The Heart Arcade

Satan, The Other and The Homeless in LA

2010-01-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

“My husband’s up in heaven, but he sure is making his way down to hell.”
Tommy Kim eavesdropping on Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Like I mentioned on my text message, I'm reading "Paradise Lost" for a number of reasons. I feel like it's one of those "party-line" books, a piece of literature you can say you've read in order to be designated as learned.

I'm only on Book I, but I'm getting a depiction of Satan that is a more generous allegory than that of the cartoonish versions.

The intro to this book has a good essay on this very topic of Satan as an analogue to all idolatry and symbol worshiping. I'm guessing Milton viewed any form of "objectification of the human subject" as Satan, and when we start looking at work (writing and day job) as a separate thing, treating the human subject as a “thing”, like a baseball card whose value can be quantified, we are lost in the darkness, abutting the other fallen angels in pandemonium. It’s like we search for something true and rewarding from something as un-human as a job, a mistake I made a few years ago when I took my poor performance at work personally (“Tommy, you’re just not leveraging your skills properly”).

So what is the effect of giving ourselves to this thing outside of us? David Foster Wallace seems to think that we all have this intense willingness to give ourselves away to an organized set of beliefs, that it's coded in our DNA. Whether it’s the church, the office, the arts, etc we want to hurl our souls, headlong into the group. His characters are living representations of what happens when we give too much.

Milton predicted this. Now, the modern embodiments seem to live inside of the works of David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami and Thom Yorke.

The yellow-eyed fallen angel accompanies Hal Incandenza when he’s smoking out in the basement of the Academy. He’s with Toru when he’s trapped in the well. In the darkest moments of loneliness, Satan is the one true thing in the lives of these characters, making them feel something, even if it’s despair. At least it’s not Nothing, or Milton’s “Abyss”.

I see, throughout your posts, a slow continental drift between two distinct worlds that most people see as qualitatively different. You, my friend, see them as existing as one world. The writing world, which some see as recreational or, in my situation at work, as a hobby equaled to golf or stock-picking, is more than an external action taken on the top of a turret. What some people don’t realize is that they are confusing the sign for the referent, much like Satan does in Paradise Lost. The Devil prances around the craggy depths of hell as if he can raise himself above the Maker, when he is himself a product of the maker. Satan is a literalist, unable to see beyond his self, unable to see that his very existence was already designed and approved by the Man.

My life and my writing are not qualitatively different. To treat them separately is to be tyrannized by the literal, to inhabit Satan’s pandemonium and to be deprived of the generosity of imagination.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

I hope I’m not diverting this blog into something too religious. I’m not trying to proselytize or wave a bible in the air and smack anyone in the face with it. I’m just trying to work within the medium here. But before you can even get going in the writing, Josh, before you can imagine an un-loneliness, compassion has to exist for yourself. The Other does not exist without being compassionate to the self, something Dominic taught me in my last semester. So on that note, be good, to yourself. I’m depending on it.

PS: I've spent a good 30 minutes formating this thing at work. I'm glad I just announced that.

Thanks and a Gauntlet

2010-01-25T02:39:00.000-08:00

I wrote the seven posts on sin listed below this one on your web browser over about three weeks, starting a little after Christmas 2009 and ending about a week ago, mid-January 2010. When I finished the first one, I had no idea that I'd want to continue the theme - but the sensation of writing "out loud" (a strange phrase, but this is how blogging always feels to me) about my past and pseudo-spiritual predilections was so pleasurable that it made me want to keep going. Looking back, I wish I'd kept the autobiographical strain up. I also wish I'd been a bit more succinct. And that I had a pony named Marigold.

I've cleaned up what typos I could spot - there are probably plenty more. I should thank especially trixie delicious, a set of whose Seven Sin plates hangs in our living room. They are my girlfriend's most prized possessions. Check trixie's etsy page out for more wonderful crockery-related translations. Seriously, these plates are genius.

The last thing I wanted was for any of this to feel monolithic. To my mind, blogging's biggest evolution over print is its ability to trace the response part of the call and response dynamic in writing. So please, if anyone reading this has any thoughts on sin, art, creation, deformation, or Scarlett Johansson, post a comment. I, at least, will be reading closely.

As for my fellow Heart Arcadians: the only way we'll be able to put this all behind us is if y'all throw something up. I am triple dog daring you.

Rage and Loneliness

2010-01-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

Finally, wrath. Western literature begins with it, in a full on drop-kick that knocks us into the dust.

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos…

Perseus’s (the website, not the hero) online Greek dictionary understands that first word as “wrath, lasting anger”; but though Achilles' emotion is unchanging, like everything the Greeks called divine, our understanding of it will always rely on that most mortal of all pursuits: translation. In English, the versions reach deep into literary prehistory, like rungs on a ladder. Alexander Pope’s, for example, kicks off with:

“Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess sing!”

To me, this couplet is like a particularly difficult yoga pose, or the opening sequence of a Hollywood action movie: contorted, obscurely balanced and – to an unsympathetic observer, at least – completely ridiculous. Much syntactic madness is inflicted in the name of rhyme; but despite our modern touchiness at this type of deformation, the Iliad’s central problem is still there, poised like a teacup on the tip of a sword. Wrath is sung, exclamation point – not sung of, or sung about, but SUNG! The lack of preposition suggests invocation rather than paraphrase: an act that, like Christmas Mass or a particularly vigorous touch football game, aspires to become what it describes. In other words sing this wrath, goddess, and in singing make us feel it. Kindle our hearts.

In the history of literature as it's known to us, then, wrath is a brushing of invisible dirt off our very real shoulders: the opening stutter-step with which we indicated (and indicate) our boredom, as a species, with walking, and a desire to elevate our body into a higher and more deeply useful sphere. As with all dances, however, the steps change over the years. Watch the just-departed 20th century sing its way out of the Homeric gates:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son Achilleus,
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold on the Achaians.” (Lattimore, 1951)

“Anger be your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’s anger doomed and ruinous…” (Fitzgerald, 1974)

“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses...” (Fagels, 1990)

As the years pass, composure slips from the original poem's shoulders like the silk bathrobe of a heavyweight fighter, revealing lines so muscled that they begin to seem more brutal than classical. The brilliant contemporary poet Christopher Logue completes this transformation with a version of the Iliad whose wrath is truly placed on our tongue and swallowed. Here’s his description of Patroclus’s thrown spear skewering Akafact:

“As Akafact fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull.
His dead jaw gaped. His soul
Crawled off his tongue and vanished into sunlight.” (Logue, War Music, p. 153)

Given how soaked through these lines are with pleasure, it should be no surprise that the wrath they incarnate is pleasurable to us. Reading Logue’s Homer is unsettling and enlightening over and over again exactly because of how much pleasure it not just takes but makes us feel in its violence. Like Kill Bill vol. 1 (in my opinion our second greatest contemporary translation of the Iliad next to Logue’s), it illustrates how hypocritical it is for us to say, with Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, that “It’s no real pleasure in life.” Actually, one of the problems of art is exactly that: no matter how rigorously we try to portray sin as terrible, monotonous, and limiting, our very portrayals are, by virtue of their being works of art, sculpted, powerful, and suffused with meaning. Admit it: you kind of sort of love the Misfit. And you love Achilles, or rather Brad Pitt, despite the fact that the work he exists in portrays him as the Slave (and therefore, we rush to conclude, the Master) of his passion.

I’m belaboring this point, which probably seems antithetical to my larger, pan-blogular argument about the fundamental sterility of sin, because I think it frames one of the biggest temptations I face as an artist: namely, to mistake the romantic creations of the books I read for their much less romantic creators. I call this The Stephen Daedalus Syndrome, after Joyce’s “autobiographical” hero from the Portrait and Ulysses. Sharp as a tack, “doomed and ruinous” as any Greek hero, he drags his roiling creativity through the Dublin of both books. For a good ten years, I was deeply in love with him, partly because of how much like me he seemed to be, and partly because of how much better than me he always was. But a while ago, I came to a realization: Stephen Deadalus did not write Ulysses. He couldn’t have, in the same way that Paul Morel couldn’t write Sons and Lovers: not because they lacked ability, but because there was something deeply adolescent in them, meaning something that, for all its promise, clung to its potential in order to avoid risking failure, which is after all the price of any communicative creativity.

As a young, failing, frustrated and frustrating writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of led life will allow me a writing one. I also spend a lot of barely-wrested time staring at my computer screen, wondering why nothing's happening. One of the things I’ve come to dislike about these posts is how much they seem to put me on the side of the normal and normative in fiction, as if I were trying to be a sort of James Woods lite. But as much as I love Woods, along with the rest of the great British belle-lettrist tradition that stretches from Coleridge and Hazlitt to Ricks, Bayley, Pritchett, et al, it would be facetious and dishonest of me to claim membership in their tribe - not to mention the rhetorical self-confidence conferred by that membership. Anglicans protest only to form new communities; but the American tradition is an archipelago of antinomians that curls like a nautilus towards greater and greater loneliness. Our brains breed islands, as Bishop’s Crusoe puts it. And if those islands found cities in the future, we should remember to be conservative with our conservatism – for the unmannered now may seem thoroughly normal in the future, even sophisticated. Think Stein, that disciple of Henry James, or Picasso’s portrait, which he admitted did not look like her. “But it will,” he said.

Still, the new and different is not always the prophetic, and it is every writer’s job to decide how much of his tradition he can abandon, and how much of himself he can indulge. Not every passion deserves to be fed – or rather, within every passion there is a bet being made (if not in the sufferer, then at least on him), that the voice being heard is God’s. If it’s not God’s, we’d better believe it is – either way, we’d better be skilled and persuasive enough to convince others that it is. Because the loneliness of an artist who cannot believe in his or her own art is a deep one, and no amount of readers or rewards will be able to change that.

