Homeless Shorts – First take – Brandon

As I get more and more comfortable with the thought that:

1) I might never find the time, frame of mind, patience, etc, to finish writing or editing my many half finished texts (a finished book in Spanish which I can’t seem to edit; one in English, same applies; dozens of short stories in English that aren’t enough for a book; a half finished novel in Spanish that I started to translate into English and then I left unfinished; a half written novel in English that I promise myself I won’t continue writing until I finish all the above; etc);

2) I might never bother to look for an editor, agent; and/or

3) I might never find an editor stupid enough to publish anything written by a polyglot stutterer (Oliverio Girondo’s dixit; pretty Deleuzian if one thinks about it…);

4) nor will I miraculously find a Gaius Clinius Maecenas to pay for my writterly divagations so that I don’t have to worry about things rotting in my drawers; and last but not least,

5)  I haven’t got the slightest intention to even think about changing the way I write the things I write in order to be more attractive to readers, publishers, the public, the Queen and country and God or Satan,

I decided to create a page where I will start “releasing” (as a commentator to this blog put so eloquently) some of my short stories. You can see it up there next to my bio, contact, etc… In case you are too lazy to click over there, the first one these homeless shorts is here:

Brandon

The loneliness of the polyglot

Monolinguals don’t go through this; life in mono. Bilinguals don’t go through this; they enjoy the brain working on stereo, their lucky dialectical brain. Trilinguals, it starts to become shaky. And the polyglot, so many things lost in translation; always a part missing, always that mental conversation from one tongue to the other and to the other, and so on; always the interlocutor somewhere else; always partially unhomely. How could a polyglot, for example, explain the different taste of the word “pan”, “pain”, “pane”, “bread”, “pão”?

Gómez

Here’s Gómez… 

There’s this guy I know that doesn’t have a name. Or better: There’s this guy I know that doesn’t seem to have a name, only a surname: Gómez. He is Gómez to his friends. To his wife. And they say he is Gómez to his mother too. When I met him – on a kayaking outing, in one of the islands of the Paraná river, back in 2000 – we shook hands and he said “Gómez” and I said my fake name at the time: “Jean Pierre”. He had arrived by yacht; he had this small sloop named “La Gómez”. I don’t know why Gómez was simply Gómez but he seemed happy and proud about it. We became friends, sort of. And then he moved to L.A. And then I left too. And many people left during those years so I lost Gómez completely and never had a chance to ask him about his strange condition.

After being Jean Pierre I went through a period in which I called myself Gino. That was when I lived in Paris and Dublin – there are people that still call me Gino. Others call me Artti (but that name I took before being Jean Pierre; so I don’t see many of these any more). Then I was Zwi Migdal for a while. And I even went under the name Federico, but I can talk about it for legal reasons. I only started being Fernando Sdrigotti again after I published my first book: a friend told me that I should sign my books under the same name I sign my cheques. Sometimes I miss being Gino or Jean Pierre. But life became easier since the intelligentsia and the grocery store man know me by the same name.

Gómez, on the other hand is still Gómez. I don’t know how but he found this blog. He sent me an email. From: Gómez. I can’t reveal the full email address, but he managed to get a gomez@ email from a rather popular email provider. Lucky bastard, Gómez. Him, no names. Just Gómez. While I am a constellation of names.

(image source: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2390/1546217882_3ba0559392.jpg)

Tales for Revolutionary Children – Cinderevska

Cinderevska was a young cleaner at the palace. She was poor and humble; yet she was happy and her joy was contagious. Perhaps because of this, the prince took fancy of her. He fell for her, so they say, like struck by lightning – so much so that he changed the Constitution so that he could marry her.

Their wedding ceremony was flamboyant. People came from all parts of the kingdom, to join them in their happiness, to wish wealth, health, and beautiful royal children.

It took her just a couple of weeks to realise that the marriage was a sham, that it was a cover for the prince’s sexual deviations (of which the most striking was a taste for underage boys from the lower echelons of society). Yet she decided to hang on to her husband and be the best wife she could be; even if she was trapped in a sterile marriage – perhaps even better if she was, because that meant she could canalise her surplus of sexual energy towards other practices. And she would continue to be joyous. And powerful. And rich.

