The following reflection is the product of the mind of a librarian in the body of a poet...Or of the mind of a poet in the body of a librarian...Or anyway of a body in a library – that being the libidinal disguise of talent and its teleological suspension in which modern writing might be said to turn prodigal to expression, and so to spend beyond its means. And so the mantle of composition stretches itself, becoming membranous, though not like an echo that perpetuates itself in love by repeating the name of love itself. No, what an author is, in modernity, is a mutilated inscription: always falling out of books and money, dripping in speculation like sap from a good copy of a young hero, or the prerogatives of self-promotion from the mouths and chins of our mentors and superiors. What an author is, is a sacrifice to that flat place where December’s intaglio finds only wonks and bankers willing to decide on the future of what we love. The Borgesian combinatorial apocalypse anticipates, belatedly, this process, equally radical and mundane, by which each writer confronts a mushrooming of predecessors, and the artist, who has taken care to choose nothing, will swallow again all that severity of the word in which she stands accused.

In Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith offers a manifesto about the role of the poet in “the digital age.”^KG Embracing what so many others have bemoaned – the demise of originality in a mass culture of commodification, appropriation, and idle consumption – Goldsmith proclaims an apparently epochal shift in literary practice:

While writers have traditionally taken great pains to ensure that their texts “flow,” in the context of our Joyce-inspired language/data ecosystem, this takes on a whole new meaning, as writers are the custodians of this ecology. Having moved from the traditional position of being solely generative entities to information managers with organizational capacities, writers are potentially poised to assume the tasks once thought to belong only to programmers, database minders, and librarians, thus blurring the distinction between archivists, writers, producers, and consumers. (p. 28)^KG

Not only does the Conceptual poet’s joy mingle^WNK with a Modernist law of poetics; his pleasure participates in a logic of feeling fundamental to modernity writ large. Under the banner of “new management,” this description tries, perhaps, to resolve a basic tension (so I dreamed and dreamed you might one day write back, responding to the monuments mentioned in the streets tonight): labor itself does not partake of the intelligence. For most of us, this prohibition occupies one and the same body; we are divided between the work we do, and the capacity, not to do that work, but to think it, where work is the cardinal passion, and thought is nothing but the constant tally of a judgment that never achieves its sum. What plagues the white-collar worker like another raiment, a kind of undergarment, or like the elegance of an ex-lover, was a girdle of management first put on by the artist and the “man” of letters. What provokes this split? And why should this binding, even if done as well as possible under existing conditions, endure?

O indescribable smell of men digging in the “library,” my “friends,” your locus classicus becomes hereby an occupational hazard, too hard a cuticle for our esteem. I tell them^GWB a little pedantically: there is a fierce wisdom in teams.^GWB I tell “them,” with their idealized male “youth,” they did a great job^GWB inside of the bull. But when the shadow of the object fell upon the work of art, scholars and poets lay prostrate together, divorced from the “sacred,” and unable to join shareholders and apostles in their march on America’s mailboxes or the five handsome senses of the Holy Lands. In the transformation of a conceptual-affective cathexis, like the perversity of a man under a beard or behind sunglasses,^DIS into knowledge, and knowledge into intellectual property, speaking quickly, a printer’s error^HOB garners a following, large and fine, as an illustration^JWG of our decline, and the nonproliferation^GWB across the aesthetic, erotic, and conceptual domains, as required by various commissions, withdraws into our difference from those who know their gods. All this is by now noe question but^FIT a spectacle – so “spectacular,” in “fact,” that an indescribable something^VIC is but another fragment of quotation, and smoke mushrooming over the fertile crescent, when the majority opinion is to do the thing,^TRD is felt as a creative power. The challenge is to survive the fragmentation of subjects by the customs of capital – to create a situation – to commit a crime.

