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Creative Engagement with Steve Dalachinsky’s Trust Fund Babies and Phenomena of Interference (Unlikely Books, 2011)

Dalachinsky’s Unlikely Books double-chap Trust Fund Babies/ Phenomena of Interference is inherently inclusive of. Ripe and rife with sudden appearances (like flashes of fluorescent light?), there are various textual typesets and textual sizes throughout. There are also symbols and spacing performances which feel to me like they are meant to jar the mind/body open—open and into.

In Trust Fund Babies there are multiple admittances, repeats of being a “Trust Fund Baby:” born into money that one does not have to work much for (“he covers himself in monotonous abundance”). There is also a strange syncopation throughout the work. It is as if, if being a Trust Fund Baby is the initial admittance, then the rest of the work of both chaps is the actualizing of work itself.

We are met with an appearance of Cezanne (the word and the figure as I understand it), then in that same book we are joined by Satie! These figures present themselves and sort-of inadvertently drive the narrative as we move through “puddles of melting snow, [] anarchy’s urgencies.” Riding “on a piece of sound,” we are shown political sense (“I know what white America thinks of other-colors America”/ “these are [] lips in your land”), longing and tug (“(un)gloved she puts roses in his closing palm”/ “a gesture of suicide more like the broken heart of a girl [] a sensitive cross-dressing novelist who thinks he’s a samurai”) and interesting bends in desire (“his sex long-knifed between his legs”/ “his wife eaten out by a convict”).

In Trust Fund Babies, in a very musical way (“music agitates the savage beast”) Dalachinsky is begging to speak to, to sing to, more than the moon. He takes us beyond the strictures of the moon as simply present when he takes us into Phenomena of Interference (“ego is a dynamic lamp which overshadows the moon. The moon is a transparency. A false light”).

Dalachinsky has stated in other works, that he seeks to alter the image (“when you are a tree you know nothing there is only the earth where you are”) rather than to simply describe it. There are many methods that I see being used in order to achieve this end. Here are two: the spoken word quality of the sound in the writing and a form of pressure being applied to certain narrative terms/words (“did I say color? [] did I say sound?”). I read this double-chap as a dusty place. Like a long outdated coffee shop floor. Here the “charnel angel” is rising within us. Within a place where wars and histories can soften due to their having extraneous data pumped into them.

Dalachinsky’s Trust Fund Babies/ Phenomena of Interference, Unlikely Books 2011

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