Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read Online Free Page B

the next moment I am thinking: “Thank you for this horrible, tasteless and irreverent image. I couldn’t have conceived it—or written this anti-preface—without you. You’re like no other dead writer I know.”
    Now despise all future prefaces and turn the page—or press the button. If you’re wearing a tie, have your hat on backwards or smell of civet spray, you may need this book more than you think.
     
            Karl August Kvitko
            Publisher, Xenos Books
     

 
    NOTES
     
    [1] For a special thrill listen to Girondo himself reciting “El puro no” in a voice resonant with Weltschmerz. Go on the Internet to http://www.cervantesvirtual.com and type his name in the “Busqueda” window.
     
    [2] I am speaking, of course, of the literary or spiritual scarecrow, not his papier-mâché incarnation. Dubbed Colonel Molina, the dummy was inherited after Girondo’s demise by friend and fellow poet Enrique Molina. However, at two meters in height it was too big for Molina’s apartment, so he donated it to the city museum of Buenos Aires, where it may still be accessible to all as a thumbnail photograph on the Internet: http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/cultura/museos/ciudad/index.html
     

SCARECROW
            Accessible to All
     

 
                                                    I    know  nothing
                                                    You  know  nothing
                                                    Thou knowest nothing
                                                    He  knows  nothing
                                                    Men   know  nothing
                                                    Women know nothing
                                                    You all know nothing
    None of us knows anything at all.
     
    The disorientation of my generation has its explanation
    in the direction of our education, whose idealization
                        of action, was—without question!—a mystification,
    in distinction to our passion for meditation,
    contemplation and masturbation.
     
    (Guttural, as guttural as can be.)
     I believe I believe in that which
     I believe I do not believe.
    And I believe I don’t believe
     in what I believe I believe.
     
    “Song    of the   froggies”
            A       A        Is  Is    A   A
            nd    nd    it   it    nd   nd
            a            be    th   thi     a   be
            bove  low   ere   ther   bove   low
            the   ?       ?   the   the
            stair   lad   It        It   stair   lad
            ways  ders   is         is   ways  ders
            climb  cur   n’t         n’t  climb   cur
            ing   ving   he           hi    ing   ving
            over   under  re            ther  over under
            head!  neath!  !               !   head! neath!
     

ONE: MARIA LUISA
     
    I COULDN’T CARE less if women have breasts like fresh magnolias or withered figs, skin smooth as a peach or rough as sandpaper. I accord it an importance equal to zero whether they wake up with the breath of an aphrodisiac or the breath of an insecticide. I am perfectly capable of enduring a nose on them that could take first prize in a carrot exposition. But here’s the thing!—and in this I am inflexible—I do not pardon them, under any pretext, if they don’t know how to fly. If they can’t fly, they have wasted the time they took trying to