UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE :: DOSSIER
SIMONE WHITE UNREST
A.
SOMETHING LIFTED OFF THE ANHEDONIC FLOOR
Bacon and body hair— substance, indeed, of news. My brother called on the phone. I could hear the music again. I needed to talk, but not now and not about poverty.
B.
WHO RODE THE BUS DISCOVERED IN ITS WET HEAT THE RUMPUS ROOM OF INFLATIONARY CITIES
I wanted to write every day but didn’t know why. It was all I could do to think about Sebald and this was painful to me, having been devoted to what was broken off, then modally restored. My hair badly needed cutting. The musculature that formed a band across my sternum twitched and was pinching me short of breath. Mother knows the names of small muscles. She took me, sometimes, to see the cadavers believed at the time of her training best to convey the true form of living persons.
C.
THROWN INTO SILENT WONDER AND ADORATION
Branch of affable. Upside down, or bowed, affability seconds the daring rescue. I could be a little germ of wheat. Oh goodness. Grateful sharp, not low, for reading and being lettered under lamps and deeply affable at first light by turns cruel one beat nearly to death discovered and powered by rich shocks of leathery affable ladies ordered too off the Amtrak in cold rain and of walking across invisible track all covered by these machines Henry James, yo. Smooth ironed with the cheap spray starch from the dollar store. A very imperfect power and alight and change one’s whole thing into another word attainder or rocket or something.
D.
I TOOK OFF WITH THE ALICE COLTRANE
Not to pocket, for though I was rimless, I was not a crook. The minor apparitors cleaved to me in sparkled wake duly and North. No good to no perfect body.
E.
TWO LEAVES OUT OF LEAVES
priceless shame trash no one could have known priceless. not one more day about the business of pretending hedgerow spunked is knowledge. not one slip of Blondie too late, a boy’s girl roughly forgetful of outfolding into love of a whole population. never ever to wear a white dress in public is no kind of unified theory. if one were needed, I’d trip over it, as over the cobblestones dribbled from the road like teeth. mmmm, territory and a punch in the mouth.
F.
David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 colon “I will give here a very imperfect list of the cruelties inflicted on us by the enlightened Christians of America—First, no trifling portion of them will beat us nearly to death, if they find us on our knees praying to God,—They hinder us from going to hear the word of God—they keep us sunk in ignorance, and will not let us learn to read the word of God, nor write—If they find us with a book of any description in our hand, they will beat us nearly to death—they are so afraid we will learn to read, and enlighten our dark and benighted minds.”
G.
ICE: OR, INTERFERENCE
Conditions. Cold and marsupial. Excellence, in unexpected locales. I heard myself hailed, but ice was interfering. Every further day God grants delta equals spatial metaphor plus object of actual desire. At Greenland, combustibles plus vast quantities of very high and curious mountains of ice, entrapment and immobility of highly particulate waters bounded by the horizon only in the latitude 81 degrees North, we was working to purify much farther than previously thought possible. Black people make anything look so graceful, yet the execrable ice did hold me distressed, the fears of death hourly upon me, as I beheld the eternal dark pressing down the two floors of frigid topography and did obtain dim, shuddering glances into those Polar eternities of unsourced existence.
H.
“THIS TRADITION IS CONCERNED WITH THE OPENING OF A NEW ENLIGHTENMENT, ONE MADE POSSIBLE BY THE ONGOING IMPROVISATION OF A GIVEN ENLIGHTENMENT.”
I would not and I would acknowledge where trends in prostitution are headed. Bottle service dropped that girl on him. Whoo-hoo. Sound systems can be beautiful things I think of all the time and download trends procuring certain newer systems of accessing the high gender of half-hooker, which, check, Las Vegas transformed even into medina gargantua. I acknowledge not knowing anything about what other people in privacy of they house think about and only, Lord, recently discovered pornography party as a grown woman not looking to blow my breasts out or fantasize either about being housewife vantage. Vintage. Vantage. Anyway, fire that bitch. Under her dress, inaccessible to meme GFE-tiger.
I.
NOW TO RETELL THE HISTORY OF WOMEN’S TIME
At least four women old enough to be my mother love Thom Yorke. Just rattled by these circumstances. Sex dropping off turns out to be a goddamned lie. Dependent on what is is. Other disciplines include total abandonment of hormone therapies thrust on me relentlessly since puberty.
J.
IN WHICH I TALK PAVEMENT
Erica: In Pavement we learn Oregon tall mysteries of Oregon, loose fantastic and Pavement, which, failing Pavement resting, stagga back New York. I agree: Pavement is not mountain callous. Some ravenous varieties of trash bird deny Pavement’s low pecking car refuse at the intersection of like minds. Find a friend. Recombine. Joy. Jay-Z. Santi. Siouxsie. Ali. “Ice Cream.” Hope E. James Murphy.
K.
DETAILS, DETAILS
galactic fallopian complete break plastic garbage teenage girls whip in the street unknown phases of matter measure formal limits of the constabulary
L.
