June 12 2002
A group of people go out to sea in small boats made from weak branches and reeds. They leave after dark. The boats start falling apart in the ocean. The cold water comes in through the holes. But they keep paddling out to sea. There's no choice but to keep paddling out into the cold. The moon is out. They can see the tips of the waves. They don't talk to each other. When the boats start to fall apart they start laughing. It's very amusing. The branches and reeds are left behind them on the sea. They aren't even going to make it out of the harbour. They can see the islands that protect them from the huge waves of the ocean. If they made it that far, they would keep paddling into the waves, although they would immediately be swamped. They don't paddle desperately. Time is measured. There is no sense in tiring oneself out. The point is to get as far as you can. There is nothing to do but paddle out as far from shore as you can. The cold water is your reward. Your skin was constructed to feel the lash and to respond to it with hesitation and desire. That is why you constructed the raft from reeds. Even though you could have chosen concrete or steel, you chose something that would fall apart around you. All your companions did, too. You are all true seafarers. There is nobody weak. The moon is beginning to set. Soon you will be paddling in darkness. You will be able to hear your companions. You will always be able to hear them. Why did you leave in the darkness? Because it is never daytime. But I'm with you. That's all I wanted to tell you. All the time. This is me speaking to myself, I suppose. I speak to someone else in the way I want to be spoken to. The only thing that could happen is if you drifted away from us; and I will never, never let that happen.
There is no true darkness
There is always an elegy
That speaks to you on the point of suffering
Listen to it in books, listen to it in the air, listen to it in your high pitched ...
At the point of greatest suffering
There is a superficial transmutation
It is what you can feel
Like a vibration around you
Don't - try not to be afraid of suffering
Remember what you have made from fear and loneliness
Remember that there is something comparable to what people call 'madness'
(When they think of 'eyes rolling back')
What do you see when your eyes roll back in your head?
White light, maybe, or flashes or needle pricks
(At the highest point)
But don't be distracted from the SOUND you can HEAR
If you strain your ears and it becomes louder, the more you're ...
There is no true darkness
What I wrote was a lie, because even at sea
There is always a white light
And even now the gift of suffering
Is the words that won't stop coming and will torture you all day and night
An increasing whine in your ear
This is what will drive you insane and back to happiness.
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I remember once being at Brandeis, that's where I went to college, and some obnoxious professor was talking to me and used a word I didn't know. And I remember saying to myself, "That's the last time that's ever going to happen." There's no reason that I need to be lorded over by someone just because their vocabulary is bigger. So I just look everything up when I come upon something, and then write it down. I think it's important to know scientific language because otherwise it gives people tremendous power over you. I mean, look at the way a doctor can diagnose you and suggest some sort of radical remedy and you won't have any idea what he's talking about. It's like when you bring your car in and they say you have this and this and this and you just say, "OK." And that's what most people do with doctors. I make a conscious effort to include that sort of language now and then in my books because I'm really fascinated by it and I think it's good for people to know. I always try to make every single line interesting. I think my books give people a very unique form of pleasure. So I think they have a very kind of erotic appeal. But it's a kind of cerebral erotics. I'm talking about the feeling of pleasure that every person gets from reading. I want to make people laugh. I was influenced by poetry, because it's so marvelous. Poetry by John Keats, or Rimbaud or Baudelaire. Because the work is so dense and so rich. I think I've been much more influenced by poetry I've read than certainly any fiction writer. I don't read fiction that much. I tend to read older things. Language Poetry to me is just unendurably boring. But I talk to some of these people who write it and they say, "Well, it's supposed to be." I just can't imagine sitting down with that stuff, bringing it to the beach with you. I love the ease with which Duchamp could say, "Well, I'm not painting anymore" and move into a completely different sort of work. There was a point at which he stopped painting and started just making different things. And at some point he said he wasn't doing anything anymore, and just played chess, basically, and he wrote essays. He was also not being completely truthful about not working on anything. I've always found him to be a very elegant person. And elegance is something that is very important to me. No matter how wacky or silly what I'm talking about is, I try to make a very elegant sentence about it. I just have a very personal affinity for elegance. Which has nothing to do with money. It has to do with one's style. I always thought The Ramones were elegant, because it was just so chasent of anything extraneous, and they had obviously made exactly what they intended to. It just seemed completely error-free to me. It was impeccable. Madonna as far from what I'm talking about it as I can imagine. Every year I predict the end of Madonna because I just can't imagine people being interested in her anymore. And to her credit, she comes up with some way of reinventing herself so that people are interested in her. [Mark Leyner.] |
my new project - THE FINAL SOMNOLENCE March
Maryann Nelson
I parked my car outside my house on the night of Thursday, February 8, 2002, in a legal park at the kerbside with no yellow lines, road markings etc. When I left the house at approximately 11.30 am the next day a new 'Residents Parking Only' sign had been erected beside my car and white lines had been painted AROUND it, and I had this ticket. While this is quite amusing, I hope that you will quickly cancel the fine. I have kept a copy of this letter. Please write back to me to confirm that the fine has been cancelled.
