I've begun to take action towards moving to Turkey. The plan being to live and teach in Istanbul from roughly August of this year until July of the next. Following that, I will make another attempt to gain entry into MFA programs. The overall failure of the graduate school try stunned me for a a few weeks. It's easy to think that this lack of validation is the best measure thus far of my own abilities. But this is art. It doesn't work that way. It can only be done with no fear of consequences or failure, with an irrational belief that your work is good and that it will only improve. And to write with the discipline and stimulus I need, new surroundings and daily demands are a must.
But the decision to go to Turkey is motivated by many things. I am dissatisfied in my job and all the possible jobs related to it. I have purposely stumbled onto a time in my life with virtually no responsibilities. I have always wanted to spend enough time in a foreign land to be a citizen of it, to meet its people as an equal, to learn the language, to not merely observe but participate in its culture, to break the narrow views placed on me at birth. I am in love with the world. It's so tremendously big and so much different than you'll come to understand it through television. So beautiful that you can only look at it in small pieces. For all my nihilism and misanthropy and doomsaying, I love this place and hope to soak up as much of it as I can. And do my best to interpret this experience in words as I go. I've dedicated myself to narrative. And this isn't simply reading and writing, narratives are the things we live too. The story of people on this place and at this time, the story of your life starting at the moment you saw first light to the moment you see last. And just thinking of these billions of stories as they interweave and conflict and gyrate and come together and split apart, thinking of that hulking place just outside my window, a great human novel in constant motion that can never and should never be written . . .it's enough to keep me awake at night.
Also. The mookfish is coming out, for the foreseeable future. We will have a time.
The question comes to me now that it's real . . .what relation does the artist have to their parents? Some of us have bohemian 'rents that once tried their own hand in some art or at the very least hold up creativity as something with which to measure other things by. And some parents likely view it as an empty pursuit by which no access to the good life or happiness is granted. My parents are nowhere in this continuum. They barely listen to music, my mother reading glorified romance novels, my father reading nothing at all. They do not watch films, but popcorn movies with whatever actors they prefer. The production of even these instances of art are so mysterious to them that the thing they watch may as well have been dropped from the sky. And yet, I'm trying to include them as much as I can in my circumstances re: graduate school. And somewhere in these last few months it occurred to them that I am writing. A lot. And they wanted to see something. So . . .after they bugged me over the course of several of our weekly phone calls, I relented and decided to send them something. I thought over a half-dozen short stories that may be suitable. This one discarded for all the drugs done in it, that one put aside because the protagonist is too close to my father, a third overlooked because it would simply be too damn weird for them to ever look at me the same. And I settled on this one as it seemed the most neutral. And even it has vomit, and alcoholism, and swearing, and a man's pubic hair catching fire. They called me today after having read it, and said: "thanks', 'it looks good', 'are all those countries real countries? or did you come up with some of them?'. Now, I don't expect them to provide incisive critique. But I don't know how to talk to them about writing, it is so far removed from their world that I might as well discuss my love for some forgotten tribal rite. And yet I came from them. Somehow.
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A fellow student that I've had workshop classes with has been published in a contest wherein this work also competed. She has not been published before and in almost all cases I would be happy for her success despite my slim envy. But the nature of her work, and the small success it has been granted, disturbs me. See, in my inability to get things published or gain acceptance into most of the schools to which I've applied, I've suggested as one of my disadvantages the content of my stories. I've identified a continuity in the themes and characters and plot and perspective and aesthetic of the work that gains traction. And it is not what I do. I've told people that what is looked at as good in 2009 is work that is memoirish, sentimental, banal, depicting love as it has existed on television lo these many years. Work that when it strays from reality, wanders into magical realism and thus calms the chaos and confusion of living in the modern world. Magical realism is a cop-out, a boiling down, a superstitious response to those things not understood. And my fellow student's work is all of these things. I won't go further into detail about the work itself, but when I read it in class I recall thinking and noting that "this, this in front of me, is the opposite of what I want to write". Further, it is done badly. Sloppily, with cliched details, mortified progresion, warmed-over nostalgia.