RUN OF QUESTIONS
If not in the scarf-skin, where does it “reside”? Do objects have business ends? In our parade clothes, shall we go to business, only? Or, doesn’t the whole thing transact? What is “repair”?
And how to account for the frission between us, which, previously, I could not imagine?
M.
LET THE RIVER RUN
On one hand, I feel knowledge as an air, a sound the mind makes when it makes it; what sustains and relieves another natural thing doing work in the main order. This does not make me a lung tissue. It hurts me, savage commerce in aspects. They will want me to say, here, about the person I saw somewhere, do the thing about music, then animals, then domestic work. A brute set if ever. I reject an ashy death, not to say childless, not to say, as if I could be so late to thinking, all the fat was sucked out. An observer who pities dry thought, yet performs other feelings, would never say, get you a baby in the wordless vicinity, as preparation for this is this sound the mind makes when it makes it.
N.
IN WHAT IS SLIGHT, THIS IS A QUESTION
In the half-species it is urgent to lie back in sense memory and be sat upon. A crooked spine will not pull right between your legs, up and down. Also, poor vision. There are shoulders burning somewhere full of stickpins. Optimistic weathers bludgeon and call for entry at the same time. A tiny brawn; it explains itself best quite naked.
O.
LOOK INTO MY EYES
The cat was trying to look into my eye. Turning her head and bobbing a little to get a better look into the eye I had opened. She pressed her nose against mine, and looked into my eyes, pressing her brow, her 3-inch skull underneath it, against mine.
P.
HONORIFICS LACK SPECIFICITY
I hate when people call me “Miss,” which isn’t an honorific in precisely the way that “Doctor” is not when uttered by a working class rabbit or old-timey Negro. We should talk about back-handedness, perceiving it, for example, in, “Thanks for your help.” It’s something to think of oneself as a lemon, or to consider that this is how others might think of you. One has to wonder whether the “sexual cut” doesn’t reify some very bad shit having to do with the female icon—worship of her/need to dominate her icon/get beyond her domination as “loss.” I’m actually not in conversation with those who would thank or nominate me, or with those who might want to worship some iconic aspect of me. (They say these exist. I have never met one. Failure to appear is the problem with this proposal of reverence supposed so profoundly to do with me.)
Inevitably I find myself on the subway thinking “Alden Spooner…Alden Spooner,” completely unable to remember anything about Alden Spooner, comforted nonetheless by the singular sounding name. It gives this singular feeling because it’s an out-of-fashion name, as is my personal name, out-of-fashion and from another language. The best question I have been asked, having to do with my future life, is, “Are you independently wealthy?” In law school, I admired the capacity of certain people I knew (like the teacher who asked me this, called “Terry,” as in tertius, of the third generation, a grand example of this intellectual style) who were geniuses for carving vast quantities of information into steps that became bricks that became bridges and arches. (My god, the outlines of a Terry Fisher! The sentences he could make! I was struggling verbally at the time.) They appeared to me if I made no effort, these pure physical structures, but mine were impressionistic and could not be counted on to stay; chord-like, the analogy is to music, which I have tried, always failing, to avoid.
The kindest thing this sort of white man could have said to a person, me, at the time. Maybe it doesn’t seem to be of the cosmos in the way one would like and to bespeak unlimitation. This was not an emotional relationship. I was afraid of him in a blushing, girly way and intimidated by the calculating braininess that I understood as his main dogma. Not that he cared to press this on me. I write of him now in a zone of nostalgia, not at all bad, for a zone of girlhood utterly destroyed. I am talking about yearning for the line, for the mathematical. In recent months, when dressing myself, especially when pulling on an especially tight pair of blue jeans of the dark, expensive sort that has really to be squatted into and that I have become quite expert at preserving in squalid, pristine condition by extremely infrequent washing, a feeling of mild disgust will come over me. That I still care so much to have an ingenue’s physique, when I can’t help but see that I have become the dense powerful creature I could see only in shadow twenty years ago, frightens me. When I think of having to live another forty, fifty years in a state of bafflement over my own decay, I think I will not stand for it.
I say, not because I am small. Not because black people my age who aren’t addicts don’t have face wrinkles. Do you know that the marathon record of Haile Gebrselassie still stands? What must it be like, to be so far ahead in one’s body.
Q.
R.
S.
“IS THAT BIRDS IN MY HAIR? JESUS.”
