a salon.
Andrea says she misses the time
When all it took to shake things up
Was a hip shaker.
John Paul was in it for the music,
Fuck the kids, he said,
There’ll be new ones tomorrow.
Garrett went to guitar college,
And art school,
And had friends in every bar in town.
Brad played the drums,
To a beat in nineteen eighths time.
I was giving it up for tomorrow,
And they were wearing green,
In Tehran.
We’re in the ash the wind whips against your ruddy cheeks.
Time to go to work...
I eat a fried egg on toast for breakfast. Outside, the western hills glow with the reflected light of the rising sun. In the garden, the cauliflower is barren but pert. Its leaves are bug-eaten and they will wilt in the day’s heat. The zucchini is in flower, too soon and without bearing any fruit. In the back corner of the tiny plot, a single beet stalk, more eviscerated than the cauliflower leaves, protrudes from the clayey soil on its withered root, its wisp of fruit below the surface. I need to amend the soil and add fertilizer. Only the few heads of lettuce look hale.
I finish my breakfast and put the plate in the sink. I sneak into the bedroom quietly, so as not to wake Andrea, and I go to brush my teeth in the bathroom there. The tube of toothpaste is empty and I’m running late, so I take a mouthful of Listerine from the bottle, and sneak back out into the hallway. I swish the mouthwash through the gaps in my teeth, agitating it between my lower lip and gums. It burns. I spit it into the kitchen sink.
I gather my things and head out the sliding glass door. I take a closer look at the garden as I pass: at the eaten edges of the lettuce leaves, at the decimated beet stalk. I head down the cobbled stone stairs, stepping on weeds sprung up through the mortar in the gaps between stones. I walk across the driveway, where more weeds strain skyward through cracks in the paving. I walk along the sidewalk to the top of the street, then turn left, and follow the gentle curve of the sidewalk of that street, until it ends. I make another left, then a right, through a parking lot, then a left onto the main road. There is no sidewalk here, so I walk in the leaf-covered dirt of the shoulder of the two-lane highway, Highway 33. It’s less than a quarter of a mile up the 33 to the Ojai Rancho Inn, where I work.
At work, I set up the continental breakfast: coffee, orange juice, milk, oranges, coffee cake, cereal and oatmeal. I print out the list of rooms to be made-up for the housekeepers, who should arrive at 9:00. Around 7:30, guests start trickling into the lobby: for the free coffee, for a slice of coffee cake, to check out. I ask those checking out if they enjoyed their stay. Yes, they say, but the shower wouldn’t drain, or the remote for the television didn’t work. I’m sorry, I say. I tell them I’ll make a note of it for our maintenance person. I write down the complaints, on a sheet of scratch paper. At 9:15, the first housekeeper, Alicia, arrives, and I give her the print-out of the rooms to be made-up, along with the master key, which opens all the rooms. At 9:30, the second housekeeper, Cynthia, arrives, and goes to join Alicia. At 10:00, I put away what’s left of the continental breakfast. At 11:00, I call the guests who have not checked out and remind them that now is the time to do so.
At 1:30, the housekeepers finish cleaning the rooms, and Alicia returns the print-out, now messily annotated in black pen, along with the master key. I put the print-out next to the list of guests’ complaints. I read the news on the computer. At 3:30, Sally arrives. She says hello and goes to clock in. She comes back behind the front desk. I gather my things. I ask her how she’s doing. I show her the list of guest complaints. She sighs. It’s always something, she says, there’s always something wrong with this place.
May 25, 2009
Alan Turing.
The girl who hands me my coffee is seventeen or eighteen years-old and pretty as a model. I take the cup of hot coffee and pay with my credit card. I apologize for not having cash. Behind me, I hear a man’s voice slurringly ask if they have beer. I walk outside with my paper and sit down. I smoke a cigarette. I read about healthcare reform.
There’s a full page ad on the next page from the pork producers’ association, asking people to keep eating pork, assuring them that they won’t get swine flu by doing so. The ad features blurbs from public officials testifying to the safety of pork products. They remind me of the book I read last night, about chatbots and Turing tests, about how we’re all working off pre-recorded scripts.
The slurring man from inside sits down across from me, uninvited.
“Bullshit, man, you guys think you can do this to me…”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“No, sorry.”
”I know who you’re with, man.”
”Who I’m with?”
He laughs derisively. ”You’d do it if you could. If you had something to say to the world, you’d say it right now, man. But you can’t.”
“I guess I don’t really have much to say.”
“You guys think you’re something, but you’re not. Your fuckin’… whatever they call those, shirts. You think you’re something, but you don’t mean shit.”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“You know who Miles Davis is?”
“Yeah, he’s a jazz player.”
“Bullshit. I have it like him, man. The heart zone. Right in here.” He motions to his chest.
”That’s good.”
He laughs. ”That’s not good, man. That’s not good. It makes me… Just watch, man, just watch what I do.” He makes an expansive gesture with the pen and sunglasses held clumsily in his right hand.
I watch the pen carefully, to see if it’s capped. On television the other day, I saw a man stab another man in the neck with a pen.
“You guys think you can do this to me, put me out of here. That’s bullshit, man.” His mustache is stringy and overgrown. He wears red hiking socks that go halfway up his sun-darkened calves. His shorts and t-shirt are almost matching browns. The shirt bears the logo of a company that makes shoes for skateboarders. He digs into his plastic grocery bag and pulls out a Member’s Only jacket. He struggles to put it on. ”Just watch, man, just watch what I’ll do.”
I gather up my paper, put my cigarettes in my pocket, and stand up to leave. ”Well, I gotta get going. Work…”
“Get the hell out of here then.”
“I’m going.” I turn and walk away. ”Good luck,” I call out over my shoulder as I go. In my head, I add, “You’ll need it with a script like that.”
May 11, 2009
One of sixty million.
The western world is in trouble. This is not news. We have followed the tradition of every great empire, and will soon experience the consequent decline. Our “sins” are myriad: complacency, laziness, destruction of natural resources, abandonment of an industrial economy for a financial services economy, etc. America, and its European brethren, are no longer top of the pile, and we may soon be at the bottom of it. This article from the Asia Times (written by a westerner, on Susan Boyle, of all subjects), highlights our failures. But it comes to a problematic conclusion. The fall of the West does indeed signal the emergence of the East, but their success will be as short lived as our own.
The western economic world is in decline largely because we no longer produce anything worth exporting. Our chief industries are financial and recreational services. Our education system, as the Asia Times’ column points out, is geared toward producing salesmen, not engineers and scientists, so we are unlikely to reverse our downward trend in innovation. The coming advancements in industry and technology will hail from China.
The Chinese do not share our current infatuation with leisure. Their schooling is rigorous, their upbringings strict. The Chinese will produce the first mass-market electric car. They are educating more scientists and engineers than we are people in general. Sixty million children are currently training to become classical musicians. Sixty million. You can bet they’re going to be damned good musicians too, their parents will make sure of that. The author of the Asia Times’ column points to hardships faced by the Chinese in the last century as the source of their industriousness, and he’s probably right.
American innovation in the last century was spurred by our own hardships, specifically the Great Depression. Our great-grandparents also had to meet reality head on. They also saw that “the world shows no mercy to mediocrity.” They raised their children to meet the challenges of industrialized life, to be the best. Their toil created an America richer and more advanced than any civilization in history. And yet here we are. In two generations, that old work ethic and wisdom has evaporated, a victim of its own success.
In all societies, wealth begets laziness. When there’s enough to go around that some can succeed easily, everyone works less, and towards more ambiguous aims. It’s human nature: we are social beings, we take our cues from those around us (in modern society, we’re receive these cues in a particularly pernicious mediated form).
