Cantankerous:depressive::impatient:consensus reality
Winter ate spring’s breakfast and is now astride the commode letting loose some unconscionable filth oblivious to just how outworn is its welcome.
Art is suffering is shame is redundant isn’t so hard to spell correctly is a Modernism among many is a slogan for a mid-tier university press.
In dreams on Tuesday nights, We so often forget to say of the restaurant - “the food there is terrible.” And expect our companions to respond: “and such small portions, too” without hankering for another a beat.
an immense panorama of futility and anarchy, the stern doubting Thomas says
He would envision failure, moving from the abstract to the palpable. A huge failure, a blistering mind-fuck of failure that rattles around in certain peoples’ heads like gravel in an empty can, orchestrated, for no reason, other than being tired of unblemished success and domination. 4 years and 4 state championships, now a senior, chasing a record tying 5th: all that rolling around on a mat with other dudes, straining and pushing and pulling, inflicting pain and imposing will, did not prevent the fixation that he would end with his shoulders pin to the mat, not by an actual opponent (he did not fear this for he could not fathom it), but by purposelessness. It was the stuff of a bad dream, seeing the ref raise a hand and slam it down, a short piercing whistle, unable to move and no one out there with him. Pinned by nothingness, letting all the struggle seep out, and a crowd in the bleachers cheering at his humiliation
The countless times he heard it said “don’t leave anything left on the bone“ growing up, so it became engrained and part of him, like the involuntary smile that spread across his face when an opponent would flail in panic. To the same extent he was taught and came to internalize with no hedging the idea that saying no when everyone wants a yes is a sign of strength.
Ficciones. Copyright and all rights reserved re text
Quirky artifacts of heartache and of terminal end stage malaise
Kelvin was reading Ferry’s rendering (clearing brambles of the mind) on the epistle to the manager of the farm. He was deep in the stacks and as he alternated checking and marveling over and questioning what Ferry had wrought, his mind would occasionally drift to the classicist wunderkind in a PhD program at age 19 who could not help but give off the austere luxury vibe of the unconscionably wealth even when donning the indigent graduate assistant khaki/sweater/clarks suede Chukkas uniform and whose invocation of and subsequent riffing on the genitive/possessive ambiguity in the title of the seminar kelvin was auditing and he was guest starring in, Philosophy of Art, shattered Kelvin’s brain cells. He thought of it later too as they leaned over the multiple lines of second city marching powder, those little blue capsules smashed into a more or less sequenced delivery system for which Kelvin and the grad student, named Peter Cunningham, shared an ever deepening affinity, Kelvin with his scratch paper from the computer lab rolled into a spherical tube and Peter always at the ready with his fifty quid rolled up the same, until it got to the point where it would seem only inevitable they would retire to the corner bar to argue the proposition of whether China will get rich before it gets old and take in the eye candy around them, then stumble up and down the streets that are inconspicuously but thoroughly haunted by the ghosts of leopold and loeb, still.
ficciones
Spilt coffee on the table and hearing the drip drip
Spilling goes to spilt as spoiling goes to spoiled. Sold American where selling is conquest without parting with gold and treasure is thought to be the arrival of souled Americans, which is, to some, a pity and others a monstrosity and still others one of several causes of celebration.
We have warrant to say if John was hit by this falling Apple, then this falling Apple hit John. Some think we have warrant to say the falling Apple exhibits the properties of gravity, and others would describe at as exhibiting a theory of gravity’s properties. Others say the bitten Apple foretell human misery, just as it enabled truth to have bite and gain purchase on the world. Gaining purchase is an old-time and cold-ass form of apprehension, which is just one more circle, perhaps, whose circumference will admit of expansion. It is on these Sunday nights, most often, when I want to walk into a painting and get lost in it, to climb into the percussive list of a poem and find the beat of my heart fall into line with the rise and fall of its phrasing and breaks and melt into its soft sibilants and brace against its hard flat Saxon stopping points.
I can’t help but watch the surface tension of the puddle gathered on the grain of the wood or find solace in the soft scratch of the pencil as it makes progress and then lifts and drops to the start of the new line as the needle on the record player draws ever tighter loops and sets the bright declarations of a trumpet pregnant with the birth of cool against the percolating hiss and excess of a new cup filling and spilling over.
For god’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings
It is curious how often we accept the idea of an obvious fact and sprint past whatever assumption is informing us that of course this thing is true and scolding us no there is no need for proof or explanation. Like, why would JP Morgan look like a butcher in a Turkish bath? Or when Buendia stands in front of the firing squad, thinking of his father and the idea of ice, why do we see him lost in thought and in the splendor of his regalia? Will it always be the case that I will want to cry when the singer puts the guitar down at the end of Two-Headed Boy? Isn’t it obvious? Does it betray some deep need that I would think most everyone else would want to cry, too? Or some deep misunderstanding?
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
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
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.