by Joshua Cohen
Point is, so it goes with our own human couplings: After a while, everything starts seeming logical. A failed writer gets used to being blocked. A Yemeni childbride gets used to being beaten. Both qwerty, if in disparate degrees.
Using Tetsuite, its wordprocessor—one feature I hate is how it senses you’re typing an interrogatory and just automatically inserts the punctuation. Also, the Notes tab is lost in the clutter of the Typefaces menu, the notes themselves get lost if margins change, it reformats every numeral into heading a list, respells “algy” as “algae,” and though I turned Tetration.com into a macro it keeps reproducing as a link, and I keep accidentally tapping it, and raising that unmullioned sill—that disconnected window.
Or I’m writing cliché, and it just autoinserts that accent? That acute or grave? As if cliché were French. As if it weren’t universal. Publishers started out by setting their books one letter at a time. The type was movable (it was movable type), which was necessary given that all the letters had to be rearranged into every conceivable order, to spell out every conceivable word—necessary but also wasteful. And so the printers, always working toward efficiency, soon cast metal slugs of words and then, eventually, whole entire repeated phrases. “Love” was not composited of four separate sorts anymore—“l” “o” “v” “e”—but merely of one, “love.” Phrases such as “as it were” or “for that matter”—their equivalents in the European languages—were confined to one continuous line. The sizzle made when a phrase was cast—when the hot hackneyed metal was dumped from its matrix into water to quench—was said to be, in French, cliché. The hiss of clich, clich, clich, cliché. In time, this onomatopoeia was shed, or rather acquired significance. Like: divorcing balding overweight broke male writer. Like: divorcing balding overweight broke male writer has sex with a younger female. Like: benevolent Jew, bewildered Arab. Like: if I remember it, it’s true.
Other things I’d like to tetrate: Is the chair I’m in Biedermeier? Who’s Biedermeier? Or is it Empire? Whose? Louis XIV was the furniture king? Louis XVI was the king whose only memorable furniture was the guillotine? This desk, what type of wood is it? Deskwood? How to pick a drawer’s lock? How to determine whether a drawer is stuck or merely a glued cosmetic forgery? “Casement” windows? Or “casedment”? Is this ceiling “coffered”? Can floors or walls be “coffered”? Are the parquet plat inlays swastikas or is it me who’s bent? Swastika is “hakenkreuz” and the plural is “hakenkreuze” but am I pronouncing either correctly? Who’s the saint in that painting holding his own severed head as ink spouts out from the mouth? What are the pedals of this warped discordant piano called? How to determine whether a pendulum clock is broken or just unwound? How to wind it? No fireplace? No electronics so the remote I rummaged under the divan cushion is for what? That chest? Camphor chest? “Shoji” screens? Or “joshi”? Lacquer, how? Is there anything creepier than the Reich’s kitsch penchant for the Orient? Are the three idols made out of crystal all Buddhas, or is only one of them the Buddha and the others Laozi and Confucius? Which one is wearing the hat?
—I have groceries now NO MORE FASTFOOD! NO MORE MC’D’S! STICK WITH RICE! PLATES @ 12:00/8:00!
—the Visa’s been rejected by Deutsche Bank/Commerzbank/Volksbank/Berliner Sparkasse (multiple locations)
—who are Balk’s contacts in Berlin (besides Maleksen)?
—contact Balk or Maleksen via Myung but how?
—better to go online at café or library or try by disposaphone?
—destroy Principal’s passport or just dispose of it?
