coldever

Where ideas are likely to be arranged differently: the point of literary criticism is to rearrange the text with a few ideas; reverse that, you have arranged ideas by literary means. A sort of fictive dialogue dealing with extant texts. They're like warm, ungovernable bodies.

A theory-minded critic doesn't truly excavate; it is a commonplace that we write the thing we read. You'd still be lost if you looked past either tradition, philosophy or literature. Try to engage them both with antagonism set between them? What occurs is a rippling fusion of disparate discourses that are usually interconnected.

And so the last few projects have looked...slightly subjective, really trying to convey an artist's arrangement of these textual moments, and in philosophy: a style above all, following Nietzsche most in creating--smashing around in--words. Not a mere call to write forcibly, or to even provide a sense of meaning. Not so small as therapy. Instead an inducement, a law--reeking of candor. Affirmations ripped bodily into text.

createven education

The process has been covertly creative—for every theory presented in grad school I pretended an alliterative, studied performance as if upon a stage. Values-theory and aesthetics have merged into a purpose at once artistic and intellectual; they are conflicted as to which extreme I point. Arendt introduced me to the thought control of totalitarianism, which must be set above fascism for the pure repetitive constraint of the subject’s thought, the crippling logic in one of two ideological stances. In one, nature is embodied by the state and it must be furthered—nurtured—by the master race; in the other, history is finally to fulfill itself by actuating the giant nothing, the end of conflict (the key problem solved by the state). At last I saw Nazis and Stalinists at the level of logical thinking, I considered the reasons why they had to be obeyed…

Political science was a way to study moral philosophy, with MacIntyre owning most of the final scene, Arendt falling in the middle of Locke and Rousseau, debt and ownership to liberty, onward to freedom—until we reached Rawls and veils of ignorance which began to look strangely decorative when they were only meant for setting up hypothetical states.

Thereafter American liberalism took on bleak forms as political boundaries shrank: Rawls sought to eliminate the personal, private, that which is specific to a non-repeatable individual unit. Many—particularly Mouffe—have asked if there is a way out of this state of effacement. Isn’t it merely a quest for invisible liberty, even if expressed precisely in Rawls’ dry tone, this strictly logical attempt to structure a state permanently? For when we remove the veil of ignorance we resume our title, be it low or exemplary; we’re never absolved of personality. We get our wallets back and cannot help knowing where we stand and from that, how others stand. To the best possible effect on their stations, we arrange society to maximize the general good, along well-defined lines, from that neutral place of valence so that while I have as much as possible, so do you, though still less than me. After all, we cannot just dream a theory of total equality and general ownership! Rawlsian liberalism prevents such forgetting: someone always has what the other lacks.

And then there was Foucault, Derrida et al. What was before a case for European universalism fell to the next wave and everything dissolved, especially the underlying thread, the backdrop of superiority in learned and artistic discourse. Suddenly everything was the empty transcendental signified, Europe falling off its high horse: every simple aesthetic pleasure was stripped of innocence. With Eagleton running the show, beauty was a distraction from the political and was therefore always used politically, to distract while Reason was employed far more dangerously to obfuscate crucial economic realities. Naturally, capitalism uses the best of us against us…

All this began to fade, however, when Dolores returned to Alterity.

Law and literature. Legal literature. Law as literature. No, and no. Only law in literature--because reading literature as literature is not averse to law...

Is the gulf of oil to be the next gold rush? Once the gulf itself is sealed and turned into an oil reserve, really only a few letters off from reservoir...

We'll need a large roof. Unless we build a maze of siphons, spin it back into the zone---a void...enter at your risk. The most dangerous place to just light upon, lift the lid, swim: 't will suck you in. The depths, the miles of oily depths, the West's last drop, its full deck of what it's got that it must steal from others once it's gone. The bank of America, enormous. From the moon you'd need a scope to see. "The oil is likely to stretch into the fall. The cap will trap only so much of the oil, and relief wells being drilled won't be completed until August." And it will be an ocean we'll just scoop from, heat our homes with, live in common competition for---the vastness being drained.

Let's hook it up to vending machines at the furthest points, provide tap sources for mules and such. They're just as stubborn as they ought to be. Convenience stores will improve as you push on south. Shit just up and starts looking like gold.

Until at last. Like the fish throwers of Seattle, gas fillers juggle toddlers and are so friendly you'd entrust them with your reputation, they are the swipers of cards and spinners of petrol pumps---"gas" having gone out with the idea that it comes from underground. For we have a sea of it and have erected a see as well. Religious oil economy, dutiful post-oceanic following. (The Mexican government will have to love it as well. Many opportunities for a city made with the well of life flanking and encouraging it---join us!!)

In short, how I could use this, personally in my fictive little realm of Word documents:

Consequences for America's sodden lower extremity in its entirety. Stretching as north as Alterity along a nauseating life-line, a channel, and with it, putrid hope. In this town we make...all sorts of stuff for well-oiled machines; many things made with or by or for Oil, these are the parts required. We sort and grind, pack and send, parts--lots and lots of parts. To the rest of the country.

We function a bit like ants. We are well paid and watch after a major operation, each of us. Our pubs are great for brawls. Our hills inspire poets, isolate intellectuals. Great four-wheeling. Tough tracking, building forts accessible only by fat four-wheelers.

You haven't thought much about the fact of there even being four-wheelers in the world---those tear-uppity crawlers with glutinous nobs around the wheels, gummy chompers set into spinning rubber puffs.

Yes, disgusting in this context.

But don't knock it without having first tried it, obviously...

Eyes just closed on me. Dry.
Anyway in the town of Alterity--never mind.

and it's

You've got to just...tell us what it is about that place, and the tale can be rung up again, another way. We only need evidence. At the gate, as it were. Can you deliver?

It's not settled yet, says Ray. It won't be until we get our quotes back. Does she still have them, says I. Not--as it stands (inside this...hole in the ground)--that's it, I continue: what gets me about this place. Just that, it's a sodden hole in the ground.

Where the defeat waits, is it death?

Quite, that is it. Mirror the others, along the way, driving a tractor possessed. This is the escape, and there is the bottom. Riding along, a track--rather, a cut long and sideways, or at least on our right, a definite side.

Get away. I am riding in this? Possessed--tractor? As you say?

Or aren't we all?

"Dicey, this game you're playing. Isn't it? As I said, the quotes are mine unless specified other-wise. I'm the only one simply begins and ends. Not that I am it. But it's told by me. I've caught a few and I'll go further, certainly. I've got parameters. Said, what--did you? You couldn't have! But not now. You're interruptions, betwixt yourselves...really not good. Take them out."

Fools. No longer anything. Two, now it's a lonely one. Looking. Outstretching. Dicing--and it's the saddest...development in my life, anyway. We're not even sure we have to say a name any longer, each has been established, both--is how we're represented, insupportable would be our separation.

"Nice. Very nice indeed."

named

"We wish that the situation involved you, only it doesn't," I told the editor of the Lookout. He stood as a man standing in the past. "What is that crawling behind you?" I asked. It was some rodent. "Only a humble zombie, let's hope. Or did you bring a guest? In that case let her treat you with silence, and tell the tale of what brings you here. Strange."

"I shall make it hopeful and emphatic, including the price adjustments that will occur later today, but from the perspective of a riotously silent Sunday morn."

"Can you tell me the prices as they stand at the moment?"

"They don't actually matter." But after a moment he was visibly in a state of acceptance. "It's a Marxist text, yet." He paused again, the moon shed its last slice of influence, and Ray decisively began. "In short, flies stuck in the intermission soup and the effect they had on the reviews. 'Need a Head Shave?' ran one in particular, in my own paper. 'You'd like to make sense of her lines--but they're tangled inside this ineffectual Hairdressing Studio. Says one actor, 'We didn't know when to begin the Weird. Before, her work was very clever with cues for awkward behavior, as in they weren't exactly part of the script, or even a part of the plot. Just the arc, the curve--one ought not to say "the mood," because that...comes and goes.' Does this actor know her earlier work like we do? Was he ever cast a special role, one made just for him? Of course not. The only real person to ever appear in her work was you. Genius! And now I find you here! Forget that I'm the one in the garden at 5am. I have a right to be here. I'd never been discovered and all I'd ever seen was my own fate on the perimeters of what I'd thought was her most absorbing hobby--as if gardening had replaced writing! At any rate, the structure, the reviews were saying, was there in the Hairdressing Studio, but--and I quote--'not its translator.' What could that mean? Were you her translator? Why should something written in the common language need translating?"

"I know all about this but thanks, thanks for the new perspective," I said.

He went on, "The wave of activity of misguided actors, quoting the devil who would take their sentences backstage. As for me," he coughed, "I've been living in the fog, waiting. I've been leaving my lights on but not necessarily sleeping. I fear I'm obeying a dozen masters and their friends' voices. 'Find the strength to publish these reviews and do not mention them in you editorial, tell your opinions on other matters. And think not of how she works the stubby green pen made of wood and silver that shades and glares the glossy photos she signs!"

"Alarming!" Dolores said from the window, a balcony I had forgotten overlooked the garden from the far corner of her room. I felt as if I were in a control group, the one not given the questionable substance yet convinced it has been--and this is almost how the obvious concept of a placebo worked its way into my head, after a meandering sentence preparing me for it. I wasn't narrating, I was barely thinking in words, but out came the phrase "romantic individualism," and I was sure I had concluded my role in this suddenly fanatical love triangle. Strange, the editor of the local (intellectual) newspaper committing himself to the illusions his star writer stirred in him...

