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Another pretty simple answer, from outside the window: even the best of rap has no 'vision' of anything beyond present discontent less because it's a black music than because it's a distinctively young one. Ours is a generation (late- or post-Boom) divorced from Time: we're taught to look to the 'innocent past' for signposts to value; to see the present as little more than a compendium of evils and past fuckups we have to borrow a couple trillion from the Japanese and throw an innocent-past party to forget; to see the future as a vague fairyland where the consequences of our dire present will by political wand-waving 'all work out,' or else as the grim, cinereous end-of-the-month day when the Visa charges we've been using to pay off our AmEx finally come due. And the time banditry has got to be specifically worse for the urban black young, since the only real 'past' that might summon its political pavlovs is that of a civil rights movement no one under 30 can recall, of a King and an X both murdered at rhetorical zenith, before the movements their words fashioned had barely begun transit. Because the past can be considered altered, falsified (for whites by Reagan, for blacks by the whites who ran the past) induction doesn't apply, and so no imaginative future can exist: at best it'll be more of the same. Today even the _fresh_est black music is no longer an 'escape' from the very conditions and tight borders that make it possible as music, or even an expression--since rap is, in the best and worst ways, just a mirror.
[...] A music that collapses the distinction between homage and infringement, signal and rule--shit, Self and Other--in the ripoff that is sampling can't but be 'original' in how it plunders and mangles and re-uses; for a signal without rules is also without precedent, just as 'stealing' means nothing when nothing can be owned. [...]
this is so DFW i am dying
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] I am too personally at my own firm of Alan Schoenweiss and Associates. 'So then where's Mr. Associates?' the hilarious Solomon Silverfish asks me every time he has had a cocktail in my presence. 'When do I get to meet Mr. Associates?' [...]
classic DFW gag
[...] The train was called Dying, it was the Dying Person Express, was what everybody but the smooth pink healthy doctors seemed to know. Solomon also knew, though he did not believe. The train was called Dying and the louder it got also the smaller in your field of true vision. It did not run you over like a penny on a track but shrank as it grew to be nothing but a roar that came from deep inside you, where there was only the growing heat of a boiling fight between polysyllables. Here was a train you didn't know was on you until it was too late to get free of the bright knife of the track, a knife that cuts you to show that the ear has been hearing itself, a knife whose thin side is also a mirror in which you see what you hear while it cuts what you are. While you sink and burn. A sickness not at all delicate was what she had.
Sophie, in bed, drowsed, and bits of memory came at her in the flashing strobes of predreams. Here's a shiny ice storm, two newlyweds in a new tract house in Cicero. Ice glittering gray in a crunchy March lawn, more wet ice falling out of a sky without color. Solomon watching it out a window, Sophie behind him with her arms around his thick waist, her hair a black waterfall down his arm, her chin on his shoulder, also watching. Pellets of dirty Cicero crystal hitting the hard lawn, beads bouncing and jumping hopping lively skittering ice. Solomon's voice, quiet, full of Silverfish dreams, his breath fogs a rainbow circle on the window as he stares at the jumping beads, whispers to himself grasshoppers grasshoppers grasshoppers. A young man she loves dreams life into ice while she plays with his ear.
just, beautiful
[...] feeling almost as though she and Solomon, or rather she-and-Solomon, will never really and truthfully die, no matter where or what they are. She feels through the promise of new pain and sickness of the stomach a brand-new sensation of cleanness and security, like a cold chill warmed, wrapped in a hot quilt on the lap of a mother who radiates a soft flame in gentle tones and tiny gestures of arrangement.
A thing that for her was magic Sophie was remembering as she drowsed in the orange light through the filmy window and her arm warmed with medicine. She felt the crackers in her stomach. It was 3:30 in the morning. Through a dream soaked the sound of the doorbell [...]
[...] I tell him S.S. child I seen love at angles you ass aint dreamed but I aint never seen no white man love a bitch like you love that tiless stick in that little metal band. My man get pissed off? He never get pissed off at Too Pretty. He just look in Too Prettys face with some bad eyes all aftershave blue and deep as his own head and ax me do I love my own self. And when I say shit whose black ass I gone love if not Too Pretty, my man say what it is, young Schwartz, he be callin my ass Schwartz, knock me out. He say that it rights there, Londell. The bitch be my own ass. [...]
the way he writes in Too Pretty's voice is weird, to say the least, but this passage at least is nice
"Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who's also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who's enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he'll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn't regard himself as funny at all."
also: checks himself out in the mirror but pretends not to
I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen's impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: "We are not aroused." I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I am awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.
"[...] He keeps pretending it's different people asking for you, holding his nose, putting a hankie over the phone, trying this totally pitiful English accent, pretending it's outside calls for you, which he should know I can tell it isn't because he knows the way the console light flashes all fast when they're in-house calls. [...]"
Candy speaking