Haunted.

I had to do a writing exercise for one of my classes. The prompt I went with basically required writing something that is “haunted by cinema”. This phrase “haunted by cinema” sums up an idea that is commonly discussed in writing classes: that movies have had a dramatic effect on the way that narrative writing works. There are things that movies do very well, like convey motion and action and the visual, things which written words do not do as well. Sometimes narrative writing tries to adapt itself to the strictures and functions of film and a lot of people would say that doing so undercuts the things writing can do that movies can’t (interiority, history, examination, etc.). So that is where this phrase “haunted by film” comes from.

The exercise below is not terribly good, but I tried to steer into the skid by invoking the logic of movies while using language that movies normally don’t have access to.

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I Know a Fancy Word!

For one of my classes I had to write an ekphrastic exercise. It is a pretty standard writing prompt. You take as your subject a particular thing (often a piece of art) and you use that as a starting point or as a central theme or as a structuring device. Basically you use the first thing as a jumping off point to do something else. Ekphrastics are pretty common in poetry (“Ode to a Grecian Urn” anybody?).

I’ve had the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch on my mind lately because there is a documentary coming out about him and I keep reminding myself that I need to catch it when it is in town. And because he was a super weird fucking dude. Kind of a mash-up of Dante and Salvador Dali.

So I decided to start with Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights". The results are below.

By no means am I claiming this is any good. It just happens to be a thing I wrote today.

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Earthly Delights.

Earthly Delights

By James Bezerra

Hell as television. This is the thesis.

We find the sins of others titillating, erotic even. We also like it when they’re punished for them.  

I had to fly all the way to Madrid to see this thing.

Let’s look at it:

It is a triptych. A three-part painting on three wooden panels. Left, center, and right. The center panel is twice the width of the first and third panels. The first and second panels are odd green landscapes populated by many long naked figures as pale as ghosts. We take it all in from a distance, as if we are watching from a hot air balloon, something which didn’t exist in in 1490 when Hieronymus Bosch painted these. The first two panels are strange. In the background, something like a submarine rises from the water of a lake. At each corner of the lake sprouts a pink castle shaped like a lung, or a maybe gallbladder.  In the foreground, a nude man and woman sit in a clear bubble that seems to be formed from the mucus membrane of a flower. His hand rests on her abdomen, below her belly button. Her hand sits restlessly on his arm. Elsewhere, a creature like a white giraffe with a bird’s head looks down into another lake, at the center of the lake stands something that is either a spacecraft made of meat, or an armor-plated sea creature. The panels are very busy and border on indescribably weird.

The third panel is different than the first two. It is darker both in color and in tone. There is no blue sky here, no rolling green landscapes. At the black horizon there is smoke lit only by the glow of distant fires. In the center of the third panel is a figure my professor used to call “The Tree Man”. He is only the torso of a man. Oriented away as if doing a push up. His arms plant into the ground like tree trunks. His chest has been cleaved open and inside the dry cavity three red figures sit at a table while a milk maid tried to open a barrel of milk. The Tree Man looks back at us over his shoulder. His expression seems to ask, “Who are these people inside of me?”

Below him are scenes of bizarre and intriguing torture. A naked man flayed on a giant harp. A naked man whose throat is being eaten by cats with lizard tails. A naked woman being grabbed from behind by a demon that might be a tree - it is hard to tell - as it drags her into the darkness.

For most of humanity’s time on this planet, we did not have television.

That is the first most important thing that no one teaches in any history class.

The second most important thing that no one teaches in any history class is that for most of our history, water was a dangerous thing to drink. Beer and ale and mead and wine were much safer. During virtually every moment of our modern history, the key players were drunk. We make so much more sense once you know that.

Prior to the invention of television, we had inferior forms of distraction. Books, but you had to know how to read. Paintings, like this one, but that’s not what this really is. It is called The Garden of Earthly Delights and there is so much to it, some many small vignettes - so many people naked or suffering or prancing or touching - that the eye can’t help but move, to flit from scene to scene, to experience this moment then that one, then that one, then this one. It tricks the brain and conjures the quality of movement and you realize that Bosch invented the first television. And you are here in the Museo del Prado watching it and the only thing on TV is a Christian horror flick.

That churches and theaters have essentially the same floorplan is not a coincidence. Your living room is aimed at your television for the same reason.

We find the sins of others titillating.  

And we like to watch them punished.

