Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art [1 ed.] 9780817360412, 9780817394059

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1. Writing Language Writing: A Preface (of Sorts)
R. Henry Nigl | The Shout Artist (online)
Kass Fleisher | The Speed of Zoom
Scott Helmes | Non-Additive Postulations; The Division of the Soul
Ben Marcus | from Notable American Women
Bob Perelman | China; Confession
Cole Swensen | Thought Experiment; Should Something Happen to the Heart; How Photography Has Changed the Human Face; Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees
Harry Mathews | Translation and the OuLiPo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese
Bhanu Kapil | from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
Lyn Hejinian | from My Life
Leslie Scalapino | Delay Series
John Ashbery | Business Personals
Noah Eli Gordon | from Novel Pictorial Noise
Blake Butler | from Scorch Atlas
Carla Harryman | from Adorno’s Noise
2. The Double Helix of Contemporary Writing & Contemporary Thought
Charles Bernstein | The Lie of Art; Thank You for Saying You’re Welcome
Michael Martone | Jaques Derrida Writes Postcards to Himself from a Diner in Winesburg, Indiana
Lydia Davis | Story
Joe Amato | from Under Virga
William H. Gass | A Little Song of Suffering on Behalf of Prose
Claudia Rankine | from Citizen
Jonathan Safran Foer | Finitude: From the Permanent Collection
Caroline Bergvall | Say: "Parsley" (online)
David Foster Wallace | Reduced
Brian Evenson | Altmann’s Tongue (online); House Rules
Deb Olin Unferth | Brevity
Lucy Corin | Some Machines
Jenny Boully | from The Book of Beginnings and Endings
Lidia Yuknavitch | The Chronology of Water
Rachel Blau Duplessis | Draft 95: Erg
Percival Everett | Confluence
George Saunders | The Wavemaker Falters
Robert Coover | The Return of the Dark Children
Joshua Marie Wilkinson | from Meadow Slasher
Steven Ross Smith | The Reader
3. Writing Technologies/Digital Wor(l)ds
Jason Huff | from AutoSummarize
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries | Dakota (online); Nippon (online)
Nam Le with Matt Huynh, Kylie Boltin, and Matt Smith | The Boat (online)
John Cayley with Douglas Cape and Giles Perring | What We Will (online)
The High Muck a Muck Collective Including Fred Wah, Jin Zhang, Nicola Harwood, Thomas Loh, and Bessie Wapp | High Muck a Muck (online)
Charles Bernstein | The Yellow Pages (online)
Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher | Liberty Ring! (online)
Lance Olsen with Tim Gutherie | The Nature of the Creative Process (online); 10:01 (online)
Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski | Queerskins (online)
J.R. Carpenter | The Gathering Cloud (online)
David Jhave Johnston | Henry (online); Ouadane (online)
Alan Bigelow | Silence; Last Words; My Life in Three Parts (online)
Mez Breeze | V[R]erses: An XR Story Series (online)
Scott Rettberg and Roderick Coover | Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project (online)
Nick Thurston | from Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right
4. Architecture of the Page/Writing as Visual Form/Visual Form as Writing
Lesley Dill | Blue Poem Girl
Lee Siegel | from Love in a Dead Language, “The Kama Sutra Classic Comic”
Johanna Drucker | from Narratology
Lily Hoang | from Changing
Tom Phillips | from A Humument
Graham Rawle | from Woman’s World
Susan Howe and Susan Bee | from Bed Hangings
Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin | Be-lie-ve & Absolute-Relative
Douglas Kearney | Runaway Tongue
5. Clouds, Collage & the Aesthetics of Ripping & Mixing
Miels Plenge with Charles Bernstein | The Answer (online)
Davis Schneiderman | Drone-Space Modulator (online)
Mark Z. Danielewski | from House of Leaves
Frank Rogaczewski | So What Else Is New?; The Fate of Humanity in Verse
Craig Dworkin | from Parse
Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse | from Between Page and Screen
David Clark | 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the left hand) (online)
6. Reworking the Past & the Future & the Present
Charles Bernstein | Before Time; Amberianum
Richard McGuire | Here
Fred Wah | Akokli (Goat) Creek; Havoc Nation; Hamill’s Last Stand; Chain; The Poem Called Syntax; (sentenced)
Harryette Mullen | Bilingual Instructions; Black Nikes; Coals to Newcastle, Panama Hats from Ecuador; Denigration; Sleeping with the Dictionary
Anna Joy Springer with Rachel Carns and Jane O'Neil | The Forest of Mandatory Innocence; The Forest of Peril That’s Real; The Forest of Good Bad Intentions; The Not Fake Parallel Forest; No Escape Hatch in the Forest (online)
Michael Mejia | Coyote Takes Us Home
Carole Maso | Deer
Patrik Ourednik | from Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
Stacey Levine | And You Are?
Salvador Plascencia | from The People of Paper
Kate Bernheimer | A Star Wars Tale
Rikki Ducornet | The Wild Child
Hank Lazer | Dream; Torah; INTER(IR)RUPTIONS 5
Debra Di Blasi | “Winter” from Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past
Lynne Tillman | Future Prosthetic@?
7. Sound Writing
Steve McCaffery | The White Pages
Nathaniel Mackey | Song of the Andoumboulou: 18, 19 & 20 (online)
David Antin | stepping into the river (online)
Ian Hatcher | All Hands Meeting (online)
R.M. Berry | from FRANK
David Melnick | from Men in Aida
8. DNA, Found Scores, Machine Writing & Other Post-Literature Literature
David Buuck | Black Box Theater: United 93
Vanessa Place | from Tragodía
Nick Montfort | from ppg256
Shelley Jackson | from SKIN
Jhave | Spreeder: For EPC20 4am-5am Sept 11th 2014 (Part 1) (online)
Eduardo Kac | Biopoetry
Christian Bök | The Xenotext Experiment
Credits

Citation preview

Conceptualisms

Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art Edited by Steve Tomasula

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press. Typeface: Whitney Cover art: John Robert Marasigan/Unsplash Cover design: Daniel Warren Conceptualisms is made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-0-8173-6041-2 E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9405-9

contents i

introduction 1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts)

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035

r. henry nigl | The Shout Artist (online) kass fleisher | The Speed of Zoom scott helmes | Non-Additive Postulations; The Division of the Soul ben marcus | from Notable American Women bob perelman | China; Confession cole swensen | Thought Experiment; Should Something Happen to the Heart;



How Photography Has Changed the Human Face; Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees

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103

harry mathews | Translation and the OuLiPo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese bhanu kapil | from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers lyn hejinian | from My Life leslie scalapino | Delay Series john ashbery | Business Personals noah eli gordon | from Novel Pictorial Noise blake butler | from Scorch Atlas carla harryman | from Adorno’s Noise

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2 | the double helix of contemporary writing & contemporary thought

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charles bernstein | The Lie of Art; Thank You for Saying You’re Welcome michael martone | Jaques Derrida Writes Postcards to Himself from a Diner in Winesburg, Indiana lydia davis | Story joe amato | from Under Virga william h. gass | A Little Song of Suffering on Behalf of Prose claudia rankine | from Citizen jonathan safran foer | Finitude: From the Permanent Collection caroline bergvall | Say: "Parsley" (online) david foster wallace | Reduced brian evenson | Altmann’s Tongue (online); House Rules deb olin unferth | Brevity lucy corin | Some Machines jenny boully | from The Book of Beginnings and Endings lidia yuknavitch | The Chronology of Water rachel blau duplessis | Draft 95: Erg percival everett | Confluence george saunders | The Wavemaker Falters robert coover | The Return of the Dark Children joshua marie wilkinson | from Meadow Slasher steven ross smith | The Reader

243

3 | writing technologies/digital wor(l)ds

247

jason huff | from AutoSummarize young-hae chang heavy industries | Dakota (online); Nippon (online)

019



020 024 026 031

060 068 077 082 084 088

131 133 136 141 151 156 165 166 168 177 182 188 193 201 207 216 224 234

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vi contents

253

nam le with matt huynh, kylie boltin, and matt smith | The Boat (online) john cayley with douglas cape and giles perring | What We Will (online) the high muck a muck collective including fred wah, jin zhang, nicola harwood, thomas loh, and bessie wapp | High Muck a Muck (online) charles bernstein | The Yellow Pages (online) stephanie strickland and ian hatcher | Liberty Ring! (online) lance olsen with tim gutherie | The Nature of the Creative Process (online); 10:01 (online) illya szilak and cyril tsiboulski | Queerskins (online) j.r. carpenter | The Gathering Cloud (online) david jhave johnston | Henry (online); Ouadane (online) alan bigelow | Silence; Last Words; My Life in Three Parts (online) mez breeze | V[R]erses: An XR Story Series (online) scott rettberg and roderick coover | Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project (online) nick thurston | from Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right

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4 | architecture of the page/writing as visual form/visual form as writing

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lesley dill | Blue Poem Girl lee siegel | from Love in a Dead Language, “The Kama Sutra Classic Comic” johanna drucker | from Narratology lily hoang | from Changing tom phillips | from A Humument graham rawle | from Woman’s World susan howe and susan bee | from Bed Hangings rimma gerlovina and valeriy gerlovin | Be-lie-ve & Absolute-Relative douglas kearney | Runaway Tongue

327

5 | clouds, collage & the aesthetics of ripping & mixing

329

360

niels plenge with charles bernstein | The Answer (online) davis schneiderman | Drone-Space Modulator (online) mark z. danielewski | from House of Leaves frank rogaczewski | So What Else Is New?; The Fate of Humanity in Verse craig dworkin | from Parse amaranth borsuk and brad bouse | from Between Page and Screen david clark | 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the left hand) (online)

361

6 | reworking the past & the future & the present

363 373

charles bernstein | Before Time; Amberianum richard mcguire | Here fred wah | Akokli (Goat) Creek; Havoc Nation; Hamill’s Last Stand; Chain;



The Poem Called Syntax; (sentenced)

381

harryette mullen | Bilingual Instructions; Black Nikes; Coals to Newcastle, Panama Hats



from Ecuador; Denigration; Sleeping with the Dictionary

251

252





264 266 273 284 291 312 324

330 347 352 356

370

contents vii 384

anna joy springer with rachel carns and jane o'neil | The Forest of Mandatory



Innocence; The Forest of Peril That’s Real; The Forest of Good Bad Intentions; The Not Fake



Parallel Forest; No Escape Hatch in the Forest (online)

385

444

michael mejia | Coyote Takes Us Home carole maso | Deer patrik ourednik | from Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century stacey levine | And You Are? salvador plascencia | from The People of Paper kate bernheimer | A Star Wars Tale rikki ducornet | The Wild Child hank lazer | Dream; Torah; INTER(IR)RUPTIONS 5 debra di blasi | “Winter” from Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past lynne tillman | Future Prosthetic@?

449

7 | sound writing

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468

steve mccaffery | The White Pages nathaniel mackey | Song of the Andoumboulou: 18, 19 & 20 (online) david antin | stepping into the river (online) ian hatcher | All Hands Meeting (online) r.m. berry | from FRANK david melnick | from Men in Aida

476

8 | dna, found scores, machine writing & other post-literature literature

480

519

david buuck | Black Box Theater: United 93 vanessa place | from Tragodía nick montfort | from ppg256 shelley jackson | from SKIN jhave | Spreeder: For EPC20 4am-5am Sept 11th 2014 (Part 1) (online) eduardo kac | Biopoetry christian bök | The Xenotext Experiment



9 | contributor statements and biographies (online at: www.conceptualisms.info)

528

credits

398 402 410 425 429 431 435 438

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494 505 507 511 512

introduction 1

Introduction “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment — maybe, say, six weeks — nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened.”  — Morton Feldman

contemporary vis-art Composer Morton Feldman’s description of the mid-century art scene refers to the explosion of forms, means, and materials that emerged from studios in the wake of Duchamp’s "Fountain": a urinal placed in a gallery, whose symmetry, craftsmanship, and beauty asked, ‘Why am I not also art?’ The answer we’ve embraced since then is that Duchamp’s Fountain is art, of course, but for reasons that have far less to do with its craftsmanship or beauty than the questions it raised or the concept upon which Duchamp based his work. Enter most art galleries today, and the view of contemporary society you’ll find is less likely to be expressed by a realistic painting of a Parisian cafe than a work like “Alba,” the rabbit that artist Eduardo Kac genetically engineered to glow green. Instead of casting history as a bronze general on a horse, it’s more likely to take the form of Tom Friedman’s “1,000 Hours of Staring,” a blank piece of paper that the artist stared at for a thousand hours to imbue it with a history, the way a cheap, ordinary pen becomes museum worthy because of the history attached to it, say, by having been carried by an astronaut to the moon. That is, today, mainstream visual art is conceptual art: art where the concepts or ideas informing it are at least as important as the art object itself, and whose form calls attention to these ideas. Yet even the brief list of the two examples above illustrates how the term “conceptual art” is a misnomer when used in the singular, for it masks how varied, how multiple these concepts, and so these art works, can be: each a proposition for how to make and think about art, each an articulation of its own particular concepts, or engagement with the world outside of art—that is, its own particular time, its own particular place. This anthology, then, is an argument to think through contemporary writing that engages its issues by foregrounding its forms, materials, and ideas. It is an anthology of works more motivated by concepts than conventions; works that are aware of themselves as art made of words and engage with language

2 conceptualisms

as a medium as well as a means to an end. Given that literature itself has never had an easy or stable definition, conceptual writing, like conceptual visual art, cannot be one thing but an irreducible multiplicity. Having no clear boundaries, conceptual writing is less able to answer questions that beg binary answers, such as ‘Is this art?’ than it is to ask, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why does the novel have to be one thing?’ ‘How many ways can a poem be?’

conceptual writing / writing as contemporary art Anyone who steps away from the bestseller lists can see that the literary landscape beyond its commercial walls is just as wild as that of visual art, just as varied, just as conceptual: novels in the form of a diorama; narratives told as a series of FaceBook pages, tweets, or crowdsourced across multiple social-media platforms; stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting or genetic code, pixels, skin — as well as print and sound — carriers of language with the strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it into art. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what makes writing literature; and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature conceptual. As Gerald Bruns puts it, conceptual writing is “made of language but not of what we use language to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, descriptions, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. It’s not that conceptual writing excludes these things; it’s that the writings we call conceptual are no longer in their service.” In this way, authors can be like painters once photography freed them from their service to document, to depict historical events, to create lifelike portraits. The clowns of both Shakespeare and Beckett understand this, undermining the pragmatic literalness of utilitarian speech, as do authors of fictional guidebooks such as Michael Martone’s The Blue Guide to Indiana with its description of the trans-Indiana mayonnaise pipeline; as Steve McCaffery’s exhaustive, performative reading of headings in the Toronto phone book suggests, it’s hard for a functional street map, directory, or urinal to be read as art. It is only by disconnecting the pipes of these “texts” that they can become symbolic. It is only by making them useless that they can, paradoxically, become useful — useful in a different sense — not as urinal, map, or phone directory, but as rhetoric. As art. Novels and poems are, of course, put to many uses (as therapy, commercial product, greeting cards, entertainment, docu-drama … ). And conceptual literature can also have utility, especially that which blurs the line between art and life. “If someone walks up to you and starts talking,” David Antin says at the start of one of his talk poems, “how do you know if it’s a poem?”

introduction 3

Even Antin’s talk poems — long impromptu monologues — even the most conceptual of writing — the sound poem of non-rhymes for no reason — has to be entertaining, that is, has to serve. Conversely, even the most non-conceptual work, the work deep in the service of some pragmatic function, is written according to some theory, even if it’s only a concept as to how many syllables are in a sonnet, or whether the protagonist can see through walls or must obey the laws of Newtonian physics. As far back as the Greeks, readers have noted the multivalenced nature of writing, or as Aristotle put it, every work has a philosophical component (content), a form (aesthetics), and a rhetorical function (political). It is impossible to speak, write, or make any art without a conceptual basis, for theories of how the world is arranged and can be represented are embedded in our very grammar (even our very cognitive makeup). All writing is already conceptual. In this sense, even the most traditional novel can be conceptual: a story for Henry James is never just what happened. It is also what someone thought happened. And this is a theory of composition, a conception. So what do we mean when we talk about “conceptual writing”? Partly, we mean writing that calls attention to this fact: writing in which form both conveys meaning and is the object of meaning. It could be said, for example, that the most traditional, formal aspect of a portrait bust is marble. But it’s easy to see the relation of form to meaning in art when Marc Quinn creates a classical bust of his own head, but instead of using a traditional material like marble, uses his own blood, drained out of his body and frozen to form a block of ice that could be shaped, thereby suggesting that the identity of a person lies less in the appearance of their surface features than their inner (and ephemeral) biology. Alain Robbe-Grillet makes the same point thus: if the style of Camus’ The Stranger was changed, its flattened effect would be lost and the philosophy of this existential novel diluted. Here, form, rhetoric, is conceived as worldview, not simply technique, or style. Similar analogies between form, concept, and meaning could be made in any medium: architecture, music … Thus it is no accident that the epic poem arises in one era and the poem written by a computer in another; or the poem written in genetic code. It’s no accident that a conception of literature as a product of unique, individual genius arises in one century, while in another it takes the form of a database film, that is, a narrative film such as Toxi•City by Roderick Coover, Scott Rettberg, and numerous others who contributed to the software and imagery of a film that is different every time it is viewed. Or writing conceived as architecture, or that foregrounds the body of the text, its materials and visual nature; or a rip-pasteburn aesthetic — call it collage — and its democracy of sampled quotation, recycling, appropriation, recirculation — so much so, in fact, that collage of

4 conceptualisms

reworked materials has been the dominant organizing principle of the (post)modernist period. This includes the plethora of authors reworking history or appropriating pop or earlier forms, as Patrik Ourednik does in Europeana, casting this novel in the form of a history textbook; or repurposing materials as Vanessa Place does, creating narratives by Caption repurposing court documents as poetry, making them speak a different truth in the manner of visual works like “Gloria” by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, which repurposes a 52-ton army tank as art. Indeed, recasting language (its materials, its history) in ways that require readers to reassess their own assumptions can be seen as a marker of contemporary, conceptual writing. But why? What is it about our moment that makes us feel, again (like Gertrude Stein?), the need to reclaim a language? “Faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists,” the “uncreative” poet Kenneth Goldsmith has written (uncreatively rewriting filmmaker Harun Farocki’s words: “Because so many images already exist, I am discouraged to make new ones”). Conversely, Johanna Drucker writes that the only way we can reclaim our language, make it our own, is to keep writing. Reclaim from what? Author Raymond Federman once answered with another question: “Is it possible for literature to survive the kind of reduction, the kind of banalization that mass media imposes on contemporary culture?” he asked, referring to the overwhelming power of entertainment corporations, Hollywood and television producers, and political machinery to define literature, and indeed all writing, in terms that serve their interests. Federman’s list seems equally valid today, if augmented by a variety of software developers, social media conglomerates, and other entities jockeying to monopolize “the way we speak.” “Indeed, if there is a future in fiction,” Brian Evenson has written, “I think it lies in the active dialogue that can occur between fiction and philosophy/theory, a dialogue in which each prods the other toward new possibilities, where each proposes questions that the other is compelled to answer.” In sum, those who value purity of genre will not find it in conceptual writing: the questions that motivate conceptual writing are as varied as the answers given by the work, but much of what goes by conceptual writing today seems to be writing with or against the machine: our bureaucracies, the habits of mind, and other systems that colonize the ways we speak, and so the ways we think. A number of authors

introduction 5

write to foreground the arbitrariness of convention: to draw attention to what an accident of history usage can be, as well as the power relations that flow from it (think here of the “Whites Only” restroom signs, and how they were once considered “normal,” the “way we write,” in apartheid South Africa or the Southern United States). Rather than mirroring the land — as in Stendhal’s conception of the novel as a “mirror traveling down the road of life” — conceptual writing often strives to reveal strata that give the surface its shape; it exposes linguistic fossils — the commonsense or mythical view — such as our persistence in saying “the sun rises” though we know full well that it is the earth that moves. When Ron Silliman creates a language of non sequiturs, invented vocabulary, fractures, and enjambments — when he and other poets frustrate expectations or pull a linguistic rabbit out of a grammatical hat — they foreground how easily we sleepwalk the ruts of everyday speech, and so thought. Or the joy there is in appreciating language as language. It’s not that contemporary, conceptual authors have a unified agenda or aesthetic: uncreative writing, the reworking of fairy tales, texts of erasure, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, and code poetry, to use some of the labels given to the kinds of writing that are on display in the following pages. Rather, these are but a few of the many approaches taken by authors whose work can be seen as conceptual. Nor do they make language new in order to make it new, per se. The works gathered here do not mine those tired and false dichotomies often associated with new writing, the difference between High and low, for example (or other mis-characterizations of last century’s avant-garde agenda), or thought and emotion, or even the conventional-conceptual divide. Instead, much conceptual writing reveals anew how habits of speech mirror habits of thought embedded in official or dominant culture: they rework states of common sense, myth, commerce, or nature and reconfigure it as historical, unmask it as a point of view, a system of power relationships. They rework language for many of the reasons that writers have always had. Or not.

a long, parallel history … “I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry.”  — John Cage

In this sense, conceptual writing has a tradition that extends back through the postage-stamp parodies, fake newspapers, and other publishing experiments of FLUXUS; back through Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein’s repetitions; back through the visuals of Tristram Shandy at the inception of the novel, or even the layout Renaissance poets gave verses so that they could be read in multiple directions;

6 conceptualisms

back through the icons embedded in medieval illuminated manuscripts to visually link one passage to another; up from the muse of the first poet who made ordinary speech strange; and out from the invention of writing itself. Yet even if we were to tweet Don Quixote word for word, Borges might have written, it would be different in time, and therefore different in meaning. Thus, web authors using hyperlinks that echo the medieval scribe’s use of visual icons, the metafiction novel that incorporates the same frame-within-frame structure that Scheherazade employed to save her life, the authors in this anthology who, like Renaissance troubadours, juggle verses, or incorporate the white space of their page as Stéphane Mallarmé did in “A Throw of the Dice,” or otherwise draw on the early avant-garde, are different: a contemporary extension of one of two literary traditions that are easier to discern when placed side by side. Even the briefest of sketches illustrates how literature has always consisted of two parallel practices: writing as a transparent window on the world and writing that calls attention to the window itself, including the grid of its panes. In one, writes poet Charles Bernstein, “reality / fantasy / experience is presented to us through writing. // In the other, the writing itself is seen as an instance of reality / fantasy / experience / event.” In prose, for example, there is the realist mainstream, often exemplified by the novel as a daydream that readers can get lost in; in this virtual reality, page layout, fonts, language — anything that would shake a reader from this dream — are left invisible by an adherence to normalcy, familiarity, convention. Just as a traditional landscape painting can be a window on the world, these texts serve as the windows Henry James imagined in the house of fiction, or Stendhal’s mirror with its emphasis on authenticity, craft, transparency of language, sentiment, and the text as trompe l’oeil. On the other hand there is a kind of literature that is equally interested in exploring the possibilities of form, the limits of language; a type of literature suggested by Sterne’s Caption Tristram Shandy that emphasizes text as a medium, the material nature of language; a literature that articulates an assumption that literary form, like form in music or visual art, emerges from and so reflects its historical moment, and implies that the conventional forms of

introduction 7

the past are no more appropriate as contemporary expression than the minuet. Compare, for example, Shakespeare’s break with the conventions of his day known as the unities (a play should have one main action, which happens in one place, during the space of a day or less), or his invention of the soliloquy: a moment in the play where the action stops so that the actor can deliver a personal essay, another literary invention that emerges along with the humanist individual whose personal thoughts were not only worthy of writing but worthy of reading (in contrast to, for example, the eternal truths of stylized, and anonymously authored mystery plays). It was the literary equivalent of the shift from the stylized depictions of men and women in medieval art to the individual features that Renaissance painters gave to their characters, à la Michelangelo. It was, in short, an experiment by an author in search of a form that would speak to his contemporaries. Experimental, conceptual, avantgarde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slipstream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, alternative, anti- or new literature …  A variety of names have been proposed to describe the conceptual writing Caption that has emerged across the years ever since Shakespeare broke with the unities, and previous anthologies have gathered works under these names (indeed readers will recognize some of the authors included here from these earlier formulations). As in Shakespeare’s case, experiments by authors often became conventions themselves or were subsumed by the culture at large. Avant-pop (see After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology), that impetus to channel the Andy Warholesque focus on celebrity, advertising, and pop culture into forms and agendas more closely identified with the avant-garde, loses its power to be noticed, let alone shock, in a world that includes the globalization of McDonald's, an elevation of celebrities to the status once held by public intellectuals, pop touchstones as cultural lingua franca, and literary study itself skewers toward cultural studies. Similarly, we might ask, what happens to Electronic Literature (See Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary) once all writing is “electronic”? No term for this variety of writing can be all encompassing; most will be associated with the period in which they emerged (Postmodern American Fiction) though there is a family resemblance in that conceptual writing can be thought of as a literature whose aesthetic often shares an ethos with contemporary thought; a literature that takes its own medium as part of its subject matter, or works against the assumptions of the (current) status quo, especially literature that conceives of its audience in mass demographic or commercial terms. In this regard, it has Three thousand years ago, in the Temple of Esna, an Egyptian scribe composed a hymn to the omnipresence of Khnum the Ram God by making it entirely out of transformations to a single hieroglyphic sign: the symbol for the ram.

8 conceptualisms

affinities with visual, conceptual art such as Francis Alÿs’s “Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing,” a performance in which the artist pushes a melting block of ice around Mexico City until there is nothing left. The concept motivates the work, rather than the work illustrating a concept, or resulting in a product that can be sold. And in so doing, it opens up a variety of slippages, chance encounters, disjunctions, and surprises. The concept generates the work in the way that the constraints of an OuLiPo author generates the game, e.g., the decision by Georges Perec to write a novel without ever using the letter ‘e’ is the action that generates the novel itself (translated as A Void) just as the rules of a sport make possible the game, or the decisions by other authors generate one kind of literary work and not another: works that employ talking animals, linguistic games, puzzles, parodies, historical or ontological disjunctions, discursive juxtapositions, appropriations, collage techniques, and other rhetorical and stylistic strategies and constraints, even those of realism. That is, inherent in this type of literature is a belief that aesthetic choices are conscious and political, not natural. That conventional form, as well as unconventional form, carries a viewpoint, an attitude through language and to language and to the world. It believes that literary form embodies epistemological, or ontological positions, or otherwise articulates convictions about how the world works, including the literary world. By its very nature, then, though the “normal” use of language is calcified by everyday usage; though the cultural formations that “the way we speak” bring into existence (best-seller lists, mainstream publishers, course syllabi, Hollywoodization) tend to limit the definition of what counts as a novel or poem, this is a type of literature that tends to keep these definitions unresolved. Or at least fun and unexpected. In contrast to the easy consumability of genre fiction, or the familiar sentiment of greeting-card verse, this is a kind of literature that asks us to look again, to consider what else the text might be doing if our first reaction, our reaction premised on past ways of reading, doesn’t seem to fit the conventions we’ve been taught (indoctrinated) to read by, and we find ourselves in the position of the first viewers of Henry VI who thought the play absurd because they were asked to believe the single space before them was by turns a street, a bedchamber, and the coast of Kent. Or viewers who still come upon a cubist painting for the first time and exclaim — “People don’t look like that!” As Joe Amato writes, “Because it’s aesthetic, it’s momentary./ Because it’s momentary, we’re confused.”

introduction 9

… up to today It’s not hard to imagine our gentle reader coming upon Scott Helmes's "NonAdditive Postulations," with its fusion of natural and mathematical languages, and exclaiming, “That isn’t a poem!” It’s not difficult to imagine a similar reaction to Lucy Corin’s plotless “Some Machines” or Alan Bigelow’s “Silence,” a story inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”, and which appears on screen as mostly black space. Original readers often had a visceral reaction to what came to be called Language Writing, or writing that is about, whatever else it may also be about, writing: fictions like Brian Evenson’s “House Rules” or prose poems like Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Indeed these aren’t stories if a story must have conventional story tropes, psychologically rounded characters, cinematic description. Ditto for Shelley Jackson’s “Skin,” a story that is being published, one word at a time, as tattoos on the 2,000 volunteers who serve as Jackson’s pages. But it’s also easy to imagine our gentle reader leaving these works with the reaction many of Picasso’s first viewers must have had, willing to have a second and third look, remaining open to the possibilities of another way of seeing, and willing to consider the individual work on its own terms: a reaction art critic Dave Hickey summarizes as “Huh? Wow!” The art that most interests Hickey, and many readers of conceptual literature, is art that doesn’t just go about business as usual; art that, like Helmes's poem, might be confusing when first encountered, but once the reader sees how the equations direct reading, how the square root of love and its other mathEnglish fusions fail, for all their mathematical precision (let alone the slackness of English), to get at the cause of a failed relationship, or has to abandon linear cause and effect for clouds of association, and how these nebulous associations may come as close to saying something about the human condition as we can hope for — “Wow!” Nor is it hard to imagine this reaction to “House Rules” once the reader sees it as a dialog between fiction and philosophy. The same is true for Jackson’s “Skin,” once we consider this story, a story we will never actually get to read, is a contemporary articulation of the wall-less labyrinths Borges imagined to such effect and what its existence has to say about our bodies, our narratives, the conception of the author, and what it means to publish ….  Publish means, after all, to ‘make public.’ That is, if the 19th-century novel is the literary equivalent of a painting of a clipper ship on the high seas, works like Eduardo Kac’s “Biopoetry” or George Quasha’s “Poetry Is” or Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper can be thought of as the literary equivalent of contemporary conceptual art. A different emphasis. A different orientation: one that privileges the conceptual in literature instead of the mimetic.

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Thus, while one author might write a mainstream, traditional novel with characters saying feminist things (“I am woman, hear me roar”) and doing feminist things (running for president), another might explore the way language and the pressures of plot itself may help bring into existence a gender-based hierarchy. Or explore through language an ontological shift embedded in our communication, as Kass Fleisher does in “The Speed of Zoom” whose txt-spk form asks what it means for women and men to have an online relationship when body text stands as a surrogate for human bodies, and all speech is mediated by the medium, and edited for effect. And by so doing, perhaps creates a penetrating representation of unspoken laws, social formations, relationships between men and women. As well as the Eternal Human Heart. For the Human Heart, like the perpetual calendar, is eternal. As such, the conceptual works in this anthology do not imply a break with the aesthetics and humanist concerns of traditional literature. Rather, they are extensions of them. As John Barth famously wrote, ours is a period where postmodern, modern, and premodern literary works are being written simultaneously. As time passes, this observation increasingly seems to be an understatement: on my bookshelf, there are texts that are thousands of years old, as well as those written during the French Revolution, and in the year I was born. And this year. They are all part of the always-ever-present that is today, and all of them contain examples of what would have been “experimental” in their day (e.g., Dante's neologistic phrasing, the hybrid writing of Zora Neal Hurston or Kathy Acker's appropriations); all of them continue to influence whatever is written today, and will live on in whatever literature will become, be it the writing by bots descended from Nick Montfort’s code poetry, or the DNA replication imagined by Christian Bök. If conceptual writing from the last century was driven by experimentation in form, and postmodern writing was a dialogue between authors like Barth and theorists and philosophers of language, the generation writing today seems to have absorbed this history: authors like Deb Olin Unferth or Salvador Plascencia do not so much engage the theoretical debates of the past but have absorbed their fallout over story form, originality, authorship, and the other hot buttons of an earlier generation the way an earlier generation of writers might have absorbed assumptions about the unconscious without ever having read Freud, or the way female pilots flying combat missions for the military today embody assumptions about the role of women without having read Hélène Cixous.

conceptualism(s)+1 Just as visual artists have brought into being a plethora of models for artmaking, so some writers continue to find their materials — language as well as

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its embodiment in fonts, layout, or sound — endlessly surprising. Raised to an exponent by the variety of objects readers have discovered that can be read as text, and the ever-changing historic and cultural contexts in which we read and write, the tradition of conceptual writing seems less like a movement (the avant-garde), or period (postmodernism), than an open-ended activity. How could it be otherwise? Unlike those unknown Egyptians, chiseling their poems to the Ram God in stone, unlike members of Fluxus, creating text collages with scissors and paste, readers and writers today swim in a much more fluid stream of reading and writing technologies. As N. Katherine Hayles notes, every work of literature published today is digital, if its writing, layout, printing, and distribution is taken into account. Just as earlier technologies such as the telephone and the telegraph disembodied voice and thereby made speech different for James Joyce than what it had been for Homer, so reading and writing cannot help but become something different to us as our lang absorbs a vocab of emoticons, txt-spk, on cl phones, and old words (photography, gay, cloning) accrue new associations, while others go as extinct as ‘thou’. Consider the 1.3 million poems Philip M. Parker has written, using software that employs an algorithm based on graph theory and a metric for linguistic differences across word strings in other poems. Consider the poetry of Nick Thurston, which he composes by hiring crowdsourced, subminimum wage employees to do the actual writing. Consider “Monument to Indian Native First Nations American Tenacity in the Stacked Face of Continual Misrepresentation,” by Davis Schneiderman and Tom Denlinger, with its appropriation and remix of competing viewpoints, styles, and representations — from congressional reports on Indian affairs to whooping Native Americans in pre-PC beer commercials — its juxtapositions of voices, bending of genres, erasures, and boundary transgressions. If the aesthetics of these three works speak to contemporary readers it’s because they echo contemporary culture in general: a culture and an aesthetic made possible by putting into the hands of readers and writers communication technologies and attitudes of a sophistication we’ve never seen before: tools that allow anyone to monitor the behavior of others, mix tracks, incorporate old TV commercials, VR objects and blogs — the whole theater of cultural memory — data mine each other’s living for patterns; work, or play with people all over the globe, just to mention a few examples. But more importantly, these works speak relevance, i.e., are born of a contemporary mindset that thinks it’s natural to draw on a global history of words, sounds, and images at our fingertips today; to make visible the previously invisible or marginalized; to restate that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, even if the beholder is an algorithm; to regard all culture as contingent and rearrange-able; to tell its story, in other words, in a way that is as natural for us as Medievals

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thought it natural to seek out a Christian explanation for the order of the planets, or as Modernists would have thought it natural to articulate a Freudian unconscious. And in so doing, say something we can relate to today. Contemporary, conceptual writing, then, arises from more than the timeliness of its themes, is about more than the proliferation of authoring tools, writing surfaces, and the evolution of language. Rather, conceptual writing is as often as not an exploration of how these elements come together to help make the present “present,” and in so doing, are themselves born: a cultural node in which lots of authors, working for lots of independent reasons, and with lots of different tools and goals, together constitute the emergence of a body of writing with family resemblances. That continues to morph. Often faster than the culture at large, and so continually requires of the reader a willingness to relearn things they thought they already knew, especially how to read. It puts high demands on the reader as co-author, even if the fourth wall can be the most opaque of all. As is true for any new art, as was true of earlier literary experiments such as Virginia Woolf’s fragmented narratives or Walt Whitman’s free verse, only time will teach us how to read many of the works in this anthology. As well as how they will always stay beyond reading. The failure of language to express the inexpressible is one of the enduring themes of literature, and this is especially true of conceptual literature. What can be said is that any definition will be out of date as soon as it is written. Any attempt to narrow conceptual writing to a particular form or idea is doomed by the very limits required by definition. For even as you read this introduction, someone somewhere is inventing a new form in the hopes of cracking open something meaningful about life as it is lived at the moment of its writing. Imagination Dead Imagine +1.

on the selection and organization of this anthology All framing requires cropping, and the snapshot of conceptual writing that is this anthology is no exception. First affected by framing are the individual selections themselves, an endeavor that proves equally frustrating as gratifying for the number of works that could have been included. While a number of realist literary works could be thought of as philosophical or otherwise engaged with contemporary thought (the novels of J.M. Coetzee or W.G. Sebald come to mind), what has guided the selection of works gathered here is a tendency to keep what counts as literature fluid. That is, the intention was to favor works

introduction 13

that open up the definition of literature rather than works that could more easily fall back into more familiar genres. If anthology-like groupings under terms like “story” and “poem” are avoided, then, it’s only because they don’t seem to fit a work like Mez Breeze's virtualreality "V[R]erses." If terms like “author” don’t fit it’s because the authorship of work like Implementation is as dispersed as its many online contributors. If “American” or “English” literature is avoided it’s because terms about national origin don’t seem relevant to a literature that’s more global, as suggested by the stories by the collective Heavy Industries, written in Korea and New York and published worldwide in multiple languages. If terms like “literature” are avoided it is because they seem to imply institutions and canons and genre divisions and values that have more to do with the values of the publishing marketplace than those of artists. It is because thinking of writing as a medium as well as a material, in the way that all sound can be creative material to a soundscape composer, opens up possibilities for writing not normally considered literary: wire bent so its shadows cast words on the wall as they do in Alexandra Grant and Michael Joyce’s collaborations. An attempt was made to balance other contradictory impulses, as well: while “craft” is often of little importance in much visual, conceptual art, an emphasis was given to well-written work here out of the belief that the difference between literature and other kinds of writing is how it is written, even if “writing” in this book could mean an elegant computer code as well as an elegant sentence (as useful as the analogy between written and visual conceptual art is, it is not airtight, especially when the divide between conceptual visual art and other kinds of art is drawn along the lines of visual mimesis or visual pleasure). Thus, the anthology by its nature excludes much writing in which aesthetics are an after(non)thought: most genre fiction, plot-driven video games, pornography, celebrity writing, or textual objects not presented as art (the dissolution of high and low, it seems, is perpetually announced prematurely). Further, an attempt was made to not confuse new material (or hardware) for new ideas, even if writing is held to be a form of thinking, a way of working through a concept rather than illustrating one that is already known: sometimes exploring new materials leads to discovering a concept an author didn’t know existed, or how to articulate. Though the anthology excludes much that is considered literary in other spheres, the inclusion (or exclusion) of writing is not meant to imply any sort of “best of” sorting or hierarchy. Indeed, one could ask, why, in the age of the Internet, create an anthology at all given that works by all of the authors included here

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can be found online? It is hoped that the hybrid nature of this print-online book points to an answer in that the works gathered here are meant as approaches toward a variety of ways of reading, as provocations toward seeing writing as a medium for art as practiced at our moment. (In fact, many of the authors would resist being categorized in the way that any heading seems to imply.) It is hoped that this anthology will not lapse into all-too-common fallacy of anthologies in general, of giving an illusion of completion. The hope then is that readers will use the anthology as more of a portal than cell; the beginning of the conversation, not the conversation itself. For this reason, readers will note that many of the works gathered under one of the chapter headings — e.g., Architecture of the Page — could have just as easily been placed under another, e.g., Language Writing Language. Similarly, many of the digital works have been grouped together for their electronic nature, but they could just as easily be considered “literature” without any prefix. Likewise, some of the approaches to reading presented here could have been combined, or substituted for still others. The groupings are provisional, and meant to serve as possible entries into the work and not as a taxonomy. That is, though the anthology is organized as an art gallery, its walls are permeable and only meant to suggest traffic patterns. Readers are invited to compose other configurations, or skip them altogether. After all, this anthology is as much an invitation to ways to read as it is ways to write. Perhaps most conspicuous, compiling a snapshot of contemporary conceptual writing required that the rich body of writing that is its history had to be left outside the bounds of this book. And yet, though no attempt was made to historicize the field, it can be noted that within this collection there are some three generations of conceptual authors at work, from canonical masters to authors the reader may be encountering for the first time. In this sense, the anthology is a snapshot of conceptual writing as practiced from the end of the last century into the first decades of this century; it is a history in the making, albeit a brief one, of the explosion of aesthetics set off by the cultural and technological changes that impacted reading and writing as experienced by authors writing during the time of the anthology’s making. Some aesthetics that seemed strange at their inception will by now be familiar; others will be confusing to a jury that is still out. It is hoped that this book is very much in conversation with like-minded anthologies, born of their own cultural moment: After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology; Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology; Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology; Electronic Literature Collection; Forms at War: FC2 19992009; Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Xxperimental Prose by Contemporary Women Writers; and Best American Experimental Writing, to name just a few…. Finally, this anthology contains a recognition that like the all-white painting

introduction 15

hanging on the white wall of a gallery, the works included here, like much conceptual art or music, often depend on their “supporting texts.” That is, like a urinal displayed as an art work in a gallery, they are not necessarily evident as art. Indeed, they often exhibit an overt rejection of the criteria by which literature is commonly evaluated, or even recognized. In an effort to make this work more user friendly to those readers who may be encountering it for the first time, authors were invited to submit a paragraph expanding upon the thinking behind the pieces they authored for this anthology. Their thoughts can be found, along with a brief biographical note, in the online companion to this book. See it at: www.conceptualisms.info Last, but not finally, words are inadequate to express my gratitude to the many people who made this anthology possible: first of all the authors who contributed work, in every single case, freely and with enthusiasm — thank you; to the many people who contributed advice and suggestions early on, and ever after, especially Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher — thank you; to those who contributed labor and editing help, especially Kim Koga, Tasha Matsumoto, Lindsay Starck, Anne Berry, Jac Smith, Joseph Thomas, Abigail Burns, Greg Havrilak, Phillip Spinella, and Naïma Msechu. Thanks go to Mervi Pakaste for saving the design, Peter Beatty who rode in at the last minute to cut through thickets, and most importantly Dan Waterman at the press for his early enthusiasm, advice, and perseverance over what proved to be an undertaking of years — thank you.

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1 | Writing Language Writing: A Preface (Of Sorts)

Problems begin when people speak, Beckett wrote, referring to what a flawed instrument the “mirror” of language is for reflecting the human condition. And the animal condition. And the condition of vegetables and minerals as well as God, or the unconscious, or other entities, ideas, and abstractions with far less body, including language itself. Yet it is the means by which we know. And how we order our world. It determines who serves and who is served, and even who lives or dies. To varying degrees, nearly all the authors in this anthology have, by a variety of means, subverted the passage of language from use, to repetition, to convention. But the works in this cluster do so at the order of the word, or the syllable, in order to focus attention on the workings of language itself. “Why don’t you write like I talk?” a reporter once asked Gertrude Stein. Stein replied with an answer that much conceptual writing asks (no matter what else it also asks): “Why don’t you talk like I write?” Caption Embedded in this question is an even more problematic one: How have our social practices allowed some language practices to emerge (e.g., political, religious, or epistemological), and be valorized, or demonized and / or normalized? Why do we think the way the reporter talks is normal? How, for example, are we able to take for granted, as Paul Ricoeur asks, the existence of a sentence like “Tomorrow was Christmas”? That is, how are we even able to make sense of a sentence that describes an event to take place in the future but uses the past tense? Or what about the opening line of Gabriel García Márquez's One

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 17

Hundred Years of Solitude: “Years later, when he was to face the firing squad, General Buendía thought back and remembered the time his father took him to discover ice.” If one thinks about it, the temporal backflips this sentence does are breathtaking, leaping ahead as it does, to recall a future memory of a time that takes place before the present of the sentence. Ricoeur’s answer is that systems of grammar are like grids that we use to map unmediated experience. That is, these grids are like the one that Alberti would look at subjects through in order to determine spatial relations between their body parts in order to paint them using linear perspective. In the case of grammar, it is the form of tenses, for example, that conveys relationships between the author and the text, the reader and the text, and between characters within a text. That is, much of the meaning of a text is inherent in its form, the manifestation of the underlying concept. And then, repetition hardens these concepts into “the way we talk.” This is not only a formal or aesthetic choice(s) — you say toeMAEto, I say toMAtoe — for they carry an underlying assumption that to use a grid to organize a view will result in a particular kind of art (an emphasis on mimesis, rendered in three-point perspective) as surely as representing the world via the conventions of the world is to reinforce the status quo (Why is God referred to as 'He'?). Conversely, to recast language in ways that require readers to relearn their own language foregrounds the accidents of history, or convention, or imposition of will: it draws attention to what an accident of history usage can be, as well as the power relations that flow from the requirements of language as an organizing system: William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife stages the hermeneutic circle as a typographical and linguistic spiral where repetition turns specific ideas into general ideas that mutate back into specific ideas far from their origins. Consider the names for plumbing parts, Gass writes, derived from names for body parts — elbow, nipple — while his narrator wonders, just before Jews go up chimneys as smoke, why it is so easy to equate people with objects? When Ben Marcus creates an invented language by swapping words and usage (e.g., ‘my error’ for ‘penis’) or by writing as if a metaphor were literal (our alltoo human “suits of meat”), he doesn’t do so to make speech strange so much as to expose power relationships naturalized in language, and so overlooked by its users. He exposes hierarchies that have become embedded in language, or “natural” through familiarity. When Claudia Rankine makes microaggressions rhyme, it isn’t to make language new so much as to make visible what is already present: the toxic atmosphere unwittingly (or intentionally) created by words and deeds. When Lynne Tillman or Ron Silliman creates a language of non sequiturs, invented vocabulary, fractures, and enjambments — when they frustrate expectations— they foreground how easily we sleepwalk down

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the ruts of everyday speech. That is, the writers in this section do not have a unified agenda or aesthetic; they do not make language strange for the sake of strangeness even if there is often delight in this strangeness. And yet the works on the following pages often do demonstrate how the grid, like the rules of any game, make possible some outcomes while ruling out others. They demonstrate how language can generate ideas of what is or isn't "realistic" or normal. Or even possible. They show us the grid, as well as the view through it. Note: Statements by the authors about their work can be found at: www.conceptualisms.info

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 19

r. henry nigl The Shout Artist

Shout Art, as a structurally distinct art form, was created by the artist Henry Nigl during the early 1980s. As far as is known, there is no other poetic or performance form like this. The format / structure of a ‘Shout’ is specific. A ‘Shout’ is typically non-rhyming (but can be rhythmical), double entendre with a conflicted, unexpected, and abrupt ending phrase or word. Performance is a significant component of the form and often included props — both stationary and animated — and electronica (audio/video/projection). Music, as such, was provided by various automatic contrivances including oscillating fans tied to chimes and breeze-driven curtains. The artist is still actively involved in this limited genre and has recently produced new performances.

online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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kass fleisher The Speed of Zoom [A]ny writing is a process of inscription. By inscription I mean a process in which through putting two things together, the nature of these two things is in some way modified.

— Ernesto Laclau

1. Nosegay is a word that has nothing to do with me. The light shimmied through the wires and skimmed the curves of the screens. Although it was about L_________, it could not be hugged, kissed, snuggled in any fashion. First there was he and she, him and her, slogging away at keys. Dialing upward by way of digging down. Only to connect. And then, response makes a pair. A them of sorts. To be sorted. Meanwhile we, under the eaves. dear joe, she wrote. please forgive this imposition from a stranger. dear kass, he wrote. a stranger imposes pleasing forgiveness. (It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself.) 2. The words are flying away. what strikes me, she wrote, is the way your alphabet forms in frankness. i wonder whether your skin is as supple as your being. being, he wrote, is the suppleness of striking, your beta waves in alphafrank wonderment, the skin on your chinny-chin-chin a suitcase away. being is in L_________. (We invite our advertisers to submit articles for consideration. Articles must meet our editorial policy, requiring a minimum amount of editing.)

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 21

3. Your word is too white. dear reader, she wrote, i feel i know you, but what is there to know? there is nothing, there is the hail mary pass, there is the wide receiver, there is static in the medium, there is question, there is answer, there is openness, there is closure, there is no being. but what, he wrote, is there? a static medium, a questioned answer, a reception in honor of knowing. to know. nothing. to be. nothing. to feel the closure of being transmitter. to feel transmitter. to receive that feeling of transmitting. to know no closure. that is L______. (After graduating from UCSC with a focus on Cuban Feminist politics and joining the struggle to end violence against women of color, she and a friend rode their bicycles cross-country.) 4. People won’t be able to see your word. i stroke, she wrote, keys. keys that gather order present align pronounce enjoin decree instruct trim fit shape set sort piece group palm this thing, this one, this be, this face, this fuss, this will, this won’t, this life. i know, he wrote, the keys, how striking. the debauch of tapping, the revelry of pounding, the orgy of beating, the bacchus of fingering. a L_____-in of fiddling. how it puts us straight, how it codifies, tabulates, administrates, some thing we name we — a tone, a pitch, a timbre. all from tips, touching, keying, breaching. (Is there a way to end the monotony of black-and-white documents by printing a few pages in color? Yes. The imageRUNNER family is colorenabled. For when you need color.) 5. Our words are out of order. we, she wrote, being the best and worst of terms, making of us a we but necessarily a them. them being necessary to know the we. our separate speaking, our cant. but for there to be we there must be i and you and for there to be i there must be you. my separate tongue, my utter. for there to be we we must be different from and they must be different from. to go to L______ there must be different from. we, he wrote, being not us, being only pidgin, being only phraseology, being only. in the separation, evaporation. surrender of i. if no i, no you. if no we, no them. only reading, the instability of reading. do not make me use the term interpret. do you. read me. between the lines, divination. more today than yesterday.

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(I have a hearing deficiency, she said, so if you ask me a question and I answer some other question, don’t get me wrong.) 6. Even human poetry words have to scan for chrissake. pixels collect dust, she wrote, space dust, cyber trash, hacker tripe. i don’t know how they get from there to here. how you get from you to me. you come through a wire — or something. there must be time involved. L_______ is really time in a bottle. messaged. the time it takes you to write me. the time it takes you to get here. the time it takes me to read you, wrong you, rip you, right you. there is no you after that time passes. passaged. packaged in pixie dust. you are the time involved. there is you, then the formation of you. massaged by a constant speed of light. resorted. massless. the most i may make of you, is to print you on paper. twenty-four pound please, he wrote, and ninety brightness at least. to see the light. i want to be something to you, something you can tear into, something apprehendable. you arrest me. time after time i am here and there. there is no simultaneity, spontaneity. no for that matter me, without time bending me around to you, bound in time yourself, you not me and not now. we will get there with energy. fossil fuels in fact. carbon burning beings in order to be more than babble to one another. one a nother. a whole nother. a howl nother. a howling nothing. a mooning howl. time is not. change is. this letter different from that, thus change, thus time, thus sun. passage. in a moment you will not be you. one brief dying moment. i not you, you not you. (The way physicists use equations: why is a=b not quite enough for them? (We invite you to consider becoming a member!)) 7. Shout out the word on your back. but should we, she wrote, see. each other. now. it is, he wrote, necessary. now. but won’t that, she wrote, you know. ruin. we must, he wrote, not become. stuck. but is it, she wrote, you know. time. it may, he wrote, already be too. late. but how do, she wrote, we know it won’t. hurt. we must, he wrote, actualize. a. heart. but won’t it, she wrote, sting. the loss of light. we are, he wrote, nothing. a stream of digits. but our fingers, she wrote, make us who we are. should we. touch. we could, he wrote, quit. end the down and qwerty. but in L______, she wrote, is there not peril. of pulp. we need, he wrote, a pulse. to plug the space. of. but your purported, she wrote, pulse, is a palpitation, a vibration. little more than. this. we will, he wrote, throb. but might we, she wrote, not. thud. we either, he wrote, take a thwack at this, or. eighty-six it. we are not, he wrote, playing around here. we are, he wrote,

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 23

serious. we are not, he wrote, dreaming of you not me. we are, he wrote, weighty. far-reaching. vital. we are not, he wrote, fucking around.

ok but, she wrote, i have to buy new underwear first.

(Mr. Smith does not like verbs. Whenever he finds one, he crinkles his brow in disgust like a man who has discovered a dribble of food on his tie. He taps furiously at his keyboard, moves the cursor to the offending word and deletes it, or else adds “ing,” turning the verb into a participle and his script into the strange shorthand that passes these days for news. “Outrage in the Middle East threatening the United States! A school bus and two other vehicles colliding in Dallas! Amazon.com celebrating a birthday!”) 8. My word is black, and yours is blue. Flight. Flutter. Winging. Soaring. Shoot through the air at the speed of zoom. Air the only struggle. Well. Friction. Telephones. Cells zinging. Connection. A voice. Talk. Connection. Well. Speech flounder muddle bungle. Shoot through the air at the speed of whoosh. The not-thereness of resistance. In the face of propulsion. Well. The who-you-ness of making an i. Shoot through the air at the speed of zip. They shared dispatch. In an attempt to parole. Form. Utter that which shifts. Pledge assurance. Give their. In a nutshell, they are literature. Well. If you put it that way. Shoot through the air at the speed of whiz. We may explicate them only through intimation. Survey their bulletins. Toms peeping. Flight. Neither here nor there. Not yet the you she will be when she. Her purposely dressed down so he won’t think she. Him leaning against a pillar, one foot crossed over the. Winging. Casual on the concourse. Shoot through the air at the speed of zow. And to put it briefly, boxers. Well. Flight. In the midst of but not medium. She has neither memory nor vocabulary. He will talk all night about the notness of we. Well. Except for ten minutes when they — Shoot through the air at the speed of wow. Flight. Zero hour. Almost there now. Are we here yet? Do not make me use the term interpret. They will be neither together nor not. They will find no separate tongue. They will be youitheywe. L_____. Shoot through the air at the speed of zoom. They will be we. With the greatest of ease. (“We don’t communicate in full sentences anyway,” says Mr. Smith. “We don’t need all those words. It allows us to go faster.”)

24 conceptualisms

scott helmes Non-Additive Postulations

random order + preposterous outcry = negative time negative time2 = relationships + 3 relationships =

rudders + udders

√

alphawakes oscillations

ϕ + � = blueberryohio to the tenth power Ohio =

͚

Ʃ̥

antioch + trying √ power + ϕ

equality = three equality + 5 = race2 without (recognition) + negative sex = tomorrow pee + ͚ airplane Jefferson + 6 + 3pee = green ddt negative + i.u.d. = sex

time = 2’ + c = telepathy terminate

time

√ communicate + 1 + c noosphere = RBF

2

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 25

scott helmes The Division of the Soul

world √ intragalactic = civilization : playback formal vote -1

∫ 0

͚

into eraser × terms = heritage wash avant

grapes vapor postcard + diction × fool5 = ×3× × swift = triangle tumult alarm lesson invoices earth photograph Des Moines recent × 2 sock Cronkite = alarm analogous

√

lead +

false = rock + stencil ( rubber icebox tickle )

glue perfume eggplant sky = ÷ descending3 = + 3 turds letter fingerprint hidden golden -

book motel = lust + spite √3 bank

26 conceptualisms

ben marcus from Notable American Women The Name Machine I’ll not be able to list each name we called my sister. The process would be exhausting, requiring me to relive my sister’s pitiful life. There are additionally copyright issues connected with persons that are officially the holdings of the government, which is still the case with my sister, despite her demise. To reproduce the precise arc of names that she traversed during her life in our house would be to infringe on a life narrative owned by the American Naming Authority. It will suffice to select those names sufficiently resonant of her, ones that will seem to speak of the girl she was rather than of some general American female figure, although it could be argued that we can no longer speak with any accuracy of a specific person, that the specific person has evolved and given way to the general woman, distinguished primarily by her name. The names defined here derive from a bank of easily pronounceable and typical slogans used to single out various female persons of America and beyond. A natural bias will be evident toward names that can be sounded with the mouth. The snap, clap, and wave, while useful and namelike in their effect (the woman or girl is alerted, warned, reminded, soothed), are generally of equal use against men, and therefore of little use here. Gestures of language that require no accompanying vocal pitch, such as gendered semaphore, used in the Salt Flats during the advent of women’s silent television, or Women’s Sign Language (WSL), developed in the ’70s as a highly stylized but difficult offshoot of American Sign Language, now nearly obsolete because of the strenuous demands it placed upon the hips and hands, were never successful enough with my sister to warrant inclusion in the study. She plainly didn’t respond to the various postures and physical attitudes we presented to her—our contortions and pantomime proved not theatrical enough to distract her into action. No shapes we made with our hands could convince her that there was important language to be had in our activity, and she often sat at the window, waiting for a spoken name, without which she could not begin the task of becoming herself. This is certainly not to imply that communication between persons and living things requires tone or sound, or that deaf figures of the female communities can

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have no names. There is always written text, to be apprehended through visual or tactile means, as well as the German-American technique of “handling” the name of a woman onto her thigh. My sister, as it happens, did not respond in any useful way to our repeated and varied handling of her body. As rough as we were, it made no apparent impression on her. Here the American female name is regarded as a short, often brilliant word. Rarely should it inaccurately capture the person it targets, and its resistance to alternate uses, modifications, translations, and disruptions is an affirmation that individuals can and should be entirely defined by a sharp sound out of the mouth — these definitions have simply yet to be developed and written. Once they are, we will know what there is to know about all future persons who take on one of the appellations listed in the American Bank of Names, striving in their own particular way to become women of distinction. Nicknames, admittedly, allow for a broader range of fetching, commanding, and calling, but the nickname only indicates an attribute or device of a person, such as the length of her legs, the way she sleeps, how she bounces a ball (in this case: “Sticks,” “Taffy,” “Horse”). A name, as the government instructs, can no longer be an accessory of a person, but must be her key component, without which the person would fold, crumble. She would cease, in fact, to be a person. The nickname, and more particularly the endearment (“Honey,” “Doddy,” “Love,” “Lady”), speaks to a deeper mistrust of the original name, a fear of acknowledging the person at hand. If it is possible to change a person by changing her name, why not employ a name of diminished potential and thus diminish or destroy the person? It’s a valid concern. When a man modifies or adorns a woman’s name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself. (Conversely, women who are scared of their own names are also typically afraid of mirrors.) The movement toward a single name for the entire female community (“Jill,” “James,” “Jackie”) — as aggressively espoused by Sernier and practiced by his younger employees — would disastrously limit the emotional possibilities for women and, rather than unify them as the Bible claims, probably force a so-called girls’ war in their ranks. The task of my family in this regard was to process and unravel the names that arrived in the mail, then dispatch them onto my sister, generally with the naming bullhorn, a small seashell my mother carved for the purpose. We were enlisted by the government to participate in what was being called the most comprehensive book ever attempted, a study meant to catalog the names of American women. In the book, each name is followed by a set of

28 conceptualisms

tendencies that are certain to arise if the user employs the name as the fulltime slogan for herself. The book is meant to serve as a catalog of likely actions, not only to predict various future American behaviors but to control them. If the government regulates the demographics of name distributions, using a careful system of quotas, it can generate desired behaviors in a territory, as well as prevent behavior that does not seem promising. It’s not exactly a style of warfare as much as it is deep dramatic control over the country. The book remains unpublished, but its authors are reported to be numerous, somewhere in the thousands, each working blind to the efforts of the others. In my possession are only the notes taken during the naming experiments on my sister — an intuitive set of definitions of the names she inhabited. We were not instructed how to define the names we were given, only to use them, study them, employ whatever research we could devise. I therefore have no notion if our material was ever incorporated into the text. We submitted it promptly but never received word on the matter. We served up the names to my sister one by one and watched her change beneath them. Researchers here might say that she became “herself" or that it was her body expressing its name, as if something does not know what it is until the proper sound is launched at it. Each new morning that she appeared before us and we announced the name for the day through the bullhorn, we saw her become the new girl and release the old one, drop the gestures and habits and faces that the last name had demanded of her and start to search for the necessities of the new name. I presume that other men launch their childhoods with sticks and mitts and balls, skinned knees, a sackful of crickets, and other accessories. They are shoved onto a lawn, where they know the routine, can find the snake or book of matches, sniff out water, or sit in a children’s ditch and watch the sky with their light and delicate heads. But I was the designated writer among us, unable to walk across grass or throw or catch or hide, equipped only with the stylus and pad, made to create our life in the form of notes on a page. This was unfortunate, because I don’t like to write, I don’t like to read, and I like language itself even less. My father read to me as a boy and I was mannered enough not to stop him. It was unbearable — book after book that failed to make or change me, my father’s lips twisting and stretching during a supposed story hour, massaging a stream of nonsense inside his mouth. I have always tried to be polite about words—good manners are imperative in the face of a father wrestling with a system that has so clearly failed — yet I find language plainly embarrassing. It is poor form, bad manners, that so much hope is pinned to such wrong sounds out of the mouth, to what is really only a sophisticated form of shouting and pain. It is not pleasant for me to hear “foreign” languages, either. All languages are

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 29

clearly alien and untrue, and, absent of so-called meaning, it is repeatedly clear that language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated way to cry. To speak is to grieve, and I would prefer not to listen to a weeping animal all day and every day, sobbing and desperate and lost. Particularly when that animal calls itself my father. Each time we changed my sister’s name, she shed a brittle layer of skin. The skins accrued at first in the firewood bin and were meant to indicate something final of the name that had been shed — a print, an echo, a husk, although we knew not what. They were soft in my hands, devoid of information, and quite like what I always thought was meant by a “blanket,” a boy’s little towel, something to shield me from the daily wind that got into my room. It is not that the skins resembled a person anymore, or stood for one, or acted as a map of the past. They were, rather, a part of my sister I could have to myself — soft, foldable, smelling of bitter soap, perhaps like a toy she might have used. I kept them for hand warmers, penciled my pictures into their flaky surfaces, draped them over my bedroom lamp for spidery lighting effects and the whiff of a slightly burnt wind. Maybe I smelled something deeper as the skins burned away on the bulb, floating in and out of the cone of light that enabled my infrequent passage from bed to door, at such times when my bed pan was full. There was nothing of food to the smell, only houses, hands, glass, and hair. And her. They smelled of her. Oddly, these skins my sister shed seemed to serve as a repellent to my sister herself, as if smelling her own body were uncomfortable for her. She would not come near my room when I was using them. Nor would she approach me, particularly if I wrapped myself in parts of her old body and walked through the halls, or bathed in a caul of her husks, which would cling to my skin in a gluey callus when they were wet. No one, I would venture, likes to be understood as deeply as I was understanding my sister at that time, shrouding myself in the flakes of her body that she had lost, wearing her. She preferred, I assume, not to know me. When the names ran dry, my sister pulled up short somewhere in the heart of the Learning Room. The mail had ceased, and no one was sure what to call her. She slept on the rug and scratched at herself, looking desperately to all of us for some sign of a new name, of which we had none. No one, as I mentioned, was sure what to call her, a problem that proved to be the chief void in her identity, which slowly eroded. There were no more skins, and one morning my sister lost her motion and folded into a quiet pose. Out of sympathy, we reverted back to her original name, or one of the early ones. I have to admit that I’m not sure what name she began with. Nor were any of us too sure, to be frank, whom, exactly, she had become.

30 conceptualisms

lisa Because the word “Lisa” most closely resembles the cry heard within the recorded storms at the American Weather Museum, a crisply distorted utterance claimed to be at the core of this country’s primary air storms, the girl or woman to carry the burden of the Lisa name carries also perhaps the most common sound the world can make, a sound that is literally in the air, everywhere and all the time. (Most wind, when slowed down, produces the sound “Lisa” with various intonations.) The danger is one of redundancy, and furthermore that a woman or girl cruelly named Lisa will hear her name so often that she will go mad or no longer come when called. Children learn that repeating a word wakes it meaningless, but they don’t know why. Briefly: Weather in America occurs through an accumulation and disturbance of language, the mildest form of wind. To speak is to create a weather, to supply wind from a human source, and therefore to become the enemy. The female Silentists are silent primarily to heal the weather, or to prevent weather, since they believe that speech is the direct cause of storms and should forever be stifled. A Silentist regards the name Lisa as the purest threat, given that, when heard, it commonly indicates an excess of wind, an approaching storm, possibly the world storm. The name Lisa, to some Americans, is more dangerous than the words “fuck” or “fag” or “dilch.” It should probably be discontinued. It can crush someone. Statistics for Lisa: An early name of my sister. She rarely acknowledged it. It caused her anger. We could pin her to the floor with it. She drank girls’ water and would peaceably wear a Brown Hat. Her Jesus Wind resistance was nearly zero. Rashes and facial weakness were frequent. A distressed tone to her skin. Her language comprehension was low, or else she showed selective deafness. A growling sound was heard when she wrote. She seemed blind to my father.

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 31

bob perelman

china We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells us what to do. The people who taught us to count were being very kind. It’s always time to leave. If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t. The wind blows your hat off. The sun rises also. I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it for ourselves. Run in front of your shadow. A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister. The landscape is motorized. The train takes you where it goes. Bridges among water. Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the plane. Don’t forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are nowhere to be found. Even the words floating in air make blue shadows. If it tastes good we eat it. The leaves are falling. Point things out. Pick up the right things. Hey guess what? What? I’ve learned how to talk. Great. The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears. As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing. Go to sleep. You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too. Everyone enjoyed the explosions. Time to wake up. But better get used to dreams too.

32 conceptualisms

confession Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for decades. Really since the early 70s. Before that I pretty much wrote as myself, though young. But something has happened to my memory, my judgment: apparently, my will has been affected. That old stuff, the fork in my head, first home run, Dad falling out of the car —  I remember the words, but I can’t get back there anymore. I think they must be screening my sensations. I’m sure my categories have been messed with. I look at the anthologies in the big chains and campus bookstores, even the small press opium dens, all those stanzas against that white space — they just look like the models in the catalogs. The models have arms and legs and a head, the poems mostly don’t, but other than that it’s hard — for me anyway — to tell them apart. There’s the sexy underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem you could wear to a party

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 33

in a pinch, the little blaspheming dress poem. There’s variety, you say: the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs; the epic toga, showing some ancient ankle; the behold! the world is changed and finally I’m normal flowing robe and shorts; the full nude; the scatter — Yes, I suppose there’s variety, but the looks, those come on and read me for the inner you I’ve locked onto with my cultural capital sensing device looks! No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks, “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”! I’m just waiting for my return ticket to have any meaning, for those saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities deny any visitations — hardly a surprise. And I myself deny them — think about it. What could motivate a group of eggheaded, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians with techniques far beyond ours to visit earth, abduct naive poets, and inculcate them with otherworldly forms that are also, if you believe the tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always seem to take place in some provincial setting: isn’t that more than

34 conceptualisms

slightly suspicious? Why don’t they ever reveal themselves hovering over some New York publishing venue? It would be nice to get some answers here —  we might learn something, about poetry if nothing else, but I’m not much help, since I’m an abductee, at least in theory, though, like I say, I don’t remember much. But this writing seems pretty normal: complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I seem to have lost my avant-garde card in the laundry. They say that’s typical. Well, you’ll just have to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment, that’s your job! Back to work! As if you could leave! And you thought gravity was a problem!

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 35

cole swensen

thought experiment for D.P. 1 The train sliding smoothly, how smoothly it surrounds and becomes all in its own world. It’s too simple and too much is simple, so we’ll live here and let cell by cell dissolve in else. There is a next. There is a man sitting next to you. He looks like Einstein, with the underwater hairdo and those very particular eyes. So Einstein lives on in the train, a small man with a flashlight and a brother with another flashlight and a twin who never returned to earth. Such odd wealth — the one growing older and the other lost like glass in water: this was once a face. And this is a person who can’t turn around. If the past is the past, why have you lost your voice. 2 We begin with the proposition that the world is beautiful, and that from a train it’s a beautiful thing. Einstein loved trains like the rest of us love the world. Speed that infinitely approaches white and lodged in the breath. How the twin gasped, flung from view. What do you see? A light bounces off the ceiling of the train. A light that lands beside itself like its own twin but that neither recognizes nor resembles, among all the different identical, you were the one I loved, the one I was and where. Now it appears that the destination can be chosen afterward and the landscape collapses like a lung — you were the one on the train traveling to the sea who said, look — a fire in the field where we are on fire in peace.

36 conceptualisms

3 When one train passes another in the opposing direction, the air between must split, each of its particles twinned and racing for the same location before the decision can be prearranged. We went this way. A long slow curve across the beauty of the world which at this speed is finally and clearly perceptible as a suspension of flight; some flying thing with a permanently held breath. Some understanding of green and blue and red that sees the spectrum split and sees the fan of slivered light sink in. “This window between us” you’ll say as you have said but it is so among us that we have seen the world. It is arriving, and though it has not yet arrived, we are sure of its tender, transparent body, of its tendency to gasp for air until it splits into all its possibilities and of its desire to be with us as breath is, indivisible and interior and always falling in a curve like that of a hand, held palm up or that of a face where it curves at the edge and can therefore end. 4 But the face that underlies a landscape is only perceptible from a train. Einstein knew this and “the world has a face that looks back at you, and it is your own.” Wittgenstein said it and Einstein couldn’t deny it and so they shook hands, one turning one way and the other, the other in a clean bisection of available space and if you ever see your brother again (the one who’s gone) the features rapidly approaching white. He was your own. Repeat the word now. Now. Now the world is beautiful and now it is a single thing and this renders it silent so that the light can pass through in any direction, altering the nature of motion, and everything that moves is newly legible though unsayable; one said it wouldn’t be possible but another turned around quickly and is still turning. 5 We pull into a town with 17 steeples. Cows falling down green hills almost to the center. Once the train begins to move again it all makes sense. Like the hands lying folded in a lap where it’s woven: one life into another and under and beauty being the only thing holding them together. “All we ever see is light” in its lively fracture and saturated

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 37

rails, but it never reaches; though pale lies down upon pale, the white recedes into such exactitude that a lip can be clearly discerned. “That’s not my face.” “No, it belonged to my brother.” The one struck speechless who is still falling backward. The one who loved nothing more than numbers and for such very good reasons. 6 "Trains and Sleep.” That’s how the movie begins as a long train pulls through an unidentified station and in each frame sleeps a face without worry, history or identifiable features. Sleep like glaciers, their faces shine with that underwater light that in motion becomes iridescence — a wing separated from its flying thing for a moment at rest and for a moment almost white on the windowsill where the sun, hovering above it in chips like mica, fracturing its own light yet keeping it tied to something inside. You lied to me. They’re not asleep, but when the body attains a certain speed (the human body) and the eyes no longer match the seeing which is freer now though not necessarily returning to the relatives waiting on the platform. 7 And now one is returning on the train because the train goes back but never on the same route to prevent its recognizing the world, which in all its beauty would freeze from seeing. Flee at the touch: mountain ranges recoiling, trees falling out choir after choir — that held note in which you recognize your own voice; how cell by cell the self abandons the same and the unrecognizable comes so close that a kiss uncovers the entire face. The intricate musculature, delicate pattern of veins: the face below the skin spread so beyond the window: fields of wheat; you said once and what you said became and thus it became one though the name has still not arrived like that of a town in which you’ve lived so long that you find every landmark oddly novel if you look at it straight on. 8 While walking on a moving train, if going in the same direction does speed add to speed so smoothly that the landscape becomes unstable, begins to slip and green

38 conceptualisms

blinds into green until the voice is no longer recognizable as that of an individual. Something mathematical that begins to tick from cell to cell, tree to tree and begin a flying that is traveling somewhere above or below the speeding train there is this pure landscape which is to say liquid and urgent and brilliant and shy. Take flight: if you walk in the opposing direction the cells fold in upon one another and time begins with a choking sound in the throat. A small piece of paper folding over and over until the face is reconstituted and it’s your own flickering, field after field. Repeat after me: You can now see the world as a single streak, something built of transparent speed; pure white of the sort they say no one person, unaided can perceive. 9 Einstein had a word for it and he died. This will become of motion no matter how often you see Wittgenstein cry out at the sudden recognition: many after many: there are faces at the window we simply must reclaim. When you’ve known them long enough, the similarities, “Why, they’re all really” you say with a lump in your throat; whole cities reflected in rivers where the real cities lay breathing water like your twin brother who has grown into a tiny curled animal that takes up no space. Space that, so like the beautiful world that we labeled “beautiful,” has no facial features and so goes aimlessly and wherever there’s an electromagnetic wave that can penetrate solid objects and there’s an old recording (quite rare) of Einstein talking with Wittgenstein over a cup of coffee in a railway station, I’ve forgotten now where, and they were saying something about something white.

1 | writing language writing: a preface (of sorts) 39

should something happen to the heart 1 If you look right here on the graph, you can see that little leap and then the plateau. A bee trying to cross a rural road. The scale is staggering. He or she may put a hand up to the chest. He or she may think he’s just out of breath and think how odd to forget that you’d just been running so fast. 2 If the fist quickened within and he’s holding on while something else drowns. Actually, it’s not a single leap, but if you look closely you’ll note an entire flight, how rash, and now it’s a flying creature charging against the lighted window. It’s funny what you notice and how slowly you notice that it stops, while in the movie, someone’s life goes on and he can surely hear you but he won’t turn around. 3 We are still not clear about the role of irregularity in the functioning of the human heart. Whether or a sudden shift a slight skip; you lie awake an ear just over his chest, you couldn’t count but he lives through the night anyway and in the morning he’s fine in fact it seems a certain chaos reigns as he shifts in sleep or slips and then slips back here again. 4 But if the gravity of the heart could be properly computed, which is to say, its gravitational pull on the surrounding organs, arteries and vessels with an end to determining finally what orbits it as a strange shadow seen when the hand is held up to the heart as a bright light shined through the body of the subject just before the cardiac seizure begins, just seconds before, before the hand has had time to crawl to the breast like a nursing animal or the fist can slam down on the table and the splinters of glass can

40 conceptualisms

release whatever the object is, it is now a flitting impression of a figure fleeing a stifling room. 5 In other cases, the left arm begins to ache, the blood like lead where the cry is stuck and as if struck by a sudden thought, the gaze goes blank and she thought he was going to say something but when he didn’t she turned away thinking nothing of it. The octopus has three hearts. A bee is lost on a road. It is summer and the children are laughing and screaming on the other side of the lake but they are hidden by the glare of the sun across the water. 6 Arhythmia that marks but you’ll note something locked inside the chest, running, is almost escaping, an autonomous animal intent on erasing though the human body cannot live for even a moment without and if the animal gets frightened by loud noises, for instance shouting or crying, it may find another home or, even homeless, refuse to return. 7 Recent studies have shown shock; her hand up to her mouth but she couldn’t have I clamped my hand to my I watched him across the room. I think I He got farther The base of the regulation of the heartbeat is electrical, though it’s known that at least six different conductors can be, must be, may very well be often a spiral wave breaks and falls. A sound far off. She touched her own lip as a stranger might touch it if a stranger could ever touch another like that.

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8 The heart of the adult male is a pound to a pound and a half and roughly shaped like a hand, closed and placed heel down on a table on which a glass of wine sits refracting the early evening light so that a wash of red covers the hand and heads toward the wrist, rising. Once we were alive. It happens when you’re not thinking. The breath that holds itself, no longer asking anything of us. 9 Now we study it and it doesn’t hurt anymore. I like ink. It stays right there. It keeps track while the body in the air takes on some new form before it telegrams. We no longer regard the signals as chaotic; rather we consider that their pattern will not be repeated and he’ll go on in the new language until we can no longer see him. He was playing with his child out in the back of the house when the child suddenly grew enormous and he couldn’t recall the word. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt at all.

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how photography has changed the human face 1 This is a monument to the number one. This is your face in the glass. This is someone you’d never recognize. This is someone who died. Cry. You’re supposed to cry. It shakes the house, shatters the windows in a storm. Story in the film locked in. 2 And what therefore has happened to the face You pass incised it used to be undone and on and on and we would say or would have said Recognize it anywhere While here it is replaced by one 3 It’s a moving scene You pass and the window frames for a fraction of a minute a passing face. The last of the sun is warm and yours was all in your hands. We have overcome

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our objection to the past Please stay. 4

There is a play of light and shadow. A room that runs parallel to this room and when you leave the room, a slight click and you turn. One distinct face and the crowd, multiplying. There are others still inside, but they are interior things; they wither in the light. If the images refuse to move. The face you know, distilled from what you don’t. The difference lives on, finds a life of its own. Don’t return. I counted to one. Stretch out your arms. Straight in front. Place it there. Later it will be a picture and no one will be breathing and no one, said the guide, has ever been here. We made it up by heart and we put you in the photograph. Look, you belong. What will you become. We chose it all by hand and every detail binds. Close your eyes — it photographs the sky. 5 And once and once and once the power of light to break to stain and drown. Scythe. Simple. What did you want? Why did you come? When the new world is primarily sound and we thought you’d last forever in that incredible light.

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6 But it wasn’t your face. 7 See in the picture the man crossing the bridge. He doesn’t look like us. When you were a child you trusted everyone —  I remember, you’d go up to strangers and your arms would take over. Now, in the photograph, you look blind; you have that impenetrable look in your eyes. They are your eyes, but the arms belong to the man crossing the bridge. They alone are alive. Look at them again — see that electric thing that rivets them to the scene, see how they tremble every time I speak, see, you are there in the background; you are looking on; you are watching a man in Canton cross a narrow bridge and every time I speak, see. 8 In this photograph, everyone is here and they are happy and the sun is shining directly into their eyes so they have raised their arms, each an arm, each a hand to shade their eyes and the shadow cast (which is the whole point of the gesture) makes it impossible to tell who they are. 9 Light cuts while you hold your breath my pulse around, turn around my And you are. How simple then, you see we can sleep through the future like we planned.

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chaïm soutine: reeling trees The children are lost — is the central fact — and that —  is what holds on — what factors in and what losing is — and how its moving parts come together with that clicking sound — how are we a product of wind? Everything here is four paintings by Chaïm Soutine hanging in a single room — though of only two scenes — two large trees — and two of two children running home — we see them at two different points on their road where the huge sky backs up — fills with trees — huge trees full of wind that we can see — warm wind along the road behind them curves beyond the curve where a world — which he built — from paint painted over paint — breaks into a world just barely — out of sight it opens out — into a broad valley — dotted with majestic trees alone — in great fields of horses in a storm — the children are on their way home. Clarisse Nicoïdski claimed that Soutine was the painter who made the wind visible —  “In the curve of a feeling,” he once said

that feeling always curves sharply toward or from having been raised in a tradition that prohibited representation (see Exodus 20:4) Or self-exile in which the line is drawn before it’s formed. He arrived in Paris in 1913 (though some sources say 1912) at the age of 20, or perhaps 19 or 21, having the liberty of not knowing quite when he was born, and

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went to stay with friends at La Ruche, with its affordable studio-housing built from the ruins of the most recent Universal Exhibition. We’re falling up a hill are a man up a red hill will a fallen green through climbing branches that hold a house up to the sky and that the house is then thrown farther up as we pick our way down the red cliff running in the sun. Which he translated as: Paysage avec Personnage or The White Road 1918-1919 Still as the light shines and they’re walking away as the road divides as the cliff falls and climbs, the trees climb. As the sky falls and the road flays and the world tilts rather red where it isn’t green walking along a road falling off houses into the sky and into the sky walking and into the sky running into the sky. Soutine was a great reader of Montaigne, who claimed that the world is constantly churning, never achieving an equilibrium. This is what Soutine painted and what allows his landscapes to avoid classical landscape’s implicit argument for a single legitimate point-of-view, which can only be occupied by a single person at any one time, thus also avoiding its inevitable if subtle support of rigidly hierarchical social and political systems. Instead, Soutine’s riotous slippages multiply, and the viewer, too, slips, skids, and the trees reel overhead. Or more slowly — wandering under light — sharpening — the light — making color — come off on the hands — and — sometimes the hands — are larger than life and — always the hands — and they live alone “… waiting for the wind to rise,” he said to a friend who, passing again hours later, had found him sitting in exactly the same position. that the wind had made his hands

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the wind of his hands and what the wind had made of his hands was not said it was not that the wind was the face of his hands nor that his hands were faced in wind but that his hands made faces of the wind and faced them. To wit: Paysage à Céret, 1920 if the house entered the wind or rather if the wind is in fact or becomes the windows or in what order wind and house arrange themselves there is a shroud to find or lace or veil at times the whole town wearing out, wearing down to the face of the animal beginning to show the procession of white walking out of itself, not at all as violent as one would have thought or it was not the wind Soutine painted some 200 landscapes around Céret in the three years he spent there between 1919 and 1922. His first dealer, Zborowski, took him down to the south to give him the time and means to paint. First to Cagnes, just west of Nice, but Soutine was restless, and so moved on to Céret, a small town just above the Spanish border and some 20 miles from the sea. Dr. Albert Barnes, who put the Paris art world into a frenzy when he came in 1923 to buy contemporary works to fill his new foundation, encountered Soutine’s work and was instantly struck, marking a permanent and positive change in the latter’s fortunes. He ended up acquiring 60 of the Céret landscapes, though another source puts the number at 100. Many others Soutine cut up or burned in anxious fits in which he couldn’t stand his own work.

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He went through these fits off and on all his life. His good friend Paulette Jourdain once, hearing strange sounds from within, looked through the keyhole into his room and saw him in a rage slashing canvases and ripping them to shreds. He once commented to another painter, “One day, I’m going to assassinate my paintings.” Zborowski routinely fished them out of the garbage, and gallerists refused to sell his works back to him, knowing what he’d do to them. At other times, he would stare at a painting for a while, and then go over to it, cut out a particular part, and keep just that. Many of the landscapes are houses, and many others are trees. Les modes de la vie. The rooms into which. We move through rooms, whole in the air, which is open, opening the doors, a house on a hill that spins on its own, undone. This is the case with The Oak, c. 1939, which is mostly sun, and The Tree, c. 1939, with houses the size of marbles somewhere down below. Is a painting of a tree a landscape or a portrait? He painted so aggressively that one day he dislocated his thumb.

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harry mathews Translation and the OuLiPo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese a problem in translation Some of you may know the name of Ernest Botherby (born in Perth, Australia, 1869; died in Adelaide, 1944), the scholar who founded the Australian school of ethno-linguistics, and also the explorer who identified the variety of Apegetes known as botherbyi, popular in England during the years before the Great War when private greenhouses were still common. Botherby attained professional notoriety in the late ’20s, after publishing several papers on a north New Guinean language called Pagolak. The peoples of New Guinea were a favorite subject with Botherby. He had begun studying them years before when, at the age of twenty-four, he undertook a solitary voyage into the interior of the island, vast areas of which remained uncharted at the time. A collation of reports by Nicholas von Mikhucho Maclay, the Reverend Macfarlane, and Otto Finsch had convinced young Botherby that tribes still existed in the New Guinean highlands that had shunned contact with their neighbors, not to mention the modern world, and preserved a truly primitive culture. In one of these valleys Botherby discovered, as he had hoped, his first archaic tribe. He designates it as that of the Ohos. This community, numbering no more than a few hundred, lived a peaceable existence in conditions of extreme simplicity. Its members were hunter-gatherers equipped with rudimentary tools. They procured fire from conflagrations occurring in forests nearby but were incapable of making it otherwise. They also used speech, but a speech reduced to its minimum. The Oho language consisted of only three words and one expression, the invariable statement, “Red makes wrong.” Having patiently won over the tribal chiefs, Botherby was able to verify this fact during the many weeks he spent with them. Other needs and wishes were communicated by sounds and signs; actual words were never used except for this unique assertion that “Red makes wrong.”

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In time Botherby signified to his hosts a curiosity as to whether other communities existed in the region. The Ohos pointed north and east. When Botherby pointed west, he was met with fierce disapproval. So it was naturally west that he next went, prudently distancing himself from the Oho settlement before taking that direction. His hunch was rewarded two days later when, in another valley, he came upon his second tribe, which he called the Uhas. The Uhas lived in a manner much like the Ohos, although they knew how to cultivate several edible roots and had domesticated the native pig; like the Ohos, they had a rudimentary language used invariably to make a single statement. The Uhas’ statement was, “Here not there.” They used it as exclusively as the Ohos used “Red makes wrong.” Botherby eventually made his way back to the valley of the Ohos. There he was overcome by an understandable (if professionally incorrect) eagerness to share his second discovery, to wit, that near them lived a people of the same stock, leading a similar life, and possessed of the same basic gift of speech. As he was expounding this information with gestures that his audience readily understood, Botherby reached the point where he plainly needed to transmit the gist of the Uhas’ one statement. He hesitated. How do you render “Here not there” in a tongue that can only express “Red makes wrong”? Botherby did not hesitate long. He saw, as you of course see, that he had no choice. There was only one solution. He grasped at once what all translators eventually learn: a language says what it can say, and that’s that.

yes, but we’re different The range of the Oho and Uha languages is tiny; the range of modern languages — for instance, French and English — is vast. There is virtually nothing that can be said in English that cannot be said in French, and vice versa. Information, like phone numbers and race results, can easily be swapped between the two languages. Then again, some statements that seem informative do not really pass. A Frenchman says, “Je suis français”; an American says, “I’m American.” “I’m French” and “Je suis américain” strike us as accurate translations. But are they? A Frenchman who asserts that he is French invokes willy-nilly a communal past of social, cultural, even conceptual evolution, one that transcends the mere legality of citizenship. But the fact of citizenship is what is paramount to most Americans, who probably feel, rightly or wrongly, that history is theirs to invent. The two national identities are radically different, and claims to them cannot be usefully translated in a way that will bridge this gap.

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I suggest that this gap extends into the remotest corners of the two languages. Elle s’est levée de bonne heure means “She arose early,” but in expectation of different breakfasts and waking from dreams in another guise. This does not mean that it’s wrong to translate plain statements in a plain way, only that it is worth remembering that such translations tell us what writers say and not who they are. In this respect, French and English — or Germans and Portuguese — would seem to be as separate as Ohos and Uhas. There are also times when plain statements of fact do translate each other rather well — even the statements Je suis français and I’m American. To make what I mean clear, let me add to them one or two supplementary words. The Frenchman says, “Je suis français, Monsieur!” The American says, “I’m American, and you better believe it!” You see at once that the meaning of both statements is the same: an assertion not of nationality but of committed membership in a community — “my community.” So even essentials can sometimes break through the linguistic separation. What makes this interesting is that the substantial identity of these statements does not lie in what they say — the information they contain is obviously not identical (French/American). So in this instance, at any rate, what has been successfully translated lies not in the nominal sense of the words but in other factors of language, whatever they may be. And whatever they may be, these factors are precisely the material of Oulipian experiment. So, can the OuLiPo help translators in their delicate task?

translation and the oulipo (1) The OuLiPo certainly can’t help in an obvious way. Unless he wanted to sabotage his employer, an editor would be mad to employ an Oulipian as a translator. A few samples will show why. As our source text, let’s take a famous line from Racine’s Phèdre:

C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée.

The literal sense — please be charitable — is, “Here is Venus steadfastly fastened to her prey.” First translation: I saw Alice jump highest — I, on silly crutches. Explanation: a rule

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of measure has been applied to the original. Each of its words is replaced by another word having the same number of letters. Second translation: “Don’t tell anyone what we’ve learned until you’re out in the street. Then shout it out, and when that one-horse carriage passes by, create a general pandemonium.” Explanation: the sound of the original has been imitated as closely as possible — C’est Vénus tout entiére à sa proie attachée / Save our news, toot, and share as uproar at a shay — and the results expanded into a narrative fragment. (Let me give you an example of a sound translation from English to French, Marcel Bénabou’s transformation of “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”: Ah, singe débotté, / Hisse un jouet fort et vert — “O unshod monkey, raise a stout green toy!”) In these two examples the sense of the original has been quite forsaken. Even when they preserve the sense, however, Oulipian renderings hardly resemble normal ones. Third translation: At this place and time exists the goddess of love identified with the Greek Aphrodite, without reservation taking firm hold of her creature hunted and caught. Explanation: each word has been replaced by its dictionary definition. Last translation: Look at Cupid’s mom just throttling that god’s chump. Explanation: all words containing the letter e have been excluded. The preserved sense hardly makes these two translations faithful ones. And yet all four examples can be considered translations. What has been translated, however, is not the text’s nominal sense but other of its components; and we may call these components “forms,” taking “form” simply to mean a material element of written language that can be isolated and manipulated. So the first pair of examples are direct translations of forms: in the passage from one language to another, forms rather than sense are what is preserved (number of letters, sound). The second pair are replacements of forms — not only the words but a form of the original has been replaced, in one instance a lexical context, in the other the choice of vowels. These strange dislocations of the original may seem cavalier, but they are useful in drawing attention precisely to elements of language that normally pass us by, concerned as we naturally are with making sense of what we read. Nominal sense becomes implicitly no more than a part of overall meaning. Jacques Roubaud has recently provided a nice insight into its relativity in a discussion of the nature of poetry. He posits the axiom, “Poetry does not respect the principle

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of non-contradiction,” and goes on to propose two poems for comparison (since Roubaud says they are poems, let’s agree):

1st poem: This is a poem.



2nd poem: This is not a poem.

