Which is to say now might be a good time to take a closer look at Ocampo’s “Yes, Sir! No, Sir! Right Away, Sir!”, which I downloaded and enlarged and printed so I could get as good a look at it as I can without seeing it in person, which I can’t. My first look is intentionally, despite your request, thru the lens of your telling me of T’s reaction to it. Because that’s why I’m looking at it, to compare my reaction to his, and to see what I think about Ocampo’s “taking charged iconography (swastikas, crucifixions, robed figures like KKK, etc) and emptying those images out of their charged meanings, and his desire ‘to push painting / image beyond thought.’” As you know, I’m not sure that’s possible. I don’t see how a charged image can be uncharged, there is too much momentum behind it; I think of what Marx said in another context about the tradition of all dead generations weighing like a nightmare on every aspect us poor mutts, who happen to be alive. I think about something A wrote me a few days ago, how he, like Stephen Dedalus, sees history is a nightmare from which he too would dearly love to awake. And something you also recently wrote me, about how we might come to think of the Anthropocene as a chance to reboot. I think about what starting over might mean. You know all those ancient “fertility goddesses” like the “Venus of Willendorf?” No one has any idea what they really are. I read that they must have been made by women because when looked at from above they look like what a woman sees when she looks down at herself. But no one knows. Maybe if as much time passes between now and when the Venuses were made and us (approximately 30,000 years), whatever passes for human then will have forgotten the meaning of the charged symbols out of which Ocampo makes art. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’m back. You couldn’t have known it but I was gone for a few minutes googling him, and while I was gone I came across this: “The only art objects ‘censored’ from Documenta IX were eliminated because of their content: paintings by the Filipino painter Manuel Ocampo containing images of swastikas. Ocampo’s five paintings were seized from the walls on the day of the opening by Hoet and his assistant, Bart de Baere, who told the painter that he ‘wasn’t an artist, but just wanted to cause trouble.’” Which is pathetic and funny and very telling, I think. Especially when a salesman, I mean a curator says it. It gets better: “Four of the paintings were put back into crates while the fifth was moved to the gallery basement where it was displayed in a workroom, behind saws and other tools and equipment.” Which sounds like the greatest exhibition space ever. You know that barn at the end of Twister, when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are outrunning the tornado, which is not just any tornado, it’s a Category 5 tornado, it’s as big and mean as they get. But somehow, due to the magic of movies, and some inept effects, they’re outrunning it, they are running thru a cornfield or something, or maybe the corn was in another scene, they're running thru a field of something, shit is flying thru the air, and they are running, and the big dark funnel cloud which must be a mile across is right behind them, they see the barn, they open the door and go in, to hide I guess, what a stupid hiding place, a flimsy barn, they too think it’s a bad idea, but not because the barn is flimsy, because hanging from the rafters are saws and scythes and god knows what, at least a hundred very sharp and deadly objects. That’s where I picture they hung the painting. Anyway, the first thing that strikes me about“Yes, Sir! No, Sir! Right Away, Sir!” is its family resemblance to the work of the later Guston, say, and Neo Rauch, and Peter Saul, and Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker ... Damn, I wish you were interested in photography, I could add Cristina de Middel to the mix, her Afronauts series. So it’s a crucifixion, there’s a man tied to a yellow cross, a black man, or rather a stock racist cartoon image of a black man, a savage, a true primitive, with a bone in his hair and a grass skirt and monkey- or ape-like features, a Trump-supporter's version of a black man. He reminds me at first of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda ... then I realize: I’ve seen him before, he’s Winsor McKay’s Little Imp, almost exactly, with the hairbone added ... I will call him Little Imp ... is Little Imp Ocampo’s Christ figure? I don’t think so, even tho we all know Jesus wasn’t white. Why not? Two reasons: first, whoever is being represented is tied to the cross, not nailed, like Jesus was. Second, this victim is a painter, he is painting while he is being crucified. And yet, there’s a darkened sun, just as there was during Jesus’s crucifixion ... Anyway, I think a painter is being crucified. A painter with weapons in his belt, a gun on one side, a bottle without a top on the other, I decide it’s either for a quick drink when needed, for medicinal purposes only, as the old Lambert, Hendricks, Ross song has it, or else it’s a Molotov cocktail, maybe, I’m very maybe about the bottle, but the point is that with his hands tied he can’t get at either the bottle or the gun. All he has available is his brush. And he’s painting. I can see what he’s painting. It could be a sausage. It could be a shit-filled condom. I don’t think it’s a condom because it’s knotted at both ends. I really don’t know what it is, but that’s the shape. There’s a bird perched on the top edge of the canvas, a crow or a raven, and it suddenly occurs to me that he is the painter’s dealer, his agent, his gallerist, and the title of the painting represents the pressure the dealer is placing on him to produce produce produce. In other words, art and all it can really do is what’s being sacrificed here. At the foot of a cross one finds a bunch of green cross-eyed kind of goofy stupid looking what I take to be penguins, who seem to stand in for the usual bored Roman soldiers rolling dice and paying no attention to the main action going on above. Tho I was looking at a Michelangelo crucifixion the other day and there were no Roman soldiers there either, there were half a dozen naked men, straight out of some classical version of the Castro district. If I’m right about the raven, perhaps the penguins are gallery-goers who just adore openings, or investors in art, or something like that? I know, that’s hanging a lot of interpretation on a bird, especially because in that other Ocampo painting you sent me an image of, it also shows up. But forget about the bird. There’s the star, the charged image, it looks a lot like the badge the Nazis and at least some of their allies forced Jews to wear. Which is kind of at the center of our whole conversation. What is that star doing there? I’m not sure, really, but there it is, nailed or pasted to the top of the cross, not the very top like the star on top of a Christmas tree, but on the cross’s face, just above Little Imp’s head. I look at it, I think about it, I feel it; it doesn’t strike me as any more in or out of place than anything else in this bent version of what’s possibly the most painted scene ever ... Anyway, despite K’s and T’s reaction, the star doesn’t give me the creeps, maybe it alludes to something in Jewish history which the artist and by this point I am assuming it’s a self-portrait identifies with. Anyway, he wouldn’t be the first artist who felt crucified and equated that with this way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen. When I was in therapy for the first time, in my early 20s, my therapist asked me to read Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. As I remember the book, which I haven’t looked at in 40-something years, Asher’s from a devoutly Jewish family. At some point in his life he discovers his truth: he IS an artist. He’s also very aware that his mother’s life’s been rough, that she’s suffered a lot. So he paints her crucified against a window frame. Not actually crucified but with her arms spread in the pose, with the window frame serving as the crucifix, and the life outside the window the life she can’t get to ... This is his breakthru moment, the moment he comes into his own, which is also the moment he alienates everyone he loves ... I was asked to read the book as a warning. It was a good call, by the way; I lost my two best friends. This is all coming back to me while I look at and ponder that star at the top of the crucifix. I think about how it’s positioned. Like a label. Like a nameplate. I dunno. It’s hard to pin down what that star is doing there. I don’t know anything about Ocampo except what you’ve told me. Of course I don’t want to pin down anything, that would make me some kind of self-appointed unacknowledged legislator, and that would make me sick to my stomach, I’m just telling a story, really, Dear Angel of Dust, there are stretches of time that seem outside of time. This is one of them. It’s like the other ones. I know I keep mentioning them. But the air and the sky seem to have periods of burning, bright but oddly muted intensity, which makes for repeated sense of displacement or dislocation, of things being out of joint, multiply out of joint, and more so every time. And every time it’s as though we’d migrated south or been visited by a region farther south, unexpectedly hosted a Mesoamerican visitation. I don’t know why I think this, never having been to Mesoamerica. Yes, I do know, it’s because whenever this happens I think of T (a different T) who was sure, if he ate just a few more mushrooms, he’d be able to decipher those glyphs, which he saw every time he ate mushrooms, he was sure the glyphs were Aztec or Mayan or something, he didn't know and he didn't care, he just knew he had to decipher them. Anyway, these spells or whatever you want to call them keep on happening. At rehearsal today whatever it is crept into our music. We trudged up a hill or a ladder, yes, a ladder, the chiming rungs of which were digital strings and they bore us over, eight or eight hundred years into the future, eight or eight hundred years after the ... I dunno, but we were trying to make it home or to heaven, hoping to make them one and the same. We were trying at the very least to make something happen. L’s audible exhalation etched an aspirate sigh. In so doing it exacted of each of us an answering susurration, a particulate cloud, a wall of glass. All this was abetted by N’s bass. What came out of the horn at that point were not balloons but a bouquet of milkweed, sourgrass, dandelions and such. One was led to hear not only root but weed, leaf given rise to by root. We could hear P put that bouquet into his pipe, we could hear his blown smoke, it unveiled an eclipse one could otherwise not have seen, are we revisiting Ocampo’s darkened sun, maybe? Dear Angel of Dust, and here I quote
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
— three cheers for the ants.
So I guess the thing is, stay away from goats at 4am. Goats only like happy people. No shit. They did a study at Roehampton University, where N works, or used to, at least. But forget goats, let’s think about baseball a minute. Mark Kingwell, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, wrote a book called Fail Better, which concludes that “Baseball is [...] the most philosophical of games,” and baseball at its most truly philosophical concerns guess what? failure. Most obviously failure at the plate. Everyone knows that if you fail seven times out of ten to get on base with a hit you are still a potential Hall of Fame hitter. Another philosopher, Kieran Setiya, argues that, yes, everyone knows it, but the commonplace is wrong. To begin with, you have to add in fielder’s errors, hit-by-pitches, and walks. On Base Percentages are generally about sixty points higher than batting average, and are .376 for Hall of Famers. Still, any way you slice it, that’s a lot of failure. Setiya’s a SABRmetrics fan, Kingwell is not, he thinks all those stats destroy the magic. But let’s face it: SABRmetrics or seat of the pants, one of the teams with the half dozen highest payrolls always wins. And yet ... and yet ...
Every day I peruse the box scores for hours
Sometimes I wonder why I do it
Since I am not going to take a test on it
And no one is going to give me money
The pleasure’s something like that of codes
Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say
So as brightly to picturize Eurydice
In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day
The day she went 5 for 5 against a Vic Raschi
A pitcher no one remember but Tom Clark
who wrote that poem. So I googled Raschi. He was pretty good, 132 wins against 66 losses, almost a thousand strikeouts, and a 3.72 earned run average. The day after our wedding, I had a dream about the world: At the entrance to the world, I had to decide whether or not I wanted an anaesthetic. The blanket that was lying on top of me was yellow. I hate pain. While I was in this consciousness, a pillow, which was around my ass, inflated and I floated three feet up. Then I was in a car. The car reached the end of the dirt road. At this spot, the man who was in the car with me informed me that I could drive. But I had never driven a car. I began driving the black Bentley. To begin, I had to turn the car, but I had no idea how. Turning must have something to do with steering. There, in woods which, here and there, had been cleared, stood a number of cabin-like, but larger, buildings. After we had abandoned that part of the army that had once been our home. For we had been planning to go to England by train, then by boat, but the train had derailed. We had had to spend the night. A clerk handed us the keys to the royal suite as if we mattered. Perhaps we did, for we were the only people here, in this area which the sun no longer visited. It is now 10:53:08. At 11:07:00 the Boss is going to phone me. I have been waiting by the phone all day. Since I am the only one who has feelings, I have started to cry. But I have to figure out why I’m crying so fiercely. I’m crying because I have too many feelings: feelings must be evidences of something. If the office is on the fourth floor, I’ll walk there. If it’s not on the fourth floor, I’ll race up the remaining steps: there’re no windows in my basement. Then it’ll learn what it’s lost. Another Dog says: Let’s get out of here, master. This country isn’t worth living in. Don Quixote says: Yes. I love this country. I was going to save it. Another Dog: Well you didn’t. Everything’s the same as it ever was. No, now everything’s worse. (They look at the dust of the desert.) Don Quixote, crying: I did what I could. Another Dog: Dogs don’t notice that sort of thing. Bad Dog thought to herself: What decision am I going to make? I know horse wants to trot, gallop, down the stairs from the edge of the terrace that lies off this room. I should have thought of all this before now. But I’m a bad dog. I should have bought oats at the same time I bought turtle because oats are what horsies eat. What am I going to do? Should I let horse go outside by himself? It’s dangerous on the outside and horse has no protection. Am I hurting horse even worse by shutting him in here with me? She returned to us and told us that now she knew where pirates came from. “Pirates came from the moment animals became holy.” It was only now that we were able to make up the rules of piracy.
When you’re feeling
about as
bad as your
average
English translation
of Goethe you must
go see the
Parrot of Penance
and he will
say unto you
“Way around it?
Way around it?
There’s never been any
way around it”
Assignment: look at these lines
again in a hundred years
und so weiter ... The codes must be sought in the serious locales of fingertips and thigh muscles, also in the hamstrings, the molars, the minor joints, the mammoth comprehending digestion, the ardent and responsive scalp. It’s almost too easy to bring up Adorno here, I mean, “Everyone wavers between Adorno and the damp sorrow unfolding under her own nose.” The reading is at a church that also hosted, among various community functions, The Burrito Project, in which people get together to make food for those who have none. A scheduling mistake puts poetry where some were expecting burritos, and Boyer stands by the open door of the crowded, overheated room, listening to Moten read and apologizing for disappointing the hungry’s expectations, apologizing for poetry’s failure, for her own. But the reading, her reading, takes over, she forgets her compulsive plan to throw her wig into the crowd, und so weiter, and, as Moten reminds her later, visiting Kansas City for another reading, “a person cannot live on burritos alone.” But what this tells me is there should never be poetry in public without food. Speaking of which, Elise Hunchuck, who is working on “An Incomplete Atlas of Stones,” just told me about the “hunger stones” which have been uncovered by the low-flowing, drought-reduced waters of Czech Republic’s Elbe River, NPR reports. Hunger stones are “carved boulders ... that have been used for centuries to commemorate historic droughts — and warn of their consequences.” One stone, we read, has been carved with the phrase, Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine, or “If you see me, weep.” Although there are apparently extenuating circumstances for the rocks’ newfound visibility — including a dam constructed on the Elbe which has affected water levels — I nonetheless remain haunted by the idea of uncovering buried or submerged warnings from our own ancestors stating that, in a sense, if you are reading this, you are already doomed. Others took the almost-as-easy other route, citing “divine intervention.” “Comeuppance” also trended. Several news outlets noted the iconic fountain missing from the lawn. One journalist assumed it was a film shoot and went on record with, “This movie is gonna be cool as fuck.” This latter take of course inserted just enough doubt into the discussion — even if patently dismissible, as the comment was live on social media for only three minutes before being taken down and followed by a new post, “oops scratch that last one wtf” — to allow the usual suspects to deny that anything had happened at all. The members of It Never Happened quickly began to compile lists of other demonstrably provable events that they nonetheless believe to have never happened such as evolution and the moon landing of course. For some reason they were particularly vehement in their refusal to acknowledge the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. Empiricists responded with quote unquote facts, such as that fact that the building is no longer there, the fact that many of the building’s immediate trappings are no longer there, the fact that the site is still a disastrous mess, that fact that all of the secret service agents who were patrolling the roof are now in the hospital, and the fact that it’s been a week since the president’s last tweet, not to mention that no one’s seen hide nor hair of any members of his administration. The matter of the missing structure has led a fringe group of event-denialists to advance the claim that the entire structure had never been there in the first place, which they were able to substantiate in a quasi-convincing manner with quotes from the aforementioned article, “Holographic Universes and the Dialectic of Simulacral Non-Events.” It is an acutely esoteric story; one is asked to go through an invisible door. In one passage, Jon “tells himself that as long as he can hold his breath then every light they pass will mean a thousand people get to avoid being tortured.” Jon also holds his eyes open with toothpicks so he won’t blink. He reminds me of Dylan Thomas a little, who is his own way tried not to blink, like when his son was born in ‘39, at the end of a “low dishonorable decade,” when
Glory cracked like a flea
etc, etc,
O wake in me in my house in the mud
he says, etc, etc,
The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair.
And when the girl died by in the firebombing, and his I’m-not-mourning-watch-me-pour-my-heart-out poem which he published on the other side of the same goddam war, with its
After the first death there is no other
which, as you say, could be a rebuttal to Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” that Donne poem by the way just says the same thing over and over and over and over, but calling bullshit on it is harsh, I think Donne too, like Jon, was trying for the very same reason to hold his breath. I think a lot of people are grieved and horrified. Grieving and horrified. A lot. “... a story is told about Psammenitus, a King of Egypt. When he was defeated and captured by Cambises the King of Persia he showed no emotion as he saw his daughter walk across in front of him, dressed as a servant and sent to draw water. All his friends were about him, weeping and lamenting: he remained quiet, his eyes fixed on the ground. Soon afterwards he saw his son led away to execution; he kept the same countenance. But when he saw one of his household friends brought in among the captives, he began to beat his head and show grief. You can compare that with what we recently saw happen to one of our princes. He was at Trent: first he heard the news of the death of his very special elder brother, the support and pride of his whole family; then came the death of his younger brother, their second hope. He bore both these blows with exemplary fortitude; yet, when a few days later one of his men happened to die, he let himself be carried away by this event; he abandoned his resolute calm and gave himself over to grief and sorrow — so much so that some argued that only this last shock had touched him to the quick. The truth is that he was already brimful of sadness, so the least extra burden broke down the barriers of his endurance. We could, I suggest, put the same interpretation on the story of Psammenitus, except that the account goes on to tell us that Cambises asked him why he had remained unmoved by the fate of his son and daughter yet showed such emotion at the death of his friend. ‘Only the last of these misfortunes can be expressed by tears’, he replied; ‘the first two are way beyond any means of expression.” There are just too many bones at the bottoms of all the world’s Thameses. Is that the plural of Thames? Is there a plural of Thames? There is now. Trying to imagine how the girl felt, as she was devoured by fire, I can’t imagine being burnt, reminds me of an old blog post by Jacky Wang, called “TO BE DEVOURED”, there’s no way to not quote it all to you, she says
my energy is waning. where are you? shall i try to write on the edge of this feeling of exhaustion?
