Friday, May 27, 2011

Reno

I'm off to Reno this weekend with the boys, for Sam's AAU basketball tournament. Be hard to name something I'd rather do—the way that kid moves—despite the catastrophe of traffic we'll face leaving the Bay Area.

I mentioned the trip to my creative writing class yesterday. I said, "Doesn't the idea of Reno make you want to write?"

Bruce knows something about writing, and he gave us our final story, before we said goodbye.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

TFTD

I feel sorry for you, monsieur, that you are so easily happy.

— Charles Baudelaire

Monday, May 23, 2011

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Over this longest-of-all weekends, I re-read the novel that changed my life back in high school—the novel that made me want to be a writer. And I stand by my younger judgment: it's a perfect book.

All great books get better with each re-reading. More than ever I was enthralled by the novel's form, the rhythm of its prose, its imagery and its courage. Effortlessly—yet ruthlessly—Heart of Darkness addresses life's fundamental questions. Proceeding through it, I often stopped and thought, I can't believe how good this is. It's as good as anything; it's one of the great works in world literature.

And because it belongs to my youth (I seem to have forgotten nothing from my youth; I felt that I remembered every line) it afforded me the chance to contrast that younger reader with who—with what—I've become. Conrad's framing, telling the story in retrospect, invites and then steadily intensifies this kind of self-interrogation.

Kurtz was right. The horror.

After reading it I watched the Billboard Music Awards, when I wasn't walking in circles, rubbing my face. Listen: I like popular culture as much as the next guy. But the sanest response to the Black Eyed Peas is: You can't be serious.

Conrad is serious. He knows that if you're going to risk adulthood—and not content yourself with BEP—you've got to make your journey up the river. What you find there will be serious. Kurtz's last words are serious. The measure of a man is not what he finds at the end of his river—we all find the same thing—but how we respond to what we find.

Marlow finds, among many things, that it's ok to be haunted by the truth.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Vietnam Orphanage Eagle Service Project

I met Brent Omdahl when I was ten years old, in Clayton, CA. My family moved into the house across the street, and he was my partner-in-crime until eighth grade, when his family moved to Germany. We reunited in college, and we've tried, with meager success, to stay in touch since.

I knew that Brent had been living in Vietnam for a while. He and his family now live in Georgia, and he recently sent me a note telling me that his son Ashton is returning to Hanoi to help an orphanage there.

I invite you to visit Ashton's website and consider helping him with a contribution. It's hard to imagine a worthier cause.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Shawn Mahaffey, Rest in Peace

Coming across Nevada we ran into a blizzard. We decided to stop in Elko—really the weather gave us no choice—and I turned the U-Haul toward a cheap-looking hotel. But I forgot I was driving a truck and slammed the roof of the U-Haul into the overhang at the hotel entrance. The truck shook violently; we could hear the truck's roof dragging along the base of the overhang. "Keep going!" Shawn shouted. Soon we pulled clear. When I parked—anyone who knew Shawn will know that I'm not exaggerating—he literally fell out of the truck, he was laughing so hard.

We walked to the overhang and looked up. There were streaks of freshly gouged paint along its underside.

More laughter, through the lobby doors—I let Shawn lead the way; I knew his smile would help.

The Chinese lady at the reception desk said, "Don't do that again!"

Again Shawn was in stitches. But his laughter was softening her. "Whole building shake," she said—speaking more gently.

His smile, his laughter—I don't use this word lightly: Irresistible. By the time she gave us our room key even she was laughing.

And he had his saying for the rest of the trip, in a perfect Chinese accent: "Don't do that again!"

~

Shawn was on the trip with me because he knew that a brother-in-law needed help. That was all he needed to know. That's how Shawn was, to a greater degree than anyone I've ever met.

Why is it that the most selfless people we meet are often the most haunted?

Shawn was an alcoholic and died from complications arising from his alcoholism. Those of us who knew him now ask ourselves if we could have done more. I could have; the cold luxury of hindsight makes that cruelly clear.

But we often fail each other, just as we fail ourselves—the point now, as Shawn's brother said in his funeral yesterday, is to "choose to remember." Shawn makes remembering easy, having been, in a manner that was both a blessing and a curse, unforgettable.

Rest in peace, Shawn. We miss you terribly.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Thorology

The gods want to be human; we want to be gods. Coming together, we comprehend that we are indistinguishable.

The artist's hammer belongs to those who no longer seek it. Creativity belongs to those who release themselves to fate. The hammer doesn't exist prior to its use.

Like us, the gods don't distinguish between the beautiful and the divine.

To live beautifully is to forget the illusion of the self.

To live beautifully is to hear, "She's waiting for you"—and turn towards the abyss.

The art is in what the artifact wasn't supposed to be.

Women embody the tragic helplessness of wisdom. In this regard both women and wisdom are god-like. To be divine is to be helpless.

Beauty doesn't exist that's not helplessly beautiful.

We want to be helpless before the spectacle. To the artist we say: "Render me helpless, like you."

To be grateful is to dissolve.

Monday, May 9, 2011

The Day After Mother's Day

A Chinese girl led her mother into Subway today, walking backwards in front of her, holding her by both hands. It looked like they were attempting to dance, but could barely manage to walk. The mother might have weighed 70 pounds. They progressed as if against a river's current.

The girl pulled her mother to the bathroom. They went in together; she closed the door behind them.

I went to the tea-brewing machine next to the bathroom door to refill my cup.

Soon the daughter came out. Gently she closed the door. She was covering her mouth and gagging meekly. She turned towards the wall to hide her gagging.

I went back to my table, picked up my sandwich, and left. Crossing the parking lot, my eyes blurred with happiness.