And, as counterpoint, what I try to write is what I think needs to be done, in this moment, in narrative. A sort of NeoNaturalism in that the characters, like us, are bound to lives they cannot control by forces of nature. And that the predominate element of that nature, in a postsurvivalist world, is the environment created by our own culture. And further, that the environment does not have absolute control over our fate, but that for our constraints to be surpassed we must be willing to accept the greatest risks. Death and its metaphors are the gamble one must tolerate to become something other than circuitry exposed to the weather. And I try to document this alienating environment we occupy, present characters with circumstances at the furthest edge of confusion and possibility and reconciliation. It is not science fiction, but the leveraging of the unusual to suggest how very little sense we can make of this nature that shapes us, and that we fight against, and that we try, riddled with anxiety and doubt, to understand. In this milieu there is no room for hokey magic to resolve complications, there is only the paucity of explanation and the unsettling discomfort of feeling alone and perturbed when everyone else seems calm and aligned. It may not be the materials that everyone chooses, but they are honest ones and they come from a life I have led that has been fraught with uncertainty and nervousness and frustration and ceaseless inquiry to little avail but temporary contentment. I do not traffic in memoirs, because no person can truly understand another and to fictionalize such an account is as if to say that the writer has feared to live the life they depict, and wishes for some other reality that is not true. So. Fuck your memoirs, unless they be your real life. And fuck sentimentality unless you've loved and lost it and accepted it and your scars will not heal. I have some that still raise pink and shiny from my skin. And fuck magic, go to religion if you wish the world to make sense.
(quote: The Judge, video: Black Moth Super Rainbow)
I'm submitting a proposal to the Modern Language Association for their annual conference in Philadelphia. The topic is the "Evolutionary Origins of Narrative". This subject represents the confluence of much of the extracurricular study I have done over the last two years, and upon suggestion by a professor multiple thesii immediately jumped to mind. Basically, evolutionary psychologists, philosophers of art, and kids with nothing better to do, are trying to understand what function art serves from an evolutionary perspective. If it is in fact a functional adaptation, in what way does it aid reproduction? There are generally about 5 theories that I am familiar with. Steven Pinker suggests that art has no evolutionary function, that it is a mere byproduct of complex brains. Others suggest that art is simply the effort of individuals to become appealing in the eyes of the opposite sex. Others proclaim that art is a survival strategy that benefits either social cohesion or mental organization. A fifth theory suggests that art began as a means by which to share attention. None of these is quite complex and holistic enough for me. None of them answer the fundamental four questions required to identify an adaptive mechanism (or in Pinker's case, show how art does not meet some of these requirements). The four questions for adaptation, as formulated by Niko Tinbergen are: 'What benefit does the adaptation provide for reproduction?', 'What is the mechanism by which this adaptation occurs?', 'What is the origin of the adaptation in human evolutionary history?', 'When does the adaptation develop in the individual human?'. Any theory for the evolutionary origins of narrative or art will be forced to handle these four questions. My proposal is to synthesize a new theory focusing on narrative specifically. Essentially, a sort-of anthropology or genealogy of the "Narrative Mechanism" in human behavior. In evolutionary psychology, every definable behavioral phenomenon comes from a 'mechanism', a system of actions, feedback, requirements, problematization strategies, perspective, and subconscious analysis. My paper would, more or less, begin to define the Narrative behavioral Mechanism. Essentially, I believe that narrative as a meme in cultural evolution have worked so well because they are aligned with the way that we sort information already. All of our myths are in narrative form, and the most efficient way to convey some idea is generally to have an accompanying narrative (anecdotes work better than statistics, even when they are misleading). It is a result of our biological understanding of time: we think everything begins, develops, climaxes, and dies. The world around us does this through the seasons, our bodies do this, most phenomenon that we observe seem to behave along the archetypal pattern of narrative. This way of thinking met up with the burgeoning survival value of symbolic language. As we became more complex philosophically, eventually narrative was used as a means of approaching existential anguish (an affliction that may be the true separation of man from beasts). And now in the bourgeois world we occupy, where survival is a given, the role of narrative has been displaced. The art and it's artist have been alienated from their homeland, the Pleistocene. Anyway, much more on this later . . ..
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I've developed a new hobby. I put a draft of something I've been working on in my jacket and walk the mile downtown and deposit myself on the worst lit chair in all of 10th Street Tavern, and I drink whiskey and make red marks on the paper until something adequate becomes something good. Then after a couple hours, in the dark, I walk back home. I take the most circuitious route possible, with something disjointed and beautiful on the headphones. Look for fences to climb, buildings to surmount, etc. The other night I . . .well, I'll keep that moment to myself. It was wonderful to just be cold in the dark alone. Seeing the life that we avoid with our houses and streetlights and televisions and cars.
