scrypt
Head-Fi's Sybil
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2002
- Posts
- 2,382
- Likes
- 125
For days -- if not frustration’s equivalent of decades -- I’ve tried vainly to crack my laptop to check my email accounts, only to be spathioned[size=xx-small](1)[/size] to death by editorial work on my PC (read: the textual equivalent of spittoon tidying). Imagine my glee when I noticed Jude had emailed me a link to this appreciative thread about my penchant for spewing doggerel. Neater than gleet!, I whirred to the other verbal grunts.
Neurological deadlines resembling those in Flowers for Algernon dictate I’m less likely to return here as a regular than I am to forge marimba keys out of my in-laws’ gonads. Still, I feel compelled to swear fealty to my Texting Brother and erstwhile kneepad pal, Jude Mansilla. Though his massive physical presence and espionage-ready wardrobe shriek that his one-liners have put many a boisterous crank in his place -- and, trust me, Otto, they have -- Mr. Mansilla is still just a biped, a Homo Erectus Dysfunctionary, an everyfoont, if you will. He’s a formidable admin who has ejected legions of trolls with his bare alphanucleic keys but retains the earthiness to savor fine ponchos and the integrity never to sell a single Head-fi alumnus downriver, no matter how porous. Each day, he jets to some Alps-climbing tuff-off and texts you from the peak (the signal plays hell with his send key), only to appear at your unborn cousin’s bris just when you thought people’s RSVPs were FOADs. O, he’s a man who tears a new one for plucked scufflers, then buys £5,000 iridium-cupped mufflers, then he bans you and un-tans you, but promotes you just when other drips swift-boat you. Jude’s the man who jingle-dongles. Burma Shave.
And now for tonight’s most terrifying topic: Mixed-Economy Nudists of the Byzantine Empire.
Those of you who, like me, possess quaint vocabularies and walk with a syncopated limp that betrays the tooling of your artificial leg muskets must be all too aware of your status as involuntary gunslingers. Though you wish you could comport yourselves differently, your style provokes others to label you arsenal’d exhibitionists. Every would-be John Selman in the Worldwide Saloon comes a-saunterin’ down your scroll-bar to challenge you to an insult duel, as if that’s how you liked to spend your Sundays: belittling strangers you’d prefer to support on principle. Unless your idea of a good time is stomping the corneas out of Keane paintings, it robs you of your innocence to defenestrate the belligerent repeatedly, and all because your choice is either to defend your pants or mutilate your own voice. Those become your choices: cruelty or conformity.
Eventually, all gunslingers grow tired. It happens faster when every shootout feels the same.
Not so long ago -- scratch that -- last century, I returned to Head-fi for a look-leer and was amazed to discover that a member I’d considered a friend -- someone whose birthday I’d toasted nearly every year with a poem for the oak-cajun -- initiated a thread accusing me of linguistic dishonesty. I returned later to read what other members said in response, but said thread had been deleted.
The irony: His evidence of my dishonesty was that I had communicated with him occasionally in straightforward language, therefore, my usual ornate style was a lie. The details of my crime: I had approached him in my natural joking manner without any thought of being misunderstood -- we’re friends, I reasoned. When he became miffed because I’d disparaged one of John Carpenter’s films, I replied with simple diction and short declarative sentences. Writing that way out of pure consternation felt unnatural to me. It was like trying to walk in pronghorn thimbles instead of wingtips.
In classical rhetoric, as well as standard usage, there are levels of language deemed appropriate for different kinds of communication. That characteristic switching of modes becomes more pronounced over time -- especially in our own, when polystyle has become so prevalent that it’s used in ads in Reader’s Digest as well as ballet, comic strips and Tarantino flicks (echt, etc.). (Of course, I thought I myself had coined the term until, reading a bio of composer Alfred Schnittke, I learned he’d used it two decades before to describe his technique. “I believe the expression you’re looking for, Sweet Echolalia, is oops.”)
Specifically, levels of language often correspond to one’s sense of danger. African-American writers like Ishmael Reed (and, famously, comedian Dave Chapelle) have said that “all” African-Americans are bilingual, which means that, in I.R. & D.C.'s view, black Americans learn the formal (arbitrarily “white”) level of speech as well as continually reinvented colloquial speech (arbitrarily “black”) (and can be “trilingual” in the sense that a third level is reserved for private conversation). Surprising juxtapositions of the two (or three, or twelve) can add contrast, depth, texture to a gifted writer’s style. Yet few caucasoids would criticize a black person for speaking one way to a cop and another to a great uncle, nor should they: Dissimilar situations require tailored methods.
