Nathaniel West :: The Day of the Locust

Nathaniel West :: The Day of the Locust

New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a change come over them as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters... dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears, and passion fruit. Nothing happns... did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them came from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all. The asme is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a "holocaust of flame", as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can be ever violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.

in the hospital

Being in the hospital is all about regression and being getting lots of excessive attention from the nurses and doctors. It's about walking around in a shapeless patient uniform most of the time, when you can walk, and having your sheets changed for you twice a day. For a short time I could not walk around and had to be pushed around by someone, who would always park me next to someone especially old and about to croak. It's also about being a bad fashion statement with tubes and medical tape and needles stuck into you and having to push around saline baggies. New appendages to your body are not so easily managed. Don't try to dance on when too many tubes are jammed into your arms. It's also about constantly drinking, drinking, eating, telling nurses when you shit, what your blood pressure is, what your temperature is.

Once I was good enough to walk again I was pretty happy and ran around the hospital corridors like a naughty little kid that I am, spying on all the people. Hospitals are weird gathering places for various cross sections of society. There are the confused relatives, perpetually lost and asking for directions, holding cellophane-wrapped bouquets of flowers and boxes of candy, dark circles under their eyes. There are the nurses who are a lot more laid-back than the doctors, maybe a little shell shocked from what they see all the time, always much prettier or more handsome once they strip off their uniforms and emerge in civilian wear.

The doctors have more of a stick up their ass and seem to be on a permanent authority kick, but you can't really blame them. Mine are surprisingly tender and it seems like everybody I meet has worked a year or two in New York and we joke about how they were worried about their English but that wasn't the big deal, it was Spanish, because anybody who is anybody knows that you only speak Spanish in Manhattan after a certain point.

My roommate is the portrait of perpetual suffernig. If she were catholic I bet she'd double as the Virgin Mary in all the season plays. She is a really sweet old lady, though. She can't understand why I like Berlin at all and reminisces about her short window of happiness, the time when she was married to an English soldier. "That's why I can speak English so well," she explains. "I used to live there, near Portsmouth. But then my husband died." She has so many health problems. She tells me that she will not have a boyfriend anymore because her second husband was so terrible, and she tells me that I must always take good care of my health. "You can't really buy good health. So always take care of yourself." Amen.

Stepping out onto the subway, into the real world again was exhilarating. I can do anything! i am healthy again! No more droopy hospital uniform. I feel good, I really am, and I love you all.

fiction :: she blew me away

fiction

she blew me away, everyone would turn to look at her when she walked down the street, and here she was talking to me. the first time i met her she snapped my bra and said hello. it was all this bright purple hair and rattly chains and a lock around her neck. She was wearing a plaid schoolgirl skirt and 12 hold doc martens & she was laughing because I was blushing at the bra snap, she must've done it so much it was like art to her. she told me she'd been seeing me everywhere, who was I? who was I to talk to you?

The first few weeks, I was so nervous around her, how did we start to become so close? We would sit on the edge of the river, the edge of the city almost falling in, and talk for hours. What the hell were we talking about? I can't even say. That was still back when that part of town was a little sketchy, but we were stupid, and nothing bad had happened to us yet, so we went there late at night with flashlights and beer. I was so nervous, my hands were shaking, my knees buckled when she kissed me. we were drunk and rolling around on the group, on spread out old newspaper sheets, inhaling each other's bad breath.

When morning came I expected her to be gone, but she was still there but asleep beside me. Up close she looked human. I held her tightly.

the two girls, staring out the sheer glass wall into the trinket lights of the big city. they were both small and cute with messy hair and huge china doll eyes. in one moment they looked at each other and revealed their naked love. the looks were like this: please don't hurt me, i am helpless here then in a flash they put back on their cloaks of self defense; wanting to be the one who wanted the other less, although both wanted each other with pathetic intensity.

They both had the same boyfriend at that time. He was a sleazy loser, and he had brought them here as show-off girls. His friends leered appropriately and he felt like a man. The girls clung to each other because they were just wild party girls and they weren't used to fancy places like this, where there were people paid to wipe your hands in the bathroom and the cocktails cost as much as a fancy new dress. tomorrow they would break up with him and then walk down to the river, listening to their cell phones ringing desperately.

if you look in the peephole you will see:

• 2 girls in cathead suits flapping their arms like chickens
  
• 2 girls running around the city covered in mud
  
• 2 girls climbing over barbed wire fences to go to punk rock shows on the docks
  
• 2 girls sucking each others toes
  
• 2 girls dying quiet deaths as they kiss
  
• 1 girl crying as the other is passed out with pills in her hands
  

frank's notebook

frank, reading to me from rainer maria rilke's diary:: "irony don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. when you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life. used purely, it is too pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, you are afraid of this growing famikliarty, then turn to great & serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless. search into the depths of things: there, irony never descends--when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world arrives out of the necessity of your being. for under the influence of serious things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental) or else (if it is really innate & belongs to you) it will grow strong and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments which you can form your art with."

frank, givin' me more rilke:: "in one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exultation. and those who come together in the nights are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth and strength for the song of some future poet who will appear in order to save ecstasies that are unsavable."

dogeaters :: jessica hagedorn

jessica hagedorn :: Dogeaters

We compare notes after the movie, sipping our TruColas under the watchful gaze of the taciturn servant Lorenza. “I don’t like her face,” Pucha complains about Jane Wyman, “I hate when Rock starts kissing her!” “What’s wrong with it?” I want to know, irritated by my blond cousin’s constant criticisms. She wrinkles her mestiza nose, the nose she is so proud of because it’s so pointy and straight. “AY! Que corny! I dunno what Rock sees in her—“ she wails. “It’s a love story, “ I say in my driest tone of voice. Although I’m four years younger than Pucha, I always feel older. “It’s a corny love story, when you think about it,” Pucha snorts. Being corny is the worst sin you can commit in her eyes.

“What about Gloria Talbot? You liked her, didn’t you? She’s so...”—I search frantically through my limited vocabulary for just the right adjective to describe my feline heroine—“interesting.” Pucha rolls her eyes. “AY! Puwede ba, you have weird taste! She’s really cara de achay, if you ask me.” She purses her lips to emphasize her distaste, comparing the starlet to an ugly servant without, as usual, giving a thought to Lorenza’s presence. I avoid Lorenza’s eyes. “She looks like a cat—that’s why she’s so strange and interesting,” I go on, hating my cousin for being four years older than me, for being so blond, fair-skinned, and cruel.

Pucha laughs in disdain. “She looks like a cat, aw-right,” she says, with her thick, singsong accent. “But if you ask me, prima, Gloria Talbot looks like a trapo. And what’s more, Kim Noval should’ve been in this movie instead of Jane Wyman. Jane’s too old,” Pucha sighs. “Pobre Rock! Everytime he had to kiss her—“ Pucha shudders at the thought. Her breasts, which are already an overdeveloped 36B and still growing, jiggle under her ruffled blouse.

collaboration with dj saiba

collaboration with saiba

florida

so what if i had you?
so what if you liked me too?
then i wouldn't want me
and you wouldn't want you too
you're such a coward with your love
you burned me a bunch so i won't talk to you no more
i done all these things before
just knowin you like me keeps me happy for days
i don't care what you says
but why o why do you torture me so?
yidda yidda ya! o wah wee woo