The Character of Rain, by Amélie Nothomb

Some books we can't read until we're ready for them. Fortunately they wait for us, which can't be said of much in life. They seem to understand our inability to pick them up. It's fine, this small book said to me, the months clicking by. When you're ready. I understand.

This week I was finally ready. I wish I'd been ready sooner.

The Character of Rain is really funny—laugh-out-loud funny—and free-spirited; serious, too—philosophically serious; and on occasion it's mournful, even heartbroken. Some of that heartbreak might have been mine, what I brought to it; but some of it wasn't. It's about the awestruck arrogance of childhood, and the ways our awe and our arrogance die.

It's a happy sad book, or a sad happy book—but that's as it should be: real happiness (being doomed) is always a bit sad; and deep sadness never loses the sweet savor of what we've lost.

A favorite quote:
When the subway comes out of a tunnel, when the black curtains are thrown open, when asphyxia stops, when the only eyes we need to see us look at us anew, the lid of death lifts, and the tomb of our brain stands open to the endless sky.
The actual title of the book is Metaphysics of the Tubes, which is a far stranger—and far better—title than The Character of Rain, a title the English version of the book was given, no doubt, by some marketing guru with no sense for the pleasure of the strange.

I'll be reading all of Nothomb's books now.

She just did some writing for The Paris Review, which can be found here and here.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Welcome to Brutalism

It was one of those tossed-off comments that made François Camoin such a great teacher: "The next phase of the novel is going to be post-Romanticism, if you want to give it a name."

We'd been talking in class about postmodernism, its relation to Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, to earlier modernism—all of that. But we, the young writers, didn't want to know where we'd been (modernism) or where we were (postmodernism); we wanted to know where we were going. We wanted to take the novel to its destiny.

That was thirteen years ago, and we now know that François was right. Welcome to the post-Romantic era. Welcome to the Age of Brutalism.

~

It's one of the ironies of history that Romanticism arose from Voltaire, the scientific method, and the Industrial Revolution.

Voltaire incinerated Enlightenment optimism and, in Candide, left us one of literature's great portraits of the meaninglessness of life.

Science materialized the planet and our bodies in a manner unknown to the West since the pre-Socratic era.

And the Industrial Revolution introduced into our aesthetic lives the metaphor of the machine. (We know from history that we become our metaphors.)

No one foresaw the dangerous implications of these revolutions as dramatically as Sade, who carried them to their logical conclusion: life is nothing; systematically steal from it what pleasure you can, by any means necessary.

Sade constituted a kind of endgame for the novel at the end of the eighteenth century (despite being a supremely tedious writer). He created, for other artists, a genuine dilemma: How does one respond to the logical case for sodomizing children for fun?

It was necessary, in other words, to imagine a way out of Philosophy in the Bedroom. That way, cleared first by the Germans, came to be called Romanticism.

But—to paraphrase John Barth—Romanticism is exhausted. We once again stand with Voltaire in the ruins of Lisbon. To that horror we add Oppenheimer in the ashes of Hiroshima and Robert Downey Jr. in his Ironman suit.

To put it another way: we're back in Sade's bedroom.

~

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 inaugurates a new era in literary art. I'm calling that era the Age of Brutalism.

Unlike modernist and postmodernist novels, which are, in essence, romantic, 2666 doesn't deny the reality of Sade's bedroom. (Exhibit A: Bolaño's novel within his novel: 'The Part About the Crimes.") But it's Sade's bedroom seen without Romanticism's delusions. We see Sade through the clarity of mourning, and with sad relief.

What gives Brutalism its pathos—what makes Brutalism art—is its awareness that all our songs (they still echo across the canyons of memory), all our political exercises, all our romantic odes to love and the human spirit failed to save those sodomized little girls. Sade still stands over them with a shrug. And it's his shrug—the sense of its inevitability, exacerbated by the philosophical failures of the last 200 years—that sends us back to language.

Brutalism is the representation and the contemplation of the Sadean shrug. That shrug, according to Bolaño, is "the secret of the world." Literature must rise to its challenge.

Brutalism recognizes that the rhetoric and the philosophical content of Romanticism have failed to rid of the world of Sade's shrug. Romanticism—after the Holocaust, after Cuidad Juarez—is an evasion. Religion? Ni hablar. Science? Sade is nothing if not a scientist.

Confronted by Romanticism's failure, Brutalism takes a new path—I'm not just thinking of Bolaño but also of Michel Houellebecq—employing the rhetoric of Sade against itself. Brutalist art is characterized by its emphasis on explicit sex and extreme violence, Voltairian cynicism, scientific and academic discourse, misogyny disguised as adoration, satire, and a cold delight in insult, which it constructs as a mode of honesty.

Brutalism's ambition seems to be, at least in part, to undermine Sade by appropriating his discourse. To defuse the bomb by blowing it up.

It's an open question if this will work. The great risk, of course, is that one becomes what one hopes to destroy. Another problem is that we're no longer sure what we're rescuing. The idea of love? Human dignity? Promethean hope?

Regardless, there's something in Bolaño, and perhaps even in Houellebecq, that's not in Sade, yet not Romantic. For all their brutalism, there's something other than a shrug at the sight of a sodomized child; and there's something other than a Blue Flower.

That new thing might be our future. It might be what fills the void left by the end of the soul.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Make Me Rich!

The Bewildered Eye is now available as a Kindle subscription.

I might have to get a Kindle, if only to subscribe to myself. I could then be with myself any time, any place, instantly updated.

My disingenuous apologies for the price, which was set by Amazon. If it's any consolation, you get a 14-day free trial.