Jared Schickling to me:
Dec 14, 2009
When you have a moment, attached is the ms. I was hoping you'd blurb it. Only if you're moved to.
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 14, 2009
Will do. When do you need the blurb by?
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 14, 2009
No rush. If you can get to it in a month, that'd work. And longer would probably work too. I think Geoffrey's got a number of things before he gets to mine.
I'd recommend printing it, unfortunately. There are variations in the font easy to make out on paper but tough on a screen. But either way....
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 15, 2009
I'll print it out. Was going to do it that way anyway. To seriously read something I need to see it on the page literally. Computer screens are too small and incompatible with the eyes.
I decided to turn down a couple so-called writing offers from XXXXX and the XXXXX. The pay was ridiculously low and it was obviously geared for someone looking for exposure not money. I got exposure and neither of these outlets would be very dignified for me. But nonetheless, XXXXX, a '75 DeSales grad and friend of Ted Pelton, is looking over my writing samples, etc., and she edits XXXXX. That's a monthly and if she wanted to throw me $50 to $100 a month for five to 10 hours of copy writing a month, or something, that'd be sweet.
I'm also not going to make too much of a fuss at XXXX. Just take the new position and be quiet. They're not bright people--management/union--and I'll be finished with that outfit all together, one way or another, by the end of 2010. In the meantime, I'm loving the time off. The novel's truly blooming. Here's the title that's sticking: Objective 13: A Ziggy Fumar Manifesto. I'm not saying anything else about it other than it will be the piece I was born to write and will probably not need to write anymore when it's done...unless I feel there's yet a better way for it to be said...though I think I'll be reaching my limits with this one. I already feel myself somewhat slipping in the mental area...zero short term memory...increasing fugue states as if my waking life were a low-grade acid trip and my dreams, my REM sleep, an equally lucid adventure...could I be going insane? Dementia? Whether I am or not, Objective 13 will be the necessary achievement to hunt down my birth mother and say see? See what you gave up? To look at my mother now and say thank-you, see what your patience and kindness has wrought? And also, a great deal of I told you so. This is the one. It's all collapsing into simple arabesque patterns thanks to the simple method of the writing and its autobiographical nature. Enough said.
I'll begin work on the blurb today. I'm thinking of asking you to blurb So It Seams because I still don't really know that many people. I'm also going to ask Goro Takano and Bennett Lovett-Graff. I'll ask Geoffrey if he can think of someone else, the way he asked me for Goro. I also imagine he might put something from the reviews of Smoke on the back cover. I don't know. I hate this part of it. I enjoy the opportunity to blurb and closely read unpublished texts, but I don't like thinking about who to ask. Asking isn't bad, just thinking about it is...
If you're interested, I attached an excerpt from Objective 13. These are all real people. I haven't changed the names yet. Tomorrow I start a similar section about my mother.
The only thing I'll say is that I keep thinking of the way Italo Calvino approached his Invisible Cities and the way Robbe-Grillet examined objects in his dimension in Jealousy and The Labrynth. A later draft edited and commented on by Ziggy Fumar will contain a manifesto without agenda. Ziggy will be a recursion of the narrator and it will be up to the reader--Marco Polo's Kublah Kahn or Scheherezade's king--who will compose the final draft...or 13th objective, to close the hoop of the spirit's text. You'll see. It's going to work. It's going to be pleasure inducing...or I've wasted my life in the most amusing way.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009
ps and regarding the edits -
thanks for all your patience and no pressure. With those edits we have a final draft.
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009
OK. I read through this thing last night and the edits this morning. I'm simply going to type out my handwritten notes for whatever they're worth. I imagine my blurb will emerge from our discussion.
*****
1. Like Dura, Zero refuses to be organized into a singular matrix or web, locating Itself in various fonts and forms of writing.
2. Zero un-travels, un-locates and un-relocates Itself...be-ing on a blooming excursion.
3. Reading Zero requires constant translation and re-translation, which is to say cursion and re-cursion...
4. p. 12, 21: Zero lingering on [me] as an object that's a combination of phallus and window. I'm flattered and touched, and moved by the footnote at bottom of p. 21.
5. p. 62--"Let the old dwarf stutter"--"we leak"--much improved placement; works in a way worthy of your talent, which is huge and tender...reminiscent of Whitman.
6.Merging with the Socia's pineal gland...The whole [of Zero] is a transbifurcation of voice...a cacophonous unity of symbols--visual, aural, intellectual--collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual--The awakened human mind making sense of the chaos...THE MIND IS AN ARABESQUE ONE MUST RELEASE TO PERCEIVE.
7. Zero's Blooming Excursion is, in part, a literature of negation...nihilism seams a fundamental force...like entropy...a natural law...death.
8. Whom is the "they" who "loved address/of new men year"...?
9. Begins with a negating enigma that takes off via the salvation of 10 deleted lines [a "complete set?"]...
10. OK. Right off the bat I'm mystified...struggling to figure out a way to read Zero from the start...p. 3 seems almost heiroglyphic...something seems to be going on re: sets within sets...then the name of our dearly departed, suicided friend...It's as if we're entering another realm...one of a negated, suicided ego named Zero--the intentional black hole, the necessary absence].
11. Zero is the text's strange attraction to a kind of suicide/nihilism.
12. This is quite literally an end-time apocalypse...a near death revelation.
13. p. 5: Could be a message to Pat, the p. 6 becomes a portal with a footnote...a threshold that feels like Beckett's Lost Ones.
14. p. 7: MERGER OF THE PINEAL GLANDS. A whole new room or world...I'm expecting a land of the dead...an enigmatic, esoteric narrative seems to be taking shape--Zero's psychomythology in the face of death?...That it's composed by joining two minds/souls together across the life/death divide via the part of the brain controlling waking and sleeping patterns and seasonal fluctuations of brainwaves, etc. & et al, which, according to the Surrealist Battaille reveal a blind spot in Western philosophy...the theosophist Madame Blavatsky spoke of an esoteric pineal gland and HP Lovecraft's "From Beyond" deals with a machine that stimulates the PG allowing subjects to perceive alternate realities...
15. Is Zero like Orpheus chasing Eurydice [suicided/suiciding/annihilated humankind] to the Underworld?
16. Sets within sets become texts within texts of different fonts joined together via familiar lines and groupings yet alien or other-worldly--inhuman or transhuman--in the way they're seamed together. If one is to be literate in the realm of merged pineal glands one must make sense of the seams...It's as much a painting to make sene of [the repeated Chagall] or puzzle to construct [the chemistry and mathematics] as a poem to read...It's a poem that's forcing the reader to write the final draft.
