Lunar Follies

STRAIGHT WALL

A long flat slab of the finest marble from the celebrated although by now wholly exhausted quarries of the small Tuscany village of Sfogliatelle is balanced, on one edge, elegantly if precariously, atop a volume of dead poems of some local notoriety. Their floating vocables urge new ways of seeing if not reading, of reading if not seeing, or of thinking a little if neither reading nor seeing. So the placard above the receptionist’s desk states: said placard and desk depend from the saccade-like nervousness and twitchiness of the slab’s darker side. Bolted to the slab are magazines that feature some of the finest writers of our time, but not, thank God, all of them. Many of them are in collaboration on contemporary thoughts: “The Future of the Village”; “Frozen Custard Rediscovered”; “How a Tough Street Kid Became an Oscar Contender”; and many others. Their prose, which is refreshingly irreverent, is the norm. The magazines have been sprayed with a faux-gold lacquer which has then been “sown,” while still wet, with cigarette stubs, ashtrays, insects, a small Burundi vase, a report detailing the bad news for an unknown yet beloved person as to his incurable disease, or, perhaps, diseases (the report is in the demotic Greek spoken by Weehawken diner owners), many excellent words from here there and everywhere, a sepia-tone photograph of a small glade in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, smeared with what may be brown paint, Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, or excrement, and a glob of a truly ghastly crème de cervelle, once served to a Princeton alumnus on the occasion of his life. A small rectangle of stiff white cardboard is stapled to the wall and reads: DON’T BELIEVE THE POOR. The slab lists slightly to one side and is bathed in the soft light that is, so we have been told many and many a time, the hallmark of New England summers. A cheerful video loop reveals a smiling youth gesturing toward what he says, or, rather, shouts, is San Francisco. “WHAT WEATHER!” is a phrase that he repeats over and over again. The slab turns occasionally, somewhat like a scena ductilis. But only at certain hours, and not so anyone would notice. Then there is the music that happenstance, as it will, directs, jingle jingle jingle. And all is rendered in a brilliant Lydian translation.