Rolling Rivers, Turning Planets

Time, like an every rolling stream, bears all its sons away. Healing all wounds and wounding all heels, it buries heroes in oblivion and restores the forgotten to their rightful honor. The ancients noted this process and called truth the daughter of time. Should the fancy strike you on a rainy afternoon, you may open the pages of a history book to watch historians chase time’s daughter through the ages. We all bring different equipment on this venture—some carry a guidebook (perhaps the Holy Bible, perhaps the Communist Manifesto, perhaps Virginia Woolf), some march with a patriotic flag upon a stick, some lug a heavy case of scientific instruments with which to quantify humanity. For better or for worse, none of us can look through time without using the spectacles of our presuppositions. One may be surprised by the vehemence with which we assert contrary conclusions from the same evidence, but that is only because our lenses are so very different.
It is such a human impulse to chronicle one’s deeds for the benefit of posterity, and just as human to look to one’s fathers for tales that give identity. Yet the chroniclers and truth-seekers of mankind have not looked at time in the same way. The Greeks, believers in fate, watched a series of epicycles in which mankind repeated itself with the predictability of orbiting planets. Their great Thucydides wrote history in order to foretell the future.
Israel received history from their God, a creator who was not limited to the generation being addressed but who called himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Hebrews stood on a straight path and looked down the line of time to the fulfillment of Yaweh’s purpose. Unlike in the Greek cycle of evolving gods, the Israelite beliefs showed exactly when time had begun. Unlike the Greeks, Hebrews had no need to dread time’s passing and to strive desperately, Achilles-like, for the immortality of an undying name. They trusted that eternity stood outside of time.
Monumental forever, Athens and Jerusalem guided the chroniclers for many years. Then came the Enlightenment and another definition of the world’s aging. Mankind was seen in a great procession of progress from primitive to intermediate to glorious. Each decade of time struck fetters away, crushing ignorance and superstition, until at last freedom from the old faiths (of Jerusalem and even of Athens) led to the liberty of a new utopia. With the irony of a god’s sense of humor, it took only the passing of yet more years to disillusion mankind with its own progress. You will find many historians of today who have returned to either Greek or Hebrew view. Others have lost themselves so thoroughly in the mists of changing eras that they prefer vague confusion and refuse to make the choice. Yet the hill of time, higher than Olympus, still offers a fascinating view. You may stand on the hill, searching for truth, and hope to follow the pointing hand of time’s daughter. (Anna I. Beck)

My Kitty

My kitty wouldn’t wake up today. I was petting him a lot because he was colder than normal, but he didn’t warm up. My parents came in and saw me sitting by the fire, petting my kitty. They smiled. They never smile for long anymore. They told me I should wake up my kitty because he hasn’t eaten. I told them I couldn’t though. They came over to him and nudged him and then stepped back really fast. They stopped smiling. Their voice got louder and they asked what was wrong with me. I told them I didn’t know. They became all fast and sad, and they grabbed my kitty. I didn’t know what to do. So I just sat there, in front of the fire. My parents came back much later and they were crying. I don’t know why, but they cry a lot since I last saw the doctor. My parents told me that my kitty was ok and he was just going back to his family. They told me they would bring me one of my kitty’s brothers or sisters really soon and I shouldn’t be sad. I’m not sad though, if he’s just with his family why should I be sad? Why are my parents so sad?
My parents don’t stop crying now. They talk a lot and hug me a lot and touch my hair a lot but they always cry. They smile whenever they talk but their eyes are so red. They brought me a new kitty. This one’s a girl. She plays with me a lot and I don’t think about my old kitty too much.
I get really tired now. My parents want me to sleep all the time, but I want to play with my new kitty. Sometimes, I sneak out of my room so I can go play with her and Mom yells at me. She yells really loud and then she cries and needs to talk to Dad. I tell her I’m sorry I made her cry and she just cries more. After that though, they bring my kitty to me and sit on my bed and watch my kitty and I play together.
I went to the hospital today. Everyone is really nice here and the nurses tell me lots of jokes. They gave me a cool hair-cut too. They said it was cool. I get all the Jell-O I want and I get to watch funny TV. Sometimes though, I miss my kitty.
My parents are sleeping at the hospital with me. I like that. They talk quietly to each other a lot. I ask them what they are talking about and they don’t say. Mom was looking out the window for a long time. Dad came over to me and told me he had something important to tell me. He said soon I would fall asleep and I wouldn’t wake up. I asked if it was just like my first kitty. He said it was. He said I would be with my old kitty soon and all of his family. I asked him if I would see him and Mom there. He said I would one day. He said I was going to a good place and I would have a lot of fun there. Dad said there wasn’t any school there. He said I shouldn’t be afraid or worry. But if it’s fun why would I be afraid. Why do they keep crying? I told them it would be all right. I would see my old kitty and I liked my old kitty and I don’t like school. I asked him why Mom keeps crying. He said because he and Mom would miss me very much. But they’ll see me again. I keep telling him that. But he shook his head and told me I was a good boy.
My parents brought my new kitty in today. They said it was a special day, but their smiles look so funny. I was so tired though. My kitty kept playing with me but my eyes kept closing. My kitty kept licking my face and my parents kept crying. I just couldn’t kept my eyes open anymore. My kitty kept licking my face and my parents kept crying. But I don’t know why. (Andrew Reher)