The French philosopher/Alsatian Simone Weil, who died when she was 34 from tuberculosis and self-enforced starvation, kept a copy of the Iliad by her bed. “A Poem of Force” she called it – though to her, the rage of the book’s characters was something that the book itself ended up condemning, through relentless accumulation. In this way, it was less a thriller and more a war movie, like Saving Private Ryan or Plattoon – or better yet, an Apocalypse. There may be people who encounter works like this and find themselves thrilled to the point of imitation, but Weil wasn’t one of them; on the contrary, her Iliad, unlike Logue's, denounces the pre-Christian world of might makes right with a vehemence that is absolutely unwavering. You want man in nature? You want to follow your passions without any conscious or cultural checks? Well then, here you go. Breathe deep. That faint metallic scent you smell is your own helplessness in the face of the Gods.

For me, sin is real because loneliness and isolation are real, and the self-devouring is everywhere. It’s also real because writing is life and life is writing, the one an allegory for the other. If we take this connection seriously, I think, we bring ourselves closer to an understanding of what it means to be both creative and happy in the world. We also get a sense of how difficult it is, not just to understand ourselves, but to pour out the rich little glass of our personality in a way that enriches both it and the larger community. Despite the romantic image of the writer holed up in his tower that has been foisted on us for at least a century, I understand writing as a fundamentally social act. It is work, not Mozartian work that flows from our fingertips like snot from a runny nose, but achieved work, half gift, half labor, whose deep desire, like ours, is to be shared.

Why I Keep Talking about this Shit

2010-01-16T04:40:00.000-08:00

What’s going on here? Why bother talking about something as abstract and anachronistic as sin? Why open myself up so obviously to charges of spiritual dilettantism (from people who are more serious about religion than myself), and cranky irrelevance (from people who are less so)?

It’s hard to ignore questions like this, as I sit here at six o’clock in the morning, staring out at the Northern New England darkness, wondering how much there is left to say about “wrath”, “greed”, and the whole abstract mechanism in general. I mean, even if we grant that there are certain types of human behavior that God doesn’t like (an idea that must remain securely rhetorical for some people), how can we seriously believe that a list of seven words, translated and misappropriated from Greek and Latin traditions, can be anything more than the barest of placeholders for these types of behavior? And how can we pretend that any thought about them is something more than an exercise: a way to make ourselves seem more serious than we are, by harvesting the philosophically-intriguing categories of a religion without really taking seriously the whole heaven-harps-halos mythology that makes those categories so significant to the vast majority of the people who use them?

If I was raised with any sort of religion at all, it was the WASPy Protestantism that encourages me to cherry-pick spiritual truths so long as I accept the radiant basement-dwelling of a home-made spiritual world. In this way, I don’t think I’m that much different from the rest of America. Talking about things like what happens after we die, or what it means to be a good person, my voice inevitably lowers, and my shoulders hunch. I begin to feel like I’m walking through a hushed pine grove, or maybe hidden beneath a pile of cushions. I remember an old Teddy Ruxpin adventure when the gang is shrunk down to the size of chess pieces and then left to wander around the underside and interior of their apartment sofa. The landscape is lunar – full of galloping bugs and pennies the size of wagon-wheels – but still, at the same time, deeply intimate. Strange as it may be, it’s still their sofa: an object that they’ve lived with their entire lives. Which is kind of how I feel when I start talking about these things.

Does it sound ridiculous to say that I get that same intimate/strange feeling when I talk about certain aspects of writing? Probably – but there’s no way around it: at this point in my life, writing is the most undivided form attention that I practice. It’s the way I access the world: the door that leads most reliably to the inner chamber. Other processes (I am tempted to say all other processes) may allegorize it – sex, for example, or chopping wood or restocking hospital supply closets – and therefore give me helpful ways to think about what I’m doing, the same way that studying a painting can help us understand something about the symphony we’re writing. But when it comes down to brass tacks, writing is what I’m interested in. Or not writing, so much as making, in all these fields (and here, I think I’m going to pull a Tolstoy and say, simply, and in full confidence, that you know what I mean).

When I think about sin, then, it is as a writer who believes that the problems of writing are the problems of life, and that, if we stay open-minded and attentive enough, an observation of our left hands will always help us understand what our right ones are doing. The Old Testament contains two things, stories and laws; but what the New Testament reminds us is that both of these are tools for understanding and manipulating that strange border in each of us where our behavior in the outside world shapes, and is shaped by, who we are inside ourselves. Religion as primitive cognitive behavioral therapy? To my mind, there’s nothing even remotely primitive about it. On the contrary, what we’re talking about here is a highly-sophisticated piece of spiritual technology, which furthermore is continually evolving and being updated by its users, generation after generation. Like all living languages – like the natural world itself – it is open source, in the truest sense of those words.

But even admitting this, the question remains: what does it help us do? Well (to begin with, since even my leviathan-sized ego has to admit that its attempts to plumb the depths here are cursory and limited), like any book, the Bible can be seen as a sort of virtual reality, which allows us to imaginatively experience certain difficult situations in a very refined form. In refining these situations, I would argue, it also poses, or at least invites us to understand them. Osip Mandelstam linked this with the domesticating culture of the ancient Greeks (Hellenes):

“Anyone who feels himself a Hellene must be on his guard now as two thousand years ago. You can’t Hellenize the world once and for all the way you can repaint a house. The Christian world is an organism, a living body. The tissues of our world are renewed by death. We have to struggle with the barbarism of a new life, because there, in the new life which is in full bloom, death is unvanquished! While death exists in the world, Hellenism will be, because Christianity Hellenizes death…” (Pushkin and Scriabin, Selected Essays, p. 127)

In other words, Christianity takes the most terrifying and difficult thing in the universe – namely, death – and makes it just another part of our emotional living room. The Bible – ostensibly the most victorious book ever written – is full of failure. If you don’t believe me, read for yourself: you will be amazed, I promise, by the sad epilogues of almost every one of the Biblical heroes, from Moses to Noah to David, to Christ himself. They live in God – and then again, taking the writer’s point of view, it is impossible for me not to see this as translating into something like “they live in a creative spirit, their inner and outer worlds line up in a way that makes it possible for them to create”. But that window of creation, like a square of sunlight in an overcast afternoon, only lasts so long. The question, then, is what to do, not with our blessed moments (since in those moments, we don’t need to ask any questions: we just write), but between them, when they have gone away. How to live without God, or good writing, or happiness, or work.

Or, how to make these things come back. With this turn, I think, we move from the desert of the Old Testament, with its disasters and exoduses and late-night angel wrasslings, and into the New Testament’s hemmed, though flourishing garden. Sin in the OT is a matter of disobeying laws: eating pork is a “sin”. But Christ as I understand him both refines and, more importantly, relocates the spiritual battle: now, in addition to our behavior outside, there will be our behavior inside. Sin is “soul error”, to use Montaigne’s phrase: a disalignment, or malformation, which alienates us from our own creative instinct (Hmmm....). Gripped by greed, for example, we are not empowered but consumed. We quite literally “miss the point” of what we are doing, not to mention life in general: we pursue things that do not make us happy and husband traits or habits that are self-defeating. And the result is that death takes over, in a way that is frustrating instead of fructifying.

If I’ve spent far too much of everyone’s time here thinking about all this, it’s because I find it immensely applicable to any creative work, but particularly to writing, which is after all what we spend all day doing or trying to do. Greed, for example, is what I see in the way I load some of my paragraphs with imagery. I’m like a kid in a candy store: I legitimately love comparing the material of life, finding resemblances, how this looks like that. In and of itself, this is, I think one of my greatest strengths as a writer. But when I indulge it too much, the page begins to sag. My reader’s attention gets lost; my own attention gets lost even, or stopped, like water attempting to make its way through a clogged pipe. The piece as a whole fails, because a larger proportion has been sacrificed for miniature workmanship. So what was started, ostensibly, as an act of communication turns its back, not only on its audience, but also on the very thing that it is trying to communicate. Insert your own indulgence here.

(not that there’s anything wrong, in and of itself, with working Joyce-like all day on a sentence. But the result has to be something that fits in with a larger pattern.)

I’ll stop here, for today. For your own indulgence with all this hooplah, attentive or not, I can only offer my thanks and sincere belief that what I’m talking about here is worth looking into. Life is a constant creation; the Bible is a record of creation; writing is our own creating, our profession and vocation. There’s nothing holy about it. At least, there’s nothing any holier about it than there is about picking your nose, or getting stuck in traffic or going skating. Books help us transform the world into something useful. In a very real and tangible way, they allow us to join in the fun.

I Want You

2010-01-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

Working as a hospital orderly teaches you, among other things, that the human body is a temple lodged precariously between currents of quicksand and wind. Two disasters can happen to this temple: 1) a total movement, or 2) a total solidity.

Think of total movement as life-overload, in which the flow state that we lust after is courted to the point that it begins sleeping on our couch and using our credit cards. One of the most visionary moments in the recent disaster epic/Woody Harrison vehicle 2012 was when a tiny passenger jet took off to find the normally uncluttered Las Vegas air transformed into a maze of fire and falling buildings. This, my friends, is your body melting down. In my job, it means a patient can’t stop shitting, bleeding, throwing up, etc. If uncorrected, it leads to a disintegration that is simultaneously both larger and smaller: smaller in that cells burst and organs liquefy, larger in that the body itself expires. As any cholera sufferer will tell you, diarrhea can kill. Easily. All it takes is for your body to get so excited that it either forgets how, or loses the ability, to stop.

Solidity, on the other hand, is the body stopping too much, from fear or misunderstanding or even anger. It starts with a clench and runs to irritation. Alain (Emile De Chartier, secret philosophical godfather to both Sartre and Simone Weil) gives us a simple and helpful example:

“If you rub your eye when you have a gnat in it, or a bit of dust, it will bother you for two or three hours; just keep your two hands still and look at the end of your nose; soon the flow of tears will relieve your discomfort.” (On Happiness, p. 28)

Often, medicine will help us induce this composure; but a failure to do so will lead (again, in my rather messy professional experience) to constipation, nausea, fester and boil. At the hospital where I work, patients – no matter how serious their conditions – are strongly encouraged to exercise three times a day. For many, this means simply sitting in a chair for a half hour. Others do laps, their IVs trailing behind them like thin and worried butlers. But no matter how bad what they have is, the goal is the same: to get them moving again.

