Script For A Cocktail Party

A. Twelve guests are invited by two hosts (six each).

B. As they enter, each guest is handed a small card. The cards are given in order of arrival. Each contains a different instruction, mandating some variety of physical activity to be performed on cue.

C. An assembly with every appearance of a cocktail party ensues. That is, until the system of signaling is initiated, and the sequence of activities begins:


1. At 9:46 (by the clock in the hall), the first guest rises and throws heris glass to the floor.
2. The second guest rises, retrieves a dustpan hidden under the green armchair, and attempts to pick up the pieces without a broom.
3. As the dustpan first touches the shards, the third guest shouts once and starts pacing in a circle.
4. Upon hearing the shout, the fourth goes to the radio on the kitchen table and turns it to 88.9 FM.
5. When the radio comes on, the fifth guest goes to the dinner table and sits. This guest then lets heris head fall onto the table, and remains motionless.
6. The sixth picks up a striped handkerchief left on the cherry endtable and lets it fall to the floor.
7. Upon seeing the sixth guest pick up the handkerchief, the seventh guest rushes over, picks up a checkered handkerchief laid out next to it, and lets that fall as well.
8. Upon seeing the seventh guest run to the endtable, the eighth closely follows him or her. The eighth guest's goal is snatch both handkerchiefs out of the air--failing both, only the second. If both handkerchiefs have already reached the floor, she or he will stand still in close proximity to them and stare down.
9. The ninth guest proceeds to a mandolin leant against the wall in the corner, sits, picks it up, and strums it frantically for two minutes.
10. Whereupon the tenth guest starts to dance on tip-toe for the duration of the mandolin play, freezing with arms in the air upon its conclusion.
11. As the dance ends, the eleventh guest lets out a long whistle and lays upon the ground, head pointed towards the window.
12. This being accomplished, the twelfth guest points an index finger heavenwards. This is the signal for all activities to end and the dinner party proper to resume.

Comment On Ethics

Behaving as though the person you most respect is present can be a problematic moral rule, since it excludes any awareness of that person's capacity for compassion.

Abstract Of The Baskin Lectures

Notes taken by a conscientious third-year student at Pollexfen University during critic and "versifier" Kendrick Baskin's momentous engagement. Further material is forthcoming, pending restoration efforts on a cache of reel-to-reel tape held by the Pollexfen Archives. -ed.

