jadbalja

[jadbalja]

On mass culture eating itself, the current creative desert, etc. (part 1A)

[text here] denotes a reply or an editorial comment for continuity

K: Oh and I started playing that game Cyberpunk 2077 A: Aw video games. I remember them. I played them K: I think I need to play more. I think it's healthier (for me) to play something I'm actively engaged in rather than passively watching. A: Yes I always thought so A: Problem solving, some motor skills, hand-eye coordination. And minor adrenaline rush A: All good for one, if one is going to be immobile anyway … K: https://www.instagram.com/p/C27uSeho0r9/ K: Reminds me of a bit I read in an autobiography of a US ambo who was in the UK in Bush W's time (I think Reymond Seitz?) Where he referenced the ultimate redeeming quality of the British, which was the capacity to make fun of themselves. A: I think a lot of cultures have it. India has tons of videos and content deriding Indians for typically Indian things. So does the USA. But I am not sure the Japanese put out a lot of stuff making fun of themselves. At least not intentionally … K: Not sure if you saw this, but just in case… https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1762934445634416679 K: I feel they're not exactly striking while the iron was hot… K: We're closer to the year Neuromancer was supposed to be in than the year it was written in K: In 1984 the novel was almost visionary. Today, I fear it will come out like a second-rate Altered Carbon type of show. K: One wonders if they're going to replace all the anachronisms. Like will all the Japanese tech suddenly become Chinese? K: Or, will they go full throttle and depict the kind of cyberpunk future artists imagined in the 1980's? A: [Not sure if you saw this, but just in case… …] don't know how I feel about this A: [In 1984 the novel was almost visionary. …] And Altered Carbon dipped significantly from season 2 A: Though so far Apple's sci-fi shows have been pretty good. They did a good job with Asimov's Foundation, albeit that I find that the show drags a bit K: Same. It feels too late for Neuromancer. Also, I thought "The Peripheral" was a bit flat. A: I can't remember if the original novels did or not. It's been a long time since I read them A: I am going to look up Graham Roland/JD Dillard A: yes, I stopped watching it. But there the source material was not the best. I read that book (one of the few new Gibson outputs I did finish). A: (talking about The Peripheral) K: True, but, I am not thrilled with Apple at the moment, based on their recent sci-fi release "Constellation." They seem to have taken an excellent French sci fi show from a couple years ago and basically are stealing from its plot. It's ironic Noomi Rapace is the star, since Hollywood did this to her own performances in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies.

#sci-fi #culture #Gibson #Apple TV

[jadbalja]

On mass culture eating itself, the current creative desert, etc. (part 1B)

A: [regarding Gibson] his near-future work is political and not particularly emotionally resonant. Can't really get into it. I also don't like Chloee Moretz - which had a lot to do with my reaction to that show K: Although those were direct remakes. Constellation is basically kind of stealing from a show called Infiniti, which was excellent (but not released in the US.) K: I don't really know who she is outside of that show. I just found the world-building a bit shallow. "Oh no, there's been a pandemic, a nuclear explosion, and kleptocrats run the world." Not very imaginative. A: I got to Ep. 8 of that French show you liked - with the monsters and vaguely Cowboy Bebop vibe K: Lastman? A: there's a surfeit of sci-fi out there. "The Kitchen" is barely worth the term sci-fi, but it's a recent British offering A: [Lastman?…] yeah K: Lastman is great. There is a Season 2 also btw. A: hmm mm I have to get through some other material first A: I'm working through For All Mankind right now so other stuff is in abeyance K: I've seen The Kitchen on I think Netflix or Amazon but haven't watched it yet. A: don't bother, unless you basically want current race politics pasted onto a future reality which is more or less an unimaginative resource crunched dystopia K: I liked For All Mankind A: so far it's been good - I'm waiting for it to spring forward in time to the near-present A: the forced Latina janitor's daughter is a math genius thing seemed a bit off. But that was the only thing. K: Sometimes it do be like that, though K: There's a character in the latest season I find annoying. But it's still good sci fi. K: Although I feel the initial conceit - that the Russians got to the moon first, and how that affected the space program - gets a bit diluted as the show progresses. A: yes I'll stick with it A: well, I like that it's seen as a stimulus and not the carrying theme. After all, that would be the reality too A: in this reality, Robert Kennedy wins the presidency, goes hard for the moonbase. They find water (which we still haven't located 100% in this reality) and go from there A: back to Neuromancer - this guy J D Dillard - his work so far doesn't tell me much and also doesn't inspire confidence he can handle this material K: Yeah I see he did the remake of "Utopia" which doesn't inspire confidence. K: Actually, like Neuromancer, it was extremely untimely. A: [Actually, like Neuromancer, it was extremely untimely. …] spectacularly, given it was in the midst of the pandemic. I did watch that season. Never watched the original British version K: I watched the original, season 1. It was good. I started the second season but didn't finish it. But the second season had a couple of Game of Thrones actors in their pre-Game of Thrones eras. K: Another very hard to find Blu Ray, the second season. Oddly, there is no UK version, despite it being a British show. The only country that produces it is Germany.

#sci-fi #culture #Neuromancer #Apple TV

[jadbalja]

On mass culture eating itself, the current creative desert, etc. (part 2) A: it's probably worth watching the UK version only A: this Roland/Dillard combo is very uninspiring for a novel of this seminal nature. I have trepidation. But then I had the same for Sandman and that turned out okay K: I confess I didn't see the US remake. John Cusack annoys me and there was no way it could live up to the original. Plus as you said, I didn't feel like watching a show about evil vaccines was comforting during the pandemic, when there was plenty of that nonsense in real life. A: the strip mining of the 80s/90s cultural landscape for material in our currently depleted creative industry continues K: Yeah, sometimes they get it right, like Sandman. K: I feel like Neuromancer could never have had its day though. For the 80's and most of the 90's, it would have been too speculative for most showrunners to portray without looking silly. Then suddenly the cyberpunk future arrived, and it wasn't quite what Neuromancer predicted, and overnight it became dated. K: Johnny Mnemonic was about as close as it came to a 90's Neuromancer. A: [..feel like Neuromancer could never have had its day though. …] though now with Musk's Neuralink, some people are thinking "jacking in" might be possible in the near future K: But I can't write if off entirely because as Cyberpunk 2077 (both the game and anime) showed, there's still juice in the genre, and depicting that kind of world. A: [Johnny Mnemonic was about as close as it came to a 90s Neuromancer …] I liked Johnny Mnemonic. And that too was Gibson K: Yes re things like Neuralink, but we're sort of 2/3's there now compared to 1984 when the book was written. What I meant was more that we know already that so much of cyber culture is going to be kind of mundane, full of grifts and so forth, an evolution of human nature rather than a revolution. Intellectual minnows like Musk look at books like Neuromancer and now try to backwards-develop their realities, rather than those books being prophecies as they once were. K: Yes there's stuff yet to come with AI and it will be interesting to see how the show portrays them. I recall the AI that got Swiss citizenship in the book, still a very fun thought experiment in ethics, philosophy, law, etc. Just a matter of time before it happens. K: But… like those robots from the 1940's who could "talk" and smoked cigarettes and whatnot, first we'll see silly things like that robot person the UAE called its first robot citizen. K: With Musk in particular it's hard to say where Neuralink is on the spectrum from making an interesting display centerpiece through groundbreaking scientific development, because he has enough money that he could conceivably hire the right people who use it wisely and make real breakthroughs. Or, it could all just be PR bluster. K: He apparently can make rockets. Can't run a social media platform to save his life. And his cars are a bit iffy. So, mixed bag. A: I think Neuralink has some way to go and he’s not the only one working on a brain-tech interface. MIT was demonstrating some such stuff a few years ago. A: To me the gap between the world in Neuromancer and the one we actually have (without a Neuralink possibility) is one of the mundane taken to its technological apex vs the human struggle taken to a technological abstraction. “Breaking ice” for hacking, artisanal objects for surfing the web, an underground ethic to the outsiders working in tech, and existential dilemmas of AI. Versus of course, today’s reality - machine computation cheapening real creativity, the web as an extension of cultural stagnation in another form, and mass produced and commodified tech interfaces. A: The 80s cyberpunk is an aesthetic state of being, I think, more than a template for a prediction. Now in nostalgia, it is a lament for what we could have had and did not get K: Yes you've summed it up perfectly.