A Special Event

Diptych

The falling rain could only barely be heard against the roof. Outside the window he thought he might just see the distant lights of the cars passing on the highway. That road had been his lifeline. When that same highway had brought him here years before, he had been single minded in his ambition and already impatient to leave. He had been younger then.

She had changed that, and now here she was for the last time. Here they were together alone with the rain.

On the mantle above the fireplace had been lain a distant memory, now overturned.

The road, his lifeline, took him away from this place.

_____

Here he was again, and again it was raining as if it had never stopped. Some long-forgotten desire brought him back to the same spot where he had stood that night. The headlights passing slowly below crept by the window in an eternal stream. The ravages of youth had not been kind to him.

A fine coat of dust was all that remained on the mantle where once her image had rested, watching, waiting.

She was not here anymore, nor had she been, in spite of her sincerest efforts. She would not come around here again.

On down the road he went, weary and wet. (Joshua Wilson)

(Untitled)

(Meg O'Keffe)

Jacob Q. Chaconne

Jacob Q. Chaconne strolled down the sidewalk, notes racing through his mind. Chaconne stumbled on a crack, as composer’s block smothered every attempt at a melody he produced. As he lumbered up the staircase to his meager apartment, he was reminded of an ancient Greek love song he once knew. How did that tune go again?
Inside the comfort of his own apartment, Jacob looked desperately for inspiration. He settled into his favorite chair and soaked in the warmth of a splendid performance of Cage’s 4’33”. “Ah, yes,” thought Jacob, “This is the music for me.” He immediately shuffled over to his piano.
The resulting composition for piano and trumpet that was the product of the next few hours was the substance of legend. It contained chords that hadn’t previously existed. They required the use of all ten fingers, as well as three toes and an ear lobe. He invented new dynamic markings like just a little pianissimo, and almost forte. The trumpet was required to play four notes at once in several places. Several phrases lasted over 342 measures. Chaconne’s work was like something no man (or beast) had ever seen.
It was well into the middle of the night by the time Jacob wrote in the final cadence. He was so fatigued from writing the piece that he passed out on top of the piano. His sleep was filled with dancing visions of his piano and trumpet concerto being performed to raving crowds at Carnegie Hall. Who had heard of Bach? Of Mozart or Beethoven? What of Brahms? None could compare to the new master of music: Jacob Q. Chaconne.
The next morning brought sunlight creeping its way onto Jacob’s stubbly face. When it reached the bridge of his nose, Jacob awoke to a muffled German augmented sixth chord being played by his chubby elbows. He came to his senses as he remembered his masterpiece. “Yes! I shall call it-” Before he could finish his sentence, the music that he grasped spontaneously combusted, leaving nothing but carbon as evidence of what would have been the world’s finest musical composition. (Benjamin Simmerman)

