Y les abrimos la puerta
por temor a lo ignorado.

Iban montados en bestias
como demonios del mal
Iban con fuego en las manos
y cubiertos de metal.
Sólo el valor de unos cuantos
les opuso resistencia
Y al mirar correr la sangre
se llenaron de verguenza.

Porque los dioses ni comen
ni gozan con lo robado
Y cuando nos dimos cuenta
ya todo estaba acabado.
Y en ese error entregamos
la grandeza del pasado
Y en ese error nos quedamos
trescientos años esclavos.

Se nos quedó el maleficio
de brindar al extranjero
Nuestra fe, nuestra cultura,
nuestro pan, nuestro dinero.
Y les seguimos cambiando
oro por cuentas de vidrio
Y damos nuestras riquezas
por sus espejos con brillo.

Hoy, en pleno siglo veinte
nos siguen llegando rubios
Y les abrimos la casa
y les llamamos amigos.
Pero si llega cansado
un indio de andar la sierra
Lo humillamos y lo vemos
como extraño por su tierra.

Tu, hipócrita que te muestras
humilde ante el extranjero
Pero te vuelves soberbio
con tus hermanos del pueblo.
Oh, maldición de Malinche,
enfermedad del presente
¿Cuándo dejarás mi tierra..?
¿cuándo harás libre a mi gente?

Amparo is my favorite Spanish name, which can be used as a noun, for "protection."

The nine owners to the name.

"Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound.
...
'But how little,' said Menenhetet, 'can magic offer when the heart of the magician is heavy with fear? It is the first paradox of magic, and the worst, that it is always least available when we are most desperate. On this night, Isis was working within a cow's head not yet familiar with Herself. How could she measure the potency of a curse when instead of widening a delicate nostril, She had now to resolve a nose as large as a snout? With such unfamiliar instruments, the question is whether She was able to affect anything that night, at least until the moment she did. But, finally, she did. How else account for Set's stupidity in so exploding, oink oink,' said Menenhetet, 'that He fell asleep without knowing His semen was left in the enemy's hand. Can you believe it? He dreamed that his seed was taking knowledge, drop by drop, of the secret turns of Horus' bowels. I can promise you that Set snored with raucous expectation of orgies in years to come. He was certain that Horus could now keep no secret imparted to Him by Osiris. Sweet Dreams! said Menenhetet. 'Isis took one look at the hand of Her son, and exclaimed, 'The seed of Set is dense as the milk of silver,' and all of Set that had collected in the palm of Horus now was heavy, and brilliant like the moon. That liquid silver became our first ball of mercury, no more (and no less!) than a distillation of the seed of Set. Isis, now in full recovery of her wisdom, encouraged Horus to throw this gout of mercury into the swamp even if every weed in the march must turn poisonous. On the consequence, our native Egyptians, eating the meat of beasts who graze upon these weeds, have turned as spineless as mercury in their will, and so we are reduced from a great nation into one without character, yes, every ejaculation of our Gods that is not left in the body of another is the birth of a new disease. Much of Maat resides in this stern principle. Otherwise, Gods could sow Their seed everywhere" (1, 82).

...pour les réunions officielles.

Terminal Afternoon.

Vorrei essere svegliato.

Monkey Puzzle Tree: One of the Carboniferous

"'Did his mother know that Elvis would die young? She talked about assassins. She talked about the life. The life of a star of this type and magnitude. Isn't the life structured to cut you down early? This is the point, isn't it? There are rules, guidelines. If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology. She worried about his sleepwalking. She thought he might go out a window. I have a feeling about mothers. Mothers really do know. The folklore is correct'" (70 ).

