The Eye of the Beholder (homage to Georges Perec)

The person formally known as me recently watched a Tehran-set horror feature on my laptop. He stretched out on the bed, head cradled by a feathery softness (but safely supported by a sturdy headrest), feet abroad, off on hols. He purchased the bed from a popular company out of Sweden. The company had made an……

XXX

Ask people what love is and they will pull a neatly folded definition from their pocket like an old, creased picture (it is usually a list of attributes such as “trust”, “togetherness” and “specular flattery”). Ask people what time is (beyond our regulatory measurements of it) and they invariably succumb to temporary aphasia. J and……

Re:

There is a woman standing behind me in the supermarket queue. She looks pretty, seems nice. She smiles at me when I tell her I will be back in a moment and run off to grab a bunch of bananas that will lose their spray-tan yellowness and blacken overnight. J is scanning her goods in……

48

The Great American Novel, as a Scottish acquaintance of mine eloquently observed, inclines by the lay of the land it covers towards voluminosity. Breadth is mistaken for depth. The slog to get from cover to cover is a mark of authentic Americanness, a textual re-enactment of the trailblazing pioneers that traversed the vast expanse of……

Limbo

“Jesus, I’ve never seen so many fyfas!” said J as we stocked up on provisions in a Maxima supermarket in Palanga. We had come to hunt for amber (to scavenge, it would soon turn out) and I was feeling predatory (supermarkets have that effect on me). I had noticed all the gaudily outfitted fyfas parading……

To tu

“Is that a swan?” I ask J. Only the neck gives it away, a shadowy curlicue standing out amid the crushed ice and frozen gloom. The bird appears to have been set into the river as the frilly, lily-like ice floes finally locked together after days of drifting downstream. The River Neris does not freeze……

Pipe dreams

It  was supposed to have been a great year. A monumental year. Lithuania was marking a millennium of recorded existence, an event of such significance that it had started planning for it as far back as 1997 under the State Commission on the Commemoration of the Millennium of the Name of Lithuania. According to the……

The Golem of Gedimino Avenue

A homeless man is tormenting me. He is enormous, strangely formless, a begrimed golem forever trudging up and Gedimino Avenue. He has a towering shock of matted hair and fiery beard and root-like hands. He is not so much a man as a miasma bound and bundled together in thick, dirt-stitched layers of clothing. He……

Vytas Does Vilnius

Vytas pointed the camera at his dick, tapped the screen, waited for the familiar click, then put his equipment away. He looked at the picture noddingly; he was looking good. He liked to think of his erect penis as a boletus, the so-called “king of mushrooms” (his father had made a small fortune from mushrooms,……

Graffitum

Existing in this manner is precarious to say the least. I am a tenuous corpus of kilobytes bobbing up and down on the ever-shifting crest of cyberspace. Nothing remains buoyant for long. The page is always refreshing. The space is always replenishing. Nothing sticks, stays, endures. One outrage supersedes the next. Absurdity goes to its……