Strange Faces Other Minds 26: Untitled 404

Untitled 404 

(After a Cindy Sherman Photograph)  

Recently someone scolded me for speaking about Cindy Sherman because 
+++Cindy Sherman was an instrument of the patriarchy 
Like an evil saxophone, that only plays hold music for a bank
Bad financial jazz pouring out of the telephone 

O sometimes I get so tired I want to blow the stars out, one by one 
Every year people demand to know what art is feminist and what art is 
+++un-feminist 
Sometimes I wonder if it’s ethical to be a woman at all 
It’s a great stupidity to waste your life on right-seeming behaviour 
Like putting a coin in a jukebox that only plays whale song 

I like this picture because it reminds me of loneliness 
And the great, unspecific boredom of life 
It’s the expression I get every time someone tries to hold me accountable 
+++for my artistic wrongdoings 
The critical theorists advancing, with black leather pompoms 

Once there was a time in which I had many ideologies 
Many self-pleasing ideologies with which to chastise others 
The theme of these ideologies was: however wrong you are, that is the exact 
+++amount I am right by 
I felt them in my blood like too much money 

Once upon a time, I had many ideologies 
Many superior ideologies, with which to cheerfully educate 
+++my family and friends 
Forget crying myself to sleep, I wanted to cry everyone else there 
Then drive off in my Cadillac, my black wig blowing 

Once upon a time I had many ideologies 
And by ideologies I mean specific ideas about things other people should and 
+++shouldn’t do 
But proving yourself right is a bad career 
Then you have to prove yourself even righter, in a blue satin pantsuit 

Sometimes the world is so backwards all you can do is stare 
Stare and stare, from out behind your waterproof mascara 
Oh it’s a great responsibility to be your own misogynist 
There are so many beaded handbags with which to oppress yourself 

I don’t think the great project of art is ideological messaging time
Like Monet, spelling ‘fuck you’ in waterlilies 
All I want is to pour my eyes into the world 
The sunset blazing overhead like too much eyeshadow 

People are always on the lookout for new ideologies with which to punish 
+++themselves 
Contemporary ideologies, studded with hashtags 
It’s like not being able to wear a sexy nurse outfit unless you apply for a sexy 
+++medical licence 
You have to take someone’s blood pressure with your skirt hiked up 

There are a lot of punishments in this world 
And some of these punishments look a lot like day to day life 
Some things cannot be transformed, only endured 
The moon shining over all of us, with its clean white handrail 

The imperative to be correct is the great failure of the left
Sometimes you just want to wash iceberg lettuce in quiet despair
It’s like buying a second wig, and putting it on over the wig 
+++you’re already wearing 
You cry and cry, impressing no-one

  

By Hera Lindsay Bird

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

Practicing My Writerly Gaze 8: Guy Davenport’s Dream

If I had to live in one writer’s universe, 
Let it be Davenport’s
No economic excesses or worries
Plentiful sex but no VDs or pregnancy scares
Everyone has Scandinavian beauty
Tall and blonde
Reads ancient Greek
And is brilliant
It’s almost always spring
People walk and bicycle a lot
They are young, athletic
fictional versions 
Of Keats’ urn
Where beauty is truth
And truth is
Swimming naked
In the afternoon 
Having studied
the presocratics
All morning

Check out other work in the Practicing My Writerly Gaze series here.

Strange Faces Other Minds 25: Tetelestai

Tetelestai

I
How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly
For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days,
Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely?
I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,
Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs
Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets;
Say rather I am no one, or an atom;
Say rather, two great gods in a vault of starlight
Play ponderingly at chess; and at the game’s end
One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor
And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece
Forgotten there, left motionless, is I….
Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with lips and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.
Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,
Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,
Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders
Dispatched me at their leisure…. Well, what then?
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

II
Morning and evening opened and closed above me:
Houses were built above me; trees let fall
Yellowing leaves upon me, hands of ghosts,
Rain has showered its arrows of silver upon me
Seeking my heart; winds have roared and tossed me;
Music in long blue waves of sound has borne me
A helpless weed to shores of unthought silence;
Time, above me, within me, crashed its gongs
Of terrible warning, sifting the dust of death;
And here I lie. Blow now your horns of glory
Harshly over my flesh, you trees, you waters!
You stars and suns, Canopus, Deneb, Rigel,
Let me, as I lie down, here in this dust,
Hear, far off, your whispered salutation!
Roar now above my decaying flesh, you winds,
Whirl out your earth-scents over this body, tell me
Of ferns and stagnant pools, wild roses, hillsides!
Anoint me, rain, let crash your silver arrows
On this hard flesh! I am the one who named you,
I lived in you, and now I die in you.
I, your son, your daughter, treader of music,
Lie broken, conquered…. Let me not fall in silence.

III
I, the restless one; the circler of circles;
Herdsman and roper of stars, who could not capture
The secret of self; I who was tyrant to weaklings,
Striker of children; destroyer of women; corrupter
Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty; I,
Too easily brought to tears and weakness by music,
Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder
Of the war in my heart of desire with desire, the struggle
Of hatred with love, terror with hunger; I
Who laughed without knowing the cause of my laughter, who grew
Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own body;
Loved without reason the laughter and flesh of a woman,
Enduring such torments to find her! I who at last
Grow weaker, struggle more feebly, relent in my purpose,
Choose for my triumph an easier end, look backward
At earlier conquests; or, caught in the web, cry out
In a sudden and empty despair, “Tetelestai!”
Pity me, now! I, who was arrogant, beg you!
Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.
Blow horns of victory now, as I reel and am vanquished.
Shatter the sky with trumpets above my grave.

IV
… Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust and is blown!
These bones, how they grind in the granite of frost and are nothing!
This skull, how it yawns for a flicker of time in the darkness
Yet laughs not and sees not! It is crushed by a hammer of sunlight,
And the hands are destroyed…. Press down through the leaves of the jasmine,
Dig through the interlaced roots”nevermore will you find me;
I was no better than dust, yet you cannot replace me….
Take the soft dust in your hand”does it stir: does it sing?
Has it lips and a heart? Does it open its eyes to the sun?
Does it run, does it dream, does it burn with a secret, or tremble
In terror of death? Or ache with tremendous decisions?…
Listen!… It says: “I lean by the river. The willows
Are yellowed with bud. White clouds roar up from the south
And darken the ripples; but they cannot darken my heart,
Nor the face like a star in my heart!… Rain falls on the water
And pelts it, and rings it with silver. The willow trees glisten,
The sparrows chirp under the eaves; but the face in my heart
Is a secret of music…. I wait in the rain and am silent.”
Listen again!… It says: “I have worked, I am tired,
The pencil dulls in my hand: I see through the window
Walls upon walls of windows with faces behind them,
Smoke floating up to the sky, an ascension of seagulls.
I am tired. I have struggled in vain, my decision was fruitless,
Why then do I wait? with darkness, so easy, at hand!…
But to-morrow, perhaps…. I will wait and endure till to-morrow!…”
Or again: “It is dark. The decision is made. I am vanquished
By terror of life. The walls mount slowly about me
In coldness. I had not the courage. I was forsaken.
I cried out, was answered by silence…. Tetelestai!…”

V
Hear how it babbles!–Blow the dust out of your hand,
With its voices and visions, tread on it, forget it, turn homeward
With dreams in your brain…. This, then, is the humble, the nameless, –
The lover, the husband and father, the struggler with shadows,
The one who went down under shoutings of chaos! The weakling
Who cried his “forsaken!” like Christ on the darkening hilltop!…
This, then, is the one who implores, as he dwindles to silence,
A fanfare of glory…. And which of us dares to deny him!

By Conrad Aiken, and here is a recording of Aiken reading the poem.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

Uncollected 86, Forgiveness

Forgiveness Fell Onto The Floor One Day
Rolled on the carpet and stopped.
I went to pick it up,
But would it break if moved?
Forgiveness can be fragile.
Maybe I’d make things worse.
So I called my wife into the room,
She always knows what to do.
Except this time she didn’t.
“All you need to…,” she said,
But then stopped.
“I don’t know. Deal with it.”
It’s been a while now.
Forgiveness is still on the floor.

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 73-80

Knut Hamsun was once a horse-car conductor in Chicago. (73)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyricon could have been lost forever, for instance. (74)
#DMBookshelf

Mallarmé learned English specifically to read Poe (75)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Walter the Penniless. Peter the Hermit. (76)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

During the four years that Dostoievsky spent at hard labor in Siberia for political conspiracy, the only book he was allowed was the New Testament. Though once in a prison hospital he found Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. (77)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 

Deus Vult (78)
#DMquotations

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was. (79)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #parents
🎵 He loooooved his mother

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.
Said Henry James. (80)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Strange Faces Other Minds 24: Underwear

