Background: Tony Morrison, George Steiner, Danilo Kis, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Roland Barthes— all eventually wrote towards the aesthetic and ethical value of openendness.

Discursiveness, theory, worry – the mind alone with a book in a room at night.

Point of origin: There must be a starting point which isn't loss.

Cosmology: Heidegger said "questions are paths toward an answer"; each path will be unique to the mind who sets off asking it. Schools turn paths into highways by sending us to chase the same question and to compare our responses.

Being able to ask questions is more important than being able to answer them. And the belief the answering questions is a measure of intellect diminishes the range of thought, both formally and institutionally.

We cannot dismantle the house in which we live by coming up with new answers. Dismantling requires undoing, reformulating…

The right answer – the one directed by the textbook – testifies to its own idolatry, or to the belief that one answer can stand for eternity.

Technical considerations: Good criticism reveals the supple shoulders and strength of an idea, its gait, its range, the terrain it travels in a landscape of inter-textual topography.

How steep is the slope of the gradient away from convention in comparison to other ways of knowing?

What is the degree of this gradient, its effects?

The ways language fails those who put their faith in it.

The aesthetics of idolatry uncovered by the author, whether personal or cultural. The particular lineaments of loss — not to start in that space, but to acknowledge its potential dominance.

Subjects: Amatonormative relationships.

Class as construed by the cognoscenti. Power.

The nature of belief and its relationship to the vatic voice.

Memory as elsewhere or otherwise.

Longing as a failure of markets.

The apocalyptic heart of modernity. 

To seek the metaphysics of how language changes, and how unstable the world conveyed in a word, whether we read it from experience, cultural limitation, or time.

The insight and the apercu, the personal portrait set against the pain of the text.

The posthumous voice on trial for what it failed to anticipate, and dialogue with her grief continues to challenge semantics.

Barthes quotes from Gide's 1927 journal: “They want to make me into a dreadfully anxious being. My only anxiety is to find my thoughts misinterpreted.”

Abstractions: You don't know what you don't know until you've built a house which must be undone by it.

The hunger for purity rationalizes violence.

Therapy doesn't provide solutions to social problems – it merely offers attention to those who can afford it.

Social problems are not resolved by privatized solutions.

Asides: We mistake citations for rigorousness, just as we mistake the use of complicated lexicons for intelligence.

Neoliberalism offers to each the opportunity to each be the hegemon of our own hallway.

Storyline: Someone wants to rule the world so they run for local office. 

Poem: The sapling stripped by winter. 

The rawness of the leafless thing.

The incongruency of raw evoking meat when I mean is a bone.

Distractions: Piranesi, piano tuners, baroque variations. 

Samuel Beckett saying to A. M.: “It gets harder and harder to write a line that’s honest. It’s very painful, very difficult.”

Contentions: Modernism relies on the sense of observable time as a form of authority.

Schools tell us a statement is true or false but life reveals the truth or falsity depending on its moment of utterance and its situation.

Tempo: The velocity of engagement and the language which enacts this. 

Cigarettes in the bathroom: Memory is elsewhere or otherwise.

The moment of utterance.

Counterfactuals. Sincerity and good faith: both require a commitment to error.

Mysteries: The way ideas are used to explain a perception, and what it triggers in the reader. What sort of re-cognition is involved.

How a poem has its own landscape and selects its own characters.

The specifics, the details, the blitz.

The visibility of voice. ….Is the poet whispering to someone else in the room? Why not?

“Resonance” rather than “reference”, Daniela Cascella calls it in Chimeras, this decentering of academic citation and direct quotation.

Non sequiturs: The discourse of great seriousness may not be serious.

Language doesn't become a god just because we put our faith in it.

Moral choices require the existence of other people; ethics exists outside of the closet of our personal feelings, in the space which is social, in the cafeteria.

How a book creates a sense of reality.

How a poet encounters temporality.

You don't know what you don't know.

And yet, one hopes to somehow build a house which is undone by it.