Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Caline Aoun
Born in Beirut in 1983, Caline Aoun lives and works between Beirut and London.
She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London, in 2005. In 2009, she received a Postgraduate degree in Fine Art from the Royal Academy School, London. She also earned a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London, London in 2012.
Achilles Introduced to Nestor
In Greek mythology, Achilles was a hero of the Trojan War, the greatest of all the Greek warriors, and is the central character of Homer's Iliad. Nestor of Gerenia was the legendary wise King of Pylos described in Homer's Odyssey.
John Held Jr. 1889-1958, New York city watercolors, circa 1936.
John Held Jr. (January 10, 1889 – March 2, 1958) was a cartoonist, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, and author. One of the best-known magazine illustrators of the 1920s, his most popular works were his uniquely styled cartoons which depicted people dancing, driving, playing sports, and engaging in other popular activities of the era.
His friendship with Harold Ross, creator of The New Yorker, served him well in his career, as his cartoons were featured in many prominent magazines including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, and Life magazine.
Due to his sense of humor and keen observation of his surroundings, Held was praised for his cartoon depictions of the cultural paradigm shift in the 1920s. The drawings depicted the flapper era in a way that both satirized and influenced the styles and mores of the time, and his images have continued to define the Jazz Age for subsequent generations.
After F. Scott Fitzgerald complained that William Hill designed the characters on his covers to look too much like himself and his wife Zelda, Fitzgerald hired Held to illustrate his book covers, after taking a liking to his cartoon style. This represented the stylistic shift of the period from realism to abstraction which influenced the Art-Deco style of the decade. Held's first cover for Fitzgerald was a companion book of short stories for The Beautiful and Damned, and he subsequently illustrated Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and The Vegetable (1923).
To some, Held is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of American art in the early to mid-1900s. Some critics disagree, claiming that Held's work was too superficial, but Fitzgerald lived a far more tragic and tumultuous life that was well reflected in his writing. Held matched Fitzgerald, not in depth of subject, but in skill and honesty.
A&P by John Updike
The New Yorker, 1961.
In walks these three girls in
nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the
door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught
my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid,
with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of
white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs
of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to
remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts
giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty
with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip
me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a
mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers
smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in passing,
if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem
-- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and
were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the
aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes
on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and
the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I
guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those
chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and
a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these
sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know,
the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and
"attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which
is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so
tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and
making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just
walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down
a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much,
putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if
she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra
action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really
think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but
you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and
now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink -
- beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it
and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped
loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had
slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this
shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have
been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there
was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just
her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones
like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than
pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that
the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a
kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose
it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck,
coming up out o fthose white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't
mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner
of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but
she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and
stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and
buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they
all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri
ce-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- rackers-and- cookies
aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter,
and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with
the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing
their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic
(not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You
could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or
hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they
pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would
by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering
"Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah,
yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no
doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around
after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have
a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody
can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A
& P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with
her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile
floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie
said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said.
"Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on
his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's
twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.
"Is it done?" he asks,
the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's
going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great
Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is
five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're
right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts
or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these
are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and
nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of
town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the
Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and
about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer
broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's
people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat
counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they
shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was
left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them
sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they
couldn't help it.
Now here comes the sad part of
the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself.
The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing
much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again.
The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel
they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around
the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings
or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars, and
plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them
anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little
gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see
her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an
old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple
juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked
myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into
my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now
her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I
wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a
folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The
jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody's luck begins to
run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot
and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all
day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school
and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says,
"Girls, this isn't the beach."
Queenie blushes, though maybe
it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she
was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring
snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the
people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked
over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right
down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing
around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up
herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks
the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have
somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall
glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.
"That's all right,"
Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me
as funny, as if it hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these
years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He
didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates
on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn
now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really
sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for
the one thing."
"That makes no
difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went
that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you
decently dressed when you come in here."
"We are decent,"
Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she
remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must
look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to
argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our
policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the
kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had
been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had
all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a
peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting
nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this
purchase?"
I thought and said "No"
but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC,
TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough,
it begins to make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello
(bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the
drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just
having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known
were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle
the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time
thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them,
are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough
for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero.
