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MayJournal

In which I visit Chongqing, and describe several local luminaries of Yilong

A permitted Rally- What do we want? More plastic crap!
When do we want it? Now!May 1st, 2005
    This day I walked around Chengdu. The road out of Yilong seems to have gotten even worse than when I came in. Many hours of potholes, so it was too bumpy to read. Chengdu seems the same. It’s odd to be crammed in with so many people again. I found a huge bookstore, but it had no English books. My other Chengdu task is to find fuzzy socks. Chinese socks are like mini versions of lady’s nylon stockings. These micro-thin wisps are grossly insufficient. I did find some Western socks in an outdoor store, but could not bring myself to pay 50 Yuan for them. Granted, that’s only six US Dollars, but also my food budget for a month. I did find a compass though, to replace one I lost on a train. I walked over to the Tibetan neighborhood again. It’s interesting to see the monks buying electric guitars and CDs. I also saw some of the weird advertising rallies pictured on the following page. People in uniform march back and forth, holding signs with advertisements. Lots of pretty girls are walking about. I think those must migrate out of Yilong.

May 2nd, 2005
    I began this day with a ride in a local bus up to the train station. I wanted to catch a bus out to Bauguang temple to see their collection of crazy Arhat statues. However, I found the melee of busses too confusing, and couldn’t find the right one despite asking. I didn’t feel too disappointed, as I had something else in mind. I walked back to an interesting street I’d noticed on the bus ride up. It was a large street totally crammed solid with pedestrians and pedicabs, or bike taxis. I bought some little folding scissors for my friend Thimble, costing 3.5 Yuan. Remembering my mission to find socks, I diverged into a side alley, which led into an enormous covered market. It was dark and crowded, and reminded me a bit of Middle Eastern markets, except it looked to be from the 1980’s rather than the 1180’s. It was not long before I found socks in the most overwhelming abundance imaginable. At least 20 sizable stores specialized only in socks. Yet with dawning disappointment, I realized that of the 27 million socks on display, every last one was of course a micro-thin nylon ludicrosity. They did have lots of cool fuzzy legwarmers there though. I wandered on into other complex labyrinths of superheated consumerism. Areas the size of small planets were devoted to shoes. Everywhere was a sea of black heads.
    My next objective was to find some felt to make gloves and other things with. I found another enormous market with hundreds of little stalls. Observing buttons and zippers, I sensed that I was getting closer. In an upstairs part, I found a vast cloth market in which I wandered overwhelmed for a long time. All kinds of amazing fabric were for sale, but no felt could I find. In this expedition, I was seeking the thick and organic, but everything for sale tended very much towards the diaphanous and synthetic. This idea stayed with me for a long time. Eventually I decided I wasn’t going to find what I sought, so I’d better just wander around and observe. I saw lots of beautiful silks and wispy things. I decided to walk down to the Buddhist temple and get some more of their cool laminated cards. On the way I dropped into a bookstore, where I copied the glyph for “felt” out of a Chinese-English dictionary. I bought some of the cards at the temple, but the vegetarian restaurant refused to serve me because I was alone. I decided to try my luck again at the market, armed with my copied glyph. On the way back, I noticed a few shops on the other side of the street specializing in military gear. One had a picture of a giant hiking boot above the entrance. Surely, the Chinese wouldn’t wear their pantyhose with hiking boots. I dodged across and managed to find some fairly normal hiking socks. Yay. Back at the fabric market, I began displaying my copied glyph to the proprietors of stalls. They all recognized it, but just waved me away. A few pointed vaguely in contradictory directions. Now here was the one time I really missed the insatiable Arab lust for cash. At any market I the Middle east, I would have had a rabid crew of touts around me in an instant, all pulling me towards the felt warehouse where they would receive a fat commission for reeling me in. Alas, the Chinese couldn’t be bothered. Somehow, I wandered into the remotest back corner of the fabric market where suddenly I found a roll of black felt standing by itself! An image of a brass yak presided over the stall. I bought one meter for 5 Yuan. Next, I ate some rice and veggies at a stall serving out of metal bowls covered in plastic, before taking the bus back to my hotel. I again tried and failed to find a bookstore with English books. At least I had my socks and felt though. (Note- In retrospect, I realize I should have just gone to the Tibetan section of Chengdu to find felt. I’m sure I could have turned up rolls and rolls of all sorts of thick, wooly yak products there.)

