Fragments, an excerpt

This is the opening of Fragments. It was also posted on The Green Lantern blog.

There was no desire for arrival.

The furniture, like the weather, changes without anyone noticing.

The dwindling time between arrivals and departures drew her attention to the outdated calendar, an ancient time-map in which she had lost her way.

A constant tinkering.

She navigates among the geography of shadows.

Her fragile mouth.

Orisons for paper cuts.

Once upon a time there were any number of alternatives.

They share a chapter in the history of tingling.

He likes the circles and curves and arches of uneven thinking.

Call flesh the name of angelic letters.

Neglected ear charting for itself a course across their daily sounds.

As if by so feeding his brain some conjugal growth might visit itself upon him.

Comestible language might ooze off the page through the ravenous stretches of mind reaching out.

Vistas he knows exist and yet fails to grasp.

That the mind is but gently balanced and with the slightest nudge might topple from its isolate pedestal like Milton’s proudest Satan, into a pit of knowledge unknowing.

That the alchemy of language might turn leaden thoughts into golden vistas of thinking.

Part of them emerges on the other side of something they know not what nor begin to guess its thickness.

Language laps at the edges, spills over the boundaries, washes away the barriers, and yet still they remain confined.

For example: skin and poetry.

Blood remains the most complicated language.

What about the fact that we have decided to allow the combination of approximately two dozen consonants and half a dozen vowels to represent everything we are capable of thinking, feeling, and imagining?

Thought’s efforts to no longer be thought.

An obsession bordering on the religious.

No book can live up to a person’s desires because books are only records of other people’s desires (and whether these books stem from abundance or indigence, what one takes away from a book always depends on what one brings to it).

As if your eyes were the page on which the story of my own eyes were written.

A sphere out of control.

Harassing vocabulary.

Man imitates what he sees and is always ready to adopt desire.

What stirs.

Excitement by proxy.

He thought of her as one who bore her loss with admirable disdain.

She was feeling a bit translucent.

From the window they watch a boat floating in a muddy puddle.

All of life is a lie in response to the truth that whatever beauty does not end was never there to begin with.

A discourse that made no provisions for the future.

What she calls poetry is a certain inability to see the world.

She sees life as an affair chiefly of pronouns which she can neither order nor use in their proper relationships to people or objects.

The piles of fruit in the bowl have no mythology by which to peel them.

She threatened to continue striking him over the head with her forms of insistence until he repeated after her the words she feared to speak alone.

“If you were a book on a shelf, what two books would you want to be placed between?” she asks.

There are objects surrounding them other than the objects they have chosen to surround themselves with.

Each turned page an attempt at prayer.

Fragments on the backs of postcards sent from a dirty room in Istanbul.

Foiled by such preposterous instruments as language wields.

“You’re beginning to get a picture of just how non-renewable your resources are,” she says.

Shocked at the thought of barns.

Shallow without surface.

To find room for everything.

He remembers.

There were times like these that reminded them of other times unlike these.

The secret terror of those who believe in God is the fear that they are wrong; the secret terror of those who do not believe in God is the fear that they are right.

The page is the repository for an organization of words that points away from its own finitude to something more.

A full dose of the missile’s accuracy.

The “long poem” fills him with fear and trepidation.

Still quivering after having been coaxed from beneath the refrigerator.

Pierced by a certain knowledge.

There was something about the sheets of plastic taped over the outside windows that lent a charming opacity to their interior world.

Below the level of responsibility an elevator starts its descent.

Bones stacked in piles along either side of the tollbooth.

Although this is not “all there is,” that is the misconception that allows them to go on.

A case of one hand scratching the other.

Waiting for faces to appear at the window.

Fragments Forward

Below is the Forward to Fragments, written by Joseph Fuller.

Dave,

 

A pretty sly strategy, your not responding to my earlier missive. Anyway, I took another look at Fragments and, boy, was I off last time. A “crypto-relationship novel”? Of course, it certainly seems to be playing that game, but now I’m pretty sure it’s a red herring. I mean really: “the membrane of language a tenuous barrier to intimacy.” Fragments doesn’t exactly trade in thesis statements, and even if it often seems like a stalled and fumbling bit of make-up sex between eros and logos, I really think that’s just one of many heads on this beast of yours. Forget this “he” and “she” and their fractured colloquy, language itself is protagonist and antagonist here, and these word-lovers are a kind of thematic distraction to divert the attention so some other spooky thing can slip under the radar.

