The Catastrophist, II: Tracking National Security in Swimwear

The Catastrophist

Chapter Two: Tracking National Security in Swimwear

By T.J. Gillespie

“Welcome, welcome, come on in,” booms a frantic, excited voice from behind an overstuffed shelf of paperback potboilers. A head pops up, wide-eyed and enthusiastic. Will shows him his identification card. “I’m Archie Armstrong. And this is my oasis for bibliophiles!” he winks, jotting down the information in his log. He looks like an aging hippie, with a graying beard and thick, shaggy hair. His introduction certainly contains more energy than one would expected from the musty surroundings. Books spill out everywhere. It is hard to walk around without bumping into towering, crooked piles of yellowed, mass-market thrillers.

Without taking a breath, he continues with his pitch: “Is there anything in particular you’re here for or just browsing? If you’re just browsing, that’s perfectly fine. Paperbacks are two dollars and they’re down here. Military History and non-fiction are in the back along with art and anthropology. Upstairs we have even more. Judaica, Philosophy, Spirituality, New Age and poetry. In the back attic we’ve got more fiction and hardbacks. There’s an order to everything, you just have to find it!”

Then taking a moment to size him up, he jokes, “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you, General Washington, sir. Revolutionary War books and local history are kept on the other side of this shelf.”

“I think I’ll just look around for right now,” Will offers, relieved that the welcome finally ended.

Meandering through the labyrinthine collection, Will browses along the stacks looking for inspiration. He feels a little less self-conscious about his costuming. He spends about ten minutes getting lost in the various alcoves and overstuffed nooks of the shop. Every now and then Will sees a title that catches his attention. He’s tempted at nearly every turn. There are the classics he’s always meant to read, the old favorites that he has given away or lent never to see return, and the odd curiosity piece, the unexpected. There’s a mental list of books to read that he carries around with him, but it always seems to blank out the moment he steps into a bookstore or a library. He is particularly interested in finding a copy of a Japanese writer a friend had told him about. He can’t remember the name of author or of any of his books, just that he uses a lot of fantastical elements like talking cats, teenagers making love to ghosts, and mackerel raining from the sky.

“Ever hear of anything like that?” he asks the bearded guy who runs the shop. He seemed real eager to talk when Will first came in, but this question catches him off guard.

“Can’t say that I have. We’ve got a lot of detective stories though. You like Agatha Christie?”
He has absolutely no interest in Miss Marple, but he hides it with a smile.

“What do you have back there?” Will asks politely nodding to a red painted door directly behind him. There is a large, imposing poster tacked on the door. It features a black and white photograph of bald headed, bespectacled man. An author, presumably. His eyes, wide and angry, seem to stare out of the two dimensions and they make Will look away uncomfortably. Underneath the man’s face is the title of a book:The Theory and Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism. As an advertisement, it seems to Will to be incredibly ineffective. Steeling his nerve, he resumes his question. “More books?”

“That is a private collection,” Armstrong responds tensely. “Books on order for collectors. Not for sale.” His voice is guarded, cordially defensive as if asked about his weight or income. Perhaps catching himself, he resumes the tone of the affable salesman. “We keep some of our older books in a humidity controlled room. To preserve some of the more fragile works. They’re not really valuable or anything, but there are some old collectors living up in Chestnut Hill who like to stock their personal libraries. I keep my eyes open for them at auctions, at other shops. That’s just the room where I store them.”

He continues right along, “So, what were we talking about? Ah, mystery novels, right? The trouble with finding a good Christie story though is that you can’t tell if you’ve read the darn thing already or not.”

He waits for a reply, or at least a glimpse of interest. Will doesn’t offer one.

“Cause of the titles, you see. There’s the British title and the American title. They can be different. I got three chapters in to Thirteen at Dinner before I realized it was the same thing as Lord Edgware Dies!”

“Is that so,” Will offers just out of politness.

“Same thing as The Boomerang Clue, which I first read as Why Didn't They Ask Evans? And of course And Then There Were None was changed for political correctness. Under the original name, well, I can’t imagine I’d sell any of them. Well, help yourself. There’s some Dashiell Hammett over on the other side. Everybody likes him. Magazines are by that wall. Newspapers over here, too.”