1
"MATTERS OF DICTION"
On calibrations: specifically, how to negotiate, when to elevate vocabulary, and how to navigate between comprehension and elaboration. "The hopeful thought is that a vigored and flowery style--not afraid to aim thorns at its own eyes--should please in any case."
2
"MUSTARD-SEEDING"
Considering the proposition that verses are grown from single words, not born from thematic matrices. "A verse often expands from the word as though defining it; whereupon it proceeds to use this word in context...Thereafter, the seed is seen hanging from a minor branch of the plant--it is not yet suspected that this is the second generation." Awareness, perhaps in order to curtail revision, that the aforementioned original associations of words--as in Roussel--best dictate genetic sequence and syntax of composition.
3
"THE ONE AIM"
Work specifically intended for multiplicity, tending towards a refusal of unities. That "any god that could be postulated must needs be as much of a patchwork as Dr. Schreber’s."
4
"THE MEASURE OF SEPARATE CHARMS"
Further, that superimpositions exist even in what are intended as the most singular meanings. "Artwork is true insofar as it contradicts itself—this is the hallmark of souled truth".
5
"DOING YOUR COLORS"
Proposition that ideological, syntactical, logical contrasts work for verse as "color-juxes" do in visual design. Slides provided.
6
"DOTTY"
The conscious preservation of "the dainty and precious, the effeminate prerogatives of verse". Being that it is a universal expectation, the best practice is to seize it and turn it back against (...?)
7
"...THAT SAID..."
An excoriation of reflexive verse, of the exaltation of verse and the versifier, of verse such as it is (or is not). Also: any named colors, most places, most trees, and "all but the most select scatology, slang, and 'plain speech'”.
8
"DOGGEREL DOGGEDLY"
"The versifier sits in a study, looks at the rest of it, and labors at how to say it—oh no, that approach is too direct. 'How do I do this place in pleasing words?'" Instead, intuit something pleasing out from the span of several years. "Don't think in subjects; think and think around them as though they were very tall formations."
9
"I HARDLY KNOW"
"...what’s to be written when I start." Be like an atrium, "incessantly poured through and walked", like a reverberating machine. "I don’t know the best way to proceed; I can, at the least, be the exemplar of what’s naive. If I can but promote new forms of sense: extend the tongue by natural degrees, rather than by dictate." Movement towards a greater faith, in terms of turning metaphor towards the literal--seeing as there’s been no faith in the tissue-integrity of posited relations.
10
"CLOCK-TIME"
Regular meter can only be countenanced when the ideas and vocal contours of the individual lines are "rocky" and not at level; i.e., Coleridge composing on uneven ground and Wordsworth on a straight walk. "...You ease your way, mindful, down the slope—some skree, some spar, some pack-dry, some slide." Let rhyme and ready measure lie with popular music.
11
"NOW, WRITE FOR MASS TRANSIT"
Promulgation of a "crass poetics against crassness". "...When your reader may need to cross the same ground three times, it’s not such work, but such charm, and firm collar-leading."
12
"I DON'T BANK"
There exists a lack of credence in any particular polemic, but some have more allure, and more charm. That charm and allure are known compounds, "as sure as the fragrances that are known to abet them".
13
"CONCERNING ARTICLES"
"To cite 'the pots' is sorely different than citing 'pots'." The deifications or other 'cations introduced by "a" and "the" dramatically narrow the spectral width of a word, until only a scant received idea is left. For example, "pots" stands for any possible or pleasing association for the reader with such vessels, while "the pots" forces a reach for the most proper set--encouraging in this case "a tissue of the rustic, the quaint, and the earthen".
14
"JUMPING TRACKS"
"...as our current-day authorities would have it. It's irritating, since it takes such a lot of switchman's-work to get to writing at all." If the versifier cannot write so as to dislocate her-or-himself from accepted notions of "what a rain is, what it looks like, where it may licitly appear", the verse will eternally remain composed on its page, and never perform its own particular function of pleasured re-routing. How to achieve this? "Make a knotted switchyard", and draw all lines so as to connect by some slight remove. As a rule, write quickly and with little regard, and then knock any disparates into a shared path.
15
"ORGANELLES"
No verse need be essential in of itself. "If we're all so keen for a verse to be a flower, then: some as orchids, self-complete, rare, nigh-unique; some the whites of Queen-Anne's-lace, insignificant in atom, but the prime constituents of a heavenly-milky disk." The individual verse as a working organelle in the cell of a larger work. The goal is more for a single Dickinsonian proposition than "a suite of carved masterworks".
16
"BIND TOGETHER SUCH SPARKS INTO THE ONE OPAL!"
Summary and review.

Urbanism (Not Urbanism)--Concluded

ST. LUCIA URBANISM
All public light fixtures are replaced with agglomerations of candle-holders. Citizens pay a yearlong "wax tax", compelled to continually donate candles to neighborhood distribution centers in order to keep the streets lit. Local children (ages 6-14) are gainfully employed in maintaining the candles; girls march in processions of ten, carefully lighting them, while boys stand by in formation, water-pails at the ready.

TULIPOMANIACAL URBANISM
Portable shelters are issued by the government, offered to anyone who might want them. There are forty-something distinct lines available, each containing between seven and ten cosmetic variations on a basic model (something like jockey silks). Outside of this readily available array, there are any number of special editions, offered either for a limited time through rehabilitated warehouse/storefronts--or as rewards for secretly witnessed meritorious acts--or as rewards for any chosen random action (28th person through door X on 28th Street on the 28th of March.) The scarcity and variability of these items propels a furor: citizens constantly exchange shelters, barter for one another's shelters, pull around their own shelters (now to display them, now to obscure them). Permanent dwellings are largely abandoned; seen from above, colorful shells constantly shuffle themselves in the streets and open spaces.

COCKTAIL-DRUM URBANISM
Mixed-use planning is taken to its logical conclusion; separate rooms within buildings are apportioned in order to create microcosmic neighborhoods inter mures. To reach a hotel room, the enterprising sleeper must first get through a laundry, a teahouse, and a tax-preparation service.

BILLINGSGATE URBANISM
All public statuary is removed and replaced with identically-scaled foam copies. Citizens can visit their scorn upon the simulacra: easily gouging in graffiti, sawing off heads, or removing riders from their horses. Moreover, they may post notes of mockery upon the foam--attacking their their neighbors, their elected officials, and their fellow man in terms of foul contempt.