In the center of the center panel is a round lake and dozens of very pale, very young women stand knee deep in the water. A human figure as black as night makes them balance apples on their heads.

At the bottom right of the right panel, a pig in a nun’s habit tries to kiss a nude man studying scripture.

At the top of the third panel a set of floating human ears wields a large knife.

On the plane crossing the Atlantic I watched a cop show about a man who murdered female joggers in Central Park. Then I watched a movie about a man who abducted a woman and wore her skin around his house.

In the center of the left panel the pre-incarnate Christ is presenting a kneeling naked Eve to Adam, who lounges leisurely on a hillside.

My hotel TV offers incredibly expensive American porn films that have been dubbed into Spanish. They have English subtitles.

The right side of the third panel depicts a blue bird-like figure swallowing humans whole and then shitting them out through some sort of pale amniotic sac. They pass through the lining of the sac and fall through a hole in the ground. Anguished and barely visible faces gaze up through the hole.

I sit here in this gallery staring at these three panels.

I can’t turn them off.

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Quantity.

Today I inadvertently ran straight into a wall. I misspelled my own name on some paperwork and I accidentally drew a penis on the dry erase board while explaining rhetorical strategies to my students.

Today I also wrote the story below. It is not particularly good or anything, but I had no intention of writing any story today, so at least it exists. I guess. I don’t know why I have been producing lots of these useless little narratives lately. Perhaps it is because the key to being generative is lowering one’s standards!

If you prefer quantity over quality, you sure are in the right place here!

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The Curse.

The Curse
by james bezerra



Only the little girl had survived the curse.


Her father had died decades ago.


Fathers can never be young in the memories of children, but she kept a picture from the expedition on her nightstand and he looked so young there.


She wasn’t a little girl anymore and not all of her moments were entirely lucid anymore. Some nights she would roll onto her side and look at the picture, just study it as if it were something new that had appeared there. A tall and slender man with neat black hair and a thin moustache, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips. His hands gently gripping the small shoulders of the little girl who stood in front of him. Who would take such a little girl to such a desolate end of the earth? Both of them smiling widely out from the picture frame as the excavation site loomed in the background. Big skeletal scaffolds and ropes and the blur shadows of the dark-skinned locals who did the actual excavating.


He was an attractive young man, the little girl thought with her head pressed comfortably into her pillow. He reminds me of someone …


The days were better for her than the nights. Her mind seemed to work more easily in the daylight. Each morning she would brush out her thinning white hair and as she left the bedroom to go down for tea she would say back to the photo, “Good morning Daddy.”


She read The Times of London while Marjorie rolled the tea cart into the sunroom. More dead in the western Somali deserts, but she had to go far into the paper to find that news. It had become her habit as an adult to follow the news from east Africa. She felt some guilt about it all. The curse was not localized there, but those hundreds of natives must have all carried a germ of it after the expedition. When they had all returned to their homes and their families, the curse had gone with them and then it must have spread like a contagious. It must have spread with every hug of homecoming, every kiss on the cheek of a wife, every pat on the head of a child. It had ravaged that whole continent, as far as the little girl was concerned.


It had not stopped there.


Bromwich, her father’s faithful sidekick and the excavation’s foreman, was shot dead in a Cairo street fourteen years after they had opened the tomb, purportedly over a gambling debt, which would not have been out of character for Bromwich.


Jianxing, her father’s lifelong valet, died of typhoid 35 years after they pried the final stone away from the burial chamber. He’d retired back to his ancestral village on the Kowloon Peninsula after the cancer took the little girl’s father.


Jagdish, who worked as their translator and local palm-greaser - and who always offered her sweet dates from a blue metal tin - was killed in the desert by bandits less than a year after he’d followed her father down into that ancient burial chamber.


Even Zisfain fell victim. Always her father’s shadow, he had ostensibly been only their armourer. In actuality, the little girl knew now, he had been their hawkish protector. Zisfain, whose bloody reputation, it was rumored, stretched all the way back to the Second Boer War. Zisfain, whose quiet had always unnerved her, whose eyes had never betrayed a thing, whose thin lips seemed to have no color to them at all. Zisfain who was still only ever spoken of in hushed tones or - preferably - not spoken of at all. Zisfain who, when a native laborer had been half-crushed by a cave-in, killed the man with a single quick blow of a pickax to the forehead. Quite antithetically, Zisfain had been killed in a car accident in Paris. Perhaps even the curse had been a little afraid of him, and so had chosen to ambush him with a lorry at night on the rain-choked Rue de Seine.


