“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

I think I went fast to the end of my story, because it was so short. Trembling a little and nervous, or probably terrified. But all the amazing people were there. Having heard the others read made me feel better. And Math, she was so calm and so expressive and lively when she hosted and read Dennis’ letter she made even me calm and collected.
Everyone was great, and I envied those who moved to laughs the listeners, and everyone else, each one of them being younger than me, closer than me, more connected than me to everything around, the city, the language, the nation, the places.
I came all the way from Milan, Italy and suddenly I wasn’t even supposed to be reading anymore and nobody had told me but in the end I read anyway, and I was happy. And all the time I was learning again how everything about this vague dream, this wanting to write in english, wanting to do without my roots and my falling nation is a folly, A FOLLY, but still I can only follow that quivering thing deep in my throat, can’t help it, there are still living narrow dreams there, irrational, unmotivated, unplanned, useless, that keep me going and alive.

I rewrote the story for the event just two days before the reading, in bits from different cyber cafes and internet points in the city, foreign computers, and of that rewriting I am happy too. Because of different accidents the story that originally got on the anthology was so wrong, and I always hated it and I still hate it, there in the middle of so many great pages. But just to change it into something else, something I now feel for and can defend, it has been emotionally important, even if it is not important at all.

I read, stumbled on the words a few times, probably pulled a ridiculous accent, and the girl behind the counter started to loudly run the coffee machine as I went on, and in the background the traffic on Allen street steadfastly kept running. But I was focused on the page and just trying not to screw up my pronunciation too much like Dita recommended me, and I felt fine. And the story was short anyway. The bookshop small and cozy, well illuminated. Afterwards I signed copies of the anthology and didn’t know what to write and I only wrote stupid things and I rather should have just signed the copies, I was so unprepared at the idea and I always hated the thing where the writers sign books and instead, I suddenly realized how these things can be important, and pleasurable, because they make people closer, in indirect ways I am only starting to understand now. I was impermeable to that in Italy. Barely disturbed by such scenes. And it’s like how it is important to remember names when you shake hands with people, and instead I always forget them. Although I never forget the faces, and probably too many other details I keep with me forever, possibly without a reason or a use.

Later the bar was dark and lovely and only my inability to be easygoing and easy at making friends and be interesting or carefree or whatever prevented me to let myself go and fully enjoy all the moments. But none of these anguishes is much important.

This morning right after dawn I descended seventh avenue from uptown, dragging my luggage and homelessness back to the hostel that kicked me out for two days. Black people and Latinos where everywhere around the opening places, off and on trucks, pushing carts, delivering, arranging, preparing, cleaning and setting up the city for the later people, some of them look so tired or sad in the gray early saturday, others all busy in the frenzy anticipation of the rush hours to come.
Few mellow groups, each with its own leader seemed to be coming back from parties, famous actress passed me by too in the very changing light above the city, as the shadows thickened at the base of the tall buildings, and only occasionally the cold wind came pushing from the side, channeled through into the streets.

The coffee places were still closed, my knee still hurting, still limping all the way, but I wanted to walk anyway, lugging the sad wheeled case about to fall apart or explode.
All the emotions at this point were drained out. All my feelings, back to a familiar state of disillusioned hope where nothing is clear except solitude, of myself and so many, the necessary condition to be dragged across the puddles like a broken case on wheels.

A different version of this quite short story has been published on the amazing anthology Userlands edited by Dennis Cooper for Akaschic books, NYC.
Honestly I always hated that version of my story, it came out all wrong because of a series of stupid personal reasons that got in the way, and I always regretted it especially because of all the other amazing Userlands authors that surround it with great pages.
Anyway. What follows here is a version of it I might consider now decent and final, and that I read with defective pronunciation at Bluestockings, NYC on March 22nd 2007.
Some of you reading this might be reminded of an old post on this blog which in fact was the original inspiration both for the first and second version of this very piece.

*

you weird people by ico

I know that the smile of the grocery girl is because of my mother, her crazy looks, untidy hair, her odd clothes, the strange hat, the jabbering. You all must be weird people, says her smile, putting those useless animals before yourself.
I cave in with my own phony smile. Like I’m not like my mother. Not to be confused with her. Not of the weird people.

