Saturday
Apr072012

Convergence

I'm still a little upset, digruntled maybe, that Jupiter and Venus failed to fully converge. Or if they did I missed it. I was reading a magazine, staring at the ground. But it seemed to me that they just came closer and closer for all those weeks, up there in the sky, shining, above Los Angeles, above all kinds of other places too, until finally they began, just as gradually, tentatively, to separate, to put distance between them, to walk in opposite directions. Like any other lovers. But what a show it might have been, right? Planets colliding, and maybe not just planets, but stars. Let's push it a moment and imagine all heavenly bodies in love, planets, stars and asteroids, all of them so enamored with one another that they rush closer, closer, closer, anti-matter and space junk even, broken satellites, all the unlovable stuff in love, everything out there except for us of course, never us, because if we didn't stay put here on tired Earth, who would watch the rest of them explode?

Friday
Mar302012

Update to 2012 Aimé Césaire Inspirational Calendar, March/April

“All this wreckage, all this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think that does not have a price?”

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

Tuesday
Mar272012

Okay then, here you go, a Piñera story:

The Mountain

The mountain is three thousand feet high. I’ve resolved to eat it, bit by bit. It’s a mountain like any other: vegetation, rocks, earth, animals, even human beings climbing up and down its slopes.

Every morning I lie down against it and begin to chew the first thing I come to. I continue in this fashion for several hours. I return home, my body exhausted and my jaw destroyed. After a brief rest, I sit in the doorway to watch the mountain in the blue distance.

If I told my neighbor these things, he would surely burst out laughing or think I was crazy. But knowing what I have taken on, I can clearly see that the mountain is losing mass and height. Eventually they will speak of geological upheavals.


And that is my tragedy: no one will want to admit that I was the one who devoured the three-thousand-foot mountain.


Virgilio Piñera, 1957. Translated by Mark Schafer. From Cold Tales.

Sunday
Mar252012

God's favorite organ

Seriously. Look it up yourself. And on his breath, "a fine tang of faintly-scented urine."

Friday
Mar232012

Sneak Preview: 2013 Aimé Césaire Inspirational Calendar, May

“The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly—that is, dangerously…”

—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism