tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4180066234506311232024-03-13T13:10:18.213-04:00Seventh DraftAlexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02074998005975572587noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-10186507883831802572010-06-12T07:50:00.014-04:002010-06-17T14:55:58.122-04:00DayjobsJosh,<br /><br />When I was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, during my honeymoon in Barcelona, I spent three days in the ER, hooked up to a tube of insulin the size of a bomb. It was called <span style="font-style: italic;">la <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">bomba</span></span></span>. My blood sugar was <span style="font-style: italic;">so</span> high the bomb needed replenishment every few hours, and this need was announced with a shrill alarm. If I had been sleeping, I'm sure that dramatic alarm would have jolted me awake. But I couldn't sleep. I was in the ER. I was laying on a thin, awful mattress. <a href="http://www.warren-wilson.edu/%7Emfa/newwebsite/homepage.php">A plastic mattress</a>. I was hooked to tubes and bombs.<br /><br />After three days, I was unhooked and transferred to a room with a slightly more comfortable bed. Hallelujah! I'll never forget the delight of my first meal: roasted potatoes and cod with spinach. I ate slowly, savoring each bite. I sat, cross-legged on my bed, reading and re-reading the <span style="font-style: italic;">USA Today's </span>Olympic coverage (this was the 2004 Games, in Athens). After eating, feeling <span style="font-style: italic;">finally</span> relaxed, I closed my eyes. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Ahh</span></span>, sleep...<br /><br />Did I mention my roommate?<br /><br />He was an elderly man, a Catalan, who hardly spoke Spanish, let alone English. He introduced himself. I had just eaten. I had just closed my eyes, in fact.<br /><br />"<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Señor</span></span>," he cried. "Lo <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Siento</span></span>!"<br /><br />He pumped two shots of cologne in the air. The smell, floral and nauseating, hit me all at once, and it arrived with a surprise: <span style="font-style: italic;">another</span>, deeply human, smell. Shit. The man had pumped his cologne, thinking it might disguise his accident; it only amplified the smell, brightened it, really, as lemon zest brightens cooked mushrooms.<br /><br />"Lo <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Siento</span></span>," he said, again, his voice full of shame.<br /><br />Within minutes, two orderlies--two slim, cheery guys--arrived to wash the man and change his bedsheets. Closing a blue curtain that seemed, to me, to divide my beginning from the old man's ending, the first orderly smiled and repeated the old man's sentiments, "Lo <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Siento</span></span>!"<br /><br />I heard, and smelled, the routine through the blue curtain, as the man's cries modulated, from shame to thankfulness, as the smell evolved from a floral funk to an equally nauseating soapiness.<br /><br />I stayed in that room, with the old Catalan, for four days. I spent my time looking out the window, to a strip of pavement below, where patients in blue outfits roamed. Some patients smoked and talked, and some simply smoked as they moved, tediously, across the pavement. To me, though, these walking patients embodied the most powerful urge that had yet occurred in my life—the urge to get the fuck out of the hospital. I felt <span style="font-style: italic;">terrible</span>--reduced to a bed! And the man--I felt terrible for him, too. It seemed unfair! How did we end up in this place? How do we get out?<br /><br />And that's how I came to think about the orderlies. These guys, the same two guys, <span style="font-style: italic;">willingly</span> came here, to this hospital, day after day, merely to work. To clean. To comfort. To wipe.<br /><br />It's the wiping that got me. After a few days, these guys seemed like saints to me. I mean, their life's work, at least at that time, included the necessary task of wiping an old man's soiled ass. Laying there in bed, I lost all sense of self-pity. How could I feel bad for myself? These orderlies were much more pitiable. Clearly, they had the worst job in the world.<br /><br />And, Josh, this is what you do, right?<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjex9PTJYfLbPi2opfxziMJ6RSMGd33sh4uP178nMC3-6_Tbe3Ba_EFhNlKUpE5OggfzKFPJqfEdIhwD6JD3bFyQq60ewnqGAB_Qb2FePbpEiayr986c-Gj67h7ofzGf61tIrPNL-lL59lx/s1600/orderly.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjex9PTJYfLbPi2opfxziMJ6RSMGd33sh4uP178nMC3-6_Tbe3Ba_EFhNlKUpE5OggfzKFPJqfEdIhwD6JD3bFyQq60ewnqGAB_Qb2FePbpEiayr986c-Gj67h7ofzGf61tIrPNL-lL59lx/s320/orderly.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483006427671872738" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Ordely</span></span></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQekV2JzamJdKSLZ26BlVrn-OGVaJ0wG0u0JAyLk0xm1JOcrVlk0w5i9gJOK9jK4y3GbENupyb1pg02r7O79nnGz8di1MdJ0r6HghA4b0W3FWgVFiFbrQUkwfD4h3pI4s15HunqidIBiV9/s1600/Medics.jpg"><span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class=" on down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Italic" title="Italic" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 4);ButtonMouseDown(this);"><img src="http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif" alt="Italic" class="gl_italic" border="0" /></span></span></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;">For most writers, especially young writers, writing is a notoriously low-paying job. I'm always comforted when I hear about writer's "real" jobs--the jobs they take to satisfy life's financial needs. It reminds me, as I trudge out the door for another shift, that we're in this together, all of us, equals in ambition <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> needs. The goal, of course, is to make a living writing. Or, as Kenneth Koch so beautifully states it in his poem "Some General Instructions":<br /><br />"If you do not have money, you must probably earn some<br />But do it in a way that is pleasant and does<br />Not take too much time."<br /><br />After a failed romance drove him to Europe in 1977, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski">The Great <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Bolaño</span></span></a>, "began a long, itinerant tour of the Mediterranean coast, taking on an absurd variety of jobs: grape harvester, dockworker, campground watchman, trinket-shop proprietor. In his spare time, he wrote lush, sentimental poems about his Mexican friends."<br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />William Carlos Williams was, awesomely, a doctor. Wallace Stevens, shockingly, was an insurance executive. <a href="http://flavorwire.com/78351/awesome-chart-famous-authors-day-jobs">Frank Kafka</a>, the Chief Legal Executive of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Workmen's</span></span> Accident Insurance Institute, spent his working life writing reports such as "Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines."<br /><br />T.S. Eliot was a banker. Douglas Adams was "<a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20115153,00.html">moonlighting as a hotel security guard</a>" in London when he began <span style="font-style: italic;">The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Hitchhiker's</span></span> Guide to the Galaxy</span>. And Kurt Vonnegut owned a <a href="http://www.saabhistory.com/2007/04/15/saab-cape-cod-kurt-vonneguts-dealership/">Saab dealership</a> in the late 50s.<br /><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGAnctB5aj-4o1zavqmcEhPUW05-DevsXd3mVwJg3bSfRYvlPeRu-qC9VDTdnt2H35xYcDTCtKljyCmf7yvMpDKrkt5rR3WwXLK2hIGLHbMvM_qa_IqMgGtDtm8etDK1zjdmeQhNLWHoB1/s1600/kurt_vonnegut_600.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 191px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGAnctB5aj-4o1zavqmcEhPUW05-DevsXd3mVwJg3bSfRYvlPeRu-qC9VDTdnt2H35xYcDTCtKljyCmf7yvMpDKrkt5rR3WwXLK2hIGLHbMvM_qa_IqMgGtDtm8etDK1zjdmeQhNLWHoB1/s320/kurt_vonnegut_600.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482233822121840498" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;"> From the improbable website <a href="http://www.saabhistory.com/2007/04/15/saab-cape-cod-kurt-vonneguts-dealership/">www.saabhistory.com</a></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">I've been (relatively) lucky: since I was 24, I've managed to make money in a way that is pleasant and does not take too much time. Before that, I worked almost exclusively in kitchens, except for the year after college, when I worked at my father's consulting company. I was the lowest paid executive in the entire place. (Karen, my future wife, also worked there, and made about 30% more than me.) I didn't read or write a lick for an entire year. Faced with the very real prospect of assuming eventual control of the company, I left for Barcelona. My father, finally fatigued by the business, sold his share five months later.<br /><br />In Barcelona, living entirely off my savings, I wrote every single day, longhand in a journal, sometimes for 8 or more hours a day. Since then, my shining goal has always been a return to this momentous opportunity: to write every day, without concern for cash.<br /><br />At 25, my money depleted, I came home and started a new <a href="http://inconex.org/">consulting</a> "company" with my <a href="http://iradaily.blogspot.com/">father</a>. We got a few contracts, which required about two weeks of work each. For that work, I made $1500/month for two years. During that time, I lived with my father, writing my first, second, and third novels--all failures. At the end of that period, I finally moved in with Karen, and my financial situation complicated. Still, via a patchwork of freelance work, I managed to successfully stay away from a real job for years.<br /><br />Then, I came home from my honeymoon, at 29, in September 2004, broke and sick and fearful that I might have to move back in with my father, wife in tow. That spring, I found a job at a grocery store. Whole Foods Market. I've worked at the grocery store, happily and sometimes unhappily, since then. I wear an apron to work. I make the equivalent of about $40K/year. My title is: Demo Coordinator & Healthy Eating Specialist. Yes, you can be a "specialist" in healthy eating; you merely need to be hired for the job, and complete an online course from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">eCornell</span>. Now I have an Ivy <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">League</span> education, a "Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition."<br /><br />And yet, I actually enjoy the work. I cook. I teach. I guide others through the rigors of<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"></span> kale. Most importantly, though, I make my own schedule. I work only 30 hours. It all comes down to this: I took the job because it allows me the time, and freedom, to write.<br /><br />I basically live paycheck to paycheck.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />Sometimes people ask me, "What will you do with your MFA?"<br /><br />As if what I'm doing, trying each day to write a worthwhile novel, is not the real thing. The real thing, of course, is money.<br /><br />"I'm applying for teaching jobs next fall," I say.<br /><br />And I mean it.<br /><br />But even as I say it, I start to feel a constrictive life of no-writing, or less-writing, tightening around me like a hospital tube. The truth is, for my entire adult life, I've stubbornly and selfishly chosen jobs that accommodated my writing lifestyle, and not the other way around. I know this can't last--unless something changes: unless I publish my current novel; unless I find some way to have my writing make money for me.<br /><br />My wife makes nearly double my salary. Soon, we'll try to have kids. At that moment, when my wife stops working, my current lifestyle will become immediately untenable.<br /><br />Now, each day when I sit to write, I feel the weight of this upcoming challenge. Of course, I don't expect my writing to take me anywhere, to<span style="font-style: italic;"> do</span> anything for me, to make a career for me. But I am a writer, for better or worse. The difference, of course, the main difference between being a writer and not, is writing. Without undue expectation and with wild abandon.<br /><br />I suppose one thing that motivates me, then, is to hear about all the others. My friends, Kurt Vonnegut,<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"></span></span></a> any writer, who has done something like wipe another's ass, or run a Saab dealership, merely to sustain a writer's lifestyle. But there's something in these jobs, too. These jobs are not always merely means to an end. They say something about us, don't they? I suppose my hope is that writing will eventually say the most about me.<br /><br />Until then, I'll continue to specialize in healthy eating.<br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-18810030273645287922010-06-05T09:30:00.011-04:002010-06-14T17:36:45.039-04:00The Watery Parts of the World<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQtwKpOYiIGaiEASlXbRcrLBXMMS92y3BiU6A2bfwYDUtmxugmgU3xh_RbsVEND74TsTx3HRZ2C4k3fVLCDb8SNLLuLBDwZmZ01CyPHTKAA8R3rbmMBqabWKzDWvUiNPLLj1cUGbJ5ZSQ9/s1600/deathmask+Joyce.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 284px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQtwKpOYiIGaiEASlXbRcrLBXMMS92y3BiU6A2bfwYDUtmxugmgU3xh_RbsVEND74TsTx3HRZ2C4k3fVLCDb8SNLLuLBDwZmZ01CyPHTKAA8R3rbmMBqabWKzDWvUiNPLLj1cUGbJ5ZSQ9/s400/deathmask+Joyce.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5479321618504263106" /></a><br />Seth,<br /><br />Your generous, starwalking last post reminded me of the great final third of Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrook's (panoptical harmonium of German middle-class life - written when he was 26!), in which the young scion of a prosperous German family wakes up one morning and decides that he doesn't want to get out of bed. So he says he's sick. Is he really sick? Even he isn't totally sure; but from that point on, his day is full of pampering and delight. Cordials! Presents! People feeling sorry for him! Needless to say, the boy realizes quickly that being sick is vastly underrated - perhaps even the best thing in the world. He resolves then and there to be sick for the rest of his life. And he is, for the most part, with a variety of real and imagined illnesses - the most debilitating and (for our purposes at least) interesting of which is not a biological condition at all, but the great chronic disease of art. <br /><br />Yes, young Hanno Buddenbrooks is an artist. And he is sick. Paraphrased like this, the connection sounds forced and naive; but no matter how much I reject its pedantic and pseudo-Christian Scientist overtones, I find it hard to read the moment in which Hanno "decides" to be sick without at least a tiny shock of recognition. I feel exposed: as if Mann has caught me stealing cookies or sneaking into my mother's closet to play a game of Zelda II, which I am not supposed to even know about until Christmas morning. But, uncomfortable though they may be, I have learned to trust such neurological twitches as symptoms of some larger truth. And I do think Mann has it right here, if only in part. Art, though it may not be an actual physical illness, is certainly an effective way to stay in bed. <br /><br />Artists need beds - if not real ones, then at least the metaphorical rectangles of imagination and repose that Australian poet Les Murray sung in his beautiful "Homage to the Launching Place", which ends like this:<br /><br /> "I loved you from the first, bed,<br />doorway out of this world;<br /> above your inner springs<br />I learned to dig my own.<br /><br /> Primly dressed, linen-collared one,<br />you look so still, for all your speed,<br /> shield that carries us to the flight,<br /> and bears us from it."<br /><br />Who, reading this, does not feel a twang of tenderness for that "kindest of quadrapeds"? Just writing the lines out, I find myself gazing at least twice towards the shadowed bedroom, where my faithful mattress lies resting after a hard night's sleep. How gluttonous I have been with her! And how neglectful! But then, like Hanno, I have perhaps come to rely a little too much on the "doorway out of this world" part of the equation - have begun, in other words, to glut myself on that mulch of interspace from which art arises like mushrooms on a compost heap. <br /><br />That's the tricky thing about beds: they grow. They overflow and spread, to the point that soon you're falling asleep wherever you please. The whole world has transformed, from an unforgivable and dangerous surface to a sort of gigantic moonbounce, on which we desire to sink at a moment's notice. And why shouldn't we? Aren't we weary? Haven't we spent the vast majority of our day doing things that we wish to escape - that we would opt out of completely if we could, like a frail little German by deciding to roll away from work, responsibility, and duty, and towards tubercular infection?<br /><br />But it's not that simple of course, and I know this - for I am not just a user of beds: I'm a maker of them as well. Every night I wander the halls of my hospital, snuffling like a hedgehog, not just for whimpers and moans and the telltale manatee-rolls of unsound sleepers, but for the disturbances of this kind <span style="font-style:italic;">that haven't even happened yet</span>. No one sleeps well in a hospital, they just don't, and anyone who tells you differently is or was on drugs; but between sleep and non-sleep is a state as wide as the one between health and death, and that is where I do my work. It's my country, if you will: my garden of mandrakes clenched in their various beds. And I, along with my companions, am its steward: one of the many naiads and dryads and goblins of water-replenishing and pillow fluffing and volume-lowering.<br /><br />Hospital corners are difficult even for a professional, and I'd be lying if I said I always executed them with an identical amount of patience. Still, one thing that I've discovered over the course of the past year is how much these and other little featherings can help a sick patient become a sleeping one. Exactly how this works remains a mystery to me; but what I do know is that, when we look at it through the lens of illness, the story of the princess and the pea takes on a startling poignancy. As told to children, the tale lies once, but at a critical juncture - for the truth is that there was no pea, and that the woman would have tossed and turned no matter what she slept on, not because she was a princess, but because she was sick. The pea was inside her: it was her death. And though it looked like the prince was testing her, she was actually the one testing him, as she'd been testing all of her hosts over the years, tossing and turning in the pretenders' beds as she submitted to their stupid little vanities: the mountain of mattresses, the transparent secrecy, the relieved, if still strangely self-congratulatory morning embraces. But in the end there was no sleep in any of them.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibQ_yKjKg2F5oevX8J9oGh2A7zQUVdJBbwJbKEtDkAkqg9bDP4HnJGhQMHE-d8wn0IUjMK1kTMckowAfb0HWrE53uR5GJ4lL8fpFd4JK1qk2Y7o7FBU8eUotb-MCgsqrqGWa6vNDfDD3oH/s1600/death+mask+inconnue2ar.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 288px; height: 360px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibQ_yKjKg2F5oevX8J9oGh2A7zQUVdJBbwJbKEtDkAkqg9bDP4HnJGhQMHE-d8wn0IUjMK1kTMckowAfb0HWrE53uR5GJ4lL8fpFd4JK1qk2Y7o7FBU8eUotb-MCgsqrqGWa6vNDfDD3oH/s400/death+mask+inconnue2ar.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5479324351249605570" /></a><br />Artists write about the relationship between art and illness in different ways, depending on (among other things) their own health. There is writing that wakes us up - that seizes us like a cough and leaves us bed-ridden for days, after which we emerge to a world glistening with sweat and newness. Books like this are a mini-death: an allopathy (to use a late 19th century medical term), or "other suffering", which helps us combat the disease we are by introducing a disease that we are not. We read them in order to be more awake and to feel more alive, or simply to feel less isolated by a disease that we'd thought was personal, but which is really shared (these writers suggest) by everyone. <br /><br />Our age is full of great allopathic writers: lucid insomniacs like Celine and Bolano and Roth and Beckett, the uncomfortable-makers whose dreams demand that we submit to them, and which suggest that if we don't we'll wither and die of something we don't even know we have. And we need these writers, the same way that you need to be sick. NEED to, Seth - not in an exceptional way, either, but in what I would say is a deeply normal one. Because whatever health is, it is not standing still. The tepid pool breeds disease in the same way that a patient confined to a hospital bed will begin to develop bedsores, insomnia, nausea and constipation.<br /><br />Books that get us moving, however, are only one half of the equation: floods are as dangerous as clots and often more so (dysentery, which growing up in Africa made me see as terrifying, was once known simply as "the flux"). So, when our bodily vacillations become too drastic, we turn to the other tradition, the homeopaths - not just the nappers, but the sleepers, the dreamers and tunnellers and divers through deep water. <br /><br />What does writing like this look like, and how do we recognize it? In his essay Sleep-and-Poetry, the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi describes a "Poetry of sleep", in which, "the connections....with the Reader are so intimate that they can <span style="font-style:italic;">share sleep</span> with one another." So, the homeopathic writer attempts, not the famous writerly estrangement (of the brilliantly militant Shklovsky, yes, but also of many others before and after him), but the opposite: an at-home-ment, at-one-ment, (atonement?), in which the bare cave of exile gets relined with a wallpaper that not only soothes our cheeks but reminds us of a room we left a long time ago, where we were happy. Miraculously, we believe it.