CONSEJOS DE UN UNINITIATE EN EL REALM DE LOS QUE HABLAN SIN SABER

Never call medicines candy
in front of your small children
Try not to belch ebulliently
or breaststroke in the cathedral
of your body odor. Forsake sexual
lair entanglements! Tear gratuity
from the rafters! Forego Tuberculosis
control in lieu of international
elopement quarters Steer shady characters
away, banish the cokehead short-order
cooks and those under the fiefdom of a substance
Teach them to save and earn, learn
the Morse of the mongrels when they
clang on the shiftless water pipes
Harangue them about manners of flossing
like you don't stare at the skewered
morsel, and you certainly don't
nibble on that kernel Childrens
seek the subtle oratory morass
but Tae Kwon Do speaks leagues more
punctuation importance, and the disciplined
way we must speak to each other

IN/VISIBLE WE/B, OR INVISIBLE WE BE

Am I to believe that the bulk of materials on the world wide web are hidden from plain sight? The same way that the records in city halls are open to public scrutiny but rarely visited except by its custodians (lawyers, paralegals, Legalese scribes, winos with serving-papers credentials), the heft of helpful, informative, and essential databases are actual, factual, tactile (in the digital sense) but seldom used.

The problem is simple: search engines can't index web pages in which you have to enter data into fields(i.e. zip code, user name, password); they (the "spiders" that index web pages) can't log in as users to access websites that you and I use like WebMD or YouTube. When you do a search with a search engine, the spider-indexers search the hypertextmarkuplanguage of documents contained in webpages and bring back those pages that most nearly textually match the operators you wrote into the dialog box of the search engine webpage. So, when you plug "A-Rod and Madonna's baby" into a search engine, unless the pic is attached to a page that has any configuration of the aformentioned phrase, your search will retrieve no results. Your only other hope is that search engine you are using is newer generation that also checks the text in the caption or alternate heading that is usually provided by the person or organization that has uploaded the photo.

The bigger problem is that search engines do not bring back pages that have a lot of images, videos, or real-time applications like updated stock quotes(para los de alta suciedad), weather conditions(para los con el fetish del Weather Channel) and ticker headlines that cable news companies like CNN and Fox use(para los pinche conservadores). Therefore, unless you sign up for a Myspace account you will never get to access Nick Cannon's Myspace page because to a search engine machine Nick Cannon's webpage is invisible to the world wide web. It's not that it doesn't exist in real space and time, but the knowledge of it's existence is relegated to the chosen few millions that have MySpace accounts and use MySpace's internal index to locate Nick Cannon's MySpace page,ya dig?

With that said, I have heard an estimate that about 80% of the world wide web is part of the invisible web and that there are approximately 1 billion web pages that are part of the more visible world wide web. Therefore, if my math is not wrong and my math is almost always wrong, therefore, by this figure's estimates (if we extrapolate their figures, 20% of the www is visible and four times that amount is invisible, i.e. 4 billion web pages) then there really is an abundant amount of crap out there and the modern-day user really only uses about one fifth of the world wide web's digital, effervescent glow. Is this what I am supposed to believe? I entreat you.

A SAMPLE OF SONOROUS WORSE I ADMIRE/ADORE& THEIR RESPECTIVE VALENCES OF CONNOTATION

Scorpio, deft tendril, Stinger missile for punctuation. Stoics, flame-retardant, prone to the pangs of a tangent?

Oratory, gingerbeer, soundsystem grammarian. Call and Response of fortissimo plaudits, rope gold chains and lollipop chameleons in camouflauge.

Columns, marquise azafran, the ghoul of a castrum where the satrap's favorite priest
plows the first furrows led by the chalk-white oxen and the senior sentries.

Court, invincible preamble, the premier grilled on the record about the tank man, his
whereabouts, the history of his effects.

Order, decibel request, to take to task and certify extent from behind the public access index kiosk tomes in the pigeonholes, all told.

Grotto, tressels and ivy, the lichen and moist conifers of my impending savage tantrum, the escape pods for the personnel of revenge fantasy clerks.

Torrid, gracious dolt of coordinate coitus, narrator Labrador scamp totallytotally
indelible, earmarked for grunting oglerobics, gloriousvain glorious.

RATIONALE PARA EL SPICARISMO...

Still on Miller's study for this post, but I believe there is still a lot to learn from, "The Picaresque" (1967). In one of the chapters Miller writes about the education of the picaro or picaresque character. Miller says that "the pattern of education into roguery by the world reflects on the world more than on the picaro. It is the world that is picaresque; the picaro only typifies that world in his dramatic change from innocent to trickster" (1967, pg. 56).

And this is relevant because education is something I am deeply ambivalent about. Sometimes I get all quantitative and think that really education is mostly a battery of exams that one manages (or doesn't manage) to overcome. And then I get all qualitative and start to cry so that I have to snivel on the cuff of my sweater that I am a public school mutt and that I wouldn't want it any other way. But what have I learned from the battery of tests that I have overcome and the many years of public school university and college grinding. I guess I have learned that timing is the quartz and not the other way around.

