Last week the Sentinel Bonny Baby Competition was held at Prince’s Building. And late last night the body of a dead male baby was found, neatly wrapped in a brown paper parcel, on the rubbish dump at Cocorite.
I have seen the baby and I am in a position to say that it did not win a prize in our Bonny Baby Competition.
(more…)
Sunday there was rain, leaving me with memories. Rain seems to make them swell like bothersome flowers whose perfume is bittersweet. A night I remember: we were children, embracing in a garden above the Harbour. The rustling of azaleas, smell of oranges, a black frock she wore that absorbed all the stars and moon; reflecting nothing back. As she had taken from me, all my light. She has the carob-softness of my heart.
-Thomas Pynchon -V.
This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father’s.
His face was drawn but the curtains were real.
Amazing scenes were witnessed in St. Vincent Street yesterday when Biswas, 31, unemployed, of no fixed address, assaulted a receptionist at the offices of the TRINIDAD SENTINEL. (more…)
Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. (more…)
I decided that I was going to find out who killed Wellington even though Father had told me to stay out of other people’s business.
This is because I do not always do what I am told.
And this is because when people tell you what to do it is usually confusing and does not make sense.
For example, people often say “Be quiet,” but they don’t tell you how long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASS but it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGN or KEEP OFF ALL THE GRASS IN THIS PARK because there is lots of grass you are allowed to walk on.
Interviewer: You lived life with a big ‘L’.
Mervin: And sometimes I suffered pain with a big ‘P’. Like when I met this terrible agent. This lady producer, she said, “I’m having this surprise party.” I got the surprise when I got there, I can tell you. Carrying on like that. It was disgraceful, like that film about Gomorro and that other place, you know. A tower of babell there, it was full of beatniks with long sideboards full of drink. No, I mean the side… they had sideboards, it was full of drink. Some of the men was just as bad. I tell you, there, I tell you there was witches there, they were practicing witchcraft. Not just lady witches but men witches, they had men witches there.
(more…)
As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and a boot, or a sock and a shoe, or a sock and a slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all. (more…)
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers,who are privileged to live in Space.
Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows–only hard with luminous edges–and you will then have a (more…)
Ecclesiastes 3
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
(more…)
A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it
likely that a change.
I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in forcing his feet into Manderson’s narrow shoes. (more…)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
But let me tell you this: sometimes at night, when I look up at the stars, an see the whole sky jus laid out there, don’t you think I ain’t rememberin it all. I still got dreams like anybody else, an ever so often, I am thinkin about how things might of been. An then, all of a sudden, I’m forty, fifty, sixty years ole, you know?
(more…)
I looked around for his birds,and not seeing them,asked him where they were. He replied, without turning round, that they had all flown away. There were a few feathers about the room and on his pillow a drop of blood. I said nothing, but went and told the keeper to report to me if there were anything odd about him during the day.