The Towering Irrelevance

You know nothing, nothing, but nothing

You can’t touch me.

   I have no eyes, no ears, no teeth, no tongue, no brain tissue, no hair, no lungs, no heart, no bowels, no cock, no voice, no smell; there is no blood in me, there is no lymph in me, there is no feeling in me, no devotion in me, I do not know hunger, I do not know the roads, and I do not know pain, I do not know the directions, I do not know the hiding places and I will never seek them out, and I know nothing of the earth, of sweat and of danger, I know nothing about skin, about flesh, about pus and about bones, useless for anyone to scream at me, I don’t understand, because I don’t hear anything,  useless for anyone to strike at me, I don’t see, I am entirely blind, you don’t know what I’m like and what I am, because you can’t even picture it, you can’t even conjure me up in your dreams

etc.

Part of the second of fourteen chapters of Animalinside by Laslo Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, published by Sylph Editions and New Directions in turn, for sale here, read out loud today by Sam while we stood at the cash register, read privately by myself, thrilling with terror, on a hurtling overwarm train this past fall, posted now in response to Daniil Kharms and Zach Schomburg.

No one sings all the time

No one sings all the time   By everything else we shall also be judged

                                                    But only we ourselves can do it

This is without exception   We who are everything else   In the dark

                                                               song, bright, beyond

                                                                   all comprehension

Goran Sonnevi, in part LIII of his Mozart’s Third Brain, translated from Swedish by Rika Lesser, published by Yale, on sale here.

I Found a Beating Heart Half-Buried in the Woods

mythologyofblue:

Is this your beating heart? I 
asked. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have a larynx. She didn’t 
even have a thorax. She didn’t have anything. Not even arms 
or legs or a head. She really wasn’t a woman as much as she 
was the space between dead leaves. No, it’s yours she said.

—Zachary Schomburg

(cocophony)

There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.
He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.
He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.
We’d better not talk about him any more.

Daniil Kharms, Blue Notebook #10, written sometime in the late 1930’s.

I wonder if there is a point where you can look around and realize that your band has become thirty-four unhandsome dude with drums and orgasmface and decide to rein it in, or if by that point it feels like it has always been too late and you have to just say fuck it, sure Jim, you can join too, pull up a conga. 

Still love these guys, though.

Apparently it is music video day over here. GRIMES. We’ve all agreed to only listen to Canadians again this year, right?

Oh hey there entire twentieth century distilled into one band.

cosycos:

St Vincent - Surgeon from 4AD Session (by 4ADRecords)

Yup.

Two New Poems

ecantwell:

Splash of Red just published two new poems of mine - go check them out, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Trust me, you are very much into this kind of thing.

What will we do without Ed Park? We’ve been obsessively asking ourselves this question since Ed informed us of his departure—he’s training to be a croupier in Monaco, or so we’ve been told—and a satisfying answer has yet to emerge.

No. Ed Park is leaving to be an editor in the newly created publishing wing of Amazon.

I know Ed only a very little but respect him endlessly and like him enough that that little feels too little. I want to be his friend, I mean. I want to go on double dates with him. He’s also a great editor, a great writer, and more polite than you could imagine.

But he will be working for Amazon. My entire livelihood is predicated on resistance to that bloated grotesque company, and I can still respect the choice to work for them. It sounds like a sweet gig with the possibility to do good for some good writing. Also Ed has a family to feed.

It just strikes me as weird, then, that they’d choose to be coy about it at The Believer. I know the croupier thing is an obvious reference to it. And perhaps they’re only hoping to protect him from an onslaught of submissions. Still: weird.

"Literature is sacred. It is as sacred to me as anything I know. I suspect that most editors and agents feel the same way, if only during the quiet hours of the night. But there is always the issue of how one goes about selling the sacred without defiling it. There is the issue of how one goes about superintending the sacred when tens of thousands of fellow brethren, some of them abundantly insane but many of the truest sort of heart, want to add to its flame. What does one tell them? That they are not holy enough? However one personally and professionally elects to handle these troubling issues, a tiny piece of the sacred is ruined. For me, at least, all of this inevitably leads to a small, quiet grief. We would all like for our worlds to be bigger."

Tom Bissell, from his 2003 essay for The Believer, anthologized and published in the book Magic Hours out this April and available here. The essay is much larger and better than this very good paragraph, and has had me making sort-of-exclamatory noises through my nose. But this passage in particular is a good summation of one of the sharper sorrows inherent in my job.

The entire essay also speaks directly, if accidentally, to some of the furor about access that occasionally bubbles up in tumblr poetry spheres.

God yes. Finally, some great jacket design by Fred Marcellino, whose work I generally hate. Some of his SFnal stuff here.

Maybe hate is not even strong enough. His work is so iconic and, to my mind, stands for a decade and a half span of literature I’ve no interest in opening up. And these are by no means bad books. They’re books I’d gladly read today in any other edition: Berger, Disch, Vollmann even. All of them plastered with this faded Palm Springs aesthetic. All with those fucking pointy types. 

(Source: aubzillatron)

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