CXXIII
A Coney Island of the Times:
“Shenzhen is the ultimate symbol of modern China’s economic transformation.
“The city, which was only a coastal fishing village when the country started reopening to the world in the late 1970s, leapfrogged ahead of China’s other metropolises on the path of capitalism thanks to its status as a special economic zone, separated by an internal border.
“In recent years, the area has also transitioned more smoothly than others to the latest phase in China’s development, a growth model that revolves around services and consumer spending. The factories churning out lower-value products like garments and shoes are closing down, relocating inland or heading to cheaper destinations like Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.
“In their place, dynamic companies have risen to cater to China’s rising consumer classes. Tencent, the social messaging and online gaming behemoth, counts Shenzhen as its home base. So do DJI, the world’s biggest consumer drone maker; Citic Securities, heralded as China’s answer to Goldman Sachs despite falling under scrutiny recently…” [“The Overnight Metropolis,” Neil Gough, NYT, 12/24/15, A1:1]
I was a subgluteal line, an intergluteal line, a sacral dimple and an iliac crest for the FBI
Shenzhen: 11 million inhabitants
Only a coastal fishing village
Cheaper destinations
Growth model that revolves
Falling under scrutiny
Have risen to cater
Consuming classes
Unto Chelsea Clinton a childe is born, and candidate Hillary, wrapping herself in the mantel of the abuela, stands – according to the tabloids – of “hispandering” to Latino voters…
Sí, en serio…
Where was it?
We are the elders our elders swore would never mature
I was a Magdeberg hemisphere for the FBI
It is a terrible thing when the circumstances of people’s lives stunts the development of that vital organ we call empathy.
Writing is the legitimate child of reading. Says Stella Gaitano.
In the change and intertransformation of things, the beautiful and rare melt into the ordinary and out of the ordinary emerge the beautiful and rare.
Use earth to move your body and heaven to move your spirit. Let them meet at dantian, and at the conjunction of coming and going, rising and falling, gathering and dispersing.
I was a real gone cat for the FBI
And dove is just a four-letter bird
Now is the time to:
Relive your future
Breaking News: Zhou Enlai was gay
Ah, that explains everything…
“Uncertainty is being heightened by the lack of a clear hierarchy of the island’s [Puerto Rico’s] creditors. Much of the island’s $72 billion of financial debt – in the form of municipal bonds – has statutory and constitutional underpinnings that have not been tested in court. In some cases the Spanish-language version can be read differently from the English version.
“’We are, to a large extent, trying to map uncharted territory,’ said Sergio Marxauch, policy director at the Center for a New Economy, a nonpartison research group in San Juan.
“He recently issued a study of Puerto Rico’s complicated debt structure… [and] found many unanswered questions. He confirmed that the general-obligation bondholders are at the top of the pecking order… but he also found that in Puerto Rico, they lacked the legal tools they would normally have to enforce their claims…” [“Puerto Rico Debt Crisis Closes In on Jan. 1 Deadline,” by Mary Williams Walsh, New York Times, 12/30/15, B1:1]
Turn around, Colón, while you still have the chance!
If I am a ghost to myself, will I also not be a ghost to you? And if I am a ghost to you, will you not also be a ghost to me?
Pollito chicken, gallina hen
lápiz pencil y pluma pen
ventana window, puerta door
techo ceiling y piso floor.
Almohada pillow, cama bed
mesa table y silla chair
dedos fingers, cabeza head
brazos arms y piernas legs.
Ha llegado la hora de aprender inglés
si tu abres la mente podrás comprender
y verás tu lo fácil que es hablar inglés.
Pollito chicken, gallina hen
lápiz pencil y pluma pen
ventana window, puerta door
techo ceiling y piso floor.
Esto ha sido todo, lo hicieron muy bien
y aquí terminan las clases de inglés
esto ha sido todo, this is the end
y aquí termina, good-bye my friends.
