The Color and Shape of Grammar

A novel by David Peck

The color and shape of grammar A novel by David Peck copyright 2003-2016 David R. Peck Los Cercados 37 Manzanares El Real, Madrid Spain 28410 davidgarcia@hotmail.com phone: +34 +91 852-8863

What it is!

Letter to a well known literary agent:

“BEGINNING, AGAIN”, is a plot-deficient, character-challenged bauble of language, a what was and could be from a now, spewing from an unemployed, under financed, unloved and often over looked expatriate pitching his prospective, possible, doubting tentatively drunk agent, whol we’ll call Sloan, cause his name appeared one day in the newspaper and seemed more fictional than real. It should have been a play, but was rejected early, tried to be a film and grew by fits and starts into a novela, which is to say, not much; being not long enough to be a novel and too long to fit into the space allotted for a short story, but none the less, far away from being a play or a movie. But the dialogic imaginative is still there, boxed in with some narrative that could be travel writing or political commentary, which was in it’s day also discarded for not fitting into the carefully chosen categories called for by the newspaper editors.

So without anything else to do, our writer, lost abroad for a decade and all, did what he thought writers did, little or nothing. Novel mind: a well architected word formula that you keep in your head for a while. And then you add and subtract, multiply and divide it and file it where ever is closer. Sometimes it moves the text, becomes part of the geography, mathematics, from here to there… A bird sings, a dog barks, a writer writes; 1-2-3, it´s a life.

Sticking a label on BEGINNING, AGAIN, is like painting an old car a new modern color. But they tell me you won´t open the door if I don´t. That´s what agents do, put lipstick on the pig, thinking all the while they are dressing up their date in sexy lingerie. A literary agent I don´t got, so I´ll call it literary fiction, myself. Literary, because it just doesn´t fit into romance or memoir or historical — it´s the last car on the train, fiction. That narrows the demographic quite a bit. Old men and spinsters I guess. Folks not otherwise engaged. Those who want to get lost. Those who fit in and aren’t happy about it. They didn’t start out that way. They were rebels. Inhaled. Once upon a time a bit slutty, but found early success. A good address. Mark em with an X and we´ll assume them so. Fiction cause I made them up. A literary fiction. I hope they exist.

Agent: What´s a text? What kind of writer are you? You can’t separate the writing from what’s written, but there certainly can be a gap between the writing of it, and everything else. One mind the Soto say, toto moto roto, in between what and what if?

Writer: The spot, the dot; a point? OK, I’m a lazy bad writer, who can’t spell, but a proud graduate of the eighth grade, smoke cigarettes when I’m on the phone to my mother’s oncologist. Over confident and unemployed, vain and insecure at the same time, gripping tightly to hope, a hope that is the last thing to go before madness sets in. Euripides warned about this predicament: “Whom the gods would destroy he first makes mad.” Then the Bible goes ahead on and rubs salt in the open wound, eliminating any doubt that a ratio might be in order: “When pride cometh, then commeth shame; but with the humble is wisdom.”

And you know, I go ahead on and respond with ridiculous texts full of leaps, gaps, crevasses, flaws, holes, then fill them in, grind them off. Mistake after mistake, year after year, snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with pen and ink, see across the valley of death to, you know, snowy hill tops and greener pastures on the other side. But the way to get over there, must be to get first to the nadir of the valley, the lowest, most absurd place from where to grab a hook and hold on tight. That’s hope, and the courage or the stupidity to carry on, keep going in the swamp at the bottom looking for a hook. But in the meantime, keep writing. Word after dot after comma, one line at a time. One after another, then go back, the beginning, again and again, time after time, despair on top of tragedy and growing poverty until, the end. And hope it´s the beginning, again. A little more humble, but vanity is still lurking around with that nagging residue of over confidence in her mouth.

Come on, don’t you have anything better to do than read this dribble, it’s contagious I’m told, this losing here and there of decades, that’s ten years infected by the secret life of dots. Is it a slow day in the office? Or did you even bother to make the effort to get there. A second, then a third cup of coffee, all comfortable in your under washed bath robe, Kleenex from your last bout with the flu mildewing in the pocket. The television tuned to a day time soap and the dog rolling over now and then, wishing he were someplace else. Hasn’t the phone rung today? Are you eating too much of last nights leftover chick peas and potato chips. Another nibble on that bar of chocolate that you really shouldn’t have bought given the upcoming epidemic of diabetes just around the corner. That last episode you hoped was love, but only produced another awkward mess. That’s why they call it life, because calling it suffering wouldn’t get you through the day. And then you go to heaven, all fluffy and nice to listen to old fashioned music, for ever! Why don’t you just get showered and dressed and go for a walk, or has depression set in again. That Black Sun Julia shed some light on.

Until one day, you get the call… That’s your que. You made it out, manuscript in hand, a fast walk to the office to get your heart rate up, knocked over the sludge pile accumulating on the desk reaching for the telephone, dialing…

Agent:

“Darling, is this all you got?”

Writer:

Heavens no, it’s just the beginning or the end! Follow the dots and you’re going to or coming from Pink Noise, where it all began or has met it’s end… That’s where you’ll find the novel, new novelness, just ask for it, connected or not, esta cumulo de anecdotes… find me an editor who doesn’t like newspapers, who sees the life in dots, lines and planes. What you don´t got. Always what you don´t got. Got, I got. Half full, half empty. I got empty. Ness. I got not-ness and can´t locate my footprint!

You thought expat life was still some kind of movable feast, and was and could be, but there is a dark side. For some people, maintaining a drivers license, was always a theme in their lives. When you´re talking about decades, deep fissures carved into their skin, huellas they call them in Spain, “wa-yez”, they say. Yea, but here we go with that pink noise again. Pink huellas, noisily. Making pink footprints, noisily. The sound of music, the sentient bodies, a point, the one, and the indefinate two, I am and I am not Presidential reified politics, I was, but still may be. The Guardia Civil pulled over our writer and asked for his documentation today. But he don´t got huellas.

On and on, and we´re supposed to be having fun. But if they called it suffering, we’d just quit. Go home. So here we are again, stuck between what and what not.

You probably do X. Pay your bills on time or borrow, manage, kite wheezle, out of it, but still get to wear the nicely pressed suit to dinner. Get your prints taken regularly. But some of us just get carded when we shouldn’t, like when we don’t have a card, like he didn’t today. A card he had, but they hadn’t seen it before. California in big letters. The other one too, but the February 4 expiration date meant he couldn’t show it. Passport? It´s in the apple orchard. You can’t drive without a Spanish license, the high booted officer said aggressively. Three other officers standing by the patrol car in front. The same setup across the street.

Boots: “You ain´t got huellas. You ain´t from these parts, you otherness somewhere else. Expat, xprints. You be X, Mr. Pink Noise, or else!”

The Lost Decade

A postmodern cosmic si(t) com.

The color and shape of Grammar

Set: Three raised platforms, two with a table with a lamp on it. The third, the party platform. Metaphor of tables communicating in Café. Forms, a point in color, framing platforms. Brown 40´s gabardine coats and fedora hats, black clothes, except party, spots.

Scene 1: A reading that turns into a conversation between, first Jesus and Iñigo, then the Writer and Agent. Piano. Chronotope: adventure time.

WRITER:

- The call Jesus had been waiting for came not in the night as he had expected for so many years, but in the middle of the day. He was dressed, kids in school, the dog at the fence waiting for an excuse to bark. Two pots of espresso boiled up drunk, half pack cigarettes smoked one after another, keeping the lines of communication open between thoughts and an occasional pipe. The bank quieted with a hard won loan from his Suegro. Incomming from the Suegro, opining that his paintings would cause nightmares in the children. The Suegra warning of poisoning las nietas with Tobasco sauce. The Wife blaming his last job for her early onset of menopause. Bad news during waking hours had everything to do with la banda de Mata Hombres from across the mountain, below the castle.

But it was springtime and the river was gushing over the bridge, after days of rain. The Basque scion of a prominent banking family Jesus had gotten into a drunken brawl with the week before, on the other side of the bridge and the events leading up to it, were turning around in his mind, he smoked.

After the kids went to bed, Jesus’d head up the dirt road by the river running through the kings apple orchard, and have a beer with Iñigo. Iñigo didn’t hear very well, due to a wall of sound two decades ago, but after a couple bottles prone to drift into a monologue lasting until time the cows come home. You hear bells, as they wander up the mountain in the evening.

Manzanares El Real lies at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, along side the Manzanares River. Here, it’s a mountain stream. Fly fisherman from the capitol, 45 Kilometers away, wondering up-stream in their department store “official” fishing duds. A Movable Feast, or For Whom the Bell Tolls, one or the other, or both, bought and sold. From the left bank, right side of the Atlantic, left bank of the Manzanares, who when she gets ready to flows through Madrid on her laid back way to Lisboa; you can speak Spanish to the Romans and Milanese flows back into Castilian.

Spring on the left bank, cool puffy white clouds, the summer residents unpacking and installing themselves from the capitol. Pregnant with possibility, wide patches of open morning, all day long! Leisure time. Two months in a row Jesus couldn´t get to the post office in time to mail his submission to a far away, obscure, nearly worthless first unpublished novel contest in Scotland that he´d planned on somehow winning, even though he ignored the submission rules again; but couldn´t get up the gumption to get to the post office by noon and mail the damn thing off. Re-writing the same sentence, over and over; a paragraph, line by line. A page where emptiness just was and will be. Not! Not! Not! I am not! I am not an artist! One word at a time. All connected, linked up, webbed in a 3d multiverse, third person in the noosphear, a Ricci flow, a modulo diffeomorphism of maximum horns. A geometry of 3d space. Find, navigate, connecting the dots with the Poincare Conjecture. Grisha should really get the dough.

Yea, were back in the chronotopics. We’ve got to laugh our way right out of town, while we can, before they lock the doors. I am not, Hell! …there is hope on the horizon, it is a nice sunny day and my mid-size Sancho Panza is drawing well, mumbling all the time: “traité sur l´origine des romans”, prophesying Abbé Huet. Sancho´s dialect can really get a lot worse, and probably will. A war of words, rojo´s y azules, el conflicto de los generos.