Eager to get away, Will follows the proprietor’s eyes over to the papers. Scanning the headlines, one can see the world’s history condensed: South Korea pledges to talk to North, FBI Disrupts Latest Plot, Ex-Soldier’s Case goes to Grand Jury, France to mobilize 4,000 more police.

Suddenly Will can feel someone reading over his shoulder.

A voice: “Named after island where the US government conducted over twenty hydrogen bomb tests.”

Will turns around. It’s Deedle, Kay’s boyfriend. Will feels his face scrunch up as he asks, “What about bombs?”

Deedle points to the paper. “Bikini Bathing Suit Celebrates Birthday. Love how that story is on the front page. But what I was saying is that the media named it the Bikini because it was the atomic bomb of fashion!” He says the last part with such flourish that it iss hard to tell if it was meant to be bitterly sarcastic of just playfully ironic.

“I guess it is a sexier name than Alamogordo,” Will lamely suggests.

Deedle suddenly turns very serious. “I hate fashion.” He stood there in a patchwork of dusty brown camouflage, the type of army style fatigues popular during the first Persian Gulf War. His red t-shirt, easily two sizes too small, torn in all the right places, has a cartoon image of Mao, the kind of hip images that combine Dada, Warhol, and street graffiti. His wrists have six or seven bands hanging loosely and his ears are punctured by large dark studs that stretched the lobe unnaturally like a Buddhist monk. No, clearly this man doesn’t care about fashion at all. It probably only took him an hour to get his tousled hair to this perfectly insouciant mess.

“I’m serious. Those people, designers, models, magazines, the people who buy that shit—"

“The vast right wing textile and cosmetics conspiracy,” Will interrupts.

“Don’t be flip. They are such out of touch bastards. They joke about a weapon that kills millions of people. They take themselves so goddamn seriously. You’ve got the whole world on the brink of war with Iran, with North Korea. Why? Because they want nukes and we name women’s swimwear after them. Pakistan has ‘em. Do you ever think about that? How’d they get them? Who are they going to give them to?”

Will stops listening. “Hey,” he blurts, eyes on the paper, “Stop worrying about Pakistan for a second. Look.”

As a sidebar to the article, the newspaper ran an old picture of Ursula Andress in her famous Dr. No white bikini.

“James Bond. He had the right idea. Never let your fear of Bikini interrupt your appreciation for a bikini.” Will’s mouth, a mocking rictus, tries to inject a little levity.

“That reminds me,” he said completely ignoring my attempt at a diversion, “the BIKINI Alert!”
“What’s that, like what you yell out when you see a hot girl at the beach?”

“No, the BIKINI Alert. For terrorists.”

“Like Homeland Defense?” Will queries, trying to stay with him.

“For British armed forces. But, yeah, like Homeland Defense. They even use color codes to indicate the level of danger. White is Peacetime. Red Alert is…well, I guess it’s obviously Red Alert.”

He places the paper back on pile.

“Sean Connery is a wise man. Embrace the White Bikini.”

Will waits for Deedle to laugh. He doesn’t. Will hopes for a smile. None comes. Finally, Will plunges in. “So, what did you want to see me about? What’s all this about Samira?”

“Let’s eat first. I am hungry. All these books give me an apetite.”

Will, scratching his head, couldn’t really see the connection, but he did have to admit that his stomaching needed something. He felt relieved that it ; Deedle’s nonchalance reassured Will that there was no emergency, no real danger. Maybe Samira ran out of money, needed a small loan or a ride to the airport or some other trivial help and had probably been to embarrassed to ask herself. Maybe she and Kay had some kind of falling out, a nasty squabble between girlfriends and some one had something that cut too deep. Deedle was probably here on a diplomatic mission, here to recruit Will into acting as an intermediary. That’s all it is, Will thinks, and felt his shoulders relax as he exhales.