<br /><br />Gaston Bachelard talks about something like this in his dream-manual "The Poetics of Space". Poetic images, he says, do not simply describe things for us, <br /><br />"They give us back areas of being, houses in which man's certainty of being is consecrated, and we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths." (POS, p. 32)<br /><br />"We have the impression that..." - and then this, I would say, is the great gift of homeopathic writing, which helps take us out of illness and into sleep, out of wine and into nap (to use counters close to both our hearts!). Is this valuable? To me, yes - more and more so the older I get, as rest becomes a rarer and rarer commodity. You don't get it in the hospital. But you have to get it. It's part of being healthy - not the only part, or even the best, but one that I think we need the most right now. At least I need it. After all, what's more untrue than the phrase "We'll sleep when we're dead"? <br /><br />In reading over your post again, Seth, I found myself thinking a lot about what I want writing to do, both in me and for me. I'd like to say that every reader needs both allopathic and homeopathic types of books - but while I think this is true, I also think that many books, and writers, can be usefully placed on one or the other side of the divide. If this sounds overly simplistic to you, that's because it is; still, simple things can be helpful sometimes. You talk a lot about the difficulty you have in the amount you obsess over your illnesses - the need you seem to have to be sick. Well maybe that's just it: maybe you need to be sick to be healthy. And maybe your tiredness with illness is just a way of being sick with being sick. Allopaths live not just for, but in resistance. Take away the disease and you take away the health. Not to mention the beauty.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-jQaDAoog8y81jN3kLXUKgK9RZGJ6XuE3PeL_5iX03lxFneS6qeePI8jYl7ljyJ4A5JrKziJKcNntsKVa0TMV6V0_GF1UwgVRn9F942DtoLyFcP0nrbb6R58evXwiw3yQIOLLIe-tipAO/s1600/deathmask+keats.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-jQaDAoog8y81jN3kLXUKgK9RZGJ6XuE3PeL_5iX03lxFneS6qeePI8jYl7ljyJ4A5JrKziJKcNntsKVa0TMV6V0_GF1UwgVRn9F942DtoLyFcP0nrbb6R58evXwiw3yQIOLLIe-tipAO/s400/deathmask+keats.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5479321022368558082" /></a>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-33938890468795675872010-05-13T10:09:00.009-04:002010-05-30T09:53:01.983-04:00The Saints, Sex, Hope, and a 20-sided Die<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikC82tbRVQxXZ0bMcgxSsCcAq7Q6t2CQMyg2TKuzZ_34EE30N5e9ihSFPeIZPNHKdI4nSIqakiT_vkpcUCHCvN70c8pjPJxg6PqY0ZRIKIP7xdTWhDJMff7NNKq38NE6TMwU2Il9UIfmAm/s1600/hemingway_with_shotgun.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471172671425750706" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 320px; height: 278px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikC82tbRVQxXZ0bMcgxSsCcAq7Q6t2CQMyg2TKuzZ_34EE30N5e9ihSFPeIZPNHKdI4nSIqakiT_vkpcUCHCvN70c8pjPJxg6PqY0ZRIKIP7xdTWhDJMff7NNKq38NE6TMwU2Il9UIfmAm/s320/hemingway_with_shotgun.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Seth,<br /><br />Abstain from masturbation and sex? Are you serious? I mean, how would someone with my impressive and hyperactive libido do that? We're artists, after all. We fuck anything that moves! It's in our contract! Don't be insane!<br /><br />Seriously, though. For all his romantic lion-hunting, Hemingway was a pale-faced Puritan and therefore terrifically afraid of any activity that he did not have absolute control over. I understand where he was coming from, I think, though in my case, all the perfectly-wrought stories I've tried to fashion have felt less crystallized and more constipated, to pick up <a href="http://seventhdraft.blogspot.com/2007/11/consta-poo-poo.html">7D's scatology theme</a> (well, not pick it up: that would be gross).<br /><br />In order to understand Hem's anxiety here I think it's important to imagine that he's your friend, and that he's telling you this sexual abstinence=genius plan as a friend, rather than a world-famous writer. You nod of course, because he's always been a little easy to rattle, and anyway there's no discounting the effectiveness of superstition. But when you relay the information to, say, your wife, you hear it coming out differently - especially as you watch her face, for, you see, she has encountered this kind of thing before. Won't have sex "because of his writing"? Yeah right. What she knows (and what you find yourself "knowing," too, or at least suspecting, in a way that makes the backs of your calves itch uncomfortably) is that the abstinent man abstains because he is AFRAID of sex, not because he has "overcome" it, mastered it, whatever. To pretend otherwise is to delude yourself - productively, maybe (at least, productively for a time), but in a way that must eventually be abandoned once your own private tide-pool becomes too rank.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6_KtqrDwQJWh5hLWT9pvtVwPwOzuovWUlPB1BzTejd_YGmjRBjoevhUCKHUjHdSuST3sfLvTOXSOws11mlqx0pLyZ2z6Kr-euqN54XrXty89J227H3_gqFfrz-duD2rLA1nVDCvGobk39/s1600/hem.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471172438747524226" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 254px; height: 320px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6_KtqrDwQJWh5hLWT9pvtVwPwOzuovWUlPB1BzTejd_YGmjRBjoevhUCKHUjHdSuST3sfLvTOXSOws11mlqx0pLyZ2z6Kr-euqN54XrXty89J227H3_gqFfrz-duD2rLA1nVDCvGobk39/s320/hem.jpg" border="0" /></a>I think your wife's right about this one - not because I agree that sex is this transcendent power capable of undermining any amount of pretty wordage, but because I think that, whatever else it is, sex is also fundamentally <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> any other activity, - flossing, say or <a href="http://unurthed.com/2008/03/15/florenskys-iconostasis/">icon-painting</a> or chess - that is to say a vital human form, through which our attention moves like a man measuring the British coastline.<br /><br />Bad writers - meaning writers who have no bravery, curiosity or gratitude - measure using a yardstick. They are happy with their approximate results. Better writers use a tape measure, which lets them hug closer; but the best writers are fractal and deploy words that hug the coast like wacky wall walkers descending a glass door, slowly, and with seemingly-infinite amazement. This, as St. Fwallace tells us, is a matter of commitment. A lack of assurance about which tool will work best displays an inability to see one's subject. Maybe you have to walk the entire coastline yourself, running a thin line of graphite over white cliffs and sea walls and the backs of old ladies' heads. Maybe that will take a long time and be very inconvenient to things like relationships, making a living, or your sense of who you should be. The only way to know for sure is by trying each method and then testing the results against what you can see.<br /><br />My own limited experience is that this kind of commitment is scary for all the usual reasons. It makes all the usual reasons for being scared feel fresh again, freshly terrifying and freshly real. Chief among these is failure. You are going to die, and in a very literal sense, this means that your life is going to fail. I believe that, until we make the decision to explore this fact - not just in a big abstract way, but while we are lying side by side with someone whose smile has the power to *destroy* us - we will never write anything worthwhile. And no, there is no "mastering" death, or failure, or loss. There is no "coming to terms" (a hilariously business-like phrase given the unreliability of the customer here). As Eudora Welty points out, all problems, in writing and life, are singular, which means that their solutions must be the same and unrepeatable. Even the greatest trick on earth will only work once.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiArhPjWcjvKF0XIwloI3qyfG_BqAlN5zMrAse_50mfwqEFLQBAFS6aMIihdHjd5elc4P0uABcgNRxQ5xrHIIeUAgmBpT23_RsdeN9y8bOFNmQL3ZgXA9A_leLHjFwDk7-IkFmJ3hiwxOxp/s1600/marthagellhornandhemmingway1941460.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471172932272891026" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 320px; height: 192px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiArhPjWcjvKF0XIwloI3qyfG_BqAlN5zMrAse_50mfwqEFLQBAFS6aMIihdHjd5elc4P0uABcgNRxQ5xrHIIeUAgmBpT23_RsdeN9y8bOFNmQL3ZgXA9A_leLHjFwDk7-IkFmJ3hiwxOxp/s320/marthagellhornandhemmingway1941460.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />You brought (or rather conjured: check out those salty eye rings!) up Beckett, the patron saint of modern day literary failure. But really, isn't ours a golden age when it comes to these types of saints? Rereading and rethinking<span style="font-style: italic;"> 2666</span> these days, I've been struck, not by its uniqueness, but by how much it shares with other novels I love. It's unfinished; but reading it, I feel like Bolano could have worked for 20 more years and still never completed his project. Its openness is part of the attraction, as is the case in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Castle</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">The Man without Qualities</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Moby Dick</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Molloy</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Anna Karenina</span>. These books contain plots the way a body contains organs, or cities contain neighborhoods. But their hidden gift to the reader is not a plot, but the capacity for plotmaking - that is, the ability to find significance in our lives and knit ourselves up into novels of meaning and passion and interest. How do we become interested, focused? By convincing ourselves that what we are doing/looking at/tasting is significant, even vital. That it connects to everything else.<br /><br />It does - and here I mean this less in a fancy, faux-cynical "it's real if you believe it" sort of way way and more as someone who believes that whenever we say "there is no there there," we are lying, or at least succumbing to despair. And one thing I know is that artists cannot afford despair. Doubt, yes, failure, yes, destruction, yes. But putting pen sincerely to paper, like all true activity, is inherently hopeful, no matter what shit-assed hacks might think (and if I'm sounding like a terrible cross between Bono, Ralph Waldo Emerson and your high school football coach, you'll have to forgive me: I am what fellow recovering Dungeons and Dragons players (I know you're listening!) will recognize as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_%28Dungeons_%26_Dragons%29">Chaotic Good</a>).<br /><p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoG1CQ9loban4i53iewQV34sqvoK8wf4zdpm8bf4dxxQdhtfTslk8yq1TssxD66VeNaZrUGONgFCIyACTSPrksg7bzcIKWpArC3sV_ByedD3Fu_YENtvXv76j4ZCr7TnAX1dWXDwh1rocw/s1600/Gallery-Magnums-Cuba-Fide-010.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471173155795821874" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 320px; height: 274px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoG1CQ9loban4i53iewQV34sqvoK8wf4zdpm8bf4dxxQdhtfTslk8yq1TssxD66VeNaZrUGONgFCIyACTSPrksg7bzcIKWpArC3sV_ByedD3Fu_YENtvXv76j4ZCr7TnAX1dWXDwh1rocw/s320/Gallery-Magnums-Cuba-Fide-010.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />When you talk about the daily "destroying" of yourself, Seth, this is sort of how I understand it. I am not a risky person; at least, I have come over the years to see that almost every single one of my habits, be they mental or physical, is based on preservation and control. In this way, I think I am unfortunately Hem's spiritual great godson and pretty representative of writers in general. But I also know that it takes an inherently cowardly and frail individual to be brave. So I have hope. Lots of hope.<br /><br />Did Hemingway have hope? I'm sure he did, at least in the great foppish bearhugging stories. But like most Americans, he couldn't take what happened when the bright world he'd seem coming towards him suddenly swerved off, leaving him alone and disappointed. At that point, I think, despair entered his writing. And so, because I know this, it is hard for me to read him now and not feel despair.<br /><br />Kafka had hope too apparently. In one of his essays, the German cultural critic/hashish-connoisseur Walter Benjamin recounts a conversation between K and his friend Max "Saver of Manuscripts" Brod. Kafka rails against existence, saying that men must be dark, suicidal thoughts that have come into God's head, and our world therefore something that happened on one of the creator's off days. Brod, ever the optimist, points out that, if this is true then there must be hope, at least in other worlds. At which point Kafka smiles. "Hope?" he says. "Oh there's plenty of hope - an infinite amount even. But not for us."<br /><br />These are the words of a deeply healthy man.</p><p><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVmicC4gh3HCyJqjWxupVfpZOSS2l6fAzirazUtBzzLmPJ_VuOAQIHa5HXA-dYKVz0k-KOXAHFamX6AX4FiWwcpP4cWnj5cQ1sTtdeoHYZDT8BubFi5VbRVP7ZniW6PsEumWCXd7DD-nsh/s1600/franz-kafka.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471173476835610194" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 242px; height: 320px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVmicC4gh3HCyJqjWxupVfpZOSS2l6fAzirazUtBzzLmPJ_VuOAQIHa5HXA-dYKVz0k-KOXAHFamX6AX4FiWwcpP4cWnj5cQ1sTtdeoHYZDT8BubFi5VbRVP7ZniW6PsEumWCXd7DD-nsh/s320/franz-kafka.jpg" border="0" /></a></p>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-22193126120248487292010-05-02T16:54:00.006-04:002010-05-02T18:46:37.147-04:00I Would Like to Burn a Theme at This ForumJosh,<br /><br />You're right, two years is a long time. And like a neglected lawn, apparently, old blogs can actually sprout weeds. Since we last posted, we received a slew of comments--almost all from spambots. I've just spent an hour or so deleting these comments form our old posts. Most were an illegible scramble of code and nonsense; some, though, were charmingly ridiculous. My favorite, from "Anonymous":<br /><br />"Hi there! I would like to burn a theme at this forum. There is such a thing, called HYIP, or High Yield Investment Program. It reminds of ponzy-like structure, but in rare cases one may happen to meet a company that really pays up to 2% daily not on invested money, but from <span style="font-style: italic;">real</span> profits."<br /><br />So, Josh, if you do not mind, in keeping with the Eastern European theme you cultivated with your Hrabal talk, I would also like to burn a theme at this forum.<br /><br />(I've been singing that quote for the past hour to the tune of "Blowing in the Wind": <span style="font-style: italic;">How many themes must we burn at this forum before we can call it a forum</span>?)<br /><br />Anyway, it's nice to be back. I had intended to work on my novel this afternoon, but keeping with another theme of the blog, I've sought diversion. Writing and <span style="font-style: italic;">not-writing</span>. Lately, it's been hard for me to make the distinction between the two. When I'm not physically writing the novel I'm thinking about it: devising scenarios, constructing sentences in my head. I wonder if this is productive?<br /><br />Hemingway, in his sometimes helpful, sometimes absurd, basic principles for writing, said: "Do not think about writing when you are finished for the day but allow your subconscious mind to ponder it."<br /><br />Good stuff? Early on, Hemingway also thought that the energy required for writing came from the same place that sexual energy came from, and so he (he said) he abstained from sex or masturbation while working on his projects.<br /><br />I'm not sure.<br /><br />I do know that a lot of the stuff I do <span style="font-style: italic;">besides</span> writing--cooking healthy food, for example, or exercising--explicitly serves my writing life. I run every day because, I believe, running gives me the energy and motivation to continue writing. Without running, I can't imagine how I might sustain this energy or motivation. Of course, I might find it in the work itself, and that would be a nice thing to say, but practically, my brain and body need the fuel that good food and exercise provide. Writing, to me, is extremely bodily.<br /><br />Of course, there's my soul, too. There's inspiration, which is different, I think, than energy and motivation. And what fuels my soul is sometimes oppositional to what fuels my body. I drink too much wine. I stay up all night talking. I wake up tired and hungover. My body hurts. And yet, my soul's inflamed.<br /><br />I like what Hrabal says: "Not until we're totally crushed do we show what we're made of."<br /><br />I spend all day getting healthy so that I might write. I spend all day destroying myself so that I might write. I wake up, and start again. This doesn't seem entirely sustainable. I need a more balanced fuel. I guess I find balance in all the other stuff that sustains me: reading, writing letters, writing blogs.<br /><br />We wouldn't do this if we didn't care; if we didn't find it necessary. With or without this blog, I'm sure we've both spent plenty of time not-writing over the past two years. We tried another <a href="http://theheartarcade.blogspot.com/">blog</a>, but the forum just didn't seem to work. I never felt at home there<span style="font-style: italic;">. This</span> forum, it seems, might be better for burning. There's energy here at Seventh Draft, even if it has been dormant for the past two years. We should tell Tommy and Alex, urge them to post, if they like.<br /><br />Ever see this guy?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxHWexan956bfbIOTl5soS_RVy9L39Ti-R_8vN8owyh2DG8LG-gJGPLfSRDtn9FPj6eDsj4jBwdB395eAzB0n0rhD3sE6Acd1zCFR99Scx1VPEzFaYTAYIpECywh_3dyrhyv0puinQBQQQ/s1600/beckett.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 258px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxHWexan956bfbIOTl5soS_RVy9L39Ti-R_8vN8owyh2DG8LG-gJGPLfSRDtn9FPj6eDsj4jBwdB395eAzB0n0rhD3sE6Acd1zCFR99Scx1VPEzFaYTAYIpECywh_3dyrhyv0puinQBQQQ/s320/beckett.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5466806635287042898" border="0" /></a><br />"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." ~Samuel BeckettUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-8085031747366247542010-04-27T13:06:00.009-04:002010-05-02T10:32:21.201-04:00Size Is Not an Option<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/hans-christian-anderson-joann-lense.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 600px; height: 423px;" src="http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/hans-christian-anderson-joann-lense.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Dear Seth,<br /><br />The almost two year gap separating what I hope will be this post (and not just another <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">styrofoam</span> cup along the modest New English interstate of my "writing life") is, I have to admit, completely unfathomable. It's like a picture of a <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/upload/2007/04/Whale-Shark-01_about_utila.jpg">whale shark</a> or <a href="http://www.sayyadfamily.com/umar/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/giant-squid1.jpg">giant squid</a>: I stare at it in disbelief, not horrified so much as ticked off that the blogger administrators have allowed such an obvious mistake to slip through their fingers. Time! Shout it in the dark with me. And yet here we are again, trying to figure out what happened and how the hell we got this way.<br /><br />And then immediately, the thrill of writing a Seventh Draft post: like putting on an old flannel shirt, or rather the over-eager leather jacket of a man who spends hours staring at <a href="http://totheroots.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/roberto-bolano-smoking.jpg">author photographs</a>. What is it about that face? The freedom of contempt? Or a contempt of freedom? How did that person get to be who they are, and why does it seem as if they are the ones observing me - as if, in other words, the sides of the little window have been reversed, and I am the one now staring out of the red book of my life, not trapped so much as simplified, for a moment, into nose, hair, eyes, mouth?<br /><br />Seth, I admit it (two admissions already, in one post!): I feel more than just vaguely stupid writing this way. I can't help it; it's my own fault; a legacy of, among other sources, my Puritan ancestors, who held onto their election by never leaving their bedrooms. I'm afraid, basically: afraid of exposing myself in a way that puts the picture I create outside of my control. The British genius/poet/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Rogaine</span>-spokesperson Geoffrey Hill (whose <a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/20/books/geoffrey-hill-big.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/20/books/Logan-t.html&usg=__z80KGk6D_A5ollfDi_03reKObB4=&h=602&w=450&sz=63&hl=en&start=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=0WfGsstt_TgggM:&tbnh=135&tbnw=101&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgeoffrey%2Bhill%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26tbs%3Disch:1">author photo</a> I find no less intimidating than Rimbaud's) writes quite a bit about this dynamic - that is, about the way that writing always forces you to take those things you value most. Your ideas, for example. Your cherished constructions and sunsets and even the chameleon you found in your backyard when you were twelve--there were dozens of them back then, hundreds even: a whole ocean of miniature gentlemen exchanging jackets with one another, and the trees and grass, and then lost somewhere, until a smell somewhere between spoiled milk and rubber lead you to a small, eerily-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">untwitching</span> stain behind the radiator--and then throw them into a mess of contingency, of language, where they will be changed. And rest assured, they WILL be changed: you can count on it, if only because language, being social and a shared invention as well as a private tool, is full of things that are bigger than you are.<br /><br />Language! It makes you feel less big! Or if not big, then at least concentrated.<br /><br />In a religious context (contexts being, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">GH</span> points out again and again, the things we step into whenever we decide to speak), this is a Fall. But as another shared passion of ours, the beer-swilling Czech <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">levitationist</span> <a href="http://www.vitejte.cz/velke/17/1700_88_01.jpg"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Bohumil</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Hrabal</span></a> has not just pointed out but demonstrated, in poem after poem, falling is upside-down rising, as growing is inside-out shrinking. Do you remember? And here we go, here's a perfect example of what I've been talking about, since my attempt to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">googlebooks</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Too Loud a Solitude</span> and quote you the beautiful concluding passage, in which, I seem to remember, although it is perfectly possible (wonderful, utterly-mysterious phrase) that I have done what all us imperfect memories must do with our favorite passages, and written it myself, within the loose ruins of a building that would look completely different were I to go back and actually reconstruct it. Do you remember when <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Hanta</span> the dumpster-diving hero links the memory of a gypsy girl lying beneath him in bed to a home-made kite rising in the sky, rising and falling combining in a single juxtaposition, so that the entire book is transformed (or revealed) in an instant, into a sort of hourglass that you can watch run out and then flip over, and then do it all again?<br /><br />The problem is that when I actually do look up the book, I discover I am thinking, not <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Hrabal's</span> book, but a completely unrelated one by the Polish science fiction writer, <a href="http://3aymun.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/stanisc582aw_lem.jpg">Stanislaw Lem</a>, called <span style="font-style: italic;">The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Futurological</span> Congress</span>.<br /><br />Defeat - though isn't <span style="font-style: italic;">I Served the King of England</span> on my bookshelf, only feet away, and wouldn't a single sentence serve to prove my point just as well? The phrase "single sentence" being, let's be honest, completely inadequate to describe the immense, always generous <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Scoobie</span>-Snacks that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Hrabal</span> delivers on page after page?<br /><br />Such as (and here, I swear, I am just opening the book and picking at random):<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"And I talked in a jumbled way about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and thought it was ten at night while it was really only half-past six, when you started talking to yourself, speaking to the horse, the dog, the cat, and the goat, but best of all to yourself, silently at first - as though showing a movie, letting images from the past flicker through your memory - and then out loud, as I had done, asking yourself questions, inquiring of yourself, interrogating yourself, wanting to know the most secret things about yourself, accusing yourself as if you were a public prosecutor and then defending yourself, and so arriving, in this back-and-forth way, at the meaning of your <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">lif</span></span>e." (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">ISTKOF</span>, p. 128)<br /><br />Oh italics, even your typographical intensity is no good when it comes to beauty like this! Pack up your bags. The war is over. Your mother is dead and your sweetheart married or marrying another, who will make her exactly as happy and unhappy as you did, though in completely different ways.<br /><br />Except, of course, that if writing could be condensed into a single purpose or idea, right now, it would be, for me, "Nothing is over".<br /><br />In other words, nothing is perfect, nothing is finished or done. You can pack a lot of failure, disappointment, and pain into two years; then again, you can find more than a splattering of exuberant, scalp-peeling joy, not to mention the deep happiness of good sofas, coffee, and sleep. Time doesn't care about the ratio of one quantity to the other. Quite the opposite, actually: the care in the world is something WE put there, despite time; something which<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"></span> we will someday take with us when we leave.<br /><br />One more misreading/mishearing to close (or not close, since the unique thing about blogs, to my mind, is that, in a way that is most obviously not not only literal, they are never totally closed). In keeping with 7D's love affair with Swedish folk singers, I am listening at the moment to <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyCZXNgEmbYy_gqEhDhA35svyWGxnj-4VV8GbmfrZq4oer2ZZRK4e6AWZTvLuT0OHxUzCI6lckV6RWSQAC5YstL0mmPNzsPjhD0ojDutGwzoJ0h-622pVsd9zhHmi4XMAWgQq6TFRsiMmi/s400/the+tallest+man+on+earth.jpg">The Tallest Man on Earth</a>. In a beautiful ballad ("Kids on the Run," off his new CD, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wild Hunt</span>), he sings "Oh meet me when I lost my part in the choir of dusk" (pure Springsteen here, only early <a href="http://www.morethings.com/music/springsteen/bruce_springsteen_photos/345ggg.jpg">Bruce</a>, the one we have forgotten: "Growing Up" and piano ballads and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">sweated</span>-through headbands). Except that what I hear is: "Oh meet me when I lost my part in the choir of <span style="font-style: italic;">doves</span>". Is there a difference between these lines? I wonder. Either way, I like calls to come together, break bread, talk the talk. If they involved the dissolution of choirs, so be it. Failure is hard enough.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-52706680324443185462008-07-04T16:26:00.009-04:002008-07-05T15:13:20.083-04:00The Dark Boquet of DoubtJosh,<br /><br />Gabriel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">García</span></span> Marquez was once asked, "Does a blank piece of paper distress you as it does other writers?"<br /><br />"Yes," he answered, "It's the most distressing thing I know next to claustrophobia."<br /><br />I agree with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">García</span></span> Marquez, although the terms of my distress are distinctive. Garcia Marquez sees a blank page and possibly envisions himself trapped underwater, in an iron box; when I see a blank page I envision myself standing on the minuscule summit of a mountain peak, looking out. I'm standing on my toes, and of course, I'm naked. I have no idea how I got here, no idea how I'll get down. When I look out, I see a voluminous wall of glacial white. When I look down, I see an enormous abyss, looming under my feet.<br /><br />"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," writes Nietzsche.<br /><br />This is the blank page: the abyss that looks into you.<br /><br />So I stand there, looking in, being looked in. I consider my options.<br /><br />I consider leaping over the abyss. (But what if I miss the other side?)<br /><br />Then I consider building a bridge across the abyss. (But what if the structure of the bridge fails?)<br /><br />So I peer over the ledge. Every now and then I call out some name, a few nonsense words. The words come back to me, disembodied, like intonations from a distant, unknown twin, peering from the bottom of the abyss, and calling up. Suddenly, I want to meet this man, this alluring <a href="http://tv.yahoo.com/scott-foley/contributor/37746/photos/1"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">dopplegänger</span></span></a>. So, finally, I jump.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCn4KTdH5wAdXlZjZg03wpwtP-m-1ghLNZCTdut7uV4m28fPJjkOhO8u8_x_edVFzUPXy2sNoBVt7J6RyNsZuJcFb1FCZ2Vi38iNThJNAhUhmkBbg_JcCpc0-OkdB7cagOJ-20aK88qZB2/s1600-h/Bugs_Bunny_second_bit_1_preview.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCn4KTdH5wAdXlZjZg03wpwtP-m-1ghLNZCTdut7uV4m28fPJjkOhO8u8_x_edVFzUPXy2sNoBVt7J6RyNsZuJcFb1FCZ2Vi38iNThJNAhUhmkBbg_JcCpc0-OkdB7cagOJ-20aK88qZB2/s320/Bugs_Bunny_second_bit_1_preview.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5219600377975963442" border="0" /></a><br />Of course, if you're a writer, sooner or later you jump--you jump everyday, sometimes numerous times a day. It's scary (What the fuck is down there?) You're utterly full of doubt (What if my parachute fails?!) And you're alone out there (The only echo you hear is yourself.) So it's natural to question this situation, to doubt.<br /><br />But still, you jump...<br /><br />It's a long fall, fraught with the silence of swift air. You engage your chute.<br /><br />You hit land.<br /><br />Suddenly, you're standing again, high on a dune. There above you is the blue sky, in which two or three clouds, patterned by some crafty god to look like seashells, drift. Intoxicated by the scene, you raise you hands high and exhale deeply. A light breeze amuses your skin.<br /><br />You survived! The freedom is so fresh you feel utterly overjoyed.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br />You're so overjoyed, in fact, you fail to see the enormous abyss, looming under your feet.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">In his biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andrew <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Turnbull</span> notes that before beginning <span style="font-style: italic;">The Great Gatsby</span>, Fitzgerald re-read Joseph Conrad's preface to <span style="font-style: italic;">Nigger of the Narcissus</span> which states that a work of art should carry its own justification in each line. Then, while writing his novel, Fitzgerald kept his ambition clear: he wanted to create, line by line, a work of art. In doing so, he later wrote, he "tread slowly & carefully at times in considerable distress."<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />I've been working on a novel and I must admit: I've been experiencing considerable distress. I'd like to think I am making a conscious effort, like Fitzgerald, to produce, line by line, a work of "art." But this is not my ambition. In fact, my ambition seems to oppose Fitzgerald's ambition entirely: I simply want to finish the novel, quickly.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />Gabriel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">García</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Márquez</span> speaks similarly of Fitzgerald's type distress: "At the beginning, when I was learning my craft," he says, "I wrote jubilantly, almost irresponsibly. I remember, in those days, I could easily write four, five, even ten pages of a book after I'd finished work on the newspaper...Once, I wrote a whole short-story at a single sitting…Now I'm lucky if I write a good paragraph in a whole day. With the passage of time the act of writing has become very painful."<br /><br />So, is writing inherently distressful? Or, is this a burden that comes only with age, with experience? I admit, for me, writing is often quite distressful. I plod, from sentence to sentence, torturing myself over each word. And yet, still, I am doubtful.<br /><br />Then there are those rare moments, those titanic instances, when I feel inhabited by the muse, utterly overwhelmed and inspired. Then, I literally gush words. I am confident!<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />I'm a whimsical, moody guy. I change, day to day. Carried along by my changing moods, I feel exhilarated one day, mopey the next. For example: I sit down on Friday, start writing a story. I'm full of confidence. I'm certain the story will be published. It's my best yet.<br /></div></div></div></div><br />Saturday morning, I wake up, hung-over, and read my story. Suddenly I see the truth: It's actually terrible! It will never be published. I'm full of uncertainty.<br /><br />What do I do?<br /><br />I like what Uncle <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Mentor-Pitt-Poetry-Young/dp/0822959917"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Deano</span></span></a> says (in a letter he wrote me when I was 21):<br /><br />"Allow yourself to be uncertain but don't let your uncertainty turn to despair because it can be wonderful to write when you're sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery lends itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one's own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day."<br /><br />So I sit down, full of doubt, and write.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">I suppose this is just a ridiculously <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">convoluted way to get to this point: You have to just sit down, full of doubt, and write. Everyday.<br /><br />This is the only thing you can do. You write. You write, with wild ambition; without undue expectation. This is what writers do, obviously.<br /><br />And each of us is all alone on the edge, looking down, with only one parachute: me, you, Fitzgerald, </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">García</span></span> Marquez, Uncle Deano.<br /><br />Everyone feels doubt: <span style="font-style: italic;">everyone</span>.<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><br />I think you need to make a distinction, though.<br /><br />When you're on that ledge, feeling doubtful, the doubt is <span style="font-style: italic;">something</span>, isn't it? It's a beginning. It's a challenge. Maybe you </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">need </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">that doubt. After all, certainty is for the mathematician; the technician. But writers just might need<span style="font-style: italic;"> uncertainty</span> in order to work. To me, at least, writing's not fun unless it's something to figure out, a way of figuring out something. I think you'd agree. Nobody wants to write the story already written (except, of course, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote">Pierre Menard</a>.)<br /><br />To me, doubt is a sort of wonderful, weird fuel. I suspect it's what skydivers call adrenaline. And it's pretty much what makes every single thing in life interesting.<br /><br />(Will Federer beat Nadal in the <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/05/sports/EU-TEN-Wimbledon-Men.php">Wimbledon final</a>? Will I like <a href="http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/noflash.html?redirect=http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/wall-e/index.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E</span></a>?)<br /><br /></span></div></div>The distinction you might need to make, then, is between doubt and despair.<br /><br />Do you want to write? Do you believe in writing, as a life? Do you sense the celebration, looming?<br />Sky-diving, after all, is fun. It's risky, too. It's not fun, though, if you're sure you're going to die each time you jump. Odds are, that won't happen.<br /><br />So, if you don't like these odds, why are you standing at the edge, looking over?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-46838201348432231842008-06-29T07:00:00.007-04:002008-07-07T22:35:16.742-04:00Josh Bares Heart, Soul in Response to Seth's Callous CritiqueSeth,<br /><br />Like a cartoon octopus at a singalong Disney barn raising, your <a href="http://seventhdraft.blogspot.com/2008/06/seth-reads-joshs-novel-and-responds-in.html">post</a> simultaneously hits a number of nails squarely, and impressively, on the head. Again, I am amazed at how transparent writing is, especially unsuccessful writing. So often I try to hide behind what I'm doing - images, mirrors, devices - but in the end it's all laid out there on the page, waiting for a perceptive passerby to pick it up and be like, "Wait, this isn't a quarter...?"<br /><br />Nail 1: My inability to have fun while writing. Yes, this is the heart of the debilitation and something that makes me want to run to some reservation where I can sit under a smoke-filled canvas until suffocation forces me to claw my way back into the panther-colored night. The question, then, is how to bring the joy back, and I take your point about the eighty page story seriously because I think it's right on target. For a long time I've been bucking the story form (as I, barely, understand it) in the interests of being original - but by doing this, I realize, I'm forced to rely, as you say, on my talent only. It's like I've got this beautiful, incredibly comfortable sock, but for some reason I spend all my time trying to amputate the foot it should be going on. I'm at sea, in other words, which is one of the reasons, I think, that the language of these pieces feels so disconnected and straining. There's no repose in them, because they don't know what they are and therefore can't settle into themselves. They haven't got a story to fall back on.<br /><br />(sub-nail 1A: Why can't I write a story? Why do I fear writing stories? Lately, I've come to realize that it has a lot to do with my fear of failure - that is, of "falling" into the normalcy that using a shared form (let alone medium) entails. In other words, instead of solving the problems that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">everybody's</span> got to solve, I want to find a stretch of beach with no one on it, where I can just fuck around to my heart's content. Which is probably why so much of this shit feels like just that: fucking around. Plus, you've got the idiotic reversal of beginning with the desire to be different, as opposed to beginning with a legitimate difference and then expressing that, via the shared form of the story, in a way so true to your experience that the end construction can't help but be unique.)<br /><br />Nail 2: Blog/emails vs. "Writing." I think this may be a more mundane, process-type question than it at first appears. In both the blog and emails, I have a goal, an "objective", something I want to communicate. For example, right now, I'm thinking, I want to respond to Seth's comments, and while responding, I want to use the English language as a way to think through what my actual response is (this is, I think, a weirdness of my brain...one you might share, or might not: I literally CANNOT THINK about a story outside of when I'm actually writing it. It's like the story doesn't exist outside of the words in which it's written). The solidity of a goal makes it pretty easy to write - it gives me a poise and balance (between making my point and having fun with the writing itself) that is much difficult for me to achieve in an actual story. In a story, I can never tell what's necessary and what's not. When I try to be shapely, I end up underwriting, and when I try to elaborate, the fabric becomes slack and fetid. You say you spend hours, days on sentences, and I do too - but then the sentences I spend hours and days on inevitably end up feeling stupid and overwrought: like when you're talking to someone about basketball and he suddenly starts referencing the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Nichomachian</span> Ethics. I mean, it could very well pertain, but there's a breach of manners - manners here meaning, not just surface courtesy, but the deep fabric of people communicating. Something throws the whole conversation out of whack, and the guy's <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">embarrassed</span>, not necessarily because he tried something different, but because he tried something different and then allowed it to sit there, out of context.<br /><br />Nail 3: Fear of the mundane. This is very true, and I wonder if, again, I'm not just trying to make prose do something it's not supposed to do: exist as language before it exists dramatically. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_D%27Ambrosio"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">D'Ambrosio</span></a> says, poetry is inspiration, but prose is work. You've got to sweat it out. But I fear sweat as a sign of my own imperfection as a writer and human being. You know what it is? I want to be Mozart. And I'm not Mozart, and I realize that, but even realizing that, I find myself secretly wanting to believe that I'm secretly secretly Mozart, and that all the demands that art makes on me are really just affronts to my genius, and what Writing should really be doing is bowing before me, its lord and master. Immature, right? A sure fire way to never write anything worthwhile. Ever. Unless you're Mozart. Which I'm not. But I could be. No, I couldn't. It's so fucking WASP/Puritan/Calvinist, Seth: I recognize the lineaments of my sick and wasted ancestors in each of my sentences, their faces and anxieties. The desire to be a member of the Elect, which used to mean God's Children, but now means An Artist - proven by faith, though, rather than actual work. Ugh. It's <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">embarrassing</span>, sometimes, how persistently I seem to be trying to destroy myself as a writer.<br /><br />But, there's always hope... After all, this is what we're all going through, right? One thing that <a href="http://www.warren-wilson.edu/%7Emfa/newwebsite/homepage.php">Warren Wilson</a> has convinced me of is that, though we each have our variation, the spectacle of another writer's struggle to become something real is valuable, maybe even heartening. And yes, one thing the Puritans got right is that life really is an allegory. My story (I have the arrogance to believe) is your story in the same way that my fork is your fork, or my car is your car.<br /><br />Anyway, I wanted to answer your generosity with generosity, and I will. I've been trying to decide how to take on <span style="font-style: italic;">your </span>story. Before I got to that, though, I had to try to communicate all this to you, because I was really pleased and happy that you took the time to read my stuff and give me comments on it. As I've said before I think, I admire and envy your joy. If we're similar in general, we're certainly different species, and it's bracing and important for me to get your point of view on this stuff. I certainly think we should keep swapping stuff.<br /><br />Anyway, '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">nuff</span> said for now. Let me know if any of this hits home, resonates, works for you. Again, for all my obsession with my version, what I really want and need to hear is your version.<br /><br />And then I took a shit...Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-23131691957859138242008-06-28T21:13:00.003-04:002008-06-28T22:24:26.648-04:00Seth Reads Josh's Novel and Responds in ShockJosh,<br /><br />Turns out, I just went through your novel draft in a traditional way, lightly editing in places, leaving comments. I didn't want to mess with the language too much because it's really what I love about your writing. That said, read my comments about precision and superfluity--perhaps they'll resonate. Basically, I think your rich language could be made even richer by excising some of the extras you throw in, here and there. For example, you use "that" a lot, and it doesn't always seem to be needed.<br /><br />How long do you work on a sentence? In my recent story (not the one I sent you) I'd say I've given each sentence at least an hour's worth of thinking. Some of your sentences seem so carefully wrought; but then, in some places, I feel like you're drifting by on talent. It's obvious to me: you are much, much more talented than me. BUT: I think there is a but! The but is that I enjoy writing, a lot. This is a major plus. From your blog, from our correspondence, I assume writing is more tortuous for you, less fun. Why? Can it be fun? It seems like you have a blast writing Seventh Draft stuff. And e-mails. So what's different about the stories?<br /><br />Actually, I think I have a sense of why you're complaining of writer's block, having gone through something similar a few years ago. I could be way, way, way off base, but perhaps it's in the work itself, the fact that you're setting up a tremendous, daunting project and that you're worried about sustaining your rigor.<br /><br />Your "novel" is not really that; it's basically, a series of vignettes, loosely tied together by the presence of the narrator's voice. A few things seem to happen, but there's no sincere connections, yet. I wrote eighty pages of a novel once; something somewhat similar. Near the 80th page I found myself thinking, What the fuck am I doing? I'm not even telling any sort of story at all! Sustaining this tremendous, loose sort of prose-poetry is impossibly hard. It's just daunting. Why don't you figure out a story? Go back, edit, cut whatever you need to--make a story!<br /><br />My suggestion:<br /><br />Think about how your sentences work in the piece, how each sentence might deliver a reader into the scene, but <span style="font-style: italic;">also</span> represent what’s going on in the story. Think about how a sentence might also contribute a larger meaning to the story; it should echo previous incidents; it should illuminate. I’ve been thinking about this idea in terms of the mundane: how a writer might offer a very simple, but needed expository sentence, while also contributing something else to a story, something larger. You seem to shy away from the mundane. Your sentences are all relatively spectacular. I can't recall any mundane sentences. Sometimes, to make a story, you need to write "And then I took a shit".<br /><br />Anyway. Phew! Hope these comments spark something for you...<br /><br />SethUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-79641760913997360022008-01-31T15:33:00.000-05:002008-02-05T11:57:49.151-05:00BetrayedJosh,<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ccel.org/ccel/easton/ebd2.html?term=Jealousy">Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary</a> defines <span style="font-style: italic;">jealousy</span> as:<br /><br />"Suspicion of a wife’s purity, one of the strongest passions (Num. 5:14; Prov. 6:34; Cant. 8:6); also an intense interest for another’s honour or prosperity (Ps. 79:5; 1 Cor. 10:22; Zech. 1:14)."<br /><br />Incidentally, the same dictionary defines <span style="font-style: italic;">the waters of jealousy</span> as:<br /><br />"Water which the suspected wife was required to drink, so that the result might prove her guilt or innocence (<a class="scripRef" id="j-p116.1" href="http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bible/asv.Num.5.html#Num.5.12" onclick="return goBible('ot','Num','5','12','5','17');" onmouseover="popupVerse(this, 'Num 5:12 - 5:17')" onmouseout="leaveVerse()" name="_Num_5_12_5_17">Num. 5:12-17</a>, <a class="scripRef" id="j-p116.2" href="http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bible/asv.Num.5.html#Num.5.27" onclick="return goBible('ot','Num','5','27','5','27');" onmouseover="popupVerse(this, 'Num 5:27 - 5:27')" onmouseout="leaveVerse()" name="_Num_5_27_0_0">27</a>). We have no record of this form of trial having been actually resorted to."<br /><br />No record? Of course. Why use water when "the result" could be more quickly obtained with blood. But what, I wonder, was "the result"? Easton's doesn't tell us and I for one am glad. This absence inspires me. I envision levitation, vomiting, cursing.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Nowadays I think we have a more reasonable (at least less gender specific, and clearly less misogynist) view of jealously. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jealousy">Wikipedia</a> says simply:<br /><br />"Jealousy typically refers to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that occur when a person believes a valued relationship is being threatened by a rival."<br /><br />I prefer this modern, friend-focused version of jealousy and all that it implies: backstabbing, fist-fights, hot tears!<br /><br />Both definitions, though, have one thing in common: betrayal.<br /><br />The jealousy you're talking about, I think, really, is a jealousy over yourself. You're jealous of that young kid, back there, full or promise, so happy with the accomplishments of others, so un-disgusted with himself. He's betrayed you. You write:<br /><br />"Of the many things I wish I could tell my younger self, the danger of jealousy is one of the most difficult to part with. I am sure there was a time when I felt that I was who I was - there <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span> have been a time like that...But now I feel like there's no way out of certain things: self-disgust, for example; also shame, a sense of failed promise. Does this mean that I'm growing up finally?"<br /><br />Perhaps your younger self, the one who betrayed you, wishes too that he could tell <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> many things, such as: Is that you there, sitting on the sidelines, scratching your elbows? Are you still doing that? No wonder you're disgusted! I thought growing up means growing out too...<br /><br />Of course, growing up probably doesn't mean that. From what I know of growing up--which is, admittedly, not much--growing up probably means growing down, growing in--learning, somehow, to feel comfortable in your own skin, your own soul.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />I had a Korean friend named, let's say J. After high-school we grew distant. Then one day, out of the blue, I wrote him an e-mail:<br /><br />"I've known you for a long time and have been your friend for a long time, but I have always felt that you were never really "open" with me or anyone about how you were feeling. For example, you always used to seem to downplay the fact that you're Korean; even when we asked you to speak Korean you never did. Back then, and still to this day, I feel like a lot of the time when we speak you try to impress me with certain things, like your salary for example. It seems to me that you were always having a hard time finding your place, especially as the only Korean in the group, and perhaps you did these things to compensate for what you felt you were lacking, which in reality, WAS NOTHING.<br /><br />You have always been kind, intelligent, and fun to hang out with, and I have always considered you a friend, but NOW, as we grow into adulthood I would like to be friends with you, without the added bullshit. I want to understand every part of you. Hell, I don't even care if I have to learn Korean! I always have wanted to know that part of you. But you never gave it up."<br /><br />Of course, this e-mail came to J. as a shock. He wrote back a long, intense e-mail (probably the longest thing he had ever written or ever will write) basically laying it out on the line, speaking of an illuminating trip to Korea, and how, back in the states he would go to Korean bars and feel incredibly out of place, how he was now trying, trying, trying, to figure out who he was, but it was hard, so very hard. And he told me he was a bit jealous--jealous of the ease with which I walked through life, my white guy in America-ease, my popular-guy ease.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />It's strange then, to me, that you write about your jealousy over Asians who were younger, smarter, and better at what you do best. Of course, most of the Asians I've known (in school mostly) have been younger, smarter, and better at what I want to do best. (I remember, specifically, two Korean girls in my ceramics class: there disturbing, exquisite talent created the most beautiful ceramics figures I have ever seen, all the more beautiful when placed near my blobs. Ceramics: one of two classes I've failed. The other one: gym.) But I can't help but think of Asians in America divorced from my impression of J. and his struggles: feeling a bit alienated, unsure of his culture, perhaps even embarrassed.<br /><br />But who am I to question J. really? Who am I to demand: show yourself!<br /><br />This is an easy demand, perhaps, when you speak from my viewpoint: White guy in America.<br /><br />Am I so thickheaded?<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />Is it so easy for me though? Probably, yes. But I'm certainly not dominant. Just because I'm the majority doesn't mean I <span style="font-style: italic;">feel </span>major. Often, I feel very minor, a tiny universe to my own, utterly different, so idiosyncratic, so in need of my strange rules, my necessities: my insulin, my three-square meals, my Noni-juice.<br /><br />I don't always like to show this odd part of myself, but who am I supposed to be, if not this weirdo?<br /><br />I think what we share, something that's basic, is how much the sense of betrayal really influences us. We don't feel right when we don't feel like ourselves. We feel like we've betrayed something essential and were jealous for what we could be.<br /><br />For J. the situation, living in America, divorced from his heritage, only accentuates the struggle: Who the fuck am I?<br /><br />But the question itself might be ridiculous. How do you answer that question, after all? Probably, you just live. I think this is what I mean by "growing in" instead of out. It seems like it has to be easy, but sometimes it's hard. I think it's hard, maybe, because we spend so much time thinking about growing <span style="font-style: italic;">into</span> something, becoming something--a good husband, an adult. But maybe it's as easy as Not Thinking--instead of becoming, maybe just being.<br /><br />But what do I know: I flunked ceramics. <br /><br /><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-89085498034601446372008-01-24T19:44:00.002-05:002008-06-28T23:16:23.425-04:00No Matter How Good You Are, There Will Always Be an Asian Man Who Is Younger, Smarter, And Better Than You At What You Do BestFrequently, that man will be your best friend.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />The history of my life is in many ways a history of the Asian friends who have been better than me at what I do best. I'm not sure how far back records go, but beyond the border of my birth-picture I'm pretty sure there's a Japanese boy eating his foot.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />"Watch out!" I want to yell at my baby-self. I want to warn him to pay no attention to what is happening one dish over.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />There is so much to say in these situations! For example, I want to say, in second grade you will befriend <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Shunsuki</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Eno</span>. His house is covered in blue shag; there is a Yamaha organ with an ungodly number of sound presets in one corner of it. The bench is so tall that your feet barely reach the ground - but this is appropriate since Shun himself is at least twice as good a piano player as you. He does not look at his fingers while he plays.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />In addition to the organ Shun will have a Nintendo. But it's a strange Nintendo: smaller, with bright, pastel-colored games that cause him to whack disdainfully at the controller. None of its games will work on your console.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />At one point you will decide to design your own video game; so you will sit on a wall drawing the slime from Legend of Zelda until your mom comes to pick you up. Shunsuki will let you keep his drawings.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />Later, Thomas Aquino will own that rare thing: a Sega Genesis. You will never get to play it. You will never want to play it: you will prefer watching him play, cross-legged on one of his tessellated floor pillows, lunging through Strider, hacking apart Golden Axe, or manipulating the gigantic four-dimensional quilt of Sonic the Hedgehog. You will watch him play these games with your heart in my stomach - you will want him to win so badly! And when he does win, you will feel a warm feeling spreading through your body like pee or the seat-heater on your family's Volvo. Even when you're outside - even when Tom's mother kicks you off the Genesis, and you go outside and tie firecrackers to small lizards, you will continue to feel this.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />You will be, according to your sixth grade science teacher, "fiercely competitive." And this will be a terrible and exhilarating feeling at the same time - one that you will savor for years, that makes you more unhappy than any other friend, girl, or even parent. At this point, finally, you will begin to beware your Asian friend.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />The Asian friend of your youth will occasionally be Jewish. Don't let this fool you.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />He will be an only child; or he will have a sister who he worships.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Tri</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Vinh</span> Van, location currently unknown. Of all the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Asian</span> friends, he will be the most mysterious. A gentle man whose generosity is at times princely, at times merely Canadian. The first one to broach, unabashedly, the Insolubility of White People. The borders of his life will be bizarre, even dangerous-sounding, but he will maintain a clear and untroubled brow. When you drop out of touch with him you will begin to doubt that he ever existed.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />Boxers, Hockey Players. They will gravitate to sports and video games, both of which they will beat you at. They will be dogged and quick and above all else hungry for love and attention. They will have pity on you, but this pity will be tainted by your weakness, which will disgust them. Weakness: one of the few things that you will learn without hesitation to call your own.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />There will be problem areas. Girls, for example: the time <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Dewi</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Dynoot</span> puts paper-clips in your hair. You thought you were just playing around and in doing so proved yourself part of the Insolubility of White People. In this way you will betray, again and again, your Asian friends. They will repay you in kind through their excellence at what you do best, or by stealing girls from you. You will repay them through your excellence at what they do best.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />What will it take for you to understand the serious of this? The older you get, the less you will know. Conversely, your Asian friends will get younger, more talented. They will succeed where you failed.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />At which point you will have to discover their secret.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />You will have to find out how to use this feeling or be destroyed. On the other hand, if you are not destroyed, you will owe one more thing to your Asian Friend.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />Of the many things I wish I could tell my younger self, the danger of jealousy is one of the most difficult to part with. I am sure there was a time when I felt that I was who I was - there <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span> have been a time like that. I remember it as if it were this morning, before some long nap I fell into. But now I feel like there's no way out of certain things: self-disgust, for example; also shame, a sense of failed promise. Does this mean that I'm growing up finally? I am convinced it must be, that I'm not alone.<br /><br />How can I possibly be alone?<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />On the other hand, I am pretty sure that Shun would never allow himself to be this way.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-14370335792396616492008-01-17T16:38:00.000-05:002008-01-18T11:38:06.702-05:00Anti-Castration EpicSeth,<br /><br />Writing as life seems like one of the main currents of Seventh Draft, and frankly I can't see anything more writerly than putting your all into a MySpace comment. Sure, we're all addicted to the opus - but good is good and the stank of quality rises no matter how small the stain.<br /><br />I think of it in terms of energy. You've got X amount of energy and you want to make something with it - want to bend the world and feel its kiss or disgusted slap or whatever. You do this because you're inadequate, a Castrato of moon-mash, too awake for an animal but otherwise powerful sleepy. So you doodle in your margins or write notes that no one will ever find. You lavish attention on the world the way you would lavish your hand on the back of a particularly lustrous golden retriever: because hair is soft and your hand can feel it.<br /><br />The no "good" reason part is why art is heroic. I mean, I'm all for taking your shot at the title, writing a three-thousand page epic on the tobacco industry or rhyming enough couplets to get you into <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000027/">Guinness</a>, but that's not really the point, is it? That's the world's work, and though art is always of the world, it needs to possess multiple dimensions to be real. It needs to have velocity, to be shooting off in all directions - to be shooting especially into those dark spaces and unborn minds that whose existence it can't even begin, at the moment, to imagine. Because it can't imagine them, it has to be as generous.<br /><br />Art has no good reason and needs none. It's gratuitous, unnecessary - but if performed sincerely, it manages one of the most amazing inversions of existence and ends up being the most vital and useful thing in our toolbelt. Trusting in its utility doesn't have to be a faith thing, either. Think about how many beds you wouldn't have been able to get out of if it wasn't for Anna's squint. Or how you might not have been able to look yourself in the mirror if it hadn't been for <a href="http://www.jenslekman.com/">Jens Lekman </a>singing to his hairdresser,<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Your hands are soft.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Your hands are soft, just like silk.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You're a drop of blood.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You're a drop of blood in my glass of milk."</span><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.exclaim.ca/images/up-jens_lekman_lrg.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://www.exclaim.ca/images/up-jens_lekman_lrg.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Words like these do more than just suffuse my life with romance - they shape my thoughts, give me a pattern to run myself through. They give off sparks that seem inexhaustible to me, and I know they have real effects in the real world. For one thing, they have made me prick my finger so that I could see exactly what a drop of blood in a glass of milk looks like. I think I know the girl he's talking about.<br /><br />Art is art, writing is writing, and passion/emotion well-arranged will deliver itself, no matter what. Fuck the consta-poo-poo of masterwork and genre and follow delight, perversity, what ever you want to call it like a bird-dog. Because at this very moment, whether you like it or not, you are writing your life.<br /><br />JoshJoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-63731679699682015702007-12-17T17:33:00.000-05:002008-01-17T20:01:48.300-05:00Master of the Myspace Comment GenreOur tag reads: I need numerous diversions from writing and I figure the best diversion is probably writing. But what happens when I'm not writing at all? Well, obviously: no writing, no need for diversion.<br /><br />Which is to say, now that our semester's work is done, I'm feeling a bit listless. Basically, I'm not writing all that much. I had big plans for these days--I was going to work hard on my novella; I was going to edit my ghost story to its natural degree of awesomeness; I was going to write actual letters to my greatest friends, telling them how much I love them (this last one came to me in a fit of unrequited enthusiasm.)<br /><br />Instead, I'm cooking massive pots of soup. I'm eating glorious dinners. I'm drinking too much wine. I'm hanging out, talking. And, finally, four years after the purchase, I'm reading the instruction manual for my camera.<br /><br />So, yeah, I'm doing all kinds of Not Writing. But you know what? I'm not really feeling so bad about it. I'm feeling like I've written <span style="font-style: italic;">enough</span> over the past months. I need to take a break.<br /><br />So why am I here, writing a blog?<br /><br />Well, for one thing, I'm wildly addicted to writing. When I'm not writing I feel itchy. I <span style="font-style: italic;">actually</span> feel itchy. It's an acute physical sensation.<br /><br />So, I'm itching my elbows and wondering: Is it even possible to take a break?<br /><br />I mean today I wrote: two or three meaningful e-mails, one very meaningful Christmas card, two or three meaningful messages on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Myspace</span>, and about twenty <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Myspace</span> comments.<br /><br />Yeah, it's true: instead of working on my novella, I've been tooling around, posting comments on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Myspace</span>. I kind of like this one:<br /><br />"I think I can accurately say I eat more chicken any man ever seen. Do you agree?"