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Shoe Lace


by Ann Bogle


I did not realize that a generation of young writers had taken INDY as a plank in pursuing IDENTITY in literary careers.  It's the real truth, as my friend A.Q. once described real, that I had read Tao Lin early and heard him read at the Bowery and thought no one writes as he does and that his feeling of influence came in homages to the minimalist generation of the 80s—born in the late 40s to early 50s—in taking them to heart and not missing their content.  Is this a place to show posterity and mortality?  Half the time I imagine myself as working in an American shoe factory, as making shoes, one at a time, not as well as Italian shoe makers, but as well as I can, and as with all labor, though an item or a few items I make may have a significance to <100 or =100 or even sometimes 100+ readers, mostly it's days, minutes, and years of seen and unseen effort, appreciated, misconstrued, and jism'd in competition for notches in a leather belt, though I tie shoes; and if you compile others' seen and unseen efforts, and especially, seen and unseen appreciations of effort, it mounds to a collectivity not comparable to one team of swimmers who hit shore and penetrate one egg, as in John Barth's “Night-Sea Journey,” where one sperm fated or destined but more likely not one, engages, while the rod of spermatozoa clothed in Speedos or eye-, mouth- and nose-hole tunics ram the coast from the sea.  Thank You for Your Sperm, Marcus Speh.  This is a shoe lace, white or ribbed-brown  or gold.

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