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

San Diego, a Journal. Volume I: Routine

 

After the rain, from the living room.

 

     The most difficult thing about writing, for me at least, is sitting down to do it.  It’s strange, because I enjoy writing so much once I’ve started, but I have a hard time clearing the time and physical space necessary to work effectively.  One of the fatal errors I make over and over is failing to set my writing space apart from my living space in general.  I’m writing this from the kitchen table.

     This is a problem for my writing life, and my personal life.  I start writing, but to Andrea, it looks like I’m just sitting at the kitchen table, surfing the internet or whatever.  So she asks me the sort of inane question all people who live together ask each other, like whether or not I’ve seen her coat, and, in my feeble mind, she’s interrupting me in the middle of a torturous sentence.  I lose my train of thought, I get mad, she gets offended, no good.  Tomorrow, after my job hunt, I’m making myself a workspace in my grandparents’ bedroom, locked away in the unused back part of our borrow home.

     The problem with setting up a dedicated workspace is that I share my writing instrument with Andrea and my other computing activities.  Her computer’s on the fritz, so the problem is especially acute right now.  I’ve been playing around with an old typewriter, but its quaintness and air of gravitas do not outweigh its inefficiency, at least not for me.  So I’ll have to start kidnapping the laptop too.  Sorry, baby.

     This is a lot of bitching about the minor hurdles I have to deal with.  Things are otherwise as good as they’ve been in a long long time.  I’ve been vacationing in this house, where Andrea and I are now living, since I was a kid; these are comfortable surroundings for me.  The house itself is beautiful, set on a beautiful piece of property with a creek in the back.  The kitchen table is actually a great place to write from, I can see the birds pecking away at the feeder, at the food Andrea left out for them.

     And here’s why I need to establish a good writing routine, a better life routine, in fact: I don’t want to write about San Diego.  I mean, I want to write about, I want to get the story out of me, put it all on paper, sort it out, make sense of it all, put order to it, or write it off as a series of random events, but I hate to think about that city, and everything that happened to me there, and everything I did there, and the noise, and latent violence, heavy in the air as the humidity, as the smell of the ocean.  I need the routine so that I can say I gave it my best effort.  That I really tried to write that damned story.  And if I still can’t pull a coherent story from the mess of my memories of San Diego, after I’ve really assigned myself to the task, well, then I’ll say, “It’s just too soon, I’m still too young.”  And I can start writing a different story.  But if I keep pecking at this book, writing when I feel like writing, instead of regularly, every day, I’ll be left with a pile of pretty vignettes and a knot of loose strands.  That sounds much worse than having to borrow the laptop from Andrea.

 

Personal Note: Four days off the smokes and counting!  Thanks Nicopatch!  Kids, never ever start smoking.  Ever.  Seriously.

 

March 5, 2009

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

 

 

 

 

The Restroom Is for Customers Only

     On the radio, Cat Stevens sings “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.”  I hear a clang and look up.  I know it’s her as I do.   With one of the double doors closed, the entrance to the shop is too narrow for her conveyance.  I’m supposed to keep the left door closed when it’s cold.  She and her motorized wheelchair would fit if not for the raft of over-full plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it.  She takes hold of the closed door in her right hand, reaches across her lap to the joystick that controls the wheels with her left hand, and, holding onto the door with her right hand, backs the chair up.  The door cracks opens and she uses her left hand and the joystick to maneuver the chair and its attending sacs of miscellany into the opening.  She flings the door fully open, switches her now free right hand to the joystick and scoots across the threshold.  The door rebounds at the extreme of its hinges’ range and swings shut as rapidly as it was flung open, thudding to a stop against her chair’s trash-bag rear fender, dragging shut as she enters the shop.

     Inside, she parks her rig, stands up and examines the display case.

“Oh, they all look so fluffy, like colored whip cream,” she says to me.

“Yeah, I like the way they look too.” I say.

“Can I try a couple?”

“Sure.”

“How’s that pineapple?  When I lived in Hawaii, they  always had pineapple ice cream.”

“Oh.  I bet it was good, Hawaii, and pineapples and everything…”

She stares intently at the case.

“Do you have a coconut one?”

“Yeah, right here, in the back.”  I put my finger against the freezer case’s sliding plastic doors, pointing at the frozen white waves on the surface of a pan of coconut sorbeto.

“You could make like a-uh pina colada.”

“Yep.”

“Do you like those?  I mean the drinks.”

“Not really, too sweet for me.”

“Me too.  I never really liked alcohol.  Beer I guess, but I never liked alcohol.”

She stares into the case.  I stare into the case.

“Which one do you want to try?” I ask.

“Just give me the four-seventy-five cup, with the pineapple and the tropical.”

“A medium with pineapple and tropical?”  I take a pink cup, made from biodegradable corn plastic, from the top of a two-foot tall stack of inverted pink cups that sits between a one-foot tall stack of smaller green cups and a three-foot tall stack of larger blue cups.  With my left hand, I grab the top pink cup and flip it top-side up.  With my right hand, I open the plastic sliding doors of the smaller of the shop’s two freezer cases, the one that holds the sorbeto, the one she stares into so intently.  I look at the metal pan, with a small plastic lean-to placard in front of it that reads “Pineapple” on both sides,  a quarter full of pineapple sorbet.  I look at the tropical, nearly full.

     With my right hand, I pull the red handled spade from the pineapple sorbeto, like sword from stone.  I scoop the pineapple first because it is older, and I know it will be harder, less malleable, than the fresh, airy tropical.  If I reverse the order, the serving will not find its form: a cupcake-like half-dome, an inch over the pink corn-plastic rim, forming a sticky equator between hemispheres of pastel orange and yellow.  Without the constraint of the week-old pineapple in place, the tropical will not hold its shape.  It will flow over the edges of the cup and stick to my hands.  I’ll have to give her the cup and the sugary soup will stick to her hands too.

      She’ll touch her money with her sticky hands, and it will become sticky, and I’ll have to touch the sticky money.  She’ll touch the chair she sits in, because she does not sit in her wheelchair while she is in the shop, and the chair will become sticky, and I’ll have to clean the chair.  She’ll put her hands on the bathroom door before she leaves, and I’ll have to clean the bathroom door, after she’s used the bathroom.

     I slice through the frozen mixture of pineapple, water, sugar, syrup, dextrose and air with the edge of the equally frozen spade.  A jaundiced iceberg breaks away from a pineapple glacier.  The atoms of the iceberg are cold and slow and so adhere to the cold slow atoms of the spade’s metal concave.  I scrape the chunk of pineapple sorbeto into the pink cup against its plastic rim.  It slips into the dish and lies on the bottom.  I pick it up with the spade the way one picks up a sleeping drunk, and lean it against the wall of the cup, mashing it in a bit with the back of the metal scoop, so it knows to stay up.  I replace the spade, convex down, handle resting on the clean back edge of pineapple’s metal pan.  I reach for the spade resting on the clean back edge of the metal pan with a small plastic lean-to placard in front of it that reads “Tropical” on both sides.  When she sees I’ve got the flavors right she begins pulling crumpled bills from the folds of her clothing, and half-heartedly straightening the bills.

     I pull the spade from the tropical with a slurping suck.  The softer stuff is the fresher stuff, the right stuff, possessing the texture it’s meant to have.  It  scoops less like an iceberg than beach mud, bits of blended seed and pulp for the grit of sand grains.  With the pineapple retaining wall in place, the tropical mudslide fills into the neat mound I mean for it.  I use the nose of the metal scoop to scrape the pink-plastic edge of the tropical hemisphere.

“Could you put one of those cones on there sweety?” she asks.

“Sure.”

     I press an inverted sugar cone into the surface of the mounded cupful of sorbeto.  I’m supposed to put it on the counter by the register.  She’s supposed to walk over and give me five dollars.  I’m supposed to put it on the counter by the register because it’s bigger, so the cup is less likely to be knocked over onto the floor, which would make a mess I would have to clean up.  Also, my tip cup is by the register.  I don’t get tipped as often if people don’t see the tip cup while I’m taking their money and giving them their change.  I take the cup of sorbeto to the bit of counter that she’s leaning on, in between the two freezer cases, and set it down.  She gives me five crumpled singles.  I take them to the register.  I press a button on the register with the number “2″ on it in bold black lettering.  Then I press a key marked “PLU”.  Then “6″, then “1″, then “PLU” again.  Then a button marked “CA”.  The drawer of the cash register springs opens with a thud.  I put the five crumpled bills on top of a crisper stack of the same denomination.

     She ambles to a table in the middle of the dining room, cup in hand.

“Do you drink alcohol?” she asks me.

“Sometimes,” I answer, “Not hardly at all lately.”   I take a spray bottle of kitchen cleaner and a rag from under the counter, beneath the register, and start cleaning the espresso machine.

“My daddy owned a bar, in New Jersey, that’s where I’m from.  So I grew up seeing people drinking and everything.  But I think sometimes the beer actually makes people go crazier than the other stuff even.”

“People drink so much of it.” I say, staring in to the already shiny chrome of the espresso machine, searching for water spots, for any dried flecks of steamed milk.

“There was one guy, he came in all the time.  I would come home from school, and he’d be there in my dad’s bar, and I’d have to go move his car from the middle of the street.”

     I turn my head to look at her and she shakes her head and laughs.  ”He got drunk and left it there?” I ask.

She stares into her cup, “I was seven I think…  when you’ve served drinks most of your life, which is what I did, you see the way that people are when they drink alcohol, you know?

“Yeah.”

     I put the spray bottle and the rag back under the counter.  I sit at the table, under the pass-through window to the production room, where the gelato and sorbeto are made, where I have my computer set-up.  I sit and start typing:  

     “On the radio, Cat Stevens sings “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.”  I hear a clang and look up.  I know it’s her as I do.   With one of the double doors closed, the entrance to the shop is too narrow for her conveyance.  I’m supposed to keep the left door closed when it’s cold.  My boss says it’s to keep some heat in, but still let people know we’re open. She and her motorized wheelchair would fit if not for the raft of over-full plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it.  She takes hold of the closed door in her right hand, reaches across her lap to the joystick that controls the wheels with her left hand, and, holding onto the door, backs the chair up.  The door opens and she uses her left hand and the joystick to maneuver the chair and its attending sacs of miscellany into the opening.  She flings the door fully open, switches the joystick to her now free right hand and scoots across the threshold.  The door rebounds at the extreme of its hinges’ range and swings shut as rapidly as it was flung open, thudding to a stop against her chair’s trash-bag rear fender, dragging shut as she enters the shop.”

     I hear her clear her throat and look up.  She’s standing by the small freezer case again.

“You want another one?” I ask.

“Mango and wildberries.” she says.  ”Here’s the money.”  She lays more crumpled bills on top of the freezer case.  ”And can you scoop it, but leave it in the case for me while I use the restroom?”

I close my computer and stand up.  I wipe my hands on my apron.  ”Sure.”

Mise en Fail

“Nobody reads anymore.”

- Steve Jobs

     I’ve been reading a lot lately about the death of reading.  Shuttered newspapers, slow ebook reader sales and falling literacy rates, it’s argued, all portend the demise of the written word.  To fill the void, those holding a still-fogged glass over literature’s ashen mouth offer us its replacement: image-based language.  The king is dead, long live the king.

     Flickr, YouTube and Google, they say, have the vocabulary for this new language languishing on their servers.  All the “words” need is a taxonomy, an index, and fixed definitions.  No problem.

