A train, Ada, and recitations in New Orleans.

Real friends boss
the wind around.

A voice. An animal need.
Like if I stink

you do too.
If it’s just the sunlight

again, lie down with me.

—-Jordan Stempleman, “All Actually”

THE BOOKS

The zipless portion of the old black suitcase, the most important space in my packing, is reserved for the selection of books that will accompany me. Clothes are the things forgotten, left behind—I don’t remember what I wore in Seattle, Burlington, Demopolis, New Orleans—- I recall what I read, the shape and feel of the words that accompanied me.

I dress in books as if each trip is another wedding, feet feeling their way down an aisle with the sounds of strangers rising from the space around me, the silence of not turning to them and saying: "We are here for different reasons. This means something different to each of us.”

The formula disciplines my tendency towards overlarge desirousness; it tames my book frenzy. After decades of travels, I limit myself to the bridal idiom: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And so I packed for the wedding of New Orleans with the following:

The old was Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.

The new was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.

The borrowed was Kenneth Burke’s Counterstatement.

The blue was Osip Mandelstam’s Noises of Time.

[Always, there is the music.]

M.’s hand, the Amtrak Crescent at night: “Map of the Falling Sky” by Songs Ohia.

THE PARTICULAR MOTION OF THE ARDOR-TRAIN

Notes from a station in Mississippi. The ghost of Captain Badass.

Seriousness, as a tone, works against sincerity in the poem. We can ‘speak’ of ardor, for example, in a way that takes itself seriously, and this act of taking seriously brackets ardor, and sets it apart formally. All that starched, buttoned-up ardor like a sad groom waiting at the head of that aisle for an idiom that trains wrong.

(As lovers we did not fail)

M. pours drinks as the night rolls past our train window.

(Brown eyes your pulse is getting hotter)

I feel most myself when moving, walking down a city sidewalk, whirring over old tracks, recognizing the music (and the muses) pushing me forward. Arduously. Stay in my head, I say to the rhythm. Linger longer, I say to the feeling. Don’t finish with me yet, I mutter to this beast that settles by the train window with M. on the other side of the table and Osip Mandelstam’s “Journey to Armenia” beside me.

Wheels on steel, rural houses and trees blurring together, sensation inflected by the velocity of Mandelstam's enthusiasm as he describes voice . . . What does it mean to “explode with ardor” for the minutes between one place and another? How does one notate the width of the instant, or measure the breadth of each tinny tick tick tick? All that white silk behind me, shredded by gravel and metal teeth.

GEARLESS IN THE GREEN CHASM

Tame the unruly with a list that instantiates the line moving towards a destination. Write this as if you will get somewhere. And then see where ‘it’ ends.

1. I crave coffee but we lack the appropriate gear.

2. Miriam pours into a small paper cup discovered near the sink. A post-toothbrushing cup for swizzling water. I shoot it quickly, racing the collapse of the paper, surprised that I lost this game I knew I was playing, this game I prepared for, the hot brown liquid seeping onto my forearm—-

3. —- and a constant chasm of green owns the air to my right.

4. Without announcement, the train halts abruptly amid the knees of various trees submerged in a swamp near Fosters, Alabama. Something nondescript prevents us from moving further. The trees are clear.

5. The blur has paused and now the view is a postcard. The red dirt roads of my youth are visible behind a tree grove and a bluster of white privet; their scent reaches me through the glass.

6. Not even glass can inoculate me, I say to my notebook. I speak in black ink to it.

7. What color is my voice when speaking to M.?

8. The way I know this swamp is all five senses, zero language.

9. M. and I chug soda and recollect wandering through Anais Nin’s words. When the train begins moving again, nothing is perturbed, nothing is ruined, nothing is jostled. The green blurs into a long seam beside us, a stitch on a map. A pattern emerges—-thirty breaths of tall pine forest followed by five breaths of massacred tree trunks, stacked in piles, denuded of branches and greenery, the bark flayed off. The tree slaughter is visible by train, though not from the highway.

10. “What are you thinking about?” The clouds are low in the sky, keeping the air humid. The red dirt rests like the rural’s handprint on the seat of a memory's pants. 

Night in New Orleans; statues and shadows; “Steve Albini’s Blues” by Songs Ohio and Jason Molina.

THE FIRST PANEL OF THE MORNING

At the NOLA Poetry Festival, the first panel of the morning is titled "Poetry Recitation: Exploring the Intersection of Memory, Adaptation, and Place." Zach Savich talks about how reciting a poem removes the word from the technology of the page and draws it into presence, rendering the body part of the annunciation and intonation. The responsibility of speaking blends with the feeling of saying, and the annihilation of the intermediary involved, in reading rather than reciting.

“I’m with you in the recitation,” Savich says slowly, looking at the audience. 

How to describe the feeling that eyes are trying to catch their breath?

I find myself italicizing Zach’s words when bringing them into text. Or using punctuation to intonate the intimacy of his statement, describing a moment that was revolutionary to him. He calls it a responsibility that the poet should “step into form” to inhabit it.

How does visuality on the page translate into audibility and sound in recitation? What sort of soundscape does each poem offer to us? 

“The mass, the thousand masses”: the epigraph to Zach’s book. Sarah said she would recite it to herself, these little phrases that got stuck in her head and later became poems, “snippets.”

Jordan Stempleton recollects memorization as a traumatic experience similar to his bar mitzvah, in that he couldn't understand in that moment how he was being changed by it. “To be possessed by the text" is how possession differs. 

“The narcissism of eye contact”: Nick Malone talks about where the poet’s gaze rests as he recites. Where is the poet looking? Where is the gaze located? Malone is interested in the moments where the recitation fails; he scavenges for the exact locations where the memory is lost. “Not about the place, but because of the page: harmonic with another, that cares.”

The act of reciting a poem posits a different relationship between the speaker and the subject, the poem and the expression, the saying and the being. 

Someone mentions a recording of all the air and silences in John Ashbery's readings, and my pulse speeds up, thrilled by this possibility implicating an archive of breath alongside the impossibility of holding these breaths in place. The risk of vulnerability becomes less performative in this idea of presence.

Each recitation is different in that it exists in relation to the space and the audience: a queer relationality emerges in the poem as a saying shaped by the relationships emerging from sound. Being aware of those people around us, looking up at them from a sheet of paper, permits a more defensive sort of being-with, one where the performance gives us an excuse for not dissolving: the body “knows" what it will say so nothing is created anew in that space. Under those conditions, the way we measure a reading's success depends on assessing whether we performed it correctly, rather than how we were changed by it.

How does recitation alter one's relation to the poem itself? How is a word like full (which hovers close to fool when spoken) enunciated differently? How does it sound more fully when the "ll" is drawn out?

Carolina Ebeid's poems moved me to complete silence. I had to hold my own hand because there was so emotion flowing, pulsing, dancing through that space.

I sit found for adoption
by slightness and by light.

- Jordan Stempleman, “Unmoved”

You said I am an empty page to you
I once had all the words
I forgot all the words
The body burns away

- Jason Molina, “The Body Burns Away”

Two fakes: the child and the monumental.

SARTRE’S FAKE CHILD

“I WAS A FAKE CHILD,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his autobiography, titled The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre. Here is the quote in its entirety:

"I adapted myself to their intentions with a virtuous eagerness that kept me from sharing their purposes,” the elder says of his younger self.

In Sartre’s telling, childhood's "I" figures itself in relationship to knowledge of hypocrisy. The child, here, is helpless; adults rule the world. Comparing this child with my favorite teenage-ing mammals, I am relieved to see this knowledge expressed. What the child knows without saying, the teen articulates as a claim towards their own autonomy. According to the teens, the world is still owned by idiotic adults—and they are absolutely correct. The teens resent this. The teens taste the edge of adulthood on the horizon and they want none of it. Their concept of power is still hitched to exploring the relationship to judgement and guilt. Like Sartre, they exercise their autonomy through the assignation of blame.

As an adult who resents what adulthood has wrought, I’m intrigued by the way in which resentment (my own, the rue I share with the teens) complicates the retrospective gaze. Can we blame our parents for wars, for being veterans, for being survivors of domestic violence, for letting the television run full-time and filling the rooms of our childhood minds whity shitty television sitcoms that socialized us into consumerism?

MONUMENTAL APOLOGIAS

RETURNING TO MY NOTES on Corey Van Landingham's essay, "Apologia," on the apology's elision of sorry-not-sorry. How the 'we' in past tense is always wrong—"And the multiplicity of future I's thus destabilizes every utterance, every word on the page."

Apologia, in Greek, refers to a speech in defense. As a genre, the apologia doesn't admit regret or guilt but "desires, instead, to make one's position clear, to offer an explanation in the face of accusation, to justify one's belief." Van Landingham considers how any public apology in the context of social media becomes an apologia, a mode of constant defense. Thus, monuments are an apologia, or "war's apology" – and I'm fascinated by how monumental apologias maintain a dialogue with the future anterior of the event they make common and perpetuate. Every statue of a man on a horse writes war into the future of human events. 

In Birmingham, three children feed pigeons beneath the boot of a war monument. They are forming an unconscious landscape which kins the monument to the innocence of childhood, restless pigeons, sun-lit sidewalks, the ice cream truck's choired bells. The monuments center meaningfulness as guarantee of timelessness: the single everlasting act of significance is human sacrifice. And publicity forever.

THE TAYLOR SWIFT CASE STUDY

DURING THE PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN, the two teens who were pre-teens and middle-schoolers at the time loved Taylor Swift.

(Although soft pop annoys me, I supported their emerging love for a particular music that felt inhabitable to them. Even now, we discuss and debate our preferences and tastes often but I don’t condemn their newfound affections at the risk of foreclosing those conversations where I learn more about the teens’ world. Imposing my own monuments, my studied likes and incorrigible appetite for the difficult, on humans who are already buckling beneath the absence of agency that characterizes 21st century late capitalism, seems like an ego-driven use of force. If adults need teens to reify their preferences, the nuclear family is even sicker than I thought.)

A few years ago, the teens removed every trace of Taylor Swift from their rooms, conversations, playlists, and clothing. The Swift imaginary was dead to them. When I queried the end of Swiftmania, one of the teens declared, simply: “She’s a fake.” Thus do I find myself thinking about the politics of betrayal.

We use the word 'betrayal' to refer to a violation of trust. As such, it is a statement about a relationship, a social form articulated on the basis of trust. Whether someone has been betrayed depends on the conditions of that relationship, the soil of that trust, and how loyalty is defined by both the betrayer and the betrayed. One could say, for example, that the President of the United States betrayed the people he was elected to represent if that President committed American citizens to a war after running on a platform that promised not to do so. In this case, he betrayed his constituency, or those who brought him to power. Alternately, one could say the President betrayed his country if he engaged in activity that is prohibited by the Constitution or federal law. The President may betray his wife if they have agreed to a monogamous relationship and he solicits an intern, whom he is also betraying in his function as a public servant. Again, betrayal depends on the particular relationship as well as the conditions that comprise 'trust' in that relationship. 

For betrayal to occur, a relationship must risk having something at stake: it must have something valuable that can be lost. If I am thinking about stakes and betrayal, it is because I am fascinated by the role parasocial relationships play in the political imaginary. Our super-screened world enables us to identify with the people we want to be seen with, and the imaginary unfolds from that space of visibility, of having seen and being seen as or with. Feeling betrayed by the fact that Taylor Swift couldn't care less about the Palestinian children being murdered by US bombs in Gaza is a sentiment based on a willing delusion about the nature of the relationship between fans and their idol. 

Parasocial relationships, more generally, indulge fantasy and delusion to the point of world-making. Because these relationships originate in the fan's imagination rather than the trust of an intersubjective relationship, it strikes me as a sort of masturbatory betrayal that mistakes its object for a subject. It makes sense to be disappointed in the discovery that Swift doesn't use her social power to defend the lives of the most vulnerable.

Enough with the Swiftie lamentations of betrayal! As a writer, the characters I invent cannot properly be said to betray me—even if they disappoint me. 

One might also wonder what sort of fantasy facilitates the belief that Swift would speak for the lives of Arab children. Activism hardly rises to anything like a priority in her career. Her fans may be global but her platform remains pinned to the emotional landscape of American girliness. Like other limousine liberals, Swift waves a flag of affirmation alongside her peers—but only when it suits her, and under very particular conditions that generate publicity for her public persona. 

Taylor Swift is the sort of poet that is more interested in creating ambiance than revealing a difficult truth. Her poetry is indistinguishable from a GAP ad for cute boyfriend pajamas. But the tastes and preferences expressed in these final two sentences are not dicta for utopia. I don’t want my preferences to become rules or laws. My interest is economic: the law I want guts the entire possibility of the American dream that wants to be billionaire. Taxing Taylor down to a few million would be good for almost everyone.

Ernaux and Duras: A comparison.

[From my 2023 notebook entries attempting to compare what it is that Duras and Ernaux do differently.]

Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux both control the narratives carefully by narrowing staging and circumscribing the temporality of the event. Each book has a distinct, particular time signature… Other books return to the same scene or event but alter the stage and time signature. 

