Pages 53 through 77
DIARY 5262
JOTTINGS - OCTOBER
NEW YORK EXCITEMENT
Vignette: Crash of glass, another, another, and a black Ford stops, two doors open and two fellows run, wildly, down one-way street. Red Corvair follows them, down wrong direction, and doorman points "There he goes." People dash down street, Mercedes about to come out looks around. Ford sits in street, dripping vital fluids below car, onto street, it flows downhill toward 75th Street. Left light out. Other cars stop, wonder at empty Ford. Crowd gathers. Chinese go to see, come back expressing, "Found out nothing." Up to 73rd, see, in entrance to Third Avenue, the shape of a car in dust---had obviously been hit. Dust tracks out, turning right onto Third, broken glass at entrance---thus Ford WAS hit, hit another car, possibly another as there was more glass down Third a bit, then leaking started and empty Ford still stood, radio blaring from open windows. Fellow comes over and kicks door shut. People still cruising, looking alternately out into the street, and alternately at the cute people passing. Figure the kids stole a car and were trying to get away, and in their haste to leave the scene of the stealing (or maybe they were being chased in the car that hit them behind the first time---like the Corvair?) and in terror hit someone else, then the car broke down, and they ran. A building lot was the aim of one, and people chasing after gave the impression that the two runners, running scared, managed to get away. Home.
DIARY 5292
SUBWAYS, TRAINS AND JOHNS
1. Odd sight to see people in clumps along train platforms in AM, the early AM, so that the commuters are old women or jacketed workers who moan and sleep on trip upstate. Later come the suits? (Train to Poughkeepsie).
2. Woman's room without words, only fan and handkerchief and fussy items. Gent's room, only a cane. Man peeks in cautiously before entering.
3. 174th-175th Street station: Pillars stretching away to infinity, a column in an army of mottled orange soldiers, each proudly showing 174/175 for his face. The glint of light on the far rails, curving off to the right, and a mysterious upswing in glint, rails and light, looking like the dimly seen approaches of the first hill of a roller coaster, viewed from the first seat of a squeaky rocking train of cars in a tunnel of darkness leading to the endless chain---drawing up the hill. Then a rumble, and a quiver, a muffled crash, and the sound of iron rotating on iron rotating on iron, filling the air with steel dust, grinding hardnesses harder, crunching grains and pushing atoms as the leviathan thunders downward. The jar of the cars on the uneven rails, tossing the seated riders about like chalk in a box. The roar growing, and, with a strange clacking vibration directly above your head, the two insect-snake eyes come burning out of the blackness, and the green sparks from her electric claws scratch it up its sides.
DIARY 5293
ATMOSPHERIC FANTASIES
1. The revolving door in Chase Manhattan bank went faster and faster as people went in and out, and the last woman through ran through, giggling, high heels clicking on hard floor. What if it KEPT on increasing, sucking in people from bank and off the street, turning into a huge human centrifuge. Funny it would be at first, then horrid with pain and screams and splintering bone.
2. Nancy's parties were inclined to be strange. Faces, masks drawn on milk, floated on blue-white smoke. Eyes became movie lenses, through which you beheld faces soft and luminous, with fuzzy outlines. Everyone floats and dissolves.
3. Ticket taker for Gray Line with two pockets, one Canadian, one American.
4. Well-played piano notes are lumps of purest crystal dropping into quiet water of the utmost limpidity.
5. The cry of the power saw resembled the implacable screams of a prehistoric baby.
6. The statue was burning under its hard, gem-like crust. The flames ate from within until the glaze on the surface was as thin as a coat of powder. With a hiss, the covering fell inward, and a small heap of debris marked the site of the statue. And soon the wind had dispersed even that tiny trace.
7. A horrible howl came from the orchestra.
8. He moved about behind the counter in a manner which convinced me he did his own choreography.
9. A lady in free-falling cape, who had obviously practiced running in front of a mirror, running with the tips of her cape turning tiny flip-flops as she jogged along.
10. Each came into the room with a conversational ball balanced on their noses. When they saw someone whose ball resembled theirs, they barked with glee and tossed their balls back and forth. The room was filled with barking applauding people, and the air was full of conversational balls, which, unfortunately, were too nearly the same to be of interest---like the smells of dog urine against a tree.
DIARY 5294
PLAYING WITH WORDS AND THOUGHTS
1. Drinks: Scotch on the stones, gin on the gravel, Drambuie dirt, rye rocks, bourbon boulders, port pebbles, seven-up schist, absinthe makes the heart grow fonder, daiquiri debris, pschitt on the pschale, water on the wocks, grenadine on the granite, alcohol on the anthracite, beer on the bituminous, crème de menthe coral, vodka on the zircon, tea on the tourmaline, miltown on the malachite.
2. Tumultitudinous crowds at the New Year's festivals.
3. Spring filled trees with green smoke.
4. The boating pool had goose pimples under the wind.
5. The night was a cloak, covering her to her chin in soft velvet.
6. Revival services being conducted by shysters throwing sex at old women.
7. Carrots as long as bull's pizzles, and twice as thick.
8. Yellow stanchion blinking feeble like a crushed beetle in the street.
9. Newspapers chasing in the wind like puppies---or
10. Puppies chasing like windblown newspapers.
11. The dog walked awkwardly, like a man dressed as a dog.
12. A lascivious liver like Loam//Fakes a frivolous flivver from foam.
13. Unfortunate how similar to pastor, bastard is.
14. The fart echo bounced around the tile bathroom like a mad thing fighting to get out.
15. Pawn tickets bought, selling the right to the birthright?
16. The bumblebee was a bathysphere in a pool of sunlight, skimming the floor of the ocean of air.
17. Parts of paths long placid under pools.
18. As he walked, spiders laid web tiaras on his brow.
19. The stillness was felt not as absence of movement but as the positive presence of non-movement, as if everything were making an effort to remain still, in place.
20. From Boothill: Margarita: stabbed by a gold dollar.
21. John Blair: Died of smallpox///Cowboy threw a rope over his feet and dragged him to his grave. Two suicides, Verone and Delia. Two cowboys, drowned, 1896.