     Image-based language cannot approximate written language because of its difficulty with precision.  Photographic or cinematic mise en scéne in all but the most controlled set-ups is imperfect: accidental signifiers appear, meaning is unfixable.  Fine for impressionistic art, but less valuable for philosophical wrangling.  We use abstract symbols to describe the world, because its reality is beyond our complete grasp.  We cannot create the whole of existence from scratch.  Images are terrific when used to depict the world as it exists.  They fall shorter when asked to depict the world as it is experienced.  Readers subconsciously fill in the blanks, the parts of the universe the artist couldn’t or didn’t summon, that viewers have unpurposefully completed for them.  This new language of images is doomed to such fundamental imprecision as to be practically useless.

     The problem of imprecision in language is important because it plagues us already.  Language has always altered over time, but our time is unusual in the amount of words whose incorrect pronunciations or definitions have become standardized.  Our fondness for colloquial misappropriations intertwines with our society’s utter disdain for propriety and formality in conversation, knots our collective tongue and we speak as the deaf.  Our stilted English already feels the lack inherent in any image-based language.  It is a language of greetings and concrete things – free from ideas, from action and abstraction alike.  It is direct as a river of Hemingway prose, but bereft of the emotional undercurrent.

     And so what will the visual vocabulary created by our tongue-tied culture look like?   We supposedly see its unorganized protolanguage on YouTube and MySpace.  Will we be crass Eskimos, with a hundred “words” for fart?  What is the visual equivalent of “sorrow”?  Will our new visual language need interpreters?  Genetic and environmental differences in ocular sensory perception among different people seem to make a high-res hieroglyphics so much less universally approachable than our current arbitrarily abstract system.  How do you translate images?  So many questions.

     If Steve Jobs is right about reading, as, sadly, he might be, we’re staring at a future of human interaction impossibly less nuanced and expressive than its already stunted present.

Between the Spirit and the Letter

   Andrea gave me A Moveable Feast for Christmas. It seeped into my brain to leak out in my first post, yesterday. I can’t help aping the style. Those short taut sentences are like Alexander’s blade through the Gordian knot that is modern life. They are simple in structure and lean heavily towards physical action.   In the book, Hemingway says that writing hungry gave his characters great focus: they were always hungry too, always knew what they needed.  Their actions and speech always represent this clarity of vision.  There are no Focault-esque baroque oddities, spirals of abstraction, clause draped upon clause, endlessly supplementing, clarifying, hedging. The conventional thinking has Hemingway’s style as a product of its times, a counterpoint to the disorienting horrors of the first war fought with the full technological bounty of the Industrial Revolution, to the relativism of appocalypse. I think what makes that style so appealing today is the new universality of its application.

     We live today in a continuous state of upheaval. New technologies supplant old faster than ever before. World changing innovations are on tips of tongues in labs and on campuses, not only across the country, but across the globe. Breakthroughs are shared at near the speed of light and critiqued, corrected and expounded upon nearly as fast. But the sword cuts both ways, and let us not forget, is a sword. War becomes smaller, faster and more deadly to the innocent, it seems everyday. Soldiers die less and less often, more and more return home wounded or changed or both. Industries emerge and collapse in fruit fly cycles. Today’s “conflicts” may not be “World Wars”, but the specter of their violence and confusion covers the globe.

     So it feels good for me, like I’m sure it felt good for him, to put something in black and white, to cut through a knot I could never untie, to present my version of events and say simply: this is how it happened for me. Excise lengthy digressions on subjectivity and Heisenberg: writing is presenting an answer to a problem whose solution is unknowable.  Every good piece of writing is a religion, presenting a universe within our own, with rules and norms askew or realigned to our own, varying assumptions about the nature of reality suggesting varying modes of life. Hemingway’s voice is authoritative as Moses’.  He hedges no bets, makes no disclaimers on his prognostications. That’s a welcome relief in a deconstructed world and it’s the reason he’s the embodiment of American literature.  Who could help ripping that off?