If I were better read I might be able to quote Rilke with authority, but the handful of times I've read 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' it hasn't yet hit me; hit me hit me, in just the way that the line I'd like to quote suggests: 'you must change your life'. I can't help but have it in mind lately because everyone and their mother, including Gadamer and my advisor in her last book, quotes it to lend - something, I'm not sure what, since what is meant by it invariably varies - to whatever they're saying about the nature of art. The line has been in mind because I believe it so much, or want to, and I didn't need Gadamer or Rilke to convince me to - I was already ready to. Or already did. Which of those two, I'm not sure, since the way I've been approaching art of all sorts recently makes me confused about whether I'm forcing it or not, and if I am, whether that lets me deceive myself about what artworks are actually capable of. Every book I pick up, literature or not, I seem to approach more like: you must change my life. Even if I were to confine my threats and appeals to really really classy strangers, I'm sure my luck there, with the books, will continue to be no better than if I were to ask the same of every person I met on the street.

One major failing of this attitude is the lack of commitment on my part; but in the pursuit of that change, in the physical act of reading, it always feels like the reason I can't slow myself down, sink into things, is the very thing I'm after. I can't take the time because I don't have enough time - I have to change my life!

Dear Flip,

I respectfully disagree.

You do not have that B.I.G. Ready To Die shit.

But I like you anyway.

sincerely,

Josh

'Lived life is tested and fulfilled in the stream alone.'

I've been reading a lot lately, almost manically. One thing that has passed across my eyes is Louis Zukofsky's Complete Short Poetry. There is something reliably thrilling, igniting, about his way with the smallest bits of words and speech, in the poems where I can tell in advance by looking that I'll like them, the way they're trailed thin down the page; so with that, and with my not totally self-assured suspicion of things I have to decode to read, why is it that I feel so compelled to read the poems from 80 Flowers (and - understand them? ever? that seems doubtful, and wrongheaded anyway)?

Telephus Sedum

Tell of us sedum comic
course a zone everlasting fuses
hue green questions cosmos nods
tell of him sempiternal octobers
seat white-purpling house-roof hen-'n'-chicks or
no anthers a kor homer
grass-widow's goldenmoss weigh little lovely
rosette-climbing-3's two-lip dropper bred true

(Of course, Williams, longtime correspondent of Zukofsky (who edited The Wedge for Williams, for one), did say something like: all sonnets are about the same thing, which is plausible when you take him to really be talking about his own poetry, and, hello: he didn't mean looooove.)

(I think.)

I love the Just Blaze / Bleek / Free track (I almost said 'joint' with no reservations whatsoever but then decided that noticing that I was going to say it without reservations was still a reservation, somehow) that Jess tipped (er there it goes again with the reservations and not) me to, inadvertently, a while ago, that I am anxious to hear everything on his list (that I haven't already heard - 'Goodies' is inconsequential but pleasant, especially in the way it refracts off of every other single beat in its little Lil Jon family). Especially 'Frei / Hot Love' - is this the same 'Frei' from Kompakt Total 5 or so?

There have been, obviously, technical problems.

Joel's phone company is to blame.

Everybody seemed to be after us
even the manufacturers
wouldn't press our disc
you know it wasn't fair
fuck everybody who worked there!

The actual film site for The Ister is probably a little more illuminating than that news story.

This is exciting! Though for some reason the note that Terence Malick was a Heidegger scholar before becoming a filmmaker is more exciting than the other dudes' film. Which is, though, as I say, still exciting apart from Terence Malick's being a Heidegger scholar once.

NB: I saw twenty minutes of a Terence Malick movie once. It was nice. That's all I can say with authority.