Monday, October 31, 2011

Occupy Oakland

Protesters rush to help Iraq War-veteran Scott Olsen, who's just had his head fractured by a projectile fired by Oakland police while exercising his First Amendment rights to free speech and to peaceably assemble.

If what you see at :40 doesn't piss you off, I don't know why you're reading this blog.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Home Alone

Nothing of the eager laziness that defines the way they live at home. Here, they are visitors. I'm their host. I rally them to comfort. "Take off your shoes! You're home here, too." They don't bother to pretend they believe me. In their eyes: How can we be home here, if you're not?

~

I'm reading again. Four, five books a week, as if I'd returned to college.

I'm uncluttered; my mind's not only sad; I remember my dreams (literally); most days it's the little conveniences I miss, like a mitt for handling hot pans.

And again I'm sleeping on the floor, as I did when I was teaching at San Diego State; also as Amy and I did just after our wedding. I sleep well on the floor, although on account of the single-pane windows my throat aches mildly every morning.

~

What matters I keep to myself. You think I'm going to write about what matters—that I have the courage for that? Here, I evade. I digress.

~

I live around the corner from Belmont's library. I write there now, mostly, surrounded by books. Two days ago I was hurtling through a scene in my novel and a woman with Downs Syndrome sat across from me, despite the unoccupied tables around us. She leafed quickly through a fat US history book. After she'd turned through every page, she went to the shelves and picked out a new book. And again sat across from me and read, after her fashion. She breathed loudly; I could smell her breath.

For nearly an hour she flipped pages, while I attempted fiction. Sometimes she would look at me, as if hoping that I'd speak.

I wondered that I didn't gather my things and move to a different table. But I'm not that kind of man. My inability to move—or, to see it another way: my decision to stay—explains all that's wrong and all that's right with my life.

~

Not many birds. Mostly crows.

A crow's intelligence scales nicely with our own. I find that everything crows do, as I watch them, makes sense.

This morning as I pumped gas I watched one of them pecking at something in the middle of the street. Nonchalantly it walked out of the way of an oncoming car, declining to fly.

~

The night's are extraordinarily silent. More silent, somehow, than the night's in Half Moon Bay. Certainly I'm more silent—as if I were traveling through a foreign land, ignorant of its language and, as a consequence, unwilling to speak.

~

Two bedrooms. Nothing—not even love—is as expensive as optimism.

~

Tonight I won't see them in their Halloween costumes. But tomorrow night, after their grandparents have left for Michigan, they will, I hope, come for a visit. I'll make spaghetti; we'll sit on the carpet and watch a movie. They won't spend the night—they never do. Home—life—is elsewhere. They wonder about me. They ask themselves, looking at me, at my apartment: Is this what it means to be a man? Is this how a man lives?

Yes. I don't know.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee

INTERVIEWER
And men? What do you think interests them?
HOUELLEBECQ
Little asses. I like Coetzee. He says things brutally, too. 
— The Paris Review
I first encountered Coetzee about a decade ago, when I read Disgrace. From that experience I can tell you that Houellebecq's right: Coetzee says things brutally. More than brutally: crushingly. I wasn't prepared for his brutality—rarely in my life have I been as outraged by a book as I was by Disgrace. Indignantly I finished it, as if to prove to the author that no matter what he did, I wouldn't let him make me quit.

I'm reading Disgrace again now, having loved Summertime. This time through I'm not outraged but filled with dread, as if by reading it I were listening to my smartest, cruelest self warn me from the future, of my future.

Among the tragedies of aging: slowly coming to realize that one is capable of anything.

But about Summertime: I've had the good fortune, over the last year, as I've negotiated the long-foreseen dissolution of my life, to encounter a series of books that have all arrived, I've thought, exactly when I've needed them. The pattern began last October with The Unquiet Grave. It continues with Summertime, Coetzee's evocation of the years, during his mid-30s, when he finally became a writer. The novel takes the form of some notebook fragments and the memories of five people—four of them are women—who passed, at that time, through his life (or this fictional reconstruction of his life). The novel's conceit is ingenious: Coetzee has died, and a biographer is traversing the globe interviewing those who knew him.

True to form, Coetzee gives a brutal portrait of himself—or of his alter-ego, we'll say, if we're particular—as a reclusive, damaged man, a failure as a lover, an emotional and intellectual mediocrity.

The novel's triumph is that it replaces the portrait of the artist as young hero with a portrait of the artist as human being. In Coetzee's case we have a human being who makes art of his mediocrity. From his example we can infer that to be an artist, all you have to do is refuse to lie.

Good luck with that, Treanor.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Libertarians of the World, Unite!

Some of my most interesting friends have been—are—libertarians. Yet many of them belong to fiercely regulated communities—often a religious community. In my life, for example, most of the libertarians I know are Mormon.

And from what I can tell they see no conflict between their distrust of democratic government and their trust in the intensely authoritarian, aggressively communal religions that govern their ethical and social lives.

And maybe there is no conflict.

Regardless, this apparent paradox leads me to believe that no one is a libertarian vis-à-vis the community by which they define themselves. Our primary communities will always feature robust regulation, a hierarchical structure built to maintain the rule of law, and a fierce repudiation of individualism. For just about all of us, our fealty to the community by which we define ourselves precedes our fealty to ourselves—including those of us who call ourselves libertarian.

So it could be that the difference between conservatives and liberals in this country is not political but social: for conservatives (and for libertarians in particular) a community other than the nation is their primary community; for liberals, the nation is their primary community.

This difference explains the radically different attitude toward government that distinguishes conservatives from liberals in this country.

Conservatives experience the nation as oppressive—as another community attempting to displace their primary community. They seek to avoid that displacement by weakening the nation to the point that it no longer represents a threat to the roles played in their lives by their primary community.

Liberals, on the other hand, experience the nation as their primary community and want to strengthen it to the point that it can do what a conservative's primary community already does: function as a viable social world that provides for the safety, health, and stability that all human beings need to flourish.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

TFTD

How much sadness there is in life. Still, it won't do to become depressed, one should turn to other things, and the right thing is work, but there are times when one can only find peace of mind in the realization: I, too, shall not be spared by unhappiness.

— Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to Theo, 15 September 1883

Monday, October 10, 2011

The Joys of Student Writing, Exhibit D

Q: What government agency is responsible for regulating the food industry?

A: Fast food restaurants.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

TFTD

It's not the consumer's job to know what they want.

— Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, RIP

He'll be best remembered not for technological innovation but for an intense aesthetic sensibility. That sensibility shaped world commerce and product design for a generation. Jobs—who was, from what I hear, often unbearable to work with—gave us a lesson worth remembering: to draw a distinction between form and function is to court mediocrity and irrelevance—no matter what you do with your life.

In this delightful speech, he tells us to never forget that death awaits us all. Now his death has arrived. Having lived defiantly in its shadow, he'll likely—imagine—never be forgotten.