His robotic hypnotism to the spoken word’s expression is like a moaning awkward tone that depicts like nothing else the impossibility of our expression. His spoken commas, periods, pauses and literal pauses have the power of an incantation and I am in fascination of his channeling. This is seeing the muse spoken. I aw. Aw. Aw man, its dropping me. Look at this. This is it. The one. Hemingway is a curse. Smite me. Curse me. Incant me. Voodoo drums blood in my eyes. Rip maw rip hit me up. Dedication. Dedication.
Tapping in
Tap me in
Concentration. Agitation. Contemplation.
Production, they’ve stolen production. Productivity of pain. Pain as muse and unspoken unspeakables the rapturous destruction listen to the incantation this is the only productivity and its pure its pure see this is the painful curse. It’s the Hemingway curse. Let me die but I must live and this is life in death and death in life. I’m a two-way spectre and the pain is dissonant and alternate ringing round and in to out. They’ve stolen my productivity. They’ve made it theirs. Its something I owe it to somebody else it’s a compensation for our original sin it’s the debt owed as a member of this social contract we’re partakers and now there is distance. There’s always distance.
You haven’t stopped running; and, whatever distance you think you have put between you and you, you still leave behind new statues of salt.
- Andre Breton
French translation dubbed over the original sound of Hemingways’ Spanish.
Those Kafka ghosts are inevitable but they’re nothing but the ghosts of distance. Distance is the most devilish thing I’ve ever encountered, and scares me wide-eyed awake quite often. The distance between you and your audience, you and your friends, you and your lover even in an embrace, you and your mother, you and life, you and yourself, theres always distance and its terrifying but irrefutable, indestructable. These are the ghosts. They reveal themselves in our attempts to reconcile it but thats no argument against it and clearly Kafka never meant it as anything like that for he still wrote a few times a day, Milenas letters coming in bouts of twos and threes, though likely not quite as prodigious as his, though we’ll never know, but still the input and output in some kind of dialogical race that he must have known felt damn nice. Even ghosts have rhythm
Asleep by the Smiths Vapour Trail by Ride Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum Dear Prudence by the Beatles Gypsy by Suzanne Vega Nights in White Satin by the Mood Blues Daydream by Smashing Pumpkins Dusk by Genesis (before Phil Collins was even in the band!) MLK by U2 Blackbird by the Beatles Landslide by Fleetwood Mac Asleep by the Smiths (again!)
Also featured:
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana Another Brick in the Wall Pt. II by Pink Floyd Something by The Beatles School’s Out by Alice Cooper Autumn Leaves by Nat King Cole Broken Wings by Mr. Mister
In the novel, Charlie’s teacher, Bill, assigns him various books to read. Charlie describes them all as his favorites:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald A Separate Peace by John Knowles The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger On the Road by Jack Kerouac Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs Walden by Henry David Thoreau Hamlet by William Shakespeare The Stranger by Albert Camus The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The book also references a book of poems by E. E. Cummings and The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts
The young stastician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. “Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation, “concentration,” “reciprocal induction” – all Pavlovian brain-mechanics – assumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one – the probabilities.
