Saturday, August 18, 2018

taste, any taste, so long as it's strong



Reading the tweet by Robert Minto in which he tells me, us, that “increasingly I enjoy the aesthetic opinions of people with *a* taste, any taste, so long as it's strong and they're articulate. Those people are the ones who show you new ways to be" -- I thought, oh, advertising, we want advertising; we are unhappy when it manifests itself insufficiently, when the brand is not evident – this is bad for me -- I will never show anyone a way to be, my taste is very very little, I am less than a new car or a box of butterless butter – and if a person does not have a taste then they are not even flesh, they are cardboard. Even Frankenstein's monster had an opinion.

I should find a thought and espouse it ... I will be angry at texts that do not feature farts. There is a manifesto in that. "Farts are part of LIFE," I write, "why are they not ALSO part of literature?" Every piece of text must have at least one anal utterance unless it is an academic paper: those I will excuse. I write, "A fart is as intimate as we can be with the divine element, Air, and does not the position of the emittance indicate a relationship also with Earth? Throwing open the skylight we establish a deposition to the ground. Nearby there is Water." I’ll follow this up with water wisdom of some kind -- quote: Shelley, Percy B (do you pron. this Bish?): "A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight." A Defence of Poetry, writ. 1821, pub. 1840: posthumous. Everybody will be impressed but we want something more contemporary. Adrienne Rich, why not. "I have always wondered about the leftover | energy, water rushing down a hill | long after the rains have stopped," use that, from For the Dead, found in (as in, I opened the book and looked for the word "water" because the title sounded as if it would lead to water) Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971 - 1972, pub. 1973, "Co-winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1974." Water: done and sounds unassailable. Water is life and poetry. Fire, I don't know -- fire? I could fuzz something about the energy of life being essentially multiplicitous, composed of opposites and contrasts and everything in the middle, therefore firelike as well as waterlike (n.b., this connection to the convincing earlier extrapolations about water will be worth half the argument right here) and this energy runs through all of our bodies but especially through the anal-neighbourly presence of two clumps that do not pick anything up* or transport us anywhere and instead hang there with energy popping through the fat "as a flame leaps (leapeth sounds better? too pretentious?) between gum trees, therefore FIRE, the plump arse is a natural HOTBED, plural units cry out for transference and fire transfers itse" ... no, I dunno about Fire. I think I could get away with it though.


* there must be someone with good musculature who could do this.


2 comments:

  1. Strong and articulate! I am inspired to now locate all of my literary opinions within the realm of the four humors. I will be fierce and fearless and probably betake myself to twitter.

    I had also begun to write the following: "On the other hand, I sort of take Minto's point. Most people who write about anything don't really say anything, and a strongly held opinion is at least something to " and at that point I realized that no, wanting someone's opposing strong opinion to cast my own opinion at is merely pride, and not really worthwhile, and maybe Minto should just shut up about other people and realize that "new ways to be" is a fantasy, or a form of vanity tourism. I am becoming a Beckett character.

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    1. "The plot is strong and the protagonist appealing, but there's not enough Phlegm at the end and the second chapter is way too short on μέλαινα χολή." I think this works.

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