On The Hunt For Elfriede Jelinek

That dream sent me out in search of her fiction. Something like, "Aesthetic purity or a matter of taste," I wonder, "either would be OK just as long as it's not fit for print in The New York Times," as I turned left onto M.L. King Dr. "Rainy day, dream away, lay back and groove on a rainy day..." Or even better, Jimi singing "Tire tracks all across your back I can see you had your fun." It must be tough being a recognized literary critic having to fend off the barbarians at the gate with their preferred book recommendations.

This one stretch of road in Pompano Beach, M.L. King Dr., it's the one area here that actually makes me feel like I'm in the South, not Southern Florida. The heat is up, it's shorts weather again. Just past the turn, at around 20 MPH there's the street sign for the avenue named after Esther Rolle. Hi Florida! The crates are turned over in front of the "Food and Meat" convenience store, and the men are playing chess in the shade. With the windows in the car down I can smell the barbeque smell from the cement sided store with "Beef and Pork BBQ" handpainted over its white washed wall.

But that's all later on. Along the pleasant slow crawl of a road, out on a walk this early in the day, it's pretty obvious who the whores are. For one thing, they're white, and are in the extreme minority along the lack of a hurry. For another, there's something undeniably gross about them, even though some of them aren't all that bad looking, despite what's probably a heartbreaking narrative in store for the patient-minded. For a third, when I give them a good lookover they wave me back. There are a few Baptist Churches. When I ask the ladies at the supermarket how they're doing today, they say, "I'm blessed, thank you, couldn't be better," something you'd never hear anyone in Boston saying out loud. Just beyond the Haitian church a group of men were waiting for the public transportation. One who couldn't possibly know where he's headed, with his graying hair, almost greenish eyes, had his stumpy pud pulled out of his vinyl tracksuit and was urinating a steady yellow stream smack on in the direction of the oncoming traffic.

It's midday, and that feeling of intimacy holding Isabelle Huppert in my arms is as strong in the imagination as when I dreamt it. I'm not even that big of a fan, having seen only one of her movies the name of which I can't recall. But captivated by an interview and photo shoot from a magazine I had purchased while in Sapporo, Japan, the magazine actually made it back, even while I felt I had to leave behind much more personal treasure, the souvenirs handed out from those who had once told me, "Please don't forget me." 

There was a time beginning from around eight years old I'd think about a pathetic crush intensely, teacher or student, one or the other, for at least an hour before going to sleep in the hope they'd appear just like Isabelle Huppert did last night. These things just can't be forced; they arrive when they do, which is more interesting to me than what dreams might actually mean. Admitting this poem, dream, and after-shock online, I know I'm opening myself up to all kinds of psychological interpretation. I've read them all too.

At the library I renewed Sylvia Plath's journals, which I'm just about ready to give up. I took out The Piano Teacher, which will now read as Huppert as instructor. This won't diminish Jelinek the writer; I believe in the collaboration of the arts more than I do books. I need Frank O'Hara again, so I took out Poems Retrieved. I've decided to give Ellman's James Joyce another try. And for those times when the internet makes me want to hate myself, Heidegger's Early Greek Thinking.

The library is attached to a college and the students have returned. At the half-assed college I went to out in Western Massachusetts, from Day One administration wished to emphasize that ours, unlike the other ones, is a friendly campus; everyone says Hello to each other on campus, and for four years that's what I did, say Hello to everyone passing by each other on the campus. I tried that out this morning and received about an 18% response rate. I did look like a bum though, as I haven't showered and shaved for a few days now.

A few days ago I did a post on Anne Carson and Matsuo Basho, about those eternal returns that come back like an autumnal breeze. Something like that was at work returning to the car. There's a canal at the back of homes, near the library. The urban design, the strip malls, the cul-de-sacs of this Southern Florida region isn't just material for cultural commentary; it's real to me, and it feels like death. But in this small shaded canal, with the tropical greenery Vietnamese lush, with a group of white birds with long, curved, orange beaks pecking at the thick grass, the families of ducks emerging from under the tropical trees, with a turtle climbing a rock and then falling back in with a slip, it all came back to me, Ms. Le's home on the Mekong Delta, back to some beautiful days I'll never forget. I ought to be looking to the future more, as it feels like I'm now stuck in a vacuum of a seat writing, but I feel like I've already lived enough of a kind of experience many will never see.