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

Sharpen the knife that slices the contradictions

Sharpen the contradictions that knife through a Sunday night, when the soul suffers from heartburn.

Monday is for washing and drying laundry and then leaving it crumpled and hardening in desiccated lumps in order to trace the arc of the Tennis Court Oath as it rattles down the hallway of history and echoes the Persian sacking of Delhi in 1739 and presages Yeltsin on a tank at the White House, the other White House.

Pity-wallow in the scrim of this droll and complacent Tuesday, the better to map the bounded conceptual stickiness of a closed-off 24 hour universe in which the mother is prohibited and frustration of the object for itself renders a biting boredom implacably gray.

Awake on Wednesday and understand that “enjoy yourself” is no longer permissive’s prerogative, but imperative’s ironclad directive. Revolt by being miserable and eating heaping plates of overcooked gelatinous fusilli.

Thursday is for folding and putting the laundry away and telling anyone within earshot that a murmuration is to a starling no different than a monster truck rally is to our forebears from that foreign land of 1987.

Friday is good for a dog worrying at the marrow of a shin bone and for cozening up close to that phantasm in which ascending to the top of a multinational corporate pyramid to chip away at the heart of the heart of the territory is a plausible and cognizable minor term in an incoherent syllogism.

Saturday fulfills a duty to document the momentary relief that comes from an unclocked and inimical freedom from, not freedom to.

Sunday, whet the stone. Scrape to sharpen, sharpen to simplify.

Moral dithering and the insecurity of God

God didn’t want Adam and Eve to know, and to come upon the power of naming as a kind of knowing, not because he wanted to protect them from the Fall but because he needed to stave off their growth. God feared the possibility that humanity’s incipient dynamism might lead to some tapering off and reduction of the quality of his relationship with an aspect of his creation. God’s insecurity, not his beneficent and all pervasive love, underwrites the injunction and proscription against human becoming. And you thought the prelapsarian perfection was something other than a hotbed of interpretive intrigue and dialectical imposture?

Can calling God insecure, or attributing to divinity some unsavory characteristics, invite calamity? Are we totally removed from the notion that blasphemy might lead to a divine smiting, from retribution on high? We don’t seem to ask this question anymore, perhaps because it no longer is intelligible, which is a way of identifying a concept that cannot any longer be taken seriously. Maybe even testing the predicate (God exists, and is not indifferent, but also not above petty self regard for protecting the vision of the shape he wants his creation to take or opposed to recriminatory acts against the tribes and individual actors opposed by jiggery-pokery happenstance to the full flowering of that vision) lacks imaginative purchase, doesn’t warrant attention and energy and hand-wringing anxiety because we’re both too distracted to test the content of the predicate and too infatuated with our fatuous, vapid, low stakes modern 21st century lives to be bothered with its contemplated conditional consequent? Or because it’s trivial, and hopelessly arrogant, and more, to assume that we ought to spend time worrying about blasphemy when we should focus on mindfulness and balance and purpose, to the end of garnering higher returns on personal investments in whatever kind of spiraling spirituality we might muster? Do we want our musings on big questions to be reduced down to a salty roux of what is and is not efficient and “healthy,” to focus on what we get from the bargain we strike with the shadow of the shadow of what passes for the big questions? Are big questions deadening? Is it deadening to even assume that asking that is worth asking?

Dibs on that vicious abundance

It doesn’t always matter if the slipshod way of making something out of gluons and would-be syncretism is spelled out in the lab report. Sometimes you try and make a universe just to bunk super symmetrical claims and the universe shirks loose of the hold you had on it. Calamity ensues, administrators appear ululating exasperation. Wrangle the universe back into kelvin zero box, or leave it be. The cat will die or it won’t. But eventually it will.

Coming at it from a slipshod point of attack in the concentrated mapping of starscapes is no worse off than coming at an associative putsch in the unwinding of neurotic bleating. Galaxies and minds have their own fearful symmetry. It hits different from the bottom of the well, is all.

I say that I am the anachronism of a man in a hat with a newspaper tucked under my arm, striding confidently in the direction of the advertisement’s denouement, ready to close the always-present transaction and avail myself of the gods and their immense lucidity. Do you believe? Can you countenance the symbol of the gray flannel suit? And this is an altogether different universe than the one you unleashed in the lab. This plenipotentiary construct. This re-strained analogy. This limpid coelacanth of a metaphor.

I know what I am doing; nonetheless I am doing it. Perhaps because I don’t know what I can will myself to believe, after all.

