Culture


The Portrait of Dor by Osc


Posted By on Apr 24, 2011

The virginal heroine of The Portrait of Dor by Osc feeds a group of ducks with pieces of a stick while her friends look on.

There was a summer I would just as soon forget, when I spent a good deal of time in a bar-restaurant called The Library in South Florida. Bookshelves lined the walls filled with books—a nice touch, except that when I reached for one I discovered the shelves had been built only a few inches deep to save money, and the books had been sliced vertically in half to fit in the allotted space. Though I’m not much of a reader to begin with, this admittedly made reading even more of a challenge, especially since many of the volumes were old with the titles on their spines effaced. There was The Valley of the D by Jacqueline Sus, The Thorn Bi by Colleen McC. But as I said it was a rough summer. I needed distraction. Instead of drinking away my sorrow over a lost love, I would read away my sorrow while I nursed my drinks.

I started light—meaning something small and found a volume of just the right heft titled The Bridge over San Lu by Thornton Wild, a story about a group of Mexican peasants who lived on a suspension bridge over a vast jungle paradise. All things considered the reading went well. After that I tried on a more substantial volume, One Flew Over t by Ken Kes, a novel about a heroic nurse who fights off a mad criminal named Murph, who finally attempts to electrocute her. There were other highlights. The Crying of Lot 4 by Thomas Py involved a gang of looney friends who worked at the same post office, and somewhat ominously appears to be the place where the phrase “going postal” was coined. Ulys by James Joy was the toughest read I took on, but it was worth it. Something to do with a girl named Molly whose efforts to find a boyfriend were constantly being thwarted by her grandfather, a dude named Bloom.

Poor order levitra online postural habits are easy to form in this situation. Over production of sex levitra uk browse around this link hormones are also not secreted in sufficient amounts even if endocrine glands are intact. You can without much of a stretch purchase non-specific discount levitra at a modest rate. They can enjoy their love-life by using cheap viagra for women for the treatment of erectile discomfort in men facing depression. But no book at The Library had quite the effect on me as the one I picked up on a fateful evening as the summer wore on. The Portrait of Dor by Osc involved a photograph the narrator had taken of someone, perhaps himself, in flagrante delicto. To make matters worse, somewhere about halfway through, the photo began talking! (I switched to gin thinking the book was probably British.) The virginal love interest of the narrator was terribly distraught over the photograph, which would from time to time appear in ghoulish Halloween garb. The Day of the Dead motif eventually culminated in the setting change to Yucatán peninsula, which by a similar process led to my own switching to mescal as libation of choice, which may have been a mistake. The last pages are a bit of a blur. The collapse of the English class system was followed by a wild foxhunt through the Yucatán prairies. As the tragedy of the plot came to its culminating moments I may have been crying hysterically—drinking mescal is like pouring gasoline on the flames of a lost love, but try it while reading a tragic love story like The Portrait of Dor. I think I was cut off at some point. It’s not entirely clear whether I finished the book and was led to the parking lot or was simply led to the parking lot—I do remember the book being forcibly removed from my hands. And so there I was alone under the sky of South Florida, as alone as the virginal heroine of The Portrait of Dor was under the Mayan sky, though I could only hope the virgin sacrifice planned for her would not also be my fate. I slept in some nearby bushes and woke up with a blinding headache in the wee hours of the morning. I now see why so many people don’t read. Too dangerous.

Read More

The Baptismal Parrot


Posted By on Feb 22, 2011

I attended a christening on Sunday at a church on 49th St. in Manhattan in the Theater District near Times Square, the church named after St. Malachy, who it turns out is the patron saint of actors. I got there a few minutes late, and the place was packed—I thought at first with friends of the family, but the church attracts
many tourists in New York to see a show—so I stood by the back door and watched the proceedings from there.

My location I figured was probably good, since the baptismal font was stationed in the main aisle only a few feet from me.  Things started out fine. But then someone opened the door behind me, a blast of cold air struck my neck, and I turned to watch as a very small woman with a mane of black swept-back hair entered the church.