She heard Marjorie returning, “More tea mum?”


“Oh no, no thank you Marjorie. I have to attend services this morning, for Colonel Hardaker. Remember to set out my father’s watch. It was a gift from the Colonel. I’d like to give it to the Colonel’s son.”


“Yes mum.”


Hardaker was the last of them to fall to the curse. She’d never believed the adoption stories that her mother told anyone who would listen. Elliot had her father’s soft and expressive brown eyes. Her father had always treated Elliot like a son - which everyone knew that he actually was - but had never, insofar as she knew, acknowledged him as such. She remembered so clearly how big fat Bromwich used to bounce Elliot on a knee while the little boy hooted and laughed and pretended to be riding a horse. “Giddy up! Giddy up!” Mother had been incensed that Father would take such a little boy to the godless edge of Africa.


The curse had finally gotten to him too. Some eighty-five years on from the opening of the tomb. He’d been a fine man and a caring half-brother and he’d distinguished himself in her Majesty’s Royal Marines. He’d lived well. He’d married and had children and those children had their own children. It had been a good and worthy life, but nothing could stop the curse. It laid its dark grip on his heart just four nights ago when Elliot had stopped breathing in his sleep.


Now she was the only one of them left.


The little girl folded The Times and laid it down on the tea tray. She turned her attention to the bright and crisp morning beyond the glass of the sunroom. How will it come for me? she wondered to herself.


She had only ever spoken out loud about the curse once. In her father’s final days, when it was clear to everyone what was happening, when it was obvious that his end was near, she’d sat right there in the sunroom and held her hand out to Elliot, who had only been a Captain at the time. He’d taken her hand in his and given it a little squeeze. “I suppose we all knew this day was coming,” she’d said to him.


“The cigarettes,” Elliot had said, “Always with those hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes.”


The little girl had looked at him intently, “No. I mean the curse, of course.”


Then Elliot had said back, “What curse?”








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Awkward Elevator Cannibalism.

Awkward Elevator Cannibalism

by james bezerra

If there were three of us it would probably be less awkward to discuss who to eat first, if things come to that. But there are only we two.

So awkward.

It is made additionally awkward by the fact that he brought a kit of surgical tools onto the elevator with him when he got on, back when the elevator was operating. So obviously it would be his tools one of us would use to cut up and eat the other. I am so embarrassed that I do not have any dissection tools to offer up for the community good. It had seemed odd at the time, his old rectangular case of dark brown leather. It seems even ... odder now. Too much of a coincidence … He says that whichever one of us wants to go out first can use the chloroform he has with him. He seems very polite that way, and exceptionally well-prepared. Like a Boy Scout, or something.

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I DARE YOU.

Below is a short piece of writing I did for my Creative Non-Fiction class last week. It is not particularly good. It is tricky though because I DARE YOU to read it and not be fooled into thinking it is good. It has all the hallmarks of good writing, however, on the whole, it just is not very good.

Anyway, the writing prompt for this one was difficult because it was vague: write about a trip you took alone when you were young.

This was also tricky because I do not want to write a memoir and have no interest spending my time writing mini-memoirs, but I am a dubious student and I do what I am told and - to be honest - part of the reason I am in school is so that I will be forced to write stuff I wouldn’t normally write.

So then, please read on! (And remember that I warned you that it is not actually very good.)

Oh, and just to prove the veracity of some of the claims made below, here is a picture of me at Pear Lake in Sequoia National Park (See?! I do go on adventures.)

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Some Information Concerning an Endless Series of Improbable Coincidences.

Some Information Concerning an Endless Series of Improbable Coincidences
by james bezerra

Bartleby’s shower door had been installed backward. Not the door, just the glass. Although - come to think of it - yes, it was the entire door, not just the glass. Though it did hinge outward properly, it did not hinge inward into the tall narrow tiled space of the shower itself. So it must have been hung upside down, which is both more and less odd. Less because it is understandable that the door might be hung that way by mistake, since the hinges would still line up. More because it meant the men who hung the door might have had to pause to decide which side went where. One side of the glass shower door was smooth, the other side was grooved. The little grooves were meant to channel the water downward. The men who must have hung the door must have thought that the grooves went on the outside. But why - Bartleby would often wonder while showering before school - would they have thought that? Were their own shower doors hung upside down as well? Had these men grown up trained by life to misunderstand shower doors? And if so, why had no one pointed this out to them when they went into the shower door hanging business? An endless series of improbable coincidences always seems more credible than admitting the possibility of a mistake. Or so thought Bartleby, back then.

