Two quick poems

…Written over the weekend:

Born On A Train

Oh, just one more of those happy sad songs. Spring is around the corner.

Fuck You – A magazine of the arts

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow. I feel pretty blown away. I’d just spent a good part of today reading through the Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts archives.

Long story short, Fuck You is Ed Sanders’ hodgepodge of a magazine “published” in New York in the 60s during the time of mimeo revolution, when clusters of writers and poets and people of all sorts printed alternative literary things by way of the cheap mimeograph printing. The magazine is printed on colored construction paper, features handwritten scribbles alongside the typeface, and is put together at a “secret location on the lower east side,”

The contributors are astounding: Ginsberg, Pound, Mailer, Carl Solomon, Auden, and so on, and the energy of the writing often frantic and out for the kill, what with the Beats’ and New York Poets’ footprints all over it.

I particularly love this cover of an androgynous child demon:

Inside of cover:

"Fuck You / The magazine read by Toe Queens"

In the same issue, a poem in Al Fowler’s series of ode to smack:

Carl Solomon:

And at the back of the issue, some contributors’ note:

CARL SOLOMON/ Shriek! Shriek! is the legendary Artaudian scholar & poet; recently ejaculated from a flip scene in Long Island & now on the freak-lone to zap back at all the creeps, fascists, psychiatrists, poets, & nutscene totalitarians, that puked their creep vectors on him these last few years.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS/ has one of the most sensitive prostates in the history of Western Civilization; he can experience a spurt scene through pure passive cornholery, sans meatbeating, testacular manipulation, & other normally attendant gropings. Burroughs ejaculates data from Northern Africa where he lives with his son and publishes his magazine.

AL FOWLER/ the brilliant New York poet and hebophile who refuses to gobble, freak, fuck or grope anything over 15 of age. A cleric in the Free Catholic CHurch, Fowler is a nurse and dope mogul at a New York hospital. His scholarship in narco experiences is fantastic, Fowler can actually experience an hallucinogenic flash thru a quick early morning gobble of a moon pie & a pepsi.

NORMAN MAILER/ is the whisper-over soldier, stomper, novelist, poet, critic, cocksman, & politician. His new novel will be spewed out by DIAL. Mr Mailer is spending the summer grassed out in P-town.

HOW FUCKING PRECIOUS.

(I borrowed everything from Jed’s archives over here, which has a pdf of every issue of Fuck You and many other pertinent, precious and rare things.)

Reading Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

Proust pic by Fernando Vicente

I have been living my final semester of college in a Proustian daze. It’s this somewhat unorthodox literature class I’m taking: we read all six volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, all 4,211 pages, in the span of 12 weeks. That’s more or less 350 pages each week. We meet once a week. The whole class is centered around loaded discussions—there are no papers, no quizzes, no grading structure. The sheer volume isn’t the worst part. It’s the cloud of Proust that you have to carry in your head, steadily growing, and growing, and growing, until you feel it in every heeeavy step in your gait. Your feet turn to lead and you wear Proust-tinted glasses, dividing the world up using “Proustian” as a frontrunning category, that sort of thing.

In the last class we discussed the fifth book in the series, called “The Fugitive and The Captive.”

Here’s what happened: We spent the first hour laboring over a “little patch of yellow wall” in a painting the narrator talks about in quite some detail. In the second hour we talked about whether or not the invention of language did us any good (the irony of using language to hold this discussion). In the third and final hour we debated over whether or no the narrator’s unusual behavior towards his sleeping girlfriend constituted rape (“was there, or was there not, penetration?”).

I walked out of the class, 11.30 at night, so preoccupied with these Proustian turns I couldn’t work on my thesis (which is very almost due). Proust is a genius, and there is an incredible deftness to his manipulation of the narrative form to accommodate the passage of time. But after 10 weeks of daily doses, some things get old. I read the text with certain pre-conceived cynicism and expectations—Oh, there he goes again, doing that whole tangential not-entirely-relevant worry that spirals into its own standalone event that is substantial enough to trigger its own tangential anxiety about itself which gets substantial enough to…you get the whole recursive picture.

