- No Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend, barring kaboom I'm squelching jones until Monday. Or not; or not.
- Against the Death of the Novel.
- Which spurred this post.
- Danto's The Artworld.
- Art thieves and gurus.
- Game theory and The Price is Right.
- There are new places in Newest Gags First and Second, please check them out as they float to the top. Thanks for the Kind to those of you who've floated me recently on yours. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
- Neruda, for those of you who do.
- Vollmann: self-images of a cross-dresser.
- Return of Scuba-Dog.
- Melville's secrets. (h/t wood s lot, who you should ping daily)
- I confess I may not have given Franz Wright a fair chance because of who his father is, but "book of our time?" That's today's edition of thank Baal I have access to a university library's stacks.
- Pere Ubu in Cork.
- No, not that Phavid Dillips:
LAMP
Franz Wright
Evening street of midnight blue with here and there a lighted window. Of the at home, or possible not. Concentrically into the air whose blue sphere gradually gives way to pure lethal space, wave after wave of a pale cadmium yellow expanding into emptiness and past the blood-brain barrier. Lamp manufactured unwittingly in the image of its make the mind, which goes on emitting dim rays from its frail bulb of skull, from its insignificant and evidently random sector of an infinite place all its own; mind illuminating not much: seen, say, from its own frozen and excommunicated Pluto, it is nearly indistinguishable from any other. All minds are pretty much the same, they'll tell you so themselves, but secretly each is devoted to the conviction that it is irreparably different from all the rest - in fact, it is this in which they are most fundamentally alike.
THE UNFOLLOWING 51, 56, 62, 71, 72
Lyn Hejinian
51
Afloat in a glass-bottom boat, I see into the sea—a miniscule emerald
memento
That the strongest social bonds are forged by language doesn’t nullify
the power that dancing around the puppet effigies of the men
in power has
On the solemn face of the glinting belly is a button baby
You have to know how to roll on the horizon
Followers follow, possibles possibulate, coruscations consider, blood
coagulates
An allegory is a depiction of something that can’t be depicted
Mathias Madrid thrusts his fist toward his face in a mirror, Millicent
Malcolm pets a faithful falcon on a perch, Margaret Mason
makes fig jam to serve on cold toast with hard cheese
The pyrotechnical expanse, lacking azure, makes do with blatant
blackness, unspoken light
Winter’s cover’s curled back by adjectives—whacking winter’s roadside
cover
Stained owls and up over the ill rabbits they fly
Several hours go by but hours are impossible to perceive
I market, am marketed, mark, remark
We walk down a street under windows that let in noise that might
prompt someone asleep in the room to dream of drummers,
flautists, a man on stilts with a tuba, a sextet of giggling girls
What is it ghosts wonder?
Mathias Madrid thrusts his fist toward his face in a mirror, Millicent
Malcolm pets a faithful falcon on a perch, Margaret Mason
makes fig jam to serve on cold toast with hard cheese
The pyrotechnical expanse, lacking azure, makes do with blatant
blackness, unspoken light
Winter’s cover’s curled back by adjectives—whacking winter’s roadside
cover
Stained owls and up over the ill rabbits they fly
Several hours go by but hours are impossible to perceive
I market, am marketed, mark, remark
We walk down a street under windows that let in noise that might
prompt someone asleep in the room to dream of drummers,
flautists, a man on stilts with a tuba, a sextet of giggling girls
What is it ghosts wonder?
56
It should not be strange to be a woman rewarded
Letters click as they wander, shift as they ascend, their altitudes attain
autobiography
Next you are like dry steps’ passing sound and fall, and then you are
like sweetened grapefruit
It should not be strange to be a woman rewarded
Letters click as they wander, shift as they ascend, their altitudes attain
autobiography
Next you are like dry steps’ passing sound and fall, and then you are
like sweetened grapefruit
Everything applies in the hyper-patterning that retrospect
attempts and to which the irreverent response is “How
splay!”
