CXXXIV
Folks, I’m goin’ down to St. James Infirmary,
See my baby there;
She’s stretched out on a long, white table,
She’s so sweet, so cold, so fair.
Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be,
She will search this wide world over,
But she’ll never find another sweet man like me.
Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches,
Put on a box-back coat and a stetson hat,
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,
So you can let all the boys know I died standing pat.
An’ give me six crap-shooting pall bearers,
Let a chorus girl sing me a song.
Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head
So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along.
Folks, now that you have heard my story,
Say, boy, hand me another shot of that booze;
If anyone should ask you,
Tell ‘em I’ve got those St. James Infirmary blues
[Trad. with augmentations by Cab Calloway]
What ever happened to Zyklon A?
How many early mornings, and on how many benches, in how many squares have you sat waiting for a city to come alive?
Enough of Truth Truth Truth
Donne moi des truffes!
A coney micromacrogasm of the mind
The human body as a numinous vessel
Humanous numinous
In Chelsea, in general, the dogs look to be in better shape than their “owners.”
More than a keystroke’s difference, I’ll warrant, between a fender bender and a gender bender.
As if cars could have sex!
Or reproduce!
“You don’t follow me, do you? I’ll try to put it more simply. Time is not a chain of seconds driven from cog to cog by a clock weight time, I would say, is a wind of seconds buffeting things as it whirls them away, one after the other, into nothingness. I hypothesized that the speed of this wind varies…
…Wherever the wind swings us, our consciousnesses follow. Our perception of time is linear, whereas time itself is radial…” [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit., p. 195]
Clockwise. Time foolish.
I’d like to buy the world a Kool-Aid
Is it any wonder that we are different people to different people
Thems that ‘r’ world-grabbers will 4ever and always be back-stabbers
Ain’t that true, Skizziks?
Mensch-child in the Compromised Land
Modern civ evolved a strategy of turning our humanity on and off like a light switch. Now you’re human, now you’re not. Back to human again. Click-click.
And our consciousnesses wink bright or dark as the circuits alternately connect and break.
Who can wonder at all the blown fuses?
Et voilà, les truffes shall set you free!
Polyptych: from Greek polyptychos, having many folds.
That which is not sinosoidal is perforce suicidal.
And so, my children, at last the great ship of signification – part Great Eastern, part Titanic, part-Dreadnought – sank into the bottomless ocean, after many a dot-dash SOS and myriad streams of semaphore… see, there are its ripples, where the upthrust stern so lately stood, screws whirring mists of sea-foam in the air.
While on another shore, her body a recoalescence of that very foam, Aphrodite alights, borne thence upon her stately shell. Whereupon the game begins anew…
And today, in celebration of said cycle, we eat madeleines. But which end do you bite into first, O dear ones? And do you hold it scallop side up, or down?
Increased oscillation
Rosie the Riveter meets Galloping Gertie
When u and i were young, Skizziks
Social meteor
Remember when you… were the desperate motherfucker?
You are only responsible to your current consciousness.
I’m OK with stripes, checks and plaids, but I’m deathly allergic to spots.
U too? Wow. Some herringbones give me hives, so I avoid all of them…
My sense of the people now surrounding me is that they are people without a now, people whose present has been left behind, people with projected wills, with words resembling the ticking of clocks wound long before, with lives faint as the impression under the tenth sheet of carbon… [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit., p. 205]
“Some day, a historian, in describing the times we live in now, will say, ‘It was a period when creeping about everywhere, attaching itself to this name and that, was a blind and slippery “ism.”’” [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit., p. 206]
Se non e’ vero, e’ ben trovato.
Even if it’s not true, it makes a good story.
Once during their usual walk up to the Krutitsky Tower – this was on a silver gray September evening – Shterer said, “Now I understand why that future which is now past looked so dead to me and shrouded: I had merely obtained [in traveling forward in my time machine] the difference between my existence and my nonexistence; I mean to say: a dead man strapped to a saddle may be borne up a steep slope, but…” [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit., p. 209]
Made flesh, daily
To air is human
The conversation broke off between “yes” and “no.” The manuscript remained in an editorial folder tied tight. But texts are capable of diffusion; certain paragraphs and pages of Memories [of the Future] seeped through the cardboard folder and, multiplying and modifying, began to whirl from hand to hand and mind to mind. The pages hid in coat pockets and stole into briefcases, squeezing between official records and reports; they unfolded their folded-in-four bodies so as to slide into circles of lamplight; their lettered residue settled in the convolutions of brains, turned up in private discussions between public lectures, became twisted into jokes and circumlocutions. [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit., pp. 210-211]
A man, a plan: Bataclan
A comely Ireland of the mind
“So be it. What’s banished from sight will find its way to the brain through the skull’s seams. So be it!” [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit., p. 211]
Flow with the go
I’m allergic to gluttons
Spring wind: tearing the past from the present
Y u shameless Husserl!
Phenom-o-barbitol
Polyptdict: The many folds of saying
Stuck stuck stuck in the folds of language – how to kick off the covers?
The tongue makes the bed – however Procrustean – in which we lie. Lay. Laid.
Hospital corners
Dirty linen
Don’t you know there’s a place for us, in between the sheets? Leaves. Sheeps.
Parchment, papyrus, paper. Rock, scissors. Cut!
Illumination
Defolds are decreasing
Massa’s in de cold, cold text
Masoch?
Yeah, him too
‘swat I sade
Which is how I got on the FBI’s Must Want It list
I mean Most Want Ad list, er, Wanderedlust, ah…
choo!