Greil Marcus: “. . . that beloved American story, that Gothic weather report, about a girl swept off a Kansas farm by a tornado and dropped down into another world as the killer of a witch. There is a way in which Dorothy’s adventures in the land of Oz are really about the frustration of a young woman who wants more than anything to escape from a language in which every vocal sound has been so polished in taciturn mouths that neither a laugh nor a scream can be made, let alone heard, let alone be paid any mind.”
Which makes me curious: where did Marcus grow up?
~
Rather tickle’d to receive an hieroglyphickal gush of spam with the sender list’d as “Finally K. Blanches.”
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My reverting—in the new place—to one-pot-ism: suppers of endless leftovers always add’d to, like a sourdough. Some individuals covet stray lines that way, starter kits. Never sweeping off the all, tabula-rasaickally.
Reading: Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn. A story related by orphan turn’d detective agency “heavy,” Lionel Essrog, who suffers the touching, rearranging, repeating compulsiveness of Tourette’s Syndrome, along with its uncontrollable (quasi-filthy) nonsense shout-outs: Eat me, dickweed!
(Besides activating the sleeping adolescent in me, I begin to think of mild Tourette’s as a sine qua non for the writing of poetry: that compulsive measure, counting, repetition, that word-roar, radical combo-ship, that missing off-switch to the brainpan’s rabble-gouge.)
“Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive—it teaches you this because you’re the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way.”
“Speech was intention, and I couldn’t let anyone else or myself know how intentional my craziness felt. Pratfalls, antics—those were accidental lunacy, and more or less forgivable. Practically speaking, it was one thing to stroke Leshawn Montrose’s arm, or even to kiss him, another entirely to walk up and call him Shefawn Mongoose, or Lefthand Moonprose, or Fuckyou Roseprawn. So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.”
~
Of note: Otis Books / Seismicity Editions put out a call for submissions of manuscripts of poetry and fiction. Details here.
