Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex?

Roberto Bolaño: Los detectives salvajes (1998)


Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives & the eternal avant-garde

Mexico City, July 1982:

Someone had to call Ulises’s mother, I mean it was the least we could do, but Jacinto didn’t have the heart to tell her that her son had disappeared in Nicaragua … just like Ambrose Bierce … and Pushkin, except that in Pushkin’s case his wife … was Reality, the Frenchman who killed Pushkin was the Contras, the snows of St. Petersburg were the empty spaces Ulises Lima left in his wake, his lethargy, I mean, and his laziness and lack of common sense, and the seconds in the duel were Mexican Poetry or Latin American Poetry, which … were silent witness to the death of one of the best poets of our day.

– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [1]

•

Auckland, April 2006:

Dear Leicester,

Not that I suppose you’ve been missing it exactly, but I thought you might like to hear some old-fashioned, Auckland-style literary goss about a few of your old friends.

So there we all were in the little Art Gallery in Northcote: comfy sofas, cushions, tables of wine and cheese. The plan was that we should each read for five minutes, then have an interval with music, then read again for another five minutes, then there would be an open mike (necessary to get funding for the gig, apparently).

In shambles Donald, just before the readings begin. He looks a bit pasty to me, and has obviously had quite a bit to drink. He asks if I can give his magazine Bread a bit of a puff. I say of course, but suggest that he read something himself later on in the open mike (I’m quite keen on some of the poems he’s been writing recently). He likes the idea, and goes off to get some copies of the mag from Craig’s car, which is parked nearby.

Meanwhile the reading begins: read read read, yawn yawn yawn. Then the interval. I talk to Craig, who says he hasn’t seen Donald for quite some time, since he went off to look in the car, in fact, and is a little worried about him (‘He was popping anti-depressants in the car, and he’s been drinking all day, and he was in hospital this morning with some cuts he’d made on himself’). Ah.

•

Mexico City, May 1977:

Our visceral realist activities after Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano left: automatic writing, exquisite corpses, … masturbatory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls (‘This is it,’ ‘Laura, my love,’ etc.), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, … poems in hard-boiled prose … parables, fables, theatre of the absurd, pop art, haikus, … Bloody poetry (three deaths at least), pornographic poetry (heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, with no relation to the poet’s personal preference) … We even put out a magazine … We kept moving … We kept moving … We did what we could … But nothing turned out right.

– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [2]

•

The reading recommences. The first two do their sets, the third begins … I’m standing to one side when in comes Donald. He does have copies of the latest Bread, but seems very unsteady on his feet. He comes up to me and asks if he can read. I suggest that I’d better do it for him, as he doesn’t look like he’s in very good shape. We’re just discussing the matter when he starts to fall over, unfortunately on the bare feet of the wife of one of the more senior poets present, who is sitting right next to me.

‘You just stood on my feet! I have a bad toe!’

‘Sorry,’ mutters Donald, ‘Bad knee …’

At this point he starts to go over again, and I grab him to try and steady him.

Suddenly the senior poet is on the scene. ‘You just stood on my wife’s foot! You should get out of here!’

Donald protests, organisers start to cluster round.

‘This is a paid event … You have to leave …’

‘I’ve paid already,’ says Donald, ‘I don’t see why I should leave …’

The senior poet seizes him and starts to thrust him towards the door. Donald resists. Others start to join in. ‘What’s going on?’ says Hilda, as her interminably dull reading about an alcoholic failing to resist the booze meanders on …

•

Mexico City, November 1975:

The night before … Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet, Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer, Borges was philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
In our language, of course, he clarified. ‘In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.’

– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [3]

•

The senior poet (to do him justice) is clearly experienced in such matters and by now has Donald all the way to the door. Jack stands there like a stuffed dummy thinking how unnecessary this all is and wishing they’d stop fighting with one another. Craig and the friend he came with are trying to drag Donald away. Various impotent attempts at a fist-fight between Donald and the senior poet. Shouts, curses … Suddenly a wine glass comes flying through the door (presumably thrown by Donald) and detonates in the middle of the floor, luckily touching no-one.

