...We danced at the Roseroom till 5:00 AM and on the way up Central Park West towards my atelier...In the morning I found her reading my MS, The Going, The Doing in her lime half-T with the big STAR on it and a pair of cut-offs that had been through the ringer so many times they were almost linen in lightest sky blue...She only looked up for a smile, and then went back to my MS, sipping her tea, and making little circles with a strand of her hair on one finger...
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This Free Letterform is a category of writing that belongs to the class called fiction.
Here, too, are many poetic works that, as is usual in the art, involve the exercise of the
eponymous license. Both contain names, characters, places and incidents which
are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ã Wallace Darwen Brindle 1998
Warning! This work may not be copied, whole or in part, by any means; or
Published, without the written consent of the author or his representatives:
R.P. Ebersberger & Associates
Attorneys At Law
5775 Wayzata Blvd.
Suite 500
Minneapolis, MN 55416-1231
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The Going,
The Doing
--Albert Pallas [mutatis mutandis]
I dedicate these exercises to my forebear Juan Crisóstomo
Lafinur (1797-1824), who left some memorable endecasyllables
to Argentine letters and who tried to reform the teaching of
philosophy, purifying it of theological shadoes and expounding
in his courses the principles of Locke and Condillac. He died
in exile; like all men, he was given bad times in which to live.
--Jorge Luis Borges From A New Refutation of Time, in Labyrinths
...January 16, 1999
Foreword
From The Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Dear Reader,
Parzifal \’pãrt-sê-,fãl\ Epic poem, one of the masterpieces of the Middle Ages, written between 1200 and 1210 in Middle High German by WOLFRAM von Eschenbach. The source for this 16-book, 25,000-line poem was probably Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal, an unfinished work by Chrétien de Troyes. Wolfram’s version, which introduced the theme of the Holy Grail into German Literature, is in part a religious allegory describing Parzifal’s painful journey from utter ignorance and naiveté to spiritual awareness. The poem is also considered to be the climax of medieval Arthurian tradition. It questions the ultimate value of an education based solely on the code of courtly honor, and it takes its hero beyond the feudal world of knights and lords to the threshold of a higher order.
Parzifal, who is eager to become a knight, visits Arthur’s court but is judged too raw to become a knight of the Round Table. Later, after numerous adventures, he is granted knighthood. When he visits the ailing Grail King, however, he fails to ask the one question that will release the old man from his suffering: the reason behind his illness. For his ignorance, Parzifal is punished by being cursed, and in turn he curses God. When he meets an old hermit who helps him realize the true nature of God, Parzifal reaches a turning point in his spiritual education. He returns to the Grail King and this time, having gained wisdom, performs his duties correctly. He is rewarded with title and duties of the keeper of the Grail.
Wolfram’s eccentric style, with its complex rhetorical flourishes, its ambiguous syntax, and its free use of dialectic make Parzifal a difficult but richly rewarding poem. More than 70 manuscript versions of the poem are extant, testifying to its popularity in its own day. Richard Wagner used it as the basis for his last opera, Parsifal (1882).
Using the decronstructionist methods of Jacques Derrida. Begin now. Go ahead and start now. Commence now. Initiate J.D.’s method...
ù û ù û ù û A Farewell Note to The Good Folks, The Eleven, Upon My Withdrawing Down The Line, 1 January, 1999: two full years before the beginning of the next millennium. Please kindly understand, receiving a copy of this final note TGF does not necessarily make you one of The Eleven.
(Speaker's head is slightly rolling back with little jerks:) Well, now they won't have Walt Nixon to kick around anymore!! // You see people, it was "The 400 Blows" -- and I begged my therapist to find a way to get me into the Minnesota Institute for the Treatment of Victims of Torture, but he didn't take me seriously (partly, perhaps, due to the Iatrogenic Connection Reaction), and tortured me instead; and of course, he needed the bread for The Self (please, gentle readers, see Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on the question of $ balance) -- that drove me to gather up my sore bones, counteract the swirling in my eyes by staring at a reverse tape of an old beginning-of-dream-sequence, synthetic vertigo, optical illusion from the old B-movies, put the books, manuscripts, furniture, stereo, computer, and those clothing items that were still legal; and follow the murmurings mulling inside the Big Imaginary Bluebird Egg -- inter-ear transmutation of the Twelve Year Catastrophe Storm -- to fancy, shiny, sparkling, shimmering, glistening, new-car-smell-in-the- bathrooms, Phabletonjah.
