metropolis m

Voice #1: If only the picture would speak for itself.Voice #2: I speak most clearly when I’m quoting someone else. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough. That’s Anne Carson* speaking as me.Voice #3: By quoting, are you suggesting something Benjaminian?Voice #2: Carol Jacobs** nutshells Benjamin’s tactics: ‘To read: what was never written’. Voice #1: Such a theory of reading depends upon the folded and/or intertwined relationship of writing/reading, but is there an equivalent for looking? I can’t complete the analogy: writing: reading:: ___________ : looking?Voice #3: Comparison never was her forte.Voice #2: You’re always trying to get as many distractions on the page as possible, but that image with its, um, hot goings-on, boggles the mind, what’s not physically there, what’s ghostly reflection, has as much presence as what’s actually present. The clearest representation of the fun is virtual—a reflection in glass—allowing bodies to merge with furniture, mouth to merge with anus, inside with out, back with front.Voice #1: Jeff Burton caught the image at Herb Ritts’s house: it’s the unconscious of Ritts’s entire photographic enterprise, everything that girded his success but that he never published or showed. It’s ‘about’, in part, the difference between homoeroticism and homosexuality and yet their interdependence, their self-reflexivity. But the trouble with about is that it’s a struggle. Isn’t also just as much ‘about’ the body’s dissolve into surface, into sheer reflection. About always makes me want to accomplish an about-face from the norms of thesis, usefulness; question what it means to state, This is about __________. Burton’s poolside idyll is also about language’s impasse—the tongue (language, writing) probing a black hole—critique’s dissolution and superfluity. That the picture captures this act in bright SoCal sunshine, naturalizing it, reminds me of Cody Foster.Voice # 3: Cody Foster made his gay debut in Workin’ Stiff as a bootblack and starred in Malibu Pool Boys as a kind of Juliet in a famous flip-flop scene with swarthy Chad Knight. Born Shawn L. Sumner, on October 9, 1970, he died, in Grand Junction, Colorado, on January 7, 2007, apparently of liver cancer. It was claimed he fostered the early ’90s ‘California chic’ aesthetic—sun-kissed shag, jock’s bod, gaze usually untroubled by thought—a look that it would be difficult to prove ever really goes out of style, not to mention when exactly it came in. A tawny, unforgettable bottom, he was not uncut. Before the listing—in the sort of places that post such stats—of his height (‘5 ft 8 in’), weight (‘180 lb’), eye color (‘blue’), hair color (‘blond’), and ethnicity (‘American’) and his penis size (‘7.5 inches’). His life, like others’, was turbulent, infirm. Here lies one whose fame was writ in sperm.Voice #2: That sounds familiar.Voice #1: Language only rims the edges of things, hoping to turn itself on. Voice #3: The guys, their happiness (?) in the midst of labor—they’re at work, don’t forget: performers in the scene of a porn film—smell like the dispersal of the certainty of comprehension, saline and inky.Voice #2: That’s the goal of critique.Voice #1: Dispersal of certainty?Voice #2: Yes.Voice #3: Pit inkiness?Voice #2: YesVoice #2: Salinity?Voices #1 & 3: Yes.Voice #1: To speak the silence so as to approach and/or perform it. Everything occurring between the lines, murmuring.Voice #2: Too many remain enthralled or overwhelmed by silence, especially god’s, but I’ve always found his mute mood a reason to look for alternatives.Voice #1: …god’s logorrhea, god’s caterwaul, god’s rim job, god’s toothache, god’s burp…Voice #2: …god’s mealymouthedness, god’s bleb, god’s halitosis, god’s dental spinach, god’s lisp…Voice #3: …god’s chapping, god’s embouchure, god’s swollen tongue, god’s whisper, god’s smirk…Voice #1: …god’s girlish shriek, god’s phlegmy chortle, god’s nicotine-stained grin, god’s moustache, god’s drool…Voice #2: …god’s fat yap, god’s cum-facialed jowls, god’s temper tantrum, god’s botched grammar, god’s hiss…Voice #3: …god’s cavities, god’s chant de nuit, god’s lip-synching, god’s ullage, god’s sob…Voice #1: I’m not sure we know what we’re doing.Voice #2: By which you mean, we digress?Voice #3: But that’s the start: not knowing…Voice #2: …and digressing.Voice #3: Expressing doubt. Asking the questions you wish to ask. No matter how forlorn, how chagrinned, or rancid…Voice #1: …in an effort of radical depersonalization.Voice #2: There is no other.Voice #3: Or there are only others.Voice #1: Other voices, other rooms.Voice #3: This is what it sounds like when doves cry.Voices #1 & 2: [raised eyebrows]Voice #3: Well, then, I must be going. I have to finish my essay on the stupidity of materials. Artists strive to convey this stupidity as artlessly as possible.Voice #2: The stupidity causes a magnetic field and attracts vocalizations like iron filings.Voice #1: I didn’t really wish to bring him up, but Clement Greenberg’s greatest essay, his greatest contribution to aesthetic theory, was his translation of Kafka’s Josephine, the Songstress or: the Mouse People published in the Partisan Review, May-June 1942. It’s penultimate and final paragraphs:’For Josephine herself, the way must lead downwards. The time will soon come when her last squeak will sound and forever die. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people and the people will survive the loss. This will by no means be easy; how will it ever again be possible to hold our gatherings in complete silence? For were they not silent, really, even with Josephine? Was her actual squeaking noticeably louder and more vivid than our memory of it will be? Rather, did not the people in their wisdom esteem Josephine’s singing so highly just because it was imperishable in this way? For this reason, perhaps, we shall not be deprived of so very much; but Josephine, delivered from the earthly cares, which in her opinion are prepared for the elect, will lose herself joyfully among the unnumbered multitudes of the heroes of our nation, and, since we keep no history, will soon be forgotten in an intenser deliverance, like all her brothers’.Voice #2: It’s not her singing, which might only be “squeaking,” but the memory of the squeaking, that is intenser when forgotten, kept from history.Voice #3: That’s beyond paradox.Voice #1: Yes, but imagine the forgotten as an ever-expanding solar system. The forgotten exists without us, literally (I would suggest Kafka be read literally) without our knowledge. What is forgotten and not known is more than what it is known, and what is forgotten may be of more permanence. That is its caution and intensity. Our squeaking, scratching, and scribbling should attempt to recall the voices and pictures of the forgotten. This may mean that we are only ever trying to find new voices, new pictures, since we confront the irretrievable in such an attempt.Bruce Hainley* Anne Carson is a Canadian poet and classicist. Winner of a MacArthur ‘genius’ Fellowship, among numerous other international awards, she has published numerous books; Decreation, The Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, and Economy of the Unlost are among her most compelling. The quotation is from her ‘Short Talks’.**Carol Jacobs, a student of Paul de Man, wrote In the Language of Walter Benjamin, one of the most brilliant studies of Benjamin’s writing, from which the quotation is taken.