"Let me repeat: none of this has any real meaning"

(quote: Camus; video: WTF arrest at G20 in Pittsburgh)


In some ways the current political climate has stoked an interesting conversation. Interesting as sort of a DFWesque parody of political dialogue. The invocation of the word 'Socialism' has been ringing out, and I think even the most media-paralyzed would have to ponder over that term for a moment. In many cases aligning it with evil intent or totalitarianism or whathaveyou, but only peripherally aware of what the ideas actually mean. Likewise, the presumed antipodes of 'Capitalism' is going through a similar semi-conscious examination. Michael Moore's new film is called "Capitalism: A Love Story" and he claims that he'll show the evils of our economic system, many of the teabaggers' sandwich boards praise capitalism in the same triumvirate as Glenn Beck and Jesus, even my old man has started to question whether profit margins are a blameless motivation. But, of course, the whole argument is more heat than light. We're not processing the information in anything approaching a comprehensive manner. The war of ideas is based on emotional anecdotes and carefully presented numbers. The pragmatic compromise that we're currently going for is ignored and we reduce ourselves to Socialists and Capitalists. Just as so many of ua have reduced ourselves to Democrats or Republicans, heathens or teetotallers , godless scum or good Christians.


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I gave my brother The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus for his birthday. And reading back through some of it while I waited for the alst possible day to mail it, I thought again about this idea of Absurdism that has become second-nature to me since I first read it. See, Absurdism is an acceptance of the inadequacy of existence to explain itself. It places man at the nexus of a well-nigh unanswerable proposition: Is the universe illegible? Or is there nothing written there? Or is it dream stuff, fluid and mutable and activated only by consciousness. To be an Absurdist is to be a small-a anarchist. To retain something of a well-read scoff at all authoritative gestures, all illustrations of utopia, all comprehensive definition. To recognize the value of charity as an appeasement to our alienated conscience with an understanding that perhaps nothing can really be helped To live with the notion that mankind can not be improved, because each effort to make us less violent or more compassionate or more aware is to simultaneously tame us, make us more prone to external controls, compromise our integrity and validity and identity. To confront the Absurd is to hold on to contradictory ideas and live in a state of anxious dissonance. To both love and hate, to be a heroic misanthrope, a free-wheeling tyrant, a humble sage, a clear-headed psychonaut, a free-loading pillar of sciety, an anal retenteive bodhisattva. It is to accept nothing as statuesque face and embrace life as an asymptotic approach to a wider and more truuthful self-delusion.

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I originally planned to have my book in shape by Thanksgiving. And I was right on track. I've decided to postpone it for a month and attempt to have all of my ts crossed by Xmas. This a result of deciding to replace 1/12th of the book with another piece that's only in it's second or third revision, a realization of the problematic nature of typesetting/design, a spurious perfectionism that has infected me like a childhood disease I was never inoculated for. No worries though. I'm working hard, and it will see the light of day in due time.

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"You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in."

(quote: Cormac McCarthy Child of God, video: The Good Consumer)

Read an entire book today lethargic and hung-over from the usual Friday night. Perpetual second guessing and trying to remember my diction and exuberance from those last few hours sitting on a northend back-stoop and carrying on like I, in fact, know something about things. The book I read (the one quoted here) is by one of my favorite writers, and I'm guessing that it is probably a masterful work; however, 3 solid months of painstakingly editing my own corpus has rendered me incapable of simply enjoying a text. Maybe I've lost that capacity for good. And here is how it goes: I cringe at overwrought lines, I doubt plausibility even amongst stark irrealism, I re-encounter my editor's insightful and oft-cited remark: 'I know what you're trying to say, but for a moment it seems like something else has happened'. No narrative seems tightly woven enough for me, or appropriately displaced, or line-by-line subtle and elegant enough. This happened reading Middlesex last week as well, when I saw District 9 a week prior, when I read Tony Doerr's 'Shell Collector' stories the week before that. I suppose this tendency to find fault was always there (I'm a writer after all, and a competitive mfer. A subconscious aversion to calling something 'good' because of what it means for my own work), but the intensity of it now suggests a rewiring of my brain. To write is to be a critic, to be a critic (it seems) may to be insufferably cynical.


I used to have dreams about the world ending. Or a romanticized and savage survival in the aftermath. Despite the anxiety this suggests, it seemed to put me at ease. The world appears as a continuous downward tumble into chaos even as it becomes more ordered and surveyed. Imagining it at its terminus feels like a sudden, jerking return to something resembling the way we truly want to live. But those dreams have stopped. Replaced with scenarios in the margins, living off the land or on the outskirts of a very real and living society. Guilty of small crimes-in-name-only. Clean slate with no worries about anything except the next few minutes. Gazing off at the horizon while admitting things to people I never would in real life. I don't put stock in dreams as having predictive power, and I think that if there are symbols written in them that they are obvious and require no more decoding than a television show. But there is something to them. They give pattern to the subconscious procession that's happening always, and shifts in their motifs may very well indicate fundamental changes in the way I'm seeing things and living them while awake.


I haven't been posting in this as much in the last couple weeks. Wrote about half-a-dozen things that still reside in draft form somewhere in the cloud. But some of these thoughts are hard to put out there: a post about how I'm no longer going to vote in national elections/on national issues, a summary of a surreal night in Denver that I can't seem to get right, a broad attack on Obama's lecture to schoolchildren. . .The more time that goes on, the more I feel my perspective is at odds with just about everything. And the more productive it seems to simply let them gestate before offering them up to the randomness of the internet. I may be beginning to think that discussing these things, whether you call them philosophy or use some other signifier, may be better in person. So the conversation can flow in an irrational, heat-seeking manner. So the idea can be tested immediately by the incisive and the lubricated.

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