Excerpt from a writer posing as journalist for whom journalistic scruples was something to which one must subject an exacting gaze

In a charming and artful essay of 1908 entitled “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes about taking some brown paper and colored chalks to the Sussex downs on a fine summer day to do Chestertonian drawings of “devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.” But as he begins drawing Chesterton realizes that he has left behind “a most exquisite and essential” chalk—his white chalk. He goes on:

One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is that . . . white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. . . . Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Since Chesterton wrote these bubbly words, the world has seen two world wars and a holocaust, and God seems to have switched to gray as the color of virtue—or decency, as we are now content to call it. The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral.

  • Janet Malcolm thing on the zeitgeist in the Potemkin art world village whose child all involved it took pains to raise.

a sort of culminating aria, sung from the ground with the knife in the chest

We are back. Back with a vengeance. Why vengeance? Why not back with a bad case of ennui? Bathed in demotivated disaffection. If we are going to be back, we mine as well have some score settling in mind.

The scroll circulating throughout the underground pop up galleries in Mitte Berlin is comprised of Wraths and vendettas and miscellany trivia crawled on toilet stalls of biker bars in the tri-state area. Not like the staked claims of teenage couples who defile a tree with a carved declamation of name plus name. The scroll is not a palimpsest and yet all the bright young men like to show that they know what that means by saying it is. As though pronouncing a modish word correctly could cover up the fact that they cannot make enough money doing what they love for long enough to do it while they still love it. As though it all isn’t just compensation, in one form or another.

Vengeance, tho. Somehow it strikes me as plausible, if not logical, defensible, if not persuasive, to keep delaying slipping back into sleep and drawing comfort from the idea that no matter what I will rise with the sun. As though taking vengeance on tomorrow’s self as a kind of extending the debt forward for the shit yesterday’s self pulled in putting me here right now.


“ - Screw you “

“ - no screw you “

that kind of thing. And that is not logical but plausible, the deferral

of sleep

as a continuity of self-sabotage and abasement.

we are back. In the full indefensible regalia of scatterbrained insomnia.

And we must imagine that Sisyphus was joyful

“I have heard,” Camus tells us, “of […] a post-war writer who, after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was judged no good.”

It is in the adamantine fact-bound groundedness - which to me is morning stiffness, the making of coffee, the wayward form of drifting thought-clusters and transitions as I stand in the shower with my hand on one of its interior walls, still idling and not yet wakeful - that it seems clutchable, solid, intact. And it is in the surprising abrupt statement of truth, the zigging and zagging acceleration to something revealed, that I tend to find myself laughing.

Hours worked Sunday to Sunday: 73. Dinner soirées attended: 1. Books started and finished: 1. Books picked up again after a break and finished: 1. Books started and mulling over: 1. Books started and hooked like a soft-mouthed, pea-brained bullhead: 1.

I heard it said today that a but-for reason why there is a unit on Mars beaming back images of a helicopter in flight is because Hitler wanted to be able to drop bombs on London and planes weren’t an adequate tool for the job. Hence rockets. A wag would emphasize the confounding path of complicity. I am not that wag.

also this:

The Dark Encroachment of Old Catastrophes

It turns out producing a subject-self is not too far off, if approached as a project, from being subjected to production as a labor minion. Except who holds the lash - that’s different. Ask a Scandinavian.

optimizing is a disease caused by venom, not a virus caused by self-mobilizing cellular mutation, and the shambolic virtues of a loud animated conversation in a crowded, bustling diner with a clear-eyed visionary new friend are its antidote. All the yellowed-eyed cunning coyotes in the world can’t convince me otherwise.

Inbox zero is an infection caused by non-linear ambition that masks a fear of moral turpitude and manifests as a titanium-alloy linchpin holding back the possibility of devolution into the disaffected class that treats the mess of life as the problem to be solved, not the table stakes to be tossed casually as a condition of sitting down at the table. That possibility of devolution is like a salve of wet concrete into which I place my scalded hand.

To say and mean in the inner-head voice I was gloriously productive today on behalf of my own commitments is to be weaned from the need to say anything out loud and also who in the world talks to themselves like that and would you ever have any desire to audit that consciousness. That is, the key would be to utter death is the mother of beauty in a way that rhymes with perspiration is the kissing cousin of disemboweled anomie without sounding like an asshole.
Read more Mark Twain, the crotchety chain smoking professor of aesthetics advised. Read more Bud Smith, the arc welder rejoined. Travel safely, the long distance lover threatened.


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Sententious caprice and all that jazz

I will sit in bed, picking then flicking

Psychic scabs,

not from a sense of duty, but only to keep time

and faith with the lucid grim shadows

on the inside wall.

so much for insomnia. I won’t let sleep creep

up on me, overcome or stun me.

Feet that fret the next blind step, I’ve learned,

will like sweaty boots they call home.

Well appointed turned out and slick,

more than ready and roaring to be in

the automatic mode in which we roam.


As long as I can complain about what happens

I’m ok with what happens.

Color me purple and defer the slow saunter

for now. It is the kind of transit in which the

third step forward after the words back

subsists in this, and only this ——

submit and lesson and learn.

Not just mouth the stupefied message,

nor just chew the cud of the pat facts.

Closing in on the delusion of closing in on

Anything full-stopped definitive.

Having picked and scraped and itched,

The scab levered up like

an attic door propped up

into the stale waiting darkness

The vivid red flows

and I couldn’t quite tell, and wouldn’t dare ask

what were the stakes.

