In an earlier post, I mentioned rather condescendingly how people always have and continue to believe that the end of time is near.
I apologize to anyone who believed such things. It would seem you were right. The end of times is nigh. My proof:
A Grammy show where Taylor Swift wins album of the year and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” is song of the year.
Filed under: Books
Up until I was 16, I had never read anything. That is to say, I had read every Agatha Christie novel in my parents’ garage (which may have been every Agatha Christie novel), the usual elementary school fare like Wrinkle in Time, The Indian in the Cupboard, and a few series like the Wizards and Warriors choose-your-own-adventure novels. Other books, including ones that I have great respect for, works of Literature, came and went through middle and high school. But I had never read a book the way I read a copy of Catcher in the Rye a new friend gave me when I was 16.
Catcher was a revelation. Like so many young readers of the book, I identified with Holden, who identified himself as only that which was not everybody else. The self defined through isolation from others. And it wasn’t only Holden’s personality and the novel’s themes. Could it be that novels could be written like this? In this voice that sounds so near my own?
I remember running out and buying Salinger’s Nine Stories and reading them after Catcher, but I cannot recall a single one now. Perhaps the reclusive author would have preferred my forgetting, forgetting all of it. He once told the New York Times, “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
I was speaking about Salinger with my English-teacher colleagues in the hallways between third and fourth period today. One hadn’t heard; the other excitedly reported on what I now call The Legend of Salinger’s Safe. According to this article – http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obit_salinger – there is rampant speculation that he kept many finished novels in a safe at his home. He had even given a simple code to his family in case of his death: if a blue dot is on it, it is ready to be published; a red dot, and it needs to be edited.
Here’s hoping that there is a safe, and that there’s a great many dots of blue and red inside of it.
J. D. Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010)
The following is one of 21 films which have stood up to repeated viewings without diminishing returns.
The Big Kahuna (1999)
It isn’t a perfect film. In fact, its flaws are everywhere. It partakes in the archaic custom of unabashed moralizing. It allows one of its characters to speak as though with the author’s voice. It risks, at all turns, becoming preachy and self-righteous. And it focuses on antiquated notions of what it means to be a man in the man’s world of work. What gives a man character? What does it mean to be honest, and how does dishonesty creep up on all of us? And what of being honest with ourselves? Who are we? What is the nature of a man’s identity? Is there a difference between who a man is and what he does? If there is a space between those two, just how wide is it? And where is God in this whole confusion of identity, anyway? Perhaps the awareness of that absence is still part of society’s identity crisis.
The dialogue in the film is sharp and witty (though the moralizing monologue near the end is a bit clunky). Spacey rattles off many of the best lines, often so quick that you find yourself laughing at it by the time his character Larry has moved on to his next wry crack. DeVito’s Phil is pragmatic and melancholy, a disconsolate optimist. And finally there’s the actor who plays the young idealist Bob. Any stiffness in Bob is either a sign of excellent acting or excellent casting. Each character serves as a foil for the other two, which keeps the dialogue flowing seamlessly. It is hard to believe the film is based on a play, whose script they follow closely. It sounds like the actors are improvising these riffs that are delivered (for the most part) so naturally.
The film moves through a small space: the hospitality suite where Larry, Phil, and Bob have been sent by their company to sell lubricants to the eponymous buyer. This premise is not as Kafkaesque as it sounds, though I am tempted (by my love for Kafka) to make comparisons between Kafka’s castle and the buyer in the movie. The Big Kahuna, however, stays true to the reality it depicts. Like Larry, it cannot abide liars, and while it recognizes the absurdity of the whole situation, the situation is real as opposed to surreal. The buyer, and his absence, may himself be a metaphor for God, but only insofar as metaphor is a natural means through which humans process understanding. This symbol emerges naturally, whereas a bit of literary artifice creates the other, more mundane symbol for God: a coat closet.
In the limited space of the film, the immense worlds of these three characters are laid bare. Revealed. Honest. And still, always, conflicted. Truth has nothing to do with comfort, and these characters will continue to struggle with the mistakes of their lives, their regrets, their convoluted sense of their own identities long after the credits – and we with them.
