Transit Fucks
(Dec 29/05)
All I can hear is the flat, monotonous gibber of her voice. The bus is relatively empty except for two Jamaican women, three or four student types, psychology majors or anthro’s, and me. Fucking nuisance, fingernails on a chalkboard sort of nuisance. I don’t even like this, this writing nonsense. Writing is the real nuisance, not bus riders or gibberers, or students too young to now the difference between Jung, Adler and Klein. The difference being there is no difference, they’re all not Freud, enough said. Perhaps it’s the psychopathology I’m after, the mechanism that makes the cogs engage with the wheel. I could, of course, try my hand at technical writing, like this new Canadian poetry, what’s it called, minimalism, or some such nonsense. Too close to algebra and logarithms for my liking, which likes very little, not even my own postmodernist crap.
All I can hear is the flat, monotonous gibber of her voice. The bus is relatively empty except for two Jamaican women, three or four student types, psychology majors or anthro’s, and me. Fucking nuisance, fingernails on a chalkboard sort of nuisance. I don’t even like this, this writing nonsense. Writing is the real nuisance, not bus riders or gibberers, or students too young to now the difference between Jung, Adler and Klein. The difference being there is no difference, they’re all not Freud, enough said. Perhaps it’s the psychopathology I’m after, the mechanism that makes the cogs engage with the wheel. I could, of course, try my hand at technical writing, like this new Canadian poetry, what’s it called, minimalism, or some such nonsense. Too close to algebra and logarithms for my liking, which likes very little, not even my own postmodernist crap.
Sodomy, perhaps, with nouns and adjectives and the odd pronoun thrown in for good measure. When poetry becomes indistinguishable from metaphor, the whole shit-house is out of order. I, for one, should know, as I write most of my excrement flat-assing the toilet seat, or with a disjunctive thumb up me bunghole fishing for a good assonance. Minimalist, post postmodern poetry, and prose, for that matter, has become a breeding ground for malcontents with nothing better to say than, look at me, I’m riding my bike with no hands. The idea is to master the use of the hands, opposable thumbs and fore, before trying to let go of the handlebars. T.S. Eliot, although somewhat of an intellectual bore, certainly knew how to conjugate a verb or punctuate a proper sentence, grammar aside. The WasteLand is an opposable poem; it can be read from left to right, from right to left or stern to prow. Even upside-down, should one be so disposed.
I fear my writing is like an unclipped fingernail drawn down a postmodern chalkboard, all that raucous noise with no substance or algebraic certainty. Best to keep both hands firmly on the handlebars, than risk a blowout or a header over the mudguard. But for the time being, time being a lousy judge of characterlessness, I’ll keep to my Wastelands and old schools, perhaps a few moments of pleasure with Kanto or that incorrigible Deride, or a day off lounging poolside with a Houellebecq or a Heaney. Enough said.
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