4 Rooms

An English professor was always reminding us of time. He said, “When we’re in this classroom, we’re dealing with an artificial situation.” By this, he meant our use of the clock to define when to be here, and when to leave. I always pondered what a genuine, non-artificial situation was supposed to be. Perhaps all situations are artificial, whether we’re in class, driving to appointments, calling friends, or watching television. Appointments cannot be missed, minutes on phones cost money, and problems on television must be solved within an hour or half-hour. One thing did impress me: we ARE governed by time, whether artificial or not.
I was walking with a friend 3 years ago who said she would have liked to take time and put it into a jar. I thought we would be immortals, then, peering into a mortal world, escaping artificiality. I drop a green leaf into that jar and watch it die. My hand would whither with age. The sun would rise and set, all within the jar containing time. Outside that jar, we’d sit, and be immortals, Greek giants passing the jar back and forth for entertainment, watching decaying little people do decaying little things.
Now, the demands we make on each other change our conceptions of time. Today, everyone expects email responses immediately. Globalization induces instant communication—the click of a button, the ring of a cellular phone. The second grows, even as the world shrinks. Once, time really was our ally. And now, we are pushed and harried, falling into the future at the break of yet another artificial day.
Fortunately, time is forgettable. Despite our mortality, and when time occasionally spares us, we still do produce things. We daily leave our thumbprint on a rushing world filled with ticking clocks. We persist in reading and writing. Some of us avoid isolation, ignoring barriers, forcing a lively talk, in a system of taps through prison walls. We hope that the sun will occasionally pause for us. We lose ourselves in history, philosophy, and literature, exploring worlds that stand to multiple explorations. The libraries of the world invite us to forget about time for a while. We hope we may not really someday have to die, and that our growing isolation will crumble into unity when we realize that time is not time unless we feel its passing.
Nevertheless, around the world, 6 billion little clocks are ticking, roughly 80 times a minute, clocks like small homes with four rooms, a limited number of ticks, with a steadfast wind that cannot on this earth be rewound—and what a beautiful, silver alarm bell! (Caleb Sattler)

Only Numbers

Time exists only through numbers. Consider the course of the day. The sun rises and it sets. The moon appears and disappears. These are cycles we witness, just as you inhale and exhale, just as you eat when you are hungry. It is not time but an event, a cycle. Even a life ending in death is an event, an inevitable circumstance. It is another cycle. Yet, an event is not necessarily time passing. There is nothing linear about the repetition of certain events-that is until you count them. Once counted, they cannot stray from the undeniable path of logic to continue onward: 1 to 2, 2 to 3 etc, etc. The cycle is forgotten. It is no longer an event but a number. There are 7 days in a week, 24 hours in a day. How could you explain the length of a week without numbers?
For some reason, we want to know how these cycles are numbered. We want to know numbers which represent our understanding of everyday events. Desperately, we seek to understand our life through any means, so we label, so we number. Even in history, we see the mistakes, the repetition, but attach a worthless timeline to it, a year. What is our fascination with time and the numbers attached to it? Are we so desperate to explain and understand that we need to label it? All day we move with the numbers. We understand, that to be efficient, we must obey their symbols. Forced by time, we must base our actions upon numbers, by a date, a time. We must hurry to class by a series of 3 to 4 numbers separated by a colon. Most students know that in a certain number of weeks or days or perhaps hours, an assignment is due. Carefully weighed and measured, we determine how long it will take. Whether starting a few days in advance or pulling an all-nighter, we make adjustments and decide.
The time is watched. It is carefully monitored. Like a danger approaching us, we wait in apprehension, we wait for the imaginary numbers of time. Eventually, the numbers begin to worry us. Only numbers. Numbers which nag, which whine, which vie for your attention. Coercive numbers which demand millions of slaves to wait in traffic for hours, which demand workers to be on time or be fired, which demand us to wait in a long lines and wonder how much better we could be spending the five, ten, twenty minutes waiting. This is time, the self-inflicted way in which humanity continues to simultaneously organize itself and create chaos. (Andrew Sippie)

Time emission?

emiT.Time. Play withe word,

because we can't play it's meaning.

It's meaning toys with us.

Emitimemitimemitimemitimemitimemitimemitime

Time it. Admitting time?

