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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"A ram chased my friend in a dream"

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

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

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

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

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

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"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy"

[quote: Henry Miller, video: Doug Stanhope - Excessin Moderation]




So the thing has a new format . . .which might abruptly change again soon. I'm not an expert at this, and I'm lazy. But I realized my blog was the ugliest webpage I visit, so something's got to give I suppose.

--
Since I graduated, I've been spending 5 out of 7 nights and most of the weekend by myself. Really trying to get something done right now and enjoying it, so no lament. But, on the growing list of lessons learned in solitude is a big fat one: learn to enjoy the memory instead of missing the thing. Also, have a pet and talk to it. Have your favorite drank on hand once in awhile. Have tiny elements of routine but recognize when they don't work anymore. Own a lot of music and put it on random once in a while. Remember to eat. Sing a bit. Get some sleep. Just use the goddamn air conditioning. Have landmarks on your calendar that you look forward to, plan to have something in particular done by then. Don't miss the really important, biographical shit. It's really been fantastic, but I realized the other day that I have an inside joke with myself. I'm not sure what that means.

--

I figured out how to sidestep cliche. See, by focusing on some aspect of the cliche (in my case, I'm working on a piece with an amnesic in a supporting role) and making it as realistic as possible, beneath the simplification and convenience the cliche wields as a notion, you make it new. You subvert the cliche, almost make a commentary in it's usage. So, for instance, Amnesia is a widespread trope in narrative (after I had my basic idea, I accidentally came across two books and one film with amnesics). IN researching how amnesia actually operates, I found that it has not, to my knowledge, been shown for what it is. In movies and books it almost always appears as a loss of memory starting at the moment of brain injury. However, most commonly appears in real-life as both a loss of access to previous experiential/declarative memory and an inability to create new long-term memories.This has interesting side-effects: 'muscle memory' is retained and can be learned, a memory function called priming works surprisingly without experiential memory of the thing being primed, cognitive skills (problem-solving, playing music) often remain. Most intriguing to me is that the amnesic is able to remember sequence of events for as long as they remain highly engaged in processing ongoing causality (i.e. when they're in the 'zone' they can remember back to the beginning of the 'zone').
Anyway. It seems such a rich ground for narrative, so many aspects of it grow plots.

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under remodel

sorry if things look a little weird for awhile

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"I work till this here little flat line closes the curtains"

(quote: Aesop Rock, video: finale speech from Generation Kill)

I climbed Thompson Peak yesterday. A sweaty foray out of the lab, all anxiety about the hours away from the word processor ameliorated in the things I relearned. 14 miles across scree and up hills and picking my way across icefields with pointy rocks in my hands so I don't slip to my death. Jumping from boulder to boulder at altitudes that remind me how weak my lungs are. Fending off the hot sun with willpower. Drinking blue water from enormous puddles where the snowmelt collects. Aches in my knees so pure, movement so stiff by the summit that I can feel by swollen tendons creak. And clambering up and over that last rock to look down on everything. Like the roof of the tallest building in the city, looking down on creation with all its perfections and its coincidences. At the summit there's a little metal box that has been bolted there to the rock since the 1960s. Notebooks full of jottings, a pack of rolling papers, a tiny empty bottle of Crown Royal. On the first page of one these someone has written an ode to a loved one that died on that mountain. The author returns every year on the anniversary to pay respects and write some tear-jerking update as to how her memory has survived. A more fitting tombstone than one you'll find in any cemetery.

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Ancillary to this workshop I've been involved in I've been reading much of the fiction that's been published in The New Yorker for the last six weeks or so. This is the premier American publication to feature short works of fiction. Supposed luminaries such as Lorrie Moore and Tim Gatreux and Johnathan Franzen. The works all have in common a vast lack in imagination. Nothing worth noting happens, ordinary people going through somewhat ordinary things. My own impatient and stultified life strikes me as more moving and interesting than any passage from any of these. But despite my disdain, the whole thing is encouraging. There is so much room in literature: for fiction more interesting, more memorable, more urgent. Line-by-line more engaging and carefully wrought and mindful. Thematically more relevant to this weird world we find ourselves in. No disrespect to anyone that shares my craft, but I'm afraid modern American fiction is completely insubstantial (DFW RIP). We'll only be allowed to bitch and moan about depleted readership when we've written the next "On the Road", the next "Grapes of Wrath", the next "Blood Meridian". Writers, it's time to step your game up. The world is passing you by and you're pondering the rusty undercarriage as it scrapes off your dead skin.

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"La tierra vive ahora tranquilizando su interrogatorio"

(quote: Pablo Neruda, video: The Pied Piper of Hutzovina

Dreamt of Africa while in Vegas and woke up to look out my hotel window at its exact opposite. A weary, misplaced feeling. Spent the night before drinking Jameson's in a casino bar with the pachinko sounds of Pavlovian triggers chinkboingbanking around me and I could take in fourteen different kinds of ESPN. Thinking that as we become a service culture, kindness becomes a commodity. And the artifice of it becomes profitable. Try to appreciate your fellow man when you know that. Driving Las Vegas Blvd with a tallboy of Colt .45 in the cupholder because sometimes the best drink is an ironic one. Traffic jammed amongst the construction of new leering casinos like the whole country is not biting its nails at its short-term prospects. The lights of Vegas famous, sure, but each one of them is an advertisement. The entire city an experiential commercial for itself. Back in the casino watching people tote their new luggage to their hotel room with their addled children, weaving between the drink girls in their soft-porn costumes. The median age staggering, and old men and woman with their walkers and their tracheotomy-control devices poking their fingers at video screens. The hotel I stayed in unexpectedly posh and enormous and glinty. And I guess I don't do well with grandiosity because the shinier things are the more I feel has been wasted, and I cringe seeing retirement funds roll into slot machines just as I balk at the Hummers in the parking lot and roll my eyes at twelve billion lights. It makes me admire religion, in the old days of grand devotional art and architecture those people at least created their monuments to something they believed in. True or not, the things they made in that vein were full of passion and meaning. And in turn they came out beautiful and touching. Our current iteration builds monstrosities with high ROI . . . Mandalay Bay glistens in its grease, the lion in front of MGM Grand weighs more than everything I will ever own and it looks like the boredom of an untalented child. In the morning I drove out into the desert, it starts to gradually get beautiful.

--

Heavily researching Artificial Intelligence and Memory. Ostensibly for the purpose of understanding a character/plotline of this big writing project I'm working on, but also because I'm fascinated by it. I suppose that's how it works. Putting the two together makes me doubt the Singularity.
There's a theory being somewhat scoffed at (but not disproved by any means) that the human brain makes computations that fit into the mysterious depths of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. And further, that the brain accomplishes this by the manipulations of and shifts in the quantum state of nanoscale elements within the neuron. I don't understand this on a deep-level, and I suppose it doesn't undermine the notion that we can make an artificial brain. Hopefully someone can straighten me out on this.

Also . . .did you know that the ability to remember nonsense words is a strong indicator of intelligence? Lots of probably uninteresting reasons as to why.
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