A Concise History of Name Tags

Poppy comes from Berkshire. Pippa comes from Buckinghamshire. 
Poppy studied history. Pippa studied anthropology. 
Poppy loves Christmas. Pippa loves Easter. 
Poppy is catholic. Pippa is a Seven Day Adventist. That is why she doesn’t love Christmas.
Poppy works in a solicitor’s office. Pippa works in a barrister’s office. 
Poppy is afraid of spiders. Pippa is afraid of staplers.
Poppy has two older sister and a little baby brother. Pippa has three sisters and an older brother who died of AIDS in 1991, before they knew about cocktails. 
Poppy was once stuck in an elevator for three hours. Pippa was once a high jump champion. 
Poppy fell in love once with a surrealist Spanish painter. Pippa fell in love with her uncle’s life partner. Poppy wants to travel around the world and help women who were abused by their husbands. Pippa has no plans at the moment.
Poppy loves popcorn. Pippa does to. 

Poppy was once late for work and in her haste bumped into Pippa who dropped a two hundred page legal document on the dirt road, its pages blew away and landed in a lake where a lonely secretary was eating leek and potato soup on an overlooking bench.

The Pinafore Room

From time to time I would work at the Savoy Hotel. One night I worked for a reception for Canadian business men. They held the reception in the Pinafore Room. They said they chose it because of its historical significance.
And why was the Pinafore Room so special? It is said that once someone put a photograph of Churchill in it and it stayed there ever since.

Oeuvre mystique


In a fragmented moment we become fecund with wistful imagination. We become impregnated by the semen of doubt, or conviction.

Time, when it is flux, allows up a pensive gaze into our own contemplative mechanism; we become detached from the fantasmatic elements that construct our reflexive actions, leading to a kind of paralysis.

This paralysis, which is also known as void or, under religious hypotheses, ecstasy, expands our view of the fragmented, expanded time, in which he paralysis is not really ours, but the world.
This is in a sense of spatial time: imagine one in outer space going at three times the speed of sound. Not only is he detached from any spatial coordinates i.e. directions in vacuum manifest differently than in condensed space. He is no longer abiding by up/down, right/left binary oppositions.  Instead, he can choose new definitions. It is not that he is changed; it is the world that is ceased to work, at its most simple and complex mechanism.

In this void two elements are manifested in a paradoxical manner: the first is the sense of  feeling the “heaviness” of the void: as the airless expanse becomes more “palpable”, one can feel as if the space is dense, heavy, even though it is the opposite.

The second is a sense of elation in this space. Even though the space is limited and serves as an oppressive cage, one may feel that he is looking into eternity, feel himself revolving. This is of course unproven as the space can be as small as an atom.

With these two elements in play, one is both attached and detached from the particular space and time at the same instant.

It what makes our world go round; and what makes us revolve in the world.


Rules for the Modern Socialite #1

1. If it's too good to be true, it must be a lady boy.
2. You are not a true carpenter if you still have all you're fingers.
3. Things we learned from movies #23: Jews always have Chinese take out on Christmas Eve.
4. By the time you get to the mixed nuts bowl at the bar, there will be no cashews.
5. People you can hit #15: People who say on 31/12, "See you next year".
6. Athletes foot does mean you work out to much; It means you should take shower.
7. Just so you know, through the course of their marriage, you're father asked you're mother to have anal sex.
8. Even though you're shoes smell like a dead vulture, you can't stop smelling them.
9. Even the pope partakes to Dutch ovens.
11. The only reason why Woody Allen makes films is to prove that even an uglier guy than you can get laid
12. Even Charlie Chaplin didn't have energy to watch silent films.
13. Yes, truffles taste like mud and socks.
14. Every person tried to imitate the characters in the signal light.
15. Yes, the reason you can't work you're computer is it was revenge by the nerd you used to beat up at school.
16. It's not a detective movie if the detective does not give in his badge and gun and gets drunk afterwards.
17. It doesn't matter how old you're TV batteries are. If you open the lid and twist them, they will work.
18. Even Elton John thinks musicals are too gay.
19. You were offered to be Santa at the office party. It is not because they think you're jolly; It's because you're fat.
20. Even Lewis Hamilton doesn't recognize anything when looks under the hood of the car.

Seared Gaze

I’m hiding behind a cheap pair of dark glasses.
Hiding from the smell of reeking fish lying one, one,
in a market stall.
the fishing boots laid to rest in the sun.
the hustle and bustle of tourists
looking for that tomato that will remind them of their childhood
that never was,
On a kibbutz or an Indian reservation
Weekends at the city’s shore.
playing with sand as it was clay
crafting a Golem that will protect them from the shining light
of growing up.
sand pales blue and wet
riding in the back of cars
glorious Sunday afternoons
in a gridlock.
the kids ask for a pee stop
they go in front a great beech,
near the beach,
where a fishing smack
fashioned for two,
The sailors went to the pub
drowning in ale and sorrow (they need a pee stop as well),
sorrow for playing the part
of drunken sailors,
in some imaginary escapist world
of a writer in a shared flat,
hiding behind cheap dark glasses.

Food for Thought

My friend Marv eats books. He does not eat them for taste. He eats them to gain knowledge. He believes that by eating books he can better remember and store knowledge of those books he has eaten, as if by osmosis.
He started to eat books in college, when we had an exam do on Shakespeare’s Henry the V. He took a pair of scissors, cut up the text book into mulch, stirred it with some milk and ate the copy.

From then on, he was eating books regularly. He ate our county’s phone book, Webster’s Dictionary and the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which took a week and two blenders. After that he would eat random books. For a while he was into the Russians. He ate a second addition of Gogol’s The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, all of Chekov and some late 20th century writers like Vladimir Sorokin.

Then he went on to eat American fiction, biographies and so on.
Once I asked him if the subject of the book influences its taste. He said it didn’t, but more the book itself, for example a paperback has more sweet tones to it while hardback usually tastes like octopus or sandals. He also mentioned that he didn’t care for new books, because they use too much glue.

He ate his way through man’s greatest literary achievements, and the occasional “light” pulp novel or reader’s digest.

I do not want to get into digestive issues, but once he described his dejections as 
being similar to Paper Mache.

One day he got a call from a newspaper that did a story on him and quickly enough he became a celebrity appearing everywhere: He went on Jay Leno and ate his cue cards; he came to a Michael Chabon signing where he got Michael to sign a book which he later devoured. He even came along to a high profile trial where he ate an international law book, to emphasis the case of the prosecution that the law is being devoured by our corrupt society.

One day he got a call from the Guinness Book of World Records, telling that he won the prize for bring the man who ate the most books. It comes as no surprise that when receiving the award, he ate the book, the certificate and his valet card, which made it hard to find his car at the lot.

After his popularity sore, universities and libraries banned him from going in. a few copyright lawyers tried to sue him as they contested that by digesting a book, it is considered editing, and that is not allowed.
With the advent of electronic book readers, Marv could eat five thousand books in one sitting. But after a while he had to stop eating them, as his doctor told him he was allergic to glass. It caused him internal bleeding.

Sometime later, Marv met a lovely woman and fell in love. He knew everything about love, but it was all cerebral. He couldn’t feel anything in his stomach. No butterflies, no palpating of the heart. Zilch. 

So Marv ate her so he could really sense what love felt like. It was a few frightening weeks in our town, when Marv started eating people he had different emotions to. He ate his personal banker, which he hated. He ate his pastor, for he made him feel optimistic and he even ate his cousin who came from out of town unexpectedly and surprised him.

My friend Marv is now sitting in jail where I’ve been told he ate his hand, for he felt loneliness.