DIARY 5295
CENTRAL PARK ATMOSPHERE
1. High above, showing the thinness of the fog, stars twinkled, and even low on the horizon, where apartment lights were clouded, Venus shone.
2. Light through the leaves made all things seem the same distance, and the entrances and exits were lost, and vague fears crept in under the fog cover.
3. My long long shadow crossed a sleeping duck, and with a great splash it flew to the other side of the pond.
4. Picture of a car, wet leaves plastered about the outside, and INSIDE, in the back window, a withered branch of the SAME sort of leaf.
5. Activated sine waves of squirrels ran under the trees.
6. The crickets, formerly harsh and dry and arid, now possessed all the characteristics of moisture. Differences in resonance between dry and wet?
7. The fish pecked away at the morsels of bread in the pond. Because of their fear of the people at the edge of the pond, they struck only from the center of the pond. The number of bites, slowly, surely pecked it toward the shore. When it got too near, they all fled, and the smallest one, fearless or ignorant, continued pecking alone. There's a parallel somewhere.
8. Oil, from trees, from bodies of insects, from hotdog wrappers, skinned the surface of the pool. A microscopic breeze shook not the surface, but the colors on the surface, and a misty veil wavered over the water.
9. As in one night, all the tree buds burst their pods, which lay in a smashed moist mess on the sidewalks. The sun shot through the trees as if delighted to find green, and lit up the branches, then hit the green on the sidewalk and bounced back in joy, until the tunnel between tree and walk reverberated with a joyously green intensity of happy light.
10. The trees that display the most violently colored autumn robes are the younger ones, as if the old had not the passionate energy to turn a brilliant color, but settled for a graying orange.
11. Strange color juxtapositions: the off-orange-pink of leaves in a fallen skirt around the feet of white-limbed trees is precisely the color of the region between the legs of a tiny white toy poodle I'd seen the other morning, rearing up on its hind legs to get a better look and smell at a huge white hound coming toward her.
DIARY 5296
POPULAR ENTERTAINMENTS IN NYC
1. Ford Pavilion: into building and past cars in model settings (very good) of parts of the country that make cars. Then cars in fountain and up ramp through PSDQ or something of sketchy dioramas to old news clippings and past good sketches of 20's to 60's and tractor and then auto parts bank into runway line into cars, through outside port, and for all Disney dioramas (surprisingly good) the FAR entrance is the better because the cars are on the lower, nearer track. City of tomorrow is disappointing, being mainly colored plastics. Out of car and down ramp to color dioramas of steel and radar and energy and design, past sleek dreams of "atmospherics" styling (this RIGHT after car) and garbled sounds and down ramp to showroom for Aurora, Cougar II, and other cars. Past good watercolors to areas where you can select car colors and upholstery and out. I was in one hour and twenty minutes.
2. Must be some way of photographing a symphony orchestra: by blurs or filters or out of focus lenses---to make only the overall motions of violins or cellos appear---remove all random motions of the individuals, and get the SWEEPING actions of rhythms as ALL violins go up and down, as all brasses flash as they lower, as ALL basses sweep as they zum.
3. Incisive song in "Fantasticks" about the mask through which the rich view the world of the common and the poor. "Look at them beating a man dressed as a monkey, isn't that fun?" While the man bleeds and, despairing, calls for help. We toss pennies in the water and ignore the TB germs swarming after the kids who retrieve them.
4. Bach Brandenburg Concerto Number 5 playing during intermission of a horror movie series at the New Yorker.
5. Great stage gimmick: lights flashing rapidly on and off vertically casting shadow of dancers on scrim. He jumps and dances to a very strange effect. [DIAGRAM MISSING]
6. Cliff dwellers looked OK until the fellow put the green and white striped paper boater on the counter. That killed it as a possible place for meeting people.
DIARY 5297
OBSERVATIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES
1. Never noticed how the Germans capitalize TWO first letters of the names Christ or Jesus or God (at least in aria parts). As much of a surprise as learning one STOOD for the "Hallelujah Chorus" in the Messiah, or neglected to applaud at the conclusion of "Parsifal," or DID applaud the crucifix in the Radio City Music Hall Easter Extravaganza.
2. Too bad the Syrians and Egyptians didn't think to bury their glass objects. They're much more beautiful iridescent.
3. Museum: Pre-Christian mosaic glass. Made of canes of molten colored glass elements for the desired design. Several of these were fused and then sliced so that cross sections formed the surface. Mosaic glass was very fine and was used to line glass rooms. Millefiore, similar, lacks often the delicacy of execution.
4. Clavichord better than harpsichord, because not plucked, but struck, like piano, and can be kept vibrating, unlike harpsichord.
5. What an amusing spectacle it would be if the walls of every building with the furniture and everyone nonhuman suddenly disappeared. Secretaries above secretaries typing, filing, kissing bosses. People in apartment houses shaving, sleeping, shitting, singing. Cats curled on nothing.
6. Why it is that anything touted as sensitive (an old movie, a book, a child) is rarely, if ever, sensible?
7. The light from the candle would be worth the candle, regardless if there was a cake or not.
8. In nothing else are there so many degrees of perfection as there are in complexion. Some are so perfect that there can be no recourse to similes with rock or alabaster, or clouds or peaches or silk or cream. The complexion has the quality of skin, neither diaphanous nor stony, but infinitely tactile, not so much for its particular texture, but simply for the reality of its marvelous existence.
9. Why is it smokers drinking beer have lovely bodies and complexions, while nonsmokers drinking milk are scrawny and sallow?
DIARY 5298
REASONABLY DISGUSTING FOODS
1. There were THINGS in the lettuce, things that had crept or flown in and gotten caught when the head was picked. Perhaps they scurried about in green labyrinths scrambling to find the lost exit, or maybe they were crushed immediately by a hard muddied thumb, between green book-leaves of fiber. But there they were, sodden and clinging, as I ate raw leaves plucked from the head: little black motes with wings and crooked legs. When I rubbed a brownish rust spot, much of it came off in a coherent piece of broken insect carcass, limp legs clinging to my finger like in life, and I brushed it against the table thrice before it scraped off. I crunched sand left from the washing and grimaced at the thought of small heads and thoraxes splitting between my molars.
