cris cheek wrote:
> What interests me is the publication and the implications of that > event for publishing and writing.
Haven't brought myself to read any of it yet, but did enjoy David Foster
Wallace's story "Lyndon" in his "Girl With Curious Hair" -
"My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I own the fucking floor you stand on
boy." It begins with those words from Senator Johnson & ends with an
aide's Haitian lover dying, of aids, in the arms of & in bed with
Vice-Pres Johnson. Fiction. Take it or leave it.
The Starr report: alleged/facts. Can we take or leave them?
I phoned my dad in Coventry this morning - he was tickled that the Starr
report is featured in the Observer on the Sports' pages.
To speak a little to the public-private (I avoided the pun!!) cris
mentioned in an earlier note, the Aug 20th LRB has Jacqueline Rose's
"The Cult of Celebrity". Towards the end she asks these questions:
"Can you have public life without idealisation? And then can you have
idealisation without sadism? What would a world look like in which we
did not seek out people to carry our own shame?...Is there finally a
link not only between celebrity and shame but but between celebrity and
fascism?"
I do not expect to find tact or discretion in the National Enquirer. I
wonder if any of the details in the S report were necessary. But of
course this is a battle for the public sympathy & the Pres has
maintained too much support there for the righteous prosecutor to
stomach.
To get back to poetry & discretion. A personal favourite erotic poem is
a John Newlove after the Sanskrit, with which I'll attempt to redeem
this post.
FIVE POEMS AFTER SANSKRIT
4. Through tears she saw the lovely
masses of clouds
grouping in a dark sky: 'Love,
if you leave me
now...' she said: holding me: her
legs moving: words
turn away helplessly from
what she did then.
Cheerio, Pete.
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