Caterwaul Quarterly Archive

It all started with a treaty. The end of World War I signaled a great shift in the balance of power in the Middle East, as European powers laid claim to a region that had been under Ottoman rule for five centuries. Under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, the Empire would be carved up amongst the victorious Allies, and ethnic minorities living within its territories, including the Kurds and Armenians, would be granted independence.

Between 1856 and 1858, a series of woodcut prints by the Japanese artist Hiroshige were issued, titled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Edo being the pre-1868 name of Tokyo). This series depicts the quintessential scenes and spaces that made up the visual idea of Edo at the time. An analogous series of prints depicting New York City might include a view from the Brooklyn Bridge, the Staten Island Ferry lurching toward Battery Park, the bustle of China Town, and other such scenes which may enrich our concept of the city, but would not change or challenge it.

“The man in the black pajamas, dude. Worthy fucking adversary.”
-Walter Sobcheck, The Big Lebowski

The coffee tastes terrible, as if the urns
were used in mining sulfur: burnt
out again, raw throats, red eyes, hundreds
of miles more to drive. I have a wife now.
I still wish for a dog, a big ugly mutt
waiting where the road curves, Manhattan and I-90.

So she says, Shall we roam around for a year?
My wife sips the hot coffee the hue of thin mud
at the lip of a creek. I glance away from her eye
as I watch some geezer, tough in flannel, dungarees,
cut up to the counter to order a beer without words.

I take water for granted and indulge
in far too many showers
There were a thousand just today
Have become an incorrigible
waster of water.  There Aqua, Marina

Gilgamesh dripped primary, I’m told
Etched in stone and scribbled on thereafter
Was readable once but now needful of readers
Picture pictograms, picturesque, picaresque
Grim grinning ghosts it soppingly birthed

That great dripper there is proud of this mouse
Unoften do mousies find themselves
at the feet of beached blue whales. And

These are pictures from Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, which I
visited in that order. I fell in love with Russia studying it's history in
high school. As a graduation gift, my mother bought me a ticket to
visit St. Petersburg the summer before college.

Illustration: George William Myers

[I]

In Eagle Point, Oregon, the houses have wheels, the husbands are unfaithful, and the land is on its way to sub-development. And because nothing lasts, time moves faster here; methamphetamine addictions are abundant, cars speed, teenagers are parents, and the middle aged are elderly. Young men leave for Iraq, old men rarely leave their bar stools, and lonely wives and mothers invite strangers into their homes. And so I find myself in Linda Knapp’s dusty front yard, stranded in a bivouac of old mattresses and orphaned car parts during the final days of summer.