• Absence of a controlled focus, the ripped-from-the-mind feel of the narration, the recursion and repetition make beginning and ending less central to the shape of the novel. This is different from realism, where the beginning and ending are part of the arc, and a way in which success is referenced.

• Suspense is built in the voice’s relation to self through others. Voice – or the sound of their own — is central to style for both writers.

• The interlocutor is rarely described at the outset, or, if they are, the shift occurs inside the You with transitional movements from interior world to exterior.

• Techniques used by both include: rhythm, tempo, use of silence and pauses in a way that resembles music theory, recursive repetition, modulation, use of refrain rather than flashback, ongoing rupture, continuous interruption, contrapuntal alterations between descriptions or inventories and dialogue or address, recurrence, leitmotif, disclosure without psychologizing,  and the centrality of human relationships as a site in which meaning is created.

• Things overheard become part of the speaker's life – the porous self, the unfinished, is often portrayed through non sequiturs and open ended statements or thoughts. The ellipsis, the open dash, the unfinished quotation… 

Both Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras write love as a compulsive and destructive power which involves a loss of self; this loss is gendered by the margins, and the presence of motherhood and children. Both write parenting as an emotional and physical commitment carried primarily by the mother's body and mind.* So: motherhood and romantic love threaten the solitary self that both writers embody. There are no happy or well functioning couples. Therapy doesn't fix or prevent foolishness; therapy doesn't resolve harm. Boundaries are trespassed, selves are modified without being redeemed or improved. Shame persists, in time, in tone, in the grief over utopia, and the refusal of linear time (which is also therapeutic time) or progress.

From the individual memory privileged in Proustian literature, Ernaux attempts a horizontal move into cultural memory, the base of modernity's Memory Studies. This is her structural shift (Duras focuses on landscapes and cinematography instead). I keep trying to find a way to write this without feeling as if I have abandoned my protagonist.

* (Part of me wonders if I could appreciate Ernaux or Duras in the same way without this awareness of how much the cost of mothering is factored into their words. That is the shadow looming behind their stoic silences. The unmentionable, unsexy part. So many of us are bludgeoned by it. How funny that it is gauche to say so. I laugh and look back at the knife or pen in my hand.)

Annie Ernaux and the "oblong perturbance".

1.

Revising a draft essay and thinking about Annie Ernaux’s writing, cutting thousands of words (as usual), I return to her commitment to indeterminacy and its refusal to grant absolution. Her texts never elide the affect of shame and abjection on narrative form. Shame touches everything. Overcoming, in Ernaux, is the arc of narrative bullshit. There is no redemption, no salvation: only the dead statues that surround her in the cathedral she revisited after her abortion.

As an artistic mode, the pieta hovers over the speaker’s assertion of "fearless insight" which arises "from the arid patch of facts." Secular epiphany and hagiographic-femme feels distant from what the author intends to give us. But I use my "we" loosely: I use it and lose it the way a loose woman loses her voice. 

What is at stake for Annie Ernaux as a writer? I ask this dull, unshattering question in order to procure permission for writing about my own Annie, rather than presenting the definitive one. The request for permission here is merely rhetorical, since I will write my own Annie regardless in the hopes that this Annie will enable me to answer other questions presented by her writing. Among these questions: What is at stake for Annie as a character in each of her novelizations? And what is at stake for her readers, particularly the women she hoped would be part of her audience?

2.

Can the verb "transcend" be applied in any shape or formality to this labor, this writing, this life. Should I punctuate myself appropriately by posturing this as a question.

And if I don’t . . .

3.

There are so many Annies, I think again, as dusk descends on Birmingham, Alabama; the horizon pukes up the viscous pinks of its pollution. A friend with three cars tells me he loves Annie Ernaux for her sparsity. "She reminds me of a female Hemingway," he ventures. And I can see how this might be true for him. Just as I can see how Tobi Haslett’s brilliant, deBordian Annie might give us a reading in which each of Ernaux's books presents "the charge" to see and do something, to "rifle through the particulars so you can synthesize and thus transcend them." 

I can visualize the transcendent scenario. I can imagine there is a sense in which the male-identifying critics have, so to speak, nailed it. 

The pink horizon shrieks idiotically, loosening its skirts near the coal-fired power plant. It remains at the periphery of my vision when marveling over the way criticism has enabled readers to believe we can ‘read the same’ book, or live in the same world. Being that shadow of a shade who is less sure of the ground she is standing on, less certain of her "position" on the literary terrain, so to speak, I note the shame of this Birmingham skylines that passes for sunset—- a shame that often takes refuge behind soporifics that purport to overcome or rise above what exists. 

But the sky cannot rise above the coal-power that poisons it. There is no overcoming. No greenwash can scrub this enough for a redemption.

4.

In 1995, four years after the publication of Simple Passion, French author Alain Gerard published Madame, C’est A Vous Que J’Ecris, a novel that responded to Ernaux's from the perspective of the mysterious, married lover. Gerard chronicles the affair as he saw it. 

Where Ernaux's speaker applies "ecriture plat" or the flat affect in writing, the stylistic tone borrowed from reportage, Gerard's speaker emerges from indignation, and a sense of having been wrong. To Eranux's refusal of moral judgment, Gerard brings moralization, emasculation, and betrayal of romantic love.

Simple Passion focuses on the writing subject, the woman’s hunger for the absent lover, and the lover, who has made all the more interesting in his absence. Annie knows this. And by protecting the identity of her married lover, she is also protecting the reader from the other banality of his personality. By devoting so much space to describing the waiting, providing us with a phenomenology of washing herself wait for this man, Annie writes into desire. The anticipation of the lover is superior to the Love. 

As for Betrayal, I think of it as the moment when we discover that we don't ‘know’ the Other. The one we love is a stranger to us. Only the stranger remains fascinating. The stranger is the part we want to keep as well as the part we can't believe. While desire craves a stranger, the relational parameters require maintaining a firm boundary between the ordinary portions of our life.

Ernaux keeps her affair secret from her sons and friends. As an event, her relationship with A. never locates itself in the mundane. A. appears powerful because his life and career determine when they can meet, but that is his only power, really. He is a sexual object. And a sexual object is, ultimately, an asexual one. 

The nineteenth century epistolary novel emphasized the formal conventions of a polite, Victorian femininity. In this form, how much a woman knew was constantly renegotiated with respect to how well she knew her place, and how well she performed obsequiousness. The feminine epistle spoke earnestly, prioritizing feelings and aesthetic responses over claims to intellectual discovery.  In a brilliant, embittered move, Gerard deploys the gender-coded femininity of the epistolary genre to complicate A.'s character while also challenging gender’s connection in the form of the letter. In comparison to Gerard’s entreaties, Ernaux's reportage seems evasive, overly neutral, and possibly spiked by guile. 

Gerard’s A. begins by contesting Ernaux's claim that the novel is not a betrayal. "Nous nous étions promis de ne jamais rien livrer de notre secret," he writes. (We promised ourselves that we would never book anything of our secret.) After portraying her lover as a sex object, Ernaux insults his manhood by narrowing it to his dangling organ. "Choosing to forget that a man isn’t reduced, even if he sometimes fears it, to that oblong protuberance that adorns statues, silencing the crudest part of our nature, you weakened it," A. accuses. 

The charge of emasculation brings to mind the Hermes— those roadside gods associated with Roman decadence—and the dream I keep having of a small classroom with pegs along a wall intended for coats and backpacks, except that each peg is a wooden penis, and the girls are aware that their clothing, their school bags, their lunch, sacks, all hang from this oblong protuberance on the wall.

It goes without saying that the fear of emasculation is closely related to the sort of cultural sensitivity the penis has come to expect. Girls are socialized to protect the penis from knees, elbows, sharp bumps, teeth, insults, withering words, insecurity, disapproval, and the wiles of the cocktease. What the penis expects, the penis must get. Surely there is nothing more serious than a disappointed penis given the power its owner exercises.

Gerard's A. wanted "a story" but what he got was a cheap, pornographic voyeurism with no emotional depth and no spiritual entanglement. He refuses to accept that this is her version of desire: she is either lying or trying to hurt him. He cannot imagine that the book about him is finished. It would have been more feminine if she'd revealed him and exposed the truth of his marriage, rather than foreground her own salacious diddling in the feminine imaginary.

5.

Now I digress in Paris, where Roland Barthes introduced Michel Foucault to Pierre Klossowski around 1963. Barthes observed that both men had a thing for Nietszche's eternal return.

In 1947, Pierre Klossowski married Denise Marie Roberte Morin Sinclaire, a war widow who had been deported to Ravensbrück as a result of her Resistance activities. Setting the suspended vocation aside, all of his future work was to be "dominated by and dedicated to her haunting beauty," as David Macey wrote in The Lives of Michel Foucault (Verso Books).

Denise is the Roberte of Klossowski's drawings and novels. Denise is the one who led his hand to the large-scale drawing graphite and color-pencil sketches executed painstakingly on paper. In Macey’s words: 

Klossowski's novels and drawings make up an imaginary world in which erotic, religious and philosophical themes merge, and, being a self-confessed monomaniac, he has little interest in anything outside that world. Although his work — and especially the trilogy known as Les Lois de l'hospitalité — is sometimes dismissed as misogynist and even pornographic, he insists that it has a mystical content and belongs to a gnostic tradition. Maurice Blanchot endorsed Klossowski's claims when he described his writings as "a mixture of erotic austerity and theological debauchery". Both the novels and the drawings are sequences of scenes, understood in the theatrical sense of that term, and of humiliating encounters between Roberte and characters from a threatening commedia dell'arte. Roberte becomes an object of exchange, circulating endlessly in an erotic economy. She is raped and assaulted, is seduced and seduces, and takes on many different identities but remains unpossessed, inviolable, it being the author's conviction that the deepest level of individuality is a core which is both non-communicable and non-exchangeable. Like the tableaux vivants imagined and staged by de Sade's libertines, Klossowski's words and images betray an obsession with representation itself: representations of plays, of drawings, of drawings of scenes from plays, books about books. They are a theater of simulacra in which everything is represented, and nothing is real. The theatrical scenes that make up the trilogy, in particular, originated in planned drawings that were not actually executed.

Klossowski locates his "theater of simulacra" in the era of ancient Roman decadence, where so-called "simulacra" and simulated effigies of the gods lined the avenues. The presence of the gods on the streets testified to their material existence but also served as a reminder to citizens that worship was required. This was the time of the roadside Herms. What drew Klossowski to these simulacra was their capacity to "sexually determine the divinities they represented, as David Macey explains in his biography of Foucault: "The indeterminacy of their essence was replaced by a materialization, which was that of a sexuality. Gradually, the classical reference became combined with a meditation upon the nature of icons, and the simulacrum is finally defined as constituting the sign of an instantaneous state and cannot establish an exchange between one mind and another, nor permit the transmission of one thought to another... The simulacrum has the advantage of not purporting to fix what it represents or says of an experience; far from precluding it, it implies contradiction."

Michel Foucault’s interest in hermeneutics should be mentioned here, for Foucault discovered a link between the simulacrum and the demon stalking Nietzsche's Gay Science in one of Klossowski's essays. “This is the demon who says that everything in your life... will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence',” Macey observes:

Nietzsche then asks: 'Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine"?

The ambiguity of the demon-god is also that of the sign-simulacrum known as Roberte. For Klossowski, language is an unstable medium in which startling transformations can occur. It is also closely related to the body: Roberte is a word made flesh and her body is of a flesh made of words. 

The body-language relationship generates texts which must have appealed greatly to Foucault's own enjoyment of wordplay. In Roberte ce soir, for example, erotic encounters can be couched in the language of Thomist theology, as when Roberte is penetrated by the sed contra of a colossus while she stimulates her own quid est to orgasm.

In addition to a shared obsession with Nietzsche, Foucault and Klossowski also shared a fascination with de Sade. Apart from Blanchot's Sade et Lautréamont, Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor was one of the first devoted studies of the Marquis. Klossowski read Histoire de la folie intently (it’s not clear that Foucault had read it prior to reading Klossowski’s essay). Gilles Deleuze, who was Klossowski's friend, intimated that Klossowski's work was compelling for a man who resisted the lure of self-definition. All of Klossowski's writing “strives towards a single goal: ensuring the loss of personal identity, dissolving the ego; that is the splendid trophy that Klossowski's characters bring back from a journey to the edge of madness," to quote Deleuze via Macey.

Walking through the tunnel of Danielle Dutton's dresses.

for Daniel Dutton’s dresses

Kiki Smith, “Butterfly” (2000)

i

Danielle Dutton’s “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read” moves like a mix between a quotation-collage and a spec-fi installation that gathers dresses from readings into a collaborative space called the page. The speculative quality demands a certain kind of engagement from the reader, namely, a creative one. Imaginations are invited to bear on what emerges, or is made to happen, in those interactions. One loves it so much that one pines away in its lineaments.

ii

—One of Dutton’s dresses.

“Biography of a Dress” by Jamaica Kincaid.

iii

Why do these dresses elicit a feeling of recognition for me? What does it mean to “identify with” a dress one has read? Which dresses have I read that did not make Dutton’s list?

