In the tradition of Godzilla vs. Mothra…
…I give you Michael Palmer vs. Michael Palmer!
[
Michael Palmer (born May 11, 1943, New York, NY) is a contemporary American poet and translator.]
[Michael Palmer, M.D. (born October 9, 1942, Springfield, Mass.) is the author of fifteen novels, often called medical thrillers.]
[from Publisher's Weekly:
Hieratic, hypnotic, at times apocalyptic, Palmer's 10th volume (his first since 2001) offers more of the serious pleasures and delvings that have won him admiration over 30 years.]
[from Publisher's Weekly:
Palmer's 10th medical thriller rides on his usual wave of unrelenting adrenaline, and will make readers think twice the next time they're due for a routine vaccination.]
Now, without further adieu, the first page of Company of Moths re-mixed and mingled with the first page of Fatal:
IT HAD STARTED WITH A SORE THROAT. Nattie was really sick and Nadine had the discomfort of forgetting whether the hierophant had bathed the antibiotics in invisible water or artificial light. She knew the cold had gotten progressively worse. The pounding headache and the talking mosaic told her so — that her scratchy throat would project a diffuse song beneath the elements, as snow going down in the season of fire. After the first treatment, she remembered when the exact moment, despite its dailiness, was scented in fire.
In the abandoned clinic, doctors were consuming green beans, chicken nuggets, and Hashish Pudding for dessert. Across the raised glass counter, fragments of dioramas suddenly lined up in unison, swelling the sphinx-like eddies of Night. From the thresholds of the hospital — The Passage was beginning to remember the season of nothing, the tales from before her fiery pain was writ with nothing more than long oaks and the oils of thought.
There, the ship sweats in the rain while time divides its name in half…
Now we go toward The Moth.
Above the glass cedars, The Moth was seen as a shining wax sail enfolding in flames. The red winds were beginning to cough the iron ornaments of morning.
And the moon did not appear that night to scatter these sick heads from our bodies.
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#AuthorFail 10: Laura Goldstein
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, American Letters and Commentary, Carl Sagan, Chicago, CutBank Reviews, Dancing Girl Press, Day of Answers, EOAGH, Facts of Light, Gertrude Stein, Harper’s Magazine, Hex Press, How2, Ice in Intervals, Laura Goldstein, Let Her, Little Red Leaves, Moria, Otoliths, Plumberries Press, poetry, Rabbit Light Movies, Red Rover, Requited, Seven Corners, star, Text/Sound, Tir Aux Pigeons on August 8, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Um, well, this is embarrassing: if you checked this post this morning between 9 am – 9:26, you would have found an incomplete entry: devoid of this snappy opening, and truncated, it the main text, from its full form.
Could it be that #AuthorFail has had its first fail? Would this then equal success.
I feel miserable, I mean happy…I mean, well, something else.
As Jean Francois Lyotard notes in The Inhuman, the sun will burn out one day. Thus, all human activity is under the sign of this eventual catastrophe (no, I don’t think he considers widespread space colonization). I wonder if the sun will fail in its great and final task, to burn into nothing.
When you look into the sky today, enjoy the steaming ball of ambivalence–before that, enjoy this serious failure of a column from Laura Goldstein.
(more…)
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