BOOBY, BE QUIET! Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl BOOBY, BE QUIET! CONTENTS 7 A brief history of nýhilism: Felix culpa 14 The importance of destroying a language (of one’s own) 24 You are a pipe 33 The rebellion and the apathy 42 Mind the sound 59 The metaphorical crisis 74 Mock Duck Mandarin – the sound and the fury 100 Attention: Attention 103 Literature in the land of the inherently cute – the search for literary crisis 125 THE GRAPEVIne ColUmnS 126 Icelandic art makes me feel nothing at all 128 Hay-grinder of the greenpeace-kitten earth-channels of the desert-asphalt sugar-free beach-found transparent salt-Coke 131 Warning: You don’t need poetry 134 Two thousand krónur’s worth of freedom 136 Poetry – to the death! 138 Award this! © Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, 2011 141 Poetics Anonymous 144 The word is a virus Graphic design: Liina Luoma 146 Killing yourself with poetry ISBN 978-952-5954-06-7 (paperback) 148 Longest Poem in the World (dot com) ISBN 978-952-5954-24-1 (PDF) 151 Babe, come onto me Printed by Hansaprint Oy, Vantaa, Finland, 2011 153 Speaking like a God 156 I’ll have what he’s having A brief history of nýhilism: Felix culpa 159 READ THIS COLUMN DON’T READ THIS COLUMN NOW READ 162 Poetry and prose 164 The death of a poem I 166 So what, you gonna cry now? 168 The barbaric arts If a Lorentzian spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and 171 Canon fodder if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R x Σ, where Σ is a 174 Left, right and center – a self-righteous rant three-manifold of nontrivial topology, whose boundary has 177 A few words about the surprising qualities of topology of the form dΣ ~ S², and if furthermore the hy- sucking really hard persurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a 180 Inscribed around the rectum of a Hollywood superstar quasipermanent intra-universe wormhole.1 183 Cotery poelumn: Pwoermds 185 Gung Ho When one tries to speak of poetry one usually starts by mak- 188 There’s a new screen in town ing a really big circle, a really really big circle that engulfs the 191 Experimentalism is a humanism entire universe. When one actually starts mouthing the words 194 Making perfect sense that will – if god and effort allow – become one’s eternal speech 196 Quiet, you ignorant Booby! about poetry (and therefore everything else) one finds that the 199 Future perfect poetry circle has shrunk. The circle is now no more than a dot. The 202 So is The Waste Land dot, dark brown like a mole or something of the sort, one re- 205 This is your brain on crack cocaine alizes, is on the tip of one’s own nose. This, unlike the words 208 The art of any impact that opened this my eternal speech about poetry (and there- 210 On the urgent necessity of banning poets fore everything else) is not merely a theory. This is the god’s honest truth. Sitting on the edge of my bed a few weeks, days, minutes or seconds ago (depending on who you find it proper to believe in these matters) I noticed something on the tip of my nose and 1 Matt Visser, Lorentzian wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking 7 on the unfocused plateau in front of it – I started marvelling at II the accomplishments brought to life by my friends, my close acquaintances, my relatives and, oh yes indeed, by myself. So Nýhil. By some astonishing coincidence this was the same time A few years back I was standing on a street corner in Reykja- I started writing this piece. My eternal speech about poetry vik. It was a great winter of much poverty in the circles I was (and therefore everything else) – cleverly subtitled: The unspo- circulating in, and me and a friend of mine, a poet with pre- ken facts. maturely greying hair and a knack for walking holes into his (It shall be noted, and probably has already been noted by shoes in a matter of days, were sharing our last cigarette in a the more clever of readers, that this essay, rant, or what you quiet winter stillness. It might have been Tuesday, and I think want to call it, is not at all entitled eternal anything or the other, it was around 4 in the morning. A brief history of nýhilism: A brief history and it certainly is not subtitled). In the night. I don’t remember what it was that I promised Kim,2 but it We had just shared a beautiful late dinner of rice and soy must’ve had something to do with literature. Very probably po- sauce, a treat that we had grown bizarrely accustomed to. etry, and I am almost positive Icelandic