#sci-fi #culture #Neuralink #William Gibson #Neuromancer

[jadbalja]

On mass culture eating itself, the current creative desert, etc. (part 3)

K: I find it an odd coincidence that this week alone I've both heard about the term "Douglas Adams era of tech" as well as the Glasgow Willy Wonka event, which both in their way are basically death-knells for a certain vision of technology that we had in the early internet days. K: The odd coincidence being also the rebirth of Neuromancer being announced in the same week, I meant to add. K: It seems a bit like they're propping up the patient just a second after he actually died. A: Hah, I saw that Glasgow Willy Wonka tableau. It was so dire. I almost thought it was a Scottish “fuck you” to corporatized entertainment for children K: As best I can tell, it seems like the person who organized it had some strange beliefs about what AI can and can't do on it's own. A: Douglas Adams as a quixotic or whimsical take on SF is not really done any more. Doctor Who is so far up its own political arse that it’s not fun. A: I missed the AI aspect of it beyond the fact that they used some AI tool to gussy up the venue K: I haven't seen any of the new Doctor Who after the first season with Billie Piper. It just doesn't hit the same as when I was younger. K: [about Glasgow Willy Wonka …] Apparently it was almost entirely conceived by AI, from the scripts, the "plot," the characters, even the advertising. A: [about Doctor Who …] You might as well avoid it altogether. I did watch the recent Christmas specials - only the first K: [about Douglas Adams …] I never read him but I sense that Terry Prachett may have been the Fantasy version of Douglas Adams, in that he had a sense of the absurd. A: [about recent Doctor Who special …] It was okay, it had some classic elements and brought that guy from the reboot back. But the body switching and race/gender swaps are making it hard to keep the character’s aesthetic straight for me. I get why they would do it and applaud it - however that doesn’t make me want to watch it. A: [I never read him but I sense that Terry…] I think you would enjoy Hitchhiker’s Guide a lot K: [about Doctor Who special…] It seems very fast, also, compared to the pre-Reboot Dr. Who, where he switched bodies basically once a generation, not every season. A: [about Douglas Adams still …] You should try it. Some of his humor is black without being obsidian if you know what I mean K: Oh I've read Adams and loved Hitchiker's Guide! I meant I haven't read Prachett. A: [about Doctor Who…] Yeah, it’s the new paradox of genre viewing - you applaud their reasons for casting and plotting but don’t really feel like watching it all the same. It’s like nutritious food. I like that it exists but don’t really want to eat it. I want the old messy ethically cancerous White Male driven slop. K: Yes, there's a difference between what you feel is right from a societal view versus what you really feel like watching here and now.

#sci-fi #Doctor Who #Douglas Adams #culture

[jadbalja]

"The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by its variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols." W.B. Yeats in The Symbolism of Poetry

#poetry #Yeats #quote #electronic music

[jadbalja]

A night in older Delhi Two sheep grey-white in the orange light of street lamps lick salt from a wet patch at the crossroad Half-glimpsed, a simple plea from the makers of Favre Leuba watches breaks the mist over the abandoned cinema hall Cart horses having worked the day to its death wrap the night around whip lashed bodies, now suddenly satin. As the late-shift traffic warden semaphores at me "the way is clear for angels", a skeletal dog hesitates in-between rushing cars unable to get across, yet unable to die The midnight sky captures a million murmured breaths echoing the city's drone as the drunk walks the empty highway majestic, alone. A bottle smashes, two pigeons rise startled and are swallowed by the moon January 2000

#poetry

[jadbalja]

The Fireflies

"Mature fireflies which emit light have extremely short life spans of two to three weeks and are traditionally regarded as a symbol of impermanence"

There were fireflies about, even a few weeks ago. I suppose now they are dead, buried in the soil like nuggets of gold, their fire extinguished. No more dancing outside my window, hidden in the leaves of the tree which tries to push into my bedroom. Glimpsed through the mesh, they seem close and yet impossible to know. I could never imagine this in LA.

One evening a month ago, returning from work, it started to rain. It was about 8.30 at night, and I had no umbrella. Walking on the footpath under an awning of branches, in the light rain, there were fireflies dancing on the edges of the senses; their glowing tips like cigarettes held by ghosts. A soft sighing wind was shaking the curtain of falling drops; and a vast moment held itself aloft, carelessly holding its breath, lest the perfect beauty of the instant be lost.

And I was glad to be alive, suddenly and fleetingly.

August, 2006 | Rosslyn

#short text

[jadbalja]

Witnesses   sorry is a word crows don't understand, they cluster like glinting cowboys by the roadside, waiting for a bloody resolution.   but there will be no fight, no match, no ring of laughing geese huddled together, hungry for the sparring, the violent words.   you will talk of snowdrops and i will quietly pack a box.   goodbye means nothing to the solitary magpie but he knows of winter, the slow flight home under an empty sky.

Amy Stanbrook

#poetry #amy stanbrook #stride magazine UK 2008

[jadbalja]

#Mizoguchi #sansho the bailiff #movie stills

[jadbalja]

#stalker #tarkovsky #movie stills

[jadbalja]

Department of Fables The Distant Mountains Once upon a time, a man was walking towards the Distant Mountains. Before the desert, he came to the edge of a steppe of flat, dry grassland, dotted here and there with trees that knit the landscape together. After walking for some time in this region, he saw a house, in which a woman lived. The man stopped at the fence around the house, and the woman came out to meet him. "I am going to the Distant Mountains," said the man. "You're welcome to stay," said the woman, without reference to his quest. So the man stayed, and slept next to the woman, and when awake at dawn, crept to the window to stare at the Distant Mountains; their white, glistening tips wavering in the warm air that rose from the deserts. Many years passed, and the view of the those distant peaks kept hovering in the senses of the man, even while their little home soon welcomed an addition - a girl born to the woman, a fruit of their unspoken, implicit marriage. As the child grew, the man's looks of longing for the Distant Mountains also grew in number and length. Seeing this, the woman came to him in the gardens of the house, bringing a leather bag of food and a wineskin. Standing with him and finally looking together into the distance, she told him, "Go, it is your time." And he went, almost with no second glance back at what had been his home. A long time later, when the little girl was almost a woman, her mother invited her one day on what she said was a short journey. "Where will we go?", the young girl asked. The girl had grown to be a silent and yet thoughtful person like her mother, as windblown and scoured of words as the land. "Not far. But we will need this sack." They began their journey walking along a coughing, half-dry stream that flowed down to the desert. After a day's tramping through the long, waving grassland, with nothing to see but the shimmer of the desert far ahead and the even more distant promise of the peaks of snow, they came upon a pile of bones under the shade of a sickly acacia tree - its flat twisted branches shading the chalky clutter of what remained of an adult male. A desiccated and worn wineskin lay half-buried in the sand near the skeleton. Wordlessly, the mother and daughter gathered up the bones in the sack, and started back home. At the edge of the muddy, brackish pool that the stream made not far from their house, the two stopped. The woman began to dig a shallow grave in the clay near the pool, not far from where a small pile of stones, obscured by weeds, marked another, older grave. "Who is in there?" asked the girl, as she washed the old wineskin clean. "Oh. His time had come as well." The young girl nodded at this answer, its meaning fully clear to her. She looked at the house nearby, and the empty, dusty road that lay beyond, leading back to civilization. In time, when they were due, the men would come.

© Arin D | Feb 2008

#short text #fables

[jadbalja]

The following lines were culled from Michiko Kakutani's New York Times book reviews by Christian Lorentzen. This appeared in Harper's. Limn an entire life in a couple of pages Limn the trajectory of an entire life in a handful of pages Limn the suffocating atmosphere of small-town life and the alienation experienced by those who defy its provincial mores Limn the last days of an alcoholic frontiers-woman living in a small western town Limn a man's sudden apprehension of vulnerability and loss--all brought on by his discovery of a dead rat on his kitchen floor Limn his inner life or probe the sources of his equipoise Limn the inner life of people, surprised by the deceptions of time Limn, with tenderness, wisdom, and humor, a vast array of human relationships, both straight and gay Limn the rituals of hunting, trapping, planting, and canning with a wry mixture of amusement and respect Limn the daily minutae of life Limn the human condition Limn the complicated emotional geometry Limn the delicate geometry of emotions Limn a marriage of enduring passion and shared ideals Limn Willy's fears of losing Biffs love and his own longings for immortality Limn the brutal, perilous, and harrowing art of killing a forty-ton creature with a hand-thrown weapon Limn some of its burgeoning manifestations Limn the social and geopolitical fallout Limn the surrealness of contemporary life Limn the rhythms of the universe and an artist's inner state of mind Limn a future in which Pop Art gives way to Poll Art Limn the nervous, almost flirtatious banter Limn a hero's efforts to achieve self-understanding Limn girls' secret struggle for womanhood in the post-sexual-revolution world Limn the dangers posed by emerging diseases Limn the spiritual yearnings and dislocations of an entire nation as it lurched from the certainties of the World War II years toward the confusions of the 1970s Limn the irrationalities of history Limn the impermanence--and emotional chaos--that threatens to overwhelm ordinary people Limn the fabulous Limn the ordinary with seeming nonchalance Limn this deeply felt, if somewhat limited, theme with clarity and moral vigor.