They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they
flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony
(not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in
his eyebrow.
"Did you say something,
Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to
embarrass them."
"It was they who were
embarrassing us."
I started to say something that
came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and I
know she would have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what
you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I
said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start
shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my
slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look
very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years.
"Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me.
It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal
not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red
on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it.
The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the
rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but
remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I
punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer
splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow
this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and
galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother
ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the
sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but
they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming
with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue
Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat
moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in
my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and
his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind
of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
Quadraturin. A short story by Sigizmund Krahizhanovsky
Translated by Joanne Turnbull
From outside there came a soft
knock at the door: once. Pause. And again—a bit louder and bonier: twice.
Sutulin, without rising from his
bed, extended—as was his wont—a foot toward the knock, threaded a toe through
the door handle, and pulled. The door swung open. On the threshold, head
grazing the lintel, stood a tall, gray man the color of the dusk seeping in at
the window.
Before Sutulin could set his feet
on the floor the visitor stepped inside, wedged the door quietly back into its
frame, and jabbing first one wall, then another, with a briefcase dangling from
an apishly long arm, said, “Yes: a matchbox.”
“What?”
“Your room, I say: it’s a
matchbox. How many square feet?”
“Eighty-six and a bit.”
“Precisely. May I?”
And before Sutulin could open his
mouth, the visitor sat down on the edge of the bed and hurriedly unbuckled his
bulging briefcase. Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he went on. “I’m
here on business. You see, I, that is, we, are conducting, how shall I put
it…well, experiments, I suppose. Under wraps for now. I won’t hide the fact: a
well-known foreign firm has an interest in our concern. You want the
electric-light switch? No, don’t bother: I’ll only be a minute. So then: we
have discovered—this is a secret now—an agent for biggerizing rooms. Well,
won’t you try it?”
The stranger’s hand popped out of
the briefcase and proffered Sutulin a narrow dark tube, not unlike a tube of
paint, with a tightly screwed cap and a leaden seal. Sutulin fidgeted
bewilderedly with the slippery tube and, though it was nearly dark in the room,
made out on the label the clearly printed word: quadraturin. When he raised his
eyes, they came up against the fixed, unblinking stare of his interlocutor.
“So then, you’ll take it? The price?
Goodness, it’s gratis. Just for advertising. Now if you’ll”—the guest began
quickly leafing through a sort of ledger he had produced from the same
brief-case—“just sign this book (a short testimonial, so to say). A pencil?
Have mine. Where? Here: column three. That’s it.”
His ledger clapped shut, the
guest straightened up, wheeled around, stepped to the door… and a minute later
Sutulin, having snapped on the light, was considering with puzzledly raised
eyebrows the clearly embossed letters: quadraturin.
On closer inspection it turned
out that this zinc packet was tightly fitted—as is often done by the makers of
patented agents— with a thin transparent paper whose ends were expertly glued
together. Sutulin removed the paper sheath from the Quadraturin, unfurled the
rolled-up text, which showed through the paper’s transparent gloss, and read:
Directions
Dissolve one teaspoon of the
quadraturin essence in one cup of water. Wet a piece of cotton wool or simply a
clean rag with the solution; apply this to those of the room’s internal walls
designated for proliferspansion. This mixture leaves no stains, will not damage
wallpaper, and even contributes—incidentally—to the extermination of bedbugs.
Thus far Sutulin had been only
puzzled. Now his puzzlement was gradually overtaken by another feeling, strong
and disturbing. He stood up and tried to pace from corner to corner, but the
corners of this living cage were too close together: a walk amounted to almost
nothing but turns, from toe to heel and back again. Sutulin stopped short, sat
down, and closing his eyes, gave himself up to thoughts, which began: Why not…?
What if…? Suppose…? To his left, not three feet away from his ear, someone was
driving an iron spike into the wall. The hammer kept slipping, banging, and
aiming, it seemed, at Sutulin’s head. Rubbing his temples, he opened his eyes:
the black tube lay in the middle of the narrow table, which had managed somehow
to insinuate itself between the bed, the windowsill, and the wall. Sutulin tore
away the leaden seal, and the cap spun off in a spiral. From out of the round
aperture came a bitterish gingery smell. The smell made his nostrils flare
pleasantly.