Three different narrative approaches come to mind. Three ways of thinking about dresses:

a) a quotation-collage of my dresses modeled on Dutton’s

b) a description of my own experiences with Dutton’s dresses

c) a lyrical enumeration of my dresses in relation to each other, and what they picked out from the world, or what they rendered salient

Obviously, the end should be an appendix that names the dress-makers, themselves.

iv

——A few of Dutton’s dresses that I have worn, with the acknowledgment that the sites where I read them must be designated as spaces in which I, too, was worn by them. Or various loci wherein the book became part of the lived experience.

I read dress 60 in the emergency room of the children's hospital as my youngest mammal lifted each wire attached to her body and demanded to know what it meant. What each line was for. Where it was going. How did this line tell the men in white coats what they wanted to know. Sometimes the syntax got so intense that I had to lay the book near her feet and walk to the door, back and forth preparing a riddle. “Why are the mother and child at the ER at 3 a.m.?” My daughter loves riddles. “To give the vampires who live in the basement eight tubes of blood so that the hospital's electricity doesn't go out.” Leaning to kiss her forehead, I whispered a secret to the stories growing inside it: stay lit, I told them. There was more blood to come. And gawd’s heaven knows life is a cartography of places where you learned how to read that shit. 

I read dress 51 through the Romanian summer with seventeen years attached to my name and limp dragging my right leg slightly behind my body. The limp had its own labor; it met prior surgeries at the negotiating table and made bids on the future. I wasn't part of those negotiations. And there was a limp in Rilke's Paris that hounded my steps each time I wore this dress again, each year I could not resist zipping my aging flesh into its strictures. The balm of familiar cuts, the good whir of elliptical anxiety. I would never be a writer, the dress whispered. Dresses know what they know of the best of it.

Late last year, while reading dress 211, I dreamt in orange. And paused at the point when the speaker mentions how Celia Paul ate when her husband was away on business trips: "No candles. No meat. At dinner she'd read Goethe with rice pudding. 'Half of me is still Paul Becker,' she wrote, 'and the other half is acting as if it were.'“ Celia Paul's 'as if' felt like a hinge zipper in dress 21, or maybe it cast a different angle of light on Paul’s interlocutor in dress 31. which remains a complicated and fantastic dress in the epistolary style. The book is addressed to artist Gwen John, or to her ghost. "You and I have often painted self-portraits by proxy," Paul says.

I read dress 31 in the week that repudiated the persistent imbecility of my idealisms.

v

218 The buttons run like rivets down the front.

220 Wednesday: White dress or what?

237 Tonight men stride like elegant scissors across the lawn / to the women arrayed there, petals waiting to loosen.

280 the douce campagna of that thing!

281 a coat in the barbaric style

289 His white gown and the beige blanket of his bed were wet, scarlet and livid.

290 a gown with a hoop skirt, with a hem of gold

311 causing faint alterations of the status quo

312 liberally and light-heartedly [ . . . ] poeticized at a dainty table

313 swathed in greatcoat

888. I stick a knife in my head

vi

Unnumbered, buried in their beginnings. The others have been worn long enough to develop palettes, textures, and images dangling from their verbs like porn-bots from tweets or beer cans from bumpers carrying away the newly-married. The expectations of luminous whiteness. The first one hangs next to a poem I started and never wanted to finish. A poem I did not want to wear. I left it there. —- The second demands attention; it gives rise to duties. Time is structured by it. Poems get written and hidden, and the white dress participates in this game of being. To be or not be that infamous paraphrase. — I wore the third through so many mornings of breast milk that memories curdle when I permit myself to inhabit it, however briefly. The men are the tools capable of cutting the fabric and shape for the girl’s party dress, and they intrude on tthe dress she is reading until the third dress gets overshadowed by the scissors of fourth, and how their elegant whiskerings destroy me. — I have done abominable things when wearing the fifth; have used this dress to excuse the things I did in it. I would do them again for the pleasure of being so damned.

vii

vix

In a celebrated biography of Proust (Tadié) is a small poorly reproduced 1907 photo of Proust and Alfred Agostinelli seated in their motor vehicle, dressed for a journey. Proust, swathed in a greatcoat, one leg crossed over the other, looks puffy and already bored with wherever they are going.

—- Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout

211. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton
218. ”The White Dress” by Lynn Emanuel
220. “Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List” by Andrea Carlisle
237. "Party Dress for a First-Born" by Rita Dove
280. “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” by Wallace Stevens
281. “To a Madonna, Ex-Voto in the Spanish Style” by Anthony Hecht
289. “The Unspoken” by David Hayden
290. “The Scissors and Their Fathers” by Paul Eluard
311. “Sentence” by Donald Barthelme
312. “Walk in the Park” by Robert Walser
313. The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
888. “100%” by Sonic Youth

Excerpts from 'my X's'

A project with UNA last year, a collaboration in publishing with a class taught by the incredible Jason McCall at UNA: the experience of rapidly typing up my notebooks to try and make sense of them, while playing on the interview as a form that has been so highly professionalized and desaturated that our bodies rarely make an appearance in it. My X’s.

A few excerpts . . .

1.

Imagine if every interview started with epigraphs.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We can say any truth and any falsehood. We can affirm and negate in the same breath. We can construe material impossibility at will; in the Hegelian dialectic man ‘falls up’. Thus language itself possesses and is possessed by the dynamics of fiction. To speak, either to oneself or to another, is in the most naked, rigorous sense of that unfathomable beauty, to invent, and to reinvent being and the world.

— George Steiner, Real Presences

What was passed is present, what will be future is past, and what can never be might return time and time again.

— André Aciman

Creative minds know how slight can be the line between flying and falling, between a failure and a co-creation with human fallibility.

— Svetlana Boym

2

This is a book, a text, a way of speaking inside a designated context. But texts are not separate from the world in which they are written. Unlike the borders of nation-states or the fences announced by private property, the mind is continuously permeated by the world. Thinking, itself, is an act that involves being altered by thought.

Maybe “this” also refers to the conditions under which this book originated, particularly the coincidence of its proposal in the week following October 7, 2023, as well as the conditions under which it was written. To begin under these conditions is to admit the instability in our ways of knowing so as to inhabit the particular contingencies of authorship. To admit is not a negative thing. Admitting permits us to think into the difficult and to ask hard questions about boundaries, borders, and ethics. In this sense, to admit gives us permission to transgress the facile line between “right” and “wrong” and explore what is destroyed by such lines. We can ask who stands to benefit from administering them. We can use mirrors for something besides self-affirmation. A mirror can reveal the gaps between the way we imagine ourselves and actuality. “Co-creation” turns a monologue into a dialogue that makes creative use of discord and misunderstanding. I make the book as the book makes me; we make each other with every encounter and conversation; we make the world in relation to the ways we know others have made it. The hardest part for humans is that there is no way to know (or control) what others will make of us. Or: what Others will make of Us.

Saying nothing concisely: Macedonio Fernandez.

"Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes".

—Macedonio Fernandez, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (1925-1952)

1

Mount Parnassus, near Delphi, Greece, has two summits. Back in the ancient days, when the gods still roamed the earth seeking sexual partners among humans, one summit of Mount Parnassus was consecrated to Apollo and the Muses, while the other belonged to Bacchus.

The mountain acquired its name from Parnassus, a son of Neptune. Allegedly, Deucalion's ark came to rest there after the flood. Owing to its connexion with the Muses, Parnassus came to be regarded as the seat of poetry and music; hence To climb Parnassus is "to write poetry".

I’ve been musing about muses, great and small, worshipped or banished. Gratuitously, a “muse” is one who inspires art. Given the gender hierarchy elicited by this word (the Muses served the men’s creations), ‘muse’ has been read as a trope for male supremacy in art. The man needs his muse to make art; the woman is responsible for keeping him inspired and excited. She is whatever he makes her, as Alberto Moravia demonstrated across various fictions.

2

Anna Akhmatova’s poem “The Muse,” was written or published in 1924. It is given to us below in English as translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.

She answers: “Yes.”

I want to leave the riddle of this poem aside for a minute and read it against its grain, as a framing device for the muse.

If you stand near the left side and look at the ellipsis in the center, “she” is there. She is the one whom the speaker attends. She is “her whom no one can command.” She is, obviously, also known as Inspiration. But as you stand here, peering at the poem from the left, following the ellipsis down to the definitive and final yes, there is something else you notice about the muse, apart from her gender.

By closing this poem with a confirmation from the muse, Akhmatova (perhaps unintentionally) plays into emptiness of that affirmation. For, she remains nameless. She is simply the titular whose yes issues from a cloud of fury, flute in hand, “serene and pitiless,” but still anonymous and unknowable. We can’t grasp or hold Akhmatova’s muse. We can supplicate and placate her, but we cannot control her. This romanticized notion of the Muse as female spirit informed even the Surrealist conception of gender: Breton’s novel could not exist without its Nadja.

3

To scat a bit, or to follow the sonic thread into its less ‘intelligible’ modulations, amusement is an affective response to an encounter with the muse, whether real or imagined. A museum is where the muses are collected for others to admire. A curator is the boss who elects what gets preserved and displayed for posterity; the curator is the cleric of reigning muses. Author Macedonio Fernández engaged these varying velocities with his anti-novel, The Museum of Eterna's Novel, that imagined itself as a museum for nostalgia. Make no mistake: it is the imagining that matters to Macedonio, who began writing the book in 1925, and continued wandering through his imaginary museum until his death in 1952.

The novel or museum or nostalgia is a thing that he never entirely finished, and so Museum was published posthumously, 15 years after the death of the author in Argentina (a decade or so before the death of the author in continental philosophy). 

Jorge Luis Borges named Macedonio as one of his muses. But, unlike other modernists, Macedonio had no intent of founding a school or a manifesto party. His refusal of chronology and linear progression was necessitated by his own neo-Pythagorean talismans against hypochondria and constant worry. Where other modernists used stream-of-consciousness as an ornamental facade that guised how the plot was ‘getting to the point’ and drawing us along the arc that peaks in the usual climax, Macedonio diverted, discoursed, meandered, dreamt, reconsidered, and shifted through the ether plotlessly. He made sure to preface this plotlessness with more than 50 potential prologues, preambles, prolegomena, and provocations served to the reader prior to the main course of the text.

Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, 'projected novels', and George Steiner's 'unfinished books' bobbed through my mind like ducks in a bathtub mind when I returned to the Museum of Eterna this weekend (particularly since Joycean stream-of-consciousness has returned to the discourse). 

My marginalia from prior readers included questions (What happens to time and duration in the present? What is time in the museum where one's relationship to time is transformed by conversation with objects? Who is the speaker of the book the author ghosted? ) as well as a note about a character that I snuck into a short fiction that I never submitted for publication, partly because the reference felt too obscure, but mostly for the usual reason known as self-doubt. The character note —- use her song in that story that plays with Eliade — is scribbled next to this passage by Macedonio:

A Romanian woman once sang me a phrase of folk music and I have since found it tens of times in different works from different composers of the past four hundred years. Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don’t begin when they are created. Or the world was created old.

One could say I, too, have mused Macedonio. The way he literally imagines his characters as separate from him, as shadows released into the world by the author’s imagination, was a formative fictional influence for me. What do characters do when the author is sleeping or failing to submit his draft on time? How do they deal with our extraordinary self-doubt that translates into a penchant for fiddling which refuses to commit the text to closure, just in case another character should pop in and make sense of the madness?

Macedonio says of the characters:

It’ll be necessary that some of them have altercations and even become enemies, as is obvious, considering the close quarters they share, living in the same novel: characters destined to be permanent rivals, or those who are so only for a moment, must both conduct themselves as people who nevertheless share the same death, at the same place and time: the end of the book.

The text is a museum but also a novel, which Macedonio defines as a formal expression of the imaginary. “Author: I shouldn’t say to the reader, ‘Come into my novel,’ but rather save him from life indirectly,” he writes. “My quest is that every reader should enter my novel and lose himself in it; the novel will take him in, bewitch him, empty him out.”

In its layers of frenzied avowals, the novel vacates the reader. We read to become nothing, or to relish the author’s preference for a gnostic plenitude of nada. Subtitled "the first good novel", the Museum makes deploys injunctions until the syntax, itself, begins to resemble a literary manifesto. Macedonio demands "constant fantasy" of his words, a stream of half-conscious phantastes that protect the reader from the horror of embodied reality, a horror that the author refuses the status of reality. The pages must “avoid the hallucination of reality, which is a blemish on the face of art.” 

Borges lost faith in his muse as his own fame grew. In this, Borges meets the countless writers and thinkers who abandoned viscosity for a more respectable, orderly cosmogony in their later years. To Borges' chagrin, Macedonio never really changed his tune on relativism: the only real world was the one in our heads. His commitment to modernism refused the industrialized Progress implied by GNP and GDP. He lived his aversion to productivism as praxis rather than theory. Perhaps most notably, he managed not to avoid modernism's tendencies to indulge in literary neocolonialism. 

