As artist and critic John Kelsey noted a few years ago, one can hardly be blamed for thinking that literature, in all its liberation and excess, has already been obviated by something called the internet!Īs it mobilizes and gains speed, art becomes a lot more like what literature once was (which is a strange thought now, when literature is itself being superseded by digital culture): in its time, literature was a massive info leak that eroded disciplinary hierarchies, overflowing national borders and property lines alike. This is the reason we like writing that is literary rather than not, that is not, therefore, purely professional, scientific, didactic, legal, personal, academic, commercial, factual, or whatever else. Literature’s transgression of boundaries (legal, generic, national, stylistic, etc.) allegedly establishes its value and/or goodness. However, their boundaries are somewhat trickier to establish than one might imagine at first glance, and it’s in this that their peculiar literariness inheres. Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, novelist, and critic, in his recent The Pink Trance Notebooks, says, “- don’t / keep saying ‘Stabat Mater’ / as if it meant anything -.” Also: “I wrote / down every word the / drunk jocks muttered.” “I am the love / child of Las Vegas / and Belarus.” “I made a film / (Warhol-style) of the child / psychologist and me / orally grappling.” And: “am I / squirrel-like?”Īphorisms please us. “My vagina hurts when I watch gymnastics,” says Chrissy Teigen. “In love, he who heals first, heals best,” says La Rochefoucauld. They don’t touch what they cannot eat,” says Karl Lagerfeld. The aphorism is careful, rather than abrupt, and frequently warm. Something (even a great deal of something) has been left out, but the aphorism is not merely or only a fragment or piece, something bit haphazardly off from something else. Its brevity is a performance and thus requires skill, also a source of its sympathy. It slinks shut, sometimes with a little snap or tone. inventory #45078.I THINK OF the aphorism as a sympathetic form.
His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity. Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. Freed from the conventions of prose, this concatenation of the author's intimate observations and desires lets loose a poetics of ecstatic praxis�voiced with aplomb and always on point. The resulting sequence of 34 assemblages reflects Koestenbaum's unfettered musings, findings, and obsessions. FROM THE PUBLISHER-THE PINK TRANCE NOTEBOOKS is the product of the year Wayne Koestenbaum stopped keeping the traditional journal he had maintained for three decades and began a series of trance notebooks as a way to reflect an intensified, unmoored consciousness.
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