one. Wet evening, windy evening. Subway System, A Train, 59th Street, Columbus Circle. Four bearded younger men huddle by the turnstiles, raise their horns and start to perform Bach. 4 melodies, 4 tones fill the tunnel at after. My eye correct on the tracks, on the junk down there. A tiny rat operates through the junk. Like absolutely everyone else on the platform, I fake I’m not a struck tuning fork. That’s what the city exacts of us. We’re already dreaming into the point we’re on the way to: exercise, hookup, business deal, consume, meal, that meeting with an editor. And nevertheless one thing essential is heading on below. I know it, I suspect the gentlemen and girls beside me know it. It’s our key. This isn’t just tunes, but a village. 4 voices in dialogue, mimicking, speaking back to one an additional. Often in sync, occasionally in argument. I think there is anything beautiful relocating amongst them, in between them. The seems lean into one particular an additional. They raise us previously mentioned the trash. The one light-weight of my prepare is coming up the tunnel. Shortly the village will be taken down into the noise of it, but that’s all proper: that’s a part of the pact. Possibly the playing (and listening) wouldn’t be so animated if there weren’t some shared consciousness of interruption. And then it takes place to me: this may not just be a village we’re listening to but one thing nearer, inside us. It’s the audio of consciousness, the track of the human brain considering 4 different issues at after.

2. Simultaneity: the aspiration of getting that on the page. The composer has counterpoint. Or a lot more typically: harmony. In pop tunes, bass line, drum, keyboard, vocal, etc. Many levels in the most basic piece of tunes, but in creating? A single voice at a time, the tyranny of the singular. Not that terms aren’t freighted with several associations, not that we don’t have puns, rhymes. But how does 1 start to create consciousness on the website page? Virginia Woolf manufactured use of parentheses. David Foster Wallace experimented with the foot note. As D.T. Max claims, the foot be aware was D.F.W.’s way to capture “all the caveats, micro-ideas, meta-moments, of [the] hyperactive thoughts.” But all that leaping about, all these gaps in time between taking in the major textual content and its subordinates. It doesn’t precisely occur with the grace of the fugue, even if there is some thing oddly stimulating about being wrenched back again and forth among two tracks. It’s a small like being in the arms of a taxing coach, who tells you to do 10 lunges, ten chin ups, 10 lunges again.

What, if anything at all, stunned them about the voters www.college-homework-help.org/ interviewed.

three. On pages 22-23 of Alison Bechdel’s e-book-size graphic essay Are You My Mom we have tables of passionate attachments, tables of therapists. A drawing of a younger mom within a circle, cigarette poised amongst fingertips. Boxed interpretations of D.W. Winnicott’s theories of the mom-toddler partnership. A graphic illustration of an trade among the speaker and her therapist. Graphics at some (comedian) odds with the fraught content of the exchange. A boxed statement relating to the “involuntary torrent of terms and images” that arrived to Virginia Woolf in the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. Somehow these two internet pages control to be orderly, significant, orchestrated. We’re provided place to process this materials. But graphics set their possess phrases, and we’re as soon as once again shunted again to the limits of mere words.

4. Anonymous: “A fugue is a piece of music in which the voices arrive in one soon after another and the audience go out 1 right after an additional.”

five. MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces, 1967: “The existing epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of place. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the facet-by-facet, of the dispersed…of a community that connects points and intersects with its possess skein.”

six. I have a brief focus span. I hope that doesn’t make me seem like an fool, but I’ll threat it in any case. By that I mean a sensitivity to way too-considerably-ness. The door swings open up way too much gentle comes in with that flood. My eyes damage. My brain aches. I need to pull the doorway shut just before I can open up it up once more. Open up-close-open up-close-open: that’s the tale of perception to me. Which is another way of declaring the story of reading, writing.

But that’s only 50 percent of what I’m battling to say. I believe my resistance may well be to the 1 Factor. In my imagination the A single Point can loom like a Giant telling me to feel this way, not that. The Huge stops numerous viewpoints, The Big ignores the simple fact that there are other truths, other hues, other sexualities: in-betweenness, paradox, ambivalence. The Giant can only see what’s in front of him. I need to have to search to the left and right of the Giant’s massive feet. I want the village. I want the room amongst oncoming trains in purchase to listen to the audio in the tunnel.

7. No surprise we understand in quick bursts provided the flood that’s coming towards us: thirty p.c much more information than 30 many years back. DFW expected it himself, from years again, when he talked of footnotes: “They may possibly make the main textual content an easier study whilst…[mimicking] the data flood and knowledge-triage I count on would be an even larger element of US lifestyle fifteen years consequently.”

eight. My very best friend has brain most cancers. My mother has dementia. Although they are many years apart in age, they share some of the exact same symptoms at the end, a decline of tact, a inclination to mash a single layer of time into the subsequent. They die inside weeks of every other, one at the starting of the summer time, one particular at the conclude. The fatalities of our beloveds are to be expected in every single lifestyle, but I’m shocked by these losses, particularly by the loss of my buddy, who is unexpectedly simpler to miss out on than my mother, who was absent extended in the past. In the months after her demise, I start off to compose a e-book about her. She would adore a book about her–a enjoy track of types–even although it feels like hell to do it. I don’t want to say my good friend is dead, I don’t want to say: the globe is dangerous, brutal now, ugly. I want to write about pleasure. I attempt my best to signify my pal in emblems–”moments of getting,” as Virginia Woolf would get in touch with them– but the emblems aren’t sufficient. They’re not the whole story. The complete tale is: a local weather out of whack, climbing h2o, a tsunami, an uncapped oil nicely slopping shorelines, mangroves. Dolphins useless in the marshes. What’s outside the house the body is also inside, which is why the guide must go again and forth in between two tracks. The construction doesn’t really resound with the simultaneity of the horn gamers but I’m when once again dealing with the truth that words and phrases aren’t wind.

nine. MICHAEL HAMMER, What’s in a Name… Fugue: “In a number of seconds, this voice will be joined by a next voice, imitating it, at what we contact a fifth greater….Now, it is a single of the tricks of fugue writing that you have to know the greatest way to carry in that second voice–just as the initial, or by ‘fudging’ it a tiny. There are policies for that, as well. Then, right after a short little bit of ‘connective tissue’ we arrive again in the original key, and a 3rd voice enters, once again with the subject. If there are 4, or 5, voices (Bach when wrote one particular with 6!) the exact same issue happens with their entrances, alternating amongst the original notes and 5 notes up from the initial. The total section is known as the topic region. For the duration of the arrival of the additional voices, the outdated kinds preserve on ‘singing’ but they do not have to keep to any particular tunes, due to the fact the freshly arrived ones are not likely to preserve imitating them. It is only the matter that is critical….When all the voice entrancing has been achieved, they all get started to dance around according to the inspiration of the composer. This far more optional segment is typically referred to as an episode, as in ‘I’m having an episode, and if you don’t go away I may possibly have another one particular.’”

ten. What else could I do? If I had a stack of transparencies I’d print a single passage for every webpage, maintain them up to the gentle, so you could see each and every textual content burning into the following.

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Paul Lisicky is the creator of Lawnboy, Renowned Builder, The Burning House, and Unbuilt Initiatives. His work has appeared in The Awl, Fence, The Iowa Overview, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Tin House, Unstuck, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and nonfiction in the MFA System at Rutgers-Camden. A new nonfiction guide, The Slim Doorway, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2014.