seanconned

Missing a digit, or two: Moody's The Four Fingers of Death

2011-01-17T17:17:00.000-08:00

I can't remember why I wanted to read Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death. The Rumpus Book Club had a few copies they were tossing around last summer, towards the beginning of the club. I didn't earn a copy (weak plea for wanting to read it), and received Stephen Elliot's The Adderall Diaries instead. I have to say, looking back on the two books, I'm glad I got the book I did. Elliot has become a staple of mine, a ballast in more ways than one. He's helped spawn things. Moody's novel, on the other hand, has made my reading momentum sputter here in the early parts of 2011.

Regardless of why I wanted to read it in the first place, the jacket blurb sold me. It promised that The Four Fingers of Death "will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22." If any publicist knew what to put onto a jacket to get me enticed it was this one. And for a while the novel did. A comic novel, weighing in at 720 pages, set in 2025, it pushes a lot of the buttons that Vonnegut does, which is appropriate as ol' Kurt is the novel's dedicatee.

In a postmodern twist, Moody's novel is home to another writer, Montese Crandall. In the Introduction and the Afterword we get his story. A master of the micromicrostory, Crandall is an author who has excelled at nothing but the six word story. This makes for an interesting reading, but also contrasts with the opus of an interior novel, the effective Four Fingers of Death as written by Crandall. A novelization of the remake of the 1963 film The Crawling Hand, Crandall wins the rights to author the book via a chess game with Dr. Tyrannosaurus. Instead of sticking to the screenplay, the book is a platform for the comic portrayal of life as Crandall, or Moody, sees it in 2025.

Crandall frames his novel in two books. In book one, with the dominance of NAFTA having given way to the rise of the Sino-Indian compact, Crandall depicts NASA's scientific coup de grace of landing men on Mars. Told via the e-mail dispatches of astronaut Jed Richards, the mission goes awry from the outset. Jed falls for Captain Jim Rose, and while they are having an illicit love affair other astronauts turn traitor. In one encounter, a berserk astronaut takes three fingers off of Jed's hand, of which only two are found and reattached. Thus the four fingered hand is born, though in book one it remains attached to its owners body.

Book two chronicles the arm back on Earth, where, contaminated by a Martian bacteria, it proceeds to wreak havoc. It lands in the southwest, outside of Rio Blanco, and proceeds to do what an arm has always done, grasp, clench, claw. A bloody swath is born, and of those who come in contact with the arm who are fortunate to avoid strangulation are at risk of contamination. Enter taboo cults, robot sex, a talking chimp, odd philosophies, crazy science, and you've got the ingredients for a grand, postmodern comic novel.

Unfortunately, Moody just doesn't hit it quite right. Given the range and potential that could be summoned in a book of this length, the novel felt strangely contained. The strands, so distinctly developed, all kind of mash into each other for the final 200 pages. Some taper off, forgotten, while other, less prominent strains emerge to give us the novel's climax. The entire frame is interesting enough, and I'm a big fan of how Moody opens up the world of what was supposed to be a B-movie novelization to explore love, death and vanity. But it falls flat too often. Moody changes his tune every ten to fifteen pages, emerging with a new voice, a five page paragraph,or a new POV. And some of this really works. I should admit my literary shortcomings, as I believe many of these parody tokens of the literary genre, but they aren't explicit enough, or revealing enough, to merit the slog that they occasionally become.

That's not to say that this novel isn't worth reading. More, it's a reflection that The Four Fingers of Death could have been so much more. Shortened a few hundred pages and Moody could have delivered a crisp analysis of what's to become of human civilization in the years to come while keeping us with him to believe it.

Ringing in a New Year

2010-12-30T11:17:00.000-08:00

It's odd how things in a day can stack up against one another. This morning, I called Liz on my cellphone while I was cooking eggs. My reception is terrible in Beverly, and she was waking up, so it was a faint touch, but one nonetheless. My aunt and uncle have a landline, and I wonder why I haven't considered using it.

Work started with sending out emails to Canadian architects and international designers whose office chairs are for the most part empty till January 3rd, 2011. As I skipped between the contact pages of websites, I listened to the This American Life episode, Recordings for Someone. "Act One: Buddy Picture," told the story of a forwarded voicemail message that brought the students of Columbia University together back in the late '80s or early '90s, and (allegedly) the voicemail server crashing down. I had no idea you could forward voicemail messages with a little intro, but apparently you could do that at Columbia. Like a forwarded email or text message, but with the personality of each link in the chain clearly preserved.

Later, post tracking down a few companies successfully, I read Ian Frazier's essay, "Dearly Disconnected." It was written for the Jan/Feb 2000 issue of Mother Jones, before I was even cognizant that cellphones existed. Frazier documents various encounters with pay phones in his life, how he can map moments into their chords and buttons, and their fall to the mobile, fluid life. I've never considered them as anything but antiques. I've maybe slipped a total of $4.75 into the change slot my entire life, but this really got me:

I'm reading Rick Moody's Four Fingers of Death. Set in 2025, people have PDAs implanted in their wrists, capable of sending and receiving messages completely handsfree. It's a comic novel's logical conclusion of current trends.

The four steps of the phone: payphone, voicemail fowarding, cell phone, digital implant, all in one day. Enough of a coincidence to write about before I go grab some lunch. Not enough of one to merit deep thinking beyond what you read here. Rather, a Happy New Years, and happy texting.

Grooving Through Copy 12/6: The Tallest Man On Earth

2010-12-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

This band has grown on me. I first heard them on NPR. Then Derek put them on the morning after Thanksgiving, and five of us crooned into a soft morning to the twangy iterations of The Tallest Man On Earth. I can't recommend a better way to listen to them.

I still need more time with the album. Despite making several noteworthy top 10 / 20 lists, it still hasn't grown on me with the infectious spirit of The Freelance Whales, David Dondero, and Yeasayer. But that's probably because I didn't find them on my own. Give me a few months, and I'm sure I'll be a genuine fan. Until then, enjoy the "King of Spain."

Grooving Through Copy 11/29: Buddy Ross

2010-11-29T18:33:00.001-08:00

No video today. Youtube is fresh out. Still, here's the mp3:

I don't know much about this guy, but here's his myspace. This song though (available via iTunes, or free via KEXP's song of the day podcast*) is awash with a spacey freshness. In the tradition of Wooster Collective, I could aptly have named this post: "Shit I'm Diggin Buddy Ross."

*I've figured out how to rid songs of the annoying podcast codex and add them to my greater iTunes library where they can be freely added to playlists, mixes, and other such miscellany, without stopping abruptly at the end of each song.

Grooving Through Copy 11/22: Wild Nothing

2010-11-22T18:36:00.000-08:00

It may be surprising that I'm not rolling with another week of Kanye, as his new album is out. Though I can't emphasize how riveting of an album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is. But I'm pushing through stuff to push stuff it out to you, and today's pick, Wild Nothing, got passed on to me today, and the buzz is still settling in on my brain as I pass it on to you. Given to me in a flash drive trade by my Features Editor, Michael. When I first heard this cut, "Bored Games," I felt as though I've heard it before. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. Theres something youthful in the ambience, and though I know nothing about this band, or this song, I'm listening to it now, and so should you.

Grooving Through Copy 11/15: Kanye West

2010-11-15T21:06:00.000-08:00

I've been listening to a lot of Kanye lately, to fight through the post-lunch lag. I'd spend more time talking about this guy, but I'm saving that for an essay, or a short story. But, I'll give you some words from my friend John:

What a timely coincidence. I've been having a Kanye Renaissance myself recently.

(please read this next part as if the intensity in my voice is building with every word I say)

He's been releasing a new single every Friday for the last couple months on his website, and they'll keep comin' til Christmas, and following him on Twitter and his blog I've noticed it seems what sets him apart from other artists is the fact that he lives his life as if nobody ever told him what not to do, and if they did tell him he didn't listen, and listening to his music within that context sheds a whole new light on what he's all about...

:inhale:

I think this sums Kanye up much better than any 100 words I could throw together.

Grooving Through Copy 11/8: David Dondero

2010-11-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

When $60.00 previously allocated to margaritas was returned me, I finally took the step and purchased David Dondero’s Number Zero with a Bullet. As with many artists, David Dondero came to me via NPR’sAll Songs Considered. Robin Hilton has a serious crush on this vagabond folk singer. And since I heard the first of many songs All Songs would feature, I have admired him too.

David Dondero has produced seven solo albums and hasn’t yet broken out. Conor Oberst cites him as an influence, and Dondero currently is listed on Oberst’s Team Love Records, but if Dondero’s YouTube selection is indicative, he hasn’t found much of a following despite being, in this humble writer’s opinion, one of the best lyricists of the past decade.

Dondero’s twang is reminiscent of Oberst’ scratch, and many with whom I’ve shared his work have made that connection. But Dondero is no disciple of Oberst; he’s been touring these great states solo since 1999, having been the drummer for several other bands before that. For most of the solo tours it’s been Dondero sleeping in a car, playing bowling alleys and grouchy bars, but hopefully that has started to change. This is Dondero's Tiny Desk concert. It concludes with the stunning “It’s Peaceful Here,” from Number Zero with a Bullet. The entire performance indicative of Dondero’s graceful swing and explorative lyricism.

Listening to the song as I write this, I can only think how peaceful it is here, now, with Dondero in the air. I have never encouraged the purchase of any artist or album on this blog, but if you have a few extra bucks in the bank give Dondero a nod. I’ll make assurances that you won’t be disappointed.

Zadie chats about Generation 2.0

2010-11-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

In a recent review of The Social Network in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith starts off with some interesting observations on Generation 2.0:

How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon.

At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

The rest worth the read, if, like me, you enjoyed the film. It will shake things up for you. But I really like what my lady Zadie is getting at here. The idea that my generation, and the one following, are being so intrinsically altered by something that might not befit the human spirit. Food for thought, as I go check in on my wall.

Grooving through Copy 11/1: Phantogram

2010-11-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

I saw this duo a week ago Sunday, and though I was on the verge of collapse c/o sleep deprivation, I was nonetheless captivated by their performance. My only regret was I couldn't understand the vocals of Sarah Barthel. As this track, "Mouthful of Diamonds," reveals, that's not a problem for the recorded album.

The group consists of Barthel on keyboard/vocals, with Josh Carter on guitar. Rumor has it they composed Eyelid Movies, of which this is part, in a cabin. Wikipedia won't confirm this fact, and it may be something akin to indie music's version of the Silicon Valley garage origin story, other acts like Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens having had albums crafted on reclusive sabbaticals into the wilderness debut with resounding success.

But really, I could care less, cuz I'm digging Phantogram.

The Instructions: On the Combover

2010-10-27T21:26:00.001-07:00

Reading another 1000+ page book. Here's a taste:

Forgetting that the hairstyle doesn't fool anyone, ignoring that it highlights what it's meant to hide, the hairstyles's name—combover—is in the same class of words as unibrow and needlenose and muffintop and trampstamp, i.e., not only does the name mock the thing it refers to, but it's the only name there is for the thing it refers to. So any speaker of English old enough to sport a combover has to be aware of what it is called, and thereby aware that electing to do what he does each morning in front of his mirror invites disdain.

LINGUISTICS :: Episode 002

2010-10-26T19:16:00.001-07:00

I recently concluded a correspondance with my friend Tim Schuler about the lyrical implications of "A Wild Holy Band." I'm working to embed a copy of the song online, but until then, you can check it out on his blog, readzebra.

Grooving through Copy 10/25: Matthew Dear

2010-10-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Matther Dear opened for Four Tet and strutted around the stage, a love child of Davids Byrne and Bowie. If you dig this, check out "You Put a Smell Me."

Grooving through Copy 10/18: Sharon Van Etten

2010-10-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

One listen of Sharon Van Etten on All Songs Considered and I bought her album off iTunes. Too bad I'll be out of town when she visits Chicago in November.

//This post marks the first Grooving Through Copy installment. This will hopefully become a weekly chronicle, wherein I'll post quick bits of what I've been listening to as I troll through Canadian copy.

Falling Hard

2010-10-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

Joan Didion writes, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

Despite this warning, I am still desperately crushing on this woman.

Dear Joe,

2010-10-16T07:41:00.000-07:00

I owe you a swelling apology that it's taken me this long to finally have gotten around to Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Some honesty is required here. When you first recommended it—when was that, sophomore, or maybe junior year of college?—I lumped it with Chucky P of Fight Club fame. Ie. I didn't want to read it. I had tried and given up on Chuck post Fight Club, and assumed anything with a title like ABNISC could easily be dismissed as another work in the Palahniukesque tradition. I wanted nothing to do with it. Man, I couldn't have been more wrong.

As you know, my rediscovery came while attending AWP in Denver last year. Flynn was in attendance, and a fellow member of Bathtub Collective wanted to attend one of his panels. I tagged along out of an interest in seeing a real-live-published author, rather than in the hopes of rekindling an interest in the man. For me, seeing RLP authors is akin to what seeing movie stars is like for people visiting LA: I absolutely cease to function normally, and drool out of the left portion of my jaw-dropped lips. I stumble, and stutter and get really nervous and daydream that one day I could be one of those guys.

Unfortunately, we missed Flynn's presentation portion of the panel, where he read from his newest memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb. But during the open Q&A, I started to realize something about Nick Flynn. The guy was scary smart. I can't quite remember what the subject of the panel was, but I think it had something to do with torture. (Though, I admit, that's probably my memory fusing my own experience reading The Ticking is the Bomb into some muddy idea of how AWP panels function.) When answering questions, Flynn kept referring to his interviews with Abu Ghraib torture victims with a haunting intimacy, and yet, when various attendees started masking disgust with bluntish, ideologically strained no-possible-answer type questions, Flynn handled them with compassion and humility. From what I would come to learn about a man whose life has gone to hell and back a few too many times, who has reasons to challenge anyone's ideological certainties about class, or family, or war, this refusal to lob a lifetime of contradictions at these few people was human indeed.

After the panel, I met him at a book signing, where I purchased the conference's last copy of The Ticking is the Bomb, talked sheepishly with Flynn for five minutes, and made a big deal about keeping the homemade bookmark with "Book Signing 1:00" sharpied across it. The rest is, as they say, history. And history can finally document that I've read ABNISC.

Today, with you Joe, I'm going to focus on how this memoir is about fathers. We've talked before about our own, and how our relationships have evolved with them. To be completely open, we've both had infinitely better luck with our fathers than Flynn. And yet, despite the hell Flynn's father put him through, and the various ways Flynn himself strikes back, at the end of the memoir we're left with father and son, some fundamental construction that can't be broken.

I think a strong case is that fathers, or parents in general, create a strong ballast of support for their kids. Or, they should, at least. Or, let's leave value-prescription aside, and admit that children of 'present' and 'positive' parents tend to have healthier, more dynamic and opportunistic lives than children of 'absent' and 'destructive' ones. This seems very much the case for Flynn. His father abandons him, his mother and brother, when Flynn is six months old. He offers no financial support, and though much of Flynn's subsequent journey into drugs, alcohol, and depression can be attributed to Flynn's own choices, it seems apparent that his father's absence catalyzed it to an extent.

Yet, Flynn's father feels much more a character in his life than my own father does in mine. In this, I am using character in that vivid-dynamo type way—a description of one of those persons who creates dramatic tension—and in reference to drama itself, as a player in the greater narrative, coming in and out with almost scripted frequency. To be fair, Flynn's life could have turned out many other ways (Flynn's brother, for instance, wants nothing to do with their father, despite having as much opportunity as Flynn to get back in touch), yet there is an insistence in ABNISC that a reunion was impossible to escape. Flynn writes early in the memoir:

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

It's as though, for Flynn, that this paternal bond is as rigid as the laws of Physics. And in a way, Flynn's father makes it this way. His father, while physically absent, mails letters continuously, atoms smashing across Flynn's bow:

The way he came to me first was as a letter, handwritten. It came addressed from federal prison, it came during America's Bicentennial. The stamps were free, he'd later tell me. A number written below his name, a few words strung together, an incomplete sentence. Soon—very soon—, he promised, I shall be known. Known? What did that mean? I was sixteen, I'd never asked for any such promise. I'd never asked him for anything, as far as I could tell. Tell me of yourself—I regret our mutual loss. Over the next twenty-five years he would send me hundreds more.

The rest of the memoir is, again, history. Flynn works at a homeless shelter in Boston where his father eventually shows up. Their is never an explicit reason his father picks this one shelter in this one city. But chance seems unlikely. Instead, I think ABNISC is an advocation for this paternal bond. Which is what I wanted to ask you about Joe. What are our father's legacies for us? I realize we're probably too young to really have any sense of what that could be. For us, our fathers are still very much men beyond us. But I want to know how we carry them with us. At the end of the memoir, there is the scene of Flynn and his father talking at a car. Flynn writes, "he's leaning into my window now, if I were to pull away I would drag him with me." This idea of dragging our fathers with us, their influence, their quirks, their personalities, intrigues me. Does it you?

I'm going to sign off with another passage from Flynn, one that deals with these queries of mine. Thanks, Joe, for your patience, this post is for you.

Maybe the whole time the book has been standing in front of me and I've failed to grasp it. If I could hold my father in my hands, bring him under the light—his stories are all there, each story is inside him. The transparency of the word, the transparency of the story, he is constructed entirely of the stories he tells, like the scaffolding around a building still unbuilt. The story of how to rob a bank. The story of sleeping on a bench. The story of his father inventing the life raft. The story of my mother, the love of his life. How many stories could you take from him and leave the building standing? Is there one essential story, is the story of his masterpiece, as yet, forever, undone? Is there a deadline ticking inside him for when he must finish, a day marked, like Noah, when the rains begin? As I reread his letters, as I try to write out his life, I worry that his obsession has passed into me, via the blood, via the letters, via the vision of him rising naked from a tin tub. For the only book being written about my father (the greatest writer America has yet produced), the only book ever written about or by him, as far as I can tell, is the book in your hands. The book that somehow fell to me, the son, to write. My father's uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter. Not enough to be stuck with his body, to be stuck with his name, but to become his secretary, his handmaid, caught up in a folly, a doomed project, to write about a book that doesn't, that didn't ever, that may not even, exist.

Your friend,

Sean

Author's Note: Joe is a real human being. He is currently attending law school in Houston, and is one of the most honest people I know. For that, he is one of my best friends.

Fiction and not

2010-10-05T19:05:00.000-07:00

The two block walk from the metra stop to Dearborn still makes Ryan feel like he's on the set of an NYC cop show. Even though this is Chicago, there's something unusually NYC pre-fab about the red granite tunnel to the escalators, something about the cabs that pull up in half serious gestures to the curb. As if they aren't serious enough to pick anyone up, their tires saying something like, who gets off the train for a cab? The buttress of CTA's tracks crops off the sky, and on good days Ryan thinks he's just an extra coasting through. The bad days, well Ryan knows that's one drama that wouldn't sell and fears being erased with the flick of a channel.

