Francisc Nona's Word Epidemic

Is Google colonizing language?

2013-02-20T23:04:00.006+13:00

Ever since the first instalment of Google's Panda, in February 24, 2011 (just coming up to two years), the internet has been abuzz with news about how many users have seen their websites or blogs plummeting in their rankings. It was all due to an automatic update which put an end to basically everything users knew was ethical internet etiquette.

It's understandable why bloggers who found themselves
among the victims might come up with such plastic representations

I don't want to talk about how right Google was to start waging this war against cheaters (because there were many out there who surely deserved a thorough spanking). But I want to talk about Google's intentions, at least how they look on the face of things.
I'm especially interested in what Google thinks is good practice in relation to the use of language.

Google, the Goliath

It's interesting to note that Google measures its success in terms of casualties. If you look up a list of all the upgrades operated ever since its 2011 inception, the innocent and lovable Panda has left more than 30% of the users lying dead or in agony on the battlefield. With so many fatalities, one would be inclined to sniff a smell of revenge. Isn't this how powerful lords deal with their not-so-powerful subjects (because we must not forget how deeply we are subjected - although we say "indebted" - to Google)? But we must not be deluded. Google has better plans than just killing its own vassals. What Google has been murdering is mostly duplicates, or plagiarism-ridden websites, also known as scraper sites, where copy-paste debauchery was happening at alarming scales. Okay, so we're fine with that, by and large. Google has sent the message that the we-could-do-shots-all-night-long mentality is no longer the way to go. The culprits got their hiding and the show goes on without them.

Google the Almighty rules the Earth. See source.

But why would Google engage itself, with all its might, in such a terrible war against internet 'terror,' since its older Page Rank was already pretty well tuned to the doings of wrongdoers? There may be many answers out there, but here's what I think. Google has the demeanour, force, and maybe willingness to turn itself into a kind of tyrant (let's call it trust, or corporation, or monopoly, or whatever comes handy). According to Alexa, Google has almost 5 million sites linking back to it. I stress this: we're talking about sites, not regular users who never owned or attempted to own a site (the lumpenproletariat of the net, if you like). If we count in those as well, we get to dizzying numbers. Some say it's well beyond one billion (a milestone reached as far back as June 2011). Google+ alone has already counted over half a billion unique users. That, of course, doesn't put Google too far ahead of its rivals, but it tells you how mind-blowing its influence may be. In the Alexa ranking mentioned above, Google sits comfortably on the first position in both American and Global rankings. Which means, at the moment it is the most popular search engine in the world, with a bouncing rate of less than 15% (in fact, in the last month or so, it has barely gone beyond 2%), and an average time of about 15 hours per day spent on Google or Google-related websites. Now if that's not an indicator of prosperity I don't know what is.

Language regulation

And so, with such an enormous popularity and an elephantine scaffolding that boasts hundreds of services, Google is poking its nose in almost everything there is at the moment in terms of language acquisition and manipulation. So much so, that it can take that snorty attitude and grimace of superiority that allow it to regulate the use of language.
Language regulators are usually national academies or similar scientific bodies, which provide the infrastructure for correct, acceptable use of the language under their jurisdiction. In the case of Google, which, of course, is not a country, the major documents it draws its conventions from are, as Miguel Helft describes, "transcripts of United Nations proceedings, which are translated by humans into six languages, and those of the European Parliament, which are translated into 23." But then, no matter what the source is, and no matter its level of authority (by the way, who said that the UN or the EP are the repositories of most language uses?), Google has the ability to reinforce these rules, and its ability is greater by thousands of times than that of these language regulators. Of course, Goole is, again, not the only one getting inspiration from the afore-mentioned institutions. So we must not cast the blame exclusively on them. Microsoft is doing a pretty good business out of it as well with its Internet Explorer and Bing, and so does Yahoo!, and others: you name them. But that doesn't turn my question away: why is it so important to act as a language enforcer? Or better, who cares about language enforcement?
Well, usually an absolutist power does: a state, an institution, an influential group which aims to seize power over all means of expression. In 2012, an article in Wired was drawing attention to a Google-commissioned report which concluded that all major search engines are licensed through the First Amendment to police the use of the internet. Google is, it seems, pretty well accustomed to playing the game of the Big Brother, and can find even good justification for it.

Language tyranny

But that doesn't mean that one should not realize the dimension of its discretionary powers. It is one thing to guard off against pornography, paedophilia, or terrorism, and another thing to come up with algorithms such as Panda or Penguin and turn down users who don't observe the rules of a given language (in this case mostly English). We should not forget that the greatest part of internet content is being created nowadays outside of the United States. India tops the charts, followed by its relatives and neighbours (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka etc.) and what you have there is a mass of people whose first language is not English. What do you expect? Having all those individuals (very few of whom are academics or even university graduates) write in the language sported by the UN or the EP is often like asking a mosquito to bark or a dolphin to bloom. But I am also talking about users from other languages as well. For better or worse, the Indians have had some kind of contact with the English language in their past and not-so-past history. But what do you make of a Mongolian, or a citizen of Uzbekistan, whose English may go only slightly beyond the vocabulary of a picture book? They may be very well interested in reaching out to an English-speaking audience, because this is where the trend lies at the moment. But they are clumsy and uncertain; they make mistakes only three-year-olds make when inflecting an irregular verb. They don't make these mistakes because they are evil-spirited, or because they have started a terrorist attack against English language. They simply don't have the level of language proficiency Google expects from them. Increasingly nowadays, one cannot speak of one English language, but of a multitude of Englishes. Google, however, seems to be aiming at reunifying the use of English, very much like a colonist power in pursuit of total occupation.
Take a look at Google Translate, where 52 languages are manipulated to create an enormous (con)textual empire.

Inadvertently, this logo supports very well my point. Source: Submit In Time

We're not only talking about the possibility of instantly translating the content of a webpage (as Translate is incorporated in Chrome). Google has launched itself into more adventurous and possibly more enticing projects, such as the one promising to develop an image reader, so that a photo taken on your smartphone can be turned into translated text as you go. And another one leading to similar effects is a project for the creation of an interpreter of spoken words. Plus work is being done to perfect a similar tool for translations from YouTube clips. All these projects (many of which may sound downright utopian) are aimed precisely at enlarging Google's already outstanding mass of human-generated content. Which means, Google is basically colonizing Language (with capital L). Running on a few hundred billion English words, it is now certainly able to produce accurate guesses as to what an English text should sound like. These guesses are not perfect, of course. You still get those unexpected pearls of mistranslation, and as the pessimists prognose, there will never be any machine able to replace a human speaker. Do you know why? Because human speakers are unpredictable: they don't follow academic rules. So what Google seems to be doing here is forcing common users into obeying rules they don't use in their daily lives. Doesn't this sound like authoritarianism? Big Brother making sure Newspeak is properly applied? Especially since nobody invested Google with the authority of watching over the right use of language (Google is not a country, and certainly not an academy).

Web 3.0

So what's left then? I'm thinking of web 3.0, the internet that will allow search engines to answer queries in a human manner. At the moment, the internet is a kind of Disneyland where everybody is having a good time without realizing that they are not getting what they have been hoping for. When you ask the search engine to inform you about something, it doesn't give you an answer reflective of the actual need you might have, but rather reflective of the engine's ranking system. When you type in 'shoe' you get a list of sites where the word 'shoe' has been most frequently used, or a list of the best-ranked sites where the word 'shoe' has been prominent. More recently, with the localization of web searches (the prime product of the Panda and Penguin algorithms), you become even more puzzled in your search for the meaning of 'shoes,' as the search engine will return first and foremost local sites that use the keyword, followed by the highest ranking global sites. So in fact your desired answer is pushed even further back in the list of possible answers. And so your chance to acquire the reply you've been craving diminishes to almost zero, knowing that you are very likely to browse through the first two or three pages in the response list.
This is what the semantic web wants to do away with. But in order to do so, web 3.0 requires a good command of natural languages. Which in turn requires the ability to manipulate a vast lexical domain. It is only this way that natural language processing can produce accurate predictions about the meaning of one's words, which to a computer resembles nothing but a string of disparate units of data. Google already has this textual foundation. Even if it is said to have slowed down on its book copying from university libraries, the internet giant has digitizes so far more than 20 million books. That makes it the largest warehouse of books on Earth. Books have almost come to mean 'Google Books,' the same way 'Earth' can no longer be pronounced without its 'Google' extension. And all these books are a treasury of natural languages. Ad Google Translate, Google AdWords, and even Google Code (concerned with artificial language). What you get is Google doing to language the exact same thing it is trying to do to the planet through its Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Panoramio, and Google SketchUp. Colonization is in full swing. This is, in short, what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "The Googlization of everything." More about his book in the near future, I hope. At the moment I am in the process of reading it.

The Following - 2013 series

2013-02-17T02:03:00.000+13:00

I watched the first episode of The Following tonight. It promises to be interesting but it has its usual cast of set characters ready-made for the genre: a renegate policeman haunted by memories of the criminal he gets to re-meet under new circumstances, an apprentice cop who's very young and somewhat clumsy but surprisingly well prepared, and of course the clever criminal. Plus a host of other minor characters made to fill the story for more credibility. So far the action gravitates only around Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), the criminal, former professor at a fantom Winslow University who has just managed to escape from prison to finish a work left unfinished:. The job is a victim who was saved by the Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon), a cop who's on a peacemaker as a reminder of the prior (unfortunate for both) encounter with Carroll, when one got shut and the other stabbed in the heart.
The series has a lot of references to literary works. Not surprising, knowing that Joe Carroll is a professor of literature. He is said to have followed Poe rather too closely, and to have found the wrong inspiration in him. His hobby used to be (up until the moment he was caught by Hardy) gouging out the eyes of beautiful girls, all of them students in his literature classes. To complicate things, he has managed to create a cult of sorts: individuals who aspire to become serial killers and who fall prey to his charm, but also to his talent to impose literature as a standard to emulate. Finding a fat cop ready to agree with Carroll's Poe seemed a bit taken too far, but that's probably meant to emphasize the fan base he has managed to create.
And because as a series The Following falls into familiar patterns, it is also endowed with the handy specialist characters who can make it easy for the viewer to understand what's going on when things go beyond average knowledge. Such is the case here not only with Hardy, who is a cop with literary inclinations (or maybe obsessions, knowing that he got into literature as a result of his involvement in the Carroll case in 2003), but also with Claire Matthews, Carroll's ex-wife and mother of his only child, who is also a professor and who can pass on handy clues about what to look up to find out references to her killer-husband's inspiration. For instance she mentions "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" just to make sure the audience gets the point of Carroll's obsession for women's eyes.
Plenty of quotations, references, and cross-references brandished to impress and to complicate the plot make this series interestingly intricate. Of course, like all good series, the first episode ends in an effective cliffhanger, promising more to come in the follow-ups. I can already tell that more Pope will pop up, quite copiously, as it did in this first episode.
About the advertising machinery that's accompanying this new series? The whole shebang meant to boost up its coming into being is already on. There's even a pretend blog dedicated to Joe Carroll, apparently built by one of his fans, in which we find out that in 2003 he was teaching Classics 201B (American Gothic) at the so-called Winslow University and that he had an office in room 369 WT. I bet the dogs are barking already and the serial freaks are already trying to figure out what those initials stand for, or where did this Winslow University come from. More to chew on twitter, with an account for Joe Carroll which already has 378 followers (we're on February 17th).
But that's just to make the game more interesting. Didn't they do the same thing with Lost? I wonder why there's no review to The Gothic Sea, Carroll's novel, described as a sequel to what else but Poe's unfinished novel, The lighthouse.
Redundancy is not a big word to use in relation to this series so far. On the blog, a screen shot of Carroll's course description reveals only three titles from the reading list: Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories, and Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Stories. (I wonder where the emphasis on short fiction is coming from.) On twitter, the account is following only three sources: two Poe accounts and one website of the film itself. That strengthens my feeling that more Poe is on the way for the following episodes. And so does the derelict bed-and-breakfast site called (not surprisingly) The Lighthouse, which feels like an illustration for The Fall of the House of Usher.
After this at least intriguing debut, I'm curious to see what the series is bringing along. So I'm waiting.

Life of Pi two ways (or maybe three)

2013-02-07T12:12:00.002+13:00

I saw Life of Pi the other day and it got me thinking about the book. I had the feeling that a lot was missing from the filmic version. So I went back to my notes and highlights.

The book

Source: Technology of the Heart

A wee bit too much on the religious side, if you asked me. Not that I don't appreciate the worth of a book on religious matters written at a time when the topic seems so out of date. But I think the whole religious shine was somehow lost during the novel's main section: i.e. the three quarters of the novel where Pi is lost at sea. It's true, the theme recurs at some points (one may even thing that the vastness of the sea could be a replica of the vastness of God), but it seems to be forgotten throughout the more central lost-at-sea narrative.
Second point. The island comes into the story unexpectedly but it causes a huge sigh of relief. For pages on end I hoped for the protagonist to arrive to a safe place, although I knew from the first-person narrative and the framing of the plot that he was going to succeed. I guess the mastery of a writer who attempts a shipwreck story is in the way he/she manages to postpone the obvious episode of the resolution, but also in how they succeed in making the reader forget about the very possibility of salvation. My belief is that Martel did it very well. So when the island comes it strikes me as a relief. Pi has finally gotten to the point of salvation, I'm telling myself. But then everything becomes something else, and the novel receives the first crucial twist: it is turned into another genre altogether. What seemed to be a feat of realism turns out to be handbook fantasy.