TOBACCO URBANISM
The timetable of the built environment is altered so that buildings may be conjured in a matter of days out of a fixed vocabulary of prefabricated parts, and then disassembled slowly and methodically over a standard course of time. Whereas the constructors worked in haste and obscurity, the destroyers will work in daylight under the terms of a scrupulous choreography. Crowds will gather outside to cheer these ritual demolitions. In addition to being thrilled and edified, the public will also be given a visible index of the passage of time.

CYPRESS URBANISM
Lines of settlement rake across the country in fixed channels. Immense brooding shells begin at the coast, progressively half-sheltering slightly smaller iterations of the same forms, terminating at the opposite border in a scattering of rounded sukkahs. Humans are dispersed throughout this array based on the results of an extensive written questionaire concerning their space preferences.

NARCOLEPTIC URRBANISM
Ready access to sleeping facilities is taken to be the greatest possible good; whereby entryways, benches, and window-ledges are optimized for the comfort of the weary passerby, with leather cushions and coils of bedsheet rolled up like garden hoses. As a last resort for the exhausted, pavements and grates are rubberized, with reams of newspaper set out in neat bales.

Wherein I Solve The White Mystery

It seems that the only necessary element for the creation of a mystery is application of the label "mystery"; that is, that any simple act classed outside of conventional norms can lend its setting more than its ostensible share of scrutiny. So, our modern-day mystery novel can add interest to any period, any geographic region, through the shortest possible expedient: a murder. A murder, being horrible enough to hold attention but not abominable enough to deflect it, seems an ideal light to hold to the otherwise dim outlines of any prosaic landscape or society. In other words: the ignoble can take the opportunity to march into view close on the heels of the parading return-of-the-repressed.

Scaling the observation down, a mere ambiguity of trait or motive may attract such interest on a smaller, less official scale. Certain simple products become fathomless confusions of elusive taste and racial unease. Such insertions of the inexplicable not only beguile the young, but tend to inculcate a taste for ambiguity for its own sake (and, one suspects, unpleasantness for its own sake).

Speaking of confections, elusive taste and racial unease: an nth generation laughingstock.

Quotidiana

I was being harangued at the bar the other night.

"You see," he said, "that every itinerary is itself a place. You may move from one apartment to another three blocks away, and find that you are no longer in the same neighborhood; not because you've crossed a border, but only because the base sequence you encounter in your comings and goings has changed. What can seem bucolic from one angle can be nothing but paving and pigeon from another; oases become wholly habitual, and hideaways become theaters. The very in-between places that charmed in their irrelevance have become quotidiana."



I know all about quotidiana. I can quote it chapter and verse: to wring out the sponge when you're done with the dishes, to make long phone calls on Thursday nights, to run the dryer 55 minutes on hot,to reach the cafe before 9 on Saturday mornings (if you want to duck the crowd). These actions, even, are functionally somewhere where I've been sitting too long.

Patently Untrue Statements

I've made a few. You can't say that you minded; the worst that they could have done is take up space, and there's enough space in the world.

Something patently untrue is precious. It brings out the hunter in you. You spy it between the leaves, in a clearing. It's easy to hit.

By giving you this untruth, I have given you the opportunity to bring out your keen common sense. The more you keep that common sense at hand, the more sensible you feel.

You really ought to thank me!

There Is A Song, The Song I Want

It is processional. The sense of the performance corresponds to any unit in a parade--it approaches, pauses to be taken in, and moves on. It is likewise made of quiet and bright components, the sort that can make racket together.

A typical method: you'd empty water onto a snare drum, then strike it.

It has a certain keyed character, operating between definite junctures--so the song is its own index. It's scored thematically, but these themes are graced by felicities, first-thoughts, and side conversations. You could see in it some humanists revisiting the bare of the Twenties, bringing a lilt from the Nineties. Or a neighborhood's girls and boys on a Sunday, chanting down the void.

Think of it in company terms. Oratory and pleasant silences. Then oratory and pleasant silences. An all-day roundtable, with shuffled participants, the subject being _________. End result: an impromptu invitation to the public on watermarked paper.

It depicts the frame of reportage, while omitting the picture; so it shows vast lines across nearly nothing, with no view of the acting pen. It will translate easily across scales (an engineer's scale; an architect's scale).

Nonetheless: it takes less time to hear it than to read this post.

Why We Committed It To Tape

Because we didn't want to care to fully hold it, and so sheathed it, and jettisoned it.