#limn #short_text

[jadbalja]

28 August 2004

sense of emptiness has just begun to grow, expand, an envelope for the being

the sense of sleeping in October in my bed after the evening ceremonies still smelling faintly of the ritual incense, the bed cold but only deliciously so, and the feeling of a greater community warm on my skin is still remembered and cherished the common or human way in which we are all bodies seems manifested even more when watching the Olympics; exaggerated even by the focus on the successful athletes rather than the also-rans. This fetishizing of both success and the body itself creates in one either the sensation of a great inspiration or a subliminal egolessness which is in retrospect vicariously enjoyable though personally felt. It is the craft and the worship of the body as temple, the expropriated images of the foreign athletes and their sculpted androgyne bodies are simultaneously reinforced and reified as human ideals by one's own intimate realization of mediocrity and failure. the sense in the limbo of a dream, the half-alive REM flutter of one's motor-nervous response to dream stimuli; the sense that the fleeting touch of a cool and dry female hand on one's cheek received from a woman long forgotten but reasserted and dredged from muscular - perhaps some core of emotional and sensual knowledge embedded as flesh not thought - recollection, is more alive and real than anything we experience in the waking world after deep insomnia, the sleeplessness which is beyond frustration and tossing, the loose-limbed helplessness in bed, a sprawled devastation of caffeine: the sense of sheer and utter sensitivity to one's mind: the isolation of both memory and thought as organic, living processes which flutter and flicker in the insomniac night behind our still open eyelids like old movies; pale shadows on screens of skin the sense of fragility of existence, riding the freeway in the shimmer and shake of the car beyond the 75-mph mark. You recollect that at that speed the surface in contact with the tarmac is less than the area of a dime. the sense that it's all in how you spin that dime, the coming up heads or tails on random events outside your control. and when control needs to be exerted for a decision on life itself, whether to live it, the inability to throw the car out of its lane, to admit to the certainty of total annihilation. the sense that death is always so absolutely near that it is a more profound and real an experience than life the sense, though very rarely, of sight, that neo-Matrix moment of piercing the veil of our own placid reception of the sensory world to a more acute and yet unworded acceptance of what is; what remains beyond us and is despite us. sitting on a bench watching the sailboats in the bay, the ripples of an august breeze across the surface of the sea, the scattered people dotted on the raked sand and the falling streams of data from the sky, billowing binaries. the sense that it is possible that this moment itself is unique, unforgettable, the regret that it will be gone, never to experienced again, irrevocably erased by the heavy hand of time; a very Proustian sensation admittedly, but exceedingly fleeting in its realization and savoring

#short text

[jadbalja]

the days grow lonely as oaks and in the summer glade of each afternoon each second unfurls like a petal, wet with anticipation

5 December 2005

#poetry

[jadbalja]

