I should go back to my old Missionary's Journal to look up his name: I'm pretty sure it was Paul—not Pablo but actually Paul, the only child of two people who were old enough, I thought then, to be his grandparents. He played the guitar all the time, usually alone in his room, he said; but on Christmas Day 1986, which my companion and I spent with him and his family, he sat at the dining room table after a late lunch and played for us and sang.
After he was done, we went outside and lit off bottle rockets. He and my companion and I were basically kids, remember, so it should come as no surprise that we thought it was great to place the stems of the bottle rockets in a pile of wet sand and aim them at passing cars. The Argentinian bottle rockets seemed to me stronger than any I'd used in California, but that impression might of been a by-product of my general delight at setting off fireworks for Christmas.
That night, before leaving, having, in my bag, nothing else of use, I gave Paul my copy—a cassette tape—of Paul Simon's Graceland. I wasn't supposed to have it (The Missionary Handbook authorized nothing but classical music or anything by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) but I thought it was a sensational album and believed he'd like it.
I wasn't wrong. A couple of months later he told me that he'd listened to it so much that he'd broken the tape. To prove it, he brought out his guitar and sang "Graceland," the title track, which we both agreed was as good as any song by the Beatles, even though neither he nor I were parents, of course, and I was not yet divorced, so the truth of the song must have seemed to us as distant (yet indisputable) as the the truth of Jesus' love had felt, when we'd read of it together before lighting the bottle rockets, in a short passage from the Gospel of John.
Showing posts with label Eric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eric. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Friday, December 26, 2014
Provo
Once, when I was very young — likely 23 — I went to a Mormon dance at a municipal park in Provo, Utah, and there watched a girl dance with a sensuality I hadn’t seen before and have not seen since, not in the flamenco bars of Madrid or Cádiz or in the strip clubs of North Beach — not even, it occurs to me, at the senior proms I have chaperoned for my two sons, where the girls were as playful and beautiful as they will ever be but, I suspect, too burdened by the extravagance of their dresses and by their awareness of themselves as spectacles to release themselves to sensuality, which a poet must once have called, perhaps redundantly, the “perilous sublime."
Uncharacteristically, after suffering for a couple of hours at the sight of her dancing, which made me ache and possibly broke my heart in some kind of permanent fashion, I managed to ask her if she would go with me for an ice cream sundae. She agreed. I remember nothing about our date, however, except that at one point she commented on how I enunciated the word really. “You have a funny way of saying it,” she said. “I do?” I asked. “The way you say the e,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it that way."
I never saw her again.
Uncharacteristically, after suffering for a couple of hours at the sight of her dancing, which made me ache and possibly broke my heart in some kind of permanent fashion, I managed to ask her if she would go with me for an ice cream sundae. She agreed. I remember nothing about our date, however, except that at one point she commented on how I enunciated the word really. “You have a funny way of saying it,” she said. “I do?” I asked. “The way you say the e,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it that way."
I never saw her again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 HolbergI 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.
Friday, August 24, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Huck Finn, C'est Moi!
Yesterday my father said: "Sometimes I feel like what I'm going through isn't even my problem—like it's a problem that doesn't actually belong to me. But suddenly it is my problem, and now I've got to deal with it. Even though I don't know where it really came from, or who caused it. But it's got to be fixed, and I guess I'm the one who has to fix it."
Immediately I ran with the idea—I've been running with it since—because it reflects how I often feel about my own life; also, because it reflects my experience as a reader and the connection between literary characters and the world. Huck Finn's problems don't interest us because they're his problems but because he embodies a moment in time—post-Civil War America—and through him we contemplate the process by which we, as a nation, kind of grew up. The problems he negotiates weren't his but ours. It fell to him to try to sort them out, in his life.
So narrating myself into existence I become aware that my problems aren't so much mine but the world's, right now. And, as with Huck, it falls to me to live them out, with everyone else.
Part of the appeal of this idea, I suppose, is that it permits me to transfer the responsibility for the difficulties of my life to the larger world. But that falls in line, for the most part, with my politics and with my understanding of the relationship between myself and society.
Because let's be real: I don't exist. The we is the real I.
Frightening? Not really. Far less frightening than the deluded narcissism and, inevitably, the crushing loneliness of individualism.
Immediately I ran with the idea—I've been running with it since—because it reflects how I often feel about my own life; also, because it reflects my experience as a reader and the connection between literary characters and the world. Huck Finn's problems don't interest us because they're his problems but because he embodies a moment in time—post-Civil War America—and through him we contemplate the process by which we, as a nation, kind of grew up. The problems he negotiates weren't his but ours. It fell to him to try to sort them out, in his life.
So narrating myself into existence I become aware that my problems aren't so much mine but the world's, right now. And, as with Huck, it falls to me to live them out, with everyone else.
Part of the appeal of this idea, I suppose, is that it permits me to transfer the responsibility for the difficulties of my life to the larger world. But that falls in line, for the most part, with my politics and with my understanding of the relationship between myself and society.
Because let's be real: I don't exist. The we is the real I.
Frightening? Not really. Far less frightening than the deluded narcissism and, inevitably, the crushing loneliness of individualism.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
MVP
My sister, Mckenzie, has been named the 4A High School Volleyball MVP of the State of Utah.
I concede that her achievement represents an advance for the family over my own Most-Improved Award at the St. Mary's College Basketball Camp when I was in third grade.
I concede that her achievement represents an advance for the family over my own Most-Improved Award at the St. Mary's College Basketball Camp when I was in third grade.
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.
~
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?
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Virtues of Embarrassment
People forget that I want to disappoint. — Gabriel OrozcoI 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.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)