In 1960, Yves Klein set a tarpaulin on the street, leapt off a building onto it, later altered the photograph to make it all seem cooler, and called it “Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void).” No one expects the artist to have hurt himself in the making of said image, so we’ll give him the haha-ok nod. Of his other works, my favorite, is “Le Vide (The Void)” (1958) in which he showed an empty display case in an empty gallery in order to present nothing; of course, somewhat unfortunately, the presence of the display case in itself was necessary in invoking the theoretical absence of what might have been there. On the opening night, 3000 classy Parisians waited in line outside waiting to be let into the empty room. Some 30 years later, a then-disgruntled singer of a rather popular grunge band leapt off a stage set into his fans, lending an Olympic component to the “stage dive.” The fans braced the imminent collision with extended hands, together in a mutual crowd wave which I’ve always found endearing. To carry your fallen hero back to the alter is well worth the ticket, and chance of a sprained wrist. If the acceleration of gravity is godless physics, then the assumption that your fans will catch you is faith in one’s art. For your own personal Klein painting, this contributor encourages you to google map any of our vast oceans (zoomed in, satellite view); or, in his avoidance of work, this.

There is a moment when a human being walks into a camera’s view which, devoid of any narrative we might honor it, is simply that, a moment, a dot on a timeline as a bee’s stinger suspended above a meadow. Yet it is profound, the semblance of immortality. The same camera which killed painting is insentient, judgeless, uncaring — yet turned into an ethical machine, as we appoint it objectivity, the auspices of “what happened” via residual files inside a memory card smaller and smoother than a cat’s tongue. We expectantly look and point at shapes similar to us, no longer inside the camera, but displayed on screens by signals detached from the original event, now portrayed in numbers, binary code, recollated into bands of color, thru four channels, or something, physical parameters we barely understand like the spill-shaped universe itself. And here, somewhere in a parking lot, in the western hemisphere, at some point in this current century, two people displaced light’s refraction, inadvertently asserted their contours, the man observing the evolutionary pause of his member’s intraface with his partner’s mouth, how funny and endearing that act is, and multiple men weeks or months or years later would semi-emotionally reappropriate these images by funneling them into their minds, to the smaller universe between their synapses, forever lodged in some lobe in their brain, some desperate corner, the original event now something greater, surgically deeper. This is porn.

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Gregory Sherl is the author of the excellent poetry collection Heavy Petting (my review, here, at Diode). I’ve always admired the sensuality and openness of his writing so we talked about the way he exposes himself in his poetry, Ryan Gosling’s satin jacket in Drive, and the matter of fucking in poetry.

What is your obsession as a writer?

Trying to stop myself from being so desperately aware that I’m a writer. Or maybe my obsession is figuring out how to pay for healthcare when my only income comes from being an Adjunct English Instructor. Or maybe it’s me obsessing over obsessing about the fact that I need to apply for my MFA like today but not doing it because writing new poems is better than putting old poems together in a packet with some stamps on it. Or maybe it’s watching the doctor try to figure out the right cocktail of medication so I don’t sleep nineteen hours in one day. Or maybe it’s trying to watchFelicity in its entirety as quickly as possible (a little over two weeks, I believe). Or maybe these aren’t my obsessions as a writer but my obsessions as me but I’m a writer so I think it fits.

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True to his plan, arrogant and contemptuous of an opponent’s worth as never before, Ali opened the fight flat-footed in the center of the ring, his hands whipping out and back like the pistons of an enormous and magnificent engine. Much broader than he has ever been, the look of swift destruction defined by his every move, Ali seemed indestructible. Once, so long ago, he had been a splendidly plumed bird who wrote on the wind a singular kind of poetry of the body, but now he was down to earth, brought down by the changing shape of his body, by a sense of his own vulnerability, and by the years of excess. Dancing was for a ballroom; the ugly hunt was on. Head up and unprotected, Frazier stayed in the mouth of the cannon, and the big gun roared again and again.

And, you know, this. Whatever.

And could anyone point me to better next-day Kram (or same) writing about sports? RIP literary sports writing, like of the event, once the actual norm before the YELLING. YELLING is now sports reporting, eh? Get off my YAWN. Who writes very well about sports now? I ask you. I ask. I mean in Good Faith: I’ll read your answer.

RIP Joe Frazier.

In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on Mona Lisa and titled it “L.H.O.O.Q.,” phonetically Elle a chaud au cul, or “she has a hot ass,” and more loosely, “there is fire down below.” He made multiple versions, including one called “L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved”; that her mustache was not shaved directs our attention elsewhere. It is a cynical piece, as with most of his work, though if one considers the fury of cameras as cicadas coming out in the Louvre, their masters’ faces sharing the frame with hers, then maybe that’s warranted. In 2011, Urban Outfitters would sell a sort of non-functional shade (Sunstache, $8.00) adorned with a plastic mustache, mostly a gag gift. Its wearers would be seen going to or coming back from a party, ostentatiously on public transportation in that loud oblivious yet confident twenty-somethings manner, saying to the world #toomuchfreedom. The one time I went to the Louvre, I waited in line for three hours while the soft balm of French spoken by young girls behind me inspired me to “hold on” a little longer for the fleshy canvases awaiting inside. To render light loyally finding the full contour of an arse ends the argument of what is art. That night, I ate a crepe along the Seine, gazed up at Notre Dame, and felt an odd bulge growing on my back; some hours later, three Irishmen would find me in our hostel room, on the top bunk, another odd bulge growing from under the sheets as I imagined the slender pale hands which had made my crepe, reconfiguring each finger around my poetry. I was sure to peek, and did, inside the Mona Lisa room for good measure, of grave responsibility almost. Her smile could only flicker in between mounds of black asian hair in front of me, the entropy of a million languages as a car bomb under the Tower of Babel. In the room the asians come and go, talking of Michelangelo (which rhymes better than da Vinci). I’ve always wondered where that winding road past her right shoulder leads to, ideally a monk’s hut, if we consider the asian landscape-y vibe, paper light and flecked with ink. “Let us go then, you and I,” is the solicitation to come back to my hostel which I never used. She handed me the crepe, said voila and smiled. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

For $800 you, too, can have an ipad typewriter. ipad not included. Click clack.