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider   
underwear in the abstract   
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised   
Underwear is something   
we all have to deal with   
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana   
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down   
Underwear is one thing   
men and women have in common   
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice   
the way things are set up   
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end   
Take foundation garments for instance   
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do   
Did you ever try to get around a girdle   
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?   
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing   
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious   
Underwear with bulges very shocking   
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom   
Someone has escaped his Underwear   
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul   
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!   
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear   
Do not go naked into that good night   
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely   
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion   
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti found on Poetry Foundation

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

Strange Faces Other Minds 25: To Juan at the Winter Solstice

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right she crooks a finger smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving—cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses
There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea—blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

By Robert Graves

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 66-72

Albert Camus’ father was killed in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was only months old. His mother was an illiterate charwoman. (66)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Once, at dinner, with great delicacy Brahms told Tchaikovsky that he did not approve of his work.
With equal delicacy Tchaikovsky told Brahms that he did not approve of his. (67)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

After Byron and Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned Shelly’s body on the beach at Viareggio, they got drunk. Boisterously, shouting and laughing and even singing.
Then again, they had been dealing with remains already five weeks bloated and decomposed. Bryon had at least once turned sick. (68)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain? (69)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

In Königsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years. (70)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like? (71)

An assemblage? (72)
#Reader/Protagonist

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Strange Faces Other Minds 23: In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

The tight rhyme of the third section is always so jarring, but the first two are so good, I don’t even care. Here is the link to Auden’s poem on poets.org


Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

Strange Faces Other Minds 22: Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

By Wallace Stevens


Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 58-65

Bohemia. A desert country near the sea. (58)
#DM Map #DMquotations #DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 
Rule: Read any work mentioned by name, quotation, or character.

In 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Perruggia who had been working at the Louvre managed to remove the Mona Lisa from its frame and walk out with it under his overalls. 
And to go unsuspected until he tried to sell it two years later. (59)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #DMGallery #DMTimeline 

Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping. (60)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Always a bit confused on the mechanics. Is it the heat or gas of the stove that is lethal? The heat seems improbable. If it is the gas, why aren’t the children dead?

Leibniz: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? (61)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Speculation

When Daumier was sixty, destitute and almost blind, Corot bought the house Daumier was renting and gave it to him. (62)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Der Untergang des Abendlandes. (63)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps? (64)

A sense somehow of total retreat? Abandonment? (65)
#Reader/Protagonist

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 48-57

Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time. (48)

Freud. (49)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Joseph Beuys was a Stuka pilot in World War II. (50)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Monet, visiting London:
This brown thing? This is your Turner? (51)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats #DM Map

René Descartes was born in a hayfield. (52)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Ultimately, Emily Dickenson would even hide from visitors at her house itself. (53)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #PoorMadDirtyDrunkAlone 

Reader and this notion of his. (54)

Reader and his mind full of clutter. (55)

What is a novel in any case? (56)

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography after all? (57)
#Reader/Protagonist

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 43-47

Tolle lege, tolle lege. (43) 
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations

Wherever conquest led him, Alexander the Great made it a point to have botanical specimens sent back to Aristotle, who had been his tutor. A copy of the Iliad that he carried in a jeweled chest contained emendations in Aristotle’s handwriting. (44)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 
If still extant, one can’t even imagine how much this copy of the Iliad would be worth. 

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young. (45)
 #DMquotations #DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate that he knew the sun did not move before Copernicus did. (46)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Nobody came. Nobody called. (47) 
#Reader/Protagonist

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Practicing My Writerly Gaze 7: Fishing

Occasionally I’m asked what it is like to write poetry.
mostly, a poem is like a fish that fights the line,
and a poet a fisherman that doesn’t want to fight,
and thought, a line that breaks under tension.

Yet there are times,
unaided by fisherman or line, 
a poem simply jumps in the boat
whole, inexplicable, stunned
as surprised by itself as you are
this is what poets mean 
when they say they discover a poem

And discovering poems is why 
we put up with writing them
the experience of jumping
leaving the water
expecting to have gravity
take you back
and by nothing but dumb luck
finding a boat 
being taken beyond
          gasping

Check out other work in the Practicing My Writerly Gaze series here.

The Social Unit 19: The Risk of Training Citizenry in Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

A nation that educates its citizenry in these techniques risks having its citizenry use those techniques against them. One can of course make this objection, but the same objections can be said of training your citizenry to use conventional weapons of warfare. In fact, training citizens was for a long time resisted by kings who preferred to use mercenaries. 

