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12/06/2005 Archived Entry: "Literary Identities"

Literary Identities
From the school of fetishistic play. Notes in map making.

  • William Burroughs. "Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world."
    Listen.
    "For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out."

  • Walt Whitman. The king of lists. How many things can one list in a single phrase? Bad, good, happy, sexual, arrogant, bored...a Whitman series of thoughts...

  • Stan Lee. Able to create a superhero in a single minute. Anxiety + nuclear material + revenge =

  • Primo Levi. Here is where my pedagogical training began... The Periodic Table... a fall semester as a graduate teaching assistant...the text as rhetorical model

  • Amos Oz. They make fewer books more beautiful than To Know a Woman. At least that's how I remember the book. A moment of aesthetics. I only grant that moment once.

  • Roland Barthes. How to make literary theory anything but literary. The rhetoric of being allusive. My theoretical alter ego.

  • Muddy Waters. "I need a whole lot of lovin' / to make me feel good." What is more literary in post War America than music? And what more than that: the blues. "I'm drinkin' TNT / I'm smokin' dynamite / I wish some school boy / start a fight."

    Replies: 3 comments

    Richard Pryor. What else is there to say?

    Posted by robert @ 12/10/2005 06:28 PM EST

    Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. Yiddish poet Poet, early 20th. Created himself in poems of nightmares and daymares at the chasm between the old world and the new city. Asked what people would say if he told them he saw death walking on the waves at coney island and answered his own question with the poet's doubt "Who would be able/to believe Moyshe-Lebyl."

    Posted by robert @ 12/07/2005 10:03 AM EST

    Christopher Smart. 18th century english poet. Great Manic Inspirited listmaker. Nothing beneath wonder.

    "Let Ucal bless with the Cameleon, which feedeth on the Flowers and washeth himself in the dew.

    Let Lemuel bless with the Wolf, which is a dog without a master, but the Lord hears his cries and feeds him in the desert.

    Let Huldah bless with the Silkworm -- the ornaments of the Proud are from the bowells of their Betters."

    And on and on and on for a few hundred of pages

    Posted by robert @ 12/07/2005 09:55 AM EST

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