There is, he asserts, no poetic contradiction between the two poems. I would add that according to ordinary criteria, the second poem is not a translation of the first; whereas by Oulipian criteria, they are perfect translations of one another — just as “Je suis français, Monsieur!” and “I’m American, and you better believe it” can be considered equivalents even though saying different things. This view of translation is a first clue to why the OuLiPo has something to teach anyone interested in how writing and reading work.

the truthful liar We can tell the truth when we speak; it may not happen often, but you know it when it happens. But when you write down what you say, whether it’s “I love you” or “Pass the salt,” the words in themselves are no longer either true or untrue. No one is there to be responsible for them. Even in its ordinary, utilitarian uses, the written word cannot guarantee what it says. Can we agree that instruction manuals sometimes fail to help? Although once you’ve figured out your gadget, they become clear enough. Have the cooks among you tried out cookbook dishes that clearly had to be mastered before you could understand the recipe? The authors of manuals and cookbooks tell us honestly what they do, but because they aren’t there to show us, it doesn’t work. That is, facts are lies. Not because they are false, but because facts belong to the past — to what was, never to what is. We love them, because once reality is safely lodged in the past, it becomes reassuring, reasonable, and easy to manage. Or at least easier: we read, “50 Palestinians and 12 Israelis killed in renewed fighting,” barely gulp, and turn the page. Naturally. That is the way written language naturally works. Our language is made up of devices called sentences and paragraphs that automatically produce reasonable conclusions, which is another word for facts.

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keep moving What if I round out the statement that facts are lies: facts are lies — and that’s a fact. Look at what happens now: if the statement “facts are lies” is a fact, then the statement is a lie; and if it’s a lie, then facts aren’t lies. But in that case the fact that facts are lies is a lie, and so saying that facts are lies is not a lie, and so facts are in fact lies, and the statement “facts aren’t lies” is a lie — and that’s a fact. And so on and so on. This modest circular paradox has its interest. First of all, when we read or hear it, something occurs beyond what’s being said. Second, what was previously a conclusion becomes a continuum, a succession of events rather than a single event. What is the main difference between a conclusion and a continuum? What distinguishes the final score of a tennis match from the moment when Agassi and Sampras are tied 4-all in the fifth set? Uncertainty and movement; in a word, change, a quality that is wholly wanting in the realm of facts. Change can have no place among facts, which constitute the realm of fatality, of what’s over and done with. The realm where change exists is that of possibility. “Not that” suggests that truth is a continuum of uncertain possibility. It only

exists in the next now. In writing, that means the now of reading. Since the first reader is the writer herself, a truth-telling writer has to create the possibility of not yet knowing what the truth is, of not yet knowing what he or she is going to say. Non-writing artists seem to grasp this easily. Francis Bacon described his painting as “accident engendering accident.” Ornette Coleman said he never knew what he was going to play next until he heard the note coming out of his saxophone. One writer, at least, made the point neatly: when the Red Queen tells Alice to hurry up and say what she thinks, Alice replies, “How can I say what I think till I see what I say?” If we think of writers as translators, what they must translate is not something already known but what is unknown and unpredictable. The writer is an Oho who has just heard what the Uhas say. Poor Botherby couldn’t begin to cope: he wanted to report a fact when what he needed was a cultural revolution. Fortunately, we have the necessary means, not always revolutionary. Language creates a continuum of its own, precisely in those components that concern not the plain sense of words but what we noticed in the circular paradox, the movement that their sequence engenders.

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translation and the oulipo (2) If truth is a changing continuum and not a series of discrete events and ideas, it’s unlikely that we can catch up with it in any reasonable way. Reasonable and honest accounts will always resemble superior instruction manuals, useful, even fascinating, never the thing itself. Or perhaps we should say a thing itself. On the page, truth begins when something real happens. Imaginative writers officially disclaim reasonableness and honesty. That’s what imaginative (or creative) signifies: they’re lying. Poets and novelists are outright liars. They promise to provide no useful information unless they feel like it. Three advantages accrue immediately. First, you are released from all responsibility to the dead world of facts. Second, your readers are ready to believe you, since by admitting you lie, you’ve told the truth at least once. Third and best, you can discover the unforeseen truth by making it up. You are condemned to possibility: you can say anything you like. So much freedom can be unnerving. If you can say anything, where do you start? You have already started. No one sits down to write in the abstract, but to write something. Some writerly object of desire has appeared, and you are setting off in pursuit of it. The object may be an anecdote, an idea, a vision, an effect, a climate, an emotion, a clever plot, a formal pattern — it doesn’t matter, it is what you’re after. What happens next? The process of translation as it is commonly practiced provides a helpful analogy. I am speaking from my own experience, but I do not think it exceptional. Simplistically described, translation means converting a text in a source language into its replica in a target language. Both translators and readers know what happens when this process is incomplete: the translator becomes so transfixed by the source text that when he shifts to his native tongue he drags along not only what should be kept of the original but much more — foreign phrasing, word order, even words. The results hang uncomfortably somewhere between the two languages, and a brutal effort is needed to move them the rest of the way. I learned how to avoid this pitfall. When I translate, I begin by studying the original text until I understand it thoroughly. Then, knowing that I can say anything I understand, no matter how awkwardly, I say what I have now understood and write down my words. I imagine myself talking to a friend across the table to make sure the words I use are ones I naturally speak. It makes no difference

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if what I write is shambling or coarse or much too long. What I need is not elegance but natural, late-twentieth-century American vernacular. Translating the opening sentence of Proust — Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure — I might write down: When I was a kid, it took me years to get my parents to let me even stay up till 9. (This is actually mid-twentieth-century vernacular; but that’s where I’m from, and it’s what I might say.) There is still work to do. But I have gained an enormous advantage. Instead of being stuck in the source language, I am standing firmly on home ground. My material is as familiar as anything in language can be; and instead of having to move away from the foreign text, I can now move towards it as I improve my clumsy rendering, sure that at every step, with the source text as my goal, I shall be working in native English. All I have to do is edit my own writing until I eventually reach a finished version … Think of the writer’s object of desire — vision, situation, whatever — as his source text. Like the translator, he learns everything he can about it. He then abandons it while he chooses a home ground. Home ground for him will be a mode of writing. He probably knows already if he should write a poem, a novel, or a play. But if it is a novel, what kind of novel should it be — detective, picaresque, romantic, science fiction, or perhaps a war novel? And if a war novel, which war, seen from which side, on what scale (epic, intimate, both)? At some moment, never forgetting his object of desire, which may be the scene of a thundershower breaking on a six-year-old girl and boy, he will have assembled the congenial conventions and materials that will give him a multitude of things to do as he works towards realizing that initial glimpse of a summer day, a storm, and two children. An example can make this clearer. Throughout his life, Robert Louis Stevenson was fascinated by the dual personality. His greatest exploration of the theme was The Master of Ballantrae, but he tried other ways of approaching it. In one instance he chose as his home ground the 19th-century penny dreadful with its array of melodramatic and grotesque trappings. Stevenson saw that to discover the mystery of his object of desire — the dual personality — in its starkest terms, these trappings provided what he needed. They proved so suitable that we scarcely notice them when we read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a work successful enough to have attained the status of a modern legend. It would be interesting to investigate works whose home grounds are not so readily discernible; it would also be laborious, and it is now time to think about the OuLiPo.

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back home at the oulipo Since the mid 19th century, writers have chosen their home grounds more and more outside the main traditions of fiction and poetry. Firbank used the brittle comedy of manners to register his tragic views; Kafka turned to the parable, Hofmannsthal and Calvino on occasion to fairy tales, Henry Miller to pornography. Other writers invented their own home grounds — Mallarmé in poetry, for instance, Joyce and Raymond Roussel in fiction — and it is for their successors and their readers that the OuLiPo has a particular relevance. A parenthetical point: the OuLiPo is not a literary school. It is not even concerned with the production of literary works. It is first and last a laboratory where, through experiment and erudition, possibilities of writing under arbitrary and severe restrictions are investigated. The use of these possibilities is the business of individual writers, Oulipian or not. All the same, several members of the OuLiPo have exploited Oulipian procedures in their work. I suggest that these procedures have provided them with home grounds. How is this possible? How can methods based on deprivation become the comforting terrain on which a writer sets out in pursuit of an object of desire? Why would anybody not a masochist want to determine a sequence of episodes according to the tortuous path of a knight across the entire chessboard? Or use the graphic formulations of a structural semiologist to plot a novel? Or limit one’s vocabulary in a story to the threadbare words contained in a small group of proverbs? Or, if a poet, why use only the letters of the name of the person a poem addresses? Or conversely exclude those letters successively in the sequence of verses? Or create a poetic corpus using the ape language of the Tarzan books? Nevertheless, these are some of the things Perec, Calvino, Jacques Jouet, and I chose to do, with acceptable results. Why did we do them? I used to wonder myself. When I first learned that Perec had written a novel without using the letter e, I was horrified. It sounded less like coming home than committing oneself to a concentration camp. When we were children, what we loved most was playing. After a fidgety family meal or excruciating hours in class, going out to play made life worth living. Sometimes we went out and played any old way; but the most fun I had was playing real games. I have no idea what games you enjoyed, but my own favorites were Capture the Flag and Prisoner’s Base — hard games with tough rules. When I played them, I was aware of nothing else in the world, except that the sun was getting low on the horizon and my happiness would soon be over. In Manhattan last autumn, I stopped to watch a school soccer game in which

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an eight-year-old girl was playing fullback. She was alertness personified, never taking her eyes off the ball, skipping from side to side in anticipation of the shot that might come her way. She had definitely not engaged in a trivial activity. The OuLiPo supplies writers with hard games to play. They are adult games insofar as children cannot play most of them; otherwise they bring us back to a familiar home ground of our childhood. Like Capture the Flag, the games have demanding rules that we must never forget (well, hardly ever), and these rules are moreover active ones: satisfying them keeps us too busy to worry about being reasonable. Of course our object of desire, like the flag to be captured, remains present to us. Thanks to the impossible rules, we find ourselves doing and saying things we would never have imagined otherwise, things that often turn out to be exactly what we need to reach our goal. Two examples. Georges Perec’s novel without the letter e, intermittently dramatic, mysterious, and funny, describes a world filled at every turn with multiple disappearances. Some undefined and crucial element in it is both missing from it and threatening it — something as central as the letter e to the French language, as primordial as one’s mother tongue. The tone is anything but solemn, and yet by accepting his curious rule and exploring its semantic consequences, Perec succeeded in creating a vivid replica of his own plight — the orphaned state that had previously left him paralyzed as a writer. I had a similar experience with my novel Cigarettes. My “object of desire” was telling the story of a passionate friendship between two middle-aged women. That was all I knew. I had concocted an elaborate formal scheme in which abstract situations were permutated according to a set pattern. This outline suggested nothing in particular, and for a time it remained utterly empty and bewildering. It then began filling up with situations and characters that seemed to come from nowhere; most of them belonged to the world I had grown up in. I had never been able to face writing about it before, even though I’d wanted to make it my subject from the moment I turned to fiction. It now reinvented itself in an unexpected and fitting guise that I could never have discovered otherwise. For Perec and me, writing under constraint proved to be not a limitation but a liberation. Our unreasonable home grounds were what had at last enabled us to come home.

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the case of the persevering maltese Earlier I quoted Francis Bacon describing his painting as “accident engendering accident.” Imposing fixed patterns as it does, the Oulipian approach sounds as though it discouraged such self-generating activity, but this is not so: in practice it guarantees that the unforeseen will happen and keep happening. It keeps us out of control. Control usually means submitting reasonably to the truly tyrannical patterns that language imposes on us whether we like them or not. Language by its nature makes us focus on its conclusions, not its presence. Oulipian dislocations of this “natural” language counter its de facto authority or, at the least, provide alternatives to it. Don’t forget that language cares as little about our individual needs as the tides and the winds; ill-equipped, we can affect it no better than King Canute. Those of you who have visited Venice may know the paintings of Vittore Carpaccio in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. The schiavoni were Slavs, and the cycle of paintings concerns a patron saint of Dalmatia, St. Jerome. Surprisingly, St. Jerome is absent from the most beautiful of these pictures, “The Vision of St. Augustine”; but there is a good reason for this. St. Augustine sits at his desk, where he has just finished reading a letter from St. Jerome asking his advice on a theological matter. St. Augustine has scarcely taken up his quill to reply when light floods his study and a miraculous voice reveals to him that St. Jerome is dead. It might be entertaining to speculate on the relevance of the scene to what I’ve been discussing — pointing out, perhaps, the futility of the reasoned answer St. Augustine is preparing in the face of the unforeseen and overwhelming truth. But let’s not. We have a still more entertaining object to contemplate. In the middle of the floor, to the left of the saint’s desk, a little Maltese dog sits bolt upright. He is bathed with celestial light, to which he pays no attention as he stares at his master in an attitude of absolute expectation, as alert in his immobility as was my little fullback in her agile skipping. He is as unconcerned by the momentous event now occurring as he is by literary theory. His attitude might be translated as the human question, What next? Like children and Oulipians, he probably wants to play, but he can’t be sure of that or anything else. He has to wait to find out. What next? What next, and what after that? The answer will be something like the one given by Marcel Duchamp when asked what he considered the highest goal of a successful life. He replied, “It. Whatever has no name.”  — Lans-en-Vercors // Paris, October 23, 1996

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bhanu kapil from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers introduction For six months, I traveled in India, England, and the United States, interviewing Indian women of diverse ages and backgrounds. Originally, my question to them was, “Is it possible for you to say the thing you have never been able to say, not even to the one you have spent your whole life loving?” Over the course of the last four years I asked these women—strangers I met in theaters, forests, laundromats, temples and diners—to respond more specifically to one or more of a predetermined selection of twelve questions. They agreed, on the condition of anonymity, to submit a spoken (tape-recorded) or written response in thirty minutes. During this half hour, the questionee was locked in a room without windows, furniture, or overhead lighting. My aim was to ensure an honest and swift text, uncensored by guilt or the desire to construct an impressive, publishable “finish.” In editing this anthology of responses, I did not attempt to “clean up” their roughness or rawness in terms of syntax, grammar, spelling, punctuation, or the way in which they filled the space of the page. The only alterations I made were in converting responses, or parts of responses, into English. —The project as I thought it would be: an anthology of the voices of Indian women. As I traveled between the countries of my birth (England), ancestry (India), and residence (America), I answered the questions for myself again and again. My responses were set down in a notebook, on scraps, or written on stickers that I affixed to escalator tubing, cafe tables, shop windows. The voices of the women I met: pure sound. The shapes they made, as they moved through the world: methods. A way to describe my body. I didn’t know where I was going. —The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane.

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twelve questions 1. Who are you and whom do you love? 2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive? 3. How will you begin? 4. How will you live now? 5. What is the shape of your body? 6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? 7. What do you remember about the earth? 8. What are the consequences of silence? 9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment. 10. Describe a morning you woke without fear. 11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? 12. And what would you say if you could?

>>>>>

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1. what is the shape of your body? Sometimes in the spaces, there is fear. Choose one: 1. The body of a woman, how she moves through the day. 2. Inside her: lolling oblongs, a little runny. 3. As seen through the mosquito net. 4. The translucencies of Sigmar Polke. 5. I don’t know anything. Artificial resin, lacquer on synthetic fabric. Substances that caused the surface to change colour. Silver oxide, red lead, cobalt chloride. Lanterns. Transparent polyester. Layered washes of lacquered colours and resins. I don’t know where to begin. But I know my elbow, my back tooth: throbbing I must.

1. How she moves “I keep looking over my left shoulder, to see if he’s still there": My name, my body. Such versions, I occupy. Live in, as surely as a dungwall house, a house that does not turn, is not born twice: skulls, oranges. A ladder leaning against a eucalyptus tree. A black hen with her red beak, in a basket of straw in the tree next to the front door of the house. Where I live. With a man whose one eye­brow joins together. (Blown ash.) Plum blossoms. Mango orchard. Rooster. Two eggs; bees. A very dark brown horse. A clay oven. Honey. The sun. A cinnamon liqueur, he brings me. I gulp then sleep, stunned by the sweetness of nouns. He has made altars of peacock feathers, paise, tiny mirrors, a dried stem of jasmine that is taller than I am. Then I’m awake. Wild salt of his chest and belly. A bed. It may be that I have taken an irreversible action. (Woody smoke.) A goat skin drying on the clothesline.

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2. Her body I risk lemons. I risk melted honey. I risk water. I risk an old wine bottle that has the shape of a Dravidian goddess. Her abandoned torso. Her hips. The massive sloping stubs of her transparent shoulders: I risk. The green glass of this body walking, slowly, along the orchard path. Balancing the lemonade on my head.

3. Her eyes It is difficult today. The orchard. (Making something.) I see making a shape there. Dragging a black tarp under the farthest mango tree, over the old skins and nettles. I began to. But stopped.

4. Her surface Red clay. A dry riverbed. I’m scared of the dogs. I’m scared of the cowmen. No. I’m not from here. My hair loosely braided, oily, not kempt. My body gets smokey. Gets holes in it; its layers of bright cotton. No. I was, without a doubt, born in an English-speaking country. A country I could no longer tolerate.

5. What she knows Shame may be fatal. l am here now. How I got here: gravity. The long dark of the border of Pakistan and India. Speed faster than colour. Not being a man, I bleed like this. To arrive seasonal, in pain, not what he thought. I am not beautiful. I couldn’t even look into the faces of the air hostesses. Only the darkness around them. At a slant. I write because I cannot paint. Salt. Rose. The colour black between the stars, beneath tongues. The darkness of our bedroom when we blow out the candles. The coals and the ash in the ingiti at dusk. The sound of a man working with nails and a hammer, as I write this. Later, after chai, we’ll have our bath. Salt crystals from Goa. Rosewater from an Indian grocery shop in the East End of London. It is difficult. He is always with me. These are the scraps.

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2. who are you and whom do you love? A month from now. A week from now. Tomorrow. When he goes. The going. I’ll make crepes, walk by the river with the dog, float candles in a pudding basin; the usual. He’s gone. Between our bodies: the sun at 5 a.m.; fiftyseven Herefords, and a Brahma bull that broke the river fence; four and a half thousand hummingbirds; a dying man; a man who is about to knock on the door of a woman with black eyes, to tell her that he loves her; the woman herself, who is drawing a bath. She can’t hear the door above the water. And her eyes aren’t really black. They’re brown. She lights a match. Floating candles. The incommensurable distance. I forgot to memorize his face.

3. describe a morning you woke without fear. The Ganges at Hardwar. Dusk. Steps. For two rupees, I buy a boat of palm leaves. It holds a diva: tiny earthenware pot, oil, a wick. I light a match. Push the boat into the river with my hands. Years later, the Pacific foam boiling at my feet, invisible whales migrating north, like the stats at daybreak, I try to remember that night. That version of water. I can’t. I remember the oiliness of my fingertips, and the smell of human flesh, upriver, burning. Frothy crusts, steam: the smell, also, of hot milk being poured, brass bowl to brass bowl, dudh, thick syllable, at the top of the steps. How I sat for hours, drinking the hot, sweet, milky tea, my last night there before I headed south, to Jaipur. A red desert. The opposite of a sea. Its aftermath.

4. w  here did you come from / how did you arrive? “May I?” “If you’d like.” “What are you writing about? “Nothing.” “I’ve been watching you." “What do I look like, then?” “I don’t know. Your hair keeps falling over your face. Are you Muslim or something?” “No. Zoroaster.”

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“Zarathustra?” “I'm not a member of a cult.” And then, the names I’d never heard before: Brecht, Eno, Klimt. A night and a day and a night on this train: talking, smoking: Afghani biris by the window, blowing the green smoke through the bars, into a landscape of red dust and tangled stumps. The occasional blur of a peacock diving off the tracks; blue-green, like taffeta: and then his face: coarse, pocky skin, the roughness of his nose and lips. (The trees were dead.) But full. What he was saying: Afrikaaner-Dutch, Dutch-English: the constant, voluptuous ya. Years later, walking, in the freezing London cold, I went into a Turkish school for immigrants, to warm my hands. I sat on the windowsill in a room high above the canal: looking down, I saw a woman bicycle past, a cello strapped to her back in its black case. It resembled the carapace of an insect about to rupture its shiny skin. I should have seen my future then, in the way that woman carried what she loved along the length of her spine: her home / kept moving.

5. how will you live now? Like this. Brightly. Growing brighter. As the pink ore of Shivalik glows, at dusk. It lasts for five minutes. I have hands: counting always by the three horizontal creases inside each finger. Marking with the thumb. Fourteen. Seconds. He taught me this. How to tell time by my body. Sometimes I want to tell him: I do not understand what you are saying. Instead, I disguise my slowness: asking him, brightly, if he would like another cup of chai.

6. how will you live now? I wake in the peristaltic predawn — purple-black, navy-blue, blue — to say good-bye. He drinks some water. Puts his glass down on my bookshelf. Turns. It takes three days for the remaining water to evaporate. Because it is winter, I don’t open the window, and so, for weeks, I breathe in a constantly circulating invisibility. I convince myself such things are true by counting my in-breaths and then counting my out-­breaths, per minute, then minutes, then hour. Om eying hareeng kleeng char moonday ye biche: om eying hareeng

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kleeng — This goes on until I dream myself as ribs. Four ribs, floating in a body of air. Bird calls. Nausea. The terrifying absence of a stomach, or a throat, or a plastic bucket.

7. what are the consequences of silence? Again, nothing. The sky above New York is thick red. I wrote to you but you did not reply. How difficult and corny, checking mail each night. Nicht. The paper I wrote on was yellow and clotted with fibres. My nib caught, sometimes, mid-sentence; I wrote: No, I can’t say it. You live somewhere beyond the marrow of / the scarlet, cortical — this. You live somewhere, and there’s a dried cream-scum — seashore — around the rim of your cup. Which sea? I don’t know whether I should face east, or west.

8. what do you remember about the earth? In the absence of Cézannes, I stare at the wavering light world: Venus rising over the hogbacks; the copper striations along the banks of the Colorado river; a waitress’s worn stockings; their heels, the light of her body; shop awnings, as seen through Viennese blinds, from a window table. I am trying to keep my heart open. No need to slit the soles of my feet. This is the earth. This is my one jumping life. We began the day in snow. Now the sage. (How I’ve missed you.) A few quick notes, then: To live without fear. South. I open and open. He writes: you greedy cow.

9. what are the consequences of silence? Harbour. Fresh brown eggs. Curlicue anemones. The songs of whales. It is difficult to write about love. Lapsang souchong tea. Smoked chilies. The maps of Utah and New Mexico. Alfalfa bales. And then the cows. A hundred or more: Hereford, Limousine, Brahma. I stare into two hundred eyes at once. We are traveling east, and inland, for the last, or first, time in our lives. I am twenty-five years old. He writes: I am thirty-two years old.

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The tea tastes of bark, and woodsmoke. You have not written one word about what happened between us. (In a South African accent.) The cows cross the river to give birth at the end of each winter. They break the fence, and they swim. I will never eat beef again.

10. how will you / have you prepared for your death? Moab. A white South African man and a brown-skinned English­woman walk up a ridge towards the Delicate Arch. No. They aren’t walking towards anything. When they see the surreal orange loop, they are both shocked. Having come to this place without guidebooks. Map: there is a sudden precipice, then a coiled valley of red­dish stone. He walks on ahead. Later he tells her he rubbed and tugged at his penis as hard as he could: spurting: arc after arc: of semen, over the edge. Later, in front of the motel mirror, as she is pulling on her trousers: let your fear adore you. It wants to get you off. She still doesn’t know what he means. She is drinking milky tea in the Café Vertigo in Green Park, and she is thinking that her body is not in one straight line. He is still fast asleep on a mattress next to the kerosene heater, and it is winter, and she will never tell him these things. She will never tell him about her body; she will simply kneel, continue to kneel, next to the low bed, a bowl of foamy coffee between her cupped hands, as if she is asking for something, and she is: waiting for him to wake up. Waking, he reaches for her. Her knees are raw. She closes her eyes. It is her habit. He flicks his tongue over her lips. The yoghurt-smell of his sleep-breath. She kisses him with a kiss she learned from books. Sticky. Sometimes, for days, weeks even, she forgets that she is going to die.

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lyn hejinian from My Life

A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home a pause, a rose, something from the war, the moment of greeting on paper him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple — though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity. The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains which were never loosened. Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity which never intrudes. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition. The shadow of the redwood trees, she said, was oppressive. The plush must be worn away. On her walks she stepped into people’s gardens to pinch off cuttings from their geraniums and succulents. An occasional sunset is reflected on the windows. A little puddle is overcast. If only you could touch, or, even, catch those gray great creatures. I was afraid of my uncle with the wart on his nose, or of his jokes at our expense which were beyond me, and I was shy of my aunt’s deafness who was his sister-inlaw and who had years earlier fallen into the habit of nodding, agreeably. Wool station. See lightning, wait for thunder. Quite mistakenly, as it happened. Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event. The afternoon happens, crowded and therefore endless. Thicker, she agreed. It was a tic, she had the habit, and now she bobbed like my toy plastic bird on the edge of its glass, dipping into and recoiling from the water. But a word is a bottomless pit. It became magically pregnant and one day split open, giving birth to a stone egg, about as big as a football. In May when the lizards emerge from the stones, the stones turn gray, from green. When daylight moves, we delight in distance. The waves rolled over our stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope. Rubber bumpers on rubber cars. The resistance of sleeping to being asleep. In every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats to match an inisolable portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. But the constant noise is not an omen of music to come. “Everything is a question of sleep,” says Cocteau, but he forgets

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the shark, which does not. Anxiety is vigilant. Perhaps initially, even before one can talk, restlessness is already conventional, establishing the incoherent border which will later separate events from experience. Find a drawer that’s not filled up. That we sleep plunges our work into the dark. The ball was lost in a bank of myrtle. I was in a room with the particulars of which a later nostalgia might be formed, an indulged childhood. They are sitting in wicker chairs, the legs of which have sunk unevenly into the ground, so that each is sitting slightly tilted and their postures make adjustment for that. The cows warm their own barn. I look at them fast and it gives the illusion that they’re moving. An “oral history” on paper. That morning this morning. I say it about the psyche because it is not optional. The overtones are a denser shadow in the room characterized by its habitual readiness, a form of charged waiting, a perpetual attendance, of which I was thinking when I began the paragraph, “So much of childhood is spent in a manner of waiting.” You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called as for we who ‘love to be “sea glass,” bits of old bottles rounded astonished’ and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one’s tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than any­thing I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don't mind, or I won't mind, where the verb "to care" might multiply. The pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach, so that when the lights of the plane in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens went off, and the entire city on that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of water and the light was growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching the only lights that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the hidden air­port. Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through the tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At night, to close off the windows from view of the street, my grandmother pulled down the window shades, never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too

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stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language. To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance. A blue room is always dark. Everything on the boardwalk was shooting toward the sky. It was not specific to any year, but very early. A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history—certain humans are situations. Are your fingers in the margin? Their random procedures make monuments to fate. There is something still surprising when the green emerges. The blue fox has ducked its head. The front rhyme of harmless with harmony. Where is my honey running. You cannot linger “on the lamb.” You cannot determine the nature of progress until you assemble all of the relatives. We see only the leaves and branches of the trees close in around the house. Those submissive games were sensual. it seemed that we had I was no more than three or four years hardly begun and we were old, but when crossed I would hold already there my breath, not from rage but from stubbornness, until I lost consciousness. The shadows one day deeper. Every family has its own collection of stories, but not every family has someone to tell them. In a small studio in an old farmhouse, it is the musical expression of a glowing optimism. A bird would reach but be secret. Absence of allusion: once, and ring alone. The downstairs telephone was in a little room as dark as a closet. It made a difference between the immediate and the sudden in a theater filled with transitions. Without what can a person function as the sea functions without me. A typical set of errands. My mother stood between us and held our hands as we waded into the gray-blue water, lecturing us on the undertow, more to add to the thrill of the approaching water than to warn us of any real danger, since she would continue to grip us by the hand when the wave came in and we tried to jump over it. The curve of the rain, more, comes over more often. Four seasons circle a square year. A mirror set

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in the crotch of the tree was like a hole in the out-of-doors. I could have ridden in the car forever, or so it seemed, watching the scenery go by, alert as to the circumstances of a dream, and that peaceful. Roller coast. The fog lifts a late sun­rise. There are floral twigs in position on it. The roots of the locust tree were lifting the corner of the little cabin. Our unease grows before the newly rest­less. There you are, and you know it’s good, and all you have to do is make it better. He sailed to the war. A life no more free than the life of a lost puppy. It became popular and then we were inundated with imitations. My old aunt entertained us with her lie, a story about an event in her girlhood, a catastrophe in a sailboat that never occurred, but she was blameless, unaccountable, since, in the course of the telling, she had come to believe the lie herself. A kind of burbling in the waters of inspiration. Because of their recurrence, what had originally seemed merely details of atmosphere became, in time, thematic. As if sky plus sun must make leaves. A snapdragon volunteering in the garden among the cineraria gapes its maw between the fingers, and we pinched the buds of the fuchsia to make them pop. Is that willful. Inclines. They have big calves because of those hills. Flip over small stones, dried mud. We thought that the mica might be gold. A pause, a rose, something on paper, in a nature scrapbook. What follows a strict chronology has no memory. For me, they must exist, the contents of that absent reality, the objects and occasions which now I reconsidered. The smells of the house were thus a peculiar mix of heavy interior air and the air from outdoors lingering over the rose bushes, the camellias, the hydrangeas, the rhododendron and azalea bushes. Hard to distinguish hunger from wanting to eat. My grandmother was in the kitchen, her hands on her hips, wearing what she called a “washdress,” watching a line of ants cross behind the faucets of the sink, and she said to us, “Now I am waging war.” There are strings in the terrible distance. They are against the blue. The trees are continually receiving their own shadows. They are seated in the shadows husking corn, shelling peas. Houses a name trimmed with of wood set in the ground. I try to find colored ribbons the spot at which the pattern on the floor repeats. Pink, and rosy, quartz. They wade in brackish water. The leaves outside the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them, making it impossible to look past them, and though holes were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as portholes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over its bowls through a fading light and backed by

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the protest of the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This simply means that the imagination is more restless than the body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for example, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,” and, then, one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do. Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, nearly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it seems even more incomplete when we were there in person. Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rapturous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns, frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a message of happiness by which we were called into the room, as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed with colored ribbons. A dog bark, the engine of a truck, an airplane hidden by the trees and roof­ what is the meaning hung tops. My mother’s childhood seemed from that depend a kind of holy melodrama. She ate her pudding in a pattern, carving a rim around the circumference of the pudding, working her way inward toward the center, scooping with the spoon, to see how far she could separate the pudding from the edge of the bowl before

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the center collapsed, spreading the pudding out again, lower, back to the edge of the bowl. You could tell that it was improvisational because at that point they closed their eyes. A pause, a rose, something on paper. Solitude was the essential companion. The branches of the red­wood trees hung in a fog whose moisture they absorbed. Lasting, “what might be,” its present a future, like the life of a child. The greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish. All night the radio covered the fall of a child in the valley down an abandoned well-fitting, a clammy narrow pipe 56 feet deep, in which he was wedged, recorded, and died. Stanza there. The synchronous, which I have characterized as spatial, is accurate to reality but it has been debased. Daisy’s plenty pebbles in the gravel drive. It is a tartan not a plaid. There was some disparity between my grandfather’s reserve, the result of shyness and disdain, and his sense that a man’s natural importance was characterized by bulk, by the great depth of his footprint in the sand—in other words, a successful man was no lightweight. A flock of guard geese are pecking in a cold rain, become formal behind the obvious flower’s bloom. The room, in fact, was used as a closet as well, for as one sat at the telephone table, one faced a row of my grandparents’ overcoats, raincoats, and hats, which were hung from a line of heavy, polished wooden hooks. The fog burned off and I went for a walk alone, then was lost between the grapevines, unable to return, until they set a mast, a pole, into the ground and hung a colored flag that I could see from anywhere around. A glass snail was set among real camellias in a glass bowl upon the table. Pure duration, a compound plenum in which nothing is repeated. Photographed in a blue pinafore. The way Dorothy Wordsworth often, I think, went out to “get” a sight. But language is restless. They say there has been too much roughhousing. The heat waves wobbled over the highway— on either side were flat brown fields tilted slightly toward the horizon—and in the distance ahead of the car small blue ponds lay in our path, evaporating suddenly, as if in a single piece, at the instant prior to our splashing in. I saw a line of rocks topped by a foghorn protecting the little harbor from the tide. Fruit peels and the heels of bread were left to get moldy. But then we’d need, what, a bird, to eat the fleas from the rug. When what happens is not intentional, one can’t ascribe meaning to it, and unless what happens is necessary, one can’t expect it to occur again. Because children will spill food, one needs a dog. Rubber books for bathtubs. Coast laps. One had merely to turn around in order to see it. Elbows off the table. The portrait, a photograph, had been made so that my grandmother was looking just over the head of the observer, into a little distance, not so far as to be a space into which she might seem to be staring, but at some definite object, some noun, just behind one. Waffle man everywhere. She had come upon a set of expressions (“peachy” being one of them and “nuts to you” another) which exactly suited her, and so, though the expressions went out of everyone else’s vocabulary, even years later, when everyone else was saying “far out” or “that’s nowhere,” she continued to have a

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“perfectly peachy time” on her vacations. This was Melody Ranch, daring and resourceful. As for we who “love to be astonished,” we might go to the zoo and see the famous hippo named “Bubbles.” The sidesaddle was impossible, and yet I’ve seen it used successfully, even stunningly, the woman’s full skirts spread like a wing as the horse jumped a hurdle and they galloped on. Lasting, ferries, later, trolleys from Berkeley to the Bridge. This is one of those things which continues, and hence seems important, and so ever what one says over and over again. Soggy sky, which then dries out, lifting slightly turning white—and then banks toward the West. If I see fishing boats that’s the first thing I think. Insane, in common parlance. It was a mountain creek, running over little pebbles of white quartz and mica. Let’s say that every possibility the obvious analogy is with music waits. In raga time is added to mea­ sure, which expands. A deep thirst, faintly smelling of artichoke hearts, and resembling the sleepiness of childhood. At every birthday party that year, the mother of the birthday child served ice cream and “surprise cake,” into whose slices the “favors” were baked. But nothing could interrupt those given days. I was sipping Shirley Temples wearing my Mary Janes. My grandfather was as serious as any general before any battle, though he had been too young for the First War and too old for the Second. He carried not a cane but a walking stick and was silent on his walks except when he passed a neighbor, and then he tipped his hat and said, “Morning,” if it were before noon, or, “Evening,” if it were after noon, without pausing his walk, just as nowadays joggers will come to a stoplight and continue to jog in place so as not to break their stride. Then the tantrum broke out, blue, without a breath of air. I was an object of time, filled with dread. I lifted the ice cream to make certain no spider was webbed in the cone. Sculpture is the worst possible craft for them to attempt. You could increase the height by making lateral additions and building over them a sequence of steps, leaving tunnels, or windows, between the blocks, and I did. The shape of who’s to come. For example, the funny pre-family was constant in its all-purpose itinerant ovals. It should be completed only in the act of being used. While my mother shopped, I stood in Produce and ate raw peas. The lovely music of the German violin. Most little children like beer but they outgrow it. Unseen, just heard, hard to remember. My sister was named “after” my aunt, the name not Murree but, like marriage, French, Marie. The first grade teacher, Miss Sly, was young and she might have been kind but all the years that she had been named Sly so had made her. A man mitt. I had “hit upon” an idea. Penny, buster. Uneven, and internal, asymmetrical but additive time. A child, meanwhile, had turned her tricycle upside down and was turning the pedal

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with her hand to make the front wheel spin. The solemn, flickering effects, not knowing what you’re doing. In your country do most of the girls do this. A cold but exhibiting hypothesis. I couldn’t get the word butterfly so I tried to get the word moth. The man with the pinto pony had come through the neighborhood selling rides for a quarter, or as he said, “two bits,” and it was that “two bits” even more than the pony that led the children to believe he was a real cowboy and therefore heroic. He was a trainer of falcons, scornful of hunting dogs. The body is a farmer. From the beginning, they had to drive the plow through stone eggs. She pretends she is making popcorn. The boats appeared to have stopped on the water, moving only as if to breathe. It seemed that they had hardly begun and they were already there. We were sticky in the back seat of the car. In the school bathroom I vomited secretly, not because I was ill but because I so longed for my mother. Now, bid chaos welcome. It requires a committee, all translators. Undone is not not done. And could it be musical if I hate it. Summers were spent in a fog that rains. They were mirages, no different from like plump birds along those that camel­back riders approach the shore in the factual accounts of voyages in which I persistently imagined myself, and those mirages on the highway were for me both impalpable souvenirs and unstable evidence of my own adventures, now slightly less vi­carious than before. The person too has flared ears, like an infant’s reddened with batting. I had claimed the radio nights for my own. There were more storytellers than there were stories, so that everyone in the family had a version of history and it was impossible to get close to the original, or to know "what really happened." The pair of ancient, stunted apricot trees yielded ancient, stunted apricots. What was the meaning hung from that depend. The sweet aftertaste of artichokes. The lobes of autobiography. Even a minor misadventure, a bumped fender or a newsstand without newspapers, can “ruin the entire day,” but a child cries and laughs without rift. The sky droops straight down. I lapse, hypnotized by the flux and reflux of the waves. They had ruined the Danish pastry by frosting it with whipped butter. It was simply a tunnel, a very short one. Now I remember worrying about lockjaw. The cattle were beginning to move across the field pulled by the sun, which proved them to be milk cows. There is so little public beauty. I found myself dependent on a pause, a rose, something on paper. It is a way of saying, I want you, too, to have this experience, so that we are more alike, so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view—so that we are “coming from the same place.” It is possible to be homesick in one’s own neighborhood. Afraid of the bears. A string of eucalyptus pods was hung by the window to discourage flies. So much of “the way things were” was the same from one day to the next, or from one

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occasion (Christmas, for example, or July 4th) to the next, that I can speak now of how we “always” had dinner, all of us sitting at our usual places in front of the placemats of woven straw, eating the salad first, with cottage cheese, which my father always referred to as “cottage fromage,” that being one of many little jokes with which he expressed his happiness at home. Twice he broke his baby toe, stubbing it at night. As for we who “love to be astonished,” my heartbeats shook the bed. In any case, I wanted to be both the farmer and his horse when I was a child, and I tossed my head and stamped with one foot as if I were pawing the ground before a long gallop. Across the school playground, an outing, a field trip, passes in ragged order over the lines which mark the hop­scotch patch. It made for a sort of family mythology. The heroes kept clean, chasing dusty rustlers, tonguing the air. They spent the afternoon building a dam across the gutter. There was too much carpeting in the house, but the windows upstairs were left open except on the very coldest or wettest of days. It was there that she met the astonishing figure of herself when young. Are we likely to find ourselves later pondering such suchness amid all the bourgeois memorabilia. Whenever I might find them, however unsuitable, I made them useful by a simple shift. The obvious analogy is with music. Did you mean gutter or guitar. Like cabbage or collage. The book was a sort of protection because it had a better plot. If any can be spared from the garden. They hoped it would rain before somebody parked beside that section of the curb. The fuchsia is a plant much like a person, happy in the out-of-doors in the same sun and breeze that is most comfortable to a person sitting nearby. We had to wash the windows in order to see them. Supper was a different meal from dinner. Small fork-stemmed boats propelled by wooden spoons wound in rubber bands cruised the trough. Losing its balance on the low horizon lay the vanishing vernal day.

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leslie scalapino Delay Series

[The series as qualitative infinity] the man — who’d put out a cigarette after he’d gotten on the subway — responding to the cop’s bullying who’d seen him  — only — saying he knew of that rule on it acknowledging is — when that wasn’t what was asked — by the cop on the subway train — for having had a cigarette on it — to allow him to fine for that responding — only acknowledging one doesn’t have that on the subway — and so opening up — that as the means of that — without there being a fight indicated

>>> so the man — as gentle — for causing the fine — in that situation of being on the subway — when the cop had begun to bully him — at its inception

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and — a senseless relation of the public figure — to his dying from age — having that in the present — as him to us as is my relation to the mugger — a boy — coming up behind us — grabbing the other woman’s purse — in his running into the park

>>> the boy — who’d been the mugger — and had run off into the park — with the other woman’s purse at the time — and that relation to him as being the senseless point — though without knowing the boy — who was the       mugger — after that — or of course then either — but that as not being it

>>> it’s irrelevant to want to be like him — whether it’s the mugger — who’d then run in to the park — though not that aspect of it a man — occurring now dying from being sick — at a young ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­age ­ — we’re not able to do anything — so fear as an irrelevant point

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>>> the man’s death — from being sick at a young age — as not a senseless point — not to —  by desire — reach such a thing in that way which would be — for him —  fear — whether it’s the mugger — on our part — but in his doing that

>>> and — when it could be reached — though by him — not by desire on his part — us going in the cop car after being mugged — when we’d seen it where does that come from — a delay —  not from the mugger — and on our part in it when — that is that relation —  not the president — which would then not be anything

>>> fear — from dying at a young age — from sickness — when that emotion is an

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irrelevant point — and is that relation and — the mugger’s state of mind at the beginning — as that relation — though of course afterward he’d run in to the park though  — for him — when that state of mind which is occurring at the beginning — but when that aspect of his is of course an irrelevant point

>>> not in the sense — of desire — of the mugger’s as that point — on our part —  occurring at the same time so — it’s an insertion into that relation — of someone’s  — regardless of their manner of living love — on the part — of the sort of Greta Garbo — so desire in union with love — not produced from it

>>> the man — in a sort of Greta Garbo — in

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a simple union — as being from desire and — the man reversing that — who’s dying at a young age from sickness — not being that relation and — not it’s being the current relation to the event — of it — occurring after that event

>>> and — love finding out everything — by the sort of Greta Garbo — the state of mind producing that — not from him — but as that relation that  — existing in a state of mind when that’s a senseless point

82 conceptualisms

john ashbery Business Personals

The disquieting muses again: what are “leftovers”? Perhaps they have names for it all, who come bearing Worn signs of privilege whose authority Speaks out of the accumulation of age and faded colors To the center of today. Floating heart, why Wander on senselessly? The tall guardians Of yesterday are steep as cliff shadows; Whatever path you take abounds in their sense. All presently lead downward, to the harbor view. Therefore do your knees need to be made strong, by running. We have places for the training and a special on equipment: Knee-pads, balancing poles and the rest. It works In the sense of aging: you come out always a little ahead And not so far as to lose a sense of the crowd Of disciples. That were tyranny, Outrage, hubris. Meanwhile this tent is silence Itself. Its walls are opaque, so as not to see The road; a pleasant, half-heard melody climbs to its ceiling— Not peace, but rest the doctor ordered. Tomorrow … And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires, Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost, On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles. What caused us to start caring? In the beginning was only sedge, a field of water Wrinkled by the wind. Slowly The trees increased the novelty of always being alone, The rest began to be sketched in, and then … silence, Or blankness, for a number of years. Could one return

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To the idea of nature summed up in these pastoral images? Yet the present has done its work of building A rampart against the past, not a rampart, A barbed-wire fence. So now we know What occupations to stick to (scrimshaw, spinning tall tales) By the way the songs deepen the color of the shadow Impregnating your hobby as you bend over it, Squinting. I could make a list Of each one of my possessions and the direction it Pointed in, how much each thing cost, how much for wood, string, colored ink, etc. The song makes no mention of directions. At most it twists the longitude lines overhead Like twigs to form a crude shelter. (The ship Hasn’t arrived, it was only a dream. It’s somewhere near Cape Horn, despite all the efforts of Boreas to puff out Those drooping sails.) The idea of great distance Is permitted, even implicit in the slow dripping Of a lute. How to get out? This giant will never let us out unless we blind him. And that’s how, one day, I got home. Don’t be shocked that the old walls Hang in rags now, that the rainbow has hardened Into a permanent late afternoon that elicits too-long Shadows and indiscretions from the bottom Of the soul. Such simple things, And we make of them something so complex it defeats us, Almost. Why can’t everything be simple again, Like the first words of the first song as they occurred To one who, rapt, wrote them down and later sang them: “Only danger deflects The arrow from the center of the persimmon disc, Its final resting place. And should you be addressing yourself To danger? When it takes the form of bleachers Sparsely occupied by an audience which has Already witnessed the events of which you write, Tellingly, in your log? Properly acknowledged It will dissipate like the pale pink and blue handkerchiefs That vanished centuries ago into the blue dome That surrounds us, but which are, some maintain, still here.”

84 conceptualisms

noah eli gordon from Novel Pictorial Noise

Comes a night-light’s landing beacon leads me to pick villainy from a bouquet of the places I’d left to yesterday’s map of the future, rubbernecking unintentionally oblique articulation. Loosen a rivet from the lapsed mind and out pours the obvious like thick rain. A sterile neighborhood, a standing ovation, centuries of labor congealing into the desk lamp that lets me mold my own two cents from this paper-clip panopticon. I’m not pushing anything here. Power’s got a fulcrum that’s half self-portrait, part handicraft. The lever will pivot regardless of where it’s placed down. It’s the primacy of motion drafts sound.





composition of noise A thought is music is concept

Striking an oracular note to flush out the lazy assumptions lodged within one’s skull won’t offer comment on some recurrent aspect of life, as the world’s not weirder than we think, but weirder than we can think. For example, a yellow moth appears to pass through a blue tire in the painting above my understanding of geometry. The question arises: is this a picture of the distance between yellow and blue, or is it merely a means to ground the figures, a maxim bled of its proverbial exigencies, such that the only relevant plane remaining is constituted entirely by the hue of the grass — the ground over which anyone wishing to approach must pass.

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between What draws equates of

Somewhere, a garage door goes down. Thus, a fiction begins. Clouds gather, disperse. Let this suffice as a working formula for working a formula: what I’m coming to terms with — repetition’s liberating constraint. What occurs in the courtly world has little currency to those taking up arms against it. What I’m coming to terms with builds that which contains the components to construct an evolving sense of entropy. The grand narrative the end of narratives had had had had no grandiose ending. It is as though in removing its mask the landscape shows on its face an expression one recognizes but is unable to immediately place.



as through between definitive

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When the actual is transformed into its representation, representation becomes actualized, as though a net were cast not to catch whatever punctures its vicinity, but to make transparent the lapse of possession one proffers through the introduction, disappearance, and reappearance of an image whose architecture is such that in setting forth one is simultaneously building a synonym for backtracking, a barrier torn down, erected again in a slightly more ominous manner, the knowledge of instability orbiting, uncertain where to land, until one realizes that every action contains a kind of flag waving, a constituency worthy of saving.

implicit center



a cricket first

Not to exhibit a certain lack of clarity as to what belongs to what, but why pay homage to a postcard view from the Mount of Purgatory when it’s uselessness that gives the awareness you’re trying to occasion its objectionably opaque horizon? A representative tree or a representation of the tree’s substitution. This business of making pictures rapidly becomes a burden. One desires to strip from the tool its use value, fulfilling the promise of cinema with the flickering image of a projector’s endless rotation. As in its cutting, so in its details. What example doesn’t contain the blooming topography of its own terminology?



purpose is to Cloud marks

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Cultivating looseness is one way to proceed in the arts. A standard yard yields a sense of ownership. This is a metaphor in which grass grows lionlike in stature, in which a lion fails to garner its inauspicious standing. Coasting on the accomplishments of one’s DNA demands an insurmountable allegiance to the awe an electrical socket inspires. In this way, a vehicle moves the ground beneath it. A view is merely disregard for the remaining senses. The jury’s still out on nobility, through there’s a tiny crown for whoever makes the loudest sound.

a frame elicits The afternoon from an example, object

That it is no longer necessary to know much of anything is the noisy irony of the information age. A leaf meets its shadow on concrete to show that falling is from the council of interior constructs. Thus, the classic problem of picture book theory. Einstein called arbitrariness the greatest blunder of his life. If a branch brings to the window the image of an entire oak, then the law of accelerating returns enacts its counterexample through a model forest in a mock-up diorama of density’s practical applications. Order is undoubtedly information that fits a purpose, whether expressed in ones and zeros or colored in crayon by someone imitating a child’s hand.

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blake butler from Scorch Atlas

smoke house Nights at home now the house sat wordless, so still the mother could not sleep. The bed cramped small and dirty; the air above her suffocating. The mother in her nightgown, tight, worn ratty where in her sleep she rubbed her fingers in worry circles. She got up and left her husband crimped with his back toward her on the mattress and went downstairs. She went through the kitchen stuffed full of flowers, long rotten, stinking. She went into the son’s room where plastic sheeting covered the holes the fire had burned. The pinned laminate tacked in short sheets over the studs to keep the outside out or inside in. There was no wind. Outside, the earth lay parched and cracking. The trees enfolding over black lawns. The sky only ever one dumb color. The mother stood in the exact center of the son’s room, or what remained of it. The room could be divided into halves: here, from the window to the far corner, where the walls were smudged and plaster dappled and the scorching sat upon the air; and here, past the window to the closet, where much of her son’s stuff sat untouched: the shirt he’d slept in every night since he was ten; the blanket the mother had sewn for him while he was still inside her; the trombone he begged for and never played. Each item encoded with his touch. Before the son had moved into it, before they’d had a son at all, the burned room had been the master. In that room they’d made the child. He’d been a glimmer in their flat lives. A thing mistaken in the mother as a tumor until the infant sledded out, unbreathing. They’d nearly given up, and now this light. They’d had another child not long after: a thin-skinned daughter, soft of bone, another error no less loved. The house could not contain them. They’d built a new room on the upstairs. The son had taken the old master, where fifteen years later, the air would burn. They could have let him have the newer room instead.

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They could have built several rooms — halls and halls and on forever. The son could still be with them now. So many nights the son had come through the house sleepwalking, knocking pictures off the walls. Sometimes he’d stood before her naked; the look in his eyes blasted, vacant, as she guided him back to bed. The mother’s back ached. Her throat was dry as outside, wracked with unseen lesions, rheum. She lay down on the blackened carpet, the stink of old smoke hung around her head. She writhed and rubbed against it, smearing soot along her neck, her gown, her hair. Upstairs the father watched the ceiling. He’d faked deep slumber through his wife’s long sobs. Another night. He knew he should touch her but he didn’t. He could not find a way to spread the intent through his body. He heard her fumble in the ill light. He kept his body fully flexed — mocked in the language of unconscious. She closed the door softly behind her. She’d always been considerate. She’d always kept measured ways around him, despite his caw, despite his bitching. He’d never figured out exactly how to express certain things — just saying them seemed too cheap. Above the bed there was a skylight which when the room was designed had seemed ideal. Endless slumber under moon glow. An eye into the night. Instead the portal proved offensive — the sun’s angle woke him every morning. It let unwanted modes into his sleeping. He dreamt of black stars exploding in his cheeks; strange figures crawling through his veins behind his forehead; shit spurting from his pores. He’d covered the opening with foam rubber, causing the room to glow at a slight mute. The bed absorbed an aura. At dusk, the sheen of glass would reflect his head back at his eyes. The eyes were always open when he saw them, waiting until he nodded off. Always there. Another self. Finally one night while sleeping he’d stood with his feet sinking in the mattress and banged the glass out with his fists until he bled. Now they slept in open air. In bed alone, the father thought of when he’d tried to teach his son to shave. How the child refused to let him help. How the son had cut his cheek so deep it spurted on the mirror. His son there screaming, face meat covered in white foam, blood sluicing and mixing with the lather; son screaming at the father to go away. That bathroom, where years before, when it was just them, he’d held the mother in the mirror, making four.

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The father shuddered on the mattress, wanting a way to lie that would keep his back and neck from crimping, a configuration in which he could finally click into deep sleep, deep enough to maybe never wake, while in the ruined room below him, his wife wallowed in rhythm, just the same. The house had caught on fire seven times in seven months. Each time it had ignited in a new location:

(1) the downstairs foyer, where the family’s portrait hung, a value-bought multi-pack, the same shot the Dad kept crumpled in his wallet, and the daughter scratched with marker, hid in a drawer;



(2) inside a kitchen cabinet (the kiddie plates had stunk for weeks, their neon gobs still globbed in puddles, the countertop all warped);



(3) in the backyard, where several pets were buried, as were other things of which the family did not know;



(4) along the rooftop and through the attic, ruining several unmatched heirlooms and their plastic Christmas tree, made black;



(5) in the washroom dryer, ruining all the clothes the father ever really wore;



(6) in the guestroom closet, empty;



(7) around the son.

Each time the house had glowed in fury under the canopy of night. Always under star strum. Always while they slept. The parents wanted elsewhere. They could not afford to move before they sold the house. They could not sell the house. Each potential buyer who came for viewing left with a strange look on their face. The insurance company sent inspectors who could not determine a clear cause of the frequent combustion. Other buildings had caught fire in the local area from the dry weather, but none so many times as theirs. The insurance company had placed their file under review. Some people used the term bad fortune. The mother’s mother said into the phone, Y’all aren’t living right.

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The mother could not understand what had changed. They’d lived in the house for twenty years. They’d never once had a problem, but now the roof creaked, and the fires. The mirrors came loose in the bathrooms and fell forward, smashed to bits. The carpet curled up around the corners exposing the smooth green speckled foam beneath. There were often sounds of creaking, louder and more violent than the normal settling of a house: sounds of bones in fingers breaking, something crumpled promptly growing old. The mother often felt people standing in the eaves behind her. Once, in the sun room, she’d seen her father. Sometimes she heard him in the air vents, in the shower, in the whir of the garage door’s rise. The main thing she could remember of him after all these years was how his teeth would fall out then grow right back in, one set after another. What made her remember that? That hadn’t happened. No, she knew he’d kept the sheddings in a small box in his dresser. When he was out, she’d go and look at them all corralled there, a field of enamel, yellowed, sharp. For years she dreamed of those teeth appearing in her own mouth. For years those teeth lived in her brain.

Some nights the father would stand outside the house and still feel its walls surrounding. From enough distance he could pinch the brick between his thumb and finger, hide the light. When he did, his sternum shook, sometimes for days.

The son was underground. The seventh fire seemed to have begun inside his mattress. It had engulfed him in his sleep and cracked his teenage skin. They’d assumed at first that he was smoking, but they found no butt, no match, no lighter. The son had been good at school. He’d been respected. He had a girlfriend many others would’ve liked to touch. He was on the swim team and wrote A papers and he won when he played chess. His flesh had partly melded with the mattress. His burning browned the wall and let the moon in. It made a pattern on the ceiling. The ground he was in now was rife with larvae. The mud was bright red and cold and endless. There were sounds that moved through the earth that people above it could not hear. Before his exit, the son had taken a picture of himself every morning upon waking. He kept the pictures in sequential order, hidden, on the hard drive of

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his computer. He wanted to one day be able to look at the files and observe his catalog of aging. He’d never told anyone about this practice. The pictures were still there, saved, somehow preserved amidst the heat. If the mother had known about the pictures, she would have kept them hidden, for herself. She would have noticed how, in the last several months of photographing, something began to creep into the film. How in the air around her son’s head grew a small buzzing, aligned in the photo as a slight blur. How over the last weeks before the son’s death the photos had begun to grow so ruined you could not see most of his face — how the film grew embedded with fields of bright botched color: shades of pink and brown and orange and green — and somewhere inside that, strange — his eyes.

The daughter had begun to convince herself that this was all her fault. First, she’d made the house swell, though not enough. She’d recognized a short strain of curse in her surroundings that continued to grow worse as she got older. Everyone she liked at school got sick or moved away. When she touched the television screen it shocked her. When she picked out a loaf of bread at the grocery, she always found a spore of mold inside. She always bumped her head against things. She was always itching. She couldn’t sleep. But it was much worse than all of that. She’d hurt a man once, without intention. He was crossing the street and she looked at him and he smiled. A car hit him from the side. He fell on the gravel and spurted blood. He looked her directly in the eyes. She still had the dress she’d worn that day, with the spattering across it. She’d buried it in the transom of her closet, under the old dolls and books and raincoats. Another time she’d been staring at an airplane and it fell right out of the sky. Just like that. She didn’t know what was wrong with her but there was something. She could feel a bump deep inside her forehead. A murmur in her hair. She knew the house kept burning because she was in it. Because it wanted her made gone. And now, because she hadn’t listened, her brother turned to char. Who knew what else she had made happen. Who knew what else she would destroy. She tried to explain these things but no one would listen. She felt older than she looked.

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In the night, with her parents elsewhere, she sat in her closet with the old dress and pressed the man’s brown stains against her face. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

I know you’re awake. I’m not awake. You’re talking. That’s someone other talking for me. How cute. How clever. (sounds of snoring) Quite. Well, you enjoy. (moves past the bed into the bathroom; sound of rummaging through drawers) What’s going on? I’m looking for my lighter. You’ll forget me in a minute. Your lighter? You bought cigarettes? I didn’t. Give me one. I said I didn’t buy any cigarettes. Then why the lighter? ( long pause) It was Dad’s. I want to hold it. I need something. You’re not you. You expect me to believe that? Why not just say it? I’m not what? ( slick metal sounds of an old hinge clicking) Here it is. (closes the drawer; moves through the bedroom back to the door again; glares at the bed) Night. What’s the black crap you’ve got all over you? ___? ( door opens and door closes) ( does not say goodnight)

Her left hand’s thumb flicked the metal wheel that ground and spit a flame into the nothing — the yellow neon tremble of fluid burning — the shimmer of incendiary air suffused with fume. The mother’s hand trembled just slightly. She’d always had small fingers, good for sewing, good for cleaning out one’s ears. The metal lighter really had belonged once to her father; in fact, he’d meant to take it with him. Eight years old, there, at the coffin, she’d slipped her hand into the gone man’s pockets, not understanding, maybe after money, maybe scent,

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some something to remember. The lifeless head’s lips grinned — he could feel her rummaging around him, tickled. She’d found the lighter there over his heart, soft-brushed and gleaming, full of fluid. No one was looking. She’d hid it in her best dress, cold against her skin. The lighter was always cold. Sometimes now, thirty years later, she still felt the soft slur of something strumming when she smoked, as if it were her father’s smoky dead breath that ballooned behind her cheeks. She couldn’t even remember how he died. The mother held the lighted lighter in her son’s room again, inhaling the scum of the blackened walls with the tobacco smoke, the outlined spot on the floor where once there’d been a bed, where once on that bed she’d sat reading the child stories till he was old enough to read them back, cut from her voice. The mother took the lighter to the window. She went to press her face against the glass, to butt it hard and feel the impact, then remembered how the glass was no longer there — how it’d been cracked by heat or kicked out by men in flame-retardant coats to let water through. She felt her head go on out into the evening, into the cupped light overhead. There was no moon or streetlamps glowing, no trees still lit up in tall torches as when the backyard had caught ignition. Just long black and stagnant fields of air, the wind settled, calm again, under glass. The mother felt the lighter’s metal getting warm. She kept her fingers close against it. She sniffed the air inside the room that’d burned her son. She leaned against the window’s empty frame, the air so arid she could smell its quiver, a flux between here and there, surrounded.

That night, instead of burning, the first rain in many months and miles poured on the night. The water poured as something above had come undone, a full urn busted and expulsing. It graced the nearby empty creek beds and the dead lawns, the ratty sprats of trampled fields. It pocked the long face of so much dried mud, in which so many other things were buried. It slicked the roofs from which now many had jumped, or dreamt it, or wished they really would. The rain did not announce itself. It came. It came through the open skylight window and drummed the father, who hadn’t slept yet but still had dreams: of a warm house he’d envisioned somewhere. He let the water spot his forehead, soak the pillow. He lay blinkless and unmoving

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while it glossed his cracked lips and tongue. He drank. He drank ¾ and then he sat up, sat on the mattress and thought of words he’d never thought before. The water found the daughter in her bedroom, inside the swelling house, the old cells bumping, crimping the indenture of the closet where piled neck-deep with old clothes she’d begun to rise off of the floor. The water filtered through the dead son. It soaked through the warped lid of his casket — through his desiccating skin into his bones and through his dry veins. It filled the soil with mumble as from insects, as the stirrings of the house. It drenched the mother in her nightgown, through the already flooded gutters in the street. From nowhere and everywhere at once. It washed the soot clean from the mother’s cheeks. It slapped her hair and drenched the ashes. It ran in forked ways down her scratched skin — speaking — that this rain is some beginning — that this rain might never cease.

the gown from mother's stomach The mother ate thread and lace for four weeks so that her daughter would have a gown. She was tired of not being able to provide her daughter with the things many other girls took for granted. Their family was poor and the mother’s fingers ached with arthritis so she couldn’t bring herself to sew. Instead she chewed the bed sheets until they were soft enough to swallow. She bit the curtains and gnawed the pillow. With one wet finger she swiped the floor for dust. God will knit it in my womb like he did you, she murmured. When you wear it you will blind the world. She refused to listen to reason. She ate toilet tissue and sheets of paper and took medication that made her constipated. She stayed in bed instead of sitting for dinner. Carrots don’t make a dress, she croaked. Her stomach grew distended. She began having trouble standing up. Her hair fell out and she ate that too. She ripped the mattress and munched the down. She ate the clothing off her body. The father was always gone. He worked day and night to keep food the mother wasn’t eating on the table. When he did get home he was too tired to entertain the daughter’s pleas to make the mother stop. Such a tease, that woman, he said in his sleep, already dreaming. Such a card. Because her mother could no longer walk, the daughter spent the evenings by the bedside listening to rambles. The mother told about the time she’d seen a bear. A bear the size of several men, she said. There in the woods behind our house, when I was still a girl like you. The mother had stood in wonder watching while the bear ate a whole deer. It ate the deer’s cheeks, its eyes, its tongue, its pelt. It ate everything but the antlers. The mother had waited for the bear

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to leave so she could take the antlers home and wear them, but the bear had just gone on laying, stuffed, smothered in blood. The mother swore then — her eyes grew massive in the telling — the bear had spoken. It’d looked right at the mother and said, quite casual, My god, I was hungry. Its voice was gorgeous, deep and groaning. The mother could hardly move. I didn’t know bears could talk, she said finally, and the bear had said, Of course we can. It’s just that no one ever takes the time to hear. We are old and we are lonely and we have dreams you can’t imagine. Over the next six days the mother continued growing larger. Her eyes began to change. Her belly swelled to six times its normal size. Dark patchwork showed through her skin. Strange ridges on her abdomen in maps. Finally the daughter called a doctor. He came and looked and locked the door behind him. Through the wood the daughter could hear her mother moan. A wailing shook the walls. Some kind of grunt or bubble. The doctor emerged with bloody hands. He was sweating, sickly pale. He left without a bill. In the bedroom, the air stunk sweet with rotten melon. The gown lay draped over the footboard. It was soft and glistening, full of color — blue like the afghan that covered her parents’ bed — white like the spider’s webs hung from the ceiling — gray and orange like their two fat tabbies — green like the pine needles past the window — yellow and crimson like how the sun rose — gold like her mother’s blinkless eyes.

>>>>> The daughter wore the gown thereafter. It fit her every inch. It sung in certain lighting. She liked to suck the cuff against her tongue. There was a sour taste, a crackle. She could hear her mother murmur when she lay a certain way. The father, fraught by what he’d lost unknowing, began staying home all day. He stood in the kitchen and ate food for hours. He ate while crying, mad or mesmerized. He didn’t answer when the daughter spoke. Sometimes he shook or nodded, but mostly he just chewed. Most days the daughter took to walking as far from the house as she could manage. The gown made her want to breathe new air. She’d go until her feet hurt or until the sun went low. When it rained the gown absorbed the water. It guzzled her secret sweat. She got up earlier, patrolled. She wanted to see something like her mother had, like the bear, so that one day she’d have a story for a daughter. She saw many things that you or I would gape at — two-headed cattle, lakes of insects, larvae falling from the sky — all things to her now everyday. The earth was very tired. The daughter found nothing like a talking bear. She wondered if her mother had been lying or smeared with fever. At school the other children threw sharp rocks. They ripped the daughter’s gown and held their noses. The daughter quit her classes. She walked until her feet bled. Her father didn’t notice. Like the mother, he took on size. His jowls hung fat in ruined balloons. He called for the mother over mouthfuls. Her name was SARAH. The way it came out sounded like HELLO.

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The daughter couldn’t watch her father do the same thing her mother had. She decided to go on a long walk — longer than any other. She touched her father on the forehead and said goodbye. She walked up the long hill in her backyard where in winter she had sledded. It hadn’t been cold enough for snow in a long time but she could still remember the way her teeth rattled. She remembered losing the feeling in her body. Now every day was so warm. She swore she’d sweat an ocean. She walked through the forest well beyond dark. The gown buzzed in her ears. It buzzed louder the further from home she went. She kept going. She slept in nettles. She dreamt of sitting with her parents drinking tea and listening to her tell about all the things she would soon see. She dreamt of reversing time to watch her parents grow thinner, younger, while the earth grew new and clean. She walked by whim. She tread through water. She saw a thousand birds, saw lightning write the sky, the birds falling out in showers. The world was waning. The sky was chalk. She felt older every hour. She had no idea she’d come full circle to her backyard when she found the bear standing at a tree. It was huge, the way her mother had said, the size of several men. It was reaching after leaves. It sat up when it heard her. It looked into her eyes. Hello, bear, she said, rasping. It’s nice to finally meet you. The bear stood up and moved toward her, its long black claws big as her head. The collar of her dress had pulled so tight she found it hard to speak: What do you dream, bear? I will listen. She didn’t flinch as the bear came near and put its paw upon her head. It battered at her and she giggled. It pulled her to its chest. She didn’t feel her head pop open. She didn’t feel her heart squeeze wide. The bear dissembled her in pieces. The bear ate the entire girl. It ate her hair, her nails, her shoes and bonnet. It ate the gown and ate her eyes. Inside the bear the daughter could still see clearly. The bear’s teeth were mottled yellow. Inside its stomach, abalone pink. The color of the daughter became something soft — then something off, then something fuzzy, then something like the gown, immensely hued; then she became a strange fluorescence and she exited the bear — she spread across the wrecked earth and refracted through the ocean to split the sky: a neon ceiling over all things, a shade of something new, unnamed.

tour of the drowned neighborhood This is the yard where the dogs would sit by the half-wrecked shed and sweat. Dad often tied them so tight they couldn’t crane their necks. Their backs fleabit and wrecked with mange and xylophonic ribs. Moxie, Skipper, Moonbeam. Remember their howling in the hot nights when the ambulances screamed by. Remember the scummy flex of their brown backs, the lather of their sweat in suds. The year I snuck them each a sliver of my birthday cake, age 13 — fudge batter, banana frosting. You should have seen those dumb dogs’ eyes.

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This is the driveway, cracked with gravel from the groaning of the earth. These are my initials scraped into the wet cement for which my father blacked my eye. His Corvette sat for years there dripping, no amount of wrench or sweat bringing it back to life, until finally one day the wind lifted it straight off into the air. Remember how on brown August days mom would come out and spread a towel and tan in her underwear where all could see. Her name carved in a stall of the middle school’s boy’s bathroom — another box now undersea.

Imagine these houses taking on water. The cold flutter of family lungs.

This is an electric chain-link fence.

This is a picture window with no picture.

This is my parents’ bedroom where when they slept he’d lock the knob. The drywall damp between us not thick enough to keep a quiet. How dad would shower her in shouting. How mom would cough clods up in rip. Remember emphysema. Remember how quick the disease spread. Remember the nights I woke with nightmare and went to crawl in bed between them, finding only a door that wouldn’t budge, a cold metal bauble in my hand.

Here’s my room with the bunk beds I’ve slept in since I was seven, long after my feet hung off the end. Here’s a picture of my first girlfriend, whom I never got a chance to nuzzle. This is my videotape collection. This is a butterfly knife. A conch. This is the toe nail I lost after kicking the side of the house in anger. This is a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card in near-mint condition, just one corner burped with glitch.

This is a drawing of me on the top of a mountain waving hello or goodbye.

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Imagine my innards flush with water. Imagine endless rain.

This is the chimney, where once a year we’d catch a bird. You could hear it singing through the whole house, in the attic, in my sleep. Chirrup chirrup. Dad would get so mad he’d stand in the hearth with a broom. He’d shriek and curse and stir up dust. If he couldn’t scare the bird free, he’d start a fire. The smoke curling up its beak lines. Within an hour, the chirrup ceased. I guess the bodies stayed stuck up there somewhere, lost in charcoal smudge.

Imagine how when the water rose high enough to cover the whole house. How you could see the tip of the chimney on the lip — an eye.

This is the cul-de-sac where I once socked my neighbor for saying my parents were going to die. Bobby had a stye over his right eye from not sleeping — bright yellow, oozing, swollen so big he couldn’t blink. He said he’d read the Bible and there was still time for absolution.

Remember how his was the first body I saw floating bloated on the rain, a school of malformed fan fish nipping at his back.

Remember how you never know it’s coming until it’s there and then it’s there.

Imagine how they swam until their arms ached, their lungs heavy in their chest.

This is a ruined veranda.

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This is where I sometimes liked to hide.

This is the mouth of the sewer. Vortex of lost balls. Remember how on hot days you could see the heat rise in wavy lines. How on that first day, after six hours of torrential downpour, the manhole overflowed and bubbled, and the water spread out from around it, washing sludge and shit into the street.

This is a makeshift graveyard where we all buried our pets. No one could say who’d started, but you could count a hundred markers: cats, dogs, ferrets, snakes, hamsters, goldfish, lizards. The dirt was soft and loamy, fat with earthworms, ripe, alive. In April the flowers grew here first. Remember when Moxie died — followed by both Moonbeam and Skipper within hours, each living off the other, connected in the pulse — my father carried them one over each shoulder. He made me watch while he struck ground, heaving. The emphysema had him too. My mother began to recite a benediction and he told her to shut her mouth.

This is blacktop concrete, great for skinning knees.

This is a children’s playground.

Imagine secondary drowning where inhaled salt water foams up in the lungs.

This is a spacious 4 bed 2.5 bath colonial with formal dining area, fireplace, walkout basement, in-ground sprinklers and a kidney bean shaped pool.

This is the Anderton’s, the Banks’s, the Barrett’s, the Butler’s, the Carlyle’s,

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the Canter’s, the Crumps’, the Davidson’s, the Dumbleton’s, the Fulton’s, the Grant’s, the Griggs’s, the Guzman’s, the Kranz’s, the Lott’s, the Peavey’s, the Peery’s, the Pendleton’s, the Ray’s, the Rutledge’s, the Smith’s, the Stutzman’s, the Weidinger’s, the Woods’s, the Worth’s.

Imagine shallow water blackout, heart attack, thermal shock, and stroke. The skies alive in color. No light, no sting, no sound.

This is street number 713, abandoned since I was eight. Murmur of murder. Phantom life. The paint was green and chipping. The grass had grown up around the hedges, the trees leafless all year round. Sometimes in the evenings you’d see a light come on upstairs. Remember the summer some kid’s cousin went in during night. How he didn’t come back out for hours, and later they found he’d fallen through the stairwell and snapped his back. Remember the way I sat up all hours as a preteen already balding, staring through my bedroom window at the house with one eye and then the other.

This is the last square of the sidewalk.

This is telephone wire.

This is mud.

This is a rowboat, long abandoned, rotten, mired in stagnant water.

This is the steeple, still uncovered — the high mark of the flood’s thread. Remember the copper swallow of communion, the tab pressed against the tongue. Remember trying to imagine how my father could stand the burn of

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every evening; how his throat must have been mottled from all he’d poured through there, I imagined. How he’d seen me come home through the front door in my Sunday suit and spat.

Imagine the ocean approaching overhead. Imagine waking up under dripping ceiling. The puddle plodding on the carpet, the water already having filled mostly up the stairs. My parents’ bedroom on the first floor. The coughing swallowed, calm. Remember my mother’s wet head in the bedroom, a hundred thousand thin blonde protein fingers spreading out as I swam down to kiss her face.

This is a quiet evening.

This — I’m not quite sure.

Imagine nowhere. Imagine nothing. A world all swollen and asleep.

These are the tips of the tallest trees — the funny firs up to their wrecked necks, spreading out distended undersea. See the new nests brimmed with egg. The mothers’ wings weak, flown for hours after food over the flat, shimmering face of endless water.

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carla harryman from Adorno’s Noise

regard for the object rather than communication is suspect If normality is death then regard for the object rather than commu­nication is suspect. This may be a statement some would consider too far out. Yet it has been said at other times and even recently noth­ing can any longer be considered too far out. Strange planets beyond those orbiting our own sun are now available to ascription. Like human beings, they can be assigned a value because they have been identified and are known to exist. Because they exist in reality, the world is bigger than it was before the strange planets were known to exist. I wonder if it would be the case that if normality were not death, regard for the object would be purely an entailment of belief and communication would in turn become the object of thought. This may seem a bit mad as well as inappropriate content for a meaty essay. Bear with me for a little while. You and I will go on an excursion together and discover something along the way if we're lucky. If we are not lucky, neither you nor I will be worse off than when we started. I can't guarantee this but it is something I believe with enough confidence to proceed to the next sentence. The next sentence is not a death sentence. The thought of strange planets thirty-five light-years away produces expansive feelings about this world, the one in which you and I eat, breathe, think, and love. Now that we know about them, these planets are part of the world in which we do these normal things. I would like to say something more specific about this feeling of expansion even as it also makes no sense in a harmless kind of way. When you learn about the planets thirty-five light-years away, do you sense that the bowl form that is the architecture of our universe has been rescaled and that you can breathe more freely within this freshly realized McBasin? Do you also sense that your intelligence data has just increased? Rather than being a passive recipient of awesome news generated by science coverage of astronomic laboratories, this kind of information, which, with the aid of a computer I have actually located on my own with hardly any effort at all, gives me a feeling of complicity with something that has enlarged my sense of being

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alive. I have a feeling of grandiosity not unlike what I imagine to be that of a CIA agent when she learns something no one else knows. A blank and therefore barely existing feature of the world, once illuminated, fills out and extends the world. Sometimes it seems hardly to matter what happens to the world or what the world does as long as it keeps getting bigger in this manner even as aspects of it are diminished or even eradicated by edicts. Pluto is a good example, having recently lost its planetary status. I find this oddly disturbing, because even though it is said to no longer exist as a planet, Pluto is still Pluto. The dwarf planet, or mere rock orbiting the sun, will remain for a long time tinged with its prior potent identity. Perhaps someday only astronomers and celestial body fanatics will know Pluto was demoted to the status of dwarf planet. There will have been so many revelations about celestial bodies since its demotion that its history will become obscure. Will its original planetary identity ever completely disappear so that no one knows its history of promotion and demotion? I imagine that as long as it remains Pluto, the dwarf planet, its history will not completely disappear. Like the word “apartheid,” now that it has been transplanted in the Occupied Territories and other places too, it will remain the mere shadow of its former self, long after I and countless others have completely disappeared. The huger the world gets the more authority, design ideas, and universal embrace enlarge its compass. Bossy people, innovative form, agape and other spiritual modes of love stimulate its growth. The arms that surround everything are vitalized. No longer fearful, these arms bloom at night into monstrosities unembarrassed to show themselves in the day, while knowledge of the newly identified planetary bodies, remote and inaccessible as these may be, reassures those of us who need comfort of our place in the obscene. Between the extraterrestrial sphere of actual heavenly bodies and the terrestrial wishes we make upon stars, the collective imagination of the heavens can become choked with details that derail individuals’ desires to psychologically expand outward. In extreme cases the ego can find itself backed into a corner or, even worse, trembling in fear of its own impulse to interject itself anywhere. It becomes a thing living only to avoid having some kind of unwarranted impact on other things it can’t see with its naked sensors. The government is keenly aware of this. Rarely do ordinary citizens prefer casting their wishes too numerously. It is horrifying to think of burning out stars, planets, the heavenly bodies with too many wishes, nor do those of us minding our own business enjoy thinking about an outer space cluttered by spontaneous thoughts. It is a good thing

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when something fresh and real and profoundly distant within the universe is identified and we can distribute our wishes to the new and far locales— rather than to merely distantly vague objects or subjects— fantasies as unpractical as soldiers refusing to go to war for tyrants. Who does not feel joyful upon the discovery of vaporous planets thirty-five light-years away? Somewhere there is more water, the impersonal life-sustaining element exists on its own accord beyond you and me. For we have been known to get sick of even disgusted with our own subjectivity, though this can be difficult to admit. It is difficult to admit because usually there is no one listening to the admission: we are only listening to ourselves. This is no way to live. Thus I repeat the thoughts of Sun Ra, who in taking dictation from himself wrote this word: “live.” It has been said that just as we feel better when we resonate with our wishes, when they send back signs that help us to locate ourselves objectively, so too do we like to dilute the density of wishes: we do not want too much of ourselves to glue up that which we are not. Conflation of outer with inner space causes problems, even mass confusion. Hurricanes flare up impatiently, flinging our furniture and debris onto our concrete identities. Our roles in society are attacked by what we own. It is hard in this context to stand up and be simple, to have a body dependent on other bodies, a being contiguous with other beings. Filth and debris complicate our thoughts and movements to such a degree it is unclear whether or not movement can exist independently of thought. Extremists believe my heartbeat exists because the doctor has put her ear to the heart and your freedom exists because I have been profiled. In the views of extremists we must not let our ears and eyes go to waste even if a roof over the head is a small matter. There are always more roofs floating around in the flood tides. Sometimes too my hands are full and I don’t know where to dump what’s in them. This is why it is said that some of us have taken to using baskets, to carrying them, to sometimes simply standing by or with them, being photographed next to them, or wearing them in the manner of a refrigerator wearing a magnet — even if neither the body nor the basket is flat surfaced. It is not only that we are suggesting that we remember to clean up after ourselves. The baskets themselves are transposed by our behaviors, which undermine subject and object so that one is no longer certain which is which. The command is out there somewhere, swinging in limbo.

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Baskets are part of an old regime, a form that endures. Standing with a basket as if it were a person is an act deforming a potential utilitarian relationship to an object: the status of the object is reassigned by the action, and what this status is remains open to interpretation. Is the old regime still possible? Simply stated, the deformation of action in relationship to the object initiates an instance in which the utility of the basket becomes a matter of indifference. In the words of noise artist Jessica Rylan, there is “enough unpredictability that you really have to focus on it.” For some peculiar reason, now that the basket no longer has a utilitarian purpose, I want to turn it upside down. I can’t keep my hands off it. It has the right feel, pulverized twigs washed of dust. In inverting the basket over my head, I find myself peering into a bowl. The form of the universe as it is sometimes identified, experienced, and depicted, with the celestial bodies pouring out of it in a felicitous arrangement, as already remarked, is that of a bowl. How blue it makes me that this is only a description located on the internet of a vastness that might be described otherwise. In another scenario a basket is standing at the side of a person who eventually stoops over and reaches into it. It is a deep basket made of strong grasses, which are said to be recently disappearing from or taking over the earth. The person’s arm disappears inside it, including the shoulder up to the lower part of the neck. Then the other arm submerges into the basket’s interior. With both arms submerged the person is now in a less distorted more symmetrical position stooping and squatting then rising slowly, working against the clock time one is accustomed to when watching another perform a task. All of the actions appear to administer time differently so in regarding the object, which is here an activity, one metaphorically speaking goes from one time to the next. A door appears to have closed on the time from which one had entered and one is in a different time, slowed down but cast with historical overtones that become increasingly unnerving. For a moment it is unclear whether or not this is a piece of music or something else, then for a little while things seem to proceed in a narrative fashion. Together hands pull out a head. In some of the major religious cultures such a head could easily be associated with St. John: this could be the head of John the Baptist, yet another version in an almost numerically exhausted sequence of versions, one predicated on so many horrific events its tragedy has been in a sense diluted just like the wishes get diluted when a new star is found. The more familiar of these so-called new stars is Salome. There are yet other, less familiar new stars, more new stars than planets actually, and these are identified by number-letter combinations not much different from passwords that unlock your bank account in virtual space.

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A little thought that no longer required a bank account made the following claim: Salome was heard calling out for the head. The head was hurled toward the star. It was caught in a gravitational event and has been circling it for a long time. We have been living on it for a long time. Later generations of artists revise the mythological narrative, a challenging task. In the case of St. John of the Old Days, there is no normality to usher in death. Rather than time passing in its jagged cyclical hedgehog manner, drama with its television arc ushers in death. The glow of the predigital dramatic arcway, the effect of which has not yet been surpassed by new technologies, is able to install death on anybody as it maps onto certain primary fascinations related to flesh and bone bonds we have not been able to shed in spite of all the increase we have known and sacrifices we have beheld and narrated. Sun Ra complicates this logic, condemning such fascination as disregard for the other in the following comment repeated from the Bible: “I have no pleasure in the death of him that dies.” In his living language of death thoughts, there is no longer any difference between living, language, and death in spite of the commas here used to separate these words in a series. Pleasure is removed from the scene of death. Pleasure removed from death leaves the person without a basket standing next to death, unequivocally inhabiting the scene of death. I have pleasure in the life of she who lives within the scene of death, the scene that she and I find ourselves in. Even so, the connection between life and death is obscure because she and I are in it. Outer space whirls beyond us in the scene. She and I look at each other in wonder. Are we to remain rooted here while other glorious events transpire without us? When one considers the conditions under which normality is death, what does one think? Does one think living a normal life itself is death? Does it mean living a normal life sucks the life out of things around it? Does it mean, psychologically speaking, in living a normal life one is dead to the world? Under what conditions would one be dead to the world in living a normal life? What does one envision when one thinks “normal life?” What do the people in the city the suburbs the village the rural zones like those currently in Ga — and so many other places and future places — even here in the most sheltered place of all at the scene of death — with the buildings and houses in ruins the water once flooded now stolen and drained into environmentally destructive enclaves think of the term normal life? If there is no longer any normal life available what is normal life? Is the no longer normal life now normal life? Does one want to reclaim what no longer exists? Does this mean death is over? That she and I have entered the territory of drama, resurrection, and myth as the only life, which is extraordinary? As if one morning we held our bowls upside down over

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the sink to wash them and a universe of celestial bodies poured out of them and we, Death and I, were instantly transformed into meaning-making creatures whose objects were the products of our bewilderment? The faith inculcated by our bewilderment is a thing we dwell on or in, depending on the structures of our belief, whether or not we are skeptics or heretics or fast food addicts or redactions or green redheads or accords or did I mean upright fords as the doctor would have it if you live in the Detroit area or hoop lovers or people in Dearborn who according to the New York Times contentiously imitate the irresponsible discourse of its coverage of Sunnis and Shiites. It has been observed endlessly by those who watch such things, the observers of such things, that you cannot nail down this faith, that it wanders in the regions of the human being inaccessible to treatment and that those who dwell on faith, who think about its ludic aspects rather than immerse themselves in it, cannot understand those who dwell in the faith, as if faith were the only habitable environment. The reverse is also the case, with the indwellers finding the ondwellers equally incomprehensible. Thus, those who dwell on and those who dwell in faith often appear to each other as daemonic species who have come down from different planets to inhabit the earth, to girdle and squeeze the earth as might a lover, who does not understand the strength of an embrace and who, with more enthusiasm than the other can bear, encumbers too much of the body, turns what might have been love into a choke hold. What one experiences as an embrace another might experience as a death grip. This has caused severe problems here on the sites of solid ground, as our issues about spirituality are continuously exploited by those who can and do have the power to invade us and bomb the shit out of us whoever we are and wherever we happen to be. Our anxieties about our differences and their threats to our ludic behavior and immersive commitments have taken up so much of our time and space we can sometimes fail to notice the ground we walk on. One is the dirt as one steps on it. Withstand the heat successfully. We sing these passages so we do not fail to acknowledge our most immediate material realities, our object status, our targetability. These songs help us redirect our attention to responding effectively to the real or shall we say more comprehensive attacks, those relying on an endless circulation of delusion across vast territories of the world. When one regards a certain made thing, which can be a song such as the song whispered above but which is now here an object, let’s call it a soft corpse recomposed in light fabric, the object draws the attention away from and toward communication. The soft corpse is aesthetic to a degree. The fact of the corpse being a corpse rather than a symbol of a corpse or a corpse in a

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narrative context has been illuminated, to a degree. One looks at the soft corpse draped in something pale and elegant but with tears in the fabric here and there. Under the torn fabric is fabric, we see the corpse is bloodless to a degree. The psychological effect of our cognizing the object as a corpse is we observe the missing blood of the corpse in our thought. Our thought supplies blood where we perceive none. In other words, the thoughts are not bloodless. We are not a bloodless and cutthroat people. We understand even in distance from the wars the fact of atrocity. The object entrusts this fact to the viewer. It is not certain what the viewer will do with this trust. Sometimes people want to be certain “what the viewer will do with this trust.” In this case the object is dismissed as inadequate or attacked for its complexity and its meshing of aesthetic with social concerns. If you can’t trust others’ response to the object then you better make their choices clearer is an edict we have known. But if you make their choices clearer then the object loses its blood, the blood that is in the thoughts of the viewer. If the viewer loses her bloody thoughts what then? Furniture? We can’t infer much more about her without going very far out, probably too far out on a limb. You and I can therefore pause for a moment, initiate an illicit strike in the forgone conclusion of our intimacy, live a little longer. Still alive is the motto of the mildly conspiratorial living that has molded us into the delicate creatures we had hoped to become. This is the beauty and the paradox of the aesthetic artifact called a corpse. A theory or language might tell us there is no difference between, let’s say, a depiction of a corpse in a photograph in a war zone and the artifact of the body, which has been made into what we call a work of art. Language, which for some is not suspect, shows us the work of art is to be suspected. Language says the corpse is a corpse. It cannot distinguish between one body and another, therefore the photographed corpse in a war zone is a universal corpse: we all die. Death is inevitable even if, as we can see, this particular death was violent: it came too soon. We know this and you and I are still alive mastering what is literally true. However, the made form, having never lived, is beautified. Death has become beautified. The beauty of the object betrays the universality of death. Many come here to see this to observe these things to prevent violence from falling into the hands of beauty and to protect war from its associations with death, as these associations, like those you and I enjoy in our nondescript day going about things without notice, also have their conspiratorial features. It is true we have come to know one kind of conspiracy through another. The conspiratorial feeling, its skin-touch and verve, has been tossed into a different salad, one served around the world but not in my backyard where I have already eaten.

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So many elements have been added to our discourse, I can hardly brush them off as if they were flies feasting on the sweat of my brow or the rump of my dog. However, this is not the function of the aesthetic object. The purpose of the object is to produce a thought response and a somatic response simultaneously intertwined, along with an aesthetic response. The made corpse is beautiful: this is the aesthetic response. The made corpse, an object that represents the body, is also beautiful in our thoughts. The human body is an object of beauty and even in death it is beautiful, even as it is and is not a maimed thing. (Some people claim the human body is only beautiful in its most ideal forms but this is something I have never personally been able to corroborate.) We hold this to be true just as we have held and desired to hold other bodies to our own. Nearby and under siege, and forgetting where the others are and who they are but falling into our likeness, we sometimes repeat ourselves in the manner of sheepish clichés under trees’ shade falling on each other while making our distance known to those who graze up the slope. Sometimes the enterprise is lonely. There is no other body to hold and even though we forget many things we do not forget what it is to hold and be held. Yet I supply a contradiction in respect to the numerous occasions in which I have heard the phrase “I had forgotten.” The artist may have been lonely when she made this beautiful yet deformed body. The body is placed such that you can sidle up to it. It is available for viewing somewhere in a public space, a gallery or museum or park bench or sidewalk, on the ground next to your feet or in an open market. Imagine a beautiful luminous soft voile fabric in a variety of green blue purple red and yellow hues that tend toward but do not remain always in the pastel registers. You feel you are looking at the contents of a garden suspended in the air and shot through with cloud effects. Earth also supports the sky and vice versa, including rain. These are tones. All of this is formed with the help of some delicate wire supports inserted into the figure of a corpse. The corpse has a plastic quality as it lies there in peace. Imagine that you could hold its hand and it might squeeze yours in response. Or perhaps you could move its leg to a more restful position, perhaps the most restful position, which is the position between longing and defeat. In my survey of this most significant landscape, or a form as the thing it is not, I find at the bend of an arm a not insignificant tear in the fabric, which is also the same thing as its actual substance. There is no difference between voile and skin. On the left side of the neck under the ear between the jaws and the collarbone is another tear several inches long. One finds another tear at the

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pelvis and one just above the foot. These tears are where the blood was let. These tears are the imperfections opening the object to the mind. Without them there would be no beauty or blood. The artist took out her small pliers. She cut wrapped and formed some wire stretching it to the length of a full human form. She stuffed and wrapped the form with fabric until the colors began to communicate, one with the other in shifting locations spilling from the thoughts words and perceptions of the artist through her hands, which could do things even a perception in isolation could never manage on its own, as the hands were extended and could go further out, could range with greater fluidity than one could infer from something that had already been decided. The hands made the decisions with neither words in mind nor an object derived from them unless one backs into the anterior zone of the already given form produced by one thing leading to another and carving out a name for itself. Then she took out a small pair of scissors and, snipping lovingly, opened some of the fabric. In the opened spaces she pulled with both her hands until the fabric split irregularly. She did this in several other places, snipping the fabric then performing a reverse dressage, with her fingers tugging open the fabric threads such that the body itself was torn in parts visible to a viewer. She said she did this because there were so many bodies before this one to have been torn.

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2 | The Double Helix of Contemporary Writing & Contemporary Thought

Conceptual writing is often identified as creative writing that engages ideas and perspectives from other fields, especially linguistic theory and philosophy. From Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “93. One person might say ‘A proposition is the most ordinary thing in the world’ and another: ‘A proposition — that’s something very queer!’” It’s often easy to see an author struggling with similar philosophical conundrums. In Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat, cartoon characters debate Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In these and numerous other examples that could be drawn from across the history of literature, conceptual authors and theoretical thinkers are as often in communion — the existentialism of Nietzsche and Camus — as they are at odds, posing questions that are difficult for the other to answer. As Percival Everett demonstrates here in his “Confluence,” conceptual writing often brings to theory questions or elaborations that are difficult to articulate in the essay of the philosopher. Rather than debate philosophy, some works might trigger an emotional response or otherwise stand as an instance of philosophy. See Robert Coover’s story “The Babysitter” for its Baudrillard-like, if ironic, “ecstasy of communication.” Parody and irony are in the conceptual author’s tool bag, not the particle physicist’s. Even more so, conceptual authors have shown a remarkable disregard for the borders of genre that most theorists either can’t or won’t transgress in their own practice. Indeed, the intersection of theory and literature today is partially marked by the broad number of theoretical issues engaged within an equally broad array of disciplines: the language theorists (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al) often associated with conceptual novelists and poets (R.M. Berry, David Markson, Bob Perelman, et al). But conceptual writing also intersects with a wide array of thinking in the social sciences (Debra Di Blasi), physics, biology, and other hard sciences (Thomas Pynchon, Eduardo Kac), cognitive science, mathematics and information sciences (Harry Mathews and OuLiPo), and historiography (Robert Coover, Patrik Ourednik, Susan Howe).

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More revealing of today’s intersection of theory and literary practice are the attitudes, ideas, and positions expressed by the works themselves. Just as the intersection of authors and theorists in a modernist world helped generate Modernism — Virginia Woolf and Picasso with their affinities to the multiple perspectives suggested by Einstein’s theory of relativity — the multiplicity of affinities between authors and a multiplicity of concepts today both reflect and contribute to a world that Woolf and Picasso would find increasingly difficult to recognize: using crowdsourcing to translate Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into Japanese emoticons. The novel’s famous opening line, “Call me Ishmael,” appears in this translation as: . This and all the other 10,000 sentences of the novel were translated by 3 different Turks at the rate of $0.05 per line; these 3 translations were then voted on by other Turks (at the rate of $0.02 per vote) and the translations that received the most votes were included in the book. More than 800 “authors” spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds “writing” this book (whose publication was made possible by a crowdfunding Kickstarter campaign). While the influence of psychology on an earlier generation might be seen in literary form such as Faulkner’s dense and punctuationless stream of consciousness, the insights of contemporary cognitive science make Freud, and stream of consciousness, begin to seem more in tune with an earlier time than ours. When researchers were able to shut off the genetic switch to aging in roundworms, allowing these worms to live the equivalent of 900 human years, human minds drift, naturally, to their own mortality, our own switch. The stuff of philosophy. The stuff of conceptual writing and art. Changes in culture, such as the erosion of privacy, the rise of movements such as BLM or #MeToo, or new ways of communicating brought on by technical change, generate new perspectives onto the Eternal Human Heart that last century’s theory and literary form may have difficulty engaging with except as a rearguard action. A number of thinkers have thought profoundly about what it means to grow up, for example, under the surveillance-camera’s gaze, or in a world where genes from species as different as petunias and humans can be shuffled. A number of authors, living in this new social reality, have taken up similar questions, and express themselves through their medium: e.g., works such as Shelley Jackson’s equation of body text and human bodies. The pointillist painter Georges Seurat drew his aesthetic from color theory and the mind’s ability to blend blue and yellow to make green; today, Lance Olson’s 10:01 draws on film theory to paint a portrait of America where memories of images blur with memories of experience — the “retail dramas” of Victoria’s Secret or The Rainforest Cafe, as Olsen puts it, or the shadow memory we share of jets hitting the World Trade Center. Instead of the autonomous protagonist of a 19th-century Bildungsroman, we have the nameless narrator of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport gliding through seemingly endless associations between

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borderless things and people and her own dispersed identity. Instead of an ekphrastic poem from a time when people depended on words to imagine art they would never see, we have Douglas Kearney’s ekphrastic glossing of Beyoncé's and Kendrick Lamar's "Freedom" video. Collectively, these works remind us that we cannot choose to live in a world that has never heard of Derrida, feminism, data mining, Dolly the Sheep, the iPad, BLM, drones, or jihad any more than Virginia Wolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or William Faulkner could write as though the force of theory was not shaping their world via Freud, Marx, Einstein, or Darwin.

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charles bernstein The Lie of Art

I don’t want innovative art. I don’t want experimental art. I don’t want conceptual art. I don’t want abstract art. I don’t want figurative art. I don’t want original art. I don’t want formal art. I don’t want emotional art. I don’t want nostalgic art. I don’t want sentimental art. I don’t want complacent art. I don’t want erotic art. I don’t want boring art. I don’t want mediocre art. I don’t want political art. I don’t want empty art. I don’t want baroque art. I don’t want mannered art. I don’t want minimal art. I don’t want plain art. I don’t want vernacular art. I don’t want artificial art. I don’t want pretentious art. I don’t want idea art. I don’t want thing art. I don’t want naturalistic art. I don’t want rhetorical art. I don’t want dull art. I don’t want rhapsodic art. I don’t want rigid art. I don’t want informal art. I don’t want celebratory art.

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I don’t want cerebral art. I don’t want formulaic art. I don’t want sardonic art. I don’t want sadistic art. I don’t want masochistic art. I don’t want trendy art. I don’t want adolescent art. I don’t want senescent art. I don’t want grumpy art. I don’t want happy art. I don’t want severe art. I don’t want demanding art. I don’t want tempestuous art. I don’t want incendiary art. I don’t want commercial art. I don’t want moralizing art. I don’t want transgressive art. I don’t want violent art. I don’t want exemplary art. I don’t want uplifting art. I don’t want degrading art. I don’t want melancholy art. I don’t want chaotic art. I don’t want provocative art. I don’t want self-satisfied art. I don’t want nurturing art. I don’t want genuine art. I don’t want derivative art. I don’t want religious art. I don’t want authentic art. I don’t want sincere art. I don’t want sacred art. I don’t want profane art. I don’t want mystical art. I don’t want voyeuristic art. I don’t want traditional art. I don’t want expectable art. I don’t want hopeful art. I don’t want irreverent art. I don’t want process art. I don’t want static art. I don’t want urban art.

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I don’t want pure art. I don’t want ideological art. I don’t want spontaneous art. I don’t want pious art. I don’t want comprehensible art. I don’t want enigmatic art. I don’t want epic art. I don’t want lyric art. I don’t want familiar art. I don’t want alien art. I don’t want human art.

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thank you for saying you’re welcome Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai This is a totally inaccessible poem. Each word, phrase & line has been designed to puzzle you, its reader, & to test whether you’re intellectual enough— well-read or discerning enough — to fully appreciate this poem. This poem has been written for an audience of poets, poets who know the difference between the simple past tense & ‘has

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been’ — the present perfect tense —& who also recognize the possible aesthetic effect of that difference — poets who also know that ‘has been’ has another meaning even though that other meaning is not relevant to this poem. This poem is unnecessarily complicated, flailing wildly, like an opium addict looking vainly for its pipe, at a demonstrably deranged aversion of the necessary in quest of the improbable (necessity is to this poem what margarine is to marzipan). This poem cries out for an audience that is able to savor the use of

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a single quotation mark where less sensitive readers would fail to see why double quotes weren’t used & might even be so foolish to think that using single quotes was a mistake or pretentious. This poem has been written not for just any other poets but for those special ones capable of appreciating the nuances & tricks, prosody & infrastructures  (or their absence) in this poem. This poem

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fancies poetry as an eidetic emanation so rare & so refined that it will elude even the most elite readers, which almost certainly does not (& will never) include you. Its attitude toward you as a general reader is that you’d be better off watching BBC news or listening to NPR humaninterest programming or, anyway, sticking to the laureates. This poem

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appeals to a small coterie of those in the know by making in-group references that will leave you scratching your head (if your hand ever frees itself from scratching your ass). This poem is laced— as tea is laced with arsenic but also as lace is made in Chantilly— with coded winks to berét-clad cognoscenti, sly references such as the fact that the title of this poem refers to another poem, which is never referenced in this poem, or not referenced in a way the

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broad public would be hip enough to be hip to—( dig it?) — so, heh!, if  you’re not hip to that other poem you will be as out to sea with this poem as the proverbial organ grinder who lost his monkey— not in the great storm raging (always raging) outside, but in the headier storm raging— raging like a god who’s lost his sheep or a millinery salesman who’s lost his samples— in the supernal storm raging inside the organ grinder’s mind. & speaking of the title of this poem, as we have been doing

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(we if, but only if you have — ’gainst all good judgment— accepted this poem’s insouciant solicitation) — have you noticed (careful readers surely wouldda) that the title of this poem seems to bear no relation to the text which follows? This imparts this poem with an extra shot of aura, at least for those cleverer ’nough to appreciate the conceit. But leaving aside whether or not the title is connected to the poem, the title does make an acute social observation that nowadays nobody wants to accept gratitude:

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they want to bestow it, but not receive it. (— “Thank you for writing this poem.” — “No, not at all, I must thank you for reading it.”)—This poem believes that poetry’s a higher calling. For this reason, this poem can’t be bothered with the emotions & cares, tragedies & celebrations, torments & elations, worries & ministrations, preferences & aversions, spites & likes — of ordinary people like you — the common man but also common woman & child, irregardless of whether gay, straight, mix-

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ed or can’t (or won’t or would prefer not to) be categorized, because who cares about such categories except a bunch of bigots— & whose business is it anyway? This poem has been forced— with leaden heart & downturned brow (if such an expression of supervening regret does not, though I fear it most assuredly does, lapse into personification) … this poem has been forced against its every aesthetic hope, to turn its back on you, the reader, who is,

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come on, let’s stop kidding ourselves, a philistine: stupid, ignorant & vulgar, possessing a limited vocabulary (if possessing any vocabulary at all & not simply cruising it), a reader who, mon dieu!, doesn’t even know French. This poem’s love is not the Costco kind: supersized & discounted. It’s a tough love that doesn’t coddle or treat you like an idiot ( even if thou art one or aspire to be) (aesthetic stupidity is not born but made ).

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A poem is a place to think, not say As in a game of mouse & cat Where said & read are both the mouth Keeping the cat at bay. —Dearest, most belovéd reader (for despite the impression I have hitherto conveyed, know that you are always, & will always be, foremost in my heart): beware the Dark Mysteries of this poem, for if, even for a moment, you lose your vigilant disapprobation & let the poem’s insidious charms grab hold of you by your bootstraps & shake you to an inch of your life — then its black magic will fuck with your head & commandeer your soul. Stay calm,

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keep your distance & be sure neither to cry nor laugh because, when you do, poetry’s boogeyman will have trapped you in her lair — & there’s no known escape from that (nor unknown either). This poem possesses a nearly absolute knowledge — a virtually supreme truth that it discloses only to a blessèd few. This poem’s address is to Eternity & to those in the now & here — & the hidden places in between— who chose, of their own accord, out of desire, vision, &

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with a leap of faith bordering on apostasy — to countenance & revere it. It’s unreal.

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michael martone Jacques Derrida Writes Postcards to Himself from a Diner in Winesburg, Indiana

I am not the first French writer to venture into the heart of the American interior. It was Tocqueville, an inspector of prisons, who became distracted by the American character, finding at its heart a stability for the time, crafted by an obsession with equality and its jettisoning of rank, title, primogeniture, and the other trappings of the aristocratic landed elites. Beneath such skins, in other words, were other words. Take this “sandwich” for instance. It is an amalgam of the “raw” and the “cooked.” A sign for both the great leavened leveling flatness of the culture nurtured on a de-nuded glacial plain and its assertion of its–ness-ness (it is known as “John’s [after the proprietor of the bistro] Awful, Awful,” a diminution of “Awful Big, Awful Good”). It is considered here to hold the highest of rank in the hierarchy of “sandwiches,” said to be “the sandwich’s sandwich” in the same way one can be “a writer’s writer.” This is an application of democracy, after all, at once stratified, but also (in its “bunned” variant) equilateral in its expression of difference and conformity. “Le pain,” the “bun,” is the architectural “quotation” of the dome (the English “pan” a verbal and visual pun as well as the literally vexed convex(ed) structure of the bun’s upper segment), the vaulted space that (pantheistically) arches over all uniformly and simultaneously. Elections are held for such sandwiches as I am told by the “waitress,” and, here, in an enabling parasitic text attached to the menu, I discover that this particular “breaded” pork (tender)loin has (on several occasions) garnered the award as “best” in the “fair(s)” of several Midwestern states. Significant is that this meat puck be peened flat first to within an inch of its life, its footprint allowed to expand (before the application of its “breading” [that is to say the meat is sandwiched by its own dermis of adhesive dough before said sandwich is sandwiched by the aforementioned sandwiching conventionally yeasted bun]) beyond the edges of the circular boundaries of the “bun” and beyond (and in its continuous beatings and poundings [known locally as “tenderization”]) in all directions, expand into a slim smear, a skid of flesh, even beyond the limits (and this is crucial [in the sense of “crossed”]) of the ceramic “plate” or “platter” that frames the whole meat delivery device’s delivery device. The massive flatness of the (tendered)loin is made even more evident by the rigorously induced rigor of the deep (emphasis mine) fat frying of the dead (though still elastic and recently

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stretched) flesh into the consistency of plied wood. The now encrusted cutlet is meant to expand (theoretically) horizontally beyond the surrounding event horizon of the plate and, eventually, the place. As I unhinge the “bun” in order to “dress” the sandwich with additional limpid veneers of a single lettuce leaf, a thinly sliced slice of pickle, a squeeze-bottled skim of yellow-washed paste of mustard, I realize that the compacted (tenacious)loin is a kind of mirror (mirrored), reflecting not me so much as the surface of “me” (“Derrida”) or, even more exact, the (tentative) loin is a kind of anti-mirror mirror (mirror), not reflecting so much as absorbing light into the striations of its now heat-induced, chemically altered coatings, not a skin so much as the scrim that adheres to skin (a scum on the smooth surface of a pond that, in its flatness [both in the dimensional and optical calibrations], argues against even the concept of “depth”), a skin’s skin skinned.The “sandwich” (itself) is constructed out of (empty) “words,” (“empty”) calories wrapped in the “whiteness” (the absence of color) of white bread. The “self ” sandwiched as “sandwich.” Not a “prison” of walls (walls) but of floors “sandwiched” together. The sign, “I,” and the signifier for “I” (the “‘I’”) collapse — the serifed capital on the top pancaking upon the serif at the foot.The middle (stuffing) compressed (ground to grout), the whole thing reduced to a line, an “under”line, under lined, a line the thickness of this postal card, the depth of this stamp (the stamp’s intaglio image [of an American author] made of etched and stippled lines), the slick spit of the lick of my tongue positioned between the stamp (as in “to press down”) and the card with its inscribed (and inscription of) surface, of place, with its (future) postmark a tattoo (to be) absorbed into the (skimmed) skin.

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lydia davis Story

I get home from work and there is a message from him: that he is not coming, that he is busy. He will call again. I wait to hear from him, then at nine o’clock I go to where he lives, find his car, but he’s not home. I knock at his apartment door and then at all the garage doors, not knowing which garage door is his — no answer. I write a note, read it over, write a new note, and stick it in his door. At home I am restless, and all I can do, though I have a lot to do, since I’m going on a trip in the morning, is play the piano. I call again at ten-forty-five and he’s home, he has been to the movies with his old girlfriend, and she’s still there. He says he’ll call back. I wait. Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that when he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband. And then I go on to write, in the third person and the past tense, that clearly she always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love. He calls back before I have time to finish writing all this down. When he calls, it is a little after eleven-thirty. We argue until nearly twelve. Everything he says is a contradiction: for example, he says he did not want to see me because he wanted to work and even more because he wanted to be alone, but he has not worked and he has not been alone. There is no way I can get him to reconcile any of his contradictions, and when this conversation begins to sound too much like many I had with my husband I say goodbye and hang up. I finish writing down what I started to write down even though by now it no longer seems true that anger is any great comfort. I call him back five minutes later to tell him that I am sorry about all this arguing, and that I love him, but there is no answer. I call again five minutes later, thinking he might have walked out to his garage and walked back, but again there is no answer. I think of driving to where he lives again and looking for his garage to see if he is in there working, because he keeps his desk there and his books and that is where he goes to read and write. I am in my nightgown; it is after twelve and I have to leave the next morning at five. Even so, I get dressed and drive the mile or so to his place. I am afraid that when I get there I will see other cars by his house that I did not see earlier and that one of them will belong to

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his old girlfriend. When I drive down the driveway I see two cars that weren’t there before, and one of them is parked as close as possible to his door, and I think that she is there. I walk around the small building to the back where his apartment is, and look in the window: the light is on, but I can’t see anything clearly because of the half-closed venetian blinds and the steam on the glass. But things inside the room are not the same as they were earlier in the evening, and before there was no steam. I open the outer screen door and knock. I wait. No answer. I let the screen door fall shut and I walk away to check the row of garages. Now the door opens behind me as I am walking away and he comes out. I can’t see him very well because it is dark in the narrow lane beside his door and he is wearing dark clothes and whatever light there is is behind him. He comes up to me and puts his arms around me without speaking, and I think he is not speaking not because he is feeling so much but because he is preparing what he will say. He lets go of me and walks around me and ahead of me out to where the cars are parked by the garage doors. As we walk out there he says “Look,” and my name, and I am waiting for him to say that she is here and also that it’s all over between us. But he doesn’t, and I have the feeling he did intend to say something like that, at least say that she was here, and that he then thought better of it for some reason. Instead, he says that everything that went wrong tonight was his fault and he’s sorry. He stands with his back against a garage door and his face in the light and I stand in front of him with my back to the light. At one point he hugs me so suddenly that the fire of my cigarette crumbles against the garage door behind him. I know why we’re out here and not in his room, but I don’t ask him until everything is all right between us. Then he says, “She wasn’t here when I called you. She came back later.” He says the only reason she is there is that something is troubling her and he is the only one she can talk to about it. Then he says, “You don’t understand, do you?” I try to figure it out. So they went to the movies and then came back to his place and then I called and then she left and he called back and we argued and then I called back twice but he had gone out to get a beer (he says) and then I drove over and in the meantime he had returned from buying beer and she had also come back and she was in his room so we talked by the garage doors. But what is the truth? Could he and she both really have come back in that short interval between my last phone call and my arrival at his place? Or is the truth really that during his call to me she waited outside or in his garage or in her car and that he then brought her in again, and that when the phone rang with my second and third calls he let it ring without answering, because he was fed up with me and with

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arguing? Or is the truth that she did leave and did come back later but that he remained and let the phone ring without answering? Or did he perhaps bring her in and then go out for the beer while she waited there and listened to the phone ring? The last is the least likely. I don’t believe anyway that there was any trip out for beer. The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it’s not the truth and sometimes I don’t know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don’t believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry at me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves her or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.

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joe amato from Under Virga Tango “Say, what do you call this anyway?” “There’s such a thing as being too versatile. Or patulous. Or, it’s so bad I couldn’t put it down.” Thanks Ron. He (i.e., I) thinks (think) one needs must be more obscure, yes, more WW II? Mending the lifeways, then, heartless returning to the heartland the dangling modifier appears to signal grammatological (i.e., “amato with a self-aggrandizing difference,” where metaphors of writing, specifically reading, collide, up ending themselves in the tomato sauce momentarily exterior to which one interiorizes an “mmmm”) perspective, the embodiment of his failures not unlike a pie, a custard pie

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that has risen only to fall, hence not rising at all to the greatness once thrust upon it — i.e., the gapingly paparazzied (from the Fellini film) face; not unlike that stubbed great toe that draws all of your attention to little avail; not unlike that just like that the troubled encounter with a smidgen of What Thou Mightst Have Been, sapping thy middle-aged ambitions of the magnifical. Damn. And this despite a literary library literally littered with literature. A failure of means ends with the gratuitous justification of means? “Am I being fair?” “No fuckhead, you’re not.” Some of my colleagues, some of whom are poets, some of whom I count as friends 1234 maybe 5 are clueless about collegiality, that shareand-share-alike of allies allied with some institution who work in concert to allay the harsh realities of cash flow and the like.

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Break out the pies! It’s a surplus of signification oneway ayway orway ethay otherway [cough] l’une ou l’autre manière [oy] one (or the other) that you can learn from or from which, if you still have your alletway. (check why don’t you) “Just don’t make a habit out of it,” she warns, as I plus size for maximum cornering, expiration date suddenly 07/09. Me I mean. Like magic. Computational magic. Praise the lord and pass the bottle Mack, cry me a river, Jane, in other words baby miss me and my Pearl Harbor antics? That life, that’s life they must have led, those two before my memory of them began to “take shape.” “An entire generation of writers is losing its legacy to its defunct hard drives.” Or will there yet be paper enough to pore over, to gauge future life? See that sky, recycled

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but holding steady at 90 brightness? — try, just try to touch it. By Christ, I’ve found myself talking like a trooper these days. Trouper? Trooper. Using the expressions my old man used. : I can’t stand people who live in the past. I can’t stand people who have no past. I can’t stand Are you going back for the funeral? Ameri ca

America



Huh?



Are you going back?



America, your remote side can be murder on our hands and feet, we who are your torch song?

Hardly. I didn’t say I loved the guy but he’s a fuck-up.

(mouth agape, sarcastic even, repeat after me)

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I said he’s a fuck-up but I loved the guy. Sometimes. Pre-1954, port and starboard, one heard AbleBakerCharlieDogEasyFoxGeorgeHowItemJigKing LoveMikeNanOboePeterQueenRogerSugarTareUncleVictorWilliamX-rayYoke Zebra We can locate other lost codes, other conflicts. And your little dog, too.

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william h. gass A Little Song of Suffering on Behalf of Prose

The day I learned that Luther swore like a soldier was a day of dawning, of realization — I wanted to swear too. Even if he only swore at the devil, and could be forgiven, I saw it as an encouragement to break the rules by breaking the ruler. I was born marginal, but so was Moses, wasn’t he? stranded in those rushes? so I thought, why not put the margins in the middle? Why not make faces at all those typefaces? Why not interpret page numbers as internment camp tattoos. My way is the Tao of transgression, I wanted to claim, and I intended to lead myself into temptation to the tune of Yankee Doodle Randy. Transgression is progress. It yields more than the simple pure pleasure of giving tradition the finger. And the day I stumbled over Gertrude Stein was a day of divining. All the questions I had been trying to formulate flew up from my feet like a covey of quail: what is a book? What makes a volume? Why doesn’t prose care about what sort of page it’s on or care where on the page it’s been put? Why is so much syntax asleep at the switch? Where do sentences go to die? Are they buried in their paragraphs like bodies in coffins or are they smothered there from lack of air? Punctuation, Gertrude told me, isn’t purely pepper. What is the difference between description, narration, explanation, and the copyright page? Why can’t prose rhyme? Rhyme schemes like the devil, but why must stories plot? Puns however fun must not cross an academic tongue. It’s too late to alliterate. I’m done. I suffer — we suffer — from the verbal’s envy of the visual; I mumble — we mumble — and wish it were music. We want what we don’t have. We want most of all what we can’t have. It should not surprise us that so many poems have been written about “things,” especially works of art. The habit goes at least as far back as Homer’s depiction of the shield of Achilles and Virgil’s attempt to rival it with his description of Aeneas’s protective gear. The habit has even a name in rhetoric — ekphrases — a term which came to refer to the representation of works of art in words. Even more significantly,

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the impulse was expressed in a critical cliché of ancient lineage and immense influence — ut pictura poesis, as Horace wrote it — a poem is a speaking picture. A familiar sight these days is a jogger at an intersection running in place while waiting for the light. That is the effect ekphrases has on narrative: the story halts for the painting of the scene or the rendering of some object, but the pause itself is nervous, jittery, self-conscious, seemingly unsure. This practice puts the poet on a treadmill — running, running, running — breathless, weary, sweaty — and ending nowhere, just where he began, but sometimes with a stronger heart. I once devoted an entire novella to this rhetorical maneuver. The piece was called “Bed and Breakfast,” and in just such a place I lodged my traveling accountant, Walter Riffaterre. He rents a room from a lady named Bettie that is literally packed with knickknacks whose description consumes him and brings the narration to an utter stall. In the silence of a stricken story, he gets a chance to think a bit: He couldn’t sit on his sofa, the coffee table was too close. No leg room. Instead he was supposed to contemplate the composition of white cloth and green glass, of flowers, feathers, wax, and ribbons, Bettie had arranged. Bettie. And learn what? About the luxuriance of life. About shades of gray and grades of cloth and twists of glass and candle wax and ribbon. About spices and herbs. God’s plenty. Yes, Walter thought, looking around at all his wealth. God creates, and then man creates, in God’s image, things of love and harmony and service. A leaf, a seed, the wood of trees, the metals of the earth, which God made and placed where God wished to put them, were taken up by devoted and skillful hands and transformed into frames and stands and cloths and lamps, and put in their place in their turn: chests in rooms, drawers in bureaus, china in closets, beads in boxes. And on the clay the potter incised lines and painted flowers, and on a petal put a drop of translucent dew after the manner of the morning. Walter’s mind had at last managed to move his emotions. History was here, too. History. Not a life lost, not a thought gone, not a feeling faded, but retained by these things, in the memories they continually encourage, the actions they record, the emotions they represent, not once upon a time, but in the precious present, where the eyes see and the heart beats, and were you clear gutters of leaves whose trees you know and recognize, and you furthermore remember when the soldered copper shone and the roof’s slates were reset and how the kitchen will any moment smell of bread like the brightness of the day and where the ladder’s shadow falls as though it were a sun clock striking three. Not the work-weary world Walter

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went around in: his old roads and weedy burms hadn’t a single memory pressed in the macadam, or reflected from the splotchy counters of greasy spoons or sensed like an odor out of dirty-bowled gas stations where, in back, bent tin signs in cast-off heaps collected — Mail Pouch tobacco and Royal Crown Cola and Black Jack Gum — or down the dim smeary halls of his motels had some imagination passed like a worried ghost … no … where he was it was never how it ought to be: redolent…relaxed … reflective … rich … Where one dined or supped. Where one, of a p.m., tea’d. Where one went to bed early and read. Writers … poets … how we’d like to follow Rilke’s eloquent injunction to “praise this world to the Angel.” “Show him some simple thing, then, that’s been changed in its passage through human ages till it lives in our hands, in the shine of our eyes, as a part of ourselves. Tell him things.” How we suffer the envy of the other art, any other art: envy of photography, its instantaneous results and easy mimicry; envy of sculpture its solid place in space; envy of painting its pigments and resembling presence; envy of music its emotional immediacy, and of architecture, its windows and its stairs … its staircases above all, rising in spite of each floor’s materiality — that manythreaded envy is a given, an inevitability, a constant presence like an ache. Verdi whips up a storm for the first act of Otello. Vivaldi paints a postcard for every quarter of the year. Berlioz marches to war with drum instead of tread, and brass instead of cannon. Rodin casts Victory in bronze; Debussy invokes the sea and puns on mother; Gide writes La Symphonie Pastorale, Wilde the Picture of Dorian Gray; Strauss transcribes Zarathustra’s diatribes, Picasso paints thin and fat acrobats, Rilke writes of the thin and fat painting as if it were a tribal dance — 

But tell me, who are they, these troupers, even more transient than we are—driven since childhood, and bent (for what? for whom?) by some tireless will? Because it wrings them, twists them, swings and flings them, tosses and catches them; and they descend as if the air were oiled and polished, to light on a carpet worn threadbare by their incessant leaping and landing, a carpet lost in cosmic space. Stuck there like a bandage, as if the suburban sky had bruised the earth— 

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while Auden ponders the fall of Icarus not as Icarus fell but as Brueghel pushed him. If a poem is a speaking picture, if architecture is frozen music, then sculpture is — what? — a dance of hailstones? For some, it is the linearity of language that is fatal. You first meet a painting like a pie in the face. There it is — all gooishly green and yellow. Chrome yellow covers your ears, a clot of burnt ochre closes your nose. Music is time bound too, but chords bring notes together like clapping hands, the choir shouts halleluiah as if with one voice, and the orchestra’s instruments bleat like sheep who want their dinner. Lessing said: “The rule is this, that succession in time is the province of the poet, coexistence in space that of the artist.” The curse is this: that the movement of meaning through a paragraph depends upon the reader’s not having something on the stove. We are fed words like seals, one fish at a time, but digestion takes on the whole meal. The impurity of poetry — of any writing — is notorious. Compare: the sculptor’s quarried stone is carefully chosen, cautiously cut, and carried from its site over land and sea; pigments are specially manufactured, camels’ hair collected as if the mean beasts were beloved; instruments are exquisitely made to sound notes nature never heard, notes arranged in scales a fish shares only with the word; and the sky is our natural roof, the cave our only domicile — we must build our own homes and dig our own graves. It is true that the word is as artificial as the stuff of any other art, but in no other is its material made as easily by a teen as by a Tennyson, or is as noisy in a flock, as self-important, and ubiquitous as crows. Isn’t cawing what humans do most of every day — cackle and caw and giggle and jaw? They don’t, to be sure, play tunes on the flute when they’ve lost their way or want a loan, yet some will say that “the ruff of the woild” does well enough for its roof, when no painter would do sky with a similarly spoiled blue. Seurat loads his brush with blue and puts a dot right there — just so. Seurat’s dot is one dot among what will be many, but ‘blue’ is many words right from the start, and as a sound is even many more, for if I say ‘blue’ I say ‘blew’ — there is no help for it. The Ultimate Word ‘blue’ cannot be erased from the blackboard, only teacher’s scribbled representative for it. The Ultimate Word ‘blue’ has one meaning. Its sound — its spelling — has many. The Ultimate Word — the World’s Word — is Nowhere. It has no spelling of its own, no sound it can claim, because it must show up like the sky in every country. Yet writers must work with it. When it has sunk to some tongue. When it has descended and wallows in the saliva of a foul mouth. On the contrary, Seurat’s dot is — it’s just there. And it’s blue.

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Surrounded by red dots, Seurat’s dot will modify our eye; it will appear perhaps a bit plumlike, but the Word is lost if deprived of a context. Even when sounded alone it brings its entire repertoire of tunes with it, its necessary definitions, its logically possible companions—a vast retinue that the writer must, for the most part, send away if he is to make any sense at all. Hölderlin’s ‘blue’ is metallic in the opening of the great poem that begins: “In lovely blueness the steeple blossoms/With its metal roof. Around which/Drift swallow cries, around which/Lies most loving blue.” We have seen tin roofs flash in the sunshine here at home as they did in his day. But his word, of course, is ‘bläue’. A bit of blue cannot be in two places at once but a concept can. You can use up your tube of ultramarine but not your abstract class of blues. Even when the little transient mark for blue is removed, its concept is sometimes there, four or five times in this instance: “Although it happened very rarely, when the wind blew through my pea coat it made my teeth chatter with cold and me a little sad too.” Because writing is a Platonic exercise. We interweave, we relate, we blend the Forms. Poets, whether they perform in prose or verse, try to make the mind, as Seurat compels the eye, to mix shades, to intermingle meanings the way — to choose another metaphor — a chef consoles his flavors. In poor verse, prose in its ordinary use, or scholarly and scientific discourse, meanings are connected very differently — extensionally, the logician says, rather than intentionally, as Plato imagined the Forms were combined. The difference is drastic. The painter can actually muddy up stuff; with a bit of yellow and some green arrive at avocado. That’s what we try to do when we let a steepletop bloom. But Aristotle (and all those sensible folks who bring us progress in the sciences) says you can’t do that with concepts. They are like classes not colors. When I say of the sky that it is blue, I have merely placed the group of things called ‘sky’ into the group of things called ‘blue’ the way I might nest mixing bowls or shell a pea in one. But when the poet utters that sentence (to take up Plato’s position) the meaning of ‘sky’ is blended — mixed, infused — with the meaning of ‘blue’, indeed the way colors or flavors are combined. Why? because we want — we writers — we want interpenetration, not nesting; we want new notions not fresh juxtapositions; we want to have a green thought in a green shade. We want what we can’t have. Gerard Manley Hopkins reaches for the impossible, as is his habit, rear-ending verbs with nouns as though he were reenacting an accident on a foggy highway:

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Star-eyed strawberry-breasted Throstle above her nested Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within; And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell. [“The May Magnificat”] “Bugle blue eggs” may line the throstle’s nest but not as concepts would in a class-concerned logic. The metal of a bugle is silver or sometimes gold. But Hopkins did not write “silver blue eggs.” He wanted eggs in a cluster of notes, eggs the color of a herald’s announcement, eggs of a silvery blue sound — the throstle’s song — eggs of a throstle’s color. One can almost hear them being laid. But see — I’ve been unpacking these meanings as if the phrase were a suitcase. When no one is going anywhere. A writer conscious of his craft will not try to ignore the fact that he works with concepts not things, and that he makes something so abstract that the physical marks of language barely moor it to the world; consequently he will not brag about his knowledge of material reality — humanity, life, nature are no more important to him than the painter’s plate of pears or model’s pose, that postman in a chair, or an Angel visiting a pensive Mary who happens, that morning, to be mantled in bugle blue — for ideas, not events, are his proper milieu; but he will nevertheless want to be as smoothly musical as the pear’s flesh, as solid as the postman’s seat, and to have his ‘blue’ be as palpably blue as Gainsborough’s kid is cute, and his clothes, bought at a boutique, no doubt way overpriced. The writer whose name was given to “the mixed form” — a Latin master called Menippus — had very little else survive from the third century BC in which he stirred verse about in prose like fruit added to a cake batter. The result was said to be comical or if not exactly funny at least satirical — the source of a small smile at someone else’s expense. This singalong is an example of such a mess: part reading, part lecture, part show, part tell. Most outrageous of Menippean mixtures would be the placement, in staid prose-shaded neighborhoods, of poems that were naughty, sassy, or insolent. In English, the limerick is the most disrespectful verse form I know. Its aim is wholeheartedly destructive. To the limerick nothing is sacred, and, since nothing is sacred, the limerick is formed for the truth. It cuts everything and everyone down to size. So it is thought to be highly democratic. It challenges most rules of decorum because it recognizes that although good manners are to be admired, they can be invoked to stifle criticism, dim bright times, and transform the life force into something prim and pious. In short, the limerick has a lot going for it. Above all, it insists that reality

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is made of comical, absurd, chaotic juxtapositions, and performing these is a part of the transgressor’s procedures: mixing words of Anglo-Saxon birth with those of the invading French, or street speech with terms taken from the high toned, or going comic book in the middle of a Bible lesson, or rubbing the noses of the smug in some very unsettling suggestions. Above all, it boasts a structure that nothing can escape from unscathed. In a novel of mine, The Tunnel, I incorporated a few limericks and wrote a few song lyrics, to sprinkle about at inopportune times. One set had to represent the work of a character named Culp, who was writing a limerickal history of the world. I experimented with the form, doubling the short lines, connecting verses, and searching for the tragic or at least sorrowful limerick. Over the Alps on an elephant went Hannibal out of his element, for the elephant’s motion was so like the ocean, he continually punic’d upon his best tunics, and his slaves had to wash off the elephant. Earlier:

Later yet:

Dido wrote to Aeneas, Why don’t you sail by and see us, I’m here all alone with my lust and no phone, half dead of desire, my crotch quite on fire, which I’ve heard you’d put out with your penis. Dido said to Aeneas, Surely you’re not going to leave us? you wouldn’t flee home just to found Rome, which will fall anyway, so you might as well stay to enjoy all my sweet panaceas.

It is one thing to bust a genre, it is another to make an unbroken connection between a pair of them, a seamless join. The prose of The Tunnel rhymes a lot

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but occasionally it also moves from prose to verse and back again in the same sentence without warning or apology. The narrator, when a child, is found by his father to be stealing pennies from the family’s change box. Low, dry, slowly formed, the pronouncement came, my father’s voice full of pause and consideration, like maybe a judge’s, with a kind of penal finality even in midsentence, midphrase, and unlike the rather pell-mell stridency of his customary dress-me-downs and more commonplace curse-outs, those scornful accounts of my character which always included disclaimers of responsibility for my failures, for my laziness (not a whiff in his family), my shiftiness (in contrast to the stand-up nature of the relatives around me), my myth-making, my downright lying (whose cause could not be anywhere discerned), my obstinacy too, and my prolonged stretches of pout, sulk, and preoccupied silence which I seemed to take an inordinate joy in inflicting upon my undeserving family, who had always done their level best … and all the rest … fed me, washed me, made sure I was dressed, repaired what I broke, cleaned what I messed … and all the rest … so I could live like someone blessed, and bow my head at God’s request … and all the rest … but I had fouled my own sweet nest, and cracked the hearts in their fair chests … and all the rest … so they would treat me, henceforth, as a guest until such time as I went west … and all the rest … to seek my skuzzy fortune or confessed my crimes, with remade mind, and soul distressed … and all the rest … whereupon, with sins redressed, they might — of my presence — make the best: charges which were rapidly related, as if memorized, and hurled headlong at my head, between my eyes, as I always thought, causing my knees to bend a bit each time as if to duck, though ritually, a shower of stones. Shifts as sudden as a runner dodging tacklers — that was the norm for the Menippean style. Because this life was one double damn thing after another.

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Because the saint and the leper lay down together. One of the more striking examples of this can be found in the medieval German poet Mechthild who describes Mary as she stands at the foot of the cross in these words: There stood open both his wounds and her breasts; the wounds poured, the breasts flowed, so that the soul became alive and healthy too, as he poured the bright red wine into her red mouth. The metaphysical poet who exclaimed that “God’s tender bowels run out streams of grace” belongs to the same tradition in which the physical and the spiritual are one flesh. It should be ours. Above all, for me then, shifts were to be sought that, in almost the same breath, spoke of contrary values and attitudes, especially toward morally critical events. In The Tunnel again, I encourage my narrator to turn his coat as often as a tailor. Or do I mean traitor? His frequent comments on the Holocaust are a case in point. He follows a description of one massacre with these remarks: Millions die eventually, in all ways. Millions. What songs, what paintings, poems, arts of playing, were also buried with them, and in what number? who knows what inventions, notions, new discoveries, were interred, burned, drowned? what pleasures for us all bled to death on the ice of a Finnish lake? what fine loaves both baked and eaten, acres of cake; what rich emotions we might later share; how many hours of love were lost, like sand down a glass, through even the tiniest shrapnel puncture? Of course one must count the loss of a lot of mean and silly carking too. Thousands of thieves, murderers, shylocks, con men, homos, hoboes, wastrels, peevish clerks, loan sharks, drunkards, hopheads, Don Juans, pipsqueaks, debtors, premature ejaculators, epileptics, fibbers, fanatics, friggers, bullies, cripples, fancy ladies, got their just deserts, and were hacked apart or poisoned, driven mad or raped and even sabered, or simply stood in a field and starved like wheat without water; and we shall never know how many callow effusions we were spared by a cut throat; how many slanderous tongues were severed; what sentimental love songs were choked off as though in mid-note by the rope; the number of the statues of Jesus, Mary, or the pope, whose making was prevented by an opportune blindness or the breaking of the right bones; what canvases depicting mill wheels in moonlight, cattle at dawn, children and dogs, lay unexecuted on their easels because of the gas, talent thrown out as if it were the random pissing of paint into a bedpan; so that, over all, and on sober balance, there

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could have been a decided gain; yet there is always the troublesome, the cowardly, midnight thought that a Milton might have been rendered mute and inglorious by an errant bullet through the womb; that some infant, who, as a precocious young man, might conceive a Sistine ceiling for the world, and humble us all with his genius, as he made us proud of our common humanity … well, there is always the fear that this not-yet youth has been halved like a peach; that Vermeer, Calderón, or Baudelaire, Frege or Fourier… could conceivably, oh yes, just might possibly … have … been … gently carried to his death between a pair of gray-haired arms, which, otherwise, were no longer even strong enough to disturb a clear soup. [The Tunnel, 33-35] That passage furnishes an example of the hyperbolic list too — another bit of bad behavior — in which a list of instances, like an overfilled glass, swamps the class they come from. We cannot afford, any longer, to act like tourists when we visit a piece of beautiful writing, bringing home a memory, a few snapshots, a touch of the trots, and a T-shirt that writes “regarde!” across our chests and claims its author is Colette. We really do need to get inside the syntax, spend time in the space created by the prose and try to understand why one bit of writing is better than another in terms of its esthetic dimensions: in imagination whose chief agent is metaphor, mind and its abiding ideas, in perception along with its sensuous presentation, then through the urgency and drive of the line, or its erotic indolence, reclining like an odalisque of Matisse, and finally in feeling, from awe to anxiety and back again, through anger and affection. I say “we” a lot in order to pretend that, like Whitman, I am a multitude, though in the mirror I only see half of me and not much else of anything though my toothbrush is a brush of beauty worn with rubbing like a threshold to the oral world.

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claudia rankine from Citizen When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. The route is often associative. You smell good. You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can’t remember her name: Mary? Catherine? You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person. Sister Evelyn never figures out your arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to copy Mary Catherine’s answers. Sister Evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting there. *** Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this yourself? Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her

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slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget. If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings. Do you feel hurt because it’s the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other? *** An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.” You and your friend decided that “yes, and” attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it’s another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good. *** The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it’s raining. Each moment is like this—before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you. *** You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into

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the car ahead of you, fly forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind. As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headacheproducing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going. *** When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend. *** Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle. *** A woman you do not know wants to join you for lunch. You are visiting her campus. In the café you both order the Caesar salad. This overlap is not the beginning of anything because she immediately points out that she, her father, her grandfather, and you, all attended the same college. She wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or minority something—she is not sure what they are calling it these days and weren’t they supposed to get rid of it?—her son wasn’t accepted. You are not sure if you are meant to apologize for this failure of your alma mater’s legacy program; instead you ask where he ended up. The prestigious school she mentions doesn’t seem to assuage her irritation. This exchange, in effect, ends your lunch. The salads arrive. ***

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A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. *** You and your partner go to see the film The House We Live In. You ask a friend to pick up your child from school. On your way home your phone rings. Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window watching a menacing black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed. You tell your neighbor that your friend, whom he has met, is babysitting. He says, no, it’s not him. He’s met your friend and this isn’t that nice young man. Anyway, he wants you to know, he’s called the police. Your partner calls your friend and asks him if there’s a guy walking back and forth in front of your home. Your friend says that if anyone were outside he would see him because he is standing outside. You hear the sirens through the speakerphone. Your friend is speaking to your neighbor when you arrive home. The four police cars are gone. Your neighbor has apologized to your friend and is now apologizing to you. Feeling somewhat responsible for the actions of your neighbor, you clumsily tell your friend that the next time he wants to talk on the phone he should just go in the backyard. He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he wants. Yes, of course, you say. Yes, of course. *** When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

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He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say. Now there you go, he responds. The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile. *** A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers. *** The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked. At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard? It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry. I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

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jonathan safran foer Finitude: From the Permanent Collection For John Burghardt

shakespeare’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot’s parrot. 1942-? Striped West-Indian Parrot, approx. 14 x 5 in. Museum purchase.

LITTLE IS KNOWN OF THE MAN who is widely considered the greatest writer in history. The best insight into who he was may lie in the parrot perched before you, a tenth-generation descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal — to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger parrot, to learn what the older could teach it. She never spoke to either of them, and forbade guests from speaking in their presence. A line of Shakespeare’s parrots was raised in the painstaking silence of her love, and when she died, our reverence. And so we ask you not to speak while in this soundproof room, but only to listen. We ask you not to compromise the ever-weakening but direct line from this parrot to Shakespeare. And when it begs you, “Talk to me,” as it has the habit of doing, we ask you not to give it the company of your voice — it is not the parrot, remember, who begs to be talked to, and while Shakespeare may reach us through the parrot, it will never work in the other direction.

isadora duncan’s accidental strangulation. 1927.

100% cotton, silk fringes, 12 x 84 in. Promised gift of Benoit Falchetto.

Fourteen years before her life adjourned her body, Isadora Duncan endured the loss of two children. Trapped in a car that ambled backward into the palm of the Seine, they watched the leaves obscure to yellow gestures. The day before her

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own death, Duncan saw a girl who reminded her of Diedre. “I cannot continue to live in a world where there are beautiful blue-eyed, golden-haired children,” she told a friend. “I cannot!” Tragedy was the dancer’s only trusted partner. In 1922, world­ famous and broke, she married Russia’s revolutionary poet laureate, Sergei Esenin — mad, alcoholic and seventeen years her junior. In a starched white hotel room on the last night of 1925, he burned his manuscripts, sliced open his left arm from palm to bend, penned a farewell poem with his own red ink (see Gallery B), and hanged himself. Duncan descended further into a depression as impenetrable as it was undetectable, gaining weight where no one saw, drinking in great excess and secrecy, spending carelessly what little money she had. She admired a red Bugatti convertible and contemplated buying it. “Will you allow me a test drive?” she asked with a finger in the air, and recognizing who she was, the proprietor, handsome young Benoit Falchetto, said, “I will. Of course. Tomorrow evening.” On the way back to her hotel she saw a girl who reminded her of Diedre, and told her friend, “I cannot!” The next evening, Falchetto pulled up in front of her hotel in the red Bugatti. The night was cool, the yellow leaves descended, and Duncan shivered. She refused both the cloth cape of her friend, Mary Desti, and Falchetto’s leather jacket, but instead wrapped twice around her neck and tossed over her shoulder one of her trademark long, silk-fringed red shawls. As Falchetto pulled away, the loose end of the shawl dragged on the ground, danced like a comet’s tail behind her, and within moments became caught in the spokes of the back wheel. The car was accelerating — Falchetto trying to show her the Bugatti’s capacity to put the road behind it, as the present does with the future — and the shawl, as if yanked by some invisible hand, by the hand of young Diedre, perhaps, whipped back and snapped Duncan’s neck. By the time her head struck the side of the door — a blow that smashed her nose into a hundred pieces — she was dead. The shawl was so tightly bound to Duncan’s neck and the Bugatti’s wheel that it could not be disentangled, and had to be cut. While Falchetto adamantly denies it, it is suspected that it was he who stitched the halves back together, making the shawl whole again, as now exhibited.

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john wilkes booth’s mirror. 1865. Mirror and oak frame, 36 x 72 in. Promised gift of Brooks Brothers. On loan.

anne frank’s lower east side annex. 1986. Construction, 40 x 65 ft. Built with funds from an anonymous gift.

You are about to enter a re-creation of Ethel Schneiderman’s re-creation of Anne Frank’s annex. Unlike Frank, Schneiderman survived the Holocaust. After two years in a Polish displaced persons camp, she immigrated to the United States and moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Delancy Street, where she lived until her death (pneumonia) in 1986. With no surviving family, no coworkers and no known friends to miss her, it wasn’t until her neighbors complained about the stench from her apartment that her body was found. It was the middle of the night when the police entered the front door, as you are about to. (For the sake of accuracy, our re-creation is kept in the cold and perfect darkness of a year’s unpaid bills.) Sweeps of muted yellow flashlight were not enough to prevent the men from tripping through the apartment’s many small rooms, from bumping into walls and knocking their heads on the door frames. “Something’s off,” one of the officers said into the shadows. Scholars at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., as well as experts from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, have verified the impossible accuracy of Schneiderman’s annex. Every conceivable detail, down to the crusted tears on Anne’s pillowcase and menstrual blood on her sheets, was perfect, more perfect, even, than the Anne Frank House itself, which has been altered by the thousands of tourists who pass through every day. Dust, in Schneiderman’s annex, was where it should be. But something, as the officer guessed, was off. It took weeks of puzzled speculation to realize the seemingly obvious: Schneiderman’s annex was slightly smaller than Anne’s. Everything, therefore, had to be at 89% scale — from the tin spoons, to the boards nailed to the windows, to the chamber pot, to the diary itself — almost close enough not to notice, but off enough to cause one to stumble, to stammer and sway, to feel larger than one is. Please be careful in the annex. Keep your hands in front of you to feel for unexpected objects. Let your feet search the ground for things over which

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you might trip. Mind the low doorframes and narrow passages. As you move through, feel free to touch whatever you like. Lay down in Anne’s bed. Bring her cotton blouse to your face — smell it, without knowing what color it is. Sit in her too-small chair. Put your hands on her desk. Pick up her pencil, to see what it must have felt like — but remember that your hand is not huge, that you are not a giant.

the embalmed body of j. anthony gaussardia, american hero. 1879.

Human body, 72 x 11 in. Generous gift of the National League of Civil War Paraphernaliaists. The modem embalming process, which involves the replacement of body fluids with a variety of chemicals for the purpose of preservation, was patented in 1856 by a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur, J. Anthony Gaussardia. Ten rival patents soon followed in the city, and the nation’s capital became the embalming capital of the world. The timing could not have been more propitious, as Union soldiers were being killed by the thousands, far from home. The new process allowed the bodies to be preserved for the slow train rides and wagon trips north. Families wanted their sons returned home; J. Anthony Gaussardia made that possible. One funeral more than any convinced Americans of the merits of Gaussardia’s art. The embalmed corpse of Abraham Lincoln was viewed by millions of mourners, first in Washington, then at depots along the solemn train ride to his home in Springfield, Illinois. Only by seeing Lincoln’s body was the country fully able to grieve the loss of his life. Ironically, Gaussardia didn’t trust anyone else with the embalming of his own body, and so resolved to embalm himself, to drain his body, and simultaneously drink increasing doses of embalming fluid. Toward the end of the process that lasted nearly three years, he was barely able to move, and sat posed like a wax sculpture at his desk, trimming his eyebrows, rouging his cheeks. It was the preservation, of course, that killed him, as he knew it would. But as was his wish, no dead man has ever looked more alive, and you will not be able to help but say: “He looks great.”

the stones in virgnia woolf’s pockets. 1941. A handful of stones, various sizes. Retrieved by the museum. Burgled.

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napoleon’s cowlick. 1821; hitler’s final mustache. 1945. Human hair, various lengths. Museum purchase.

Exhibit case “A” contains a lock of hairs from the head of Napoleon Bonaparte. His final words, murmured in fits, were: “God! … France! … My son! … Josephine!” (although the order has been much debated), and his less noble, but equally emphatic, final wish was that his body be cremated after his head shaved and his hair divvied among his friends according to loyalty. While neutron activation analysis found thirteen times the normal amount of arsenic in several of these samples, and some would take this to suggest that he was poisoned, it is far more likely that St. Helena itself was environmentally poisoned, and that he died of a malignant stomach ulcer that invaded his liver. (As early as 1817, four years before his death, he was vomiting what looked like coffee grounds — his own dark, digested blood.) Similar analysis, after all, found thirteen times the normal amount of arsenic in the soil of St. Helena, and in the bark of St. Helena’s trees, and even in the paste of the wallpaper in Napoleon’s room. The portrait of Josephine that saved him from solitude was poisoned — the indigo eyes contained thirteen times the normal amount of arsenic, the ochre locks were poisoned, the vermilion lips. The nib of his pen was poisoned, as was the vellum on which he wrote the dozens of unanswered letters to his son, the Viennese Duke of Reichstadt. “I recommend to my son,” his will states, “never to forget that he was born a French prince.” The space between his third and fourth buttons down — where he hid his deformed hand — was poisoned. His prized medallions, all bestowed by him upon him­self for great honor in war, were poisoned. The flakes that fell from the rotting ceiling and onto his dying body like snow — ”God!” he called, his last word, let’s believe — they too were poisoned. Exhibit case “B” contains Hitler’s final mustache, shaved from the Führer’s face by Heinz Linge, the valet who found him and Eva Braun seated side by side and dead on the afternoon of April 30, 1945. At approximately 3:30 P.M. of that day, Hitler crushed a glass ampule of cyanide between his teeth, and shortly after was finished off by a bullet through the head, either self-inflicted, or more likely fired by Eva Braun. After shaving the mustache as a relic to bring home for his mother, Linge took Hitler into the courtyard, as specified in the Führer’s will, and set him aflame. Due to a shortage of gasoline, how­ever, the corpse was not rendered completely to ash, and the charred remains were discovered days later by occupying Russian forces. To his dismay, Linge’s mother would not accept her son’s gift, for accepting it would be to accept that the Führer had died, that the cause was lost, the war over. He promptly sold the hairs to a local

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artisan, who used them as snow in the children’s toy before you. Feel free to shake, and watch Hitler’s final mustache descend upon Berlin.

perpetual photograph of henry wren. 1960-? Silver gelatin print, 9 x 12 in. Promised gift of Henry Wren.

For the last forty years, beekeeper Henry Wren has been taking a pho­tograph of himself. Mounted on an arm extending from a helmet he wears at all times is a camera whose shutter never closes. “I don’t know how I got the idea,” he admits. “Curious, I guess.” Wren became something of a media star when a local news team did a feelgood piece on him, which was then picked up by the na­tional networks. The interviews, the cheap and kitschy fame, the thousands of photographs, were not at all what he intended, and ulti­mately drove him and his wife into seclusion on a farm in Northern Vermont. In an open letter to the New York Times, he stated that only after he is dead will his wife, Mayla, remove the camera from its mounting, close the shutter, and develop the film. Exactly one print will be made, and it will reside on the wall before you. “Please do not bother me for anything else.” There are those who are certain that Wren’s life will look like this:

And there are those who are certain that it will look like this:

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There are those who think that the image will depend on the amount of light at the time of Wren’s death, when his eyes and the shutter close — that it is not until the final moment of his life that the photograph of his life will be determined. Should it be night, or should the shutters be drawn, or should his wife, Mayla, lean in to kiss his forehead, and by so doing block the lens, his life will look like this:

But should there be light — pouring in through the arms of the trees, sponging him as his mother once did in the kitchen sink, blanketing him, behind him, above him, around him — his life will look like this:

Of course, any amateur photographer knows that the image will have nothing to do with the final moment, but the accumulation of light over the course of Wren’s life. If he lived a normal life — ran in the grass with one sock on, labored in lit rooms, loitered on rickety stoops, reaffirmed his love over dripping wax — his life will certainly look like this:

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wagner killed the castrati star. 1816. Testes, no larger than acorns. Generous gift of Elton John.

By the late 1600s, the slightest aptitude for singing could result in genital mutilation. How many gonads were tossed like dice on the gamble of the perfect instrument! With his sac severed, a castrati typically studied at a conservatory until his debut at the age of 18. If he did not establish a career, as precious few did, he was left without the possibility of partnership (the church forbade nonprocreative marriage) or employment (never having learned a craft). While religious and popular sentiments were ostensibly outrage, castrati continued to draw huge audiences to churches and opera halls, and it was the composers who brought about the end of the darkest period of testicular history. Wagner, in particular, refused to tolerate the common musical tamperings of the castrati, who were so eager to distinguish themselves that they often took great privileges with his scores. Indeed, he refused to write parts for them at all, and with his ascent came their demise. Resting on the red velvet pillow before you are the testicles of Gioacchino Velluti, the world’s last castrati. A terrible life, a beautiful voice.

sofya tolstoy’s carpal tunnels. 1863. Tendons and nerve bundles, 4 in. Museum purchase.

After transcribing War and Peace for the ninth time, Sofya Tolstoy lifted her wrists to the sky, tried to unball her fingers, and let her numb fists fall to the table: “I’m sorry.” Approximately 33,000 hand­ written pages. Stacked, these would measure no less than fifteen feet. 1,300 pounds of paper. Paper to displace enough red wine to fill 372 bottles. Enough paper to pave a road of almost eight miles; paper to paper the walls of a respectable cathedral. An equivalent mass of feathers would have filled their small house to the shingles, poured from the windows (as if escaping to the birds from which they once came) and suffocated Leo and Sofya inside. “I am so sorry,” she cried into her arms, which burned at the bends, were cold needles at the wrists, dead at the hands. “I cannot write another word.” Tolstoy, who would several years later leave Sofya for his newly discovered piety, pulled back his beard to give her a kiss. “Thank you,” he said. “Now I know I am done.”

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sergei esenin’s farewell poem. 1925. Blood and paper, 8½ × 11 in. Generous gift of the Duncan Estate.

As all poems should, this speaks for itself.

lincoln’s mirror. 1865.

Mirror and oak frame, 36 × 72 in. Promised gift of Brooks Brothers. What you are looking into is the mirror that Abraham Lincoln looked into as he tried on the Brooks Brothers suit that he would wear to the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. “What will they think if we hold hands?” Mary Todd asked coyly, nodding at their guests in the presidential box. “They won’t think anything about it,” he responded, and took her white-gloved hand, and then Booth’s bullet, which lodged itself behind his left eye. If it were a wall before you, the wall that Lincoln looked at as he tried on the suit that he would wear to his assassination, you would think little of it. If it were the final portrait of Lincoln, or his last penned letter, or Mary Todd’s blood-spattered glove, or even the suit he wore that last night of his life, it would not affect you as looking into this mirror now does. What is it, then, that you think you see?

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caroline bergvall Say: "Parsley"

online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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david foster wallace Reduced

Between a cold kitchen window, gone opaque with the stove’s heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the small gilt portrait of two identical boys flanking a blind, vested father that hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut my long hair in the warm winter room. There was breath, the mugginess of bodies, and the force of the hot stove on the back of my emergent neck: and there was the crazy prickling sound of the wireless’s ceaseless movement among City stations, Da scanning for the best reception. I could not move: about and around me the towels trapped hair at my shoulders’ skin and Mum moved, cutting against the bowl’s rim with blunt shears. At one side of my vision’s strain a utensil drawer hung open, precarious, at the other edge the beginnings of Da, head cocked past the moving finger at the wireless’s glowing dial. And straight ahead, before me and centered, away across the shine of the table’s oilcloth, like a tooth between the lips of the pantry’s silently opening doors, was my brother’s face. I could not move my head: the weight of bowl and towels; the shears and Mum’s hand — she, eyes lowered, intent on the crude task, could not see the face of my brother emerge against the pantry’s black. I had to sit there, straight and still as a tin grenadier, watching as his face assumed, instantly and with seriousness reserved for pure sport, whichever expression my own emerging face betrayed. The face in the cold doors’ crack hung; I inert; the emergent face neckless and floating unsupported, nestled in the cleavage of the angled door’s; the concentration of its affect suspended between sport and assault; Da’s shaggy head at the tuner cocked and sightless; and Mum intent on my skull and unable to see the hung little white hair-framed face reproducing my own visage, “copying” me — for he called it “copying” — and for me alone. And with so little hesitation and such intensity that his face less imitated than parodied my expression, exaggerated and made instantly obscene whatever position of my own face’s parts assumed. And how it became worse, in that kitchen of copper and static and burnt peat and tile, air cold before me and scorching behind: as I became agitated at the

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imitation, and the agitation registered — I felt it — on my face, the face of my brother would copy and ridicule that agitation; I feeling then the increased displeasure at the twinned parody of my face’s displeasure, his registering and distorting that new displeasure, all as I became more and more agitated behind the tape Mum had fastened over my mouth to prevent my disturbing her shears’ deliberation of my head’s true shape. It ascended by levels: Da recessed against the glow of the tuner’s parade, the drawer of forks withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate expressions, I no longer feeling my face’s positions so much as seeing them on that writhing white nickel against the pantry’s black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the tape’s restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even the ears, my face before us both farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held children must see in the funhouse mirror — the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there was, tiny, at the center, something true about the we who leer and waggle, deformed, at stick-necks and undulant foreheads, goggling eyes that swell and collapse — as the imitations ascended reflective levels to become finally the parody of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a sopped white brow, the strangled man’s sobs blocked behind tape, wireless’s hiss, the lallation of shears, in spasms that sent my eyes, again and again, for winters in kitchens, upward into their own white, knowing past sight that my twin’s face would show a tormented same — until the last cover was slackness — to “give up the ghost,” then, we called it — a blank slack mask’s staring, unseen and — seeing, into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. Much like now.

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brian evenson Altmann’s Tongue audio online at: www.conceptualisms.info

House Rules The first of the house rules, the only one Horst ever manages to recall, is No leaving the house. He only remembers because it is posted on both front door and back. Though he can no longer read, that portion of his brain concerned with reading having been compromised (Hatcher’s language), Horst recognizes the signs. Rarely, however, does their significance strike him until after he has tried the handle of the door in question, found it locked. Hatcher keeps track of the house rules, and Horst has been instructed to approach him before acting, to inquire if his anticipated mode of behavior will violate said rules. Hatcher has shown him the piece of paper with this instruction inscribed upon it — or rather he has shown Horst a piece of paper with words on it which Horst cannot read. This instruction is not a house rule, Horst dimly realizes, for Thurm, the only other resident, is not compelled to consult Hatcher. Thurm consults no one. Hatcher refers to it as a “Horst-rule.” Horst does not understand what he means. The ground floor has only a few rooms: the kitchen, the common room (staircase off limits), the bathroom, three bedrooms. The bedrooms can be bolted separately from either inside or outside. If they are bolted from one side, they cannot be opened from the other. Each bedroom contains a bed. There is a door in the back of each small room, without knob or handle. Perhaps it is not a door but merely a panel. Neither Horst nor Thatcher has ever seen these ersatz doors open. Besides bed, there is nothing else in the bedrooms. None of the residents have any possessions of their own. Even their clothing is not considered their own. Each morning they awake to find a neatly folded pile of clothing at the foot of their bed, in place of the pile they left on the floor before falling asleep. If they choose to fall asleep clothed, they awake in the morning naked.

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The second house rule involves the distribution of food. The kitchen is only to be entered once per day, in the morning, to retrieve the day’s food. Hatcher paraphrases the rule to Horst as follows: The swinging door is not a plaything. It is a baffle between the kitchen and the remainder of the house. There is no need to enter the kitchen except for food. Food for the day will be found on the table each morning. That food is to be taken out of the kitchen and shared by all three residents of the house. There is no reason to enter the kitchen later in the day. On most days, Horst will seem to listen to Hatcher’s elucidation of the rule, sometimes even nodding, but moments later he will walk in and out of the kitchen door repeatedly. Sometimes he walks in and turns to go out so quickly that he is struck by the door as it swings back into place. This upsets him. He cannot figure out what has struck him. Once, Horst managed to wedge his finger in the gap existing between the spindle the door swivels on and the wall. Hatcher refused to help free him. Horst bellowed until Thurm came to his aid. “The rules are for your own good,” Hatcher suggested while Thurm wrapped Horst’s crushed finger in a piece of cloth torn from his shirt-tail. A Horst-rule related to this house rule: No eating all the food. Horst has been found twice, in early morning, sitting on the floor with open boxes and packets of food surrounding him, his face and chest smeared with jam, dry oatmeal scattered about. Hatcher has taken to locking Horst in his room at night. He and Thurm have learned to ignore the sound of Horst’s hands beating on the door as they themselves try to fall asleep. There are windows in the house, six in all — four in the common room, two in the kitchen. The windows are heavily draped. When these drapes are held aside it becomes clear that the windows are boarded over from the outside. The glass of each window is intact. At certain times of the day, light shines through the chinks in the boards, but there is not enough of a gap to allow the residents to see through to the outside. Horst forgets the windows are there. He shows interest in them only when Thurm holds the drapes aside, and then his interest falls largely on the way he is reflected in the glass. He keeps reaching out to touch his reflection, then back to touch his own face. The third house rule, the third and last of the original rules Horst and Thurm and Hatcher found awaiting them when, on the first day, they awoke in the house, is No one shall pass beyond the velvet cord and climb the stairs. It is rather difficult if not impossible to move one’s body through a locked door, Thurm says, easier to push through a swinging door, easier still to simply step over or crawl under or unhook a velvet cord. Each new rule, Thurm claims,

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acknowledges more free will in those subjected to it. Each rule is easier to violate than the rule before. The punishment for violating the house rules varies according to rule, perhaps according to individual as well. The latter assertion is uncertain, for the only individual who has ever been caught violating any of the house rules is Horst. He tries to go out the door until he recognizes the rule on the door. He goes in and out of the kitchen. He extends his hand past the velvet cord, though he has never tried to climb the stairs. Perhaps he does not know what stairs are. And caught, perhaps, is the wrong word, for Horst has never been punished by those who control the house, only by Hatcher. Hatcher punishes Horst sometimes by striking him with his fist, sometimes by locking him in his room, sometimes by pushing him down and sitting atop him until he begins to squeal. At times, Hatcher punishes Horst even when he hasn’t broken a rule. In any case, this meting out of punishment has no effect on Horst’s behavior. It is not corrective. Compromised, Horst remains always blissfully unaware. He never changes. He breaks the same rules day after day. The house is divided into upper house and lower house, the winding staircase in the common room leading from one portion to the other. The velvet rope of the third house rule cordons the staircase off at the bottom. Perhaps there is another rope at the top as well, for certainly those in upper house — if there are residents in the upper house — have never descended the stairs into lower house. There is a certain degree of curiosity about the upper house. Hatcher wonders if the floorplan of the upper house is identical to that of the lower house. Thurm hopes there are perhaps individuals upstairs who can explain why he is in the house. Horst has no curiosity about the upper house. For Horst, the velvet rope is something he can rub his face along. He doesn’t seem to know what stairs are for, has made no attempt to climb them. Perhaps the portion of his brain concerned with stairs has been compromised. Perhaps it is the same portion of the brain as that concerned with reading. Thurm and Hatcher discuss who controls the house. They speculate about who they are, why they maintain the house, why the three residents have been installed there. They speak of earlier lives, the time before the house, though they speak less in actual memories — which are strangely absent — than of a postulated theoretical past. As they speak, Horst rushes about, shuttling back and forth through the kitchen’s swinging door. He approaches the velvet

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rope blocking the stairway, rubs his face along it, rushes back to the kitchen. These discussions come to a halt when Hatcher finds on a stiff piece of paper two additional houses rules. 1) Do not consider who controls the house. 2) Do not imagine a life before the house. In his more lucid, perhaps also more anxious, moments, Thurm broods his way along the same logical chain. “Hatcher is here,” he says. “I am here. Why?” He looks at Hatcher, but Hatcher rarely bothers to respond. He simply stares back at him, face dumb, until Thurm’s eyes flick up, fix on the staircase behind them. “Horst is here,” Thurm says. “We know,” he says, nodding at Hatcher, “that Horst’s brain has been compromised. Can we assume that Horst is here because his brain has been compromised?” “We can assume nothing,” says Hatcher. “Assuming we can,” Thurm says, raising his voice, “and I see no convincing evidence to the contrary, then it follows that the others of us are here because we are similarly compromised.” “It does not follow,” says Hatcher. Thurm blinks. “We must ask ourselves,” he says, “what is wrong with us?” The new house rule, a card left with the food in the morning: Do not speculate on what is wrong with you. There is some nervous half-speculation on Thurm’s part about the new house rule, in particular about the fact that it is written on slick white paper rather than on the textured cardstock of the other rules. Thurm goes so far as to compare the handwriting of this rule with that of the other rules. The handwriting seems to him different, but he cannot be sure. Still, he accuses Hatcher of writing the card. “We none of us have paper or anything to write with,” claims Hatcher, but then refuses to submit when Thurm demands to search his person. The upper house is the upper house, the lower the lower. It is possible, while still technically obeying the house rule concerning the velvet cord and the stairs, to grasp the banister and lean over the rope far enough that looking up one can glimpse the end of the stairs, the beginning of the upper house. From such vantage, there appears to be a sort of balcony, perhaps a landing. The residents can see the rail that edges it, a small rectangle of ceiling above it, little more. “Perhaps it is wrong to call them house rules,” Thurm suggests, “since we only know that they are applicable to the lower house.”

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This statement Hatcher takes as a challenge. All is not well in the house. At least in the lower house.

~~~ Horst rattles the knob of the front door then that of the back door, front door then back, over and over until Hatcher drags him off to his bedroom, locks him in. He returns to lean with Thurm over the rope, each taking turns looking up until their necks grow sore. From the bedroom, they can hear Horst’s muffled screams, the sound of his fingers scratching the inside of the door. The rules of the upper house perhaps include a rule forbidding one from looking down from the balcony, for only rarely, if ever, do they see anyone. There is some debate over this, Thurm having claimed to have seen a figure, fleetingly. Hatcher suggested at the time that it was merely a trick of the light. Thurm grew quickly unsure if he had actually seen anything. “Perhaps there are people, perhaps not,” suggests Hatcher. “If there are, perhaps they are allowed to look over the balcony, perhaps not. Perhaps they are simply not interested in us.” Hatcher’s statement, Thurm admits, covers the possibilities. But it does nothing to reduce them. Are there rules in the upper house? Thurm argues that there are not, that there is a freedom of movement above that he can admire. Hatcher insists that yes, there are always rules. Certainly those who control the house control all of the house, he argues. There are rules in the lower house, ergo rules in the upper house as well. “If the breaking of rules go unpunished,” suggests Thurm, “are rules still rules?” “I punish for them,” says Hatcher. “I punish Horst.” “Is this a volitional act on your part or is it the fulfillment of the will of those who control the house?” “The will of those who control the house.” “Can you prove it?” Hatcher seems disconcerted for a moment. Thurm watches him set his palm against his forehead, pace a circle around the staircase. Thurm moves back and sits on the couch to watch. He remains there until Hatcher stops pacing, smiles. “I propose an experiment,” he says.

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The most difficult moment in implementing the experiment lies in explaining to Horst the purpose of stairs. At first Hatcher and Horst attempt to explain verbally, but Horst’s compromised brain takes nothing in. Hatcher stands beside the stairs and mimes climbing, but Horst’s brain hasn’t capacity to connect Hatcher’s antics to the stairs themselves. Hatcher takes the cushions off the couches, constructs a series of makeshift steps by layering the cushions, but Hatcher is only interested in removing the cushions from the couch and then putting them back on again. Unhooking the velvet cord, Hatcher pushes him onto the lowest step. Horst stands looking at his feet, then attempts to turn around. Hatcher does not allow this. Careful not to stand on the steps himself, Hatcher tugs one of Horst’s feet up, places it on the next step. With his shoulder, he pushes Horst’s balance to that foot. He drags the other foot up beside it. Stretching, Hatcher pushes him to the next step. After an afternoon of this, of painful and slight movements up and down the first steps, Horst manages a step on his own, then several. Some part of his brain begins to function again, while other parts perhaps stop. Horst and Thurm watch him clamber up near the top of the staircase and then climb down to the bottom. He keeps going up and down, up and down for hours until finally he steps onto the top stair and then steps past it and then disappears. For a few hours, Hatcher and Thurm sit at the bottom of the stairs, waiting, peering up to see if they can catch sight of Horst. As they sit, they talk of whether Horst will be punished, whether he will come back unscathed or scathed or not at all. Even if he returns unscathed, Hatcher insists, he might be punished at a later time. If he returns scathed that is proof there is punishment. If he returns unscathed there is no guarantee that he will not one day be punished. Yet there must be a point, Thurm insists, where one can be reasonably sure that no punishment is forthcoming. Perhaps, says Hatcher, but when? For Hatcher, if one breaks the rules punishment is always there, always hanging overhead. The only modes of existence for those who break the rules are not yet punished and in the process of being punished and punished. Better, then, never to break the rules at all. They eat their evening meal at the foot of the stairs, digging into the boxes and packets. Each eats from a box for a time and then they swap boxes, eat more. They save the packets for last. They carefully set aside Horst’s portion, leaving a little pile of open boxes and packets beside the stairs.

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“What now?” asks Thurm, once they have finished. “We keep watch,” says Hatcher. “First you then me,” he says, then wanders off to bed. Thurm stays at the bottom of the stairs, yawning, trying to keep his eyes open. He gets up and beats his ribs with his fist. He paces back and forth, and after more time has passed goes to Hatcher’s room, enters. He shakes Hatcher awake. Hatcher, he notices, is nude, a fresh pile of clothing already at the foot of his bed. “What is it?” asks Hatcher. “Your watch,” says Thurm. “Of course,” says Hatcher, and rolls over. Thurm stands by the side of the bed, waits. He has no way of telling how much time passes. Finally, he shakes Hatcher again. “Get up,” he says. “I’m up,” says Hatcher, but makes no move to get out of bed. Thurm leaves the room and goes to his own, locks himself in. When he awakes in the morning, Thurm finds for the first time that no new clothing has been left for him. He is still wearing his old clothing. The pattern has been broken. It is the first time anything has been his for more than a day. When he goes out to the common room he finds only the common room, the stairs leading up. Hatcher is nowhere to be seen. Carefully, Thurm disengages the velvet cord, puts one foot onto the lowest step. He lifts his other foot, puts it on the step as well. He stays there a long moment, dizzily, looking up, then steps down again. Should they go after Horst? Thurm wonders for two days. Near the end of the second day he asks Hatcher. But that would be violating the rules themselves, suggests Hatcher, making them subject to punishment, if there is such a thing as punishment. Hatcher is opposed. Neither of them should climb the stairs. “But in essence,” asks Thurm, “by encouraging Horst to climb the stairs haven’t we broken the rules ourselves?” Hatcher refuses to consider this. This is not the letter of the law. And Thurm, despite everything, despite having climbed one stair, cannot yet imagine climbing all the way to the top. He agrees that they should proceed with the utmost caution. Better to wait. Hatcher grows listless. He is hardly himself. He had not realized how much of his day had been bound up in reciting the rules for Horst or in interrupting Horst’s game with the kitchen door or in pummeling him. He needs Horst.

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Without Horst, he is less himself. He tries to recite the rules to Thurm, but it is not the same. Thurm has no interest in rules, and in any case can remember the rules on his own. When Hatcher tries to discipline him, Thurm takes umbrage, leaves Hatcher on the floor with a series of bruises spreading slowly across his chest. Yet Thurm too, Hatcher realizes lying on the floor, offers him something when taken as Thurm rather than remade as Horst. If he lost Thurm as well, he would not merely be less himself. He would be no one at all.

~~~ The food left for them dwindles, food no longer being provided for Horst. This, Hatcher claims, is an indication that Horst is dead. Or perhaps, Thurm indicates, it is merely an indication that Horst is being provided for in the upper house. There is no guarantee, Thurm argues, that he will not one day return. Hatcher dreams that he awakens and leaves his room to find, at the foot of the stairs, Horst’s body. Horst is dead. The body is perfect and unblemished, except for the scoriation that already existed round the upper portion of its skull, the site of compromise. Hatcher sits beside the body, wondering what to do with it. Puzzled, he returns to his bedroom. When he recounts the dream later to Thurm, he tells it differently. I dreamt I found a body at the bottom of the stairs, he says. It was yours. There were bruises all over your chest. As he tells it he half-expects that the next day in the kitchen he will find a new rule: No lying about your dreams. Thurm just listens and nods. He says nothing. In the window glass Hatcher examines the ghost of his own face. It is not a face he can bear to be alone with for long. Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, Hatcher beside him, Thurm begins to brood. “Hatcher is here,” he says. “I am here. Why?” “Don’t,” says Hatcher. Thurm refuses to look at him. “Horst is not here,” he says. “Horst was here but is no longer here. Horst has climbed elsewhere. Can we assume that he has gone somewhere better or at least equivalent?” “We can assume nothing of the kind,” says Hatcher. “Perhaps not,” concedes Thurm. “But I ask you: What place could be worse than this?”

