"The time for your labor has been granted"

(quote: Jorge Luis Borges, Video: Mike Tyson - Beyond the Glory [I suggest watching the full hour])

I've developed a fascination with Iron Mike Tyson. I recall that, as a child, I never saw a complete fight but rather the occasional highlight reel of his fist dissociating the skullstuff of various other men that seemed nearly as big and intimidating as him. He was something of a mythological figure, a punch so powerful that it could be used as a unit of measurement. And of course I was always peripherally aware of his craziness. Watching his interviews and documentaries about him, though, a more complex picture emerges and I can't help but think of him as anecdote for how alienating and strange our world has become. Mike Tyson was, in fact, a brutal and violent individual. Yet that's what we wanted from him. Like all of our celebrities who cross a certain threshold of recognition, we enjoyed watching him fall. But consider what Mike Tyson might have been had he been alive a thousand years ago. While a failure at being a complete human being, Tyson marked an apex of human ability. In the physical realm, the man is/was simply unfuckwithable. His ability to fight was one aspect of this, but the greatest contributor was how his mind works. In physical conflict he brought all of his emotion to bear. And in the lead-up to these bouts he worked as hard as any person at any pursuit. He could have been a king, or at least a celebrated warrior. He is a man perfectly designed for battle. And say what you will about violence, it has been a constant throughout human history. Those that are capable of it in its highest form have always had an upperhand, and Tyson was capable of humiliating even individuals of this echelon. But there were no rewards for him, because this isn't 500 BC. And in the modern era, even a man that could hold his ground against a legion of enemies can be taken down by collective greed. Mike Tyson became the notorious felon he did because his tremendous abilities (and the mindset that MUST accompany it) are ill-adapted to this crazy world we've constructed. So we gave him way too much money when he was a kid, and those interested in his marketability surrounded him with women and drugs and the most exotic of luxuries. And those he put his trust in ultimately bent his skill for their own sinister ends. Mike Tyson is a monster that we created, in many ways. A tragic, absurd hero who, despite his ferocity, could not overcome himself and never recognized the wolves at the door.

--

It has been six months since I've been out of school. In that time I've spent nearly 600 hours writing, editing, reading for craft, outlining, brainstorming, staying up until the wee hours to perfect every word. And there are times when I'm exhausted, worn out on whatever the week's project is, frustrated, lonely. . . but the fact remains that I've improved by an order of magnitude. From a fumbling idiot to a stony-eyed amateur. So much further to go.

--

When you were a child, what did you expect? How did you think it would feel to be 20-something? To wait for 30? Did you always presume the grown-ups knew some secret you didn't? Or did you, at some point, realize that everyone was as confused and inexperienced as you? Did you assume that you would fall in love easily and for the long-run? Did you suppose that there would be lonely days? Did you recognize how much bullshit you'd have to slog through to enjoy even a few minutes of your day? How did you measure success and at what point did it become important? Where did all of these habits come from? What was the most exciting prospect for the future that you eventually had to cast aside?

»»  read more

If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time.

(quote: Arthur Jolly; video: If You're Going to Try from Bukowski's Factotum[NSFW])

November is NaNoWriMO. And as I traffic in words, and talk to people about it, and gravitate to the literary side of the Internet I've been hearing a great deal. People commenting on their idea, on what their schedule will be like, on 'Tips for Motivation'. And if a person wants to give it a whirl, more power to them. But one will never learn to write this way. Writing fiction is not a correspondence course, it is not a discrete series of steps that can be marched through like rehab or learning a piece of software. Coming in dry to a solid month of writing will turn up nothing but a lot of poor writing. There may be pages of brilliance, sure, but the project makes the solemn mistake of isolating writing from one's life. To be any good at this at all, you need to read a tremendous amount. You need to write even more. You need to watch the world around you with the singular purpose of seeking meaning in every little twitch and flitter. You have to go all the way.

I don't mean that one mustn't give it an exploratory shot. Writing is a beautiful, transformative experience. NaNoWriMO is simply not the way to go about it. It cheapens the novel into a Web 2.0, self-esteem generation marketing campaign. It perpetuates the notion that any jackass can pound out a novel; that it is not a hard-learned art like music or painting. But worst of all, it's useless for learning to write. Unless, of course, it's immediately followed by National Edit Your Novel Year. Dabblers should instead write a short story, or even a vignette. Edit it five times. Show it to a friend. Edit it another five times. Leave it alone for awhile as you read incessantly. Edit it a few more times. Learn, actually, how to turn an idea into a story. Learn what your style is. Learn what makes a character pop, or a line of dialogue fall flat. Learn how to construct a story so that a line of causality and emotion runs through it. Learn how to defamiliarize the world. OR waste a month typing something you'll never look at again, because December isn't assigned to writing. It's the holidays or shopping season or whatever, and January is no good because it's cold. And then there's school, and then spring break, summer, and on and on until NaNoWriMo comes around again. . . Write a bit, by all means. But stay off of bandwagons, they're bereft of ideas anyway.