Source: www.media.theiapolis.com

Millions of meerkats are already a few hundreds of thousands too many. So there's a sign here that things are strange. But a cannibal island? Come on. That's impossible to imagine unless you transpose yourself into another dimension. SciFi: that's what I'm thinking. It felt like an enormous disruption: almost a betrayal. Almost like a cheap trick. But a cheap trick which now, in retrospect, I appreciate in a different way. The story in its entirety is unbelievable. Lost at sea with a tiger who has a human name and arrived on the coast of Mexico unscathed? That's already fantasy stuff, right there. But then the realistic hocus-pocus kicks in and you're somehow encouraged to buy into the story, because it is all reasonably described and because it doesn't transgress any acceptable norms of reliability. As any good realistic plot, you forget that everything is so unlikely. So you need a kick in the bum to wake you up to the reality of the story. And that reality is that the story is an exaggeration: an allegory, I would say (hence, maybe, the religious background). So what do you need? You need something blatantly impossible. You need a cannibal island. And there it is, bang! right in the middle of the story (well not quite, but thereabouts): a trick, but an efficient one. The island pops in, the reader is awakened along with the protagonist, and the change in awareness is fully achieved. From now till the end of the book you know you're in fiction territory. There's no doubt about it any longer.
Another point I want to make is about the multiple ending of the novel. Not only is Pi requested to fabricate another story (one more realistic, but precisely because of that - more unbelievable), but there are other ways in which his story is told: an official report, the writer's testimony, the transcript of an audio record of his interview with the two representatives of the Japanese shipping company. Martel is truly great here. Manipulating so many modes of story-telling is not an easy task to get yourself into. But the really great thing here is that all these layers of alternative plots render the entire narrative as a gray zone of undecidedness, or rather indeterminacy (to use a word I'm going to expand on further down). With so many alternatives competing with the main plot, the story is no longer the nice and reliable thing it has been all along. Everything becomes relative; everything proves to be nothing but one point of view out of a multitude of possible points of view. This is what I think is the greatest achievement. This is why I liked the novel.

The film

Source: Coming Soon

I was right. The film has left aside a lot of what the book was so proud of displaying. There are beautiful moments of fantasy when the sea looks dreamily unnatural (who's ever seen a sea that looks like a mirror, without a single wave to disturb the surface, other than the Dream Works logo?) Never mind that, the point is clear: the story itself is unnatural; it is too fantastic to sound natural at all. That's precisely why the two representatives of the Japanese shipping company demand the telling of another story. So a still sea is not that bad. It just looks a bit tacky to my taste.
My greatest disappointment was to see the blind French cook turned into a different thing. Gerard Depardieu was good. He played the role prepared for him by Ang Lee. But he was not the cook in the book. In the book, the cook appeared from nowhere. He was like a chimera in an unlikely situation: both him and Pi blind, bumping into each other at open sea, when the boy had been floating around for months already. That, on Martel's side, was a stroke of genius. It added a lot to the fantastic and phantasmagoric atmosphere he had in mind for the book. In the book, the cook and Pi are not said to have been on the same ship. The assumption is made by Lee, who places Depardieu on the Tsimtsum well before the catastrophe. Who knows for what reason?

Source: Santa Banta

And then the island. That's also a light version of what the book is about. The cannibal island, the most fantastic element of the novel (if not the only one), is experienced by Pi as a place of salvation. You see him bubbling up with enthusiasm and hope. A lot of that is lost in the film, when the discovery is somewhat matter-of-fact-ish. Plus, the island scene is not at all differentiated in the film, while the book is decidedly more interested in setting it aside from the rest of the plot. It's only when Pi discovers the cannibalistic nature of the island that the reader understands the fantasy that's been in Martel's mind all along. It is the only element that makes the novel a piece of fantasy, and for that reason it stands out big time. The film, however, makes it a lot paler in comparison with the sea visions, which are more abundant, more on the illusory side, and more central to the entire feat. But I guess this is just a matter of choice. Adaptation doesn't mean word-for-word rendition.
All in all I guess the film is less an adaptation of Yann Martel and more an Ang Lee film. He's used to adapting and remaking, isn't he? Think Sense and Sensibility (1995). Think Brokeback Mountain (2005), after a story by Annie Proulx. Think Hulk (2003), after the comic strips. Think even Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I can never get the order of these right), an adaptation (2000) of a wuxia novel by Wang Dulu. It's only a matter of internal logic that his Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) was adapted into Maria Ripoll's Tortilla Soup (2001).

Becoming-food: A note on the theoretical side
I think I'm going to mention the book in the course I'm teaching this semester. I can see it working well as an illustration of Deleuze's theory of becoming-. I can see it especially in relation to food. Becoming-food is the topic for one lecture I'm giving around mid-semester. It's the turning of inordinate matter into food that makes me interested in the book as a manifestation of Deleuzian philosophy. Chaotic matter, that which exists in a state of indeterminacy (a kind of disorganized, or rather yet-un-organized multiplicity of potentialities) becomes something else, i.e. becomes food. All this takes lace by means of an event. That event, in Life of Pi, is the sea catastrophe itself. The animals on board are all zoo dwellers. They are not wild creatures in the strictest sense of the word, although they have preserved some of those attributes. (Right here I can already see the transformation of matter into something else: the becoming-zoo-animal; the animals are, by virtue of their having been transformed into caged creatures - which is the event of their lives -, manifestations of a potentiality that preexisted: the state of indeterminacy is their wild nature from which they were snatched in order to be turned into entertainment.) But then there's another transformation the animals are subjected to. Once the catastrophe has taken place, they become food. And it strikes one that this possibility has always already existed in these unlikely animals. Only when they meet on the boat they become aware of their foodness, or their mutual edibility. The hyena eats the zebra and the orangutan, the tiger eats the hyena, the rat and the various insects that appear out of nowhere, plus the tons of flying fish hopping on board in plentiful blasts; and there are moments when we see Pi perceiving himself as food in the eye of the tiger.
By the way, I love how the orangutan arrives to the boat: on a floating bed of bananas (good thing Ang Lee preserved this image in the film); as if as an offering: an offering of food for the event of itself becoming food. The bananas (to be noted) are discarded as non-food, in spite of their obvious nutritional value. Bananas are not matter-becoming-food; they are are already something else: a kind of sacrificial altar.
The zebra also preserves some of the aspects revealed by the orangutan: it has a broken leg that oozes blood. The first thing the hyena eats is this impractical leg. In other words, the hyena transforms the zebra into food while the zebra almost agrees to its mutilation.

A piece of news added 17 hours ago: The film has won the top prize of the Visual Effects Society. I guess I should have said something about the visual effects. Stunning, some of them.

Back to the blog (I hope)

2013-02-07T00:23:00.002+13:00

Lost hair? Might not even be perceivable. It's shaved off anyway, but I've always had scarce hair.

I've been away from this blog for two and a half years. I'm feeling so guilty I want to hide my face in self-disgust. I don't even know what I've been doing all this time. Oh yes, I finished my PhD. Big deal. And yes, I'm successfully unemployed at the moment. Some things have changed in the meantime, I think. I've lost a lot of hair (all of it to be more precise).
And I read this post today by Steve Corona. It's about procrastination and the little damn thing some call INSPIRATION. I think my inspiration is frightening me. It usually works by throwing me to the dogs of inactivity. And when they start biting I feel like I'm stuck and the next moment of inspiration will never really come to bother me again. But it does come. The problem is the gaps: they're huge. I'm ashamed by the very time I spent doing almost nothing in between my bouts of inspiration. It's not like I'm waiting for it to come and strike me; but I kind of commit myself to the power of doing-nothing too often and far too easily. And then I feel guilty again. Who the hell can understand me, 'coz I can't. I want to do so much and yet I do so little. I read Steve Corona's post and I know full well what he's saying:

Wanna know how to make your inspiration? Start working on that thing. Even when you don’t want to. Everyday. Even when you’re scared of it. Seriously. Stop what you’re doing right now. Do your life’s work.

