HIS HAIR WAS RED

Today I met someone who is trying to write a Young Adult novel, and I tried my best not to make any immediate judgements about what he is like as a person. There is very little I can tell you about him other than that his hair is red, and he employs a particular method when he writes. LA METHODE is not particularly interesting or inspired, but, I have found, works a genuine trick on the mind, which, though initially appearing a detriment, ultimately serves as a great benefit to the writer. Here is just one of the benefits of modern dating. This man, we'll call him YA, only writes in his journal at the EXACT MOMENT that he feels he is THE AGE TO APPEAL TO YOUNG ADULT READERS (that he is in the exact mental state equivalent to that of a young adult) and thus all of his ideas are entirely inspired and entirely true. There is only one problem, and that is that he loses all inspiration by the sheer habit of the act, which moves in a diagonal line, crossing out the true youthfulness of his pen. AH, THE TRUE YOUTHFULNESS OF HIS PEN, I used to stay up into the early hours while he was writing so I could smell it, adorned with the lingering scent of fernstem and musk. I would go down on THE TRUE YOUTHFULNESS OF HIS PEN with such tenderness and vigor that I could picture a movie being made about it, and people actually did come out and start filming–the story of YA and his wife. Isn't that what I was? Though at times it seemed like he was cutting me too, crossing out the true youthfulness of MY life every time we made love in the EXACT MOMENT. So I started watching us from above, which turned out to be good for the art, too.

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MANIFESTO

I am starting this blog because THE JOKE OF THE ARCHIVES is not as thick or burly as THE JOKE OF PRIDE. I am starting this blog because it's cool, it's hip, it's young. I am starting this blog because the SONGS OF MY EXPERIENCE cannot get over THE SONGS OF MY INNOCENCE. Yesterday, the songs of my experience called the songs of my innocence from a yonder wood (was GAZING into that wood), then called MY SONGS OF INNOCENCE on the phone precisely 58 times and was not ashamed of it, then MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE snorted a line of coke trying forgot the LINES FROM INNOCENCE, which left my experience even more confused, as it couldn't decide whether cocaine was INNOCENCE'S song or its own. It did some good MYSTERY HUNTING. No cure's better. A doctor told MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE that, and even though MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE cannot think of that doctor without thinking of TEAM USA GYMNASTICS and pervy doctors fingering children, because that doc's also an osteopath, MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE still trusts him. Even though that doctor's perviness runs deep, deep like the tiny filaments that run under TEAM USA GYMNASTICS' tumbling matts into the darkness at the center of the universe deep, MY SONGS OF EXPERIENCE still trusts him. M.O., SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. I am starting this blog because I loathe the phrase "starting this blog" so much that I decided I must put it somewhere so I can say hi to it once in a while, but only when I'm feeling sauced. I am starting this blog because I have been feeling veritably UNSAUCED lately, dry as the Sonoran Desert, and an ARCHIVIST told me this is the way back to wetness, and I listened to him. No–songs of experience wouldn't do that, or was that the song of innocence?

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"HIS HAIR WAS RED" and "MANIFESTO" are from a hybrid prose manuscript, TRACTATUS. Part philosophical treatise, part Künstlerroman, and part Girl's Diary, TRACTATUS takes up Wittgenstein's charge that "a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." In TRACTATUS, the joke is seen both as a site of resistance against the alienating forces of patriarchal, capitalist society–a way for the narrator to release pressure as she navigates and time-travels her multiple and myriad jobs (as a grocery store cashier, a security guard at THE UNIVERSITY OF SEX AND ORANGES, an assembly line worker at LEE's factory of paintings of the interiors of cars, and, possibly, a high school student)–and as somehow essential to an authentic (or a freed-from-authentic) relationship to language, reality, and the material world.