Outside the grocery store dogs and people move about in the brown shadows of the trees, and the metal bodies of the parked cars shine dryly, the edges white-hot under the sun.
We move out into the light and I reach for the trunk, squinting, crate of carrots in my hands, warning the old man that the car is a mess, ’cause that’s the way my mother keeps it. He says okay and starts to fight his way into it, moving empty bottles around, dried sheets of old newspapers torn to pieces, the snow chain case that will tumble against his feet every time we accelerate, various slabs of dried mud spatter all around the inside, including the seats. As we slam the doors the overloaded ashtray exhales out gray and white particles that flit between our legs.
Dogs share the car, I apologize to him. Would he appreciate it if I started blaming my mother for everything? I wonder. I am willing to. He repeats three times, No problem.

In two minutes we are at the pharmacy, a quiet door gaping out on a narrow lane abandoned in the shade. At the opposite end of the alley the village suddenly disappears, and the curvy hills shine in the distant land before the Italian sea.
The old man and I part ways with a wave and a grumble, but then he calls me from the other side of the road, and he says, the grocery girl, she’s my daughter. She’s a good girl.
In my paranoia I figure he has a scheme that I should marry her.
The round face of the pharmacist takes its time to scan mine. There’s a priest-like morbid aura about it, eyes of repressed sexual desire in the gloomy colors of the store as he hands me back the prescription.

Later I stop by an abandoned lot along the road across the olive groves in the countryside. The landscape is marked by scattered trulli and modern cement angular houses half hidden by the green.
The cats flock over meowing and rubbing themselves against the edges of the low stone walls as I get out of the car. I have detailed instructions about where the cat food has to be dropped. The small bowls and the old aluminum pans, one for each cat, are important. The pecking order is important. My mother is crazy.

Back on the shattered road I think of her, and how it would be if she died. Because she’s at the hospital I am entitled to this thought. As the road winds down the hill bordered by more stone walls, further into the land I am not familiar with, I imagine a funeral, words of condolence and affection exchanged, how I wouldn’t cry, unable to, maybe later on, and how unsatisfactory the long awaited sense of liberation would be, secret joy for a new life that in the end doesn’t come about.
I wonder if the disappointment produced by my imagination makes me a better person or is it that I am just unprepared, that there is no way to be prepared but to imagine, and be disappointed.

As the car jolts against the roots cracking the driveway, the eight dogs rush out of the house barking and howling against the fence to cheer for my approaching smell and figure. The wind is ruffling their fur, scraps of toys and rags are scattered in the yard, their animation is irrational and sweet. All my perceptions are now flattened out to a uniform complacent, absurd lack of criticism, as I mentally go through the returning-home procedures. One bone-shaped biscuit for each of the dogs, in a rigorous hierarchical order. Two biscuits for the biggest one. The oldest barks fiercely and runs across my legs. He knows he comes first.

Hours have gone by when I’m finally done feeding the dogs and the horse and cleaning the stable.
At this point outside it is quiet as inside, only residual puffs of wind are stirring the foliage and shaking the hanging clothes. At moments, there’s the crunching noise of the horse chewing on the last bits of carrot scattered in the hay. That’s when I feel how after all my mother was right, to come to live this far from everything, here where communities are remote lights out in the dark and being this far and invisible is the safest thing you’re left with at the end of the day.

But then some of the dogs are barking from very far out in the field, possibly at a fox. They’re too far to be called back. I mentally pray not to find the fox slaughtered in the field the next day, not to have to get the shovel and the black bag and be seen from across the field again, gleaning the fox remains strewn about the meadow, carrying the rolled up formless bag to the dumpster down the hill, carelessly tossing it as if it were no corpse. But the dogs continue to bark, excitedly.

little updates are about to be swiped in like a metrocard. Patience. I’m in the city, still.

One thing about beauty is that it can’t be planned. Or at least it shouldn’t. What I believe happens, is that beauty comes about despite planning, and more often than not, beauty is in the unplanned accumulation of elements that are not meant to be essentially beautiful as much as they are meant to be useful and used. So is for elegance, and for writing (words about things and not the other way around), and so is for architecture.
Venice is the perfect example, the product of a sort of irrational individualistic development, never planned, where structures like the houses for the Arsenale’s workers, the churches of the monastic orders, the street markets, the palaces for the aristocracy all stand next to each other, in a sort of awesome conversation that nobody saw coming or wanted to happen in the first place.
And so obviously is for New York, whose beauty is really in the palimpsest of growing and decaying and renovating and reusing and reinventing that made the colors and the solid forms of this incredible urban island. And I know that every word about the city is trivial and has been said already so many times.