And then to have come throught the machine of education, to have esconced myself in the catacombs of drudgery smack dab in the middle of ground zero of the economic disparity in the U.S. To have been an educator in the poorest county of the country is nothing to balk at, although to be honest this honor is most important to the person who had to trudge through that task. Teaching in the most poor county in the country is like being a war correspondent without any of the cool acoutrement and sexual radiation that being a war correspondent connotes. In other words, I would rather be Anderson Cooper in the Afghan hinterlands than Yago Cura in the Mosul Educational and Babysitting Complex in the Bronx.

Miller is right. The world is unmistakenly picaresque, and the common, heathenish carbon-based lifeform must transform themself into a rogue just to get by, just to survive the snares or more importantly to detect the snares and to avoid them or to rouse from their foxholes the scions and magnates that set the snares and traps. I refuse to take education seriously, because ultimately an education opens the world up and shows you the motives and rationales behind things. I am all for education because it will in the long run make me a better spicaro.

The (S)Picaresque World...

According to Stuart Miller in the Picaresque Novel (1967), "in the picaresque world, the chaos is radical; it extends to the very roots of life. In a picaresque novel one has as much chance of being run over by a cart if one steps into the street as not...When one reads a picaresque novel, he gradually comes to feel that he may be in physical danger sitting in his armchair." (pg. 134)

I can't but help feel that the immigrant makes the perfect picaro or rogue. In fact, my parents who are Argentine have always felt that the main export of Argentina is fully formed adults that are vivos, despiertos, and picaros. In fact, the porteno or person from Buenos Aires is constantly obliged to be the anti-boludo. Boludo is a very Argentine thing to call someone. In circles of confidence, it is like a hey you. In unknown social navigations it can become an insult, like calling someone a dolt. My father got away for calling me this for most of my adult life. For an Argentine, especially a porteno, there is nothing worse than a boludo, a bobo, a dolt.

Therefore, Argentines are preternatural picaros and are wired to become social rogues. More than free thinkers, Argentines are raised to want to become Pucks, jesters, and ball-busting troubadors. And the history and culture of Argentina play into this temporal aesthetic. During a ten day period last year, Argentina went through at least four presidents. It was as if the presidency of Argentina were a hot potato, or stolid ember from a pyre. And the military dictatorship during the 70's where countless students, lawyers, intellectuals, therapists, homosexuals (at least 30,000) were disappeared by the military government. If a dirty war is not a manifestation of the sang froid arbitrariness of the picaresque, then I don't know what.

CODE 46

Holy crap! I am just watching Code 46 and I love its sense of what the world is going to look like in a couple of years. What is not to like. Samantha Morton is a woman names Maria Gonzalez and all the people speak this multi-lingual amalgam of Arabic, Spanish, French, and English that is just so amazing to hear. Like if you have two kids you would say I have two chicos, etc.

The interesting thing to me would be how to establish what language is used for what words, etc. So like we would say hello in Arabic because I kind of like the way Salaam sounds. It's better than hello. And everyone has a secret palabra that they use which is a password, etc. People get summoned on happiness breaks and everyone has to tell Tim Robbins something very personal about themselves. I would ask though that the writers just clarify the main narrative of the movie, like what exactlt is Code 46: when people of similar genetic makeups have children together?

Spicaro

PICARESQUE, QUE SO...

In Stuart Miller's Introduction to The Picaresque Novel (1967), the author laments that there is little in the way of defining the Picaresque genre, or novels written using the conventions of the Picaresque novels, "there are no studies of the picaresque novel in the sense in which Aristotle's Poetics is a study of tragedy." (Miller, 1967)

Additionally, Miller fixes the date of the Picaresque "period from about 1550 to 1750" (Miller, 1967). But, his attempts at delineation of the Picaresque span the rest of his monograph; Miller first dissects the Picaresque into three parts: Plot, Pattern, and Rhythm," "Character," and "Interpretive Devices: Point of View, Style, and the Ending of the Picaresque Novel." But, back to the definition. And therein lies the difficulty. Because Miller's text is so expansive, it is hard to devour morsels and the reader must immerse themselves in Miller's focused study.

What I like most about Picaresque novels, Miller addresses in his first division: Plot. According to Miller, "The infinite possibilities of the picaresque plot express total openness. Since there are no limitations of probability, the door is left open to the fantastic, the improbable, and even the weird. The picaresque plot expresses an intuition that the world is without order, is chaotic." (Miller, 1967) There is also in the Picaresque novel, a seeming preference for the episodic plot rather than a causal one, meaning that the protagonist is mostly acted upon and does not really leave a lasting, cause-and-effect footprint.

