Tuesday, June 28, 2011

"Slow Learner"

A couple of weeks ago, while cleaning out my desk drawer, I found a stack of old Zip disks. I recalled seeing a dusty Zip Drive in a drawer at my office, so I grabbed them. This afternoon I went through those disks for the first time in over a decade.

Among them, a disk labelled Eric's Files. On Eric's Files, a folder called "Old Writings." In "Old Writings," a subfolder called "Old Work." Within "Old Work," a subfolder called "Slow Learner"—a title I no doubt stole from Pynchon. Within "Slow Learner": six stories I don't remember writing.

So we got a torrential rainstorm today—something that at this time of year in the South Bay simply does not happen—and I spent the afternoon reading stories that I wrote over a decade ago yet absolutely do not remember.

In addition to the "Slow Learner" stories, I've found at least eight year's worth of writing that I thought gone forever, including basically all the fiction and every essay I wrote as both an undergraduate and a graduate student.

My vertigo was exacerbated by a folder of old photographs on the same disk, among them, a picture with Lincoln when he was seven years old:


For grins, here's the first story in that "Slow Learner" subfolder, written, I'm guessing, some time in the early '90s:

Fall

          Rhoda fell down the exit stairs. You need to be more religious, he said.
          You’re the man who tries to help, she said. I’ve seen your type.
    His name was Story. He waved at a car that thought to stop.
    She said, When I was nine I fell off the monkey bars—
    And I was the one who made fun.
    I was dropped on my head as an infant.
    He held out his hand. My guess is you’re almost finished.
    She took his hand and stood up with a flourish. She said, When I was fourteen a man kicked me in the face with steel-toed boots.
    This stopped his wit.
    She rubbed her palm against her pants. When he reached down, she said, it was to take off my shirt.

    What’s that noise? Story asked. He took the poker from the fire and with it above his head he roared at the open room.
    Rhoda opened her eyes. Got any hot bread?
    I have a learning disorder, he said. Sleep sneaks in—
    I really have a headache.
    A splitting headache, he said.
    She waved finger. My headaches don’t split.
    I do, he said.
    She looked at the fire. After a while she said, Let me think for a second.

    When she called he was on the couch. He said, The moss grows greener—
    I know, she said. I’m sorry. The bear on her floor showed teeth.
    He said, I have a horse, you’re stuck, your shoes have holes—
    The last guy I asked for a glass of water collapsed like a corpse on the porch. You lifted me up, Story. She tapped the phone with her finger. I keep telling myself, That fellow lifted me up. 


    Rhoda was with Deirdre at the bar. He’s from Brazil, she said. She pointed at a waiter. 
    There was broken popcorn on the crushed-felt floor.
    The waiter came up and Deirdre’s eyes glazed over. After he left Deirdre said, They wear those hats and those frocks the colors of kid’s cereal.
    A girl danced under two blue lights.
    Rhoda nodded and Deirdre handed her another cigarette. Rhoda said, Is the grass always greener?
    Do I look like an expert? Deirdre pointed at the talent. Ask her.
    That’s what he told me, Rhoda said. He said ‘moss,’ though. And he said he has a horse.
    There’s a caption.
    He said lots of things, but that about the horse was what caught me. I thought, That’s a great line for after sex.

    Rhoda read the sign. Recycled Cans Only.
    I want to go to Europe, too, Story said. Hear some Frenchy say, ‘You are an ugly American.’ Or whatever they say over there.
    Se la vie, Rhoda said. Or, ‘Americans are very fat. Don’t you worry about your health?’ Or, ‘Psychoanthropomanic reoccurrence stemming from a history of sublimated violence.’
    Story said, That’s not French. That’s TV.
    Rhoda looked passed him. You were the best drunk ever, Story. You didn’t have drunk-type endurance.
    He nodded and tossed his book in bar. Everyday I watch the news, he said. ‘When the lights went out he pulled a gun.’ ‘Enflamed hearts, broken minds.’
    I lost my last newspaper, Rhoda said.
    To live life that way. Put down the weapons—
    The fear—
    He traced the fall of her palm.
    Oh, love, love, she said. I can’t stop reading that sign.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Common Sense Gets the Death Penalty

Setting aside the morally intolerable possibility of the State executing an innocent citizen, here is yet another reason to object to the death penalty: it costs way too freakin' much.
Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty's costs.
Choke on that, California.