Yeauh, yeauh, yeauh... And there's not a dry eye on the whores. Consider, you won't have me to remind you anymore to read your Henry James, Dickens, O'Neill, Balzac, Berryman, Borges, (W.S.) Burroughs, and Sophocles (a little "J. DOBBBBS" a day keeps the bandits without stinkin’ badges away) so you'll have to take care of this crucial mental and life-health item through your own devices from now on. And we've seen what happens to people who try to slip by on a little Mary Higgins Clark washed down with some Garrison Keillor; don't let it happen to you! (Alternately, from "Rebel Without a Cause:" Jim Backus's character to James Dean's: "Be careful how you pick your friends Jimbo, don't let them pick you!"
A Working Table of
Contents
The Going, The Doing
Foreword
2
Preface 3
And Now For Your Enjoyment and Edification 6
Epigraphics
Gentle Reader, If It Pleases 8
Right Rhyme & Left Rhyme
Essays 11
Utopias 12
"What If I’m Really Not A Lunatic After All?" He Asked The Giant Metal Lizard In Plaid Shorts
Dystopias
Imaginary Places Where Everything Is As Bad As Can Be 23
Opus 1
46
Two Times Two Stories
Chad Deleroix’s Act 47
The Emperor of Greater New York
104
Wozzeck, Agent 133
Seaside Heights 167
The Treatment
207
Deuce Razed By The Power of 7 --poems 334
Bibliography
462
And Now For Your Enjoyment and Edification
:
"From far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores where warm suns shine and sweet odours linger about strange gardens and gay temples." (Lovecraft, The White Ship)
"Trust no one. Doubt everything. In a world of mystery, everyone's under suspicion." (TV Guide/CBS)
"...There are some who follow Renan in taking Caliban for a type of Demos, and regard his desire to 'nor scrape trenchering nor wash dish' as eminently characteristic of political ideals which aim at nothing higher than the escape from reasonable labor..." [Sir Edmund Chambers, on The Tempest)
"He was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean school-world, and he had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority -- which could include even stupid, sordid head-masters -- turns infallibly to the vindictive. [Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (...head-masters -- and the come – out - of – no…! no – go – back – into - your shell-shocked, scientific professionals at 529 and Neptune, et al. -Ed.)]
"Did you know Rachmaninoff had a nervous breakdown in Russia when he was nineteen years old? That I can understand. But they brought in Tolstoy to cheer him up. That I cannot understand." (Oscar Levant on the quiz show Information, Please! about 1940.)
"Oh, yes, I wear clean pants all the time now." (The late primitive artist Basquiat when asked if his association with Andy Warhol had made a difference in his life. N.B.: The editorial staff of Letter To Eleven cannot vouch for the complete accuracy of this quote.)
"With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame." [George Eliot, Middlemarch,Book 6, Chapter 61]
"From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. / All art is at once surface and symbol. / Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. / Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. / It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. / Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. / When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. / We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. / All art is quite useless." [Oscar Wilde, the last part of the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891]
Supplement:
How I became
charming delightful
and delicious
I sleep very late. I commit suicide 65%. My life is very cheap, for me it is only 30% of life. It lacks arms strings and a few buttons. 5% is consecrated to a state of semi-lucid stupor accompanied by anemic [rallies]. This 5% is called Dada. So you see that life is cheap. Death is a little more expensive. But life is charming and death is charming too.
