Sunday, November 11, 2012

Fair Weather

Three years ago, almost to the day, I started The Bewildered Eye. But recently three people I love and trust have suggested that the energy I'm directing here might be better directed toward other, more urgent work.

And in truth my heart's not in it anymore. I've grown tired of this voice—of its possibilities; I no longer require the man who made it. All literary voices are inventions: The Bewildered Eye's invented voice is mercifully obsolete.

Obama's re-election now nailed the Eye's coffin closed.

Over the coming months I'll revisit what I've made here, and I'll probably refine some of the posts a bit, and I might create some kind of "Selected Works" label for the writing I continue to approve of. But I won't add to it; I consider it complete—finished—

But for this: Thank you for listening.

Update: I haven't done much refining, but the "Selected Works" label is now in place.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Yes, Please

A note to friends & family who are California voters:

A couple of weeks ago my dean at Chabot College informed me that my classes are on the chopping block if Prop. 30 doesn't pass. The district will be eliminating classes for over 2000 students, which means it will be eliminating the teachers who teach them. In all likelihood, I will be one of those teachers.

A week ago, Lincoln applied to Cal-Poly. But if Prop. 30 doesn't pass, the CA State schools will cut the number of incoming freshmen that they'll be accepting by 20,000 students—which might include him.

No, I don't want to pay an extra quarter of a percent in sales taxes for four years. But the long-term cost to the state—and to my family—will be far higher if we allow six billion dollars in cuts to education THIS YEAR ALONE.

We can debate how we got here until we're blue in the face. But the public education system in our state is in crisis. I urge you to help save it. Please join me in voting YES on Prop. 30.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

TFTD

Only people with some strength of character can be truly gentle: usually, what seems like gentleness is mere weakness, which readily turns to bitterness.

—La Rochefoucauld

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

On Bitterness

An aqueduct runs through the trees behind the house. A few years ago, county workers landscaped the aqueduct's banks, and it's now re-populated, at long last, by ducks and drakes. During these hot October nights I keep the bedroom window open to hear their chatter. Listening to them, they become extensions of my own yearning—or I become an extension of theirs.

I'm used to sleeping near water. The house in Costa Rica, where I discovered unhappiness, also had a waterway behind it, bordered along its edges by trash and towering Poro trees heavy with orange blossoms. In the evening, the sky above the creek's trees swarmed with bats. Sometimes I'd sit in our little backyard drinking a beer, watching the bats feed. The backyard was surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire and the upturned edges of broken bottles. In the middle of the yard there was a small concrete manhole cover. It permitted access to the home's drainage system, which carried sink water to the creek.

For many months we had no trouble with the drains. But one evening, after hours of torrential rain, water from the creek surged up through the pipes and lifted the manhole cover off its setting. Within minutes the backyard was submerged. Floodwaters came across the patio. I put towels against the back door, but they proved useless: the creek, roaring through the trees behind the house, was now pouring through the kitchen. Soon the house was flooded. The boys occupied the kitchen counter, where they could watch the flood without, I hoped, being injured. I opened the front door and attempted to direct the water from the back door to the front door. If I could get it out the door, I thought, it would roll down the driveway, into the street.

After a while the rain stopped, and soon the flooding stopped, and by nightfall I'd swept most of the water, which stunk of sewage, out of the house. The two older boys helped clean the mud off the floors.

The bases of my bookshelves, which were made of cheap particle board, had absorbed water, and over time they rotted. But I'd managed to save the music speakers and the throw rugs. So we still had music when we wanted it, and a place to dance. But music and dancing was rare during those months; we'd had our share of it during the early years of our marriage, in Utah. Maybe the Costa Rican tropics—torrential sunlight, torrential rain—overwhelmed us, to such a degree that we became unrecognizable to ourselves, and, as a consequence, to each other.

~

This summer, one of my dearest friends, who lives in Boise, let me tell him about a more recent flood. He's been through a few of his own; after a long weekend he gave me a broad-chested hug and said, "Be patient, Eric. Most of all, with yourself."

Maybe I'll manage to take his advice. Tonight, the October breeze is unseasonably warm, and I've got the window open. The ducks have resumed their noisy yearning. Soon, November rain will bring new floods. The ducks and drakes are counting on it. So am I.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Kabul

Your ochre heart
Your heart lit up in blossoms

A plum tree’s bark
Funneling rain
Water to its roots

Your fig lips
Almond eyes
Your persimmon thighs

The body both student and teacher

Wisdom’s carnage
Scented with cinnamon

Carved by youth’s eviscerating scimitar

Romance does not belong
To the sea

Romance is what happens
When we cease to be
The split seeds of a pomegranate


Love an opiate breeze
Carrying the scent of apricots

Into the strewn sheets
Of delight

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

TFTD

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Monday, September 24, 2012

TFTD

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Four More Years

A little over four years ago, I sat on the edge of a bed in a Guadalajara hotel room and watched John McCain introduce Sarah Palin as his running mate. Less than a minute into her thank-you speech, I said aloud, to the TV, "Barack Obama just won the election."

In light of the videos that came to light last night, in which Mitt Romney speaks disdainfully of half the people he aspires to govern, I say, with even greater confidence, the same thing: "Barack Obama just won the election."

I say this with a degree of sadness. This country desperately needs a serious, intelligent debate about its future, about the various roles of the federal government, about taxation and debt, about foreign policy.

With many conservatives, I'd hoped that both Romney and Paul Ryan would elevate the quality of our national conversation.

Sadly, Ryan, for his part, at 42 years old, with an opportunity to explain to the nation how conservatives see the world, opted instead to structure his entire Convention speech around what he knew to be a gross distortion of Obama's (utterly correct) "you didn't build that."

Romney's incompetently run campaign has been equally disappointing. He has combined miscues with evasiveness and left many of the voters he hopes to persuade convinced of little but that he's an unreliable cipher.

From the beginning of this election cycle we've been treated to a parade of Republican fatuousness: Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich. That's to be expected: every village has its idiots. In Mitt Romney I hoped for—frankly, I anticipated—a legitimate candidate. But Romney's most recent comments—which, at some level, take that parade to its apotheosis—have no basis in fact, grossly misrepresent both liberalism and the dynamic between individuals and their government, and, worst of all, show a frightening degree of contempt for nearly half his fellow citizens. They end my hope for a real debate.

Like McCain, Romney won't win the election because he doesn't deserve to. Democracy—speaking generally, generously—works.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Standoff

At the end of the dream I was on your couch. Sam was beside me. He pretended to ignore us. But his presence made us—made what was happening—real.

Both of you wanted to leave; you wanted out of the room. I wanted both of you to stay. These different desires were all forms of love.

Noises from outside—the encircling world—prevented us from resolving our standoff.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

In Defense of Everyone

When I was very young—five, six years old—my family lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a couple times a year we'd visit our cousins in Alabama. My uncle Forrest worked in Huntsville as an aeronautical engineer for Boeing.

Among my cousins, I was most in awe of Tim—a tall, slim, handsome boy, a few years older than me, who struck me, in a manner typical of middle sons, as warmer than his cool brother Dave and cooler than his warm brother Todd. I followed him around a lot during our visits, trying to learn how to be a boy. In memory, he's forever the handsomest of the Treanor boys, and, despite his meek name, the most admirable, combining a Treanor's congenital interest in the life of the mind with an athlete's physical ease.

It's been at least twenty years, I'm guessing, since Tim and I have seen one another. But a minor family crisis this summer involving Chik-Fil-A, my mother, and my gay brother Nathan sent me to Tim's Facebook page, where I learned something of his life today. He now lives in North Carolina, where he works as a chiropractor. The Western diet, as with tens of millions of other Americans, has softened his slim handsomeness. And—now to my purpose—he's become a staunch, activist Republican.

I took some time perusing his posts, which I could read despite the fact that we've never become Facebook friends. Many of them were about me: a progressivist liberal who, for the most part, votes Democrat. Yet they weren't describing a person I recognized.

Nor did they describe a president I recognized: a "communist," who wants to "destroy the family, destroy private property, destroy religion, destroy the nation." For a while I considered attempting to disprove his claims—but I quickly realized that I'm about as unlikely to change his views as he is to change mine, and there wasn't much summer left, and only an idiot begins an un-winnable war. Especially against family.

But Tim's Facebook page has stayed with me. And alongside its catalog of crimes and misdemeanors I've considered the way some of my liberal friends talk about Republicans: as anti-intellectual, racist, xenophobic, gay-hating, Bible-thumping, patriarchal, anti-science reactionaries working to drag us back into a 19th century, Gilded Age dystopia, where unregulated corporate magnates collaborate to steal the nation's wealth, overheat the planet, and destroy the middle class, all in the name of some Darwinian, Ayn Rand-ish individualism that replaces community with the Law of the Jungle and tolerance with the Law of God. And don't bother asking whose God.

Something is wrong with these pictures. Most people I know, Democrat or Republican, are, speaking generally, equally decent: equally compassionate, equally patriotic, equally smart, equally happy, equally devoted to the future of America and equally devoted to the safety of their families and their neighbors. Republicans, in my experience, do tend to be a bit more insular and frightened of otherness, particularly if it comes packaged in poverty. Democrats, on the other hand, do tend to be a bit more starry-eyed, a bit too indifferent to tradition, and a bit suspicious of wealth, particularly if it comes packaged in a suit and tie.

Which brings me, like most of my experiences these days, to James Baldwin:
What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I'm not describing you when I talk about you; I'm describing me.
So I turn this wisdom upon myself. Many of the most astonishing people in my life—including my own mother, who walks on water—are dedicated Republicans. Like many Democrats, they genuinely worry that America—which is inevitably their idea of America—is losing its way. They fear for their future and for the future of their children; with good reason they look back on the 20th century and proclaim that the single greatest threat to freedom is the tyranny of the State.

In fact, this fear is as old as the country. DH Lawrence saw it with an artist's acuity when he wrote of American immigrants:
They came largely to get away—that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.
'Henceforth be masterless.'

[. . . ]

In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation.
According to Lawrence, that refrain—"henceforth be masterless"—captures something essential in the American temperament; and I think he's right. Yes, Lawrence has plenty to say about the self-delusion that accompanies our cries for masterlessness in American life. It's the same self-delusion that liberals point out when they note the hypocrisy of Tea Partiers who simultaneously call for government to get out of their lives and, in the next breath, threaten any politician who wants to cut Medicare. It's the same self-delusion that conservatives point out when they note that Occupiers are organizing against corporate power by using iPads. There is always, says Lawrence, a master.

For many Democrats these days, Mitt Romney embodies, down to his toenails, their idea of a freeedom-destroying master: a monied corporatist, archetypically white, who has enriched himself by financial sleights-of-hand, exporting jobs, and tax evasion. He's not an embodiment of American ingenuity but an amoral crony-capitalist whose trickle-down economics and commitment to deregulation will only accelerate the collapse of the middle class. Never mind his well-documented philanthropy, his dedication to his family and his faith, his years of unsalaried public service. Talk to a Democrat and he'll make it clear: "Mitt Romney isn't the solution. He's the problem."

And for Republicans, Obama perfectly embodies the freedom-destroying master they fear: of uncertain—possibly foreign—provenance; a foreign-educated, multi-racial, multi-religious "community organizer" who rose to fame not through merit and hard work but on the wings of Marxist utopian conspirators and a healthy dose of liberal guilt. Never mind that coming out of college he took his Harvard degree to Chicago's South Side, or his own commitment to faith and family, or, as president, four years of historically low taxes, robust militarism in the country's defense, and, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a level of frugality while in office unmatched by any president since Eisenhower. Ask Tim: Obama isn't the solution. He's the problem.

Contrast these views with how each party sees its own candidate: for Republicans, Romney isn't a usurping master but a fellow traveler who will help them build a road to their idea of the American Dream. Ditto for Democrats: Obama isn't a usurping master but a fellow traveler who will help them build a road to their idea of the American Dream.

In other words, American Republicans and American Democrats—Tim and I—are two sides of the same coin. Our distraught response to each other's politics, our habits of impugning each other's motives and attacking each other's common sense, simply reflects back to us what we most fear: a master-tyrant, who has tracked us from the nightmares of the past, even to here, where we thought we'd finally be free.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

No Thank You, Please

If one learns theology before learning to become a man, one will never become a man. —Ludvig Holberg
I still remember vividly the afternoon I told my Mormon bishop that I wanted my name removed from the records of the LDS Church. Utah sunlight, coming through a large window to my left, lit up his office; portraits of Mormon leaders and Jesus and Book of Mormon heroes decorated the walls of his office; photographs of his family cornered his desk. During an earlier meeting he'd told me with enthusiasm of the happiness he and his wife experienced singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He had mementos on the shelves behind him of their travels.

He received my news with sadness. He tried to get me to explain my decision, but I refused to do that, and he soon gave up. With grim professionalism he told me how to proceed; he also told me what I'd lose, which amounted to everything: the assurance of life at God's side in heaven, with my family, forever.

While he talked I thought mainly about him. I couldn't help but see him as a projection of myself 30 years from then: soft-spoken and wise, silver in every respect, kind, and harmless, and maybe, I thought, vaguely angry. He seemed to abide, like many religious leaders, in a kind of patriarchal self-assurance that I found both enviable and scary. What he no doubt meant as compassion I experienced as condescension. He seemed sexless—or nearly so: too sexless, anyway, for me to trust. His assiduously combed hair and clean-shaven cheeks both saddened and frightened me; but adult innocence, or an adult's ambition to appear innocent, is always sad and is often frightening.

After a while he reassured me of God's love for me and sent me on my way.

I have never, not for one day, regretted my decision to abandon Mormonism—not because the church is evil or its theology incoherent but because from adolescence I'd used religion to avoid becoming an adult. Yes, I can provide a mildly sophisticated repudiation of Mormonism on philosophical or rational grounds. But the truth is simpler: I left the church because I was tired of childhood. I yearned for messy complexity, for the bewildered authenticity—the earned blue happiness—of adulthood.

~

Watching Mitt Romney reminds me of that bright April day, because Mitt Romney strikes me as a version of myself, had I allowed my life to unfold differently. I see him as many things, some of them good, but mostly I see him as miserable. He carries his misery in his body: his smile is miserable; his laugh is miserable; even his notorious hair is miserable. He's embittered by innocence, by obedience; he's crushed by the myths of superiority and chosenness that have been pounded into his head since he was a toddler and which, in some gleaming corner of his consciousness, he knows to be false.

That knowledge haunts his life; his vast ambition, including his quest for the presidency, is little more than a tireless battle against his misery.

And it's not just his misery: it's the misery of anyone who has only been obedient. Romney was told to be good, and hardworking, and conscientious, and self-reliant, and god-fearing, and tolerant, and compassionate, and obedient, and honorable; and he's been all of those things. But to have been only those things—to have never known disobedience, and rebellion, and secrecy, and drunkenness, and dancing and swearing and fucking—precludes the possibility of growing up. And a man who never grows up is a miserable man.

In Romney's cruel unhappiness I see the future I could have had, if I'd been obedient to my destiny. Of course I would have been less wealthy than Romney, and less handsome, and less ambitious and less renowned. But I would have been similarly miserable. And, like Romney, I would have asked the people around me to collaborate in my misery by pretending that it was happiness and worth emulating.

Romney now seeks my collaboration by asking me to vote for him. Instead, I'll vote for the adult, with his blue happiness, his easy smile, his hard-won, complicated calm. I'll vote, in other words, for the man I wanted to become, long ago, when I took a last look at the dreams of my father, and told them goodbye.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

TFTD

I'm going to take your brain out of your head and wash it and scrub it and make it clean.

— Dirk Diggler, Boogie Nights

Friday, August 31, 2012

Bad Math?

Romney refuses to share his tax returns = if we knew what he did in his tax returns, we wouldn't elect him = we shouldn't elect him.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Truck Was the Color of My Father's Porsche When I Was Eleven

The most disturbing thing about the dream wasn't the person who accelerated to prevent the man in the truck from passing, or the amount of debris coming off the truck as it rolled, or the number of times it rolled, or the sight of the destroyed truck in the grass beside the freeway, but the nonchalance with which everyone drove on.

Monday, August 27, 2012

TFTD

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

— James Baldwin, "My Dungeon Shook"

Friday, August 24, 2012

TFTD

Certain people permanently change what we perceive as beautiful. Like a good writer they teach us to see beauty where we'd failed to see it. These are the people we come to love, sooner or later; they make the world richer, more expansive, and its beauty more abundant.

Lines of Sight

Hard-hatted workers have removed the small plum tree from the plazita by the Language Arts Office at Foothill. Apparently it blocked an architect's idea of a line of sight.

In all my life—all my travels—I've never seen anything more beautiful than that plum tree.

When it was in bloom I'd ask my students to draw it, or to go look at it for awhile. Sitting near it between classes, I liked to think about what it meant.

For a long time I allowed it to remind me of someone.

On occasion it brought to mind an anecdote about Faulkner. He once asked a woman if she wanted to see a bride in her wedding dress; she said yes; he drove with her at night, through fields, until turning his headlights upon an apple tree in bloom.

On melancholy mornings that little plum tree never failed to return to my life a sense of wonder and optimism. It reassured me of—let me phrase it this way—God's love, or of the love of the gods, and of life's ongoingness, and of the persistence of beauty. It's absence will now remind me of the persistence of folly.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

July's People, by Nadine Gordimer

Well into July's People I realized that all along I'd been hearing echoes of Faulkner. I rarely hear him in contemporary American fiction (in Cormac McCarthy, obviously; also in Toni Morrison, whom I no longer read); but I hear him all the time in Latin American and European writing, and I suppose it should come as no surprise to hear him in a novel by a South African.

Gordimer has written an apartheid book, a political book, a product, like all great literature, of its time and place; and it deserves to be read if only as a fictional analysis of the awful traumata, public and private, of racism. But more importantly July's People is an extraordinary stylistic achievement.

In Dark Star Safari, Gordimer tells Paul Theroux, "The American proofreaders often try to correct my English. . . . They follow the rules. I don't. I like my sentences."

Anyone who doesn't like her sentences is deaf to the supple muscularity of modern English prose:
She went out. Night was close to her face. Rain sifted from the dark. She knew only where the doorway was, to get back. She took off her shirt and got out of panties and jeans in one go, supporting herself against the streaming mud wall. Holding her clothing out of the mud, she let the rain pit her lightly, face, breasts and back, then stream over her. She turned as if she were under a shower faucet. Soon her body was the same temperature as the water. She became aware of being able to see; and what she saw was like the reflection of a candle-flame behind a window-pane flowing with water, far off. The reflection moved or the glassy ripples moved over it. But it existed—the proof was that there was a dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness.
And:
There was the stillness of unregarded trees and ceaseless water. On the huge pale trunks wild figs bristled like bunches of hat-pins. The earth was sour with fallen fruit; between the giant trees a tan fly-catcher swooped, landing to hover on the invisible branches of a great tree of air.
Prose of this caliber insists on slow attention. (Good luck reading those passages online.) It reminds us what prose alone can do, and what the novel as an art-form continues, if barely, to give the world. For those reasons—beyond its usefulness as an historical document, as a study of human psychology under duress—July's People can't have enough readers.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Bourne Legacy and the Perils of Empire

I was likely fourteen when I read The Bourne Identity, and I loved it. I still remember a moment midway through the book when Bourne walks into a parking lot and perceives in his peripheral vision the glint of a rifle scope in the distance. Instantly, unthinkingly, he falls to the pavement and rolls behind a car; a bullet ricochets off the asphalt where he'd just stood. His primary response to what's happening is baffled awe. How did I know I was about to be shot at?

The book becomes a prolonged meditation on those types of questions. Why am I so good at  surviving, at fighting? How is it I'm a killing machine? Most fundamentally: Who on earth am I?

