Michael S. Judge, Death Is Just Around the Corner

version

Well-known member
The Pynchon guys keep going on about this bloke, so I had a look. He has a podcast about conspiracy theories (JFK etc), but fuck podcasts. Anyway, he's apparently a writer too and this caught my eye in an article on him,
A good parallel might be the work of J.H. Prynne. His texts, too, are known to be “difficult,” and yet there is some agreement that reading them involves tracking the language as an assemblage or collage of signifiers that simply refuse the transparent, realistic mimesis of conventional writing (or, more pointedly, the language of ads that do not know they are ads). The poems are about putting different registers of diction and domains of knowledge into dialogue and refusing to naturalize and accommodate their interactions through modalities of (sustained) narrative, exposition, or argument. And the domains we see “collaged” in this passage from Judge belong to (put broadly) chemistry, sound recording, oil extraction, genetics, archaeology, astrophysics, technology, financial capital, history, and human nervous systems, among others. In other words, Judge is evolving an idiom that allows him to speak these things simultaneously: to give us the texture of their interpenetration and reciprocal or parasitic re-writing of one another. Nervous systems are fracked. DNA becomes externalized in cables and wires. Stock markets absorb shockwave data. Stars speak into fossils. History is an engine. Earth becomes a battery whose fluid spills across stars. And someone or something is recording all this. Some-one/-thing is doing this. And so what is the speaker/scribe of this text, then? A witness? A victim? Someone doing their own version of these same operations? Keep reading. Soon you’re doing all these things too. One might call this omnigraphia: all writes into and out of all else.
 

luka

Well-known member
like a teenage sci-fi Prynne. could be good if you invest in it, possibly. hard to tell at a glance. doesn't seem as serious as what i do, doesn't have the gravitas, but on the other hand it doesn't look totally boring which is an achievement in itself.
 

version

Well-known member
what do you think as you skim through it
Not much tbh. I need to have a proper look at it though. The people who keep going on about him mostly just listen to his podcast. I haven't heard them say much about his actual writing. I think @Linebaugh likes him.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Ive never found the energy to really give his writing a chance, my take is the same as Lukas- could be good if you invest in it, possibly. hard to tell at a glance... doesn't look totally boring which is an achievement in itself.
 

version

Well-known member
Has PassedOver read him? He was the first person to mention him to me. I think he's spoken to him a bit too.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
But the GR series I think is worth a listen to anyone who enjoyed the book. The first episode is barely about Pynchon, if that makes it all the more alluring.

His on air personality might put you off, very antagonistic, acerbic. He can also be so forthright in talking about his mental illness I feel the need for a trigger warning. But the content is good.
 

version

Well-known member
But the GR series I think is worth a listen to anyone who enjoyed the book. The first episode is barely about Pynchon, if that makes it all the more alluring.

His on air personality might put you off, very antagonistic, acerbic. He can also be so forthright in talking about his mental illness I feel the need for a trigger warning. But the content is good.
Isn't he usually drunk when he does them?
 
Top