 

Along those lines: “The poem is not in any ordinary sense about its subject; it is an attempt to be ‘the thing itself.’”

 

Maybe you can respond now.  Just—something—a crumb or two.

Am I on the right track?

 

Anon,

JF

 

***

 

Dave,

 

Again with the silence! Are you out of town, or adding a bit more hermeneutical menace? If the latter, I’d say it’s hardly necessary, especially given Fragments’ increasingly suffocating qualities.

 

It’s odd that the work could seem to have such a ludic spirit in one reading, and then register as a metalinguistic horror novel the next go-round. But of course I know that’s not really the case. It’s not even the case that this is a novel, right? I’ve determined pretty conclusively that it’s not an epic poem, nor a philosophical work, nor anything else I can even think of. This is closer to lexical music, but where my first reading felt like an encounter with a playful jazz suite, this most recent go-round produced an impish threnody.

 

Patiently awaiting a reply,

JF

 

***

 

Dave,

 

Scratch what I said earlier. You know, I thought the whole ‘authorial silence’ thing was funny for a while, but not anymore. I’d really like some kind of answer. I’ve interpreted and re-interpreted and re-re-interpreted and I need a little help.

 

Strange as it may sound, I’m back to the relationship reading. I mean this work is about something, not everything or nothing, right, and what it’s about is this tragicomedy of self-consciousness. This reading I felt the tangibility of this “he” and “she” of yours—felt there was a story unfolding within this increasingly dusky wood of too many words and too many ideas. All that bothersome atmosphere of dying certitude about language is just the backdrop for these two reaching out to one another—or away from one another. Funny, before I was positive it was the other way around: they were the background, the canvas set, and the true focus was this spooky, fluctuating signal-to-noise ratio. What I haven’t figured out is how to classify what goes on between this “he” and “she.” Is it a romance or an agon? Is each dreaming the other, or are they too busy dreaming up themselves to grasp that the other is real? They try to escape their own minds using the only tools they have, language and more language and more language, but it just leads them into a labyrinth of solipsism and away from one another.

 

Pretty sure I’m spot on, but some aid would be welcome,

JF

 

***

 

Dave,

 

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

 

and…

 

No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize language. It proceeds differently if we proceed by the expression of the idea as such. Here we find ourselves in an area where requirements have not altered since the pre-Socratics.

 

and…

 

The intrinsic value of books does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

 

and finally…

 

The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.

 

Yours,

E.M. Cioran

 

*** 

Dave,

 

Let’s try this.

 

Fragments has some sort of code:

 

__ yes

 

__ no

 

__ maybe

The author must keep his mouth shut when the work starts to speak.

—Nietzsche:

__ true

 

__ false

           

Fragments is (please check two):

__ A meditation

__ A novel

__ A poem

__ None of the above

__

 All of the above

__ A tragedy about language

__ A comedy about language

__ ‘David Carl’ is a figment of the book’s imagination

__  _________________________________

***

Dave,

 

I won’t even ask anymore, so never mind all that.

 

A little experiment:

 

I decided to approach Fragments as something I found—a sheaf of loose-leaf pages. I went to the Laundromat and had a seat. I picked up this stack of pages and removed the rubber band that was holding them together; I started to read. The first page slipped around to follow the last. And so it went.

 

Taxonomical questions fell away pretty quickly. I wasn’t looking for a fiction anymore.  I wasn’t looking for a confession, or an essay, or a guided meditation. Fragments became a stroll among the ruins: it was the jagged objects themselves, the weeds springing up between them, the horizon all around. Meaning began to slip away, and it pulled even inklings along with it.

 

Mystery gradually withdrew as well.

 

Each line began to mute whatever had preceded it, until what finally remained was silence.  In the end it was the white on the page that had the final say.

 

JF

 

***

 

“Dave”,

 

Is it true that if you read into an abyss, it starts to read into you?

 

Just wondering, because I’m a little worried about what Fragments might actually do to a person. Are they predators, these lines?  Is the brave, dumb, active reader essentially lunch?   To read a line is to identify with it, consciously or not, a graft between mind and word, mind and image, mind and idea.  And in a moment, as word yokes to word and slithers through eye and ear there is that tremor of a marriage between being and sentence.  I’m thinking Pessoa here:

 

“All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and all of our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.”