"Everything was going to resolve itself right there, at that moment; there was like an immense silence which had nothing to do with physical silence. It was stretching it out, setting itself up. I think I screamed, I screamed terribly, and at that exact second I realized that I was beginning to move toward them, four inches, a step, another step, the tree swung its branches rhythmically in the foreground, a place where the railing was tarnished emerged from the frame, the woman's face turned toward me as though surprised, was enlarging, and then I turned a bit, I mean that the camera turned a little, and without losing sight of the woman, I began to close in on the man who was looking at me with the black holes he he had in place of eyes, surprised and angered both, he looked, wanting to nail me onto the air, and at that instant I happened to see something like a large bird outside the focus that was flying in a single swoop in front of the picture, and I leaned up against the wall of my room and was happy because the boy had just managed to escape, I saw him running off, in focus again, sprinting with his hair flying in the wind, learning finally to fly across the island, to arrive at the footbridge, return to the city. For the second time he'd escaped them, for the second time I was helping him to escape, returning him to his precarious paradise. Out of breath, I stood in front of them; no need to step closer, the game was played out. Of the woman you could just see just maybe a shoulder and a bit of the hair, brutally cut off by the frame of the picture; but the man was directly center, his mouth half open, you could see a shaking black tongue, and he lifted his hands slowly, bringing them into the foreground, an instant still in perfect focus, and then all of him a lump that blotted out the island, the tree, and I shut my eyes, I didn't want to see any more, and I covered my face and broke into tears like an idiot" (130-1 ).

Jane Birkin reading a poem

The Whisper Coming Back

"M turns out of the creek, squeezes through the fringe of riparian scrub onto the springy orange-tinted coral fern, side-stepping potholes and moss pincushions so green they are almost phosphorescent. And where the pad first slinks into the bush he drops his pack, for this is where he will set his snare. He finds his wire, pegs and straight stick as he had left them, thinking: With this patina of rain and dirt they are no longer newcomers and, no longer new, they are not to be feared ... So works the oldest trick in the book ... The thing that will snatch you up into the air has been lying dormant all along. Then he searches around for a sapling, something long and thin and flexible, and in half an hour he has found one. On either side of the pad he hammers in a graphite peg; into each peg a notch has been cut at the height of a tiger's chest" (46).

"Then I saw that there is a neatness about tragedy -- it looks perfect, as false things so often do: fake blood in all the right places, pretty victims, stately burials and then silence. It is all glorious and conceited. But nothing is worse than disgrace. It is lonely and irreversible -- a terrible mess. The loud snorting laughter it produces is worse than anguish. Having to live through a disgrace is worse than dying.

All your secrets in a twisted form belong to everyone else -- and you are in the dark. That was how I felt then, guessing at what was going on; and I didn't know the half of it. Nothing truthful was revealed, but a version of events emerged. It was like a badly wrapped parcel coming apart --slowly at first, just stains producing rips and leaks, and then more quickly collapsing until it was all loose string and flaps and crumpled wrapping, and something dark and slimy showing through, and finally flopping on to the floor in full view, while people said, 'Oh, God, what's that?'" (57).

Until the hours after noon

Rewriting the Riding Lesson

"But how did they evolve, where did the first one come from, they weren't an invasion from another planet, they were

terrestrial. How did we get bad. For us when we were small the origin was Hitler, he was the great evil, many tenacled, ancient and indestructible as the Devil. It didn't matter that he had shrunk to a few cinders and teeth by the
time I heard about him; I was certain he was alive, he was in the comic books my brother brought home in the winters and he was in my brother's scrapbook too, he was the swastikas on the tanks, if only he could be destroyed everyone would be saved, safe. When our father made bonfires to burn the weeds we would throw sticks into the flames and chant "Hitler's house is burning down, My Fair Lady-O"; we knew it helped. All possible horrors were measured against him. But Hitler was gone and the thing remained; whatever it was, even then, moving away from them as they smirked and waved goodbye, I asked Are the Americans worse than Hitler. It was like cutting up a tapeworm, the pieces grew" (149).

"As he stood there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure , and went, presumably, to his bath"
(138).

Mentre ch'io canto, Iddio Redentore

vedo l'Italia tutta a fiamma e foco.

While I sing, God the Redeemer

See Italy all to flame and smoke.

Two Adjoining Green Houses

She continued to defy the hands on her dresses, at the siren's most impossible,

She is being left, just as clouded mineral water trinkles down moss filtration. To pure water.

Absent of impurities, which some diarist powerhouse supposes aromatic. The bath star is

Half dormant, yet the project on day avenue is effervescent from eventide to eventide.

Somewhere, a half-hidden fecundity involves two adjoining green houses where

She continued to defy the hands on her dresses, at the siren's most impossible,

Sunlight's lemon and greens. The fire cast out, all with beams melting, charred mantel.
But the hardwoods were scrubbed, and beards removed, the window's myrtle remained
Absent of impurities, which some diarist powerhouse supposes aromatic, the bath star

Just foaming. The crystal charged with wines at each other's separate dinner parties.

