Saturday, September 16, 2017

Never Refer to the Rooms Hidden Behind Where Dissections Are Effected




  • Colin Newman's birthday, his 64th. Above certainly one of the three most posted songs here.
  • Wire in the innermost circle of bands that rotate through the three non-permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game.
  • Darkening
  • Closing time in the West?
  • John Gardner's tangled legacy
  • When I was in my twenties - reading October Light, Mickelsson's Ghosts - Gardner was someone.
  • I liked October Light, Mickelsson's Ghosts, the latter lots.
  • I did not read his book on motherfucking moral fiction.
  • I knew of the food fights and thought Gardner the ass.
  • The food fights are not why I haven't read Gardner's fiction in, best guess? 28 years.
  • I found three Larry Woiwode novels in a box on a shelf. 
  • I read them once upon, must have liked enough to think I might reread. 
  • I have not thought of Larry Woiwode's novels in two decades and remember nothing about them.
  • When I wrote my thesis on Elkin it never occurred to me to browse Gardner's motherfucking moral fiction even though I knew about the food fights.
  • I am small.
  • Imagine Stan Elkin and Bill Gass drinking whiskey, riffing on John Gardner.
  • Ed's Hurricane Irma Reading Riff
  • I'm gonna try Hannah again. I should like, why don't I get it?
  • Withdrawal from traditional food fights intensifies reading blocks in at least motherfucking me.
  • Dan reviews The Fabrications. 99 cents at motherfucking Amazon.
  • There is a reason all but two posts a year here are tagged My Complicity.
  • The first thirty pages are pow! but I usually sputter to at least 70 pages before failing a novel. 
  • UPDATE! Fuck, the chain fell off the bike.
  • You are the product.
  • Robert Duncan / Charles Olson correspondence
  • Makeup on empty space.
  • I love Wire. This is new, as in this year:






BUTCHERS

C.K. Williams
 
1
  
Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,
from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need.
  
Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block,
and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected,
  
where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation
as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.
  
Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman?
It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are.
  
Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations—
Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.
  
2
  
But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely
that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal
 
within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain,
aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards.
 
Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec
your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance!
  
Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling,
we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher,
  
who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure
where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.



1 comment:

  1. A few days after Gardener's death, John Irving was doing a press conference in The City for (I think) the release of 'Hotel New Hampshire' and a friend who worked for NPR and was covering Irving's appearance asked me along. It was brief, and held in a room off the lobby at the Mark Hopkins hotel; after, my friend went up to Irving with me in tow and I remember Gardener's accident came up. Irving stopped, looked at us, and said "What was he thinking?" Then shrugged and said, "Well, you know John; mind's always somewhere else; he was thinking one way and his motorcycle went the other." I've always remembered the encounter due to the odd assumed familiarity with Gardener, which my friend and I, of course, didn't have.

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