It is high time that we raise a glass in honour of Victor Borges, the poet, blind pianist, and film critic, A native of the Moroni Islands, a group of islands off the coast of Guadalajara, he has recently doubled down on Bruch’s Violin Concerto as the most underrated of all the great underrated violin concertos. The article, in Underrated Quarterly, kicked up quite a fuss among the fiddlers on the roof of the Chesterton Museum in Boston, and the author’s notoriety caused him to take refuge in his Moroni family heritage.
Historically, the Moronis, like their sister city, are known for their tequila, mariachi music, and more recently, the production of witty instruction manuals. (The latter business moved south in the early 1950’s, after being blacklisted; their motto is “Instruct and delight!”) Borges grew up in Buttinski, the strangely-named capital of the Moronis, which Russian immigrants settled in the early 1600’s.
Like many young poets in his hometown, he labored for years to keep body and soul together by working in the instruction manual industry. Then one afternoon while sitting at his desk, he looked out the window and had a vision of Cincinnati, the riverfront city famous for Proctor and Gamble, Pete Rose, and Kentucky — a riverfront city right in the middle of the American heartland, city of hills and parks, old money and rugs. He had been working on a short manual for the government — the Moroni legislature had revised the national “Medal of Distinction” it awarded to its foremost citizens — and Borges’ manual described how to attach the new medal. (Unlike the old medal, the new one had a difficult clasp instead of the traditional lanyard). He suddenly realized he didn’t want to write the instruction manual for the attachment of the new medal — or old medals, or any medals! He longed to visit Cincinnati – to witness the miracle using all his senses to compensate for the lack of sight.
After an arduous and scary emigration–a story for another time, involving secret codes, Russian spies, and an insane ICE agent–he was finally able to settle in Cincinnati. Victor rented a small apartment in Clifton, the university district, and we got to know each other one morning in Kroger’s, when our shopping carts somehow got hooked together and no amount of pushing or pulling could unlock them. I was completely flummoxed, but Victor said, “This problem looks just like one of our medals.” “You put shopping carts on your medals?” I asked. Victor smiled, “No, but the clasp —“ And he deftly unhooked the two carts with a move that was almost magical; I certainly didn’t see it. After that, we got some coffee at the in-house Starbuck’s, and sat in Kroger’s for hours talking about poetry and rugs and how what goes around comes around.
Victor, who did a masterly imitation of Art Tatum made elaborate jokes in the scherzo movement of his first book, The Knife and the Gaucho, which he set in Buenos Aires. By then he had moved to Los Angeles and was married to a shrewish Brooklyn-born babe with an ankle bracelet she flashed whenever she wanted something that poor Victor couldn’t give her. In my next installment I will tell of the time I sold Victor a straight-life insurance policy and the improbable consequences of this routine event. The client kept the whiskey in a locked cabinet but he brought his own set of keys. How could he have known murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?
4 / 12 / 20
Ed. Note: One of Victor B.’s early librettos, “Lady and the Scamp,” published in the “Libs for Kids” series, was scooped up by the Disney adult department and was the basis for their porn production starring Linda Lovelace and Louise Lasser. (It was Lasser’s first porn movie; she went on to star in “Geoffrey Hartman! Geoffrey Hartman!” a brutal send-up of the Yale philosophy department, filmed entirely in the nude.) In “Scamp,” a coming-of-age story set in Detroit, Lasser played a late-model Trans-Am who was transitioning from a V-8 to a V-6, in a country dangerously attached to fossil fuels. The various and vicious discriminations she had to endure always seemed to end up in the bedroom, much to the delight of the Car & Driver and Motor Trend wankers around the country; it won a J. D. Powers award for best movie, as I recall. Lovelace almost stole the movie playing a skanky pick-up.
11. 27/ 23
Go to Source
Author: The Best American Poetry
