{"id":1369,"date":"2006-01-13T10:17:23","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T18:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2006\/01\/je_mamuse\/"},"modified":"2006-01-13T10:17:23","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T18:17:23","slug":"je_mamuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2006\/01\/je_mamuse.html","title":{"rendered":"JE M’AMUSE"},"content":{"rendered":"

By way of introduction: I typed and retyped roughly 50 words in columns from the beginning of several texts. I then proceded to read across the columns and typed them again, trusting the words only. They showed me writers who were fed up with Reality. This was the way I saw it long ago: “A short blast of their machine guns, understand, and we talked better than their guns.”
\n\"JAN<\/a>Words may amuse by exhibiting the ridiculous. If their dying images attract the intellect, it is because they earn their living in a dying galaxy. (“We just kept going until the thing happened in trance & horrible agony. Lightyears filled with compassion for you all.”)
\nChinese classics were never a one-way trip, not when juggling words seemed exactly right. On the edge, orbiting, wounded, paying dues. News of suicide hit me as it cared. So I typed and retyped these columns to talk.
\nI lay there riddled with the springs and traps of inspiration, courtesy of Brion Gysin<\/strong><\/font><\/a>. Streaming holes of what we breathe, terminal holes which formed in the air, in we who breathe in words. And words protest. They came in, hovering above us, a sort of antipray coughing white cloud of ruined sex — Thee, the Out-word in action.
\nI was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered down in gray bone-dry “heroin words.” (“No, these are not the fossilized bones near the shores of Lake Rudolph. Addicts talk I am talking about.”)
\n\"1969<\/a>The patterns smelled surgical, visual & aural, racing alive again. Smelled like cotton & pistachio nuts and drifted away in one direction to sounds and colored money, in the other to my skin of conspicuously more brain waves … minute electrical discharges oscillating with Dr. Vassily Lewis, who wrote in a messy hotel room: “Activity can be measured accurately. The pinhole has been graphically recorded where medieval epidemics are occluding.”
\nWe were holed up in Superville. He brushed a straight and certain exercise of authority through a lock of rust-colored hair. He used words, authority words, courtesy of Bill Burroughs<\/strong><\/font><\/a>. He uncovered the skull of a man more habit-forming than heroin, a creature who lived the use of words more than two and a half million years ago, where colorless words formed the bomb-throwers. The future will go next.
\nEnter ZZ, flipped, saying: “I gotta learn no-chance nugget voice of consciousness.” How to use words? She stopped for about two minutes, then snorted out, thinking: “What are words anyway? A few banshee yells.” She started to fall, and it frightened her. She haunted the subway and felt very lonely. Deprived of both outlets (sex & words), she became a ritilin freak who’d been drummed out<\/i>. So she wandered, straight, and ended up in Tangier. “I was so serious, it was a monologue.”
\n— The Tireless Staff of Thousands<\/i> took the day off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By way of introduction: I typed and retyped roughly 50 words in columns from the beginning of several texts. I then proceded to read across the columns and typed them again, trusting the words only. They showed me writers who were fed up with Reality. This was the way I saw it long ago: “A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-m5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}