This all fades by the turn onto Jackson, where the sky opens up again and the idea of a non-fictional life resurfaces. Ryan can think again of his brother going to law school in New Orleans and his desire to meet Dr. Luke and how each day on the train ride to and from work there is at least one beautiful girl he will consider starting a conversation with but never will. Not just relative beauty, but the empirical kind that gets measured by the turned heads of the train conductors. How every ride, one of those girls. How every day the thought of every ride because of one of those girls. How expected the thoughts of those girls. How he will only get frustrated pulling skirt steak out of the fridge for all the time wasted on thinking about every day expecting the thoughts of those girls.

The coffee shop on the first floor of his office building is staffed by slick gentlemen in vests and ties. Slick to the neck at least, above the collar giving way to disheveled beards and bushy brows, and Ryan knows the vests are costumes for him and the other nine-to-fivers.

Salvos from Salvador

2010-08-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

I had no idea that there was a civil war in El Salvador in the seventies and eighties. I wasn't surprised to learn about it though. That was the time right? The time for all hinge countries to go right or left, to fall with the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. And yet, before reading Joan Didion's Salvador I had never heard one bit about this war.

The war itself officially took place between 1979 and 1992, yet violence preceded the "official" launch, in some sort of pregame fashion, drills and warm ups and the like. Didion enters the scene in 1982, at the war's "height" (though who can know the "height" of a war until it's over, a decade later). She is accompanied by her husband. It's a short, two week stint, yet in that space Didion delivers some of the most honest description and analysis of one of those wars that are fought out of sight and out of mind.

Salvador opens with a an epigraph from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This, of course, is an obvious choice, but throughout the book Didion deconstructs this simplicity, the assumption that we know what the war in El Salvador is all about.

The inability of conceptualization pulses as an unseen yet fervent artery in Salvador, necessary but ignored. The inability to process the place, the mechanisms, the political shifts and movements, the culture. What underwrites typical foreign involvement is a sort of divine providence, an assumption that the ways of the West can find sense in any societal milieu. Yet 'sense' in the Western sense, doesn't apply. Describing the Metrocenter, "Central America's Largest Shopping Mall", a transplant of the shopping center model then becoming a staple of the American diet, Didion is confronted with the inadequacy of her observations:

"This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of 'color' I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a 'story' than a true noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all."

This gets at the heart of these fringe wars and how I've processed them. I have always found myself possessing an immense inability to actually imagine what it is like. What it's like in the war torn country. What it's like to be the ruler, the citizen, the soldier. What it's like to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, to cross a street, to breathe the air, to hear the gunfire. But then, I find it difficult to imagine the place of those on the other side. In the case of El Salvador, it's America. Officially, it's not our war, but under Reagan we train troops and send helicopters and most important, if El Salvador can demonstrate "improvement" on a biannual basis, there is ten million dollars per annum in aid.

What's created is a sort of double bind. The political leadership in El Salvador is playing for money, and will compromise just enough to ensure that money comes in. For the United States, their is an air of optimism about the process, that improvement is actually being made, but also one of necessity, for El Salvador can't fall to the Communists. The American Ambassadors in El Salvador convince themselves that the situation is better than it actually is, an in turn, transmit false promise to Congress and the Press and thereby the American public that progress is being made. This is a symptom of our self-assured Divine providence, and Didion gets it perfectly:

"In other words 'anti-communism' was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take.

That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a play of power in the political tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet there we remained. In this light all arguments tended to trail off. Pros and cons seemed equally off the point. At the heart of the American effort there was something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador, the mirage of a society not unlike our own but 'sick,' a temporarily fevered republic in which words had stable meanings north and south ('election,' say, and 'Marxist') and in which there existed, waiting to be tapped by our support, some latent good will."

What I appreciate most about Salvador is Didion's ability to show how inextricable these situations become. She moves beyond the talking points and the headlines, the situation reports and the punditry, to grasp at the real dilemma, that two worlds are colliding with superficial collision. Nothing of substance transmits either way, rather the illusion of substance, of improvement, that change and reform are just around the corner.

Book Notes

2010-08-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

Blogs been a bit sparse, and in an attempt at revitalization, here are a few quick notes on books I've read post DFW's Infinite Jest. Though all literary, the following have been put in a tough position having followed one of the most compelling novels I've ever read. But here's their space:

The Surf Guru by Doug Dorst
Dorst's second book, the stories in The Surf Guru are enjoyable in their stylistic scope. Though a few stories are actually linked, most of these endeavor in completely different areas, from the kitchen of an artisan cake to a fictional compilation of sketches by one botanist picking apart the professional successes and failing of his colleagues. I enjoy Dorst most when he's being a bit more bold, such as the sectioned elements of the story "The Surf Guru," or in the poetic prose of "Jumping Jacks" (this line, for instance, describing jumping jack fireworks being lit in a dry brush: "The sound? It's a cartoon sound: when a man is startled and his derby hat spins off his head. Fweeee! Math lesson: fweeee! x 16 = the shit you're in."). A quick read, by an author that's sure to stick around.

Citrus County by John Brandon
A McSweeney's book, the binding of this novel is gorgeous, with a stitching across the spine and various levels of embossed text and images. Unfortunately, I wasn't a huge fan of the novel itself. Set in Citrus County, Florida, it follows the lives of two eighth graders, Toby and Shelby. In order to fulfill some sort of malevolent calling, Toby kidnaps Shelby's younger sister and stores her in a bunker for months. Brandon plays out the tension in interesting ways. Toby and Shelby develop a romantic connection, while Toby maintains the surreptitious mechanisms of keeping a four year old alive. In an interesting parallel, their teacher, Mr. Hibma, also presents with a desire to be evil, plotting to murder an English teacher at the school. It's a lot to handle in a two hundred page novel, and Brandon loses some authenticity in the intricacy.

Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst
Dorst's first book, Alive in Necropolis is a fun summer read. A literary mystery with a dash of ghosts. The novel is set in Colma City California, just outside of San Fran and Oakland, a town with more dead residents than living, housing the majority of graveyards for all of San Francisco and surrounding areas. Accordingly, the book's cast of characters finds itself a bit undead as well. Not as literary as the Surf Guru, but decent fun.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Tower, one of the New Yorker's top writers under 40, writes about shit outta luck men in his first story collection. Take the first story's opening lines, "Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants." Tower's prose is clean, and comedic, capturing a modern destitute America. His writing reminded me of Denis Johnson with some humor thrown in.

Richard Yates by Tao Lin
I actually met Tao Lin in Lawrence and had dinner with him after a reading. He picked at his french fries like a bird, his fingers poking at them periodically with some awkward cadence. This mannerism conveys itself into Richard Yates' characters, and the effect is galvanizing. On one hand, I really admire his sparse writing style, and the way he brings contemporary technology to the page, the protagonists communicating primarily through gmail chat and text message. However, his characters seem at times less people than literary stylisms. Even their names, Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment, beg some postmodern trickery, and it was tough to delve past this into the story itself. But, I have a feeling this is what Tao intended.

Infinite Ended

2010-07-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

When answering the question "what is Infinite Jest about?" I have found it neccesary to answer with an explanation of what the book itself is. It's a physical prsence. 980 pages with an extra 100 pages of footnotes; not just normal pages, either, but big 6"x 9" ones with condensed print that pushes against the margins. Infinite Jest is a month and a half of my freetime. One half of summer 2010. An endeavor. Let me try to explain some of the details.

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest rockets along three distinct plot axles all of which are primarily set during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (circa 2015, except in the novel years have become subsidized, e.g. Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, Year of the Glad etc.).

Axle one is Boston's Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.). A prep school focused around tennis, E.T.A. was founded by one James Orin Incandenza. James O. aka Himself aka The Mad Stork, for the physical space of the novel is toast, having commiting suicide by placing his head into a microwave and punching in some number and hitting ON. The narrative around E.T.A is concerned primarily with Himself's youngest son Hal Incandenza's prodigal tennis career and addiction to marijuana.

Axle two is Ennet House, a halfway house for recovering substance abusers located just down the hill from E.T.A. and home for Don Gately. Having been a graduate of Ennet House, Gately is now live-in staff. Necessary facts: he is huge, has a block for a head, and carried himself as such prior to his rehab as 'muscle' for a bookie and burglar on the side.

Axle three is a Quebecois insurgency against the U.S. See the AFR (wheelchair assassins) and their quest for a cartridge of the Entertainment. This Entertainment being the film Infinite Jest, the final project of James Orin Incandenza, and rumored to be the perfect entertainment. Anyone unfortunate (or, one might argue, fortunate) enough to view Infinite Jest becomes catatonic, yearning only to view the film again and again. Instant and perfect addicts.

Get it? I find myself asking when I begin explaining this thing. Get it? Does this make sense? But I concede it doesn't. It can't. The thing about these axles is they're relatively disconnected, ratchety parts of the novel. DFW doesn't allow the novel to function as typical fiction. He challenges everything. Most notable is the lack of any traditional ending. On page 981 Infinite Jest ends midsteam sans conclusion. No wrap up. Though the plots start touching, there is no resolution.

Which is why this is an entirely inappropriate, yet inescapable way to talk about this book. But where does that leave hopeful readers? Why read Infinite Jest?

My answer is that it's good for you. This book will leave you thinking differently, if only because it's trying to reimagine fiction and give it relevancy by latching onto the way our world works. The page or two long sentences, hyper realistic descriptions of environments too meticulous to digest, the ten page footnote cataloguing the complete filmography of James O. Incandenza, the bounty of characters and sub-plots and sub-sub-plots which the reader wants to come back but never do, the fantastic yet oddly believable political and economic environment, the pages and pages and pages of tennis or dialogue sans exposition or dreams or drug detoxes. These aren't just there to be diffcult. Or they are, but only because DFW cares so much. Infinite Jest is about addiction, entertainment, depression, and loneliness, and the way a culture, ours, has shifted into something that is no longer linear and has much more potential for passive reception. Infinite Jest is telling us to buck up, that it gets to be tough because humans need tough, and believe it or not, humans like tough. There are parts of our brains that every other media is ignoring that this novel takes on a marathon run throught the desert. DFW says earn it. You are smart enough.

I won't recommend this book to anyone in the tradiational mode of book recommendations. It's not a type of reading you're going to be used to. But if you pick this up, handle it's weight, read a page, or two, or thirty, well I'll buy you a beer and ask what you thought. And then if you finish it, get through those pages, let's sit together and talk about the ways our view of the world is just a little bit different.

Out of the Infinite.1

2010-06-06T08:44:00.000-07:00

Early rumbles from Infinite Jest.

The issue of whether the damaged even have interested wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort o f ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north.

The medical attache sits and watches and eats and watches, unwinding by visible degrees, until the angles of his body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has passed into sleep, at which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically to recline to full horizontal, and luxuriant silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly from long slots in the appliance's sides; and unless his wife is inconsiderate and clumsy with the recliner's remote hand-held controls, the medical attache is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night's sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of low-volume surf and light rain on brad green leaves.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light -- the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

Hal has no idea why this is, or whence, this obsession with the secrecy of it. He broods on it abstractly sometimes, when high: this No-One-Must-Know thing. It's not fear per se, fear of discovery. Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up to lead to anything, Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

[...] he is almost glowingly white, as if cut from the stuff of moons.

So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen have these vivid shoe-and-shirt tans that give them the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from different bodies' parts, especially when you throw in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes.

The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious.

Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles.

This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: gou got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time. [From a philosophical exploration of why people in the fictional world crafted by IJ preferred classic voice to voice phone communication versus a telecommunicational push towards video communication technology, which might carry interesting wait in why services such as Chatroullete or the majority of YouTube videos are so minimally significant and stagnant, in that, nothing real seems to be transmitted.]

The Chariot: Rolling to 200,000 and On

2010-06-05T07:49:00.001-07:00

Last night the Chariot turned 200,000. Recorded for posterity with my Sony ICD-P620 Digital Recorder and the camera on my Sanyo SCP-3810 cellphone. Journalistic integrity at its finest.

Infinite June

2010-06-01T07:19:00.001-07:00

It begins: my dedicated consumption of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I'm aiming at eating away 40 of the novel's 1079 pages each day.

It begins:
"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies."

It begins: and I couldn't be more stoked.

Slate on Street Art

2010-05-27T07:48:00.001-07:00

Ran across this interesting slide show earlier c/o Ben Davis of Slate, documenting the significance and viability of street art in today's culture. For those who don't know, I fell in love with Banksy at one point a few years ago, and have been an in-and-out follower of the street scene via Wooster Collective ever since. Regardless of my personal history, the following really seemed to shore up how street art is operating these days:

"And yet… street art's symbiotic relationship with the Web makes you wonder whether the genre's broad popularity stems from the fact that its characteristic features—swift execution, quicksilver response to pop culture and politics, the dominance of quotation and commentary, snarky attitude, fragmented statements embedded in the world rather than meant to stand apart from it—actually reflect the way that plugged-in people process information, more so than "traditional" art. There is something particularly contemporary about street art's whole M.O., in this sense."

I really dig this dual analysis, both about the art as a medium, and broader trends in cultural consumption. We are the screen generation.

Walking the Road

2010-05-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

You know it's Cormac McCarthy when 'glassed' is used as a verb to depict gazing at a landscape through binoculars. When the story is nothing but grim. When you finish the novel in less than two days because one hundred pages takes an hour maybe, or time is unimportant because you operate on his watch and not your own. When movie renditions are made from the books and they don't totally ruin the experience. When one sentence jams actions together with such efficiency and detail you know you could recreate whatever you just read, sans an imagination. When you are left at the end of the book with an inertia that's been built up and then the last line comes but you're not ready because there is more story to churn out. When the world created has a God voice in the narration that makes you want to move on to the next person one mile off and pick up with them. When you feel a bleakness just because it's over.

The last few days I've walked down the road, a state highway through post-apocalyptic ashen landscape, with a father and his son. Except I did it from my hammock, from my bed, from a table at a restaurant, with a full stomach and a roof to hide under and plenty of things to do except walk and sleep and cough and eat. And my world has color, and the sun is cranking, and I can go to a grocery store and smile at a stranger.

It's kind of a wonder what the point of a novel like this is. The characters aren't going to find paradise, and not just because McCarthy is dictating their steps. The world just sucks. Nothing but grey and sleet and snow and the winter coming on quicker each year with a permanent overcast. Nothing but rot, scarcity, death and the breathing of soot through improvised bandannas. Nothing but masked cannibals with homespun clubs and one incongruous diesel truck and slaves chained in the basement of an old Victorian and a pistol with two bullets only to become one with the combustion of brain matter all over a son.

The novel could be about goodness. About being the good guys, the ones "carrying the fire," and how to find more of these people in a world where none of these people want to be found. About how this is such an averse idea, impractical in a world where things are ceasing to exist. Or it could be about focusing on how good we have it, how lucky we are to live in a way where the idea of living is something more than just biology. In a way that lets God in, and hope, because the only thing good in common between the world we sit in and the world of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a little thing named love and there isn't much of that when everything turns to dust.

My Day on the 3six5

2010-05-20T07:47:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, May 19, 2010, was my day to write on the 3six5. You can read my entry here. But, more than that, I encourage any reader of this blog to check out the whole project. It's 365 humans, ranging in age, occupation and general gumption, taking on 2010 one day at a time.

I learned about the project via SMITH mag, a purveyor of digital writing exercises, most notable of which is the proliferation of six word memoirs. At that time, 2010 had already rolled over, and early January found the3six5 in need of more authors. The entries of Jason Theodor and James A. Reeves hooked me. I still follow their blogs religiously. And then, after reading their entries, and those of people I thought were generally more impressive than me, I threw my hat in the ring with a bio along the lines of:

My name is Sean Conner. I make t-shirts for a living, but I think I can wrestle one day of 2010 into the ground.

This is why the3six5 is magic. Not because it's doing anything particularly revolutionary, but because it's crowd sourcing the world. There aren't any parameters limiting acceptance, except for 365 treasured spots. To be fair, the project has been a bit heavy on e-media professionals, as the project seeped out through the various crags that get lapped up by the tweeters and blogites. But the response and participation has been dutiful. We've witnessed accounts of parades, radio chatter, Haiti relief work (this post was transcribed over the phone), kids being born, reports on digital trade shows, and unemployment. All of this, and the year isn't half over.

I can't speak to the other writers, but for me May 19 loomed on a heat soaked horizon for months, hazy and distant. And then yesterday it showed up, and I had nerve explosions considering what I would fill it with. It turns out, the world gives you plenty of fodder to offer up. A day is full of stories. They just need to be observed. There was nothing remarkable about May 19, 2010, except that I chose to be a little more aware.

So check out the 3six5. And next year, if this community keeps up the spirit that has pushed it this far, opt in for 2011. The project is a testament to the life in the day-by-day, those moments that often pass by when they should be shared with another human being.

Space Wars

2010-05-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Not the intergalactic kind, but one on the level of sentences, at the end of them, in that gap between each independent thought. The space war over, oh the drama, of whether to use one or two spaces after a comma! Dramatic, tense, and possibly as apt to a gridlock of proliferation as the Cold War, if only MLA backed me up.

In case it's not evident, I am a two spacer. See. <--Here. <--And here. (Except I can't actually show you, because my blogger truncates extraneous gaps. It too, is my enemy.) My foe is Kim Koelling. Friend turned nemesis. First front occurred in conversation, in a passive question, "Why do you use two spaces after each sentence?" I asserted grammatical superiority, that that's the way it is. Kim, a design student, asserted differently, that in typography the form has switched back to a one space standard, that fonts kern and format to allow for enough space between the end of one idea and the next. Yada yada.

Second front on Kim's blog 7 months without Joon, in this post. Okay, she has evidence. She's up 1-0-1.

Today I decided to fight back, gain a little evidence of my own, and turned to the old dog literary style mongering of the MLA. They gave me this:

I lose. 2-0-1. Two spacing is antiquated. Behind the times. Now I'll go to work absolving my thumbs of their tendency to double tap after each sentence.

Limericks

2010-05-11T22:39:00.001-07:00

On the walls of a middle school gymnasium, posted next to others themed around World of Warcraft and Transformers, were three limericks concerning 9/11. The authors, eighth graders, would have been in kindergarten.

The Twin Towers

They shone in the sunlight like dew
Those who didn't know them were few
Those structures that once stood
Came down like timber wood
Cruel men, into it they flew

Nine-Eleven

There was an issue in the past
The memory will always last
It was nine-eleven
People went to heaven
This event happened very fast

9-11

The twin towers lost their crown
Of being the tallest around
Some people must have died
As they jumped off the side
The twin towers came crashing down

A Road Trip with DFW, or, I am a Maniac and so Should You

2010-05-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

Those who have put up with my book talk have probably had to listen as I run on and on about the brilliance of David Foster Wallace. To those reading this, who already get an earful, my apologies, because here comes some more unconditional love.

I picked up Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself the day before it was officially released, at the Raven, because they called me that day about my pre-order. The cashier said she technically couldn't sell it to me, but did anyway, and I promised not to leak it all over the internet. The truth is, the fervor for DFW runs in a small circle, an insular literary one, and his once-in-a-century voice and talent were never able to to latch onto mainstream book culture with the effectiveness of J.K. Rowling, Dave Eggers or Michael Chabon. In part, he's a tough read. But he was also young, still prodigal. And now he's gone, and I'm left trying to lap up all I can about this man I discovered too late.

A.O.C.Y.E.U.B.Y. is a conversation, tapes to transcript, between David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky. Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to road trip with DFW on the last leg of his Infinite Jest book tour. They traveled from Bloomington, Illinois, DFW's residence at the time, to Minneapolis via Chicago and back again in an icy Midwestern Winter. They eat McDonald's and pop tarts and pizza. They play chess. And they talk a lot. About movies, fame, books, cars, writing, entertainment, dogs, women, literati, and Infinite Jest. About Updike, DeLillo, Franzen and the immediate driving conditions. About family, editors, and agents. They talk about DFW. And that is why I had to read this book.

For those who haven't heard much about DFW, or anything at all, one crucial piece of information is that on September 12, 2008, he killed himself. It wasn't the first attempt, just the most successful. I didn't start reading him seriously till that September, when I picked up a copy of Consider the Lobster off my bookshelf, where it had sat for the better part of a year, a book I had been diligently avoiding for no apparent reason other than that the first essay--DFW covers the Adult Video Awards in Vegas--embarrassed my Midwestern modesty. Upon returning to the book I found some magic in the words. Not just literary merit, but a voice that seemed to be talking about all the things that irked me on some subliminal level, the things I was incapable of putting a finger on. I hadn't read anything quite like them and I've been picking him up in whatever form I can ever since.

A friend asked me my thoughts on A.O.C.Y.E.U.B.Y. as I was reading it, saying, "I'm curious because I slurp every word of Wallace's that I can find, but the structure and (lack of) editing in the book kind of bugs me. I don't think anyone who's not a DFW fanatic would really get through it. Then again, I don't think anyone who's not a maniac would pick it up in the first place." Everyone I've met who has read DFW carries around this sentiment. We're dutiful slurpers. Route 44 after Route 44 we go back, taking him all in until our brain freezes and we scrunch up our faces only to do it again once the pain subsides. I have to agree that the book is fragmented, at times slow and odd. But that's life, which is what this book is: DFW's life, and for me, the experience of sitting down with DFW in real life, via Lipsky, is totally worth it.

Would I recommend this book to anyone who is not already a fan? Nope. Check out DFW first. Dip into that well, and if it hits you like I think it might, then dip again. And after you're hooked, after you want to know more than is healthy about this man, then pick up A.O.C.Y.E.U.B.Y.

Towards the end of the book, Lipsky is packing up and DFW is out scraping his car. Lipsky asks:
What's the make on this? It's a Nissan?

(Like prisoner reciting his numbers) 1985 Nissan Sentra. I know it dudn't look like much, man, but this things starts. This thing never breaks, it starts all the time. It's actually a terrible problem: 'cause I gotta get a new one. But I don't know what I'm gonna do. I can't junk this.

Why?

Because it's like, it's my friend. I've had this thing all ... but I can't really leave it in the garage, mean, that's just sick.

Although riding in that--[He indicates my forest-green Pontiac Grand AM--like Tower Books, Dutton's, the book circuit, the Whitney Hotel, a car that also no longer exists]--made me realize that I'm, that there are whole vistas of driving experience that I am not getting.

The feeling of gliding when you're driving, instead of ... I mean my car dudn't even have shock absorbers, it's like riding a power lawn mower.

This snippet is comic yet mundane. It's a far cry from the countless brilliant conversations and insights the book contains. Yet, reading this dialogue hit some quiver in me, and I laughed something deep and rich, alone in my room, on the second floor of my empty house, on my bed; laughing just for me, with this man, now gone. I picked up this book because I wanted to know a bit more about a mind that seems crazily smart. I wanted to make DFW a bit more human. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself accomplishes that. It puts you there, in the backseat of the Nissan, with Lipsky and Wallace and the mind that worked so hard to make sense of the world, yet couldn't quite make sense of itself.

Too Much Ticking Waiting for the Bomb.

2010-04-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

When the planes hit the towers I was a sophomore in my honors European History class. We turned the television on at the end of the hour, and tough as stones McCue started crying. I'll be honest and say I didn't much know what was going on. We got to leave early. That was enough.

Two and a half years later, and the Abu Ghraib torture photos were released, and their name, their significance, has floated around in a similar manner, an event, a change, a relapse into status quo and high school and video games. Before reading Nick Flynn's The Ticking is the Bomb I'd never even taken the time to really look. Sure, I've seen the famous one of Lynddie England--forever now the poster child for the debacle, the mistake, the "necessary" actions--holding onto the end of a leash, the other end running down and away from her, coiled around the neck of a prisoner cringing on the ground. The man looks like he wants to go to sleep. Lynddie's face is blank, robotic, conditioned. It makes it easier to look at, her, like that, remote, less human. Looking back at it now, it's not quite what I remembered. My memory has taken the time to patch up the photo, make it less miserable, make it okay, me okay, okay with the fact that this actually happened.

Flynn wants to take us back there. Make us remember. Make the social consciousness of this country feel it one more time. But The Ticking is the Bomb is more than an Abu Ghraib memoir. It's a memoir about how we torture ourselves, all of us, and how we move past that, or how he has, or tries to. Flynn gets the privilege (can I call it a privilege? An obligation seems more appropriate) to be present in Istanbul when several of the former Abu Ghraib prisoners are interviewed in 2006 about their experience. But these scenes are scattered throughout the book, lost within the stills of Flynn's own life, and the shadow life that he carries with him.

The Ticking is the Bomb is successful because it's not an indictment. It's an exploration, primarily Flynn probing into himself, and then an extrapolation into what it means to be human, those qualities, dark and light, that make us who we are. Flynn's mother an alcoholic who commits suicide. His father an alcoholic who leaves him when he's six months old, poof, gone, out of the life, goes to jail for a forged check, ends up on the streets, homeless, and then back into the life of the son he abandoned, getting food at the shelter where Flynn is working in his late twenties. Flynn himself, like father like son, a recovered alcoholic and user, a drifter, in love with two women at the same time, picking one, Inez, and finally himself having a child, a daughter, Maeve Lulu.

The Ticking is the Bomb is short. 262 pages. Large print. Short, two to three pages chapters. Each chapter carries a weighted titled--the falling is the rain, istanbul redux, dear reader (oblivion), heroic uses of concrete--and the sense that this is poetry within prose becomes evident. This is appropriate, Flynn is a self-proclaimed poet first, writer of everything else second. And the book hits like that. Each chapter is significant, stunning, a hard enough gut punch to make you stop to catch your breath, but soft enough that you keep turning the pages until your heart hurts too much. Reading this, there were times I set it down at my chest to stare at the blinds, or the wall, or the clothes on the floor, anything but the words that just came, the ones that would come next. Yet, the words are necessary, and they bring the reader back. We yearn to know.

What follows is one of the most accurate descriptions of torture--its purpose, function, and legacy--that I've ever encountered. If you don't pick up the book, please, read this at least:

"I've come to believe that the functions of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened. That it is ineffective in gathering information, that it is actually counterproductive in making us any safer, has been clearly commented, it's been known for years. That the box has been opened, and that the use of torture continues, now legally, suggests that it has become, for us, a mystical symbol, no less based on superstition that carving a crescent into a stick. Money, information, these words you are reading--all of this will seem quaint in five hundred years, if we have that long. What they will say when they look back on this time is that torture continued from the death of Christ for over two thousand years--a strange, primitive reenactment. They will see that at first we confused it with passion, which devolved into the Inquisition, and then transformed into what we now call "information." They will see that a handful of maniacs living in caves were able to take down the greatest empire on earth, they will wonder how that could be. All we can tell them is that these maniacs understood our fear, that they transformed into it as we tried to hold on, asking, over and over, our meaningless question.

That last part, that torture is about information, that's the crux. And not only torture on foreign combatants, or enemies of the state, but on our relationships and on ourselves. We dig in the claws, pull out the leash, drag ourselves around through little hells, all for non-existent information for impossible questions that have no relevance. The questions aren't investigative, but rather, like Jeopardy, they seek the answers that we already assume.

I met Nick Flynn in Denver a few weeks ago. I have never read him before this, and bought the last copy of The Ticking is the Bomb at his AWP book signing. I admired how he talked to me, about my life, asked exploratory questions. Having read this, I'm not sure meeting Flynn would have been as easy. I would have wanted to reach out, shake his hand, tell him thanks, and ask, how is your daughter, how are you, how are all of us?

Record Review: Anais Mitchell's Hadestown

2010-04-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

I picked up Hadestown yesterday, on a 'shortie' recommendation from Largehearted Boy. A new album by Anais Mitchell, it features the likes of Justin Vernon, Ani DeFranco, Ben Knox Miller and Greg Brown. To be fair, prior to the album, I'd only ever heard of Justin Vernon (see: Bon Iver), Ben Knox Miller (see: The Low Anthem) and Ani DeFranco (see: not sure, the name strikes some feint chord of memory, a synapse of recognition, no more). Anais Mitchell herself didn't register anywhere on my musical radar. These artists pack themselves together in a Folk Opera, envisioning the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus as it would have happened in a Depression wrought America. Though the tonalities of folk make it easy to think of this is a interpretation of the Great Depression of the 1920's, the album packs clear resonance in today's tenuous economic climate.

Originally found in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the myth centers around Orpheus and Eurydice. They are to be married when Eurydice is captured and taken to the underworld. Still a member of the living, she gets tricked into eating some food and, a la mythological protocol, seals herself in the Underworld forever. Orpheus, famed poet, travels to the Underworld to save her with the power of his ballads. Performing for Hades's court, he sways Hades's wife, Persephone, to permit Eurydice to return with him to the living. Hades' condition, however, is that she can leave with Orpheus only if, as they walk themselves out of the Underworld, Eurydice follows behind him, out of sight and sound. Should Orpheus ever turn to check on her before surfacing, she would belong to Hades forever. As is the way of Greek myths, Orpheus turns and loses her.

In the album, the underworld is a town, Hadestown itself, and Hades acts as a sort of magnate, a Rockefeller or Carnagie of sorts (or Wall Street King). I'm still unpacking the album, but from what I can tell the population of Hades is, fortunately, employed in an ambiguous, eternal way, all of it stemming from Hades himself. They are the ones with jobs during the depression, and they seem excited, or at least fervent, about this prospect. They have built a wall around the city, to keep the enemy, 'poverty' out, and in my favorite song of the album Why We Build the Wall, the population joins with Hades in a chorus of blind dedication. Initially, Hadestown doesn't seem such a shabby place to live. It's got amenities. But this security is a sort of illusion, as the whole place, through the course of the album, starts falling apart.

The reinterpretation of this myth finds the perfect venue in folk music. The opening lines of the first song find Orpheus and Eurydice talking about marriage. Eurydice asks Orpheus, "Lover tell me if you can, who's going to buy the wedding band, times being what they are, hard and getting harder all the time." Orpheus responds: "Lover when I sing my song, all the river's sing along, they're gonna break their backs for me, lay their gold around my feet, all the fashion in the pain, all the fashion for your gain, river's gonna give us a wedding band." It's lyrical dynamite, and it never stops delivering for the album's entirety.

What I love about the album is each of the aforementioned artists plays a roll. Mitchell sings as Eurydice. Justin Vernon, with the heart throbby rhythms that make his Bon Iver albums so pointed, as Orpheus. Greg Brown steals the show as Hades, gravelly voiced and brooding. You know that voice has to be Hades when it first pulses through the speakers. With the characters cast as some of the contemporary rock stars of folk, each song becomes a narrative element of the myth, delivered by the cast. The album is flawless in its execution. Each member become a distinguished, determinable voice in the greater whole of the album, fading in and out as the myth calls on them. On musical merit, Hadestown is hands down my current top dog for Record of 2010. Check it out.

Wedding Song:

We Built the Wall:

358 books to go

2010-04-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

Just read this article, care of Michael Hingston's blog Too Many Books in the Kitchen.

The quick gist, a home with a library of 500+ books "would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."

I spent this morning counting the top shelf of my bookcase. Multiplied by three. Threw a quick glance at all the other books I have in piles on the floor, on the desk, on the bed, on the dresser, next to the computer. Rough estimate: 142 books. That's not counting the ones boxed in the basement (academic, college stuff, stuff I won't want in my home library), or the lit journals and magazines.

That means 358 more books to go.

I like this. It will become the metric I use to thwart having a kid in the near future.

Drafts

2010-04-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

A writing exercise with my book club.: Dialogue heavy, three drafts necessary, begin with the line, "I used to believe in him:

Draft 1:

"I used to believe in him." She slips a rag over the counter top. It's already clean, but she's wiping it again. I lift my glass and she erases the ring of condensation. I set it back down.
"I'm going to take out the trash." I say. The trashcan under the sink is too small. It's always full. I change it once a day. It gives me an excuse to get outside.
"Don't bother," she says. She opens the drawer under the sink and pulls out the trashcan. Black plastic spills over the sides. She slips the bag and ties it off absently, her fingers performing an age-old act.
"I always worry these things will leak," she says.
"They never do," I say. "Not the heavy duty ones."
She drops the bag on the hardwood, and cans clink as they settle into a new position. From back under the sink she pulls out the roll of trash bags, stretches her arms out to unwind one. There is the subtle, delicate snap of the plastic peeling away from itself. She returns the roll under the counter.
"Would you like anything for lunch?" she asks.
"No thanks. I'll just heat some leftovers."
She rubs the black plastic of the unused bag between her fingers, forcing it open. It unfolds in thirds, and she whips it up and down, capturing air.
"I always wanted to go to Paris." she says. "If he had just taken us to Paris. All of us. Him, you and me. We could have walked down past the Eiffel tower and had lunch outside the Louvre. We could have ridden the train out into the country, out to all the little vineyards and little cottages." She sighs then, and looks down at the bag hanging limp in her hands. She coaxes it back open, and forces it into the trashcan, securing it with a knot. Setting it back under the sink, she closes the cabinet.
"He would have liked to see where the Germans first crossed into France. He liked history. His head, always in one of those books, the military ones. Black and white photos on the cover. Those men, those soldiers, they always look justified."
I take a sip of my water. The ring has reformed and is growing. "He wasn't one of those men," I say.
This makes her pause. She rests her palms on the counter and looks out the windows above the sink. Outside it is bright and green. Her eyes focus on nothing. The street is stagnant. Parts of a croquet game
are abandoned on our neighbor's front lawn. Colored balls idle, orbiting around nothing. I know her look. She is reaching for words.
She says, "Do you remember your sixth birthday? We offered to take you and two friends to Chuck-E-Cheese. It had just opened, and you had been nagging us for weeks to take you. But when it came time to go, you didn't invite anybody. Instead, you told me you just wanted to play games with Dad. We gave you twenty dollars in tokens and you spent it all playing your father in Whack-a-Mole. For an hour you played, and you never could beat him. You were so determined though, and on the last tokens he let you win. Do you remember that?"
I didn't, but I said yes anyway. It was often best to leave it like that, to let the story unwind how she wanted it to.

Draft 2:

"I used to believe in him," Janice said. Her hands clamped the steering wheel. She had been driving them for hours. "Westward," she had promised. "Home." Eric and Athena, fellow law students, consented on three conditions: "We will get to ride horses; we will get to eat grits; we will lose ourselves under the night sky." They made Janice repeat these lines, an oath, before they tossed their bags in the trunk and strapped seat belts across their chests. Janice hadn't told them the moon was cycling towards full, and the night would glow like the day. Horses, though, she could deliver on. That was enough.
"I used to believe in Obama too," Eric said from the back. "I think we all did."
"I'm not talking about Obama," Janice said, but the three of them knew that.
Athena pulled an apple out of her backpack. Green, pocketed with a few shallow divots, bruised from where it had nestled between her laptop and textbooks. Athena thought about Eve. She took a bite. "I think about Eve a lot," she said.
"Eve who?" Eric asked.
"Eve Eve. The Eve that fucked us all."
"Didn't exist," Janice said.
"Agreed." Eric said. "No apple. No tree. No snake. Never happened."
"Maybe," Athena said. "But I still think about her."
Janice hit the breaks, slowing the Civic, and cranked the wheel left. Tires squealed and the car jutted across checkered yellow lines and shot from pavement onto gravel. They faced north.
"Sorry," she said. "I always forget where the turn is.
In the back Eric watched fields roll past. Barbed wire stretched out and around each one, three strands supported by steel posts. Each field trapped by miles of wire. He wondered how they made it, how they weaved it together, the number of barbs per strand, barbs per field, barbs per mile. He attempted to count the steel fence posts, so that later he may count the barbs per section, and plug it into a calculator and have an estimate. He counted thirty-seven posts before getting dizzy. Not even the length of one....
"Janice, what do you call the sections of field?" Eric asked. "Tracts maybe? Plots?"
"I don't know." she said. "I've always known them as fields. My dad numbers them, some kind of quadrant system."
"I like the sound of plots," Athena said, through the slosh of her apple.
"Yea, me too," Janice said.
"Plots it is then. Not even the length of one plot." They didn't know what he was talking about. They didn't ask. Gravel crunched and spat. Janice had them cruising. The roll of their dust cloud could be seen for miles. At each intersection Janice squeezed the horn. It wheezed a nasally, half pitched whine, like the buzzer on a game show. The rest of the world was quiet.
Athena could feel Eric shift in the back seat, his knees coming up and resting on the back of her chair. It was good to feel him there. Athena didn't do well with the open space. The plane of the earth swept into an infinite blue and there was nothing else. She only knew they were somewhere in Kansas. Signs for towns she recognized had stopped appearing long ago. On the gravel, the signs were coded in something she couldn't understand. They read, E13500. Or worse, there was no sign, just more road, unmarked and endless, shooting straight in whatever cardinal direction that was. Her seat belt was tight, grating, but it kept her in place. She felt like she was in an auditorium, or a movie theater, too early, alone with her purse or popcorn or maybe some friends. The rest of the seats stretched out into the yellow black haze of the pre-show lighting. Their hinges held some anticipation. Potential in that state, each an unopened invitation. And more people always came and accepted the seat with a squeak. By the time the lights dimmed, the place would be full, or closer to it. Out here there was no hope for that.
"It's beautiful out here," Eric said.
No, Athena thought. It's not.
"Yea." Janice said. "I love coming home. I miss it."
"Can we pull over?" Athena asked. "I need some air."
"Sure," Janice said. She slowed her civic and didn't even pull it off the road. Air rushed in as the doors opened. Eric popped his neck and walked over to a fence to pee. Using her finger, Janice wrote the word "believe," in the fine dust that coated the back of her car. Thinking better, she wiped it away.

