Smartass Writing Ideas: Clarice Lispector Edition

Filling out an online dating profile using only sentences from Clarice Lispector novels:

1: I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became the child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth.

2: I want the inhuman inside the person; no, it isn’t dangerous, since people are human anyway, you don’t have to fight for that: wanting to be human sounds to pretty to me.

3: My own innocence? It hurts me. Because I also know that, on a solely human level, innocence is having the cruelty that the roach has with itself as it is slowly dying without pain; to go beyond pain is the worst cruelty.

4: Identity can be dangerous because of the intense pleasure that could become mere pleasure. But now I’m accepting loving the thing!

5: I, person, am an embryo. The embryo is only sensitive–that is its only particular inherence. The embryo hurts. The embryo is eager and shrewd. My eagerness is my most initial hunger: I am pure because I am eager.

6: How would you know you met your ideal partner? ” Through a love so great that it would be of such an indifferent personal–as if I were not a person. He wanted for me to be the world with Him. He wanted my human divinity, and that had to start with an initial stripping-down of the constructed human.”

7: Guess at me, guess at me because it’s cold, losing the lobster’s casings is cold. Warm me up with your guesses about me, understand me because I am not understanding me. I am only loving the roach. And it’s a hellish love.

8: Use me at least like a dark tunnel–and when you’ve crossed my darkness you’ll find yourself on the other side with yourself.

9: Identity is forbidden to me but my love os so great that I won’t resist my will to enter the mysterious fabric, into that plasma from which I may never again be able to depart.

10: What would you say to your last ex? “Ah, how I wanted pain then: it would distract me from the great divine void that I had with you.”

Sweet Dreams, Friends…

A gorgeous video to watch just before bed I thought I’d post. Even though it’s still a bit early in the evening.

Books Read, 2012 Edition:

. An incomplete list.  I’ve got over a month of time yet to make use of, so this will be getting added to in the meantime, and January will bring with it an overview of some of the notables in this list.

 

01:  A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen

02:  The Quorum, Joshua Cohen

03:  Mother Mary, Heinrich Mann

04:  In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, Andrea Weiss

05:  Above the Leaders, Alice Notley

06:  From the Beginning, Alice Notley

07:  Hermetic Definition, H. D.

08:  165 Meeting House Lane, Alice notley

09:  Phoebe Light, Alice Notley

10:  Tell Me Again/When I Was Alive, Alice Notley

11:  The Artist as Political Educator, Karin Verena Gunnemann

12:  The Blue Angel, Heinrich Mann

13:  The Box, Gunter Grass

14:  Conversations with Zizek, Ed. by Glyn Daly

15:  Autoportrait, Edouard Leve

16:  Flyover, heather June gibbons

17:  Litany for the City, Ryan Teitman

18: Fjords Vol. 1, Zachary Schomburg

19:  I Have Blinded Myself Writing This, Jess Stoner

20:  Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, Michelle Naka Pierce (Three times)

21:  A White Egg for White Death, Milan Dekleva

22:  The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

23:  Demarcations, Jean Follain

24:  Suicide, Edouard Leve

25:  Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens

26:  Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound, Andre Gide

27:  Tiresias: The Collected Poems, Leland Hickman

28:  A Fast Life: The Collected Poems, Tim Dlugos

29:  Encounter, Milan Kundera

30:  The Good Soldier Schweik, Jaroslav Hasek

31:  The Map of Human Knowledge, James Tadd Adcox

32:  Swallowing the Sea, Lee Upton

33: The Holocaust as Culture, Imre Kertesz

34:  Youth without God, Odon von Horvath

35:  In Time’s Rift, Ernst Meister

36:  Adam in Eden, Carlos Fuentes

37:  Emmaus, Alessandro Baricco

38:  The Walk, Robert Walser

39:  Thirty Poems, Robert Walser

40:  Mortality, Christopher Hitchens

41:  A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers

42:  Madame X, Darcie Dennigan

43:  The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, Antonio Tabucchi

44:  Lividity, Kim Rosenfield

45:  The Right Place to Jump, Peter Covino

46:  Everyone Has a Mouth, Ernst Herbeck

47:  Public Figures, Jena Osman

48:  Butcher’s Sugar, Brad Richard

49:  A Penance, CJ Evans

50:  Animal Eye, Paisley Rekdal

51:  MLKNG SCKLS, Justin Sirois

52: Dear, Companion, A. E. Watkins

53:  Theophobia, Bruce Beasley

54:  Predatory, Glenn Shaheen

55:  I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, Anthony Madrid

56:  The Talking Day, Michael Klein

Your Saturday Andante…

…is from Henselt’s rarely-heard piano concerto, one of the great concertos that aren’t heard much anymore, here heard performed by Marc-Andre Hamelin.  The second section of this movement (starting at 2:40) gets complicated enough to require four staves.

