1 — Jean Baudrillard’s Conspiracy of Art. Fine reminder every five years. Cynicism bites its tail, transposes into a perverse cousin of hope.
2 — Don DeLillo. Mao II. Also Cosmopolis again a while ago. Who else so icily devoid of kitsch and atavism. Narratives that thrive like extremophiles in the lunar ice of the abovementioned conspiracy.
3 — Diet of Dickinson.
I read my sentence steadily,
Reviewed it with my eyes,
To see that I made no mistake
In its extremest clause,—
4 — The screenplay of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. Inasmuch as screenplays are unfleshed skeletons, art-potentialities as opposed to artworks, they engage a different mental musculature than do texts like books of poems, or history, or fiction. One can read a screenplay to interrogate the choices a director made. Or one can read the screenplay of a finished film to unsee that film, to reimagine it unfinished or with different actors, different choices. Both are interesting, the former especially, because one often discovers script-dialogue to be far less nuanced than the same words in a finished film. Hundreds of micro-shadings in the human face and voice can lend a formulation as tired as “Here’s what I would do. I would have him turn himself in. Cause then, you see, your story assumes tragic proportions because, in the absence of a God, he’s forced to assume that responsibility himself” an odd profundity. How is it that this Sartrean cliche, decades after it died in the desert, can be resurrected to such fine effect in Allen’s finished film? One can’t do this in poetry or fiction. One can, at best, spend a few sentences qualifying a line of speech, but to accurately describe the spectrum of comedic, self-ironizing, winking, vulnerable-yet-guarded, character-in-context nuances with which Allen-as-actor imbues Allen-as-writer’s text would take pages and pages and would almost certainly come off, even in fiction, but especially in poetry, finicky. To wit, “comedic, self-ironizing, winking, vulnerable-yet-guarded, character-in-context” is not enough to immunize Allen-as-writer’s line from a writerly glibness, and yet, in the film, the spoken line comes off somehow elegant, untrammeled by its origins. This is one of the few genuinely literary advantages film has over poetry and poetic prose, which generally dwarf screenwriting via sheer accretive possibility.
5 — Snack of Celan.
Wordaccretion, volcanic,
drowned out by searoar.
Above,
the flooding mob
of the contra-creatures: it
flew a flag—portrait and replica
cruise vainly timeward.