I love the image in the post below!  I love this album!  I am a little confused though, as the album cover--is it the backside?--I love even more I think has Lauper on a street-corner, though this could be faulty memory; mm, I do remember an image where she's in the same outfit, but positioned differently; anyways, everything is happening awesomely.  Does a record cover get any better?  LOL, what a dumb question: the answer is a resounding no! 

600 x 600 · 60 kB · jpeg·Cyndi Lauper – Portrait Of An Artist | corePLATINUM

More On Tropes

I had all these ideas I wanted to write down just like less than a minute ago and I would still write them down if I remembered what they were, what I wish they still are. Now, I’m my usual blank, from which I pull out more blanks, creating seamless chains of anything I doubt anyone has much use for. This is a kind of modesty and this is indisputably egotistical, the way I so thoroughly engage with language in ways few if any will find helpful. I should be optimistic. I should consider the possibility that I may achieve a goodly readership. I should trust that there’s a chance a few readers may find the words I’ve arranged engaging.


OK, now I’m in a mood in which I desire to write prosaic prose, and I’ve told myself I’ve exhausted my point in the prior paragraph. Well, there’s always, this, this going back to a point I make over and over, though hopefully each time with slightly different contours: I distrust the locution “my [this, that, those, any of any].” I don’t believe one can legitimately claim possession, or claim so without stating how one too is possessed. I believe there’s danger to easily believing in ownership. I believe there’s value to trying to build in freedom to what one claims to perceive, so that one may make clear to an interlocutor that you are prepared to be wrong, could currently be wrong.

Like unless it’s questionably legal, I don’t believe anyone besides me should care what I want to write, or rather how I want to write, or rather how marbled to what. Belief is a queer beast. I recognize the “like” opening this paragraph is unnecessary. My counter is this: I believe the “like” engaging because it’s a catalyzing word, a word which encourages followup, which is useful for going on with an essay, which in this instance is more aptly deemed Messay, which is awkward because I consider these sentences me being rather calmly me, almost lucid, almost transparent, almost plain.

Now, it’s time for a “from Blank to [Mark]” to Remark moment. I know I’ve just been pretentious, and more on-point have been being pretentious all along. I’m a fan of pretentious, or at-least a fan of pretentious writing, at-least a fan of pretentious poetry. Yes, pretentious poetry is what I mean. I arrive at value in pretentiousness. For example, the mindmotion Troping engages me. I love the notion substitution serves as an engine, that any dynamic could stand-in, pinchhit, for any other. One reason for this love is this: if dynamics can cross with each other, can engage and re-engage with a diverse field, then ownership becomes less possible. Qualification is necessary. I should have written ownership, in a world viewed as endlessly troping, may become more readily responsibly imagined.

Honestly, and why I’d start such a way, and threaten to diminish totally any credibility for what precedes this bit of this Messaying, is up for grabs and every grasping will somehow point to insensible, I’m not sure what trope means. I remember a friend saying it’s when one thin stands in for another, which seems consonant with substitution, with interchange. But what if he’s not telling any than sadly truncated tail? The term trope, to me, seems always already like a figuration, impossible to pinpoint semantically, but very possible to use in meaningful manners. I could be stupidly celebrating ignorance, or minding my own mind too scrupulously and glossing over the external world as if most significance doesn’t exist there.

My defense, and I’m not sure why I always have to have a defense, I guess it’s a property of prose, is that I’m pretty sure I’m not alone when I state that so much of what, of how, a person knows is based on a network of impressions that are not necessarily retrievable. Am I alone in stating that I usually don’t verify, with some authoritative source, a given concept I’m musing? If I am not, if indeed it is common for knowing to be filtered through memories, glimpses, bursts, and rarely for it to be ordered by complete research, maximal awareness of a Discourse, a mind incapable of perception as other than authoritative accuracy, acuity an impartial spectator can articulate, then there may be relevance to meditating this state. If one attends to the how of knowing, some sense may be intensified as to the what of it.

I understand the necessity of the What-State, but favor How. What strikes me as too much noun. How strikes me as being so much verb. How strikes me as being. Verbs, for me, already connote nouns. Pure action, pure doing, pure capability of doing, the very root of motion, is energy. Energy is a noun. But it’s a body, a matrix of bodies, acting.