Dolores repeated my phrase verbatim, as if it were a soliloquy rather than a puncturing quip in the night: as she enunciated each syllable it fell to the grass and sprouted intimations, very colorful in the accumulating sun. But then as if she had said nothing, she pushed her smart little head further out the window and asked what this was all about, as if the silence she was assuming to have been only now interrupted could be mended by a dutiful explanation by one of her suitors. The falseness of this attitude struck Ray instantly; he seemed about to fall into the pit he was about to claim was the source of evil in Dolores's garden. He began to recite this foolish bit, only to be told by the playwright herself why his peculiar role in the writing process was certainly not to be neglected but never to be overstated. "We have an editor in the garden" she ended, "a decision maker. Now, to excise is...not all that this fellow does, just most of it. But he won't revive his paper by trying on new hats in front of old friends."

This baffled both of us. The disgruntled magic of the moment seemed obliterated; but as dolorous loyalists, we insidiously justified this witticism, making our own meaning, leading ourselves into it all over again.

For me, this exercise in hidden logic told of a courage in Dolores' distant urges, to write a play about a matriculating housewife because she'd realized that at one point, she'd wanted to become one, and was now resting her chin on the window sill like a pie that needed cooling. "Ray, please return later, then go away."

Nothing obstructed his retreat, but he was caught. Talking was his salvation, as if regardless of what he would say we would still appreciate the effort; furthermore, we'd feel obligated to respond. And so he went on with it. "Tonight I have called the site, the active burning opening, the source of all poetry, to finally discover what it's got--the last thing I'd expected was considerate behavior on the part of those intruded upon! For I am, at bottom, a caricature. I came here to make myself less substantial, to excite the enterprise of managing a paper and, it turns out, to contribute to a smoldering love affair between writers. Myself, however, I am--as you say, Dolores--excised."

I wondered whether Ray had had to sit very long for these hypothetical caricatures or if he had visited a carnival artist even less dedicated than Dolores. He had no idea what he was about; she was complacent on the matter; I was faithfully disinterested, so much so that I was the only actor willing to put a name to the travesty, the rhetorical monstrosity, of his presentation. Yet my intention was to wait until the scene had ended.

Ray took out a thought from his pocket to help him insist she was her own actor from the play. "Did they sell you to an auto shop to be lent to strangers who generally went for mudding, leaving trails over the hills? What did the parents think? You were too deliberate for a machine that responded well to children."

Uncomfortable, I interrupt. "What...in what direction lies the office of Dr. Benway?"

"A phenomenal artist," answers Ray. "All hands off, man. No one's left to say what anything's good for."

Dolores shifted ground. "Start talking like me--you're nothing to reach around with. I'm just fine with my own voice imitating me."

"That's why, incidentally," I say, "there's so much shown on the dolorous show, going back mostly to a bottomless pit."

Ray: "I've come, I think, to fill it in."

pics of exags

She was attaching false greenery to each post on the back deck--which of course she called a porch. The only roof was the tree she had to trim just a bit to let the flames not touch its branches; the side of the porch that was most frequently comfortable to her after this operation was the one least lit by the flames.

"We wished that the situation involved you, only it doesn't." He stood--as if standing in the past. "What is that crawling behind you? Only a long-haired zombie, let's hope. Oh. You brought a guest. In that case let her treat you with silence, and tell the tale. Make it hopeful and emphatic--the outlook of price adjustments on a Sunday morn. Can you tell me the price?"

He accepted. "It's a Marxist text." He paused. The moon had moved when he began: "Flies stuck in soup during intermission, the effect they had on the review. 'Heads are shaved at dolorous show' ran the title. 'You'd like to make sense of their line--it's caught up perhaps at the sight of the hairdressing studio--we didn't know when to begin the Weird.' The structure, they were saying, was there, but not its translator. The wave of activity would continue alone, misguided, 'the devil may take it back to storage, the last sentence, I'm going into the fog. Leave the light on. Obey a dozen masters, find it in yourself not to use a broken pen.' But Dolores works it fine, a stubby green pen made of wood at the base and shiny silver against the page."

"Alarming," she said from the window, a balcony I'd forgotten looks to this day from the far corner of her room onto our leafy control lab. Where no group is given the test, though they each constitute the entire study--"Rampant individualism?" she stood her head up to say. It looked about to fall into the imaginary pit. Since Ray had mentioned just a moment ago (or was about to mention) the likely locality of the void, adding that he'd not slept since he heard the voice saying it was possibly here--since that information was fresh in my mind, Ray was now being told by playwright herself. "We have editors, decision makers. to excise is...not all that they do. Just nearly. You won't get that by trying on new hats in front of old friends."

This shocking exercise in hidden logic told of a courage in Dolores' distant urges, portraying matriculating housewives because she'd realized that at one point she'd wanted to become one. "It comes slowly and is reinforced, towards the forgiveness of the present century; are we taken out of it, then? Never! Ray, return, go away."

Nothing stood in his way, but he was caught. One could tell he didn't like gardens but was standing in one he couldn't let himself escape though he just was ordered out. Talking was the answer, no matter what he'd say we would recognize the effort, and be responsible to ourselves respond. He went on with it. "Call the site, the active burning opening, the source of all poetry. See what it's got, possibly all manner of thoughtful (considerate) behavior, a man with talent's caricature's running half the business of self-imagining."

Did this man, we might ask, make or sit for these pictures of exaggeration? When is the next logical leap for this poor unreflective boot in the door so that the terror in his eyes will be cleared up (in our understanding of it)? He approached an answer to all this. "Oakland coastal base, one number off so, further down the road you'll see a wreckage on wheels, upright, enjoying loyalty across the lake, smiling."

"I know, Ray," says Dolor. "You've got all kinds of stories left and right about how this shit of me got stuck. It's Flavor-Aid, remember. And laced? Not at all. Just cold. Exceedingly cold on the hottest of days. Thus the wreckage! This is the story you want to explain my character--as a news event, yes that is fine. Alterity has less to show for its theories of being than your paper could ever pretend to acknowledge!"

damn tired

What a monologue praying used to be, a beseeching self-castigation, throwing promises into the dark! That was the beginning, one likes to admit, of writing. Yet it was stopped before any descriptions of the apocalypse could be made in my own style.

"'Control yourself,' she intoned." Hasn't that been the injunction when you are too aware of what you're about? Such a controlled stance is indeed awkward! Finally, you must learn that you need your books. Contemplate selling them in the front yard, a dollar each, the fabled renouncement that should be just as redemptive of learning as imagining one's death ends up redeeming life. Imagine the suffering after the loss of your books/life!

At least now I've a different role to play--forget that it's not any better. Focus on its difference from the previous one. No need to be specific: the focusing is to be conducted in private.

Shouldn't I find a place between symbolic and realistic? I see you standing there, ready to tell me the boundary is never fixed. I say, your platitudinous post-: what exactly does it follow?

You could learn to write with chalk. You could ask the audience, are my eyes closing because I'm tired or because I've a headache? To which they would be obliged to respond somehow, it being a "random" question: make the impression of randomness. Seek out the drollery in every moment, the flat humor that once gave others the impression that you possessed an intellect. This could help launch a career!

No exclamations, please.

Anyway, I thought you had a new style for me to watch develop. It's finally late enough to go to sleep since you've discovered you are not a writer yet. Been playing games, eh?

Yes well, my alter-ego gave this [death-scene snow globe] to me, 27th birthday. Said, grad school's over the moment you know you're going dry.

A Leave

Current affairs: packaging all things dolorous into a short story or chapter. Be back when the wilderness permits.

worthy of its organs

Why the remission--so that we can trace her progress into the sleepiest categories of a hostile nature, cooking and gardening, scraping by on my efforts to conceal her--the remainder, what she knew was beyond capture, was the surplus. As if she was ever grateful that I could never put all of her in here--so grateful that she raised the stakes by interrupting, mocking, to see the balance tipped towards a postmodern narrative--threatening always to make me seem too intentional! Her plays were marked by a freshness and curtness, by a chill continuously engulfed by laughter, like the salving punishment of Steppenwolf after his dower sobriety is raised out and above him like an ax. The executioner is also the jester, so what we have is a stuck philosopher going to shambles with the popular decree, the jury's sudden rupture, the frivolity engaged for his redemption--cruel, but refreshing. This was the elemental fury undergirding the dolorous show--and once I'd been cast a role that could scarcely be denied, her career terminated itself because she suspected I'd know too much of the back-story--which is true, but as it is also fiction once it is represented, she has plainly overestimated me, leaving me with a burden I was not born to bear.

It is her own, and her cowardice even in taking the final plunge is transmuted into my responsibility, as if the project was mine all along! She wants me to admit I've always been metaphysical while possessed of the fantastic, but the truth is I've had to conduct my most laborious study in her favor.

It was a single episode that hooked her on the idea of my being some sort of prophet, a rustic mystagogue--just one afternoon in an abandoned house where I told the short tale of an alien to an empty kid's bedroom. I've had to revamp that story to make it interesting to the reader--it falls in the next chapter--for at the time, who knows what I said. It was the directness of my approach to this imaginary audience, as if even Dolores were vaporized incidentally into it, impregnated with the idea that I was some father of philosophy and poetry and all I'd require for a repeat episode was a stage, the right lack of clarity and the fulsomeness of surrounding characters that evokes the best declarative stance: here, listen, all you empties, to the tale that I'll tell.