Then there is the question of author intent, which is a subject up for grabs until beyond infinity. How close is the narrator, unnamed in the book, to the real Marcel Proust? What do we make of the deliberate moments in the book where the narration becomes self aware (the narrator refers to himself not as “I,” but as “the narrator,” who in the same sentence makes a reference and comparison to “the author.”)? How much should we worry, and how much should we allow for editorial mistake?

It is a book loaded with ambiguity. Nothing gets defined or settled. I can roll with that.

With that I leave you with a quote from the fifth volume. The narrator is smack in the middle of watching his sleeping girlfriend. There is something tender in this voyeuristic moment that comes very, very close to something that resembles love in the book. One of the times where the feeling is not excessively justified, and allowed to exist as is.

I would run my eyes over her, stretched out below me. From time to time a slight, unaccountable tremor ran through her, as the leaves of a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind. She would touch her hair and then, not having arranged it to her liking, would raise her hand to it again with motions so consecutive, so deliberate, that I was convinced she was about to wake. Not at all; she grew calm again in the sleep from which she had not emerged. Thereafter she lay motionless. She had laid her hand on her breast, the limpness of the arm so artlessly childlike that I was obliged, as I gazed at her, to suppress the smile that is provoked in us by the solemnity, the innocence and the grace of little children.

This scene sees our tormented narrator actually describing his girlfriend, for once, in a neutral way, after pages and pages of being pulled in every direction (jealousy, rage, melancholy). It’s in that last line: All he feels is the small urge to “suppress the smile that is provoked in us by the solemnity, the innocence and the grace of little children.” It’s beautiful. But nothing is what it seems. We barely wait a minute to savor the beauty before we are consumed by the question of his girlfriend’s uncanny tendency to show up at his house and sleep—no, pass out—in his bed, and then the question of whether or not when he later on insinuates at sex is a kind of violence (and was there penetration? all the sex scenes in the book is overt enough to constitute real sex, but he never says the word), the question of how uncanny it is to have sexual love paralleled with childlike and little children, the question of how much does Proust the author (who was gay) knew about heterosexual relationships—and so on and so forth until brain dies. The entire process is fascinating. Reading Proust is like fueling a bizarre desire for agony, yet the process is also so categorically different from what we would today call masochism. At its root it’s…otherworldly. I simply cannot walk away.

Burning Man

Today I finally went around to archiving the article I had written some time ago about Burning Man. It was my first and needless to say a surreal and incredible experience. And the article should have been shown to the world a long time ago. Click to read!

Not all is lost

Today I woke up and spent 4 hours turning my room inside out. I lifted heavy things, shifted tables, restacked books, flipped beds and shelves, and turned everything else over. Trying to keep panic under wraps I put on Soma FM’s Boot Liquor station (it’s impossible to get too overwrought when you have happy crooners going on about being drunk, being broke, tipping cows, and sitting in train yards watching the moon), but I could not find my passport ANYWHERE. It was still too early to drink. I poked my head into crooks and caught spiderwebs in my hair. Found old things that I thought I’d lost. Recovered three lighters. But no passport. Finally I rifled through all my coat pockets for what I thought was the tenth time, thinking wishful thinkings, and there the culprit was. All clean and official-looking in its passporty ways, unaware of the chaos it has caused.

In the process I found old notebooks with forgotten quotes in them, so that’s something. Here are a few:

“The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry.” (Author unspecified)

“To be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that’s the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.” – Akira Kurosawa

“But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face, but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.” – From Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”

I keep forgetting Kurosawa’s words. Never to avert my eyes. It’s so easy to turn your back on something that burns but in the process there are things that get thrown out with the bathwater too. Perhaps the wisdom is to know what to salvage and what to disregard, and that is an ongoing effort in itself.

(The photo above was taken when I visited France last summer. It’s a serendipitous shot—the sun just happened to be in the right place when I framed my camera, creating shadows in the right places. That’s what street art does. It confronts you where you don’t quite expect, incorporating the surroundings to its maximal effect. This is not all folly For my senior thesis I am writing about Hegel and street art, making the argument that street art is an example of rational agency. We do the things we do to increase our self-understanding, thereby increasing our understanding of our place in the world. It’s moving along quite happily!)

