Ephemera Weekender

I’ve finished going through a notebook, and am sending it to the drawer this afternoon. We all have these books. And what are we to do with them? For what it’s worth, here is the ephemera from this little blue one.


Titles I didn’t get to use:


Book of Winter Words
Blood & Treasure
Legend of the Wayward Duck
From the Committee of Meaning
History Seizure
With the Tabloid Regulars
Hooray for the Hills
The Nodes of Ranvier
Little Lambs Eat Ivy
Friendly Interview
Diner with the Norwegians
Shooting Day for Night in a Gorilla Suit
Bingo Night in Space


Ideas I didn’t do anything with:


Something to help us through the difficult bits, the deaths of our fathers, the long illnesses.

I’ll testify if I have to, but only in movie quotes from foreign films I’ve never seen.

If called to serve, I’ll have to borrow an apron.

We’re experimental now, we only capitalize vowels.

Language does not mirror the world, but our way of being in the world. If this is the case, different “schools” of poetry, as they enact different ways of mirroring our way of being in the world, can be seen as competing alternatives, and pretending otherwise is like saying that religions should be able to wholly coexist with each other. (Which people do all the time, of course, even religious people.)

We want what we have, but made a little more vague and mysterious. Maybe a funny hat.

You can pass the time by focusing on the edge of the desk or the first few months of the war. Well-made desk. Good war.

I have no confidence in things.

Is this even a real road?

It’s mostly April, with patches of other months here and there.

You say nothing of it to the authorities.

When the boardwalk slingshot carnival ride thing—some metal ball tethered by bungee cords—flew up into the sky with two teenage girls in it and splattered a pelican flying by, I learned something new about the world, surrounded in little silver fish raining from the sky. It was on my last trip to Daytona.

And then we all turned into boats.

I’m on the phone to China.

Most things are going to be OK.

It’s still the end of the world. It’s just taking a bit longer than expected.

We develop a culture of hitting ourselves over the head with bricks.

I was having a difficult time finding my glasses, until I realized I was wearing them. After that, it was easier.

Six billion people is a lot of people.

The buildings have begun to sing. Don’t listen to them very carefully, it’s their first try.

Suburbia is the theory of heaven during an apology.

You must not listen to them or understand anything they say.

Election years as a series of Americas.

How does one negotiate a post-Courage the Cowardly Dog world? And did they ask this question of Felix the Cat? So how could anyone complain seriously about the “difficulty” of poetry?

understanding is not the point.

Understanding, as in “understanding” is not necessary to live with something. What it takes to live with something is to live with something. I don’t need to understand transpiration to encounter a tree.

Go tell the president that the kingdom moved to the other side of the river, leaving nothing but old maps and racing forms.

We don’t talk as much about the unified field theory as we used to, though I believe the search continues.

What I dislike about some poems is that they lead one to believe (in their extension and in their enactment) that the world is finally explainable. I find that not to be the case in my experience of the world. How one stands on the question of the world as finally explainable or not makes all the difference.

Art must coincide with the world. Must be in tune with a conception of things.

The taken-for-granted is the only interesting place to investigate.

“We must do away with all explanation and allow only description in its place.”
—Wittgenstein PI 109

The bars down there only serve whiskey.

The limits of what language may touch, and if thought may go further.