Saturday 2 March Nigel Bunn's house today - he lives at the top of consultancy house - the elevator to the seventh floor is barely a metre square - the concrete floors outside his house smell like - concrete dust.We sat in the kitchen and you could see a sliver of the harbour but not much, mainly the 'grey belt', that is to say the industrial zone that the city fathers in conjunction with Des Boyes have built around our harbour in order both to beautify and protect, and Nigel has so much equipment that even making espresso was an elaborate process, I thought the boiling sound of the machine was something terrible going wrong because it went for so long, then I saw the steam, luckily I hadn't said anything, and I read 'Twelve Nights', I was just getting up the the part where Uncle Belch is making jokes when Nigel said 'have you seen my recording studio.' We went through to the studio. It was sort of like a professional recording studio crammed with dials, keyboards, mixing desks, except if half the normal equipment was taken away and replaced with strange prototypes built in the 1950s. It was a small room with a green blind blocking the light. I kind of tried to make some sounds but I didn't really understand what was going on; there were thousands of red inputs and black outputs and golden plugs and black levers and then I felt my legs going numb because I'd been sitting on a box for ages, so I said goodbye, and Nigel gave me the book of 'Twelth Night' plus the Cliff Notes for 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles', he'd made the eyes of Viola black.
H.N.*
get off the net! I know you're there. You're nothing but a phony mock nerd.
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is over. These days many people openly admit that they just don't need to be addicted to anything. They try it out for a few years, then give up. It's yet another vice that contemporary society has made redundant, like sex. Of course, the media still portray people as having drinking problems, just like they act as if people are still having sex: I'm talking about Cleo, Cosmo, Sex and the City, The Mind of a Married Man ... the public has to be kept happy. The strange thing is, how willing 'the people' are to go along with the charade. I've seen people putting on impeccable performances: claiming that they had affairs, have drinking problems, even that they're struggling with drug habits. I know it's all for my benefit and I love my friends for it, but still, I wonder what they're really getting up to. What's actually going on when they claim to 'have a hangover' or when they're lying on top of their girlfriends, 'having sex'? I wish I knew. Because to tell the truth, I'm a little behind; I occasionally fake a few vices but I sincerely don't know what the new ones are. If anyone's willing to tell, let's get together and 'have a drink.'
A Triumph of the Will and The Pleasures of Primitive Gentlefolk
I was gonna write here about Bethune's Gully. Nobody's there; the car doors open; Suicide already got lots of Echo echoing round the gully; the strip of light down the middle of the gully; the dark wet trees up the side; the swings, jumping off the swings and running over to the cold river and putting your wrists into the water. Putting your wrists to your forehead and feeling the water evapourate without stickiness; imagining the place before white settlers got there, imagining you lived here now and there isn't any houses. Sitting on the seesaw and trying to make it jump at the top.
BRRRRRRRD
I see a lot of boys with big noses and big bodies. A bunch of big boys got into the lift with me to go up to the eighth floor of the Hocken Building. There was no other girls in the lift. some of them were sniggering.
I read "Killer: The Confessions of Carl Panzram." He killed 23 people. Two or three of them were young boys whose brains he bashed out with a rock after he'd sodomised them. He learnt about sodomy from juvenile correction school; he called it the way of civilised people, ironically. "I help people the only way I know how, by killing them. I help them to reform." He was kept in solitary confinement for almost five years once, spent most of his life in jail. He always tried to escape. He fell off the wall and broke his legs, a bone in his back, a couple of others; they wouldn't set them, left him in solitary for them to heal, fourteen months later he could walk again, but always with a limp. When they're preparing the gallows, they put a concrete weight on the rope for days beforehand to stretch it til there's no give, so that when the prisoner falls, it will snap like an iron rod. When Panzram was taken to the gallows, he ran ahead of the hangman and the screws he was manacled to, dragging them behind him. He had a writing style I liked.
the sun is setting on this city. i'm hot and sweating. i put my t-shirt on, but it already smelt rotten, the way things sometimes do when they've taken too long to dry. i wore it still, my hairs in feathers, try as I may i can't care what i look like, i wear flat black school shoes and a flowery skirt and a blue and red hooded sweatshirt. i didn't brush my hair today or even look at myself. thinking 'but this could be your big day' still i wear dirty clothes. i look in the mirror and see a white food stain in the middle of the bib of my sweatshirt. this depresses me but I like the jersey because it's comfortable. and besides it has genuine style in my mind, being blue and red and with the logo of the now-defunct 'Dunedin Electricty' - DE - on the upper left. People like that when they know what it stands for. i was standing in the lift with the boys and my face was squashed into the back of a Kathmandu backpack. The guy didn't seem to realise, he kept leaning further and further back, though the lift wasn't full. This made the guy in the red t-shirt standing next to me snigger even more than he already was.