The trick is to learn to negotiate levels of language without losing your place: To express your personality and interact with others while remaining true to your own voice. For certain writers, individuality comes from a polyphony of voices: from the use of bold and idiosyncratic mimicry.
Interviewer: How many voices and styles do you incorporate into your writing?
John Ashbery [Pulitzer-winning poet]: As many as I can manage.
* * * * *
My exchange with the member who denounced me was typical of my later experiences on Head-fi: Increasingly, I found myself adopting faceless language because my personal style seemed to lead to quicksand standoffs. Certain newer members seemed to take my jauntiness as a poisonal insult, imagining that large words implied an even larger ego, or that I provoked confusion in an effort to make everyone else feel teensy. They never understood how innocent my style really is. Simply bleated, it feels exhilarating to find the right word, the right rhythm, for expressing something intrinsic to one’s imagination. Writing is more than communication -- it’s a way of altering time’s velocity, so that you can linger on the cusp of sunrise long past supper; of rising into a state of conscious thought so forceful that you’re flung and hung, cortex-first, into the fixed ionosphere. Somehow, through ritual and discipline -- through regular hours, particularities of diction and the avoidance of clichés -- you reach a level of perception that makes the rest of waking life feel like slumbering stumbling. Perhaps pilots feel that, too, after learning to relax into flight.
But that only makes the inevitability of landing more irksome.
The need to defend myself constantly began to corrode my personal style. I was being conditioned not to write in my normal voice in order to avoid repercussions, which would have resulted in my habituating stylistic limitations that would leave me feeling as smoked as a chinchilla trapped in an ogre’s BIC. I’d already experienced that in the music tent, having been paid to imitate famous keyb’ists by producers who should have been cultivating my personal style if only out of selfishness (style that can’t be found elsewhere = product that can only be bought from you). Their repeated imperatives to imitate songs on the radio threatened the evolution of my playing and composing, which is why I chose to be an editor instead: To allow my personal efforts to remain unthumbed.
Which brings me to my abandoned palships here on Head-fi.
What you want from a forum of like-minded hobbyists is the chance to relax and riff in an atmosphere of gear-fetishizing camaraderie. You have enough petty quarrels at work, with your Main Clench at home and sinister mohels brandishing Mogen Clamps in the halls of darkened synagogues. What you need is to relax in the intellectual equivalent of a sauna: A place where you can extemporize nakedly without having to be worried about dressing just so. The steam of anonymity frees you as surely as the forum’s misted friendships sustain you.
Unfortunately, the larger a forum grows, the more difficult it becomes to maintain camaraderie. Swelling crowds come to resemble gatherings in the street: you hope you’ll slip past them unnoticed lest some walking migraine spit at your taste in spats. You endeavor to remain alert to herds of hurt. (Burma Shave.)
A small group of hobbyists often consists of mutually supportive geeks, whereas a tumescent crowd becomes increasingly adverse to the happiness of its individual members. With mutual neglect comes bitterness: The first group become friends, the second, a collective predator.
People who don’t know you, Buster, but are poised to confront you can turn hostile, edging you toward silence as they continue to shout, whereas an oval of friends who enjoy your writing often encourage you to be productive. They’re far less likely to say damaging things, let alone, drain you in bitter tussles.
Ultimately, you realize it’s more problematic to try to effuse globs of prose all over, and befriend startled members of, a popular user’s forum than it is to write seriously for publications and socialize trivially in person. Which is only to be presumed, of course: To attempt to maintain low numbers on a forum like Head-fi would be to deprive it of exposure and revenue and, therefore, continued existence. That’s why responses at Head-fi can be indifferent or unwelcoming despite the evident good will of its aforeyodeled creator, mods and fetching long-term members: To try to limit membership volume on a famous internet board is to geld the medium in the name of sustaining pleasure.
