Wednesday, December 19, 2018

The Ruined and Vacant Sheets

  • The writing block that's not a writing block, I blame seeing a movie.
  • I bought Earthgirl a $100 gift card (don't 
  • worry, she doesn't read this shitty blog, if she finds out 
  • you told her) to Bethesda Row Cinema and will tell her if we go to three movies the two of us I'll buy her another.
  • I thought I'd read Eliot's Daniel Deronda before but no (I 
  • read Adam Bede, I don't remember a single scene, sentence, image about Adam Bede, the novel, a major Murnane theme, recall reading a novel, remember nothing about the novel).
  • I'm a hundred pages in and happy when suddenly here is Mallinger Grandcourt, I 
  • guarantee after one chapter of the fucksmug (and
  • then there's Gwendolyn) he 
  • is an asshole supreme
  • whose first name will make me smile as only one person can vouch (unless apathy is a disease - origin of the maxim directly related).
  • Novels, I can read Eliot, I can read Murnane, gonna try to read McElroy's cinderblock, but...
  • I know why I'm afraid of movies.
  • I have never had a writing block that worried me less, strange times, a writing block not a writing block.
  • I still think often, daily recently, about Coover's Brunists, Wrath of, that was, um, cinematic...






HAPPY OBLIVION

FRANZ WRIGHT

It circles awhile, I suppose, until at last
having found nothing green
it returns.

The holy dove of tongues on fire released -

The birthday cake, the ruined and vacant
sheets, the pilot lost
in a vast dopamine cloud.

Closed eyes
and lips that open hovering
on the verge of speech, the final

breath, also known as the infinite
hours which proceeded the first,
at last released.

4 comments:

  1. Totes linear, yes, although the maxim, was, now obviously, flawed. And yes. Vouchies.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1)the pilot lost in wright's poem reminds me of 'the lost pilot' by james tate

    2)here's a james tate poem

    I Am a Finn

    I am standing in the post office, about
    to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
    I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).

    Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
    He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
    When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger

    no one suspects that I am a Finn.
    I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
    on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid

    to show their quivery emotions, secure
    in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
    emigrate from Finland in 1910 – why

    is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of
    thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
    Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue

    or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s
    one hundredth birthday, though he is not
    Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud

    laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals
    are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten
    and fox. There are about 35,000 elk.

    But I should be studying for my exam.
    I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
    assuming I pass. Finnish Literature

    really came alive in the 1860s.
    Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
    no one cares that I am a Finn.

    They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
    winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
    As a Finn, this infuriates me.

    3)reading about sillanpää, i learned about the finnish civil war in the early 20th century

    4)i also learned that many of his works had been made into movies

    5)speaking of films and finland, the phrase in quotes after tate's mention of charlie chaplin is from the finnish national anthem

    5a)charlie chaplin's 100th birthday, the 'today' of tate's poem, was april 16th 1989

    6)tate's poem speaks of the post office, as does

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/opinion/trump-postal-service.html

    published 'today' - also see

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/why-the-post-office-makes-america-great.html

    ReplyDelete