Charting Tehran

I'm going to assume you still haven't read or seen the most excellent film version of J.G. Ballard's hallucinatory THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION, Will, because you never got back to me on it and I expect at some point both book and flick will haunt you for weeks on end, and you will thank me for the recommendation with the same gusto I showed when a fellow Mickey Mouse tripper handed me a copy of De Lillo's PLAYERS at the Cal Jam back in the late Seventies.

But in this eerily beautiful montage poem, you've got very close to approximating that stunning sense of unreality that comes from living through bad mojo times where Presidents lie, cover up and catastrophically misplan (Ballard's experience during Vietnam) while the media inserts the edited contents of the "meta-narrative" of the virtual war without coffins into our eyes and ears like Hamlet's treacherous uncle, like Chomsky's worst nightmare, like Forest Lawn curators, like the keepers of the deadly chronos moments that must not be seen or watched, only experienced as a rape in your dreams.

Mixing phantasmagoric cuts of dream froth, black humor fantasy--Jeb I recall was the name of one of the Beverly Hillbillies, or was it Jethro?--and adrenaline charged sex where the wah wah pedal is the human tongue, just as Ballard's delusional character the speaker becomes one with his sinister view of reality and blends it like so much multitasked "white noise" into his sensory inputs, which are clearly selected very carefully for obsessional value.

This feeling of otherworldliness while all hell breaks loose on the planet is captured here with superb subtext and indirect allusion; I also thought of the great scenes in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW with Pokler the German engineer, trying to forage a little piece of serenity out of the illusion of a non-existent daughter in the final days of the War, when the V-2 rocket makes it appear that the conflict may continue indefinitely.

I love the radical displacements of time you engineer here in fractured grammar and syntax, deliberately eschewing punctuation to get at that stream of consciousness logic, where we don't need no goddamn reason to slip slide into another story, sentence, memorable image. There are many, many memorable images in this poem, Will, which even in this "vernissage" draft shows elements of great style.

"valentino floating in gaspacho ," where in St. Petersberg did you find that one, Will? Superb. This ebb/flow, wax/wane comparison of life such as it is, and life such as it is, two worlds clash/coincide/coexist, create for the reader a tension that is not easily overcome, even with the soft, sublime endings. Here's the question of the day, is it possilbe to live and love, when, as Woody Allen once said, just one dying soldier or one little child is violated or many, many fall at the hands of a dictator.. is it possible to go on loving? I think so. Woody Allen: "It puts a crimp in my day." Excellent work, Will