May 4th, 2005
    Yesterday, I had a long wait for my bus to Chongqing, where I intended to visit some famous Tantric Buddhist rock carvings. I spent the time wandering around Chengdu. I walked down to the Buddhist temple and read volume 2 of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. I’d managed to acquire it by trade the previous night. Somehow, reading about the ten and twenty year sentences to Siberian logging makes my two remaining months of teaching seem a bit less long.
    I also had two interesting “conversations” in which my interlocutors realized for the first time in their lives that some people exist who do not speak Chinese. The first one involved a raggedy street boy who came up to me and repeatedly tried to strike up a conversation. He tried talking extra loud. Basically, a lot of noise was coming out of his head. After quite a while of him talking, he stopped, and I could tell he suddenly thought “Whoa. This guy hasn’t understood a single thing I’ve said!” I was reminded of a scene in Huckleberry Finn when Huck tries to explain to Jim how French people speak French. “If they’re people, how come they don’t talk like people?” is Jim’s irrefutable reply. Later on, an old woman came up to me on the street with a laminated plastic card covered in Chinese glyphs. She kept talking and pointing at the card again and again, following me down the street. I was only able to get rid of her by finally just grabbing the card and holding it in various upside down and sideways positions, while making noises expressive of utter bafflement and stupefaction. After this, she tottered away muttering. Another common one is when people realize that I’ve not understood what they’ve said, they start writing imaginary glyphs on their hands. Of course, this tactic has always worked for them when dealing with speakers of different Chinese dialects, because they all use the same characters. Maybe they think that I’m just a fluent speaker of Cantonese. But really, I want to tell them “Dude! I can’t even speak or understand the simplest sentence in Chinese, and here you are expecting me to be able to read some fucked up glyph that you’re writing in the air? Hello?”
    Anyways, I finally got on the bus. After a long ride, it dropped me off in the dark along the side of some random, sidewalkless highway somewhere in the environs of Chongqing. So much for my carefully laid plans for walking to my chosen hotel. Nevertheless, being plopped down in the middle of a vast and unfamiliar foreign city is one of my favorite experiences. Chongqing is an amazing and humungous city of 31 million, built on a vast hilly peninsula between two big rivers. It seems bigger than Chengdu, and even than Beijing, because of the interminable concentration of skyscrapers. It’s a stupendous cyberpunk wasteland of overpasses, tunnels, and narrow stone staircases. Weird machines jut from sidewalk holes. The flyovers are lit up with flashing multicolored lights. Many buildings have unique light displays and model UFOs on their roofs. It’s amazing that something this big could exist and I’d never even heard of it. Using my new compass, my Lonely Planet guide, and my intuition, I managed to hike into the center of the city. After trying several places, I finally found a grody dive called the Shipin Hotel. It features humungous squished cockroaches on the stained rug, and a toilet that emits a geyser of its contents when flushed. It’s also vastly overpriced at 180 Yuan. Still, it felt very good to take a shower and collapse into bed. Chongqing is a very hot city, and I was soaked with sweat from my nocturnal navigations through its twisting stairways and clogged roads.
    Today I arose and decided to make an attempt to see the famous Tantric Buddhist rock carvings in Dazu County, about 112 km outside of Chongqing. After lots of confusion, I ended up at a big bus station, but they didn’t have any busses going there. Outside, some taxi drivers pointed me up an alley up the hill. Here, crammed between three enormous buildings under construction, and 737 flip-flop stores, were a set of sleeper busses with the Dazu glyph on them. Who knows why they were using sleeper busses for a two-hour trip. This form of transport, aside from its inherent absurdity, is always in my experience unduly prone to inordinate delays in its departure. Indeed, it was nearly two hours before we got underway. While waiting, I enjoyed watching the many porters working in the area. They wore only shorts and cheap sandals, and kept their money in a sock tied by string in their pockets. Their bodies were amazingly muscular. One guy had calves like grapefruit. They were like middle-aged chain-smoking bodybuilders. They were constantly lifting and stacking huge loads. They all had two parallel purple welts across their shoulders from the big bamboo poles they used for carrying things.
    At last, the bus finally got rolling. I’d been wanting to see these sculptures for a very long time. An illustration in my guidebook first aroused my interest. It shows a sculpture of the Buddhist wheel of life, held by a frightening demon. After a few hours of travel, the bus dropped us off in some random vacant lot behind a few auto repair shops. So seldom do we end up in bus stations, so often in such lots. I walked around, and after taking a few weird, random local busses, I arrived at a huge mall swarming with Chinese tourists. This must be the place. After more wandering, I at last discovered the entrance to the carvings. They turned out to be amazing, and well worth the long and troublesome journey. The sculptures were carved into a U-shaped cliff surrounding a green and pleasant vale. Some of the best ones emitted a wonderful atmosphere of calm abstraction and contemplation. The giant wheel of life was indeed awesome. Most amazing of all was a huge sculpture of Avalokitesvara with thousands of hands. The postcard above may give you some idea of it, but an image cannot convey the imposing scale, daunting atmosphere, and sheer, mind-blowing surrealistic weirdness of the original. It was one of the most powerful works of art I’d ever seen. In fact, I can’t remember any work of art affecting me in the same way. It was tall and dark, enclosed in a special ancient building set into the cliff face. Four rotating red columns filled with thousands of little gilt statues spun before it, and a constant stream of worshippers bowed to it. Also, the postcard only shows the central section. The sea of hands extended far out. The whole thing was maybe thirty feet high. After looking at it for a moment, my mood totally changed, and all my vexation with the bus system evaporated. I can’t think of any Western work of art that compares to it. Some of the other sculptures were interesting too, but a lot of them were degenerate Confucian pleas for many sons, longevity and good fortune. People were blowing off fireworks somewhere nearby. It’s interesting that the Chinese set off fireworks in their places of worship. I think it’s a tradition that ought to be introduced to the Christian church as well. I bought a small souvenir carving on my way out.
    Once back in Chongqing, the bus dropped me off at a huge bus station somewhere outside of the city. I had no idea where I was. I walked around for a bit, quite at a loss. Eventually, I thought up the expedient of showing my hotel keychain to a taxi driver. This got me back to my hotel. I had a very good and salty dinner nearby, and came back up to my palatial 10th floor penthouse to pen these memories of a long day.

