Выбрать главу

Andi and I dropped by Davenport’s house one afternoon for a tour. What I remember most was how, at the base of his easel in the bright alcove dedicated to his art, every brush was aligned with every other, every paint tube lay beside the next in a soldier-perfect row. He had meticulously squeezed each tube from the bottom so it wouldn’t form unsightly crinkles.

He still used a manual typewriter.

In his last letter to his sister Gloria Williamson, written on that typewriter just before his death by cancer in 2005, he wrote: I hope you’re as happy as I am.

:::: RHETORIC. The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.

Ben Marcus.

:::: Or the German street art chanced upon in a U-Bahn station: someone spraypainting across the filthy tiled walclass="underline" Question everything.

Beneath, someone else spray-painting: Why?

:::: We took our seats in the first row of an unmarked white van outside our hotel in Kampala for the drive to the airport. It was 3 a.m., we’d slept only two hours that night, and we were dazed, filmy. Three Koreans materialized a couple minutes later and climbed aboard. They sat directly behind us. The driver asked for our passports. When the Koreans saw we were American, they got up without a word and moved to the seats in the far back row. It occurred to me they considered us liabilities.

The dirt roads through the capital possessed no streetlamps. All the houses were dark. It was like driving through German expressionist cinema, and then there were five grim men in military uniforms blocking our way. They stepped from nowhere carrying machine guns and flashlights, both leveled at our van. The flashlights were canted to blind us.

Our driver rolled down his window and exchanged some words with them, handed over our passports.

Two minutes were found lacking.

Five.

Back came the passports. The soldiers waved us on. I think we’d been stopped at some sort of makeshift checkpoint, though what was being checked, exactly, and how, still eludes me.

Throughout the event the Koreans behind us remained very quiet.

:::: We are all cultural informants.

:::: What won’t leave me alone about Ben Marcus’s definition of rhetoric is how it is and isn’t one. How it is indicative of the backbroke sentences that comprise his bafflement before not-knowing, about conventional mimesis as a kind of somnolence, about the very problematics of representation. How this sentence, that is, like them all in The Age of Wire and String, is a post-genre edifice that exists in some smudge between or beyond theory and fiction, poetry and prose, meaning and the other thing, by means of what we might call paragrammatic illegibility that gives rise to an abstract language that almost means, but doesn’t, quite (why do alarm and harm rhyme so loudly, so close together? in what sense can language make someone receptive to a pain she or he can’t imagine? shouldn’t our listeners be our readers? and by our the narrator — who is, come to think of it, who, exactly? — means. . what, exactly?), a language whose signifiers point to non-existent signifieds, unhinge the process of reading by fashioning something approaching asemic wordage that looks and sounds like it should make perfect sense. . until, that is, you pay any sort of attention to it.

:::: Ten days ago cranes started showing up around Wannsee — on the docks at the marina, waiting for fishermen to motor in with their catches, at the edge of the woods. They had returned from France and Spain on their way to breeding grounds in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. But two days ago they started disappearing again. The news says they’ve called off their migration in response to the extended snow and cold, have begun backtracking to warmer temperatures.

This morning Spiegel Online reports a flock of ill-fated ones became disoriented in central Germany’s thick fog and icy wind and began slamming into buildings and cars. In November 2011 more than 55 cranes and 300 geese landed on a highway in Brandenburg, where they were run over by cars.

:::: Here is Alexander Pope: Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

:::: And Don DeLillo: We seem to believe it possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

:::: How Marcus’s sentence exiles readers from knowledge, forces them to imagine in slow motion. It bears family resemblance to one by Barthelme. It is fifth cousin to one by Burroughs. It performs what it has been about all along: how, in the end, it is what it is talking about, as all rhetoric should be, all art — how it causes life to be less believable, which is to say more conscious of itself as cultural construction, as experience mediated by language, a kind of fiction making itself strange in order to startle said reader into waking, again and again, in order to feel, which is to say to think, which is to say to feel in exciting ways that challenge all he or she takes for granted, again and again, about language and experience and therefore about narrativity.

:::: An email from my friend Rochelle Ratner, her lung cancer having metastasized to her brain: They have me on this experimental chemo pill, long-term, which is supposed to reduce the risk of recurrence greatly. The problem is it made my face break out in this horrendous acne-like rash. So I’ve cut back to half a dose and begun taking antibiotics as well as using all sorts of creams. My dermatologist’s assistant spent nearly an hour with me showing me how to use makeup to cover the rash. I’ve never used makeup in my life, and really hadn’t planned on starting now, but it does seem to make a difference.

:::: According to a recent study, 88.2 % of those who live in what was once East Germany consider themselves atheists. Almost half of all Germans do. This in a country which ranks 11th behind the most heathen in the world, Sweden, where upwards of 85 % weigh in as non-believers.

In the Puritan-souled U.S., only 3-to-9% of the population identifies itself as bored by belief in boogiemen and tooth fairies.

:::: A cage went in search of a bird.

Imagined Kafka.

:::: Click.

:::: Raymond Federman, Larry McCaffery, Andi and I racing a RAV through narrower and narrower washes in the desert near Borrego Springs where Larry and his wife Sinda live.

:::: Click.

:::: We weren’t meant to be here, the literary critic Brian McHale pointed out several years earlier, standing beside me on a ridge overlooking those vast, arid, reddish-brown California badlands that are just like Mars, only with oxygen.

:::: Click.

:::: The four of us had stopped to pick up sandwiches at the deli in town before heading out. Larry drove with a tumbler full of vodka over ice between his legs and Sonic Youth on his RAV’s crapulent sound system. (Or maybe it was Bruce Springsteen. I remember both as the case.) After a while we couldn’t drive any farther, so got out and walked. I think I recall Andi and me lugging a cooler between us (and I think I recall Andi and me not lugging a cooler between us). We ended up in a natural amphitheater, a large bowl cut from the loose dry soil, slick clay, deep sand, rock. Its walls sloped up 100 feet above us. From somewhere Federman produced the manuscript he’d been working on (I want to say Return to Manure) and started reading aloud. McCaffery extracted his video camera from his daypack (although I don’t actually recollect him wearing one, although he must have been) and commenced filming while backing up a path that snaked toward the top of the wash.