Mature Themes Read Free Page B

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
    â€œCan’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