America is a place in my imagination. When I allow a more realistic image to appear, I can´t see the forest for the trees. Identity disappears, distorted into a perverse glimpse of the past. The “lost decade” filter, then and now, who am I, if I am, are you or are you not? That´s what I got to imagine, a strange foreign maybe. To be other, or not. Being other now, like it or not. There is not there anymore; only mind, maybe no-mind.

A metaphor, a string of space grammars, a time for anything… It’s that light you see in El Greco, a Latino “Woody Allen” springtime, a playful romp in the country.

…As time goes by. Sing it Sam! In country, away, left bank in spring, out country, where I be and where I’m not. Even if I am and there is no there to be here in. But Pink Noise covered that first. Millenniums begin in the spring. Long marches, solitary confinements, be here now engagements, the birds making a ruckus outside. What must be done? New pillows maybe, a tent. Blood in the desert: “…a more ancient heritage, revealed its full potential and began to play such a titanic role in the formulation of a new literary and linguistic consciousness.” An entertaining list in stream of consciousness chronology. Always more or less in order. “The poetry of the Macaronics…”

The Sierra de Guadarrama divides Spain into north and south, even though, they go mostly north-east to west; they still stop the north wind and rains, but moreover separate an Atlantic and a Mediterranean culture, new and old, commerce in the north, warriors in the south; Celts, Phoenicians, Basques and the Romans, on the road to Santiago. Historical digression ad-nauseum. And before that? And before that? And before the “Pre-history of Novelistic Discourse”, that? …well, before that we walked around naked with clubs and hit stuff and ate it. Then we got on the trail, our holy walk in the country. Out country. In-n-out. In but out. You know, left bank of the Alta Cuenca, where the big birds still fly. Storks and vultures, by the thousands, circling.

The north eastern side, between here and La Granja, where Gary Cooper slumped on a hillside with an imaginary fascist bullet lodged within, an American fighting for democracy, for the Republic of Spain. Even though it was mostly a fight between Communism and Fascism. Americans were always sticking their values into the pot, liberty, democracy, then watching them get kicked to pieces by the “politica real”. George’s disappointment, Paris pouted until after the invasion.

This side of the mountain represented a happier time. Fresh trout, bottles of wine, and senoritas capable of transforming worn out cotton blouses into prurient fecund bogenvilla. A flour mill built of stone in the 14th century by the moors, slowly decaying by the river. Al Molino del Cura. Two stories of hand cut stone, nine point four two meters round, pie are squared maintaining the water aloft, now guarded with the cross. An ovum, a phallus, a glory hole; the staff of life, a crucifixion. A tango. Tutu tanga´s tango: diablo’s hanging from the window, on the eve of the day of the dead, but don’t seem to bother the trout, anyway.

After ten years in the old country, the lost decade, peering behind those carefully piled old rocks, held in place by gravity and tradition, moistening a parched mouth at Marga´s tavern on the road below the castle, las illuminarias and a smokey ancient pot, stuck together and torn apart by an invented history, the centrifuge and the centriped: wounds in search of lost time, fresh from the massacre at Attocha or just as likely from the last millennium. An involuted script left by Cesar, Arab kings, Isabella and Ferdinand, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, Hemmingway and Eisenhower; directing modern actors about their lives. The European novel grew in a warm imaginary, a prohibited illuminated moisture.

The pastoral image of the Pyrenees Jesus knew, that wonderful Bakersfield rite of summer, the Basque picnic, was a reflection of another time, a time driven by hunger. A hunger not only of the stomach. But hunger for new land, new liberty, new opportunity in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

After the assassins of Attocha struck, Iñigo carefully peeled back the layers of Basque history. Iñigo was a Basque of the Etxaberria clan, a long-term under performer. He made a career of a thought over lunch, conversation, and well poured beer. The black garbanzo. Whole afternoons, stretching into evening, to chew things over, preparing his closing argument. Two three days just getting ready… “…but, I am… …a dilitante.”

Iñigo:

The Basque country had grown rich from the trade their sailors brought home, and the goods they produced and exported, from the currency foreigners brought to gamble in their casino. No, the Pyrenees was where they bought their spring lamb, their cultural capital was San Sebastian, where they ate it. La Concha. An esencial European excursion. The best summer party of the old world. The summer residence of the Queen. There was Biarritz across the border on the Bay of biscay, the continental edge and the Cantabrian Sea; on the way to finis terre.

The Basque people were not an isolated minority in Spain, they were the praetorian guard of the Queen. Her special operations forces, her SWAT Team. The tip of the spear of the Spanish monarchy. The motor of Spanish industrialization. The first among unequals. The enforcers of the inquisition: when Queen Isabella reigned over the harshest period of fundamental religious terror the world has ever known. The Basques were the nobility of Spain. That little rubber ball they slap around, they invented it. Bilboa, if you wanted to get something done, Orgo Joko, to lift the wagons high. In the Pyrenees, they hadn’t invented anything in a thousand years.

(Iñigo pours a fresh head on his beer, and continues)

“Yet that is but a long glance back for you Americans and the Basques you know in Bakersfield. Are you surprised to find the most important modern painting in Spain, the jewel of the permanent collection at the museo Reina Sophia in Madrid, to be Picasso’s Guernika.

“History is what you find Americano, behind these piles of old stones, piled up so carefully they stand 2,000 years without cement or steel. History, in Guernika, is no picnic.

JESUS:

Maybe. I saw the painting. I´m the laziest guy around. I never get past the headlines. Dyslexic. The protestant work ethic just never took hold. Not that I don´t have type A outbreaks now and then. I can just as well sit around and make mistakes. I do like, though, to advise others on some pretty good mistakes they might make. Borges in his declining years, 85, thought that he should have made a lot more and much bigger mistakes. Convince others to make more mistakes, world peace if we just follow that little Bakersfield nugget of wisdom, “just go ahead on and do it.”

Okies are really great people, as long as you’re not fighting with them. My ex-brother-in-law´s father once shot his arm off, cleaning his police issue revolver, and he wasn´t even mad or anything. “Just go ahead on…”; it’s Bakersfield’s “get-it-on”, “get down”, “right on”. We just go ahead on and do it. New Yorkers hate it. Bakersfield mixed race okies defining the after post-modern paradigm. Go ahead on and shoot you right now. They’ll nut up, light you up with the stock of that shotgun hanging in the back window. “You want to get it on?” Yea, let’s get it on. Marvin must have passed through. The taco plate at the Arizona Café. It’s what you would’ve expected of a Mexican restaurant close by the train station, in the 1940’s. Marvin could’ve heard it there. Let’s get it on, Baby… What it is. Go ahead on man. Do it. Bakersfield must have had the worst collection of parents in the western world. The fifties came too fast, swinging into rock and roll, the babies just happened after a few too many beers. After the children came, she switched to gin. Less burping and pissing. Kind of an effefiance thing. What, the children were just overlooked? But they went ahead on.

Make bigger more glorious mistakes.

But do try not to hurt people. Abu Ghraib. Don’t drive the kids after you’ve been drinking, George. Keep a few of the really useful rules handy, but be ready to break the rest. Get a whole group of pretty good mistake makers together to figure things out. It’s easier to make ém in a group, they seem to fall right out of your pocket. Splat, splat, splat… You scoop ém up and mix in some jello and put it to cool in the fridge. Jello splat decision making. Chart which way the jello vibrates. Wiggle it… splat jello splat.

Like, New York is a our wound, as in, searching for lost time… Splat, splat, turning his lips into a frowned seriousness, ironic, a dialectic imaginary 1,2,3 splat of mind jello: It was the second airplane that crashed into our consciousness. Inserted itself into it. Exploded it. But it didn’t kill it. Transformed it into something else, like a body on it’s way to heaven; suddenly we are forced to decide: how do we put it back together, splat, but first, where the hell is it? A fresh splat is forming nerve endings in open sky.

Iñigo:

May you live interesting times, the Chinese curse threatens; we are living interesting times. God shows us incongruous choices: patriotism, vengeance, plane missiles, train bombers, bomb cars, head choppers, prison guard rapers; but then we have on display hope, magnanimity and generosity, innovation, trust, brotherhood, world-beat multi-culturalism, Islamic economic democracy republicanism, open… the void. And what about the Samari… the irresolute acceptance of chilled wiggly jello mind. They are surly the prior art! Goes right to the heart of the “I am not” controversy the Buddha stirred up.

Jesus:

– But we have to choose now, as we pull the pieces of that second airplane out of our consciousness like so many fish bones, and this fish has a lot of bones. So as we try and grind them up into meal, we still have to decide, how do we mix them back together and get them in the fridge, to cool.

Should we be terrorists, a few hundred million young men and women are now asking the Iman? Yo hago atentados contra la perversidad. No los tipos de peccadillo’s sexuales tan familiar y divertidos; yo hago atentados contra la arrogancia, the flavor of arrogance that results in fascism, and not those accumulations of will and spirit and hope that ejaculate themselves from time to time; yo hago atentados contra those fragile structures that remain from centuries of repression past, depending who’s at bat, from the 8th or 15th, but duly enforced by the popular jello makers. Splat, splat of arogarant self-confident footprints.

(Jesus put another log on the fire and continued)

- Hell, these Junior Fellows in Middle Asia are way behind the times. The newer left with it’s merry band of pranksters figured this out a long time ago. Splat. The let’s do everythings, the go ahead ons, the all at once forever generation. Updike inspired an entire generation with one line: ‘’He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.’’ Oh, give me a harp, were all going to heaven! Splat. That’s what they did, went ahead and just raised our expectations to exorbitant levels.

The state just has too many guns. Just look at what happened at Torra Borra. Splat. You fight within the belly of the monster you’re opposing. And not with absentee ballots, but ideas in the noosphear! Splat, splat, splat. I’m with Bono and the Treasury Secretary. And why not, statesman vs. terrorist has a long successful history. For a time, it was terrorist into statesman, look at Israel, America, South Africa, Ireland, France, Scotland, Bolivar and Henry Lee! But not now? Statesmen win, suspending the constitution, and all… We laid the foundations for asymmetrical warfare at the same time we launched our democracy rockets! Ideas are on first now. But then just what are the mechanisms to enforce the right to self-determination?

(Interior future monologue)

(Jesus lept to his feet and stuck out his chest)

- I accept this award, the “Come In Out Of The Cold” statuette, for a majority of one; for a majority is nothing but a bag of bones and water, and the truth, or what seems to look like it anyhow.

There’s really a lot behind this visualization business. Shape color grammars, cellular automata of what, our conscieness? I am therefore I suffer. It’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? Defining a precise metric to measure our own precious suffering against others. Then there’s suffering in the precocious style. Armani’s suffering, bottled.

You may rightly conclude that it is a bit premature to write my acceptance speech in advance of even the first word of my obra maestro, my magnum opus, magna carta, my curriculum vitae… or in anticipation of the future members of the “Come In Out Of The Cold Society”, saying even where they are. My acceptance speech may even preclude it’s being written.

But I live in the land of Quixote, of sudden illuminations, perfect moments… Catalan Champaign, impossible dreams. A friendly friend suggested I try on normalcy a few days ago, in the wake of such dramatic and thorough defeats, to which I reply, my heart still beats, my spirit has not fallen. The chinks in my armour have let in the cool breeze of humility, again, yet keeps out the poisonous perversity of an enforced normality. Splat.

So in acceptance of the warmth the future hopes to bestow, many words henceforth, restoring titles that have been denied me, except of course, that of graduating from the 8th grade, citizen of the United States of America, and permanent resident of the Kingdom of Spain; and ignoring the outstanding warrants for my arrest that have resulted in my forced, and seemingly permanent exile. Allow me to digress into a future, now past, a future that may or may not contain this bag of water and bones, as water an bones, but a fine humus or dust… if that.

The Spanish Mother-in-Law chronotope has endured through the millennia. I picked a loosing fight. In the end you become like them. Start to think like them. Your kids sure as hell do.

As the bubbles drift up from the centre of the glass, a semantic web appears, which I just imagined as it could be, much as I thought an object should be present, you know, visible, in an object oriented language. I mean you got to have to see it if you’re gunna make a shapecolorgram of the known and imagined universes, aren’t you?

I guess Bakhtin got me in the habit of this symbolic textual visualization, hallucinating really… Jimmy, the PHD POET would just blow up… “god damn deconstructionist bull-shit”, like he was talking about Nixon. So you throw in this colorgrammar, a little chunk of chocolate, Platon’s one two threes, Celines ellipses, push button Curl controls, moving, organizing, inciting social machines onto the semantic web; our postmodern political machines.

Well, so there we go. It’s mostly written, this is just the story of it’s creation… yet another refraction, another lens… altitude. Although it’s almost written, it has not been said. This is it’s saying. The utterance, uttered, like the objects, visualized. Spring, summer, fall, winter. ABC. 123…

It all looks so orderly. There was really nothing else to do. Believe me, I tried every conceivable digression, risked untold humiliations and suffered endless deprivations. Way into the red again and facing narrowing, aging prospects. Writing, was just the only thing left me, that I could do on my own. You’re not even supposed to talk about it with anybody, except you, and I’m not sure you’re going to be listening. Splat.

Jesus played the harmonica like the drums, any change in tone had more to do with geography and rythem than haromony; detonated by a mix heavier on entheusaiam than talent. Iñaki, the guitar player, would whisper a letter when the key was about to change. It improved the odds of getting lucky with a good riff, never to be repeated. A thick build-up of wine, lip and tongue, becoming a crust, changing the tune all by itself. But Iñaki was mostly deaf and just felt around for theback beat. Another log on the fire, a stir of the garbonzo’s, another glass of wine.

A memory of a remembrance, a memoir from long, long ago; and way before that?; memory taking on a patina, producing an image, more or less: “…the lacework of time, as they say…”. An imaginary dialogic pulsing in and out of focus. Has been, would have, didn’t do it, wasn’t there.

The bank robbery never happened. The manager in the south turning security upside down, a double reverse spin, no, just pretty good ole “backwards” security. “Everyone thinks the money’s in the bank, so I’ll put all the notes in my black leather case and walk it home.” The exact same route every night and morning. Never varied in 35 years. Walk up Ellem, come down Main, walk up main, come down Ellem. Sunset, sunrise. Were gunna have to get one of our bright eyed economists to get fiddling in the back room decifering the significance of backwards thinking. We’ll get the team that did “second best” economic policy. Yea, a good backer-upper is a pretty good thing to have around. May be there’s some “backwards” sector out there. Could get in early. Single shot futures. A “backwards” REIT. Shop it to 401K’s and mutual funds, hedge funds. V.C.’s. A backwards, over the shoulder, nick of time, hook.

Scene 2 — Blue Dot — New York Agents office: Al trotè.

Jesus received a response from an Agent:

Dear Mr. Garcia,

Thank you so much for submitting the opening chapters to Beginning, Again. This is certainly an intriguing submission; unfortunately it is not a project we will be pursuing at this time.

You have a marvelous knack for rhythmic prose. Beginning, Again is written as if by drumbeat- it adds an air of immediacy and vitality to some of the weightier semantics. Yet along with this sort of lush decadence comes the unfortunate consequence of literary untidiness. In your pitch letter you attempt to describe the novel in a variety of ways, and the text itself leaves the reader somewhat desperate to know what exactly they should be seeking and finding. I’m rooting for you, Mr. Garcia, but I think that your focus is a bit lacking. If properly executed, your voice would certainly be amoung the more unique I’ve seen.

Thank You so much for your patience in waiting for a response. We’ve been inundated with proposals, and it is important that I give each the attention it is due. I honestly look forward to receiving submissions from you in the future.

Best Reguards,

Poco Alegria

The WRITER, rewrites and responds:

Jesus Garcia

Cornocal 10

Manzanares El Real

Madrid, Spain 28410

May 20, 2005

Poco Alegria

10 E. 53rd Street

New York, New York 10022

Dear Mr. Alegria:

The is part is mostly was and possibility lurks just out of reach. A sit in the basement for a decade, reaching, making. Syllable by syllable, making with what was into could be, maybe… it’s taking shape, a word image on it’s way to New York.

Agent: Beginning, Again, not: time isn´t on your side, it´s death on the installmant plan, all over again; go to the second act if you hope to have one, which I doubt.

All right, so no sonnets, kill the foreplay and lift the skirt revealing the lacework of time. A novelized fictionalized memory, a new novel;memorialized.

I submit, again, I am not.

The opening chapters of: PINK NOISE, a nonliterary fiction; enclosed. Think of it as a humility vehicle for you. You become fictional, nonliterary text, symbolic code: it’s a whole new category!

The epiphany let me down but left a glimmer of hope. The curtain rises on Pink Noise, a murmur from the audience, all the commas waiting to be heroes drinking port.

Jesus

Manzanares El Real, Spain

AGENT:

It’s a real wonder you got through to me! Why did I have to pick up the phone. My assistant at her gynecologist. But all day? I make my living by being inaccessible, same as you, she was supposed to say no! A pretty, friendly, polite, no, en voz bajo — OB/GYN. Keep out! Like the cannon is our private property. I have to say OK if you are to cross the membrane into the universal literary harp factory.

Murmuring… Well, your lucky, at least it didn’t say: Dictated but not read. It’s your hook. A book hook. Your hooky-booky.

WRITER:

- So I got lulled into sleep, he continued, ignoring the Agent. It’s so easy to feel optimistic when we should be pessimistic. Put that lower part of the brain on drugs, or undefended happiness. The bitch of the brain; no, don’t fuck her, she might not fit in; better bring a coat, when the sun is shinning on the odd chance there’s a cold fog on the other side of the hill. Just in case. And then there’s the possibility of a dirty bomb. Wasn’t a dirty bomb an attractive woman who liked to have fun? You’d seen ém in the ball park, and breakfast by the bay on Saturday morning. Mimosa’s and Cuba Libres, seagulls squawking, noon is still a ways off, an afternoon in the café. You wanted a dirty bomb!

It’s time for Bob to talk of the Bodhisattvas again. We still have to choose, remember, how we get to what next. The past is not optimistic. It is the future we can make ours. In world time, we may be in another stalemate, empate. How we gunna race the Muslims to the moon? How we gunna race them to see who gets more stuff. Got more guns?

You are paying attention, aren’t you?

AGENT:

- No. But that’s why they call me Mr. Happy. Drone, Sloan.

WRITER:

- We’ll join the Sultan of Oman for the Phaedo back-beat, the theory of forms, check him out, he says in King Louie’s voice:

(String middle Asian music accompanies text.)

“The constituents of real being are not the transient mutable objects apprehended by our senses, but immaterial forms, immutable and eternal, the objects of thought or reason, existing independently of any mind, and in someway participated in, or imperfectly imitated by, sensible objects.” It fits doesn’t it? ´The soul may be purified by science or philosophy´. Sound familiar? Omar´s in debt to Herclitus and Parmenides… the fusion of “Socratic teaching with the scientific side of Pythagoreanism”… (…) ´The macrocosm whose order may be reproduced in the microcosm of the human soul´.

Bongos

Bach can have his way tonight! The finish line will be reached with pen and paper. A dialogue. Endless negotiation. A morning in their marketplace, getting to know each other. A cup of tea to settle a full stomach. Leisure time to let a new world morality settle in. A morality is what’s left after battle, the stone and flesh that’s been carted away, by centuries, millennia, daisy cutters. This morality creation only happens with thorough testing. Time doesn’t take chances. It’ll let it get up and walk around for a while, but it’s got to be what’s left when all the shootin is over.

Painting has changed, our symbology has changed. What do we draw on the walls of our caves now?

But maybe we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. The expansion process has to be complete, before we reduce it to just a few symbols. You have to get a little way into this new tapestry before you can begin to visualize the thing. For now it’s thousands of words strung together, raw intelligence.