(quote: Faulkner, video: Chimpanzee Problem Solving")
The woman that lives next door to me sometimes goes out on her back porch and screams. She screams at god, her children who do nothing for her, some entity that strikes me as The Man but she probably understands as misfortune. Today I was in the backyard enjoying the sunset, sitting on a cooler, having a smoke and a beer, reading. I heard her sliding door creak open, watched through the slats of our privacy fence as she sat down on her step. Heard her beer crack open. And for a moment we just drank together. I read a page of my book. And then she starts to cry. A stifled cry like a war widow. And then the vibrato of sob pooled, where the cry starts to make a whining sound. And then she says something. Then says it louder. Then yells "Why doesn't it work?". The question Camus would have asked had he been an Engineer. And then she scolded her grown gone children, they never help. And then she demanded of god to know why he did this to her. And then she cried, the way we don't think people cry; with that 'huh-uh .. uh-oh" getting loud in the black trees and pink darkening sky. Her shouts lasted longer than my tolerance. I went back inside. Finished my beer. Cracked the window open so I could just hear her. That inconsolable grief. I don't know what a person is to do with that.
Reclusive as the days get longer. Habits developed in winter now wincing at the sun, now demanding some middling interval. Punctuation that let's me breathe. Dwindling social interaction somehow makes every one of them more valuable. But it's only half on purpose, the other part the circumstances of grinding. I've got these two classes that demand a novel of reading and two days of writing per week. And my every opinion in them is contrarian, apparently.
I've been rejected by the University of Pittsburgh. I think that if I get rejected ubiquitous, I'm going to take the survival money I've socked away for grad school and move back east. Not Michigan, but closer; somewhere I don't know anyone. Get a job there working part-time (as much to meet new people as anything. Something physically demanding.) and write. Take two years working on the thing that I plan on doing as my thesis. The Ex Nihilo Creative Writing Program. Sign up now.
My brother leaves Boise in three days. He's packed up his belongings, prepped his dog, cleaned his house and found some young rabble to inhabit it, cast a line for job prospects, and is now counting the hours before he roars off into the mountains to be with the woman he loves. I came here because he was here, or at least that's why I tried to. He's my patron saint, the patience and even hand that laid the groundwork for me to be however rebellious and uncouth I have been. The wise and kind older brother that we should all have, and I cannot say I would have tolerated me as well as he has. He has never failed with an encouraging word, an incisive observation, a veteran bit of experience. And our relationship has grown more complicated in the City of Trees. We shared a dwelling for over two years, and relearned each other's idiosyncracies, talked until late at night in that complex of sentence-finishing and head-nodding that only siblings and spouses can conjure. We went to Africa together, to Amsterdam, to San Francisco. He watched me cry a hundred times for someone a million miles away and said exactly what I needed to hear always. He tried to understand my writing, and even when he didn't ruminated about how important it was that I kept going. And though we carry out our lives differently, and I was often selfish and closed off, I respect him as much as any man I know. He's struggling, like all of us, but he has never been afraid to do the hard thing when it was right. He's the man my father could have been, and one whose respect I will work my entire life to maintain. Thanks, bro. It's been good. I love you kid, and what's mine is yours. For life.
Plans gradually into fruition. Like there is no action but waiting. And all these kilobytes committed to text have simply served to keep me distracted, to keep the nausea down about what may or may not happen six months hence. Anxiety evolves, and the things that made me tremble even two years ago now get swallowed like daily medicine. Money, loneliness, validation, insomnia, stagnation. . .gulp. The next half-decade sits in smoky still-images in my brain: surrounded by spectres, high as a kite, ox-like and obstinate, laughing in the dim morning in my cold bed. I tried my hand at this conventional thing: worked in my office, and put on brown leather shoes, and made the phone calls I had to, and contributed to my retirement fund, and clinked drinks with mid-life crisis casualties. And I didn't fail out, I wasn't asked to leave, and I have burned no bridges, try as I might. The televised 'merikuhn dream just isn't my gig. Even now I can feel the mercury setting in my bones, like concrete turning me into a statue here; groaning and medicating with the other statues in our still, still garden. But I've found a way out, and not a frantic leap from windows, but an almost sanctioned way to stave off my demons and wake up enthusiastic. Almost counting days now . . .
