136 Vietnamese figures of speech and proverbs

Off by an inch, walk a mile.

Sai một li, đi một dặm.

*

Buffalo shit, after days, turns to mud.

Lâu ngày cứt trâu hóa bùn.

*

God made elephant, god made grass.

Trời sinh voi, trời sinh cỏ.

*

Sleeping during the day, plowing at night.

Ngủ ngày, cày đêm.

*

Swinging a stick in an empty garden.

Múa gậy vườn hoang.

*

Saying the sky's too low, has to stoop.

Bảo trời thấp, phải đi khòm.

*

Building a stable after the cows are gone.

Mất bò, mới lo làm chuồng.

*

Died with sins intact.

Chết người không chết tật.

*

Better dead sated than alive craving.

Chết no hơn sống thèm.

*

Half man half beast half orangutan.

Nửa người nửa ngợm nửa đười ươi.

*

Elephant knows elephant, horse knows horse.

Voi biết voi, ngựa biết ngựa.

*

Dog yawns, swallows a fly.

Chó ngáp phải ruồi.

*

Dog dies, story's over.

Chó chết thì hết truyện.

*

Hiding needle inside sleeve.

Giấu kim trong tay áo.

*

Hide, like the cat, its litter.

Giấu như mèo giấu cứt.

*

Mouse gnawing on a cat's leg.

Chuột gặm chân mèo.

*

Kill one cat, save ten thousand mice.

Giết một con mèo mà cứu vạn chuột.

*

Showing deer where to run.

Chỉ đường cho hưu chạy.

*

Taking wood back to forest.

Chở củi về rừng.

*

Wine in, words out.

Rượu vào, lời ra.

*

Weak wine, drank enough, still gets you drunk.

Rượu lạt uống lắm cũng say.

*

Empty stomach, deaf ears.

Bụng đói thì tai điếc.

*

Empty stomach, cold kidney.

Bụng đói cật rét.

*

As ugly as a ghost, still good enough
To sleep with a woman.

Xấu như ma cũng thể chà con gái.

*

Tailors eat rags, artists eat paints.

Thợ may ăn giẻ, thợ vẽ ăn hồ.

*

Hiding head, exposing behind.

Giấu đầu, lòi đuôi.

*

Wiggling out, ducking in,

Ra luồn, vào cúi.

*

Knocking way out, bumping way in.

Ra chạm, vào đụng.

*

Child turns three, whole house learn how to talk.

Con lên ba, cả nhà học nói.

*

Son in loin cloth, father naked.

Con đóng khố, bố cởi truồng.

*

Father eats salty food, son's thirsty.

Cha ăn mặn, con khát nước.

*

Mother sings, daughter claps.

Mẹ hát, con khen hay.

*

Much passion, much bite.

Yêu nhau lắm, cắn nhau đau.

*

Sisters love each other,
Sisters-in-law fear each other,
Brothers-in-law crack each other's head.

Yêu nhau chị em gái,
Rái nhau chị em dâu,
Đánh nhau vỡ đầu là anh em rể.

*

A century is short, a day is long.

Trăm năm thì ngắn, một ngày dài ghê.

*

Morning, then night.

Qua ngày, đến tối.

*

The wind blows, it's god's broom.

Gió thổi là chổi trời.

*

Old for him, but new for me.

Cũ người mới ta.

*

Holding a knife by the blade.

Cầm dao bằng lưỡi.

*

Beauty over virtue.

Đẹp người hơn đẹp nết.

*

Virtuous, but ugly.

Đẹp nết không đẹp người.

*

Planting his whiskers on her chin.

Râu ông nọ cắm cằm bà kia.

*

Drawing a snake, adding legs.

Vẽ rắn, thêm chân.

*

Mother chicken, son duck.

Mẹ gà, con vịt.

*

He said chicken, she said duck.

Ông nói gà, bà nói vịt.

*

Your wife first, then god.

Nhất vợ, nhì trời.

*

Smart for three years, stupid for an hour.

Khôn ba năm, dại một giờ.

*

Smart at home, stupid at the market.

Khôn nhà, dại chợ.

*

Argue with a smart man, can't win, with a stupid man, can't stop.

Nói với người khôn không lại, nói với người dại không cùng.

*

Ate rice gruel, pissed in the bowl.

Ăn cháo đái bát.

*

Ate the whole dog, even the hair.

Ăn chó cả lông.

*

Danced badly, said the ground's not level.

Múa vụng, chê đất lệch.

*

The smart eat men, the stupid are eaten.

Khôn ăn người, dại người ăn.

*

A magpie, starved, eats banyan fruit.
A phoenix, starved, eats chicken shit.

Sáo đói thì sáo ăn đa.
Phượng hoàng lúc đói cứt gà cũng ăn.

*

Have vegetable, eat vegetable.
Have rice gruel, eat rice gruel.

Có rau ăn rau, có cháo ăn cháo.

*

A piece of meat is a piece of shame.

Miếng thịt là miếng nhục.

*

A bowl of sweat for a bowl of rice.

Bát mồ hôi đổi bát cơm.

*

Eating new rice, telling old stories.

Ăn cơm mới, nói chuyện cũ.

*

Three bowls of rice, a cold shower in the morning.

Cơm ba bát, tắm mát hôm mai.

*

Buying from one end of the market,
Selling at the other end.

Buôn đầu chợ, bán cuối chợ.

*

Selling face to the earth, ass to the sky.

Bán mặt cho đất, bán mông cho trời.

*

Selling ass to feed mouth.

Bán trôn nuôi miệng.

*

She whores in nine different neighborhoods, keeps reputation in one.

Làm đĩ chín phường, để một phường lấy chồng.

*

She worries about the crooks of her knees, curliness of her pubic hair.

Lo co đầu gối, lo rối lông lồn.

*
Yes yes I know your wife: she’s cross-eyed
And sells sticky rice at the temple.

Thôi thôi tôi biết vợ canh rồi:
Vợ anh toét mắt bán xôi chợ chùa.

*

Yes yes I know you:
You’re the opium addict with the bruised lips.

Thôi thôi tôi biết anh rồi:
Anh hút thuốc phiện cái môi thâm sì.

*

If I want good food, I wouldn’t come
To your mother’s house.

Có ngon chẳng đến mẹ con nhà mày.

*

With a husband cannot travel,
With a child cannot stand still.

Có chồng chẳng được đi đâu,
Có con chẳng được đứng lâu một giờ.

*

Husband rolls the dice, wife gambles.
Husband with three wives, wife with three husbands.

Chồng đánh bạc, vợ đánh bài.
Chồng hai ba vợ, vợ hai ba chồng.

*

A man crosses the ocean with his buddies,
A woman crosses a stream by herself.

Đàn ông vượt bể có bầu có bạn.
Đàn bà vượt cạn chỉ có một mình.

*

Like salt tossed into the ocean.

Như muối bỏ bể.

*

Like a chick without its mother.

Như gà mất mẹ.

*

Honesty breeds stupidity.

Thật thà là cha dại.

*

One theft, ten suspects.

Một mất mười ngờ.

*

The rich have easy manners, the poor lie.

Giàu thì dễ người, khó thì nói láo.

*

As a poor man, invisible.
As a mandarin, nine thousand relatives.

Lúc nghèo thì chẳng ai nhìn.
Đến khi đỗ trạng chín nghìn anh em.

*

The unthrifty rich turn poor,
The unthrifty poor turn beggars.

Giàu không hà tiện khó liền tay,
Khó không hà tiện khó ăn mày.

*

The rich feast on rice and rice gruel,
The poor smoke water pipes.

Giàu thì cơm cháo bổ lao,
Khó thì đánh điếu thuốc lào ngâm hơi.

*

Growing hair inside the stomach.

Mọc lông trong bụng.

*

The rich eat and drink, the poor fight each other.

Giàu ăn uống, khó đánh nhau.

*

Rich in the evening, poor by morning.

Giàu chiều hôm, khó sớm mai.

*

Rich before noon, poor by afternoon.

Giàu giờ ngọ, khó giờ mùi.

*

The rich sell their dogs,
The poor sell their children.

Giàu bán chó, khó bán con.

*

Eyes rich, hands poor.

Giàu hai con mắt, khó hai bàn tay.

*

Rich in your youth, rich when your children are grown.

Giàu lúc còn son, giàu lúc con lớn.

*

As fickle as the palm of the hand.

Giở mặt như bàn tay.

*

Large head, stupid anyway.

To đầu mà dại.

*

Laugh for three months, no one laughs for three years.

Người cười ba tháng, không ai cười ba năm.

*

One mouth, two stomachs.

Một miệng, hai lòng.

*

One neck, two nooses.

Một cổ, hai tròng.

*

One woman, two men

Một bà, hai ông.

*

Unmarried woman, like a boat without a rudder.
Unmarried man, like a horse without a rein.

Gái không chồng như thuyền không lái.
Trai không vợ như ngựa không cương.

*

Married woman, like a shackle around the neck.
Married man, like a rope around the ankle

Gái có chồng như gông đeo cổ.
Trai có vợ như rợ buộc chân.

*

The unmarried girl cannot wait to go the market.

Gái chưa chồng trông mong đi chợ.

*

A daughter belongs to other people.
A daughter-in-law is bought and brought into the house.

Con gái là con người ta,
Con dâu mới thật mẹ cha mua về.

*

Thick-skinned face, brash brows.

Mặt dày mày dạn.

*

Bamboo shoot face, milk mouth.

Mặt măng miệng sữa.

*

Trash face, dirty brows

Mặt rác mày dơ.

*

Flower face, powdered skin.

Mặt hoa da phấn.

*

Green face, yellow fangs.

Mặt xanh nanh vàng.

*

Callous face, rock brows.

Mặt chay mày đá.

*

Owl face, eel skin.

Mặt cú da lươn.

*

Fish eats ants, ants eat fish.

Cá ăn kiến, kiến ăn cá.

*

Car hits dogs, dog hits car.

Xe cán chó, chó cán xe.

*

Without the elephant, the cow swaggers.

Không voi, bò lám lớn.

*

Winners are kings, losers are bandits.

Được làm vua, thua làm giặc.

*

A soldier with a general’s temperament.

Người lính tính quan.

*

Black near ink, bright near a lamp.

Gần mực thì đen, gần đèn thì sáng.

*

Three things in life to wean yourself from:
Fragrant wine, fatty goat, pubescent girls.

Thế gian ba sự khôn chừa,
Rượu nồng, dê béo, gái vừa đương tơ.

*

A tongue, with no bones, wiggles every which way.

Lưỡi không xương nhiều đường lắc lẻo.

*

As close as the tongue is to the gums.

Gần như lưỡi với lợn.

*

Her traits are revealed in the kitchen.

Xem trong bếp, biết nếp đàn bà.

*

Alive each man his own habits,
Each man his own illness when dying.

Sống mỗi người một nết, chết mỗi người một tật.

*

Old hair old ears old gums old teeth.

Già tóc già tai, già răng già lợn.

*

Old scrotum, young testicles.

Già dái, non hột.

*

As sad as an old whore.

Buồn tênh như đĩ về già.

*

The old know work, the young know eat.

Già thì biết việc, trẻ thì biết ăn.

*

The smart one grows old quick.

Người khôn chóng già.

*

The seventy-year-old learns from the seventy-one.

Bảy mươi còn học bảy mươi mốt.

*

The seventy-year-old is lesser than the seven-year-old.

Bảy mươi không bằng đứa lên bảy.

*

Old, young, same difference.

Một già, một trẻ, bằng nhau.

*

Each man his own shirt: what odor?

Áo ai người ấy mặc có mùi gì đâu.

*

Each man’s shit to suit his own nose.

Cứt ai vừa mũi người ấy.

*

Beating a dog, kicking a pile of shit.

Đánh chó đá bãi cứt.

*

Beat a dog, look at the owner.

Đánh chó, ngó chủ.

*

As aggressive as a newcomer.

Hung hăng như thằng mới đến.

*

Arrive late, gnaw on the bones.

Đến trễ gặm xương.

*

Fierce laugh, fresh tears.

Giòn cười, tươi khóc.

*

Drowning, grasping at foam.

Chết đuối với phải bọt.

*

The deaf are not afraid of guns.

Điếc thì dạn súng.

*

Man, dead three days, shows up in the market.
Fox, dead three days, shows up in the forest.

Người chết ba ngày, người quay về chợ.
Cáo chết ba ngày, cáo trở lên rừng.

*

The living is done, death is here.

Cái sống đã hết, cái chết đã đến.

*

Dead man argues with his pallbearers.

Thằng chết cãi thằng khiêng.

*

Long departure, short return.

Đi xa về gần.

*

Close, I’ll come by today, tomorrow.
Far, I’ll come by twice a year.

Gần thì nay viếng, mai thăm.
Xa xôi cách trở một năm vài lần.

*

Back and forth, to please each other.

Có qua có lại mới toại lòng nhau.



[Image: Interior of a house in Thái Bình, photo taken in 1995.]

Thái figures of speech and proverbs

I haven't opened this book in more than a decade. Tục Ngữ Thái (Hanoi: Văn Hoá Dân Tộc Publishing House, 1978) is an anthology of Thái figures of speech and proverbs, collected and translated into Vietnamese by Hà Văn Năm, Cầm Thương, Lò Văn Sĩ, Tòng Kim Ân, Kim Cương and Hương Quyền. Various Thái tribes have been in Vietnam for 1,200 years, having migrated from Yunnan in present day China. Today, there are a million Thái living in Vietnam. I translate a tiny selection from this book:

At thirty, if you’re not smart, you’re stupid.
At fifty, if you’re not rich, you’re poor.

Chop the weak spot,
Poke the thin spot.

Dog bites man with a torn shirt.

Shirt torn at the chest,
Pants with a hole in the crotch.

No rice to eat,
No land to step on.

Some with two, some none.

The rich feign indigence,
The poor dress snazzily.

Dog dies, fleas also die.

Behind back, plot murder,
Face to face, profess love.

Eat without waiting,
Kill without asking.

Buffaloes only know buffaloes,
Cows only know cows.

Had crab, ate only the eyes.
Had fish, ate only the entrails.
Had fruits, ate only the skin.

A dog will bite without barking,
Marriage often happens unexpectedly.

Flavorless yet still wine,
Old yet still your woman,
Blind yet still your lover.

Children shitting on your shoulders,
Throwing up on your neck.

Adore your wife, adore all the children.
Love your wife, love all the in-laws.

Husband and wife:
Don’t abandon each other during grief,
Don’t leave each other during poverty.

Eight ca dao poems

Responding to Jason's comment on ca dao, I mentioned the ca dao anthologies I own. Actually, some of these are folk song [dân ca] anthologies, but most of these songs are derived from folk poems, after all. For more on ca dao, check out an essay I wrote for Wikivietlit.

I translate eight ca dao poems:




Who brought me to this place?
I sleep late, rise early, my eyes burning.

Ai đem em đến chỗ này.
Thức khuya, dậy sớm mắt cay như gừng.



Sing so the dog will bite you, the bull will buck.
Sing so a woman will leave her husband to follow you.
Sing so the dog will bite you, the bull will bellow.
Sing until the old one crawls from his hut.

Hát cho chó cắn, bò lồng,
Hát cho con gái bỏ chồng mà theo,
Hát cho chó cắn, bò kêu,
Hát cho ông lão trong lều bò ra.



Nothing to do, I'll sew a bag to hold heaven,
Break rocks, kill an elephant, watch the wind blow.
Nothing to do, I'll take out my measuring stick,
And measure Sở mountain, So mountain, Thầy temple.
I'll go up to the sky to measure the clouds and the winds.
I'll wade into the river to measure the water.
I'll measure someone between eighteen and twenty.
A pretty one, a cute one.

Ngồi buồn may túi đựng trời,
Đan xề sảy đá, giết voi xem gió.
Ngồi buồn đem thước đi đo.
Đem từ núi Sở, núi So, chùa Thầy.
Lên trời đo gio,ù đo mây,
Xuống sông đo nước, về đây đo người.
Đo từ mười tám đôi mươi.
Đo được một người vừa đẹp vừa xinh.



When March comes, a frog will bite a snake in the neck,
And drag its corpse into the rice paddy.
A tiger will lie down so a pig can lick its fur.
A ball of rice will swallow a ten-year-old child.
An eighty-year-old man will be eaten by a dozen persimmons.
A chicken and a jug of wine will swallow a drunk.
A trap will crawl inside an eel.
A band of grasshoppers will pursue the carp.
The seedlings will jump up and eat the cows.
The grass will lie in wait for the water-buffaloes.
The chicks will harass the hawk.
A munia will chase and crack the pelican's head.

Bao giờ cho đến tháng ba,
Ếch cắn cổ rắn tha ra ngoài đồng.
Hùm nằm cho lợn liếm lông.
Một chục quả hồng nuốt lão tám mươi.
Nắm xôi nuốt trẻ lên mười.
Con gà be rượu nuốt người lao đao.
Lươn nằm cho trúm bò vào.
Một đàn cào cào đuổi bắt cá rô.
Lúa mạ nhảy lên ăn bò.
Cỏ năn, cỏ lác rình bò bắt trâu.
Gà con đuổi bắt diều hâu.
Chim ri đuổi đánh vỡ đầu bồ nông.



Nine stars line up vertically.
I've loved you since you were in your mother's arms.
Nine stars line up horizontally,
I've loved you since you were in your mother's womb.
Nine stars are bunched together.
I've loved you since she came home with your father.

Sao Vua chín cái nằm chồng.
Anh thương em từ thuở mẹ bồng trong tay.
Sao Vua chín cái nằm ngang.
Anh thương em từ thuở mẹ mang trong lòng.
Sao Vua chín cái nằm kè.
Anh thương em từ thuở mẹ về với cha.



People in their teens
Are already someone's husband, someone's wife.
Miss, you are already in your twenties.
You have many dates in the daytime,
But no one to sleep with at night.

Người ta mười mấy tuổi đầu
Đã về làm rể làm dâu nhà người.
Cô kia hăm mấy tuổi rồi,
Ngày thời lắm mối, tối thời nằm không.



Man: A river so vast, a fish will disappear.
If we are meant to be together, I can wait a thousand years.

Woman: Repair the dyke if it's your paddy.
If it's meant to be, we'll be together. Don't bother waiting.

Sông dài cá lội biệt tăm,
Phải duyên chồng vợ ngàn năm cũng chờ.

Ruộng ai thì nấy đắp bờ,
Duyên ai nấy gặp đừng chờ uổng công.



I can see rocks in the clear water,
The shape of a fish swimming.
Turn around, girl, so I can draw you.
Later, should we stray from each other,
I'll use this picture to track you down.

Nước trong thấy đá,
Con cá lội thấy hình.
Này em ơi quay mặt lại,
Cho anh họa cái hình.
Ngày mai có lưu lạc,
Anh lấy hình tìm em.