When I was a kid, Bill Gates was known as the richest man alive. What did Bill Gates do? He played with computers. Obviously he did a hell of a lot more than that, but that’s not how he was portrayed. His billions were the result of some key strokes. He was a college dropout. He was that quintessential American archetype: the special genius. If you read the business press you knew about his work habits, but if you were a passive media consumer (as almost all Americans were in those days of TV news), he was an exceptional intellect who was in the right place at the right time with the right idea.
And that’s what really sold us, has always really sold us: that an idea can make you rich. Not hard work, not rigorous education, not even exceptional intelligence (we all believe we’re geniuses, after all), but an idea. The allure is obvious. Who doesn’t have an idea? I found out about Bill Gates and his idea when I asked my dad, on his way to work, “Where does the richest man in the world work?” It only made sense to me then that everyone had a job like my dad did, that everyone went to work everyday, that everyone had a boss. I saw wealth as the result of hard work and careful saving. The richest man in the world would clearly be the one who worked the best, and so was worth more than the rest. I didn’t know anything about capitalism.
Once I’d heard about Bill Gates, I wasn’t interested in a good job anymore. As I got older, I learned more and more, from newspapers, and TV, and my dad (who was also pretty taken by this Gates character), that the path to riches was not a ladder, but a trampoline. It’s easy to see why my dad was so captivated by the idea. Twenty years of real work, as a cabinet maker, hadn’t gotten him any closer to wealth or even security (and he was married to the boss’ daughter!). It wasn’t about working your way up, it was about taking it all in one fell swoop. After all, no one got rich working in a factory or in a lab. Scientists and engineers, it seemed, always worked for someone else, someone richer.
And Bill Gates wasn’t the only example. Think of the most conspicuously wealthy Americans (not that we don’t do enough of that already). What do they do? They’re “managers” and singers and athletes and dot commers. Why on earth would Americans think it takes an engineering degree, or hard work, to succeed? Why would they train their children for those things? Why would anyone even be interested in hard work? It is hard, after all. So we came to attach a stigma to labor. ”Workers” are schlubs, sweating for someone else’s payday.
Which brings us back to our friends, the Chinese. How wealthy will their society get before those who sweat to make it so realize the that they will not reap a bounty of fruit from their labor? Is their culture really so different that they will not tire of working to enrich someone else? How long until a billion Chinese all want to be billionaires? I guess as soon as they’re all well fed. They’ll go bust as fast as they’ve gone boom, same as us. They will forget the cause of their success as quickly as we have. And in the end, the world won’t pay sixty million concert pianists, however well-trained they may be.
April 26, 2009
Prohibition made this guy rich.
I don’t like to use this space for political argument. This blog is ostensibly concerned with literary pursuits, and I dislike the strident language of political discourse. The issues under consideration are usually too complex, the various positions too nuanced for the crude summations of politicians’ rhetoric. Today, however, I want to examine a political policy, and a cultural attitude, that is so clearly wrongheaded that stridency is possible and necessary. I want to talk about our government’s prohibition of marijuana.
In the interest of full disclosure: I do not currently smoke marijuana, but have in the past. This puts me in good company. Ted Turner, Stephen Hawking, and our current president, to name a few, have publicly admitted to using marijuana, and enjoying it. This in itself is not an argument for marijuana’s legalization, but I point to these luminaries as a counter to the notion of pot-smokers as shifty do-nothings (which is not to say that there aren’t shifty do-nothings who smoke marijuana). As Obama himself has (somewhat hypocritically) shown, there is a tendency in segments of our society to laugh off marijuana advocates and users as harmless agitators, best ignored.
This attitude manifests itself in our current policy on marijuana. Thirteen states have “decriminalized” private use of marijuana. Decriminalization can mean lowered penalties for users, or that arresting or citing users is law enforcement’s lowest priority. Decriminalization, in no cases, applies to sellers of marijuana, and is, in all cases, superseded by federal law, in the guise of the Controlled Substances Act. The problems of this false leniency and the foolish policy it veils are numerous.
While decriminalization acknowledges that users of marijuana are not a genuine threat to society, we continue to investigate, arrest and prosecute those caught with and those who sell marijuana. This results in unnecessary and exorbitant expense on state and local levels (probably around $13 billion a year for all marijuana-related arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations), as well as a terrible personal toll on those prosecuted. While it’s easy to write sellers of marijuana off as “drug dealing criminals”, their crime is a victimless one. They provide a commodity that is in high demand, a commodity whose use thirteen states (with a combined population of 115 million citizens) have deemed not a threat to society. Under any other circumstance, we would call these people entrepreneurs.
Beyond those who sell marijuana, prohibition disproportionately affects minorities. In New York, in 2007, nearly 90 percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses were black or Latino, despite demographically-proportional use and sale. Meaning that while caucasians represent the largest percentage of the population, and the largest percentage of drug users and sellers, minorities, specifically blacks and Hispanics, represent the largest percentage those incarcerated on drug convictions.
The most damaging effects of decriminalization, and of prohibition, are not felt in the United States, but in Mexico. By prohibiting Americans from responsibly supplying our vast market for marijuana, we have outsourced much of its production and resultant income to a country whose government resources are inefficient to enforce a ban on the substance. And so Mexican producers reap windfall profits, which they use to consolidate and protect their businesses through violence and the wholesale corruption of Mexican law enforcement. Illegality begets illegality. By banning the sale of a drug that is widely-agreed to be no more dangerous than tobacco, we have created an epidemic of violence in Mexico. Lifting the ban on marijuana would allow well-regulated American producers to supply a very profitable market that is currently monopolized by the lawless.
While it’s true that Mexican cartels profit from violent and illegal activities besides the production and sale of marijuana (specifically, trafficking in harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin), the end of marijuana prohibition would free up government resources to address those activities. In the United States it would mean more resources available to attack the demand problem for those harder drugs, and in Mexico it would mean more resources available to attack the supply problem. The emergence of a legitimate supply for the marijuana market would, at the very least, severely reduce cartel incomes, leaving them with less in their coffers to pay thugs and pay off law enforcement. The legalization of marijuana would be the most devastating blow yet dealt to the cartels in the war on drugs.
So why haven’t we legalized marijuana? Here the discussion is infinitely complicated by myriad cultural and political factors. Opponents of legalization argue that marijuana has a potential for abuse. They argue that legalization will lead to increased usage by adolescents (which would indeed be harmful) and increased health care costs. Those arguments are horribly hypocritical in light of our society’s attitude towards and use of alcohol. Alcohol is the most heavily abused substance in this country. Adolescents currently abuse alcohol, alcoholics currently tax the public health system. But do we reconsider the 18th Amendment? No, we work to limit alcohol’s deleterious effects, because, as we learned during its prohibition, people are going to drink alcohol, regardless of the law.
In the same sense, people do, and are going to continue to smoke marijuana. The question is, do we continue to spend billions arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating them? Do we continue to allow violent criminals to reap the profits of the marijuana market? Do we continue to allow teenagers unregulated access to marijuna? Or do we legalize marijuna, creating billions in tax revenue, dramatically reducing cartel incomes, and making it harder for adolescents to abuse the drug?
We haven’t made the smart choice yet because politicians aren’t willing to expend political capital on the issue. They worry that supporting legalization will upset politically active constituents without any compensatory gain in support. Politicians are bad at making good decisions, but great at making popular ones. It’s time to make this good choice a popular one. Whether you smoke or not, take a minute and email your representatives and senators, let them know you support legalization, because it makes sense for all of us.
April 21, 2009
This painting needs a Twitter client.