The concerto served as inspiration and basis of Rachmaninov’s famous prelude in C# minor.

The Library of Babel

Never being able to read all of the books in one’s library is one of the things that book-readers eventually have to resign themselves to.  One of the reasons for this is that, as one goes, more and more books move to the “to be reread” pile, and, of these there are books that can stand to be reread repeatedly.  Combine that with new discoveries and purchases, the books of friends and idols as they come out, and you have an almost infinite regression.  A fragmented, fragmentary attempt at such a “To be reread” list:

Macedonio Fernandez, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel).

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions

Albert Camus, Notebooks

Heimito von Doderer:  The Demons

Fyodor Dostoevsky:  The Demons

Hermann Hesse:  The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Broch:  The Death of Virgil

Gunter Grass: Too Far Afield

Adam Robinson’s “Say, Poem”

My review for Adam Robinson’s wonderful book is now up at The Lit Pub, where you can also buy it…

Walter Benjamin–The Arcades Project

“Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld–a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise.  All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors.  By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries leading into the city’s past) issue unremarked into the streets.  At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past–unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.”

–Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Chicken Sandwiches and Arson

 

Over the past month I’ve heard all sorts of nonsense on social issues.  Hell, in the past 25 years which is as long as I’ve thought about them, I’ve heard  nonsense on social issues.  Much of it not based on fact, much of it hurtful. Much of it from people who were and are speaking from positions that are resting on the suppression or exclusion of other people to maintain their exclusivity.  This suppression, and often the exclusivity too, is often not even on the radar of those that have the good fortune of being within the boundary of the gold cord. If people who live outside that boundary take offense at certain things that are said by such privileged folk, the privileged folk often blink and look on in wonder.  Though this phenomenon isn’t at all new (“Let them eat cake” is just one of an extended series of blunders in this mess), I plan to limit my subject to what appears to be, at first glance, about chicken sandwiches. But it isn’t about chicken sandwiches.

After CEO Dan Cathy’s interview in which he stated explicitly his views on same-sex marriage, which came as a surprise, really, to no one, there were immediate reactions and immediate polarization.  While Santorum and Palin had their self-serving photo ops with bags of junk food, mayors of certain large metropolitan areas overstepped the law by saying, also self-servingly, that such businesses were never to set up shop within their boundaries. Gay activists, including people I knew, were planning sit-ins where they choked various restaurants staging kiss-ins or ordering cups of water rather than actual food. There are certainly better things to do than to sit in line to make Chik-Fil-A lose a nickel per person, and that is one of the many reasons I wasn’t at all interested in helping that particular restaurant gain any more publicity regarding this very public stance that the CEO and part-owner of the company took. I feel primarily, on a non-personal level, for the various owners of the franchises, who are the ones that are in the direct line of fire. They are the unfortunate ones that have to deal with the public comments of their upper-level administration. And though one feels for them, the money from their franchises goes to support not only said CEO and part-owner, but also—through the company’s donations—various anti-gay lobbying efforts, including organizations whose purpose is to help make homosexuality a capital offense in various parts of Africa.

