Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Complaisant Fog Wakes Me From My Slumber

One would think goodness matters, but it doesn't seem to, in the end. Perhaps because we're all about equally good, both with each other and with ourselves. The world has its saints—heaven help them—and its demons, but we shouldn't model our lives after aberrations. We should be true to what we require.

I've discovered that I don't require goodness but strangeness—strangeness and beauty.

By strangeness I don't mean eccentricity, which, like Montaigne, I find irritating. I mean unexpectedness in the movement of a mind, as when Zachary said: "I like fish because they are interesting." Zachary is not eccentric but he is strange, to my unending delight.




I also mean formal strangeness: the way a poem, for example, or a face is assembled. Beyond all other qualities strangeness is what we look for in art, and in love. It's what the French call je ne sais quoi—that certain I-don't-know-what that escapes, in both French and English, the scope of a single word.

As with beauty, we recognize strangeness immediately—so we always fall in love at first sight.

I remember that discovery: I was seven years old and sitting in Sunday School in Lafayette, Indiana. Just in front of me: a girl's long brown hair, its streams of curls, its luxurious resplendence. At a particular moment she glanced toward the back of the room—her name, I soon learned, was Denise—and her eyes caught mine, and I was finished.

Even now, remembering that moment, I feel her strangeness, her difference from anything else, anyone else I'd ever encountered. To my new mind she was indecipherable.

She proved to be a girl who took pleasure in kicking my shins, not unlike most girls at that time, but she was also possessed of a strange quietness, so long ago. She still had that quietness when I saw her twelve years later, in college. But our time, I knew immediately, had passed.

Great artists are like great loves: Homer, the swift-footed poet of friendship, grief, and life's on-goingness; Shakespeare, who is so strangely all-encompassing as to make everyone else seem narrow-minded; Dickinson and her dashes; Kafka; Billie Holliday; Radiohead. Borges, Bolaño, Cézanne, and Chagall. Ravenous Petronius. Cartier-Bresson, Vallejo, Gombrowicz, Bjork. The list is, thank goodness, long enough for a lifetime.

Occasionally the world itself summons us from our slumber. The fog this morning, butting up against a radiant sky to the east, enshrouds Half Moon Bay in strangeness. I'm a small animal pulsing inside the sky. And for the first time in a long time—these things can't be explained—anything seems possible.

That's the gift of strangeness: like beauty, it opens the world, transforming everything, if only for a moment, into real—not fantastical—mystery.

Friday, August 27, 2010

TFTD

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true?
Or is it something worse . . .

— Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James

One of my life's treasures is a single Word file: Various Quotes.doc

A collection, begun about a decade ago, of quotes that have caught my eye, it's become a record of my intellectual life: my reading, my thinking, my enthusiasms, my obsessions, my laments, my solitude, my delight. I've assembled the quotes as I've encountered them, so it's order is chronological, and I've recorded their origin, including the page number, so I that I can easily locate them again, should I need to. What riches.

Fundamentally, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James's Various Quotes.doc, consolidated into a book, with commentary. The book is filled with astonishing quotes, taken from a life of reading—my goodness, what reading—and film-going, listening, traveling. James uses his various quotes to contemplate people whom in his view we should not forget, mostly for their grandeur, occasionally for their depravity. The quotes get him rolling, and his essays often turn in unexpected—and consistently marvelous—directions: a mediation on the anti-Nazi heroine and martyr Sophie Scholl, for example, turns into a celebration of Natalie Portman. James imagines Portman playing Scholl in a movie of Scholl's life—which takes him to a claim about the limitations of cinema:
If Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl won't die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl's career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really did come to an end. The Fallbeil (even the name sounds remorseless—the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It's a fault inherent in the movies that they can't show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person, and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history.
The essays in Cultural Amnesia wander like this, as essays should—orbiting elegantly, satellites crossing the firmament, around their brilliant quotes. The quotes are shining little planets upon which they gaze, and which give them the axis all orbits require.

The primary pleasures of this text, which as a whole constitutes the most compelling defense of Western liberal democracy that I've ever read, number three: 1) reading the quotes James has gathered; 2) becoming acquainted, or re-acquainted, with some of the essential figures of (mostly) 20th century cultural and political history; and 3) following the movement of the author's mind, which, in the end, is any essay's fundamental gift.

The good news here is that Clive James has a exceptional mind and he has given us an indispensable book.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

What's Mine Is Mine, and God Bless America

David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.

While God's light shines serenely upon him, David Koch spends a little bit of his $35,000,000,000 upgrading New York City concert halls.

Less publicly he spends a good chunk of his billions fighting popular efforts to protect the environment (bad for his business) and arguing for tax policies that will starve to death the social security programs that help those who are at risk of starving to death.

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Dead Parade

Astonishingly, the murder rate in Venezuela is 63% higher than the murder rate in Mexico. And it's nearly 4x higher than the murder rate in Baghdad. More than 90% of Venezuelan murders are never solved.

One out of every 500 Venezuelans will be murdered this year.

Another megalomaniac, another wrecked country, another example of "revolution" providing cover for depravity.

Friday, August 20, 2010

The English 1B Book Club, Fall 2010

Here are the books I'll be using for English 1B at Foothill College this fall.

Break It Down, by Lydia Davis
Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platonov (reviewed here)
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Dusk, by James Salter

I've never taught Platonov or Fitzgerald before, but those are favorite novels of mine and "Books I Love" is going to be the theme of the class.

Self-indulgent, perhaps—but sharing what you love seems like a decent way to spend an autumn morning.

And I'll supply a collection of poems for us to enjoy. I've decided—I now think foolishly—not to have the students purchase any poetry collections.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Love's Labour's Lost Among the Redwoods

Empty wine bottles at our feet. The remnants of cold salads and sliced cheese. The picnic basket, as much as possible in the tight crowd, kicked aside.

Standing to pee I snapped the stem of a wine glass.

The stage among the trees; the stage lights lashed to the trees' trunks, high up. The actors running by.

Their eagerness a kind of joy. Our laughter, too.

The moon coming on, very late, turning the sky, the tops of the trees, vaguely silver.

The only line I remember being: "All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder."

Conundrums

Must all the good things in life do battle between themselves?
  • Love with Peace
  • Memory with Time
  • Abundance with Simplicity
  • Joy with Rest
  • Freedom with Stability
  • Youth with Innocence
  • Exuberance with Wisdom
  • Secrecy with Knowledge
  • Privacy with Integrity
  • Passion with Tranquility
  • Sophistication with Purity
  • Beauty with Reason
  • Desire with Contentedness
  • Inquiry with Faith
  • Curiosity with Tradition
  • Comedy with Elegance
  • Lust with Composure
  • Action with Idea
  • Strength with Compassion
  • Bravery with Humility
  • Decisiveness with Patience
And on and on, the irreconcilable dilemmas of life, which are not struggles between good and evil but, to paraphrase an idea from Isaiah Berlin, between two goods. That's where life is lived—or lost.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Lou Gehrig Didn't Die of Lou Gehrig's Disease?

This fascinating article suggests that multiple concussions—which Lou Gehrig was known to have suffered playing both football and baseball—can lead to exactly the same types of neurological disease that doctors normally associate with Lou Gehrig's Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
The Yankee legend had a well-documented history of significant concussions on the baseball field, and perhaps others sustained as a battering-ram football halfback in high school and at Columbia University. Given that, it’s possible that Gehrig’s renowned commitment to playing through injuries like concussions, which resulted in his legendary streak of playing in 2,130 consecutive games over 14 years, could have led to his condition. 
“Here he is, the face of his disease, and he may have had a different disease as a result of his athletic experience,” said Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the neuropathology laboratory for the New England Veterans Administration Medical Centers, and the lead neuropathologist on the study.
In other words, it's possible that Lou Gehrig didn't actually die of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Which is, at some level, impossible.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Burning the Days, by James Salter

You either burn the days or you're burned by them, I suppose—although at some point the wood becomes the fire, the fire the wood, and attempting a distinction is futile. That futility might be what we mean by aging, if we're lucky.

James Salter certainly has burned through his days, as this oddly structured, intensely lyrical memoir demonstrates. He's best known (properly) as the author of two of my favorite post-war novels—A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years (reviewed here). He wrote the screenplay for the icy, piercing Downhill Racer, one of Robert Redford's best films. Before becoming a writer, he graduated West Point and fought in the Korean War as an Air Force fighter pilot.

Also, to his credit, he embraced the post-war possibilities open to an American man: see the world; educate yourself as world citizen; help re-construct, if only by your love, Western Europe; and never cease to admire our country's incomparable landscapes and coincident opportunities.

By all appearances, Salter has known power—been close to it—but never allowed that closeness to ruin him as an artist. In Burning the Days, he evokes the circles of power, the famous faces, with their fantastic, distorted personalities, with intriguing delicacy. He's also had the good sense to fall in love a few times. Anyone who has picked up A Sport and a Pastime already knows how precisely, how lethally he records the flaming choreography of love.

I don't know if it's still possible for an American man to burn the days as Salter did. There are obstacles on all sides—foremost among them our post-Reagan isolationism and moralistic fervor, our proud Crawford TX stupidity, our decadent laziness. Reading this book, I couldn't help but lament what we're becoming (which is another way of saying, What I'm becoming). This book allows us the secondary pleasure of envying Salter—which is an important pleasure, as it means that something essential is not yet forgotten.

Ghosts, by César Aira

All fiction is allegorical—which might explain why I don't read much fiction anymore. One tires, after a certain age, of lessons.