A lot has been made in recent days on the narcissistic nature of Twitter. While I’m probably the ten-millionth person to write on the subject, most of them have been looking at Twitter as a bastardized Facebook, or Myspace. The critics, it seems, have imported their paradigms from those social networks, and assume that Twitter users have as well. Without grossly overstating the importance of Twitter (it won’t alter the basic nature of human interaction), I think a more appropriate reference point is the printing press, or more specifically, the advent of literacy made possible by the invention of the printing press, or even more specifically, the ensuing flourish in written correspondence.
Before your head explodes with rage at the idea that 140 character “tweets” compare in any way to paper-and-ink letters, consider the early days of public literacy. Remember first that the telephone, our current favored means of transmitting trivial information to one another, did not exist. What did eighteenth century letter writers have to say to one another? Certainly the time, labor and expense involved, in those days, in mailing a letter encouraged the writer to consider carefully the content and presentation of her message. Certainly the correspondence from that time that survives today evidences these traits. We should bear in mind though that letters considered worth saving for 300 years are generally not your run of the mill correspondence. Not every letter written in the 1700’s was a treatise on human nature, we just haven’t saved most of the letters that weren’t.
Even the luminary minds of the pre-telephonic world produced letters that were far more akin to a tweet than Common Sense. I have, at home, a book of Lincoln’s correspondence, among which is a brilliant essay on the development of language, as well as many brief letters about women and the inanities of his attempts to enter government. In other words, even Lincoln wanted to let his friends know about what was happening in his life. Whether or not they viewed him as a solipsistic navel-gazer is a question whose answer is lost to time (or at least is unknown to me).
Be sure that the widespread literacy spawned by the invention of the printing press was, as Twitter is now, declared as the end of intellect and dignity. Imagine the chagrin of the former keepers of written language’s flame, the church, at the introduction of easily available text reproduction. People could write in ink, on parchment, easily enough before, but most were illiterate, mostly due to the rarity and expense of books. But with the printing press, that all changed. Once literate, the unwashed masses were suddenly able to express their base experience in a format formerly reserved for the holiest of holies. And not just to their immediate social circle, to everyone, pretty much anywhere! The horror!
But, as is their wont, the church overlooked the social value of the invention. They saw it as a means for transmitting information: political, religious, or worse, scientific. This is still the utility of the printing press, and of public literacy, that is most highly exalted in our textbooks, and rightly so. But it overlooks an important facet of human nature: we are social beings. I believe the ability for people to extend their social interactions beyond their immediate surroundings was, and is, nearly as important as the content transmitted in those interactions. Columbus discovered America with written information (albeit it bad information); colonists came to America because people they knew and trusted wrote to them about the place. And I’ll bet a lot of those letters included details almost no one would care about.
Which is what detractors say about Twitter: “Who cares about the details of our boring lives?” The answer, as they’ll rightly tell you, is no one. But as anyone who has ever made small talk with a new acquaintance knows, it doesn’t take an academic discourse to establish a relationship. And herein lies the real value of Twitter. No one is going to produce a unified field theory or great work of literature in 140 characters (although Hemingways “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” is a heartbreaking tale in only six words), but millions of people will “make small talk” with millions of other people. They’ll share interests and dislikes, and yes, inane blather about what they’re doing right now. With all we’ve heard in the last decade about how the world is getting smaller, Twitter may be the first step in getting to know our new neighbors. Plus, it’s a great way to show all your friends that Onion article that just made you pee your pants.
April 1, 2009.
Summer, 2001.
NOTE: My Downtown Year was written in 2004. I will be using excerpts from My Downtown Year in a book about San Diego that I’m currently writing. For more context on its serial presentation on this blog, click here.
Day 6: There are places in the Free World where you can buy a 13 year-old boy as a sexual servant. The people saw it on Dateline and cried, “Outrage!” Less than 300 years ago, 13 year-old girls purchased as sexual servants were known as wives. Four generations prior to ours, the practice was legal in the United States under the guise of slavery. In all that time the practice of men paying women for sex and vice versa has occurred the world over. But now, now we’re talking about little boys being anally assaulted by dirty old men who look like grandpa. And PFLAG shouted, “Homophobes!” Thank you for flying United Flight 11 from Boston to New York City, and enjoy your stay in the United States of America.
