New (and last) novel by Robert Bolaño - VERY mind-blowing.
Recencja w Technopolis/Polityka
America is where only memory divides the present from the future, and where the unconscious dreams of the people who live here understand that the Declaration of Independence was signed after Hiroshima, not before, and neither has yet happened (33).
People with nuclear imagination not only conceive of the abyss and confront it, but are liberated by it; everything they do is infused with the blood of an armageddon with no god, a judgement day in which the guilty and the innocent are damned with equal cosmic merriment. … In the process they force the crowd to consider matters as they do, confronted with the truth that every moment is potentially irrevocable (42).
… the generation of writers .. growing up with a television culture, the most pernicious influence of which is not its inanity or even its visuality but that visuality’s want of metaphor, the niggling literalness of its archetypes. We’ve insisted on writing as though we expect never really to mean anything to anyone again, as though with an unstated loathing for anyone who would value what we say. Afraid of seeming sentimental, we’ve risked no passion; afraid of seeming pretentious, we’ve risked no scope. We’ve written little books that masquarede as large ones, literature for the blackboards, appaled by its own juices, that doesn’t deserve to capture the imagination of the public because it has none of its own to offer in return (43).
I didn’t want to write about this or what followed. Guayaquil, Lima, Santiago and all the others I didn’t see. The easiest victories are the most costly in the end.
I have blown a hole in time with firecracker. Let others step through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons led to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.
I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.
After LA Times:
Rumors have begun circulating that Thomas Pynchon is at work on a new novel. And the rumors are pretty specific. Author Steven Moore has spoken to someone connected to Pynchon:
The rep told me it’s around 400 pages, and is a kind of noir detective story set in the 1960s, with lots of psychedelia as background. How groovy is that!
The famously reclusive Pynchon has never been known for working fast. Fans waited 17 years after “Gravity’s Rainbow” for “Vineland,” and then another seven for “Mason & Dixon.” In 2006 — after nine more years — “Against the Day” was published. That novel was, for some, a return to Pynchon at his best: funny, complicated, absurd, smart. Others had kind of a love-hate relationship to the book, like “The Economist,” which wrote:
Is it any good ? Baffling, yes. Clever and inventive in a cackling, manic, mad-professor kind of way, yes. Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry, yes. Rambling, pompous and often completely incomprehensible — yes to all that too.
Packed with scientific ephemera, “Against the Day” was massive — 1,085 pages — and came out less than two years ago. Some readers were exhausted by it. Pynchon, certainly, wouldn’t be blamed for taking a rest. But here it is, 22 months since his last book, and we’re hearing news of a novel in progress that has not just a premise (noir), not just a tone (psychedelic), but a page count! And it’s due next year, in 2009!
This rumor started on a William Gaddis mailing list. And while it might be nothing more than an Internet rumor, the idea of an Internet rumor fits so well into Pynchon’s themes of paranoia and secret information that fans can’t help but embrace it.
i am a stranger
lurking alone in my own vicious wilderness
while the meat in my chest
squeezes and teases a hulking hunger
groping in motion
balance is but a shimmering notion
and lurching compelled
my soul in its special hell of wet mortal limits
perpetually thirsting
but i bask in a beautiful byproduct
from twisting torque of dichotomy
what my eyes do see
in this spilling, dead wicked desert
it dances
born of babble
is now raison d’etre for the rabble
i sing my soul
with tongue
a sword in the sunlight
thrashing and flashing
glossolalia
Richard Morgan’s latest is a fantasy novel - a dreadful thought for those actually in love with his blend of future noir, cyberpunk and thriller from practically all previous novels. Good news is - it’s all good here. The Steel Remains is very very brilliant, very very off-beat, and very very non-typical. In fact, it is one of those that at first seem fantasy to the core (dragons, magic, spells, blah blah blah), but, if read carefully, move more and more towards the sf end of the fantastic spectrum. (This generic identification is further complicated by a number of very explicit, if not outwardly pornographic, passages.) There are very few fantastic elements that cannot be rationally explained and contextualized. Like in any Gene Wolfe novel (but especially The Book of the Long Sun cycle), as the narrative proceeds, tiny, almost subconscious hints (Morgan, of course, being THE master of interstitial context creation) are being dropped, which constantly nibble at the edges of our understanding of what is REALLY happening here and WHAT KIND of the text it is that we’re reading.
The Steel Remains is essentially a story of three major characters, whose disparate streams of narration slowly converge towards the end and the climactic confrontation. Ringil Eskiath is a nihilistic gay war hero (now, read that combination again), whose sexual intensity is matched by his fathomless spite for any and all institutions and causes other than fighting to death. kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal (when you read it first you think Morgan is taking a cheap piss at those fantasy naming conventions) is a half-breed Kiriath, the last remaining member of the race of engineers which has departed from the novel’s physical plane (you hear the distant twinkling of the Elves’ sailing away in LOTR but the circumstances of the Kiriath’s arrival, stay and leave are radically different from Tolkien’s epic) long before the commencement of the story. And she’s lesbian but do not expect descriptions here, which combined with Ringil’s exposures (pun intended) is a very clear indication of Morgan’s undermining of fantasy’s sexual politics. Finally, there’s Egar the Dragonbane - a Majak steppe nomad, one of the handful people alive who ever killed a dragon, and a wielder of a double-ended staff lance, which is the last weapon anyone would ever like to see on their opponent, with the predilection for big-breasted young women. All three had met and fought together before, became separated by life and circumstances, and reunite at the close of the narrative.
Even from this little it is apparent that Morgan plays with fantasy conventions fast and loose - very much in the tradition of Stephen Donaldson’s Covenant novels but - I would argue - in the ways which cut much deeper. Where Donaldson often went for the negative mirror image of fantasy accouterments, Morgan complicates, scandalizes and strips away the genre’s moral certainties. But then again this might not be the genre at all. The medieval garb is here alright, but apart from that most elements of the plot can be rationalized. The dwenda can be a race of interdimensional travelers in hyperspace (which interpretation is further strengthened in a single - but very telling - mention of the attire/suit that Seethlaw wears as he kidnaps Ringil). The Scale Folk and the Kiriath would be alien races - the former reptilian, the latter humanoid (or an offshot of the human tree). The several Majak visitations by what the tribe consider demons and gods could be easily construed as instances of highly-advanced teleportation. We even get the world’s equivalent of AIs in the form of Helmsmen, one of which/whom the departing Kiriath left for Archeth’s use in her home, and the other still fitted in the old model of the Kiriath warship. All these interpretations are not immediately obvious and it is possible to read The Steel Remains as pure fantasy but the same cognitive mechanism that is at work in The Book of the Long Sun is apparent here. Also, not all lines of such thinking can be brought home yet - the novel can easily be the first installment of something longer, a possibility mentioned at one point on Morgan’s site although not marketed at this point.
Morgan also very cunningly evades the clear identification of the physical space as a secondary world. Only a handful of place names are invoked and no customary map (which is typically an important element in structuring the imagining of fantasy worlds in the same way in which the early maps of America worked upon the European mind) is provided. For all the strange sounding names this could well be the third planet from the sun. The same indistinctness applies to time frames. In fact, several mentions of the times when swords will be only museum pieces or soaring bridges will rise from where now there are marshes seem to vaguely suggest that perhaps this is some kind of Earth’s past (alternative or not). Equally, this could be our distant future - one of yet another cycle of the pendular swing between barbarity and high civilization. Technologically-advanced Kiriath with their submarines and AIs and the dwenda who have overcome the constraints of time and space could then be the visitors from the future-extrapolated world as we know it, which for the characters from The Steel Remains is a past so distant it has overgrown with oblivion and can only be glimpsed through the thickest of all veil of superstition and belief in magic.
Regardless of whether fantasy is the name of the game or a disguise for a more rational narrative, the author’s preoccupations and totems are strongly present. Some of those are evident echoes of passages from previous novels. In Altered Carbon Kovacs threatens his kidnappers with this: You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You don’t fuck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you. In Black Man, Marsalis renders it more succinctly: “‘I told him I’d go back to Mars and find him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Told him COLIN would fund the ticket, there and back. Told him I’d kill him and everyone he cares about.‘” Here, Ringil says to a slave trader: “You make sure they get the message. Because if I do have to come back to Etterkal and ask again, I promise you it’ll make what happened tonight look like minor toothache. I’ll kill you and your whole fucking family, and I’ll burn this place to the ground around the corpses. Then I’ll move on to Findrich and Snarl, and anyone else who gets in my way. I’ll torch the whole fucking neighbourhood if I have to” (192). The cadences are obviously very similar but with Morgan this is not a sign of self-cannibalization but rather of long-running preoccupations.