Chilled, a Yellow

In yesterday's Corriere Della Sera:

É stato ucciso sabato mattina alle 10 in pieno centro a Orgosolo (Nuoro) Peppino Marotto, 82 anni, persona molto nota in paese e anche nel resto della Sardegna per il suo impegno come sindacalista della Cigl e come poeta dialettale. L'uomo è stato freddato con sei colpi di pistola sparati alle spalle mentre entrava in un'edicola, come faceva ogni giorno, poco distante dalla sua abitazione. Il killer è fuggito a piedi facendo perdere le tracce nei vicoli del paese [...]

In English: "Peppino Marotto, 82 years old, was killed at 10 AM on Saturday in the center of Orgosolo. He was well known in the area and throughout Sardinia as a union leader and as a poet in [the Sardinian] dialect. The man was killed with six shots fired from behind him as he walked up to a newstand near his house, something he did each morning. Escaping on foot, the killer disappeared into an alley."

In the original text, "freddato," literally "chilled," was used to mean the poet was killed in cold blood, he was chilled. Notice also the borrowed English word "killer." Another English word, "water," is used in Italian to mean "toilet," and an unsolved crime story is called a "giallo," a "yellow," from the American use of "yellow journalism," which started with the Yellow Kid, the first comics character. The novelty and antics of this vaguely Chinese-looking imp were used to peddle the World, a New York tabloid.

Yellow in English is tawdry and cowardly but in East Asia, where most folks are golden, this color represents only the highest. The Vietnamese words for yellow and gold are the same. In English, "mongoloid" also means retarded, since those with Dow syndrome are apparently indistinguishable from people like me, Yo Yo Ma and Aung San Suu Kyi. Black is evil and dirty, of course. Only white is pure. Chill, dude, or I'll chill your ass. A yellow!

HAPPY NEW YEAR THERE'S NOTHING MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM

Photos I took in 1995, near Lai Châu. In Vietnam, the distinctions between inside and outside, private and public spaces, are often fudged. You can observe the activities inside a house by simply walking pass it. Their doors and windows are wide open.

Here, the banner over the door trumpeted, "HAPPY NEW YEAR." On the right wall, there were a military service certificate, a NVA pith helmet, common for men in northern Vietnam but never worn by southern Vietnamese civilians, and a quotation from Ho Chi Minh, "THERE'S NOTHING MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM." High on the left wall, an ancestral altar. Notice the slow-slung arm chair with foamboard cushions. There was no mattress on the bed, only a straw mat. On the table, a thermos bottle and a tea set with mismatched cups. The new year celebrated was Tet/Chinese new year, but this photo was taken three months later. In Vietnam, you'll see Santa Claus decorating restaurants in July, and a page from last year's calendar taped to a wall, because the girl is so lovely.

Most Vietnam eateries also leave their steel gates wide open, with their chairs facing the streets. Eating out usually means that you will have to deal with a constant stream of peddlers, shoeshine boys and beggars as you slurp your noodles. The peddlers, too many of them small children, will try to sell you everything from a bag of peanuts, a rose, or a book. Most, however, are pushing lottery tickets. On his third day in Saigon, a not-too-quiet, not-too-ugly American friend said to me, “It’s nice that the government provide these beggars with something to sell.”

“What are you taking about?”

“You know, instead of having everyone going around begging, and making the country look bad, poor people can sell lottery tickets.”

I looked at my friend incredulously. “But this is a government racket! They’re the ones who are making the money!”

A lottery ticket costs 2,000 (14 cents), only 10% of which goes to to the peddler. The most you can win from a single lottery ticket is about $3,200. One woman in my Saigon neighborhood came up with seven winning lottery tickets, which netted her nearly $23,000.

Occasionally, a male restaurant patron will be approached by an overly made-up and perfumed girl selling lottery tickets. She will allow him to “win” instantly if he makes a private arrangement with her.




[For more on compromised privacy, check out Nicholas Manning's "The Dialectic Of The Glance."]
[Of all the European cities I've been to, Naples was the only one with exposed interiors.]

Anglo-American Ambitions behind the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the Destabilization of Pakistan

by Larry Chin

[...]

This was Pakistan’s 9/11; Pakistan’s JFK assassination, and its impact will resonate for years.

Contrary to mainstream corporate news reporting, chaos benefits Bush-Cheney’s “war on terrorism”. Calls for “increased worldwide security” will pave the way for a muscular US reaction, US-led force and other forms of “crack down” from Bush-Cheney across the region. In other words, the assassination helps ensure that the US will not only never leave, but also increase its presence.

The Pakistani election, if it takes place at all, is a simpler two-way choice: pro-US Musharraf or pro-US Sharif.

[...]

A paradise story by Dustin Heron

Earlier this year, I blurbed: "Dustin Heron's Paradise Stories is a marvelously told tale. At times grotesque, bizarre, often hilarious and always painfully true, it features a cast of vivid characters, including several ghosts and a talking stack of shit. Heron has penned a very moving meditation on our mortality." Here's the opening story/chapter:



Two Very Long Arms

When he was ten, a shit field sprang up in Billy’s front yard. It started in the house, coming back up and out the toilet. Water splashed out so fast the toilet lid flapped up and down in the rush. The dingy brown water spilled across the linoleum, old floaters and forgotten wads of toilet paper swimming towards the shag carpet, which became thick and wet with humid toilet stink; the whole house took on the atmosphere of a marsh.

Everyone was out of the house when it happened, and one by one came home to clouds of stale piss and flies. When Billy’s mom, Ant, came home from shopping, she saw the water running out from under the front door and went to her parents house on the other side of town. When Billy got home, he opened the door and went slowly inside, squishing across the carpet for the phone. He called his grandparents and Ant came home. They laid down towels from the kitchen to Ant’s bedroom and watched her TV until Billy’s dad, Stan, got home. His sawdust covered work boots left giant footprints in the carpet that filled with water. Sawdust and shit floated in the puddles left in his wake.

“This place needs a concrete foundation and hardwood floors,” Stan said, swinging a claw hammer around his meaty index finger. Stan’s idea was impossible: the house was a lima-bean green trailer up on cinder blocks—a mobile home—that did not belong to them.

Ant said, “Just fix this for now.” She always said this to Stan. There were boxes of unused collectibles and hand-me-down junk stacked around the house, and every bit of clutter had, at one time, been addressed with this command. Still, it remained.

But this day, Stan went out to the front yard, found the septic tank markers, and dug into the hard, red dirt until he had formed a basin around a slender black pipe with a valve at the top. He released the valve. Whatever pressure had forced the old shit into the house now released it out of the pipe and into the yard, filling the earthen basin until it became a putrid, shit-filled pond; a swarm of flies hovered immediately over the water and mosquito larvae began to multiply uncontrollably. The pipe coughed up wads of stringy old paper, sinking into the water with a plop only to reappear floating, pulled apart and trailing across the surface like fake spider-web. The shit was probably not all theirs—some surely belonged to former tenants, and had been stored in the rusty old pipes and murky limits of the tank as old memories are shuttled off to the dark corners of the brain—but it seeped out into what was now their yard, and was entirely their problem. The sudden excess of water and crumbly old shit was sucked up by the crusty, hard land, filled for years and years by pine-needles that would not decompose, would not give up nutrients to earth so stale it had no choice but to drink up septic water as if it were lapping at a wholesome fountain of youth. Billy’s parents had tried growing a vegetable garden, but all that mountain soil ever yielded was hard tomatoes and wilted broccoli. Now they grew shit.

After a few days, the water began to flow out of the basin and throughout the front yard, until even the gravel driveway squished when you stepped on it, as if the whole quarter acre were sitting on top of a sponge. When a car pulled into the driveway, the whole yard shifted and sloshed like a waterbed. The septic would have to be replaced, but it was expensive, and they had no help from their landlord.

They lived in Paradise, California, but a tour of their small lot would make you think they lived on a farm in Wyoming, which in fact was their dream. Paradise had been their dream once, too, back when they lived in Tracey and Stan worked graveyard at the box plant; but now paradise had turned into Wyoming while Paradise was flooded with shit. To simulate Wyoming, they tried to squeeze a farm onto their quarter-acre rental lot by stuffing it with themselves, Billy, three dogs, nine cats, six chickens, four geese, two goats, and a cow. The cats were various degrees of stray, the dogs stayed strictly in the back but were let in at night, the chickens fought with the geese in a shit splattered coop in the corner of the front yard while the goats and cow were on either side of the mobile in their own too-small pens, built by Stan’s hands with leftover lumber from Meeks, where he drove truck. The cow was still a baby, gotten after they had slaughtered the pigs the spring before. All of this Wyoming in California meant that, when their septic tank exploded into their house and yard, they couldn’t call their landlord for fear of being evicted.

Stan used a Shop-Vac to suck up most of the water from the carpet, but the smell still hung in the air, a smell of old water at the bottom of a well, a smell like the wisp of a fart filtering from the room, a smell that hung around and mixed with Ant’s potpourri, or that of a cooking dinner, to make an entirely new smell, like shit lasagna or a bouquet of shit roses. Everything they ate tasted like shit, everywhere they went, they were sure they smelled like shit. For a long while in the beginning, they sat around with their noses pinched in clothespins, but, slowly and unnoticeably, they grew used to it: Ant no longer stopped in the corner of the grocery store to sniff herself, and she no longer dabbed Billy with Stan’s cologne before letting him leave for school; Stan, who worked in the sun and sweated and stunk like a mule anyway, was never bothered by thoughts of carrying the shit stink with him. They had come to a point, collectively and without speaking of it, where they believed that if they had to smell like shit, so be it. The yard was the big problem now, and it would require hiring a septic specialist to come and dig out the old tank and replace it.

Ant got a job taking care of a couple of old fogies down in Chico, and had to stay with them until after dark. Stan started going to the dairy farms after work to see if they needed help running their milk tankers in the winter—with persistence, but little luck. It was October and most of the tankers had drivers already. Still, Stan came home late after waiting on the edges of farms on the off chance of work, digging his toe into gravel like waiting to be picked for schoolyard baseball, and so it was up to Billy to get the fire going when he got home from school and make sure all the animals were fed. He would do this and, once it got dark, turn on the TV in his room and look out the window, waiting for one of his parents to come squishing into the driveway.

He came straight home after school, which was no problem, because he had no friends. Besides, if the goats got too hungry, they would start bleating like crazy. Neighbors had complained, and threats had been made of calling the landlord. Nothing had been done yet. Billy learned that when one of their neighbors came knocking at the tall front gate, ignore them. They always wanted to come in and brought with them all sorts of questions about his parents and where they were and how they could leave such a young boy home all alone. If he heard a knock, or if the phone rang, he turned out his light, and turned the TV off, and lay on his bed. Alone in the dark, the septic smell became the entire world. He imagined that stale stink of piss and shit moving through the house as visible as snow in the wind, climbing through his nose and into his lungs, filling his bladder and stomach again, so that all he would eat and breathe and drink was distilled piss and shit, and he would piss and shit it out again, and it would go right out the toilet and into the front yard to rise up into the air. He was learning about the water cycle at school, about how the world moved only in circles—every toilet flush became a gurgling splash in the yard, confirming this.

Now it was mid-November. Billy was home from school, about to feed the goats. Heavy clouds, black and grey, were boiling quietly overhead. The pine trees around their yard stuck up like black sticks, scraggly and jagged. Stan had dropped a big pile of alfalfa hay in the driveway the night before, so Billy went out to it and gathered up two big handfuls, pressing them against his chest. Dry flakes of the dense, stringy hay stuck to his sweatshirt and his nose filled with the green dust. He used to let his nose fill with the flakes to cover up the shit, but, at this point, it wasn’t the smell that got to him: it was how the soggy ground slid beneath his feet, the way one step would make the gravel ripple and rupture, a thick black sludge oozing from secret pockets hiding just beneath the driveway surface. He imagined that any day now the shit would start poking up through the ground like clover, toilet paper would open and flower like dandelions. He breathed in as much of the hay as he could, and walked quickly, and made his way towards the goat pen, on the other side the shit pipe and its dark pond.

As he was walking by the shit pipe, trying not to look at it, he heard a sudden, vaporous gasp, followed by a gurgle; a thick gust of wind, foul with the smell of old toilet water and fresh shit, came rushing over him. The smell, so fresh, as if a ragged shit had been smeared beneath his nose, penetrated even through the hay. It was as if he had smelled shit again for the first time. He gagged, bent over, and spat strings of thick vomit slime onto the ground.

It smelled as though a fresh shit had just been spat into the yard. But no one had been home all day. Old shit didn’t normally come out during the day. Billy thought that all of the old shit was already in the yard, out in the open, floating beneath his bedroom window. He turned towards the smell. It was not a fresh stream of shit, after all: rising slowly out of the water, dripping wet and blinking, was a tall pile of shit. Just a small mound at first, it kept rising up, growing taller and wider, until it loomed above Billy, casting a long, dark shadow over him. For the most part, it was an indefinable brown mass, but here and there individual logs and features stuck out: it clearly had a mouth, which opened and closed, lips smacking, releasing the same fart smelling air with every breath; its eyes were globules of toilet paper.

The great mound slid like a slug to the edge of the water. It moved slowly, its whole mass wobbling. “Do you have the time?” it asked.

“Four o’clock,” Billy said. “Are you my poop?”

The pile laughed. “Not entirely. Tell me, what year is it?”

“Nineteen-ninety four.” Billy pressed the hay tighter and tighter against his chest. He stepped backwards. Though the shit was enormous and bubbling, it had no smell at all, save that dull and muggy stink that filled the house and that Billy had gotten used to.

“Ah,” said the shit, and it leaned back, or appeared to: the shit that was its face slid up to the top of the pile, and the shit at the top rolled off, cascading down its great back, plinking and splattering into the water. Then its face slid back into pace. “Forty-five years!” said the shit.

Billy could say nothing. He was still amazed by how tall the shit was. Easily two feet taller than him. If he had been as tall as the shit, he could play basketball at lunchtime with the older kids. They would pick him first, and they would all know his name.

“What are you?” he said finally.

“It’s a long story,” said the shit. Little bubbles were always popping all over the pile, making a sound like moldy fruit being dropped from the top of a table. The dogs started barking in the backyard.

Billy stepped backwards, until he felt the jabbing end of a pine branch in his back. “I need to feed the goats,” he said.

“Wait!” said the shit. “Don’t you want to hear my story? I have so much to say!” Its eyes stretched out wide, until the toilet paper that made them was thin and transparent; its mouth opened until it was as big as Billy was tall.

“Like what?” Billy asked, squinting into the windy, fart-smelling yawn of the shit.

The shit gave a squirm, a sloppy turning that shook turds form its sides and back like a dog shaking off water. “Um.....hey! Do you like to read?”

Billy took a step towards the goat pen.

“Because I’ve got a book,” the shit said breathlessly. “Have I got the book for you!”

“Me?” Billy tried to point at himself, as if the shit wouldn’t know who he meant, but his arms were full and tiring from holding the thick bunches of hay.

“Yes, you! That is, if....” the shit looked around conspiratorially: it’s eyes swished back and forth and all the shit from one side of its body swung to the other; great streams of brown sludge ran down its sides. Finally, its eyes settled in the middle again, and it teetered dangerously over the edge of the water towards Billy. “....if you want to live forever!” it whispered loudly.

“You can live forever?” Billy dropped the hay.

The shit leaned back again, a smug smile on its face. “Apparently so, my friend. Apparently so.”

“But you’re poop.” He gestured with his hay-dotted arms at the festering shit field. His arms felt light, and, for some reason, capable of anything—as if he could lift up a great pile of bricks, or push cars all by himself.

“Yeah, but I feel great!” The shit flexed like a bodybuilder.

Billy stepped towards the shit. He stood at the edge of the water. The shit smiled down at him. Up close, Billy could see the various colors of the shit, dark splotches here, raggedy brown speckles there, mysterious greens and impossibly whole chunks of food all over. It still had no smell, nothing more amazing than the tang of pine or the gathering whiff of rain. He reached towards the shit. His hand passed through the shit as if he were putting his hand into cold, wet cookie dough. It globbed onto his fingers, it was thick, and sticky, and yet wet, squishing loudly. When his arm was up to his elbow, he felt the hard edge of a book. He grabbed it by the spine.

“There you go!” said the shit.

He pulled his arm slowly out, and as the pocket of shit he had made refilled with air and shit, it made a squelching, farting sound. Both he and the shit laughed. His arm was completely covered in runny blobs of shit. He went to the hose, holding his arm and the shit-soaked book out away from him. One good spray from the hose cleaned everything off; he wouldn’t even have to wash his sweatshirt, and the book was undamaged. He was near the corner of the house. He flipped the book open and glanced up at the shit, who had floated over to the nearest edge of the pond and was looking at him, a big smile and wide eyes shining between two branches of a small, black oak.

“Yes, yes,” said the shit. “We never have to die!”

There were pictures in the book and lots of words. A slight wind picked up, coldly crossing over Billy’s face with the terrible stink of shit. He gagged. His eyes watered. The goats started bleating from their little pen. The wind passed and, again, there was no smell. He dropped the book and went to where he had left the hay.

“What are you doing?” said the shit.

“I have to feed the goats.” He picked up chunks of the hay, stuffing them in his pockets and down the neck of his sweatshirt.

“Don’t you want to learn how to not die? Aren’t you afraid? I was afraid. I was so afraid of dying I looked everywhere to avoid it. Thank god I found this book! I’ve seen people die, and it is so painful. And then, you’re gone. But, this way, you never feel pain, you never go away. Have you ever seen anyone die?”

“Yes,” Billy said, and he thought first of his siblings, twins, who had died, but that was before he was born. He thought next of the pigs they had slaughtered. The pigs had been mean, sloppy animals covered with mud, with black eyes that would lower at Billy when he went to see them; they would charge at him, grunting, when he came in their pen. To feed them, he had to stand on the porch and pour the feed over their fence. When they were killed, a man came from the butcher shop and brought the two muddy beasts out into the front yard. They weren’t mean at all to him. It was raining and the pigs were covered with even more mud and shit than normal; they were almost black with it. The man dumped a pile of green pellets onto the ground and while the pigs rooted around for it, he pulled a rifle from his truck and shot one, and then the other, squealing, in the head. Then he took a knife and slit their throats and blood pooled beneath the giant, writhing monsters, mixing with the muddy rain water and flowing out across the yard in dark, swirling rivers. Billy watched from his bedroom window without once looking away. Yes, he never liked the pigs, and yes, it was terrible to watch them die, and he was sure that they hurt very much just before they were gone, maybe even while the butcher hung them up and cut their bellies and took all of their guts out into a pile in the dirt. But he was certain, also, that all the blood that flowed so freely down the driveway was still partly there—there was too much to ever wash it away completely. The shit was maybe right; it would probably hurt to die. But when you were dead, you also didn’t stink, or scare little boys who were only trying to be nice and feed you, and so when you were dead, all that little boy would have left of you was the dried blood in the driveway dirt and the memory of how sad he felt when he watched you die.