America's most important contribution to the history of moral philosophy is pragmatism. I suspect I'm not alone in yearning for its return to American political life.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Sam Hearts Pink Pop

The English 1B Book Club, Summer 2011

This summer's theme: "Crime: What, How, Why?"

We'll focus on noir. Our books:

The Gold-Bug and Other Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
Dirty Snow, by Georges Simenon
Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Buried Child, by Sam Shepard
Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

Poetry by Sylvia Plath.

Some movies, likely including The Asphalt Jungle (its final scenes, at least, and the Marilyn Monroe scenes), Badlands, and L.A.Confidential.

Also, I'm going to give the students the option of playing L.A. Noire and writing about the game as an artistic experience vis-à-vis our readings. I haven't played it but hope to, despite the fact that it's been years since I've picked up a game controller in earnest.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Thursday, June 16, 2011

The End of the World

As a boy, summer Sundays, I lived on apricots, plucking them from my grandmother's backyard tree. I remember their skin's light down and their unpredictable little squirts of sweet juice—so tender they'd fall apart sometimes in my hand—and spitting the seeds casually into the weeds. I would eat them over the course of a day by the fistful.

So this morning I gave my son Zachary his first apricot—incomprehensible but true.

At least I think it was an apricot. It was advertised as an apricot. It was hairless, a dull yellow, and as firm as an unripe peach.

He took a bite, chewed for a moment, looked up at me and said: "It tastes like an apple."

The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq

I bought this book when it came out but failed to make it beyond page 50. I had no desire to read the diary of the protagonist's 24th clone.

But after reading Public Enemies and teaching Platform this winter—after, in short, imagining myself to be an expert on Houellebecq—I picked it up again and this time read it in short order, rapt.

At the center of the novel is Houellebecq's alter-ego: a famous comic, Daniel, who has arrived at middle-age, lost his interest in the people around him, and set about surviving on sex and alcohol. As in Platform, mere survival is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman, Esther, who restores him to life. But his young love is promptly taken from him—but not by Islamic terrorists, as in Platform, but by the vapid pleasures of Western Civ. (drugs, casual sex, dreams of celebrity).

By linking capitalist hedonism with religious fundamentalism in this way—arguing that they're essentially two sides of the same coin (standing, both of them, in the way of love)—The Possibility of an Island clarifies the source of Houellebecq's hatred for contemporary life:
To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.
I admit that I find ridiculous statements like these exciting. So I found the book exciting. Schizophrenic moral outrage drives the narrative: on the one hand, the book is nostalgically conservative, yearning for a time when love meant something, when people had souls; on the other hand, it delights in modern libertinism, in the availability of beautiful girls who bounce into one's bed now and then to casually rescue one from despair. The kids are unleashed, and, my god, isn't it lovely?

But Houellebecq's aware of his schizophrenia: the schizophrenia is the point. He spends some time narrating the rise of a minor California cult that will, we learn, eventually conquer the world. At times it seems pretty clear that his heart's not in all the tedious storytelling. He's at his best—in some respects he's our most interesting working writer—when he's outraged, sparing no one, including himself:
If you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give back joy.

The Tree of Life

Cyril Connolly's masterpiece, The Unquiet Grave, opens with bracing audacity:
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
I don't know if Terrence Malick has read The Unquiet Grave, but I say with confidence that Malick thinks the same of filmmaking: if you're not out to make a masterpiece, why bother?

And he's made at least two masterpieces: Badlands, which is as good as just about anything, and The Thin Red Line, which finished in a dead heat with Pulp Fiction and Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy ("Blue," "White," "Red") as my favorite films of the '90s.

Now comes The Tree of Life. It shames any film I've seen in the theater since The Bad Lieutenant. Malick beautifully evokes the beauty and terror of childhood as we experience it in memory. In the process, he takes on life's most excruciating question: How does one come to grips with the death of a child?

The film is an homage to brotherly love, to the beauty of boys, to the imprecisions of parenting, to the failures—mostly private—of adult life; and to the formal possibilities of cinema, our era's preeminent art-form.

I'm happy to report that Malick is either tired of plot or—perhaps more admirably—distrustful of it. Instead, he trusts images—which is another way of saying he trusts his audience.

And I trust him. That's not something I can say of many contemporary artists. He has the courage to risk feeling. Odd, isn't it, how rare that's become?

Monday, June 13, 2011

God-talk

I have the impression—the product of ashes—
That I speak with the voice of God.
A consequence, too, of a lot of God-talk
When I was a kid—listening to my father,

For instance, pray in Spanish:
The tongue's mallet transformed into kisses.

