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Tracker posted: 02/28/2007.
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current reading list (as of September 20, 2006): (edited October 15, 2006)
1. Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges, by Gabriel Weimann.
2. 9/11 Commission Report, introduction by Thomas H. Kean and Hamilton.
3. Eyewitness to America: 500 Years of American History in the Words of Those Who Saw it Happen, ed. by David Colbert.
4. Understanding the U.S. Health Services System, 2nd edition, ed. by Phoebe Lindsey Barton.
5. A Practical Guide to Finding and Evaluating Meta-analyses for Healthcare Managers, ed. by Kitty S. Chan, Ph.D., and Morton and Shekelle.
6. Statistics for Health Policy and Administration Using Microsoft Excel, ed. by James E. Veney.
7. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer.
8. Why Nations Go To War, 9th edition, by John G. Stoessinger.
9. Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell.
10. The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters, introduction by Barbara Lounsberry.
11. Lo Que Vi: Experiencias de un Periodista Alrededor del Mundo, nueva edición, by Jorge Ramos.
12. Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life, by Queen Noor.
13. Larousse, Concise Dictionary, (French-English-French), 3e édition, coordinating editor: Marc Chabrier.
14. Barron's, French Verbs, 2nd edition, ed. by Christopher Kendris, Ph.D.
15. Barron's, French Grammar, 2nd edition, ed. by Christopher Kendris, Ph.D.
16. Barron's, Dictionary of French Slang and Colloquial Expressions, ed. by Henry Strutz.
17. Parallel Text, French Short Stories 1, ed. by Pamela Lyon.
18. Langenscheidt, Standard Spanish Dictionary (Spanish-English-Spanish), ed. by Jose A. Galvez and Russell, et al.
19. Barron's, Spanish Grammar, 2nd edition, ed. by Christopher Kendris, Ph.D.
20. Barron's, Spanish Verbs, 2nd edition, ed. by Christopher Kendris, Ph.D.
21. Harper Collins, Italian Concise Dictionary (Italian-English-Italian), 4th edition, ed. by Catherine E. Love and Clari.
22. Barron's, Italian Verbs, 2nd edition, ed. by Vincent Luciani, Ph.D., and Colaneri.
23. Le Monde.
24. The New York Times.
25. The Times and The Sunday Times.
26. Corriere della Sera.
27. El Mundo.
28. The Commercial Appeal.
29. The Washington Post, usually via The New York Times or C-Span.
30. The World Fact Book(CIA) (as of September 28, 2006)
31. The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall, by Oliver E. Allen.
32. Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington, by Paul Rieckhoff.
33. We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, by Harold G. Moore and Galloway.
34. TerrorWatch
35. Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture, by Michael Kammen.
36. Beware the Night, by Ralph Sarchie and Lisa Collier Cool.
37. BBC.
38. The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, 2nd ed., by Andrew Wilson
Music:
October Ice
by Andrew Cruz
I sat on the wooden floor,
through a thin cotton rug,
which had followed me from Long Island,
to Forest Hills, to the rolling green.
Two candles burned sitting
in shallow glass plates
on the window sill,
a deep shot to the glass pane.
Forest of October ice stars
grow over the windowpane.
A now-dormant greenhouse
along the roof of a nearby building,
yellow-maize bricks,
and brown-grey, meshed concrete,
still visible through the icy mists
just past the farthest brownstone.
Jazz played on the stereo,
when I heard Jack Kerouac
rap poetry to a muffled trumpet;
his voice hums a dance,
under a placard of cool comfort.
For a fortnight,
the building yaws after the Bay winds,
the well silent of brackery.
Every dream shoves against the southerly wind
brushing through the cavernous street below.
Every cauche-mar barred shut an opening gate,
cast in iron, rusted and eroded surfaces,
with the tenacity of spiders' webs,
beyond which screamed creatures of fire
casting pitch black shadows which screamed for freedoms
of careening through streetways and alleyways,
of well-placed yaws on faraway seas.
I awaken before every hour,
drenched in my own sweat,
every light off,
the half moon over Brooklyn,
creeping through the window,
an ominous yet dull glow over everything.
Ares can only gaze,
when desiring to pierce the air,
to lay bare the shadows behind the cloaks,
hidden before and after the tides:
"the nadir maroons our ships,
the apex inundates our cities,"
is all he could say.
He cried mists onto Brooklyn,
and looked in despair.
The bound Earth,
celebrated with budding greenery,
trees along the way,
in muted agony.
Night falls.
I light a cigarette,
walk robot-like
to the writing desk,
dark green leather with dark solid wood,
which lay against the north wall.
Who am I?,
Who are those who seined the streets,
several stories below the kitchen window?
open during the last month of summer,
Atlantic mists coalescing on my skin,
the beat of drums beyond and to the left,
of the furthest crossing,
from where squirrels poked in their heads,
as I typed in fury,
doubtful voices
from the rolling green of Tennessee
clipping at my feet.