“What if everything changes when you die?” he asked.

“You a gambler?” laughed the shit.

“No,” Billy sighed. “I have to feed the goats.”

He went and fed the goats. He set the hay down in their trough and then stood in the center of their small pen, arms out straight, while both Lilly and Pearl circled around him, nibbling the bits of alfalfa off his sweatshirt with their nimble, purple tongues. Lilly licked his face for the green dust and followed the trail down his sweatshirt, pulling the sharp pieces from against his neck. Normally, this was Billy’s favorite part of the day, letting the goats search him for food. They were gentle and warm, and would rest their foreheads on his when they were done and let him run his hands up and down their long, coarse necks. He thought about their heads, how when they were babies they had little nubs of horns. His dad had burnt them off. He told Billy to hold their baby goat legs while he pressed a red-hot iron against the horns. The little goats screamed and bleated and their legs pushed against Billy. He thought they would hate him like the pigs hated him, but with reason. A few minutes later, though, they were running all over the yard, jumping onto the deck with their clacking hooves and bleating playfully.

He felt a drop of rain on the top of his head. He looked up into the blackening sky, here and there a white drop of water streaking across. He gave Lilly and Pearl a final pat on the head and went back to the shit, picking up the shit’s book on the way.

“You have to go away,” he said to the shit. “My mom’s coming home soon.”

“She won’t get home until after dark,” said the shit.

“Still,” said Billy. “You can’t be in our front yard. You have to go back to where you belong.”

“Your dad opened the septic tank. He released me,” said the shit, sliding away a short distance. Then, quickly sliding back, “Have you ever heard of black magic?”

Billy looked up at the sky. “If it rains, will you wash away into the yard?”

“I hope not!” Something burst on the back of the pile, and shit sprayed the side of the house.

Billy sighed. “I have to go inside now. You should be careful.”

As he walked away, the shit yelled after him: “This offer won’t last forever, buddy, but I will!”

Billy went in and sat at the kitchen table, which was cluttered with a bunch of Ant’s papers and files, stacks of Stan’s old hunting magazines. The whole house was cluttered, and the whole back yard, too; wherever there wasn’t an animal, there was some old piece of junk that his dad had dragged home from work. Billy pulled out his sketchbook and pencils from his backpack and pushed his mom’s papers aside. One of her folders opened, exposing the edge of a picture that he knew without seeing. It was the only picture taken of his older brother and sister, Lucy and Travis. They had died in the hospital shortly after birth. In the picture, his mom’s face was thin and sweaty, and her eyes were red and huge; Travis and Lucy, identical and premature, were still covered with goo and their eyes were squeezed shut and they were crying and tiny and pink. Billy had asked once which one was Travis, and Ant had gotten very quiet, and said she didn’t know, and she had gone away into her room and didn’t come out for a very long time. Billy closed the folder and put it at the edge of the table, far away from him. It was true, too, that when you died, you made everyone who knew you or who would have known you sad. He could hear the shit out in the yard singing softly to himself. It had the voice of an old crooner, and was singing a medley of Sinatra songs.

Outside, it was starting to rain. Billy began drawing a picture of the shit to show his parents when they got home. When he finished the shit, he opened the shit’s magic book, flipping around for pictures. He found a painting of Ponce de Leon standing on a rock and pointing to some jungle. Billy copied the explorer’s picture onto his paper, next to the shit. Then he drew himself on the other side, what he hoped he looked like when he got older: tall, with big muscles, on top of a skateboard. Billy gave the shit two very long arms, and put one on his shoulder, and the other around the great Spanish explorer. He looked at the picture for a long time, for so long, when he closed his eyes he could still see the three of them, together. Rain began to patter hard against the aluminum roof.

He put his hood up and went back out front and stood before the shit. It was almost completely dark, but the shit was half-covered in the yellow porch light. Rain fell between them.

“Mooooon Riverrrrr,” the shit sang, looking away from Billy.

“How do you live forever?” Billy asked.

The shit faced him, not by turning, but by sucking its face through the pile until it slowly emerged on the other side, blinking away pieces of shit until it could clearly see. “First, you have to put your soul into a container,” it said, turds falling from its mouth.

“Like a septic tank?” Billy asked, scrunching his nose up.

The shit sighed. “I would urge you to take longer to make your decision than I did. But, yes.”

“What happened to your body?” Billy crossed his arms and held his shoulders. His legs were shaking.

“It rotted away. Most things do.” The shit gave a kind of shrug, the pile bubbling and heaving up.

The rain fell and fell, forming little streams down the sloping gravel driveway, dripping in wide curtains from the edge of the roof. The sound of it was everywhere.

“But not your...soul? Do you have a soul?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, you have a soul, and it won’t go anywhere, as long as you put it somewhere safe.” Rain ran down the shit, taking big chunks of it along its wide mass, dropping with a familiar plunk into the shit pond. The shit appeared to be growing smaller. One of its toilet paper eyes was running down its face in stretchy globs.

“That’s what I thought,” Billy said, kicking some gravel into the shit with a plink. He looked up at the dark sky through the pine trees. The made a kind of jagged circle, like a crown, filled with roiling grey and cold. “Why did you flood our house?”

The shit sunk with the slobbery sound of a deflating balloon, closed its eyes as if thinking. “Have you ever felt so trapped that your spine twists inside your body, just trying to pull out of your skin?” it asked quietly.

“Sometimes,” Billy said, stepping eagerly forward to the edge of the shit, reaching out as it shrunk away to an unavoidable nothing, reaching out to keep it there, for just a moment longer, because suddenly he wanted to say just so many things.

Dog Magnet

Lush Life III

American Cheese III

Lush Life II

Lush Life

We B Toys

Some Kind of Cheese Orgy

[poem formerly here will be in the May issue of the Indian webzine, Almost Island]





[Angela Genusa makes her own cheese.]

I Egest You Not

This morning, Jay Johnston emailed me from Spain an image of a "caganer," with this explanation:

Caganer, que podría traducirse por “cagón”, es una figura típica en los pesebres catalanes. El origen de esta tradición hay que buscarlo en el siglo XVIII y se dice que los campesinos comenzaron a colocarlo en el belén porque simbolizaba la prosperidad para el año siguiente. Su postura no deja de ser simbólica: el objetivo era fertilizar las tierras para que las próximas cosechas fueran buenas. Su presencia traía buena suerte y dicen que su ausencia auguraba malos tiempos. Con el paso del tiempo ha perdido gran parte de su significado original, pero se ha convertido casi en un objeto de culto para coleccionistas. Cada año aparecen nuevas versiones del Caganer con las caras de los personajes del año. Al contrario de lo que algunos pueden pensar, el objetivo no es para nada ofensivo, sino casi todo lo contrario: de esta forma se homenajea a los famosos de la vida pública que más han dado que hablar en los últimos 12 meses, en especial a políticos, futbolistas…

In English: Caganer, translatable as “crapper,” is a standard figure in the Catalan Christmas manger. Its origin can be traced to the 18th century, when peasants started to place it in nativity scenes because it symbolized prosperity for the coming year. Its posture was also literal, since the objective was to fertilize the earth to ensure the next harvest will be plentiful. Its presence brings good fortune, its absence foreshadows bad times. With the passage of time it has lost much of its original significance, becoming instead a curious objects for collectors. Each year new versions of the Caganer appear with faces of current personalities. Contrary to what one may assume, the objective is not to be offensive, but nearly its opposite: a form of homage to those who have been talked about the most during the previous 12 months, especially politicians, soccer players…





Top to bottom: A generic grandmother: Thiery Henry, striker for FC Barcelona; Salvador Dali, Catalan painter with a museum in Figueres, his hometown; Pope Benedict XVI.

There's a Catalan saying before a meal: "Menja bé, caga fort i no tinguis por a la mort!" ["Eat well, shit strong and don't be afraid of death!"]. Now that we're on the subject, here's a Bob Malloy essay on poop, from the fourth issue of the Drunken Boat:









I translate two Vietnamese folk poems:


There is a lime tree in my garden,
Without branches, yet with flowers.
There is an elderly mother in my house
Who can neither cook nor sweep.
At the banquet, she has the place of honor
In front of fine china on a red-lacquered tray.
After she eats, she shits on the floor.
Children, grandchildren, come quick;
It is time to put grandmother in the hole.


It is good fortune to marry an old wife.
The house is clean. The meals are proper.
It is a waste of breath to marry a young one.
She snacks between meals, then takes a shit
In front of the house.


Four proverbs:


Buffalo shit, after days, turns to mud.


A phoenix, starved, eats chicken shit.


Each man’s shit to suit his own nose.


Beating a dog, kicking a pile of shit.


And a riddle:


Toot, toot, toot.
Eats, shits, and walks
With the same mouth.
(a snail)




..................................
Finally, Mohandas Gandhi as quoted by V.S. Naipaul in An Area of Darkness, 1964:

Shankaracharya Hill, overlooking the Dal Lake, is one of the beauty spots of Srinagar. It has to be climbed with care, for large areas of its lower slopes are used as latrines by Indian tourists. If you surprise a group of three women, companionably defecating, they will giggle: the shame is yours, for exposing yourself to such a scene.

In Madras the bus station near the High Court is one of the more popular latrines. The traveller arrives; to pass the time he raises his dhoti, defecates in the gutter. The bus arrives; he boards it; the woman sweeper cleans up after him. Still in Madras, observe this bespectacled patriarch walking past the University on the Marina. Without warning he raises his dhoti, revealing a backside bare save for what appears to be a rope-like G string; he squats, pisses on the pavement, leisurely rises; the dhoti still raised, he rearranges his G-string, lets the dhoti fall, and continues on his promenade. It is a popular evening walk, this Marina; but no one looks, no face is averted in embarrassment.

In Goa you might think of taking an early morning walk along the balustraded avenue that runs beside the Mandovi River. Six feet below, on the water's edge, and as far as you can see, there is a line, like a wavering tidewrack, of squatters. For the people of Goa, as for those of imperial Rome, defecating is a social activity; they squat close to one another; they chatter. When they are done they advance, trousers still down, backsides bare, into the water to wash themselves. They climb back on to the avenue, jump on their cycles or get into their cars, and go away. The strand is littered with excrement; amid this excrement fish is being haggled over as it is landed from the boats; and every hundred yards or so there is a blue-and-white enamelled notice in Portuguese threatening punishment for soiling the river. But no one notices.

Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover. Muslims, with their tradition of purdah, can at times be secretive. But this is a religious act of self-denial, for it is said that the peasant, Muslim or Hindu, suffers from claustrophobia if he has to use an enclosed latrine. A handsome young Muslim boy, a student at a laughable institute of education in an Uttar Pradesh weaving town, elegantly dressed in the style of Mr Nehru, even down to the buttonhole, had another explanation. Indians were a poetic people, he said. He himself always sought the open because he was a poet, a lover of Nature, which was the matter of his Urdu verses; and nothing was as poetic as squatting on a river bank at dawn.

These squatting figures--to the visitor, after a time, as eternal and emblematic as Rodin's Thinker--are never spoken of; they are never written about; they are not mentioned in novels or stories; they do not appear in feature films or documentaries. This might be regarded as part of a permissible prettifying intention. But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist: a collective blindness arising out of the Indian fear of pollution and the resulting conviction that Indians are the cleanest people in the world. They are required by their religion to take a bath every day. This is central; and they have devised minute rules to protect themselves from every conceivable contamination. There is only one pure way to defecate; in love-making only the left hand is to be used ; food is to be taken only with the right. It has all been regulated and purified. To observe the squatters is therefore distorting; it is to fail to see through to the truth. And the ladies at the Lucknow Club, after denying that Indians defecate in public, will remind you, their faces creased with distaste, of the habits of Europe — the right hand used for lovemaking, toilet paper and food, the weekly bath in a tub of water contaminated by the body of the bather, the washing in a washbasin that has been spat and gargled into — proving by such emotive illustrations not the dirtiness of Europe but the security of India. It is an Indian method of argument, an Indian way of seeing: it is so that squatters and wayside filth begin to disappear.

But here is that observer again:

Instead of having graceful hamlets dotting the land, we have dung-heaps. The approach to many villages is not a refreshing experience. Often one would like to shut one's eyes and stuff one's nose; such is the surrounding dirt and offending smell.

The one thing which we can and must learn from the West is the science of municipal sanitation.

By our bad habits we spoil our sacred river banks and furnish excellent breeding grounds for flies. . . . A small spade is the means of salvation from a great nuisance. Leaving night-soil, cleaning the nose, or spitting on the road is a sin against God as well as humanity, and betrays a sad want of consideration for others. The man who does not cover his waste deserves a heavy penalty even if he lives in a forest.

The observer is seeing what no Indian sees. But he has now declared his foreign inspiration. The celebrated Indian daily bath he frequently dismisses as 'a kind of bath'. He is unwilling to see beyond the ritual act to the intention, and in the intention to find reality. Sanitation is one of his obsessions. And just as in London he had read books on vegetarianism and clothes-washing and in South Africa books on bookkeeping, so he has read books on this subject.

In his book on rural hygiene Dr Poore says that excreta should be buried in earth no deeper than nine to twelve inches. The author contends that superficial earth is charged with minute life, which, together with light and air--which easily penetrate it, turn the excreta into good soft sweet-smelling soil within a week. Any villager can test this for himself.

It is the characteristic note of this observer. His interest in sanitation, which is properly the concern of the latrine-cleaner, is not widely shared. The briefest glimpse of the lavatories at New Delhi's international airport is sufficient. Indians defecate everywhere, on floors, in urinals for men (as a result of yogic contortions that can only be conjectured). Fearing contamination, they squat rather than sit, and every lavatory cubicle carries marks of their misses. No one notices.

Where Coke and Michael Jackson meet Ho Chi Minh

By Teresa Leo
[published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on April 30, 2000, the 25th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon]


Imagine sitting in a wood-and-bamboo hut. Thatched roof. Floor of packed clay and buffalo dung. A fire pit is dug in the ground. Buffalo parts hang from the rafters to smoke.

There's no running water or electricity, and you're squatting on a wicker stool drinking hot lemon juice while the occasional chicken or piglet wanders by. You are watched curiously by the people who inhabit the house. They belong to the Hmong tribe and live in the hills outside of Sapa in northwest Vietnam near the China border. There, playing among the children dressed in their everyday clothes--traditional wraparound tunics handwoven from hemp with elaborately embroidered trim--is a single boy sporting an Adidas-style sweatsuit.

This is exactly the sort of odd East-meets-West juxtaposition I kept encountering on a recent trip to Vietnam. I expected to see global influences in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, the large, developed cities on opposite ends of the country, but I was constantly surprised by the collision of cultures at points in between, in small villages or in hill tribe areas where the last thing you would expect to find is a poster of Michael Jackson hanging next to a Ho Chi Minh calendar.

Apparently the Vietnamese are fans of many things Western: I saw such labels as Versace, Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Fila on all manner of clothing and accessory. This next to conical hats, ao dai flowing tunics, military uniforms and traditional ethnic tribal ensembles.

Word on the street is that most of the items with designer logos are knockoffs made in either China or Vietnam. Some logos are creatively spelled--such as "Leves" on a T-shirt instead of "Levis."

American companies have made inroads since President Clinton lifted the embargo in 1994. I was told by a tour guide, Chau Huynh Hoa, that Coke set up shop 24 hours later and Pepsi soon followed. Now Philip Morris makes Marlboros in a factory outside of Ho Chi Minh City, and you can't escape advertising for such brands as Nizoral, Wrigley's, Close-Up, Kodak and the other big three in carbonated beverages, Fanta, 7-Up and Sprite.

Chau also said that McDonald's was currently in negotiation with the government to begin its fast-food infiltration, but so far, no deal.

With so many products that didn't exist just a few years ago surfacing in the country, what does the government currently censor? According to Linh Dinh, a Vietnamese-American writer who recently moved back to Ho Chi Minh City after more than 20 years in the United States, what's blocked is anything written in the Vietnamese language by Vietnamese people living abroad.

That includes Web sites, literature and film. Dinh said that "the most famous Vietnamese filmmakers are not known in Vietnam." Movies like Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo and Tony Bui's Three Seasons are banned.

This censorship of divergent ideological viewpoints extends to television as well. The four basic (noncable) channels broadcast such programs as folk opera, drama, singing, knowledge games, soccer matches and a popular program called Foreign Recreation that showcases sports not found in the country, such as snowboarding and skateboarding. Of course, in hotels and bars that cater to tourists, cable (which most Vietnamese cannot afford) is readily available, and you can watch CNN and the ever-perplexing MTV Asia, which seemed to run Celine Dion and Britney Spears videos in constant rotation.

Of all the examples of cultural convergence I saw, none could match the scene at Club 106 in Ho Chi Minh City, an upscale cocktail lounge frequented by trendy Vietnamese youth who looked as if they were auditioning for a Gap commercial. There, among the fancy drinks with exotic garnishes, top-shelf liquors, marble bar and free snacks of fresh pineapple, grapes, lime slices on ice and fried squid, were the mobile phones, dyed hair and expensive watches.

In between Vietnamese pop songs, the band played "Yesterday" by the Beatles, then played part of a song and then ran a contest to guess the correct name (which turned out to be "Mickey" by Toni Basil). Between sets, they showed video performances of Taiwanese house music with Chinese subtitles and Korean rap on a big-screen TV. And yeah, they played Elvis too--Elvis Phuong, who is The King in Vietnam.

Maybe it's not unusual for foreign artifacts to begin to penetrate countries like Vietnam. But it's still disconcerting to see a pair of Nike sandals left at the entrance to a 13th-century Hindu temple, or a motorbike on a dirt road near rice paddies with 20 chickens tied to the handlebars driven by a man wearing a Chicago Bulls jacket.

If McDonald's ever gets here, we'll soon have Big Macs served next to noodle soup. Maybe some things are best kept to ourselves.



........................................................


Top image: Elvis Phương singing in the US, around 2005. Bottom image: The cover of Elvis Phong è morto, which is my Blood and Soap translated into Italian by Giovanni Giri. The name "Elvis Phong" is a spoof on "Elvis Phương," obviously, but the two singers have nothing in common. In April of 2005, I read my short story, "Elvis Phong is Dead!", on San Francisco's KQED. There is also Tuấn Anh, the Vietnamese Little Richard:

An interview from 2000

This morning, a Christmas email arrived from Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Jerry Gorman:

It is about 90 degrees but it is harder and harder to forget it is Christmas here in Cambodia.

Plastic Christmas trees everywhere in Phnom Penh and in Siem Reap. There is no snow but plenty of dust to cover the fake greens!

