As Claudia of Bravo’s Gallery Girls stood in front of a Roy Lichtenstein still life, the base on which the jug stood — a cut-out sculpture (technically) rendered as a flat painting and oriented in unison with its counterpart behind it — was cropped off, so that the average unacclimated viewer, blockaded online in two-dimensions, would have thought it was merely a painting. In this world of illusion, of collapsible iconic space, one may also be drawn to Claudia’s beauty, the sides of her hair as curtains to the constant one-act play of herself. One night after work, scanning through my Comcast options — with that kind of defeated shameful complicity in television viewing — I settled upon this show, skeptically, as it had appeared on some bitch’s facebook timeline. It basically follows half-a-dozen women through their lives as they maneuver New York City’s gallery world. We see effeminate attitudinal men in rimless spectacles, often holding obnoxious dogs; women whose countenances have been stretched both severe and eerily frozen by plastic surgeries; the glass spiderweb of a cracked iPhone being cried into, inside a cab whose fare their father is, well, faring. I may have shouted at the TV and lowered my pants. I may have drank a bottle of wine. “My still life paintings have none of those qualities, they just have pictures of certain things that are in a still life,” says Roy concerning his less than palpable work. Implicit satire is the spoiled child of the homage. In the episode I saw, Claudia got upset with soon-to-be ex-bff Chantal — whose distant Xanax induced gaze reminds me of a Nebraskan horizon one can never drive closer to — for supposedly getting sick in Paris, causing her to miss out on some hefty electricity bills. We then cut to commercial: a woman riding a bike with a tampon inside her, smiling as if ’twasn’t there. Perhaps menstruation is the opposite of God. We pretend it doesn’t exist. I felt sorry for myself, and the dead author whose novel I was neglecting. Later that night, some claws came out at a table adorned with tulips, its still life barely noticed in the background.

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech,” says the ticked off voice from above in the Book of Genesis (11:7) — though modern versions prefer confuse to confound, retroactively auspicious, since Babel sounds like the revised “confuse” (bālal) in Hebrew — thereby scattering our tongues into various, um, babbles, from the harshest Cantonese, bluntest Ebonics, to the always DTF-French. Regarding the etymology of babble, “no direct connection with Babel can be traced; though association with that may have affected the senses,” attests the Oxford English Dictionary. Near bizarrely, the original English word for babble was babeln (c. mid-13th century), that helpful -n a kiss away from Babylon, just for funnies, where this all supposedly took place, meaning “gateway to God.” Early 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceives the Panopticon, an institutional building (usually prison, though also applicable to hospitals, daycare, etc.) in which authorities at an omniscient center have a 360° view of the entire perimeter. Mr. metaphor Foucault (in Discipline and Punishment, 1975) is moved by the idea of “permanent visibility,” a form of power whose construct was more imperative than its actually being possible: the prison guards, while having access to the sweeping perimeter could only look at one area at a time, their backs turned to everything else. The habitual possibility of being watched was just as effective as actually being watched. Hence, religion as security cam.

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Suze Rotolo, who appeared on the cover The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend between 1961-1964, but because he’s an artist, is considered a muse. That muse is merely love’s exacerbation may be the most sneaky euphemism of all. “Don’t think twice, It’s alright,” whose damn cold lyrics include I ain’t saying you treated me unkind / You could have done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time was written in emotional defiance over Suze’s considering moving to Italy permanently. We’ve all done this before: diminished someone’s feelings on behalf of our own. He knocked her up, she had an abortion, they broke up. Some years later, in 1971, another couple appeared under fateful film, this time in New Haven Connecticut via Yale. They were both law students destined for politics, both of whose word bending and rhetorical capacities, if not imperatives, give both philosophy and creative writing a useful and more utilitarian poke. One remembers Clinton’s “it depends on what the meaning of the word is, is” as he dug a hole straight into phenomenological territory. The Heideggerian “is,” it turns out, was just sex, the milkshake of human civilization. The president blew a stressed-out wad on an intern, a projectile as morally devastating to this country as a few planes some years later. Suze indeed moves to Italy and marries an Italian director. In his follow-up album, The Songs of Bob Dylan, recorded in a single evening in June of 1964, Dylan would recount his falling out with her in “The Ballad of Plain D,” succinctly beginning with I once loved a girl… only to continue, verse after verse, for a treacherous 8:18 min. It is unlikely that Bill and Hillary got dressed up that day, coordinated in a suede and green jacket, in the fashion of an album cover. It is also unlikely that they knew they would almost change the world by simply trying to. A cynic will tell you the election is an illusion of choice, which is why cynics are rarely remembered. The greatest muse is history as it happens, the notion of one’s part in it. On Tuesday November 6, 2012, in the spirit of American antagonism, people will vote against their enemies all the while imagining themselves standing by each other, or better yet leaning in.

