arms, legs, books
All that matters out here is wind. It gives
distance.So do arms, on rock, hunting
for seams and pockets hidden to eyes, sometimes touch unused to tactile
seeking.
The sun is playing hide & seek out here
too, leaving us damp in the trees, reading overpriced used books and craving the
dry that will bring enough
friction.Avoiding email like the
plague.Don DeLillo's
The Body
Artist is empty, in three voices, distant,
marked by absence, and short. It is less profound and full of meaning--as the
critics praise--than devoid of it, but self-consciously so in an awkward way. Of
course it is about language, but so is all DeLillo, if not all of literature. It
is also about a suicide, a conversation, a woman performance artist, time and a
timeless man. Its punctuality is at times as frustrating as it is searching, and
I like that, for although it is never late, it is perhaps ahead of its time.
Best read in one sitting, but better
re-read.HST requires some re-reading
too.Generation of
Swine is HST's '80s book, the collected columns
for the San Francisco Examiner. Reading it today reveals precisely accurate
predictions on George Bush (corrupt, dodgy, even a side reference to
Halliburton), the failure of incisive journalism in regards to Iran/Contra, and
an unfortunately unerring analysis of the self-destruction of the Democrat
party. It starts slow, although once Thompson gets into his swing with uncannily
accurate betting statistics on political futures, his sentences can't be stopped
by a pack of bloodthirsty wild boars--or Pat Buchanan. What better way to
enumerate the politics of the '80s ?A
must read to reposition George the Second's apparent destiny. And doublespeak:
HST often tells the opposite tale, in a thinly-veiled cynicism that cuts like a
bullwhip, to undermine the enemy (or subject its laws to such extravagance that
it becomes monstrous, yet somehow all-too-normal in the logic he spells out).
Many of these columns are wrapped in political allegory and metaphor (such as
his story of trapping and feathering a red fox--which he has to point out is
allegory, to avoid an investigation of animal harassment; yet even this story is
difficult to verify--did he really receive complaints? Or was the animal story
true all along as well as a metaphor? HST always did seem to act out his stories
rather than just fictionalize pure
imagination).Next: original edition of
Abbie Hoffman's Woodstock
Nation, "A Talk-Rock Book."
Whereas drugs appeared to work for HST,
they didn't for Abbie.
posted. Fri - July 8, 2005 @ 09:17 AM
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..ziP:
./them.hallucinates./.
.this blog sketches patterning / [tV] -- everything here is in-progress, often a mess of thoughts and poorly edited grammar.
.. @rchives //
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numbers that mean little:
absolut numerosity..:
...puplished 0n: Jul 11, 2005 09:17 AM
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