Ostranenie The world as the possibility of a text or so I may have imagined An opposite illusion accelerating the growth for the first time in a generation We were served spectacular pizza and vodka in four languages Access to computers and telecommunications equipment Thus the romance of breaking into multinational networks as a form of subversion With travel grants from the university to attend the symposium On juxtaposition and double vision is not a negation but an achievement Causing numerous instances of panic like being in love with love Lost in the boundary we were now a long way from beatnik days I was no longer certain which part of the city we were in It was late and not enough in this elegant apartment Floating in indeterminacy penned where the trains pass through To the end of empty into reality with nuclear weapons and a subway system As a vehicle for its own self-scrutiny within the flattening of history In buildings in the sedimentation of discourse in communality It is hard to give up the account by circumstances of time and place We stayed up all night to wait for the lights during long drinks When a door opened to a party in progress oblivious to us Things appear out of order in a new environment implying the city I read my telegram in front of the noise and hope it will reappear for Aaron Begg sugarhigh!          Get drunk before the day begins    Architecture in ruins was always burnin’ ‘Cause today I’ve found my friends    Here to break away the chains                Where it all ends the feelin’          Of belongin’ to your dreams when             The pad throwin’ up gang signs And I keep funds comin’ in          Fun to lose and to pretend       Wallace Stevens waitin’ to get shot             Clothes do not make the man    Historical shudder experienced by my libido       It gets funky when you got                A theory of the subject and    Street names and correspondence with Adorno             Theses with a flurry of buckshots       The radio talks about a revolution Mulatto cinema, urban albino, a mosquito                No walls, only bodies bein’ found       Rock around the bloc flyin’ off    Pessimists, picketin’ masses, separated communists, apocalyptic          Police comin’ straight from the underground Library of money, arise children of             The university as diapason of music                A poet could be a band Cities dancin’ on the backs of                The poor in candy-colored linguistic districts       Antilyrical abandonment of the antisystematic sun    The clocks will all run backwards                A memory from century to century          The white cop without a gun And a badge, reach the bourgeois             A seminar on ‘68 and philosophy       Lucky to be much too young             A summer long: Debord and Godard          On commodity fetishism bein’ left empty       They have the authority to kill             You’re still alive, tyranny’s bloody narrative          Is raised against us, melancholy sex                Between a bridge and a fall       From the sheer face of love          Let fury have the hour indexed    To Marx havin’ nothin’ at all And all the aristocrats will have                Two heads, it’ll be fine, students             And ghosts of lamp-posts, dominated sectors Auteurs and specters of sophisticated motherfuckers for Joshua Clover Autographeme I suffer no less from a wound, if I know in advance that it will soon have healed. I found it surprising, the memories evoked less a reminiscence of years than on the issues that underlie those memories, tugging away from unities toward a form in advance of the tale, the original series. The context commands. Interruptions to daily life, the substance of it: the way things went, as characteristic and definitive as a person’s gait or way of drinking from a cup. The termination of a hierarchy, blurring the distinction between theater and life, how to know the difference? In imitation of peers I typed up my notes: everything is in flux, everything is an influence, the divine organization of hodgepodge, the space of alterity. Parallel, overlapping monologues, not a paring away of branches from trees but a letting come forth to hear what is not coming through, a roulette wheel flashing never knowable mixes of fate and chance through the casino-like spaces one grows up in. Across possible divides I had to commit to not understanding what I’d thought I’d understood. It’s uncomfortable engaging with tradition: its weight when yoked to the shadow of local life, turned inward toward the self, outward toward the world. In proximity but not the same, becoming tighter, an inexorable clamp that holds together what it no less powerfully strives to break apart: love? It was as much to control fear as for a discovery of exteriority, the embodiment of thinking as distinct from thought. The departure for a fact, a fantasy, never imagining how lucky one is. Broken apart, there is no original form to return to. Now I was participating. I had done this damage, bonds forever broken, henceforth invincible. Stained by time, at its own pace. for Melissa Mack