What’s the matter with the mill?

Well, I had a little corn, I put it in a sack - brought it to the mill and come right back…

Approximately 5:43 AM, when the sky has the sort of subtle darkness which is only an intimation of a pale dawn to come, and I’m blearily beginning a day’s writing with a ritualistic clove cigarette (bad things will happen if I don’t observe this sacrament and set the volume to a prime number), adjectives regarding Einstein (batty?), and eighty year-old blues—and that’s Memphis Minnie, mournfully crooning over the busted mill in with a delicate twang, she herself and her lover Kansas Joe strumming their guitars like rainfall on the fields of the Great Depression.

Hey, I think, dramatically mouthing the words for the Audience Of The Invisible (like ya do). I so could do that. I could play the guitar. Or the banjo. I so totally could do that.

What's the matter with the mill? It done broke down…

Which is how with David’s encouragement (because I believe in fairies and a secret lunar language spoken by the moths, but he’s the sweetest one who always believes in me) I’ve ended up here, on the antique cartographical carpet with my legs crossed as once we did in first grade music class (xylophone solo, thank you very much), a guitar cradled in my lap.

I so can do this. I’m fairly sure that were I to search online I could find a tabbycat with at least a ukulele, so I must have a chance. But I shan’t make pretenses, either—this is sort of hard! Not in the crafting-a-lifesize-map-of-Brazil sort of way, but in the I-had-better-practice way. And what about the virtuosos, with their priceless autographs and lustrously blistered thumbs—how do they do it so fast? Apart from a teenage foray into the standup string bass (oh, for the utter cool of pizzicato jazz), I have little experience with the architecture of music; much of what I know of octaves has been derived from reading old books about Pythagoras (who in the structure of harmony found the mathematics of the universe itself, and inscrutably also believed eating beans to be a sin).

But now I’m learning chords—as of now I believe I favor E minor, as it is melancholy and requires but two mournful fingers—and the scales of does and rays and the blues…or I’m very much trying. In spite of my love for the jazz groove of “I’ve Got Rhythm,” and Gene Kelly tapdancing in the gay Paree of Hollywood’s golden days

—well, “I got music, I got starlight, I got my man”, but I have not got rhythm, yet.

What's the matter with the mill? It done broke down… What’s the matter with the mill? I can't get no grinding, tell me what's the matter with the mill…

I like my guitar, its voluptuous curves and hollow heart, and I think that in honor of my pioneering maestro muse (who also toured with the Ringling Brothers and wore bangles of real silver dollars), I shall call it Minnie.

And learn to play “What’s the Matter With the Mill,” though mayhap it shall take me eighty years.

Excuse me, but I was told there would be poop, or, witchcraft, or, vine-tending

I may be alone, or at least neurologically skewed, in wishing that I was handling a pail of fecal matter. But fertilizing our vineyard on its way to November somnolence, I find myself rather peeved that unlike my preconceptions we use chemicals, not fresh manure still redolent of a cow’s tasty snack. It’s simply that shoveling poop seemed somehow more authentic, as if stinkiness amounts to a sort of peasanty baptism. Now I suppose I’ll be forced to compensate by wearing a babushka, which I don’t entirely mind. Really, our chemical fertilizer is just pale pebbles of some sort of numinous unknown substance, reminiscent of something. Wait, that’s it! kitty litter!

The way to do it, we’ve learnt, is simply to sprinkle the pellets in a circle around those crones’ roots, in a halo appearing so radiant and anomalous against damp soil and moss with the properties of neon. The loops make me think of nothing so much as witchcraft, some tenuous boundary drawn between our days and the world of ghouls just past our sight; I ought to know some sort of spooky chant. I suppose it’s fitting, as we do approach the gauze cobwebs of All Hallows’ Eve. Admittedly, I wish Halloween had a more prominent place here in Hungary, because everybody likes free sugar, and my Mom always makes the best costumes ever, even a wizard’s cap.

But hauling a pleasantly aged pail of pebbles and a scoop like a prospector’s pan, I move methodically down the ten rows growing gold and biblioform with fall, past indignant spiders and the shriveled grieving heads of a few bundles of forgotten grapes; occasionally I look back to scrutinize the spellwork of glowing circles I’ve left behind. I haven’t got a bucket of poo or candy, but I creep along, casting stones widdershins. Hunched at the roots like this, I realize I’ll probably have a crooked back tonight, and tangled hair, and I shall need a broomstick to clear the walk.

Windfall, or, Radio Grape, or, how we came upon much more fruit

There are some types of good fortune both exuberant and slightly embarrassing, like the time I caught a leprechaun under a glass and accidentally left the little emerald scamp in a cupboard until three weeks later I discovered no more than a shamrock mummy. Impulsive and effusively farsighted and magnificently lucky…David and I sort of own a vineyard now. Okay, we actually do.

On occasion, I’ve heard, quite valuable gold meteors will fall from the sky, as well as scrumptious and dangerous pineapples, but rarely is one showered with old men. Nonetheless, taking a spectator’s motorcycle tour through the hills outside the village of Pellérd, some twelve kilometers outside of Pécs in the last revenants of summer air, David and I came upon a man moving slow down a dirt road

bearing a wiseman’s cane. And, it turns out (as eventualities are wont to do) that this particular vineyard—yes, there, across the way—belongs to him, and it’s for sale. His name is Anti-Bacsi, and he’s quite willing to offer a tour.

And that night we’re at home in the autumnal garden, me watching a pigeon think about itself upon the eaves. What do you think? Oh, baby, it’s tempting. It’s such a good deal… the price of a car and I can’t even drive…. Could we do it? We tell Laci-Bacsi, vineyard sage, about the property, the price, the five rows of grapes and the twenty-six laden trees—igen! csinalyal. he tells us. Yes! do it.