—hold onto Principal’s passport
—clean up this shitpit
—pawn the flat’s antiques at pawnshop, or “flohmarkt”
—wait until dark to take out the trash (“restmüll,” the rest of the bins in the courtyard are recycling)
—rejected at ReiseBank/Western Union (multiple locations)
—€118.62 left
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From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Wed, Sept 28, 2011, 11:37 PM
checking
Dear J, stop reading this and get back to work. Two things are bothering me: should I be opening emails with “Dear,” like a letter, and 2.) should I be worried about teensy mental slips like signs of aging? (like not flipping that formula around—it should read: should I be worried about signs of aging like teensy mental slips …) I hope your concerns are slightly more—slightly more—I hope you’re writing. Give me news if you can but if you can’t Just whatever you do don’t come back to NY, where I haven’t been able to sleep so Just up on the roof heeling the tar, clinking two rocks against the glass. The brownstones from here are green Achsa’s settled into Princeton. But of course with her there’s the car issue and she bitches that I’m trying to revert the insurance. She asks me if I know what the payments are. I don’t know how to answer, besides obviously I do, you spoiled bratty bitch of my own raising. Her major will be Econ, which is now called operations research and financial engineering?! or is it !? Mir’s loss was my gain. Now my loss is some asshole fratboy’s gain, but she’s not dating or wouldn’t tell me. For the Econ major most students take a psychology minor. But she didn’t say that. She said something like more than 60% take a psychology minor. Over the phone. Even with the car she don’t come home no mo no mo no mo no mo.
Now, Rach. I can’t have this. Fucking Martinize and Simonize (tetrate it) the Eisen lawyers call. Not to mention the actor guy calls twice a week and last time according to Seth this boy who’s been on phones giving Lisabeth a break—a break from what?—he even tried to pitch a children’s book, a fucking series of children’s books, because, the actor guy said, Seth said, he understands “such things are pitched in series.”! Josh, I can’t have it. I’m your agent, not your personal assistant. And I’m certainly not this kid power forward anymore running pick and rolls like Carmelo Anthony last season (they’re going to regret the lockout, the players arguing over salary caps and revenue sharing while their youths tick away). Don’t get me wrong, I understand what we’re doing and why I have to tie myself and all the office up in phone lies, saying we’ve got no idea where you are, no idea when you’re coming back, but now I’m realizing, with you not responding, it’s true, I don’t, I’m worrying.
You need to get a lawyer (because I’m not a lawyer and my dead parents are on line 2 saying “we told you so.”). You’re going to need Irv Feyer, or maybe like a Spence Rich. I’ll think on which, you’ll think on which, GET BACK TO ME and I’ll handle it. Rach is trying to serve you with papers, and because she can’t or for whatever other fucked delusional reason she’s trying to shame you with this illiterate blog of hers and anything you can do to address it on your own will just exacerbate the situation. Do Not Fucking Comment. Keep doing what you’re doing and DON’T CONFRONT. We’ll get a lawyer to handle everything and make the removal of the blog a stipulation. But only a lawyer can tell you if that’s viable.
The other reason I’m getting personal and legalistic is this: the check, first half, just came. I knew it was coming and I knew we had to decide what to do with it and trust me I considered every option. We need, the two of us, to talk, and if you end up retaining either Feyer or Rich as counsel as I strongly advise, we need to talk with him. Because it’s my sense, again, not as a lawyer, that as the contract was executed and the half advance was sent before a divorce or even papers were served (it’s not like I’m in the position to tell Finn how to time his checks, it’s not like Finn after your fiasco with him in California would put himself out with “the bookkeepers”), it’s my amateur sense that this counts as earned income that Rach can claim, because this is NY, babele, up to 50% of, especially given indiscretions I’ll spare the both of us, and the fact that she’d supported you financially for years, or like a decade. A judge would bankrupt you and a lady judge wouldn’t leave you enough for funeral expenses. I was hoping you
’d patch all this up or had been straighter with me.
So, two options to consider (I haven’t taken my commission yet, I haven’t even deposited the check): we can be what Miri used to call “home kosher” on this—meaning we ate whatever on our own but in our parents’ house it was milk separate from meat and never a crustacean—and you get a divorce and only after the divorce the agency cuts you a check and you keep low like the mafia after a heist and don’t flash foxes and Caddys, or we go full on treyf and impatient and you go now and open a new account with a new bank abroad and I’ll have the money routed there and we pray (I have European junketing this autumn)—again, we can discuss this, even with Feyer and maybe Rich.
