killing floor

shitty week. crappy month. canceled future.

Been reading:

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski: Great seeing eye prose. The stripped down style suits its brutal logic to a t. I am really glad I didn't read this book when I was younger though as it most assuredly would have encouraged my self destructive behavior even more. This book should be read with some manor of distance.

Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire: My first thoughts on this book are somewhat mixed. I really like the prose poem style and there are some truly amazing sections. Interested as I am in place in literature I was hopping there would be a bit more direction, the city appears mostly in the people the narrator encounters or the distorted humanity inhabiting a horrific geography. A child whom B falls in love with comes to live with him only to hang itself in his closet after B reprimands it for stirring up trouble. The Flâneur engages the citizen as the representation of place.

"What Oddities can't you find in a big city, when you know where to walk and how to look? Life swarms w/ innocent monsters. Lord God! Though the creator, though the master, though has't given us the law and freedom. Thou the sovereign dost permit, and thou dost pardon." CB Paris Spleen

Started reading Down River by Iain Sinclair: Didn't immediately take to it and jumped to Nadja by Andre Breton after the first chapter. Hope to return to the other soon, my first impression is that its a quite dense (not that this is a bad thing, just that it calls for a certain attention I didn't have at the time). As for Nadja: this book first came to my attention during a conversation with Neeli Cherkovski the first time I met him this summer after he had been kind enough to give us some poems for a magazine James Cook and I put out this past summer called Polis: Resistance (Neeli also ties in some to my picking up Bukowski). He had mentioned Nadja to me after asking about the story I had written for the issue. In part my story involved a walk around the city following an old train right of way that dates back to early San Francisco history. This reminded NC of Nadja, since a great deal of the book involves walking through Paris and the chance encounters he has with a women by the name she has given herself. The story I wrote was more inspired by Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge and the movies Robinson in Space and London directed by Patrick Keiller; it sticks to a pretty straight narrative of a walk through an urban area (San Francisco's Mission District- where I live) that leads off into the history of the city and the train line. After NC had mentioned Nadja I knew I would have to read it this year but it wasnt until I was reminded of it again this fall when it was mentioned in an essay called Remarks on the Literary Transformation of San Francisco by James Brook in an anthology called Reclaiming San Francisco, which I am currently working on a response to. As with Paris Spleen (though of course they are separated by time) the city is here, much more so than in PS, there are landmarks, points on the map to follow, but they are not really the point (I may regret saying this later). My feeling at the moment is there is not too much meditation on these locations as there is a wonder for the situations they produce:

"to the complete lack of peace with ourselves provoked by certain juxtapositions, certain combination of circumstances which greatly surpass our understanding and permit us to resume rational activity only if, in most cases we call upon our very instinct of self-preservation to enable us to do so." AB Nadja

This is all fine and good, but it still only gets us as far as starring in amazement. The significance of place in Nadja does not merit much attention. We are lost in the city, wandering in search of banshees.

Next up is Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud then something not French.