Jason Bourne reflected his time. Through the slog of the Cold War, the United States had become a globalized military power, efficient in the arts of killing. But after the Vietnam War, wounded, battered, it faced an identity crisis. The beginning of The Bourne Identity gives us an appropriate metaphor for the American condition at the the end of the 1970s: we are Jason Bourne, wounded and bleeding, wondering who we are, and in need of re-birth. America had become a bewildered killer, without an identity, in search of its past—or of a future worth living to see. In Ludlum's vision, Bourne's solution was simple: withdraw from battle. But the world wouldn't let him.

The Bourne Legacy reflects its Age every bit as succinctly as The Bourne Identity did. In the film, the United States has become an Orwellian, corporatist-scientific super-State, its citizens under constant surveillance. Our super-hero is no longer a reluctant, baffled Everyman but a wounded soldier now hyper-enhanced by genetic manipulation and paramilitary-survivalist training. He (read "we") is no longer in flight from his superpowers but dedicated to making them permanent. They aren't a bewildering curse but his reason for being.

The movie itself is ok. There's a chilling scene—basically unwatchable—in the middle of the film when a scientist hunts down his colleagues in their workplaces, calming killing them, one-by-one. I don't want to imagine a single American watching that scene with enthusiasm, entertained—but there are many things I don't want to imagine about my fellow Americans, and that has never stopped them from being true.

Ultimately the film acquires its force from the usefulness of its metaphor. We are no longer Jason Bourne, looking to understand—and escape—what we've become. We are now Aaron Cross; we know who we are and want to be nothing else. Cross's name, like Bourne's, is on point: we have arrogated to ourselves the role of global messiah.

One assumes that in the inevitable sequel Bourne and Cross will come face-to-face. Which vision of the American hero will triumph?

The Bourne Legacy's abrupt ending and its heroes' last words might offer a hint—and reason for hope.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux

Fitzgerald was wrong; the pilgrims weren't the last people to come "face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to [our] capacity for wonder": Paul Theroux did it ten years ago during an overland trip across eastern Africa.

Dark Star Safari, the riveting account of his journey, made it clear to me that: 1) the same experience is available to me, right now; and 2) it's unlikely I'll have the courage to seek it.

Africa, after all, is a frightening ruin, according to Theroux—its cities, which best embody its politics, especially. But he also observes that the West is its own kind of ruin, alienating us from ourselves in manners so profound that to even discuss them puts one at risk of becoming a pariah. By evoking that alienation—by evoking the mystery of Africa's pervasive lawlessness (we have no other word)—Theroux's travelogue becomes less an exploration of Africa than a mediation on the limits of the Western imagination.

Theroux arrives at a second insight that is, in some respects, more provocative: the large-scale international aid that characterizes the developed world's primary relationship to Africa should end immediately. Theroux comes to believe that it's not just unproductive; it's dangerous—to Africans in particular.

Which begs the question: might it not be the case that we don't provide that aid for them, but for ourselves? And if so, what might be the cost—to us—of ending it?

Sunday, July 22, 2012

channel ORANGE

I just drove from Salt Lake City to Payson, the Wasatch Mountains off to my left by turns oppressively and consolingly permanent, listening to channel ORANGE, the new album by Frank Ocean.  I'd spent the night with two friends, Jorge and Dave—gotten mildly drunk. This afternoon we celebrated the two-year birthday of Felix, Jorge's son. Around 4:00pm I left in a rush and drove through streets that teemed with memories.

I used to listen to R&B all the time. This afternoon, before leaving Jorge's, I saw a celebratory article about Ocean in the New Yorker and decided the album might help with the drive. It did. channel ORANGE reminded me of Prince in its oddness, its freedom—also of Outkast (André 3000 appears on a song I haven't yet reached) and of Kanye West and—less forcefully—of Marvin Gaye. Ocean isn't courageously honest; he's honest because, as with those other artists, honesty makes his art possible. So his honesty isn't an act of bravery but a means of survival.

Upon arriving at my mom's I decided to learn a bit more about him. A Google search revealed a recent Tumblr post in which he announces—confesses isn't the right word—that his first love was a young man he met when he was nineteen. (He's now 24.) It's a beautiful post, belonging to the sacred tradition of love letters written by the brokenhearted. It can be found here.

Beyond that, Utah remains as lovely as ever, the mountains ascending into its high desert sky, the sunsets exquisitely slow this time of year, the clouds throughout the day providing their drama. Tonight I'm going to spend a few hours imagining that Frank Ocean and I are kindred spirits. Yes, we pay a high price for life's moments of happiness; but sadness, too, has its rewards. In Ocean's case, it makes him sing. So: here's to more sadness.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Aurora

A couple of weeks ago I went for the first time in my life to Buffalo Wild Wings. The building was cavernous, dimly lit; huge projection screens hung from its high roof; plasma TVs—themselves enormous—surrounded the room. Here and there a neon sign gleamed. The restaurant was full. Couples, who had been seated to face each other, gazed up at their respective TVs; children, too, with their families, turned in their seats to watch while they ate; everyone—but for the smallest children, who were either locked in high-chairs or running about—gazed upwards, as if at flickering angels. Beneath their upturned faces their hands worked on plates of orange chicken.

The plasma TVs glowed with sporting events: soccer; baseball—our beautiful game; poker; an old NFL game; golf; hockey; even sailing. But the four projection screens, which dominated the room as a movie screen dominates a theater, were all broadcasting the same event: an MMA fight. Two men, their heads shaved, wearing nothing but shorts, circled each other. The mat beneath them was smeared with their blood.

I'd been invited to the restaurant by a friend. And for a few minutes I tried to stay. But I found it impossible to ignore the MMA fight, and without an available table it was easy for me to suggest that we leave. "Anyway," I said, "I can't watch this." Actually, I could do nothing but watch it. The scene was primal, riveting.

I remember when MMA fighting was an underground subculture, mysterious, barbaric, vaguely shameful. Occasionally I saw advertisements for it on late-night TV. The DVDs promised warehouse settings, high cages, poor production values. The fights, always between two white men, apparently had but one rule: win. The midwestern American high school fight had found its expression in commerce.

Now MMA has gone mainstream—more than mainstream: it's dinner table entertainment. You see it, too, in upscale SF bars on Saturday nights, and in posh lounges in Los Altos and Burlingame. It's even advertised during Giants games on TV: an inning ends and abruptly we're confronted with the sight of a man being knocked unconscious by a kick to the head. He falls to the mat, his eyes gone white, for our entertainment.

~

A couple of quarters ago I taught Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño. I found discussing it difficult. Bolaño's books—being, at every level, new—defend themselves against understanding. But we concluded (in a very small nutshell) that Bolaño was announcing the triumph of fascism by way of the arts. Fascism might have been defeated militarily, the book seems to say, but it has triumphed culturally, which is a vaster, more fundamental victory. The principles of fascism—purification through violence, corporate militarism, the glorification of the body, "survival of the fittest," nationalism as patriotism, a disdain for the life of the mind—dominate contemporary Western culture. The West—America—defeated Hitler, only to become, in many respects, his most ardent spokesman.

Leaving Buffalo Wild Wings (which no doubt survives—this isn't a peripheral point—on the low-cost ruthlessness of industrialized chicken farms), it was easy to imagine Bolaño's wry smile. You didn't believe me, did you? Compassion, community—a civilized dinner? Those ideas belong to another age. Welcome to the global triumph of fascism.

~

I have yet to see The Dark Knight Rises. Lincoln and Zachary saw it on Thursday night in Daly City, about an hour after—unbeknownst to all of us—a young man in Aurora, Colorado, walked into a packed movie theater and opened fire, killing twelve people and injuring dozens more. In the world of Distant Star—in our world—the slaughter in Aurora was essentially performance art. Yes, James Holmes, a PhD student in neuroscience, is a moral outrage. But—as the forthcoming media circus will confirm—we find his story riveting, and eminently American. According to the New York Times, many people in the audience thought what was happening was part of the show.

As much as we like to declaim against it, violence is our national pastime. We eat to violence; we pay for violence; we export violence; we applaud violence. America loves violence. If we didn't, we'd fucking change.

Monday, July 9, 2012

TFTD

I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

— Albert Camus, "On the Future of Tragedy"

Friday, June 22, 2012

First

for Lincoln

Earth heart
The prime consonant

Curled on my chest,
A bald pulse—

Your mother’s milk in the folds of your neck,
Your stomach as round as a cantaloupe.

Now your long skeleton,
Marrowed with kindness,
Carries the world—

Running through fog—

The Pacific you hear
As the mechanics of love,
Its green rumble
Always in need of repair.

But I haven’t forgotten
Your rosebud ear
Against my chest,
Your toothless yawning,
Your coal-black eyes,
Your urgent grip on my finger:

You are our settlement
Beside life’s lake, Lincoln—
Always fulfilling
The promise of home.

                                    — June 22, 2012

Monday, June 18, 2012

Notes for the Defense

In class today I gave an impassioned speech about literature—maybe for myself more than for my students, who regarded me as I spoke with impassive curiosity, if at all.

I said (I'm summarizing): These stories are songs written to make life, with its inexplicable suffering, something more than a desert of pain. (I was happy to hear myself carried away.)

We were discussing "The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick. At the end of my speech I had the sense to ask one of the students to read the story's final paragraph. I've made the mistake of reading it to a class before. It's disconcerting for students to watch their professor weep. And these students, most of them, don't deserve to see that, anyway. I've been dumbfounded this quarter—I've told them this—by their indifference. But, like me, they reflect their Age. I'm angry; they're indifferent; one or two of them seem to care about something other than money or grades—one or two of them are extraordinary, luminous with intelligence; the rest strike me as bored, and I strike them (correctly) as angry, and we blame our boredom and anger on each other and will forget about each other as soon as we can.

Still, walking into class this morning I was in an exuberant mood: after all, we were discussing "The Shawl" and, after a class break, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Reading García Márquez returns me to my youth, to literature as joy, to the pleasure of story: my first love. It's the love to which I've been most faithful, I suppose. It turned out that most of the class hadn't read the book—the luminous had read it—but I didn't care. Chronicle will be there for them tomorrow; it will be there when they're ready for it, when they realize that life is not about money or grades or the approval of their parents and that the same fate awaits them that befalls Magda and Santiago: certain death.

"So," I told them, "I suggest that you attend to this singing, and, more broadly, to the blessed habit we have—these artists have—of making songs of our suffering."

~

Nina Simone echoes through Coupa Cafe.

~

The Euro 2012 soccer tournament is in full swing right now, and like García Márquez soccer returns me to my youth—to the moment in my youth when I woke up: namely, to Eric in Argentina. There he is, in his white shirt and his conservative tie, with his boyish blonde cluelessness, watching Maradona highlights on a restaurant's flickering TV in little, provincial Azul. And, a year later, there he is—it's a June night in General Belgrano—swaddled against the cold in his uncle's down-filled sleeping bag, opening for the first time El amor en los tiempos del cólera.

Soccer and the novel: two inventions that honor life as suffering, punctuated by moments of beauty and joy.

~

There's a woman sitting at a table across from me who desperately needs a cigarette. She doesn't know she needs a cigarette—like most non-smokers—but by the velocity of her speaking it's clear she does.

The young man sitting with her hasn't touched his bagel. His slim arms, dark and almost hairless, he has folded across his chest. We both are trying to defend ourselves against her onslaught.

~

"It seems," Nina says, "that I'm never tired loving you."

I hadn't realized this about her: she sings like Elvis.

~

In a week my life will return to a now-all-too-familiar rootlessness. I blame no one but myself—in fact I don't even blame myself—but I'm aware this afternoon of a new exhaustion in my legs, my eyes, my heart. Perhaps it's this exhaustion that has me nostalgic for my youth—for Argentina and G.G.M.'s literature of joy, for soccer and its elegant, futile virility. Whatever the case, my life continues to be undeniably beautiful, but also saturated with sadness and tinged with new despair at a certain unrelenting maliciousness from over the hill that I cannot—and will no longer attempt to—surmount.

Eric in Belmont approaches his terminus. I cheer him up by reminding him of the girls in their summer dresses, and dinner tonight with Nathan and his new love, and the almond eyes that illuminate his dreams, and The Character of Rain (our next book), and the mystery of what tomorrow holds, be it sacred or profane.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

An Open Letter

I write this letter in response to a text message I received last night from one of the most important people in my life. Of course at some level I'm writing this letter to myself. 

Dear ---,

          Love doesn't condemn, so it has no need to forgive. If you're worried about other people forgiving you—condemning you—then you have already condemned yourself, which is not my responsibility. I mean to say: I'm not to blame if you're worried about condemnation and forgiveness (the Law). It's not my place to condemn you or forgive, and if I imagine that it is, I haven't spent enough time in front of a mirror.

          If you're right about us and it's true that we condemn you, that's not your problem. Don't condemn us for our failure and, as a consequence, become like us.

          The Gospel—life—isn't about forgiveness. Too often we forget that fact and use a perverse obsession with guilt and innocence to justify ourselves. Mostly we do this because we want to control how people feel about us. My advice: don't worry about how we feel about you, and don't bother justifying yourself. You were justified before you were born. Or you never will be. It amounts to the same thing.