2. Undoubtedly the worst "Over $1" breakfast at the Ho-Jo's outside PoKeepsie Motor Inn. OJ was warm and tasteless. Coffee was coffee, but the plate of scrambled eggs and bacon and toast was cold and unattractive. Eggs hard and cold and seemingly artificially yellow and odorless and tasteless and (at least) greaseless; the bacon was meatless and all the fat was charred a brownish black that crumbled under the fork; the toast was symmetrically cut and placed, but that was all---it was underdone, dry, too lightly buttered, and COLD. And this for $1.20. I was later told by John to try the Diner, probably ten times as good for half the price.
3. Small restaurant (greasy spoon) surrounded by Schrafft's trucks on 22nd this side of Coronet, surprises by furnishing a two-inch mouse running down the blind pull and stumbling about in the coffee cups and plastic covers.
4. After the party at Shanghai East, fellow pours remains of tea into ashtrays to clean them, and pours the nauseating remnant into a glass. Ugh.
5. At the Tenement we went to the second floor restrooms because the third floor was drafty, and then there was a SPOON in the urinal.
6. How easy to eat fast and leave, listening to the skipping music at Tad's Steaks at 42nd Street.
DIARY 5299
OBSERVING NEW YORK
1. Nude dressmaker's dummy sitting primly cross-legged with the torso above the waist not there at all.
2. Sign of the Dove---advertising itself by simply getting built.
3. Puerto Rican kids at Macy's fireworks: "Mira, mira, mira."
4. The tide of green lights swept up the avenue, carrying busses, taxis, and trucks in its thrall.
5. The white changing to green lights against the windows of Park West Village.
6. November 30, 1963: 4:10 to 4:20: two police "fix" bystanders in front of Malachy's.
7. Same: Cheery station wagon motor gurgling to itself in a sleeping neighborhood.
8. You'd think there might be one pair of Venetian blinds in certain Bronx apartment buildings? NONE.
9. New York might be nice with FREE tickets to concerts, TAILORED suits and CHEAP clothes, $2.25 for 2400 ft tapes, 88 for Polaroid film, SILENT films and FREE midnight shows, Wednesday amateurs night, discovers of Italian night club, FREE meals with Escoffiers, books 10% off, pocketbooks 20% off, cheap trips to Europe, free chess and coffee shops, cheap restaurants, neighborhoods, art galleries, sex for the asking, if you're not particular.
10. It was a night I felt alive. I got off the 101 bus at 125th Street and Old Broadway. I walked for a breathless bit in front of a Puerto Rican of great massy hair and a triangular sweet face like the head of a preying mantis. The Park began at 125th and I marveled at the stone sweep of the stairs, then had to marvel at the idea of stairs at all, and as I climbed I grasped at shadows and watched the lights of Palisades Amusement Park swing below me. The Hudson was a random collection of colored neon rods from the lights of the Park and the Spry sign flashing yellow and red. My shadow swooped along the ground on the other side of the parapet, scooping over dollops of ground at one bound. Grant's Tomb, unlighted, eclipsed the lit tower of Riverside Church which looked like, not a buttressed monolith of Styrofoam, not a wax-furrowed candle, but simply, sternly, precisely like Riverside Church, but then the cruising began and the spell ended.
DIARY 5300
CARNEGIE AND PHILHARMONIC HALLS
1. The light on the chorus grew dim and dimmer, until the books were pulled closer to the face, or turned out toward the audience to catch reflected orchestra light. The men in the last row faded with obscurity as they turned profile and held their books above their head on the RIGHT to catch the light coming from the LEFT. Some sopranos in the dim second row gave up completely, and the chorus became ragged and fuzz-edged. Then, on the program, under Stage Director, was the Lighting Director, who was undoubtedly being hurled to blackest Hades.
2. Unique arrangement of Stokowski orchestra. The group was either amazingly young---many still must go to high school, and a scattering of beaked virtuosos. The audience was 70% silent, except for damn Bill, who insisted on Breathing exercises through the strings. What an odd assortment in orchestra: three oriental violinists and an oriental bassoonist---the only negra a female, and a timpanist. The fourth violinist had to restring a string in "Serenade for Strings" and the elaborate kitchen for Shostakovich's Tenth had to sit through both that and Kamarinskaya---in neither of which did the violins go above middle C. The layout of the orchestra produces a singularly deep and striking sound due to its arrangement. Pleasant to the eye and very to the ear---all those boxes shooting into the balcony---the picture was a bit wrecked by bassists peering from their side positions to see their music---two drummers followed the string score and the gongist (?) snoozed.
3. Not only does the second terrace of the Philharmonic Hall have better sound than the floor, the floor (with only row Z level with row A, all between in a depression) ALSO has the airy noise of the air conditioners, completely missing from higher up.
4. Acoustics of revised Philharmonic Hall are disquietingly good---sitting over at the left, it's downright unnerving to hear the left ear as full of sound as the right.
5. The beams of snow swirled the four stories from the beams to the balcony, and they draped and swirled except under the pillars, when I guess lights on the walls melted the snow from the stone at Philharmonic Hall.
DIARY 5301
LUNT-FONTANNE AND LEWISOHN STADIUM
1. The Lunt-Fontanne has circles in much the same way that Hell would have, and some of these bear wonderful resemblance to them. The lowest was the basement lounge---lit theatrically and dimly with spots and left in deep shadows. Lean gentlemen with haloed heads and holes for eyes glare cadaverously about, like some elegant preying hideaway denizens. The marquee lights lightly over crowds spilling into the street, and a humid breeze dissipates the smoke, but the third circle, the lobby, was cool and open and the promenade was open and casual. Up the stair to the mezzanine lobby and the wood floors and mirrors and murals caught sounds and threw them about, the noise level rose and the loudness seemed louder for being light yet smoky. The theater itself was warm, and I did not visit the top circle, highest at the top of the balcony, a padded plush passageway admitting the dear ones to their cheap seats.