I am into its changing light today, the confused feelings of a guilty morning in my steps getting back to the hostel, thoughts of wrong doing and unrelated worries, the day of the reading closer and closer, not prepared, not deserving, not prepared. I am amazed by all the roofs and the tanks against the moving clouds, and by the faces and bodies of the people walking with me. We drive the trucks and we wash the windows and we sing into the iPods and we bite the bagels and we drag the dogs away and we swear, we are humanity, and we don’t have a clue, that’s what we are. Beauty isn’t there for a reason and into this unasked answer is all I ever wanted anyway.

I wake up before 7 A.M. because of the party of young dutch students that took over the hostel yesterday. Overgrown by cattle hormones, absurdly tall and loud even when they barely move around on the old wooden floor, dutch guys and girls seem to be in every room of the hostel and in every bathroom and under every shower and into every room at this floor and at every floor of this part of the hostel. The hostel extends itself over several street numbers so I don’t know if they took over there too. Anyway the turn-over for the bathrooms and showers has started slowly, and noisily, and as I lay in bed in my room I try to identify the moment when the bathroom on my floor will finally be accessible. I curse the dutch people of the world and try to sleep or at least masturbate but without success, ’cause they have now decided to hang just outside my door waiting for their turn, horsing around, calling down from the top of the stairwell, talking and laughing.

It’s not before 9 that I can eventually use the bathroom and take a shower. By then the dutch world is gathering its people across the street, and is being noisy down there in the sun. From the window of my room they now look less noisy and less tall and are instead quite good looking, with their blond and red heads glowing under the bright sun light scouring 20th street out of the frozen snow.

I love this Hostel. I have my own double bed room, all run-down and sloppy, luckily no television. There are common bathrooms all right, but it’s not a problem for me. Well, as long as the dutch leave something for me.
There is no curfew, it is all very clean, and it’s in Chelsea, Manhattan. It is ridiculously pricey, but only compared to similar places outside New York or in Europe. It is actually cheap for the standards here.

From the Hostel I walk down towards the village, have breakfast somewhere (I wish there were alternatives to the fucking starbucks of my boots) and then I probably head towards a cyber cafe’ in Bleecker street that seem to be run by a very nice middle-aged chinese lady who doesn’t speak english except for two essential words, and who sweeps and mops the floor under your feet while you’re there writing.

Afterwards it’s the city, it’s my being useless into its belly, it’s bars I never dared to enter (thanks, Dita) and my feelings come and go, and at moments all the beauty of it, all its lively magic, all the moving accumulation of sorrows in the shaded maze of the subways hits me with a smell and a push, like the banal solitudes, the young couples kissing on the trains at night, the displays of fish and algae in Chinatown, the fabric stores I enter imagining what Libi would think or say of the colors and the materials, where the old jewish store manager tells me, “if you think you can pick the fabrics for your friend you must think you’re very good.”
And he’s right, I mean. I could never pick the right fabrics.

in picture, above: you know what. It has nothing to do with the hostel though.

Folks shovel the snow away from the parts of the sidewalks in front of their building or stores. At the corners of the streets the snow accumulates creating valleys of brownish waters between white mountains. People jump around to avoid them. Leashed dogs skid and never lose balance. In Chelsea, Avenue 6 there’s almost nobody around, the small Starbucks almost empty and silent. Later a little more to the south east, there are the banners, and I guess I’m wearing my green sweater for st. Patrick today, although the only Irish I’m familiar with is James Joyce and it’s not like he wanted to be considered Irish anyway.

I am so not prepared for this kind of weather. My shoes are not water proof, instead they are soak wet, my burgundy jacket not even seriously protective. When the wind blows I lose contact with my ears.
But I love the steam coming out of my mouth, the cold in my hair still wet from the shower. I know all the basic sensations, walking on the hard snow, the too warm insides, the smell of the subway, the long coffees, the endless coffees sipped in the soft music of the Starbucks, with all those silly misused italian words.

Last time I was in the city it was easy to be under the illusion of being a part of it, of being just another citizen, in spite of not having anything to do there. It’s odd, or maybe not, how this time it’s not so easy.
My obvious not belonging here. My not being one of them. My not having the financial and emotional means to be one of them. See, there, I wish I was one of those folks shoveling the snow from the sidewalks, scattering grains of salt on the frozen parts, just to know how it feels. I’d be singing some song and someone would smile at me as they walk by.

