next time i watch a movie

it will be this one! I saw it when I was 11 and it freaked me out.

let's read something by Leonard Michaels!

ok? I just bought The Collected Stories and The Men's Club on the webbernet. Books are like friends! I have lots of friends! Most of them are books, though...

selection from Sylvia
by Leonard Michaels

"Sometimes, after a fight, we went to the movies. It was like going to church. We entered, found seats, faced the light, and let go of daily life as we succumbed to the vast communal imagination. In the all-night movies on Forty-second Street, we’d sit in the balcony with great smokers and popcorn eaters, their fingers scrabbling, mouths gnashing. Others sucked chocolate, licked ice cream, rattled candy wrappers. Drunks and half-wits talked to the screen. Bums spit on the floor. This was the honest-to-God movies, place of Manhattan’s sleepless people, like a zoo but, in its massive anonymity, private-feeling. We could go to the movies together, even though twenty minutes earlier we’d been screaming murder into each other’s eyes. In the desolate silence after a fight I might say: “You want to go to the movies?”

Sylvia would straighten her clothes, check her face in the bathroom mirror, grab her leather coat, and she would be tying the wrap-around belt as we went out the door. I loved seeing her quickness, particularly in her hands, when she gave herself to something. We’d hurry off to the subway without finding out when the movie began. There would always be two movies. We could watch at least one from the beginning.

Sitting in the balcony, the eating and smoking all around, I sank into creaturely happiness, and then I noticed my arm was around Sylvia’s shoulder, and she had leaned her head on my arm. Our bad feelings were annihilated by big faces of love shining on the wall. Later, back in the street world, electricity lashed at our eyes, crowds mauled us, traffic wanted to kill us, and evil birds of marriage, black flecks soaring high in our brains, threatened to descend, but we were going home, we’d soon be in bed, hidden, committed to each other’s darkness."

fish lips

From "The Flounder" by Gunter Grass:

"'All a lot of subterfuges!' you say, looking sternly out of the window into present January. But how do you expect us to live without subterfuges! You yourself are a subterfuge. That's why Agnes never closed doors. Always left them ajar. No hesitations between her comings and goings. Often she was there, but I noticed only myself, whereas someone else (Möller) noticed her even though she was with me. Her love was placeless. That's why I was never able to perceive her presence: what I missed was there. And even the Flounder, for whom everything, like his backbone, tapers down logically to a tail fin, couldn't understand that what she never ran out of was dill. He thought love must work like a mousetrap and that she must have fallen for Möller and me. Actually it was one of four or five Swedes whose regiment was occupying Putzig, and they'd only wanted to go for a ride and hunt rabbits in the dunes when they came across Agnes, who was sitting curly-haired in the beach grass. She was tending her geese, and all of a sudden she had all four on top of her, one after another, it didn't take long. But only the first really counted. He was closer to her than Möller and Opitz later on. It seems his name was Axel. And it seems his downy boyish beard was blond. And his brittle, commanding voice lingered on. He never came back, and he was always near her while I, sitting over blank paper as Agnes passed through the room, traveled to Zlatna, where in my days as a young teacher in Transylvania I was surprised by a young kitchen maid who never cooked for me - just as you listen when I'm with you to see if someone else is coming. When actually I've been gone for ages and I'm just smoking.

My subterfuges - yours. I suggest we meet where the Striessbach flows into the Radaune and the Radaune flows into the Mottlau and the Mottlau flows into the Vistula and all these rivers empty into the Baltic Sea. And there I will tell you how it was with Agnes, whom I also have in mind when I come to you and absent-mindedly - which always makes for a fight - call you Agnes."