Draft 3:

See them: a red Honda Civic moving north across backwater highway pavement, lonely except for the dot of a pickup, miles off. The car stuffed with five bodies: Janice, Athena, Paul, Eric [1], Eric [2]. Janice driving.
"I used to believe in him," Janice said. Her hands clamped the steering wheel, mapping the way home. Her home, a Kansas ranch. The gold of wheat pushed into the fences.
"I used to believe in Barack too," Eric [2] said, from the back. "I think we all did."
"I'm not talking about Obama," Janice said. They all knew that. Who they were talking about: Joel Jenson, first in their law school class, seething charm, perfect smile etc. etc. Athena has the type of mother that would call him husband material. Athena's mother also cuts up the vegetables the night she brings them home from the grocery store and seals them in independent double seal zip lock bags. Labels them with Sharpie. That's the kind of mother Athena has, which is to say, a mother ignorant of the sheer fuckerdom of Joel Jenson. "The dick," Athena had called him. Yes, these five bodies had all agreed, the dick. Except it made Janice wince a bit, ie. for her, the dick cut it a little close.
In the Summer, asphalt sweat in the Kansas sun. The streaks of tar-patched cracks glisten. It is a lot for five bodies to take in. In the back seat, Athena thought about Joel as she pulled an apple out of her pack. She is stuffed into the narrow space between driver seat, door and Eric [2]'s elbow. Her first bite menacing. Through the slosh of apple: "I think about Eve a lot."
"Eve who?" Eric [2] turned to ask her.
"Eve Eve. The Eve who fucked us all."
"No, Joel fucked us all," Janice whispered. Only Eric [1] could hear.
"Didn't exist." Paul said, leaning forward to see past Eric [2]. His head rested on the back of the passenger seat.
"Agreed," Eric [1] said. "No apple. No snake. No Tree. No Eve. Never happened."
"Maybe," Athena said. "But I still think about her." She took another bite of her apple. Eric [2] turned away. Paul moved his head back from the passenger seat and started reading Wired again.
"I mean," Athena said, "Is it so wrong to think about Eve? Like, I think about her a lot. In the mornings, I think about her when I squeeze out my Aquafresh 2x whitening toothpaste. That green on the white bristles, and I'm thinking about Eve. I'm not sure why I think about her when I think about green things."
"How is your whitening toothpaste green?" Eric [1] asked.
"I don't know. But that's not even important, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying..."
Cut off as Janice, slamming the breaks, cranked the wheel left. Athena pushed into Eric[2], Eric[2] pushed into Paul, Paul into glass. That tire squeal; singed rubber. The civic and its five bodies a red blip until the tires catch some gravel and Janice regained control.
"Sorry," she said. They face west. "I always forget the turn."

They had agreed to the trip only if Janice promised them a few things. These they made her repeat, an oath, at Conoco that morning.
"We will get to ride horses," Paul said.
Janice repeated, "We will get to ride..."
"Have to have your hand up," Eric [1] said.
Janice rolled her eyes and set her coffee on the hood of the car. Her right hand she raised in front of her, palm forward, elbow locked at ninety degrees. With her left she covered her heart.
"That better?" she asked. The rest nodded. She said, "We will get to ride horses."
"We will get to eat grits," Paul said.
Janice had never, herself, at her ranch, or anywhere for that matter, eaten grits. "We will get to eat grits," she said.
"We will lose ourselves under the night sky."
"That's so lame," she said.
"Janice," Athena said. She was leaning against a pump, eating a granola bar. Her fingers dissected the aluminum wrapper in methodical bursts, splitting it just enough to pry off the next bit of granola. "Say it."
"We will lose ourselves under the night sky," Janice said. "We ready?"
"I'm going to pee," Eric [1] said. Janice, Paul, Athena and Eric [2] waited against the car, looking around at everything but each other. Eric [2] kicked at some loose stones. It was early enough that traffic was still light, the town still waking up. Eric [1] returned from the restroom. "I love the smell of gas," he said.

Yucca [Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, Why, Why, Why, Why]?

2010-04-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

John D'Agata's book, About a Mountain, delivers on itself. Specifically, it's about Yucca Mountain, a large, indiscriminate mess of rock northwest of Las Vegas. Yucca is where spent nuclear fuel rods were supposed to go to die. Congress said okay, initially. Not anymore.

D'Agata's book is about more than the mountain though. A memoir of sorts, it traces the summer D'Agata went to Nevada to help his mother move, and on encountering not just a mountain, but a city full of incongruities, his choice to stay. The Yucca incident--the mountain itself, the facts & figures, the 'science' on both sides, the surrounding political gambits--serves as the journalistic crux of the novel. It provides a detached framework, the book sectioned in the classic 5 W's format: Who? What? When? Where? Why?

I first encountered Yucca in "Menacing Earthworks," a Believer article by Alexander Provan. Basic physics is that all this nuclear waste will eventually degrade into less radioactive versions of itself, and eventually the radioactivity won't be detrimental to humans, dogs, trees, and environments; i.e. there will be a day the stuff won't melt our skin off. And until that day comes, Yucca was to be the world's first radioactive crypt. Arbitrary cool off period for the nuclear waste: 10,000 years. (Actual, scientific cool off period: millions of years. And that's assuming we don't keep adding to the pile and give ourselves a start date witch which to count down from.) Provan's dilemma: how do you label such a site and guarantee it will be avoided for ten millennium? Only scholars can touch Beowulf in its original 'English'--English that was standard only 1,500 years ago. Thanks to Saussure and Semiotics, we know language is basically constructed from culture, and as those cultures change, which, let's be honest, they will, our ability to approach the languages of history, those arbitrary squiggles on walls, or paper, or in binary databases, or in light drives, or however they will be recorded in the coming years, becomes increasingly difficult. Some of the more saner solutions involve the creation of a council that maintains a 10,000 year vigil, ensuring the skull and crossbones death warning of today is understood tomorrow. Sounds great until you think about how you and your fellow classmates couldn't get a three word sentence through the 'telephone' game in Kindergarten without it coming out all sorts of FUBAR. I preferred Provan's conjecture at the end of the essay: maybe we shouldn't label it at all.

D'Agata's gives this linguistic quandary ample space in About a Mountain, as well as a bunch of the other Yucca debacles*. However his concern isn't really that Yucca mountain never gets open. About a Mountain contains all the facts, skillfully reported** by D'Agata, to demonstrate the failure of Yucca as a viable site for the long term storage of our nuclear waste. But he's never a pundit about it. Never once does he question the viability of nuclear power if we can't store its byproduct. Instead, he focuses on the Why? Why do we, as humans, have such a propensity towards botching science, or reason, or the obvious, that we may quell our fears and insecurities? Why does this mindset, one of ignoring the hard, somewhat queasy facts about a situation, or just plain life, come so naturally for us? Vegas is the city that the world visits in order to forget. Yet, it has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. The incongruities emerge. In About a Mountain, it becomes clear that Yucca isn't everything, and D'Agata shifts his coverage from the mountain to Levi Presley. Age sixteen, Levi Presley jumped off the top of the Stratosphere Tower and onto pavement the same summer Vegas turned 100 and the Yucca debate flared. John D'Agata, working as a volunteer for a suicide prevention hot line, is initially convinced he spoke to Levi on the phone the night before the jump.

D'Agata writes:
"It was clear as I left Vegas that some other boy had called.
Clear that if I point to something seeming like significance, there is the possibility that nothing real is there.
Sometimes we misplace knowledge in pursuit of information.
Sometimes our wisdom, too, in pursuit of what's called knowledge."

This is the heart of About a Mountain. The keen observation that, as humans, we often find significance for significance's sake. D'Agata, using Yucca as the ballast, as the unwieldy, precarious flop, sets us up for Levi Presley, the punch, and the fact that we so often measure ourselves against the future, even 10,000 years of it, without dealing with what's actually here.

*Other Yucca Debacles: Not many materials we can produce today have the capability to withstand 10,000 years of the environmental climate around Yucca. Or, if they do, they're too valuable to post as a sign out in the wilderness. There's also the logistical nightmare of transporting the nuclear waste to Yucca. It would require constant truck loads over forty years, coming from all the major regions and their nuclear facilities. Five trucks would pass through a congested section of highway in Vegas itself, every day. The odds of one of the trucks being involved in an accident where one of the transportation canisters was pierced is 1 in 26,000. That's better odds than winning big in Vegas, and doesn't consider all the other miles in the journey. Plus, if only one percent of the radiation leaked, and got out onto air currents, the entire city of Vegas would be toast. And this is an accidental spill. The threat of a terrorist attack can't be ignored. And then the mountain itself isn't that great of an insulator. In an experiment, 60,000 gallons of water were dumped over the mountain to determine how porous it is. All 60,000 gallons got to the center of the mountain in less than three months. Water is the most destructive solvent we have on the Earth, and if the climate were to change at Yucca over the next 10,000 years the facility would be toast. Oh, and though I don't have to hold myself to any journalistic integrity in this blog post, all these facts came out, more or less, in the book. For their sources, check D'Agata's appendix.

**By skillfully, I mean professionally. By professionally, I mean with a journalistic professionalism, i.e. he sources his stuff painstakingly. It should be noted that there's a highly enjoyable stylistic efficacy in his sentences: preened, simple, and pragmatic. In its more reporty moments, About a Mountain is perfect newspaper journalism: in a register for the masses, yet capable of harnessing insight and intelligence.

Year of the Yellow Book

2010-04-13T22:26:00.001-07:00

AWP Denver concluded.

I'm shooting for an MFA.
Alabama
Irvine
Syracuse
Kansas
Arizona
New Mexico
Montana
among others.

Saunders read. We were yanked around a bit, left gutted. Read the story here.

I crashed into a grassy hill for an afternoon. Felt like a knoll. I read, slept and waited for Kennedy.

Top Panel: DFW remembered, as essayist.

It led me to the yellow books:
John D'Gata's About a Mountain
David Shields' Reality Hunger

And I bought Nick Flynn's The Tick is the Bomb: A Memoir. He shook my hand, read my name tag, used my name in a sentence. It was the final copy. I got to keep the bookmark. Written in black pen: "Event! Saturday 1:45 pm."

All these books are new. Hardcovers. All three of them yellow.

Authors I want to read whose books I haven't bought:
Etgar Keret
Ander Monson
Joy Williams

Chloe killed at the Black Warrior reading.

Flarf.

Bathtub Initiation: new name acquired: S-Bag.

His name is Doc Furtive

2010-04-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

and he sabotages my brain.

Guy Rawlins

2010-03-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

There are two types of people in the world, the type that soak the table cloth of any situation with kerosene, touch a match to it, and get high off the fumes and everyone running around all aimless and funny, and the type that run around all aimless and funny. Guy Rawlins was the type that lit the match.

Six two and stocky, he had long sandy hair and looked kind of like Dog the Bounty Hunter. In fact, people often came up to him on the street and asked if he was, in fact, Dog the Bounty Hunter. "Nah, I'm better," he'd say, "that guy got shit on me." In a way, this was kind of true. Guy ran special operations in Gulf War I. At barbecues he would often drink too much warm Budweiser, slouch in his chair and gloat. "If there had been a damn deck of cards for my war, I'd a been credited with nabbing a whole damn suit." He would push his hand up his shirt and rest it on his stomach. "Ace of Spades my ass." Later, when the Ace of Spades was nabbed, tried and executed, Guy called our house late and slurred, "Fucker coulda been mine," and then hung up. I often imagine all the people he called that night and said the same thing to.

Not long after this phone call the Jackalope business started, and my Mom moved in with Terry Dorsey, the manager of Swan Lakes, Oak Grove's premiere golf course. As much out of professional necessity as loneliness, my dad invited Guy in on consult, and a day later he showed up on our doorstep in a silky Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and combat boots. He and my father shook hands like soldiers. Moving through the doorway, he slapped me on the back and asked, "Where's the beer?"

Abandon Ship

2010-03-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I drove east out of Lawrence on 15th street, till it turned to gravel and crept into unknown country. Off dirt, the Outhouse, an obnoxious blue concrete outpost serving as Lawrence's finest strip club. I'd heard about it, and in my attempt to weed through the Kansan backwaters, it decided to make itself found. Rolling past, a sign read, "BYOB. Juice bar inside."

I was heading for Kansas City to take my sister to a Black Eyed Peas concert. Not ready to face the arena crowd, I struck out early to plot a course through farms and dormant fields. The road spun me south and into Eudora, a town I've passed on the highway countless times on my jaunts between KC and Lawrence, but never hopped off to explore. Only the posted signs marking a decrease in speed let me knew a township was close. Eudora's downtown marked itself in that quaint way of all small Kansas towns: twenty mph speed limit, a few antique stores, post office, Bar and Grill, a spirits shop. I love these towns. They persist with an endurance I'll never know. They will outlive me.

Today, Eudora's remarkable feature was the blue Weldon trash cans lining the street like soldiers. Substantial plastic containers, their blue unnaturally vibrant under overcast skies. Eudora's finest out to greet me. A reception for my swashbuckling. Bravado in digging my van's tires into the divots of roads until then unseen. Like any good pirate, I cut out into it. I run from my problems. Two weeks ago I made the commitment to leave my job at the end of July. Fetters loosened. Wind hit the sails. I fired a few cannon shots off the port side and cheered as they hit water with an ineffectual, soppy slap. Anchor up, I cruised that ship out into open water and dropped it again.

The Black Eyed Peas told me to Boom Boom Pow, and beyond that to love. KC newsmag INK's feature article mapped out the anxieties and desires of those other twenty-and-somes like me, and how our number one desire is job security. Wired's essay "Art of the Steal" about Jay Blanchard made me want to become a thief. Eudora said stay quiet, and you will survive. Lots of maps for one day. None of them with an ascertainable X.

Four months to set up my own plank and walk out on it. Whiskey and words, all this pirate needs. Whiskey for the hurt, words for the world.

A-Z: Walter

2010-03-24T00:24:00.001-07:00

Note: This was written for a challenge at Desktop Objective, a blog urging creative outbursts. Read this, and more like it, there.

After Breakfast Walter walked down past the farmer’s market to do the Times Crossword at Nina’s Cafe, his weekly ritual ever since his son moved out. Bloody Marys, always two, mild. Chair and table next to the window. Donut for dessert. Each week it passed without consequence, two, three hours, until the church crowd emerged in their best digs to overtake the place. Fanciest dressed invaders Walter had ever witnessed.

Greg was working today. “Hello Walter,” he said. “I’ve got bad news, we’re out of mix.”

Just like that, a breach. Kathy had been better equipped for situations like this. Lateral plays drawn up fast, alternate routes assessed and settled upon. Moments, for Walter, were best served as scripted events. Nina’s Cafe was a one act play, few props with little or no dialogue. Ovationless. Paid with exact change: $8.25. The quarter he could feel in his pocket, a divot between his wallet and leg.

Reaching into the pocket he pulled the quarter out. Silver as it should be, matching his wedding band. The United States of America minted along the top of its circumference. Under this, Washington’s profile, steely, gaunt and decisive.

The vacuum of the tip jar in front of him, Walter slipped in the coin. Windows framed the yawn of a Sunday morning. Extended behind Walter now, a line. Years spent, he thought, waiting in lines. Zipping his coat he moved outside.

Book 5 2010: Tree of Smoke

2010-03-16T20:17:00.001-07:00

Author: Denis Johnson
You should read this book. For me, it's been a long engagement. We started a year or two ago, post multiple readings of both Seek and Jesus' Son. We courted on and off last summer, two times surviving with each other for 300 pages before I thought it best to part ways. It was my mistake.

For those of you who haven't read Denis Johnson, go out and read him. For those of you that have, and haven't read Tree of Smoke, know, it will deliver.

Short summation:
Behind it all is the colonel.

Long:
Tree of Smoke is sprawling yet claustrophobic. 700 pages map the lives of Skip Sands, Kathy Jones, Bill and Sam Houston, Minh and a slew of others over eighteen years, Vietnam and its legacy. Cinching them together is Colonel Francis Sands, an Irish Army officer who sends the whole cast reeling, directly or otherwise, into the morass of Psy-Ops Operations in southeast Asia.

As a novel about Vietnam Tree of Smoke has to measure itself on a dual metric; first, how does it operate as a contemporary American novel, and second, how does it operate as a piece of Vietnam literature. I'm more interested in the second. As a piece of Vietnam lit, it must assert itself under the canonical shadow of authors like Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr. Johnson does this by expanding his scope. Instead of focusing on the intense, grunt experience common in Vietnam works (Tree of Smoke only contains one, intense in-combat scene) Johnson spends the novel surveying the intricate and monotonous influences of the colonel and his evolving rogue Psy-Ops campaign. The thematic grounds of Vietnam lit--uncertainty, anxiety, alienation, madness--become expansive. In Tree of Smoke, chapters are years. The first, 1963.

It starts wet. The Philippines. JFK has just been assassinated. Life keeps turning itself back around to try and catch a glimpse of that Kennedy smile. New to the C.I.A., Skip Sands is tasked with the formation of an unorthodox card catalog to serve as the Colonel's bastion of intelligence. This is the Tree of Smoke, but in reality it's little more than scotch tape, glue, and paper cuts. Under alias as a Del Monte representative, Skip Sands pastes together an inane intelligence system while yearning to get into the Vietnam theater. We also meet Kathy Jones, a missionary whose husband, a preacher, is found murdered in the wilds of Filipino jungle. She sleeps at night with Calvinist dreams and enters into a brief, haunting love affair with Skip. From here Johnson moves out, away, further from Vietnam, to Arizona and the Houston family. Bill finds himself forced out of the navy as James is moving himself towards enlistment. Johnson is crafting a disparate bunch of characters as he debuts the colonel as the force to send them all 'Nam bound.

The colonel wrenches the novel like the morass that was Vietnam. His presence is profuse, necessary but reviled. He operates on two levels, first as Colonel Francis Sands the man, an uncle, friend, reveler, and second as the colonel, a phantom presence that eludes capture, both literal and imaginative, of both friends and foes. Minh, a Vietnamese air force pilot, provides the reader their first oblique insight into the Colonel:

He'd met the Colonel only a few mornings back, out front of the helicopter maintenance yard at the Subic base, and they'd sought each other out continually ever since. The colonel had not been introduced to him--the colonel had introduced himself--and didn't appear to be linked to him in any official way. They were housed together with dozens of other transient officers in a barracks in a compound originally constructed and then quickly abandoned, according to the colonel, by the American Central Intelligence Agency.

Minh knew the colonel was one to stick with. Minh had a custom of picking out situations, people, as good luck, bad luck. He drank Lucky Lager, he smoked Lucky Strikes. The colonel called him "Lucky."

"John F. Kennedy was a beautiful man," the colonel said. "That's what killed him."

This description becomes the glue that binds the colonel as morass construct together. Striking, forward, charismatic, irresistible; the colonel possesses a gravitational flux that holds in orbit the characters in this novel, and in many ways, the presence of the war itself. In Tree of Smoke's rendition of Vietnam, Johnson creates a milieu that subsists on him as a presence. His actions, or the thought of his actions, that provide the lattice within which, aware or not, Johnson's cast operate. With its construction, Johnson has let Tree of Smoke-as-Vietnam Lit enter into the canon with a fresh, unheard perspective.