*UPDATE*
See a few clips from the film here.
Filed under: Teaching
where I can’t breathe easy. Where I go to bed late because it seems like there is so much more to get from the day, and wake up late because I dread facing the burden of my failures at work.
This lack of sleep is overcoming me; I’m succumbing to weariness.
This afternoon I have, first, essays to grade. I am looking forward to reading them (though I wish it were not so many; what can you do?). Then I have the much more tedious task of preparing my students’ writing folders, another bureaucratic invasion into my profession, because my principal will be inspecting them. Even when I’m finished with this job and have all but given up, I respond to the pressure by trying to do as much as possible.
On to reading essays now. Perhaps I’ll share some of the best excerpts with all of you. Student essays are as enjoyable as they are cringe-inducing.
Filed under: 21 Poems
The following is one of 21 poems that have influenced me and stayed with me, in no particular order.
(Here’s a quick analysis of Ginsberg’s furiously mournful masterpiece on the death of his mother.)
Allen Ginsberg:
excerpt from Kaddish (1959)
I.
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while
I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up
all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud,
listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the
phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three
years after — And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas
aloud — wept, realizing how we suffer –
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing,
remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the
Buddhist Book of Answers — and my own imagination of
a withered leaf — at dawn –
Dreaming back thru life, Your time — and mine accelerating
toward Apocalypse,
the final moment — the flower burning in the Day — and what
comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and
a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never
existed –
like a poem in the dark — escaped back to Oblivion –
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the
Dream, trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom,
worshipping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all — longing or inevita-
bility? — while it lasts, a Vision — anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back
over my shoulder, Seventh Avenue, the battlements of
window office buildings shouldering each other high,
under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant — and the sky
above — an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the South, to — as I walk toward the
Lower East Side — where you walked 50 years ago, little
girl — from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes
of America — frightened on the dock –
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what? –
toward Newark –
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-
churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor
boards –
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation,
teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream –
what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window — and the great Key lays its
head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor,
and lays down on the sidewalk — in a single vast beam,
moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish
Theater — and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now — Strange to
have moved thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe
and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstoops doors and
dark boys on the street, fire escapes old as you
– Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me –
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe — and I guess
that dies with us — enough to cancel all that comes –
What came is gone forever every time –
That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret — no fear
radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end –
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul — and the
lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to
change’s fierce hunger — hair and teeth — and the roar
of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked
Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death
let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your
century, done with God, done with the path thru it –
Done with yourself at last — Pure — Back to the Babe
dark before your Father, before us all — before the
world –
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve
gone, it’s good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now,
no more fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades,
debts, loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds,
relatives, hands –
No more of sister Elanor, — she gone before you — we kept it
secret — you killed her — or she killed herself to bear
with you — an arthritic heart — But Death’s killed you
both — No matter –
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies
weeks and weeks — forgetting, agrieve watching Marie
Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godinov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, halling his voice of a
weeping Czar — by standing room with Elanor & Max
– watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra,
white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL’s hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy
gym skirts pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other
round the waste, and laughing eye, too coy, virginal
solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead, now, and that long hair in the
grave — lucky to have husbands later –
You made it — I came too — Eugene my brother before (still
grieving now and will gream on to his last stiff hand, as
he goes thru his cancer — or kill — later perhaps — soon
he will think –)
And it’s the last moment I remember, which I see them all,
thru myself, now — tho not you
I didn’t foresee what you felt — what more hideous gape of
bad mouth came first — to you — and were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark — that — in that God? a radiance?
A Lord in the Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a
dream? Adonoi at last, with you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the
yellow skull in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and
a stained ribbon — Deathshead with Halo? can you
believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash
of existence, than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have — what you had — that so pitiful
– yet Triumph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower –
fed to the ground — but mad, with its petals, colored,
thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf
stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth wrapped, sore
– freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and
fought the knife — lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman’s icy — even in the Spring –
strange ghost thought — some Death — Sharp icicle in
his hand — crowned with old roses — a dog for his eyes
– cock of a sweatshop — heart of electric irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out — clocks, bodies,
consciousness, shoe, breasts — begotten sons — your Com-
munism — ‘Paranoia’ into hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure
later. You of stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of
you, sisters in death. Is Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large
mustache over midnight Accountings, not sure. His life
panes — as he sees — and what does he doubt now?