          I remind you of what you've taught me: Love doesn't accuse, it doesn't impose, it doesn't demand, it doesn't require. Love is or it is not—either way, with or without it, it  makes us free. Guilt, innocence, condemnation, forgiveness—those words belong to those of us who are enslaved by an attachment to the Law, which has never saved us and never will.

          For my part: I love you. In the freedom of my love for you, we live. Yes: not always, perhaps, to our liking. But our love for each other frees us from transforming our failures into sins.

          Jesus told Mary Magdelene: "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." The first clause contains the essence of Christian ethics. The second clause was not a commandment but a compassionate appeal. Jesus didn't forgive Mary: she had no need of forgiveness. She, like you, is beyond forgiveness. Together we all abide in the grace of love, free. Whether we know it or not.

Your ---,

Eric

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Meaning of LMFAO

Everything deserves to be thought about seriously, especially clowns. On Friday night I went with a friend of mine to see clowns: he had two free tickets to the LMFAO concert at Oracle Arena.

We arrived exactly when the show began, which gave us an hour and a half to buy a beer, find our seats, and look at each other with bemusement. But after the concert's first ten songs, which were remarkable only for the magnitude of their mediocrity, the band gave us "Party Rock Anthem." And we shuffled—by which I mean we attempted the song's famous zombie dance—and confetti fell and we laughed with other shufflers around us, and when the song ended we declared the night a success and left. Five minutes of heartfelt, unmitigated, shufflin' joy. How often do you get to experience that?

Clowns like LMFAO get the big bucks—and over 446,000,000 hits on YouTube, at last count—by reminding us that a clown's life is more than an imaginative possibility. Beckett actually tells us the same thing, more enduringly, more grimly: the clown is a legitimate answer, a common answer, to life's deepest problems.

The famous refrain from "Party Rock Anthem" says "Everyday, I'm shufflin'." Until Friday night, I had heard the line as: "Everyday, I'm sufferin'." Walking through the Oracle's doors into the night air I realized with a smile that at some level those are two ways of saying the same thing.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Rascals

At night now and then outside my bedroom window the raccoons fight. I find the sound of their fighting beautiful in its directness. Not for raccoons, the 20th century affection for allusion and irony. They explode with brief, precise violence, becoming, by the sound of it, a lacerating flurry of claws and teeth. Then, within seconds, a squeal and flight through the shrubbery.

On the balconies of the apartments above college students laugh, talking loudly, drunk. I can't smell their cigarettes; the hot smoke rises above our roofs, drifting south. I envy the sounds of their friendships—the talking most of all. It's not uncommon to hear them fight—a boyfriend and girlfriend, maybe—but in comparison to the raccoons, the fights are tedious. The banality of the problems they dispute seems to be the fighting's point. They are reassuring each other—themselves—that they're alive; the fighting says, I care.

Friday, June 1, 2012

TFTD

The anti-utopias of our century (Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell) depicted societies under total control where the absence of freedom was called freedom. In such societies, the rulers take care to supply the ruled with suitable diversions to prevent mental anxiety. Sexual games best fulfill that function. It is a credit to the intuition of the authors of those books that they depict Eros acting as a subversive force, which is no secret to the authorities: sex is anti-erotic and not only poses no threat but effectively prevents the appearance of the passions, which draw persons, not bodies, together and engage them both as flesh and as spirit. The hero enters upon a dangerous path when he is awakened by love. Only then is the slavery that was in disguise and accepted by everyone revealed to him as slavery.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions of San Francisco Bay

Thursday, May 24, 2012

(R)evolution

Dance, most joyous of the arts—

Two and a half years ago some young men on the corner of 90th and MacArthur (Oakland, CA) reminded us that the trajectory of any art is always a distillation of its past.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

TFTD

Mother, father—always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.

The Tree of Life

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Avengerology

Weakness is more interesting than strength.

Beauty is always unspent.

To be self-aware is to be other-unaware.

The dominatrix surrenders to her responsibility to dominate.

We respect the hero because he fights our mutual desire to watch the world burn.

A society pays for military progress with its intelligence.

What makes banter funny is its sadness.

A woman's legs render power, wealth, and narrative irrelevant.

When the heavens open, listen to the stars. Preferably one with an Academy Award.

A man in a suit is interesting insofar as he fails to be his suit.

To be violent is to commit suicide.

Lips are a window to the soul.

The common man is a child in need of protection.

Insects embody both the past and the future.

Heroes are slaves of their heroism.

Suffering's recompense is shawarma.

Music is redundant.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

TFTD

There is a tale of necessity within every vulgar story.

— Amelie Rorty, "Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love"

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Tuesday

I choose the flawed apple,
Literally. Art Pepper explains
California. Cigarette smoke, drifting
Through the bathroom window, sanctified
By its illegality, unlocks
Belmont, the sun’s throne.

Tuesday permits the dissipation
Of love. Let the vibration—Adderall,
Pilsner Urquel—reinforce the memory,
Now sacredly vague, of fixing

Brad’s computer under his
Desk. And the vast affection
Of Friendship. Later,

Sam, not yet two, runs
Naked through the living room.
Our eyes—Scotch-laden—
Widen. The world, too.

The Forgetful Reader

My morning reading is random, whimsical—whatever happens to catch my eye between bedroom and bathroom. This morning: "The Lost," a short essay by Bolaño, constructed as a single paragraph, about the Chilean poet Rodrigo Lira and, more generally, about suicide.

The essay is an exquisite example of Bolaño's finely honed recklessness:
The best thing about Latin America are its suicides, voluntary or not. We have the worst politicians in the world, the worst capitalists in the world, the worst writers in the world. . . . . Our discourse on wealth is the closest thing there is to a cheap self-help book. Our discourse on poverty is an imaginary discourse in which the only voices are those of madmen speaking of bitterness and frustration. We hate the Argentines because the Argentines are the closest thing in these parts to Europeans. The Argentines hates us because we're the mirror in which they see themselves for what they really are—Americans. We're racists in the purest sense: that is, we're racists because we're scared to death. But our suicides are the best.
As with the rest of the essay, some of this seems true to me and anything that doesn't seem true I've  forgotten.

Because reading isn't like life: in life we forget the moments of truth and remember the lies; in literature we forget the lies and remember the moments of truth.

This contrast is true largely because in literature everything is invention, so the reader creates moments of truth for himself. A good reader, a reader who permits a writer to write, collaborates in the process of creating truth from a writer's bravery. Bravery is always—like the last line above—a bit absurd; but through laughter, through delight, the reader transforms that absurdity into truth. The absurdity is forgotten; the truth remains.

So the fundamental problem for the writer is not to be truthful but to be brave.

But of course there's nothing more difficult in writing than being brave. The last line of "The Lost" explains, at least in part, why: "The cowardly don't publish the brave." The brave risk an audience of one. And only a madman writes for himself.

Monday, April 30, 2012

The Estranged

So, yes, I've returned to Camus.

Years ago his example summoned me to the artist's life. I opted instead for traditional joys, which were real enough; but traditional suffering always comes with traditional joys, and in the end one must choose between living and dying. It's easy to mistake death for life—easy enough that, at some point, just about all of us do it. For many people it's the mistake that defines their lives. For a long time it defined mine.

What I loved most about Camus when I first read him was that despite his elegant, extraordinarily lucid prose, I couldn't understand him. Reading The Stranger, I thought, This is a little, simple book. It's taught in high school. Why can't I understand it?

François Camion, one of my life's many brilliant teachers, released me from that particular anxiety when he pointed out offhandedly that to understand and to love are, at some level, opposites. Ideas like that come from somewhere: I never asked François if that idea came from Camus. It certainly could have.

In any case, my inability to understand Camus became an enduring source of pleasure, and—more to the point—it served as a thrilling artistic model. Be clear, I thought, yet  mysterious. Write sparely yet mythically. Do not articulate the trivial despairs of domesticity. Be in the world—he repudiated the commandments of my youth—and of it.

Of course we're attracted to our opposites, and in many respects Camus is my opposite: African-born; a sensualist, a success with women; hard-working; brave; stylish; free of religious dogma; French-Mediterranean (in a nutshell); a smoker (somehow, that's important); prolific. A romantic figure who managed to be above romance. A man at home in the world, in his time.

But we must recognize something of ourselves in those we love, too, and I had the audacity to think of him as a kindred spirit. In the 1958 Preface that opens Lyrical and Critical Essays, I recognized myself time and again:
I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything. . . . The lovely warmth that reigned over my childhood freed me from all resentment. I lived on almost nothing, but also in a kind of rapture.
After some soul-searching . . . I can testify that among my many weaknesses I have never discovered the most widespread failing, envy, the true cancer of societies and doctrines.
I don't know how to own things.
I have never been able to succumb to what is called "home life" (so often the very opposite of an inner life); "bourgeois" happiness bores and terrifies me.
I don't envy anyone anything, which is my right, but I am not always mindful of the wants of others and this robs me of imagination, that is to say, kindness. 
I don't think I ever found delight in re-reading a finished page.
Differences and similarities of this order—this intensity—mark most love affairs. The good thing about falling in love with an author is that he's easily returned to. If he's changed, it's because we are. Noting those changes can be both a relief and a heartbreak.

I finished re-reading The Fall last night and with relief still found it incomprehensible. Which probably means that it's the mirror Jean-Baptiste (and, by extension, Camus) meant for it to be.

Art, life, love—the words are synonyms—are all incomprehensible. With Camus as my model, I am, I hope, also incomprehensible—not least to myself. Certainly I hope I'm incomprehensible to those who love me or have loved me. If they have ceased to love me, it's probably because they have decided that they comprehend me.

Camus warns against that decision. While humanity is inclined to interpret incomprehensibility as a mark of evil, of guilt, his work reminds us that it's often a kind of beauty, and worth treasuring.

At least I think that's what he says.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

TFTD

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practice charity.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The Laughter of the Doomed

A few days ago I was at Vivace, the only decent restaurant within walking distance of my place. I'd ordered one of their Happy Hour margherita pizzas; I was sitting alone in a booth for two, not far from the bar, watching a Giants game.

At the bar itself two men, one of them about my age, the other at least a decade older, were laughing, talking, drinking. Their laughter made them impossible to ignore. Also I found the face of the older man intriguing. He had dyed his graying hair black; it was swept away from his fleshy, gleaming forehead—away from his nose, too, which dominated his little eyes, his thin mouth, his recessed chin. It was a tremendous, beautiful nose: the nose of a character from Bellow.

I quickly discerned that the two men were talking about money.

The older man was turned toward the younger man as if flirting with him. I envied their laughter—their camaraderie.

At one point the older man acted like he was pushing a button on bar. "$10,000!" Dink. "$10,000!" Dink. Again the laughter. A bit too cliche, I thought.

The younger man said, "They ask me what I do, I say, 'I provide liquidity to the markets.'" [Laughter.] "I provide liquidity to the markets!" The older man, holding his gin & tonic, nearly fell out of his chair.

After wiping his eyes the older man said, "Get up, push a button, back to bed!" More laughter. It went on like that for a while, and only stopped when the Giants scored, which the two men celebrated—this behavior, at least, I recognized—as if they'd scored the Giants' runs themselves.

Anyway, when I was leaving I took some consolation in the fact that they seemed to find their lives—their money—as absurd as I did.

~

Wendell Berry has written an essential essay—the essay of the year, an essay for our time.

"It All Turns on Affection," which takes its title from Howard's End (a novel I've never read), argues that the fundamental orientation of our civic and economic lives must change, that we're doomed if it doesn't. Yet Berry manages to make this argument with the same generosity, resolve, and transcendent tranquility that has defined his writing—his sensibility—for decades. "It All Turns on Affection" offers hope for the rest of us—not least for the discouraged man, still hungry after eating his little pizza, who stepped from Vivace's luxurious bar into Belmont's early evening sunlight and headed for the place he's supposed to call home.

TFTD

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent. . . . That's what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be just a joke.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

Monday, April 16, 2012

Reality as Analogy

Entering Half Moon Bay:

Zach:  "Cool.  Look at the sky."
Me:  "Yeah.  Amazing, isn't it?  It looks like a pearl."
Zach:  "It looks like clouds."

Friday, April 13, 2012

Monday, April 9, 2012

Is Consuming Sugar More Dangerous Than Smoking? (II)

In my English 101B class at Chabot College this semester, we're studying the American diet, which increasingly appears to be, by just about any measure, a nutritional and cultural catastrophe.

In an earlier post I asked if consuming sugar is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. "60 Minutes" finally addresses the dangers of sugar, introducing new research that suggests that sugar might be as addictive as cocaine.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

American Football, American Culture

Care to see how the sausage gets made?



Yeah, I'm tired of NFL America. "Captain America" America. George Zimmerman America. Rick Santorum America. Secret Drone Program America. High fructose corn syrup America. Paul Ryan America. Ke$ha America. Incarceration America. Goldman Sachs America. Kim Kardashian America. Chicken nugget America. "The Avengers" America. Yes on 8 America.

Yet I'm not tired of America, not quite.

After all, we've still got Bruce.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Notes on Houellebecq

My face is dying. More slowly than the rest of me—but dying, indisputably.

And no matter what strategies I devise to pretend otherwise (and to distract the world from its pitiless collapse), plainly: my face is me. From its angular meatiness I can no longer expunge the traces of grief, failure, fleeting joy, and the wounds of love and solitude.

~

In the bible of contemporary literature, Michel Houellebecq is Ecclesiastes.

He reminds us that all is vanity, that life is fleeting and inconsequential, that pleasure is rare and never surrenders what it promises. In response to art's diligent attention to human striving, Houellebecq writes, for example: "They don't really amount to much, anyway, human relationships."

Absurd claims like this one possess: 1) the legitimacy of grammar, and 2) a perspective from which they're true. Set against the backdrop of the universe—13 billion years and 300 billion galaxies—it's not unreasonable to conclude that life is brief and meaningless, that we're scattered dust; our love affairs, betrayals, and suicides are sighs lost in the wind of time.

But frankly, that perspective doesn't amount to much, itself. It's an inhuman (by which I mean irrelevant) perspective. From the perspective of a human being—Houellebecq knows this—human relationships in fact amount to everything.

By proclaiming life's banality, Houellebecq's art—like Ecclesiastes—has the peculiar capacity to remind us that what we mean to each other is a protean invention, subject to accident, folly, and the evanescence of ideas. Life's inventedness is what makes it unconquerable. We feel the distance between his cynicism and our optimism, his indifference and our devotedness, and that distance is poignant. Really no word better summarizes the effect of Houellebecq's writing: poignancy.

~

The fruit tree outside my window has nearly lost its blossoms. Fallen petals rot on the concrete.

For about two weeks that tree kept me alive, after a fashion. I wouldn't have died—but it required that I lived. In its presence I had no alternative.

Its late-spring greenness has now rendered it more or less invisible.

~

Twice in my life I've seen a dog get hit by a car. The first time, I was six; I was walking to a friend's house in Knoxville, Tennessee, and being followed by our family beagle, Joshua. I kept shouting at Joshua to go home, and he'd lower his head and pretend to go, only to resume following me when I continued walking. After a while I started throwing rocks at him to get him to go home. To escape my rocks he ran into the street, where he was hit—clipped—by an on-rushing car. I took him home—his back leg had been broken—and my dad took him to the vet. I never told my parents that I had caused his injury.

The second time, I was in my late-20s. I was on a bike ride with my brother and his wife's family, and their family dog—I've forgotten its name—was running along with us. We weren't yet far from their home when he dashed in front of a truck. The truck's driver saw him and slammed on his brakes; the dog—a small dog—got caught against one of the truck's front tires, and the tire briefly pushed the dog along the asphalt before mercifully running over it. The dog wasn't immediately killed; but its fur was ripped from its back, exposing most of its ribcage. The dog dragged itself under a car and snarled at anyone that approached. It seemed to be embarrassed by its dying. It declined to look at us. Slowly a pool of blood formed around its paws. After a while it put its head down, and its eyes dimmed and turned off.

~

Embarrassment is the sign of a soul. Anyone incapable of embarrassment is incapable of love.

Michel Houellebecq produces embarrassed art. His novels are embarrassed by their attentiveness, by their stories—by the fact of their existence. Their existence refutes their ostensible nihilism. Houellebecq loves the world, people—the whole mess. If he didn't, he would shut up.

~

Unlike Roberto Bolaño, Houellebecq is romantic about his post-romantic pose. His use of the semi-colon—it's the linchpin of his prose—gives him away. His semi-colon is stylish, and style is always romantic.

~

Houellebecq's male characters, by the end of his novels, always arrive at a cavalier indifference to sex. They're like men for whom peeing has become optional.

~

In Bolaño and Houellebecq, 21st century literature begins where 20th century literature began: with naturalism. Their prose is more clinical, less melodramatic than Norris or Dreiser, but like those writers they are advancing an aesthetic of brutalism; they see anti-heroism as heroism; they see triumph in failure.

~

We are both the map and the territory.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Against Despair

On Monday I read "Africa's Dirty Wars"—an article in the New York Review of Books that managed to convince me that Africa, in the short term, is more or less beyond hope. The article ends with a scream. I set it aside with a sigh.

But then I saw this film today—consider giving it 29 minutes—and it reminded me that it's possible to do something about barbarity; that despair isn't the only response to monumental evil.

(On occasion you might need to remind yourself that ultimately the film isn't about the beauty of its hero.)


KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Update: This video has now gone viral, which makes its presence here redundant. I guess I'll leave it up as an historical artifact.

Monday, March 5, 2012

The Sky Actually Is Falling

Find here a succinct summary of why the global warming skeptics are wrong.

Update: Find here a response to the article by some of the scientists it eviscerates, and a response to their response.

Alive

Adele's live cover of Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love" on her Royal Albert Hall album, which she dedicates to Amy Winehouse, reminds me why it's a good time to be alive—to have this art: the art that belongs to our time.

Here she performs the song on Letterman:

Monday, February 27, 2012

NYRB Winter Sale

The New York Review of Books has produced an extraordinary collection of books since 1999, when it opened for business. For most of the last decade it's been my press of first resort.

So good news: NYRB is presently holding a Winter Sale, making available a wide selection of books at 50% off.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Love's Work, by Gillian Rose

"Matured by love, practised in the grief of its interminable exercise, I find myself back at the beginning."
Sadly, Gillian Rose was not at the beginning but at the end: she died of brain cancer shortly after writing those words. With or without that knowledge, the reader experiences her voice as nobly heartbroken: life, she tells us, is permeated with sadness; to live is to lose, in the end, everything.

But despair not! Rose was, after all, a working philosopher, and philosophy, she writes, offers real consolation in the face of life's losses, not unlike, in its hopefulness, the lips of one's beloved. Among her ambitions in Love's Work is to offer a scathing defense of philosophy against postmodernism, which, she says, "renounces the modern commitment to reason." The postmodernist impulse to blame reason for the Holocaust, for example, demonstrates an inability "to perceive the difference between thought and being, thought and action." That inability represents a real threat to the future of civilization:
[Postmodernists] proceed as if to terminate philosophy is to dissolve the difficulty of acknowledging conflict and of staking oneself within it. To destroy philosophy, to abolish or to supersede critical, self-conscious reason, would leave us resourceless to know the difference between fantasy and actuality, to discern the distortion between ideas and their realisation. It would prevent the process of learning, the corrigibility of experience. The ill-will towards philosophy misunderstands the authority of reason, which is not the mirror of the dogma of superstition, but risk. 
And it's there, at risk, that Rose's link between philosophy and love becomes clear. Both thinking and loving are risks; we undertake them with no guarantee of success, and often at great personal cost. But in the end they are what is worth doing. They represent the fundamental work of life.

So Love's Work as an elegy to labor. With equal fervor it celebrates the labor of the mind and the labor of the body. In love, these two undertakings coalesce. To love is to think with the body, to caress with the mind. This extraordinary book, which alternates between treatise, polemic, memoir, and eulogy, is an act of love, concerning itself with what most matters in life and nothing else.