17. Aural punning like "ears quoi" adds to the almost meaningful, yet still annihilative chaos...
18. Humankind seems killed off by mathematics and chemistry.
19. The redacted parts can be viewed as stand-ins for Zero. Every time you see a redaction, fill it in with Zero and it makes a shifting sensibility...
20.The lined-through parts seem visible stages, or mid-scales of awareness pushed aside...each pineal gland seems to operate with its own font...
21. p. 24--"I dominate this space." "I"=Zero's delusion of transcendence...
22. Uses the space on the page as a painting of words, and as the pages accumulate so does the sense that a real, albeit esoteric, that is highly personal, narrative is taking place...this is quite literally a myth making a psychology of Itself in poetic and fictional terms...
23. Seeking a kind of salvation/salvaging through nihilism...
24. Every word bleeds into the next, defamiliarizing them as objects, allowing the reader to feel them as subjects instead--worlds blocked in by sheer data of a single pivotal year in the life of the re-dacted Zero...
25. pp. 35-6--Beautiful. The rhythms of the whole piece boil down into concise poetic form, and yet it's not Zero stitching the senses together...
26. Bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, mathematics, chemistry, strange symbols, numerology/Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data [like patent backgrounds]...all adding up to a paranoiac approach to the cosmos that seems to subvert or counter Its own overt nihilism...Zero also seems a bit sentimental, as if he were re-couping what Pat Lowther rejected with his suicide and what humankind seems to be rejecting with its own...a psychopathically rational materialism hinging on superstition...
27. Shares a similar joy of ironically sending up technical jargon, much the way I do marketing in So It Seams...language can be hilariously mocked...have fun goddamnit!
28. p. 49--Excellent definition and placement of Hinge.
29. p. 50--Now it get's really political with the Lt's body coming home and a reporter capitalizing on it with a feature story for which he wins a Pulitzer--told as footnote--Zero's trying to stay out of the reader's face--sure, go ahead, just read the "poems" my dear...
30. p. 51--Interesting use of images like thought clouds...the hearts and Chagall very moving personally...this is, in a way. a love poem to the people and animals and flora and things you love, yet it's paradoxically nihilistic...or is it? Beginning to salvage something spiritual from the suicided/suiciding wreckage called "humankind."
31. And then the sheer bifurcated music seaming language at top of page 52...you can literally see and breathe the weaving coaxis esemplasizing...
32. The repetition of the Chagall image of the green man a kind of mantra, repeated over and over--Zero projecting himself out of the poem and into the painting...Possibility and the Village, p. 52--entering a climax the way one might enter an event horizon.
33. OU and Socia--partner, companion--salvaging what Pat suicided on p. 61
34. p. 63--Therefore...an essay on the objectification of ecocriticism?
35. Focus on the non-human...recuperating the "primordial experience" by conceptualizing it in non-linguistic symbols...regard for and valuation of dream symbols--The Symbology of Silence--"The verbal record of an interactive encounter in the world...where Nature retains its autonomy."
36. This is an ecopoetic manifesto that comes with an instruction manual for how to read it.
37. pp. 65-6--Derrida--literature of negation, Zero, nihilism to differance & arabesque via language as an alchemical membrane...or, perhaps, falling into the grotesque of Baudrillard's "hallucinatory hyperreality."
38. For me, the essay seems to suggest you quit poetry for criticism, as if the ladder was more adequate to the task at hand. It seems a further descent, formally speaking into nihilism without having salvaged what it originally hoped for...Orpheus fails to recoup Eurydice...this would be a tragedy but Zero has no hubris [at least not as of this reading]...By including an essay at the end you seem to negate your original intent of poetic apocalypse...sort of the way Joshua Cohen falls short by not sending Jonathan through the Valley of Nails...it seems a limit you didn't explore...it's the textual parallel of Pat's suicide, of humankind's surrender to consumption/commodification...Is that what you actually want? It seems to me you were getting somewhere then stopped.
*****
Nonetheless, this is a brilliant book and my mind could change about the essay over time. It throws me for a loop. Don't get me a wrong, it's a very informative, excellent piece for what it is...i just wonder if it will be as well received placed there as it might elsewhere, and if it doesn't somehow diminish the experience...then again, it helps the reader read the first part...perhaps if you finished the first part and kept the essay?
I really don't know what I'm talking about. You're today's cowboy genius, not me. Great work.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009
Thanks for the insightful read. I'm uncomfortable with "nihilism" -- though, I won't disagree with your read -- I didn't notice a direct noticing of the time line, the chronicle (less narrative), 1996-2006, and the "events" marked at stages ("ten to cover," beginning with an enlistment in first section, 2003 invasion in second half of second section, and a return in the third -- all told from these shores, or from a bird's eye view either over these shores or of a self-aware surreality that derives from its roots in these shores -- re-read the poem "3rd person 2003" in light of the war -- after finding what's at stake, or not, ask, what survives? "No return address." In the sense that the "he" possibly doesn't, the he of the third section must necessarily be some ghost. That's one possible read). There are two characters, confused and complicated and clarified and over again along the way, he and she -- the book doesn't so much tell the story as speak about the story, in order to find the story, by being the things contained inside and outside the story, the things that won't let what "he" (and she) wants just be. I'm not even sure what he "wants" is present in any finally discernible way -- more of a settling -- and, then thinking of "he" as an aspect of "the poem" which is talking about itself -- for domesticity and "love" and that baby which is or is not born -- as if, such things are grounding, last ditch efforts at finding something worth it, perhaps good, uncontaminatable by virtue of its undergirding makeup or facts, whose manifestation doesn't really believe this either. What persists, maybe, is the force of this, the energy, the vectors of a human life -- but which nonetheless leave the actual lives behind (closer to birth), or ahead (closer to death), forlorn lying etc. This in a way necessitates the essay -- which I hope forces a re-read based on new information in terms of what's been constructed. The human dimension of the poetry is also a nonhuman dimension, being other to itself. It's mythical aspects and allusions -- I think it boils down to Apollo stealing Iris's caduceus and passing it on to Hermes for his gift of eloquence and skill at the lute -- Hermes is rewarded for his lying and thieving. And Hermes is messenger between human and gods, god of poetry, the role granted by Apollo, who stole it from Iris (first part of second section, also notice the direct engagement with third-wave feminism --- allusions and engagements saturate this thing -- I don't think it's necessary to pick up on all these, but where they are grasped, it adds layers of reading, particularly in the way quotes are contextualized and re-worked and mangled). Iris carried a ewer dipped in the river Styx which she used to put to sleep those who perjure themselves. I love the etymology of "iris"....
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009
That's all very hard to digest. I don't read that stuff in your poem. Well, sort of. And the essay at the end can make sense and may grow on me [though as I said before it's an excellent stand-alone piece]. However, due to the poetry/poem itself, and what the reader's going to read on any given page, I think you have to accept a certain misprision, a creative misreading/misinterpretation/misrepresentation of the text on my part [which composes my palate with my prior knowledge of you the way a poet might misread Yeats to achieve a Yeatsian level of poetry for herself--I can't help trying to read Jared Schickling as well as Zero's Blooming Excursion, to read Dylan's lyrics the way I might hear Bob sing them], for the reader to find a way into the text for herself.
This stuff you mention may all be very important to you, but the reader might pick up on "a" repetition or allusion, just not "the" repetition or allusion. Perhaps they will pick their own, things you weren't aware of that your subconscious nonetheless projected there, waiting for someone--you, perhaps--to read/see/bear witness to...
When you name Pat Lowther in the beginning, the average reader will be non-plussed, just a name. When I read it I instantly click to suicide, a suicide caused by humankind's suiciding that has shaken us in a variety of ways. So I look for a recuperation because that's what it--the whole poem--seems to be...almost.
Theoretically, I think the intentional fallacy is itself a fallacy on my end [best not ignore what I know about you and just focus on the text alone...otherwise I'd probably be lost]. My cultivating an ignorance of your intentions is easily "annihilated" due to the power of your language in light of our relationship. I'm trapped into reading certain things certain ways.
And by nihilism, I don't necessarily mean it in a negative sense, but simply in the existential sense of God being dead--the old ways of making sense no longer work--meaning we're free to make sense of the chaos as we will, and that your brand of nihilism is ecopoetic-ethical in that it refuses to cultivate an ignorance of that chaos in favor of some delusional form of happiness...focusing on a re-distributed material environment in search of some sort of literary or linguistic consensus.
Keep responding...perhaps explain a little how the poet named Zero is not Orpheus but Hermes, told as if to a bright-eyed child...seriously. What are you doing, Daddy?
Finally, that we're even writing about something one of us has written on this level seems to signify, at least to me, that the text has achieved its aim of provocative, intellectual stimulation. In other words, I can't really ask for more from a book [other than you follow my advice, trudging through the Valley of Nails, completing the first part]...or is it a sense of incompletion you're after...?
This is a very good book.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009
"misprision" -- right. I was just curious that the timeline wasn't mentioned in your notes. perhaps it was and i missed it....
i'll have to think more about Zero Orpheus Hermes -- hmmmmmm ---
i really do appreciate your honest and spot-on read -
I'm curious though, and I know you already said, but I guess I need maybe other words to put alongside what you already said -- in what way doesn't the essay fit in? The poem was "abandoned" for the essay, suggesting that the essay isn't part of the same work, but different and antithetical and therefore doesn't fit? If so, how so, all over again?
From me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009
Yes, I was aware of the timeline but focusing on different aspects. The fact I read it as a narrative implies a timeline...narrative necessitates time and vice versa...I was really reading it in sync with A Heaven of Others...it just seemed to fall in that way for some reason...all the contemporary fiction I've been reading deals with loss in various ways...but your "heaven" seems the recuperation of a chaotically inhuman natural world...a nihilism that isn't actually a loss a but spiritual-cognitive gain...there's a hero's journey in Zero's Blooming Excursion [love love love the title by the way, love saying it], but not quite. I see Zero--the narrator/poem--as plumbing another realm within or without this one [again that sets within sets thing I sensed], chasing after that which has died or gone elsewhere like a missing cat...slipped away between the seams and cracks of one's consciousness...our tears being the splash of its wet entrance into the beyond, dampened by our impotent memory...
In my view it's not so much that the essay doesn't fit, in fact it's probably necessary to extend the method and metaphor into the book's architecture, so we have a variety of fonts and styles, footnotes, poems, and yes, an essay [ever think of adding a piece of short fiction? a fable, perhaps?]. It's just that the "poem" proper doesn't seem to go far enough for me. Of course Pat and the dead can't be recuperated into this realm the way we would like them to be...we miss them...but the actual emotion of missing hasn't been fully explored in the poem, though Zero does go all out to give it shape by layers upon layers of testimony as to what it isn't or what it seems to be, almost...I'm looking for the "poem" to come to an utterly mystifying point of simplicity beyond which no human being can imagine that points to, in Jeffers' words, the "transhuman sublime," the inhuman point beyond that makes humanness necessary. Does that make sense?
Jesus Christ, if I were a gormande, and you a chef, you'd cut my throat with your favorite fillet knife about now, and if you didn't cut my voice box, I'd criticize your stroke and dare you to try again...
And please, I'm going to write something about all this, probably more than once, so take the time and think about, and then explain to me in simple English, how Zero is Hermes not Orpheus...then I may retort, or not, on how you're wrong that he's Orpheus, or how I'm right that he's Orpheus...or some exasperating words of such nature...
LOL. Wish you were here. We'd smoke a fatty and celebrate your most excellent work. Bravo, my friend.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 17, 2009
To be honest, Orpheus never crossed my mind. But I think you're right -- insofar as Hermes is a further abstraction of the idea of Orpheus. And vice-versa. I'm not sure Hermes and Orpheus are that separate. Though, of course, they are. Anyway here are some notes on how I'm navigating your question...
MORTAL
Orpheus founds Apollo's cult, the oracular god who in one of his roles brings plague and misfortune. Hymns sung to Apollo are "paeans," while a "peon" was a Spanish someone who travels by foot instead of horse, and describes a laborer with little control over his and her work conditions. "Pawn's" etymology.