‘Shut the doors!’ shouts my colleague Myra. ‘That way they can’t get back in …’

By now the Mayor of Northcote, who used to be a cop, has got involved. The organisers are ringing the police. The senior poet and various other bystanders come back in. Calm settles in again, as Hilda’s dreary reading continues (she’s started again at the beginning, lest we should have missed any of her words of wisdom).

•

Mexico City, November 1975:

At Don Crispin’s request, I talked to him about visceral realism. After he’d made a few observations like ‘realism is never visceral,’ ‘the visceral belongs to the oneiric world,’ … which I found rather disconcerting, he theorized that we underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. I asked him what exactly he meant by underprivileged ... But then I thought about the tenement room Rosario was sharing with me and I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispin, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.

– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [4]

•

The senior poet’s as happy as a dog with two tails. ‘Didn’t think I still had it in me … He was soft … took mercy on him, but I could have dropped him easily with a single punch …’ etc. etc. to anyone who’ll listen.

Hoping that Donald & Craig & co. have pissed off and driven away, I do my bit of the reading, though the audience has thinned considerably (and understandably) by this time. The broken glass is mopped up, (relative) peace is restored …

And now the cops come driving up. ‘Why have they brought them back here?’ asks Myra. Waves of rumour come and go among those of us who are still hanging around. It seems that the mayor pursued the malefactors in his car with a cellphone, directing the cops where to intercept them, an event which finally took place in the park at Stokes Point.

Craig (as he tells me later) elected to take the heat while Donald and an even drunker member of the group took off to hide under the piles of the Harbour Bridge.

•

The review … tried to sum up the [writer]’s personality in a few words:
Intelligence: average.
Character: epileptic.
Scholarship: sloppy.
Storytelling ability: chaotic.
Prosody: chaotic.

– Roberto Bolaño, 2666 [5]

•

By now the organisers appear to have worked out that it’s my friends who’ve been causing all the ruckus, so I think it best to leave before the cops can start questioning me and demanding addresses. On the way out, though, I encounter Craig. The cops simply let him go, as he hadn’t really done anything wrong. They seem pretty bored with the whole business, in fact. The irony is that nothing would have happened if the Mayor hadn’t happened to be there, and hadn’t happened to be an ex-cop …

But now comes the clincher. I write to the organisers next day apologising for the disruption of their event in such a non-North Shore sort of way. They reply pretty graciously that it wasn’t my fault, and I suppose it wasn’t, though I do feel a bit bad about it nevertheless. And then in comes Myra (this is in the office, at work).

We giggle. ‘Well, that went well …’ I say (I’d invited all my students, though luckily none of them came – just the usual culture-vultures).

‘So,’ she asks, ‘What’s all this stuff about [she names the senior poet]?’

‘What stuff?’ I reply. ‘All I remember is him skiting about what a hard man he still is.’

‘I’ve just been hearing that those friends of yours told the cops that he’d been molesting young girls … including a Czech girl at the uni who complained about him.’

At this I remember an earlier part of the evening, just after the senior poet had started to read, when a voice outside the hall (obviously Donald’s) had shouted something about ‘fondling the buttocks of young girls’ … I assumed at the time that it was just him being drunk and disorderly, as in the days when he used to write abusive letters to people (the editor of Poetry NZ most prominent among them).

•

There was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist … who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick … and A Christmas Carol over … The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

– Roberto Bolaño, 2666 [6]

•

The cops, Myra continues, had seemed quite concerned about it – as if nowadays no such accusation can be dismissed readily as baseless for fear of later repercussions.

So it begins to look as if, rather than simply getting a bit the worse for wear and being thrown out of a venue (as happens to some of our mutual friends most nights of their lives), Donald actually came to Northcote with the intention of confronting the senior poet.

Kind of sickens you a bit with the ‘literary life,’ though, doesn’t it? The voice of a writer droning on about the imaginary dilemmas of her alcoholic character, while a real alcoholic character (which is what I’m beginning to fear Donald may be) is brawling and disintegrating under all of our noses.

And yet (though it seems rather unlikely when I read over the dreary chronicle of events) there was something irresistibly amusing about the whole thing: the senior poet’s complete and utter glee at having proved himself in combat in defence of his lady (‘You missed all the excitement!’ as he shouted to Myra when she came sidling up); the looks on the faces of some of the Northcote ladies – poets unfettered just a bit too close for comfort … Hilda picking up the gossip a mile a minute …

No-one was hurt and nothing got damaged (funnily enough, far more glasses were broken by people knocking them over with their elbows than the one destroyed by Donald), but I do feel bad for the organisers and the gallery-owners. They put a lot of work into the whole thing.

Most of the poetry that was read was (predictably) dreadful, but that’s not a mortal sin either. Tell me if you’d like to hear more of this sort of thing, or if you’re relieved not to have to hear about the mad antics of your writerly friends … I just thought it might amuse you, but now that I look at it I guess it’s not all that funny after all.

It’s certainly a reading that will go down in North Shore history, though.

Lots of love from

Jack

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Notes:

[1] Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives. 1st ed. 1998. Trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2007 (London: Picador, 2009), 321.

[2] Bolaño, Savage Detectives, 196.

[3] Bolaño, Savage Detectives, 72.

[4] Bolaño, Savage Detectives, 101-2.

[5] Roberto Bolaño, 2666. 1st ed. 2004. Trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2008 (London: Picador., 2009), 27-28.

[6] Bolaño, 2666, 227.

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David Eggleton, ed.: Landfall 230 (2015)


[11-17/11/2014]

[2205 words]

[Published in Landfall 230 (November 2015): 89-96;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 53-60.]

Jack Ross: Ghost Stories (2019)

•

A Strange Day at the Language School

John Amos Comenius. Orbis Sensualium Pictus: A Facsimile (1659 / 1968): 248.

i.m. In-Jae Ra, d. 29/12/97

I slept so soundly I did not know the
mountain rain had stopped.
Waking up, I felt the whole house airy
and cool.
– The Sound of the One Hand, trans. Yoel Hoffman (1975) [1]

Monday, December 29, 1997

I took the bus before my usual one for some reason (curiosity?) and so arrived early at the school, around 8 a.m. Martin and Hamish were standing outside smoking. We exchanged good mornings, then went upstairs to the teachers’ room.

The first we heard of it was when Ian, the temporary Director of Studies, came bustling in. Teresa, the Korean counsellor, had told him that one of the students was dead, had died during the night. Car crash? I enquired. No, some kind of seizure or haemorrhage he thought, but she’d been too upset to say.

As more of us arrived, the news began to get more circumstantial. The dead student’s name was In-Jae. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it was only when Hamish told me she was in the TOEFL [Test Of English as a Foreign Language] exam class that I realised I’d been teaching her the week before.

I still couldn’t put a face to the name until I looked at the school notice board (I went over to check after I saw Dong-Youl pointing her out to another student). Then it suddenly clicked. My class had all gone shopping for the Christmas party, then we’d had coffee together in Robert Harris on Queen Street – iced coffee for Hyun-Kyung, cappuccino for Su-Jin, latte for me, and black coffee (I think) for the rather undemonstrative In-Jae.

We chatted about our plans – Christmas, etc. She was a university student, doing the TOEFL exam in order to get a better job back home in Korea. In class she seemed a little reserved, as if awed by those who’d been studying for so much longer.

•

How can I convey the strange – uncanny, almost: unheimlich [eerie] – atmosphere of a language school? I tried to say it in a poem once:

Inside this room
it is Korea.
Auckland rushes by. [2]

That isn’t quite it, though. It isn’t that Auckland rushes by while we sit suspended, flies in amber, caught in some Eastern dream of serenity. What is it, then? Perhaps it’s that normal rules of conduct change. We become more exemplary of ourselves – as if we, as teachers, felt compelled to represent a Western dream of compromise, freedom, fair play – as if the students were countering with Confucian virtues of filial obedience and respect.

All the guessing games – Trivial Pursuit; Botticelli; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral – go wrong, bound up as they are with cultural assumptions. Who was Marilyn Monroe? What was John Wayne’s real name? Where is Big Ben? Our textbook writers seldom show the imagination to bridge this gap.

Of course there are students from Russia, from Europe, from South America, but the overwhelming majority (here in Auckland, at any rate) come from China, Korea, South-East Asia, Japan … the term “Asian” soon ceases to have much significance when you teach ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages).