Any philosophy, religion or literature that ignores the body is doomed to wither into the prized pet of a decrepit coterie; that Christianity (along with all the other world religions) has not should clue us in to the rootedness of its wisdom – despite all popular and institutional prejudice. Read the Song of Songs, or Genesis, or even the Gospel of Luke again: desire is so pervasive in these books that we forget to look for it. Read Leviticus, in which an ungiving mesh of rituals and laws is laid over Israel like a lace tablecloth over a pool of blood. Then think of those stories in which this pattern is rent. You won’t have to think long: there are very, very many of them.

A study of any one sin reveals the similarity of all sins; but when it comes to physical desire, lust is where we start. What is it? In America today I see us talking about desire in one of two ways: either it is a) a poisonous bad thing to be avoided at all costs, or b) a life-giving, truth-affirming force that has the potential to break through your staid bourgeois comforts and let life in, man. But isn’t choosing between these two options like choosing between dysentery and paralysis? If we actually read the Bible, on the other hand, we find a world that is neither one nor the other: a world in which desire is like air or food, a necessary component of human life, desirous and terrible at the same time but then hey, what isn’t? Adam lusts after Eve, David lusts after Bathsheba, Christ lusts after Mary Magdalene, Judas lusts after Christ (er…I mean, Sam/Gollum lusts after Frodo!). Saying this, however, is a far cry from admitting that “anything goes”; if anything, what we begin to see is how the book of books can be understood as a study on how to avoid the comic/tragic exaggeration of desire, which I think we can safely call “lust”.

Maybe not safely – though I do maintain that the balance, no matter how precarious, is what we all really want, and that a sincere succumbing to desire or fear is more a misunderstanding of how we can achieve that balance, than a rejection of it. Lust, like pride, or envy, is an attempt to transcend – a willful and childish disregarding of proportion. It differs from desire in the same way that Anne Carson’s Socratic eros differs from the bad reading of her Lysian dilettante. Please excuse the parentheticals: despite Carson’s plainwater prose this shit is VERY difficult (for me at least), even after you’ve read the whole book:

“In Sokrates’ view, a true logos [a true written argument or work] has this in common with a real love affair, that it must be lived out in time. It is not the same backwards as forwards, it cannot be entered at any point, or frozen at its acme, or dismissed when fascination falters. A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer, like Lysias [villain and fool of the Phaedrus, the dialogue under discussion], may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time. So readers and writers dabble in the glamor of grammata without submitting themselves to wholesale erotic takeover or the change of self entailed in it. Like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship, a reader may titillate himself with the siren song of knowledge and sail past intact. It is a kind of voyeurism, as we see when we watch Phaedrus [Robin to Sokrates’ Batman, at least here] seduced by the written word of Lysias. In Plato’s view, the Lysian text is as philosophic pornography when compared with the erotic logos of Sokrates.” (Eros the Bittersweet, p. 165)

This quote is a diamond: turn it in your hand and watch as thought fractures into new alignments. On this particular circuit, I am struck above all else by how Carson, while writing a book about erotic love, can make me feel that true eros (that is, for the purposes of our argument, true desire, rather than simple lust) must be committed, even when “fascination falters”. To me, this brings the very Greek-Greek eros much closer to the Christian-Greek agape, which is the word that appears in the gospels. The relevance of this swerve is as important for writers as it is for doctors. Life lusts after death in the same way that a page of any book, anywhere, longs to be blank again. The created object (body or book) is a temple perched between currents: like a sewer grate, it would cave in if too solid, be swept away if too flimsy. So all structures aspire to the harplike stringing between heaven and earth

How hard is it to remember this? Or, even better, how easy is it to forget this? Anyone who has found themselves compromised by lust will tell you how easy, and if you don't believe them, that's fine: just beware that the history of the human race is full of recorded examples of men and women who thought they were bodiless, pure wills. The mind can chose not to recognize consequence, if necessary; but the body is where consequence writes itself. Just look at a lifelong smoker. In artistic terms, this consequence is not something to be avoided: if anything, I think what Carson and the Bible both suggest (as much as an encyclopedia and a lake can suggest anything) is that it is precisely when we accept the consequences of our desire that we move out of the creationless desert of lust and into the creative kingdom of desire and satisfaction. The sin, then, is not in wishing to overstep boundaries (or even in overstepping boundaries), but in the way that we try to tell ourselves that everything is ok, everything is the same. We can do whatever we want. We can't do whatever we want, in life or art. But then, things would be stupefyingly boring and completely meaningless if we could.

The Green Room

2010-01-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

I was made for jealousy. My brother, born two and a half years later, seemed perfect in every respect: he was happy, cute, blonde, and, most importantly, athletic, with the musculature and coordination of a superchimp. Meanwhile, I could barely walk across the room without tripping over my ankles. Gravity is how the universe expresses its love; but to the uncoordinated this love seems embarrassing, even compromising. We want to be free. And no matter what element we chose, my brother always seemed about 15% freer than I was.

The literature of envy is rich, probably because writers and artists, existing as they do in a world of limited attention, are so naturally competitive. Even Goethe, who sat on German writing like an elephant on a chandelier, said: “The root evil: everyone would like to be what he could be, and would like the rest to be nothing, indeed, not to be.” In other words, no matter how much our sense of our own excellence inflates, it will never be able to detach itself from the surrounding social ground and float free. The gigantic little brother of the world will always be there to remind you how assailable your success is, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Other national genii – that is, other artists who we now understand to be, not just greats, but actual founders, firsts – have been similarly preoccupied with the jealousy theme. In Alexander Pushkin’s mini-drama “Mozart and Salieri” (adapted into a play and, eventually, Milos Forman’s Pushkinian film “Amadeus”), Salieri lays out his reasons for murdering Mozart with a metaphysical tenacity reminiscent of the best Dostoyevskian criminal. “People say that there’s no justice on earth. Well there isn’t any in heaven either.” His complaint against Mozart, then, is that he manages to embody an injustice that somehow manages to feel both cosmic and personal. Life is not fair: more specifically, my life is not fair. Mozart’s self-assured reply to this is genial, even bland: “Genius never commits a crime.” So, by murdering Mozart, Salieri unwittingly proves his own mediocrity (in the play, though not in the movie, where he’s wheeled away cackling and triumphant: a Satan who has managed, finally, to correct God).

Salieri’s monologue is a room: a room that we all inhabit occasionally and sometimes get comfortable in, to the point that, even if we were shown a way out, we wouldn’t take it. I remember for example what it was like to “celebrate” my eighteenth birthday by going to the drive-in with my parents. There, in the back seat of our forest-green minivan, I stared up at the ceiling as the felt of the floor-mats pricked my neck. I had never felt more miserable in my entire life – and the reason I had never felt more miserable was that each laugh or shout that I heard outside my window seemed like it had been conceived, crafted, and carefully launched in a single-minded attempt convince me of my own worthlessness. I felt alone, in other words; but in one of envy’s great paradoxes, I also felt like the still center of a closed and airless circle that had been created and was now being maintained by every single person in the world other than myself. Had someone whispered in my ear, at that moment, that there was no justice in either earth or heaven, I would have known what they meant. Jealousy, like all the sins, makes the world feel completely personal. That it is not may point the way to that door, and inspire us with the desire to walk through it.

What is the opposite of envy? Humility doesn’t exactly get it: when I try to be humble about the people I envy, I usually just end up denigrating them through some more-inclusive means (“Well, in a hundred years we’ll both be dead! Take that!”). But perhaps the sense of proportion that humility depends on can be useful; for if being humble means abandoning the float-above-the-world mentality for one that accepts the deeply-rooted interdependency of life (and art), then can’t we point humility, like a sort of emotional firehose, at our own personal Mozarts? Rene Girard, a true genius of jealousy, said that envy’s biggest mistake is the way that it turns the envied into a sort of god: a creature, in other words, not like me. Whereas the truth is that even Mozart was human and therefore imperfect, sinning, and yes, even jealous. (the letters, journals and biographies of the Great Dead (now there was a band) are instructive reading on this: who was ever as jealous as a pantheon-level writer?)

It may seem paradoxical to suggest that admitting jealousy is a way to get over it; but when it comes to the city of the creative mind (meaning, every mind), paradoxes are like traffic circles: confusing, but essential. For those of us who want to make things, envy can be a useful kick in the ass; unfortunately, it can just as often be the kick that keeps kicking, and if I can’t sit down then how am I going to write? Christianity has been accused of infecting us all with teleology, meaning a view of things in which there is one best end point and a million other subservient steps leading up to it. This may be true. But isn’t there also a way to read the Bible as a longer, more detailed version of Robinson Crusoe – that is, as a vast meditation on making? God creates, and then each subsequent hero in the long line of heroes creates as well, or tries to; meanwhile, what we hold in our hands is a record of their successes and failures: a list of tried inventions. The challenge is to see it as more zoo than museum and more vibrant ecosystem than zoo. Like all great books, it wants to be used.

Harold Bloom would probably disagree, but for me, the teleological pyramid picture of writing is unhelpful - even paralyzing. The thought that out of all of us (all the thousands of us), only one will get to stand on the top wrung doesn't make me want to jump higher: it makes me want to crawl into my bed and die. Is this hesitancy to join the huge, envy-soaked agon of literary supremacy itself proof that I will never be a great or even good writer? To be completely honest, I don't know. But I DO know that, if I want to be any kind of writer at all, I simply cannot afford to think this way. Inherent in this is another paradox, and maybe a lie too: the tree, one of many, has to somehow find a way to subtract the chatter of its forest and create a sphere of sunlight and silence around it, in order to grow. Mozart, who was a man before he was a genius, knew how to do this. Salieri did not.

How To Be Lazy

2009-12-31T05:42:00.000-08:00

The secret theme of all creations – from the Bible to a Quentin Tarantino epic, to a level of Super Mario Brothers – is creation. How do we make things? More importantly, how do we go on making things? The persistence of these questions should be obvious to anyone who has ever hung out with artists; but the most fascinating part of it, to me at least, is how integral laziness is to the productivity that obsesses all of us, no matter how many “good” hours we manage to pack in a given day.

I get bored easily. As a childhood animal lover, my Book of Books was a binderfull of celluloid sheaths that my father brought home from work one day. The volume’s empty pages had a pleasant kerosiney smell and glossy texture, like over-tanned balloon-hides. I filled them, one by one, with the Ranger Rick magazines that I’d been collecting since I’d been old enough to demand a subscription. The issues came every four months or so, along with a tape of Northern Exposure episodes and various cooking utensils, in the bubble-wrapped care packages that my grandmother sent us from Somers, New York. I poured over them giddily before placing them, one at a time, in my binder. And from that point on I was always reading them. I brought them to school and to restaurants, where I would store the bulging compendium beneath my chair as I suffered through the meal itself, and then bring it out as soon as there was a lull.

Later, while visiting my great aunt in Maine , I remember realizing suddenly that one possible way to survive the interminable booklessness of family reunions was by imagining that I was a character in a video game, and that each detail of my surroundings (whatever level or “board” I was on/in) was therefore a challenge and opportunity for Mega Man-like personal enhancement. The world was transformed, from a flat surface to a veritable advent calendar of significance. As such, it was inherently interesting: not just a place for books, but a book itself, as readable to me as it had been for Edwards, or Emerson, or that original Mario in the depths of Bowser’s castle, Henry David Thoreau.

Henry James, whose writing stands in relation to those original side-scrollers with a revelatory vagueness of Mystian proportions, told us, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” In saying this, he is looking backwards to the listmaking Benjamin Franklin and forwards to the paranoid fantasies of Thomas Pynchon, who, in The Crying of Lot 49, described how truly horrible it would be to be trapped in a video game. Or a web for that matter, whose crystalline filaments are after all a metaphor of mobility only for the unmoving spider.

The internet makes Crusoes of us all – but the point here is not that Crusoe is lonely, but that his loneliness is sublimated, to an industry that sees the world as a gigantic tool, something like the cliché about the Native American and his buffalo, every part was useful. The French anthropologist/landscape artist Claude Levi-Strauss makes a similar point about the “primitive” cultures of Brazil when he points out that their language (which named every plant and animal with a precision that makes Linnaeus look like a kindergartner), like their habit of tattooing every inch of available skin, was really a very developed version of what our own culture does now with an indulgent and self-congratulatory hightechitude reminiscent of, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The naked world must be covered against emptiness, the same way that the naked head must be covered against rain. This does not necessarily mean that you have to invent a machine for shooting clouds out of the sky.

Nights, of course, were significantly more dangerous. They left me: alright, they had to, I know - but they still left me. And though I had my books – had more of them, actually, now that I’d been sent to a school where books really were the only things that would talk to me – I found my brain and heart spinning like wheels in mud. In any examination of the malformations called “sins”, proportion begins to crop up as an antidote; but where was I going to find proportion? I was an expatriate by birth and uprooted, used to gorging myself. “Candy, anger, sleep,” I whispered, or should have. It probably would have helped to know that someone else knew what I was going through. Of the three, the last is what bothered me when I visited my family in Cairo, in their new home, their first home without me. Jet-lagged, I read through the night or wandered around the apartment trying not to trip over my sister’s new cat. One day I woke up (from a nap? Or was it the middle of the night again?) to see the sky outside churning like a cement mixer. The khamsin, or sirocco, which I watched cake a donkey standing inexplicably beneath my window with a slow layer of lard-colored dirt. The donkey didn’t move.

Of course it didn't: it didn't see any way out, didn't see any way to see a way out. Sloth, like gluttony, produces a nausea that is both spiritual (not totally sure what that word means, but hopefully you do) and physical. It is the result, rather than a preventative, of industry: not work, but rather the effort that apes the procedures of creativity without ever really managing to hit, through exploration and bravery, on any real root. It smacks of diligence, or duty; of the obeyed letter rather than the animating spirit. In my experience as a writer, there is a point in every day when we know what we should be doing. Sometimes that “should” is simply sitting down at the desk, and we don’t, because we feel like we need to research more, or write a blog entry, or read another chapter… But more often, I think, the should happens within the writing. Not knowing what we have to do isn’t depressing, so long as we have faith that whatever we’re doing will eventually reveal that; what’s depressing is when we know what we have to do, secretly, but keep deciding not to do it. We hold back by telling ourselves we’ve gone forward. Isaac Babel (another devotee of patience) put it in a way that no amount of exposition can exhaust: “One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.” Sloth is what you feel when you’re turning the key so much, and so fast, that the gears are stripped.

The secret insight of Christian theology (and others probably: I'm only trying to say what I know) is the deep sterility of sin: the way it knocks us out of the very world that it promises to open. The question, then, is how we get back in – and not once, but again and again, since by the time we realize the value of what we’ve lost, it will probably be gone forever, at least in that form. In Pynchon's seemingly-closed riddle of a universe, the underground postal service is called WASTE. Henry James would be appalled. But ignoring this reality provokes, I think, a disappointment with life that leads us to a watching-TV-for-9-straight-hours despondency. It is one of our culture's best kept secrets that it cultivates this state at the same time that it pretends to relieve it, by eliminating waste. But there is no eliminating waste, at least for us. For God - or whatever you want to put in that place - maybe. But then the next question to ask is, is God the most bored being in the universe, or the most interested?

Gluttony

2009-12-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

I grew up an expatriate in the third world, meaning that early on I grew gluttonous in a way that I still have trouble with. Let me explain.

The only place to get Snickers bars in Lusaka, we thought, was at the commissary, a building that I never saw, but which I imagined as a sort of cross between a military bunker and Candyland, except that instead of passing through it visitors were content simply to browse the shelves - forever, if possible. In order to do this you had to be American, meaning you had to work for the American embassy. Families, like my own, who were employed by less reliable organizations were forced to shop at the local Zambian supermarkets, where the controlled chaos of the African food industry made every visit a harrowing adventure. Aisles shifted and items appeared, or disappeared with a dreamlike suddenness that would have taken a full-fledged Joseph to comprehend. Boxes of South African breakfast cereal stood like soldiers at attention, or better yet, like men impersonating soldiers and trying not to laugh as my brother and I inspected them. Their cardboard (the reverse sides of which we could see, since many of the box-tops were torn open) was unbleached and their mascots harried beneath sagging speech-bubbles. “Tommy the Tiger says: ‘You will enjoy my flavored cornmeal!’” Except that, next to his radiantly chesty American original – a stencil of which I had made in one of my notebooks the previous summer and now kept under my pillow, along with two issues of Gamepro and a MacDonalds placemat – Tommy looked haggard and even a little guilty-looking.

America, like heaven, was somewhere else. Still, there were windfalls. In the middle of the melee my mother clung to our cart-handle like a dowser clutching her dowsing rod. She held her head high, her flared nostrils sifting through the layers of spoilt milk, okra, and split-open rice bags until they caught on something interesting. Sometimes this was nothing we could use. A bottle of curry-sauce stamped with letters that looked like tiny pictures of different types of noodles. A shoebox sized container of pickled shark meat. Or the tiny chewable ginger ties that were delicious, sure, but which, because of their packaging, smell, and general grit, my brother and I rejected immediately as Not American, meaning Not the Real Thing.

Given this general atmosphere of difficulty, you would think that stumbling onto a box of Snickers bars would have caused my family immense joy; but if anything, I remember feeling only terror. Afterwards, in our boiling Volvo (its inside smelled like a gigantic sponge, at least during the rainy season), we poured over our carton like priests before an oracle, examining each little detail. Where had it come from? What did it mean? And did the fact that splendor had entered our lives mean the favor of the gods, or their curse? Either way, we all felt the presence of something bigger there, lying under our hands with ominous generosity, like a case of candles that we had bought and then discovered was full of dynamite…

The literary thing to say here would be that my un-American childhood created a vacuum of expectation that the real America could never satisfy; but the truth is that my childhood expatriation wasn’t un-American: it was hyper-American. So, after fifteen years of living on the continent that presumptuously assumes its name, America has never disappointed me, because I haven’t found it. I eat and eat and eat and it sucks, because despite all the resources at my disposal, I can’t find the flavor I’m looking for. I spend hours on the internet trying to find out what was in the Mezoe orange juice (battery acid, grapefruit rinds, and didn’t it always seem to suggest just a bit of salt?) that I habitually poured out on the concrete at the American Embassy School of Lusaka, because it lacked the nectar-like sweetness of my classmates’ Juicy Juice.

This Christmas, my dad the unreconstructed expatriate (Dakaar, for now at least) very generously gave me his old MacBook. His undeleted iTunes library includes a bunch of Eagles songs, which is funny because, like that great and admirable homebody the Dude, I loathe the Eagles more than fruit flies and freezing rain combined. “Take It Easy”, “Get Over It”, “Learn To Be Still” – but then isn’t this the point? The West coast’s gluttony for stillness and relaxation is the three-ton Buddha we place on our scale in the hope that it will counterbalance a deep and inborn anxiety. But that’s narcosis, not absorption. As a deeply anxious person myself, I know that the worst thing anyone can say is “Don’t worry.” Why not, I want to scream back? And where does your sense of calm get you but further immured, further removed, further stuck, in other words, in the hell that is disconnection and detachment?

(and alright, I can’t believe I’m going to do this, but the Eagles even showed us what that place looks like, right? It’s the Hotel California, a legitimately brilliant marriage of form and content that is far more hellish than even a above-average high-school term paper can reveal. Listen to it again: it will ruin for you, in order, 1) Don Henley, 2) guitar solos, 3) classic rock radio stations. This is not a song about California: it’s a song about art, or the failure of ambition in art, or what happens when you succumb to the gluttony of satisfactions that some concierge has handed you, but which you yourself take no pleasure from)

To rush into the third act here (since, let’s be honest, an Eagles reference should sound like a death knoll, for anything, anywhere): the good thing about gluttony is that it feels like a search, whereas the bad thing about gluttony is the way that it promises an end to searching and so focuses us on the goal, rather than on the process itself. Like each of the seven deadly sins, it is deeply idealistic and therefore unforgiving, meaning that it justifies itself by saying that everything we can actually see and experience is not It, not Worth It, not the Real Thing. By doing this, it robs us of our enjoyment and so alienates us from the very food that we need to survive. It allows us to accept our fear of being human, which condition, with all its pain, can be our sustenance.

Gluttunous writing is not hard to find - although it's important, I think, that we distinguish it from writing that is legitimately hungry and therefore overflows through pleasure, rather than disgust. Stephen King and James Clavell are only two examples of writers who write as if the only purpose of opening a book were to finish it, as the only purpose of opening an XXL bag of Dorritos is to be able, half an hour later, to scrunch that same bag up and throw it in the trash. I don’t say this Puritanically, or because I dislike Dorritos (I pretty much worship them, which is why I can pretend to know what I'm talking about). I loved and love both King and Clavell, among others (Timothy Zahn, anyone?), and in many ways owe my love of reading to the complete immersion that their worlds offered me when I was a kid. But I know I have to be careful. I remember what those Snickers bars tasted like when we finally opened them, and what they led to, which was not even more desire, but the despair of knowing that I would never be able to eat enough. The suspicion that we had been duped again, and that these were not the actual Snickers bars I'd heard so much about, but some strange simulacrum, a box of fakes.

I want to live. More importantly, I want to want to live here. I grow impatient, these days, with things that suggest I should want to live somewhere else. Or language that suggests, by its use or misuse, that language is not important. Books of gluttony exhaust, but books of appetite – I’m thinking here of books like 2666, or The Castle, or Moby Dick – both satisfy and provoke, by some strange and beautiful paradox. At the heart, for all their searching, I think they embrace what they are, no matter how limited that is. Kafka said that patience wasn’t just a virtue, but the virtue: not a humiliated waiting, but its own kind of fulfillment. Osip Mandelstam: “To speak is to be forever on the road”. We are all on the road. And, being on the road, our only recourse is to speak, and in doing so transform the alien corn into Keats’s “alien corn”, which is both haunting and gorgeous. The Real Thing, which I like because it shows something I suspected even then: that art is what makes us real, brings us closer, rather than the other way around.

So speak.

Manners

2009-12-28T14:18:00.000-08:00

Growing up, at the same time that it was always my mother and my father, it was also always my mother or my father.

There was nothing Greek about this; it happened at the dinner table and then in my head, as I thought about the one place where the two of them seemed most divided. For while my mother orchestrated meals with the ritual care of a batter about to step up to the plate, my father had haste. He ate like a vacuum cleaner and then started picking things off our plates with the graceful, self-delighted lunges of a velociraptor stumbling upon a field of gerbils. Sensing a soft spot in the usually clear hierarchy of our life, I followed his example – mostly because (unbelievably enough) I actually ate more quickly than he did, at least if the dish in question was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or cereal.

It wasn’t, for the most part, which meant that I had to find a way to get rid of it. Over the years, I refined my technique like an apprentice burglar. Like all great artists, I indulged in flourishes, but only when I felt like they were subordinated to an over all design. My tools were few but effective: a large napkin (preferably made out of a resilient material like cotton or polyester), a glass of milk (to mask the taste of those bits I had to eat in order to make the trick believable), and, if necessary, a pair of very, very deep-pocketed sweatpants (which, unfortunately, I wore a lot of in those days). When caught, I took a quick second to gauge the situation and then pleaded misunderstanding or repentance, depending on the parent.

According to my mom, I had no manners. But the truth was that even then, I was simply confused and, confusingly, perhaps even a little excited by the places in my life where it was not really clear what type of behavior would be normal and what would not. To say that Americans are particularly stupid on this topic misses the point, since it is exactly our lack of manners that makes us the most mannered people in the universe. Live in New York New York, or Portland Maine, and you’ll see this equally: life in these places is a texture of densely woven gestures that exist in and of themselves but at the same time mark the gesturer as a member as surely as a lantern sticking out of said member’s skull would mark him/her/it as a fish known as the deep sea angler, which survives, like a poet in Hollywood, by adopting the manners of something that its prey’s usual environment (water) finds alluring (light).

Another way of putting this is to admit that you’re always either on the inside or the outside of any group - and then looking back, I think that if there was one vulnerability that my mother had and my father didn’t, it was this fear of being on the outside. She didn’t want to be shunned, revealed as an outsider, and because of this she decided that it was much safer and better not to put oneself in harm’s way. America, the same country that had left her this bursting, heartfelt, debilitating idealism, had given her a perfect way to deal with it. Be an outsider. Be unique. Be the single member of a country whose boundaries only you can make out, and then inhabit other memberships with the sort of barely-perceptible disdain that insinuates just how impressive your jacket lining would be, if they could only swim fast enough to see it.

The great southern puppeteer/Bible saleswoman Flannery O’Conner followed Henry James (himself a lifelong expatriate) by parsing fiction’s flow into arterial Mystery and veinous Manners. But aren’t manners – that is, the huge mechanism of what we, as a group and individually, find usual – the greatest mystery of all? A Tolstoyan experiment: right now I am sitting on my couch writing a blog entry as my sister’s dog throws up in his dog bed. Sounds reasonable enough – but then turn the situation just a bit towards the “cowlike gaze” and we see, aha, the mystery of furniture! A lump of shaped and molded softness serving no discernable purpose! A tiny animal that has been bred, over centuries, not for its adaptive capabilities, but for sheer and utter uselessness! It’s all so ridiculous; but at the same time, the heart of the mystery here is the way that, sitting here, doing this ridiculous thing (blogging!) in this ridiculous environment (“Vermont”!) on this ridiculous object (a sofa-bed!) find absolutely none of it ridiculous. In fact, the truth is just the opposite: it is all normal. And it is all normal for me because somewhere in my brain and body lurks the idea that it is all normal for everybody else.

Manners are not the enemy: manners are the door, the jug that invites the water in the way a tree invites birds, or a house people. And there is no other way. Turn from the spirit if you want to, but every break will be partial and every move from that point on an attempt to move to some higher communion, perhaps possible, perhaps not – perhaps only lonely, since the other citizens of your imaginary republic do not yet exist. Milton’s Satan says “Which way I fly is hell/ Myself am hell”, and though it might be interesting for a second to see this as the first artist in Western biblical translation, I think that saying this misses the more massive point of Satan’s fundamental sterility. Adam and Eve broke the rules, and we have a sense that this crack in the world is somehow fundamentally related to our subsequent creativity. But they also repented – that is, they made peace, asked forgiveness, tried to re-enter the family. Satan broke everything, repented nothing, and so ended up creating nothing, except the brokenness.

You're Funny

2009-11-17T18:03:00.000-08:00

"Are you smiling?"

"It's not going by fast enough."

"Thanks for reminding me, but, no."

"You're already in bed."

"Yeah, I was gonna say."

"Did you? No? That must be nice."

"Mm-hmm."

"I just think it's totally unfair that you're in bed and I'm here."

"What?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Okay."

"What?"

"Okay."

"So what did you do tonight? Anything fun? No."

"What did you guys make?"

"Sounds like fun."

"Nice."

"Well... "(muffled)

"What's wrong with this picture."

"Well I won't text you then at two thirty in the morning."

"What?!"

"At two thirty in the morning."

"You're silly."

"You're gonna check out what?"

"I refuse to do that. I'm into mafia wars."

"So apparently I don't have to say thank you anymore?"

"Why?"

"Whatever."

"I just, yeah, think I have to say thank you, I appreciate you."

"If you say so."

"No, just, I just wanted to say thank you."

"Nothing. Doing work on the computer."

"I'm just appreciating the fact that I have time that I can call you, and talk."

"Mmm hmm. Yeah. It's just, if my cell phone rings, I have to answer it."

"No."

"No. I just wanted to hear your voice."

"I'm not use to this."

"What?"

"It's like, I want to pinch myself."

"Oh really."

"Okay."

"Yep."

"Well, I'm sure you want to go to sleep."

"What?"

"Yeah I guess."

"Ok. Yeah."

"Ok."

"Ok."

"Ok love you too."

"Ok."

"Ok."

"Love you too."

"Love you too."

"Ok."

"What the heck is that supposed to mean?"

"Ok love you too. Goodbye."

Shower Scenes

2009-11-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

I’ve been training Chloe (our new American Bulldog) to take food from my hand while I’m in the shower. Sometimes Jill is involved, but only to block off the entrance so that she can’t escape. This whole exercise began about a month ago, while I was brushing my teeth, and I noticed Chloe’s melancholy frown: the drooped ears and bent head of defeat. She wanted to be with me, her body against my calf, but there was an invisible barrier right where the carpet of the hallway ended and the bathroom tile began. Why so afraid, Chloe? Why the heavy head?

So I started by lying down next to the toilet, the cool Spanish tiling against my cheek, and when I’m in this position, she can’t help bounding across the room to lick my face or go into a spasm of sniffing. So she stepped inside, through the barrier, and as not to scare her, I stayed in that position and celebrated with a cheer out of the side of my mouth, as if I were trying to sing in my car and didn’t want anyone seeing me belt out “Bom-ba-bom-ba-bom-ba-bom.” As I got up, she flinched, then turned and jumped out of the bathroom. It was a start.

Jill and I have one bathroom, so when we have to get ready together, it’s cramped and I’m always having to coil my head around her waist to spit out my toothpaste froth, and not disturb her whilst she is plucking her contacts out of her eyeballs. During these moments, Chloe is at the doorway, standing on all fours, sitting, getting back up, eager to join us. But that wall!

So I went to our treasure box full of treats and brought out a venison-rice jerky treat. She could smell the treat. It’s a smoky savory smell that I’m sure I can eat at my finer moments. As I walked back into the bathroom, she didn’t even pause. She was right by my leg, her wagging tail slapping at the toilet. She gently took the treat from my hand, then she suddenly remembered that she was supposed to be afraid of this space, so she turned and walked back out, getting into same finical sit and stand routine at the doorway.

Last night, while I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, I saw this blurred figure out of the corner of my eye. The little shit had busted in on me while I was showering! I parted the curtain and saw Chloe, with that concerned look in her eyes, as if she were asking me if I were ok, if I needed some help putting the soap cake back on the tray.

In my dripping nakedness, I called Jill over and she was ecstatic, proud that our dog had busted through. We were cheering in the bathroom. We were nearly in tears. There was something going on beyond dog training and my nakedness. I’m sure this past year had lots to do with it.

Josh, the only reason I bring this anecdote up is of the very slight overlap between your post on walls and with which the walls Jill, Chloe and I are surrounded. Going through, which means you’re now inside, but in another space of which you know nothing about. It’s terrifying. But we’re willing to get to that space, and more importantly, we’re willing to build it before we get there, imagination and faith being the only things in the satchel.

I’m also not writing fiction as much. But I’m reading. I’m writing blog posts and emails to my buds. For now, with the stuff going on with my job (new position in the same company, more hours, more responsibility, blah blah), and all the other stuff in my life, I’m willing to be patient. Who knows, this may be an elaborate cop out, but I’m learning to pay attention to my life, and look for that moment to bust through, with a venison-rice treat between my teeth. God damn I miss you guys.

PS: I heard this term used on the radio this morning, "The Iron Fisted Dictator of Romania."

Shit Eating Grunts

2009-11-09T18:53:00.001-08:00

Fellow Travellers,

So I haven't written a thing of my own in over four months. My skin is pasty, my mouth is dry, and I find that when I look down, the normally unembarrassing span of my torso has been transformed into something as strange and foreboding as a martian landscape. What's happened to me - more importantly, what's happened to us? And when it goes, does it go forever, or is there a way to get back what was once so important in your life?

A better man than I would have taken his ideas of departure and return from Greek myths, the New Testament, and the novels of Joseph Conrad. But for me, the formative influences - at least the ones I can pin down - are all either cinematic or musical. As I look at the things that have gone out of or come into my life, Walt Disney is my Edith Hamilton and Bruce Springsteen my Joseph Campbell. Everything dies, baby that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

To the point: one thing both rock and roll and movies teach you is that the only way out of the desert is through it. Ezekiel ate shit - can you imagine that? The man actually ate shit. I wonder if he started with a little bit, just a little smidgen that stuck on the end of his spoon, tilting over like an old man falling asleep in his chair as Zeke stared and stared. Or did he just dive in, attacking that shit like it was his last meal. Relishing it, in other words. I'd like to know, and feel like it is both a canny elision and an unfortunate caesura in the Books as we know them. What does it feel like to be hungry?

I don't know what the fuck's going on. I don't want to trivialize the feeling of being cut off from creative sources by making it seem like simply one more topic for a blog post...but then why not, at this point? If the only way out really is through, then why not begin with the trivial?

What do you think? Are you out there?

Howl?

Pheidippides Was A Real Man

2009-08-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

Well, boys, I figured out over the weekend that I have to drop out of the marathon. The shin splints (that I think I was whining about when I was down at WWC graduation) haven’t gone away, and my acupuncturist/physical therapist said I need total rest until they don’t hurt at all anymore, which could be up to two weeks. Then I can start with one mile, and then I increase that by 10% every time I run. I did the math, and that does not get me to 26.2 by November 1.

I know we’ve talked ad naus. about sports, but indulge me for one more post.

This sucks, because the marathon was a big thing in my life. I don’t really have that many things: my cipher of a day job, my writing, my friends and family (but no family of my own), and the marathon. It was sort of a parallel goal with writing, you know? ‘Today I will complete one task with a very specific measure and one with no real measure at all.’ One made the other easier to bear.

But also it sucks because I feel like a coward. I could run the marathon. I could swim for a few weeks and then get up to ten miles, let’s say, and then try to fudge it. A couple of friends have fucked their legs up trying to do similar things, but the very high likelihood is that I’d be more or less fine. A real man would find a way, right? and other people overcome way way worse things than this to run it (e.g. missing limbs).

There are legitimate medical reasons to drop out, but there’s also a big part of me that doesn’t ever want to run the marathon. That part wants to have a sick day for the rest of its life and watch TV and eat mochi balls and drink crème de menthe. I’ve been training myself not to listen to that part when I’m running. So Mr. Crème de Menthe is loving the shin splint excuse.

And if I do follow the advice of my physical therapist, I’ll feel fine on race day. That’s the most galling thing. I won’t be on the sidelines on crutches, I just won’t be in good enough shape to finish.

I also committed to raising $2500 for a charity to get into the race. I not only have to let them down, but I also gave them my credit card as security against the money I don’t raise, and I don’t know if they’ll give me dispensation for an injury.

Anyway, part of me writing this on Heart Arcade is just to bitch to my friends, and I know in the grand scheme this is small potatoes: running races only happens in a life that doesn’t have any life-threatening threats. But I’m writing about it here also to wonder about discipline and structure with writing, too.

As I said above, running was a temporary structure for writing, but I just haven’t known what I’m doing with writing for a while. And I mean this less in an existential way and more in a practical way. Am I really trying to write a book of short stories, or am I just starting a thousand different things to distract myself from the hard work of digging into anything?

I have a novel idea that I’m not that fired up about, but am I not that fired up because I’m just too scared or lazy to get into something that involved? Pretty soon it’s going to be a year since I graduated, and it’s not like I have five polished stories up and ready to go. And just as the shin splints are a helpful excuse for Mr. Crème de Menthe, so is the well-known mysteriousness of the writing process.

It would be helpful to have a metric, is what I’m saying. ‘Getting a Novel Into the Western Canon’ is a little grandiose (and the Western Canon ain’t what it used to be); ‘Two Hours of Writing A Day’ is a little too local. ‘Making Work That Causes Readers I Respect to Laugh In Recognition of Truth’ is probably the closest thing, but I don’t know exactly what that looks like on a Tuesday when I’m tired and want to watch re-runs. ‘Three Finished Stories by the End of the Year’? ‘Always Have Two Stories in the Inboxes of Magazines, No Matter What’?

I guess dropping out of the marathon has made me take another look at exactly what I’m trying to do, and where the runway lights are.

I know I’m supposed to be the wise sage after living for six more months in The World than you guys have lived, but what lights are you flying by right now?

Rock the Rock

2009-08-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

So at this point in the writing/sports conversation, if it's not getting too stupid and reductive for everybody, I feel like I should mention my burgeoning interests in 1) mainstream/slightly not mainstream American sportswriting, and 2) Late 20th century Black Mountain-style poetics.

The first is last-two-years new, but surprisingly bullish: for someone who NEVER watched, or really even played team sports as a kid, I've found myself digesting a surprising amount of articles, books, and podcasts about them. Puzzling, at first (especially to myself); though upon further reflection, I think I understand what's going on. Sportswriting - good sportswriting that is, or at least the kind that I've found myself gravitating towards - is not actually about sports. It's about storytelling. Fuck the universities: the purest, most refined, and most probing narratological analysis right now is going on smack in the middle of the national consciousness - and as a writer (read: someone interested in stories and how they're made) I've found it more than just a little fascinating to watch how this discussion frequently plays out, branches, and spirals back to ideas and forms that seem to directly effect and fertilize my own endeavors.

Sports (and here I'm talking, not just about the sports you play, but about the sports your watch, consume, enter and live in: sports media, in other words) is a language. As with most languages, the success or failure of initial willed acclimations is often beyond the knocker's control (witness my repeated, pig-headed, but still fanatical attempts to like jazz. I'm talking stacks of CDs, Ralph Ellison essays, constipated, cocktail-sipping concerts, not to mention hours upon hours spent trying to hear what ever the fuck it was I was listening to, and yet still it's no dice. I don't even not like jazz: I simply can't hear it, which is to say, I can't speak it. For me to pass judgment on it would be like an American tourist passing judgment on Swahili). But in cases rich and overwhelming (meaning, any case worth your time), I'm a big believer in the guide. A Virgil, a map: that person or entity who can take you by the hand and tell you what's good, what's bad, what you should be looking for/give you a level ground of understanding, which you can then keep or dismantle as your tastes develop.

So far, I've had two ridiculously predictable, and yet totally infallible, sports-related guides: Bill Simmons and freedarko. What I find in each is, essentially, what I find in both: entertaining writing that is simultaneously about both a fascinating and complicated "obvious" topic (sports, or to be more specific, professional basketball), AND a hidden, secret, gnostic undertopic (writing). And there's the rub - for in using the medium of language to get at the heart of something inherently non-linguistic, I find, these two writers (or more than two: freedarko is actually a collective) inevitably seem to end up talking about writing, stories, history, creation.

(I'll dispense, for brevity's sake and under the banner of Tolstoyan familiarity, with a long proof on this point. Read FD's post on Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo (which contains the sentence "I've long maintained that point guards are like writers, whose effectiveness is determined not by their own personal ability to put the ball in the basket but to turn the court into their own dark funhouse and make the opposing team see the game on the point guard's revised and ultimately manipulative terms"), and try and tell me it isn't all about the flow-state/staticity argument we've been having. Or listen to Bill SImmons's tete-a-tete with Chuck Klosterman and see if there isn't something there pertaining to narratology and the storymaking of popular culture)

Anyway, words, words, words: but isn't the fascinating thing about sports, and about thinking about writing as a sport, the way that it acknowledges and respects the strange, mysterious core of all performance, be it linguistic or otherwise, while at the same time acknowledging the importance learned technique/inherited ability play in the coddling, cradling, and execution of those performances?

TO wit: Charles Olson's poetry may be bland, idiosyncratic, and imagistically poor hippie-babble, but when it comes to announcing the poetic sport, I find him one of the most entertaining and insightful of near-contemporary color men. Reading his essays (which poets from all over the world map credit with opening up the poetic field, turning their understanding of literature as something about to something), I get the feeling that I'm not just watching literature, but somehow participating it; that the energy inherent in poetry is somehow being transmitted to me, like a signal or electric charge. The parallel difference here: watching basketball as a spectator (which I do), and watching basketball as someone who will then go down to the local court and pull some crazy cross-over move whatever (or at least, will practice it until he can do it in a pick-up game). This, for me, is one of the greatest parts about being a writer: when I read, I'm not just being entertained, I'm being taught. Something is teaching me how to make. But then, to push the idea a little further, isn't it possible that, given the right guides and a sharp enough inquisitiveness, attention paid to ANY creative endeavor will end up teaching us about our own? Watch basketball, read sportswriting, listen to someone's grandmother talk about how to make a pie, hear a hobbyist hold forth on the peculiar pleasures of Amazon frog-collecting: in each case, there is something there that will talk to you about your own art/life/rhythm. One of my/our previous blog obsessions was the way that writing needed to be a conduit into, rather than away from life, and I feel that repeating itself here - though maybe the many-roomed-house metaphor needs to be subtilized. Not rooms, but worlds, constellations, whose motions parallel one another, but which touch only through our own inhabitation of each of them. Any real act will teach you about all the others.