So Merry Christmas to all!
Joyeux Noël à tous!
Feliz Navidad, Frank!


Love,
Tina and Jerry

Tina is an ethnic Chinese who was born in Cambodia, spent some time in Vietnam before emigrating to France, then the US, where she taught French literature at Bowdoin College in Maine, before deciding to move back to Cambodia in 2003 with her San Diego-based boyfriend Jerry Corman, who's now her husband. Tina and Jerry thought they would open a Tex-Mex joint in Phnom Penh. Like pizza, cheeseburgers, sushi and Chinese food, Tex Mex is popular with the back-pack crowd. Make a passable burrito and customers will show up, they figured, but once in Cambodia, Tina and Jerry came up with a better idea, a bed & breakfast in Siem Reap, a small city 4 miles south of Angkor Wat. Although the Moonsoon B&B was an unqualified success, Tina and Jerry finally shut it down this year, to spend more time with what they really love to do, writing scholarly works and fiction (for Tina) and photographing and film-making (for Jerry). I first met Tina and Jerry on July 12, 2000, when they showed up in Saigon to interview me for Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue, co-edited by Tina and Jane Bradley Winston. With a $85.00 cover price, not too many people own this book, so here's the interview:





A conversation with Linh Dinh
Ho Chi Minh City, July 12, 2000

Leakthina Ollier: Linh, you have been living in Ho Chi Minh City for a year and a half now, and this is your third trip back since your left Vietnam in 1975. On a personal level, how is Ho Chi Minh City different from where you lived in the U.S. and do you consider this city home?

Linh Dinh: Yes, this is more home than Philadelphia. I don't have to apologize for being here. I might get harassed on the street, but I know that this is my city. In the States, I always felt apologetic. I always felt like I was walking through someone's living room to go to the bathroom. I always felt like I was a squatter. Maybe that was a very extreme attitude. I hope most Asian Americans and immigrants don't feel the same way I do because that is a very uncomfortable way to live. Maybe that's just my hypersensitivity, but in Philadelphia, people were always asking me, "Where you're from?" It's such a standard question when they see you. When people say "Where are you from?" what they really mean is, "What are you doing here?" Here, they might ask the same question but I don’t care. At the same time, Ho Chi Minh City isn't quite home either. When I walk down the street people know immediately that I'm not a regular citizen. They think I'm Taiwanese, or at the least a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese. They can tell immediately, there's no hiding it.

LO: How can they tell?

LD: Perhaps because I look a little different, I wear this goatee, cut my hair this way, and my face is kind of round. I don't know what they look at, but my face is different, the color of my skin is a little lighter, and the way I stand or sit is different. My body language gives it away.

LO: Do you still feel somewhat like a tourist here even though you've lived here for a year and a half now?

LD: Yes, there's still a lot to be discovered and it's good to be on the outside...

LO: I see that you have the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam on your bookshelf...

LD: Yes, I bought that last year and still have it...

LO: Do you still have recourse to it once in a while?

LD: When I visit the different towns, yes! It's a good book. It's the best book of its kind... I didn't bring a lot of books back. People bring books to me when they come to visit. So that's strange too: I'm cut off from that source. I was always buying books back in the States and now I can't buy them. I have to download things off the Web, but there isn't much there. So I was trying to feed myself strictly on Vietnamese literature, but I got a little tired of that.

LO: As you said, you’re seen as a foreigner both in the U.S. and in Vietnam, or at the very least here you are being considered as Viet Kieu which, of course, also carries with it the connotation of not belonging, and by extension you have been made to feel, in many instances, like a foreigner in both countries. So how is one experience different from the other? To that effect, let me also read these verses by Saint Victor and ask you to comment on that:

“The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner.
He to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong.
But he is perfect to whom every land is a foreign land.”

LD: Well, that's a very stoic attitude. By Saint Victor's definition, I'm perfect already. I feel alien to the very house I grew up in. Although I'm a native born, I'm perceived as a foreigner, so I can assume the privileges of an ugly American if I want to. It's very ironic. A foreigner is superior here, unlike in the U.S., where a foreigner is leveled down to the lowest social level. Unless you're a white European, of course, then you're elevated... You might be an Indian doctor or a Chinese scientist, it doesn't matter what level of education you have, how much money you make, but you're still seen as a social inferior. A white working class person can insult you at anytime, can laugh at you, and feels entitled to do that. Here it's the reverse. Whether I want to or not, I enjoy certain privileges here because I'm perceived as a foreigner. Just by returning to Vietnam, I became a bigger man. In a literal sense also.

LO: What was your experience in growing up in the United States?

LD: Well I moved so much: Washington, Oregon, California, Virginia. In San Jose, my school was mostly Mexican, in Virginia it was mostly white. I never really saw a pattern because I moved all the time. But I Iived in Philadelphia long enough to examine my life more closely. There is a funny illusion. You think that assimilation is a gradual process: you learn English, meet people, learn American history, learn baseball, learn football, and you're gradually allowed in. So when you reach a dead end, you're in shock. You realize, finally, that you're never going to be allowed totally in.

LO: The cultural glass ceiling?

LD: I don't know, the glass wall, whatever. I came to the States when I was eleven so my embrace of American culture was an organic thing. But it was also a half deliberate thing because you always want to belong. Any kid wants to belong. For example, I happened to like baseball. I watched it on TV because I liked it, not necessarily because I wanted to be an American. I also liked Speed Racer, and that was Japanese. I liked what I liked. So I did all these things organically. My assimilation was organic, but twenty five years later, people still ask me where I'm from, and are still surprised that I'm American. Then, you realize you can't go any further, and it's a shock when you realize you will always be on the outside, permanently. There are hundreds of incidences I can tell you about. It gets so tedious to talk about this. I used to think I don't want to talk about race any more. It's such a sordid topic, but I have no choice. I walked into a store in the Italian Market in Philly. I liked to shop in the Italian Market because they had all sorts of things I wanted and I walked into the store and this guy said "Hey, I shot this guy in Hiroshima." What are you going to do? Laugh and say "Hey, you missed!"? You don't expect that but you hear that shit all the time and it always comes at you at the most unexpected moment... You look at Black culture, and I've always been curious about the Black response to all of this, and you see all this anger coming out. It's getting more out of control actually, but you can see where it's coming from, and it's very sad and it's very unfortunate. Around the 10th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, some homeless guy chased me with a branch through the park right behind Independence Hall. Maybe he was a Vietnam vet, or maybe it was because I was walking with a white girl. Maybe both.

LO: With all these problems and difficulties, why do you feel you will eventually have to go back the U.S., as you told me the other day?

LD: Because of my future as a writer, I need to be there. My writer friends are there. I need to be closer to books and journals, just to function as a writer. In the long run, I need to be back in the U.S. My home is in the English language. Also, I'm not a citizen of Vietnam, I'm just a guest here. I don't have a lot of the legal rights here, and I wouldn't want to be a citizen of Vietnam under this government. If the laws were different, that might be a possibility. But I have to be practical. There are a lot of disadvantages to being a Vietnamese citizen. As an American citizen, I have all these advantages. Just traveling, you know. It's very hard to get a visa as a Vietnamese citizen, to go to certain countries. So, for practical reasons, I'll remain an American citizen. I see the flip side to Vietnam. This country is very badly run. It’s a mess. The wages are absurd and there's a lot of sadness, a lot of anger, but that's a whole different set of problems. The only Vietnamese Americans who come back here to live permanently are old people. They come back to die. And the ones who are in trouble with the law. If you've killed somebody then you come back to Vietnam.

LO: What were your conceptions of Vietnam before you came and lived here, and how have they changed?

LD: I think one of the misconceptions I had was that people related to each other better here. All superficial observations, I mean you can see how people live here: they live in close quarters and the neighbors know each other, they have time to talk, the conversation can drag on for three hours, so I thought people had more patience with each other, they liked each other better, sense of family, sense of community, all that shit. But I was also a little skeptical. I didn't believe it fully. In the States, I didn't know my neighbors. I hardly knew anyone. I had to go to the bar. I knew my friends at the bar but the people around me I didn't know. But here, you see people chatting and talking. But after living here a while, I can see that people aren't quite that social. They might talk, but there's a lot of animosity, there's a lot of mistrust, there's a lot of underhandedness, you know.

LO: What do you think it's caused by?

LD: Several things: maybe just human nature, maybe people are like that anyway, they just happen to be physically close to each other, but not psychologically close to each other. One thing I've noticed is that haggling is a very bad custom. You're always trying to get over the next person. You're always haggling. In the States, you're not worried about being cheated when you go to the supermarket, but here you're always worrying about being ripped off when you buy anything. So this mind game that's being played, haggling, haggling, corrupts people. But on the other hand, there's a conversation. In the States, you buy things and you don't even talk to the person. But here, they play mind games with each other. And over what? Five cents? Two cents? And there's a lot of distrust of the government, because this government is so dishonest, what they say and what they do, and the school system is all screwed up, so dishonesty trickles down from above. The citizens here have all these complaints. They know they're being screwed. They know that when they send their kids to school, they have to bribe the teachers, they know when the cops stop them on the street, it isn't because of what they did wrong, but to shake them down for money. They know it's not right. They complain about it all the time.

LO: What other common themes and concerns have you noticed in your everyday conversation with people here?

LD: There's the perception that any country outside of Vietnam is fantastic, and this has to be the dump of the universe. And many of the Vietnamese Americans who return play up to this conception: a guy could be flipping hamburgers in the U.S., but here he's a hotshot. It's a joke, a stereotype, but it's a very common stereotype. And you must remember that only a short time ago, there was this hysteria to get out, the boat people, so the psychology of getting out is still there, it would be a dream come true for many people. People would ask me: "you must know somebody, I have a beautiful daughter." It's pitiful, but who can blame them. There's a seamstress in my neighborhood. She makes fairly decent money. She's twenty three and has a boyfriend here, but her mother wants to hook her up with some guy from Germany. This is pure fantasy. The mother is adamant about not letting her go out with this boyfriend. But what is she going to find in Germany? You hear the most horrible stories too: like the Taiwanese who come here to get married. There are these middlemen to hook them up. A Taiwanese pays a fee to a middleman, about $10,000, and the middleman goes to a village, finds a girl, then brings her back to Saigon. (The farther you go the cheaper they are. Sometimes a girl can be had for as little as $500). Sometimes a girl will accept the money then disappear, or she will go to Taiwan and freak out because she thinks her husband's some hotshot and he's bagging groceries in a grocery store. You hear all kinds of stories about the Taiwanese here. The Vietnamese press loves to pick on them. They are the new ugly foreigners in Vietnam.

LO: The other day we also mentioned that we both noticed how young the Vietnamese population is, many of them born after or just a few years before 1975. Is the Vietnam war, or rather “the American war” as it is called here, still part of the Vietnamese consciousness? What do they think about Americans now?

LD: The kids who are born after 1975 aren't interested in the war. They don't want to hear about it. What they have been taught about the war is confusing: Vietnam fought America, but now the government is getting all chummy with the US, because it is scared of China, and its old master, Russia, is gone, so what's the message? They don't know what to believe. In school they heard criticism of capitalism and now they see on television how rich the capitalist countries are. They can tell just by watching the soccer matches from England or Italy. The stadiums are beautiful, the spectators are well dressed. I've heard people say, as they're watching a foreign soccer match on TV, "Wow, look at how beautiful that grass is!" And the Party officials are sending their kids to America to study at the most expensive schools. It's the government that is being hypocritical. If the war was fought against capitalism, against America, then why are they acting this way now? And if it wasn't fought against that, then they should have left South Vietnam the way it was, because the South Vietnamese didn't sell out the way they're selling out now. This government is selling whole chunks of land to the Taiwanese at ridiculous prices, kicking people off the land. So they are selling out to foreign companies worse than the South Vietnamese ever did. What was the war fought over? It doesn't make any sense.

LO: What is the level of animosity between South and North Vietnamese?

LD: It's very muted. This house for instance is South Vietnamese, next house over is North Vietnamese. After 1975, many horrible things happened. The North Vietnamese moved in and took over houses and just shoved their former occupants to new economic zones. People do remember. This house doesn't speak to that house but they don't fight each other. There's a lot of old history...

LO: In your introduction in The Literary Review's special issue on Vietnamese literature, you wrote about government's censorship, its monopoly on publishing, and the "climate of intimidation" that exists here in Vietnam, which greatly stunts literary production, reducing it to a rather sterile and sentimental accounts of the Vietnamese reality. Are you conscious of this censorship in your own writing?

LD: I don't have to worry about it because I don't publish here.

LO: Since you don’t write under the same constraint as Vietnamese writers, do you then feel an obligation, a responsibility (which can also be regarded as a sort of constraint) to expose and depict a different set of realities than what has been depicted so far?

LD: I feel challenged to capture some of this reality. Although I know much less than someone who's lived here his whole life, I can perhaps see things a local wouldn't see. I have a fresh eye because I'm coming in from the outside. I also have a basis for comparison because I've lived elsewhere. But I'm not a complete outsider. I was born here, after all. Sometimes you read an American account of the war and you can see how excited the writer is. He is almost gleeful. The most horrible things become mere spectacles to a true outsider. Like you said, I'm not handicapped by the censorship affecting the local writers. I tell my writer friends here that Vietnamese literature, as published in Vietnam, does not reflect Vietnamese society. I tell them that the Vietnam War is better depicted by American writers than by Vietnamese writers. The Americans are more blunt, more candid, more honest. "They've stolen our our topic!" I tell them.

LO: Are you aware of any difference between your writing while you were in the U.S. and here?

LD: I think my writing reflects my personality. I've always been somewhat belligerent in my writing. Where it comes from, I'm not so worried about. This place certainly didn't produce that. I came here with that personality already formed and I don't think I'm being reactionary to this place at all. My writing is fairly constant in its tone and its concerns. But it's odd for me, because here I don't speak English hardly at all, I speak it maybe once every three months. In Philadelphia, I would go to the bar and hear conversations. So that dialogue, I don't hear. I'm not sure how that affects my writing. I suspect that it is making me a little bit more tentative at times because I have to think about my English more. But there's a trade off: I'm exposed to all these themes and issues that I wouldn't be exposed to in the U.S. Because I feel more integrated here, more in touch with people, my writing has become less claustrophobic. My set of concerns is becoming wider. And I'm less angry here. I'm not saying that anger is a bad ingredient in writing, but I can see that anger is less of a driving force in my work here. Anger fed me for a while, and now it is something else that is feeding me...

LO: What is feeding you here?

LD: Curiosity, more of a curiosity. Like I said, I've gained a composure here that I didn't have. Maybe that's bad, maybe I should be breeding that anger, that edge. But there's a distortion in anger, and it can also get a little tiresome, although entertaining to a degree...

LO: How has the feeding on Vietnamese literature influenced your own writing?

LD: It certainly has. There's a lot of writers I didn't know too well and a lot of incidental things in the newspapers, the crime stories in the police newspaper, for example, things you only get by living in a place.

LO: You write poetry and also short story. What are the differences between writing poetry and fiction?

LD: I have different intentions with poetry and fiction. In fiction, I am more aware of an audience. It's much more social to me in that I want many people to read it and I want to be clear and accessible. I also want to drag in as much as possible of my surrounding. It's a friendlier act. Because fiction forces me to be more curious about other people's lives, I become more moral somehow. I'm a nicer guy because I have to pay more attention to what other people are thinking. When you have a character talk in a piece of fiction, you don't want him to sound like you, so you become a better listener and you try to understand why people do what they do. I'm also aware that when I write about Vietnamese or Vietnamese Americans, I'm also writing for an outside audience (non Vietnamese or non Vietnamese Americans). I have a responsibility towards how I depict my so called community. But I'm not too worried about it because my ultimate responsibility is to be true to my own experience. Let's say if I write about an Asian guy, a Vietnamese guy, let's say he doesn't come off too well, let's say there's something wrong with him, I'm not going to worry about it as long as I'm not creating a caricature, a distortion. If an Asian American reader decides that one of my characters is making "us Asians" look bad, I'm not going to worry about it. But I have to avoid the traditional pitfalls, the stereotypes. As long as I'm not pandering to anyone, I have nothing to worry about. I suppose you can create social situations which are not true to life as it is lived right now, but can serve as models for the future. That may be something constructive to do, but I haven't done it, maybe later...Whereas in poetry, I couldn't care less. I'm after something elusive and I have to track it down. That's all I care about. I have a couple of friends I send the poems to. The more people read them, the better I feel, of course, I'm not indifferent to that, but as I'm writing a poem, I couldn't care less.

LO: What is the writer’s social and political responsibility?

LD: That's up to him. That's not his responsibility as a writer, it's his responsibility as a citizen. If that's what he wants to do, that's on top of his responsibility as a writer. If he wants to be an activist, that's his choice, but he doesn't have to be. As a writer, if you can clarify anything whatsoever, you've done a great service. If you can shine a light in anyway, that's enough. Let's take the race issue: if a reader can come away from a poem or a story with a deeper understanding of race, then the writer has done his job. But he has to be very honest. You can't just look out for your own community and distort the truth. I know my racial allegiance, so that's a kind of racism right there. I know I'm partial to Asian people, I have to admit that. I can't pretend I'm color blind so I can't demand that the rest of the population be color blind or claim that my writing is color blind. The most I can ask for is that people respect each other's basic dignity and don't interfere.

LO: In the introduction to The Literary Review you also wrote: "The ability to write, and to publish, away from Big Brother's shadow comes at a price, however. An overseas Vietnamese writer is someone working in isolation. He's cut off from what should be his main audience: the reading public in Vietnam." At the same time, the other day, you also mentioned that to write in Vietnam, for you, is to write in isolation, away from your peers...

LD: The Vietnamese American writers I mentioned write in Vietnamese, so they're cut off from Vietnam, but in Vietnam, I'm cut off from America. I still publish in the States. I send all my stuff back. I publish poems in magazines but I can't see these magazines. It's odd to go for months without speaking English. I cannot buy the newest books and I have no idea of what's happening in the writing community. I wrote to poet Ron Silliman: "If I could take a train to New York in the morning and return to Saigon by evening, I'd be a happy man." I live in a police state but I'm not persecuted here, they leave me alone. I mean, they look at my email, I know that, and I can't have books sent to me here, but I'm not persecuted. I would like to publish here just to feel more involved, but they won't publish my poems here...

LO: Why?

LD: They just don't publish overseas Vietnamese writers. My friends here have been trying to get me published. They tell the editors "he's not an overseas Vietnamese writer, he's an American writer" but these editors don't buy it. They're afraid they will get in trouble if they publish me. A poem of mine was included in Best American Poetry 2000, so some of my friends here were trying to get it published. There were three different translations floating around, but they were all rejected. One editor told me through an intermediary that he couldn't publish the poem because it wasn't clear which army the injured soldier in the poem belonged to. I felt like sending him a snide note, “Tell me which army you want him to belong to, and I'll put the right uniform on him!”