Excessive moderation can be as suffocating as the hostility of resentful users. Too often, restricted forums become the lair of some once-reasonable admin who degenerates into a scalding shrieking control freak. Todd Harbour, for example, on the otherwise useful Mobius Forums: One never reads about the brilliant critics and film industry people whom Harbour banned periodically because he got so incensed by free will that he followed them to other forums. Why, you coo? Because, when they grumbled about him publicly, he threatened the mods of the newly migrated sites until any and all uncomplimentary threads were taken down. Googled results about his and his forum’s names changed as rapidly as the value of my wombat’s 401k.
No, I never participated in those virtual stonings, but I did understand the anger that banished members felt. It’s agonizing to be excluded from conversations with brilliant critics like Tim Lucas on the strength of some cryptic and arbitrary rule that doesn’t seem to exist on any other forum -- a rule that Harbour would only offer, when forced, because the offending party had won an argument with him in public and he didn’t want them to continue to upstage him.
He wasn’t like that when he started his forum years ago, when gleeful exclusion wasn’t the object.
Restricted membership can lead to ill feelings as easily as open membership allows them. My only solution to the fallout so far has been to hide in obsolete or unpopular forums, maintaining temporary friendships under threat of imminent dwindling.
But my sojourn on other sites shouldn’t imply I’m indifferent to my friends on this site (how do I list thee? Let me count the names): kwkarth, Wmcmanus, immtbiker, Genetic, stuartr, Vertigo-1, chadbang, rickcr42, mbriant, Samgotit, The Monkey, Dusty Chalk, philodox, Orpheus, violante, plainsong, saint.panda, KR, subfocus, Sean H, Bob ♫, Robert Linthicum, Mr. PD, daycart1, Bunnyears (who was so familiar with the intricacies of pathologies and their treatment that I suspected she was a closet Ph.D), fractus2, titaniumx3 and so many others too numerous (and luminous) to enumerate.
Long ago, members used to send me headphones to fondle. Their motive? To spread unbridled gear bliss. Others who transacted with me enclosed extras and surprises that suggested the exchange wasn’t mercenary but rather esoteric. Like the dandy in Huysman’s A Rebours, my Brethren in the Sect only wanted money so that they could initiate new gradations of aural exploration, and subsequently would pass their finds to the next initiate with this central thesis in mound: To trade slices of sonic manna -- that is the object of this object.
I haven’t forgotten their magnanimity and commitment. Those qualities are more rare now than then.
* * * *
Unfortunately, duty calls, and by duty, I mean the biological kind. (Unlike C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, my incontinent memoir will be titled Annoyed by Nature.) Allow me to close this written robe by plunging digit-foist into my supposed dishonesty. I’ll be shifting stylistic gears for the remainder of this savory manipesto.
* * * *
Often, when I write, part of the momentum that keeps me staining pages is the reluctance to say goodbye: To stop prematurely is a petit mort without pleasure. The convergence of endings in life, too, signals the urgency to speak: two consecutive girlfriends missing, parents and siblings dead or convalescent, the maternal family specter of pogroms (I hate the specific term Holocaust, which suggests religious sacrifice by fire) possessing its remaining members, so that every jest is elegiac; early writer friends who suicided (Edward McGranahan, R.I.P.) or allowed ulterior powers biological access to their spans, as if refusing treatment were a stage in a natural cycle (Kathy A.) -- and the sense, with which I was born, of century displacement -- all compel the lengthening of epistles, scrolling posts, and tangential narratives. Sayonara equals cyanide.
Reluctance reappears in the shape of clutter, too: When people send me physical manuscripts, it takes me years to purge the stacks because I lack the heart to relegate friends and young writers to the trash. Nor am I anxious to consign this very forum to the dung heap, though the gravity pendulum slows to a still cartoon teardrop. It seems silly to feel that way about you, Head-fi, yet I do.
Learning of his numbered days, Maurice Ravel wept and exclaimed, “But I have so much music left in me! I’ve written nothing -- nothing at all!” And while I feel I’ve whipped off slightly more than nothing, and my demise is not as imminent as the thud of M.R.’s falling elevator, still I feel the impress of eventual cessation. To write while I can, and say crucial things to intimates, present readers and later strangers (Whitman and I have that one -- one! -- quality in common) -- before time rivels to a foont-clot in a wooden oblong, however fascinating to one’s inner Victorian, and flurries of metaphor ossify into landmark sculpture. To leave you, beauts, is to erase you, and I wish you to be indelible: to linger at least as long as the key in my back still turns. We have millennia to rest, mere decades, to petition our nose-wiping muses.
