Blasting me away, blowing us both through the floor, and ticking through the igniferous floors below it, bombing the lobby at mortal checkout—bringing the hypostyle to crash, the arches to collapse, atop a cuneiform of limbs and kilim tatters and fragments of the monogrammed blazon of Allah that’d pendulated over the interactive pillars. Imagine, amid the settling dust, a providentially inviolate vase from which a single peacock feather—drifted.

“Vous étrange,” she said.

“Non.”

She shuddered. “Oui, vous.”

“Non je ne suis pas regardez you strange.”

My last wish before I submitted: let her explosion scramble this diary so that everything will read like my French.

She shimmied out of the bra, let it fall—without a flash, without immolation. No martyr.

Then she tugged the panties down, stopping at the calves to shed the heels before continuing.

She wasn’t shaved. Not in any of her pits.

I was holding in my hands this wild mother of a bone.

Rach would be familiar with the feeling, Principal would be too. This feeling of unveiling. To unveil the next product. To lift the curtain on the new.

I went slowly with her below me and then I was behind her and not slow.

Her name was Izdihar, so Izi, so Iz.

://

No one is spared the betrayal of a biographer: not his ostensible subject, and certainly not his truer subject: himself. “All books are autobiographies,” can be found in books in nearly every language, in nearly every age. How else can a man survive having dedicated his one life to the lives of others, to reading them and especially to writing them—isn’t betrayal the only noble choice? […] Which is why I can’t decide about a child—what material will I have to bequeath? […]

Diaspora Jews have inherited not a tradition but a rupture. If we were enslaved, it was to fashion; if we were liberated, it was by wandering the deserts between channels; if we fought wars, they were against our own parents; if we had any true enemies, they were our selves. All generations are condemned to end in death. Only ours was lucky enough to have never lived to begin with.

—POLYN: A LIFE OF MY MOTHER, JOSHUA COHEN

Yehoshuah Kohen was born in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine. The old century was dying, and the new century   lurking just beyond the fields, lying in wait in the snowy woods   would be no consolation. By the goyim Christians, it was 1870/71. In an heirloom Bible, the family Kohen recorded only                     FUCK ME BEGIN LATER

://

from the Palo Alto sessions: We were born in the year of the microprocessor, LGBT Pride Month, the Day of the Death of Mohammed [June 8, 1971]. M-Unit a retired gender studies professor at UC Berkeley, D-Unit an engineer, Xerox-PARC. Basically he was one of the inventors of personal computing. Which meant, he used to say, he took computing personally. We grew up in a white splancher in Crescent Park [Palo Alto]. A good neighborhood too überaware of its goodness. Lots of cool subdued kids. Lots of cool hippie parents. Kindergarten was at Berkeley. A totally egalitarian viro. M-Unit and D-Unit alternated breakfasts, spelt pancakes, stevia quinoa. We had chore charts, surprise room cleanliness inspections. We collected dinosaur eggs, coprolite, ambered insects, pyrite. We memorized the chart of Mendeleev, which hung on our ceiling. We were picked on at school for our [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—wardrobe?], which was sewn by parental friend [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—Nancy Apt?], the back fabrics of the chinos and buttondowns different from the fabrics in front. We were raised to mistrust brands, to be a proactive consumer, a prosumer. All adults were academics. Primiparousness was the norm.

://

Communication is a useful [tool [way] to understand Cohen’s family. Cohen’s was a family [consumed subsumed] by communication [communications/communications systems]: His father, Abraham, was one of the prime innovators of     laid many of the most important foundations for     worked on a team that helped establish a few vital technical specifications for the internet—before the web, before the technology had any commercial, industrial, or even military? applications. Not many companies can afford a pure research arm, but Xerox, the photocopy giant, could, and endowed PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1970 ? thousands of miles away from Xerox corporate headquarters (in Rochester, New York). The PARCys, as employees were called, were free to pursue their projects with minimal supervision, but with minimal support. The innovations that came out of their labs, particularly from the Computer Science Division, set the standards for modern computing. Though Xerox invested in developing none of them, though development costs would’ve been prohibitive.

In 1972, the Computer Science Division built the Alto, the world’s first personal computer [IS THIS TRUE?], which featured a wordprocessing program called Wupiwug, which its programmer Hal Lahasky always claimed was a monster from a scifi book by a writer he’d never name, though it was only an acronym for “What U Press Is What U Get,” an indication that the keystrokes a user made were reflected directly onscreen, and not on a teletype printout. [INSERT HERE A LINE ABOUT LANGUAGES: BASIC, LISP.]

Nascent computing displayed its output on a tick of tape. The monitor followed, a face to face the user’s, light hurled at a pane of glass. The last frontier, or what was regarded as the last frontier, was also the first, paper again. The laserprinter both continued and undermined the Xerox tradition: in that it reproduced, but from a nonexistent original, putting to paper the page of the screen (parenthetically, the laserprinter was the only PARC innovation Xerox ever brought to market, in 1977 debuting the 9700, which averaged TK?? pages per minute, and retailed for $??K). (The output of nascent computing was just text, and not its formatting—to Abraham, the two were inseparable.) The problems he had set out to solve involved what today is called “desktop publishing,” or “design”—namely, how to perfectly reproduce a print artifact onscreen, and then, outrageously, how to render it manipulatable, perfectly printable again.

[However, building on phototelegraphy, which had been around since the 19th century, and the shift from wire to wireless facsimile, which occurred just after the turn of the 20th, Xerox’s main interest in documents remained in their reproduction, and in their reproduction through transmission, not in their manipulation. All distances had to be bridgeable, as far as Xerox was concerned—the distance between PARC and Rochester Stamford, CT, to which Xerox moved its HQ in 19??, was not.] While Abraham’s colleagues were focused on [creating the] transmission protocols between computers[, and computers and printers], and constructing the Ethernet—a local area network [explain] that allowed machines, and the people who made them, to communicate with one another virtually—Abraham was alone in his fixation. He spent 14 years at PARC huddled with scanners that still functioned with tubes, surrounded by hunched engineers who’d already been graduated to transistors and circuits.