That successful, Johnson is left to craft a literary spectacle. His prose is gorgeous and poetic. At times it feels a bit too perfect, challenging the verisimilitude of the work, except that it resonates in the fantastic language that has been classically permitted in the genre. Take this conversation between James Houston and two companions, their first day on the ground in Vietnam, and the officers escorting them to their outpost:

"All right--shit. Fine. Shit. I'll take over," said Jollet. "All aboard, let's go."
"Oh no you don't. The truck stays here."
"It's near a klik to anyplace else!"
"Men," Flatt said, "carry on. Move in single file and pray your asses don't get ambushed your first night on the ground. You got any money?"
"Shit," Jollet said. "They don't have any money."
"You keeping saying 'Shit' like it's my name," Flatt said. "Stop saying 'Shit' like it's my name. How much you guys got? Because in this wacky-ass modern world where we're living," he explained, "you can't get laid without no money. You got enough for a beer?"
"How much is a beer?"
"I got a couple bucks," James admitted.
"U.S. cash or MPC?"
"Regular dollar bills."
"Corporal Jollet, take these new guys to the Floor Show."
Flatt and Jollet, both bumping into each other and getting in each other's way, giving off an aura of mutual dependence and resentment, like brothers, placed their M16s in the carryall's toll compartment. Jollet said to the privates, "Where's your weapons?"
"Jesus God!" Fisher cried out. "I TOLD you!"
James said, "We don't have no weapons."
"How bizarre," Flatt said.
"Are we gonna get some?"
"Yes, I believe we can furnish you all the weapons you want," Jollet assured them. "This is a war."
Flatt went into the Long Branch Saloon, leaving them with Jollet, who said, "I'm not actually gonna say it, but I feel like saying, 'Shit.'"
He turned and headed toward the town. They could only follow.
"Where are we?"
"Bien Hoa. We don't go past the edge. It's all air force in there."
It was dark. This was Vietnam. "Goddamn," James said, trying to keep his voice as soft as the darkness.

Characters become oracles, wacky and insightful. The language is magnetic, binding and constrictive. Tree of Smoke is relatively plotless, given its scope, in that it pulls the reader through the bog with language and description as opposed to narrative progression. There's very little movement in the novel, or at least movement capable of changing the situation. Characters shift geographic locations, but are allowed little respite from the implications of the war. There's a ton of waiting, and expectation becomes the tension of the novel, such that, when the Psy Ops operations crumbles with the colonel's death, characters are left stranded and desolate. Their framework for the war abolished, their war ends.

Tree of Smoke is an investment. Denis Johnson, though uncompromising on depth and scope, guarantees an astonishing novel. The myriad madness of this work is haunting yet immediate. Forty some years later, he gives the world of Vietnam some new relevance. I encourage anyone to get to work finding that out.

Book 4 2010: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

2010-03-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

Author: George Saunders
(Been too long since I finished reading this to give you an ample review.)

Selling it on:
Classic Saunders.
Short.
Sweet.
Sardonic.

It will make you laugh; and to think about yourself for an unhealthy amount of time.

Critiques: America, religion, humans, robots, consumerism, academia, the media, geopolitical interactions, food, absurdity, sanity, you, me.

Contains illustrations.

Two hour read time. Tops.
(Oh, and WARNING, the title gives it all away.)

San Fran

2010-03-02T17:42:00.000-08:00

San Francisco smells like spring. Its buildings climb up and down hills--their slopes the city's static heartbeat, pulsing with a rigorous vitality. In this city of 800,000 the streets are ridiculously clean. No fast food wrappers, ticket stubs, newspapers, to-go cups, adverts, bottle caps, or copper pennies. Nothing. None of that rank, city smell either. Under all of it three cable lines still clank along on their historic gears. The sidewalks are wide, even, and friendly. Trees line the streets. Dogs putz around leashless, but calm. This whole city rises up out of the island, coyly proud, as if aware of its own efficient, pristine existence.

I'm here for 826 National's 101, an intense, one day bull session where they pull back the curtains for forty strangers curious about how they pull it off. I'm one such stranger. And as to what exactly they pull off, well, it goes something like this. 826 is a series of writing centers. Formed in San Francisco, with 826 Valencia in 2002, they currently operate in six other cities--Ann Arbor, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and New York--with another in D.C. slated to open this year. Founded in part by Dave Eggers, it was an excuse for a bunch of creative San Franciscans to get together to help out the community. With an idea to provide free-of-charge one on one tutoring for local students, they signed a lease in the Mission District of San Fran, a largely Hispanic section of the city. Inadvertently, they zoned commercial, and the city came in forcing them to sell something. Thus, the Pirate Supply Store, the front, the legendary, among Eggerphiles, one-stop-swashbucklin' shop that started it all. 101 hosts itself here, within 826 Valencia, at the tables where Monday through Thursday 40+ kids make their way for daily tutoring. The whole venue has the feel of a pirate ship, thus the concept. It's support beams reinforce the planks of a wooden ceiling. The warm glow of the wood, hanging, antique chandeliers, and the sun creeping through the skylights gives the whole place the illusion of a ship's hull. The shop sells Pirate merchandise--eye patches, cans of leeches, rope, iron locks, dice, and mustache extensions, among other knickknacks--along with McSweenys lit products, and the 826 books compiling the work of the students they serve. It's all very fun, humbling, and brilliant.

I'm here with little more plan than to listen. When anyone asks, I describe my work with the Bathtub Collective in Lawrence and our recent Writing in the Schools endeavor with Shannon Draper's 3rd and 6th hour at Lawrence High in which we hope to gather and publish the voices of her students in some kind of book. But, in reality, I'm here more as an Eggerphile with a vague dream of opening one such writing center, said dream, though vague, also the most tangible dream I've held onto for the last four years. The trip is recon. Logistical analysis. A Do-I-Have-What-It-Takes self evaluation.

M.C. of the seminar is Ninive, the other co-founder and current head honcho of 826 National. The rest of the 826 National staff runs support, also leading various parts of the program. Perhaps it's the seven years she's been at it, but Ninive, a former high school teacher, carries herself with the acerbic efficiency of a C.E.O. She's intense, direct, crushingly intelligent in that hyper-pragmatic way, and she corrals us through the day with a minute by minute itinerary of information overload. Though I'm no accomplished author, hearing the nonchalance with which Dave Eggers describes the founding of 826 is reassuring. Ninive's professionalism makes me grovel and squirm, to consider, once again, graduate programs in insanely pragmatic things like an MBA in executive kickassness.

From here, I can go on to tell you what I learned, all the fund raising strategies, what it takes to start and manage a nonprofit, the activities and programs that work, more 'too cool' anecdotes (Yes, I got to meet Dave Eggers, and also was pleasantly surprised that Thao (of Thao with the Get Down Stay Downs: see former blog entry for an album review) was a representative for the Volunteer Q&A session). But my most valuable piece of information was a contact, a Kansas City teacher with the hopes of doing something like this. It's a man on the ground with which to get something, if anything, running. Second most valuable info came in learning how to craft a chapbook. This I'll take back to Lawrence, to the high school class, in the hopes of getting a product created. If there was any tangible piece of information that 826 101 enforced repeatedly, it was the creation of something that can be handed over. Evidence of results. With that, here goes.

Resume

2010-02-24T19:44:00.001-08:00

As I currently work at finishing my first complete one of these, I found this lounging idle in My Document. I think it was for ME101, Intro to Mechanical Engineering. First semester, freshman year. Apparently I was efficient in Internet Navigation. Oh, and I love the last line.

Sean Conner

Present Address: 344 Haymaker, Manhattan, KS 66506

Objective: Acquire a summer internship with an engineering firm

Education: Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS

Major: Mechanical Engineering

Cumulative GPA: 4.0/4.0

Johnson County Community College

Engineering Experience: Design Car Team for mousetrap cars

Computer Skills: Efficient in Office programs, Power Point and Internet Navigation

Activities: National Honor Society

Eagle Scout

Employee of the Month at Price Chopper

Former activist for the new KGB

Roadblock

2010-02-17T12:05:00.000-08:00

Cutting east out of Lawrence on my run, I crested the hill that marks the last suburban street and the transition back into Kansas farmland. Below me the plots opened up, yellowed with the skeletons of corn stalks. I run out here, on the fringe, because of the silence, the way you hear nothing but the wind and your shoes on pavement, your heart pulse against the sky.

Today, though, there was a roadblock just past the train tracks, at the intersection where I depart pavement for gravel. The glow of the lights hit first, and as I ran closer I saw the car and two officers erecting a wall with two of those stilted "Road Closed" barricades. It felt as though they were waiting for me. Stopping would be suspicious, as would turning around. I kept up my pace. The officers were wearing fluorescent yellow vests, and this along with the orange and white striped signs and the lights seemed terribly out of context at one in the afternoon on a cloudless, Kansas day.

Hitting the intersection I turned north, waving and saying hello to the closest officer. His hair was curly and silvered, and the black ellipses of his sunglasses covered his eyes. He said hello. Behind him, the barricade and the squad car. His partner leaned above the passenger seat door, elbows flat on the roof, arms crossed. He didn't say a word. I focused on the crunch of gravel as I started pulling away. Free, I thought. Innocent. Ahead of me the road was clear save for a cyclist slowly heading towards me. His face was framed by the hood of his jacket. I feigned another wave and tried to ignore the fact that he was also wearing a black ski mask. I couldn't see his eyes.

At this point I began considering the plausibility that I was being woven into a Cormac McCarthy novel. To my left, between the road and a lifeless stretch of land, a deep drainage ditch carried a slow stream of melted runoff. Nothing in front of me except the yellow arrow signs marking the turn of the gravel road. I resolved not to turn around, not to acknowledge the return of tires on gravel. A large orange truck pulling a trailer passed close from behind. Too close for the width of the road, until I realized the cyclist was back, slowly pedaling north with me, back the way from which he came. His bicycle was too small for him, and had the disconnected seat bar common to Wal-Mart grade mountain bikes. He wore cowboy boots, khaki pants the color of dried moss, and some type of thick, beige jacket stained brown with dirt. Watching him pedal was monotonous, a slow turn of two legs. My pace was hardly letting him pull away from me. At the elbow joint that pulled the gravel road back West, back towards town, I stopped to walk.

The silence returned as he skirted further down the road, and I began running again. In an attempt to focus, I counted dried corn husks, ravaged cobs and Busch light cans. A hawk screeched as I crossed the train tracks again, signaling my return to Lawrence, to city, to a place where people don't seem so far away.

Record 5 2010: Odd blood

2010-02-16T07:33:00.000-08:00

Artist: Yeasayer

Yeasayer's Odd Blood marks my first record review of 2010 that was actually released in 2010. I've had it on my turntable for a week or two now, and am finally getting some time to jot down some thoughts. The first of which is, I dig it. I haven't listened to Yeasayer's debut album All Hour Cymbals, but after hearing their sophomore effort, I look forward to hunting it down. I ran into the band via a recent episode of Bob Boilen's All Songs Considered.

Odd Blood opens up with "The Children." It begins with a metronomic bell rhythm, and an eerie way-slow-downed synthesis of various instruments. I felt as though I was crossing some vast nautical body in the gallows of a haunted galleon. The lyrics are unintelligible, and I initially thought I was spinning the record at the wrong rpm. It's a chilling prologue for the rest of the album, which works to blend electronic experimentation (akin to Animal Collective) with a more tangible poppiness. There is a mythological aspect to "The Childrend," and to all of Yeasayer's rhythms--a lot of which probably owes tribute to the influences of 'world music' on their tracks, the use of unique instruments-- and I had the uncanny feeling that "The Children" was being sung by the stone heads of Easter Island.

"Ambling Alp," the album's second song, serves as the paradigm for how the musical thematics of electronica, world rhythms, and pop all mix. While "The Children" mashed the lyrics into the same digital processing of the instrumentation, Chris Keating's vocals cut out above the reverbic ambience in "Ambling Alp." The track has been out for a while, released as an EP with three remixes last summer, and serves as the album's initial single. It's anthemic, capturing a father-son type conversation in some more mythic overtones. It's chorus seems explicit enough: "You must stick up for yourself, son / Never mind what anybody else done," but each verse moves towards a grander narrative. There are references to an Old Man Schmelling, Ambling Alp himself (a hero, or a literal mountain with consciousness, I'm not sure), and the narrator's insistence to couch advice in the fantastic, such as here, in the third verse of the song:

And when those thunder clouds are crying in the skies, in the skies
And when those fireflies keep shining in your eyes, in your eyes
Keep your mind for the time, with your ass on the line
Keep your feet, feet sliding to the side, to the side

This is what I really enjoy about Odd Blood. It's got the intonations and sentiment of normal pop, but is immersed in the lyrically and electronically fantastic. The blend of the mythic line "thunder clouds [...] crying in the skies," with the pragmatism and modernity of "with your ass on the line," captures this dynamic. Form reflects content and vice versa. Mount this on some exciting and unusual percussive experimentation and you've got a catchy, yet distinct, album. If anything Yeasayer are masters of weaving seemingly disparate elements into bold, innovative tracks.

Odd Blood's weakness may be in its tendency towards sentimentality (see "I Remember"). Yet each track is so diverse. My personal favorite is "Madder Redder," where the chilling harmony of the entire band surges in at the 0:25 mark over a reverberating drumbeat right out of Phil Collins. And then it all cuts out for the vocals of Keating, only to return to bridge the verse. It's simple in comparison to the other tracks on the album, but each element is layered so effortlessly.

The masterpiece of the album is "O.N.E." Running itself on the melodic bounciness and repetition of several simple patterns: electric guitar pluck and three part fade, chorus repeat, drum sequence, and some type of electronic tonal pulse progression, among others. It finds itself as these patterns fade out and into one other. The track has a residual slide, where each of these unique patterns reemerge and blends again with the other elements and it all builds up to the 4:30 mark where a Top-40 pop-esque vocal remix careens out and pushes it all together. Give it a listen:

Oh, and a special shout out needs to go out to "Rome," only because if the vocals were cut it would be a perfect soundtrack for that SNES classic Donkey Kong Country.

Day 1, Writers in Lawrence Schools

2010-02-10T20:03:00.000-08:00

Having just joined the Bathtub Collective here in Lawrence, I had the opportunity to go into Lawrence High today and work with Shannon Draper's 3rd hour English class. Shannon and Bathtub have teamed up to create an exhibit in KU's Spencer museum. The Spencer gave us access to their collection, and we were tasked to pair one of their pieces with a brief writing sample of our choosing. I chose the following photograph, Earl Iverson's Kansas State Fair:

Paired with it: The opening of DFW's essay "The View From Mrs. Thompson's":

LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS
DATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER 2001
SUBJECT: OBVIOUS

SYNECDOCHE In true Midwest fashion, people in Bloomington aren't unfriendly but do tend to be reserved. A stranger will smile warmly at you, but there normally won't be any of that strangerly chitchat in waiting areas or checkout lines. But now, thanks to the Horror, there's something to talk about that overrides all inhibition, as if we were somehow all standing right there and just saw the same traffic accident. Example: Overhead in the checkout line at Burwell Oil (which is sort of the Neiman Marcus of gas station/convenience store plazas -- centrally located athwart both one-way main drags, and with the best tobacco prices in town, it's a municipal treasure) between a lady in an Osco cashier's smock and a man in a dungaree jacket cut off at the shoulders to make a sort of homemade vest: "With my boys they thought it was all some movie like that Independence Day, till then they started to notice how it was the same movie on all the channels." (The lady didn't say how old her boys were.)

In choosing these two pieces, I was attempting to illustrate how instances of communal emotional extremism, in this case the joviality of a Kansas State Fair and the tension and angst of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, catalyze the breaking down of typical social barriers. They elicit conversations between strangers. They bring us together. They establish communities. The emotional spark plug can run the gamut from depressed to elated, but irregardless, when faced with such an emotional flux, humans tend to come together. That was my intent, at least. I'm not sure if it got across. (Nor, I assume, did my explanation of synecdoche (a part representing the whole, or the whole acting to represent a part.))

What got across to me was that these kids actually had memories of 9/11 (they were first graders, at the time). All of them could place where they were (mostly in school). One girl said she was building legos and heard other school children running and screaming down the halls. They were enthusiastically shouting, "Terrorist attack, terrorist attack." The implications of the attack were beyond their comprehension. (As it was, in a way, for me in my 10th grade, AP European History class. End of the hour. We turned the T.V. on and tears rimmed the eyes of our toughest teacher, Mrs. McCue. She never cracked. Ever. She ground Europe into our skulls with the furor of a German blitzkrieg. None of us got it. The best and brightest 10th graders and we all kind of stared blankly at the black cube of the television mounted against the beige walls, at the smoke billowing out of Tower 1. I don't remember us using that T.V. for anything else that year.)

According to Shannon, most of these kids had IEP's and weren't up to snuff compared to others in their grade. One student frequently cussed Shannon out. The students in her third hour were loquacious. They were restless. They snapped when we finished our presentations. They rested their heads on their elbows and dozed off as we lectured. But when it came to experience, when it came to conveying their thoughts and ideas, they came alive. After the three Bathtub representatives shared their pieces, Shannon made the students choose one of the art pieces on display and respond to it in verse. The exercise called for twenty lines minimum. The room fell silent. Each and every kid put the pen to the page. I read over shoulders, requested finished copies, helped students struggling with writer's block. I have to be honest, in many ways I was envious. Some of the stuff was remarkable, spewing out of that youthful place yet unhindered by fear and reservation. It was honest. Unpolished, yes, but constructed with a grace and fluency that I find often escapes me.

After class I headed to the school cafeteria with Nathan, one of the other Bathtub members. $3.10 got me a pastrami and roast beef sandwich, potato wedges, minestrone soup, an orange slush and a milk. We sat at a table adjacent to the kids in Shannon's class. They didn't say a word to us. In a way they didn't need to. They already had. They shared with us a part of themselves that, as we age, becomes so much harder to express.

Four Miles

2010-02-10T07:36:00.000-08:00

This is my run. It's an exercise in redundancy. The route has forged itself in the addition of one long block each outing. Four runs a week. A month ago I could hardly run 2. The temperature outside has yet to crest 40 degrees. My legs feel like logs for the first 2.5 miles. My arms feel like anchors at around 3. The first 15 seconds after each run I think about how I don't ever want to do it again. The rest of the walk home I think about how I could have gone further. Next run, I say. One more long block.

Book 3 2010: The Subterraneans

2010-02-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

Author: Jack Kerouac

I'm not sure I buy Kerouac, or, more accurately, I'm not sure I buy the cultural resonance of Kerouac. My first Kerouac experience was On the Road, arguably his most touted novel. I had attempted reading it four or five times before finally completing it in Fez, Morocco. My resistance stemmed from the incongruity between the expectation of reading On the Road and the actual act of reading it. Since high school I've seen it on both every Must-Read and Banned Book list. I saw it quoted on K-State's English Grad Student bulletin board. It had been held up in so many conversations as an example of how to really live. However, when I actually sat down to read it, it didn't inspire me to loosen the fetters and go out and hit the road. Rather, it showcased the monotony and tragedy of the Beat life. Of life in general. Satisfaction for Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise comes around like a comet, once every three or four years, as they hit the road and move through America with an intrepid lustfullness. Yet, in the midst of this satisfaction, they cut the strings of friendships and communities.