In the small houses of the children in the house there are always
complex simplicities and one was a vast pink stuffed
equine thing called Star
Wet Brahms
Revocation of harm
By moving from window to window and carefully recording at
each what we see, we...*
It is time you were told of the time I failed to defend the bull and
indeed rejoiced in its murder
This is not hypocritical!
The statue at its fullest is emptiest of meaning
She speaks to another not about sex but about a particular game
of truth
Sonorousness facilitates the descent of sunny motes from the
ponderosa
Dancers have fleas—or, shall we say that fleas live on the planet
of dancers?
attempts and to which the irreverent response is “How
splay!”
In the small houses of the children in the house there are always
complex simplicities and one was a vast pink stuffed
equine thing called Star
Wet Brahms
Revocation of harm
By moving from window to window and carefully recording at
each what we see, we...*
It is time you were told of the time I failed to defend the bull and
indeed rejoiced in its murder
This is not hypocritical!
The statue at its fullest is emptiest of meaning
She speaks to another not about sex but about a particular game
of truth
Sonorousness facilitates the descent of sunny motes from the
ponderosa
Dancers have fleas—or, shall we say that fleas live on the planet
of dancers?
62
Into the disordered shortening of a circle comes this little fury,
this abdicated panic, this dirty Venus, this resemblance
to nothing we know of the dead
Sky simultaneous bud, cavity contemporaneous slight
And from the tree a ripe peach falls and a puff of dust rises,
gently circles, drifts, spreads, holds its shape, dissipates,
and settles under the tree again and on the weeds nearby
Once there was a woman I’ll name another day and in her care
were eight well-matched strong pelicans who flew low
over the sea in careful configurations that brought her
aesthetic pleasure and more fish than she or they could
eat
Life is rife with erasure and time is rich with delay
Immediately the eater spots some defects (bits of meat, scraps of green)
No, I did not forget the sad vagrant shuffling about in his red
Into the disordered shortening of a circle comes this little fury,
this abdicated panic, this dirty Venus, this resemblance
to nothing we know of the dead
Sky simultaneous bud, cavity contemporaneous slight
And from the tree a ripe peach falls and a puff of dust rises,
gently circles, drifts, spreads, holds its shape, dissipates,
and settles under the tree again and on the weeds nearby
Once there was a woman I’ll name another day and in her care
were eight well-matched strong pelicans who flew low
over the sea in careful configurations that brought her
aesthetic pleasure and more fish than she or they could
eat
Life is rife with erasure and time is rich with delay
Immediately the eater spots some defects (bits of meat, scraps of green)
No, I did not forget the sad vagrant shuffling about in his red
speckled secrecy and I will never do so again!
You’ve been boasting of your cantaloupe pottage, you’ve provided
us with thin toast, your glory increases all about you
Hush—ssshh—what is it?
The ancestor wandered toward the horizon, he craved
recognition, but eons went by and he landed in a circus,
there being no other work for a man from the gloom of
origins
Cousins are composite, constructed, compared
Quick, lively, assembled ripples monitor, mosquitoes spill, and
the children dine on candy
The sky is another point, this time of ambiguous blue
Why didn’t I think of that?
You’ve been boasting of your cantaloupe pottage, you’ve provided
us with thin toast, your glory increases all about you
Hush—ssshh—what is it?
The ancestor wandered toward the horizon, he craved
recognition, but eons went by and he landed in a circus,
there being no other work for a man from the gloom of
origins
Cousins are composite, constructed, compared
Quick, lively, assembled ripples monitor, mosquitoes spill, and
the children dine on candy
The sky is another point, this time of ambiguous blue
Why didn’t I think of that?
