"I think they're lying to you"

(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)


I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.

This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.


Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.

»»  read more

"Of course you see me . . .there's cameras everywhere"

(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)

For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else


I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.

--

Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.

»»  read more

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

(quote: Cormac McCarthy, video: Sasquatch! 2009 [some friends of mine appear])


You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.


The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.



I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.

»»  read more

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

(quote: Bukowski, video: Alice)


The other day I had this glorious bike wreck. I'd spent all night downtown buying rounds, in transit via my good friend's 'garbage' bike. And I did shots and paid covers and danced for three minutes at least, remembering my quote of the week. And then on my lonely pedal back I was so drunk I lost it. One of these landscaping rocks we use in the west to remind the citydwellers where they be at. At full tilt with that moment in my head where you think 'oh shit' and the camera zooms in and out like Adam West Batman is changing scenes. And I flew through the air maybe eight feet and landed on a damp pile of dirt like god's own drunk. The bike was destroyed, unridable, and I hiked it up on my unfazed shoulders dialing drunk friends on my phone. In the long morning next's hangover there was nothing left to do about it but laugh. And I laughed walking through the cemetery rain.

I haven't been posting as many blogs lately because I have been writing my joyous brains out And now I understand how much school obstructed the occurrence of real writing. Even when I tried to write there was always the huzz of anxiety . . .that some book needed to be read, some paper written. And now it's gone and I wake up earlier than you even want to hear and write for an hour and then bicycle to work and keep as dissociated as I can for 8 hours and come home and write another two or three. Or four. And then the weekend.

The weekend. The best thing the Man ever kicked down to us. There's no such thing as the American Dream, but whatever withered intention of it remains lives between Friday at 5pm and Sunday at midnight. And maybe if they let us work four days a week instead of five without risking bankruptcy by chest cold, the yeomen and -women could all have jobs even with less money to scrape by with. That extra day to read something, to work in your shop, to record a song, to make sure the TV is raising your kid alright.

Happiness comes and goes. And when you're up like that you might be best enjoying the sunshine and knocking it off with the questions. We're all addled now living in this alien camp and when it doesn't suit us we call it depression or ADD. And though no man on the street can even talk sense about the world leaving us behind, we think if our children get bored they must be lunatics, and if we don't want to get out of bed on some loveless, jobless morning we must be out of our goddamned minds. No one gets a say on the place they're born into, and I'm done judging this one except to say that I don't think my brain works the way that Web 2.0, or the Democratic Party, or marketing research says that it should. We're supposed to feel things, as hard as we try to contain all of that mess to television. And so when you do feel something, you're not alone. We're all hiding it, because that's what we think we're supposed to do. Unless you're happy, ecstatically happy, then you just have to be comfortable with people thinking you're high.

»»  read more

"We are alive in amazing times"

(quote: Mos Def, video: Umi Says)


I haven't posted in a minute. The last three weeks this significant transition from whatever my life was about then to whatever it's about now. I graduated, wore a cap and gown and sat twiddling thumbs while a thousand people I don't know got hype and shook hands with University presidents and listened as Bethine Church recounted her crazy life. My 'rents were here for it, and my brother, and I partied it up a bit. . . but it was anticlimactic. The first time you go through college there is this recognition that you've kept pace with the ideal, that you've invested in your future or somesuch and like a 13-year old Jewish boy you are now some variant of an adult. But when you've got your second undergraduate degree for something that will not, under any circumstances, help you make more money, secure your finances, or move up the corporate ladder. . .well, it's difficult for your UAW dad to really understand your motives. But they did their best, and whatever the case I'm now fully qualified to work at Barnes & Noble, correct your grammar, and drop obscure quotes in conversation. There is some satisfaction in that I did at least one thing I said I was going to. . . even if grad school plans did not work out, even if I am now not going to Turkey, or anywhere else for that matter. Whatever slack I've allowed to build in my stilted attempt at adventure I did show up to class, I did write the papers, and I did read the texts. I leave Boise State with a 3.92, a stack of solid references, 15-20 short stories written, perhaps 100 books read, dozens of friends made, and more questions than answers. That last one is the important one I think, I have really learned no tidbit that I will be able to retain for the rest of my life. But I know where to look now, I know who else has asked these questions, I know methods of inquiry. Whatever the case, my booknerd credentials are now impeccable and I admit I'm marginally satisfied.

Almost immediately after graduation ish ended, and my parents went back to Michigan, I started preparing for the Sasquatch! Music Festival at the Gorge. Me and something like 10 or 11 friends of mine packed up vehicles and spent four nights out in god's own country seeing amazing live acts, killing brain cells, losing sleep, getting sun burns, not drinking enough water, and laughing to crack our ribs. This was perhaps the most fun I've had since moving to Boise. Thanks to my friends for making room for me in the caravan. This was the first year that I didn't spend at least a minute moping about missing DEMF. The dance tent, molly, Mos Def, Girl Talk, and everyone in Rows 26-30 made up for it. Good times kids, well worth it. I'd document it more, but I don't know that I could relate the epiphany I had lying there on that hillside listening to whoeveritwas, witnessing the immensity of the earth and realizing that this is the happiness with which we must be satisfied. The thinking person will never be happy at all times, but our best chance to grasp it occasionally is to pay attention, to enjoy good company, to let the beauty of things sometimes wash over you as you lay prostrate and humble. I don't know if anyone saw it, but I figured out a big artistic puzzle that has been subcutaneous and throbbing now for months. And laying there sweating in a crowd of thousands, a genuine, involuntary smile came over my face. And for something like thirty seconds I was invincible and immemorial and at peace.

