My grandchildren see the pedantic glint
and squirm as I explain
how floating cities
like Rio, Shanghai, Alexandria
still follow the contours
of ancient mule-paths
far beneath the waves.
The kids say, “We know,”
and go back to their games.
Author Archives: Fritz Bogott
Azuki Beans
紅豆生南國
春來發幾枝
願君多采擷
此物最相思
– Wang Wei
The photographers always come in the spring.
They come for fashion shoots, for catalog shoots, for architecture shoots.
Only the richest and the poorest ones come: either ones who are just starting out and are desperate for a fresh angle, or ones who are so well-funded they don’t give a damn. The ones in the middle are effectively kept away by their lawyers, actuaries, and wives.
I suppose I would do the same thing if I were an actuary—although god knows, if anyone is going to be here when the beams come down it’s me. The probabilities for short-term visitors like photographers just aren’t all that grave.
I understand why they choose the spring, with the buds and blossoms and bright-green shoots that are so hard to do justice in the slanted indoor light.
I actually prefer the summer, when the sheer density of deep-green leaves and pods is like an orgasm or a really good drunk, wiping everything away. Or the fall, when the leaves begin to get brittle and turn away and the pods rain down beans in sudden volleys onto the floorboards. The mice come then, like scavengers to a battlefield, stuffing beans into their cheeks and bowling them with their paws. Or the winter, when the leaves have shriveled and merged, and the vines dangle like trunks of cable inside a vast cold-war computer after the moths have nested in the relays.
It was winter when the letter came. I had finished construction just before the first fronts, and I was still finding sawdust in all the corners whenever I swept.
It was harmless, novel, delightful. “Red beans for true love,” it said. “Send five red beans in the envelope provided, and send five envelopes to people you trust. Good luck and true love will surely follow.”
Red beans. An excuse to leave the house. I always thought beans were white and it was the gravy that made them red. Bacon and onions and tomatoes and molasses. More brown than red actually. But I put on my boots and went out.
“Red beans,” I said.
The shopkeeper just stared at me and sold me a pound of bologna.
“Red beans,” I said.
“If we ain’t got ‘em,” the next grocer said, “You ain’t gettin’ ‘em.”
And he was probably right. He did run the biggest grocery in town.
“Red beans,” I said.
The old Chinese lady laughed at me.
“Love letter,” she said.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“She’s far away,” she said.
“I haven’t met her yet,” I said.
She laughed again and sold me the beans. The shop was tiny and full of strange smells. I would have to come back again some time.
The beans made the envelope look foolish. A letter ought to be tidy. The postman took them away.
The crocuses were just coming up when there was a knock at the door.
“You son of a bitch,” she said.
She was tiny, slight and angry, and she poured a bushel of red beans on my kitchen floor.
“Stupid,” she said. “Thoughtless.”
“Hello,” I said, and held out my hand.
She held up a piece of paper. It was creased, stained, and covered with names.
“This is you,” she said, pointing to a blur in the middle.
“Every single one of you,” she said. “I’m tracking you down, and I’m giving them back.” She kicked at the beans and sent them scattering.
I looked at the paper, and I looked at the beans.
“All those people?” I asked. “That’s a lot of beans.”
“You’re goddamn right,” she said. “Make me a cup of tea.
We were married almost fifteen years.
At first we were able to keep them down by crawling on the floor and trimming the sprouts with scissors. They kept coming up, and we kept cutting them down. We tried herbicide, we tried fire.
“Hey, look at this,” I said.
Tiny shoots were reaching out of the window frame. The roots must have been down in the walls somewhere.
“Bring me a cup of tea?” she said. “I’m not feeling well.”
The roots must have been down inside her somewhere. They tried medicine. They tried knives. They tried fire.
The beans like plaster, and they love lath. They like shingles. They like nails.
“Don’t you get cold?” asked the photographer. “In the winter?”
Warm spring air was pouring through the walls, and the tiny white blossoms were bending on the vines.
“Yes,” I said. “I get cold.”
21st Century Blackbirds
I
What is that black bird?
