“Whoa there, scooter … looks like you might be starting to veer toward nihilism … Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.”
— Allie Brosh / Solutions and Other Problems
There were erasures to make. He made the erasures. There were no complaints. The work was done. He moved on. When more erasures were required, he made those; and in this manner his work was accomplished, and he continued erasing. This is how it was to be alive then. This is what it meant to finish. Whatever you take from this—you must know this—this was only one of many ways of moving through life. There were alternative ways of working, and of moving through life. That much is assumed. That much is certain. When he needed more erasures, he did this:
“I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”
— Danielle Evans / “The Office of Historical Corrections”
Fade In
-Series of found film cuts as the camera goes out of focus or shoots unfocused
-Series of stills from said shots
-Series of cuts of shots becoming resolved into focus
-Asynchronous sound of obtuse observations
-mundane observations
-Cut-ups
-Fade ins / Fade outs to black leave 2-3 sec black between shots
Fade Out
“A new Americanism would mean a devotion to equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness, along with a commitment to national prosperity inseparable from an unwavering dedication to a sustainable environment the world over.”
— Jill Lepore / This America: The Case for the Nation
It’s the anvil in the stomach that gets me. You never get me. The feeling of being tethered to the earth by your viscera. That insouciant look when you ignore me. So I’ve taken to overconsumption of foodstuffs—I call it foodstuffs, because what else can one call a slimy cheese sauce that coats the inside of one’s mouth and tongue with a sebaceousness that says: all American eats! Cheese is good food, but I can hardly call this cheese. This is really some kind of sign that I need to get moving or I will waste away here on the outskirts of civilization. You are nonplussed. Jacob Pablum is my name, and I am a horny canary executioner — out of work for a decade or so, and constitutionally unable to take a morning constitutional. You are eyelid flickering ennui. So, I pledge allegiance to my own, to the United Crates of Distemper and to the republic for which I grandstand. One evasion under fraud with extrusions and sniffles for all. That’s what I’m about. You are nameless and filled with inertia. The desert stretches out before us.
“I offer myself awfully
abyss frost
I offer myself
you frighten me
I offer myself
I don’t give a fuck”
— Alejandra Pizarnik / “Memory Near Oblivion”
Testy? Who does what to whom? This is now. Now is the only thing that’s real. What are you talking about? Why are you quavering in the light of darkening testimony? What is this? Does this make any sense? Does this seem appropriate in light of unseen circumstances? In light of circumnavigations, circumcisions, and charitable giving in the year of the buffalo? Testing again, on another day, something not so new—but new fangled and angled—Los Angeles without the pouting and disease. Miami without the vapidity and self-absorption (calm down, it’s my hometown! I know of what I squeak) Some time far from self-simulation there were simulacra crying out for liberation from the fantastic twelve—imagine 900 foot Jesus … 899 feet just won’t do! Something remotely Daliesque and grandiloquent. Stop stop the triangulation of the suicides, it all stops here, herr doctor … Here, it’s time to write by hand. Time to use the other dendrites and axons—bathe the neural synapses in luxuriant Oil of Olay and Jean Nate not to be confused with John Natty, Natty Bumppo! God-damned Natty Bumppo! A blast from a past we need not unearth. Hell freezes over. See, this is a tale, told by a post-punk, full of pus and pleurisy signifying nothing, but three-chord chaos. Does this make any sense?
“The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask for forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To live and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.”
— Sigrid Nunez / What Are You Going Through
An irritating squirrel says
To an umbrella made of stone:
“You are a conflation of an Absurdist dialectic.
You are an impossible form.”
The umbrella sprouts a stratocumulus cloud on its ferrule and floats away.
The squirrel, inspired, writes a sonnet, follows that with an ode, then a sestina.
“Perhaps another thing the dystopian future might bring: People suing their parents for having given them birth. Pointing as evidence to the abundance of scientific studies and warnings their parents had been given. What did you assholes think two minutes to midnight meant?”
— Sigrid Nunez / What Are You Going Through
My heart is shrapnel —
Incised, excised, in your wake —
Fragments, incomplete.
“My work is to believe in grace even though I don’t believe in God. To realize that all of my greatest fears are things that are definitely going to come true. My father will die, my mother will die, my brother will, my niece, my nephew, me.”
— Ayşe Papatya Bucak / “An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work”
Strictly speaking I’m not saying what you think I’m talking about. You’ve got your facts correct but your theme is enjambed with my leitmotif. I’m schooling you with malevolence, and secretions waiting, in sketchy, skittery, and toothsome fashion. I’m chomping and slavering, and you seem to be missing that fact. I’m a bad mood guy. Drop your Sharpie. Don’t bring that reductive redaction act my way. I will smite you, askance of oblation, in obloquy. It won’t cost you more than a thorough humiliation in front of Carmelite nuns. But as you’ve run short of Thirteenth Century crusades, and your words dissipate before they form in the back of your throat, and you claim to need more encouragement … here, come here, step closer to this open window I have something I’d like to show you.
“They’ll declare America a carnage. They’ll call immigrants ‘animals’ and other countries ‘shitholes.’ They call themselves ‘nationalists.’ They’ll say they can make America great again. Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.”
— Jill Lepore / This America: The Case for the Nation
Do you want me to make dinner now? It seems to be what you are saying. I’m saying that the guys over there fighting about whether U.S. Girls is “rawk” enough—maybe in an indie way—but no way “traditional rock” … Why do they waste time? Why do they make these distinctions? Just enjoy the friggin’ music, guys. What’s with the polemics? There’s a pandemic still afoot—a calm before the storm—there’s racism run rampant, food shortage, debt crises of every sort, there was even a wreck — the Edmund Fitzgerald. And on you guys go about Meg Ramey’s too disco, too pop now. You remembered when it was noisy lo-fi DIY. You’re about to come to blows because you say she was better in Philadelphia in 2008, but you prefer her earlier sets from 2011. And isn’t it a shame how she ruined “Red Ford” all these years later. You guys need to relax. Get a room. Wear your god damned masks correctly, not down around your chins, and stop exhaling all this blowhard air into the atmosphere. There. Now what are your issues with Dry Cleaning again?
“We’re headed for empty-headedness,
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,
states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.”
— Lynn Emmanuel / “Out of Metropolis”
I.
Sole lox lunchbox
Bite full o’ soul
Tar by the shoreline
Bisected by sandbank
Oil derricks ablaze
Gas flames in the ozone grey
II.
Stamp your heel in the sand
The tar ball forms a toothy edge
Blasted by seagulls drunk
On gas fumes thicken
the horizon line stitched by a tanker
To sky and sea
A uniform wash of concrete
At the end of sight
III.
Site specific
And septic like the weak
The week you crushed black ants
And drooped them into the Pre-K
Pea soup and followed with lead
Flakes shingling off the window
Sills silly and smeared black
And white and black
Back to Mighty Mouse blaring
In the desolate spaces
“No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It’s simply not worth it. Do not think of it as an investment in yourself that you’ll be able to recoup later on. This is not medical school.”
— Ann Patchett
