Dispatch 1/11/23: New Year
Dave Berman memorial, Lorentzen and Caveh, Rainald Goetz, Gutes' birthday
I’m thinking about the tagline of Rainald Goetz’s Rave—“Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music.”—and the form of writing in which the writers throw themselves headfirst into the dizzying ecstasy of nightlife, the narration a fragmented trip of a voice, anonymous sex and ego death, how it demands an author unafraid to lose themself in the subject, the subject is the author’s desire, so lost in the subject that they struggle to reassemble themselves, mouths and eyes and breasts and genitals, on the dance floor, in the foggy corners of nightclubs, at the afterparties with the promoters and the orbiters, with other comrades in pleasure, in the toilets, with the girl with an arabesque tatted pussy, with the tribal war council divvying up the rations, moments of intimacy before the return to a reality so intense it drowns out all words and thought, with no way out but through, a phallus dancing without its body, total release, an orgasm that lasts eons, thousands of years into a future of eternal night, and then passing through a black hole into a new body, a body in the delirious world that I have thrown myself into, a vaguely nasal voice grows louder as I start to come to awareness, a big grumpy voice that lingers like a horn on certain notes to comedic effect, the loudspeakers fill the cavernous space with a very different poetry, like a parody of the voice of God, in a luminous synagogue in Park Slope, it’s that familiar bastard Christian Lorentzen reading the late Dave Berman’s cantos at the Dave Berman memorial poetry reading, on what would’ve been Dave’s birthday, less than one hour in to what would be two-and-a-half hours of earthy tangerine hilltop slackercore Americana verses from his book Actual Air, “we’re gonna be here a long time,” Lorentzen says, working the crowd like a techno DJ, a crowd of flannels and snapbacks and an ambient whiff of discreet liquor, a few niche internet microcelebrities among them, Lorentzen reaching a crescendo with an excited exaltation of beer—“God, that’s some good shit,” he says, pausing from the source text, “can’t wait to get to the bar later…”