Day 7: There was a man named Youandi who played the lottery religiously. From the day he turned 18, he bought a ticket for every drawing held. Every time, he would choose his own numbers. He did not have a specific set of numbers that he chose, but rather chose numbers that had been of some significance to him during the week.
One day, Youandi’s wife of 27 years, Faith, left him for a woman she met at the gas station. Both were complaining about high gas prices and hit it off. Faith had long had sexual desires for women, but considered them evidence of her being free and enlightened in her sexuality. Faith’s new lover, Chance, was a lifetime lesbian who had been sexually abused as a child. It was during a drunken “girls’ night out” that Faith and Chance had first sexually consummated their relationship. It was the infidelity that weighed heavily on Faith, and she did not sleep. In the morning, she went home and told her husband everything. She told him how she had met Chance, what happened, and that she was very sorry, but she had to leave him. She had been happy with Youandi, but could never be as happy again. She had found what had always been missing.
Youandi listened to every word. He was rent with grief, but remained stone-faced and silent. He left her where she stood and went to the store and bought his lottery ticket, as he always did. The numbers he picked were all directly related to the day’s earlier trauma, a scrambled sampling of digits from his and Faith’s anniversary, her birth date and the price of a gallon of gasoline. That night, as he mourned his misfortune, the television announced the evening’s winning lottery numbers. As the winning numbers were drawn, Youandi began to realize they had already drawn four of his own numbers. As a fifth numbered ball rolled down the shoot, Youandi found himself one stroke of incomparable luck away from the night’s 125 million dollar jackpot. When the sixth and final number was drawn Youandi was suddenly holding a slip of paper redeemable for 125 million dollars (paid in 26 annual installments).
Youandi was ecstatic. For a moment, he forgot about the immense pain of losing the woman he had loved for so long. The juxtaposition of such extreme emotions was overwhelming. He hid the ticket in a small box safe in his closet, took two Valiums and went to sleep. While he was asleep, a nuclear weapon exploded in Haifa, Israel.
When Youandi awoke in the morning, gas prices had skyrocketed to 27 dollars per gallon. All of this was still unknown to Youandi as he headed to his car to go claim his winnings. Months later, an investigation found that the police car that jumped the curb and killed Youandi was traveling over eighty miles per hour, on a suburban side street, en route to quell a riot at a local gas station, one of many gas station riots that day. And so it is that we are all prisoners of Fortuna’s Wheel.
Summer, 2008.
Thrillseekers!
When I started reading fiction, as a child, I read adventure stories. Books were, I was told, a way to go places one could never really go, to do things one could never really do. When I wrote stories, I wrote about flying couches and other planets and purple monsters. I saw fiction as a way out of the boring (stable) life my parents had created for me, as a chance to create a new, more exciting world.
I saw fiction as fantasy for most of my youth, until my junior year of high school. That year, I took Mr. Kilmar’s advanced composition course. He made us read Confederacy of Dunces, among a dozen other great works. It was like realizing television has more than one channel. I saw for the first time that literature was meant for more than excitement, for more than entertainment. Ignatius J. Reilly’s story was amusing, sure, but it definitely wasn’t an adventure like I was used to. There was no globe trotting or war fighting. Nothing terribly exciting happens in Confederacy of Dunces.
It was a revelation. My old adventure stories, my dog-eared Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children books, suddenly seemed cold and boring (the revelation that Mr. Kilmar had ghostwritten a Boxcar Children book didn’t help). Those books were just made-up stories, and anyone could make up a story like that. Confederacy… was different. No one but John Kennedy Toole could have written that book. It was personal and weird and not always pleasant. And I cared about the hero, not because he was the hero, but because the author cared about him. People who I used to think were weird became suddenly interesting. The book had made me see that the interesting things in life were not across the world, but at the grocery store and at school, in my own backyard. I saw people as characters for the first time, understood that they had motivations different from my own.
