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Excerpt from “Description Without Place,” Wallace Stevens

Description is revelation. It is not The thing described, nor false facsimile.

It is an artificial thing that exists, In its own seeming, plainly visible,

Yet not too closely the double of our lives, Intenser than any actual life could be,

A text we should be born that we might read, More explicit than the experience of the sun

And moon, the book of reconciliation, Book of a concept only possible

In description, canon central in itself, The thesis of the plentifullest John.

“The Rhinos,” Jane Yeh

We meet under the stars, touch noses In the dark. Our secret greeting.

Our nocturnal meetings are brief, but friendly. Sometimes I pretend to be asleep.

We really aren’t The loners you think. We snort and cluck When we’re together. Our private conversation.

The enchilada of Africa—the whole Kalahari—is our kitchen. I’m only interesting to smaller males.

We’re not in a hurry To copulate. I swing my head from side to side, Then run away. It’s called flirting.

Our dusty hides are thick, but sensitive. I capture bugs by accident in my teeth.

By day we don’t gather, Just do our own thing. I poke my nose In a mud hole, splash around in my piss.

I’d rather not have a bath If I can help it. My powerful smell.

We’re vanishing As I speak. One by one, we go missing From the bare savannah.

Above, the high sky. Our canopy, our heaven.

Excerpt from “The Dry Salvages,” T. S. Elliot.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behaviour of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biography from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers; release omens By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids, or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors - To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press.

Robert Hughes on post-structuralism.

Jargon, native or imported, is always with us; and in America, both academe and the art world prefer the French kind, a thick prophylactic against understanding. We are now surfeited with mini-Lacans and mock Foucaults. To write direct prose, lucid and open to comprehension, using common language, is to lose face. You do not make your mark unless you add something to the lake of jargon to whose marshy verge the bleating flocks of post-structuralists go each night to drink, whose waters (bottled for export to the States) well up between Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Language does not clarify; it intimidates. It subjects the reader to a rite of passage and extorts assent as the price of entry. For the savant's thought is so radically original that ordinary words will not do. Its newness requires neologism; it seeks rupture, overgeneralization, oracular pronouncements and a pervasive tone of apocalyptic hype.

Excerpt from "Kraken," China Miéville.

A small obsessive tribe. Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields. Soldiers of the Saviour Worm one week, Opus Dei or the Bobo Dreds the next, with genius for devotion and sudden brief bursts of sincerity sufficient to be welcomed as neophytes. Some were always cynically in it for the notch on the bedpost, others Damascene certain for two or three days that this one was different, until they remembered their own natures and excommunicated themselves with indulgent chuckles.

They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware Road cafes over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the "trap streets," Vardy said. They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.

"What about your apocalypse, then?" "Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it's going to shrivel and fall off into hell." Murmurs of admiration. "Ooh, nice one. My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun."

Excerpt from "The Age of Wonder," Richard Holmes.

Laplace's cool confidence in avowing atheistic sentiments was legendary. The story was told that after Napoleon had inspected a copy of Laplace's Système du Monde, he challenged the astronomer about his beliefs. "Monsieur Laplace! Newton has frequently spoken of God in his book. I have already gone over yours, and I have not found His name mentioned a single time." To this Laplace made the magnificent and disdainful reply: "Citizen First Counsel, I have no need of that hypothesis."

Excerpt from "Rabbit at Rest," John Updike.

“Pig valves.” Rabbit tries to hide his revulsion. “Was it terrible? They split your chest open and ran your blood through a machine?”

“Piece of cake. You’re knocked out cold. What’s wrong with running your blood through a machine? What else you think you are, champ?”

A God-made one-of-a-kind with an immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to teach you in Sunday school, or really didn't try very hard to teach you, just let them drift in out of the pamphlets, back there in that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an air-raid shelter.

“You’re just a soft machine,” Charlie maintains.

Excerpt from "Twilight of the Idols," Nietzsche.

In physiological terms everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, powerlessness: it actually makes him lose strength. [...] Whenever man gets depressed, he senses something ‘ugly’ is nearby. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all are diminished by ugliness and increased by beauty. [...] Ugly things are understood as signs and symptoms of degenerescence: anything which serves as the slightest reminder of degenerescence produces in us the judgement ‘ugly’. Any sign of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of tiredness; any kind of constraint, a cramp, a paralysis; above all the whiff, the colour, the form of dissolution, of decomposition [...] — all produce the same reaction, the value judgement ‘ugly’. A hatred springs up here: who is man hating here? But there is no doubt: the decline of his type.