Still dream of making money, or that might have made
money, hired nurse, had children, found even your
Immortality, Naomi?
I’ll see him soon. Now I’ve got to cut through — to talk to you
– as I didn’t when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever — like Emily
Dickinson’s horses — headed to the End.
They know the way — These Steeds — run faster than we think
– it’s our own life they cross — and take with them.
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind
behind, married dreamed, mortal changed — Ass and face done
with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia,
shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah,
accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless,
endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy,
I am unmarried, I’m hymnles; I’m Heavenless, headless in
blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothing-
ness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity –
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in
a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing — to praise Thee
– But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for
the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed
clean by weeping — page beyond Psalm — Last change of mine
and Naomi — to God’s perfect Darkness — Death, stay thy
phantoms!
Filed under: Music
Five (5) albums you might listen to for each year I’ve been alive. If you’ve lived without them, remedy that. (Listed are artist first, album second.)
2009 – OK, so this is six. I’m making the rules here.
Bat for Lashes – Two Suns
Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons – Death Won’t Send a Letter
The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Danger Mouse – Dark Night of the Soul
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz
2008 – A strange year; there were few entire albums I loved from 2008. Lady Gaga nearly made it.
Raphael Saadiq – The Way I See It
R.E.M. – Accelerate
John Legend – Evolver
Mason Jennings – In the Ever
Kings of Leon – Only by the Night
2007 – Ouch. A lot of good albums in ‘07. Since I allowed myself 6 before, I’ll have to allow it again. Only this time it’s 12. That’s what happens when you break rules. It’s a slippery slope, kids.
The White Stripes – Icky Thump
Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
The Shins – Wincing the Night Away
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand
Radiohead – In Rainbows
The New Pornographers – Challengers
Modest Mouse – We Were Dead before the Ship Even Sank
Mat Kearney – Nothing Left to Lose
Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog
Interpol – Our Love to Admire
Burial – Untrue
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
2006 – Tough cuts and refocused.
TV on the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain
Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Joseph Arthur – Nuclear Daydream
Damien Rice – 9
Band of Horses – Everything All the Time
(Honorable Mention: Bob Dylan – Modern Times)
2005 – See how I did that? Honorable mention. That’s what they call a crutch. But still within the rules!
Sleater-Kinney – The Woods
Jenny Lewis – Rabbit Fur Coat
The Decemberists – Picaresque
Death Cab for Cutie – Plans
Beck – Guero
(H.M.: Bruce Springsteen – Devils and Dust)
2004 – OK, so now HM’s are going to the old guys who are still producing good music. Now that I’ve broken the addiction, here’s a concise sign of my good intentions.
Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch
Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Autolux – Future Perfect
Arcade Fire – Funeral
2003 – Ah, god, it just feels so good!
The White Stripes – Elephant
Radiohead – Hail to the Thief
The Postal Service – Give Up
Outkast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
The New Pornographers – Mass Romantic
The Mars Volta – De-Loused in the Comatorium
Death Cab for Cutie – Transatlanticism
Belle and Sebastian – Dear Catastrophe Waitress
2002 – Yes, yes, I’m fine, fine. Really.
Joseph Arthur – Redemption’s Son
Iron & Wine – The Creek Drank the Cradle
Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head
Beck – Sea Change
Audioslave – Audioslave
2001 – Aararghgh ,
White Stripes – White Blood Cells
Starsailor – Love Is Here
The Shins – Oh, Inverted World
Radiohead – Amnesiac
Garbage – Beautiful Garbage
Bob Dylan – Love and Theft
Bjork – Vespertine
What’v I got left? i’M too old for this shhit ‘ Pick your own ablums.