The Aftertaste of all Sweetness

posted Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:40:28 -0800 On March 28h, 2006, the famous Internet journo-dadaist shashkin (aka jadbalja) was interviewed by Wintermute from the webzine forlorn.envy.nu. This is an excerpt from the transcript. Wintermute (W): Thanks for coming. Let's start with your latest work, You Incomplete Me just out with Medium publishing. It seems to depart from your previous oeuvre. Does this signal a move into more character and dialogue-led explorations? Shashkin (S): Great to be here. The piece you mention has actually been referred to by some as an 'epistolary novel'. Though, neither are emails really epistolary, nor is it of novel length. It could be a 'micro-' or pico- novel. Novel, novela, the magazine short story, and then the micro-novel, I suppose tracking the shrinkage of our collective attention span in the wash of pop-culture. This isn't meant to be derisive though - I've always believed that pathos can and will be conveyed if required from the most succinct of prose, and a character can be fleshed in sentences rather than chapters. Whether that's successful or not - you'll all tell me, right. Going back to the idea of the 'epistle', it's always been a literary device which writers have used to peel back layers of intimacy between characters. Anything which wouldn't be rendered adequately in common dialogue. Then you have the entire collections of the letters of historical figures, say Virginia Woolf, or Sylvia Plath.  There has been a certain valorization of the literary and sentimental value of the physical letter, what we now call snail mail, though to me that image spoke of a trail of slime rather than emotion. So, my challenge here, or what I've felt challenged to do, is to see if that similar significance in terms of intimacy, and as a literary device could be extended to the most banal of communications, though I guess less banal than chatting - the email. How dada would I be if I didn't raise something utilitarian to an artform? So, to really answer your question, I'm not actually moving into 'novel' territory, if you pardon the involved pun, that is, I'm not doing anything new in terms of characters. Just trying to tell stories in new ways, with new methods. As I think you see, just a few emails is all it takes for Vahe to make a very long personal journey and there's enough hidden context and substance, I hope, in the added details. W: What kind of detail should we be looking at? S: I can't give too much way...haha. You're asking me to give a normative reading of your subjective experience of the piece! But I think, if I were to go back to it again today - and I don't really re-read what I write except when I feel the mood strike me which resonates with each work, because to me every work is the aborted child of a particular moment and mood - well, then I'd look at the dates, and the arcana of the structure of the email, the error messages. The project of uplifting emails to literature isn't easy, and the language - which I at least try to instinctively keep to what we might think is 'business English' slants heavily to the utilitarian and the prosaic, so to add what I feel are the important elements, deepening the fiction in time and in mordancy I have to play with what is happening outside the text. So, in a sense, my canvas is both the email text and its attendant trappings. But sometimes, as in the stolen 'real' exchange between Pat and idali [Ed: entry 'Nevertheless, dear'], the people writing the emails provided me with everything I'd need in the texts themselves, so when I put them together, edited in a certain way, they transcend, i.e., I have the gestalt. W: I think I see. This is a continuing theme though, for you - this experimentation with the 'trappings' of our communication culture, mediated as it is by machines and software? I was thinking especially of the piece about the French girl and the hacker.. S: Yes, The Girl and her Hacker [Ed: entry 'Arpanet']. I am very interested in the linguistics of software interfaces, the way there is a new grammar in online forms, and checkboxes and other widgets and knobs of our surfing experience. I think that story isn't the best example of that kind of experimentation though. It just happens that I chose to present certain communications in the text in what I think are approximations of actual software interfaces. But in a sense, what I am saying is that checkboxes, buttons and scrollbars are now ubiquitous in our reading of the electronically generated word, but we don't see them as part of our language because we still think in sentences and paragraphs and these elements are outside those modular linguistic forms. So, what happens when I insert them in a sentence with an attempt at syntax, and fill them with a word, or emboss them with some meaning, do they become just placeholders for letters, independent semiotics, or a blend? This is for me the continuing element of evolution in the way we conduct the business of writing... W: There's another theme, isn't there - not in terms of subject or experimental focus, but the emotional core of your work, that is, the sense I get that you're really the only poet of urban alienation of a certain kind, of apartments and chatrooms and cubicles. It resonates with me, and I'm sure with anyone who lives alone in a metropolis, it's really an unique kind of vibe. I know you've said before that your work is not directly autobiographical - but do you want to explain if it is indirectly, that is, where are you channeling this from? S: Haha, I hope you're not feeling this resonance only because you're a figment of my imagination, or well - my creative imagination. W: No, please don't trivialize my response - I think there is individuality even in those who are not individuals. S: I'm sorry, I didn't mean that you're not self-contained. Well, this really brings me to an interesting response, because I was going to talk of the author-text-character-reader distances, and the whole system of reflected selves, but that would all get too post-structuralist a discussion and I like to keep it more general. What you are right about is that the sense of alienation which I am definitely channeling is a deeply felt thing, even if I didn't