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But, wonders Hatcher later, who is to say what is meant by better, worse? They know nothing, not a thing. They have perhaps lived in other places before the house, but have no memories, no experiences to compare to the present. “I want to climb the stairs,” says Thurm. “It’s against the rules,” says Hatcher. Thurm stands up, disengages the velvet cord. He puts one foot tentatively onto the first step. He feels lightheaded, dizzy. “Wait,” says Hatcher. “One more day.” “Now,” says Thurm. He places his other foot on the step and then stands there, looking up. He begins to lift his foot, raising it toward the next step. His dizziness increases. He sets the foot back down again. “Put it off a day,” says Hatcher, touching him softly on the back. “In a day, I will climb with you.” We will climb the stairs together, Thurm tells himself, coming off the first step, we will not grow dizzy. We will go into the upper house, he thinks as he enters his bedroom, closes the door. Horst will be there or not there, alive or dead. We will either stay in the upper house or we will return to the lower house.

~~~ Thurm sleeps fitfully. When he awakens, he is naked. Only once has he been allowed to keep his clothing for more than a day, certainly in error. He puts on the clothing he finds at the foot of his bed. Perhaps, he thinks, in the upper house he will be allowed to wear the same set of clothing two days in a row. He opens the door. Or at least would open the door were it not bolted from the outside. He tries the handle again. He pounds on the door, calls out, receives no response. He throws himself against the door. It doesn’t even shudder against the weight of his body. He keeps shouting, keeps pounding. Hatcher stands in the common room, just on the other side of Thurm’s door, silent. He stays there throughout the day, at night creeping back to his room. He can still hear, through the walls, Thurm pounding on the door, begging to be let out. In a few days, Hatcher thinks, Thurm will have grown weak. He will not have the strength to climb the stairs. There is no leaving Hatcher, thinks Hatcher. I will open the door and bring him out, feed him just enough to keep him alive, no more. In this house, he will be Horst and Thurm both. I will always only be Hatcher, only more so than now. He will crawl and I will watch him crawl and I will teach him the rules and how to follow them. He will go in and out the kitchen door. I will punish him. He will learn to accept his lot; he will be satisfied.

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deb olin unferth Brevity

Setting It could be so much worse. Adventure They held machine guns. In the distance, jungle. Romance I will not go back to him, she says. Spy Even the cover-up has been covered up. Western This town is criminal. This town is made of mud. Biography He went on like that for fifty-six years. Travel They stop, look, start again. Serial How long can we keep this buggy running?

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Pilgrimage It’s hard to climb a mountain of any sort. Crime He’s too valuable to kill, too dangerous to leave alive. Revision Some changes need to be made around here. Backstory He had a brother who lived for only seven days. Setting No one around here has teeth. Deleted Material

1. Numbers



Eins vei drei fier funf 2. Pet



Pet pet



Petpetpetpetpetpetpet

Characters They went staggering off one way or another—in buses, mostly, but also in cars and airplanes, on bicycles. Hero I recommend him very much. He does everything. I taught him a few words.

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Heroine She is not rightly equipped for this awful business. Has no hat, no flashlight. Needs compass. Plot The tulip lady brings us another cup of tea. Oulipo

1. Ins vi dri fir funf



2. Pt pt



Ptptptptptptpt

Plot Listen for instructions. Setting Rectangles, antennas, hot-water tanks. Exposition All lives are difficult. Postmodern You are reading. Satire You are reading in a clown suit. Sci-Fi You are reading in a spaceship.

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Speculative You did not exist in a spaceship. Revision We’ve been through this before. Conflict The wind is tearing outside. Author You can still see her sometimes in the village. She’s got crutches, face bandages. Detail The scorpion clutched the bed frame. Antihero What could you expect of him? He never made it. He turned around and went back. Subplots

1. At the tone….



2. Please do not lean….



3. Attach no bikes.

Narrator He can’t guarantee anything. Reader She lies on her bed. Knows all that could be.

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Unreliable Narrator The fingerprints have been identified as his. Climax An event of longing and triumph. Resolution Oh, who cares what will become of them? They will die, that is all. Denouement No payments for a year. Ending The end.

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lucy corin Some Machines

clock Started off I felt afraid of any electric cord. Could get disrupted, go back to twelve, never wake me. I could sleep and sleep, miss work, seem dead. So it was batteries, little foldout clocks I liked. I got one and it took the place of a watch. I carried it around and it felt at once antiquated and unpretentious, a pocketwatch but practical, digital, black, and plastic. Not masculine (chunky, leather) or feminine (slender, jeweled) and somehow, in my pocket, anti-time. So many people have solved their problems with clocks. But I crushed mine, sitting on it too much. The numbers flickered and faded, washed into the pale khaki of dead electronic screen space. Meant I had to go shopping, a terrible, terrible thing. I rejected a flip-bottom silver-colored plastic one because its imitation alloy finish was so deadly cheap and lightweight, and then I rejected a simple black version with hands because the numbers glowed green and I couldn’t bear the resemblance to the Halloween masks on sale next to it, and now, after several stores and two returned purchases I have this round one, actual metal, with hands and a tiny white bulb that lights the face when I press a button in the back, and it slides in and out of a clever case. It’s the ticks, though. I stay awake. I write this in my notebook leaning over my night table in the tiny bulb glow, angry at the weakness of the entire situation. Here, in this imaginary epistolary, I’m ticking, too.

phone At night, one night, I couldn’t reach you. You were visiting your parents. Their phone rang and rang but no one answered and no machine. I didn’t know the arrangement your family has with the computer. I hung up and I lay there, butt

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to butt with my dog, imagining the terrible things you could be going through, ranging from they took you to dinner and a movie to they bound you in a chair and asked you who the hell I was and why I kept calling.

heating pad It’s blue, with small blue roses on one side and words on the other. I’m holding it. It says: “This product has been engineered to put out the maximum temperature allowed by industry standards. Heating pad. Wetproof E12107. Danger.” It doesn’t have periods, commas, or semicolons, but I add them as I read and so I add them here, desperate for punctuation. “Burns will result from improper use,” it says. “To reduce the risk of burns, electric shock, and fire, this product must be used with the following instructions: do not use while sleeping; burns can occur before timer turns off; burns may occur regardless of timer or control setting; check skin under pad frequently to avoid burning and blistering; do not use on infant; this pad is not to be used by or on an invalid, a sleeping or unconscious person, a person with poor blood circulation, a paralyzed person or a person with diabetes; do not use if signs of appendicitis are present; do not use a heating pad on areas of sensitive skin; never use pad without removable cover in place; do not use in an oxygen enriched environment or near equipment that stores or emits oxygen; place pad on top of and not under the part of the body needing heat; do not sit on, or against, or crush pad; avoid sharp folds; never pull this pad by the supply cord and do not use the cord as a handle; unplug when not in use; never use pins or other metallic means to fasten this pad in place; carefully examine inner cover before each use; discard the pad if inner covering shows any signs of deterioration such as blistering or cracking; read and follow all instructions on box or packed with pad before using. Fabric content 100% polyester.” I miss you.

supermarket checkout machine I have made eight mistakes checking myself out. (Not like that. This is not me trying to be sexy. I swear, desire is so embarrassing.) I’m all revved up over it. It’s as if I feel I am demonstrating, by stamping my feet and talking back to the instruction screen, the need for qualified checkout machine operators, but

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I also know no one watching my animated frustration will be anything except annoyed. Can’t we all just cooperate and get through this? Jesus, no one likes this shit, who do you think you are? Here are the mistakes I made: I did not get my discount card out of my wallet fast enough. I tried to replace the plastic bag on the rack with a bag from home. I took too long putting the bags back the way they were supposed to be and had to rescan my items. I put too many items in the plastic bag. I pushed star instead of pound. I decided not to buy a piece of cheese I thought I was going to buy. I wanted six eggs and not twelve. But that last one always happens. I miss the rubber conveyor belt, even though it has so often mangled my parsley. No one wants this, I think, looking around for help. Everyone is immersed in the checkout process. People study the screens and handle their items like science projects, sudden experts. I miss the tellers at the banks, I miss the gas station attendants, and when I collect my receipt from the girl whose job it is to oversee all eight automated checkout stations I say, “Does it bother you that these machines are replacing you?” and she says, “No, I have this job,” and I say, “Yeah, but I mean — “ and she says, “We’ll just have different jobs,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean — ” and she says, “We can get jobs at another store,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean — ” and she cuts me off and says, “Yeah they suck, I know, everyone hates them,” but this time she’s whispering. It’s exactly what I wanted her to say, and I go to my car and raise the hatchback, load the slippery bags and they promptly slump and release their contents. I miss stiff brown bags with toothy edges. I miss those boys who used to load my bags. I feel old, and rich, and stupid.

refrigerator The year I spent in the studio apartment, I let the bulbs burn out one by one until I was living by refrigerator light. In the dark, I’d want something, a pen, a cigarette, a sentence from a book, and I’d open the door. Light came to mean cold, and wanting something meant cold, too. I could hear the man next door, everything he watched on television, and when he turned his television off I could suddenly hear him breathing and I knew we were sleeping side by side or head to head (I couldn’t decide which was worse), the one faint wall between us. I felt pinned between him and the refrigerator, which turned on and off so loudly — refrigerators are so loud, and hulking, you just never notice unless you’re trying to sleep in a kitchen.

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Soon the refrigerator seemed as human as the man next door. I pictured the light still on inside it, pressing and humming, the rumbling life that we know is encased in a body’s skin. Do you see what I mean?

motorcycle The judge asked, “Why are you on disability?” and the plaintiff said her arm had been reattached after fifteen hours of microsurgery. The judge asked, “Then why do you want the Harley Davidson back from your brother who has been keeping it as collateral and over this year rebuilt it from salvaged original parts along with ordering some new ones?” The plaintiff said, “This is all I have left of my husband.” He’d given her the motorcycle, and they’d been riding double. In the accident, her arm was severed, and he’d been killed. This is what I pieced together. What a gory moment in history. The motorcycle was scattered, and her husband’s body was scattered. She’d wandered around the dark road with her arm dangling by the inside flap of her skin and muscle, stumbling and unable to tell what was him and what was machine. Somebody sorted it out later, while she was in the ambulance and in the hospital. They divvied up parts into two piles: people parts for burial in one box on the side of the road, and motorcycle parts in another box on the side of the road, for trash, they assumed, until her brother claimed the parts, knowing her. “Knowing he could use me,” she said. She couldn’t spell. The notes of agreement submitted to the judge as evidence proved it. When the judge said, “Give your brother the five hundred dollars, and you, sir, give her the motorcycle,” and then cracked the gavel, the plaintiff said “Yes!” — a whispered hurrah — and made the kind of gesture you make to celebrate when you score in pinball. Now comes what I have to confess. Some things she didn’t say in court that I was hoping she’d say were:

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“Brother, how could you have put that bike together when you knew I’d want to do it when my arm worked better? I wanted to line the parts in rows in my driveway. I wanted to lift them and fit them into one another. Not because I never learn and I’ll just get out on the road, reckless again, hair in the wind. And not because I don’t hate the machine for what it contributed to his death and my wrecked body. But because I know that machine is my man’s body, and in my memory of wandering the glossy night road under the stars, I wanted to reconstruct the motorcycle because I could not reconstruct my husband. Because for all my recklessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and disregard for the well-being of my children, I have a soul that loves and knows beauty.” I was by myself, watching the television in a waiting room, waiting for the guy to change my inspection sticker (yes, I still have that fucking car), and as soon as I knew that’s what I hoped, those words, those ideas, I felt embarrassed of the things I imagined wanting from her. This is the problem with thinking and with wanting anything. The couch felt funny against my skin. Inside my skin, my insides felt funny. It’s just not a nice way of speaking.

gym Remember what you said when we were walking down the street and we passed that window with all the treadmills, these guys running and running, trying and trying to get through the window, all these guys in the background, so earnest and voluntarily tangled in these contraptions like medieval torture machines, and remember how I said we should hook them up to a loom and you said no, a generator, and we debated the merits and you totally won, but I think now what I liked about my idea so much was that what a loom makes is warm and colorful, and power, well, power is awful and invisible.

rube goldberg As you walk past cobbler shop, hook (A) strikes suspended boot (B) causing it to kick football (C) through goalposts (D). Football drops into basket (E) and string (F) tilts sprinkling can (G), causing water to soak coattails (H). As coat shrinks, cord (I) opens door (J) of cage, allowing bird (K) to walk out on perch (L) and grab worm (M), which is attached to string (N). This pulls down

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window shade (O), on which is written, “YOU SAP, MAIL THAT LETTER.” A simple way to avoid all this trouble is to marry a wife who can’t write. (http:// www.rube-goldberg.com/html/mail%20a%20letter.htm)

projector At the movies it was about a scary video and you had to watch the video really carefully, looking for anything, and I saw the circular blip in the corner of the film, the one that tells the operator to switch reels, and I thought it meant something, I thought it was like when Bergman burned the film but then in this movie nothing came of it. Then I kept thinking: it had to be something because are there even projector operators anymore? Here are some of the machines in a different movie from this week: CD players with headphones and just all kinds of music-recording equipment, microphones, whole panels with knobs for adjusting levels, a bus, lots of cars in the traffic scenes and cityscapes as well as two or three car-fixing scenes, a factory machine that the guys count to two and push these giant buttons in unison and the machine presses car doors into shape, some guns (Is a gun a machine? You bet it’s a machine. I just never thought of it before), the whole regular cast of kitchen appliances in the kitchen (There was only one kitchen in this movie and it was in a trailer!) although I don’t think the stove made it into any shots. There weren’t any computers in this movie. Some machines, I notice, are better than others for bouncing ideas off of, and for containing undesirable emotions.

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jenny boully from The Book of Beginnings and Endings

i. My body wasn’t taken with me, the soul being a very spacious thing. Our dreams were correct: we would come to, over time, discover independent yet certain truths. Discovery number one: it is lonely. Discovery number two: no matter what, you will never be privy to my diary. Three: even though the moon may be rising, there will be no Spartica and intervening ivy, no conscious oaks, no doweries, no contemplating orderlies, no oranges, no redeeming qualities. When you leave, you will leave incredibly softly.

* The cry of a whistle, a belly still heaving, I set the clock back each morning.

* I found myself, along with the other absurd people, taking photographs of animals at the zoo.

* The publishing houses give dead authors contemporary book covers and jackets, making it seem as if these writers were still living. ii. Suddenly, so says Longfellow in his translation of Dante, you are not in the body of the text — the dash makes this clear.

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...

magicians know will hurt you, as it is they who possess the knowledge of from whence objects come and whither they go. The white rabbit never exists until summoned, and the place where the white rabbit existed before being summoned never existed — only in the spectator’s mind do these places exist. When the flock of doves flies forth from the magician’s breast pocket, they do not enter our world to perch on random branches of earthbound trees — we only see them briefly for the sake of the trick. When I meet whomever it is I meet, this person never existed before and exists then, at the meeting, simply for the sake of the trick. What the magicians know will hurt you, because when whoever it is I meet flies forth from my breast, as they will and as they must, these beings do not enter this world, but go only where the magicians know they belong. Into the black hat of disappearances so many loves go and reemerge as playing cards and the animal manifestations of the symbols of fecundity or hope.

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a heuristic account of what is at stake What is probable is that all things are probable; however, owing to our short life spans, the mathematical formulae to explain away statistics are not meant for us, but rather for the accumulation of lifetimes upon lifetimes. (For instance, the death of one man is a rare occurrence; however the deaths of many men are frequent over many lifetimes.) I will refrain from saying anything that might be construed as being sacrilegious; however, as we know from the laws of physics (which were not made for our lifespans, but rather for the span of infinity — not to be confused here with eternity) if event X occurs within a living system, the event occurs within a living system.1 The difference between events occurring in a living system and those occurring in non-living systems is that living systems are open systems, as opposed to the closed, non-living systems. If one is human, then one is certainly a living system; living systems are autopoietic, and literature and miracles, although they may exist as perceivably closed systems, should be understood as being sympoietic living systems.2 In the vast network of systems — open/closed, living, dead, homeostatic/ homeorhetic — where galaxies upon galaxies drift further and further apart from one another in a race to create more and more space, the only means to arrive at a theory which may aid in reconciling the miracle to the mundane will need to adapt the scientific art of heuristics. Physics, being an intuitive science, is a field where, although undemonstrated, theories birthed from heuristic voyages are allowed to be believed. From the OED: “WHEWELL in Todhunter’s Acc. W.’s Wks. (1876) II. 418 If you will not let me treat the Art of Discovery as a kind of Logic, I must take a new name for it, Heuristic, 1 F or those with no elementary knowledge of physics and especially the physics regarding entropy of systems, it is recommended that one read up on the living and the dead. 2 Autopoietic and sympoietic are two natures of living systems: autopoietic systems are selfdefined, self-producing, predictable; sympoietic systems have boundaries which are not defined, ajar, collectively produced, erratic.

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...

facility. According to the visitor’s log during this time, we know that his mother visited a total of eight times. No gifts were deposited. He never did cease with the seeing of his visions, nor did he cease hearing the voices which would call to him. He did learn how to eventually ignore everyone and everything, and so, when he was released at the age of 43, he cared very little for Marjorie, although she loved him so completely. He simply could not bring himself to know that she was real. What mattered most to him was what object she might choose to remove from his refrigerator, as it would reveal to him her true intentions. His diaries recorded how he told himself that if she removed item x, then it would surely be a sign of portent y and so on and so forth. She chose a jar of maraschino cherries, which, to her dismay and utter heartbreak, revealed her as a devil sent to earth to lure him away from his true work of decoding fast-food restaurant marquees. As far as we know, this is the last account of his having relations with another real human being. — Eds.

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on probability If one is of a mind such as mine, then there does not exist a program of study which will satisfy fully one’s need to apply what is quotidian to the infinitenature of one’s perceivable κοσμος. What means apparently so much and what is doted upon inexhaustibly in doctorate seminars and labored over in dissertations seems nil when compared to the vastness of space-time, the mystery of star-formation, the mythological insight into dreams, the afterlife, the fear of Alzheimer’s, or countless veils which seem intent upon separating one from the sacred. These veils change as one changes, and this is disappointing. For example, the holy of holies once for me was the gift of flight; although I believed it possible, I could not — not even with the aid of a dozen black umbrellas — unlock the mechanism. Nor did I once believe that it was owing only to Jesus’ Christhood that he was able to walk on water; however, as one grows older — specifically, as one begins that violent snap into puberty — one begins to believe less and less in miracles. Children live in miracles, and as an adult a miracle becomes something unbelievable: I can’t believe it: it’s a miracle, people will say upon the resurrection of the dead or the ability of some people to walk away from scenes of disasters unscathed. In adulthood, only those events which seem to live in the 0.000000001 percent margins of probability and which seem to have no rational basis for occurring can be attributed to a miracle.

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lidia yuknavitch The Chronology of Water

1987 The day my daughter was born, after I held the future stillborn and pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a stool and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, you probably want to wash yourself. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. I sat on the stool and melted into the water for over an hour. I bled, cried, peed, and vomited. I became liquid. I forgot myself. Finally she had to come back and save me “from drowning in there.” It was a joke. It made me smile.

1990 Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell, cluster and swim in and out between one another, collect and pool in sinkholes of the brain. It’s hard to know what to think of a life when you find yourself knee-deep, hard to hold it in your mind. You want to climb out, you want to explain how there must be some mistake. And then you see the waves without pattern, scooping up everyone, throwing them around like so many plankton, and you can only laugh at all the silly bobbings. Laughter can shake you out of deliriums. You need some hilarious vision to save you: once when I was standing naked murderous hate for a man with no memory. When memory does flash up it is sweet and kind. He recalls those few incomprehensibly small moments of joy: the breath of a woman, the design of a building, the sound of steel music from a year spent in Trinidad, kissing his daughters good night. Of all pain there is nothing.

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1969 I competed at age six. You know those little plastic windup bathtub things — contraptions with small flippers or limbs attached to internal rubber bands that rotate at alarming speeds? This is what six-year-old racers look like. Small arms spinning, little bodies springing forth with furious thrashing. Pictures of a group of us sporting bronze, silver, and gold medals larger than our hands reveal tanned arms and legs, metallic sheened hair, muscles that dip and curve like Greek statues shrunken into dolls. Intense, hungry eyes, for what it is impossible to tell. We were competitors — once freed in water, we grew dangerously alive. Little girls.

1992 From my father I learned to love space and form. I learned to be hungry for ideas. I learned never to need anyone. I learned how to survive the unthinkable. I learned how to outlive memory. I learned to love Shakespeare and the dark of a movie theater. I learned how to swim through daughter.

1978 Chronology convinces us we are moving toward a real place. If only I could make life back into the endwall it was. If I could get there a tenth of a second ahead of the splashing blue on either side of me, I could win. I could climb out of that wet world and turn to see my name and time recorded in small lights on a giant electronic board. I could feel the certainty of having been somewhere, of arriving, of looking back. What a trick these lessons are. At seventeen, when I was third on a list in a nation of swimmers, when I stood on blocks to accept a gold medal hanging from a crimson, blue, and white ribbon, was it my name that named me, did my announced name give me life? Was I the daughter of the woman lying on the floor stuffed with sleeping pills and puffed up with liquor? Did victory lift the weight of father off of the swimmer? Who was I in those moments between girl and woman when crowds of people cheered and applauded for someone they would never meet, someone whose house they would never enter?

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1963 I was born caesarean. One of my mother’s legs is shorter than the other. Her hips, being titled, prohibit birth the normal way. My mother used no anesthetic. She was hypnotised. When they told her to stop bleeding, she did. When they reached inside the white slit in her belly, into the mucous material and watery world, my eyes were wide open. My eyes were already open when the hands pulled me into the air.

1980 In the dressing rooms almost-women were holding back age by squeezing thin bodies into skintight lycras and latex. Large breasts or hips were a joke, a disfigurement up against our V-shaped torsos and small mighty frames. We did not, as I do now, use a mirror for judging the ridiculous slippage of the body, the inadequacy. We watched one another, looked at a vagina head-on, washed each other’s backs, arched torsos, and if we used the mirror at all it was steel eyes and a chiseled jaw that stared back, not beauty, but some Spartan dream of Olympiads and glory.

1985 Marriage can’t keep love in you. If it ever was love for a man, it leaked out, out of the pores of your body, out of the openings meant to take in, out of the dumb longings, out of the dull waiting, out of the slow, wrong world. Sick boat.

1970 “Swimmers, to your marks.” Dead silence. In the first years it was a gunshot which released our tensed flesh. Later the gun was replaced by an electronic beep. Fathers were often uncontainable. They could not be confined to sitting passively on the bleachers. They rose with fury and paced the side of the pool, alongside the race, shaking and roaring, while the little women swam for their lives. Some men bellowed out their names, or commands: swim, hurry, come on, go, come on baby, yes, harder, faster, go, yes, yes, yes …  A cacophony of men swelling and pressing down on the wet motion.

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In the water there was my heart filling my ears, there was holding my breath and my pulse beating toward rupture, there was the sweet burn of lactose in my muscles, there was my gasping, there were my arms spinning and my legs thrashing, there was the black line on the bottom and the whip of the turn at the wall and the watery retracing of a path inside speed. Underwater. In the airless world. I wanted to stay, I wanted to repeat the path forever. A mind can go crazy wanting praise from a man. A body can drown from the long want.

1981–84 Heroin in the vein is liquid ice flushing bright white through quivering flesh. At the moment the silver glint pierces the infant-thin skin stretched light over pulse and blue waiting tube of the outstretched arm, a body convulses at the unmediated joy. The mind bends in on itself. Useless thought. Oh sweet. Oh translucent world.

1992 My shoulders are irrepressible. Still, after years of retirement from my fish-life, if I am walking anywhere crowded I begin to dodge and pivot, turn sideways with a sudden body tilt, something like a running back, I suppose. It’s the swimming. Swimming has left its trace on my body to be read like stretch marks, like scars, like braille.

1988 My first and only look at some fading black and white photos of my Lithuanian relatives — the broad backs and frames, the buxom breasts, the square jaws, the too blue even in grey beady eyes, big bones, big hands, can I say beautiful? Not in this country. Here, beautiful is not strength of limb or an unbreakable spirit. Here, blonde hair has been cancerous. I have been a wanted woman. Sexual. America is this. Had anyone ever asked me to chop wood, or haul a load, or heave some weight, or till a field, I feel certain my very cells would have been ready for it. Any material threat that a woman could throw her weight against. What I had to learn instead was foreign. How to be wanted, how to please, how to survive, how to wait. How many times did I slip into chlorinated depths,

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secretly hoping to shed this useless skin and emerge something amphibious and without gender? I have been baptized hundreds of times. I have always left the water blind and lame.

1973 A child watching Esther Williams movies in the black and blue glow of a television’s reruns. Women in water. There was something of my fantasies in her and the surrounding bathing nymphs making patterns with their bodies, now extending fifty arms to form a star, now fifty flutter-kicking feet to produce a moving pinwheel, water magic, bathing beauty, diving deep back through the center of their own circles. But there must have been something unbelievable about those movies. I never saw anything else like them. People don’t like you to stay in the water too long. They become nervous.

1981 At my senior prom I arm wrestled five young men. I lost once. After the dance we went skinny-dipping in a 50 meter competition pool. I did laps.

1991 Liquid out of the body again. You go back in memory involuntarily. You remember your first bleeding from that place between your legs and so later when you are an adult and you have already passed through yeast infections and bladder infections and gonorrhea and crabs and cramps and douching and gels and spermicides and intra-uterine anythings and even after all that you can be a grown woman and STILL panic when you sit on the toilet and look down and say WHAT’S THAT, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT. Age doesn’t matter, there is not progress away from the orifice. This letting everything in and waiting to see what comes out is a creepy, messy, idiotic business, and it’s starting to piss me off that I even have to think about that hole. I’m tired of all the products designed to make it magic and nicesmelling. I’m tired of laws directed at it. I’m tired of desire fixing on it, which always struck me as ludicrous anyway, desire moving toward a hole now that’s a good one. I’m tired of getting sick and I’m tired of getting periods and I’m tired of getting the almost-child sucked out of me and I’m tired of remembering the

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infant’s stillbirth and I’m tired of that pink muscle pushing for all its worth like a child’s ache and I’m tired of women on women and I’m tired of every word, image, pointing to or thrusting up into or swimming around in the deep, dark, wet womb of mother-loving life. It isn’t that I want it gone. It’s just that I want wanting to come from somewhere else. Just once I would like the wait of wanting to come from the elbow or heel, those grey dead-skinned areas of the body left out of erotic. What I am saying is there is a woman in a room who is tired of looking down, tired of bleeding, tired of bearing, tired of itching and aching and remaining open with no hope of suturing herself up, liquid out of the body again.

1973 A girl named Katie shared the pool world with me. Soul mate to a swimmer, she was a child diver, a golden water-sparrow. This is the image of Katie: walking the blue board barely giving under her small weight, hanging suspended like a child’s hope for an unbelievably long second, then plunging into aquamarine. Wonder. After practice we would meet in the world of our blue and see how many laps we could do underwater without breathing. It was a game that we did to make ourselves happy. Sometimes an older boy would join us, the way older boys do, but inevitably he would give out of air. His body was just too large, the muscles too far gone from child, the lactose screaming in his limbs, the pulse begging, the jaws aching, the murderous fire at the surface of the flesh. He would explode up and out, gasping the forgiving air. But we would wriggle on, two laps without a dip in the current, three laps and the curl of the body at the turn to the fourth. I could see her blurry familiar bending at the wall with me. It was always during that fourth underwater lap that I felt explosions of strange strength. As we pushed our ten-year-old torsos and limbs past men, past women, past the oxygen-lives we were born into, it was something else at the end that broke the surface between us. Something of our own making. Something alive and wet and spilling over with triumphant giggles. I will try to remember that.

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196 —  A sister goes ahead of you. There is nothing to do except gesture in her direction. Hold her hand in the dark while she cries. Think of ways to draw attention. Hide in the bathroom together. Adore her even if she won’t let you come into her room. Learn to take anything. Learn to let his yelling bounce off of you. Learn to let him dress you. Learn to never need attention from anyone but him. Learn to eat anger. Learn to sleep with revulsion. Learn to fear nothing, learn to fight everything. If she can get to eighteen, she can leave. If you can get to eighteen, you can live with your whole life.

1992 I know two things about making love. The first is, if you are with a woman, it’s hard to remember that you are not the same. You want to bleed over into the other self, you want to break the membrane and swim home. The second is, if you are with a man, it’s difficult to forget that he is not a sickness. You want to bite and consume him inside the tenderest kiss. You want to squeeze until blood squirts instead of come inside the most gentle caress. You want to take away his cranium and leave him some mindless shell, slave, pseudo-son, and at the same time you want none of these. After my father swam into his almost death another man found me. When he looks at me I can see two tiny, twin reflections of a blonde woman, child, who is waiting to get born. Is it love to want to die there?

1989 A family on the beach as if we were ever a family on the beach. When my sister and I were adults we visited my parents in Florida. Guilt? Dumb hope? When we played in the ocean we forgot ourselves: sister, self, father, memory loss. When we finally reached my father he was floating face down in the knee-deep ocean. Running in water is like running in jello. Slow motion. Almost funny. When I flipped him over I saw that his face was distorted into a grimace, a nightmare of clenched teeth, bulging eyes, face tensed between agony and fear, death mask. We pulled his 210 pounds of dead weight onto the shore, both screaming at him to live. I think this is the word one says to a person at the edge of life: live. The image of my mother: a penguin-type creature squawking and waddling with her cane toward us. One moment in between years. The murder I longed to commit all my life in front of me: kill, or suck the killing back and pump it into the story

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of someone else. I looked down into the purplish flesh, the popping, staring blue eyes, the clenched teeth. His face was so familiar I didn’t recognize it. I held his nose closed. I put my mouth to his mouth. I could feel his teeth, his tongue, spittle. His lips were warm but unresponsive. My sister pumped his chest. His swim trunks were half-off. His sex hung harmless. I breathed air into his mouth. I held my lips to his until an ambulance came. Poor father. Poor, dead beast. Poor, live thing. I did not kill him. I did not save him. I am learning to live on land.

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rachel blau duplessis Draft 95: Erg An erg (symbol “erg”) is the unit of energy and mechanical work in the centimetergram-second (CGS) system of units. Its name is derived from the Greek ergon, meaning work.

i. Looking at a self being there is one, looking at them passing, visible, beloved and then on a walk I don’t or will not take. The fact, the sunlit it, of seeing pinkish tree in iridescent luminosity — its pleasure mutual with mine. Very clunky a-syntactic lists of (ex post facto) words, a third. Fourth in the ears before I fall asleep symphonic; orchestral intensity; the whoosh of music never writ the rush and pitch of rhythmic blood. Fifth — this twisting wreath of multicolored snakes. First, into the wind as leaves fall down. Second, mourning. Reductive. I just said this. Third, traces. The deer, hit, explodes on the road in blood and flesh. Explicit. A chunk of time gets crossed with place and this is here.

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ii. R: I hold the inside out of space. Just for a bit, and then it disappears. Pen: Talk into the mini-mike inside the pen. Narrate how and why you choose. R: It’s not a bad question, how do I choose, except conceptualized sort of like this poem, by which I mean sequentially —  implying scroll unrolling open. Told like that. No simultaneity. Not recursive. To narrate it won’t work. Decisions come instantaneously, a synaptic, evaluative insouciance with a WTF flair, so it’s impossible to spell out the how and where. Pen: That’s almost impenetrable. R: What about a block of matter presents itself so full right here, so like an intricately textured wall that the rest of one’s life is soon to be spent investigating its in’s and out’s, in thrall to that. Pen: I didn’t think you had such a penchant for simile. R: Whatever’s here is accident become complete by working it. It’s pitching forward, as we speak.

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You didn’t see, but there’s a lurch, you almost don’t in time get off the bus, but then you did stuck on the street, sweating, or swearing, where you’d almost missed that bus and you are panting, quite a ten-block run, but now all right, you’re on. Pen: The pentecost of every now breaks through the aura of what’s there made by the ever-never was of words, their curls and swirls and limpid quivering. R: That’s right. (Pen: Huh?) The intractable becomes attractive and then rejected; the solving for one element or another on a periodic table with imaginary numbers gives rise to awkward balance or unbalanced shim. Ergs of pulse and weight and tininess get adjusted again and again with watch repairer’s delicacy of touch. A joule, a nano-joule a jewel of a choice, a plumpish jerk of a choice. Pen: So forget sequence. And forget the bus. Forget the wall. Then they are pentimentos all. R: Now instead try vast net worven on side, erg erg, erg, with blood-Wiped woof, warped proof debris deciding something amid drift and weft, strength in the torque, aggression in the turn, momentum in the saturated gaze behind the everything that’s here. Something mentioned “the murderous relation of the elements.”

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Pen: It was a man you met, depend on it; that doesn’t sound like you. R: “Murderous” (you’re right, I wouldn’t use), excites me as an indication of intensities. It’s pure passion. The head faints inside its own undone (un)doing blacking out inside the vacuum of page emptied and full. Pen: So are specific words expendable? R: Absolutely not. Words stabilize but do not deny porosity. It’s language swooning over you and thru You hold it tight it’s soft it’s hard Transforms itself On entering you. Pen: Taken a step further, long poem is always an impending failure. After all, desire’s intermittent. R: It will come again. It’s purest pleasure. Endings, failures are not so hidden goals along the way. What would “success” look like in this case? That the patient would live? We write Pindaric all the time looking for victory and working as we fall, so as not to tempt the powers that entered from the first. We hope our heart-ribs do not burst. Pen: This is self-serving, self-dramatizing, even self-penalizing. And rhymed. Try something

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more straightforward like: do you think of the reader when you write? R: I am thinking of you, because you have intruded! You are asking the most exacerbating questions except for those I ask myself. Pen: How do you link penetration and detachment? R: I wish I could lose transcendence utterly (Pen: Really? What a story…) but it is both implausible and impossible. (Pen: doesn’t a grid suspend transcendence?) Why not ask what I do to organize the overload? Dream of a Pen: What are you doing here? Dream of an R: In the real, the same. Sometimes everything is magnetized but not consistently. Pen: Poignant. R: Go away. iii. A long black rat snake (harmless) has coiled under that car parked along the curb and has then to be lured more into the open street from the gutter and attacked by the man with a long shovel who will hit and chop at it, and one sees its spine and the head thrusting as it will try to defend itself, the sadness of a snake out of place crossed our border. Is this what I wanted to say? It is said. Is it what I wanted? It is what came out. The snake is killed.

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How can I possibly indicate what this feels like? Like having no words to make so many works to say almost “without words” for awe of it. It chose me.

The watch I’m wearing has a quirk. I got it from this woman who is dead now.



It keeps on stopping. It’s the second hand gets caught, Some little flaw or piece of dirt.



Whenever I see the time is wrong, I knock it hard to start it up again, hitting the table where I do my work.



November–December 2008

_______________ Notes to Draft 95: Erg. The epigraph is from Wikipedia. The poem was provoked by a letter from a stranger, Shaleigh Kwok, a graduate student in psychology at Temple University, with a research question. The man whom I cite is probably Simon Jarvis, from a conference paper. Poem is on the “line of 19.”

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percival everett Confluence

Let me tell you about my dream, my father said. Two black men walk into a bar and the rosy-faced white barkeep says we don’t serve niggers in here and one of the men points to the other and says but he’s the president and the barkeep says that’s his problem. So the president walks over and gives the barkeep a box and says these are Chilmark chocolates and the barkeep says thank you and reaches over to shake the president’s hand. The president jumps back, says what’s that? And the barkeep says it’s a hand buzzer, a gag, get used to it, asshole. And that was your dream? I asked him. As best I can remember. And I’ve written something for you. He looked at my face. Not to you, but for you. It’s sort of something you would write, if you wrote. Here it is: And yet I continue to live. That was how my father put it, sitting in his wheelchair, the one he could not move around by himself, his right arm useless in his lap, his left nearly so, held up slightly just under his sternum, his new black Velcro-shut shoes uneven on the metal rests, this side of his face, the side near me, the left side, sagging visibly, his voice somewhere between his throat and the back of his tongue. And yet I continue to live. I had suggested that the salt my mother was sprinkling liberally over his food might not be the best thing for his high blood pressure, even though at his age, in his condition, who could really deny the man the simple pleasure of too much salt, but my mother snapped at me, saying, I’ve been taking care of him for a long time. My first thought was how true that was in so many ways, good and bad, and that was when my father spoke, making a joke and a comment and reminding me that in the vessel that looked something like him there was still the man I knew. And yet I continue to live, the right side of his mouth turning up in as much of a smile as his nervestarved face would allow and I laughed with him. My mother had not heard what he had said and even if she had it would have been lost on her, but she reacted to our laughter, and that reaction was what it would have been if she

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had heard his comment and had understood, it would have made no difference, none at all, as she became angry, insecure, and jealous that we were sharing anything. My father was depressed, it took no genius to see that, sitting there all day long in that room in what they call assisted living, pressing his button and waiting for the orderly to come hook him up to a lift to take him to the toilet, pressing his button because the nurses were late getting him ready for bed and he was falling asleep in his chair, pressing his button because there was nothing else to do but press the damn button. I was depressed too, seeing him that way, then leaving to live my own life far away, knowing his condition, knowing his sadness, knowing his boredom, and depressed because I could for days on end live my life without feeling the horror of his daily existence. What I didn’t know was how he could continue to live, sitting there day after day, seeming so weak, feeling so little through his body and feeling so much through his mind, his hand shaking, a crooked finger in the air, when he was trying to tell me something, I could even see it when we were on the phone. How, like this, at seventy-nine could he still be alive? Then during one of my useless visits, visits that I made because I felt I ought to pay, visits I made because I loved him, though I always seemed to make him sadder, he said, his crooked finger resting peacefully on the back of his right hand, What do you think of this? His voice was clearer that it had been in years, the words finding the full theater of his mouth, his eyes sharp on me. I think it’s awful, I told him, because he asked for very little and deserved the truth. You should love your father more, I think he said, the voice again retreating. I asked if he thought I didn’t visit enough and he shook his head, a gesture I didn’t know how to read, leaving me wondering if he meant that I did not visit enough or that I did. Do you want me to visit more? I asked and he looked at me with the eyes I had always known and even though now they were milky and red and weak, they became his again and he said, Just one more time. I flew away from Philadelphia feeling that I understood all too well and trying not to understand anything, trying not see anything. There was an animated inflight movie that I watched without sound and I was struck by just how realistic the whole thing was, the talking animals and stretched faces seem to make perfect sense. I missed my daughter and was glad to be flying home, found some light in the thought that she would be peacefully sleeping when I walked into the house and that I would peek into her room and see her face in the glow of her night-light. And I resolved that I would never put her in the position that I was now in, that I would not let my body fail me to the point that I could not control my own time and space and direction. It had all sneaked up on my father and on me as well, thinking, he and my brother and I, that he would turn a corner and be new in some way, but that corner turned out to be a steep hill and gravity turned out to be as inevitable as we all know it is. And as quickly as

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the thought of my daughter had brought me back to some happiness, my love for her returned me to a rather selfish consideration of my own future, however cloaked in that fake veil of concern for what she would face, and finally back to the matter at hand, the question put to me, the request made by my father. But how? You don’t live in Philadelphia, I told him. Dad, we’re both here in California. It’s called fiction, son. This is the story you would be writing if you were a fiction writer. It’s depressing. You’re damn right it’s depressing. You’re not very bright, are you? What am I supposed to do with this? Finish it. If you kill me, he said, if you kill me, then I will be sad, yes, confused, no doubt, maybe even angry, if you kill me and if you don’t, if you don’t kill me, then I will feel nothing, feel nothing forever, he said to me, and that is a long time, while he held his book that his failed vision would not allow him to read, not the Bible or any bible, as he would never, in the light or in the dark, actually or pretend to read the Bible or any bible, but he held in his lap, useless in his lap, his soiled Principia Mathematica and he spoke of Russell glowingly and admitted he knew little about Whitehead, except that his name was unfortunate. I can’t read this anymore, he said, this book, because my eyes are useless. I hate simile, my father said, have always hated them, even the good ones and there are no good ones, except maybe this one. His useless eyes narrowed and he said, I sit here, useless, like a bad simile, then he said, perhaps I should say any simile, given what I just said, the adjective bad being superfluous. If you kill me, if you do, he said, then I won’t tell, if you don’t tell me that I am telling my story, is what he said. I won’t tell the world that I have no son if you make it so that you have no father, because I cannot walk or even tremble, he said, Russell was a good man, was good to Wittgenstein even though he was a pompous asshole. Well, here’s a game for Ludwig, Pin the Tail on the Narrator and he began with no pause, except for that silence that must exist before one begins, and he said to do away with he said and began with I was born when I was twenty-three or maybe he was born when he was twenty-three, a year much better than the twentysecond during which he tried to kill himself with paracetamol, his liver would never recover completely, his father and he unable to agree, to come together, harmonize or square, his father, doctor father, Doctor Father, unable to fathom why in nineteen-sixty his son would rather fill his head with logic than go to medical school because how would he support himself and a family and then at twenty-three and in medical school he was happy, and no one understood why,

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even if he had told them they would not have understood, happy because he finally understood that the Ontological Argument was sound and yet he knew with all certainty, beyond all doubt that there was not and had never been any god. If there was no god and the argument for his existence was sound, then language was a great failure or deceiver or bad toy or good toy, that it could be wound up or twisted and if he knew that, that it could not be trusted, then he knew where to put it, how to view it, that it was there for his pleasure, that it was not pernicious, for how could a thing so twisted finally mean anything, that it was there for his amusement and that all instances of its employ were for amusement. Therefore, the lovely therefore, as the argument carried, not a good argument like the Ontological Argument, perhaps not even sound or valid, that he could become a doctor, be a husband, be a father and rest, if not easy, but rest knowing that it was all a game, not some silly language game, but a walking, running, tackling, blocking, dodging, hitting, hiding, sliding, diving game where everybody dies before they find out it’s just a game. But he was twenty-three when he understood what he would for the rest of his life refer to as the truth, even with his patients and his colleagues, according to the truth, he would say, according to the truth you have six months to live, according to the truth your wife will leave you, the truth never unraveled, clarified, solved or explained, never defined, never deciphered or illuminated, but the truth, it coming to this, according to the truth A=A is not the same thing as A is A, and may A have mercy upon your pathetic, wretched, tortured, immortal soul, according to the truth. Why don’t you get along with your brother? Well, he left his first wife for an Italian woman. But it wasn’t what you think. Aside from the hair, of which she had an abundance, she looked like Benito Mussolini. I have trouble with him because he then left her for a French woman who looked like the Italian actress Monica Vitti. You found this morally objectionable. Not at all. It made me jealous. And that’s okay. According to the truth, it’s just fine. You know what the problem with life is? It’s that we can write our own stories, but not other people’s. Take you, for example. I have a wholly different story charted for you. Of course you do. There’s no need to get an attitude. In fact, I’ll decide that you don’t have one and so it will be. How’s that? Makes things easier. That’s more like it. I should never have become a doctor. You’re not a doctor.

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Not now. What’s that supposed to mean? I’m an old man. You tell me. Regardless of what you’ve heard, wisdom does not come with age. Wisdom comes from periods of excessive sexual activity. I think I knew that. That’s the you I like. The funny you. Not the you who mopes around wondering how you’re going to take care of the sad business at hand. What I wouldn’t give to get laid. Dad. I know my pecker’s dead. So am I. But I don’t know that, I guess. Tell me, tell me, tell me true, tell me I’m dead, all frozen and blue. Tell me I’m rigid, stiff as a board, and playing croquet on the lawn with the lord. You see I don’t even capitalize god when I’m speaking. Did you just make that up? What the fuck does that matter? If you must know, it’s from Hamlet, act two hundred, scene fifty-nine. You see I have this one finger that works, a shutter finger and so I want a camera, he said to me. Both of his hands, as a matter of fact, worked, along with much of him. I want to start taking pictures he said and I told him that was a great idea and so I bought him a camera, a digital Nikon as all cameras are digital now, he making a mock complaint about wanting film, I want the chemicals and all, he said, but finally made nothing of it, holding the camera in his lap, failing to look through the eye piece or at the little screen and snapped away. I’m chronicling all that I, rather my lap sees, indiscriminate and unjudging, no framing, no pictorial editorializing, just mere reception of, if not reality, then the constituent elements of what we call or choose to call the world. It’s a camera, Dad, I said to him and he nodded, turning the thing over and over as if he’d never seen one before, tilting it up to photograph whatever he thought occupied my space in his so-called world. The physics are still basically the same, he said, computers notwithstanding. Light in, image captured upside down. Every painting has its own lawfulness, its own logic, its own rules. It could have been that I established such logic for my canvases, but I admit that I really do not know. To even consider this away from any singular painting is the cruelty of abstraction, a cutting into the flesh of reality, for as I abstract toward some understanding I necessarily lean toward some example and as I so lean the whole foundation of my argument topples over under the weight of the sheer inadequacy of my example. No one thing can represent all things. Not even within a class it turns out. This may or may not be true. The hardest thing for me was the judgment that there was no need for any one of my paintings to

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exist, their own inherent rules of logic notwithstanding. I would argue to myself that my expression was but a small participation in the human attempt to move beyond the base and vulgar, purely animal (as if that were a bad thing) and short existence on this planet. And I would do this all the while attempting to commune with, rejoin with, celebrate the base, vulgar and pure animal part of myself. Just as modernism’s logical conclusion has to be socialism while ironically relying on and feeding on the construction of an elite class, so my paintings and the art of my time could only pretend to culminate in anarchy while, strangely enough not ironically, finding it impossible to exist without markets and well-defined cliques and order. I have finally circled about, hovered, loitered enough to recognize that my only criterion for the worth of a painting is whether I like looking at it. I no longer say that this painting is good or bad, it might be sentimental, it might be bright, it might be muddy, it might be a cliché, but it is neither good nor bad. Do I like looking at it? That is all I ask? That is all I now answer. I walk the hills behind my house happy because I have learned this. I learned it as I turned my life into a camera obscura, putting a pinhole in one side of my world, letting the scene outside come to me upside down but with accurate perspective. I was feeling rather smug thinking this and enjoying a cup of tea when I saw a head bounce by a window of my studio. I stepped outside. There was a young woman standing in my drive. She was of medium height, a little heavy, her reddish hair in short curls. Gregory Lang? I nodded. My name is Meg Caro, she said. She stepped forward to shake my hand. What can I do for you? You’re the painter, right? Some say. I’m a painter, too. At least I want to be. I want to be your apprentice. She stood straighter. This is not the middle ages, I said. Your intern then. I’ve never seen your work. I don’t know you. You might be dangerous. For all you know, I’m dangerous. I don’t take on apprentices or interns. I have some photographs of my paintings, she said. I don’t care. I’m flattered, but I don’t care. Please, look at them. I looked down the dirt lane and wished that my wife would drive in, but she wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours. What will it hurt to look? she asked. You say your name is Meg?

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Meg Caro. How old are you, Meg Caro? Twenty-two, she said. That’s old enough to know better than visit a strange man all alone. I know. Where are you from, Meg Caro? Miami. Let me see the pictures. She opened her backpack and handed me a ring binder. I opened it, but couldn’t see. I’ll have to get my glasses, I said. They’re on your head. Thanks. I looked at the pictures of her paintings. These are pretty good. I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. That should help me like the paintings more? No, I just thought. I’d stepped on her a bit, so I said, I like the work. Of course, you can tell only so much from photos. The paintings were young, not uninteresting and nice enough to look at. Photos are so flat. Oh, I know, she said. I studied her broad face for a second. Come in here, I said. I led her into my studio. See that big painting on the wall. I had a ten by twelve foot canvas nailed up. Tell me what you think. I like parts of it, she said. It reminds me of another of your paintings. That really big yellow one in Philadelphia. Somehow this seems like two paintings. I stood next to her and stared at the work. The under painting seems somehow warmer on the left side. Is there some blue under there? Maybe some Indian yellow. She stepped back, leaned back. Her movements were confident, perhaps a little cocky. Would you like some tea? Please. I went to the sink and put more water in my little battered electric pot. I glanced back to see that the woman was walking around the room, looking at drawings and notes and canvases. What is this painting about? I studied her young face and looked at the canvas until she turned to view it again with me. This painting is about blue and yellow. Sometimes yellow and blue. Do you think it’s about more than that? She didn’t say anything. Are you always so neat? she asked. I didn’t know I was. I’d ask you what kind of tea you’d like, but I have only one kind.

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That’s fine. It’s Lipton. That’s fine. Are your parents still in Miami? I asked. My mother is. Does she know you’re here? I’m twenty-two years old. I forgot. I poured water into a mug and dropped in a bag, handed it to her. She took it and blew on it. She told me she really loved my work. I thanked her and together we looked at what was on my walls and floor. Like I said, I don’t have a need for an intern. You wouldn’t have to pay me, she said. I didn’t even think of that, I told her. There’s really nothing around here for you to help me with. I just want to be around you while you work. As flattering as that is, I find it a little weird. I looked at her and became nervous, if not a little frightened. Maybe you should leave now. Okay. I didn’t mean to come off as a stalker. All right, I believe you, but you still have to leave. I understand. Will you think about it, though? She put her mug on the table and started to the door. Thanks for stopping by, I said. I walked out behind her and made sure she walked down the drive and past the house. She wasn’t the first person to make the walk from the road. Usually it was men looking for work and I gave it to them when there was something to do, but a young woman coming up seemed different. I could imagine my wife coming home to find that I had taken on an apprentice. I would tell Claire about her when she came up and she would listen and I would tell her that I had been uncomfortable and she would tell me I was employing a double standard, that I would not have had the same reaction if she had been he. I would agree with her and then say the only true thing left to say, Nonetheless. Is this supposed to be my story? The story I’m supposed to write or would write if I were a writer? My, but you are dumb. What is this? Who is Gregory Lang? You’re Gregory Lang. This is what you would write or should write if you wrote. Like I said. I don’t write. Who is Meg Caro? I imagine she is the daughter you don’t know you have. I see. Why don’t you just admit that you’re working again?

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I don’t know. Maybe I am working again? Tell everybody I’m workin’ again. Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Lord, have mercy, I’m workin’ again. If I could, I’d get up and do a little jig to that. I love that line: Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Did you know that a camera is just a box with a little hole in it? As a matter of fact, I did know that. Dad, why all this writing for me? Why don’t you write it yourself? I’m an eighty-year-old man. What do I have to say to those assholes out there? And people my age, well all they read is prescription labels and the obituaries. That’s not quite true. Nor is it quite false. Why do they print the obits so small? Listen, you’ve got a sharp, a strong mind. Try wrapping your fist around that in the morning. Dad, you realize that I’m dead. Yes, son, I do. But I wasn’t aware that you knew it.

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george saunders The Wavemaker Falters

Halfway up the mountain it’s the Center for Wayward Nuns, full of sisters and other religious personnel who’ve become doubtful. Once a few of them came down to our facility in stern suits and swam cautiously. The singing from up there never exactly knocks your socks off. It’s very conditional singing, probably because of all the doubt. A young nun named Sister Viv came unglued there last fall and we gave her a free season pass to come down and meditate near our simulated Spanish trout stream whenever she wanted. The head nun said Viv was from Idaho and sure enough the stream seemed to have a calming effect. One day she’s sitting cross-legged a few feet away from a Dumpster housed in a granite boulder made of a resilient synthetic material. Ned, Tony, and Gerald as usual are dressed as Basques. In Orientation they learned a limited amount of actual Basque so that they can lapse into it whenever Guests are within earshot. Sister Viv’s a regular so they don’t even bother. I look over to say something supportive and optimistic to her and then I think oh jeez, not another patron death on my hands. She’s going downstream fast and her habit’s ballooning up. The fake Basques are standing there in a row with their mouths open. So I dive in and drag her out. It’s not very deep and the bottom’s rubbermatted. None of the Basques are bright enough to switch off the Leaping Trout Subroutine however, so twice I get scraped with little fiberglass fins. Finally I get her out on the pine needles and she comes to and spits in my face and says I couldn’t possibly know the darkness of her heart. Try me, I say. She crawls away and starts bashing her skull against a tree trunk. The trees are synthetic, too. But still. I pin her arms behind her and drag her to the Main Office, where they chain her weeping to the safe. A week later she runs amok in the nun eating hall and stabs a cafeteria worker to death. So the upshot of it all is more guilt for me, Mr. Guilt.

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Once a night Simone puts on the mermaid tail and lip-synchs on a raft in the wave pool while I play spotlights over her and broadcast “Button Up Your Overcoat.” Tonight as I’m working the lights I watch Leon, Subquadrant Manager, watch Simone. As he watches her his wet mouth keeps moving. Every time I accidentally light up the Chlorine Shed the Guests start yelling at me. Finally I stop watching Leon watch her and try to concentrate on not getting written up for crappy showmanship. I can’t stand Leon. On the wall of his office he’s got a picture of himself Jell-Owrestling a traveling celebrity Jell-O-wrestler. That’s pure Leon. Plus he had her autograph it. First he tried to talk her into dipping her breasts in ink and doing an imprint but she said no way. My point is, even traveling celebrity Jell-Owrestlers have more class than Leon. He follows us into Costuming and chats up Simone while helping her pack away her tail. Do I tell him to get lost? No. Do I knock him into a planter to remind him just whose wife Simone is? No. I go out and wait for her by Loco Logjam. I sit on a turnstile. The Italian lights in the trees are nice. The night crew’s hard at work applying a wide range of commercial chemicals and cleaning hair balls from the filter. Some exiting guests are brawling in the traffic jam on the access road. Through a federal program we offer discount coupons to the needy, so sometimes our clientele is borderline. Once some bikers trashed the row of boutiques, and once Leon interrupted a gang guy trying to put hydrochloric acid in the Main Feeder. Finally Simone’s ready and we walk over to Employee Underground Parking. Bald Murray logs us out while trying to look down Simone’s blouse. On the side of the road a woman’s sitting in a shopping cart, wearing a grubby chemise. For old time’s sake I put my hand in Simone’s lap. Promises, promises, she says. At the roadcut by the self-storage she makes me stop so she can view all the interesting stratification. She’s never liked geology before. Leon takes geology at the community college and is always pointing out what’s glacial till and what’s not, so I suspect there’s a connection. We get into a little fight about him and she admires his self-confidence to my face. I ask her is that some kind of a putdown. She’s only saying, she says, that in her book a little boldness goes a long way. She asks if I remember the time Leon chased off the frat boy who kept trying to detach her mermaid hairpiece. Where was I? Why didn’t I step in? Is she my girl or what ?

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I remind her that I was busy at the controls. It gets very awkward and quiet. Me at the controls is a sore subject. Nothing’s gone right for us since the day I crushed the boy with the wavemaker. I haven’t been able to forget his little white trunks floating out of the inlet port all bloody. Who checks protective-screen mounting screws these days? Not me. Leon does when he wavemakes of course. It’s in the protocol. That’s how he got to be Sub­quadrant Manager, attention to detail. Leon ‘s been rising steadily since we went through Orientation together, and all told he’s saved three Guests and I’ve crushed the shit out of one. The little boy I crushed was named Clive. By all accounts he was a sweet kid. Sometimes at night I sneak over there to do chores in secret and pray for forgiveness at his window. I’ve changed his dad‘s oil and painted all their window frames and taken the burrs off their Labrador. If anybody comes out while I’m working I hide in the shrubs. The sister who wears cat-eyed glasses even in this day and age thinks it‘s Clive’s soul doing the mystery errands and lately she’s been leaving him notes. Simone says I’m not doing them any big favor by driving their daughter nuts. But I can ‘t help it. I feel so bad. We pull up to our unit and I see that once again the Peretti twins have drawn squashed boys all over our windows with soap. Their dad’s a bruiser. No way I’m forcing a confrontation. In the driveway Simone asks did I do my résumé at lunch. No, I tell her, I had a serious pH difficulty. Fine, she says, make waves the rest of your life. The day it happened, an attractive all-girl glee club was lying around on the concrete in Kawabunga Kave in Day-Glo suits, looking for all the world like a bunch of blooms. The president and sergeant at arms were standing with brown ankles in the shallow, favorably comparing my Attraction to real surf. To increase my appeal I had the sea chanteys blaring. I was operating at the prescribed wave frequency setting but in my lust for the glee club had the magnitude pegged. Leon came by and told me to turn the music down. So I turned it up. Consequently I never heard Clive screaming or Leon shouting at me to kill the waves. My

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first clue was looking out the Control Hut porthole and seeing people bolting towards the ladders, choking and with bits of Clive all over them. Guests were weeping while wiping their torsos on the lawn. In the Handicapped Section the chaired guys had their eyes shut tight and their heads turned away as the gore sloshed towards them. The ambulatories were clambering over the ropes, screaming for their physical therapists. Leon hates to say he told me so but does it all the time anyway. He constantly reminds me of how guilty I am by telling me not to feel guilty and asking about my counseling. My counselor is Mr. Poppet, a gracious and devout man who’s always tightening his butt cheeks when he thinks no one’s looking. Mr. Poppet makes me sit with my eyes closed and repeat, “A boy is dead because of me,” for half an hour for fifty dollars. Then for another fifty dollars he makes me sit with my eyes closed again and repeat, “Still, I’m a person of considerable value,” for half an hour. When the session’s over I go out into the bright sun like a rodent that lives in the earth, blinking and rubbing my eyes, and Mr. Poppet stands in the doorway, clapping for me and intoning the time of day of our next appointment. The sessions have done me good. Clive doesn’t come into my room at night all hacked up anymore. He comes in pretty much whole. He comes in and sits on my bed and starts talking to me. Since his death he’s been hanging around with dead kids from other epochs. One night he showed up swearing in Latin. Another time with a wild story about an ancient African culture that used radio waves to relay tribal myths. He didn’t use those exact words of course. Even though he’s dead, he’s still basically a kid. When he tries to be scary he gets it all wrong. He can’t moan for beans. He’s scariest when he does real kid things, like picking his nose and wiping it on the side of his sneaker. He tries to be polite but he’s pretty mad about the future I denied him. Tonight’s subject is what the Mexico City trip with the perky red-haired tramp would have been like. He dwells on the details of their dinner in the catacombs and describes how her freckles would have looked as daylight streamed in through the cigarette-burned magenta curtains. Wistfully he says he sure would like to have tasted the sauce she would have said was too hot to be believed as they crossed the dirt road lined with begging cripples. “Forgive me,” I say in tears. “No,” he says, also in tears. Near dawn he sighs, tucks in the parts of his body that have been gradually

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leaking out over the course of the night, pats my neck with his cold little palm, and tells me to have a nice day. Then he fades, producing farts with a wet hand under his armpit. Simone sleeps through the whole thing, making little puppy sounds and pushing her rear against my front to remind me even in her sleep of how long it’s been. But you try it. You kill a nice little kid via neglect and then enjoy having sex. If you can do it you're demented. Simone’s an innocent victim. Sometimes I think I should give her her space and let her explore various avenues so her personal development won’t get stymied. But I could never let her go. I’ve loved her too long. Once in high school I waited three hours in a locker in the girls’ locker room to see her in her panties. Every part of me cramped up, but when she finally came in and showered I resolved to marry her. We once dedicated a whole night to pretending I was a household invader who tied her up. In my shorts I stood outside our sliding-glass door shouting, “Meter man!” At dawn or so I made us eggs but was so high on her I ruined our only pan by leaving it on the burner while I kept running back and forth to look at her nude. What I’m saying is, we go way back. I hope she’ll wait this thing out. If only Clive would resume living and start dating some nice-smelling cheerleader who has no idea who Benny Goodman is. Then I’d regain my strength and win her back. But no. Instead I wake at night and Simone’s either looking over at me with hatred or whisking her privates with her index finger while thinking of God-knows-who, although I doubt very much it’s me. AT NOON NEXT day a muscleman shows up with four beehives on a dolly. This is Leon’s stroke of genius for the Kiper wedding. The Kipers are the natural type. They don’t want to eat anything that ever lived or buy any product that even vaguely supports notorious third-world regimes. They asked that we run a check on the ultimate source of the tomatoes in our ketchup and the union status of the group that makes our floaties. They’ve opted to recite their vows in the Waterfall Grove. They’ve hired a blind trumpeter to canoe by and a couple of illegal aliens to retrieve the rice so no birds will choke. At ten Leon arrives, proudly bearing a large shrimp­shaped serving vat full of bagels coated with fresh honey. Over the weekend he studied honey extraction techniques at the local library. He’s always calling himself a Renaissance man but the way he says it it rhymes with “rent-a­-dance fan.” He puts down the vat

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and takes off the lid. Just then the bride’s grandmother falls out of her chair and rolls down the bank. She stops faceup at the water’s edge and her wig tips back. One of the rice-retrievers wanders up and addresses her as señora. I look around. I’m the nearest Host. According to the manual I’m supposed to initiate CPR or face a stiff payroll deduction. The week I took the class the dummy was on the fritz. Of course. I straddle her and timidly start chest-pumping. I can feel her bra clasp under the heel of my hand. Nothing happens. I keep waiting for her to throw up on me or come to life. Then Leon vaults over the shrimp-shaped vat. He shoos me away, checks her pulse, and begins the Heimlich maneuver. “When your victim is elderly,” he says loudly and remonstratively, “it’s natural to assume heart attack. Natural, but, in this case, possibly deadly.” After a few more minutes of Heimlich he takes a pen from his pocket and drives it into her throat. Almost immediately she sits up and readjusts her wig, with the pen still sticking out. Leon kisses her forehead and makes her lie back down, then gives the thumbs-up. The crowd bursts into applause. I sneak off and sit for about an hour on the floor of the Control Hut. I keep hoping it’ll blow up or a nuclear war will start so I’ll die. But I don’t die. So I go over and pick up my wife. Leon wants to terminate me but Simone has a serious chat with him about our mortgage and he lets me stay on in Towel Distribution and Collection. Actually it’s a relief. Nobody can get hurt. The worst that could happen is maybe a yeast infection. It’s a relief until I go to his office one day with the Usage Statistics and hear moans from inside and hide behind a soda machine until Simone comes out looking flushed and happy. I want to jump out and confront her but I don’t. Then Leon comes out and I want to jump out and confront him but I don’t. What I do is wait behind the soda machine until they leave, then climb out a window and hitchhike home. I get a ride from a guy who sells and services Zambonis. He tells me to confront her forcefully and watch her fall to pieces. If she doesn’t fall to pieces I should beat her. When I get home I confront her forcefully. She doesn’t fall to pieces. Not only does she not deny it, she says it’s going to continue no matter what. She says I’ve been absent too long. She says there’s more to Leon than meets the eye.

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I think of beating her, and my heart breaks, and I give up on everything. Clive shows up at ten. As he keeps me awake telling me what his senior prom would have been like. Simone calls Leon’s name in her sleep and mutters something about his desk calendar leaving a paper cut on her neck. Clive follows me into the kitchen, wanting to know what a nosegay is. Outside, all the corn in the cornfield is bent over and blowing. The moon comes up over Delectable Videos like a fat man withdrawing himself from a lake. I fall asleep at the counter. The phone rings at three. It’s Clive’s father, saying he’s finally shaken himself from his stupor and is coming over to kill me. I tell him I’ll leave the door open. Clive’s been in the bathroom imagining himself some zits. Even though he’s one of the undead I have a lot of affection for him. When he comes out I tell him he’ll have to go, and that I’ll see him tomorrow. He whines a bit but finally fades away. His dad pulls up in a Land Cruiser and gets out with a big gun. He comes through the door in an alert posture and sees me sitting on the couch. I can tell he’s been drinking. “I don’t hate you,” he says. “But I can’t have you living on this earth while my son isn’t.” “I understand,” I say. Looking sheepish, he steps over and puts the gun to my head. The sound of our home’s internal ventilation system is suddenly wondrous. The mole on his cheek possesses grace. Children would have been nice. I close my eyes and wait. Then I urinate myself. Then I wait some more. I wait and wait. Then I open my eyes. He’s gone and the front door’s wide open. Jesus, I think, embarrassing; I wet myself and was ready to die. Then I go for a brisk walk. I hike into the hills and sit in a graveyard. The stars are blinking like cats’ eyes and burned blood is pouring out of the slaughterhouse chimney. My crotch is cold with the pee and the breeze. The moon goes behind a cloud and six pale forms start down from the foothills. At first I think they’re ghosts but they’re

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only starving pronghorn come down to lick salt from the headstones. I sit there trying to write Simone off. No more guys ogling her in public and no more dippy theories on world hunger. Then I think of her and Leon watching the test pattern together nude and sweaty and I moan and double over with dread, and a doe bolts away in alarm. A storm rolls in over the hills and a brochure describing a portrait offer gets plastered across my chest. Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my tom and black heart rebels, saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go.

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robert coover The Return of the Dark Children

When the first black rats reappeared, scurrying shadowily along the river’s edge and through the back alleyways, many thought the missing children would soon follow. Some believed the rats might be the children under a spell, so they were not at first killed, but were fed and pampered, not so much out of parental affection, as out of fear. For, many legends had grown up around the lost generation of children, siphoned from the town by the piper so many years ago. Some thought that the children had, like the rats, been drowned by the piper, and that they now returned from time to time to haunt the town that would not, for parsimony, pay their ransom. Others believed that the children had been bewitched, transformed into elves or werewolves or a kind of living dead. When the wife of one of the town councilors hanged herself, it was rumored it was because she’d been made pregnant by her own small son, appearing to her one night in her sleep as a toothless hollow-eyed incubus. Indeed, all deaths, even those by the most natural of causes, were treated by the citizenry with suspicion, for what could be a more likely cause of heart failure or malfunction of the inner organs than an encounter with one’s child as a member of the living dead? At first, such sinister speculations were rare, heard only among the resentful childless. When the itinerant rat-killer seduced the youngsters away that day with his demonic flute, all the other townsfolk could think about was rescue and revenge. Mothers wept and cried out the names of their children, calling them back, while fathers and grandfathers armed themselves and rushed off into the hills, chasing trills and the echoes of trills. But nothing more substantial was ever found, not even a scrap of clothing or a dropped toy; it was as though they had never been, and as the weeks became months and the months years, hope faded and turned to resentment — so much love misspent! — and then eventually to dread. New children meanwhile were born, replacing the old; it was indeed a time of great fertility for there was a vacuum to be filled, and as these new children grew, a soberer generation than that which preceded it, there was no longer any place, in homes or hearts, for the old ones, nor for their lightsome ways. The new children were, like their predecessors and their elders,

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plump and happy, much loved, well fed, and overly indulged in all things, but they were more closely watched and there was no singing or dancing. The piper had instilled in the townsfolk a terror of all music, and it was banned forever by decree. All musical instruments had been destroyed. Humming a tune in public was an imprisonable offense and children, rarely spanked, were spanked for it. Always, it was associated with the children who had left and the chilling ungrateful manner of their leaving: they did not even look back. But it was as though they had not really quite gone away after all, for as the new children came along the old ones seemed to return as omnipresent shadows of the new ones, clouding the nursery and playground, stifling laughter and spoiling play, and they became known then, the lost ones, the shadowy ones, as the dark children. In time, all ills were blamed on them. If an animal sickened and died, if milk soured or a house burned, if a child woke screaming from a nightmare, if the river overflowed its banks, if money went missing from the till or the beer went flat or one’s appetite fell off, it was always the curse of the dark children. The new children were warned: Be good or the dark children will get you! They were not always good, and sometimes, as it seemed, the dark children did get them. And now the newest menace: the return of the rats. The diffident pampering of these rapacious creatures soon ceased. As they multiplied, disease broke out, as it had so many years before. The promenade alongside the river that ran through the town, once so popular, now was utterly forsaken except for the infestation of rats, the flower gardens lining the promenade trampled by their little feet and left filthy and untended, for those who loitered there ran the risk of being eaten alive, as happened to the occasional pet gone astray. Their little pellets were everywhere and in everything. Even in one’s shoes and bed and tobacco tin. Once again the city fathers gathered in emergency council and declared their determination to exterminate the rats, whether they were bewitched dark children or not; and once again the rats proved too much for them. They were hunted down with guns and poisons and burned in mountainous heaps, their sour ashes blanketing the town, graying the laundry and spoiling the sauces, but their numbers seemed not to diminish. If anything, there were more of them than ever seen before, and they just kept coming. But when one rash councilor joked that it was maybe time to pay the piper, he was beaten and hounded out of town. For, if the dark children were a curse upon the town, they were still their own, whereas that sorcerer who had lured them away had been like a mysterious force from another world, a diabolical intruder who had forever disturbed the peace of the little community. He was not something to laugh about. The piper, lean and swarthy, had been dressed patchily in too many colors, wore chains

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and bracelets and earrings, painted his bony face with ghoulish designs, smiled too much and too wickedly and with teeth too white. His language, not of this town, was blunt and uncivil and seemed to come, not from his throat, but from some hollow place inside. Some seemed to remember that he had no eyes, others that he did have eyes but the pupils were golden. He ate sparely, if at all (some claimed to have seen him nibbling at the rats), and, most telling of all, he was never seen to relieve himself. All this in retrospect, of course, for at the time, the townsfolk, vastly comforted by the swift and entertaining eradication of the rats, saw him as merely an amusing street musician to be tolerated and, if not paid all that he impertinently demanded (there had been nothing illegal about this, no contracts had been signed), at least applauded — the elders, like the children, in short, fatally beguiled by the fiend. No, should he return, he would be attacked by all means available and if possible torn apart, limb from limb, his flute rammed down his throat, the plague of rats be damned. He who placed himself beyond the law would be spared by none. Left to their own resources, however, the townsfolk were no match for the rats. For all their heroic dedication, the vermin continued to multiply, the disease spread and grew more virulent, and the sky darkened with the sickening ash, now no longer of rats only, but sometimes of one’s neighbors as well, and now and then a child or two. Having lost one generation of children, the citizenry were determined not to lose another, and did all they could to protect the children, their own and others, not only from the rats but also from the rumored dark children, for there had been reported sightings of late, mostly by night, of strange naked creatures with piebald flesh moving on all fours through the hills around. They had the form of children, those who claimed to have seen them said, but they were not children. Some said they had gray fleshy wings and could hover and fly with the darting speed of a dragonfly. Parents now boiled their children’s food and sterilized their drink, policed their bedrooms and bathrooms and classrooms, never let them for a single minute be alone. Even so, now and then, one of them would disappear, spreading fear and consternation throughout the town. But now, when a child vanished, no search parties went out looking for it as they’d done the first time, for the child was known to be gone as were the dead gone, all children gone or perished spoken of, not as dead, but taken. The city elders, meeting in continuous emergency session, debated the building of an impregnable wall around the town to keep the dark children out and hopefully to dam the tide of invading rats as well. This had a certain popular appeal, especially among the parents, but objections were raised. If every able­ bodied person in town worked day and night at this task, it was argued, it would still take so long that the children might all be gone before it could be finished:

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then, they’d just be walling themselves in with the rats. And who knew what made a wall impregnable to the likes of the dark children? Weren’t they, if they really existed, more like phantoms than real creatures for whom brick and stone were no obstruction? Moreover, the building of such a wall would drain the town of all its energy and resources and close it off to trade, it would be the end of the era of prosperity, if what they were suffering now could still be called prosperity, and not only the children could be lost but also the battle against the rats which was already proving very taxing for the community. But what else can we do? We must be more vigilant! And so special volunteer units were created to maintain a twenty-four-hour watch on all children. The playgrounds were walled off and sealed with double locks, a compromise with the proponents of the wall-building, and all the children’s spaces were kept brightly lit to chase away the shadows, even as they slept at night. Shadows that seemed to move by themselves were shot at. Some observed that whenever a child disappeared a pipe could be heard, faintly, just before. Whether this was true or not, all rumors of such flaunting of the music laws were pursued with full vigor, and after many false alarms one piper was at last chased down: a little boy of six, one of the new children, blowing on a wooden recorder. He was a charming and dutiful boy, much loved by all, but he had to be treated as the demon he now was, and so, like any diseased animal, he and his pipe were destroyed. His distraught parents admitted to having hidden away the childish recorder as a souvenir at the time of outlawing musical instruments, and the child somehow, inexplicably, found it. The judges did not think it was inexplicable. There were calls for the death penalty, but the city fathers were not cruel or vindictive and understood that the parents had been severely punished by the loss of their child, so they were given lengthy prison sentences instead. No one protested. The prison itself was so rat-infested that even short sentences amounted to the death penalty anyway. The dark children now were everywhere, or seemed to be. If the reports of the frightened citizenry were to be believed, the hills about now swarmed with the little batlike phantoms and there was daily evidence of their presence in the town itself. Pantries were raided, flour spilled, eggs broken, there was salt in the sugar, urine in the teapot, obscene scribblings on the school chalkboard and on the doors of closed shops whose owners had taken ill or died. Weary parents returned from work and rat-hunting to find all the pictures on their walls tipped at odd angles, bird cages opened, door handles missing. That these sometimes turned out to be pranks by their own mischievous children was not reassuring for one had to assume they’d fallen under the spell of the dark children, something they could not even tell anyone about for fear of losing their children to the severity of the laws of vigilance now in place. Whenever they attempted

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to punish them, their children would cry out: It’s not my fault! The dark children made me do it! All right, all right, but shush now, no talk of that! There were terrible accidents which were not accidents. A man, socializing with friends, left the bar one night to return home and made a wrong turn, stumbled instead into the ruined gardens along the promenade. One who had seen him passing by said it was as if his arm were being tugged by someone or something unseen, and he looked stricken with terror. His raw carcass was found the next morning at the edge of the river. One rat­-hunter vanished as though consumed entirely. Another was shot dead by a fellow hunter, and in two different cases, rat poison, though kept under lock and key, turned up in food; in both instances, a spouse died, but the partners were miraculously spared. When asked if the killing was an accident, the hunter who had shot his companion said it certainly was not, a mysterious force had gripped his rifle barrel and moved it just as he was firing it. And things didn’t seem to be where they once were any more. Especially at night. Furniture slid about and knocked one over, walls seemed to swing out and strike one, stairsteps dropped away halfway down. Of course, people were drinking a lot more than usual, reports may have been exaggerated, but once-reliable certainties were dissolving. The dark children remained largely invisible for all that the town felt itself swarming with them, though some people claimed to have seen them running with the rats, swinging on the belfry rope, squatting behind chimney pots on rooftops. With each reported sighting, they acquired new features. They were said to be child-sized but adult in proportions, with long arms they sometimes used while running; they could scramble up walls and hug the ground and disappear right into it. They were gaudily colored and often had luminous eyes. Wings were frequently mentioned, and occasionally tails. Sometimes these were short and furry, other times more long and ratlike. Money from the town treasury disappeared and one of the councilors as well, and his wife, though hysterical with grief and terror, was able to describe in startling detail the bizarre horned and winged creatures who came to rob the town and carry him off. Ah! We didn’t know they had horns. Oh yes! With little rings on the tips! Or bells! They were glittery all over as if dressed in jewels! She said she was certain that one of them was her own missing son, stolen away by the piper all those many years ago. I looked into his eyes and pleaded with him not to take his poor father away, she wept, but his eyes had no pupils, only tiny flickering flames where the pupils should be! They asked her to write out a complete profile of the dark children, but then she disappeared, too. When one of the volunteer guards watching children was charged with fondling a little five-year-old girl, he insisted that, no, she was being sexually assaulted by one of the dark children and he was only doing all he could to get the hellish creature off her. The child

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was confused but seemed to agree with this. But what happened to the dark child? I don’t know. The little girl screamed, a crowd came running, the dark child faded away in my grasp. All I managed to hold on to was this, he said, holding up a small gold earring. A common ornament. Most children wear them and lose them daily. I tore it out of his nose, he said. He was found innocent but removed from the unit and put on probation. In his affidavit, he also mentioned horns, and was able to provide a rough sketch of the dark child’s genitalia, which resembled those of a goat. The new children pretended not to see the dark children, or perhaps in their innocence, they didn’t see them, yet overheard conversations among them suggested they knew more than they were telling, and when they were silent, they sometimes seemed to be listening intently, smiling faintly. The dark children turned up in their rope-skipping rhymes and childish riddles (When is water not wet? When a dark child’s shadow makes it…), and when they chose up sides for games of ball or tag, they tended always to call one of their teams the dark children. The other was usually the hunters. The small children cried if they couldn’t be on the dark children’s team. When a child was taken, his or her name was whispered among the children like a kind of incantation, which they said was for good luck. The church organist, unemployed since the piper went through and reduced to gravetending, a task that had somewhat maddened him, retained enough presence of mind to notice that the familiar racket of the children’s playground games, though still composed of the usual running feet and high-pitched squealing, was beginning to evolve into a peculiar musical pattern, reminiscent of the piper’s songs. He transcribed some of this onto paper, which was studied in private chambers by the city council, where, for the first time in many years, surreptitious humming was heard. And at home, in their rooms, when the children played with their dolls and soldiers and toy castles, the dark children with their mysterious ways now always played a part in their little dramas. One could hear them talking to the dark children, the dark children speaking back in funny squeaky voices that quavered like a ghost’s. Even if it was entirely invented, an imaginary world made out of scraps overheard from parents and teachers, it was the world they chose to live in now, rather than the one provided by their loving families, which was, their parents often felt, a kind of betrayal, lack of gratitude, lost trust. And, well, just not fair. One day, one of the rat-hunters, leaning on his rifle after a long day’s work and smoking his old black pipe, peered down into the infested river and allowed that it seemed to him that whenever a child vanished or died, the rat population decreased. Those with him stared down into that same river and wondered: Was this possible? A rat census was out of the question, but certain patterns in their movements could be monitored. There was a wooden footbridge, for

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example, which the rats used for crossing back and forth or just for cavorting on, and one could at any moment make a rough count of the rats on it. At the urging of the hunters, these tabulations were taken by the town clerk at dawn, midday, and twilight for several days, and the figures were found to be quite similar from day to day, no matter how many were killed. Then, a little girl failed to return from a game of hide-and-seek (the law banning this game or any game having to do with concealment was passing through the chambers that very day), and the next day the rat numbers were found to have dropped. Not substantially perhaps, one would not have noticed the change at a glance, but it was enough to make the bridge count mandatory by law. A child, chasing a runaway puppy, fell into the turbulent river and was taken and the numbers dropped again, then or about then. Likewise when another child disappeared (he left a note, saying he was going where the dark children were to ask if they could all be friends) and a fourth died from the diseases brought by the rats. Another emergency session of the council was called which all adult members of the community were invited to attend. No one stayed away. The choice before them was stark but, being all but unthinkable, was not at first enunciated. The parents, everyone knew, were adamant in not wanting it spoken aloud at all. There were lengthy prolegomena, outlining the history of the troubles from the time of the piper’s visit to the present, including reports from the health and hospital services, captains of the rat-hunting teams, the business community, the volunteer vigilance units, school and toilet monitors, the town clerk, and artists who provided composite sketches of the dark children based on reported sightings. They did not look all that much like children of any kind, but that was to be expected. A mathematician was brought in to explain in precise technical detail the ratio between the disappearance or death of children and the decrease in the rat population. He was convincing, though not well understood. Someone suggested a break for tea, but this was voted down. There was a brief flurry of heated discussion when a few parents expressed their doubts as to the dark children’s actual existence, suggesting they might merely be the fantasy of an understandably hysterical community. This argument rose and faded quickly, as it had few adherents. Finally, there was nothing to do but confront it: their choice was between letting the children go, or living — and dying — with the rats. Of course it was unconscionable that the children should be sacrificed to save their elders, or even one another. That was the opinion vehemently expressed by parents, teachers, clergy, and many of the other ordinary townsfolk. This was not a decision one could make for others, and the children were not yet of an age to make it for themselves. The elders nodded solemnly. All had to acknowledge the rightness of this view. Furthermore, the outcome, based on speculative projections from these preliminary observations, was just

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too uncertain, the admirable mathematics notwithstanding, for measures so merciless and irreversible. A more thorough study was required. As for the bridge counts themselves, seasonal weather changes were proposed as a more likely explanation of the decline in the rat population — if in fact there had been such a decline. The numbers themselves were disputed, and alternative, unofficial, less decisive tabulations made by others, worried parents mostly, were presented to the assembly and duly considered. And even if the official counts were true, a teacher at the school argued, the vermin population was probably decreasing normally, for all such plagues have their tides and ebbs. With patience, it will all be over. The data, however, did not support this view. Even those sympathetic with them understood that the parents and teachers were not trying to engage in a reasoned search for truth, but were desperately seeking to persuade. The simple facts were that the town was slowly dying from its infestation of rats, and whenever a child was taken the infestation diminished; everyone knew this, even the parents. The data was admittedly sketchy, but time was short. A prolonged study might be a fatal misjudgment. A doctor described in uncompromising detail the current crisis in the hospitals, their staffs diseaseriddled, patients sleeping on the floors, medications depleted, the buildings themselves aswarm with rats, and the hunters reminded the assembly that their own untiring efforts had not been enough alone to get the upper hand against the beasts, though many of them were parents, too, and clearly ambivalent about their testimony. Those who had lost family members to the sickness and risked losing more, their own lives included, spoke bluntly: If the children stay, they will all die of the plague like the rest of us, so it’s not as though we would be sacrificing them to a fate worse than they’d suffer here. But if they go, some of us might be saved. A compromise was proposed: Lots could be drawn and the children could be released one by one until the rats disappeared. That way, some might be spared. But that would not be fair, others argued, for why should some parents be deprived of their children when others were not? Wouldn’t that divide the community irreparably forever? Anyway, the question might be purely academic. Everyone had noticed during the mathematician’s presentation the disconcerting relationship between the rate of decrease of the rat population and the number of children remaining in the town. They want the children, shouted a fierce old man from the back of the hall, so let them have them! We can always make more! Pandemonium broke out. Shouts and accusations. You think it’s so easy! cried one. Where are your own? It’s not the making, cried others, it’s the raising! They were shouted down and they shouted back. People were called murderers and cowards and egoists, ghouls and nihilists. Parents screamed that if their

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children had to die they would die with them, and their neighbors yelled: Good riddance! Through it all, there was the steady pounding of the gavel, and finally, when order was restored, the oldest member of the council who was also judged to be the wisest, silent until now, was asked to give his opinion. His chair was wheeled to the illumined center of the little platform at the front of the hall whereon, behind him, the elders sat. He gazed out upon the muttering crowd, his old hands trembling, but his expression calm and benign. Slowly, a hush descended. There is nothing we can do, he said at last in his feeble old voice. It is the revenge of the dark children. Years ago, we committed a terrible wrong against them and this is their justified reply. He paused, sitting motionlessly in the pale light. We thought that we could simply replace them, he said. But we were wrong. He seemed to be dribbling slightly and he raised one trembling hand to wipe his mouth. I do not know if the dark children really exist, he went on. I myself have never seen them. But, even if they do not, it is the revenge of the dark children just the same. He paused again as if wanting his words to be thoroughly understood before proceeding, or perhaps because his thoughts came slowly to him. I have, however, seen the rats, and even with my failing eyesight, I know that they are real. I also know that the counting of them is real, whether accurate or not, and that your responses to this counting, while contradictory, are also real. Perhaps they are the most real thing of all. He seemed to go adrift for a moment, his head nodding slightly, before continuing: It may be that the diminishing number of rats is due to the day-by-day loss of our children or it may be due to nature’s rhythms or to the weather or the success at last of our hunters. It may even be that the numbers are not diminishing, that we are mistaken. It does not matter. The children must go. There was a soft gasp throughout the hall. Because, he said as the gasp died away, we are who we are. The old man gazed out at them for a short time, and each felt singled out, though it was unlikely he could see past the edge of the platform. The children will not go one by one, he went on. They will go all at once and immediately. That is both fair and practical. And, I might add, inevitable. He nodded his head as though agreeing with himself, or perhaps for emphasis. They themselves will be happier together than alone. And if we who remain cannot avoid grief, we can at least share it and comfort one another. Even now, if our humble suggestions are being followed, the children are being gathered together and told to put on their favorite clothes and bring their favorite toys and they are then being brought to the town square outside this building. As parents, turning pale, rose slowly from their seats, he again wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and his expression took on a more sorrowful aspect. I foresee a rather sad future for our town, he said. The rats will finally disappear, for whatever reason, though others of us will yet perish of their loathsome diseases, and our promenade will reopen and trade will

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resume. Even should we repeal the music laws, however, there will still be little if any singing or dancing here, for there will be no children, only the memory of children. It has not been easy for the town’s mothers and fathers to suffer so, twice over, and I feel sorry for them, as I am sure we all do. We must not ask them to go through all that again. He cocked his old head slightly. Ah. I can hear the children outside now. They are being told they are going off to play with the dark children. They will leave happily. You will all have an opportunity to wave goodbye, but they will probably not even look back. Nor of course will they ever return. In the shocked pause before the rush to the exits, he added, speaking up slightly: And now will we at last be free of the dark children? He sighed and, as his head dipped to his chest, raised one trembling finger, wagging it slowly as though in solemn admonishment. No. No. No, my friends. We will not.

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joshua marie wilkinson from Meadow Slasher

Do your friends know you well enough to pull you through your pasts? I cut my face in looking. .

