A Lurid Excerpt

“Well,” the storyteller says, taking back the floor, “I can tell you our Flavius never met a man with a coin for the empire. You know in the provinces a tax collector is entitled to ten per cent of whatever he manages to get; and an effective man in the post always has influential friends. The job is often done with truncheon in hand. There was a man in ___ called V. the Marrow-drinker, who carried a black bronze rod bound to his wrist by a leather thong, and who took broken bones in lieu of money. They say he wore a ring set with a man’s tooth. You cannot pay him, but there he stands; how will you get a man like that, a man who knows the sounds a long bone makes when struck by his awful tool, out of your poor home? His great forearms are thatched in hideous black hair and the thewy sinews stand out at his wrists in the shadows of his balled, impatient fists. His eye tooth looks across the twilit room at you like it is looking at a naked hare. Send, therefore, your family from the room and plant your palm upon the table; it pays him as well to shriek and clutch your ruined hand as to have the money ready.”

The women listened rapt, pale with imaginary anguish or droopy-lidded with worldliness or disbelief. The men exchanged a look or cringed or cracked their knuckles.

“Every man feared this V. because he feared nothing, wanted nothing. The people of the province, unable to rid themselves of him in any more indirect way, finally beat him to death in the shade of a plane tree on the edge of the town of C., a mob of sixty or eighty peasants and blacksmiths crashing over him in waves of righteous revulsion. They beat him until his jaw swung free from his face, until the basket of his pelvis collapsed, until they cut their insteps on the jagged points of his ribs.”

There was a very small silence, an eyeball of silence, before someone said, in a long, slow way, “No-o-o.” And the others shifted on the couches, relieved by this exhalation of doubt, and then there was a longer silence; or rather silence apart from the sound of T. sucking on the pit of a prune.

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Billy Bragg: Which Side Are You On

Ann Margret in Tommy, 1975.

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The Band: Last Of The Blacksmiths

Robert Herrmann: River Buildings, 1966

I dreamed (and you will not be interested to hear about it, but I am not recording it for you), last of all (but aren’t all the choicest dreams the last ones?), of a large pink cockatoo, flying above the cloud-darkened beach and the slates of the city, as the heavy-shouldered storm waded greyly in to shore.

And, being Nabokov, it's all like this, page after page of it

This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus’ silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates.

From the opening chapter of Invitation to a Beheading. Why have I been reading the garbage I’ve been reading? I must stop reading garbage and read more Nabokov.

Route of Mar. 25 race

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68km, 2,300m climb.

And he writes like him, too!

Production still from Kerouac: The Inevitable Biopic, starring Steve Gutenberg in the role he was born to play.

In a spirit of exasperation, occasioned by conservative rhetoric

The first and most important step for working people must be to change their attitude towards other working people. When we regard someone who enjoys more leverage over his or her employers than we do over our own as a spoiled, greedy parasite, rather than a model, we are engaging in fantasy. Anyone with less than $100,000 a year who imagines that he is being impoverished by, say, public sector employees’ benefits is deluding himself. The reality is that these people are people just like us, on balance no lazier, no less competent, no less well-intentioned. To imagine otherwise is to fall into the error of identifying with people whose interests do not align with our own, of imagining that by saying what rich people say we are more likely to become rich ourselves; but we will not become rich in any case. If we cannot see that higher wages for ordinary working people—even for not particularly efficient or attractive working people—is what drives job creation, growth, and social cohesion, we will continue to grow poorer, never mind rich.

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Aerial photo (probably from a crane; note cables, right) of Portuguese quarry, from the project “Open Space Office”, by Tito Mouraz.