One Good Reason to Maintain Healthy Trans-Atlantic Ties

Faces of Terror

Still Bellow Month!

She wanted to fly, but with the cartwheel hat, the tweeds, the religious medals, the large pectoral cross, her heavy heart, getting off the ground was not easy.

He trailed her through the mirror-paneled room, past framed prints of Flemish altarpieces, gilt, green, and red. The doorknobs and locks were immobilized by many coats of paint. Madeleine tugged, impatiently. Herzog coming up behind her jerked open the white front door. They went down a corridor where bags of garbage were put out on the once luxurious carpet, and down in the decayed elevator, out of the trapped air of the black shaft into the porphyry façade of the moldy lobby, into the crowded street.

"Aren't you coming? What are you doing?" said Madeleine.

Perhaps he was not fully awake. Herzog was loitering for a moment near the fish store, arrested by the odor. A thin muscular Negro was pitching buckets of ground ice into the deep window. The fish were packed together, backs arched as if they were swimming in the crushed, smoking ice, bloody bronze, slimy black-green, gray-gold -- the lobsters were crowded to the glass, feelers bent. The morning was warm, gray, damp, fresh, smelling of the river. Pausing on the metal doors of the sidewalk elevator, Moses received the raised pattern of the steel through his thin shoe soles; like Braille. But he did not interpret a message. The fish were arrested, lifelike, in the white, frothing, ground ice. The street was overcast, warm and gray, intimate, unclean, flavored by the polluted river, the sexually stirring brackish tidal odor.

"I can't wait for you, Moses," said Madeleine, peremptory, over her shoulder.

They went into the restaurant and sat at the yellow formica table.

"What were you dawdling for?"

"Well, my mother came from the Baltic provinces. She loved fish."

But Madeleine was not to be interested in Mother Herzog, twenty years dead, however mother-bound this nostalgic gentleman's soul might be. Moses, thinking, ruled against himself. He was a fatherly person to Madeleine -- he couldn't expect her to consider his mother. She was one of the dead dead, without effect on the new generation.

On the yellow-plated table was a red flower. The sharp dots of the blossom in a metal holder, or choker, sunk to the neck. Curious to know whether it was plastic too, Herzog touched it. Finding it real, he quickly drew back his fingers. Madeleine was watching.

"You know I'm in a hurry," she said.

Protestant Town

Foreign Correspondence

Question

Aber doch Bellow Month

Some things I have an ability to see without feeling much previous history, almost like birds or dogs that have no human condition but are always living at the same age, the same at Charlemagne's feet as on a Missouri scow or in a Chicago junkyard. And often that is how the trees, water, roads, grasses may come back in their green, white, blue, steepness, spots, wrinkles, veins, or smell, so that I can fix my memory down to an ant in the folds of bark or fat in a piece of meat or colored thread on the collar of a blouse ... If I mentioned a Chicago junkyard as well as Charlemagne's estate, I had my reasons. For should I look into any air, I could recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El pillars -- such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are -- like a terribly conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshipers crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel that I myself was the creation of such places. How is it that human beings will submit to the gyps of previous history while mere creatures look with their original eyes?

Popewatch

Not just Bellow Month

Monstergesäß

Berlin's Water Pumps

Usage Note

Indonesia

Cookie Monster Caves

April is Bellow Month at Radio Free Mike

She wore her everyday clothes and shawl again, so that everything was to be presumed back to normal or almost so; whereas it was actually nerve-silent, and her face, attempting to be steady and calm, was blenched as if she really had lost blood, or else her long-time female composure at the sight of blood. She had to have been horribly moved and scared to lock her door, but apparently she had decided that she had to come back and, moony-pale as she was, turn on her influence. But there was something missing. Even the frazzled, pursy old bitch whose white wool had gone brown around her eyes, took a slow walk with clickety claws, as if she sensed that new days were pushing out the last of an old regime, the time when counselors and ministers see the finish of their glory, and Switzers and Praetorian Guards get restless.

Who Says Germans Can't Rap?

Street Theater!

Bellow's Death

It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there's a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.

Pope John Paul I

While he frequently masturbated with a belt fastened around his neck this was not the cause of death.

Liberals Killed Terri Schiavo!

Did Liberals Kill the Pope?

Signs of Spring