THE LAST TESTAMENT OF LUCKY LUCIANO ✶ Martin A. Gosch, Richard Hammer ✶ 28/12/23
"I never liked the cold weather when I was in New York, and I'd always head for Florida in the winter when I could. But once you've been livin' in Italy, you miss everythin' about New York, the weather included. Then I found that the cold in London was just like New York. There was days I used to stand on the street corner in London and just let the wind blow across my face, stand there freezin' and lovin' every minute of it. There was people walkin' by, speakin' a language I could understand, and the cold—it was great."
If any of this sounds even remotely interesting save yourself the time it takes to read a 500 page book and watch Lucky Luciano (1973), which raises arguably more interesting questions and stars Gian Maria Volonte....................
ELEGY FOR A BOYHOOD LOVER SLAIN IN BATTLE ✶ Alex Halberstadt ✶ 23/11/23
The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;
Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.
A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus,
light on your bare neck, your voice
almost washed out in memory's reel.
Rapt in that flood I heard the night away
through Ovid, through mauve firs thrashing.
Your voice like a bellrope dangles in sterile heat
amid these unspooled metaphors. Today
the dry sun annuls the slide into la terra trema, but
through sweet parallax I watch you, sixteen, climb
like Phaethon the too-large chariot, the pitcher's
mound in Griffiths Stadium. A fire
in the house of Cadmus, a fire, and hard rain
in that trance. Tuxedo in the scullery,
the nails of your thick fingers flash
in the night-light. Still as a deer I smell
you through the monogrammed cloth.
The milk on your breath tarries the years.
"Verbose and hard" the Times once wrote,
and even now I stiffen, but strangely,
as a battered word reforms, anagrammatic.
A fire rises and falls, another trance
but no rain any more, no mansion.
Only the newsprint-brittle bacchanals of the sea.
The sun depilates boughs and dries the cliffside
veins of sediment and clay. Your Hesperidian form
gone, still I imagine you poised on a cot
dark-faced over your mother's Leaves of Grass:
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, dash me
with amorous wet, I can repay you, awake,
not noticing the roan morning or the locust calls
on Iwo Jima.
Les branches tremblent, Jimmy, il pleut en cette transe.
Un smoking dans les colonnades demande après ton petit-déjeuner.
Un feu monte et chute dans la maison de Cadmus,
lumière sur ton cou nu, ta voix
presque délavé de la bobine de la mémoire.
Captivé dans l'inondation, j'ai entendu la nuit s'éloigner
à travers Ovid, à travers la débattre des sapins mauves.
Ta voix comme une corde pend dans la chaleur stérile
parmi ces métaphores non-bobinées. Aujourd'hui
le soleil sec annule la glissade à la terra trema, mais
à travers parallaxe douce je te regarde, seize, gravir
comme Phaethon le char trop-gros, la butte
du lanceur du Griffiths Stadium. Un feu
dans la maison de Cadmus, un feu, et une pluie battante
en cette transe. Un smoking dans la souillarde,
les ongles de tes mains épais étincellent
dans la lumière-nuit. Immobile comme un cerf
je te sens à travers le tissu monogrammé.
Les ans s'attardent dans le lait dans ton haleine.
"Verbeux et dur" The Times écrivait,
et même maintenant je me durcis, mais étrangement,
comme un mot battu se réforme, anagrammatique.
Un feu monte et chute, une autre transe
mais avec aucune pluie, aucun manoir.
Seulement les bacchanales cassantes de la mer.
Le soleil épile les branches et sèche de la falaise ses
veines de sédiment et d'argile. Ta forme Hesperidée
parti, je t'imagine encore posé sur un berceau
visage sombre sur Leaves of Grass, de ta mère :
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, dash me
with amorous wet, I can repay you, éveillé,
sans apercevoir le matin rouane ou les appels de locuste
sur Iwo Jima.
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES ✶ 26/10/23
200g butter / margarine
120g coconut sugar
70g brown sugar
150g white sugar
120 ml milk
1 tbsp vanilla
450g ap flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp salt
chocolate chips to taste.
cream margarine, brown sugar, and granulated sugar together in a large bowl with a hand mixer for 1-2 minutes. add milk and vanilla, cream together again.
add flour, salt, and baking soda and fold to combine. stir in chocolate.
cover dough with cling wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
scoop into even balls and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment. bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes.
remove from oven and let rest on a rack for ten minutes to allow the centers to firm.