I look out over Dekalb Avenue
through a drywall of plaster and wood,
and sandstone;
a sole portrait of the American West,
riverbed painted in maize and maroons,
hangs there, centered;
a tunnel to the Mississippi,
yet doubtful of its forebears
across the Hudson.
In the hidden remnants of the old fort,
ghosts walk the streets,
marauding British armies,
which had come home.
An old General
orders the walking dead
to stand at ease.
Tap-tap-tap on the keyboard,
three Times articles in a row,
and I slam the floor,
my feet weak and trembling from a earthquake
on the other side of the world.
Sweat beads milked from my face,
rain on the hardwood floor.
I navigate in my mind
the underground trains and tunnels
up the 1/9 to Columbia,
and walk out onto the streets below,
though General Greene cannot let me leave
past the fort gates,
for the war had already begun.
Light flickers for an instant
through the windowpane.
From the deepest dream,
I stand by the bed.
Through the windowpane,
brownstone masks the bedrooms across the way,
and I hear a scuffling shoe through the ceiling.
One earthly revolution hence,
a macabre dance of delusional grandeur,
and cascades of concrete,
and the memory of a friend,
dissolve on every television screen,
while I peer through the telescope,
from a settlement at the 3rd landing,
the course of the Mississippi
still safe and below the levees,
Arkansan plains drenched in blue-green waters
from the inland sea,
now light brown with soil,
exhausted from the harvest:
Les cauches-mar, ce furent la verité.
Sois prudent,
Tout qui sont les soldats au coeur,
les gars qui boivents les fleuves avec les mains!
Tout le monde s'est noyé!
Aidons-nous, les lunaires!
Nous sommes aux anges,
pendant nos vies sur la Terre!
Nous qui sont à l'autre bord
où on a fait une fugue de la Louisiane,
aux et par les fleuves,
aux et par les mers!
I sat on a beige carpeted floor,
my back to the light blue couch,
flickers of colored Christmas lights
cast muted glows through the window blinds,
D'autant plus qu'une cinquième bouteille de la bière au gorge,
je vois la rêve, la cauche-mar se termine à l'autre bord,
dans le coeur,
au délà derniere hameau aux bords de la Rivière,
sur la route d'abonnement aux mers
vers la Croix sous l'horizon soudain,
et sur la Mer-Atlantique
aux terres de Breukelen,
la route que je n'aie eu jamais,
pour que j'aie compris,
et je crie:
on est à Nouveau York,
avec tout le monde du Fort Putnam.
With me, a loner who kicked beer bottles
through abandoned streets,
tufts of weeds having caught the dusk,
neon lights reflect from water pools,
the turning Earth a rumble in the black cosmos,
and violet and blue swirl in reflection
while collecting on the streets of Fort Prudhomme,
the muted trumpets having been silent
over several rings of the hour,
with hope,
that the sun would rise again.
I peer into the gray mists,
tangent slices the Pacific from the sky;
San Francisco tolls from a distance:
tildes catch on the breeze
under the sole patch of sun on this peninsula,
its babel of the world,
a current within currents,
and my stark warning to an old friend,
who returns to Istanbul,
hidden beyond Piraean Walls,
my viscera gassed to ashes in Aegean Fires,
as I hop the islands in my dreams,
and glimpse the silhouettes of minarets,
glowing blue-orange in the sun setting
beyond the Balkan mountains.
I'm passed out on a desk in San Francisco,
an unfinished memo crumpled under my hand,
triturated sawdust,
communiqués with all the wrong answers
as the clocks tick toward dawn,
which never arrives;
he hides inside the bazaars
beyond the eastern horizon,
and never returns.
Mares of mid-twentieth century wars,
shadows of minds induced by saturated, watery winds,
the meath of Nietzche's super-men,
and Biblical metaphors shoved on the invaders,
all turned back from the Golden Gate,
for less than one tick of the clock,
and I see my old friend slaughtered by opposing wars.I throw the memo, a crumpled ball of dead paper,
drenched with sweat,
into the wastebasket,
and vow to never to accept that mission again.
Wanders and weeks through streets,
long abandoned of trolleys and tourists,
the night air already settled over San Francisco,
a bar past the furthest Castro shotgun,
and I jump into a taxi with someone new.
I find myself in a living room,
and gaze northward towards the orange lights
of San Francisco below the horizon.
Dull hues reflect off the edges of couches and tables,
and I sit and listen:
a conversation condensed into a blurb
about history, and my history,
of faraway lands marauding on American soil,
a message dimmed:
the closing war plan.
My tongue arches a bow
just beyond his lips,
his breath inside my own,
his chest weighs on mine;
he presses me onto my back,
his arms wrapped around my naked torso,
and I forget myself,
a caesura from the war,
and orgasms within orgasms within orgasms,
a fortnight before the Ides of March.
