This is what happens, Larry. This is what happens . . . . ——-) [turned page] Prairie nocturne

Joel and Ethan for the next two months, eager to continue to revisit the goods and see what has staying power, what surprises, and what basks best in the light of the first look. In the meantime, in the land of vertiginous texts:

*****

Trips to deserts and mountains lay bare

The minimalist slippage of the plains

When the snow is here.

In winter any farmhouse or naked strand

Of naked trees isn’t so much desolate as

Unfinished. Reading Hugo and degrees of gray

Doesn’t cut the ketchup. It’s either

the intimate, insulated hush when the wind

Is out of breath, or it’s the moaning

And keening and prostrating when it

Is at full ecstatic hostility and

Compounds its interest on having so much to say

With this broad, sparse, and saddle-sore canvas

To spread across itself and

To spread itself across.

I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success

“How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?”

So asks Gabriel Keith, and proceeds to put a little chest in it by talking of maniacs of materialism and egoism and the soft narcotizing patter of pragmatists, too. So on he goes, pressing the point that those who may have taken on aspects of the preceding generation of sheep may come out with reddened tooth and claw, the better defend the practice of having conviction. In the name of conviction those sheepish aspects are made ravenous, going on and on exhorting and declaiming their very selves at dawn and midnight alike.

I for one am not well versed in this practice. My conviction muscles atrophied and kinked up with each episode of early Mike Judge. And as I start this particular book, which came to me at a slant and with a kind of wolfish hunger for a less kinetic theorizing than the the critique involving a dwarf, a puppet, and a fair amount of jokes about Slavs and Kompromat in which I first saw reference to this bracing orthodoxy. I wonder if there are a kind of spiritual exercises (whether as Pierre Hadot might conceive or Joel Osteen might loan on high interest credit) by which to test whether those conviction muscles are gone or capable of coming back into round.

Who would you rather have at your back or next to you on the charge, a passel of Davening mystics who truck with the emptied idea of this-is-all-as-it-should-be because it is all illusory and because suffering is constitutive of whatever is not illusory, or four jesuits in hairshirts on whose visage emaciation is quite becoming? Odin and Mithras besides . . .

I have some more orthodoxy to witness. It is no small thing to be able to look up in wonder.

Everyone deserves our spite

In an age where few had left any fucks to give, I knew of one who took a kind of rebarbative solace in being against. Against infinite resignation. Against intransigent empathy. Against supposing that truth is a woman or that we might find a chaste place to stand and assess and measure and judge and condemn. Dirty-handed complicity isn’t underhanded or a fall from grace; it’s a baseline condition.

This person lived a quiet life, doing honest work, telling everyone who was naked that they were naked, and going a-sauntering when it seemed the time and hoeing beans simply for the sake of counting bushels at harvest. Only a measure of solace he drew from this, though, not the full compensatory redemptive sort: consistency in this pessimism against any and all comers (what are you rebelling against? Whaddaya got) the heated forge out of which the constancy of his character might be welded. Can’t hide the seam, though.

I mean, for Chrast’s sake, what are you on about?

Of all the high-functioning-but-depressive-on-the-margins avant garde belletrist readers one might ask for, Markson - who knew every taut curve of every limb of Wittgenstein’s mistress - might be the most ideal for Bill, whose letters to his mother his most ardent fans have tattooed on the wan skin of their solar plexus. I will not attend the funeral of the English major, but I will forever burn sage at the altar of whatever contemporary analog might spill over into this black and white imbroglio.

The problem of undifferentiated epochs, or scrambled time

DNA has a signature, or chemicals and elements do. Light from distant objects has to be recalibrated for red shift, just as salary snd pricing data (sticky and inelastic) need to be inflation-adjusted if looking back or reduced to present value if casting about in the game of forward looking forecasting. Rhetorical throat clearing over.

It is not endorsing the end of history to acknowledge the uncanny feeling that modernity presently cast is stuck, and to see that there is no historical horizon which will look different from what has come before, in living memory.

It is a sickly nostalgia positing that Truly Great Moments are found in the past and may be revived but new ground cannot be broken and greater depth in the field of human heroism is illusory, like when eyes fist-rubbed raw in disbelief that Santa didn’t leave presents for anyone.

I am writing this to put myself to sleep. Presumably it works that effect on you too. I forget if dudes who want to make babies are advised to wear boxers or briefs, and I wake up nearly every night recognizing that I likely won’t be able to go back to sleep. Cold, bitter cold, freezing, and life threatening bone-fixing skin-blistering frigidity.

Clarity is better than money, when it comes to sleeping soundly. Never in my adult life have I slept like a baby.

Bubble test protocols in an impressionist portrait world

"It's always “eat the rich” and never “feed the poor”,

making sense of all this is not just impossible, it’s also very difficult.

Trace the urge to villainize the present - disordered and disarrayed, stultifying in its decadent stupidity - with the most braying voices of my generation spitting caustic rhetoric against the wall to see what might stick. Turn the dial and come on insipid apologists praying for a return to normalcy that comes bathed in the nostalgic light of a disfiguring, false idyll of the not too distant past.

the trouble with all this delirium-driven drivel is it still reads white and ends up secretly double reverse repudiating everything we were taught to love.






