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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Dark City

Charles Bernstein

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A Sun & Moon title.

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Dark City, Charles Bernstein's twentieth book, is an at times comic, at times bleak, excursion into everyday life in the late 20th century. In Dark City, Bernstein moves through a startling range of languages and forms, from computer lingo to the cant of TV talk shows, from high-poetic diction to junk mail, from intimate address to philosophical imperatives, from would-be proverbs to nursery rhymes and songs.

Bernstein's city is flickering and evanescent, moving from Madras to New York to Los Angeles, from "Virtual Reality" to "The View from Nowhere." Yet his collage of diversive/divisive voices also represents, as The Village Voice has noted, "A tireless attempt to regain our attention and bring us from inertia into discourse again":

Love is like love, a baby
like a baby, meaning like
memory, light like light.
A journey's a detour
and a pocket a charm
in which deceits are borne.
A cloud is a cloud and
a story like a story,
song is a song,
fury like fury.