The other night a friend of my brother's, this guy I've known for about a decade now but have never really connected with, asked me about the whole grad school thing. When I told him I was going so that I could write a novel, he asked: "what do you write? I mean, murder-mysteries, or science fiction, or something?" And I didn't know how to respond. What do I write? So I laid out the plans for my novel, the gist, the theme, the setting, one or two of the characters. The thing is, talking to people that don't read much, I have a hard time explaining what my overall project is. I feel like the follower of some unkempt religion, like some excuse needs to be made. But in the glow of my computer, it all makes absolute sense. Finish two more short-stories that are stewing in my skull and turn everything legible into a self-published collection. Draft the text of my graphic novel about time-traveling drug-dealers and immortality cults. Pound out my novel about loneliness and amnesia and Detroit and identity. Congeal my Antarctic dreams into some kind of bleak narrative. The thing is, I have never felt this in charge of my creative impulse. I know exactly what I'm doing, even if part of the plan requires me to give up all conscious control.
On New Year's Eve the police force of the United States showed their true colors. In Oakland, Houston, N'awlins police used excessive force on minorities that were ostensibly guilty of nothing. Two of them are dead. One has been shot in the liver. Oakland rioted. Police cars were burned, windows were smashed, the local police force was overwhelmed. And the blogosphere chided the rioters for destroying property. See, when it's in another country people say "why doesn't 'merikuh react that way!?", but when they see fire in the streets, and people bleeding from massive headwounds they call it senseless violence. And sure, the violence itself may be regrettable. We shouldn't destroy things like children when we get frustrated. But the police are leaving the city of Oakland no choice. The bullies that chose to join the police force, in particular those that fire on noncriminals and the pigs that protect them, have abdicated their claim to righteousness. The police force exists to protect and serve their community. Police themselves are not above the law. But this sanctioned and tax-funded gang behaves as though they are subject to some separate set of laws. Cops that kill people undeserving are not hauled off to jail, they are asked to resign pending investigation. The bureaucracy protects them. If Oscar Grant, or You, had killed someone in the course of work, you would not be given the luxury of resigning. You would rot in jail. You would scrape together whatever meagre savings you could to hire the greasiest lawyer in the phonebook and you would pray. A police officer is not subject to that set of circumstances in our great nation. And if that is the case, if they claim to be beyond the reach of our common agreement of laws, our response to them must also be outside of the law. The authoritarians set up this cycle of action and response, they have required from us violent retribution. The riots serve to prove the maxim that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (thx JFK). I wish it could be some other way.
I have been having dreams about Antarctica. A frozen landscape that does not blink or punctuate its days. Dreams of ice and mud and wind and alien creatures, alien feelings. It is close to another planet as one could hope to find on Earth and still breathe oxygen. The people drawn to it are of a scattered tribe that seek hardship, purity, proof of their existence, expansion of their narrow and tawdry experience. I've found a way to go there. After I complete my MFA (btw, all apps in. Waiting on responses. Smoking, drinking too much, crossing fingers, making claims, feeling superhumanly confident one moment and childishly uncertain the next), I plan to submit a grant proposal to the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. This will require of me a longish work that is set in the Antarctic and deals with the landscape and the lives of those who live there. The largest boon is that I get to live rent free on the most insane patch of the world I could imagine for several months, and get some choice in what my activities would be while there. Luckily, I have a story idea already . . over the next couple years I can let it gestate and be ready to crank out a massive anti-historiographic metafiction about loneliness, near-death experiences, fossils, and the end-times. All of this, for me, is a perfect opportunity and suggests a possible lifestyle. This grant is only one of many, many funding opportunities for writers. Ideally, I would bounce from one to the next. thank you taxpayers.
I just finished tweaking a short-story. I find that my stories fall into approximately 4 categories: painful and clear, irreal, pseudo-biographical, and hyper/ludicrous. This story falls into the last. I wrote the first draft, all of it, from a hotel room in Santa Ana, CA last year and only this week got around to editing it for mass consumption. If you get around to reading it, let me know what you think. Also, this story, like all of my work that I like is linked to here and in the sidebar under "short stories".
