inspo/misc
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Robert Hass,
David Foster Wallace,
Ellen Ullman,
Mark Fisher,
Mary Karr,
China Miéville,
Rachel Kushner,
Angela Y. Davis
miscellaneous inspo
Ronnie’s loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro’s, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said MSG on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.
pretty
He had both liked and hated Brasília’s stiff white meringues, which perfectly blotted the ugly history that paid for them. His father’s rubber-harvesting operations in the Amazon had made the Brazilian government enough money to build an all-inclusive concrete utopia, a brand-new capital. The money had poured in. The rubber workers were still there — they were still there now, in 1977—and there were many more of them because their children were all tappers as well. Neither Sandro’s father nor the Brazilian overseers and middlemen ever bothered to tell the rubber workers the war was over. They simply kept them going, doing their labor up there in the remote northwestern jungle. The tappers didn’t know. They believed that someday there would be an enormous payment, if not to their children, maybe to their children’s children. “What is time to an Indian?” his father had said to Sandro that night in the hotel, the Palace of Something or Other, another interplanetary meringuelike building for industrialists and diplomats. “What is time?” his father asked. “What the hell is it? Who is bound to time, and who isn’t?” Sandro became angry. What am I doing here with this old bastard? “Go tell them, Sandro,” his father had said. “Go on up there. It’s only three thousand kilometers, most of it on dirt roads. Go let them know the war is over and they can all go home, okay?”
It was the last time he saw his father.
Everything a cruel lesson. This, what fathers were for. His father taking Sandro, four years old, to the tire factory gates during a strike. The workers carrying a coffin and Sandro saying, “Papa, is it a funeral?” His father laughing and nodding. For me. I’m dead, right? Holding up his hands, slapping his own cheeks, then holding up his hands again. What do you say, Sandro? Do I look dead to you?
damn
My certainties breakfast on doubts. And there are days when I feel like a stranger in Montevideo and anywhere else. On those days, days without sunshine, moonless nights, no place is my own and I do not recognize myself in anything or anyone. Words do not resemble what they refer to or even correspond to their own sounds. Then I am not where I am. I leave my body and travel far, heading nowhere, and I do not want to be with anybody, not even with myself, and I have no name nor wish to have any: then I lose all desire to call myself or be called.
<3