Comments on: Dirk Does Dallas

By: Rebecca Wolff

Rebecca Wolff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:30:12 +0000

I’m afraid this is my hallucination, not yours, and cannot be further explicated, except perhaps to say that the phenomenon I experience is probably more akin to Emily Dickinson’s I think famous declaration that she sees auras around words? auras around words in combination? I can’t find this anywhere on the internet which may mean that I actually hallucinated it myself. Here’s a poem of mine, since we seem to be sharing poems in this venue, in which I at the very least refer to it:

Exalted

on the rainy
road to daily
January’s
exception

Returned at last
mid-valley
to an elevation
from which inflation

(Words as visions)

mountain
bowl
windproofing

offers a reprieve from
the “community.”

Do those words seem special to you?
In light of Emily Dickinson’s aura
and the room in which she labored.

By: Rebecca Wolff

Rebecca Wolff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:55:25 +0000

That sounded like it was meant to be really heavily metaphorically laden, but really it was total nonsense. What I meant to say was: If you’re reading The King, shouldn’t I be reading Clay Banes’s hidden or not-so manuscript? How does that date work otherwise.

By: Rebecca Wolff

Rebecca Wolff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:38:07 +0000

Sounds like a date. I’ll bring the bitter radicchio, you bring the sour vinaigrette. Chewing makes things sweeter.

By: Rebecca Wolff

Rebecca Wolff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:36:25 +0000

I can’t believe I didn’t register that. It adds a frisson of ultra-cheesiness.

By: Clay Banes

Clay Banes — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:11:00 +0000

Rebecca, let’s split up. You read The Weather (I urge you), I read The King, and we meet back up again in a fortnight.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:05:33 +0000

you look for a mop.

By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:06:17 +0000

If you put that book next to Tan Lin’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, what happens?

By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:00:33 +0000

OMG you have to read her previous books, esp. Occasional and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture & Debbie: An Epic. Um, & The Men. Btw, the title of Robertson's book is actually (awesomely) Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:46:38 +0000

Wanted to second Jordan – yes, thanks for link to Tallis article! More needs to be said about the determinism of the brain-explainers.

By: Michael Theune

Michael Theune — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:30:50 +0000

Intrigued by your comments about Robertson’s book, Rebecca, I’ve looked up what I could of it online… I wonder if you’d be willing to identify and say more about the images in the text that seem to rise holographically from the page.

I’m interested in the capacity of words to pull off this kind of feat (one of the reasons I love Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book, a great work of literary criticism that examines how powerful images are created in language), but I didn’t see a lot of this in Robertson’s work–what I saw was more language delivered with a very (even, dare I say it?, intentionally) flat affect, a la Michael Palmer.