And with what still seems to me the swiftest whirl of papers and gracious family meetings, we have a vineyard…

more than a vineyard

The requisite rows of grapes, white and red and wizardly, and also plums, droll little apples, vegetables which-are-good-for-you and bulbous pears…a cottage! oh, and we could put shrines up on those shelves, and the wine cellar

is Poe’s case of the willies, and it comes with all the viticultural equipment we need…

Oh my gosh! Oh, goodness and gracious and me…

Look at the old radio! It picks up cities!

Anti-Bacsi…do you want that old radio? I’m sure it doesn’t work, but—

doesn't work?! and Anti-Bacsi leaps to plug in that sketchy cord—to the subsequent universal speech of static sound—it tunes into the European metropoli as they were seventy years ago…

but I’m sure that with a certain twirl of dial and a tinfoil hat, with how fortunate we truly are we could find a program, a classic show, an on-air drama in the aureate wind—

Take the show on Radio Copenhagen, in which my fingers smell of the delicious wretchedness of rotten fruit, having picked up the last artifacts of our orchard’s harvest and dumped it into the heap of future compost, and I’m attempting witchflight now with an inefficient old rake, amassing piles of leaves for possible play and snacking occasionally on a few overripe pears. And with a fade through the merry melancholy of ragtime violin, hit Radio Athens

where David laughs from somewhere in our rows of grapes, back and forth and hoeing and plowing the trenches which we’ll soon fill with benevolent manure, in a fecal blessing for next year’s wine. The cheery advertisement for a miracle shaving cream, and Radio Munich plays softly in the attic

becobwebbed and dry with the afternoon sliding through the tile roof, illuminating the knuckles of an amiable ghost. Or twist to Radio Paris, and behind the strains of dirty mandolinists upon the Seine there’s the woodstove with its jaws of ash and the infinite potential

of artisan breads I don''t actually know how to make without danger of fire. Radio Prague—the new neighbors waving from between the apples in their bruised heaps—and Radio Sofia, where we stand with hands on hips to survey the host of furniture and random trinkets left to us, the owl figurine with wise and empty eyes, the ambiguous identity of a stone animal, and somebody has broken the pearly wrist of the little porcelain nude. And what in the world are we going to do with the miniature sculpture of a drunkard? With complementary shot glasses. But I insist the sentient garden gnome goes on prominent display.

And Radio Budapest, with the dry and tender voice of Anti-Bacsi’s wife, Juli-Neni, pressing the ceramic garden of an heirloom urn into my hands, though I plead to refuse. It was my mother’s, she explains, and our wedding gift. Thank you, and thank you, koszonem. I'm grateful for everything, and I believe I will hear music in the vines.

I like stuff, or, a short story I wrote

Feeling rather under the proverbial weather (preternaturally cold with a chance of headache and nausea) this morning, I accomplished little in the way of working on my novel, but I did manage to write a short story, which provides a minor sense of accomplishment in lieu of cleaning the toilet. Slate.com has advertised a contest - for others who are interested, here be the link :http://www.slate.com/id/2231262/ - asking for 500 word short stories regarding a given worthless object. This:

And here's the tale I wrote to match:

Simply put, Melvin is a dapper man. He is spick and span and almost swanky, in his own inimitable way, and he will admit to being a bit of a hunk. Melvin is the sweetheart of a thousand beauties so frenzied in love’s savage and saccharine appetite as to arrive in armies simply to kiss his cheeks. And Melvin’s summertime picnics in the park are all the rage for all his gals. It must be said, nonetheless, that however promiscuous he may be Melvin truly adores them all, each petite lover with her ruby skin and excruciating mouth and infinitely delicate legs, and he is devoted to their pleasure and the feel of their creep over his chest, arm, their peck upon his cleft chin. A beau this popular must have his vanity, never to disappoint a single ladylove, and so Melvin enjoys a meticulous toilette routine. First his suit—the pants fashionably tight and silk conveniently thin—and each day a fresh dandelion tucked into the pocket at his throbbing breast. With a flourish of sticky pomade he molds his hair into a pompadour, though he will wear no shoes; he would not wish to crush a lover’s tarantella toe. This done, he will devote an hour to his extended shave, and a man such as Melvin needs no barber. After mustard, relish, mint chutney and caviar, even nectar in its dreamy indolence, he has found that of all probable shaving creams barbeque sauce is easily the best. He dips his brush into the pot with an artist’s secretive precision, and smears all the stubble of his body with the sauce, a hint of onion and pepper, tomato and chile del amor. And avoiding a single bloody nick—for love has its bite, Melvin knows—he shears away each troublesome hair. But never, never will he wash away the sauce: this is the secret of Melvin’s allure. His loves await, and now so utterly polished Melvin strolls into the park with a picnic basket of hedonistic jelly sandwiches in his hand, humming jazz serenades. Aware that his darlings already crawl frantic towards his embrace, he lays himself down splayed in the long grass, and sighs with a kind of subterranean and epicurean bliss. And his girls arrive in hordes, scuttling into every crevice of his body and the gourmet bowl of his bellybutton, ravenous for passion’s barbeque shaving sauce. But he does not believe they could possibly think of him as only a piece of meat. Passion is the spice of the endless honeymoon, he murmurs in ecstasy, and lets himself become the feast, for Melvin is the lover of the ants.

On squashiness and incomprehensibility, or, winemaking, phase three

I could build a house with that! In all sincerity this does seem quite architecturally feasible, possibly even incorporating Corinthian columns (obviously the best kind) and basilicas: the densely packed remnants of our grape harvest have formed a log of solid fruit which appears to offer a sort of fruity adobe of fairly trustworthy structural integrity. Like so:

Though David compares it also to a wheel of cheese, which also seems quite apt and at the very least vegan-friendly. Utilizing a lovingly aged press we’ve squashed our grapes

and cruelly extracted their luxuriant juice, a hue of rather carnal crimson already on the staggering way to fermentation, so that leaning over the barrel I gain a not-unpleasant high. O my, but that butterfly’s so pretty I think I’ll cry.