Through a critique of Romantic ideology, Goldsmith’s text promotes a Conceptual poetics mature enough to seek gratification in “the glut of language” available for manipulation, re-mixing, mash-up, and generally mischievous re-use. For Goldsmith (taking a page from Marjorie Perloff), the stereotype of inspired genius is obsolete; “today’s” writers, if they are smart and hip, will reject such naïve enthusiasm, such blind faith in the munificence of the imagination, in favor of a frugality of constraint. (See the huge success of IKEA^TM, whose CEO made them take trains.^DIS) Truly managerial, such poets do not “create”; they appropriate, capitalizing on the surplus of scribal labor made available by the Internet. And yet, for all its embrace of injured or imperfect^WNK information, Goldsmith’s argument does not put the poet himself in question.^WNK Rather, the latter’s status is assured, straddling the old romantic chasm in which modern art deposits its load of gold and famine: the sublime.

The text cycle is primarily additive, spawning new texts continuously. There is no need to assume that [...] a textual drought will occur. The morass of language does not deplete, rather it creates a wider, rhizomatic ecology, leading to a continuous and infinite variety of textual occurrences and interactions across both the network and the local environment. (p. 32)^KG

In Goldsmith’s words, language, ever “flowing,” becomes an “ecosystem,” fluvial, lacustrine, or pelagic. Although the tenor of such passages is the entrepreneurial conception of language – according to which language belongs among the enormous variety of information^DIS now capable of being managed – within this general scheme, a poetic logic consigns information itself to the domain of sublimity, i.e., of the forces of nature. Moreover, in its resort to figural logic, Goldsmith’s own text plumps itself up with that sublimity that William Duff extols: “In the descriptions where sublimity is required, an Author of original genius will fix on those circumstances that may raise our ideas of the object he endeavours to represent to the utmost pitch” (p. 162).^DUF O must^HOB I subscribe to this colossal grandeur^WNK on which my Senses,^TRD occasionally intricate^WNK and covetous of verification, can get no grip? However their hunger, nothing gnaws at melancholly persons^FIT like probability against the artist’s wish to be profound. Shall we put faith in the managers’ use of a circulating medium^JWG to qualify the disappearance of royal speech^{JWG, ASS} into the depths where she resides today?

Jacques Rancière has recently proposed that the sublime, as a rule of thumb,^FOG fed into the neoclassical emphasis, lovingly copied from antiquity, on the harmoniously ordered whole.^RAN In the category of the sublime, this harmony is expressed in the symmetry between reason and nature, in which the artist’s conception becomes a bridge or arch spanning the mechanical and the divine. Or as Immanuel Kant would have it, nature expresses herself like an attractive girl at play^NYM through the soul of the artist, to whom she is as a stimulus remunerative in his veins: improving and embellishing,^TRD if not the dome of heaven, then our lodging and transience in this low abode.^VIC Momentarily devoid of ego, the artist of genius becomes an instrument, a vessel, a piece of hardware^DIS running nature’s commands.^ASS His skill and talent translate that mute immensity, that obscurely moving power to make physical objects come into existence;^ASS his every act of Volition,^TRD in apparent leaps, follows the handiwork of a world that remains continuous in reason, as a circle of fire springs from a swung brand.^LEI The artist is a wooden horse,^TRD nature his rider; she guides his hand. But this sublime absence of intention only consolidates the author’s social position, or rather sublimates it: purging it of the coarse sugar^LAD of that toil whereby artisans, to sweeten the Esteem and Affection of their^HAY neighbors and masters, mature in their craft. To stay awake^ASS is to put into your hands^HAY the churn of love into disappointment in the infirmity^FIT of the body, no less loveable for being the seat of our embarrassment: as if to say, take me again into your arms.