i was sitting in the kitchen thinking about Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John, eating whole wheat penne pasta, drinking holy basil tea, reading philosophy books on love, thinking about matthew’s letter. the snow falling outside. no class tomorrow. maybe for the first time in my life i feel sad that class is cancelled because it’s Jamaica’s class.
i think, i will go upstairs and write something simple. in my head there were basic scenes i wanted to document without commentary simply because i miss documenting. i know that, given the dreadful state of my memory, everything i failed to write down these last 6 months has been lost.
i rehearsed these scenes in my head as i sipped on my tea and tried to challenge myself not to “figure out” what happened or to comment on the significance of the events.
here the scene appears as “thinking”
the feeling of stepping into Jamaica Kincaid’s office
the yellow furniture
the red Marx bust on her bookshelf
Jean Rhys on her table
my head full of bullshit like, “will i have enough time to finish reading Lacan after our meeting?”
i told her that i had lived in the desert and that it was very lonely
i said, every night i dreamt i found a secret ocean
i had to conjure a body of water with my mind because my psyche could not bear the dryness
she spoke at length about the Goya painting “Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga”
a painting about death, she said, not innocence
everything in the painting is about to be devoured
including the boy
who would not grow up to be king
who may have already been dead when the painting was executed
by the end of her gorgeous soliloquy i may have said nothing
was it at this point that she looked out her window at the snow?
she was pissed about the snow
it was at this point that she took off her olive green glasses and sprayed them with cleaner fluid, rubbing the lenses gently
it never even occurred to me to buy eyeglass cleaning spray
maybe in that instant i felt a twinge of humiliation at being dirty
as she rubbed her glasses she said,
“i think this winter’s snow annoys me so much because i am losing my senses. my vision is deteriorating.”
i nodded and said that i too was preemptively mourning the loss my senses
that i had recently been told i have a brain tumor on my acoustic nerve that may eventually make me go deaf in my right ear
“there is a constant ringing in my ears,” i said
she asked me about it.
the pitch of the conversation abruptly shifted.
i can’t write what she said after that moment because i have already chosen to approach these memories using understated language.
her concern was maternal.
she said, “my god, you are my son’s age.”
she said, “you must demand to see your doctor right now. people who are made to feel worthless are treated as worthless by doctors.”
she spoke of the healthcare system in NY vs. MA
she said, “it is your brain.”
i downplayed the seriousness of it.
she said, “you are suffering. you don’t even know you’re suffering.”
she handed me a box of tissues.
i said that things have been hard, but that everything would be okay.
i could not bring myself to admit that i was suffering, though i have admitted it to my twitter followers and people much less willing to treat me with compassion
she said, “you haven’t got anyone in cambridge, do you?”
i admitted i was lonely, but said that i go to new york city frequently to do poetry readings
she said, “i will go to the doctor’s with you.”
i thought about how funny it would be to be accompanied to the doctor’s with a famous writer.
she said, “are you eating?” and i joked that that was the one thing i have going for me: i always eat
i called my PCP from her office phone and while talking to the receptionist she said, “tell them it is an emergency!”
i couldn’t bring myself to say “emergency” so i said, “urgent.”
she said, “go to the HUHS building right now and demand to be seen.”
(had i ever felt seen?)
