Elegy for the nobodies nobody knows

What attempts to convince you it loves you by pandering to you does you harm. It teaches you that you are so weak that what does not pander to you—does not obscure difficulty, disagreement and boredom—is to be reviled and punished.

G Jackson, in The Proleptic Line

The meaning of the start of Christendom + the weight of the frankincense + what Blake’s chimney sweeps saw when they closed their eyes to sleep = something akin to this recognition that this moment in its monstrous immediacy is just as much what history is made of as anything ever was or ever will be.

John used a pictorial syntax to pose abstract philosophical questions about meaning and certainty; he was a doubter, mistrustful of absolutes. His work could be puzzling or even obscure, but as he got older, John’s background as a painter reasserted itself, and his work became more visually lush.

D Salle, in Not Dionysius

Unkept promises and unkempt premises

I don’t want to be neutralized by what makes the world commensurable, made me get out of bed and pace when I first read it. And brew coffee and throw darts and play imaginary chess games until daybreak.

I was right in the middle of Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of “intense life” what seems to be so many desperate people’s last reason to live, ever fully distract them from the fundamental emotional when the phone in my office rang and I was called upon to help defend an innocent man accused of an orthodox crime.

I had tucked the bottom corner of the sheet under the mattress when I recalled The curiously superstitious notion that to have no reason to believe a proposition is the same as having a reason to assert that the proposition is false.

The Cowboys were driving with less than a minute to go, and Exley was pouring Tabasco directly into his eyes, cursing the giants but unable to do anything but listen to the play call and stare out through the bloodied webs blooming around each iris, when I heard it echo in a somnolent Spalding Gray monotone:

In the American grain, it is gregariousness, suspicion of privacy, a therapeutic distaste in the face of personal apartness and self-exile, which are dominant. In the new Eden, God’s creatures move in herds.

as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.

It seems odd, at this point, that the driving musical montage in American Psycho is a Huey Lewis song? Huey seems harmless, a bit daft, not so much uncool as lacking in both the rock and in the roll? It’s not just axe murders and tunneling rats and dissociative manias that drive the plot. It’s also Huey and Bale’s cold empty eyes. Like how Quint describes the eyes of a shark. In yet another movie about naturalized monsters.

There is something denaturing about the hum of an office: the ringing phones, the vomiting copier, the calling out of the same greetings and same tired crutch of stale conversational gambits, tetrabytes of mouth breathers inhaling and exhaling, the fruits of this time (so-called work product) floating dead eyed and limp up there in the cloud and backed up on a remote server in a rack somewhere somewhat secure. And then there is the shared denial of the stolidly indisputable fact that the actual work being done doesn’t really matter all that much to most of the ones doing it, and the work that is done could have been done a lot quicker and a lot better, too, as everyone knows and nobody cares.

But what about art? Will it save us? And if not salvation, exactly, will it entice all who fall into its graves to enter into a reverie just long enough to make bearable another day in the trenches of glib discursive laments and garden-variety alienation? Will it fructify these barren hearts and shake shake shake us out of this slapdash monotony of motions-gone-through?

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.”

At the school you may recall hearing:

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

And also, on the side of the box, you may recall these instructions:

"The days of irony are here, irony and deception. But do not harden your heart."

And it is in these fleeting moments, remembrances, into which you dip and draw sustenance, however ephemeral it may be, and come to staring face to face with a strange object covered in fur that breaks your heart . . .

Thus, choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour

All these backward-looking arete-loving Spartan-cos playing avatars inspire a kind of hagiographic exercise in the middle-aged, formerly prodigious, supposedly fully formed adult brain which has wrestled with but not been pinned to the Mat by ennui: the idea being something like a Platonic engagement with manly virtue, always coded as necessarily such.

Except the same flaw in the idea of pursuing the ideal comes out, making it horror show overdose of botulism. There’s no such thing as halfway crooks, no turning back on the burnt tongue of a too eagerly hungry wanna-be warrior. Adulation from the crowd, yes; Stockholm syndrome, also yes. Viable hard-won alternative to what actually is, no; path out of the vertiginous maze of clever Daedalus’s clusterfuck double-bind, hard and intractable no.

Malignant Normality and the Busted Heart Machine

It’s not enough to call bullshit on the cankers and callouses, rough hewn from clustered extinctions and wet atrocities. Arrows pierce completely through fish with fat lips and hold them fast, swimming in place, to the bottom of the barrel.