<br /><br />This is a comment I posted on my wife's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Myspace</span> page at approximately 4:49 PM.<br /><br />Elsewhere, I wrote:<br /><br /> "I <i>am</i> chicken."<br /><br />~Seth, upon being asked, "Do you do chicken?"<br /><br />Writing this, weirdly, satisfied me. Reading it, weirdly, also satisfies me.<br /><br />Remember when I said:<br /><br />Blogs, letters, e-mails--to me, they're part of it, just as important as the "real" work. Your writing life is just that, your life. When you write a blog, it's not like the blog is <i>not</i> you--it is you. I mean do you really look at your writing as something outside your life? You move from one to the other. You write. You figure things out. Without the blogs, you'd be itching to write elsewhere--you'd be sending mad e-mails; you'd take up letter-writing, you'd deliberately fog your bathroom mirror just so you could finger a few lines on the glass.<br /><br />I think I'm ready to say, for sure, that writing a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Myspace</span> comment often fulfills me as much or more than working on my novella.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />Recently Janet wrote <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/books/06masl.html">a review</a> of a book by Marie Phillips called "Gods Behaving Badly" for the <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">NYTimes</span></span>.<br /><br />Here's a brief excerpt from the review:<br /><br />"Ms. Phillips’s premise is that the Greek deities have collectively suffered a whopping reversal of fortune, but that they still endure tenuously in the modern world. They live together in a disintegrating London house with a laurel-wreath knocker (nostalgia counts for a lot here) on the front door. Thus ensconced, with time on their hands, they trade spiteful wisecracks about the glory days."<br /><br />The book looks ridiculous, but that's besides the point. Janet's not entirely kind in her review. Later, she writes:<br /><br />"In a story so conventionally constructed that it suggests the help of fiction-writing software (yes, there is some), “Gods Behaving Badly” injects a pair of human lovebirds into the world of its downtrodden deities."<br /><br />Finally, she writes:<br /><br />"...although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">didn</span>’t talk about things like that."<br /><br />What the fuck, exactly, is Janet <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Maslin</span> trying to say?<br /><br />Basically, she's saying: Of course this novel is a joke, but more than that, the writer is a joke too. At the very least, she's certainly not a <span style="font-style: italic;">serious</span> writer, an Olympian, as she most certainly should aspire to be.<br /><br />I cringe. What would Janet <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Maslin</span> have to say about my obsessive <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Myspace</span> commenting?<br /><br />Maybe it's just me, but I look at <span style="font-style: italic;">every</span> venue as just another genre. Right now, I'm really working on my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Myspace</span> commenting. I'm trying to become a Master of the Genre. I've even met a few Masters. Recently, I discovered a new <a href="http://www.myspace.com/vodkablood">Master</a>. His <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Myspace</span> name is boxy and if they ever decide to give a Pulitzer for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Myspace</span> comments he will be nominated. From him, I've re-affirmed that the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Myspace</span> comment can be: offensive, hilarious, and utterly illuminating.<br /><br />A few weeks ago, I was deeply immersed in my novella, so deeply that I couldn't even fathom taking a week or two off. Now I'm like novella-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">shmovela</span>. I have <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Myspace</span> comments to write!<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div>An admission: I've been cooking dinner and writing this blog at the same time.<br /><br />I would never do that when working on my novella.<br /><br />But what if I did?<br /><br />If all writing is the same, as I'm trying to say <span style="font-style: italic;">maybe </span>it is, then why do I always set aside the most special time for my novella? Why do I pace around beforehand, procrastinating?<br /><br />Perhaps I take it more seriously. Perhaps not. Maybe I'm just psyching myself out.<br /><br />Whatever. Dinners almost ready.<br /><br />I have wine to drink, chicken to eat.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-10551143753559613542007-12-07T05:23:00.000-05:002007-12-07T07:02:12.146-05:00Schrodinger's IglooSeth,<br /><br />A true Winter morning here in Brooklyn: cold, dark, just enough snow on the ground to make me nervous, or more nervous, about riding my bike to work along the slippery Manhattan "bike paths." Winter, Seth....Winter! Just writing the word makes me excited and provokes me into contrasting your <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Mediterranean</span>, sun-worshipping shark-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">attackery</span> with my own bearish love of cold, inside, small quarters, snow...<br /><br />(great how we can do this. Last night in my journal: "A new person is an opportunity to create yourself again." It's strange since I spend so much time alone, but to be totally honest I don't think I'm anybody <span style="font-style: italic;">at all</span> without another person around - even if that other person is only a vaguely-imagined audeince. I'm like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodingers_cat"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Schrodinger's</span> cat</a>: I mean, common sense and experience dictate that I should exist on my own, but then what do you do with the fact that entire constellations of television satellites are kept in flight based primarily on the science of my nonexistence...? Do you just let these things hurtle into Australia...?)<br /><br />Winter is a natural time for introverts and sleep-artists like myself: a great season for writing but even more so a great time for Not-Writing. I personally have been doing a lot of the latter and not looking back, embracing a mix of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Pushkinian</span> laziness and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Rimbaudesque</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">mopery</span>, though with much less absinthe, wine and derangement. All that stuff is fun - but for me, the most interesting route to life's strangeness isn't jumping on it (pretending it's a horse, galloping, I don't know, spilling <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">everyone's</span> drinks), but rather crawling under it. I've been calling this the Russian way here and intend to stick to the term despite the fact that pretty much anybody can do it bearded or not.<br /><br />Even Americans, like Ahab, who wanted to strike through the mask - though in my own personal cosmology I cross him with my grandmother's <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">quilt making</span> and imagine myself a needle pushed - tenderly but firmly - to the other side of the fabric. What a strange place that must be for a first-time needle! A sort of anti-world, colors muted or reversed and the stitching hanging off of everything like wiring after a hurricane, ragged and warm and dream-like, frightening.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.oneworldmagazine.org/seek/nanook/pix/nanook8.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://www.oneworldmagazine.org/seek/nanook/pix/nanook8.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Winter, for me, is like a gigantic, three-month-long other side of the quilt: a time of transfiguration and power - the season of advent, which I, being heathen and bearish in my understanding of the term, associate with tiny, pockmarked calendars and the world they represent: a world that isn't a single <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">unliftable</span> piece at all, but a network of little doors and tunnels: people slinking down fireplaces and disappearing into back pockets. A subterranean hearth-lit dreamed and dreaming world; domesticated. Most importantly a place where escape is possible.<br /><br />(hilarious and revolting how much this post makes me sound like a fat old man eating gumdrops)<br /><br />Escape...yes...<br /><br />Freedom/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Nonfreedom</span>, or as <a href="http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no2/shklovsky.html">Victor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Shklovsky</span></a> calls it, "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Unfreedom</span>"...Why does this idea obsess me so much?<br /><br />VS says about his time as a young writer:<br /><br />"I spent the second factory thinking - or to put this in terms of an object being processed - undergoing the thought of freedom.<br />What concerns me now are the limits of freedom, the deformations of the material."<br /><br />And again later, in a letter to Roman <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Jakobson</span>:<br /><br />"Roman, I am studying the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">unfreedom</span> of the writer. I am studying <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">unfreedom</span> as though it were a set of gymnastic equipment."<br /><br />Freedom presumes that I AM something to begin with - but what if this constant reaching was just a slightly more complex version of the way a plant moves towards sunlight? Then what we've been talking about here isn't freedom at all, but an attempt at a more complicated <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">unfreedom</span> than the one we've got.<br /><br />An unfreedom we're at home in, like a gigantic living room, with the great living-room strangeness I can remember distinctly from when I was a kid, and even a paper-weight was like a nugget of uranium that had landed in my hands against all sense and decency.<br /><br />The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the fables the native Brazillians told him as an attempt to turn the world from something strange and frightening to something human - something interesting, rather than terrifying. Igloos, however, are usually abandoned after a night's use, since food moves and anyway snow is everywhere.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-21363362495243528712007-11-30T15:06:00.000-05:002007-12-02T10:49:31.064-05:00The MopeJosh,<br /><br />Funny you should mention Rimbaud, of course. I like to think of him as a sort of emblem of what you might call, following Pushkin, the "lazy man". I like to say "the mope."<br /><br />It's funny too, though, how mopes always seem to be the ones slamming open hidden doors. That monster Elvis, for example, was a classic lay-about. And have you ever read Truman Capote's <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1957/11/09/1957_11_09_053_TNY_CARDS_000252812">New Yorker profile</a> on Marlon Brando? The Duke, it seems, the torrent of American Acting, was really a fat, lazy bum at heart. And that's <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> he actually became a fat, lazy bum.<br /><br />I love these guys, but I love them, mostly, for their <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">mopiness</span>. I aspire to Brando in <span style="font-style: italic;">Streetcar</span>--cut, virile, ridiculously handsome--but really I feel more comfortable with <span style="font-style: italic;">Godfather</span> Brando--fat, slow, a bit ugly. The one seems full of energy, but a little empty; the other, full of languor, and yet utterly powerful.<br /><br />I mean, I always admired a guy like Neruda for his industriousness, but I didn't <span style="font-style: italic;">love</span> him until I read his thoughts on wasting time:<br /><br />"If poets answered public opinion polls truthfully, they would give the secret away: there is nothing as beautiful as wasting time."<br /><br />But there's a difference, I think, between being lazy in life and being lazy in ART. For example, that bum Pushkin, you mention, throws grapes at us until we see that we've got to keep slapping ART, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms.<br /><br />Which is basically what Rimbaud says: "The invention of the unknown demands new forms". And, really, what poet's life better distills the essence of this quote than Rimbaud?<br /><br />He wrote this famous line in 1871, at the age of sixteen, in the midst of a sequence of two brash and absurd letters that have come to be known as the <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Lettres</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">du</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Voyant</span></span> or, if you prefer, "The Seer Letters."<br /><br />The first letter, to his teacher Georges <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Izambard</span>, announced Rimbaud's intentions to become a poet, a seer, and it included a short poem, which begins with a choice Rimbaud line: "My sad heart slobbers at the poop."<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Izambard</span> blasted the letter. It was vicious, detestable he later said—the young poet seemed to want to screw himself up, as much as possible, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.<br /><br />But <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Izambard</span> missed the point. Yes, Rimbaud was screwing himself up, but he was serving an inviolable master: Poetry.<br /><br />"Right now, I'm making myself as shitty as I can," he wrote. "Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a <span style="font-style: italic;">Seer</span>. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. And I've realized I am a poet. It's really not my fault."<br /><br />This strikes me as one of the most pretentious, ridiculous letters ever written. And I love it. I love it for what it says about the connection between writing poetry and living poetry. <span style="font-style: italic;">The derangement of all the senses</span> is one of Rimbaud's most celebrated phrases. With the support of this bold assertion, Rimbaud transformed the act of writing poetry into an act of living, a voyage into the wild unknown.<br /><br />"The invention of the unknown demands new forms," Rimbaud wrote in the second of the <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Lettres</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">du</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Voyant</span></span>, sent to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Izambard's</span> friend, Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Demeny</span>, several months later. At this point, the young poet was certain: the new form was meant to be amorphous, as a man's life is, essentially, amorphous. And although <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Izambard</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Demeny</span> both dismissed the letters as utter inanity, practical jokes at best, utter filth at worst, Rimbaud was certainly not joking.<br /><br />Within a few months he was carousing bohemian Paris, living on little else than absinthe, hashish, and the erotic adulation of Paul Verlaine, and writing his masterpiece, "A Season in Hell."<br /><br />From poop to poetry—the evolution of Rimbaud was furious.<br /><br />But still, I must admit, it is this early line that has always haunted me: my sad heart slobbers at the poop.<br /><br />This line has occupied my thoughts for several years. It comes to me during the most opportune occasions. When, for example, alone and sitting on the toilet, I begin to imagine Rimbaud at sixteen, and I see the portraits of the young poet, the first taken in October, 1871, the second, more famous, taken two months later, in December.<br /><br />The difference between the two pictures is astounding.<br /><br />In the first picture Rimbaud, recently arrived in Paris, appears to be no more than a child, a puffy, mopey brat, eminently poised for naughtiness—the type of child who seems capable of writing an entire manifesto on poop.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXfPlBZCs44307nY5EBMNPGJQgkDD-7yJeNYS9-VMOyCiMAfoZrP_JtLDJAOpRri50sj47jOBM5tNf2C-Vt4sXUnwzZeCwjxlcbCeWcVcIV6gK5WC0i3kIVz1jSCMBKLj4SwM75ZA_ugI7/s1600-r/RimbaudI.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Fuo59BTVrM5-tPF4z-AV_cv5Jom31rjcFhyphenhyphenlsZ6vajkMR9mfUgeyEzvTHZGB7MxLT3wT3npvuPif399YeACm1T3OSUHPJEG0jk68wVZt03F5515DphdBQX2scd_-tl2GQOHLiBQnCZEt/s320/RimbaudI.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138735811859828082" border="0" /></a><br />In the second picture, Rimbaud has aged considerably; his face, chiseled, evocative—Jean Cocteau said, "He looks like an angel"—is the face of a poet, a man.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLu_ehTpGoKQmr_NOuFA6XEo8dpd5P4bAgkw2UvO8BwAwH1o-Pl2dFybv-OIfSbBolbdaQ76lm48HBNDaBqcM3i4X0ajK0IoOMH_qr5sgrCrQspwSkONE6ah281eUA5e4H-sZkVjaNJlP6/s1600-r/RimbaudII.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVtjZZ8jev2fhRSf7vsLewwCJUKtRRAFle-mpJJGNaGkT2Rfg61II532Y62Q4JnlbljlrEl-_zEiIa7svSyu-jhuriZTfibbQ_mfm5GU45qRfnSdeDYx8Dgx9_-I7ivHqLd-hlABtzA73I/s320/RimbaudII.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138729193315224930" border="0" /></a><br />What possibly could have happened in the span of two short months to bring about this incredible transformation?<br /><br />Sometimes I linger on the toilet, for up to ten, fifteen minutes, my chin positioned firmly on my fist, thinking about Arthur Rimbaud's life. I can see him, for example, standing on some non-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">descript</span> corner in the Latin Quarter, kicking a stone, a seventeen year old absorbing the hitherto unfamiliar language of the world that was Paris in 1871: the dung-filled alleyways, the aroma of bodies and smoke, the muggy air. Then, in the evening, when the darkness collapsed upon the city, he would have strolled along the streets until he hit the small alley, the Rue <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Séguier</span>, where a metal cot awaited him in a studio at number thirteen, the second of four, five, or six addresses in Paris, the filthy rooms where he conceived the lines that won him posthumous worldwide fame.<br /><br />But eventually my thoughts always turn to his life after Paris, his years of wandering, and his death in Marseilles. The biographies tell us that in 1874, though possibly later—the life of Rimbaud has always remained splendidly ambiguous—he quit writing, irrevocably.<br /><br />Rimbaud—the seer-poet—was nineteen years old.<br /><br />He spent the next seventeen years wandering around Europe and Africa. This period of his life is sketchily documented, often vague, and mysterious. His letters, written during the time, reveal a sullen, mopey man. "I am bored all the time," he wrote to his family in 1888.<br /><br />By the time he died, in 1891, in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Marseille</span>, after years of wandering, his poetry had resurfaced in France, but Rimbaud had vanished so completely that many people did not believe the news of his death: they assumed he was already dead. Rimbaud—the wanderer, the mope—was thirty-seven years old.<br /><br />Rimbaud's life—the early, resounding poetry; the sudden, unreasonable renunciation of poetry; and the inscrutable years of wandering that follow—has fascinated and perplexed me for some time. And this is why I have chosen to evoke him now—as a resounding testament to the intrigue of mopey behavior. And yet, when I am on the toilet, thinking, and even now as I write, I am confounded by what seems to be the inscrutable enigma of Rimbaud.<br /><br />After all, what is one to make of this enigmatic character?<br /><br />How am I to evoke the unreasonable Rimbaud?<br /><br />Was he a seer? Or a mope?<br /><br />Whatever the case, it's obvious there was a lot of Not-Writing that led to Rimbaud's writing: a lot of getting ready. Does it really matter what you do to get ready, though? Probably. I tend to think boring lives inspire boring writing. But then, of course, there's the Emily Dickinson factor. She basically sat around her place a lot, but she sure wrote a lot of kick-ass poems.<br /><br />Did she even do drugs? I don't think so.<br /><br />I suppose the connection between Not-Writing and writing might be too subjective to qualify at all. We all get ready in different ways, of course. Writing, though, the act of sitting down and doing the work--that's easier to define. You sit down, do it. I know you might find that attitude naive, a bit ridiculous, but that's how I've always gone about it.<br /><br />I live, get drunk, wake up hung-over, and sit down and write. If I don't make this commitment to sitting down, each day, I'll never write. When I'm Not-Writing I don't think about it. I try, instead, to give my attention to what really matters, at least to me: my wife, my friends, my family, food. Funny thing though, this attention, this look away from writing, is me writing too.<br /><br />Basically, I'm always preparing, but not always thinking about the preparation. That puts an awful lot of stress on your life. Deliberately going out to derange your senses in the service of writing? That's childish. I'll just go out and derange my senses.<br /><br />Hemingway was a dick-head, for sure, and part of this might have been his need to <span style="font-style: italic;">live</span> experiences for writing. That strikes me as extremely artificial and very bullshit.<br /><br />Perhaps that's why I prefer the mopes, the ones who love wasting time, which really has nothing and everything to do with the time they spent writing--which, of course, was not wasted time at all...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-59408663914806677102007-11-20T07:34:00.000-05:002007-12-02T10:35:56.548-05:00pushkin47<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Polis</span>,<br /><br />Russian Futurist…French Surrealist…? Are you serious?<br /><br />Putting the inherent ridiculousness of these two ideas on the sideboard for a second, let’s have a closer look at them. My can-opener in this discussion, as usual, is going to be the Russian serial-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">amorist</span> Alexander Pushkin, who Russians worship but who nobody else pays any attention to and rightfully so: he sounds stupid in any language other than his own, really beyond shitty.<br /><br />I think he'd like this – I mean, if anyone spent less mental energy on writing and being a writer it was Pushkin, who founded Russian literature in a few brilliant strokes and then walked into a Frenchman’s bullet because his wife was a flirt. Live by the sword die by the sword; so he’s become a real hero of mine, not just for what he wrote, but for the way he wrote it. Reclined, generous, with swiftness and vigor and complete immersion.<br /><br />Pushkin was a “lazy man,” by which I mean the usual pose of artistic industry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">didn</span>’t appeal to him. Easy for us to forget in professionalized America, but art used to be, not so much a matter of when you clocked in and out, but rather how you positioned yourself so as to let the energies of the world flow down your pen-hand most efficiently. As beard-wearer/Soviet-escapee Abram <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Tertz</span> wrote:<br /><br />“If Pushkin (let’s assume!) was only pretending to loaf, it means that he needed that pretense to free his tongue, that it suited him as the plot motivation for the unfolding of his destiny, and without it he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">couldn</span>’t have written anything good.”<br /><br />I love this quote because it gets to the heart of what is a real writing problem for me. I mean, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">isn</span>’t that what a long and intense part of what we do is about: not the writing itself but the getting ready to write, the Not Writing that leads to writing: organizing oneself like a circuit, the perfect combination of tradition and re-invention?<br /><br />For Pushkin this meant giving yourself up, letting Fate (Pushkin loves F-f-fate) make you the greatest writer who ever lived one minute and a ridiculous <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">cuckold</span> the next. Your destiny is someone else’s business, which frees you up to look around and describe everything you see so beautifully and memorably that you end up, strangely enough, outwitting fate completely: escaping it, disappearing <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Houdini</span>-style through a trap door no one else can see, because they're too busy doing what they do.<br /><br />Another important fact about Pushkin, who was murdered by a Frenchman: he loved France. All Russians did – most of the upper class at that point spoke French from birth and had to have Russian letters translated to them, sniff sniff. But, attracted as he was to its masterpieces, P. knew he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">couldn</span>’t compete, for example, with Victor Hugo. And he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">didn</span>’t have to. He was a Russian. The whole thing was hilarious to him: the wigs and powders (which he loved), the balls (adored), the pretenses and high-blown speeches (made a few in his time). High-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">falutin</span>’, fascinating but, at the end of the day, kind of beside the point. Now, a Russian horse shaking snow off its back – that was life! That was a moment that deserved to make its way into literature!<br /><br />So Pushkin becomes one of the first <span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">flaneurs</span> – the first walkers, to translate the term stupidly: one of the first guys to try to put everything and especially the underbelly of life back into art. Art is great, but art is also very, very stupid, Pushkin held. We’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">ve</span> got to keep slapping it, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms. Keep looking, Pushkin shouts at us – or not shouts, since he’s not really a shouter. He throws grapes at us and threatens to not invite us to his next party.<br /><br />Empires, cultural or otherwise, develop underbellies, which the provinces explore vigorously; then if they’re smart the empires themselves learn from their subjects and begin dissecting themselves. So genius France develops in the 19<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">th</span> century a generation’s-worth of little <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Pushkins</span>, which it now officially calls <span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">flaneurs</span><span style="font-style: italic;">:</span> walkers, starers, examiners of underbellies. Rimbaud, for example (sound familiar?). Baudelaire. Alfred <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Jarry</span>, and all the other people who piled out of that particularly roomy clown car. As archer/vegetarian Roger <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Shattuck</span> says:<br /><br />“The intellectual activity that Diderot refers to as <span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">libertinage</span> (free-thinking, debauchery) in the opening sentences of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Rameau</span>’s Nephew rests squarely on this response to the fragment as ambiguous – both isolated and implicated. Baudelaire developed Diderot’s attitude into the endemic activity of the dandy: <span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">flaner</span> (to stroll about, to saunter). The Surrealists in their prose narratives of city promenades refined <span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">flanerie</span> into fine art…”<br /><br />[fragments here – argumentative <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">etiquette</span> suggests I hold my tongue, but come on: there it all is, the 7<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">th</span> Draft aesthetic in a nutshell! <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Shattuck</span>’s prose is as clear and strained as a man asking a passerby to kindly help him remove the badger from his Balzac<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"></span>, but you can hear the point trembling under there, compact and dangerous as the hum of an electron cloud…]<br /><br />Pushkin showed France how to strut…but how does this fit up with us, who are anyway just Americans plain and simple, putting on these masks and codpieces as they suit our moments, whims, deficiencies and advantages? Well, to their surprise, the mob of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">flaneury</span> has discovered in the centuries 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">th</span>+ that when a prone position transforms the entire world into a work of art, everybody becomes an actor. As the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Shatt</span>-man <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">explaineth, once again</span>:<br /><br />“What is no longer given – station of self – must be created. It may take a lifetime. To that end most of us own a little property, have some adventures high or low, and revert at intervals to the mutterings of our innermost feelings. It all helps. At the same time I wonder how far the histrionic sensibility, the fourth path [!!!] to a place in the world, has also made actors, and perhaps lunatics, of us all.”<br /><br />With the curtain closing, then, enter poor belated blogging, this fucking ridiculous enterprise comprised, as has been noted before <span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">mon</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">frere</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">MOY</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">DROOG</span>, of equal parts tragic and absurd, or just plain stupid, and which runs on a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">frottage</span> and aspires to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">smitage</span>, the wholesale eyeball-peeling of the sun settling like a grapefruit on some distant dirty rooftop. “IT ALL HELPS” – I hear the famous Be Someone On Which Nothing Is Lost dictum in this, not to mention the dream of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">miscellaneists</span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">bloggers</span>/diarists, which at the end of the day seems to be nothing more than to catch all the little fragments of life and rub them together until they spark and the world (or, more often, an immediate circle) catches fire and burns.<br /><br />Pushkin…<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">proto</span>-blogger? Dumber things have been claimed for him, I guess. The way I see it, the dream haunting literature is anti-literature and the nightmare of the Book therefore the Anti-Book, which, solidified, gets busy throwing its own shadow. Pushkin left behind a handful of fragments, which he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">didn</span>’t think was anything to take seriously.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-79905495093413677672007-11-15T13:32:00.001-05:002007-11-16T09:59:37.154-05:00Communism Works: An Open Letter to Michael SilverblattImpossible to say exactly why, but the lumpen is rising, people. For example last night I listened to the voice of <a href="http://www.kcrw.com/people/etc/programs/bw/silverblatt_michael?role=etc_host">Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Silverblatt</span></a> and wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Silverblatt</span>. For one thing is certain: we cannot go on like this…<br /><br />I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">ve</span> been thinking about the world for a while now Michael – thinking of it not as a network of true or <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">false</span> propositions but as the inside of a gigantic whale tunnelling through time and darkness. Etymologically, as you know, whales and architecture come from the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum – but there is architecture in the whale as surely as there are whale pods migrating through downtown Los Angeles. Just because things <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">aren</span>’t brightly lit, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">doesn</span>’t make them invisible, Michael.<br /><br />Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Silverblatt</span>, to be honest I thirst for your tears as <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">voraciously</span> as a car whose little orange gas-icon has been lit up for the last thirty miles. I feel like we could get there, Michael. I really do. You interview authors on the radio and I am an author not on the radio, and together we are travelling through a series of interlocking whales that make up existence. One whale is America, another is Earth, then others that are God, Los Angeles, etc.<br /><br />You remember the grade-school exercise that asked us to write our exact location on an undelivered envelope? Well, I think it’s time you opened that envelope and delivered the message that America has been promising the world for years. We’re ready for it – we’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">ve</span> waited long enough, anyway, and the message is burning through the thin blue sheath like a coal. Messages, messages: we’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">ve</span> been promised these for centuries, Michael. But your country’s hesitancy has made the rest of the world suspect her.<br /><br />Michael, I believe I have made progress along these lines, and though I may not be the first person to say this to you, I want you to listen very closely: the thing that will make you cry is brotherhood.<br /><br />“Brotherhood?” says Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Silverblatt</span>. “Just last night I talked to <a href="http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw071108junot_diaz"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Junot</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Diaz</span></a>. <a href="http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw050512jonathan_williams">Jonathan Williams</a> sat on that exact stool – you’re speaking into the microphone that once touched the lips of <a href="http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw040819seamus_heaney">Seamus <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Heaney</span></a>!”<br /><br />What, exactly, is Michael’s point here? An older guard might pull out the over-rich consistency of the bourgeois worldview – but I like Michael, and more importantly I <span style="font-style: italic;">am like</span> Michael, specifically in my reverence for the sacred and the high. I believe that we are all in the same whale and therefore hope to answer him, not with the scorn of the working class, or the kiss of the whip, but with a vision as pure and simple as a rose in winter. A ROSE IN WINTER MICHAEL! Am I speaking loud enough yet? Lower this partition, take off your headphones and I will show you how passion can make a rose blossom from your forehead and vines drip from your nose like shoelaces; thorns pierce your eyelids. I will show you the world you’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">ve</span> been longing for.<br /><br />Should Michael trust me on this one? Should he put down his collected works and chop wood with the rest of the sun-bronzed <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">demi</span>-gods? More importantly will the whale ever dock and the message dribble off its lips to collapse exhausted on the ivory sand?<br /><br />Alright, I admit it Michael, you are making me cry now, which is not exactly what I was aiming for, but which I like anyway. Delicious tears of the people, or the person! Rosewater on my upper lip! I feel that we are halfway there – Communism works, Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Silverblatt</span>! Say it with me, and by saying throw off the fetters of your life and ambition and find yourself in the real utopia that we’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">ve</span> been planning for generations, whose groundwork we laid before you were born and whose spires will continue their putsch long after you yourself have disintegrated. You may die, but the world you bequeath to your children will live on into the night.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiayxHSmuDxbeXcH4rGMu02dK6XEcMZeaCmm_F193zjes4XJfWZOmxJliaSfhRdpQ-FG-BJ3kKLBchZ1mptcmiXiATJsGi6b1vxV4JHVTSaZN5S9WbFv2_COAEOcs996E16t0j1qIGswe3F/s1600-h/IMG_0822.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiayxHSmuDxbeXcH4rGMu02dK6XEcMZeaCmm_F193zjes4XJfWZOmxJliaSfhRdpQ-FG-BJ3kKLBchZ1mptcmiXiATJsGi6b1vxV4JHVTSaZN5S9WbFv2_COAEOcs996E16t0j1qIGswe3F/s320/IMG_0822.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5133139388359426674" border="0" /></a><br />Are you crying yet, Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Silverblatt</span>? Because listen, people, if Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">isn</span>’t crying we haven’t done our job. Rend your clothes and don <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">hairshirt</span> after <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">hairshirt, for</span> an unmoved Michael is the surest indication that everything we have worked for is lost. The winter is upon us. The vast Russian winter. Take refuge in your rabbit holes. Because from now on the only things that you will experience in common are death and sleep and maybe not even the second of these, because the world we have made respects nothing and lurches gradually towards the twenty-four hour work week. The man on which nothing is lost looses everything, and this is the secret Michael. This is the switch you must flip to extricate yourself from this madness of industry, nightmare of endless books…<br /><br />I know you can do it Michael. I have faith in you, I hear a spark travelling through your vast and deeply-sonorous naval cavities, making its way towards the light, moving as it not-moves, like Jonah in his whale. Longtime listener, first time caller, Michael. Take me into your heart and I won’t disappoint.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-16500195666169930342007-11-11T09:10:00.000-05:002007-11-11T16:59:19.100-05:00Sermon on IndustrySeth,<br /><br />I’m sitting here picking my nose and trying to think of how to start this letter – which, of course, is always the problem. How to start. The inertia of life is so powerful and the vice-grip of routine so ever-present that I find myself constantly plotting, scheming, and devising what my girlfriend likes to call “spiritual pyramid schemes” for how to get up. A particularly pertinent problem for a writer, since most creative work is self-structured and therefore lacks the easy motivation of, say, a gallon of water shot up your nostrils.<br /><br />In general, I’m a naturally lazy and even indolent person – indolent, which when used in a medicinal context (about an ulcer, for example), means persistent: slow to develop, progress or heal. So, in order not to stay in bed all day I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">ve</span> had to organize my life into a series of intricate routines, the point of which seems to be to turn a normally shapeless existence into something structured, purposeful.<br /><br />One example is my morning, which I developed the year after I left college and have stuck to rigorously ever since. The keystone is a ridiculously-early wake-up: 4:15 am, on the dot. My alarm goes off on the waist-high bookshelf in our living room; I walk the six or so steps to turn it off (very important, an alarm next to my bed being easy to snooze). Then I go into my bathroom and turn on the light to pee. While peeing, I keep one eye tightly shut, which is a little disorienting, but which makes it easier for me to walk through the pitch-black apartment after I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">ve</span> finished peeing, since my closed eye remains dilated and can therefore see better in the dark. Out in the living room, I turn on the lamp and prepare to make coffee.<br /><br />I am not lying when I say that I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">ve</span> done this exact same thing every morning (barring travel, disaster, and acts of God), for the last three years. The process as it now stands is effective, both streamlined and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">possessing</span> a few little kinks (the one-eye thing, my alarm in the other room) that I’m proud of, because they work, and because they’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">ve</span> evolved like monkey-sticks from the frustrating encounter with reality that is everyone’s day, really, from start to finish.<br /><br />Now, one of the things that forces me to my knees and makes me regularly weep or at least scrunch my face up in a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">simulacrum</span> of weeping is the human mind. I carry mine around with me in a silver dish and exercise it with the same delight I get from putting on a pair of fresh-from-the-box sneakers – a feeling of power, yes, but more importantly of rightness, the feeling a fork probably gets as it’s spearing asparagus. I stand in awe of its redundant beauty – redundant because why should we have these things? Why <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">shouldn</span>’t we just be worming around in the warm earth, bumping into roots and eating our children?<br /><br />There’s so much posturing in writing and art that it’s easy to forget how beautiful and pleasurable a mind can be – but as usual, going back to the primary sources makes things a little more complicated. Virginia Woolf, who suffered from her mind as much as she delighted in it, thinks in her diary about the magic word “Health”<br /><br />“Returning Health<br /><br />This is shown by the power to make images; the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">stockish</span> and fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs. Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shakespeare has it compared to me.”<br /><br />Again and again, I try to pin down why passages like this one, and the books they come from, are so important to me. Books are cities; books are cathedrals. Books are machines that can channel indolence to awe and awe back into indolence with <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Rumpelstiltskin</span>-like efficiency. And the best books can (I really believe this), graft themselves onto you in a way that causes your original organism to react. They can turn sicknesses (depression, exile, prison, or just life) into the precise conditions in which joy can happen.<br /><br />It’s Sunday morning, and I’m obviously feeling <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">sermonly</span>; but I don’t see any real reason why I should feels so charged, so excited. The room is freezing, the heater spasmodic at best, and there’s a bright yellow vacuum cleaner standing about two inches from my left arm – but god, how I love Sunday mornings! I remember being five years old and laying in my bed, listening to my parents sleep, the house creak around me, the wind like a gigantic dog chasing the trees and the leaves and all the other stuff around the yard. It was like the world was lying preserved in jello: inactive, but therefore couched and peaceful. People in general (especially writers) like to use upward-looking words to describe their happiness, but for me, happiness is about ankle-level. It’s that real life that we barely register, the world of drawers and closets and back seats and roots. Right now, for example, my socks on the floor look pretty happy.<br /><br />I don’t know, I’m sure things need to exist in a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">balance</span> – but for me, there’s something indescribably satisfying about making coffee in the morning. It’s as if the process – which I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">ve</span> cut into my life <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">mysteriously</span> over the years and now can only marvel at, as if it were some kind of crop circle that had appeared there beyond my strength to assimilate or change – it’s as if this form releases, rather than blocks my energy. I mean come on, about ten sentences ago I was practically peeing in my pants! But then at the beginning of the post, honestly, I was just sitting here picking my nose and thinking about how bizarre it is to be writing like this, for no particular reason (for no essential reason, at least).