2. The rolling blending melody swelled from golden lips, and the flowing curtains billowed like notes blown by wind into hollows, tone by tone, of an immense arpeggio. The microphone swayed as oscillations reinforced, then broke into jerky half-swings as a node halved the frequency of vibration. Only infrequently the wind was of the proper direction to produce a hum. A solitary man in anchored straw boater sat chin in hand, at a table reflecting light yellowly. Off-duty bassists bent back and grinned fatly at the rolling draperies that lightened and darkened themselves and the stage as they blew in and out of the lights. The wind altered the strings most, but the inferior brass had their built-in dissonance. The wind was merciless with the soprano, tossing her white voice unrulily as it tossed her white tulle. During the quiet second movement of Dvorak's "New World" the wind repented and held pent for half the term of the movement, then it regained vigor, and the flapping of papers, bending over their supports like limp ballerinas, flew modulated with the music. The string section was half-strength as bows were used to supplant the Brobdingnagian clothespins that held the music to the metal, thankfully, stands.
DIARY 5302
PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS
1. My eyeballs, behind closed lids, turned to churning smoke in my skull.
2. I rummaged among the dirty dishes for a knife not so dirty as the rest.
3. Days you never thought would come, happily have a habit of coming. So it is with days of leaving and departure on vacations.
4. I gulped the cold water until I felt my eyes start from my sockets. Were they connected, I wondered.
5. The local anesthetic was so effective I felt that I could clip a dollop of lip and not even feel it.
6. In an office building when I hear a siren, I needn't get to a window to see the STREET, simply observe the people in the OFFICE across the street and I watch them to see the progress; if it stops, or looks interesting, I take action.
7. Busy days: Pass FBI building with black Buick with bullet holes neatly through both front and back windows, with glass (but no blood) on the seats. Washing dishes, before a movie and there's a "whunk" and someone's lying in the street in front of 315 E. 70th. They struggle to reclining position, and just after ambulance leaves, a light truck comes to repair the burnt-out light just above the accident scene.
8. What an odd morning (May, 1962). Enjoy the luxury of waking to the light of the sun at 6 am and lounging, amid fantastic dreams, until 7:45. Then Dr. Moorman's office is vacant, with a sign on the mirror "Do not remove, Dr. Moorman," and he doesn't come. Then see turbine car in front of 58th Street TV station, then see Bobbie on the street, carrying one ski. Get to office to find three jobs bombed, all because of rotten tape on the card-to-tape machine.
9. The amount of sheer galling boredom generated during a scientific conference is truly phenomenal. A dull, long-winded paper, presented by a stumbling illiterate oaf, is replied to by an equally illiterate oaf, drawing on his own experience until the audience numbly fears that a second paper of the tedious length of the paper replied to is being given. The moderators clench their fists and rest their heads, conversations proliferate, and a stomach-tightening ennui clutches everyone.
DIARY 5303
FLYING
1. Contoured orchards look like bits of chenille bedspreads scattered below.
2. The sun was a frozen exploding hydrogen bomb just above the horizon.
3. The skin of the plane wing vibrated back and forth, as if a tiny, frightened heart were beating within. The sight of street lights as diamonds set into the velvet of the night-flight countryside immediately reminded me of Violetta's lush black velvet gown for the third act of the City Center's Traviata. How many times could I look out the window and FEEL "Black Velvet, Black Velvet, Black Velvet."
4. Barren as the vastness of the moon, the cloud layer formed the bottom of the well of the range of vision. Lightly crumpled, speckled with the blue of underlying water, it was broken by odd spherical tufts higher than the rest, like the frozen image of a boiling surface of porridge.
5. The earth was a burnt red Mars under the setting sun, and the mountain tops were islands floating in seas of their own shadows. A prop plane droned past so far below it looked treetop high.
6. The landscape was swirled with washes of fuzzy paint. Swatches of green and rock-yellow, flashes of violet and patches of orange and yellow, and tiny individual dots of bright red. Montreal was a city of metal edges---all flat roofs had them. Peaked roofs were cobalt blue or fire red.
7. The inbound roadway swarmed with suburbanites coming to their urban work. The outbound roadway carried urbanites going to the airports to fly to work in other urban areas. The roads passed between rows and rows and rows of people going nowhere, doing no work: the cemeteries.
8. The dandelion leaves patted the mud smooth as the prop wash flattened them. Bits of stone flew away at the first blast, but others stood their ground, only to reluctantly roll uphill when the engines revved. The dandelion heads, long ago denuded of their pillowy scarves, whipped tail-like back and forth, and the weeds looked not so much like trees holding tenaciously with their roots, as lice greedily clamping their heads into the skin, even though the finger tries to scratch them off. Then the plane circled a bit and they were lost to view, to recuperate until the next whirlwind.
DIARY 5304
QUIET SUBWAYS
1. The dead quiet Second Avenue station at First Avenue and 1st Street, presumably, but not, the lower right-hand corner of Manhattan Island. Not a footfall to echo except my own---except a sound. A faraway, yet coming loud sound---a repetitious hacksaw, pebble-rolling sound. Somewhere in the column-lined caverns, someone was snoring. Red lights twinkling in the far right distance and white lights blazing on the near left. Slow footsteps down leaden steps, and pats across the concrete floor as a late-goer returns to the caverns to wait for a subway. What business had they being out at 3:15 on a Wednesday morning? I had a class to make at 116th and 7th at 9 that same morning, so I was determined to squeeze in a few hours sleep between now and then. But what business had these usually old workers in the subways at this hour? Only they, and from the fatigued look in their eyes, maybe not EVEN they, knew. Station-shaking rumbles from a great distance, and a hum growling, then quickly louder. A repercussion on the ears growing to a roar and a click and a blast of light and wind and the train thundered into the station, tossing up green lightning-sparks in its wake. Passing, it coasts up the platform and stops as I dash up to make the momentarily-closing doors; a swish, and I am inside and the door slides closed behind me. A pause, jerk, and the trip uptown has begun.
