Death

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

R.I.P. Carlos Fuentes. I just found out. He was one of the greats. Places to start if you haven’t read him: Where the Air Is Clear (1958), The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962),  Terra Nostra (1975). & here he is on the BBC (audio), and here are various YouTube videos.

Godspeed, good sir.

The Remaining Lost Poetry of Slash Lovering

Here are the Seattle-based poet’s remaining works, from the CD-R he gave me before his tragic death at age 38. More on Slash in my first post on him here. His graphic web-based poetry continues to inspire me – both for its raw emotion and for its quietness and grace.

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Author Spotlight / 22 Comments
February 9th, 2012 / 12:33 pm

So Ben Gazzara and Zalman King both just died on the same day? Ouch.

If the dictionary is a graveyard, writers are either necromancers or necrophiliacs

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Craft Notes / 7 Comments
January 12th, 2012 / 6:33 pm

THE ZERO DEGREE NOISELESSNESS OF DEATH: LECTIO V-VIII

Lectio I-IV

What if “horror” has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life? Not a very uplifting thought, that. Nevertheless, death is simply the non-existence after my life, in a sense akin to the non-existence before my life. These two types of non-existence (a parte post or after my life, and a parte ante or before my life) are mirrors of each other. This is a sentiment repeatedly voiced by Schopenhauer: “For the infinity a parte post without me cannot be any more fearful than the infinite a parte ante without me, since the two are not distinguished by anything except the intervention of an ephemeral life-dream.”

–Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet

LECTIO V: Forget This Memory–Édouard Levé’s Suicide

LECTIO VI: Torture Porn is Capital– Reality & “Solitary”

LECTIO VII: Guy Bourdin’s Spread Legs

LECTIO VIII: The Cinematic Space of Lust

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Word Spaces / 12 Comments
September 9th, 2011 / 11:00 pm

This again, not this again

I wasn’t going to write this, feeling like the last thing anybody needs is another post explaining or defending or extolling paper, but then two events became bridged in my mind and I felt like I would be restless until I wrote them, about that bridge, so there you have a little apologia for what follows, which is that I moved some months ago to a new house, and recently found myself sitting on the floor late at night amidst boxes filled with folders and smaller boxes, and several folders were marked MISC and contained all kinds of paper, critical essays that I wrote during college and grad school about Emily Dickinson and Auden and post-structuralism and William Blake, and pages from the first novel I wrote, and pages from the first “novel” I wrote, and notebooks filled with other writings, and long letters never sent, and then I opened a box within a box and it was filled with floppy discs, each one labeled with the year and some vague tags, like “teaching stuff” and “post-mod essays” and “stories/summer” and “Needle,” and I just held those floppies like they were quaint artifacts from my Victorian childhood, realizing that I had no means of accessing their contents, and then stacking them neatly back into their smaller and then larger box, and returning to the piles of paper feeling a kind of profound agitation with regard to permanence or the myth of permanence, and remembering standing outside of the office where I worked just a couple blocks from the World Trade Center READ MORE >

Blind Items & Random & Technology / 13 Comments
February 21st, 2011 / 6:30 pm

Last Thing I’ll Do Before I Die

Music & Random / 6 Comments
October 29th, 2010 / 8:08 pm

What Reconciles Me to My Own Death (John Berger)

“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.” – John Berger

Random / 9 Comments
October 22nd, 2010 / 1:35 pm

RIP, Frank Kermode. This was a deeply important book to me circa 2006-2007.