(Pause)

WRITER:

- Don’t you have your doubts?

AGENT:

- I do.

WRITER:

- The future of this guessing and testing business has always been fraught with pitfalls. Hell our rear view mirror isn’t always 20-20. Our future vision is always a bit ambiguous, being that most of us are always wrong. And with all this democracy movement, we’re in a hell of a fix. Sure, give democracy to the Arabs, mock the French and Germans: “Un petit dejeuneir! Strudel and baklava. Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. Recycled cold warriors drinking scotch in the White House. Their Frank Sinatra is Garth Brooks! Not even Hank Williams, but Garth Brooks. No, you get Hank in there moaning about what could and is going wrong, that’s just too much of that pedestrian Neanderthal inner brain shit; bitch, bitch, bitch…”

W screams back: “Hell No! Were the cocaine generation toasting the 50´s, unprotected happiness now! Or we’ll pout. All these young virgins walking around naked, my word! Paradise usually ends badly, a backward glance. The decline is over before you knew it started. That siren song, those sweet violins. Hope for the best, then hope for a whole lot more!”

They are beginning to laugh out loud at the supermarket.

Progress only comes with leisure time, and leisure time only comes with security. That’s our chronotopal dilemma. We have to decide what time it is! Where we are, and are not. Just what is the foundation of existence, after all? That will show us what to paint on our walls. So now we got a democracy deciding what time it is. Death in the chronotopics, what, where? Time and space, now those are worth talking about… one part time, three space. And can we shed some light on these black hole explosions? Their likely to be around for a while. You know, out with the petty viscidities! Shoo! Git! Were repainting the home cave.

AGENT:

– You know, you’re going to have to deliver that in 80 seconds?

WRITER:

– I’ll give out a written copy or something — post it — that’s the problem with filming this, the time problem. It’s really so… We only decided less than 100 years ago what time really is, and we’re still arguing about it. Homogeneous , heterogeneous? E=Mc2 or Wavy Gravy, irreversible or can we go back? Time as a subjective force, but well here we go again. What are some useful categories for this universal stuff. A change of pace or a change of direction. Time or space. Form or content. You know, chronotopics, the void, the moderns; Ezra by the Pound, Sam Beckett I am not!

Hands the Parmenides to Agent, Look on Page 21, Cornford, “The Heaven is one, and from the Unlimited it draws in upon itself time and breath or the Void, which keeps the places of individual things always distinct. (Frag. 201R)

AGENT:

– Are you talking about gravity? Cornford? Always distinct or a list of anecdotes… Ala Romana de la Rose: “…the sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.” Hey, you hungry?

WRITER:

– Let me finish! Takes book back, briskly.

“The Pythagoreans also asserted the existence of the Void, and that there comes into the Heaven, from the unlimited breath which heaven breathes, the Void also, which keeps things distinct, the Void being regarded as a sort of separation between things that are next to one another; and this occurs first in numbers…”.

Symphony No.9 From the New world, begins playing.

He got that Chronotope right on target. Hallucinating future chronotopes!

AGENT:

– What? How?

WRITER:

– And Historians, let alone Writers can’t give policy advice? What kind of Ivory Tower is that — “don’t learn from our mistakes”. Hell, artists can make mistakes right up there with the best of them. I mean, “Give peace a chance”, and all that. Every band should have it’s foreign policy, that’s what democracy is, a real mess! If only fascism wasn’t so orderly, and communism so confused about liberty and motivation, with it’s “let’s build a huge bureaucracy — Let’s make it all bureaucracy…”. Jump right in, were all still learning this mud wrestling.

AGENT:

– Or Simonyi, he´s decided that rock rolled authority on out the eastern gate. My word, the poets take the castle! Sargent Pepper at the gate. Just up the road from Kafka´s. If Lenin could have only seen it! But we are leaping around again. Can’t you think in straight lines for a few minutes? If you want to be a maker of movies, deal with fiction rather than fact!

WRITER:

(Pulls out napkin, draws 4 dots)

- Then the second airplane hit. The second plane swept away normality and made us all foreigners in New York. The beginning and the end. The world consciousness was deported to N.Y., wondering what’s next. And we’re on the couch on Fred’s front porch with the Buddha’s question: meet suffering, tragedy, crime, terrorism, certain death… with magnanimity and generosity?

AGENT:

– Can’t we keep this more patriotic and statesman-like?

WRITER:

– But patriotism only works when it’s globalized. Good globalization, like good cholesterol. Nationalized patriotism gets ugly fast, economic globalization always had a thin gruel to offer, depending on which side of the ladle you’re on. We have to go back trying to fit Vermont and Virginia together. We have to choose, Great Great Uncle Henry Lee’s school of revolutionary thought, or the boot! These right wing republicans have no monopoly on patriotism. We’llglobalize politics, democratize the economy. Sit, boy. Heel! We’ll put public members on corporate boards, not just “independent” directors, Ralph Nader on GM, Tom Hayden on GE, David Boise on Microsoft. Were not out of ideas, were out of revolution! We’ll show ém what independence means. The future is ours! There’s a whole arsenal in the armory of non-violent social change besides electoral politics. Look at South Africa. You couldn’t mobilize white college kids to support the ANC´s military efforts, read terrorism, but divestment resolutions by pension funds, shareholder resolutions. It worked, we won! They were falling out of their chairs at Harvard to get to the front of the march.

An escalation of strategy… launch global civil campaigns in the noosphear! Globalise foreign policy. A trilateral commission except for a change of form… a cellular automata as social machine in the noosphear! Real politic is at a disadvantage in the “hearts and minds” contest. That’s where the future is, if you’re concerned about the what, why, when. The future of the world is up for grabs, and maybe, the “Hearts and Minds” are gunna win this round. Give peace a chance. Girls say yes to boys who can spell noosphear. We are the word!

Those are the skills we need to sharpen. Europe is practicing a lot of globalized patriotism. National boundaries are becoming like local folk festivals. It matters where you are, but more important is what you’re going to be eating and drinking. And then there’s all those foreign panties! Interanimation of tongues, Degas Tutu´s every which way. Psychedelic lingerie. The multiverse.

AGENT:

– You’re incorrigible! Are we waiting for sensible boddies to self-organize themselves? And just what in the Sam Beckett does the Uncle Henry Lee School of revolutionary thought have to do with the Archimedes?

WRITER:

– The Parmenides. But it all fits, Celines “lacework of time”, Plato’s dot, revolutionary dinner parties, the beginning… perky pointy breasts with a good colour pallet.

(Napkin with lines all over it, Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”, playing)

Hah, who how. Any what the who how! It’s the underpinning of the whole American Chronotope. It’s synonymous with the frontier, expansion. Probably just an accident, but when a world generation grows up with that music and those associations, it begins to represent the American post, after, next chronotope, from here to advent.

AGENT:

- Let’s walk across the park and get some borsch. 40 percent of all sales from turkey to egg nogg. You seem a little hung up on this chronotopics. Smacks of Russian formalism. A mid-spring coronal mass ejection or a chronotoping stomachion conbinatorics? What’s the new space you’re opening up for us, this timely infinite you’re wrecking?

WRITER:

– God, just look at the last 5 or 700 years in Spain. This mask everyone works so hard to maintain. Repression, denial. It really creates a kind of perversion. You got to meet Pepe. He’s a producer I taught English to over there. We’d meet at his house in winter and go into this outbuilding, a studio filled with reels of film, and swallow a bottle of old red wine, waiting for the fire to warm the room. 3 quarters down the bottle he blurts out with his newly learned words, “Spain is perverse!”

What, I asked?

(Spot on Pepe.)

PEPE:

– Es perverso, he lapsed into Spanish, yo soy un jarro, no es eso. Tiene poco que ver con el sexo.

AGENT:

– This Iberian perversion plot might fit in well between the soup and the bef strognov. They have this Kotlety Po–Kievsky.

WRITER:

– Is that a new drink?

AGENT:

- No, No. Chicken Kiev. Delicious. We lie differently… we have different ways of making truth. Have you ever negotiated foreign rights with a Portuguese Moroccan from Galicia? They take advantage of the fact that you can’t really build a sound argument out of pure logic, they’ll syllogize you from here to chocolatë y churros. Where are you thinking of filming the dialogue, in a theatre?

WRITER:

– Yea, like Our Town. Kinda direct. But kinda ethereal, like opera. La Scala in Milan, New York? Bicocca… Rebirth of the narrative, the narrator getting born. The borderlands of the western edge of time. Dr. Seuss, from here to there, from there to here, funny things are… The Spanish view the world with a pre-Socratic mind. Turns the rational materialist paradygm inside out. They argue under the rubric of “clarity of reason”, a rational reason of reasonableness, to obscure rather than clarify.

AGENT:

“The reason for the unreason to which my reason turns so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of thy beauty.” -Quixote.

We’ll be finishing up with the vodka today.

I think we can figure out how to film this, but La Scala closes on January 1, what I’d like to know is how you’re going to write it?

WRITER:

– Well, with blank paper, and some time. Fish around for some fresh philoso. Sashimi syllogisms. Dream it up. Reach deep into the archetypes of the collective unconscious. That dark murky part of the well. The idea you parked, let decay set in. It’s self-created atmosphere. Moist, humid. Extract it’s DNA, construct it’s shape grammar. Then paint it with your dreams. Feint lines of colour taking shape, an idea. A hologram. “Everything under the sun intact!” Sleep on it. A fino on it’s way to becoming a brandy. A silhouette. I hope I can fix my typewriter. But then, that’s what pens are for, backup. Lot’s of raw material, it’s just sorting it all out, lining up stuff in a row, a job description for my desk. Then splatter it all on the wall and see what it looks like. Go with the stuff that sticks together. Make a story board out of that splatter. We’ll film during construction. The super-critics of the upper galleries sitting on scaffolding! We’ll send a troupe of our Night Cats on patrol. El Moro at the edge of time, al moro de Venecia.

red dot

Scene II — The tea room.