The entire house was a bit of a camel - a camel being a horse, assembled by committee - and was littered with similarly Winchester-Mystery-House-ian peculiarities. The hall closet outside of D’s bedroom had a trapdoor. D had shown it to Bartleby once when she was hiding kittens under the house. She had rolled back the irregularly shaped patch of green shag carpet that was left over from the carpeting in the room Bartleby shared with R. Then she’d jammed a flathead under the lip of the door to lever it up. Technically it wasn’t a door because it wasn’t hinged. It was just a square of wood placed over the square hole in the bottom of the closet. The hole existed for easy access to the underside of the house. Though there was seldom snow, winters were cold enough to freeze the water in the pipes. If the water froze the pipes might burst. At the end of fall, shortly after the end of cotton-picking season, Dad would crawl down there through the hole to check the insulation on the pipes. The space was less than two feet high, but it ran the entire underside of the house. Once - some time later - Bartleby had crawled all the way to underneath the kitchen. Along the way he’d found the dry gray carcasses of birds. They were the first dead things he could recall having seen.     

He’d known he was under the kitchen because by the time he was eight he knew the layout of the house, but also because he could hear the long low thruuummmm of the washing machine. The washing machine was the kind that would move around on casters and connected to the kitchen sink with a plastic and rubber hose. The whole kitchen had been like. The stove itself wasn’t crooked, but the floor under it was and Dad had leveled the stove out by shoving a couple of red wooden blocks under the right side. This was a constant childhood annoyance for Bartleby because the red blocks were rectangular and perfect for building the walls of fortresses on the floor. The lack of those red blocks meant he had to build sections of his walls with the smaller blue squares, which were crap by comparison This left dangerous vulnerabilities in his fortresses. Eventually he started building them smaller so that they would be stronger. Bartleby had been small for his age, so he’d had to learn to think laterally so as to outflank his problems.

He had vague memories of Dad sitting there with him in the corner of the kitchen and showing him how to build with blocks. Dad was a tinkerer himself, hence the camel house. His degree was is Ag Science, but he’d been accepted into a graduate program as an architect. That was in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War. The same year Martin Luther King was shot on a balcony, the same year Robert Kennedy was shot in a kitchen, the same year Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, the same year North Korea took the USS Pueblo. It was the year that America inexplicably elected Richard Nixon President, it was the year of My Lai, it was the year Marcel Duchamp died. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, but Dad’s parents said he couldn’t go to grad school, because they needed him back on the farm. So Dad left grad school behind, left the student deferment behind, and moved with his pregnant wife back to the farm. That’s what Dad’s parents had been like.

The tinkering never went away though. He’d built the strangely skeletal, unmistakably ‘70s bookcases in the room Bartleby shared with R. He’d built the fence around the pool out back after designing the pool out back. He’d also built the entire house, though not really. He’d bought the house when it was forty-five minutes north up the 41 freeway. He saw it there on the outskirts of Fresno and bought it and immediately had it cut into pieces and put onto flatbed trucks and hauled out to the farm where it was reassembled, with numerous alterations.

The built-in linen closet just outside of Mom and Dad’s room had a bottom drawer that was filled to spilling with all of the family photos. Just overflowing shoeboxes of them. Nothing in order. Just a jumble of people and ages and places and faces from decades apart would be pressed together in there. Relatives who hadn’t lived long enough to know each other might be staring right into one another in that drawer. Those photos could prove anything. Once when Bartleby had been terrified of the face NASA found on Mars, Mom had taken him to that drawer and rummaged around until she found pictures of her honeymoon. She’s shown him a picture of a ridgeline in Hawaii that looked like a giant man laying down; like a god rendered in volcanic rock. She’d run her finger along the shapes of the man’s face and said, “See? Sometimes things just look like other things.” 

There were pictures in the drawer of the house all cut up into pieces. There were pictures in there of the backyard before there was a house in front of it. Dad had taken Bartleby to the drawer once to prove that the house had not always existed where it was today. It was a monumental and god-sized thought for the little boy Bartleby had been at the time: impermanence.

It is not much of an intellectual leap from impermanence to death and when he was seven Bartleby used to throw up at school and cry all day from the stress of having realized that eventually everyone he knew was going to die. A decade or two later Mom would tell one of Bartleby’s girlfriends that, “he was always the sensitive one.”