But this isn’t even about fast food franchises or the money they make. There is, certainly, a merely Capitalist way to look at this—a way to see this limited to the idea of “well if you don’t like how they do business, then don’t do business with them.” The issue is where things get a bit problematic in the Facebook/Social media world; it’s more than the CEO blabbing on about things, and more than buying sandwiches that’s at stake.  Let’s say a company makes a public stand on race. In the meantime, let’s put aside the fact that there are currently laws (less than 60 years old, by the way) against this.  Let’s say a fast food restaurant does something like refusing to serve non-white customers and then, when the media blows up about it, has a CEO go on record saying “guilty as charged,” in an interview, using Biblical (as has certainly been authoritatively done in the past) or other religious-text reference as backup.  Considering Ron Paul’s and others’ stated stance on businesses and civil rights legislation, this isn’t particularly out of the realm of possibility in the future.  When people then go online in support of said restaurant, is it solely about burgers?  It isn’t.  It is about tacit approval of racism. If someone responds with “Hey, I’m all about putting on a crazy outfit on [restaurant] approval day so I can get a free burger,” they are not saying that they are about freedom.  They are not saying that they approve of the Capitalist system playing itself out.  Anyone with these particular ideas in play would make great pains to say so with explicit and carefully-worded caveats.  To go all out without reservation for Cathy’s, Santorum’s, and the Palins’s publicity in support of what [restaurant] stands for is saying not that they like the restaurant or their food, or the freedom that they say it represents.  They are saying, in unmistakable terms, that they approve of the racism that the restaurant CEO has explicitly put forth in his statement.

When I’ve used this example, people made the point that Chick-Fil-A doesn’t refuse service to gay people.  That’s true.  But mostly they’ve asked, with a degree of incredulity, whether I equated race with sexuality.  The (I hesitate to use the word “hangup”) disconnect here seems to be that, to my commenters, race is something you’re “born with” and that sexuality is something that is either something you “choose” or, primarily, something you do.  There are gay celibates, but they remain gay, so it is more than the act itself, regardless of gender.  Regarding “choice,” even “gay-therapy” advocates have shown that prayer or other more insidious modes of reprogramming are ineffective in changing same-sex attraction. Not that this has been of any impedance to family members sending me, unsolicited materials on programs I can go to have myself discreetly “reprogrammed.” The argument here is less about the reality of the situation and more about the discomfort such people have with folks that aren’t like them.  And such people have the audacity to take offense when these “other” people aren’t hip to putting themselves through anything less than years of agony to make the crowd more “comfortable.” Such people have the chutzpah to ask that gay folks not “get personal” in response to comments made on their position in society, which is, of course, a personal attack in itself. Or perhaps I’m misreading the statement: is “we like you, but we don’t really think people like you should be thought of in the same way as us” not to be understood as a personal attack?

Speaking of statements, considering so much of them are being made in social media; when people make public comments in a public forum such as Facebook, said comments are up for commentary.  As a writer and academic, I understand and teach that one of the main tenets of academic discourse is the discourse. What gets put out on a public forum needs to stand up to facts. When various people made an effort to go public not only with the coverage of the Chick-Fil-A controversy, but that they were excited about donning cow costumes in support of Chik-Fil-A, I took them at their word; not only were they up for the tasty sandwiches, they were up for supporting the company spokesman’s statement in the midst of the ideological adversity it was experiencing.   When I forwarded a list of outspokenly anti-gay businesses so as to make their shopping choices easier, I was told that I was in bad form; I could have made my disapproval known, but there was no need “to make things personal.”  What these folks don’t seem to understand is that by making their approval public, they made it personal, as I’ve already mentioned. They made sure to let me know that that was how they felt, in spite of the fact that they knew I was gay.  They made sure to let me know that not only was being gay bad, but that gay people had no recourse to equal treatment under law, and, in the specific context of CEO Cathy’s statement, such people such as me had no place within “the Biblical definition of family.” I could simply remain silent and thus give tacit approval of such statements, or I could respond, saying that I was not fine with being written out of my family, was not fine with other people deciding that I did not have the same rights in this country, was not fine with other people deciding what sort of caring relationship I could have.

Twenty years ago, I found myself in the awkward position of speaking in front of a bank of TV news cameras as a college undergraduate to a city council deliberating on adding the words “sexual orientation” to the city’s nondiscrimination statement.  Assembled were a great number of people warning the council that they would be voted out, that majority ruled, and that they were the majority, and that they should, for God’s sake, think of the children, think of the families that would be ruined. With notes I wrote on the spot in a spiral notebook and without the knowledge or support of my family, I spoke at the podium about equal treatment under law while upstanding citizens sneered and hissed behind me. As I left the meeting, they clutched their bibles and muttered horrible things.  Before the summer was over, my mail was routinely destroyed, threatening phone calls were made. People tried—and nearly succeeded—in setting my apartment on fire while I slept. The police were uncooperative. I’m hardly alone, telling a story like this. Actually I suppose I could say I am lucky.  I should count my lucky stars I woke up in time to see the arm extended into the bedroom window after the screen was removed, and was able to clap out the flame creeping up the foam-backed drapes. Why I should take personally mere statements about support for chicken sandwiches is obviously mere oversensitivity on my part. Remaining silent while people assume I’m idiotic enough not to see that they aren’t just “excited about Chick-Fil-A” is simply not an option.  And if people think it is simply about chicken sandwiches, they need to take a closer look.