The belief lingers that causal determinism is but one option on the menu. So we must ask: What passes for considerate declension in the enjoyment of life for those of us who used to wonder whether umbrellas were sufficient armor against acid rain and the pushed launch button of intemperate statesmen? Every onslaught on what used to pass for the homunculus comes from these whacked people who used to pass for the Preterite. What presently musters up as rock-ribbed conviction in the idea that the best government is that which governs least no longer gains purchase on the fixed firmament of collective consciousness.

Work is the creed that remains. The weird, having gone to finishing school, no longer deign to nix the elaborate fiction that all will be well in the end. Zero sum games take primacy. Style runs rough over uncertainty, mundanity and banality duel at dawn. The distaff mob stands blinkered and mashed in the face of metaphysical theft prevention. We visit violence on Parnassus and reap every solitary strand of grain, insisting in ravenous stupefaction that next year’s harvest is looking pretty damn good. Logic stands defeated in the lethargy of the rendering plant, with its undead mute beasts finally given free rein to gallop as only ghosts can.

The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, the child is not father of the man, and the sucking chest wound is not the mandarin’s cauterizing encounter with torched dreams.

A change is gonna come. We will make munitions from the flickering shadows at the back of the cavernous theaters where light and photo realism induce each other, kicking and screaming and fully dilated, into existence. Cain will be called Ishmael, and the dead salesman will be buried with deep seated survival anxieties thrust upon him like a bad rash. Mourners will mill around, eating cubed cheese and coughing from the burning effigies, wondering aloud when it came to pass that mediocrity became lethal.

Will remain relevant for as long as people still die

What we were (how it started)

Organized around a creed, which purported to stand in for absence of a national character. Americanization was the unique non fungible virtue. No one could claim to have much of a history, so even the most senior denizens would still cop to being part of the asylum. Choosing exile, of some sort.

Walter Benjamin at the Local Dairy Queen ——) Everyone seems to have a bad memoir in them.

Ode to the end of an era that could not spell ignominy


The person with a paint can in hand who decided to share with the world

MY LIBRARIAN WAS A BITCH.



All the Tumblr accounts lit ablaze at the thought that if they loved the Last Psychiatrist so hard, it was written for them, and they were convinced momentarily that they were not afflicted, but the conviction lacked courage, lapsed into confusion, and ashes and more ashes heaped and heaped.

This is It or Super Bowl commercials, I know not from where the Bud Heavy love came in the 00s. I’d like to say the hipster was not so bad but I try not to lie, for my serenity’s sake.

Goa is a state of mind where hippie scrums and polyester plenitude procreate

Desire is the name of the game that gets played in the land of the absolute given, where for every if x, then not y someone on the corner is shouting about how A = B does not derive A = A.

Desire is fumbling in the backseat of a car for the eyelets of a bra that holds breasts that fed babies and using just one hand left ringless and two lives which felt senseless.

Desire is being unable to stave off clicking refresh on the Roth account that a near-term future self will milk dry before a long-term future self gives up the ghost.

Camus as husband, Vonnegut as lover ——).(——- Against condescending to our younger profligate whoring selves

in the great modernist project that has not ended - where to be disoriented and rent asunder is to have gone back to where home once was - we were once told that some writers are husbands and some were lovers. Later we learned of other amorphous categories that reworked the categorical so it was neither box nor a sieve but a 3d printer of identity run on open source code that did not contain, but amassed. But that “later” is for another day.

Camus we were told treated his fiction as scaffolding for his ideas, and his “ideas essays” were alleged to be somehow less than the sum of their cognitive parts. We were told wrong things, then as now.

But - we are coming to a sharper point, even if it not sharp enough (yet) to make a clean cut - what of Vonnegut and his yellow fingers, pecking away, hunting and finding? What of his Midwestern groundedness and his Midwestern suicidal tendencies? His terse witticism and the goofy earnestness of his plenary bleakness?



I could not think of a more bizarre pairing culled from that genus of Don Juans whose works boil the blood of the intemperate young, are set down for two decades or more, and turn out, on being picked up for purposes of re-acquainting brace, to have sustained a destabilizing not-to-be-fucked-with brainworm for the fat, median-voter theory worshippers we’ve all become. Not in the realm of prosody, obv - not sculptors of polymorphous linguistic perversity, on the jagged ruins of which so much modernist righteousness productively shores itself - but just in the sense of mapping the coordinates of the raw meat on the floor.

Call it appreciation but don’t tie a ribbon on it. The way in which they (each so different as to risk embarrassment at invoking the yoke of a “they”) shamelessly exposed how putting a name to forces of fraudulence and penury and paradoxically rich banality could be a salve on, but not a cure for, some basic, dumb emptiness that befriends whatever you want to call whatever it is that is rattling around on the inside, still.