Wittgenstein as a modernist. The idea was so attractive to me, whenever I first encountered it, that I was able to accept it, take it as given, without ever really troubling myself about what it meant. I was readied by what I’d heard about other modernists, other modernisms, in the arts rather than in philosophy. Which were, in part, what I counted as art. My first real encounter with poetry, early in college, came from reading either—I forget which was first—a cheap selection of William Carlos Williams that included, among others, 'This is just to say', or a slim anthology, used, pages ready to fall out, of 'imagist' verse that included probably the Williams as well as this, by Pound:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I didn’t like poetry, I didn’t understand poetry; it took me many years to get to the point of feeling like I did, or could—and I did so in reverse, really, reading about poetry, reading criticism, and criticism about criticism, before much more than Williams really started to take. The little imagist anthology made a powerful impression on me because it gave me a way to alibi my simplest reaction, startled and emphatic: this is a poem. This can be a poem.

It wasn’t a reaction in the direction that the stories about modernism usually frame things from: startled by unaccountable newness, moved by the object itself to accept it as a work of art despite its evident refusal of the standards by which all works were formerly accepted, a poem despite. Those poems hadn’t done anything for me. I didn’t have an accepted background of work against which Pound’s lines could be challenging to accept. I didn’t have anything; he gave me something, and gave me poetry, by inverting (from my perspective) the official story, so that I could trust my own, private reaction enough to insist that from that point on, anything else that I would come to see as poetry, that would count, would have to count this, too—or I could discount it.

I took my license from the criticism, the manifestos, the slogans. For a while, make it new and no ideas but in things could well have condensed the essence of art for me. (Accurately? Does it matter?)

—A similar first encounter with Wittgenstein: this is philosophy.

The building next door fell down last night.

The wall really.

One wall.

Part of it; the bricks.

They had been bowed out for years. Now the space between the buildings is a pile of bricks.

It was the wind. A gust blew through my apartment so hard that I thought the boom was a window falling out.

There was nothing dynamic about the scene when I went to look. Seconds after the boom it was already just a pile of bricks.

Well, that's what that was, I thought. How about that.

Then I lost interest.

'"This is a university, my friend," said one representative when asked about Axact. "I have no idea what you're talking about."'

'… establishing a habit…'

'We have no politics of time.'

'… the very idea of waiting is frowned upon.'

79 Theses on Technology

'… still this young man wasn't going home to his parents that night.'

'… trying to figure out what in the world we can do with and about the genres in which we choose or in which we are forced to live.'