Penthouse Letters Mad Libs.

I mentioned on here awhile ago that I was reading a weird ass little book called “Doggy Bag” by a weird ass man named Ronald Sukenick. Well I finished that awhile ago, but it has stayed on my mind. It is not a book for everyone. I would even be hesitant to recommend it to people who like weird ass books by weird ass little men, but I’m comfortable enough to say that I enjoyed it (or, more honestly, I occasionally really enjoyed it, but generally I appreciated it as a sort of post-modern exercise. When I say “book” I am saying that it was an artifact with a front cover and a back cover and some pages in between and on those pages was printed some text which had originally been written by a man named Ronald Sukenick. The thing wasn’t a novel and it wasn’t a collection of short stories and it wasn’t essays or poetry or travelogues. It was all just a whole bunch of writing. It was occasionally SUPER PRETENTIOUS and occasionally it was boring as all fuck, and occasionally it was needlessly confusing, and occasionally it was just a waste of time. However, when it wasn’t those things, it was great. It is the kind of “book” that starts with what seems like the travel thoughts of the author but then it becomes too weird to be real and then later somehow morphs into this allegorical detective story about “vampires” trying to cure the disease of “zombie-ism”, but really that is about capitalism and how consumerism breeds thoughtless ness (the pun-y wordplay in this section is really lame). Then there was a whole middle section that seemed to be a story that moved between different tellers randomly. One of the latter sections was this ... (I’m choosing my words carefully here) … well-crafted section that is complicated to explain. Essentially it is about this young couple that has a lot of sex and then starts getting into some kinkier stuff (strangers on airplanes, group stuff at fancy tropical resorts, you know the usual) only the writing itself is fragmented. Like, the sentences themselves are fragments. They are not complete. It functions sort of like a dirty, sexy fill-in-the-blank, except once you get the hang of it and you start to think, “Oh, cool, this is just sort of like a Penthouse Letters Mad Libs ...” then some very weird and not-at-all-cool stuff starts to happen. Only it still has all of these broken spots and gaps, so you (the reader) become complicit in this really weird way, with the things that are “happening”. It was a strange and intense read and I don’t think anything I’ve ever read has been that dirty (and occasionally revolting) while simultaneously describing so little. The words that actually appear on the page are not remarkable or dirty at all. They wouldn’t even push a movie into PG-13 territory. All that being said, I’m not sure if that is just a neat trick, or if there is a deeply meaningful lesson there about how our brains construct stories. This is the basic premise behind all of the really good horror movies, right? Show the monster as little as possible, let the audience fill the dark with whatever frightens them. I will say that the “book” has made me think about it quite a lot. I guess that is a good thing. If you ever come across it - maybe in your friendly neighborhood independent bookstore - you should pick it up and hold it in your hand and remember that it is the book I told you about. I am not comfortable recommending that you read it. Let’s be clear about that; you’d can’t come back to me and be all like, “Why did you make me make my brain go through that?!”...

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The Art of Daily Life.

Right now I am reading a strange little collection of what can only generously be described as “stories”. The collection is called Degenerative Prose and it takes its cues from the “Avant-Pop” movement which apparently was a thing back when it looked like the rise of the internet was going to make the world into a peace-loving intellectual commune of anarcho-hippie. Little did they know back then that the internet was really just going to be the most effective means of distributing cat videos and porn that mankind has ever devised.  

At this moment I am reading something like an “essay” by a woman calling herself “Eurudice” and I just came to this passage which I really enjoy:

There is no greater art than the art of daily life. The talent for living well is the most substantial; so I try to fashion my life as I would create a text, driven by sheer desire and imagination, with no regard to rules, limits or fears, feasting on this bottomless world.

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Plethora.

In the post below I tell you I’m reading a weird book by a guy named Ronald Sukenick and how he is good at writing stuff with his words. This is what he says about the strange multiplicity of things that we call ‘love’:

But I couldn’t admit any of this was love, maybe partly because, as I know now, it wasn’t what we call love. The overload we put on that word just indicates the poverty of our vocabulary.

I have always said there needs to be a plethora of words to replace the English word ‘love’. Some of them should be light and silly and taste like white wine on a summer afternoon, and others need to be thick and heavy and dark and peppery like a Tempranillo in the back of a cafe in the evening, and still others need to be so completely dangerous and radioactive that we keep them under safety glass.

This Sukenick dude really gets me, you know?

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Sukenick Knows.

So I needed something read this morning when I got to campus about 7:30 and so I did as I do and I wandered into the fun part of the library and quite at random I plucked from a shelf the very small novel “Doggy Bag” by Ronald Sukenick (it is maybe six inches tall and four inches wide and less than a half an inch thick, so really I grabbed it because I liked that it would fit in my back pocket) and it is a strange and fascinating little book and about 25 pages in I found this passage about the life of grad students. I think it is fun because it describes my life, but also -- I would imagine -- the life of anyone hunting an advanced degree. Anyway, if you ever wonder why I’m so moody, this is why:

But let me say something first about the life of a graduate student. Suspended as it is between the student world of the undergraduates and the workaday quotidian, and above all, between the perfection of the written word and the abjection of the rotten world, it lacks what you might call ballast. Without friction with the ordinary contingencies and tolerating a high level of anxiety aggravated by too much work and too little pay, it tends to exaggerated swing of mood.

This Sukenick guy knows his shit. Please be prepared for me to spout off more of him.

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