Second chances for fourth place finishers, twice passed over and stuck in the numbing mud , and then broke open and cauterized by a love that boomerangs and blooms for having once been lost.

Amicable split it was not, with strips of flesh in all the nails of all the fingers and all the boards on all the windows hammered tightly shut. Coiled resentment like ropes round a stanchion, betray me twice and I’ll go and wrap my guts around a ceiling fan and jump.

The becalming was the worst. The good intentions left suppurating scars. So and so might have thought that it was destined not to be and marinated me in the mush of this too shall pass. But I like myself raw and unwashed, stinky with virulent refusal. I like myself down and emptied of any chance the better.

The watchers would not have guessed that this breaking core was but a bracing test of malcontent whirling yes finally yes.

Full on February reflux, quarried from this bleak frozen husk, impatience blooming on the hour by the hour. Feet of snow, lashing wind, water quench beneath a skein of ice insists on blood in its breaking. And then transformed and slick with buzz. Yes yes finally.

How you managed to shower me in vital sparks of what I had considered long-dead and too brittle love, so all the pores are tingling rage and a drip lengthens to a slow trickle, is more than mere syllables can sequester into plain sense.

Redoubtable Gen X Aversion

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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.

We want to want what we want to want and waste what is there for the taking. Declaim and repeat.

I do not pine after every paean to the explanatory power of mimetic desire moldering in the drafts folder of a West Coast would be hustler. I pine after the idiosyncratically generous voice of the niche-regional autodidact who tried but failed to teach himself Latin or made a point of getting through the how to code in RubyOnRails not to disrupt anything, but because conversancy in many languages is the currency that giving a fuck cashes out in. Because encompassing multitudes and gazing on the nude bathers is just how one rolls. Because minding the gap between being the person who knows that what gets measured is what matters and becoming the person who gives voice to what is zipping around one’s soul is what used to get called integrity and now just oscillates around in object-oriented ontological ether. Which may be better, in what presently passes for the long run.

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.

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Deleuzian century says what?

From head to toes in Acronym and pegged to the prose of one William Gibson

Street style as a kind of legible enactment of a higher purpose that only matters to an inside few and that feels, outside a ping of the cash register, purposeless to all who do not share it and do not belong to it. Pockets of intrigue, cut throat and hidebound. No to the runway, as it existed when street style was still held back, behind the roped entrance. The exclusive walled off domain: not that the walls came crumbling down, but were vaulted over, made permeable, a pole vaulter’s inner confidence that the springboard of cool, that which need never explain itself, would bend back to true and transfer its terrible leverage so the up and over came to be.

yes and yes to kinetics and concealment, yes and yes to a closet of instantaneous transport.

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Land is wealth, vague as Luc Tuymans

Say the author is dead all you want, and sustain the pleasure of the text as a reverie. But the painter is not dead. The painter’s trace is something else

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Hoods and arrows, the hot wind of an inclement mind

in the beginning of a painting everyone's in the studio—like all of your thoughts and people who are on your mind—and little by little everyone leaves and finally the painter leaves too, and then the painting happens, and it becomes a painting.

• someone not famous, in the wider sense of the word

To be on-kilter, go unplugged; if not loved, be scarce at least

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OF all the greatest minds of my generation, so many were making a go of it by pitching self-development to an audience of others pitching self-development and sitting in an expanding tent of self-congratulatory irrelevance. Great faith in finding sustenance in the productivity and time management practices. Go forth and prevaricate, picking among the desiccated husks of ideas that have been repurposed and refashioned to a new sheen. So long as new vocabularies can still connect to the old cliches, the fashionable tripe of today will rhyme with what was being passed off as original thought 20 years ago. Even if the accelerationists might demure. Perhaps the efficiency of type setters is not the great dirge I might want to make it out to be, or perhaps I’m just tired of having such dispiriting little faith in the idea that this self has the capacity to be disciplined about developing itself. The scarcity mindset and the soft dignity of low expectations have their place. Indifference is the skeleton key of the misunderestimated resistance to the dominant ethos of the age. Color me neutral, in other words. Mark the stage of grief that follows from Kafka being all the rage and Knausgaard being all the belly button lint. All the great teachers, having been taken out at dawn and shot, are haunting us with the sense of insecurity and meager accomplishment they helped to inspire. Ride out the rhetorical filigree in the future rake’s gleeful dismissal of all that we, here in the now, amounted to.

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

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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.

The trouble with being born and the black hole of August

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Also this