On Humanity

Watched this interview on Vice from the so-called Canadian Jihadist, http://www.vice.com/vice-news/the-canadian-jihadist-678

and then afterwards Nick Drake came on. The first is probably the individual voice of most of humanity – angry and fearful, ideological and delusional, and violently giddy in its self-aware transience. And I’d like to think the second is the voice of abstract Humanity, singing to its baffled multitudinous selves.

Please give me a second grace
Please give me a second face
I’ve fallen far down
The first time around
Now I just sit on the ground in your way

Now if it’s time to recompense for what’s done
Come, come sit down on the fence in the sun
And the clouds will roll by
And we’ll never deny
It’s really too hard for to fly.

Please tell me your second name
Please play me your second game
I’ve fallen so far
For the people you are
I just need your star for a day.

So come, come ride in my my street-car by the bay
For now I must know how fine you are in your way
And the sea sure as I
But she won’t need to cry
For it’s really too hard for to fly.

Huckleberry Picking

Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is 139 pages gone, and my pace is slowing and Italo Calvino knows it. After I struck up a conversation with that mysterious woman on the bench, who liked to draw inanimate objects, I came to learn her interest in grapnel anchors was more cunning than aesthetic. I was being duped, and somewhere after that point, and before I sought out the publisher and maker of books to complain about my faulty copy of Calvino, I went up Mt Mitchell to pick huckleberries.

The huckleberries are found at high altitudes, and we had to go pretty far up the 6,683 foot mountain to find the trail where they grew. If you went too far into the forested mountain slope, the shade was too strong. You had to stay along just the right parts, where the sun made its arc, to find the huckleberries trees that grew tall (taller than low altitude ones) and full. 

With the two hoes we had brought along, we’d hook the branch or thin trunk. Like a grapnel anchor hooking to the bars of a prison window, the hoe would bend the tree towards us and allow us to free the huckleberries. The ripe ones were eager, and we’d use care to grip them strong enough that they wouldn’t tumble to the ground, but gentle enough they wouldn’t pop, stain our fingers, and be ruined for cooking. Huckleberries, if you didn’t know, are small fruit that look very similar to blueberries, but are more tart and sour. Those that grew at the top of the trees were dried by the sun, and at least half of each tree’s bounty were not yet ripe, and we left them behind for a later prison break.

Two hours walking along the trail, pulling trunks and branches toward us, selecting the ripe berries, dropping them in our bag, and repeat. We haven’t measured yet, but I venture to say that we walked off with at least four cups of the small berries. Another mysterious woman will toss three cups of those into a pie, and we’ll consume the literal fruits of our labor with a scoop of ice cream.

Then I’ll have to return to the printing house and find out what happened to my book. If there’s one thing reading Calvino has reminded me of, it’s that the narratives of our lives intersect with the narratives we read. Never more directly than while you’re in the act of reading it, but, of course, long after the reading is done as well.

If on a summer’s night a traveler

After a couple hours on the road, as we passed exit signs to Jacksonville, I thought that traveling is a lot like reading. In particular, the act of driving a long distance. There’s a clear start and a clear end, and you’re pretty certain that the simple application of time will take you from A to B. But progress isn’t measured in time, and for good reason. The miles or the pages both take a degree of effort rather than just happening, and you will sometimes have to slow down, pull over, or double back.

Around 12 hours and nearly 700 miles later, we arrived back in the mountain home north of Asheville, aka the greatest reading spot in the world. I’m now making a trek through Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, currently just over fifty pages in. I think it’s the only novel I’ve read in the second person, with you, also called the Reader, as the protagonist. The narrative is crisp despite what may seem like a clever device – a reader (you) seeking the rest of a story that’s been cut off prematurely.

I’m hoping to push through page 100 tonight as this traveler is ready to rest. But it’s hard to put down until I find out what happens to me.