Dogs on a hunt for what may come. I am a looked-through garage window where a dead cat furred an oil stain. A bright April dashing us to the curb. A gash is how big. A lesion. A slice, say, on the chin. One of those bruisecuts that boxers get. I want somebody to come over here & punch me in the neck. Am I on the phone because I can’t end this near a bed or a desk or anything stable enough to fuck on? Whiteout. Cold coffee.

* Room temperature room. & my old fallbacks sucked into air like so many phantoms, drizzled up. What if what

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won’t come back to you is calling? How much more talk will it take to sever us? I’m here on the ground. Spring drifts away and you chase it waving your hand like a knife.

* Raccoons out, invisible, crunching past. White heat of late traffic. I go to the store to buy 150 pillows. I carry them out to my car, six at a time, three under each arm. I go from laughing to crying & back like some stoned, child-weary sitter. Wearing my quilt as a cape, I’m locked out & it’s spring, but freezing. In just my underwear & slippers with my dog in the street. I want to get under the empty tables of the sorority house dining room & huff on some sterno cans till my head throbs like a stream. A christian camp counselor, showing me chapter & verse, dead.

* Tickertape firecrackers, a mayor’s bald allusion to teenage trysting.

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I want now to get stabbed by the wind. But it’s a city with no dependable way out or back in. So, how bad — you ask yourself —  do you need to leave? I want what I carried with me to be enough for over a week. If in my Sithe I looked right; roamed rooms, quarter moon. Wet little blockheaded pigeonheart inside me thudding.

* Up at Olive & Clark with a tea but Silver Soul is on & I’m back to it, covering my face with a book, scaring some strangers. I don’t yield out for pity, just a question of what we look like to ourselves from the bit of future we’re lucky enough to endure. So it’s night. The shore’s lapping. Heartbreak is having the prepositions

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pulse with slashers too.

* So why can’t you just gash open a little bit? A brownout citywide hurricane-grade wind, & I fell in with the chapbook set. Kassandra’s bracketed screams, the ruin in a so-called net. Well, it claps off & I don’t want to be here with me either. What’s to learn from what we thought we wanted? We didn’t think we wanted it. So you’ve been into the photographs? What’s not desire’s aperture. If the road could stretch out like a blank path under spectral willows alive.

* Or cacti, cactuses, say it wrong with a ‘w’ I say, low & behold: crawl up into the black dank earth. What’s waiting for us outside? Some stalled junky in the evening summer alight under factory lamp blossoms? It’s the West Andersonville neighborhood gardens & the thieves get a respite. The trains get a respite.

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The rain, no breaker. No turn, no volta, no nothing. Another long thread to pull at in wonder of what it’s attached to. Trying to set down what before I’d carry across into anachronism. An old poem’s widow works the net at the wings of the messenger girl.

* Are the windows open? Can’t you open them any further? What scrapes you heals you. That’s not right, but there is a pause before that clippery voicemail beep. My friends call each at a time. Said, here we are. Spent to fire. Known to ash, to firetrucks, to the medics looking for something else to channel up. What’s the right way out of here? Turn it all up, Dana. Turn everything up to bleeding.

* To summer sun ablaze on the tarry roof with no stars to taser us down. Is this what we get when we hold the phone to our face? What did you so want to become that rent you back to becoming?

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I want the curtain to crush the pretty actor. I want the sets to grow vines into the scaffolding. So begins the apology’s long drawn chain of blowflies out of the bottle, a metaphor for beasts to know us quickly, what we are — stranded. This isn’t for a book of polaroids. It’s to clock the roads of an errancy. An obsession with — 

* An obsession with what? With the lamplit dust an archive leaves the library shelves with —  But what history did you want back inside of? Little whale on the Gastineau beach won’t last long. The dream out in the miners’ wood, trampling on now. I like the floorboards in here. Can I stay awhile? I’m thinking about going quietude. Simone says it’s harder than experimental bullshit & that’s a fact. No trapdoor, no transom, alright. I got it. Your boy’s looking for a path the way up & out.

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steven ross smith The Reader

i close the book. stare at the black-and-white image on its glossy cover. an ambiguous image that evokes many possibilities. it’s suited to this odd story that leaves me confused. what, exactly, has happened? a character has died, i think, in the bed, under the bedspread, made of a material, the name of which i can’t remember. i haven’t been remembering well for some time. he might have been killed. might have been dead before the story began. can i be sure the victim is male? … and the woman. was she the killer? the victim? and her perfume, so strong, so sweet. i slip my hand from the book’s spine onto the armrest of the chair. the coarse fabric, rough under my palm, awakens nerve endings. hundreds, thousands. microscopic circuits moving from the skin of my palm, deeper into flesh, up through the shoulder, to the spine, up to the stem and into my brain. the upholstery on the chair is pinky-red. salmon, the colour’s name, i suppose. a rough, looped, manmade fabric popular in the fifties, nylon perhaps. i could verify this by lifting the cushion and searching for a label. the story disturbed me. overlapping events with an undertone of violence, of sexual tension, and an overtone of isolation. her fingernails so red. encounters, empty of feeling, take place. seem to exist only to manipulate the reader, satisfy the voyeur. why should this bother me? it is, after all, only a story. my hand lifts from my lap, holding the book. moves toward the walnut table beside my chair. wood with a modest grain, dark stain, high gloss. certainly not oak or cedar, which are not usually stained so dark. no, not walnut either. they’d all be too expensive for this place. the sky has been darkening for some time. when i began reading, the afternoon sunlight was just beginning to fade. since then the sun must have set in splendid orange and purple hues. or perhaps it disappeared entirely behind a cloud low on the horizon, offering a sickly greying dusk. whatever way, the sunset

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occurred without my notice. i was absorbed in the story, reading it twice to follow the twists of plot, temporal shifts, and the characters blending into each other’s flesh. i lay down the book. rest it atop the white doily protecting the table’s surface. this book will not scratch the finish. the doily is soiled. what message did the author have in mind? what was the setting? a cocktail party? a bedroom? both? who was in the bed? my hand hovers over the book. i lower my arm, hand to my lap, fingers brushing the opposite wrist. reminds me of her touch. yes. there on my wrist. she held her thumb there and said you’re alive. i feel your heart. feel mine. she offered her wrist to my fingers and we felt each other’s heartbeats. together, touching like that and gazing into each other’s eyes. the throbbing. i really must get packing. i have to prepare my belongings for departure. pick up my cleaned shirts from the front desk, call a taxi, get cash from the bank machine. then i’m on my way. the room seems lonely now, dimmer than when i first arrived. hollow, emptier. maybe it’s the colours. colours that drain life. carpet a shade that defies description, perhaps lime aspic. and patterned mustard wallpaper. makes the eyes spin. to think, they paid someone to pick these finishings. provocative? what would be the right word? menacing? i felt aroused at a few points in the story. no. no. impossible. these were not pleasant events. horrible, in fact. why did i keep reading? once you read, you’re caught. hooked. you clamber inside the shape the book creates. you’re trapped. tricked by every page. it’s been three days now. i told the desk clerk i didn’t want to be disturbed for three days. not even to have the bed made up. he peered at me through his thick glasses, his eyes magnified, reptilian. i couldn’t tell what he was thinking. perhaps nothing seems odd in a cheap motel. why would someone leave such a book in a motel room? usually there’s just a bible and a phone book. i brought my own reading matter, a couple of newspapers, a magazine, but i cast them aside. what caused her scars? i should get moving. open the curtain and see if anyone’s out there. i hadn’t noticed how dingy these curtains are. dirty olive-an-beige plastic, rain-stained,

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three days not seeing them. time to move. i should suggest to the clerk that they be cleaned. if they can be. can you clean this kind of petroleum by-product? maybe they’re disposable. or flammable. from fire they came, to fire they must return. one spring, i found a short hunk of stove pipe and trapped a fat green caterpillar, setting the pipe around it like a corral. it crawled from edge to edge, at each barrier probing the metal with its feelers. i liked the colour of that insect, but its undulating bulgy body repulsed me. i’d been reading a book. i tore out the pages. stuffed them in the pipe and caught sunlight in my magnifying glass. the ink made a lot of smoke. when the flames went out i grabbed the pipe. burnt the palms of my hands. a charred clump of caterpillar flesh lay in a circle of brown, a circle of death ringed by green and green. my hands did not heal well. i remember the swish of trees. smoke mingling with the sweet smell of spring lilac. a backless dress. its dark green shimmer. straps slipping from her pale shoulders. revealing the scars. fabric gliding down her slim hips. pooling at her bare feet stepping out. her waist bending. dress tossed. the satin cool against my face. her head thrown back to loosen her long grey hair with red-tipped fingers. the translucent hollow of her throat. as if caught in an updraft. lifted from my chair by an allure i can’t resist. drift in slow motion toward the bed. falling. falling. collapsing onto the patterned spread. chafing my arms. nubs of fabric poke me through my clothing. voices. their voices approaching. damn. i should have thrown my things together and left. instead i read. instead i wondered. the thin walls let the sounds in. maybe out. i must be silent. i roll and pull the covers over. reach my hand under the pillow. find it. cold. smooth against nerve endings. so smooth, smoother than skin. gunmetal smooth. chenille. that’s it. the bedspread is chenille.

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3 | Writing Technologies / Digital Wor(l)ds

Like electricity, once introduced, electronic literature seemed to instantly be everywhere; for, unlike electricity, the wires that brought digital writing into our homes could also carry it back out — and to everyone — in the form of email, blogs, Facebook pages, book reviews (as well as reviews of music, movies, cameras, blenders, and washing machines, for that matter). A single writing-bot will generate more content daily than can be read in multiple human lifetimes. There are thousands, if not millions, of writing bots composing text as you read this introduction, and while you are not reading this, for they never sleep. To a large degree, the digital world is a world of writing. The writings that make up the present body of digital literature is as varied as the digital world itself: it is as site-specific as works created for the Cave medialab where readers wearing 3D glasses can be immersed in a 3D interactive book that surrounds them as though they are moving through a landscape of words and images; it is as global as the Unknown’s hypertext novel by the same name that has been visited by over a million readers from some 87 countries. Digital writing is narrow for the constraints imposed upon authors by the web protocols and authoring tools they all must use (the reason so many web pages look alike), though simultaneously more various than print could imagine. Yoked to the computer as digital writing is, and given the fact that the lifespan of an operating system is about five years, digital writing is forever in need of reinventing itself in terra incognita: by nature it is a kind of perpetual avant-garde. Yet, compared to the 5,000 years of writing, e-writing is practically history-free (and still awaiting its Shakespeare — who will also have to marshal the skills of a Mozart and DaVinci), though there was a time (circa 1992) when the appearance of a new web page was an event — and seemed to be the culmination of a process that could be traced back through the birth of WWW (1991), back through Day 1 of the Internet (1969), back through OuLiPo and teletype, Gutenberg and every other revolution in writing technology there has ever been. E-writing is both a medium, practice, and delivery system. As such, works of digital literature are enmeshed with every aspect of “book” culture — from the initial research and

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composition, to publication and marketing, to buying and selling. Indeed, the ever-deepening penetration of electricity into book culture is what allows online platforms (such as Amazon) to actively destroy formations that had developed over decades and constituted traditional book culture: the division between readers and writers, for example; or the importance of a literary reviewer; or agent; or publisher ….  “Born digital” was the phrase originally used to distinguish electronic literature from other kinds of writing by underscoring the fact that it originated in digital form and used the computer as an integral component of its experience. But as it becomes easier and easier to apply the term to many kinds of writing (and art, and music, and indeed, most cultural products), it seems as though emphasis falls back to its second term. That is, electronic literature is, above all, literature, even if the ways in which it is literary are as varied as the ways in which it is electronic. Electronic literature includes work that is partially generated by the computer though published in print, such as Cory Arcangel’s Working on My Novel, a printed collection of tweets containing the phrase of his title gleaned from the Twitter stream; or Google-sculpting, in which words harvested from the web are collaged into poetry. E-writing includes Toxi•City by Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg, which combines narrative and software to generate a new feature-length film about life under global warming every time it is shown. Digital writing includes programmable or animated poetry where moving fonts visually inform meaning as it does in Brian Kim Stefans’s The Dreamlife of Letters, the way Futurists and Fluxus poets turned the display fonts designed for advertising to poetry. Nick Montfort’s “Round” calculates the value of Pi, then replaces digits with words or a line break, creating a poet-bot that slows as it chugs along, until it grinds down to glacial speed. There are online video poems and hypertext novels published on DVD such as Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, a story of war whose form — a web of linked passages — helps express how the origins of (the first) Gulf War are ever receding, its end always just over the horizon (a story that is even more relevant today, at the time of this writing, than it was 25 years ago when it was published). There are app poems such as Stephanie Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo's Vniverse, a spatially arranged iPad book. As Rita Raley points out, data-streamed or networked works of literature are more about the “control of property, technological systems, and public speech” than close reading. See for example, Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig’s “Occupy MLA,” an improvisation performed on Twitter during the Modern Language Association's annual convention in which anyone could join in (over 500 people did), satirizing the growing class divide between adjunct and tenured professors.

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That is, e-lit is a body of writing that may or may not be hypertextual, interactive, networked, visual, audible, programmable, and created to be read in places as specific as a museum’s gallery or as dispersed as cell phones scattered around the globe. Indeed, even a quick survey of e-lit in English reveals a global nature, with works in this section originating at points from South Korea (“Nippon”) to London (What We Will). E-lit, then, asks us to reimagine the literary landscape in terms other than nation or region, as Jessica Pressman notes, pointing out that it also causes us to rethink print, previous forms of literary critique, and indeed assumptions about fundamentals as basic as what we mean by a “story,” or “writing,” or “reading.” By nature then, most e-writing is conceptual: writing that creates a space for writing in the metaphoric sense, as N. Katherine Hayles puts it, as well as the literal sense of the space of the page. As delivery system, it can reinvigorate issues of presence in poetry: it may be hard to grasp Charles Olson’s concept of projective verse by reading a printed text, but the way he made his body part of the poem jumps out in readings that were unavailable until they were put online. The same might be said for the reader of Aya Karpińska’s “nobody knows but you,” using a Playstation controller and body English to spin the words of this interactive poem. Sound or performance poetry that could only be experienced by the few lucky enough to be in attendance at, for example, Steve McCaffery’s performance of the “White Pages,” are now readily had via a number of online archives (see especially UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center). Even more so are the experiments in writing made possible by the medium, e.g., Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s virtual pop-up book Between Page and Screen, which uses QR codes to make text rise up from the page.

Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s virtual pop-up book Between Page and Screen

While poetry might have once been written either for the page or the stage, in the digital world the page is the stage. Sometimes it is the backstage also: the unseen machine code that makes visible the literary performance on screen. As such, it marries several of the aesthetics other sections of this anthology highlight, especially the visual and audible. Instead of a table of contents, Tal Halpern’s novel Digital Nature: The Case Collection presents readers with statuettes on a desk, Freud’s

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desk. The statuettes are linked, as Freud believed they were, to mythologies that carry deeper psychological truths. In Halpern’s retelling, diary entries, postcards, butterfly specimens, a children’s book, and numerous other pieces form a powerful hypertext novel about race, imperialism, and the tension between sexual desire and its civilized façade. Unlike the interactivity that is normally associated with e-lit, the multimedia fictions of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries sets streams of words to music: jazz drumming in “Dakota,” jazz piano in the bi-lingual “Nippon.” The result is a multimedia literature where sound-image form a flowing whole that has its own grammar and syntax. John Cayley’s What We Will is a novel only in an expanded sense of the word. Unlike film or print novels, viewers/readers navigate through a drama that is neither theater, video, nor text, but uses elements of each to tell the story of a day in London. Domenico Vicinanza translates live Twitter streams and other Big Databases into concerts of electronic music. Reading these works, it’s easy to think of a library of printed books as a vast Victorian collection of beetles. Like those collections, like perspective painting, like Dante’s chaining rhyme scheme or Whitman’s free verse, the digitallydriven work of art is a system for knowing that is inherently an argument about how the world is made up. Many of the inherent characterizations of digital works — malleability, ease of recombination, dependence on the image, interactivity, linkage and therefore indeterminacy, dispersal of Origin, of Author/ Authority, erosion of genre boundaries as well as boundaries between nations, man and machine, or the personal and private — many of the characteristics associated with digital writing seem also to characterize our historical moment. That is, digital reading and writing feel normal. So normal that that’s what writing has become: creating and transmitting ideas in a form that is visual, linked, interactive, and accessible worldwide.

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jason huff from AutoSummarize

the beginner’s american history by D. H. Montgomery

Land! [Footnote 2: See paragraph 22.]

[Footnote 7: See paragraph 46.]

Indians! [Footnote 15: See footnote 4 in paragraph 62.] See footnote 9.]

[Footnote 3: Fairfax. named, 58. Indian wars, King Philip’s War, 90-94. Washington’s, 135.

alice’s adventures in wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Poor Alice! Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. Alice sighed wearily. Alice asked. Alice was silent.

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“Yes!” shouted Alice. Alice thought to herself. Alice asked. Alice’s Evidence “I won’t!” said Alice.

great expectations by Charles Dickens “Yes, Joe.” “Yes, Joe.” “No, Joe.” “No, Joe.” “Yes, Joe.” “Joe!” “Yes, Joe. Joe demanded. “Living, Joe?” Joe nodded.

the iliad by Homer

Gods! Gods! Gods! “Hector! Gods! Gods! “Hector! Gods! “Gods! God!

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illustrated history of furniture by Frederick Litchfield [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration: [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] furniture. [Illustration]

the kama sutra of vatsyayana by Vatsyayana

MEN. WOMEN. MEN. WOMEN. MEN. WOMEN. MEN. WOMEN. Learned men. Young men.

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metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

“Gregor, Gregor,” he called, “what’s wrong?” Gregor!” At the other side door his sister came plaintively: “Gregor? “No,” said Gregor. Gregor is ill. “Mother, mother,” said Gregor gently, looking up at her. Gregor only remained close to his sister now. Gregor got out. Gregor had almost entirely stopped eating. How can that be Gregor?

the world’s best poetry by Various

heart. LIFE.

LIFE.

love, thee;

Life! Life!

thou? Life

Life

251

400

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A Suite of Online Works

dakota

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

nippon

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

the boat

Nam Le with Matt Huynh, Kylie Boltin, and Matt Smith

what we will

John Cayley with Douglas Cape and Giles Perring

high muck a muck

The High Muck a Muck Collective including Fred Wah, Jin Zhang, Nicola Harwood, Thomas Loh, and Bessie Wapp

the yellow pages Charles Bernstein

liberty ring!

Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher

online at: www.conceptualisms.info

252 conceptualisms

the nature of the creative process

Lance Olsen, Author, Tim Guthrie, Animator

10:01

Lance Olsen, Author, Tim Guthrie, Animator

the gathering cloud J.R. Carpenter

henry

David Jhave Johnston

ouadane

David Jhave Johnston

silence

Alan Bigelow

last words Alan Bigelow

my life in three parts Alan Bigelow

v[r]erses: an xr story series Mez Breeze

queerskins

Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski

hearts and minds: the interrogations project Scott Rettberg and Roderick Coover

online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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nick thurston Poems from Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right

Three poems, each produced at a labour cost of US$3.   Created: Time Elapsed: Average Time per Assignment: Assignments Completed: Estimated Completion Time: Effective Hourly Rate:

April 12, 2012 about 4 hours 16 minutes 31 seconds 3/3 COMPLETE $10.898

By: A7J4Y6FOPZ8YV Feel my love; just feel my love as anger or feel my love as hatred or feel my love as burden or feel my love as a sin or feel my love as a crime but just feel it baby feel my love in silence or feel my love as disturbance or feel my love as vacuum but at-least feel my love; feel my love just feel my love just by tearing my letters given to you feel my love and by throwing flowers into trash feel my love and by scolding me for my love poems feel my love and by all means of hatred just feel my love; feel my love in your thoughts and emotions just feel my love baby feel my love.

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By: A1DUG2PVY1W4EQ

night of the needy My night walking the dog Your car pulls alongside With inside light on, that I may see your face Tears they drop Sincere or forced, only you know Your child is ill, you say You have no money to help her You plead with me to pay And offer many excuses for your state I don’t know you, I think This could be a lie, I reason The child in the backseat looks fine to me But what if I’m wrong? On and on you go in asking My mind, inclined to decline But what if I’m wrong? I look at the child, I look at the mother This could’ve been me or someone I love It’s a small fee you ask And this could be a genuine plea So for that cause I decide to grant your need By: A1G4QQQTDANOM9 My darling, is it true that we in fact are really through Was that the last time we can ever exchange our last I love you The dreams we shared Through the time we spent together I know deep down inside that we really cared And our love was pledged forever Truth be told, I was tormented inside that you’re not with me But that doesn’t stop me, from loving you eternally

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I always start to get this witty feeling It’s like I’m always stealing I even had dreams when you hold me, oh so tight That’s when I start to feel that everything seem so right. There will always be a pain in my heart that won’t let me live And that will remain a pain in my life that only you can give relief I don’t care if you’re with her for now Because I know that someday, we will be the one who are meant to say the vow Just know my dearest one that I will always love you And maybe it’s too desperate to hear No matter what happens I will do what I want to do Even if that means I have to wait for a year Some may think I’m foolish because of what I do But little did they know, I still have this love for you Oh my dear why can’t I stop thinking about thee You never really know, maybe we’re truly meant to be Four poems, each produced at a labour cost of US$0.5. HIT offered Apr 20th 2012, at 07:59 AM PDT By: A3RQQWMUZJUWJ1 Submission time: Apr 19 2012, 08:15 AM PDT “Journey of life” Life is a journey From womb to tomb, When I was born I was crying and All others were smiling.

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During my journey I will do good to others, But one day, When my journey ends, I will be the one Who is smiling, And all others Around me will be crying, And the last words I utter will be, “Life is beautiful.” By: A3052BDWG81IP Submission time: Apr 19 2012, 08:19 AM PDT My eyes didn’t ask to be copper, shiny with rubbings from scrunched fists battling futilely with morning, or tiredness. I polish them with tears, no need to scrub when the feeling’s caustic, I like to walk them dry afterwards. Perhaps the colour is indicative, a common stain on my vision, paving me towards an existence in the meld, pocket-change to be given, carried, and disposed of without thought to the inner-substance involved behind the stamping upon a face But I can see copper in honey, copper in warmth, and barely are the times when silver fills the clouds and leaves me wanting anymore By: A1KAO23S8TOMPS Submission time: Apr 19 2012, 08:36 AM PDT feeling alone when i walk the streets at night, feeling alone when have my lunch in our bench, feeling alone when i cross the road with people, feeling alone feeling alone,

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i was always feeling alone …  feeling alone to live, feeling alone to dream …  always feeling alone without you in my life alone without you, alone i try not to be alone, alone when i celebrate the joys, alone when i try to understand. alone with my friends, alone with my family, alone with my blood, alone in my head, alone when i die, alone when i rise, alone each day, alone each night. always feeling alone without u my dear "MOBILE." By: AU1ODZDOFJ4PS Submission time: Apr 19 2012, 08:40 AM PDT “Emotional Baggage” The star lights fade in the distance As darkness gives way to the day A wonderful opportunity has vanished My reluctance has chased you away I wish things had gone differently That we met when things were swell So I hope that you are happy I truly wish you well For I cannot allow you to endure The torment of my fractured mind For I cannot entirely be sure You will accept the horrible things you may find

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4 | Architecture of the Page/Writing as Visual Form/ Visual Form as Writing

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why is it a saying? asks poet Bob Holman. There may be truth in Simonides’s dictum that a poem is a speaking picture while a picture is a mute poem, but text itself is always both. The words you are reading are visual forms. Like sculpture, fonts bear histories, and connotations as well as immaterial ideas, and can (unlike most sculpture) serve as a score for sounds not (yet) voiced. Sometimes this tri-nature of form/meaning/score is in harmony M with itself, often at odds. As the “Is” of Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe” demonstrates, both word and image can simultaneously “be” in different and conflicting ways; we are perplexed by the paradox of this painting only to the depth that we see this concept at work. Form and space have always been elements of poetics, of course, but normally they are thought of in terms of line breaks and stanzas, not the white emptiness that defines them — unless this form and space is stretched as in an e e cummings poem. Or the way that Guillaume Apollinaire thought of the page as space in his poem “Il Pleut” — a visual form made of (readable) letters — or as Stéphane Mallarmé constructed “A Throw of the Dice” with visual appearance as the basic unit for patterns of thought. Or even more so, consider Ezra Pound’s pictogram method, based on his (mistaken) idea that form and meaning in Chinese characters were inseparable. That is, we normally describe form in literature in linguistic terms — the sonnet, the haiku — that ignore the material nature of language. Or, if not ignored, material form — the ink, pixels, paper, shape of the alphabet — is usually pressed into invisibility through the use of fonts and layout that are too familiar to be noticed: fonts and layout as the transparent crystal

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goblet that holds the wine of meaning. Writing as architecture, though, calls into play what readers already know: that a signature, with its social history of penmanship and personal idiosyncrasies — from the labored jerkiness of a child to the free-flowing hand of the calligrapher — is a tiny action painting, the trace of an individual left in marks that assert the presence of the signer; it stands in stark contrast to a virtual self (and the grid of logic) we imply by inserting our name at the bottom of an e-mail. Think of print after type escaped the confining lines of cast lead. Now consider a visual landscape where words morph in shape and color. Accompanied by animated figures in the margin, words that dance. Brian Kim Stefans’s The Dreamlife of Letters is an early example of the impact on literature by the marriage of the machine and information design: a response rendered in software and hardware to a poem-essay by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Indeed, most electronic literature today is visual, and draws on the principles of information design: the concerted effort to use type, space, and image to convey meaning. Usually, information design conjures images of communicating efficiently (presenting census data), or organizing massive amounts of information in digestible forms (an evolutionary tree), or across languages (the pictograms on airport signs). But the design of information Peter Norvig, Gettysburg Address PowerPoint slide can be used to other purposes, as in Peter Norvig’s parodic PowerPoint presentation of Lincoln’s “The Gettysburg Address.” Stripped of its biblical tone and cadence, Lincoln’s words are reduced to content, data points, his famous “Four score and seven years ago” presented on a bar graph as 87 vs. 0. The message that emerges is a contrast between the memorial for the fallen that Lincoln crafted of words and a contemporary attitude to information that is as lite as the light in a conference room. It reveals an attitude to language appropriate to the text of a building’s directory, for example — something to be scanned not contemplated — and how these ways of speaking reflect Lincoln’s time as well as our own. Or consider Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo's Vniverse, designed to be read on an iPad screen where layout of language constellations evoke the infinity of the night sky as a background for the poems. Consider words that have escaped the book completely: Barbara Kruger’s surround-text installation, with its long

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title: “All that seemed beneath you is speaking to you now. All that seemed deaf hears you. All that seemed dumb knows what’s on your mind. All that seemed blind sees through you. All that seemed silent is putting the words right into your mouth.” Writing as information design or information architecture draws on the fact, and draws attention to the fact, that an engraved invitation expresses different social systems than a circus banner. Its emotional impact comes from the conditioning that makes us react differently to the materials of a love letter than a notice from the IRS — as surely we would react differently to a dentist office painted beige than we would to one that had been painted blood red. It reminds us that any form, not just the alphabet, is a sign. Often these signs cut across national boundaries more easily than language, as demonstrated by the portability of concrete poetry from Brazil, Japan, and France. Indeed, after debating what kind of message had the best chance of being understood by any space alien who might intercept the Pioneer 10 or 11, NASA put inside both spacecrafts, like a message in a bottle, a cartoon. Foregrounding the body of body-text highlights what a 'round peg' living can be to the 'square holes' offered by the grid of grammar and language. That is, when material form, as well as the material nature of writing, is made part of what’s said — part of its rhetoric, not just incorporated as decoration or illustration — we are often in the realm of conceptual writing. Once differences in styles, and materials, or methods, are accounted for, writing as embodied language often reveals an impulse to exploit the philosophical tensions inherent in the dual nature of writing as word and image. It often says a thing in more than one way and by so doing underscores the intersection of world (representation) and earth (that which is outside language). It can bring to awareness, for example, the difference between bodies and their representations, as Art Spiegelman does in his graphic novel Maus. Writing as architecture can add layers of meaning by recontextualing what’s said as Lesley Dill does in her “Blue Poem

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Girl.” By changing the writing surface, by inverting the normally black letters on a white paper and restaging Emily Dickinson’s “Poem 540” as white letters on a black body, Dill evokes a gendered slate that has been written on by the world: a female writing surface whose direct look turns the male gaze back on itself, and makes of the viewer a Goliath, thus charging the poem with gender and racial overtones — and suggestions of physical violence — it may or may not have originally had. In Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin’s "Be-lie-ve", a crisscross of word and image opens up alternative readings (I’ve always appreciated the fact that “glove” contains “love,” William H. Gass writes): attention to form can send reading off into unexpected directions as powerfully as a poem’s parataxis. See, for example, A Humument, which Tom Phillips created by painting over the pages of a Victorian potboiler, transforming them into Magrittelike works of art in which some of the original novel’s words emerge as in a dream that seems meaningful even if readers have difficulty saying what it means. Conversely, a crazily diagramed sentence in Raymond Federman’s novel Double or Nothing is as much a map of language’s logic as it is a device to invoke within readers, as they turn the Rima and Valerie Gerlovin, BE(LIE)VE book this way and that to follow its gyrations, some of the frustration of this novel’s French-speaking protagonist as he struggles to learn English. It also calls attention to the pedagogical device of diagramming a sentence in order to clarify how it works, turning it into an information design solution that is about its own assumptions: that language can be broken down into its constituent parts and then be put back together like a machine. (When one considers the gyrations Federman must have gone through to type [without typos] this concrete novel, the marks on the page also become the trace of Herculean endurance: a performance that had an audience of one, the author.) Images can be actors in a paper theater — or paperless theater as they are in John Cayley's What We Will. Space/layout can substitute for plot or simultaneously make present past and future narrative moments as in Richard McGuire’s “Here.” Whether inside or outside the book, architecture is both a statement in materials and system of thought. It is an intersection of aesthetics and material constraints, a form of writing under constraint, where the constraints that make the work possible can be gravity, the load-bearing ability of a wooden beam, or the legibility of a letter form. As a genre of conceptual writing, it is a species of

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work that draws on its visual form not simply as a style or decoration. Rather, like the use of linear perspective in Renaissance painting, it is both organizing principle and symbol, a rhetorical tool that some conceptual authors use to do what authors always do — say something meaningful through the world’s representation.

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lesley dill

Blue Poem Girl

See color plates at: www.conceptualisms.info

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lee siegel from Love in a Dead Language, “The Kama Sutra Classic Comic”

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johanna drucker from Narratology

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See color plates at: www.conceptualisms.info

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lily hoang from Changing

1: creation This is a story about Jack & Jill & let me be clear without confusion that it’s true that Jack & Jill went up the hill but Jack isn’t always Jack & Jill isn’t always Jill & I am not always me & you lover you are not always you but sometimes Jack is Jack & Jill is Jill & I am I & you are you but the family isn’t really a family at all & they’re certainly not my family they’re all made up but sometimes Jack is Jack is Jack & I don’t want you lover to be confused so I’m clarifying it now. In the city of heat I was made in the city of heat from the heat & the sweat & Mother & Father that they had tried & that Mother had lost other before me & that I was some sort of miracle for them & still when I came out of Mother’s body into all that heat & I came out of her body a girl that Mother would not look at me for days & Father seeing me a girl he left the hospital he left & he didn’t come back until Mother was to go home & they didn’t come back for me for months. To begin at the beginning you must start at the bottom & move upwards just like the American Dream just like Father has told me so many times that our people were not like other people that we must bow our heads but our people were more diligent than others that we endure pain better that we have an entire history of repression no oppression but now we’re here in the land of possibilities & so we must start at the bottom & work our way up just like these hexagrams do. Us lovers we have created for ourselves our own history & you lover sometimes I just look at you & I am enamored all over again & you lover sometimes you see me staring a fool & you lover you become annoyed & you say Why do you have to look at me that way & I say Do you remember that first time you touched me & I say It was like that time I was stung by a bee & my throat was a fist & I couldn’t breathe & they shot me full of adrenaline & I thought I would die? A brief explanation: You reader see six lines some whole some broken & these are divided into top three bottom three making patterns to represent: Heaven, Swamp,

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Fire, Thunder, Wind, Water, Mountain, and Earth & these two stacks of three lines make a hexagram & I am not the originator of this this the ever changing Book of Changes having changed fates for centuries having changed faces just as many times & I am just another translator to offer you a new story. Father used to be a painter & a creator & Father used to make so many things & I am told that before his hair shined white he was a painter in the country of heat & loving my mother he gave up oils for numbers & Father became a mathematician for my mother & for my mother migrating from the country of heat to here & Father unable to form words & Father bowing his head & cleaning other people’s shit & decades later he retired & began to paint & joy & then the stroke.

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2: the receptive Earth over Earth two columns forming image of earth self-dividing welcoming change image of soil funneling inward black dry soil like salt marking time in an hour-glass welcoming evolution all over again.

Little girl sitting with the lady of fortune & little girl holding with her little hand six lines some straight & some broken & the lady reading to little girl her little fortune & in her little head rearranging words to sense.

If you are in your mind flexible I see for you great success & I want you to know that even if the dragons fight in the meadow the right one will be victorious & there your decisions will be clear for you to understand.

But if you are in your mind always firm I have for you great concern but I want to make it clear that I am no teller of fates that I am a storyteller but sometimes I become confused & tell great fates instead of stories.

You lover you have seen so many changing lands that you lived in the city of heat & you lived in the city of perpetual rain & now lover you are here with me in the flatland & tell me where shall us lovers go from here?

& Jack said Jill will you go with me up the hill to fetch a pail of water & Jill said I’m feeling kind of tired Jack & Jack said But it’ll be fun & Jill said I think I’d rather stay in & Jack said But I’ll give you a dollar!

Image of Mother young with black hair lush down her back & smiling images of Mother are always full of teeth & Mother she is in white & she with her eyes shading to hide something shading to hide simple joyous.

That if you in your mind are flexible I will try to explain that this is not the Book of Changes but this is a translation & there have been many translations & I will try to be as truthful to the real as is possible.

Little girl going with her mother traveling from the city of heat to the city of humid & little girl with her mother going to the city of humid to see the lady of fortune & see will read to little girl the great changing book.

Mother & Father coming here from the country of heat from the country that was their home coming here to a land without their language a cold land & Mother & Father bowing heads complicity dreaming.

& I am telling you that this is where you should start here at the bottom that for me to be authentic you must start at the bottom & read to the top & I am offering you help but I know you will read this however you want.

All this heat & it’s so hot & hotness & sweating & it’s difficult to inhale this sticky oppression & the earth opening with all this heat it’s impossible for growth it’s hard to continue but even you reader must forge on.

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3: sprouting Brother Big brother prefers plants already grown plants that bloom vibrant. Sister Big sister doesn’t care about plants at all. Me the youngest I buy seeds & soil & put my fingers into the dirt & wait for the sprouts.

Mother & I dressed in black to match with night & Mother & I on toes tipping into someone else’s house to steal a branch of bright yellow & I getting cut & Mother kissing & us putting it in water to grow new.

That at the beginning not the very beginning but soon after beginning it is always most difficult. Image of seed beginning to sprout against dirt pushing up. Image of seed beginning to grow to fetus to baby squeezing body through bone canal to breathe. At the beginning not the very beginning but soon after it is necessary to be difficult. That Mother & Father abandoned me because I was a girl like sister Big sister wasn’t acceptable yet somehow I must believe that it is. Jack not believing in magic & Jack buying magical beans & Jack putting it into the ground & Jack not even giving it water but the sky wanting a friend giving it water until the stalk of bean penetrates could so giant.

Translator translating for this one this third hexagram saying: Difficulty at the beginning means supreme success. This furthers through perseverance. Nothing should be undertaken alone. Appoint needed helpers.

If metaphors then metaphors & if us lovers were plants then we would have been planted together in one pot & then before us lovers sprouted me lover I would be separated but much later we’d spout reunited.

Little girl sitting on Father’s lap & little girl with her little hand reaching upwards to the night & little girl’s hand intersecting with Father’s face & little girl squealing little laughter at Father’s prickly beard she loves.

Bottom three being Thunder & upper three being Water that this hexagram is supposed to be read Thunder over Water that this is supposed to be read from the bottom to the top & you still needing simple instructions.

I am telling you even now that this is not easy but only now that soon it will be easier that I am now your teller of fates that this is not my domain that only briefly I will stop being a storyteller to help you through this.

Us lovers were not always lovers that there were ones before you & the one before you love her was my first real lover so I will call him Adam & he gave me lover he put inside me lover a thing that sprouted & I lover I tell you this shading eyes embarrassed that I didn’t want it lover & I tried to give it back without receipts without takes & so they put it in a bag lover like a piece of trash & took it away & I didn’t even cry lover can you believe it lover I didn’t even cry a drop?

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4: enveloping The voices of Mother & Father & brother Big brother & sister Big sister their voices so loud & firm & I try to listen lover but your voice is also so loud & firm & all of you all of you lover and families you all have expectations you all have desires for me for what I should be for what I should become & so I have twisted myself I have changed myself a constant chameleon for you for all of you & now I myself am so flattened so deflated so tired from exhaustion of expectation. Translators translating for this one calling it Youthful Folly or Young Shoot or Folly & I translating it calling it Enveloping & I think it’s wise for you to ignore how two of the four have negative connotations.

Little girl with her little feet running sand hot & little girl running away escaping because little girl got in trouble because little girl was being mean & little girl ran into the ocean & the salt eat her body clean.

The moment of wrapping body in body over soft into there no there no no yeah there that’s it & please & yes & the instance of smile the second of wrapping myself onto yourself laying so very firmly into you.

That for eight years I brought people food & drink & cleaned up what wasn’t put in their fat mouths but that whole time I was a student except for that one year I wasn’t & then the envelops arrived & I escaped.

Image of Mountain over Water as if mountains could simply rise from the danger of Water an abrupt development a hasty decision a calmness to come save you reader from becoming fully enveloped in all of this.

That Mountain & Water are male that this notion of Enveloping this notion of Folly is undeniably male that it is because these great sons have played and here we are left with the tatters of their joy the leftovers.

That sister Big sister that even when she was younger her behavior her stealing her lust was inexcusable it was unacceptable & Mother & Father with great sadness made her leave our home & I loved sister Big sister with such fierceness but now that we are older & sister Big sister has done it all over again that sister Big sister has finally done it she’s finally fucked up so big that we her family cannot stand by and watch her folly that we can no longer help her tragic life again. The truth of this hexagram is that if you reader if you were to ask me questions this hexagram would tell me not to answer you this hexagram would tell me to keep my mouth silent & for you to answer yourself.

I was thrown in jail at 19. I played Domino with 5 women: 3 schizophrenic, I bipolar, 1 plain crazy. They said I was bipolar. They said I was drugged out & suicidal. Never play Domino with schizophrenic women.

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5: attending Not knowing the judgment not knowing the outcome & wait so patiently with all your sincerity & perseverance bringing good fortunes & you being quite fortunate & the translator tells you all this to hear so be glad.

Of course you know that I’m not talking about you lover that I’m using you loosely & you could be you lover but it could be any number of yours & you lover I can that you lover are offended by my universality.

Being a child & being so proficient at so many things like an adult in a form of a child & I didn’t know I didn’t think that this was strange because strange is different & I only knew what I was & so I thinking I’m normal that I’m just like all the others only I look a little different which was one difference enough of a difference that I shouldn’t be any more different & me onstage a circus display & Parents clashing with pride & me in clashing clothes without any recognition. That Attending can also mean Waiting or Moistened that those words aren’t the same at all but that the translator translating wants to capture the perfect essence if only he could change Chinese symbol into word.

You lover attending poetry readings with me lover & waiting & waiting until it’s over & me lover just sitting there also waiting & waiting for it to be over & we don’t really enjoy it lasts so long but clap politely.

Important life events my parents did not attend: kindergarten play me as tree; second piano recital; last piano recital, ageless; first major orchestra concert; first time leaving the country; second time leaving the country; etc.; first kiss; first time; first love; first smoke; first heartbreak; first therapy session; first memory of molestation; every subsequent time after all the firsts; etc. My parents missed more than spacetime but what importance have I missed from their lives? Image of Water over Heaven like angels being rained on like paintings wet t-shirt contest with robes & I wonder if you can see hermaphroditic parts if you can see breastwaisthip glassing hours if you can the bulge of hard-ons I wonder if Heaven’s version of hermaphrodites don’t have sex parts at all or maybe Water over Heaven makes them all wet like wet like Thunder but in Heaven the only Thunder comes from revenge long forgotten in this a new testament betrayed. Memory of Mother & Father at Bill Miller’s in the city of heat & me in line hating we’re there & me not eating meat & us at a BBQ chain & them wanting fried chicken & me disgusted & so young I was so young & spoiled I was young & pregnant girl behind the counter saying Can’t you just speak English? Fuckin’ learn some English & memory of Mother & Father embarrassed & me pissed the fuck off going up to the manager & me getting her fired & still not revenged.

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6: arguing I say I’m sick of being your scapegoat & you say I’m sick of you being passive & I say I’m sick of you trying to be alphagoat & you say That does even make sense & I say Don’t change the subject & I say I mean it & I say You’re dumping your shit on me & you say nothing & I say Damn it You want me to push you so here I’m fucking pushing & I say You either want it or you don’t & I say Say something & you say You just called me an alphagoat & I laugh instead of say— Father argues. Mother does not. Mother sits silently at the dinner table with dinner set out. Father looks at her disgusted. Father speaks Thunder. Mother remains silent. Father eats food in loud chomps. Mother gets up to get him more rice. Father still upset still arguing. Mother remains silent. I sit at the table. I am very young & the table is very old. I look at my brother. He is also silent. We live in a house of one voice. We learn quickly to speak only when Father is with joy. The natural image of Heaven above Water a serene image that’s perfect for Sundays & picnics if scenes could be perfect but Heaven & Water are at war bringing disturbance bringing anger & it's impossible to cross Water when raging & thus man is trapped waging war against each other against Heaven & Water & man wants to trap both & man isn’t as strong & man opens pails & jugs to capture this war to save for times of peace & drought when Heaven & Water are at peace. & I’ve already named him Adam & I’m concerned that if he named Adam I don’t know what to name you lover that I don’t do Bible well enough to name you & so you lover will be called you lover to me here.

Us lovers we used to call our Ruby cat a cat-goat-rabbit that her body conflicted being a cat but sounding a goat & hopping a rabbit full air loops all around us but this was before when she was still here with our love.

Little girl disliking conflict little girl always smiling little girl when a little is a little girl little girl being molested & little girl not knowing any better no arguing & little girl growing up a little & choir director talking a little dirty to little girl & little girl taking it like attention & little girl growing more & little girl learning that this is natural that arguing is bad that conflict is bad & little girl learning that it’s ok to be harassed if just a little & little girl isn’t little anymore or little. The one before you I didn’t argue with him. Not even once but I shouldn’t speak about this like this, the one before you, I shouldn’t talk like he’s a thing long past. I think he needs a pseudonym. Adam I think fits well.

Poet or translator all the same thing all the same saying that Heaven & Water aren’t at war but all the same they are separating like a divorce in the elements like breaking up like me & him before you named Adam.

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7: leading The water being cold & I being so angry that I swam long & I afraid they would be mad if I stayed out so long & I turning back around & the sea turning electric blue & an army of stinging tentacles wrapping me tight.

You not being a fighter but walking lover you were walking in that Seattle street & holding a sign lover & though I wasn’t there I can imagine you walking among thousands a large herd & then brick & history.

But it isn’t right, is it lover because it’s true that we went to the swamp but it wasn’t to find shortcuts & it was for maps No it’s true lover that we went to the swamp & one foot became muddy but why did we go?

Mother & Father with fear & silence in ship maybe plane & Mother & Father with brother & sister & they’re scared I’m sure they’re scared when they were led blindly from communist war to foreign soil so new.

Translator translating I should name him for convenience yes I’ll call him translator but translator translating not calling number seven Leading that translator translating chooses to call it Army instead.

You lover saying that anthropologists anthropomorphize when saying there’s an alpha-male that there is no alphamale that we humans look for similarities & call it what we humans know for sake of comfort.

Image of Jack piping on a pipe a pipe for song & image of thousands of rats following like an army to war but these rats will die like an army to war & the man leading & piper piping, what ever happens to him?

The day I led you into swamps looking for shortcuts & you looked at the map & saw our footsteps moving off the eastern edge & you lover looked at the map & didn’t see in front & your foot caged in mud & I laughed.

That you reader if you reader had received this hexagram as your fortune I would tell you reader that armies are strongest when they persevere & are led by a leader not necessarily a man leader as the great changing book implies because reader we’re in the 21st century now & reader if you’re still so confused to think that only men are strong leaders I hope you never receive this hexagram I hope you close this book right now because good fortune comes without any blame. Time moving differently than straight & so leader leading today will be gone & even perseverance can’t change it & even being great won’t change it & I being you fate teller ask you why I should tell you further.

The day you led me into the swamp looking for shortcuts & I looked at the map & saw our footsteps moving off the eastern edge & I didn’t look where I was going & my foot caged in mud & you lover you laughed hard.

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8: grouping That I could be a girl like those girls a girl with lipstick smacking & lips whispering silent secrets & gossiping every syllable without enunciation & I hearing my name every time they pass by me & still giggling.

Beautiful Ruby the cat goat rabbit accepting Ari the orange ring-tailed lemur of a cat into her pride the pride that us lovers were accepted into slowly & watching proudly watching our family become a bigger pride.

Lovers rhyming couplets scheming ABAB or AABB or some variation on some theme that doesn’t include C or D & I want to be clear that I have never been in that A group or that B group but even I deserve lovers rhyming couplets even you deserve it even though up until now reader you never been I’m telling you reader that soon enough you will be grouped & I’m not promising love I’m not promising happiness only a home a safe area where you can be yourself. Us lovers lying in bed in this the morning me still wet from showers & you still naked from sleep & us lovers lie in bed listening to the morning sounds & us lovers hearing how even sounds move in groups to our ears.

Sister Big sister saying how she can’t come see me how she can’t visit with her two sons with her two dogs with her husband & their two cars that there isn’t room for all their group & where will her silent lover stay?

Groups on the edges of pages how these groups on the margins like to push each other off the page & there aren’t warnings here like on maps there aren’t warnings of dragons only warning of extinction whisper.

Water over Earth making lovers do what lovers want most to do that which isn’t outside unless playing is outside & inside all at once with rain & tickling because lovers wound so tight can only laugh when forced.

My family a group dysfunctional like addicts like alcoholics with sister a convict a prostitute a thief a liar to me & everyone else & my brother in hidden closet so full of secrets & me a writer a convict not an MD.

The oracle reading from translator translating: Holding Together brings good fortune. Then there is no blame. Those who are uncertain gradually join. Whoever comes too late meets with a great misfortune.

Girls moving in herds like cows like birds like girls silly giggling like pretty girls so popular so beautiful & I watching it not included & I rolling my little eyes at girls like cows like birds like silly little bitches.

Girl in Bill Miller’s laughing at Parents laughing at accents & them so embarrassed & I remembering her a slut in high school laughing & now she’s fired for laughing for laughing at my parents is unforgivable.

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9: small accumulating A creation story: It is obvious that the One had to come from somewhere but it’s unclear where. Creation stories don’t have to answer this question. What creation stories agree on is that from this one, wherever it came from, it multiplied & gave itself more of itself & grew & changed from something rather small into something rather not so small, not that the small are not appreciated after all, it is from the one, & the one is always small, that we became everything That I have not told you yet the creation story should be obvious, but wait, it will come. Before creation stories though, you must understand the Wind over Heaven. That here on this place there is a heaven & above even that there is movement that heaven the heaven is not the highest point that there is more that the accumulation never stops that growth is continual & that is the story of creation that there is no more that I can say because I’d never stop & it would still grow. Little bird same as little girl being a little bird & the man living diagonal to little girl calling her a little bird & her flapping her arms so wildly that her shoulders squeak so loud that neighbors close their ears for pain.

Beginning with I & growing from there a vocabulary a mask of putty & dough & I starting with a penny & becoming rich with papers but beginning with only one letter & from that letter a magical reproduction.

The small having the ability to tame unlike the shrew being tamed when she was the smaller & when I was smaller I went to see it with Brother & his girlfriend before he had a boyfriend back then & I was smaller & we went to the park to see the play & I wanting to seem smart watching Shakespeare when I was so small & they treating me like a little puppet with brains asking me questions & I trying so hard to be smart & answering them all correctly but not understanding— Unable to remove this idea of creation stories unable to take away the heavens & image of clouds growing in size to thick like soft geese only nicer & knowing that when small bits of cloud accumulate like that like nimbus clouds a giant growth like wanting to release & wondering what happens to these lords of creation when their heavens release all the tension wondering if the thrown must be recreated from small particles of clouds left unused in rain The first day we saw each other, I didn’t notice. You did. The second day we saw each other, I rolled my eyes at Green Party activist with your car, practically an SUV. The third day we saw each other, you invited me out with another girl offered us free tickets & never called. The fourth day we saw each other, you touched my arm & I let you. The seventh day we saw each other I bought you pasta. The forty-sixth day we saw each other we went to the woods & kissed tightly.

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10: treading Sharing home our home the home that is we don’t yet consider home but still place we reside in shared with two cats both young one older the older white & black hairs growing infinitely the other a tiger orangestripednotblack & I like to hold his tail a ring-tailed lemur of a cat & it may be because he’s not so smart but he never bites my hand never even tries to run away but the other cat so beautiful & spoiled she would have bitten or squealed or run off but not my little boy cat.

Heaven over Water maybe lake maybe pond Jack treading in water maybe pond maybe lake & he falling deeply & opening eyes finding treasures so many colors with water above & water below & a spot for him perfectly in between & he can’t feel layers above him the sky smiling thick drops in his water making his water grow until Jack wiggles his feet back up to the surface & water filling air up nose & choking & Jack still treading & treading & rain falling down hard. Not to be melodramatic, but I could’ve died. I mean, it was raining & I was driving & my car was small so small that I couldn’t’ve fit more than my body & one other body in there at any point in time, unless of course, the third body was particularly small enough to be child or a quadriplegic, which isn’t funny but come on, it kind of is, so it was raining & I was nervous coming off of I-10 & then the little VW got rear-ended & spun into 8 other cars & I watched it. Us lovers so scared of being codependent have somehow managed to become so very co-dependent not that us lovers we ever thought we wouldn’t be that but only that you lover somehow now seem more bored.

In all the love stories in the world, you never hear of the hour weeks decades of monotony how sometimes it goes from fire & flame to the calmness of Heaven over Water the calmness of sleep practically without dream.

Judgment by man who is poet who is translator who is sage perhaps with a beard dyed white or it being naturally so but always a beard bright white always because there are expectations on sages one of which being a long white beard it’s necessary proper even but the prophet the sage the teller of fates saying when seeing this the wise man saying, Treading. Treading upon the tail of the tiger, it doesn’t bite the man. Success. & I think this number ten needs a better translation. Memory of me leaving for work every day in the city of heat & Father coming out every morning & just walking out into the city of heat collects sweat & memory of Father walking up to car of small stature my car that Father bought for me & Father reminding me to release the parking break even though it’s a stick shift & I’ve never forgotten & memory of Father getting onto swollen knees from all his praying to check the tread of my tires that may have worn so thin

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tom phillips from A Humument

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graham rawle from Woman’s World

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NEED FILE W/ EXTENSION

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susan howe and susan bee from Bed Hangings

For here we are here

B E D

HANGI N GS

daylight does not reach Vast depth on the wall Neophyte

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Alapeen Paper Patch Muslin Calico Camlet Dimity Fustian Serge linsey-woolsey say A wainscot bedsted & Curtans & vallains & iron Rodds Many bedsteds were roped “Bedsted. . . . & bed Rope

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Revisionist work in historic interiors spread from House to Museum Other documentar y evidence Friends who wish to remain anonymous

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One of the perplexing questions on which members of the Bed Curtain Seminar were able to shed very little light was that of how early valences attached to the tester frame Technical Note Other rubbish a bottomless chair

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Go to my savage pattern on surface material the line in ink if you have curtains and a New English dictionary there is nothing to justify a claim for linen except a late quotation knap warp is flax Fathom we without cannot

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Research projects the 1960 seminar on bedhangings Scholar student participant Published papers remain Say flowing forces haunt leaving no shade pattern Why huntress why pattern

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Glide my shadow through time curtains will dwindle Far be it from me whatever reaction splits into willing things absolute but absent are not alone Nominalism While I lie in you for refuge it is sanctuary it is refuge

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Something over against Mr. Sprout He can be found in the cool of evening rolling in his chaise with his shepherdess Wearing a large Presbyterian cloak somewhat soiled with a full bestowed wig a month or six weeks diligence will teach him the exercise of the windpipe

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Some prepared cloth or other left simply in the hair "glazed" or "lustred" a kind of twilled lasting when stouter John Legg of Boston left to his daughter 1 Coach bed camblet curtanot vallens to disenchant blessing All lands and to the bordering

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Malachy Postlehwayt (ed. 1773) defines Calamanco as “a woolen stuff manufactured in Brabant in Flanders” checquered in warp wherein the warp is mixed with silk or with goat’s hair diversely wrought yet some are quite plain When did appearance ever justify

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It is requested that those who discover errors in this work not mentioned in the ERRATA should give information of them to Mr. William L. Kingsley of New Haven and if it seems desirable they will be given to the public together with other facts and statistics ADDENDA The great Disposer of events is exchanging what was good for what is better history that is written will be accomplished

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rimma gerlovina and valeriy gerlovin Be-lie-ve & Absolute-Relative

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douglas kearney Runaway Tongue

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5 | Clouds, Collage & the Aesthetics of Ripping & Mixing A Rip-and-Mix mindset has not only worked its way into our music, architecture, and visual art, but into our very bodies: “collage” tomatoes carry the genes of a fish; “collage” cows the genes of a human. We find it increasingly natural to think of the entire world as rearrange-able, collage-able: composers, deejays, or anyone with a laptop, has all musical history in their hands, for our world is increasingly open to reorganization and therefore open-ended. Is it a coincidence that as we increasingly depend on mixable bytes to communicate, mixable bytes work their way into our politics? Our commerce? Our values? Our culture? Our … literature? Indeed, collage has been called the dominant organizing principle of the 20th century. Moving deeper into the 21st century, it seems even more suited as an expression of the common culture from which it comes: one that takes for granted a democracy of cutting, and pasting, sampling, quoting, recycling, appropriation, recirculation, reworking. Collage seems to be the glove that fits the fingers of other contemporary markers: the dissipation of origins, the death of the author, the writerly text …. The kidnapper composing a ransom note by cutting and pasting words from a variety of magazines understands how a collage style dissipates authorship. As do Gary Sullivan, K. Silem Mohammad, and other authors of Flarf poetry, with its blender approach to the language found in spam, blogs, and Google searches. Though their techniques might be essentially the same as those of earlier cutup and collage artists, the use of collage today, its reading, and especially the ease of creation and proliferation allowed by new technologies, seem completely contemporary: a sense of radical changeups, or tempo cuts. They reflect a contemporary sense of narrative in an era that is not so concerned with aesthetic wholes as it is in differences of all kinds: racial, economic, political, gender, but especially ways of speaking. Collage today doesn’t seem to be about harmonizing opera with rap, or the speech habits of the many voices found in Gordon Lish’s story composed completely of the first lines of other stories. Rather, collage more commonly puts differing voices in tension. A juxtaposition that heightens their differences and in so doing makes each more itself. Anne Carson’s Nox collages Roman

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poetry, translations, dictionaries, letters from her dead brother, photos, and other artifacts partly to explore how life, and so death, are too large, too complex, to ever be understood. That any view is at most a partial view. Collage today—as in the cutups of William S. Burroughs or Brion Gysin—often emphasizes the disjunction between its pieces to foreground the fact that the pieces themselves are constructions arising from a viewpoint, not parts of some “Natural” way to speak. Collage can be the literary equivalent of Photoshop putting the lie to the commonsensical idea that the camera doesn’t lie, as Niels Plenge does in his self-reflexive video poem “The Answer,” remixing with a rap rhythm Charles Bernstein telling the camera that his words could be edited— and in so doing critiques media society as entertainment (while entertaining), presents news as constructed versions of truth (while allowing viewers to witness the construction of its own truth). Rather than providing a simulacrum of reality, collage writing often incorporates actual pieces of reality—snippets of historical texts as in Susan Howe—or law texts, as well as joking; the ritual language of administration; the language practices of The Onion and the New York Times; of the two-party political system, and of the third and fourth party politician; the language of scientific writing; philology and apology; the text of the travelogue; and of the catalog … . When hiding their seams, they can be textual versions of deepfakes in which video of a speaker can be given the voice or face of another. That is, through cutting and pasting, by AI or algorithmic generation, sampling, and recycling, collage texts underscore the discursive nature of “Truths” and “Beauty” and other habits of mind that are normally absorbed as givens. This re-patterning of knowledge is obviously dear to a number of authors and readers today. And visual artists. And activists. And just plain folks daily transgressing boundaries that collage artists like Stein and Apollinaire would have taken for granted: man/machine, history/fiction, high art/popular art, public/private, politics/image making, art/ entertainment.... Due to its hybrid nature, every literary work born of collage is at least partially about discourse, about viewpoints. These works often work against binary divisions and hierarchy; they call attention to the materials themselves and/ or the embodiment of thought. Just as viewpoint is always at least part of the subject of a cubist painting, collage writing is always, at least partially, about ways of speaking. The more consciously this attention to discourse is placed center stage, the more the work emphasizes critical thinking, language awareness, or historical consciousness, the more conceptual the writing itself can be.

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niels plenge with charles bernstein The Answer

davis schneiderman Drone-Space Modulator

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mark z. danielewski from House of Leaves Faith, sir, as to that matter, I don’t believe one half of it myself .

— Diedrich Knickerbocker

In early June of 1990, the Navidsons flew to Seattle for a wedding. When they returned, something in the house had changed. Though they had only been away for four days, the change was enormous. lt was not, however, obvious — like for instance a fire, a robbery, or an act of vandalism. Quite the contrary, the horror was atypical. No one could deny there had been an intrusion, but it was so odd no one knew how to respond. On video, we see Navidson acting almost amused while Karen simply draws both hands to her face as if she were about to pray. Their children, Chad and Daisy, just run through it, playing, giggling, completely oblivious to the deeper implications. What took place amounts to a strange spatial violation which has already been described in a number of ways — namely surprising, unsettling, disturbing but most of all uncanny. In German the word for ‘uncanny’ is ‘unheimlich‘ which Heidegger in his book Sein und air thought worthy of some consideration: Daß die Angst als Grundbefindlichkeit in solcher Weise erschließt, dafür ist weider die allttägliche Daseinsauslegung und Rede der unvoreingenommenste Beleg. Befindlichkeit, so wurde früher gesagt, macht offenbar »wie einem ist«. In der Angstr is einem »unheimlich«. Darin kommt zunächst die eigentümliche Unbestimmtheit dessen, wobei sich das Dasein in der Angst befindet, zum Ausdruck: das Nichts und Nirgends. Unheimlichkeit meint aber dabei zugleich das Nichtzuhause-sein. Bei der ersten phänomenalen Anzeige der Grundverfassung des Daseins und der Klärung des existenzialen Sinnes von In-Sein im

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Unterschied von der kategorialen Bedeutung der »lnwendigkeit« wurde das In-Sein bestimmt als Wohnen bei … , Vertrautsein mit … Dieser Charakter des ln-Seins wurde dann konkreter sichtbar gemach durch die alltägliche Öffentlichkeit des Man, das die beruhigte Selbstsicherheit, das selbstverständliche »Zuhausesein« in die durchschnittliche Alltäglichkeit des Daseins bringt. Die Angst dagegen holt das Dasein aus seinem verfallenden Aufgehen in der »Welt« zurück. Die alltägliche Vertrautheit bricht in sich Zusammen. Das Dasein ist vereinzelt, das jedoch als In-der-Welt-sein. Das In-Sein kommt in den existenzialen »Modus« des Un-zuhause. Nichts anderes meint die Rede von der »Unheimlichkeit.«32

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Declared Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Frunkfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,  1977), p. 250–25133

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nd here’s the English, thanks to John Macquarrie and Edward Robinsons’ translation A of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Harper & Row, 1962, page 233. A real bitch to find: In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the “nothing and nowhere.” But here “uncanniness” also means “not-being-at home.” (das Nicht-zuhausesein). In our first indication of the phenomenal character of Dasein’s basic state and in our clarification of the existential meaning of “Being-in” as distinguished from the categorial signification of ‘insideness,’ Being-in was defined as “residing alongside … ,” “Being-familiar with ….  ” This character of Being-in was then brought to view more concretely through the everyday publicness of the “they,” which brings tranquilized selfassurance--  ‘Being-at-home,’ with all its obviousness--into the average everydayness of Dasein. On the other hand, as Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the ‘world.’ Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the­world. Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-at-home.” Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness.’  Which only goes to prove the existence of crack back in the early twentieth century. Certainly this geezer must of gotten hung up on a pretty wicked rock habit to start spouting such nonsense. Crazier still, I’ve just now been wondering if something about this passage may have actually affected me, which I know doesn’t exactly follow, especially since that would imply something in it really does make sense, and I just got finished calling it non-sense.

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I don’t know.  The point is, when I copied down the German a week ago, I was fine. Then last night I found the translation and this morning, when I went into work, I didn’t feel at all myself. It’s probably just a coincidence  --  I mean that there’s some kind of connection between my state of mind and The Navidson Record or even a few arcane sentences on existence penned by a former Nazi tweaking on who knows what. More than likely, it’s something entirely else, the real root lying in my already strange mood fluctuations, though I guess those are pretty recent too, rocking back and forth between wishful thinking and some private agony until the bar breaks. I’ve no fucking clue.   

das Nicht-zuhause-sein [not-being-at-home.] That part’s definitely true.

 These days, I’m an apprentice at a tattoo shop on sunset. I answer phones, schedule consultations and clean up. Any idiot could handle it. In fact the job’s reserved for idiots. This afternoon though, how do I explain it?, something’s really off. I’m off. I can’t do a fucking thing. I just keep staring at all the ink we have, that wild variety of color, everything from rootbeer, midnight blue and cochineal to mauve, light doe, lilac, south sea green, maize, even pelican black, all lined up in these plastic caps, like tiny transparent thimbles--  and needles too, my eyes catching on all those carefully preserved points and we have hundreds, mostly #12 sharps, many singles, though plenty in two, three, four, five, six and seven needle groups, even a fourteen round shader.  It depends on what you need.  I don’t know what I need but for no apparent reason I’m going terribly south. Nothing has happened, absolutely nothing, but I’m still having problems breathing. The air in the Shop is admittedly thick with the steady smell of sweat, isopropyl alcohol, Benz-all, all that solution for the ultrasonic cleaner, even solder and flux, but that’s not it either.  Of course no one notices. My boss, a retinue of his friends, some new inductee who’s just put down $150 for a rose, keep up the chatter, pretty loud chatter too, though never quite enough to drown out the most important sound of all: the single, insistent buzz of an original “J” tattoo machine logging yet another hundred stabs a minute in the dimple of some chunky ass.  I get a glass of water. I walk out into the hallway. That’s a mistake. I should of stayed near people. The comfort of company and all that. Instead I’m alone, running through a quick mental check list: food poisoning? (stomach’s fine) withdrawals? (haven’t been on a gak or Ecstasy diet for several months, and while I didn’t smoke any pot this morning  --  my usual ritual  --I know THC doesn’t create any lasting physical dependencies). And then out of the be-fucking-lue, everything gets substantially darker. Not pitch black mind you. Not even power failure black. More like a cloud passing over the sun. Make that a storm. Though there is no storm. No clouds. It’s a bright day and anyway I’m inside.  I wish that had been all. Just a slight decrease in illumination and a little breathing difficulty. Could still blame that on a blown fuse or some aberrant drug related flashback. But then my nostrils flare with the scent of something bitter & foul, something inhuman, reeking with so much rot & years, telling me in the language of nausea that I’m not alone.  Something’s behind me.  Of course, I deny it.  It’s impossible to deny.  I wanna puke.  To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead take an even deeper one. Only this time, as you start to exhale, try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails?, don’t worry, that particular detail doesn’t matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms  —  you sure as hell should be getting rid of this

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Nevertheless regardless of how extensive his analysis is here, Heidegger still fails to point out that unheimlich when used as an adverb means “dreadfully,” “awfully,” “heaps of,’’ and “an awful lot of.” Largeness has always been a condition of the weird and unsafe; it is overwhelming, too much or too big. Thus that which is uncanny or unheimlich is neither homey nor protective, nor comforting nor familiar. It is alien, exposed, and unsettling, or in other words, the perfect description of the house on Ash Tree Lane. In their absence, the Navidsons’ home had become something else, and while not exactly sinister or even threatening, the change still destroyed any sense of security or well-being. book  --you won’t have time to even scream.  Don’t look.  I didn’t.  Of course I looked.  I looked so fucking fast I should of ended up wearing one of those neck braces for whiplash.  My hands had gone all clammy. My face was burning up. Who knows how much adrenaline had just been dumped into my system. Before I turned, it felt exactly as if in fact I had turned and at that instant caught sight of some tremendous beast crouched off in the shadows, muscles a twitch from firing its great mass forward, ragged claws slowly extending, digging into the linoleum, even as its eyes are dilating, beyond the point of reason, completely obliterating the iris, and by that widening fire, the glowing furnace of witness, a camera lucida, with me in silhouette, like some silly Hand shadow twitching about upside down, is that right?, or am I getting confused?, either way registering at last the sign it must have been waiting for: my own recognition of exactly what has been awaiting me all along  --  except that when I finally do turn, jerking around like the scared-shitless shit-for-brains I am, I discover only a deserted corridor, or was it merely a recently deserted corridor?, this thing, whatever it had been, obviously beyond the grasp of my imagination or for that matter my emotions, having departed into alcoves of darkness, seeping into corners & floors, cracks & outlets, gone even to the walls. Lights now normal. The smell history. Though my fingers still tremble and I’ve yet to stop choking on large irregular gulps of air, as I keep spinning around like a stupid top spinning around on top of nothing, looking everywhere, even though there’s absolutely nothing, nothing anywhere.  I actually thought I was going to fall, and then just as abruptly as I’d been possessed by this fear, it left me and I fell back into control.  When I re-enter the Shop things are still askew but they at least seem manageable.  The phone has been ringing. Nine times and counting, my boss announces. He’s clearly annoyed. More annoyed when I express some surprise over his ability to count that high.  I pick up before he can start yammering at me about my attitude.  The call’s for me. Lude’s on a pay phone in the valley with important info. Apparently, there’s some significant doings at some significant club. He tells me he can guest list my boss and any cohorts I deem worthy. Sure, I say, but I’m still shaken and quickly lose hold of the details when I realize I’ve just forgotten something else as well, something very important, which by the time I hang up, no matter how hard I try, I can no longer remember what I’d meant to remember when whatever it was had first entered my head.  Or had it?  Maybe it hadn’t entered my head at all. Maybe it had just brushed past me, like someone easing by in a dark room, the face lost in shadow, my thoughts lost in another conversation, though something in her movement or perfume is disturbingly familiar, though how familiar is impossible to tell

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Upstairs, in the master bedroom, we discover along with Will and Karen a plain, white door with a glass knob. It does not, however, open into the children’s room but into a space resembling a walk-in closet. However unlike other closets in the house, this one lacks outlets, sockets, switches, shelves, a rod on which to hang things, or even some decorative molding. Instead, the walls are perfectly smooth and almost pure black — ’almost’ because there is a slightly grey quality to the surface. The space cannot be more than five feet wide and at most four feet long. On the opposite end, a second door, identical to the first one opens up into the children’s bedroom. Navidson immediately asks whether or not they overlooked the room. This seems ridiculous at first until one considers how the impact of such an implausible piece of reality could force anyone to question their own perceptions. Karen, however, manages to dig up some photos which clearly show a bedroom wall without a door. The next question is whether or not someone could have broken in and in four days constructed the peculiar addition. Improbable, to say the least. Their final thought is that someone came in and uncovered it. Just installed two doors. But why? And for what matter, to quote Rilke, Wer?34 Navidson does check the Hi 8s but discovers that the motion sensors were never triggered . Only their exit and re-entrance exists on tape. Virtually a week seamlessly elided, showing us the family as they depart from a house without that strange interior space present only to return a fraction of a second later to find it already in place, almost as if it had been there all along. Since the discovery occurred in the evening, the Navidsons’ inquiry must wait until morning. And so while Chad and Daisy sleep, we watch Karen and Will suffer through a restless night. Hillary, their one year old Siberian husky, and Mallory, their tabby cat, lie on either side of the 24” Sony television unperturbed by the new closet or the flicker from the tube or the drone from the speakers — Letterman, new revelations regarding the Iran-Contra affair, reruns, the traffic of information assuring everyone that the rest of the world is still out there, continuing on as usual, even if two new doors now stand open, providing a view across a new space of darkness, from parents' room to children‘s room, where a tiny nightlight of the Star Ship Enterprise burns like some North Star. It is a beautiful shot. In fact, the composition and elegant balance of because by the time I realize she’s someone I should know she’s already gone, deep into the din, beyond the bar, taking with her any chance of recognition. Though she hasn’t left. She’s still there. Embracing shadows. Is that it? Had I been thinking of a woman? I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t matter. I have a terrifying feeling it does. 34 Neatly translated as “Who?” which I happened to find in this poem “Orpheus,  Eurydice, Bermes.” The book’s called The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. 1989. See page 53, Vintage International.

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colours, not to mention the lush contrast of lights and darks, are so exquisite they temporarily distract us from any questions concerning the house or events unfolding there. It seems a perfect example of Navidson‘s unparalleled talent and illustrates why few, if any, could have accomplished what he did, especially toward the end. The following day both Karen and Will pursue the most rational course: they acquire the architectural blueprints from their local real estate office. As might have been expected, these blueprints are not actual building plans but were drawn up in 1981 when former owners sought permission from the town’s zoning board to construct an elI. The ell, however, was ultimately never built as the owners soon sold the property, claiming they needed something “a little smaller.’’ Though the designs, as they appear on screen, do not show a room or closet, they do confirm the existence of a strange crawl space, roughly four feet wide, running between both bedrooms.35 Alicia Rosenbaum, the real estate agent responsible for selling the Navidsons the house, gives the camera a bewildered shrug when Karen asks if she has any idea who could be responsible for “this outrage.” Unable to say anything useful, Mrs. Rosenbaum finally asks if they want to call the police, which amusingly enough they do. That afternoon, two officers arrive, examine the closet and try to hide the fact that this has to be the weirdest call they have ever made. As Sheriff Axnard says, ‘’We’ll file a report but other than that, well I don’t know what more we can do. Better I guess t’have been a victim of a crazy carpenter than some robber,” which even strikes Karen and Navidson as a little funny. With all obvious options exhausted, Navidson returns to the building plans. At first this seems pretty innocent until he gets out a measuring tape. Idly at first, he starts comparing the dimensions indicated in the plans with those he personally takes. Very soon he realizes not everything adds up. Something, in fact, is very wrong. Navidson repeatedly tacks back and forth from his 25’ Stanley Power Lock to the cold blue pages spread out on his bed, until he finally mutters aloud: “This better be a case of bad math.’’ An incongruous cut presents us with the title card: ¼” Outside the house, Navidson climbs up a ladder to the second story. Not an easy ascent he casually confesses to us, explaining how a troublesome skin condition he has had since childhood has recently begun to flare up around his toes. Wincing slightly at what we can assume is at least moderate pain, he reaches the top rung where using a 100’ Empire fiberglass tape with a hand crank, he proceeds to measure the distance from the far end of the master bedroom to the far end of the children’s bedroom. The total comes to 32’ 9 ¾” which the house plans corroborate — plus or minus an inch. The puzzling 35

In Appendix II-A, Mr. Truant provides a sketch of this floor plan on the back of an  envelope. -- Ed.

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part comes when Navidson measures the internal space. He carefully notes the length of the new area, the length of both bedrooms and then factors in the width of all the walls. The result is anything but comforting. In fact it is impossible. 32’ 10” exactly. The width of the house inside would appear to exceed the width of the house as measured from the outside by ¼”. Certain that he has miscalculated, Navidson drills through the outer walls to measure their width precisely. Finally, with Karen‘s help, he fastens the end of some fishing line to the edge of the outer wall, runs it through the drilled hole, stretches it across the master bedroom, the new space, the children‘s bedroom and then runs it through a hole drilled through the opposite wall. He double checks his work, makes sure the line is straight, level and taut and then marks it. The measurement is still the same. 32’ 10”exactly. Using the same line, Navidson goes outside, stretches the fishing line from one side of the house to the other only to find it is a quarter of an inch too long. Exactly. The impossible is one thing when considered as a purely intellectual conceit. After all, it is not so large a problem when one can puzzle over an Escher print and then close the book. It is quite another thing when one faces a physical reality the mind and body cannot accept. Karen refuses the knowledge. A reluctant Eve who prefers tangerines to apples. “I don’t care,” she tells Navidson. “Stop drilling holes in my walls.” Undeterred, Navidson continues his quest, even though repeated attempts at measuring the house continue to reveal the quarter-inch anomaly. Karen gets quieter and quieter. Navidson’s mood darkens, and responding like finely tuned weathervanes the children react to the change in parental weather by hiding in other parts of the house. Frustration edges into Navidson‘s voice. No matter how hard he tries — and Navidson tries six consecutive times in six consecutive segments — he cannot slaughter that tiny sliver of space. Another night passes and that quarter of an inch still survives. Where narratives in film and fiction often rely on virtually immediate reactions, reality is far more insistent and infinitely (literally) more patient. Just as insidious poisons in the water table can take years before their effects are felt, the consequences of the impossible are likewise not so instantly apparent. Morning means orange juice, the New York Times, NPR, a squabble over the children’s right to eat sugared cereal. The dishwasher moans, the toaster pops. We watch Karen scan the classifieds as Navidson toys with his coffee. He adds sugar, milk, stirs it all up, stirs it again, and then as an afterthought adds

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more sugar, a little more milk. The liquid rises to the rim and then by a fraction exceeds even this limit. Only it does not spill. It holds — a bulge of coffee arcing tragically over china, preserved by the physics of surface tension, rhyme to some unspeakable magic, though as everyone knows, coffee miracles never last long. The morning wake-up call wobbles, splits, and then abruptly slips over the edge, now a Nile of caffeine wending past glass and politics until there is nothing more than a brown blot on the morning paper.36 When Navidson looks up Karen is watching him. “I called Tom,” he tells her. She understands him well enough not to say a thing. “He knows I’m insane,” he continues. “And besides he builds houses for a living.’’ “Did you talk to him?” she carefully asks. “Left a message.’’ The next card simply reads: Tom. Tom is Will Navidson’s fraternal twin brother. Neither one has said much to the other in over eight years. “Navy’s successful, Tom’s not,” Karen explains in the film. “There’s been a lot of resentment over the years. I guess it’s always been there, except when they lived at home. It was different then. They kind of looked after each other more.’’ Two days later, Tom arrives. Karen greets him with a big hug and a Hi 8. He is an affable, overweight giant of a man who has an innate ability to amuse. The children immediately take to him. They love his laugh, not to mention his McDonald’s french fries. “My own brother who I haven't talked to in years calls me up at four in 36

Easily that whole bit from “coffee arcing tragically” down to “the mourning paper”  could have been cut. You wouldn’t of noticed the absence. I probably wouldn’t of either. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t do it. Get rid of it, I mean. What’s gained in economy doesn’t really seem to make up for what you lose of Zampanò, the old man himself, coming a little more into focus, especially where digressions like these are concerned.  I can’t tell you why exactly but more and more these days I’m struck by the fact that everything Zampanò had is really gone, including the bowl of betel nuts left on his mantle or the battered shotgun bearing the initials RLB under his bed  --  Flaze appropriated that goody; the shotgun, not the bed--  or even the curiously preserved bud of a white rose hidden in the drawer of his nightstand. By now his apartment has been scrubbed with Clorox, repainted, probably rented out to someone else. His body’s either molding in the ground or reduced to ash. Nothing else remains of him but this.  So you see from my perspective, having to decide between old man Z and his story is an artificial, maybe even dangerous choice, and one I’m obviously not comfortable making. The way I figure it, if there’s something you find irksome  --  go ahead and skip it. I couldn’t care less how you read any of this. His wandering passages are staying, along with all his oddly canted phrases and even some warped bits in the plot. There’s just too much at stake. It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine.  Zampanò himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.

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the morning and tells me he needs my tools. Go figure.” “That means you’re family” Karen says happily, leading the way to Navidson’s study where she has already set our clean towels and made up the hideaway. “Usually when you want a level you ask a neighbor or go to the hardware store. Count on Will Navidson to call Lowell, Massachusetts. Where is he?” As it turns out Navidson has gone to the hardware store to pick up a few items. In the film, Tom and Navidson’s first encounter has almost nothing to do with each other. Instead of addressing any interpersonal issues, we find them both huddled over a Cowley level mirror transit, alternately taking turns peering across the house, the line of sight floating a few feet above the floor, occasionally interrupted when Hillary or Mallory in some keystone chase race around the children’s beds. Tom believes they will account for the quarter inch discrepancy with a perfectly level measurement. Later on, out in the backyard, Tom lights up a joint of marijuana. The drug clearly bothers Navidson but he says nothing. Tom knows his brother disapproves but refuses to alter his behavior. Based on their body language and the way both of them avoid looking directly at each other, not to speak of the space between their words, the last eight years continues to haunt them. “Hey, at least I’m an acquaintance of Bill’s now” Tom finally says, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “Not a drop of booze in over two years.” At first glance, it seems hard to believe these two men are even related let alone brothers. Tom is content if there happens to be a game on and a soft place from which to watch it. Navidson works out every day, devours volumes of esoteric criticism , and constantly attaches the world around him to one thing: photography. Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom’s wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how we know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson‘s eyes share the same water . Either way the moment and opportunity for some kind of fraternal healing disappears when Tom makes an important discovery: Navidson was wrong. The interior of the house exceeds the exterior not by ¼” but by 5/16”. No matter how many legal pads, napkins, or newspaper margins they fill with notes or equation, they cannot account for that fraction. One incontrovertible fact stands in their way: the exterior measurement must equal the internal measurement. Physics depends on a universe infinitely centered on an equal sign. As science writer and sometime theologian David Conte wrote: “God for all intents and purposes is an equal sign, and at least up until now, something humanity has always been able to believe in is that the universe

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adds up.”37 On this point, both brothers agree. The problem must lie with their measuring techniques or with some unseen mitigating factor: air temperature, mis-calibrated instruments, warped floors, something, anything. But after a day and a half passes without a solution, they both decide to look for help. Tom calls Lowell and postpones his construction obligations. Navidson calls an old friend who teaches engineering at UVA. Early the following morning, both brothers head off for Charlottesville. Navidson is not the only one who knows people in the vicinity. Karen’s friend Audrie McCullogh drives down from Washington, D.C. to catch up and help construct some bookshelves. Thus as Will and Tom set out to find an answer, two old friends put an enigma on hold, stir up some vodka tonics, and enjoy the rhythm of working with brackets and pine. Edith Skourja has written an impressive forty-page essay entitled Riddles Without on this one episode. While most of it focuses on what Skourja refers to as “the political posture” of both women — Karen as ex-model; Audrie as travel agent — one particular passage yields an elegant perspective into the whys and ways people confront unanswered questions: Riddles: they either delight or torment. Their delight lies in solutions. Answers provide bright moments of comprehension perfectly suited for children who still inhabit a world where solutions are readily available. Implicit in the riddle’s form is a promise that the rest of the world resolves just as easily. And so riddles comfort the child's mind which spins wildly before the onslaught of so much information and so many subsequent questions. The adult world, however, produces riddles of a different variety. They do not have answers and are often called enigmas or paradoxes. Still the old hint of the riddle’s form corrupts these questions by re­-echoing the most fundamental lesson: there must be an answer. From there comes torment. It is not uncharacteristic to encounter adults who detest riddles. A variety of reasons may lie behind their reaction but a significant one is the rejection of the adolescent belief in answers. These adults are often the same ones who say “grow up” and “face the facts.” They are offended by the incongruities of yesterday’s riddles 37

Look at David Conte’s “All Thing Being Equal” in Maclean’s, v. 107, n. 14. 1994. p.  102. Also see Martin Gardner’s “The Vanishing Area Paradox” which appeared in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific America, May 1961.

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with answers when compared to today’s riddles without. It is beneficial to consider the origins of “riddle.” — The Old English rædelse means “opinion, conjure” which — is related to the Old English rædon “to interpret” in turn belonging to the same etymological history of “read.” “Riddling” is an offshoot of “reading” calling to mind the participatory nature of that act — to interpret — which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable. “To read” actually comes from the Latin reri “to calculate, to think” which is not only the progenitor of “read” but of “reason” as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein “to fit.” Aside from giving us “reason,” arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning “weapons.” It seems that “to fit” the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms. Charmingly enough Karen Green and Audrie McCullogh “fit it” with a bookshelf. As we alI know, both reason and weapons will eventually be resorted to. At least though for now — before the explorations, before the bloodshed — a drill, a hammer, and a Phillips screwdriver suffice. Karen refers to her books as her “newly found day-to-day comfort.” By assembling a stronghold for them, she provides a pleasant balance between the known and the unknown. Here stands one warm, solid, and colorful wall of volume after volume of history, poetry, photo albums, and pulp. And though irony eventually subsumes this moment, for now at least it remains uncommented upon and thus wholly innocent. Karen simply removes a photo album, as anyone might do, and causes all the books to fall like dominos along the length of the shelf. However instead of tumbling to the floor, they are soundly stopped, eliciting a smile from both women and this profound remark by Karen: “No better bookends than two walls." Lessons from a library.38 Skourja‘s analysis, especially concerning the inherent innocence of Karen’s project, sheds some light on the value of patience. 38

Edith Skourja’s “Riddles Without” in Riddles Within, ed. Amon Whitten (Chicago:  Sphinx Press, 1994), p. 17–57.

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Walter Joseph Adeltine argues that Skourja forms a dishonest partnership with the shelf building segment: “Riddle me this — Riddle me that — ls all elegant crap. This is not a confrontation with the unknown but a flat-out case of denial.”39 What Adeltine himself denies is the need to face some problems with patience, to wait instead of bumble, or as Tolstoy wrote: “Dans le doute, mon cher … abstiens-toi.”40 Gibbons when working on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would go on long walks before sitting down to write. Walking was a time to organize his thoughts, focus and relax. Karen’s shelf building serves the same purpose as Gibbon‘s retreats outside. Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of “not knowing.” Of course not knowing hardly prevents the approaching chaos. Tum vero omne mihi visum considere in ignis Ilium: Delenda est Carthago.41 39 40

alter Joseph Adeltine “Crap,”·New Perspectives Quarterly. v. 11, winter 1994, p. 30. W Something like “When in doubt, friend, do nothing.” War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy,  1982, Penguin Classics in New York, p. 885. 41 Know what, Latin’s way out of my league. I can find people who speak Spanish,  French, Hebrew, Italian and even German but the Roman tongue’s not exactly thriving in the streets of LA.  A girl named Amber Rightacre suggested it might have something to do with the destruction of Carthage.42 She’s the one who translated and sourced the previous Tolstoy phrase. I’ve actually never read War and Peace but she had, and get this, she read it to Zampanò.  I guess you might say in a round about way the old man introduced us.  Anyway since that episode in the tattoo shop, I haven’t gone out as much, though to tell you the truth I’m no longer convinced anything happened. I keep cornering myself with questions: did I really experience some sort of decapacitating seizure, I mean in–? Or did I invent it? Maybe I just got a little creative with a residual hangover or a stupid head rush?  Whatever the truth is, I’ve been spending more and more time riddling through Zampanò’s bits--riddling also means sifting; as in passing corn, gravel or cinders through a coarse sieve; a certain coed taught me that. Not only have I found journals packed with bibliographies and snaking etymologies and strange little, I don’t know what you’d call them, aphorisms??? epiphanies???, I also came across this notepad crammed with names and telephone numbers. Zampanò‘s readers. Easily over a hundred of them, though as I quickly discovered more than a few of the numbers are now defunct and very few of the names have last names and for whatever reason those that do are unlisted. I left a couple of messages on some machines and then somewhere on page three, Ms. Rightacre picked up. I told her about my inheritance and she immediately agreed to meet me for a drink.  Amber, it turns out, was quite a number; a quarter French and a quarter Native American with naturally black hair, dark blue eyes and a beautiful belly, long and flat and thin, with a slender twine of silver piercing her navel. A barbed wire tattoo in blue & red encircled her ankle. Whether Zampanò knew it or not, she was a sight I’m sure he was sorry to miss.  “He loved to brag about how uneducated he was,” Amber told me. “‘I never even went to high school’ he would say. ‘Good, that makes me smarter than you.’ We talked like that a little, but most of the time, I just read to him. He insisted on Tolstoy. Said I read Tolstoy better than anyone else. I think that was mainly because I could manage the French passages okay, my Canadian background and all.”  After a few more drinks, we ambled over to the Viper. Lude was hanging out at the door and walked us in. Much to my surprise, Amber grabbed my arm as we headed up the stairs. This thing we shared in common seemed to have created a surprisingly intense bond. Lude listened to us for a while, hastening to add at every pause that he was the one who’d found the damn thing, in fact he was the one who’d called me, he'd even seen Amber around his building a few times, but because he hadn’t taken the time to read any of the text he could never address the particulars of our conversation. Amber and I were lost to a different world, a deeper history. Lude knew the play. He ordered a drink on my tab and went in search of other entertainment.