LO: So do you consider yourself an American writer?

LD: Yes.

LO: Why an American writer and not an Asian American or a Vietnamese American writer?

LD: I used to get really angry when I was referred to as anything but an American writer. When someone called me a Vietnamese writer, I would get pissed off, and I didn't want to be called a Vietnamese American writer either. Of course, I am Vietnamese American, but I want to be an American writer. First of all, I write in English, period. So I'm an American writer, period. I don't want to be pushed out. I mean you would never introduce someone as a Jewish writer or a Jewish American writer, or an Italian American writer, you wouldn't do that... Thematically, there's a lot of thing that I deal with that other Asian American writers deal with. So it is helpful as a term. I mean I use that term too. I see race affinity too. I used to pretend I didn't see that, but that's just dishonest. Look, I check my baseball scores and I look at the Japanese guys to see how they're doing. I gravitate toward them, I notice these things so, of course, an Asian American reader would want to see what the Asian American writers are doing. It's common human narciscism. You want to see yourself in everything. But in general conversation, I will insist on being called "an American writer."

LO: These are very complex issues: in "naming" your identity, you're limiting yourself, fixing yourself as one thing or another. In the publishing industry, for instance, as a Asian American, you're limited to writing on certain subject matter, the Asian American experience, the successful tales of acculturation, and so on. But at the same time, as you said before, you can’t never (or not yet) be perceived as simply an “American,” people will still ask you “where are you from?”

LD: Maybe what I'm trying to say is I want both. I want to be a homeboy and a cosmopolitan. Clayton Eshleman was the first person to publish me, in his magazine Sulfur. It was an avant garde magazine, and I'm proud to be associated with that group of poets. But when I was translated into Vietnamese a few years ago, I was happy about that also. I feel an emotional need to belong to the Vietnamese writing community. And I also pay attention to Asian American writers, so I guess I want everything.

LO: Now, let me turn to your work as editor and translator. You've translated poems and short stories from Vietnamese into English. What criteria do you take into account in the selection process?

LD: I translate what I like. It's not done systematically and I make hardly any money from it. I just have to be confident that these pieces can be published and that American readers will find them interesting. As a translator, I'm also an editor. I feel responsible as a presenter of Vietnamese literature. So the question becomes, "Will the reader conclude that this is as good as anything out there and not some second rate, third rate Third world product?"

LO: So again, there's a burden of responsibility in introducing something from here that is worth the world standard...

LD: That's only natural because English is the international language and Vietnamese writers are very eager to go beyond their own boundaries, to present themselves to the rest of the world.

LO: What are some of the challenges involved in translating from Vietnamese to English?

LD: Whenever you translated from A to B, you better be a good writer in the B language. If you translate from Vietnamese to English, your Vietnamese can be relatively weak but your English has to be strong. If your Vietnamese is perfect but your English is weak, you're in trouble. If you translate a Vietnamese poem into an English poem, you better know how to write an English poem.

LO: How about cultural translation?

LD: Of course, there are things that won't translate, but I don't worry about that. You use footnotes. I just want to make sure it reads well as an English poem. But I don't want to make it sounds as if it was written in English either. For example, if a weid metaphor is used, keep that metaphor. Where Vietnamese syntax is different than English syntax, don't streamline it into English. I am not trying to present an exotic poem, but I want to show that it is something that wasn't composed in the American context. It was written somewhere else and that's the attraction of reading literature in translation. It should feel foreign. When I edited Night Again, one of the characters in a story said "your mother's fart" in Vietnamese. The translator said that no one would say that in English so she wanted to change it to "damn you." But I said "no," leave it as "your mother's fart," because that will give people a window into the Vietnamese psychology.

Notes
1. "Vietnamese Poetry and Fiction," guest-edited by Linh Dinh. The Literary Review 43.2 (Winter 2000)



..................................................................
I messed up the last answer. "Địt" is "fart" in southern Vietnam, "fuck" in northern Vietnam. Growing up in Saigon, I only knew its fart meaning, so I had misread Lê Minh Khuê's usage of "địt." It's not "your mother's fart" after all, but the more universal "fuck your mother." Vietnamese often say "fuck mother" as an expletive, not yours or mine, just "fuck mother."

When the Philadelphia Orchestra came to Saigon in 2000, I asked art curator Julie Courtney, wife of bass player Neil Courtney, to bring me three CDs, a Django Reinhardt and two Lester Youngs. When poet Teresa Leo came that same year, I asked her to bring the just-released Borges: Collected Fictions , translated by Andrew Hurley. I read the new Borges translations cover to cover, lent the book to a literary critic I barely knew and never got it back. The CDs I gave to poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh when I left Vietnam in 2001.

My wife and I took Julie, Neil and their daughter down to the Mekong Delta, where we heard a local musician play. We also took Teresa Leo down there, where she almost got killed by a careless boatman we had hired. Steering us towards a broken dock, he didn't see a metal rod aiming right for Teresa's head. She ducked just in time.

At the time of this interview, I have not started to write directly in Vietnamese. Hence my insistence on being called only "an American writer."

My use of "reactionary" is incorrect yet etymologically sound, since reactionary comes from reaction: 1611, from re- "again, anew" + action (q.v.). Modeled on Fr. réaction, older It. reattione, from M.L. reactionem (nom. reactio), from L.L. react-, pp. stem of reagere "react," from re- "back" + agere "to do, act" (see act). Originally scientific; physiological sense is attested from 1805; psychological sense first recorded 1887; general sense of "action or feeling in response" (to a statement, event, etc.) is recorded from 1914. The verb react is attested from 1644. This interview was recorded, so what I said, I said. "Reactionary" is often used by Communists, so it flitted around my consciousness while I lived in Vietnam. The Vietnamse version is "phản động," to "act against." When Seven Stories Press sent me my author's copy of Fake House, the Saigon post office confiscated it on the ground that it was "decadent and reactionary." "But I wrote this," I protested, "How can I be corrupted by my own writing?"



[Top image: The Moonsoon B&B. Photos in images 2 and 3 are by Jerry Gorman]

American Cheese II

for Lanny Quarles

American Cheese

A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US

The story of Eva Ósk Arnardóttir:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

[...]

Peanuts

Leif Holmstrand

In October I met Swedish poet Leif Holmstrand in Reykjavík, Iceland, and heard him read this poem, as translated into English by Frank Perry:



Vortex Pump and Seconds of Stillness

Opening the next day to series of sleep and waking, waking and sleep,
stations
along sprawling phrases,
citizenship lost in the union of orderliness
befuddled
by the off-balance
down, up,
down,
up,
down
of dates.


...


A time or place
when any and all form is shown solely by the skin's shivering edges,
a senile, furious void of whirling taunts,
a block of stillness and the spiteful slaps of silence in the middle of the vortex here someone, wooden and robbed,
vibrates
at low level,
owing to sperm and minor messes
come off with victory.


...


Easy to further the order divided,
easy to go when the death-sigh moves walls,
planting
echoes and daylight
in fragile architecture or lowering the model in a lesser enchantment,
using prisms
and little thin boxes of glass with samples in
for thorough examination,
and the building is evident, finished after this,
latticed by the light of the external,
meaningless light,
so easily understood.


...


Vastly different views and cues
ready to contain anyone at all
in the building
or be decomposed,
I am
false
through and through —


...


Downwards I go,
upside down I can see
moments twitching with the gleam of steel among the reeds
and little feet kicking, suddenly dry-shod,
rage over glass.


...


Flowers up from the furrows of the palm
like small worlds in the blisters on the surface,
the present provides a terrified grace when it aches,
salting gleams
that, an error in their essence, in the blue light stretch
my recess,
an edgy viral sense
now wind-lashed
now.


...


Come banners,
The opposite of banners, come
and budding skull soon to set seed,
the body is a vane.


...


Lingering ridge of an idea
everything's infinite
ur-hole:
the toilet.



....................................................................................
Leif and I were on a panel where a participant complained that he had to express himself in English, which gave me and Canadian Angela Rawlings such an unfair advantage. I acknowledged the irony of a Vietnamese using English as a weapon against Europeans, but English will go belly-up soon, I said, after the American empire implodes. In the meantime, I won't relinquish my blue passport. Panel over, I asked Leif for his notes in English:




I see fragile things.

I see small sails, a something/nothing close to the sharks. A sudden floor of glass. I see a stranger, and I become something new in this relationship.


I see lots of good things to eat, like big shrimps and tuna, but someone tries to steal these things from me. My stomach is empty and turns inside out through my mouth to devour neighbours and neighborhood.

I see a Turtle flying in the air far above me.

I see mouths moving and chewing stupid words, repetition, repetition.

I see fragile things, justified anger, always that terrible common sense.

The sharks are getting closer.



I see conflict. I see lack of conflict, and sometimes peaceful meadows.



I see ice melting. I see ice melting. I see ice melting.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Horror movies--cinema and television can be the dreams of society. They can contain coded unintentional subversive material beneath the cliché surface. I believe this can be seen very clearly in horror movies.

But, according to psychoanalysis of old times, the meaning of the dream is to keep the sleeper asleep. So I have to be very critical to what the material of dreams, cinema and television tells me.

Art is a great source of inspiration. I'm an artist as well. Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys and so on.

Another source of my writing is the other writers, with whom I feel I have some kind of positive conflict, like Henri Michaux, Erik Lindegren and George Bataille and others. Very frightened little boys.

Earlier, not so much nowadays, a big source of material for my poetry was experiences from hospitals and experiences of psychosis. I suffer from schizophrenia, and thanks to this I have total access to the romantic role of the mad poet. I can bend this role as I please and use this position to talk about other ways of perceiving the world and interact with it. But now this position is, at least for the moment, running out of possibilities and I have started to play with other writer-attitudes.

"Resting Piece"

The Federal Reserve is the silent partner in the bloodletting

Another excellent essay by Mike Whitney, worth reading in its entirety:

[...]

What matters now, is that the system is collapsing. It's slowly getting crushed by the accumulated weight of its own corruption. When the system crashes, the flag will be lowered over Guantanamo Bay, the present oligarchy of racketeers will be removed from office, and the troops will come home from Iraq. Sometimes tragedy produces a positive outcome.

[...]

Two Vietnam postcards

Before Nguyen Qui Duc hired me to write these postcards for his now defunct website, I wrote them as emails to Hoa Nguyen, who had never been back to Vietnam since childhood. Hoa was born in Vinh Long, in the Mekong Delta. I would only meet Hoa and her husband, Dale Smith, in 2005, at the fabulous Carrboro International Poetry Festival, organized by Patrick Herron. Where else could you see and hear Harryette Mullen, Christian Bok and Gabriel Gudding in quick succession? OK, we go to Saigon in 2000:


A Seamstress’ Story

Thao is a seamstress. A tiny, tiny woman with a steady gaze and a bright smile, she is a 23-year-old with an eighth-grade education. (Thao’s round face and features, although entirely Vietnamese, recalls a Caucasian friend of mine from Tennesee. Cross-racial resemblances are not at all uncommon. Travel, and you will discover your own likenesses in the most unlikely places. I’m sure there is a Linh Dinh in every country on earth, not that I would like to meet any of them.)

Back to Thao: she came to the city two years ago from Buon Ma Thuot—rugged, coffee country in the highland, 200 miles north of Saigon. “I only knew one person here,” she said. “It was my first time away from home and I had a million dong in my pocket [72 bucks].”

There are seamstresses everywhere you look. Some are set up right on the sidewalks, operating antiquated, foot-pedaled sewing machines.

Thao pays 22 bucks a month for one half of a dingy room in a narrow, crooked alley, where she can run her business and sleep. The house itself has three rooms and holds 12 people--11 busy women and one idle man. To attract customers, Thao sits right in the window, a bright, downcast face against a dingy background.

From her window, Thao can see people flitting back and forth all day long, on foot and on motorcycles. And right outside, below her window, squats a turbaned, middle-aged woman, a fish monger who chews gum incessantly, eternally, peddling climbing perches from a wicker basket. For her meals, Thao pays another 22 bucks a month to an old lady who lives ten doors away.

Thao has earned a good reputation and business is steady. She has also taken in a couple of students, teenaged girls from the Mekong Delta, fresh off the bus, to teach them the tricks of the sewing business. They also work as her (unpaid) assistants. Altogether, Thao makes about 150 bucks a month, 70 of which she sends back to Buon Ma Thuot to keep her two youngest brothers in school. She also sends money to her father who now lives in a Buddhist temple. He moved there seven years ago after his wife dumped him for a new lover.

In spite of all these responsibilities, Thao is happy. She is proud of her independence and she is in love. Her boyfriend, Truong, also sews for a living. Twenty five years old, he is a quiet, serious, good looking guy who, like most men his age, lives at home.

For privacy, they often go to one of those cafes designed for groping lovers. The room is so dark the waiter--always a waiter, never a waitress--has to shine a flashlight on you to serve you your drink. The music is wordless and mellow.

Last Sunday, they went to Suoi Tien [Celestial Spring, a nearly grassless and treeless theme park on the outskirts of Saigon featuring giant polyurethane buddhas, dragons and dinosaurs] and snapped a roll of pictures on a borrowed camera. “Truong wants to marry me,” Thao confided, “and his family is willing to give us money to open a real shop.”

There is only one snag: her mother does not approve of her choice for a lover. Like many Vietnamese mothers, she is holding out for a Viet Kieu son-in-law. “We have relatives in Germany,” Thao said, “and my mother thinks she can arrange something for me.”

*

Six months after I wrote the above lines, I saw Thao again and found out that she did indeed marry the man she loved, in defiance of her mother. It had not turned out well: “We argued right on our wedding night and he has beaten me six times in three months already.”

“Beaten you?!”

“Truong would go to the bia om cafes. When I get jealous, he would punch me and slam my face against the wall.” Neither the police nor the neighbors would intervene.

It was hard for me to reconcile the quiet boy I had met several times with this violent husband. But I had seen, over and over, how a Vietnamese would alter his demeanor dramatically depending on whom he’s dealing with. His voice and his body language would all change. An ingratiating, spineless individual can suddenly shift into a bullying asshole.



Two For One

A friend of mine said: “Westerners like to get divorced all the time, but we usually don’t get a divorce. We just take a mistress. That way, we’re both happy and responsible at the same time.” The Vietnamese word for mistress is vo be, “little wife.” One’s legal wife is called a vo lon, “big wife.”

Although one can go to jail for bigamy here, many men still like to keep a little wife on the side. This extra arrangement is often done surreptitiously, with some men maintaining two separate households, with two sets of children. There are also cases where both wives share the same house, with their children all intermingled.

The women, too, sometimes get into the act. (There is a proverb: “Husband with three wives; wife with three husbands.”) In my neighborhood, there is a middle-aged woman who decided to remake herself a couple years ago. She had her breasts and face lifted, her lips drawn, her eyebrows lined, and her stomach tucked. Rumor has it that she also did weird things to her interior. A rejuvenated woman, she went out and got herself a handsome, well-muscled, 30-year-old boyfriend, a stark contrast to her stooping, grimacing, coughing and generally worn-out 52-year-old husband.

Also in my neighborhood is A Sin, a man currently shuttling back and forth between two women. His story is rather complicated. A Sin is an ethnic Chinese from a rich family. His parents arranged a marriage for him at 22, but the loveless union went nowhere. He quickly drifted away from his wife and two children. By 1977, two years after the Fall of Saigon, A Sin’s family fortune had declined dramatically, but they were still relatively rich. A Sin was still a very eligible bachelor.

He met a Vietnamese woman with two young children, a widow of an ARVN officer who had died during the war. He fell for her and they got married.

He treated her children as his own. They had a beautiful daughter together. Everything seemed fine until one day, eleven years into their marriage, A Sin went home and found a strange man sitting in his house. It was the supposedly dead ARVN officer, returned from 13 years in a re-education camp. All through their marriage, his wife had maintained contact with her first husband, and sent care packages to him in prison. She had lied to A Sin right from the beginning.

There are perhaps only one or two opportunities in a lifetime when a man can show his true character. Instead of going berserk on his deceitful wife and booting the ARVN officer out, A Sin offered to let the first husband stay in the same household. The ARVN officer, in turn, thanked A Sin for raising his two children.

Alas, the ARVN officer also had a mistress. He went to live with her, and they emigrated to the US a year later.

With perhaps a second opportunity to show his true character, A Sin took a mistress of his own, a rather homely, older Chinese woman. He now divides his time between his two wives. They seem to get along very well.



Hoa Nguyen and I in Carrboro, North Carolina, 2005. Photo by Dan Duffy.

Nine Philly shots

Image 1: A mural at 4th and Titan, "SOUTH PHILLY--NEIGHBORHOOD OF CHAMPIONS--WE HAVE THE GOLD!!" Images 2, 3 and 4: Murals beneath I-76, on Washington Avenue. Images 5, 6 and 7: A sort of Christmas maypole at Jefferson Square. Image 9: Looking at one of the few Philly projects still standing, I'm reminded of Minoru Yamasaki, architect of St. Louis' infamous Pruitt-Igoe, whose thirty three 11-story apartment buildings were finished in 1955, destroyed in 1972. Yamasaki's even more famous World Trade Center was also imploded on television.

In 2003, when Bob Malloy visited my wife and I in Certaldo, Italy, he said, "Now I know I live in hell," meaning Philadelphia. After Dan Duffy visited us in Philadelphia in 2005, he returned to North Carolina and wrote in his newsletter, "Linh Dinh gave me a little tour around his slum neighborhood." South Philly is actually OK because it is walkable, lively, relatively safe and not the suburb. We'd rather live in hell than the suburb.

[Pruitt Igoe]

Six poems translated into Spanish by Gabriel Bernal Granados

LA PALABRA MAS BELLA

Creo que la palabra "verruga" es la más bella de la lengua inglesa. Dormía boca abajo, sin su camisa, su espalda humeaba. Yo mismo estaba sangrando. Había una cosecha de verrugas en su espalda. Su cuerpo lloraba. Guiño puede ser la más fea. No digas: "La bala guiñó dentro de su cuerpo". Di: "La bala danzó dentro de su cuerpo". Di: "La bala dio tumbos adelante y arriba". Luz oblicua. Todos los músculos inferiores de mi cara se crisparon. Le di la vuelta a mi hombre delicadamente, como un amante impaciente, cuidando de no fracturar su espina. Fichas de domino dieron chasquidos bajo la piel crocante: ¡Clack! ¡Clack! Una cara colapsada miró con asombro. Había un rocío rosado en el aire, luego un breve arco iris. La mandíbula estaba cosida con hilos azules al alma. Extraje un diente de la lengua. Se había tragado el resto.