I want to work on that damn thing, but I can't find the strength of stopping what I'm doing right now (whatever that thing was, is, or will be).
I'm my worst enemy, I know. I should sue myself for idleness. They used to do that in Romania under communism. They found you wandering aimlessly on the street - they took you to the big house for a while, and they re-educated you for reintegration. That's the kind of thing I deserve. I only need that police state to do it for me. To save me from idleness, to make me work.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FOUR

2010-08-13T11:26:00.000+12:00

The woman with enormous nipples

The woman with enormous nipples chases after her dog, pointing at it with a newspaper rolled into the shape of a physical threat. The newspaper is a weapon which kills by taming the animal spirit into submission. Only subjecting this particular animal is not an easy task. The little white poodle goes on unflinchingly towards its unspecified target. The rough words uttered by the woman with enormous nipples don’t bother it in the slightest. It looks over its shoulder after every other step taken towards the fragile promise of freedom. The tall figure is always there, towering over the tiny stature of the wide-eyed animal like an Egyptian obelisk. The woman with enormous nipples is, indeed, a tall woman. Had the sun managed today to pull aside the curtain of these nasty clouds, her shadow would have definitely caught the little rebel which is causing so much trouble. The woman with enormous nipples can put up with an impressive number of things. She can put up with the mailman’s late delivery; she can put up with the horrible taste of today’s breakfast cereals; she can put up with the exaggerated media coverage give to the Steven Slater event; she can even put up with this adamant little dog which always misbehaves when its tantrums are less needed. But she just cannot put up with the chill of this morning wind, which has had the better of her, making the two excrescences on her breasts rise up audaciously, poking through the thin fabric of her top like two nosy poodles reduced to scale. Her enormous nipples look like two handles, and I am not going to draw any conclusion out of this matter of fact. Suffice it to say that they are eye-catching (or I should say eye-poking), although not at all able to persuade the white poodle that it should return home, where it could sort out its temper quietly.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY THREE

2010-08-12T22:53:00.001+12:00

The oxymoron

I see now how beauty and ugliness can live as one in a second of a second or in a fraction of the infinite time. I see how they can make sense together, in spite of the oxymoron of their being together. The story is simple. It is also inciting here and there. Out of an anonymous yard come two young women. They have both dressed themselves hastily, with black tights that display the rotund consistency of their calves, the length of their legs, the admirable impudence of their buttocks. The upper part of their bodies reveals just as much as the lower part, as minuscule t-shirts stretch with a groan on their copious breasts and the soft nests of their bellies. The enormous smiles slashed across their faces seem to be just other garments in this their compendious wardrobe. They both have black hair and are tall and beautiful, dissidents of troubled lives, happy to be of their own age, full of sap, exuding good humours and joy. They’re straining their bodies to push and pull an old sofa out of the yard. The object is a pathetic derelict. The cushions are musty and black in places, their insides eaten by an unknown disease of which old things customarily die. The stomach of the sofa has thrown up some disgusting discharges onto the red fabric of its former beauty. In normal conditions, one would turn one’s face away from such spectacle, spitting in the dust with evocative repugnance. But not now (and not I). By some kind of incredible magic, the ruin of the deceased furniture brings light upon those cheerful faces, illuminating them from below. It looks as though a strange aura has grown around these two young women, wrapping them in light of their own shape. I believe that this light comes from the sofa, I do: this ill object which has reached beyond the limits of its life but which still transforms reality to its heart’s content. I hate the fact that this image has survived for an upsettingly short time, after which it disappeared even from the mirror of my slow-moving car. Or maybe I should praise the chance I’ve had to see it! Allow me to choose the latter.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO

2010-08-11T22:33:00.002+12:00

Left behind

They get out of the car together, almost at the same time. There are things about them which are similar: the tall stature, the short hair revealing strong foreheads, the small round eyes. They seem to have been interrupted from a conversation which wouldn’t make sense outside the car. But then, no sooner have their feet touched the ground than they become separated. The father is quick to notice the presence of an acquaintance. This is a man of his own shape who’s just parked his car in front of the same gym where they are going too, with a bag in his hand and an attitude of an iron-bending warrior. The approach of the acquaintance sparks inside the father’s mind the light of recognition. He sees how deeply he belongs in this society of strong physical men. The son is no longer his equal. The son is very thin. In spite of his tall stature, he looks fragile, breakable, delicate. He isn’t made of the fabric of which heroes are made, like his father. He isn’t swollen up with muscles, nor has his pectorals puffed up in pride. His walk isn’t full of self-assurance. He isn’t comfortable with the gym bag on his shoulder, going to a place where he doesn’t seem to be going willingly. The teenager tries to hide this burdensome feeling of isolation. The big, masculine laughter of his father, and that of his father’s friend, are far too much for his flimsy construction. He chooses to bury his face in the screen of his mobile phone, texting or maybe just simulating it, stooped over the gadget as if in it had been deposited his entire treasury of optimism, his hope that the blooming roses of embarrassment won’t stay for too on his cheeks. He has this awkward limp as well: not a permanent defect, but a physiognomic peculiarity that highlights the differences between him and his father. The distance grows longer and longer, as the boy slows his pace almost to a halt, while glancing at the adults from underneath his thick eyebrows. The two at the front don’t mind. They haven’t noticed anything. There is no place in their chit chat for words about the young one. Let him be their follower, in every sense of the word.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY ONE

2010-08-10T13:09:00.002+12:00

An impossible story

It looks like the train on the other side of the station is minutes away from swiping the platform clean, taking the commuters along with it. Most of those who wait there are kids prepared for a damned day at school. But in the mass of uniforms and giggles I can distinguish the shape of a man who looks different. He stands by the information panel, propped against one of the wet poles, indifferent to the fact that he may get wet too. Worn-out sports shoes, the kind that must be incredibly smelly and awfully impossible to get rid of, contain his feet like a pair of mini coffins, real burial places. He’s wearing trousers that seem, from a distance, to be white jeans, but because they are so dirty and so tattered, I cannot tell their true nature. Baldness has made him wear a tall forehead too, empty and smooth like a piece of glass. It contrasts greatly with the rest of his face, which is covered in a forest-like beard. From under the brow, his eyes frown through, looking at the world with disgust. To stress that, he’s knitted his arms across his chest. They suggest contempt; they call for the world to answer important questions. And to be sure that what’s exterior to him deserves being hated or frowned upon, the speakers of the train station blare the message all passengers dread to hear: the train going his way has been cancelled, due to an engine fault. Frankly speaking, I’m expecting him to explode, to start punching the widow that covers the information panel, to start swearing towards the skies and yelling at the other commuters. But that is now how he reacts. In fact, he has no reaction at all. He doesn’t even untangle his arms from across his chest. He doesn’t even deepen his frown. He doesn’t even start pacing around to show distress or anger or violent feelings of any sort. He chooses to remain where he is, in the same state of indifference mixed with scorn. He may be disappointed, but he doesn’t show it. Admirable, indeed, but he doesn’t help me get a good story.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED SIXTY