AGENT:

- Yea, or maybe at the Arcimboldi, kind of industrial, but we’ll still need some stage directions.

WRITER:

– You think I should raise the noise to content ratio? Oh hell. That’s why you get a director. They just make it up as they go along. They’ll think were being liberal, giving them all that creative freedom. Give ém some good bud. Soiled sullied Scot ballerinas to transcribe the choreography. Broken lace and garters.

AGENT:

– Could we talk about resolving some little conflicts. Geography for instance. Milan, New York, Venice, Bicocca, the second airplane? And what’s anything got to do with the undergarments of the Scots?

WRITER:

– Jimmy´d hit you over the head for that one. Deconstructing before it’s even been written — He’d just get all over your case. Even if you’re really looking for some kind of useful category or other. I mean, what about poetic speech in the novel? Who’s on first, the poets or the novelists, form and content all over again. Dialogic Imaginary, dueling chronotopes; dancing dirty Scots, resolving little conflicts.

(Rika sits down on Sloan’s lap, wiggling around on his conflict)

RIKA:

– Who’s your friend, Sloan? A new recruit?

AGENT:

– Yea, he’s underground in Spain, subverting 700 years of perversion!

RIKA:

– Sloan darling, I’m having a wake for Chekhov tonight, why don’t you bring along the pervert? I’m sure they’ll be a lot of terribly perverse young ladies he can, what, subvert!

(She puts his hand on her breast, the other nipple getting firmer. Rika leaves.)

AGENT:

What a cock tease. She’s always testing my loyalty to her mother.

WRITER:

– A little detail, Sloan. All the communication between us will happen through your aid.

AGENT:

– But why. God, you don’t like me or what?

WRITER:

– I’ve got an economist friend in Washington, a Senior Fellow, and I think that’s a compliment, even for someone middle-aged.

AGENT:

– Yea. It’s like way tenured down real good. A title, like Sir somebody, but it’s not hereditary, unless you’re from Spain. Harf Harf… A grown-up. Senior Fellows get the benefit of the doubt, but have to do a lot of explaining themselves.

WRITER:

– So this Senior Feller, tenured this way and that, informs me that deals where there’s an intermediary always work out better. And he was trying to figure out why, and the only explanation left standing was because through an intermediary it is so much more effective lying.

AGENT:

– Hey, that’s my department. You’re supposed to be telling the truth! Don’t you remember why you came to me in the first place? You couldn’t even fill up a post card with a description of your sacred Pink Noise, I make it up as I go along, bla, bla, bla, until someone picks it up and reads it. An intermediaries intermediary, OB/GYN?

WRITER:

– The lie we need to be convincing about is this exaggeration that we do to each other. Both of those images have to stick to the wall. So those are the rules of engagement. After all, I still have to write this thing. These stage directions don’t mean anything, except for the broken lace. If you want to be helpful, write AGENT — then add your own dialogue!

AGENT:

– So, what do we do with Pepe? I can’t believe you picked a name like Pepe. Two quick syllables, sounds so cliché. Everyone will think he’s a moist Mexican. Ya know “a yondo rancho grande”.

WRITER:

– That’s his name, call him what you want. Diego?

AGENT:

– Sounds like a city.

WRITER:

(Pulls the napkin from under the Kalashnikov)

- Do you like the black eggs or the red ones?

(brutally smears the red caviar on buckwheat crepes)

AGENT:

(Grimaces)

I like to look at them, I only eat them, eventually, cause they cost a lot, and I’d feel pretty stupid if I didn’t, so be my guest.

(Grimaces again)

WRITER:

(Draws picture on napkin.)

AGENT:

– Is that the Pepe splatter?

WRITER:

– Yea. With the good ones, something always sticks. With Pepe it was this perversion comment. The phone must have rung, because we never talked about it again.

AGENT:

– How you gunna write about Pepe if you stop the dialog just as it gets started?

WRITER:

– So this idea gets stuck someplace, and I don’t know why. I get the sense that it explains something but I can’t quite picture it.

AGENT:

– I can’t either.

(waiter comes up)

WAITER:

– May I get you another Kalashnikov?

AGENT:

– Talls. Ok. Reinforcements are on the way. You can’t just massacre characters the minute they get onto stage. Disappoint, frustrate people right off the bat.

WRITER:

– Take everything under the sun intact. A big tent, a large purple dot. Don’t you just love a circus band? A little off-beat, but pretty good when things get moving. Hungarian folk music. Gogals band. There’s a lot of rough characters to get flying in formation, truth, time, what must be said!

AGENT:

– Now things are getting way out of hand. Can’t we keep things simple?

WRITER:

– It’s the same font. The Greeks, who dope smoking Imans found a particularly rich humus. Hell, they almost took over the whole world. We’ve seen this story before. Spain was the big megaphone. Critical mass in Cordoba, The Alhambra, Valencia. And all this when the rest of Europe was eating raw meat! The Greeks, the Muslims and the Jews, the fecund flesh of knowledge. That’s where you’ll find the 72 fresh virgins! Holly fucking! Paradise is always a backward glance. Just ask the Atlantians in Cadiz.

AGENT:

– You’re serious about this 700 years of perversity!

WRITER:

– Well, just look around. We’re all thinking of the future as the recent past. But the well…

AGENT:

- …or the swamp?

WRITER:

- …is deeper than that. It’s the search for lost time, again and again!

AGENT:

– So, where’s Pepe?

WRITER:

– Begins drawing on napkin again. Waiter brings drinks.

“Great, more ammunition.” He pulls out the napkin from under his tall.

AGENT:

– It looks like my job description is re-supply and lying!

To waiter: could we have Yarpakh Dolmasy, you´ll love these, bulgur rather than rice.

WRITER:

– Sounds Greek.

AGENT:

– Armenian.

WRITER:

– Holding up napkin, hands it to AGENT.

The Pepe pour!

(Arrows, lines and circles indicating what part of the napkin went with which part of the stage directions.)

WRITER:

- Binary. With Plato´s two, the indefinite two, Arostotle could explain anything! “When the first unit had been constructed… at once the nearest parts of the Unlimited began to be drawn and limited by the limit.”

WRITER reads from napkin:

Looking for house in light snow, dim lights, camera inside car. Finds house, rings bell. No answer. Rings again, no answer. Opens door, dog escapes, walks up to house — birds in winter, knocks, Moroccan maid leads him to outbuilding. Fire going, poorly, in little pot bellied wood stove. Moroccan leaves, starts blowing fire.

AGENT:

– They make them with lamb. The yogurt and cinnamon really works.

WRITER:

– Can I have your napkin. Maybe you could ask for some more.

(Film sequences, describe napkins. Mary Poppins style, Dick´s stick. Then Arbian nights, Casablanca, when dialogue proceeds.

Dreamy remembrances — film library, conversations, wine. Story of grandfather told from grandfathers point of view. Back to perversion comment. Phone rings.)

AGENT:

– 50 Years, recent past.

WRITER:

– Bottom of the well… Let’s start again at the beginning. Remember, the search for the beginning. Lost time. I was sitting on the couch with my then 2 year old, and she asks, Daddy read me a story. On top of the sowing box was Plato’s Parmenides. I picked it up and began reading… “from solid figures come sensible bodies. The elements of these are: fire, water, earth, air; these change and are wholly transformed, and out of them come the cosmos…” And I didn’t know what to think of it. The broken lacework of time? I was eating with a gardener and I brought the book along. He knew right off what it meant. It was the foundation of his life’s work. From soup to nuts. We need more napkins.

AGENT:

– Our stuffed vine leaves. Jack, could we have 10 cocktail napkins, like these. Holds 4 drawn napkins up to waiter.

WRITER:

Hungrily stuffs 3 in his mouth, one after another, using his fingers. The beginning and the end. “The universe may last forever, but life may not”. Blows a big hole in the whole plot. Were still trying to figure out gravity and Hawking has the gall to ask if there are “Black Hole Explosions” or not! Warped time-spacedodecahedrons and the general theory of Iberian perversity. That Kristavan abjection. Good reason to worry. “Giving birth… Wrecking the infinite”. A doctor said to wash your hands before the birth in the 19th century, but it took until a novelist in the 1940’s to put it on the headstone: her Doctor touched a corpse and then her vagina, and didn’t wash up first.

It’s all so tragic. Birth was supposed to be forever, wasn’t it? If Fred’s right, we’ve got it all wrong! Radical change now, while we can. Really increases the urgency of deciding when to be aBODHISATTVA . Spiritual engagement. Magnanimity and generosity or nihilism? It all depends on how you take the “I am not” spiel. Good and evil all over again. We must choose and pretty soon. Eternity just might have it’s limits.

AGENT:

I like the sensitive bodies, fecund flesh and the 72 virgins part. How you maneuvered a sex scene into all those platonic solids, was a refreshing break.

Dips stuffed vine leaf into the yogurt and cinnamon.

- The Roman of the rosy flesh on the never ending quintessential pentagonal faces! This was turning into a dying puppet theater. I´m happy they all fit!

(Noisily, sloppily eats as he talks. Mouth full. Lot’s of yogurt. )

- Don’t you think that monologue to start things off is a little slow? They’ll all fall asleep. This isn’t a novel, is it? Can’t you pick up the tempo and give it a nice back-beat, something like: “In this contrapuntal narrative stream there is more than one coda to decode.” A little more peppy. Cut to, cut to, cut to, five times a minute for 180 minutes. 900 cuts to somewhere!

WRITER:

– Christ! I’m just trying to tell a story, one word at a time. What, cut to a Souza march? The symphony, the lace work of time. Dancing dirty Scott’s. World time! That’s the back-beat, the Pheado!

AGENT:

– There you go again. Synthian nomads, Scottish tutu´s, 72 virgins. That’s a mouthful!

WRITER:

– But you’re just looking at it one thread at a time. It’s the lacework of time, all heaven… sensible bodies. A point, a line, a plane. White noise into pink. The Hallucinated lacework of time; synthian silk stockings and Scottish tutu’s. 123. 123. 123. You only see the end of your own dick, while there´s the whole itty bitty wiggly thing holding it all up, and the problem of how to photograph it from all 26 angles.

