Visual Coercion

Ted Leo, Henry Art Gallery Seattle, WA Ted Leo, Henry Art Gallery Seattle, WA Richard Baluyut and Fontaine Toups of Versus Bradford Cox The War on Drugs 3/18/11 The Crocodile, Seattle, WA Eddie Argos

Aphasic Workshop: John Berryman & Things so Ghastly You Cannot Respond to Them Directly

The poems are infused with the voice of a Lost Generation poet defeated before he makes his own glory, defeated by the legacy of poetic giants the likes of Eliot and Pound, and by the accelerating disingenuousness and misdirecting insanity of his century- his century that moved from one atrocity to the next in a blind panic to dispose of all unifying narratives, as though in the hope it could rid itself once and for all of the one narrative that fuels the gaining, encroaching accusing blame and recompense the 20th century will demand in unrelenting perpetuity.

…As Bolaño wrote of the eye that has tried so hard to forget one thing it has forgotten everything else, as Pynchon rightly wrote of his Lethe-water baptized Americans, Berryman, in monstrous solitude, himself mulled on the century and mulled brightly, flashing and yearning with his own power and worked to admit what people so often do not in order to presume toward a critique.

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2666

“2666: A Novel” (Roberto Bolano) I followed them: I saw them go down Bucareli to Reforma with a spring in their step and then cross Reforma without waiting for the lights to change, their long hair blowing in the excess wind that funnels down Reforma at that hour of the night, turning it into a transparent tube or an elongated lung exhaling the city’s imaginary breath…. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

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QA

Szigeti: “So, do you write fact or fiction?” Hrabal: “Not fiction, more the truth.

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