Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, August 02, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Strangers on a Train meets Dead Poets' Society! So Nancy and I got together the other day and swapped ideas--literally. I was over visiting her on Thursday and listened to her talk about her dentist chapter, and gave her my dentist idea for free, and then she told me this awesome story about Chris playing the tutorial for Star Wars Galaxies and she told me I could have it. And I don't know if she's going to get as much distance from my idea (because once she told me the particulars of her story, it was pretty fucking great without the stuff I threw in) but her idea works so well with what I'm doing, I could cry.Also making me want to cry is Ashbery's Flow Chart, which reminds me of nothing so much as Gravity's Rainbow, another book where I was wayyyyy out of my league and yet entranced with the language, I had no choice but to turn pages goggle-eyed and re-read certain phrases three times or more before giving up on them entirely. I'm wandering lost through this book, taking my time to stop and scrutinize a phrase that may well mean nothing, and then ignoring a meandering groove that could lead me back to the poem's measured road. I have moments of panic, of helplessness, which pass and somehow ferment into a sense of selfless calm. I have no problems reading the same three pages in the morning, returning to them while hiding in a toilet at noon, and going over them one more time at a streetcorner at dusk. And then I might realize I'm turning the pages without reading, my mind spinning like a skipped stone between the end of one line, and then another three pages later--the end of those lines being like the words invoked in dreams, which new associations each time, or the phrases you hear a loved one say even when you're not really listening: the book is like a hypnotist, my attention waxing and waning and my head wavering like an entranced snake, and I wonder if I actually sleep while I turn the pages, receiving new instructions without my knowledge. The book is a drug is another way to say it, subtly altering my consciousness by allowing me to build wild theories of meaning, then forcing me to dissemble them as they prove premature. This oscillating understanding results in waves of vivid impressions, the mad chimeric offspring of the poem and my mistaken impressions of the poem, and I wonder if Ashbery isn't trying to ensure every reader's experience is individuated. Or, as page 77 (which I'm now perusing for the fourth time) puts it (maybe): "....Although we mattered as children, as adults we're[fons et origo=the source and origin, nemine dissentiente=with no one disagreeing.] posted by Jeff Lester | 1:39 PM | |
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