She did a great job being the “princess of the poor”, playing her part in helping to keep the status quo, doing the best she could to help quench the revolutionary thirst that was getting hold of the kingdom. She convinced many that the monarchy was the right thing for everyone. But not the revolutionaries. They took no pity of her.

So Cinderesvka was executed, along with the whole royal family, by firing squad, in one of the royal parks. Her joy was lost at the sight of an incoming bullet and the story tells that he shat her expensive underpants when dying. Her remains were buried in an undisclosed location.

May her story warn others.

A dream

I had this strange dream last night. I was in what seemed to be a secondary school, dressed in uniform. The school was catholic  and there were priests scattered here and there. Some of the [male] students – me included – were waiting outside a gigantic church a la Notre Dame. Me and this other guy whose face I can’t remember were guarding the place (I had been told by a priest to guard the entrance; this is a remnant of a previous moment in the dream or an artificial memory). There were other students waiting by the doors, queuing to see the priests. In one of these great oniric jump-cuts my “perception” finds itself inside the church while my body remains outside – and I use quotation marks because I guess this is one of the instances in which the dream-camera does something similar to what Bakhtin calls free-indirect speech in literature, meaning the POV from where the situation is narrated/depicted/dreamed can’t be attributed to anyone, it’s just delivered for the viewer/reader/dreamer, to his or her exterior perception. (Perhaps it’s easier to think this by taking into account that although the character in the dream and me – the dreamer – shared a consciousness until that point, with this jump-cut our consciousness divided, and this shot was just delivered for me the dreamer. Me the character was left out there, oblivious to myself). There, inside the church, there this scene where a priest is telling a student to go to the corner and recite a Hail Mary 349 times.

Back outside. My perception is with my dreamed body but with the added knowledge of the punishment given to the guy. Because I don’t believe in celestial beings that listen to you (or virgins of any kind) I make my mind up to just sit zazen during my punishment when my time comes. In order to know how long to sit for, I recite mentally a Hail Mary and estimate that it takes me 30 seconds to recite one: I will sit for whatever Hail Maries I get x 30. Then I realise it’s easier to calculate how much time I need to sit if I take into account that I can do two Hail Maries every minute: for example 349 Hail Maries divided 2 would give me the amount of minutes it would take me to go through my punishment.

When I am about to work out this division (349/2) my perception abandons my body once more, in a flamboyant tracking shot of about 100 metres, all the way down the stairs (I wonder how they would actually shoot a tracking shot down a set of long stairs like that church’s), and into a football pitch on the other side of the road. They are bringing in a coffin. The people are crying. The deceased was a young man. He died doing sports, I overhear someone say. Scenes of pain and flag-waving. (I guess a mix of Mwamba’s story with a photograph of the incidents in Egypt I saw last night.)

Jump-cut #2. EXT/NIGHT. Back to the stairs.

“It’s like three hours of zazen,” I think and I wake up.

Reminder – Cockroach racing

Every now and then I recall my childhood with detachment;  it was a strange childhood, at least seen from the place where I am now. Exotic, I would say if I weren’t the person I am (or if I actually succeeded in detaching myself completely from myself). I need to keep setting reminders: there are things that shouldn’t be lost to memory for they might explain a present inclination towards oddity.

I used to watch cockroach races on a kids’ show. This was the 80s, before a huge cholera pandemic, across most of South America. Then the TV got sanitised and the only rot allowed was mental. But for a while it was the roaches running free in a TV studio. What an incredible image.

I once tried to train a cockroach, but she escaped and the dog killed it. Ever since then I hate pets, particularly dogs.

Perhaps there are things that need to be forgotten. But I refuse to let the roaches go.

Gerund

Writing. Snapping. Filming. Playing music. A process of becoming. Becoming the word on the page/screen/napkin. Becoming pixels or indexical marks, light imprinted on a film. Becoming an image stretched across time (becoming duration). Becoming sound, harmony, melody or atonal sound. And becoming food; becoming baby; becoming politics; etc.

Some might like to become the noun; find comfort in calling themselves writers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, parents, chefs, politicians, [productive] citizens (adjectives sneaking in), etc. But things are only alive when they succeed in becoming a gerund.

The noun is just a dead taxonomy.