Monthly Archives: November 2014

Mut@tus

Tony

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The first guy I ever kissed was a boy named Tony. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but we were down an alleyway, somewhere between my home, his home and our school on the corner. He had blue eyes, freckles, veins in his face and swore he’d be a football star one day, Tony. He and his mum lived on the downstairs floor of a maisonette. A red brick house with a green door like all the others. We were down the alley and I was leaning up against the wall when he stuck his tongue down my throat the way grown-ups do. Not touching anything else, mind; we just stood there with our tongue down each other’s throat and I can’t even remember; were we hugging or not? His mum seemed nice enough. Said hello if we happened to meet. Not like most of them. She’d’ve thrown a loopy, though, if she’d known what was going on. Then again, she might’ve been the type to just laugh and say, ‘kids!’

Tony and me we met a few times to stick our tongue down each other’s throat before each went home, but we also met to play table tennis.

Bit…

bat…

bit…

bat…

he’d squat as though about to sit on a chair in his head and I’d try to keep the ball going over… that…

net…

and when it fell on the floor and I picked it up, I was always surprised by just how light it was. Strange, isn’t it? We were classmates. He was Irish. And we must’ve been around eight years old. And without anyone saying anything one day it was over, we’d just walk past each other and nod, ‘wotcha!’

(from Mut@tus)

Verses Nature, Writer's Kitchen

on the art of meaning

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JBS meditating in garden 12-07-20(2)

words might have a beginning in sound but not in meaning. I can understand you

like t h i s
but maybe you mean
t
h
i
s

?

Art is therapy. Eventually. (F. Bianco)

*

The three of us slept in the same room last night: First-born, Second-born and I. We tend only to do this when we need extra emotional security, like in the worst phases of my separation. First-born is glad to be home. She is not happy at her father’s.

Their breathing in the dark was like the call of the sea beyond the horizon. I hardly slept at all. I just listened. Feeling guilty for what they have had to suffer because of my drive for freedom, knowing I would do it all again, for I cannot be other than myself…

in the end, I couldn’t bear it. Got up, went outside. Waited for the dawn.

Hmm… GUILT… what “they had to suffer”… Had you not broken free– what would all three of you feel now? just some first thoughts to keep you warm…

You say we do our best to block or enhance our doubt zones. i still stumble over the idea of enhancing one’s doubt zone. can you explain that to me? Maybe we are simply using our tools – language – in the wrong way; must use it to go beyond language, to tap into the affective plane that is crucial to understanding (hard-core psychologists now up in arms!) tho it still cannot guarantee that we really understand what is going on in another´s mind. You say I`m too ‘soft’. Well, I say I don`t belong to the fornicators, and I have never been keen on the clergy, either.

Re: that other comment: How does your wife feel? Do you humour her desires, too, or is she also a workaholic and you both spend your days buried in paper? I suppose, like most, she has bowed to your wish. I really would make a ghastly wife…

Most of the time I can handle the guilt. Banish it. I’m fine just the way I am, doing what I do, thinking what I think, wanting what I want, growing my own way, but the children’s quiet, faithful trusting breathing was too much for me last night and counter-rhythm to my impatient hunger.

I cannot sleep. I go outside. Let my dressing gown fall in two velvet folds as I bare my breasts, my sex, to the night, inhaling deeply as they howl at my lack of means to pacify them. I am so hungry, I could kill.

… and there will be the moment of delicious pacification…feeling your body embraced gently, the warmth of the other… and feeling the other deep in you… the forest will listen to the audible silence… the birds will be gossiping later on…

what is your ultimate intention behind the expression of your ideas… the expression of ideas You will have to explain the correlation between closeness and evasiveness because I don’t get it.

LACK OF WORDS IS NOT EVASIVENESS

if there is one thing you are not lacking in, then it is words…

i prefer silence at times… and much of my writing is intensely compressed into tough idea complexes hard to understand

I think I know why you feel close to me.