(did she see me?)
i left her office and went to the library instead because my philosophy seminar on love was beginning in less than an hour
in the seminar i felt the urge to issue a disclaimer, “my head is elsewhere today.”
but i didn’t. despite being too distracted by the existence of my tumor to focus on Lacan fully, i spoke eloquently of desire and the professor kept coming back to my remarks
by the end of the class i felt oddly liberated from the guilt i’ve always experienced around my “bad attachments”
perhaps all my interpersonal disappointments were just lessons
and this thirst for the Thing — the object eternally in absentia — was the force propelling me toward the world
to be bound to the world by this search for a lost object that must necessarily remain unrecoverable
i felt moved by Lacan’s description of the pot maker in Heidegger
the void at the center of every being, around which we mold the receptacle
with our hands
When I sat down to read this morning, flies and more flies ran over my outstretched legs. “I suppose you’ve got the same problem,” I said to Mr Ambrayses, who nodded yes. “Two explanations are commonly offered for this,” he said: “In the first we are asked to imagine certain sites in the world — a crack in the concrete in Chicago or New Delhi, a twist in the air in an empty suburb of Prague, a clotted milk bottle on a Bradford tip — from which all flies issue in a constant stream, a smoke exhaled from some fundamental level of things. This is what people are asking — though they do not usually know it — when they say exasperatedly, ‘Where are all these flies coming from?’ Such locations are like the holes in the side of a new house where insulation has been pumped in: something left over from the constructional phase of the world. This is an adequate, even an appealing model of the process. But it is not modern; and I prefer the alternative, in which it is assumed that as Viriconium grinds past us, dragging its enormous bulk against the bulk of the world, the energy generated is expressed in the form of these insects, which are like the sparks shooting from — you get my drift.” The response is a 310-page serial poem, with many of the untitled poems being 14 lines long. The dedication reads: “Thanks to David.” One poem begins:
The poem of eyedrops on the ashen warrior
the poem of sea light on chopsticks
the poem of Father Deal and his zephyr trail
a poem from the Stuff and Nonsense board
poem for putting things on top of other things
Sixty or so pages later, “a poet picked up a used tortoise.” What is a “used tortoise”? What is an unused tortoise, for that matter?
“Why, they’re
these super-tall
funnels that
start from a
few tiny spots
near the earth,
say about right
here, level with
the bottom of
your pretty
pink jeans,
and they
reach all
the way up
to heaven,
Sweetheart,
and
they each have
an itty bitty sieve
at the very bottom
just above the dirt,
where only the
purest of spirits
can crawl through.”
... [He pauses,
seems to reach
metaphorically
for something
he just can’t get]
“Which they do,
if not often, at
least a time or
two. Or so I’m
told.” Exhausted,
he slams the shovel
down further into
the drying earth.
I mean, I can’t believe I sold that first iteration of Hoover’s Norton Postmodern Poetry. Now I don’t have a copy of the greatest poetics statement since the Personism Manifesto, Anselm Hollo’s “Wild West Workshop Poem.”
[Note: Sources: JBR, several conflated emails to E, sent 29 Aug 018, throughout the morning; Nathaniel Mackey, “Dear Angel of Dust”, at Detroit Metro Times, 17 May 00; JBR; Wislawa Szymborska, “Four in the Morning” (trs. Magus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire), at Poetry Society; JBR (re the goats see “Goats prefer happy people”, at Science Daily, 28 Aug 018; JBR, but see Kieran Setiya, “Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy”, at Public Books, 30 Aug 018; Tom Clark, “Baseball and Classicism”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR (the stats are from Baseball Reference); Kathy Acker, “The Language of the Body”, Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream, Pussy, King of the Pirates; Anselm Hollo, “When you’re feeling”, “Would it be sentimental to state”, in Guests of Space; JBR; Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, and Kyle Proehl, quoted in Proehl’s “Not Unpacking but Seeking”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 Aug 018; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Warnings Along the Droughtline”, at BLDGBLOG, 25 Aug 018; Paul D’Agostino, “Something Happened in DC”, at Hyperallergic, 1 Aug 018; Fani Papageorgiou, “A Norwegian Tale of Love Is Translated”, at Hyperallergic, 1 Aug 018 (re Hanne Ørstavik, Love (tr. Martin Aitken); JBR, letter to Alan Baker, 2 Sept 018, approx. 8:47am PDT (the quote is from Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (tr. MA Screech)); Jackie Wang, “To Be Devoured”, at Giuliana Tofana the Apothecary (which was probably called Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns when this was posted), 8 Feb 015; M John Harrison, “what we talk about when we talk about Viriconium”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 2 Sept 018; JBR; John Yau, and Clark Coolidge, Poet, quoted in Yau’s “What Is a Poet?”, at Hyperallergic, 2 Sept 018; JBR; Del Ray Cross, “mmdccxc”, at Anachronizms, 2 Sept 018; JBR]
Comments