Books I Read This Year

Books I've read since the jump (just over 6 months now):

The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken:
Seemingly valid approaches, however impossible in implementation, to the concurrent problems of class warfare, corporate greed and environmental exploitation. I tend to be an advocate of big picture approaches, and here Hawken examines the very root of our daily lives. Reading this book, I came to understand that there is a fundamental flaw to the manner in which we conduct business, and to continually ignore it is to hasten our own collapse.


The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
For me, provided tremendous insight on perhaps the most influential figure in black culture. I had been woefully ignorant of his accomplishments, history and lifestyle and found him to be nothing short of inspirational. A true rebel who found out through daunting trials that the revolution starts within. X went from being, essentially, a street thug (albeit a particularly calculating and skilled one) to being perhaps the most disciplined, hardest-working firebrand of America’s past century. One of very few martyrs in our recent history.


The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil:
A great deal of hubris and self-aggrandizement from an individual just shy of deserving it. Illuminated the facts I needed to argue for something I’ve felt for a long time; that we will inevitably merge with our technology. Were you aware that currently there is a complex, evolutionary algorithm at work somewhere in NYC that is monitoring millions of dollars in investments with an amazing track record? This book is full of ponderous updates on the progress of artificial intelligence.



Waiting For the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee:
Obviously influenced by The Great Wall by Franz Kafka, but chilling nonetheless. There is something inherently surreal about a settlement out on the frontier, waiting to be pounced upon by barbarians, or rather waiting to pounce on noble savages in their midst. This book had some extremely powerful moments; stark, painful, reflection on an Absurdist agony.



Dune by Frank Herbert:
I've already talked about this here



The Silent Cry by Kenzuburo Oe:
Not very good at all. I used to really like Oe.


Collapse by Jared Diamond:
This book provides great context and historical background on why civilizations fail. From Easter Island to the Vikings to modern day China. We live beyond our means, simple as that, and as long as we continue to measure things in purely monetary, short-term units we are destined to fail.


The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme:
Hilarious, beats Samuel Beckett at his own game. The story essentially revolves around the transportation of a quasi-dead, partially mechanical godhead across the countryside. He is at once full of rage and lust and innocence and stupidity. He inspires both awe and pity. Fascinatingly written, but occasionally overwrought in its strangeness.


As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:
I have had this book since I was 16 and then found it too difficult to follow. Now, reading it, I see why Faulkner is considered such a great writer. Nimble and funny. He is capable of making one feel exactly how he wants in the mere architecture of a scene. And the way Darl describes things can make you weep at the timbre of the words on the page. Near the end is, I venture to say, the single best "action" scene in all literature.


(BTW, this is my 100th post. Go me!)

»»  read more

"Ars longa, vita brevis"

So this was my final paper for poetry class, an interview with myself:

First question, why bother?
Bother writing, or bother getting up in the morning. I’m not sure the first can be answered without referring to the latter. I can’t say writing poetry was something that I wanted to do up until the last couple years. Even now I tend to cringe saying that word: poetry. I always wrote stories, since I was a little kid, and have always found some sort of pleasure or at least temporary satisfaction in creating characters and situations or adapting the events of my life into something of interest. Poetry really came into its own, in my life, while I was at university studying Civil Engineering. I had written poems previously, as a teenager or whatever, but looking back they are vaguely embarrassing. Things you write at that age, no matter how genuine your intent, sound immature. They sound like they have a philosophical latency that requires another half decade of experience at the very least. At university, I found my time was consumed by mathematics, the application of scientific principles, et cetera. I didn’t have a great deal of free time to construct meaningful fictional stories. Poetry became this sort of release that I could indulge in on the margins of my notes. Five or ten lines, hopefully mirroring some of that efficiency that engineering convinced me was crucial for everything . . . .





So, not being a student of liberal arts until recently, would you consider yourself a sort of “outsider” to the literary world?
Not at all. I suppose my literary education has been a bit unconventional. Public education only really scratches the surface of literary studies. So back in high school, and this continued into my college years, I read everything I could get my hands on. While in class we were spending a half-semester on Beowulf I was reading the Beats, Sartre and Camus, Nietzche, Buddha, Henry Miller, Kafka, Hesse. I didn’t delve into poetry headlong the way I did other works, but I was deeply familiar with Ginsberg and Corso and Kerouac’s poetic works. I also tried to familiarize myself with some of the “classics”, Shakespeare and the like. I think I was very well-read and very deliberate in what I read over those years. I’m still very influenced by the work that I came across in my personal studies.