Ah, shut it, Scrypt. Your palaver’s as gaudy as your cuff-links. Kilroy was a kleptomaniac and I watched him steal your place. Real funny, Kilroy, but he wants his land title back. And he wants to pick up those audiophile knick-knacks on the artificial hearth. You know, the ones with the gilded miniature tubes and the latticework of embossed cable in the corner and the human hair and the rotating micro-lingams and whatnot. You, you’re just some outhouse cut-up who can’t possibly appreciate that kind of finesse. Aficionados at Head-fi, they know, and they no like. And they want it back, you goof.
Top of the morning, listeners! Need a vinyl pre in the shape of a jeweled brocade? Sorry, Apple, but Ray’s got an amp for that. Need a pearled cryogenic crescent that leers like a leprechaun and flickers in time to the jitter it prevents? Someone at Head-fi will confect it for you -- don’t forget to ask for the free monogrammed hearing aid and its velvet basset-hound-shaped carrying case.
Don’t you dare threaten Head-fi, Muffles! Don’t you realize they’re all a mish-mash of mesomorphic obsessives who bench-press actual rhinos? You’re a fool to enter the ring!
“Somehow, the magic of the pursuit hasn’t fizzled,” Otto reflected while studying his goblet of thermal mead. “And though a pessimist is never disappointed, an optimist is always conjuring. Jude is just such a genie. His focus is on that filament of green smoke -- just there! -- rising from Tinkerbelle’s tiny abandoned heel. The rest, Dear Bleeder, is what they call pop legend.”
OK, Mr. Betty -- maybe Jude, he is not your what-you-call pop-culture-type person. But me and my crapzhu, Chester Himes? We saw him go right up to the Lady Gaga promo booth in West Berlin. He demand special headphones like they was nothing to him. That's right, he did. And you know what? -- they give ’em to him, too. He walk away with a whole barco de pesca of the iridium cups. I wish you coulda been there, ’cause he was fearless. The other men, too, they say he was fearless.
[size=xx-small]
==============
(1) SUEGIOAL INSTETJMENTS IN GEEEK AND KOMAN TIMES [plenty sic], by John Stewart Milne and [according to Google Books] the numerically bling-medallioned Keith Gold Medalu8t.
[/size]
Neurological deadlines resembling those in Flowers for Algernon dictate I’m less likely to return here as a regular than I am to forge marimba keys out of my in-laws’ gonads. Still, I feel compelled to swear fealty to my Texting Brother and erstwhile kneepad pal, Jude Mansilla. Though his massive physical presence and espionage-ready wardrobe shriek that his one-liners have put many a boisterous crank in his place -- and, trust me, Otto, they have -- Mr. Mansilla is still just a biped, a Homo Erectus Dysfunctionary, an everyfoont, if you will. He’s a formidable admin who has ejected legions of trolls with his bare alphanucleic keys but retains the earthiness to savor fine ponchos and the integrity never to sell a single Head-fi alumnus downriver, no matter how porous. Each day, he jets to some Alps-climbing tuff-off and texts you from the peak (the signal plays hell with his send key), only to appear at your unborn cousin’s bris just when you thought people’s RSVPs were FOADs. O, he’s a man who tears a new one for plucked scufflers, then buys £5,000 iridium-cupped mufflers, then he bans you and un-tans you, but promotes you just when other drips swift-boat you. Jude’s the man who jingle-dongles. Burma Shave.
And now for tonight’s most terrifying topic: Mixed-Economy Nudists of the Byzantine Empire.
Those of you who, like me, possess quaint vocabularies and walk with a syncopated limp that betrays the tooling of your artificial leg muskets must be all too aware of your status as involuntary gunslingers. Though you wish you could comport yourselves differently, your style provokes others to label you arsenal’d exhibitionists. Every would-be John Selman in the Worldwide Saloon comes a-saunterin’ down your scroll-bar to challenge you to an insult duel, as if that’s how you liked to spend your Sundays: belittling strangers you’d prefer to support on principle. Unless your idea of a good time is stomping the corneas out of Keane paintings, it robs you of your innocence to defenestrate the belligerent repeatedly, and all because your choice is either to defend your pants or mutilate your own voice. Those become your choices: cruelty or conformity.
