BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)
By:
July 25, 2022
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, delivering brief remarks on mottos, mantras, speeches, slogans, and other words to live by. Series edited by Adam McGovern.
Jack Spicer: “And I would think that we probably will always be crystal sets, at best.”
Not a generator, but a collector of electrons. A cathode-ray tube. An ear trumpet. Maybe an oscillator. Or a porcelain insulator. On days you feel fancy, a ghost box. Jack Spicer said Martians sent him poems. So also a manta ray, swimming through the hoops of Aquaman’s marine telepathy. What’s the surmise here? Thoughts moving through water cast a shadow. Other thoughts fall through the violet ether, glint by glint. Those thoughts don’t cast shadows. The poet is a radio, but just a crystal set at best. An alligator clip, a cat’s whisker detector, some germanium for the diode, shiny as foil. Or some galena, shiny too, cubic in structure, full of lead. Quartz, if you like things stable. The waves: never not there. Put the wire to the crystal. A booming cascade of voices, a roll of gold fabric unspooling for centuries. What’s sharp enough to cut off a sample square? No scissors you own. Put the wire to the diode, but not for long. Voices corrode. Too much noise. The wooly voices crackling on the danger scanner. Too many voices that say I’m Bob, or Get out of here, or Help. Or a fragment of song lyric from before the war, during a radio sweep. Martians or Raudive voices or fans of the Purple Space Friend. Don’t trust an angel that says its name is Doug. Don’t trust an angel with a last name. Pick up this word or that word, a whole sentence, and write it on your arm. The vocabulary may glow silver, it may be cubic in structure, it may be full of lead. Wear industrial gloves to handle it, but it defeats the purpose. You’ll lose some eyesight. You’ll burn your eardrums. Vibrating crystal, sending purple and dull silver voices pulsing through a wire. Through headphones, no other way to hear it, right into your head. The voices are a substance. A condensation, an inversion, blue smoke curling over magma. They rush. They speak in a cadence forced upon them by the lattice-like structure of what some call the beyond. They must speak quickly, in a rhythm forced upon them. Fast talkers, forced to speak Esperanto Telegram. Bricolaging the AM dial. Baseball, weather, mortgages, power riffs, morning hosts, the Emergency Broadcast Service. Breaking straight from the fissures of the crystal. What a relief! Not your fault. Can’t blame the circuit. Vocabulary or etheromania? Try to keep up! Try not to get lost! And yet. You will; you will get lost.
BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Ran Xia on BLACK CROW BELIEFS | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on LEFT-CORNER BRICK | Andrea Diaz on JOY IS RESISTANCE | Lynn Peril on TO THINE OWN SELF | Miranda Mellis on THE FUTURE IS PASSÉ | Bishakh Som on LET THE WEIRDNESS IN | Lucy Sante on FLAUBERT’S PERFECT WORD | Stefene Russell on CRYSTAL SETS | Crystal Durant on LIFE IS A BANQUET | Adam McGovern on EVERY MINUTE AN OCEAN | Josh Glenn on LUPUS LUPUM NON MORDET | Heather Quinlan on SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED | Adrienne Crew on WATCH YOUR PENNIES | Art Wallace on COME ON AND GIVE A CHEER | Julia Lee Barclay-Morton on WILLIAM JAMES, UNADAPTED | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on TO EACH HIS OWN | Nikhil Singh on ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | Mimi Lipson on CHEAP FOOD TASTES BETTER | Kahle Alford on NOT GONNA CRACK | Michele Carlo on YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT | Marguerite Dabaie on WALKING ON WATER | Raymond Nat Turner on TRYIN’ AND TRANEIN’ | Bob Laine on WHEN YOU GROW UP | Fran Pado on THE SMILEY EMOJI | Deborah Wassertzug on PLACING YOUR BETS. PLUS: BLURB SERIES CODA by Lisa Levy.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!