Shooting For Consistent Poetry

Lately instead of going to sleep at night I’ve been taking a smattering of naps here and there. I now understand the kitsch little signs in coffeeshops that say things like “There is too much blood in my coffee system.” Life glazed with exhaustion takes on a whole new sheen.

I don’t even feel the pounding of my own heart anymore. And always I leave the lights on. There is just too much work to do. I don’t want to forget all the things I’m trying to keep together in my head, so I keep the lights on.

The dreams are extra vivid when you sleep in short snatches under bright lights. Sleep paralysis sets in more often. Last nap I dreamt I was violently attacked by a family member, but underneath my helplessness it was love that I felt, then the dream melted into a second dream, and I was turning large apocalypse-style giant robots into gold. In that dream every thought I thought became reality. Even a short flash of thinking that someone might have died, in the harmless and anxious worst case scenario way, would cause that person to actually die. That kind of power was terrifying. Then I woke up and the sun was just about rising over the woods behind my room, and a bright orange shone through the dead tree branches as if in a show of support that says, I’m rooting for you.

Which brings me to the next thing—lately I’ve been wondering about the question of earnestness. With people my age (the twentysomethings) there is no escaping irony. I get that. Every time I am at any social gathering, where large groups of people convene, the default mode that I operate in is also one of self-deprecation. I make fun of my jobs, my studies, my writing, my philosophical meanderings, my longings, the beverage I’m holding in my hand. Pragmatically I have no problem with that.

The veil of self-inflicted jest makes me less of a stark individual, less of a threat, and easier to identify with. People talk to me, and I in turn talk to people who similarly don’t take themselves too seriously. We laugh loudly and all too gladly suffer insincerities. Hegel’s worry for modern life was exactly that we have come to live as strangers to each other and to ourselves. In a sense, homeless in our own world. It’s hard to break away from habit. The collective refusal for longing, for allowance for longing, is unmistakable.

But I do wonder: what is the problem in losing that cover more often? Can we not root for each other anymore? Surely not every voyage has to be an isolated passage at sea. If we went right ahead and differentiated ourselves to our hearts’ content, if we dared to declare the extents of our ambitions in all earnestness, if we just revealed the naked tips of the blades that cut right to the cores of our hearts—imagine how many more kindred sprits we would have and could have found in each other?

Spring Break

At the Austin Public Library I can hear soundwaves trickling faintly in the air outside. It’s SXSW time and bands are playing on every other street, everyone is merry and the town is flooded with visitors. I should go out in the sun but I feel a bit too wrapped up in Borges at the moment, stuck in my own head. I’ve only got a few more months to spend with this head of mine, after all.

A few days ago we went camping at Dripping Springs. It was that same weekend that Austin decided to devote two whole days to rain. The whole place became a mucky site trampled all over by wet hippies, but, muckiness aside, there are very few things that can compete with sleeping to the sound of rain pattering on tent. The last morning the sun finally came out, and under my bare feet I felt the soft earth turning solid and warm, and right there in between my toes I felt some sort of loose love for things yet undefined.

White Noise

Every year I fly to Malaysia without fail, but this time, this third (or was it fourth?) time of doing so, I am painfully aware of how old this has become, how old I have become. This year the route was New York>Cairo>Bangkok>Kuala Lumpur, and by the end of it I felt like I was recovering from a truck-related accident that left all the bones in my body shattered and my muscles pulled in every wrong way. I used to somewhat enjoy long stopovers, what better time to wait and read, or else write, but lately flying had just meant: A large bill at the airport bar, self-medicating while some three or four TVs surround me from each corner, blasting sports commentary. Sleeping on the plane brings me the most vivid, strange dreams (example: me giving birth to a child), and there is nothing more disconcerting than waking from a strangely personal, haunting dream, to find yourself strapped in place, neck throbbing, strangers snoring off on your side.

The Sixth Finger, The Amputated Tail

Shorter thoughts at theganges.tumblr.com.

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