Pinko's Copies - a place for stuff to go so people can look at it
Under Northern Eyes
Posted in USSR June 29th, 2008 by john paul

Hello,

Please do read the story I filched from Joseph Conrad.Second half to follow in a few weeks. Warm regards,

John Paul G.

He didn’t notice that day that the city of Abaixado seemed to be plotting its own demise. Near dusk, a mist rose in the wake of a vengeful rainstorm, catching the weird blue-gray light of the gas lamps. In the avenues now like the pulsing arteries of an exposed heart, things began to seem like a Joseph Conrad novel and Bocanegra had no idea at all.

The evening had fallen like a hangman when Bocanegra stood abruptly, half delirious, with a need to leave the cafe. On the small black metal table in front of him were an open copy of Capitalism and Freedom, a coagulant plate of juevos flacos, an un-warm mug of coffee. The coffee had branded two pieces of chicken-scratched paper roughly equal halves of a blurred, brown-black “O,” and these he clutched, along with the keys to his apartment, in his right hand. With his left he jerkily dug in his pockets and set down a few coins — maybe it was enough, maybe it wasn’t — and thrust his notes and book into the black satchel he carried with him everywhere. On shaky legs he left by a breach in the wrought iron gate that segregated the cafe’s patio from the ministerial plaza.

He crossed the plaza with a restless look in his eye, his mouth drawn and firmly shut to, his gunpowder hair like an oil painting on his skull. He was walking a kind of walk that wasn’t totally human or even, really, animal. Like a red-eyed ghost, he passed through the plaza and onto Avenida Bolivar, where the pearly face of the clock above the entryway of the mayor’s mansion read ten past six. He smiled grimly to himself, his head throbbing.

The mist rose like the notes of a violin in the blue of the lamps, and, still some six blocks away from his apartment, he began to fumble for his keys. He patted his breast pocket, then each of the pockets of his withering pants. But the keys had already made their way to his hand.

Avenida Ninos Heroes gave way to Avenida Victor Hugo, and then came the house — his house — with its Kool-Aid blue siding, burnt orange trim, and its air of an enormous, stale pastry. The Indian maid stood aquiline at the landing, sweeping without expression. He grunted a hello before lurching up the stairs to his apartment, twisting the key in its lock, and cramming himself inside the darkness.

When he’d slammed the door shut, he stood with one hand propped against it and the other gripping the handle. The room, which was in that moment a moist kind of dark, seemed to draw him further and further into itself.

“Thank God,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?” asked in a small way the man who was waiting in his room. Bocanegra turned around: a pair of eyes, so wide that they were like two black apples, were staring back at him from the gloom. The eyes belonged to a thin but muscular figure with the suggestion of a shrug in its shoulders and a set of buck teeth that teepeed out from under lazy, loose, strangely red lips. It was easy to see, even in the poorly lit room, that he — whoever he was — was ugly.

            Bocanegra’s jaw dropped just a little—

            “Don’t yell, please, Bocanegra,” the weak, brackish voice came again, this time with urgency, and Bocanegra thought of the bottom falling out of a bucket. He wondered illogically whether he had somehow let himself into the wrong room.

            “Who is there?” asked Bocanegra, not impolitely. A half minute or more passed, the two people in the room breathing together.

            “It’s just me, Carondele,” said the man finally. “From school.” It was a name said as though belonging to an acquaintance, but to Bocanegra it was only vaguely familiar. His gaze still fixed on his uninvited guest, he started toward the door, his hand out to grasp the handle.  

           “Would you like some water?” asked Bocanegra, for obscure reasons. Time had ceased to exist (everything had ceased to exist, actually), and there was something like a very civilized carnival going on inside the room.

            He had failed to escape.

 Without another word, Carondele’s black-apple-eyes lifted (he had stood). And now, breathing very loudly through the triangular space between his teeth and his lower lip, the man removed something that looked like a silver snake from where it had been tucked into his pants. Slowly, he put it beside the lamp on Bocanegra’s desk.

            “What would you do with this?” asked Carondele, pointing at his gun.   

The room began to stink like something — like sulfur, or fermentation, or like danger, or a threat, or something — and it began to spin a little. In that instant, Bocanegra ceased to plan how to get rid of his unwanted guest and decided instead to plan his own escape from his tiny room on the second floor of the house that looked like an enormous and stale pastry.

All that was no use anymore.

*         *         *

            He’d met the mayor once. It had been almost a year now, during Bocanegra’s third year at school. It was before the strike (and then, of course, the riots), and it was before things in the city started feeling vaguely toxic and on days in late summer when it rained the rain didn’t suggest anything of the end of days.

            He was summoned to the office of the president of the college on this day, which wasn’t exactly expected and wasn’t exactly abnormal. The president of the college, a nakedly ambitious, stupid man, had always seemed fond of him, as a gardener might prefer his orchids or succulents. And even though the president of the college wheezed a lot and he sipped his tea too loudly, Bocanegra could stand him all right. His name was Sanjurju, an uncommon name. Sanjurju would call Bocanegra up to his office often enough, especially after Bocanegra won the prize for his essay on the price of bread in Zimbabwe.

            When he’d made his way to the mansion that housed the offices of administration, he was ushered by the fat little secretary more quickly than was normal into Sanjurju’s office, a bright room with a fireplace wreathed in golden plaques and certificates of distinction.  The president stood rigidly behind his desk, his well-kempt and unfashionable moustache dangling stupidly below his nose. When Bocanegra came in, the man’s chuckle (nothing good-natured about this chuckle) sounded in the room like startled birds taking to the air and Sanjurju said higher than normal that he was pleased to see him.

            He thought: I’m being studied.

            And then Bocanegra, the air thinner than normal, noticed the man seated opposite Sanjurju in a plain leather chair. He had very black eyes, pale skin, and he was dressed in a well-fitting linen suit. He was probably handsome at some point, Bocanegra figured. And there was something violent about him.

            “And may I present,” continued Sanjurju idiotically, “The mayor of Ciudade Abaixado, Ulíses Dias.” The head of the man nodded once or twice, the eyes bulged almost imperceptibly, and the nose twitched.

            “Your name is one that I hear often enough these days,” Dias said as he almost stood, extending his hand. The three men stood there, all trying to figure out what they wanted to say while they were standing there. Until Bocanegra asked in very simple terms if he was a suspected dissident.

The men laughed in this order: first the mayor, then Sanjurju, and then Bocanegra, a little and to himself.

A halting, awkward conversation ensued about Bocanegra’s favorite subjects, his favorite sports, the weather at this time of year, and the progress of the machines making the superhighway across the isthmus. And then the mayor turned to Sanjurju: thank you, Mauricio, and Bocanegra was told that he could leave. Everything they had spoken about had turned on the strange circumstances of the conversation itself—it was only later that he let a thrill passed through himself. Even when things began to go badly for the mayor, it was a comfort to know that such a man had heard his name “often enough.”

Since that day, there was the strike and then the strikers and then the movement and the farmers down from the campos; there was Gilson Cabral shot dead in the street; there was the police disbanded, but there were still the white trucks with no plates coming in the night to Eglisa Santo Domingo where the 5,000 of them slept. And they killed in the night.

People had begun to demand the mayor’s resignation, calmly, like the sea gnaws at a cliff, and Bocanegra hadn’t seen him since that day, except on TV.

*         *         *

            “It was me who shot the mayor this afternoon,” said Carondele after a while. “Just a little while ago. At the Hotel Zará.”

            When he understood the words, even Bocanegra’s eyeballs sweat. He may have gaped, and in fact that would have made sense. A groan, like wind through the rafters of an old house, left him and turned the room the arsenic green of panic. He shook suddenly and, pulling out his sad little chair from behind his even sadder little desk, Bocanegra took a seat. Vomit stung the back of his throat.

            He looked at Carondele again, and this time he recognized him as one of the idiots who liked to stand on the steps of the library, giving the clenched-fist salute. He thought with disdain of their brand new clothes and their clenched fists: Bocanegra stood and walked very slowly to Carondele, who wouldn’t meet his gaze and who looked older now, somehow.

            He had learned a dirty trick in his youth, and tonight he used it on Carondele: his shoulders, firm and thick, betrayed no movement as he pulled back his right fist and plunged it deep into the guts of his comrade. He punched as though aiming for the man’s spine. The other clutched his stomach and collapsed onto the small bed, a gasp coming and going, before he began to weep. His crying was not only for a physical pain, but for something deeper; the weeping was more existential than that, and it belonged to the first murderer Bocanegra had ever met.