(Kristen Weber)

An Ode to Advancements in Technology

O, wonderful spork!
Crownéd plastic king of spoons,
Better than a fork

(Kate Schultz)

Timeliness

Chess is a game intensely focused on the value of the moment. While the hours of the clock stretch on, the moment of play is far more eternal. Quite frankly, time is not about the moment so much as a sweeping survey of multiple moments, each deprived of their infinite significance and generalized into the likewise infinite abyss which we so lackadaisically entitle “time.”
Time—the word is all too ubiquitous, so that now the significant meanings are hashed and debased. They say that time is priceless or that “time is money.” Everything is qualified by what its worth to the author of that very moment and yet, a moment spent pondering the value of an activity is a moment lost. Either a moment is squandered and thus lost, or its infinite value is finite production.
At this point it becomes clear that each individual will claim an equally unique measure of the productivity of his/her moment. Even when we admit to wasting time or having a particularly productive afternoon, time was ours to use as we saw fit or as we were externally coerced (or paid) to. And while it would be inappropriate to slander another’s “well spent time” (even in the case of papers which have become shadows of their former selves), there must be some generalized key to productivity; some rule that divides wasted moments and profitable moments.
In the least specific of terms, one could say, that which benefits the self, another, or the whole, and preferably the best combination of the three (with increasing weight to the larger groups) with reasonable room for human error and exceptions. Perhaps the best advice is that a moment ought to be ‘spent’ to realign our value of the moment with something more eternal than the sum of each moment passed thus far. (Thomas Reher)

Father Time

Time is like an emotionally absent Father watching over us, detached but influential in his mere existence. He does not involve himself in our petty problems—does not share our anger or joy or grief—but stands outside of us, constant in his passive destruction.

We measure our lives by highlights: victories, losses, pleasures, betrayals. Minutes and hours are relative, fitted between ballet recitals and high school graduation. A moment may seem tortuously long in its execution, but in its completion it becomes one of a hundred-million others, each as inconsequential as that before it. A moment is nothing without a corresponding event to make it tangible.

And yet those events, too, are worth only as much as their memory. A first birthday party, so significant to a parent, means nothing to a child with no recollection of it. The momentary mortifications and petty victories earned in high school are free to completely evaporate once that cap has been thrown, just as college will soon pass away with only highlights and summaries left behind in scrapbooks. Life and time make up a yearbook of our lives, only as important as each picture and caption we put into it. We may save nothing. We may save everything.

Ashes to ashes, the world will not remember us for long after we leave it. Family and friends will leave in their time, and their memories of us may follow to the other side. But they will not stay here. Two or three generations is all it may take for a person’s life to be erased from existence. His personal victories, losses, pleasures, and betrayals will mean nothing to those left behind him, just another casualty of Father Time.

At the finish line, we all end as casualties. (Jessee Cordell)

Note from the Editor

(Coming soon)

Just One More Time Around

All the day is twirling as the time is whirling and it turns on its spinning top head. Revolving around the endless bickering, the whimpering wishes of so many strained voices. Annoyed voices pleading to be heard. Wishing to be read. Complementing the whiner is always a blamer. They play on the repetitive game of shame. You may see them one day being sold on the store shelves in plastic toy boxes. You may hear the commercials booming and frantically screeching about a duel of two destinies, the fight of two fates. You may watch as they bicker and brawl in an obscure blur of finite absolutes. You may gawk at the colors swirling in a blended twirl of unknown dimensions. But, do you wonder why? Reversing the scales of sanity, these debacles hollowly flash, reflected in the solemn stupor plastered upon your eyes. The dropping skin hanging off the face has the residue of ignorance and drool. Perhaps you eat as you watch. You indulge the desire without tasting the sludge slurp and slide down the throat, without feeling the gritty grime grinding between the mechanical chomping teeth. Grease and drool mingles on your chin as a sickening apparition cruelly plastered to the face. Unknown twinges blare through the body, but are unknown to the mind. Numbing the senses, numbing the emotions, is the altered sense of…

Stupid commercials interrupting the shows. Interrupting the… oh mommy can I have that? No dear you can’t… well you know we do need a new… no we can’t afford that… the quality talk enlightened around the essence of television. Why are those commercials so long?

Why not leave when the commercials appear? Why can’t you move? The show ends as a gasp of air is inhaled, as the continuous revolving barrel roll of the gun is twirled around a clock’s hand endlessly ticking. In one chamber lies the bullet, in one chamber is a blank. Pull the trigger, pull it continuously, watch the time, watch the chamber. Hoping for bullet or blank? Never question what can’t be…well it can be found tomorrow. But, the show is on tomorrow. You wade through the asphalt, the skin melts, the pain glares reality. Escape the grinding machine where you are the cog; endlessly working. Escape the bullet-filled chamber of time. Please, please one more blank, one more tick of the watch, just one more time around. So I may escape to be found, so I may live to die, so I may be numb to stay numb and never feel pain. Just one more time around.

