The Oulipos Made Me Do It.

I guess I should have warned you previously, but I am taking two (very) different writing classes this semester and a lot of the exercises I end up writing find their way onto this here blog. Well below is yet another of the weekly “constraint” exercises I’m doing for one of the classes. This is in the tradition of the Oulipo writers of the 1960s who - because they were French and hated themselves, or something - enjoyed imposing artificial constraints on their own writing. There are legitimately good things to be said about why these sorts of exercises are good for writers, though I’m still not entirely convinced that they are good for the writing.

Either way, here is the artificial constraint I was operating under this week:

Make a diagram of the house you grew up in and assign each of the rooms a letter.  Make little pieces of paper with each of the letters printed on them.  Make 10 each of these little pieces of paper.  Scramble them up and draw 25 of them. Then write a story moving from room to room in that order.

So that sounds … complicated, right? Well it was, but it also turned out to be kind of fun. I bent the rules some because this was supposed to be autobiographical and what I wrote is only mostly autobiographical-ish.

Between this autobiographical stuff and my creative non-fiction class, I am seriously getting annoyed with having to write about me. I have no interest in writing about me. What I like to do is this: I like to just make people up and then make them say and do stuff that I think is interesting. So yes, that is entirely about me, but in that situation I’m not writing about me. All I am doing there is bending a tiny fictional universe to my will.

If none of that makes any sense it is because I am very tired right now because I had a long day and I also spent almost an hour on the treadmill too! But I think I did have a point in saying all that stuff about writing … what was it? … thinkthinkthink … oh yeah!

Please remember that the piece of writing below is only autobiographical-ish. It is more true to tone than to fact. I would NOT submit this to my non-fiction class because I blurred things a little bit too much and borrowed a few too many details from people who are not me. Also, because of the constraints of the exercise I took a tact that is more atmospheric and interstitial than I normally would have otherwise. (BTW, I caually use the word ‘interstitial’ now, apparently. Thanks grad school.)

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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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Stephen Fry is a Badass.

Stephen Fry talks about language.

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Truthiness.

So remember how I told you that I would be taking a creative non-fiction class? Well it has begun.

And remember how I was saying that I didn’t want to read the memoirs of grad students? Well the class met for the first time last week and it took 78 minutes for someone to say that she was already working on her memoirs anyway. That was the first night of class and on the first night of a class you spend the first hour making sure everybody is in the proper room and then going over the syllabus, so - in my adjusted reality - it really only took 18 minutes for her to say it. So there’s that.

Our first writing assignment was a “personal narrative” which is basically just a short memoir-ish piece. The prompt was: write about a time when you were young and had to make a decision.

That’s pretty broad. Below is what I wrote. I believe that all of this is true. Or at least pretty true in so far as I can remember. But my memory is pretty bad. You know what? Let’s not use the word ‘truth’, let’s use the word ‘truthiness’. I’m way more comfortable with that.

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The Autodidact.

The Autodidact

by james bezerra

I used to press my ear to the telephone pole out in front of the house and listen to the hum inside the wood. Sometimes I thought that I could hear – hidden down there below the hum – the voices that were sizzling by on the wires up above.  

The wood of the pole was dark with age and sometimes a little splintery, so I had to place my ear carefully and gently if I wanted to listen in.

I wasn’t six years old though.

It would be a perfectly charming story had I been six years old. I was actually twenty-four and the telephone pole was planted in the concrete of the sidewalk in front of the weird little duplex where six of us were living in two small bedrooms and a tiny living room. People still refer to it as “the Half House” because of the way it had been poorly and illogically split straight down the middle to make two separate apartments. It was on a short, dark street in the shadow of the second largest mozzarella cheese production plant on the planet. The smell was terrible. On 105 degree summer days - with just a swamp cooler - that curd smell permeated everything: pillows and carpet and clothes and skin. We smoked in that house. Everyone was a smoker back then. It was a very small town and on a late Saturday night – or more likely, an early Sunday morning – I’d often stagger somewhat drunkenly out of the smoke and the noise of the Half House and stand on the sidewalk and lean against the telephone pole and press my ear against it and I would listen to the voices in there. Sometimes those voices made me very sad. Sometimes they weren’t even voices – and they never actually sounded like voices anyway – sometimes I thought that they were all the thoughts I’d never thought. Sometimes I thought they were just ghosts of all the stories I hadn’t written, or the soft and distant echoes of the life I hadn’t lived. Sometimes those voices bothered me as they shot by overhead. I could look up and imagine them zipping past like flashes of light along the wires. I imagined them passing me by, because I felt like everything was passing me by. I can see me there, drunk and smelling of smoke and cheese and looking up at those wires. I was fat back then, with big round glasses and a full beard and ratty curly hair. I looked a bit like a woodchuck. And so now when I close my eyes I look down and see that big round face looking up with big blurry eyes under big circles of curved eye glass and imagining that he can see up in the air a life he had chosen not to have. That fat little roly-poly woodchuck man was wondering if he’d made a mistake.

The thing about decision-making is that it always feels like closing a door. Because that’s exactly what it is. Sometimes we hear noises from the other side of those closed doors. Quite often it sounds like the lives happening on the other side of those doors are a lot more exciting.