DO I?

if you don’t, why do you say that you do? obviously here we differ in meanings–

i never shared your “promiscuity clause”  HOW DID YOU GUESS? WHAT DOES IT MEAN? FROM YOUR END  Because I let you. SO DO I, I think not… this is why you keep negotiating the immediacy, turning it to its opposite SO DO WE we???  is there anyone else involved here that I have failed to take into account? we= you + i + your doubts = 3 in total

I don’t want to be embraced

really?

i want to see who you are…

setting yourself tough goals… i am in movement

trust means acknowledging vulnerability

not my idea of trust… vulnerability is not a concept there

you seemed surprised, if not offended, that I challenge you. Is there a patriarch slumbering in your breast? the spring of the patriarch? a nice title for a short story… NEVER MIND WHAT YOU COME ACROSS HERE IN MY “CASE”, THIS VERY SAME “DEMANDFUL GIVING” WOULD MAKE IT VERY DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL OF SHARING AND BEING WITH I think you made the crucial mistake of a) presuming to know where ‘this’ was going  b) presuming to control where ‘this’ was going. Sharing involves a degree of negotiation. I’m negotiating. I’m saying, Hey, you alone don’t call the shots.

fighting, fighting… but there is no battle

Maybe I should have said this much, much earlier

and what would have been different?

(fieldnotes)

Verses Nature

Low-hanging fruit

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Screen shot 2014-11-18 at 10.11.59 AM
copyright L.W. Eden 2013

J.M. Coetzee, in Waiting for the Barbarians, paints a pretty grim picture of the sexual life of the older man. I have been known to succumb to such low-hanging fruit and, frankly, I’m glad Coetzee says what I don’t have to. It sounds less vicious coming from a man:

Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs?

the older the man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal

his erection has nothing to do with desire, it being nothing but a stiffening, like rheumatism

Tatar, the protagonist of my novel-in-progress (you’ve met him several times here already, Mr compulsive-repulsive (cf Chef d’Oeuvre or Perfume); after how many thousand women was it that he stopped counting?) would have us show more respect for his ‘old man’s member’. I wonder if his proclamations will mellow?

For the records: I don’t do old members anymore.

Further on the topic of other low-hanging fruit:

Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier): what was I expecting? I dunno. An intellectual-sexual challenge more than a tease. Close-ups of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s wet fleshy bit not only put me off but haunted me all the way home. Had visions of it creeping up on me and licking my earlobe whilst I was minding my own business. I return to a central preoccupation in my novel-in-progress, Verses Nature:

how can you thematize sex (-related issues) in a way that is original?

I don’t think Tatar is that original. He’s frank, no doubt about that:

Men shouldn’t assist at childbirth if you ask me. She’ll be screaming, farting, crapping, saying vile things to and about you and you, idiot, are ‘sposed to just stand there saying Yes darling as you squeeze her hand or mop her friggin brow? Then there’s the pushing and gushing and out it plops as from a sewer. Puts a man off for life. You’ll never really want to be in there again, But we’re not allowed to say that about wifey, are we?

He’s full of tips:

get Him not to wash for a while so he stinks of man, then you give him a royal blow job, he’ll spray like a whale, I swear.

If I were twenty years younger, I’d open a brothel for senior citizens of both sexes, say seventy and upwards. They’ve got the finish line in sight, cash in their pockets, assorted ailments to forget, if only for that moment… and ungrateful brats as offspring. It’d be a runner. Especially with the women. With my neighbour for starters. The way she looks at me. Teeth tarnished. Slack wet slit where her mouth should be. Gives me the creeps. She’d pay. Bet she would.

He’ll say things you may find irresistible tho you may be unwilling to like such statements openly (I’ve been tracking you on this blog. Don’t be so chicken. Click that button!). The originality in Verses Nature must stem from a combination of content and structure; from how his voices (there will be many) dialogue with the multiple voices and structures of the other characters in the novel. Big project. Every time I think about it, it makes me gulp. This project’s been on my shelf for two decades. To imagination I am now able to add experience. I’m ready for it.

guest blogger, Words Worth

MY VIEW – A Women’s Issues Feature

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KURT✌️BRINDLEY

When DotedOn submitted her essay My View to the Relating to Humans Women’s Issues feature, I could immediately feel its power and its truth, and the life lived as written, raw and exposed.