But even this requires a direct quote--as it happens, the Violent Femmes--"You wanna know how to take a short trip to hell--it's guaranteed to get your own place in hell."

In that song a child is thrown into a well; in my seminal performance the children had long since disappeared; in her rendering the audience took the blame for every emptiness! Despite the Ann Arborite's avant-gardism, the pit was unfavorable, it reached up and grappled with the implications to prove that its hollowness was only a conceit inverted against the author, in turn pulling them down in it and releasing only when the playwright's been sufficiently flattered. For it was now.

Not that the reviews of her play about me were negative. Dolores suffered at the hand she dealt of chagrin as a member of the audience--not an unusual situation, except that in this space, the spectator was an uncomfortable role for her to put on--she was the original spectator now trying to capture me!

And I'm trying to establish she's got a list of prerequisite flattery.

I brought her back to Alterity and have kept her there. I am her author; she is not mine.

past

I definitely don't want to live in the valley again until I can build my own place for everything artsy, on the property of the red house (now burnt down, knocked over, and sinking back into the earth)

for that is the finale of a story I'll tell about walking up for a Mug, seeing Jason talking in the distance to people I knew I wouldn't know, being deflected by the little stone bridge: a path across the valentine's day field. to cross the river I had to deliberate before a bending tree with two branches, inviting my heroics. It was too far a reach and I stood for too long thinking: had I just lunged and lifted the seat of my pants with the rest of me, I could have scaled successfully across. Instead, after a moment of hovering (amid a depleting energy source unbeknownst to the arms supporting me horizontally in air) my ass sank directly into the water, which I had begun to consider a faintly shifting pool: we'd become familiar, this river and I. Luckily there was another river directly after the first; and lest I think that since I've already wet feet I can just walk across, a broad fence of angry briars detained me. I was now ready for the frontal attack against a nature that never cared whether I was poetic or that I belonged to a romantic project; this walk was unnecessary in the eyes of the landscape, which I felt forbidding me as I stepped---angling my shoes to cut at the thorny sticks growing like ossified blades of grass, betwixt motherly batches of more! Even pestilences have relatives.

They, the entire witch-brew of nuisances, were...the closest I've come to the Real; the horror of nature, the unlimited range of uncaring torments it holds for an ambler! But I had a destination, a place to check up on. Go there I would. Of course the land that supported two equal-sized branches of the same river (neither appearing a tributary of the other) is one obviously at a low level; the flatland equivalent is a marshy field traversable thanks to tufts of hay, growing wild, already dead-manila colored, and providing no single place to stand. Only temporary dryness; but you've got wet freezing feet already. It's not that warm out: it's only a few early days of March that got me out like this!

The only view of the red house must have seemed like the top of the hill far beyond the shit I'm slogging through now; and once I'm on that hill I have had time to consider how to step against a of porcupine-quill mountain. So now I'm mostly okay to do just that.

Fine. Of course I'm out of breath.

There's a sniper's booth 3/4's the way up. I rest by climbing up and staring at a bunch of nothing. more brambles. a field of fucking empty.

Red house? The place to be on a sunny day in the valley? Musing over past lives now all messy and useless yet still, enchantingly grody? Quite, and precisely. I'm going there, yes I said I was and yes I will yes.

Finally I see there's been a path nearby for the duration---very short---of my precarious perch 9 feet up a tree, should have been 10 but I did not fancy sitting on a wobbly aluminum frame. Couldn't let it dictate how I'd see the rest of my stupid little journey, since only one who's out to shoot deer from a high place he cannot get to alone---such was the company that preceded me more immediately. I was after the ancients of the valley, the truly old-school occupants of a strip of land destined to be considered haunted.

But again, nature didn't care, ever.

As for how my finally descending upon the ruins resembled far too much of my oft-repeated dream, why that's too weird to get into right now...

contort.

I wanted to go in for the passions, and the quickest route was the song where the flames are bitter and the singer is raging while shotguns and muddy tube socks fill the stage with a gaseous hatred that has no source yet deflects blame for its emptiness upon the audience, who only want to divulge their own secrets according to the scripts, which by this point is obviously too linear for the lot of them, trained post-structuralists with tepid affairs kept on the burner that has its green light and nothing else burning; you see it's a contagion without ailment, better known as Dolores' final attempt to fit herself within a theoretical framework of any sort--the audience calls out themes--post-colonialist! Subaltern! But the plot is suddenly wavering. All anyone can see is the chair sitting there ready to burn. A set of hands ready to clasp. A bucket about to be kicked--and holy God! Is that the dramatist in the third row? Why are we directed there--who's in charge here!

(Don't type this up. Don't write this out. Don't share this online. Don't hide this from the playwright. Don't call the doctor. Consider the prostate cancer of withholding like a leashed mutt. You are nevermore to speak of this, I think it has chosen you so beware--the manager is near--she needs reports!

She's the one who volunteered. There goes the best creative mind Alterity's ever known. Who can say what brought her into the realm of theory and why her characters are angry now without being funny--a tale for another day. We see Death on a tripod stool with his hands lap-folded before a gallon of fire water. Now he's passing out samples, he's struck that stance which says I know all about your silly situation, it will be the greatest disappointment once you run away from it--for only then will it catch you! Go on, try swallowing her whole, she's a spot on the rug that will stain your socks every time you awake at 4 to make urine--stop wearing socks? Stop listening to her talking after midnight? Why, that's early. Too much worry causes nothing but panic and that is precisely what we need down here--

You! In the 6th row! What do you know? Has her hair stayed straight, or is the rest of the earth realizing its roundness--is the disbursement of ideas and cultures and anxieties restricted to a ball, can it be that the back of her head is pinpointing too much and you had better substitute this clarity for swarthy deceptions? You know she has curly hair and that torture can only work under her disinterested watch--so control yourself. I think we're in for a ride. You have fortunately been drinking wine.

bow

I walked outside today and saw that Nietzsche had 2 fresh bones in the yard and I thought, well, I have 2 new characters--with names. But that was a lie. The second, the owner of the local theater, is to be disillusioned before she gets a name! That is unfair.

time for

The field work of source collecting and quote hunting is past--I wouldn't say it is complete, or that it isn't sorely unfinished, or that it won't take several dutiful hours to coalesce what I have gathered--for the ghosts are calling for a series of sentences that are true to my original intentions, even if what I have thought of late is compromised. For everyone wants resolution--at the least, closure. I am to admit that the the old ideas have partly ceased to be; they have begun their new life in creative writing. I cannot claim fidelity to Durrell's text any longer, and I will appear as a thief if I proceed into fiction without admitting the places where my pen runs after a moment in Clea, for instance; but it could just as well have originated in Justine. To avoid redundancy I won't bother to list the other two books; one gets my drift. The theme is back to:

The absence of the other's mind during the creative act no longer causes dismay, for it frees up one's own mind, allowing unfiltered enjoyment of the other as a separate space moving about in distant though shared joie de vivre. The fortress shall not be compromised--yet the result of so much respect is the "marriage of true minds." I cannot put it other than in Durrell's terms; and by not electing a strict theoretical perspective, I am not obliged to pull out those moments that increase the scope and flexibility of any hermeneutics. My perspective seeks to become creative for an imagined freedom; bondage and debt are constants of literary production.

crank

I had found a place where I could get things wrong, but then was interrupted constantly by old claims. Who cares anymore which direction I take, what is this artificial reality anymore? A sham despite its erudition. To mute it, then. To clench my teeth while talking on the phone with a troglodyte--the music stopped because the electricity was shut off, and I began the course of demystification. Charging my laptop at Bigby's, bringing it home to do the real work of distraction, idyllic, really: as if I could approach honesty with a euphonious strand of sentences. Who can say whether it matters that a single reader takes more than one idea seriously--the point is selfish, the world is outside and I might control it within this suffocating, uncomfortably furnished place of softness and ennui. Losing an iota of perfection is tragic: the merit is in the foolishness of believing in any sort of completion. That was necessary decades ago; else I never would have left the creek where a universe of rhythms and cymbal crashes echoed in the cyclical droning of the bugs, later identified in a lusher setting as cicadas. The valley had other species, I believe, but none of them en masse: the urban graveyard--a city of death? The death of a city?--was the site of an adult's deliberate insanity. The valley was childish reverie of the purest variety. And now? Despair set out to dry, perchance to be quenched by language? Not enough nonsense for that.

placed, set.