Eventually, all gunslingers grow tired. It happens faster when every shootout feels the same.
Not so long ago -- scratch that -- last century, I returned to Head-fi for a look-leer and was amazed to discover that a member I’d considered a friend -- someone whose birthday I’d toasted nearly every year with a poem for the oak-cajun -- initiated a thread accusing me of linguistic dishonesty. I returned later to read what other members said in response, but said thread had been deleted.
The irony: His evidence of my dishonesty was that I had communicated with him occasionally in straightforward language, therefore, my usual ornate style was a lie. The details of my crime: I had approached him in my natural joking manner without any thought of being misunderstood -- we’re friends, I reasoned. When he became miffed because I’d disparaged one of John Carpenter’s films, I replied with simple diction and short declarative sentences. Writing that way out of pure consternation felt unnatural to me. It was like trying to walk in pronghorn thimbles instead of wingtips.
In classical rhetoric, as well as standard usage, there are levels of language deemed appropriate for different kinds of communication. That characteristic switching of modes becomes more pronounced over time -- especially in our own, when polystyle has become so prevalent that it’s used in ads in Reader’s Digest as well as ballet, comic strips and Tarantino flicks (echt, etc.). (Of course, I thought I myself had coined the term until, reading a bio of composer Alfred Schnittke, I learned he’d used it two decades before to describe his technique. “I believe the expression you’re looking for, Sweet Echolalia, is oops.”)
Specifically, levels of language often correspond to one’s sense of danger. African-American writers like Ishmael Reed (and, famously, comedian Dave Chapelle) have said that “all” African-Americans are bilingual, which means that, in I.R. & D.C.'s view, black Americans learn the formal (arbitrarily “white”) level of speech as well as continually reinvented colloquial speech (arbitrarily “black”) (and can be “trilingual” in the sense that a third level is reserved for private conversation). Surprising juxtapositions of the two (or three, or twelve) can add contrast, depth, texture to a gifted writer’s style. Yet few caucasoids would criticize a black person for speaking one way to a cop and another to a great uncle, nor should they: Dissimilar situations require tailored methods.
The trick is to learn to negotiate levels of language without losing your place: To express your personality and interact with others while remaining true to your own voice. For certain writers, individuality comes from a polyphony of voices: from the use of bold and idiosyncratic mimicry.
Interviewer: How many voices and styles do you incorporate into your writing?
John Ashbery [Pulitzer-winning poet]: As many as I can manage.
* * * * *
My exchange with the member who denounced me was typical of my later experiences on Head-fi: Increasingly, I found myself adopting faceless language because my personal style seemed to lead to quicksand standoffs. Certain newer members seemed to take my jauntiness as a poisonal insult, imagining that large words implied an even larger ego, or that I provoked confusion in an effort to make everyone else feel teensy. They never understood how innocent my style really is. Simply bleated, it feels exhilarating to find the right word, the right rhythm, for expressing something intrinsic to one’s imagination. Writing is more than communication -- it’s a way of altering time’s velocity, so that you can linger on the cusp of sunrise long past supper; of rising into a state of conscious thought so forceful that you’re flung and hung, cortex-first, into the fixed ionosphere. Somehow, through ritual and discipline -- through regular hours, particularities of diction and the avoidance of clichés -- you reach a level of perception that makes the rest of waking life feel like slumbering stumbling. Perhaps pilots feel that, too, after learning to relax into flight.
But that only makes the inevitability of landing more irksome.
The need to defend myself constantly began to corrode my personal style. I was being conditioned not to write in my normal voice in order to avoid repercussions, which would have resulted in my habituating stylistic limitations that would leave me feeling as smoked as a chinchilla trapped in an ogre’s BIC. I’d already experienced that in the music tent, having been paid to imitate famous keyb’ists by producers who should have been cultivating my personal style if only out of selfishness (style that can’t be found elsewhere = product that can only be bought from you). Their repeated imperatives to imitate songs on the radio threatened the evolution of my playing and composing, which is why I chose to be an editor instead: To allow my personal efforts to remain unthumbed.
Which brings me to my abandoned palships here on Head-fi.