It’s not enough simply to avoid pejorative clichés, though. What I do like about the poem is the sense it gives of a kind of secret society – an initiation into difference which has been the common property of English-language teachers in the age of the Pax Americana.

For a long time the only way I could find to express this was by copying bits of writing and drawing from the walls of classrooms (realia we call them, in the ESOL world). It wasn’t that I thought them cute or funny, but dislocating, as if they offered a new way of looking at things, from the outside looking in:

When I was child, I would rather be naughty, than a good one.
One day, my mother told me not to go out after having dinner because she had a bad dream about me, last night.
So, she was anxious about what happen to me.
But when she washed the dishes in the kitchen, I went outside secretly to play with my friends.
We played at a narrow side street without any accident for one hour.
All of a sudden some one pushed me to the corner way and then I fell down.
Unfortunately there was a fire pot beside the wall.
I was aware of falling down with it.
My arms were burned and my head was hurted.
I was surprised at the bleeding from my head but I couldn’t tear homing back to my house rightaway so I called her.
She was very surprised at my appearance and called the doctor and moved to the hospital.
A couple hours later I was awake.
Both of my arms were bandage and a right part of my head was stitched by a doctor.
When the effect of anesthetic wore off, I was very painful.
I was absent from school a week.
In spite of growing up, I can’t forget it.

– Tee Young

•

The first intimation that anything was really wrong came when I saw Hyun-Kyung sobbing in the office next to the teacher’s room (she’d just asked us how to get an outside line). Janine went in to comfort her.

From then on, things began to get increasingly strange. More and more students were arriving and being told the news, and then reacting in their various ways – some pacing like cats, others giggling in small groups, others heading straight for the telephone.

All of us were aware that this was moving beyond our control. Hyun-Kyung was sobbing openly, comforted by some of her classmates (I even had a go myself, but to no avail). Vic, too, was sitting and sobbing by himself till Hamish went over and joined in.

As class-time (9 a.m.) approached, it became clear that anything like a normal working day was impossible. Jim Salter, the Kiwi Academic Director of this Korean-owned school, sent up to say that he would address the school in ten minutes time. By then, though, many students had already disappeared. Getting to the hospital was the one thing on their minds.

Visiting hours in the Critical Care ward were, Jim told us, from 11 onwards, so there was little point in going there right away. I managed to get my class to sit down, and we talked for a while. No study was possible, we concluded. After a bit they went out to smoke, then May, an ex-student, an older Korean student, arrived, and we all talked together some more. They decided to go off in her car without waiting until eleven o’clock.

•

China [la Chine] is one thing, the idea which a French petit-bourgeois could have of it not so long ago is another: for this peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium-dens, no other word possible but Sininess [Sinité]. Unlovely?

- Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1987) [3]

Perhaps a better alternative to the “unlovely” Sininess might be Chinoiserie. There’s a great temptation to indulge in Chinoiserie, or Orientalism, or any of those tried-and-true devices by which the Westerner attempts to assimilate, and distance, the Other (in the guise of understanding) when talking about language schools. Actually being there is, fortunately, a different matter. The sheer solidity of the individual students, with their individual problems and points of origin, resists our generalising tendencies.

The Christmas party was a case in point. We’d all gone shopping for small presents (under two dollars, if possible) at the Korean Gift shop “Morning Glory” just off Lorne Street. This was before the days of Pokémon and Pikachu, but the bizarre kitschiness of the shop’s contents still had to be seen to be believed:

Have a Happy!

Hello❤️Kitty

Lovely Boat

Mr. Lonely

I love me!

Koala-bear backpacks, Snoopy watches, fluffy-bunny stickers, fluorescent tissue holders, furry-toy pencil sharpeners, “Sunny Day” T-shirts …

As a contrast, I could cite the slightly surreal figure of Dong-Youl Shin, long-term student at the school: ex-monk, martial arts expert, windsurfing champion, survivor of apocalyptic motorbiking accidents, philosopher, part-time caretaker, rapid language assimilator, Renaissance man, he always seemed to be living on some heightened plane of reality. Martin defeated him once at arm-wrestling, which surprised me, as I’d become accustomed to regarding him as the Asian superman. We were, for a time, good friends, and he gave me a lot of advice which I felt I understood at the time.

