Acting, not prostitution, is the oldest profession in the world. None of us, Marilyn Monroe included, none of us could wait to get to work. I made pictures, I made love, and I made martinis. I had no idea of what I was coming across like on the screen--I just knew that what I was doing felt real.

If sight is evidential (I saw it with my own eyes), smell moves us closer to essences….In Exodus, the Lord goes so far as to give Moses a detailed recipe for incense, promising to meet him in the smoke.

You’re going to hell, said George
Location, location, location

said Jack

Well here I be, and just as happy as an unsteamed clam. The sky is a rather dense gray, of a shade that in Southampton would have me humming “Gloomy Sunday” but here seems just another of Maine’s little miracles. Of course it helps to have it reflected on the bosom of the bay (which would place its cunt somewhere down around Vinalhaven) where for some reason it picks up a faint purplish flush.

Some have profited from this story. A young man hearkened, despite reservations grown all but instinctive. Before he finished reading he felt the story changing his life. Not that everything changed utterly, but the small decisive change went deep, the man knew.

The steadfast security of return is not guaranteed to whoever risks venturing into force fields the Earth keeps charged with energy…

[I] took another sliding step, two, three, hard fur against my cheek, smelled it smelling me….Enough. I stepped away from the hull but kept my hand there and with the other reached across to my shoulder and grabbed. Pulled. Felt it cling to my shirt and skin and a wet sharpness in my cheek, a kiss with teeth, then ripped it away with skin and cloth. A scream in my hand.
I gave it back. They answered from everywhere.
I kept moving.
There in the blind.

The shy
shrimpy girl across the street
wants me to rim her husband —
a desire she communicates
through magic-marker murals

Things are falling apart in upstate New York's Beardon County. Mysterious disappearances. Uncanny antigravity pockets. Repeat visitors from "beyond." New York City's not much better. Endless summer. An alarming uptick in the mortalities and syndromes. Open season for rabid foragers.

For them the Continent had still the flavour of the eighteenth century Grand Tour, with perhaps a touch of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. For them Germany was still the Germany of Goethe; France, the France of the first English settlers on the Riviera; and Switzerland, devoid of sanatoriums and winter sports, the Switzerland of edelweiss, William Tell and the Merry Swiss Boy.