AGENT:

– Yea, a mess! It’s starting to sound like a polka!

WRITER:

– We could do Flamenco with the Gardner, you quark gazer. Canellas and ____-dancing, singing, banging on a box.

AGENT:

– Or opera? Who’s that plump lady from Cataluna?

WRITER:

– …Or Opera. Maria fits his character, he said deferentially. Be patient. This is just the second act. Thanks Jack, as the waiter places a pressed copper rack of soft avocado-green cocktail napkins on the table.

AGENT:

• So there are second acts in American lives! Fire when ready.

(Three pieces of bulgur, fly arching across the table.)

WRITER:

- I show up on time to the gardener’s studio and walk up to the front door. Fernando called himself a gardener after something written on a Frenchmans gravestone. The corpse actually put gardener right on his tomb. A novel on his putridificador! Fernando had gotten his BA in Philosophy just in case. He must have been a bad student cause he seems to be still catching up, becoming a gardener because he didn’t have anything else to do. So rather than be idle, his in-law’s friends would pay him to worry about the soul’s of their gardens.

So I show up and notice the ice on the two long rectangular pools stretching out at the top of the stairs, meeting at a moat leading to a well locked door.

AGENT:

– I’m Lost.

WRITER:

– Hang on. So with the Parmenides in my hand, Fernando said kind of bluntly, “thought we had canceled?”

AGENT:

– This is beginning to become a habit. Suffocating newborn voices before we even get to know them.

WRITER:

– First I heard about it, I argued. He nervously let’s me through the door.

FERNANDO:

– I’ve got a client coming at five and I’ve got to clean up, Fernando explains, ready to cut off my head if he needs to get rid of me. But I’m curious. We can talk as I clean, he decides, knowing that he’ll loose $50 if he cancels without notice.

WRITER:

- Everything was at a 90% angle. Squares and rectangles of all varieties. Not very much planted and then really small, boxy and orderly. You definitely can’t get through that door if they don’t want you too.

AGENT:

– So you knocked?

WRITER:

– At first I knocked, then I kind of banged. Fernando opened the door, yanked open the door. Seemed like the weight of all that wood was bending the hinge. Fixing it would have been a minor engineering project. So Fernando had the whole place added and subtracted, multiplied and divided. But not just any old way. He turned 3 millennia of sensible bodies into pure harmony by the numbers. 4 divided by two equals two. Longer than high by two. The indefinite two. Here you got Cornford eying Aristotle again… …numbers are… …the whole heaven.

Fernando turns on the hose and climbs into the pool. I’ve got my brand new 70 percent off, shined, one hundred percent leather wingless toed Loutsse dress boots on, but follow him in.

FERNANDO:

– I’m trying to find a leak, the water level is dropping too fast.

WRITER:

- I pick up the looped-up part of the hose so the debris floats down the drain. Fernando puts down the hose and picks up a push broom, pushing the leaves to the growing puddle around the drain.

FERNANDO:

– What are you reading, pausing, handing the broom to me and picking up the hose.

WRITER:

– The Parmenides. Cornford.

FERNANDO:

– Who?

WRITER:

– Plato.

FERNANDO:

Oh, Platon, el Parmenides.

(Fernando recites passage in Spanish)

Un punto, how do you say that?

WRITER:

– A point.

FERNANDO:

- Einstein reduces it to e = MC2 = 1. One world. The algebra of one world. You know a “…table of ij algebras where i is greater than or equal to j is the degree of a special element and j is dimension of the space: i = 0, line i = 1, plane i = 2, solid i = 3.”

AGENT:

– Now you’re going Pythagorean. Must we cover spiritual geometry? Keep to the point. Tell me a story. My word!

WRITER:

- I thought a nice garden was what someone made with too much money. But Fernando had all the dots connected, from the Parthenon to the Rolling Stones. Dignity — pride = humility. A big symphony. The whole heaven. 1,2,3. I didn’t know what to think!

(A bloody soup arrives)

WRITER:

– What’s that?

AGENT — The first course. Past as prologue. You can ask for sour cream, it turns everything pink. Pink or blood stains? You’ve got to decide. You’ll never get them out.

WRITER:

- We finished cleaning up and Fernando sent me off. Walked me through the gate to make sure I was leaving.

AGENT:

– Can’t we get your Gardener to talk with us a while?

WRITER:

– Take your pick? Pepe, the gardener or Abel, who you haven’t met yet. It’s a medley. Three songs threaded together. A mix, a la Cabra con Esquivel!

AGENT:

– Who’s Abel?

WRITER:

He helped me figure out the meaning of the dots. You remember, “But the third act remained as song, a song I am singing now, with pen and ink”.

(begins singing Pusicdaw buget sonset…, Waiters and cooks join in. Shows AGENT the third act splatter… the yellow dot.)

- We went all around the dot, a point, a line a plane… sensible bodies, and were right back at the artistic consciousness navigator. The poetry of meta knowledge navigation, the oracle, let a thousand flowers bloom!

AGENT:

– God, were finally moving on.

WRITER:

– This is when we build toward the climax. People will want to have sex right after the movie. That’s what’s defined as pornography isn’t it? You know, in a legal way?

AGENT:

– Well pornography now days makes you want to have sex, while you’re at the movie! Now you’re really fucking my reputation. “I am a lying pornographer.” If you’re not arousing, appealing to and gratifying their lust, passions and sexual desires, nobody will show up. Is there no honor left in this profession? Those mahogany panelled walls stand for something: the past! Tradition! Honor! Trust! Erotic technology, really!

You know these geniuses in the White House take things pretty literally. You try to explain some subtle differences to the Attorney General and he may aw shucks you off to the pokey right now! It’s not such a leap from someone you just don’t like to enemy combatant. J. Edgar would have declared half of Hollywood enemy combatants, he just made it up as he went along… My God, the Pentagon is running a global web of prisons, and Karl Rove is deciding who gets in and if they get out.

WRITER:

– A trusted intermediary, motivates. Deception is just part of the repertoire. Same as political organizers. Just what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth anyway? I’ll give it my best shot, you know, good faith. But I’ll still have my doubts. The pornographic party is just another way of showing a Bakhtinian marketplace. The power of laughter… Another way of looking at what Fred is saying: it’s all going away, so we can laugh about it, can’t we? All the while making regular deposits in the old magnanimity account. 123. I am not. Blue, red, yellow, purple. Take joy in the suffering of the world.

AGENT:

– Purple?

WRITER:

– It’s like bodies on the way to heaven. Sensible bodies. Transformation. Transparent to the whole pink noise novelization.

AGENT:

– How you gunna film pink noise? Slow motion?

WRITER:

– This is where it gets pepe, zip, zippy, zip… boom.

(Esquivel music begins playing.)

AGENT:

– So what about pepe?

WRITER:

– So I called him up a few years later…

AGENT:

– That time problem again, mumbling.

WRITER:

– I was doing all this stuff in my basement. Most days the only thing that moved was the water dog rolling over, writing this script.

AGENT:

– Or this novelness!

WRITER:

– And this pink noise kept wafting in. Pepe´s busy moving his family to the coast. Selling the house, relocating Maura films; can’t get him on the phone…

AGENT:

– You suffocated him again.

WRITER:

– But this pink noise keeps lurking around.

AGENT:

– I thought it was purple?

WRITER:

– The dots… The dot. The purple dot. The dialogic, from the primary colors, becoming secondary. Evidence of the transformation. White into pink… transience, sensible bodies. This idea inspired the Parthenon, Bach, La Graja. The whole heaven… So then the testing started, met him pike horses, how do we make it?

I had to figure out how it worked. Some smarty-pants radical lawyer advising our just maybe VC financier, he had even agreed to be on the board, blurted out: do you know what the dots mean?

AGENT:

– Do you? What, Hermes? That “sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is no where?

WRITER:

– Of course I don´t! It was a hallucination, like trying to remember precise details from a dream.

So then, how do you build it, motivate it? Because it’s also an imaginary social organism, a social machine. We´re forming nerve endings, another sensitive skin.

…and just what do those dots represent. So I drew a bunch of pictures, put them together and started trying to get in touch with you.

AGENT:

Nick of time. I don’t know where I’d be without you. Really, a resuscitation of Goethe:

“Everywhere eternity is stirring

And everything tends towards non-being in order to participate in being?” Oh yea, we´ll just get some unactors to make our not a movie! Oh boy, then we just go ahead and decentralize the universe, and call it theater! No stage directions because Saint Boneventure whispered to you “everything is equal and everywhere. Center stage, the center of our universe which is “not in heaven but everywhere, all space is equal.” That´s your secret opening to the underground? Have some pride. Dignity x vanity = pride.

WRITER:

- IBM came out with this mainframe, which is really where I’m coming from, connecting mainframes to cable networks. 1987. We were all over that stuff, smoking pot, but the interface was always too hard to make.

…So IBM has this new Linux only mainframe that can run 400 Linux sessions — in your closet. Hook it up to fibre cable, and now we just do our new generation web interface, the dots, a picnic in Plato’s Garden, Curl controls, rules, billing!

IBM was like finding an old pair of shoes… Slow downs are when you want comfort, and these guys have been doing mission critical apps forever. Stick all the disruptive technology under the hood, and put a 50´s suspension and a sexy grill in front. The IBM thing just triggered all these memories. The 80´s were great. Stumbling into these data centers, a Cosco full of star wars stuff, a tape library that went for two blocks; with Suki, drunk and stoned, picking up 50 boxes of print outs in a topless jeep.

AGENT:

– And a minor role for la Roman de la Rose, that reaching back and the hot pink resurgent mainframe. A climax for the mainframe? And in the third act!

WRITER:

– You’re still going one thread at a time — put on your rose colored Soto glasses. I am not, and I can see. The whole enchilada in one gulp!

It all lights up when you get the dots flying in formation. Semantic web, well a sensitive, thoughtful sort of web; for the am nots, a sentient web. And why not a meta-knowledge base? The oracle was there all along in each and every one of us, all together now, all together now!

