Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire

Lovesick Catullus, you ass, man up,

And what looks lost cut loose as lost.

Your good old days dancing gold

Back and forth—Come here, she said—You came—

We loved that girl like nobody.

There—like that—between breath and laugh,

What you wanted and she didn’t stop—

Sure, you had some good old days.

Now she don’t want what you can’t give up.

Don’t chase what runs, don’t sink in funk,

But get your mind right, punk. Man up.

Adios, babe! Now Catullus hangs tough:

He won’t look for you, he won’t call.

Poor girl, nobody ringing your phone…

Bitch. What you got to live for now?

Who’s gonna text you? Read your updates?

Be loved by you? Say you’re his babe?

Who you gonna kiss? Whose lips bite?

Now, Catullus, resolved—hang tight.

(my translation)

The Real End of the Iraq War?

Matt Gallagher comments in the NY Daily News.

I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly

In his foreword to his father’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, Patrick Hemingway compares the book to the Bible, draws connections between his father and Christ, and makes sure to remind us Papa was at D-Day. Maybe it was young Mr. Bumby’s hagiographic opening that made me begin reading Hemingway’s memoir with such a glum eye, but even if I was predisposed to be ungenerous, it was Ernest himself that made good faith impossible. Yet by the end, through the cracked, arid mask a little light shone, all the more moving for its fragility. I couldn’t help but keep thinking about the anecdote Stein tells in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, where she tells Hemingway his problem is that he’s 90% Rotarian.

“Can’t you make it 80?” he asks her.

“I can’t,” she says—but it is his desire, and that 10%, and the aching way that 10% unsettles and undermines the Rotarian in him always rising up to overwhelm and drown the rest, that shows in the end of A Moveable Feast. Maybe only Hemingway could have written a book so petty, stupid, sentimental, badly-written, mean-spirited, tedious, and false—that is at the same time somehow moving, profound, and even beautiful.

Rendezvous

Aucune demande ne nettoie l’ignorant ou scié teneur; toutefois, étant données quelques cages, c’eut une profonde emotion qu’éxécutent toutes colles alitées.

—Marcel Duchamp, Rendezvous of Sunday 6th February 1916

I begin with my presuppositions. If these are trivial, as the philosophers say, all the better.

1. Aesthetics has nothing to do with whether or not something is art.
2. Good art feels good.
3. All art is social, which is to say intersubjective.
4. All art-making is a question of form and expression.
5. All art is made art.

Aesthetics is the red-headed stepchild of philosophy and art criticism. Pulsing in the electric nexus of thought, feeling, culture, and commerce, “art” presents philosophy’s trickiest questions in their slipperiest forms. From Zeuxis’s birds to Warhol’s Brillo boxes, from Aeschylus’s chanting choephoroi to James Franco’s performance artist “Franco” on the daytime soap opera General Hospital, the form of the made raises questions of meaning, politics, epistemology, and ontology that may not only be insoluble, but perhaps unaskable. What is art? What is real? What is form? What is good?

Tendering Buttons

ACT SO THAT THERE IS NO USE IN A CENTRE

To speak of Stein is not the same as to read Stein. We speak of Stein speaking unspeakably always speaking or talking rather or we mean writing. We speak unspeakably always speaking. We speak of Stein unspeakably. Unspeakably we speak not the same as having to read because reading isn’t speaking unless reading is writing and writing is speaking and then reading is speaking. Or if reading is reading as speaking but then the speaking isn’t reading at all.

Why I Write

"I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts back together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me."

Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"

To hell with you and your poetry

Tom sat upon the shore fishing, with the arid plain behind him—those fragments he shored against his ruin—lamenting his Shantih shantih shantih—when the rude obstetrician burst in, bloody babe in each hand, crying Spring!

First, William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All is a manifesto and an ars poetica (as noted by Emily Lambeth-Climaco), or rather first it’s a poem, for as the question of prose v. poetry is itself worked in the last third of the book the whole thing comes down decisively on the poetry side, that is, a thing. Creation v. reportage. As WCW puts it, “prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form” (67).

Poem

(Note: I'm still figuring out how to upload audio, hence the clunky junk above. It will serve for the time being)


To Elsie (William Carlos Williams)

The pure products of America
go crazy--

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car


--from Spring and All (1923)