:::: A disgusting city, this Berlin, a place where no one believes in anything.
The Italian occultist Alessandro Cagliostro pronounced.
In 1775.
:::: You are crazy, my child. You must go to Berlin.
The Austrian composer Franz von Suppe recommended.
In 1800.
:::: Andi is so taken with the light here, how it is never the same thing from one pulse to the next, that the day after we arrived she began snapping a couple photos from our balcony every morning between 7:40 and 7:50 to document the transformations of what she couldn’t believe she was seeing.
:::: Which is to say Larry McCaffery and Lidia Yuknavtich introduced me by the way they moved in the world to the idea of literary activism — the importance, not only of writing, but also of editing and bringing out fellow authors’ work, reading and reviewing that work, producing essays about it, teaching it, talking it up, urging others to launch journals and indie presses, running reading series, laboring in arts administration, coordinating conferences, launching local workshops, posting about texts you love on your blogs or via other social media, getting out the word any way you can, because innovative writing isn’t just innovative writing: it’s a cultural urgency.
:::: One of the fellows at the Academy explains to me she became so infuriated at the Catholic church for including her lapsed soul among its demographic reckonings that she requested to be un-baptized.
After much bureaucracy meant to wear her down, the Church refused.
:::: The first geese v-ing north against a desert of rainless clouds.
:::: How you jumped through the hole in the ice on one of the Åland islands after sitting in a sauna as long as your body could bear. You were visiting the chair of the English department at the Åbo Akademi in Turku at his vacation home. Although you only knew him professionally, you had both just stripped down to less than nothing.
He waited until you climbed up the ladder through that hole in the ice before telling you the story about the Fulbright fellow who had had a heart attack the year before while attempting the same maneuver and died on the spot.
:::: At the end of the stupendous cascade of The Unnamable’s nine-page-long final sentence, in many ways the epistemologically and ontologically indeterminate companion, the stuttering and pallid postmodern pal, of JoyceMolly’s confident modernist linguistic rush at the conclusion of Ulysses, we reach. . what?
:::: Curiosity — the act of determined noticing — connects innovative writing with traveclass="underline" both ask you to accept the full adventure of not-being-at-home.
:::: We could contend those last Beckettian words signify a triumph over existential adversity, an assertion of the human spirit against umber odds, which apparently the Nobel committee did, and we would be wrong. We reach, rather, a moment of gray unknowability, an act of grammatical erasure. The antimatter of I can’t go on cancels out the matter of I’ll go on, and vice versa, so that we sense the real last line of Beckett’s un-novel isn’t composed of language at all, but instead of the white space washing down the remainder of the page, signifying the absence that both self and text have become.
:::: Lidia Yuknavitch and Larry McCaffery taught me to black out conceptual distinctions between the categories editor/writer, critic/poet, reviewer/novelist, academic/publisher, or blogger, or tweeter, or reading series coordinator, or volunteer at a journal or small press.
They taught me that the literary mandate for writers in our century should be: Ask not what publishing can do for you; ask what you can do for publishing.
:::: One of the fellows’ academic spouses at the Academy is working on a project to establish the provenance of four sixteenth century paintings that no longer exist except as references in various historical texts.
:::: Who is the you? The I? Molloy eons later? Some science fictional semi-being being dreamed by another? Certainly a disembodied subject position, uncertainly human, suspended between masculine and neuter, thereness and not-thereness, in the falter between penultimate clause and ultimate, immobile mind and its fantasy of a body that can move, self and other, speech and silence — an ellipse of uncertainty, a space of unfurling consciousness without steady temporality, geography, identity.
:::: Or the name of the color people deploy in their earrings, scarfs, shoes, glasses frames, sweaters beneath sports jackets, shirts beneath sweaters, knapsacks, purses, necklaces, socks, gloves to highlight their often dominantly dark clothes: Berlin geranium red?
:::: In what sense can it go on or not go on, its universe having already been unwritten around it?
In The Unnamable, Beckett remarked, there’s complete disintegration. No “I,” no “have,” no “being.” No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There is no way to go on.
You can’t remain the same person after having read that last
Can you?
:::: As Andi and I walked down a narrow street in Quito, Ecuador, just a few blocks off the Plaza de la Independencia, someone reached over the balcony above and dumped a glassful of diarrhea on us.
Thin, watery diarrhea that reeked of uncertainty and death.
Andi caught the worst of it on her wide-brimmed hat, shoulders, down her back. I caught a few pungent collateral splatters.
When we looked up, the balcony was already empty. A flinch later, and a crowd had gathered around us. A man emerged with a Kleenex in his fist. He began alternately dabbing at the shit on Andi’s blouse and apologizing for his country’s bad manners. Another man was already helping Andi with her camera, also beshitted.
Jabbering was general, and then, of course, Andi’s camera was gone.
She had managed to keep hold of her purse, but her camera was history. The whole thing had been a setup whose imagination you had to admire — though, personally, I would have preferred being robbed at gunpoint. In someone’s eyes, we were the rich, the bad guys. We were the marks.
I noticed a policeman floating at the edge of the crowd. When our eyes met, he shrugged, turned, and walked away.
:::: Hitler, e.g., was a vegetarian.
:::: It should be obvious, said Sukenick, that there is no intrinsic virtue in a quantity of readers.
:::: An invitation arrives from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, to visit for a month in the fall and help think their graduate creative writing program into innovation. The first thing I do after accepting is check which venomous snakes frequent the Eastern Cape Province. Black Mamba. Rinkhals. Puffadder. Cape Cobra. Boomslang.
Robert Berold, head of the program, emails me a photograph of the latter, its long, slender green body hanging from a branch outside his window, head buried in a black sunbird’s nest, feeding.
:::: The German language curses and cajoles, belches, farts, and philosophizes with boundless delight, then retreats suddenly, tightening its belt, squelching its own wild urges with the syntax of discipline and restraint.
Observes Peter Wortsman.
:::: How one day you start reading about skin aging as if it’s something you’ve always done: its propensity to receive less blood flow, become thinner, more easily damaged, less capable of healing, its decrease in volume, elasticity. Cortisol degradation of collagen. The body’s increasingly lower glandular activity. Sagginess, wrinkles, reddening, browning, yellowing, abnormal growths.