"The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture."
--Jacques Lacan

I've been working away at Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism for about 10 months.    It's been a long slog but worth the time and effort. Less than 300 pages to go (it's a 1038 page book)!

The Lacan bit quoted above is something Zizek returns to again and again in Less Than Nothing.  I've been thinking about it a lot.  One is always already in the frame one has created.

*

I'm at another sticking point--or perhaps better said, point of hesitation--in the novel.  I'm at the point of introducing menace into the book and am trying to figure out what that might mean for a couple of key figures.

Appearances is "about" projections, ventriloquized thoughts, hypnosis,collective dreaming, shadows, the Virtual and the Real.

*

Read the Auster/Coetzee letters over the weekend.  Recommend it.  Correspondence on this scale has become a very rare thing.

*

I keep pacing, looking for the UPS truck.  Charles Bernstein's new book Recalculating should be arriving soon.  I'm anxious to read it.

Charles was the first poet I interviewed, back in the day. And probably the most philosophically disposed poet I've ever met.   He and David Bromige are paired in my mind as the two greatest performers of poetry I have encountered.

*

Note to Self

Since I
started teaching
myself to
play guitar
I haven't
stopped playing
air guitar.

I just
play it
better now.

The opacity

Of this

Decomposing moment

Is surrounded

By a

Deafening clamor.

Listen, try

To see.

You appear

To be

A person

Of renown.

Re: nouns…

Renounce the

Nominal and

Embrace the

Thesis statement.

Theses killed

The Minotaur.

Images are

Screens, obscene

Or not,

Viewed or

Heard.  Hard

To know

What now

Noodles in

Our network.

Images are

Screens, unseen

Rattles delivering

A spectrum

Of murmurs.

The Spectacle

Climatizes things.

From the for what it's worth department...

go here to see a photo of me reading at Kent State last Fall.

biselectuality

The last several months I've felt more ill at ease than usual.  It comes down to the fact that, since I retired at the end of 2011, I have largely stopped writing poetry. (Though I do have a fairly large sheaf of uncollected stuff. I sent a couple different manuscripts around in 2012, entered contests even.  No takers.C'est la guerre.)

 For the last 14 or so months I've been working on Appearances: A Novel in 365 Fragments; and for the last few months I've been trying to teach myself to play guitar.

The novel writing thing is going slowly, painfully at times.  I'm over halfway through a first draft, having completed 191 fragments so far, about 76 manuscript pages.  But I'm somewhat stuck and unsure about what should happen next.

The guitar thing is also going slowly.  I've been obsessively working on 3 exercises: a "Three String Blues," a "Guitar Boogie," and a "12 Bar Blues."  Each of the pieces only uses the first three strings.  I'm hoping next week to move onto the 4th string.

Mostly I'm playing notes.  I'm pretty intimidated by chord shapes at the moment.  In my noodling around I've experimented some with bending notes.  On the third string I was able to make some patterns I like by playing the open G and then bending the A.  I alternate between practicing in a disciplined way and then seeing what I can discover by messing around.  The trick is remembering what you did to make that particular pattern that actually worked.

"Everyday I have the blues."