Orpheus is one of Apollo's sons. Strabo, a veritable ecological anthropologist in his geographies, early historian, emphasizes Orpheus's mortality and explains he used his skills for money, gathered followers and power and dies as a result of it:
Here lived Orpheus, the Ciconian, it is said -- a wizard who at first collected money from his music, together with his soothsaying and his celebration of the orgies connected with the mystic initiatory rites, but soon afterwards thought himself worthy of still greater things and procured for himself a throng of followers and power. Some, of course, received him willingly, but others, since they suspected a plot and violence, combined against him and killed him.
In his version, Apollo was courting the laughing muse Thalia when he met Orpheus, grew fond, gave him a lyre and taught him to play it (an instrument learned from Hermes, see below). In Strabo's version, Apollo silently (or audibly, depending how you look at it) brings misfortune upon Orpheus, who also worships chthonic Demeter. Strabo uses a word to describe Orpheus meaning "charlatan."
Put Strabo's early treatment of the myth next to the advent of democratic values in ancient Greece (see below), that the popularity of the lyric evolves into the popularity of the tragedy...
In versions earlier than Virgil, (such as Strabo's, though the Eurydice tale is not there) Orpheus is presented only with an apparition of Eurydice. He is punished for being a coward, for resisting the true death that would actually return him to his wife -- which is to say, his muse, and a false one we should remember, who is invoked as such only upon her disappearance, upon Orpheus's own loss, the one to whom his sad, most famous music is played. He is punished twice for his cowardice. When he re-enters the living world the apparition vanishes and the trick exposed, and he learns "what" was dead remains so. In some versions he is then the first to name Apollo (thus he "founds Apollo's cult") and one morning when going to the mountaintop to worship, he neglects his ablutions to his previous patron Dionysus, and the Maenads tear him apart, his second punishment.
Who or what ruins lyrical Orpheus, conspires against him? Why does he himself, eventually, by the time of Virgil, ruin the chance of his dead wife's / born muse's actually returning to flesh and earth? How does tragedy appropriate the lyric?
Note the homophonic lyre / liar...
IMMORTAL
Apollo is also the god of healing -- of music and the lyre, of battle and victory -- Roman soldiers sung paeans on the march. Because of Orpheus, Rome could know Apollo.
Aeschylus identifies Maia with Gaia, Maia being Hermes's mother ("Orpheus worships chthonic Demeter"), Zeus his father. Hermes: guide to the underworld, messenger of the gods (bridge between gods and men), master of the lyre. "Hermeneutics": art of interpreting hidden meanings. Hermes was born before Dionysus. Inventor of fire, he parallels Prometheus; in Aeschylus, Hermes visits Prometheus on the mountainside with a message, and matter-of-factly, smugly, urges him to repent. He is a trickster. God of boundaries. Note he is a "guide" to those already dead.
God of thieves, the night he was born he slipped away and stole his elder brother Apollo's immortal herd of cattle. He chose two ("Hermes Logios" becomes Plato's god of persuasion), killed them, and divided them into 12 parts -- 11 corresponding to the number of Olympian gods, the remainder set aside for himself. This establishes a new sacrificial ritual among men -- which required transgression, breaking of taboo, cosmic theft, in order to do so. He hid the rest of the herd in a cave and covered his tracks.
Apollo somehow knew what had happened -- he visits Maia, who defends her son Hermes, but Zeus intervenes and sides with Apollo (dad's a son of a bitch). Hermes, suspecting he'd be found out, had killed a tortoise and strung its shell prior to Apollo's arrival. In the midst of arguing, Hermes strums this original lyre, a strung hollow shell, and seduces Apollo -- Hermes keeps the cattle in exchange for the lyre. Hermes is granted a servile, peon (Hermes's winged *feet*) position on Olympus. Later Apollo gives Hermes the caduceus in exchange for a flute.
Note some of Hermes offspring, all chimeric and related to fertility: Pan, Hermaphroditus, Eros, Priapus, Fortuna. And the prince of thieves, Lone Wolf Autolycus. Note that by breaking taboo, in which lying and eloquence and seduction are involved, a new covenant between the gods and men is established. Note the "immortal herd" receives a new shepherd. Note his promotion to a regime post and its nature. Note the new peon, an addition to the Olympian regime, across the invoking lips of men, brings a new "paean."
****
Note the homophones "lyre" and "liar." And note how the "lyre" reached Orpheus's hands. Apollo, oracular bringer of plague and healing -- sometimes at the same time as the case may be -- is the stitch joining them -- who is himself the thief of all that was Iris -- the locus of the myth and its knowledge shifts thus from the eye to the ear -- Iris brings "sleep" from the river Styx, closed eyelids, to those who perjure themselves. Put this development next to the flourishing of literary arts, always to be performed, in ancient Greece. Note the decay of ancient Greece, the advent of tragedy, the spurning of epic and the preservation of lyric, the invention of oratory and rhetoric, and Rome's embrace of all things Greek.
It's not possible to flesh out all the details. Part of the problem and value of myth seems to lie in that it adapts. In how it adapts. In the case of the Greeks, ex-change between Orpheus, Hermes, and Apollo seemingly represents in part an ongoing navigation of representing the nature of music and poetry, two things the west took time to divorce, and which were part and parcel to the advent of history as a discipline -- myth and the births and doings of the gods were once our literal "history." "His story." The mind was a living being whose attributes were to be understood in the same terms as bodily doings -- hence the anthropomorphizing of the perceivable immortal. The myths correspond to your comments about truth not feeling good, nor intending to. In ZERO's, the poem would be something like the Hermes of an Orpheus, wise and unwise to Apollo, the true seducer yet unconscious in that role.
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 17, 2009
Duly “noted.”
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 17, 2009
Don't be turned off by all the "note." Was talking to myself more or less
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 17, 2009
I know. Note that it was fucking annoying and how I felt like tweaking you. Note when I'll have a much more detailed response [in a day or two]. Note what you said was instructive, and useful. Note that what I write will be something of a rough preliminary first draft of a preview. Note how it will eventually be something on NHR, at least. Note how I imagine out of this response, the drafts of several blurbs will emerge. Note why I'll then brush them up and give you a multiple choice, as I did Goro. Please note that my private review will likely rake you over the coals a bit on a specific point, which I hope you'll note I'm going to belabor. Note my public review will be that the reader should brace herself for an odyssey beyond Eliot's Wasteland upon a magic carpet woven of symbols we can only seem to note due to their hermeneutical nature...Please note that one will be absolutely as sincere as the other. Note how you deserve nothing less...LOL!!! ;)
All writers are liars, etc. & et al...
