First of all, I want to honor Mr. Rosenberg who is our first reader who isn't family. You are reading this stuff, yeah? We've both read Infinite Jest and gotten tanked up and weepy and recited the last few lines about how the tide was way out, so we're on the level. And nearly come to blows about the relative tragedy (yes, they can so) of authorial suicides and whether Bolano counts or not. Let's don't get me started, shall we?
At any rate. This is just a place-holder for now but I think I can interest some big names in recording various versions of this. It would be a sort of history of 20th C American music. I want Brian Wilson and Richard Simons to do a dreamy surf version (a la "In My Room") and I'm pretty sure Jagger will want to do the disco version.
And if when the time comes to seal this venture, we can all three--you, me and V. (and James Wood can come if you think he can manage not to be a prima donna)--we'll (I'm pioneering this form of recursive long-sentence grammar that assumes short term memory problems in the reader, by which I don't mean you, although you're our only one of those) engage, to seal the venture, in some sort of ad hoc New Age ritual that involves us being reborn from the desert of David Foster Wallace's something-or-other, which even if we can't figure out what it is, we'll be in an actual desert (V. has one) and so that'll pretty much cover the bases, in terms of ineluctable-concept-trumping-brute-physical-reality wise. That is, the half-assedness (sometimes, alleged) of my thinking will be neither here nor there once we're in the desert. Be assured of this.
We're going to need your input (and your John Hancock on a few pro-forma forms) re: the movie trailer. I'm excited.
[Image: John Bellushi as Bacchus in Bob Guccione's quixotic made-for-TV children's version of the classic holiday story. I still have the lunch box.]
I await Bacchus' reply. Meantime, I think we should keep working on this sentence-form that does what our brains are actually doing [minus the self-crit and the wildest digression which are mostly of a sexual nature and therefore not interesting]-Mary Grace has me listening to Beyonce so I'm not being real clear about this right now- all the eliptical asides; parenthetical equivocations and qualifications; the struggles with meaning that require colons, semi-colons, commas, and other markers of jumping the rails of linear thought that we have not yet invented such as the double-colon and the semi-comma, as well as the extra-big period that marks the utter death of a train of thought [thoughts of sex with person walking by on sidewalk ommitted here] [and here] to bring the reader in on how utterly alone we are in our mental monkey-hood and how in need of almost continual meditation practice- as well as Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, kava, caffeine, etc.- we are.
ReplyDeleteCharles Olson, whose books will do you some good if briefly bibliomancied or even left in front of a plate during a meal, but will prove pure gorgon if consulted by the naive and linear good will, does this thing where he opens a parenthesis and begins to chuck stuff in but then doesn't close it, or opens another. Sometimes he opens several in a row. But giving this much thought will give his ghost a good chuckle so I retract the point. So we need grammar for nevermind.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we shd consider grammar to be just a nod to the human head and its apparently innate verbal logic and need for verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and some amount of order, is all, so's it makes sense but not too much sense, or not so much sense that it veers off from real human experience into the Cartesian grid of complete lucidity and mechanical hygeinic order where nothing ever happens except it have a plain and explicable cause and effect, cause that's not how we sense most things most days.
ReplyDeleteMr. Rosenberg? Your digressive thoughts? Would you plese break your silence so we can judge whether or not you're really one of us? 'Cause if you infinitely dig Mr Wood, you may have a case of Descartesitis which only hardship can cure and only academicism can endure.
ReplyDeleteBut the jury is, you know, out. Like, still. So,um.
ReplyDeleteAnd we can outwait you. If that's what it takes. Just keep blogging. Boom!--the USSR crumbles. Boom!--fall of the Berlin Wall. Boom!--return of the salmon. We've blogged through worse, is my point, here.
Mr. Rosenberg?
That even looks like me! I didn't realize you had no readers. I'll check in more often! So, Kirk, is this a movie proposal? Isn't John Belluschi dead? I'm not sure I can keep up with you two. I thought you were maybe English teachers but I see you have some movie and music things here, too. So do you know James Wood? My teacher had us read Infinite Jest last year and it's my favorite book. He also wants us to read Roberto Bolano, and then there's the James Wood interest, so it looks like you and my teacher went to the same school or are the same age. I AM GOING TO KEEP READING THIS ITS VERY ENTERTAINING. THANK YOU!!!
ReplyDeletePS. That looks like me a bit but I am not that fat!
ReplyDeletePPS. Do you mind if I link my blog to this post? I told my friends about it.
ReplyDeleteOk with me.
ReplyDelete