OJOS DE PESCADO

Mi hijo no comerá otra cosa que ojos de pescado. En la pescadería, si mi esposa quiere comprar un esturión que ya no tiene ojos, también tendrá que preguntar por dos ojos extirpados a un bagre, o incluso a una anguila, de modo que mi hijo pueda cenar sus ojos de pescado esa noche. En casa, esos ojos se pondrán dentro de sus nuevas cuencas.

Si un muchacho que come piernas de pollo todo el tiempo se convertirá muy probablemente en borracho, y un muchacho que come alas de polio se convertirá en poeta, ¿qué será de mi hijo, que nunca come otra cosa que ojos de pescado?



COMIENDO POLLO FRITO

Odio admitirlo, hermano, pero hay veces
Cuando estoy comiendo pollo frito
Cuando no pienso en otra cosa que en comer pollo frito,
Cuando me olvido por completo de mi familia, honor y país,
Las varias deudas de sangre que tienes conmigo,
Mis humillaciones pasadas y mis crímenes futuros--
No hay, en resumen, sino la piel crocante de mi pollo frito.

Pero no soy tan malo, también hay veces
En que me niego a lamer o tragar nada
Que no tenga relación con lo humano.

(Que es, si te fijas bien, algo completamente anodino.)

Y sin duda ésta es la razón de que las manzanas ocasionen pleitos,
Y la carne roja acarree humillación,
Y con cada bocanada de aire
Se llenen mis pulmones de pólvora y humo.



CUERPO SIN FRONTERAS

Antes, era una persona miserable, enjuta, estirada,
Tiesa, completamente torcida, tartamuda, fanática,

Pero esa mañana, mi piel se sintió fresca y consciente como nunca.
Mi cuerpo tintineó. De pronto pude entender y hablar

Dos mil lenguas. Mi alma floreció, mis pechos retoñaron.
Volví a pelarme el prepucio para eliminar todos mis obsoletos

Y elaborados prejuicios. Mis dientes, los huecos entre
Mis dientes y mi aliento se sentían frescos y limpios como nunca.

Pude ver muy lejos. Pude simpatizar con cada
Hebra de pelo trenzada en la piel de cada persona.

Temblando, eyaculé por primera vez en mi vida, en la vida.
Me volví consciente del milagro de mi ano y vagina.

Finalmente, se me había permitido despatarrarme, mezclarme con
Todos los seres humanos, animales y cosas. Solo quería volcarme

A besarlos a todos en ese momento. Solo quería servir
Y mamarlos a todos en ese momento. También quería que todos

En esta tierra me mamaran. Estaba deseoso de perdonar
Y pedir disculpas a la juntura entre los dedos de cada persona.

Desnudo, caminé por la calle como el primer ser humano.



VOCAB LAB

Esta palabra significa sí,
sin embargo, tal vez o no,
dependiendo de la situación.

Esta palabra significa deseo,
amor, amistad, violación o el deseo repentino
de involucrar a alguien en una conversación
filosófica.

Esta palabra es irrepetible;
su significado, hermético para todos los que vienen de fuera.

No puede pronunciarse
ni memorizarse.

Esta palabra también es proteica,
y puede usarse en lugar de cualquier otra,
sin merma en su significado.

Sólo puede sugerirse, implicarse,
y por lo tanto no aparece en ningún libro,
ni siquiera en un diccionario.

No puede decirse ni verse.
Puede escribirse con libertad, sin embargo,
pero sólo en completa oscuridad.

Esta palabra significa una cosa cuando la dice un hombre,
y otra, completamente distinta, cuando la dice una mujer.

Esta palabra significa ahora, pronto o nunca,
dependiendo de la edad del hablante.

Esta palabra significa aquí, allá o ninguna parte,
dependiendo de la nacionalidad del hablante.

Con frecuencia se ha dicho que los nativos
sólo enseñarán a los extranjeros un fraude, lenguaje degradado,
un sistema de signos simulado
que parodia el lenguaje real.

También se ha dicho que los nativos
desconocen su propio idioma
y deben imitar el lenguaje falsificado de los extranjeros,
para dar un sentido a sus vidas.



PRODUCTOS DE UNA MARCA NUEVA

La pistola de un vigilante que siempre da
En el blanco --incluso si el blanco eres tú--
Sin importar a quien estés apuntando.

Una computadora que escucha y te silba,
Como tú le silbas, tu tonada favorita.

Carne que te limpia los dientes
Mientras la masticas.

Un camión tan imponente, que sólo al presidente
De los Estados Unidos de América le está permitido
Volcarse en él, a su propio antojo.

Un diccionario con adjetivos positives solamente.
Un diccionario sin verbos húmedos.
Un diccionario con definiciones negociables.
Un diccionario que define palabras per sus antónimos.

Todos los grandes éxitos del último milenio
Interpretados en vivo, en el escenario, conforme
A tu concepción del arts, cráneo acústicamente agrandado.

Una serie completa de tus fotos
Desnudo, que tú tomaste y tú
Te revendiste —con descuento.

Una muñeca inflable con cara de espejo.
Una muñeca inflable con doctorado.
Una muñeca inflable con color de piel ajustable.

Una muñeca inflable sensible que sólo quiere
Tu amistad —una muñeca inflable platónica.

Agua de lluvia en una botella, luz solar en una caja
Y sonido ambiente de una parada de autobús
Al final de la calle, grabado en un CD.

Un video de 24 horas de lo que hiciste ayer.
Un video de 24 horas de lo que harás mañana.

Una foto hiperrealista de lo que está afuera
de tu ventana, pegada a tu ventana.

Un juego de beisbol que nunca termina,
para jugarse al mismo tiempo que
Un partido de futbol que nunca termina.

Bombas en racimo que esparcen ejemplares de Hojas de hierba
En un radio de mil millas, durante mil años.

Minas terrestres hechas de pasta,
Copeteadas con mozzarella y todo
Lo que tú quieras.

Un aeroplano que nunca aterriza.

Y, finalmente, tu cuento de hadas favorito
Pintado en tus nuevos miembros de plástico.




Published in Mandorla, no. 9, 2006. Sources of originals: "The Most Beautiful Words" and "Fish Eyes" in All Around What Empties Out; "Eating Fried Chicken" in American Tatts; "Borderless Body" and "Brand New Products" in Borderless Bodies.

Hola, It's Io

Tahseen Alkhateeb has just translated three of my poems into Arabic. A few years ago, Ali Mizher converted four, also into Arabic. I'm very grateful to both.

In 2005, when I gave a reading in Berlin, Gerd Burger translated a selection of my poems and a short story into German.

At the same website, Anny Ballardini's Fieralingue, I've shapeshifted some of my own poems into Italian, available here and here. Marco Giovenale, whose Italian is reputedly better than mine, having born there, who can actually speak it without provoking looks of outrage, incomprehension and disgust, has translated eleven poems from my Borderless Bodies and published them on GAMMM:::.

Translated into Italian by Giovanni Giri, my Blood and Soap is published by Edizioni Spartaco. It will soon appear in Japanese through translator Motoyuki Shibata, who will also broadcast a story from it, "Murder or Suicide," through The Open University of Japan.

At the Brazilian webzine Sibila, I have two pieces translated into Portuguese by Odile Cisneros, Regina Alfarano and Maria do Carmo Zanini.

Animated genius...

Some wild alliteration from George Herriman, from a Krazy Kat strip of December 11, 1938:

[click to enlarge]



And Betty Boop in Snow White, 1933, as animated by Roland C. Crandall:

Composition with Bar Stools

My Real Wife

Poem for Infants

[poem formerly here will be in the May issue of the Indian webzine, Almost Island]


......................

Is it abstract?

Dig a hole in your back yard. If there is no back yard, use the front yard. If there is no yard at all, dig a hole in a large potted plant. Bury the meat sack upside down, head downward, facing east, in the hole and cover it over. Let the candle burn continually until kingdom come.

Metakat

[click on each strip to enlarge]

Hoo Doo Economics

In "Saint Joe and the impending global financial crisis," Mike Whitney points out that some Americans are resorting to sorcery to help them sell their house while the market collapses. The formula:


REAL ESTATE SPELL KIT

Alleged to Help in the Sale of Real Estate

1 Dressed and Blessed Saint Joseph Candle
1 Statuette of Saint Joseph
1 Bottle Saint Joseph Oil
1 Saint Joseph Chromo Print
1 Saint Joseph Holy Card

PREPARATION: This spell is used to make a home or other property sell quickly once it is listed on the real estate market. It is up to you to see that the premises are clean and that the asking price is within market value. In addition to the items here, you will need a picture frame for the print (it is 8" x 10" and fits in a standard frame) and a trowel to dig. If the property has no yard, you will also need a house plant in a large pot.

DOING THE JOB: Remove the cling wrap from the Saint Joseph candle and light it. It is already dressed with St. Joseph Oil and with three herbs used in real estate spells -- Cedar, Cinnamon, and Cloves. As the candle burns, hang the print of Saint Joseph where it will be seen by those who are viewing the house. Hide the holy card of Saint Joseph among your real estate papers (deed, termite inspection notice, mortgage, etc.). Spray or dab Saint Joseph Oil in the four corners of each room, each window frame, each door jamb, and the framed print. When you are done with this, hold the statue of Saint in the your hand as you recite the following:

PRAYER TO SAINT JOSEPH FOR SELLING A HOUSE

O, Saint Joseph,
you who taught our Lord
the carpenter's trade,
and saw to it
that he was always properly housed,
hear my earnest plea.

I want you to help me now
as you helped your foster-child Jesus,
and as you have helped many others
in the matter of housing.

I wish to sell this [house/property]
quickly, easily, and profitably
and I implore you to grant my wish
by bringing me a good buyer,
one who is
eager, compliant, and honest,
and by letting nothing impede the
rapid conclusion of the sale.

Dear Saint Joseph,
I know you would do this for me
out of the goodness of your heart
and in your own good time,
but my need is very great now
and so I must make you hurry
on my behalf.

Saint Joseph, I am going to place you
in a difficult position
with your head in darkness
and you will suffer as our Lord suffered,
until this [house/property] is sold.

Then, Saint Joseph, i swear
before the cross and God Almighty,
that i will redeem you
and you will receive my gratitude
and a place of honour in my home.

Amen.

Now take up the statue of Saint Joseph and dig a hole in your back yard. If there is no back yard, use the front yard. If there is no yard at all, dig a hole in a large potted plant. Bury the statue upside down, head downward, facing east, in the hole and cover it over. Let the candle burn continually inside until it goes out.

FINISHING UP: When the property sells, you MUST dig up the statue, clean it, and carry it with you to your new home, where it should be kept in a place of honour. Failure to do this will lead to trouble with the sale or trouble with the new home or property.



Rather than Saint Joseph, someone should bury our Decider-in-Chief upside down. In "Spirit of the Season", James Howard Kunstler dissects Bush's five-year-plan to freeze mortgage interest rates:

The clowns in charge of things understandably feel that they have to do something -- or pretend to -- in the face of what is shaping up to be not just a credit "crunch," but a potentially lethal illness in the credit system per se -- that is, in the very process of trading in paper that claims to represent faith in the future creation of wealth. That process underlies all of modern finance. Investments, currencies, economies, and nations hang in the balance.

President Bush, seeming very much the clown-in-chief, led the way last week by proposing a mortgage crisis bail-out that would appear to have no chance whatsoever of working as advertised. He called it, arrestingly, the Hope Now Alliance. It blithely assumed that those "servicing" mortgages -- that is, collecting the monthly payments -- have the ability to suspend scheduled upward re-sets of adjustable mortgages for five years for certain select homeowner payees -- so that theoretically said homeowners could avoid foreclosure.

[...]

Good Morning, Good Night

[poem formerly here will be in the May issue of the Indian webzine, Almost Island]


....................

Taliban Beat

by Luny Tunes, the Dominican raggaeton production duo of Francisco Saldaña (Luny) and Víctor Cabrera (Tunes):





There is also the "Corrido de Osama bin Laden" by Mexico's Andrés Contreras, as translated by Elijah Wald from the Spanish:

(Now let's go to Afghanistan, listen, where Osama bin Laden and his brave mujahadins, accompanied by the Taliban, oppose themselves with singular bravery, in very unequal combat, to the most powerful empires in the world. Those bigfooted gringos . . . [unintelligible]. . . If they don't kill bin Laden, bad, and if they do kill him, worse, because millions like him will arise!)

Over there in Saudi Arabia a brave man was born
That which no one had done, he dared to do it
In various places he attacked the gringos
And every time he did it he killed many soldiers

Although he is a great millionaire that did not matter to him
And he dedicated all of his fortune to the struggle
The American government was very frightened by him
And sent thousands of troops to kill him.

Osama bin Laden, don't let yourself be caught
Look, if they catch you they are sure to kill you
There is a price on your head, many want to win it
For all that you have done they will not forgive you

[...]

Don't worry, Andrés Contreras, Bush is not looking for bin Laden. The "War Against Terrorism" was never about bin Laden in the first place. In any case, this ballad is an exception. Most corridos mourn, not celebrate 9/11.

Pie Recipe

by Stephanie Bachula


2 lbs. to the head
1 Tbs. nausea of surprise
¾ - 1 cup blood extract
2 Tbs. all purpose villain
½ - 1 tsp. ground skin dragging against
dash of desperation
2 Tbs. fight or fright

Close, squeeze, and thinly slice the eyes. Sprinkle with doubt.
Combine concussion, improbability, and phobia, and mix with throbs.
Prepare the aftermath, then fill it with the pain mixture.
Dot with instinct.
Adjust open legs. Brush with knee and sprinkle fingers on top if desired.
Cover the distance with your whole voice, and hope at 375ºF for two seconds.
Remove breath, and let fade until dark.



.........................

Traces and Attributions

1) Marcel Duchamp. Female Fig Leaf. 1950. Electroplated copper over plaster, 3 1/2 x 5 1/4 x 5" (8.6 x 13.3 x 12.7 cm). Gift of Jasper Johns. In the collection of MOMA, NYC.
2) Concrete cast recovered from a man's rectum showing grooves produced by mucosal folds. Ping-pong ball is encased in concrete (arrow), image scanned from Amok Journal.
3) Abdominal roentgenogram showing impacted radiopaque mass filling the same rectum. Note the radiolucent ping-pong ball in the upper portion (arrow).
4) Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. God. 1917. Cast iron and wood. This dada sculpture was until recently attributed to the painter Morton Schamberg. In the collection of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hold the Applause!

[poem formerly here will be in the May issue of the Indian webzine, Almost Island]

A Talent of Seven Steps

Speaking of unusual poets, here's "a talent of seven steps," from the [North] Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), bold emphasis mine:



Palhae Literature, National Treasure

Pyongyang, October 26 (KCNA) -- Palhae ("Haedongsongguk") existed for over 200 years after it was founded in 698 by the ruined people of Koguryo. And its history records the brilliant culture and tradition created by its people.

Palhae literature opened a high plane in the development of Korean literature in the middle ages.

The literary works of Palhae are characteristic of high patriotic spirit and exquisite description in thematic and ideological contents and opulent lyricism and narration in artistry.

Typical of them is the poem "Cloth-pounding Sound at Night". It truthfully depicts the mental state of the hero who is homesick and missing badly his parents, wife and children far away from home.

The poem of 12 verses was written by Yang Thae Sa, a Palhae envoy, in Japan in the mid-eighth century.

Other literary works including the poem "One feels homesick, looking up to the moon" by Wang Hyo Ryom reflect vividly the noble patriotic minds of the forefathers.

Famous foreign men of literature and talents in those days were unstinting in their praise of literary works of Palhae.

The then well-known writers of Japan appraised Pae Jong, a Palhae poet, as "a talent of seven steps" meaning a brilliant poet who wrote an excellent poem while taking seven steps. They said his poems were so virile and acute that they reminded one of a sharp-edged sword in the hand of a warrior dashing into an enemy camp and he wrote a poem with the speed of flashing lightning.


[Communists and Capitalists are both materialistic, hence their needs to quantify all achievements and happiness.]

You only die once...

Sex Hanging in a Female
by Abdullah Fatteh, M.B., Ph. D., LL.B., D.M.J. (Clin.), D.M.J. (Path.), M.R.C. Path., F.C.L.M.
[this excerpt, included in Amok Journal, edited by Stuart Swezey (Los Angeles: Amok, 1995), was originally published in The Handbook of Forensic Pathology, 1973. This is the only recorded instance of accidental asphyxiation during aberrant sexual activity by a female.]

[...]

A 19-year-old white female was found dead in her bedroom, hanging from the hinge of a closet door. She was dressed in the attire of an Oriental "harem girl." A towel was wound round her head and a window sash-cord was wound around the body in a complicated fashion. The cord was passed around the breasts in a "figure of eight" fashion and then down between the labia majora. A blindfold and mouth gag made from a housecoat belt was passed across the eyes, behind the neck, then back across the mouth and again to the back of the neck.

An "underground" magazine and a paperback Alfred Hitchcok book found at the scene explained the fantasy. The center fold-out of the magazine showed a bizarre dance involving a clock. A nude male figure was bound to the minute hand. A verse on the fold-out showed how the two clock hands would move and the two figures would perform the sex act at the stroke of the hour. The paperback contained a story (which had been read so many times the papers were loose) about an Oriental harem. In the story the harem master provided girls to his lord and after the girls were "used" they were "stored" by hanging them around the walls on hooks.



...........................................
[also from Amok Journal, an excerpt from "Autoerotic Fatalities with Power Hydraulics" by Ronald L. O'Halloran, M.D., and Park Elliot Dietz, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., originally published in Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 2, March 1993. Bold emphasis mine.]

[...]

A 42-year-old Asian man was found hanging by the neck, suspended by a rope attached to the raised shovel of a John Deere model J D 410, diesel powered, backhoe tractor. He was last seen alive by his parents, the prior evening at 10:30 when he walked out of their shared rural home. Shortly thereafter they heard the tractor engine start, as they had on prior occasions, but they investigate no further. The following morning the father noticed that his son's bed had not been slept in, and he heard the tractor engine idling. When he went out to the yard, he found his son dead, stiff, and cold.

The decedent was suspended in a semi-sitting position by a cloth safety harness strap wrapped around his neck and clipped to a rope that was hooked on the raised shovel of the backhoe tractor. A towel was between the loose-fitting strap and the victim's neck. A long piece of plastic pipe was connected on one end by conduit tape to the hydraulic control lever of the shovel in the operator's compartment of the tractor. A broomstick was taped to the other end of the pipe and was partially under the decedent's buttocks. The hydraulic shovel could be easily raised or lowered by pressure applied to the broomstick. The decedent was fully clothed and his genitals were not exposed. No pornographic materials, women's clothing items, or mirrors were at the scene.