Death is complicated in the country. When D went to college Bartleby got her room. He would lie in bed, about twelve years old, and listen to the coyotes yelping in the slough on the other side of the field. They yelped like that after a kill. The braver ones would sometimes creep right up to the house. They’re pernicious little bastards, coyotes. Some of the farm trucks had cheap .22s behind the seats, just for scaring off coyotes. So sometimes death was a spectre. Other times it was commonplace. Sometimes very young Bartleby and older D and much older R would have to wait for the school bus next to the carcase of a downer cow from the dairy. Cow corpses would be scooped up by the tallow works truck as it made its regular route around countryside. Sometimes death was allowed to be a sad thing. Bartleby caught Mom crying once in the little bathroom next to Dad’s office. One or another of the dogs had been hit that morning. The dogs were always getting hit because that is what dogs do in the country.

That little bathroom was only vaguely rectangular, it had been one of Dad’s additions. It was just a small sink, a toilet, and a shower. The shower was lined with blue tile. The shower door had been installed properly. It was a good room for crying; very small, very private and the blue of the tile seemed to deaden the little bit of light that came in through the little window. It would always feel like an afterthought of a room and so it was a good place to feel all the things that didn’t have their own rooms to be felt in.

Dad had been bad at designing bathrooms. Yet it was the simple unfinished feeling of that bathroom that gave it its purpose; it hadn’t been designed as a dank little mausoleum. In his defense, Dad had at some point realized that he was bad at bathrooms. The drafting table in his office always had sketches on it. When he turned the garage into a game room and then built a new garage, it started on that secondhand drafting table. Mostly though the sketches were of places that didn’t exist and wouldn’t ever. Mostly they were of other houses. They were also always the same house. They were houses vaguely like the one they all lived in, but slightly straighter, slightly calmer. Mostly they were trial and error houses. Mostly they were the houses that he was trying to design around their lives. Mostly they were houses that he thought might work a little better. Houses where the dishwasher didn’t have to be rolled across the kitchen, houses where the stove didn’t require even one red block. They were houses that very softly called back to 1968 and to a sense of loss and to a feeling of fear. They were houses maybe he imagined very far away from the farm and from the dairy and from this dusty part of the Valley where the dead get left out next to the road and no one bats an eye.

When Dad wasn’t home - which was often - Bartleby would sit in the chair at that drafting table and he’d study the sketches. He learned to account for the space that a door takes up when it swings open. He figured out that on a sketch it is drawn like a right triangle with a puffed out hypotenuse. In that way Dad kept track of all the things that hadn’t happened yet.


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Autoethnography.

Below is something that we fancy writer types call a “constraint exercise”. Basically some predetermined constraint is placed on a piece of writing and then you write in and around the constraint. I know it sounds arbitrary, but it forces you to think differently than you would normally. It is basically like stretching for your brain.

I wrote this for one of my classes. Here is the constraint:

Find your name in a dictionary--or, if your name is not there, find the place where it would be.  Then, take each noun that follows the place where your name is or would be and use it, in order, to title the sections of a piece of autoethnographic writing. Minimum, 10 sections.

It is harder than it sounds! And my nouns really sucked.

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Constraint.

Bezerra, James

Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1983

Beziers

My very last moment in France would have been that moment just before the tires left the tarmac of the runway at de Gaulle airport. In this I am not alone, as that’s how a lot of people leave France. I always consider us to be on the ground until that last lick of reinforced airline rubber ceases to be earthbound. Technically though being an inch above France is legally the same thing as being in France even if you are airborne. Everybody agrees on that. Interestingly, no one actually agrees on exactly how far up controlled airspace goes. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale says that you’re still in airspace up to 62 miles above sea level. NASA says that if you’ve gone more than fifty miles up you’re an astronaut, congratulations. Despite this confusion, from de Gaulle it is 220 kilometers to the English Channel, 204 to the Belgium border, and 374 to Germany, so if you absolutely, positively must get out of France as quickly as possible, going straight up is still your best bet.