What you want from a forum of like-minded hobbyists is the chance to relax and riff in an atmosphere of gear-fetishizing camaraderie. You have enough petty quarrels at work, with your Main Clench at home and sinister mohels brandishing Mogen Clamps in the halls of darkened synagogues. What you need is to relax in the intellectual equivalent of a sauna: A place where you can extemporize nakedly without having to be worried about dressing just so. The steam of anonymity frees you as surely as the forum’s misted friendships sustain you.
Unfortunately, the larger a forum grows, the more difficult it becomes to maintain camaraderie. Swelling crowds come to resemble gatherings in the street: you hope you’ll slip past them unnoticed lest some walking migraine spit at your taste in spats. You endeavor to remain alert to herds of hurt. (Burma Shave.)
A small group of hobbyists often consists of mutually supportive geeks, whereas a tumescent crowd becomes increasingly adverse to the happiness of its individual members. With mutual neglect comes bitterness: The first group become friends, the second, a collective predator.
People who don’t know you, Buster, but are poised to confront you can turn hostile, edging you toward silence as they continue to shout, whereas an oval of friends who enjoy your writing often encourage you to be productive. They’re far less likely to say damaging things, let alone, drain you in bitter tussles.
Ultimately, you realize it’s more problematic to try to effuse globs of prose all over, and befriend startled members of, a popular user’s forum than it is to write seriously for publications and socialize trivially in person. Which is only to be presumed, of course: To attempt to maintain low numbers on a forum like Head-fi would be to deprive it of exposure and revenue and, therefore, continued existence. That’s why responses at Head-fi can be indifferent or unwelcoming despite the evident good will of its aforeyodeled creator, mods and fetching long-term members: To try to limit membership volume on a famous internet board is to geld the medium in the name of sustaining pleasure.
Excessive moderation can be as suffocating as the hostility of resentful users. Too often, restricted forums become the lair of some once-reasonable admin who degenerates into a scalding shrieking control freak. Todd Harbour, for example, on the otherwise useful Mobius Forums: One never reads about the brilliant critics and film industry people whom Harbour banned periodically because he got so incensed by free will that he followed them to other forums. Why, you coo? Because, when they grumbled about him publicly, he threatened the mods of the newly migrated sites until any and all uncomplimentary threads were taken down. Googled results about his and his forum’s names changed as rapidly as the value of my wombat’s 401k.
No, I never participated in those virtual stonings, but I did understand the anger that banished members felt. It’s agonizing to be excluded from conversations with brilliant critics like Tim Lucas on the strength of some cryptic and arbitrary rule that doesn’t seem to exist on any other forum -- a rule that Harbour would only offer, when forced, because the offending party had won an argument with him in public and he didn’t want them to continue to upstage him.
He wasn’t like that when he started his forum years ago, when gleeful exclusion wasn’t the object.
Restricted membership can lead to ill feelings as easily as open membership allows them. My only solution to the fallout so far has been to hide in obsolete or unpopular forums, maintaining temporary friendships under threat of imminent dwindling.
But my sojourn on other sites shouldn’t imply I’m indifferent to my friends on this site (how do I list thee? Let me count the names): kwkarth, Wmcmanus, immtbiker, Genetic, stuartr, Vertigo-1, chadbang, rickcr42, mbriant, Samgotit, The Monkey, Dusty Chalk, philodox, Orpheus, violante, plainsong, saint.panda, KR, subfocus, Sean H, Bob ♫, Robert Linthicum, Mr. PD, daycart1, Bunnyears (who was so familiar with the intricacies of pathologies and their treatment that I suspected she was a closet Ph.D), fractus2, titaniumx3 and so many others too numerous (and luminous) to enumerate.
Long ago, members used to send me headphones to fondle. Their motive? To spread unbridled gear bliss. Others who transacted with me enclosed extras and surprises that suggested the exchange wasn’t mercenary but rather esoteric. Like the dandy in Huysman’s A Rebours, my Brethren in the Sect only wanted money so that they could initiate new gradations of aural exploration, and subsequently would pass their finds to the next initiate with this central thesis in mound: To trade slices of sonic manna -- that is the object of this object.
I haven’t forgotten their magnanimity and commitment. Those qualities are more rare now than then.
