TFTD

      Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

— Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill"

The Virtues of Embarrassment

People forget that I want to disappoint. — Gabriel Orozco

I experience writing as a dance with embarrassment. Language lets me humiliate myself systematically; it lets me become the champion of my own stupidity. Through both prose and poetry—especially through poetry—I insist upon my narrowness; I drag my indignation and self-importance into the light so as to destroy it and rescue myself from the boredom of being right.

Day after day I read what I've written—which at the moment of its creation echoed "GENIUS!"—and I marvel at my theatrical cluelessness, at my ambition, my naive glee. My god, I think: the vanity! And—as if to repudiate the increasing evidence of my own pointlessness—I begin again.

So this blog serves best as a record of my stupidity. It's a record of my embarrassing search for what Richard Buckner calls the "gone ghosts that only suckers make." The Bewildered Eye is the archive of a sucker. I'm grateful for it not least because its avalanche of failures proves that I'm still alive, that I'm still willing to risk catastrophe, and, most plainly, that I still enjoy the fruits of my past embarrassments: a broken heart, a yearning for wildness, and an abiding hope that eventually, despite all, love and beauty will win the day.

Salter on Hemingway

This blog began as—and always will be—an homage to the artistry of James Salter. He's just published an admiring essay on Ernest Hemingway, which takes the form of a book review regarding a new Hemingway biography called Hemingway's Boat, by Paul Hendrickson.

Find Salter's essay, "The Finest Life You Ever Saw," here.

Is Consuming Sugar More Dangerous Than Smoking?

I've wondered at Michelle Obama's decision to focus on diet and childhood obesity as the First Lady. But after absorbing the information I've linked below, I've come to the conclusion that no single message will have a more salutary effect on the future of American life than the call to change its catastrophically unhealthy diet.

Why catastrophically unhealthy? Because sucrose—cane sugar—and fructose (especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup) might be killing more people every year than cigarette-smoking. And sugar, in whatever form, starts killing us at a much earlier age.

From the soapbox: "Is Sugar Toxic?"

And (if you have 90 minutes):



The message is simple: Sucrose and fructose are poisonous. Eliminate them, as much as you can, from your diet. Over time they're as likely to kill you as smoking. Before killing you, they'll do what they're doing to much of the country: lead to obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

TFTD

Decadence was brought about by doing work too easily and being too lazy to do it well, by a surfeit of fine art and a love of the bizarre.

— Voltaire, The Princess of Babylon

Train Brain

Train north to the city. High school girl talking loudly to the boy next to her about becoming a meteorologist. Her skin translucent, her eyes green, her nose fierce ridges of cartilage.

He's in love with her. He leans into her clumsily, whitely. His white innocence is boring—a luxury.

She—her voice—trembles with frustration. He's too far behind her. Trying to talk to him she's just-about shouting.

But love has crippled him—made him stupid. He keeps leaning into her, unable to speak, to do anything interesting. He's using his soft, new body to defend himself against her intelligence. He thinks that looming over her is clever.

In Burlingame they de-board.

I'm reading Summertime, by Coetzee.

A woman in the seat across the aisle further complicates my journey by shouting into her phone.

Looking up from my book I marvel at the complexity of her ugliness. She hides the dissolution of her face with large whiteframed sunglasses. Even her voice is ugly. But she doesn't give a shit; she has urgent business—she's needed; through her phone she proves to anyone who might mistake her for her body (me) that she's not a body—a doomed, desolated body—but a voice articulating the vast, irrepressible ongoingness of the planet.

I'm not needed. I'm a curiosity—even to myself. I want this version of myself to die.

The good news is: I'm succeeding in killing him.

A night in the Mission will help.

TFTD

Poems are not made out of poetry.

-- E.M. Cioran, "Beyond the Novel"

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit C

"Society is full of ignorance and steroid types."

Reflections on Kid A [Chicken]

Ensoulment

Not just ideas but certain people ensoul the world, when we encounter them.

They summon us from certainty to wonder.

Ensoulment is what we mean by love.

Kid A Chicken

According to this website, chickens are being slaughtered around the world at the rate of about 1000/sec. This evening, the boys and I ate two of them.

Eric's recipe for Kid A Chicken

• Put on Kid A.
• Preheat your George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine™ to medium.
• Use organic, free range chicken breasts.
• Pepper with Jamaica Me Crazy Seasoned Pepper™.
• Salt with Jamaica Me Crazy Seasoned Sea Salt™.
• Lightly powder with Spice Islands Gourmet Blend Curry Powder™ sprinkled from a teaspoon. Rub the powder into the breasts with the back of the spoon.
• Baptize with Rose's Sweetened Lime Juice™.
• Christen with extra virgin olive oil.

Cook for ~10 minutes. Midway through grilling, lift the grill's lid and sprinkle the breasts with additional drops of olive oil. Permit the chicken to cook for ~four minutes with the lid raised. Close the lid for the final minute of grilling.

Serve hot. Explain to the children—or to whoever happens to be your captive audience—that the meat will be slightly tougher than they're used to because the chickens didn't live their entire lives inside a cage, in the dark, but were permitted to walk the earth, after their fashion, like Jules Winnfield after he returned the briefcase to Marcellus Wallace. (Children appreciate hyperbole, not least because they're rarely fooled by  it.)

At some point, turn the conversation to art. Using Kid A as Exhibit A, explain to them that over the course of their lifetimes, they'll discover that most great works of art are initially befuddling. Eventually, however, those same works will strike them as inevitable. Indeed (they'll exchange smiles when you use the word "indeed") the transition from befuddling to inevitable is the means by which we recognize a great work of art.

Don't neglect to be grateful for their gratitude, for their company, for the chicken, for the searching generosity of artists everywhere, and for Labor Day, which at some level makes all of this possible.

TFTD

The world of literature: a sort of Club Med cunningly disguised as a swamp, a desert, a working-class suburb, or a novel-as-mirror reflecting itself.

— Roberto Bolaño, "The Myths of Cthulhu"

I Do My Part

With the boys I wandered Borders' carcass in Palo Alto this afternoon. Most of the bookshelves were bare, although, curiously, the Romance section appeared to be over-stacked; the Crime section, too. Philosophy was gutted. There were no children's books left. I couldn't find Poetry.

At 70% off I bought:

• Hygiene and the Assassin, by Amélie Nothomb
• The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds
• One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode, by Ingo Schulze
• Mourning Diary, by Roland Barthes 
• The Insufferable Guacho, by Roberto Bolaño
• Remainder, by Tom McCarthy

Reviews forthcoming, perhaps, weeks, months, years from now.