Many people would have liked to have that option on 21 July 1209 when Catholic forces hunting Cathars laid siege to the city during the Albigensian Crusade. Beziers is 783 kilometers from Charles de Gaulle Airport, which did not exist in 1209. The Cathars - who did not call themselves that and who would not know what you were talking about if you said that word to them - are most well-known for being implicated in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as one set of keepers of the secret knowledge of the Holy Grail (which is not actually a thing that ever existed). For $159 you can go to Beziers and take the “In The Footsteps Of The Da Vinci Code” tour. Your guide that day will tell you about the beliefs of the Cathars as the tour bus delivers you to Chateau de Termes where you will have a prepared lunch of duck breast with mixed, fresh vegetables. A vegetarian option will also be available upon request.

Bezique

The logic of card games always tends to escape me. They seem to always have far too many rules which always seem to me to be far too arbitrary. Plus those rules never stick to my brain. If you teach me how to play Bezique tonight, you’ll just have to teach me how to play it again tomorrow night because I’m not going to commit the rules to memory. The only thing I like about card games is figuring out how to cheat at them. This is really the only reason to play a card game. There are few traditions in my family, but each Christmas we all come in from wherever the winds have scattered us and spend Christmas together because we all know it makes my father happy. His own family had all the warmth and love of the cast of King Lear but without Cordelia and with far more Fools. My family all crams around a table after dinner and we play the Mattel card game Uno which has a bunch of rules that I don’t remember right now. By the end of the night most of us are hiding the good cards in our clothes or around the house because having a couple good cards at the ready is a far better way to win than learning the rules.

Bezoar

King Lear is not the worst analogy for understanding my father’s family. My paternal grandfather James - for whom I am named - was first generation American. His father had literally stowed away on a boat to get to America. His family was Portugues by way of the Azore Islands. He descended from what historians seem to enjoy calling “The Secret Jews of the Azores”. Chased off the Iberian Peninsula by the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, they sailed west 850 miles to nine islands of volcanic rock where they took to raising goats and cows, growing grain and pretending to be Catholic. For reasons passing understanding, my grandfather’s father settled in the long, dry San Joaquin Valley of California where he took to raising goats and cows, growing grain and actually being Catholic. Eventually he sent away to the old country for a wife and pretty soon one showed up. As a boy, my grandfather James grew up in the exact same dirt that I did, out there 30 miles northwest of Tulare Lake, which was carved by a glacier during the Holocene epoch and which doesn’t exist anymore because we drained it in 1899 to turn the valley desert into farmland.

My grandfather grew up never far from the smell of cows and my father grew up never far from the smell of the descendents of those same cows. Cows are terribly dumb creatures that will eat anything. Often their stomachs will fill with things they can’t digest, things like hair (trichobezoars) or unripe fruit (diospyrobezoars). Often though they will eat metal. The last thing you want passing around in the digestive tract of a cow are tangles of baling wire. At the right angles a shaft of bailing wire is sharp enough to pierce the linings of a cow’s own organs. A dumb cow can stand there in front of you bleeding internally and you won’t even know it until it lays down and doesn’t get up again. It will just lay there in the middle of the coral and start making a low, deep, death knell moan. If the moan starts to sound wet - a little like a gurgle - the most humane thing to do is shoot it in the head because its lungs are already drowning in blood. To prevent this sort of situation, my father used to toss Alnico magnets into the feed. They are smooth silver magnets about three inches long. Errant metal will stick to them and the resulting pseudobezoar will usually lodge in one of the stomachs, which is better than the other option. My father used to call them “cow magnets” and we always had a few clean ones stuck to the fridge in the kitchen. Because they were fun to play with.        

Bezonian

A bezonian is a scoundrel and a scoundrel is a knave and a knave is a dishonest man who tries to trick you into giving him your money, which brings us back to Dan Brown.

Bezzant

I have no beef with Dan Brown, just a few bones to pick. He rewrites history to tell a story and I am all for that, but he is quite earnest about the truth of the “facts” in his books, which is ironic because he lifted the “facts” of The Da Vinci Code from the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which itself is based on documents that are widely known to be forgeries. The real truth of the Holy Grail is that it was made up by a Medieval French poet called Chretien de Troyes. He was from Troyes France, which is 186 kilometers from Charles de Gaulle Airport and 740 kilometers from Beziers. Chretien de Troyes made his living writing Arthurian legends but pretending he didn’t. It was the custom of Medieval poets to pretend they were just recording a story they’d been told by someone else and therefore they weren’t responsible for the veracity of the tale. In one poem, de Troyes claimed to have been told of the Grail by a minstrel whom he paid a bezzant for a story.     

