Monday, January 18, 2010

On the bike this morning finished reading Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle."

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Listening now to a live recording of Jeff Beck playing "Cause We've Ended As Lovers" with the extraordinary Tal Wilkenfeld on bass.

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In the midst, too, of reading and thinking about The Body: An Essay by Jenny Boully, a text comprised of footnotes, which is jamming kind of interestingly with thoughts about Derrida on Jean-Luc Nancy. The body which is not one.

The Boully book was published by Essay Press. I've read 2 other books from this press recently( Adorno's Noise by Carla Harryman and I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time by Kristen Prevallet). I admire its project.

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About a month ago I sent EXPOSURES to a publisher I don't know to see if it would get a reaction. Not even a response to acknowledge receipt. I'm not surprised.

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James' "The Beast in the Jungle" has to be read slowly. James' prose style demands that. Not unlike Derrida or late Joyce. It's "about" waiting and recognition,deferral and consequences (James' prose style and the story as well).

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In my day job I interact with a lot of people. Outside of my job, I really don't. I'm pretty good with people on a one-to-one basis, not so good with groups. I've grown to hate public speaking. Which is funny since I loved it when I was a kid. I did plays in high school and a stint of debate club in college. I once considered going into Law/politics. (My BA is in Political Science.) Somewhere along the way self-consciousness in public situations became almost crippling.

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I write poetry, I suppose,because-- oh, let me more accurately say that I've been trying to learn how to write poetry for a very long time now--because I've come to believe that experience is a cocoon of threads which can only be unraveled and parsed through the kind of epistemology that poetry is. That poetry is philosophy that can carry a tune, philosophy that shakes its ass.

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When Derrida famously said in the documentary film that he would want to know about the sex lives of great philosophers(because it is something they didn't write about) but would not want to reveal the details of his own...Now that was interesting.

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I've lost the habit of daily blogging but keep flirting with the practice of blogging to see what place it can have at this point. Hard to know. No longer very sure whom I'm writing for, speaking to.

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Last night went to bed very early. Was extremely depressed and had a pinched nerve in my neck. Dreamt I had a personal conversation, across a table, with Charles Bernstein.(We haven't spoken in years.) It was an extremely vivid and relaxed dream. Strangely, this morning I discovered Charles had recently linked on his blog to my poem "PARTS (30 Things for Geof Huth)" which can be found below.

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Drinking Sicilian wine. Still listening to Jeff Beck.

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1 comment:

  1. We're still here, quiet but listening. Writing when and if we can. Still working on the third section of my "book" (well, it'll have 90 poems in it, so I think it's a book), "beckettt." Hoping to find three publishers in three different countries to bring it out in disparate pieces. But maybe I should finish the third section first.

    No response to a submission is standard. I hate submitting but submitted poems to a journal about six months ago. Got the rejection emails this Monday. Expected, but I decided that being creative requires us to court rejection. It is a reality we have to accept.

    And you haven't been rejected.

    Be well, Tom.

    Geof

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