May 6th, 2005
    Back in Yilong. I recently realized something rather sad. I was up on the mountain, reading about the gulag by the old overgrown Buddhist cliff sculptures I’d discovered earlier. I sat in an alcove and wondered when the sculptures had been carved. The date 1979 was visible amongst the numerous graffiti. I started to carve 2005, but it felt odd, like someone was watching me. As I got up to go, I suddenly realized that all of the damage to the sculptures was very deliberate and total. Even carvings high on the cliff, reachable only by scaffold, had been destroyed. The main Buddha’s head was entirely gone, and chisel marks visible there. All of the other figures, including flying divine maidens, were really only distinguishable by jagged outline. I thought of the damage to Petra inflicted by Muslims. I suddenly realized that these sculptures must have been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The damage was too total and thorough to have been inflicted by mere vandals. What a totally evil deed.

May 7th, 2005
    On the opposite page you may see displayed part of a typical Chinese Chalk box. I tend to go through 2-3 pieces of chalk each class. By the end of the day, all of my clothes are covered in chalk. I feel like I’ve been working in a chalk mine. On the floor beneath the chalkboard is a small talus slope of chalkdust and stubs. I like to fall down and roll in it to demonstrate the word “dirty.” On the first two fingers and the thumb of my right hand, I’ve developed big calluses from gripping chalkstubs to write with. It’s like when I used to play guitar all the time. At first, I wondered what these huge calluses were from, then I realized the chalk. Now, after my vacation, they have peeled off.