A few days ago I attended a gathering of imbeciles. There were lots of people. Everybody was charming. Tristan Tzara, a small, idiotic and insignificant individual, delivered a lecture on the art of becoming charming. And incidentally, he was charming. And witty. Isn't that delicious? Incidentally, everybody is delicious. 9 below zero. Isn't that charming? No, it's not charming. God can't make the grade. He isn't even in the phone book. But he's charming just the same.
{Ambassadors, poets, counts, princes, musicians, journalists, actors, writers, diplomats, directors, dressmakers, socialists, princesses and baronesses--all charming. All of you are charming, utterly subtle, witty, and delicious.
Tristan Tzara says to you: he would be quite willing to do something else, but he prefers to remain an idiot, a clown and a faker.
Be sincere for an instant: is what I have just told you charming or idiotic?
There are people (journalists, lawyers, dilettantes, philosophers) who even regard the other forms--business, marriages, visits, wars, various congresses, joint stock companies, politics, accidents, dance halls, economic crises, emotional crises--as variations of Dada. Since I am not an imperialist, I do not share their opinion--I prefer to believe that dada is only a divinity of a secondary order, which must simply be placed beside the other forms of the new mechanism for interregnum religions.
Is simplicity simple or dada?
I consider myself quite charming Tristan Tzara (c. 1918, 1924)
Gentle Reader: If it pleases?
A Rhyme For Phabletonjah Before Arriving There Secretly Aboard Two Time Quanta Craft
So, you were all an Elvis Impersonator!?
B. hurt me in the extreme and she should have thought of the things I have did sic)for her – and in re hereunder as she has deemed:
I am not a skid row bum, I am not the talentless scum she hopes I am!
(I think it's) really about the big bad bushy man in the aluminum trailer. Who would have thought to have her Read plays of "The Sailor" (O'Neill) to prepare her for marriage and bushyman? I should not have failed her.
J., you should watch On The Waterfront inside car scene 'tween brothers Brando 10,000 times!
Why'd you fight in V. for? To preserve the right to betray people; and you a lover of rhymes?!
Out-of-control Schadenfreude learned at the perverse knee of DR. D.?
Yes, I do use that word, I suppose, quite a lot, so what, and what are you? part of the plot!?
The mandibles are wider-apart than you know, GUN GUY from the Little Afar.Oh!! Secret... (bhoomp bhoomp) Asian Man, Secret... (bhoomp bhoomp) Asian Man!
A., you "didn't do what you said you were going to do..." Was it all a scam?
And tell your wife that "The Show Must Go On" takes precedence over Best Man's Duties!
[C# Maj.] "Never betray your frairs, oh my! Lyings & Tie-grrs & Bares, oh my!" (you cuties!)
Recall: "Elvis" is a variant of the Teutonic Elvin, meaning "elf-friend" and Elves are supposed to be wise!
Oh! Learn the story of the Erl-King and remember it all of your lives!!!!
"Its not enough to succeed," you see -- mostly "others must fail."
Oh, yee of slick sick agendas, who were driven beyond the pale!
K³, read please (now) the report you threw out about the world-famous doubt of that French Jewish lout Who landed with flair: yes! The Dreyfus Affair!
(A personal hero who faced YOUS sans fear, Oh!)
[Major, unquotable applause, he looks up to the near-stage-left box, and proffers an elaborate bow -- but, friends, that box is empty!!!!??]