However, if purely aesthetic questions were at stake, questions of love and alcoholism would not be so paramount to this study of Durrell and Lowry--despite the obvious fact that these themes are paramount to the novels themselves. Both writers deserve unflinching attention to their style, yet their themes touch upon aspects of the human condition which itself must be treated aesthetically--arguments as to why writing or making love under the influence (of alcohol and thoughts of another, respectively) continue to simultaneously draw out the worst and best of the subjectivity presently at risk. For I hesitate to refer to the persons of Lowry and Durrell: the impression their authorship makes of their personality is favorably hazy, such is the achievement of their art that regardless of how autobiographical it appears, always present is the distance that reminds the reader of that troublesome notion, the autonomy of art, its blameless separate sphere that is most blameworthy in the eyes of political-minded critics (e.g. Terry Eagleton).

back

Quite equal to the sound of a lone chirping in the night was the thought--I have wasted, somewhere, another opportunity! And where was its sign? In the land of the honest, into which I am loathe to peek. What motivates one to throw around words that sound fine together while advancing some half-buried theory of the Gothic, let's say--or what inhibits one into merely offering these ideas succinctly and usefully? Two opposing forces, that's all. The one wants to expand, savor, and never be done with an alluring thought. The other wants to know that this thought can be acquired at a reasonable price. Which are we to trust? In good writing, the choice should not be available to us. We cope with the linguistic overgrowth and blame ourselves for not getting the point--a pleasurable guilt, for a second reading will certainly resolve every ambiguity...

When the enthusiasm for vocabulary outstrips the exigency for an argument, the reader should at least be grateful for the opportunity to enhance his or her vocabulary. Peering into that blinding darkness of philosophical verbiage is a rare treat: only stylists of the first order can deliver the experience. The scenario of criticism turning into fiction is less likely than I previously thought, at least in my own criticism: guilt for abandoning the primary text is inescapable, and any bit of Durrellesque fiction I include in the critique is scrupulous to a fault, citing the master automatically without daring to stake a claim to originality.

Such fiction is self-consciously secondary while refusing to appear naive: such a work as the Alexandria Quartet would be treacherously difficult to reproduce, yet the fear of disastrous failure is less severe than the dread of one's own fiction being rejected or ignored. Thus criticism can at times be formulated as a training ground, even at the graduate level: an introductory composition course asks basically the same questions of the transfer from explorations of personal relevance to an objective reading, while bona fide literary criticism is a more varied arsenal of similarly self-centered questions...

Such as?

coffee

For throughout Under the Volcano we cannot escape from the pain of composition--it smarts perhaps more because the autobiographical protagonist is not a writer, or he hasn't touched his book on alchemy for months, has still a formidable collection of books from which to draw inspiration and facts but not his own misery. This is his contention, finally, with learning: he has reached his own apex though he is no wizard, he has put his sources together on paper while increasing his tolerance for tequila, realizing mescal has as much of the philosopher's stone as he will ever acquire. So much depends on the right mixture of alcohol and sleep deprivation--he says it himself, this consular Firmin, in a conversation with his younger, non-biological French brother.

"You are interfering with my great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac: a las 6:30 P.M. "I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."

"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.

"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness." (227)

The start of this drinking session began with the Consul's promise, after M. said No to tequila:

"--like Oxygenee, and petrol...If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for."

"It's mescal with me...Tequila, no, that is healthful...and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end," the Consul said dreamily." (226)

Until this point mescal has not so obviously been omitted as the bouts of elation and self-laceration muddle Lowry's brilliantly-worded landscape. I ought to warn the reader against looking back too far in the text; the language will stop you cold. The ingredients to the Consul's ontological stew will be revealed as we progress to the end, which from page 227 is a very long way off indeed. The crucial question--has he not been drinking mescal the whole time?--must be answered thus: just wait until he breaks his promise not to drink mescal.

atmospheric session

Is it too late in the day? Should I have begun as soon as I got home with groceries and showered? Has my mind already gone off into the common?

They want you to teach writing and literature because you are always strong with words and ideas. You just think you don't have them until there's a prompt, a pressure, a deadline, an end of times over the horizon. But it's all nonsense. Talk to yourself a little and you'll find, you can do this anytime!

Every word has the potential to turn the others into gold. Every song can change the tone subtly until you've hit the wall, then look back thinking, this could have been otherwise. I let it simply go on too long. But you'll love it later in the evening, removed from the scene; as if control issues were at stake, that you felt inclined to know the outcome already while the writer advocated risk, chance, compromise. Then the person--the owner of the personality, rather the manager and naysayer--remembers he wants to step back anyway, that he does not enjoy writing. Try to never mix up the two characters, try indeed to kill the person (smother him with rambling sentences), convince him he's inconsequential (deny his very subjectivity), and finally, rip off his head. The neck has been complaining for some time.

It's a process that simply takes longer to get started in the conscionable day.

Are you looking around again? Employing geometry to indicate you'd rather not write now--the appendage angling towards the ground as if to kiss it and snap back up? "The pain of composition was due," says Durrell's Pursewarden, to the fear of madness. "Force it a bit and tell yourself you don't give a damn if you do go mad," you'll find it comes quicker, "you'll break the barrier."

crate

All that you can think of--is false and we bury the past, obviously to make it up later. The extent to which it matters is unknown. How it appears before us, maudlin tight-lipped! This is the fetish of fantasy in the Alexandria Quartet--not stealing memories from each other, the characters live in the same very philosophical space, where sin is as fluid as virtue, because everything wafts around by fantasy and erudition. Never unicorns or wizards, but succubi and doctors.

The only way I could know that I had read these books thoroughly enough was to write them myself, a few scenes and ideas of their implications, simply me removed from the text by a few days, and let us hope, after a few drinks. So that I might reveal more than I would otherwise; that I might let loose, why else? Though I am not drinking in the day. Despite the funny little secret that that entails--others haven't a clue!--as in the recent French movie (my girlfriend saw it not me) some sort of freedom ought to be achieved that carries a slight guilt. Just to know that what you are about is wrong somewhere--this adds responsibility to an otherwise drifting life...set in motion by the energy of crime, in Sade's sense of nature progressing, life advancing, only by infractions of what seems right. We needn't libertinage if there is nothing against it. Turn us outward in the wind with no strings and life fades directly, faces contort into smudges, as of too many every which way until at last, a blur. A digital image splintering into puff.

Fire and disease, rage, spin-offs. Carelessness. Obeying the impulse that permits no fissure--go there. Try not to be trite. Jumping around, then. The end of a neck, an extension of terms, the material of a tent draped yet tapered from a set of spheres, white letters on a pair.

title waving

Asked if this worked, I hesitated. A moment passed; I realized, why I'm hesitating has something to do with the work they have done without me. This is a cause for pause! As if waiting around to be picked, assuming the world would know. Did you call them? I didn't. How did he know then? Assumes cameras are on him constantly. He wears striped pants under black so he might foreclose and no one will recover. A damn cat leaping off the counter.

How did you get this working, with a bore's help?

Deadly and insanely sick. A ceremony. How would something cruel look for us, the artists? We've heard of cruelty. Devise a system that solves for painless cruelty. Indeed, we've got it. Love. Mythmaking lovers, Durrell. Or the other source: drink. It is indeed painful but the entire point is to distract from while enhancing pain, through poetry. The fall into the ravine, not a volcano, in Lowry is likely to ruin the image without alcohol and, it seems, pot. He walked into a marijuana bar in the last 10 pages, and lit a pipe. Someone had offered to light it for him while a Mexican insulted him; the Consul by this point--by any point, really--is hazy enough to mutter that these insults are tiresome: and they are. The Consul seems to die for insulting the way a Mexican was insulting him, for it was strictly the Consul's Englishness that made for the tired old pun. The Mexican spun around, and around. A fly gathering force until the Consul is blasted in the chest--quite a "dingy way to die" is his thought, recognizing the backward thrust as from a gun.

He had just identified it and advised the owner not to use it since it throws off steal shards. Enough land in Geoffrey's body to send him over the volcano's edge and, it would seem, down into it. The screaming faces and burning walls, the finale to his perfect moment--the drunkest clarity of the entire story, or perhaps not: the scene is late, just before his death. This carries finality already, and reminds us that to drink oneself sober is the best route to the bottom: the volcano having been gorged through and exposed in the middle of it, La Sepultura. If the Consul jumps, it will be into that ravine, this is clear. But the jumping is the last mescal, premeditated. One more and that is that, and so, he sips on the final drink. Doesn't quite plunge. He is not a suicide, but a pointless murder, faintly honorable if only for the fact of a fractured, drawn-out insult provoking it.

recent blog tack

I at last said, what is stopping me from recreating criticism in my own mind? Let's do it, then. What? Recreate criticism. What is that? It is making a new place to play for a secondary activity. Why? It lets us know who is good and for which reasons. Can you write under this strain? Precisely because of this strain I have kept writing--the thing I love is the thing I enjoy hating most.

Get a lot of air in here? Have you captivated the audience enough to tell them that tonight they will hear a story and a critique?

This shouldn't matter as much as it does. But there are intellectuals, and there are artists. They have different names because I want them to. Because I want to know which one I really am.

An ancient question, really. Though the flame is too hot now, too waxy, to allow an accurate score. We see postgrads lingering around in a hard-wood floored living room, eating each others'...

Dizzy spells. We eat the others' bad moments. We talk to the dead. We don't want to write another paper--they always reek of opinions set down merely to annoy the artists. I tell you, they are different people. They are very few. I will prove that I am one of them and that since I have learned so much--about them---I will know that playing with punctuation is primarily a sin. Of course, one cultivates a taste for that. The department? Of English? An introduction to sin! This is what I will bring to it. You thought you lived because you played these games online, and people you could see eventually on your screen just sort of sat there like you are. And this was life--

Who took the banter out? Was it pre-focused, so that in going off like that it is repeating the discourse recorded and plugged into it--you see, a classroom. Looking round. What happened...to literature? Has it been kept alive? Where is the...rub?