poetry is what I prom- And there it was. Suddenly, as if it had crashed on top of ised to write about. Oh, the late Sigfús Daðason! The marvels our heads: an idea as beautifully upheaving and destructive of the late Dagur Sigurðarson! The late Einar Ben, late Davíð as if Orville and Wilbur had taken off in a Concorde super- f Stefánsson, late Egill Skallagrímsson, late Tómas Guðmunds- sonic transport (crashing or soaring, one or the other, take your elix culp son! Ahhh... one’s heart throbs with joy at the infinite beauty pick). and bleh bleh. After jumping up and down to display our joy and amaze- A Please, I don’t mean no disrespect. Don’t mean no double ment for a few seconds, minutes, days or weeks (depending on negatives. Only pure positives. As of late though, I’ve found an who tells the story) we realized that the idea, like we’ve real- increasing desire to dismiss the late departed, as being a little ized since goes for all ideas worth anything, was naught but a less than timely. The circle is closing in. We’re not crossing the name. creek to get water, not this time. We don’t have time, I am in a The name was, it goes without saying, Nýhil. hurry. Please. III 2 Kim Simonsen, editor of Outsider Magazin where this essay was origi- As in nihil: nothing. As in vox et praetera nihil: voice and noth- nally published. ing more. As in aut Caeser aut nihil: Either a Caesar or noth- 8 9 ing. As in nihil obstat: Nothing obstructs. pear somewhere else: And as in nihilism: A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.3 A wise man Different types of black holes have differently shaped singu- once said that nihilism was the blackhole of philosophy. A larities: in a stationary black hole it is a point, in a rotat- wiser statement yet would be that nýhilism is the black hole ing black hole it is a ring. If you passed through the center of poetry. of the ring without touching the ring singularity itself, the The nihilists of old went down the black hole to stay there, mathematics predicts you will come out somewhere else and with rotting teeth and pathetic revolutions that somehow never you cannot return. This is the basis of the wormhole idea. got farther than a shot in the foot. When the nihilist says: noth- However the mathematics gives no indication of where (or ing matters so I might as well rape and pillage, the nýhilist asks: when) that somewhere else is, and no way to control or select A brief history of nýhilism: A brief history if nothing matters then why should I bother with raping and it yourself.4 pillaging? They say buddhism is nihilism with a smile. Nýhil- ism is nihilism with a ‘ý’. Apples and worms: Does anyone recall the symbolism? Ný. It’s the age-old prefix for new, as I guess most Nordic readers have already guessed. “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, 5 f and you will be like God”. elix culp IV Yet, much like in the apple, there’s a hole in the story – there A This is where we start getting closer to the point. The circle grew no apples in the Middle East. Which is hardly a great keeps closing in and the spot on my nose is itching with glee. matter for anyone godlike, for anyone who has the wisdom not The black hole has a theoretical brother known as the worm- to circumvent the apple (malum in latin; evil is malus) but to hole. The name is derived from an analogy according to which go straight through. From one side to the other, laughing, in a worm crawling over any surface will not circumvent an ap- an action of non-action known as wu-wei within the Tao – in ple to get to the other side. The worm will dig through it and the old texts they compare it to moving through water. But therefore get to the other side much quicker than otherwise enough of that. thought possible. Going down the black hole you might reap- 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes#Black_hole_FAQ 3 One of a few definitions in the Merriam-Webster's dictionary. 5 Genesis 3:4. 10 11 What was the first thing the Lord asked, what was the first published around 20 poetry books, 4 essay collections, 2 DVD’s, question to form on the lips (or not-lips) of God Almighty after a novel and a CD, produced four short films, a sportsbag, three his children betrayed him? instruments, while travelling the country for readings, hold- ing a two-day international poetry festival in Reykjavik, and The Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”6 will soon open a bookstore in Reykjavik with an emphasis on underground art and poetry.