My point is that it’s not enough to see these as normal parts of our cultural landscape. We have to find new categories to put them in. Barthean Sinité may not be the solution, but perhaps a more self-conscious and pervasive sense of strangeness might be – a Brechtian alienation effect, but without the latter’s dependence on the dogmas of class struggle.

•

By the time break came (10.30), most of those close to In-Jae had already gone. Jim’s rather dilatory way of dealing with the emergency had left us with a fait accompli. It was decided that Hamish, Janine and I should go to the hospital with any remaining students. Martin said we could borrow his car, and I ended up driving various young Koreans there in his Mitsubishi automatic. Somewhat unexpectedly, parking was no trouble at all.

After some wandering about inside the main building, we ran into Dong-Youl and Sunny, who told us to make for the second floor. There we found an immense horde of people, and a rather flapped receptionist. She insisted on telling me and May (the closest thing to authority figures?) the rules: only two people at a time, none till the nurse allowed it, no-one to slip through the door unnoticed.

When we turned the corner, we found that Helena, another student, was letting in large numbers of people, something she claimed the nurse was happy to allow. All of the kids went in together. I waited, suddenly unsure whether I really wanted to join them. I felt like an intruder suddenly – a tourist to their grief.

Finally I did steel myself to go in, with May. After threading various twists and turns, we came to a curtained-off recess. In it there was a complex mechanised bed, surrounded by various stands, charts, benches, etc. In the midst of it all a small, official-looking nurse was bustling about the patient. In-Jae lay there, with a swollen face, tubes running from her nose, hooked up to two sets of pinging machines. Her breast rose and fell under the thin hospital gown. She looked quite alive, but completely unconscious.

“She’s combed,” the nurse said. The brain haemorrhage had crushed all the basic functions in her brain stem, so she was, effectively, dead. Her heart was still beating, though, and might go on doing so for some time to come. She’d combed in fifteen minutes, the last time she was timed, she told us.

•

 

Life Support

No doubt you’ve heard she’s combed
– little In-Jae –
the nurse told May and me

A rupture in the wall
of the blood-vessel:
brain-stem injury

She came here from Korea
to learn English; she returns
burned dry as dust

Dead when we saw her
(breathing still)
… Perhaps the word was coned

•

The major point of controversy at this stage was whether the Korean Pastor would be allowed in to conduct a prayer meeting. The receptionist was doubtful, but the nurse had no problem with it at all. She was going off to lunch, but said we could all come in. So the tribe trekked in again: Natalia and Oleg (the two Russian ex-students In-Jae had had dinner with the night before), all her classmates, Helena, May, Mae-Jong, Hamish, Janine, the Pastor. He began to pray over the girl in Korean. We repeated “Amen” from time to time. I joined in on what was, I hoped, the Lord’s prayer.

•

Points to bring out:

• Amazing tolerance, forbearance, dignity of hospital staff (especially the nurses).
• Dong-Youl’s penetration of the hospital byways (as reported by Hamish). Later that night he led him down a labyrinthine set of stairs and corridors to a little coffee room in the bowels of the building, no doubt reserved for staff.
• Long, intense conversation with Chinese girl in class next day. (A Taiwanese girl, jilted by a gambler boyfriend who took all her savings. She had come back to the school in a stricken state, at a reduced tuition fee).
• Hamish weeping with the others in the hospital corridor. How much I admired him at that moment.
• Photos of the exam class going skydiving, leaning out of the plane, In-Jae in their midst.

•

There was a great deal of coming and going. Helena and I were shut out at one point, and had to petition the receptionist specially to be let back in. So much coming and going, dissolving into a blur. I even saw the doctor at one point, for a minute. He spoke to me (presumably) as the only European present.

The whole thing hinged on when the respirator could be switched off. In-Jae was, to all intents and purposes, dead. It was only the machines that were keeping her body going. They needed the bed, and her parents couldn’t be there till next day. In any case, it was questionable whether they would really want to see her in that state.

I couldn’t help him, though I sympathised with his dilemma. These decisions were clearly beyond me, beyond any of us there. We felt that only her parents had the right to decide.

