Everywhere present and nowhere visible leads him right into the embrace of the death of the author whose intentions have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway, a multidimensional space where the modern scriptor is born with this, this detachable self this second voice inside predicting the future in its hoarse belly-voice, Strabo? You hear me? Strip the romantic veil off the naked animalâs only purpose perpetuating the species the race the tribe the family for everybody else sex is for pleasure like the flute, pushpin or poetry âthe most intense pleasure of which man is capableâ says my golden Sigi, seek pleasure avoid not a clue what theyâre being used for even that theyâre being used till the roof falls in, doctors lawyers abortions adulteries thimble theatre learned nothing forgotten nothing go right back and do it all again. âMy one impulse is to work and forgetâ says Tolstoy âbut forget what. Thereâs nothing to forgetâ and then? hereâs the scrap, âI shall write no more fiction,â heâs about thirty, âpeople are weeping, dying, marrying, and I should sit down and write books telling âhow she loved himâ? Itâs shameful!â And where else yes here, âreading bad books helps me to detect my own faults more than good ones. Good books reduce me to despairâ maybe where the idea for this whole absurd project of mine here came from this fear of failure, the technology the artist created being used to eliminate him and the piano, the player piano and its offspring the computer barricades against this fear of chance, of probability and indeterminacy thatâs so American, this fear this stigma of failure which separates the crowd from the elite when Flaubert writes to George Sand âI believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable. Nothing is important save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torchâ try to sit up straight here stopped shivering and dry out mindâs clear as a bell, everything falling right into place get it all down before the belly-talkers come back with the death of the author, the artistâs solitary enterprise with the individual reader Hawthorne talked about horrified at success with the public taste, with the crowd meant you must have sold out, send the author of The Marble Faun out on a book tour? Out giving readings from The Blithedale Romance to entertain this gaping clutch of pleasure seeking chance persons, this enormous market of the non-literate and half-literate devouring the poets who compose to please the bad taste of their reviewers end up instructing one another, what this glorious democracy in the arts is all about isnât it? Get up there and perform with what Hawthorne called âthat damned mob of scribbling women,â even Poe with his mechanized genius for forcing order on chaos scorning the public and thirsting for fame, and Melville, good God Melville? Begins Moby Dick wants everybody to read it finishes daring them to, has to borrow money to write it because Harperâs wonât give him an advance, they publish it and he still owes them a hundred and forty-five dollars and eighty-three cents never forget that figure, âdollars damn me!â he tells Hawthorne, writes that terrible Pierre you canât get thirty pages into hates feeling he must take his readers where they expect to go, talk about elitism about setting yourself apart from the common herd beyond reason above reason on the shelf with the dead white guys ends up in the Custom House at four dollars a day reduced to a nonperson, to herd anonymity humiliated castrated eliminated as a threat thatâs what itâs all about thatâs what I have to explain. Of course you canât really explain anything to anybody thatâs why all we hear are explanations of these explanations get right back to Wiener with his
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