But we’re not done with fumes, not yet. I get to learn every day! and I just want to find stuff out, hence the excellent mineral Fact of the Day: one utilizes sulfur to liberate wine from rank odors and evil microbes and thereby prevent spoilage. And the use of sulfur was officially permitted in viniculture by Prussian royal decree, though the process would be fascinating enough

with Laci-Bacsi igniting a little wing of sulfur paper and dipping it into our future-wine’s present-vessel, there in that cellar like the inner ribcage of Edgar Allen Poe. And now, there doth it lie

whilst we must wait—

and educate ourselves.

For in spite of the geographic factoid that the vicinity of Pécs is one of the noblest wine areas of Hungary—Villany, with its famous reds and processions of cellar doors inviting bats and tasters—and in spite of our own nascent enterprise of do-it-your-own-tipsy-self, I know only a glistening little drop of anything about the art of oenology. Not which liquid colors possess more valuable wavelengths—I tend to default to that which possesses some hint of purple, or all of the snooty terminological poetry. There are odes to aging in oak barrels, as I understand it, and verses about wine with legs or full body, which seems to caress the edge of erotica. Probably I ought to acquaint myself with a dictionary. So, apparently a fine chardonnay ought to taste buttery (one can learn anything on the internet, and since it’s hyperscript it has to be true, right?), while the initial impact of a first sip is its attack (rather scary), and a flinty taste “describes an evaluation indicating a young white made from cool-region grapes under cold fermentation characterized by high acidity and a filling mouthfeel” (oh, for goodness’ sake).

On that squishy feeling, or, our first steps into viniculture

Pah! I would have scoffed, a year ago when I was but a blushing maid of twenty-three, so naïve in the ways of the world—pah! I would have told you, had you suggested that I would come to enjoy red wine. But now, aye, I am an older (i.e. one step closer to looking like Yoda) and a wiser (i.e. having rather recently learnt what a “Blackberry” device is, and it has nothing to do with pies) lass, I must admit I’ve developed an enthusiastic taste for it; moreover, in a turn as astonishing as those spontaneous materializations of badgers under chairs, David and I are actually in the process of making our own red wine.

David had agreed—we like the thought of red wine, we would affirm to one another, as it seems so urbane and is juicy with some sort of substance which benefits the left ventricle or the consistency of snot or whatever the Sunday newspaper chooses to extol. Red wine seemed to me something a baron might sip whilst combing burrs from his ermine muff

or else a deeply sophisticated ritual belonging to one of our favorite authors—Hemingway, David's read, enjoyed a bottle for breakfast

(eschewing toast for toasted, as one might say), and though I don’t know any specific factoids regarding the matter I can imagine my dear Jean Genet sipping from some stolen decanter in a Parisian slum or from a starstruck rooftop in his lover’s Moroccan medina. Anyhow, we appreciated the notion, but it didn’t seem to be our cup of tea. I mean wine. I’m mixing beverages here, which in itself leads to another figure of wandering speech…

Winemaking. ‘Twas that of which I spoke.

Step One: Pickiness

This feels wholesome, I repeat to David, not even complaining about the intimacy of the sweat in my ribs or the intricate language of scratches up my arms. Oooh! That’s a good one.

We’re picking our grapes—o, goodness, this is what satyrs do!—Kék Zwiegelt, we learn, which (according to the authoritative vinophilia of the internet) is a red grape variety developed in Austria in 1922 (Austria! That’s where they make Alps and schnitzel!) and combines the bite and fruity character of Blaufränkisch and the body of St. Laurent. Gross.

Not truthfully, as when we pluck a few, or

a chokable load, it’s divinely honeyed and already practicing the raisin’s lunchbox tendency towards fermentation. Istvan, the ancestral vineyard’s heir and master with his wiseman’s beard and antiquated scale, leads us down the rows of whorled vines. Our neighbor—the inimitable and generous Laci-Bacsi

the miner who carries tales of subterranean fires, the brutality of the Soviet regime, and hiding within a car in Croatia whilst inebriated, which led to a hapless soldier imbibing his urine (I shan’t elaborate)—helps us along

showing us the sweetest bundles to heap in a dozen plastic pails; his moustachioed dachshund, Betyar (meaning rascal) obligingly eats the leavings.

Do you like the Zweigelt wine? we ask Istvan.

I don’t drink, he tells us.

Step Two: Mushiness

Apparently, the proportions of sugar involved in a draught of wine determine its alcohol content, which means that if a likewise phenomenon occurs in everyday life I am a sot. In addition, however, I am not precisely certain as to the affect of a high fruit-to-bug ratio, but I note the hapless wasp disappearing like sleepwalkers’ thoughts into the mashed grapes.

Don’t stick your hands in the grinder, David warns. It’ll smash them like you wouldn’t believe.

But I waaaaant to! Not really, though I do savor the hale and sunny feel of taking turns at the wheel

crushing the poor frail grapeskins into a lovely prewine morass. And I will say this: if one has ever treasured some fantasy of sinking fingers into the disemboweled guts of a vegetal beast, dipping arms-deep into pulverized grapes and with a haphazard system extracting every possible stem

(because stems=bitterness, which is not good for the soul, and no-stems=dry wine, which is good for the tongue) is supreme. We’re imperiled by the miniature geysers of barrel-cleansing

blessed with woodfire ash, sinful in advance with embryonic inebriation, beatified by haloes of honeybees.

More to come, but like David and I ourselves, the nascent wine must mature and sunsimmer through whatever phases a grape must undergo (the wild teenage years, the inevitable crisis of no-longer-appropriate-to-wear-hot-pants), so steps three and four must wait. During said aging interim, David shall become a coot who remembers when young people knew what-was-what, and I a wrinkly crone with many illogical stories about the King of Bohemia, whilst the fruit grows treacherous and seductive and effervescent with the wayward wings of intoxicated insects.