(Andrew Sippie)

The Aedificium

I walked towards the library the other month, to reinforce my scant set of sources for senior seminar. It was the second time. Last time I had come alone, got lost, almost got hit by someone, and finally stole a resident’s parallel spot as soon as he left. This time, it was snowing.
I tried to tell a friend how I feel about libraries. Most people wouldn’t understand, I think, about the size, the number, the absolute availability of information. I think people these days are similarly impressed with the Internet. But I don’t get the same thrill of research when I google something. In fact, I get this cheesy feeling that I’ve been cheating. In a library, books are solid, hardcover, permanent. They’re certainly more “real” to my hands than an Internet source.
I was thinking about this as the UWM library loomed over me. Each floor stood stacked upon another like a lazy pile of videotapes, corner extending over corner, rows of windows revealing ceiling-high stacks filled with books. At the top floor, through those windows, on my right hand side, lay my PS.3505.U334 books. I recalled The Name of The Rose, a murder mystery set in a Franciscan Abbey in 1327 AD. Their library was held in the upper floor of the Aedificium, which is a large building for study, with the kitchen in the lower floor.

The second floor had held the Scriptorium. I looked from where I crossed the street to the second floor of Golda Meir, and saw at tables people writing and reading, just like careful monks, with cold fingers illuminating their beautiful transcriptions. All day long, between their offices, Franciscans filled their texts with gold ink, depicting fantastic kingdoms, terrible monsters, humans with animal heads and claws, musical instruments played by beasts. I remembered the debate of the monks about tragedy and seriousness versus comedy and frivolity that had taken place in the Scriptorium. One monk, the old blind one named Jorge, had associated laughter with the devil, condemning it with comedy.

I pushed open the doors of the west wing. A rather tired-looking man sat at the first desk, there, like a little king. His job was to glance at me, give silent approval of my entrance, and turn away. I found the stairs on the left, and hauled my materials up the steps to floor 3. In the Aedificium, Abbey newcomers William of Baskerville and his young accomplice Adso of Melk had to sneak into the library. It was restricted from all monks. Even the Abbot avoided the Library. Only the librarians knew the codes; only the librarians passed that knowledge to their successors. Theirs was a profession of secrecy.

Of course, the book was a murder mystery, and since it was by Umberto Eco, in a 1327 monastery boasting the largest library in Italy, how could the mystery of seven deaths not be centered on the library, at least according to William? William and Adso had to sneak into the Aedificium late at night, through a passage deep below a graveyard of buried monks, from the chapel to the kitchen. The doors from the Scriptorium and the library were left unlocked on the principle that no one knew of the secret passage (except the librarian, the Abbot, and now Adso and William).

The library in the Aedificium was a labyrinth.
I picked up several books from PS.3505: (re)Valuing Cummings, Critical Essays, etc. I decided to take a leaf out of Dr. Krenz’s (and Wayne Booth’s) book, and look into the bibliographic pages for more books. Of course the library is a labyrinth, for here in these pages are 135 more sources about my subject, which I never knew existed. The library was interconnected, woven, cross-referenced. And I was pulling a string out a pocket that would never end.
The end of that string for William and Adso had been near, through poisonous, hallucinogenic smoke, a maze of rooms with blind walls, no windows, carnival mirrors, narrow slits to transform wind into ghastly howling. The Finis Africae was the final room they sought. It contained a book that would solve every mystery, and reveal a whole world of delight to a researching population. I suppose I was seeking my own Finis Africae. To me it was the book that would do what I was doing in research. It was the book that could even abort my precious research by leaving me with the short end of the stick: has my paper “already been done?”
Of course, for Adso and William, their book was not so docile. At its fault, disaster occurs, men go mad, they die, a world collapses, and it’s all thanks to a passionately kept secret: the library’s true contents. I wonder what UWM had kept beneath these stacks, between the walls, over the ceilings—probably dry wall, bricks, mortar, or wood, or electronics. There is no room for secrets anymore. It’s all on the Internet.