Today commenced a very different order of intellectual discipline for me. I'm used to half-assing my way through schoolwork with very highly-ordered deadlines and intimidating quantities of uselessness to slog through in order to find the shreds of value deep in that swamp. But now I'm free from all of that, and the point is to write as much (and here I should emphasis the importance of quality over quantity AND emphasize that I believe that quality can only come with quantity. The craft is in the revision) as I possibly can between now and this time next year. Or, scratch that, between now and when I finally succumb to cirrhosis. Whatever the case, I've now established some pretty solid guidelines for myself and today was a test run on a reasonable amount of work for a day off. In an hour or two I'm going to go to bed. . .and I'll fall asleep immediately because today I worked my ass off. Six to seven hours on the keyboard, or hunched over a dirty manuscript with a pen, or with my nose in a book . . .if only I could do this everyday.

»»  read more

Been selfish once or twice, I had to learn how to sacrifice

(quote: Cee-Lo Green, video: Persistence Hunt of the Male Kudu)





I just had my last classroom experience for the foreseeable future. I grumbled through it, bearing the last fluttering whimsies of my professor, I scribbled a haiku in the margins of my notes. I bent my ear for hints toward the final exam I'm writing over the next week. When it was over I walked out of the room without a word to anyone. Not wanting anything to disturb that last lonely hustle home. It's been a long dig. Eight years of school, upward of sixty classes passed, perhaps 2,000 actual attendances, two degrees as different from each other as one can get. Whatever paid my rent, this has been my job for as long as my job has mattered. And there's some perspective now: the Engineering gig was an obvious bid for money. Harried by parents and the environment I grew up in, I wanted financial independence. And I sought it. The English gig was more desperate. I thought I needed the institution to articulate the insights I've been wrestling with for years. I thought being forced to read, I would be forced to read what I needed to. I thought that studying literature was the same as writing it. And bygod I wanted to write it. And between my workshops where I plied the craft as intently as I could muster, I came across interesting ideas. I learned a lot about where to look, the people that were asking the same questions I was too mealy-mouthed to ask myself, what words can mean. But it felt like a distraction in many ways. Studying in vectors that I only needed parts of, stealing time from my own wanderings. The thing I learned about myself in college is that I am an autodidact. A disproportionate amount of the knowledge I have that genuinely interests me has been self-taught. The influences on my writing are essentially all writers that I found on my own. And sitting in that class today, realizing as people gushed about how much they liked William Dean Howells, all I thought about was my plan for the next year. The research I'm ecstatic about, the big writing project that grows more solid every day, the half dozen other small projects I will finally have time to see through. I sighed, a big long sigh while the bubble-sheets came around to review our course, So glad it's over. Almost as glad as I am that I did it.

+
I've been reading interviews in The Paris Review the last few days. Norman Mailer, Kerouac, Burgess, Nabokov (who is kind of a dick it turns out), Huxley, etc etc. These may be the best writer interviews I've ever read. Long enough to matter, incisive and productive in getting the writers to talk about the process. They show revised manuscript pages so you can see how the 'genius' writer hacks away at his work. The writers talk about how they work, how many hours a day, what time of day, by what method marks are made on paper, what stimulants or relaxants they prefer, their thoughts on the canon. All of this tragically uninteresting to nonwriters I should think. But I could read this stuff all day. So interesting to see little tiny things that I also do in their description of writing. Not stylistically or actually within the work, I mean habits and superstitions and compulsions. When they talk it seems familiar. Someone buy me a subscription, pretty please?


+
Anyone who's been in my apartment knows I live in squalor more or less. One raggedy couch, a cushion on the floor where I work on a wobbly desk, typing on the missing keys of a battered MacBook, looking through cracks in the screen. A lot of that is going to remain, but I'm about to enter a period of strict discipline. The goal to write 20-30 hours a week until I buy a plane ticket or have an aneurysm. So, I'm finally capitulating to comfort: Reorganizing furniture, buying a massive dinosaur of a keyboard (an IBM M Type for supreme clackiness, whiskey-resistance, self-defense), plugging in a huge new LCD monitor so I can actually see what I'm writing. I'm going to bask in the consumerist endorphins while they last.

