I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit ejaculation to explain my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods in the middle and all around various obscure dark figures prostrating themselves in worship.

W. N. P. Barbellion
October 22, 1913
(The British Museum Reading Room)


The Break

(1) Happy Birthday, dear sister. Happy birthday celebrants! Congratulations, dear newlyweds!

(2) Action is the conceit of man, yes, but hide it so that it's okay, like a camouflaged fast. On the other hand, indolence - much more, exalted indolence - leave it to people who feel themselves slouch-worthy like the universe.

(3) Yesterday morning, much to my brother's relief (for we can turn the lights off and he can sleep the sleep of the must), I finished Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes. Goodbye eight hundred pages and many thanks.

(4) I am not fit to teach.

(5) Another baroque offering, so far from the last Fuentes I've read, Diana, which already mentions the creation of the "terrible beauty" by the author cum narrator. A whole 'nother animal than his The Death of Artemio Cruz. The Death and the Land share the same gnostic stripes though. Or the same fertile mother. I imagine Diana as Fuentes's rest before, after, or within the exertion of Terra Nostra.

(5) Pity I only found this out after two and a half years.

(6) Terra Nostra surprises with the reimagination of Don Juan umbilically coiled to Don Quixote, Cervantes to Kafka's Metamorphosis, and the New World's Quetzalcoatl to other such Christs. Much of literature rewritten here. Watch out for Pierre Menard, Jean and Javert, Colonel Buendia, Ariadne, and boys born of she-wolves.

(7) The wasted time of children in classrooms. The wasted children of classrooms, of time.

(8) How's the US of A this time of the year?

(9) Now I know what a black kiss means, thanks to the invention of a Tiberius Caesar that promoted the symbolic cross alongside the sexual slavery of the dwarfed and deformed.

(10) April or May. The last novel I read was the book sent by CBS, Mario Vargas Llosas's Feast of the Goat, the bloody juices shimmered despite the dark glass of the translation. I hope I get to read a novel every vacation. The rest of the time I devote to anthologies of poems, short stories, and plays. CBS, I hope, would be happy to know that the book suffered the leafing of three other pairs of hands: my father's, a co-teacher's, and student's. One of them a lover of Minerva, La Mariposa. One other reading it over her sembreak as a requirement. The last or first just had time on his hands and sat the book on his palm to kick time out like a whipped mongrel.

(11) If you force a vacation on someone, is it still a vacation? If you force a vacation on yourself, is it still a vacation?

(12) Sincere thanks to friends who severed ties. This is the best of all possible worlds when the shoe speaks and proposes to the man how it is unfit. In this case, the women tell me: you are a shoe, you are an overbearing heel, you are unfit. And when they tell me it is a good world, I believe them with all my heart.

(13) Congratulations, dear newlyweds! My sister, happy birthday. My brother, sleep tight.

(14) Gadzooks plus twin exclamation points? The only diarist more pathetic than the author of this abomination is one who would quote that author verbatim.

(15) Never waste a compliment on the vain.

(16) If you force your friendship on someone, is it still a friendship? If man ought to walk around like Plato's Socrates creating quarrels to define friendship: what is love?

(17) How's Singapore this time of the year?

(18) Fuentes discourages me to type one more letter, drop another drop of ink on a sea that will drown itself. The way Fuentes writes a long sentence reminds me of Joaquin. Joaquin reminds me that I ought to write that long sentence writhing, pullulating in my stomach. Cervantes would say the same thing if I listened to him any closer than I could bear him.

(19) Both my chalk and pen belongs to a hand with more fingers and lines.

(20) Congratulations, dear newlyweds! Sixty-what days till Christmas?

(21) My friends, it's a good thing there's more to me than me, there's more to you than you, and there's more to us than a cosmos. Get down and lazy on me! We have all the time in the world! Eat, drink, envy, marry! I'll say goodbye so that tomorrow's a day with one less exclamation point.