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 36-42

Giorgione and Titian were pupils of Giovanni Bellini’s in Venice together. Giorgione was dead in his early thirties, in 1510. Titian was still painting sixty-six years later. (36)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map

What has happened? It is life that has happened; and I am old. (37)

Said Louis Aragon. (38)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox. 
Said Xenophanes. (39)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

26 Piazza di Spagna (40)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons  #DM Map

More Keats.

Laurence Sterne’s corpse was sold to a medical school by grave robbers. It had been almost completely dissected before someone chanced to recognize it. (41)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

How much of Reader’s own circumstances or past would he in fact give to Protagonist in such a novel? (42)
#Reader/Protagonist

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Practicing My Writerly Gaze 6: Es Mus Sein

es mus sein was one of my yearbook quotes
It was so awful and loveably me.
I had read Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being
and was impressed by a passage in which he riffs on it.

I wasn’t sure what it meant 
but was sure it was deep
terribly deep
and more important 
nobody else would know either

In the mot juste of es mus sein
the yearbook staff assigned to quotes
took my desire to be smarter than I was 
south of the border
and so under all the angsty things I wrote stands:
Es mus seino — It must be-o

Check out other work in the Practicing My Writerly Gaze series here.

Uncollected 82, The Puzzling Truth of No Truths

I remember saying 
to a friend
in high school
nothing is true
which troubled me
isn’t that a truth?
he asked in response
making it even worse

for while 
it seems in the realm of possibility
that nothing is true
language can’t be made to say it
to be a speaker at all
you are committed to the existence
of at least one truth
it doesn’t seem fair
that language should so encumber the world

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

The Social Unit 18: National Defense

Could a national defense strategy be predicated on cultural achievement and nonviolent civil disobedience? Of cultural achievement, I’m thinking of examples like China, ancient Greece, and Blacks in the American South. All having lost political power, but culturally conquering their victors. Of civil disobedience, I’m thinking of the examples of India and Norway. Both of which were able to repel invaders.

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

Practicing My Writerly Gaze 5: Like a Hera Lindsay Bird Simile

It’s like getting three wishes and wishing for less wishes.
It’s like designing a flag the exact same colour as the sky.

How does she think of these?
It would seem she walks around with brilliant similes 
looking for antecedents.
They are so good that the similes have stopped serving
their objects and strut around in sequins
while everything she tries to speak about 
slouches in khaki.

A few stats, 
in her first two collections,
there are over 500 similes,
that is on average 6 similes per poem.
211 similes for love,
125 similes for sex.
And it should be mentioned
a strange preponderance of kites and telescopes.
If you are ever lost,
and aren’t sure what poem your are in,
look around and if there is a simile about 
love or sex, and a kite floating oddly above,
then there is a 98% chance you’re in a Hera Lindsay Bird poem.

Check out other work in the Practicing My Writerly Gaze series here.

Uncollected 81, Ten Poems to Write for the Coming Year

  1. A Decently Encouraged Eye Does Happily
  2. Buckminster Fuller in a Bathtub
  3. The Lethal Clumsiness of Jar Jar Binks
  4. Practicing My Writerly Gaze
  5. Changes in the Chin of the Chopfallen
  6. The Adorable Worrying of Sally Field
  7. Paraphrase isn’t a Poem
  8. Penises: the Long and Short of it
  9. Mind on the Sea, a Thought in the Foam
  10. The Good, the Bad, and the I Don’t Care

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

Practicing My Writerly Gaze 4: People Love Paul Celan, But Not Me

people say words
but they don’t mean them
people write words
and they don’t mean them either
does poetry have a loafing problem

in the cladogram of poetry
who is the first beast on your branch
or are you trying to negotiate
a new limb

let critics scoff at your poetry
let friends, husbands, wives, and parents
scoff at your poetry
it is living with compliments
that’s excruciating
can one write poetry
without being a poet

Check out other work in the Practicing My Writerly Gaze series here.

Uncollected 80, The Golden Age of Future Tense

I miss the future maybe more than the past
what was to be and now will not
tragically gliding forward and away from us
there were happier men in that future
there was justice in that future
and most of all there was great poetry

can we bring it back forward
or is it gone forever
men will never have the character and intellect
that was to be so

being of the future
this loss cannot technically be 
a fall from grace
but being so close to realization
it feels we really did lose something
and now that wisdom, gentleness, and peace
is never to be had, or almost had, again

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

The Social Unit 16: Pigouvian Taxation

Would a tax regime that is completely Pigouvian work? The US government already uses the tax code to incentivize certain pro-social behaviors. But it still taxes income, which presumably we don’t want to discourage. It also taxes consumption which isn’t necessarily antisocial either. Why not use the tax system to guide citizens toward society’s benefit?