Civilization is comprised of a network of ideologies. There are religious ideologies, economic ideologies, the ideology of family, the ideology of the military. Each of these is strictly real and material (that is, they manifest in the material world with rituals, institutions, objects, documents, physical inter-relations, etc). There is no escaping ideology without entering a new one. There is an ideology of science and rebellion, of art, of humanism, of philanthropy, of anarchism, of nihilism. You will never be free of ideologies, only incrementally inching into newer and less false ones. Every ideology, beyond being material, is essentially the imaginary relationships of individuals (though this word is now in some ways moot, replace with subjects) to their real conditions of existence. Ideologies emerge, in part, out of long-held misconceptions about the way things are. This misconception becomes an Ideological Apparatus concerned with maintaining its existence and growing arms and legs. And so subtle hierarchies become material discourses on power. Confusion about the universe becomes religion. Misunderstanding of human nature becomes economics. The biological appearance of families becomes the 'nuclear family'. All of these things form a vast, dominant, oppressive force that encourages our conformity, insures our complicity, and convinces us to perpetuate it.
Ok . . .all that thanks to Marx and Althusser. But, I thought this in the stolid quiet of my office at 6am, the world outside my window matte black, if every ideology is based on "imaginary relationships" (even what we think is the truest possible statement is distorted by the limitations of language, even the purest observation is poisoned by our eyes) then certainly, in all ideologies, their will be a day of reckoning. Not only that, but if one patiently observes an ideology in its death throws, he or she will observe what it was about that system that was imaginary, false, a lie. We are currently witnessing a glitch in our economic system. Some think it is simply a setback like the recessions of the 80s or other earlier economic crises. I don't know what the medium-term economic picture might be, and I am certainly no expert. But what I can say, is that in the failures of the current economic arrangement, the lie behind our economic ideology is exposed. Money is not real. It could be, I'm not saying objects have no value and that there is no sound means of acquiring food by providing services. But in America, money is not real. The government pumps numbers into the system, founded on no actual product or material. Banks charge you interest to provide you with electronic numbers that do not exist as anything but imagined agreements. Mortgages are taken out on property, and the debt is sliced into a million pieces like cake. But it is all simply numbers in an electronic system. This is what causes inflation, in all reality. Having more money than value. If things are worth $100 and you divide it 105 ways, you can hardly call each divided unit $1. And yet that is what we do. The moment that we dematerialized money, that we negated raw mathematics, we started the timer on the ultimate failure of the economic ideology.
Likewise, the economic system holds fictitious tenets of human nature. It presumes rationality in all actions. It starts wars and speculates based on the notion that each human unit is identical to the next. It assumes that free markets will flush out the best of the competitive nature deep within each of us and thus actualize us. All of these things are lies. All of them erode the base of the economic system.
I pushed out 10 graduate applications this week. Three 12 hour days of making checklists and sending electronic money and rewriting personal statements and listening to skull-rattling gangsta rap. Sliding that first completed one into the mailbox, I almost heard the click. New human being, new daily bread, new settings on my alarm clock, new skylines, new means of conveyance, new pollution in my lungs, new garbage in my newspaper, new bass in my headphones, new software to write with, new photos to fuck up, new people to alienate and avoid, new dreams at new altitudes, new brands of alcohol. Most importantly: new trade, new 40hours+, new opportunities. The only lesson I can give on this: Remember that what you do for yourself can never be taken from you. Make a plan and hold it glowing in your ribcage like fascists might drag you from your bed pre-dawn. Hold it above everything: carnal desires, food, your health, your happiness, familial obligations, your god, your illnesses and allergies, the law, propriety, comfort, sanity, bills, everything.
(quote: William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust; video: Warren Ellis on writer's block)
I'm writing my personal statement for applying to grad schools. While trying to understand how I should direct a passage of the essay, I listed writers that I feel influenced by (Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Kenzeburo Oe, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Lethem, Warren Ellis, Zola, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Paul Auster, several others). And then, looking over the list, I realized that none of these have been suggested or read in my fiction workshop courses. At least twelve short-stories*5 semesters of workshop=60 short stories and nary an author that I would want to emulate. This is not a knock on them specifically, they're all obviously accomplished and highly skilled at the craft. I just don't think the aesthetic of contemporary lit., as canonized by the academic creative writing machine, is particularly exciting. Dusty, wistful, soft . . .victimized, eviscerated, cliched.
