...not acres, in fact, but the grass-floor of the pergola is indeed artificial. The swing--which we called Hollywood-swing in previous editions (our friend Sacha informs us that said expression is only used in Germany and unintelligible to normal people)--so, said swing is from Belliani, a Portuguese outfit. The two deck chairs are from LaRedoute:
We ordered four canvas chairs (director's chairs in German), so stay tuned.
On closer inspection, the natural grass looks artificial as well, but that's just an artefact induced by Chang's lawn-mowing plus the dry high winds of the last couple of days. The swing swings with the wind, very nice.
Pictorial warning: this is not an exciting picture, but...
...it answers a question that expats living in the Alcobaça area are facing
when they move into town and learn that our name derives from the confluence
of two rivers (or "rivers"), one called Alcoa and the other called
Baça.
They may have searched Google Map and Google Earth for answers, yet in vain. Google is misleading, in that it elevates
the weaselling Alcoa
to a full-fledged Alcobaça:
There, there, the yellow arrows pointing at it: the misnaming of the Rio
Alcoa by Google running past the east of our world-famous monastery.
Google, the world's fifth-largest company by market capitalization (@ 1.3
trillion in American $$$), mistaking a pars pro toto as it
cuts through our little town (@ 6 k inhabitants). But what can we do
about it?
Research.
And so, at the top of this post you see photographed the real confluence
of the two "rivers" where it occurs, at the phallic top of the
Jardim do Amor...:
...whence the entire river system of Alcobaça is about to say goodbye
to our charming community and ejaculate carelessly into the Atlantic
Ocean a few kilometres away.
But the Baça, you ask, where does it show? Not on Google. But it
shows on these pictures we took yesterday:
The Baça, just south of the confluence, as it arrives at the Rua16 de Outobro
This rua just bridges over the Baça. But now, if we turn the camera in
the opposite direction, we should see the southern part of the bridge
with the Baça still flowing. Instead, we see this:
The Baça has disappeared. It's channelled underground through old
Alcobaça downtown until it resurfaces 400 meters further south,
here:
Yes, channelled underneath cobblestone alleys, but you can still hear
her...
...if you can.
A mystery of expatriate importance finally solved! Read our
lips: "Baça, Baça, Baça..."
So, we received a new gate control per Nacex this afternoon at exactly15:06 (even though we are unfindable on Google maps (perhaps we should consider selling our place to some priceless celebrity at a priceless price)), and so we triumphantly decided to excurse on a visit to Paredes da Vitória, an ancient harbour which is now completely silted up by a marvellous beach, all this 10 km north of Nazaré.
Waves were breaking several hundred meters out. A serious ocean, folks. That's why we came to Portugal.
And the gate control...well, we're working on it...
...note the Russian license plate! Dans le vent as always, we're operating in serious conspiracy territory.
...or, to be more specific, a view of the eastern environs of Alcobaça seen through the haze of a very cold, very charming morning, as usual from our house. Note the outline of the Serras de Aire e Candeeiros on the horizon.
If you're old enough, you'll remember the eternal French words "Je
t'aime...Moi non plus", spoken by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, in
what...let's look this up...in 1969 (meaning you possibly won't
(remember)).
But we got struck by this not so jugendfreie poster on the
internet...
...and feel encouraged to engage in another act of self-promotion by invoking our
novel "Green Eyes", which--regular readers of this blog may have come to
regret--is always about everything, and so it's also about this
song...
We're in Chapter 17 of the GREEN EYES, and the whole thing is NOT
jugendfrei at all, so you'll read this at your own risk. John,
the narrator, and Alex, the lead character, have met once before, and now they meet again--in Johns bed:
We’re back in the bedroom. We finally embrace, kiss. This is it, this is the
moment. Should Alex expect me to sink to my knees now, unbutton his fly, like
in the porn flicks? Or unzip his zipper, most porn flicks are so cheap, they
don’t have money for the more expensive, button-holed Levis—-unzip his cheaper
jeans and start caressing his briefs with my lips, drawing the attention to
his budding tumescence under the cotton?
