The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab
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NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
In this edition, where the author was quoting from English texts, we provide these texts. Where the writer has adapted texts, on the other hand, we have followed the writer, and these instances are marked with an asterisk.
Digital computers are superb number crunchers: B. J. Copeland, B. J. and D. Proudfoot. “Alan Turing’s Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science.” Scientific American, August 1999.
The binary system of numbers: F. G. Heath. “Origins of the Binary Code.” Scientific American, April 1992.*
Augmented Reality: Luis Arroyo. “Realidad Virtual.” La Ciencia en tus manos. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2000.
A spy wants to send a message: Jerome Segal. “Geometry of Information.” Scientific American, November 2003.
It was ultimately decided: Richard P. Feynman. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!” in Adventures of a Curious Character. London: W. W. Norton (reprint edition), 2010.
It was in Hoeller’s garret: Thomas Bernhard. Correction, trans. Sophie Wilkins. London: Vintage, 2010.
How much information is required: Jacob D. Bekenstein. “Information in the Holographic Universe.” Scientific American, vol. 289, August 2003.*
The second example happens: Daniel Arijon. Grammar of the Film Language. Beverley Hills: Silman-James Press, 1976.
Cook Ting was cutting up an ox: Chuang Tzu. Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.*
Imagine an urban network: Anthony Acampora. “Last Mile by Laser.” Scientific American, vol. 287, July 2002.
Joseph Campbell assumed as much: Mark Dery. Escape Velocity. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
It’s the year 2054: Jeff Rothenberg. “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents.” Scientific American, vol. 272, December 1995.*
Sooner or later: Félix de Azúa. “Diario,” El Pais, August 10, 2004.
One way to prevent people from accessing transmissions: P. R. Zimmermann, “Cryptography for the Internet.” Scientific American, vol. 279, September 1998.*
The magazine Artforum: Phyllis Tuchman. “‘Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor,’ July 2–Sept. 22, 1998, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.” Artforum. http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/tuchman/tuchman7-14-98.asp#11.
Each of us is immersed: Martin Cooper. “Antennas Get Smart.” Scientific American, vol. 289, July 2003.
The Sex Pistols have cleared the ground: Greil Marcus. Lipstick Traces. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
Principle of superposition: Dictionary of Physics, third edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.
From the propeller plane: Dolores Hayden. A Field Guide to Sprawl. London: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Tired of walking back and forth across his apartment: Jorge Luis Borges. “On Rigour in Science,” in A Universal History of Iniquity, trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin Classics, 2004.
The bebop pianist Thelonious Monk: Eddie Prévost. Minute Particulars: Meanings in Music-Making in the Wake of Hierarchical Realignments and Other Essays. London: Copula, 2004.
First it was steel: Ignacio Paricio. The Construction of Architecture. Barcelona: Catalunya-Itec, 2004.
In this case what you get is the Kuleshov Effect: Silvestra Mariniello. El Cine y El Fin del Arte: Teoria y Practica Cinematografica En Lev Kuleshov. Madrid: Ediciones Catedra S.A., 2000.*
Many different articles from The New York Times have been adapted in this book.
The rest of the references, whether paper in origin or from the internet, are in their complete form and presented with sufficient clarity in the text itself.
Though, as we know, everything in existence is made up of fiction, some stories and characters have been taken directly from this “collective fiction” we communally refer to as “reality.” The rest come from that other “personal fiction,” the one we tend to refer to as “the imagination.” So the reader will have come across certain real, public biographies that deviate from their original state, as well as fictitious biographies that converge with the sources of other, real ones, all coming together to form the “docu-fiction” that is Nocilla Dream.
Nocilla Dream began out of a reading of “Middle Gate Journal; On Loneliest Road, a Unique Tree Thrives” (by Charlie LeDuff, The New York Times, April 18, 2004), at the same time as the fortuitous discovery, on a sugar packet in a Chinese restaurant, of a verse by Yeats, “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born,” and on the same day hearing again, also fortuitously, the song “Nocilla, qué Merendilla!” (“Nutella, What a Great Snack!”) by Siniestro Total (DRO Records, 1982), and was written between June 11 and September 10, 2004, in the cities of Bangkok and Palma de Majorca.