As far as poetic works, what other individual or movement would you say most influences you?
Poetically, I think I can sort of see of certain influences hold some reign over certain aspects of the poetry I write. For example, though I don’t think that my poetry mirrors Kerouac’s strongly I am an advocate of the sort of spontaneity that he emphasized. I used to try and practice that with fiction as well, but the results were not entirely satisfying. As far as the spiritual or cognitive elements that I am trying to provoke, I must say that I try to do what Kafka did. I think there’s this capacity in surrealism to better explain the real world. Or at least make it substantially more interesting.

More interesting in what way?
Well, the movement of surrealism, no matter what anyone else says, originates from the dreamtime. We’ve attached science and psychology and the crafts of various arts to it, but surrealism would be a non-starter, especially for the audience, if we didn’t all have some familiarity with the logic of dreams. What’s interesting about what Kafka did (and this feat was likewise accomplished by Oe and Barthelme), is that he was able to turn the logic of the dream, elements of the dreamtime, and the stunted architecture of dreams into a sort of universal image of our subconscious. He created a sort of mythological environment that played by the rules of dreams and thus indulged in this sort of secret logic that all of us sort of understand. I want to try and create the architecture of the same sort of mythology through the briefest glimpses.

Forget subject matter for a moment, as far as tone. You don’t seem to be afraid to use rhyming or alliteration, what is the motivation there?
I listened to a lot of hip-hop. Listening to hip-hop made me feel like poetry was still vital and was actually important to our culture. Poetry became something other than self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people. The power of hip-hop comes from several aspects, but to answer this question, listening to Aesop Rock or The Roots I came to understand the effectiveness of beauty in sound. Whatever experience one is trying to transmit to the audience, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a beautiful sound. To some extent the opposite is true. However, I think something that sounds beautiful strung together (and this is related to rhythm and rhyme and alliteration and all these other devices) has a much greater chance of burning a hole in a reader or listener’s mind.


When you say “self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people”, what exactly are you talking about?
I don’t mean to speak ill of the accomplishments of the proponents of this tradition. What I mean is that poetry became important to me when I realized that it could do something. That what is often considered the “best” poetry often, upon closer inspection, falls apart when you try to determine why its actually important. For example, Ezra Pound had wonderful thoughts on poetry and probably on life in general (I find his biography fascinating), and yet his poetry fails to either dance or make me want anything or imprint any experience on me. I don't even care to know why it fails in these things, it simply does. Contrarily, I would submit that I love William Blake. So who knows.


What is the importance of image, in poetry; or where do you think it falls in the priorities of a poem?
Image is crucial, in that in our understanding of how memory works and how emotive impulses are aroused, we have a strong bond to the visual. In photography, an art form that may have very well been dismissed early on, the power is in the image the photog obtains from the world around them. A powerful photography puts us in that instant and yet universalizes the instant; appeals to a common, or somewhat common, sensibility. Imagery in poetry can work in the same way, though because its textual it is perhaps more difficult to convey an image. Thus in poetry, the thrust isn't accuracy or framing or lighting the thrust is in the delicacy of the diction. There are particular words that strike a chord, much like the image of a child in Bangladesh with a bloated belly strikes us. And a poet has to focus on the essence of that image, to somehow convey what that image conveys in a line or two.

How can poetry stay relevant in our culture, in spite of technological advances that might push it to the margins?
As far as duking it out for a place against film or whatever, poetry doesn't need to “fight back”. It will remain relevant, and I would think perhaps increasingly more relevant, in impoverished nations. It will remain married to modern music as well. I think poetry is such a broad thing; when we don't try and convince ourselves that artistic culture falls into these neat little buckets it will remain relevant as long as we have something to say.

»»  read more

" . . .and if I don't respect it enough, fffade away it will"

Someone important to me has made a life-changing decision. Decided to forego potential fortune and legacy and comfort to have communion with her own fatal elements. We all know what we want, we've all known it since our earliest years. We spend our lives trying to convince ourself otherwise.

I spent some time last week with a colusses. A tall Irish surgeon who found the thread in his life and followed it until he finally sat drinking tequila with me and blessing the mountains he finally got to call home. He's saved countless lives in his day, raised a dynamic family who genuinely loves each other, made friends with success. He encourages everything. He encouraged even my timidly laid plan for the next few years with a refill to my Don Julio and a serious request to know what I'm reading in class.

Ideas for stories I have neither time or patience for fill my pockets, and as I wait for files to download or the coffee to brew I pull them out and ponder them. Fish for their remnants in my hastily forgotten dreams. Put opening sentences in my mouth to examine their texture, hold them out again in the light to make sure they're solid enough. I make mental notes of nervous tics and always suggest to my comradrie some alternative ending to this thing we call now.

Once or twice each afternoon a car would drive through the ankle-high water, see the lights of Ciro's, unsubmerged, above them and pull up the incline to take a break. Sometimes these drivers would meeerely get out, visor their eyes to the sun, and look south-west down the road at the water as it stretched out before them. Sometimes they would kill the ignition and walk into the restaurant befuddled.