The decedent was a self-employed engineer who was unmarried and had always lived with his parents. He owned his own successful company and was actively involved in several hobbies, including two high-risk sports. He regularly contributed volunteer work to a charitable organization. His medical history was remarkable only for Reiter's syndrome with ankylosing spondylitis and clinical urethritis. He had no known psychiatric illness.

Two years before his death he had bought the backhoe tractor as a Christmas gift to himself and named it "Stone." He used the backhoe on occasional ditch-digging jobs. He wrote about it in a Christmas newsletter to friends, in which he enclosed Stone's picture. He also wrote about his tractor in a long poem, which alluded to flying high in the sky with his friend, Stone.

[...]



................................................
[Also from Amok Journal, death during intimacy with a vacuum cleaner. It's almost too trite an idea, nearly a cliche. Like spreading peanut butter on your genitals so the dog will lick it, I'm sure every man, woman and child from here to China has tried it at least once.]

Vacuum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death
Riazul H. Imami, M.D., Ph.D. and Miftah Kemal, M.S.
The American Journal of Forensic medicine and Pathology Vol. 9, No. 3
1988
[an excerpt included in Amok Journal]

CASE HISTORY
The body of a 57-year-old white man was discovered by a neighbor who responded to the sound of "a vacuum cleaner running continuously for a long time" coming from the decedent's trailer home. Upon entry, he found the decedent slumped over a vacuum cleaner and proceeded to notify the police. A medical examiner was requested at the scene for a possible case of "electrocution." The decedent was naked, leaning against a dining room table with his feet on the floor. His testicles, thighs, and buttocks were tightly bound with pantyhose (Figures 1 and 2). Areas in direct contact with the beater bar (his abdomen, parts of his chest and arms) showed some burn marks. His tongue, which protruded, was dry and cyanotic. A bottle of wine, some food items, jars of lubricant, a glass of urine, and a wooden table leg laden with fecal material were seen on the dining room table. The decedent had had a history of heart disease. No electrical defect was detected in the vacuum cleaner.

AUTOPSY FINDINGS
The victim's lungs showed congestion and emphysematous bullae. Atelectasis was also noted. Frothy liquid material exuded from cut surfaces of the lung and bronchial tree. The spleen and blood vessels showed passive congestion. Chronic pancreatitis was also observed. The heart showed massive scarring. The coronary arteries and their branches as well as the aorta showed marked arteriosclerotic involvement (up to 95% occlusion) and extensive calcification. Microscopic examination of areas in direct contact with the beater bar confirmed the presence of postmortem electrothermal burns. The epidermis was denuded and the dermis was somewhat coagulated. Results of tests for alcohol and other drugs were negative.

DISCUSSION
The victim in this case displayed characteristics of autoerotic behavior consistent with the findings reported by Resnik and other investigators. The solo act was performed by the victim in the privacy of his home and in the absence of his wife. The finding of "sexual paraphernalia" — the pantyhose, table leg, lubricant, and vacuum cleaner — along with the victim's nudity pointed to an autoerotic death. The fact that no semen was found suggested that the victim possibly suffered a heart attack before achieving orgasm. The presence of the wooden table leg indicated the victim's attempt to experience orgasm via anal infibulation. His wife said that once before she had surprised him masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. She also admitted to not having had sex for the past five years.

Determination of the manner of death poses difficulties in fatalities resulting from autoerotic behavior. Most episodes have been ruled accidental deaths. In this case, however, death was classified as natural, based on the decedent's medical history, the pathologic and toxicological findings, and the absence of a suicide note.



..............................................

Check out this samizdat cover of Nguyen Quoc Chanh with his vacuum cleaner:



I've translated a large selection of this fierce Saigon poet, perhaps the best inside Vietnam right now.

PoemTalk

I've been involved with PoemTalk, an initiative of Al Filreis. It is now officially launched:

For each episode of PoemTalk four friends and colleagues in the world of poetry and poetics convene to collaborate on a close (but not too close) reading of a single poem. We talk through and around the poem, sometimes beyond it, often disagreeing, always excited by what we discover as we talk, and perhaps after twenty-five minutes we've opened up the verse to a few new possibilities and have gained for a poem that interests us some new readers and listeners.

I was alert and engaged when talking about Williams and Adrienne Rich, but for the George Oppen show, I felt a little spaced out, having just returned from Iceland the day before, but since we had Rachel Blau DuPlessis, everything turned out fine. Tomorrow, Al, Randall Couch, Erica Kaufman and I will discuss Ted Berrigan's "Three Pages." Since it's dedicated to Jack Collom, I even called Jack yesterday to ask him a few questions.

Recently, Nicholas Manning stirred up some ill-tempered debate when he complained about the "rambling, annotative style" of Dale Smith's Black Stone, which he traced to "late American Confessionalism (no less than Lowell and Plath) and a slightly tired current of the New York School." "O’Hara knew how to turn such annotation to poetic effect," but not Dale Smith, according to Manning. While acknowledging Smith's "substantial lyrical gifts," Manning doubted if they served any "poetic ends." I haven't read Black Stone, so I don't know if Manning's verdict has currency, but it seems to me that many "I do this, I do that" poems rely on heteroglossia to seduce the readers at first. In able hands, this textural excitement is also interlarded with sharp insights, sly jokes and poignant aphorisms. Berrigan was a precursor of this method, but the grand master, then as now, is John Ashbery.

Berrigan's "Three Pages" is also a list poem. Here's a wonderful list by a fifty-year-old actor found dead in his bathtub, "strangled by a rope, which wound around his neck, was looped over a sliding door, and was tied to his left wrist and ankle":

Hot wax brushed on nipples and genitals
Dildoes
Several 2-inch flat lathes or short whips
Shaving the genitals
Nipple rings, ear, nose, and penis
Teasing with feathers
The box with the hole for the head
The collar suspended from the ceiling
The buttocks as a pin cushion
Tied by the neck to a tree
Legs spread, hands behind, she sitting on the mouth of her slave
The sexual degrading and abusing of the slave
Directive to masturbate controlled by the whip
Forcing the victim to tie himself
The admission of surrender and acknowledging the mistress by a signature
The taboo and the kneeling
Kissing and sucking the cunt
Put in frame with buttocks as target
Painted in bizarre designs
Walk through the street tied and naked, except for a raincoat
Chained by neck and hand

[from "Illustrative Bondage Deaths" by Robert E. Lipman, included in Amok Journal, edited by Stuart Swezey (Los Angeles: Amok, 1995)

Nábraekur

What is this and where is it? Any intelligent guesses? Answer on Friday:

This is a nábraekur, the lower half of a dead body reputedly worn by some Icelandic bankers to generate endless amounts of money. This specimen is in the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in the village of Hólmavík. The lower half is associated with defecation and sex, with its "dark center where procreation flare[s]," to quote Rilke. Sex is sporadic for some, non-existent for many, but shit is constant, what the lower half generates daily. Shit is filthy lucre, is golden. Vietnamese believe that seeing shit in a dream means cash will flow your way. To wear a dead man's lower half also reeks of necrophilia. To leapfrog into the highest tax bracket, would you fuck a dead gentleman?

Two watercolors

These I did for my first chapbook, Drunkard Boxing, 1998. The first was actually printed upside down on the cover, but I never told Gil Ott, my publisher. Gil was already upset that the printer had messed up the indigo tint, which is here restored. I never asked for the originals back, so I assume that Julia Blumenreich, Gil's widow, still has them.


.........................

Some Gil Ott links:

-CA Conrad interviews Gil Ott.
-Audio files from the Gil Ott Celebration at the Kelly Writers House, 2001.
-A Gil Ott story at xconnect.
-Poets reflect on Gill Ott upon news of his death.

In Youth

OK, two guys and one girl had a long night at the bar. Rolling Rocks, Jameson, lots of laughing, they'd been friends a while. The girl was tan, because she had just visited Florida. After closing, they returned to one of their apartments, the nearest one to the pub, since they could walk no further.

The guy whose apartment it was decided to give his bed to the girl. He would sleep on the floor in the same room, while the other guy could claim a couch on another floor. So far so good. In the middle of the night, the guy on the floor discovered that the other two were screwing in his bed. What would you do if:

A) You were sleeping on the floor while these people, your friends, were polluting your fuckin' bed?

B) You were having sex on your best friend's bed because, well, these things happen, while he was sleeping on the floor, getting an earful?

C) You were the girl who thought this was kinda funny although a little out of hand?

What actually happened was the guy on the floor did nothing, out of decency, highmindedness and a deep sense of shame for these pigs. They didn't make that much noise, actually, a fact that could be intepreted any number of ways. Still, the suppressed audibles and hydraulic sounds would echo a long time in his wounded, outraged memory.

The loving couple finished after a while and actually slept on the bed until nearly dawn, when the girl whispered, "I think you should go back downstairs." After leaving their friend's apartment, the two of them had breakfast at a nearby diner. An awkward warmth suffused their gazes and they would grin deeply about what had just happened, without even mentioning it. When it was time to pay, he wondered if it was appropriate or inapppropriate to pick up the tab, but she did not object. They kissed upon parting, never to see each other again. As for the two male friends, their friendship was already irrepairably destroyed, so it wasn't really worth it, or maybe it was.

Her Place

[Joe Banford and I got off on a bar tangent in the last post, so here's a portrait of a Saigon bar, written and published in 2000. Carmen has since closed.]


The Nike factory managers and whores and backpackers and outbackers can vogue their nights away at Apocalypse Now, but Carmen, at 8 Ly Tu Trong Street, is the coolest club in Saigon. Spacious, dark, with a door you must crouch to enter (even if you’re Tattoo), it features mellow, cosmopolitan music, Nat King Cole, Tammy Wynette and Bobby Bland, etc, on the sound system. (“Tammy Wynette as cosmopolitan?!” I can see you cringing, my friend, but context is everything; Vietnamese yodeling would be considered sophisticated in New Jack City.) The live music starts at nine, and it's mostly flamenco, played by an excellent lead guitarist, a rhythm guitarist, and a guy on bongos. There are singers also. One, the owner’s daughter, has a swooning, husky voice, and does lovely renditions of Trinh Cong Son. Audience members, when inspired, have also been known to invade the stage. Once I witnessed two older American guys sang spirited, ragged versions of “Country Road,” “Red Mountain River,” and “This Land Is My Land,” with its lyrics changed to “This world is our world, from the Virgin Islands, to the Mekong Delta, etc, etc... This world was made for you and me!!!!”

As they left the stage, a friend of mine whispered: “These guys should be locked up.”

“They are already,“ I responded. “Them are those MIA’s we’ve heard so much about.”

But the entertainment is secondary at Carmen. One goes there just to chill in the mellow ambience. And to chat with the owner, Nguyen Thi Hoang. Before the Fall of Saigon, Hoang was a literary star, with 30 novels and short story collections to her credit.

But after April 30th, 1975, her life quickly spiraled downward. She and her husband lost their Saigon home and was sent to a New Economic Zone. where they labored for two years. They built a little hut for themselves, worked on the collective farm, while also caring for their four children, age 5 to 14. She described clearing the land, by hacking and yanking at roots, on their tiny plot so they could grow vegetables to eat. “Just like Robinson Crusoe,” she smiled. “I wore one shirt for two years. It was split down the back after a while. I weighed 78 pounds. I was neither a kid nor an adult, neither male nor female.”

But there was beauty and magic even amid this incredible hardship. “I would go into the woods in the evening to dig for cassava, when the light shining through the leaves was most beautiful. Once I heard a loud snoring, like an old man sleeping. I went to the source of the noise and saw, in the hollow of a tree trunk, two intertwined centipedes!”

Hoang also talked about ghosts, including one variety “with only a head and its entrails dangling down.”

On this night, however, there was neither snoring centipedes nor ghosts with their entrails dangling down, only Hoang’s beautiful daughter, Ha, at the microphone crooning: “Which speck of dust changed my life, so tomorrow I can return to dust?”


An image of Nguyễn Thị Hoàng, as scanned from Công-Huyền Tôn-Nữ Nha Trang's article "Women Writers of South Vietnam (1954-1975)", The Vietnam Forum, number 9, Winter-Spring 1987.


...........................

Khanh Ly is the most admired, beloved singer of Trinh Cong Son's songs. This image shows them performing in Saigon in the late 1960's. His music captures the culture of wartime Saigon, with all of its sadness and beauty. Saigonese everywhere still tear up hearing Khanh Ly interpret Trinh Cong Son.

Some drawings

Jay Johnston, Felt tip pens on paper, 11 3/8 X 12". 1994. I doubt if Jay remembers drawing this. I'm surprised to have it.


Three by Kevin Washabaugh. Pencil on typing paper, each one 11 x 8 1/2". 1989.


Aziz Vargha. Pencil on paper, 13 3/4 x 11". 1988. I published a poem about Aziz in American Tatts. He's been in the looney bin so many times. The last time I saw him was in 1994. We were sitting in an Old City bar on 2nd Street. Catty corner from us, there were two women, one blonde, one brunette; one wearing glasses, one not; one clearly fatter and shorter than the other. Suddenly, Aziz turned to them, "Excuse me, misses, but are you twins?" He wasn't trying to be funny. "What's your name again?", he asked me at one point.

The Seventh

Attila Jozsef


If you set out in this world,
better be born seven times.
Once, in a house on fire,
once, in a freezing flood,
once, in a wild madhouse,
once, in a field of ripe wheat,
once, in an empty cloister,
and once among pigs in a sty.
Six babes crying, not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

When you must fight to survive,
let your enemy see seven.
One, away from work on Sunday,
one, starting his work on Monday,
one, who teaches without payment,
one, who learned to swim by drowning,
one, who is the seed of a forest,
and one, whom wild forefathers protect,
but all their tricks are not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

If you want to find a woman,
let seven men go for her.
One, who gives his heart for words,
one, who takes care of himself,
one, who claims to be a dreamer,
one, who through her skirt can feel her,
one, who knows the hooks and snaps,
one, who steps upon her scarf.
let them buzz like flies around her.
You yourself must be the seventh.

If you write and can afford it,
let seven men write your poem.
One, who builds a marble village,
one, who was born in his sleep,
one, who charts the sky and knows it,
one, whom words call by his name,
one, who perfected his soul,
one, who dissects living rats.
Two are brave and four are wise;
you yourself must be the seventh.

And if all went as was written,
you will die for seven men.
One, who is rocked and suckled,
one, who grabs a hard young breast,
one, who throws down empty dishes,
one, who helps the poor to win,
one, who works till he goes to pieces,
one, who just stares at the moon.
The world will be your tombstone:
you yourself must be the seventh.



translated from the Hungarian by John Batki

.............
I'm posting this as an example of a poem that sounds "simultaneously ancient and contemporary." Jozsef is both tender and fierce, world weary and heart-breakingly innocent. I first read about him in a book by another Hungarian, Arthur Koestler. Both were suicides, Josef by lying next to a railroad track, facing the train with one bare arm, sleeve snipped off, draped across a rail; Koestler by a drug overdose, in a suicide pact with his third wife, Cynthia.


[Working from English translations, I've converted two Jozsef poems into Vietnamese.]

Nothing Remains Empty

Nothing will remain empty.
Nothing will remain forgotten.
There is a place in the Universe
where the memory of time
is recorded.
My words will be recorded there.

In clean books.
In pure books.
In books of gold.
In books of light.
In peaceful books.
Because I am writing with
a sacred pencil,
with a sprout for a pencil,
with a pencil of white light.
Thus I feel secure.
Thus I feel wise.
My word is sacred.
My breath is pure.
It is born from there.
My language is fresh.
It will be heard.
It will be written.
In clean books.
In pure books.
In books of gold.
In the books of light.
In the books of peace.
My words will reach there.
On the white table.
On the mother table.
On the clear table.
On the wise table.
Because they are not empty words.
Because they are not hollow words.
Because I speak humbly.
Because I ask for mercy.
Because I ask for justice.
I am not speaking to a vacuum.
I have my light turned on.
I have my breast open.
I have my heart pure.
It is born from there.
It springs forth from there.
It germinates from there.
I have my tender pencil.
I have my kindly pencil.
I have my pencil of light.
I have my sprouted pencil.
It is in between my hands.
It is in between my fists.
They will arrive at a clean house.
They will arrive at a white house.
They will arrive at a celestial house.
They will arrive at a house of flowers.
Because I am begging for clemency.
Because I am begging for justice.
Nothing secret exists.
Nothing hidden exists.
These images speak.
These images plead.
Between many dead letters.
Between many bad rifles.
Between many words
that do not reach the sky.
Now I hand it over.
Now I send it.
How far does the infinite light reach.
How far does the white light reach.
In the clean house.
In the white house.
In the celestial house.
My words will arrive there.
Because there are no lies.
Because there is no evil.
Because I deliver humbly.
Because I ask with just words.
Because my language is pure.
Because my word is wise.
Because my speech is sacred.
Because my breath is fresh.
They will be received,
they will be heard.
In the house of purity.
In the house of chastity.
Where the lovely table is set.
The white table.
The mother table.
The clear table.
The table of the dawn.
They will arrive like fresh medicine.
Like new leaves.
Like tender sprouts.
Like blank dew,
clean and transparent.
As my grandfather says.
As my mother expresses.
My young mother.
My tender mother.
My pure mother.
My dewy mother.
Thus I deliver this word.
Thus I deliver this book.
Thus I deliver this judgment.




...............

This poem raises some interesting questions. It feels ancient, except for three incongruities: "pencil," "bad rifles," and "my light turned on," so one can conclude that it partakes of, or mimics, an ancient form and attitude, but written by someone with an electric light to turn on. Does it matter where it was written? Are Americans and other first world denizens less entitled to pencil something like this? An author's biography tints how we read, as Kent Johnson has proven so well with Araki Yasusada, a great conceptual work of art. Here, the author is Juan Gregorio Regino, who wrote in Mazateco before converting it into Spanish. Included in the anthology Que Siga Lloviendo, Escritores en Lenguas Indigenas (Mexico City, 1999), it was then translated into English by Earl Shorris and Sylvia Sasson Shorris, who note: "Although the subject matter of the poem is contemporary, the style is traditional. As Juan Gregorio Regino has maintained the rhythms of Mazateco chanting in his Spanish translation, we have attempted to carry the rhythms through here." I don't see any contemporary subject matter, do you? In any case, many other poets have managed to sound simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Juan Gregorio Regino didn't quite do it here, not that it was his objective to begin with.

Tijuana

[half of this post has been incorporated into this one]

I've written two long essays in Vietnamese about the US/Mexico border, the first covers Marfa and Ojinaga, the second El Paso, Juarez and Tijuana. In El Paso and Juarez, Bobby Byrd showed me around. Crossing the international bridge, we ran into Julián Cardona. In Tijuana, I was given a book by Roberto Castillo Udiarte, from which I translated a long poem.