September 21st, or, how aye, I hath sinn'd against mine blog

In the interest of historical, physical, ontological study, one must note the fact that this blog entry is postdated; egregiously postdated, with the sort of anachronism that induces so much wincing among watchmakers as to cause their faces to explode. But I do possess a tremendously valid excuse, namely, that I am lazy, easily distracted by shiny items such as tinfoil, and have also at last perfected time travel. I shan’t go into the details of how I have done so—save to hint that the process requires scissors, 1 ¾ cups of apple juice, and a fairy.

Thusly, one must understand that I am in fact posting this entry from weeks upon weeks in the misty past with its fungus and amnesia, though in accordance with the laws of physics and stuff-I-resolved-to-accomplish-today, I must return now to the present

boom!

and it’s now (ah, Monday, September 21^st, anniversary of Benedict Arnold’s treason and the first publication of The Hobbit), you see, and David and I are here, home in Pécs, amidst the lethal chestnuts tumbling maliciously from the garden’s enormous tree (this is not a joke; the chestnuts are like rocks with spikes on them), amidst neighbors with armfuls of pears, my beloved tomes of bread recipes and thunderheads of flour, the books whispering their seductions and winsome trickeries, amidst the Hungarian autumn rendering the students a-chatter and the cobblestones gold, amidst writing and ice cream and laundry and all the myriad distractions and pleasures and inanities which have distracted me for an entire eon from adding anything at all to my blog.

(I promise to offer more in the next few days, detailing adventures with pirates upon holy islands, meteorology, the beauty of vineyards and the perils of their profits, unicorns, literature, crumpets, and other such epics)

An Ode plucked from the Renaissance Gourmand

Thou seest the Fig amidst the leaves—

Its Sap of Milk and em’rald sheaves—

How might such Fruit seduce us so

With sorcerers’ juice and seeds aglow?

We sink unto sots much woozled by bites

Aye, the Bonbons of Botanie’s most sinfull nights

And condemn not the Fig’s Testicular charm

Nor slap the Harvester’s long-stretch’d arm

For a Glad Tummie-ache be Glutton’s disc’pline

And Sweet Taste doth redeem the Epicurean sin.

~ Lady Smokva, circa 1573

(note one: not actually a real live ode. But figs are officially The Favorite Fruit, and are available for free in the trees surrounding our campsite.)

(note two: please note David’s ingenious contraption, the Fig-Hook

a most worthy, nay, the most worthy employment of his fisherman’s rod, which permits him to fetch the loftiest and plumpest of fruit from the tiptops of the trees, and which earns him the official title of Figgerman.)

(note three: 1 fig + 1 wedge-of-bread + pinch of salt = Figwich)

On shooting stars and stick insects

How would they explain it? David asks. From these haphazard angles—the two of us sprawled upon the packed earth and parched grass of the ants’ summer and the olives abandoned—I cannot see him, but even in the night I feel the tangible residue of sun as I hold his hand. Seriously, he says, I can understand how you might imagine the stars embedded in a celestial sphere, but how would an ancient explain those?

Because it isn’t one of those nights in which the sky holds back a breath made visible as luminosity, but a gasping, if belated night of the Perseid meteor shower, and we’ve borne commonplace and still extraordinary earthbound witness.

My problem, or my pleasure, is the constant, fervent conflict between an assiduous attention and adoration of scientific fact and my own desperate need for metaphor. The star as asterisk to a universal afterword, the marginalia of terrestrial civilizations and belladonna, a kiss as the variable in a nonsensical equation. I am remembering the existence of a comet and marveling at the very idea that our planet should pass by cosmic chance through its wake, and that comet’s coterie of icy, dirty debris strikes the upper atmosphere and happens to appear in a form so apt to be called a shooting star.

And were I a Paleolith, painting cinnabar huntresses on a cavern wall and slumbering to the wails of sabretooths, or a Greek scholar speculating upon the connection between memory and the morning star, I could concoct an entire astronomy of nonsense verse. The larger meteors—like that one, there, did you see? David gasps—are a sudden bloodletting of orange, scattering sparks before their vanishing, and others are bright and momentary veins, or incisions of the dark into a flesh of light beyond, or arrowshot, or the tears of tungsten, or flutesong or messages or birds escaping being—

I can’t cease in analogy, can’t control my own stumbles into the sense of profundity. Think about it, I tell David. Of how vast it all is, and the very fact that stars exist at all. Stars exist, and if I truly contemplate it I feel that sort of beatitude that verges on mortal peril; I think of shards of stone and the ethereal skin of an arbitrary planet, and I don’t know what to do.

But

Exploring the poetical science and logical absurdities of language, in search of entries for my first book (the ersatz fabulistic dictionary, Logodaedely (the info’s in my about me section, along with other blatherings) I did unearth out of meteoric dust the word phasma, with its forgotten and bizarre connotations:

phasma

('fazmə) [Latin phasma, spectre, apparition (later adopted as genus name), Greek phasma, ϕάσμα, spectre, apparition, phantom (from phainô, ϕάίνειν, to show or appear)]

1. the appearance of anything fantastic, such as a meteor, or, 2. an apparition or phantom, or, 3. a “walking stick” insect of the genus Phasmitidae, known for their ability to mimic twigs; these insects may possess spines or a terrible smell, and in large numbers may devastate oak trees.

(1837 S. GALLIEN. Advanced theories of the new astronomy, and its perils, anniversary edition) p 282 And the meteors—what are we to think of them? Be they the great Deer, in those howling forests of the night, as it flees from the glimmering Wolf? Or be it a dragon’s fart? Or emissions from the crossbow of a cosmic Huntsman? We discard such fancies in favor of the phasma. For we know the legions of walking twigs that appear in the nests of the craters, advancing upon us in ravenous formation to impersonate and despoil our forests—we can catch their foul scent, surely the perfume that belongs to the stars alone, and their false thorns puncture our filmy palms. But it is the way of all creatures to assault one another’s homelands, rendering it unrecognizable through their own rustling presence. We can rarely distinguish the devious insects devouring those trees which we ourselves so adore and exploit, but do not all things resemble other things? So do our theoreticians thus begin to pursue the luminous flora and fauna whose scatterings make up the forms of other galaxies, in search of the origins of mimicry.