Well, I might, at least in the sense that my bedroom looks almost as bad as
the motel rooms where those flicks are shot. A chest, two wooden bedside
tables, two wooden chairs. A timber-framed bed done in cherry imitation, a
mattress and dirty sheets, a discordant collection of things that speak of my
financial (and mental) condition.
Yet Alex isn’t waiting for the cotton kiss (besides, he doesn’t wear any
fly-enhanced leg-wear but is still clad in his hospital sweatpants). Instead,
he undresses unceremoniously. T-shirt, pants, briefs, shoes, socks are all
arranged into a neat pile on the second chair.
He climbs onto the bed, folds himself into some relaxed, unassuming position,
like a model in a drawing class, but without the attitude. The simplicity of
his movements I will never forget, they changed my life.
I follow his example and make an unusual effort at apparel-folding. Although
we had fairly rough sex the previous morning, there is not the least
suggestion of anything untoward between us in the past, for all practical
purposes we could be virgins. I lie next to him.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, caressing my face. I’m caressing back. This would
be the moment to say ‘I love you,’ although you never know what you get back,
like ‘moi non plus,’ statistically the most honest answer (moi non plus,
French, used by Serge Gainsbourg, the one and only basis for his fame, this
noun phrase, meaning “me neither”), or ‘I love you too,’ but uttered
unconvincingly, or ‘I love you too,’ uttered more convincingly, although you
know it’s bullshit.
(I hold back.)
(I cannot hold back.)
“I love you,” I say.
“No sweat,” Alex comes back—-bypassing world literature from Homer to Spielberg.
Have you ever heard anybody saying ‘no sweat’ in this situation? There’s a
teasing movement of his eyelashes, although his green eyes stay neutral as if
it’s head or tail. “In human sexual behavior,” he says, “foreplay is a set of
emotionally and physically intimate acts between two or more people meant to
create desire for sexual activity and sexual arousal.” Ooh, he’s so sweet!
(There's more educational content below, first the self-promotion:)
So, while SCOTUS ruled in an unsigned court order sans dissent that
Trump has to hand over his tax declarations to the NY prosecutor (almost
ascertaining his future as a convict in orange jump suit and shackles), we,
in blissful ignorance* of said ruling, went to the
Praia do Norte nearby, which holds the
Guinness Book of Records for the highest surfable waves on the
planet. (continues below)
The killer surf happens twice a year or so, but we had never seen the sea this
agitated, with breakers perhaps 7 meters high (max is something like 38
meters). They are caused by the Canyon de Nazaré, an underwater fold of the
continental shelf that reaches the floor of the Atlantic Plate 3000 meters
down very quickly and echoes/reinforces the waves' amplitude.
*Nassim Kaleb, the author of
The Black Swan, writes in his book that it's practically useless to follow the news.
Almost nothing really important ever happens, he holds--until a
Black Swan Event occurs.
(Ask us in a comment if the link is not informative enough).
Jan van Rijn, the celebrate bibliophile publisher, has a new book out, and it's about "Notre Dame des Fleurs", the mind-boggling first oeuvre of Jean Genet. Genet wrote it in a Paris prison in 1942, on brown-bag paper, whence his "manuscript" got confiscated by prurient prison guards. Undaunted, he asked for more brown-bag paper and rewrote it from scratch. Eventually it got published, so that Jean-Paul Sartre could discover it---Sartre, the inventor of Existentialism---and promptly declare the author a "saint". Genet's career was made---such was the way of French cultural life at the time.
We read the "Lady" four times and it got better with each pass. Four times? Yes, because we had promised to contribute to Jan's publication and didn't know for quite some time what to do.
But then, in late 2019 we hit on an idea during a chance meeting with...
...the mysterious founding fathers of the Verse Reconstruction Movement.
