The Seeress of Prevorst, 1892 by Gabriel von Max (1840-1915)
“My Days Are Numbered”
by
Rick Moranis
Published in The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2006
The average American home now has more television sets than people … according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.
— The Associated Press, Sept. 21.
I have two kids. Both are away at college.
I have five television sets. (I like to think of them as a set of five televisions.) I have two DVR boxes, three DVD players, two VHS machines and four stereos.
I have nineteen remote controls, mostly in one drawer.
I have three computers, four printers and two non-working faxes.
I have three phone lines, three cell phones and two answering machines.
I have no messages.
I have forty-six cookbooks.
I have sixty-eight takeout menus from four restaurants.
I have one hundred and sixteen soy sauce packets.
I have three hundred and eighty-two dishes, bowls, cups, saucers, mugs and glasses.
I eat over the sink.
I have five sinks, two with a view.
I try to keep a positive view.
I have two refrigerators.
It’s very hard to count ice cubes.
I have thirty-nine pairs of golf, tennis, squash, running, walking, hiking, casual and formal shoes, ice skates and rollerblades.
I’m wearing slippers.
I have forty-one 37-cent stamps.
I have no 2-cent stamps.
I read three dailies, four weeklies, five monthlies and no annual reports.
I have five hundred and six CD, cassette, vinyl and eight-track recordings.
I listen to the same radio station all day.
I have twenty-six sets of linen for four regular, three foldout and two inflatable beds.
I don’t like having houseguests.
I have one hundred and eighty-four thousand frequent flier miles on six airlines, three of which no longer exist.
I have 101 Dalmatians on tape.
I have fourteen digital clocks flashing relatively similar times.
I have twenty-two minutes to listen to the news.
I have nine armchairs from which I can be critical.
I have a laundry list of things that need cleaning.
I have lost more than one thousand golf balls.
I am missing thirty-seven umbrellas.
I have over four hundred yards of dental floss.
I have a lot of time on my hands.
I have two kids coming home for Thanksgiving.
Annunciation, 1997 by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)
My Parents, 1977 by David Hockney (b. 1937)
February 11th.–I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (northeast, I believe) blew up through the dock, as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water,however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill Monument; and, what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,–my olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe, which the captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for February 11th, 1840. From Passages from the American Note-Books.
Prospectors, 2013 by Nigel Cooke (b. 1973)
A week or so ago, Mike McCubbins offered me a review copy of Anasazi, the graphic novel that he made with Matt Bryan. He sent a link to the Anasazi’s Kickstarter page. I skimmed over the art, was impressed and immediately interested, and then read their blurb:
Anasazi is a nearly wordless 212 page, 8″ x 8.5″ full-color cloth-bound graphic novel. Its a story of war, assimilation, and cultural divisions on a colorful alien planet that combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, mythology, world history, and horror.
…16 chapters. 16 words. There is no English dialogue or exposition in Anasazi. Instead each chapter heading contains an alien language glyph along with a non-English word or phrase meaning and its literal English translation. These glyphs then appear as dialogue throughout the story.
The art, overview, and the concept of a story told in glyphs intrigued me, and I trusted my intuition not to read the brief “What’s the story?” section of Anasazi until after I’d read the novel. I read it twice; once the night it showed up, and then again the next morning. The story synopsis (three short sentences) hardly spoils the narrative, but it offers enough context for anyone wholly lost to find their footing.
The joy of Anasazi is sinking into its rich, alien world, sussing out meaning from image, color, and glyphs. The novel has its own grammar. Bryan and McCubbins conjure a world reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels, Charles Burns’ Last Look trilogy, Kipling’s Mowgli stories, as well as the fantasies of Jean Giraud.
The sixteen English words in Anasazi are all chapter names, and all are loan words, as the novel’s title suggests. Some (“M’Aidez,” “Sheol,” “Melaina Chole”) were more familiar to me than others (“Zinduka,” “Gweilo,” “Shuv”), and all take on a strange tone in the novel, as if the glyphs the characters speak are rough transliterations of something far more refined than our alien ears could comprehend.
I really enjoyed Anasazi, and I aim to have a full review soon. But I plan to read it a few more times first.
Burial, 2009 by Eduardo Berliner (b. 1978)
Conversation, 2018 by Tim Eitel (b. 1971)
What’s in here?
This is the meat locker, where Dolores’s parts are. When the electrician wired it up, he asked, “What do you use this for?” I said, “Oh, that’s just where I keep my victims.” There was a long silence….She’s got her dresses here and I have my bulletproof helmet and various stuff from my journalism in there.
Have you taken many reporting trips recently?
No, that seems to being drying up. It seems that the magazines have less and less money. They’re mostly interested in domestic stuff. I don’t know whether it’s to save costs or if they really think Americans are only interested in America. I get sort of sick of it. So there are the wig heads. Whatever woman comes in here, I always say, “Now, those are your rivals.” They kind of freak out.
Do you have many visitors or is this mostly a solitary space?
I have the occasional visitor, yeah. And then let’s see. [Opens the door to the bathrooms.] I figure the men’s room and the women’s room ought to connect.
Why is that?
Well, you know male and female should always get together wherever possible. The men’s room is the toilet. The women’s room is the shower. They didn’t used to connect. It was really, really gross when I bought the place. This old restaurant—everything was all rotted out with pee.
[Bill takes me into another small room.] And then this is the books and bullets room. I put my phone in the closet most of the time, so I never have to hear it. I got all the extra copies of my books and all the bullets I’ll need for my various pistols.
Read the rest of Stephen Heyman’s 2013 interview with William Vollmann at 3:AM Magazine.
The interview is one of 29 that comprise Conversations with William T. Vollmann, a new collection edited by Daniel Lukes.
If you’re able, check out the book launch for Conversations with William T. Vollmann tonight (8 Feb. 2020) at 6:00pm at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11238.
From Narcissus to Icarus (After Déjeuner sur l’herbe), 2019 by Raqib Shaw (b. 1974)
Buggin, 2017 by Michaël Borremans (b. 1963)
Book Painting No. 6, 2015 by Liu Ye (b. 1964)
One hot night a leopard came into my room and lay down on the bed beside me. I was half asleep and did not realize at first that it was a leopard. I seemed to be dreaming the sound of some large, soft-footed creature padding quietly through the house, the doors of which were wide open because of the intense heat. It was almost too dark to see the lithe, muscular shape coming into my room, treading softly on velvet paws, coming straight to bed without hesitation, as if perfectly familiar with its position. A light spring, then warm breath on my arm, on my neck and shoulder, as the visitor sniffed me before lying down. It was not until later, when moonlight entering through the window revealed an abstract spotted design, that I recognized the form of an unusually large, handsome leopard stretched out beside me.
The first paragraph of “A Visit” by Anna Kavan. Originally published in Julia and the Bazooka (1970); reprinted in Machines in the Head: Selected Stories of Anna Kavan, forthcoming from NYRB.
She Has Funny Cars, 2018 by Tomasz Kowalski (b. 1984)
Meteorite, 2019 by Robert Pruitt (b. 1975)
Biblioklept 