Goldsmith’s sentimental strain^VIC merits our consideration, if not endorsement. If the poet can stand in for the programmer or archivist, data jockey or librarian, then we can consummate the liberal bias^SAN in the coming together^DIS of aesthetic and utilitarian labor under the aegis of a new economy, and a new Taylorism that touches the emotions, too. Or as Saracco, et al., enthuse, “in the Knowledge Age, almost everything is information” (p. 92),^DIS and we are subject to who knows what turning of the brayne.^FIT Links in a continuall chaine^HOB we can’t hope to trace to an original freedom, the poetic texts that Goldsmith cites – like Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts, Craig Dworkin’s Parse, and Rob Fitterman’s transcriptions from nothing but the melancholy material locomotion^TRD of boredom, provocation, and consumer culture – attest to the strange vectors, not altogether orthogonal to the dimensionality of^OFF delight, that such a managed poetics can produce. That such work can delight and provoke in almost equal measure, and that these delights are somewhat more than a sustained joke about how much it bores, need not set it apart from the labor of programmers and librarians. However, these texts bore as that is said of kings.^ASS In them a sovereignty of boredom commands a cathartic exercise,^SAN an exercise motivated by a new ontology^ROY of relation to the text. You could say that these texts perform an intersubjective^ROY breach in the performative conditions of language, wreaking havoc on fixed ideas about where the literal ends and the literary begins. But in modernity, the literary work is already rent by thunder, written under eclipse.^ASS For in “ordinary” production, the lustre of the imagination wanes, or disappears entirely, before what Emil Røyrvik calls “the opulence and spectacle of [...] Man the money manager” (p. 254).^ROY For as Marx saw clearly, social reality^ROY is created against me.^ASS As a result, the literary demands a reflexive, almost an automatic, disavowal: reader and writer conspire to forget the fate by which all work answers to a valuation on the market, in the equally opulent hope that my workmanship^TRD will remain with you, that your face will shine.^ASS And this hope operates (in the literary work) even without the support of an informed poetics. Do the poets whom Goldsmith lauds, however loosely affiliated, practice fringe forms^GWB that dilate^WOO the ideologies of Modernist distinction? Does a Conceptual poetics enhance our intelligence capabilities^GWB or magnify our manufactures by Perception^TRD of the work’s material conditions or social circumstances, and does it require that reading here? Have I managed only to smudge the outlines of a more constitutional difference?

Librarian and poet, I can’t answer you in the same hand. Millions of Americans^GWB might well call this mutilation of artistic and authorial integrity an attack on freedom itself, as if a writer whose bibliography is not long enough^GWB might be a malapert, a palpable error^WNK in our spectral global economy, a kind of leak of the soft matter inside. Americans are asking,^GWB why does the Conceptual poet hate himself? (O phantastical^BRO democracy!) Of more desperate probity, the best Prophets^AVL might observe of Goldsmith’s text that the zeal lavished upon the solidarity among poets and librarians appears to seek its own fulfillment in another figure, a fellow clerk, a white-collar colleague. (It’s a true team effort.^FOG) The aesthetic, in Goldsmith’s argument, is renewed, and renewed, and renewed^JWG in a third kind of knowledge, neither poetic nor managerial. Of this third knowledge, some unknown quantity populates the matrix^OFF – or shews its influence, though with little or no mention, like the power of Gravity,^TRD as if to unite the kingdom of genius under a likeness to Domitian.^WNK By “knowledge leadership”^ROY this power saves art from the reasoning that written documents^JWG have themselves unleashed. This dispersal being so sublimely decorated in Goldsmith’s text, the reader might miss it, like a mist set before the eyes^AVL of our neoliberal common sense. This Homer economicus, this cyber-democrat^SAN behind the curtain, let us call him by his household name: the critic.

If all language vomits words, then she who expands poetry by merely reframing virtually any relevant information (lists of cities, directions to knit, bits of bookshelves, ancient masses from new religions, etc.)^DIS in a courteous style^JWG exciting to our taste for possibility, will have found a way to be judged that reframes words, as in the games of young girls,^NYM one of the participants grinds a hendiadys into more technical skills (text editing, etc.).^OFF We don’t have hard evidence,^GWB but poetry is to terror as the most charged and convincing of arguments throw judgment out of the best. I agree that the moment we YouTube, there is a pressure to yield to notoriety,^SAN but it’s generally a window to your heart’s content; without a proper degree of Attention,^TRD we’re in trouble. Democracy is fine for art. Meanwhile, all words print a recipe for disaster when it comes to the Secret in an Enemys hand.^AVL Liberty and Necessity may be created equal when it comes to art, but thus to have treated judgment and folly to the same still small voice^AVL by which the stability of legitimate governments^GWB is assembled isn’t managing rationally.^ROY It’s impossible to suspend the creative and stop writing; but as in (burnt) bread, (baked) gypsum, (fused) beads of lapis lazuli,^ASS it’s sheer folly to dismiss quality. (p. 10)