Your novel in commercial form, taken from the stack of books being sold at your reading. A certain lovely casual or incidental pretension to this. It’s like you walk into a bookstore with the most reasonable faith that your duly inventoried novel, of course, is replicated ~8-12 times in a stack (its “head” brandished vertically by either its own weight or a plastic contraption), on a table next to the mic’d podium, on which aristocratic miscellany (e.g. bouquet of flowers, a doily, English biscuits, a glass of water) rest. This is your reading, and the only preparation required is the lifetime of authorial sensibility whose matured peak may be found in the imminent vocal/verbal/mental evocations soon spoken from your mouth. The type of person who walks into their reading empty handed has faith in both commerce and the self-regenerating muse of whatever’s on his mind.

Your seemingly incidental smartphone. You are most likely still in college or just graduated. You communicate to the crowd “new media,” that unearned and premature skepticism towards tired print. You share the same smug “mellowness” of our recent author, simply finding some online content (gchats, emails, texts, your blog) to read from — as if you made such an ad hoc decision during your ornate introduction, when in fact you had decided days, maybe a week, before the reading to read from your smartphone as affected gesture of commonplace epiphany. The solipsist emphatic slouch of someone gazing into their smartphone is lost upon you, seeing that you cannot see yourself outside of yourself, as someone who looks like that. A bug.

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Provincial painter Elías García Martínez painted, sometime in the 19th century, Jesus Christ as mirrored in our minds; or rather, in the accepted manner by which our minds have been irrevocably influenced — the tilt in the head, sullen look, blanketed yet speculative eyes perhaps wondering if He, just before his “Ecco homo” crucifixion, should have simply conceded to the Romans that he (left column of H now broken off) was just a man. Christianity’s solipsist ethos is based off an antagonistic bluff: that this Man was much more than that. A hundred or so years later, one 80-year-old woman Cecilia Giménez, in the Santuario de la Misericordia, a Roman Catholic church in Borja, Spain, voluntarily “restored” the brittle fresco to such a comical simian degree, that the irony of the church’s denial of man’s evolution from ape is felt upon me.

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It is odd how a magazine that entrusts their readership with the most reputable of writing can simultaneously treat them so obtusely as to give them 8 links to the same subscription page in one notice, as if they needed such excessiveness to either help with a decision or to find the link. Obviously, the editorial and subscription departments are two separate beasts, the latter’s sense of rhetoric as blunt as a teenager with a hard on, dry humping the nearest throw pillow. I can live with the (3) “save 75%” and (7) “renew now” capitalisty buttons, and there’s something almost endearing about their final (8) footnote-ish “subtle” oh-in-case-you-missed-it-the-first-seven-times hyperlink, but (5) that Eustice Tilley has been reduced to a roll over link, the symbolic object of his lepidopterous preoccupation now cropped, is something sad. To say he is blinded by commerce would be too easy, thus their editors are free to call me. The race for high brow has gotten so high, over the scalp, the best hairlines are found at the ass. For the past year, I flip through the cartoons during dinner, finding it all kind of funny.

Since the beginning of the internet, I estimate having waited for said internet, in some way, be it a massive .pdf within a browser, a youtube clip during peak hours, or porn clip off some shoddy site during night’s black skin — the euphemism “loading” an affront to our wants, desires, impatience, and ultimate sadness, staring at a loading wheel, mockingly clockwise as if time even mattered — cumulatively for about a week; meaning, if I didn’t get up for a sandwich, I’d be dead. The staunch lateral progress of the loading bar always felt more western-y, whereas the wheel has a kind of reincarnate cyclical Buddhist-y flow to it, to cease desire, or at least wait. On Monday August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will occur, said totality (as opposed to the more common, and broader, partial ones) being when the moon’s apparent circumference is not only larger than the sun, but directly in front of it, turning the day into a kind of movable night. This will only be experienced on a narrow path across the earth, auspiciously this time around in the United States. The “greatest” total eclipse on earth that day, i.e. the most darkness at the longest duration, will occur in Christian County, Kentucky, whose 73,000 +/- estimated residents will likely tailgate the damn thing, sucking on corn dogs in darkness.

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