“Hmm … Let’s try it. Although …”
And, having removed his jacket,
the possessor of Quadraturin proceeded to the experiment. Stool up against
door, bed into middle of room, table on top of bed. Nudging across the floor a
saucer of transparent liquid, its glassy surface gleaming with a slightly
yellowish tinge, Sutulin crawled along after it, systematically dipping a
handkerchief wound around a pencil into the Quadraturin and daubing the
floorboards and patterned wallpaper. The room really was, as that man today had
said, a matchbox. But Sutulin worked slowly and carefully, trying not to miss a
single corner. This was rather difficult since the liquid really did evaporate
in an instant or was absorbed (he couldn’t tell which) without leaving even the
slightest film; there was only its smell, increasingly pungent and spicy,
making his head spin, confounding his fingers, and causing his knees, pinned to
the floor, to tremble slightly. When he had finished with the floorboards and
the bottom of the walls, Sutulin rose to his strangely weak and heavy feet and
continued to work standing up. Now and then he had to add a little more of the
essence. The tube was gradually emptying. It was already night outside. In the
kitchen, to the right, a bolt came crashing down. The apartment was readying
for bed. Trying not to make any noise, the experimenter, clutching the last of
the essence, climbed up onto the bed and from the bed up onto the tottering
table: only the ceiling remained to be Quadraturinized. But just then someone
banged on the wall with his fist. “What’s going on? People are trying to sleep,
but he’s …”
Turning around at the sound,
Sutulin fumbled: the slippery tube spurted out of his hand and landed on the
floor. Balancing carefully, Sutulin got down with his already drying brush, but
it was too late. The tube was empty, and the rapidly fading spot around it
smelled stupefyingly sweet. Grasping at the wall in his exhaustion (to fresh
sounds of discontent from the left), he summoned his last bit of strength, put
the furniture back where it belonged, and without undressing, fell into bed. A
black sleep instantly descended on him from above: both tube and man were
empty.
2
Two voices began in a whisper.
Then by degrees of sonority— from piano to mf, from mf to fff—they cut into
Sutulin’s sleep.
“Outrageous. I don’t want any new
tenants popping out from under that skirt of yours… Put up with all that
racket?!”
“Can’t just dump it in the
garbage…”
“I don’t want to hear about it.
You were told: no dogs, no cats, no children…” At which point there ensued such
fff that Sutulin was ripped once and for all from his sleep; unable to part
eyelids stitched together with exhaustion, he reached—as was his wont— for the
edge of the table on which stood the clock. Then it began. His hand groped for
a long time, grappling air: there was no clock and no table. Sutulin opened his
eyes at once. In an instant he was sitting up, looking dazedly around the room.
The table that usually stood right here, at the head of the bed, had moved off
into the middle of a faintly familiar, large, but ungainly room.
Everything was the same: the
skimpy, threadbare rug that had trailed after the table somewhere up ahead of
him, and the pho-tographs, and the stool, and the yellow patterns on the
wallpaper. But they were all strangely spread out inside the expanded room
cube.
“Quadraturin,” thought Sutulin,
“is terrific!”
And he immediately set about
rearranging the furniture to fit the new space. But nothing worked: the
abbreviated rug, when moved back beside the bed, exposed worn, bare floorboards;
the table and the stool, pushed by habit against the head of the bed, had
disencumbered an empty corner latticed with cobwebs and littered with shreds
and tatters, once artfully masked by the corner’s own crowdedness and the
shadow of the table. With a triumphant but slightly frightened smile, Sutulin
went all around his new, practically squared square, scrutinizing every detail.
He noted with displeasure that the room had grown more in some places than in
others: an external corner, the angle of which was now obtuse, had made the
wall askew; Quadraturin, apparently, did not work as well on internal corners;
carefully as Sutulin had applied the essence, the experiment had produced
somewhat uneven results.
The apartment was beginning to
stir. Out in the corridor, occupants shuffled to and fro. The bathroom door
kept banging. Sutulin walked up to the threshold and turned the key to the
right. Then, hands clasped behind his back, he tried pacing from corner to
corner: it worked. Sutulin laughed with joy. How about that! At last! But then
he thought: they may hear my footsteps— through the walls—on the right, on the
left, at the back. For a minute he stood stock-still. Then he quickly bent
down—his temples had suddenly begun to ache with yesterday’s sharp thin
pain—and, having removed his boots, gave himself up to the pleasure of a
stroll, moving soundlessly about in only his socks.
