November 2011
23 posts
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For Gombrowicz, men, “those eternal actors,” are shaped by each other, by their mutual seeing of each other. Man is “adapting” every instant to what is expected of him, according to his role—thus, schoolboys expect dirty words and bragging from each other. True individuality is unattainable, for man is always enmeshed in interdependences with other human beings....
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“Everything that ever happened either
never did or always will with variations....”
– Al Young “How the Rainbow Works” from The Vintage Book of African American Poetry
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Archaeologists have recently decided that we can designate the beginning of civilization in the concept of sharing the same kill, in which simple idea we can see the inception of the family, the community, the state. Of disintegrating marriages we note that Jack and Jill are no longer sleeping together when the real break is when they are no longer eating together. The table is the last unassailed...
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But the only real thing reading does for anyone is to shut them up for a few hours, and let the other senses function as usefully as the mouth. Quiet already, a young man will grow sullen. Sullen, he will grow into stone. But any “normal” most times noisy city half-slick young college type hipster will close his mouth for all times, so ugly will have been the nature of his...
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There was no one to whom I might tell an obvious fact: Kappa Gamma Pi was too expensive for me.
I was a scholarship student, I had virtually no “spending money” as it’s called. Of course I knew this before pledging yet somehow had ignored the fact like a diver who suspects that the water into which she wants to dive is freezing, and lethal, yet she dives into it just the same....
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-I was out spiriting around and this dog got restless one night and went out wandering, and some people came and found my body and thought me dead and took it off and buried it, so when I came back the next morning I had nowhere to go, and I had to find a body to go back into or my spirit would die. And I looked around and I saw the dog coming home, but when he saw me he ran off, and I saw a...
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“Outlaws claw mostly to a riddled end,
the close of their stories known. The...”
– John Berryman, “Sonnet 116” from Sonnets to Chris
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KOSMO: She was lying facedown between two double beds with her right hand holding the phone so hard that the veins were standing out on her thumb. She had a squirrel fur wrapped around her neck with little black eyes that stared out at me. There were ostrich feathers lying around on the rug and blowing into the air-conditioning. The air-conditioner made this high, whining sort of sound. The sound...
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It reminds me of a conversation in the book Drylongso, a book of interviews between black anthropologist John Gwaltney and residents of black communities around the United States. Gwaltney is blind—a fact he considers an asset to his work, for people feel they should obey the injunction to help “the sick and afflicted.” His blindness was an important element in his interview with...
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The difference between Einstein and Kafka, both sons of middle-class middle-European families, both of whom found life in the ordinary world intolerably dreary: Einstein escaped the world by science, that is, by transcending not only the world but the Cosmos itself. Kafka also escaped his predicament—occasionally—not by science but by art, that is, by seeing and naming what had...