2010-08-09T21:47:00.000+12:00

Dissident in McDonald’s Land

It’s the destiny of dissidents to be dispelled from the table of the well-fed. There’s no better place than McDonald’s to prove the truth of this. A young, seemingly innocent, definitely unintended woman in her mid-twenties has placed her order and a pair of professional hands handed to her the customary brown tray, three or four different objects arranged upon its surface with no apparent design in mind. What she’s got there is pure madness in this land of serious eaters. It’s dinner time, when people crowd McDonald’s with armies of children crying by their hands and asking for impossibly unique combinations. I’ve seen a car at the entrance, with a sticker on its rear window which was pure McDonald’s philosophy: ‘If they don’t have chocolate in heaven I’m not going there.’ In this land, where you don’t exist unless you can eat half the weight of your body at one sitting, the small and slim young woman is painful nonsense. She has a bagel on her tray, a teapot, a cup, and possibly another item of which I’m not quite sure. It doesn’t matter anyway, because I strongly believe that it is a napkin. She walks slowly to a table where she sits herself delicately, afraid that her appearance may disturb the order of the world. Around her, people munch in big batches. Everybody’s serious about eating here. There are large, family-size boxes with fries and patties flowing out and enormous drinks sweating lavishly in frozen droplets. The bagel-eater-tea-drinker realizes very quickly that this is not her territory. And when she sees the discrepancy between the timid tea pot on her tray and the mastodons eviscerated onto the trays of the others, she packs her belongings with a look of a haunted animal on her face, the head buried pointlessly between the shoulders. Dissidence is no easy task when you run into it by pure accident. Luckily enough, she finds a place away from the eyes of the others, and while the diners devour their supersized Angus-the-Thirds with eyes exuding flames of criminal hunger, she can enjoy what’s left of the pleasure of her late, meaningless tea. Poor little rebel, what has become of her dissidence, and in how short a time.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY NINE

2010-08-08T22:06:00.001+12:00

Caught in the trap

The sky is pretty low today. The pressure in the atmosphere is lying heavily upon every corner of the city, and most of the people I see are either staring at the road from behind a steering wheel or sticking their noses from the other side of some bus window. There’s only one pedestrian animating the atmosphere: an Indian woman dressed in a red sari, walking down the street slowly, at a very carefully measured pace. She looks somewhat inappropriate in the deserted, humid surroundings. Hoards of road workers have been turning the pathways upside down throughout the week and their work has now acquired the semblance of a disaster. Deep ditches dug on the sides of the road, mud oozing everywhere, a big chunk of the area fenced as if with the frenzy of paranoia. The sari hangs loose around her body, inflated by the strong wind, which makes the woman resemble a bird with very long wings. As she walks, shy and discrete, along one of the metal fences, an impolite piece of invisible wire grabs hold of one of those flaps and pulls the woman black with a violent jerk. She now resembles a pigeon caught in the claws of killer kite, wriggling to get rid of the lethal clutch, with nobody around to lend her a hand, left all to herself to fight the demon. The battle takes a while. The jinni isn’t willing to give in easily. The woman pulls at the end of her sari, fidgets and gets her fingers working rapidly. The wind blows on, and her hair is now rising to the skies, like the flame of a candle (a black flame burning incessantly). When she finally finishes the struggle and the sari is back to its expected form, the woman moves away from the fence like a small field animal which has just escaped from the clutch of a foothold trap, looking with increased suspicion at every moving object around. Her desperate fight hasn’t changed the nature of the surroundings. The sky is still low, still cold, and still inhospitable. What a day!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY EIGHT

2010-08-08T22:04:00.000+12:00

Three on a bench

The three teenagers are seated on the bench in the waiting room like three sparrows perched on an electric wire, taking a rest after a long flight. They are so close, their bodies touch each other. They have to squeeze their shoulders in order to find enough room. The one in the middle, seemingly the oldest one of the trio, skims through an auto magazine. He has something to say about almost every photograph. There’s an emphasis in the tone of his voice. He speaks Chinese so I can’t understand a word. I can, however, follow his gestures, his thin fingers, the bones showing through the translucent skin. The eyebrows ascend every now and then, whenever he comes across a problem. He sorts the problem quickly and buries it in another avalanche of words. The teenager at his left, a bespectacled young man with a bush of hair flowing into his eyes, listens attentively to the wisely articulated sentences. He seems so absorbed that he gets lost in a mist of veneration. He only has enough energy left in his body to poke his left ear, extract a modicum of wax from it, roll it into a tiny ball and dismiss it with an expert flick of his forefinger. The boy in the middle keeps going about his explanations, without noticing this rapid performance. The third one, isolated to his right, is utterly absent from the show. It’s improbable that anything impress him in any way. His hands woven across his chest, the legs stretched well beyond his required space, the eyes languid and lost in a contemplation that seems otherworldly. The words uttered at the centre of the trio have no connotation for this adolescent, possibly the youngest one. I conclude from his complexion and his apathy that he must be the sick one, waiting for the doctor to come and call his name. Taken over by his state of desolation, he exists in himself and to himself. His friend, the one who has something to say about everything, has nothing to say to him. The beauty and vigour of those cars in the magazine have thrust the ill one out of the scheme. It always happens, doesn’t it? The sick is always pushed to the margins.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY SEVEN

2010-08-06T22:08:00.000+12:00

Very, very, very old

Is there love when time has closed a cycle? Can there still be a love story when love itself seems impudent and offensive? The tiny car parked in the underground lot appears to be lifeless. There are two hardly distinguishable figures inside, a man and a woman, both of them outrageously old, synonymous to eternity. They are reduced to outlines; there is so little body in them that the spirit must be overwhelmingly large, disproportionate. They are both on the front seats, their heads touching one other, and I’m not sure if they do this because they want to feel each other’s spirit or if they just cannot keep their bodies erect. The woman is holding an envelope in her hand. The man is following her gestures only with the corner of his left eye. The envelope is shaking with this terrible shake of the old, desiccated hand. The tremulous white surface of the envelope makes it look like the wing that keeps flapping although the bird has long been dead. The two stay head-to-head a long time. They seem to feel so good in that position, connected like two Siamese twins, made inseparable, forever tied to each other, impossible to tell apart. They say that people who live long together end up resembling each other. That means that eternity could make them incredibly hard to distinguish. That explains why the first impression I got when I first saw them in the car was that they were two women. Old age, I suppose, distorts external attributes. Gender or beauty, the colour of skin and the firmness of flesh, they all turn out to have been ridiculous illusions. The man and the woman in the car look so much like each other that they make age become the confirmation of that universal suspicion that if we look deep inside our souls we can see how identical we are. The envelope is still flapping hopelessly in the bony hand. I don’t think they are going to open it. They seem to need this fragile thing between them, an object that’s more delicate than their forsaken bodies.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY SIX

2010-08-05T15:21:00.001+12:00

No parking

The cafe rustles with the clinks of coffee cups and of forks scratching the surface of plates. It's lunch time and the place is full. It smells of meat pies and curries of all sorts. A woman with Caucasian features walks in, accompanied by two Asian men who smile imperceptibly behind her like two naughty kids. The woman walks to the counter and talks to one of the employees. It is clear from her gestures that she's not here to order food. She would like to talk to the owner, please. The owner comes out of the kitchen with an expression of deep spleen. He's got a voluminous belly under the apron and a moustache that expresses limitless self-satisfaction. The first couple of sentences he speaks through the employee, as if she were a translator he absolutely needed. The woman on the other side of the counter would like to know if parking was possible in front of the cafe, for the length of the entire day. She is confused by the fact that the owner of the place where she's come for a day's training couldn't provide proper parking. She came here to sort it out with the cafe owner. After listening for a while to the talk between the woman and the interpreter, the owner decides to take matters in his own hands, and he starts talking himself. He wouldn't allow the woman to park her car in front of the cafe, because her car would take the room for the cars of his customers. Frankly speaking, that's not really the case. I take a look out the window and I can see no vehicle parked there. The woman cannot understand the reluctance, so she tries again and again. To no avail. The owner is adamant. His rounded belly adds authority to the injury of his words. The woman finally leaves, followed by the two Asian men who keep smiling without understanding what's going on. The owner stays put. He now repeats his words for the ears of his employees, so that they could understand where his decision has come from. The employees stare at his moustache as if the owner were the winner of a historical battle. They show him respect.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY FIVE