2. The train is empty, completely empty, yet its full complement of lights flash bravely in the loneliness, proclaiming that it is ready for anything that might come: from a marauding boy scout troop with impedimenta, bound under concrete walks to a tent-pitching area far, far out, to a covey of wealthy hens, home from the theater, clucking cheerfully from their black plumage. The row of yellow seats, woven synthetically into dirt-accumulating patterns. One high seat, one lumpy seat, one seat with a piece of gum, used, perched out of seating range on the edge, one seat in shadow from the lights above, one seat slanted, as if it had been sat on for years on one side and never on the other.
DIARY 5305
CINEMATEQUE AND LATIN QUARTER
1. For the third Cinemateque the crowd was even more so. The poor were more ragged, they smell. The rich better, and one woman in a feather cap the IMAGE of Marienbad, and lovely blonde in long varnished straight hair surrounding impeccable makeup, and the cliques are more beautiful and talk louder and know more people and socialize more loudly. A couple were drinking and a fellow had spyglasses. The two fellows bent to talk in front of me, and the hair of the one mingled with the hair of the other, and formed a small Japanese character in the spotlight.
2. Latin Quarter: First the dancers and singers come on and introduce the show---then the cowboy mood, and the girls sit on huge horses and have feathered chaps and the two trolleys on the ceiling roll out a pistol and a hobby horse, surmounted by girls in imagination. The juggler comes out, tumbles, juggles seven balls and seven hoops and tosses seven cups and seven saucers, plus a lump of sugar and a spoon, onto the top of his head as he careens over the audience on a tall unicycle. Then come the Spanish dancers and the whining, shrill pitch of the flamenco singer, and the hand-clap and castanets of the Spanish. Another production number and the six-footers have skirts that slip over their heads and form halos of feathers. Then the gypsies, the pantomimes come on in red-checked jumpers and imitate the Andrews Sisters, John and Martha, the King and I, You're Just in Love, and take their final bows in white dinner jackets, cream scarves, black socks, and red and white checked skirts. Suddenly the corner of the room echoes with drums, and the scene lights up with surf riders and the Hawaiian dancers come on, beating themselves with their hands, juggling glinting machetes. Then the dancers come out and do a fluorescent dance, and it starts raining on the stage. The dancers juggle torches and the black light comes on and the costumes glow. They sing and dance and parade and the show at New York's Latin Quarter is over.
DIARY 5306
LOW SUNSET AND SHADOWS
Watching people walking with the sun low behind them is a "new" sight. The smoothest of walkers, when covered and forcibly disconnected from their shadows, produce shadows that jerk and stop, jerk forward and stop, pulled along by a jolting string ahead of them. Probably connected with the way people bob up and down, the changes of the arms were even more striking. From above it's obvious that they're swung back and forth briskly, but translated into linear shadow-motion along the sidewalk, the arms can only be on springs, jumping up and back, and up and back, fingers always visible, as if on limber free-running springs. Shoulder-sway, alternating up and alternating down, not at all visible from above, is perfectly visible when shadow-transmitted. Even people walking, not into, but along with, their shadows are strange. They walk evenly (from above), but their shadow lengthens and shortens grotesquely as they bob as they walk. (From October, 1963)
DIARY 5322
November, 1964
JOTTINGS
PLEASANT BIT AT RUDLEYS: 10/20/64: Sit for a bacon and egg sandwich and vanilla malted before an evening at the New York City Ballet, and a violin carrier walks in and sits down two from me. I ask "Are you playing tonight?" and she says yes, and it turns out she's a sub, from knowing people in the viola section, is going on the three day tour to North Carolina after this season, and has never played "Piege de Lumiere" before. We chat and eat and she leaves, but I stay on to see the tall elegant shaved-head negro talking to the gang of toughs lolling against the counter. He's fey and inventive, and carries among other things, dead worms, an infallible conversation continuer. They take and laugh and he leaves and the fellows sit down. The enormously round, petaled short waitress rolls around the counter to wait on them. Orders taken, she bustles back to file them. She looks perplexed, then calls out to one of the boys. "What do you want on your sundae, fruits or nuts?" There's a rising "Awp" of laughter from the boys, and an amused "duh" from the questioned. What could he possibly ask for. "Ah, I'll take the nuts," and the waitress grins. I BET she knew what she was doing. She flubbed in stacking the cherry atop the whipped cream mound; the round thing rolled off the top and onto the dirty counter. She batted it, quick as a cat, then watched it intently as if to make sure she'd killed it, picked it up, wiped it off, and plunked it on top. Grinning, I left for the ballet, jotting the jotting on the way.
DIARY 5357
ORANGE JUICE 229
HE TOOK THE CAN OF FROZEN ORANGE JUICE out of the refrigerator, took the can opener down off its hook beside the sink, and opened the can. He had turned the cold water tap full on, and the cold water from the depths had come rushing through the labyrinths into the sink. He emptied the gelid orange mass into the narrow top of the yellow plastic quart bottle, then rinsed the can carefully, lid first, under the cold deluge, pouring the brownish-yellow liquid into the plastic yellow container on top of the frozen mash. He repeated the process a second time, when the water from the cleansed can poured forth slightly muddily orange. After the third time, the water flowed from the shining tin lip clearly. He dropped the dripping can into the garbage bag at his feet, then screwed the black top onto the yellow container. He shook it vigorously three or four times, then, without setting it down, unscrewed the cap. Two drops flowed down the smooth surface from opposite sides, leaving a quantity of liquid still clinging on the ledges formed by the screw. When he fitted the top of the bottle neatly onto his curved lower lip, both sides smack up against the cracks of his mouth, and tilted it up to level the water into his mouth, the drops on the screw-ledges flowed downward to meet the corners of his mouth, and too much and too heavy to cling there by surface tension, they flowed down each side of his chin, as his throat opened and closed redly around the flowing orange stream. They flowed down the same tracts, where, in fifty years time, the chin-furrowed frown lines of old age would sit in toothless splendor.
