News that stays news after literature goes into hospice
The stories we encounter create a composite idea of the world out there and our possible role in it, and headlines like those above tell a familiar story: Yours is a frightening, violent, dysfunctional world, but unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it. You can read about it and you can learn to fear it, but you can’t change it. Home improvement, consumer choice, and cooking are instead the mainsprings and extent of your autonomy. If you like summer cocktails, you will love these recipes.
The animal that knows one big thing review, by (the child as father of) the man who made prodigals.
Portrait of an artist no longer a young man by an artist his friend
Auerbach was one of the first ones I tried hard to study and learn from, which I took at the time to mean study in order to understand. And now learning from stands in a separate room from understanding, with different fixtures and a different assemblage of mental furniture. But, now, like then, becoming transfixed by the viewing and thinking hard on the viewing is like falling water, finding itself wherever it happens to flow. Big ups.
I said what I meant about the co-optation, and all the theory guys trotted out Carl Schmitt
If we’re all wrong about everything, the life so short and the craft so long to learn, the assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, the dreadful joy that passes so quick and then being left alone again, what I mean is love astonishes my feeling with its wonderful working so ardently so painfully that when I’m thinking about such certainty I don’t know like the earth if I’m floating or sinking.
God as good orderly direction, or as Santa for grownups, or as what you remember being told as a kid when the idea of death first rode fast and hard into town
Which is the more totalizing act of fealty to ego, having the temerity to claim that no one has any idea the truth of the matter or the temerity to claim that just you and your partisans know it exclusively and well?
Epic short story: eloghosa osunde, GOOD BOY
Yes yes yes to the art that exercises eminent domain over that moment when it first takes your breath away and leaves you in doubt when, if ever, the art will give you your breath back. Yes yes yes to being slayed and resurrected and somehow revivified by that same art, that same fearless resonance and resonant fearlessness, hand in glove. Brav-fucking-o. Brav-fucking-o.
More feasts than saints to host
It’s a baggy monster, this business
a slack report from the weird sisters who
binge and purge in yet another year
of bad wind.
Blame worthy the lot of us,
even those like me who will vouchsafe
the age of wire and string
bent into pentagrams by mr difficult
and choose not to forego
the corrective good of old catastrophes
by the bird watcher who could not
but help me fathom
out of which end
to find a binocular focus.
Steeped extra long, this ministration is,
till the milk curdles into rank breath
and inimical fey utterance.
Why repeat yourself when you can badly misquote others
search and rescue an indwelling infelicitous phrase
from the same waste basket of history,
As clotted bloody Kleenex and ash pile
peer out brown-ringed styrofoam cups?
A King just might trip on the third step of
making a decision to accept surrender,
like a immobilized fly proving the tensile strength of the web that made of it a meal.
Fat white globe, indeed.
All of that history shivers my crooked spine.
a brittle pittance or pitiful monstrosity,
this tower of texts, be it
tally or tarry, but not both.
That is this business too.
All of this is a that, as though a banana skin discarded calls the sprained love of this world into being. It is said wind-dried laundry originated in Cambridge. Terrible angels too.
we have wind here in the Dakota. It never ceases too. Used to lay claim to the sunshine state but never more. Our wind and our water pours over and powers cities where the barrel racers go to die and end up becoming pouched in a hot domestic cramp, parched of the wind. No country for old horses put away wet.
Gass bag, a recondite in felicitous drag
“So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce or James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, and mindful Sublime.”
Apropos of this enervating, execrable moment that is all there is and is as good as as it might get (terrible food, and such small portions)
We don’t have to struggle or strive for reality to keep happening, for sensations to keep arising and washing over us, for thoughts welcome and unwelcome to keep arriving unbidden. That reality happens, that sensations arise and then dissipate, and that thoughts arrive are realized and then go wherever abandoned thoughts go - it is not so much automatic as indwelling.
Against this soft pettable insight I have a history of being enamored with fiction that is not sci-fi dystopia but more like inner life malignancy dystopia. And, like two snails racing across a small British lawn under a gray sky pregnant with rain, i feel the insight and the personal history strain to gain purchase, to win a race that can’t be won. There but for the glory and the indifference of a fictitious God, go I.
And yet there was indeed shame in his game
“He splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.”
she was a she, not a he, and blessed in her unremitting ability to cut to the quick. Go West, young man, and follow her until the trail that ought to go cold just consumes itself instead. find one who will encircle you in wit and barbed repartee to a degree that will make you dizzy with sustaining envy and want to tickle more keys, pull more out of your mind, some of which might stick, to the page if not yet the brains of the readers for which you yearn like a fever does to break. And still she’ll be so far ahead of you, a glimpse omitting itself behind a sightline, then a long shadow cast at six o clock against your squint, and the mind in the body from which the shadow is cast is back on the move, gobbling up so much new ground that you won’t even countenance a vexing idea of catching up.
Being caught up, entangled, beholden as if by a vexing secret spell: yes that happens, often and often enough still more. Put down she’s book and go field dress a pheasant, taking from its crop the makings of a glaze that might be sautéed in oil, reduced down, and brushed on its naked hairless broken down body to make the skin steam and crackle. Spit out the shot, as one does, without complaint or pageantry. It is fall in the northern plains and shots ring out, as they are wont to do. The black lamb doesn’t budge, and the grey falcon, circling above, has not yet discovered the gyres it will make elastic. Stoke the fire and read on - only twelve hundred and ninety more pages to get lost in.
Forgetting not forgiving remembering not repeating and coffee is for closers only
Rejoice . . . . [that voice]
Snippets of Solie
That day I’d walked the beach,
picking up shells, their spirals of Archimedes and logarithmic
spirals, principle of proportional similarity that protects
the creature and makes it beautiful. Sandpipers materialized
through tears the wind made, chasing fringes of the rising tide.