Inside a bubble. I hate the blogosphere. I wish it were inside so that I know what's inside always turns out to be outside the inside. Like Schenectady, that literary trope of an equine city.

quotes, Durrell's Justine.

"Nevertheless there is no woman too humble, too battered, too old, to receive those outward attentions--those little gallantries and sorties of wit which I have come to associate with the Gallic temperament; the heady meretricious French charm which evaporates so easily into pride and mental indolence--like French thought which flows so quickly into sand-molds, the original espirit hardening immediately into deadening concepts." (38)

"The guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses" (39).

"Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnate things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life! Women feel like birds confronted by a viper when they gaze into that narrow flat face with its tongue always moving across the thin lips." (39)

"...the living limbo in which my beloved Jusine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself" (40).

"The sad thirteenth child of Valentinos who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him.' Anything pressed too far becomes a sin." (40)

"Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism." (40)

"Catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: 'What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.' I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long." (41)

"As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision." (44)

"How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!" (47)

"I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other." (48)

"'Idle,' she writes, 'to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point--for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true...of Justine!" (50)

Yes, I think that shall work: let us move around four texts with utmost devotion to simultaneity.

this...like the other

Somehow, now, I have been put in the wrong class--it seems. I want to float; no, this isn't it at all! It's just that everything is already over, and I didn't finish! Wearing thin already, it's positively heinous, as I would say if I were quaint. But it's instead...some deathly thrash band, calling me out to learn some new words before I get back to the thesis. That thesis--is scary at times. I have thrown out everything and am trying to write to Durrell from the realm of...poetry. Simply the aesthetic attitude in creating mode--look, this word seems plain dirty now. The aesthetic. Ambivalence and the like, ambiguity, occupy different spaces...not defensive as yet. Who cares anymore about them? But they are not a scourge on the differentiating mindframe as is aesthetics. So entirely removed that I cannot say where I am when I bring it up: suddenly back in my basement, mixing elements and staring off, writing! This is the space for poetry, even if I would produce only dismal prosaic lines about the same nothing I'm trying to escape. The space...of poetry? The notional space? Can Borges help?

At least allow me to explain that I'm after a process, truly. Something to rely upon. Calling it a battle between criticism and fiction--this has been a very long temporary pursuit, but it's due to my being a student still. This era will end on Friday; and of course I'm stuck wondering what I'm about. The project has to take up its own life, carry me along. I'll comment upon it. Please, allow me repose! Sitting on a divan in a boxcar tossing out quips, the humor of the secretly sick artist, hiding all and everything and thereby not making it up so much as allowing it to pass, borrowing his own dirty laundry.

Durrell and Lowry could be bad influences on me, who have grown up on Joyce, the Beats, Woolf. Only here the pain of existence is more prevalent, it makes each text glow. The others merely sing; they have style with content, with erudition and even spiritualism. In Lowry the problem is as obvious as the genius, in Durrell the intellect is as problematic as love.

Each has a symptom that plagues, the negative that produces the positive. The alcoholism of Lowry is legendary; in his life he posed as various egos, an exaggerating personality to deal with in conversation. Where's the truth--why should it matter, this is the Consul. His drinking as an author is not too close to the surface in the character Geoffrey Firmin; the quality is sincerely fictive, exposing everything that an artist should but still so we do not blame him.

The moral is certainly around here somewhere, but if Darley is struggling to conceptualize Justine, it is because Clea has difficulty painting her without kissing the painted hand and putting down the brush. The next level: Darley's easiest way of knowing the world is through Clea, the artist who came of age but not fruition preoccupied with another, the same Justine who involves Darley in the literary process. She is interested in philosophy like a syphilitic finds aspects to reflect upon her medicine, the places it takes her--love is the vehicle. Balthazar declares "all our women are Justines." And so, her involvement in ideas is telling for the redemption necessary to purge one of her: becoming an artist, or ceasing to try. For at that point she is no longer needed and returns to her husband, whom she never needed at first, whom she warned about the impossibility of her ever loving!

Yes, well, the best way of digging around in Durrell is explaining to yourself the triangulation. It is all slippery, yet centered, and so: we cannot stay for long in this set of texts alone. An entire trinity awaits, with a few onlookers besides. That little stage produces mixed results by default; try now to actually mix the elements and put them with something already mixed. Then mix. Do you see? This sort of reading has to approach poetry, it has no other choice. It is not seeking to establish anything but my own voice with the help of a batch of masters. Forget that they're all male. I write to a female audience, and yet feminism can't get a foothold.

One cannot wonder what that all means without feeling guilty already--now this is the space from which these writers write! Bad conscience, which Nietzsche explained thoroughly according to his dialectics (which took several books to come into a dialectical shape) and Freud then conceptualized with his damn trinity. The origins, the true causes, are fascinating to contemplate, but not a part of this project. I would rather fabricate my own cause for shame, the strongest motivator of these books even if the author feels it not, for it is in the background, the edges of society are ever peeked into--the writer could be mucking it up or anguishing over it, whatever the pleasure is. Perhaps lionizing the whore while condemning the critic: Justine is the concubine of individuality, Darley is the artist too intellectual for Pursewarden to call an artist, because preoccupied with the question of "writing" rather than willing to suffer on account of it. And the most suffering is the greatest art, certainly: this is proved by Pursewarden's letters, which we are not granted permission to see for both its shameful content (incestuous) and its unutterable beauty--too much pressure, one would expect, for the author, too much awe in the narrator leading up to the letters' discovery. Pursewarden's blind sister Liza, raised in mutual isolation, the other partner in the fateful taboo of Durrell's text, the sin raised up to show at what cost true art is settled: and they must be burnt. As a writer contacted by the widowing sister, he makes that decision, and we are spared the scenes perhaps barely alluded to by the artist: Pursewarden takes contrary views deliberately, saying (in my paraphrase), that words being what they are, and people being what they are, we ought to discard of language forever as a tool that can express one's meaning. But he doesn't write in Sade's space.

from a status

That tired old canon. I wish it would come back already. Put Durrell on it. Write on him like...well, Borges. Let's be clear. Imitative and honest, admitting nothing to theorists. They'll eventually pull a few things out to correct, solve.

A literary event, a doctor visit, poof--a new reading to put on the table, let the audience gawk. The book is reborn, in your hands! It's what you get out of it, yes.

... Ver más

Clea smacks Darley across the face, causing the blood to surround his teeth, as if to mortify his grin--but we are told he's upset, livid. His response to being smacked for suggesting he'll write a book of criticism is not a grin!

Darley, that lecher "with chalk on his sleeve," bespectacled--needed wakening from someone who has lost herself and can only revive by alerting another of his slumber. And sincerely, thanks goes to Clea. The literary world ought to hear about this, the panel has got to be notified.

(They want smacking--more than the artist who here in Durrell's text was filling the silence with a dull remark about the future. The truth is he writes three of these books for us: we only know what we know because he interfered with the past, rendered it artistically. Yet he ever doubts that he is a writer. He is not an artist, he tells us. The moment he realizes it is finally poignant in the fourth book: until then, it was a slowly dawning matter of fact.)

pain, etc.

The evil in each version: the love of the sadist and the writer.

Justifications for perversion from a rhetorical assault: the wounds he opens in one's morality cannot let one rest.

Durrell's Justine creates herself, seeks herself, debases and threatens (telepathically) with--herself. Catharine--who is actually Sade's Justine telling her own story by the name Catharine--does not go in for sin straight from the home as does her sister. She carries virtue until she is finally struck through the breast and into the heart so that the lightning rips through her, a cavity, passageway, orifice through the regions of her very life. Heart, arteries, blood and rhythm: destruction of the sex she's been subjected to--chapters upon chapters, positions upon torturing position, of deliberate, elaborated rape.

But we also get protracted treatises on why this is natural, how crime is the energy that moves us. Progress, growth, etc.

And where it turns from pain to pleasure is only in the 20th century, with Durrell running through the metaphysical ways Justine is caught up in desire: though the pain is still crucial: "We use each other," she says, "like axes to cut down the ones we really love."

formally wizened

Without error, compiling data that serves others in different spheres--this has been repeated. Water encircling a dry space seems necessary. If he picks up the sandpaper and goes to work the result will be a surface from which there's too much to choose. Argot: the bloody nose in the delayed act of surfacing. It drips, tickling. Life might still teach the alternate routes! This is passing however and in its place we see a leather belt slamming down upon the kitchen table, to cut through the cloth.

title, phenoma's last.

What was all that about? Every word just wanted to stay out of the pool for a while, they stood around looking grim into the water. A bloody blue cement floor with a drain! It's not dead center? Look at it, as I am with my hair too flopping-wet, did you bring...

that book of metaphysics? I resort to it when it seems my friend the consul has grown thin on waiting his turn for the writing, staring at the pen.

does the theory of evolution sit on trampoline, thinking, where's my article? Where's the little one-letter word that helped bring me here? Hollow under that pale of black hair--a ghost in the machine, however! Ever an intelligence and cankering.

A new model for criticism? Speaking of characters, Durrell's or Lowry's, may occur: primitive model of art is at stake, that it is a random process that makes salutary connections--while not talking to its mother-ego about what's outside for now, the limited material beyond the text--the matter not reigned in by Derrida, for instance. We need to send these people a post card asking about Jesus, and why he was regaled in the process of their presiding over a wandering 5-year-old during a shotgun wedding.