Most contemporary novelists try to disguise their allegories in the centuries-old conventions of realism. They pretend to be wholly—not selectively—reporting the world. But César Aira can't be bothered. So my principle reaction to Ghosts was relief: at least this guy isn't pretending. He's an unapologetic child of Kafka—or, more to the point, he shows us we all are, fancy literary embellishments aside.

But I didn't only feel relief; I also felt like I'd been returned to fiction as it sounded when I was a child. We're trained early to look for the lessons—the moral—in stories. The history of my life as a reader can be summarized as a slow transition from explicit to implicit allegory. And now back. In this case, it's a happy return.

Aira's topics in Ghosts (which are really one topic) are the birth of desire, the end of innocence, the death in life that goes by the name eros. The book evokes that death with levity and precision. Like Kafka, Aria is never clever. He is compassionate, lucid, and funny. A girl in her mid-teens lives among ghosts, all of them men, naked phantasms covered in dust. She's lived among them for months, seen them floating about—but one day she actually sees them. And that's the difference, right? To really see a body. That's the moment when everything changes. This little book evokes that moment—when, to put it conventionally, a girl becomes a woman—exquisitely.

I read the book at a leisurely pace, in part because I was re-learning how to read like a kid. Sometimes I felt a kind of aching impatience to know what was going to happen, what the lesson would be. It might take me a while to once again experience that impatient ache as pleasure.

But among the book's many indisputable pleasures: a fantastic essay, dead in the middle of the book, on architecture; and its cast of characters, a family of immigrant Chileans living in Buenos Aires. Wonderful: people I love, a city I love, both evoked with generosity and intelligence.

Chris Andrews' translation is, as always, superb. Heartily recommended.

(I reviewed another book by César Aira—An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painterhere.)

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Let Justice Ring

Frank Rich's column this weekend eloquently notes that on August 4 our astonishing Constitution, which subjects all our laws to judicial scrutiny, has once again rescued us from ourselves.

Equality under the law; freedom and justice for all: these are living ideas, defended and advanced by good people (Rich's "angels")—among them, my dear brother Nathan.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Friday, August 13, 2010

Pale Blue Dot

My father sent this to me today. It's his kind of wisdom—of a genre that I've been inestimably lucky to have in my life.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Knives Come Out

I confess that I have a weakness for this kind of thing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_672974.html

Of the fifteen writers browbeaten by Shivani's (rather crotchety) knife, I've attempted to read:

  • John Ashbery (increasingly over my head, but sometimes moving and clearly a careful, even masterful poet)
  • Mary Oliver (one of her poems meant the world to me once)
  • Helen Vendler (on Keats she is brilliant)
  • Sharon Olds (yeah, pretty dreadful)
  • Jorie Graham ("Did you want to remain completely unharmed?")
  • Junot Diaz (so loud I can't hear him)
  • Louise Glück (worth a look, if not a lifetime of study . . . and so perhaps not worth a look)
  • Michael Cunningham (unremarkable)
  • Billy Collins (embarrassing)

The rest of the writers I've either never heard of (Antonya Nelson?) or avoided for the same reason I avoid almost all contemporary American fiction and poetry: their artistic ambitions remind me too much of my own.

I wonder if Shivani is any good. . .

I must say, though, that anyone who calls Marilynne Robinson "unreadable" is either deaf to language or stupid.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

War, by Sebastian Junger

On certain days I despair to think that our entire country—especially its youth—isn't reading this book and others like it.

Against that despair I imagine it secretly held under the desks of students across the country; I imagine them clustered in their cafeterias, discussing its somber evocation of life in Afghanistan for a handful of American soldiers. In short, I imagine young America seeing their destinies as indistinguishable from the destinies of the men and women in this book.

But then I remember that everything has changed. We're now a nation with a professional army. Our soldiers aren't us, really, but people who are merely doing their job. In a fashion that has transformed American political and moral life, our military now basically has nothing to do with our private ideas of citizenship and social responsibility.

So we don't read these books, most of us, and the war goes on, and some soldiers die, and it all seems about as important as Sarah Palin's latest tweet.

But for those who care, here it is: War, a book about a single platoon that's been asked to hold a section of the Korengal Valley, in eastern Afghanistan.

For reasons that belong to them, these guys have signed up for war's deadly work. They are extremely well trained and live in desolate conditions. We pay them accordingly. In part, we pay to keep their tragedies—which once belonged to all of us—to themselves.

Junger, who has made a career of writing about dangerous work, has given us an updated Perfect Storm. The men are at least as brave as deep-sea fisherman and by all appearances as economically—and perhaps psychologically—desperate. War, like most forms of hard labor, is tedious, dreary, often boring, occasionally lethal, addictive, sometimes thrilling, and usually hopelessly sad. (It's violence, of course, is uniquely grotesque.) The soldiers, we're told, really just fight for each other. They don't care much about politics; they aren't especially patriotic; their fraternal love might be the most intense love of their lives. And Afghanistan is an impenetrable mystery, as it should be to the 21st century mind.