“May I come in?”
The voice of the landlady. He was
on the point of going to the door and unlocking it when he suddenly remembered:
he mustn’t. “I’m getting dressed. Wait a minute. I’ll be right out.”
“It’s all very well, but it
complicates things. Say I lock the door and take the key with me. What about
the keyhole? And then there’s the window: I’ll have to get curtains. Today.”
The pain in his temples had become thinner and more nagging. Sutulin gathered
up his papers in haste. It was time to go to the office. He dressed. Pushed the
pain under his cap. And listened at the door: no one there. He quickly opened
it. Quickly slipped out. Quickly turned the key. Now.
Waiting patiently in the entrance
hall was the landlady.
“I wanted to talk to you about
that girl, what’s her name. Can you believe it, she’s submitted an application
to the House Committee saying she’s—”
“I’ve heard. Go on.”
“It’s nothing to you. No one’s
going to take your eighty-six square feet away. But put yourself in my—”
“I’m in a hurry,” he nodded, put
on his cap, and flew down the stairs.
3
On his way home from the office,
Sutulin paused in front of the window of a furniture dealer: the long curve of
a couch, an extendable round table… it would be nice—but how could he carry
them in past the eyes and the questions? They would guess, they couldn’t help
but guess…
He had to limit himself to the
purchase of a yard of canary-yellow material (he did, after all, need a
curtain). He didn’t stop by the cafe: he had no appetite. He needed to get
home—it would be easier there: he could reflect, look around, and make
adjustments at leisure. Having unlocked the door to his room, Sutulin gazed
about to see if anyone was looking: they weren’t. He walked in. Then he
switched on the light and stood there for a long time, his arms spread flat
against the wall, his heart beating wildly: this he had not expected—not at
all.
The Quadraturin was still
working. during the eight or nine hours Sutulin had been out, it had pushed the
walls at least another seven feet apart; the floorboards, stretched by
invisible rods, rang out at his first step—like organ pipes. The entire room,
distended and monstrously misshapen, was beginning to frighten and torment him.
Without taking off his coat, Sutulin sat down on the stool and surveyed his
spacious and at the same time oppressive coffin-shaped living box, trying to
understand what had caused this unexpected effect. Then he remembered: he
hadn’t done the ceiling—the essence had run out. His living box was spreading
only sideways, without rising even an inch upward.
“Stop. I have to stop this
Quadraturinizing thing. Or I’ll…” He pressed his palms to his temples and
listened: the corrosive pain, lodged under his skull since morning, was still
drilling away. Though the windows in the house opposite were dark, Sutulin took
cover behind the yellow length of curtain. His head would not stop aching. He
quietly undressed, snapped out the light, and got into bed. At first he slept,
then he was awoken by a feeling of awkwardness. Wrapping the covers more
tightly about him, Sutulin again dropped off, and once more an unpleasant sense
of mooringlessness interfered with his sleep. He raised himself up on one palm
and felt all around him with his free hand: the wall was gone. He struck a
match. Um-hmm: he blew out the flame and hugged his knees till his elbows
cracked. “It’s growing, damn it, it’s still growing.” Clenching his teeth,
Sutulin crawled out of bed and, trying not to make any noise, gently edged
first the front legs, then the back legs of the bed toward the receding wall.
He felt a little shivery. Without turning the light on again, he went to look
for his coat on that nail in the corner so as to wrap himself up more warmly.
But there was no hook on the wall where it had been yesterday, and he had to
feel around for several seconds before his hands chanced upon fur. twice more
during a night that was long and as nagging as the pain in his temples, Sutulin
pressed his head and knees to the wall as he was falling asleep and, when he
awoke, fiddled about with the legs of the bed again. In doing
this—mechanically, meekly, lifelessly—he tried, though it was still dark
outside, not to open his eyes: it was better that way.
4
Toward dusk the next evening,
having served out his day, Sutulin was approaching the door to his room: he did
not quicken his step and, upon entering, felt neither consternation nor horror.
