As far as you’re concerned it was just another compulsion.
There’s this.
Cy Twombly, Like A Fire That Consumes All Before It
via itnumberpi, akirak, amare-habeo
I bought a postcard of this Cy Twombly fire scrawl at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1999. It’s hanging in my hallway now.
Gary Lutz reading from Pulls:
For a while, I tried to get her steered toward women. We settled on a blowhard ofsporty despondence, crude to the eye but newly starving for her own sex. I staked the two of them to a meal and threw in good wishes.
She came home ebbing in all essences, looking explored and decreased.
She wanted to know about my best friend. I told her that he and I fell onto each other more in sexual pedantry than out of affection, that our life together did not grow on us or chew away at our hearts. His body was just profuse foolery.
When convicts escape in summer, they go to the beach because nobody can recognize them in swimming trunks. @guernicamag’s Benedetti
It’s been almost two months since I last heard from you. I’m not asking you what’s wrong because I know what is. And what is not. They say things will be back to normal after a week. Let’s hope so. You don’t know how important a letter is to every one of us. When we go out to exercise, you can tell right away who received a letter and who didn’t. An unusual glow lights up the faces of the first, even if they often try to keep from showing how happy they are, so as not to depress those who weren’t as lucky. During the last few weeks, for obvious reasons, we all had long faces and that’s not good either. So I have no answer to any of your questions simply because I’ve had no questions from you. But I have some for you. Not the kind you can readily guess without my having to ask them, and I don’t like to ask anyway, so as not to tempt you into telling me (in a joking or, even worse, in a serious tone): “Not anymore.” I just wanted to ask about the Old Man. He hasn’t written to me for quite some time. And in this case I’m under the impression that there’s no special reason for not receiving letters. It’s just that he hasn’t written in a long time. And I don’t know why. Sometimes I go over (only in my mind, of course) the things I remember writing to him in some of my short notes but I don’t believe I’ve said anything in them to hurt his feelings. Do you see him often? Another question: how is Beatriz doing in school? In her last letter, I seemed to detect something vague about some things she said. Do you realize how much I miss you? Despite my ability—and it’s considerable—to adjust, being without you is one of those things neither my mind nor my body has been able to grow used to. At least not so far. Will I get used to this? I don’t think so. Have you?
from Ambroise Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels
In the year 1562, on the first day of November, there was born in Ville-franche-de-Beyran in Gascony, this present monster, without a head, which was given to me by Monsieur Hautin, regent doctor of the faulty of medicine in Paris, of which monster you have here a picture, both of the anterior and of the posterior, and he assured me that he had seen it.
The Fish Poison Con by William S Burroughs
“So I walk in on this Pleasantville croaker and tell him I have contracted this Venusian virus and subject to dissolve myself in poison juices and assimilate the passers-by unless I get my medicine and get it regular – So I walk in on this old party smelling like a compost heap and steaming demurely and he snaps at me, “What’s your trouble?”
“The Venusian Gook Rot, doctor.”
“Now see here young man my time is valuable.”
“Doctor, this is a medical emergency.”
Old shit but good – I walked out on the nod –
Audio cribbed from Ubuweb. Text clipped from the Google Books preview of Nova Express
(2 plays)#Bloomsday bonus: dirty letter from James Joyce to Nora. Read by me. By personal request from @mstcambot. Thanks, Chris!
Dublin
8 December 1909
To NORA
My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.
You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.
Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.
JIM
(130 plays)
In order to facilitate the transaction of business with our clients, we have given a telegraphic code word to every article in the Catalogue, and have also added a list of code words for dates and numerals.
Jonke translator Vincent Kling with @matt_jakubowski: “Real experts in syntax tell me that a good many of those long sentences are deliberately short-circuited syntactically.”
MJ: What do you mean by “deliberately short-circuited”?
VK: That he is parodying the extreme turgidity of the way German can be, by leading all the way up to some gigantic verb that ties it all together, and then not putting it there. I hadn’t noticed it. Because everything that I’ve read eventually wound up making sense as just an utterance.
This, what I’m saying now, all comes out of Breon Mitchell’s observation, which I’m a big fan of. That you capture short sentences with short sentences. You do not break long sentences into two or three. This would take me into—if a poem rhymes in the original, it must rhyme in English. And so on, but that’s another thing. And I’m not even sure what original question of yours I just answered. [laughs]
The entire Quarterly Conversation interview is terrific. The Jonke will be (of course) The System of Vienna.