Bocanegra was now thinking very quickly because the sound of the crying had kicked some lever in his brain. He walked briskly and quietly to the window and looked outside: no one.  But, he thought, who knows if the idiot has been followed?

With a sneer, he said, “Thanks for dropping by.”

He walked to the cabinet above his sink, removed some instant coffee and a mug, and filled it with tap water. He noticed that his hands were now shaking a little. He understood that it wasn’t that there weren’t any police in the city, exactly, but rather that they had taken off their uniforms.

It was all very bad and very unlucky.

In this way, slowly, by degrees, he understood three simple facts. The first was that he had no real desire to help Carondele. He certainly felt no great political sympathies, since, a ward of the State, Bocanegra had watched developments with the neutral eyes of someone who witnesses their parents fighting.  Second, Carondele was in danger of being caught and he was in Bocanegra’s room and so long as he was in danger Bocanegra was in danger himself. Third, Carondele needed to leave his room very quickly and quietly and needed not to be seen by anyone, not even the Indian maid sweeping wordless and aquiline in the foyer.

His heart felt full of panic and fear, still. But there was also his mind. And so anger gave way to curiosity and he began to think differently about things, generally.

            “Your comrade,” he said, not mockingly, exactly. He’d accepted that he was guilty by association, really. He could almost hear the television station reporting in a scandalized way the single word that would be his end: a co-conspirator. As in: The assassin fled the scene of the crime and went to the house of a co-conspirator. And he pitied Carondele. He pitied him.

            All of which meant: Fuck!

            So he said that, again and again. In his mind he saw a black hand with fingers as thick as cudgels, coming for his throat. His stomach tilted upward into his head.

Carondele stopped crying: “I’m sorry,” he said imploringly. “I wasn’t sure where else to go.” His hands were pressed to his sides and his black eyes stared straight upward, studying the lines of the ceiling, maybe. Thinking of family, friends and enemies.

 Bocanegra thought about how pathetic it was.

            The knock could come at any minute. It wouldn’t be a hard knock. It would be quick, confident, entirely impersonal. It would ring like church bells. Two men would enter, inconspicuous except for their aviator glasses and the toothpicks jammed between scarred lips. They’d be at the door, they would enter quietly; they wouldn’t take out their guns, nor would they show their badges (no doubt they would have badges somewhere). Placed there by the force of human drama, they would ask, almost politely, “Come with us.” Somewhere, in a smoke-filled room behind an unremarkable door at the bottom of an unremarkable staircase, Bocanegra and Carondele would be beaten. Gleefully they’d beat them. Burning with cigarettes, electrocution, the removal of the fingernail from the finger with a pair of pliers!

           What, exactly, is your connection to the assassination of Mayor Ulises Dias?

            They’d be there soon—any minute now—to remove his fingernails! He asked Carondele, without feeling, “But why did you come here?”

            And Carondele, shifting only his eyes, replied, “I thought I recognized you from the assemblies at the Eglisa Santo Domingo.”

This was a ridiculous notion—Bocanegra wouldn’t have been caught dead at one of those. They were noisy and crowded, and the idea that anyone should be free to speak and share their idiotic revolutionary ideas revolted him. The idea of preaching to the choir was anathema to Bocanegra, who distrusted all agreement.

“You didn’t see me there,” said Bocanegra, with finality.

“I wondered.”

“Well, you didn’t,” said Bocanegra, lip curling even as he spoke.

Favorite Books
Posted in USSR June 16th, 2008 by Jed

I was assigned to write a list of my top ten favorite books in my life, and I’ve put too much thought into it. It’s supposed to represent the “classics of [my] idiosyncratic world experience,” and equally represent all phases and ages of my life. I’m posting it here because if you guys have time, I’d be really interested to hear yours.

It’s only vaguely alphabetical by author, not by preference–that would be too hard.

1. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: my first favorite book, introduced me to the idea that science fiction can critique colonialism.
2. Minding American Education by Martin Bickman: We have had good schools in America, it just hasn’t caught on recently. Anyone involved in education should read this book.
3. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs:
4. Anti-Oedipus by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: This book will be the foundation of my life’s work. D & G write like poets, they create a brand new vocabulary and dismantle the regime of psychoanalysis.
5. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsburg: the most effective poem ever written, published in the most convenient and useful and groundbreaking series of poetry (the pocket poets series).
6. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin: In this list, this book stands in for a phase of my reading life when I was deeply invested in literary science fiction. LHD is a masterwork of the genre; it illustrates how alternate reality-creation is always political—in this case, feminist—by imagining alternate power structures.