»»  read more

Poetry Manifesto

I wrote this for class, but I rather like it:
I write things people call poems, first and foremost, out of pure selfish pleasure. And if I didn't know better its likely every line I trailed out would be self-indulgent dreck. Sketches of drug intoxication, or sex, or the time I nearly punched a cop. The impetus, the Neanderthalian urge underneath the artifice and my naive attempts at happiness is the rambling vexation that emerges as I emerge from sleep. I write a lot of things: stories, terse e-mails, technical memorandums that people half read and nod at, invectives toward the government, text messages that mean two or more things. But poetry is how I think in the wee hours bookending my day, and for some squashed 15 minutes throughout when I'm left to my own devices. Often spontaneous, I keep whatever has surprised me and stilled my world for its instant.

And yet the flawed intellectual in me disallows meandering. It scoffs at mere spontaneity spilled out for its own sake. After all the dreams have been distilled, and the swarms of context and image have been wrangled; it all has to mean something. Every time I write a word there's a twinge of pressure and futility. The burden and anonymity of millenia stretched out behind us like entrails from a mortal wound. And yet profundity and enlightenment is no genre, see we've got our Buddhas and our Christs for that. And a poem need not solve world hunger or clothe orphans. It is momentary relief for instinctual anguish, its a lozenge or catalyst with which to understand the simultaneous pain and joy of existence. Poetry is the contradiction of pragmatism and idealism, balanced delicately on the tips of our tongue.

Our language; English, Hindi, the whole mess, utterly fails to explain the unseen 7/10s. It's mere woodblocks of archaic things arranged just so, names for animals and afflictions that hold no weight when unmatched by experience. And poetry is the attempt to convey experience, in the broadest sense. It's an attempt to illuminate the notochord.

This language, kept in tidy, grammar-school boxes, is our Rosetta Stone for the minds of our brethren. Without the placeholders of individual words our meagre understanding of each other would grind to a halt. They are our units of cultural memory, and they have only agricultural as rivals for our most important innovation. They carry us thru life, these words, and yet each one is merely a symbol briefly representing some minuscule component of this ever-changing reality.

But the experience of life demands more than words floating in the ether. Movements of the mind that go unexplained, joyful frustration at the virtually intangible; these things demand new symbols and their complexity requires towering new assemblages of those same grunts and moans we murdered our way out of the caves with. They are all we have.

And just as any Webster entry means some idea or observation, so does Naked Lunch and hip-hop and Zarathustra. Some things in the human experience are so complex, so subtle in their relevance and so difficult to elucidate that we must write Finnegan's Wake, Some require a single sentence with only the most tenuous relationship. Some require us to scream from our rooftops. Poetry, not merely our codec for the submerged, is also our means for communicating the uncommunicable.

»»  read more

Honesty, Hormones, Humanity

Over cold black coffee,
I learned to talk less.
Learned to pace floors in warpath.
And how to pass polygraphs.
A shoe with a thumbtack.

By apathy newscast,
I'm servile as a eunuch,
A tendril of raw wonder,
smashed before I knew it

There is a reasonable debate, in my mind, over the necessity of truth in writing. I am of the belief that, for the sake of the art, any fabrication is acceptable. That is, I never learned to pass a polygraph, however as a metaphor this statement fits some calloused groove of how I've felt about life over the past few years. I've learned to lie for the sake of personal freedom or in defiance of authority. It's a declaration that I find it acceptable to lie to the institutions that loom large over our lives.

My life has been interesting, I don't know if it would inspire good film as of yet; but as a writer I see moments where it might have been more conspicuous, more meaningful. Hypotheticals that may have revealed a greater truth about the microverse we inhabit, possibilities riding the coat-tails of actual events that speak more succintly about what the event really meant. Chronological manipulation that says more about the architecture of my experience than a strict, wholly factual diagram ever could. And think of life, is it merely the events that mattered? Or the what-ifs, the possibilities, the longing for unlikely returns and separations, the way a dream trickled into consciousness until it became the lens you viewed life through. Truth, cold empirical facts, have their value in the sciences, in politics, in the courtroom; and it is here where anything else represents corruption. But in trying to transcribe the caterwauling human experience into a single tome, or a few lines of verse, the "truth" is far less important than commitment to reality. I make things up when I write, but in an effort to pull back the curtain further. And never to conceal. That being said, an attempt to glean a factual understanding of the events in my life via this blog or online writings may prove futile. And in fact, I'm considering a partitioning of my online posts between this and myspace. The former for topical and "artistic" endeavors or musings, the latter for personalized ("true") accounts . Of course, these buckets may not be clear-cut and I won't be scratching my chin thinking how I can fulfill some obligation that I haven't outlined in black marker.