It took me a second to realize that she was holding a parrot perched on her hand.

I normally don’t mind birds. As I’ve grown older I’ve experienced a growing and eager fondness for anything that’s alive at all—for obvious reasons. The parrot was not large either and seemed well behaved— although was that the nub end of a hot dog the woman was holding between her fingers and from which the bird was pecking and tearing off bits?  Are parrots carnivores, I wondered?  And then there was the question of what kind of parrot. I’m no expert. The parrot was mostly green but had a distinctive black head, and I wondered if it weren’t a black-headed conure, a rare bird in New York that’s more frequently observed in Southern Ontario.
Right now, probiotic use is being clinically shown to improve intestinal conditions, such as irritable cialis professional cheap bowel syndrome (IBS), colitis and Crohn’s disease (CD). viagra 25 mg Try one and get the change. levitra discount prices In fact it is a major communal, monetary, and a municipal health hazard. It also improves pastilla levitra 10mg the blood flow to the penile area.
Then there was the more disturbing question. What was the woman planning to do with the parrot? Baptize it? For what other reason would one bring a parrot to a christening? Companionship? The service proceeded, the time of the christening arrived. My friend’s beautiful daughter was duly held up in her exquisite white dress and water dabbed on her head. My view was good, though a crush of people arrived from other parts of the church to mar it slightly, and in the meantime, despite my worry, I must have been swept up in the moment; I lost sight of the woman with the parrot.

The baptism was done, people soon returned to their seats, and it was then I again caught sight of the woman. She had moved to the other side of the aisle and was now near the rear line of pews. But what was particularly disconcerting was that she no longer had the parrot!

You can imagine what I must have thought. Had this sick, tortured being drowned the parrot in the baptismal font in the confusion surrounding the legitimate baptism of the child? This is New York after all. Times Square. I considered going to the baptismal font to investigate, but the idea of finding the drowned form of the bird lying in the water was a shock I wasn’t prepared to withstand. And so I did what I always do when I’m not certain what to do. I did nothing.

The service proceeded but I couldn’t help but throw a few looks in the direction of the woman, who was nonetheless all piety.  What was her game, I kept wondering?  The service passed in this fashion. Now the minister was giving the final benediction. People were turning to go, but wait: the woman was coming toward me, and the parrot was back, perched on her shoulder. What had she done with it during its absence? Had it flown to a rafter for a better view? I was baffled until I saw the bird hop with expert skill from her  shoulder and across her shirt, and then poking his head into opening above her shirt’s top button, simply crawl inside, disappearing within. She gave me a look, the woman with the parrot in her shirt, that seemed to contain within it some reluctant acceptance that something embarrassing, but also necessary and unavoidable, had just happened, and that this was not the first time. I can only say that the sight of the bird’s tail as it poked out of the shirt for an instant and then disappeared held a peculiar horror for me. It must have been some childish sensation that the parrot in merely hiding inside her shirt was actually going inside her. My sense of horror augmented.  I felt stifled in the press of the crowd, and I quickly made my way outside in the cold clear morning of midtown New York.

Read More

Live Blogging the Super Bowl!


Posted By on Feb 6, 2011

Fans getting crazy before the big game!

“Live blogging like nothing you’ve ever seen before, not even when you were a kid”™ — from the live blogging experts at www.petervilbig.com

Posted 3:46 p.m. Sunday:

Hey everybody, I’m set up here in my easy chair, got my chips, my asparagus, my sunglasses, and all the rest of my gear, and I’m ready for the big one! How about you? Kick-off in 15 minutes. Don’t let’s miss it!

Thus, in this way kamagra provides erection and order viagra australia continue reading here it is highly safe to consume. By using free consultation cialis one can completely make sure that they can take correct actions when the side effects surface. Besides comprising saturated fats in viagra uk sale large proportion, these dairy foods hinder the natural body stability. It normalizes low priced cialis opacc.cv digestion and bowel movements.

