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?

Add sad in the wake of a cascade of calamities; so many first rodeos to come


insurance companies are going to make adjustments, and reinsurance companies are going to write (and pay out on) more policies. Poets are going to be called upon to consider what words are appropriate to capture the attention of an Audience that did not act when it knew it should and more than fair warning, as expressed and confirmed in multiple lines of evidence, of what havoc would wreak if It did not rise to the occasion. Wreckage is a new kind of bricolage. Add sad again and again.

That black dog, gone and died, or killed was it

From Big Les, in prose:

Every day, though, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes all day, a coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a sense of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a foetal position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain. During and after such attacks, I would be prostrate with inertia, as if all my energy had gone into a black hole.

Black dahlia, but with the Staccato of pecked keys and the whirring slide back to the left beginning again, once more aligned, we won’t know it solved until it tells us so.

Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier

On the bedside table:

local souls, Alan Garganus

collected stories, Amy hempel

the crossing, cormac mccarthy

the blue guitar, john banville

all that is, James salter

believing is seeing, Errol morris

Also: star of the heart by clarice lispector. Consider the possibility that Felicite and her parrot would be a boon companion as a read-along with this one.

Alas, the pulled heart string is not enough on its own, and neither is the head gone soupy for having been bashed up against a figurative wall by its own self’s intransigence. By bread alone we aren’t to live, even if we can and sometimes, in brief spells, do.

Donald Rumsfeld deserves a fact-facing vitriolic historicizing obit of the kind by which HST rendered Dick Nixon. An island of rats, feasting on each other. But not without joy, of course.

Also this

beware of your enemies, but above all beware of your enemies’ sons, for they will one day rule you.

Moving boxes. Things were always coming apart at the seams, was the kind of love they had snd suffered through, especially at the beginning. The suffering of love was easier to withstand than the work of marriage. Romantic suffering. Tiresome work. It was thought that newspapers would suffice but on a whim the expensive bubble wrap was ordered and added to the bill that the eponymous two guys and a van came calling for their fee. Which is when it hit home, in what her gym teacher - a living caricature (lesbian, softball) who proved how little caricature might capture a round character whose complications were in the flesh - called a teachable moment. She had moved out, and the move had cost her more than she knew. Could have ever possibly known. It’s not ideology or a thrumming internally coherent plot. It’s just a hum drum devastation of the life they had lived, the life-as-they-knew-it gone and become a conflagration across her history.

Fragments of Amy Hempel

If you’ve had your fill of prolegomenon and genealogies, of discursive and logical exegesis - if you no longer gain from elaborate figurative emblems of an argument’s structure, loops and transcendental deductions and language game absurdities, I do not blame you. I too have supped at that rich vein and been be bedeviled and bedazzled by its seeming suppleness, even as I grew pale and sickly, redolent of bologna, wearing scuffed and unpolished leather boots even in the summer, and incapable of making direct eye contact, even in my dreams. I am an enthusiast, but to fatigue I have succumbed. I am philosophical about my benumbed philosophical capacity. Still I encourage you . Have at it, I say. A more virulent strain is not a more deadly strain if the strategy is to contain rather than to treat, I say. Much of what I say is just saying what someone else once wrote down.

And as against that burned-out husk, that brittle desiccated commonplace book, I commend to you the rich tradition of the American short story, circa 1988-2010, including Barthelme’s ambling progeny and the whelped pups of Annie Proulx’s hard won Western grace. And I do so commend with a kind of stalking-horse idea at hand - that the short story that is not particularly invested in being “about” something, that sustains itself at the level of the sustenance and neither kvetches nor pines for leaving its readers’ nails bitten or heart a-palpitating, is but a taxonomic attenuation of the philosophic proposition-making mood, not a different species altogether. See for example Tumble Home, to which I have flipped at random in this collection of Hempel’s stories.

I am that overexposed light, that awkward angle, that angle of repose between the moldy but redoubtable Stegner oeuvre and the coiled kink of wayward but deep exploration that the certain class of Stegner fellows have kicked out over the decade and a half that marked three straight Republicans administrations and the onset of a Slick Willy era that is simultaneously more callow and more polished than what immediately preceded it.

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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