God in Spanish is made of Ss—
The serpent in the tree, summoning us
To suffering. Awaited

The sequoia, the sea otter,
The succulent oyster. Cunnilingus.
Buenos Aires and Concepción.
Salt Lake City. Menlo Park.
A morning dove glimmered in late April dew.
I withdrew my hand and she flew.

To my left, the Monterey cypresses
Scatter the wind. The foghorn continues
Its cloud-muffled blaring. I can no longer
Distinguish myself from the suffocating
Eucalyptus, the yellow-eyed starling,
The paused cow. In El Granada,
The Tree of Life, it turns out, is a weed.

Now to the pain of love
I add the shame of ending it.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Me Party Platform

All that I've achieved, I've achieved alone—including my ability to write these lines. To tax my achievements is theft.

"Women's health" is a euphemism for slaughtering children.

Good government programs should be referred to as "my _________," as in: "Don't touch my Medicare!" or "Hands off my Social Security!" Everything else is welfare, destroys the moral backbone of the nation, and should be eliminated. If I can't call it mine, it shouldn't exist.

When in doubt, incarcerate.

If we must choose between privatizing schools and privatizing prisons, do both.

"The arts" is a euphemism for what gays do to each other.

Sex should only happen between a married man and woman or between an adult citizen and the flag.

Any drug that I don't use, or that I haven't used since college, or that wasn't produced by a multinational corporation, should be illegal.

Spare no expense when invading other countries. A truly great country invades another country regularly—at least once per president. As with men in general, a strong president invades; a weak president withdraws.

I am a well-regulated militia.

If you don't understand any of this, you're in a tax-induced coma. The best antidote for that coma is a corporate news channel. News agencies owned by billionaires reliably speak truth to power.

Jesus is the founding member of the Me Party.

The Conquered Reader

During my early youth there were the books I tried, over and over, with no success, to read: Being and Nothingness (odd that Sartre comes first to mind), Atlas Shrugged, and Brave New World; anything by George Eliot; The Grapes of Wrath and East of EdenGreat ExpectationsZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; anything by Herman Wouk; Watership Down; the James Herriot books; Your Erroneous Zones; Born Free; Carlos Castaneda; The Day of the Jackal and The Eagle Has LandedI'm OK—You're OKThe SilmarillionFor Whom the Bell Tolls.

As if to honor that failure I have yet to read any of them. (Contemplating another run at Being and Nothingness makes me shudder. I must have started that book fifteen times.)

Most were my dad's books, left lying around, after he, too, in all likelihood, had set them aside.

Now it's the case that I fail to finish most books. After a few pages, I think: Yeah, I get the idea. Awash in stories, after all these years, the thought of reading now makes me tired.

Yet I still haven't found something better to do.

Reno, Continued












Thursday, June 9, 2011

X-Men

Magneto is right to wear a brain-cap. If some guy—a professor, in particular—is rolling around (literally) controlling our brains, I can assure you: brain-caps would be as ubiquitous as baseball hats at a NASCAR race.

Really, the politics of X-Men is a complete clusterfuck, but the film plays nicely into the present American fantasies that 1) our hopes for survival reside in superheroes; and 2) that we tolerate difference.

So:


AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN FILM-GOER

June 9, 2011

Dear American film-goer:

There are no superheroes.

Difference terrifies. Terror is the source of its appeal.

Sincerely,

Eric Treanor

Beyond that: thank you, Michael Fassbender, for bringing gravitas to being correct.

Matthew Vaughn: Prostitutes sell a feel-good message. Please get back to making satire like Kick-Ass, which was the iciest indictment of contemporary American dream-life since American Beauty. I’ve said something along these lines before: the truth is usually cruel.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Sometimes

We paint the red door.

Mother won't shut up.

The starling banishes the hawk.

The heart declines to blush.

God is not insufficient.

Night outlasts the gardenia.

New Orleans explains it.

Winning is sad.

A lone oak neutralizes the landscape.

The offered flower is not a metaphor.

I miss the dove.

Friday, June 3, 2011

A Wounded Crow

I'm a boy in Chalmers, Indiana, in my neighbor's tree-house, looking across cornfields at an approaching storm. As I watching, a phalanx of black clouds begins to turn upon itself. The rain, no longer falling, circulates. A tearing sky howls.

Abruptly, the horizon disappears behind a rising wall of earth. With a roar, storm is consuming the world.