Apparently Dick Cheney has been indicted for profiting from a corrupted system of private prisons. He was invested in a company called Vanguard that operates Federal Detention centers, and it appears they ran it little different than an organized criminal enterprise would. The whole thing sounds rather thin and silly, considering Cheney's remarkable tendency towards 'evil'. And, most likely, Cheney will worm out of any culpability whether he deserves blame or not. What's most unsettling about this scandal to me, is that Cheney is even involved in prisons to this degree. He shouldn't have any involvement with any corporation other than blind trusts operated by financial managers. And yet he is. He makes money from the saddest part of our society, the most overt denigration and dehumanization we have in this country. And, not just Cheney's involvmenet, but that there are private prisons at all. As government functionaries we need to have individuals interested in the goings-on of the prison system. But the notion that there are huge companies making profit from building cinder-block incubators for violence and alienation . . .the idea that there is some conference every year in some shithole casino where the salesmen for Vanguard or Wackenhut are showing the heads of Dept of Corrections glossy pamphlets of people being caged like farm animals . . .How the fuck do these people sleep? We need prisons, yes, but how can a person pour their cup of coffee in the morning thinking how to sustain more human beings on less and less. Make the food shittier, make the cells a little smaller, make the rec yard smaller, look for extraneous luxuries to take away, look for opportunities for prison-labor profit. And then, when the new business plan is all arranged, maybe they punch their grandmother in the neck and piss on their neighbor's mail. Well, as long as they can figure out how to make money on it.
(quote: me; video: clip from Bad Boy Bubby {turn your volume up a bit})
A humanist organization has begun putting advertisements on buses that say something along the lines of: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness's sake". As a phrase I find none of that disagreeable. I don't believe in god, and I find our culture and progress diluted by those that practice within organized religions. I believe that religion is a trait adapted for survival in an environment we no longer inhabit, a vestige of a different time, and irrelevant paradigm that refuses to get the fuck out of the way. But this advertisement nonsense is just that. The struggle of ideas is not won with bus advertisements and silly mottos. This campaign will do nothing but embarrass most atheists and further alienate believers. Consider this: if you are an atheist what is the single most personally annoying attribute of religion (we are not talking here about its tendency towards violence and hatred, the stupefying effect it has on children, the reprehensible behavior it is allowed to excuse)? I think we can all agree that it is evangelism. We do not like the word 'god' on our money, we do not want religion forced on us in television or the public square, we do not want the moral compass of the church taking bearings in our halls of justice. Many atheists say that they don't have any problem with people practicing their 'faith' as long as they keep it mostly to themselves. The tacit agreement behind that is that we keep our understanding mostly to ourselves. And yet, here we are. Evangelizing. Giving the fools an argument for what's wrong with us. Occupying, however inaccurate the term, the 'militant' moniker bestowed by Bill O'Reilly and Bill Donohue and Rush Limbaugh. Religion will end. In a few generations it will finally be shrugged off like an ill-fitting coat. That is not to say that we can't push on it with science, or air it out in the appropriate interpersonal conversation, or write about it on our blogs, or create irreligous art. We simply need to hold the same respect for everyone else that we demand they give us. I don't know what the hell this group was thinking.
It all starts to become real when you get your test scores back and your portfolio is 95% done and your letters of recommendation are piling up in their letterhead envelopes and Wayne State has sent most of your transcripts and your boss tells you "there is no point in doing x, you'll be gone in a year". And if I were to gut a deer and read its steaming entrails they would tell me my best chances for acceptance are the University of Oregon, Ohio State, Brooklyn College, and my second alma mater. Next summer, I'm plotting a month-long Retirement Party that will find me hitchhiking and bussing from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco, California. I will sleep on the beach in Coos Bay, in the salted trees of Siuslaw National Park, in the view of Stinson beach, in the parking lot of Mt. Tamalpais State Park. I want to demarcate my departure, dig a deep slash in it that can never be recrossed. I want to think of nothing save how I will eat and where I am going for 30 consecutive nights. There will be only so many instances in a life that allow for such digressions. Each one must be swallowed whole.