Keep it real out there.

»»  read more

The Funniest Thing that's happened all year . . .

It's got to be tough to live a lie. Spending any brief moment of inactivity sweating over indiscretions, bartering with the almighty to keep your hideous secret to yourself. In every public gesture knowing full well that your artifice is a sham.


Ted Haggard, champion of Evangelism, pariah of born-agains, Creationists, political activist and ally of the pious and moral (I can't say that with a straight face) president, is a gay man who has struggled with his sexual identity and impulses for all of his adult life. He also may have a drug problem. I know gay people and I know drug addicts; the former having no adjective that fits them all and the latter being a pitiable sort. A reasonable person, especially one who's life is devoted to forgiveness, should see nothing wrong with homosexuality and at worst extend a helping hand to the drug addict. Haggard, on the other hand, has been stamping his brand of moral rectitude all over our culture with a self-hatred that he could seemingly only extinguish be distributing amongst others like him. While not the most hard-line homophobe in charge of a church, he held office with the National Association of Evangelicals (a body representing the tilted ideology that favors legislation like the marriage amendment), he lobbied against gay rights, he belittled Richard Dawkins for arrogance. Think of that, a hypocritical, irrational preacher with political influence and a history of secret homosexual rendezvous with prostitutes telling a man of science that he is arrogant.
As a human being, Haggard deserves our sympathies during this difficult time. However, as an idea (and a man who heads a mega-church and presided over an organization representing millions is more an idea than a man) he needs to be exposed and ridiculed. Not for being a gay man and not for being a drug addict. But for being an asshole who hates himself so much that he won't be satisfied until you hate yourself. For dragging our culture further into confusion and denial. For working in direct opposition to the forces that could have liberated him from his life of fear.

Moreso than the event itself, I'm piqued by what this all means for religion. Obviously it says little about the truth or implausibility of religion; but what does it say about our culture of religion. What are we, rational thinkers and people trying to do our best, to make of posturing, self-important "prophets" when it is learned that they are in fact their own worst enemy?

My impression of these events reinforces what I already thought. The puritanical religious tendency (that is, the impulse to push one's morality onto others) is bred in fear. Fear of oneself and the misplaced reaction toward the masses. What's most perplexing and troubling about these revelations, these particular ones and those uncovered in the past, is that Ted Haggard is still sticking to his guns. Homosexuality is still "wrong" to him, and he refers to the mess as a deep, dark sin. I disagree. The "sin" is that we live in a society, perpetuated by cowards like Ted Haggard, in which we have to hate ourselves for being ourselves.

»»  read more

Nausea

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable"
-JFK

Good Night and Good Luck. I'm humiliated to be an American citizen, and the next educational institute I join will be in another country.

»»  read more

"Told the truth to get what I want, but shot it with no shame"

In order to maintain some sense of propriety and not reveal the fact that I’m actually a raving lunatic, atheist and struggling artist, I am taking an exam called the Engineer-in-Training. People in my field take it so that they can grow up to be professional engineers and advance their careers through a serious of bureaucratic hoops, none of which are particularly relevant to where I want to be a decade from now. I’ve finally convinced myself that if I am going to take this exam and thus began the tyrannical onslaught of studying the same shit that gave me nightmares not so long ago, I'm going to teach it a thing or two. After a couple weeks of ruining sleep, annoying passers-by, screaming expletives out into our suburban neighborhood, compromising fragile relationships and virtually forgetting the Word I will be prepared to sit in a room with a few dozen other preening Gentiles and give ‘er a go. The fact that this test is one of the expectations required by the program I’ve decided to undertake does not escape me. Even still, my hatred for the role of this nonsense in my life has me vicious, bloodthirsty, willing to sacrifice sanity in order to bury this ridiculous “test” of my completely unused skills in a shallow grave. Somewhere that wild animals can get to it. I'm good at my job and this proves nothing.

It’s not that I mind hardwork, see, I just feel like I’ve given enough. This is supposed to be my time, and it is being compromised. This exam, more than anything, has made me realize that I must escape this function in society or I will not survive it. I’m pregnant with literature and corporate America does not offer maternity leave.

On that note, I’m feeling the affect of taking two classes on early Saturday morning, usually still hung-over and sweaty from the bad behavior of Friday evening. My poetry professor looks me in the eyes when he talks and criticizes the smallest increment of my writing, the same flaws he completely overlooks amongst everyone else.

Some poor soul, the vibrant hatchling of pure brilliance, has decided that I might be worth a shot after all; the entire arrangement buttressed with disclaimers that she merely brushes off. We've read the same books in seperate time zones and batter our way through life in full contest of astrological phenomenon that we share a birthdate. The argument may be that nothing has changed, but I'm starting to feel as though I might actually exist here.

»»  read more