Betraying Žižek for Kundera: Yet Another Post about My Reading Habits

I started reading two Žižek books: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. First as Tragedy is engaging, but I set it down after the first thirty pages, intrigued as I was to know just what precisely was the perverse core. 

The perverse core of Žižek’s subtitle (SPOILER ALERT) is that God needs betrayal. Christianity, in which God needs his followers not just to worship but to betray, by setting up the Tree of Knowledge, by relying on the hands of Judas. A God which needs the finite to be whole; needs the temporal to be complete. But in setting up the conditions for betrayal, we have God the arch-manipulator, punishing the most faithful with the task of betrayal.

Žižek deploys material philosophy, or what’s now often called physicalism, in his exegesis. The dialectical choice makes for interesting reading – like a late night conversation with a good friend after several beers. It may succeed, as Žižek sets out in the series forward, in revealing a “disavowed truth” of Christianity, but let’s be honest: there’s no book like the Bible for finding disavowed truths. You can hardly read a page without coming across contradictions and abominations that often brilliant and sometimes moral theologians have twisted themselves into knots trying to make right, without much success.

I’m only twenty pages in and a lot might still follow, but I’d rather engage Žižek in a dialogue than read all his thoughts between two covers. After having just finished a Murakami novel, this feels like a slog through a logical morass. I get logic, I am logical, but this writing is both telling me nothing new and is depressingly claustrophobic. There’s no room to think or to let the mind wander, jumping from conclusion to conclusion like this. 

I think I may redirect my thoughts to the pages of Kundera’s Identity, with perhaps a sidebar to revisit his similarly brief and – as I remember it – profound and comic Slowness. And in between, perhaps a dozen pages at a time, when my mind grows agoraphobic, I’ll return to First as Tragedy.

It’s hard to say the meaning of this song

Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage has many failings.

It tells everything. There is little action beyond a man traveling from point A to point B, and everything we know about character is developed by what the characters say about their own and other’s character. Every character is also hyper-introspective, yet more than willing to open up about that introspection at a moment’s notice. Want to know the arc of someone’s life? Pay them a 30-minute visit on their lunch break. It’s not that people don’t talk like that in real life, so much as very few people talk like that in real life.

The events of the novel are of the most banal sort (the few big dramatic moments have either happened off-stage in the past, or in dreams in the past). Most of the words are spent on the thoughts of Tsukuru’s everyman, and most of those circle around his preoccupation with self-doubt and abandonment issues.

Also, I couldn’t help but squirm at the generalizations about women that kept creeping up. Throwaway lines, they were generally innocuous in content, but their very presence in relation to some of the key plot points in this story felt out of sync.

The novel’s movement is one of illumination; without a doubt, it’s entire thrust leaves the reader expectant for some sort of final revelation. Ultimately, it’s not that there’s a complete lack of illumination, but the dimness of the resolution will make readers squint their eyes to make out the contours of all the moving silhouetted characters.

The ghosts of the past don’t return to tie things up. Most things are lost in the flow of time, except perhaps hope.

And despite all of this, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. Perhaps it’s just where I am in my life story’s arc. There’s no clever literary artifice, just people talking about their lives. No pretension of being a direct mirror to reality, nor the pretension of being anything: not magic realism, not a bildungsroman. It’s a novel that a new author could never get published, but Murakami has of course earned the right to such a novel. Sort of like Neil Young earned the right to release Trans. Or perhaps a more apt analogy: like Neil Young’s Ragged Glory, it’s a good time, the work of a master craftsman who figured he probably didn’t have to work so hard on packaging to deliver a good product. But it will never be On the Beach, with “Ambulance,” which ran through my head a few times while reading –

On Work, Words, and Murakami’s Pilgrimage

I’ve spent the past three and a half years working as a copy writer, copy editor, managing editor, and operations manager for an international media research company. I liked the editing. And I like my business even if the feeling isn’t and never can be mutual. I’m still not sure where the plot twist happened that led me into management.