Then, senior year, I took advanced literature with Mrs. Arnold. If Mr. Kilmar taught me to really read, Mrs. Arnold taught me to really write. The course centered on English-language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was not enough to just understand the plot anymore. Now I had to read as a writer. Mrs. Arnold made us read Sons and Lovers. I did not like Lawrence on my first read.
Confederacy… was one thing, that was funny. But Sons and Lovers? It’s so boring! There must be a hundred pages of the main character pining for his teenage love. I hated Lawrence. So whiny, so redundant. Why do we need to hear over and over about how much he loves this stupid girl? Arrggh!
Then Mrs. Arnold led us in dissecting the book. Oh. He’s supposed to sound whiny. That’s how teenagers sound to adults? Wow. So all that boring stuff is supposed to be tedious? It’s supposed to make me feel squirmy? I understood it, but I didn’t like it. Why not leave all that stuff out? Realism is great, but to a point. Come on.
And that’s sort of where I stayed for a long time. I added a morose flourish to my writing in college, after my parents got divorced, but it was just a tweak to the romanticized realism I was stuck on. ”Real life, but more,” could have been my motto. I was trying to capture real life, but without all the tedium. Just the good stuff. I read Hunter Thompson. I felt like he got it. Living life, writing the interesting parts down, seeing through the bullshit. That’s what I wanted to do.
I dropped out of college and starting living downtown. My friend Brad moved in. Brad liked different music than I did. I was still on Bright Eyes and similar “enhanced-realism” songwriting. Brad liked noise music. I thought it was just noise. Brad was patient. He traced the lineage for me, the punk ethos, the avante-garde sensibility, the situationalist methodology. He played me a mini-CD by a group called “Destroy 2″. Just a drummer and a Japanese guy screaming for 30-second songs. They recontextualized music. A cover of the Beastie Boys in that arrangement blew my mind.
It was totally new, but referenced the old. It made all music make more sense. The droning chaos of this version made the original, with its melody and rhythm and structure, seem standard and uninteresting. It made me better understand difficult passages in literature. The painful parts make the beautiful parts. Ah, the importance of juxtaposition.
Noise music is a terrific depiction of modernity. It is so bombastic, so constantly “exciting”, that it becomes monotonous. To create a climax in a song made up of distortion and feedback is difficult. The true climaxes of noise music are actually decrescendos: a measure of rhythm eight minutes into ten minutes of a car being dismantled with a circular saw. It is the boring little things that make a story, and life, exciting.
March 26, 2009
Junior Prom. May, 2000.
NOTE: My Downtown Year was written in 2004. I will be using excerpts from My Downtown Year in a book about San Diego that I’m currently writing. For more context on its serial presentation on this blog, click here.
Day 5: Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. But he missed the mark. Religion is, in its very nature, agitating, and anarchistic. It demands the usurpation of all authority that is not God. Eventually, a truly deistic society will not need government in any form. This was the ultimate failure of the English church-state. The “Pilgrims” were retreating religious insurgents. To maintain government, the encouragement of religious thought is contra-positive. It is in this sense that communism and capitalism can be seen as what they really are: two different means working towards the same end. The goal of both is ultimately state control of the individual in order to maintain an ordered society. Communism failed because it attempted to substitute state for god in the pantheon of worship. Capitalism allows god, but neuters him/her/it with more alluring alternatives. Consumerism is the official religion of the capitalist society. Communism sought to destroy all concept of a supernatural God. In so doing, they indirectly endowed any concept of a god with infinite power. Why fight something that does not exist? Consumerism loves god when convenient, but locates him/her/it somewhere below new sneakers on the Mazlo Triangle of Actualization. While true religion eventually leads to revolution, consumerism invariably leads to greater reliance on government control. We require government to ensure that the mechanisms of buying and selling remain viable and stable, especially in this flying nation of hungry importers and haughty exporters.