So I bring with me my not having a purpose. Hands in pockets, a silly smile on my face, always there, telling what I am, a spectator of the most trivial things, and all the other things, unreal only because I am unreal.

Once again I think of that phrase from the Nicolas Born’s novel I am reading, The Deception . Well, I forgot it in Milan, together with the stupid cable to download the pictures from my camera (shit), so I quote from memory: Ends and Goals are never so important as Means.
Whether you’re waging a war, or helping someone, or just going on with your life. What really count are the ways you’re adopting. The real truth is that the machiavellan logic should always be reversed. So it doesn’t count why you are at war or at peace or at love, it counts how you behave to get there. And if your ways are sick, or rotten or phony, then even your best aims aren’t any good, and what you’re doing isn’t any good.
I don’t think this forgives me for feeling so aimless, still aimless, after all these years. Does it? Even ashamed of having come all this way to feel like this, on my first day, and also, not really caring: and still feeling good and not caring. I wonder what’s wrong with me.

— In picture, above: saturday morning, “except sun”

The Pope will be infallible like the Pope.
The novel will be fantastic like a novel.
The movie will be unreal like a movie.
The needle in the haysack will be hard to find like a needle in the haysack.

— Peter Handke, Prophecy

While I am on this trip, it’s pretty improbable that I will write about Italy, just in case you wonder. So for new readers, this blog’s title will sound a little off topic the next months. It is not a problem because I am almost never in topic.
During this stage updates may or may not be infrequent, but there is always going to be an update at some point. And if you get tired of coming around to check, just subscribe to the feeds, they’re useful.

Biba goes across a corner of lawn following something. It’s the noise of the dry leaves below the frayed wall, and the blur of white flowers against the green lawn. We chat as we follow her, me and Gisa, until Biba turns around to check on our presence, smiles and goes a bit further. Gisa wants to steer her away from things dirty and rotten, but Biba knows better. There are things she sees in the way little stones are trapped by the brown dirt, and the way flowers crumble between her fingers when she pulls them hard from the ground. There’s a mystery in the way green musk layering the bark of the trees pulverizes under her thumb, and the dogs behind the fence are thrilling as they come closer to smell and lick her fingers and she backs away, excited. They are very big and strangely attractive and incontrollable.
There are gray hard stairs in a corner of the garden, that Biba wants to climb up and down over and over again, it might be for the satisfaction of doing it or for the way the landscape changes as she moves. She doesn’t really know. They’re very high steps for her, she’s is so small, it’s an adventure. Gisa wants to hold her hand but she doesn’t. So she stumbles and hits her forehead against the base of the railing but just like her father, she almost never feels physical pain. The bump doesn’t bother her. Cries a little for the shock, gets back on her feet and up and down the stairs again. We follow. Talking out our fears and hopes and the distance in the sunny milanese spring day.

The first post I ever wrote on this blog was about me trying to go across the city to cut my hair. The theme is interesting, isn’t it. This time I’m going to this place on the other side of the avenue, which is just a regular hair cutter like thousands in the city. I don’t go very often for hair cutters. In the falling nation, hair cutting is the sole branch of commercial business to never go under some crisis, and this tells a lot about the shallowness and manipulability of italians.

It’s funny how there usually are one or more ladies having their hair done while I’m there, and I think that never once in my uneven career as a hair cutting customer I was able to witness one of those ladies to actually have her hair done, pay and leave. I always have my hair done while they’re there, and I leave before anyone of them ever leaves. They sit there with tinfoil hats and gossip magazines, are moved from area to area, are washed and blew dried and they always have different persons attending to them and there’s always another thing they have to undergo after the last one and they never leave.
I look at them sideways in the mirror and they seem victims to me. Probably I transfer on them my own victimized feeling, but they usually they have such morose and alert faces, hate to be looked at while they’re there, browse magazines with aggressive turning of pages, and they never seem to be wanting to get out of it. No nostalgia for the outsides. They always give me this mixed feeling of sympathy and actual sadness, trapped as they are for so long under the hands of hair cutters pushing on them new styles and ridiculously overpriced products, and they’re bored to death, besotted. And they also give me a bitter feeling of distaste and hate for their laziness and passivity and active participation in the general lie, that so effectual negation of death and crappiness of things, and for the selfishness of all those caring energies devoted to them. Makes me want to slap them in the face, slap them again. Drag them out to the sidewalk, kick them in the ass.

