Actual Clouds

This morning I found a parking spot just outside the office, it being Sunday. Everything has its season, or so we are promised, and on Sunday mornings parking spots are plentiful. I was pretty happy about it all. Mildly happy, I should say. Not quite ecstatic, but I knew that I would be able to see my car from my window, several stories up. I didn't expect the car to do anything amusing or to be particularly worth watching or even to have anything exciting done to it, but it's comforting to be able to glance out the window every now and again and reassure oneself that things are where you left them. Especially large, expensive things like automobiles. And so I sat, a couple of hours later, in my desk chair, sipping coffee, swiveling, and took advantage of my good fortune earlier that morning to glance (swiveling left) out the window at the street below, and at my vehicle. A woman stood crouched between my car and the car in front of it, but she seemed benevolent enough, and was engaged in sorting through her possessions, which she had piled on a purple luggage cart. As she wandered off into the street, pulling said cart, I noticed that there appeared to be something in the rear of my car, just behind the back window. I couldn't quite make it out. Cotton batting, something like that. And as I puzzled over what it could be and arrived at the conclusion that I had left nothing there and began to wonder what lunatic would break into an automobile, stuff the back seat with cotton batting and leave it otherwise unharmed, I realized that there was likely nothing in the car, or nothing I hadn't left there myself, and that it was the window itself I was seeing, not the seat beyond it, that someone or some power had sprayed the rear window with smears of white paint, which was of course infuriating and also more than a little odd, because whoever or whatever it was had not written anything, as is customary in such situations, they hadn't tagged the car, hadn't even allowed a drop of paint to drip from the window, which was in itself odd, given the looseness and general chaos of the swirling pattern they had drawn. And as I debated whether I should get up (swiveling right) and march to the elevator, out the door onto the sidewalk and around the corner to inspect the damage, or should wait until I was ready to leave, because the damage would surely wait for me, it occurred to me that it was not paint on the window at all that I was seeing, and not cotton batting beyond the window either. It was the sky reflected in the glass. It was the clouds above the car. And the funny thing is that they looked nothing like the clouds in the sky, the actual clouds.

Ten Years

"Inscribe your letters in laurel trees,

From the cave all the way to the city of the chosen.

It was here that Destiny stood wondering.

Oh Night, are these lights that I see real?"

—from Emad Abdullah Hassan's "The Truth," in Poems from Guantánamo

Questions of Style

"Throughout the unbroken sequence of world war, revolution, and civil war, these men feverishly pursued their trades. While battles raged on the outskirts of Petrograd, they met in icy, sometimes flooded rooms to argue abstruse questions of literary style and structure. After showing the members of Opoyaz how novels are assembled, Shklovsky would return to his unit and show his students there the more mundane techniques involved in assembling armored cars."

—Richard Sheldon, (first) introduction to Viktor Shklovsky's A Sentimental Journey

Because today marks 3,300 days without Joe Strummer

"We've got loads of contradictions for you," says Strummer, shaking off his doldrums with a smirk. "We're trying to do something new; we're trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we're trying to be radical — I mean, we never want to be really respectable — and maybe the two can't coexist, but we'll try. You know what helps us? We're totally suspicious of anyone who comes in contact with us. Totally. We aim to keep punk alive."

—Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone, 1979.

Samuel Bing

Not too long ago (summer?), an old friend and I spent a few days in the desert. My friend slept through the daylight hours. Most of them, anyway. My dog, who is very clever, pretended she had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The neighbors behaved oddly, even by desert standards. (Why the onion rings strewn along the fenceline? Why the pork loin in the yard? What about the lunch meats?) Every few hours, artillery exercises at the Marine base 20 miles distant made the windows shiver in their frames. America! The sky made me dizzy, especially at night but also at dawn. I was reading Virgilio Piñera, who looked like this:

The point of all this, though, is that my friend and I spent a few hours talking with a voice recorder running and that some small portion of our conversation (the part about his music) was just posted on Bomb's website.

Update on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 03:26PM by b.

Bomb posted the other half of the interview today, in which I'm the one answering and he is the one asking.