(Quote: MF DOOM, Video: Keith O. Special Comment on Prop. 8)
I've come to realize that my political perspective boils down to a theory of what government has authority to do, and where that authority comes from. The government is our agreement on how to operate, a system developed to collectively protect and promote one another's livelihood. As a consequence we have police and fire and health services and educational systems, and as economic cooperation we have roads and business regulations. I don't believe that any government has the authority to impose rules on anything that doesn't substantially effect the agreement. The government cannot tell you you cannot smoke marijuana, or marry someone of your own sex. It also cannot arbitrarily delegate huge sums of your money through deliberate and secretive strategization. It cannot tell you to protect yourself from anything. It cannot tell you where and when to work. It cannot make you change your personality. It cannot meet nonviolence with violence. We need to rethink what it is that our government does in the sphere of our life. Every government that distends our agreement, or degrades our humanity . . .is a usurper and a tyrant. I think of these things in light of two very recent legal anomalies. Pot took one small step towards legalization, and we will watch as the Federalies attempt to crack down on one more complex of nooks and crannies. This slow progress will make the war on drugs more ridiculous with each DEA budget, and more absurd with each $100 ticket that replaces jail time. Proposition 8, in CA, is a different breed. The most "liberal" state in the union rescinded its decision to allow gay marriage. Homosexuals are less free than the rest of us, even in what people think of as our freest state. This 'rule', outside of the bounds of our agreement, is a lie, an impossibility. The materialization of an ideology based to its core on lies and self-deception and pitiful hatred. We do not have the permission, the authority, to decide another's life like this. We do not have the right to take away that which we cannot give. A supporter of Proposition 8 is a fascist and a repulsive artifact of a past that I want nothing to do with.
The past two weeks I've been swimming in a head cold. I sweat in my sleep, I wake up with a broken nose, food is unappetizing. This gets in the way of everything.
I had the best workshop of my short career. This story excited positive comments from the full round of cynics. There is an old man in the class that seemed bewildered and frustrated about it, he spent 5 minutes articulating some dissatisfaction that no one else could follow. Though of course, that happens every week. I plan on putting the story in the above link in my graduate school application package. I'd appreciate any commentary. It is not of the MFA aesthetic, and that may be what I like about it best.
(quote: PJ Harvey, video: The Mindscape of Alan Moore)
I'm in Pocatello, Idaho tonight. Another fervid drive out of my town and into the nether regions of the west. And I drove into the rising sun at 7am completely by myself, half asleep at 90 miles an hour listening to the news on the radio devolve into static. A broadcast pure and unadulterated, no spin or bias or ulterior motives; simply the amplified sound of silence. And then I half-assed a training session in the middle of nowhere, bored yokels resenting the armload of software I'm intended to bring down to them like some cybernetic Prometheus. I drink their weak coffee, I eat their shrink-wrapped donuts, I sweat and go cotton-mouthed for lack of sleep. And then I drive nearly a hundred miles and stop at Idaho's Largest Army Surplus store. Several stolid acres of cast-off woolen garments, wrenches the size of a femur, empty .50 caliber shells, watch caps and socks that carry the scratch of eczema in their every fiber. And then to Pocatello where there's a hotel room on the hill waiting for me. I spoil the afternoon poking my head into used bookstores, and eating at a deli watching the college girls come and go from their classes, drinking coffee and watching youtube videos while the guy next to me talks loudly about Fantasy Football, and I can't will the scenester chick in the striped sweater to turn around and look at me. At first glance, speeding by on the freeway, Pocatello seems generic; the staple arrangement of gas stations, hotels, department stores, chain restaurants. All replicas of towns all over the country as though a helicopter deploys them in one drop as guided by socio-political strategy from on high. But then I go way downtown for dinner . . .fifteen miles or more off the freeway, and the old trainyard, and the leftover hotels sided with faded advertisements for products that no longer exist, the long-bearded shaman throwing cardboard boxes from the loading dock of the Idaho Foodbank into a scuffed garbage bin, the three familiar kids smoking cloves on the stoop of a church that has seen a century. All of it so beautiful, the only thing I can do is sit on a patio and drink a local-brew stout and try to make time stand still.
I took the GRE and scored well enough to keep me on any number of admissions lists. I halfway expected this, but the simple process makes graduate school seem all the more inevitable. I'll be moving from Idaho just in time to miss it all horribly. This is how it goes. And, what I've learned since leaving home is that you can never truly go back. How we feel in a place is a tentative, fragile, temporal melange of experience that depends on so much . . . but most of all our presence. It changes as soon as you leave, as you track pieces of it with you like mud and leave a wake of dead leaves and swirling plastic bags behind you. It all settles again looking nothing like it once did. All the detritus rearranged.