2010-08-04T21:48:00.001+12:00

A lucky escape

F is walking at a sluggish pace. Right in front of him, a woman who seems somewhere in the late forties. She's wearing black trousers that touch the ground a little, stressing the length of her legs. Her hair is cut at shoulder level and from where F is F cannot quite make the colour of her locks. Is it grey indeed, as it looks to him, or is it just a sorry trick the dimming light is playing on her? She walks almost unnoticed for a while, looking nowhere but ahead, detached from the lavish surroundings of the public park, indifferent to the landscape. Then she suddenly extracts from the bag perched upon her left shoulder a packet of cigarettes. She's one of those who like smoking while walking, F concludes after a quick glance, while a bitter taste is taken over his palate. F tries to look somewhere else for distraction. He knows what's going to follow. The park is humid after the rain. That's the first thing F notices. F and U and C and K, F whispers to himself. The smoke released by the woman invades his nostrils and it hurts. F is not the only one for whom the smoke is a threat. F watches a young man coming from behind. It doesn't take long for his fresh mind to spot the danger. Maybe his nostrils are hurt too, F conjectures. The young man takes up a fast pace, one that grows faster and faster with every step. He's almost running around the woman, making sure he gets to safety before it's too late. When he has reached in front of the woman, the young man takes a deep breath of relief. He has survived, thanks god. He can now slow down, if he wants; the danger is behind him. Not behind F, though. Pleased with herself, the woman makes the smoke rise far above her head, like clouds for little amoretti to rest upon at the hour of their childish leisure. But then the mirage is quickly dispelled and the soft clouds fall back like grenades. F can only watch the young man increasing the distance, becoming smaller and smaller, rejoicing perhaps at the thought of his near miss. Ah, lucky bastard!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY FOUR

2010-08-03T23:23:00.002+12:00

In the city before slumber

The time is ripe for some dusk observations. With interior lights turned on them, characters inside downtown stores look so exposed, so unprotected. It's a delight to watch them unaware of being spied upon, mere lambs at the mercy of an urban voyeur who pries on their ignorance. There's the security man at the Gucci, who's trying desperately to remove a nasty thing from behind the glass door. His stretched leg makes long attempts to dispose of the innocuous but irritating thing, which may be nothing but a figment of his tired imagination. He tries to persuade that thing that it's presence there, behind the closed door, is not appropriate and certainly not welcome. A few meters further down, at Rolex, two employees are about to close. They're frantically removing various shiny and odiously expensive wrist watches and placing them into specially designed sacks. They both wear black gloves and move fast, as if afraid of being caught in the exercise of their jobs. They look like thieves, their eyes rolling like the eyes of two mad convicts: the woman at the front throwing hurried glances through the window to the indifferent passers-by, the man at the back stuffing his bag with that devilish look on his face. At a local tailor whose name escapes my unreliable recollections, a large mirror is covering the entire surface of a lateral wall. The shop is ridiculously small and yet it manages to accommodate two people. The absentmindedness of the woman, who is checking the records of the day, brings nothing noteworthy into the picture. The man, standing in front of the large mirror, is making silly faces which the looking glass is reflecting faithfully. He stretches his facial muscles, reveals his teeth and checks their whiteness, bulges out his eyes a couple of times, looking for something that's not quite clear when analyzed from a distance. He seems bored, painfully bored. The day is closing in but the process is taking forever. The shop people offer this funny spectacle of a city about to fall asleep. If it weren't for those lights.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY THREE

2010-08-02T22:38:00.002+12:00

Oh, so delicate

The blushes in her cheeks are a perfect chromatic match for the unusual scarlet-red of her stockings. The leopard pattern doesn’t seem to go very well with the scarlet, but it is there, and it draws attention. She has long slender legs and a skirt with a mid-thigh hemline that allows her knees to stay in sight. Her bony hands search frantically through her shoulder bag, trying to find things that are too willing to stay together. Her search is accompanied by a quick frown but in the end she gets what she’s been looking for: a packet of mints. She extracts one with two stick-like fingers and places it between the lips where it stays for a second like communion bread. The mint is white like her teeth and it disappears behind the lips, where it is rotated a couple of times, then sucked at with imperceptible movements of the mouth. The low heeled shoes she’s wearing, black and unpretentious, emphasize the length of her legs which, when crossed, resemble two patch-coloured snakes. The one on top swings indifferently, like a pendulum, or rather like a metronome. It seems to be keeping the rhythm of an inner string of thoughts. The hands, thin like her legs, are now holding a hard-cover book. She immerses into the reading quite easily and never raises her eyes from those pages. Absorption has taken her over, and now her body is an entire collection of detailed movements that stem out of the unconscious. The leg swings, the foot rotates around its own axis, the lips purse and relax a number of times, the eyes follow the lines in the book, the head tilts now to the left, now to the right. When the book alights upon her knee, the hand follows in almost apologetically. It rests on the open pages with a delicacy that reminds me of the hands of saints in Italian Renaissance paintings, where fingers never really touch the objects; instead, they caress those objects’ invisible aura, the palm full of that curious energy that renders everything around diaphanous and almost breakable, like the transparency of glass or the quiet, promising rustling of silk.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY TWO

2010-08-01T19:33:00.002+12:00

Deceit

Appearances deceive. That’s a truth often confirmed by first-hand experience. Yesterday’s description was a case in point. Today’s is just another. Here’s this old looking woman on the other side of the road, approaching at a slow pace the pedestrian crossing. She’s pushing a four-wheel pram. Isn’t she a lovely granny taking the little offspring for an invigorating stroll through the neighbourhood! She takes one step onto the crossing and cars stop one by one greeting her reverently with their luminous noses almost touching the ground. Drivers wait patiently for the old woman to take her time with the crossing, and she does so, making sure the little one doesn’t grow anxious and start crying. But hold on a second. Something’s wrong about this picture. The thick comforter that’s supposed to cover the small body snuggled inside the pram is pulled to an extent which should be utterly uncomfortable for the baby. It looks like the hurried granny has pulled the thing over the baby’s head. Oh no, the little one could get suffocated. I’ve got to stop this woman and point out to her the terrible mistake she’s made. But by the time she’s on my side of the road the picture changes entirely. She doesn’t look as old as I first thought her to be. Her face is wrinkled alright, and her skin is dry and burnt by long exposure to open sun; but let’s be frank: she must be only in her early fifties. Not quite a granny yet, unless the timing for birth-giving has been stretched between three generations to the maximum of probability. But what’s more important, the thing in the pram is not a baby. What the woman has been carrying all along, deceiving drivers and well-intended passers-by, is a carton case of twelve wine bottles, which rattle rhythmically when touching each other. There seems to be at least one more such case in the pram, behind the visible one. The thick comforter that comes on top is just a disguise. I don’t know what caused this need for a cover-up, but the deceit has been bloody effective. It fooled me, for one. Not to mention the well-mannered drivers who’ve given way to an illusion unknowingly.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY ONE

