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Blasting me away, blowing us both through the floor, and ticking through the igniferous floors below it, bombing the lobby at mortal checkout—bringing the hypostyle to crash, the arches to collapse, atop a cuneiform of limbs and kilim tatters and fragments of the monogrammed blazon of Allah that’d pendulated over the interactive pillars. Imagine, amid the settling dust, a providentially inviolate vase from which a single peacock feather—drifted.
“Vous étrange,” she said.
“Non.”
She shuddered. “Oui, vous.”
“Non je ne suis pas regardez you strange.”
My last wish before I submitted: let her explosion scramble this diary so that everything will read like my French.
She shimmied out of the bra, let it fall—without a flash, without immolation. No martyr.
Then she tugged the panties down, stopping at the calves to shed the heels before continuing.
She wasn’t shaved. Not in any of her pits.
I was holding in my hands this wild mother of a bone.
Rach would be familiar with the feeling, Principal would be too. This feeling of unveiling. To unveil the next product. To lift the curtain on the new.
I went slowly with her below me and then I was behind her and not slow.
Her name was Izdihar, so Izi, so Iz.
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No one is spared the betrayal of a biographer: not his ostensible subject, and certainly not his truer subject: himself. “All books are autobiographies,” can be found in books in nearly every language, in nearly every age. How else can a man survive having dedicated his one life to the lives of others, to reading them and especially to writing them—isn’t betrayal the only noble choice? […] Which is why I can’t decide about a child—what material will I have to bequeath? […]
Diaspora Jews have inherited not a tradition but a rupture. If we were enslaved, it was to fashion; if we were liberated, it was by wandering the deserts between cha
—POLYN: A LIFE OF MY MOTHER, JOSHUA COHEN
Yehoshuah Kohen was born in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine. The old century was dying, and the new century lurking just beyond the fields, lying in wait in the snowy woods would be no consolation. By the goyim Christians, it was 1870/71. In an heirloom Bible, the family Kohen recorded only FUCK ME BEGIN LATER
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from the Palo Alto sessions: We were born in the year of the microprocessor, LGBT Pride Month, the Day of the Death of Mohammed [June 8, 1971]. M-Unit a retired gender studies professor at UC Berkeley, D-Unit an engineer, Xerox-PARC. Basically he was one of the inventors of personal computing. Which meant, he used to say, he took computing personally. We grew up in a white splancher in Crescent Park [Palo Alto]. A good neighborhood too überaware of its goodness. Lots of cool subdued kids. Lots of cool hippie parents. Kindergarten was at Berkeley. A totally egalitarian viro. M-Unit and D-Unit alternated breakfasts, spelt pancakes, stevia quinoa. We had chore charts, surprise room cleanliness inspections. We collected dinosaur eggs, coprolite, ambered insects, pyrite. We memorized the chart of Mendeleev, which hung on our ceiling. We were picked on at school for our [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—wardrobe?], which was sewn by parental friend [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—Nancy Apt?], the back fabrics of the chinos and buttondowns different from the fabrics in front. We were raised to mistrust brands, to be a proactive consumer, a prosumer. All adults were academics. Primiparousness was the norm.
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Communication is a useful [tool [way] to understand Cohen’s family. Cohen’s was a family [consumed subsumed] by communication [communications/communications systems]: His father, Abraham, was one of the prime i
In 1972, the Computer Science Division built the Alto, the world’s first personal computer [IS THIS TRUE?], which featured a wordprocessing program called Wupiwug, which its programmer Hal Lahasky always claimed was a monster from a scifi book by a writer he’d never name, though it was only an acronym for “What U Press Is What U Get,” an indication that the keystrokes a user made were reflected directly onscreen, and not on a teletype printout. [INSERT HERE A LINE ABOUT LANGUAGES: BASIC, LISP.]
Nascent computing displayed its output on a tick of tape. The monitor followed, a face to face the user’s, light hurled at a pane of glass. The last frontier, or what was regarded as the last frontier, was also the first, paper again. The laserprinter both continued and undermined the Xerox tradition: in that it reproduced, but from a nonexistent original, putting to paper the page of the screen (parenthetically, the laserprinter was the only PARC i
[However, building on phototelegraphy, which had been around since the 19th century, and the shift from wire to wireless facsimile, which occurred just after the turn of the 20th, Xerox’s main interest in documents remained in their reproduction, and in their reproduction through transmission, not in their manipulation. All distances had to be bridgeable, as far as Xerox was concerned—the distance between PARC and Rochester Stamford, CT, to which Xerox moved its HQ in 19??, was not.] While Abraham’s colleagues were focused on [creating the] transmission protocols between computers[, and computers and printers], and constructing the Ethernet—a local area network [explain] that allowed machines, and the people who made them, to communicate with one another virtually—Abraham was alone in his fixation. He spent 14 years at PARC huddled with sca