When the dim, sixteen-candle-power bulb lit up somewhere in the distance
beneath the long low vault, its yellow rays struggling to reach the dark,
ever-receding corners of the vast and dead, yet empty barrack, which only
recently, before Quadraturin, had been a cramped but cozy, warm, and lived-in
cubbyhole, he walked resignedly toward the yellow square of the window, now
diminished by perspective; he tried to count his steps. From there, from a bed
squeezed pitifully and fearfully in the corner by the window, he stared dully
and wearily through deep-boring pain at the swaying shadows nestled against the
floorboards, and at the smooth low overhang of the ceiling. “So, something
forces its way out of a tube and can’t stop squaring: a square squared, a
square of squares squared. I’ve got to think faster than it: if I don’t
outthink it, it will outgrow me and…” And suddenly someone was hammering on the
door, “Citizen Sutulin, are you in there?”
From the same faraway place came
the muffled and barely audible voice of the landlady. “He’s in there. Must be
asleep.”
Sutulin broke into a sweat: “What
if I don’t get there in time, and they go ahead and…” And, trying not to make a
sound (let them think he was asleep), he slowly made his way through the
darkness to the door. There.
“Who is it?”
“Oh, open up! Why’s the door
locked? Remeasuring Commission. We’ll remeasure and leave.”
Sutulin stood with his ear
pressed to the door. Through the thin panel he could hear the clump of heavy
boots. Figures were being mentioned, and room numbers.
“This room next. Open up!”
With one hand Sutulin gripped the
knob of the electric-light switch and tried to twist it, as one might twist the
head of a bird: the switch spattered light, then crackled, spun feebly around,
and drooped down. Again someone hammered on the door: “Well!”
Sutulin turned the key to the
left. A broad black shape squeezed itself into the doorway.
“Turn on the light.”
“It’s burned out.”
Clutching at the door handle with
his left hand and the bundle of wire with his right, he tried to hide the
extended space from view. The black mass took a step back.
“Who’s got a match? Give me that
box. We’ll have a look anyway. Do things right.”
Suddenly the landlady began
whining, “Oh, what is there to look at? Eighty-six square feet for the
eighty-sixth time. Measuring the room won’t make it any bigger. He’s a quiet
man, home from a long day at the office—and you won’t let him rest: have to
measure and remeasure. Whereas other people, who have no right to the space,
but—”
“Ain’t that the truth,” the black
mass muttered and, rocking from boot to boot, gently and even almost
affectionately drew the door to the light. Sutulin was left alone on wobbling,
cottony legs in the middle of the four-cornered, inexorably growing, and
proliferating darkness.
5
He waited until their steps had
died away, then quickly dressed and went out. They’d be back, to remeasure or
check they hadn’t under-measured or whatever. He could finish thinking better
here—from crossroad to crossroad. Toward night a wind came up: it rattled the
bare frozen branches on the trees, shook the shadows loose, droned in the
wires, and beat against walls, as if trying to knock them down. Hiding the
needlelike pain in his temples from the wind’s buffets, Sutulin went on, now
diving into the shadows, now plunging into the lamplight. Suddenly, through the
wind’s rough thrusts, something softly and tenderly brushed against his elbow.
He turned around. Beneath feathers batting against a black brim, a familiar
face with provocatively half-closed eyes. And barely audible through the
moaning air: “You know you know me. And you look right past me. You ought to
bow. That’s it.”
Her slight figure, tossed back by
the wind, perched on tenacious stiletto heels, was all insubordination and
readiness for battle .
Sutulin tipped his hat. “But you
were supposed to be going away. And you’re still here? Then something must have
prevented—”
“That’s right—this.”
And he felt a chamois finger
touch his chest then dart back into the muff. He sought out the narrow pupils
of her eyes beneath the dancing black feathers, and it seemed that one more
look, one more touch, one more shock to his hot temples, and it would all come
unthought, undone, and fall away. Meanwhile she, her face nearing his, said,
“Let’s go to your place. Like last time. Remember?”
With that, everything stopped.
“That’s impossible.”
She sought out the arm that had
been pulled back and clung to it with tenacious chamois fingers.
“My place… Isn’t fit.” He looked
away, having again with-drawn both his arms and the pupils of his eyes.
