What does it mean to dream u were Berryman? I have lived orgies and will one day make pageants. Bright windows with continual feast: those eyes’ swift flash as I pass. O I make rows of you, streets of you, processions, spectacles … From “I’m a rocket ship!” to “I’m princess Spiderman!” in the span of an hour. But le BIG dilemme: Light Cone aux Abattoirs vs Rosa Luxembourg / Agone à Terra Nova. There’s no need to replicate and yet realism. I think my brain may fall out. I added numbers and filled out little boxes and cut along perforated lines all day. But just once I really, really, really want to be able to fill out the little box that asks for “Fishing Boat Proceeds.” If you were to ask me how this will end she says in a terrible car crash, at sea, holding hands, and survived by our five hundred children who have left directions for our tombstone to read SAVIORS OF ALL MANKIND. We want to watch the sunset we say out loud. All we want is the sunset the sunset the sunset the sunset the sunset the sunset. I said Would you like to hear a good joke. Look at my beard! I said but you were eating oatmeal. Otherwise proceed to the bank. I want to give you the horse bladder part of this thing, but I cannot figure out what part of this thing the horse bladder is. A critical button functioning. You must love gloves and give up legumes. And maybe three electric eyeballs. I have been stressing more than anything and watching gobs and gobs of TV. I am realizing if this psychotic novel is my Justine, then I need to as well write a Juliette, of which some of the material was in that chapbook I AM SHARON TATE. In my notes I’m kind of confusing when Grosz is speaking or when Lacan is, but she is often speaking through Lacan. “But look: my shirt is 1,600 dollars and I don’t give a fuck.” I mean, “I like purple ’cause purple is like red to me. I like red too, but purple is just like red. Don’t it look just like red to you? Think about it.” The novel tells the story of a minor but self-aggrandizing provincial official who decides to buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia and install it in the local capital in order to increase tourism. Along the way he discovers a village full of people with highly unusual skills: a one-legged long jumper, a blind woman who can hear and name dropped objects, a deaf man who sets off firecrackers around his head. Some Chinese sometimes do eat puppies, as the presence of organized dog farming and items on restaurant menus rather directly attest. According to Nora Pärt, that is, the last chord in Cantus seems not to want to come to an end. It stands still, without growing or diminishing. Something has been achieved and now one doesn’t want to let it go. The content of the entire work strives toward this point. When the plateau of this cadence has been reached the chord does not want to stop. The same thing happens at the end of the first part of Tabula Rasa: always this final chord that appears to want to go on forever.
[Note: Sources: Giles Goodland, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Aaron Shurin, “City of Men”, in From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (ed. Douglas Messerli); Delon Ackerman, FB post, 30 Jan 013; KBR; Rachel Eros Isarose Defay-Liautard, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Dennis Phillips, “from MEANS”, in Messerli; Arielle Guy, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Sasha Fletcher, “just enough thunder”, “love is real!!!!!!!!”, “my eyes have seen the dawning”, “this is the year where astonishing things try to kill us”, in 5 Poems, at Crush 15; Emily Pettit, “Really Emotional About Learning to Swing on a Swing”, in four poems, at Crush 13; JBR (hat tip Anne Gorrick); Nico Vassilakis, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Kate Zambreno, “King LEER: Lacan & courtly love”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 30 Jan 013; Mark Cugini, “Chief Keef on Writing”, at HTMLGIANT, 30 Jan 013; JBR; Eric Hayot, “China, Middlebrow to Highbrow”, at h Public Books, 14 Jan 013 (re Yan Lianke, Lenin’s Kisses, Christopher Buckley, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?); JBR; Nora Pärt, as quoted in Lars Iyer, “Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer …”, at Spurious, 30 Jan 013]
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