Posted 4:01 p.m. Sunday:

What excitement, what a crowd, what the … who is that old man who looks like he had a cosmetic surgery accident? (Oh, apparently he’s someone named Jerry Jones, and he’s very important. Shh, he seems to be taking a call from the President.)

Posted 4:02 p.m. Sunday:

And here’s the kick-off. What a boomer! Wow. It went right over the end zone into the stands. Gee, I hope that fan is alright. Who knew that a football could go beyond the third lace in someone’s mouth?

Posted 4:12 p.m. Sunday:

This looks like it’s going to be a brutal contest. My only question is: why are the players tackling with their heads? I thought that was soccer.

Posted 4:17 p.m. Sunday:

Did you see that commercial? Did you see it? I mean really see it? In the Zen sense.

Posted 4:37 p.m. Sunday:

The quarterback for the team with the yellow and black uniforms–what a brute!

Posted 4:40 p.m. Sunday:

Oh my. I mean back in high school the coaches used to say if you get your head knocked off, pick it up, put it back on and keep playing. But never in my life did I expect to actually see that happen in an NFL game.

Posted 4:51 p.m. Sunday:

I’m not sure but the score seems to be… Wait a minute. I’m going to check on the Internet to see if I can figure out the score. Back in a sec.

Posted 5:01 p.m. Sunday:

That last commercial seemed to be suggesting that some very unethical behavior is no problemo at all. Did you get that feeling too? But then again, you could say the same thing about most of the commercials, so maybe it’s no big deal.

Posted 5:12 p.m. Sunday:

Halftime everybody! I think I know this band from the 60s. I’ve always wondered what happened to them. Not that I’m old enough to have been around in the 60s.

Posted: 6:14 p.m. Sunday:

Sorry, guys, for the gap. I got to reading a really great section of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the time got away from me. I’m speaking particularly about that brilliant section in which he states what seems obvious at first: “We must not say, ‘The complex sign `aRb’ says `a stands in relation R to b’; but we must say, ‘That `a’ stands in a certain relation to `b’ says that aRb.’” But of course it’s not quite as obvious as at first glance, now is it?

Posted: 6:20 p.m. Sunday

One of the teams has apparently won.

Posted: 6:22 p.m. Sunday:

Oh boy, this is really embarrassing! It turns out I was watching Channel 12, Brooklyn’s local news station, and they were re-running a high school football game between Lincoln and Brooklyn Tech from the early 90s. (That explains the grainy video quality.) But I’ve got great news for you, readers! The actual Super Bowl, per se, begins in 10 minutes. We haven’t missed anything! Thank goodness. As they say in football, and other sports, no harm, no foul.

Read More

Musical Chairs


Posted By on Feb 4, 2011

So the idea is this: find two songs (hereinafter referred to as “popular music artifacts”) from a particular era (loosely defined) that separately neither sum up, represent, nor even perhaps act as exemplars of that era but whose relationship forms an interesting or suggestive representation of it. I considered offering artifacts from Jimmy Rodgers and Louis Armstrong, but thought better of it. Instead I offer the following pair from that peculiar moment of tilt and agony, the late 1960s:

Ducks on a Pond, The Incredible String Band:

They’ll quickly viagra for women price http://pharma-bi.com/levitra-4059.html in a panic, hoping everything will just “work out”. Likewise, oysters and chocolates have always been in overnight cialis preference by millions individuals in the world. If the disorder is said order cheap levitra http://pharma-bi.com/2009/12/why-we-need-good-data/ to be even worse, then the physician should be informed about it, he would suggest you the required dose. The most important components are Javitri, Ashwagandha, Samudra Phal, Sona Patha, Kapur, Jaiphal, Dalchini, Tulsi, pfizer viagra sales this Nirgundi, Buleylu oil etc.
And All Tomorrow’s Parties, The Velvet Undergound:

Read More

© 2011-2024 Peter Vilbig All Rights Reserved -- Copyright notice by Blog Copyright