Seriously, who invents words like that?

Moonshine, or, on memory’s images and moving pictures too

Madness, memory, and Myanmar, or, recalling our wedding

As David recorded in his most recent blog post (just in case: http://davidrozgonyi.blogspot.com ) in the conversational time travel of late last night, while a sailboat with ballerina sails and galactic lanterns blazed over its own reflection in the bay, we spoke with a fellow traveler (please see below for details, as he has been an excellent campground neighbor) about theatre and his comedic experiences on Spanish farms and the blur of Bangkok and our own journeys; through reminiscence we awakened the memories of our wedding in the hallowed blue of a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar. David’s already narrated the ceremony in his own entry, so I shan’t reiterate, but I think now of that time (two years and eight months and twenty days ago) and thought I would include a few of those flickering images of my own.

(except the photographic pictures are entirely those of David's expertise, though the prattling memoranda are mine)

The first day in Yangon

with all its madman traffic orbiting the temples and the artistry of urban disintegration and the ostentatious cockroach in the shower and the culture shock I assiduously concealed from my unflinchingly wayfaring love—but the old woman selling magic oranges in a night market, who suddenly clasps my hand when I am lost, alone, and smiles to me with a kindness like aurora, like water, like earthshine—the lane of bookmakers we wandered down with held hands, the ink’s honest and heady and murky scent from miniature printing presses, the paperbacks arrayed across broken concrete—the cat and mouse and crocodile upon the golden feet of an enormous reclining Buddha

at an early dusk—the gunshot of our bus’ engine breaking down and the chaotic hammering which provided a numinous instant fix—a gecko gaping with absurd balleyes from the ceiling over our bed—the advice offered by tin signs upon an inn’s stair, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and much effort bears fruit of success—platters of peppercorns with their omnipresence in eyes and nose, and bowls of ruby centipedes for inexplicable sale—the flawless tessellations of a dead moth David finds and gives to me at the improbable shrine of Kyaktio

a boulder precisely in the form of a holy beggar’s skull and lifted from the bottom of the sea and coated in the gold leaf of thousands of worshipping pilgrims—the jade sheen of a rubber ball we buy for a band of children whose soccerball is on the rapid path to deflation

and the lunar face of the monk who marries us—his counsel to speak kind words to one another, for sweet words are like honey—

the spiraled suns of my wedding skirt and the sudden, lovely friend kneeling to knot it about my waist—her pet mouse suspended from the ceiling in a shoebox—the brutality of a twenty-one hour northward bus ride through cosmic dark one day beyond our marriage, and how David stands to beg a stop for me at midnight when I believe my bladder will burst—a tinkling miniature boat of silver and faith at the paramount, fantabulous, incomparable Buddhist stupa of Shwedagon, hoisted up a rope with a berth of written prayers—the noose of a trap meant for wildcats with their clairvoyant ears, upon the exhausting trail into the Myanmar hills—the weight of blankets upon us in the home of a village family, the daughters

who scamper with us and win the game of tag—David’s finger indicating the first and only firefly I have yet seen—the papaya we share on a barge down the aorta of the Irrawaddy River—the nauseatingly cute puppy who scampers out of a weaver’s shop with fluff and ears flopping so adorable as to reach the point of terror—the iridescent drove of dragonflies circling our heads at a clifftop temple—the anime action figure a pigtailed little girl gives to me, peeping between the seats of a long-distance bus—the wickedness of a jacaranda’s thorns in the palm of the hand as we step into an abandoned stupa, one of ghostly thousands constellated in the dead city of Bagan

—the weeping of bats around a secret stair

the Barbie dolls and matchbooks and mangoes arrayed across an altar to the thirty-one nat spirits

who dwell just beneath the surface of this hot, sweet, swift material world—David’s rapidly decaying shorts, which he still—you were born upon a Wednesday under Mercury and the Tusked Elephant, an astrologer with robes of green and a numinous book tells me, and to David, you are Monday and the Tiger and the Moon, and how I think instantly of how the moon might go on the wane and the tides ebb towards luminescent fish and yet its romance is forever waxing and gravity is physical law, and love makes lunacy.

On the virtues of staying up late, or, our excellent neighbor and his art

Here’s the thing about me and David: we’re so not cool. As is indicated by my utter lack of knowledge as to the current state of fashion, though I suspect it is largely continuing down a swift track towards complete nudity, and our inability to stay up past 9 PM if it is not a special occasion or an auspicious arrangement of Venus and Mars. I mean it; we get sleepy, sort of like when kids or kittens tucker themselves out. It takes something particularly valuable to keep us up, and our current campground neighbor, Ben, managed to provide this last night—11 o’clock, which I hear is how late teenagers stay awake. There we were, discussing our disparate journeys, the virtues of Montenegro and vices of erroneous guidebooks, while David and I provided him with the gourmet snack of hard-boiled egg yolks and CocoPops ceral bars (I told you they were good!).

I ought not to steal all of his own travel tales—I will mention that one can find human feces in plastic bowls beneath beds on Spanish farms, and that scuba diving in Kotor Bay is no good with a cold—but when not on the road Ben is an actor and scriptwriter in Seattle, and in the interests of informing readers of quite phenomenal talent, I’ll provide a link to his immensely clever short film (writer, director, and actor), Man Talk:

http://www.cromagnonpictures.com/?p=14

It's the farce of a banal office workday, but reimagined to become a mesmerizing bit of clever wordplay, sly social criticism beneath sharp-as-stab-by-corporate-stapler acting. Enjoy! David and I most definitely did, enough so that we were chuckling together in bed at 11:01.

note: David and I have been in a running competition with Ben in the unearthing of vivid and archaic words for nonsense. I haven’t been keeping score, but…

• balderdash
• claptrap
• fiddlesticks
• baloney
• rubbish
• pish posh
• jibber jabber
• flummery
• twaddle
• fiddle faddle
• eyewash
• jiggery-pokery
• moonshine

Any further suggestions are much appreciated, because David and I really, really, want to win.