Before he leaves, Will purchases a small used paperback for two dollars. Armstrong, picks it up, turns it over in his hand to admire the title, and wordlessly rings it up. He smiles, waves, and watches the odd pair, Paul Revere and Sid Vicious, exit the ship. He stand motionless for a full minute before turning slowly and with great deliberation, to a computer in the back room where he shakes a small black mouse which in turn wakes the monitor up from its sleep. Then, in full compliance with the law, he records the pertinent information:

Cutomer:William Sommers.
Price: Two Dollars.
Payment: Cash.
The title: Regime Change Starts At Home: Love Poems.
Author: John Muckle.
Category: 5. Highly Suspicious.

Armstrong, biting his lower lip as he considers his next move, looks over his work and then finally clicks Submit.

Will could have selected any book out of ten thousand, but instead he chooses this one. He liked the picture on the cover.

(This is part two of an on-going story.You can read chapter one here.)

Borderland

Borderland

Or The Teutoburg Forest (September 11)

By T.J. Gillespie

In the dense dark forests of Westphalia,
not far from Osnabruck,
an old sign greets visitors with words of
warning and welcome:
"Als Die Römer Frech Geworden:
When the Romans Started to Misbehave."

Tourists come to this part of Saxony and Rhineland
for holiday retreats, health vacations,
relaxing in spas, photographing charming hillside towns,
looking for castles or cathedrals,
hoping to rediscover rebuilt medieval cities.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, they came from the south,
over alpine peaks, crossing swift rivers,
through dangerous passes,
circumventing villages where they spoke a strange tongue
to take lost relics back home.
It is hardest to bury the dead this way,
Returning later, long after the fact,
To pull off the bare, bleached bones
that have been nailed to the trees.
Skulls split by swords,
are not just reminders of slaughter,
of an almighty upended, overturned by surprise,
an empire overstretched.
They are skeleton signposts,
demarcations of a border between worlds.
Reminders of the place where one people impinged upon another.

What constitutes a boundary?
Mere geography—the mountain pass, the wide hungry river,
The churning torrents of the sea, vast unfathomable deserts
Or man—language, creed, clothing, culture.
What is the harder line to traverse?
Some are natural, some man-made;
Some last forever; while others fade;
Some disputed, some agreed;
Some inherited, some decreed;
Some are won with iron,
Others lost with tears;
Some vanish quickly,
Other wars take years.
How can you break through blood and fear?

Here metaphor fails.
Here Rome stops.

Doing His Best Impression of Dante's Virgil, Literary Critic George Steiner Takes a Group of High School Students on a Tour of Philadelphia

Behold, the abyss. Ground zero of our cultural freefall. The Gallery, Market East Station, Philadelphia---- a tile-floor apocalypse of fast food wrappers, Timberland boots, urban clothing retailers, and stores whose business model is still the sale of Compact Discs. God may have left, but CDs are still with us. Tell me honestly. Have you ever seen so much camouflage? Like a latter day Charon, the conductor ushers the teeming masses of unemployed pensioners off the publicly subsidized 1970s vintage reeking train car. In the distance, a sixty year-old hungover man squeegies the windows of a cavernous hell-store. The poet's words were never of greater moment. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

***

Chestnut Street. A name intended, isn't it, to conjur the yellow glow of a cultural memory none of us can recognize. None but ghosts of emptiness flutter in these paltry trees. Above us, the tall expanses of oppression loom over us with steel and glass--- the retro-facture of man's limping spirit. Indeed, this physical exaltation is merely the inverted image of our disease. There is nothing Promethean for us here, no fire to light the hearth of our post-capitalist malaise. Fie, fie. For you who are Night's Children, the Army Surplus Store, the random Wendy's, and the consignment shop can offer nothing. The Wasteland is us. Your mother is a metaphysical pawnbroker. Your father is that gutter on which the homeless man, the last refuge of humanity in this infernal darkness, is sleeping. But the pressing question is not what bright dawn will greet this crack-addled bottom-dweller upon his waking. The question is what monsters now haunt the freakish reminiscences of his fitful sleep.