Dec 14, 2009
When you have a moment, attached is the ms. I was hoping you'd blurb it. Only if you're moved to.
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 14, 2009
Will do. When do you need the blurb by?
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 14, 2009
No rush. If you can get to it in a month, that'd work. And longer would probably work too. I think Geoffrey's got a number of things before he gets to mine.
I'd recommend printing it, unfortunately. There are variations in the font easy to make out on paper but tough on a screen. But either way....
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 15, 2009
I'll print it out. Was going to do it that way anyway. To seriously read something I need to see it on the page literally. Computer screens are too small and incompatible with the eyes.
I decided to turn down a couple so-called writing offers from XXXXX and the XXXXX. The pay was ridiculously low and it was obviously geared for someone looking for exposure not money. I got exposure and neither of these outlets would be very dignified for me. But nonetheless, XXXXX, a '75 DeSales grad and friend of Ted Pelton, is looking over my writing samples, etc., and she edits XXXXX. That's a monthly and if she wanted to throw me $50 to $100 a month for five to 10 hours of copy writing a month, or something, that'd be sweet.
I'm also not going to make too much of a fuss at XXXX. Just take the new position and be quiet. They're not bright people--management/union--and I'll be finished with that outfit all together, one way or another, by the end of 2010. In the meantime, I'm loving the time off. The novel's truly blooming. Here's the title that's sticking: Objective 13: A Ziggy Fumar Manifesto. I'm not saying anything else about it other than it will be the piece I was born to write and will probably not need to write anymore when it's done...unless I feel there's yet a better way for it to be said...though I think I'll be reaching my limits with this one. I already feel myself somewhat slipping in the mental area...zero short term memory...increasing fugue states as if my waking life were a low-grade acid trip and my dreams, my REM sleep, an equally lucid adventure...could I be going insane? Dementia? Whether I am or not, Objective 13 will be the necessary achievement to hunt down my birth mother and say see? See what you gave up? To look at my mother now and say thank-you, see what your patience and kindness has wrought? And also, a great deal of I told you so. This is the one. It's all collapsing into simple arabesque patterns thanks to the simple method of the writing and its autobiographical nature. Enough said.
I'll begin work on the blurb today. I'm thinking of asking you to blurb So It Seams because I still don't really know that many people. I'm also going to ask Goro Takano and Bennett Lovett-Graff. I'll ask Geoffrey if he can think of someone else, the way he asked me for Goro. I also imagine he might put something from the reviews of Smoke on the back cover. I don't know. I hate this part of it. I enjoy the opportunity to blurb and closely read unpublished texts, but I don't like thinking about who to ask. Asking isn't bad, just thinking about it is...
If you're interested, I attached an excerpt from Objective 13. These are all real people. I haven't changed the names yet. Tomorrow I start a similar section about my mother.
The only thing I'll say is that I keep thinking of the way Italo Calvino approached his Invisible Cities and the way Robbe-Grillet examined objects in his dimension in Jealousy and The Labrynth. A later draft edited and commented on by Ziggy Fumar will contain a manifesto without agenda. Ziggy will be a recursion of the narrator and it will be up to the reader--Marco Polo's Kublah Kahn or Scheherezade's king--who will compose the final draft...or 13th objective, to close the hoop of the spirit's text. You'll see. It's going to work. It's going to be pleasure inducing...or I've wasted my life in the most amusing way.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009
ps and regarding the edits -
thanks for all your patience and no pressure. With those edits we have a final draft.
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009
OK. I read through this thing last night and the edits this morning. I'm simply going to type out my handwritten notes for whatever they're worth. I imagine my blurb will emerge from our discussion.
*****
1. Like Dura, Zero refuses to be organized into a singular matrix or web, locating Itself in various fonts and forms of writing.
2. Zero un-travels, un-locates and un-relocates Itself...be-ing on a blooming excursion.
3. Reading Zero requires constant translation and re-translation, which is to say cursion and re-cursion...
4. p. 12, 21: Zero lingering on [me] as an object that's a combination of phallus and window. I'm flattered and touched, and moved by the footnote at bottom of p. 21.
5. p. 62--"Let the old dwarf stutter"--"we leak"--much improved placement; works in a way worthy of your talent, which is huge and tender...reminiscent of Whitman.
6.Merging with the Socia's pineal gland...The whole [of Zero] is a transbifurcation of voice...a cacophonous unity of symbols--visual, aural, intellectual--collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual--The awakened human mind making sense of the chaos...THE MIND IS AN ARABESQUE ONE MUST RELEASE TO PERCEIVE.
7. Zero's Blooming Excursion is, in part, a literature of negation...nihilism seams a fundamental force...like entropy...a natural law...death.
8. Whom is the "they" who "loved address/of new men year"...?
9. Begins with a negating enigma that takes off via the salvation of 10 deleted lines [a "complete set?"]...
10. OK. Right off the bat I'm mystified...struggling to figure out a way to read Zero from the start...p. 3 seems almost heiroglyphic...something seems to be going on re: sets within sets...then the name of our dearly departed, suicided friend...It's as if we're entering another realm...one of a negated, suicided ego named Zero--the intentional black hole, the necessary absence].
11. Zero is the text's strange attraction to a kind of suicide/nihilism.
12. This is quite literally an end-time apocalypse...a near death revelation.
13. p. 5: Could be a message to Pat, the p. 6 becomes a portal with a footnote...a threshold that feels like Beckett's Lost Ones.
14. p. 7: MERGER OF THE PINEAL GLANDS. A whole new room or world...I'm expecting a land of the dead...an enigmatic, esoteric narrative seems to be taking shape--Zero's psychomythology in the face of death?...That it's composed by joining two minds/souls together across the life/death divide via the part of the brain controlling waking and sleeping patterns and seasonal fluctuations of brainwaves, etc. & et al, which, according to the Surrealist Battaille reveal a blind spot in Western philosophy...the theosophist Madame Blavatsky spoke of an esoteric pineal gland and HP Lovecraft's "From Beyond" deals with a machine that stimulates the PG allowing subjects to perceive alternate realities...
15. Is Zero like Orpheus chasing Eurydice [suicided/suiciding/annihilated humankind] to the Underworld?
16. Sets within sets become texts within texts of different fonts joined together via familiar lines and groupings yet alien or other-worldly--inhuman or transhuman--in the way they're seamed together. If one is to be literate in the realm of merged pineal glands one must make sense of the seams...It's as much a painting to make sene of [the repeated Chagall] or puzzle to construct [the chemistry and mathematics] as a poem to read...It's a poem that's forcing the reader to write the final draft.