On Montenegrin chefs, or, our friend Danilo

I have decided I shall call him Danilo. As he does not speak our language and lack his own high, lengthy vowels, I know not what other names Danilo might bear in the dawn of the cicadas or the yellow subsiding of the dusk - other campers have given him their own terms of endearment: hello there, Tiger.

But Danilo has taste. Perhaps it comes from having lived half his adventuresome life in a campground, though I’m not sure. He visits us most typically in the evening, pattering up the bus with steps quiet as ideas in the drowsy mind, laughing or begging with tiny little words, a bit of a charmer, really; his hair is dusky and dappled and meticulously clean. Disregarding social propriety or vagrant ants he will loll across our rug, keenly listening to our desultory conversations with dragons’ moons in his eyes. In the afternoons he is the happy mirror of the sun, occasionally leaping atop a caravan to watch a young couple making custard or a naked child cavorting with a discarded carnival mask.

But Danilo has taste. It would seem he can find the alchemical magic of the gourmet even in our scraps, which we give to him at his solemn, silent request. The remnant sauce of piquant squid, replete with ink, the oil left rippling numinous in a can of Turkish grape leaves, crumbs of bread with peasant sorcery (which he scorns), the gilded tails of fried fish and joghurt, his apparent favorite. I can only imagine what delectable recipes Danilo concocts out of our leftovers, what crafty dishes of tentacle and olive, fin and curdled milk, though David and I are not so keen to try. Admittedly, Danilo is a cat, and the culinary arts of the felines remain known only to he.

On campgrounds and suave villains, catastrophes and Serb vocabulary

On how campsites are born

I can imagine it so easily, in one of those flights-of-avian-fantasy conferred by the heat of cicadas at three o’ clock or possibly by the fishes’ snot and hallucinogenic salt in an accidental mouthful of seawater—I can envision just how it must have looked, the day an acre of grass-swathed Yugoslav land trembled with seismic resolve and rose that first inch above the ground. All the campers—a dozen families nestled against the plastic chairs and miniature refrigerators of their caravans—held tight their electric lanterns and infants with eyes so wide and lunar it seemed they might never grow up, while the flight of the campground began. But whilst it ascended with the graceful glide of a moth’s sweetest Persian carpet, the campers ventured to the edge, gasping and laughing with the awful glee of acrophobia, gripping the children’s sticky hands: look there, they pointed, speaking the clack-and-symbol-and-wind of Serbo-Croat syllables. There, beneath this campground floating as in an earthworm’s dream up to the altitude of winsome cirrostratus clouds, there was the white wending of the Croatian shore, and the city of Dubrovnik with its buildings leaning over three-story laundry lines, there the terrifying emerald shock of the woody, towering peaks of Montenegro, and there, there, oh, there, the war. And then Kotor from above...

Okay, I’m in one of my oh-goodness-whimsy states, like when I catch the incomprehensible scraps of an argument and decide people are bickering about magic wands. But the tale is true, sort of. This very campground, where now David and I type and curse at our manuscripts and our stove breaks in a ho-hum of gasoline, isn’t exactly what one would call a purely Kotorian place (look! I made up a word).

Sonja smiles gently as she and I walk together down the mosses’ procession of the stairs to the coast’s single narrow lane. My grammar is not so good, she apologizes. I do not know much English.

I shake my head. You speak such good English, I say, better than my Serbian.

I have been coming here twenty years… She counts behind her eyes. My son was…eight.

Because, as David and I have learnt, it was two decades ago when this campground creaked into its current incarnation—Mimoza Camping, reads a rusted and disused sign leaning against the house of Barto and Vanya (the campground’s current managers, he both greeter and laughing pizza chef and sailor, she the smiling mother of children chasing cats; I should mention too the grandfather, who has the slow aura of some Zen master as he wanders about pruning shears). Apparently, the entire populace of this site, and all these trailers streaked by the signatures of rain, once sat contented in Croatia.

And then the war began—from the ease and distraction of history courses and the flickering TV I heard about it, the fracture of Yugoslavia and the savage boom of nationalism, the massacres and bombings and insidious mines, the innocent names dissolved in blood mingling with dust. And with this sort of collective agreement, strife and grief and conversations I can only imagine, all the campers agreed to move, en masse as do the triangulations of migrating birds. A dozen families gathering all the trimmings of their summertime lives, all the pails and hammocks and folding chairs, and searched—and here is Kotor, eden of water and fjord and figs.

So I picture Sonja, the flax of her short hair growing gray and her smile bearing new wrinkles, there among all the other campers converging before Barto to ask about the backyard. And give it, I suppose, a dance of landscaping and sputtering engines and electricity rewired, and the campground floats to land right here… And, we learn, the same network of families with their flip-flops and blossoming stories and increasing sunspots on busy hands have returned each summer ever since.

Welcome to Montenegro, Sonja laughs, as she and I each carry pails of fresh water back from an open fire truck. The pipes have failed, leaving us supplied solely with the nectar of immature figs and red wine, and each family converges before the truck just for the precious chance to sip something clear and wash their sticky and savory and sugared plates.

This happens every year, Sonja tells me. The pipes break, the electricity, you know. Nothing has ever changed.

It’s perfect, I say. We love it here; we’re so glad we came.