Ringil is clearly another version of Takeshi Kovacs and Carl Marsalis - a version sufficiently different from his two predecessors to cut a truly fascinating character but also sufficiently compatible with the two in his views for us to see that this is Morgan speaking his - not only narrative, I dare presume - mind. This is especially obvious in the unyielding and caustic criticism of political authority and institutionalized religion. The change of the story paraphernalia notwithstanding, the novel breathes the same violent rhetoric of anti-establishmentism. Like his predecessors, Ringil has a very ambiguous relationship with violence: he is seething with outrage at injustice, pain and death inflicted upon any Other (in this novel mostly religious, ethnic and sexual), and for all his military distinction hates war (see his long rant on 310-311), but he also exudes extreme violence (both physical and verbal) with prejudice in most of his contacts with other characters.
Other trademarks are also present. Racial Blackness features prominently (not only were the Kiriath ebony-skinned but all their machines were also made in that color) as an emblem of both outsider status and certain sublime non-/super-humanity. Technically, Archeth is not as universally hated as Marsalis in Black Man, but her mixed blood and lesbianism make her status triply ambiguous and her exclusion is only tampered by the fact that she remains one of the close advisers of the ruling emperor. Also, the Throne Eternal imperial guard seems to be avatars of the Envoy Corps from the trilogy, even if its members are far more susceptible to religious fanaticism than otherwordlily cynical Kovacs or Todor Murakami.
Having written all the above, The Steel Remains is also a great, fast-paced story with loose ends one could clone at least novellas from and great mastery of language. Then again, Richard Morgan has never been delivering anything else.
PS. In a bout of wild wishful-thinking I imagined Morgan’s all narratives as part of the same spacetime, in which Market Forces is followed by Black Man and, three centuries of narrative time later, by the Kovacs trilogy, all of those capped on either end by The Steel Remains.
Interesting findings about MMORPG gamers - here.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that game playing provides a “significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.” 97% of teens responding to the survey said they played games (75% played weekly or more often), and roughly two-thirds of teens use games as a social experience. The full report (PDF) and the questionnaire with answer data (PDF) are both available for viewing. From the report: “Youth who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing to discussion boards, are more engaged civically and politically. Youth who play games where they are part of guilds are not more civically engaged than youth who play games alone.”
According to the mechanic, another new fight club rule is that fight club will always be free. It will never cost to get in. The mechanic yells out the driver’s window into the oncoming traffic and the night wind pouring down the side of the car: “We want you, not your money.”
The mechanic yells out the window, “As long as you’re at fight club, you’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself.”
The mechanic yells into the wind, “You’re not your name.”
A space monkey in the back seat picks it up: “You’re not your problems.”
The mechanic yells, “You’re not your problems.”
A space monkey shouts, “You’re not your age.”
The mechanic yells, “You’re not your age.”
Here, the mechanic swerves us into the oncoming lane, filling the car with headlights through the windshield, cool as ducking jabs. One car and then another comes at us head-on screaming its horn and the mechanic swerves just enough to miss each one.
Headlights come at us, bigger and bigger, horns screaming, and the mechanic cranes forward into the glare and noise and screams, “You are not your hopes.”
No one takes up the yell.
This time, the car coming head-on swerves in time to save us.
Another car comes on, headlights blinking high, low, high, low, horn blaring, and the mechanic screams, “You will not be saved.”
The mechanic doesn’t swerve, but the head-on car swerves.
Another car, and the mechanic screams, “We are all going to die, someday.”
This time, the oncoming car swerves, but the mechanic swerves hack into its path. The car swerves, and the mechanic matches it, headon, again.
You melt and swell at that moment. For that moment, nothing matters. Look up at the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the horns are blaring around you. The headlights are flashing high and low and high in your face, and you will never have to go to work again.
You will never have to get another haircut.
“Quick,” the mechanic says.
The car swerves again, and the mechanic swerves back into its path.
“What,” he says, “what will you wish you’d done before you died?”
Stylowe połączenie policyjnego thrillera z science fiction, Chrysalis operuje bardziej na poziomie elementów niż całości. David Hoffman, paryski policjant, w otwierającej scenie filmu traci partnerkę (w sensie policyjnym)/żonę - zabójcą jest niejaki Nikolev, powiązywany z szeregiem zaginionych kobiet. Drugi główny wątek owinięty jest wokół znanej kardiolog, która próbując ratować życie ciężko rannej w wypadku córki, wchodzi w konszachty z Nikolevem. Obydwa wątki spina zainteresowanie służb wywiadowczych oraz nie do końca jasna walka agencji rządowych i policyjnych zaś w centrum filmu znajduje się maszyna do wymazywania/nadpisywania wspomnień. I to właśnie pamięć - niezależnie od bardzo stylowej estetyki bliskiej przyszłości filmu - wydaje się być głównym emblematem filmu.
Jej charakter dla miłośników science fiction nie będzie niczym zaskakującym - ludzkie wspomnienia są tu przedstawione jako digitizowalne a więc i manipulowalne. Fakt, że istnieje tylko jeden prototyp maszyny zdolnej do tego rodzaju operacji umożliwił reżyserowi rezygnację z przedstawienia wpływu tego faktu na społeczeństwo. Utracone i sztucznie nabyte wspomnienia Hoffmana i Eleny, rosyjskiej prostytutki (?), odgrywają kluczową rolę w intrydze - to co nie jest do końca dopowiedziane to implikowane konsekwencje istnienia takiej maszyny. Szefostwo policji i wywiadu wspomina jedynie o potencjalnych użyciach i nadużyciach urzązenia przez terrorystów - w rzeczywistości wynalazek ten mówi coś bardziej fundementalnego o naturze naszego umysłu. W tym sensie Chrysalis wpisuje się w długą trajektorię obrazów zaczynającą się przynajmniej od Bladerunnera. Obrazów, które na dobry i na złe czynią nas programowalnymi - przynajmniej jeśli chodzi o wspomnienia. A to z kolei stawia pod znakiem zapytania prawdziwość i namacalność wszelkiego doświadczenia. Chrysalis nie sugeruje bynajmniej żadnych ontologicznych rewolucji (np, że świat jest wielkim komputerem, w którym zarówno my i jak zawartość naszych umysłów to pod/wy-mienialne zera i jedynki) ale i tak wyraźnie grawituje w kierunku dystopii poprzez tentatywne chociażby podważenie nienaruszalności naszych wspomnień.
Sama fabuła jest epizodyczna i spazmatyczna zaś reżysera nie interesują jakiekolwiek bliższe czy dalsze implikacje wynalazku. (Z drugiej strony pod koniec filmu widz nie ma najmniejszych kłopotów z rekonstrukcją zawiłych polityczno-policyjno-osobistych gier.) Jeśli pominąć wprowadzenie wspomnianego gadżetu scenariusz Chrysalis nie wynosi go też w żaden sposób ponad średnią konwencji. To co zdecydowanie wyróżnia film to konsekwentnie budowana atmosfera pewnego zawieszenia i bezczasowości. Oczywiscie w sensie dosłownym czas akcji upływa a wydarzenia mają swoją sekwencję ale subiektywny czas narracji porusza sie skokami, wiele kauzatywnie nieznaczących sekwencji jest wydłużonych i zwolnionych, zaś sceny walk - głównie wręcz - też pokazane są inaczej niż w większości filmow z tego gatunku. W rezultacie dla osób poszukujących wartkiej akcji bedzie to film raczej lekko nudnawy - ci nastawieni bardziej na estetykę ujęć, grę światłem i “obrazowość” znajdą tu wiele okazji do zatrzymania wzroku.
True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we’re all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and-that chillingly neutral word-information. “What goes on inside,” Wallace wrote in “Good Old Neon,” is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant.” The title of Infinite Jest calls to mind the image of Hamlet holding up a skull - that of the jester Yorick, “a fellow of infinite jest” - and Wallace’s literary project was to get something of that infinity within us out where we could see and hear it. This explains his characteristic footnotes and endnotes, his digressions within digressions and his compulsive, exhausting (but never sufficiently exhaustive) piling on of detail. Like the narrator of “Good Old Neon,” he found it “clumsy and laborious . . . to convey even the smallest thing,” and his writing bulged and strained against practical limitations.
This from the surprisingly brilliant piece in Newsweek.
David Foster Wallace committed suicide last Friday, September 12th. Reports here, here, and here. If you have not, this may be a good time to read his Infinite Jest.
A part of his 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College seems very foreboding in the light of the above:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
AND - there is this very long thread on Metafilter, which is not, despite appearances, all about short responses.
Very leftist, very Situationist, very brilliant. Here. I particularly like Ben Watson’s “Music, Violence, Truth” written after 9/11.
From Vollmann’s latest book on hobos, riding the rails and moving. Reminds me of bit of Lucius Shepard’s Two Trains Running from a few years ago, which I reviewed here.