In an earlier draft, I took Goldsmith to task for exempting the aesthetic from the pressures of democracy – for wanting to believe that we might knock the literary work off the pedestal of original genius without touching the charter of the museum itself. Now looking into his text, I find it more equivocal. Nonetheless, there remains an insistence – even an anxious one – on the critical activity of the writer: “what becomes important is what you – the author – decides to choose. Success lies in knowing what to include and – more important – what to leave out.” The advice is eminently compatible with that dictate of Lord Kames, in his Elements of Criticism, that “a capital rule for reaching the sublime in [...] works of art” is “a judicious selection” (p. 165).^KAM This power of selection is not to be confused with the imagination, which brings forth fresh and entire the lustre of new ideas and novel forms of experience. The business of judgment is not to create, nor even to discover, but to take inventory and audit the accounts, to monitor the transactions of feeling and conception, to polish and police. In the case of the sublime, judgment requires “keeping out of view every thing low and trivial.” In this connection, Kant’s account of “the power of judgment” remains highly instructive: however far the latter goes in rapturous approach^JWG to a sublimity that defies understanding, when it comes to art, a critical judgment remains its “indispensable condition” (p. 197).^KNT It is indeed a capital rule, for it ensures that “highly attractive harmony”^WNK by which artistic labor, divided against itself, gives birth to healthy dividend.^JWG And by demanding that each artist judge his own productions with the disproportionately large eyes^WNK and mutual watchfulness^JWG of a society of spectators and shareholders, one can guard against “the Novelty of a Washer-Woman’s turning Poetess.”^COL

In this division of labor, genius occupies the place of those who stopped being gods and heroes. It is a managerial arrangement. But what disappears from this arrangement may be the mindful cunning (where cunning is a head in 1844 compelled to bear^JWG the debts incurred on its behalf by the dialectic) and the peace of practice itself. Stress is placed^DIS on a naïve spontaneity that our “digital environment”^KG has disrupted, as on the virginity of daughters among money-lenders. (May they become Bacchante in the dark.) The astute poet’s role lies in managing the digital; the digital transcends the manual labor on which it relies (like the handprints in Google books); and this has its history, too. To transcend the manual, or the mechanical, has always been the prerogative of poets and philosophers – not because the mechanical per se constrains the intelligence, but because to those whose labor seems, by an insidious and inept analogy, “mechanical,” it proves all too convenient to assign, in the words of Joshua Reynolds

a very narrow mind; a mind that is confined to the mere object of commerce, that sees with a microscopic eye but a part of the great machine of the economy of life, and thinks that small part which he sees to be the whole.^WOO (p. 85)

Wherever we find “mechanical dexterity” opposed to “mind and carefulness,”^WNK we are in the presence of an ancient prejudice. The artisan’s dexterity is mechanical because, in contrast to the artistic intelligence, the artisan cannot comprehend the whole of which she is a part, cannot hear the harmony in which her strokes disappear. Drunk and scrofulous, the artisan stomachs the materiality of toil and its heartache without taste. In Kant’s Critiques, we can perceive the inward migration of this prejudice. And by the time we come to Freud, it has become a model, however mutilated and broken off,^WNK for love itself.

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud observes that the disappointment of our libidinal investments can plunge us into a pathological state characterized, above all, by the chronic protestation of our own weknes.^FIT In contrast to the “normal” course of mourning, the melancholy patient, lacking the portent of a fit substitute for its hopes or affections, proves unable to form new attachments. The interest in Freud’s account lies in the picture of the psyche that this observation leads him to. Disfigured by its loss (usually of a parent’s love), the ego reabsorbs that quotient of libido in such a way as to “establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (p. 249, Freud’s emphasis).^SF In Freud’s text, this identification is described in the past tense, underscoring its primary and hieratic character. Freud notes that the ego could

henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

The ego “altered by identification” might describe the artist caught, like the American people^GWB in a colloid of lucre and terror, in the suffumigation^LAD of the material element by desire. But it is the subsequent triumph of critical judgment that presents the most enduring symptom: viz., an incessant and often public, though not necessarily superfluous or unfounded, self-reproach. In private use,^JWG it murmurs against us to perswade.^AVL When, in Freud’s later work, that “special agency” (demon, informer, cultic torch^ASS) receives the title of “superego,” we are dealing, friends, with an apotheosis of the critical occupation, which has burrowed deep into the bourgeois soul. Historically, melancholly may indeed have been the beginning^FIT of an awareness of the cleavage between base and superstructure, by which the best manuscripts^WNK and banking establishments^JWG made dominion over the earth, ushering in “all kinds of mess and buzz”^ROY in the surrender of human flesh^WNK to the bottom line. The avatar^DIS of the capitalist-Oedipal law remains this sublimely unoriginal but sovereign judgment, lording it over the rest of the personality. The ego’s darkness and invention, it is both the intruder upon our diaphanous inner peace and, in barring the Doors^HAY and folds of our psyche,^HER the chaperone of the senses and of erotic life.

Freud’s work belongs to the era of rotary telephones.^GWB But the melancholy of telecommunications is as old as modernity itself. Melancholy, as requiring literary activity, remains for much of modern history reserved for the leisured orgeones^NYM of the West. But with the spread of literacy among unsuspecting people,^GWB this association begins to reflect more, perhaps, than the male citizen’s privilege, or the performative dissertions^FIT of phallic privilege from itself. Or perhaps the tender Assiduity^HAY afflicting literary production signs into law^GWB that privilege with all the urgency^GWB of feelings aroused by long nights of smuggling quires^HOB into the clever streets, with “fearful inductive effects,”^TEL though also with joy and expectations,^AVL such as feed the high bloom^WNK of a sensationalist materialism:^WAR I mean, the seasoning by money and documents of the modern subject, yourself.

In those distemperatures^FIT observe them girding their cloaks^WNK – how by a woolly muscle the work distends us almost too much. That the marketplace was founded^JWG on the passions of opulent men may be true, but if their acts were in a style in which to woo, their Roman money^WNK always could produce a likeness^WNK to profundity in the Cogito Ergo Sum. Do I profess to love a statue? No more the irreversible arrow of Cupid or of time, the mutilations of the modern aesthetic conform to a psychic receptivity^HER shaped by modern habits of reading, and if the digital can be compared only with itself, its displaced mosaic renders mythological the remnants of the mythology of print. The specter of melancholia, as visceral expression vying with citationality, will look and eat^HAY like a rodent in the library stacks. In liability to interruption, it models print; this in the Freudian retardation coil^TEL corresponds to what Leibniz set down in his papers as “the whole labyrinth of the composition of the continuum” (p. 49).^LEI Our limited and mutilated conception, harried into combinatorial Mathematicks, would stamp out tremors like a surgeon’s hand, but the heart spikes still: “there are innumerable minds everywhere” (p. 51).^LEI You look prehensile in “youthful stillness”^WNK among profane things mingling^WNK with our frailenes in a mirour;^AVL you look a person who might flourish under the commercial and economic administration^JWG of the conscious mind. Your remote flesh sporadically my ideal and miserable distinction, in school I was as if armless and headless, wrong and ill, but still acquainted with the portal to the seraglios^TEE of public opinion, where I sought myself between sex and art. Awash in constant hope, as if the apparatus could be kept private,^TEL nowe speechlesse, nowe crying out,^AVL we exude promises that, brought to the mouth or ear,^TEL border on the Obscene.^HAY Here the multitude meet^AVL that informed consent^SPN in which the word was a word^TEL printed twice: once to kill sound, and once again to hear yourself falling into what hundred lost comedies^WNK is it possible to say?^FIT And the probable certainty^JWG in which, by chance, time, or bribery,^AVL we will seem sometimes to have been partakers, which creeps, sucking the dust^TEL of conformity, even into our beds, will not prevent my digging for a likeness to your daring or the lustre of your hair.

