Comment: Easy there Bernhard, it’s as easy as ‘Enter’ then ‘Tab’…

Thus far, Justin RM has garnered 2 “people liked” for his quick response to Kyle Minor’s admittingly Bernhard-esque sans ¶ break post. Minor has an MFA in Literature, and obviously knows how to indent; he was simply employing a denseness in aid of the compulsive quality of the post, a rhetorical compulsion that operates as sentiment/endearment towards the book under review. Justin’s comment is witty, but does things which bother me: 1) he name drops a non-mainstream esteemed author to establish himself as one of the initiated, 2) he uses “easy there,” a phrase commonly used at/with/for a horse, dog, or some unconstrained wild animal, 3) he ends with the ever ominous ellipses, as if he could go on, but won’t, because, well, he’s not an impulsive uncontrollable hog, unlike Minor; and finally, 4) he uses “easy” twice, splitting the effect of that word in half, with no ear for alliteration.

Justin’s comment pairs well with gorgonzola on wonder bread, for one wonders if it’s the cheese, or if Justin just removed his shoes.

The first scene of Reservoir Dogs follows a group of men around a table having a discussion about Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” my favorite moments being when the camera’s view is completely obliterated by someone’s back — and a black occurs like said movie’s premature end. Tarantino (both writer and actor here) proposes that the song is about a woman in coitus with a man of such large girth, that the pain is that of a virgin’s incipient intrusion. In 1917 an unidentified photographer took multiple pictures of Marcel Duchamp and patched the images together.

The zoetrope — or (from Greek) “wheel of life” — is a device we owe our first moving images to, a kind of cyclical Sisyphus, like our tethered earth moving in circles and never going anywhere, just forcing seasons into chapters, as if a grand story were being told. Should Duchamp look a little like Andy Garcia, and should Zoetrope be Ford Coppola’s production Co., then we’ll have to block Godfather III out of our minds.

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A mime is a tragic figure, as they are contained inside a non-existent box, the projection of a world defined by its constraint. Their vocation and existential desperation is to communicate that which is not there. A happy mime is like a happy clown: a satire of itself, as anyone with a heart would be devastated to be locked inside themselves. One’s greatest critic are their organs, conspiring to spaz out any day. Comedy gets a smile and drama gets one salty tear drop because life is 70% sea water and that is some salty shit. Saline the sea of love. Ok I’ll stop.

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00110001 00110000. A reflection, of the kind stylized under internet-based logos ever more increasingly, not only actualizes an object and propels it into space, but implicates a pristine white surface on which it stands.

00111001. An empty white room is a good place for a logo. A white room, if one considers the etymology of white (white blood cell, white wedding, white house), is a good thing, a room of one’s own without an angry Woolf, a good place to write.

00111000. A wall on which one writes one’s thoughts is not graffiti, for graffiti is written on walls by the marginalized other, a group who has been unfriended irl. In real life, people have less friends.

00110111. Your facebook wall is not the Berlin wall, or the Great Wall — a place to keep others out — but the Wailing Wall, a daily place of prayer, where hopes and dreams are stored.

00110110. If you are followed, your wall is on somebody else’s feed. You do not reflect on your wall, but type whatever. When someone says whatever, in that suburban ghetto way, they are dismissing you. A baby bird, a tiny twitter, chirps “feed me.”

00110101. In Caravaggio’s “Narcissus” (c.1599), the eponymous young man, in love with his reflection, is transfixed by its residence on the surface of a pool. Narcissus, in Greek, means “sleep, numbness.”

00110100. Narcissus cannot leave his reflection. Unable to differentiate between himself and his image, he wastes away and dies by the pool. He partied like it was 1599.

00110011. No one considers Pequod’s reflection on the sea, as it was not in a white room, but on a blue circle. The light, one presumes, is turned off in Beckett’s room, so his room is black. When Benjy Compson closes his eyes, he thinks the room turns black.

00110010. At the end of a difficult French film that was excruciatingly boring, you see a black box with the word FIN inside that box. You will write on your wall about seeing that French film, and how you only watched half of it, because half of the time you were reading the subtitles.

00110001. Every word is a subtitle in the film of your life, directed and shot in real time by you. Congratulations. You, in a white room, not reflecting on things, just reflecting.