Olson as point guard: "It is unbearable what knowledge of the past has been allowed to become, what function of human memory has been dribbled out to in the hands of these learned monsters whom people are led to think 'know.' They know nothing in not knowing how to reify what they do know. What is worse, they do not know how to pass over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past because they purposely destroy that energy as dangerous to the states for which they work - which it is, for any concrete thing is a danger to the rhetoricians and politicians, as dangerous as a hard coin is to a banker." (The Human Universe)

Now, leaving off the obsession with monetary value (typical of even the greatest village explainers), watch the way that quote unlocks the "high work of the past", turning it from monument to generator, something we plug into. Which is the mystery at stake here, right? How do we create? Or, how do we harness our own unique combinations of talent and history in a way that allows us to put that fucking rock in the hole? In my own personal experience this is tricky, not least because you must first find a way to discover/create your position on the literary team - but in the moments that you do it? In the moments that you fit your art or life or whatever as smoothly as a key fits a lock or a bat fits a ball or a puck fits the net or word fits the world?

Olson is in the Emersonian line of energy transmition - but then again, so is Simmons. So are we. America is obsessed with renaissances and rebirths and revivals: not for nothing have we had (by the most conservative of estimates) three Great Awakenings in this country. A blog, written by beginning artists, about writing and life, must necessarily be obsessed with creation. But then, isn't its own making the secret subject of every made thing the world over? And don't we knock to be admitted, if not now, then please God, someday?

Take a Shot in the Mouth

2009-08-04T15:51:00.000-07:00

I've always played team sports. Hockey, baseball, soccer (as a goalie, for one game, until I picked the ball up at half court. You can't use your hands outside of the goalkeeper area). Team sports are still a performative act for the individual player, but you have a group of fellow comrades that provide you with fist bumps and warm cheers to help you out of these moments of choking. Here’s a moment: I once slashed a player during a 5 on 3 power play, and the coach just ripped into me during the intermission. He threw a bowling pin across the room. I didn't even take off my helmet. I felt such intense shame and disappointment, not only for myself, but for my teammates. I let the guys down. When we were ready to get back on the ice, the guys gave me these small words of encouragement, "Come on, bud. Don't worry about it." I was benched for the rest of the game. But knowing the fellas were there to fully share the experience, no matter how devastating or ecstatic, no matter if we won or lost, I learned the importance of connections. I am not alone. I learned this.

We have the furious work done alone, in the gym, in the kitchen to maximize the effects of the gym (Seth, the exactitude of my diet would make you proud, although the taste of the food would horrify you. Tuna and iceberg lettuce blended into a muddy pap.) You can feel your skating stride lengthening (stretching regiment) and your foot work exploding (plyometrics and weight training), and you can see this on the ice, but there's also a higher level development of mind and manners. During one of my first college games, while I was walking back to the locker room, a fan threw a hot dog wrapper at me, and I swung my stick at the bleachers, trying to disembowel him. I looked like an idiot and embarrassed my team. Having to rely on others, you understand that they also rely on you, and so you can't do things like swing your stick at fans. These correctives, as silly as they seem, helped me become a better teammate.

In that sense, I feel like writing exists somewhere in this continuum of public and private acts. I mean, like Josh said in his class, we write for someone, even if that someone is an amalgam figure. Like, right now, I'm writing to a three headed dragon who is informing the content of this very post. If you write to yourself, who the hell is listening? Well, that's tautological sloppiness, but I guess I'm trying to say that I've learned how the lessons in team sports has transferred into my writing. How much of writing is really done alone? How much of sport is performed alone? This can get messy, depending on the sport (golf vs basketball: solitary, collaborative), and the type of writing, but I'll just end it by saying that this blog, as well as the talks, walks, dances, car rides, drunken meanderings near the hog pens, have changed the way I perceive my life, which translates into richer writing. By listening, and participating in these bad-ass talks, I move closer to what Auden called "the authenticity of being," a noble, life long goal of becoming, a process that is deathly essential in my writing. So keep feeding me, suckas.

The Skid Boast

2009-08-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

Teammates—

Thank god Josh took this in the direction of sports; now I have an excuse to drop all the volleyball and badminton and marathon analogies that drive my friends so crazy.

The act of writing (and art generally) does seem to have so much in common with athletics: you teach someone history or algebra but you coach them in writing (The hard science types will protest, and say the same is true of the improv of badass math). You learn the basics of basketball technique, memorize them, but then have to repeat them over and over until you forget them when you’re actually making the finger roll. The newer parts of your brain (learning things abstractly, grasping concepts via words), eventually give in to the old parts of your brain (reflexes, senses, habituation).

The muscle awareness overcomes the analyzing, judgment-making awareness. You’re absorbed, you’re in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state, you can do no wrong, your ego drops away, the violin is playing you, etc. It is the super-bestest, and if you can get there often, you get very very good at whatever it is you’re doing.

Playing squash in college, and was very bad at getting into the flow state, especially when I was playing big matches. I had the same disco-rice mind that Josh had on the racing blocks, and what made it worse: I thought that you could get into the flow by trying to strangle the chatty, doubty, wordy mind. Get out of my head, internal monologue!

It really quickly devolved into this: “Oh my god, if I’m THINKING about whether or not I can get into the flow state, I am by definition NOT in the flow state, and, Jesus, my opponent over there with the Walkman on, it probably never even occurs to him that there is any other state than the flow state, and he’s probably some Ivan Drago machine/noble savage who has no reflective consciousness at all, and oh I am so cursed with consciousness, and you taught me language and my only profit is to curse…and now the match is over and I hate myself.” I basically pried the squash-court map off of my brain with the crowbar of thinking.

So with writing, I think the flow state is extra hard to get into, because I’m trying to get past the chatty verbal brain into the…um, un-chatty verbal brain? It’s a real bitch when you’re trying to get the brain's new part to behave like the old part: according to reflex, intuition, habituated certainty, and so on. That’s exactly what the frontal lobe is designed not to do. I’m trying to make something inspired with the same part of my brain that produces the words that are distracting me.

I think writers like to bitch and moan just because, but I really do think it’s harder than painting and music because we have to move into words instead of away from them.

But the payoff is so huge. When I read something that has really performed human experience with words, I think the edge between the animal and the intellectual gets blurred, and I get a shocking, clarified feeling for life. It’s an awareness of all the things that happen to me all day long that I can usually only half-sense.

But the work is really hard. It seems like we’re starting to talk a fair amount about passion vs. patience, and the passion part helps when you just have to say something and so fuck that verbal resistance.

But the rare instances of patience help me so much, too. After my competitive squash days, I started realizing how much the scared part of your brain loves being strangled. You try to shut it up and it gets louder and louder. But just keep hitting balls, letting the voice sit over there and do its thing, eventually it gets quieter. And with writing, the more I sit at my desk, the less time I spend worrying about whether or not I can do this, the quieter that voice gets, too, even though worry has its way with me most of the time. Writing is the opposite of waiting—ok, so Roberto said this whole post in three words.

Another thing that came as a shock in squash was: thinking helped! If I let my analysis mind concentrate on the weaknesses of the other guy’s game, it got occupied and couldn’t worry about whether or not I was in the zone. OK, I’m getting weary with this analogy, so I’ll just say I think that has a lot to do with editing.

How are you all doing getting past words to get to words?

All right, off to do some star drills.

(P.S. If I could figure out how to make post titles into links, you would have seen this video. After watching it you should be able to do it perfectly.)

Brother Sport

2009-07-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

Fellow me lads:

I'm going to follow Italian/New Mexican basketball genius Mike D'antoni's Seven Seconds or Less rule on this one, which paraphrased, runs something like: "Don't look at the coach or spend too much time dribbling or worrying about whether you're getting the play right: you're a basketball player, make something happen," and which led to a series of 50+ win seasons for the immortal Phoenix Suns. Part of the fun of explicitly inviting your instinct to enter the conversation is that it allows for creativity, explosion, and multiple-assist games; part of the danger is that you'll be cold and end up looking like an idiot. But then that's the genius of this forum, this endless Kerouac(k)ian "page", which I have already started to imagine as a poorly-painted but deeply-loved stretch of blacktop, a sort of high-low-tech agora/parking-lot/used book store.

In 1928, the French poet/badminton enthusiast Paul Valery published an article entitled "The Future of Literature: Will it Be a Sport?" I am fascinated by this idea, but hate it too - for in my own mind literature and sport have been distinct and unfriendly fields for some time now. Have had to be, actually. As an alternately tubby and rail-thin kid, with "girl-sized" hands and limbs that, even on a good day, seemed to exist in a dimension that was exactly two inches to the left of the one that the other kids were playing in, it was important for me to pick my battles. In basketball, this meant defense (I have tremendous, ape-like arms and the older-brother's natural ability to frustrate); in volleyball, set-up (I liked the satisfying "bump" the ball made hitting my forearm); in swimming, distance. For eight years, through middle and high school, I cobbled together mile after theoretically-swum mile, persisting past the endurance of my peers, encased all the while in a thin but surprisingly invulnerable shield of hunger, sweat and self-punishment. It was grueling work and I threw up often. But I never had to pick my head up and watch my pass or shot sail wide of its target.