in the hot sun before evening i was driving to university as fast as i could, without my seat belt on. trying to find somebody. stuck in front of the railway tracks, the barriers lowered for some dirty fucking green engine that wasn't even pulling anything. Still, it was kind of exciting to hear the bells. the solid gold 'top five at five' came on. 'mrs brown you've got a lovely daughter' was one of the songs: 'i'd go down on my knees, but there's no use in pining.' then 'the game of love.' an important song in my intellectual history, representing the moment my depression broke in the shower, when i realised the foolishness of human romantic endeavour as i sang it to myself half-heartedly. it was the steam too and the stupidity of what i was doing. 'downtown'; 'when you're alone and you're feeling lonely' ... i was thinking about writing these songs in my webdiary. i remembered all the lines that struck me so i could write them down here. it seemed romantic. my skin was crawling.
If you want to know what i'm thinking about right now I'm thinking about Mark Prindle and Andrew WK (or here)
I'm starting a
new web-diary, because I dislike Duane. You might think I'm joking about Duane, but who cares what you think.
Employment
In reply to your advertisement for a shop assistant:
I have been the purveyor of many ridiculously useless products. Products so ridiculously useless, I can't believe they could be sold. The sort of products that people respond to with nervous firmness: 'Perhaps later.'
I never have had any idea whether my employer is making money. They generally employ me for about five dollars above the minimum wage, perhaps because they genuinely need the help, perhaps because they want to feel like powerful bosses, perhaps to give the business the appearance of corporate structure and thus to instill a (perhaps phony) faith in it. (Although I see my employer as completely alienated from me, it occurs to me that I have had an experience that may represent a vague insight into their attitude. This was a freakish moment when I paid removal men two hundred dollars and watched with increasing pleasure as they emptied the house of my possessions, possessions that by right I ought to be heaving with my own hands; and I've thought briefly, without daring to fully conceptualise it, that it would have been worth paying then the two hundred dollars simply in order to see them work, even if it weren't necessary at all - but the thought is uncomfortable to me and I don't entertain it for long.) I could go even further than saying that I don't know or care whether my employer is solvent, and say that I prefer working for businesses that seem to be on the edge of destitution.
In the small, struggling business, the employee is generally not very closely watched by the harried, clueless employer. The employer tries to be nice to the employee, like an impoverished noble who (stupidly) turns to his servants for affection. There are barely any customers to deal with. As a teenager I worked for busy restaurants, fast food chains, and so on, for slightly lower wages and under more intense supervision, under employers who knew how to motivate their sluggish staff with star charts and wage penalties and aloof firmness. I now prefer, if I have to, to work for the crumbling, for people whose clingy desperation and simultaneous loathing of me as a drain on their finances allows me to be the one who is above it all. The ability to gain this type of employment is perhaps the single benefit that has accrued from my unobtrusive neatness and inoffensive physical appearance. Just over average height, of average good looks, of a pleasant and mild temperament in general, easily amused but not too gay, having had a somewhat awkward childhood, I am able to empathise with those who are suffering, but usually hold back from becoming too close, as I have reason to fear the power of others. Thus, I am perfectly suited for employment by the struggling businessman.
I remain your humble servant etc.
GOD FORGIVE ME!
Rock City Rocker
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Diary index
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Art
What kind of music do you listen to?
There is a lot of dirt in me, a lot of separation. To be myself is to be separate from myself because I still bear the anguish of people who were crushed.
An older female relative of mine was beaten up over and over when she was growing up. What could it mean to her to listen to Bjork? But she does - because she wants to mute her feelings. She knows she ought to be like Bjork - she ought to be intoxicated with life - but she isn't. Amongst the most lively things in her life are feelings of pain. So if she heard someone say, 'I was beaten up every day,' I think that would touch her. I think that would bring her back to life. And that's why, even though they're bastards, I listen to Iggy Pop and read Carl Panzram; because they talk about being beaten, about being dirt, and restore me to life.
Being afflicted with poverty differs depending on how poverty is perceived in your society. In ours, nothing is given to the poor except the means of survival - they're failures. So they beat each other up. The relative I mentioned is obsessed with financial security, because this is the only way to cocoon yourself from hatred in our beautiful country. One hundred years ago, people moved here to become rich. People weren't simply born here. They came here to get rich.
There's something to be said for art
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