While elegance is refusal, this blog commends instead the exultance of acceptance, the radical acceptance even of what might look like refuse. Trashadelica: because I’ve washed up on an isolated shore under my own uncertain navigation. Trashadelica: the aesthetic of a solitary bricoleur, the perspective from an invisible academic atoll, an ethos of well-intentioned liminality.
Trashadelica: the surprise in the cadavre exquis, not to mention the recycled cadaver; for more on the latter, see Mary Roach’s awesome book Stiff, a sincere survey of the heroic, surprisingly varied careers of dead bodies. Trashadelica forages (what is psiloscybin but repurposed poisoning?) and reveres frugality: lichens can live on rocks, and nothing on earth is more beautiful, or makes more out of less.
Trashadelica exults not in debris per se, but in heterogeneity, hybridity: what comes in over the transom, since everything’s dust anyway, “star stuff,” to quote Carl Sagan. But before its atoms are rearranged some stuff might turn up at Value Village, where one can find both staph infections and the stray Limoges box. Trashadelica is sometimes trashed, because, as Rimbaud knew, there is much to be found in the disordering of the senses, though my stance is more humble.
Trashadelica: most of all because I admit defeat at trying to divine any grand literary purpose, the salvation of some ecriture feminine or even a single genre, let alone a verifiable trajectory for autobiography. I’m closing in on a half-century, after all, so better late than never, with a shout-out to Ken Macrorie: it is right to give him thanks and praise. Trashadelica: candygrams from my brain (inestimable gratitude to you, John Jacob, for that line and so much else).
Trashadelica: it’s not in the OED. But here’s what I did find: –delic (2nd ½ of psychedelic), from the Greek, deloun: to make manifest, reveal. As for the word trash itself: origins fittingly unknown. “1. A thing of little or no value; worthless or poor quality stuff, esp. literature; rubbish….” Okay. So what's in there? And what else?
*I freely admit to stealing this title from the late Ellen Kreitler, who was brilliant, who had read Kant and everything else (I have not), and whose Prolegomena I read at VCU in the 1980's (when the mainframe--hey, UNIX for People!--was newly installed in the Hibbs building and no one dreamed of actually charging to print a document). Sic transit gloria mundi.
Trashadelica: the surprise in the cadavre exquis, not to mention the recycled cadaver; for more on the latter, see Mary Roach’s awesome book Stiff, a sincere survey of the heroic, surprisingly varied careers of dead bodies. Trashadelica forages (what is psiloscybin but repurposed poisoning?) and reveres frugality: lichens can live on rocks, and nothing on earth is more beautiful, or makes more out of less.
Trashadelica exults not in debris per se, but in heterogeneity, hybridity: what comes in over the transom, since everything’s dust anyway, “star stuff,” to quote Carl Sagan. But before its atoms are rearranged some stuff might turn up at Value Village, where one can find both staph infections and the stray Limoges box. Trashadelica is sometimes trashed, because, as Rimbaud knew, there is much to be found in the disordering of the senses, though my stance is more humble.
Trashadelica: most of all because I admit defeat at trying to divine any grand literary purpose, the salvation of some ecriture feminine or even a single genre, let alone a verifiable trajectory for autobiography. I’m closing in on a half-century, after all, so better late than never, with a shout-out to Ken Macrorie: it is right to give him thanks and praise. Trashadelica: candygrams from my brain (inestimable gratitude to you, John Jacob, for that line and so much else).
Trashadelica: it’s not in the OED. But here’s what I did find: –delic (2nd ½ of psychedelic), from the Greek, deloun: to make manifest, reveal. As for the word trash itself: origins fittingly unknown. “1. A thing of little or no value; worthless or poor quality stuff, esp. literature; rubbish….” Okay. So what's in there? And what else?
*I freely admit to stealing this title from the late Ellen Kreitler, who was brilliant, who had read Kant and everything else (I have not), and whose Prolegomena I read at VCU in the 1980's (when the mainframe--hey, UNIX for People!--was newly installed in the Hibbs building and no one dreamed of actually charging to print a document). Sic transit gloria mundi.
I'm a fan already!
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