17. Aural punning like "ears quoi" adds to the almost meaningful, yet still annihilative chaos...
18. Humankind seems killed off by mathematics and chemistry.
19. The redacted parts can be viewed as stand-ins for Zero. Every time you see a redaction, fill it in with Zero and it makes a shifting sensibility...
20.The lined-through parts seem visible stages, or mid-scales of awareness pushed aside...each pineal gland seems to operate with its own font...
21. p. 24--"I dominate this space." "I"=Zero's delusion of transcendence...
22. Uses the space on the page as a painting of words, and as the pages accumulate so does the sense that a real, albeit esoteric, that is highly personal, narrative is taking place...this is quite literally a myth making a psychology of Itself in poetic and fictional terms...
23. Seeking a kind of salvation/salvaging through nihilism...
24. Every word bleeds into the next, defamiliarizing them as objects, allowing the reader to feel them as subjects instead--worlds blocked in by sheer data of a single pivotal year in the life of the re-dacted Zero...
25. pp. 35-6--Beautiful. The rhythms of the whole piece boil down into concise poetic form, and yet it's not Zero stitching the senses together...
26. Bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, mathematics, chemistry, strange symbols, numerology/Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data [like patent backgrounds]...all adding up to a paranoiac approach to the cosmos that seems to subvert or counter Its own overt nihilism...Zero also seems a bit sentimental, as if he were re-couping what Pat Lowther rejected with his suicide and what humankind seems to be rejecting with its own...a psychopathically rational materialism hinging on superstition...
27. Shares a similar joy of ironically sending up technical jargon, much the way I do marketing in So It Seams...language can be hilariously mocked...have fun goddamnit!
28. p. 49--Excellent definition and placement of Hinge.
29. p. 50--Now it get's really political with the Lt's body coming home and a reporter capitalizing on it with a feature story for which he wins a Pulitzer--told as footnote--Zero's trying to stay out of the reader's face--sure, go ahead, just read the "poems" my dear...
30. p. 51--Interesting use of images like thought clouds...the hearts and Chagall very moving personally...this is, in a way. a love poem to the people and animals and flora and things you love, yet it's paradoxically nihilistic...or is it? Beginning to salvage something spiritual from the suicided/suiciding wreckage called "humankind."
31. And then the sheer bifurcated music seaming language at top of page 52...you can literally see and breathe the weaving coaxis esemplasizing...
32. The repetition of the Chagall image of the green man a kind of mantra, repeated over and over--Zero projecting himself out of the poem and into the painting...Possibility and the Village, p. 52--entering a climax the way one might enter an event horizon.
33. OU and Socia--partner, companion--salvaging what Pat suicided on p. 61
34. p. 63--Therefore...an essay on the objectification of ecocriticism?
35. Focus on the non-human...recuperating the "primordial experience" by conceptualizing it in non-linguistic symbols...regard for and valuation of dream symbols--The Symbology of Silence--"The verbal record of an interactive encounter in the world...where Nature retains its autonomy."
36. This is an ecopoetic manifesto that comes with an instruction manual for how to read it.
37. pp. 65-6--Derrida--literature of negation, Zero, nihilism to differance & arabesque via language as an alchemical membrane...or, perhaps, falling into the grotesque of Baudrillard's "hallucinatory hyperreality."
38. For me, the essay seems to suggest you quit poetry for criticism, as if the ladder was more adequate to the task at hand. It seems a further descent, formally speaking into nihilism without having salvaged what it originally hoped for...Orpheus fails to recoup Eurydice...this would be a tragedy but Zero has no hubris [at least not as of this reading]...By including an essay at the end you seem to negate your original intent of poetic apocalypse...sort of the way Joshua Cohen falls short by not sending Jonathan through the Valley of Nails...it seems a limit you didn't explore...it's the textual parallel of Pat's suicide, of humankind's surrender to consumption/commodification...Is that what you actually want? It seems to me you were getting somewhere then stopped.
*****
Nonetheless, this is a brilliant book and my mind could change about the essay over time. It throws me for a loop. Don't get me a wrong, it's a very informative, excellent piece for what it is...i just wonder if it will be as well received placed there as it might elsewhere, and if it doesn't somehow diminish the experience...then again, it helps the reader read the first part...perhaps if you finished the first part and kept the essay?
I really don't know what I'm talking about. You're today's cowboy genius, not me. Great work.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009
Thanks for the insightful read. I'm uncomfortable with "nihilism" -- though, I won't disagree with your read -- I didn't notice a direct noticing of the time line, the chronicle (less narrative), 1996-2006, and the "events" marked at stages ("ten to cover," beginning with an enlistment in first section, 2003 invasion in second half of second section, and a return in the third -- all told from these shores, or from a bird's eye view either over these shores or of a self-aware surreality that derives from its roots in these shores -- re-read the poem "3rd person 2003" in light of the war -- after finding what's at stake, or not, ask, what survives? "No return address." In the sense that the "he" possibly doesn't, the he of the third section must necessarily be some ghost. That's one possible read). There are two characters, confused and complicated and clarified and over again along the way, he and she -- the book doesn't so much tell the story as speak about the story, in order to find the story, by being the things contained inside and outside the story, the things that won't let what "he" (and she) wants just be. I'm not even sure what he "wants" is present in any finally discernible way -- more of a settling -- and, then thinking of "he" as an aspect of "the poem" which is talking about itself -- for domesticity and "love" and that baby which is or is not born -- as if, such things are grounding, last ditch efforts at finding something worth it, perhaps good, uncontaminatable by virtue of its undergirding makeup or facts, whose manifestation doesn't really believe this either. What persists, maybe, is the force of this, the energy, the vectors of a human life -- but which nonetheless leave the actual lives behind (closer to birth), or ahead (closer to death), forlorn lying etc. This in a way necessitates the essay -- which I hope forces a re-read based on new information in terms of what's been constructed. The human dimension of the poetry is also a nonhuman dimension, being other to itself. It's mythical aspects and allusions -- I think it boils down to Apollo stealing Iris's caduceus and passing it on to Hermes for his gift of eloquence and skill at the lute -- Hermes is rewarded for his lying and thieving. And Hermes is messenger between human and gods, god of poetry, the role granted by Apollo, who stole it from Iris (first part of second section, also notice the direct engagement with third-wave feminism --- allusions and engagements saturate this thing -- I don't think it's necessary to pick up on all these, but where they are grasped, it adds layers of reading, particularly in the way quotes are contextualized and re-worked and mangled). Iris carried a ewer dipped in the river Styx which she used to put to sleep those who perjure themselves. I love the etymology of "iris"....