~

The Greek gods didn't reflect the Law but the world's wildness. Nature, to the Greek eye, literally embodied the Divine; to be divine was, fundamentally, to be wild.

In response to the mystery of wildness, Greek art invented tragedy and comedy, which turned wildness into an aesthetic principle. Through the alchemy of poetry, wildness became fate—which is to say: it became beautiful.

Surrounded, then, by beautiful gods, humanity occupied a place within the world that was, for many centuries, both dignified and jocular.

~

Over time, however, nature's gods disappeared, driven away—humiliated—by the One God of the Book. Nature no longer embodied divinity but was subject to it. Man (who invents and then mimics his saviors) was not longer natural—no longer wild—but master of nature and servant of God. The purpose of life was not to live beautifully but to live obediently, productively: to save oneself, in other words, from wildness.

The world's transition from a pantheon of wild gods to a single, law-giving God made possible the triumph of metaphysics and the emergence of civilized life, with its hopefulness, its (relative) tranquility, its quests for meaning, its devotion to abstractions. Of course all these ambitions, before the infinite silence of the stars, are absurd: the universe does not hope, or quest, or sprout seeds of goodness. The only invention that could disguise the absurdity of ideas was an even greater absurdity: the omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful Father of monotheism. God justifies the absurdity of hope (for example) by rendering all existence absurd. God's absurdity displaced Zeus's wildness and made possible the majesty of history.

~

To use the word "absurd"—to call, for instance, the God of the Bible "absurd"—seems like a provocation. But I mean it as a tribute. Absurdity is, after all, the only conceivable response to wildness. Faced with nature's intractable, incontrovertible, non-negotiable wildness, we build the Great Wall of the Absurd, which is every bit as intractable, incontrovertible, and non-negotiable. By this means we survive. Thanks, for instance, to the absurdity of a crucified God, we acquire the immortality that the Greeks once acquired through song.

In this regard, absurdity is compassionate. Absurdity repudiates the amoral, raging, mute cruelty of the natural world with the moral, communicative, attentive compassion of God.

~

Death, not wildness, made God necessary. Death is neither absurd nor wild; it has no value; it abides beyond language, beyond sense. Against its awesome valuelessness both wildness and absurdity come into relief. Death proves that existence is real.

Death is to life what the zero is to mathematics. By standing outside of mathematics, the zero makes mathematics possible. Death does the same for life.

~

If you appreciate justice, equality, hope, compassion, pity, order, the idea of evil—in short, if you are a meta-physician—then you are a disciple of the absurd. Absurdity is humanity's great triumph, its highest invention.

But it's human, all too human, and despite its momentous consolations, absurdity does not attract us. We find it repellent. We appreciate its significance; we depend upon its stability to counter the world's ongoing wildness; but fundamentally we do not desire it. We desire wildness.

Thoreau understood the essence of desire when he wrote, "In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us."

What's true of literature is true of everything. Only wildness attracts, ever.

Thoreau is properly understood as the father of modern environmentalism; "Walking" is the modern era's first yearning for the wild gods' return to the world.

~

The God of the Book has never truly been worshiped. Monotheism requires violent coercion because it demands that we desire the undesirable, that we worship the absurd. An executed God asks us to sacrifice what we most love—wildness—in order to live forever.

As we approach death—real, valueless death—this sacrifice appears to make sense. In this regard, monotheism is the revenge of death upon life.

~

Now, after 2000 years, we are crushed by the Law. We're tired of monotheism's coercions. We're tired of the tamed world's ugliness. We miss the gods—with Thoreau, we yearn for their wildness. We want god-embodying nature back.

Kafka saw this yearning before anyone else: Absurdity, once our Great Wall, has become our prison. Absurdity's immortality is no longer worth its cost; immortality without wildness isn't salvation but murder.

~

Yesterday, driving along Homestead Ave in Sunnyvale, I saw a wounded crow bouncing its way across the road. It could no longer fly. Two cars passed over it without killing it. Flailing its wings, it hopped up onto the sidewalk and into the grass. Quickly it disappeared into some bushes under a tree.

Again, Thoreau: "In Wildness is the preservation of the world."

The best way to summon the gods back to the world is to love what embodies them. A worshipful attitude toward our planet must be, upon pain of extinction, the essence of our religious lives.

Yes, absurdity rescued us from the banality of death. But we now must rescue ourselves from our rescuer, replacing the good with the beautiful, the law with a song.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

TFTD

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

— Albert Camus