Liszt, whose piano pieces I love, born two-hundred and three years ago today. The piano player explains himself.
The Hamster Emergency Alert System worked.
So, me: the recent Booker Prize winner, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was on a new book cart at the library I work in, doopty-doo, I'm at that section of Gravity's Rainbow, deep in the zone, when Pynchon tests his theories of entropy out on the reader, I can take a minute to check out the Flanagan, who knows, it might work, be a welcome sherbet break in the middle of Gravity's heavy gravy. And it was working! And may still work, but.... the main character, in an encounter in a used book store, meets a magnetically mysterious woman, they engage in an enigmatic conversation laden with electric flirtation but then go their separate ways. Meanwhile, the main character's not-blood uncle, who he has never met, owns a hotel on a beach near where the main character is in training for deployment for the Australian army, invites his nephew to visit. The main character walks into the hotel's bar, the woman behind the bar turns to greet him, it's the uncle's wife, the mysterious woman from the bookstore, and goddamn it, long-timers here know of my awe and love of Serendipity, but goddamn it.... this is a minor bitch in the litany of reasons for my past few year's struggles with reading novels, but don't hit me with plot-sticks, goddamn it, though it is illustrative of my growing impatience if not yet rejection of contructs and the unconsciously accepted right-angled laws of construction.
- Says the guy with the formatted blog posts.
- I love the scrolling scores.
- Speculative post-humanisms part one, part two.
- Is not the night restless for them?
- The technology of violence.
- Your cult artists' favorite pseudoscience!
- Blog masthead museum! This is true - I never think to take a screenshot of a current format of this shitty blog until I've changed it.
- Escape from Microsoft Word.
- Walser, for those of yo who do.
NOT TO LIVE
John Berryman
It kissed us, soft, to cut our throats, this coast,
like a malice of the lazy King. I hunt,
& hunt! but find here what to kill?—nothing is blunt,
but phantoming uneases I find. Ghost
on ghost precedes of all most scared us, most
we fled. Howls fail upon this secret, far air: grunt,
shaming for food; you must. I love the King
& it was not I who strangled at the toast
but a flux of a free & dying adjutant:
God be with him. He & God be with us all,
for we are not to live, I cannot wring,
like laundry, blue my soul—indecisive thing . .
From undergrowth & over odd birds call
and who would starv'd so survive? God save the King.