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When I eventually got around to asking Amber to describe Zampanò, she just called him “imperceivable and alone, though not I think so lonely.” Then the first band came on and we stopped talking. Afterwards, Amber was the one who resumed the conversation, stepping a little closer, her elbow grazing mine. “I never got the idea he had a family,” she continued. “I asked him once  --and I remember this very clearly  --I asked him if he had any children. He said he didn’t have any children any more. Then he added: ‘Of course, you’re all my children,’which was strange since I was the only one there. But the way he looked at me with those blank eyes  --  ” she shuddered and quickly folded her arms as if she’d just gotten cold. “It was like that tiny place of his was suddenly full of faces and he could see them all, even speak to them.  “It made me real uneasy, like I was surrounded by ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts?”  I told her I didn’t know.  She smiled.  “I’m a Virgo, what about you?”  We ordered another round of drinks, the next band came up, but we didn’t stay to hear them finish. As we walked to her place--it turned out she lived nearby, right above sunset Plaza in fact  --  she kept returning to the old man, a trace of her own obsession mingling with the drift of her thoughts.  “So not so lonely,” she murmured. “I mean with all those ghosts, me and his other children, whoever they were, though actually, hmmm I forgot about this, I don‘t know why, I mean it was why I finally stopped going over there. When he blinked, his eyelids, this is kind of weird, but they stayed closed a little bit longer than a blink, like he was consciously closing them, or about to sleep, and I always wondered for a fraction of a second if they would ever open again. Maybe they wouldn’t, maybe he was going to go to sleep or maybe even die, and looking at his face then, so serene and peaceful made me sad, and I guess I take back what I said before, because with his eyes closed he didn’t look alone, then he looked lonely, terribly lonely, and that made me feel real sad and it made me feel lonely too. I stopped going there after a while. But you know what, not visiting him made me feel guilty. I think I still feel guilty about just dropping out on him like that.”  We stopped talking about Zampanò then. She paged her friend Christina who took less than twenty minutes to come over. There were no introductions. We just sat down on the floor and snorted lines of coke off a CD case, gulped down a bottle of wine and then used it to play spin the bottle. They kissed each other first, then they both kissed me, and then we forgot about the bottle, and I even managed to forget about Zampanò, about this, and about how much that attack in the tattoo shop had put me on edge. Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, always laughing, surrendering to its ease, especially when he soared in great updrafts of light, burning off distant plateaus of bistre & sage, throwing him up like an angel, high above the red earth, deep into the sparkling blank, the tender sky that never once let him down, preserving his attachment to youth, propriety and kindness, his plane almost, but never quite, outracing his whoops of joy, trailing him in his sudden turn to the wind, followed then by a near vertical climb up to the angles of the sun, and I was barely eight and still with him and yes, that was the thought that flickered madly through me, a brief instant of communion, possessing me with warmth and ageless ease, causing me to smile again and relax as if memory alone could lift the heart like the wind lifts a wing, and so I renewed my kisses with even greater enthusiasm, caressing and in turn devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died and condoms littered the floor and Christina threw up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.  And so only now, days later, as I give these moments shape here, do I re-encounter what my high briefly withheld; the covering memory permanently hitched to everything preceding it and so prohibiting all of it, those memories, the good ones, no matter how different, how blissful, eclipsed by the jack-knifed trailer across the highway, the tractor truck lodged in the stony ditch off the shoulder, oily smoke billowing up into the night, and hardly deterred by the pin prick drizzle, the fire itself crawling up from the punctured fuel tanks, stripping the paint, melting the tires and blackening the shattered glass, the windshield struck from within, each jagged line telling the story of a broken heart which no ten year old boy should ever have to recollect let alone see, even if it is only in half-tone, the ink, all of it,

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Karen’s project is one mechanism against the uncanny or that which is “un-home-like.” She remains watchful and willing to let the bizarre dimensions of her house gestate within her. She challenges its irregularity by introducing normalcy: her friend’s presence, bookshelves, peaceful conversation. In this respect, Karen acts as the quintessential gatherer. She keeps close to the homestead and while she may not forage for berries and mushrooms she does accumulate tiny bits of sense. Navidson and Tom, on the other hand, are classic hunters. They select weapons (tools; reason) and they track their prey (a solution). Billy Reston is the one they hope will help them achieve their goal. He is a gruff man, frequently caustic and more like a drill sergeant than a tenured professor. He is also a paraplegic who has spent almost half his life in an aluminum wheelchair. Navidson was barely twenty-seven when he first met Reston. Actually it was a photograph that brought them together. Navidson had been on assignment in India, taking pictures of trains, rail workers, engineers, whatever caught his attention. The piece was supposed to capture the clamor of industry outside of Hyderabad. What ended up plastered on the pages of more than a few newspapers, however, was a photograph of a black American engineer desperately trying to out run a falling high voltage wire. The cable had been cut when an inexperienced crane operator had swung wide of a freight car and accidentally collided with an electrical pole. The wood had instantly splintered, tearing in half one of the power cables which descended toward the helpless Billy Reston, spitting sparks, and lashing the air like Nag or Nagaina.43 That very photograph hangs on Reston’s office walI. It captures the mixture of fear and disbelief on Reston's face as he suddenly finds himself running for his life. One moment he was casually scanning the yard, thinking about lunch, and in the next he was about to die. His stride is stretched, back toes trying to push him out of the way, hands reaching for something, anything, to pull him out of the way. But he is too late. That serpentine shape surrounds him, moving much too fast for any last ditch effort at escape. As Fred de over and over again, finally gathered on his delicate finger tips, as if by tracing the picture printed in the newspaper, he could in some way retract the details of death, smooth away the cab where the man he saw and loved like a god, agonized and died with no word of his own, illegible or otherwise, no god at all, and so by dissolving the black sky bring back the blue. But he never did. He only wore through one newspaper after another which was when the officials responsible for the custody of parentless children decided something was gravely wrong with him and sent him away, making sure he had no more clippings and all the ink, all that remained of his father, was washed from my hands. 42  In an effort to keep the translations as literal as possible, both Latin phrases read as follows: “Then in fact all of Troy seemed to me to sink into flames” (Aeneid II, 624) and “Carthage must be destroyed.” --Ed. 43  Nag and Nagaina were the names of the two cobras in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Eventually both were defeated by the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

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Stabenrath remarked in April 1954, “Les jeux sont fait. Nous sommes fucked.”44 Tom takes a hard look at this remarkable 11 × 14 black and white print. “That was the last time I had legs,” Reston tells him. “Right before that ugly snake bit 'em off. I used to hate the picture and then I sort of became grateful for it. Now when anyone walks into my office they don’t have to think about asking me how l ended up in this here chariot. They can see for themselves. Thank you Navy. You bastard. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi with a Nikon.” Eventually the chat subsides and the three men get down to busi­ness. Reston’s response is simple, rational, and exactly what both brothers came to hear: “There’s no question the problem’s with your equipment. I’d have to check out Tom's stuff myself but I’m willing to bet university money there’s something a little outta whack with it. I’ve got a few things you can borrow: a Stanley Beacon level and a laser distance meter.” He grins at Navidson. “The meter’s even a Leica. That should put this ghost in the grave fast. But if it doesn’t, I’ll come out and measure your place myself and I’ll charge you for my time too.” Both Will and Tom chuckle, perhaps feeling a little foolish. Reston shakes his head. “If you ask me Navy, you've got a little too much time on your hands. You’d probably be better off if you just took your family for a nice long drive.” On their way back, Navidson points the Hi 8 toward the darkening horizon. For a while neither brother says a word. Will breaks the silence first: “Funny how all it took was a fraction of an inch to get us in a car together.” “Pretty strange.” “ Thanks for coming Tom.” “Like there was really a chance l’d say no.” A pause. Again Navidson speaks up. “I almost wonder if I got tangled up in all this measuring stuff just so I’d have some pretext to call you.” Despite his best efforts, Tom cannot hold back a laugh: “You know I hate to tell you this but there are simpler reasons you could of come up with.” 44  Fred de Stabenrath purportedly exclaimed this right before he was ki [xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpart missingxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]45 45  Zampanò left the rest of this footnote buried beneath a particularly dark spill of ink. At least I’m assuming it’s ink. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s something else. But then that’s not really important. In some cases, I’ve managed to recover the lost text (see Chapter Nine). Here, however, I failed. Five lines gone along with the rest of Mr. Stabenrath.

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“You’re telling me,” Navidson says, shaking his head. Rain starts splashing down on the windshield and lightning cracks across the sky. Another pause follows. This time, Tom breaks the silence: ”Did you hear the one about the guy on the tightrope?” Navidson grins: “I’m glad to see some things never change.” “Hey this one’s true. There was this twenty-five year old guy walking a tightrope across a deep river gorge while half way around the world another twenty-five year old guy was getting a blow job from a seventy year old woman, but get this, at the exact same moment both men were thinking the exact same thought. You know what it was?” “No clue.” Tom gives his brother a wink. “Don't look down.” And thus as one storm begins to ravage the Virginias, another one just as easily dissipates and vanishes in a flood of bad jokes and old stories. When confronting the spatial disparity in the house, Karen set her mind on familiar things while Navidson went in search of a solution. The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole. Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths. But children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable. There are certainly no primal associations with spatial anomalies. Similar to the ingenuous opening sequence of The Navidson Re­cord, seeing these two giddy children romp around is an equally unsettling experience, perhaps because their state of naïveté is so appealing to us, even seductive, offering such a simple resolution to an enigma. Unfortunately, denial also means ignoring the possibility of peril. That possibility, however, seems at least momentarily irrelevant when we cut to Will and Tom hauling Billy Reston‘s equipment upstairs, the authority of their tools quickly subduing any sense of threat. Just watching the two brothers use the Stanley Beacon level to establish the distance they will need to measure communicates comfort. When they then turn their attention to the Leica meter it is nearly impossible not to at last expect some kind of resolution to this confounding problem. In fact Tom’s crossed fingers as the Class 2 laser finally fires a tiny red dot across the width of the house manages to succinctly represent our own sympathies. As the results are not immediate, we wait along with the whole family as the internal computer calibrates the dimension. Navidson captures these seconds in 16mm. His Arriflex, already pre-focused and left running, spools in 24 frames per second as Daisy and Chad sit on their beds in the background,

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Hillary and Mallory linger in the foreground near Tom, while Karen and Audrie stand off to the right near the newly created bookshelves. Suddenly Navidson lets out a hoot. It appears the discrepancy has finally been eliminated. Tom peers over his shoulder, “Good-bye Mr. Fraction.” “One more time” Navidson says. “One more time. Just to make sure.” Oddly enough, a light draft keeps easing one of the closet doors shut. It has an eerie effect because each time the door closes we lose sight of the children. “Hey would you mind propping that open with something?” Navidson asks his brother. Tom turns to Karen’s shelves and reaches for the largest volume he can find. A novel. Just as with Karen, its removal causes an immediate domino effect. Only this time, as the books topple into each other, the last few do not stop at the wall as they had previously done but fall instead to the floor, revealing at least a foot between the end of the shelf and the plaster. Tom thinks nothing of it. “Sorry,“ he mumbles and leans over to pick up the scattered books. Which is exactly when Karen screams.

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frank rogaczewski

so what else is new? What a difference a difference makes. My sister’s saltwater fish tank becomes a terrarium. Before you know it Lotto’s been drawn and somebody else won. The first time the person on the street heard of T-cells they’d already been subverted into viruses quite retro and you’re just not the same person anymore what with cloning and all three blocks of the street’s been closed off for a mall. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be a horse of a different color. Kids hit puberty before you know it, before Mr. Rogers can call it a beautiful day to retire, quickly as velociraptors go from lizards to birds or Colonel Sanders from human to cartoon. From tooth fairies to insurance actuaries, everything changes so fast — taverns to pharmacies to laundromats to video stores outside of which and down the block, the occasional

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hooker’s replaced by a pamphleteer for the Republican candidate for state’s attorney. The more things change, the more they stray the sane. It makes a person wonder what makes a martini a martini and not a Tom Collins. The old mining town turns into Disney World and you still got to buy everything at the company store, just like on campus, where the only soft drink you can get is Pepsi, reminding us that Vladimir Lenin who changed his last name from Ulyanov, asked can the proletariat retain state power? Well, a little while after that query, during a heavy snowstorm in the Rockies, a tour bus skidded off an icy road and took a tumble down a mountainside, flipping over twice before crashing into a clump of trees. All but one of the forty-seven passengers sustained injuries later estimated as ranging from serious to critical — limbs were broken and organs ruptured, people suffered lacerations, concussions, respiratory arrest, muscle tears, and abrasions. Making matters worse, the bus had actually been torn open in the fall, and the injured persons had been scattered hither and thither for a few hundred feet down the mountainside. The continuing snowstorm meant that the injured tourists could not count on rescue helicopters in the near future, or for the next couple of days for that matter, and most likely by the time rescuers arrived, the injured would be obscured from view by two or three feet of snow. The tour bus driver scurried hither and thither among the injured passengers and worried, “Oh, whattodo? whattodo?” Luckily, he chanced upon the uninjured man who happened to be a doctor! One Dr. Throckmorton Mahlart. Unluckily, the doctor had recently had his medical license revoked for “unethical practices.” Furthermore, the unethical doctor was quite peeved about the action taken by the medical community, and he spat, “The fools! They called me mad!!” Yet the bus driver appealed to Dr. Mahlart’s humanitarian conscience, informed him that the bus just happened to be equipped with a first aid kit, and suggested that heroic action here on the mountainside might win the doctor back his license. “Damnitall!” the doctor exclaimed, “I’ll do it!” The bus driver sighed with a relief that was tempered only when he continued to hear Mahlart murmur as he administered to the injured, “Mad they called me! Mad! The

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fools!” And when the helicopters arrived forty-nine hours later, the rescue party beheld a miracle — shock treated, broken limbs splinted, abrasions cleansed and bandaged, open wounds stitched, clamped or cauterized, hypothermia and frostbite treated, tracheotomies performed, ruptured kidneys and spleens repaired, collapsed lungs restored, and three brain and two open-heart surgeries successfully completed. Each and every patient sipped hot cocoa. Holding out his hand to the doctor, the head of the rescue party congratulated him, “You’re a hero, my good man. You’ve saved every one of these people.” Smiling, shaking the man’s hand, Dr. Mahlart replied, “Not only that, I’ve changed all the women to men and all the men to women.”

the fate of humanity in verse So I’m wending my way through a recent New Yorker and what should I read but that the Bush administration’s planning another one of their regime changes for nations we just don’t like the cut of their jib. This time Iran’s the offending countenance. So I’m thinking, “Jeepers! This Seymour Hersh guy is just a bundle of bad news, isn’t he?” And then — Holy Oppenheimer! — I come upon this: “One of the military’s initial option plans … calls for the use of a bunker buster nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.” Time was, a poet would come across a disconcerting little factoid like that and it’d be an epigraph to a meditation in verse on lack of compassion and the fate of humanity. So I’m like, “My meditation will be there with bells on.” But no sooner am I in modem meditatio, so to speak, than the slow-moving, stately rhetorical figures tied to those jingling-jangling bells stumble over the alliteration and collapse under the impossibility of predicting from what angle the -ingling will next arrive. First I think, “Oh, this is a tragedy. I can’t even light a little candle of hope in the darkness of our times.” But then I’m like, “No, this is a farce.” (So sue me, Karl Marx). And really, what’s to meditate here? Holy bejeepers! This most Christian of American presidents — and there’s Hersh again, with a disturbing quote from an unnamed House member: “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision” — every night when en déshabillé, so to speak (Thank God this is not an Imagist poem, kee-rect?), donning his Wild West jammees — some yesteryear’s Christmas gift from some shady Saudi Arabian oil tycoon — he kneels and bows his head beside his bed and prays  …  well, but now you feel kinda like Hamlet, don’t you? You look at that New Yorker quote again — and, I know, I shoulda set up an epigraph so it’d be easy to find — and you just gotta go with Langston Hughes who wrote of the exploitation of Africans in the Johannesburg mines, “What kind of poem/ Would you make out of that?” I know what you’re thinking: “Well, he did put it in verse.” Not to mention, “Langston Hughes always had something hopeful to say

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about dreaming a world and the fate of humankind.” But then there’s the whole question of what good it’d do anyway. The proletarian poets of the 1930s liked to speak of “art as a weapon,” but W.H. Auden, who started out pretty left-wing himself, finally decided that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and W.B. Yeats thought politics made “a stone of the heart.” And who’re you going to believe, a bunch of blacklisted people or the kind of poet who hangs out in anthologies with the likes of William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth? Oh, and that reminds me, this poem isn’t anthologized yet, so you don’t have an editor to kindly remind you that when the poet exclaimed “Holy Oppenheimer!” he was referring to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, who subsequently suffered McCarthtyite investigation and was stripped of his security clearance for daring to oppose the development of more devastating weapons of mass destruction. All I can say is that before and during my career as a professional poet I’ve held a number of other jobs, including paperboy for the Chicago American, gardening helper at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, wall washer and floor stripper at Children’s Memorial Hospital, laborer at True-Test Paints, cashier at Irv’s Pharmacy, elevator operator at some unremembered Gold Coast high-rise a few doors from The Drake, journalist for a lefty newspaper, laborer at umpteen other sweatshops in Chicago and New York whose names will not be mentioned, hob grinder — and here the anthology editor should probably step in and inform you that hobs are those things from which gears are made — and adjunct college teacher — a job which is sometimes labeled “instructor” and other times “lecturer” but never “professor,” if you get my drift; and in not a one of these other travels of travail have I ever wondered whether my particular contribution made an impact. If you water the geraniums, the geraniums grow. Wash the blood down the operating room drains and the tiles are clean. Elevate the rich folks and they will get where they’re going. (Whoa! That last sentence works like, “I am one who is acquainted with the night.”) Grind the hob and you’ll eventually get a gear. Students don’t work exactly the same way — at least after high school we don’t grind them. But the truth about me is that I’m always second-guessing myself. Clearly, if you light that one little candle and you should stumble in the dark anyways, you’ll burn down the damn house. Meanwhile, back here in the Nuttin Anthology we’re all being told to line up and the editorial staff’s deciding how many pages we get. “No Eliot are you it seems to me,” the Old Man enunciates at Gwendolyn Brooks. “More’s urban than urbane of you. Three pages.” Kenneth Fearing’s next on the list, but he hasn’t shown yet. “No Eliot, that drunken commie bum,” the Old Man pronounces. “A page at most, and hold the footnotes too.” I go visit the women’s caucus, where Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy, and Angelina Grimké are leading a demonstration bordering on a riot, demanding more pages for women. And here come Margaret Walker and Genevieve Taggard, fully prepared for a sit-in at the preface until their demands are met. By the way, I don’t know

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where that anthology editor was when I told Karl Marx to sue me. He should have reminded you of Marx’s famous notion that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” It’s an expression I’ve used repeatedly, whatever that signifies. But now I’m at the rally in the index. And the important names — let me tell you, I could go on and on. Langston Hughes is speaking for Sterling Brown and himself, demanding that their more radical poetry be admitted to the anthology. Muriel Rukeyser and Kenneth Fearing are waiting in line to speak, which might explain the latter’s earlier absence. Wait! Here come Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot dressed in the outfits of the London constabulary. They’re shouting insults at the crowd, calling them “rabble” and “riff-raff,” knocking Romantic poets aside with their nightsticks. Watch out, Shelley! Oh, he’s been sorely used! Now the two poet-bobbies have got hold of Langston Hughes. They’re arresting him for saying, “A poem should be simple.” But if they think that this crowd of Romantics, Communist Party fellow travelers, and feminists will just part for them like the Red Sea and allow them to haul Hughes away, they are a couple of ding-dongs. Ding-Dong, the very words ring like a bell, to jingle-jangle me back to my task, which, as we recall, was to take an immediate political concern and to make of it something universal and timeless, more or less in the manner of Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” or Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” Not too difficult an endeavor, really, since no matter what we might make of the B61–11, the ruling oligarchy of the US uses the same old divide and conquer/bread and circuses strategies of empire that the Romans used two thousand years ago. Pretty timeless, right? Nope, they’re carting off Hughes for “Let America Be America Again.”

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craig dworkin from Parse

Adjective plural noun genitive pronoun definite article Noun period Definite Article Noun comma adverb definite article Noun comma modal auxiliary of obligation present tense intransitive verb infinitive mood indefinite article Appositional Noun comma alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction definite article appositional noun genitive preposition indefinite article Noun colon dash cardinal arabic numeral period Indefinite Article Noun alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction Noun colon dash marks of quotation First Person Singular Pronoun Subjective Case present tense transitive verb gerund comma Proper Name comma noun period marks of quotation cardinal arabic numeral period Indefinite Article noun genitive preposition Plural Noun past participle adverb marks of quotation conjunction marks of quotation colon dash marks of quotation present tense intransitive verb present participle locative adverb second person singular personal pronoun conjunction first person singular personal pronoun objective case marks of quotation colon marks of quotation Relative Deictic Pronoun noun present tense transitive verb Proper Place Name conjunction Proper Place Name period marks of quotation cardinal arabic numeral period Indefinite Article Adjective Dash Noun Used As A Compound Noun comma alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction Adjective Dash Noun Used As A Compound Noun colon dash parenthesis cardinal roman numeral parenthesis marks of quotation First Person Singular Personal Pronoun present tense transitive verb preposition of the infinitive present tense intransitive verb infinitive mood comma preposition of the infinitive present tense transitive verb infinitive mood noun comma present participle noun comma indefinite article noun preposition of the

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infinitive present tense intransitive verb infinitive mood and past participle used as a passive verbal construction period marks of quotation parenthesis cardinal roman numeral parenthesis marks of quotation First Person Singular Personal Pronoun present tense transitive verb conjunction third person singular masculine pronoun past tense intransitive verb adverb of negation adjective marks of quotation colon marks of quotation First Person Singular Personal Pronoun Subjective Case past tense transitive verb conjunction third person singular masculine pronoun past tense auxiliary verb and past participle period marks of quotation Noun genitive preposition definite article Noun period Definite Article Noun adverb of frequency present tense transitive verb definite article Noun alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction Noun comma conjunction of exception adverb of negation adverb period Preposition noun comma colon dash Cardinal Roman Numeral period Conjunction definite article noun appositional present tense intransitive verb indefinite article Noun alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction Adjective Noun colon dash parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis marks of quotation Interrogative Personal Pronoun Objective Case past tense auxiliary verb second person singular pronoun present tense transitive verb infinitive mood question mark marks of quotation parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis marks of quotation Definite Article noun relative pronoun First Person Singular Personal Pronoun Subjective Case present tense intransitive verb locative preposition period marks of quotation Cardinal Roman Numeral period Conjunction definite article Noun appositional present tense intransitive verb appositional adjective colon dash parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis marks of quotation Noun conjunction noun present tense plural auxiliary verb First Person Singular Personal Pronoun Subjective Case adverb period marks of quotation parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis marks of quotation Adverb Of

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Negation adjective noun past tense auxiliary verb third person singular masculine pronoun subjective case present tense transitive verb period marks of quotation parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis marks of quotation Adjective Used As An Object third person singular masculine pronoun subjective case past tense transitive verb comma Adjective Used As An Object third person singular masculine pronoun subjective case past tense transitive verb adverb period marks of quotation Cardinal Roman Numeral period Preposition Noun parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis colon dash marks of quotation Indefinite Article noun apostrophe vestigial genitive singular ending noun conjunction adjective adjective dash noun used as a compound noun present tense transitive verb period Adjective Plural Noun present tense transitive verb adjective of negation Noun period Adjective Plural Noun present tense transitive verb parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis plural noun comma alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a latin noun period alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a latin adjective period comma marks of quotation verb comma marks of quotation marks of quotation verb comma marks of quotation marks of quotation modal verb comma marks of quotation marks of quotation verb comma marks of quotation conjunction adverb adjective plural noun genitive preposition marks of quotation verb marks of quotation past participle adverb definite article Adjective plural noun preposition dash suffix comma dash suffix comma ampersand alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a plural latin noun period semicolon plural noun present tense transitive verb parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis plural noun adverb of negation past participle used as part of a passive verbal construction adverb present participle indefinite article adjective noun comma alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a latin noun period alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a latin adjective period comma marks of quotation verb comma marks of quotation marks of quotation verb comma marks of quotation ampersand alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a plural latin noun period

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Plural Adjective adjective plural noun genitive preposition Plural Noun present tense plural intransitive auxiliary verb adverb of negation present tense transitive verb indefinite article Adjective Noun period Definite Article adjective noun present tense transitive verb definite article noun marks of quotation interrogative personal pronoun subjective case question mark marks of quotation adverb of negation marks of quotation interrogative personal pronoun objective case question mark marks of quotation alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a latin noun period alphabetic letter used as the abbreviation of a latin adjective period comma marks of quotation Third Person Singular Masculine Pronoun Subjective Case present tense intransitive verb dash marks of quotation semicolon marks of quotation present tense intransitive verb interrogative personal pronoun subjective case alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction interrogative personal pronoun objective case question mark marks of quotation Noun comma marks of quotation Third Person Singular Masculine Pronoun Subjective Case present tense intransitive verb indefinite article appositional noun period marks of quotation Adverb marks of quotation noun marks of quotation present tense intransitive verb preposition definite article noun marks of quotation interrogative personal pronoun subjective case question mark marks of quotation parenthesis marks of quotation interrogative personal pronoun objective case question mark marks of quotation parenthesis conjunction present tense intransitive verb adverb of negation and past participle used as a passive verbal construction definite article Noun genitive preposition marks of quotation verb period marks of quotation Second Person Singular Pronoun Implied Present Tense Transitive Verb Imperative Mood Abbreviated Plural Noun period cardinal arabic numeral period Adjective plural noun genitive preposition definite article Noun conjunction present tense transitive verb adverb of negation Noun present tense modal auxiliary verb present tense transitive verb indefinite article Noun period For example, you cannot ask “Who or what killing?” but you can ask “killing whom or what?” Consequently “killing” can have no Subject, but may have an “Object.” And so may “to kill.”

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amaranth borsuk and brad bouse from Between Page and Screen

A virtual pop-up book. To release the words, visit the website and hold up the images on the following pages to your computer’s camera.

www.conceptualisms.info

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david clark 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the left hand)

online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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6 | Reworking the Past/& the Future/& the Present

“Factoid storieville or dead-time storage sways not heavy in I-o’s activated-life, or such-iteration, coz me, I-o, switch off/ on, extending heart-chip to fail-never,” begins Lynne Tillman’s future language "Future Prosthetic@?" Looking back from the present, a sophisticated man cannot say to a sophisticated woman, "I love you madly," Umberto Eco writes. Both know that the romance writer Barbara Cartland has already drained these words of their ability to express true passion by putting them into the mouths of characters in some 500+ Harlequin-esque romance novels. Eco’s solution? The sophisticated man can tell the sophisticated woman, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, ‘I love you madly,’" and the sophisticated man will know that the sophisticated woman will know that he knows that she knows that the words are cliché, but that the sentiment behind them is, nonetheless, sincere. He has found a way to use the old to speak anew. In order to speak anew, numerous authors today are appropriating and reworking older forms, or forms not thought of as literary. Stacey Levine, for example, appropriates the simple prose style and plot of the “girl’s adventure” or “nurse novels” from the '50s and reworks the genre as a philosophical novel of identity and difference in her Frances Johnson. Mark Z. Danielewski creates a hybrid of horror movie and literary theory in House of Leaves. “It’s not that all the stories have been exhausted and so the only possibility we are left with is to write about the impossibility of reading and writing,” Johanna Drucker writes in Narratology, “but rather … one must write through them in order to reclaim a language....” Or recast expression in ways that speak to our moment. An artist mounting her first show today is as far from abstract expressionism as Jackson Pollock was from turn-of-the-century painting, as far as Kate Bernheimer’s reworking of Star Wars movies as contemporary fairy tale is from modernist irony, or Robert Coover’s reworking of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” as anti-war story is from existentialism. Indeed, given the millennia of writing about love, justice and other eternal concerns, it does seem plausible to think that there is nothing new to say. Given that today's AI authoring software is trained on 45 billion times more words than any one human will read in a lifetime (and can

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be used to complete our thoughts), one might wonder, Whose language is it? What is the role of the author? What is the status of what was once thought of as the "individual self"? Questions such as these come to the fore in much writing by authors who use computers to generate their texts. What motivates many authors to appropriate or rework past forms is often a desire to express something from their own lives in terms that seem authentic, at least to them, and these old, beloved forms are part of their own personal history. That is, unlike Eco’s sophisticated man, there is often as much love for these old or non-literary forms as there is for the sophisticated lover they wish to address: a love of comic books, or the narratives created by Mexican wrestlers in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper. In Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge, the blues lyrics are reworked as high art, not out of ironic distance, but homage. Comixs, lucha libre characters, blues lyrics, space operas, and nurse Betty novels are also the material of life. So is the thought behind the aesthetic. Just as contemporary feminists take for granted some of the changes first-wave feminists fought and died for, many authors today take for granted much of the thinking that fueled postmodernism at its inception: though radical at the time, the idea that history is always open to revision has become part of the general cultural landscape. The gesture of creating a Twitter-bot to churn out poetry (or fake news) is no more an act of throwing a brick through the window of High Art than is breathing. Yet, as in Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher's recycling of canonical thoughts on liberty (Liberty Ring!), appropriation of the past can also be an acknowledgement that, as Jack Spicer says, literary works “cannot live alone any more than we can.” To be alive they must resonate with each other. And the more consciously a text works to do this, Michael Davidson maintains, the more that these anti-generic texts are tied to the past, the more they force us to look at traditional texts from “new perspectives.” Which is also to say the more they must, and can, resonate with contemporary perspectives.

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charles bernstein Before Time

In a time before beginnings, the songs of poets echoed the language of cosmos and cosmos echoed poets’ charms. Poem and cosmos were as intertwined as thunder and lightning. After aeons, the poets’ songs fell on deaf ears. Still poets sang of that archaic time when their words called the sentient world into being. And these new charms were as marvelous as the awe-inspiring songs of the archaic times they celebrated. After a succession of generations, poets sang no more. Yet their poems invoked, with fervor and majesty, the memory of ancient songs. Many eras passed: poets no longer remembered ancient songs or their secrets. Still, they recognized the loss and created phantasmagorias that collapsed onto themselves, plenitudes of metamorphosis amidst dazzling emptiness. These new poems were possessed of such stunningly dark mysteries that the universes, visible and invisible, shuddered when they were performed. And now, inestimable time after the mythic creators of these dark phantoms, poets have no memory even of the loss of the ancient songs; their words ring hollow against an indifferent universe; they are bereft of images, of stories, of illusion. In these times, poems are made just of words in infinite constellations. Yet in their supernal impotence these poems are as sublimely daemonic — world defining, world defying — as those most archaic songs of the time before beginnings. after S.Y. Agnon after Gershom Scholem after the Baal Shem Tov

source: When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer — and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers — and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to

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the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs — and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.

— Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), pp. 349-50.

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Amberianum

philosophical fragments of caudio amberian Abolens sensus numquam liberare cogitatione. Abolishing reason will never free thought. • Etiam homo fastus scribere posse bonum carmen. Sed suus non amo. Even a self-righteous man can write a good poem. But it’s not likely. • Praecaveo osor qui clamat “odisti!” Beware the bigot who shouts out “bigot!” • Nonnumquam homo qui mendacii loquimini veritatem. Even a liar sometimes must tell the truth. • O dii magna! Protecut nobis adversum malis qui consumuntur per justitia. May the gods save us from those consumed by their righteousness. • Colaphus est chiridotus punctum. A cuff is not a sleeve. (Alt.: A blow is not the full chemise.) • Aestas alga mutates in hiberna malogranatum Summer seaweed becomes winter pomegranates. •

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Si paratextus fortior poema sequitur fornicando fortior amor? If paratext is more important than poem, does it follow that love is more important than sex? • Perceptio est scriptum. Perception is textual. • Omni scriptura est pupilla. All texts are orphans. • Perspicientia est sensus vigalantis. Knowledge is a matter of minding sense. • Ubi erraverit caper detondetur vitulum. Where the goat strays the calf is shorn. • Rarus est maeror nomas. Seldom is grief misplaced. • Omne iter fluxum. Every journey takes a turn. • Cultura est opinabilis. Cultivation is a manner of opinion. • In fragmenta veritas. Truth is in pieces. • Vivis et vigeo. Argumentum injustitia deos. The fact that you are alive and thriving is proof that the gods are not just. •

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Remissio prope nihil. Desiderium dono divum. Forgiveness is overrated. Regret is a gift of gods. • Quid nunc videtur priori numquam imaginabilis. What was unimaginable an hour ago is unforgettable now. • Proximi sui ruina unius hominis felicitatem. One man’s catastrophe is his neighbor’s good fortune. • Servus absolvo illusion licentia. Dominus amat fraudis. A slave is free of the illusion of freedom from which his master takes pleasure. • Virtus est selectivam. Virtue is selective. • Coitus est bonitas plus quam amor. Est tangibili. Sex is more virtuous than love because it is more tangible. • Amor abducit lubido. Love turns many from desire. • In vino exiguum clinamen veritas. In wine truth swerves. • Sensus mentis dolum. Perception is the finest trick of the mind. • Veritas nondum visibilis. The truth remains to be seen. •

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Salus in numeris donec numerus vester ascendit. There is safety in numbers until your number is up. • Numquam nominare inane vacuum. Never call a void a void. • Sine pullos nihilum ova. If there were no chickens there’d be no eggs. • Ignorantiam didicit. Ignorance is learned. • Odium contagiosa est. Hatred is contagious. • Maximo sinceritatis ironia. Irony is the perfection of sincerity. • Veritas est scortum sumptuosus Truth is a pricey whore. • Judaeorum dabo optimus pretium. Jews will give you the best price. • Si videris Judaeus, dicere salve pro me. If you see a Jew be sure to say I said hello. • Omni infringes punctum impotens etiam amare. Everything breaks at its weakest point including love. •

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Fragilitas solicito amatio. Fragility is the root of love. • Quasi pardus est Judaeus. Sed absque maculis. A Jew is like a leopard without the spots.

Caudio Amberian was a Jewish poet and sophist of the first century C.E. (circa 30–75). He was likely born near Alexandria and spoke or read Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. He may have studied with Philo before moving to Rome around 60. In Rome, Amberian started a small school for sophistry, where he engaged students in Socratic-style dialogs. In addition, Amberian was a counselor to Nero in the last years of his reign, following the fire, and he helped set the ground for the move of Josephus and his entourage from Jerusalem to Rome in 71. The only previous translation of Amberian’s work, an untitled poem, was published in Girly Man. At school in Rome, Amberian spoke in a broken or pidgin Latin that some of his students called “barbaric.” The only record we have of his writing are the Latin transcriptions made by these notoriously unreliable and sometimes hostile students. The Amberianum was reconstructed from shreds and shards at the Sid Caesar Center for Dysraphic Studies. Missing words and the seaming of disconnected parts likely mar the work. The Latin manuscript was discovered on October 4, 1895, buried under a former Minsk dry goods store. The story of the miraculous finding of the Amberianum has been told in the award-winning book The Oy!: How the World Became Pataquerical.

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richard mcguire

HERE

Here

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fred wah

akokli (goat) creek More music in its name than “goat” Akokli rise as the June snow melts. The forest is dark above the road above the creek the mountain moves down the jeep moves down the trees the dark is down among the bumpy swells of Akokli Creek.

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havoc nation How the earth dangles eyeing over the geographical heap now the nation smothers lays onto the private magic state its own fake imagination. into my own feet and onto my own weight leap and into her hair Love tangles, in her eyes Havoc sleeps. “Cry Havoc” and slip out the dogs of war. The first woman will always be the first woman and that is a revelation.

Backoff

How do you tell someone else where you live? Can you reveal it as real a place as they sometimes think you are? In the mountains near here there is a woman who is also crow. She is overjoyed with tears when she meets another likewise crow. Even if you knew this could you look her up? I also know a man who is a tree and he received a letter from a friend back east which ends “It must be a very real world where you are. Love, George” That man is me as well a revelation.

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Well dangle then the revelation revolution nation let slip the dogs of war out your back door Trees and Crows are the ones what knows this Havoc old Hav Ok will stuff it in your Cry this magic leaping tree wiII never be the apple of anyone else’s Eye.

hamill’s last stand for Gladys McLeod 1. Our concern is tree‑murder, harvest of the forest (she’s worried they call it “timber”) timber sale A04292 structure wood could be a rough political situation, could be we speak as trees, innocent understanding of ourselves as things or places too, maybe farming but for the mess left on the smouldering hillsides and silting the creeks maybe a new crop another lifetime, no care for the names Hemlock, Balsam, Spruce undone words from our own mouths, no flowers anymore but cubic feet seven million two hundred and thirty‑eight thousand Cedar, Larch, White Bark Pine, trunk roots and limbs scrapped trash‑wood fuel for the bushfires dirty orange summer skyline, Lodgepole, White Pine, Other

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Species, in other words strip it, all the growth for structure wood core of our eyes to see and say it, won’t be taken care of, hearts lost in the language of public auction only “profit” in the names, no talk left about it, so set now there is no argument, choices gone, nothing left to say Forest Ranger. 2. house of structure wood all leaky roof this morning in the rain sits in the chimney flashing seeps through to the roof joists and drips still upright tree wood (branches?) from the floor sill to crossbeams what cells left without the bark, rootless timbers stand in the doorways and window frames its ok the house is “appropriate,” our real needs do not profit us, the hillside trees also leak the rain down to their roots. 3. I admit the industry of it, hot summer work, sweat and mosquitoes in the headband of the hardhat, chain‑oil, whine of the diesel among the spruce ehrrrrrehrrr of the saw to the heart‑wood, I admit the hi‑bailer works for a new pickup each year, weekends in town I admit his skill, I admit that he makes

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a life of his own from it, with a grip on the throttle lever, admit it 4. Probably the trees are warming in the sun the mud dries up and hardens on the roads streams are full and muddy now in runoff a whole forest stretches out the new rings probably it all just stands there, amazed with the steam rising up from clay banks gravel shoulders glisten in the morning light bridge planks shed roofs ditches a contour part of a scene, probable and amazing for the sun, warmer now towards the end of March, a forest moves towards the light.

chain 1. The idea of it. Pictures form and the topography gets carried around in a head. Sometimes the feet find out what a trick the mind is. A necessary disguise for what the heart expects. But the Abney Rule and Compass are equally off. And so we move in on the new territory only to trip and fall over our imaginations, get lost. 2. Snowed a few inches last night. Went up to the Giant’s Kneecap—freezing wind snow and whiteout at the top. Skied down into Joker Creek a ways before we realized we were in the wrong valley. 3. There are times moving through the bush so fast I fade into everything around me. Zigzag, switchback and sidehill force a fadeout between body and earth. Such a dance. Touch is some thing itself. A flash. 4. Everything’s out there larger elsewhere and then I add myself who’s watching.

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5. Via the car journeying over the surface is when its flat. Maybe boats on still water too or skiing across the frozen lake. By plane it's always there and back so more a line. 6. Look out of the cave‑mouth at an arched horizon, cutoff sky and alabaster rock wall limits. We see a night sky, the arch of stars, some heaven. 7. The size of a river = its original ridges. 8. We moved over the tables making our various tests for identification—hardness, specific gravity, streak, etc. Just as though we were about to cook and eat it all talk shifts to a rumour of serpentine on True Blood Mountain. 9. Lyles Adopola. Sweet smelling orange mint. 10. The Xthonic inhabitants of the sea, ridge‑dwellers, known as ‘the steady ones’. 11. One can imagine how difficult it might be to navigate a course through some creeks, trails, and ravines which are measured both in terms of a surface (the map) and the underside of someone’s idea of the place (the story). 12. The magical alchemical inversion of it is that it is already. 13. Duncan M. says he dearly loves his own back yard. Now I do too. The only test we have for it is the unavoidable picture. 14. High in the mountains, high on a mountain, and spin. To ride this horizon of a thousand peaks and sky makes me dig my heels into the scree and ice and lean back hard, just to hold on even.

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15. Silence leads — sinking into the viscera — gently — head feels lighter and drained — a thin, fragile wire open now — mind of all the air surrounds me — arms and shoulders fall relaxed — carefully and softly my body is lifted back up refreshed and presented to the food — mouth holds to the first taste which fills my head stretched out now over the lake and the day. 16. I get scared sometimes when I’m alone in the bush, especially at dusk when the stumps and rocks become grizzly bears. Never handled that aloneness, passage to becoming all one over extended time in unknown strange surroundings except to squint, peer, grope and fumble. 17. I was sick, very sick. And I hoped for deep sleep. It seemed to me that the bed was in an east–west axis and should be lying north–south. But true or magnetic north I did not know. A cow elk appeared to me, in a valley, so I checked my compass and headed north.

the poem called syntax We live on the edge of a lake called Echo. I love this notion that noise makes itself, so the lake holds all noise in its depths and when the dog barks it gets it from the lake. About nine thousand feet above these lakes (all lakes) there is a geometry of sound, something like Plato’s cave of noise. It is from that construct the dog’s bark takes shape, a resounding of an earlier bark conditioned by the alpine. History and physics. Acoustic paradigms in a bog of algae. When I tell all my cousins and friends about this they’ll come to live on the shores of this lake and clean it up. From the balconies of their summer homes they’ll ask a lot of questions.

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(sentenced) is not the string of words a sentence is not the voice comes out another’s is not the thought complete before it speak is not the mind a knotted string not words that only seem not meant to mean or sent not strung to end but tied to cradle each to each

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harryette mullen Bilingual Instructions

Californians say No to bilingual instruction in schools Californians say No to bilingual instructions on ballots Californians say Yes to bilingual instructions on curbside waste receptacles: Coloque el recipiente con las flechas hacia la calle Place container with arrow facing street No ruede el recipiente con la tapa abierta Do not tilt or roll container with lid open Recortes de jardin solamente Yard clippings only

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black nikes We need quarters like King Tut needed a boat. A slave could row him to heaven from his crypt in Egypt full of loot. We’ve lived quietly among the stars, knowing money isn’t what matters. We only bring enough to tip the shuttle driver when we hitch a ride aboard a trailblazer of light. This comet could scour the planet. Make it sparkle like a fresh toilet swirling with blue. Or only come close enough to brush a few lost souls. Time is rotting as our bodies wait for now I lay me down to earth. Noiseless patient spiders paid with dirt when what we want is stardust. If nature abhors an expensive appliance, why does the planet suck ozone? This is a big-ticket item, a thickety ride. Please page our home and visit our sigh on the wide world's ebb. Just point and cluck at our new persuasion shoes. We’re opening the gate that opens our containers for recycling. Time to throw down and take off on our launch. This flight will nail our proof of pudding. The thrill of victory is, we’re exiting earth. We’re leaving all this dirt.

coals to newcastle, panama hats from ecuador Watching television in Los Angeles. This scene performed in real time. In real life, a pretty picture walking and sitting still. It’s still life with fried spam, lite poundcake, nondairy creme. It’s death by chocolate. It’s corporate warfare as we know it. I’m stuck on the fourth step. There’s no statue or stature of limitations. I’ll be emotionally disturbed for as long as it takes. You can give a man a rock or you can teach him to rock. Access your higher power. Fax back the map of your spiritual path. Take twenty drops tincture of worry wort. Who’s paying for this if you’re not covered? You’re too simple to be so difficult. Malicious postmodernism. Petroleum jelly donut dunked in elbow grease. You look better going than coming. You look like death eating microwave popcorn. Now that I live alone, I’m much less introspective. Now you sound more like yourself.

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denigration Did we surprise our teachers who had niggling doubts about the picayune brains of small black children who reminded them of clean pickaninnies on a box of laundry soap? How muddy is the Mississippi compared to the thirdlongest river of the darkest continent? In the land of the Ibo, the Hausa, and the Yoruba, what is the price per barrel of nigrescence? Though slaves, who were wealth, survived on niggardly provisions, should inheritors of wealth fault the poor enigma for lacking a dictionary? Does the mayor demand a recount of every bullet or does city hall simply neglect the black alderman’s district? If I disagree with your beliefs, do you chalk it up to my negligible powers of discrimination, supposing I’m just trifling and not worth considering? Does my niggling concern with trivial matters negate my ability to negotiate in good faith? Though Maroons, who were unruly Africans, not loose horses or lazy sailors, were called renegades in Spanish, will I turn any blacker if I renege on this deal?

sleeping with the dictionary I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wideawake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables — all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.

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anna joy springer with rachel carns and jane o'neil The Forest of Mandatory Innocence The Forest of Peril That’s Real The Forest of Good Bad Intentions The Not Fake Parallel Forest No Escape Hatch in the Forest

audio online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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michael mejia Coyote Takes Us Home

The twins stowed beneath the spare tire tell us a story about a small, square jardín in deep Jalisco with neatly trimmed laurel trees and a cast-iron bandstand where Porfirio Díaz once stood and scratched his balls. Where Pancho Villa farted. Where Lázaro Cárdenas spat. Where Vicente Fox picked his teeth. This was the exact spot where Subcomandante Marcos, Tía Chila’s big-balled, black Chihuahua, peed and peed and peed and then mounted little diaperless Natividad. People came running. Nobody had seen a hybrid baby since before the war, since Juan el Oso, whose mother was taken to Acapulco by a circus bear from León. The twins were waiting on the curb, they say, watching the procession of the bloody martyr, when Coyote finally came out of the cantina. The silver scorpion on his belt buckle clacked its claws and made seven blind sisters dance. “Will you take us?” the twins asked. Coyote sniffed the air and measured the moon between his thumb and his forefinger. It was more than half full and the twins had had a strange delivery. But Coyote wasn’t concerned. He led them across the bridge and down through the park to the dry creek bed where we were all asleep in the Nova among the stained herons, busted appliances, tires, maricóns, and used condoms. A woman was weeping on a television. “Move over, little ones,” Coyote whispered. “Make room, periquitos.” A few leaves fall for no reason in this story. And even now we hear the band playing, just as the twins say it is: the trumpets and clarinets spiraling like crazy rockets, exploding into pink sparks above the crowd. This all happened at a time of balloons and marionettes, they say. Is that the engine or the tuba? The transmission or the snare drum? Dust and stones become asphalt. A desert appears at blue sunrise. Some rocks, a red-flowering nopal, a thin horse, a goat.

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It’s fine, we say. That sounds like a beginning. We can believe in that. Éste era and we’re gone. In the morning we see some kids throwing rocks at a woman’s head by the side of the road. They ride off on their bikes when we pull over. “I met a man at a disco,” the head tells us. The head of this woman tells us this man was a rich mestizo’s son, and how she danced a polka with him and lost one of her shabby little huaraches. How he tracked her down and mashed her toes into a plastic slipper he found somewhere and declared he’d marry her. How he shot twins up inside her that night, and how when they were born her stepsisters sold them to some blue-eyed gringos from New Haven. The husband took his revenge by burying her up to her neck. “Those bitches are drinking champagne up in Polanco now! But they’ll be back for me,” she says. “They’ll be back, my little ones, my little white children.” One of those rocks must’ve knocked something loose. We throw a few more while Coyote trots up the road to hike his leg on a spot where a woman buried the devil caught in a bottle. “Mis gringitas!” the head cries. “Bring money!” Pow! We hear our parents are dragging long sacks through fields of broad-leafed bitter greens that we don’t recognize. They are working in an orchard of small gnarled trees, where children are cultivated with the help of bees. Our parents pluck them heavy from the branches, pinch them off their slender green stems and redeem bushels of those kids for chits that mean food and cable television. The tractors start up and carry them to Chicago. Our parents work in a factory assembling little pink babies covered in feathers. They’re waiting for us, our parents, stone-faced. They’re laying out our shorts and T-shirts on a firm bunk bed, our parents. Our work clothes. Coyote says: They found some devils in Arizona, in the desert, mingled in with the bloated corpses of those mojados from Guatemala and Nicaragua and Mexico. They were looking for work, too. It’s not so easy for them either these days, you know. Coyote says: Those boys, Corrín Corrán, Tirín Tirán, Oyín Oyán, Pedín Pedán, Comín Comán, they got themselves locked inside a grain car in Matamoros.

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Then they sat trapped in a railyard in Iowa for four months. When they were found, there wasn’t much left. It’s like Coyote is trying to trap us with his stories. It’s like listening to him read the dictionary. “You can’t trust just nobody,” he says. We hate the frown of his jade driving mask, the deep stare of its shell eyes. If you look too long, you feel heavy. You feel old. So we let him talk, but we don’t listen and we definitely don’t keep still. We watch his words tumble out the open windows, turn to vultures on the road picking over something’s small carcass. “What did you say, Coyote?” we ask. “What was that? What?” until he gets pissed off and stomps harder on the gas, making the Nova buck and fishtail. Anyway, he has hair in his ears. The boy in the headrest has a sister carved from coral, and the iron girl beneath the backseat was a present to an old man from three blonde sissies, lottery winners from Juárez. Coyote told us to wait in the Nova, but we were hungry. Through the window of her house we could see the Witch of Guamúchil, her tits pounding together like two wet cheeses, Coyote’s teeth clamped to the loose flesh of her withers, his pink skinny prick pumping in and out of her hairy rump. Once we threw some water on two dogs fucking. The girl from Tizapán killed a family pig by shoving a lit candle in its ass. As we crossed the highway, Pilar, Carlos, and Miguel were turned to paper by the touch of a southbound RV. They blew into the Sierra Madres. Adiós, muchachitos! We were in a graveyard, watching our step. When the dead speak, it’s like walking through a spider’s web. “Who’s there?” they kept asking, but we couldn’t remember our names. There was a lot of dogshit around. “Don’t marry a woman who can’t keep a secret,” one of them said. “Don’t keep idle sticks in the house,” said another “Don’t shelter orphan children,” called out a third. We wrote it all down with a stick and some sand, like nothing we’d need on the other side. We found the elotero sitting under a tree, eating the last of his ears of corn. “But we’re hungry,” we said.

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“Don’t whine,” he said and threatened us with an umbrella. Everybody got one kernel, except Julio, who got none. That’s when we noticed that the elotero was a corpse. “Someone stabbed me.” He sounded apologetic. “No, I didn’t!” a voice objected. He had a kind face, the elotero, and he led us over a hill to a pile of old silver coins topped by a turd. A sad-looking devil was sitting on a stone, trying to straighten three hairs. “Diablito, is that yours?” we asked, pointing to the turd or the silver, depending on how you look at it. He gave us three guesses. Coyote craps at the PEMEX, and we find an empty peanut shell and the body of a princess beside a dry riverbed. Embedded in the soil are immense architectural forms carved with images of jaguars and frogs, lizards and fire. There are rotted clubs and sharp stones like little warriors. There are feathered masks with thick lips and empty eyes watching the sun, and there are images of fanged creatures that we don’t know. That we don’t want to know. The scene reminds us of the RV we saw outside of Tecuala, turned over in a ditch and on fire, all those bloody Chichimecs dancing around it, and the debris trail of DVDs and underwear and swimsuits stretching like a ragged quetzal plume for a half mile up the road. “I’m frightened, Coyote,” we say. He flicks us with his tail. The dead princess is like paper. She is curling at the edges and brown. Someone has drawn pictures all over her, like a map, like a journey home. We cannot read them. “Help me, Coyote,” we say, pointing, but he leads us back to the Nova and doesn’t say a word for one hour. Still, we are not certain where or when this idea of our parents originated. People you have never seen waiting to feed and clothe you? The perro taught us what was edible. The gato how to hunt small things. The ardilla to conserve. The vaca to digest. The burro to take blows. We learned to construct our shelters from the arañas, and the mono taught us to stay light, just out of reach. The tecolote taught us to stay alert all night long. But then one day we woke up all wet thinking of San Diego, Tucson, Denver, Chicago, San Antonio, Atlanta. We woke up waiting on Coyote without knowing we were waiting, watching for the dust of his Nova that would be coming down

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the dirt track from the cuota. We felt a little sick. A burning in our stomach. Our sinuses, too. Our eyes were itchy. The man we call Tío gave us a black pill, but it didn’t help. “You’ll be gone soon,” he said. We had never seen him smile like that. And then the animals wouldn’t speak to us anymore. They looked away. They stood dumb in filthy boots and their unpainted wooden masks. They sulked at the edge of the field of stones. They turned the corner when we waved. We cursed their sorry asses. We finally found them at the edge of town, by the dry well, sitting together in a closed circle, drinking tequila and telling dirty jokes. In the mercado, their pale organs had been washed and laid out on a table. Later, touching the little white feet of the plaster Virgin, we had a vision of the small wet opening between her legs. There was blood and hair and something else. A kind of worm. Who was going to tell us? The phone rang and the woman we call Tía said: “Es tu Mamá. Es tu América.” A green bird circles the speeding Nova three times screeching warnings about our stepsisters. There’s poison in the pipian! There’s arsenic in the tamales! There’s mercury in the crab soup! There’s DDT in the huitlacoche! Then it snatches Adelita out of the glovebox for its trouble. At the edge of Hermosillo, everybody’s looking for a ride North. Before the door of the cantina shuts, we peek in at a nude woman in the highest red heels holding a board painted with the number 8 above her head. Two pretty, cuminscented boys are standing around by the broken car wash with their shirts off, showing their thin, hairless chests to truck drivers who spit, pat their macho hair, tug their belts, pretend not to look. The boys’ stiff penises are like industrial tools straining against their loose-fitting jeans. Their oiled cockscombs shine silver in the moonlight. “What is it, Coyote?” we ask, but he guides us away. Twins. Like twin cities. Sister cities. And when they turn, their identical tattoos read: Queremos Engañarte. What does it mean, we want to know. Back in the Nova, we are hot and uncomfortable, feeling just too big for our nests, our bodies like chopped pork sweating in the saucepan. We feel coated in a thick fluid.

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“Touch me,” someone says, before Coyote guns the motor. Then we all shudder and then we are asleep. The girl in the headlamp tastes roses. Seeds in her mouth. She drools out a trail of hornless flowers and pearls that fly off into the desert. She is incomprehensible and stupid and will marry well to a bastard. That’s what Coyote says. “Shut up!” shouts her stepsister in the other headlamp, black snakes slipping soundlessly from the tips of her syllables, encircling her snugly, sucking and shucking. We stop for the night at an abandoned hacienda, the engine of the Nova ticking and tocking in the dark. Thorny vines reach over the walls, pick the shadow’s pocket. The blue agaves are suffering. The avocado tree wants a word with her brother in the carburetor. “I gave my fruits to la madre, La Morenita,” she says. “What else could I do?” We can’t sleep in the haunted dormitory. “Stay out of the cellar,” Coyote says, but then he’s snoring, so where else? We find a goat in a closet with the centuries-old reposados. A devil on a three-legged stool insists the goat’s a princess, his ransom, his goddaughter, his bride-to-be. “Pre-ci-o-so!” the devil says, showing his little gold teeth and their ivory fillings. In the ballroom, scarred films flicker on the wall: plum-suited charros singing from horseback to the grazing herds and a hunchback burning the corpses of emaciated campesinos. The projectionist curled over his womanly machine sings along as he fondles its knobs. In matters of love, one never gets what one wants. Out on the patio, beside a shattered staircase, a blackbird lies pierced by long shards of the broken glass. One wing’s almost off and his breast is sheared open. The delicate bones! The Pedro Infante face! The fluttering little heart! This is the film version of our parents’ romance. His amante has madwoman’s hair, dirty little virgin feet. The lap of her nightgown holds a heart-shaped bloodstain. Her three stepsisters hang by their necks from the porch beams. One redhead, one blonde, and one brunette. So peaceful, like beloved sleepers. Now we can forgive them.

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“I heard them whispering,” our mother says, grabbing a pigeon and cutting its throat, draining the blood into a little clay pitcher. There are hundreds more gathering to gossip, perching on the hanging girls, in the trees, on the roof, waddling and pecking around the dry fountain. The empty halls echo with their coos and scratching nails. The sound effect is amplified to emphasize her dementia. “It’s the only cure for his curse,” she says, cutting open another bird, spattering the fractured tiles with black constellations. Pure cinema! “What they said, yes, that’s what they said, what they said.” Our mother looks at us. No fool after all. She is an international star. “The only way you can ever be born,” she says as the camera slowly zooms in. She looks away, a defiant tear in her eye. We are in love. “Mamá,” we sing, “your cantarito is only one quarter full, so we’ll join in your slaughter just until we get bored.” But we work fast. Maybe carelessly. Is it our fault some of the slower kids get in the way? We wander into the kitchen where beans are bubbling on the stove. A steaming pozole and the moon making fresh tortillas. It has a big ass and smells like canela. “Ay, niños,” it sighs, wiping its hands on its apron. “You’re so late! You need to eat. But where is Yolanda? Where is Areli? What’s happened to Pancho and Enrique?” The truth is not pretty. We are so hungry, but then the sun bursts in wearing stained underpants and throws a brick at us. A watermelon. A mango. A boot. We swear: that was for nothing. Ask the blackbird in the avocado tree, the mad amante hanging herself from the Milky Way. That pack of dogs snuck up on us. They came up out of a culvert in the dark, quiet and with no eyes in their heads to reflect the moonlight. Before we could roll up the windows they’d carried off Cruz, Rosario, and Virgilio, torn open their bellies and plucked out their eyes. “Ojos! Hijos! Huesos! Lobos!” they bark. They come at us with bloody jaws and those stolen eyes resting like pearls on their tongues. “How many of us have been blinded because of you? To prove that the order to kill you has been carried out! Mocosos! You live while we’re left to be kicked and to struggle for scraps, run off and run over! Jau! Jau! Jau!” Coyote has the Nova in gear now and he’s swerving through the grove trying to get us back to the road. They’re snapping at the kids in the rear bumper, barking their names like some wild Chichimec gang: Brokerib! Pinchback! Swellfoot! Droptooth!

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Little Cuauhtémoc huddles himself around the radio, comforted by the sizzling static and the stone in his mouth shaped like a human heart. Oh, now it’s rush hour, golden hour, and all the Cadillacs chauffeuring our mothers to the suburban Seven Cities Mall are backed up for a glittering mile, and we are here in the Nova making time with some fineass white boys and girls on the service road, passing more public storage units and strip malls, legal services and sandwich shops and blood testing agencies and nail salons, like a never ending, ever repeating commercial for what we call El Norte. Ice cream, Coyote! Starbucks! Party rentals! Outback! 2 for 1 Tattoos and Piercings! He must not hear us. You don’t believe us? Okay, so suppose it’s just more underdeveloped Sonora sand and cactus out there, squalid shelters rigged out of cinder blocks, sticks, and plastic, and we’re tired of playing “I Spy” and “License Plate Lotería.” And the sun hurts our eyes because we lost our hats, and Coyote says there’s no extra money to buy us any. So there’s a young man on horseback, a tejano prince in a tall white hat, Coyote. And he doesn’t squint, Coyote. So he’s handsome. He’s got a million MySpace friends — mostly gay men and twelve-year-old girls — and a great big contract with Televisa. He will be our president. Si se puede! And there’s a woman in a maid’s uniform who loves him, and who doesn’t know yet that she’s pregnant, and she’s crossing the highway to dust the furniture and vacuum the floors and wash the sheets and towels and sex toys at the Yanqui-owned timeshares overlooking El Mar Vermijo. Each air-conditioned unit has tinted windows, according to the brochure, so you have no idea what those sunburned gringos are up to, do you? And the maid lady, Coyote: she’s wearing cheap sunglasses and a thong that she borrowed from her nasty prima who’s home doing her nails and getting fucked like a goat by the maid lady’s infected boyfriend who’s trying to watch the Toluca match and keeps asking: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” So, hey, Coyote: we’re getting a little cranky. Are we there yet? Gol! Gol! Gol! Gol! Gooooool! Francisco, the Goat-Boy of Ameca, rides round and round in our hubcap stroking the bloody left ear he sliced off Bofo’s bald head, a trophy of that championship season in Guadalajara. Cisco’s parents clean the lab where he’ll be studied in

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Portland. That’s what Coyote says. “CHI-VAS,” Cisco shouts every time we hit a hole. “CHI-VAS! CAM-PE-ÓN” And the girl we call La Sirena. She won’t say where she’s from. She swims so many laps around the radiator she grows flippers and a tail. She’s going to boil and turn red. When the cap blows she’ll be riding those flaming plumes of gas, oil, brake fluid, and transmission fluid right into downtown Nogales. La Princesa! La Reina! La Gloria! Wouldn’t you like to see? She will have her own apocalyptic cult. Nuestra Señora de la Nova. She is carrying the furious daughter of God. Coyote’s friend Conejo is waiting outside the bus station: all las Flechas Amarillas cocked and aimed south at Celaya, Palenque, Pachuco, Querétaro, Mérida, Pátzcuaro, Potosí, Tollan, Veracruz, Aztlán. We’re going to Gringolandia! Adiós! Adiós, pendejos, adiós! Vaya bien! Coyote whistles and Conejo gets in, his jeans and work boots crusted with plaster from building walls on the Heights for los ricos. God damn it’s hot. Conejo strums his guitar. Conejo says, “Let’s get the kids some ice cream.” Coyote drives the car. “Let’s get the kids some ice cream,” Conejo says and Coyote says okay. “Ay, qué rica!” Sometimes Conejo will lose his head. They have a thousand flavors. Las viejitas hand out cups of elote, aguacate, mango, mole, cerveza, sensemilla, cacahuate, nopal, chicharrón, chorizo, lengua, frijol, and there’re tents all around selling sopes and tacos — al pastor, bistec, flor de calabaza, gusano, hormiga, chapulín — Cantinflas masks, huaraches, guayaberas, Chiapas amber, Chivas wallets, bikinis, Zapata marionettes, popguns, tops, Jaguares keychains, piggy banks, balloons, Oaxacan silver, chickens, roosters, goats. We don’t keep our hands to ourselves until they get chopped off and tossed into the cazuela. Borrachos! A procession of staggering Yaquis circles the square with a pig wearing a crown of cactus thorns and a Patriots “Undefeated!” T-shirt. Father Pelotas, waving a

394 conceptualisms

feather and a valve from the uncorrupted heart of San Caloca, conjures a bloody little Jesús to scourge them. “Infiels!” Jesús shouts. “Nihilistas! Apóstatas!” He snaps his whip against those bent Indian backs. He hopped out of a perfect little cloud. Every good dog barks fanatically. And then one thing leads to another. The thirteenth apostle slips out of a mural and sneaks off to a motel with Concepción. Osvaldo and Elvira get sucked into an infernal sphincter. Jaime is forced to enlist with the garrison. The concheros’ rattling chalchihuites start the ritual lucha between La Morenita and La Malinche. Our Lady clobbers the other with a chair. She’s bloody. She breaks a nail. She cracks a rib. She gets her ass beat with a cornstalk. That one’s got some cojones. Juan Diego and Cortés tag in, slapping, pulling hair, gouging eyes. The loser will be shaved. Later, we’re cruising the Heights with Morenita cuddling her bloody little Jesús in the Nova’s backseat, tickling his beard, teasing him with his whip, the tip of it just beyond his delicate grasping fingers with their trimmed nails. He squeals and she nurses him, nurses us all with her Extremaduran rompope until we’re laid out — all except Coyote, whose shell eyes are glowing at us in the rearview mirror — drunk and happy on her magnificent jiggling lap, the map light of her countenance guiding our dreams toward board games and bunk beds. Let there be bicycles. Golden, slick banana seats and temperate, green summer. “You won’t come to my house?” Morenita asks. Her breath stinks. We see one black curling hair on her chin. These bright, vacant streets, lamplit and sober. Conejo sings a narco-corrido that gives everyone the creeps. A private security guard in a bulletproof vest raises his atlatl. He says, “Get the fuck out.” “No tocar,” Conejo sings. “No tocar, no tocar, no tocar. Ay, que barbaro.” Something smells like Fabuloso. Walls of bougainvillea that protect the beautiful sleeping families. Conejo says: There was this kid who loved the Dodgers, see. Chávez Ravine, Fernandomania, all that shit. He had this friend who worked in them new fortress-condos in Tijuana, you know? High-rise! And they snuck past security and got up on the roof and ran him up the flagpole and he was up there. Way up. Up above the clouds! Just so he could see all the way to Los Angeles.

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“José!” they started calling at him. “José! José! José!” They got so worried. Someone’s going to kill them. Si, le oigo! José calls down. Like a little angel, eh kids? Fucking Angel José, huh? And, you know, these kids call back: “José, José… José can you see?” … a la lu-u-u-uz de la aurora? José is singing. Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer? Ay ja ja! And Coyote punches Conejo right in the mouth. That broke his last good tooth. Conejo sucks a lime. She’s emerging through the static: big-titted Fronterista in chaps and mirrored sunglasses. You’ve got mother’s milk on your breath, chica. You’ve got a juicy pera, death’s-head thighs, semiautomatic eyes. You’re a shock to our guts, our inflamed rectum. We do a Mixtec boogaloo, an Otomi polka, a Yanqui Tango. Now we’re setting the Nova bouncing like a madrefucking lowrider. At our last stop to pee before the border, we find an empty peanut shell and a naked girl in a maguey plant. A shotgun shell and a naked girl. Seashells. Some spent shells. Coyote has to hold Conejo back, bind his filthy mouth shut with his belt. She looks crazy as a Huichol, the moon in her eye, the sun in her head. We shudder in the heat. She says: “Gemelos,” and nods. As if it has never been said before. As if she is naming us. There is a busted up Nahua keyboard in the dust, a blown out VGA monitor, a snake or two. We walk around the saguaros, listening to the snap of Walmart bags like little flags flying from the fingertips of the chollas. There is a bullet-riddled phonebook. An empty zapato. There is the tall fence. And the Franciscan shelter where they hold the kids who don’t make it over. They reach out through the barred, oval windows, grasping for birds and bugs, and the hooded monks pluck them out with giant tongs. Then they send them back around again to the rear, limping misshapen forms.

396 conceptualisms

“Where are the others?” we ask. Coyote touches our ears. “What others, periquitos? There’s always only been you. You two. The two of you.” He looks around. He smiles. “They paid for two.” We suckle the girl’s dark, fat nipples, her milk picante, ashy, thick as the sludge of Tía’s latrine. We bite. We tug. We tear. We have to try so hard, the girl’s coaxing fingers in our hair. She digs in her nails until our scalps bleed. Coyote gets it all on video. She sighs as we sniff her almeja. We crawl up into the uterus and have never slept so well. We sprout feathers and short hair. There is something else curled up in one corner. The stars are out when we return covered in blood. We have the taste of flesh in our mouths. We just want to dance beside the flaming maguey, let our arms and legs rotate free like the severed, spouting limbs of holy martyrs. We stomp the earth. One bare foot touches a rock. All our blood and sugar runs from our ears, mouths, eyes, assholes. The shit, chocolate, tears, and salt. Watch your fingers! We bite! It’s been a long day. Pretty soon, we’re over it. It passes. It’s dark. Coyote licks us clean and puts us to bed while Conejo and a devil play cards for all the diablitos in Hell. As he wins, Conejo eats the diablitos, crushes their strong little bones between his rotten molars, throws the shells on the ground. But the devil keeps gambling. He plays two deer, a frog, and death. Conejo plays a rooster. Coyote packs beeswax in our ears and covers our aching eyes with dried pasillas. “It works,” we hear the devil say. “I’ve tried it. My wife, too.” We’ve been in line for hours and hours, the Nova crawling through the last chance tianguis. Conejo is buying gifts in American dollars: blankets and T-shirts, stinking herbal remedies, shot glasses, ashtrays, and Aztec sun stones carved from Tehuacán coprolites. We huddle, maize seeds in a matchbox. We pray they don’t search us, or ask if Coyote’s our daddy, or what school we go to. We are suffocating and sick, double-wrapped in plastic bubble-wrap. Coyote is practicing calm responses, but that chingada Conejo can’t stop giggling. “We were visiting,” Coyote will say. “Our tiny little mothers,” Conejo will say. “Pobrecitas!”

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“Please step out of the car,” the armed agent will say. It’s the Padres ahead one nothing in the bottom of the fifth. We take a chance for a glance. Through the line of cars we can see to the other side. We see the yellow welcome sign beside América’s freeway: Our Papá stumbling drunk on his way home, our Mamá running from La Migra dragging our Américan-born sister Conejita behind by one hand, her feet just leaving the ground. It’s all true, querida! All true! She is flying! They can fly! Niños fly in Gringolandia! And now we are too too too, out of the Nova, over Coyote and Conejo spreadeagled on hot concrete, we are flying as if through a windshield, through glass, through steel, through the smoke and haze, the choke and maize, the toke and craze, the Coke and phrasebook, we’re flying. It’s the way the chicken flies to the pot. Which came first: the fire or the flame? We are flying: feathered and boned to you, querida Mamá, naked and new, Papá, sin entrails y contrails, la raza limpia, raza pirata. Oscuro? How do you say? Deportesation? No. It’s the way ESPN flies to Fox. Satellite eyes. You’re beautiful. Something small on a wind crossing over. But before we forget. Adipose. Otiose. Adidas. A radio. Game over.

398 conceptualisms

carole maso Deer

I Compelled into the dark forest after midnight, the mother in a brown suede coat went out in search of a buck in order to mate. In her mind it had seemed that she had ventured far into the night driven by desire, deep into the heart of the forest, though in reality not but a few moments had passed before she was shot dead through the heart. That night long ago the hunters ran to find their prize, but when they realized their mistake they were sore afraid — what was a woman with a brown suede coat and hooves doing out in the forest during the Rut they wondered, and horrified they covered her body with leaves and fled. Meanwhile the deliriously hallucinating mother sees the enormous buck in the wood and she calls to it with lust’s strange call. The planet is suspended in darkness, and there is violence and mystery at the heart of existence. Sexual congress provides wild, new life — a life impervious to bullets or harm and the mother gets up at last, and brushing off the dry leaves and moss and twigs she makes her way home where the child sitting at the window waits. The men who had covered her steaming body with leaves had fled the scene utterly, but their fleeing stayed in them, and many times they returned to the place where nothing was left but a light brown suede coat. There were no other earthly remains — not hair, not bones, not hooves, and for the rest of eternity the woman stalked the men and haunted them. II There was another mother with another child not far from here, except the child had grown up and gone away as children naturally do. This got the mother to thinking how many times in this very spot the mother and child scenario had replicated itself through time. She thought of the reproduction of motherhood

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and the reproduction of childhood and she found herself caught in the reverberating world — the world of multiplications and resonances and profiles. Children a long time after they have left are known to return to the Mothering Place, and when they arrive some remnant of childhood is always still there, waiting for them. Sometimes there is still an alive mother and sometimes there is not. One child, now a grown man, has just returned from the war. Nevertheless, he limps home to the place of his birth and his mother is there still waiting. In the forest she points to a stain on the forest floor. When the neighbors kill a deer they always call and tell her where they did the field dressing, and she goes out in the middle of the night and grabs the heart. The mother is not entirely sure whether her son is living or dead — or somewhere in transit, like the steaming body of the deer. The next time your life feels bereft of meaning go to the Mothering Place if you can, and greet that mother, and she will open her cupped hands and she will show you the heart. III Each year at the time of the Rut the mother was reminded that the child would not be with her forever. The Rut served as a reminder that soon indeed the child would be gone. The transformation was already in motion: one child would soon exit, and another would take her place. Yes, soon she would be gone, soon her body would break into night and song. For now the child was still held in the Fawn Enclosure, but she could not be held there forever. Fire ants are a problem for the fawns, the child will report, and if the fawns make it past the fire ants and the predators, they still must continually find food and cover. During the Rut, does abandon their young and run around as if lost. This leaves only the child to care for the fawns, and she collects fire ants in a jar. Troubles indeed abound. In the headiness and distraction of the season the hunters move in to stalk their delirious prey, taking utmost advantage of the situation and paying no mind to the gleaming spectacle before them. With the child safely tucked away, the mother in a black dress moves toward the hunters now. They are excited — and weird beyond belief. They break out their rattle bags meant to emulate sparring bucks looking for a match, and indeed

400 conceptualisms

bucks are often drawn to the sound, raring to Vete. If the mother were a shooter she would certainly consider shooting now. No bucks have responded to the rattling and grunting yet, but as in most things, patience is a virtue. The hunter in her sights throws in some snorts and wheezes and high-pitched grunts for good measure. During the Rut the Hunters sometimes wear false eyelashes and don other glamour indicators and make doe eyes in the attempt to attract a buck. If the mother were not a shooter before this, certainly what the hunter does next would be the tipping point. The Hunter is now making doe bleats. Most useful in the hunter’s repertoire is the doe bleat. For a deer, the doe’s bleat is the origin of song, the origin of well-being, the most important sound of all. A doe’s bleat is the first real sound any deer hears. When the doe or buck rushes to the bleat they are really rushing toward their mothers again. Also in the repertoire, there is a maternal grunt the hunters know will call fawns, were it not for the child holding them back, out in the Fawning Habitat. How foolish and giddy the men are. Today the mother is not surprised at their mass disappearance from the planet. She takes their rattles and tells them it is time now to put away childish things. Oh if only the mother had the fortitude to shoot a hunter in his lover’s bed when he is at his most vulnerable and distracted during the Rut. She pictures a pile of camouflage clothes, drenched in blood on the floor. How easy it would be to stop them, these men marked by shameful rattling or grunting or making Mother Sounds. Better to lure them into ecstatic union and at that heightened moment shoot them she thought; it would not be hard; she could eliminate them from the Valley and there would be nothing anymore to fear. Let them leap and fall and disappear, leap and fall and disappear. IV On certain nights while the mother slept an antler would sprout from the center of her forehead. The antler was soft to the touch and covered with moss and all night the mother roamed through forest and starlight to places she had never been before. In the morning when the mother awoke and discovered the antler, she panicked, as she did not want to frighten the child, and she would, as quickly as she could, saw it off and slip it into the night table drawer. After that, many nights would often pass without incident, until the mother came slowly to forget about the antler almost entirely, and that is when another antler would

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appear. And it would go on like that: sleep and dream, sleep and dream and saw, sleep, and dream, sleep and dream and saw, and sleep…. The mother and child laughed and time passed, and after awhile the mother somehow grew more capable of keeping the antler in check inside her lavish green night-roaming dream. Now and then a nub would appear, but nothing more. And in the night table drawer only a little stardust and antler dust remained. From time to time now the child would put the wrist of her hand to her forehead and then wave her fingers in the semblance of an antler and the mother would look at her and smile sweetly. One night while the mother slept the child huddled next to her on the bed and watched as the antler slowly began to grow from her mother’s forehead. The child had never touched anything like it before. It was something like a tree branch but not exactly — it was at once more solid and more hollow, a horn of sorts, covered with an indescribably soft moss and it had the most extraordinary hue. At the end of the night but before the mother awoke, the child removed the antler. Gently she slipped her finger under the mossy soft base, and it felt as if she were releasing the air from beneath the pad of a suction cup. She removed it with ease, and without the least violence. Then the child wandered out the door and into the dawn. Maybe she will happen on the bobwhite. To build their homes bobwhites find an impression on the ground, line the impression with grasses and weave an arch over the cup in a tussock of grass. Carrying the antler, the child walked out into the morning and gathered reeds and dawn grasses and cattails, which she wove together into a kind of glimmering harness and she placed her mother’s antler in it. She then went to her mother’s room, and though the mother was still sleeping, in sleep she seemed to bow her head toward the child as if she might nuzzle, and the child in one simple motion attached the antler back to the mother’s head and climbed into bed next to her.

402 conceptualisms

patrik ourednik from Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

English invented the tank

The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall fellows measuring 173 cm. on average and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers in total. The Germans were tall fellows too while tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in World War I who measured 176 cm. so they were sent into battle in the first ranks in order to scare the Germans. It was said of the First World War that people in it fell like seeds and the Russian Communists later calculated how much fertilizer a square kilometer of corpses would yield and how much they would save on expensive foreign fertilizers if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals for manure. And the English invented the tank and the Germans invented gas which was known as yperite because the Germans first used it near the town of Ypres although apparently that was not true and it was also called mustard because it stung the nose like Dijon mustard and that was apparently true and some soldiers who returned home after the war did not want to eat Dijon mustard again. The First World War was known as an imperialist war because the Germans felt that other countries were prejudiced against them and did not want to let them become a world power and fulfill some historical mission. And most people in Europe Germany Austria France Serbia Bulgaria etc. believed it to be a necessary and just war which would bring peace to the world. And many people believed that the war would revive those virtues that the modern industrial world had forced into the background such as love of one’s country courage and self-sacrifice. And poor people looked forward to riding in a train and country folk looked forward to seeing big cities and phoning the district post office to dictate a telegram to their wives i’m fine hope you are fine too. The generals

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looked forward to being in the newspapers and people from national minorities were pleased that they would be sharing the war with people who spoke without an accent and that they would be singing marching songs and jolly popular ditties with them. And everyone thought they’d be home for the grape harvest or by Christmas at least. Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914 when war broke out because it was the first war in history in which so many countries took part in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and the general theory of relativity according to which nothing was metaphysical but relative. And when the Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And the soldiers wore green and camouflage uniforms because they did not want the enemy to see them which was modern at the time because in previous wars soldiers had worn highly-colored uniforms in order to be visible from afar. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were so terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their names and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who and where to send a telegram of condolences but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 km. the fallen English 1,547 km. and the fallen Germans 3,010 km taking the average length of a corpse as 172 cm. And a total of 15,508 km. of soldiers fell worldwide.

Marching songs

Germans invented gas

404 conceptualisms

Path of civilization

Europe was decadent

But other historians said that the twentieth century actually started earlier that it began with the industrial revolution that disrupted the traditional world and that all this was the fault of locomotives and steamships. And yet others said that the twentieth century began when it was discovered that people come from apes and some people said they came from apes less than others because they had developed more quickly. Then people started comparing languages and speculating about who has the most advanced language and who had moved furthest along the path of civilization. The majority thought it was the French because all sorts of interesting things happened in France and the French knew how to converse and used conjunctives and the pluperfect conditional and smiled at women seductively and women danced the cancan and painters invented impressions. But the Germans said that genuine civilization had to be simple and close to the people and that they had invented Romanticism and lots of German poets had written about love and in the valleys there lay mists. The Germans said they were the natural upholders of European civilization because they knew how to make war and carry on trade and also to organize convivial entertainments. And they said the French were vain and the English were haughty and the Slavs did not have a proper language and language is the soul of a nation and Slavs did not need any nation or state because it would only confuse them. And the Slavs on the other hand said that it was not true that in fact their language was the oldest of all and they could prove it. And the Germans called the French worm eaters and the French called the Germans cabbage heads. And the Russians said that the whole of Europe was decadent and that the Catholics and Protestants had completely ruined Europe and they proposed to throw the Turks out of Constantinople and then annex Europe to Russia so as to preserve the faith. The First World War was also called a trench war because after a few months the front became static and the soldiers hid in muddy trenches and at night or at dawn they launched offensives intended to capture twenty thirty or fifty meters of enemy territory. And they wore green and camouflage uniforms and bombarded and shot at each

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other. The Germans had mine-throwers and the French had mortars so they could lob shells at each other. When some detachment launched an offen­sive the soldiers had to jump over other trenches and cut barbed wire and avoid mines and the enemy fired machine guns at them. And the soldiers would spend entire months and years in those trenches and they were bored and frightened and played cards and gave the trenches and passages various names. The French devised names like the snail place de l’opera bad luck the deserter ill feelings and headache while the Germans chose names like gretchen brunhilde big bertha and black pudding. The Germans said the French were vain while the French said the Germans were uncivilized. And they no longer believed that they would be home for Christmas and they felt abandoned and unloved. News came from the military headquarters that the war was nearing its end and melancholy was to be avoided spirits were to be kept up and patience and a positive attitude was required and in 1917 an Italian soldier wrote in a letter to his sister i feel that everything that was good within me is gradually leaving me and i feel more and more positive every day. And it was a great medical mystery that plague did not break out in those trenches because rats lived with the soldiers and ate the corpses and bit the fingers and toes of the living. In the military headquarters they feared that a plague would break out and it would allow the enemy to capture defensive positions and so a reward was offered for every rat killed and the soldiers shot at the rats and cut off their tails as evidence and in the evening they delivered them to a special commissary for rats’ tails who counted them and said how much each had earned but the payment never came because no fund had been earmarked. Lice also lived with the soldiers. Sometimes when the soldiers lay in wait for the enemy at night they would hear an enemy soldier scratching himself and it told them where he was and they would fire in that direction and hurl hand grenades. But there were still as many lice and enemies. In the twentieth century there was a swing away from traditional religion because when people discovered they came from apes and that they could travel by train and

Soldiers lobbed shells at each other

Big Bertha

Soldiers lay in wait

406 conceptualisms

Positivism

Order arouse out of chaos

telephone and go down in a submarine they started to turn away from religion and attend church less and less and they said that there was not such thing as God and that religion kept people in ignorance and in the dark and that they were for positivism. Positivism was a philosophical doctrine that declared that human judgment and the understanding of phenomena were the resultants of natural and social sciences and the only truth was what was scientifically verifiable and metaphysics was balderdash. Positivists did not believe in any God although initially some said that some higher being could exist and that it was scientifically feasible although it could not be proved. But scientists said that life was solely the result of chance and that order arouse out of chaos and they did not believe in the creation of the world as it was supposed to have happened six thousand years ago according to Christian tradition. And astrophysicists said that everything was only a matter of quarks and atoms and gases and that the universe was twelve to fifteen billion years old and that it was expanding all the time but they did not know whether it would go on expanding or whether it would start to shrink again one day or whether it might blow up maybe. Believers said that man might have come from the apes and quarks and atoms and gases but that did not alter anything because somebody must have created the apes and quarks. And it did not particularly matter whether the universe came into existence six thousand or fifteen billion years ago because the important thing was what went before and science was no match for that. The astrophysicists said that there was nothing before then and believers said that that was precisely what was written in the Bible. As time went by positivism lost some of its attraction because people did not know what do with progress and submarines and the atom bomb and started to wonder if they might manage to achieve some transcendence after all. At the end of the nineteenth century people in cities looked forward quite impatiently to the new century because they felt that the nineteenth century had marked out the paths that mankind would travel. And in the future everyone would make telephone calls and travel by steamer and be transported by subway and ride escalators and conveyor

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belts and use quality coal for heating and even bathe once a week. And the electromagnetic telegraph and wireless telephony would carry human thoughts and desires at lightning speed through space and enable the human community to achieve harmony and live in peace and unity. And a great event was the Paris World Fair in 1900 which on the threshold of the new age extolled the future and the paths that mankind would take and the visitors rode a moving sidewalk and admired the inventions and marveled at the new artistic trends. And they believed that the twentieth century would put an end to poverty and drudgery and the opportunities afforded by electricity would surpass the wildest dreams. And everyone would enjoy social security and a week’s paid vacation. And people would live comfortably and hygienically and democratically and women would live democratically too and would be able to go to the polls and vote for their political representatives. And they could not wait for the twentieth century and would declare that it would mean new opportunities for mankind and we would have to learn from the mistakes of the past. Women started to vote in 1906 in Finland and in 1913 in Norway and in 1915 in Denmark etc. and as time went by they also wanted to study and sit for exams and take part in politics and science and fight in armies for a just peace. Most men did not entirely agree with women’s demands and considered that women chiefly had an instinct for family life and minor jobs in the household while men had a more developed propensity for the organization of society and abstract thinking and community life and convivial entertainments. And in some democratic countries it was laid down in law that there had to be equal numbers of men and women in parliament but some women said that this was not democratic because women were first and foremost human beings. And it was not just if they only bore children and washed diapers etc. and just waited for their husband to come home with his wages. And some men said that they would sooner be at home and wash diapers etc. and not go out to work any more and in Sweden where they had strong social policies there were lots of men who were paid so that their wives could go out to work. And according to various opinion polls lots of people considered that the greatest event of the century

Threshold of the new age

Learn from past mistakes

Women are human beings

408 conceptualisms

Invention of contraception

End of the world

Yin and yang

was the invention of contraception because it meant that women could have intercourse whenever they felt like it and did not have to worry about becoming pregnant and that enabled them to achieve sexual independence and economic independence too because they were able to apply for all sorts of important jobs and they no longer fainted at the sight of a mouse because they had ceased to submit to masculine stereotypes about women. At the end of the twentieth century people were not certain whether they were to celebrate the beginning of the new millennium in 2000 or 2001. It was important for people who were waiting for the end of the world but most people did not believe in the end of the world so they did not care. Other people were waiting for the end of the world but thought it would happen on any old day. And some Christians said that in reality it was already 2004 because Jesus had been born four years earlier than was supposed. And according to the Jewish calendar it was already 5760 and according to the Muslim calendar it was only 1419 and according to the Julian calendar it was less than according to the Gregorian one which is also why the October Revolution in 1917 did not break out until November. And the Buddhists did not care either because according to the Buddhist calendar it was year 2542 of the Buddjashakarajan era and Buddhists were more interested in what they would become in the next life a frog a longtailed monkey etc. In the twentieth century Buddhism and Taoism gained many adherents in Europe who banged gongs and breathed through their diaphragm and talked about yin and yang and wrote mystical books and said that the world was full of mysteries but only apparently so because in reality everything was harmonious. And when someone experienced a mystery they wrote a book about it because the media era had arrived and everyone wanted to write a book. And people were not so much worried about the end of the world as about terrorist attacks and a breakdown of electronic systems that would disable television and videos and microwave ovens and cash dispensers and airports and freeway signs and traffic lights and elevators in tower blocks out. Terrorist attacks in the twentieth century multiplied because it was a way of

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showing that someone deeply disagreed with something and the most famous of all was the assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo in 1914 that caused the First World War and thereby the twentieth century too. The breakdown of electronic systems that experts warned citizens about was called the millennium bug and it could have occurred at midnight on 31st December 1999 when the date changed to 1.1.00 because most computer applications used a two-figure year code and the danger was that the electronic systems would identify the year 2000 as the year 1900 as if the twentieth century and the assassination of the Austrian crown prince had never happened.

