he listens to what was (it’s supposed to be music,
it is noise
But not for me).
In “The Scent of Thunbergias,” Misia Taboda. Lady Obstreperous. Bette Davis. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. W. S. Maugham’s The Letter. Dotty Dabble. Mme Marasm. Mme Sarcasm.
There’s no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel (Calvino, Italo). Quoted by someone else, citation needed.
Voices: George Sanders, Tom Conway.
Finally decided on a title: The X-Positions (Las equis distantes)
And, incidentally: no one else seems to like it.
(Appendices)
1. Concerning the enigma of The X-positions
“Today I put an end to — which is to say, I found names for — two of the enigmas in my life, now banished forever,” wrote Nicasio Urlihrt in his diary shortly before his death. “They were in a terrible poem,” he added, “by a terrible friend: his worst, I’d say, although I admit its intended meaning was lost on me. Love’s got to be good for something. Time’s got to be good for something.” Those who want to pursue this matter further (or destroy the evidence) can take a break from reading this apologia and seek out the material in question, as published in the journal Agraphia. If nothing else, you’ll get a kick out of the punctuation.
X-Positions refers more to unresolved puzzles, the unknown, than to the old question of anonymity; this according to a somewhat biased interpretation of the second hemistich of the last line of the first stanza of the sonnet by Sabatani—“It wasn’t yesterday the world we call old / Nor the secret lost on a mystery / Cult. Be grateful for the levity in the grave: / The bad poets, the x-positions”—that precedes the three Spanish versions of Mallarmé’s “sonnet on X” in his chapbook.
The ability of the X to contain conflicting concepts is both a blessing and a curse, bestowed by accident and by amphibology, among other things. Xs are, according to Sabatani, “symmetries of opposition or denial similar to the phenomena of inverse relations studied by Lévi-Strauss.” The genealogy of these Xs goes back to the “the Arcadian period” of Agraphia [Urlihrtian terminology] — to its very first issues, in other words, in one of those supposedly popular articles Lino Scacchi wrote for Sherbet Aria (“Todo Sobre la equis” [All About X] later published in Idiomatics as “Todo sobre equis, nada sobre Zeda” [All About X, Nothing About Z]), later translated into English by Hermione Hepburn and published in a journal called Bible Black (Tantrum Press, 1978) with the title restored to “All About X” (for a brief description of how all this came about, see “Early”). In his essay, Scacchi unleashed all the voodoo-erudition of a man who nonetheless ended up as the crossword-writer for a small-town paper. He ascertained, for example, that the Dictionary of Defiance by the mysterious L.F. [Louis Felipon], traces the sound of the letter X to that of the Greek word chrestos, or Christ. And according Scacchi, who cites “the best prose in the world,” to adduce that the letter X “cheered and chastened the best man in the world, Thomas Browne, who said ‘the letter X … is the Emphaticall decussation, or fundamentall figure.’”
After two pages of frenetically-written fustian, full of unconnected ideas and obscure references, Scacchi proceeds along the following line of thought: “It’s curious to trace in the history of this feeble cruciate sign the adventitious influence that has led to its being given coronal rank in the hierarchy of letters. Nonetheless, in the majority of cases, writers, from Ben Jonson to Gertrude Stein, Confucius to Cummings, Argensola to Gerardo Diego, have rejected it with disdain. Ben Jonson wanted to remove poor X from the alphabet, saying it was ‘rather an abbreviation, or way of short writing with us, than a letter,’ and Gertrude Stein spoke of its triviality, its function as a simple strikethrough, swift deletion, blind shorthand. Some countries and languages — like Welsh and Gaelic, for example — have never felt its influence. Yet, its wholly gratuitous or fatuous acoustical expression is married to its striking graphical representation like no other letter in the abecedarian chronicle.”
For more on the casuistry, the soteriology, and even the proctology of the letter X, see Edgar Lee Meaulnes.
NO
Felipe Luini, Hunting Journal
Ideas of Order, Wallace Stevens
Table of Contents
1. THE SCENT OF THUNBERGIAS
I. Early
II. The Imitation of an Ounce
III. Returns
IV. Occupation
V. The House on Calle Piedras
VI. The Cult of St. Mawr
VII. America
VIII. The Scent of Thunbergias
2. THE SEYCHELLES
I. Laetitia Pilkington
II. Hilarión Curtis
III. Doris Dowling
IV. Constantin Berev
V. Lord Swindon
VI. Irene Adler
VII. Venus Rattlesnake
3. SHERBET ARIA
I. Stealth//Centipede
II. Centaur
III. Arena
IV. Rhetoric
V. Karmapolis
VI. Ahnungslosigkeit
VII. Sestina
VIII. Pop Museum
IX. Portrait of a Tin Soldier
X. Chronoscopy
XI. Sircular Cymmetry
XII. Lycergical Glossary
XIII. Away with Them [Dead Aunt’s Diary]
XIV. Epilogolipomena
4. POPULAR MECHANICS
I. Every Nerve and Sinew
II. Semblance
III. Replicas
IV. The Xochimilco Diary
Appendices
All About X
Fame, Polyonymy, and Denial in Agraphia
Photo Anthology
The Biographies
Epistolary
The Dry Martinis
Poem and Sestina
NO
Glenmorangie — Nicasio
Better: Lagavulin
Or bourbon — Wild Turkey — prefers Jim Beam to Jack Daniels. Four Roses. Canadian Club.
Wyborowa. Stolichnaya.
Angostura. Negroni
dosage
Fernet or Negroni, Eiralis.
Red without question. And lots of it. Lalo.
The Dry Martinis
To sing sweetly then perish—“For Janis Joplin,” A. Pizarnik
She seems quite despondent in that photo of her seated barelegged: an attitude of cloying introspection induced (more than likely) by the Southern Comfort