I had been reading and doing note cards for 2 hours, now. My hands wanted a bit of warmth. I leaned from my desk and looked beyond the cards and the books to the soft city lights, and tried to picture Italian mountains, other monks. Vespers was about to ring, and soon we would reawaken at 2:00 for the first office of the day. The snow still blew beyond the third-story window, and below, a city gleamed with mystery. The sidewalks lay quietly, silenced by a descending layer of snow.

(Caleb Sattler)

Touching The Cave of Despair

Edmund Spencer’s “The Faerie Queene” holds in the ninth canto of Book I a rare gem about “The Cave of Despair.” Written in the late 1580’s, it contains adventure, intrigue, fantastic characters, and a deeply intellectual and theological theme dealing with the problem of evil, the condition of man, and man’s limited conception of God’s relationship with him, all of which, of course, deal with the very meaning of life. St. George, the Red Cross Knight, is protector of Una (True Religion) and has recently been freed by Arthur from the dungeon of Duessa (falsehood). Still weak, he encounters a knight fleeing the terror of Despair. St. George rushes to meet this foe to see justice done for the deaths he has caused. As a Christian, the confrontation that occurs in the cave had a great impact upon my memory. Some of my more difficult recollections are my encounters with the damning finger of the law which seems to drill into my heart and pronounce death eternal. Justice, were we to demand it, would never be satisfied, hence the eternal nature of hell; the never-ending torment to pay for Sin and rebellion.

And yet when we see the Red Cross Knight being driven to despair, we know that there is hope, though we may not be able to express it in words. When St. George grasps the hilt of the dagger offered by Despair, we gasp in shock as he prepares to end his life and his years, abandoning his purpose. Despair preys on the guilty conscience while appealing to the pride of human reason, for human reason, above all else, desires to be independent and sufficient, correct beyond dispute. The finite reason of man declares that forgiveness is impossible and that man is without God. Thus man rejects logic and disregards the infallible premise of the Loving Grace of God, for man’s reason, without the aid of Faith, is sinful and base and cannot grasp or comprehend the Infinite; man is incapable of comprehending the incomprehensible work accomplished by the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore it is only with the aid of Faith as worked in us through God’s word and the work of the Holy Spirit that we can hope to defeat such despair. Indeed it has been defeated by Jesus Christ on the cross. So St. George who is to defend Una also is in need of Una’s aid if he is to survive.

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/queene1.html#Cant.%20IX

(Joseph Gutschmidt)

Governing Dynamics

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."- Edmund Burke
Good, but incomplete. To finish it, I suggest “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing [or do so much that they corrupt any honest original intention and bring other ignorant individuals with them].”
Propaganda is by far my most beloved weapon of mass destruction. It is the power to take the as-of-yet morally disinclined masses and manipulate them to your side by providing insufficient cause with more-than-plenty emotion to awaken a false sense of civic duty and a personalized sense of cause ownership.
Emotion has no place in logic. Arguments of any stature should be decided in cold blood (as opposed to hot blood). To suggest supporting an argument with emotion muddles the details and invokes the wrath of ‘fog of war’ and ‘rosy retrospection’ of the past.
Two such examples are marriage and abortion. Objective defense would rely in biblical standings primarily, and then concern itself with the philosophical, ethical, biomedical (etc.) defense of both sides. Propaganda on one side would commission bombing abortion clinics, ransacking weddings, and more commonly pull at heartstrings with touching stories emphasizing the emotional aspect over the objectivity of life and death. Alternatively, the other side would encourage protests supporting human rights to freedom of personage and way of life and slight the psychological and sociological outcome of such liberty. Emotions lie (note both definitions) on multiple sides of numerous issues. It is a crime against rational thought to use them in place of deductive reasoning.





If you’re reading this, you risk taking offence and a bruised ego. That’s all the disclaimer I will give. It’s been a long time since I seriously wrote much in the lines of propaganda or satire and while this saddens me greatly, perhaps it is best. Few people merit the abuses of such a potent verbal attack, and even fewer can withstand the aftermath.

