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Up in the Gallery

If some frail, consumptive equestrienne in the circus were to be urged around and around on an undulating horse for months on end without respite by a ruthless, whip-flourishing ringmaster, before an insatiable public, whizzing along on her horse, throwing kisses, swaying from the waist, and if this performance were likely to continue in the infinite perspective of a drab future to the unceasing roar of the orchestra and hum of the ventilators, accompanied by ebbing and renewed swelling bursts of applause which are really steam hammers -- then, perhaps, a young visitor to the gallery might race down the long stairs through all the circles, rush into the ring, and yell: Stop! against the fanfares of the orchestra still playing the appropriate music.

But since that is not so; a lovely lady, pink and white, floats in between the curtains, which proud lackeys open before her; the ringmaster, deferentially catching her eye, comes toward her breathing animal devotion; tenderly lifts her up on the dapple-gray, as if she were his own most precious granddaughter about to start on a dangerous journey; cannot make up his mind to give the signal with his whip, finally masters himself enough to crack the whip loudly; runs along beside the horse, open-mouthed; follows with a sharp eye the leaps taken by its rider; finds her artistic skill almost beyond belief; calls to her with English shouts of warning; angrily exhorts the grooms who hold the hoops to be most closely attentive; before the great somersault lifts up his arms and implores the orchestra to be silent; finally lifts the little one down from her trembling horse, kisses her on both cheeks, and finds that all the ovation she gets from the audience is barely sufficient; while she herself, supported by him, right up on the tips of her toes, in a cloud of dust, with outstretched arms and small head thrown back, invites the whole circus to share her triumph -- since that is so, the visitor to the gallery lays his face on the rail before him and, sinking into the closing march as into a heavy dream, weeps without knowing it.

By Franz Kafka
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

From Galway Kinnell's sonnet "Blackberry Eating,"

the ripest berries

fall almost unbidden to my tongue,

as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words

like strengths or squinched,

many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,

which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well,

in the silent, startled, icy, black language

of blackberry-eating in late September.

I wrote an essay on chooglin. A man named Clinton at WFMU liked it. He did a lovely job of illustrating and hypertexting it. The timing was a little strange. You can find it here.

The Umbrella Journal

Volume 30, No. 2, Jun 2007 

Artist Books Reviews

There weren’s many girls around, so we dated ideologies. This left us always on the brink of war. We often discussed that a likely result of battle would have been more girls to go around amongst the survivors, but we quibbled rather than acted, & slept alone in our cold beds dreaming of glory by Ami Tallman (Los Angeles, 2nd Cannons, 2007, ed. Of 500, $28.00 softbound) is a series of drawings of interiors, occasionally interrupted by men in uniform, that tells the story of a young aristocratic heir to an English country estate who abandons his manor when coerced by a fetching young member of the Red Cross into taking up trench warfare. The book follows his recollections from the field regarding his old family pile.

Tallman is a Los Angeles-based painter, and her paintings full color and full-paged and more add to the lusciousness of the interiors, environments, architecture of this English country estate A wonderful transition from full memories to partial ones where words had to fill in the blanks, and yet there are always blanks. This story almost without words, but always hungry for words. A commemorative piece for someone who went before. Beautifully designed and printed. A must!and probably the longest title you could ever find. Available from 2nd Cannons