The Subterraneans operates in much the same way. Narrated in the first person by Leo Percepied, it documents the rise and fall of his relationship with Mardou Fox, and how it operates in the greater context of the Subterranean community of San Francisco. In Leo's words, the Subterraneans are "hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike."

Leo himself is an author, and it's explicit from page one that he's got something to get out. The prose is angsty, doubtful, and exhaustive. In that classic Kerouacy style, The Subterraneans runs itself on the midnight oil, not stopping lest the prose shut back up on itself. Periods are rare, new paragraphs rarer.

As a literary work, The Subterraneans is worth the read. It's crafted well and it rewards the persistent reader with classic Kerouac 'beat' induced passages; passages like:

"that excitement of softnight San Francisco bop in the air but all in the cool sweet unexerting Beach--so we in fact ran, from Adam's on Telegraph Hill, down the white street under lamps, ran, jumped, showed off, had fun--felt gleeful and something was throbbing and I was pleased that she was able to walk as fast as we were--a nice thin strong beauty to cut along the street with and so striking everyone turned to sea, the strange bearded Adam, dark Mardou in strange slacks, and me, big gleeful hood."

These moments are all well and good. However, they are a sentiment common for anyone versed in Kerouac. They appeal to the freewheeling aura in all of us, that part of our selves that yearns to act without responsibility. This is what it means to be 'Beat' I guess. But that's known. Passages like this are the expectation from Kerouac.

My aversion to this novel is that there is no deviation from this expectation. The Subterraneans was predictable. Not only was I quite aware the novel was going to end with the split of Leo and Mardou, but I guessed the entire novel was the manifesto of an artist reclaiming himself after a romance lost. The final lines of the novel, "And I go home having lost her love. And write this book," were stagnant. Duh, I thought, of course that's what you did. It's so typically Jack Kerouac.

In some ways I can't rail against this. Again, it's written well, and arguably Kerouac is doing an honest job reporting the mindset of the 'Beat' subgroup of his generation. My problem is that at no point in the novel does Leo change his tune. It's a cyclical break down: Leo and Mardou have a great few days, he then stays out too late, runs about town, doesn't give himself up for Mardou's love but despite this they rekindle, etc. Except it is imperative that Leo doesn't ever admit to loving her. He desires to possess her adoration, but there is no inclination that he plans on reciprocating. Instead, he's setting himself up for the creative catalyst for his next book: the breakup itself.

There is one moment where I really felt Leo had a moment of self-reflection. Indicative only by the prose slowing down, it comes in this line:

"How clear the realization one is going mad--the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract."

One sentence, one paragraph. The only emotionally sober moment of vivid introspection by our narrator. Yet, again, it's all about Leo.

Last night I watched the documentary Soul Power at Liberty Hall. Bill Withers singing "Hope She'll be Happier," has been haunting me since. I went to sleep to it last night. First song I started my day with today. Honest and pure, it possesses the integrity of one who has loved and learned. It holds a humanistic empathy. Leo doesn't understand any of that.

So, Leo, this one's for you.

Record 4 2010: Blood Visions

2010-02-05T19:31:00.000-08:00

Artist: Jay Reatard

I had never heard of Jay Reatard before he died. Instead, he came to me via the obits in all the music blogs. Aaron of Love garden recommended this record over his more recent Watch me Fall. If the cover is at all revealing, it's that Blood Visions, originally released in 2006. is eerily portentous.

Blood Visions opens up and I am warped back thirteen years to standing with my Dad in front of our stereo listening to his Ramone's 'Best of' Album. The early songs of this album exude pure punk. They are fast, riff heavy, weaving both lyric and sonic repetitions. The majority of the tracks clock in at less that three minutes. Their brevity resonates a mantra, a repetition in form that seems to reinforce the mantric overtones of each song.

Every song on this album is constructed from a similar mold. It enters with the shrill, low-fi sonics of typical punk. Each song consists of a central set of lyrics, repeated over and over, as guitars and drums open up from basic beats into complex riffs and progressions. I spent most of the record trying to pin down the emotional intent of the album. After the first three songs, I wrote that these songs are, "flights of raw emotion, as if repetition is trying to make it true." This came to me as I listened to the line, "All these faces mean nothing to me," during the song "It's so Easy." Reatard delivered the vocals with such detachment, I couldn't really buy them. But as they came over and over again, I felt as if he was almost trying to convince himself. I got this feeling repeatedly through the album. Most of the emotion seems bare, sparse, jocular even, Reatards voice analytic and regimented in it's punkness. But I believe this construction to be purposeful, because at times the mechanical drone of the repetitious chorus lines are diverted by outbreaks of authentic, reverberating emotional purity. The best song that captures this is "Not a Substitute." In it, Reatard delivers the line, "It's not a substitute," on atonal repeat. Finally, he breaks the mold and sings, "Missing you," in one of the album's few moments of unabashed emotion. Reatard's voice carries itself over the guitars and the drums as it fights against the rigidity of structure the song has created thus far. It's Reatard fighting against the grinding false-truth of the repetition. "Not a Substitute," is my song of the record. Give it a listen:

Considering Jay Reatard's passing, I can't help but write a little about the eerie portentousness of this record a little more. Apart from the visceral cover--Reatard covered in blood, the sight of it pooling around his feet, the reflection of his leg escaping into the redness of it--the track titles themselves seem foreboding. "Blood Visions," "My Shadow," "Death is Forming," "Nightmares," "Turning Blue," and "Waiting for Something," all felt a bit more layered as I considered they came from a musician no longer with us.

Jay Reatard was actually named Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. He died of an alcohol and cocaine overdose on the thirteenth of January last month. R.I.P. Jay. I wish I'd found your music some other way.

Letter; Words.

2010-02-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote a letter to a friend today. In it we began the discussion of why we write, and though I want to leave most of that to him and I, afterward I read the following from Kerouac's The Subterraneans:

"And as I wait for her to come out, I sit on side of water, in Mexico-like gravel and grass and concrete blocks and take out sketchbooks and draw big word pictures of the skyline and of the bay, putting in a little mention of the great fact of the huge all-world with its infinite levels, from Standard Oil top down to waterslap at barges where old bargemen dream, the difference between men, the difference so vast between concerns of executives in skyscrapers and seadogs on harbor and psychoanalysts in stuffy offices in great grim buildings full of dead bodies in the morgue below and mad-women at windows, hoping thereby to instill in Mardou recognition of fact it's a big world and psychoanalysis is a small way to explain it since it only scratches the surface, which is, analysis, cause and effect, why instead of what [...]."

This reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend David today. The specifics aren't terribly relevant except for his description of a certain person as the seven meters of Earth's outer crust. The argument is thus: this person is versed shallowly in just about everything; their knowledge is a large net, but the depth of that net is limited. That whole jack of all trades, master of none kind of logic has application here. Same with the pancaking of the information--value being placed on harnessing and navigating all of it, rather than gaining true insight into one area.

So why do I write? In a way I'm just scratching at the surface of everything. I, like many others in this generation, find it so easy to succumb to the e-A.D.D. I spend my mornings surfing through the links of my Google Reader, plumbing each well I find there in a near superficial manner, until I head to another link across the e-world. I value taking in all this information, but the discovery of such tidbits isn't nearly as rewarding as digesting 50 great pages of a book. Yet I keep scratching and scratching, every morning, and leave the real digging for the night, for the every other day of the paper pages.

This is all stream of conscious illogicisms (I want this to be a word... sigh, I want so many things to be words), and I'm going to go dig into this book some more. Will write soon. Scratch sooner.

Record 3 2010: Numero027 Eccentric Soul: Smart's Palace

2010-01-31T13:23:00.000-08:00

Artists: The Smart Brothers, Baby Neal, Theron & Darrell, Fred Williams & The Jewels Band, Chocolate Snow, L.T. and the Soulful Dynamics, Kenneth Carr, Fred Williams, Tim Jacob, and Hard Road featuring CC Neal

Numero027 Eccentric Soul: Smart's Palace came to me via my roommate Miranda. Compiled by the Numero Group it is a compilation record of the 60's and 70's Wichita Soul Scene and the bastion at the center of it: Smart's Palace. The scene was created by the determination of the Smart family. A cadre of eight brothers raised in a shack, the boys worked diligently and one by one came into instruments: Vernon, the first to aquire a tenor sax, Richard III (aka Dick Smart) followed with a clarinet, Leroy on trumpet, John on sax, Wendell on Trombone, and finally the baby brother, John Smart, bringing them their first experience at live play with his efforts in a high school R&B band with brother Dick (he traded his clarinet in for a baritone sax) . Wichita lacked a strong horn scene, and this gave them an edge with a promoter, and by the end of high school the small band had made headway into the Wichita music scene.

By 1961 the Smart Brothers had formed the Smart Bros. Band, bringing in friends to round out their sound on piano, guitar and vocals. Together they recorded "You Don't Love Me Anymore" and "Those Three Little Words" and headed west to California.

A year later had them back in Wichita, where they founded Smart's Palace, a club and restaurant. Most members of the Smart family worked there, and the Smart Bros. Band played nearly every night. Located in Wichita, the band had to expand its performance to assuage a Midwestern crowd, taking examples from Country and Rock & Roll to diversify their soul and R&B sound. On top of that, the band really performed. The man on his hands on the record cover is Leroy Smart, and his acrobatics were a common occurrence as the band played into the Wichita night.

Numero 027 is a double LP housing the various artists that played at Smart's Palace through the 60's and 70's. The opening track, Baby Neal and the Smart Bros.'s "Not Ashamed," opens with Baby Neal's rough voice singing, "Not ashamed. I'm not ashamed," over the soft harmonies of the rest of the band. In a way, it's an anthem for the record and the Wichita soul scene itself. Cut from the mostly lackluster Wichita scene, the Smart brothers created the infrastructure necessary to create and sustain the presence of soul music in south-central Kansas. When they needed a record store that would house black music, they opened one up. Lacking a label that would pick up artists, they founded Solo Records. I'm no expert on soul music, but this unabashed ethic seems to be what it's all about. Soul seems to be about making things happen because they need to happen in order to survive. Something inside lets you know it feels right.

The first two sides of this record are dominated with love tracks. With titles like: "I Was Made to Love Her," "Tell Her," "Lorraine," "Everyone Needs Someone," and "Crazy About You Baby," most of this record speaks to the pursuit of this love. It's no secret that music has long alighted itself to this territory, however there's something about it coming through the genre of soul. The suspense of the horn section dramatizes the desire of the lyrics. It moves them beyond words and into something organic and playful. Soul allows love to move out of it's generally angsty and maudlin musical confines and into something funky and fun.

For all that fun, I really dig this record at the opening of Side C. Chocolate Snow's "Inflation," and Kenneth Carr's "Don't Hate Let's Communicate," take a step beyond the thematically poppy sounds of the rest of the record and start tackling some issues. "Inflation," speaks to the diffucult economic circumstances of the times, bringing to bear those issues most blue-collar Wichitans were entering Smart's Palace to avoid: work, poverty, and the day to day dredges. "Don't Hate Let's Communicate begins like this:

I'd like to say / to the people of this land / now here's a message / I hope you all understand. / Now the interrupted in this country / and you want to keep it straight /don't hate, but let's communicate.

Both these songs are a bit more pointed, but there tone bespeaks of soul's amiability. They aren't hard anthems with which to revolt, but cordial invitations into issues. I love Carr's voice in "Don't Hate Let's Communicate." Friendly yet persistent, it's impossible to avoid. It wants to talk about things, but it's not willing to spoil the party doing it.

Overall, this record was an important investigation for me not just because it provided an avenue into soul, but rather into the music scene of Kansas. Though I'm based in the eclectic haven of music that is Lawrence, Kansas, I've been a bit disheartened by the authenticity of the local music scene, both here and in Kansas City. To be fair, I've witnessed a bunch of fun local acts lately, but their sound is all reactionary, derivative of the musical motions on the East and West coast. In a way, the Smart Bros. were very much as derivative as their modern day Kansan counterparts. They left Kansas several times for Chicago and California. Yet, they always went back to the Wichita soul scene over those two decades, and really carved a niche in an otherwise sonically stagnant scene.

Unfortunately, Smart's palace closed its doors in 1989. Dick Smart moved back once again to his old Wichita address in 2008. But nothing of the Smart legacy remains. No label, no record shop, no palace. If you get a chance, let Numero 027 Eccentric Soul: Smart's Palace, take you back there sometime.

Tom Shoeleries

2010-01-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

It opened with a quick video, remarkable only in the scene of brightly colored feet cutting through the too-green grass in pursuit of a soccer ball. It catered to those softer sentiments. Poor Kids. Bleak conditions. Somewhere exotic. This argument had never sold me on much of anything.

And then comes Blake. Not Tom. Some guy named Blake Mycoskie. He's wearing a red and maroon weaved plaid shirt, grey chords, and a pair of what appear to be some iteration of the Birkenstock loafer. I assume they're TOMS, but I can't see the tell tale flag from my distance. He's painfully cool looking. Shaggy hair, rough beard, tan. He's northwestern. I want to be his friend, or more specifically, I want him to be mine. I'm at Kansas University's Lied Center for a lecture from a guy whose product I had two years ago convinced myself I'd probably never wear.

The push towards TOMS came first from my friend Tim Schuler. On a time line, Tim was wearing TOMS within a year of their inception, circa Fall 2007. We were both undergraduates at K-State at the time, and it just goes to show you how ahead of the curve Tim is. Always is. He's wearing these god damn cloth shoes in just about the last place on Earth anything fashionable hits. Manhattan sits at the +3 annum on the trend scene (which in a way, is nice, because what's going out of fashion other places comes into fashion in Manhattan at a convenient time for all the sales. Unless it stays abuzz: see TOMS shoes, initially $45.00, now all $54.00+).

I was impressed by Tim's shoes. They seemed humble, yet practical. They did the minimum required of a shoe: covered feet. And then there was the story. One pair sold equals one pair for a disadvantaged youth of the world. It was a convincing argument. What wasn't convincing for me, at the time, were the styles available when I logged onto the site. None of them really sold me. Some of them were a straight turn-off. Gandhi quote? No thanks, my feet aren't political. And so, as happens when the inertia of the initial push towards something fades, I convinced myself I would not buy myself a pair of TOMS shoes because A. I would never take myself seriously making such a fashion statement; B. I have no tangible investment in the cause; and C. I was behind the trend (thus, purchase would somehow equate to poserdom). Plus it's always easier to sit on the sidelines as a skeptic. And oh boy, skepticize I did! I called out anyone but Tim who got TOMS shoes. My initial impressions: the tinge of admiration at their functionality, but more importantly my respect for the cause itself, slipped out the back door.

And then came Blake. A last minute text message let me know he was speaking. I decided to wade back in, as much for a chance at reaffirmation in not purchasing TOMS as it was an opportunity to learn something new.

The initial talk was what I expected from a charitable cause. Blake worked 80 hours a week at a successful start up, found himself burning out, took a month off to bum around Argentina, hooked up with a charitable organization doing a shoe drive and helped them outfit some kids. Yada yada yada. Then he said something interesting. He talked about how he was looking at these kids getting fitted with a hodgepodge collection of used shoes and how none of them fit, or that they were worn down. Ostensibly, the charity, through its shoe drive, outfitted all of these bare feet with shoes. It accomplished its goal. But for Blake Mycoskie, it was ineffective. The whole nature of a charitable foundation forces it to function on the premise of charity itself: they survive on receiving donations, financial or otherwise, from others. It's a purely voluntary system, and, more importantly, incapable of efficiency and sustainable aid. So instead of thinking of this as a problem charity needs to address, Blake Mycoskie made it a business problem. And that mindset hit me. It is one of the most profoundly pragmatic argument for charitable contribution I'd ever heard: using the business model, the flagstone of our capitalist economy, to address the issues of inequity facing the world.

From here, the whole plan seemed natural. Obvious even, like all good plans are. As a result of a pragmatic approach, the charitable actions of TOMS shoes aren't just effective, they have became sustainable. Because of that, I bought some shoes. Size 11 Charcoal Canvas Stitchouts. They look like this:
And I gave some kid somewhere in the world a pair too. Consumerism rarely feels that good.

All hail the Chew Chew

2010-01-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

Randomography 2: Line 5 Blue (Montreal Metro) + Pentagon City (Washington Metro)

Chew on this:

If humanity ever takes that dire step to hit the red button and scorch the skies, I imagine they'll have to build a national metro system, and dump out the whole box of crayola crayons to cover the web of lines that would spring up. Can you imagine the map on the subway wall, itself the size of a football field, bright colors straining and colliding within the borders of the U.S. of A? If this happens, I hope I live somewhere off of the Burnt Sienna line. I have always loved the sound of it.

Pentagon City sounds like a wonderful hub for such an ambitious project, though it also looks dire and lifeless:

That's the thing about metro's though, isn't it? Despite their profound convenience, they are remarkably apocalyptic in facade and ambiance. Sleek machines cut through Orwellian feats of engineering. People treat them like a car, solitary modes of transportation, despite the fact that in the next seat is a working, functioning, capable human being. It's as if life is stifled in the underground, as if all the transit bound pedestrians are holding their breath until they can emerge from the stairwells and into the world again.

We'd really have to up the ante if we were going to live in that environment. Trees yes PLEASE! Skylights? Uh huh. Even if these have to be reproductions of the actual things (the skies would be scorched...). And we'd have to get about renaming it all. Pentagon City, pashaw. We'll need to take a page out of Montreal Metro and make it alliteratively pleasant. Then we can brighten up each Crayola Line with Crayola influenced light bulbs. See Montreal Metro's Blue Line:

Pleasant eh? The Blue Line is Line 5 of the Montreal Metro, and in some weird slip of etymology, Line 3 never got around to existing. I can't help but thinking this ghost line is the future line between Pentagon City and the Montreal Metro.

Speculation aside, the future subway sub-culture will need some flavor. First I recommend a mandatory graffiti ordinance, where every patron carries a can and adds a bit of themselves to the concrete gangplanks. Secondly I'll turn to the definitive practitioners of Subway Fun, Improv Everywhere. They currently do it every year, if we ever take refuge in the subterranean confines of American soil, we'll need bi-weekly installments of such monotony breakage to survive:

Dibs on the polka dotted man thong. See you there.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_5_Blue_%28Montreal_Metro%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_City_%28Washington_Metro%29
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23884821@N00/275082464/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI46nl9pkc&feature=video_response

Book 2 2010: Then We Came To The End

2010-01-22T18:11:00.000-08:00

Author: Joshua Ferris

The End begins like this: "We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day."

Joshua Ferris' debut novel is the Catch-22 of the Office Building. Set on the decline of a Chicago ad agency, it's absurdly hilarious, yet like Catch-22, this hilarity is protective in nature. Without it, we, as readers, might be too distraught with the bleakness we find in the modern office.

To be fair, an office building is not too terribly equatable to the war-time conditions of Pianosa. Yossarian is pissed because he can't see the sanity in getting up in a plane to die. The collective conscious of Then We Came To The End is worried about survival in a professional sense. They don't want to lose their jobs. However Ferris ties the profession to life. It becomes equatable. As the opening passage demonstrates, the tedium of the office is insane. Yet they stay in it. The "impulses" are haunting. Yet they aren't enough to enter life without security, without the ability to get to the "issues of the day."