May 8th, 2005
    Traveling salesmen of curious medical and religious relics pass through town sometimes. They roll out a blanket on the main street and spread out their wares. On display are plastic bags with filled with varieties of spices and dried medicinal plants, all manner of bones, fossils and skulls, roots, piles of dirt, and dried out paws. These latter purport to be tiger paws, I think, but look rather like large dog-paws dyed orange. Especially attractive are the monkey skulls with tinfoil balls in their eye sockets. Every once in a while, a new deformed beggar appears in town to stay for a few days or weeks. Today on my way to dinner I saw a grey-robed monk sitting by a very weird display. He had a big red tarp covered with occult symbols and glyphs, the swastika and yin-yang images being most prevalent. In the center, a large rock, maybe 20” square, was balanced on top of a stick on a teacup, with a One Yuan note under it. All around was an array of dusky medicaments. It looked like there must be some string supporting it, but there was none. The monk warned off meddlesome boys. A bit farther up the street was a vendor with an extensive display of newly printed esoteric and religious texts. I leafed through a very detailed astrological ephemeris, and a well-illustrated guide to divination by body type. Each feature such as earlobes, toes, nipples, etc., was shown in all its variations. A few wizened geezers offered to perform divination with a set of long cards or sticks. Mostly though, the streets in the center of town were lined with men waiting for work. They have bamboo poles for carrying, and smoke wads of raw tobacco leaves from short metal pipes.

May 11th, 2005
    I sometimes wonder if my classroom will survive my teaching term. I am a disciple of the teaching method known in the trade as TPR, or Total Physical Response. Objects tend to take a beating. First, I kicked a big hole in the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom. I found that it produced a wonderful, resonant reverberation, excellent for instantly quieting a noisy class. Alas, it was not long before the hole developed. I laid off it for a bit after the hole appeared, but the other day I could not resist giving it a big kick with my boot. A shower of particleboard splinters erupted, and the desk lurched wildly. One of its legs now hung useless at its side. At present, its barely standing, and I hesitate to set my books on it in the morning. Then, numerous sizable craters appeared in the blackboard after a particularly vigorous game of “flyswatter,” in which students slap words on the board with plastic edging that they ripped off of their desks. And how did those bright orange splotches appear twelve feet up the wall? Surely, no sane teacher would direct his students to throw a huge broken Chinese carrot at an empty juice bottle balanced on the top of the blackboard. It should here be noted that the local carrots attain to prodigious girths exceeding 127 millimeters. I was a bit disconcerted when the principle walked by during this crucial academic exercise. Finally, the blackboard itself is so warped that one side bulges out more than a foot from the wall. You can actually store sizable objects back there. I would not be too surprised if one day, after I have finally coaxed some minute, 4 decimeter peanut sized girl up to do something at the blackboard, the entire thing should come crashing down and squash her flat.

May 12th, 2005
    Today I was walking up on the mountain when I encountered a group of children playing an odd game. They picked leaves off of a reed-like plant, peeled back a few inches along the central stem, then hurled them high into the air. It was like a natural atlatl or spear thrower. I stopped and learned how to do it with them. A sublime amusement.

May 17th, 2005
    The blackboard in my classroom is now bulging out about two feet from the wall. A single rusty screw supports it. The writing surface is totally convex, like the side of a barrel. Weirdly, it never seems to change while I’m teaching. I just walk into the classroom and find it bulging out by another six inches every so often. Perhaps the phenomenon relates to the weather. A few days ago, there was a strong rainstorm early in the morning. After it cleared, the sky became totally blue, and the atmosphere attained a crystalline lucidity. I could see many distant hills and mountains that had hitherto been obscured by haze. I took a few pictures of the bright countryside. I’ve also discovered a nice secret meditation spot up by the cliffs.

May 18th, 2005
    This day the first interesting event in several months occurred. The blackboard in my classroom finally collapsed, tumbled off the wall, and smashed to pieces on the floor. Alas, to my supreme disappointment, this did not happen while I was teaching. I unlocked the classroom for my first class and saw it lying shattered on the ground. A vast and grotesque expanse of moldy horror stood revealed on the wall. A single fragment hung pinned to one side. An autopsy showed the blackboard to have been made of a damp, particleboard-like substance, similar to the stuff clipboards are made of. The collapse of the blackboard lent my class a chaotic, happy feeling. A Chinese teacher called someone, and a while later a little man showed up carrying a tiny wooden toolbox. He surveyed the destruction slack jawed and left. Clearly, it wasn’t a matter of tightening up a few screws. The Chinese teacher said “Maybe it cannot be repaired.” I love the unintentional Chinese understatement. Like the time I asked my boss Mr. Liu about the huge rotted corpse of an ancient tree near the school. He stopped, surveyed the blackened, eroded stump, and said “Maybe it is dead.”
    I taught my classes by propping up the blackboard fragments and writing on them. When I left at the end of the day, workers came and began installing a fresh blackboard. If only every day could so burgeon with excitement.