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

Practicing My Writerly Gaze 3: The Gifts of Anger for the People of Anger

Father Zossima’s body starts to smell
ambition whispers 
around the bed
an acolyte opens a window
people gather.
we are told the stench is sin


and so, to return to our story
I’m in love with my wife
when she sleeps,
I’m in love with the world 
when it sleeps,
and I love, faltering, 
but still love Father Zossima.

Check out other work in the Practicing My Writerly Gaze series here.

Uncollected 79, Four Paws

four paws,
in this trap again 
are we?
let’s not begin with goodbye
you know the interesting thing
about collision– 
it’s so mutual
stop trying to right the wrongs
of law and love
the children of man
are naked and featherless
feeble and querulous
and you want to be 
Moses on a motorcycle

don’t think it isn’t a junkie fall
many wish life was 
one long blow job
but there are dimes
on the eyes of the walking
there is a poetry
to that kind of blindness
the world says no,
and all they hear is yes, yes, yes

four paws, listen to me
this net is a visible sign 
of my continued support
it’s old sad music 
always comes into major
sometimes the second chance
comes first
there are opportunities here
for a comfortable earth 
and sumptuous heaven
there is now parking 
free parking
in Jerusalem

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

The Social Unit 15: Better Coercion

Almost all social units articulate a sense of progress in outcome and process. Humans want to play “fair” and live in a social unit whose outcomes are “fair”. Both of these require coercion. Following up on note 4, I have been thinking about a system for improving our coercions. The ladder of coercion has three broad rungs: Thayler-style nudges, pigouvian taxation, fines, and violence. These run from the least to most onerous forms. The idea for whatever social target you want to hit is to simply never use a more onerous form of coercion than is necessary. 

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

Uncollected 78, Second Hell

Turned away from heaven
I went to the underworld
But the Devil said
My company for eternity
Would be “onerous”

And that is how second hell started
I called to the cloying
The grating, the unambitiously mean
With no small pride
I say we are many

The double-parkers, the naggers,
the peg-backers.
Artists of self-pity and blame
Those that do not return shopping carts
Gossips, click-baiters,
know-it-alls, and do-nothings.
We are legion

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 27-32

Severn, lift me up, I am dying. (27)
Don’t breathe on me, it comes like ice. (28)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend 
Both 27 and 28 are deathbed utterances by John Keats as recorded by friend and hospice nurse Joseph Severn. 

The world is my idea. (29)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations
The opening proposition to Arthur Schopenauer’s The World as Will and Idea.

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also the first person he ever saw who could read without moving his lips. (30)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Always confusing: Aquinas and Augustine.

Saxo Grammaticus (31)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

 It is not impossible that the young actress Molière married when he was forty, and with whose family he had been closely connected in the theater for years, was his own illegitimate daughter. (32)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

The Snevets Stories 12: The Burden of Purpose

Whatever purpose Snevets had in committing these crimes, it started to weigh on him. His later jobs were more workman-like and earnest. He increasingly regarded his job as gravely important–more than that, critical for the world. That is a lot of weight on one’s shoulders. To tell you the truth, I missed the playfulness of his earlier crimes when he would do things with words just because he could. Sometimes it felt like he was as surprised as we were, like he was discovering himself. If he hadn’t made a fool of me so many times, I would have really enjoyed it.

Check out other posts from The Snevets Stories here.

The Snevets Stories 11: The Library

At one point we had Snevets surrounded in a library downtown. And not just with a unit this time. He was swarmed. We are talking Billy the Kid swarmed–at least 100 men. There were hostages inside so we were being extra cautious though. I’d never known Snevets to carry a firearm, but he was somehow controlling the library staff and the patrons inside. He had one standing in each window to prevent our snipers from getting off a shot. We called in to the circulation desk from our command tent outside. Snevets picked up. He sounded funny, but that was because we masked his audio with a filter so he couldn’t slow us down with his sonorous speech powers. We informed him there was no escape. He was surrounded by at least 100 men. He nonetheless persisted, claiming that no one would be hurt, and he would send a list of demands within the hour. I was cautiously optimistic. We had him dead to rights, but I also knew that being in a library would only fuel his powers.