AGENT:

– Oh, come on! Form, structure, tradition!

WRITER:

– But… look at the poetry of it all. An artistic consciousness navigator, reflecting Plato in its miorrors, in the reflection of Plato.

AGENT:

– Can we be literal, for a while? A story, characters that talk. Movies can’t be unusual. There’s a whole industry producing blueprints for them. Proven commercial models.

I’m your AGENT! I’m in this for the money, like everyone else. Do you even know what tuition is at Radcliff? A little vanity goes a long way, try inflating your dignity with it. It works.

WRITER:

– What’s wrong with Dega´s tutu’s choreographing visualizations of shapecolor grammars. Building a meta-knowledge base with Ferdinand’s ellipses and the Phaedo´s laws of form. Computational colorforms, the meta-knowledge base is a hallucination! The whole heaven, all those ladies in the chorus at the top of their lungs!

What gives… are the permanent forever Universal Resource Identifiers of Form and Function not the holy grail? Wolframs right, follow the dots… or the little squares and see where they go. Write their rules, explain their algorithms. Cellular automata as user interface, the rules of consciousness, the algorithms of spacetime… it was written plain all along, we just had to peer inside, and what, transparent to the lacework of time, all right, a nice pair of panties, time in red fishnet and heels… fuck time! Fucking spacetime! Transformation, reproduction. Born again, searching for lost time. That’s where the future is.

yellow dot

Act III

creshendo, al galope!

Scene I. Party. New York. The Host, our wealthy publishing heiress, the daughter of an important, rich, recently dead, literary woman. Very elegant, old apartment. Wood and glass. Ballerinas in black stockings with garters, colored bra´s, wired white and marine green lacy tutu´s. Stylized Degas. Like an image, comic, abstract painted faces. Rough, friendly. Night Cats in red. Fun lingerie, Moulin Rouge, in sequence of dots, Blue, Red, Yellow, Purple Bra´s, AGENT nuzzles boob´s, tutu lights up. Three ring circus. Circus music, Hungarian folk music, Beethoven’s 9th Choral. All together now! Host brings Night Cats. “…terribly perverse young ladies”.

In the taxi Agent asked Writer:

AGENT:

So `Sus, who are your influences?

WRITER: Hefner more than Flint, but (the Lover) made an impression, Kafka and Quixote, you know, in the original, in the case of the former, the latter… but there were others!Over Sized mamaleries on the easter bunny. But they don’t dance.

AGENT:

And what do you call them, a fruit cocktail?

WRITER:

Macedonia. A dialogic imaginary, if you want to name names, except it was much more promoscious than a duo. More democratic, but juggling a couple at a time, crisping and blurring focus; these butterfly’s got to fly in formation, remember?

I mean, you can have sex naked or you can experience french lingerie with your pants down in the park, over and over.

AGENT:

– Her mother had great parties. So I’ll be Sancho, the practiced, practical. I’ll have mine sunny-side up, you just need a few days in the morning sun.

WRITER:

- Were gunna make music tonight!

(Wafts of Hungarian Folk music heard. Laughter)

AGENT:

– I’m not sure what you’re trying to do… revive Russian formalism? I didn´t think there was any breath left in em. Come on, what about Checkov? Julia Kristeva, that’s so 80´s. I’m not sure about a movie of the dead and the dying. I can sell the second airplane! You suggested you had something fresh, but they’re all dead… is this going to be theatre or warmed over beer?

Assorted chronotopes, tied up in a knot. You’re in New York, not Bakersfield for heavens sake. Try and hold a tune for a couple of bars. You’re going every which way and there’s still nothing to cut to! I want 689 cut to´s.

Cut to fuck. Cut to boobs. Cut to cloud burst, boom, boom, boom. 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, Fibonacci numbers don’t play well on Broadway. Think waltz, 123412341234. Not this cellular automata polka. What’s that, the new new thing we’ll have to get confused about. The novel is dead, or dying and you’re proposing replacing Kristeva with Wolfram on our coffee table?

WRITER:

– Well, what about time and space, they’ve been around a while. An inward glance at the rules, reproduction, like in replication, reusable. A universal language for the universe. An alphabet for time and space. Even if there isn’t any, or not much, and we still don’t know how much, and when is a bit iffy, depending on whose clock you’re watching. Is it going to tick slower up there? Are “space and time linked, so that distances shrink and time slows down at high speeds”?… Knots on rope were once new. …but put them into the void, and you get mathematics.

AGENT:

– You can marry space and time in a novel, but no one reads them, so what do you need an agent for?… HardCover Fiction is what you should be salivating over, what is this, Rablasian Sci Fi, with a Pheado back Beat? Think “the seventh book of the “Milford Years” series,… Book after book after book, that’s what we do here. We sell books! It pays the bills, sends the kids to college, a pad on the beach, an olive grove in Napa. God, you can afford a mistress and still contribute to the Philharmonic. You get to hang out with people who say “whom” more than they should and change their underwear frequently.

ITALIANATE:

- So what do you do? Asked the loud, thin, Italianate with the over-stuffed mamaleries…

Our writer had been turning on and the question startled him, as the signal began to screech.

WRITER:

– I’m the unrecognized talent at the wake. She invited me to lower the success quotient a decibel or two. I hang out in the basement all day long, waiting for a good idea to walk in. Eliminate everything I can. Took out the phone when the Adsl line was installed. Someone with a job would have had to drive for an hour and knock down the door to offer me it. It’s hard to hear the phone ringing upstairs over Curtis Mayfield, all that base and the ala carta doce-voicetta…

ITALIANIATE:

– It doesn’t sound like “type A” kind of work.

WRITER:

– It certainly doesn’t pay like type “A” work. Swimming in red ink ain´t so bad, you just bump along with the current.

ITALIANIATE:

– How do you pay the mortgage?

WRITER:

– Rent.

ITALIANIATE:

– Rent.

WRITER:

- Late.

ITALIANIATE:

– I’m sorry to hear that.

WRITER:

– Well the dividend is time.

ITALIANIATE:

– Don’t you get bored with nothing to do?

WRITER:

No, living on the side of a mountain, dead broke and beyond. A decade like that, just sitting around, waiting for something to show up. So something did occur to him and he wrote it down… around the time the Confession of Professor Y to the current inquisition was bluntly delivered: “I am not an artist but I have a good memory for Flowers… Janine… Marie-Louise… (…) what´s written plain, that isn´t much… its transparency that counts, the lacework of time as they say…”

Louie Ferdinand Celine

When you look out ahead of you and see a decade waiting for you to knot up… –the last thing you are is bored!

ITALIANIATE:

– You do nothing for decades? What does your CV look like, “Jacked-off a lot, sat on my butt, 1993-2003”?

WRITER:

– A pretty blank page, splat.

ITALIANIATE:

– Why bother.

WRITER:

– I don’t. So what do you do, he asked challengingly?

ITALIANIATE:

– Mortgage Banker.

WRITER:

– Are you one of the strangers, as in “I get by on the kindness of strangers”, kind of Mortgage Bankers?

ITALIANIATE:

No. It all reduces down to a number, your FICA. You’re just an algorithm to us. But I do often fuck on the first date. Relieves all the tension, right off the bat. Instant copulation, just to get it out of the way. I like, want to know, is it worth it?

I fuck, am fucking, been fucked. A rose is a rose is fucking… a rosy FICA mortgage banker whom by is going to get loosie goosey with the who how, now.

I like, do, speed dating, but fast fucking’s where I’m at. Quicky speed fuck dating. We’re a growing demographic. Rules, no rules! Hello to insertus potus. And I come first. Surprise, hound dog! You want to be fucked, don’t let them jerk themselves off and call it fucking you. You got fucked. They jacked off in your box, sister, now addressing an evening dress lovely. Go get yourself fucked. Talking about it ain’t fucking. Doing and remembering. And fucking again, that’s my soto motto, toto.

WAITER to Italianate: May I get you another Kalishnakoff?

ITALIANIATE: Yea, go ahead on, we’ll have a round, as she forced the stranger walking by to a halt. Thirsty, she asked, breathing into his ear, a warm whisper.

John: What’s in it?, her prey asked cautiously.

Italianate: …Icy Vodka and frozen cranberry squares. Very Amagasette. Where do you summer?

(Pirouettes in Tutu, rubs hand across stranger’s hip and buttock, while ending address, leading stranger away toward bar.)

AGENT:

- She could hurt ya. You have to write for polite society. Those women in the low cut black evening dresses are talking about you up on the top floor.

- AGENT mocks Evening Dress Lovely: “He couldn’t help being that way, because he had never resolved the inner torment of his youth.” What you got is that fluffy air that time forgot! It´s a one way ticket to nowhere. But it´s there, it isbecoming. Smells pre-columbian. Hot and sweet. You notice that you been some time in the stream bouncing along with the current. Every which way, another malformed proof of the Poincare Conjecture.

Scene — Luminarias digression capsule, like an ad. Cocktail Party, Clarinet Woody Manhattan city lights exaggerated, surreal. The evening dress lovelies are addressing the Agent, as through a video conference.

First Evening Dress Illuminaria:

– OK, but in spite of his dark side, he still manages to inaugurate the post, after-modern, next aesthetic and establish a completely new form of chronotope even if it doesn´t solve the Poincare Conjecture. Philip Roth could have been addressing Jesus and not ___, “…premonitions of failure, couldn’t be entirely curbed by the liberating feeling that an artistic about-face usually inspires, at least in the early stages, of not quite knowing what you are doing.”

Second Evening Dress Illuminaria:

– He bends over time space and spanks it. I do enjoy his chronotopics in lace and garters. It’s beautiful balance. Young. Heady. An enjoyable, refreshing breeze blowing across the American burlesque; lives locked in routine, monasteries, reified into a single dot, held together with a centripetal gravity, the doors wide open… but nobody leaves. Our writer creates identities co-mingled into the indistinguishable, as they search for another label, a brand that can liberate souls from monotony, becoming only more perverse. He posits an alternative to the grave yards filled with monuments to the mundane. The middle way.