That works best if no one knows what it's really about, and I cannot take any further prevaricating. You want to know! You! All about what this is about.

Well I could tell you, but then I'd--

Enough.

markers-crayon

I want nothing of heart: professionalism, veneer.

I've been thinking.

Yes, what it means to be a writer: in the mawkish sense. It's an ugly word full of nasty implications for the heart!

Did you put that in? This is only me, perhaps in the drab of secondarity, foretelling an aching skull. The topmost portion, the brink! Aching, sore. Apologizing daily, looking about: the sophistry in a sound place of love. Regardless of synecdoches.

streets of gold

Because, well simply it is what I do, or tend to: it's that, and this, but it's pretty much it. Doesn't anyone believe me? I've got to explain it. The only way I can is through an essay, via story. The formula works, if you can justify it daily, constant excuses. So many signatures. Only they don't have a legal system in prose, no one's accountable--cannot this be seen?

Cannot this...did he say, be seen?

yes, he believes he's on a stage. let him or nothing will get done.

an executor!

it's--it's--: hold on.

It just started making sense, that I would write in this medium first and then span out--but something told me that was safe, and I fled.

Safe in what regard? In the sense of saving--a responsible depository.

blogger's my girlfriend.

with mustard

I just want to watch all the sci-fi movies ever...and write until I have it in my palms, control of that one pen...the one I've been searching this earth for, the flowing and gently stabbing end somehow like a ball-point but rather, almost a Uni-Ball.

If only my writing commanded the attention of an abomination, as I said I created with someone else's song! Not Unsane's, but that of a guitarist brother. Well, unless he says it's less insane than I think it is, it will remain hidden. Of course, David Grom knows...if he's checked his bloody email recently.

/ok.

Ha!

in the studio---

It was then that I looked around, and said: "What have I got?"

A raspy voice! Really loud and screeching, celebrating--what? A well-written essay, a swimming day, a sidewalk well-shoveled, a car belatedly disinterred? What then--this is the question. "Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ."

Joyce.

"It wasn't always this way...it wasn't always this way. It wasn't always this way...

"You laid there on that sidewalk, you laid there on that sidewalk. You laid there on that sidewalk..."

--Unsane.

Today I went ahead and drummed that infernally repeating young-punk beat that sounds quite sad when put with those awful vocals, despairing and stabbed through with problems the singer has created for himself: the blood on the sidewalk, the fumes wafting about his head! This, a song by Unsane, and the one that follows it--are both as one to me. Nothing is more miserable, this delightful pair of dirges. I try to live by them, as in, capturing the agony of adolescence in that old house way, that flavor a thousand times removed from traditional teen angst, rendered typically by teeny-bopper fluff. No! This is Poltergeist with better production.

where'd this come from?

at the moment it sounded crazy awesome, and later as I thought about its possibilities I felt they were defensible. damnit! have you never tried to create something? undue elation and foolish pride finish every stupid project! why did I waltz into Lisa's room when I was 10 and say, look at this drawing! because even though it wasn't finished, if I didn't show it to someone right then, by the morning it would've seemed a wasted effort. self-canceling doubt follows upon every production. it can't be helped. only the audience can be switched.

an intro of sorts

If the Consul is concerned with drinking, if he reviles himself incessantly during the first interview with his recently returned wife, and if he pursues this line of attack upon himself for more than a few pages and passes out in the end, what is his wife to think? The question of why she came back down here is not the answer: it is her self-destruction she must secretly wish for, embodied in her husband the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, and the writer who linked those names together for one prodigious drinker.

I have said as much already in a later part of this essay, which will only become apparent once you discover that this blog post has some tremendous project behind it that really cannot get going without this indulgence: this place that seems vital, and one with its own saving mechanism: as in, it saves automatically.

Now, back to the point.

an email to a person.

I think I'll send one tomorrow.

bring---it?

This time, Durrell must be defended from oblivion--I can still recall when criticism was seen as the champion of great literature, custodian of mediocrity. For the moment it seems .. lost, as if fiction is getting along fine without it. Of course this is only because literary studies has jurisdiction over criticism: who reads a good book review anymore, one written knowing that most readers respect, believe in, great writers as something more than...

the last frontier of a Hollywood obsessed with dark corners to be exaggerated?

What is assured is veritable oblivion for those who speak wisely about books: for unless they enjoy scheduled, recurring get-togethers of people who like to read...literary folks will have a beast of a time connecting with anyone not majoring in Literature.

Perhaps they study very well, these book clubbers. Perhaps discussion groups are extremely rich enterprises in which it is my desperate misfortune not to have partaken...or maybe I simply have a single movie in mind, The Jane Austen Book Club--where discussion did reach some sophisticated heights. Of course as a chic flick it left its residue.

I cannot trust Thursday night smart-talk simply because I see it as it should be as a student. Yet of course this normative sort of blitheness is directed critically against the classroom as well, the very place where I learn to be thus critical!

This justifies the institution of higher learning. It, like N., seeks to achieve a trenchant self-criticism as a means of knowing the world, of overcoming--the reader is familiar with struggling as a form of philosophizing. It still requires a veritable career in philology...

cover letter

I would like to establish that the following is not impossible; I want to actuate it, bring it into being:

"In my essays--I've got ample background in criticism and theory to connect this text to that in interesting, authoritative ways that aim above all to constitute an artful demonstration bordering on literature itself."

What that means, I shall have to figure out in the very act of demonstrating it, birth it by recognizing that there's a possibility that it might be.

scripshor

--The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces.

Joyce 13

Don't make me come down there, and explain to you all the fact that Ulysses has to wake up now and, really---sort of take charge, for a month. For a week. At least for tonight, and night's like tonight, when I have skipped the required reading and taken Stately, plump Buck Mulligan for his word that 'Kinch whose mother is beastly dead' shall be the knifeblade to figure out Hamlet's lineage after a few pints.

If you catch me speaking of anything other than this book,

...

Mountolive

Well, anyway I think we'd better just talk.

It involves something which I was just thinking about confronting, so long as you have terrific speakers. In that case---since you don't---let me tell you about this particular phase of the project in which I so frequently find myself caught up. But don't let it take too long. I have to get back to what I was doing. In French they call this sort of trance as if everyone knows it was initiated by jouissance which is not to say: I knew they would call it this. Because I've not heard them do so; I cannot look back and say that in the futuristic sense of what has occurred of late, I do indeed look forward to serving Proust's breakfast inside a comic: tea with biscuit, dipping the latter into the former. Recollecting, indulging.

And your primary sources are: photos of the author himself, Mr. Grom looking up from a paling dish of cank,

shit, whatever that entails, the rot is inside, with the emo song we transcended mere dead-girlfriend dolled up for you in the basement (the movie Dead Girl) to something more locally...positive, reinforcing: a scene from your days in youth, swearing not to measure anything; just wishing for a reflective moment rather than a one directed towards ensnaring the future within present whims,

however powerful the emotion that enforces them, they are all fleeting and all---for the most part---revolting. Yet this is the complexion of an entire face.

Hahaha,

Mark

a best man speech

I suppose I'll write it along the way, carry the notepad around with me. Or I'll drink and then stand up talking.

he had 7 spots, orange skin.

It was like--one might say--some ancient figurehead, telling stories (as they must) when out came the brief, as if on its own.

Look at your brother suffering on account of art. They made us pass around empty bottles of air.

Well, what else could there be, and how afraid are you to admit that it's still not empty? You 'said' all that about the center, now look at this silly old bottle.

We need equal syllables.

I prefer sounds like...Slithering. Sliding. (Creeping)

But only endearing qualities will I tolerate.

At last, after all that, something started making sense!!!!!!!!

Just look at all the torment these salamanders had to endure, walking from hand to hand, an infinity of two hands!

Now, that's emptiness. That...is something.

Now pay attention. It's remarkable how many words mean nothing.

Let's try to keep this in order--

You swallowed that cube of iced coffee,

thither.

No. Couldn't have. Makes so much sense the other way--can you open that back door?

This never feels like a lot.

I deceive every customer. Like it never mattered. I am, above all, a customer. Myself.

Now--as I was rolling out of bed I heard this delicate drumming noise--sort of spooky in a way--at 11:45 well that's when I looked up at the clock but I'd been listening for 10 minutes I'd say--All within a moment--A very long, courageous moment.

This sounds like a fever, yes, they call it in Haiti--

Nothing so different from what you were raised to believe it to be (long, stretched out, dimensions curled). However, each around the other like that ! While each is also spun around itself.

Never. I'd never heard of it even once--Always such a dreary fade out.

At the same time, just moving meaning around.

It's all going up--

How long has this been going on? How unmanageable is it really--and who's running up and down those steps, twisting up, spinning down(ward)?

We told you. We are a noncontinuous electrographic monologic singular-crepuscular view of the front lawn, somewhat possessed.

You got out of this...precisely how many tracks? And your nose smells inside of baby lotion--why?

How many sides of the coin can you predict will fall--where?

Cannot cannibalize what's sitting there waiting for you to enjoy...
Your appetizer:
A bug.
With wings.
And antenas for directing traffic.

You--want to sleep downstairs? The great pile of water which the dog lapped up?

I've been working, you see, on this project for hours. Soon enough you'll see results.
When will you want this--indicated--on the sheet--never mind. I'd sooner be deleted myself.

boligrafo

And as for...those souls that have not lost their content, their context even--haven't been made frivolous yet....