When submitted, DotedOn initially addressed it to me. I wrote to her soon after and asked if I could take out the address as I felt it may be distracting from the essay’s message. She wrote me back and, kindly, as she always is, said it was fine for me to make the edits and, since English is not her first language, she asked that I make any other edits that I felt may be necessary. I was pleased when she wrote this because there were, in fact, some grammar adjustments that I had wanted to make.

And, with haste, I made the adjustments.

However, after I read her essay with my edits, I found that something…

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Long Time Walk On Water

Long Time: mother and child

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Ruby studied the child but could find no resemblance to anyone she knew. Looked it over. Its feet. Its frail fists. Its scrunched up face. The lungs pumped and pumped, rocking the entire vulnerable frame. Ruby looked over at her daughter lying, exhausted, in a moist pool on the bed, almost asleep, the deep scent of her screaming perforating the thick air. It had lasted for hours, for hours Gertrude had screamed and screamed, her eyes exploding with fear and surprise. She hadn’t given it much thought, what it would be like, having a baby. She knew about the pain, but no-one had told her about the pain; betrayed, her eyes sprang out of their sockets as she screamed, as her hands seemed to want to push her away from that bloated belly grinning up at her as she thrashed around on the hard bed. Ruby had tried to be of assistance to the midwife. It wasn’t in her to hold her daughter’s hand or mop her brow; she had never done it before and failed to see why she should be doing it now, so she said, “Come, now… come, now,” and when Gertrude’s screams ripped into the air, she shouted irritably, “Cho man, yu nat di only person ever give birth, calm yuself down!” and she thought; you want be a woman? Well, now yu know. Yu damn well learn to live wid pain if yu want be a woman, yu hear wat me saying to yu? She wrapped up the child and left the house.

Gertrude saw her mother leave. Watched her through the corner of her eye. Started crying softly; my baby… my baby… The midwife looked over, said, “Hush now. Yu done good. Hush,” as she sat in her chair near the window, looking out into the yard. She only wished the mother would do her business soon and get back home so that she could be on her way. She did not want to get involved. Listened and nodded as Ruby told her the story she was all too familiar with, as Ruby explained how she had had to beat her daughter into seeing reason, that the last thing an intelligent young girl needed was a baby. A baby. No money. No man. Just the baby. Complained how the young people had no self-respect and that when she was young –

then she broke it off.

My baby… my baby… The midwife sat in her chair, looked out of the window and tried to close her ears to the girl’s plea. This child was sensitive; it is not every mother you can take a child away from. Some of them turn, and this child, she could feel Gertrude in the room and her nose was full of the young girl’s motherhood, she had them easy-hurting eyes. Gertrude’s voice rose, expanded, taking on the features of a song. She toned it, nursed it, and at some point beyond naming, where pain takes on some amorous quality that breathes a mysterious beauty, Gertrude, for the first time in her life, found that she was singing. No words, not even really a song, but beyond her control; the secret language, and it wafted over to the midwife in dolorous clouds to smoke a dance before her eyes. It danced of pain. Of shame. Of broken pride. It circled the room in search of promises. Stroked the panes in need of visions. Rose from the girl on the bed who could not have her baby. The girl, taken over by a voice so new it was almost not her own. The midwife was lifted to her feet and carried over to the bed. She looked into Gertrude’s eyes, and knew. Not from this one, oh Lord. Lowered her hand to Gertrude’s hot brow.

Hush now. Hush now.

And at her touch Gertrude fell asleep.

*

‘Strands of fate magically interwoven to give you a reggae-type experience full of pain, sweat, suffering, pride, poise and grace.’ (Goodreads)

walk-cover-w-s

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Tatar, The Red Room

Chef d’oeuvre

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Poo edit 2014-11-14
I LOVE THOSE WHO LOVE ME

THO IT’s NO FAULT OF MINE

IF IT’s NOT THE SAME PERSON

I LOVE EV’RY TIME

Hello you lovely people. It’s been a while. What’ve you been up to?