May 21st, 2005
    My pen trembles to record the latest upheaval in my storm-tossed existence. The entire neurological agglomeration recoils, reeling with blank incomprehension. Yet my duties as a correspondent compel me to record the direful factoid- the price of eggplants has plummeted to ONE YUAN. Was it only last week, seven short days ago, that this comestible retailed for 1.5, if not 1.8 Yuan? Who can tell what inscrutable agricultural permutations conspired to bring about this unforeseen revolution. Yet even as I approached the market this morning, the news wafted to the opalescent portals of my ear. My usual throng of acolytes swarmed about me to watch the purchase. First six, then eight, then ten persons gathered about to monitor the transaction. It was with a heavy heart that I was at last impelled to inform them that the entertaining highlight of their day had reached its lamentable termination. The laowai had finished buying his eggplants. With hanging heads the spectators at last dispersed, although not without many an hopeful backwards glance, anticipating some last morsels of entertainment from the freakish interloper. Alas! While the grotesquely bloated citizens of the USA sit enthralled to the computer generated imagery of Star Wars Episode Three, the residents of Yilong are compelled to seek diversion in the sale of eggplants.

May 23rd, 2005
    Yesterday I observed something exceedingly bizarre. I was walking around town when I passed a small shop selling pig food. On display there was a large, full color poster of a key being shoved into a pig’s anus. This was a very large and dramatic image. When my initial stupefaction receded, I started to laugh very hard. There were no people in the shop, but a group was playing mahjong on the sidewalk outside. First they just stared at me, but when they realized what I was laughing at, they started laughing too. I considered making an offer for the poster, but it looked like a very long-term integral part of the shop’s décor. Besides, it wasn’t exactly the sort of image one would want to be a daily part of one’s life. I think I’ll have to go back today to confirm it was real. It’s on the same street as the hospital with photos of malignant breast cancer on display near the main entrance. Not too far from the elementary school playground decorated with photos of bleeding dismembered corpses from traffic accidents.

May 27th, 2005
    Last night, I dreamed that the ATM would be broken. As I approached it this afternoon to replenish my funds, I sensed that it would be so. I tried circling a few trees to break the spell. Indeed, the ATM was broken. I had to go into the bank. Precognitive dreams are quite rare with me, and they always seem to relate to some practical aspect of the next day. I believe this to be a vestigial adaptation from our hunter-gatherer days.

May 28th, 2005
    It’s only 10:48 AM, and I’ve already caused a riot. I was walking through some fields in the valley below, when I came across an isolated elementary school. All the students spazzed when they saw me, shouting “Hello! Gooda Moaning! Saionara!” The frenzy continued as I walked up the hillside, receiving a fresh burst of energy whenever my diminishing figure appeared from behind a rock or shrubbery. It was weird to be the focus of this phenomenon. Also on my morning walk I discovered a cool old little pagoda lost in the back of a crowded market. Lots of huge slabs of fat were on sale there. I’ve started to wonder what they do with the actual meat of the animals they kill. Everywhere you can buy hearts, ears, tongues, tails, livers, stomachs and blobs of fat, but nothing like a steak or chop. The ancient Greeks wrapped the bones and fat in skin and presented the bundle at the alter, while saving the meat for human consumption. Perhaps the Chinese do the opposite. Splenitic offal is so popular.
    The male and female students are housed in two large separate tiled structures. The boys are warehoused in a big orangish tiled building visible from my bedroom window. Lights out is at 10 PM. You can see the warden flipping off the breakers floor by floor as the last bell rings. This is followed by about 20 minutes of intense yelling and ass slapping, before the boys all fall asleep. By 10:30, the building is totally dark and silent. This is quite a notable contrast to the situation in the girl’s dormitory. Their building is a stately seven-story pile surmounted by a pink and white dome, topped with a lightning rod. When I first saw this building, and indeed on every subsequent occasion that I laid eyes on it, the words came involuntarily to mind
    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure dome decree…
After my nightly beers and perusal of cyberspace, I often wander around the darkened school thinking. It is quite picturesque and atmospheric to stand in front of the girl’s dorm at night and listen to the hundreds of excited whisperings. The girls light candles and stay up late chatting. All their little socks and underthings are hung up to dry on the metal window lattices, backlit by the girl’s improvised lanterns. Even at 11:30, the chatting is still raging.
    On my walk tonight, I stood contemplating myriads of moths fluttering under a big streetlight. I thought about how the proper amorous and crepuscular activities of moths and other night creatures were disturbed by artificial lights. Their sensory apparatus, attuned to the subtlest glimmerings, must be overwhelmed by the ghastly blaze of electrical bulbs. As I stood there thinking these thoughts, the streetlight went out, and we were all released into darkness.

