What are you reading?

Vanessa Place

Archeology, p. 28

We must ask ourselves what purpose is

ultimately served by this suspension of

all the accepted unities

if, in the end, we return to the unities

that we pretended to question at the outset.

In fact,

the systemic erasure of all given unities

enables us first of all to restore to

the statement the specificity

of its occurrence, and to show

that discontinuity

is one of those great accidents

that create cracks

not only in the geology of history,

but also in the simple fact

of the statement;

it emerges in its historical irruption;

what we try to examine is the incision

that it

makes, that

irreducible--— and very often tiny

—--emergence.

However banal it may be,

however unimportant its consequences may appear to be,

however quickly it may be forgotten after its appearance,

however little heard or however badly deciphered

we may suppose it to be,

a statement is always an event

that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning

can quite exhaust.

It is certainly a strange event:

first, because on the one hand

it is linked to the gesture of

writing or to the articulation of

speech,

and also on the other hand

it opens up to itself a residual existence

in the field of a memory, or in the materiality of manuscripts,

books, or any other form of recording;

secondly, because, like every

event,

it is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, and reactivation;

thirdly, because it is linked not only to the situations that provoke it, and to the consequences

that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in accordance with a quite different modality, to the statements that precede and

follow it.

Homage to Sextus Propertius

(What Makes a Lady)

Shades of magnolia, brown-bagged ghosts of O'Hara

It's in your groove I'd talk talk

I who arrived from the near front

and the dance into Atlanta

And the flowerless young ladies'll like them

And there will be a crowd of young ladies

paying a call on my call

I'd been made in the shade

Where a girl waits solo for her cholo

These are your photos, from you the voodoo of agoros

Difference of Opinion with frying

she twiddles the spiked wheel of a thermos

selling rich love for cheap apples

She stews stuffed bogs, bakes stones, melts fathers on beach towels

She blinds me with Reverdy and grapeshot clouds

I'll sing more more when this chatter of a girl is exhausted

We'll spin long sweaters out of yarn

whatever she does or says about light women

You will sometimes laminate a lost friend

For it's a custom:

This care for postmen.

Good I am for a dime.

You'll say you went down on same same danger

Lawd I can for a lime

charmingly identical, with the other O'Hara

he did not respect the front desk

and you know it is and you know it is

please repeat with experience

There are enough women to tell

quite enough suitable women

Maybelline, Sarah Lee, darling Jemima

katydids don't, echo's not eternal

no beau's got so deep a tooth, beauty firmly on the hoof

no sigh from god honked from a goose

I'm scared of numbers and stupefaction

Blue soldiers and what never has been

numerical estimates

thundered predestiny

crab apples

shot full of importance

And still a girl adorns the gods

My genius is no more than a girl