rocket to nowhere

I will be giving a reading with the fabulous Joanna Ruocco
on Thursday, February 18, 2010
at 7:30 p.m.
in the English Department
at the University of Denver
(Sturm Hall 495
2000 E. Asbury
Denver, CO 80208)

I would love it if you came.

I will be giving a reading with the fabulous Joanna Ruocco
on Thursday, February 18, 2010
at 7:30 p.m.
in the English Department
at the University of Denver
(Sturm Hall 495
2000 E. Asbury
Denver, CO 80208)

You should come.

Conjunctions.com has just posted (beautiful) selections from my friend Richard Froude’s work Fabric. Here is a link to the work at Conjunctions.com. Here is an excerpt:

Despite his twentieth-century notoriety, Tutankhamen is considered a minor king. I think Frank Sinatra was buried with a tootsie roll, a roll of quarters, other New Jersey artifacts. I keep telling Rohini they should put a change machine in the laundry room. It’s 2008 and I’m 29 years old.

According to Sartre the activity of consciousness is a constant reappraisal of the past in the light of a projected future. In this sense, fiction is revealed as the most popular form of immortality. I don’t think I’m going to explain this any further.

by Matt Kish

I’ll be reading this coming Saturday in Fort Collins at the Art Lab as part of the Remembered Maps exhibition my good friend Jess put together. I’ll be supporting the fabulous Dani Rado, Richard Froude, and Jennifer Denrow! Check the link for more details. You should come out and support live literary and visual arts!

Link: http://rememberedmapsatartlab.wordpress.com/

See you there!

The romantic novel can manifest the continuity of forms of the poetic absolute—and it can give individuality to this absolute—because it has discovered the absolutely dissolving power of prose. Prose signified, for the romantics, the potential for indefinite encompassment that defies all conceptual thought and all systematic construction of the absolute. The romantics found this signification in the following manner. In the first, ordinary sense, prose refers to speech without poetic meter, speech close to ordinary speech, ungebundene Rede. However, as Gasché comments, “in addition to its proper meaning, prose has a figural, improper meaning, namely prosaic, plain, ordinary, sober. Furthermore, this improper meaning cannot properly be distinguished from the proper. But it is this very lack of differentiation, this ambiguity of meaning, that predestines prose to become the comprehensible manifestation of the Absolute.”
—Piotr Parlej, The Romantic Theory of the Novel, pp32-3

Where should I keep a heart? I have forgotten that I have one. Certainly it is sad, but how should I find it proper to feel sorrow? One feels sorrow only when one has lost money, or when one’s new hat does not fit well, or when one’s holdings on the stock exchange drop, and even then one has to ask if that is sorrow or not, and on closer inspection it is not, it is only a fleeting regret, which vanishes like the wind. It is, no, how can I put it now—it is marvelously strange to have no feelings in this way, not to know at all what an emotion is. Feelings which concern one’s own person, everyone has these, and they are at root despicable ones, presumptuous ones if they relate to humanity as a whole. But feelings for particular people? Of course, one sometimes would like to ask oneself about this, one feels something like a slight longing to become a good, compliant person, but when could one manage it? Perhaps at seven in the morning, or some other time? Already on Friday, and right through the Saturday following, I am wondering what to do on Sunday, since on Sunday something always has to be done. —Robert Walser, “Helbling’s Story”

Einige von denen, die derart hinaussprangen, hatten feurige Flügel, ihre Köpfe brannten oder ihre Hände, und sie sahen wie merkwürdige Vögel aus, die schreien aber nicht fliegen konnten.
—Robert Walser, “Theaterbrand”

(Some who jumped had fiery wings, their heads burned, or their hands, and they looked like strange birds who could scream but couldn’t fly. —Robert Walser, “Theater Fire” [my translation])

from Fiction and Diction, chapter 3: “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative” by Gérard Genette:

²⁵Jorge Luis Borges, “Epilogo,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1974), 1143. The technique, of which Borges’s text is surely not the earliest illustration, has been used more recently by some of Jérôme Garcin’s collaborators in Le dictionnaire: Littérature française contemporaine (Paris: François Bourin, 1989), a collection of preemptive autonecrologies.

The Khazars pray by weeping, for tears are a part of God, by virtue of always having a bit of salt at the bottom, just as shells hold pearls. Sometimes women take a handkerchief and fold it until it can be folded no more; that is a prayer.
—Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars