Lance Olsen - There

:::: On our way to Tegel Airport and a long weekend in intricately exquisite, touristy Prague to celebrate Andi’s birthday, our taxi driver, raised in the East, reasons in jaggy English.

We have freedom now, he says. Even growing older belongs to us.

:::: The family of Roma — Romanians and Bulgarians trying to escape the wretched conditions and bleak prospects in their home countries — packing up their camp in the median strip as our taxi shoots by.

:::: Scott Black and Eric LeMay, redux: Zeno’s paradox says we can’t think motion, but it also seems we can’t think fragments. Brain scientists suggest we coordinate and blur perceptions, like film cells, into Zeno’s impossible motion. The illusions of time’s arrow and a stable, cohesive world are perhaps themselves temporary, jerry-rigged, ad hoc solutions. They may be ways we receive and transmit in momentary configurations the bits of information we thereby, essaying a world, call home.

:::: Ronald Sukenick: Theory is the delirium of intellect. It makes life more interesting.

:::: Here is Michael Martone’s prediction for the future of narrative:

Anonymous, viral, collaborative, ephemeral.

:::: The goal of all life is death.

Affirmed the guy Nabokov referred to as an elderly gentleman from Vienna who the author didn’t want inflicting his dreams upon him.

:::: In Yangon (which also simultaneously exists, inverted, as Rangoon, like the metropolis in China Miéville’s The City and the City ) we hire a driver and guide. Whenever the former steps out of the dented white mini-van for a smoke, the latter turns around in her seat, drops her guard like a used hotel towel, and asks us about what’s happening in the outside world. She’s heard there’s a war in Iraq. Who’s fighting whom? Why?

We tell her what we know and ask about her life. She tells us she’s an American Studies major at Yangon University. I ask who her favorite author is. Mark Twain, she says. I try talking with her about Huck Finn until I realize we’re discussing two different books. The one she read was fewer than a 75 pages and edited into appropriateness by the State apparatus.

When the door opens and the driver slips back behind the wheel, our guide’s voice flattens and she turns around in her seat. The mini-van rolls forward. She picks up where she left off, pointing out this site, that, as we creep through the congested streets.

That’s her , she says quickly, under her breath, as we inch by the lane down which Aung San Suu Kyi is being held under house arrest.

:::: Beyonding Art : Krzysztof Ziarek’s thought of a self-reflective, always-in-process creating that moves the maker outside conventional grammars of aesthetics and commodification.

:::: Trying to reach the castle hovering on the hill above Prague through the city’s winding medieval lanes, you realize the great mistake is to fail to realize Kafka has always been a realist.

:::: David Shields and my weekly ritual while living in Iowa City: a salad and pepperoni pizza at the Brown Bottle followed by a short walk up to his dark bookish apartment to eat turbulent ice-cream sundaes and argue about literary everything — our favorite and our most loathed novels, emerging ideas about writing, toothy obsessions, under-conceived pedagogies.

Literary siblings, we made a sport of disagreeing with each other in a graduate program that on the QT bred uniformity of vision and something called [[craft.]] I learned more over those pizzas and sundaes than in all the workshops I dutifully if laconically attended every Tuesday afternoon.

David: gracias.

:::: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. What astonishes me about these nine words, makes them immovable in my memory, is how they announce, not only a murderous narrative about pedophilic obsession and hobbled love, an acidic satire about the bubblegum-chewing brashness called American consciousness, but also the Event of Language.

:::: How, to pass time once on the Paris metro between stops, I asked my sister, with whom I was riding, how old she wanted to live to be, and, instead of answering, she began to cry.

:::: Or Thoreau: How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?

:::: A few minutes later, it is April.

:::: And one day the sudden amazement of blue sky turning the lake into a shimmering Nordic fjord.

:::: Entropology : a neologism Robert Smithson borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss that holds within itself both the concepts entropy and anthropology .

Entropology, Lévi-Strauss asserts in A World on the Wane , should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of the process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms. Smithson wanted to explore that notion, but not in a negative sense, not with a sense of sadness and loss. Rather, for him entropology embodied the astonishing beauty inherent in wearing down, wearing out, undoing, in continuous de-creation at the level, not only of geology and thermodynamics, but also of civilizations, and, ultimately, of the individuals within them.

::::

4.4 The Borges Ventilator. (Alembic Medulloblastoma.). . pg. 378

4.5. . . . . . pg. 538

4.5.1. . . . . . pg. 542

4.5.2 ( .). . . . . . pg. 566

4.5.3. . . . . . pg. 567

4.5.4. . . . . . pg. 570

4.5.5. . . . . . pg. 572

4.5.6. . . . . . pg. 575

4.5.7. . . . . . pg. 579

4.5.8 ( .). . . . . . pg. 585

4.5.9. . . . . . pg. 601

:::: Lolita. Closer to the phrasings of resonant lyric than the vapid transparencies of fictions that want to be films when they grow up, this luminous opening is Nabokov’s novel in miniature: a warped mind-in-motion — but equally, if not more so, the drama of alliteration, assonance, rhythm, self-reflexive verbal surprise, the pleasure of lovingly sculpted prose, the delight in density and detail, each phrase written on the back of an index card until it was just right by the distinguished, trilingual, virtually apolitical Anglophile who in mid-career had to win himself recognition once again in a new tongue and culture because he had had to flee both his homeland and two political harborages, first Berlin, then Paris, so that the reader can hear here in this initial linguistic fervor, if he or she listens attentively, the foreshadow of Humbert Humbert’s burning dyspepsia during the famous seduction scene at the Enchanted Hunters half a book away; St. Augustine’s brutally conflicted Confessions in the clash between the spiritual housed within the first metaphor and the sinfulness within the second; in the lee comprising the second syllable of the nymphet’s pseudonym (Humbert has stolen poor Dolores Haze’s name from her just as he will steal everything else) Poe’s poem Annabel Lee , and hence the Annabel Leigh who unreliable Humbert blames (by way of that quack Freud) for his, Humbert’s, fixation.

:::: A few minutes later it is April and Andi has embarked on a new project: a silent film about music, or, more to the point, a series of slo-mo black-and-white close-ups of musicians’ faces as they play.

That look in their eyes.

That way they have of paying rapt attention.

:::: You’ve come to recognize the bundled homeless men (you see almost no homeless women) waiting with their money cups, often next to a big brown beer bottle, on the train station steps at Savignyplatz and Hackescher Markt.

Every once in a while others in better shape board a train at one station, beg through as many cars as possible, debark at the next.

Nearly everyone looks through these people because no one knows what else to do.

:::: Ironically, we should remember, Smithson’s jetty, the site of such arresting entropologic processes, is itself wildly generative, a world-building appliance set into a no-man’s land.