I haven’t finished a book in around two years. The last time was June of 2012, at which time I had completed around twenty-four contemporary novels from January-June. (Thanks for the history, Goodreads.) Four per month for six months, then nothing for two years. Nor have I written a serious word in that span. No writing in notebooks, no letters, no unfinished manuscripts taking up space in my documents folder. No emails to myself of great novel ideas. No blogging.

My head’s hurting. It’s the pieces of the words I never wrote jostling around up there, crumbling apart from wear and tear, having not been replaced by fresh ones for so long. How much longer can I get by on memories of words that I once read in Zarathustra and Absalom and Henderson the Rain King? They need refreshing, and not just with brand new words. The olds ones made new will do, too.

Haruki Murakami has a new novel, so there’s a starting point. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The book itself, the first edition sold here in the states, is beautifully designed. The front cover shows a hand, palm out, in the buddhist symbol of divine protection from fear. Beneath the paper cover, the hard cover is a map of subway and train routes through Japan.

Murakami is an inviting way to return to reading after my forty years of wandering. He demands so little other than to go along for the ride, and offers so much. He tells everything, he holds you by the hand, which in most any other writer would be irritating (show, don’t tell being the mantra of all writing). But something in Murakami’s telling is…telling. It’s a struggle to tell, the way people in the real world struggle to tell themselves the story of their own lives everyday – full of abstractions and intuitive knowing that would drive a literary agent mad. For example, here’s the achromatic eponymous hero attempting to explain a six month period during college, still trying to understand it and himself now that he’s 36:

“There was an actual event that had led him to this place – this he knew all too well – but why should death have such a hold over him, enveloping him in its embrace for nearly half a year? Envelop – the word expressed it precisely. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Tsukuru had fallen into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void.”

I look forward to joining Tsukuru on a pilgrimage in our 36th year.

Best Songs of 2013

Phosphorescent – Song for Zula

Vampire Weekend – Ya Hey

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – We No Who U R

Phoenix – Entertainment

The National – Pink Rabbits

Bear’s Den – Isaac

Sous le ciel de Tampa Bay, there’s an accordion player playing by the pier. He strikes a discordant note.

Marcel Proust paints the experience of disorientation as waking up in absolute darkness and imagining the furniture to be in a variety of arrangements – is the dresser to your left under the red-curtained windows like that room where you slept in childhood, or is your wife’s vanity table over there at the foot of the bed like it was before you were divorced. Go to sleep some night with your head at the foot of the bed and hang up black-out curtains so that you awake in such a state. In search of lost time indeed.

Sometimes in the light of day, even sitting in a cafe near Tampa Bay, the same disorientation may arise. It’s less identifiable as disorientation since the ground beneath is still visible, but it’s the same thing. That you’ve been here before and a million places like it with a million people. That you thought these ambitions and worries all before. And that suddenly the wholeness of it overwhelms the particular of where you sit.

Am I at a cafe or all cafes?

Place has a hold on us like few things do, and it holds us more quietly than anything. I am where I tread and have trod, some culmination of footfall under forgotten skies. In a familiar place, it’s easy to forget that each step is new unless there’s an accordion player to remind you.

 

I wish I had something to say tonight. I miss saying things and believing in them. I’ve used quite a few different narratives to understand myself, but they decay. I’ve been living outside any narrative that makes sense to me for a while now.

Reading Update: End of February 2012

Reading as many contemporary novels as I can in 2012. So far, those I’ve finished in 2012 in order with last month’s in bold:

1) Outer Dark (1968) by Cormac McCarthy
2) The Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins
3) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
4) A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan
5) The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) by Aimee Bender
6) Golden Compass (1996) by Philip Pullman
7) Winter of Our Discontent (1961) by John Steinbeck
8) Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
9) The Art of Racing in the Rain (2008) by Garth Stein

*Other
a) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-up” (1936)