Blue is a trope, blue is as a trope, a displacement, but even in mutation blue, maintaining blue, indicating blue is contingent and historically coherent. I am interested in the notion of there being a state of trope, of world as substitutions. The notion trope seems so mobile, so motile, so adequate a concept for knowing within contingency. My prose is awkward and probably pretentious. The words on this page displace my intention. I am not blue about it. There’s no reason, I agree, love can’t be blue, trope can’t be blue, and if one agrees these words display trope and love and blueness despite fully defensible identifying of clinamens then, well, I don’t know how to go on with the subject, or not without subjecting it to tweaking, which is maybe like peeking at a no-no-yes-yes fact, contingent, of life. Blue is big and my silly I, my occludingly self-deprecatory pose, does a go-go grandiose. I am so caught up in believing my prose is cruddy. But I don’t hone it endlessly as with poetry. I wish my natural style would be neutral, transparent, not transparent like a negligee smoking a joint and petting a pony at 34th and Broadway in Manhattan, or elsewhere if the image makes more sense cast at that location’s homonym.


Is and is as, for me, well duh for me, but it’s important to state limits, or is it just sheer redundant when one’s writing in a mode which could easily be termed speculative, embody the difference between knowing, declaring knowledge, and declaring knowledge contingent, subject to the eruptive energies of the present moment.

I wish more people would read this blog. It makes sense few do; not many are likely to have much love for quasi-lyric quasi argumentative musings, mumblings, meows, pleas, cryings out, callings, and this list must stop: it has become back-patting.

What does my fascination with trope signal? Is this my attempt at theorizing the essential, or is the concept that there’s the essential another trope, and substituting for what, and is substituting standing in or is standing in already oriented around an axis, an edifice, incommensurate contingency.

Just very quickly looked at Google-Images of Odilon Redon paintings: mmmmm, deliciousness for the--well, my at-least--eyes!

Where You Are There’s My Name

For John Ashbery

Patrons were invited

To guess the time:
The clock was always wrong,
Even when in the split
Of the most exact telling, or as
Precise as time gets in this precinct, policy’s
Fullest fruiting  and envied
By  the trashcan full of flame.

Time was mostly underground,

Slips and splutters girt
By everything but earth.  This took
No getting used to: nobody knew!
No-one clothed their torsos; dew
Gave everyone a full suit of buttons
Which the philanthropists fed to the birds
Like an anorexic man with a muffin.

A little later that dawn,

Like a crocus, time shot through
His path; the nearby fire
Turned the pistils blue, the petals
Pink, and every bench vanished
As if to say there should be no
Place from which to view
Speed and its bones, rags, their cleansing stones.

 

 

Little note:

I don't really give a shit about aesthetic offense, but I majorly care if I ethically offend; I really don't like the idea of hurting readers/viewers; I'm always, I guess, wondering what constitutes hurts someone versus challenges someone.  Challenging, stimulating, exciting someone--that's goodgood; making someone feel terrible, hurt, degraded, dismissed, well, I'd really rather not.  Another way of phrasing could be this: when is art more a crime than an aesthetic energy; when is it harrassment; when is it, quite literally, indecent; when is it better off not being written or displayed; when is it worth not being explored, pondered?  When is the real, or the forgery of realness, so much more wrong than right?  I'd love to edit an anthology where writers detail ideas/concepts that they would not feel ok pursuing, like probably ever; it's utterly commonplace for writers to state limits should be ignored, or fought against, but I'd be very surprised if even radical writers don't have no-no zones; I'd love to find out what those zones are!  Honestly I don't see how this anthology cld even exist, as it'd involve contributors writing notes regarding what they believe should not be written, and if the words are gonna get gnarly, then the wrong, the illegal, the criminal, would get traced, and I'm pretty sure I don't even want a mere trace: too much space for holding back.   Too, I imagine this sorta anthology wld decapitate the perhaps precious engine of feeling one is a badass and not, in the most macro-sense, far more timid than current discourses suggest.

Maybe this is an answer to the unasked question: Adam, do you view your poems as radical?  My answer is--NO!

I guess I don't even mean radical, as that, discursively, does exist, and it is, in some circles, sanctioned, or will be soon enough.