At first there were two, then three appeared, but when I began
to pay attention I realized they were everywhere.
And
The perspective is unfamiliar.
We hadn’t looked back, driving in,
and lingered too long
at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life
experience. Many things we know
by their effects: void in the rock
that the river may advance, void
in the river that the fish may advance,
helicopter in the canyon
like a fly in a jar, a mote in the eye,
a wandering cause.
And
Our culture is best described as heroic.
Courageous in self-promotion, noble
in the circulation of others’ disgrace,
its preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory
truly epic, and the task becomes to keep
the particulars in motion
lest they settle into categories whose opera
is bad infinity.
A revolutionary aims to have a tight grasp on the reality without the converse necessarily being true
It is an affliction, forgetting music is. That numbing forgetfulness that gives a muffled day enough fuel to become carnivorous and gobble row after row on the calendar, stacked days shuffled through without any exposure to the rush of recognition that this melody, this flow, this anguished plea of a voice that cracks at just the right frequency - each in its own way confers exactly what is needed at this moment to express what this moment might amount to if a self could only get outside of itself. Show me that lever, Archimedes.
It takes all kinds. Sometimes it is four-on-the-floor transitioning to a melodic, barbed hook (Jeff Rosenstock, No Dream) sometimes it is throwback to some fierce vintage with the staying power to gobble up Maybach Music like a airy canapé at a black tie affair (Rakim, When I be on the mic; Mos Def, Redefinition) and sometimes it is that salve that speaks to a broken not-quite-yet-bled out person because it makes the Humpty-Dumpty fracture real (Bonnie Prince Billy, The Way, Phoebe Bridger Halloween). A dagger through the heart, a jolt that no facsimile can approximate, a defenestration that continues long after the body and the broken glass have been swept up - it’s all that and a schmear of more fully felt sensation on top. And then it seems momentarily impossible to be lulled back into the absent-minded worrying over and worship of a list of tasks that is the hustle and the lifestyle-design creep it lionizes.
Yoking awe and drawing it right up against the dally of the saddle horn takes practice, and practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does enable keen kernels of lucidity that can be spiked into the ground so that I won’t float back away into those numb, monochrome days and succumb to that baffling, cunning delusion that wearing this facepaint of will and control is what will render everything A-Ok. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, and then it seems like sustaining escape velocity will be possible, after all.
When you hit a wall, kick it in
A ruler attempting to measure itself, a deep foreboding tap-dancing on innumerable unleavened souls, and a soupçon of emotion desperation. Season to taste.
Two frames
Life,
Liberty
Pursuit of happiness
Stability
security
pursuit of property
Saddled with serendipity, afflicted with empathy, rippling with ready ripeness
And then the people made still even more Powerpoints and commented on each other’s failure to become
simple - direct - vibrant
in a long, undirected, and vituperative discussion on an
open Slack channel.
I felt like those star-crossed soldiers who fell
off the rope bridge into the river and then ripped to shreds by happy, basking crocodiles in the temple of doom movie
Conscripted in a role I hated, fated to a miserable senseless death after which no trace of me would be left.
Ok, it wasn’t that bad. Did you know Tom Stoppard touched up that script? For Spielberg? Or maybe the following one. I forget which.
Guess which is his:
Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Ripeness is all.
Readiness is all.
Did you guess?
black magic removal of a man’s beating heart is a metonym for what sixteen-year old autodidacts in small towns think poetry’s function: a gender neutral truism.
TV hijack, or how I learned to love faux agency and the pushed envelope paradox
In the pressing project to stop taking myself and the world so seriously, to embrace mortality, I have been reading, consuming, and making a lot of art. This art making mode has been going on for about 12 months or so. Much of it shitty and intemperate stabs at expression, but gleeful all the same. The big grab - the reach that exceeds the grasp - is to be a conduit through which the restless, tensile culture shines. Works, even.
I am not sure that slathering cheap paint on a cheap canvas is an adequate response to the various realizations that have been dawning on me, like sun to a flower, or seizing me, like an epileptic attack, but I am also not sure that having an adequate response to these realizations is what these realizations call for. Evolution is not undirected, exactly, but it is unresponsive to a guiding hand. It is aloof to intentional intervention, but / like all great neuroses / it is always on call, always with its teeth on the bone of reality, chewing and grasping. These trees gave us hands to climb, these predators gave us unthinking flight, and all that.
I can say - and do avow - that the burden of inheritance is not lightly borne. And the burden of depiction is not easily transfigured into a burden of signifying something more. And the burden of declaring small, smoldering truth is not more perfunctorily compensated for by snatching embers from someone else’s well-banked fire. Fire makes shadows as evolution manifests effects. That unduly burdensome residue from the smoke and the accumulated ash.
A mind like a CT scan, that could clinically and comprehensively render a complete psychological cavity search, but that still, in the end, functioned like a machine.
He whose status as a chronically underrated author (if largely in his own mind) was almost mythic, who in private tended to wear his natural feelings of competitive envy toward his famous old friends on his sleeve in a way that was likably, neurotically funny but painful too, because it wasn’t delusional: He was less well known, his books were weird, he didn’t write blockbuster suburban-sexual family dramas, he didn’t write massive postmodern game-changers — and though he wrote funny, his funny was dark. He ought to feel lucky to have a readership! (And he did feel so, in his strongest moments.) Now, “the culture” had turned its gigantic mechanical eye toward him and blinked and said: You, you are real. You must keep writing. Here is $625,000.
JJS ON DT