What then came to be called Project Nocilla, which is made up of Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and Nocilla Lab, responds to the transfer of certain aspects of post-poetical poetics into the sphere of fiction.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Aina Lorente Solivellas, without whom this book would not have been possible.
OUTLAW: Those are salt flats down south. [Chuckles.] Even a rattlesnake couldn’t get across ’em.
GREGORY PECK: A desert is just a place. A place can be crossed.
—Yellow Sky [1948]
WALTER BRENNAN: Where do you hail from?
GARY COOPER: No place in particular.
WALTER BRENNAN: Where you headed to?
GARY COOPER: No place special.
—The Westerner [1940]
MICHI PANERO: Be anything you like, just not a pain in the backside.
—Después de tantos años [After All These Years] [1994]
1
How could I have been the one to come up with the Theory of Relativity? I think it must have been because I was a late developer.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
2
Then they found a body floating faceup in the lake, and the right eye—the only one remaining—was open and showed no sign of trauma. The volume of the body, due to the water it had absorbed, and to the high density of chemicals in the lake and the different fauna and flora that had formed inside the intestines and other passageways of the deceased, had multiplied by almost 2. Body sponge. Tea bag. In life we absorb the past and we take in air; when we die, we are entered instead by chemicals and organisms, and by things breeding, and by the future—though a future worthless to us now. And then nothing. From the rooftop terrace, the backs of cars can be seen as they advance down the wide one-way street to the waterfront shipyard. They cannot come back along it, nor will they be able to—not one.
3
Sandra flies from London to Palma de Mallorca. Barely 1 hour, the orbit of the earth on pause. She flicks through the in-flight magazine, British Airways News. Reports on wine production in Ribeiro and Rioja, the latest high-tech architecture in Berlin, mail-order Majorica pearls. A tear falls onto a photo of a Caribbean beach, but the beach has not pricked it from her, and neither has the Caribbean, nor the gravity to which all tears are subject. She looks out the window, looks ahead, sees neither clouds nor earth. Here, the verification of something she already knew: on airplanes, there is no horizon.
4
Marc studies the book with care, Philips Agricultural Guide: 1968. An old possession of his father’s that he kept. He glances out at the roof terrace through the door of the hut in which he lives. A shed at the top of an 8-story building that he has assembled over time using sheets of corrugated iron, oil drums, pulverized cardboard, and waste pieces of asbestos. All put together in such a way that the 4 walls have become mosaics of chopped-up words and icons—La Giralda olive oil, Repsol lubricants, Drink Pepsi, sanitary ware by Roca. Sometimes he looks at them and, from this welter of logos and brands, tries to discern maps and itineraries, as yet undiscovered
traces of further artificial territories. The roof area, which none of the tenants comes up to anymore, is crisscrossed by a series of clotheslines made of wire. Rather than clothes, however, they have pieces of paper pegged to them, each with mathematical formulas handwritten on a single side. When the wind is up [it’s always up] the pieces of paper, seen front-on, form a kind of sea: a tumult of theorems in ink. Seen from behind, the blank sides of the A4 sheets seem closely symbolic of a desert—the closest symbol possible. Watching as they flutter in the wind, he thinks, What a fascinating theory. He shuts the Philips Agricultural Guide: 1968, places it on the table, and goes out to take down sheets from the wires numbered 1, 4, and 7. Before going back inside he rests his elbows on the guardrail and thinks about the World Cup we’ve never won, about the fact that the flattest things on earth are train tracks, about the score to Battleship Potemkin, which, studied correctly, is a version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Then he goes back inside the hut, which shakes when he slams the door.
5
Finally, they’ve found the weapons of mass destruction. The dictator hid them inside his body. And there was only one in fact, neatly sewn into the lining of his stomach—a capsule, one cubic centimeter, connected to a micromechanism that he could activate via a remote control in his mind. Indeed, by simply focusing on this very precise point in his stomach, and by directing all his pulmonary and intestinal force there through an ancient yogic breathing technique, he could activate that micromechanism, releasing a poison that would kill him instantaneously. As for the mass destruction, that would ensue in a “cascade effect”: the wave of chain immolations prophesied in the Alt Koran to take place at such a juncture, exactly like that other chain reaction known as “nuclear.” Christianity, Buddhism, Islamism, and technosecularism: gone in a flash.