Jim arrived about half way through the prayers, so I was able to fill him in on what I’d been able to gather up to then. It was a relief to hand over even this tenuous responsibility. Shortly after that I decided to leave, and drove the same boys back to the school with me (Hamish and Janine chose to stay on). Then I was off. I went home, exercised, took a long swim, went for a drive – life activities, the only ones I knew how to do.

The gravity of it all seemed somewhat compromised by the bizarrerie of the circumstances, the pinging bed, the endless complicated viewing arrangements, but it hit even me from time to time. More often, though, I felt like Meursault in Camus’s L'Étranger, unable to cry or show the expected set of human reactions.

•

Hokoji pointed to the clouds in the sky and said, ‘All these lovely snow-flakes do not fall on any particular place.’ At that time a monk by the name of Zen said ‘Where do they fall then?’ Hokoji slapped him … and said, ‘You see, but you are just like the blind. You speak, yet you are no different from the dumb.’

– The Sound of the One Hand, trans. Yoel Hoffman [4]

Next morning Jim had pinned up a note FYI: For Your Information, which we could hardly understand at first. It gave an account of the onslaught of the brain haemorrhage – the fact that the ambulance had arrived within five minutes of being called – the fact that this was the best and largest critical care unit in Australasia – the fact that there was nothing more that could have been done, or that was left undone.

Hardly anyone was in class. Language schools stay open all the time, every day except statutory holidays, as many of the students have no other place to go. Only a skeleton staff is usually needed over the period between Christmas and New Year, but now any semblance of instruction had broken down.

Or had it? What does a teacher do at a language school? You talk, essentially. You need some kind of crutch: a text-book, a theme, but the main thing is to talk and cause to talk. These are the ESOL dogmas: the Four Skills – two active (Speaking, Writing), two passive (Listening, Reading); the Three P’s: Presentation, Practice, Performance. Essentially, though, it’s talking that’s required.

We talked that day. We talked about In-Jae, about life and death, about our feelings. The atmosphere was hushed, tense, emotional. The students needed each other and they needed us, they needed us to show we cared about them, about their loss, about the fact they were so very far from home at such a time, just after Christmas (important for Koreans – not so much for Chinese, Japanese).

By the next week the whole thing had died down. The other teachers came back, the daily routines were re-established: “How was your weekend?” “Have you done your homework?” “Don’t fall asleep in class!”

It was a moment which called for something extraordinary from each of us, and afterwards it was impossible to know how well one had performed. Simple human gestures were what was required, yet they didn’t seem enough. The gulf between us and the students, between them and poor In-Jae, could not be bridged.

So what does it mean? Little enough, in this bleached-out world we spend our time in – we don’t have a context for such weighty matters. It was a strange day at the language school. That’s all, perhaps.

•

Today was fine: I could look at the sky and I felt very fine. however it was a strong winds. And when I woke up in the early morning. I felt cold. Sometimes I sneezed. I woke up in the morning by my friend. he told me I was too late and if I didn’t go to school, ~ll forgive teacher. But I couldnot wake up as easy. Anyway I must wake up and go to school, because of I’d like to speak in English. But it isn’t easy to speak in English well. I think I’ll have more time that listening and understand. And a friend of mine advised me to think about something in English. How do I do? Still I’ll try to srudy hard.
Today my class mate who called Hans finsished this school In order to go to school in his country. I was friendly with him. He was young boy, but he was clever. I liked him. I’ll miss him. Adios amigo. ^ ^
I hope I’ll meet him after long time. Maybe he will be gentle man.

– Soo ii

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Notes:

[1] Yoel Hoffmann, The Sound of The One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers. Foreword by Hirano Sōjō. Introduction by Ben-Ami Scharfstein. 1975 (St Albans, Herts: Paladin, 1977), 63.

[2] Jack Ross, "Morning at a Language School." City of Strange Brunettes: Poems (Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998), 23-24.

[3] Roland Barthes, "Myth Today." Mythologies. 1957. Rev. ed. 1970. Ed & Trans. Annette Lavers. 1972. A Paladin Book (Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1973), 109-59 [121].

[4] Hoffmann, The Sound of The One Hand, 100.

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Landfall 203 (2002)


[7-30/6/01]

[3055 words]

[Published in Landfall 203 (2002): 119-25;
Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004): 83-93.]

Jack Ross: Monkey Miss Her Now (2004)

•