Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
“Home”—Anton Beans pronounces the word as if it is coated in multiple layers of aspic, bile, and perhaps petroleum jelly—“is a construct. It has also, if we recall anything of history, been used to justify so many atrocities across the regrettable creep of the last hundred years, not to mention the current colonial escapade being waged in ‘our’ name. I would be surprised if any one among us even knows what that really is, what home really means. I’m sorry but of course Chelsea loves her grandmother. ‘Cry me a river,’ as Justin Timberlake says. However, Chelsea’s grandmother—fortunately, for so many reasons—is not equivalent, even metaphorically, to the house she lives in! She’s a person who had a life, who was a subject of American sovereignty and capitalism, and this poem wants to reduce her to a piece of ideology, a symptom of the Cold War, now reheating in the era of peak oil in the Middle East. I doubt that I need to remind everyone that we are currently living in a surveillance state, a homeland, not a home, and to me it matters, deeply, whether or not the poems I read seem aware of that. I’d like to add that I don’t think we’ve survived the poetics of modernism for nothing and I would like it very much if this poem reflected the history of its own form just a smidgen.”
Stillness.
Now the question is, Harry thinks, who’s the most dangerous man in the room: Loudermilk or Anton Beans? Are the two of them in competition for this title? And has this contest already gone beyond being an event Harry can participate in? Maybe Harry’s locked out and he’ll observe their emotional affair from afar, Beans + Loudermilk 4EVA. Harry feels slightly ill.
But on the tape Loudermilk does not respond, does not make a play for the limelight. And it’s as if this reticence on his part is a message to Harry, as if he’s speaking to Harry through the recording, telling Harry: “Just listen in. It’s all here for you, man. I wanna make sure you’re intuiting the ripeness of these whimpering IQ voids.” And as Harry listens on, he hears the message all the more strongly: It is here for him.