Being my mini-memoir for readings at which everyone
but my two friends is younger than 32.
[for Raymond Federman]
On the road
She’s pushing 50 plus, don’t ask. No more Southern Comfort orgies, existential funhouse trips, Kundalini embraces in grottos, poetry benders, and slightly protected sex, she’s busy trying to be the heroine of the story, a third [...]
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At a party, sitting at the dining room table, Jeffrey talks shit to James, asserting that he’s a poser, he’s wrong if he thinks he’s cool, and that, generally, he’s a piece of shit. James sits across from Jeffrey, nodding his head. Jeffrey loses his virginity to a freshman in his [...]
Categories: thoughts | Tags: Brandon Scott Gorrell, fiction | 6 Comments »
There’s a touching story in Jackie Wullschlager’s wonderful, illuminating biography Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. In it, a seventeen year old H.C. Andersen enters a school in the town of Slagelse where all his classmates are six years younger. When asked by the headmaster to locate the city of Copenhagen on [...]
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“Forget the self-indulgent quest for happiness or self-knowledge associated with Byronic heroes” relays the The Longman Anthology of British Literature, in paraphrase of a warning once delivered by Thomas Carlyle, “strive instead to improve society and practice greater artistic control; know your work and do it.” Here is the conflict that inhabits the [...]
Categories: Regular Contributor, thoughts | Tags: Bob Dylan, Byronic Heroes, Jane Eyre, Jeff Price, Thomas Carlyle | No Comments »
About fifty years ago, David Markson wrote a pair of hard-boiled detective novels set in Greenwich Village, Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat. The books read like beat-flavored Spillane, and within the private eye character of Harry Fannin you can see the beginnings of the voice, form, and preoccupations of Markson’s [...]
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An extremely normal man walks past a park bench, a stoplight, a pigeon, a dog, etc. So certain is he of these objects that he can think about other things as he walks, which is why he fails to notice when the world becomes paper. He’s agonizing about something in his briefcase.
Only as the snowflakes [...]
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In the end, I also brought the Lonely Planet’s 30 pages on Albania. Also the out-of-print 1996 Blue Guide to Albania. I read them on the plane to Rome. The Lonely Planet reassured me that Albania is lovely now, all safe and beautiful, really, very safe, don’t worry, well, of course, except perhaps for Tropoja [...]
Categories: thoughts | Tags: Albania, Catherine Bohne, Community Bookstore, Poetry, Reading | 1 Comment »
“Once, only, I was awakened suddenly, by something falling on me – flomp – miaw – fizz! – an accidental cat had tumbled from some unexplored height, and testified great surprise . . . .”
– Edward Lear in Albania
In three days, I am getting on an airplane, and going to Italy, with the firm intention [...]
Categories: thoughts | Tags: Albania, Catherine Bohne, Community Bookstore, Reading | No Comments »
By Wythe Marschall
1.
When I read, I try to read quickly, swimming across a river of ink. It is only later that I can return and wade more slowly, learning its depths, and whirlpools and fords, oxbows and overhanging cypress branches, and look for life in the riverbed—where the juiciest ideas and quotations often wait, buried [...]
Categories: thoughts | Tags: Barthes, Re-Reading, Reading, Wythe Marschall | 2 Comments »
“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A [...]
Categories: Regular Contributor, thoughts | Tags: Bob Dylan, conspiracy theories, Gravity's Rainbow, Inherent Vice, Jeff Price, paranoia, Richard Fariña, Thomas Pynchon | 2 Comments »
