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The Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
Edited by Andrei Codrescu
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the making and unmaking of person
Anti-Anthropomorhism or: Animals Redeemed

Shelby the Dog
by Robert Sward


";all that I cared for was the race of dogs,
that and nothing else; To whom but [dogs]
can one appeal in the wide and empty world?"
--Franz Kafka

Philosopher Dog

Shelby:

In a world of No,
dogs are a Yes.
Sixty-eight million dogs in America
and they understand
there is a fundamental human reaction
to everything--,
and it's No, No.
Grrr! Dogs hate hearing shit like that.
People, it's all No and it's No
and it's No.
And they look at a dog sometimes
and the dog is on its back, say,
on someone's lawn,
legs in the air,
rolling and bouncing;
'This is the hand I was dealt. I'm a dog,'
says the dog. 'It's not a problem.'
But people
Look at me, Goddamnit!
'I don't have time for this,' you're thinking.
'Something better is going to come later.'
No, no it won't. As Ram Dass says, This is all there is.
This is all you get.
'All knowledge, the totality
of all questions and answers,
is contained in the dog.'
Do you know who said that? Kafka.
That's right, Kafka.
Bow wow, bow, wow. Bow, wow.
Bow wow NOW.


Dark Matter

"Black holes lurk in the centers of most galaxies
belching x-rays as they swallow stray gas and stars."
--New York Times

Shelby:

"Dogs know this shit,
the cr'me de la cr'me of bow wow.
Astral barking, the music of the spheres.
Yeah, and they've seen the snapshots,
'black hole core samples,'
holes the Hubble found
billions of times the mass of the sun.
Bow wow, bow wow.
Look, dogs want answers too.
You don't think we have a hunger to know?
Not all dogs are rational,
but we're here for a reason.
We're here to take the lid off life.

So, which came first, galaxies
or the black holes inside them?
Bow wow, bow wow.
Just because you can't see something
doesn't mean it's not there.
Dogs know. Dogs knew from the beginning.
Once the universe was swaddled in gas
that blocked all light.
What else?
Humans use only 5 to 10% of their brain capacity;
90 to 95% goes unused.
Six hundred thousand years ago hominids first appeared
in Europe and Asia.
And that, from start to finish,
is just how long it took
to invent dog food.



Laika, Dog Astronaut

"The more time passes, the more I'm sorry....
We did not learn enough
from the mission to justify the death of the dog."
--Russian scientist

"Imagine me now alive. Dogs into cosmonauts.
'Muttnik' they called me.
And 'Laika.' The name means barker.
Bow wow, 2,570 times around the earth,
then burned up on re-entry.
Look in my eye. Tell me, what do you see?
Da! A dog biscuit 28 billion light years in diameter,
and it's floating in space. 'Luminous splendor
of the colorless light of emptiness.'
That's the universe.
Bow wow, and you can hear it,
continuous song, the perfect but inaudible barking
of all the dogs that ever were.
Nyet, nyet! God isn't done creating, my friend.
The world is still coming into being."

 

 

 

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diaries and memoirs translation and her retinue
the book of revelations and epiphanies working class sweat
the making and unmaking of person the corpse reads classics letters

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