And at the end of the year [12/31/15], a kind of Tierra del fuego, a más allá del fin of the Times:
“Lisa Libretto, an artist, embraces on line shopping. ‘My time is so short that when I do get to shop, the alerts are fantastic,’ she said.” This captions a photo of a youngish, blondish woman with an edgy, asymmetrical haircut seated and holding her smart phone. In the background, a horrifyingly kitsch landscape painting, presumably by her hand. The story, titled “Enter a Shoe Aisle & Feel Your Phone Buzz,” is twinned, across the bottom front page of the Times Business Section with “Puerto Rico Plans to Default on $174 Million in Bond Debt.”
Even as six thousand NYC police prepare to deploy in Times Square to securitize the crystal ball’s gravitational pull.
How sibilant was my shibboleth?
Parsley perejil and Smyrna myrrh
And all forgotten massacre
In the year of peace, bombs rebelled against their makers, refusing to detonate under any circumstances.
In the year of peace, drones renounced their stingers and returned to their accustomed practice of pollinating.
In the year of peace, confusion and happiness shared a joint reign that extended, potentially, beyond any conceivable vanishing point.
In the year of peace, the miraculous became ordinary and the ordinary blossomed myriad subtleties.
In the year of peace, camels slipped effortlessly through the eyes of needles, and the rich melted into the heaven and earth of mere breathing.
In the year of peace, the round and the square saw their distinction and smiled at it.
In the year of peace…
I’ll have one for my flying monkey
And one for the road…
Cues, cues and ratamacues
A rare bouquet of Times headlines:
BATTLEGROUND SHIFTS IN DEBATE ON GUN CONTROL
ARMED PROTESTERS VOW TO STAY ON OREGON REFUGE INDEFINITELY
ECONOMISTS TAKE AIM AT WEALTH INEQUALITY
CAUTION
MEN WORMING
The incense is frank, but myrrh’s mendacious, and the gold just flows.
If it so please any man spiritual or temporal to buy [copies of the Sarum Ordinal] imprinted after the form of this present letter, which is well and truly correct, let him come to Westminster into the Almonry at the Red Pale and he shall have them good cheape. Writ William Caxton, c. 1477, in what is said to be the first advertisement for a prynted booke.
The gigantic four-footed Eiffel Tower, its steel head high over the human hubbubs of Paris, was fed up, you see, with having to listen to that hurly-burly street-entangled life strewn with clangs, lights and clamor. As for the muddleheaded creatures swarming at its feet, they had equipped the inside of its pointed crown poking through the clouds with global vibrations and radio signals. The space inside the tower’s needlelike brain now began to vibrate, began to seep down through its muscular steel interlacements into the ground, whereupon the tower wrenched its iron soles free of the foundation, rocked back and lunged off. This happened before dawn, let’s say, when people were asleep under their roofs and the Place des Invalides, the Champs de Mars, adjacent streets and quays were deserted. The thousand-foot colossus, barely able to lift its heavy swollen feet, crashes across the cast-iron arc of a bridge, circumvents the sad stones of the Trocadéro and lumbers up the rue d’Iéna toward the Bois de Boulogne: in that narrow defile of houses, the tower feels ill at ease, once or twice it knocks into sleeping walls, houses crack and crumble, spilling bricks and waking neighbors… [from Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “The Bookmark,” Memories of the Future, c. 1925,Joanne Turnbull, trans. New York: NYRB, 2009]
Thenglish: The English. Thabbay: The abbey.
Thensygnementys: Caxtonian Frenchfied contraction for “the teaching.”
While a few years earlier, c. 1460 and somewhat to the south of Red Pale, Westminster, one Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto, a Venetian explorer working for Henry the Navigator was taking note on what he observed in Africa:
You should also know that behind this Cauo Bianco on the land, is a place called Hoden,which is about six days inland by camel. This place is not walled, but is frequented by Arabs, and is a market where the caravans arrive from Tanbutu [Timbuktu], and from other places in the land of the Blacks, on their way to our nearer Barbary. The food of the peoples of this place is dates, and barley, of which there is sufficient, for they grow in some of these places, but not abundantly. They drink the milk of camels and other animals, for they have no wine. They also have cows and goats, but not many, for the land is dry. Their oxen and cows, compared with ours, are small.