After the knife's edge runs around the ramekins, pausing for comment on the Times

She continued to defy the hands on her dresses, at the siren's most impossible

The tablecloth is striving to imitate kelp forest, where the blue tiles wave the washroom's light.
What a life a dish towel has, patterned linen in the hands of each, housekeeping absently,
Absent of impurities which some diarist powerhouse supposes aromatic, the bathing star

Until the other promises to come. The home awaits the blue ocean to each other's walk,

Swimming parallel to the waves, so as to not be swept out to sea, she thinks she really sees her--
She continued to defy the hands on her dresses, as the siren's most impossible

Request, though she is entranced with the surroundings, she could have chosen herself.
The crewelwork, the bleached coral, where the memory of someone goes on to stay, she does
Not stay herself, bent double over the bath someone runs for her, to continue unstintingly, to steep

She continued to defy the hands on her dresses, at the siren's most impossible.

What a life a dish towel has in your hands.

giornata profumata e fresca


"She had a look and manner people took to be unconventional in a certain way, a kind of reclusiveness in a crowd. She wore soft clothes. She draped herself in casual layers, a smallish woman half buried in pastels. There was always the idea she was in quiet retirement from some fear or pain. She bought factory-outlet moccasins, never wore jewelry, kept snapshots of her mother in favorite books. People thought she was a canned-soup heiress who painted seascapes with birds. She ate soft food, spoke softly, with a slight huskiness, a sexiness. She was very sexy, at forty-seven. There was still that smoky little thing about her. The sexy swaying walk, the dark voice. She had a dry way of delivering friendly insults directly into people's chests. She walked softly swaying into a room and you could sense the anticipation in the group. They began preparing their laughter before she said a word" (124).

Stirling Moss: A Nodding Acquaintance with Death: "'Yes, terribly, because I can't see in the ultimate what there can be of happiness. I know that to some people, achievement in business, in work, is happiness. To me it's not; it's a fulfillment, but not necessarily happiness. It's a pleasure, but pleasure isn't happiness. My idea of happiness seems utopian to me, and it may seem absurd to you. It is to be married and have two or three children and a house in the country, if you like, and to go away for two weeks on holiday--and, most of all, most importantly, to be able to accept that life as happiness. Do you understand? To be able to accept it, that's the whole heart of the matter ...I keep my finger in the dike; it's not going to patch the bloody thing, but at least it's stopping the water pouring in. I'm waiting for my maturity to come to me, and I am doing what I can to bring it. I don't know if one ever feels happiness or if contentment is the maximum we can hope for. As I said, I'm not unhappy. If I were to be killed tomorrow, I wouldn't feel that thirty-two of my thirty-two years had been unhappy..." (208).

The Blue Grotto________________________________for Mona Van Duyn


The boatman rowed into
That often-sung impasse.
Each visitor foreknew
A floor of lilting glass,
A vault of rock, lit blue.

But here we faced the fact.
As misty expectations
Dispersed, and wavelets thwacked
In something like impatience,
The point was to react.

Alas for characteristics!
Diane fingered the water,
Don tested the acoustics
With a paragraph from Pater.
Jon shut his eyes--these mystics--

Thinking his mantra. Jack
Came out with a one-liner,
While claustrophobiac
Janet fought off a minor
Anxiety attack.

Then from our gnarled (his name?)
Boatman (Gennaro!) burst
Some local, vocal gem
Ten times a day rehearsed,
It put us all to shame:

The astute sob, the kiss
Blown in sheer routine
Unself-consciousness
Before one left the scene...
Years passed, and I wrote this.

--James Merrill

Bill Geist interviews Maureen Dowd-CBS Sunday Morning

Eclectic decorating. Weapon for hire. A Chagall in a parking garage. One broad's broad generalizations. I wonder if she is afraid of losing her glamour? We know the fate of charismatic leaders, it makes the rabble beneath scramble like ants to dismantle one...to install another charismatic person.

I know how narcissistic this post might seem, but I'll go with it.