 

And so it nests, for an instant, in the cranial dome: the realer-than-real.

 

The satisfaction of most writing is that we conspire with the writer on a dream of coherence: sentence follows sentence, idea follows idea, building, be it gracefully or cloddishly, into a phantom organism—a spell of continuity that reassures even if the vision is dire, because the mind simply must trick itself.  It must trick itself that being is not merely a fluttering illusion, but somehow substantial, that there is tissue and ligature binding all that unruly symbolic surplus.  To read is to dream ourselves into being.

 

But.

 

Then there’s Fragments.  The eye scans the line, the pupil dilates and contracts, the moment of being’s birth begins—

—only to be devoured by another sentence, another blip of immanence, itself a birth, itself a death.  And on it goes, page by page, procreation and slaughter, fecundity and finitude.  Insidious.

 

A work of nullity.

 

A peepshow oblivion.

 

Or. 

 

Is it a work of becoming?

 

Is this a Heraclitean literature?

 

Forget this notion that this is somehow a story—that there are people hiding in a thicket of words.  These teasing pronouns that recur are flypaper for being, so desperate is the reader to identify, and the moment of identification is the moment where the sentence, the phonetic cudgel, is brought down, delivering the reader a little death, so that a little birth can then necessarily come about.  So let’s abandon the old ‘death of author’ blather.  This is the ‘death of reader’.  Isn’t it?

 

And who is the archon rigging this maliciously tender, tenderly malicious game? 

 

Is “David Carl” simply whoever happens to pick this up?

 

 “JF”

A Review of Fragments

Early one morning near the middle of November 2008, a group of Green Lantern faithfuls hit the streets, inserting a fake section of newsprint into the Chicago free weeklies. Included was the following review of Fragments.

Fragments is a book. Once that has been established (fairly easy, that) everything else becomes difficult. It could find its place in the fiction section of a bookstore, or the philosophy, poetry, or literary criticism sections. None of these designations would be totally incorrect, but they wouldn’t feel especially right, either. A novel lacking true characters and plot, philosophy without an argument, poetry lacking verse, criticism without an object.  The one thing each has in common with the other is likewise the thing they all have in common: paper, filled with sentences, gathered and bound, easily shelved. Fragments is a book.

Each sentence stands alone, separated by a quarter of an inch white space from the sentences preceding and following it—a more significant stylistic constraint than you might assume.   As an extra foot in a line of Shakespeare or an awkward rhyme in a sonnet may shake the reader, an oddly placed semi-colon in Fragments affects the text to a similar degree.

There are two characters, a man and a woman, both unnamed. The reader knows so little of their fictional biographies that they can be read as archetypes or even as mere abstract textual pronouns.  At the same time however, they have just enough personal characteristics to defy such a simplification (“he freezes at the sight of household cleaning products, she is a maker of lists” ).  They interact, but they do so at such a remove from one another as to render the exchange nearly meaningless. When “he” speaks, we assume he is speaking to “her”, but his words are isolated on the page. When she responds, if she responds, it is pages later.   Sometimes the sentences are part of this non-conversation and sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are ideas one or the other entertains.  Sometimes they are quotes they have read.  Sometimes they are thoughts they’ve written down. Sometimes they are exposition.  Carl gives few hints about how to discretely categorize and place a sentence, although after a few pages the reader may eventually come to realize that she can is intuiting who is thinking and in what way.  And each time a reader returns to Fragments, she will find a different book.

When the reader grows comfortable with the book (and like many great books, it is the kind of book that one must grow comfortable with) she will notice that, in many ways, such distinctions are unimportant. Or, at least, they are of secondary importance. Fragments is primarily a meditation on the sentence. The sentence is protagonist.  It does what a protagonist does in most novels: views and shapes the world, and is, in turn, shaped by it.  David Carl has done well to perform this interrogation of it.