Modeling our plethoras of swank and messianic pragmatism, American authors have disavowed most of that relativist namby-pamby, which is to say, we have privatized it as a locus of magic that only exists between the patient and their therapist. But Macedonio looks up from his hermetic cave and points to the indescribable images on the wall. He cannot remember drawing them. Is he the author or the interpreter? Who will explain what he imagines?

Privileging the act of thinking and imagining over existing inside the terms defined by others, Macedonio's commitment to the imaginary can be read alongside critical theory's focus on literature as a space where the world of the future might (and must) appear.

On a funnier note, rumor has it that Macedonio was a descendant of the Macedonio family of Naples, Italy who claimed descent from the Macedonian dynasty of Eastern Rome and Philip II of ancient Macedonia. “Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes,” as Macedonia wrote.

Turning directly to the reader with his cavernous You, Macedonio promises: "You will be the one who changes Thought to Love and I will be the pause or the anticipation during which time cannot change things.” One is undone by such preposterous, metaphysical intimacy.

Richter's lustrated photographs.

1

I’m think of archives, photographs, and alterity in the reading of the ordinary. Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives deploys the chance encounter and temporal to place archives in conversation with one another. In these telepathic archives, the image serves as a sort of communicative interlocutor who instructs the reader on what to make of it. Howe locates a "visionary spirit, a deposit from a future yet to come," in the domain of research libraries and special collections. This "mystic documentary telepathy" arrives suddenly, pressing "things-in-themselves" against "things-as-they-were-for-us."

Here, the poet centers the "insignificant" material details: "quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-out." Howe rewrote William Carlos Williams' Paterson — an archival study of the scholar's relationship to the text.

This playful engagement of archives lends itself to poesis. But archives are more complicated where I come from. . . archives are expected to provide a sort of justice. I should begin with a word, lustration, that hangs over European history as well as art. The etymology draws on the ancient Latin word, lustratio, meaning “purification by sacrifice”:

“Purification by sacrifice” is an action undertaken to restore lost purity, and that is certainly the way many politicians have attempted to efface the past crimes of governments: name the dirty ones and ask them to stand as scapegoats for the things ordinary citizens did at a time when their governments funded and sustained genocide, war crimes, and pageants perfumed by patriotism.

Baptism, itself, is a form of lustrating ritual. For context, however, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry on the lustrations of the 1990’s in Central and Eastern Europe:

Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe is the official public procedure of scrutinizing a public official or a candidate for public office in terms of their history as a witting confidential collaborator (informant) of relevant former communist secret police, an activity widely condemned by the public opinion of those states as morally corrupt due to its essential role in suppressing political opposition and enabling persecution of dissidents. Surfacing of evidence for such a past activity typically inflicts severe reputation damage to the person concerned. It should not be confused with decommunization which is the process of barring former communist regular officials from public offices as well as eliminating communist symbols.

The principle of non-retroactivity means that a past role of a confidential collaborator (informant) is alone as such inadmissible from the beginning for criminal prosecution or conviction, thus, lustration allows at least to bring such past collaborators to moral responsibility by making the public opinion aware of the established outcomes through their free dissemination. Another motivation was the fear that undisclosed past confidential collaboration could be used to blackmail public officials by foreign intelligence services of other former Warsaw Pact allies, in particular Russia.

Depending on jurisdiction, either every positive result or only the one obtained regarding a person who falsely declared otherwise, may trigger consequences varying greatly among jurisdictions, ranging from mere infamy to purging the person from office and a 10-year exclusion from holding public offices. Various forms of lustration were employed in post-communist Europe.

In the curation of historical memory, the interest of the nation-state and empire often diverges from that of the scholar. Public memory, after genocide and war, demands recollection, or re-collecting.

2

Horst Richter was a school teacher, a father, a community member known for his staunch, traditional valorization of family life. He was also a member of the Nazi Socialist Party, a war veteran, an owner of faded Nazi uniforms. 

When the postwar lustration of German Nazis began, Horst lost his teaching license. His son, Gerhard Richter, spent his childhood in the Third Reich. Many years later, Gerhard vaguely recalled the attractions of militarism as a young member of the Hitler Youth. Childhood marks its weather on the basis of sunniness, and how close the next son is to the rays of the father. 

Gerhard Richter's photographs lustrate themselves by over-exposing the image. I am staring at a photograph of his aunt, Marianne, who was committed to an asylum for schizophrenia at the age of 18.  By the war's end, 3,272 patients of the state mental institution had been murdered as part of the Nazi program to exterminate the mentally ill or socially unstable. Aunt Marianne was among them.

Richter implies that his uncle worked at the hospital where Aunt Marianne was interned. 

Werner Heyde was one of the psychiatrists who organized Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program. When the war ended, Heyde was imprisoned along with other Nazi officials. In 1947, Heyde escaped. Hidden behind the alias Fritz Sawade, Heyde practiced sports medicine and psychiatry in the town of Flensburg. He shopped at the grocery store. He served as an expert witness in local court cases. For 13 years, Mr. Sawade lived as an ordinary, upper-middle-class German until a falling-out with a friend led to his identity being betrayed. 

On November 12, 1959, Werner Heyde turned himself in to police in Frankfurt, ending 13 years as a fugitive. The picture below was taken at his arrest.

In 1964, a few days before he was put on trial for his war crimes, Heyde knotted a noose and ended his own life.

Gerhard Richter painted "Herr Heyde" in 1965 based on Heyde's arrest photo. It is no longer on display anywhere. The painted caption reads: "Werner Heyde in November 1959, turning himself in to the authorities." Richter described this painting as an effort to evoke the paranoia of realizing that one’s neighbors served as functionaries in the state apparatus of genocide. 

In 2002, Richter still claimed that there was no conscious link between his aunt's deaths and the juxtaposition of these early family portraits. Childhood is when the family portrait is strange but not yet evil: it hasn’t been developed in a darkroom yet.

3

There is a poem by Phillis Wheatley that speaks to recollection here, in the US: it is a brilliant poem and I find myself leaning along its edges and rhyme schemes, noting how formal rules often served as tests for demonstrating poetic competence. In 1761, a slave ship brought the poet from West Africa to Boston, where she was purchased by a rich tailor and his wife. Six years later, Wheatley’s first poem was published in Newport, Rhode Island’s local newspaper.

In 1773, Wheatley published her only collection of books, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, with a press in London. It was the first published book by what historians called “African-Americans,” at a time, of course, when that moniker referred to Black persons enslaved by white men. Wheatley, herself, was still enslaved when this groundbreaking book was published. She was officially ‘freed’ in 1778 and she went on to marry another freedman, John Peters. But Peters abandoned her and their children in Boston. This city, Boston, is where Phillis lived in poverty, losing two children and nursing a mortally ill child when she died and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Here is one of the thirty-six poems published in Phillis Wheatley’s book:

After purchasing his slave, John Wheatley ‘gave her’ an American name. He re-baptized her. He purified her of all connections to what she calls her “Pagan land” in first line of “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The relationship between colonialism and Messianism continues to haunt US policy. Whenever an ethnic group or nationality is described as ancestrally related to Cain, I cringe with disgust. There is nothing harmless or innocent in colonialism’s sick and vicious gods.

The Thought-Piece That Can't Think It's Self

Literary criticism is, to me, a literary form: a type of writing that uses language to reveal the mind at work in reading and interpreting a text. George Steiner, William Gass, Kenneth Burke, Susan Sontag, and Robert Boyers, among others, strung together stunning combinations of words in order to describe their response to books. Perhaps that’s why I’m surprised by the complaints about an absence of rigorousness in contemporary critique? How we measure rigor, or what constitutes rigor, is often evaded in these complaints, many of which emerge as “thought-pieces” laden by a rigorous vapidity calculated to solicit the viral attention of the hot-take.

If rigor reflects the satisfaction of certain intellectual form, we should remember that an episteme is desirous: it tells us about what a mind wants to know as well as the way in which it wants to know such things. Epistemic desire is satisfied differently and what is interesting is not being convinced of one’s desire—not being convicted (the judge), condemned (the priest), or sold (salesman)—but being expanded to fathom the possibility.

Rigor is close attention to the shape of possibility, a shape that is frequently foreclosed by policing the boundaries of how thought should look. A critic whose focus is policing the borders loses the opportunity to think about how borders are constituted, and what it means to be constitutive. There is more intellectual labor at play in tracing the entrails of one’s personal misogyny through a New Critical reading than in denying such a thing could be possible. Or tucking one’s shirt into neutrality. Denial is easy but it isn't interesting or difficult, though templates abound.

According to proponents of the liberal arts, literature produces empathy in the reader. How can we, as writers, evaluate a book while speaking as if the critic is not, herself, another reader whose emotional experience and socialization determine her interpretive dance?

While trying to find words for the difference between studying the self and inhabiting the implicated subject, I came across a 2016 article that reads as if written in the present. In the year when the final videocassette recorder was manufactured, writer and editor Jason Guriel howled his lament against nefarious tendencies in contemporary criticism from the pages of the Canadian Walrus, bringing nothing short of his full-throated, first-person pronoun to bear on the excessive indulgence of what he calls “confessional criticism.” Launching his argument from the titular claim “I Don’t Care About Your Life”, Guriel immediately offers us a glimpse of his own in the first sentence:

Browsing the arts and culture pages of various websites recently, I kept running smack into it: the first-person pronoun, as conspicuous as a Corinthian column.

To note, that's an "I" in the title and an "I" in the introductory sentence. 

"Surely he's attempting to poke fun at his own title," I thought. An "I" for an "I" leaves a cool (if slightly hysterical) ripple on the surface of the opening, and ripples are not uncommon in preludes, but then, while re-reading the tail end of that big-engine yacht: I kept running smack into it: the first-person pronoun, as conspicuous as a Corinthian column.  

One could blame the Corinthian column’s splendor for Guriel’s fumbling of this opening. One could blame me for writing any of this as I sit on hold with our health insurance company to find out if the medication my child needs to live will be covered this year. One could accuse me of ruining the effect of an serious essay by mentioning the personal conditions under which thinking, or the act of surveying possibility in relation to logic, is conducted. I would not deny it; ruins and their ruinscapes fascinate me.

Giovanni B. Piranesi, Seven columns of the Temple of Juturna with Corinthian capitals . . . (18th century)

What I appreciate about Guriel's essai is the fact that he articulates it from behind the very first-person he derides. What I depreciate is Guriel’s failure to acknowledge that the essay reads like that of one who assumes his own authority and reliability can be proven as a subject where he glides above the “messily human” like a god in one of those temples with Corinthian columns and whatnot.

Readers more luminous than I have celebrated the shift towards epistemic exposure where the critic doesn’t hide behind the presumption of neutral scholarship. If we like something, we speak to the liking self. A preference is always personal, even if it is popular, even if it becomes canonical and adored by infinity. 

At present, the human condition is still relational. One can imagine a day when this will not be the case, but as yet, in the moment, the writer addresses an audience while  expressing their relation to a text. Meaning is negotiated between the text, the audience, and the speaker. Thus, interpretation depends on what is claimed in relation to what has been read. (And if this claim changes in relation to what has been "said" or elocuted.) 

The "I" is always there, however hidden: the critic is neither ghost nor godhead. What Guriel holds against this visible 'I' is that it doesn’t "guarantee more honest criticism." Surely carrying this thought directly to you, his readers, would involve defining “honest." For there are many ways of being honest, and the insurance salesman believes he is giving me the honest truth when he barters his wares. 

"What do you think this editor means by honesty?" I asked my friend Radu.

To his credit, Radu gnaws his bone and pretends as if I do not exist. As for Guriel, he takes issue with "first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography," critics who "wrestle with themselves" rather than sticking to "their assigned cultural object," critics who "embrace sincerity and locate cultural objects in relation to their own lives," critics involved with the Internet, critics with high "regard for pop culture," critics that exhibit a  "declining belief in tradition or canon" and "David Foster Wallace," in general. 

What Guriel likes is unclear–he doesn’t name names–and the closest he comes to expressing favor is when he nods towards Virginia Woolf in order to warn us that "the confessional voice is dangerously attractive." This dangerous attractiveness stems from a moral issue, namely, it enables the writer to 'indulge' their "egoism to the full." 

Immediately, I began to suspect that such a dangerously attractive voice, such an indulgent and limitlessly-egotistical voice, would refuse to define the terms upon which it based its argument. Such a voice might assume, instead, that the emphatic tone of communication validates the emotion and frees the speaker from the labor of developing an argument. 

But is it unreliable? Apparently, it cannot be because "the unreliable narrator is a cliche, and such confessions have long since become codified and suspect," Guriel adds. Codified, suspect, confessions, cliche: the words begin to smack of a courtroom drama with its stacks of legalistic cliches and evasive hyperboles. But Guriel is just getting started with the legal undertone, for soon he demands "a temporary moratorium on the memoir" in order to protect readers from his own disdain for the fabulous Geoff Dyer.

"Good criticism, like good films, will always give the impression of depth, of a presiding, trustworthy personality," Guriel concludes. To be fair, the Cambridge Dictionary defines the adjective 'trustworthy' to mean "able to be trusted"; "reliable"; "honest"; "straight"; "sincere"; "truthful". 

