#296 Scheherazade

The Marquis de Sade—
also a favorite of the

painter—spent a literary
120 days in Sodom. That

was slightly more than a
tenth of the time it took

Scheherazade to convince
her husband to cancel her

execution, & at least a
1001 times less enjoyable.

#295 The Window

Not even pivoting on
one foot for an hour or
so in what passes as
the real world will give
any indication of how the
pyramids were built. For
that you have to bury
your head in the sand at
half hour intervals & at

every fifth burial vary
things a little & raise
your legs up into the air
in a kind of ostrich yoga.
Cheops will eventually
come along; & with him the
visitors from outer space
who actually oversaw all
the construction work. Levi-

tation, levers & pulleys, a
thin magnetic strip along
which monorails ran – talk
of them & the aliens will
laugh. What they did was
offer debt relief to various
third world economies in
return for their labor. So
the Inuit carved the blocks,

& giant apes carried them up
the ever-increasing slope,
& Native Americans with a
head for heights & the benefit
of laser sights put them in
their anointed place. & all
the while bands played on
the nearby dunes with sub-
sidiary groups beamed in

from other ∆ states in Central
& South America & the U.S.
Federal Treasury while aging
rock stars who pretended to
know something about eco-
nomics gave audiences to
the Pope & ex-Presidents &
-Prime Ministers in return for
knighthoods & naming rights.

#294 Par une belle fin d'après-midi

Premonition or preparedness
or perhaps a personal per-
spective. Even at a young
age, even on holiday at a
chateaux in the Alps, sitting
on the granite balcony during
a beautiful late afternoon, the
members of Manet's family in-
evitably impress by a readiness
to address Death & their dress
sense when they're doing so.