The opening passage represents the height of the agency. They are successful. But this quickly fades as one by one employees are laid off. In an act of repossession, the workforce rephrases it as 'walking Spanish.' Down the hall, box of office memorabilia in tow, the novel is the tale of everyone at this agency walking Spanish.

At the center of TWCTTE is the narrative collective conscious. Written in the first person plural P.O.V. (the 'we' construction), Ferris lumps together the misgivings and experiences of the plebeian tier of Art Directors and Copywriters, and simultaneously forces the reader into their conscious experience. The crutch is that characters periodically jump out of this 'we' to perform their solo narratives. Each of these characters is distilled into something unique: the manic Tom Mota, Benny, the social epicenter of office gab, Marcia and her self-acclaimed bitchiness, absent minded Chris Yop, the axiom spitting Hank Neary, and many others all make the 'we' personal. As Ferris lets the narrative of each of these characters into the spotlight, they shift out from the 'we' consciousness and into their own. They become briefly unique, only to reenter the 'we' as another character's story assumes the stage. The voice behind the 'we,' the actual narrator himself, is never revealed. He never steps out into his own story.

The collective 'we' lines itself against Lynn Mason and Joe Pope. These characters never have a place within the 'we' community that Ferris creates, and as such they are the inadvertet antagonists. Lynn Mason is the ad agency's representative head honcho, one of the partners, and the one who is causing all the "Walking Spanish." Lynn Mason, we discover, also has breast cancer. She creates a pro bono project just to keep the firm busy. In the middle of the novel, Ferris wheels out into the story of Lynn, abandoning the first person plural P.O.V. to instead capture her isolation, her fear of hospitals, the professional nature of her relationship with her lover. Right in the middle, as the reader starts to align themself against the antics of Lynn, Ferris won't let us. Joe Pope is the liaison between Lynn and everyone else in the office. Joe Pope is a good guy with a bad job. He's Heller's Major Major, alienated by rank from his peers. He's humanized through the immaturity of the 'we.' In doing this, Ferris is muddling the lines between good and evil in this narrative, he's not letting 'fault' enter into the equation. Instead, he constructs office life more fully. And he does it wonderfully. Following are passages from the novel that hit on some of the bigger challenges of this lifestyle choice.

On regret:

"What should I have told the man?" Benny asked us, long after his uploading was complete, and all we could agree on was the sight of Brizz smoking outside the building in winter in nothing to keep him warm but his sweater vest. That was a story Brizz owned, but was it a story? Or we might have told him about the talk with the building guy, but that wasn't much of a story either. To be honest, what we remembered most about Brizz was his participation, along with the rest of us, in the mundane protocols of making a deadline -- Brizz's nicotine stink in a conference call listening to a client's change in directions, Brizz sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses, carefully and methodically proofreading copy before an ad went to print. Hard to build an anecdote out of that. Good god, why had nobody stopped him? Why had we never, not one of us, stopped, turned around, and sad, Knock knock. Sorry to interrupt you when you're proofreading, Brizz. Why had we not gone in, sat down? Yeah, you smoke Old Golds, you keep a messy car -- but what else, Brizz, what else? Would closing the door help? What fucked you up as a kid and what woman changed your life and what is the thing you will never forgive yourself for? What, man, what? Please! We walked past. Brizz never looked up. How many times did we end up down at our own offices, doing pretty much the same thing, preparing for some deadline now come and gone, while Brizz lived and breathed with all the answers a hundred feet down the hall?

"He ate two baloney sandwiches for lunch almost every day," Benny said to Phil. "That's what I remember about your brother the most."

On compassion:

He unpacked his supplies -- two cans of white house paint, a deep-well roller tray, two roller heads, and a telescoping extension pole. He sipped from the Thermos lid as he mixed and poured out the paint and the fumes rose up to greet him. The faint sun barely touched on him as he walked the length of the scaffold, running the roller up and down the face of the billboard, working efficiently and thoroughly to cover the girl's fading image. It had been up there a number of months, all through the bad midwestern winter and the start of the spring rains, puckered in places, bubbles of paint cracked in half. Thanks to the extension pole, he covered more than he thought he would, but he still had a good bit to go yet, so he set the roller down and finished the martini and took out a paintball gun from the backpack. He poured a second martini and then loaded the gun. From his position on the scaffold, he could see the girl's face only at a steep angle, which prevented him from knowing exactly how to aim. But he had brought with him plenty of white pellets which he had chosen to match the house paint, and as he sipped the second martini and the sky announced the beginning of another empty, interminable weekend, he walked back and forth along the planks loading and shooting, covering over the dead girl's image one bitter blot at a time, because his complaints to Jane Trimble had gotten him nowhere -- and because in conversation the previous morning, Janine said she couldn't bear to look at it one day longer.

On routine:

There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough fto make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.

On acceptance:

But it didn't happen overnight. It took weeks, it took months, and that we mustered up the oomph to start over again at new agencies was a testament to our tenacity. It was a sign that buried beneath al lthe bitching, there were parts of the job we loved. It was proof we needed the money.

[skip 17 pages]

The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the satisfaction of a task's completion -- on any given day, those things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable. What we bitched about, what we couldn't let lie, what drove us to distraction and consumed us with blind fury, was this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven, who wore their clothes all wrong and foisted upon us their insufferable features, who deserved from a just god nothing but scorn because they were insipid, unpoetic, mercilessly enduring, and lost to the grand gesture. And maybe so, yes, maybe so. But as we stood there, we had a hard time recalling the specific details, because everyone seemed so agreeable.

I realize these selections are a bit bleak. They represent the various dog eared pages still creased in my copy of Then We Came to the End. To be honest, they're editorialized selections that have some bearing on where I personally sit in life. Within the confines of a personal blog though, I allow myself the slip from accountability that a true analysis would require. Joshua Ferris, as these passages help illuminate, has created a novel not just assertive in its analysis of the office lifestyle, but on life itself. TWCTTE, in its move between all the perspectives of each of its characters, in its inclusiveness of the reader in its 'we' construction, in the way it makes one laugh out loud moments after evoking unexpected pangs of sadness, is a truly successful novel. It reminds us of ourselves.

Record 2 2010 : Echo Party

2010-01-18T18:49:00.000-08:00

Artist: Edan

Record 2 of this year came to me via Aaron, one of Love Garden's Employees. I had intended to pick up either Fanfarlo's Resevoir or Telekinesis's Self Titled album, but both were out of print and would require back ordering at best. Wanting something danceable, I explained my project, and this was the third record Aaron pulled out for me. It is my intention with this project to just go with whatever is thrown my way, and this is the first (of many, I hope) record I go into without a context.

Turns out he handed me something that was a bit out of my league sonically (in terms of my review capability) but that also has a bit of a story. First, on Edan. Edan is an American DJ, and he describes himself quite well here. His uniqueness stems from his blend of typical DJ hip-hop sampling, but merging those with riffs and sounds from the 60's, foreign voiced choruses, and some other random psychedelia.

Echo Party is his latest smash up, except it is all derived from the back catalogs of Traffic Ent. Group. From what I can figure out, he was given access to all their old school rap records, and blasted it all particle accelerator style against kazoos, synthes, drum lines, and guitars riffs.

Apart from this, the LP is actually a limited edition run of 1000, each of them bearing a unique cover hand drawn by Edan himself. Mine is rather paltry when compared to the one above. The album title, "ECHO PARTY" is quietly stamped once center top. Under it, a dual press, one in blue, one in red, of a 70's disco girl, headband on, loose striped jumper cinched at the waist. Her eyes are darkly mascaraed, Egyptianesque. Aside from these three prints the cover is a blank white sheath, simple and soothing. The record is just as plain, the tan paper center marked with a red A. Side two is all black, with no markings. Nothing on either the record or the outer cover says Edan. I had no idea who the DJ was until I googled the album title.

The record begins with a distorted voice inviting me to "Funk it Up." It moves into a bongo heavy progression and through synthed rhythms. At times the bongos themselves feel as though they're being pumped through an echo chamber, and then merge into UFO inspired tonal blurts. Enter more remixed rappers calling out to the boroughs of New York, and then to all the signs of zodiac. After the hailing, another command, "Check out this, just check out this." Rinse and repeat this kind of odd-progression through both sides of the record, and you've basically got Echo Party. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think I have the musical salt to really give this an in depth review. What I can say is that it is funky, surprising, and danceable in a difficult way, such that it keeps moving in new directions which take the shoulders a second to acclimate to. Instead of haplessly mapping the progression, I'll give you some of my favorite highlights:

There is a moment when a rapper emerges from the mash up calling himself Spider-D. He raps, "Roller skatin' on the disco scene" and this blend of rap delivery within his self-proclaimed disco band is a nice instance of just how effective this mash up works.

At times I felt as though I was literally on board the star ship in Space Invaders, or at the bottom of a fish tank. Or both.

Though I'm not a huge Lynch follower, I've read a good essay concerning him and what the adjectival Lynchian can be used to describe. This record, in its darker turns towards dissonance, strikes me as remarkably Lynchian in the solely positive way, the way that lets us know we're not quite sane and that that's quite all right.

I love the authority in the lines, "Foxy Girls -- get on the drums and rock their world." It's at once both classically stereotyping of feminine sexuality in the way a lot of rap is, but, being couched in the lingo of disco, seems empowering. "Foxy" has the ring of a compliment to it, when compared to the prevailing register of modern, mainstream rap.

Well, that's record 2. Following are some links to samples of Echo Party. I recommend it to those who want some fun ambient rhythms with which to move to.

Edan's Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/eeddaann
His site (includes videos of him printing the LP covers and a sample from Echo Party): http://www.humblemagnificent.com/index.html

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edan
http://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2009/10/edan-echo-party

Building It

2010-01-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from Charles Bowden's "The Wisdom Of Rats." Harper's January 2010.

"I have trouble understanding the concept of eras."

"Time has also been a problem since I can't keep the past in the past, cannot believe the present is pure and freestanding, and think the future is simply a place we imagine."

"Our idea of history is the end of history, of tracking a concentration of power that finally reaches critical mass, and by an explosion of force solves all problems and ends all change forever, amen."

While reading this essay I received a text message from a friend, which, in that grandest of rhetorical flourishes requested, "Guess what! Guess what!" An inability to "guess what" was understood, yet the discourse unraveled nevertheless, its course plotted against my progression through Charles Bowden's essay. Against the above excerpts I weighed the substance and historical resonance of the conversation I was carrying on. 9 keys jammed into iterations of a 26 lettered Roman alphabet. Sequences arranged, condensed, shot out as a binary chain, as electrons through the system. All with the capacity to preserve this moment. In the epoch of this fifteen minute period in my life, this capacity had achieved a history. A past was established, factoids embedded, a context shared and moved through. But as this epoch embeds itself into the epoch of a day, then two, and eventually the greater bedrock of human history, earth's history, the solar system's, the universe's, I couldn't help but wondering what kind of history we'd created.

A few days ago, over Wendy's, a friend said he'd heard the internet,--all the data and streams of information, from email to file sharing to the actual stuff of websites--weighed as much as a grain of sand*. We postulated a daily event, a siphoning together of all this data into a record, a huge yearning swirl of energy out over some nameless desert, at dusk, an eerie blue-white glow against the painted swirl of a soon sunless sky, a bang, an utterance, and from the sudden dissipation of all this energy, all the commotion, all the information: a single grain of sand. Once a day, a grain phased into existence as some sort of backup, a hard drive for that day, a history. As a singular entity, hovering three feet above desert below, it would stand as evidence of our presence. Then gravity would suck it down and it would roll on top of the sand of other days, lost in the overwhelming sense of it all.

I'm listening to Bon Iver as I write this. My iTunes treks through the Bloodbank EP and comes to rest each loop with "Bracket, WI," Bon Iver's contribution to Dark was the Night. The levels for each album are off, and "Bracket, WI" projects itself decibels over the EP, but I don't turn down the speakers. Bon Iver has the haunting resonance that seems fitting as I deal with the ramifications of Bowden's essay. I will admit I have a problem with the metaphor I've created, history as sand, our histories as deserts. That would make the past lifeless, a collection of museum memorabilia ripe for display. But either there is too much there, and the sand squeezes out and gets under us, into our shoes, or the past is a bit more active than anticipated, has a bit more vitality in it. Either way, it's there to stay, all of it, not content staying put in the seconds ago, but pushing through with us into the future like a great sonic boom over Kansas plains.

*Sourced

Book 1 2010: On Beauty

2010-01-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

Author Zadie Smith

Some books sit on your shelves, unread, and haunt you. This was one of those books for me. Not in the way books usually haunt me.* Rather, having completed all of Zadie's** other novels and receiving her new collection of essays, Changing My Mind, I decided it was time to catch up.

Zadie is a one of the prodigal daughters of contemporary literature. Her first novel, White Teeth, came out when she was 25, yet parts had been leaked years before. I read it my sophomore year in high school and remember nothing about it, except the reverence I held for anything my English Teacher Mr. Fast recommended. The opening page of her second novel, The Autograph Man, plasters my heart and brain with both envy and lust. In other words, it resonates.

This is what Zadie does so well. She packs a lot of emotion, speculation, depth, analysis, and general smarts into a brief scene, and it just spills out and sits with you. There are moments like this:

The experience of listening to an hour's music you barely know in a dead language you do not understand is a strange falling and rising experience. For minutes at a time you are walking deep into it, you seem to understand. Then, without knowing how or when exactly, you discover you have wandered away, bored or tired from the effort, and now you are nowehere near the music. You refer to the programme notes. The notes reveal that the past fifteen minutes of wrangling over your souls have been merely the repetition of a single inconsequential line. Somewhere around the Confutatis, Kiki's careful tracing of the live music with the literal programme broke down. She didn't know where she was now. In the Lacrimosa or miles ahead? Stuck in the middle or nearing the end? She turned to ask Howard, but he was asleep. A glimpse to her right revealed Zora concentrating on her Discman, though with a recording of the voice of a Professor N.R.A. Gould carefully guided her through each movement. Poor Zora -- she lived through footnotes. It was the same in Paris: so intent was she upon reading the guide book to Sacre-Coeur that she walked directly into an altar, cutting her forehead open.

This hits at page 70 of On Beauty, and it showcases Zadie's ability towards weaving it all together. It's nigh poetic. She starts with an intensely emotional moment, Kiki bonding with that music, and then strips that ability away. She ups the tension. The real sinks in. Her husband is asleep. Her daughter is living in factoids. She's suddenly alone with this moment, now lost. Zadie's ability to shift her lens is her strength, pulling out, back in, complicating the motivations and expectations of each character against those around him/her.

The problem with On Beauty for me, was that these moments started, again for me, on page 70. Like my approach to poetry, I read Zadie for these brief glimpses into something that behooves my mind. I can't say I've read any of her novels as I imagine one should actually read novels. Caring for her characters beyond those emotional cruxes like the one cited above is always difficult. Mostly this has to do with subject matter. On Beauty, like her other novels, follows an awfully ordinary family through the pains of their awfully ordinary life. To her credit, she gets it down, the story unfolds perfectly. It has that authenticity that good fiction needs. Past that page 70 mark, I had an urge to finish it. It's a nice book. It does what it needs to do so well. It offers moments of truth and honest insight. It's one I will recommend. But, for me, it doesn't hit home. Finishing the last page I closed it and set it on the bed beside me. I waited for that moment of post-book resonance, that fifteen minutes where I wanted to stare at my ceiling and just let it melt over me. But it never arrived. Instead, fifteen minutes after finishing Zadie Smith's On Beauty, I read the Prologue to Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End*** and summarily went to sleep.

*Textbook case: Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's novel mocks me with it's v-2 rocket bomb spine saying, "Go ahead, try and finish me again." Four attempts, at most 300 pages in. GR is a book that smacks the maddening defaults of my brain again and again, making so much sense, but the dark sense, the kind that keeps me up at night.

**Zadie is one of those few authors that for me get referenced in an unusual oblique way. I call her by her first name. Close friendish etc. Others include David Foster Wallace (DFW) and Chuck Palahniuk (Chucky P).

***stay tuned

Record 1 2010 : Know Better Learn Faster

2010-01-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

Artist: Thao with the Get Down Stay Down

Over the holidays I got my dad's old turntable. I've been wanting one for a while now. Partially, I have to admit, for the 'cool' factor. But also because I get lost in the excess of my iTunes library. I want to actually start engaging my music, a task unsuited when tunes are being pumped through the computer I'm destined to be doing other stuff on. Plus I want liner notes. I want an object. I want the music to exist as more than bits of information on my hard drive. I want it to have a physical space within my life.

My setup is bleak. The turntable is old. I bought some used speakers from the Love Garden for $30.00, and am syncing it up via a Miniature Pre-AMP. The speakers are 'boxy' sounding, a bit muted as if every note rumbles around for a second before spitting itself out. They provide an organic enough sound. My floor is an uneven layer of shaggy carpet, and any definitive steps near the turntable cause a stutter.

For 2010 I'm looking to buy and write about a record every week. The first, as the above notes, is Thao with the Get Down Stay Down's Know Better Learn Faster. It is the first piece of vinyl I've ever purchased for myself. I decided to pick this up because of a Youtube link from my friend Tim. Thao had an animation in her live performance that seemed catchy, yet distinct. Her vocals were a bit shrill; in the video they had a sparseness that was refreshing in an era where, in my experience, lots of female singers sound pretty damn similar to other female singers.

Based on the confetti-ridden cover, and the vivacity of her live performance, I was expecting a bit more of a poppy sound from the album. Instead, Know Better Learn Faster is a much more somber collection of songs. Lyrically it moves from breakup theme to breakup theme. However, what I think stands out about the record, a carry over from the live Youtube vid, are Thao's vocals. Each word seems like it's tiptoeing against the other sounds of the record. They operate like a collection of blips, oscillating in and out until they construct the lyrical progression of each song. Her voice is there, and then gone. Faded out. Back again. Almost a surprise each time.

What this does is deflate a little bit of the sentimentality. Though the lyrics themselves seem mired in post-relationship depression, Thao's voice delivers them as a reformed, smarter individual. Couple this with the generally upbeat accompaniment of bass and drum, and Know Better Learn Faster is one of those records that is a fun listen as long as one isn't listening too closely.

If anything, this duality is what the title of the record is suggesting, that we Know Better Learn Faster. "Fixed It" serves as the most apt example of this. It's catchy, danceable. It presents the idea of the good-self as a commodity:

And I fixed it
What you hated
Come on
I'll keep it to myself
If I can't sell you some
I'll tell you sober truth
In my sleep tone

The song hopes for a reunion: Another try grounded in the "I fixed it." However, the fix isn't just for the relationship, but for the narrator herself. It's a commodity restored. Narrator as person is valuable again.

As I wrote this, I was reading along with the liner notes. My favorite moment was in the final song "Easy." The lines:

I make it easy, easy to stop
I'll make it easy, easy enough

All I could hear was easypeasy. Over and over. Made me smile.