Miller also mentions other characteristics of the Picaresque novel, among them rhythm. According to Miller, "A Picaresque device closely related to the episodic plot is the piling of event on event in a strikingly short compass" (Miller, 1967). In other words, the movement of narrative in the beginning of a Spicaresque novel is fast, varied, and prone to the supernatural, metaphysical, and the pernicious. It is almost as if the exposition of the Picaresque novel pushes a V8 instead of a 4 cylinder Romance machination. A lot of stuff happens in a relatively short order of time, but this is much more resonant in the actual life of a reader: in one day you can lose your apartment, your job, and you girl. It has happened before.

In this light I can think of so many films and books that roll out their narration in a Picaresque manner. I mean I always like to talk about Magnolia, so I wonder if those first ten minutes of the film are in some way Picaresque? I guess if they add to the narrative, which they do, then they might qualify. And even, Hellboy II, which I saw the other night and fell asleep during has strains of the Picaresque. There is so much exposition (visual exposition) about the taxonomy of these other-wordly fairies that maybe that is Picaresque as well. Actually, my last post was about reading a Pelevin short story called "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia," and that is certainly written in a Picaresque way because of the agility of the contextual exposition. You are immersed into the story with amazing background by like page two, and that kind of writing is exhilarating to me and it should be to you too.

Spicaro

PELEVIN FOR BREAKFAST

Pelevin on the D to Fordham
a story about a werewolf summit
in the forrests outside Moscow
Sasha the wanderlust scion
hitchhiking with a Hawaiin shirt
and a muttsack of question marks

The funny thing is that Sasha
stumbles upon the summit
is only sniffed out by alpha shewolf
who tells him that he should announce
himself to the others and say he is there
because he heard the calling.

On reflection, after besting
the pig impostor, the colonel
asks Sasha to remember why he came
to the sylvan outskirts of Central Russia.

Sasha finks and finks some more
and remembers he woke up early one morning
to find a picture of a wolf among his books.

PORQUE ME FUI AL CARAJO DE LAS PEOPLE'S REPUBLICA DE MIAMI

Miami's the pantano mas proud, province of Freon and sandstone, limestone, fango.
Coral castles and dollops of mangroves, microbes in the water and sprinklers on timers.
The hemorrhage of traffic on the stereo, in the trunk: arrhythmic seismic apparatus.
An 80's Celica primered to the tits, gargling octane one octave at a time.
The Creole disc jockey murders, the rain-slapped trees, neon as a theme in perpetuity.
Exile enclave hive with octopus hands in the lobbying coral with the brown shirts.
And when they talk they fumigate: Fundamentalexilecommunitosis.
Me fui al carajo porque I didn't want to line supervise in the tourism loam.
Didn't want to have to see the golfers take the tedious savannahs in itchy pants.
Me fui al carajo porque I got paid to Fellowship en la Universidad de Massahoochie, Amherst con la idea de pursue advanced degree en poesia.
And that's exactly what yo hize.

PUES, ENTONCES ERES SPICARESQUE...

if your father hitch hiked to Brazil in a banana truck
if your mother's father first put on shoes at thirteen
if they lived above a department store in Buenos Aires

if your mother helmed a Singer on the Starship Costura
if your father bolted out the back door of a fabrica
if after thirty years they still can't finesse difference
between beard, beer, and bear.

if your mother has been dying since you were five
if she is Asthmatic, prone to Depression, and Diabetic
if she invokes virgins to obliterate her Fibromyalga
and they come but hold vigil over the Wonderbread instead

if you have a rich Aunt nobody likes because she acts like a popsicle
if you're the only cabron that can call your sister a bitch
if you've been to the federal building to stand in the immigration outfield
if you're the fiat of a splinter tribe that birthed your parents their papers

if your mother took courses at LaGuardia and her class babysat
if your father circled the campus in any variation of a Pontiac
if your aunt worked at a Chinese restaurant in Stuttgart
and your uncle painted airplane hangers without a harness

if your aunt runs the plastic surgery racket in Miami
if your uncle shuffles in Clarks and has a deliberate moustache
if their children ask for asados when they come home with their children
the specter of a cocker-spaniel that loved Steak Ums and was called Spunky.

No, not Spunky but Espunky.

ME ENCANTA EL GAZPACHO, or THE GAZPACHO IS ENCHANTING, or THE GAZPACHO ENCHANTS ME

planetoid rules don't govern molecules
planetoid rules are all philosopher's stone
molecules are lil' anvils made of lil' anvils
they tyro their heft to better gravity's raiments
hair is the epicenter of every avatar's esteem
no, hair, nonsense, is your genes' state i.d.
the argument is about the Earth's age in years
the argument mostly coming from admiral flaneurs
telescopes that size can even pick out corpse noise
telescopes size that signature, but the calculator-
interfaces do all the aggregate recognition
piano octaves, born of woozy sentiment, sound like
guitar whineys in the pressurized cabin range
and whether you are drunk, like a Pepsi legionnaire
and whether whence is enough of a thirsty posture