Have You Heard About Wyoming?

Three days in Wyoming and my head was like a racquetball chamber, brain all bruised from the solid volleys of what-ifs and why-nots running amok indoors. On the airplane back to Philly Have You Heard About The Morgans came on. I put on the headphones to avoid the too-smiley dude sitting next to me and turns out the movie is about an uber-NY couple who gets sent to Wyoming by the witness protection program. Prof. at U of Wyoming says, "I like the idea of advertising UW as the MFA program most like witness protection. That works for me." The clear, pink sky was somehow full of turbulence inducing clouds and I just kept laughing to myself. I'm going to be like Sarah Jessica Parker, going for jogs in Wyoming with bear spray in hand. Back home, my dog had a seizure, my Dad shat all over my MFA dreams (they're pretty silly, I admit), and my camera finally arrived. Tomorrow, thunderstorms and margaritas with the Wild Ones.

Printing Press Street: Lima, Peru

In the very few days I spent in Lima, I managed to wander along narrow streets into a passageway of crumbling Colonial buildings. It may have been an "area where I should not have been," though at this point it probably only exists in my personal record. In my memory, which now houses the images of that small street as a series of still photographs, the street did not have street lamps, the sky was a velvety, cobalt blue and every door was only slightly ajar, cracked and carved wooden portals sitting uncomfortably on their hinges. The whole street hummed with presses. Lima tends to be organized by sector - here is the cake street, where you can purchase a cake to suit your needs, here is the shoe shop street, where you can fix your soles at any one of 50 vendors lining it, here is the weird cardboard-and-tissue-paper party decorations street, etc. This, I gather, was Printing Press Street.

I had just landed in Lima for the first time and Printing Press Street was solidly romanticized by me in the ten or so minutes it took to traverse that alley through cabs and pedestrians. For a word nerd like me, wandering down a back-way where every single doorway led to a giant machine, purring, and the scent of ink and paper wafted out of busted doorways that had probably been carved hundreds of years ago was maddeningly enticing. Nevermind that most of what I saw being printed were [gaudily designed] advertising posters, pamphlets and leafleting sundries.

I didn't yet know about Peru's publishing piracy problem at that point. Daniel Alarcon writes about the absurd facts of said industry - as large as, if not bigger than the official publishing industry of Peru - here. Learning about all this in retrospect is vaguely amusing, impressive and depressing simultaneously, but experiencing it was maddening. As Alarcon points out in the Granta piece, book stores are hard to come by. Before taking off for Iquitos by boat from Pucallpa, I ran around looking for books for the week long trip and did not find a single book store in the entire town. When I had finally given up, reclining in my leopard-print hammock on the boat, a man came by hawking pamphlets and reading materials "to help you sleep." I should have looked for book sellers instead of book stores, apparently. Alarcon also points out that pirates, not bound by publishers' rules, contracts, or moral obligations to the writers, take certain liberties. The most impressive of these, for me, is the power of abridging. Throughout Bolivia, for example, there are book stores and stalls full of pamphlets that look like children's coloring books but are in fact abridged versions of books like Les Miserables and Three Musketeers and The Complete Aesop's' Fables [abridged] - thick books twiddled down to a few breviloquent pages. They all come from Peru.

So I wonder, now, about Printing Press Street. Was it the heart of the illegal publishing industry, pushing posters by day and switching to Don Quijote (a most popular street book throughout South America) reprints by night? The plan is to find out.

Lately

A Conflict with Geography (Natural and Man Made)

So malleable am I to the height of the skies and mountains, to the proximity of seas and buildings splayed out like a handful of jacks, that my attention seems to linger on maps, physical, more than maps, otherwise (cultural?). I knew, for example, that Valparaiso would be the Queen – Chris Marker showed me steps looking out to sea, neighborhoods melted over hillsides. And I knew Iruya would be the Gem – its white washed church pierces the sky as a culmination of the winding Route 9 after it has led you past Purmamarca, and Maimara, Tilcara, its mountainside cemetery, and my favorite, Humahuaca, which sounds like wisps of smoke when you say it out loud. New York, too, and Buenos Aires, flat, by water, lit up eternally in the dark – tiny lights like bioluminescent Dinoflagellates in the city sea. Scraggly Maine, salt-crusted, Cusco sunk in eucalyptus trees, Chimgan, snow-capped with icy streams in teal, Pittsburgh stitched together with iron bridges and smoothed by vines running down its hills.

What’s it like here? then is a superfluous question. I see the river, the bridges, the slanted layers of sedimentary beds jutting out in lines only to crumble before they get too far, the buildings dusty and not tall enough, the mounts somehow unspectacular, streets like threads weltering steeply; I get lost and am afraid of driving on them but keep pressing the gas so I don’t sink backwards. It’s un-extraordinary, which is not unusual, but years here would be ___________.

