Sunday, August 30, 2020

I Guess That Crooked Eucalyptus Tree Also

  • I finished a novel, Renee Gladman's *Event Factory,* the first of her Ravicka Tetrology, when was the last time I finished a first-time read novel and what even was that novel?
  • I figured it out, novel-wise, but it was an author I'd read before 
  • When was the last time I started and finished a novel by someone I never heard of?
  • My eyes, they are stable but I cannot read for long without ache, that's not it (but doesn't help)
  • New poetry and music and art I eagerly read hear and see (I long ago sacrificed movies, television, I don't have time and brain for everything)
  • My theory: I think poetry is poetry, music music, art art, novels systems, systems require work, systems are what got the world clusterfucked even if the novel is deconstructing that system with the novel's system, but I don't have time and brain (and patience) to learn the new systems deconstructing the old systems (plus the futility, the current system will kill us regardless how many new systems deconstructing our old system I read)
  • (this is also connected to new typing spree and abandonment of ink and tablets and sudden return of three straight days of blegging) 
  • *Event Factory* (this as much a review as I do) brilliantly disorients our familiar daily anthropologized negotiations with the disintegrating city and its citizens who share a language but cannot communicate but insist on the formalities of decorum, I ordered two, three, and four from an independent bookseller
  • So, hopefully, maybe, occasionally, novels again
  • On Talk Talk's gorgeous Spirit of Eden



















IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING

Peter Gizzi

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.
I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.
I guess this highway will have to do and the cars
     and the people in them on their way.
The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.
It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine
     hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.
This sky with its macular clouds also
     and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

1 comment:

  1. 1)commentator paul craig roberts interprets the following passage, which he quotes, as showing that national public radio hates white people -

    “The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”

    https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting

    my own view is different -

    to quote this explanation of why looting is fun
    is not an endorsement that looting be done

    2)people can describe or depict something without necessarily endorsing it - for example, an obsolete and now-seen-as-offensive word can be used in a poem to illustrate the thinking and language of someone without such a depiction being racist in intention or in effect

    3)and speaking of race relations in north america - back in the previous millennium, prior to my retirement from the rat race, at my work place i saw several persons expressing their joy that their fellow ethnic group member o j simpson was acquitted

    3.2)i thought i understood their joy without agreeing with it


    4)from reeve lindbergh's translation of francis of assisi's canticle of the sun

    for all thy gifts of every kind
    we offer praise with quiet mind
    be with us, lord, and guide our ways
    around the circle of our days



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