Fortunately, after being on hold for 38 minutes, the insurance specialist has appeared on the phone. She is ready to discuss payment plans. Having exhausted my time on hold, I return to the work at hand. But not without noticing that Guriel's ideal trustworthy personality seems oddly unsettled by its own sincerity. In the "depth" of that "presiding" persona on the page, the critic fails to notice his own I lumbering grumpily across the page. The chastising tone and the argument from personal feeling  makes Guriel sound a tad cliche, a bit like that unreliable narrator he chides— a mistake that the brilliant Geoff Dyer would never make. 

Unsaids.

My day opened into Dada, or the gist of it. Going back through the archives of Documents, marking the correspondences between Michel Leiris’ writing and that of Georges Bataille— the unsaid vibrates throughout.

Dusk of a few days prior. A phone call from C., who insists that the existentialist relationship to absurdity is acknowledgment followed by a continuance of life. Dada positions itself in a similar relationship to meaninglessness, but occupies a different aesthetic practice, namely, a sort of clowning that seeks to fill out the contours of absurdity and creates awakening.

Tristan Tzara’s “Simultaneous poems for four voices plus simultaneous with 300 definitive idiocies” brought about a special dimension to text that foregrounded sound, or perhaps it moved the poem towards music, or maybe it expanded the field of the poem to the point of meeting the intersection between the infinite in the void.

Simultaneous poetry, invented by Tristan Tzara and Richard Hulsenbeck, was intended to deconstruct the text by its simultaneous reading in several different languages. Hans Richter a friend and collaborater of Dadaists, defined simultaneous poetry as a "contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc.. simultaneously, in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work, elegiac, funny or bizzare.”

—-Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art quoted in Subversive Body in Performance Art

Dada didn’t hold the literal reading against the language. What Dada reproached was language's presumed connection to the rational, a presumption that permitted the construction of systems.

The condition of the “not yet sayable”

At which point is expression abolished?

In French, de faire express means to do some thing on purpose, and I always hear that when the word expression inches into conversations about abstract expressionism or representation.

Andre Masson, Armchair for Pauline Borghese

Packing an overnight bag and pausing near the stack of books I am currently reading, pausing and leaning over to kiss them: “I’ll be back,” and hoping the teens don’t catch me whispering tenderly to the books. The absurdity—-and yet, I mean it.

Radu’s food and his bone and the t-shirt I keep in the car, for nights that descend without pajamas. Harried.

The hustle and the harry, briefly interrupted by pleasure of conversing with Idra Novey, and lacking time to do justice to the breadth of her poetics, the intersections with her translation practice, the role of images in the textual encounter with the dead . . . “Our Good Ghosts” exists, with gratitude to Orion, but there is always something missing. Always an absence in my obsession with being exhaustive, an obsession whose impossibility I recognize, and perhaps require as a suspending void beneath the tightrope one walks when writing about the writing of others.

Soon and Wholly running the ramparts in my head. Poems that move with the suppleness of a hand in a sepia photo, watering roses—-the face absented, the hand’s owner abstracted from the motion of tending and close attention.

Idra Novey opens "Letters to C.", her series of poems addressed to Clarice Lispector, with a roman numeral, "I.", and then shifts into the epistolary address:

Dear C, I'm turning from.

The end-stopped line refers obliquely to the turn in the epigraph, a quotation from Clarice Lispector's letter to Fernando Sabino, dated 1946:

At three in the afternoon, I'm the most demanding woman in the world . . . When it's over, six in the afternoon comes, also indescribable, in which I turn blind. 

A conversation that picks up from one thread of the unsaid leads into a new unsaying:

I made a mess of page twenty-two,
couldn't resurrect what you left unsaid
into words that wouldn't. 

This one-stanza poem shapes itself as a letter that crawls down the page rather than across it. The shape does not give us that horizon. 

It leaves us in a single line: "I. N." The unidentified. The translator. 

Unsaid: The dreams that follow me into the kitchen, the ghosts that grab my chin and force me to look at them, the way the world whirls away mid-conversation when unsaid things run their goosebumps over my arms, my legs, the whorl of their Listen. 

"Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning," Giorgio Agamben says of poetry in When the House Burns Down.

And there is something lucid hewn from the possibility preserved by the unsaid. The best way to describe it is by looking at how much is said, how much is spoken and communicated across alienating mediums and disguises. 

Agamben urges us to trust that moment when we look at one another without posing words, screens, and Beauty between us. 

Trust the unsaid that doesn't fear being read in simultaneity, amid the absurdity of dailiness—- the demands of those roses.

Trust a stone to keep the whole story carved into it.

Trust the bark of a tree in Tuscaloosa.

A word between Celia Paul and Gwen John.

Deeds which populate the dimensions of space and which reach their end when someone dies may cause us wonderment, but one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies in every final agony, unless there is a universal memory . . . What will die with me when I die, what pathetic and fragile form will the world lose? 

— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Witness”

Celia Paul. Letters to Gwen John. New York: NYRB Classics, 2022. (pp. 241-244)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1962.

1

I keep fumbling back towards a word used by Celia Paul in Letters to Gwen John, an epistolary to a ghost, a correspondence with the spirit of artist, Gwen John. (For more on Gwen John, there is a riveting read on her colors and tone by Neil Lebeter.) The word, itself, is a wraithlike thing that inscribes an affinity while articulating a shared position between them: 

This word, recueillie, is slightly off kilter. The conjugation twitches, but that isn’t what draws me back to the word. I feel like Celia Paul hid something in it; she folded a secret into a pose that becomes a series of re-poses.

In French, recueillie serves as a noun and an adjective for a certain exterior calm, an imperturbable tranquility, a coolness that withholds concern, an unflappable demeanor. 

“You and I have often painted self-portraits by proxy,” Celia tells Gwen. They have also shared this an angle of repose, a position of the body, a pose that becomes a place of encounter in absence. Recueillie, in Celia’s usage, becomes a body. Or an oeuvre: an artistic corpus.

“What will die with me when I die, what pathetic and fragile form will the world lose?” The question belongs to Jorge Luis Borges, but the italics are mine.

2

After spending years as Rodin's muse and lover, Gwen John withdrew from the world to occupy a solitude that made space for art.

After being "the muse" of Lucian Freud and raising a son sired in that relationship, Celia Paul recognizes herself in John's desire to be unperturbed. 

"I have hoped to be unassailable and complete within myself," she writes to Gwen. But there is something that wants to be created; there is "something stirring" inside her, something to which she wants "to be receptive," something that compels her to seek the ghost's "guidance."  

Drawing on the ideal of recueillie, Paul considers her own self-portraits, or the ways in which she imagines herself. 

Her painting, Overshadowed, is a self-portrait inspired by Sofonisba Anguissola's self-portrait that reveals her famous teacher, Bernardino Campi, working in the margins. Titled Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (1539), the artist depicts him "brush in hand, in the act of painting her." Celia’s tone lacks inflection when she writes, matter-of-factly, that the "powerful portrait" of her belongs to him, "as if painted by him, on his canvas."

In this double-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, according to Celia:

Although "pleased" with her depiction of Lucian ("it caught him as he was, quicksilver and mercurial"), Celia decided to paint him out of the portrait. But men insinuate themselves into the emptiness that surrounds a woman’s body, especially when this emptiness exists as a repudiation of their influence.

Painting him out didn’t prevent Lucian from leaving what Celia calls "a shadow," a trace of an encounter. 

She tells Gwen about her battle with the impossible stain of Lucian’s shadow:

These eyes "alive and alight with challenge" indicate Lucian's presence. It is a gendered presence, as Celia explains. It is a presence she recognizes and feels throughout her body, from her head to her shadow. Her solution has been to step aside and refuse the cockfights. And Celia recognizes this part of herself in Gwen: both have relinquished the ring and let the men have at it. This is where the pose comes in:

“Only by being withheld (recueillie) can we access this strength.” The pose of withholding merges with the refusal to squander that reserve of energy (or strength) on male artists and partners. It is self-sabotaging to waste one’s artistic energy on trying to win. The palette is waiting to be discovered.

“Your self-portraits are always painted on a small canvas,” Celia continues. And she begins thinking about her own work. There is "a small, dark self-portrait" of Celia’s head and shoulders that "burns with a quiet intensity." The color scheme is “is russet and gray: the colors of late autumn.”

Despite her physical absence, Celia places Gwen in the present, collaborating as her mentor, a spiritual proximate.

“I thought of you a lot when I made this image of myself,” she writes.

And then Celia pauses. You can almost feel her looking up, and away, from the page. You can almost smell the cerulean canvas overpainted and darkened by grays. "I need you more than ever, Gwen,” she continues, “I need you to direct your calm regard upon me, to steady me. I am entering a time of turbulence.” You can almost taste the chilled air of the studio, the scattered brushes, the empty sink. The loneliness is about to begin.

3

In 1996, while restoring "Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola", the specialist laborers came across a spectral spot in the painting. Anguissola’s left hand seems to be holding a glove, but the laborers found that it was actually another hand, covered up in varnish, influencing the painter's hand. Mairead Small Staid describes the hand's implied motion as that of reaching up and "out of the canvas-within-a-canvas, as if to guide Campi’s own hand, as if to take his mahl stick and brush."

I shuddered with pleasure at these descriptions. As for what the Campi, Rodin, or Lucian Freud intended, I have no way of knowing. Nor am I convinced that any member of that trio possessed the self-reflexiveness to know their own intentions, or to distinguish between their actions and their accidents.

In a different sky, there is trio of writers well-versed in self-interrogation; three writers capable of making the sorts of mistakes we call accidents. And I find my recueillie-informed wandering towards them, enunciating their names in a whisper so my dog will not get jealous as I set aside three spoonfuls of mango creme, an offering flavored by the tenderness most writers feel for our ghosts. Yes, it is true. Clarice Lispector and Thomas Merton and Ingeborg Bachmann all died young in fires of their own accidental forgery, in bed with cigarettes burning forever, the accident of sleep.

A clime that could have arrived . . .

A FEW THINGS THAT ARRIVED IN A CLIME THAT COULD HAVE BEEN A HANGOVER OR A MIGRAINE

Enrique Vila-Matas concludes Montano's Malady with a description of Robert Musil on a mountain. As the coat, the hat, and the expression on Musil's face emerge from words, I recognize them immediately from the photo Vila-Matas used to write this. A photograph taken of Musil on a mountain. When I inform my dog that book ends with a photograph of Musil rather than the ghost invoked by the author to meditate, briefly, on the city of Prague, he barks three times. 

The author doesn't acknowledge the photograph at any point in the text. In this, Vila-Matas resembles Samuel Beckett, who rarely ever names the paintings by the Old Dutch Masters that figure prominently in his descriptions of landscapes and interiors. 

Alone in his cottage, Beckett stared at those paintings, described what he saw, and then placed the images in the frame we call fiction. Perhaps he was trying to exorcise them from his imagination. Obsessive relationships are tiresome. There are times when the only way out requires us to reproduce the thing we can't stop remembering. Reproduction can be read as a rite of exorcism. My dog barks again, this time for no reason. One bark seems more like a question than a response. The paintings in question feature dark backgrounds altered by shafts of light that invoke the metaphysical, a word Beckett avoided using since being kicked out of his mother's womb. 

In the past year, I've watched over 118 videos of pilots debriefing the circumstances of various airplane crashes across the world. But only at night. Only when the house is sleeping do I return to my obsession and loop its possibilities. 

The plane crashes are familiar to me. The shape of the horror engorged by the instant of realization that death is inevitable: this is already present when I begin watching the videos. Thus, each viewing offers a sense of recognition wherein the speaker reveals how the thing I imagined did actually happen, as confirmed by the evidence. The videos involving crashes relax me. They affirm my own experiences. They help me let go of the worrisome world and drift off to sleep like most imbeciles. 

Only during those secret moments near midnight when my family sleeps and my dog snores am I permitted to live in the real world of airplanes. Unlike the world inhabited by most upright 21th century humans, the airplane world of minor writers and single barks knows that numbers exist to keep us from thinking about what numbers exist to avoid saying. The odds are not comets but the horizon is saturated with them. 

I rarely leave home without a set of dice pilfered from a board game belonging to my kids tucked inside my backpack. Whenever an unexpected bird enters the frame, I remove the dice from the inner pocket and roll them. But what are the odds? I wonder. How much would the odds matter if we didn't secretly believe literature is a map that seeks to obscure its repetitions? 

Bloody Mary only appears if you say her name three times while looking in a mirror. Dorothy has to click her heels three times to move between two mutually-denying worlds. There is the world with a house on a prairie and a family, but that world feels less real than the one run by the tiny magician. 

Families in houses are not very realistic. Insomnia, on the other hand, is very realistic. 

Montano's Malady situates itself firmly in the field of literature without laying claim to a literary genre. It is a story about a story that cannot be told, just as literary criticism is an imaginary world inspired by its relationship to finding language for the co-imagining of worlds created by others. 

Knock knock, says the book I am currently writing when not writing. 

