“Um, I didn’t need you to lecture me,” she said.
“Urgh, I wasn’t,” I said.
I woke up late the next day in my friend’s bed, but she was gone. It was the first day of spring break and she had gone ahead to the beach without me. She left a sticky note on the lampshade next to the bed: “Went to beach. Come!” Clueless was still playing on the TV. Cher was in class with the famous playwright Wallace Shawn. In my friend’s soft pillows, I thought about Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg having breakfast together in Manhattan, saying things like, “Don’t you think The Times made a serious error in its review of Zero Dark Thirty?” Wallace Shawn nods his head and sips his Nespresso. “I do,” he says. On the TV Cher said, “Then I promised Miss Giest I’d start a letter-writing campaign to my congressman about violations of the Clean Air Act. But Mr. Hall”—Wallace Shawn—“was totally rigid. He said my debates were unresearched, unstructured, and unconvincing. As if! I felt impotent and out of control, which I really hate. I needed to find a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.”
there are ghosts in Paris at the Place de La Concorde
where Baudelaire still wanders for cash
you can’t find them in the obelisk that encodes their presence there
in his poem “Spleen” Baudelaire says the sky is like a lid
that covers the spirit. I imagine Tupperware for the soul
unthinkable to Cher but not to the Home Shopping Network
ur-web of unlimited purchasing power
revved in an engine of love
to perfect for you a home
the pleasure of homemaking is so absolute
if not force in the network in the first place as is the assumption
of both a soul and its container. Above me, the sky is the color
of the Home Shopping Network. In Clueless it’s the same
except it’s also a blue that sweeps toward the ocean in undulation
of wealth’s confidence that it will go on forever
in the lush Hills Clueless foregrounds
in “Spleen,” the speaker is most disturbed to find any attempt
to regain strength is necessarily thwarted by the endless natural
phenomena that surround him. Save the world and nevertheless
it will skinny-dip in a malaise as white as midnight in Dostoevsky
everything is habitual and the soul denatures along these lines to find
the earth and its pollutants describe a transformation
unstoppably beautiful, like, the world is gorgeous
and I am gorgeous and you are gorgeous, even in the inky dark
even on the CalTrain, rising off the horizon
surrounding us to form, as Baudelaire writes, “un chochet humide,”
or as Cher might say: a locker room of gross boys
the fact still remains that the sky is boundless and rumbling
toward us to unchain the light hiding below it, where light
like massive beach balls
comes tumbling down to get MTV’s spring break coverage started
we can fully expect it will wreck us. But to return
to the Place de la Concorde, which is like a Venice Beach of stone
without the beach, so imagine it’s spring break
in Paris where Cher and Dionne dance to Kylie Minogue’s
“Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
spring breakers everywhere dancing to an uptempo
126-beats-per-minute mega hit. This is
what Baudelaire means when he talks about the world
breaking out in a clamor of spirits or, in other words, sudden awareness
of the Big Other. I can’t get you out of my head
within the city walls music pushes forward to interrupt
this party, reneges any evidence of a despair in a frat boy’s fraternité
Baudelaire says the wind enters his soul
and like any porous category this rupturing is the conclusion
that ends the poem but allows him to keep writing
why Cher goes on without a Jeep and what is referred to in the poem
as Anguish or in Clueless as Paul Rudd
both drop down to plant a black flag
(you can imagine Paul Rudd listening to Black Flag
while lounging with the Modern Library Nietzsche by the pool)
into the poet’s brow or to translate: the subject
acknowledges that in exteriorized forces
the personality is determined by a variety of interventions that enter
the head like big symbolic flags in the conquered soil which
seldom knows its defeat
um, but forgive me for puking, Cher, forgive me
for not whole-sale swallowing this bullshit
which is how Baudelaire begins
“To the Reader” the only contemporary analog of which I can think of
is “Niggas in Paris,” boys’ club of the privileged few
gilded among the merveilleuses and the lights
that have lit the city since 1881 against which millions
of Americans have backdropped among fireworks
avarice, all that, in the poor who in systematized
financialization of the body politic finally resemble
the nothingness that leaps up in Nietzsche to waltz toward
the end of the world at the home of Michael Bay
where we belong is ultimately the holy land, LA
Jeep-bound in the Hills
buried in the sunlight that illuminates
every face with the brightness that accompanies any intimacy
with death, even brain death
but what I truly want to do is be with you, Cher,
and learn to tell the difference between us
the intelligence of Baudelaire is anger with strategy
shovel off the world with boredom
to avoid work and its attendant wage slavery
heinous at the time of the composition of Les Fleurs du Mal
shortly after the Paris Commune
which ended with its destruction
to create “youth culture,” MTV
and its educational programming via MTVu
I’m aware that this has nothing to do with speaking to you,
dear reader, but isn’t this what Baudelaire is talking about
when he runs up against the wall of the world
which encircles an obelisk of the world
standing in the middle of Paris it’s like the word incroyable
a mouthful of revolutionary policy
like “ours” in Egypt
from which Paris imported the Obelisk of Luxor to the Place de la Concorde
a gift from the self-appointed Egyptian Viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha
was constructed to exalt Ramses II
whose teeth rotted out of his head a pharaoh
whose reign lasted longer than any single French Republic ever has
nowhere to be found in “Au Lecteur” but its singular message as important
then as today: WATCH THE THRONE