When I (1) left graduate school the first time, the failure was monumental. It was not the first failure. Not by a long shot. But it hurt more. More youthful failures were easily forgiven. I was finding myself then. (Tangent: Finding one’s self. To find one’s self, in the most generous terms I can give it, is to find a translation of one’s individual self. Usually, this involves knowing your place in the world via what you do, via who you know, via what you like and dislike. A useful self. Translations are always flawed, always imperfect, and sometimes outright irresponsible due to the translator’s lack of skill or the difficulties inherent in the art form. In its least generous terms, finding one’s self is a state not dissimilar from psychosis, wherein the I knows who it is based on some intricately crafted tower of feather and lace supported by dental floss attached to clouds.
As we get older, we find ourselves repeatedly. To do any less is to surrender being on the altar of banality the past ignorance. Easy to be tempted: others’ expectations, the need for security, and simple exhaustion from the whole struggle. If mankind ate from the tree of knowledge in the first days, it has been dutifully eating from the buffet of ignorance since then.) More recently, (2) I figured out that I wasn’t a teacher any longer. Compared to any youthful shortcomings, it was much more difficult to think I knew myself and then fail to be what I “knew” I was.
This internal struggle must be why people rarely disavow the beliefs of their upbringing. Religions, political attitudes, and other biases passed on from the parents are a security blanket (obviously, direct rebellion to such ideas is another clear statement of identity, though equally false until the rebel becomes comfortable enough in the distance to begin forming an original self).
I am getting to this: the self must be recreated. Each creation is equally false. What else to do while you’re rolling around in the void? More than the apathy: what else would you want to be doing? The creation is intoxicating; the heady experiment of self with world is full of wonder.
Eschatology has always been present, regardless of place or time. People in all ages have never failed to imagine that impending doom awaited them in their lifetime. In fact, they want it to arrive. Either there will be rewards for the righteous or complete destruction and death; either way, life is either given purpose or life itself is extinguished. The problem of being is solved.
One thing has changed, however, in the last hundred years: humanity finally has the ability to cause destruction on such a scale as to make the end of the world seem like a mercy.
It is only a matter of time before one person’s existential dilemma creates a psychosis that prompts him or her to initiate massive devastation.
In other words, it has finally become rational to presuppose an apocalypse.
(Watch out for a fool who 1) believes in the most sensational of the 2012 prophecies and decides to help them along; 2) believes the American military’s Bible Code messages on their weaponry encourages apocalypse and decides to help it along; 3) believes that Katrina was a punishment for homosexuality and Haiti was punished for some pact with Satan and, with millions of Americans supporting his psychosis, decides to help God along in His punishment of the wicked; etc.)
Filed under: Writing
to self: Must emulate Kundera, perhaps Bellow as well, or they will crush me. Ah, but what of Ibsen and Neruda in their other forms? What of the colossal Kafka, sly Flaubert, or the monuments of Joyce and Proust –
How to even begin? What a pleasurable pressure. Back to it. Back to it.
this life and the next. I find myself here. Too often, perhaps. But I won’t apologize. The common wisdom, the bumper sticker, the motivational poster, the words of coach, the general consensus speaks loudly and clearly: Success is built upon failure. But they don’t mean this kind of failure. They mean the failure that comes when you try your best. I’m hardly trying at all. It is humbling; daily, humbling.
And I’m ok with that.
The self rarely changes at convenient times. And so the dilemma: either change when the self demands or deny the change. I still work as a teacher, but have lost any image of myself as such. I love my students and continue to try to do what is best for them. I don’t always succeed. My other self keeps clawing its way out. The writer and perpetual student. Not at all an image of common nobility. But I am stubborn. If this is how I see myself, for now, then I damn sure will be this person. Whatever has changed in me (and changed in my old profession) has put a space between myself and my work.
Now I am standing betwixt two selves, with feet on opposite banks. In slow moments, like this, it is easy to be still and contemplate. When I am moving through my day, however, my gait is wide and awkward. I slip. The river carries me a way. I rebalance. The river narrows and widens. I can’t keep this up. My jeans are beginning to chafe.
Duty. Responsibility. I hear coach cheering me on. I hear wisdom in the cliches. I just can’t seem to keep to one bank; and certainly not the side of the river from which I want to leave.
There is no temporary. Change insists itself. Impulsion is purifying. Purification means the evanescent illusion of purpose is restored for the time. I accept it. Which means no latte money very soon.