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009
That's all very hard to digest. I don't read that stuff in your poem. Well, sort of. And the essay at the end can make sense and may grow on me [though as I said before it's an excellent stand-alone piece]. However, due to the poetry/poem itself, and what the reader's going to read on any given page, I think you have to accept a certain misprision, a creative misreading/misinterpretation/misrepresentation of the text on my part [which composes my palate with my prior knowledge of you the way a poet might misread Yeats to achieve a Yeatsian level of poetry for herself--I can't help trying to read Jared Schickling as well as Zero's Blooming Excursion, to read Dylan's lyrics the way I might hear Bob sing them], for the reader to find a way into the text for herself.
This stuff you mention may all be very important to you, but the reader might pick up on "a" repetition or allusion, just not "the" repetition or allusion. Perhaps they will pick their own, things you weren't aware of that your subconscious nonetheless projected there, waiting for someone--you, perhaps--to read/see/bear witness to...
When you name Pat Lowther in the beginning, the average reader will be non-plussed, just a name. When I read it I instantly click to suicide, a suicide caused by humankind's suiciding that has shaken us in a variety of ways. So I look for a recuperation because that's what it--the whole poem--seems to be...almost.
Theoretically, I think the intentional fallacy is itself a fallacy on my end [best not ignore what I know about you and just focus on the text alone...otherwise I'd probably be lost]. My cultivating an ignorance of your intentions is easily "annihilated" due to the power of your language in light of our relationship. I'm trapped into reading certain things certain ways.
And by nihilism, I don't necessarily mean it in a negative sense, but simply in the existential sense of God being dead--the old ways of making sense no longer work--meaning we're free to make sense of the chaos as we will, and that your brand of nihilism is ecopoetic-ethical in that it refuses to cultivate an ignorance of that chaos in favor of some delusional form of happiness...focusing on a re-distributed material environment in search of some sort of literary or linguistic consensus.
Keep responding...perhaps explain a little how the poet named Zero is not Orpheus but Hermes, told as if to a bright-eyed child...seriously. What are you doing, Daddy?
Finally, that we're even writing about something one of us has written on this level seems to signify, at least to me, that the text has achieved its aim of provocative, intellectual stimulation. In other words, I can't really ask for more from a book [other than you follow my advice, trudging through the Valley of Nails, completing the first part]...or is it a sense of incompletion you're after...?
This is a very good book.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009
"misprision" -- right. I was just curious that the timeline wasn't mentioned in your notes. perhaps it was and i missed it....
i'll have to think more about Zero Orpheus Hermes -- hmmmmmm ---
i really do appreciate your honest and spot-on read -
I'm curious though, and I know you already said, but I guess I need maybe other words to put alongside what you already said -- in what way doesn't the essay fit in? The poem was "abandoned" for the essay, suggesting that the essay isn't part of the same work, but different and antithetical and therefore doesn't fit? If so, how so, all over again?
From me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009
Yes, I was aware of the timeline but focusing on different aspects. The fact I read it as a narrative implies a timeline...narrative necessitates time and vice versa...I was really reading it in sync with A Heaven of Others...it just seemed to fall in that way for some reason...all the contemporary fiction I've been reading deals with loss in various ways...but your "heaven" seems the recuperation of a chaotically inhuman natural world...a nihilism that isn't actually a loss a but spiritual-cognitive gain...there's a hero's journey in Zero's Blooming Excursion [love love love the title by the way, love saying it], but not quite. I see Zero--the narrator/poem--as plumbing another realm within or without this one [again that sets within sets thing I sensed], chasing after that which has died or gone elsewhere like a missing cat...slipped away between the seams and cracks of one's consciousness...our tears being the splash of its wet entrance into the beyond, dampened by our impotent memory...
In my view it's not so much that the essay doesn't fit, in fact it's probably necessary to extend the method and metaphor into the book's architecture, so we have a variety of fonts and styles, footnotes, poems, and yes, an essay [ever think of adding a piece of short fiction? a fable, perhaps?]. It's just that the "poem" proper doesn't seem to go far enough for me. Of course Pat and the dead can't be recuperated into this realm the way we would like them to be...we miss them...but the actual emotion of missing hasn't been fully explored in the poem, though Zero does go all out to give it shape by layers upon layers of testimony as to what it isn't or what it seems to be, almost...I'm looking for the "poem" to come to an utterly mystifying point of simplicity beyond which no human being can imagine that points to, in Jeffers' words, the "transhuman sublime," the inhuman point beyond that makes humanness necessary. Does that make sense?
Jesus Christ, if I were a gormande, and you a chef, you'd cut my throat with your favorite fillet knife about now, and if you didn't cut my voice box, I'd criticize your stroke and dare you to try again...
And please, I'm going to write something about all this, probably more than once, so take the time and think about, and then explain to me in simple English, how Zero is Hermes not Orpheus...then I may retort, or not, on how you're wrong that he's Orpheus, or how I'm right that he's Orpheus...or some exasperating words of such nature...
LOL. Wish you were here. We'd smoke a fatty and celebrate your most excellent work. Bravo, my friend.
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 17, 2009
To be honest, Orpheus never crossed my mind. But I think you're right -- insofar as Hermes is a further abstraction of the idea of Orpheus. And vice-versa. I'm not sure Hermes and Orpheus are that separate. Though, of course, they are. Anyway here are some notes on how I'm navigating your question...
MORTAL
Orpheus founds Apollo's cult, the oracular god who in one of his roles brings plague and misfortune. Hymns sung to Apollo are "paeans," while a "peon" was a Spanish someone who travels by foot instead of horse, and describes a laborer with little control over his and her work conditions. "Pawn's" etymology.