An ex-lover appeared on the patio as I watered the flowers planted by my children. “Not you again,” I said wistfully. The former was wearing equipment. He was involved in a sort of dressage. He was dressed for a marathon and totally drunk. “You're a liar,” he said to me, in that dolorous tone which appears on the coattails of an unsustainable andante moderato. At some point, you just need an explosion. Like any violin, I wanted at that moment to kiss him, an urge I resisted by nourishing the white and pink flowers, and pretending to be a gentle drizzle located directly above the flowerbed, leaking down from a stationary, spot-specific cloud. So many plane crashes occur because pilots underestimate a cloud, I thought, and what literary critics ignore is how autocriticism isn't a nouveau cumulus dominated by women with pedicures and broken hearts but rather a cloud that has continued reforming itself for centuries across the globe. No cloud can be called an American, yet critics continue to write as if the only language of clouds is contemporary, or some variant of English with an American passport. 

“If you think I'm a liar, you should walk down a street with Enrique Vila-Matas,” I said to my ex, fondly. In the years between our last meeting, my ex had developed significant calf muscles. I wouldn't have recognized him if ordered to pick him out from a series of calf-profiles in a police station; there would be no way to say with certainty yes officer, this is in fact my ex without being permitted to smell his breath, a situation that would inflame my fondness and make it harder to resist kissing him. I have been practicing the art of resistance for decades. The autobiographical self is frequently buried inside a nest of abstraction that elides the drunkenness of the author (who might be Marguerite Duras or any significant other) while weaving a mysterious aura around the character who is wobbling on the patio, guising the slur of their intonation with images of the ocean and intensified sand dunes. Every time I read about an octopus, I remember throwing up in the ocean and then trying to swim away from it, like many literary critics swim away from their presence on the page in order to demonstrate to those on the shore that the rigor with which they swim away makes them reliable and certainly more trustworthy than the drunk ghost of a former lover on the patio. Or his author. 

“Did you bang him?” my ex demanded, possibly alluding to Vila-Matas or Duras or whatever author I was reading at that moment. Once again, I remembered how viciously we had fought about Proust, and how all my ghosts existed in relation to their particular misinterpretation of Proust, as well as the various timbres of passive-aggressiveness with which they voiced those self-serving bastardizations (usually when soused) so that, even though their calves and nostrils disappeared from my memory, I could still tell the police how each one of them read Proust. I could identify each one as the X who promulgated that particular bastard variant with Jaegermeister on his breath. “Of course not!” I said to the ex, raising my shoulders indignantly, as if to italicize my refusal to countenance his way of thinking about books. I would never harm a book, no, even if I hated a book, I would not harm it physically in any way. No bang. No boink.

“A seagull went by and I'm not going to follow it,” my ex said ominously. In a fit of insecurity, he had stolen my use of italics in order to draw attention to his own emotional needs and ornithologies. In truth, he had always been the liar and his pants were on fire and his lechery was notorious in certain circles. Even when he was not drunk, I wanted to kiss him and bang things together the way children bang the naked plastic bodies of Barbies together to indicate Love/Sex/Reproduction /Recreation has occurred. I found the Barbies in those positions on a bookshelf in the basement. I felt a migraine inching into the margins of my promiscuous parenting, a regimen defined by my failure to adopt a singular mommy-book method (although I had flirted with attachment-detached paraphernalia in the early days). So I said to my ex that it was good to see him. Truly, it was good to see his calves glistening in the patio sunlight, and to watch all that light shattering over his equipment, shattering and recombining into what could only be described as a shimmery worm looking for attention and italics. “You're a liar,” he said wistfully. “It's a pity that you over-watered those flowers by letting that cloud get out of hand and now all the flowers are dying. They are drowning,” my ex said. “What sort of mother holds Proust against her ex while massacring innocent plants that rely on her for sustenance?”

Knock, knock, said the book. Meet me on the patio.

On the politics of poetry.

[I discovered this post in my website’s drafts . . . which makes it seem a bit dated, if not for the fact that I returned to Pat Parker this morning while mired in editing. And so I am sharing the unfinished draft in the hopes that this very unfinishedness adds another dimension to the original drift . . .]

1

As Israeli’s Right-wing regime shuts down Al Jazeera offices and uses its power to further limit free speech and reporting on the part of those bearing witness to war crimes, I keep trying to parse the utter absurdity of PEN America's refusal to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, a refusal that the board justifies on the basis of not wanting to "be political."

—As if defending the books of LGBTQ authors in Alabama against banning isn't political.

—As if the panel PEN America generously funded in Birmingham, Alabama on bodily autonomy and the criminalization of abortion in my home state wasn't flagrantly political, from the panelists, themselves, to the location of this event at Burdock Book Collective.

PEN International was formed to advocate for political dissidents in 1921—that was the immediate impetus, to protect writers from carceral states that sought to imprison them and limit their speech for political reasons. The PEN International Charter was approved at the 1948 Copenhagen Congress. The original language of the Charter has always been interpreted as a demand for activism, as PEN notes on its website: “We hold meetings with key decision makers to secure legislative and policy change. We work with national governments, regional human rights bodies and international organisations. We submit reports and recommendations, including submissions to the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review.” Annual resolutions evidence the calling-out and naming of nation-states currently involved in gross crimes against human freedom and speech.

If literature weren’t political, PEN America would have no reason to exist.

The Vice President of PEN America, Dinaw Mengetsu, said as much. And so I return to poetry—between deadlines and failures—to remind myself, briefly, that the powerful (including the highly-educated staffers surrounding Joe Biden) fear justice and social change more than they fear catastrophe. Many of them would rather promote catastrophe through legislation, as with the mind-boggling “no red lines” support of Israel and the billions of dollars given to corporations fueling climate change, than imagine a world that refuses this.

The US government funds a genocide and arrests student protestors for refusing to go along with it. The problem is that the protestors can imagine a world without genocide, and this is unbearable to the national-security statists.

2

Poetry also does this work of imagining the impossible. Poetry carries protest beneath its skirt, tucked into its back pocket, buried beneath the closed eyes of an elegy.

Poetry imagines the impossible because the world that we have been given remains intolerable.

Intolerable: this neoliberal air-conditioned nightmare run by the cynical billionaires whose dark money determines US electoral outcomes.

Intolerable: this pageant of cowards in business attire, engorged bylines dripping from their mouths, and resumes so rich that ones needs an antacid to even glance at them.

Intolerable: the paucity of thought in the lives of these ‘thought leaders,’ and the absence of self-consciousness, an awareness of their own thoughtlessness, and a conscience that makes getting things wrong more important than defending their over-published egos.

The intolerables stack and no think-piece can touch the mess in my head; no directive or slogan can settle the ghosts of Gaza’s children, whose lives have been torn from them as the Western superpowers watch and mumble platitudes about “well, if Hamas hadn’t done it what it did, then all these innocent children would haven’t to be dead. . .”

3

Yesterday, I found myself returning to one of Pat Parker’s poems for guidance. A simple poem about love. A poem that does love rather than smother it with roses and ornaments.

Pat Parker knew that poetry was political. She knew what she knew as a Black lesbian-feminist poet and performer. She stood on those stages and spoke her body into those poems to deny the neutrality of white liberals. She did not exist to console or comfort the politically-powerful.

Child of Myself, Parker’s debut poetry collection, was published in 1972, and gave us a series of poems that refused to abandon the child in herself that had been abandoned by family. Like countless poets from Rainer Rilke Rilke to Diane Di Prima, Parker needed to change her life in order to be able to write. And she did so repeatedly, moving back and forth between poetry, activism, and family, attempting to unite these things rather than find herself continuously divided by them.

[When she died, Parker was survived by her partner of nine years, Martha (“Marty”) Dunham, and their daughter, Anastasia Dunham-Parker-Brady, as well as the daughter she co-parented, Cassidy Brown.]

Pat Parker and Audre Lorde.

Personal experience served as the basis for Parker’s knowledge. She married playwright Ed Bullins in 1962, and spent four years “scared to death,” in her own words. Then she married writer and publisher Robert F. Parker, with whom she had two children. The two agreed to a divorce, since Parker felt trapped by heterosexual marriage.

She had her first reading of her poetry in 1963. Her style is hopeful and tender, yet often marked by sharp social commentary grounded in spoken word tradition and radical politics. By the late 1960s, Parker identified as lesbian and played a prominent civil rights activist in the Bay Area. 

In 1976, Parker’s sister, Shirley Jones, was murdered by her husband and his gun. Parker’s autobiographical Womanslaughter (1978) spoke into the grief and fury.

The Black Panther Party radicalized Parker. Determined to live as herself, a Black lesbian woman and a poet who made no distinction between the lyric and the pamphlet in her struggles for gender, racial, and sexual equality. As Jeffrey Davies has written:

Among her most provocative and subversive poetry of the time period was a 1978 poem entitled “For Willyce,” which describes a session of lesbian lovemaking and famously ends with the lines, “here it is, some dude’s / getting credit for what / a woman / has done, / again.”

Throughout the 1970s, Parker strengthened her craft by continuing to write rebellious poetry and teaching creative writing workshops. She also began healing past trauma through her work, including the murder of her sister at the hands of her ex-husband by way of the poem “Woman Slaughter.” It was these personal instances of violence at the hands of men, which had occurred throughout her entire life, that fueled the poet to further the fight for women’s rights and equality.

On November 13, 1985, Pat Parker, who was working as an administrator at the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, sat down and wrote the following in a letter to Audre Lorde, with whom she had shared a close (often epistolary) friendship since the two first met in 1969:

I informed the women at the Health Center that I am leaving effective January 1st. I am going to come home to my machine and do what I’ve always wanted. Write. I’ve talked this over and over with Marty and she is being absolutely wonderful and supportive. She’s helping me compile a mailing list to try and get readings to supplement my income and we’ve worked out a budget and looked at where we can cut back and cut out and off to make it, so that the pressure of earning money isn’t so great that I have to spend all my time hustling gigs and still not get the writing done.

Intolerable: the way white supremacy has evolved into the meritocracy of exemplarity groomed by neoliberal ideology.

Intolerable: the way those merits get listed on resumes and collected for value.

Intolerable: neoliberalism’s biopower-driven regulation of relationships between humans, and how the gatekeeping of gender is now part of that regulatory function.

“To have an African American body, a queer body, a female body, means that you live an interior life but also an exterior life, one that may be on guard constantly, even in crisis," Kazim Ali said once, in reference to political poetry and to Pat Parker's poetry, more specifically. "It is frightening to me that we live with a madness, that we continue to move through our lives as if these and more were normal occurrences," Pat Parker said in an interview. The normalization of this endless crisis and the pseudo-solutions offered by Wellness Industrialists is galling precisely because the personal and the political are not oppositional. The personal and political are not separate boxes. Love for others is not separate from love for the world.

Despite neoliberalism, amor mundi is relational, as a hope for loved ones that mingles with hope for the world.

"I come cloudy," Parker confesses in a shimmering poem titled "Love Isn't”.

The title prepares us for an inventory poem, a list of things that love is not, but Parker has different plans. She moves against this expectation into a visceral tenderness that could be addressed to a lover:

I wish I could be
the lover you want
come joyful
bear brightness
like summer sun

As a Black lesbian-feminist poet and performer, Parker lays the world she wishes for against the world she is given. The next stanza opens with a turn, an "Instead" that mentions the unsunny things she brings: "I bring pregnant women / with no money"; "bring angry comrades / with no shelter"; bring difficulty; bring those abandoned and harmed by the world. *

Structured in nine stanzas that move from expressing what the speaker wishes to what the speaker does, the poem is shaped to speak loosely to the ancient rhetorical form known as the apologia. The first seven stanzas create this gorgeously structured form of alternating anaphora:

I wish I could be
Instead
I wish I could take you
Instead
I wish I could take you
Instead
I wish I could be

Within these stanzas, Parker repeats the verbs "bring" and "come," adding a litany of possible disappointments: 

I come rage
bring city streets 
with wine and blood
bring cops and guns
with dead bodies and prison

"I come sad," the speaker admits. 

Then, the eighth stanza changes course. Here, in a simple couplet, the poem breaks free from the anaphora to make an intimate (and fairly abstracted) claim:

All I can give
is my love.

The final stanza winds this simple claim into a larger portrait of what it means to love, and what this commits the poet to doing and feeling, Parker uses a new verb, a verb associated with nurture and tending and tenderness. To love is to "care for":

I care for you
I care for our world
if I stop
caring about one
it would be only
a matter of time
before I stop
loving
the other.

Everything hinges on the sudden appearance of the conditional here—-if I stop—and this conditional injects the numinousness of counterfactual into the solid, the constructed, the heavy builtness of the made world.

"Poetry should allow others to wonder at explosions," Jenny Boully has written. Poetry should permit us to imagine the explosions of the buildings and shelters that cannot sustain us. The ‘Us’ is always there in the other. The poem’s other lures the poet from the I’s corset. Today, it helped me to listen to Pat Parker reading “My Lover Is a Woman” —

Soundgarden interlude.

Or, the week I rediscovered headphones and actually used them to listen to music while family life whirred around me.