<br /><br />These days I think about writing and life more and more as a sort of stone-soup production. You bring the pot and life brings the garden. Some books display the process that another person has taken to adapt to their circumstances. It is particularly heartbreaking when, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">inevitably</span>, this person fails – and maybe this is the biggest difference between <span style="font-style: italic;">The Great Gatsby</span>, for example, and Virginia Woolf’s diaries. One has architecture, design; the other is shifting and incomplete, partial, and imperfect. Or maybe just not interested in perfection.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-18363480841772536432007-11-05T14:36:00.000-05:002007-12-02T10:34:06.839-05:00Ask Her If She Likes Baloney<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPOIYfKn0w4RuQu37A17ZA3uu8LeSiERXwz9zzbGxF9Fh_aSbRZ-p-FWFJpIi3vajjd1dKzSJ8_oh7VEPaLq2aY3PZ-7Qehmq692f-iC1BZLXofyIn3JeTGmWe0Rz0E5tCZ-dcQZ7BWFis/s1600-h/bird_wideweb__430x327,0.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPOIYfKn0w4RuQu37A17ZA3uu8LeSiERXwz9zzbGxF9Fh_aSbRZ-p-FWFJpIi3vajjd1dKzSJ8_oh7VEPaLq2aY3PZ-7Qehmq692f-iC1BZLXofyIn3JeTGmWe0Rz0E5tCZ-dcQZ7BWFis/s320/bird_wideweb__430x327,0.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5129445972800731010" border="0" /></a><br /></div><br />Hard to talk about Bruce without getting emotional; maybe there's no need to, anyway. Argument is calm and rational, but some things plunge beyond argument into the substrata of health and disease, meaning they organize your soul. Bruce is one of these things for me.<br /><br />Like many romances, ours begins with a drought: specifically, the chunk of eight or so years that I lived between the ages of six and fourteen, when my family moved from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Brattleboro</span>, Vermont to Port <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Moresby</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Papua</span> New Guinea to Lusaka, Zambia. The capital letters are just distracting: the most important part about where we were was that it was Not America. So, as the law of supply-and-demand dictates, we were raised under the banner of what I still flatter myself was a very peculiar Not Americanism.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN1-K_3COmzgF2zve_kSTYixUdWtuiG3CIS1ujNKHf6ZpGHqnyJ3SzXhfiLB29vkR3ENDCn0AqVHaAWgP4XxtAbnaHmyyCR0uP62pqUtxAKH2e68C7GuZ3Hd05W2-iXXGwfrmPSdEZnOyZ/s1600-h/EAP.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN1-K_3COmzgF2zve_kSTYixUdWtuiG3CIS1ujNKHf6ZpGHqnyJ3SzXhfiLB29vkR3ENDCn0AqVHaAWgP4XxtAbnaHmyyCR0uP62pqUtxAKH2e68C7GuZ3Hd05W2-iXXGwfrmPSdEZnOyZ/s320/EAP.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5129452745964156818" border="0" /></a><br /></div><br />Flash forward to my junior year of high school, when the walls of the schizo-edenic East Coast boarding school I had been languishing in since my parents moved to Egypt exploded, literally exploded, or rather inverted, figuratively inverted, to a sort of Deep Space Opera I later learned to call <span style="font-style: italic;">Bruce</span>. This was Born To Run, the album that he called "My Shot at the Title." I decided immediately that I would like it.<br /><br />(I don't know about you guys but for me, this is how liking things has pretty much gone my entire life. I decide for whatever reason that I like something, and then I make myself like it until I really do like it. Eventually, I'm so caught up in whatever it is that the delight can be described as "spontaneous." Will feeds delight feeds will feeds delight, back and forth like a <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=xylkO5s976Y">Miranda July Poop Vortex</a>.)<br /><br />These days I'm on the downward spiral of my Bruce obsession - but I still think that he has important things to teach us. For example, I could ask you what you know about your own disease - the real disease I mean - and you probably wouldn't be able to tell me anything. But one way to know your disease is to see it reflected in another man so persuasively and completely that you feel a sort of intuitive sympathy for him. You think "I want to get away from this person," and at the same time "Maybe this guy will know what I'm talking about." You're fascinated, in other words, or repulsed, or whatever.<br /><br />Bruce is rotting: grandly, operatically, and right before our eyes. If a Dylan withers and a McCartney ferments, then a Bruce rots, because he's an American and has spent his entire life running in two directions: mythical past and mythical future. Like all good Americans, he is a prophet of Not America, meaning he's never found rest and never will, and this is what makes the rot so disgustingly <span style="font-style: italic;">visible</span>, like a bad sunburn, or male pattern baldness.<br /><br />Apocryphal, but true, story: I once saw Bruce Springsteen's penis or at least a shadow of it, while weight lifting in downtown Boston. I'd gone to his concert the night before and was wearing my newly bought "Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band" hat, and it was early enough on a Sunday morning that there were only three other guys in the whole place: the owner, a trainer, and a guy who looked a lot like like Bruce Springsteen. Actually, this guy looked so much like Bruce Springsteen that, after he'd finished his workout, I followed him to the bathroom, Sharpie in hand, and prepared to take my chances.<br /><br />The bathroom was cool and white, and filled (I immediately noticed) with a sound like a waterfall gushing over rocks. It was a mighty sound, a sound so intense and vigorous that at first I thought someone had turned all the faucets in the bathroom on at once, as a sort of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">paean</span> to Bruce. As I cleared the corridor, however, I saw that this noise was being made, not in honor of Bruce, but by him! Bruce Springsteen, peeing (I include this for Seth)! And not any pee, but one filled with anguish and a low lament - the kind of pee that makes you glance over from your own place and consider, seriously consider, asking the stranger next to you if he's okay! A pee of terror and loneliness, the likes of which I had never heard before, and hopefully never will again...the pee of Job in the wilderness, or Jonah in his whale. A wild, hortatory pee.<br /><br />When I closed the door Bruce re-sheathed himself and zipped up. "Excuse me," he said, shouldering his way past me. For a few long minutes, I seriously considered tearing the urinal off the wall and enshrining it in my bedroom.<br /><br />Of course he was pretty cooked by "Tunnel of Love" - and that was the late '80s, before I'd even hit double digits. Now he makes albums called "Magic," and asks us to "Rise up" - a song that, more than any of his others, I like to play while running, writing, or taking a particularly difficult shit.<br /><br />Anyway, after Bruce had left, the owner of the weight-room and I watched him walk away through the second-story window. I'd gotten my autograph, but I still wasn't satisfied.<br /><br />"I saw The Edge once, in a pool hall," the owner said.<br /><br />For some reason, I felt very jealous about this.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-63542293399799399582007-11-02T16:08:00.001-04:002007-11-02T16:13:16.117-04:00One Who Dissects Living Rats<span style="font-style: italic;">Alex <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Tilney</span></span> is an exciting man living in exciting times. Like the rest of us, he has battened his head for too long and now emerges seeking original response. He writes "for myself, strangers, and the elderly." He joins the Seventh Draft discussion in full regalia.<br /></span><br />Hey Seth, Josh, and now Tommy (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">yesssss</span></span>),<br /><br />First of all, I wish my name were Attila <span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Jozsef</span></span>.</span><br /><br />I had a beer with Josh last week and he infected me with the plague that produced this blog (another name for the blog could have been 'The Bubo.') Generally, I'm having some trouble lately buying the conceit of naturalistic fiction: 'you will experience the following writing as a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">mimesis</span></span>* of lived experience, and the dream of the story will illuminate people and the world for you.' When I look back over my last full semester of creative work (I wrote the essay this semester), I had a couple stories I was proud of, but the things that have the most live-wire energy are the letters I wrote to my advisor. There it's just me talking and trying to connect with Victor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">LaValle</span></span>, and that's where it seems like the effort to communicate a state of mind finds the most success. And as I'm approaching a lot of my story ideas now, the parts that feel least compelling are the "and then she got out of bed and went to the door to listen…" i.e., the show don't tell parts.<br /><br />We all decided to spend so much time and energy on fiction writing because novels and stories have been kicking our asses since forever, but for the last 6+ months, I just haven't wanted to read any more fiction. I thought it was because I'm lazy; or because I had been writing stories with the aim of having them be 'finished stories' instead of recreations of lived experience, and so I needed to clear out all the built-up <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">writerly</span></span> residue in my brain; or because I get so many stories already from TV, movies, journalism, etc. Maybe all of these reasons are true, but I think, Seth and Josh, you have a point that fiction just doesn't seem to be quite the right tool or toy these days.<br /><br />Like you two (or three), a lot of the ideas I've been having lately are much more marginalia-type stuff, and when I try to turn them into finished stories, I wince. My grandmother's 80<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">th</span></span> birthday party was last month, and the dinner was just overflowing with stuff I wanted to write about, but the idea of making a fictionalization out of X or Y situation just seemed like this huge exhausting detour. So along comes this blog for these other things I want to do, and I'm thankful and excited.<br /><br />Anyway, so, this first post is a little more throat-clearing intro than my posts will be from now on, and more about Jesus and Transformers soon.<br /><br />Before then, though: Josh, you mention that you can't think of a novel that you can open on any page and really like and get drawn into the way you can with Seinfeld. I agree to the rafters, but Infinite Jest jumped into my mind as a huge exception. I can open that book to almost any page and get sucked in, delighted, pissed-off, etc., etc. I know I'm going to get hated on because of Infinite Jest's reputation and because I insist on talking about it even though Josh, who has read seventeen times as many novels as I have, hasn't read this one. Oh, well--when I am doubting fiction, that book still has so much verve and all the people still exist even when they're off-stage, and so it keeps me hopeful.<br /><br />Also, Bruce is cheesy.<br /><br />Yours in grabbing hard young breasts,<br /><br />Alex<br /><br />*(I looked up '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">mimesis</span></span>' again because it's one of those literary terms I'm always a bit hazy on, and another of its meanings that I didn't know is: "the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">occurrence</span> of a disease's symptoms in somebody who does not have the disease, often <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">psychosomatically</span></span> caused.' So maybe the bubo under my literary armpit is a fake. Oh, well.)Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-22080311952261664592007-11-01T17:28:00.000-04:002007-11-07T22:19:42.736-05:00Consta-Poo-Poo<span style="font-style: italic;">While I steam and gather my strength after Seth's </span><span style="font-style: italic;" class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">vicious</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> and irresponsible Bruce-bash, the late, great Tommy Kim (pictured below) has volunteered to take - nay, to righteously </span><span style="font-style: italic;">demolish</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> Seventh Draft <span style="font-style: italic;">stage</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">As a man he cannot possibly top five ten, but as a writer, modern dancer and hockey player he literally towers over his peers. By which I mean, I have one of these "sorrow" posters hanging over my writing desk. Without further ado</span>...<br /><br />Josh and Seth,<br /><br />Someone you know (rhymes with gnarls) once said that you should have a story on why you’re writing your story. Not necessarily autobiographical material, but literally a story like “<a href="http://www.creativeideasforyou.com/mrmisadv.html">Mr. Misadventure</a>” that will keep you centered, focused, a story that will at least help you get outside of yourself and make you engage, in some way, with something beyond your own process. Sounds like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">writerly</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">hoo</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">doo</span>, but I dunno, I was willing to try it.<br /><br />When I was playing hockey in high school I was one of the first to use those breath-right strips on my nose to increase the nasal velocity of the air entering my lungs. Anything to enhance my anaerobic ATP-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">CP</span> energy process. So what story am I holding onto these days to help evacuate the backed up cloaca? Well, I can’t really reveal that. I feel it would diminish whatever elaborate mechanism I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ve</span> constructed to delude myself into thinking I can control my writing.<br /><br />In other words, I’m fucking weird, I have superstitions. I believe in lucky charms, in taping the left shin pad first before the right, etc. I believe in rituals and the power of correlation, which explains why I stuffed my mouth with foil Upper Deck baseball card packaging after getting a Ken <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Griffey</span> Jr. rookie in my first pack. I've stuffed my mouth with the foil packaging ever since, no matter how dusty the package, and when the metal paper touched my fillings, this sour-tasting saliva would burst from the corners of my mouth. This is, I think, talking about something else completely.<br /><br />Wait, let me add this one: when I played video games I would yank my t-shirt at the shoulder, revealing parts of my back, and I would somehow think this odd ritual had some effect on the outcome of the game.<br /><br />Sometimes when I have writer’s <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">consta</span>-poo-poo (this is a term my mother made up, mostly because she has difficulty pronouncing "pay-shun") I read writers I admire, but be careful there, because that strategy can overwhelm you and remind you of how you will never get your work to that level.<br /><br />Other times I will do something intensely solitary, something odd, something Jill would call “fucking weird”. I’ll go to my favorite coffee shop in K-town and use the toilet. To dispense toilet paper, this <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">café</span> bathroom uses a thick <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">boba</span> straw as an axle, a sort of pin to keep the toilet paper spinning smoothly. I don’t know what happened to the original metal pin. I’ll write that detail in my moleskin (yeah, I’m a poser, I use those.)<br /><br />Sometimes I’ll go to the Korean market and pretend I’m examining the pork bellies on display. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Assi</span> Market stores the sliced pork bellies in those wheeled, portable ice cream freezers street peddlers cart around, and I’ll nose through with the giant community tongs. I’ll dig through the clattering slices of frozen meat and fat while perking my ears and listening to conversations around me. Snooping around, being invisible yet infiltrating other people’s lives, that sort of thing. It keeps me aware of this very odd world around us.<br /><br />I’m not sure if this adds anything to anything.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-62405692181913170782007-11-01T09:07:00.000-04:002007-11-01T13:50:42.742-04:00Fuck Writer's BlockJosh,<br /><br />I should be working on something else but I feel compelled to post a blog, mainly so I can push Bruce down, get him out of my face. With each word, he goes down.<br /><br />Yeah, you like that Bruce. Don't you?<br /><br />I have to disagree with your assessment of blog-writing. Actually, I don't even really understand the whole real writing vs. everything else battle. What makes blog writing <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">un</span>-real?<br /><br />Of course, you might feel blog-writing is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">un</span>-real because you don't edit blogs as you do your more serious work. Editing, most writers will say, <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> real writing. And editing, after all, was the notion that launched this blog--the seventh draft. I remember reading a letter from my uncle <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Deano</span>:<br /><br />"You should be glad Neal didn't hear you say 'I felt the need to go back and re-write the novel I am working on.' Right now she is finishing hers which means working through a SEVENTH substantial re-write, some parts re-written more than that. It's not my field but doesn't just writing a novel from beginning to end seem a bit naive? Writing IS revision. Do the work."<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Do the work</span>.<br /><br />I understand this and live this, not just because my uncle, my mentor, told it to me. I understand it because I feel it--I feel this desperate need to go back, to re-work. I'm not sure whether this just isn't something in my psyche trying to show itself to me or whether it's just a weird manic behavior. Perhaps I indulge my urge to re-write because I can't figure out any other way to spend my time. But more likely, I own weird constellations, urging expression.<br /><br />Whatever, it makes sense. When I re-write, I roll up my sleeves, get into the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">nitty</span>-gritty, and I start figuring things out. Working on a sentence, to me, is like working on a specific weirdo <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme">meme</a> in my body--when it's figured out, the meme is actualized and I move on to the next weirdo meme. This is everything to me. This is why I quite literally <span style="font-style: italic;">need</span> to write.<br /><br />To me though, it's all work, good life-giving work. The writing, the re-writing.<br /><br />Sometimes I'll spend an hour re-working a paragraph and then, suddenly, I'll realize I've just recovered from my parent's divorce.<br /><br />Sometimes I'll write a sentence out of the blue and realize I've just pardoned myself for bad behavior.<br /><br />Sometimes nothing.<br /><br />And, of course, you work through the nothing to get to something. The problem is, you can't sustain inspiration, you can only court it. And here's the thing: it happens WHILE you work, it's not something you wait around for.<br /><br />Blogs, letters, e-mails--to me, they're part of it, just as important as the "real" work. Your writing life is just that, your life. When you write a blog, it's not like the blog is not you--it is you. I mean do you really look at your writing as something outside your life? You move from one to the other. You write. You figure things out. Without the blogs, you'd be itching to write elsewhere--you'd be sending mad e-mails; you'd take up letter-writing, you'd deliberately fog your bathroom mirror just so you could finger a few lines on the glass.<br /><br />Remember my "<a href="http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=77596726&blogID=312583080">Season of Triumph</a>" blog? Well, I'm currently writing a short-story called "Season of Triumph." The blog led to the story and now I'm blogging about the story. My last blog, <a href="http://seventhdraft.blogspot.com/2007/10/short-fiction-whats-cool_28.html">that piece of fiction</a>, that goes into my next packet for school. The other recent blog, the <a href="http://seventhdraft.blogspot.com/2007/10/joy-quotient.html">Miranda July blog</a>, well that blog was basically a direct quote of my latest annotation for school.<br /><br />Writer's block is a bullshit dictum created by THE MAN to hold us down. Fuck writer's block.<br /><br />Blogs are important. But now I have to go, because I really should be working on something else--my real work.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-90208606932807468172007-10-31T07:21:00.000-04:002007-12-02T10:35:27.965-05:00You Yourself Must Be the SeventhSeth,<br /><br />Absolute writer’s block this morning: I pull up stories, start picking through them, removing commas and ampersands with the thoroughness of a chimpanzee removing lice from its neighbor’s pelt. But two minutes later I decide that the same paragraph looked better with the original punctuation. At which point I realize that writers’ block, literary constipation, whatever you want to call it has officially set in.<br /><br />One of the interesting things about writing stuff on this blog has been, for me at least, the way that it relieves these moments, or at least makes me feel like I’m experiencing relief. For example, right now I have moved from my traditional “serious writing” armchair, to the more relaxed “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">unserious</span> writing” couch. I am semi-reclined; I begin thinking about the posture of writing, and the way that certain writers prefer certain physical positions while they write. Pushkin, my hero, wrote best lying down, in what I imagine was a gigantic four-poster with grapes and naked women strewn all over it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, wrote while walking. He composed one sentence at a time, in his head, and then wrote the whole article or poem or whatever down as soon as he got home. Edward Said wrote standing up, prowling among a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">study's</span> worth of podiums.