What are you looking at?

Pornography may be joyless, humorless, dull, depressing, damaging to its participants, drab, and badly lit. It is also a legitimate consumer product. Some of it is not, obviously. Some of it is plain evil. But most of it is harmless.

Pedophilia is not. Obviously. Pedophilia is evil and unambiguously wrong. No circumstances excuse it.

Of course, great art has always been made of great evils, and even funny art has been made at the expense of grim and humorless idiots. Great art can deal with with the sordid, but many confuse the latter with the former. Nabokov has been particularly unlucky in this regard. (Even Hunter S. Thompson has muddled the author with his subject matter, but in the good doctor's case alcohol plus a general and pure desire to mess with the world is excuse and justification enough. He is exempt.) And when you set up a half-assed site devoted to a great artist, it's almost inevitable that those looking for the sordid subject matter end up at your front door. They're grubby folks. Here's some of what they have been after for the past five days:

Day of 6/21/2002:

Top 10 Search Keywords by Server Used

[ Result keywords removed because they were attracting a great deal of pervies looking for precisely those keywords. Me dumb. ]

Removed from this list are the many legitimate searches -- all the people looking for everyone from Amis to Zadie. This is all to say that Dear Abby did the right thing. And to say that for all the good the internet has done, it has also exposed (partly because it's mediated, and partly because everyone remains more or less anonymous) more of of this unpleasant, damp underside of one's fellow that one would wish, and that every once in a while it's probably healthy to expose that damp underside to the world, so that we can all say, collectively, "Yuck," except for the person who was looking for "feet newsgroups," who is probably OK if only a little strange, and for the person who searched for the hippo cartoon, whom Dr. Millmoss bless.

From Tinfoil Trapeze (Trapecio de Papel Aluminio) By Buendía Shane, Bogota, Picatori Press, 1986¹

"Is Otis Redding the better singer, for even when he sings the sad songs he sounds happy."

"No. Is Sam Cooke, for when he sings the happy songs he sounds sad." ²

We overheard and did not join in. I wanted to join in. I wanted to let them know that I knew the people they discussed. I realized that my knowing the two soul singers formed my only real interest in the discussion, and that I had no opinion one way or the other. Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. In this stained-glassed dive in the centro. To hear the Americans talk of them in the brief silence between a Cuban son and a Colombianized rocksteady made sense. Otis and Sam had found a temporary home.

Their Spanish improved with beer. Their dancing did not.

I drank a shot of aguardiente chased by orange soda³, then danced with Marcela. When we got home I played a tape of Redding singing Cooke's Chain Gang. I don't know why I thought I'd see the Americans again.

---

¹ Mr. Shane, like many Colombians of his generation, was heavily inspired by Andres Caicedo's Que Viva La Música. While Tinfoil is not on the whole succesful, I can't for the life of me figure out why Música remains untranslated. It's a kickass novel.

However, since Caicedo's novel will no doubt eventually be Englished and Shane's will most likely not, I thought I'd give you a taste of it. Like Caicedo's, it's about drinking, dancing, screwing, and obsessing over music.

² In the original, the broken phrases are meant to suggest gringo-ized Spanish. They are about successful there as they are in here, meaning not at all. Why people think accents are funny is beyond me.

³ Naranja Postobón in the original: the Colombian orange soda of choice to chase aguardiente.

Excerpt

Yesterday, the neighbors painted the walls red. Today they painted the kitchen tile red, the living room rug, the appliances -- fridge, microwave, stove, stove-top, all red -- the ceiling, and the knickknacks: Hummel figurines, Star Trek collectible plates, posters of Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, and James Dean at the Hopper diner. All red. They opened their windows to aerate.

Justiniano walked from school to his apartment to find the open window, the red room, and the two men in their black red-speckled suits standing with their brushes looking in his direction. They had lived opposite him forever. They never said anything.

They had never done anything odd until now. And Justiniano could see, arrested in his passage from the covered patio with its defeated plantain tree to his small apartment with Digimon already on, that there was nothing particularly odd about the act itself -- his parents had painted his room a cheery, muted yellow last year. And if they said nothing to him, he had not made any great efforts to say anything to them as well. He said little. He probably talked less than the men with the dark suits and red-tipped brushes.

Itemized and Annotated

1. Jerky¹
   
2. Carrabba's Chicken Bryan²
   
3. General Tso's Chicken³
   
4. Pepperidge Farms Bread⁴
   
5. Campbell's Ready-to-Consume Plastic Jar of Tomato Soup.
   
6. Folger's Whole Bean Coffee⁵
   
7. Stir-Fry Chicken and Beef
   
8. Olive oil & Carlic⁶
   
9. Publix-brand Lite Yogurt
   
10. Publix-brand caffeine-free diet soda. ⁷
    
11. Imitation Crab Meat
    
12. Chocolatinas Jet
    
13. Green mangos with salt.
    
14. Boars Head hams and cheeses
    
15. Ark Clams
    
16. Bananas
    
17. Nutella⁸

¹ This is the best jerky in the world.
² Recipe here.
³ Eaten very sparely these days as it is a caloric bomb.
⁴ See Joel Achenbach's essay on Pepperidge Farms in Why Things Are, on why consuming PF products can be made into a disquieting funhouse experience.
⁵ 100% Colombian. Of course.
⁶ For item above
⁷ But no, not a Mormon.
⁸ See Kafka.
⁺ And all this as a way to remark on how delightful routine can be -- on how eating the same thing every week (excepting 2, 3, 12, and 15, which are only consumed on special ocassions, and salad-cut hearts of palm, consumed when the mood strikes), and how one can truly revel in quality products manufactured in countless numbers by massive corporations. (Or conglomerates? Note that the bread and the soup come from the same source, as probably do a few other products.) Note, too, that every page of my memo pad holds a permutation of this list: need more of this, ran out of that. And we can't say goodbye w/o remarking that this, right here, is what we all dreaded -- minutae compiled from the sidelines of everyone's routine. Sorry! And yes, there are far less trivial sidelines, not to mention far more entertaining food-related material.