IS THIS A MASTERPIECE?

unprophetic magisterial

here

unpainted heft;

impersonality registers departure; mind

word, within fades; wisdom deflected

stars stuck widow;

red globe theory ambush; thing maybe

was the I, self-locked

plywood scenes explode; paperback

abdominal nervous comfort; female roast

masking tape

I like beautiful things as you can see…

Going up the stairs to my living room, every guest meets this one eye to eye. Normally, I don’t even comment on it, I just stand back and take note; watch how people react to having it shoved into their face. Some say nothing at all and walk on by. Others’re quite shocked, if they say so or not. You can see the conflict negotiated in their facial muscles. Then there’re those who find it quite amusing or ask me something about it. Whatever the reaction, I get an insight into my visitor and a feeling for how to deal with them in future; you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Everything you see here is for sale. For the right price you can walk off with anything that takes your fancy… That one’s nice, isn’t it? The Temptation of St Antoine. Watch your head. This used to be an old barn. Some of the beams are low.

I spent over ten years in and out of museums and galleries. Three weeks in Paris every summer, soaking up culture. Especially with my second wife, Marianne. Hélène, my third wife, was a blockhead. I don’t think she’s ever read a book in her entire life. She thinks she’s smart, but a person’s face’ll always tell you if they’re bright or not. And I don’t care how much of an effort she goes to with her make-up and her hair-do, when I look at her now, all I see is a face that looks like a pair of skidded knickers.

IS THIS A MASTERPIECE?

thing maybe was the I. amputating itself

Know what I love about art? What? You can’t talk about it and about progress in the same breath. Art cancels all thought of progress, of movement towards an absolute good. It shows us for what we are: constantly plagued by abdominal nervous the same old Question. Would you agree with me that the Image is subordinate to the Idea? A sign of the Sign, with Man (I mean you as well of course) of course desperately clutching to some semiotic turf or another for fear of slipping off into that unbearable place?

Take a look at this one. Have you ever seen a tackier, more peevish frame in your entire life? Picture’s a masterpiece, far as I’m concerned. But that frame? What an eyesore! At first I wanted to dump it and get a decent one, something ornate and gilded. And just as I was about to, I thought, hey no, don’t do that! Keep the original frame for its documentary value. Show it to some poncy fat-arsed historian, they ought to know a thing or two, might even take it off your hands for a pretty price and have it on show in a museum somewhere with people less cultured than me straining to hear what he has to say, to hear his story, vivid for the moment but which’ll recede soon to be usurped by its own unreality, soon to becousin our dreams. That, essentially, is the problem with language; it’s a lie with complete faith in itself. To speak is to lie and to want to be lied to. But I’m digressing. Point is: I kept the frame.

That one twist more, that one step further in the proclivities of your imagination, and the ugly is ugly no more. Just goes to show; there is no truth, but that we make it. String half a dozen people in front of a work of art, each will come to a different truth. What is art? Who decides what’s precious? Who, authorised to confer such an etiquette on an item; to brand the hide of the cow? Am I the masterpiece? Why am I not the masterpiece? There is no art. No science, at least no justifiable border between the two. There is only… imagination, desire and the quest; need, the willingness to construct that other world which is so much more beautiful, more reliable than the one we live in. What is truth? Truth is every single man… Anyhow, some first class Czech impressionistic paintings hanging in my bedroom. Show you later. Maybe.

*

The innocence, the joy, the fear of discovery. Too many had told her why she should not do-think-say-ask-try the things she did-thought-said-asked and tried.

Fuck you all.

Fuck all of you!!!

My life.

My way.

*

– Open it.

– What is it?

– Just open it.

He shook the box: light…

She smiled.

– No! Don’t open it until I’ve gone.

*

– And?

She grinned at him three days later.

– I made a blood sausage with it. Blood sausage with horse chestnuts. Delicious!

(adapted from The Red Room)

‘honest, ‘dirty’, explosively direct. Natural, classy and intelligent.’ (Goodreads)

‘Joan B. delivers the goods, spot-on. if all you’re looking for is shades of grey, don’t enter The Red Room.‘   (Kulturfabrik, Luxembourg)

Writer's Kitchen

Trans-it

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pia Ines WALKER

in bed with a thermometer in my mouth and a bowl of home-made pumpkin soup. Haven’t been this ill since…???

Lenny’s here to keep me company. No, not Kravitz. Laptop.
I’ve decided to follow up that trans-thing we should be getting into, so I’ll put aside educational and/or literary concerns for the moment and venture into:
– International Journal of Biometrics and Bioinformatics
– International Journal of Image Processing

Let’s see if I last 30min. Or end up somewhat wiser.
None?

Apparently you have to: repeat a new word/idea at least 60 times for it to stick.

Maybe one reading will do. One juicy bit of info that I can embed into a novel to make one of my characters sound smart but without showing off unlike certain authors who will remain nameless, certain authors who cram their plots with so much extraneous info, you ask yourself this was supposed to be a novel, right? a good, swift read, a plot that pulls me in… but complaints are swallowed cos who wants to be outed as a philistine (1)?

I will mention one: W. G. Sebald. He’s dead. He’ll forgive me.

Peter Nadas. Still alive to the best of my knowledge. I doubt he’ll care what I think. Have you read Parallel Stories? If it takes ten pages to get the character down the stairs and out the door… Apparently there’s a sex scene in this book which lasts 100 pages. I didn’t get that far and for the life of me, I can’t imagine such a scene doing it for me, you know: one hand on the page, the other…

100pp???? Can only be art, can’t it? I wonder how much remembering needs to go into writing/editing a sex-scene one hundred pages long? How many acts have been spliced together to make your fellows feel totally inadequate? I’ll give the book another try when:

– there’s nothing else on my shelf
– the golf(2) season’s over

 Maybe. But for now:

Biometrics. I smell potential. Image processing. Need not be a waste of time…

Then I’ll trawl a few back issues of Men’s Health – got to find out (more) about how you guys tick. It’s research! Let me see…;
– libido tips
– sex timing
– secret sex tips about women
Yeah, real secret. How many million copies does this mag sell per issue? But I’m not feeling well and I can do with a laugh. I can feel the colour coming back to my cheeks already. Be back on my feet in no time.

*

Pssssst! Urban definition:

(1) philistine:

‘A person who is obsessed with sports(2), sex and Motor vehicles.’

(2) e.g. golf:

‘More than a game, it is a habitual endeavor that takes precedence over work and friends. A perpetual quest for improvement. A sport for athletes as they get older and realize their limitations. A pleasure beyond definition. Played by yourself, with a partner or in a group. Worse than drugs and better than a first time fuck.
Golf is the game of intergalactic champions. Surpassed by nothing. Takes priority over all, except being naked with the wife. She loves golf too.’
Mut@tus

Natural selection

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autumn dandelion
image: F. Bianco

Friendships float through my life like autumnal leaves on their way to somewhere else; somewhere I can’t follow. It can get kinda lonely out here, but do you see my lying down? Do you? No you don’t. I have learned not to listen to what others say about who I should be.

*

You ever heard of Erectile Dysfunction?

Well, I hadn’t… till then…

But it reminded me of Sunday morning marital obligations washed down with a champagne breakfast.

And I understand now why his wife was always crying,

Nite-times,

rolled up on her side of the bed like an

Unborn, thinking

it was her fault,

when it wasn’t. Thinking:

he’s giving it to that black bitch!

When he wasn’t.

Thinking I don’t know what:

I’m too old…

I’m not sexy anymore…

thinking all the wrong things because it probably suited him to let her believe they were true.

Don’t cry.

He told me he loves you.

Whatever that means.

from Mut@tus:

He wanted something different. She wanted the same: as herself. Time would see to the rest… A voracious depiction of liberty, goaded by a click of the mouse; at times a war cry, at times a wry embrace of the female quotidian.

‘Sheer beauty as was Henry Miller at his most liberated.

(Authonomy)

‘Written with courage, honesty, originality and artistry.’

(Authonomy)

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