Frippertronics and Writing

I think this could be a mode for production of poetic texts just as well as musical ones…the formal description of the Frippertronics method is here, but any variation of it could be applied to writing in general, with arbitrarily-repeating input (with any manner of modification) being re-input as new material is added.

The Best of What I’ve Read, Version 2011

This, this blogposting thing, is something I should do more often. A Year-end post is as good a place as any to start. Reading this year was a bit of a mess as far as documentation was concerned–I spent the summer away from home and neglected to pack the book in which I’ve been recording the books I’ve read since 1995.  But I’ll do my best to reconstruct.

These are in no particular order.  And I was going to have a list of at least ten, but here’s what I’ve got:

—The Avian Gospels by Adam Novy.  I reviewed this book earlier in the year for Cow Heavy, and the review will soon be on Lit Pub’s (wonderful, wonderful) site as well.  Wonderfully written, beautifully published, and worth rereading.

—Best European Fiction 2011, edited by Alexandar Hemon.  I’m working my way through the 2012 installment of this wonderful series (and that volume is sure to appear on next year’s best-of list), but the 2011 collection has astounding work, from a tale of artistic expression under the heel of political repression by Michal Ajvaz (honestly, more of his novels need to appear in translation),  to Frode Grytten’s beautifully portrayed dissolution of a marriage in “The Railway Station.”  It’s my hope that the inclusion of these authors in this anthology leads to more of their respective works to be translated into English for a wider readership.

—Normally Special by xTx. Appearances shall deceive.  Harrowing stuff for such a small book.  People on the bus will see you reading that brightly colored little thing and have no idea what you’re going through.  Get it get it.

—Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1, Edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg.  This was my summer of avant-garde poetry, and at over 830 pages, this was a sizable chunk of that summer.  You’ll find important works here that you can find nowhere else in English, mainly because this is the first time they’ve been translated into English.  Representative work by important members of influential movements.

—Atomised, by Michele Houellebecq.  “…outside the strict confines of history, the ultimate ambition if this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us.  This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, had such noble aspirations.  Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome, it was capable of extraordinary violence, but nonetheless never quite abandoned a belief in love.”  Houllebecq has been in the press quite a bit in the past year or so, and not only due to his mysterious disappearance.  I really was on the fence about putting this on the list, in that I didn’t like it.  This, however, seems a rather shallow determining factor, considering how much the book affected me after finishing it.  I thought about it for days.  Sure, it’s explicit.  Sure, it’s occasionally irrritating, but it’s unforgettable.

—The City, Our City by Wayne Miller.  A beautifully-unified collection of poems that explores the idea of City. My review of it appears in this month’s edition of The Sycamore Review, available now.

—The Book of Hours by Marianne Boruch.  This book is a departure of sorts for Boruch. The control, the intensity of her earlier work is here, applied to what could be seen as a book-length poem.  A series of untitled poems, in quatrains, that portray the events surrounding the death of her mother and the writer’s dialogue with herself on the dificulty of “how do I write this?  What do I do to get this to stick to paper?”  Beautifully written.

—The Songs and Stories of the Ghouls by Alice Notley.  I admit I’m a bit of a freak fan of Notley.  I don’t entirely understand what’s going on in all of her astonishingly-burgeoning oeuvre (her recent Reason and Other Women remains mostly opaque to me), but she’s interesting. Her classic Descent of Alette was the result of Notley wanting to write a feminine epic.  Such stories had been told only from the masculine point of view. This latest book grabs at women in mythology:  Dido, Medea.  “Nothing is changeable except for a myth.  Let’s change that.”  Power, even in the hands of women, was only there to give to men:  “No one really believes in her power, I assure you.  She is only allowed it as an adjunct to her passion.  She can’t just have it.  No woman is as yet allowed that.”