»»  read more

"For smart n####s it's hard to do nothing"

(Quote: Wale, Video: Nietszche-3 Metamorpheses)

I made a very heavy decision today. Plan B to graduate school was some sort of international escapade. The Mookfish came out here briefly and I was enchanted with the idea of losing myself out in the world. I wanted, and have wanted, and still do want craziness; seeing things so few from my square have seen; obliterate my language and perspective; believe in all new dogmas for just long enough to understand and discard them; see from many sides this addled machine we've created, the world. But, I've had goals for this year ahead of me, and I've slept over them long lonely nights, and saw them written out on the horizon from the peaks of equatorial volcanos, and wrote them on my whiteboard so long ago they can't be erased. And so . . .I'm staying in Boise. I'm staying in Boise and staying in my contemptuous job, because it is the best arrangement for me to write. Boise is the easiest place for me to conduct the research I need to really dig into my novel. It is now just scattered pages, missing some glowing factoid in the center that I can only erect by immersing myself in data for awhile. And Boise is the easiest place for me to finalize my short story collection and prepare for self-publication. And it is the easiest way for me to start a vigorous submission campaign to various journals and outlets. It is the easiest place for all of these things because it requires no energy from me. A move means up to two months lost time in preparation and unpacking and troubadouring and settling. And whatever I do I must work . . .here I can make a substantial amount of money with the monastic life I live and will only enforce more stringently. And that is part 2 of the new plan. Working part-time. THe absolute minimum required of me to recieve benefits, which works out to one fewer day of work each week. I will reapply to grad school, and this extended period of work will allow me to be unemployed for the entirety of next summer. This will be the least amount of time responsible to school or work that I have had since I was 15 years old.

So . . .this isn't a decision that I am intoxicated with. But I feel free now. The decision made. The course set. And all of it, finally, arranged to maximize my time at the keyboard.

I posted the above video because its logic has been long interred in my subconscious. A conversation with my brother recently resurrected it, and in the hours since its been swirling. Reading Nietszche at an age where it could do more damage than drugs, I read these words and vaguely understood them. And then marched out into life thinking my short servitude was already over. Raging out at the mores lion-hearted. But, Nietsztche's point is not to lash out and destroy what's been built around you. Not until you are ready at least. First is the long apprenticeship with burden in the desert. The camel phase. The willingness to be oppressed by whatever systems and theses are in place. And only in that conditioning, that battering load, do you really become strong enough to carve out your own space. To destroy so that you can truly create. My ego had me convinced that I had put up with enough, that I was in a position to start making demands. I realize now that is not the case. I have no qualms with further suffering.

»»  read more

"create and complete"

(quote: Mark Borchardt video: Intro to American Movie)


Received the last, surprising rejection from Boise State and now will definitely not be attending graduate school in the fall. Still sort of reeling from all that. The absurdity of being "so close and yet so far", that weird exchange of e-mails, getting the news amidst a data entry marathon that had me looking for the appropriate excel tab to paste my disappointment into. There was no real plan for this. And now there are options to be weighed, an examination of priorities, a re-evaluation of what I require to be comfortable. And there are certainly things that can happen with a little will, ranging from fatherly advice to naked recklessness. But when I'm trying to sleep the only thing that seems important is that I make more time for writing. Make the most time for writing. Finals season has me all manic and dramatic and shivery, but in the coming weeks I need to figure out what of many options is most conducive to me writing this big project I've just started to chip away on.

I got a year older the other day. The birthday sort of indistinct from the rest of the week. Long day of work, studying, running errands, going to sleep tired and waking up the next morning the same. I used to have anxiety about getting older. Feeling at 16 or 20 that I was enjoying life as it was, and getting older could only ruin it. And I still get anxious over wasted moments, amplified at landmarks such as birthdays. But I like getting older, mostly. Every day I'm getting closer to myself, getting perspective on all those things I've gone through. Feeling more experienced and capable. Feeling more accomplished and attuned. Feeling a touch more patient and kind. Really starting to see people for who they are, perpetually shrugging of the categories I was trained to think in. Experiencing ever more art in music and film and narrative and design. Evolving in what I see out there in the world, almost giggling when I read something I wrote a long time ago. Or getting shivers when I read the line next to it. The last ten years, if nothing else, have wrought a scattered corpus of words. All stacked up there on my shelves. The bulk of my meagre sentimentalities.
On that note, something I wrote to myself five years ago today: "Go ahead and list for me the dozen reasons you're disgruntled, and start with the things you can change . . ." And something from a year later: "Rilke says that in order to be a writer you must first decide or uncover is you 'must' be a writer. Would you just as soon die as permanently discontinue writing?" . . . kids, ha.



So I don't pay attention to the news anymore, and every time I turn on the radio I hear nothing but how the economy is collapsing, and how we'll all be crushed by some tumbling spire. I just want to note: you'll be ok. I'm not saying you'll be happy or comfortable or things will be easy. That's never the case. But you will be alright. And for people in my age group . . . this is the sort of experience we need. Every great generation has its struggle, the thing that gives its people their wisdom, the thing that makes us draw new lines and say 'never again', the thing that helps us understand ourselves and inspires the great works of art. I'm still pessimistic. I still think we have a long way to go, and I still think in a hundred years we might be doomed. But let's approach it with some equanimity, some reserve, some appreciation, and a willingness to change. To revert if that is what's necessary. To give up things. To want new things.

»»  read more