I didn’t go to college after high school. It was both a conscious decision and also an oddly zen-like path-of-least-resistance kind of anti-decision; like water taking the shape of the bowl it is poured into, I had glided into my own life because it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I’d been one of those high school kids who was always busy; up at 5am to make it to rehearsal by 6am. Then a full day and then editing the school newspaper until 5 or 6 at night. Before I’d graduated I was already taking junior college classes, I’d won a playwriting award six hours away in San Diego, and I was already writing for the local newspaper. I was the kid who should have gone to college. I even applied to one – I didn’t tell anyone about it – because it was the only college I’d ever heard of that had a writing program. I didn’t know then that virtually every college has a writing program. I thought that there was only the one.  I didn’t know there was such a thing as an MFAs program and I didn’t know that students who were poor could take out Federal Education loans to go to college. I had met with a high school guidance counselor precisely once to talk about college and she showed me how the University of California at Santa Cruz website had a live feed from a webcam in the middle of campus. That’s all we had talked about in her cramped little office. I cannot emphasize it enough: I am from a very small town.

Around that same time, I was working on my car in the street in front of the Half House.  The battery had gone bad and I couldn’t afford to have it towed and I couldn’t afford to pay someone to replace it. I could just about afford a new battery. The car was a gray Ford Escort that didn’t look like anything. It looked like a car. It was shaped like a car. When children draw the shape of a car they draw a horizontal oblong with a bulge in the middle where the people sit, that was my car. And I couldn’t get the last bolt off of the casing that held the battery in place. It was down below a thick black pipe and I couldn’t get the ratchet down there.  I’d nearly stripped the bolt head though because I’d tried to ratchet it out at an angle, which hadn’t worked even a little.

I was hot and sweaty and fat and frustrated and broke and all of that pissed me off.  I sat down on the curb with my friend Luke. He was a burly giant of a guy. His baggy carpenter’s jeans were cut open on the right leg because he had a long metal bar running the length of his shin. It went down through the skin and was bolted to the bone. He’d given himself a compound fracture by tumbling backward off a second floor balcony. We all drank too much back then, but Luke was full blown and. He would show up with a twenty-four pack of Keystone and drink all of it.

I told him that everything in life seemed bad right then, “Life fucking sucks man,” I said.

I told him that sometimes I thought I should have gone to college. If I’d gone to college I wouldn’t be sitting here in a shit town, working a shit call-center job, and sweating my ass off trying to get a shit battery out of my shit car.

“Fuck college man,” he said, “you’re a smart guy. You don’t need college.”

Life is a feedback loop. You get out what you put in.

I don’t regret the decision not to go to college. After all, I was going to community college, mostly just to placate my parents. I had evolved into a terrible student by then. I had realized it didn’t matter. I’d started taking fewer classes, I’d started trying less. Eventually I wasn’t taking any classes or trying at all. I didn’t see what I was getting out of it, so I didn’t get anything out of it. Life is a loop.

I was always writing though. That’s why I don’t regret the decision. I found myself in the writing. I found who I was in the writing. I found who I am in the writing. I found my own voice and it wouldn’t have been the same if I’d found it in a workshop, it wouldn’t be the same if had found it in a theory class. I’m a better writer because writing was harder for me because I was doing it in the wild. I was doing it completely alone. It was never homework for me, it was never assigned. I wrote because I needed to.

        That decision not to go did not make life easy, but it has made it interesting.

        The thing is, when I was 18 I was in love. She was a year older and she hadn’t gone to college. She’d passed on a slot at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. She’d passed on it because she hadn’t wanted to go. She passed on it because she was a Navy brat and she didn’t want that life for herself, even if it was as an officer. But she also passed on it for me. I think. We never exactly talked about it. And we never exactly talked about my not going. We started taking community college classes together. She got a good job, or what passed for one in a small town. I think that we were happy there – for a while – in that beat up little smoke-filled half of a house.

        But still, there were the nights when I would stand outside. When I would put my ear against that pole and I would hear the distant sounds of a life I didn’t have.

        By the time I was twenty-seven I’d lost the weight. I’d finally enrolled in a real university and I learned the word autodidact. I am an autodidact, but I had to go to college to learn the word. I’ve since enrolled in a Masters program so that I can learn more words.

        The one thing the Half House had going for it was that it had a giant backyard. The grass was dead, but we made the most of it. One summer evening the power went out in town. Someone showed up with an inflatable kiddie pool (people were always just showing up with things, I ran that kind of house). We filled the pool and while no one else in town had power, we still had an old radio that ran on batteries. Luke duct tapped its broken antenna and six or seven of us sat around in the yard drinking beer and alternating dips in the kiddie pool. That had been a good day. I wouldn’t give that memory up. That memory crystallizes that moment and that time and that place and those people and it wouldn’t exist if I had lived my life in a straight line.

        Not all mistakes are mistakes; some of them just look like mistakes on paper.

        There are a million beautiful and awful and sweet and strange experiences and moments of actual life I wouldn’t have had if I had made all of the right decisions. Over the course of this life I know that I’ve become an odd little man, uneven and restless and far too old for a grad program, but sometimes I walk outside of my apartment at the corner of Zelzah Avenue and Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley and I put my hand on the telephone pole there by the mouth of the alley behind the 7-11, and I think about that poor little fat woodchuck kid back home and I want to whisper to him that things will work out. They may not work out for the best, and they certainly won’t work out the way he expects. But they will work out nonetheless.

        Sometimes I like to imagine that he can hear me.

       

       

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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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