Third Evening Dress Illuminaria:

Older southern screech.

- …it’s an inchoate doodle of a first-growth experience… you just can´t keep dogs from chasing cars, joined in a purient bitter falcate. Iberian perversity is beginning to smell again. Those putrid centuries of buried humanity… staggering around looking to avoid the next assault. They simply won´t let him loose with the Pierre Cardinbrassier of American Letters for one flabby disappointment after another, tragedy and false starts, time and again. Always an old wound open… Gabo cautioned us about this kind of an unstiched together filmaker: “¿Y cómo evitar que la pelicula convierta en un simple cúmulo de anécdotes?”

Host:

Oh bullshit Margaux, guden b i l d u n g s r o m a n ! The perverts just getting warmed up… It´s a picaresque annecdotal combinatorics! A grammar of Archimedic form, all kind of ways to fit together into a tentative back-lit chronotope, though not a very rythmic resolution of the Poincare Conjecture. Es la primera intento de un novato para convieter un cumulo de sufrementos cotediana en un bola de cristal… degamos, una novela. He’s doing for after post-modern Joycean literature what Degas’ ballerinas did for impresionism. And fuck Russian Formalism, anyway. Degas put the sex into impressionism, eroticized impressionism. Not quite the contribution of the first order of Pitol See Pitol el pais………

AGENT:

- Boy, he said southern fried, you’re going to need a lot of coaching. What do you want me to do, write it for you! This is what I need: “the latest volume in a series that began with “The Clan of the Cave Bear.”” Rules, repetition, reproduction, get it? “A populist piece of theater that is very theatrical and entertaining and includes the texture of historical events”; that can play on forever! A little redundant, but it pays.

Host turns to AGENT

HOST:

– So you brought along the pervert?

AGENT:

– We’re trying to build our mid-list, just in case.

Host — Just in case what, people begin reading again. You’re competing with billions that were pored down the new media rat hole. Their marketing budget is $130,000,000 for ring tones. Mama said to watch out for all the little doggies you bring home. Is this a sell signal? You’ve got to be leading a pretty miserable life if you still think reading a novel is “entertainment”. What, our new market demographic are those whom are not prone to expense a movie?

WRITER:

– Thanks for the encouragement.

Host:

– Do shut up. Aren’t you supposed to be in some basement or something, taking notes on other peoples lives?

WRITER:

– I got kicked out of paradise.

(Agent drifts away. Host gets really close to Writer.)

WRITER:

– So what do you think about cellular automata?

Host:

– Is that where two amoeba fuck, automatically?

WRITER:

– Fucking code. Platonic solids. Yah, reproducing codes.

Host:

– Hay, you can’t just wrap your fingers around my bogenvilla, and squeeze…

WRITER:

– Yea, it should be coddled like a young bi-valve, and swallowed.

Host:

– Are you being poetic?

WRITER:

– Don’t you have a tutu?

Host:

– Take your fingers off my bi-valva and I’ll try to respond, Host says without objecting.

WRITER:

(Takes hand away.)

Host:

– Yes, and put that back.

(She does a smear of his hand around her right buttock, curving back along her skirt line, brushing the garters — snapping them a little.)

(Writer raises finger to his mouth, sips)

Host: — Might I see you in it, she asks matter-of-factly?

WRITER:- Caviar and wild cherry, a residue of apple martini…

(Host pulls Writer into office. Host and Writer in chair, somehow, after copulation.)

Host:

– And so how many little babies have you left behind?

WRITER:

– Two little girls.

Host:

– Why do we have to start right off with tragedy? And they wonder how we get “ironic” in the City.

WRITER:

– Oh please, this is not tragedy — I’ll show you tragedy, farce, abjection…

Host:

– Well, Mom sure left me the fatalist gene. Always, always I make the wrong choices in men.

WRITER:

– You’re making me out to be some sort of degenerate.

Host:

Sloan warned me.

Curtains, everyone.

——-Original Message——-

From: David Peck [mailto:davidpeck@wanadoo.es]

Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 4:12 AM

To: Harris, Sloan

Subject: Weigh Station of Destinies

Dear Mr. Harris: Your gate keepers must have made a mistake if you’re reading this. A crack in the barriers to entry, imagined and real, you really should think of firing someone. But the gates are open and I´m running through! The Lost Decade is a Novel, my second. So what do you want to hear, form or content? It looks like a play with a big monologue stuck on the front. What you don´t see yet are the stage directions, they´re next, and then a little bit about who´s who, when, why?

So there was a name change today, “Weigh station of Destinies” is where were at now, it seemed to walk past the first barrier, holding the door open.

Made it fresh and urgent again. Mail is too slow, it´s got to arrive today,everything depends on it. You´ll laugh, light up a good Cuban Cigar, and pour yourself a glass of something nice, and put your feet up on the desk,

and imagine it.

Yours truly,

David Peck Garcia

MAdrid Spain

+34 +91 8530551

——-Mensaje original——-

De: Cluverius, Katharine [mailto:KCluverius@icmtalent.com]

Enviado el: viernes, 21 de mayo de 2004 20:23

Para: ‘davidpeck@wanadoo.es’

Asunto: FW: Weigh Station of Destinies

Dear David:

Thanks for your query regarding WEIGH STATION OF DESTINIES. However, it’s not right for me.

I wish you well with all.

Best regards,

Sloan Harris SH/kc

dictated but not read

Hello Katherine C.: All right, that was a little aggresive. And the Title was a little watered down. It was for some time, “Wrecking the Infinite!, if that Kristevan thing sells, or “Waiting to be Heroes”, if patroitism is moving boxes. A fall back is always “Pink Noise”. But please, take a look at the dialogue. Search for Sloan. It´s really pretty funny and you even have a part. Granted, you don´t seem to be having any of it, but I´m flexible to a tiny degree, and consider it gentlemanly to take rejection well. Like this for example:

AGENT:

— I can tell we’ll finish with the vodka today. I think we can figure out how to film this, but La Scala closes on January 1, what I’d like to know is how you’re going to write it?

WRITER:

— Well, with blank paper, and some time. Fish around for some fresh philoso. Sashimi syllogisms. Dream it up. Reach deep into the architypes of the collective unconscious. That dark murky part of the well. The idea you parked, let decay set in. It’s self-created atmosphere. Moist, humid. Extract it’s DNA, construct it’s shape grammar. Then paint it with your dreams. Feint lines of colour taking shape, an idea. A hologram. “Everything under the sun intact!” Sleep on it. A fino on it’s way to becoming a brandy. A silhouette. I hope I can fix my typewriter. But then, that’s what pens are for, backup. Lot’s of raw material, it’s just sorting it all out, lining up stuff in a row, a job description for my desk. Then splatter it all on the wall and see what it looks like. Go with the stuff that sticks together. Make a story board out of that splatter. We’ll film during construction. The super-critics of the upper galleries sitting on scaffolding! We’ll send a troupe of our Night Cats on patrol. El Moro at the edge of time, al moro de Venecia.

Or this:

AGENT:

— Hey, that’s my department. You’re supposed to be telling the truth! Don’t you remember why you came to me in the first place? You couldn’t even fill up a post card with a description of your sacred Pink Noise, I make it up as

I go along, bla, bla, bla, until someone picks it up and reads it. An intermediaries intermediary, OBGYN?

WRITER:

— The lie we need to be convincing about is this exaggeration that we do to each other. Both of those images have to stick to the wall. So those are

the rules of engagement. After all, I still have to write this thing. These stage directions don’t mean anything, except for the broken lace. If you want to be helpful, write AGENT — then add your own dialogue!

All right, steal a cuban cigar, open up the bosses best bottle of brandy, and put your shoes up on his dest and take a look. It is funny isn´t it?

Signed: David “rejected” Peck Garcia, up on a mountain-side in central Spain. Hoping for a second chance.

——-Mensaje original——-

De: Cluverius, Katharine [mailto:KCluverius@icmtalent.com]

Enviado el: viernes, 21 de mayo de 2004 20:23

Para: ‘davidpeck@wanadoo.es’

Asunto: FW: Wrecking the Infinite

Look Jesus, we gave you a firm, polite, respectful, no. Muzt wez wuze voz alto: “you’re not invited to thizz party”!

You got the ghost letter, she don´t even exist, fiction. A made up name just rejected that little ditty that dribbled in out of your ten years in exilio!

The cruel reality is there are no stage directions, we want to know who does what, not who says what. That doesn´t matter anymore. You pin these talking heads with all your hope, and submit them to an imaginary being who poste-haste dismisses you into oblivian. Rejected by the Sloan Theater, Sloan Harris, maybe you should start in another place in the alphabet.

If you can turn your fabioocci numbers into sensible boddies by sundown cowboy, I´ll take another look. I´ll gamble 5 minutes to your ten years of dribble, but don´t expect much… I am the waymaster and you are not, remember that smart alec, when you address me, you are not because I say so. Your clock just got set back to zero. How do you muster up the arrogance to affect that angry tone of voice. You have voice when I give it to you. Your presumptive artistic consciousness navigator. Get back in your cave. Yah, I want the noise to content ratio, raised. Cut to stage left. You don´t get the girl, or the party or lunch. Solitary confinement. Purgatory. Destinies are determined here, added and subtracted. We´re all stage directions. Nothing moves with out them. Nobody talks, even if you cracked the algorythm to navigate the creative consciousness. We sell rays that people can see, we reify them, then we amplify and project. You have to distill that pink noise into something drinkable. Age it in an oak cask. Let it linger a while, on its way to becoming real, from hallucination to paint, a sherry becoming a brandy, a metaphor making sense. Seduction. Birth. Death. The infinite wrecking, just as it rounds the corner. Trying to userp the way master of destinies, that’s my turf, get out!

Send it to Katherine, if you can somehow put some form to your content. I don´t have time for you. I don´t even read your dribble. You’re a dime a dozen, make believe, maybe what? You have to commit. A play, a novel? One or the other.

I wish you well with all.

Best regards,

Sloan Harris SH/kc

dictated but not read