My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing - Softcover

Dodge, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143134361 ISBN 13: 9780143134367

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
An expansive, radiant, and genre-defying investigation into bonding—and how we are shaped by forces we cannot fully know
 
Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging.
 
Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Harry Dodge is a writer and visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues nationally and internationally. His solo and collaborative work is held in numerous institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Hammer Museum, LA; and Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. In 2017 Dodge was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

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1

 

June 2009 The place where my mom died was a nightmare. It was industrial dying, industrial death. It was a hospice, they said it was a hospice (but it was huge, with a lot of beds) and the reputation of these places is, Wow, why did we wait so long to get our loved one into a hospice? In other words, you hear Suddenly, wowee, now that they're in hospice, these nearly dead folks have tons of sweetness, cleanliness, and care from people who know how death works, how crippled, dying, drooling people gasping for breath are best comforted. One true detail is that a dying person could only stay in this particular hospice for three days. The lady actually said, Hopefully she dies soon so we don't have to relocate her. There were black plastic body bags being zipped up and uniformed transport drivers hustling them around on gurneys like it was a fucking grocery store. Zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. There were automatic double doors with a black mat like at Target and they swished open both at once like industrial wings. There were full-grown trees outside and deep, soft, green lawns proliferated in the contiguous expanse as far as I could see.

 

May 2017 My dad died today in Pasadena. I had seen him two weeks before but blew it and hadn't gone back. I thought I had more time. I gotta go, I told him, I'll be back tomorrow. And now there is no tomorrow for Dad. I love you Dad. I said to him, his gray wandering eyes. Why do people's eyes start to go gray when they're dying? He looked at me though, and gravelly, with effort, managed to get out, I love you too Dad. And formed a crooked smile. These words he meant, and meant politely, because he did and (also) did not know who I was. I love you too Dad. I like that for last words, don't you? It's Father's Day soon, in a few days. We're all fathers. My son, when he was little, was excited about special occasions. He had a cognitive leap just preceding Mother's Day when he was two, and thought every celebration was an offshoot of this one. Happy Birthday Mother's Day, he would say. Happy Mother's Day Father's Day.

 

 

Roland Barthes says that even if a thing seems to be the same as another thing, treat it as if it were different. This is a behavioral exhortation, make no mistake. In DeleuzeÕs meditation Difference and Repetition, he too suggests that even a thing that repeats has differences worth noting, worth praying to. He doesnÕt say the word pray but I know what he means. I donÕt even mean pray when I say the word pray. I mean a different thing, but I use this word. (IÕm not spiritual-this is doctrinaire-so PRAY TO WHOM would be my question.) In a not-so-strange fold, or LITERARY PUCKER even, this exemplifies my current point: a word seems to be the same but is in possession of differences worth noting, worth jacking off to, in other words. Super-sexy differences.

 

June 2015 La Verkin Creek, Campsite 6, Zion National Park, Utah. My son Lenny, who is ten years old, sharpens a pencil with his small knife. I interrupt his preadolescent concentration, Look baby, at the pink of that in the late afternoon sun, it's like flesh, the flesh of the Earth. The meat of the Earth, or a steak or a block of flesh. I observe color first, surface, the matted, torn face of the thing, bright pulsing orange and now pink. These soaring buttes are close, just past the creek, beyond a stand of billowing cottonwoods which leak prodigious tufts of silky parachute seeds. (The air is riffled of this meretricious down, causing us to be able to see the shape of the wind as it attends the valley bottom. Gusts, planar whooshes, slipstreams and more.) I can't help but think of this rock as slabs of blood-soaked, vulnerable body parts laid out to test our moral compasses, our greed. I am moved by the show of trust. I want to lay hands upon hot rock, say the best thing, be right and true and real. I'm moved every day, all day in places like this. Thunderously large. Lenny has taken them in visually-the buttes-but his reply is snipped, Hm. He doesn't like being told what to think about the geologic presences here, but I can't help test-running this: a mild-mannered introduction to a strain of homespun geologic theosophy I've been stirring in solitude for a lifetime. Then he relents. Yeah, he says, I see what you mean. He says it politely because he does, and does not, know what the hell I'm talking about. I adjust my featherweight folding chair and he finishes the pencil sharpening with a flurry of quick, controlled mini-strokes right at the tip of the thing. I hear the creek again, uncoordinated soprano trills, a susurrating concatenation of small bells. The natural pool at our site is large enough for both of us, standing or sitting. I watch him, my son, I watch the trees, I watch the dense masses of white fluff, I watch the stones ache as the sun careers away for the evening. One bat exits a hole in the rock behind us and flies drunkenly over our camp. I appreciate it as a basic notching into the continuum of disorderly conduct. Hey boss, I think silently to the insect-like knob of floating flesh as it disappears into the massive, tangled, arboreal crown of willow, aspen, oak, and sycamore.

 

Lenny scrawls a list of animals (ones we've spotted so far) on the back cover of the book I'm carrying on this trip: My First Summer in the Sierra, an early work by John Muir, first published in 1911.

 

Rattlesnake: 3 ft., beige, dark brown tetrahedrons

 

Warren snake, 8 in., ginger, gray stripe on head

 

Black and yellow striped lizard, 10 in.

 

Blue and beige with orange cheeks, 4 in.

 

Plateau lizard, spotted, gray yellow, red head

 

Desert Jack Rabbit with white tail

 

Ducklings, Mallard?, yellow and black head, about 1 lb. each

 

Bats. Smallest 7 in., Biggest 12 in. about 10

 

Wild Turkey, cream with brown spots, yellow face

 

Red and gray ground squirrel

 

Tawny-colored Rune

 

One loud strange bird call, Falcon? Condor?

 

Black and gray toads

 

4 in. hummingbird, black head

 

Weird tapeworm; dark white

 

Ring-tail Cat

 

January 2016 I have had an e-music membership for years. These credits, almost fourteen dollars' worth, will lapse at midnight-in an hour-if I haven't used them. Why can't I think of anything to get here, jeez. Sampling the algorithmically generated suggestions is unproductive, but now Dead Moon pops into my head; a happy idea, tornado from nowhere. Click and click, yes. I abandon prudence, buy two.

 

In Dead Moon the guy's voice sounds like the singer from AC/DC, wiry, scraping birdish emanations, and there's a jagged, fat guitar sound that falls apart as soon as it emerges from the amplifier. They have a girl in the band, Toody Cole, so the pleasures of listening are unmitigated, a pure stream without need for any transpositions or apologia. I saw them in New York live once and during a lightly thrumming, somewhat hypnotic musical bridge, the drummer poured a few bottles of beer onto his tom. When the song kicked back in they backlit his percussive eruption-two big sticks onto the head-which resulted in (not only an aural but a visual) beer-fucking-explosion.

 

 

In the movie Transcendence the protagonist, as he dies, figures out a way to upload his consciousness into the hard drive of a supercomputer. As I remember it now, just over two years since viewing, he is then able to enjoin with the brute computational force of the machine and exponentially grow his intelligence until he is in possession of a sort of primal god-like understanding of the physical world. I recall...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143134361
• ISBN 13: 9780143134367
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 333
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland