Wednesday, September 16, 2009

"shining constellation/ ... of / eyes, and again saw nothing."

shining constellation / each allusion / recognizes the silence / the scorching contiguity of the frantic / sex in this category / hardly ever humiliates / our living in hundreds of / eyes, and again saw nothing

It frequently happens, of course, in crowded harbors that more than two vessels are involved in an approaching situation. The same thing may even happen occasionally at sea. In all such cases, special circumstances may be deemed to exist the moment any of the vessels is prevented from obeying the usual rules.

This puts one beside oneself, this irritates and exasperates, and the language for saying it is exasperated. (It would be better to let another speak, and in a language that would remain, somewhat, on the side:7
"Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a mouth full of gum.
We quiver as we hear a voice, and what we are hearing and learning to love is a theory of the body. I, who can't carry a tune, am caught within this economy of vocal production as surely as if I were a singer.

"Red lines denote vocal sensations of soprano and tenor singers," writes Lilli Lehmann in How to Sing. Look at Lehmann's diagram of the singer: a ghoul, a skeleton, a survivor, shorn of identity's specifics.
Nothing but bread and dates and milk and coffee, and little enough of that. Often the bread runs short, and only dates and milk remain. It was a wild looking party that was gathered round the coffee pot. There's lots of negro blood in them, owing, I think, to their having negro slaves, one of whom was with them.
I kept an eye on her, though, without seeming to. After all, she was as unpredictable as I was. She could pick up a candlestick or a vase and hit me with it. And whip or no whip, I wasn't going to stand passively and let her really hurt me.


1-Captain Raymond F. Farwell, rev'd. Lieutenant Alfred Prunski, The Rules Of The Nautical Road. United States Naval Institute (Annapolis), 1954.
2-Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Peter Connor, The Inoperative Community. University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1991.
3-Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. Vintage (NYC), 1993.
4-The Letters of Gertrude Bell, edited by Lady Bell. Penguin (Harmondsworth), 1939.
5-Octavia E. Butler, Kindred. Beacon (Boston), 1988.