Little Guy Goes To Heaven

I came home today to find a little mouse – all wet except his head which made it seem un-proportionately large – dying in my kitchen sink. Little Guy was slumped against the side of the drain, heaving at times and then falling still, his slick fur vaguely pinkish, as if blood had been washed off.

I tried to get Little Guy to crawl into a container so I could bring him down the stairs and feed him to the many cats that patrol Quincy St. but he was too weak to climb out of the drain. Ever helpful, I was going to assist but thought perhaps Little Guy had been poisoned by one of the many powders inconspicuously lining the edges of every cabinet and corner of our kitchen. This could kill the cats! I thought. Unlikely, I know, but still, Not me! My cat-lady friends would disown me and the remainder of my days would be haunted by the sassy felines of youtube. My second best plan was to nurse Little Guy back to life. I stood for a solid five minutes leaning over the sink and asking him what he thought of the idea. Little Guy’s breathing was becoming less and less perceptible and finally I had to admit that he probably wasn’t going to pull through. Still, what to do?

It seemed incomparably cruel to flush Little Guy down the toilet or put him in the trash (remember people, disposal methods in Brooklyn are a bit limited) as he lay suffering, so I finally decided I would let him breath his last in peace and then I would do the disposing, with Little Guy blissfully unaware of his inglorious end. I picked him up by his tail, put him in a box on the windowsill, turned on some music and started cooking. The whole time I’m feeling kind of uneasy with the slow yet impending doom of Little Guy on the sill and the apartment is eerily quiet and cold and still. At some point Little Guy II emerges out of the stove and goes exploring while I’m standing there going, “Hey buddy, what’s the deal, aren’t you scared of me?!” I finally make a move to get at him and he runs around my pot of boiling water, singes his fur, and makes a getaway. It smells, undoubtedly, of an impending mouse revolt in apt. 285.

Soon after, my roommate comes home and I laboriously relay the entire tale to her. She picks up the box with Little Guy, goes straight for the bathroom, and flushes him. “I think he said, ‘Thank you.’” she says.

The Wha of Thomas Pynchon

The best thing so far in Thomas Pynchon's V. is his use of "wha." It's not that the book is bad, it's that the "wha" is so good. V. is made up of this consistent, energetic mad dashery where it seems that at any time quaintly-named characters are sprinting to or from revolutions, open fire, and/or parties interrupted only by song, which sometimes is also mad, or the simple, "Wha?" The casual skimping of the "t" makes the "wha" somehow triumphant; in my head, it sounds like, "Whaaaaaaaaa?!?!?!?!" It's pretty easy to get into the story and tag along on the excursions with the characters and one gets almost blasee about all the delirium that's unfolding until this sassified, James Brown-ified "whaaaaa?!?!?!" like jolts you back to your senses and makes you see the loony hoopla for what it is and makes it exciting all over again. The simplicity of the inserted "Whas" exacerbates the gnarliness of everything else. It's perfect.

uh-oh, it's a rant: telephones

I know that my employment history is not, erm, traditional. I have no idea how an office functions or what mysterious things happen in a cubicle, conference room or good old office room. Movies, acquaintances who spend time in such environments, and even brief visits to environs that could be qualified as offices have, however, taught me that there is usually a public water cooler and coffee maker, and a telephone on each desk.

My question is this: are the telephones just for show?!?! Are they all set on silent? Is there a special code one needs to dial for said telephones to erupt in coded rings, thereby letting the person at the desk know to actually pick up versus theoretically pick up?! Is it maybe the economy or a deeper existential crisis that has prompted the collective office masses to stop answering their phones?

We will not attend to your offers, demands, polite inquires, calls to productivity or friendly banter. Fuck it!

Is that it?

Making phone calls is an excruciating activity for me to begin with. I have to give myself encouraging pep talks in preparation for each call, practicing what I'm going to say to the unsuspecting, possibly uninterested, busy people on the other end. I have to pretend to be really excited to be having these conversations which in reality make me break out in red blotches all over my neck and chest and which do not subside for 20 minutes after the phone call. (I'm not otherwise neurotic, really. That's true, right, friends?) (As a side note, I once participated in a clinical study about anxiety; I had to answer really obvious, leading questions about "getting anxious" and then play really boring computer games with a bunch of wires plastered to my skull using a plastic pilot's-type hat. I had to call the study to make an appointment.)

So when I go through this exercise, an unceasing little nightmare, many time over in one day and not one person picks up the phone, it's like a cruel joke. Where the hell are you, people? I've been trying to reach one guy in particular for months now, calling almost everyday. Sometimes I'll call from different numbers, at different times throughout the day, etc. I have not reached him once. One day, if anyone ever does pick up, I might just instantly lose it Klaus Kinski-style .

So, uh, keep doing what you're doing and not picking up the phone.