Lance Olsen - There

:::: How you can replace people but not the memories you had with them.

Being a statement that sounds true, perhaps even profound, until you think about it for a trillionth of second.

:::: Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

Non-jested Judith Butler.

:::: We step out of a café in Potsdam’s Old Market Square to witness a cop chasing a woman and what I take to be her little boy — eight or nine years old — down the block.

The cop shouts at her, breaks into a sprint. We hear his heavy boots clumping. A few more steps, and the woman gives up, stops in her tracks, waits for what’s coming. The cop points at her purse, says something I can’t understand from our vantage point across the street. I assume, though I have no way of knowing, we’re talking shoplifting.

The woman’s son, about 10 yards ahead, hovers on the sidewalk, figuring, figuring, then, whoosh, vanishes around the corner.

:::: The name of the 2012 anti-world’s fair in the former Tempelhof airport: The World Isn’t Fair.

:::: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall : the official G.D.R. term for the Wall, about a dozen feet high, about 66 miles long, lined with nearly 300 watchtowers and 20 bunkers. The term roughly translates as The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.

Implying that West Germany had never been fully de-Nazified.

Which, in several senses, is the case.

:::: At the Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, a retrospective of Polish tactical media provocateur Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Hiroshima Projection : the hands — just the gigantic hands (no faces, torsos, legs, arms) — of the blast’s survivors projected onto the river bank beneath the A-Bomb Dome, one of the few structures left more or less standing when the sun set on the city6 August 1945. Disembodied voices recount the pain felt listening to official justifications for the attack, living their lives as invisible Korean slave laborers, experiencing the national prejudice depicting them as genetic threats to Japan’s general population.

All the emotion exposed in giant fingers finding each other.

All that fallout still sifting down.

:::: My books would never have been themselves without Pynchon’s and Kafka’s onto-epistemological sense of uncertainty, Raymond Federman’s exuberant challenge to what history had done to him and what the conventional page had tried to do, Donald Barthelme’s attempt to think contemporary art into language, Kathy Acker’s continuous performative advice to be more extreme, Robert Coover’s juiced-up sentences and re-configurative imagination, Steve Tomasula’s and Anne Carson’s reinvention of bookishness, Mark Danielewski’s avant-gothic architectonics, Bach’s crystalline geometric musical expressions, Duchamp’s inability to sit still, Ed Kienholz’s exhilaratingly claustrophobic alien installations.

:::: Which is to say: art’s always-already recursiveness .

:::: Kienholz bought the small town in northern Idaho called Hope. The next town up the road from Kienholz’s is named, perfectly, Beyond Hope.

:::: Or wandering among the 100,000 graves in the New Jewish Cemetery far from Prague’s old town one overcast morning.

Many of the headstones exhibit art nouveau motifs. All are overgrown with ivy, set among woods surrounded by a high wall in a nowhere zone. We’re searching for Dr. Kafka’s, number 137: a gray obelisk whose base is busy with red flowers, a single white one, a sandbox of small smooth rocks, a few soggy notes, a handful of burned-out votive candles, a plaque for Franz’s sisters.

I expected a litter of tourists, but in the end it’s just Andi and me standing side by side, recounting stories by and about him, how his vision has worked on us, paying our respects, and then Andi asks for my iPhone and snaps a shot of my hand, just my hand, touching his raised black name on the stone.

:::: Zeitlupe : the German word for slow motion —a conflation of time ( Zeit ) and magnifying glass ( Lupe ).

Not seconds lagged, but made visually hyperbolic.

:::: Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

Conjectured William T. Vollmann.

:::: How long is now? asks the brobdingnagian mural on the side of the Kunsthaus Tacheles, once a department store in the Jewish quarter next to the New Synagogue, then a Nazi prison, then a squat and alternative culture center, now closed.

Below, left, the sculpture of a cockroach’s body bursting through the wall, and, below that, the words: Vor der Mauer, nach der Mauer, schickt der Staat die Wanzen.

Before the Wall, after the Wall, the state sends forth the bugs.

:::: A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

Pointed out Wittgenstein, who believed a good and serious philosophical work could be composed entirely of jokes.

:::: Berlin is the testicle of the West, elucidated Nikita Khrushchev. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.

:::: How you fly back from Prague into a surprise snowstorm, the runway your plane lands on unplowed. Walking into your apartment at the Academy, you realize it feels like you’re returning home, which is to say you’re no longer moving, even though you’re moving.

You’re here. You’re there. At the same time.

:::: And next you are driving just north of Siem Reap on your way to Angkor Watt, and it strikes you you’ve already seen a thousand iterations of those stilted thatched huts sliding along the side of the potholed road, those packed reddish dirt yards, those mobs of green tropical foliage, that odd goat (or maybe it’s a chicken this time, or maybe a scrawny dog), have already watched this film, experienced its crushing humidity and heat, seen those cute kids mugging for the tourist cameras and spare change, those oblivious monks in red-orange robes bicycling beside your Jeep (or maybe it’s a Land Rover this time, or maybe a Pajero), and you feel a pang of shame for allowing yourself to entertain such a predictably jaded thought, except you entertain it anyway, except you don’t mean to, except you do.

:::: Et cetera et cetera:

The Oblique Derivative Predicament Conclusion

5.1 Nietzsche Throat: You are closest to a friend with your heart when you resist him. . pg. 702

:::: Guy Davenport, O.’s colleague for five years at the University of Kentucky, always struck O. as a courtly platypus. In an essay O. wrote about Da Vinci’s Bicycle , a collection that helped reconfigure his impression of the short story, he called Davenport the last modernist — a writer, painter, and scholar with a European sensibility and a bank of arcane knowledge who, like his friend Hugh Kenner, embodied eloquence and a mode of bracing associative thinking, but who was tremendously awkward in three-dimensional social situations: taciturn, grumpy, removed. He seemed incapable of taking a vacation from his own mind. Like his characters — Musonius Rufus to Walser, Stein, and Pound — he always seemed out of step with his age.

One of O.’s other colleagues there once recounted how, at the end of the meal at a nice restaurant with a visiting writer, Davenport picked up the chunk of steak remaining on his plate with his fingers, delicately wrapped it in a napkin, and slipped it in the pocket of his sports jacket for later consumption.

If the story isn’t true, it should be.

:::: In a fit of unselfconsciousness, you once told a graduate student that when traveling one is either running towards something or away from something.

You then asked which applied in his case.