2010-08-01T19:26:00.002+12:00

The stag

When the semaphore goes green, a sea of pedestrians gushes into the intersection, invading it like a threatening army. Their minds busy with the prospects of the day, these pedestrians form a pretty unitary mass of hurried individuals. It takes an outstanding figure to give the scene an interesting turn. I’ve got this figure in my sight right now. It’s the tall stature of a jogger in shorts and singlet. I watch him and it takes a while before I can tell what’s so special about him. Maybe his long hair? Maybe the white cords of his earphones which, seen from behind, resemble plastic bangles? Maybe his slender body? Maybe his height? I find myself forced to reject all these possibilities one by one. But then I see that the unusual lies in his velocity. Because of the speed of his exercise, this morning jogger resembles a wild stag. I’ve noticed in several wild-life documentaries that running stags always seem to move in slow motion. Frightened by cameras and by intrusive human presence, they try run for their lives like only wild animals can. Yet there’s something in their gait that makes one feel that the image shown on the tv screen is shot in slow motion. I think I know what it is. It’s the heavy burden of the crown of antlers. The pair of palm-like ornaments stretching over a surface that equals the surface of the animal’s body makes a counter-balancing appearance which gives this strange visual illusion that the stag is actually moving at a snail’s pace, when in fact even predators can seldom catch up with their rapid run. I get the same illusion from the tall man I’m watching now jogging his way up Queen Street. He obviously doesn’t have the antlers of a stag, but he has an unusually long curly hair, tied into a pony tail that descends to the level of his buttocks. When he runs, the pony tail swings with incredible slowness across his back, which creates this false impression of slow motion. In reality, it takes the man a mere ten seconds to disappear from sight, propelled by his bodily speed, while the pedestrians have not yet deserted the intersection, and the traffic lights are still minutes away from turning red.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FIFTY

2010-07-30T22:01:00.002+12:00

The seagull

A tall stone wall in the university campus looming metres above the heads of human actors is covering most of the background. It is grey and imposing: a piece of outdoor architecture whose intended role may have been from the beginning to stress the difference between man and stone. Right at the bottom of this wall there’s a bench and beside the bench a mid-aged woman is trying to hide the fact that she’s eating. She takes minuscule bites from a tiny piece of something of petite size: a quarter of a sandwich or a small piece of cake. Every bite is accompanied by a bashful covering of her mouth. She places her open palm across the lips and keeps the finger there for the entire length of mastication. Every chew becomes, unknowingly, a kiss she’s delivering to her own finger tips. The way she does these things (the covering of the mouth and the hiding of the lips) makes her resemble an apologetic person who would gladly implode into her own body so that her image could not be seen by others. Unfortunately this privilege cannot be allowed her, so the woman continues indefinitely with the palm slapped across her mouth, turning to one side, where she believes fewer people can see her, eating with tiny little mouthfuls the size of baby food portions. Generally speaking, the passers-by ignore her en masse. And there aren’t many of them anyway. But there’s a white seagull mere metres away from her feet who stares at the woman with an enervating insistence. The bird just doesn’t take its eyes off the eating creature standing tall above it. The yellow beak contrasting with its milk-white feathers stands out like a true organ of engorgement. If Hitchcock’s The Birds ever needed a real-life embodiment of the aviary threat, this seagull is the perfect specimen. Its intense stare is so incendiary, I am inclined to believe that the bird is the actual reason for the woman’s shyness. Under such close scrutiny, no wonder she feels embarrassed. And there are many more bites before she finishes this damned never-ending sandwich. What an ordeal!

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY NINE

2010-07-29T21:04:00.000+12:00

I've been misled

The gliding door at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Auckland opens with a gape of awe and out comes a trendily dressed man in an impeccable black suit, white shirt and dizzyingly shiny shoes. He’s full of importance. The place and time are perfect. A silent morning unfolds in front of his eyes and he moves his pupils slowly from one side to the other to capture the traffic frenzy that’s just pilling up at a gradual pace. He feels good in his own shoes, as they say. The nostrils open up like two pipes and he breathes in the polluted-yet-so-sweet air of the urban environment and breathes out the nonchalance that comes with his stature and gait. If I were to label him I’d say he’s a lawyer. There are so many law-related buildings around that my guess is almost a non-guess. But I don’t have to be impertinent and draw such conclusions from an exterior fact. There are plenty of clues in the man’s actual appearance that could very easily lead me to this inference. The tie he’s wearing, for instance. It is so perfectly knotted and so elegantly worn that I can see how used he is to wearing such items which I confess I hate with my entire soul. It takes a lawyer, I say to myself, to feel good in a tie and to wear it with this utter distinction. Then there’s his suit: perfectly ironed, spotless, not a single fold defacing its beauty. When he walks, the fabric of his trousers falls in a gentle cascade, rearranging itself instantaneously. The jacket outlines his shoulders and makes them just a little wider than they must be in reality. With all this grand attire and the lofty air, the man stands to burst out with pride and superiority. He stops for a while to make sure that his presence has been thoroughly appropriated by the surrounding cityscape. Then he walks slowly to a taxi parked close to the hotel’s entrance, his elegance accompanying him like an aura. But wait. What’s going on here? Instead of taking the passenger’s seat he goes straight behind the steering wheel. Oh no, I’ve been deceived. The man is not a lawyer. He’s a taxi driver. Well, so much for my deductive skills.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY EIGHT

2010-07-28T22:33:00.000+12:00

Soliloquy

Gimme a one, man. Whoohoo that’s my boy. Yeah, gimme a two. A two! You got it, mate, that’s the two I wanted. Gimme a three now, okay? A three, a three. Let me see your best three. Got it. Sweeeet. Now see what I’ve got here? A pretty face is what I’ve got. Just check this out: left cheek, smooth, freshly shaven, pink, niiiice; right cheeck, nothing less than the left one. Have a look, aye? Left cheek, right cheek. Left and right. Beauuuutiful. Now gimme a five. Five, man. That’s it. Five is precisely this: the jacket. Isn’t it cool? Take a good look at it and tell me. Nice and thick. Not a bloody fart of wind can go through it, if you know what I mean. I can keep it on if I want, or I can take it off, just like this. Just keep an eye on me. Here I am. Hoopla hop. I’m taking it off right now. See what I can do? I can take the jacket off whenever I want, because I can. Now take a look at me again. Ain’t I a thing? Ain’t I an admirable male figure? Tall and sturdy, the chest put forth like a double packet of stale bread. And man, I look so confident. It makes me smile, you know? This confidence in me is a jewel I can wear right on my forehead. How could I not smile when I’m such a fine fellah! Look what I’m doing now. After I’ve taken my jacket off (‘cause I can, remember?) I can check my teeth. Hah? White like a row of pearls, that’s what they say about teeth like mine. I love ‘em. They make me look healthy, yes they do. Hmmm. Where do you think you can find another one like me? Hah? Where else apart from this window? I like how they made this window to reflect like mirrors, so that one could check out one’s hansom figure and say yeah. Yeah, baby, yeah. That’s how I like it. Nice and shiny, reflecting me like a picture. Yeah.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY SEVEN

2010-07-27T23:31:00.002+12:00

Pale serenity

The side-moves of the train are barely putting her body in motion. She’s anchored herself very well, the palm of her right hand placed firmly onto the couch. She’s got this pensive look, apparent in the languid way she stares through the window, and in the chin prompted by the fist of her left hand, whose elbow is resting on the window sill (another point of support, just to be sure). She’s outrageously pregnant. The big round belly is resting in her lap as if she had hidden a beach ball under the garments. She seems quite young and at the first pregnancy, I’d venture to guess. Soft hands, almost translucent. I can see the veins through their thin skin. And also the pale colour of her cheeks, and the freshness in her wide eyes, and the pupils sliding along with the backward-running landscape. She’s opened the zipper of her top so that her long white neck is generously revealed. Her body is plump and juicy, monochromatic like a nicely sculpted piece of marble, the legs thickened by the accumulation of adipose resources, utterly symptomatic of her state. She looks very patient. The thought of the actual birth has not yet crossed her mind in the anxious way of ready-to-deliver mothers. But I gather she’s not far from it, and she knows the real deal will come to visit her in a not-so-distant future. Maybe that’s what is generating the pensiveness in her eyes. But let’s be frank: she’s also somewhat joyful, and this feeling gives her that I-don’t-know-what. The thin lips, discoloured to a pale pinkness, are slightly stretched across the face, in something that looks like a restrained smile. At times, she thrusts her thumb between the perfectly straight and white rows of teeth, and she falls into sucking the finger tip as if receded into the small pleasures of childhood. The nostrils are also a little dilated. Is there a proper smile blooming up on her face? It may be. Her thoughts, whatever they are, seem to bring to her a world she is fond of. So serene, so pale, so quiet.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY SIX

2010-07-26T20:32:00.000+12:00

Infuriated dogs

We haven’t had a warm morning in weeks. The weather, so far only intent on showing off, has now cracked down into a mellow state of solar slumber in which the trees are shaking off their excess water and birds are willing to clear their throats for a quick concerto. On the opposite sidewalk a woman dressed in an irritating green jumper is doing her power walk at an incredible speed. The threshold between walking and running may be apparent only to her. To me it is not so clear. She’s got the attitude right, and also the proper pace. The white hat she’s wearing, with its wide brims that fall upon her eyes and ears like the flaps of a withering mushroom, move up and down with the exact rhythm resembling the ears of an English hound. Her hands, two pendulums propelled by an invisible inner motion, swing widely to match the large opening of her legs in forward motion. The street is empty and apart from a small number of cars nothing disturbs her morning exercise in any conceivable way. Nothing, that is, apart from the dogs that attack at the bottom of wooden fences, barking violently and trying to bite at her fast moving shadow, or maybe at the green light her jumper sends through the boards like semaphore signals allowing traffic to go mad. The infuriated dogs conduct this current barks from one fence to the next. They all join into this universal attack, and the repetitive, pleonastic noise they make follow the woman along her route like a trail of noise progressing in the rhythm of her power walk. The tension in her muscles is reflected in this canine craziness unfolding at her feet, but there’s nothing she would subdue to, apart from the will to move forth, completing the exercise for which she’s dragged herself out of the house in the first place. The dogs must be even more infuriated by her indifference, and so their continuous howls grow louder and louder, as other dogs join in, willing to put an end to this green fury that excites their senses. And so the woman disappears in the open horizon followed by the animal yells and yelps and barks and howls. The concerto is growing dimmer and dimmer as she fades away in the heat of this pleasant morning, but it continues in the distance with the same intensity, dragging more dogs into play, driving them mad, gluing their wet noses to the vertical fences.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY FIVE

2010-07-25T22:16:00.001+12:00

Of a modern hunter-gatherer (in the past tense, for accuracy)

Past dusk, when spirits prepare themselves to melt in the slumber of the fast-approaching night, a man in a track suit made his way towards a finely drawn line of cars parked along the alley like horses at the entrance to a saloon in the Wild West. His steps were soft and inaudible, camouflaged by the springy soles of his sports shoes. The few lamp post that had already turned their cyclopean eyes into surrogate suns threw supple beams towards his head, where a whitish bald spot reflected them back in adamant refusal. The man, let us not forget, was wearing this tracking suit, a uniform of sorts. In spite of the darkness conquering the surroundings, the sparse light could make out quite distinctly the colours of this suit. It was dark blue and had white strips flowing down the laterals of his arms and legs, as if to render the man visible in the night to come. Dressed to be swift in motion, he slid across the pathway looking with eager eye for the only car in the row which was his own. His arms were burdened with a promising feast. Four square boxes bearing the logo Pizza Hut were placed uniformly one upon another, corner matching corner, a miniature tower, a statement in architecture. This was the prey of the day, the promised feast he was going to take to his tribe, and for which the tribe was going to cheer and scan his name a thousand times in perfect dithyrambs. A white plastic bag was hanging from the joint of his elbow. Inside it, two sweating bottles of soft drink were kissing each other passionately. When the man took a step, the plastic bag would swing like a pendulum in full action. The man had to stop a couple of times to allow the wide swing to calm down and turn the bag into a properly tamed thing. Finding his car in the end, the hunter-gatherer deposited the whole burden onto the roof, and then rummaged through the pockets searching for the key. He had this happy look on his face: the satisfaction of a job well done, and maybe the thought of the happiness he was going to give the hungry tribe, who had put the dishwasher to rest for the night.

The Epidemic. Case THREE HUNDRED FORTY FOUR

2010-07-25T22:14:00.003+12:00

An admirable spectacle

I’m about to take the turn to the right when I see the head of a young woman looming unnaturally high above the wooden fences on the side street. When I make the move to the right the mystery becomes clear as day light. She’s standing tall in the open boot of a car, gesturing vividly towards a house in which nobody seems to be reacting yet to her presence. There are boxes in the boot, tidily packed and mask-taped with brown crosses. She may be just moving to this new location. She’s tall and slim, the jeans very tightly stretched over her long legs, barely holding the round buttocks from exploding in carnal delights. The black t-shirt covering her upper body is also tiny and stretched to the maximum of its capability. The nipping chill of the morning has caused her nipples to bud under the t-shirt, like two ripe raspberries ready for the crop. Playful and yet well aware of the effect of her own presence, the young woman is standing there as if she were a beautiful thing in a limited-edition photograph magazine, showing off the curves of her body, the perfectly erect position of her spine, the proportions of her bodily composition. Inside the car, seemingly oblivious to her presence, a young man is staring into the void, probably listening to some mind-blowing music, and his absence from the spectacle unfolding in the boot of the car puts a lot more emphasis on the young woman. Her long black hair running down between the shoulder blades, to the point where it meets with the curves of her waist; her rosy cheeks of which the morning has made its feast of blood and flesh leaving the skin faintly coloured; the slender fingers waving to the house in the background. There is a lot more to say about this woman, but who could take the task of doing it in every detail? I, for one, wouldn’t dare. In fact, a tinge of mystery is just the thing for her, I believe.