Madonna

18) Satanic Ritual Performed at The NFL Half Time Show

I read stuff like this and am disappointed by how ordinary and free of conspiracy and magick my life is. I think it would be better to be paranoid and sort of crazy.

I know some people approach this sort of thing and think: "Oh, well, if you really think about the person who wrote this, you have to sort of feel sad. There's so much fear in this. There's so much loneliness in seeing monsters in every closet and under every bed."

But this is the thing about the internet: these people have found each other. They are all out there, and they are all finding each other. And though once these people—alone in their fear—used to suffer alone and disappear into themselves and cut themselves off from community, they don't do that so much now.

They meet now. (On the internet.) They gather now. (On the internet.) They commiserate now. (On the internet.)

Spend time watching Christian/Alien/New World Order conspiracy theory videos on Youtube, and you discover that they all have a deeply hopeful tone to them. These people are excited. They are ready. They expect to live through the coming apocalypse. They dig it. They dig each other.

They get to be characters in an action movie.

Which is, frankly, why I think creative people—choreographers and costume designers—are there, behind the scenes, doing their best to feed into our need things like "Satanic Ritual Super Bowl Halftime Shows."

I think it IS all intentional. I think that WAS staged to appear like a Satanic ritual. Because someone in Madonna's camp really wanted to give people something to support their paranoia, and in doing so, support their hope.

Bless them.

***

19) NOTHING: A Portrait of Insomnia by Blake Butler

I've mostly just been reading Blake's book for the last couple of weeks. And I haven't been sleeping. On HTML Giant, Impossible Mike wrote a short piece called "I Like Hypnotism A Lot" (20).

In it, he asked if anyone had been hypnotized. I was reading sections of Blake's book, which is full of repetitious sentence structures, and those pairings of words that are unfamiliar and unpackable and sort of beautiful when you spend time with them. And long, long chaining meditations of sentences and paragraphs. And all this streaming consciousness.

And it's hypnotic. And it's a walkthrough to his sleeptime, up-all-night thoughts.

And I was reading the book, and sometimes reading it in bed, and then going to bed and trying to sleep.

And I really do believe that living in the space of a book is giving away one's own thought process to someone else's. A brain is wired using language. Strong voices can rewire.

Blake's voice rewired my thinking. And so, in bed, I could feel the places where, say, my leg touched the bed, and the skin felt more alive in those places. The sense of touch felt stronger in those places. Too strong. Too alive.

I couldn't stop thinking about those places on my legs. (I am a side sleeper. I am also a three-point sleeper. Shoulder, hip, and the inside of whatever knee happens to be on top. So, right shoulder, right hip, inside of left knee; or left shoulder, left hip, inside of right knee.) And then I couldn't sleep.

Hypnosis.

***

21) Slow Writing? by Gabriel Blackwell

It's Gabe's birthday! Happy birthday, Gabe.

***

22 - 24) About half of five novels that were submissions to a Nanowrimo contest. A couple were very good. I'll only count it as two.

***

UPDATE

25) DC's: Gig #14: Les Légions Noires

Dennis Cooper's daily roundups of whatever happen to be on his mind are always worth the time it takes to pore through them. This, for obvious reasons, is my favorite recent one.

Welcome to 2012

I was thinking maybe this year I'd use the blog as a reading journal. But not just a reading journal wherein (or, maybe in this case it's "whereon," because things are in a bound journal, but on a website, right?) I mention all the things I read. Or maybe just all the really notable things I read?

Let's try this.

***

1. "Don't believe in writers block, but I do believe in analysis paralysis" by Reynard Seifert

I'd really like to read the book Reynard talks about here. Sounds fantastic.

***

2. "Necropolis Now" by Paul Constant

This is, so far, my favorite wrap-up of the weird, distressing, comic/tragic field of Republican candidates fighting to run against Obama in the 2012 election. Paul's a very funny writer and an astute political observer.

***

3. The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper

This was great. Period was my favorite Dennis Cooper novel. Pretty sure The Marbled Swarm is now my favorite. Here are a couple of notes on aspects of the book.

NARRATOR: The glib charm of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley speaking like an overconfident Tristram Shandy. (Marbled page, marbled swarm?) Ripley tells readers his story because he knows there will be no consequences. Who the heck are we, anyway? To Ripley, the fictive world is real life, and the reader/audience is the imagined thing. So he can say what he wants. And yet, he feels the need to charm, to win his imaginary audience over. To win himself over? To tell his story to us (himself) in such a way that he convinces himself all is right and well and proper?

Shandy presents his evidence of the injustice of his life. But Shandy is not able to focus. Shandy builds, but he is an architect given to adding unnecessary reinforcements. Shandy says he was doomed from the beginning, wants to tell us all about the terrible injustices of his life, but he never seems to get to his life. He's easily distracted.

The Marbled Swarm's narrator is caught in the labyrinth of his own language. Enamored by a labyrinth of language built originally by his father. Trapped in a labyrinth of language built by his father. (Daedalus, Icarus? A bull-cocked driver named Azmir?) But he talks his way deeper and deeper into it, instead of out.

SETTING: On HTML Giant, I put up a quick, flip snippet: Setting is not character. Stop saying that. Blake Butler countered well. In his counter: "the tunnels & houses in the Marbled Swarm is a character".

Having read TMS now, though, I might respond: No. The labyrinthine setting is not the character here. The "maze" of them is only a maze because the character has a language that makes mazes out of everything. Out of sex, for example: "As I've mentioned, having sex is always new to me," he says late (very late) in the book. All sexual experiences, a new unexpected corridor. A sudden dead-end. A turn to a long, strange, unfamiliar, dizzyingly out-of-orientation hallway. The houses. The tunnels. The assholes. The mouths. The secret passages. They're all active and disorienting because the narrator only has access to his language, his "marbled swarm," to discuss them. And to think about them, too.

In his pre-language brain, the whole thing might make as much sense as: "This is meat. It may be human meat. It may be cow meat. It nourishes. I will eat it." (The book's cannibalism as the narrator's escape from the "marbled swarm"? Even though the cannibalism is also a result of the father's influence on the son? Doing double duty?)

PLOT: Read it. I'm not telling you anything about it beyond what I've revealed discussing the narrator and the setting.

A fine interview with Dennis by Mike Meginnis
A fine review by Ken Baumann