It's best to turn yourself into a ghost or phantom. If you want to explore the oddness of other situations.
Okay. Do it now.
Good.
Now float inside your head. Until you see some people gathered in a room. The center of this gathering is someone you know or don't know very well. Maybe an internet friend. So you want to sense what it's like to be in that person's milieu. You don't really want to know what it's like as such. Rather you want to experience, hypothetically, how pleasurably tragic and odd it would be to not be an integral part of that milieu.
If I were a French philosopher, I would frame it with special words, like "difference." I would make up phrases like "abyssal frisson" or "null spectacle" or "the opiate of infinite separation" or "exquisite cruxness of unbelonging."
Think of it!
It would be like walking into a strange house that smells like a strange house. This is not your house.
While you are floating invisibly on the ceiling, you look down and observe the others. Their gestures would be almost extra-terrestrial. A semiotics of dreamy insularity. The conversation would be in words you know, yet the meanings would be dubious or unavailable. You will feel wonderfully miserable, wincingly fascinated. Aloof and adrift, almost illicit.
Well...the above is what I was thinking about just now.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Mitt Romney...
...lives in a partly real world of weird privilege, weird wealth, weird religion, and galloping egoism.
He is not a serious human being. Just a bizarre oily mist in unnerving bipedal form. His most substantial characteristic is mendacity. Apparently for him, politics and life in general are a kind of game. To me, he represents a smiling, creepy nihilism.
He is not a serious human being. Just a bizarre oily mist in unnerving bipedal form. His most substantial characteristic is mendacity. Apparently for him, politics and life in general are a kind of game. To me, he represents a smiling, creepy nihilism.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
oh no!...
If that bubble triple-gun turret is also magic, then there is no solution -- no offense, no defense, no hope. Only acquiescence in the inevitable, followed by utter despondency.
 |
| 1957 |
raise your hand...
...if you think this Italo Calvino thing is swell:
"The Flash"
I first came across this thing at Biblioklept, but I prefer the format linked above.
"The Flash"
I first came across this thing at Biblioklept, but I prefer the format linked above.
this is just wrong
Bunnies are not like that at all. No way.
This is warped and visually slanderous!
it's remarkable
In other words, I find it worth remarking on. It's a kind of mystery. I don't know what it means.
Almost all the poems I encounter on Facebook and on personal blogs range from not very good to astonishingly bad. Some instantly alter my brain chemistry, filling the space between my synapses with sulfur dioxide, making my eyes sweat and burn.
Almost all the poems I read by people who get published in journals and in small presses range from not very good to astonishingly bad.
Almost all the poems I read by prize winners and laureates range from not very good to astonishingly bad.
A great poem is a rare thing. Even a really good one is unusually hard to come upon.
What's going on?
Why write poems if those poems are not on the aesthetic level of Keats's To Autumn or something by Pavese or Tranströmer?
I don't buy the argument that it's all a matter of subjective taste. That those poems I deem sucking can still be good or great poems if someone else thinks they don't suck. I may not have amounted to much, but I have, gradually, become this (more so recently, for some reason): hyper sensitive to what is on the highest level of aesthetic creation. That will just have to suffice as my counter argument.
I do realize that writing can have an experiential meaning, regardless of the quality of work. Falling into the trance of words while making a poem can bring a sense of adventure, fantasia, and color to a consciousness. But after writing the poem, a certain aesthetic judgment should kick in to prevent inferior work from entering public space.
I wish I had thought of this two or three years ago. I would not have sent my own poems into the public arena. But what's done is done. And I'm way too lazy to withdraw my poem collections.
The mystery persists: why are so many people writing so many poems that aren't great or even good poems? It almost seems like a mass contagion of poetic hysteria. Or a tsunami of lines and stanzas coming ashore with unflappable, unrevised determination.
Only the most well-crafted and aesthetically astounding poems should be written. Or at least only those should be publicly offered. Otherwise, I don't understand what's happening at all.
Almost all the poems I encounter on Facebook and on personal blogs range from not very good to astonishingly bad. Some instantly alter my brain chemistry, filling the space between my synapses with sulfur dioxide, making my eyes sweat and burn.
Almost all the poems I read by people who get published in journals and in small presses range from not very good to astonishingly bad.
Almost all the poems I read by prize winners and laureates range from not very good to astonishingly bad.
A great poem is a rare thing. Even a really good one is unusually hard to come upon.
What's going on?
Why write poems if those poems are not on the aesthetic level of Keats's To Autumn or something by Pavese or Tranströmer?
I don't buy the argument that it's all a matter of subjective taste. That those poems I deem sucking can still be good or great poems if someone else thinks they don't suck. I may not have amounted to much, but I have, gradually, become this (more so recently, for some reason): hyper sensitive to what is on the highest level of aesthetic creation. That will just have to suffice as my counter argument.
I do realize that writing can have an experiential meaning, regardless of the quality of work. Falling into the trance of words while making a poem can bring a sense of adventure, fantasia, and color to a consciousness. But after writing the poem, a certain aesthetic judgment should kick in to prevent inferior work from entering public space.
I wish I had thought of this two or three years ago. I would not have sent my own poems into the public arena. But what's done is done. And I'm way too lazy to withdraw my poem collections.
The mystery persists: why are so many people writing so many poems that aren't great or even good poems? It almost seems like a mass contagion of poetic hysteria. Or a tsunami of lines and stanzas coming ashore with unflappable, unrevised determination.
Only the most well-crafted and aesthetically astounding poems should be written. Or at least only those should be publicly offered. Otherwise, I don't understand what's happening at all.
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