"This Be The Verse," Philip Larkin.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

The sign above the entrance to Hell in "Inferno", as translated by Clive James.

FROM NOW ON, EVERY DAY FEELS LIKE YOUR LAST FOREVER. LET THAT BE YOUR GREATEST FEAR. YOUR FUTURE NOW IS TO REGRET THE PAST. FORGET YOUR HOPES. THEY WERE WHAT BROUGHT YOU HERE.

Excerpt from "Lolita," Nabokov.

Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap.

Excerpt from "Herzog on Herzog," Werner Herzog.

Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back, that’s all. And that’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic, I see it more full of obscenity... And nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain. It’s unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that’s lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighting on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse, so we are cursed with what we do here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony. There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a [stupid pulp fiction novel], a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this I say this full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it, I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement.

Excerpt from "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel.

Philosophical skepticism does not cause us to abandon our ordinary beliefs, but it lends them a peculiar flavor. After acknowledging that their truth is incompatible with possibilities that we have no ground for believing do not obtain—apart from grounds in those very beliefs which we have called into question—we return to our familiar convictions with a certain sense of irony and resignation. Unable to abandon the natural responses on which they depend, we take them back, like a spouse who has run off with someone else and then decided to return.

"A Brief for the Defense," Jack Gilbert.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

"The Gloomy Academic," Louis MacNeice.

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it Page by page To train the mind or even to point a moral For the present age: Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity, The golden mean between opposing ills... But I can do nothing so useful or so simple; These dead are dead And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas I think instead Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, The careless athletes and the fancy boys, The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics And the Agora and the noise Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring Libations over graves And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly I think of the slaves. And how one can imagine oneself among them I do not know; It was all so unimaginably different And all so long ago.

Excerpt from "Glimmering," Elizabeth Hand.

But Leonard had always seen it. The end of the century, the end of the world: Leonard had always known what was coming. In high school, the two of them on summer nights would sneak into the Episcopal church and in the darkness they would fuck breathless, nearly hysterical in their adolescent daring. Afterward Jack would lie exhausted across the front pew, his T-shirt pulled up to cool himself, bare feet pressed against the smooth wood. Leonard would sit at the church’s old pipe organ, and play and sing. He knew only one song. He played it over and over again, hands pounding the worn keys and feet stomping the treadles, shouting in his scorched voice until Jack’s hair stood on end—

“How do you think it feels?”

He sand himself hoarse, his face growing red and damp as he hunched over the keyboard. To Jack the words sounded like a prophecy, or a threat.

“How do you think it feels? And when do you think it stops?”

Whatever secret horrors fed Leonard’s vision, Jack had always believed his friend wanted nothing more than this: to make everyone see what he saw: corpses rotting in a suburban bedroom, the husks of butterflies drained by spiders, naked men trussed like cattle in darkened basements.

And now we know, thought Jack. His gaze fell upon his friend’s ravaged face, the death’s-heads tattooed and branded and scarified across his wiry arms and the arc of glowing chips above his left eye. Nothing was left of the smooth-skinned boy Jack had loved except his eyes, which had never been boyish at all. The rest Leonard had smelted away, leaving bones and scars and unruly pockets of flesh; the only things that had ever interested him, anyway.

"My Old Job," Michael Robbins.

My name is Michael, I’m an alcoholic. Hi, Michael. Row your boat ashore. The Christian youth group is sudsing cars. They get Raptured. They hit the bars.

Cathy Aspirin’s a karaoke machine the size of Racine, Wisconsin. Cathy, I think I left my uterus in your uterus. I’d like to know what kind of response you get.

Maybe it’s Maybelline. Why can’t you be true? You re-gifted the VD I wrapped up just for you. My penis and my brain team up to penis-brain you. It is now my duty to completely drain you.

Soap me down, children, I’m full of pain pills. I was born in a barn. Some call it a manger. The car wash washed in the blood of the Lamb is full of rainbows.

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