In the Funny Culture

Steeped in cold beer.

     "I want to stay funny I want to keep moving ahead of the straight culture. I want to stay in the funny culture ahead of it."
          - Stephen Colbert in an interview at HardeeharHarvard College.

     If you don't stay one step ahead of your audience (in comedy or in poetry) then where are you but in your audience. And if you're in your audience then you aren't writing, you're being written: they are writing you. Hardeeharhar, you can't step in the same river once.

Ms. Used!

Beckett, Samuel

     "Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused."
          -Samuel Beckett

write/unwrite

Bachmann unwriting her fingernails.

     "If [as Wittgenstein says] the limits of my language are the limits of my world, the writer's task is to unwrite the phrasemaking of our ordinary, everyday discourse, the prefabricated sentences by means of which business-as-usual is conducted."
          Marjorie Perloff paraphrasing Ingeborg Bachmann in Wittgenstein's Ladder.

Oh Doctor!

Theodore Geissel in Dr. Seuss glasses.

     "To produce a 60 page book, I may easily write more than 1000 pages before I'm satisfied. The most important thing about me, I feel, is that I work like hell - write, rewrite, reject, re-reject, and polish incessantly."
          -Theodore (Dr.) Seuss Geissel.

     In a later PageBoy interview, Mr. Geissel went on to say that he preferred not to write in cafes or in the rain,
not on boats and not on trains
not in church or after dinner
or while reading Lyn Hejinian or
Gertrude Stein
he never liked Wittgenstein
or The Fat Boys
Pound Eliot or Joyce
even Berrigan's Sonnets
gave him the vomits
and after reading Plaith
he always needed a bath.
The only poet he admitted to liking
was Anvil Hammerstriking
but only all the pre-early muppets and couplets
certainly not the blank verse or German horseshits.