I've given everything I need
I'd give you everything I own
I'd give in if it could at least be ours alone

I've given everything I could
To blow it to hell and gone
Burrow down in and blow up the outside

The studio version of Soundgarden’s "Blow Up the Outside”.

The version of “Blow Up the Outside” that Soundgarden featured on Down on the Upside.

Love poem. Lunch. And linkage.

Two poems with hyperlinks that may resemble musical interludes or segues or stitches. (Also, word on twitter from Jeff Melnick: Clem Snide is touring this autumn.)

Andy Warhol, Piss Painting, 1961.

"Lunch" by David Saint John

Even the morning dreams of it

Bent over those torn envelopes or steaming
Papers those Cubist towers
Of paper clips and pink erasures

We think we understand so much but nobody
Ever mentions the secrets of lunch

We plan to meet in some cafe
As the sunlight pours off the buildings
Onto the striped canopies the umbrellas above
The white tables

As usual I’ll be late
Stopping on the way to look at books or scarves
Wondering how you’ll tell me
Finally to go screw myself once and for all

The secretaries leaving their martinis
The executives phoning in from God-knows-where

I even knew a man who ate lunch
In typewriter stores driving all the clerks mad
Leaving cigarettes burning on the display desks
Rye seeds in the immaculately polished keys
Even poems in the carriage

So here we are again bent over
Those inscribed tablets those endless commandments
Of the menu

Where the choice of wine is blood
James Joyce once said or clear electricity

"Love Poem" by Paul Hostovsky

I love this poem.
I would do anything 
for this poem.
I am not above
stealing for example.
I stole in the past
and I stole from the past
and I'd gladly steal from your past 
for this poem.
I would lie
for the sake of this poem.
I would lie in the face of this poem 
just to make the poem face me.
Just to feel on my face the hot, sweet, faint 
bad-tooth breath of the poem. 
I could sink to anything. 
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer 
body of this poem. 
Look how beautiful, 
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing 
weighing next to nothing, 
saying next to nothing. 
Saying everything. 
Everything.

Parks.

Gustav Klimt is known for his portraits more than his landscapes. That said, the The Park (1906) gives us a strange juxtaposition of blue, green, and yellow dots, a pointillism (which influences the nine-tenths of this oil painting made up of foliage) and representation (which offers the tree trunks and grass at the bottom). Without the tree trunks, The Park would be almost entirely abstract.

Klimt abandons the pointillist effect in painting the tree trunks and grass. The moss on the thickest trunk is so finely detailed and visceral that I began to wonder if that moss was the beginning of the painting.

All of his landscapes were begun in the open air, though many were finished in the studio. It seems fair to call these landscapes plein air paintings.

Poet David St. John described a postcard of this painting as “an example of cliche so profuse it touched my heart”.

In “The Park"," St. John offers an ekphrasis of Klimt’s painting—one that refuses the separation of landscape and portrait. Like many of us, he reads his affective landscape into the painting. He figurates.

Each line begins in the majuscule: there is a formal presence that undercuts itself by resorting to ampersands. How do you capitalize an ampersand? What is the majuscule of a shortcut?

We are reminded that the poet is looking at the postcard rather than the painting. I don’t see St. John’s “solitary figure”?

The poet keeps this image on his wall: he preserves it.

Moyra Davey has written about single images and fragments, how they possess  "miniaturization", the "possibility of possessing the thing." Images locked to the wall in her room form a  "psychic landscape".

Imago lucis opera expressa: Roland Barthes uses this Latin expression to designate an image expressed by the action of light, which is how he defines photography. And Susan Sontag called a photo "a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask...the registering of an emanation."

Although there is no photo in St. John’s poem, I can’t help reading a photo image into the speaker’s view of Klimt’s The Park. It is as if the emanating spirit of a moment he recollects is there, in that painting. A photo that wasn’t taken. A postcard that mines the gap.

Apropos of nothing, my favorite park piece by Klimt is The Park at Schönbrunn Palace (1916). The reflection is staggering.

Gustav Klimt, The Park at Schönbrunn Palace (1916)

Fassbinder's 3rd reading.

I

“In the throes of an almost murderous puberty," around the age of fourteen or fifteen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Initially, the novel struck him as “boring”: the first third depicted the directionless chaos of Weimar without putting a claw in his mind, or making him want to continue reading. Fassbinder nearly gave up on Döblin several times, as admitted in a March 1980 essay titled “The Cities of Humanity and the Human Soul”.

But decades later, the adult could still recall the instant when that changed for the teen. It was “p.155 of the 410 page paperback edition” — the meeting of the two “heroes", Biberkopf and Reinhold, mesmerized him. There was no going back after that.

“Devouring, gobbling, gulping down”: these are the words Fassbinder used to describe the state of reading that stopped feeling like reading and began to waver towards something like experiencing “life, suffering, despair, and fear.”

Fassbinder read Berlin Alexanderplatz three times (at least) during his life.

This ‘take-three’ — this reading trinity — intrigues me. Obviously, it speaks to the value of multiple readings, or to the attenuation of interpretations. When he first read the novel, for example, Fassbinder was quite young and bound to his family. He later said that this first reading presented him with a principle that would animate his work, namely, an interpenetration, a mutually-informing dynamic between returning to “one’s own reality” and thinking “morally about being realistic.” The novel “helps you accept the reading as the real thing, as sacred" without climbing on a pedestal to moralize. The crown, itself, is both ordinary and sacred. Ordinariness was interesting and dangerous.

"Life-support," Fassbinder called the novel. Life-affirming to readabout how men ruin themselves because they lack courage to “recognize” their need for one another. In Weimar, the impracticality of the heroes’ feelings made fear the only livable response. This first reading helped Fassbinder admit his own “paralyzing” fear of “homosexual longings”; it prevented him from “becoming completely and utterly sick, dishonest, desperate.” In his own words, Berlin Alexanderplatz saved him.

Five years later, when Fassbinder read the book again, he discovered something different in it: a way of thinking about “what I really means”, a way to resist the temptations of “living life secondhand”. The second reading offered the shock of recognition in the realization that many things had had considered part of himself “were nothing more than the things described by Döblin.” The reader had subconsciously turned the novelist’s imaginings into the script of his own life.

II

I want to pause here and note the difference between the two readings: if the First provided a glimpse of a larger reality that implicates the writer and reader, and allows the reader to use as a tool for deciphering life, then the Second reading revealed the extent to which the books we read socialize our imaginations and exert influence on our actions by expanding our views of possibility. Fassbinder’s self-recognition is what comes with the Second reading, but the nature of this re-cognition is to cognize the First readings’ influence on a life.

III

After viewing Piel Jutzi’s film version of Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder felt dissatisfied. He vowed to use cinema to “document” his own “involvement with this very special piece of literature.”

It took a decade, a different epiphany, a way of seeing. Reviewing his own films, Fassbinder discovered that there were more “quotations from Döblin’s novel” in his films than he’d realized — and many of these quotations were unconscious, or unintended. This prompted Fassbinder to undertake a third reading.

The third reading had a purpose: to get a clear picture of “what was going on between me and Alfred Döblin’s novel.” With this third reading, Fassbinder recognized that “this novel, a work of art, had helped determine the course of my life.” The course, here, designates more than how life could be (which he found in the first reading), or the way in which he saw himself in relation to the heroes (which he gleaned from the second reading), but in the art that he had produced. The reading transformed the novel into something like a formative relationship, an intellectual and emotional entanglement that touched everything in his life.

IV

Am I reading too much into the significance of the number 3 here? Perhaps. Poets are prone to such things. Still, the pure reasoners (and their reasonings) might appreciate a quotation from the opening pages of Berlin Alexanderplatz, as written by Alfred Döblin and translated by Michael Hofmann:

V

Berlin Alexanderplatz ends with Franz being committed to an asylum after being arrested for the murder Reinhold committed. The asylum puts Franz through “a reverse process of catharsis,” a socialization that transforms Franz into a normal or well-functioning citizen of Weimar.

The well-functioning citizen is the one who considers it a duty (or even an “honor”) to become a functionary. Like Franz after his reverse catharsis, the well-functioning is tamed; he has accepted the system that exists and defines success in relation to how high he climbs in it. “He will probably become a nationalist,” Fassbinder said of Franz in the interview. There was no way to survive his encounter with Reinhold in the world that the “heroes” had been given.

VI

”Cinema finds its language in the close-up,” filmmaker and former-Surrealist Luis Buñuel said on April 1, 1927. For Buñuel, a close-up is “anything that results from the projection of a series of images that comment or explain an aspect of the total view, whether it be a landscape or a person.”

The art of cinema is established by the relationship between shots. A film is a series of shots. A shot is a series of images. In the usual novel, the story follows a narrative arc. Learning this arc is a staple of writing workshops, as well as conventional rubric for analyzing plot and tabulating the “success” of a novel. The film studio formula, like the narrative arc, focus on satisfying an audience. The happy ending is in the resolution. But independent films, indie publishers, and minor writers tend to focus on experimenting at the level of the line, or how we see, and reimagining how existence is narrated visually.

Fassbinder did not make films that would satisfy the studio formula. Sometimes he even purposefully flattened narrative arcs. He stretched silence just past the point of bearability. His films make me squirm, makes it impossible to avoid reckoning with the gaps in dialogues, or recognizing myself in the rupture between characters who are asking for something as simple and human as comfort. We are never quite the persons we imagine. We are often the insecure freaks we play in ordinary life.

Oddly, the word vicinity comes to mind: to be ‘in the vicinity’ of something is different from merely observing it. Being in the vicinity encourages us to implicate our own eyes in how we see, and what we see, and why. Vicinity-driven thinking acknowledges the traces of the books that we have read on our lived experience. “And even if my reason tried to talk me out of it, I knew that my imagination was right,” wrote Peter Handke in one of my notebooks.

A part of the cover image for NYRB’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, as painted be George Grosz, whose incredible art illustrates the sordid misery that was Weimar for many.

Paul Theroux on Ernest Hemingway

“Lord of the Ring” by Paul Theroux.

Written in 1971, collected in Sunrise with Seamonsters.

Ernest Hemingway imagined himself, as all his admirers now do, a heavy-weight, a literary hard puncher and even physically a formidable opponent. He valued the attributes that the American male (and the Karamojong warrior) value. His biographer shares the attitude and the metaphor: "He ... dealt, almost singlehanded, a permanent blow against the affected, the namby-pamby . ." He took enormous pleasure in flooring a muscular Negro with his bare fists, and delivering a manuscript he could say, "I'll defend the title again against all the good young new ones." He spoke of the discipline needed for writing as similar to that for successful boxing; he was proud of his good health, doing exercises, running, swimming and rising early while he was engaged on a book; and he saw his writing career in terms of the ring: "I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr Stendhal." He had the humility to add, "But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr Tolstoy .. " His line was that he could lick practically any man in the house.

He was a destroyer and so are many of his characters: even the gentle Santiago recalls a triumphant arm-wrestling match (with a muscular Negro); others of his characters are fighters, inclined towards pugilism. One sees the glamor: his destroyers come in pairs and all eyes are on them; it is one big man against another, and implies competition, ultimately a winner and a loser. We are to admire the winner (Heming-way, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's way, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's behaviour was often that of a bully." Professor Carlos Baker is referring to Hemingway ruining his friend's catch of a large marlin by firing a tommy-gun at some circling sharks which, maddened by the taste of their own spilt blood, devour most of the marlin. Later in that same month Hemingway beats up Joseph Knapp, a New York publisher. Both of these incidents, tidied up to make the gunner heroic and the fight with the rich intruder a justly-deserved victory, are retold in Islands in the Stream, with the envoi, black calypso singers immortalising the fist-fight Lord of the Ring with a song as in 1935, they "celebrated Ernest's victory with an extemporaneous song about the 'big slob' from Key West." The boxer recalls his famous matches, the novelist his novels; a boxer is bigger than any of his fights and though writing is hardly a competitive art, much less a sport, the novelist postured deliberately to be bigger than any of his novels. The question of "style"', a favourite boxing word, is fundamental to a discussion of Hemingway's work; not style as a literary value but style as a posture, emphasising the face, the voice, the stance.

Hemingway blamed the bad reviews of Across the River and into the Trees on his photograph that appeared on the dust jacket (*Makes me look like a cat-eating Zombie"); the voice is familiar (*You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris ..."); and the stance? Always the boxer's: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

The reputation is all, and counts for more than the writing. Asked who is the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union, the Russian journalist says,'"Papa." The note of friendly intimacy is common: it is the man that matters. The American writer produces a good book and acquires a reputation. The reputation displaces the idea of literary quality: the idea of the author is much more important than the ideas in the work. Interesting, the number of academics who care so deeply about the man's adventures and leave the work unread, or see blasphemy in a low evaluation of it.

Hemingway claimed to dislike academics, but those who flattered him were welcomed at his haunts and in his house; he yarned them, feeding them lines, took them on his boat, and wrote them candid letters. In the letter refusing Carlos Baker permission to write a biography, Hemingway mentions ("with almost bewildering frankness") how he practised coitus interruptus with his second wife. (The fact appears in Professor Baker's recent biography, Ernest Hemingway - A Life Story.) 