Written and Buried

Curse with seven nails below Telegraph Street, credit Ann Raia

"At the lighthouse I made my way along the picket fence. I watched as the beam swept and flattened out on the sea. I thought of how many times I had stood watching this from a cliff. How the beam caught a trawler, miniaturizing it like a toy boat on the full yellow moon, the firmament surrounding. Black. How the kittiwakes and gulls flicked darkly through the beam. At such times, you had to figure that Botho August would see these night birds, and that the trawler crew saw them as well--the night birds is what they had in common between them. I remember Romeo Gillette saying, 'A ship in trouble is exactly the same distance from the lighthouse as the lighthouse is from it--a simpleminded fact, except if you're shipboard and about to capsize, that particular fact holds out no hope whatsoever. You simply hate the lighthouse keeper for being safe and warm, and mostly for you having to rely on him. And yet you pray he's in top form'" (146).

Two Epigrams to The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto:

Man, a god when he dreams, barely a beggar when he thinks. --Hölderlin, Hyperion

I cannot keep a record of my life through my action; fortune has buried them too deep: I keep it through my fantasies. --Montaigne

Chapter Nine: "The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I'm not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn't have different words for them. If the head extended directly in the shoulders like a worm's or a frog's without that constriction, that lie, they wouldn't be able to look down at their bodies and move them around as if they were robots or puppets ; they would have to realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die" (87).

...

"Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn't they just throw it away like trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill. Otherwise it was valueless: beautiful from a distance but it couldn't be tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices" (110).

Our lives in pictures (with credits)

Quint Buchholz "Am Strand" www.inkognito.de
Michael Sowa "AM MORGEN DANACH" www.inkognito.de

"Severine" Catherine Deneuve, Silverscreen -NL / artwork media gmbh
www.tushita.com

"Buddha Tree" Olaf Rocksien - artwork studios

www.tushita.com

"Dreamstreet 1956" Eugene Smith 1987 for Catch Utrecht, The Netherlands

"What is your pain scale?"

orlando.1992.tilda.swinton

ἀποϕορά apopherô to carry away to bring back for oneself

"The house is filled. The last heartthrob
thrills through her flesh. The hero stands,
stunned by the applauding hands,
and lifts her head to please the mob . . .
No, young and starry-eyed, the brother
and sister wait before their mother,
old iron-bruises, powder, "Child,
these breasts . . ." He knows. And if she's killed

his treadmill heart will never rest---
his wet mouth pressed to some slack breast,
or shifting over on his back . . .
The severed radiance filters back,
athirst for nightlife--gorgon head,
fished up from the Aegean dead,
with all its stranded snakes uncoiled,
here beheaded and despoiled.

We hear the ocean. Older seas
and deserts give asylum, peace
to each abortion and mistake.
Lost in the Near Eastern dreck,
the tyrant and tyrannicide
lie like the bridegroom and the bride;
the battering ram, abandonded, prone,
beside the apeman's phallic stone.

Betrayals! Was it the first night?
They stood against a black and white
inland New England backdrop. No dogs
there, horse or hunter, only frogs
chirring from the dark trees and swamps.
Elms watching like extinguished lamps.
Knee-high hedges of black sheep
encircling them at every step.

Some subway-green coldwater flat,
its walls tattooed with neon light,
then high delirious squalor, food
burned down with vodka . . . menstrual blood
caking the covers, when they woke
to the dry, childless Sunday walk,
saw cars on Brooklyn Bridge descend
through steel and coal dust to land's end.

Was it years later when they met,
and summer's coarse last-quarter drought
had dried the hard-veined elms to bark--
lying like people out of work,
dead sober, cured, recovered, on
the downslope of some gritty green,
all access barred with broken glass;
and dehydration browned the grass?

Is it this shore? Their eyes worn white
as moons from hitting bottom? Night,
the sandfleas scissoring their feet,
the sandbed cooling to concrete,
one borrowed blanket, lights of cars
shining down at them like stars? . . .
Sand build the lost Atlantis . . . sand,
Atlantic ocean, condoms, sand.

Sleep, sleep. The ocean, grinding stones,
can only speak the present tense;
nothing will age, nothing will last,
or take corruption from the past.
A hand, your hand then! I'm afraid
to touch the crisp hair on your head--
Monster loved for what you are,
till time, that buries us, lay bare."

(pp. 42-49)