Against Again

“I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. … What I dread is the isolation. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Maurice Sendak said that to Terry Gross.

In the post “Scar Scaling”, Angus Andrew of Liars sang the words in the song “Flow My Tears the Spider Said” from They Were Wrong, So We Drowned.

In “Shock at the Shepard’s Fingers”, Charles Kinbote wrote these words in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

In “The Breakfast on the Table”, David Byrne sings these words in the song “Civilization” from Grown Backwards.

In “To that which consoles”, passages are taken from W. Somerset Maugham’s Mrs. Craddock, and most passages are either spoken by Bertha if they are anti-masculine or Wildean philosophical comments on society, Edward if they are anti-feminine, and the narrator if they are reflexive comments on narrating.

The idea expressed in “The Women’s Moon” appears in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage as well as Mrs. Craddock.

In “‘…so much more real than life.’”, Lord Henry of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray speaks these words.  His words appear again in “Does she ever find out?”, as do those of Dorian.

In “The Ideal and the Idiot”, Peter MacNicol as John Cage says these words in “The Obstacle Course” written by David E. Kelley and Kayla Alpert in Kelley’s Ally McBeal.

“Bemusing” also consists of Lord Henry’s philosophy from The Picture of Dorian Gray.

“The Proof of How Fizzles General Gee” includes an excerpt from James Paul Gee’s An Introduction to Discourse Analysis.

“Ancienting” has a quote from my essay on modern love rejected by the New York Times.

In “Since”, Octavio Paz quotes Samuel Johnson in an essay titled ”Translation: Literature and Letters”.

“Brin à Brin, Miette à Miette” and “Blade by Blade, Crumb by Crumb” present a sentence from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

“The (Invisibly) Great Nerve Debate” is from M. A. K. Halliday’s On Grammar.

“A Toast to the Empty” is from Michel de Montaigne’s “On Cannibals”.

In “Posthume”, I took selections from Wallace Stevens’ “Aphorisms”, which is included in Opus Posthumous.

In “Dis-sort, Disertion”, the words from David Cassidy’s “Cherish” were included, with Nina Simone’s version in mind.

“Not Our Sort of Singing” has quotes from Andrei Sinyavsky’s “Pkhentz”.

“Sympathy for the Ugly” includes concepts from Paracelsus’ “On Creation”.

In “Bundle Selling Points”, there is an excerpt from Robert Coover’s John’s Wife.

In “The Hall of Screaming Skulls”, a piece of a conversation between Ethelmer and DePugh from Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.

I include these at the suggestion of Gail, and I will be sure to include sources for future citations.  This does seem to enrich the citations themselves, I agree.

I am playing a concert tomorrow at La Cocina here in Tucson; if any of my readers see this, please come see the show.

A Cemetery

Scar Scaling

“And the mountain that drew us together is lit/By the lightning that crackles and rivals the wind/Where the only expression of love is through tears/And the highest creation on earth is a bird.”

San Malo, November 2008

“Yeah they’ll sign up for treasure but leave with the girl.”

The Grace of Life

Is the pleasure of sex evolution’s way of fooling intelligent humans into having children?

Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Jan. 2012

Finding How to Why

BOZ

There we are: another piece on gardening in the Below: Light-Diffusive Membrane Construction for Use in Vegetable Cultivation. I don’t know what’s more brilliant—Spaley’s inventions or the titles of my articles on them. It’s funny—I know all about these things I can’t even do. I guess such is the life of a writer. How that woman manipulates those leaves to create the shields from those horrid lights Richter and Roistet strung up to disallow such gardening as we do—well, as she does—I feel like I can’t know, and how she came up with such strange hybrids—and how she was able to grow plants enough to make such hybrids to make such shields to allow so many more things to grow! Not to mention why she doesn’t capitalize on the light shields by selling them around these slums…although maybe that’s part of why she’s able to do things others can’t; she thinks in a way others can’t. Anyway, on to something a lot less practical: takes out a pile of papers, starts flipping through them Here it is, The World in Which We Live. Where did I leave off? There’s Richter’s history “From Rough Luddism and Negative Ascension to the Doctor in Cosmotic”, Roistet’s history “The Appearance of Dr. Cormcich, or the Infinite, Inventive Inventory”, then “The Separation: The Raising of the Roof”. Now I suppose I’ll have to begin writing about the same as I do for the paper; about surviving down here and growing plants and harvesting water and sewage systems and conservation and all that. sigh Maybe I can stick another chapter in here about…I really wish I could go up there and write about that… Well, here—I could always look through these interview files and try to find different accounts of when he came into power and the roof was put up—the abductions, the muggings, the famines—that’s better. Where did I put those files?