7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: what twisted decomposing America
8. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Many people have trouble with GR because they try to “make sense” of it instead of simply submitting to Pynchon’s schizoid production. Politically and culturally, the most important novel of the 20th century.
9. The Home and The World by Rabindranath Tagore: I just finished it, fascinating treatment of sexual politics, gorgeous philosophical prose.
10. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: as I read it, my first introduction to Marxism.

Runners up that it hurt to cut:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick

A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton

Summer Concerts in the New York Area!
Posted in USSR May 30th, 2008 by Inga

Rilo Kiley: June 2 and 3, Terminal 5, NYC

Architecture in Helsinki: June 8, Irving Plaza, NYC

Sigur Ros: June 16, The Grand Ballroom, The Manhattan Center, NYC

Kimya Dawson: July 2, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Kimya Dawson: July 16, United Palace, NYC

Akron/Family: July 24, Castle Clinton, Battery Park, NY

Wolf Parade: July 31, Terminal 5, NYC

Grizzly Bear: August 8, All Points West, Jersey City, NJ

Animal Collective: August 9, All Points West, Jersey City, NJ

Cat Power: August 10, All Points West, Jersey City, NJ

Anyone interested in going to any of these shows? I’ll definitely be going to a bunch of them… Sigur Ros, Wolf Parade, and Animal Collective, at a minimum. Jed, you’ll be in town, won’t you? Come with me.

Love, Inga

Posted in USSR May 30th, 2008 by Inga

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from “The Three Incestuous Sisters” by Audrey Niffenegger

Memorial Day
Posted in USSR May 26th, 2008 by Sturgeon General

I lick the cheese from the end of my pen.
Some read lovelorn letters on benches
and Beautiful Girls have no reason to look up.

I was a little one
too. My mother
held my hand and led me
forward as I looked
back wishing I could
chase the pigeon
just like you.

If I poured this coffee all
over my face
Say I missed my mouth
Could it burn more
than this sun?

Well, would it eat my pores
and galvanize my metaphors
into fluid flowing from the tip of a tit?
And still, hours later, we chased the pigeons.
With no desultory climax.

“Dad if we walked a million blocks would we die?”

From Jean Rhys, ‘Good Morning Midnight’
Posted in USSR May 24th, 2008 by Tongue-tied Lightning

… I had just come up the stairs and I had to go down them again.

No, no, your room’s not ready.  You must come back, come back.  Come back between five and six.’  ‘What time is it now?’  ‘It’s half-past ten.’

‘Courage, courage, ma petite dame,’ she says.  ‘Everything will go well.’

I go down the stairs again, clutching the banisters, step by step.

I stop a taxi.  The man looks at me and hesitates.  Perhaps he is afraid I may have my baby in his nice new taxi.  What a thing to happen!

No danger at all, I want to say.  Hours and hours and hours yet, she says.

I get back to the hotel and climb upstairs to my room.  This is a hard thing to do.  Has anybody ever had to do this before?  Of course, lots of people - poor people.  Oh, I see, of course, poor people…. Still, it is a hard thing to do, walking around when you’re like this.  And half-past five is a long time off - centuries of time.

When I climb the stairs again I am not seeing so well.

‘Courage, my little lady.  Your room is ready now.’

A room, a bed where I can lie down.  Now the worst is surely over.  But the long night, the interminable night….

‘Courage, courage,’ she says.  ‘All will be well.  All is going beautifully.’

This is a funny house.  There are people having babies all over the place.  Anyhow, at least two are having babies.

‘Jesus, Jesus,’ says one woman.  ‘Mother, Mother,’ says another.

I do not speak.  How long is it before I speak?

Attachments, Subject, metaphysics, sex and survival
Posted in USSR May 2nd, 2008 by Tongue-tied Lightning

There are hooks from me to every object in this room. Hooks attached to my eyes, hooks protruding up my nostrils into my brain. Supposing I took a bottle, smashed it on the floor, kicked the shards into every corner, spread them around the floor - the cut from these hooks would still be deeper, even if I walked around barefoot.