They are Muhammadans, and very hostile to Christians. They never remain settled, but are always wandering over these deserts. These are the men who go to the land of the Blacks, and also to our nearer Barbary. They are very numerous, and have many camels on which they carry brass and silver from Barbary and other things to Tanbuto and to the land of the Blacks. Thence they carry away gold and pepper, which they bring hither. They are brown complexioned, and wear white cloaks edged with a red stripe: their women also dress thus, without shifts. On their heads the men wear turbans in the Moorish fashion, and they always go barefooted. In these sandy districts there are many lions, leopards, and ostriches, the eggs of which I have often eaten and found good.
You should know that the said Lord Infante of Portugal [the crown prince, Henry the Navigator] has leased this island of Argin to Christians [for ten years], so that no one can enter the bay to trade with the Arabs save those who hold the license. These have dwellings on the island and factories where they buy and sell with the said Arabs who come to the coast to trade for merchandise of various kinds, such as woollen cloths, cotton, silver, and “alchezeli,” that is, cloaks, carpets, and similar articles and above all, corn, for they are always short of food. They give in exchange slaves whom the Arabs bring from the land of the Blacks, and gold tiber. The Lord Infante therefore caused a castle to be built on the island to protect this trade for ever. For this reason, Portuguese caravels are coming and going all the year to this island.
These Arabs also have many Berber horses, which they trade, and take to the Land of the Blacks, exchanging them with the rulers for slaves. Ten or fifteen slaves are given for one of these horses, according to their quality. The Arabs likewise take articles of Moorish silk, made in Granata and in Tunis of Barbary, silver, and other goods, obtaining in exchange any number of these slaves, and some gold. These slaves are brought to the market and town of Hoden; there they are divided: some go to the mountains of Barcha, and thence to Sicily, [others to the said town of Tunis and to all the coasts of Barbary], and others again are taken to this place, Argin, and sold to the Portuguese leaseholders. As a result every year the Portuguese carry away from Argin a thousand slaves. Note that before this traffic was organized, the Portuguese caravels, sometimes four, sometimes more, were wont to come armed to the Golfo d’Argin, and descending on the land by night, would assail the fisher villages, and so ravage the land. Thus they took of these Arabs both men and women, and carried them to Portugal for sale: behaving in a like manner along all the rest of the coast, which stretches from Cauo Bianco to the Rio di Senega and even beyond. [from Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto, “Description of Capo Bianco and the Islands Nearest to It,” in European Reconnaisance, Selected Documents, ed. J.H. Parry. New York: Walker, 1968, pp. 59-61]
Less frightened than embarrassed by its clumsiness, the tower lurches into the next street. But in this still-narrower defile, it has no room at all. Meanwhile, Paris the light sleeper is waking: projector lights striate the night fog, anxious sirens blare, and high overhead engines are already droning. The tower now lifts its flat elephantine feet and jumps up onto the rooftops; roofbeams crackle under the Eiffel monster’s leaden tread; multiplying catastrophes as it goes, it soon reaches the edge of the Bois and, cutting a wide swath with steel blows, continues on its way.
Daylight is beginning to glimmer. Thrown into a panic, Paris’s three million have jammed all the train stations; news of the tower gone mad is pounding off the presses, skimming over the wires, skipping from ear to ear. The sun climbs above the horizon and gives Parisians the chance, when they turn their heads at the usual angle toward the usual place where the tip of the tower always usually loomed, to see unusually empty air – and nothing else. Initially, this only adds to the uproar. Now these eyes, now those, seem to have seen the gigantic latticework, now wading toward them around bends in the Seine, now threatening to jump down on the city from Montmartre. But soon both the morning fog and the false alarms have dissipated, and millions of sanguine souls, who had reacted to the disaster by beating their shirtfronts and coming the papers are indignant and demanding revenge: Catch the runaway! [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit.]
Americans from hotels on the Place Monceau are out clicking their Kodaks, photographing the steel giant’s tracks imprinted on bodies and wreckage, while a poet from Saint-Célestin, come on foot (so as to save ten sous) to the smashed bare base, chews a meditative pencil and debates what would best suit the situation: Alexandrine rhymes or zigzags of free verse? [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit.]