Winter Armageddon

2010-01-08T12:45:00.000-08:00

Lawrence, KS has one serious case of perma-snow. Since Christmas Eve, it hasn't gone anywhere, and new flakes just keep piling up on top. It hasn't been enough to hinder much of anything, though the fierce wind from the river has allowed for a drift to encroach on our porch and has whipped some sidewalks into a showcase of miniature snow dunes, no more than two or three inches high, grooves etching there way north to south. The cold has been so insistent that I have patches of snow on the inside of my car that haven't melted yet, despite the car being driven for periods of at least 15 minutes in the last few days.

Normally I don't mind winter, or the cold, or snow. I enjoy the way the vapor of an exhaled breath crystallizes in my mustache and beard. Slight contortions of the face seem more substantial, weighted more heavily. In this way, each task feels much more significant, measured against the inconvenience and the omnipresence of the snow and the cold. Filling up the gas tank or running to the grocery store is much more of a trial. And in each of these trials I can find some sense of accomplishment. But this year, due to some personal developments, and the winter's continued insistence to let me know it's here to stay, the weather has been a bother. When I asked a neighbor shoveling their car out on the street how his day was, he responded, "Enjoying this Winter Armageddon." I haven't heard the weather ever described so perfectly.

Weather itself amuses me in its way of drawing people together. As a topic in conversation it always provides a guaranteed shared context, a way of getting past an awkward silence. With the snowfield that is Lawrence, KS, it fosters a sort of solidarity among us inhabitants. It moves us towards each other as we huddle just a bit farther from doors. Though as a photo the snow scape would seem serene, delicate, and welcome, as a force piling itself against our door frames and etching itself on the glass of our windows, it unites us in our slight nausea of knowing we'll have to deal with it again soon. Later today, and the next. For the foreseeable future. One day it will have gone, left in presence only in the large, twenty foot heaps of snow in suburban parking lots. And even those will melt and fade, slinking back into themselves, until, once again, Armageddon is averted.

PCRLS: Post Collegiate Real Life Syndrome

2010-01-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

If google is to be believed, PCRLS doesn't exist. It's not on web MD, or in any textbook. It doesn't string itself along with other, dissonantly syllabized acronyms. To be fair, it's a term I've coined myself, for the auspices of this blog post and vague, tangential ideas that have substance only in my gut, not in my brain.

Like any lifeless, medicinal acronym, PCRLS gets lumped into that odious DO NOT CARE TO GO THERE compartment of our minds, filed alongside other such possibly beneficial to pay a bit more attention to but not right now no way things: things like religious greeting cards, DARE officers, bank statements, Nutrition Facts for Ramen Noodles, the safety and operating instructions for electronic devices, car mileage plotted against the windshield's oil change sticker, and the pinch of skin just above the waistline of one's pants. We tend to shove all these things into some attic-like crevice of our brains, to literally loom over us, out of sight, but not out of mind. It's our tendency to toss these into this crevice until we stuff it with too many other such possibly beneficial to pay a bit more attention to but not right now no way things and some tumble out on the floor around us. A few of these we look at, groan a little, and throw back up into the attic. But there's just not enough room for all of them, and at some point or another we have to deal.

PCRLS is one of those I've been dealing with. And not just recently either. It's been a large spill on the floor of my life for a while. Lately, though, its ooze has crept out from the corners, tar-like and impervious to 401 and windex. Though I'm a personal believer in blogs as a pseudo personal / highly introspective medium, normally it's not my thing, and I'm only broaching this because I don't seem to be the only one facing a bout of PCRLS currently. In fact, I'd say it's a safe assumption, that everyone in his/her life, not just college grads, comes down with PCRLS at some point or another. It's as ubiquitous as ADD (you have that too, right?!). However, apart from my daily encounters, I've got some literature reinforcing my perceptions of it. They are as follows:

From Zadie Smith's On Beauty:

"She prepared a face -- as her favourite poet had it -- to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn't seem to her that she had a face at all ... And yet in college, she was famed for being opinionated, a 'personality' -- the truth was she didn't take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn't feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescured Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point."

From David Kirby's Poem "Strip Poker":

"which is good, I guess, because if people
aren't constantly explaining stuff to you
when you're a kid, then you grow up mentally active,
though also doubting everything,
even yourself, because if you're the one
who comes up with the answers,
then what the hell good are they?"

Both Smith and Kirby really aren't addressing PCRLS directly. How these passages get to me is that, as authored by what I'd consider to be accomplished adults, they still express as much uncertainty and doubt in anything as I've experienced between me and my fellow PCRLS sufferers. These passages both ascertain that there is no definitive answer to much of anything, let alone life. The irony is that, though I think most people can easily accept this as true (Black and White or other binaric forms of thinking aren't complex enough to actually process much of anything), it's human to hope and even expect an answer. I think the tough fact is that there's really never going to be one. Or not one that can be summed up in a thesis applicable beyond one's own self. What I do think possible is a rewiring of perspective to allow for this doubt, this uncertainty, to coexist with a productive and fulfilled life. It's living in our houses with the attic open.

Writing this I feel a bit new agey and preachy, and I probably won't attempt dealing with something like this again soon (unless I run across some good lit on the subject). However, I recently met a PHD student studying these very issues: specifically the conception or misconceptions of college students entering the work force. The current collegiate experience doesn't allow much of this real world in, especially for those of us who followed the liberal arts path. But it's encouraging that it might. Or that one person is trying. The only real advice I have in dealing with PCRLS is just that, deal with it. Every now and then, in small doses. I'm no doctor (M.D. or otherwise), but keep putting out the symptoms or it may metastasize into something worse. Oh, and eat an apple a day.

Brute Force and Pinocchio Noses

2010-01-04T19:19:00.000-08:00

Randomography 1 < Pulcinella + SMS Kaiserin Augusta >

This blog idea stems from a writing challenge of Jason Theodor. The exact specifications can be found here. , but the gist is you take one or two randomized Wikipedia articles and you force yourself to write about them. If you choose to pair, as I have, you have to somehow force yourself to get them down.

Besides their grainy representations below, the fictional character Pulcinella, and the pride of the turn of the (19th) century Germany Navy find a common thread in their patronage under imperial conquistadors.

Though having debuted much earlier, Pulcinella found his theatrical niche in the puppet productions during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. He's a folkloric character, most commonly found sporting almost all white attire except for a black mask with one hell of a honker. The mask itself seems a spiritual successor to some of the more raucous Mardi Gras masks, and the character rather Puckian in nature. Mode one for manipulation, play stupid. Mode two, physically conquer your foe.

And this is where the SMS Kaiserin Augusta enters the scene. A clandestine testament to German ingenuity, this hulking battleship embarked at the zenith of the 19th century. It promised stalwart imperialism and militaristic integrity. It is all mode two, guns guns guns. Ironically enough, on its first visit to America, it ran out of coal with the Green Lady of Liberty in sight, and I can't help but imagining the ironclad behemoth being hoisted into harbor by a cadre of fishing boats. Deutschland uber alles?! You got nuttin' on the Bronx.

Unfortunately, the comparisons between these two entries halt at their characterizations. Pulcinella has been blessed with an impressive legacy that maintains his folkloric status even today. The SMS Kaiserin? Scrapped in 1920 for parts.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulcinella, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Kaiserin_Augusta

2KDIME and change

2010-01-01T06:24:00.001-08:00

In lieu of the recent roll over, a good friend threw out the term 2KDIME, and I can't think of a more clever way to invoke the new year, and the new decade. All the pundits seem to be suggesting that the last 10 years have been good for a whole lot of nothing (except for music; it seems clear that this was one of the strongest decades on record for music, in terms of its expanse, reach, availability and the amount of new and upcoming 'published' musicians). Colloquialism is referring to it as the aughts, though plenty have supplanted that with the 'naughts,' and Paul Krugman called it the Big Zero. Politics were generally regressive, a war was fought with little if any change, and the growth of our economy flat lined.

However, for me (and those other young twentyandsomes) it was a decade of personal growth. To be sure, there are plenty more ahead of me [knocks over a wooden house], but cognizance and self recognition came with the last 10 years. Shrinks call these years formative, but they're also 3,650 global spin moves, 10 long laps around the sun. They were 730,000,000 births. They are a highschool and college graduation. The landmarks of the past decade, for me and my peers, have been predictable. Like a road sign, each significant moment could be clocked as X miles away. Those landmarks aren't as clear now. The white vinyl numerals are chipping away into uncertainty.

And yes, this next decade is facing some uncertainty. I was raised during one of the most prosperous decades of America (90's), and then allowed to mature both personally and professionally into one of the most grim. The next decade may be a lot of things, but what it can't amount to is another Big zero. If anything, it'll start with a dime, and hopefully spare some extra change along the way.

Happy New Year. Happier New Decade.

10 Shots Down

2009-12-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

It's the day after Christmas and I'm driving with my father, two uncles and two cousins to Bulls Eye Range LLC. Bulls Eye Range houses itself in a squat white building in the heart of downtown St. Louis. If not for the banner labeling it as such, I would have guessed the building vacant. The parking is a sandwiched section of asphalt, lunging out of the acute angle between the building itself and the road it sits on. Parking required hopping a curb. The entrance continues the unassuming blandness of a vacant building. The door opens into a surgically white waiting room, itself a staging area towards two more doors. One is marked employees only, and the the other opens into the elbow joint of a hallway. A camera sits perked at eye level, a lifeless and banal "What's up?" that violates any practical retail business model. But we're not here for the merch. We're here to shoot.

The hallway opens up into the store itself, and the first thing I see is a man holding up a pistol behind the counter, rag in hand, wiping away at what every Hollywood movie has told me is a silencer. I dispose of potential conflicts of legality by passing it off as a fake. Only later would I come to find that silencers have actually been legalized in Missouri, as an NRA study reports that no crime has ever been committed with a legally registered firearm mounted with a legally registered silencer (though I can't help but wondering, if they've always been illegal, how evidence could construe that one has or hasn't ever been indicted in any crime as a legally registered silencer as, well, they've always been illegal. Not to mention, if Hollywood movies are to be believed, the men who should be found guilty in a crime involving a silencer, legally registered or otherwise, usually have connections that would alleviate any chance of conviction; i.e. they're mobsters)*.

The store strikes my as remarkably similar to a rural country store, except it's stocked exclusively with firearm paraphernalia. It's walls are a lined with that fake plastic paneling which could be warm and cozy from 20+ feet but, as retail spaces are almost always more cramped than that, just looks cheap. The products all seem to have been packaged in some other decade. The guns themselves are mounted in three long, glass display cases, mounted side by side like the profile of a stair step, to allow for a work area at which the guy with silencer il diligetnly wiping away at his silencer. Overall the store feels grungy yet robust, and I get the odd sensation that I'm actually in the presence of real arms dealers.

My history with guns hasn't extended much beyond videogames. In Boyscouts I attended the 'shooting camp out' once and fired a .22 rifle at a milk jug and a couple of shotguns at clay pigeons. However, I've never fired a handgun. My uncles and cousins on the other hand, fire them regularly, and brought several with them to family vacation for this very purpose**. They are housed in industrial strength casings or portable safes. The largest looks as though it could house something much more sinister than handguns. Something on the line of bazooka or missile guidance system.

As I continue to take stock of the guy with the silencer behind the counter***, my uncles head right to the range director to get us signed in. The range director sits casually on a stool and asks how many of us have shot before. Outside of this building, I would have no problem admitting this fact, but in here, not just in front of this range director, but now a line of three other people, all with there cases and their clear intention to shoot, I kind of meekly raise my hand. Because of this, my uncle is required to coach me, staying with me in lane as I shoot, and takes full responsibility should I damage anything or anybody. I feel like my uncle didn't hesitate enough in his consent. Behind the Range Director a penisula juts into the range itself, each side panelled with thick windows.

--tobecont.--

*Further evidence reveals that it is state law that determines the legality of silencers. At a federal level, they are permitted but purhase includes a $200.00 tax. And they don't require a license either.

**You can actually check firearms on a plane, which, considering the raised security since 9/11 seems insane. It requires some paperwork and for a complete examination by TSA agents, but firearms and ammo can find there place in the hull next to all the generally unremarkable luggage (by comparison).

*** Later I'll swing a bit further down the display cases and see that he doesn't have just one, but two pistols mounted with silencers. The guys seems jovial and interactive enough, and the cilentelle don't really consider it odd as he lifts both of them, Rambo style, barrels to cieling, and continues to talk to one of the customers. I find this mildly terrifying, especially as this seemingly jovial and interactive salesperson is wearing a baseball cap embroidered with that dangerously reductive word infidel.

I love the way you dot your j's

2009-12-17T19:56:00.001-08:00

At work the other day I sold a man a gift certificate for $20.00. Normal, except he had me write his daughter's name after the "For:" and Mom and Dad after the "From:." He based my handwriting's merit on the gift log entry I filled out in front of him. I don't have good handwriting. It's not even decent. My grip starts classically enough, index finger pressed firmly against the pen, fingerprint an inch up from the tip. Except instead of pinching the pen with my thumb, I tuck it up and under the arch of the index finger. My writing fulcrum moves from this traditional pinch to the soft fleshy apex where the two fingers meet two inches further up the implement. My whole fist pivots and swirls as I write, and it results in a sloppy scratch of scrawl that most find unintelligible.

Thus, I'm finding it tough to understand why he enjoyed my handwriting sufficiently enough to label a gift for his daughter. This man seemed astute enough, a sharp suit and flashy ivory rounded glasses, that I can't deny the possibility he's a calligraphy enthusiast. But possibility aside, that's just not probable. More nefarious rationale don't deserve this blog's attention.

There's a field of study that legitimately analyzes handwriting. It's called Graphology, and I'll only give it cred where it is used medically to track disease progression. It also, and this is alleged, is an apt tool in determining employability, fitness as a juror, and even marital compatibility. I have no idea what my handwriting says about me, except that I address a mean gift card. Three cheers to ambiguous scrawls.

May I recommend the Gabfest? (Or, Thoughts on Gaming pt. 1)

2009-12-16T20:58:00.000-08:00

This pertains to this: http://www.slate.com/id/2236985/.

Slate's culture gabfest is a summation of week by week cultural movements and trends, dealt with by people armed with brains. It's Lady Gaga tunes crossing paths with reverent PHD's.

Okay. 3rd segment this week concerned gaming as 'art.' Their conclusion maintained the status quo on the discussion of late, that it's an 'open' question. It's a juvenile entertainment media, not just in content, but in actual age. Atari and the early nintendo systems were as much about computing polygonal movement as they were about entertainment. Let alone slip in the notion of these early games as 'art.' From there it's been developed by fringe rogues; gaming gurus are mostly rebirthed dungeon dwellers. Add to this mix that, as an entertainment medium, the dollar drives development and leaves little room for the industry to flex its artistic muscles. The gaming industy though, is gaining legitimacy through numbers. People are gaming. A lot.

I am one such gamer (though at current I'm attempting to become a rehabilitated gamer). The question of gaming as art isn't really pertinent to me except through the confines of art as worth. Is experiencing art worthwhile? Though semantics could wrangle this sentence to death (e.g. what is art? is it high art? if art doesn't touch everyone can it be meaningful? etc.), I think a general consensus is that yes, most encounters with art are meant to be worthwhile: valuable not as ego-centric currency to cash in as flourishes in any beleaguered conversation, but as engagements meant to push previous boundaries and encourage some form of growth.

So, a real question for the merit of video games becomes, are they worthwhile? At the fundamental level of 'game,' they must be, as they provide ample distraction through a fictional set of rules and logic that one must then adhere to and master in order to solve. But for most video games this trait is provided solely through the inherent nature of a video game as a 'game,' rather than developer intent. Most games seem to be about entertainment and distraction. Providers of fun. Worthy of are attentions perhaps, but still ambiguous on the question of worth itself.

The train of my current logic seems to indicate that, in their current state, video games have not provided much worth as an art. I've invested too much time into them to really let that conclusion stand uncontested. For one, their worth can be traced in other, secondary ways. Worth as a social and interactive medium, for example. For another, I have hope that their legitimacy will allow them to push into the 'art' realm further. Even if I'm not playing them.

BNAV 2010

2009-12-15T21:15:00.001-08:00

Picked up the Best New American Voices 2010 today from the Raven. The initial step in had been for a holiday card*. BNAV 2010 centered itself on the new releases shelf. It coaxed, buy me and measure up. Contributing editors I recognized, but not the lead. Purchased on the merit of these lines: "Stephen went to the woods instead of math class. His algebra book was still under the backseat of the school bus, or under his bed, or maybe even somewhere in the woods, swollen and muddy from last week's rain. Losing the textbook had meant weeks of calling out answers with squared Ys to problems that had no Ys, which equaled weeks of the math teacher yanking him into the hallway and yelling at him." Solid lines from "Horusville" by Christian Moody. I would assume this isn't the same Christian Moody who was part of KU's national basketball championship, but if it is, and he's still here in Lawrence, I should hunt him out.

A work day later I pick the book back up and Lawrence comes full circle, as the intro cites a story titled, The Burning of Lawrence. Allegedly it follows the fictitious examinations of a KU grad student on said sacking of Lawrence. We'll see. If it measures up to blog standards, I'll let you know.

*(my choice: 'Birthday Greetings' scrawled over an idling canoe. Paddles strut to the sides as the lounging captain cocks arms behind his head. Legs splayed forward open to inked lines of current. The captain smokes a pipe and wears a sombrero. Sharpie will nix birthday and stencil in 'Holiday;' a red felt pen will convert sombrero to Santa cap. Santa's probably dreaming of such a lazy river ride anyway right now.)

Getting Started

2009-12-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

David Foster Wallace is keeping me up now. I ran into him via Imad, a creative writing prof who could drop writers with rolodex precision in any situation. Need some help on theme, here's X. Character? Check out this story by Y. However, if story needed, or was like X, and X=brilliance, he'd reference David Foster Wallace. He kept popping up, moving in between the ears, until I finally picked up Consider the Lobster. The first essay, "Big Red Son" begins, "The American Academy of Emergency Medicine Confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves." 10 pages later I put it down. The first DFW prose I'd read covered the annual Adult Video News awards. Porn prizes. An author to be taken seriously?

DFW's untimely demise was the ignition switch that had me pick this book back up. Death by his own hand. For a few months the literary media scape trickled out bits of obit / memoir. And I picked back up the Lobster. I've only read DFW's nonfiction completely (Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again). His fiction I've touched (Girl with Curious Hair, the beginning of his first novel: Broom in the system) but never completed. It's experimental, zany, a bit odds n' sodds like Pynchon. For DFW writing seemed to be cathartic, a way to answer the problems he was facing. And his fiction couldn't do it. Or more accurately, his writing couldn't do it. For him at least. But his nonfiction forced his scope away from himself and onto the world, and the impressions he leaves are staggering. Brilliant. But dead.

Read:
Kenyon College Graduation Speech:
http://goaheadsueme.blogspot.com/2005/05/david-foster-wallace-at-kenyon-college.html