“You mean to say it’s cramped. My
god, how silly you are. The more cramped it is…” The wind tore away the end of
her phrase. Sutulin did not reply. “Or, perhaps you don’t …”
When he reached the turning, he
looked back: the woman was still standing there, pressing her muff to her
bosom, like a shield; her narrow shoulders were shivering with cold; the wind
cynically flicked her skirt and lifted up the lapels of her coat.
“Tomorrow. Everything tomorrow.
But now…” And, quickening his pace, Sutulin turned resolutely back.
“Right now: while everyone’s
asleep. Collect my things (only the necessaries) and go. Run away. Leave the
door wide open: let them. Why should I be the only one? Why not let them?”
The apartment was indeed sleepy
and dark. Sutulin walked down the corridor, straight and to the right, opened
the door with resolve, and as always, wanted to turn the light switch, but it
spun feebly in his fingers, reminding him that the circuit had been broken.
This was an annoying obstacle. But it couldn’t be helped. Sutulin rummaged in
his pockets and found a box of matches: it was almost empty. Good for three or
four flares— that’s all. He would have to husband both light and time. When he
reached the coat pegs, he struck the first match: light crept in yellow
radiuses through the black air. Sutulin purposely, overcoming temptation, concentrated
on the illuminated scrap of wall and the coats and jackets hanging from hooks.
He knew that there, behind his back, the dead, Quadraturinized space with its
black corners was still spreading. He knew and did not look around. The match
smoldered in his left hand, his right pulled things off hooks and flung them on
the floor. He needed another flare; looking at the floor, he started toward the
corner—if it was still a corner and if it was still there—where, by his
calculations, the bed should have fetched up, but he accidentally held the
flame under his breath—and again the black wilderness closed in. One last match
remained: he struck it over and over: it would not light. One more time—and its
crackling head fell off and slipped through his fingers. Then, having turned
around, afraid to go any farther into the depths, he started back toward the
bundle he had abandoned under the hooks. But he had made the turn, apparently,
inexactly. He walked—heel to toe, heel to toe—holding his fingers out in front of
him, and found nothing: neither the bundle, nor the hooks, nor even the walls.
“I’ll get there in the end. I must get there.” His body was sticky with cold
and sweat. His legs wobbled oddly. He squatted down, palms on the floorboards:
“I shouldn’t have come back. Now here I am alone, nowhere to turn.” And
suddenly it struck him: “I’m waiting here, but it’s growing, I’m waiting, but
it’s…”
In their sleep and in their fear,
the occupants of the quadratures adjacent to citizen Sutulin’s eighty-six
square feet couldn’t make head or tail of the timbre and intonation of the cry
that woke them in the middle of the night and compelled them to rush to the
threshold of the Sutulin cell: for a man who is lost and dying in the
wilderness to cry out is both futile and belated: but if even so—against all
sense—he does cry out, then, most likely, thus.
Diana Adams
Diana Adams (March 29, 1926 –
January 10, 1993) was a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet from 1950
to 1963 and favorite of George Balanchine, later becoming a teacher at — and
dean of — the School of American Ballet. Diana Adams was one of George
Balanchine’s “muses” at New York City Ballet and he created roles for her in a
series of ballets: Western Symphony, Ivesiana, Divertimento #15, Agon, Stars
and Stripes, Episodes, Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, and Liebeslieder Walzer.
Balanchine also created roles on her in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Figure in the
Carpet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Movements for Piano and Orchestra,
although she did not dance in the premieres due to illness or injury.
Ajax and Cassandra
The painting above is Rape of
Cassandra featured in Virgil's Aeneid. Having spurned Apollo's advances,
Cassandra is punished to never have her prophecies believed. This leads the
Trojans to reject her warning that Troy is in imminent danger from the Greeks.
When Troy falls, Cassandra flees to the Temple of Athena where she encounters
Ajax. He is later killed by Athena and the sea god Poseidon for his crime.
Ajax is a Greek mythological
hero, the son of King Telamon and Periboea, and the half-brother of Teucer. He
plays an important role and is portrayed as a towering figure and a warrior of
great courage in Homer's Iliad and in the Epic Cycle, a series of epic poems
about the Trojan War.
Cassandra was a woman in Greek
mythology cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed. In modern
usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate someone whose
accurate prophecies are not believed.