The writing is excellent. It's not Orwell's Homage to Catalonia or Finkel's The Good Soldierswhich it echoes in its accounts of war's unromantic suffering and sudden, irreversible violence, but if you care about Afghanistan, as I do at the moment, not least because one of my life's closest friends, Brad Wahlquist, of whom I wrote in "Playing Pool," is currently fighting in Khost, I haven't read a better portrait of life there for the everyday soldier.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Homo iPhonus

Clayton, CA: sunshine and swimming pools, bicycles and the Bookmobile. And an Atari 2600. And—that's what we called it—"smear the queer." And our Sport Court, and catamarans made of two skateboards, bound together by our interlocked legs, and the long Mt. Wilson Way descent, ending with a crash on my front yard grass.

All the clichés of boyhood. I lived them.

So unless I was mesmerized by a book, which happened often enough, the ambition of my life, just about every day, was to get out of the house and not return until sundown.

I'm talking about the experience of being told what time you had to be back, and saying Yep! and disappearing, unreachable, for a few hours. That's what it meant, I thought, to be a man—to be free. I was gone. I was what my parents wanted me to be, what I aspired to be: I was on my own. I knew they couldn't contact me, even if they wanted to, and that knowledge was glorious, not least because it allowed me to give myself completely to my adventures.

That boy is now dead.

Not because of kids and bills, work, all the standard excuses, but because seven years ago, I got myself a goddamn cellphone.

Now, worse yet, I have an iPhone.

As a result, I've ceased to exist. What remains is an identity that's been disseminated into countless machines, leashed to innumerable nodes, always obtainable, never alone (I mean that seriously: never alone), interconnected, spread out, scattered. The experience of my scattering is so intense and so fundamental to my sense of myself that I am no longer capable of solitude. I no longer live in the moment, present, complete. I always feel—even now, the iPhone silent beside me, poised—that some part of me is elsewhere. I am, to a certain extent, always already somewhere else, where I'm wanted, where I might be wanted, where I could call, where I might be emailed or dialed, texted or tweeted. I live in a continual state of anticipation.

That anticipation is not, as the saying goes, killing me. Instead, I have become my anticipation. I am an Anticipating Self. I am a little bit present everywhere; as a consequence, I am fully present nowhere.

I confess that I mourn my metamorphosis. I hate this connected self. I despair in the knowledge that I no longer cohere.

I yearn to be alone again—to be capable of being alone. Only by relearning the independence of solitude will I again be capable of being with someone else.

Monday, August 2, 2010

I've Seen the Light

After years without television, I've now been watching it for much of the summer. Among the many epiphanies it's given me:
  • Despise the poor. When they're not dirty, they're stupid. When they're not stupid, they're lazy. When they're not lazy, they're ugly. When they're not ugly—ah, but they're always ugly. And their primary purpose in society is to be laughed at, berated, or simply locked up. 
  • Distrust anyone with an accent unlike Jennifer Aniston's or George Clooney's.
  • Wealth is a sure sign of good character. The wealthy should be worshipped; the truest form of worship is imitation.
  • Anyone devoting his or her life to public service is a misguided, idealistic fool.
  • Anger is more effective than empathy.
  • Men are stupider than women.
  • If someone isn't listening, talk louder. If talking louder doesn't work, shout. If shouting doesn't work, resort to violence. After all, most serious problems are solved with violence. And the violent good—something you might think of as oxymoron—always win.
  • We envy those we pretend to mock.
  • We always get what we deserve.
  • Every American's ultimate ambition is to be talked about by four or five middle-aged women who are all speaking to each other at the same time.
  • Twelve is the new seventeen.
  • President Obama is shady. At best.
  • The music video is dead.
  • Turn to news sources owned by billionaires for an objective explanation of everything.
  • Most of what happens to us can be explained by our childhood.
  • Most white American families are happy and have little dirty laundry, both literally and figuratively.
  • The proper response to an opposing point of view is to treat it with contempt.
  • In our American democracy, the government is something other than ourselves.
  • All Asians are either gymnastic assassins or brilliant (but ultimately second-tier) scientists.
  • The longer the hair, the deeper the depravity.
  • Living on credit is the shortest route to happiness.
  • Despite that fact that they possess almost nothing, have no money and essentially no power, the poor—especially the foreign and the immigrant poor—are at the root of all the problems in the world.
  • All news is bad news. It's extremely important to be aware of all this bad news, especially the bad news you can do nothing about. Why? Because your sense of helplessness is a form of love—maybe the only kind of love we have left.