DIARY 5358
MISCELLANY OF OBSERVATIONS AND QUOTES AND IDEAS
1. Finally, as tears laved my lower lashes and lids, I urinated.
2. I finally, with fervor, had eggs for my supper.
3. Left home one AM with laundry and a rush, and found I hadn't tied my shoes.
4. Never had I seen so many ostentatious people trying so hard to look ostentatious.
5. Would you like to sound the clarion horn, the brazen trumpet, the sounding brass? Tantara, tantara, It is I, It is I; I am HERE (paean in Central Park)
6. Jean Jacques: It had to be good-looking, but after a while it got to be looking like the drawings for the opera house for Lincoln Center, so we went a little bit the other way, to make it look a bit more industrial looking.
7. Marty got an introduction to Astrid from Joan by telling her about the prostitute he's infatuated with.
8. "Lukas couldn't possibly remember me." "Well," said David Goodstein, "You never can tell who you should remember."
9. Note on Correspondence: Letters typed to Bill in retribution for his typing all upper case, with symbolic: one side read like THIS: [DIAGRAM MISSING], rough to type, dizzying to read. Back side typed mirror image by putting in carbon and sheet backward. Talked about CP "Tempest" Caliban farting on every other line, and three of the clowns absolute queers: lisping, rolling eyes, breaking wrists, and falsettos. Then with NO spaces between words on one side and 1 space between EACH letter on other side.
10. Just as children have tonsils removed, why not have all teeth extracted at twelve, and special odorless, tasteless, unbreakable, one-piece, plastic choppers in?
11. Idea from a museum: a fan with a little mirror on the last tine, for primping or periscoping.
12. Guatemala Wall Hanging vs Chic Container Corp (words at Brooklyn Museum)
DIARY 5359
FEELINGS AND IMPRESSIONS
1. The desperation of looking for something after you're sure you've looked everywhere it could possibly be. The relief of finding it in a place you'd LOOKED twice before.
2. The "Ode to Joy" will never be sung with the gusto with which it was meant to be sung in the beginning. The quest---the quest of what, it matters not---the quest took the joy from the ode, and replaced it with grasping and straining.
3. The ineffably good feeling that comes with wiping one's face in a warm dry towel, after coming exhausted from a cold salt sea.
4. One gets the impression, after seeing relics of martyrs in church after church, that after the lions partially dismembered the faithful, the priests of the church descended and properly finished the task.
5. Flecks on my glasses caught the lights, and threw false glints everywhere. Romantic splashes veiled the trees, and the lamps rayed stars into my eyes.
6. The strange sensation of seeing the same people in the same seats on the return trip, after getting to know them, and compare to the first impression: "My dear, they're still awful."
DIARY 5360
NOTES FROM AUREON AND BEULAH BROWN
1. January 9, year's predictions (which I didn't see), but follows the predictions for me made by Beulah Brown: next three or four weeks, skating or walking across ice, be unnecessarily careful. In relation to research, I'm trying to find semblance of direction in my interest, long road which will bear satisfactory fruit, but not as fast as I would wish. I'm meeting the requirements and passing the test. Shaping things, someone attracted to me spiritually, minute measurements, some sort of a reward. Someone scientific when they were here, can't break through. She saw me, mixing colors, an artist, elderly gentleman's influence, not a relative. He didn't even speak this language: he tells me to be very careful. "Why should you want to stop yourself. Pretty much the master---of the group the most critical and analytical. No one need apply the brakes, no one could if they wanted to. No definite trip in operation as far as definite planning will see now." When it DOES happen, it will be WEST.
2. Fantastic spaceship analogy to Stan's life. But it lapses into personal, and he KNOWS what he's saying. A man in space that NEVER CAME BACK. Mel reacts, and people comment on his acting, and Norm draws Stan out again on the trip and Mel obviously knows he's the center of attraction and ACTS the petrified realizer that HE'S farther out on the spaceship (not getting up in AM) than Stan (singing at school). "I'm an emotional feeling thing." If a bum comes up to you on the Bowery and offers you $10 for $5, you WOULD NOT TAKE IT---you would NOT TRUST him. "Within you there's an old, old man, and he SHOWS." When Stan pulled out his arch support, and MEL pulled out HIS arch support, the room collapsed. "You must know the names of the people, I have to get the terms: copping out: evading the situation; switch: changing the subject; shit, fuck, screw, tits, fart: articles of common every-sentence usage.
DIARY 5361
FURNITURE BUYING, NEW YORK COINCIDENCES
1. I went to various places trying to find a reading chair, and stopped at Office Furniture Incorporated on 61st, and Mr. Sol Rissner took me under his fat wing because I looked like his son, the producer, in California. So I showed him the diagrams I'd made of the chair, how the seat must be flat, solid, and air-holes-leather, how the seat is 16-18" off the floor, and hopefully adjustable, how the arm-rests are 10-11" above the seat, and the seat not more than 18-20" deep, and practically square. The reading tray should pivot about a point halfway up one arm, to rest on the other arm, possibly two, one for reading, one for eating. Sol said it couldn't be done, and diagrammed a lectern 32" high in front and 42" high at back, on slides which could be pulled over chair, for $135. He then sent me to Mr. Billet at Leather Furniture to get the chair at 315 W. 47th, and he had some which he said he would sell for $195, and Sol said "25% off," but when the chair was finished, I didn't like it, so that was that, for a while.
2. Want to phone Bill after I get out of the bus, but I KNOW that I have only a quarter and pennies and debate going to driver and getting change for the quarter. I needed a DIME. At that moment the fellow getting off, passing my seat, bent down and came up to say, "Is this yours?" And handed over a dime. I said, distinctly, "Oh," and took the dime, and he was gone. I looked at the dime and phoned Bill, and he wasn't home, so I went to "Viridiana" alone, cutting in front of two women fussing for change and got in JUST at intermission. That movie was, in its sacrilegious way, even worse than "La Dolce Vita." With the lying rape of a novice to start things out, snobbery among bums, suicide by hanging, a crucifix used as a switchblade, a photo of the bums in the form of the Last Supper table, with a harlot's cunt, the rape of the Viri by the bums, the son who USES everything, the farm to be productive, the plaster in the attic, the maid to play cards with, as the cat used the mouse in the attic, and the terrible end when she comes to give herself to him and he invited the maid to stay, and the modern impotence of the last line, "I knew the first time I saw my cousin that someday she would play cards with me."
