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"When he said (in 'Posture of Unease') But for all you I Have neglected, ignored, Left to stew in your own juices, Not been that friend that is approaching, I ask forgiveness, a song new like rain. Please sing it to me. I felt the 'open' interpretation of this as an address to the reader was being played with in an uninteresting way -- I couldn't get many other readings going, yet years of reading Ashbery had left me uncomfortable with that one. I felt I'd been cried wolf to one more time," Yes, as a matter of fact this one stuck in my gut too. Empty gesture. Like, how can we sing this new song to you John? What is Flow Chart doing? I read this comic once where these two groups of aliens were chasing each other through time. Eventually, far in the future, one group put their machine into overdrive - programmed it to go forward such a huge number of years - 25 billion or something - that there was some doubt as to wheter there would be any future left for them to travel in. Actually, that turned out to be the point - they were hoping that time would be shaped like a loop, and that they would emerge in the distant past! Ashes seems to be me to be trying this sorta trick in Flow Chart - to be intent on driving so far into the subjective details of his own life that he reaches the subjective details of everyone's life, which I s'pose you could objective details. Sorta like an ethnomethodological poetics... Another metaphor for an aspect of Flow Chart: Miles Davis' huge jazz-rock fusion things from the early 70s, where he just plays and plays. The details are contingent, it is the TECHNIQUE that is on show, that is the 'content', almost. Sorry I can't go into this further now, have to make some toast. Cheers Scott ===== "Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life, we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%