Monday, August 29, 2011

TFTD

Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

— Staretz Silouan

Friday, August 26, 2011

Half Moon Bay

1

The lethargic fog. Gulls on the streetlamps. The low hills, spotted by eucalyptus; the sweet air. Somewhere: my sons.


2

Ten, fifteen couples, here and there, making love, in damp rooms, sad blankets kicked to the floor.


3

Raccoons sleep in the drain pipes. From a wet power line a hawk contemplates the crushed fields. Abruptly, a boy, maybe Mexican, crosses the highway, running. The hawk's head flicks.


4

The slow, bored, cold tourists. The town is uglier than they'd expected. Realer.


5

The girls all have long hair. As if I've returned to Chile.


6

Behind me, a little boy presses his face against the Peet's Coffee window. I turn to him and he smiles, showing his gums, his tiny teeth.


7

All the bars. I remember my contentment at being a local; joyously I over-tipped. My friends always greeted me with what I took to be genuine warmth. At the end of the night I'd drive home drunk, cautiously.


8

The nights warmer than the days. The low drone of the foghorn echoing around Pillar Point and down the coastline's long crescent.


9

On Highway 1: a lone siren. Its mournful fading. Another siren soon filling the silence.


10

We stood under the front yard's only tree, weeping. The bougainvillea raged pinkly.


11

The orange haze of the nurseries' lights dulling, dimming the stars.


12

Autumn. The sunlight, fields of pumpkins, hay mazes, crows. The shortening days' glitter.


13

I am despised.


14

One afternoon I happened upon a pig browsing my neighborhood. Brown, hairy—it dismissed my presence as I'd dismiss a small dog. After a while it wandered into the hills. A couple of county sheriffs followed its tracks and shot it. Sitting at my desk—this was a couple of years ago, when I still lived there—I heard their rifles crack. Some Mexicans brought its carcass out of the trees and heaved it into the back of their truck.


15

The ocean rattles the sand. Plovers scuttle along the foam, pecking the water for crabs.


16

Main Street's long, clean sidewalks, its small shops, all but the restaurants—and perhaps even the restaurants—selling nostalgia. I'm too poor for them, thank god.


17

Fishing boats sway in the harbor; the fishermen, high on meth, their beards oxidized by salt, drink toward sleep. Their wet eyes shine bluely.


18

Two very young Mexican girls wait with babies for a break in the traffic. They hold onto strollers hanging with groceries.


19

Dead salmon silver the pier's oil-stained wood. Chinese couples from San Francisco, the men holding fat wallets, projecting an air of profound dissatisfaction with all but themselves, wait by the scales. In the distance: a fishing boat's generator. On the other side of the jetty, looking like seals, the surfers drift, talking.


20

The yellow house, its blue bookshelf, its books, its orange kitchen, its woman, its boys.  The morning's busyness; the backyard's redwood fence wet with dew.  Shoots of new calla lilies show along the edge of the patio.  Soon there will be hundreds of them, waist-high, opening their white faces to the winter sun.


21

The grass is still thin where Maggie, now dead for nearly a year, had circled it, searching for field mice.


22

Day after day I visit home.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Memoirs of a Coward

The empathetic introspection of the novel has given way to the auto-erotic exhibitionism of the memoir.

I suppose it's a sign of the times. History has defeated poetry; the novel—like love—has lost its war with the pornography of facts; we stand without songs in Plato's Republic.

Fair enough: to the project of gutting the western imagination I add my own vanity project, written in 1999—it's been lightly revised over the years—and now self-published at Smashwords.


It's also available through Amazon. Buying it through Smashwords, however, lets you access the book in a wide variety of formats, including those used by the Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, the Kobo, and just about any home computer.

Cost: $2.99 + 2-3 hours of your time.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Blood on the Polycarbonate

I've nearly finished putting my entire CD collection on the computer, in preparation for the iCloud storm.

A curious experience, going through my music: dozens of the discs I don't remember buying; dozens of others mark the various strategies I've used to both reinvent and recover myself—which is a long way of saying that they mark the highlights of my life. The sight of some of them made my heart ache: old Springsteen, Van Morrison and Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Radiohead, and Billie Holliday. Tom Waits. Dusty Springfield and Sparklehorse. A few others. To be honest, remembering the names now makes me tired and somehow desperately glad I'm alive.

The two individual songwriters of my generation who have meant the most to me over the last fifteen years are probably Richard Buckner and Elliott Smith. My love for their art—this is now clear—will be permanent, maybe because they're both from the West Coast; maybe because their songs are, for the most part, really fucking sad—hopefully, exquisitely sad; certainly because they're men; finally, because I'm drawn toward the way that their music is diffident yet audaciously beautiful.

Smith's music now rises from the grave, which intensifies its sadness—and my gratitude. He left us something, after all: he honored his unsurpassed gift for melody for more than a decade; his songwriting was incredibly generous; and then he put a knife in his chest. And none of that adds up, yet it does, and there's nothing to be done about it but be grateful that when he made music he never, as far as I can tell, lied.

Buckner's new album, Our Blood, came out a couple of weeks ago, on my birthday. Belatedly I gave it to myself. I saw recently, on some website that I can't be bothered to find again, that he's spent the last few years in upstate New York holding up signs for some construction company. During off hours, he made Our Blood, another fantastic album.

In an essay on Nicanor Parra, Roberto Bolaño says, "First requirement of a masterpiece: to pass unnoticed." Relatively speaking, Buckner's work has met that requirement. Were it not for Good Will Hunting, it's likely that Smith's would have, too; and even with "Miss Misery," Smith was never famous, really: I saw him with a couple of hundred people in Salt Lake City at the height of his popularity.