Utopias
*****Look, Here's What I'm Saying*****
I want to jingle a glass of Krugerrands and Cordon Negro ("helping dream negroes") during alfresco breakfast at my new dewy dawn place of many wooded acres with no perfidious, pathologically twisted psycholo-chia-capital-gists-trists-ists or their minions lurking in the trees for fee-seas. New 3-year-old Jaguar and a NTYO Ford Crown Victoria in the garage a must. There should be a "louche little bistro" down the swervy road a mile where interesting people gather: artists, commercial fishermen, non-racist retired police officers, "advertising exec type fruits" who have quit and are currently living in political tracts, "classical" flaut-horn-harp-ists who would rather go bird-watching or read Jack London than perform on "audition couches" for the mock Stalinesque sick little tin gods of freelance music, stockbrokers who once "managed" G.G.'s investments, famous and much venerated and Nobel-prize-winning autodidacts, Ph.D.s in the hard sciences and philosophy from the IV league who testify by tutoring at the tavern tables pro bono and whose great grandparents were once Big Birds in the fledgling film industry, beautiful, intellectual, 29-year-old, non-sybaritic, Icelandic blonde, "gel" (see J. Fowles, The Ebony Tower) of 5 feet 2 inches who speaks 34% English and shall fall short-wave-radio-frequency-fantasy in love with me and not An Income Stream and bear The Girl and The Boy, rare book collectors who bring up questions of current (book) book value vs. market risk with their widows' and orphans' garage sale in-clients before they buy, pilots, pariahs, voluble farm-assists, composers of Augenmusik, people from Sedona Arizona who don't believe, anthro-apologists, etc., etc. "to the concrete sky."
The New Life, A Bagatelle:
When do you want to introduce me to your third cousin in Ohio? I mean, of course, Zondra? I won't say just now how I found out 'bout 'er. That's another story for another file (day, a feller say). I like what I know of her so far - so...maybe...this...'s...the...one...Mmmmmmmmm...? She is 5'2", eyes of violet-blue, looks fantastic in V-neck or crew - (broadly vaudeville) have huffy Henry (ref., The Dream Songs, J.B.) seen my gal? She's 27 years of age and likes blue water sailing and gourmet gimbaled cooking and the operas of Alban Berg and late Beethoven string quartets - especially the "Grosse Fugue" - and middle to late Wagner, although she will, on certain days, stand still for Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman - oh, you knew that, sorry, but you must pronounce Fliegende Holländer as though you'd just realized that that large forkful of baked potato is cauterizing your tongue.) In the early morning, upon waking, she must have papaya juice suction-strained through a #4 galvanized wire grid and served at 60° F. ± .001° while listening to her favorite type of wake-up music: estampie*.
*Estampie, estampida, istanpitta, stampita. The most important instrumental form of the 13th and 14th centuries. Similar to the (vocal) sequence [see Sequence II, HDM 2nd Ed.] from which it was evidently derived, it consists of four to seven sections called puncta, each of which is repeated: a a, b b, c c, etc. Different endings, called ouvert and clos [It. aperto and chiuso], are provided for the first and second statement of each punctum, as in the modern prima and seconda volta. In some cases the same two endings are used for all the puncta , so that the following scheme results: a + x,a + y;b + x,b + y,c + x,c + y; etc. -HDM, 2nd Ed.
We built a 20 room log cabin with stone walls on several sides in Venice, California, (N.B.: not the real Phabletonjah) near the Santa Monica Airport, I like to take my 100 proof vodka from out my briefcase and sip it on the special limeade rocks I keep in a small cooler in the trunk of my Jaguar (for emergencies). For three hours, as the planes come in, I recline there in my backyard nocturnal garden (Paul Klee) studying Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, one hour each, and sip 'till around 4:00 A.M. It usually makes me ready, like a spinning Janus to face the quaquaversal day -- all that good vodka/lime and language -- prevents nihilism and scurvy, and promotes literacy as well. Then I sleep till 7:00 A.M., at which time I begin to write/compose while I watch my commodities or index spreads, all during market hours, after which I catch another three or four hours of sleep before going over to my fiancée Zondra,s estate, she of The Industry, where together we are editing our most recent experimental film project, my screenplay,
score and directing; her fundraising, camera work and casting; working title: They Come To Play, a story of people who typify the small to medium town seekers after the Emulsion Nurturing Delusion who pilgrimage to LA. to find their way into the Great E.N.D.
Afterwards we do whatever, maybe eat something not having had a face at a night spot with a great many plurals, then one way or another the XK8 (it's funny how many people say we look like we were made for each other) finds the way back to my garden, almost always precisely at 1:00 A.M., on the Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays, freeways with the Lears coming on below constellations I learned as a boy -- but never visited. More lime? Necessary quotidian doses head-off halitosis.
poetry page one