The excellence of a citizen^TEE is a foil or a paid something for that enmity in a dream, the girl next door^SPN under the sovereignty of doves, as though from lamp black^TEL and amateur gold he might close the loopholes in his inferior talent, which is in writing only a temptation to desire. But desires, however whisper-tight, are only his by analogy – of woman, of bank-office, of all the usury the movies might disclose – desires which pull youth under^NYM writing; which dissolve quickly; which are a hinge upon the mutilated legal status of the human being, and to debt or capital a tilted disc;^TEL which write each other into productive character; which defend the sanctuary, to the last earnest penie,^AVL with a good business hand.^JWG And as the sums gush over into accuracy^JWG and wantonness, he will learn to be creative, make money,^SPN and have fun with both hands, in manly tones.^WNK But he may forget to peek over his shoulder^{JWG, NYM} when that wantonness is administered by an imperceptible peculation: what Susanna Paasonen describes as “feeling sensations in one’s body […] similar to those watched on the screen or in front of oneself” (p. 202).^SPN

Only this affective labor puts us in relation to the aesthetic. Beyond the critic’s conjuring trick, the aesthetic is the laborenth^FIT of light and shade in which we wander. Like Johann Winckelmann’s praise of the Belvedere torso (whose mutilated head, we may presume, was larger than a private banker’s), it refuses to order our senses to convenience and advantage;^JWG nor does it fall back on a pedagogy jealous of those peculiar configurations the wealthiest will require.^JWG As Rancière argues, the aesthetic arises from the relation of our senses to “a large fragmented body” – a body hailed by a deluge of light – a body that, if it reflects anything at all, mirrors the voracious promise (it’s you, right?) of the “multiplicity of unknown bodies born from this very fragmentation” (p. xiv).^RAN The aesthetic refers to that surprise, that tinder of possibility stuffing the multiple and mutilated spaces of modernity (the passages in neglected library books, the illustrations in old catalogs, the light in certain films, a gesture with the breadth of the moon burnt in your being soft and some amount of gold^JWG). The aesthetic is that which, in no specified time,^JWG or in times hereafter, causes even the happy man^JWG to catch fire.

Nonetheless, if every budding Poetaster^QUE thinks he has produced some volatile sap,^CDC he falsifies^AVL the impressionability^SPN that hath prick’d him onto spam. Language is labor, not our inferior god,^WNK or if a liquid, oozing through, o fingers that show a true understanding of their winged genii,^WNK and an attribute solely of the proximity to us and the imminence of change. If language is the “fundament within humans by which there always exists the possibility of another order,”^GRU then the labor of love,^SPN like the actual excellence^WNK of art, lies not in the technologies of alignment among words and things. You are my luxury in cold blood.^QUE The lubric^TOU points-of-view^SPN employed in Marketing^HAY intimate society were like, wow!^SAN “‘panic’ sexuality”^NYM (“rubbing against and penetrating each other”^SPN), or ESP,^HER or the Lunatick who believes himself^TRD in love with women generally,^WNK or the truth of your perjuries packaged in glass. Our dust bears so much shame and disgust, tactile and olfactory^SPN norms, hierarchies of bribing and coaxing and flattering.^JWG We must observe lovers: their animal majority how quickly grown pejorative, they betake themselves to the lap of public ordinance. Is the kinetics^LUB between signs and feelings, then, only a money-shot?^SPN

But what information architecture^SPN more contractile^WNK than the slack rope of pleasure, like serpents gracing that beautiful hermaphrodite, the human body? And if the taste that prevails^WNK has ported commodities into traumatic eclipse, let’s lips, as though writing backwards, let’s knees together, let’s candles musical for consuming, let’s incomplete and pomegranate and an extraordinary member^JWG under pressure from your hands, and the causes that good words plead, let them lead^JWG to a different signifying...Let’s not deceive ourselves: it shows through Winckelmann’s prose, too, in that exuberance over the mutilated torso’s “powerfully developed chest,” in dwelling on “the length and strength of the thighs,” and above all, in erotic meditation on what time and matter have concealed. Describing the torso, Winckelmann imagines that “with the head turned upwards, his face probably had a pleased expression […] this feeling even the back seems to indicate, which is bent” (p. 264). Let’s incomplete the sentence: “loins and about twenty-nine years old when he first took them for you, walking naked underneath his clothes, and if you make of it the days and hours youth abolished, their place would be supplied^JWG chiefly by the larger lustre of the eyes, when hello up hot and standing still, you scull for each other in the dark.”