May 29th, 2005
    SOME LOCAL CHARACTERS

THE BLIND FORTUNE TELLER- Near the city center, in an alley leading to the stone staircase to the mountain, several personages ply their minute trades. Here are found a shoe repairman sitting beside his huge industrial sewing machine, a vendor of caramelized strawberries, and sellers of unknown fruits. Among these sits the blind fortuneteller surrounded by a huddled group of clients. He is a well-built man of middle age with a broad, open face. He speaks in an intense, hypnotic voice. Most remarkable is the intense aura of concentration around the little group he forms with his clients. I’ve never seen him alone. His listeners appear to be sucking in some rare healing fluid essential to their survival. He does not use any of the divinatory devices employed by lesser sages, such as numbered sticks or psychometric booklets. Perhaps he is more of an advisor than a fortune teller, but the feeling of mystic apartness he radiates seems to place him in the realm of an exalted occult.
THE DRUNKEN PINGPONG MASTER- This fellow is surrounded by an aura of a different sort, namely, the intense reek of booze. He always hangs around the school grounds, yelling into a cell phone and reeling across the pavement. He is the only adult who habitually wears shorts. He even goes barefoot, an extreme eccentricity in China. His constant intoxication does little to degrade his fearsome ping-pong kung fu, as he mercilessly slaughters his peanut-sized opponents. He often makes efforts to talk to the foreign teachers. These consist of repeating anything we say, and shaking hands vigorously. Yet the mystery surrounding this fellow is also intense. Why does an alcoholic barefoot adult hang out in the middle of a school, playing ping-pong? Arron cleared the matter up. It turns out he lives at the school with his parents. Supposedly, he is a lawyer. K.

THE LONG-HAIRED ASCETIC- This somewhat mysterious figure walks continuous loops around the town. He pauses before the 50-gallon containers of baijio, (a fluid ludicrously translated as “wine,” to which it bears about as much resemblance as to Kool-aid) that old women sell on the street.  I think he sleeps in a local cave in the mountain. Before I came to China, I naively thought that Asians could not grow dreadlocks. How wrong I was. Numerous ascetics sport them here as everywhere in the world.

THE NICE FOREIGN TEACHER- This amiable chap is always willing to stop for a chat. He enjoys hanging out with the students, and makes admirable efforts to master the local lingo. He has numerous friends around the town. Who knows how he lives with…

THE SCARY FOREIGN TEACHER- who can be seen, clad in black, loping away from campus at great speeds. He seems to have an aversion to forming connections with other people, apparently trying to drive them off with visualized blasts of occult energy.

SOME LOCAL HOTTIES

THE PRINT SHOP GIRL-Outside the school gate is a noisy printing shop that produces the ruled tablets for inscribing glyphs, used by all the schools in town. I like to stand outside this printing shop, listening to its fascinating industrial rhythms. Boom schwacka BOOM thwap! Boom schwacka BOOM thwap! While the press is operating, this one girl stands in front of it, wearing big gloves, just staring at in continually in an autistic fashion. She exudes a wonderful vacuity, like a yogini absorbed in contemplation of the luminous void central to all existence. Boom schwacka BOOM thwap!

THE GREASY BUN GIRL- Near the stairs down to the market is a small bakery that sells greasy buns to the local school kids. A super-cute girl works there, making and distributing buns. For a few months, I went there every day to obtain buns and see this girl, who somehow reminds me of a plump little goldfish. One day, I bought my usual bun there, and was about to eat it, when I suddenly discovered that it was unbearably revolting even to smell. My body categorically refused to ingest another of these oily, slimy, cold, blobs of half-cooked dough. So, I patronize the greasy bun shop no longer, but I always look in for the goldfish girl. She looks particularly cute when she is standing before a huge bowl of batter, vigorously kneading with both hands. Then I’m reminded of the delectable Photis, Lucius’ bane in The Golden Ass.

June Journal

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