Scared money don’t make none

Like a boss, like a peasant,

It’s so raw and unpleasant

What’s enough to the touch

Is the bauble of too much

Is the trouble with the rush

To assuage all the guilt

And excuses that we built

Three young virgins on the pyre

Wet bulb summer trending higher

Raising rabbles and a ruckus

Knowing strife will surely fuck us

stealing years days and hours

And devour what is ours

So the void is left to stew

In its juices and in you

Inner tides left to rise

Stolen valor to surmise

Breaking bread stinging toil

Broken arrows barren soil

Pity sours, left to shun

As we travel round the sun

And repeat repeat repeat

Our defeat defeat defeat

Redoubtable Gen X Aversion

Going against the grain in this moment of maximum self promotion by way of self expression is to glorify the small, imperfect, human-sized effacing gesture. The Midwestern shrug of who me? I’m no big deal. But also (the righteous rub of the matter) to be noticed for doing so, to be sought out for not consciously sticking out, having no logo, being an unbranded and illegible cow in a sea of cow-calf pairs whose flesh is still singed with their owner’s particularized emblem.

Afflicting hold: Peter Orner’s textual worlds

There is, I suppose, a kind of self-defeating mark to the task of praising a book about how affecting certain idiosyncratic short stories are to an idiosyncratic reader, who comes to the occasion entirely converted over to the cause of reading and obsessing over them. To a point where the experience of having read does not so much furnish the colors and textures of the world - the mental furniture and immense particulars of the minded creature that has to apprehend it - but is instead the lens through everything is filtered, the switch that determines in how wide an aperture it might be beholden.

I like Peter Orner. I like the fastidious way he champions what he likes, and how unfussy and uncomplicated he seems in the act of liking and championing and showing the underbelly and emotional timbre of his aesthetic commitments. I like watching him search for and activate the intellectual click that comes about in the midst of trying to sort why we merely like certain stories and why we are haunted and convicted by others.

Perhaps relatedly: i am unsure why I have been so reticent and lacked the courage to fly the flag of my own shadow. 2022 was like that, I guess.

A bon vivant kind of life

Axioms and apothegms make everyday thinking seem like it suffers from a kind of stutter. You might prefer maxims but we all have our pretensions. La Rouchefoucauld is who they summon in the seminar rooms. Rakim is who they rock in the streets. Pull a string taut and measure once, then make it a loop and measure again. Not that the mumble rappers could appreciate it, or the crank turners in tweed any better.

The inability to switch codes and follow each across the leap - the inability or unwillingness? - is a blinkering loss. Is it really the case thar 50% of people walk around without an inner monologue? When the doubting thomases shudder. It is good to be struck dumb and left with your bones reverberating in the wake of a coruscating insight. I am as close as I’ve ever been to solving the insomniac’s dilemma. Fail. Fail best. Forebear.

I sing to you my ineptitude and in exchange I deserve but do not demand sustained unremitting applause

I sing to you my ineptitude

and in exchange

you clamp down on happiness

trapped and squirming, but

signed and delivered, too.

in acceptance of what

i had wrought, clumsy as

swollen tongue

and as scintillating, maybe,

as dryer lint collected in the bottom

of a wire waste basket in the dark corner.

but true, squared away, with not even a nub of pretense

and above all, for no one else.

in acceptance, that core exchange,

you hand over your heart and

I am

without recourse, slayed.

which is why I deserve, but do not demand,

your unremitting and sustained applause.

color us both seduced.

yes, you. To you I sing.

Big in Kenya. Huge. Insatiable desire for this there.

A little Roman a clef of critical putsch:

I think autofiction’s problem is also the reason for its popularity, or the reason for its popularity among critics. Autofiction gets to the heart of why people read. Why do you sit on a train or a bus with a book? Are you pursuing knowledge, or self-knowledge, or are you using the book as a type of mating call, or as a sexual- or class-signifier? Autofiction answers the question of why people read in a very direct way: people read for sociology, or anthropology – people read to make comparisons, between their own lives and the life of the protagonist-writer, between the ways they’ve handled or not handled the issues of love and marriage and fidelity and money and child-having and child-rearing and so on, and the ways the protagonist-writer has handled or not handled same. It’s all just literacy-as-anxiety: how am I doing compared to how this published author is doing? How do I stack up? In that sense, autoficition combines the, in my opinion, deadly impulses of the religious and the bourgeois, in that it’s part Classical wisdom literature (how to live, how not to live), and part Victorian novel of “information” (providing data on how people – privileged people – dress, eat, have sex, and manage to pay for all of it). This depresses me. This need for guidance. This need for models. The constant craving and tracking of status that bespeaks an alienation from family and friends, that delicate but necessary democratic equilibrium of individual ambition and common culture. Autofiction is what comes after that: scorekeeping, a metric.

Deleuzian century says what?