PALIMPSEST ✶ Gore Vidal ✶ 12/10/23
Thirty years after the head on the pillow, I am at the Paris airport, Orly. Next to me, a French youth; he is wearing a t-shirt with Jack [Kerouac]'s face on it. I ask if he has read Jack. Yes, he has read one book—had I read him? I said that I had; in fact, I'd known him. The boy was stunned, as if I had said that I'd known Rimbaud. Did he really look like this? He patted his thin chest. Yes, he did for a time, and that's all that's necessary, to look like that—to be like that—for a time, as time is an eminence most famous for running out on all of us.
"I am in love with him," said the boy, simply.
"So was I," I said, to my own surprise. "For a few minutes, anyway." I added this last in English. Of course he never paid me back the dollar.
Have to confess the only book of Vidal's I've actually read is The City & the Pillar I'm kind of a fake fan.... I'm not really into his style of writing & I am obviously not the target audience for this book but I did have a lot of fun reading it. I think it's kind of obvious from the way he writes that he is a biographer which is interesting I've never read a memoir that was written by someone who like. frequently writes biographies of other people so I think Vidal was more capable of seeing himself critically which was refreshing lol. I have to admit also that the parts I was most interested in were the passages about Jack Kerouac & about Jimmie Trimble like from the get go I don't really care that much about the Kennedy's or whatever but I was still more or less interested. I think the way he talks about people he actually likes is very compelling and charming but the way he writes people he dislikes I could take or leave (like I could probably go without all the parts about Capote); I think his complaints about other people get pretty repetetive....
But overall as someone who is not really invested in Gore Vidal at all & just read this for the sake of reading it I think it was a good read and I really dig the idea of a memoir as a palimpsest & I thought he achieved it pretty well there were only one or two times the back and forth between past & present got to be annoying. I like the way he talks about other people I think it's obvious that he does actually care about writing people the way he sees & remembers them which I know is the whole point but I think writers of fiction sometimes get a little too devoted to storyline in non-fiction (which isn't to say that Palimpsest doesn't have a narrative, but it is more invested in memory than fact) & Vidal feels very umm transparent about his process & the nature of memory which is something I am always into (this site is called thirdmemory for a reason!). I think it ran a little long but I also thought that about The City and the Pillar so maybe that's just me.
Also the above quotation is my favourite I like the way he sort of refers back to what he said earlier in the chapter in like... anaphora I guess like I think the way he talks about his affair with Kerouac is the best example of what I like about the book he uses repetetive imagery (the head on the pillow) that kind of draws attention to the way Vidal remembers things (it feels more subjective & I feel like I'm in his head like I have a better understanding of how he remembers) and this sort of vision of Kerouac (get it) is no more real or unreal than the picture of him on the tshirt or the way Vidal remembers him later in life. I think Palimpsest is very committed to portraying both Vidal & everyone in it as non-static people & the writing process itself as ever-changing blah blah blah it very much is a palimpsest lol.... Like the static memory of Kerouac as being "like that" vs everything being only for a time vs the inevitablity of him not getting the dollar back. I think it's a good passage & that's my favourite chapter....
In conclusion I think I like this book more as an exercise in remembering (a la Georges Perec) than I do as a memoir because I wasn't super invested in the actual content so much as what the content said about the author and vice versa but that's not a bad thing I LOVE MEMORY. Probably one of the most stylistically thought provoking biographies I've read so I think it was worth reading. DUG!
EXCERPTS FROM A STORY ABOUT A DRUMMER ✶ 28/9/23
Earl introduced me to the girls in the back, shouting out names at a brisk Walter Winchell rat-a-tat: "Lucy, from North Carolina, Sugar, from Miami, Evie, from Boston, Barbara—Baby, from the Bronx, and Stella, from Syracuse." The dumbest, blondest words.
"Nice to meet you." I said. If you don't have anything nice to say, say nice.
It was like being on a spaceship. I had been abducted by aliens with grease eyelashes. The stainless steel lines of their hair. The plastic of their hands, gloves. The condensation around their footprints that only I noticed, the sweat in the valley of their backs that only I was close enough to notice.
Getting home that night, taking the late bus, seeing the blackness. The street was a Japanese garden, all gentle, swaying, green. My gut curling, hungry, fucked-up. I got off the bus and walked two blocks with my head, falling through the equinox cold to the wiry fluorescence of a 24hr general store. The guy at the counter was done up in light blue check—work clothes dyed like pajamas—flicking at a glossy yellow tabloid. I spun the magazine rack. WILL DISSENSION DESTROY A JEW LOOK AT SPECIAL FBI WANTS YOU WHAT'S NEXT WHEEL! My breakfast was a feast: a bag of potato chips, a pack of bubblegum, a can of coke. The transistor radio on the shelf behind the wood counter approved of my choice.
"That everything?" the cashier said, looking at me from under the reflection on his thick thick horn glasses.
"Everything." I ate on the curb outside.