No. 42
The untenably areopagitica’d machinations of the geezers up the hill adamantly nursing an heroic chronology, pianissimo and grand. Er, grandissimo. Disastrous interrogatory what?’s ensue. Of a sepia’d quince in the meridian. Of tansy in a bottle. Guy in a ballooning red parka jawing inanely with guy in a pre-rumpled Burberry, iconic as a fetish, or a snit. Something something the John the Revelator cookie campaign. The recorder’s bench henchmen, a big sign for the benefit of: ALL DISTURBANCES YOUTUBE’D. Tucked into a dank corner of the enormous philodendron (Gk. neuter form = lover of dead wood) that inexplicably attempts to shield the sitcom-manner’d judge of the proceedings, there teems a colony of aphids, a sticky green jumble for the ‘herboringe of pore men’ busily sucking each other off to irregular salvo noises contre la relève . . . Yuh. There’s one now lobbing a sausage sandwich down into the agora, missing a mouth-sized chunk. There’s the usual bob prosody of the unlight’d white cigarette in the mouth of a trash talker. There’s a ‘dunce of the uncanny’ contest with canned mitraillette noises off. And all the other loitering gearheads with slack breviaries and murderous synopses ‘out,’ rarely hinder’d and dis-inur’d: approv’d and licenc’t by such and so . . .
—Friday’s gaseousness and bile in a cup. I like how Jonty Tiplady writes (in “Disney Roofs”):
Wisping, ammazzaloroso, hitched ontoAnd:
a little pianism, a tender
nothing, noted, given up, said aloud
for fear of immodesty in not saying.
Manic liebsflowermilk of word ghouls, put paper on floorOut of Zam Bonk Dip (Salt, 2010). Tenderness in the ha-ha’s, or ho-ho’s. Rare the monitory clause, or pre-figurement. “Harmless delight mindfluke”—revelatory innocence, awe, quoi. (See, par contre, Barthes talking about “that excess of expression by which the narrator is expelled from himself, poisoned with awareness, overwhelmed by the ‘inexpressible individual weight.’” The name, according to Barthes, for “this enemy language” is
print life, um, unlikely words is what I only love.
Literature, not only institutional and social, but also internal, that ready-made cadence which ultimately determines the ‘stories’ which happen to us, since to feel, unless you are constantly on the lookout, is also to name.And: “Orpheus cannot turn round, he must keep going forward and must sing what he desires without giving it thought: the only way of finding the right word is by profoundly dodging away [toute parole juste ne peut etre qu’une esquive profonde].”)
(Tiplady, in “Zam Bonk Dip”: “It’s always time to sing again / careless soul. Error laughs error’s socks / off, let’s record everything in Sunshine Hotel.”)
Reading, a few pages a day, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Journal, 1966-1974 (Éditions Gallimard, 2008). Fragments of autobiography: “Premier paragraphe autobiographique. À bas la narration raisonnée.” Follow’d by a series of succinct self-incriminatory assessments:
Duplicité extrême. Extrême duplicité. Copier les devoirs. Tricher aux compositions. Ne pas travailler. Il vaut mieux risquer un zéro qu’avoir travaillé deux heures. Je raconte les aventures du Satyre paralytique à mes camarades. Les Martiens envahissent la terre et confisquent toute les verges qu’ils entreposent dans le Parthénon. Les femmes, avides d’être prises, se donnent aux Martiens. Les hommes, sous la conduite du Satyre paralytique, s’emparent du Parthénon, récupèrent leurs membres. Défaite des Martiens.Roughly:
Deceit extreme. Overweening deceit. Copying homework assignments. Cheating at compositions. Doing no work at all. Better to risk a zero mark than to have to work a couple hours. I relate the adventures of the Paralytic Satyr to my companions. Martians invade the earth and confiscate all the men’s dicks, making a stockpile in the Parthenon. Women, craving to be took, offer themselves up to the Martians. The men, led by the Paralytic Satyr seize the Parthenon, and recover their members. Defeat of the Martians.Ça me plaît énormément with its own “Manic liebsflowermilk of word ghouls . . .” Rubric of evading “Literature” by means of the beguilements of genre and self-amusement’s own formal contemptuousness. And what if one were to détourne Manchette’s own Marxist rehash and iterancy “De même que l’humanité ne se pose que les problèmes qu’elle peut résoudre, l’idéologue ne résout que des problèmes qu’il peut poser (infliger) [Just as mankind puts to itself only such problems as it can solve, that it can resolve, the ideologue only solves such problems as he’s capable of putting forth (inflicting)]”? How about: “Just as content only asks the questions it is able to answer, form only answers the questions it is able to ask.” Twelve-thirty or so, tangled in the sticky bedclothes, I look’d rather too fixedly into that formulation and suspect’d myself of being on the “verge” of going nuts.
