Auras or I am being retarded

Inundation is a day. I drank no coffee. There are 4 people gmail chatting me. I am getting txt msg'd. Phone sometimes rings but my voice can't go into it unless I hit it one certain way. My gmail tab is variating between inbox and the ___ says... of 3 different people. I am considering coffee at 11:30 pm because I feel like I got socked with a sock: sandwich eater.

Twice tonight I have posted a blog about Aura. It didn't feel right the way I had it and kept taking down. I am slurred a little. I don't think I can say what I mean the way I mean it and make sense to anyone even myself which would negate typing which would negate sitting in chair half-sweating because I took a bath and did not put on deodorant after and then began to sweat in the heat and put on deodorant and now feel disgusting in this weird shirt.

I am going to post parts of the earlier post of the blog to see if I can make sense out of it. My gmail IM is going nuts with the donk noise. I am going to mute it.

Oh I deleted the old one. Okay I'll try again. It is below. (I was going to edit and chop it up and fix things I'd thought but I feel removed.)

A thing I can't stop thinking about as I am putting final edits on this novel is how the presence of a popular and/or iconic entity effects the aura of a work. There are a couple of major instances in the book where well known names appear: not simply to be name-checked or made as a loose reference, but as a function in the book. For instance, these occurrences aren't used in a way like: "Jon went to Starbucks and bought a mocha Frapucchino." I think that kind of namecheck, brand insertion has been done and done to death. I wouldn't want to include that in new work. I am thinking more of the way an influence of other works colliding or being contained by other works and how that affects a work's reception.

For instance, I'm reading Michael Earl Craig's YES MASTER! right now. In it he has a poem where references are made to Tom Waits's ALICE and Klaus Kinski, and those images are used not as placeholders, but as things for the images in the poem to bounce off of. They accrue the energy or something. So there is the moment of recognition, and then the poem builds off that recognition, and molds it, and assumes the energy a little, rather than using the words to create the topography of the piece. The piece does not exploit the cultural reference, it rebends it. I think that's what I mean.

Another work that successfully uses these kind of ideas without exploiting them I think is Derek White's POSTE RESTANTE, which I have written about before. His book has figures like Johnny Rotten and Madonna and music references to bands like Love and Rockets, and they do not feel like sore thumbs, they seem to absorb the aura.

There are surely many books that also do what I'm talking about, but I can't think right now.

Though there are plenty of ways this kind of careering can leave a bad taste. The Starbucks example, for instance, where it serves no purpose except to be a place, or where it is done in a way that feels like a mimicry of what Delillo did in WHITE NOISE or what Bret Easton Ellis did, or what have you. I want to avoid these repercussions, but I think there is something still yet to be harnessed in the idea of what I've talked about on here a few times, and in the instances above, where you take a cultural figure and bend it to your uses, absorb its aura.

Culture worship, culture attention, culture look-at-me is ill-gotten, but we exist in this world and this world is made of these things, and these things have terrain, I think.

I'm thinking all of this now because the introduction to my novel, and another certain rather key section the book later on, includes a couple of these type things, where names of cultural icons are included (in my instance, they are people). In my instance they are important not because of topography, I think, but because of aura. There is a specific feedback caused by their presences, I think. And yet the majority of the book does not include these kind of terms, and stays in a more dreamlike, word-to-word kind of dreamlike rhythm. Does the introduction then throw the rest of the book off? As I'm getting close to finishing, I am starting to worry a little, though, that having those kind of things in key moments like an introduction could throw a reader off. Could put them in a mindframe where they are expecting these cultural references, and can not view the work on a word by word level, via which most of the book is built. (What's the difference between saying CREST and toothpaste? There is one. Sometimes I like one and sometimes I like the other. Even Cormac McCarthy says coke instead of soda.) I am wondering if I should go through and neutralize the elements so to speak, to render them more organic, though I know something would be lost if I did it. I still can't help but think about it.

Do I even care about this? I probably don't. I am overthinking, I know, because I worry, but I wonder what other people think about the function of these kind of energies.

I am sure in the end I will go with what I have created as it is, but I just want to continue to mull, and typing this out is actually making me feel better about it.

I will probably delete this post later, but if anyone has thoughts, think.

This is precisely why I do not sleep.