"Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants"

- Allen Ginsberg, "Ignu"

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by Edward Lacie

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Episode Twenty-Six

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A poem, "The Philomath", by Edward Lacie, before he abandoned this narrative in March, 2003:

The Philomath

In dreams, the letters in the book

turn right before my eyes, morphing left.

I walk across the Alps for an imaginary job.

With wild dogs, I cohabit the brush around the desert.

Words look like a foreign language through which some English can be deduced.

They'll have to carry me out, my tongue dangling.

Blaise Cendrars knew Gertrude Stein. She wrote as much.¹

It's my last, miserable ride through Paris. Don't stop.

Even so I hear voices of ghosts of banquet goers.

I do not think that they want to accompany me.

___

End of poem.

Imagine Whitman unemployed for a year, no income but plenty of time to write. Then he gets a job that takes ten hours of focus each day.

"Someone did our work for us," Cooper says of the door within Owl Cave being opened.

I wrote the above poem on a dare from Baysans. We've talked it over and know what a vain, vapid road the goal of poetry is. Even so, he couldn't help but also write a matching poem. 

The same poem, "The Philomath", by Greg Baysans:

I hereby pronounce you

Creature with a middle name, Serendip.

Garry called himself a Philomathopath.

I can see. I can see. I can see.

The qubit is a poem of great consequence. A equals Z.²

There has to be some other way to disturb the univese.

How can you ask how can I be well? Go to hell.

I'm being held captive in a world that won't let up.

Chris Butler makes, I'd guess, over $50,000 a year to be Dean

(Dean is dead, I shudder to see his name used here/there) of Instructors

though he can't punctuate a sentence or type a letter.

Someone was hired to create a BCTI typing manual that is a disgrace (since removed). A board of education (?) there approved that book. Those people are thieves of highest order.

The least significant, the most significant, includes the word "forgotten" in French. 

I've forgotten when I first read Keats, but I remember reading Eliot and hating him until understanding him better.

"Writing for wages," he drawls on C-Span2, Book TV (is that an oxymoron or what?).

60,000 words is not a challenge.

___

An inclusion by Jim Post, "The Philomath":

Women have to learn so much faster than 

men in a whisper after a rape scene in a movie.

Translating. Schwitters. Reverdy. Prévert (who, like Cendrars, was concerned about being accessible to the everyday reader as well as to those more "experienced" with "L"iterature), Neruda, too, Baudelaire. Malarme.

"If you take the action, you choose the consequences," Dr. Phil is saying on TV as I retype all this. As I wrote this originally, of course, Cooper was in the woods looking for the door into the Dark Cave.

I wonder of my ability to create a character with so many mental defects.

I make no sense of Jim Post's inclusion here, but I acknowledge that writing isn't his forté and that I don't have to be the judge of its validity. 

What pen name did Germaine Neuveau use? Did Juan Gris³ ever write poetry? Did I ever mention that? - ewl

I realize as I put the finishing touches on this narrative that the hacker added parts of Jim Post's entries, but I can't tell which parts. I have suspicion that the hacker is Jim Post. This episode's hacking is the final evidence I needed to convince me that it was he who hacked into this e-novel just before I was finished with it.

Germaine Nouveau became a penniless, mendicant beggar at a church in his later years.

Catch me if you can. The child in me plays a good game of hide and go seek.

Djami, the only one I cared enough about to try to send an inheritance.

(By the time Rimbaud's "inheritance" reached Africa, after the expected legal wranglings were over after Rimbaud's death, Djami had died a short time before.)

"We'll have a live report from the scene," the newscaster adds.

I start to wonder if my experiment has been a success: write a novel in the manner of history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: start with the intended result and rewrite history until it conforms. Has it worked?

When I get a new job, this is the end of the philomath.

Khandi Alexander is the example of an actor as opposed to the example of Andy Dick who is a performer. On "News Radio" she wore class and a happy attitude; on "CSI: Miami" she seems to be a very sad character, more than would befit someone who does autopsies. Andy Dick would do Pee Wee Herman as Andy Dick.

In the same paragraph that Steinmetz quotes Rimbaud's disappointment after the two-year-get-rich-quick scheme ("I find myself with the 15,000 francs I started with, after exhausting myself in a horrible manner for two years. I have no luck!"), he writes, "He is now struck by his first serious physical ailments."

I use myself and Enron as an example, not to say "poor me" but to show that it can happen to anyone. Baysans uses himself as an example to show that educated people do not get educated jobs. Rimbaud uses himself as an example to show that his failure is a failure of the established order.

"Bad boys, bad boys," sings the theme song from the television.

Baysans has performed his recitation of "America" and "Man Against the Sky" for me. Although impressed, I have not changed my mind about the likelihood of killing him. Soon.

End of episode.