We had always dreamed of writing prose that could pass as poetry (and vice versa), and---having already isolated the "hottest" passages of the Fleurs---we undertook to turn them into poetic language. Six poems resulted, and they are in the book. Here's the first one:
EACH CELL A HISSING NEST OF SNAKES
(by Michael Ampersant)
I’m like those prisons,
Open to all the winds,
Empty and pure,
Swarming with dangerous,
Promiscuous males,
Sprawled out on their beds.
Prisons of dreams, I’d say, for a race of murderers,
Each cell a hissing nest of snakes,
And a confessional.
Their eyes,
Without mystery,
Terrifying,
Like empty theaters,
Machinery at rest,
Deserts.
I approach, my heart racing,
And see nothing,
Nothing but looming emptiness,
Sensitive and proud,
A foxglove possessed by terrible souls.
There are 16 contributors to this volume (if we don't count Genet himself), and one of them is John Coulthart, gay life's most prolific high-culture blogger. Have a look at his post about the book here.
You can order the volume here. It is also for sale in a few bookstores throughout Europe, ie,
Vienna
buchhandlung löwenherz
https://www.loewenherz.at/
Milano
liberia antigone
https://www.libreriantigone.com/
Berlin
prinz eisenherz
https://prinz-eisenherz.buchkatalog.de/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CK6rSnOlNM1/
and if things work well in Paris very soon at
les mots à la bouche
https://motsbouche.com
PS: There are only 150 copies printed; it's a bit like bitcoins, and if we manage to convince Jan to rechristen his book "GenetCoins", or "CoinGenet" or anything else alluding to blockchains, the price will certainly skyrocket into the millions, especially if and when Elon Musk chips in a brief tweet. So, please, hurry.
And...yes...you have seen it coming: our Green Eyes are always about
everything, and so they are also about Bonny Tyler's "A Total Eclipse
of the Heart." Ben, the ravaging black guy, has missed the bus,
and John, the narrator, is taking him home. The conversation is
turning to Truman Capote (who was born in a Southern town called
Monroeville):
Okay, let’s press the issue. “These directions,” I say, “they’re for
Monaville, or for Monroeville?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Capote was born in Monroeville,” I say.
“Truman Capote?”
“Yes. Your Monaville?”
“No,” he says, “I would know.”
“Monaville or Monroeville?”
“Yes,” he says.
I’m trying to flirt, that’s obvious, but is he flirting back? All these
yes’s and no’s, what do they mean? Reader, do you realize—-perhaps not a big
insight, but anyhow—-do you realize that in our situation a flirt means more
than a fuck? Much more?
I can’t ask him whether he’s flirting, of course. “You’re like the Bible,
it’s yes, yes, or no, no,” I flirt.
“Yes.”
It’s coming back to me now. And I don’t mean the Bonny Tyler song “A Total
Eclipse of the Heart,” I mean the Harold Halma photograph
scandal.
Yes, that’s the way to go, much better than to ask him to carefully
evaluate our homosexual encounter retrospectively and split the infinitive
in the process. “You know about Truman Capote?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“You’ve heard about the Harold Halma photograph scandal?”
“No.”
“Capote was already a budding young author, after World War Two, when
Harold Halma, a photographer in New York City, was commissioned to take an
author picture of the prodigy, Capote recumbent on a winged settee, eyes
staring into the camera, the hand resting on his abdomen. Halma’s picture
caused a scandal at the time, people got very upset, even though Capote was
fully dressed, mind you, since, since there was this suggestion that he--quote--was dreamily contemplating some out-rage against conventional
morality--unquote.” Because, evidently, he had one hand in talking distance
of his crotch. Quote, contemplating some outrage against conventional
morality, unquote. Pathetic. Imagine this happening today.”
Let’s see what Ben’s going to say. I guess he masturbates a lot. Two times
per day. Three times on Sundays.
“It’s not yes,” he says, “it’s 'yea':...’But let your communication be, Yea,
yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.’ Matthew, five-thirty
seven.”
Are you still there? Then you will like the book. Give it a try:
