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jamichalski 's review for:
Angle of Yaw
by Ben Lerner
Too brainy for me at times, though I still liked it. Lerner is funny and sometimes weirdly touching. I liked the 2nd and 4th sections (prose poems) more than the other three. Some favorites:
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Eldest sons dispossessed of ancestral tears mock the tears of the nouveaux riches. You call that weeping?
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THE AVERAGE READER only perceives the initial and final letters of a word. He only reads the longest and most peculiar words in a sentence, intuiting the remaining language. The average reader often turns two pages at once, without perceiving a breach in narrative. He picks up a book, quickly flips through its pages, and believes it read. Conversely, he often reads unawares, will process and even vocalize a text he believes himself to be composing, while in fact reading skywriting, between the lines, on the wall. In your most intimate moments, my average reader, do you not rely on large cards held beyond the audience’s sight? Have you ever applauded without being prompted by an illuminated sign?
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LASER TECHNOLOGY has fulfilled our people’s ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
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A SIDE OF BEEF ON A SILVER PLATTER, a slice of life on a silver screen. A beast with two backs, a war with two fronts. Búsqueda en Google an Abraham doll with realistic trembling. Her exit is emphasized by the receding lines of the parquet floor—who says art criticism is impractical? I’ll grant the world doesn’t need another novel, if you’ll grant the novel doesn’t need another world. The smugness masks a higher sadness, a sudden chiasmic reversal mistaken for love. I just want to be held, but contingently, the way the mind holds a trauma that failed to take place. Realistic suction, realism sucks. Ah, Bartleby!
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For example, a syllogism subjected to a system of substitutions
allows us to apprehend the experience of logic
at logic’s expense.
Negative formalisms catalyze an experience of structure.
The experience of structure is sad,
but, by revealing the contingency of content,
it authorizes hope.
This is the role of the artwork—to authorize hope,
but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its fulfillment.
The value of hope is that it has no use value.
Hope is the saddest of formalisms.
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DEAR CYRUS, HE PUTS DOWN, DEAR REPETITION, while you were driving home from, how shall I put this, Mexico, driving dark pales into the panic grass, the kids got into the Roman candles, the ginger vodka, the Bible I gave your daughter was hollow, contained a, how shall I, pistol, two kinds of people in this world, do I smell incense, swimmers and nonswimmers, a child with puppy dog eyes asks if puppies go to heaven, the pistol proves untrainable, ruins the carpet, a no or no question, I guess I just assumed dogs dog-paddled, Dear, Dear, he puts down, Dear Me, when a dog drowns an angel gets its wings, and a long proboscis for sucking blood, no self-putdowns, she screamed, I pretended it was alive so I could pretend to put it to sleep, how shall I, sweetheart, no doggy heaven, put this, without a doggy hell.
-
Eldest sons dispossessed of ancestral tears mock the tears of the nouveaux riches. You call that weeping?
-
THE AVERAGE READER only perceives the initial and final letters of a word. He only reads the longest and most peculiar words in a sentence, intuiting the remaining language. The average reader often turns two pages at once, without perceiving a breach in narrative. He picks up a book, quickly flips through its pages, and believes it read. Conversely, he often reads unawares, will process and even vocalize a text he believes himself to be composing, while in fact reading skywriting, between the lines, on the wall. In your most intimate moments, my average reader, do you not rely on large cards held beyond the audience’s sight? Have you ever applauded without being prompted by an illuminated sign?
-
LASER TECHNOLOGY has fulfilled our people’s ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
-
A SIDE OF BEEF ON A SILVER PLATTER, a slice of life on a silver screen. A beast with two backs, a war with two fronts. Búsqueda en Google an Abraham doll with realistic trembling. Her exit is emphasized by the receding lines of the parquet floor—who says art criticism is impractical? I’ll grant the world doesn’t need another novel, if you’ll grant the novel doesn’t need another world. The smugness masks a higher sadness, a sudden chiasmic reversal mistaken for love. I just want to be held, but contingently, the way the mind holds a trauma that failed to take place. Realistic suction, realism sucks. Ah, Bartleby!
-
For example, a syllogism subjected to a system of substitutions
allows us to apprehend the experience of logic
at logic’s expense.
Negative formalisms catalyze an experience of structure.
The experience of structure is sad,
but, by revealing the contingency of content,
it authorizes hope.
This is the role of the artwork—to authorize hope,
but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its fulfillment.
The value of hope is that it has no use value.
Hope is the saddest of formalisms.
-
DEAR CYRUS, HE PUTS DOWN, DEAR REPETITION, while you were driving home from, how shall I put this, Mexico, driving dark pales into the panic grass, the kids got into the Roman candles, the ginger vodka, the Bible I gave your daughter was hollow, contained a, how shall I, pistol, two kinds of people in this world, do I smell incense, swimmers and nonswimmers, a child with puppy dog eyes asks if puppies go to heaven, the pistol proves untrainable, ruins the carpet, a no or no question, I guess I just assumed dogs dog-paddled, Dear, Dear, he puts down, Dear Me, when a dog drowns an angel gets its wings, and a long proboscis for sucking blood, no self-putdowns, she screamed, I pretended it was alive so I could pretend to put it to sleep, how shall I, sweetheart, no doggy heaven, put this, without a doggy hell.