Finally. It is the frivolity, the disaster of not being able to say serious things because once uttered, and shared on that feed (the front page of status update news)...

it all...seems...light, flighty. inconsequential. and that is everything now or so--they, I--will have you believe--in the power of punctuation, of close readings focusing on style. It is far beyond driven, balls out aesthetic fascism!

you weren't expecting that, oh no, no. Only you feel now that you were suspicious

(I've contributed my share of dearthiness and headache reprisals there),

Watch me advertise this. When I finally delete my Facebook I will have made up a notional space like Borges' "library (which others call the Universe)," for that is where all this is going. That story--the Library of Babel--es increible. I'm reading it everyday in Spanish a few pages at a time, mostly in the bathroom. But today I brought it down to my study, where I am reminded: this God business has to go, and I must tell of the utopia ready for poetry, if we can be atheist and anti-theory enough to tell of un-ideological matters of style until they billow out into all sorts of political and psychological issues yet still with style...still with form mattering most...

Desultory! Scattered!

When I declare the deletion of my Facebook, (after saving the words I've put there) the earth will shake. God will declare something (too) for good measure: god. He'll say, I'm just another text, yet nothing's outside me because I also AM the text. The way.

And as for the critical light!

!!!!!!! The beast held 7 swords and was known by 3 names only. Literature, language, and theory.

completely pointless

No there's no excuse you must go on except one might say you didn't...need to back then, but now that Slayer has always had poor vocals live, it seems to matter enough to mention it,

I have, after all, done that. And I could accept your...response no later than next time I'm forcing my self to write.

the dead have taken my soul!

Hahaha, there are people out there afraid--of this! Why are they all on my list?

It's sickening. Although one posted something brilliant about getting new 'church' shoes.

However seriously, the god stuff now...seriously. Sadly I could never say it like Carlin, I'd go too much into philosophy! But thank god thank god for George Carlin I'm glad I could walk down a block to the theater after work to attend a show (he was preparing another HBO special and was quite old--but I sat in the balcony & could barely tell). One of the most edifying but rather less funny episodes involving comedy under isolation--

I tend to watch Youtube comedy clips late at night, and before that it was that old 11-12:30sh show on A&E...

The host wore a pince-nez! Annoying, he kept the lens tight over one eye for the first few minutes only.

Ah! Ha! An Evening at the Improv!!!I posted this hours ago, and upon editing it....the name struck me.

bastard sons promiscuousdaughters

Except now the noise-canceling headphones are not as cheap as they were last week; I'm getting them through Marshall's.

Cheap-er.

Oh this is stupid. Force it! you have to write. fine, it's okay to curse, you pay good money to curse.

allow it all, all! this is a terrible performance of south of heaven! oh god, why did I...sing up there---

por defecto

In fact I do not want to write at all; the picture of the set in the yard past the woods by the swings...

I want to drum. Why wouldn't the headphones be on back order until February? I'm ordering these career-jinxing headphones right now.

Lleva un profundo sentimiento de culpa.

This is what I carried with me from that church, a manual on how to carry guilt, apply it like a balm upon one's work--have you heard this before? It becomes the distance between the artist and his work, or rather its byproduct. The danger is quitting all artistry to assuage the guilt by writing by hand a goddamn journal entry. One--I--cannot say the same for what appears online. As if it isn't me?

No, we've already gone through this.

It made little difference then whether it made any sense. Only now I'm made wretched for not writing, for not going on.

Of which Bible verse does that remind you? At any rate I lie.

That I haven't seen any of these Faces in years means I'll have help writing the persona. It had better not be me.

This is the tragedy:

It could be a mirage, a starving artist--twirling sticks!--since it's too late to drum. What's an artist doing being a drummer--

The tragedy...is that you never heard of this before. Course, go there now and it is a sad and incomplete tale, a story almost: until I am sick of the woods and old houses and realize that this thing wants continuity. Narrative. I refuse!

All the while, ever so distantly, wishing to live in the dark for two days maybe three, recovering from laser surgery (perhaps pathogenic ocular dissonance). I type and drum perhaps better when I cannot see. In the dark, redirected to heaven, I damn well create.

The aesthetic notional space is old news; for now, making it--this is far removed from what I've learned and it's a good thing, too. Else what subject could I have?

At least now I've got all the critical stuff surrounding and leading up to Hypertext, let's have it capitalized. It's got my audio tracks waiting, in the ether--trust...me. There will be dozens within the year, and each will be supremely worth listening to.

Prolific--you know.

bark at that moon.

I'm proud: I know I just did something, I ordered a bunch of books. It feels nice.

They'll arrive in the mail and let me know that a week or two ago, I did something.

That too will feel nice.

I'm sorry this place is shrinking, cramming my head into its drawers. It can't be helped. Everyone's sorry they asked. In fact I'll give it back to them; I can force it out of me, certainly I can re-gift it. Everything is set up except the inevitable problem of the headphones, and sitting here still makes me want to...weep. In the metaphysical sense: a good enough hiding spot. Like a cubby under the stairs in the psyche.

How much contempt can there be in a body, so fully ready to take on the world when it's not looking, let's say it's indisposed...to? I've been crying wolf on Facebook for a month, "sharing" this blog--but when the real thing's ready, oh...everyone who knows me will be too weary to go there. They checked this blog once and guffawed; and what, he's adding drums to the same old mess?

So much more than can be discussed. Pretend, then, that you're honest. Get crazy confessional with it. Recall what Sontag said of a geologist's autobiography, almost sickening with the lack of self-respect, the total admissions to failures mostly in the bedroom. I confess to constantly thinking about my projects, whatever they happen to be. I'll go so far as to say that hardly anything ever occupies me so...persistently.

For a reminder of how ugly this can be, watch the sickening video for that embarrassing song, Bark at the Moon. Nothing surpasses this and gets famous for it.

I might be calculating, careful to the point of geometric.

of course. right here.

You made me listen to the bongo-playing fool with whom Terri was speaking, didn't you? You can say, you can even stand up when you say it, that I was the hegemon from the start. That nothing needs to justify me. I've been in your heads for far too long, you think by now I've always been in your heart. It's all control. You'd die to be thus controlled. Rather takes off the responsibility, but this is not the point.

What I called you over here for was: The pain residing at the center, what is that precisely, but a shirt that is only loud if you want to take a look at it: you see others have their fears, and you are caught looking at these spindly -- what are they called again? Investments? Because you couldn't honor them they looked old and worn out, I think that by now you have recognized that there is there is...

there is no one watching after all--the world that all of us have made is already invested in, so if you wanted to tell someone that it's okay to trust one another because we're all carefully thinking about what the other's said...

Go ahead...

Otherwise we suggest you wantonize down here. The seating is best, and only people who know about this fixation of yours with prose...will understand, at best why you speak of aesthetics but more typically---more to be expected by these waifs---that you're always at least slightly upset.

Take on the power struggle. An entire generation hearing about the lack of agency, or the renunciation of silly old views about ideal selfhood, the very stuff that makes such an agency--a warrant--interesting, what gives life to the whole stupid project of living, precisely the illusions we let expand, consume us even, leaving plenty of room---if this is your wont---for mucking about in ideas. And there will be many ideas to really tear it up in. What, Susan, is so bad about mucking about in it? In our town that's muddin, and rare are those whose enthusiasm for cars--for jeeps!--justify the enterprise for their embracing of the absurdity...

"hands off, let's go!"

LitCrit: uncanny radcliffe

The ingredients for an uncanny reading are here, and are announced at the end with the recurrence of a note gradually giving way to a requiem, which prompts the reversal of the Marchesa's passions. Directly after that follows the assertion of the intellectual powers through the Confessor's disdain that this woman should allow music to vitiate her greed for prestige: she wishes now to be free of the plot to kill her intransigent future daughter in law. What is most uncanny is the ghost of sophistry, however: Schedoni's hawk-eyed, cunning knowledge of his interloper's secret fears and desires yet also the softening persuasion of a man of his order, a Confessor.

One must trust his wit and allow the beguiling to be out in the open; such is the Marchesa's predicament. The uncanny character here has glided in and out of the narrative, possibly as the monkishly cloaked "unknown adviser" to Vivaldi's inquisitions into the ruins, where he might chance upon Ellena, as well as the consiglieri who plots with his mother against his beloved.

Considering that the true danger seems at this point to be Schedoni's intellect, I am deferred from a more definitive answer concerning what is uncanny in The Italian. Instead as I read I am followed by Byron's epic "Don Juan," which was inspired, we are told in the introduction, by Radcliffe's romance. There are more than a few similarities, chiefly the curious role of intellect versus the passions (as both lovers philosophize or at least allude in their musings, ambivalent to the oncoming affair, to Plato and the implications of the stars).

Byron's characters, at least in the first canto, also engage in the old struggle between sophistry and poetry, gossip and legitimate commentary (witness Donna's book of the Don's flaws and failures which she cites to friends and family)--items which are not uncanny per se but inflect my reading quite so. The ghost of influences past, perhaps: I might allude to the fact that in The Italian, this very issue of philosophy and poetry is presently buried in voluminous prose. For now I see it arising in the form of musical motifs, serenades by Vivaldi in the ruins near Ellena's modest dwelling, where she too sings, distractedly, about the dashing young man whose love is socially above her and therefore ungraspable.