Returning to Philly, I got this email from Clayton Eshleman:

just saw a photo of you on the woodland pattern site. you look a little like forest whitaker playing idi amin--are you a rough guy?

your pal in Y,

CE

So I wrote:

Hi Clayton,

I don't know about rough, but I'm scruffy enough, with bad skin too. I was in Texas recently and went over to Ciudad Juarez. I also visited Ojinaga. I felt strangely at home in Mexico. I'm trying to teach myself Spanish. The US is so fucked up now, it's terminal, would you consider going somewhere else to live? And where would you go?

Linh

Clayton then wrote:

dear Linh,

as a Vietnamese, you are already in exile in USA. So it would probably be easier for you to shift exile than it would be for me, at 71, to go into it.

Problem is you have your reputation as a poet here.

Were I to move, I would seriously consider Vancouver, a very attractive city, with lots of people from the East, "Pacific Rim," and still not far from USA.

Mexico is very problematic these days. Increased violence mainly. As a literary scene it may look better than it actually is. I think, as a Vietnamese-American poet, you would be a nobody in Mexico City. Costa Rica would be much less hassle-free, and the cloud forests are very beautiful (still). But there is no culture there, let alone art! Cuzco, Peru, would be interesting for a while, as it is full of character and impressive architecture, at 13,000 feet (headache land), but again, virtually no contemporary art.

And there is New Zealand, with decent politics, fairly-integrated Maoris, and a gorgeous landscape (Lord of the Rings was filmed there).

But do learn to read, at least, Spanish. Then you can read Vallejo without me! My translation of The Complete Poetry is just now being published, along with a new collection of my own poetry, An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire.

[...]

I would stay away from Juarez at this point. Anything could happen to you there.

All best,

Clayton

There's a great bilingual blog called Tijuana Bible, written by Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson. For images of actual Tijuana bibles, click here.

A Strange Letter

My name is Linh Dinh and I am American. (At least that's what my passport says.) My wife's name is Diem Bui and she is not. (At least not yet.) We got married on 24 December 2000 in Saigon, the city of my birth.

I am American insofar as I read the box scores every morning, eat French fries on a regular basis, know that Buster Keaton is a genius. I am Vietnamese insofar as I have black hair, yellow skin, and a Napoleon complex.

A Vietnamese American is a special breed in Vietnam. Unlike an American American, he is not a total alien. He brings news from the promised land and, sometimes, is even a bridge to it.

Soon after our wedding, my wife received a strange letter from a distant cousin, someone she had not seen or talked to for more than a decade. The writer of this letter was a twenty-three-year-old woman:

Beloved Diem!

How are you? I am so happy for you. You are very lucky.

On the occasion of your wedding, I want to send you and your husband my deepest and most sincere wishes for your future happiness.

My mother is doing fine. I'm still in school. I'm getting rather fat and so have been on a diet.

You haven't been back to Can Tho in a long time. Perhaps you don't even remember me. I still have very fond memories of your visit in 1989. I was so happy to see you because I am the only girl in my family. Even back then you were very fashionably dressed. Do you remember? The two of us went all over Can Tho. We ate roasted corn; you took me to school, helped me with my homework. We rented Hong Kong videos and stayed up until two in the morning. Then we fried up some duck eggs with scallions. Do you remember?

I was very reluctant to send you this letter. I was afraid you would misunderstand my intentions. Why haven't I been in touch? Why am I getting in touch with you now? Now that you have a rich husband.

My beloved Diem, I was only a kid before, distracted by school and play, and did not know a thing about writing letters. I also did not have your address. Aunt Tam never gave me your phone number. I didn't even know you had a phone. All I knew was that you live by the Phu Lam Bridge in Saigon. How can I send a letter to a bridge? (Ha! Ha! Ha!)

But when you sent Aunt Tam your wedding photos, I finally got your address. My first thought was that you are truly a lucky girl! I love you very much. I'm not trying to suck up to you now that you have a rich husband. That's not how I live; I don't chase after money. We have a saying down this way: Don't let your conscience bite you in the ass!

It's true that my family is very poor now. But a torn shirt need not stink. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you have to suck up to anyone.

If only I were as lucky as you, how happy I'd be. I have dreamt of coming to America since I was ten, maybe earlier, but this lifelong dream has brought me nothing but disappointment. Now I don't think about it anymore. My mother used to be good friends with a woman who lives in Miami, a city just outside New York. One time she came by to show us pictures of her son, someone roughly my age. She even let me keep some of these pictures. I gave her some pictures in return. We all thought this woman meant something by it, that she had good intentions, but she never followed up. Why did she tease us like that? I even broke up with my boyfriend to prepare for a new life.

Maybe her son didn't think I was attractive enough. Or maybe I had on the wrong clothes. Us country girls really don't know how to dress. But the truth is, and don't laugh when I tell you this, I didn't think her son was all that good looking either. He was rather a dork. To hell with him!

I only wanted to come to America so I could help my mother out by sending money home each month.

To make a long story short: I'm just not a lucky girl. Not at all like you. But why am I boring you with my sad story? I better shut up before I put you to sleep! Seeing you so happy makes me a little happier.

With much love to you.

Your lost cousin,


Tran Tu Ngoc

I asked my wife about Tran Tu Ngoc and was told that her family deals in electronics. They have a four-story house, and she has vacationed in six different countries.

Speaking of electronics, during my twenty-four years in the U.S., I never owned a television, a CD player, a boombox, or an air conditioner. I never had a checking account. The only car I've ever bought was a used Mustang II, which was stolen from me in less than a year.

Once I went to a supermarket and paid for a packet of Ramen Pride with 28 pennies.

Another time I paid for a can of Spam with 159 pennies.

I waited until there was no one around before I went to the cash register, but as I counted out my pennies for the grinning cashier--as I formed for her 16 mounds of nearly worthless currency, minted merely to decorate the bottoms of shopping-mall fountains--a long line grew behind me.

Once, in the cheapest bar in Philadelphia, I tried to pay for a mug of Rolling Rock with 60 pennies and was told to get the fuck out.

"You have to take this! It's real money."

"Get the fuck out of here!"

This is the implied P.S. to the strange letter: Your husband must have a Vietnamese American friend who might be interested in a country girl like me.



[written in Vietnam in 2001, published in Manoa 14:1, 2002]

Schmoozing in Soho

Ron Hogan has just posted this at Media Bistro:



clockwise from top left: Linh Dinh, Samrat Upadhyay, and Quang Bao


Last week, the Asian American Writers' Workshop presented its 10th annual literary awards to poet Linh Dinh, fiction writer Samrat Upadhyay, and nonfiction writer Amitav Ghosh, which graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang winning the Members' Choice Award. Amanda ReCupido was there to observe the ceremony, and files this report:

Quang Bao, who will soon be stepping down as executive director of the Workshop, opened the ceremony with a reflection on his eight years with the group. 'I have about 60 days left in this position, and yes, to answer all your questions, I'm very okay with it,' he laughed. 'This job has helped me sort out all my issues.' He went on to advertise for his soon-to-be-open position, enticing any takers with a wonderful working loft space and the chance to work with some 'talented, sexy people.' Earlier in the day, Bao had officially debuted in his new role as an advice columnist for Asian Week, to be called 'AskQ.' 'They figured I already had a penchant for telling people what to do,' he remarked.

Upon receiving their awards, the winners each shared a bit about their writing process. Upadhyay dished that he wrote his short story collection in a Starbucks on Indiana University's campus, where he teaches creative writing and literature. Poetry winner Dinh joked that he 'didn't realize what a big deal this award was.' In a more serious tone, he spoke of how he originally felt writing in English wasn't for him. 'I have always tried to escape my American-ness,' he said. 'Writing in English takes a certain recklessness.' [...]

.....................................

It's interesting what Amanda ReCupido picked out from my little speech. I think I actually said, "I've always had ambivalence about my Americanness." In any case, I had forgotten to mention that my father's favorite book is How to Win Friends and Influence People by "Dale CanerJee," in his pronunciation. He has no patience for books without an immediate practical purpose, i.e., to help him make more money. I did say that the first poetry volume I bought was The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, an author I knew nothing about. In retrospect, it's clear that my subconscious was impressed by a non-white face on the cover. If this guy did it, maybe I could do it. This was 1981 in Northern Virginia. Home of the Pentagon and the CIA, it is infested with lawyers, military types and governmental crooks of every kind, truly a spiritual and intellectual wasteland. About the only NoVA spot that still has warmth and character is the old town section of Alexandria. There, you can buy tacky watercolors from geriatric semi-pros at an art center called The Torpedo Factory. The Washington Wizards used to be called The Bullets, remember.

Back to NYC, last week: Shooing a headache, I had two pints at Puckfair, an Irish pub across the street from the award ceremony, then several Singhas at the reception. Still groggy, I talked to Ed Lin and his wife, gave them both a kiss on the cheek, heard Murat Nemet-Nejat say that New York felt like a little village after his most recent trip to Shanghai, they're building so much over there. His carpet business is hurting because the Chinese would sell at zero profit just to keep their people employed. I learnt that Murat's new essay on Jacket begins with an excerpt from a poem of mine. I finally met Bill Marsh and Joe Kuszai of the Factory School, publisher of my winning book, Borderless Bodies. I talked to Monique Truong and her husband, learnt that they had just visited Vietnam, her first trip back since childhood. Her relatives were overbearing. "In-laws suck," I opined to her husband. "It's best to marry an orphan." All three of us gushed about Marfa, Texas, and the whole Big Bend area, where we had been thanks to the Lannan Foundation. We talked about Ciudad Juarez, which brought up Eileen Myles. "Imagine where our country would be had she won the presidency," Monique's husband wondered. I chatted with Lisa Chi Chen, whom I'd never met but who had reviewed my Drunkard Boxing in 1999. Lisa's first book, Mouth, will be released by Kaya this January. I had gladly blurbed it: "This book is wild, playful, gorgeous, weird, often hip. Reading it, I kept thinking, I wish I had come up with this phrase, this line, that entire poem, and that one, and that one, and that one... " I shook hand with Kimiko Hahn, who had sat next to me at a dinner 13 years ago, I doubt if she remembers it, shook hand with Amitav Ghosh, whose interview I'd read in 1988, my only exposure to him. Jayne Werner then filmed me with Sarah Gambito, the presenter of my award. Jayne thought she was photographing. That's why this clip is so goofily post-avant:

Petty Capitalism

A Hanoi store front, 1995. It was a tailor shop that also rented bicycles and accepted assignments to photograph weddings, birthday parties and funerals. In northern Vietnam, the Communists has ruled since 1954, but only in 1989 did they allow small businesses to operate. Either that or starvation, since Communism was bankrupt. Suddenly, every citizen had something to sell, with nearly every house becoming a store, with some displaying just a few packs of cigarettes, cans of sodas and candies. Mini-hotels sprouted in each neighborhood. The multi-nationals and chain stores would only arrive later. Petty capitalism can be beautiful. It's when the mass-produced junks overwhelm the mom and pops that people become enslaved as factory robots and office automatons. Globalism is gangster capitalism, basically, with countries like Vietnam supplying the cheap, ununionized labor to shod you with Air Jordans and put Gap straight leg jeans on your fat ass. This explains why the US has always preferred dictators for its client states, since "stability" is good for business. Back to Hanoi in 1995: After I had a decent dinner at some restaurant, I returned the next day for lunch only to discover a motorbike dealer. No, the eatery had not gone kaput overnight, but it only operated in the evenings, after they had cleared out the Hondas and Suzukis. Speaking of Hondas, that's a Dream in front of the old lady's store. Costing $2,500, it was the hottest thing in 1995. The cash must have been flowing at this three-in-one, although her sewing machine was still foot-pedaled.

The space in front of a Hanoi temple is leased, by the monks, to a video renting business and a toy seller, 1995. Many of these temples were destroyed by the Communists, a Hanoian friend told me.

Beers and Bugs

A roadside restaurant in Sơn La province, 1995. Nguyệt Nhung translates as "Velvet Moon," but it's really just an ordinary female name. Halida, Carlsberg and Tiger beers are all available, with the Singaporean Tiger using a forlorn, fleshy white chick to pitch their pretty good brew. Notice the two basic gas stoves at the lower left. The bug on the sign advertises "cà cuống," a pungent flavor enhancer extracted from the gland of a beetle. Squeezed from an eye dropper, just a tittle will give your dipping sauce that extra kick. Sold in vials, it's actually available at some Asian supermarkets in the USA.

Why are we so beautiful?

More photos I took in Vietnam in 1995:



Three images from Hà Nam, a town 31 miles south of Hanoi. Although this is a proper cemetery, one often finds single graves in the middle of rice paddies, since people would bury their loved ones on the land they already had. The dead sometimes enjoy more solid, better-built housing than their living relatives, as evidenced by the cement graves near the thatch huts, which are rarely seen in the North, by the way, with its colder climate. Standing in front of an earthen grave, the guy in the green shirt was a visitor from Florida. His skin a little lighter, he was also dressed differently from the locals. Vietnamese even believe that native mosquitoes prefer the blood of overseas Vietnamese over homebound plasma.



Top image: A Vietnamese hearse, at a tiny village in Sơn La province, in the northwestern part of Vietnam. Bottom image: Handle of a different hearse, in the same shack.



Sơn La province. The coffin hadn't even been interred. This funeral arrangement was definitely not Vietnamese. Mitch Epstein had hired Mr. Mai, a pedicab driver from Hanoi, to act as a guide for this trip. At a sight like this, Mr. Mai was as clueless as the rest of us, as was the driver, also from Hanoi. A few times when we saw minority people walking along the road, Mr. Mai would lean out the window and ask, "What are we? Why are we so beautiful?" Returning to Hanoi in 1998, I looked for Mr. Mai at the hotel where he used to park his pedicab, but the receptionist told me he had retired. A very gentle and beautiful man, Mr. Mai.







Images 1, 2 and 3: Enclosed graves in Sơn La province. Image 4: A red brick grave. Years later, I'd see many rock and pebble graves in the Big Bend section of Texas. Image 5: Beer bottle offerings, with the deceased's old pair of glasses. Image 6: Mitch Epstein photographing. Vietnamese are short enough, but the minority peoples in the mountains are often even shorter, thanks to their calcium and protein-poor diet.

Give me some

William Keckler has reviewed every poem in the 2004 edition of Best American Poetry, edited by Lyn Hejinian. Year after year, BAP annoys and infuriates many more people than it pleases, but that's to be expected from any anthology with "best" in the title. Here's Keckler on me:

*Linh Dinh, "13." Every time I see this poet, I keep saying "Please show us you deserved that $250,000 Pew Fellowship you got so early in your career." Well, here I have no complaints. It's a strong, smart sort of prose poem that seems to show the influence of master poet John Yau quite a bit. Maybe a little Edson mixed in there too. Some would argue this is really short fiction, but that's the sempiternal debate when you encounter this type of writing. "You cannot understand the story of a youth who falls in love with his own reflection in a spring. Where you are, water does not reflect. Nothing reflects. One's view of onself is made up entirely of other people's verbal slanders." Sounds like the poetry community to a T lol.

I appreciate that William Kecler gave my poem a careful reading, awarding it a "*" even, but the fact about me receiving $250,000 is not correct. Since Ron Silliman made a link to this review, I just wrote Ron:

Hi Ron,

Reviewing Best American Poetry 2004, William Keckler wrote about me, "Every time I see this poet, I keep saying 'Please show us you deserved that $250,000 Pew Fellowship you got so early in your career.'" For the record, a Pew Fellowship is $50,000, payable over two years, not $250,000. The same year I got it, another poet my same age, Lisa Coffman, also won, and I can think of at least two more young poets, Daisy Fried and Major Jackson, who later received the same award. Philadelphians are certainly lucky to have the Pew Fellowships awarded locally, but no poet can ever prove, poem by poem, that he deserves anything. Although grants and awards always overlook too many people, it's better to have them than not. I'm only thankful that Lucille Clifton, Robert Hass and Luis Rodriguez deemed me worthy that one year. It certainly made a huge difference in my life, since I could stop housepainting for over 2 years and concentrate on writing. After I spent my Pew, I went back to housepainting.

Money is always worth contemplating about. I've written about it several times. In Blood and Soap, the same volume where "13" appears, there is a story called "$," which is also the title of a poem in my Jam Alerts. In my new novel, Love Like Hate, slated to come out this Spring, there is also this passage about a rich kid, rock musician:

Living in such an impoverished, degraded country, Quang Trung justified his privileged status by becoming an artist. Buying into this rationalization, he never apologized for his expensive lifestyle. The idea was to spend whatever that was necessary to become a better artist. A weekend junket to Hong Kong was warranted because it stimulated and added to his knowledge of Hong Kong. His father earned money crookedly, sure, but this corruption of the father was serving to elevate the son. An artist cannot waste money simply because money cannot be wasted on an artist. He should be showered with money, as much money as possible, even blood money. Even if he turned out to be an artistic failure, Quang Trung reasoned, he had at least provoked and/or annoyed other artists. Bad art highlights, defines good art. Even the most deluded, incompetent artist has his reason to be. His own reason to be, Quang Trung had come to believe, was to peer under what’s under, to lift the heavy carpet of civilization, at least Vietnamese civilization, grimy as it was with spillage and crimes, and expose many centuries’ worth of frass, secrets and loose change.

Goddess worship in South Philadelphia

All these Goddess images are within a 10-minute walk of my apartment:

The Goddess of Mercy [Phật Bà Quan Âm] at the Bồ Đề Vietnamese Buddhist Temple at 13th and Washington. In Vietnam, many temples are known colloquially as a Mistress's Temple. Entangled with the American and Buddhist flags is one representing the defunct Republic of South Vietnam. Like the Confederate banner, it will not go away.


The Virgin Mary stepping on a serpent at St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi Catholic Church, 714 Montrose St.



Mural on 9th Street, between Washington and Montrose.


Mural on Hall Street, between 9th and 10th.


La Virgen de Guadalupe, also known as La Virgen Morena, the Brown-Skinned Virgin, at the Veracruzana grocery store, 9th and Washington.


The Virgin Mary standing in the shadow of St. Francis, at Paul & Frances Giordano's market, 9th and Washington.



Posters of the Virgin at Milenio Records, on 9th Street near Ellsworth. The people in the second photo were proselytizing, and why not? Let's convert these Mexican Catholics into born-again whatever. When I lived in Italy, Italian Mormons knocked on my door twice, until I told them, "No, grazie," grace to you too, now please go away.





A shrine to the Goddess of Mercy, or Guan Yin, at a private home on 9th near Reed. A soundtrack of some celestial music, at low-volume but audible from the sidewalk, is left on 24/7. The American flag is a cutesy attempt to mitigate against the foreignness of this semi-public display.


The Virgin at Annunciation B.V.M. Catholic Church, 9th and Dickinson.



[This sequence is a photographic equivalence of "Give Me Some," a poem in my collection American Tatts]

Four Philly shots