In my homeland,
we ate the last songbird a thousand years ago.
II
In our flooded suburb
we have many seagulls.
I have a blackbird in a cage.
III
My cousins from the coast
wake with the birds and smile:
No sea to fear.
IV
Our town has welcomed more than 100 refugees this year.
They don’t know the names for things.
They get all the birds wrong.
V
It is cold here.
I am glad to have a safe home,
but don’t the birds feel naked
in those bare trees?
VI
Wasilla is quieter now
birds circle vacant houses
sinking into melted soil.
VII
Dense willow boughs,
once shelter for birds,
now break the waves
and fish spawn safely there.
VIII
When smallpox returned
birds again filled the skies
above un-harvested fields.
IX
Our neighborhood cats
spend all night out on limbs
hunting transgenic birds.
They’re easy to spot.
X
Birds come to the feeder
push millet seeds onto the ground
and refuse to eat.
XI
The drones endanger the birds.
The birds endanger the drones.
XII
We like to hunt:
birds, squirrels, deer.
Some are poison.
XIII
Birds, cars, trains,
children speaking one hundred languages:
the sounds of North Dakota.
Image CC-BY by Mike Baird
Basic Introduction to Topological Manifolds
I threw up a Google Doc of my draft “Basic Introduction to Topological Manifolds” lesson plan, intended to be accessible to 4th graders and up. It should be viewable by anybody, and I’m happy to give edit permissions to anyone with constructive ideas. Hit me up.
Image CC-BY-SA 3.0.
This entry was posted in uncategorized on .
Packrats overthrew the government in 1980, or 1968, or 1922— Image CC-BY-NC-SA by Jerry Bowley My NaNoWriMo novel this year is Giant Primates of North Dakota. It’s some kind of ugly hoax that we only get posted to these anonymous corners of Earth. I sometimes imagine the globe redrawn, with all the mid-continental portions erased or flooded or replaced by warm-water lakes visited by free-spirited Danes who pull their dresses over their heads and swim naked and expect everyone to be as carefree as they are—but then I come to myself and realize that I have onions to chop or cameras to repair or guns to clean. My story The Kármán Line Brevet appears in Bikes in Space: A Feminist Science Fiction Anthology! The Syndicate is a slavish imitation of The Hardy Boys, with the following exceptions: Image via Wikipedia. Surveillance: “watching from above” Ubiquitous CCTV cameras yield ubiquitous surveillance. Residents of London live in a ghost world imposed by the state. The shadows and murmurs of un-augmented reality are barely perceptible under thick layers of surmontrance. Conscientious objectors blind and deafen themselves, only trusting their unsurmontred senses. A handful of hipsters from Dayton, Ohio (don’t laugh) It can take all day for a Lada to make it from hip to wrist, I went looking for the artist who did all that ink, Meanwhile, in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, Hat tip to Fela Kuti and Jack Womack. Source image CC-BY-SA by Mark Fischer
Neotoma
or perhaps they always ran the place.
They build their middens out of stolen wheat and mortgages,
piled in burrows on offshore islands,
cemented with amberat (which accretes from urine)
and which can preserve a treasure-pile for centuries, at least, or possibly forever,
until scholars and treasure-seekers wander in with brushes and dental picks,
prying apart the riches of a lost continent,
still—after thousands of years—reeking of lust and greed.
Giant Primates of North Dakota
The Kármán Line Brevet
The Syndicate
Surmontrance
Surmontrance: “showing from above”
Ubiquitous CCTV projectors yield ubiquitous surmontrance.
Go Slow
have full-shirt tattoos of famous traffic jams:
Lagos, Mexico City, Moscow, Joburg…
with authentic makes, models and choke points.
the driver fuming and pissing in a bottle,
and one motorbike just off Tverskaya
has never made it off its rib.
but some other dude was renting his chair,
his dealer was angry—out a hundred bucks—
and his trailer had burned to the ground.
a handful of wanna-be thugs
are sporting idealized Pan-American Highways,
just before dawn, empty of cars.