THE RULES OF
THE GAME
LM
Rivera
I.
Often, when a writer bears upon writing itself, we (the
reader) find ourselves afflicted—unless, in the most unusual of cases, the
writer invents a fiction so consummate that a new kind of authorship is born.
&
There’s another way to bear upon the writing: write unto
significance. Overpraise and bow to the proper name. Homage is an unequivocal
way to confine the mistake of bad writing.
&
An author should live in Sicily with changed name.
&
Read Kafka. Read O’Connor. Read Antonin Artaud in Acireale.
&
Writing is agonistic. If there’s no blood, you aren’t doing
it right. A smear on every page you send out into the world. Please, hold the
pen like a just sharpened dagger.
&
A book is made up of screams. If you can talk, you aren’t
doing it right. You can’t walk into a library with your eyes open, heart laid
bare and bleeding. Platitudes are the kind of things that will get you killed.
&
When you send your work out into the wild, expect
repudiation. If nothing happens: expect suicidal thoughts. Without a proper
theology, you’ll be just another dumb detective.
&
I am
irregularly Gregor Samsa.
&
A good detective will have a depleted and threatened
family. How did we end up in this place? From my balcony, I have a palatial
sense of minor and major verse.
&
And a godlike harmonics…
II.
She failed to write ideologically and, failing to do so,
the end came near. Writers avoided her whenever they had the opportunity to.
&
She reads French fluently but the French writers she reads
have fallen out of fashion.
&
She stops writing altogether. Quality of life promptly
proliferating.
&
She possesses an intrepidity—she had never before been
capable of.
&
She vanishes, now and then.
&
She felt the love a very young poet—a dialogic totality.
One fine day, the young poet vanishes. He was not seen nor was he heard from
again.
&
She tried to track him down, for a short time. But the
attempt was half-hearted and incoherent.
&
She became, to other writers, an icon of each and every
defect existing in the domain of poetry.
III.
He chose to write poetry in the same way we choose to
defend our house against an intruder. You left the window slightly open and the
masked man slipped inside—hushed and constant. You know the sound of your own
house. You know the floors don’t make that noise of their own doing. You reach
for the locked box underneath your bed. Your pregnant wife, in the deepest of
sleep, next to you. The box is unlocked and, now, you are ready.
&
He continued to write, despite the fact that the work was
quite bad. He read an immense amount and only what he believed to be the best
of it.
&
He knew only other writers and wanted only to know them and
them alone: exchanging poems, exchanging gossip, arguing many nights away, and
ecstatically discussing literary futures and forthcoming subversions.
&
He wanted children but a poet can’t have a child, with the
strange acquaintances coming and going—with trips to Rome, falling in the
street, and people disappearing. Every now and then he thought of suicide as a
romancing of the edge: to be hanged, by your own hand, by the neck till dead.
&
He grew older and grayer, at that very moment, a child
appeared. He looked into the face of himself and was reborn—having, himself,
done very little.
&
He writes a novel when the child sleeps—another contented
insolvency.
&
Banality isn’t evil—banality’s a vulgar sleep.
IV.
I should like to attack another writer but this is simply
not done anymore.
&
A famous writer insulted me at an academic soiree. My plans
for revenge were thorough, meticulous, mendacious. I later came to find out that
the famous writer was paid for the act—no surprise in the unearthing. The
famous writer has an enormous readership. Financial goals are always met for a
man of letters.
&
Two writers meet at the crossroads—neither believe in the
validity of the other. At the corners of the four angles: a marble block,
un-carved; a floating red sphere; an antique music box, golden; a rain thrashed
wooden chair.
&
In Unamuno’s A Tragic Sense of Life, the writer dies
with his pants on. If that isn’t blatant sentimentalism, I don’t know what is.
Unamuno is the kind of great writer who might, given the right moment, poison
your tea.
&
In our current climate, a writer’s meant to know where they
are but seldom is this true. I opened the book and was disallowed from future
party meetings. I was, after all, only there by happenstance. I’ve been
incapable of moralism from a young age—as a young girl with a shaved head
pontificates to a room full of aging painters.
&
Later, I called the famous writer at his home. The maid
answered the phone. I told her what the writer had done. She took my name and
number and said she’d like to speak to me again sometime alone.
&
I know that I am obsessed with writers, that I will
continue to be, and its done me no good. A lunatic’s dreams restate themselves
and no one knows why.
&
A book with no violence and a writer who doesn’t succumb to
melodrama: uninterestedness itself.
V.
When you use the word love, use also the word suffering.
You’re disfigured from devotion, a being scrubbed of pleasurable particulates.
&
You get on a train. You sleep on a train.
&
In the desert of small pain, you cover yourself in melting
ice—that does not last but for a moment. Wet clothes slows movement. But the
slow comfort was preferred to that which soon materializes. The desert
interminably arrives with a solid beam of burning light. The burns become
signatures of the sun.
&
You love someone seemingly forever, then no longer there
forever. One day, in the company of someone else, you’ll love them again
forever. A demon rests in the relative concept.
&
You write a crazed murder ballad.
&
…The night collected their revolting dreams / Knives,
glass, animals, and steam…
&
When you’re questioned by detectives, you realize you’re
the prime suspect.
&
You start to resemble the desert when the frenzy takes
hold. Memories collide with one another and roll themselves into dunes.
Creatures, once tame, are now rabid, armored, drooling, and attack anything
that moves.
&
The only cure for the desert is drinking. And you drink—drink
till you vomit and back into the desert you go.
&
The detectives find a frenzied one with most of the
incriminating evidence. It confesses to the crime.
&
You are left alone, innocently writing.
LM
Rivera lives in Santa Fe, NM. He co-edits Called Back Books with
his partner Sharon Zetter. His work has appeared in Alien Mouth, FUZZ, Mannequin Haus, DUM DUM Zine, and elsewhere. His chapbook THE LITTLE LEGACIES
is available from Glo Worm Press and his first full-length book, The Drunkards, is available from Omnidawn.
The Nag Hammadi codices take their name from the Egyptian village where in 1945 a clay pot containing thirteen ancient books was discovered. These books are the earliest extant codex bindings ever found – 1800 years old – and were uncovered in remarkably good condition. Students will construct a sympathetic facsimile of the Nag Hammadi codex, and experience the structure and form of ancient bookbinding. Partially pre-cut papyrus and leather for the covers is supplied (see material fee below). 