What else I wouldn’t bother touching on unless I felt you might have a sense of it and would be willing to break the “radio silence” and please enlighten me. I’m also a bit trepidatious like I’m some Hollywood Adam Shale about to be popped by TMZ saying something racist and then I’ll have to go on the Today Show to count up how many nonwhite friends I have. I have 12 nonwhite friends is how many (though Skip Gates has to count for like 10 on his own—my numbers were higher before Octavio Paz died).
But over the last two weeks, or when I went to the Fulton banya I first noticed it, mid-September, wherever I went I was noticing this Asian person. It’s more with Asian women and I’ll never understand this and I bet I’m not unique in this regard but I can always tell from behind if a woman’s Asian. Even with the hair bunned up. It’s not like I’ve spent so much time parsing why, but it’s consistently true, from behind, and I’m only secondarily an ass man, I can always get them. It might be just how they hold themselves. But I won’t get into it. I hate this pc shit. I hate that I’ve been cowered into this tapdance—I swear I’m so concerned for Asian welfare, I dropped Jolly Roger acid and 4F’d the VC, which at the time still meant VietCong.
So I noticed her from behind. At the Fulton banya. Then at Gourmet Garage, and I’m never at Gourmet Garage (I’d given Lisabeth a week off for a family reunion in Maine—because every weekend is a family reunion in Maine if you own Penobscot Bay—and she usually manages the menus). Remember Svetlana? Does this link work, tetset.com/svetlana.muzhikhoyeva or you’re the expert do I have to put a www.? After you left I went online, and regot in touch with “Sveltelana,” put her back on the rotation, but just the moment we’d gotten copacetic again, now that she’d turned 30 and turned her back on all the horrid shit women have to deal with in their 20s, not least of which their appraisals of themselves, their attempts to square their mothers’ and then their own assessments of ability or beauty with their ambitions, and then further with their prospects, anyway, all of that crashed, we burned, and though the time before it was about marriage, or my refusal to ring her, this time it was about a wedding and wasn’t my fault in the least, just bad luck though not nearly as bad as yours, no offense, my luck’s the only thing I’m guilty of because otherwise, I didn’t do shit. I just happened to have a lunch with an editor at Viking, junior editor, very young, very cute, Bard or Amherst grad handjob in the bathroom at a Paris Review party cute, but it was strictly a welcome to the business let’s get acquainted lunch and as we left The Breslin who was it I met? “Svetlelana” was just out from getting fitted at David’s Bridal with a lace gang of bridesmaids for one of their regular Russian nuptial orgies, and yelling at me, smacking me, stalking away with her fellow bridesmaids and the blushing bride, the junior editor fleeing crosstown weeping, and as I was about to head back into The Breslin to wash up and decompress another sazerac who was it in a Red Sox hat loitering on the sidewalk like she was checking the health inspection grade but checking me instead like a homeless harpy, and then she ran for it?
The Asian—stalking me to just about every other lunch and spending more time hanging around Achsa and me during her visits than Sveta my Svetichka ever did, and I’m sure you can put this into better Hebrew for me, but I was davening, God YHVH, Father of my fathers, don’t let her shoot me down with Achsa around or before our tix to Merce Cunningham’s farewell at the Armory. But then she’s like God herself, this Asian, in all places at all times, though managing always to be far enough away from me and inconspicuous to cabbies that I thought she might be two Asians, or four, or more, and even jumping into Bill’s on 54th and blarneying a bartender who’d once temped for me into letting me exit through the broken filing cabinets of the Prohibition sewer tunnel that let me out on 55th to come around Madison to get her face, head on, she’d turned, was gone. But then she’s outside my office. Outside my fucking building. At the fucking cardiologist’s, like she knows what she’s doing to me. Always in that Red Sox hat, and that’s what drives me crazy—also, can you imagine my bloodpressure coming through Koreatown?