It shared our mood so well that we wanted to share it with you.

We're very confused and wanted to be confused again in the future.

It deserved to be only what it was at the time.

We knew it was economical since it told a truer story in a shorter time.

It was the shortest way to a band of holograms.

We want to put a composite in the market, and assign resulting value to our own respective contributions.

It is a viable organelle, for an appropriate cell, for the growing cultural body.

It isn't here very much if it isn't there.

It didn't share our mood, and so we translated it to better speaking terms.

Bag Full Of Shot

I pray in my dream to be a poacher, and to run at some hundred sorts of game on this estate--all the subtle and variegated things, a tactic at least to levy against each one. Snares at a flexible tempo, rods camouflaged and dipped in the water, rags fitted snug over smoking barrels, and barrels with their lids pried off.

Houndsteeth and buckled boots and bristling leashful of hounds, on a smoky November day--I'd like to be a thief, a blackjack, against that and of it.

Procedurals

The two of us have in common an unreflective love of long, slightly varied series. I don't know if it's a function of our culture, or of organized capital, of consequent formal lines of product, and so, and so--but we both find that what we really crave is not a continuing development across dimensions, a great and varied work, but a single finite line of production. Its various products represent a formal approach applied to a series of objects or sites, themselves relatable along a pre-existing thread (even if tenuous).

It is a great thing to come across a new or unknown component in a common series. But the happiest times we can remember have come with discovering some new series, up until then wholly occluded from us--strange compounds parceling out physics, biology, and
geometry, in terms that urgently announce themselves to any desiring body.

Uru Dance Party

I hope I don't bore anyone when I have to run over all the details from the party last night. Each of the details from last night. It's just so good to hear strangers come forth and speak for themselves; they are fearless, and then some of them are sick. Wine gives you a free field. Women give you a free field. Song gives you a free field.

But I don't like making it to the early morning, when the situation simply turns base.

Less You Or Less

For instance, I'll tell you that I spent today mulling that particular minimalism that didn't trouble itself to excess with perfections. That is, it would leave an erasure on and not buy more spotless paper. If it set about to make a line, it would make the line once, and not care to draw it again. It would love, even, the humps that slid under the ruler, and its pencil's breaking leads.



I called this "the ringing grid", and I thought about it often back then. That the structural idea could move, and resound, when caught in physical circumstance. How could an idea subsist anyways?--were it not obstructed, misunderstood, deflected, so on--like a singular impact that would die in an instant, were it not seconded and thirded by the area of air that makes it a sound.



All of which is--in that dreary humanist realm that all things get annexed to--one devised measure of comfort against the fleshly frustrations that trouble clear thoughts.

"C'mon, Doopa!"

We're currently pitching "C'mon, Doopa!", an hour-long dramedy set in the post-industrial suburbs of Boston. The show centers around JV QB Christopher "Doopa" Doomanian and his family: brother Frankie (whose nagging catchphrase gives the show its title), mother Rochelle, father Victor, and enigmatic uncle Champy. However, the show's radius takes in their entire neighborhood (an overgrown cul-de-sac), as well as the high school that Doopa and Frankie attend.

The show takes its starting point from the assorted family sagas of the past few years (especially of the "Southie" variety), but incorporates several key differences. Most notably, the show engages in drastic (if gradual) shifts in tone over the course of a season; some episodes present a mix of low-key family comedy and minor scholastic mishaps that could easily air on the Disney Channel, whereas others engage in depths of ultra-realist reportage (one episode is to be a wholly plotless real-time depiction of Frankie's study hall period), depravity (the strange impulses afflicting Doopa's sweetheart Lynn), and Jacobean intrigue (Champy's relentless quest to be elected to the school board). In short, the show seeks to assemble a holographic portrait of human reality by cleaving it into its constituent fictions, and examining them one by one.

HOWEVER, it should be understood that the primary aim of "Doopa" is to present the assorted milieux of Milltown Massachusetts without the mediation clear empathetic points of reference (save for the assorted narrative conventions). There are no pontifications--no ostentatious good taste--no encounters with sublimities. Morals assume a paramount importance, but one of neutral valence: there are no incitements to the true or the good in "Doopa", only an acute awareness of the continual moral calculus of quotidian existence.

We hope to attract Joanna "Jojo" Levesque for the role of Lynn.

He's A Libran

There is one advantage to having no firm position, which is being able to occasionally claim an alignment with correctness--that dialectical medium which flutters between the ends of the argument.

Long Accounting

...I'd start the Long Accounting movement to run far-sighted cost-benefit analyses for corporate entities; to tell them in the beigest terms to draft empathetic, ecologically-minded, egalitarian charters. On our part, any emotional appeals, or appeals to virtue, would be discarded in favor of the advancement of a simple factual proposition: that the attainment of the greatest sustainable density of the most affluent over the widest demilitarized area ensures the highest potential profit for any given corporate entity over significant extents of time. All non-essential resources, the thinking would go, should accordingly be diverted into efforts to prepare this fruitful field.

The successful implementation thereof would inevitably result in a near-instantaneous reallocation of resource and value so as to create classless masses of free and sensible consumers, their conflicts enacted in one benign ceremony or another. Impersonal, massive entities--the surviving corporates--would provide a mute, self-sustaining infrastructure, a skeleton for the spanning human community.

One thing: the place of the creator in such a society--in any truly harmonious society--would naturally be to mar that harmony at key intervals, so that the rest could pull themselves tight together once more to fix the failure.

"Rude Mechanicals"

1.
If sand dollars are the most insipid of the animals, it is because they barely have space to be animals. I've never seen the flesh of a sand dollar, no doubt because I'm not meant to; they are intended as inert tokens. Of what? A vacationer's manna.

They are only made as animals because there is no expedient geological means to produce them. Their flesh lives its term to produce the shell, and having done so has the grace to melt away. The fleshly sand dollar, then, is a little sort of stagehand.

2.
In the common imagination, construction workers heckle the rest of humanity as they make their buildings. They are lusty and fearless; while they are never seen to work the results of their work are more evident than anyone's. These workers, then, act as the visible exemplars of a split between the careful performances of the social realm and the dreamy acts of the workaday. They can be seen to directly build humanity's haptic unities out of its wispier notions and fancies.

Ferry 'Cross The Mersey

I love a ferry for its constraints. It turns sailing and all wild navigation placid; it is endeavor itself put out to pasture. I'm perverse enough to stand on the deck of a ferry and make it out to be another, slower moving sidewalk.

We've had a few conversations where we've gotten enthusiastic about urban boating. That you could paddle to work on a canal, put in at a bare little dock, and walk up into the hustle of the city. It's nice enough, but it's fine too as is to just make a break with a recreational ferry, to somewhere unnecessary. The pilot's quotidian can at least be your secession, if you don't overindulge.

(Given that we're always having to step into each other's territory, we might as well make interesting territory to step into, OK?)

Kindergarten Questions

1. WHAT DO DOLDRUMS LOOK LIKE?

Lumps of congealed water, bobbing slowly on quick sea.

2. WHY ARE LEOPARDS SEXY?

Each of their spots is a semi-enclosed pleasure cell, opaque walls containing pocket-universes of erotic possibility. Imagine the cave where Dido and Aeneas weathered the storm, multiplied indefinitely across an arid plain.

3. WHO TEACHES IN THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS?

Precisely those persons and things that do not intend to teach.

Sunday Mornings

1.
The paramount thing is to put off breakfast as long as you can. Avoiding dressing or bathing helps, but you really can't begin working until you've had your breakfast. To cultivate the leisurely Sunday morning, then, you place that breakfast at some indefinite point in the future.

Present involvements and pertinent thoughts are batted away.

Five books to read for five pages each, and then a drift through their illustrations. One side of a record of classical music, to ignore. Any inconsiderable bodily motions--sheet-kicking, pillow-building, and eye-rubbing. A look at the wondering dial of sunbeams through the room. Overall, put-on notions of seriousness are essayed and quickly abandoned. It's a style to enable writing of precisely the present sort: a chain of single half-fogged propositions conveyed by the sentence fragment.

2.
The author, having spent some years refining this practice, decides that it has been perfected, and must now be made to dwindle away. Instead of budgeting to spend a fourteenth of her waking time entirely absent of contemptible cares, she seeks to wholly assume a better, more engrossing class of concerns. Her customary miserliness demands a value for the valueless time she has spent, and she constructs one accordingly: a working understanding of everyone's leisure, of everyone's in-between time, of everyone's unchronicled time as a body-in-bed. Not as a thinker, nor a lover, but as a slow volputuary.

She can then emerge with her half-thoughts, with native intelligence to sell.