On Excitement.

 

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

My Downtown Year, Days Two & Three

 

Germany, the summer before I left home for college.

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.

Smoked some grass, walked to the video store.  Along the way, a homeless man was berating a portly fellow who had kindly enough invited the homeless man into his house.  “You fat pig fucker.  Bacon-ass bald-headed fucking cocksucker.”  It was for the best really.  What good could have come of the homeless man accepting Fatty’s invitation?  One or both of them would have undoubtedly been disappointed by the encounter.  At least this way, Fatty is able to feel martyred, and Homeless Man can put the remembrance of what it is to have a home back into the depths of his subconscious.

 

It’s really a positive turn of events for Fatty.  He’ll never have to give another dollar to a pan-handler again.  He will likely live the rest of his life feeling fully justified at looking into a sun-scarred, toothless, unkempt memory of a face and saying simply, “No thanks.”  (Note: I meant to start writing earlier in the evening, but of course I had to choose music that would properly stimulate my writing.  Obviously it’s all very strange music, stuff you’ve probably never heard of before, so I won’t bother “dropping” any band names.)

 

And so our lives become parenthetical to their own stories.  In this free-market fascism, we are all identical, whether wearing Soviet grey or Gap khaki.

 

There’s a girl on the bed and it would be so very Hunter S. to say that I don’t even know who she is any more.  But today, and for me, I know more about her all the time, but less about myself.  And as I know her more, she knows me more, and both of us feel like we know our own selves less for the effort.  But we will never know ourselves any more than we do now.  We are the illegitimate love children of a failed revolution.  And that was so Chucky P. of me to say.

 

500,000 marched against our Marlboro Man in the streets of New York City this week.  The next day, I woke up and drove a fossil-fuel-powered automobile to work.  I wasn’t making any more money.  I was still tired.  I still had to step over drunks and junkies to get to my car.  Five-hundred thousand people screamed a collective “FUCK YOU!!!!” and two-hundred-eighty million replied with a resounding “Eh, whatever.”  The Million Man March won’t be effective until it’s the One-Hundred-Fifty Million Man and Woman March Apathy is the ultimate mind control.

 

In rear-screen projection, the car appears to be traveling extremely fast, but in reality it never moves an inch.  (Note: My apartment is quickly becoming a museum of Ramen noodles, styrofoam coffee cups and empty cigarette packets.  I’m also out of rolling papers.)

 

Day 3: Our sensitivity has overwhelmed our political sensibilities.  I was wrong yesterday when I said that 500,000 screamed a collective “FUCK YOU!”  In reality, 500,000 whispered a collective, “fuck you, please?”

 

London, the summer after sophomore year. That's me with the camera.

My Downtown Year, Day One

June, 2000: Junior Prom

 

 

My god, the world is a different place at night.  Self-consciousness sets itself in motion.  It’s to the point where forecasting criticisms of future critics has become commonplace.  Every thought is filtered through its eventual perception by an audience of fans and critics, admirers and detractors.

 

And so does the machinery of the corporate world trickle down into personal applications.  We are the first wave of buyers who accelerate the market penetration of new products and ideas.  Our product is ourselves: the newer, better, cooler versions of ourselves.  (Note: As I lit my cigarette just now, I pulled the lighter from my cigarette and my cigarette from my face in an overly dramatic manner.)  (Note also: I smoke Camel Lights, as they offer the time-tested Camel brand name combined with the reduction in perceived-risk of a light cigarette.)

 

And so it is that our mirrors become proof-sheets for a photo shoot that hasn’t happened yet. (Note: I am currently wearing tight jeans with an interesting, but not overwhelming, wash.  To complement my jeans, I am wearing a Shins t-shirt.  I have donned a jaunty army cap for the occasion, complete with a small button advertising an up-and-coming local band that you have never heard of, yet are the best band in the history of music.)

 

That last paragraph was really only one sentence, with a three sentence parenthetical.  Strunk says perfunctorily (Does he ever say anything otherwise?), that parentheses are far too formal for conversational style (Strunk can be a real dick sometimes).How witty, how clever.  “He really is the voice of his generation.”  “Look at how he subverts grammar and structure to fit his ends.”  The point of knowing the rules is to be able to break them.

 

And so are we left with a grand design that has been implemented six billion times too often.  We have learned how to ride a bicycle so that we can invent a tricycle.  We “said no to drugs” so that we would do drugs in moderation.  “A wannabe H.S. Thomspon, and a second-rate one at that,” – Dapper Literary Critic, New York Times Book Review.  (Note: Dapper Literary Critic is a widely recognized dapper and literary sort of fellow who dislikes Susan Sonntag but who admires, if not the message, the style of On the Road.)

 

What a question: the drug question – the drug question that has itself become rhetorical and isn’t even asked anymore.  And so it has become a question punctuated with a period rather than a question mark.  It is a question in the same sense as the abortion question.  Abortion question period.  Rather than ask the question, we have decided just to ask the opposing parties to separate into distinct groups.  (Note: While I dislike the idea of aborting a potential life, I feel that it is the woman’s right to choose.  It is her body, after all.)

 

And so cohesion falls by the wayside.  Less than a page by my count, but judging by the general word-to-page ratio for books by “the author of his generation”, these words will probably fall on the second or third page of actual text.  What the true page numbers of those pages will be depends on whether this is the hardcover, pocket edition soft-cover, or the special edition featuring photographs from the new motion picture now being produced by Columbia Pictures.  We also would have to factor in any special “Anniversary” editions, which invariably include all sorts of forewords and “looks back” by various literary and social luminaries.

 

And so we come to the question of our generation; we do not come to that question directly mind you, but we come to it nonetheless.  To have an enemy, that would be something.  We erect figureheads of enemies, sure, but a figurehead is not the thing.  Our enemy is in fact faceless, or, more correctly, infinitely faced.  Masks of our enemy are not popular Halloween costumes.

 

And so we come to the question of how one goes about describing a faceless enemy.  Finally, a question with an answer!  The answer of course is no… or rather, do not.  Those that recognize the enemy do well not to reveal its identity.  I’ve probably said too much already.

 

“A work of pretentious, self-important, obtuse and inefficient metaphors for nothing.” – DLC.  (Note: Dapper Literary Critic has gone to using only his initials instead of his full name, so chic.)  god damn it, he is good, that Fucker.  You’ll all have to let me know if they capitalized that “god” there.  Those bastards, I bet they did.  By “those bastards”, I mean my editor.  She’s a very smart, imaginary, young girl.  She was brought on by the publishing company, also imaginary, and renowned for publishing very smart work, to help bring some focus and discipline to my writing.  (Note: My torrid affair with my imaginary editor will be the subject of a period film, illustrating how deeply a work of art can touch a person.)

 

(Note: the ashtray next to my keyboard is now full to the brim as I smoke incessantly while writing.)  (Note also: I write in the very late-night/early-morning hours as the friscillating light from the city streets leaks through a haze of cigarette smoke into my ironically-appointed downtown loft.)  I met a homeless man once, and he told me a funny story that made me laugh.  The story didn’t really have any meaning, but it’s a beautiful image isn’t it?  Me listening to this homeless man’s crazy story?  (Note: It’s far too late for me to still be awake, but it’s more important that I capture these ideas that are bouncing around like electrons in my head than to be well rested tomorrow.)

 

“Told in a series of disconnected vignettes…” – Dapper Literary Critic.  I see he dropped the initials thing.  Good for him, it came off as pretentious.  I heard he was doing too much blow during the “initials” phase of his critical career.  He’s been through rehab now though; I heard that going back to the full name was part of his leaving his past behind him.  You always have to return to the beginning to leave the past behind.  (Note: your shirt looks wrinkled, you should change it before you go out.  No, no, I don’t mean like artist/rugged wrinkled, it looks like it’s really been in the hamper for too long.)

 

Great pornography lets you jack-off without thinking about jacking-off.

 

 

2004