Cassandra was reputed to be a
daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. The older and most common
versions state that she was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her
with the gift to see the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her
favors, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word and refused the
god. The enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, so he added to it the
curse that though she would see the future, nobody would believe her
prophecies. In other sources, such as Hyginus and Pseudo-Apollodorus, Cassandra
broke no promise; the powers were given to her as an enticement. When these
failed to make her love him, Apollo cursed Cassandra to always be disbelieved,
in spite of the truth of her words.
Some later versions have her
falling asleep in a temple, where the snakes licked (or whispered in) her ears
so that she could hear the future. Cassandra became a figure of epic tradition
and of tragedy.
Hans Rott
"A musician of genius ... who died unrecognized and
in want on the very threshold of his career. ... What music has lost in him
cannot be estimated. Such is the height to which his genius soars in ... [his]
Symphony [in E major], which he wrote as 20-year-old youth and makes him ...
the Founder of the New Symphony as I see it. To be sure, what he wanted is not
quite what he achieved. … But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my
inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which
the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant
infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted
the content of new time which was breaking out for music." Gustav Mahler on
Hans Rott.
Hans Rott ( August 1 1858 – June 25 1884) was an Austrian composer and
organist. His music is little-known today, though he received high praise in
his time from Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner. He left a symphony and Lieder,
among other works.
Rott was born in
Braunhirschengrund, a suburb of Vienna. His mother Maria Rosalia (1840–1872,
maiden name Lutz) was an actress and singer. His father Carl Mathias Rott (real
name Roth, born 1807, married 1862) was a famous comic actor in Vienna who was
crippled in 1874 by a stage accident which led to his death two years later.
Rott began to evidence
persecutory delusions. In October 1880, while on a train journey, he reportedly
threatened another passenger with a revolver, claiming that Brahms had filled
the train with dynamite. Rott was committed to a mental hospital in 1881, where
despite a brief recovery he sank into depression. By the end of 1883 a
diagnosis recorded "hallucinatory insanity, persecution mania—recovery no
longer to be expected." He died of tuberculosis in 1884, aged 25. Many
well-wishers, including Bruckner and Mahler, attended Rott's funeral at the
Zentralfriedhof in Vienna.
Some of his music manuscripts have
survived in the music collection of Vienna's national library. This includes
Rott's Symphony in E major, and sketches for a second Symphony that was never
finished. The completed symphony is remarkable in the way it anticipates some
of Mahler's musical characteristics. In particular, the third movement
prefigures the second movement of Mahler's First Symphony. In his last years, Rott wrote a lot of music,
only to destroy what he wrote soon after writing it, saying it was worthless. Other
recordings of the symphony have since been issued, and other Rott works have
been occasionally revived, including his Julius Caesar Overture, Pastoral
Overture and Prelude for Orchestra.
Mae West. A poem by Edward Field
Mae West
She comes on drenched in a perfume called Self-Satisfaction
from feather boa to silver pumps.
She does not need to be loved by you,
though she’ll give you credit for good taste.
Just because you say you love her
she’s not throwing herself at your feet in gratitude.
Every other star reveals how worthless she feels
by crying when the hero says, Marry me,
or how unhoped- for the approval is
when the audience applauds her big number,
but Mae West takes it as her due:
she knows she’s good.
She expects the best for her self
and knows she’s worth what she costs,
and she costs plenty –
she’s not giving anything away.
She enjoys her admirers, fat daddy or muscleman,
and doesn’t confuse vanity and sex,
though she never turns down pleasure,
lapping it up.
Above all she enjoys her self,
swinging her body that says, Me, me, me, me.
Why not have a good time?
As long as you amuse me, go on,
I like you slobbering over my hand, big boy,
I have a right to.
Most convincing, we know all this
not by her preaching
but by her presence – it’s no act.
Every word and look and movement
spells Independence:
she likes being herself.
And we who don’t
can only look on, astonished.
Edward Field is the recipient of the W.H. Auden award, the Bill Whitehead lifetime achievement award, the Lambda Literary Award, and is the author of ten books of poetry, including After The Fall: poems old and new, in which can be found his poem, “Mae West,” published by University of Pittsburgh Press, © 2007.
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