"Do you have any enemies?" "T", the Verizon security expert suddenly asked me.
"Enemies?"
"Yes, Ma'am. Is there someone out there who would want to do you harm?"
I felt like Briscoe and Logan from "Law and Order" were at my door, investigating a homicide, or in my case, potential identity theft.
ENEMIES?!
It was the second week of April, 2009.
I had first contacted Verizon in December, 2008, about a simple customer service snafu. Since then, I had logged in an inestimable number of hours sending e-mails, waiting on hold at the mysterious, David Cronenberg-ian e-center, speaking to human Verizon employees, then speaking to their supervisors, and, most recently, having daily conversations with "T". Could someone in my sphere of acquaintances--a friend, an ex-friend, a neighbor, an anonymous evildoer--harbor a V-for-Verizon vendetta?
These are a series of “Tag Cloud” poetry. I ran a tag cloud from my blog and what was generated was a gigantic list of words remarkably similar to the exquisite corpse theme. I call them Cadavre Exquis Web 2.0.
Bio: Vixen, just a baby when she arrived, has been living and playing to the glorious city of San Francisco for over 12 years now. Of those 12 years, many have been spent serving the city's denizens at the public library. When she is not writing about sex, she's having it.
When making love to a Sicilian woman, I have been fortunate to have had her whisper incredibly wondrous and arousing phrases in my ear with a look of pain and pleasure.As I laid face buried in her neck, mid-stroke, I heard, “Fantastico,” “Scopami,” “Ti Odio,” “Ti Amo per questo,” “Sei un Mago?” and “Brutto Mostro Cattivo”
Please God, be on my side today. Napalm my face. Spray me down with Malathion. Let a rabid mole eat through my brain. Dip my balls in a pot of battery acid. Fart in my mouth. Shove a canister of Agent Orange up my ass. Canker me with erratic skin pigmentations. Embalm me full of castor bean oil. But please don’t let this neurotic idiot sit across from me.
In the National Museum of Romanian Literature’s archive there is a set of photographs remarkably interesting . They depict a group of youngsters, about 25, happy, on a sort of “holiday game” in the Bucegi Mountains. In these photographs, taken in July 1932, we find Mircea Eliade (recently returned from India), Mihail Sebastian (recently returned from Paris), Haig Acterian, Mircea Vulcănescu, Dan Botta, Mihai Polihroniade, Marietta Sadova, Floria and Sylvia Capsali, Mac Constantinescu, Petru Comarnescu, perhaps even Leny Caler etc. Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks and so on. Ethnically heterogeneous as it were, this was an usual group of friends in interwar Bucharest. The typical examples of tolerant and multiethnic towns of Greater Romania include Timişoara, Cernăuţi, Brăila and some others. Bucharest is always forgotten, though it, too, was a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual and multi-confessional city.
The ‘20s and early ‘30s came after the miraculous date of 1 December 1918. “Romania should be so lucky – P.P. Carp would ironically comment – it no longer needs politicians”. Greater Romania seemed to enjoy a short, quasi-paradisal, period, with a generation of young intellectuals who, as Mircea Eliade believed, for the first time in history did not have a historic mission to fulfill. An “amniotic period”, as Ioan Petru Culianu would call it, referring to the state of the fetus, protected by the amniotic liquid in the maternal womb. In Eliade’s words (as used in The Myth of the Eternal Return), “the terror of history” acted softer. Consequently, “the boycott of history” could also be applied in a softer manner. It was probably the very lack of a common “national mission” (or at least a “common danger”, to generate the syndrome of the “citadel under siege”) that atomized society and led to the brutal “fall from Paradise” and the well known political failure.
The friendship between Eliade and Sebastian was an exceptional one, not just through its depth, but also through its bumpy manifestation. A Dostoievskian friendship, if not also a Eugen Ionescu-type one. For, at a certain point, around Sebastian-Béranger Romania was “rhinoceros-izing” itself in concentric circles, reaching the last, and most intimate, one – that of the friends.
Mircea Eliade (fourth from right) and Mihail Sebastian (second from left), with a group of friends in a mountain cabin in the Bucegi-Carpathian mountains in Romania (July 1932)
If you have a specimen of Phthiris pubis you'd like to donate to science, or know someone who has, please bring them to one of the events. -- Marc Abrahams, in The Guardian, Tuesday March 4, 2008
