Wednesday, September 24, 2008

"In vacant places, we will build with new bricks"


(video: Paul Newman [RIP] in Cool Hand Luke; quote: T.S. Eliot)

Great stories end and are punctuated by death or departure. And, too, I think our lives are shaped by how we leave and how we die, as much as they are on how we arrive and are born. For the narrative of your live to be of any value it must be fragmented and broken upon hardships, ensconced and mutated by love, stretched thin and cultivated by your work, and fortified and weaponized by your willingness to allow it to change. I have asked for no easy things in life, and despite my fortune I've brooked no accolades undeserving, swiped no credit under false pretenses, assembled no houses of cards that I did not intend to leave to the inevitable wind. Like the myths of Oceania I've always felt my heritage, one I scrapped together from books and hallucinogens and frustration, was to move continually. Make land, and terraform and plant things and watch seasons change, and then disembark. From one island to the next; absorbing, seeing, taking, leaving, until the waters are untraversable and I have to choose sitting still or dying.

All this year I've been on course for one short-story draft a month. I've made it to October, perfectly on course even with a half-dozen things that were discarded on page 8 and mid-month. But now, I need two polished stones from the wreckage so I can mail it to a dozen schools around the country and cross fingers. So it's edit mode for a few weeks, redlining shit I wrote a year ago before I was who I am. As a writer everything that I did not write within the last 10 minutes feels amateur, inexperienced, naive. But the more I read things, and pick through the 120 pages I've committed as draft over the last year . . .there is this thing like pride glowing in my belly.


Seven hundred billion dollars, like some stultified proof that our money isn't real anyway. And then what does the time it took to earn it mean? In percentages, in appendages, in slack-jawed dawns peeling possessions from their packaging. And who are these people that may take it from you? In namesake, in descendancy, in half-solved puzzling over the taut sky darkening. There is no threshold for success, here. Debates pull teeth like 'existential threat', like war undermines our humanity. No advocating violence, but we've killed since time unreal . . .the philosophical catastrophe is that they've come to think our livelihood is their's.

Everything in flux, all ways. Le the universals splinter, spin me blinking, rattle the rented cage of my dented skull. Let the concrete ache in my sodden bones moan. The scalpel that cut me from the motherly carves out wooden identities and arcs dry lakebeds to rest in while storms gather. Only storms and thoughts gather, people collide and swarm. Water finds home where it is low . . .and I am destined to drown.
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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

"Because it's hard. "


(Video: El-P "Patriotism", Quote: David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech)

David Foster Wallace hung himself the other day. He was not the most unlikely artist to commit suicide, I will admit. And I do not pretend to judge his decision as an individual. I have never believed that suicide is the "cowards way out". He was neither a coward nor a fool, a weakling nor a solipsist. We cannot sit and declaim what he did as a terrible wrong without the impossible empathy of being inside his head. But, goddamnit Mr. Wallace, you cheated ME. You were 46 and one of a handful of writers I actually looked up to and envied for your prowess. For fuck's sake, even your work that I didn't like changed the way I thought about writing. Call me selfish, but Infinite Jest was not enough. You gypped me. I don't know that I can forgive that.


I'm losing the heart for engineering. I was never the most enthusiastic participant in this trade, but I would mostly grin and bear it. I'm in Suburban LA all this week. Drinking whiskey in a generic room, flipping through channels so fast it's just fuzz and scrolling news about Sarah Palin and advertisements for Cialis. Looking out my window and pretending I smoke cigarettes, pondering the mysteries inside the Tustin blimp hangars 100 feet or miles from my plastic rental car. They must house monsters or documents or the control room for the coming nuclear holocaust. During the day I yell to co-workers that I've found access points to coil, moldy cabling and have a foundling's understanding of how these traffic lights work. They all come into work hilariously post-9am and stay paralyzingly late into the eveing: there is no way to get any LAist into or out of work in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, what I cannot say is how little I care. You cannot be truly compensated for hours or days or nights in your laboratory; there is no equation to rightly convert time to money. I wake up sweating in strange sheets to the sound of the icemaker and fret paranoid over the neurons that have been reassigned during the day; poetry congealed into the arrangement of data, my creative eye poisoned for the sake of seeing plan-sets clearly. The woman riding shotgun rants on the ugliness of corporatization during our mid-afternoon Starbucks break. Santa Ana does not understand irony. This time next year, I will be in grad school, or teaching English to children in India, or working an oil derrick on the frozen sea. One of these.


I called three different people tonight to ease the loneliness of being in a place so strangely populated. My mother did not answer, a kid in Detroit did not answer, a girl I obviously do not understand didn't answer. The simple thing to think is that I could not drum up interest. That people saw my name on the LCD and hit ignore, or caught it a moment later and decided against returning. Or perhaps I'm literally stuck here, the Inland Empire its very own planet with a high-smog atmosphere and godawful exchange rate for cash identical to ours. And then the realization that this is how I feel about every place, simply amplified. I'm a contrarian and understand things based on what about them I hate or am alienated by. And so no place feels like home because it never matches the image in my head (something like this, but with free internet and a weed farm in the backyard) and I'm never satisfied in my relationships because I see right through them to the end. But this anxiety mandates some resolution, at least some comfort in the desire to throw things and kill brain cells. And I've hit upon it, so brutally simple I could have surmised it as a child: there is nothing permanent, and you do not want it to be.
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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

"The time that you've been afforded."


(Quote: TVOTR, Video: Nietzsche's Last Days)
[I've got a draft of a story here . . .I really don't like the title.]

Moving in coming months. To a one bedroom or studio that I'll furnish with nothing but my floordesk and bedframe and whiteboard and collage and cat. And my only dishes coffee cups and plates handed down to me from a mythic drugsmuggler. All this coincident with being as close to home in Boise as I ever thought I might. No retirement, but the bachelor herd here will be missed. And moving might mean diluting my socialization time, in these 5 unraveling weeks between semesters I've had too much fun to wake up with a clean conscience. I found the Dionysian riot here, it can't always be stopped by force.

I made a friend the other night, and despite her smiles and laughs she was afflicted with depression. To be treated with chemicals. And I said: "On September 4th, 2008 I am really very happy." And I meant it because in the barrage of streetlights and cigarette smoke and declamations of seizure and embrace I truly was. And ignorant of the rising waters and circling helicopters, I stacked up complications and distractions until the Sunday following anxiety bound my arms and legs and I laid fetal listening to the absurdity of Kool Keith thinking nothing was real and everything mattered. I have no time for this.

Each school of literary theory says something. Even when there was no school but one-man philosophers leading us of out caves, things still stand that were said. And even as thought fractured and its pieces grew spines, Structuralism said things, and Marxism said things and the Romantics said things that we can still discuss until you sober up. But, I've come upon the one that hits me hardest. Literary Darwinism is the use of Evolutionary Psychology ("the application of adaptionist logic to the study of the architecture of the mind"-Leda Cosmides) to further understand texts. The field is nascent and fumbling and promising there glistening in its afterbirth. One example is this: a common theme in literature (and in life) is the tension between "selfish" choices (a life of independence, even rebellion) and feelings of brotherhood and concern for one's community or family. In evolutionary biology, we understand that the individual is a survival machine weaponized to replicate the species selfishly. but behaviorally we see altruism as a foundation of society because it is an effective way to survive (cooperation is genetic technology). Selfishness vs. altruism is an ingrained tension that we struggle with our entire life (conservatism vs. liberalism). It only makes sense that great literature should recreate this anxiety. There are other examples. All similarly revealing. Im writing a paper that will partly analyze Heart of Darkness through the means of this criticism.
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