Whenever I injure or tire myself on the rails, I can rest, whether at home or in a flophouse. Although I won’t own a cell-phone myself, how sweet it was in San Luis Obispo to stroll around the bend, out of the railroad workers’ sight, and then confer with Steve, who hugged the ground, murmuring through his cellphone into Brian’s cell phone, so that we could plan our trespasses with scant risk or interference. Above all, how luxurious it is to travel I care not where for no good reason! As my best friend Ben likes to say, What you get is what you get. And I hope that as what I get diminishes, thanks to old age, erotic rejection, financial loss or authority’s love-taps, I will continue to receive it gracefully. But there is no gainsaying the fact that I’ve gotten is more than many people’s share. Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may or may not be warranted. The question is what I make of them. When Thoreau went to ground at Walden Pond, he got the free use of Emerson’s land. When he was jailed for refusing his poll tax, a lady bailed him out. Do these two footnotes of dependency vitiate the integrity of his eloquence? It may well be that Thoreau lacked gratitude for these favors, or that his self-reliance was never as perfect as he pretended or I once imagined. What of that? During the time of their fashioning, words mayor may not dwell with their maker in a relationship of “sincerity.” After their maker has finished with them, they live to the extent that they inspire us. I might not have been allowed to be, no wanted to be, Thoreau’s friend. But Walden gives me pleasure and makes me braver. So does riding the rails. If this essay can do the same for you, then my material comforts, even if in your eyes they render me a dilettante or hypocrite, have been useful means to that end. If this essay fails, the fault must be in it, in you, me, the orange bucket or some combination of the above; all the same, it was still written “sincerely.”
The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it.
On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails’ European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled “i am trying to believe.” Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing “iamtryingtobelieve.com” into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site’s contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: “I’m drinking the water. So should you.” Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?
A few days later, on February 14, a woman named Sue was about to wash a different T-shirt, which she had bought at one of the Lisbon shows, when she noticed that the tour dates included several boldface digits. Fans quickly interpreted this as a Los Angeles telephone number. People who called it heard a recording of a newscaster announcing, “Presidential address: America is born again,” followed by a distorted snippet of what could only be a new Nine Inch Nails song. Then, a woman named Ana reported finding a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall at the hall where the band had been playing. On the drive was a previously unreleased song, which she promptly uploaded. The metadata tag on the song contained a clue that led to a site displaying a glowing wheat field, with the legend “America Is Born Again.” Clicking and dragging the mouse across the screen, however, revealed a much grimmer-looking site labeled “Another Version of the Truth.” Clicking on that led to a forum about acts of underground resistance.
[From Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games]
Kultowa i niezwykle ważna dla rozwoju myślenia o nowych technologiach i spoleczeństwie książka Douglasa Rushkoffa nareszcie po polsku!!! Dostępna w cudownie szalonym wydawnictwie Okultura. And Douglas blogged about it, too!
schliz at Slashdot.org writes “Real-world behaviours and racial biases could carry forward into virtual worlds such as Second Life, social psychologists say. According to a study that was conducted in There.com, virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world. Users, who were unaware that they were part of a psychological study, were approached by a researcher’s avatar for either a ‘foot-in-the-door’ (FITD) or ‘door-in-the-face’ (DITF) experiment. While results of the FITD experiment revealed no racial bias, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the experimenter took the form of a dark-skinned avatar.”
Take an eye for an eye
Take a tooth for a tooth
Just like they say in the Bible
Never leave a trace or forget a face
Of any man at the table
Any man at the table
When the moon is a cold chiseled dagger
Sharp enough to draw blood from a stone
He rides through your dreams on a coach
And horses and the fence posts
In the moonlight look like bones.
Well, they’ve stopped trying to hold him
With mortar, stone or chain
He broke out of every prison
Boots mount the staircase
The door is flung back open
He’s not there for he has risen
He’s not there for he has risen.
Well, he once killed a man with a guitar string
He’s been seen at the table with kings
Well, he once saved a baby from drowning
There are those who say beneath his coat there are wings
Some say they fear him
Others admire him
Because he steals his promise
One look in his eye
Everyone denies
Ever having met him
Ever having met Him.
He can turn himself into a stranger
Well, they broke a lot of canes on his hide
He was born away in a cornfield
A fever beats in his head like a drum inside
Some say they fear him
Others admire him
Because he steals his promise
One look in his eye
Everyone denies
Ever having met him
Ever having met him.
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
I wear this crown of shit
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stain of time
The feeling disappears
You are someone else
I am still right here
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way
Introduction to Chemical Physics: Designed for the Use of Academies, High Schools, and Colleges. Illus. with Numerous Engravings, and Containing Copious Lists of Experiments with Directions for Preparing Them
By Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. Published by D. Van Nostrand, 1873