The Last Two Seconds Read Online Free

in rubber, silk or twilled linen, enemas, clysters … etc.”—comes from a translation by Simon-Watson Taylor ( Paris Peasant , Picador: 1980) of Louis Aragon’s Surrealist text Le Paysan de Paris (Gallimard: 1926). Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk ( The Arcades Project ) was influenced by Aragon’s book. “Benjamin etceteras” echoes the end of Aragon’s list, and includes the many items that fill Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.
    Sturm und Drang ( Storm and Stress ) is a term that refers both to the title of a 1776 play by Friedrich von Klinger and to a German literary movement that flourished in the 1770’s. The literature and music responded to Enlightenment ideals of a humane society that elevated the social and moral good (reason and tolerance) over prejudice and religious ideology. It was also a protest against the oppressive restrictions of tradition in a system defined by a powerful aristocracy and a vast peasant underclass.
    “He stared sadly at the ruins of his house” is a usage example taken from the German translation for the word sad from Cambridge Dictionaries Online : http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english-german/sad .
    Provisional Doubt as an Architectural Space : The poem takes language from Raphael Rubinstein’s article “Provisional Painting Part 2: To Rest Lightly on Earth” in Art in America , February 1, 2012. The poem is dedicated to him.
    Lions and Tigers: The Escaped Animal Was Bent to the Trainer’s Will : The poem’s title is a photo caption on page 83 of a “Little Big Book” titled Lions and Tigers: With Clyde Beatty (With pictures from the Carl Loemmie production “The Big Cage.” Based on the story “The Big Cage” by Edward Anthony) (Whitman Publishing: Racine, Wisconsin, 1934). Thanks to Carl Phillips for the book.
    The poem was originally posted at 350.org on October 24, 2009, as part of an “International Day of Climate Action.”
    The Blank of Reason Produces Blank: After Goya : The poem title alters the English title of an etching by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters ( El sueño de la razon produce monstruos ), Plate 43 of Los Caprichos ( The Caprices ), etching, aquatint, drypoint, and burin, 1799.
    The chorda tympani is a branch of the facial nerve that travels through the middle ear and crosses the tympanic membrane (eardrum).
    In Dante’s Inferno , Canto XIII, line 84, Dante says to Virgil, “ch’i’ non potrei, tanta pietà m’accora” (For I cannot, such pity is in my heart.)—trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
    Let’s Say Yes : The six poems in this series were composed of words found in a 296-page paperback edition of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Javanovich, New York and London: 1985). “Scene after Scene” uses words found on pages 1–50; “This Bell Like a Bee Striking,” pages 50–100; “The Nerve Fibers,” pages 100–150; “To Write a History,” pages 150–200; “Opened and Shut,” pages 200–250; and “There She Was,” pages 250–296.
    Explain the Brain : The title of the poem and some of its language is taken from Carl F. Craver’s Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 2009). The book is concerned with neuroscientific explanations of causality, especially how to determine which ideas are logically sound and which are not. He invokes Aristotle’s example of something that is associated with the sunrise but doesn’t “explain” it (a rooster’s almost invariable crowing at dawn) and compares that to Sylvain Bromberger’s example of something that does in fact mirror the explanation of the sunrise—changes in the length of a shadow cast by a flagpole as the sun moves higher in the sky.
    All through the Night : The title, and We have no past we won’t reach back , is taken from the song “All through the Night” on Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 debut album, She’s So Unusual.