This was a darkness. I felt my way through with the left hand, shifting the weight of the ring to where the works were working. Axis of collapse and scar and devil I knew. Bareness everywhere, idea of “makeless,” murder and whatnot, reading hard, one seventeen, twenty, one forty-four, discoveries came very dear, very dark. For a long time, yourself the vortex’ source and master (say, thirteen, say, Sovereign— whose “S” is so gangster). Did my pants hurt? The wrong medicine swelled eros, pinced and cracked her thin shell absurd like a loon’s egg on a broke up pond,
already dead. Scree, equally bankrupt. I will not say it, nor should you say it. I learn from television certain things about congress. A long time ago, weird ugly thinking about my sex, roses cut, rolled off the body in little pills because I was definitely after everything, even the no-thing itself. Sweat of our wages the yellow orange of grapefruit and bitter pinks confronted some afternoon that should be warm and ain’t. Harsh things I forgot the rank design of, I put them in my mouth; I swallowed things were fundamentally wrong in nature.
(Twin boy, don’t I know a serious band when I see it? Everybody sees me walk around Manhattan live as the day I was born, optic terror of the Americas. Quick bright thug eye, oil/gas man, whatever. All small hells are heavens. Thrill and rip. Press my neck, prehistory comes out at the throat. Thought yields before flesh in sound, same as it ever was, he wrote.)
As memory is the case and vice versa, the great Lew Sargentich scanned and spoke the maid’s gifted teeth from her skull, exercise of self-help no one gets between through or under the several rule systems which uphold it. Take my cue from this reversed compassion, most anxious, mortal. I hold myself down in self-help, my Leviticus. A wider psychological space for everybody not against love, granted me, and forgetfulness to forget things we do to one another. Plus, legs like Clint Eastwood.
W.
CUTTING WORD
you li’l Supreme niggas make me cry happy tears get up in the morning worrying about where they have you on the island of Somoa why have they locked you up it was not possible previously to account for the frission between us yet yet it is not possible to stop eating altogether or putting fingers through freshly burnt hair even when that rancid protein smell is so disgusting various practices cannot be given up suddenly so many li’l Supreme niggas going down the street in antics one in a Target-ass shiny wig I cut my own wig therefore I am elegant Robert Duncan he was not dead to me The Homosexual in Society kept coming up in earnest it happened that the club was no longer needed there was so much joy in going down the street repeatedly called back by your mother to be punished observably and in an exemplary manner what sacred music what is outside being known and saying what you yourselves prove and witness it is abnormal to be style-free unliveable perhaps you’ll go unpunished fast l’il niggas
XY.
Like, Ghostface this, Ghostface that, Ghost sold crack. — Dennis Coles Something in the order of sentences should not allow for thinking three ugly women in a row, bad skin under bad pancake. I’m told there is Tourette’s. And mistake contained in the load of event that makes up a stand for attack. Praying and praying over this space without rising even one millimeter; gassed up by jive people who claim to have floated, I tried it. “My phone cut off!” she shouted up from the sidewalk. I know it is. I know you are. We do our really sad disservice together. Some affect proceeds from play. My paranoid (to beat it up, to hit it) beauty. Smokey Robinson was always getting on my nerves because our love is not out of time. Now I am so embarrassed.
Z.
PLEASE SEND MISS IDA B. WELLS TO WRITE IT UP.
SOURCES
“Ali the Primeminister.” Philadelphiaindependent.net. Philadelphia Independent, Aug. 2004. Web. 1 Mar. 2013. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-185. Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa). The Very Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gastavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself. 1814. Reprint. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Signet, 2002. 15-247. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 1904. Ed. S.P. Rosenbaum. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 1994. Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. 1963. New York: Harper, 1999.
Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. Ghostface Killah. “Ghost Deini.” Supreme Clientele. Epic, 2000. Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Madsen, Peter. “Odd Future Wolfgang Kill Them All.” Thrashermagazine.com. Thrasher Magazine, 5 Jan. 2011. Web. 1 Mar. 2013. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. 1851. Eds. Hayford Harrison and Hershel Parker. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 1967. Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50.2 (Spring 2008): 177-218. ---. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007. Simon, Carly. “Let The River Run.” Working Girl: Original Soundtrack Album. Arista, 1988. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. “Tears of a Clown.” Make It Happen. Tamla/ Motown, 1967. Taddeo, Lisa. “Rachel Uchitel is Not a Madam.” New York 12 Apr. 2010, 24+. Wadler, Joyce. “Public Lives; At 82, Still Fighting the Battle of the Sexes.” NYTimes. com. New York Times, 15 Apr. 1998. Web. 1 Mar. 2013. Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, To the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, And Very Expressly, To Those of The United States of America. 1829. Reprint. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster. Boston: Bedford, 1997.
NOTE TO P
Haile Gebrselassie’s record was broken by Patrick Masau Musyoki at the 2011 Berlin Marathon.
Unrest Š Simone White, 2013 Printed in an edition of 500 by McNaughton & Gunn in Saline, MI, and bound by hand at the Ugly Duckling Presse workshop in Brooklyn, NY. Designed and typeset by goodutopian using Chaparral for the text and Eurostile and Trade Gothic for the titles. Covers printed letterpress at UDP on French paper using magnesium plates from Hodgins Engraving. For more about Ugly Duckling Presse or the Dossier series, please visit us on the web: www.uglyducklingpresse.org.