I went through all the Asians I’ve ever repped, all the Asian women I’ve ever repped (so counting up my nonwhite friends nontheless), no likelies, so she’s either a sub I rejected, or related to us, our us, which would be worse. Because I can say this with total confidence. I’m sure I never fucked her. It’s difficult in life, to go against the conventional wisdom, to oppose all the entrenched norms and institutions and dogma, like Copernicus and Galileo, Spinoza, Marx, Pancho Villa, Rosa Parks, like Duchamp going readymade and Dylan going electric, and this is mine, my stand, my own two feet on the garbage day street with that scrawny flat just unfuckable ass always in front of me and then behind, face brimmed, averted. Unlike every other male American Jew, I have never had a thing for Asians. I’ve loved women of every race, and if I haven’t loved them equally it wasn’t from any bias, just my diet or circulation, poor sleep habits. But an Asian fetish? No. Have I ever thought of them as unobtrusive and subservient replacements for my mother? No. Have I ever thought of anyone as a replacement for my mother? Maybe my sister, maybe me for my sister’s kid, maybe Elaine Kaufman, until we got into a fight over Norman Mailer, maybe Norman Mailer.
Have to go now. Calls to return to what was once called “the coast.” Back in the days when 12 channels broadcast for only 12 hours a day, the pitcher’s mound was 15 inches and the designated hitter didn’t exist, the bestseller lists were 30% Jewish. When the pinnacle of technology was mutually assured atomic destruction, and women, who were basically typewriters—wait …
Really really can’t wait for that away msg, aar
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10/4
To begin is how to begin, for the writer and reader both. The first sentence sets the rules, the laws, the measures, sentencing the second to its fate.
To begin with how to begin, I couldn’t. I couldn’t decide on whether to try some generalist baseline crap, something about how computers have changed our lives (the history of the mainframe or personal comp?), or how online has (explain the difference between the net and web?), or how search has (explain tetration/Tetration?), or to go instead for a more intimate approach, like with an anecdote, with people in it, a person, Principal, but I was unable to decide between presenting him as a child or as an adult, at a successful moment like the company’s founding or IPO, or at a moment not more failed but sad like the cancer or Balk, though anything like that would mean that the book wouldn’t proceed chronologically, which always requires an earlier germ, the earliest—Principal’s birth and the lives of his parents and grandparents (the partition of Poland by Imperial Russia, the Roman exile, the Greek conquest of Palestine, the Babylonian exile, the sixth day of Creation, the void?).
The dream of search is the
History derives from historia, meaning “I search” [is this true?], which Antiquity [which Antiquity?]
I was [firstperson singular?] born in Palo Alto, CA, 40 years ago last summer. The neighborhood, Crescent Park, lay cradled in the crescent of San Francisquito Creek.
I am [present tense?] the 14th richest man in America and the 18th richest man in the world and my sole possession is a begging bowl.
All distractions, diversions—fidgeting, smoking, drinking, jerking to me
mories eidetic, echoic, Arabic/Semitic but fading like drunkenness, fading like smoke, until as empty as my Glenlivet and Jameson bottles and my last carton of Camel Lights.
I went reading through my old .docs for old inspiration and techniques (which voice to use for this, whether active or passive?), and I moved around (which tense, if not the present?), moving myself, the furniture, alternating nights between rooms, dragging the Tetbook’s charger wire between my legs limp until finally settling—the past, the past was unavoidable, not as deep as the void, but proximal, basically, as like.
I forced myself to stay seated, at screen—no wifi bars to stick my nose through, with any other barrier just selfimposed—and then, after a day or two sleepless, I got into it, I grew into the writing and so found myself growing up too, alongside Principal, taking his life and making it mine or half his and half mine and so going through all that childhood pap and school crap again, maturing, or aging, but also, simultaneously, getting younger. Whatever, don’t pay any attention, just get the words down on the page. Point is, that feeling was returning. That etherealizing feeling I’d assumed I’d lost forever of just losing yourself, myself, in another. Letting everything else just go slack. Hitting wordcounts, hitting Return.
The sky outside was a cloud, a metaphor or simile, a repository of all worldly files but mine. All the windows were on the same channel. Oscillating rain. Let lightning describe itself, and let thunder be its dialogue.
I had this superstition—never sit directly under the chandelier. No walls would ever be white again, next to or behind the whiteness of blank .docs. No silence would ever be as silent as the sibilance between .recs. It’s bizarre that this flat doesn’t have a fireplace, but I might’ve noted that already—pressing Ctrl+F would find that out, I keep pressing my sinuses instead.