On evil masterminds, or, the second most expensive yacht in the world (apparently)

Rarely have I been so certain of my proximity to a spy-thriller villain as I was yesterday, but perhaps my testimony might serve as a warning of the dire danger in which this unwitting little world of ours lies… With the innocuous eyes of supporting characters David and I meandered down the single lane of bougainvillea and stone leading from Kotor into a postcard, when we saw the ship, idling silent, smug, sleek as a pale knife in the bay.

It’s the sort of vessel obviously gliding with the impervious sails of great wealth and anchored only by a need for secrecy, this enormous palatial flotation device absolutely tasteless in the artistry of vulgar state-of-the-art. It looks so stupid, I said, but if any boat belongs patently to a badguy, this is the one.

Now, with his research expertise David has looked it up, and the ship stretches to 400 feet of luxury cabins, three swimming pools (why is this necessary? there's water all over the place), and a helipad. And what conferences of velvet criminals alight upon that deck?

The owner is purportedly a Russian billionaire, Andrey Melnichenko (if that is your real name), with his slick arm looped around that of a Serbian supermodel (and what wiles does she possess?), and he shelled out $300,000,000 for his craft. I presume he may use coinage or imperfect diamonds for shark bait (to stock the tank utilized to dispose of irritating heroes), but this remains unconfirmed. Given the vessel’s posture against the innocent jetties of shore, I suspect also that the berth secretes not only kitchens with disposable ovens and gourmet chefs kept under penalty of death, but moreover laboratories in which one may concoct the basic elements of some potion to infect all the world’s oceans with bubonic plague or laxatives.

Seriously. The boat’s name is A. The A. But for what, pray tell me Andrey, does this stand? Applesauce? I think not. Affluence? Agenda? Your own name? A likely story. Apocalypse? Antagonist? Or perhaps that is too blatant for you. But you cannot conceal your plots forever, you villain you.

On unexpected saltwater, or, an interesting oceanic phenomenon

Tallying up our experiences of minor natural disasters on this trip (the Greek earthquake, the insidious pineapple chicken, the alcoholic deadly scorpion), we can add tsunami!

This may, perhaps, be something of a bathymetric exaggeration, but it’s pleasant enough to boast about. In spite of my marginal understanding of oceanographic dynamics, I know enough to state that in a sheltered bay where the most prominent motion of the waters emerges from the wake of an audacious motorboat or a cruise ship rollicking with a digestively disastrous buffet, waves do not generate themselves with magic spontaneity parallel to the shore, and do not crest wildly like that, and do not scare the poo out of me so that I paddle frantic as a feline to the shore. I also know that geology has a quirky inclination of permitting stones to slide down to the seabed whenever it feels so disposed, and that a-body-immersed-in-liquid-displaces-a-body-of-liquid-equal-to-its-own-mass, and you can make a tsunami with a shockwave. Hence, tsunami! and we are a tad more cool.

I would also note the perhaps-prophetic and perhaps-ominous fact that a mere night before David and I watched a documentary upon the history of surfing, replete with Hawaiian monarchs and space-age boards and the sage philosophy of the beach bum – surf Kotor, man.

I could surf a tsunami. I just don’t feel like it right now.

Na razumem, or, I don’t understand, or, we try to learn the language

Most shamefully, this Kotor interlude marks our fourth Montenegrin stay and one of even more numerous forays into the former Yugoslavia, and still David and I possess only a paltry knowledge of the native Serbo-Croat, akin to a spider monkey’s capacity for human speech. Thus we have resolved to expand our vocabulary by a word a day, though I believe we are not so assiduous as we’d vowed. A sampler, with the help of our handy new dictionary:

good day: dobar dan

peppershaker: posuda za biber

my name is…: žovem se…

you are a great dancer: divno pleŝete

does this washing machine have hazelnuts?: ima li ova veŝ maŝina za leŝnici

please: molem

thank you: hvala

unripened rabbit cheese: kunić kravlji sir

today: danas

excuse me: oprostite

I would like to have my eyelashes dyed green: želeo da ofarbam trepavice zelen

yes: da

no: ne

I need a soup spoon for my quick descent: trebaju mi supena kaŝika za brni spust

On how David and I sort of plagiarized one another’s Blog Idea, or, on stuff we read

So, as any feisty writer is wont to do, I maintain that it was me who first came up with the idea to write a blog post about our Bus Library, or Vagrant Biblioteque

or rather the overstuffed shelves beside our bed, but David called me copycat; whatever the case we elected to compose co-posts (please disregard similarity to compost). Thusly here are just a few of the many books we have enjoyed upon the road:

Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Lawrence Sterne

This one swiftly rambled and sidled and danced its way into my Top Seven or so Favorite Books Of All Time; notably and delectably, its plot remains largely nonexistent. It’s perhaps an eighteenth-century cravat-clad predecessor to postmodernist literature, if I’m feeling scholarly, but apart from that it’s likely the most consistently entertaining and hilarious book I’ve ever enjoyed, as well as a fluent and fascinating jaunt. Essentially, the titular Gentleman

offers an extended biographical tangent beginning years before his birth and digressing merrily into his uncle’s obsessive hobby of creating mock battlefields, his father’s dubious scientific theories condemning the practice of delivering a child headfirst, as well as excerpts from stories regarding romance, adventure, and the superiority of long noses. And at times breathtaking—the lambent pupilability of slow, low, dry chat, five notes below the natural tone…a vibration of the strings somewhere about the region of the heart, and the brain made no acknowledgement.

whilst all the while Mr. Shandy jocularly addresses his readers in self-defense of his own tendency to prattle on—I will that all mankind should write as well as myself. Which they certainly will, when they think as little. And obligingly I excuse him.

