Early-Bird Gothic

wczesno-ptasi gotyku

Who dare writes such a magical phrase?!?! And it confounds me why those other translators have rendered this line into barely suitable English: "early ornithogothic." What a disservice to Szymborska's poetry and my sensibilities as a translator. Hell, even Google Translate does a better job. "Have mercy on them."

Legend

I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't know of Van Cliburn. From small-town east Texas, he became a legend--and one of my heroes--of both classical music as well as cultural diplomacy. When the Soviets sent Sputnik into space, the US sent Cliburn to Moscow, where he dazzled apparatchik and layperson alike. His win at the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Competition had to be personally sanctioned by Khrushchev himself, who asked the hesitant judges, "Is he the best?" The answer was a resounding, "Да!" His legacy and legend did more for American-Soviet peace than all the ideologues, politicians, and Cold Warriors together.

Misinformation

Assuming that there is someone who actually reads this blog--as opposed to stumbling across it while searching "big black dick" or "big gaping pussy" (the two main searches, by the way, that point to my little corner of the web)--I've had the wrong email address in my profile for some time. If you've sent me an email in the last thirty years and I didn't respond, it's because I never received it. Please resend.

In Memory of M.B.

Burn all the books. The word is eternal. L'écriture—la maison de l'être. In abandonment, the writer writes to abandon what has been written in order that writing can be written in abandonment. To write is to leave a trace of writing, unwritten and illegible. The book shows itself as the corpus, as the corpse, of the writer. Burn all the bodies so that the book can remain in what is to come, unformed, deformed, reformed, performed, conformed. Blanchot remains. Ten years on: Livre. Vivre. Liberté. Dé-livrance.

Soliloquy (of the Eye)

Dis/Orientation

Instead of fighting against inevitable conflicts, I am choosing to allow my disorientation to orient my life these days. At least until I have some kind of better plan to attend to and before I give up and have to bury an old dream.

Disenchantment

Not every image merely-necessarily represents itself to a subjectivity. Not every subjectivity merely-necessarily represents itself to itself in order to form an identity. Not every thing merely-necessarily becomes object represented upon the screen of history, culture, language, myth, et cetera to one standing apart from, against. Becoming disenchants, disarticulates, and unhinges such subject-object identifications.

He hasn't written resolutions, but if he were to, those resolutions would include

• to heed the truth of the above passage: to relearn becoming; and
• to identify less with his body and more with his mind.