* * * *
Unfortunately, duty calls, and by duty, I mean the biological kind. (Unlike C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, my incontinent memoir will be titled Annoyed by Nature.) Allow me to close this written robe by plunging digit-foist into my supposed dishonesty. I’ll be shifting stylistic gears for the remainder of this savory manipesto.
* * * *
Often, when I write, part of the momentum that keeps me staining pages is the reluctance to say goodbye: To stop prematurely is a petit mort without pleasure. The convergence of endings in life, too, signals the urgency to speak: two consecutive girlfriends missing, parents and siblings dead or convalescent, the maternal family specter of pogroms (I hate the specific term Holocaust, which suggests religious sacrifice by fire) possessing its remaining members, so that every jest is elegiac; early writer friends who suicided (Edward McGranahan, R.I.P.) or allowed ulterior powers biological access to their spans, as if refusing treatment were a stage in a natural cycle (Kathy A.) -- and the sense, with which I was born, of century displacement -- all compel the lengthening of epistles, scrolling posts, and tangential narratives. Sayonara equals cyanide.
Reluctance reappears in the shape of clutter, too: When people send me physical manuscripts, it takes me years to purge the stacks because I lack the heart to relegate friends and young writers to the trash. Nor am I anxious to consign this very forum to the dung heap, though the gravity pendulum slows to a still cartoon teardrop. It seems silly to feel that way about you, Head-fi, yet I do.
Learning of his numbered days, Maurice Ravel wept and exclaimed, “But I have so much music left in me! I’ve written nothing -- nothing at all!” And while I feel I’ve whipped off slightly more than nothing, and my demise is not as imminent as the thud of M.R.’s falling elevator, still I feel the impress of eventual cessation. To write while I can, and say crucial things to intimates, present readers and later strangers (Whitman and I have that one -- one! -- quality in common) -- before time rivels to a foont-clot in a wooden oblong, however fascinating to one’s inner Victorian, and flurries of metaphor ossify into landmark sculpture. To leave you, beauts, is to erase you, and I wish you to be indelible: to linger at least as long as the key in my back still turns. We have millennia to rest, mere decades, to petition our nose-wiping muses.
Ah, shut it, Scrypt. Your palaver’s as gaudy as your cuff-links. Kilroy was a kleptomaniac and I watched him steal your place. Real funny, Kilroy, but he wants his land title back. And he wants to pick up those audiophile knick-knacks on the artificial hearth. You know, the ones with the gilded miniature tubes and the latticework of embossed cable in the corner and the human hair and the rotating micro-lingams and whatnot. You, you’re just some outhouse cut-up who can’t possibly appreciate that kind of finesse. Aficionados at Head-fi, they know, and they no like. And they want it back, you goof.
Top of the morning, listeners! Need a vinyl pre in the shape of a jeweled brocade? Sorry, Apple, but Ray’s got an amp for that. Need a pearled cryogenic crescent that leers like a leprechaun and flickers in time to the jitter it prevents? Someone at Head-fi will confect it for you -- don’t forget to ask for the free monogrammed hearing aid and its velvet basset-hound-shaped carrying case.
Don’t you dare threaten Head-fi, Muffles! Don’t you realize they’re all a mish-mash of mesomorphic obsessives who bench-press actual rhinos? You’re a fool to enter the ring!
“Somehow, the magic of the pursuit hasn’t fizzled,” Otto reflected while studying his goblet of thermal mead. “And though a pessimist is never disappointed, an optimist is always conjuring. Jude is just such a genie. His focus is on that filament of green smoke -- just there! -- rising from Tinkerbelle’s tiny abandoned heel. The rest, Dear Bleeder, is what they call pop legend.”
OK, Mr. Betty -- maybe Jude, he is not your what-you-call pop-culture-type person. But me and my crapzhu, Chester Himes? We saw him go right up to the Lady Gaga promo booth in West Berlin. He demand special headphones like they was nothing to him. That's right, he did. And you know what? -- they give ’em to him, too. He walk away with a whole barco de pesca of the iridium cups. I wish you coulda been there, ’cause he was fearless. The other men, too, they say he was fearless.
[size=xx-small]
==============
(1) SUEGIOAL INSTETJMENTS IN GEEEK AND KOMAN TIMES [plenty sic], by John Stewart Milne and [according to Google Books] the numerically bling-medallioned Keith Gold Medalu8t.
[/size]