The Blood Oranges, by John Hawkes

This is David’s Most Favorite Book ever! and one of mine, as well; quotations drawn from its pages have also come to take up a frightening amount of our own personal dialogues, which is why we oft announce I fold the wings of the glasses or croon you know you still want me to woo you. But it is in all truth an absolute blossom of lyricism and a stunning ode to Love itself, and the plenitude of metamorphic forms that love can take: the constellation of romance and agony and death between Cyril and Fiona and Catherine and Hugh, their catastrophic idyll on the sun-washed reverie of a shore. I recite two of many gems: she laughed as if a bird had landed upon her belly in a dream, and, anything which lies in the palm of Love is good.

Second Skin, by John Hawkes

Same author (obviously), though I’m fonder of The Blood Oranges myself; Skipper, the narrator, is a sort of awkwardly loving and grievously inept former naval officer whose life is imbued both with devotion and with death—a rash of family suicides, of mutinies and insidious enemies and an endless barrage of poetry and sorrow. But with all the splendor of Hawkes’ literary skill—in all likelihood my subject may prove to be simply the wind, its changing nature, the various spices of the world which it brings together suddenly in hot or freezing gusts to alter the flavor of our innermost recollections of pleasure or of pain.

Alpha and Omega: The Search For the Beginning and End of the Universe, by Charles Seife

I brought this both for the pleasure of it and as a bit of textual research for the astronomy permeating my own novel-in-weird-progress; Seife, a skilled mathematician, cruises from the standard model of the Big Bang to baryons to the conundrum of dark matter—like how seventy percent of the stuff of this universe lies beyond all that we can yet identify and name—the dizzy spookiness of existing in this particular cosmos

and daring to look up.

Midnight’s Children, by Salmon Rushdie

Salman, not Salmon! It really must drive him mad. I have my contentions at times with Rushdie, various feminist critiques of his narrators’ perceptions of female characters and whatnot, but this book is simply a rollicking, anguished, lovely tale. What really grips me is the narrator, so much I miss him after the book’s close: Ahmed Sinai, born precisely at midnight on the day of India’s establishment as a nation, and henceforth gifted with a telepathic connection to other children sharing that dire birthday, and henceforth cursed too with an inextricable tie to history. If I had a connection to those other Libras who share my special day, I believe we’d all have a predilection for Vivaldi.

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

Typically, I tend to shrink from books which display waxen screen shots of actors kissing in the glamor of golden light (hence my shrinking from the eloquent novelization of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), but this is an enchanting one. Ondaatje uses simple language, brief sentences describing an angel looming inanimate over a devastated chapel or the cruel core of a landmine, but in an atmosphere of tragedy and floral murals he unfolds a tragic geography of character: a desolate nurse, a traumatized sapper, a mutilated thief, and a man charred unto death by love.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, by Lawrence Durrell

In spite of the graphomaniac amnesia of somebody who blathers too much, I do somewhat recollect mentioning this book before; fittingly, inevitably, we picked it up while traveling on aforesaid island, as it is an account of Durrell’s experiences as a British expatriate and diplomat in the 1950s, just when the sparks of the revolutions, exiles, and violence between Turkish and Greek Cypriots were taking more significant form. He describes the sort of village life about which one fantasizes when viewing a painting of a thatchroofed cottage or a disused well—the bickering with powerful crones, the drunken herders, the pastoral gardens with their citrus and figs: Frangos with an excess of high spirits picked up the cherished motorbike of his son-in-law and proceeded to juggle with it… the silkworms die with a dreadful crackling and sobbing and noise of sinews being ground... And a helping of local proverbs—so long as he has a tooth left a fox won’t be pious—which might come in handy someday.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I know this is supposed to be a children’s book, but it floods me with such innocence and charm and all the simple loveliness of existing amidst sheep and stars…

I love to think of de Saint-Exupery himself flying lonesome and moonlit over the pale Sahara with his biplane full of love letters, and encountering in all nonfiction a brokenhearted boy. And yes, I would certainly accept my own little planet no bigger than a house, with baobab trees.

The Spider’s House, by Paul Bowles

Amar is a young Moroccan boy certain of his sacred ancestral gifts, and Stenham an American writer grieving over the changes he personally perceives in the native culture, drawn to Lee, a female traveler with her own conceptions of the nation—and in Bowles’ style, merciless and simple and embedded into the human lung as is the desert itself, their three paths converge in the midst of bloody revolution.

Bowles is David’s literary idol, and one of my medina-wandering demigods.

Garden, Ashes, by Danilo Kis

A little-known (unfortunately) Hungarian-Serbian piece, a memoir of a boy’s fearful childhood overshadowed by the Holocaust and his own father, a wild mastermind creating a universal timetable of travel, before he himself disappears into the shrouds of war and leaves his son with only a remembered ghost—I see floating around my father’s head the radiant winged insect of his genius, and I am sure I will not be able to fall asleep that night… There is no way for me to comprehend how sleep comes all at once, how I can fall asleep without catching hold of that instant when the angel of sleep, that great butterfly of night, swoops down to close my eyes with its wings.

Prisoner of Love, by Jean Genet

Perhaps I ought simply direct the reader towards my enthralled endorsement on the side of this blog—one of my treasured tomes, heartrending—Genet’s experiences as an old man wandering in pain and perplexion and passion amidst the Palestinian fedayeen resistance fighters.

But I’ll give a quote: was the Palestinian revolution really written on the void, an artifice superimposed on nothingness, and is the white page, and every little blank space between the words, more real than the black characters themselves…If the reality of my time among the Palestinians resided anywhere, it would survive between all the words that claim to give an account…the space between the words contains more reality than does the time it takes to read them…

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Two things this book made me want (okay, I sort of already did): a sword, and a Scottish brogue. Young, impetuous, naïve David Balfour finds himself, yep, kidnapped, following the dark designs of his wicked uncle—leading most thrillingly to swashbuckling, shipwreck, scrapes with death and scraped knees in the heather of the Scottish moors. Ye haggled and argle-bargled like an apple-wife, and ye ken very well the upshot…Damned be your word! I also noted that this volume contains more references to porridge than any I have ever encountered. `

There are more books, too, but I feel like reading now anyhow.