6
On the parched brown steppe at the southwestern edge of Russia, a huge glass dome reaches into the sky, intended to house all the things a person can imagine as long as the things the person imagines are related to Parchís, an adaptation of the Indian board game Pachisi, the ancestor of Ludo. A block of glass, gleaming supra-photographically, sturdily mounted among immaculate snows and scatterings of rocks. A mirage, it seems. Training areas, lodgings for people taking courses and for the course leaders, spaces for video screenings, computer programming laboratories for sketching out games, gyms for relaxing/focusing before the game, 1 library stocked solely with books about the red pieces, another stocked solely with books about the yellow pieces, another with books solely about the blue pieces, another with books solely about the green, a restaurant and specific diets for the students, 1 canteen for visitors, and 2 libraries dedicated to the history of Parchís. The palace is situated on the outskirts of Ulan Erge, a city in the Russian Republic of Kalmykia—north of the Caspian Sea and directly between the recently formed republics of Ukraine and Kazakhstan: a corridor of land shaped like a strangulated tongue. 300,000 Russian men and women live in poverty around this great complex dedicated to Parchís. The outer edges of the palace grounds segue into an expanse segmented by semi-concrete paths, leading to a horizon busy with unconnected cell towers. The area is often visited by stray mules, which might sleep in an old hut meant for electric transformers, or graze among the radio and television towers placed there long ago. This skin of antennae describes an irregular circle a little over a mile wide around the Parchís palace, though it is unconnected with Parchís; the excellent elevation, the lack of interference, and the privileged Eurasian borderland situation simply recommended the region to the Russian government as a place to install antennae, lots of them. The president here, a man named Iluminizhov, came up with the idea of the palace; his passion for the game led him to pour huge sums of his own money bringing the fantasy to life—his own money as in state funds, plus the odd windfall from alliances with Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Such is the depression in the region that even refugees from the Second Chechen War do not linger. The water is not drinkable, and many who avoided death on the battlefield perish here. The peoples native to the steppe were nomads, and aspects of that way of life still pertain; when they find themselves excluded in some way or ejected from a place, or if they run out of ways to provide for themselves, they dismantle their homes, leaving only the foundations, pile the bricks, windows, kitchens, and bathrooms into trucks and carts, and move on. But the immaculate Parchís palace has lain empty since it was built, 10 years ago now. No red ribbon was cut, and far less has it seen any use or inhabitation. From inside all you can hear is the battering wind outside. The books line the shelves, programs are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in freezers remains intact, the board games are in the display cabinets, the counters and the dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio plays. A laborer left it switched on.
7
Saigon … shit; I’m still only in Saigon … Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle.
APOCALYPSE NOW, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
8
4-year-old Mohamed Smith was conceived and born in Basra during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He attends the Anglo-Muslim college that was recently set up by his father, John Smith, an ex-Marine who tells him war stories, for example about the time they rappelled down from a roof terrace into an apartment where a Sunni fundamentalist cell was alleged to be operating. Sending a low-explosive grenade through the window, they hurried back up the ropes to the roof terrace; the blast, lasting a couple of seconds, registered as a light tremor on the flat roof, a vibration beneath the soldiers’ feet that they compared to the sensation an ant would experience if it crossed the skin of a drum that had just been struck. The day was very cold and John had been the one to throw down the rope, which as it unspooled resembled an animate labyrinth. 7th floor, 6th floor, 5th floor, 4th, he smashed the window with his gun and took out a grenade. He was confronted with the sight of a young Iraqi woman cooking on the living room floor; their eyes met, and she didn’t cry or implore him but merely looked at the soldier as one who, aboard an airplane, can no longer see the sky, or clouds, or birds, or the sun, only the metallic extension of the 747’s wing shaking under a force that can only be supplied by oneself because there’s no horizon out there, there isn’t anything.