I tend to avoid overt politicization on this thing. Unlike in my real-life where, as you may know, I have virulent, angry opinions on politics. But I have to say: we MUST elect Barack Obama. Not because he will heal all wounds or instantly eradicate the world's problems. Not because his motives are pure and perfectly aligned with our ideals. Not because he wants to regulate that which needs to be regulated and institute a new economic justice. Not because he is black, or the most experienced candidate we could hope for. We need to vote for him because he is better than us. He is, most likely, a better human being overall then most of the people that will read this and certainly a better human being than the person writing it. He is intelligent, (com)passionate, steadfast, and most of all fearless. I can't imagine the fall-out if he loses or, worst of all, the the whole thing is stolen right from under him.
As part of the grad school application process, I'm currently studying for the GRE. I find myself using bigger words in conversation. Perhaps only my Marxists and Anarchists will see it, but the discourse, the subtext of the GRE . .the actual words they use to compose questions are oppressive and corroborate the dominant ideology. For example: "Fueds tend to arise in societies that lack centralized government, when public justice is difficult to enforce, private recourse is more brutal." and "However, the devious act of physically pilfering something from a record store is hardly present in the action of pressing a keyboard button from the repose of one's home." and an emphasis on the value of Organic Solidarity as described by Durkheim, and a dozen other subtle reinforcements of pragmatic American thought. Also, in the process of preparing for graduate school applications, I'm struggling to figure out what to submit. I like the things I've written most recently, but there is an inkling that these are not the ideal candidates in form or point or style. They are not MFA stories. I have written those too . . .but in the tail-end of this summer I've changed my game. I don't know which is best to present . . .
Everything is becoming very real. The latent precipitating and becoming the standard-bearer, the ache in my bones. Peeling off skin before it's ready, the musculature and capillaries raw and fresh to the air. I can smell it in my sleep. This move was another remove from what I remember. And now I'm a thousand miles, and one more reversal and negation from home. Nowhere is home. Everywhere is home.
I felt a twinge of fear. Good, resource-holding fear like some diluted perversion of what ancestors felt as the seasons changed. The financial crisis, coupled with lay-offs and money-troubles of those around me, engendered one lonely second where I reconsidered the wisdom of this whole MFA deal. And then radical reversion . . .security is a weakness, comfort is for hospice . . .sometimes we have to go into the cold with no jacket.
(video: Cornell West on Real Time, quote: Franz Kafka)
Reading Anarchist political thought and finding nothing there that truly transcends anything. Thus far it leans towards socialism. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" like a spit in the face to the whole manner in which we've survived through this epic. Granted that was written at a time when less was known about the human mind; but we see in all tendrils of evolutionary psychology and game theory and economics and yes even history that this strategy fails. It creates an artificial environment that breeds an undue quantity of cheaters. It is bound to cast itself into vicious tumult that only a fascist can briefly put right. It channels only the most idealistic, and thus the eventually weakest, tendency of human nature. Yes we could feel empathy for some small tribe that churns out a product. But could those we trade with ever be trusted? Casting your lot with those you know, even if admittedly outside your genetic bonfire, is possible and happens frequently. But sweating out everything for far-off strangers on a planet teeming with those you don't know, people you may have no issue with but yet are subject to different cultural pressures than you . . .how can it honestly be thought that people en masse will toil for the livelihood of people they cannot influence? I have more to say on this, but more reading to do first.
Giddy like xmas eve of '93 for grad school. And it's one year, and one year does not feel like the long yawn it once did. I met with a former professor of mine for sage advice; I will not leave any advantage to rivals or the wind. He's convinced me that I will be successful, that I will end up some place. That he reads applications himself and would vote my work into his institution. Nothing firm there to pin the label "success" on, but I've never worked this hard for something that belonged purely to me. And to know the trench I dig is deep and straight, it makes the shovel move faster.
I like the rabble. I like noise and dirt and spiders and waking up so groggy that one's entire life seems punctuated by a fever-dream that you cannot remember. I like to argue and fight and point my finger at god and government for the weirdness they have wreaked, and I like to scream out that they hold no rule over my life. I'll compromise my free will to science, but no god and no master will take it from me. I like to stagger into work on no sleep with the stink of misdeeds still leeching from my pores. I like to rip a hole in the middle of my yuppie day and bleed from it and ache from it for no other reason but that my body will endure. I like to craft rites of passage via bricolage and name my impulses like dogs in heat. I like working long into the night, save one in five when I run the streets and burn through brain cells and am liable to convert your son or daughter to my cult. It's all completely untenable, and that's the point: so is being alive.