<br /><br />So already I’m writing again….but is this a good or a bad thing? <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Shouldn't</span> I really be sitting there bent double, agonizing my way towards mastery? <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Shouldn't</span> I be suffering for my art?<br /><br />Real writing vs. everything else: this mental/spiritual battle royal has occupied me for years, not least of all because I am a puritan through and through and therefore addicted to fairly narrow ideas of work and productivity. Real writing: the work that produces a finished product, something whole and tight and perfect as a microwave - a “machine made out of words” or, failing that, a poem made out of things. Real writing, I assume, would be recognizable the moment I produced it and would fill my life with joy and self-gratification. I would stand back carpenter-style and observe it. “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Ahhh</span>!” I would say....putting my hand on my son's shoulder in a sort of Kleenex moment.<br /><br />That blog entries are not real writing, however, is a fact I have become convinced of lately: one that has confused and shocked me and made me rethink the whole dynamic. It has led me, as I'm sure you’re tired of hearing, even deeper into the thickets of marginalia. But what is this kind of writing, and what does it do to me? Should I, for example, be combing my posts over and removing unnecessary punctuation? Should I be turning my sentences not twice but once, with my hand on the key? Or, is there something powerful in this speed (swiftness) and movement (intuition) that makes the adoration of mastery and perfection seem like the wrong move? “Anyone who looks for perfection in a painting knows nothing about art,” Ruskin said. I ask because I’m curious, I don't know.<br /><br />On this topic: I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ve</span> been reading a book by the Spanish writer/scholar/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">adumbrator</span> Enrique Vila-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Matas</span>, called “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Bartleby</span> & Co.”, whose narrator devotes himself to tracking down all the writers who have ever decided to just put down their pens and not write. These <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Bartlebys</span> – these "Artists of the No" – devote themselves, at a certain point in their careers, to the abandonment literature and the advancement of non-literature. Some of them go to great, even heroic lengths: they write books, tomes, encyclopedias, articles, describing in detail the "real books" they are never going to write. Long philosophical treatises on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">notwriting</span>. Catalogues of footnotes to invisible texts. All in an attempt as the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Bartleby</span> Joseph <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Joubert</span> says, to create something that would “replace ordinary reading, where it is necessary to go from one part to another, with the spectacle of a simultaneous word, in which everything would be said at once without confusion, in a glow that is…total, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">peaceable</span>, intimate and uniform at last.”<br /><br />Talk like this has the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">stupidness</span> of true poetry to me: it makes no sense on a rational level but bites my intuitive line. There’s something in it that I feel I can use…something that pertains to what we’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">ve</span> been talking about over the last couple of months maybe, that touches my obsessions. Early in the book, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Matas</span>’s <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">footnoteist</span> notes something incredible about the author Robert <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Walser</span>:<br /><br />“<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Walser</span>’s entire work, including his ambiguous silence of twenty-eight years, is a commentary on the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself. Perhaps that is why he only wanted to be a walking nobody. Someone has compared <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Walser</span> to a long-distance runner who is on the verge of reaching the longed-for finishing line and stops in surprise, looks around at masters and fellow disciples, and abandons the race, that is to say remains in what is familiar, in an aesthetics of bewilderment.”<br /><br />Aesthetics of bewilderment.<br /><br />Bewilderment…say it seven times and it begins to sound like a gum flavor. An artistic command hidden inside like an iron-on tattoo. I think of a huge stag lifting its head up for some reason. Moss is dripping down its jaws and neck.<br /><br />What happens when the writing of non-writing (this is getting silly) begins to be more interesting than the writing of writing? When the things you do to relieve writers’ block end up feeling better than the story itself?<br /><br />Found a poem last night that explains to me why this blog is called what it’s called. By the Hungarian hunter/gatherer Attila <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Jozsef</span>:<br /><br />The Seventh<br /><br />If you set out in this world,<br />better be born seven times.<br />once, in a house on fire,<br />once, in a freezing flood,<br />once, in a wild madhouse,<br />once, in a field of ripe wheat,<br />once, in an empty cloister,<br />and once among pigs in a sty.<br />Six babes crying, not enough:<br />you yourself must be the seventh.<br /><br />When you must fight to survive,<br />let your enemy see seven.<br />One, away from work on Sunday,<br />one, starting his work on Monday,<br />one, who teaches without payment,<br />one, who learned to swim by drowning,<br />one, who is the seed of a forest,<br />and one, whom wild forefathers protect,<br />but all their tricks are not enough:<br />you yourself must be the seventh.<br /><br />If you want to find a woman,<br />let seven men go for her.<br />One, who gives his heart for words,<br />one, who takes care of himself,<br />one, who claims to be a dreamer,<br />one, who through her skirt can feel her,<br />one, who knows the hooks and snaps,<br />one, who steps upon her scarf:<br />let them buss like flies around her.<br />You yourself must be the seventh.<br /><br />If you write and can afford it,<br />let seven men write your poem.<br />One, who builds a marble village,<br />one, who was born in his sleep,<br />one, who charts the sky and knows it,<br />one, whom words call by his name,<br />one, who perfected his soul,<br />one, who dissects living rats.<br />Two are brave and four are wise;<br />you yourself must be the seventh.<br /><br />And if all went as was written,<br />you will die for seven men.<br />One, who is rocked and suckled,<br />one, who grabs a hard young breast,<br />one, who throws down empty dishes,<br />one, who helps the poor to win,<br />one, who works till he goes to pieces,<br />one, who just stares at the moon.<br />The world will be your tombstone:<br />you yourself must be the seventh.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-43539031830073138462007-10-29T17:50:00.000-04:002007-10-29T20:57:14.859-04:00Candy, Anger and Sleep<span style="font-style: italic;">Candy</span><br /><br />Candy is a marginal food group, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much. Also it is <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">delicious</span>. Also - and I truly, truly love this - you don't buy candy to improve your life. You don't spend an entire off-season rebuilding your candy empire while keeping your eyes securely fixed on an eventual title run. Candy is for the now and is therefore what makes us human, our Achilles heel. It is a strategy for remaining off-balance and develops inevitably into the second two terms of life, Anger and Sleep. It both relieves and itches. In this way, it is a rough equivalent of such narrative starters as: Your Wife, Paper Clip Girl, or the Way My Upstairs Neighbor Has Been Polishing His Floors.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Anger</span><br /><br />The second part of a life of energy, and in some ways the most important.<br /><br />For example: for a long time now, I've been looking for ways to keep myself off balance. I do this because my life is, for the most part, pretty routine. I find myself unable to read the novels I once loved - why read novels, I ask myself? The sensation is like being shot out of one of those old-style catapults, with plot as the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">cata</span>- and me as the -<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">pult</span>. What is the purpose of a novel? (ask yourself this with complete honesty - as in, "Why do I pick up this or that novel?) The answer is: to finish it. Same with a story. I mean, I can watch ten minutes of a Seinfeld episode even if I've seen it a thousand times before, and be filled with delight, scorn, love of fellow man. But try opening even your favorite novel to page six hundred and seven, and reading a line, and convincing yourself that this is something you <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span>.<br /><br />This makes me angry - not the real, out-of-body angry you get when someone cuts you off in the check-out line, but "angry," the force that like Mephistopheles "wills only evil, but does only good." In this way it is the flipside to my joy and maybe only a half-step more honest.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Sleep</span><br /><br />Sleep is what happens after candy and anger, after I have fed my body something it doesn't need and then whipped myself into a state that leads nowhere, leads to nothing. As an American, I am an ecstatic and therefore both terrified of and addicted to waste. I aspire to be one on which "nothing is lost." This is the miraculous dream, right? This is when the stars stand up and start singing out your name like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Mouseketeers</span>?<br /><br />Nap sleep is not like night sleep and this is important to me, since about half my sleep these days comes from naps. Nap sleep is marginal sleep: brief, deep, utterly more pleasurable than the food-pyramid sleep you get at night. Some people want to write a book like a dream, but I want to write a book like a nap.<br /><br />Of course, one problem with napping is that it can erase borders and make you forget things: your name, for example, or just how long you've been napping. It can want to drag you down like a turbine, closer and closer, you're nothing but sleep, you live to sleep.<br /><br />Could I live to sleep? Do you live to sleep? And how many people out there are sleeping right now, in their beds or on couches, subways, haybales, laps? How many people are sleeping RIGHT AT YOU as we speak?<br /><br />Endless sleep is terrifying, it is death or maybe worse than death and at this point it is important to remember that there is always candy.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-52391307909810869732007-10-28T10:29:00.001-04:002007-12-02T11:08:51.459-05:00Short Fiction: What's Cool<span style="font-style: italic;">For <a href="http://seventhdraft.blogspot.com/2007/10/overbabylonia.html">Josh's uncle</a></span>...<br /><br />I used to pee a lot. Now I do a lot of cocaine. The two are not exclusive. They go together. What happened was this: I spend a lot of time dining out. I drink too much wine. I have to pee.<br /><br />And, well, the walk from the table to the bathroom is <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">embarrassing</span>.<br /><br />I mean, have you really ever walked through a crowded restaurant, to go pee, five or six times? Maybe you did it once, not five times. And I know you didn't do it six times because that's the record. Trust me, I contacted the people who keep the records and everything.<br /><br />They told me: Six times, yeah, that's the record.<br /><br />This is terribly uncool. All this peeing. But you know what is cool?<br /><br />Cocaine!<br /><br />Cocaine's just about the coolest thing ever. It's right up there with the girl who wears paperclips on her shoes. I love when she finds paperclips laying on the street. I mean she's full of magic or something because she finds the most boring thing in the world laying on the street and she transforms it, magically, into an emblem of coolness.<br /><br />My emblem of coolness is my rampant cocaine habit.<br /><br />One night, at my favorite place Table, I was peeing. I was embarrassed. It was like the seventh time, a new record. I was thinking of how uncool it was. Then I was hit with an epiphany or something.<br /><br />I thought: What's cool is cocaine.<br /><br />Now when I get up to pee everyone knows I'm really getting up to do more cocaine. Trust me, I can see the looks on the people's faces.<br /><br />They're not saying: Look at that fucking dork, peeing again.<br /><br />They're saying: Look at that Mythical God of Love, doing more cocaine. Isn't he cool? He probably doesn't ever even need to pee.<br /><br />At least that's what Paperclip Girl says. I'm her Mythical God of Love.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9KArALwXj2gEiNXlQDszi2n-idMK3phQzreSzUU0d3JDp9lcvIUEG2tSgQ6Lsm6HTZOxdihKJJMeNkMMlNHk1hxousGuICLG4B-1N3PrL8pTlkKbuxO9JSsb3zPh3TurcBB24aJ8jZMjS/s1600-h/seth-love.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9KArALwXj2gEiNXlQDszi2n-idMK3phQzreSzUU0d3JDp9lcvIUEG2tSgQ6Lsm6HTZOxdihKJJMeNkMMlNHk1hxousGuICLG4B-1N3PrL8pTlkKbuxO9JSsb3zPh3TurcBB24aJ8jZMjS/s320/seth-love.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126407539876138466" border="0" /></a><br />Once, after dining, I drove Paperclip Girl to an abandoned parking lot and fucked her in the backseat of my car.<br /><br />She was like, That's good.<br /><br />But that doesn't include the sounds she was making, or the volume. That's just the words.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">That's good</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">That's good</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">That's good</span>.<br /><br />A bunch of times, just like that, with a lot more Os, and real loud.<br /><br />Afterwards we just sat there, not having to pee or anything. It was cool. She was fiddling with a paperclip which I had lovingly clipped on her nipple.<br /><br />We laughed and laughed.<br /><br />I said: Why is it that sex ends in laughter?<br /><br />She said: When it ends in crying that means you fucked up somewhere along the line.<br /><br />But anyway, I like it best when I get up, I go pee, I do more cocaine, and when I come back Paperclip Girl is there waiting, the food has been served, and everyone in the whole place knows, <span style="font-style: italic;">really knows</span>, that I only got up because I wanted to do more cocaine before eating.<br /><br />Only thing, I'm never hungry when I dine out anymore. I don't get it. I just keep thinking about "after dining", about, you know, making love, which I previously called fucking, but now realize is probably just loving.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-418006623450631123.post-63006481430692291382007-10-28T09:37:00.000-04:002007-11-15T16:16:31.112-05:00OverbabyloniaSeth,<br /><br />Before getting back to our Zeno’s paradox-type enrichment/demolishing of daily life, I wanted to pause for a second, lift my head up, shake, and take a minute to savor the great wet dog smell of other people. One of the strange things about writing online being, amazingly enough, that both strangers and loved ones can read your shit and then have an opinion of it, and that there’s nothing you can do about it. Bizarre, right? The desk drawer where I used to stash my aborted masterpieces is getting so lonely that I can hear it mewing at night like a lamb at pasture…<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh453PMq9UtRHeBZV7pb_VzytkMp7G3gbR6lLMjJxboLapV6ctq9e43nnF_kEp2fB98oK_4g-yV1uIli9Hc8_0wNRAZUxbmLp_sQdovhs5S3xDnVhotkIPbGCT53JvxfbnzhaLNNbbgQcnt/s1600-h/DSB.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 421px; height: 273px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh453PMq9UtRHeBZV7pb_VzytkMp7G3gbR6lLMjJxboLapV6ctq9e43nnF_kEp2fB98oK_4g-yV1uIli9Hc8_0wNRAZUxbmLp_sQdovhs5S3xDnVhotkIPbGCT53JvxfbnzhaLNNbbgQcnt/s320/DSB.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126382205124769634" border="0" /></a><br />The Fascination of the Fucked Up and Brilliant Uncle is a known quantity in the world, despite its mysteriousness. But why the uncle? Why not (and wouldn’t this be about a hundred times more cosmically fair) the father? Why not Barak Obama, who seems to me like he’s probably a fun enough uncle but a lousy father? Tolstoy? Steven Spielberg?<br /><br />My own uncle has become more and more important to me as I've gotten older, and especially so since his sister died two and a half years ago. As a kid I remember him as kind of a shit…a lovable shit, but a shit nonetheless. He and my mom argued whenever they met, there was tension, I mean they had a whole childhood’s worth of issues that I have no idea about and never will probably.<br /><br />One afternoon we ate lunch together at Red Lobster; at a certain point I asked to go to the bathroom, where I peed, washed my hands, and then stared calmly at my face in the mirror. My face, which at that point I decided looked nothing like either my mom’s or my uncle's, and which therefore was completely innocent, spotless, uncconected with their problems. I had been sent to this planet to observe and record and would be whisked back up to my home planet upon my eighteenth birthday. So I spent the rest of the meal watching the shrimp scampy fly from behind the dumb waiter.<br /><br />(Actually, that last part never happened and never would happen: my family is Scotch-Irish and would literally walk the Red Lobster plank before they’d let even a single slice of lemon garnish go to waste.)<br /><br />Fifteen years later the mothership still hasn't circled, and I've become at least partially convinced that there are things you can’t escape. To be honest, I've become fascinated with the things you can’t escape. Family being one of the big ones. My soul is a battlefield where my father, mother, and whatever other ancestors might want to show up fight for supremacy, and there are unfortunately no dumb waiters to hide behind.<br /><br />This preamble is getting kind of ridiculous, so I’ll speed it up. My uncle, who visits me every once in a while but whose permanent whereabouts have been unknown to us for some time (some say Indian reservation, some Hawaii, or prison, but I have insider information that points to Shanghai and a small but lucrative expatriate video rental business) has begun sending me emails about this blog. Interesting emails. To say that his angle of access is unique is understating it – I mean this is the guy who, I am not kidding, used to read my brother and I a page of Finnegan’s Wake while we were taking our nightly bath. Given that both of us kids had to fit in a single bathtub for that arrangement to work out, I’d say that our combined ages at that point were probably not even in the double digits.<br /><br />Anyway, here’s Screwtape on your last entry, blogging, and the State of the Soul:<br /><br />“i dug seth's recent gristlogue on 7thdraft and kept mulling what we were in disco about on the pierrepont street couch: writing for an 'audience' v. the interior madness & conflict we keep to ourselves, & only capture 'diaretically' in an effort to explain said incongruities TO ourselves (a losing proposition, mostly)<br /><br />for instance in the 'journal' version he woulda done that poor girl in the office. right in the ass, bent over the copier, her moans barely stifled as a stack of corporate balance sheets are spit out to the rythym of his thrusts... [sorry, but we all know this is closer to the psychic truth than any 'reality' could be!]<br /><br />it woulda been : "how could i do this to my wife whom i love??" -kinda schtick, ---the counterintuitive acting against our own best interests we all know & love so well its become the practical fabric of our existence; part of every story, every film...<br /><br />then it occurred to me, you - you & this particular associate, par example - may simply be too good-hearted as people to pull this off. you may simply lack the type of mean-spirited, selfish, & abusive instincts required to entertain an audience riddled with covert pathologies & obsessions<br /><br />for instance i would never tell ANYONE but my diary something like: "women should be routinely cornholed until they drop", etc. - a horrible, rotten thought indeedy - and yet one proffered only 1/2 in jest, since its amazing to me how many times i find myself drifting down that burnt brown dirt road...<br /><br />its the core misanthropy you're missing, lad...<br /><br />and then the killer: "WHY IS EVERYONE SO FUCKED UP AND WOUNDED?"<br /><br />wow, now THAT, that is at the very heart of the matter, isnt it. when you get right down to it & stop lying & running....it stunned me right off the side of my chair. wowwowwow....oww-wow. brilliant.<br /><br />actually once on the screen porch in Berkley several years ago i broached this very subject with a friend, and she told me almost exactly the same thing. shocked the shit outta me then & it still does. my point? you knew i was dragging you along towards one?<br /><br />well i laid the groundwerk with you & el last time at clark's, non?? did you see it rearing its ugly head then? or did my overbabylonia only cloud it up?<br /><br />OK>>lets reverse engineer this pudding for a moment. in other words, the psychic landscape may not be a function of unintended 'bad' consequences, as if we didnt want to be so detached from & hostile towards one another deep down but QUITE TO THE CONTRARY - what if its....<br /><br />-----------------------> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">TRAUMATOPHILIA</span></span></span>???"Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08087665501043864633noreply@blogger.com6