B-girl

There is an interesting moment in William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition when the protagonist Cayce Pollard (named for the American mystic Edgar Cayce) meets an attractive girl at Camden Market in London. Most nights the girl works at an upscale London bar flirting with rich international businessmen and encouraging them to buy more drinks. The businessmen don’t know that she’s on the clock though. Some nights she gets hired out by marketing firms to flirt with rich international businessmen and say things like, “You’d look so sexy driving the new Porsche Macan Turbo! Have you seen it? It has parallel turbochargers and respective charge air-coolers, so even when it is running hot it is still cool to the touch ...” It is interpersonal advertising and William Gibson didn’t make it up, it’s a real thing.

Bhabha, Homi J.

He is considered the father of India’s nuclear program. He studied with Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who fled Nazisim in 1943 and joined the British nuclear weapons research program codenamed “Tube Alloys” which was later folded into the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Fifty years later, in the summer of 1995 I had been spending a lot of time with my maternal grandmother. She didn’t bake but always kept packages of cookies in the oven. She would sit and play solitaire by herself and watch Headline News because Headline News was still a fascinating new development in television back in 1995. We were watching a short report about the fifty year anniversary of the bombings and the Headline News anchor was talking to a Japanese doctor who was saying that the children of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not have abnormally high instances of birth defects or Cancer. My grandmother - who had worked as a telephone operator while her husband was working the boilers of US Navy destroyers in the Pacific Theater in August of 1945 - stopped playing Solitaire and she said that she was glad that they didn’t have birth defects or Cancer. She said that she would have felt bad if they had.    

Bhadgaon

If you are standing in Charles de Gaulle Airport you will not be able to book a flight to Bhadgaon Nepal. Because no one calls it Bhadgaon anymore. Today it is called Bhaktapur. If you would like to go there, Turkish Airways can get you from Paris to Tribhuvan International Airport in 11 hours and 35 minutes, give or take. It will take about another fifteen minutes to get from the airport to Durbar Square in the heart of Bhaktapur. Lonely Planet is a great place to learn about the places that I probably won’t ever see. I visit their website quite a lot because the passport that got me onto and off of the ground at de Gaulle  is going to expire in 2016 and too many of its light blue pages are still blank. I keep a little box by my bed where at night I keep the things I keep in my pockets during the day: keys, wallet, small notebook, pen, phone. I keep my passport in that box too. I see it every day and it reminds me every day that the world is too big and too complicated and too fascinating to sit on the couch and eat tortilla chips. It reminds me that my great grandfather hid in a barrel - or something - in order to cross the Atlantic Ocean. It reminds me that a few hundred years ago a guy with some of my blood in him sat on a rocky crag on the island on Sao Miguel and watched his goats and looked at the sea to the east and Europe beyond and wondered if people were going to come kill him because of the things he believed. It reminds me to get out more.

Bhagavad-Gita

A few years ago I was on campus and a young white guy with dirty blond dreads wanted to tell me about Hinduism. It was totally insensitive of me, but he somehow reminded me of the white Hare Krishnas in the 1980 Zucker Brothers movie Airplane! and so I stopped to talk to him because I thought it would be funny. There is a very fine line between young American men who have truly found deep spiritual meaning in Eastern religions and those who are just Orientalizing so much that they just think they have. We talked for a few minutes and then I told him I had to go, because I wanted to go. He offered me a fat orange copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, which I took because why the hell not? And then he told me that it cost $10. So I gave it back to him and thus, have remained unenlightened.   

Bhajan

There exists a Youtube channel called “MIX - Super Hit Hindi Bhajans”. I want so very much to make fun of this, but I can’t quite stick the landing. Where is the joke in this? A bhajan is a kind of Hindu devotional song and I think having a Youtube channel of devotional Hindu songs is funny the same way that Baptist churches in strip malls are funny, or the way that it’s funny that the Presbyterian Korean church on Devonshire clearly used to be a Circuit City. I want to say something here about what happens when spirituality and technology collide like when they tested the first atom bomb in the desert of New Mexico and J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  I want to say something about what happens when the personal and the commercial collide because an attractive girl is whispering into your ear in a dark London bar. Something about when the eternal and the impermanent collide, like nations pretending that they could ever possibly own the sky. I want to say something here about how sometimes the true and the false collide and in doing so make a story; that’s how Dan Brown does it after all. I want to say something here about how sad it is that even when you are only an inch off the the French tarmac, you’re already on your way home and your passport is an inch closer to expiring.


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