29


Shifting sentences around doesn’t equal avant-garde. Collage, badly written, can be as uninteresting as a New Formalist poem that sentimentalizes things we were told already.




28


My mother’s opinion that things will get better. My questioning, internally: It can get worse, of course, logically.




27



The book reviewer who explains what a text means is in a delusion unto a fiction. This is not to say not to utter, but one must be aware of the grasping artificiality of articulating. Language, to me, is as abstract as paint or musical notes. Language gives us a sense of something, but the assigned meanings to the words crumble as one advances and uses them. This little bit of writing I’m doing is making some sense, or so I or it think/s it is, but there are senses beyond this. If we could envision a sentence, for once, not as a train of thought but as a collapsing-and-standing world of hidden remarks and references then we might stop assuredly explaining and start experiencing.

25


Anti-lodestars all around all around all.




24


The wise-ass persona is a mask like any other. One wonders who's forcing one to hold that mask in place for positioning the who below to whom one refers.


23


From two different notebooks, two different dreams, two different notes, two different men in dreams. In the first dream note, a man mentioned something was in a corpse cupboard. In the second dream note, a man said, The moon's a fuckhole from long ago.

21



Total number of nuclear missiles built by the United States, 1951-present: 67,500

Conservative estimate of nuclear weapons built by the United Kingdom: 150

Conservative estimate of nuclear weapons built by Israel: 100

Estimated number of nuclear weapons built by North Korea: Anywhere from 4 to 24

Estimated number of nuclear weapons built by Iran: 0

Estimated number of nuclear weapons built by Iraq: 0

9


It is sometimes whispered in dark corners: Neither James Joyce nor Gertrude Stein had an MFA.




8

Remembering a meeting with a job counselor with whom I became friends. We were speaking of different jobs, scanning the papers and job offers she had received, when we came upon one for an x-ray technician. I gave it some thought for a few seconds, which seemed to bother my friend/job counselor. When I didn't respond soon enough for her, she helped the situation to its conclusion by saying, "Do you really want to touch all those people everywhere?"




7

It would seem logical that there must be some people not looking for answers for their lives, etc.



6


Why is it that when I hear someone quoting another person in critical prose I have the image of someone walking with crutches?