feel all that those in my pieces feel. In the apartment arc of texts [Ed: entries 'Department of Ennui' & 'Chaque Jour'] I was involved in a particular kind of funk, a Los Angeles moment which I haven't quite tapped ever again. But I am sure in some way, what that protagonist is saying in first person is vocalizing some of my interiority, and that is the kind of schizophrenia - Whitman's 'I am large, I contain multitudes'- kind of thing that I revel in. You, me, we're all split off from the same deep core of shashkin-itude, that frothing bubble of textual gold. Though, in retrospect, a good schizo is someone who isn't aware he/she is schizophrenic, so I guess I've overanalyzed myself out of the real fun. W: Over analysis is always a dreadful shame. Still, there is this amazing diversity in your published work, which is startling. You've covered ground as an urban fantasist, symbolist poet, 'found text' artist and something which I can only term as 'conceptual blogging'. But in general, even amidst the diversity, there is more than just the alienated apartment-dwellers, but a sense of genuine sadness, and loss. Were you abused as a child? S: Sadly, I had a reasonably content childhood and terrorized the local neighborhood children as a bully, so there's not much material there. As an adult male I think have more troughs than I have crests, but I think all artists choose over a certain emotional territory that which they feel most comfortable in. I'd be wary though if you find me only working with the sad bricks. You only get typecast into a certain emotional bracket if you're a bad artist. I guess I'd produce happy work if I felt happier, but I'm not sure if that would be readable. Sadness is a more complex emotion than happiness, isn't it? I just read somewhere that as humans we're more evolved to be sad than happy.. W: Perhaps what I meant was wistful, or longing. Something the Germans call 'sehnsucht'. The addiction to longing. S: I like that word. There is definitely a lot of longing in my characters, but sometimes it's just involved satire or allegory, as in the God in the Midwest piece [Ed: entry 'Neon Summer']. I think allegory is sorely underappreciated in literature today. I am tired of dry conceptual formalism. I thought Dada was fun when it was happening - and the recent exhibition in the city sort of goes into that - but rebels aren't always the most emotionally sensitive. The rabble aren't roused by weeping. I think some of those political-artistic battles are won, but to continue the war, I think the emotional core is important in today's conceptual prose, or whatever goes as the avant-garde. In fact, since so much of the stylized conceptual art is so diminished of the sensual or the emotive, to show that one has sentiment as a writer, the affliction of 'humors' as Victorians would call it, is positively revolutionary. And I like that. W: Sensitive, but without becoming a neo-confessional. We don't want you to be the male Anne Sexton.. S: No worries. W: We're nearly done here, but I did want to hear more about your process of creation. You're hardly regular in your output and some of us wonder what process you've got there, as a writer? You mentioned moods, and how they reflect in the pieces, and you're right, you do have some of those angry pieces tucked away, and the prose poems, and also the stuff I can't categorize, like the incomparably beautiful Howling for Sade.. S: Thank you. I'm not sure how I wrote that one, because it seems uncharacteristic in retrospect. I'd also reconsider the gratuitous French today, especially since I don't speak it, but at the moment I was very into Messiaen and it seemed to stick. All my titling, at both levels, are matters of serendipity that way. I don't have a set process, and the days you could just sit down before a typewriter and bang away for some hours and have something just doesn't work. Working with a laptop is somehow more organic, though Baudrillard has argued for the opposite, about how he feels there is a distance between the electronic text and him, which lacks the immediacy of the paper, the typewriter hammers and the pins.. Sometimes my moments of greatest lucidity - when my muse is closest to me - are when other voices fall silent, when my inner horror at myself stops singing its Lethean hymn, and I stop doing - everything. A moment of stillness. Mostly when I am lying in bed, curled and heart stopped because that ineffable thing has happened, the idea has sparked. That's how I get my poems. And I haven't 'received' a poem for a long time. For prose, I do need to sit down and work through it, and I usually do not make many changes. Something about the moment has to be right. W: Yes, when the moment is right, just like sometimes when I am reading one of your pieces - like some of the shorter ones we published on forlorn.envy, which, in the atmosphere of the right music, the right hour, fills me with such a strange and overwhelming sensation of kinship, of shared experience. I feel very giddy telling you this, but considering you are my creator... I do feel that we are thinking the same great thought. My face gets that first flush of heat, that rushing behind your eyes which makes me wonder if I'll break into tears, how delicious it is to feel moved by a work of art - S: Ssh. You have to stop. W: Excuse me.. Even though I don't exist, I feel quite animated. S: It's a good thing. W: Just one more thing. Are you going to complete that 'Crossing' story [Ed: entry 'Strange light in your eyes']? What about new poetry? S: I'm not sure about that one. I never introduced the girl, and that had to have a poignant ending. I have the story in sight, but I think it's more useful to me right now, to let it spool out in the imaginations of the readers, the "hypocrite lecteurs".. Ah well, poetry. I only write poetry in the throes of mortal sadness, and I must not have been feeling it - so nothing has descended to me from the muse Calliope. Maybe I've crossed some threshold into apathy and apathy just doesn't do it for poetics. W: Fine. Thanks for the interview. Are you going to snuff me out of existence, since this conceptual farce is concluded? S: I was thinking about it. Do you mind terribly? W: No go ahead, after all I   [Ed: end of transmission]

#monomania onanistic autobiography tldr

[jadbalja]

Seclusion

Adagio di molto. When they first moved in, it wasn’t a problem. The fences separating them from the neighbors on either side were at least ten feet away from the walls. She could see into the neighbors’ kitchen and living room from the first floor. From the bedroom on the second floor, which the newly married couple used as their main, she stared into next door's rooms, their curtain choices, their bedspreads. This, they were told, was normal. “What can you expect with what you spent?”, her mother said. Yet, as nearly six months passed, she thought, “Not this. I didn’t expect… this”. The buffer of the backyard kept shrinking as more plants grew, as the friendly hand waves from the folks in the house out back metastasized into multi-family barbecues, and even the occasional drinks over. The conversations were interminable. The homes on each side hemmed her in, with the voices of neighbors either raised in anger or ecstasy soon unbearable, like physical assaults.

Adagio, accelerando. They moved. The next home was cheaper, an additional hour’s commute for him. Perfectly suburban, and made from some mould long yellowed in a Boomer-era design catalog, it had an acre of semi-landscaped grounds in the back lurching down to a dark creek shrouded by vine-laden black ash and white cedar trees, leaning in codependently. The nearest neighbor was far enough that little could be said about what they kept loading or unloading from their pickup all afternoon. At night jangly rock'n blues music eddied thickly around the street, fading in and out, and occasionally shots could be heard out past the creek, raising sharp yawps from the dogs at the home down the street. In the caffeine-buoyed day, she often sat the window in the parlor attempting to write her commissions, looking as long as could stand at the house further up the way, its shuttered windows and overgrown lawn. The arrival of the postal van drove her far indoors, all the way to the back of the single floor home. When she ventured out on the back porch, she was sure the strange man out past the meadow, who she had seen drive back one day with what looked like a telescope, was monitoring her. She felt she saw the sunlight glint off his scope lens once. At night, she felt, but didn’t see, the guns being taken angrily from their safes all around the county, near, not far. Being locked. Being loaded. She could almost feel the cavitation wounds of the people from the last mass shooting, barely five miles away last Saturday.

Andante. They moved again. The cabin was two miles up the dirt road. He had a satellite hookup for his remote work. He said he needed the bedroom - one of the three rooms - all day, in private. For concentration. They barely talked, so there was quiet. Yet so loudly. The wind made a fluttering, sighing noise in the tall pines all around the small gravel driveway. Out back, boulders and thorny bushes muscled in on the small deck. In the star-drunk night the branches scraped and knocked a call-and-response for hours, provoked by an intruding breeze. The eerie skittering of raccoon feet in the wee hours raised goosebumps on her skin. It was almost a miracle when the last owner’s Navajo blanket turned carpet revealed the trapdoor underneath. They investigated, but it soon became her project.

Moderato. The little cave-like basement, lit by a bulb (once they replaced it), was meant to be a photographic studio and salting cellar for venison. But she took to putting a beanbag and desk there, sitting for hours listening to Morton Feldman or Philip Glass piano works on noise-cancelling 'phones. Still, she heard his shuffling footsteps whenever she took the 'phones off - or the clatter of him putting plates and cutlery away. His coughs ran too loud in the quieter segments of long minimalist pieces. His interruptions about dinner, lunch, etc., etc., were like little bombs of disquiet dropped into her reverie.

Allegro vivace. So, quietly, she began to deepen the cellar. The soft clay surface was easy enough to disembowel with a shovel and the trowel she found in a cupboard. It took a few months of being down there, hiding her work under blankets and groundsheets, and depositing the earth excavated over the boulders and down the wooded slope. Not that he was interested in exploring out there or in her space. As she sank further, relishing the growing distance from the cabin’s floor (her ceiling), she felt the psychic space expanding, her horizons growing. At the bottom of the pit one day, with the light off, she felt the warm comfort of the soil around her, cocooning, protecting. She drew the blanket over her, closing her eyes. Now she had some room. Finally.

#short text #the pits

[jadbalja]

Valencia

they were apart. the man called and she answered. when I’m back, we will hold each other the whole day. when I’m back, we will go out and eat, drink, walk the boulevard hand-in-hand like we used to. I’d love to, she used to say. they remained apart. he called again, this time after a while. I’m sorry, he said. when I’m back, we won’t leave the bed for a day, he said. I will kiss you as deeply as a man drinking from an oasis after a week in the desert. wow, how lovely, she said. come back, she said. he said, soon. some time later, he wrote her a postcard. it promised and told stories of the foreign land. it said he would dance with her again soon, holding a wine glass in one hand and her waist in other. he wrote: we’ll listen to “Valencia” by Rachid Taha, like I used to love to. okay, she thought. one day, he returned, and opened the door to their house. the place was empty, and only a chair squatted on the carpet, with a card on it and the phone - with its cord snaking away over to the wall. their stereo player was set up against the wall, with a tape in its mouth ready to play. he read the card. it said: play your song, babe. and if you want to dance, call me. but I will dance with you just from here. he waited a while, and walked to the stereo, pressing play. then he walked to the wall, stooped, and pulled the phone from its socket.

#short text #rachid taha