As long as the system itself remains, we demand nearly nothing to live our lives. We want things, but we have to work to earn them. We should reward ourselves for all that hard work, so we buy more things, which we then have to work more to pay for. Life is an endless cycle of consumption and earning. We work until we die to be able to buy the things that help us relax from working so goddamn much. It suddenly occurs to me that everything I’ve written thus far is a half-assed and unsupported condemnation of a system that has allowed me to write a half-assed and unsupported condemnation of itself. Add convoluted to the list of pejoratives in the previous sentence. (Note: I bought an $80 T-shirt today with a caricature of Ernesto Guevarra on it.)
Macintyre says that we are facing a crisis because we have reduced absolutes to opinions and that the language of teleological morality has escaped our philosophical vocabularies. We should be so fortunate. We are facing a crisis because we are bored and see the world as an elaborate reality show, staged for our amusement and reward.
(Note: If you seek a philosophical system here, you are lost. I can recommend only utter and total excess and self-destruction. From there you will either become a relativist or a positivist. The choice between the two is preemptory to any other philosophical decision.)
First Garden. Fall, 2008.
Ooof.
A few days back, I wrote about style and routine. I concluded that post by saying: “The habits that matter most to a writer’s development are not writing habits, but living habits: do you put yourself in the way of situations worth writing about?” Oh man. Let me clarify and qualify that.
I do not believe that a writer needs fight in a war, or even be a soldier, to write a good war story. Do I think it helps? Absolutely. Stories are made compelling by their details. Descriptive detail is what puts the reader in the story; it creates the world. Like continuity errors in a film, unnecessary, inconsistent, or overly generic descriptions of characters, settings, events, etc., are like puppet strings, drawing the audience’s eyes away from the show, to the hands pulling the strings. They destroy the audience’s necessary illusion of “being there”. Instead of thinking about the story, we start thinking about the writer. This can be used by the writer to self-referential effect, but that’s a topic for another time.
So if the story’s in the details, where do the details come from? In my experience? Experience. The old saw applies: “Write what you know.” The way a character does something, whether they move this thing with their left or right hand, if their hands are dirty afterwards, etc., these details come from the experience of the writer. Observation is a useful tool, more useful to some than others. I learn best by doing, and I certainly can’t “show” someone else how something is done without doing it first. Experience matters.
But not if you can’t put it on paper. It’s an old joke for the downsized that now they’ve finally time to write that novel. There are millions of books lolling around in heads, waiting to be written. There’s probably a million more books half finished, or half begun, in desk drawers all over, destined for incompletion. So what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Hemingway and the countless others wounded in his wars? All the faceless others who fought and fucked through the same country? Maybe some didn’t want to talk about it. But I’ll bet most couldn’t write.
We’re always writing our own stories in our mind. We’re usually the hero, but sometimes the villain, and sometimes the damsel in distress. It seems like it would be so easy to simply transcribe this mental narrative. But our mind’s style is terrible! What details do we include in our stories? Those most pertinent to ourselves, to our interpretation of the story. What would those wounded soldiers write about? My pain, my hunger, where I was wounded, the name of the man who held my hand as I lay shot and bleeding. They would be exciting stories, to be sure, because they would be true stories of dangerous things. But they would not all be good stories, they would not all move us like Hemingway’s story about blowing up a Spanish bridge, or Vonnegut’s story about hiding in a basement while Dresden burns.
The great stories, Vonnegut’s stories, Hemingway’s stories, move us because they are that rare synthesis of experience and craft. Each writer’s stories are compelling because he captures the details: the movements, the accents, the fears. His stories are remembered because he spent enough time writing them to whittle the details into their own stories.
March 17, 2009