Although I think my career as a sportsman taught me valuable lessons about pain, cruelty, endurance and, most of all, failure, I remain deeply ambivalent it. I'll say it again: I never passed to anyone; a lack of bravery that I believe kept me for years from the swirling, dangerous, borderline-ecstatic activity of the other kids around me, and which has left, these many years later, an assist-sized hole in my heart. I mean, sure, endurance running is a sport (it's MY sport, in many ways - or at least the only one I practice regularly). But isn't there another aspect of all physical activity, be it eating (talking to you, Seth), Hockey (Tom-po-po), Squash (Mr. Tilney) that thrives off co-operation and play? Isn't there something you can do where you're not looking at your watch every five minutes, or strategically placing your towel over the treadmill screen so that you don't have to stare at the time ticking off second after agonizing second?

(Apologies here to runners, of which number I am one, for the simplification and demonization here. Certainly running, or any individual sport can mean as much to a writer as croquet, for example: the question I want to ask is not if, but HOW?)

My friends, if you'll allow a brief and perhaps slightly-showy alley-oop in this, the first few minutes of a conversation that I hope will go into multiple overtimes: ambition is one thing, seriousness is one thing, mastery is one thing, but there is a huge aspect of any creative activity that is not just physical but deeply, deeply bodied, and therefore much more a matter of superstition, nerve and joy than it is anything else. Acmeist point guard Osip Mandelstam said that one thing the poet could not live without was a sense of his own "poetic rightness" - and although this may sound simplistic to you, I think it's important to understand the quality he's describing as the same one that allows Dwyane Wade to contort his way to the basket, or Roger Federer to slice that forehand, or Wayne Gretzky to *insert impressive hockey accomplishment here.* In other words - and without minimizing the vital and beautiful work of the conscious, tunneling, exploring MIND - there is a point at which something bigger than you takes over in the best writing, and suddenly you are a ruby-eyed tarantula of language feeling the slightest tremor and moving without hesitation. Is this something that happens to you alone? Or is it something that makes you think more interestingly about where exactly "you" end, and the world begins?

So much literature assumes an image of its project and purpose that I wonder if we don't need, ESPECIALLY at this wide-open point in our lives and the lives of our art, to start re-evaluating what it is we're even doing here - not in the sense of dramatic and weighty plodding, but the way a fern tendril would investigate the shit out of the bars of available sunlight in a dark and moldy room. When you write, what do you do? What do you want to do? And in what ways are your ideas of what other people want you to do - what is expected of you, in other words - helpful or, inversely, as stupid and constricting as the decision that caused a natural 14-year-old who up to that point had excelled at that most elegant, dance-like, strategical and yet painfully slow of strokes, the breaststroke, to tell his new coach that actually, he wanted to switch. Distance freestyle was the event to win, and no amount of raised eyebrows would convince him otherwise. As someone who even now has at least a little insight into that 14 year old's mind, I can tell you that he didn't make his decision capriciously. No: that boy wanted to be absolved. He wanted, in other words, to hurt.

The Old Lady Pipes Up

2009-07-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

Hey Everyone,

First off, glad to be up and started on this.

Second, I'm such a novice that it took me about ten minutes to figure out how to create a new post, and I only read the comments two seconds ago. But the perfect is the enemy of the done, right?

But so anyway. Seth, your post got me thinking better about some things that have been milling around in my head. I’ve been reading As I Lay Dying lately, very slowly, and it’s my first Faulkner (I know, slap my wrist with a ruler). I agree that there’s something exhilerating about the mess and the fog, and then passages like this one come out:

“When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal.

“And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get back up and go to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could maybe see a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older.”

Holy shit. I’m sure a good thesis could be written about the water bucket serving as a portal for Darl’s perception to attain a celestial narrative outlook, or something, but I just feel the world up to my gums when he says, ‘Water should never be drunk from metal.’ That’s true—metal cups set your teeth on edge.

Frankly, all the stuff about transporting matriarchs across rivers and having logs rise like Jesus Christ out of the water and smashing wagons and boys burning down barns is great, but give me passages like the above and I am thrilled to the soles of my feet, and also sustained in an important way. This writing is so good but purposefully small, I think.

So I haven’t read All the Sad Young Literary Men, but I know what you mean about flawless frigid writing. It doesn’t make you want to sing your own song, it makes you want to have every clause airtight so no one can criticize your erudition or technique or whatever. And I don’t know whether Gessen is a victim of his own critique or explodes the idea of adversarial (hoo, hah, phew, he’s exhausted me already).

But I want to say that the remedy doesn’t have to be the big smoking crashing (baggy) monsters, but just RISK, no matter where it comes from.

No question, I’m a crashing monster fan. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamozov, Iliad, Infinite Jest; sign me up and call me an ostentatious goober. But these days I need books to help me against blandness and oblivion, and so short, risky, intensely felt stuff feels very important to me.

I know everyone’s tired of the name, but I’m putting Chekhov up there, and Marilynne Robinson, John Cheever, Wells Tower, Amy Hempel, Nicholson Baker, and (insert your favorite lyrical poet’s name here).

This work calls out, ‘pay attention to the details as though your life depends on it, because it does.’ Reading this intensely meditative stuff sharpens up your eyes in a world that gets dangerously bland when your eyes get dull. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about our epic talk in the Saturn, but I know it had something to do with sensing things as keenly as possible.

And then making this kind of work, getting down into the grain of the words and shaving them into shape, creating people out of ladders of molecules, that’s a big deal. And it doesn’t have to be long or messy to get over the walls that separate people’s minds, it just has to be strange.

We can have quiet conversations at dinner parties instead of sword fighting in the streets of Saint Petersburg and still be engaged in the most important and riskiest of tasks. Writing about drinking from a cedar bucket is a big risk. I don’t know if I would take it.

And now it seems like my next book should be some Bolaño. I need some insides turned out, I think.

Strangeheart

2009-07-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

Last January, just after I came home from winter residency, I fell ill with bronchitis. My doctor prescribed antibiotics. I suffered a gripping moral dilemma. I called my doctor.

Antibiotics are harmful, I said. I'm not taking antibiotics.

She said—she actually said: Okay, but you risk death.

I took the antibiotics.

I flopped on the couch for five days, recovered from the bronchitis, and suffered the side-effects of the treatment: low-grade fever, chills, stomach cramps, massively high blood-sugar, and a feeling of despondency. I googled. My antibiotic, ZITHROMAX®, I learned, is the one antibiotic that might cause mental imbalance.

I also read books. I read The Great Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. I read Keith Gessen’s novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.

A passage in Gessen’s novel (about a literary hero named Morris Binkel—the passage, not the novel) struck me:

"Binkel called for a renewal of an adversary culture – the young writers of today, said Binkel, were social climbers, timid and weak; they stood around at parties in New York waiting to be noticed, waiting to be liked. He reserved his especial scorn for his own people, for young Jewish writers, who had once been the bravest and the most outrageous, and now were the most timid, the most polished, kow-towing to their elder’s ideas of orthodoxy and demeanor…No one spoke anymore from the heart, said Binkel, and it was a shame."

I wasn’t sure whether Gessen was actually making fun of the “adversary culture,” at least in the way Binkel talks about it (Binkel, in the end, turned out to be an embodiment of abject unhappiness). But the idea spoke to me as a worthy pronouncement: great writing speaks from the heart.

What do I mean? I’m not sure, but it was quite evident, to me, in reading Gessen’s book after The Great Bolaño’s book, that different forces were at work, and they were speaking from different places. Gessen’s book, engaged eruditely with politics, sex, and the modern slacker milieu is product of a keen, wry mind. The sentences are compact; the chapters compact. The novel reads briskly. It seems carefully planned, executed, revised: a calculated affair. The Great Bolaño's book, on the other hand, engaged with politics, sex, and its own (strange) milieu, seemed to me to be written from an entirely different place. It's a torrent, sloppy in places, ugly in places, sometimes maddening.

And yet, I adored The Savage Detectives. On the other hand, All the Sad Young Literary Men bummed me out; it seemed limited, cold.

Gessen’s book certainly wowed me; reading it, I started to feel self-conscious about my own novel. I was impressed with the pacing, the intellectual rigor. In the end, though, it just seemed lifeless, as if Gessen were following some formula he had learned at the great institutions he had attended.

Natasha Wimmer writes in her introduction to The Savage Detectives:

“For Bolaño and the others, rejecting a career in poetry was a way of taking poetry as seriously as life itself—and vice versa. If the author lived what he wrote in spirit, Bolaño liked to say, the reader would naturally feel the urgency and live it too:” If the poet is caught up in things; the reader will have to be caught up.”

To me, Gessen’s book is just too smart, too polished. The moments of introspection and passion come off as hackneyed. I like messiness. I think you find that in great books: like The Great Bolaño’s book, or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, or Junot Diaz’s The Brief Life of Oscar Wao. To call Franzen or Diaz “messy” might seem ridiculous, but I mean that as a compliment: the courage to be messy, to put the mess of life on the page, with its quirks, weirdnesses, idiosyncrasies (the characters in Gessen’s book are NOT weird) and let it stand, despite what it might do to the pace, the plot.

Now I’m reading (fighting?) The Great Bolaño’s 2666. For vast stretches of pages I’ve found myself utterly absorbed; and yet, recently, I had to take a break from the book to read Peter Benchley’s masterpiece JAWS. 2666 crushes me; JAWS entertains me (even as it freaks me out). As the reviews on the back cover suggest it’s “tightly written”, “tautly paced”, “a fine story told with style, class, and splendid feeling for suspense.”

2666 is often tight, taut, and suspenseful, but it’s also often tedious (and, of course, it’s often the opposite of tight: unwound, massive). And yet, the sole review on its book jacket calls it “one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature.”

Why do the messy books always end up defining an entire literature?

I like what The Great Bolaño himself has to say about it, in 2666, in the guise of one of his characters, Amalfitano, who has just asked a young pharmacist: What books do you like? What books do you read?

"Amalfitano asked him…just to make conversation. Without turning the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Christmas Carol…there was something revelatory about the taste of the bookish young pharmacist…who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no real interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

What is that something?

I call it heart: bloody, wounded, reeking of mess. Great books, to me, show something of the struggle of the writer and craftsman, but they also show the struggles of a human being: the messy, ugly (and so beautiful) person behind the writer. Of course, not every book has to be about real combat. But really, if you're not fighting something why write?