***

At night, you wake in horror to imagine yourself swimming---- feet moving, hands grasping, heart filled with a frozen fire, eyes searching for an illumination that will never come. As your limbs fail you and your body sinks, you begin to realize that the pool in which you were swimming has no bottom. Then, the panic hits you like a downpour of hail and ice. We call this panic freedom. We call this building Independence Hall. And this we know. That every solution to our problems only makes those problems worse. Our hands can try to dig, but the hole only gets deeper. And deeper. And deeper. Until we realize that the goal of freedom might only have been a cruel mirage. What quantum of safety was lost in the transition from Serfdom to Free Man? We detect in the intellectual milieu of this Revolution ---- in its phonological timbre, if you will --- the desperation of a Mahler symphony. The one after his daughter died. Struggling, struggling. The bright notes of that red brick are but the pageantry of a "free republic," the veneer of Sousa and Emerson which conceals, not very convincingly, the subterranean struggle.

***

Man is the painting being. Homo Pictor. But by what images does this desperate artist seek to demonstrate his daylight hopes? As he inventories the created cosmos for some specter of newness, the forlorn Universal Painter searches in vain, hoping to goose the cheap thrill of a virgin pleasure from the tired substance of the creaking earth. By turns Sisyphean, existentialist, Judeo-Christian, and erotic, search he must, and paint he will. In the kaleidescopic insanity of his nascent pleasure, the same colors occur and recur. The same patterns are manifest. The same rhythms roll forth, until they fade like the dimuendo of a Shakespeare couplet. Wars and truces. Inventions and new ventures. The rising and falling of great nations, new movements, new forms of music and commerce, new dreams. But beneath it all, there is the haunting drabness of unanimous sameness. Some red bars. Some white stripes. A blue background. Some ghostly white stars. And there, the Betsy Ross house, the place where this supposedly pre-eminent symbol of novelty and triumph was born.

The Thoughts in Exile of Centro de Rigas

Gore on Dylan #2: Bob Dylan Wrote the Song How Many I Can't Remember the Words

Gore on Dylan #1: How Many I Can't Remember the Words: Al Gore Remembers the 1960s, and I Remember with Him

The Obama White House Had to Let Go of the Guy Who Operated the Teleprompter, and Somebody Is Paying a Heavy Price

Good evening, my fellow Americans. I am not Barack Obama. I am not a politician from Chicago. I was not born in America. I am not an African-American. I am not a man.

But yes, tonight, thanks to the beneficence of friends and the sorcery of wizards, I am the President of the United States. I am neither male nor female, neither straight nor gay, and I'm not transgendered either. That's pretty incredible, right?

I am your Indonesian President, and by my own confusing metaphor, I am simultaneously genderless and sexually transcendent. I am both open-minded and miraculously sympathetic to your gun-toting Nazi viewpoint.

You people cling to guns and religion. I cannot keep my hands off of cheerleaders. We don't see eye to eye. But things seem to work out.

And tonight, I am talking to country.

You are da country to which I speak. Country whom I be talking to is a land torn asunder by a great plague......

.... HORSE CANCER.

(Speaking to someone off-camera: Somebody has to work on the teleprompter. That paragraph barely made sense).

My opponents say that the swine flu has just left us. They say that aside from a few sniffles, a few aches and pains, and 14,000 mistakenly slaughtered pigs in Southern Virginia, the swine flu was not a very powerful pandemic. I don't think that's how Jimmy Dean feels about the "Fort Benning of Pig Farms" being laid-waste by well-armed Neo-Nazi environmentalists. Eric Holder is still looking for those crazy fuckers. So keep your children close.

But, I hear it. I hear it. It's true. Swine flu was something cooked up by the Green Jobs Czar. And he was a remarkably incompetent man.

But still. Watch out.....

FOR FUCKING HORSE CANCER

On this very night, there is a pestilence abroad. Beneath the dread moon, this chastisement gallops throughout the land..... with black hoof and ominous snort .... a riderless steed that seeks the life of every man, woman, and child. The name of this pestilence is....

....HORSE CANCER.

The diseased mane of this sorry mare is an apocalyptic tangle of rat poison, fungus, and an extremely dangerous cancer. A cancer that can be carried on the very wind. A cancer that will march this country down a Great Leap Forward to its very end. We'll have more for you in a little while. Just stay alert. It's coooo-miiii-ng. Ra ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (diminuendo of evil laughter trails as screen fades out to image of blood red moon).