The radio at the hair cutting place is often as loud and silly as a silly radio can be, and conversations beneath it, outside of ‘how do you want your hair done’ rarely mean anything. Or they never mean anything. But they have to be yelled out anyway to win over the loud voices of the radio and the blow driers. I look out the window like a child kept in the house for his homework on a sunny day, and all around is the chaotic horn of stupidity having its moment, and having its moment again.

At one point today the girl wanted to ask to the young foreign guy if what she was doing with the razor was hurting him, but she couldn’t speak english, so she turned to her colleagues. Nobody could help her. Nobody could speak english. My hair cutter guy said he could manage it if it was french. But nobody knew how or wanted to ask the guy if he spoke french anyway. Others said, ‘I can manage to speak english but I don’t know how to ask that question’. Soon the issue, probably just for the fun of it resembling life, was extended to all the customers in the room, ladies glued to their chairs and hanging to their gossip magazines included. No one knew how to ask that question, so I finally came out of my cocoon and asked it myself. Oh, it was fun. Following my exploit I joined for a while the animated nonsensical exchange of words going about as a disordered wave in the room and it’s true, I felt less lonely and trapped and desperate and old.
And it was ludicrously tragic too. I mean, at least fifteen italian random people in a room, and only one of them is able to ask does it hurt? in english? Pretty amazing. To his credit, the store manager tried a “is bua?” a couple of times, seriously convinced that “bua”, the slang word used in italian with children for pain, could be some international kind of word. It really was momentous the look on the face of the foreign guy when I asked him the dreaded question. “Does it hurt when she does that with the razor?” The guy hastily denied he was caused any sort of pain. By that time he probably was expecting some serious italian question and was getting worried. Afterwards was only incredulous.

At the end of it, or at the beginning sometimes, hair cutters want my name. I don’t give my name to stores. I never do. I think nobody should, but it’s too late for that. Hair cutters pester you for your name more than anyone else, because they’re the more powerful and they know it. But I am not caving in. “If you want, I’ll give you a fake name” I say to the store manager. He looks at me uneasy. Repeatedly he points his finger to the computer monitor, mutters, “I have to put your name into this.” “I don’t want to be filed, I’m sorry.” This being Italy, there’s always a way around rules, and this store manager is a nice guy. He fills the form for a guy called Uomo Di Passaggio and writes the same name on the card he has to give me. “So you get a discount after ten cuts” he explains. I am thinking I won’t come back probably. But the card registered to Uomo di Passaggio is actually memorable. “I love this card, I’ll keep it dear”, I say to him. There, he’s uneasy again.

Oh, I hate italian hair cutters. Which are the only hair cutters I know by the way. It’s just that you always have to cut your hair before you leave, it’s the rule.

The closer is the day, the more things I don’t get done, including blogging, and the more things I postpone to the imaginary day after tomorrow when all the packing will be done with few expert focused hours of work. With the effort to keep my nervousness at bay, to reassure Libi and the silent or explicit questions to answer, I feel pretty much hollowed out, in a way that worries me only because I wouldn’t want it to grow inside and extend itself across my days of travel.
I see the landscape changing all around, spring breeze celeste sky, I order few dollars at the bank, the terrace is getting thicker of blossoming plants, friends on the telephone can’t make it or can’t be reached and are told goodbye, rushing through the city teeming with the usual machinery-life, the emails to answer are accumulating, the birds chirping and the long lines at the police station to get my passport get shorter by the minute. I try to knock myself out with ideas of places and feelings of travel or walking by or swimming or new smells but it all remains in a lingering state where I can’t really express it let alone make it real.
It’s not a problem. Nothing is ever final anyway, anything is a sensation, anything is transient.
I read news about Italy, all bad and phony, but I don’t feel like commenting anything anymore because it’s like all is left to feel and relate would offend someone –and anyway I am not alert enough to make justice to it.
Just like these odd days, soon my posts will be slightly rarefied, because of me being around and far from home, but so you know, I intend to keep the blog updated and going, getting back at it every time it’s possible etc.
Meanwhile I have to put an end to this post ’cause it’s like I am having a shortage of breath or something.

— in picture, above: something that hasn’t much to do with the text below.