--

January 1, 2010 is the print date for my short-story collection. Physical copies will be available shortly after that.

»»  read more

"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on."

(quote: Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle, video: Shit Just Got Real)

According to Philip Roth, in 25 years the novel will dwindle to a cult artifact. The novel is faced with a technological deficit in competition with film and readily consumable media. The number he gives is arbitrary, but one could argue that the novel is already dusty. But, I don't buy that our cultural evolution will be so clear-headed as to plow headlong into technological dissociation. What if, at some point in a coming generation there is a backlash. Corporate, electronic media finally coalesces into one gyrating, self-referential advertisement. A sobering reduction in disposable income, and a multitude of childhoods shaped by near-poverty, and there's fertile ground for resentment of anything handed down from on high. A recognition of the consumption cycle encouraged by everything you own with a screen. And so maybe, for a second, it will be cool to read again. To pick up a novel written by some starving rascal who refuses to sell you something.

--

Whenever I hear Prozac I think of Sylvia Plath, and ADD Kerouac. Think of what Neal Cassady's teachers must have said in parent-teacher conference. Or what Kafka's father thought about his sullen, serious boy. I worry that mental illness, the vaguer forms of it not outright schizophrenia or psychosis, is a net cast too wide. We've deemed too many quirks obstinate distractions. And in the quantitative progression of medicine we've outlined a de facto understanding of 'normal'. The biggest influence on this taxonomy has been how well-adjusted a particular psyche is. How well a person can get through their day, focus on their job, appear seamlessly productive. But the environment we're to be adjusted to is not one we are born to understand. I expect children to be reckless and imaginative and flailing about. And when they grow up I'm not surprised they sometimes feel empty dragging themselves through the monotone. Or have anxiety attacks standing in line for groceries. Or weep for their long-gone spirituality when Disney animates a lovable predator.

--

I sat outside for a long time today and listened to the leaves skitter across the concrete, the hush of defoliating limbs in the wind.

»»  read more

"Had the fangs of Genghis Khan, had the heart of Gunga Dinn"

(quote: Aesop Rock , video: Tinariwen)

Started the MFA application process again. Time-consuming and tedious and detail-oriented--just like the gruntwork of editing, so I don't even leave my chair. Some different schools this time: UofNew Mexico, Washington University (St. Louis), Louisiana State, among others. Figurative pushpins in the map, and now that the years move disturbingly fast the whole thing seems moments away. Makes my restless blood itch, wakes up the travel bug that I keep sleepy with an occasional furtive plane out of town. But now a trip to Istanbul may be in the works. An entire raucous team from Detroit currently plans on touching down there sometime next May, burning a swath from the Blue Mosque to the old Soviet Bloc. And with school that fall, I'll have an entire summer to fritter away as I please. I'm going to sleep under some goddamn stars.

--


So the LHC may be trying to destroy itself from the future. Or God may be interfering with our attempts to peel back the curtains. Or scientists from the future may be reaching back through the Higgs Boson to prevent us from doing some foolish. Or it could be that there are things that cannot be measured no matter what. The path to comprehension destroyed by understanding. Numerous future attempts will prove the notion wrong or eerily hint at it ad infinitum.

--


To find something, buy a second version of it and wait for them to ferret each other out. To hide something, put it in the last place you looked. To never find it again, put it into something that moves and try to track it with your mind as it zig-zags across town and down rivers and arches over wastelands in the belly of planes. Disappears somewhere out there in the regurgitation before you ever see it again. To leave something for a loved one, conceal in seed pods and plant along the road you don't yet walk. To give to the dead, make a million copies of something theirs and burn the original (to an enemy, the opposite).

»»  read more

"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.


--

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.

--

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.

»»  read more

"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.

»»  read more

"You are brave, son, and I'm proud of you. But life is easier for cowards"

[quote: William Vollmann ; video: Bukowski's The Man With the Beautiful Eyes]

I'm getting used to these departures. Either I leave or they leave, and the map gradually becomes scattered pushpins, and circuitous routes of waiting debauchery and thrift-store couches across this makeshift homeland. Our generation, more than any other, is poised to make the wind our home.

My good friend Dale is in New York City now, going to school to be one of our finest journalists. I try to forget that it was nearly my next stop on this pilgrimage. That if I'd done things slightly different, the two us would be, right now, drunk on some nocturnal rooftop making promises at the wedge of moon we can make out between skyscrapers. Carving out some niche in the lurching mythology of that city fantastic. I suppose I simply have a different desert, a disparate mirage teasing me through the skips and the trudge.

I learned things from young Eisinger. I learned secrets about this city I now inhabit; I learned the value of art, and how you can make it the sole aegis of your life; I learned that the world belongs to those with a tolerance for risk; I learned that naivete is simply a lack of awareness and it can be remedied a thousand ways; I learned that in our weakness is where we hide what is vulnerable and beautiful in us; I learned that vision has no time for the world; I learned the stupidity of half-measures; relearned the wisdom of excess. I remembered that, like Kerouac, the only ones for me are the mad ones. And again my tribe is populated by those that might do anything, those that rebel by celebrating, by snickering at the controls. And I learned things about writing, Dale being perhaps the single most versed individual of my work, its strongest advocate and its most incisive critic. Every piece I cobble together has some fragment of him in it, and I daresay it always will.

Those still in the city of trees lament him leaving, to a point. Dale owned this place, as much as he wanted sometimes not to. But he's got something pretty major going on, and how could we possibly expect him to sit still? But he'll be missed: through him I met so many of the people that I now consider friends here and I had virtually all of the balls-out, cackling nights I've had in Boise. I'll miss occasionally waking up on his couch, I'll miss narrowly escaping intervention by the authorities, and flying around town on our bikes, the unpredictability and intellectual rigor of our conversations, I'll miss the various capers I probably shouldn't mention. Good times, bro. Hope to see you before long.

»»  read more

"A ram chased my friend in a dream"

(quote: Detroit graffitio, video: Tobacco ft. Aesop Rock - Dirt)

Tried to keep some tabs on the gamut over the last week. Utterly failed: overwhelmed. That initial flinch at seeing Michigan more scarred than last time, more self-possessed, more chaotic. My parents hunkered down waiting for the wave of violence and despair promised by the local news. Northern Michigan gradually abandoning like the eventual crash is some slow gangrene. Hiking out to the pristine dunecoast of Lake Michigan, like some metaphoric backdrop for a scene in which sand represents the discomfort of freedom. The year's shiniest day picked as though from a hat. Nothing but laughing and drinking and talking and building fires and tromping through the woods for days. I missed You this year, you should come for the next one.

A day of rest after slap-happy driving home on virtually no sleep, a sweaty mosquito-harried hike with our trash and our fuzziness. Breakfast in a diner decorated like a commercial for Dwight Eisenhower. Michigan construction barrels in every nook and cranny, slow-poke retirees in their pick-ups for miles. Back in the city, a glimpse of a community garden flourishing within earshot of 8 Mile.

The next day meeting up with one of the people I'd hoped would make New Detroitland (a surprise early return from the jungles of Bolivia) filling out the entire roster of the Commonwealth house from way back when. Driving crosstown to wander through the Packard Plant; maybe 14 city-blocks of obsolescence. In two hours covering almost none of it. So much history, but you walk it best as some kind of sculpture. A billion cubic feet. Materials: rust-rotted machinery, leaden glass in splintering frames, coxial cable festooned like vines, trucks teetering in fourth floor windows, concrete shafts gangly with broken elevators, solariums knee-deep in a generation's trash, a cot in the middle of floor soiled with whatever and decorated with fresh flower petals, patient pillars waiting and waiting, wood gone to dirt with dandelions unfurling, tires and boats and bicycles and cinderblocks and toys. And on and on and on. Trying to describe it in 500 words like putting Infinite Jest on the head of a pin.

The trip ending like it always ends when you go home, in one way or another. A little push in this direction, a little pull backwards in that one, farewell embraces befitting, a little Gonzo exit, and enough sleep and memories built up in my head to put me to sleep for the rest of the day. Waking up at a burrito table six hours later, pulling through my gambles by the skin of my teeth, thinking all of it may have been a dream. I miss all of my Detroit people, the ones I saw and the ones I didn't get to. When you leave, these relationships are supposed to diminish; but mine seem to have only condensed themselves into smaller and denser packages.

»»  read more