(Thomas Reher)

Paper Clip Strike: A Foray in Irrealism

I was walking to class around two thirty in the afternoon, by my estimate, when my paperclips arbitrarily stopped working. The pile of papers I was carrying laughed all the way to the ground. The paperclips danced around me as I knelt on the ground, gathering the papers. They reveled in my discomfort, smirking at me disdainfully. I was humbled for a moment. Then I realized I was bigger than they were.
Roaring to my feet like Godzilla, I began stomping on them, scattering them in all directions. Their glee quickly turned to terror as I destroyed them left and right. I kicked at them and they flew all over. More paperclips than I ever knew I had took flight like so many schizophrenic seagulls. I relished my power over them.
But then…
A swarm, an ocean of paperclips overwhelmed me. Like locusts they came, like multiplying amoeba. The sun flashed off of the shiny paperclips like a thousand silver swords before battle. They paperclipped my shoelaces to the ground, immobilizing me. They paperclipped my fingers together, disarming me. They paperclipped my eyes shut, blinding me! Though I flailed my arms about like a squid out of water, it was to no avail. The paperclips were as merciless as a Catholic school nun in a room full of delinquents. Covering me like some mutant slime, they paralyzed me and brought me down to the ground. I gasped for air, I heaved for air, I choked for air, but I inhaled only paperclips.

(Erin Esson)

Hocket, Just Drink Some Water

The word hocket derives from the French for “hiccup”. In the thirteenth and fourteenth century, composers used hocket to give a disjunctive flavor to the music. Music containing hocket “passes” the melody from one voice to another. For example, the top line (since at this time they did not designate soprano, alto, etc.) would carry the melody for a few lines, then pause. During their pause, the middle line would play or sing a few notes where the melody left off. The top line would finish off the phrase. The hocket, used seldom in the sacred works of the 13th century, became well used in the fourteenth century within secular conductus, as well as motets. Hocket is a characteristic usually seen in fast pieces, especially instrumental works, even though instrumental pieces were less common than vocal pieces. The principal school is Notre Dame during “ars antiqua”, the period in the thirteenth century where the motet was developed.

(Nicholas Jones)

These fragments I have shored against my ruin

“A book has neither object or subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.” –Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Entertain this conceit with me for a moment: most of your run-of-the-mill novels exist in a solid state – your airport bookstore fare, your beach/pool-side reading – you know. Some will exist in liquid form, generally with a more experimental bent: Ulysses, maybe, Pale Fire. That sort of thing. Well.

David Markson’s Readers Block: novel-as-gas. It is free-form and rhizomatic, not so much following lines as generating them – lines of flight, lines of desire, lines of insight, lines of articulation.

Roughly: a character (referred to only ever as “Reader”) sits in his room and considers writing a novel. But to reduce the thing down to this is like referring to a Rembrandt as simply “that painting.” Sure it gets the general idea across, but there’s an awful lot more going on that’s being left out entirely.

So in the case of Reader’s Block, what, exactly, is the “awful lot more”? It is a treasure: nearly 200 pages of Reader’s thoughts, as his mind wanders, contemplating his novel (starring a character named “Protagonist”). And what thoughts! Quotes, references allusions. Lists of names. Lists of things (the location of every Nazi concentration camp). Literary trivia (“Keats may have been born above a livery stable”). Titles. Items in any number of languages. Every few pages he will note that such-and-such a historical figure was an anti-Semite (is Reader a Jew? It is never specified). And, of course, interspersed are vague ruminations on Reader’s past, and the development of his novel (Protagonist lives either by a cemetery or on the beach). What finally emerges from all of this is an intricate portrait of a man who has spent his entire life (doing possibly nothing but, and perhaps obsessively) reading and remembering.

The net result of this is a constant undermining of what we think of as “a novel.” Concerned more with flow and connectivity than with plot and characters, we discover that, in the end, we’re left with a highly developed and compelling character anyway. The traditional signifiers of the novel are removed from their signifieds, hierarchies are subverted, emphasis is placed on simultaneity and multiplicity. And it works. There is of course the danger that the nuance will turn into gimmick, and that the gimmick will get old. The thing could have been a complete disaster. Instead it’s utterly mesmerizing.

But is it a novel? What is a novel? And, once we decide on the answer to that (if at all), can this one so be called? And if not, what is it?

Who can say. A meditation on the relationship between form and emptiness, perhaps (can dialectics break bricks? Proclaim the mantra which says: gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha). If you’d like.

(Richard Payton)