After forty-five minutes, the front door of the library opened. A man hesitantly slid out, his arms raised with a note in his right hand. We searched the hostage list and identified him as Ramon Santo. Ramon yelled not to shoot. Our men lowered their weapons and a team of five SWAT members readied their shields. Ramon was pale, hardly breathing as he walked down the thirteen stone steps. As soon as he made the sidewalk, SWAT rushed forward to envelop him in shields and rush him away. Once the hostage was secured, I breathed deeply.

They brought Ramon to our command tent. He handed me a note in Snevets’ barely legible scrawl. His mastery of the powers of language did not somehow extend to his penmanship. The note demanded a car to the airport and a private jet to Havana.

Before I responded I questioned Mr. Santo, I asked, is Snevets armed? He said no. Ramon said Snevets had somehow subdued them all by playing some music over the library PA. After that everyone was scared but just complied with whatever order Snevets gave them. It was curious. What kind of music was it? Ramon wasn’t sure. All he gave us was that it was a woman singing. Before I could ask anymore questions, I heard shouts from outside the tent. I ran to the flap. Other hostages had started coming out. The first few cautiously and after that the rest hurrying to the safety of the surrounding officers. The lawn in front of the library was a chaos of SWAT and hostages. I yelled at the men to maintain their perimeter for all the good it did.

It took us a half an hour to account for all the hostages. What could Snevets be playing at? In another fifteen minutes, I organized the SWAT team to take the library. I told them not to shoot unless it was to save some hostage we weren’t aware of. We needed Snevets alive. I needed him alive–there are so many questions. I was tense. This was my moment, but I had been disappointed too many times to feel confident. In went the doors. The men rushed through. Within twenty minutes they’d cleared the whole building, ventilation shafts and all– no Snevets.

We huddled at the circulation desk with the floor plans. There was no way to explain this. I knew better though. I ordered a BOLO of the surrounding area and forensics to go through the library. I didn’t have any real hope though. Snevets was gone. Walking back to pack up the operations tent, I contemplated a handwriting analysis of Snevets’ list of demands since his power was so tied up with language. That might actually tell us something useful. However, back in the tent, the desk was empty. No note. I asked around, nobody had touched it. A thought flashed through my head. I laughed and dismissed it. No way, that’s too much, even for Snevets.

Check out other posts from The Snevets Stories here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 19-22

Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall. (19)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Drunk

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me? (20)
#Reader/Protagonist

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an anti-Semite. (21)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry 
The first of many.

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.
Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot. (22)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend
How’s our Mandarin?

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

The 17/18 Poems 44: Pleased

when the poem makes me uncomfortable 

I congratulate myself

when the poem doesn’t beg

and doesn’t scold

and is never memory’s fool

I am pleased

when it has an upright zeal

but doesn’t make my teeth hurt

I sign it without regret

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 15-18

Gray’s Elegy is 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it. (15)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #Numbers

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt. (16)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Fires #GreatsOnGreats

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down? (17)

Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however. (18)
#Reader/Protagonist

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

The Snevets Stories 10: Telos

At some point in the investigation, years long now, it was clear–Snevets was himself pursuing something. What it was I couldn’t say. Originally I thought of each of his crimes as separate, but the Florida jobs, the jar in Tennessee, the Carolinas, and even Geneva were all building to something. The further Snevets went, each job needed the other more and more to make sense. If I could figure it out, I might be able to create the prison of mind I needed to catch him. Whatever the end game was for Snevets it obviously had existential import.

Check out other posts from The Snevets Stories here.

The Markson Project: Reader’s Block 11-14

Anna Akhmatova had an affair with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Late in life, not having left Russia again in a third of a century, she would be astonished to learn how famous he had become. (11)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map
Rule: read the wiki article of any person mentioned.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen, the population of Stratford would have been little more than fifteen hundred. Is it a safe assumption that he knew the woman named Katherine Hamlet who fell into the Avon that summer and drowned? (12)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map #Speculation

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house. (13)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #OnlyTheLonely

Even among the most tentative first thoughts about a first draft, why is Reader thinking of his central character as Reader? (14)
#Reader/Protagonist

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

The Snevets Stories 9: Answers

It’s hard to tell how dangerous a man like Snevets was. He definitely committed crimes, at least by the book. But were they crimes in spirit, his miscellany of violation? I’m not sure? That is perhaps why we chased him so hard? Neither his intention nor effect was clear. He was no counterfeiter, no thief, his methods were otherworldly, but certainly no grift. We were left to imagine his crimes and attribute sinister intent. Why did we pursue him? It could be, in the end, his only crime was not giving us answers?

Check out other posts from The Snevets Stories here.