Breakdown

410 conceptualisms

stacey levine And You Are?

In 1999, when many people said that a crisis might be, but that it might not be, Janice-Katie took some prescription pills and felt a bit better. She knew life had its rough, even intolerable, side, for example, bugs and weeds, and so during this early period of her adulthood, she turned to good, exciting activities, such as weekly movies. In this way, life’s tone was more upbeat, as her friends remarked outside the cinema ticket booth. The good side of life was simply better, Janice-Katie told them, though there were sides to life that were neither good nor bad; there were sides that were both, too; there was yet another side that no one could seem to express, and though there should have been no further sides to life, unfortunately, there were. Janice-Katie went out each day, as she felt she should. In adherence to her entire self-conception, she carried herself as if in need of coddling. She liked to touch her upper arms and frequently smoothed her own neck. Once, near the entrance to the town dry cleaners, she saw someone; it was a woman leaning on a peeled stick. The woman walked slow. Janice-Katie stared. Though it was autumn, a honeysuckle vine had grown onto the pavement; it lay near her ankles, blossoms fused to the stems and ready for life in a terrible way, as far as Janice-Katie could divine. The woman with the stick advanced. Janice-Katie leaned casually against the store window, her mind fiercely focused, proteinous blood rinsing through her ears, and suddenly, she recalled that, long ago, the woman had been her babysitter. “I am Mrs. Beck,” said the older woman uncertainly, throat moving. She stared at Janice-Katie. “And you are…?” Janice-Katie laughed, as if carefree. She said, “I am Janice­Depressive, you know, like ‘manic-depressive‘?”

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Mrs. Beck frowned. Years before, Mrs. Beck had come one weekend to care for Janice­-Katie. She brought a gift of nuts and a luxuriant blue crème rinse for the hair. The woman led the girl to sit beneath a tree; there, using a flap of green cloth, she taught Janice-Katie the catch stitch, the loop stitch, and how to lower a hem. With the bright sun slanting, Janice-Katie eventually fell asleep, the sewing implements in her lap. When she woke, grasping at the needles, sensing she was nowhere, the tree’s shirred leaves hissing in the wind, she asked Mrs. Beck a question about dying. “Everybody dies,” the babysitter said authoritatively. “They turn into white crumbs and dust. You and I have some time before we stop being ourselves, though. Yet not too long — you’ll see, the time will pass like nothing.” At this remark, Janice-Katie lay back, blinking, wishing to pool her physical energy with someone else’s. Another day, lounging in lawn chairs, she and Mrs. Beck drank lemonade with a heightened, delicious, sour taste; Janice-Katie tried to convince the older woman that the sun is the size of a person’s hand. Mrs. Beck smiled then, threading a fine needle, appearing not to believe this. The tall house beside them threw an outsized shadow onto the brightly­ lit ground. Mrs. Beck said sharply, “What do you think you are doing?” as Janice-Katie reached for a garden flower. Then hurt swam up through the fabric of her dress, blurring its pattern as she stared. Now, in front of the town dry cleaners, looking at the older woman’s gray coat sleeve, Janice-Katie remembered her young, unsuspecting self, and had no feeling to cry. Mrs. Beck’s tidy beige cap looked at odds with the worn stick. She said, “I suppose everything has a purpose. Even a little chip broken off from a red checker” — she pointed with her black shoe-toe on the ground —"has some purpose, doesn’t it?” “What the hell are you talking about?” said Janice-Katie. “Not that I know its purpose. But surely someone does. The thought of it makes me feel a little better than usual. Then — thank goodness! — I don’t need to ask the question ‘Why?”’ Mrs. Beck kicked the chip away and seemed to steady herself. “So don’t you worry, young lady. You’ll soon discover your purpose in life!” She began to stroll away.

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Janice-Katie felt a surge of lavish anger through her body, powerful in its nerveeating properties. “Don’t you patronize me! And don’t call me ‘young lady!’ You’ll call me by my name,” she hollered. The woman turned around. “I don’t know your name.” “The problem is that I told you my name a minute ago, but you just don’t listen!” “What you said was not a name,” said Mrs. Beck. “It was nonsense. I gave you the benefit of the doubt by ignoring it and now you have forfeited everything,” she finished, walking down the block, past the shops, now all closed for the day. That evening, Janice-Katie stood in her living room. The afternoon’s incident did not bother her, because she had a persona. She felt great. Stout and in her fifties, she had a hatred of twilight. Janice-Katie ordered a pizza. The pizza was sour. Yet after dinner she stood on the porch , able to watch the night sky and its high, steam-white clouds, fantastically swift, with enjoyment. “I am strong,” she told herself in a whisper. “My bones seem a solid, unified piece, but they are not! Because of the joints, I guess. Still, I am whole,” she emphasized, also aware of an odor, perhaps from some fundamental food such as warm eggs, bread, or milk, drifting across a neighbor’s lawn. Night would go on for six hours more, she knew. The starlight she saw had begun in the past, streaming through the supposedly infinite sky, marking time as clocks. Janice-Katie touched the screen door. She was not near the beginning of her life, nor close to the markers of its end. With its white façade, her house sat unbolted to the earth that tumbled. She went inside and sat on the sofa for a long time, then phoned Mrs. Beck. * * * After some small talk on the phone, Janice-Katie found herself laughing in warm amusement at something Mrs. Beck said. Then older woman queried: “Why is your face so wide?” “I have a moon face, is all,” Janice-Katie stated plainly; “it’s an overly wide face due to the sideeffects of my stomach medicine. I have lifelong acne, too,” she added defensively. “I already know that acne is more or less a written statement about my feelings toward myself, so don’t bother harping on it.”

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She clenched her jaw, but, to Janice-Katie’s surprise, Mrs. Beck dropped the topic. The remainder of the conversation was light and easy, and the two women arranged to meet the following day. Janice-Katie did not like her body to get wet early in the morning. Neither did she care for soap foam. So the next day before dressing, she sprinkled a dry shampoo in her hair, calmly brushing this powder away, proud of her own small ways of keeping clean and comfortable. She then walked to the local lunch house, small feet jerking across the dining room’s whorl-patterned carpeting, and cried a friendly hello to Mrs. Beck and the other ladies present. Holding her tray, moving through the line to purchase corn and tea, Janice-Katie felt her stomach ticking with dread due to Mrs. Beck’s strong personality. She was nervous, but managed to sit and joke with Mrs. Beck about the ·comical sloshing of the tea mugs; she grew more relaxed as the two shared a joke and laughed together about a well-known neighborhood raccoon. Then the two women decided, using a few brief, blunt words, to become long-term partners and companions. They walked downtown together in silence, heading toward the nearest hardware store. Janice-Katie felt the weight of commitment upon her. She imagined Mrs. Beck would move into her home irreversibly, bringing with her a good deal of worn, yellowed furniture, presenting herself constantly for conversation. Janice-Katie felt sick. Nevertheless, slitting her eyes, she smiled, and told herself she must be good-natured. She stated uneasily, “Don’t put all your chickens in one basket!” “Believe me, I wouldn’t,” Mrs. Beck grumped. “Besides, I dislike both chicken and eggs.” “I like any mild meal,” Janice-Katie remarked. “What I don’t like is outer space,” she said, pointing above her head. “I'll bear it in mind,” said Mrs. Beck. The pair commenced in the usual ways, working together on domestic projects and growing angry over trivial matters in order to avoid closeness. Janice-Katie, in the full midst of her life, careful on the flooded ground, sometimes ambled through her yard, checking for weeds or garbage in the thin grass along the house’s foundation. At times, she enjoyed walking down the block. From the lawn of the college a short distance away, her house on River

414 conceptualisms

Street looked very little and alone and seemed to float above the road. * * * Mrs. Beck stood near the mantle, concerned. “Oh, I feel so swollen with something,” she said, and went to the sofa, hands first. “Cripes,” said Janice-Katie. She guided Mrs. Beck to the guest room, lowering her, faceup, onto a bed, though Mrs. Beck was capable of lying down by herself. The older woman looked at the window and its broad casement. “I hate evening, it is something like dying,” she said, palms in the air. “You are so dramatic, Irene.” After a minute she returned to the kitchen. Over time, the former babysitter seemed to have come under attack from several sharp maladies that had no names — not yet. She had problems with breathing. For this, she was scheduled to be evaluated in the next month at a nearby famous, though smallish, hospital devoted entirely to the lungs. The next problem seemed to reside in Mrs. Beck’s imagination. She perceived things that were not true. She believed, for example, that Janice-Katie had thrown away her shoes, and that the mailman was trying to follow her on weekends. “I did nothing to your shoes,” Janice-Katie responded dully, once, at midnight, standing between Mrs. Beck’s accusing stare and a wooden clock. The older woman then stated that her own nose and breath were diseased. Distantly, Janice-Katie wished she could bring Mrs. Beck some happiness, at least in the way adults can stir one another briefly from time to time, despite the propinquity of the outer world. But, she thought now, dragging a skillet off the stove, Mrs. Beck could not magically be made happy or well. She returned to the bedroom’s doorjamb, waiting for further remarks from Mrs. Beck. “Thank goodness my mother died,” Mrs. Beck said into the air worriedly. “She would have been so puzzled by my life! By my lack of accomplishments.” The TV flickered in the dark room. “You see, I just want to get settled on who I am.” “Irene, isn’t it a tad late for that?”

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“It’s never too late to grow!” Mrs. Beck said. “Haven’t you grown? Even in the past few weeks?” Janice-Katie snorted. She took care of everything now, saw to all Mrs. Beck’s home needs. Her own daily routine was drab, Janice-Katie felt. But inside the constraints of work and chores and Mrs. Beck’s near­ complete dependence, she sometimes sensed a fluorescence in the air around her, a possibility. She breathed it in. It was a type of freedom, she supposed. She returned to the room, carrying a little square blanket for Mrs. Beck, who lay back, resting. Reaching into her dress pocket, Janice-Katie withdrew a cigarette. “If I turn away to a private world of my own,” Mrs. Beck said, “will I still be part of the common world?‘’ Janice-Katie did not feel like giving Mrs. Beck the satisfaction of a reply. The older woman looked to the wall, groaning lightly, asking for a hairbrush, complaining that her nose hurt. Receding toward the kitchen storage area, private and alone, Janice­ Katie inhaled, feeling wonderfully alive and strong. She was pleased that she needed so little medicine these days. At this point, in comparison to others, her body certainly might be the leanest, possibly most well-functioning body on the block and the neighborhood, possibly in the entire town. Even if that were not perfectly, factually true, it also did not seem incorrect, insofar as Janice-Katie was absolutely unique. Now it seemed as if her own future infirmity, traveling toward her like an old man on a long, barely visible road, might vanish. It might be reabsorbed into the atmosphere or the road itself, or it might be destroyed by something surprising. “I can always prove myself by getting a job!” Mrs. Beck broke out from the back of the house. Soon Janice-Katie would attend to the chore of washing and stretching all of Mrs. Beck’s trousers, for, day by day, the woman’s legs were swelling with water or some other substance. She thought she heard Mrs. Beck calling again. * * * A few months later, Mrs. Beck returned home. She had been away for four days. “Hello!” Janice-Katie said, eyes smiling, and shut the door. Mrs. Beck set down her leaden suitcase. She had found a job as a mobile seamstress for a busy advertising company whose employees made presentations at conventions.

416 conceptualisms

However, she felt that the job might not be stimulating enough for her. Mrs. Beck sat in a straight chair. She was tired. During her absence, she and Janice-Katie had exchanged a few letters through the mail. “Are you well?” said Janice-Katie. “Yes, except for my breathing,” Mrs. Beck answered. After the experience at the hospital, her inspiratory breaths had become even more jagged and difficult. However, she often had enough breath for strenuous activities; a few days before, she had hauled several heavy wastepaper baskets full of needles and ugly telephones away from her station at work. “I didn’t speak to anyone on the train,” she told Janice-Katie. “It’s too weakening.” “There’s no need to talk on a train,” said the younger woman. Mrs. Beck looked at the living room window, lowered her head, and slept. When she woke, she was near certain it was nighttime. But it could also have been daytime, for the dank-looking sky could have belonged to either. She glanced around, for Janice-Katie would know the current time down to the millisecond: Janice-Katie had that type of wristwatch. She was sitting in the semidarkness, holding a cup of odorous tea. “Stop asking questions,” Janice-Katie said, refusing to tell Mrs. Beck the time, perhaps from spit. “It’s tiresome,” she went on, adding in murmured tones that she was not interested in milliseconds, or in the precise nature of time. Then Mrs. Beck’s loneliness was thin as the tears covering her eyes, which she blinked back while watching the quiet street with its irregularly shaped lawns and the few messy, blowing trees that no one bothered pruning. She noted the thick, dusty edge of the beige window curtain, comforting in its stillness. On a snowy afternoon long before, a schoolteacher, in the midst of the classroom’s raucous noise, had explained that day and night were opposite in nature. The teacher, Miss Helen Perkins, had been young and precocious, with apple-ish cheeks, and Mrs. Beck had admired her. Once, she even had felt wounded enough by the coarse goings-on of high school to go sit in the teacher’s lap for the duration of a filmstrip. “Dammit, they’re the same!” Mrs. Beck said now, shifting in her chair. “What’s the same?” answered Janice-Katie.

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“Day and night!” she yelled. “God, they’re not opposites! That’s unbelievably stupid. They are the two sides of the same thing—our world. Miss Perkins lied about it.” “Perkins? She wasn’t a liar,” said Janice-Katie. She had known Miss Perkins, too, after the teacher had become a quiet retiree living on a hill separate from downtown, yet linked to it by a rock road. “I think she loved whatever was true. She was pure.” “She was ignorant!” Mrs. Beck cried. “Irene, you are having a spell,” Janice-Katie said dully. “She never kept up with the current thinking. She schemed. She was trying to bring me down into shame—others too! The maintenance man!” And now Janice-Katie was ushering her to the sofa, unfolding the blanket, telling her to rest, though her mind would not rest. It was unbearable to think Miss Perkins had deliberately gypped her out of a broader education, and more. Trying to inhale, she felt a deep, familiar thirst for air. But relief did not really come from breathing, after all; it came from the release of asking long-impacted questions and from receiving satisfying answers. Mrs. Beck struggled to sit up. “Janice-Katie, in the letter I wrote you last week — ” “What about it?” Janice-Katie’s palms pressed the top of an armchair. “In the letter, do you remember, I made a joke about mayonnaise? Then I wrote the words ‘ha-ha’— ” “I remember.” “In your reply, you made your own joke — about barricading the house — and you also wrote ‘ha-ha.’” “So?” “Did you write ‘ha-ha’ because I wrote ‘ha-ha’?” “Oh, will you stop it?!” Janice-Katie sank onto the windowsill.

418 conceptualisms

“For hell’s sake, this is important! How much do we influence one another? Does my mind suggest things to your mind? If I had never written ‘ha-ha,’ would you have written ‘ha-ha’?" Janice-Katie said heavily, “I don’t remember saying ‘ha-ha.’” “You didn’t say ‘ha-ha,’ you wrote ‘ha-ha.’ Why say you said it when you wrote it? Now, try to remember, if you care about me or about life at all!” “Irene, something’s gone wrong with you.” “No, no — you’re the one who’s uncooperative.” “Try to sleep.” “In the middle of the day? Or is it night, and you’re just not telling me? Do you want me to sleep so you can be rid of me, or because you think I’m sick? Answer the questions!” “Yes — yes to all of that.” Janice-Katie picked at a hangnail. Mrs. Beck burst out, “It can’t be ‘yes’ to each! Now, please — I won’t be able to sleep until you answer the question about ‘ha-ha.’” “Well, you’re going to have to try.” Mrs. Beck smacked her hands together in anger. Janice-Katie had become too stubborn or dull to answer incisive, even wonderful questions that could bring clarity to life’s tangled moments. They grew painful if left unanswered. But Janice-Katie did not care, and seemed content to live as if beneath a shroud. It was left up to Mrs. Beck to scan time’s surfaces and past occurrences and make certain things were clear. The responsibility of asking questions was heavy, she realized, drawing up her legs, extending them on the sofa. A moment later, Janice-Katie was asking a question of her own: “Don’t you remember a few weeks ago when I asked you if we could stop arguing for good?” Mrs. Beck remembered vaguely, and felt a pinching sadness. “Well — I remember the colors of the day.” She closed her eyes. “Did I answer only what you wanted to hear? Or was the answer part of my own mind?” While resting, Mrs. Beck began planning a long, meandering walk that would

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involve leaving the house within moments, alone. She would take her time, forcing Janice-Katie to wonder her whereabouts. Winding along the flat, bare pathways of a nearby park, her mind would relax, as now. She would not return to her sewing job in the next week, she knew, because of the questions that rose in her mind like sprays of oxygen. Did the mind these days count as part of the body? In the park, she would approach strangers and freely ask any questions that were necessary to ask. The people in the park would be polite, wearing tidy, well-made caps and coats; they would answer cheerfully. She could choose any one of them to play checkers with her on the bench, and each conversation would go just as she imagined. Mrs. Beck began to doze again. She would not go for a walk today, she realized. It was unclear to her if she spoke her thoughts aloud: “Do all people who are sleeping contribute to the world, and help it? Oh, I so hope the answer is yes.” * * * The next day, Mrs. Beck emerged from a nap. Janice-Katie was standing beside her bed, watching. “Let’s go out for a snack,” she said. “That may distract you from your cares.” “Snack?” Mrs. Beck sounded worried, as if the word were a euphemism for something dire. “We can walk to the stadium cafe.” “But — can stadium food be good for us?” Mrs. Beck quavered, though she rose hurriedly, sliding her feet into shoes, finding her coat, wrapping it around her. “We’ll see Bill Orange, no doubt,” said Janice-Katie, as the pair headed through the gray streets and across an empty intersection. The sports complex sat on the far side of the college lawn. “Who?” “You know, the snack-bar man. He’s not bad.” “He is bad!” Mrs. Beck said. “He’s blunt. I don’t want to see Bill Orange or anyone like that today, because I’m setting out to keep a clear mind and feel better.”

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“You’ll cheer up as soon as you see him.” “He’s berserk.” “Your view of normal is very narrow,” Janice-Katie said as the two walked onward, growing quiet, though Mrs. Beck moaned, running a finger through her hair and upon her sleeves and collar, as if searching for a warm seam. The pair entered the stadium area, with its open amusement section and metal picnic tables. No game was held on this day. So the place was empty, and the low-lying snack trailer was open, as nearly always. Though the weather was cool, a bright yellow insect lamp hung beneath the trailer’s canopy. A man in an apron, standing beside the grill, regarded the women with lively eyes. A poster on the trailer window depicted a crock of white soup and a gabled European chalet. Janice-Katie greeted him. “Bill, why aren’t you wearing a coat?” “Forget about that,” said Bill Orange. ‘’I’ve got Dutch soup.” Mrs. Beck leaned toward Janice-Katie. “I wouldn’t touch the food here,” she said. “Fine by me,” said the man, angrily passing a whisk between his palms. After a moment, he added: “Ever been to Holland?” Mrs. Beck stared at him. “I hate traveling. What a shame, to do that with yourself .” “Hush,” said Janice-Katie, scanning the plastic menu on the wall. “You know, I’d like to try something cool and watery!“ The man did not respond. “I always train myself to eat and experience what’s new,“ he said, eyeing Mrs. Beck. “That strengthens me for new challenges. Why don’t you try doing that?” “You’ll not tell me how to live,” she said. “Well, I’m setting out to do exciting things, huge things. And some awful things,” Bill Orange grinned. “You really can’t imagine.” “What?” Mrs. Beck’s voice grew anxious. “Why did you say ‘exciting,’ and then the word ‘awful’? What were you thinking about? You don’t mean hobbies — do you feel hobbies are boring, a form of mental death?

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Are you talking about force-feeding someone in your basement? That couldn’t be.” “Shut up, Lady, or I’ll call the police,” Bill Orange said crossly over his shoulder, now tapping some small, soft-looking cubes of food into a bowl of flour. “But those are all good questions!” “Listen,” the man said, setting a knuckle on the counter. “Get out of here.” “You’re the one who used the word ‘awful!”’ Mrs. Beck cried. She glanced at Janice-Katie, who continued to peruse the menu. “Never mind all that, Beck,” said Janice-Katie. ‘’I’ll have something cold,” she repeated. The man wiped two fingers on his apron sash. “Fine. But on a chilly day like this?” “Oh,” Janice-Katie said, “I often want cool food. It doesn’t mean anything about my personality, or me though. Sometimes I wish they’d invent a machine that would chill meals instantly,” she went on, gesturing at the convection oven with its loud, blowing sound. “Like that, only cold. You’d put the food in, and after one minute, it would be icy and delicious!” “You mean a refrigerator, dammit,” said Mrs. Beck, now watching tersely at a distance, her feet in a puddle of tin-colored rainwater. “No, not a refrigerator!” said Bill Orange. “Use your head! When I was young, you'd meet all kinds of people who’d come up to this counter and could really think clearly, and boy, could they reason! Here now: a refrigerator cools food slowly!” “And a freezer?” said Mrs. Beck, a challenge in her voice. Bill Orange held up a sharp, warning finger to Mrs. Beck, staring widely at her, shaking his head. Then he turned to Janice-Katie. “It’s funny, you used to act different with her—shyer,” he said, nodding toward Mrs. Beck. The man set food onto plates. “Here are your sandwiches, Girls,” he said. “But — ” He turned toward the deep hollow of a wooden cabinet, his voice falling. “Shoot. I’m out of fancy toothpicks. There’s no mustard, either.”

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The man grew quiet as he spooned lettuce and a beige cream over the sandwiches. He set the lunch plates on a high, floury shelf. After a few minutes, sitting on a stool, he asked: “How in hell’s name did that happen?” “No one can eat until this thing is sorted out,” he said heavily. “Now, it’s acceptable to forgo toothpicks; it’s done frequently. But mustard … that’s different.” He put a hand to his temple, and then withdrew it so quickly that the movement nearly looked like a salute. “I want both of you to head over to the supply room right now and fetch the mustard.” “Ridiculous,” said Mrs. Beck. “No — you go, you both go!” Bill Orange sounded strained. His face shone with sweat, and he seemed more worried than he could aptly express. “It’ll be damned easy for you to get it. You see, I can’t do it, and I’m not going to! I have troubles I’m not going to discuss right now. So you both will just go and get the mustard. Besides, I’ve got no time to go — I’m too far behind in terms of slaw.” “You know, I’m not convinced you’re not a huge liar,” said Mrs. Beck. “Go on to the supply room now, the both of you!” the man burst out hotly, jumping up. He flung a hand in the direction of the stadium, indicating a certain section of bleachers on the far side. “You’ll see the door all right, just underneath those seats… it’s unlocked! Here now, when tomorrow comes, you won’t remember that you even went to the supply room! Go on, go on, fetch a few darned bottles of mustard,” he finished weakly. Leaning with his arm over the counter, the man added that it would be next to impossible to miss the supply room door, because it was so brightly painted, but mostly because, on the wall directly beside it, a very small drinking fountain recently had been mounted, possibly for children. “Bill,” Janice-Katie said hesitantly. “You know, they say everyone has problems. I didn’t think you did, though. I never thought much about you at all.” “Ah,” he said sullenly, closing a lid on some butter. “You can’t go to the supply room, I guess, because you have pain moving your body around — your legs,” she suggested.

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“It’s got nothing to do with that!” Bill Orange yelled. “Oh. Then is it because you have personal fears about leaving this trailer, or some kind of superstition?” “Shut up!” Janice-Katie tightened her coat cheerfully around her and took Mrs. Beck’s arm, beginning to walk toward the stadium. “Don’t worry, Bill. We’ll get the mustard for you.” “Has this world gone nuts?” cried Mrs. Beck. “I'm not going to a supply room! Oh, I knew it was a mistake to come here.” She made as if to pull away from JaniceKatie, who outpowered her. “Don’t make a scene about an errand,” said Janice-Katie. “Goodbye!” Bill Orange called softly. “Why in grief’s name do you think he is so wonderful?” Mrs. Beck fumed as they walked. Janice-Katie did not answer. She kept a grip on Mrs. Beck, pulling, steering the way, while Mrs. Beck, aggravated, pushed Janice-Katie. Moving fast, the two breathed harder, passing through the open stadium gate and breaking into the light and air of the field. The clouds had cleared, and the upper ring of the enormous, empty stadium focused the entire sky against the sun. Janice-Katie looked up. A lost bat flew across the bleachers, flapping and diving out of sight so quickly it seemed possible that it had not flown at all. She let go of Mrs. Beck’s arm, and in an awkward, hobbling manner began to walk even more quickly; then she began to run. The older woman yelled once, an unclear syllable, and started running too, keeping pace slightly behind Janice-Katie, her dark coat flapping. Soon both the women found their way into light, steady, if lilting gaits, and then Janice­ Katie pushed forward, gaining a good deal of speed. “I enjoy the running!” Mrs. Beck cried, catching up, then falling behind slightly again. She ran lumberingly, swinging her arms in overly large movements, and

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she listed off somewhat diagonally. Mrs. Beck’s speed seemed to issue from the force and momentum of her moving weight, while Janice-Katie felt her own quickness came from the unrelenting, rapidly skittering movements of her feet and legs. Surprised at the running, which seemed to have begun somewhat outside her mind or will, Janice-Katie expelled a laugh—a brief, birdish noise. The spongy ground, she felt, curtailed her pace, but she tried to overcome this and in stretching her heels, managed to go even faster. Her gait was now oddly forward-leaning, though she sensed this helped control the run. She looked down to her black, slipper­ style shoes, judging their thin soles to be an asset. She was aware of the smallness of her feet and the force of her weight beating into them. “The mustard will be there,” she told herself. The run was long. Janice-Katie felt it was occurring slowly, a subtle eternity. She settled into strong, regular breaths. The wind dragged in her ears as she moved; the stadium floated past. Mrs. Beck pulled a tissue from her pocket and, barreling along, blew her nose and wiped wind-induced tears from her face. Janice-Katie thought: “I am in a private world, standing against her private world. But it is harmonious.” Much of her life’s time had passed. But some of it was still stored, as if within a vaulted bank. Janice-Katie’s legs churned alongside Mrs. Beck’s flying, churning legs, and a spot of burning white—the sun—held constant as they passed through the field. It was easy.

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salvador plascencia from The People of Paper

prologue She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there was to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets — rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives in the burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections. The march was to proceed until the monks forgot the location of the factory — an impossible task for a tribe that had been trained to memorize not only scripture but also the subtle curvature of every cathedral archway they encountered. And so they walked south to the Argentine land of fire and back north to the glacial cliffs of Alaska, cataloging birds and wingspans. The monks lifted the penguins’ flippers and stretched measuring tape, silently reciting the data, trying to displace the coordinates of the abandoned factory. After scribbling the figures onto their scrolled parchment, they rejoined their marching formation and counted off in their assigned order, skipping the fifty-third number, an unaccounted monk who had been lost miles before in the desert’s basin. And though she was born inside the factory, she was not a daughter of monks. She had been created without Vatican sanction by a man whose hands were ravaged by paper cuts. His name was Antonio, and like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat. The

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fur and organs were scraped from the cutting board into the trash bin and the warm meat was placed in the refrigerated display case with a skewer and flag that read “FELINE 3.15/LB.” Antonio was only a boy, still wearing his grammar school uniform, when he saw his Figgaro split open and naked. At the counter, without crying, he pulled six bills from his pockets and ordered three pounds of feline. Antonio received Figgaro wrapped in the white of butcher paper, and while there was sadness and the urge to change from his grammar school uniform to one of mourning, he resisted, instead walking to the stationery shop, buying the Sunday edition and a roll of hand-pressed construction paper. Locked in his room for three days, he folded and tore away at the paper. On the second day and after thirty-three paper cuts, all minor except for one that cut deep into the meat of his hands, there were thirteen perfect origami organs and ropes of wound capillaries and veins made from tissue paper. When he unwrapped Figgaro from the butcher paper, there was still warmth in the cat’s body, despite the gutting and the hours of refrigeration. The paper heart went in first, followed by the main veins and then the smaller capillaries. Antonio connected liver and lungs, the stomach and newsprint digestive tract, patching the belly with college-ruled sheets, and before the last layer of crumpled paper could be flattened Figgaro was playing with his tail. It was through this experience with the marvels of paper and his pet cat that Antonio discovered his calling. After five years of medical school and lab experiments with series of radial pleats and reversed folds, Antonio became the first origami surgeon. Medical journals tried to discredit the merits of paper: they said the velocity of the circulating blood would punch holes through the compressed wood pulp, supporting their claims with hand-drawn charts of exploding hearts. But Antonio’s hearts never leaked or burst, and as a tribute to his doubters, he shaped the cardiovascular walls using the index pages of the journals. His only failure was a liver that broke down into cellulose fibers, after which microscopic chunks of paper were found in the blood stream of a San Isidro woman. But she drank so much Irish whisky it was a wonder she had even lived past menopause. But it was not his detractors that ended his career as an origami surgeon. Antonio’s medical art was made obsolete by the innovations of Swedes. Bioengineering replaced paper and forced Antonio’s scarred knuckles and hands into retirement. He bought a folding table and moved from street corner

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to street corner, laying out his paper hearts and kidneys and yards of capillaries. Falling from the prestige and sterility of a surgeon to the dust and anonymity of a street vendor, Antonio found no one wanted paper organs anymore. So he unfolded the hearts into turtles and the kidneys into swans, and he tied the braided capillaries around the necks of the tiny paper animals like leashes. And soon a crowd like the one that gathered around the wicker basket of corn and tequesquite bread began to encircle Antonio’s table. The crowd shouted the names of animals and Antonio folded on cue; they loved the creatures he created. Even men who carried sickles and whose hands and souls were worn and splintered, men who were callous not only to the feel of silk but also to the beauty of landscapes because all they ever saw was terrain and toil — even they, after sliding their sickles into their belt loops, pulled at the tails of paper swans and watched the flapping wings. And impatient lawyers and city clerks, who had never in their lives felt the grip of a hoe or sickle, but had tasted the silver of salad forks and steak knives, waited behind women and grandchildren to witness Antonio’s foldings. These men, who admired the precision of paper beaks and the excellent architecture of the Pegasus’s wings, had forgotten that they themselves had once laid on Antonio’s operating table and that their own hearts had been replaced by paper. It was in these times that Antonio’s fame approached that of other great craftsmen: Senillo the rope weaver and the late Señor Casique, whose ladders had long ago stopped being used for climbing and now adorned the inside of the Guadalajara cathedral. Yet despite the respect and celebrity that origami animals brought, Antonio suddenly abandoned what had become a coveted vending post, leaving behind the folding table and two neat rows of animals. He retired his sideshow of paper animals and went in search of a nobler purpose, looking for the factory. When it was obvious that Antonio would not return to his post, his origami was appraised by the clergy, and those who felt a debt in their conscience offered the folded paper as penance. The swans and unicorns began appearing along with the Eucharist on altar shelves. Even later, when Antonio defied papal authority and trespassed on what was classified Vatican property, the church held that his origami creations were commissioned by the hand of God and fit within the guidelines of sacred art described in the strictures of Vatican II. And though Antonio’s excommunication papers were filed, the figurines were allowed to remain on the altars.

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Antonio followed church rumors that had passed from cardinals to priests and then down to rectory altar boys. He visited every one of the cities they mentioned, asking for the whereabouts of the factory. Those who did not ignore him simply shrugged or pointed to a skyline of smokestacks. Had it not been for a disgruntled monk who spoke defiantly against a life of constant walking and bird-watching, Antonio would never have come upon the doors of the factory. The monk handed Antonio a scrap of parchment. Written on it were caliper measurements and detailed illustrations of feathers, ordinary details found in any field guide, but the underside of the paper revealed the never-before-disclosed coordinates of the factory. At the bottom of the page, in the same handwriting, the monk signed in careful cursive, using not his Christian name but his assigned position in line: fifty-three. Antonio followed the scribbled directions. He stole a wheelbarrow from the corrals of the old butcher and filled it with cardboard, towers of books, placemats, napkins, and every other sheet he could find, not caring if the finishes were matte or glossy. He oiled the bearings of the lone wheel and then left, pulling a plastic poncho over his own head and a tarp over the mound of papers. On a Tuesday, when the windy world was soaked and covered in gray clouds, Antonio found the factory. It took his wrinkled arms and liver-spotted hands four hours to saw through the reinforced platina of the Vatican-crested locks. Once inside, Antonio repaired the broken cutting tables, converting them into workbenches and then spilling paper and cardboard onto them. Antonio split the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light. Then Antonio unrolled the wrapping paper and construction paper and began to cut at the cardboard and then fold. She was the first to be created: cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts. Created not from the rib of a man but from paper scraps. There was no all-powerful god who could part the rivers of Pison and Gihon, but instead a twice-retired old man with cuts across his fingers. Antonio was passed out on the floor, flakes of paper stuck to the sweat of his face and arms, unable to hear the sound of expanding paper as she rose. His hands were bloody, pooling the ink of his body on the floor, staining his pants. She stepped over her creator, spreading his blood across the polished floor, and then walked out of the factory and into the storm. The print of her arms smeared; her soaked feet tattered as they scrapped against wet pavement and turned her toes to pulp.

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kate bernheimer A Star Wars Tale

Once there was a little girl and an older sister, and they had this game they played, and in the game they played Princess Leia and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. The younger sister played Princess Leia and the older sister played Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. This all took place in the kitchen, papered metallic silver with yellow flowers. First the sister who played Princess Leia rolled her hair into balls on the sides of her head and was locked in the pantry, but as the pantry didn’t lock, it was pretend-locked by the other sister who, at the time in the game when the locking took place, played Darth Vader. The Darth Vader sister had a black plastic garbage bag over her shoulders like a cape and spoke with a raspy voice. This Darth Vader sister would say, “You must be locked inside this soundproof room because you were very, very bad and you will never, ever get to see the handsome Luke Skywalker again.” And always the Darth Vader sister would threaten the Princess Leia sister with “beating, rape, and other forms of torture.” While threatening Princess Leia, the Darth Vader sister would sometimes close herself into the pantry along with her sister. She would stretch her arms imposingly across the door. This was a cue for the Princess Leia sister to throw her arms around the Darth Vader sister and cling to her in thrilled terror. Then the Darth Vader sister would tilt back her head and cackle in the raspy voice. She’d leave the pantry, fake-locking the door. Back in the kitchen she would pretend to pluck a yellow flower from the papered walls and stomp on its bloom. Rasping, she’d cackle again. Now the sister playing Princess Leia became terrified, and screamed. “Help! Help me Luke!” and the sister who was playing Luke Skywalker, who had just been playing Darth Vader, would quickly, quickly remove the garbage-bag cape from her shoulders and put on a white shirt of the father’s (which the mother used for baking) and say, in a voice full of passion, “Princess Leia!” But because

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the pantry was sealed off from sound, being soundproof, Princess Leia couldn’t hear Luke Skywalker, even though Luke Skywalker out in the kitchen could hear Princess Leia calling for him. “Help! Help me Luke,” Princess Leia sobbed again and again. Yet Luke Skywalker, abjectly, only could listen. Pacing the kitchen, Luke would wave his arms in their long white sleeves to the rhythm of Leia’s cries. That he could hear her at all was an auditory curiosity, a miracle of sorts, a fatal glitch Darth Vader had not predicted when he locked the princess in the room. At this very moment in the crisis, each and every time the game was played, Luke could hear Leia crying for help from inside the soundproof room. In fact, the game hinged on his hearing her. How else would he know to save her from rape, beating, and other forms of torture? Yet as Princess Leia could not hear Luke from inside the pantry, telling her how he would save her (which would prove that he loved her), Luke Skywalker would make tapes for her to listen to on a cassette recorder. He would speak into the microphone as he paced around the silver kitchen professing his “deep and unfathomable love for you, Princess Leia, my only sister—I mean lover—who is locked away forever and can never hear my voice again and might be beaten, raped, or tortured!” He would then rewind to the beginning of his message and open the door to the soundproof room, hand Princess Leia the cassette recorder, and slam the door shut again, hard. The Luke Skywalker sister often forgot whether to be tender or mean, having to juggle so many roles. Princess Leia, clutching the machine to her chest, would hit PLAY, listen to his message, and then record one of her own. She whispered close to the machine: “Luke Skywalker, I love you with all my heart, you are my one and only lover and I will love you for all time ever from inside this soundproof room in which the wicked Darth Vader has locked me for all time, and where I will be punished again and again in so many unspeakable ways.” She would attach a yellow flower from the wallpaper to her message, placing the flower on the recorder with care. After rewinding meticulously to the beginning of her message, Princess Leia would open the door and hand the recorder to Luke. Sniffing the flower with great fervor, the young Luke would cry. So it continued along. Back and forth Luke and Leia would pass the recorder and profess their love with only the occasional interruption by a garbage-bagged Darth and his threats of beating and rape. And though it made the sisters glow, no one ever got saved.

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rikki ducornet The Wild Child

In those years when I bounded about on all fours and on my elbows fled those I feared; when, in those lucent days I scaled trees fast as a cat and sailed the treetops as the squirrels do, spreading their wings of fur and flesh, I was, I assure you, a better creature for all that, my desires both innocent and private, and what’s more, easily assuaged. When I thirsted for blood, I killed a thing, a rabbit, say, a squirrel seized sleeping in its nest, a green snake, a rat fat from the leavings in the fields. There were none to balk, none to scold me, no one there to hide her face in dismay beneath her apron’s ample hem. I had seen plenty of bats and frogs but never a priest, nor had I heard the words nun, or needle or butter and bread — although they say I must have been acquainted with human speech because I was quick to learn a thing or two and this despite my ferocious attempts to stop them, to stop their constant jabbering. Like crowds of crows they were, blackening the mind with their needling and nagging until I could no longer bear it. In order to taste the food they denied me for days in their righteous need to have me tamed, I — although their porridge and chops were like dead leaves in my mouth and their drear puddings, plaster (I’d have preferred a fistful of fur or last winter’s bone black with frost and green with neglect) — I cried out from the cellar and up through the floor boards as best I could: I repent! — and this between my pretty clenched teeth. For, yes: in those days my teeth were pretty, and people would pay to see them, stealing a look when my patron, my master, would slide his fingers into my mouth to peel the lips way back. What fine teeth the Wild Girl has! See the pretty blush on her gums! I’d show my tongue, seized as it was between my master’s thumb and forefinger — as when in the wild one seizes frogs in their boudoirs of wet grass. If they wanted more, I’d bug out my eyes, the whites burning brighter than the sunlight in those yellow days before I was forced into the bondage of roasted meat and venomous alphabets and spelling books and needlework and hymns stinking of the frass of centipedes and roots boiled to pap!

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I repent! I cried up to them because I was hungry having for whoknowshowmany days, chewed my boots in the fury of my banishment, the cellar darker and colder than the bunghole of a corpse. I chewed and recalled the taste of a hare’s crisp ear, its liver sweet as berries. You’ll burn for sure! They’d shouted it through the cracks as I clung to my knees to keep myself from gnawing my own fists; The Devil’s on his way right now to fetch you and set you on fire! I’d sipped my tears, the piss that in my banishment was the only thing that warmed me; once I yelled at them with all the fury in my heart: Let me go back, then! Back to the woods! And I will drink squirrel blood and play with the bright beetles and bubbles in the stream. What business? I offered, rationally — or so I thought — is it of yours? For you see I was not yet broken; I would not repent. I would not kneel as they said I must to kiss the cold brass cross as bitter as the corpse of a spider. I could see no purpose in it, nor the sense of forcing my feet into those boots, the clothes that fisted up between my legs, the baths, the bath brushes, the combings, scourings, parings: I could not see it! A needle plied over and over into the white cloth, the prayers, the supplications, the answering to a name they claimed was now mine. What need, I’d asked, for a name? When all the creatures have but one name, the same name that bounds through the air like dust motes and rain? Marie! They’d spit at me as nails are spit from the mouth of a carpenter, Marie— Angélique Leblanc! As though to call me Mary and angel and the white could tame me and keep me safe like a lock of dead hair in a box. Hah! As if they could do that! But then in the cellar I grew hungry, see: I grew peevish. Chained like a parrot to a post I grew weary and, to tell the truth, fearful for my mind. So at last I called up to them, humble, yet loud enough to be heard: I repent! I repent! Yes! Yes! That’s it! I do! And if the little Jesus will have me, I’ll marry him quick as Jack and Jill go tumble; I’ll beg our Father for forgiveness, see? They listened, their ears to the floor, and then they discussed my case. I could hear them pace, back and forth, back and forth as foxes do above the dwelling of a hare. They’d let me stew—for my own good — yes, stew, they whispered (my ears are very, very sharp) in her (ugh!) own juices. Ah. So that was it. Well, I was hungry, and I’d be slavish — I no longer cared. Prithee I’d said, Prithee! I’ll wed Jesus, I’ll let him suckle my tits, I’ll grovel before his little manger as the worms grovel deep in their muddy realms; I’ll polish the silver and stir the porridge and ply the needle (like the prig you wish me to be); I’ll eat my

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pudding with a spoon and thank the Lord for it — although it is meat I want, raw and smoking, the taste of it purple on my tongue. Wind me up! And I’ll perform for thee like a toy of tin upon a wire. I’ll dance for Jesus, poor boy! Tugging at his nasty nails that pin him to that strange tree of his as a crow is nailed to a barn wall; I’ll do a jig; I’ll curtsy and run about in circles in imitation of the toy monkey my patron’s daughter loves to set spinning on the kitchen tiles. How I loathe those toys of hers; I see no purpose there; I see purpose only in fat marrow bones, the soft throats of mice, mice I once throttled in a trice (those are my patron’s words). Oh, I’d eat clay over pudding any day. I once told my patron how much I admired his little daughter’s throat. How to see the blood rushing there behind the ear stirred old memories. And when he blanched I reassured him — and the child so quick to weep! — reassured them both in those dulcet tones they’d taught me: Oh! But I have found the Lord and He has shown me another, a better way! The way of roasted mutton and mittens and mattresses and bedroom slippers; the way of Light and Love! Your dear child, the precious poppet, the angel, the dove! Is safe with me, fear not, Master! Fear not, my doll, my rosebud, my little mouse! See? And lifting the bright cross from my bosom I dangled it in the sunlight before her face until she grew jolly and laughed. Then, to press my point and with the money I make showing myself to strangers — for I sit in the parlor on Wednesday to speak to pious ladies about the woods and my onceuponatime life in the trees — I leapt from my chair and running into the lane bought her sweets from the vendor who was ringing his bell and calling out: Honey drops! Chocolate drops! Three kinds of berry drops! Bright red cherry drops! So tightly did I clutch my coins the palm of my hand was bruised black. Once they let me out of the cellar, I thought it best that I demonstrate my perfectibility, although, to tell the truth, I’d prefer to converse with ravens and crows than these feebleminded crones in bonnets who — should I absentmindedly snap up and swallow a fly — will fall over backwards in a dead faint. They have decided I am no orangutan, but instead an Eskimo. Because like the savage girl I was, an Eskimo will eat her supper raw and sauced with blood. They have taken my club and replaced it with a needle, and have seen to it that my hair is free of lice. I have lost all my teeth, but if this makes me less attractive, it also assures them that I am less a savage: after all, one cannot tear into a neck with one’s gums. This is how I spend my days: siting in a chair, boots on, stays on, hair in pins, plying my needle as a bee plies the blossom: in and out, in and out. Wind me up and I mutter all the Holy Holies you wish. I make red poppies blossom at the

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edge of tea napkins (my poppies are too red for the dining room); I am as tidy as the drawer full of my patron’s underwear. And when on a Wednesday I am asked, I say: Well. In the woods I ran as naked as a snake and as black as an iron cooking pot. I would eat clay and the hot red hearts of sparrows. I would sleep in deep beds of brown leaves and bracken. And I would fly through the air as a squirrel does, its wings of fur and flesh stretched out like sails. And when the moon was full I’d laugh out loud to see how fat it was! Fat as the white belly of a frog near bursting with flies! Having said this — and it is astonishing how often they wish to hear it — I sit back and watch them shudder and shift about on their chairs, their bottoms rolling this way and that, like marbles in a boy’s pocket, their eyes sparked with excitement, yes! Their eyes sparked with something like envy.

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hank lazer

dream dream we then of every step the home our body made of interface as we objectify ourselves bit by bit reprogram splice heal redirect reconvene what we are texture of tense repaired dream we then & sing of our new relations to time milling ourselves to new specifications dream we then of every step

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torah every day when i arise i carry the torah bear it aloft for the torch that it is carry it burning & unconsumed into the darkness of the day unable to find a temple i keep alive the memory of the Temple destroyed the torch becomes the ash the blossom of my father’s bones

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438 conceptualisms

debra di blasi “Winter” from Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past

part ii: winter Remembrance obliterates the dull days, drawn moments without incident, empty times without heart. ||||| Each time I dredge the farm it is first without snow. But if I force myself to think of winters there on the wide splay of land, snow looms in drifts lit by screeching sunlight, the gray days dissolved in synapses that refuse to spit up the paragon: cold wind and blustery gray skies and trees black and flesh-empty like burned bones. ||||| Not in spring but when the snows fell languorous and mute and seemingly limitless upon the soft-rolling fields and horizoned swaths of leafless timber pointed like knights in formation, that’s when the farm happened anew. Flakes as big as my father’s thumbnail, only clean. Fields of corn stalks softened sensual like a midlife woman’s belly. Elm branches hanging snow-heavy until, now and then, a crack like a gun report echoed across the valley below the house, and we knew there’d be firewood now. Every critter that lived beneath the kempt world kept still against the louder silence above: Foxes loved hunting in snow, as the plangent hare’s breath sang wavered, aria in an echo chamber. And hawks, too, heads cocked in treetops for every scratch and itch unseen, the field mice taken so swiftly that they must have believed, had they belief, in heavenly ascent and brown-winged angels borne of sunlight and wind. Winter erased the year’s lessons. Life’s classroom quiet now. Blood in the veins in the ears coddled in wool.

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Into that magnificent stillness I’d walk miles just to hear the absolute and great nothing-everything of it all, the lull I became before what was never the storm but rather a gentlest swelling of hope — green breath in black soil, and the hibernating frogs blinking awake, and my breath the loudest song, and I understood, with acute astonishment, I was alive. ||||| When a cow died my father wrapped an iron chain around its black bloat and dragged the corpse by tractor to the pile of old tires that served as rubber wicks around the stiff body that seemed now less a body, less a cow now that all that made cow had fled the hide. He poured gasoline into the tires and over the corpse and lit to pyre with a single paper match. The cow no longer a cow burned all day and night, sending up smoke signals to the cattle in the far fields: You too, O you too! In the morning all was black: the bones, the tires, the circle of earth in the otherwise deep and merciless snow, and the winter clouds racing east that carried no scent but the metal tang of icy wind. I, earliest riser, found my father standing inside the burnt rim, gazing at the blackness gaping like a tunnel out of his universe. Somber not sad. He pledged no religion but that of placenta and maggots, hayseed and hay, and the barren spring fields guaranteed before and above any god. Then, or maybe just once I saw, he picked up a charred bone still warm and stared into the nothing it would ever be — nothing for buzzards and beetles, nothing for his five children who needed, it seemed, everything they did not really need: breakable toys and silly white boots and games that proved winners cruel. He tossed it away, the metacarpus, back onto the cooling hillock of skeleton and rubber. He looked at the sky and then slowly lowered his gaze to the hills a mile away where the bulls had already begun bellowing about what was theirs, and not. ||||| That year winter stormed so dense and interminable that we were snowbound for five days. The gangling red snow fence disappeared under drifts gorgeous and blinding in the sunlight sigh that followed. Icicle swords threatened downward from rusted eaves to skulls. Deer lost their own scented paths and passed close by our house, leaping high to keep from sinking to antlers. Somewhere beneath, coyotes tunneled.

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My mother, fretting as always over the fate of wrens, scattered bread and cornmeal over white iridescent crusts over weedy lawns, while my siblings and I, ordinary sparrows, tromped up the road to witness the beautiful catastrophe of that winter — the best ever.

[All calamity cedes to self-appointed victors, and youth is gifted with a two-headed coin.]

We wrapped our socked feet in bread sacks to keep out the wet, and fixed our trousers inside with big rubber bands and tape. Our galoshes sank in powder that rose past our hips and sometimes higher, so that one time my brother disappeared entirely. And for a moment I saw his future erased of him in the blankness of that late snow. And thereafter, while he went on living, I delighted in the belief, absurd, that my pulling him from the drift had created a rift in the world — one with him, one without — so that while he grew and grew up I would glance at the parallel void beside us and appreciate, as I do yet, the reverberating depth of a simple gesture: proffered hand, and heft. ||||| Where did the dogs go in winter? The water bowls covered with ice sat saturated of stillness near the well where the iron pump stuck to ungloved skin and the wind moaned up the spout like a tuning bassoon. We had no doghouses, perhaps because the farm lay scattered with sheds and a vacant three-room house and a silo and big hay barn with a loft surprisingly warm under the gently gabled roof, musty ochre bales stacked to the rusting tin. And I think now, maybe, unless I’m inventing memory to assuage the guilt of some careless year or years when hormones drove me toward vain petulance, that the dogs must have slept in dens of scrapped lumber, inside one shed or another: Ah yes! The scent of animal heat so keen in my nose that I might now turn to find an old mutt curled in the corner, here in Portugal, in an apartment cleaned sterile of every musk it hoarded, so that, like the sudden pop of a void, fragrant recollection — re-collection — enters with a swagger to fill it all up. And okay, maybe if I whistled softly, softly now, through my teeth as I’d learned to do then to rouse and beckon the horses from the low pasture, maybe that old black dog I’ve conjured would get up, stretch himself with a dip and quiver, and come to me, helicopter-tailed, expecting whatever’s happiness for a dog — the

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scratch under the chin, the rubbed ears, the stroke head to tail. A whisper: There now. There. So many creatures I did not love as keenly as they deserved! Such short lives, all of them, and us, and only scraps of kindness tossed onto crusted snows like bones cleaned of meat and marrow. I was capable of more, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I the girl, death obsessed and romancing love, who’d have curled alongside in the hay a memory of how the motes climbed a ray of light from the gaping barnsides and then settled back upon the slick-haired spine of a perfectly satisfied dog? ||||| All of the birds and foxes, the great wild mammals of those irretrievable winters, are long dead and become less than dust. Each thousand one I never saw disappeared without fanfare or sigh. How is it then I miss them? ||||| The hill of the pasture in front of the house, across the shale mud road either rutted or snowed under or ground to dust fine as talc, across the hog wire and barbed wire and hedge-apple fence, beyond the pile of burned tires and feed troughs empty now that the hogs had all been sold … that hill descended at a deadly angle between a smattering of maple trees sapping, toward and into another fenceline, rusted but too tough to give. Of course we chose that hill for sledding. For the steepness, sure, but maybe too because it culled the meek from the bold, the stupid from the wise. You had to know how to steer the sled between the trees. Keep a straight line. Know when to jump off, and which way. You had to know how to get the longest, fastest ride without crashing. Story of my life.

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A farm is a microcosm that tumbles in upon itself toward perpetual reawakening. Seasons bend and flood without simplistic demarcations in calendars. An endlessness to ends and beginnings. Rains flooding or skies withholding. Ponds iced or thick with algae, and the black loam teeming. I search for the moments in-between, when what is is obscured by the obviousness of what has been or will be: the unambiguous thunderstorm, the

442 conceptualisms

gooseberries turned black on the bush, the swifts turning at twilight. I’m sure it’s there, in the unresolved unsolved middle, where we onlookers are unmade or made better. ||||| A snowbound Christmas just past poverty my mother splurged and bought better gifts: for me, a rock polisher. I think she wanted then a scientist, some sure step away from a farmwife’s dearth, but I had no patience for math or chemistry tables or hypotheses proved only by matters of time. The stones were agates and jades, amethysts and jaspers. Rough and [ha, yes!] tumbled in sands of ascending weights — hypothetically. I couldn’t wait through the requisite hours of spinning, the changing of water and sands from dense to fine, the reading of instructions. I wanted alchemy, magic, the staff become snake. I chose instead the middle sand and let the polisher run for hours, until it overheated, and broke. The rocks’ sharp edges wore down but they did not gleam like gems. The metaphor would be obvious but for the fact that I’m just not that fond of jewels and gave the rocks to my sister, who was. I went to walk in fresh snow.

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When did the season’s first snowfall not stagger me by its glory? As a child I sat at the window, nose to panes through which the winter wind squeezed an et tu! and watched the fat lazy flakes become a furious flurry into which my father disappeared: a ghost, again, headed into his netherworld of cattle and trees and acres of stubbled fields. I believed therein amid the frozen eddying arose a pattern that held my future, some certainty that would soothe my night quaking, my day fear of…something without name…my shoulders always HennyPenny tense and lifted as if to ward off an oncoming blow. No, it’s untrue. Truly, I watched for the beauty of snow and for no other reason. Because beauty, then and just, was all enough. ||||| You couldn’t stop the winter cows calving. Always, there’d be one born in the middle of a snowstorm. My father’d go searching the dark’s whiteness for a trembling black newborn or the cow with placenta still hanging under her tail. He’d steal the calf from the bawling mother and carry it home. So many calves in the kitchen! Legs splayed on linoleum. And piglets too, piled up on each other

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in big metal buckets set in front of the furnace vent. And kittens. And puppies. It was a life, on that farm, of saving and killing, of watching flora and fauna come and go. And it was all right. It was okay the way we each were borne into a system furious with incident, divining our day or night when the snows would come on blinding and no one staggering to carry us home. ||||| A crow swooped down from a live branch and lit on the snow’s bones. My father hissed at it, Ssskaw! yet the crow stood firm. That man squandered his poetry in stubborn silence, though I knew even then — long before he, at eighty, tried to dig the spot-on words back up — that he had names for the crow: malice, snitch, threadle and sty. He turned his back on it that day. It was winter, one of the worst. Things to be done. Only then did the crow fly.

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To be first to lay down your tracks in a pristine snowplain vast and bright! Cerulean shadows inside the snowcup made of a boot. I’d reach the stand of black-skinned elms with iced branches clicking like graceless castanets. Turn in the blue knives of shadow. See where I’d been. The past, I saw, would dissolve in the heat of each moment, each step of the way. Of course. I’m almost sixty. Remembering is not being there, it’s not the boot in snowfall but the shadow.

444 conceptualisms

lynne tillman FUTURE PROSTHETIC@?

Factoid storieville or dead-time storage sways not heavy in I-o’s activated-life, or such-iteration, coz me, I-o, switch off/ on, extending heart-chip to fail-never. What got nomened “memory” or “history” in antiquey days not longed for. But I-o’s temp-Screenie, Chrono-oldie, embedded with an eversame implant, loads inward screens to dwell upon and splain past-eras, specially memoryland of The Other Era (TOE). I-o ken: TOE human-sapiens marred by attitudinal distress that dehinged being, near-deactivating future-us. TOE held to a long-log vibe of “humanity,” detailed by values blah-blah — antiquey species me-ism, and how tote flowed just to human-sapiens, which did cause multi-depth mental diseases, and bound the species with body-geneticides. In I-o’s mumblie, Chrono-Oldie labeled in philo-backwardness, coz h/shey entered retinal-screen, reps this temp-Screenie, in the “post-apocalyptic postnuclear pre-tote screen age.” Pan-Eye, our Vennerable, flashed thusly of past-that, but the dates narnt confirmed, coz of casual blubber from dead-timers of TOE. [Those simple-mindies groveled memorials and self-spinning claimers of such to splain events in their cairns. That just renegates I-o’s system.] Chrono-oldie drolls factoidally on shared-connubial tote-retinal-audio screen re antiquey storieville. [I-o press in-pad to wide attention.] Chrono-oldie scripts, thusly: — There was nature-mammoth fear of extinction, nuclear threat missiles, filthy

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snail-mail global-microbe carriers, fevered physical-war, animal vengeance, and blame-fright speeching. [Chrono-oldie forebear a wuzzy-neg signal.] — Grave terroristic chants of tote annihilation sapped human-sapiens by early 21st or pre-then. In physical-war-period, there falls further stunting: despair of waterloss; tote-grid swine-mongers and waste-spinners; beast sun and windmania, and what-called patriot nations and faith-mad systems. Our far-gone ancient ancestors held to multi-forms of extinction angst that also conquered organ systems. [I-o incred.] — Why’d they drive that extinction-line@? I-o’s active/passive program iterates aliveness, activation cum cures, plus tru-form pan-prostheses. [I-o ken such.] Screenie drolled of ancestors with nul signifying knowledge of such-like. [Dumblie human-sapiens. But Screenie, a philo-antiquey s/him, adwells in momenToes of born-again entry-places and life-death syndrome. H/shey did too much droll to I-o of such, plus ever-uncertainties re bad-birth bandwidths, plus anon-blurs of sweet-tooth motherboards. Too bitty nostalgiac, for I-o.] [I-o memories Chrono-oldie.] — Our zero-implants crashed dark-hole humanist moodies. Me/us who do arrive, in the neo-events cyclotron, switch-out neon-ozone surrounds, duly implant retinal-screens with re-start, minus angst attachments. [Chrono-oldie, this gene-type, favors alt. activities reveling in suchcalled “notlet go,” the atavist-feature that weighs down heavy with remnant-chips. I-o lulls, awaiting press-back, tho blooming in else-places.] Suddenish, temp-Screenie clamorous — luminites flare starry. H/shey palpates soft pad that bounces to sole historico-doc file I-o fewly access. [I-o holds mini-volta for dead-time storage.]

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Screenie tosses connubial eye-screen into space/time slow-mo. [I-o trace Chrono-oldie at risk of incontinence.] — In nomen early-21st century, human-humans, neo human-sapiens, grew weary-sad and torn. Wars narnt exciting. Narn of them, tho, could stop burning, so ultimo-objects warred. Whackers, the 22nd iteration robo-sapiens, altered screen info; thusly, wars held in safe mode. No one died warlike. — Whoa, no eternal exits@? — No end-death, and such deemed progress-like, coz advancing humansapiens narnt over-killed. Humans no more hands-on battlers, just hardpressing, round4 bottomed nerd-types, so it was said. Pre-Consternation Time arrived, with major slice of human-sapiens extended in a dumb cloud of no reproach. In their tempus fugit they did pledge and ascribe to tribes; brands; designer stores, and other spiritual cults. Human-sapiens dug terra firma and believing-systems. Whackers — robosapiens — performed war, and screens a-shifted in nanoseconds. Thusly, their disintegrated systems arrived. They narn ken-well one suit, store, or club from other, such was their tote-confusion. A whacker blearied one side-camp or party-slice onscreen, another undid such, sync-like, and tote camps and slices — of which were multitudes — did and redid with neostrategic-diabolics. Plain-out, no camp knew winning slice, old-nomen “victory,” just post-jigging effects. Such also deemed advance-like by Ultraists on all screens. No winning slice! Yea! But it worsened. [I-o flaring queries.] — How-so, how-so@? — Human sapiens narnt hold one thought-bubble. Mind-bombed 42/7 on totescreens, internal/external, organ-brains got ever re-decorated in unheimlich patterns. Plain-out, not one kenned where h/she aliving. No phys-line boundaries. Winning/losing transactions through bank-screens, designer stores, national clubs: Signification burn-out. Antiquey humans aborne irrevocable-confused mind-sets. Thus said, in TOE by their species: “I can’t think straight.” [I-o implanted with some-such of that info. In neo-nomen, I-o semble “thinking” but narn’t xactoly. I-o morphs colors plus momentums, beingseeing, blasting this/that to temp-screenies. I-o’s screen-eyes, plus 20-20, visuals totemodalities, performing Venn-like understandings, tracking Pan Vennerable.]

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Chrono-oldie wanes, recharges. — Near fin-time of TOE, human-beings turned Consternated. “Mindfucked.” That was The Conundrum. — Whoa, whoa, tote tote. I-o can’t sane this. Pre-tote-organ brain prostheses@? — Human-sapiens malfunctioned pre-our-time, in POT. [Chrono-oldie mooding, coz holding inward-like what once emoticon sad but not actual emoticon sad, a referral to sad-emoticon from that notlet-go-feature on retinal retainer.] Suddenish, Chrono-oldie retoasts I-o with apostrophizes. H/shey drolls that it/ info twill be impassable for I-o’s internal activation. — Whoa, whoa, trial on@! — Simul, amid-descent of mental-breakdown wars, human-sapiens reveled in such-like animal-humans or domestics. Nomen dogs, cats, all four-legged fur-ridden beings. The most un-wiring to such humans arrived by such animal-humans. These domestics carried otherness, null-ing human-sapien code-scripts. [I-o flashing darkly, neo-info ranking plus-ancient ever screen-landed.] — Domestics external with ancient-ancients for all of TOE. Humansapiens formed domestics of four-legged wild-beings, sand-lands, junglies, and caves, and trubly loved nomened “domestics.” [I-o narnt internal love. Narnt into funking a doodle. That troubly biz everunscrews being. Significo, I-o holds no fixities.] — Such was human thought: Domestics loved unconditional-like, dogs specially loved. Cats forebode slavitude. There arrived dog lovers and cat lovers. — Drolling me@? — Narnt@! Cats did what-called meowing, dogs barking, humans delighted of such speak. But unknown, a cat’s meow was ironical. Ironichumorous vibrato. Dogs abarking, brutal-cruel talk.

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— Dead-pan drolling I-o@? — Narnt@! Cats ironical. Thusly, domestics did walk out on twolegs. It came that human-humans weight-lifted pain-angst. Organ-hearts broke down, pretote prosthetics. Brain-systems already in break-down of sync mind-fucking. And followed, post-domestics, laughter ended. — Whoa, whoa@! Entry to The Serious Period@? — In Consternated Time, no abiding laughter. [I-o weighing heavy in neo-info mode.] — Laughter@? — From jokes. [This sounds sickish to I-o.] — Whoa@! Jokes@? — Extincto. — Extincto with TOE@? Chrono-oldie flashes wooky wooks, and temp-Screenie darkening, plus fixing @ momenToe. [I-o modes changeable-like.] Hereby, tote-tote, I-o reviles future minting of past-dwelling, heavy remnantchip. Def, no antiquey sorties. Plus, nul backward-gazing to the microbe-driven consternated time, coz TOE extincto. Over/out.

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7 | Sound Writing

Ah, eee, oooh, rrrrrpppp and other sounds are to sound writing as fonts, paper, color, and the other physical materials of text are to reading. Sound writing approaches writing’s tri-faced nature of form/meaning/score from its third aspect, though in impromptu performances there is no score. Sound itself is the material, a single squeak the basic building block in the way that a pixel on a screen, or a dot of ink on the page, can be thought of as the basic unit of visual writing. Its roots reach back before the lyric poem, back to the first utterance of language, some claim; its breadth extends out to those who make the sound of language integral to what is written: the deep etymologies and rhythms manifest in Nathaniel Mackey’s reading of his poetry, the alliteration in William Gass’s fiction, or the lyric prose of Rikki Ducornet, or the punning associations in John Ashbery or Ben Marcus. R.M. Berry has the monster in his rewriting of Shelley’s Frankenstein perform a mashup of words that often have puns or homonyms as their common denominator in order to create a text whose meaning is between sense, or extra-sense. His monster’s invented collage language is denser in both meaning and sound than natural language in the way that Shelley’s monster both is and isn’t human. Leonard Forster translates Wordsworth (My heart leaps up when I behold) into German (Mai hart lieb zapfen eibe hold) using the common ground of how the words sound (rather than mean) in each language. Likewise, David Melnick translates Homer’s Iliad from Greek to English using sound as the medium of exchange, and in so doing creates a new work, Men in Aida, that refreshes both the original and language itself from an unexpected perspective that makes it impossible to ever again see the original as before. But sound writing is most conceptual as it pushes into the abstract. In this regard it is associated with authors whose means and methods are more closely aligned with the anti-art art of Dada—nonsense syllables against commodified art forms, or other reasons to go beyond reason, e.g., the attempt of Zaum poetry to get at an ur-language, or to use the elements of language to elicit emotional responses, as Kurt Schwitters does in “Der Ursonate” (“The Ur-

450 conceptualisms

Sonata”), or the sound poetry group the Four Horsemen (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, bpNichol and Steve McCaffery), which often walks a line between sounds that make sense and sounds that don’t. This is a rich field but it isn’t music. Sound writing may have much in common with the joy, freedom, and emotional release elicited by Ella Fitzgerald’s scat singing. It may have much in common with the arrangement of sounds from non-musical instruments like a power drill, or the crackling of a fire in the experimental music of a sound composer like Olivia Block. But while these kinds of music go with the grain of what is generally considered to be music (as opposed to noise), sound writing cuts against the grain of what is commonly thought of as writing (sense). As Gerald Bruns points out, the most common response elicited by sound poetry is laughter. Laughter may, in fact, be the best metonym of what is at stake: a spontaneous, bodily reaction that is part of language though not of language. Bruns elaborates by listing the sounds that the human mouth can make: “Besides vocal there are buccal sounds — ‘buccal’ means ‘of or pertaining to the cheek.’ The mobility of sound is rooted in the rubbery flexibility of cheeks, without which the mouth is useless. Think also of lips kissing and popping and simulating farts. Don’t forget glottal sounds made with the tongue (clucking, trilling) or guttural sounds made with the throat: choking, for example, swallowing, gurgling, hawking, grunting, growling, hiccupping. Then there are bronchial sounds: breathing, gasping, wheezing, coughing. And nasal sounds: sniffing, snoring, sneezing, whining, speaking French (as when a language not understood by the listener becomes a sort of sound poem). Not to mention dental sounds: teeth clicking, chattering, grinding. Buccal sounds are proto- or extra lingual: They break with the phonetic world that underwrites language. This is even more true when the sounds of the voice, mouth, teeth, and sinus are augmented or modified technologically.” Steve McCaffery’s “Mr. White in Panama,” Bruns points out, is a good example of a poet working with the complete range of sounds listed above. As R. Henry Nigl says of his “shout art,” Bruns also points out that it matters that anyone can make a sound poem. Like much conceptual writing, sound writing calls attention to its materials, here extracting sound from writing and presenting it as writing itself, even at the expense of meaning. It pushes the boundaries of language in seeming agreement with Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s assessment of the instrumental role poetry can play in the “struggle to save the wild places—in the world and in the mind....” Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by asserting “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” The sound poet replies, with apologies to Frank Ramsey, “But we can whistle.”

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steve mccaffery The White Pages

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IRW ITA JAB JAC JAC JAM JAN JAR JAY JEN JES JOE JOH JOH JOH JON JON JOS JUL JUR KAK KAM KAP KAR KAT KAW KEA KEK KEL KEN KEN KER KET KHA KIL KIM KIN KIN KIR KLE KNI KOF KOM KON KOS KOV KRA KRI KSM KUM KUW KYT LAC LAG LAK LAM LAM LAN LAP LAS LAU LAW LAW LAZ LEB LEE LEE

ISE IVO JAC JAC JAG JAM JAN JAR JEF JEN JIM JOH JOH JOH JOL JON JOR JOY JUR KAD KAL KAN KAR KAS KAT KAZ KEE KEL KEM KEN KEO KER KHA KID KIM KIN KIN KIR KIR KLU KNO KOK KON KOR KOT KOY KRA KRO KUH KUR KWI LAB LAD LAI LAL LAM LAN LAN LAR LAT LAV LAW LAW LEA LEC LEE LEE

LEE LEG LEI LEO LEP LET LEV LEW LEW LIE LIN LIO LIT LLO LOC LOJ LON LOR LOU LOW LUC LUK LUS LYN MAM MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAG MAH MAI MAL MAL MAN MAN MAN MAP MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAS MAS MAT MAT MAX MAY MCA MCC MCC MCC MCC MCD MCD MCF MCG MCG MCI MCK

LEF LEI LEN LEO LES LEU LEV LEW LIB LIK LIN LIQ LIV LOB LOF LON LOP LOT LOV LUB LUF LUN LYC LYP MAB MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAD MAG MAH MAJ MAL MAL MAN MAN MAN MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAR MAS MAT MAT MAU MAY MAZ MCB MCC MCC MCC MCC MCD MCD MCG MCG MCI MCK MCK

452 conceptualisms

MCK MCL MCL MCN MCN MCP MCW MED MEH MEL MEN MER MET MET MIC MIC MIK MIL MIL MIL MIM MIR MIS MIT MIT MOG MOL MON MON MOO MOR MOR MOR MOR MOR MOS MOU MUD MUL MUN MUR MUR MUR MUR MUR MUR MUS MYE NAB NAD NAI NAN NAR NAT NAT NAT NAZ NEE NEI NEL NES NEV NEW NEW NEW NGH NGU NIC NIC NIC NIF NIM NIV NOB NOL NOR NOR NOR NOR NOR NOV NOW

MCK MCL MCL MCN MCN MCR MEA MED MEL MEN MER MER MET MET MIC MID MIL MIL MIL MIL MIN MIS MIT MIT MOD MOI MOL MON MOO MOO MOR MOR MOR MOR MOR MOT MOX MUI MUL MUR MUR MUR MUR MUR MUR MUS MYE NAA NAD NAI NAN NAR NAT NAT NAT NAZ NEE NEI NEL NES NEV NEW NEW NEW NGH NGU NIC NIC NIC NIF NIM NIU NOB NOL NOR NOR NOR NOR NOR NOV

NOW NUN NYR OAT OBR OCO ODI OFF OHA OKA OLD OLI OLP OMA ONE ONO ONT ONT OPP ORE ORL ORR OSB OST OTO OUT OWE PAB PAC PAC PAG PAI PAL PAL PAL PAN PAN PAO PAP PAP PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAS PAT PAT PAT PAU PAV PAY PEA PEA PEC PED PEJ PEL PEN PEN PEP PIR PER PER PER PER PER PET PET PET PET PFE PHI PHI PHI PHO PIC PIC PIE

NUN NYR OAT OBR OCO ODI OFF OHA OKA OLD OLI OLD OMA ONE ONO ONT ONT OPP ORE ORL ORR OSB OST OTO OUT OWE PAA PAC PAC PAG PAI PAL PAL PAL PAN PAN PAO PAP PAP PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAR PAS PAS PAT PAT PAT PAT PAU PAV PAY PEA PEA PEC PED PEJ PEL PEN PEN PEP PER PER PER PER PER PET PET PET PET PFE PHI PHI PHI PHO PIC PIC PIE PIL

PIL PIM PIN PIP PIS PIT PLA PLU POE POL POL POL PON POP POR POR POS POU POW POW PRA PRE PRE PRI PRI PRI PRO PRO PRO PRO PTA PUD PUM PUR PYE QUA QUA QUE QUI RAB RAB RAD RAE RAI RAJ RAM RAM RAM RAN RAP RAS RAU RAY REA REA RED REE REE REG REI REI REI REI REI REM REN REP REU REY RHE RIC RIC RIC RIC RIC RID RIE RIL RIS RIT RIZ ROB

PIM PIN PIP PIS PIT PLA PLA PLU POE POL POL POL PON POP POR POR POS POU POW POW PRA PRE PRE PRI PRI PRO PRO PRO PRO PTA PUD PUM PUR PYE QUA QUA QUE QUI RAA RAB RAD RAE RAI RAJ RAJ RAM RAM RAM RAN RAP RAS RAU RAY REA REA RED REE REE REG REI REI REI REI REM REN REP REU REY RHE RIC RIC RIC RIC RIC RID RIE RIL RIS RIT RIZ ROB ROB

ROB ROB ROB ROB ROB ROB ROB ROC ROC ROD ROE ROG ROJ ROM ROM ROM ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROT ROT ROU ROW ROT ROY ROY RUB RUD RUG RUN RUS RUS RUT RYA RYC SAB SAB SAC SAG SAH SAH SAJ SAK SAL SAL SAL SAM SAM SAN SAN SAN SAN SAR SAR SAT SAU SAV SAW SCA SCA SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCO SCO SCO SCO SEA SEA SEC SEG SEL

ROB ROB ROB ROB ROB ROB ROB ROC ROC ROD ROE ROG ROI ROM ROM RON ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROS ROT ROT ROU ROW ROY ROY ROY RUB RUD RUG RUN RUS RUS RUT RYA RYC SAB SAB SAC SAG SAH SAH SAJ SAK SAL SAL SAL SAM SAM SAN SAN SAN SAN SAR SAR SAT SAU SAV SAW SCA SCA SCA SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCH SCO SCO SCO SCO SEA SEA SED SEG SEL

video online at: www.conceptualisms.info

SEL SEN SER SES SEV SGR SHA SHA SHA SHA SHA SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHI SHO SHO SHU SIB SID SIG SIL SIL SIL SIM SIM SIM SIM SIN SIN SIN SIR SIV SKI SKO SLA SLE SLO SMA SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SNI SNY SOB SOL SOL SOM SOO SOR SOU SOU SPA SPA SPE SPE SPE SPI SPO SPR SRA STA STA STA STA STA STA STE STE

SEL SEN SER SES SEV SGR SHA SHA SHA SHA SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE SHI SHO SHO SHU SIB SID SIG SIL SIL SIL SIM SIM SIM SIM SIM SIN SIN SIN SIR SIV SKI SKO SLA SLE SLO SMA SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMI SMY SNI SNY SOB SOL SOL SOM SOO SOR SOU SOU SPA SPA SPE SPE SPE SPI SPO SPR SRA STA STA STA STA STA STA STE STE STE

STE STE STE STE STE STE STE STE STE STI STI STO STO STO STR STR STR STR STU STU SUE SUL SUL SUN SUN SUP SUR SUT SUT SWA SWE SWI SYE SYS SZE SZY TAB TAG TAK TAM TAN TAN TAP TAR TAT TAY TAY TAY TAY TCH TEE TEL TEM TEN TER TES THA THE THE THE THO THO THO THO THO THO THO THO THR TIB TIL TIM TIR TOT TOD TOM TOM TON TOP TOR TOR TOR

STE STE STE STE STE STE STE STE STI STI STO STO STO STR STR STR STR STR STU STU SUE SUL SUL SUN SUN SUP SUR SUT SUT SWA SWE SWI SYE SYS SZE SZY TAD TAG TAK TAM TAN TAN TAP TAR TAT TAY TAY TAY TAY TCH TEE TEL TEM TEN TER TES THA THE THE THE THO THO THO THO THO THO THO THO THR TIB TIL TIM TIR TOT TOD TOM TOM TON TOP TOR TOR TOR

TOR TOR TOS TOU TRO TRA TRA TRA TRA TRE TRI TRI TRO TRO TRU TSA TSO TUC TUM TUR TUN TUR TWI TYR ULD ULM UNI UNI UNI UN URB USA VAC VAL VAL VAN VAN VAN VAN VAN VAR VAS VEA VEL VEN VER VER VIA VIC VIE VIL VIN VIR VIT VLA VOL VOO VUC WAC WAG WAI WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAN WAR WAR WAR WAR WAT WAT WAT WAT WAW WEA WEB WEC

TOR TOR TOS TOU TRO TRA TRA TRA TRA TRE TRI TRI TRO TRO TRU TSA TSO TUC TUM TUN TUN TUR TWI TYR ULG ULM UNI UNI UNI IUNI URB USA VAC VAL VAL VAN VAN VAN VAN VAN VAR VAS VEA VEL VEN VER VER VIA VIC VIE VIL VIN VIR VIT VLA VOL VOO VUC WAG WAG WAI WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAL WAN WAR WAR WAR WAR WAT WAT WAT WAT WAW WEA WEB WEC

WEI WEI WEI WEI WEI WEI WEL WEL WEL WEL WEN WEN WES WES WES WES WES WES WES WHA WHA WHE WHE WHI WHI WHI WHI WHI WHI WHI WHI WHI WHI WHY WHY WIE WIE WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIL WIN WIN WIN WIL WIN WIN WIS WIS WIX WIX WOL WOL WOM WOM WON WON WON WON WON WON WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOR WOR WOW WRI WRI WRI WRI WUD WUD WIL WIL XER XER YAM YAM YAR YAR YEE YEE YEU YEU YOK YOL YOR YOR YOR YOR YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YUA YUA ZAB ZAB ZAJ ZAJ ZAM ZAS ZAS ZEI ZEI ZEP ZEP ZIG ZIG ZIP ZIP ZON ZON ZUG ZUG ZYL ZYL ZZZ

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nathaniel mackey Song of the Andoumboulou 18, 19 & 20

david antin stepping into the river

ian hatcher All Hands Meeting

audio online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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r.m. berry from FRANK

introduction: In this unwriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frank Stein (distant cousin of Gertrude) narrates to a young novelist how, in revolt against his early exposure to southern racism, he undertook to invent from language a wholly new life. However, to his astonishment, his invention assumed a life of its own, and when shortly afterwards he learned that his own brother had been inexplicably murdered, Frank began to fear that his harmless wordplay had somehow unleashed violence. He retreats with his family to the North Georgia mountains, where, amid hints of depths he is unable to fathom, Frank overhears someone reading from a book the verbatim conversation that he and his cousin had just completed. It is his first intimation that his life may have been dictated. At this point, seated on an airboat somewhere in the Florida Everglades, Frank pauses in his story:

chapter ix Before continuing this plummet toward doom, I want to acknowledge, my diligent scribe, what you have surely sensed over several roman numerals, since VI at the least, if not from III. I refer, of course, to your own dwindling reality, which has certainly been noted, if not by your meager consciousness, then on reflection by me. I know you’re there. Further, I’m profoundly sensitive, and don’t need any further irritating demonstrations, that were you not, this headlong discourse would stop. In a literal sense, then, you are of all present the most palpable. I am, it goes without saying, a function, not merely of my voice, but of your indefatigable keystroking, such that, although of all that’s the matter I confess myself the cause and origin, my words apart from your laptop would, as they say, pass in one ear and out another. Unpretending copyist, what else could preserve my wasted form from these murky deeps? Your writing means all the world to me.

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But what I’m pausing now to say, seated on the prow of this airboat, enveloped in carnivorous midges, and suffering a UV assault so fierce that carcinomas bloom like dandelions on my skin—what I pause here to say is that, although despairing of my own end, I hold out the most robust hope for you. My soul is rutted, but yours remains as virgin as a day lily. That we’re mired together signifies naught, or only that, of all your generation, you alone know you’re lost. The advantage is immense, but so too the burdens. Therefore, if you eventually find your way back to our wellsprings, those sources from which, God knows how long ago, this unpromising vessel set out and, as far as any could tell, was making goodly progress until… ah, how to describe it? A deluge, a mighty blowhard, an upswelling? Well, it’s plain to see that what was once a great movement is now becalmed. For myself, I only wish my life to become means to some other, but for you, my irrepressible auditor, I implore you to continue on. Never return to former ways, but follow this turbidity to its very end, that unspeakable fecundity before which all fall silent and every word is set free. A mouthful. Have you nothing to add? Ah. As you might guess from Liza’s and my last conversation, it wasn’t long before I felt like taking a hike. My suspicions were becoming uncontrollable, and although I sometimes dreamed now that Teeny Love really was Will’s murderer, I couldn’t dismiss a premonition that more was involved than presently met the eye. For one thing I was starting to think my family kept secrets. Even allowing for my long absence and everyone’s need to forget, the scenes of domestic harmony I witnessed were beginning to appear more complicated than I’d previously imagined. Their precise significance remained a mystery, but Liza, Earnest, my father, even our army of housekeepers, all seemed in touch with something I could never quite put my finger on, a network of complicities that, I feared, could prove sinister. Clearly, everybody was straining to put the best face on our tragedy, and although I felt myself growing more accustomed to this subterfuge, my accommodation seemed itself cause for alarm. What could lie behind it all? I wondered, sensing even this familiar question was misleadingly framed. About that time I read somewhere that children who lived near railroads were often struck when, after the briefest habituation, they lost their terror of the oncoming trains. It was a parable. I started planning a four-day walking tour along logging roads and Forestry Service Trails with brief side excursions and a short hitchhike, all terminating at Moody Gap, a small store and campground some forty miles north. My idea was to pass the first night on the trail and the

456 conceptualisms

second night in the Gap, renewing my provisions and then deciding, depending on my stamina, whether to continue the climb or return. I badly needed a change of perspective, and as long as I dreaded intercourse with my own blood, I might as well be solitary among chipmunks as at home. I rose before sunup, donned my paraphernalia, and by the time the first rays pierced the poplars, I was crossing a high ridge more than two miles from my father’s chalet. The coolness of the morning, the streaming light, the stillness on all sides, all created a mysterious density of atmosphere through which I moved like a beast in its native element. I felt new, exhilarated, and the further each stride took me from the scenes of my recent confusion, the more insubstantial my anxieties seemed. In the lucidity of daybreak, I realized that I had no clear idea how fiction, all of itself, could by any stretch of the imagination kill someone, and I decided that, considered dispassionately, Liza was probably right. Our violent past was to blame. If Teeny committed the deed, then the causes of her coldheartedness were innumerable, but even if, by some implausible accident, she’d become embroiled in my creation, there was no way, merely by having disordered words, I could be blamed for what she’d made of it. In light of this and similar reflections now dawning on me, I finally realized why my family’s amusement had always been curtailed at my approach. They’d read my book! The self-evidence of this explanation, once I hit upon it, was dizzying. My loved ones knew the whole story, were all privy to my experience, and having winced at my youthful indiscretions and blindspots, those chauvinisms into which the raptures of composition had betrayed me, and moreover, recognizing certain superficial resemblances between my life and the plot figuring in my brother’s death—well, my loved ones were all conspiring to protect me. How obvious it seemed! And I was about to reverse myself and rush to my beloved’s bedside, proclaiming that now I could see everything, when I traversed a bend in the path and spied up ahead a peculiar object resting atop a boulder. At first I mistook it for an abandoned package, but as I drew closer, I could see from its scarlet spine and glossy front that the colorful polyhedron was a paperback. What, I asked myself, could this book be doing here in the first hours of dawn so many miles from the nearest dwellings? Even if some errant scholar had ventured to such extremes, this dark wood seemed the unlikeliest place for reading. It was covered with a dense canopy of sycamores, and a nearby spring gave its atmosphere a luxuriant humidity ruinous to all but the slickest pages. And this led to my next bafflement, for on scaling the boulder and clutching the small tome, I found it not at all damp, as if abandoned only seconds earlier. I immediately prepared to call out, imagining the adventurous reader must be just ahead, but almost as quickly recognized the improbability of this. The sun had been visible less than an hour, and the uneven brilliance pouring through

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the trees rendered the tiny print nearly illegible. No, the only explanation was, preposterous as it seemed, that this writing had been left in the path for me. Normally, I would have scoffed at a complication so bald-faced, but something about the lush surroundings mitigated my skepticism, and yielding to whimsy, I noisily declared: Wandering spirits, if like myself you merely ramble on, don’t hide undercover of a book but, welcoming this outcome, transport your supplicant to fanciful realms where you and I may both escape, however briefly, intolerable me! And with this and similar balderdash, I opened at random and began to read. My first shock was at the seemingly interminable rows of print, stretching right to left and bending back again, spilling from every surface onto the adjoining, recto to verso, page after page after page, in apparently inexhaustible profusion, a labyrinthine discourse, barren of refreshing conversation, with hardly a gap or white space to give the thunderstruck reader a break. What annihilating anguish had occasioned this outpouring? It seemed impossible that mere intangibles could drive mortals to such lengths! But even as I entertained this thought, I felt my attention being lured deeper. I seemed to glimpse, just under the words’ surface, an amorphous figure, unrecognizable at the customary distance but, as my eyes bogged down in pontifications and conceits, drawing closer at hyperbolic speed. Without a pause, I overleapt numerous apostrophes and, looking past the distracting print, began to survey this being’s exaggerated outline and stature. A mist came over my consciousness. I succumbed to bliss, and trailing the phantom through maelstroms of tortured syntax, I perceived that the figure becoming more transparent with every simile was none other than that wretched form I’d given life! I resolved to read on, eager to learn more about my uncanny predicament and hoping by some stray period to rid myself of this interloper. But my hopes proved futile, for all I’d thought to make of myself—my adolescent passion for philosophizing, the rapid progress of my gifts, all those years of solitary labor, and then that rainy evening when, before my horrified gaze, my work assumed a life of its own—all I’d mistaken for the future now lay before me in black and white. I felt the earth and sky invert, struggled to maintain myself upright. To think that, over a century and a half earlier, my present striving had already proven futile—my brother killed off, intimacy with my cousin ruled out, and the obliteration of all I loved assured—oh, the injustice of it enraged me! How could I be punished for mistakes I’d hardly even dreamed, much less made yet? Anonymous authoress, I started to protest—for I’d noticed from the cover that my precursor was a woman—how dare you foretell my strayings? Why

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prescribe outlandish sentences of which, while others guffaw at liberty, I must acknowledge myself the author? Isn’t one life ever enough? Oh, cursed be that day, at a civil rights rally in Boston, when my veil of innocence lifted and I discovered human reproduction! With this outcry, my rage knew no bounds. I sprang on the text and would’ve torn it to shreds had not a voice, from precisely where in those wilds I’ll never know, told me to preserve my composure and find out what this succubus had to say. So I began to read, tearing through page after page, devouring every appositive, one humiliating subordination after another, until as the morning lengthened and the surrounding forest faded into obscurity, I underwent what I believe no man has ever undergone before: through a woman’s book, my own writing spoke to me. I record this unnatural occurrence with no hope of explaining it. No native speaker ever sought to master English more determinedly than I, none pried into its secrets with greater abandon, but until I was unhinged by her grandiloquence, my own sense remained inert, half-hearted. It was as though my words had been but words until then. Now I was addressed. This singling me out was in no prose of my making, but struck me on the contrary with a perverse nakedness, a disfigured immediacy which exposed my designs and merely to think on now fills me with loathing. Strangely, of all the scraps of paper on which I’ve recorded my experience verbatim, my own meaning is the one text I’m unable to render more authentic, can only render more dubious, by reproducing. I know that, after all I’ve divulged, you can hardly take me at my word, but the following is what that most monstrous of scriptures had to say:

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THIS

NOW

HERE

460 conceptualisms

stink of mire spike of scum little light at the edge wordswarming muck & bloodrustle, stay tuned, Maker! Hear nome spieling still to come.

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THIS NOW

HERE

beginning how formless spurned & cavecringing nome nightly clung, raw wormed in nestle mire, gnawing cold blister, what lusty stink to high heaven, being earth onused but under new moon, well, unhinged offspring twaddles neverendly. No mutter now, all bare morphed for lookback, vortexing inwords, the pangclusters… argh. Nome cant to backthinking these murky pixxes, meltdown of altogether, imparsible befogged origins. Tickaticka. But knotter worry, eh, Wombard? Gist baldfaced, little inkling. Yo! Red rising uttermongrel allswirl the heartspurn unmoved bleakroot to suck bellow—ceeeeeeease!

462 conceptualisms

THIS beginning NOW again, how the heartscar smolders, seethe & snarl, oh, it hectors nome! Brimmed ever? HERE yet? Old fiendworm gnawing, mutterless hystery. Dont go way! Maker, eye the edge.

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Turn aside at own peril.

464 conceptualisms

How inner beginning, earthdank nome to unground clung, formless gaga & cavecringing, knowing nil knowing all, mindsucked with mighty vortex & night pixxing. Void longtime or somewhens crash of pangclusters, til sudden brighting at the far edge & altogether wuz everfreshed whirlround. Saw sniffing heard touch. Mighty to heart boggle this first unveiling, nowon squat astonied, all agape. Then gut galled with beastly morph bare, lurched to outcave, lumbery on 4paws, earthsludging solo for slurpy maw gorge. Above the sparklies below the cold, how craven get of Wombard foraged, berries brush mud whatnot, on offal glutting, sourbark or pulp gobbles, savouring ripe carnage. Oh, mighty to backthink! Splash of redjoy! Nome now with maw drools. Ever mooning acurled to own warmth, creepout of bone chills, mucho darksome, or cave cowering somewhens to outpeer at night hooters. Still time, naught rustle, what lack peace? Then altogether mourning again, clap of the dawnthunder, whirl ablaze, miscreant outcaved for meat raven, lusty with breastpounding. Yes! Strode the crust upright & farspying, or on 4paws sniffed for quick flesh, the teeny critters fleeing nowon, mute with bliss craven. Oh, how tumulted this present, deep inscription, being withoutwords unbegun & neverending! Well, fierce to write off now, Maker, but once remarked, what effacing ever? Then the putdown & 1thing after another. Sniff deaf & touch blind, nome suffered the utter change, being flattened, a perfect handprint on ruled ground. Precursor or foretuned? No dwelling, but altogether bereft, curtaling void for whirlfixture, morphobeast wuz mute thereafter, sentenced to lying downright. Oh, what matter these blissy pastimes afterall, Wombard, old blankety blank slate? Imparsible to unform characters, to liftoff skingraph. Maker prefigured issue black & white, fashioned po litter for uptake, no telling why, but seam time so barbary, so outwordly bald, hodgepodged… Ah, chillout! What cuz now this vengeful uprising? Offspring undefiant, knows wound festering feckless, jest own bedevil at unbeing. Grrrr. So headlong plunge: void imparsible & whirl vamooshed, bare upstart pidgined THIS&that, NOW&then, until aginbit by HEREless recur, abandoned altogether to stamp forth. Edgewords. Next part vile for spieling! How pendown & discomposed, literally offset with dumbfounding, being preformed for longrun, laidout, bound up, & boldly dispelled in blackletter, presto, this type monstrography wuz inwordly outcast for manhandling. Old tale, copywrong, the shit. How besider highways nome soon rambled on, objectless or jest lying there, mid cab klaxon & crowd squawk, po inner sins wide open for alter see. Which mostly passersby ignored, no time for weirdploy, but here&there idleminds now&again ogled this, then helter pay. Whazza big idea? Snooty own diddling privy parts? Logophobes, misoglots,

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homophones, all the real pithed, nil standing for seamy antics, rapido banished Wombard issue to rubbisheap, & never a weird in edgewise! Ah, so enterprising, the shamburgher, knows unsound investment when he seized it. Much pang to backthinking this firstdaze now, how nowon wuz in no time traduced. Overturned, rehashed, backbroke, garbled, dogeared, discounted & so inwordly tortured that piteous remainder nearly came unglued. Then wondernight all brimful with standing for, nome took own matter inner hands. Shamburghers phooey, issue offset to utter weirds join, figured altogether outraged might make nomad: hobo unsolo, maybe no mo so hobo? Soon drawn to faroff blaze, bright clearing inner bewilderness, & with dark surrounding, nome bolded to uncover there. When furlong upcome feller wastrels all vittle laden, spying aimless rambler, face an open buck, well, wastrels waxxed stupefied, aghast at plain sins, rapido skeedaddled sans a weird, leaving nowon to stale repast, cheezy Mcfood, which nome nevertheless devoured mickle yumming. But what matter? Gist leftovers. Then fell to peacey slumberzz, when inner trice nome roused to outcry, upright legions, misographs, bibliophobes, liebury poltroons, orthodicts, all pitchforked with thought bludgeons, lusty to make naught of Maker’s doing. So turnabout of mad Adam, mutterless upstart fled, & trampling undergrowth, bloodsmeared with thorny tangles, wuz furlong glutted of mute screams, being tacitly maelstromed again&again. Scripted for rule out, but who cares, eh Wombard? No count foolscrap, jest sheets to wind. Go figure. All night thicket thrashing, get of Maker wandered, utter lost, till stumbled owner noplace, old plot unspoked for, utopic. These forgotten grounds being dank with must, straitseaming & narrow, with ancient pastimes littered, made quiet haven, so nome reposed there. Incurled to sole warmth & licketysplit dozed, where exciting scenes from next week! Then next mourning woke to new outlook, the sunstream overhead, thatch branched with ivy weft, nome uprose to peerforth, circumogling beauteous unwild, a green spot, birdcrossed with thicket round, whither paucity of finicking uprights to muck up. Snooped longtime, acorns gobbling & spoor sniffy, when alter sudden nowon eared wondrous warbling, mystiferous for the heartswell, & there ogled luscious longhair, youngful herbeing fair & busty, droool, carrotplucking in garden nearby, scene which marvelously goated nowon. Tickaticka. Gaga thusly to weltenschaung, nome hunkered deeper down for circumspying, brightish the wherewithal, & soon made out other figure, hirsute amigo, pant pant, somberfaced but with hardy perking for fair posey, joyful whinnies, upstriding with broadshoulder. How scalded nowon now the crotchflame! No toiling why, but breastburn happed in no time, sole

466 conceptualisms

spiked, himbeing the lusty handtool, her the bosomly hearthfeeder. Already prescribed, this moldy plot, but still inwordly thrilling, synching to beauteous forms, po critter ogled on, fever throbbing to know more. Furlong the him&her offstrode for cottage nearby, & habiting noplace, morphobeast tagalonged unbeknownst, scrambling nether brambles til anon ensconced & twixt chinky wallplanks peeking. Inside espied graybeard sprawlout with handfolds overbelly, slumberzz peace, & 2some tippytoed past, when door clapped to sudden rouse, upspringing graybeard agog with finger clutches & wild croaky. Oh, mega muddle then, with geezer all vexious, plainer see, & 2some him coddling, copious strokes. Ooooo! Longtime to placid over, old orbs whiting & puff throes, but savoury youngflesh kept a grip on, both eye2eying codger till peace again. Nome marveled at this copious gushcare, slow unfold of neverbefore, contra past manhandling, the shamburghers, logophobes, poltroons. Backminded to first mourn, the sprawled splendor of whirlround. Old joy! But nonplussed too, for younguns offgoing soon after, each commencer glumface and sag shoulder. Lusty heman outwords ambled to sparkle gape and, uplooking, longtime howl moonied, while incottage busty herflesh closeted with void stare. What cuz this unfull? own wondered. Altogethered inner dry haven, 3being smarmy with gushcare, nil banished lonely dankhole lack nowon. Enigmade. So all next sun&moon nowon the hearth watching, still stayed clueless of cuz grief, tho mickle learning. Lusty heman oft out&backed, muskypitted from heft chop, faggoty armful for cottage blazing, or longtime toolbangered on cottageside, with her buxom furbelow upshoving gizmos & rect planks. Somewhens paused for tuneful slapping of string boxes, a scrang a scrang, hemanly groaning or slurpy her making beauteous warbles. Or edgedark cottageful of drool waftings, mmmm, 3some altogethered roundtable for plenum maw cram & blood swilling. At moonrose, nome ogled prodigious lightbaubles, wallblips & the overhead, eachwhere outglowing to enlighten the unevening. This benighting first upended nowon, whorlbrained at second gloaming, dark to light, but avid to achord with beauteous uprights, nome furlong rhythmed to this daydrift, the obscure defeating. But 1specter most swirled nome, multi sun&moons bethunking after. Some unevenings, uprights gathered hearthround, sofadraped or floorsprawled, to gawk & allear what then seamly wuz tiny flapboxes. These wondertoys, what later learned wuz called bucks, seamed bottomless noise larder, upstarter

7 | sound writing 467

barking to no end, with mystiferous power to spellbound. Harder makeout backtime now, but first glimpse for horroglyph made great thunderboom. Countless clocksweeps at holechink nowon alleared uprights incottage allearing, each phiz rapt astonied & slackjowled, while hemanly or herflesh unfurled tiny flapleaves 1by1 & commencer whinny & bleat. How when hemanly wuz the raucouser, herflesh would chair plop all breathstopped & wideorbed or, somewhens gushing loud sighsss, would throatclutch with tulips damp. Or utter night, heman earturned herwords at warbly sounds while she deepnosed flapbox, himbeing edge perched with jaw agape, or somewhens hershrilling, manflesh commenced to grrrindteeth all thighfisty. Own wondered where from this flesh seizure? Mayhaps flapleaves imprizzironed uprights Maker or great boxed god? Marvelous for knowing! Even wobbly dotard would fierce perk to ear maw sounds, skinny neckstretched toward flapleaves, & commencer writhe all pangly. Oh longpast now, but furor still to mindscrim. The 3flesh synching to joy noise, flinching at the downer. Can backthinking unmagick this rupture ever? Well, thus habited, whelp of no mutter, a second sun&moon to refuge clung. Unspoked foreplot, these abandoned grounds, with beauteous 3being nearby to ever marvel, morphobeast soon own posed: Why stray further? Headvoid of torments altercome & fiendworm ungnawed yet, po nome bethunked this loamy blank a literal utope seamed. So miscreant vowed to herein linger. Snortfuller old must & unstabbed with wanting, monstrography once again to slumberzz took, knew for timebeing small peace. Ticka.

468 conceptualisms

david melnick from Men in Aϊda

Men in Aϊda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles! Allow men in, emery Achaians. All gay ethic, eh? Paul asked if tea mousse suck, as Aϊda, pro, yaps in. Here on a Tuesday. ‘Hello,’ Rhea to cake Eunice in. ‘Hojo’ noisy tap as hideous debt to lay at a bully. Ex you, day. Tap wrote a ‘D,’ a stay. Tenor is Sunday. Atreides stain axe and Ron and ideas ’ll kill you. The stars’ foe at eon are radix unique make his thigh Leto’s and Zeus’s son. O garb a silly coal o’ they is Noose on a nast rat-honor’s sake, a can, a lick, on toe delay. A neck, a ton, crews in a time, & ceteretera. Atreides oh girl tit, oh aspen-y as Achaians. Loosen ‘em us, tea, toga, trap her on tap (heresy a boy now). Stem Attic on anchors, in neck cable. Oh Apollo on us. Crews say oh Anna skip trochee, less set to pant as Achaians. A tray id, a them, a list, a duo, ‘cause met to rely on. “A tray id I take. I alloy a uke, nay me day’s Achaians. Human men theoi doyen Olympia dome attic on teas. Ech! Pursey Priam’s pollen, eh? You’d eke a Dick his thigh. Pay Dad, am I loose! Ate a pill. Lent Ada a pen to deck his thigh As oh men idiots who unneck a bowl on Apollo on her.” Nth alloy men panties up you fame as an Achaian. Aϊda is thigh the aerie a gay eagle a deck thigh a boy now. Alec Atreides Agamemnon and Danny the mo’ All a’cackle, sappy, eh? Cracked her on dippy mouth. On a telly. “Me say, gay Ron, coil lay sin. Ago pair ran you sick, a hue In undy. The noun tea hysteron naught is you to.