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Liberation through indifference

It occurs to me that the next 15 years, if pursued down the line, will make of time a slow acting but steadily settling embalming fluid. To write this off as melancholy misses the mark. Fight, spit, claw, punch, scream, agitate, but don’t spawn more concentric circles within the domain-specific sphere. Walden-ponding and sharding are not antipodes. It occurs to me what I meant to say more directly is the headless torso of Apollo’s attempt wrap up in order to induce a leave-taking from the page to the world. Try to keep up, he says. You’re welcome, he menaces.

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Be that as it might not be

Do professional people still go on junkets? Has that concept grown tired and emptied of its use? I had wanted to start with the idea of this being the opposite of humbling - having no readers or users gives a kind of terrible freedom in not being bothered by typos and unintended elisions, but it’s more than just a comfort with grammatical aberration - it’s being able to get it down without concern as to whether anything is actually being said. The opposite of humbling here being something more like fatuous self-license. Better to imagine a curious type, who happens upon this without an iota of purpose, a smidgeon of inclination to gather up intel and proceed with a japing open-minded saunter in and across the contents of this, which has been to this point fully accepting of unintelligibility. Accepting is too weak. Embracing - nay cultivating. Be that as it may.

Insomnia is a hell of a drug

Yes. I roil under the comforter. Think that a heavy blanket isn’t as innovative as the youth would claim. To say that I won’t regret being unable to get past not being able to let go is not to say I hold on to the utility of having regrets in the first place. A web of lightning arouses the thought that we know very little, almost nothing, in the way of fundamentals. Wind shear and funnel clouds and the lord of the ionosphere. Seidel would not warrant the elk being such a dick. A sickly dick, though, he might. The rash on the earth’s surface like a skein of oil in the puddle: yes a beautiful rainbow and also the transmission may soon throw a rod. Both and. Mining for metaphors, i come across the claim that the new new thing takes a sum of energy to find in an indecipherable hash that exceeds the harm inflicted by the flatulence of cows, which have four stomachs. Say this with dourness in your hear for long enough and its upper chamber turns black. We used To make chimpanzees smoke in labs to test the efficacy of our ability to test the harm of smoking out there in the wild. That may not be strictly true but it seems dead right as something we would do, huh? It fits us as an indictment. Even if we were to be punished for what was alleged but not proven, coming out in the wash and all. Being damned seems a tight fit for our predicament. Always already inherently guilty. I chew gum that delivers chemicals. I chew nails until blood arrives. I slept well once back when the epidemiological amplitude of the plague was first being sounded. Our models take their own pictures now. Call that obsolescence of the subject object bugaboo. Soon I will be the kind of tired where psychopathology aids but does not abet. Boo but not hiss, screw but will not kiss.

Unloaded guns

She prayed and prayed and prayed, and would tell people that the only travel companion she needed in her life was Jesus Christ, Son of Man, who, it seemed, had never heard of her.

she prayed on her knees with steel wool in her hands, trying to rub out a stain that had glommed into the floor and accreted into a sticky solid mass with ambitions to hang on. She prayed in the shower and in line to get on the bus. She prayed while her food spun slowly in the microwave, and she prayed at night as her head hit the pillow.

she prayed away the day and could not have it otherwise

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Not content to lavish more abstention on the obdurate slab of stubborn

There ended up being a few surviving words that I might utter and then grab out of the air before they land on their target. At times I will feign the act of bringing them back to my mouth, as though they could be planted back into the fertile soil of black-hearted resentment. But more often I cup them in my hands and look for the right time and place to lay them on the listener, as a capstone at the business end of an argument that I’ve waged with rage enough for both parties. Timing is everything, and it’s not worth sharing a word unless you can be confident it might be the last one.

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Some say it’s natural to be vigilant in cultivating the slights and wrongs that make it possible to keep enduring long after self-discipline wants to lie down, let things be, and declare a halt to the dispute. Vehemence is venom, not poison, and counting coup on the words that can’t be held onto, much less taken back, is just one way in which winning this fight at this moment is a surefire, can’t-lose, fully warranted means of never having to be heard from or seen again. You’d like that of course and I would too. #winning. But even here, at the stage when a post-mortem might be graciously given, I am standing in a half crouch, shadow-boxing with the splintered monologues that voices both parts of an exchange, not asking the questions after having seized on the answers fully-formed. Comes up empty-handed, fork-tongued, a blasphemous sermon to oneself.

What’s past help is past grief

Somnolent nights, listening to Arthur Russell’s corn fields grow in the aftermath of the seething July heat, some weeks behind the aftermath of the first cutting of the hay that is baled in what might pass for mobile ovals. Abundant summer, no longer endless, and it’s not as if she’s the first to utter nothing ever happens here or the first to feel, without yet gaining conceptual purchase over, a kind of fated projection outward from this moment. Being repelled from this nothing, as far away as can presently be conceived, is where and how she will find herself. And in that years-long arc from this place, as the sense of self formed from it and wanting to be done with it hardens like a shell, she will venture recognition of a softening loss growing out from the inside. what seemed at the time a necessary casting off will come back and grow roots. It has not rotted through, this soft centered core, it is an anvil that still sings when struck. The chores will come too soon tomorrow whether she goes in now or stays out and counts stars for another hour. Justification not needed.

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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.

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Portrait of an artist no longer a young man by an artist his friend

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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.

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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.