DIARY 5362
NEW YORK COINCIDENCES
1. All in all, it was a happy kind of evening. Wednesday, three days before taking off on a deluxe tour around the world, $1740 already paid in, one traveler's check spent, I get to work with $2 and change. Coffee and lunch and dinner (egg and ham sandwich and 7-Up) leaves one with 12 and a feeling of rain in the air. I look for someone I know and see no one. Usherette shows me to my seat, over rail, and says, "You have to walk down." I laugh and say "I didn't intend to jump over." Can I ask her for 3? Woman in back of me raves about plushness "and all for $3.05, how wonderful." "Better than City Center," I say. Can I ask HER for 3? Intermission and couple says, "I'll ask him. Can you see all the stage?" "Yes, 95% of it." could I ask 3 for my opinion? Out to balcony and part curtains. It IS raining, and hard, and I MUST get 3. Little old man leans over saying, "It rained right before opening, and it's raining tonight." I smile and take 12 out of purse. "Yeah, and I wanted to walk home tonight." "Walk," he asks, fiddling with the curtain. "Can't you take a subway?" I flush and advance, "Well, you walked into it. I WANT to take a bus, but I came out with no money, tomorrow's payday, and I have only 12." He looked at me. "Could I have 3?" He looks at me. "You want 3?" He GIVES it to me. BLESS him.
2. Fellow in truck that I thought would stop while I crossed the street, but it almost didn't: "Hey, watch it, guy. It took you a long time to get her, don't wreck it now. See the lovely lights? Red and green? OK, you can go now."
3. Strange all the exceptions: 1) Guy collapses in American Mandolin Orchestra. 2) Great Shanghai closed the VERY day I choose to go there (fire in kitchen). 3) Watch "La Maternelle" first TV show in week, but they START by showing "Greed." 4) Curtain is rung down during "The Invitation" because the microphone isn't turned on.
4. Only 128 movies in 326 days June 26, 1964 through May 17, 1965.
DIARY 5363
EXCEPTIONAL HAPPENINGS IN NYC
1. Some days EVERYTHING seems to happen. October 7, 1964. Agree to meet Bill at the Fair at 5. Thus must get out of class at 4. At 4:05 he's still going strong and class is sparking away with ideas and questions. Leave at 4:10 and there's a note from Yaciuk. Then I remember JOAN had called and I'd said I'd call HER. THEN as I enter, my phone rings and it's Miss Kess from Naess and Thomas. Call Walter and he's been jailed, Joan's been FIRED, and as I leave, KAREN has a question, and the street contains such a doll that I enter the uptown side, across the street, rather than the downtown side, on the near side of the street, and have to go underground just in time to catch the train down to Grand Central, then race immediately to catch the express, but not super-express, to the fair. Someone's barfed on the floor, and the car stinks, and probably the seat was fetid, because there was an empty space, next to which a girl smiled in embarrassment when someone sat in the chair with a wrinkled nose. I got to the Fair at 4:58, and of course Bill was five minutes late. Cheers to the fair for handing out free guidebooks.
2. New York is a young city. It may not be as heinously sophisticated as Paris or Rome, in their aged bestiality, but, as the sins of the teenager are never truly sinful, yet they are enjoyed immensely, and the New Yorker gets the everlasting delight of his wonderful wickedness much more powerfully than the practiced evildoers of the older cities of the world, though the objective hideousness of the acts may be ages apart.
3. Leaving Mario, meeting John in the park, Arno on the street, and Bill.
4. I seemed to be hitting parties: first, at the City of New York Museum, a banquet. Then in Chateau Frontenac the ticket sellers, then in the Mont Royal Lodge the groaning board, then in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts the tables set up in the halls.
DIARY 5364
INTELLECTUALIZATIONS
1. Tense-making to watch a very old performer, particularly if it's a she, and she's a dancer. I fear, watching, a dry shatter of bone and powdery splinters poking up through blue bruised bloodless flesh. I picture a grab that collapses her thin chest and a dry leaf crackle of ribs fills the theater. I visualize her falling after a spin, or hitting a foot after a fall, or banging into a platform and collapsing in a painful heap. I expect a flow of terrible blood, horridly thick, or horridly thin, in sexual regions. I expect torn clothing, exposing old skin.
2. He knew he should join the group, but he couldn't. He hovered on the outskirts and smiled with the laughter. "How funny it all is," he thought. It couldn't be said that he was crying inwardly, but he whipped himself mentally for his detachment.
3. Because of his lack of success with the world, he became detached from it. He shunned the company of men and took his pleasures from the impersonal delights of the theater and music.
4. His mind crawled with cockroaches of thought which ran from morsel to morsel of knowledge, testing each, then turning aside for another.
5. In science fiction you identify with the hero; in fantasy, there's no need (often there's no CHANCE) to identify with ANYONE.
6. My beard was 1) downright uncomfortable---aware of it when I lay down, SAW it when I chewed. 2) wanted to avoid shaving, but shaving was longer and rougher. 3) Not really the right shape beard line. 4) Not nearly a good color. 5) Too slow in growing. 6) Trouble at work. 7) Felt like a phony. 8) SERVED its purpose (no shaves in Europe). 9) Don't like being stared at for IT. 10) It wasn't ME.
7. We like to be Romans or Greeks, but in the summer, without refrigerators or air conditioners or ice? French without plumbing and regular baths?
8. The classics are not plays or orations or even celebrations of the past, they are a ritual of the present, performed with fervor, yet as with any ritual, performed with little understanding by the commoner.
DIARY 5365
VAGUELY OCCULT
1. Looking idly out cafeteria window as I eat my accustomed late lunch, I see someone who looks like Bruce Beeker from the back. On looking closer, when he turns to look at a passing car, he is MYSELF. I watch, food motionless on my tongue, as I cross the street and GET RUN DOWN. I tremble as I come to the corner, and DETERMINE not to cross, BUT---
2. "I'm working" again: October 9, walking home from work on Park from 60th, I think "Someone would think I was LOOKING for Julian Gerard, walking in front to 535 like this." Who walks out and down my direction? Julian Gerard. October 11, looking out window at corner of 59th and Madison, watching people, thinking, "I'll have to ask Herman Washington how his wife's birthday was." It was yesterday and she's expecting any day. Who walks up Madison to corner as I think that? Herman Washington.