71
A grasshopper singing of death laughs long—as if a heavy-
hearted granny spoke a light word
A shadow scuds over glass, the glass stands still
Insects seethe and they say that is the dream of language but
what is language if not what is threading through the
veins of an insect’s wings
What does it mean to say “now” now, as now surfaces in a gesture,
as of a person pushing his eyeglasses up toward his brow
Our luggage is stacked sky-high, we are wearing twenty layers of
clothes, every utterance is symphonic
I’ve never made curtains for these windows, stabbed by the mid-
morning light
I pass with a broom, standing with a hose in my hand and my
thumb against the nozzle
The loops of time droop, fall slack—and someone steps out of
those that were his or hers, hers or his, his and hers, his
and his, hers and hers—is it right, then, that we are left
to hurtle alone
The girls danced in dead light, the cadavers lay in live light—but
as for those girls, men with mouths like mare vaginas
watched them
A grasshopper singing of death laughs long—as if a heavy-
hearted granny spoke a light word
A shadow scuds over glass, the glass stands still
Insects seethe and they say that is the dream of language but
what is language if not what is threading through the
veins of an insect’s wings
What does it mean to say “now” now, as now surfaces in a gesture,
as of a person pushing his eyeglasses up toward his brow
Our luggage is stacked sky-high, we are wearing twenty layers of
clothes, every utterance is symphonic
I’ve never made curtains for these windows, stabbed by the mid-
morning light
I pass with a broom, standing with a hose in my hand and my
thumb against the nozzle
The loops of time droop, fall slack—and someone steps out of
those that were his or hers, hers or his, his and hers, his
and his, hers and hers—is it right, then, that we are left
to hurtle alone
The girls danced in dead light, the cadavers lay in live light—but
as for those girls, men with mouths like mare vaginas
watched them
Every rough rupture demands elasticity of the imagination
The silver river is irreversible but you attentively watch its mouth
What you write achieves its independence though you are nimble,
arrogant, sly and wise.
That is how you spend the day, which is itself a powerful force
and raises the significant question “How did you get
here?”
All suffering is in the egg—now suck it out of its shell and spit
it away
72
Collective longer literature appeals to cloud variants over a
crowd
See the gang, going to Alabama, tonguing cones, singing waka
wasa bong
The robust thrush it is, stately as royalty, common as a
pickpocket at a concert
I will not, I say, rest, I say, rotate
Let’s go now to the very next neologism and term it
fragmentarily
Desperate he was to cry out and couldn’t, to say what he knew
and know it
This takes adults—and very far indeed
The saxophonist breathes, takes a breath, inhales, gasps
Armadillo, yellow shovel, and empty oval
I sprawl across a bed strewn with breadcrumbs, ah ha!
At echo’s edge, a rock wall rises, a monument to leisure
The mourner chortles, she’s like a clown with sandpaper, at
sorrow’s involuntary humor
Her remarks, his remarks, their remarks, our remarks, my
remarks, your remarks betray
Oh there is a blading in this gentle bend
The silver river is irreversible but you attentively watch its mouth
What you write achieves its independence though you are nimble,
arrogant, sly and wise.
That is how you spend the day, which is itself a powerful force
and raises the significant question “How did you get
here?”
All suffering is in the egg—now suck it out of its shell and spit
it away
72
Collective longer literature appeals to cloud variants over a
crowd
See the gang, going to Alabama, tonguing cones, singing waka
wasa bong
The robust thrush it is, stately as royalty, common as a
pickpocket at a concert
I will not, I say, rest, I say, rotate
Let’s go now to the very next neologism and term it
fragmentarily
Desperate he was to cry out and couldn’t, to say what he knew
and know it
This takes adults—and very far indeed
The saxophonist breathes, takes a breath, inhales, gasps
Armadillo, yellow shovel, and empty oval
I sprawl across a bed strewn with breadcrumbs, ah ha!
At echo’s edge, a rock wall rises, a monument to leisure
The mourner chortles, she’s like a clown with sandpaper, at
sorrow’s involuntary humor
Her remarks, his remarks, their remarks, our remarks, my
remarks, your remarks betray
Oh there is a blading in this gentle bend
