Twelve dollars gets you a seat in the ultra-slick auditorium that is the City Recital Hall to see Jonathan Franzen talk about The Corrections. Lets you watch an interviewer fawn to the hallowed author in rafts of effusive, question-free rambles. Interviewer making no effort to hide his wonder at Franzen’s ability to use a metaphor [...]
1.
“We won’t find ourselves in some retreat, but on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men.”
(Jean Paul Sartre, “Intentionality”, Martin Joughin (Trans.), 1939, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (Eds.), Zone 6: Incorporations, Urzone, New York, 1992, p. 391).
2.
“She is waiting to file [...]
1. Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness shelved amidst the other endless volumes of his work.
2. “Lilik, don’t let anyone else read this” (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Letter to Lili Brik, in Love is the Heart of Everything: Correspondence Between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915-1930, Bengt Jangfeldt (Ed.), Julian Graffy (Trans.), Polygon, Edinburgh, 1986, p. 116).
[...](“Possible Changes In A Couple’s Relationship To Be Considered In Diagnosing Love”, from Henry A. Bowman, Marriage for Moderns, Fifth Edition, 1960, McGraw-Hill; lifted from the latest Diagram).
1.
Advice for the Pre-Dawn
Home is a long way
To walk, unless you gambled
Poorly, with your interior—
Lost it all, on a single
Devastating bet.
In that case, your vacant shell,
Weightless and aimless,
Will find it’s own way.
2.
A Small Conversation
Asked by the hooker
What you’re afraid of
You say: nothing
Meaning everything
It can mean.
Australia,
you are a faded haze of sirens and drifting voices while one of yours sits alone in a bright white room. There appear to be two of us here as spectators. The other, he checks his phone. There are two minutes everybody. At least as many cameras as people. Boom mikes. Mobiles to be switched [...]