10/30/11

Love Fifteen

Robert Peters' Critical Work - Delicious!

    "You shouldn't pay very much attention to anything writers say. They don't know why they do what they do. They're like good tennis players or good painters, who are often full of nonsense, pompous, and embarrassing, or merely mistaken, when they open their mouths."
              -John Barth.
     I agree entirely, but whether or not he was describing this blog is unclear. Probably not.

10/26/11

Your Immortal Need

Baudelaire: satanic and perverted.

     "Rhythm and rhyme answer man's immortal need for monotony and symmetry, as opposed to the vanity and danger of inspiration."
          -Bowed Lair
     Okay I forgive you, you absinthe soaked madman. Thank the devil you wrote prose!

10/21/11

Fuck the Lotus Eaters May They Rot in Hell

Otis Leader
  

     "Do you hear those voices, charming and funereal
     Singing: 'Come this way, you who wish to eat

     This perfumed Lotus! this is where men harvest
     The miraculous fruits your heart hungers for;
     Come and intoxicate yourself on the strange sweetness
     Of that afternoon which never ends'?"

              -Baudelaire (trans. Fowlie) "Le Voyage" Les Fleurs Du Mal

     This from the au pair of modern poetry? Save us from that afternoon that never ends! Who wants eternity? Let us all be grateful that we end. Yes. Done. No. The eternal is for the brain dead and lobotomous. They can have it, and find other vapor awful there.

10/9/11

Find Morass Here!

Delicious.


     In an essay on 'melody' in Gertrude Stein's work, Marianne DeKoven speaks of Stein's "assertion of the freed magic of the signifier over the repressed, hierarchical order of the signified." That is, the triumph of language as music magic over language as meaning morass.