Orpheus is one of Apollo's sons. Strabo, a veritable ecological anthropologist in his geographies, early historian, emphasizes Orpheus's mortality and explains he used his skills for money, gathered followers and power and dies as a result of it:
Here lived Orpheus, the Ciconian, it is said -- a wizard who at first collected money from his music, together with his soothsaying and his celebration of the orgies connected with the mystic initiatory rites, but soon afterwards thought himself worthy of still greater things and procured for himself a throng of followers and power. Some, of course, received him willingly, but others, since they suspected a plot and violence, combined against him and killed him.
In his version, Apollo was courting the laughing muse Thalia when he met Orpheus, grew fond, gave him a lyre and taught him to play it (an instrument learned from Hermes, see below). In Strabo's version, Apollo silently (or audibly, depending how you look at it) brings misfortune upon Orpheus, who also worships chthonic Demeter. Strabo uses a word to describe Orpheus meaning "charlatan."
Put Strabo's early treatment of the myth next to the advent of democratic values in ancient Greece (see below), that the popularity of the lyric evolves into the popularity of the tragedy...
In versions earlier than Virgil, (such as Strabo's, though the Eurydice tale is not there) Orpheus is presented only with an apparition of Eurydice. He is punished for being a coward, for resisting the true death that would actually return him to his wife -- which is to say, his muse, and a false one we should remember, who is invoked as such only upon her disappearance, upon Orpheus's own loss, the one to whom his sad, most famous music is played. He is punished twice for his cowardice. When he re-enters the living world the apparition vanishes and the trick exposed, and he learns "what" was dead remains so. In some versions he is then the first to name Apollo (thus he "founds Apollo's cult") and one morning when going to the mountaintop to worship, he neglects his ablutions to his previous patron Dionysus, and the Maenads tear him apart, his second punishment.
Who or what ruins lyrical Orpheus, conspires against him? Why does he himself, eventually, by the time of Virgil, ruin the chance of his dead wife's / born muse's actually returning to flesh and earth? How does tragedy appropriate the lyric?
Note the homophonic lyre / liar...
IMMORTAL
Apollo is also the god of healing -- of music and the lyre, of battle and victory -- Roman soldiers sung paeans on the march. Because of Orpheus, Rome could know Apollo.
Aeschylus identifies Maia with Gaia, Maia being Hermes's mother ("Orpheus worships chthonic Demeter"), Zeus his father. Hermes: guide to the underworld, messenger of the gods (bridge between gods and men), master of the lyre. "Hermeneutics": art of interpreting hidden meanings. Hermes was born before Dionysus. Inventor of fire, he parallels Prometheus; in Aeschylus, Hermes visits Prometheus on the mountainside with a message, and matter-of-factly, smugly, urges him to repent. He is a trickster. God of boundaries. Note he is a "guide" to those already dead.
God of thieves, the night he was born he slipped away and stole his elder brother Apollo's immortal herd of cattle. He chose two ("Hermes Logios" becomes Plato's god of persuasion), killed them, and divided them into 12 parts -- 11 corresponding to the number of Olympian gods, the remainder set aside for himself. This establishes a new sacrificial ritual among men -- which required transgression, breaking of taboo, cosmic theft, in order to do so. He hid the rest of the herd in a cave and covered his tracks.
Apollo somehow knew what had happened -- he visits Maia, who defends her son Hermes, but Zeus intervenes and sides with Apollo (dad's a son of a bitch). Hermes, suspecting he'd be found out, had killed a tortoise and strung its shell prior to Apollo's arrival. In the midst of arguing, Hermes strums this original lyre, a strung hollow shell, and seduces Apollo -- Hermes keeps the cattle in exchange for the lyre. Hermes is granted a servile, peon (Hermes's winged *feet*) position on Olympus. Later Apollo gives Hermes the caduceus in exchange for a flute.
Note some of Hermes offspring, all chimeric and related to fertility: Pan, Hermaphroditus, Eros, Priapus, Fortuna. And the prince of thieves, Lone Wolf Autolycus. Note that by breaking taboo, in which lying and eloquence and seduction are involved, a new covenant between the gods and men is established. Note the "immortal herd" receives a new shepherd. Note his promotion to a regime post and its nature. Note the new peon, an addition to the Olympian regime, across the invoking lips of men, brings a new "paean."
****
Note the homophones "lyre" and "liar." And note how the "lyre" reached Orpheus's hands. Apollo, oracular bringer of plague and healing -- sometimes at the same time as the case may be -- is the stitch joining them -- who is himself the thief of all that was Iris -- the locus of the myth and its knowledge shifts thus from the eye to the ear -- Iris brings "sleep" from the river Styx, closed eyelids, to those who perjure themselves. Put this development next to the flourishing of literary arts, always to be performed, in ancient Greece. Note the decay of ancient Greece, the advent of tragedy, the spurning of epic and the preservation of lyric, the invention of oratory and rhetoric, and Rome's embrace of all things Greek.
It's not possible to flesh out all the details. Part of the problem and value of myth seems to lie in that it adapts. In how it adapts. In the case of the Greeks, ex-change between Orpheus, Hermes, and Apollo seemingly represents in part an ongoing navigation of representing the nature of music and poetry, two things the west took time to divorce, and which were part and parcel to the advent of history as a discipline -- myth and the births and doings of the gods were once our literal "history." "His story." The mind was a living being whose attributes were to be understood in the same terms as bodily doings -- hence the anthropomorphizing of the perceivable immortal. The myths correspond to your comments about truth not feeling good, nor intending to. In ZERO's, the poem would be something like the Hermes of an Orpheus, wise and unwise to Apollo, the true seducer yet unconscious in that role.
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 17, 2009
Duly “noted.”
Jared Schickling to me
Dec 17, 2009
Don't be turned off by all the "note." Was talking to myself more or less
Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 17, 2009
I know. Note that it was fucking annoying and how I felt like tweaking you. Note when I'll have a much more detailed response [in a day or two]. Note what you said was instructive, and useful. Note that what I write will be something of a rough preliminary first draft of a preview. Note how it will eventually be something on NHR, at least. Note how I imagine out of this response, the drafts of several blurbs will emerge. Note why I'll then brush them up and give you a multiple choice, as I did Goro. Please note that my private review will likely rake you over the coals a bit on a specific point, which I hope you'll note I'm going to belabor. Note my public review will be that the reader should brace herself for an odyssey beyond Eliot's Wasteland upon a magic carpet woven of symbols we can only seem to note due to their hermeneutical nature...Please note that one will be absolutely as sincere as the other. Note how you deserve nothing less...LOL!!! ;)
All writers are liars, etc. & et al...
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