“He might have sunk into mental chaos; instead, he triumphed through discipline, work and meditation.” Words written in the book about Van Gogh. Who was he? That he that might have but instead triumphed? That is, who almost sunk but was saved by discipline? Which one was that?

Or this one, this book by Dogen under my sheets. I had been reading it last night. It’s quite different, you see. With your little hooks a-moment, you see. He says this. “The multiplicity of one flower is five petals, the opening of five petals is one flower.” That’s good, I thought. The multiplicity of one is five, the opening of five is one. Becoming is what happens, quantity is what is. But there’s something missing in all that. A bit more about the one and that five. It got captured by ol’ Jimmy pretty well, you know the man, the one who sang about his friend, the end: “Five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive now; you get yours, baby, I’ll get mine, gonna make it baby if we try.”

Posted in USSR April 29th, 2008 by john paul

Hey dudes,

I wrote this poem from a Breece Pancake short story about a serial killer who drives a snow plow. It’s pretty decadent.

Raton the sign read

Think of that buck

Then at the bend

A young feller

With rawhide hair

A nice-looking young feller

Arm and thumb like

Soldiers do

The snow i see

come all the way down to fall like chimera for me

Thanks, he says

He’s a nice young feller,

Hair like buckskin

Teeth straight as a barber’s razor

Says I’m goin’ a Raton

Says it was cold

Nobody wanted a pick me up

An’ ain’t this where

feller show up dead?

Side a the road

Half a his skin peel’d off?

Guess you never can be too careful—

My hand over his mouth,

Find a kidney, knife against that buck

In the dead of night—I see his face

antlers on the wall

No, never too careful.

I lift my foot from the pedal

Chimera like snow

Breaks along the windshield to glide

down below

for me

Yeah, right around here; I think.

Has been a while.

Sure scared folks around here when it happened

all i can think is how straight his teeth were—just a boy;

that buck. Dead of night. Buckskin sheen

Under the lamplight

Of his hair like chimera

Say, I need a look at the map

It’s under the seat—

And while he digs I reach back; wrap my fingers ’round the wrench

But the chimera decides me:

i don’t feel like cleaning up the mess

Nice-looking boy

There’s no map under here, friend

Raton the sign reads 56 miles

An Absinth Page
Posted in USSR April 13th, 2008 by Tongue-tied Lightning

(This is not a poem, I wrote it in my notebook and it has to look this way, the columns have to be narrow.)

One survives as a matter
of course. This is not up for
discussion. Birds in the background,
they I like. No cause for
concern. But a woman’s voice
is different. It goes farther.
And so what is a.

In the times when I was
young I was much the same
as now. As enclosed and
quietly friendly. A man once
said to me Beautiful it was
when I was a child. Now it
is a tragedy.

Superfluous he said. Those
girls. I think I came to the
park. Yes of course, and
there are people everywhere.
Dutching about the day.
Not particularly exasperated.
What would it be to be the
same.

The girls I said, I
think I smirked. It was
after the store where I bought.
I came out and twigged my
legs then. Whatever that means.

Licentiates one and all.
Sometimes correct and sometimes
mistaken. As a matter of
course. And so when I
looked back I said school
girls when actually they were
the approach. I was too
fixated then. Too earnest
to attract, to make a good
show. Christ. It wasn’t
what he said that made
him so.

And so what is a. Yes
many people here and flowers
too. And one over there.
Is she. But behind glasses.
Always! These and the
barbers where they go and
in the windows idealimages
and then they come out and
they are ready to. The night to.
Out and they go there to.

Is she, I swear. Look away.
There are birds in the trees,
it is not a cloudy day. “Well
hello, yes, it was indeed
and so, no go on, ah well
yes certainly it is, but, oh
well you see, ah me too!”

Yes it is certain she. And
so what is, and yes I
do not mind. I rejoice
in admixture. She is looking.
I am certain. You know
this now; remember.

As a matter of course. I
came here well I know not what
for. To sit and be stilled.
It was the shake, it was
mad on the street where
the approach and. All
licentiates, one and all, all
just only. She again. Christ.
I am not prurient she is
looking. All just only making
an argument for. But I am
getting hungry now.

Posted in USSR April 7th, 2008 by Inga

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