Housa Hoser

What in the knock-knock joke brings such delight?

The outside in and the crypt unveiled.

Who says so?

Laura Mulvey: “The melodrama takes place in the literal and psychological space of home and family, turning the narrative space inward, lifting the roof off the American home, like the lid off a casket, opening its domestic space into a complex terrain of social and sexual significance, the opposition, for instance, between upstairs/private and downstairs/public space, the connotation of stairs, bedroom, kitchen.”

What happened to the story?

It went on without us. She wonders why he wouldn't let her die. It isn't sadness but wonder, something above or below, i.e, the connotations of stairs. (Sometimes I wonder as well. I have so many windows open I can't see where I am in the story.)

Stairs?

(Appropriately operatic, opera aperta) Umberto discende la scala, hailing allamericani): “I am honorary Hoosier.”

What is the location of Oshkosh?

A Chadic speaking, predominantly Moslem people inhabiting northern Nigeria and southern Niger?

Your answer must be in the form of an answer.

A gently flowing river in the Berkshires through Connecticut?

Isn’t this name dropping?

Aren’t we all?

Who is asking the questions around here?

Knock knock?

Whose there. (Orange you glad I didn’t say, whosa there? This, of course, a variant of the same stereotypic racism that one was raised with. Or eight were. We were never raised to say “one” or even to think so, it was all you. Or seven times seven thousand. Italian dialects for two hundred, Alessandro.)

Who do you think you are, James Joyce?

Who does one think one is. In the South Buffalo house the attic joists were actually covered with stereotypes, tin panels from old newspapers tacked into the rough chocolate colored wood. I recall the feel of the reversed words, the milky look of the rotogravured photographs, the men in fedoras and wide trousers. The attic otherwise smelled of musty and dust. It was filled with books and broken toys. In our teens we added the scent of flesh and semen to the must.

What did your mother say?

“Who died and left you boss?”

Why you did, mom.

“That just takes the cake.”

knock knock who's there mother. mother who