Thursday, June 27, 2013

Moxifloxacin-induced nightmare review

"This is poison," my doctor said, handing me a prescription for Avelox, "but all antibiotics are, to some extent." I am tired of being ill, I will drink whatever posion is promised to help. Still, the warning is unusually stark. A search for side-effects reveals permanent blindness and a few other equally thrilling ailments; however, they are all rare. And then I see that fun is just around the corner. "Moxifloxacin," I read, "may induce nightmares, unusual thoughts or behavior". I take a pill and go to sleep full of anticipation.

My dreams, when can I remember them, are monotonous and autistic. Usually they consist of aimless wandering through some unknown cities, with hardly any human interaction, an experience similar to a first-person shooter game with the difficulty level set to "few monsters". In one particular scenario that I see every now and then I go back to Moscow to dicover that while I was away several new metro lines had been built. Then, of course, I have to navigate the unfamiliar maze of interchanges and take train after train. I used to derive some pleasure from trying to recall the metro map in the morning, weird colors, strange loops and all, but then I went to Japan. The complete map of Tokyo railway lines beats my dreams hands down.

Avelox gave me a gun. I dreamt that I was sitting in the middle of Avenida Insurgentes spraying the traffic with bullets. Shattered glass was everywhere, but cars kept coming. Every now and then a big red bus would pass spitting a cloud of black smoke in my face (this was a nightmare, after all). In spite of this, I am pleased to report that I did not shoot at public transport. I was expecting a stand-off with the police, but this being Mexico, the police never came, so I decided to escape. 

Here I fell into the old scheme of running through an unfamiliar urban landscape, only this time I was followed by a nasty-looking guy (think of Jean Reno wearing black round glasses) who would jump with joy each time he found my next hideout. I had spent all my bullets on innocent commuters, so I had to take shelter in houses, repair shops and so on, and talk to the people. One young man, seeing my distress, tried to calm me down by saying that his father was an assassin like me, and there is nothing wrong with it, this is just a job like any other job. When I felt I couldn't run any more I woke up. I was tired as if I had actually done all the running and shooting. 

So far, I would rate the experience as 3 stars out of 5. You can get this shit on Playstation, no need to take antibiotics, and you don't get as exhausted. On the other hand, not that I had any choice. They say that Avelox is really good at killing bugs.


Now I am having a good rest. The next pill is scheduled for midnight.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

An angry rant of an orthography vigilante

Everyone has surely witnessed the sorry and ridiculous sight of a native English speaker trying to show off his knowledge of a foreign language. What I did not realize until now is that even the supreme masters of English prose suffer at times from the delusion that they can speak tongues, such as Spanish, without assistance.

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens is an example. It is set out in the most powerful and clear English style, though, as soon as alcohol is mentioned, emotions ruin its perfection somewhat. I thoroughly enjoyed the book until Hitchens started speaking Spanish. Che Guevara no ha muerte! Must be a misprint. But then: libertad por los maricons! Oh, no. Finally: cono! This potent swearword denotes in Spanish either a union of lines passing through a common vertex, or the reproductive organ of a fir tree. Yes, the female organ, but of a fir tree, for God's sake.

One might argue that Hitchens was a communist and, hence, an enemy of orthography as such. But then, he was the enemy of Spanish orthography only, his English being far above impeccable. Also, he liked Margaret Thatcher. Most probably, he simply wrote down whatever his memory threw up and the copyeditor at Hachette couldn't be bothered to do his job. Worse things happen: I was bewildered when the Cambridge copyeditor replaced the word compatibility in my book by a monstrous compitibility.

And then I read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. This is pure magic - black magic, if you take the content into the account - but still nothing short of supernatural, an amazing show of killing power the English language can have. The bloodletting in the book alternates between US and Mexico and there are many Spanish words embedded into McCarthy's prose. Such as piñole, a mysterious substance consumed throughout the book. McCarthy didn't quite make it up: pinole does, indeed, exist. Pinole, not piñole. This spurious tilde looks as dreadful to my eye as a fake accent in the name of some pseudo-French establishment, designed to make it look more authentic, more boutique.

Now, I am not easily scared by a misplaced tilde - this is really a minor mistake - and do you know that Nabokov wrote bycyle in his drafts? - but I was reading the 25th anniversary edition, freshly reset in print. How does an error survive for so long? Did anyone read the book?

Another scare I suffered while reading Blood Meridian was the station of Alamo Mucho. In this case, however, McCarthy was innocent: this was an authentic example of the Great American Toponymical Imbecility so widespread in the south of the US. I guess the monkey who gave this name to the place formerly known as Alamo Mocho thought that Mexicans, being utter savages, cannot be trusted with their own language. Mocho? What the fuck is mocho? It must be mucho - you know, because, besame mucho. (I'm afraid I have seen this attitude in people with PhD's in exact sciences. Nowhere to hide.)

I think I have complained enough. There's just one mystery I absolutely must mention since the place names were brought up. How is it possible to call a town Rio Vista in a country where every other inhabitant can tell you que no, señor, esto no tiene sentido? 

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

The Nose

Yesterday had this surgery. I was promised a bizarre procedure of detaching my nose from my face, applying some magic to it and sticking it back somewhere between my eyes and my mouth. This is supposed to make me healthy.

If this stuff sounds like fun to you, I should discourage you from trying it for recreation, even though I did enjoy the anesthesia.

Now my life is miserable, and will be for a few days, since I am only able to breathe with my mouth. A carp on a fishmonger's counter - that´s how it feels.

This is because my new nose will flap in the wind like a flag or fall off altogether, unless something is inserted into my nostrils to prevent it from doing so. Think of the precariousness of a snowman's carrot in April sun.

Just before going to the hospital reread Gogol's The Nose. It doesn't quite prepare you, I'm afraid, only gives you weird, weird dreams ...

Monday, June 3, 2013


I'm slow. Only now it occurred to me to look up the words of the song my mother sang to me when I was very few years old. All my life I thought of it as a kind of Yiddish Greensleeves.

,אַ קוימען איז העכער פֿון אַ הויז
,אַ קאַץ איז פֿלינקער פֿון אַ מויז
,די תתּורה איז טיפֿער פֿון אַ קוואַל
!דער טויט איז ביטער, ביטערער ווי גאַל

A chimney is higher than a house
A cat is swifter than a mouse
The Torah is deeper than a well
Death is bitter, more bitter than gall