Anyway, talk of fame is beside the point. Richard Buckner and Elliott Smith consolidate how life feels to me—really feels, without adornment—into that three-minute marvel called the American popular song.

Here's Buckner doing one of my favorite songs: "Once." As of today—try not to marvel at this—the video of his performance has received 449 viewings.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

TFTD

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

— Henry David Thoreau

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Ad Honorem (2)

          From you I learned to be a believer.
          Right now I'm sitting in a mall café surrounded by concrete walls lit blandly by the skylights above my head —
          — An old woman who has lost her hair walking past with a grocery bag suspended from her arm —
          — A young lady with intelligent eyes selling mattresses on the mall walkway to my left —
          — Two men in their fifties speaking English over a flattened stack of architectural drawings.
          We're all easy targets. I prefer everything to anything’s demise. The consequences of extinction are astonishing. Who knows what I don’t know we need?
          A young man talks on the mall’s public telephone. His girlfriend pushes on the mattress three steps from him and looks at him and smiles privately and raises her eyebrows. He laughs into the phone and stops talking to kiss her openly on the mouth.
          Coal-eyed little girl drops her balloon down the stairs, and calls out, pointing while she looks over her shoulder, —¡Mami, globo!
          Always behind us that undiminished continent upon which we've constructed the nation of our lives, motherhood.
          Thank you, too, for that choice. I think it worked out much better than not. All of us —me, especially— must allow that your marriage to my mother was not a failure. It is finished yet continuous. You did beautifully! You succeeded; now you succeed anew.
          That is your achievement: your mistakes aren’t so special; but your triumphs, your successes, have been, are.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Reviews in Brief

Cowboys vs. Aliens

"Why so serious?" —The Joker

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Q: "Are we the apes, or are we the humans?"

A: "Right now we're the humans. But hopefully we'll become the apes."

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Born Again

The primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems. —Witold Gombrowicz
Because we're as old as our problems. And the secret to life isn't found in solving its problems—they're too numerous, too befuddling—but in keeping them new.

So the history of literature is a history of  revisions. Poems, novels: modified advances upon the unsolved mysteries of love and desire, of violence and community and selfhood, of predation and surrender, of language, beauty, humor, and the silence of God.

Each fresh advance rejuvenates the spirit—the mind, the self, whatever—as the comings and goings of each plant and each animal rejuvenate nature.

The Little Conqueror

It must mean something, this capacity to continue to feel life as I've felt it since adolescence.

Certain sensations abide, uncontaminated by nostalgia, exhaustion, or wisdom. By way of their persistence, I continue to recognize myself; I cohere.

Memory, when it's not entirely an act of the imagination—when, in other words, it's at least a little bit accurate—requires no effort and gives meaning to the sensation of my continuity.

Without effort I remember my roommates playing Nevermind over and over, day after day, at BYU: I remember the sensation of walking into my apartment, into a song, and sitting with my cheap lunch at our kitchen table and listening.

So this new song feels like college:



Which is another way of saying that it feels like me, right now, continuing.

The intransigence of hope might be one of the more important lessons that I took from college. Other people learn about it elsewhere; a lot of people have learned about it from rock 'n' roll.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

TFTD

He dreaded the idea of being shot down alone . . . without a girl to scream out his name.

Badlands

Monday, August 1, 2011

Checkmate 2: The Sequel

On December 7, 2010, I wrote a short post called "Checkmate," celebrating Obama's tactical victory over Republicans following the end-or-extend-the-Bush-Tax-Cuts debate. (Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer made the same point three days later.) My post ended with the (optimistic) prediction that most of Obama's supporters would eventually realize what he had done, and, as a consequence, he would be re-elected in 2012.

Now Washington has just played another, far more serious game of chicken, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that Obama caved in. (Today's column by Paul Krugman succinctly articulates that view.)

But, once again, that view is wrong. Of course liberals will spend some time—maybe too much time—wringing their hands about Obama's "weak leadership," but in truth Obama has extracted a momentous victory from Republicans: he has begun the process of dismantling the military-industrial complex.

That dismantling is long overdue. The military-industrial complex represents the most serious single threat to the health of the republic—far more serious than low tax rates on the rich or painful (and counter-productive) cuts to social services.

A neighbor of mine—by which I mean that he also lives in Sunnyvale—summarizes my point in his comment to Krugman's column:
Obama's negotiations have gotten: 
1. The extension of unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 99 weeks.
2. A 2% cut in payroll taxes to stimulate the economy.
3. Extension of the Bush tax cut for those who make less than $250K.
4. Passage of the START treaty with Russia.
5. No government shutdown, and no government default.
6. $900 billion in defense spending reductions. 
In return, the Republicans got an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that will expire in two years, and about $200 billion a year in discretionary spending cuts [beginning, for the most part, in 2013].  
The Republicans would never have agreed to items 1 to 6 except possibly the payroll tax cut. Obama has mitigated the disaster not caused them. And the Republicans have sustained devastating political damage for modest fiscal gains.
I'm delighted that Congress has just agreed to massive cuts to defense. Of course I don't like the collateral costs. (Republican commentator David Frum nicely summarizes the dangers of contemporary Republican thinking.) But Obama hasn't merely acquiesced to the Tea Party. He's extracted meaningful, long-term changes to the fundamental structure of American life. In time, I hope we'll see this weekend as the beginning of the end of the American Empire—not because we almost stopped paying our bills, but because we finally stopped giving the Pentagon a blank check.

Update: an article in today's New York Times extends this point.

Update: The push-back begins.