3. Once in a million billion years, someone, somewhere, puts a container of water on to boil, and for an instant before it boils, it freezes. The scientific laws insist that it will, once in a million billion years. The laws of probability are strict, but they insist it MUST happen to someone, somewhere. I have never seen a kettle of boiling water freeze (and if it happened to me, just today, chances are good that it happened so quickly my poor slow eyes wouldn't have noticed it at all). But once something equally startling happened, and happened to many people, and all the people noticed it. It was at a high school basketball game, in a small basketball court, crowded for the traditional rivalry. Two thousand young eager throats opened in support of their teams, and the rafters rang with roars. After a brilliant set-shot, for possibly a second and a half, after the initial cheer, everyone was quiet. The band had finished its fanfare for the points, the cheerleaders were gazing with glazed eyes at the floor, everyone, everywhere, in the entire auditorium, stopped talking for that second and a half. The ball was between bounces. For an improbable second and a half there was dead silence. When the silence was broken, it was not in cheers, but, affected by the silence, the silence was broken by soft laughter and gasps of amazed conversation.
DIARY 5366
ABSURDITIES AND STUPIDITIES
1. Absurdity with telephone: Think ME-6 is weather, and dial it twice, only to get taped comment "If you are dialing Westchester, please use the area code." I look at paper and see that people dial the ME-7 number 100,000 times a day. Dial ME-7 triumphantly, and wait for signal. Buzz and hum. Wait and then decide to dial 1111 after the exchange. "At the tone the time will be 1:19, and 20 seconds." So, that was the TIME. Decide it's Wendigo, and again see where I got the 7, from WEN. Dial WEN and wait again, THEN dial 1111 and get temperature. It was 82.
2. Got into bed with underwear on, said "Damn," got up, put on light, got slide rule out and put on tape recorder to remind myself to measure bathroom in AM, hung clothes up, shut light off, and got into bed with underwear on, said "DAMN," got up, put on light, wrote this, took underwear off, put pajamas on, shut light off, and got into bed.
3. Then there was the early morning when the unrefrigerated sweet-roll cylinder exploded, spreading dough across the room.
4. "Well, HELLO." "How have YOU been?" "OK. I've just come from Columbia." "I've just seen FRANK." "Oh, you have?" "Yes, I've just been with FRANK." I had no idea who Frank was, and hung up.
5. "Two minutes, two minutes until curtain time. PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS. The CURTAIN will go up whether you are seated or not. Please take your seats. You have two minutes, two minutes." Voice on loudspeaker in the Fox Wilshire Theater in Los Angeles before "Exodus."
6. From picture puzzle: flip wrong pieces over; find it's too big for the table; unhook already hooked pieces; turn table around; two wrong pieces perversely hooked together; a terribly phallic orientation, fit the proper protuberance into the properly shaped slot; start at 6 pm, all turned over at 6:20; boundary arranged at 7:50; finally square it at 10:10; end at 1:30 for the night; start at 10:30 am, then at 12:30, at 3:00, at 4:30, and at 5:00, finish, with a photo at each time listed.
DIARY 5367
LISTS AND LISTS
1. Chinese feast: 1. Champagne. 2. Chinese cold tray: shrimp, abalone, chicken, pork, mushrooms. 3. Abalone with beef gravy and watercress. 4. Shark Fin soup (strips are part of tail). 5. Peking Duck with Scallions (skin). 6. Duck (chopped in onion and pea sauce) rolled in extremely thin dough. 7. Pork-Chicken-Broccoli. 8. Pork-Chicken-snow pea pods-mushrooms-water chestnuts. 9. Beef-Chunks and watercress---pungent sauce. 10. Sea Bass under onions, grass, salt pork shreds. 11. Rice with shrimps. 12. Watermelon, pineapple, cantaloupe, orange, apple, pineapple, honeydew. 13. Cake and tea.
2. Schartlesville Hotel: had 35 items on the table (chicken, ham, fish balls, hominy grits, tapioca, peas, carrots, corn, green beans, lima beans, bread, cucumbers, ice cream, cake, donuts, Lebanon bologna, boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rhubarb, chick peas, cole slaw, okra, wax beans, applesauce, corned beef, shoo fly pie, peaches, prunes, potato salad, sweet relish, cranberry sauce, milk-tea-coffee, and two other items. I had only 20.
3. We traveled 4580 kilometers by bus, or 2748 miles. It's 3624 miles from New York to Paris, so assume 3626 from New York to Brussels, so the round trip by plane covered 7252 miles by air. added to the 2748 miles by bus, added to the 1 mile by boat in Venice, makes a total of 10,001 miles in all.
4. Results of Diplomacy: Game 1 I was France; ended second. Game 2 England; ended third. Game 3 Austria-Hungary; ended sixth. Diplomacy game went through Fall 07, played July 17, 1965. 14 moves, from 9:30 pm to 4:30 am, thus one-half hour per move. I was Germany, allied with Russia and Britain until I attacked, then afterward ALL were after me. I occupied England at end, and came in 4th after Turkey, Russia and Britain.
5. Quite a wild spend-spree on Cortlandt Street on November 6, 1965. Spent $43.52 for the projector, $5.50 for other stuff at the Camera Barn (slide holders, one roll of film, World's Fair slides), $1.10 for books (Spanish and Bradbury comic), $3.93 for the shaver adapter, $12.50 for clothes (six sets of shorts and undershirts, one pair of long socks), $1.24 for 200 sheets of the paper this is typed on, 62 for a cheese slicer with a slack wire, which doesn't work, $1.50 for $6.50 cards for Christmas, 30 for the subway, 16 for two pairs of shoelaces, 70 for scotch tape, for a grand total of $71.19. Good day.