Fragments and Genre

The following letters are the first two from a series of correspondences between the Senior and Assistant Editors of The Green Lantern Press on the subject of the genre of Fragments

Dear Nick,

Once upon a time, Caroline and I had an interesting conversation about how to classify Fragments.  Of course we’d love to believe that a work of art, like a human being or an experience should transcend classification on some fundamental level.  On the other hand, we are a press and a press distributes and markets books in a world that depends on classification to function.  I cannot consider this book a work of philosophy or criticism because it does not submit itself to the methodical rigor that those types of thought entail.  To me, the closest genre I can fit this piece into is poetry.  I understand that this is a provisional category and that the piece resists any attempt to label it “poetry”.  I do think that this label, however, can be useful to an extent.  Poetry is a lot easier to write than prose, because it is shorter.  You can scratch out a poem in a few moments, and toss it aside if it is not quite right and start another one.  Fiction takes time and dedication.  The burden poetry takes on in order to right this inequality of effort is that poetry must be perfect.  Every line must be an example of the very best writing available to human culture.  There are many lines in this poetic-leaning work that betray a charm that would be entirely suitable as a moment in a work of fiction, but do not stand up to this test of poetry.  Some turns of phrase and idioms that are—if I may be so bold—a little bit selfish.  A poet is the ultimate perfectionist.  A poet must be a chess master, must have played out every move a reader might make to see that it upholds the standard of perfect and nearly unattainable beauty.  I think that perhaps this is the origin of the myth that poets are insane, drink irresponsibly and die young.   

 

There are lines in Fragments that I believe attain that perfection.  But there are many that I believe do not.  What I suggest for this book is to edit it as though it is poetry, even if it is not.   But why indulge in partial perfection when there are so many lines in this work that can blow you away, make you shake your head, alter your world view, suck your gums in delight and envy?  How wonderful would it be to have a tiny, sublime book filled with only the lines that knock a reader off his feet.  It is incredibly rare a reader has an opportunity to read such a book—and we are faced with the incredible situation of having the material to make one right in front of us.  I feel it is would be an injustice to both the world of readership and to our author to have the occasion to build such a book and cast it aside in favor of publishing a book that is a slough of near-perfection pinned up by bright points of true brilliance.

 

Yours truly,

Lily

 

 

Dear Lily,

First of all, as to the issue of classification. You’re right in saying that it isn’t a work of philosophy or criticism. One could argue that it is a philosophical novel, though that brings about its own set of problems and general silliness. After all, all novels, save for the most vapid, are philosophical. Despite being a story about a bunch of characters talking and falling in and out of love, Proust has a lot more in common with Augustine than he has with Danielle Steele. Fragments is, in a sense, written philosophically, but to focus on the philosophical aspect is like focusing on the “opera” half of “rock opera” when listening to Queen. Or something. But that’s neither here nor there. And while I agree with your ideas of how poetry must be written, I don’t think this is quite poetry either and to edit it as though it were poetry does the work a disservice.

 

In the end, although “we are a press and a press distributes and markets books in a world that depends on classification to function,” I don’t necessarily think it’s our job to supply those classifications. That’s why critics get paid the big bucks. We have to look at everything critically, of course, but I think our job is more to put these things out in the world and let the readers and the critics do with them what they will. Hell, I’d be pleased as punch if one bookstore put Fragments in the literature section, another put it in the philosophy section, and another stuck it in poetry.

 

The only way this classification process helps us is in the editing process. And, again, editing it as a novel is a hell of a lot easier than editing it as poetry. Another stupid analogy: some of Beckett’s later prose pieces resist classification. They’re all philosophical and maybe they even have more in common with philosophy than they do fiction, but to edit them as philosophy would be a waste of time. Essentially, if I couldn’t figure out exactly what kind of genre a work falls into, I’d ask myself what kind of editing process is least likely to commit a horrible rape against the text. And that’s where I’d classify it. (Granted, I haven’t thought this through, but it seems like a good place to start.)

 

So most of what follows is my argument as to why Fragments is a novel.

 

I don’t think it’s necessary to go into what constitutes a novel, so I’ll list some of the ways in which it seems to differ from one.

 

1. There’s no real story. Obviously. But, just as obviously, I don’t think that’s a huge problem, because the novel has been moving away from stories for going on a hundred years now. Fragments is, however, about something (how language defines and affects our relationships, etc).

 

2. Most novels can be graphed horizontally, moving from point A to point B, with jumps at points of crisis, drops in lulls, and so on. You can’t really do that here. The way I see it, it tends to move vertically. History books move vertically. (“Consider this a history of something that is happening right now.”) History books are never as clean as novels: they have to circle in upon themselves. The threads of narrative never connect cleanly. One can either try to impose a straight narrative on history (running the risk of grave omissions), follow separate threads (this is how the plague came to Europe, this is how it affected medicine, this is how it affected daily life, this is how the governments dealt with it, this is how the Jews were affected by it, etc.), or combine all of those threads simultaneously. Fragments takes the third route. Luckily, most history books don’t.

 

3. Where most novels have a clear narrator (or number of narrators),Fragments has something more in line with Joyce’s “arranger.” That is, there are a number of voices speaking here, and rather than gather them all under a single narrative voice, Carl has let the voices speak for themselves and arranged them on the page. Some of it is what She is thinking, some of it is what He is thinking, some of it is what She is saying, some of it is what He is saying, some of it is what She has written, some of it is what He has written, some of it is what they have read, etc. That said, you don’t have to love or agree with every turn of phrase and idiom, but should you see them as things a character has written (and they spend a lot of time writing), they cease to be self-indulgent filler and actually serve to provide some insight as to what is going on in a particular’s character head.

 

Best,

Nick

Notes on the release of Fragments

Fragments was published in late spring, 2008. What follows are some notes taken from the release party.

“In summer, the song sings itself.

“The perfect man of action, is the suicide.

“But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.

“By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.”

- William Carlos Williams

We got together in Chicago this last Friday night for a reading/release party of “Fragments,” by David Carl. Reading on his behalf, Moshe Zvi Marvit introduced himself thus: “I have been working as a biographer of late, and, after reading Fragments a few months ago, I decided to write a biography about him. When I asked David for permission to do so, he said that instead of answering any personal questions, he would send me on missions in his place. I am reading for him tonight on that account. Later on, I am supposed to meet a girl he used to know.”
Moshe read for about twenty minutes, focusing on a previously selected series of lines that pertained directly to the male and female protagonists in the text. While the characters are somewhat obscured throughout the book by ideas and observations, they nevertheless exist, and, (I’d argue,) ground the book as a whole, lending it a linear course as their relationship with one another develops. By isolating the passages that involve this nameless he and she, Marvit carved out a public place for them; a place in which they might be discussed. He read under a yellow light, the Bitters signage on his left, the audience sitting in a crescent around him on borrowed folding church chairs.

He began at with the first line of the book, “There was no desire for arrival,” and skipping over other lines, his reading traveled through, “…What she calls poetry is certainly an inability to see the world./ over “…Waiting for faces to appear in the window./” and into “…She accuses him of pursuing the accumulation of knowledge. / Outside in the rain taxis sulked in isotropic spirals of isolation. / The ants were winding their way up the leg of the kitchen table. / He dried his tears on the sleeve of his camelhair jacket and fumbled for his hat in the dark as she slumped back against the light. / All one need learn from the past is that it existed. / Capable of infinite subdivisions. / To write down that storm. / If he must bear the burden of location then why not slip between the sheets of an epistemological space? / The toppling mind. / No ambition outstrips the poet’s folly. / His various forms of failure his most marked success. / Whether she should weigh more heavily single words or their combined effect. / What did she know of prisons, other than what the mirrors suggested? / It was the accumulation of layers that accounted for their distortion effect. / Alien genres of familiar forms. / Shared but mutually exclusive disappointments. / ‘Of course, there is something very permanent about death,’ she says. / Half mad from the absence of lists. / Dido’s pyre. / Deranged by virtue of her former cruelties and not to be found among the hungry. / Tumescent words cowering under her typewriter. / The skeletal structure that frames a diverse set of impulses. / The ravenous flow of time. / He wanted to give equal weight to every sentence, to make each one the beginning of what he had to say. / He perfected the art of appearing lost in thought.” And over the course of other passages, Moshe ended on page 30 with “Every word comes grudgingly.”