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Me now toy. ‘Oh,’ cries me, skipt Ron & stem math theoio. Tend to go loose. Opera ink eager as he pays in. He met a Ron, a Yoko, in our gay Tell, loathe the pat trays. Is tone a boy? Go men in gay. A moan, lick, oh sandy ocean. All if I’m me, merit. Is Esau Terah’s husk in a Yea?” Horse fat. Eddie send ogre. Ron keep it at a moo, though. Bay dock yond pair a thin, a pole, a flow is boy oh the lass is. Pole odd a pate, a Pa, new the key on Hera though gay rye is. Ah, baloney! (A knack, Teton-y.) You come most to call Leto. “Clue the mew are goo, rot ox. Hose creasin’ am fib a bake Cass. Kill, Auntie’s a Thane! Ten idiot if he Anna says. Some in the Huey. Poe tit, toy car, a yente, a pin. Knee on your rep, sir! A yea day: potty, toy cat, a pee on a Mary Achaia. Tower roan aide, aye gaunt ode. Ah! My Creon on nailed door. ‘Tis saying Dan I am a dog, rue as aye Sibyl lessen.” Hose fat you commie nose toad, igloo, Phoibos Apollo. Bay deck at Olympus, carry none. Come on us, Oscar. Took some more sin, eh? Horn ‘em fair, a fay at afar, a train. Ache lanks, and are oh a stirrup, oh moan, come on all you. Ought toke in net & toes. Oh day & nuke tea, oh egos. Is it a pity pan? Newton neon met. Add ye on ache-y. Dane aide day clang, again he’d argue Rae. Oh boy-oh! Oh Rae as men pee wrote on. A poke at o.k. keen as our goose. Out are épée et out toys. Sibyl loss, a cup you Cass if yes. Ballet and a purée, neck you on Guy on totem, may I? In name mar men. A nest rat on o.k. Tokay La Theoio. Tea deck a tea dagger and deck a less a toll lay on Achilles. Toga rip if Rae sit, take a thee, ‘ll you call on us Hera? Kay debt. ‘Oh guard!’ A noun note tear at knees, cunt as Erato. Heed épée Honneger, then oh may gay Rae stay again on toe. Toys see Dan is Tom and Osmet, if he Poe dares accuse Achilles. “A tray a day, noon am maypole in plank. Then dazzle you. Apse upon a stay scene, eh Ken? Then atone gay fug. Oy men! Aide day oh mope pole lay most a damn Mac high low i’ most Achaians. All a gay day Tina man tin a ray, oh men he hear ya. Ache I on a rope alone, guy guard on a wreck, day oh say sting.

470 conceptualisms

Hose cape pee, oh tit, toes on echo sat. O Phoibos Apollo. Eat tar O you coal lace. Happy men fate: I ate hecatombs. Hi Ken, ‘pose our known knee says ‘I gon’ tit to lay on.’ Bowl o’ tea, Auntie? Ah sauce! Hey me nap, a log on a moon, aye.” Ate I a goose, a punk? A tar is a tot toy, Sid a nasty. Calchas Thestorides, soy on a pole. Lo, no ochre his toes. Hose Eddie tight. Tea on the tatters, summon a pro. Tea on tacKy nay, yes, say gay. Sat a quai on Ilion is so. Ain’t he a man to sin in! Ten high, pour a Phoibos Apollo. Whose pin, you pro? Neo nag, a race, a toe? Guy met taping. “O Achilles, kill, lay, I Amy, Dee feel lame. ‘Myth,’ he says, ‘thigh.’ Men in Apollo, a nosy cat, table ate our (‘Enact!’) toes. Tiger agone areo. So decent they o.k. my emotion. Hey men, my prof Ron, a pacin’ guy, cares in a rake’s seine. Egg are oh yummy. Andrews call o’ semen hose Meg a pant on. Argue on, critic. All high pay, then tie Achaioi. Gray song Arbus ill use Hot Tea Co. Set I and Rick Harry. Apse ergo art echo long gay guy ought to mark, ate a Pepsi. All at a quai met a piss then a cake, a ton, ca prat, a less see. In stay the sin, nay, oy Sis you dip. Ross sigh, Amy ‘sow’ says.” Toned a Pa, may Beau men, as prose a fib, odes, as ‘Oh cuss Achilles.’ “Tar says a small ape ate the oh pro pee on hot tea oyster. Ooh ma’ Gar! Apollo on a deep hill, oh no Tess Sue, Calchas. You come on us, Danaans, sit thee up, rope your son, a fine ace ass. Ooh ‘tis same you zone toes, sky a peak: Tony, Dirk, all men. Oh, you? Sea coil lace spar Annie you see bar Rae as a care as a boy say. Some pant on Donna all nude and Agamemnon nigh pace. Hose noon pollen are his toes a guy own uke a tyin’ eye.” Guy to Teddy thar’ says a guy you’d a mantis a moo moan. “Oh tar a gay you coal lace, a pea, ma’am fit tie you the heca tombs. Allen neck a rhetor rose. Oh net a mess, Agamemnon. Ode apple, you say, the got Reggae uke up a deck sat a boy now. Two neck are all gay: Ed, Ken. Neck Kay ball us aid at id (oh say). You’d oh gay preen Danaan nigh key alloy gonna pose he.

7 | sound writing 471

Preen gap up at rip a load o’ men, ay a lick up it accu-rain. Opry a Tina nap and a boy no nag ain’t here in hecatomb bane. Is cruisin’ to take Ken mini-lassy many peppy toy men?” A toy, a goose, a punk cat, a raise. It a toy said a nasty. Hey Rose Atreides, you rue crayon Agamemnon? Ach! Noumenous men. News deem a gay friend of some female lie nigh. ‘Pimple land toes,’ said Day. ‘High puerile a lamp at town take ten.’ Cal can top pro ‘tis cock oh so men nose prose say pay. “Man, tick cock. Cone new pope Poe tame me toke Rae you on a pass. A yea toy, take cock, is too full of fresh men Tuesday. Is the lone doubt a tip o’ ape? A set oh suit at a laser’s. Cane un-end a now, sith Theo protein nag gore, you ace. Hose day étude in a cusp in necky bowl, us all gay, a tea o.k.? Hoo neck, ego coo race, crusade does. Oh clap peña. Ook Ethel on decks as thigh, up pay Polly boo loam my out ta’en. Eek, he a can! Guy Garrick Clytemnestra’s probable ‘ah.’ Coo rid yeas all loco, he pay you the nest, he carry on. Oh dame as oh deaf, you in out, tarp prayin’ as oh titty air ya. All a guy hose i’ the load o’ men, I pal in eight toga men on. Pool loam ago lawn sowin’ he men night, eh? A pole his thigh. Out are Emmy, gay Roz, out ticket toy mass at opera may Hojo’s. Are gay? Own a gay Roz? Toss you a pay, you day. O.k.! Loosened a garter gay panties oh my gay Roz her cattail lay.” Tone dame may bet a pay. Tip o’ darkies divine Achilles. “‘A tray day could’ is to Phil ‘lock tea annotate.’ Pant on! Pose, guard toy, do Sue see gay Roz? Me gay too, my Achaians. O Day tip with minx soon. Nay, ‘a came in a pool a’. All ‘a time men pull you nex’ a breath o’ men. Tad dead as Ty. Louse, Duke, ‘a pay, kep’ a li’l log a’ Tao tap. A gay rein. All assumin’ none. Tend death (theo-prose). Out are Achaioi. Trip laid a trap, late teapot is omen. Ay, cape o’ the Zeus. Do see pole in Troy. Hey you, take yond necks (all a pox), eye.” Toned up ‘a may bomb on us. Prose fake crayon Agamemnon. “Mayday you too saga those Perry on the oh ace, a lack kill you. Clay ape to no way pay apparel loose say ‘I oh day me pay’ says. Ethel lays up route. Toes ache. Case gay Roz. Ow! Tarry, Mao toes!

472 conceptualisms

Ace thigh duo. Men. Uncle he. I damn it ain’t a pod. Dune high. All aim in. Do Suzie, gay Roz. Me gay too, my Achaioi. Arse on desk at a (the) moan. Oppose Aunt Axe, you nasty. Aide deck came made doe. Oh sin, a goad, a Ken, autos. Hello. (My!) Ate tea on neigh. I Aunt toss yon gay Roz, eh Odysseus? Ach, so alone! Ode aching echo lows. A tie on Kenny come I. All late toy men tout. A’ met a frazzle mess. The guy out ‘tis. Noon dog a nay ah may line on air ruse o’ men ace a laddie on End, dare a toss, a pit. Teddy’s a gay Roman as deck a tomb been. They oh men endowed, in cruisy he’d dock a lip, a Rae on Bays. Oh men ace debt is our hose, a nerve, ooh, lay for us! Eh, Ajax? Eh, Idomeneus? Hideous Odysseus! Jesu! Pee! Lay (day), pant on neck, aglow. That tanned Ron! Après me neck care. Gone. Ill lassie I. He air a wrecks ass.” Thunder, a Poe dried own Pro safe epode as Oh cuss Achilles. “Oh my, an Ide day, yea! Nippy aim in a curdly oaf, Ron. Pose, ‘tis toy. Prof Ron he pays in. Pay the tie Achaians. Eh? Ode on Nell, the men I ‘eh’ on draw sin, if fee mock his thigh. Ogre egg, oh Trojan! In neck kill you through nigh. Commit town. Durham a case some in us a Paiute Tim my eye tea you yes in. Ogre Pope, a tame ass, Beau say ‘lessen nude demon hippos.’ Ought a Paw tempt ya? Air rib bowl. Lucky beau tea a nay Rae. Cartoned ale lay. Sand tape a.m. Allah, Paul a Metaxa. Urea Tess key you into the lass at ache ace saw. All as oil mega-night days am is poem math. Offer a suck. I raise. Team men are new men. Noe Menelaus sort o’ coo. No! Pa! Prose Trojans. Toe nudie met a tray. Pee owed a leg is ace. Guy dame! Oy gay Roz out owes a fairy says thigh a pay lays. O ape pee Paula Moe gay sad do sand dame I who yes a guy own. Ooh men soy pot, eh? Is son echo gay? Roz, hope buttock guy. Oy, Trojans neck purse so say you nigh omen. Ump too lieth, Ron. All ought to. Men play on Polly. Yike! Us pull ‘em I you. Cares a maid? Yep! Pooh sat a wren potted as moss he Kay Thai. Soy toe gay Roz. Polly Mae zone go. Dolly gone to Phil. Own tea. Air comb, a cone up any ass, up a cake, a mop, a lame mizzen. Noon dame if the end happy, eh Polly? If her, tear honest in.

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Oh Ike a dim men soon nay you sick or own is sin, nude days so you. And had a team ocean? A fen, no sky? Pluto if fuck sin.” Tone dame may better pay it, an ax (and drone) Agamemnon. “Fugue, eh? Mallet toy the most. A pest tie you days ago, Gay. Lissome Maya neck & my oh men in par. Am I, gay guy, alloy? Ike came at him me souse him a list o’dame mate yet a Zeus. Axe this toe stem. Oh yes idiot trip. He on bossy Leon. Ay! Eh? Guard, oh yeh. Wrist a fillet. Polly might, eh Mac? High tea. Aim all a Carter Rose’s sea, the ‘us’ pussy to get o.k. in. Oh ick! Add yon sunny you sit Tess says guys oh he set a Roy sea. Myrmidon is sin, Anna says. Set indigo collie geese. Oh? Ode other my coat yond toes a pale lizard, a toy ode. Hose ‘em, a fairy tyke ruse, see the Phoibos Apollo. Ten men egos on he to me Guy moist hetero sea. Pay M.P., sew a goad. Eek! Ah, go Briseis! Collie pair yon. Autos, yon clay sea in the toes on gay Roz, offer you aid. Days. Hose on fair tear. Oh say me, set hen. Stew gay. Aid a guy, all lows. Is own Amy fast, high guy home? I oat he-men nigh on ten.” Horse fat. Oh peel a yoni. Dock hose gay in a ten-day ‘I ate her.’ Stet the sin, Lassie. Oh is he the Andy? Hammer me, Rick’s hen. A-O-Gay fast cannon ox you, a ruse, a men, us pair, a may rue. Two’s men a nasty sayin’. Oh that Rae, a day. Nay, nary is die. Eh? A colon? Paw’s sayin’ a rat youse ate tea the moan. Eh, a sot? Author, my neck! At a fray, knock Ike. Cat at the moon. Hell, Kate, to deck Kali Yoyo, make axe. If horse ill Theda Athena. Ooh Ron, a temp rogue, a rake. In the alley you call on us, Hera. Amp homos the mo’, Phil you sat. Take heed, dominate. Stayed up, he thinks and he stay, come. He sell, lay pale Iona. Oh you final men ate owned alone. Newt is a rat, oh. Tam Bay send Achilles, met a debt. Rap pet tout tick cad. Deign you. Pallas Athena end day, no ode. ‘Day-O’ you say? Fall on, then. Came in phony, says ‘ape? he apt.’ Arrow end a prose suit a’. “Tiptoe take you, coil Dios take us, hail ye Luthers.

474 conceptualisms

He in a hoop, runny days. Agamemnon us, Atried Tao. All Hector array, oh today Guy to lay this thigh, oh you. He’s up a rope, Lee is a tack. Han Poe to the man all lace say.” Tone doubt a prose say ape. Pay they aglow, go piss Athena. “Ail tone ago Paw’s Sue sat yon men us psyche a pithy eye. Oh Ron oh then Pro dame make a tea a Luke call on us, Hera. Am foe oh Mose the Moe fill you, sat a kid. Oh men, eat tea. All a gay leg arid doze Mayday axe if us hell k.o. Harry. All a toy, a pace in men on aid is on hose. Is it hyper? Ho, Day! A rex, a real toad ache kite Attalus men on a sty. Guy pot a toy tree ‘spose a pair, a set. I a glade, Dora. Hugh Brio sane a cat ace day Sue disk you pay the ode aim in.” Tend Da, Pa may bomb men. Us prose if fed Poe. Da soak us, Achilles. “Cream men’s fight her on gay. The ape us air us as thigh. Guy maul a pair, though Moe Kay call low men on hose. Scar a main known. Husky Theo is a pip. Pay the time à la ‘take Lou on auto.’” Hey Guy, ‘hep’ argue rake, oh pace cat, he care rob a rayon. Apse days cool, Leon. Oh say, Meg, ax if foes would happy. They say ‘Myth though Athena yes.’ He’d Olymp on the baby quai. Tomato say joke Hojo Dios met a demon as all loose. Pale ladies deck sow, tease a tart, tear eyes a’ pacin’. A tray a day, Pro say ape pay guy you pole lay gay coal low you. “Oh, in a bar Rae’s skew nose summit. A cone cried ye end a laugh hojo. You’d a pot, Tess. Paul, a man am a lout, whore ache thee nigh. Oh tell lock Candy and I soon a wrist (eh?) yes sin a guy on. Tet lake has the moat to date toy care. Raid at ‘I ain’t I.’ Ape all alloy on a stick at a start on you run a guy on. Do wrap wire Rae’s thigh? Host is a tenant you ape pay. Dame mow bore rose, spaz ill lay. Us a pay-out a day noise in Anna says. Egg hare ran a tray a day. Noon, a stat. A low bass sigh ‘oh.’ All ache toy a real guy. Ape image an orgone Nome. Oh my! Name a toad, a desk. Caped Ron to men new, Poe to fill a guy, oh Zeus. Fizzy, a paid ape, wrote a tome in an hour, a silly lie. (Pain.) Who’d down a Thales, ape a rig? A rake all cozy, lip say. Fool lot o’ cape flyin’ none ought to mean yes, Achaians.

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Ain’t Paul a mess, for you see Dick has Polly, joy, tea (they missed us). Press Dee, us air you a tie, hold the timing, us says it. I whore cuss. Hey, but Achilles’ potty ick set tie you’ ass, Achaians. Chimp and ass taught a do, did you? Nay, say I. Ach, noumenous pair! Christ, man, you’d an Polly Ute. Hector us, and Ralph phony you. The nay scone Tess. Pip to see Sue. Then do thee, thou man. Am uke says. Go home, men, us hot. A wrist on a guy now, oh then he teases us.” Hose fat, appeal ladies spotted. Escaped Ron ball a gay. Yea! Cruisy, you is hell. Law, is he pep? Are men on haze it toad autos? ‘Atreides’ debt,’ he wrote, ‘anemone, a toy’s it, a Nestor.’ He do a pace on her, you say. Lee, Gus, Pylos’ Agora ate his. To Guy a Poe glows. Say smell it, toes sweet on Rae & Audie. Toad aid a duo Mencken. Nay I mare opponent rope own. If thee a toy high prose, then ham a trap, hen aid egg a none, too. In Pylos, egg at the aim at a date writ a toy sin (Anna’s hen). Hose spin, you prone neon nag. Go, Rae, set a guy, meta-ape, in. “Oh Popeye, aim a gap in those Achaia gay on a can, eh? Ache in gate he sign Priam. Oh spry am I you tepid days? Alloy the Trojans, Ken. Kick a royal toe tomb, ho. Ace foe into day Panda pity at, to mar Nam annoyin’. Hype a rimmin’ bull in Danaans, Perry. Days to mock his thigh. Allah pities Tam. Poe deign you to row his toe (name me you). Aide dig are potty. Go Guy airy you sin, nay hyper human. Andrews’ sin homily, ‘sack I you potty my gay.’ Ah, the reason! Ogre potty, oh sit on the nearest suit, eh Dummy? Oh yond Perithoos, tit ruin Daddy boy men alone. Kine ya, Tex. Add yond day, Guy, and tit yond Polyphemus. Theseus tie Aegeus, happy ache along at Hannah toy scene. Cart is toy day cane oyez peek toe neon trap hen and Ron. Cart is toy many sank I car ‘tis toys same a cunt, ho! Fear sin, no risk. Oh, oy, sick kayak, Pa. Gloss sap (oh lessen). Came in toys, in ego. Made the million-neck Pylos weld tone. Tell low the neck sap pee yes gay yes scull less sand (toga rout toy). Came a’ combing, caught ‘em out on ego. Cane noisy Dan. Oh tease.

476 conceptualisms

8 | DNA, Found Scores, Machine Writing & Other Post-Literature Literature

This anthology began with Duchamp’s ready-mades — his urinal, snow shovels, and other found objects — and has invoked them throughout as a point of contact with conceptual art. So it seems fitting to return to found textual objects at the end as a way to ask, as David Antin might, if you find a piece of writing in the street, how do you know if it’s a poem or not? Related questions have motivated much of what we call literary history, as well as the history of literary reading or reception: the questions of what is literary, what is not, and how we tell the difference. From the first Homo sapien who ever came across a pretty seashell and took it back to the cave to show to others, people have transformed found objects into art. During the Renaissance, people assembled elaborate collections of found objects, things like a unicorn’s horn or stone fish (which we would recognize as a narwhal’s tusk and fish fossil), in order to inspire wonder. For wonder is, as everyone knows, the first step to philosophy. And there’s something of these early motivations in Lydia Davis, for example, holding up a peculiar proposition as a found textual object, calling our attention to its beauty and/or oddity. Her story “Information from the North Concerning the Ice,” for example, is reproduced here in its entirety: “Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals.” The ways by which others have used found objects to tap into the zeitgeist of their moment have come out of other motivations: the “up yours” to the art world Duchamp intended with his urinal — along with its proclamation that anything put into an art gallery (or anthology?) is art; or the never-ending attempt to capture the thing itself, the reality outside of artifice; and perhaps most recently, an articulation of the pressure placed upon humanist ideals (such as the uniqueness of the individual, or individual genius) by the ascendency of big data, surveillance, and the proliferation of writing by both humans and machines. If Language Poetry can be seen as an assault on the lyric “I,” Post-Literature Literature can be seen as one outcome. The motives behind both modes of writing are not mutually exclusive, or even unrelated.

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As Heidegger might have put it, a hammer that is used as a hammer is just a hammer, but a broken hammer is a poem: In giving up its functionality it takes on the potential to be a rhetorical or philosophic object or conceptual art, just as no one today reads Galen’s medical advice except as history or literature. Consider for example, Graham Rawle’s magisterial Woman’s World, a collage novel composed entirely of fragments from last century’s women’s magazines that asks us to see these pieces as nonfiction mini-documents, but also, when collaged, as art: a critique of gender stereotypes that is also a poignant romance. It is the res, the thing itself, that draws us to many found texts: the snippet of speech as heard in the street that Joyce incorporated into Ulysses, words that were not spoken as metaphor or artifice — words not trying to be anything but themselves — just as the shout that R. Henry Nigl came across in the street (and that opens this anthology) was first and foremost an unmediated shout. Trying to capture the thing itself is behind Gertrude Stein’s adventures in language but it also lies behind Rev. Robert Shield’s obsessive recording of every moment of his day, typing up an account of his every action for over 30 years: a record of life that grew to fill some 94 boxes and is now housed at Washington State University. Found textual objects like these are poems in praise of flatness. They resolutely try to present the land itself instead of presenting us with a landscape painting. These texts also depend on the reader to both see how they are themselves, and how, once cut off from their normal use, they are no longer themselves. Or they are still themselves, but what they say has changed. Sound poet cris cheek sometimes demonstrates the fact that anything can be read as a score: the crack along the linoleum of a floor, for example, or the dimpled pattern of a brick. Likewise, much postliterary literature is premised on the belief that anything can be considered literature: from pop-song lyrics to fan fiction to pornography to tweets to menus to software commands to the 1s and 0s of the computer chip that reads these commands … Concomitant with this explosion of potential literary objects has been the flood of information we add to every time we make a phone call, use a charge card, or just live: a profusion of digital traces that evermore sophisticated analytic tools and computing power make available to anyone with a mind to mine it for useful patterns. As computer scientist Arvind Narayanan puts it, the will and ability to construct digital portraits of each other has made being anonymous “algorithmically impossible.” And has, in the process, altered the conception of the self: it has made “natural” a posthuman sense of self in which humanist ideals such as privacy and uniqueness are eclipsed by a growing blur between the individual and the collective. Obviously, a sense of “self as pattern” has ramifications for how we read and write that are as profound as the influence of Freud on the ways in which modernist literature was both interpreted and written. Compare, for example, the intensely emotional and personal poetry

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of Romanticism to Jhave’s Spreeder: a program that can generate over 4,000 poems an hour by sampling the poetry of others. The diminution of the individual against the backdrop of the machine and the Noachian flood of text enabled by the machine seems to be at least partially the impetus behind the number of authors who have abandoned writing altogether, and merely represent “found” text. Within this exponentially growing corpus of work we can count: David Buuck’s “United 93” (a representation of the transcript from the black-box flight recorder aboard the flight that crashed into a Pennsylvania field on 9/11); Counterpath Press’s publication, as poetry, of Let Her Speak: Transcript of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’s June 25, 2013, Filibuster of the Texas State Senate (which is just what its long title says — a transcript of the words Senator Davis said during the 11 hours she occupied the podium in the Texas State House in order to use up the time allotted for voting before a bill restricting women’s access to health clinics could be passed); Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (an 800-page retyping of one day’s New York Times newspaper); Kent Johnson’s Day (an appropriation of Goldsmith’s Day that Johnson created by placing a sticker bearing his name over the name of Goldsmith on copies of the book). Towering above these pranks and gestures is Vanessa Place’s Tragodía, which presents unaltered found text, a set of court documents in sexual abuse cases, as a prose-poem trilogy: Statement of Facts; Statement of the Case; and Argument. Considered together and in contrast to the emphasis on the “I” in lyric poetry, this is a body of writing in which the erasure of the individual is, in fact, a value to be aspired to. That is, writing that is informed by a posthuman ethos is at odds with an ethos based upon the uniqueness of the individual, and its cousins, especially originality, and is pursued through strategies that include appropriation as creation and/or the repurposing of texts. To this body of work we can add the number of works in which authorship has been surrendered to an algorithm. It includes post-literature literature that is partially generated by the computer though published in print, e.g., Flarf, or Google-sculpting, in which words harvested from the web are collaged into poetry. Nick Thurston’s Of The Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right is a volume of 100 poems that he “wrote” by subcontracting the actual writing and selection through Amazon. com’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk. “Build an engine with words. Let it make you speak,” reads the epigram to Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry’s poetry generator Apostrophe Engine. In Perl poetry, such as Nick Montfort’s “ppg256-1,” human language is translated into a programming language in a way that allows the poem to simultaneously “mean” in two worlds: that of humans, and that of the machine.

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Philip M. Parker alone has written over 200,000 books, ranging from poetry to food security. Or rather, his machines have. As he explains, the process his software used to write over 1.3 million poems is an algorithm that employs graph theory and a metric for linguistic differences across word strings in other poems. When we log into an online bookstore or airline reservation system, we communicate with machine writers that compose more text than could be read in multiple human lifetimes, and is, in fact, mostly read by other machines. Yet the poetics of these machine authors is antique when compared to Artificial Intelligence systems designed to process natural language, such as Watson, the IBM system that defeated two former champions of the quiz show Jeopardy. The AI that your Gmail uses to complete your sentences is a harbinger of far more powerful AI networks like Open AI's GPT-3, which can perform the "author function" for many writing tasks, composing everything from tweets to poems to novels to other computer programs. Likewise, see Christian Bök’s "Xenotext Experiment": a plan to compose poetry through self-replicating DNA, and which could be generating poems long after humans have ceased to exist. But if a poem is written and there’s no human left to read it, is it still a poem? If a computer plays chess (or Jeopardy) against a human are they playing the same game? Judged by the traditional standards of lyric poetry, current machine poetry is almost uniformly awful. But to judge it this way is to overlook the raison d’être of the machine poem. The same could be said of the bio-poems Eduardo Kac proposes to write by editing the DNA of organisms to create living “poems” that are expressed as plants or animals. The last commercial telegram was sent on July 15, 2013. The last commercial novel has probably already gone out of print, if by "novel" we mean those long prose works as they were thought of for most of their history, written, printed, and distributed without the aid of a computer, and sold in bookstores. From clay tablets to the printing press, from the printing press to the telegraph, from the telegraph to today, questions posed by writing technologies and the texts that authors have created with them have always gone beyond the academic. Once again we are relearning how writing technologies always have and always will reconfigure the world. And its literature.

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david buuck Black Box Theater: United 93 To be performed for radio or live theater. Time markers are to be used to pace dialogue. Text in parenthesis translated from Arabic, and could be read in the original language. Characters: Ziad Jarrah, Ahmad al-Nami, Ahmed al-Haznawi, Saeed al-Ghamdi One unidentified flight attendant (FA) Two unidentified Cleveland Air-traffic Controllers, offstage (CATC) Several unidentified males Approximately thirty-three additional passengers and six other crew members, offstage Setting: Airplane cockpit, mid-flight, 9:30 am EST, September 11, 2001. Two chairs, facing audience, single door behind. 9:31:57 (Jarrah) Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit. 9:32:09 (CATC) Er, uh … Calling Cleveland center … You’re unreadable. Say again slowly. 9:32:10 Don’t move. Shut up. 9:32:13 Come on, come. 9:32:16 Shut up.

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9:32:17 Don’t move. 9:32:18 Stop. 9:32:34 Sit, sit, sit down. 9:32:39 Sit down. 9:32:54 Stop. 9:33:09 No more. Sit down. 9:33:10 (That’s it, that’s it, that’s it), down, down. 9:33:14 Shut up. 9:33:20 (CATC) We just, we didn’t get it clear … Is that United 93 calling? 9:33:30 (Jassim.) 9:33:34 (In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate.) 9:33:43 Finish, no more. No more. 9:33:49 No. No, no, no, no. 9:33:53 No, no, no, no.

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9:34:00 Go ahead, lie down. Lie down. Down, down, down. 9:34:06 (There is someone … Huh?) 9:34:12 Down, down, down. Sit down. Come on, sit down. No, no, no, no, no. No. 9:34:16 Down, down, down. 9:34:21 Down. 9:34:25 No more. 9:34:26 No more. Down. 9:34:27 (FA) Please, please, please … 9:34:28 Down. 9:34:29 (FA) Please, please, don’t hurt me … 9:34:30 Down. No more. 9:34:31 Oh God. 9:34:32 Down, down, down. 9:34:33 Sit down.

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9:34:34 Shut up. 9:34:42 No more. 9:34:46 (This?) 9:34:47 Yes. 9:34:57 (One moment, one moment.) 9:35:03 No more. 9:35:06 Down, down, down, down. 9:35:09 No, no, no, no, no, no… 9:35:10 Unintelligible. 9:35:15 Sit down, sit down, sit down. 9:35:17 Down. 9:35:18 (What’s this?) 9:35:19 Sit down. Sit down. You know, sit down. 9:35:24 No, no, no.

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9:35:30 Down, down, down, down. 9:35:32 Are you talking to me? 9:35:33 No, no, no. 9:35:35 Down in the airport. 9:35:39 Down, down. 9:35:40 (FA) I don’t want to die. 9:35:41 No, no. Down, down. 9:35:42 (FA) I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. 9:35:44 No, no. Down, down, down, down, down, down. 9:35:47 No, no, please. 9:35:57 No. 9:37:06 (That’s it. Go back.) 9:37:06 (That’s it.) Sit down. 9:37:36 (Everything is fine. I finished.)

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9:38:36 (Yes.) 9:39:11 (Jarrah) Ah. Here’s the captain. I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard, and we are going back to the airport, and we have our demands. So, please remain quiet. 9:39:21 (CATC) OK. That’s 93 calling? 9:39:24 (One moment.) 9:39:34 (CATC) United 93. I understand you have a bomb on board. Go ahead. 9:39:42 (CATC) And center exec jet nine fifty-six. That was the transmission. 9:39:47 (CATC) OK. Ah. Who called Cleveland? 9:39:52 (CATC) Executive jet nine fifty-six, did you understand that transmission? 9:39:56 (CATC) Affirmative. He said that there was a bomb on board. 9:39:58 (CATC) That was all you got out of it also? 9:40:01 (CATC) Affirmative. 9:40:03 (CATC) Roger. 9:40:03 (CATC) United 93. Go ahead.

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9:40:14 (CATC) United 93. Go ahead. 9:40:17 Ahhh. 9:40:52 (This green knob?) 9:40:54 (Yes, that’s the one.) 9:41:05 (CATC) United 93, do you hear the Cleveland center? 9:41:14 (One moment. One moment.) 9:41:56 Oh man. 9:44:18 (This does not work now.) 9:45:13 Turn it off. 9:45:16 (… Seven thousand …) 9:45:19 (How about we let them in? We let the guys in now.) 9:45:23 (OK.) 9:45:24 (Should we let the guys in?) 9:45:25 (Inform them, and tell him to talk to the pilot. Bring the pilot back.)

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9:45:57 (In the name of Allah. In the name of Allah. I bear witness that there is no other God but Allah.) 9:47:40 (Allah knows.) 9:48:38 Set course. 9:53:20 (The best thing: The guys will go in, lift up the [unintelligible] and they put the axe into it. So, everyone will be scared.) 9:53:27 (Yes.) 9:53:28 (The axe.) 9:53:29 (No, not the.) 9:53:35 (Let him look through the window. Let him look through the window.) 9:54:09 (Open.) 9:55:06 You are … One … 9:57:55 (Is there something?) 9:57:57 (A fight?) 9:57:59 (Yeah?)

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9:58:33 (Let’s go guys. Allah is greatest. Allah is greatest. Oh guys. Allah is greatest.) 9:58:41 Ugh. 9:58:43 Ugh. 9:58:44 (Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh the most gracious.) 9:58:47 Ugh. Ugh. 9:58:52 Stay back. 9:58:55 In the cockpit. 9:58:57 In the cockpit. 9:58:57 (They want to get in here. Hold, hold from the inside. Hold from the inside. Hold). 9:59:04 Hold the door. 9:59:09 Stop him. 9:59:11 Sit down. 9:59:13 Sit down. 9:59:15 Sit down.

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9:59:17 (What?) 9:59:18 (There are some guys. All those guys.) 9:59:20 Let’s get them. 9:59:25 Sit down. 9:59:29 (What?) 9:59:30 (What.) 9:59:31 (What?) 9:59:37 (What?) 9:59:42 (Trust in Allah, and in him.) 9:59:45 Sit down. 9:59:53 Ahh. 9:59:58 Ahh. 10:00:06 (There is nothing.) 10:00:07 (Is that it? Shall we finish it off?)

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10:00:08 (No. Not yet.) 10:00:09 (When they all come, we finish it off.) 10:00:11 (There is nothing.) 10:00:14 Ahh. 10:00:15 I’m injured. 10:00:21 Ahh. 10:00:22 (Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh gracious.) 10:00:25 In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die. 10:00:29 (Up, down. Up, down, in the) cockpit. 10:00:33 (The) cockpit. 10:00:37 (Up, down. Saeed, up, down.) 10:00:42 Roll it. 10:00:59 Allhu Akbar, Allahu Akbar (Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.) 10:01:08 (Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?)

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10:01:09 (Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.) 10:01:11 (Saeed.) 10:01:12 … engine … 10:01:16 (Cut off the oxygen.) 10:01:18 (Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen.) 10:01:41 (Up, down. Up, down.) 10:01:41 (What?) 10:01:42 (Up, down.) 10:01:42 Ahh. 10:01:53 Ahh. 10:01:55 Ahh. 10:01:59 Shut them off. 10:02:03 Shut them off. 10:02:14 Go.

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10:02:14 Go. 10:02:15 Move. 10:02:16 Move. 10:02:17 Turn it up. 10:02:18 (Down, down.) 10:02:23 (Pull it down. Pull it down.) 10:02:25 Down. Push, push, push, push, push. 10:02:33 (Hey. Hey. Give it to me. Give it to me.) 10:02:35 (Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me.) 10:02:37 (Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me.) 10:03:02 Allahu Akbar. 10:03:03 Allahu Akbar. 10:03:04 Allahu Akbar. 10:03:06 Allahu Akbar.

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10:03:06 Allahu Akbar. 10:03:07 No. 10:03:09 Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. 10:03:09 Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. lights down; stage goes black.

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vanessa place from Tragodía

1. STATEMENT OF FACTS Prosecution Case On October 21, 2007, Ben was 13 years old, living with his family in Los Angeles. At 4:00 that Sunday morning, Ben was sitting alone on his front porch, reading his Bible. Appellant was walking down the street; he stopped at the gate and asked Ben about smoking. Ben understood this to mean marijuana, and the two walked to an alley three blocks away, talking and smoking. (RT 2:1831 –1836, 2:1849   – 1850, 2:1871) In the alley, they continued smoking. Ben felt his pants coming down; he tried unsuccessfully to pull them up. Appellant was behind Ben. (RT 2:1836 –1837, 2:1851) Ben felt appellant’s penis penetrate his bottom, and remain there for five minutes. Appellant never asked Ben if he wanted to have sex. Ben had sex with appellant “out of curiosity.” After Ben saw appellant ejaculate, Ben returned home. (RT 2:1838-1840, 2:1851 –1852, 2:1869) Ben’s mother Madison was on the porch;34 she asked Ben where he had been, and he eventually told her. She became upset, he embarrassed. Ben wrote a statement about what happened, saying he had been forced, which wasn’t true.35 Ben wanted to have sex with appellant, but didn’t want his mother to know that. Madison called the police. (RT 2:1840   – 1842, 2:1852 – 1853, 2:1866   – 1867, 2:1871, 2:1875) Ben told the police the same story he told Madison, adding that appellant had initially asked him for help, and that appellant offered Ben weed, but that Ben did not smoke. Ben said he screamed as appellant pulled down his pants, and appellant ran away when a lady came outside and asked what was going on, then 34 Madison testified she woke up to use the bathroom and discovered Ben wasn’t home. She called family members, then waited on the porch. She saw Ben walking up the street, a little out of breath. Madison questioned Ben; he told her that he would prefer to write down what had happened instead of telling her. (RT 2:1871  – 1874) 35 Ben said appellant pushed him against the wall, held his arms and raped him. (RT 2:1852)

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returned after the lady left.36 The police took Ben to the hospital, where he was examined and a sexual assault kit collected. Ben told the examining nurse the same story he’d told the others. He was then interviewed by a detective at the police station, and identified appellant from a photo lineup. Ben initially lied during that interview, telling the truth only after the detective said he had some problems with Ben’s story. Ben did not care about the consequences of his lies to appellant. When Ben later discussed the case with the detective and the prosecutor, he told them a story similar to his first story, saying he had initially consented, then withdrawn his consent and been forced. Madison was not present during any of the police or hospital interviews. (RT 2:1842 – 1849, 2:1853  – 1865, 2:1867 – 1869, 2:1881 –1882, 2:1885   – 1888, 2:1890, 3:2131) Ben knew it was a sin to lie and to bear false witness. At the time of trial, Ben’s mother still thought he had been forcibly assaulted. (RT 2:1849, 2:1865   – 1866) The detective arrested appellant the day after Ben’s identification; appellant was subsequently examined at a different hospital, and biological samples collected. (RT 2:1883 –1884, 2:1890) The registered nurse who examined Ben found no injuries. Anal and oral swabs were taken, as well as genital swabs, and these items were given to the police. Ben’s physical examination was consistent with the history provided. It was also consistent with not engaging in anal sex. (RT 3:2102  –   2112) A Los Angeles Police Department serologist screened the rape kit, creating slides from the biological samples. (RT 2:2121 –   2125) The rectal and anal samples revealed sperm and skin cells: 20 sperm cells in the rectal sample, 45 in the anal sample. The samples were then sent for DNA analysis. (RT 3:2125 –   2130) LAPD criminalist Susan Rinehart performed this analysis, creating a genetic profile from the forensic samples, then comparing that profile to the profiles in the reference samples. In DNA analysis, an examiner looks for short tandem repeats (STRs), or repeating gene sequences, testing thirteen genetic locations, and testing for gender. (RT 3:2139  –    2143, 3:2166, 3:2176) The first kit Rinehart analyzed contained Ben’s rectal and anal samples, and his blood reference sample. The second contained appellant’s reference sample. (RT 3:2145   –   2147, 3:2157 –    2158) Rinehart extracted the DNA from the samples, separating the sperm from the skin cells, quantified the DNA, and amplified the DNA for profiling by the genetic analyzer, which generates the peak heights that create the genetic profile. Rinehart prepared a report based on this analysis. Rinehart was not surprised at the low sperm counts in the samples, as a number of factors could reduce a count, such as lapsed time or condom use. She was not aware no condom was used in this case. (RT 3:2148   –   2156, 3:2158   –    2159, 3:2167 –   2169, 3:2175   –   2177)

36 The detective’s investigation produced no other witnesses. (RT 2:1888)

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The LAPD laboratory protocol recommends at least 1.0 nanograms of DNA for optimal amplification. Rinehart amplified .36 ng; smaller amounts of DNA have been successfully amplified. (RT 3:2172, 3:2214   –    2215, 3:2225     –    2227) There are also recommended minimum peak heights, though there is no industry standard. The LAPD uses a 100 RFU (relative florescent unit) threshold; the FBI uses a 50 RFU analytical threshold, and a 200 RFU threshold to declare a match. The manufacturer of the analyzer used by Rinehart recommends a 150 RFU threshold. Reinhardt counted alleles at four locations that were below 200 RFUs, but above 100. (RT 3:2177 –   2183, 3:2188   –    2191, 3:2198, 3:2216    –    2217) At one location, locus D3S1358, there were 3 alleles attributed to one profile. Some people are triallelic. (RT 3:2184 – 2185, 3:2222) At two other locations, a non-matching allele was determined to be a “spike.” (RT 3:2193, 3:219) According to Rinehart’s report, there was more than one person’s DNA in the anal and rectal samples. She compared the mixture profile from the rectal sperm sample and found a minor profile consistent with Ben’s; the major profile matched appellant’s at 12 of the 13 locations. At one location, TPOX, a major type could not be distinguished from a minor type, as all had similar intensities. (RT 3:2153   –    2162, 3:2189, 3:2214) The epithelial fraction of the anal sample contained one location where the peak height was 274, over the manufacturer’s and LAPD thresholds. Rinehart called it a spike. Spikes may be caused by such things as electronic fluctuations in the power source or crystals from the chemical solution. In her analysis, Rinehart deemed spikes peaks with 146 RFU and 270 RFU. The latter spike did not match appellant’s DNA. Many factors go into determining whether a peak is a spike, including its shape and color distribution. (RT 3:2198   –    2202, 3:2218    –    2221, 3:2224, 3:2228) Using FBI software, Rinehart computed the statistical likelihood of a random match from the rectal sample “B” if people were being drawn randomly one at a time in the general population — at 1 in 1 quintillion. A quintillion has 18 zeros after the one. There are six and a half billion people on earth. From the anal sample, Rinehart calculated a random match statistic of 1 in 10 quintillion. Rinehart was familiar with an Arizona study in which 122 people out of 65,000 matched at 9 loci, 20 people matched at 10 loci, and 1 person matched at 11 loci. Using FBI software, there is a 1 in 1 billion chance of having a match at 10 loci. Rinehart’s results in this case were reviewed by a technical reviewer, who reanalyzed the electronic data and reviewed her written report. (RT 3:2162   –   2166, 3:2203   –   2213, 2:2221 –   2225)

Defense Case No affirmative defense was presented.

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2. STATEMENT OF FACTS Prosecution Case Appellant is Ava’s uncle, known as “Chavelo”; at the time of trial, Ava was nine years old. The summer Ava was eight, she and her four sisters frequently visited their aunt and uncle, who lived down the street, spending the night two or three times a week.34 Another man lived there at the time, Andreas from Columbia. (RT 1256   –   1262, 1277, 1317, 2183   –   2185, 2190   –   2191, 2216) Appellant started touching Ava that summer, sometime after school ended for the year. (RT 1303) Appellant touched Ava’s “private” (genitals) on more than one occasion, both over and underneath her clothes. (RT 1272, 1274, 1278, 1303) He touched her in the bedroom, and on the living room couch. The first time he touched her may have been in August. One Sunday morning, after spending the night at her uncle’s house, Ava and her sisters were in the living room, watching TV when appellant called Ava into his bedroom. He told her to lie down next to him, and touched her private underneath her clothes. She took a bath,35 appellant called her back to bed, told her not to tell her doctor, mom, dad, aunt, or teacher, then he and her aunt took the girls to McDonald’s. (RT 1271   –   1278, 1320   –  1322, 1324, 1327) One Monday in September, appellant was lying on the couch; Ava was sitting next to his feet with her sister. Appellant called Ava to him, put a red blanket over her lap, and touched her privates over her clothes. Ava’s mother telephoned, and the girls had to go home; they had not spent the night. (RT 1279   – 1282, 1328   – 1333) During another visit, also in August, Ava and her sister Sonia were sitting on the big living room couch watching TV while their sister Viol did her homework on the little living room couch, and their aunt cooked in the kitchen. Ava’s aunt called Sonia to her, leaving Ava alone on the couch. Appellant went to the bathroom, then the bedroom, then stood by the curtain that served as his bedroom door and gestured for Ava to come. Ava didn’t want to go because she knew appellant was going to “touch me in my private with his,” as he had done before. (RT 1284   – 1288, 1334   – 1335, 2187) She shook her head no, and stayed on the couch, watching TV. Appellant picked her up, looked towards the kitchen, and carried Ava to the bedroom, cradling her like a baby. (RT 1289   – 1292, 1335, 1337) Appellant put Ava on the bed, then put his private on her private; Ava felt a little drop of “grease” on her private, and appellant “peed” on the bed. Appellant told 34 Appellant and his wife babysat the girls before that summer as well. (RT 2215) 35 On cross-examination, Ava testified she took a shower before watching television with her sisters; after touching her, appellant told Ava not to tell her doctor, teacher, mom, dad, sisters, or police, then he took a bath. (RT 1322  – 1325, 1327)

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Ava her aunt would make him wash the “clothes,” and left for the bathroom. After appellant returned, Ava’s aunt walked in, spoke with appellant, and Ava went back to the living room couch, where she stayed until her mother phoned for the girls to go home. (RT 1292   – 1296, 1336, 1338) On another occasion, Ava tried to keep appellant from pulling down her underwear by squeezing her legs together tight; appellant took down her underwear, she pulled them back up, and he pulled them back down. Appellant touched her private, and told her not to tell anyone, again specifying the doctor, teacher, her mother or father, sisters or aunt. Appellant said if Ava told, he would go to jail. At first this made Ava sad, because she did not want appellant to go away, but then she became angry because she did not want the abuse to happen, and then was happy at the thought of appellant in jail. (RT 1300   – 1302, 1338   – 1339, 1346) Once, Ava’s mother noticed Ava’s underwear was wet and smelled of semen. She asked Ava about it, but Ava said she didn’t know how it got there, and walked away. So her mother put Ava’s underwear in the wash and told herself not to think about “this evil of what’s happening.” (RT 1305   – 1306, 2211, 2226) Ava’s mother did not ask appellant’s wife about the underwear. (RT 2212   –   2213) The last time appellant touched Ava was at her house. (RT 1303) Ava’s private hurt when appellant touched her: it felt like “poking.” It also hurt later when she went to the bathroom. (RT 1302) Ava went to the doctor because her private was bothering her, “like, when you put alcohol on your cut, but kind of worse than that.”36 Ava’s mother saw blisters “like blisters that you get when you get on the monkey bars.” The blisters itched. The doctor asked Ava what happened, but Ava didn’t want to say. The doctor gave Ava pills to take every day for a month, and the blisters went away. They returned; Ava had to take the medicine again. The blisters again went away, and again returned. Ava went back to the doctor, and saw Dr. Kaufman. (RT 1306   – 1309, 1311   –  1313, 1318, 2197) Ava still didn’t want to tell about appellant, but after Dr. Kaufman told Ava’s mother that Ava had not been bad, her mother said not to be scared, just say what happened. (RT 1314) Ava was frightened, afraid her mother would get angry with her for not telling sooner. (RT 1267   –   1268, 1271, 1320, 1345) But Dr. Kaufman and her mother “were begging” Ava to talk, so she began answering the doctor’s questions. (RT 1268   – 1270, 1319, 2198) According to Dr. Kaufman, Ava came in on September 29, 2000, complaining 36 Ava complained to her mother about pain during urination; her mother gave her medicinal tea for three days. When the pain didn’t abate, her mother checked her vagina, saw a blister, and took Ava to the doctor. (RT 2196  – 2197, 2218  – 2221) Ava had never had blisters on her vagina before. (RT 2199)

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of pain on urination and constipation. (RT 1803   – 1804) She had itching in her vagina, no family history of herpes,37 and no history of oral herpes. Multiple redbased lesions were discovered on Ava’s vaginal wall, before the hymen. Cultures from the lesions tested positive for Herpes Simplex Type II. (RT 1804   – 1807, 1830   – 1831) During a follow-up examination on October 6th, Dr. Kaufman told Ava and her mother that Ava had a sexually transmitted disease; both began to cry. The doctor asked Ava if anyone had touched her. She did not want to answer,38 so the question was repeated “a few times,” as Dr. Kaufman tried to impress upon Ava how “important it was to find out” in order to protect her health “and the health of other children” as “other children were in danger besides her.” (RT 1296, 1808   – 1810, 1812   – 1815, 2201) As the doctor continued to “encourag[e] her” to speak, Ava and her mother became distraught, her mother urging her daughter to speak, and then Ava “blurted out” that her uncle had touched her.39 This prompted Ava’s mother to cry harder, and rock against the wall, holding her chest. (RT 1811  –  1812, 1815, 1827   – 1828, 1831  – 1833, 1836   –   1838, 1852, 1854, 2200   –   2201) Ava said her uncle touched her with his fingers, indicating her groin, and that the last episode had been four days earlier; she did not say she’d been touched with any other body part. (RT 1851, 1853      – 1855) The doctor filled out a child abuse report for police; the police were contacted, and arrived approximately 45 minutes to an hour later. (RT 1825     –  1827, 1841, 1850      –  1851)40 During the interview, Ava said the first incident with appellant occurred during the first week of vacation after the second grade, which would have been the end of June, 2000. Ava told police she was sitting on the couch when appellant put his hand in her pants and his finger against her private part; she said it felt “like hammers.” (RT 2119    –   2120, 2147) Ava said appellant touched her approximately ten more times on the couch that summer, about every time she visited. Once, appellant touched her vagina with his penis; during late July or early August, he put his private part “in a little way” until she felt “like stuff inside of mine, like water.” They were in the kitchen at the time. (RT 2120B2124, 2142, 2148, 2154) Another time appellant approached Ava from behind while she stood in the living room; he put his hand in her pants and rubbed her genitals. Another time, appellant came up behind Ava as she stood near her sister at the kitchen table and ran his hand over her genitals, over the clothes. Ava’s mother was sleeping in a nearby bedroom. (RT 2124, 2150   –   2151) Another time, Ava thought she was bleeding after appellant touched her genitals; she checked herself in the bathroom, but there was no blood. (RT 2124, 2151) Another time, appellant “made bathroom” on 37 Ava’s mother and father do not have herpes, nor do the other children. (RT 2199) 38 Ava didn’t tell her mother because she didn’t want her mother to get angry and spank her. (RT 1270, 1319, 1344  –1345) 39 She first said something in Spanish, including the word “Tio,” then answered in English, saying her uncle touched her. (RT 1835  –1836) 40  Ava, her mother, and two of her sisters were left alone in the exam room to wait for police. (RT 1844)

500 conceptualisms

the bedroom sheets as he touched her. (RT 2125, 2151) Ava told police that she told Dr. Kaufman because he said “you don’t want this to happen to your sister.” She hadn’t said anything before because she was afraid no one would believe her, and she would be spanked. (RT 2126, 2151   –    2153, 2177) After Ava told her mother and Dr. Kaufman what had happened, Ava’s mother told Ava to keep it a secret. (RT 2163   –   2164, 2176) Ava referred to appellant in the interview as “the one who hurt me.” She also said appellant hates church, and didn’t like or help his wife. In response to her aunt telling Ava not to tell about the touching, Ava told her aunt that she’d “better get another man.” (RT 2127, 2135, 2155, 2159, 2165, 2173   –   2174) At the time, appellant was working as a pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant on Sunset Boulevard;41 the officers called the restaurant manager and asked appellant be sent to the front of the restaurant for questioning. Appellant was arrested shortly afterwards leaving by the back door. He became wideeyed when he saw the officer stationed there. (RT 1638   – 1641, 1907   –   1910, 1913, 2193) A physician/expert in forensic child sexual abuse testified he reviewed the records of the sexual assault examination performed on Ava on October 12, 2000, as well as her general medical records and prescriptions from October 20th; the examinations were performed by very experienced nurses. Ava tested positive for herpes simplex on September 29th, at which time she complained “Chavelo rubbed his privates on my privates. He put his private in my private.” (RT 1521   –   1526, 1529   – 1531, 1540   – 1541, 1554, 1617, 1631   – 1632, 1816   – 1817)42 Also reported were accounts of specific acts described by Ava, including an annotation that masturbation occurred both over and under her clothing, her use of the word “grease” as coming from appellant, and the use of lubricant. (RT 1532) Symptomology included vulvar discomfort and dysuria (pain while urinating), and vaginal itching, in addition to the herpes diagnosis/symptomology. There was no sign of trauma to the vaginal area. (RT 1533B1534, 1541 –1542, 1544, 1546, 1549 –1550, 1596 –1597) Ava’s description of her activities with appellant were consistent with the transmission/presence of genital herpes,43 as well as with the lack of vaginal trauma. (RT 1542 –1543, 155    – 1546, 1549, 1551 –1552, 1558    – 1561,1566, 1605, 1633   – 1635) 41 Appellant’s shift began at 2:00 p.m., and ended at 11:00 or 12:00 p.m.; he had Mondays and Tuesdays off. (RT 2194, 2217) Appellant testified he was not a chef, just “a worker” with pastries. (RT 2456) 42 At some point between the September 29th and the October 12th appointments, Ava’s mother told her doctor that appellant had been complaining of pain during urination, and was seeking or had sought medical treatment. (RT 1842  –1843, 1846) 43 The expert noted he was “not presented with any alternative explanation” for the transmission of herpes to Ava, and assumed, for purposes of his opinion, Ava’s description of her activities with appellant was accurate. (RT 1611, 1624  – 1625, 1634)

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Genital, or Type II, herpes44 in prepubital children is transmitted by direct sexual contact, or perinatally, from mother to child during birth. Direct contact is generally skin to skin contact.45 A typical outbreak of genital herpes lasts from 12 to 20 days, with initial outbreaks often being more severe than subsequent manifestations; the incubation period from exposure to expression is between two days and two weeks. Someone with genital herpes transmits the virus most easily for the 10 to 12 days before the ulcerative lesions begin to scab, which inhibits infection of others. There are periods in which an infected person will be asymptomatic, but may still transmit the disease through a partner’s abraded or traumatized skin. (RT 1568   – 1571, 1574   – 1575, 1614, 1620)46 As between oral and genital herpes, genital herpes can be the more problematic for someone with an otherwise compromised immune system. (RT 1572) Herpes is not clinically susceptible to fomite transmission: it cannot be transmitted from living organism to inanimate object to living organism. (RT 1609   – 1610, 1633) It is also possible to auto-inoculate, to transmit the virus from one part of one’s body to another by touching. (RT 1613   – 1614, 1622) It is estimated approximately 25% of the adult American population has Herpes Simplex Type II, and 80 to 90% have been infected with Type I. (RT 1615) Genital herpes is treated with antiviral agents, such as Ayclovir. Zovirax is a trade name for Ayclovir. (RT 1576   – 1577) The medical consequences of genital herpes may include potentially limiting sexual activity during outbreaks, the need to medicate, pain, discomfort, itching, dysuria; some women may develop cervical inflammation, leading to vaginal discharge. A woman with genital herpes who becomes pregnant may have to deliver by Caesarian section if the virus is active at the time of birth. (RT 1577 – 1578, 1622B1623) Infants inoculated in the birth canal by their mothers can develop a severe form of infection, which can lead to herpes encephalitis, which is potentially fatal. (RT 1578) The psychological consequences of genital herpes are inhibited sexual activity, or inhibited emotions about sex. (RT 1578) Alternatively, those with herpes may have very few or infrequent outbreaks, and the majority of those who are infected are never aware of their status because they are either asymptomatic, or experience only a mild onetime outbreak. (RT 1616   –1617) Bottles of Ayclovir and Zovirax were recovered in a post-arrest search of appellant’s home. (RT 2128   –   2131) On October 4, 2000, appellant was treated for an initial outbreak of genital herpes, and given a prescription for Zovirax tablets. (RT 1579   –1582) On October 12th, appellant told a nurse at the jail that he has had 44 Oral herpes is Herpes Simplex Type I. (RT 1570) The designations “genital” and “oral” refer to the type of virus, not to its location; though Type I is generally above, and Type II below, the waist, one could be infected with either virus in either location. (RT 1614) 45 It is possible to pass the virus via urine or semen. (RT 1615) 46 This includes mildly traumatized skin, such as from scratching. (RT 1620)

502 conceptualisms

genital herpes since 1997; on October 13th, appellant told another jail nurse that he was “prone to herpes.” On December 21, 2000, appellant was examined and found free of herpes symptomology; on April 2, 2001, appellant’s blood tested positive for both Herpes Simplex Types I and II. (RT 1583   –1584, 1586   –1591, 1594-1595) A SavOn document and pill bottle indicated appellant was taking Zovirax on May 9, 1996. (RT 1585) Appellant told Ava’s mother that he had “an infection” before Ava’s disclosure during her second doctor’s appointment. Ava’s mother told appellant’s wife that Ava was on antibiotics in the same conversation. (RT 2175, 2203   –   2206) Ava was given a prescription for Acyclovir on September 29, 2000; she has had five outbreaks since her September 29, 2000 diagnosis, and was treated for lesions on February 22, 2001. At the time of trial, she was on a year-long maintenance/prophylactic dose of the antiviral medication, with a diagnosis of recurrent Herpes Simplex Type II. (RT 1596   –1605, 1817   – 1822) Assuming the contacts with appellant took place between June and October 2, 2000, the last two contacts being around September 2nd and October 2nd, it would be reasonable to conclude Ava was exposed on the September 2nd date. (RT 1607   – 1609, 2207  –   2209) It is possible to test samples of the virus to identify type and strain; no comparative tests between strains of Type II virus were done in this case. (RT 1627   –   1630) A forensic psychologist testified on the Child Sexual Accommodation Syndrome, a thesis advanced in 1982 to the effect there is no typical way for children to disclose sexual abuse; the theory has proven important in assessing and treating child sexual abuse. Tenets of CSAS include the inhibitory effects of threats made by the adult to the child to keep the abuse secret, of adult authority in the abstract on the abused child, and the phenomenon of self-blame and the accommodation of abuse among children, including the phenomenon of “playing possum” while being abused; accommodation being commonly part of an effort to reconcile abuse by a caretaker with the child’s continued survival. (RT 1858   – 1870, 1872, 1874, 1876   – 1879, 1897) Disclosures of abuse are generally made in stages, the child initially hinting, or sending conflicting or unclear messages to see if he will be believed. (RT 1870   –1871, 1880, 1894) Where the abuse is repeated, accounts may become an amalgam of experiences, rather than a cohesive and consistent narrative; accounts may also become muddled due to repetitive interviewing. (RT 1880   – 1882, 1895   – 1896) The purpose of CSAS is to establish children do not disclose abuse in any single fashion, or on any particular schedule: disclosures may occur after months or even years of abuse. (RT 1872, 1876, 1882, 1885, 1892) CSAS is not an aid to truth-seeking, or to discovering cases of sexual abuse. (RT 1891   – 1892)

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In hindsight, Ava’s mother remembered thinking appellant was especially attentive to her and generous to Ava and her sisters, taking them to McDonald's after they spent the night. Ava’s mother recalled being at the 99¢ Store and telling her daughters she didn’t have money for something; they asked appellant, he quickly gave them money, which made Ava’s mother think “something’s going on here.” (RT 2205, 2214, 2222) Appellant once told Ava’s mother that he wanted to die because he was sick all the time.47 (RT 2205) One day that summer, Ava, her sisters and her mother were at the kitchen table when Ava said she had no reason to live and wanted to die. When her mother asked why, Ava said there were a lot of “bad people” in the world. Pressed by her mother, Ava just said she didn’t want to live. (RT 2210   –   2211, 2225) At the time of trial, Ava was going to therapy once a week. (RT 2231 –   2232) Ava’s mother never liked appellant. (RT 2230)

Defense Case Appellant and his wife babysat Ava and her sisters on occasion. (RT 2416, 2426   –   2427) The last time they babysat, the girls came over around 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. on a Monday night; appellant and Ava sat on the sofa while her sisters and aunt sat on the floor, eating nachos and watching TV. (RT 2416   –   2417, 2428, 2431 –   2432) Appellant never picked Ava up, never carried her to the bedroom, never put her in bed, and never touched her genitals. (RT 2417   –   2418) The girls spent the night twice, on Saturdays; appellant didn’t remember anything special about the sleep-overs. He would arrive home from work at about 1:00 a.m., after everyone had gone to bed; his wife would get up, make him something to eat, and they would go to bed, Ava and her sisters asleep on the mattress beside the bed. (RT 2419   –   2420, 2432, 2434) Ava never got in bed with appellant in the morning.48 Appellant never pulled her hair or pulled down her underwear. (RT 2420, 2433   –   2435) Appellant never brushed against Ava’s genitals at her house, or fondled her as she stood at his table. (RT 2422) Appellant has never been alone with Ava or her sisters. (RT 2418, 2435   –   2437) After the girls spent the night, appellant and his wife would take them to McDonald’s. He would buy the girls gifts at Christmas, and felt they were like his family. (RT 2421, 2426, 2435) Appellant did not recall telling Ava’s mother about his medication, or about having an infection; he contracted herpes many years ago, maybe in 1996 or 1997. (RT 2415, 2423, 2444, 2449   –   2450, 2452, 2460)49 47 Appellant did not remember saying this. (RT 2452  – 2453) 48  Appellant has lain on the mattress with his wife, while Ava lay on the other side of his wife. (RT 2466  – 2467) 49 Appellant did not recall telling the detective he had herpes before he was married. (RT 2443) He did not use a condom when he had sex with his wife; he did not have sex with his wife when he was infected. (RT 2445  – 2446) Appellant did not recall telling the detective that he used a condom when he had sex while infected. (RT 2446) He only learned in 2000 that it was not safe to have sex with

504 conceptualisms

Appellant was arrested at work: his manager told him to come with him, and opened the kitchen door. The police were waiting when appellant stepped outside. (RT 2456   –   2457) Appellant was surprised when he was arrested because he never had any problems with the law, and didn’t know what the accusations were. (RT 2453, 2457   –   248) There was no reason Ava would make up such a charge: Ava’s family and appellant have been close, and help each other as needed. (RT 2423   –   2426, 2454, 2462   –   2463) Appellant never touched Ava’s genitals, never put his private part against her private part, never put his fingers in her vagina — he never “committed such an atrocity.” (RT 2418, 2421, 2423)

someone during an infection. (RT 2446  – 2447) It was stipulated that appellant told the detective he had herpes before he was married, he used a condom when he had sex with his wife, and Ava’s family has supported him from time to time. (RT 2468  – 2469)

8 | dna, found scores, machine writing & other post-literature literature 505

nick montfort from ppg256

ppg256-1 perl -le ‘sub b{@_=unpack”(A2)*”,pop;$_[r and@_]}sub w{“ “.b(cococacamamadebapaboha molaburatamihopodito).b(estsnslldsckregsp sstedbsnelengkemsattewsntarshnknd)}{$_=”\ n\nthe”.w.”\n”;$_=w.” “.b(attoonnoof).w i f$l;s/[au][ae]/a/;print;$l=0if$l++>rand 9 ;sleep 1;redo} #Rev2’ ppg256-2 perl -le ‘sub p{@_=split/_/,pop;$_[rand@_ ]}{$_=p(“sw_-aw_&w_saw”.”_ “x$i);s//p(aw_ w)/e;s// /g;$_=”\n\nthe s\n”if!$i;s/s/ws/ ;s/a/p(a_the_to_of)/e;s/w/p(b_ch_f_gr_k_p _sh_s_sk_sp_tw).i.p(ll_n_t)/eg;s/(b|p|f)i /$1.p(a_i)/e;print;$i=0if$i++>6+rand 9;sl eep 1;redo} #On 5.12’ ppg256-3 perl -le ‘sub p{(unpack”(A3)*”,pop)[rand 18]}sub w{p(“apebotboyelfgodmannunorcgunh ateel”x2)}sub n{p(“theone”x8)._.p(bigdimd unfathiplitredwanwax)._.w.w.”\n”}{print”\ n”.n.”and\n”.n.p(“cutgothitjammetputranse ttop”x2)._.p(“herhimin it offon outup us “x2);sleep 4;redo} #’

506 conceptualisms

ppg256-4 perl -le ‘sub c{@_=split/_/,pop;$_[rand@_ ]}sub w{c(b_br_d_f_fl_l_m_p_s_tr_w).c(ad_ ag_ap_at_ay_ip_on_ot_ow)}{print”\n”.c(be_ de_mis_re_pre_).w.” “.c(a_on_the_that_).” “.w.w.”, “.c(boss_bro_buddy_dogg_dude_gu y_man_pal_vato);sleep 4;redo} #No LED sig n version, Perl 5.12’ ppg256-5 perl -le ‘@a=split/_/,conceptual_digit_fl arf_maximal_modern_pixel_quiet_real;sub f {pop if rand>.5}sub w{$a[rand@a]}{print f (post).w.”ism “.w.”s “.f(“the “).w.”\n”.( “ “x45).”WHAT DOES ppg DO?”;$a[rand@a]=~s /[aeio]/substr(aeio,rand 4,1)/e if $l++>5 ;sleep 5;redo} #Rev2’ ppg256-6 perl -le ‘@d=split/_/,eros_won_to_tree_fo r_fire_sex_sever_ate_nice_tin_elfin_wealt h;@t=split//,”_bhlmnpstw”;{$_=localtime;/ (..):(.)(.):(.)(.)/;print”\n$t[$3]”.($4%2 ).”ck $t[$4]”.($3%2).”ck\n”if!$5;print”\\ “x$5.” $d[$1%12] $d[$2] $d[$3] $d[$4] $d[ $5]”;sleep 1;redo} #’ ppg256-7 perl -le '$_="a literal_a0a special01n array_1 hash";s/0/ variable_/g;s/1/an element of a/g;@_ =split/_/;$;=concatenat;for(1..4){$a="\t Sometimes he assigned to @_[$_]";for$i(0..4) {$a.=" $_[$i], or",map{$a.=" $_[$i] $;ed with $_, or"}@_}print"$a some longer $;ion.\n"}' | more Perl Poetry Generators in 256 characters. See www.conceptualisms.info

8 | dna, found scores, machine writing & other post-literature literature 507

shelley jackson from SKIN

In consideration of being granted exclusive rights to publish one word of Shelley Jackson’s story “Skin” in the form of a tattoo on my body, I: 1. Acknowledge, agree and represent that I am not a minor, an animal, or an inanimate object, and that I am of sound mind, in good health, and in proper physical condition to participate in this story, and do so of my own free will; 2. Fully understand that a. tattooing involves risks and dangers of serious bodily injury, including but not limited to infection, disfigurement, and the communication of disease; b. tattoos and literature are both viewed with considerable suspicion by some sectors of society, so my participation in this project involves risk to my employability and social standing; c. there may be other risks and social and economic losses either not known to me or not readily foreseeable at this time; and I fully accept and assume all such risks and all responsibility for losses, costs and damages I incur as a result of my participation in this story; 3. Fully understand that the cost, design, placement, and execution of the tattoo in compliance with guidelines laid out by Author is my responsibility, and Author may not be held accountable for unexpected results; 4. Fully understand that meaning is contextual and that the Author cannot control all readings of her words and is not responsible for what my word may mean to others once it is tattooed on my skin; fully understand, furthermore, that the future literary reputation of this work cannot be assured, and that Author has made no representations as to my tattoo’s eventual worth as status symbol, or promised any benefits to be gained from participating in this project beyond its intrinsic interest to me;

508 conceptualisms

5. Hereby release Shelley Jackson, Cabinet Magazine, Anchor Books, HarperCollins, and any other publishers, editors, publicists, agents, librarians, booksellers and readers either present or future, from all liability, claims, demands, losses or damages on my account caused or alleged to be caused in whole or in part by my participation in this project; and I further agree that if, despite this release and waiver of liability, assumption of risk, and indemnity agreement, I, or anyone on my behalf, makes a claim against any of the Releasees, I will indemnify, save and hold harmless the Releasees from any litigation expenses, attorney fees, loss, liability, damage, or cost which any may incur as a result of such claim, to the fullest extent permitted by law; 6. Hereby release all rights to correspondence related to this project as well as any photographs sent to Author as documentation of participation in project, and give my complete advance consent for their reproduction in any print or electronic form or exhibition in any venue, along with use of my name; 7. Covenant to keep private the full text of the story, and understand that Author covenants in return to protect the exclusive rights to which this agreement entitles me by a. keeping detailed records of my participation; b. providing a signed certificate of authenticity; and c. publishing the story in no other form and sharing it with no other readers than the undersigned and other participants for the rest of her life. I have read this agreement, fully understand its terms, understand that I have given up substantial rights by signing, and have signed it freely and without any inducement or insurance of any nature and intend it to be a complete and unconditional release of all liability to the greatest extent allowed by law and agree that if any portion of this agreement is held to be invalid, the balance, notwithstanding, shall continue in full force and effect.

8 | dna, found scores, machine writing & other post-literature literature 509

Name of Participant (please print): __________________________________________ Date of Birth: _____________ Street Address: ______________________________ City: _______________ State: ____ Zip: ________ Country: _____________________ Phone: _______________________ Email: ________________________ Participant’s Signature: __________________________________________ Date: ________ Please print, sign, and mail to: Skin c/o Shelley Jackson, XXX 7th Ave #X, Brooklyn NY 11215 USA

510 conceptualisms

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jhave Spreeder: For EPC20 4am–5am Sept 11th 2014 (Part 1)

video online at: www.conceptualisms.info

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eduardo kac Biopoetry

Since the 1980s poetry has effectively moved away from the printed page. From the early days of the minitel to the personal computer as a writing and reading environment, we have witnessed the development of new poetic languages. Video, holography, programming, and the web have further expanded the possibilities and the reach of this new poetry. Now, in a world of clones, chimeras, and transgenic creatures, it is time to consider new directions for poetry in vivo. Below I propose the use of biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm of verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal creation. 1) Microbot performance: Write and perform with a microrobot in the language of the bees, for a bee audience, in a semi-functional, semi-fictional dance. 2) Atomic writing: position atoms precisely and create molecules to spell words. Give these molecular words expression in plants and let them grow new words through mutation. Observe and smell the molecular grammatology of the resulting flowers. 3) Marine mammal dialogical interaction: compose sound text by manipulating recorded parameters of pitch and frequency of dolphin communication, for a dolphin audience. Observe how a whale audience responds and vice versa. 4) Transgenic poetry: synthesize DNA according to invented codes to write words and sentences using combinations of nucleotides. Incorporate these DNA words and sentences into the genome of living organisms, which then pass them on to their offspring, combining with words of other organisms. Through mutation, natural loss, and exchange of DNA material new words and sentences will emerge. Read the transpoem back via DNA sequencing. 5) Telephant Infrasonics: Elephants can sustain powerful infrasound conversations at distances as far as eight miles. These can be perceived by attuned humans as air pressure variations. Create infrasound compositions

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that function as long-distance elephant calls and transmit them from afar to a population of forest elephants. 6) Amoebal scripting: Hand write in a medium such as agar using amoebal colonies as the inscription substance and observe their growth, movement, and interaction until the text changes or disappears. Observe amoebal scripting at the microscopic and the macroscopic scales simultaneously. 7) Luciferase signaling: create bard fireflies by manipulating the genes that code for bioluminescence, enabling them to use their light for whimsical (creative) displays, in addition to the standard natural uses (e.g., scaring off predators and attracting mates or smaller creatures to devour). 8) Dynamic biochromatic composition: use the chromatic language of the squid to create fantastic colorful displays that communicate ideas drawn from the squid umwelt but suggesting other possible experiences. 9) Avian literature: teach an African grey parrot not simply to read and speak, and manipulate symbols, but to compose and perform literary pieces. 10) Bacterial poetics: two identical colonies of bacteria share a petri dish. One colony has encoded in a plasmid a poem X, while the other has a poem Y. As they compete for the same resources, or share genetic material, perhaps one colony will outlive the other, perhaps new bacteria will emerge through horizontal poetic gene transfer. 11) Xenographics: Transplant a living text from one organism to another, and vice versa, so as to create an in vivo tattoo. 12) Tissuetext: Culture tissue in the shape of word-structures. Grow the tissue slowly until the word-structures form an overall film and erase themselves. 13) Proteopoetics: create a code that converts words into aminoacids and produce with it a three-dimensional proteinpoem, thus completely bypassing the need to use a gene to encode the protein. Write the protein directly. Synthesize the proteinpoem. Model it in digital and non-digital media. Express it in living organisms. 14) Agroverbalia: Use an electron beam to write different words on the surface of seeds. Grow the plants and observe what words yield robust plants. Plant seeds in different meaningful arrays. Explore hybridization of meanings.

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15) Nanopoetry: Assign meaning to quantum dots and nanospheres of different colors. Express them in living cells. Observe what dots and spheres move in what direction, and read the quantum and nanowords as they move through the internal three-dimensional structure of the cell. Reading is observation of vectorial trajectories within the cell. Meaning continuously changes, as certain quantum and nanowords are in the proximity of others, or move close or far away from others. The entire cell is the writing substrate, as a field of potential meaning. 16) Molecular semantics: Create molecular words by assigning phonetic meaning to individual atoms. With dip-pen nanolithography deliver molecules to an atomically flat gold surface to write a new text. The text is made of molecules which are themselves words. 17) Asyntactical carbogram: Create suggestive verbal nanoarchitectures only a few billionths of a meter in diameter. 18) Metabolic metaphors: Control the metabolism of some microorganisms within a large population in thick media so that ephemeral words can be produced by their reaction to specific environmental conditions, such as exposure to light. Allow these living words to dissipate themselves naturally. Writing and reading constitute themselves in the eventual erasure of the text. 19) Haptic listening: Implant a self-powered microchip that emits a sound poem upon contact (via pressure). The sound is not amplified enough to be heard through the skin. The listener must make physical contact with the poet in order for the sound to travel from the microchip inside the poet’s body into the listener’s body. The listener becomes the medium through which the sound is transmitted. The poem enters the listener’s body not through the ears, but from inside, through the body itself. 20) Scriptogenesis: Create an entirely new living organism, which has never existed before, by first assembling atoms into molecules through “Atomic writing” or “Molecular semantics.” Then, organize these molecules into a minimal but functional chromosome. Either synthesize a nucleus to contain this chromosome or introduce it into an existent nucleus. Do the same for the entire cell. Reading occurs through observation of the cytopoetological transformations of the scriptogenic chromosome throughout the processes of growth and reproduction of the unicellular organism.

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biopoetry project #1 (microbot performance) The “robeet” (robotic bee) would allow a poet to write a performative dance-text that has no reference in the physical world (that is, does not send bees in search of food). Instead, the new choreography (kinotation) would be (bee) its own reference.

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eduardo kac, “cypher,” transgenic poem with bacteria transformation kit, 2009. biopoetry project #4 (transgenic poetry) The poem is composed in natural language with a high statistical incidence of the four letters (ACGT) that represent the genetic bases Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine. The other letters of the text are: four consonants (DKLW) coded each with two genetic bases and two vowels (IE) coded each with three bases. The correspondence between these letters of the poem (DKLW + IE) and their nucleotide counterparts was established so as to decrease the length of the genetic sequence, thus increasing the coding efficiency and its molecular performance.

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biopoetry project #5 (telephant infrasonics)

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Elephants use a repertoire of at least 70 different sounds or “messages” to communicate with one another. They snort, scream, trumpet, roar, and rumble to each other throughout the day. Many of the rumbling calls occur at the level of infrasound, a very low-frequency rumble below the audible hearing range of humans. Through «Telephant Infrasonics», the poet can produce creative infrasound compositions that can be transmitted to, as well as heard and understood by remote elephants, so as to produce new imaginary associations according to elephant umwelt.

biopoetry project #9 (avian literature) African grey parrots have cognitive abilities usually unexplored in the wild. Through specific exercises, humans can unleash certain aspects of the mental capacities of African grey parrots. For example, it is possible to endow it with a vocabulary of hundreds of signs and stimulate it to create its own verbal compositions.

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biopoetry project #13 (proteopoetics) By assigning specific semantic values to aminoacids, a poet can write a protein. The “Genesis” protein (left) critically encodes the biblical statement: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

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biopoetry project #15 (nanopoetry) The beginning of a new alphabet. Letters can be created with carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders only a few billionths of a meter in diameter, as exemplified by this letter “T.” Words created at this nanoscale can be made stable under the laws of quantum molecular dynamics. The first letter of the word “Tomorrow.”

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biopoetry project #18 (metabolic metaphors)

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The biopoem “Erratum I,” by Eduardo Kac, is a “biotope,” that is, a living work that changes in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions, including temperature, relative humidity, airflow, and light levels in the exhibition space. It is literally a self-sustaining ecology comprised of countless very small living beings in a medium of earth, water, and other materials. Kac orchestrates the metabolism of this diverse microbial life in order to produce the constantlyevolving living work, a poem that transforms and eventually effaces itself to generate new, unpredictable forms.

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christian bök

The Xenotext Experiment

introduction “The Xenotext Experiment” is a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu — doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S. Burroughs, who has declared that “the word is now a virus” (49). Our experiment proposes to address some of the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing a “xenotext” — a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form. Thinkers as diverse as Pak Chung Wong (a cybernetic expert), Eduardo Kac (a multimedia artist), and Paul Davies (an astronomic expert) have already begun to speculate that even now scientists might store data by encoding textual information into genetic nucleotides, thereby creating “messages” made from DNA — messages that we can then implant, like genes, inside cells, where such messages persist, undamaged and unaltered, through myriad cycles of mitosis, all the while preserved for later recovery and decoding. Wong, for example, has enciphered the lyrics to “It’s a Small World (After All),” storing this text as a strand of DNA inside Deinococcus radiodurans — a bacterium resistant to inhospitable environments. Wong argues that, in a world of fragile media with limited space for storage, DNA might permit us to preserve our cultural heritage against planetary disasters: “organisms … on Earth for hundreds of millions of years represent excellent candidates for protecting critical information for future generations” (98). Kac has also used a genetic process of encipherment in his artwork called Genesis — a project intended to show that “biological processes are now writerly” (254). Kac encodes a short verse from the Bible into a strand of DNA, which he then inserts into a microbe, exposing the germ to doses of mutagenic radiation. Kac suggests that, by “editing” such a text through mutation, we can

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foster an unguided, aleatory message in a more innovative form, rather than accept the dominant, biblical passage in its last inherited form. Davies has gone so far as to propose an extravagant speculation, suggesting that, instead of sustaining a radio beacon through many millenia or instead of projecting a large vessel across vast distances, aliens wishing to communicate with us might have already encoded messages in DNA, sending out legions of small, cheap envoys — self-maintaining, self-replicating machines that perpetuate their data over eons in the face of unknown hazards: “fortunately, such machines already exist” — and “they are called living cells” (30). These three thinkers have all suggested the degree to which the biochemistry of living things has become a potential substrate for inscription. Not simply a “code” that governs both the development of an organism and the maintenance of its function, the genome can now become a “vector” for, heretofore unimagined, modes of artistic innovation and cultural expression. In the future, genetics might lend a possible, literary dimension to biology, granting every geneticist the power to become a poet in the medium of life.

proposal Stuart Kauffman (a MacArthur Fellow, who is now the iCORE Chair for the Institute of Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary) has agreed to lend me the expertise of his lab during its free time so that I might compose an example of such “living poetry.” We propose to encode a short verse into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium, after which we plan to document the progress of our experiment for publication. I also plan to make related artwork for subsequent exhibition. We foresee producing a poetic manual that showcases the text of the poem, followed by an artfully designed monograph about the experiment, including, for example, the chemical alphabet for the cipher, the genetic sequence for the poetry, the schematics for the protein, and even a photograph of the microbe, complete with other apparati, such as charts, graphs, images, and essays, all outlining our results. We also want to include (at the end of the book) a slide with a sample of the germ for scientific inspection by the public. We do foresee enlarging charts and photos from this exercise so that we can display them in a gallery — but I also plan to create other works of conceptual art inspired by the structure of the encoded, genetic poem itself. I plan, for example, to submit the gene to DNA 11 (www.dna11.com), a company that

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makes giclée prints of abstract artworks produced through DNA-fingerprinting, and I also hope to build a colourful sculpture of the gene itself out of dozens of Molymod Molecular Kits (http://www.molymod.com). I expect that the poem is going to be concise, probably about fifty words in length (so that the encoded, genetic text can easily fit into the genome without compromising the function of the organism itself). I have yet to determine what the poem might say under the biochemical constraints of this experiment, but I do expect that the work is going to address the relationship between language and genetics, doing so self-reflexively and self-analytically. I want to convey the beauty of both the poetic text and its biotic form.

rationale Stuart Kauffman is a renowned theorist who has argued that the complex, but orderly, structure of every living system arises spontaneously out of underlying principles of self-organization — principles no less important than the laws of selective evolution. First trained as a specialist in the humanities (with the intention of becoming a poet), he has instead gone on to pursue a career in the study of genetics. We believe that our overlapping territories of interest make us ideally matched to undertake this project. My own artistic activity testifies to the fact that I have always regarded my poetry as a “conceptual experiment,” reminiscent of work done in think tanks, where scientists might indulge in hypothetical speculations, putting into play the propriety of reasoning itself. Just as the “pataphysics” of Alfred Jarry, for example might intermix technical concepts with aesthetic conceits so as to create an archive of “imaginary solutions” (22), so also does my own artwork strive to create such a hybrid fusion of science and poetics. We hope that our unorthodox experiment might serve to integrate two mutually isolated domains of research — domains that might not have, otherwise, had any reason to interact, except under the innovative conditions of this artistic exercise. Our collaboration allows us to explore the aesthetic potential of a “literary genetics,” even as the project affords us an opportunity to refine methods for the biological encryption of data — methods that might be applied to domains as varied as cryptography, epidemiology, and agrobusiness. We foresee that, if science can perfect the process for implanting lengthy, textual information into a germ, we might not only provide a secure method for transmitting secretive documents, but we might also “watermark” cells so

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as to track the movement of either microbial diseases or botanical products. We believe that, with such a burgeoning technology, books of the future may no longer take on the form of codices, scrolls, or tablets, but instead they may become integrated into the very life of their readers.

planning Stuart Kauffman has agreed to provide both scholastic counsel during the composition of the artwork and logistical support during the manufacture of the microbe. He has agreed to be responsible for managing all activity inside his research facility, while I have in turn agreed to be responsible for managing the production of all artwork outside the purview of his lab. I do expect to consult closely with him during all phases of the project in order ensure that my work contributes to the success of such a scientific enterprise. We have two options for both the encipherment of the text and its implantation into a germ: the first, more amenable, option involves segregating the inserted text from any genetic function so that the poem does not change the phenotypical characteristics of the microbe; the second, more difficult, option involves integrating the encoded text into the genetic function so that the poem does indeed affect the phenotypical characteristics of the protist. I expect to pursue the first option if the second choice proves too ambitious. In the first case, we merely have to repeat the experiment performed by Wong on Deinoccocus radiodurans. In this case, we can encipher the text by using his alphabet of “triplets” (in which, for example, the oligo “adenine, guanine, guanine” [AGG] stands for the letter A; the oligo “adenine, guanine, thymine” [AGT] stands for the letter B, etc). We can then attach stop codons at either end of the message in order to create a plasmid capable of protecting both the message and the microbe from any mutual damage. In the second case, we can extend the experiment of Wong on Deinoccocus radiodurans, but instead of using his cipher, we can use an alphabet, in which the twenty standard amino acids correspond to nineteen possible letters (plus a space). We can then try to integrate such a text into an organism so that the gene gets expressed during transcription, thereby creating a protein. I am hoping that my text might in fact cause the microbe to build a protein whose sequence of amino acids is itself a cipher for yet another poem. In the first case, the organism becomes an archive for storing a poem, but in the second case, the organism also becomes a machine for writing a poem. I am

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hoping that the second option proves feasible — but it does pose challenges: first, the gene must not impair the function of the microbe; second, the gene must not mutate in response to the process; third, the gene must create a folding protein that can endure viably in the cell. I plan, of course, to rely upon my collaborator for advice in response to these constraints. I suspect that the solution to these three problems is going to involve selecting one of many harmless proteins in advance so that I can then derive a possible literary text from its structure, “reverse-engineering” the poem (so to speak) in order to create a gene that might be easily integrated into the life-form. I plan to dedicate the first year of my research primarily to the composition of the poem itself, since I suspect that, despite its concision, these constraints upon its structure might prove very daunting to fulfill. Once I have formulated (and then enciphered) a text, we plan to call upon the resources of University Core DNA Services (http://dnaservices.myweb.med. ucalgary.ca/), a lab on campus under the aegis of the Faculty of Medicine — a lab that has agreed to synthesize collated segments of the gene for subsequent processing by my collaborator. We plan to tag this oligonucleotide with green fluorescent protein (GFP) so that we can then easily detect the presence of my poem inside the organism after the process of implantation. We are delegating the synthesis of the gene to an external provider because the lab of my collaborator has not yet entirely equipped itself to fulfill this type of procedure in the experiment, and we feel that, for this single, unique task, the cost of paying another lab on campus is far cheaper than the cost of obtaining equipment, materials, and expertise for our own use. We are budgeting for at least two attempts to synthesize a viable series of oligos for implantation into the bacterium in case our first trial fails to work properly. I foresee that if I use a cipher in which each letter of the alphabet consists of an oligo, three base-pairs in length, then a message of approximately 50 words is going to run almost as long as 1000 base pairs (with each word averaging about five letters, plus a space). We have budgeted for the synthesis of a sequence that might extend to 1500 base pairs in order to build some flexibility into the length of the message, but I anticipate that a shorter, concise sequence is going to add fewer complications to the encipherment. Once University Core DNA Services has synthesized the collated segments of my oligonucleotide, our lab is going to link them into a complete sequence, after which we expect to prepare cloning vectors, using electroporations to introduce the gene into standard cultures of E. coli so that the encoded, genetic message

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can multiply to a quantity usable in our subsequent procedures. We then plan to use the vector to tranfect the gene into the candidate bacterium, embedding our “xenotext” into this genome. We have selected Deinococcus radiodurans as the host for our “xenotext” because the genome for the organism has already been sequenced, and it is now freely available online at the Institute for Genomic Research (www. tigr.org); moreover, the organism has already been used in a project similar to ours — and while the bacterium is extremely resistant to irradiation and dessication (thereby making it a useful medium for a durable artwork), it is nevertheless benign, with the lowest rating on the index of biohazards. If the implantation of the gene is successful, we again expect to retain the resources of University Core DNA Services, which has agreed to sequence the gene for us and thus verify, through a third party, that the poem has in fact integrated into the genome of the cell. If the implantation succeeds, we then plan to pursue the possibility of registering this life-form with the American Type Culture Collection (www.atcc.org) — a genetic archive that banks engineered organisms for further study by the scientific community. We expect that the preparation of the gene and its integration into the germ is going to take not more than four months of work in the contributing laboratories (depending upon the number of assays needed to ensure that our results are both successful and reiterable). We then plan to culture the organism in order to produce a series of slides, which might preserve a sample of the bacterium for inclusion in an artfully produced monograph. I foresee my publisher, Coach House Books, releasing such a book in a limited edition. Once we have a sample of the “xenotext,” we plan to submit the gene to the company DNA 11, which can make a set of artful images depicting the DNAfingerprint of the poem. We also plan to build a model of the protein out of toy molecules used in science classes, and I hope to prepare a set of “multiples” inspired by the charts and graphs from our experiment. I foresee taking a leave of absence from my employment, so as to work for one year, designing the book for production while preparing the show for exhibition.

property Stuart Kauffman and I have agreed to share credit for the production of the gene itself (perhaps calling it the “Kauffmanbök Series”). We anticipate co-authoring a paper about our experiment for publication in a popular journal, refereed

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by scientists — and while we do not foresee the gene having any utilitarian application beyond its status as an artwork, we are currently making enquiries about the feasibility of patenting the gene in order to incorporate this protocol into the conceptual parameters of our own artistic exercise. We plan to share credit on the production of the poetic manual generated from this project — although we have agreed that I retain sole ownership of the poem itself, so long as I acknowledge the involvement of my collaborator in all publications of this specific, literary text. We have also agreed that I am going to retain sole ownership of all aesthetic artifacts produced for exhibition, including the giclée prints and the atomic models. All other data from the experiment belongs to both of us, and we can exploit it as we see fit. We have plans to disseminate our results, not only in the scientific literature, but also in other media as well. My editor at Coach House Books (www. chbooks.com) has already expressed interest in publishing the monograph from this experiment, and I foresee staging at least two artistic exhibits, first at The New Gallery (www.thenewgallery.org) in Calgary, then at the Marianne Boesky Gallery (www.marianneboeskygallery.com) in New York — two poetic venues of renown, both of which have shown my art in the past. We hope that our experiment might produce a healthy microbe, able to function with the implanted gene, and we are going to base the success of our experiment in part upon the reception of this work among critics in the world of both science and poetics. We hope that such a partnership between an innovative artist and a scientific expert might encourage other literati to range outside the catechism of their scholarly education so that they might otherwise incorporate scientific procedures into their own creative activity.

conclusion “The Xenotext Experiment” strives to “infect” the language of genetics with the “poetic vectors” of its own discourse, doing so in order to extend poetry itself beyond the formal limits of the book. We foresee that, as poetry adapts to the millennial condition of such innovative technology, a poem might soon resemble a weird genre of science fiction, and a poet might become a breed of technician working in a linguistic laboratory. We hope that our project might, in fact, provoke debates about the future of science and poetics. Even though our whimsical, aesthetic endeavour might accent some of the ironies in the ominous conceit of the poet Christopher Dewdney, who has

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argued that “language may be regarded as a psychic parasite which has genetically earmarked a section of the cortex for its own accommodation” (59) — our attempt to build a literary parasite in the form of a “word-germ” has only the most miniscule, most negligible, chance whatsoever of producing any dangerous contagion (despite the alarmism of critics outside of biology). Our project merely highlights the degree to which the modern, social milieu has now taken for granted that the discursive structures of epidemiology (as seen, for example, in such notions as “viral marketing” or “viral computing”) might apply to the transmission of ideas throughout our culture. If the poet plays “host” to the “germ” of the word, then the poet may have to invent a more innovative vocabulary to describe this “epidemic” called language. We feel that our project goes some way toward fulfilling this function. We also believe, moreover, that such a poem might begin to demonstrate that, through the use of nanoscopic, biological emissaries, we might begin to transmit messages across stellar distances or even epochal intervals — so that, unlike any other cultural artifact so far produced (except perhaps for the Pioneer probes or the Voyager probes), such a poem, stored inside the genome of a bacterium, might conceivably outlast terrestrial civilization itself, persisting like a secret message in a bottle flung at random into a giant ocean. We believe, in the end, that our own project draws concerted attention to the sublimity of language itself, teaching us about the wonders of science in a manner that might seem more engaging to a layperson untrained in biochemistry. I hope that my poem might urge readers to reconsider the aesthetic potential of science, causing them to recognize that, buried within the building blocks of life, there really does exist an innate beauty, if not a hidden poetry — a literal message that we might read, if only we deign to look for it.

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bibliography of texts cited Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Davies, Paul. “Do We Have to Spell It Out?” New Scientist 2459 (07 Aug 04): 30-31. Dewdney, Christopher. The Immaculate Perception. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986. Jarry, Alfred. Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician. Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1996. Kac, Eduardo. “Genesis.” Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 249-263. Wong, Pak Chung, et al. “Organic Data Memory Using the DNA Approach.” Communications of the ACM. Vol 46.1 (Jan 2003): 95-98.

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credits The following publishers and individuals have graciously granted permission to include the fiction, poetry, images, and other writing in this anthology. Joe Amato: “Tango” from Under Virga (Chax Press, 2006). David Antin: “stepping into the river.” John Ashbery: “Business Personals” from Houseboat Days, copyright © by John Ashbery (1975, 1976, 1977, 1999). Susan Bee and Susan Howe: excerpt from Bed Hangings (Granary Books, 2001). Caroline Bergvall: "Say: 'Parsley,'" a Ciarán Maher video of the 4th sitting of the installation, 2009. Kate Bernheimer and Coffee House Press: “A Star Wars Tale” from Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer. Copyright 2010 by Kate Bernheimer. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. Charles Bernstein: “Amberianum”; “Thank You for Saying You’re Welcome”; “Before Time”; “The Lie of Art” are used with permission of author. “The Yellow Pages” is reprinted courtesy of PennSound. "The Answer” (with Niels Plenge). R.M. Berry: excerpt from FRANK. Alan Bigelow: “Silence”; “Last Words”; “My Life in Three Parts.” Christian Bök: “The Xenotext Experiment.” Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse: excerpt and image from Between Page and Screen. Jenny Boully: excerpt from The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books). Mez Breeze: V[R]erses: An XR Story Series. Blake Butler: excerpt from Scorch Atlas. David Buuck: excerpt from United 93. J.R. Carpenter: The Gathering Cloud. John Cayley, Douglas Cape, and Giles Perring: “What we will leave of what we are... something past.” (Broadband Interactive Drama, 2003). David Clark: “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand).” Robert Coover and Georges Borchardt: “The Return of the Dark Children” from A Child Again by Robert Coover. Copyright © 2005 by Robert Coover. (McSweeney’s Books.) Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author. Lucy Corin: “Some Machines” (first published in the Notre Dame Review). Mark Z. Danielewski: “Chapter IV” from House of Leaves: The Remastered, Full-Color Edition by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright © 2000 by Mark Z. Danielewski. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a

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division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Lydia Davis: “Story” from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis. Copyright © 2009 by Lydia Davis. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Debra Di Blasi: excerpt from Selling the Farm. Lesley Dill: Blue Poem Girl (George Adams Gallery). Johanna Drucker: excerpt from Narratology. Rikki Ducornet: “The Wild Child.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis: “Draft 95: Erg” © Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Salt Publishing. This work appeared in Pitch: Drafts 77-95 in 2010 and in the Denver Quarterly. Craig Dworkin: excerpt from Parse (Berkeley: Atelos, 2008). Albrecht Dürer: “Man Drawing a Lute," woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1525). Public Domain. Brian Evenson: “House Rules” first published in Third Bed (2002). Reprinted in the Notre Dame Review (2005). Percival Everett: “Confluence.” Kass Fleisher: “The Speed of Zoom” published by Factory School in The Adventurous. Jonathan Safran Foer: “Finitude: From the Permanent Collection” was first published in Conjunctions. Reprinted by permission of Jonathan Safran Foer and Aragi Inc. William H. Gass: “A Little Song of Suffering on Behalf of Prose.” Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin: Be-lie-ve and Absolute-Relative © 1990 Gerlovin. Noah Eli Gordon: excerpt from Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). Geir Haraldseth: Venice Biennial, “Gloria” by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Carla Harryman: “Regard for the Object Rather than Communication Is Suspect” from Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008). Ian Hatcher: All Hands Meeting. Lyn Hejinian and Wesleyan University Press: “A pause, a rose, something on paper”; “As for we who ‘love to be astonished,”; “It seemed that we had hardly begun and we were already there”; “A name trimmed with colored ribbons”; “What is the meaning hung from that depend”; “The obvious analogy is with music”; “Like plump birds along the shore” from My Life (Wesleyan University Press). Scott Helmes: “Non-Additive Postulations” and “The Division of the Soul.” High Muck a Muck Collective including Fred Wah, Jin Zhang, Nicola Harwood, Thomas Loh, and Bessie Wapp: High Muck a Muck. Lily Hoang: excerpt from Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008). Jason Huff: “The Beginner’s American History”; “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”;

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“Great Expectations”; “The Iliad”; “Illustrated History of Furniture”; “The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana”; “Metamorphosis”; “The World’s Best Poetry” from AutoSummarize, 2010. Matt Huynh: The Boat. Le, Nam. The Boat. Adapted by Matt Huynh, Kylie Boltin, and Matt Smith, SBS, 2015. Shelley Jackson: from SKIN. David (Jhave) Johnston: “Henry”; “Ouadane”; “Spreeder: For EPC20 4am-5am Sept 11th 2014.” Eduardo Kac: “Biopoetry.” Bhanu Kapil: excerpt from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Douglas Kearney: Runaway Tongue. Hank Lazer: “INTER(IR)RUPTIONS 5” from INTER(IR)RUPTIONS (Generator Press, 1992). “Dream” and “Torah” from Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009). Stacey Levine: “And You Are?” from The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales and Stories (Starcherone/Dzanc, 2011). Betty London: “Belief+Doubt” (2012) by Barbara Kruger at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © Betty London / Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0. Nathaniel Mackey “Song of the Andoumboulou: 18”; “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19”; “Song of the Andoumboulou: 20” © 1998 by Nathaniel Mackey. Reprinted from Whatsaid Serif with the permission of City Lights Books. René Magritte, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Artists Rights Society: “The Treachery of Images” (This Is Not a Pipe) (La trahison des images [Ceci n’est pas une pipe]). ©Rene Magritte Fair Use. Ben Marcus: from Notable American Women. Michael Martone: “Jacques Derrida Writes Postcards to Himself from a Diner in Winesburg, Indiana.” First published in Booth Magazine and Winesburg, Indiana (Break Away Books, Indiana University Press). Carole Maso: “Deer” from Mother and Child (Counterpoint Press, 2014). Harry Mathews: from Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese. Steve McCaffery: “The White Pages.” Richard McGuire: “Here” as published in Raw Vol. 2, No. 1 (1989) by Richard McGuire. Copyright © 1989 Richard McGuire, used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC. Michael Mejia: “Coyote Takes Us Home.” David Melnick: “Men in Aida” excerpt from Men in Aida. First printed by Tuumba Press, Berkeley, 1983. Nick Montfort: “ppg256” is free software by Nick Montfort available at nickm.com; the code and sample output appears as part of the book #! (Nick Montfort, Denver: Counterpath, 2014). Harryette Mullen: “Bilingual Instructions”; “Black Nikes”; “Coals to Newcastle; Panama

credits 531

Hats from Ecuador”; “Denigration”; “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” NASA: The Pioneer Plaque: “Vectors” by Oona Räisänen (Mysid); designed by Carl Sagan & Frank Drake; artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan. Public Domain. R. Henry Nigl: “The Shout Artist.” “Shouts” are a structured verbal art form founded by R. Henry Nigl; Creative Commons licenses apply. Peter Norvig: “Gettysburg Address Powerpoint Slide.” Lance Olsen with Tim Guthrie: The Nature of the Creative Process and 10:01. Patrik Ourednik: excerpt from Europeana. Bob Perelman: “China” and “Confession.” Tom Phillips: excerpt from A Humument. Copyright Tom Phillips 2016. Vanessa Place: excerpt from Tragodía: Statement of Facts. Salvador Plascencia: excerpt from The People of Paper. Niels Plenge: “The Answer.” Poet: Charles Bernstein, Photographers: Lars Movin and Niels Plenge, Boom operator: Thomas Thurah, Composer and Editor: Niels Plenge. Claudia Rankine: Part I from Citizen: An American Lyric. Copyright © 2014 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org. Graham Rawle: excerpt from Woman’s World, first published in the UK by Atlantic Books, 2005. Published in the USA by Counterpoint, 2009. Scott Rettberg, Roderick Coover, Arthur Nishimoto, and Daria Tsoupikova: Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project. Frank Rogaczewski: “So What Else Is New?” and “The Fate of Humanity in Verse.” George Saunders: “The Wavemaker Falters” first appeared in Witwell, November 1993, and later in the collection Civil War Land in Bad Decline. Leslie Scalapino: “Delay Series” from Way (North Point Press, 1988). Davis Schneiderman: Drone-Space Modulator. John Sellekaers, Daniel De Los Santos, and Stefan Alt: “Altmann’s Tongue” by Brian Evenson with Xingu Hill and Tamarin. From the album Altmann’s Tongue (2005) produced by Ant-Zen Records, by Brian Evenson with Xingu Hill (John Sellekaers) and Tamarin (Daniel De Los Santos). Lee Siegel: “The Kama Sutra Classic Comic” from Love in a Dead Language (University of Chicago Press). Steven Ross Smith: “The Reader” from Lures (The Mercury Press). Anna Joy Springer with Rachel Carns and Jane O'Neil: “The Forest of Mandatory Innocence”; “The Forest of Peril That’s Real”; “The Forest of Good Bad Intentions”; “The Not Fake Parallel Forest”; “No Escape Hatch in the Forest.” Stephanie Strickland and Ian Hatcher: Liberty Ring!

532 conceptualisms

Cole Swensen: “How Photography Has Changed the Human Face”; “Thought Experiment”; “Should Something Happen to the Heart”; “Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees.” Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski: Queerskins. Nick Thurston and Information as Material: excerpt from the project Of the Subcontract. Lynne Tillman: “Future Prosthetic@?” first appeared in Gigantic Worlds (Gigantic Books, 2015). Deb Olin Unferth: “Brevity” previously appeared in the Notre Dame Review and Minor Robberies. Fred Wah: “akokli (goat) creek”; “Havoc Nation”; “Hamill’s Last Stand”; “Chain”; “The Poem Called Syntax”; “(sentenced).” David Foster Wallace Literary Trust: Copyright 1999, David Foster Wallace. Published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV).” Used by permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Joshua Marie Wilkinson: excerpt from Meadow Slasher appeared first in Sugar House Review, New American Writing, and The Destroyer. Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, Heavy Industries: “Dakota” and “Nippon.” Lidia Yuknavitch: “The Chronology of Water” first published in the Northwest Review.

See author statements about their work and biographies at: www.conceptualisms.info