Shock at the Shepard’s Fingers

“I am choosing these images rather casually.  There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia.  Humbler humans have preferred sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping the in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom.  All this is uncertain and messy.  Of the not very many ways known of shedding one’s body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others.  Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman’s promotion.  If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently–not fall, not jump–but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far  below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way.  Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your defelction offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive.  The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off–farewell, shootka (little chute)!  Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded ife, with the earth’s green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body’s obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.  If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one’s eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death.  Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one’s liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the minuscule unknown that had been the only real part of one’s temporary personality.”

With The Changing Calendar of Palaise almost completed, a new phase of nonism is beginning.  The gravity is immense.

The Breakfast on the Table

“Somewhere between the darkness and light/faces all glow but it’s not too bright/civilization, it’s all about knives and forks./Isn’t she here? What time is it now?/Is this the right place? Do I fit with her crowd?/I’m gonna be a civilized man someday.”

“Part of me wants to jump and shout,/Part of me wants to tear it down,/I thought you might prefer the cabernet./Civilization, its all about sex,/Havin’ a ball in a padded banquet,/I’m gonna be that really cool guy someday./The waiter looks me over./Would you like cream or sugar?/I don’t know – what was I supposed to say./She wonders if I’ll notice./I should have brought some roses./Her plate is full, she hasn’t eaten all day./Glasses collect we order some booze./She looks at me, I stare at her shoes./Mature situations, maybe a broken heart./Maybe I ought to pay the bill,/Maybe she thinks I never will./A million things that cross a woman’s mind./Just be yourself, well that’s what they say./I barely know who I was yesterday./I’m gonna be that civilized guy someday.”

“Good friends and conversations./The rise and fall of nations./A moment’s glory and they’ve had their day./And on my high school folder/I drew a big gorilla;/Something familiar, something far, far away./Somewhere between the darkness and light/She touches my hand, she don’t seem to mind/We can go home, we can be civilized.”

Volcano National Park, June 2009

Brawn Yawn

The color in which all things are painted is a shade of the taste of delight. I don’t mean to say that the world operates according to positive and negative grades of delight—since you “can’t know one without the other” (and thanks for that, every idiot)—, but all things to me—as a friend of mine would agree—are how they are. Do I taste delight on my tongue every day? Why yes; even as I feel hardly capable of pushing myself into a position slightly closer to that which I must assume for a seemingly-horrifying duration of ticks and turns, I taste it. It tastes like my lover’s skin and my brother’s forty-clove chicken. It tastes like “No One is Alone” out of the throats of brilliant contemporaries sweetened by my nostalgic reflection. I drive and frown with delight, I do. I will get to that artistic procedural soon, Dave, but until then—

Together

September 17th, 2008 in the garage

Sometimes our style trumps our substance–the song we played that night was atrocious.

An Equation

There is no variable–this is where you must go:

among the flowers and trees, the roots and maggots–no.

You must be the maggot that gives the trees by their roots,

and the flowers by their trees.

 

As I passed the white orchid tree last, its flowers were gone–

and I was not.  As I passed it before, months earlier, they flourished–

but I did not.  You mustn’t be the flowers, nor the trees, nor the roots–

by that you will not be, but seem to be, and appear.  Not what sees.

 

In seeing, things equal.  The pages of memories, the hurt of deception–

these are not variables, but what is.  Do you want to wilt–

do you want to cause the wilting?  Deny,

and I will join you in the solution.