Two revolutions hence,
and an edge before the Long Island summer,
with a distant friend,
who watched from within the western horizon,
I regarded conversations
which began under the falling snows of Siberia, and
a runaway train down the trans-Siberian towards Alaska.
A ship crashed against icebergs just off Vladivostok.
The war to close before it begins:
to prevent old friends:
from returning to the eastern horizon.
The pungent fog poured over Long Island
flows syrup-like through my lungs and veins,
A recent memory pans in and out,
To breathe being of more importance:
of an old friend’s vehement stare
and a white yet shadowy gas inhaled though my nose and face,
twisting and turning in and out of universal dimensions,
distant conversations of a young, and oft-brazen man from Beirut
slashed through the neck,
after I pried the blade which was mine,
from his broken wrist,
the body removed by another,
and the old friend’s now-tearful and red-eyed stare.
Seven months I wandered between curlyques of brick-lined avenues
The walls of Harvard and its students’ regards an ashen-grey I’d never known,
And sorrowful stares towards the distance as I repeatedly pass a masjid
In random circles towards a home,
where an old friend offers Turkish coffee,
and stumbles before me as I follow him through crowds in Houston.
The twisting and turning in my mind’s eye was subsided:
I’d seen the old men common during my childhood in Mississippi
Who’d lazied about in lawn chairs, beer cans littering the leaves,
on the other side of the walls of Vermont trees,
and stories from the Old South, sons chasing sons from homes,
running from every New England Cape Cod.
A distant friend I’d known for years as a ghost between I and others
approaches from the eastern horizon:
cadre of spirits dances in my sleep,
dreams and conversations travel back through time and around the Atlantic seas.
Mention of al-Aqsa echoes in my thoughts,
I shiver, the winter outside the windows enters my body,
my breath stops,
the light blurs into a passing flight of whites and greens,
a distant scream.
Heat swirls clockwise and outwards from the solar plexus,
and a breath enters my lips,
Blurred lights coalesce into the image of my bedroom.
Conversations over cigarettes and beer
gloss through bound collections of black-and-white photographs
of Manhattan in the 1950’s:
detectives donning fedoras and paging through newspapers,
rattling of the subway cars a distant memory from somewhere,
and short films of the merchants’ passers-by
jostling with playful and unaware looks
in New York at the eve of the Cold War.
A friend from Paris flashes a color photo at me and asks,
“Est-ce que vous me souvenez?â€
I mutter, “Ouias,†as memories charge, later a headache and an aspirin.
“It’s up to you,†another friend tells me,
And I fall asleep, for once bereft of dreams,
Of another city on another sea,
Memories of it burning embers under the waters,
And a tale we burned before it became.
A scribe in Ur paints a story on an old scroll:
The first written words of a new land in an ancient place:
A primal war, we have since been nomads, across deserts and seas,
running like mad from the stars careening through the night
and crashing with aplomb into the green earth.
-San Francisco, 2005. Long Island, 2006. Memphis, Tennessee, 2006, 2007.
----
n.b. Fort Prudhomme, established by M. de la Salle, in the 17th Century. From what I've read in history books and on the Internet, the fort was at or near the site of present-day Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, the exact location not known. It's not the same site as the Civil War-era fort (just south of the Rivermark), which was built through the excavation of a Native American burial mound (doesn't sound good, though I'm not aware of the details of the building of that fort, which was established to fend off attacks from the Mississippi River); this is also not the same as the fortification which once stood at present-day Confederate Park (which is north of the Rivermark, before the monorail to Mud Island), the guns of which (if I remember correctly) fired to fend off, yet there unsuccessfully, Union gunboats and the accompanying Union army from occupying Memphis during the Civil War)
Last Night in New York (the new version)
by Pietro Abbruzzi
Montage of quiet streets
coalesces into bricks
and orange light.
Leather’s rhythmic step
echoes in his ears.
Strangers’ silhouettes
dance in storefronts
to songs he cannot hear.
Seeking a visage he knows,
he finds his reflection.
Hanging on a lamp pole,
a poster in black and dark blue.
He smiles:
he won’t be there.
Remembrances fly
to the flurry of faces
which dot his corner
of Columbia,
and he laughs,
for they don’t know
he’s dead,
a shard of glass
on the bed
of the Hudson.
He walks through
the hazy night,
trips on a garbage can lid,
which makes a Tong!
--more to him
than the murmuring din
of this whole city.
-Memphis, Tennessee, 2004
Music interests/tastes: electronica, classical (primarily piano solos, violin concertos, and a various assortment of operas: preferred opera divas at this time: Vesselina Kasarova, Kathleen Battle), various Broadway off-Broadway etc., seasonal flavors, rock-a-billy, hip-hop (in various languages, including French).