Since the aggressive narcissism of commerce and the vanity of money are the driving forces of reputation-making, the progress of the reputation is best described in the language of the stock-exchange. A writer appears on the market; he has considerable long-term upside potential; he gets a divorce and hits a slump, his plane crashes in a jungle and this is a technical rally; he tumbles and bottoms out, he meets resistance at the buyer lever, then rallies again and inflates and firms up and meets a negative critical flow, and so forth. This does not have much to do with writing, but Hemingway's reputation grew without much reference to his work, and in the years since his death, aided by the urgent whisperings of fact-finders and anecdotalists, it has rallied and consolidated sideways.

Now a "new" novel has been found; it was written twenty years ago and apparently abandoned by the author. It is technically his last novel and its publication is a triumph for those obsessed with the man. The novel has no literary importance, but its personal candour is essential. This is of course the basest motive for reading; contemptuous of the art of fiction, the reader is interested in the book only in so far as it gives access to the author: "This is just a story but Ernest Hemingway is writing it . . ." The satisfactions are finding out how Hemingway drank and handled a boat, and spoke, and made love, and treated his friends.

These revelations are considered important, for once the reputation is made and the novel is a study rather than a pleasure (or a bore), the hero of the novel is its author. Fortunately for Hemingway his life began to be studied before he failed as a novelist, so it was never acceptable to say, "This novel is bad." The novels were aspects of the man, and the man's heroism was never questioned.

Islands in the Stream is divided into three parts. In 195 1 Hemingway said that parts 2 and 3 were "in shape to publish" , but he did not publish them. The novel (to use the publisher's term; it is really nothing of the kind) is set in the Caribbean and seems originally to have been intended as a study of the sea. Previous titles of the sections were The Sea When Young, The Sea when Absent, and The Sea in Being, retitled in the present edition as "Bimini", "Cuba" and "At Sea." The sections are loosely linked by the common subject of the sea and by the main character, Thomas Hudson, who is "in appearance, manner, and personal history . .. clearly based on Ernest himself (according to Professor Baker). There was a fourth section, and Thomas Hudson was not the hero of it. This was the story of an old man, Santiago, who caught a marlin and battled to save it; it was published (Hemingway had some reservations about its length) as The Old Man and the Sea. Professor Baker reports that Hemingway was very enthusiastic about the unpublished parts of the book he was calling The Island and the Stream, but rather than publish it he turned from it and wrote A Moveable Feast, his last book, parts of which are prefigured in the reminiscences of Thomas Hudson. Hudson, in his youth, also lived with his wife and small child over a sawmill in Paris in the 192s, and had a cat named F Puss and liked the bicycle races and drank in cafés with James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Here, perhaps, is the reason Hemingway never published Islands in the Stream. It was autobiography - this is clear from the duplicated recollections in A Moveable Feast - but he wanted it to read as fiction. He wrote it at an age when most novelists turn to autobiography, but rather than reveal the novel as that, he published the story of Santiago and spent the last three years of his life writing a straightforward reminiscence, to which he added ambiguously in the Preface, "If the reader prefers, this Lord of the Ring book may be regarded as fiction . .." It is hard to say whether he would have published the present novel, had he allowed himself to live a few years longer. This is crucial because a writer can only be held responsible for what he publishes himself and stands by; he can't be blamed for writing a bad book that he chose to leave in a bottom drawer.

Thomas Hudson is a painter. He has been divorced and he lives in different places in the Caribbean. He seems to have a separate personality for each place. In the first section of the book, on the island of Bimini, he is a reticent friend, a quiet drunk and a devoted father; he fishes with his three boys and does a little painting of the Winslow Homer variety. The second section is set largely in a bar in Havana; here Hudson is a bar-fly, drinking and betting, and talking at some length to an elderly prostitute; he does no painting. A sea chase occupies the whole of the third section; Hudson is a bullying, Bogartesque ship's captain pursuing Germans along the coast of Cuba. Three episodes, hardly stories, and except for Hudson, who alters but does not grow, the episodes bear no relation to one another. The three boys, Hudson's children, are all dead by the time the second section opens, possibly to give Hudson nothing to live for, though more likely because Hemingway couldn't think of any way of working them into the conversation with the elderly prostitute or the pursuit of the Germans. The artless novelist has his reasons for disposing of characters, usually no more complicated than the eldest boy's in Jude the Obscure, when he hanged himself and his siblings: "Done because we are too menny."

Hudson gets little satisfaction (but evidently lots of cash) from his painting. He is, for most of the book, an aggressive self-absorbed man for whom killing a big fish and disembowelling a German are ways of proving one's manhood. It is the philosophy of combat - perversely based on killing one's friend, for the noblest combat is destroying something beautiful, something one values. "In the worst parts, when I was tiredest, I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave, one of the sons, after the fish had been caught and killed.

Incapable of creation, these characters see beauty in destruction; considering themselves men in the proverbial sense of the word, their ambition must be to win: to kill the lion, to floor the Negro, to catch the fish, to have always the winning hand. Achievement is irrelevant here (Hudson's painting is all but dismissed as daubing) because achievement implies solitary creation. Winning is another matter: one wins by beating one's opponent. Thus, most strangely: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

"All fights are bad."

"I know it. But what are you going to do about them?"

"You have to win them when they start."

Failure is losing, because losing is humiliation, unbecoming to a man:

"Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do."

That is Hudson at his lowest point, a loser. He recovers, but others are not so lucky, for the last loser deserves it, as the winner deserves his success. The loser's mortality proves more than the winner's physical superiority - it implies the winner's immortality. So much for the fist-fight between Roger and the wealthy yachtsman, which Roger wins, saying, "That guy was no good, Tom." And Thomas Hudson agrees: "You taught him something." The implication is that the yachtsman has been taught that he will never win a fist-fight with a man Hemingway conceives to be morally superior. In this case the man should know better: Roger is a writer and the sniveling yachtsman he defeats is a publisher.

Hemingway insists on the rightness of the philosophy. Consequently there is an interminable repetition of the words fine and good and true and wonderful and brave and necessary, all applied to bullying and mean-spirited and unworthy acts, "a wonderful chase,” "a fine shot,” "a beautiful kill". A sententious utterance, implying if not employing one of these words, closes each incident. After Dave hooks the swordfish and yanks on him for six hours (and twenty-five pages of the book), the motto is, "But there is a time boys have to do things if they are ever going to be men." An odd thing for a painter to say; but Thomas Hudson is no creator.

There is a great deal of killing in the book, practically all of it gratuitous, as when the swordfish is killed or Thomas Hudson shoots a land crab that appears on his path (". .. the crab disintegrated ... Poor old crab, he thought..”) or the Germans are shelled. Murder is necessary and it is a shame it makes one feel bad:

Then why don't you care about anything? he asked himself. Why don't you think of them as murderers and have the righteous feelings that you should have . .. Because we are all murderers, he told himself. We all are on both sides, if we are any good, and no good will come of any of it. But you have to do it. Sure, he said.

We all are on both sides: "I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave when the fish is dead; and "He was a pretty good guy," Willie says of the German he's blown to bits.

The philosophy demands the sentimentality of pity. And grief is self-pity. Here is Hudson revealing the death of his son to the mother of the boy, his ex-wife:

"That isn't it," she said. "Tell me, is he dead?"

“Sure.”

"Please hold me tight. I am ill now." He felt her shaking and he knelt by the chair and held her and felt her tremble. Then she said: "And poor you. Poor, poor you."

After a time she said: "I'm sorry for everything I ever did or said."

"Me, too."

"Poor you and poor me."

"Poor everybody," he said, and he did not add, "Poor Tom."

A very large number of suicides, by various means, are mentioned in the lovel as well, remarked upon with a kind of queer joy. Obeying the rerverse logic of destruction, the destroyer as hero, it is consistent that fter subduing or killing every powerful thing on earth, the man, to laintain the image of his invincibility, kills himself. The warrior runs pon his own sword. Self-slaughter is the only acceptable end for the estroying hero; any other death is humiliating defeat. Hudson does not commit suicide. At the end of the book, wounded by Germans for whom has developed an eager affection, he is full of self-love and self-loathing hich, combined, turn to pride and a satisfied self-pity. Motto: "You never understand anybody that loves you."

The Hemingway Stamp, that cauliflower earmark that characterises his worst fiction, is everywhere apparent. Hudson reflects on catnip: "There still should be some catnip in the shelf of drawers of the cat room if it hasn't gotten too dry and lost its force. It lost its force very quickly in the tropics and the catnip that you raised in the garden had no force at all." Hudson has a drink: “... strong with the real Gordon's gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow . .. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink."

The descriptions of food and wine are given lovingly, while lovemaking is reduced to utter vagueness: "He did something . .. She did something else ..."

The novel is offered as something of a departure for Hemingway, with "a rich and relaxed sense of humor." But nearly all the humor depends on seeing bullying or ridicule as comic: attempting to set a dock on fire, humiliating the yachtsman or taking the mickey out of a tourist or "a fine old whore," or teasing a sleepy-headed servant. In each case there is a victim who is weak or passive; he is made a figure of fun and one is meant to find him contemptible and so laughable. The humor has Thomas Hudson and his friends in stitches, and in many places Hudson says how much he is enjoying himself, but he is an embittered, heartless, unquestioning and deluded man. Physical superiority is what Hudson cares about but he is old and life is unbearable for him. The disappointment and the sour regret give the novel the tone of a suicide note. It is sad to think that Hemingway wrote it, and understandable that he left it in a bottom drawer.

Fassbinder's "Answers to Questions from Schoolchildren"

In 1979/80 a German school class sent out the following questionnaire. The first twenty six questions were asked of all the respondents; the last six questions, the so-called Personal Questionnaire, were formulated individually for each participant in the survey. What follows are Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s responses to these questions (the annotations are my own).

Do you find it difficult not to feel like an outsider in a group of people you don't know?

Depends on the group. In most of them, yes.

Do you consider it likely that there could be an evolutionary regression that would take us back to a very primitive stage of existence?

No.

Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial beings?

Yes.

How do you picture your old age?

I don't expect to experience it.

What do you think of Christmas without a Christmas tree?

People who have been brought up so hypocritically that they need such symbols should just be left alone until we have a society where such things aren't necessary anymore.

How do you react to negative criticism?

Positively.

What party game do you like best?

The Truth Game. (1)

What do you think about the hostility toward children in the Federal Republic?

There is a larger problem, that of people who have been showered with too much fake love, and thereby help to preserve society in its present form.

Do you see the mentally ill as a burden to our society?

In our society there's no one who isn't mentally ill.

Do you find it difficult to show your feelings uninhibitedly to someone close to you?

No.

Under what conditions would you be prepared to make a great sacrifice?

For love.

In time of personal crisis, would you consult a psychiatrist or a psychologist?

Certainly.

What degree have you earned?

None.

Would you be willing to adopt a handicapped child?

No. (2)

Do you think other people like you?

I make it so hard for other people to like me that only a few are left.

Do you look forward to the future, or do you approach it with pessimism?

That's not an issue for me.

Who is your hero, and why?

Heinrich von Kleist, because he succeeded in finding someone who wanted to die with him.

Were you brought up in an authoritarian way? If so, do you regret it?

No.

When and why were you last embarrassed?

I'm always embarrassed when a person in uniform looks at me.

What does your self-confidence rest on?

On my skill.

What do you consider most important in a relationship between partners?

Constantly reexamining the values on which the partnership is based.

Do you see nuclear energy plants as a threat?

No.

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by other people's moods?

Depends on the moods.

What do you think is needed for a perfect Sunday morning?

Caviar, champagne, the Eighth Symphony of Mahler, "radio activity" by Kraftwerk, the Sunday Bild paper, a book so exciting you don't want it to end, a friend, a good friend, and the possibility of unplugging the phone.

In your experience, what trait or what kind of behavior has turned out to be particularly helpful in establishing contact with others?

I can't answer that like a normal person; for me it's my so-called prominence.

Are your television plays based on true happenings?

There aren't any true happenings. The true is the artificial.

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by others in your choice of a topic, or do you pick everything for yourself?

From the moment you make up your mind not to live on a desert island you no longer pick everything for yourself.

What party do you vote for in the Bundestag elections?

I don't vote anymore.

Do you believe in the things you show in your films?

Yes.

Do you like to play sports, and if yes, which ones?

Table tennis, swimming, faire l'amour.

How do you visualize your professional and private future?

There isn't any past, there isn't any present, so there isn't any future, either.

(1) There is a “Truth Game” in Fassbinder’s film, Chinese Roulette, though he could be referencing another Truth Game entirely.

(2) This is simply to acknowledge that some readers might have reacted in shock to this statement, a shock that, in many ways, both denies and privatizes the challenges of caring for persons who require continuous assistance and whose independence takes different forms than that of the abled. It is aberrant that people who are incapable of caring for disabled children are permitted to adopt them, just as it is aberrant to live in a country where disabled parents and children do not receive extensive subsidies and support from their government. And it is aberrant to believe that anyone should ever be forced to birth, raise, or adopt a child against their will and inclination.