We Always Think We Are Authentic #2: Teaching Intro to Literature and Creative Writing

traditional American-- yarn

little details of

wellmade welltold

A & MunroChekhovRaymond

literature

narrow commercial heart of

1960s New York

Skyscrapper and office

--shot in the headcurleddied


BBs "The Disappeared"

Breathing literature. Visceral literature. Terrible literature.

Creative wr--

Matt Bell--The Weather Killer--

--of horror and disgust and boredom.) Borges SleepingfishBrianEvenson

backed away, slow. a developing organism,

Bartleby

Dead letters! Not so bad a job, Bartleby. Preferable to dead boys or dead dogs. I say, better to assort the words of men for the flames than the flesh of men. Better a ring intended for a finger than a ring from a finger rendered to soot in an oven. Ours is a city of furnaces and smoke stakes and here you are just as quickly a man with a shovel as you are the man being shoveled. A city which gives much must take much, especially in this city of horror and office work. You have seen the seagulls circling, lost, figments in the gray smog. Their bills mottled with garbage and their bellies stuffed with tires. You have heard their shrieks from your courtyard walls. You have witnessed the soot and fog in your wheezing coughs and blackened handkerchief. Sensed the orange city lights through your charcoal blotted windows. In your pale youth you lived and worked in dead letter offices, a city of scorched envelopes and licking flames and ashes flittering. Well, ours is a city of dead men. Here our furnaces scrape the clouds. So, eat nothing, curl into a worm all you like. It makes no matter. Be you gull or dog all figures are rendered moot and figureless beneath a canvass sack. Here, all fellows born of mom and father, are tossed into machines and from these machines, only smoke is returned.

My Best Friend Klaus Kinsky (from the Birds of Prey)

Kinsky often insisted he was authentic but in truth he was overacting. Kinsky often believed he was intense but in truth he was deranged. The result is my films are putridly false. While I once believed them intense, I now know them to be deranged, foaming and deranged, because always there is Kinsky, wild and insane, ranting and cursing on the screen. If only none of these films had appeared, I thought, if only I had burned the celluloid in the canisters before they were ever shown, soaked them with gasoline in a dumpster, warmed my hands to their pungent green-orange blaze some winter evening. But now they are out there, multiplying, in eyes and then in minds. Now they are out there to be mocked and derided by idiots. And yet, better to be one of those gaping idiots than the one who made those movies believing them authentic and intense, I thought. I would be the happiest person imaginable if these films had never been seen, I thought, then I would not have to live with this putrid shame. Of false crazed Kinsky, become famous because I am so easy to trick and manipulate. Because I am easy and tender. Because I then had an amateur’s eye, whereas now I am experienced and easily see through Kinksy. Of course, we always believe ourselves experienced and authentic. Only minutes later will we reveal ourselves as idiots, as false, as inexperienced. We try to run from our past amateurishness, but our amateurishness is like a tiger, a fearful deranged tiger, who is always on our heels, who is always slobbering and breathing hot fecund air onto our neck, air smelling of putrid meat, who is always on the verge of obliterating us—If only I had shot Kinsky between the eyes in the Amazon. If only I had pulled a black-ski mask over my face and buried explosives in his lawn and strapped plastic explosives under his backdeck. If only I had kicked his body over the side of the boat and let the frenzied maniac piranhas devour him, because piranhas are infinitely more authentic than Klaus, I thought. A piranha has no false moments—unless it is photographed. Yes, I should have shot Klaus and then myself, and then we could have both become part of the piranha, his splendid terrible merciless ritual, and then we both could have been authentic, for once. Or if we had been exploded, or had I shot him with an arrow through his window, or from a long-range rifle, exploded his face through his window, as he sipped coffee, I thought, as if any authentic genius sipped coffee in his pajamas, ah, if only I had done so. If only I had not been so foolish. We could have laid there, on the lawn, in pieces, while the gulls circled overhead, we could have laid there peacefully and content for once, because we would no longer be groping after our stupid foolish arts, we could have laid there until the gulls, for gulls too are authentic, they are unguarded in their face-to-face confrontation with all the horror and stinking confusion of the universe, we could have laid there as they stuffed their bills with our stinking tender meat, while the gulls, shrieked in terrible horrible agony, for the gull alone, nature alone, is capable of acknowledging the truth, for the gull has not had its senses mucked over with lies and in-authenticity. If only I could have once authored such a work.

We Always Think We Are Authentic, When We Are Not

Thomas Bernhard. Lacerated again.

CarlyleSterneMelvilleSwiftRabelaisEnhaled dust and fumes from graves.

No birds swirling overhead because
the meat was all gone.

Cormac Mccarthy. Oprah. The Oscars.

I don't know.

--rejection letters and death,
death because my dad had died,
not so long after my brother died.

--old meat hanging in a freezer,

it'd stare up with

dead eyes but we'd still
hang out,

uncomfortably.

Life with the bird

Living with us, wandering our rooms, sitting on our televisions, eating our bread and our dogs, the bird continues to grow, becoming something new. Until it is shot, choked, married off--

Post #1: The Book

We will discuss the book. Talk about how we grew the book. Talk about what to do with the book now that it is here in the room with us. Now that it is taking up our lives. This book, the Birds of Prey.