ASHBERY SIGHTING: OLIVIA LAING's "CRUDO: A NOVEL"

From page 99 of Olivia Laing’s glorious Crudo: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company), in which Laing writes as a fictionalized self who is also Kathy Acker alive today documenting events between May 17 and September 23, 2017, John Ashbery’s passing makes a particularly lovely appearance:

Death: she’d been in its room, which was somehow also a NatWest bank, and then a large empty space under the ground. In the chambers on either side, other girls with very white skin, girls who had bled out form razor cuts in the soles of their feet. Kathy used to live inside a fairly tale. Not now. Now she inhabits the upper air, where moods are painful to sustain. The language will be arriving later, she misreads. Language = luggage, baggage, the sadness of rain. Ashbery has died, comma, Ashbery has died.