If administrators in search of employment call themselves your friends, we have not yet the size of falling in a vast difference in which the sentence intervenes.^TOU Its diaphragmatic functions,^TEL “like private Rooms and back Doors in abundance”^TOU forming a slight escape diagrammatically, gratify a little list to ride it in deletion,^FIT and every sentence being stolne out of other bookes,^QUE makes a good cheap novel out of captive kings.^WNK “You don’t have to like to go to the library and the archives and all that stuff,”^SAN and yet, as Caroline Warman observes, noting a sublimation reaching tincture in the library of the libertine, “without his books around him, Sade cannot write” (p. 89).^WAR And further: as Kathleen Lubey claims, it is thanks to the printed word that “eroticism has become a portable skill” (p. 198).^LUB In my failure to decipher your “ecstatic yet secretive”^NYM writing, I wood have wished^FIT that the nymphs nourished no very high opinion^ASS of you. I said you, but referring to the hole I was in, for our god is lust,^FIT and a quarrel with our oracles and the extispicy of our cattle. An animal therefore^JWG he is himself^JWG in the month of August,^JWG “being grasped, used, and sensed,”^SPN hitched to the heart’s plough or driven to the marketplace.^HAY Among men and women, the smolder about your shoulders, being vulgarly known,^HAY will have been singular in two senses of perfect,^HOB but that their nearness or remoteness touches “an individuated course and time”^LUB does not resign us to trust in the authority^WNK of books^JWG – no more than in the Internet “as a transparent window”^SPN on the future. For what is a window any girls and boys and “if it be young,”^HAY baring of large voracious vessels, o those of our jealousy itself, “immediately rife again,”^HAY those wide-rimmed vessels that pour onto the wet courtyard below, o what may they sustain? And so we have arrived at the horns of a man who will attempt^JWG to “cash in”^SAN on a melancholy labor of judging. Not in a trivial way, as one might have written a bad love letter about burning love letters and then burned it, but as we look with sadness^JWG on the captioning of beauty, and shrug our shoulders at the certainty of the one-percent, which is a froth at the bottom of our former perfection,^WNK or at least that’s what by asking myself how it happens, it happens: that amid undoubted prosperity,^JWG the balance of an age loses itself in the disposition to hoard youth, all the while paying higher prices^JWG for writing on the verge of a worship now withheld, this writing into the niche. O tongues of wood,^TEL how you belabor me to believe in the system, and doubtless you have reason. But as writing is a form of doubt, is a fine comb precisely,^WNK and nude but for the business of the cloak, may ours be a voluptuousness pursued out of private hands and into looting as literature. And in the course of that antiquarian imposture,^WNK as punishment, my purse burst,^TEE and each holding a loss of time, I saw these words fall into the fire. And when it was done, collapsing into my flesh as it would have exerted itself, the book was drenched.

Bibliographic Key

^ASSGelb, Ignace J., Benno Landsberger, A. Leo Oppenheim, and Erica Reiner, eds. The Assyrian Dictionary. Vol. 2 (“B”). 21 vols. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1956.
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^AVLLock, Anne Vaughan. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock. Edited by Susan M. Felch. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, v. 185. Tempe, Ariz: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1999.
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^BROBrowne, Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Edited by Charles Sayle. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1927.
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^CDCClaus, Daniel, and Conrad Weiser. The Journals of Christian Daniel Claus and Conrad Weiser: A Journey to Onondaga, 1750. Translated by Helga Doblin and William A. Starna. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 84, pt. 2. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994.
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^COLCollier, Mary. “THE Woman’s Labour (1739).” In Women in Service in Early Modern England, edited by Jeannie Dalporto. The Early Modern Englishwoman : A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, v. 5. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
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^DISSaracco, R., Jeffrey R. Harrow, and Robert Weihmayer. The Disappearance of Telecommunications. New York: IEEE Press, 2000.
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