Afterwards:
“Can you answer questions about the book?” someone asked. There were about fifteen of us in the room at that time, the chairs sitting a little more casually now as they had been rearranged in a sneaky succession of shifting weights over the course of the reading. The train of course, our favorite and intermittent guest, came and went over the course of the humming fans and summer heat.
“I can’t answer questions about the book, but I can answer questions about the author,” answered Moshe.
“Are you speaking on David Carl’s behalf?”
“Yes.”
“Are you impersonating David Carl?”
“Yes.”
“I have a question,” a poet said. Having once been a resident of the Green Lantern, she’s born witness to its various stages of development. “There is a quote from William Carlos Williams where he says that the poetry is sensual and consequently, that the subject of poetry has to be in the Objects. Not ideas. That the resonances come from the feeling of objects described. It strikes me that this book starts with the ideas. Do you think that’s true?”
“The passages that I chose to read are all about people. I chose to read about the tangible relationships. If people are ideas, then I suppose I’ve been reading about ideas, but I’ve always thought of people as sensual, and physical things.”
“I nevertheless got the feeling that, for the most part, the characters were hidden from view, in a way. That if you hadn’t, in this case, isolated those particular sections, the characters would have been disguised at first,” said another member of the audience. This one standing, one arm crossed over the other. A lurker in the back, I was surprised she’d say anything.
The voice of the poet was carried by another, a young woman with black hair. “It felt to me like each sentence of the book was trying to resonate. I am used to linear narratives, and often prefer them, where there is a stream of short, even awkward sentences, feeble things, that then rise up to a peak—that’s when something clandestine happens.” She shrugged. “In this case each sentence feels like it’s made to be very important in its own right. Each one can stand on its own.”
Another guest, leaning on the wall, a fellow in a plaid shirt smiled wry, “The passages feel like crab grass to me, instead of a tree that is growing straight up, in this book the lines extend outwards, covering a lot of ground. If you try to read it like a tree, you’ll be disappointed, because each sentence is given its own special significance. The individual lines are treated democratically, almost, with equal weight.”
The Lurker: “But I think that the people are important. More important than the ideas, they provide the vehicle for the ideas. I get the sense that there is a real tenderness in the book: a desire to say without saying. i.e. to tell about this couple, but in such a way that not everyone will notice them.”
The poet again: “Yes that’s exactly it. I’m frustrated when something isn’t plane. I like concrete poetry about concrete things.”
Another one: “But what about Joyce? There are many levels in Joyce, and most of them are not immediately plain.”
The dark haired girl, bright eyes confessed, “Joyce didn’t make sense to me until I read him drunk. Then it was simple.”
I said: “What’s funny is that I don’t think we’d have this conversation if David Carl was here. It’s so odd.”
“It’s a shame,” Moshe answered, speaking, no doubt, the sentiments of David Carl himself.
The poet in love with objects: “Joyce is still writing about a man walking around. A man doing concrete things.”
Moshe: “But you could say that it was based on an idea. The whole book was based on a myth. The objects followed.”

That other, The Joycean, still standing, but this time tilted a little at the hips, “Or Steinbeck, say. He writes, I think, on two levels. Only I feel he’s often passed over because his story is so cinematic and simple—people don’t often read into anything.” “Do you think Steinbeck could write today and be as successful as he was?” Moshe asked.
Another again, and having shifted, tilted the other way, “I don’t think so. I think that’s one of the issues in Fragments: this kind of self-awareness about trying to do something in an obsolete genre.”
Another young man who occasionally sports bloomers and plaid socks shook his head. “Once people said that the novel was dead, it became difficult for everybody.”
Moshe: “You can’t write simple stories anymore. Depending on what you want to accomplish, I guess.”
The Poet: “I think you can. I think Steinbeck could still be the same sort of famous writer today as he was then. He writes good stories. He’s writing myths. Simple, concrete stories. The ideas resonate out of them. We still love the Greek myths for instance.”
Bloomers: “What about Raymond Carver? He writes simple stories.”

It went on, pretty much this way, for a few more minutes and my favorite remark came out towards the end of the night, before we celebrated one last hurrah for the peg-leg pirate bbq. I went downstairs to lock the front door and pull in the sign, just as my dear friend and fellow accomplice at the space came at me, his hands waving in the air, in such a way I couldn’t tell if he was excited or horrified “There are so many Writers in there!”

Fragments

An extended meditation on the sentence, an inquiry into how we make use of language to express our selves, and an investigation of how language helps shape and determine who and what those selves are.

An imaginary conversation between Falstaff and Chuang Tzu, Veronica Lake and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A love story told through grammatical miscalculations, syntactical anomalies, and the fortuitous discoveries of vocabulary.

Intelligence is manifest in the ability to get what one wants, wisdom in the ability to properly determine what that is.

For months he lived on Altoids, coffee, vitamin C, and the hope that she would call.

There is no present like the one you imagined in the past.

Skepticism as a kind of tourism.

An economy all their own in which his vocabulary is not even legal tender.