#119 Kevin Brophy 'Living while reading Kenneth Goldsmith'

#119 ‘Living while reading Kenneth Goldsmith’

Today in the tool shed a King Brown slid out the doorway between Tony’s legs. It wriggled up inside the wall of the playroom.

The device is so much more interesting than anything that can happen on the street any more.

The young woman in the community will not go back to school now that she has a man who needs her near him.

There's something to be done and one must get through it regardless. What I do is mechanical. My work is secretarial. It is dumb.

Reading a book about birds I speak of kestrels and he speaks of falcons. He talks of feeding an injured falcon until it walked away. ‘I gave that bird his freedom,’ he says.

I’m in the middle of a project now that's eight years in, and I've got four more years until I finish it. I think, Fantastic, I don't have to worry about having another idea until I'm at the end of this one.

We are out of ginger. There is no fresh ginger in the town shop. How are we to make the dahl today? Each house I go to has no ginger until someone does have ginger that she bought a month ago and has no idea what she wanted it for then. She gives me the ginger. The dahl will be superb. The town settles back to the heat and its shrinking shadows that prepare themselves to stretch out like veteran campers on the earth at the end of another long, long day.

That bookcase has becomes useless. It's a pain in the neck for me to go all the way across my loft to take something out and have to search through it, when I can do that on the laptop.

I drive around town looking for the students who must catch the plane today back to their boarding schools. One is at the shop, then he is not at the shop. He has gone in the white car. Another refuses her education, another is going with the ranger, another has gone with her family. My car is empty but the children are all accounted for.

Suddenly everybody is elsewhere. Nobody is looking out of the window. And the old guard are scrambling. Their whole base of power, their whole poetics, is completely scrambled now because of the web, and they're not happy about it.

They are making god’s eyes with crinkly wool woven around crucifixes made from icy pole sticks. One sings a love song as he turns the wool on the sticks. One counts out an eye for her father and one for her mother. One says he’s tired but keeps going since this seems to be a way of making something. Each different eye lives briefly the life of the hand that made it.

It can all be copied and pasted, every bit of it right now. It is amazing – astonishing to me – that the whole thing can be copied and pasted.