(But here again I run into another problem: the composer Vivaldi died in 1741 and Radcliffe's Vincentio di Vivaldi goes about his denouement in 1758, while the characters, dropped after the first chapter, who are reading this second-layer narrative pick it up in 1764. No one living in Radcliffe's Italy would not have heard of the Vivaldi of Four Seasons fame, nor is her Vivaldi free from the professional musical world, as his mother administrates an orchestra which performs, early in the narrative, the work of a nameless though famous composer. Another ghost uncovered; this is as uncanny as this seminal Gothic romance has been thus far for me.).....

oh and please

Another Oreo dropped into the milk and when I'd drunk down the milk (gulped) after dipping the one still in hand (for it deserves its chance) this black disk fell down at me, spun--several times. ......
dissolved padding for the icing. This was long after the party. In my study. When it landed I was reminded of slapstick, and vowed never to mention this again. I've since told it thrice, of course.

Again, now.

again not sure, but here.

In advance you said, or at least you thought, that I'd taken up all the room with my canny head. Two in a pod, one continuously angry, always proud. Dumb subjectivity full of her father's angst. 'My favorite computer' is probably what you said once, in telling the past in words sprouting out.

No one was embarrassed when another lit up a fit, ownership. Birthday, fifth.

No one regrets having not eaten most of what I prepared--distracted? Not enough cheese, all of it melted into the very noodle, gone--overcooked?

Not quite sure. Surely nothing seemed it; I believe taste had run out, into the pan. It was a nonstick but the hot dogs were fine. Beside them, rather catty-corner, are three boxes of mac n cheese. However, Valvita. And cooked all together it's not like a stew; it's not at all like itself, it's a congealed angry mob. You know chemicals like to fight, if not each other then well fine, in you.

What has no taste must be polluted, or so Ad Busters would have us believe. See the terror in the flashy ideology, the ads disbursed for free: the editors here, theorists or inspired thereby, want to slice into corporate identity, bring on the empty center.

A very small family of ideas that must be repeated for the things they do to the shape of my prose: billowing out, yes, but contained by a catalog.

...not sure what just happened

Results matter.

It's overrotten.

Rather like our recent discussions on faith, what it does when left out.

That is, the discussion itself. I found myself supporting science like never before. I wanted lists; sick of reading Freud's Uncanny, indeed for the third time. I've tamed that particular notion; not to say I've effected it. Nor did Freud. I will do it someday perhaps--perform it--bring it out--but for now I must recognized that things that appear strange and creep us out because they are too familiar is one thing, and another might be interpreting the recurring banality and poeticizing it; finally we arrive somewhere--because we've been flung--near the banality of evil. If they each seem uncanny to me now it's because I've used them somehow, incorporated them. As in the notion has rather a stale taste; the rest is literary criticism, as he and every honest critic and professor has acknowledged. It's because it's an aesthetic phenomena, as he says in his first line: his science is with good conscience drawn from experience and literature; though it's empiricism, interactions among subjectivities, roles being played.

Regardless of the comments qualifying all this, and even if we know Freud's usual or later method...

I want him to stop talking and tell me what's happening. I'm sick of reading this essay: it has introduced two Lit courses and appeared early in Literary Criticism. English majors know that rereading is at the heart of the enterprise; no matter that I nearly had Frankenstein in three classes as well, but the prof herself was weary of teaching it--of course this is the prof now teaching the Uncanny again. No matter, it's just an essay. Scarcely a burden for the seasoned critical reader. But there is less work to be done in the domain of pulling out the latent and curiously schemetized--as in, supposedly before the critic gets a hold of it, this unconscious material is practically in three parts already.

So it goes, so we have been bred to expect; I cannot hide this anymore--I hold traditional theory in contempt, I am sick of its motifs--I see them everywhere in every class (except Paul Bruss's no doubt). Perhaps it's how they're presented to me. I suspect of course it is they themselves which deserve not mere repudiation but--parody. Which in theory is quite nice to the original source, there is a respect at the bottom of the meanest parodies, we all know. But I cannot jump from that and say I do not treat it as the original source, I see no center, nothing transcendental; no immanent justification or even first tenet--this is all so plainly abolished as to make me truly dizzy when I descend to my own immortal soul--I have retained the imagination to make the emptiness quite liveable. Of course I'm just as alienated as any intellectual--let's say for the moment that I'm that. But it's not getting any better. The Lit program is simply pestering me with old ideas that always seem at first new, while the series of syllabi undercut this. Academia's outside ties--stubborn purse strings--keep each class guided by the pressures to write theoretically...as peculiarly 'knowing' authorities.

It usually appears as putting the literary text on trial; we've heard this phrase since Sontag at least. Other instances (like on Emu's sixth floor English) though constrained by limited outside expectations, only appear to the student (if that student's me) as...a sentence that simply fell off.

actually the privilege

Now this actually went to steal time. She must have buried it. You'll tell her from no other expression, she looks the same and speaks typically in a slightly subliminal sort of way. Her tone is worth looking around for, but to know actually you'll have to rather not care.

I am mincing my words, you will notice.

There must be something poetic in the model I'm adopting. A scathing review of death itself. Now it too looks only like actually.

I'm responding ipso facto to maybe, from a show you must know. But not actually. She's borrowed from another level--she's just here looking for keys. If you think you notice hair dangling over shadowy eyes you'll notice instead the fact that you have noted that you've noticed; the problem is refraction in every boring piece of speech. And at the bottom, a unicorn.

I was introduced to infinity when I had my mirror stage; I'd been carrying the one (from a compact) and I found myself in front of my parents' dressing mirror, or this is how it's been passed down to me. I looked and I saw none other than my sufficient self--before there was a previous place to direct the energy and confidence: no self until I reached into the hall of mirrors (as it were) and pulled out this identity. I still cannot say whether it fits.

That's my crisis. Rather flimsy, already knowing itself to be false and wondering only about scale. It took no laconic theoretic jibe at the baselessness and the lack, the...all that, to illustrate the death of the subject. You'll see I simply had to already know: it was an illustration, so to speak, which brought me to know anything. The birth of the ideal, the removal from the imaginary.

There. You've got your terms.

It was just that there were far too many me's to cope with on a daily basis. They say that putting things plainly adds character to an otherwise overstuffed academic spleen--I know that's a lot, but sometimes....we must take the tone of the shit we're describing. And then every time something profane is approached, usually we warn the audience well in advance; we don't want anyone jumping just yet. The sea is swarming with the noisiest carp.

no lack's ever filled!

the Death drummer is a bit like Lars for the fact that to play his stuff well you must actually be sitting at the set--we all know the drummers of knees, remarkable demonstrations as well. But here you prove you know this by bouncing from the center--yes, the center lives on here, it provides quite the thrust; the push of the song, its goddamn bounce. In metal this is extremely valuable.

Ravens, crows, crabs and snakes have died onstage for it. They also make up for it.

cautawall--

Now I mention this because, as you will notice, there isn't a thing I can do about it: inevitable that you will stumble into a mucky pit of this....sort of music. At its worst it is the funnest thing to hate--

Really a blast to bitch about death black metal. You'll be surprised the insults that will occur to you. Who wouldn't pay to become more inventive with insulting; you'd hate to know that half your language is wasted on justifying the world to you and perhaps others---but on to vituperate, dazzling calumny. War of Words was the first time I heard Rob Halford!

Hahaha

Kreator, however.

This cannot be said of an iota of death black grind dirge, even: that throughout it's the how-they-do-it aspect of jamming to death black grind dirge, even.

Perhaps Kreator is the example of how this can go hideously wrong. One accepts that the players know this and that about the genre called death black grind (dirge). The vocalist snake-shit, he clinches the offense until you're after me for mentioning it--Kreator, to return, is bile out-your ass. Really incredibly terrible.

as I was saying, death.

As in,

The band Death has something we all thought...would at least be strange. But the rest of us know better, musicianship in death metal is simply the aesthetic--the very ground on which blood drips et cetera.

But they've got more of it, and it's better--

Listen, the singer will explain. This will positively jar you--recall that the strangest aspect of Megadeth in the Peace Sells days is that they had a drummer named Gar. Death follows that with a gently gay singer songwriter lead-guitarist: the far too modest father of death metal. This also explains why they keep the solos away from the vocals, and the band is the freest: they've got the director again. Now each is his own: solos, however, played deadpan together, stringently close: no layers, each is synced quite nice.

It startles the more you listen, I promise: forget it hasn't the flavor you'd typically appreciated applied to anything, let alone sharp musicianship.

Skit scat, ain't no body goin listen to that shit.

"No doubt you wanted to figure it out yourself; the problem with synthetic material is that it warps not what you expect,"

This couldn't have been more vague; I listen to death metal all night and I wake up thinking like this; and I can stop the semi-colon.

I know that half of them are recovering from the resentment that fueled Metallica et al, but they've lost most of their humor--thorough purges for death heads, they can also clean shockingly well if it is that time again, to punish oneself. It leads to a more thorough, messy, slam through any particular cavern of the grind.

I learned the language of criticism and I've always loved metal, so they'd say. Only now I look for what to parody critically--not so much mocking any longer, though this is how it once was played. I know, I am knowing--about death metal particularly from the base level, the foundations, the earthenware.

These are declarations of the

.