That black dog, gone and died, or killed was it
From Big Les, in prose:
Every day, though, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes all day, a coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a sense of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a foetal position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain. During and after such attacks, I would be prostrate with inertia, as if all my energy had gone into a black hole.
Black dahlia, but with the Staccato of pecked keys and the whirring slide back to the left beginning again, once more aligned, we won’t know it solved until it tells us so.
Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier
On the bedside table:
local souls, Alan Garganus
collected stories, Amy hempel
the crossing, cormac mccarthy
the blue guitar, john banville
all that is, James salter
believing is seeing, Errol morris
Also: star of the heart by clarice lispector. Consider the possibility that Felicite and her parrot would be a boon companion as a read-along with this one.
Alas, the pulled heart string is not enough on its own, and neither is the head gone soupy for having been bashed up against a figurative wall by its own self’s intransigence. By bread alone we aren’t to live, even if we can and sometimes, in brief spells, do.
Donald Rumsfeld deserves a fact-facing vitriolic historicizing obit of the kind by which HST rendered Dick Nixon. An island of rats, feasting on each other. But not without joy, of course.
Also this
beware of your enemies, but above all beware of your enemies’ sons, for they will one day rule you.
Moving boxes. Things were always coming apart at the seams, was the kind of love they had snd suffered through, especially at the beginning. The suffering of love was easier to withstand than the work of marriage. Romantic suffering. Tiresome work. It was thought that newspapers would suffice but on a whim the expensive bubble wrap was ordered and added to the bill that the eponymous two guys and a van came calling for their fee. Which is when it hit home, in what her gym teacher - a living caricature (lesbian, softball) who proved how little caricature might capture a round character whose complications were in the flesh - called a teachable moment. She had moved out, and the move had cost her more than she knew. Could have ever possibly known. It’s not ideology or a thrumming internally coherent plot. It’s just a hum drum devastation of the life they had lived, the life-as-they-knew-it gone and become a conflagration across her history.
Fragments of Amy Hempel
If you’ve had your fill of prolegomenon and genealogies, of discursive and logical exegesis - if you no longer gain from elaborate figurative emblems of an argument’s structure, loops and transcendental deductions and language game absurdities, I do not blame you. I too have supped at that rich vein and been be bedeviled and bedazzled by its seeming suppleness, even as I grew pale and sickly, redolent of bologna, wearing scuffed and unpolished leather boots even in the summer, and incapable of making direct eye contact, even in my dreams. I am an enthusiast, but to fatigue I have succumbed. I am philosophical about my benumbed philosophical capacity. Still I encourage you . Have at it, I say. A more virulent strain is not a more deadly strain if the strategy is to contain rather than to treat, I say. Much of what I say is just saying what someone else once wrote down.
And as against that burned-out husk, that brittle desiccated commonplace book, I commend to you the rich tradition of the American short story, circa 1988-2010, including Barthelme’s ambling progeny and the whelped pups of Annie Proulx’s hard won Western grace. And I do so commend with a kind of stalking-horse idea at hand - that the short story that is not particularly invested in being “about” something, that sustains itself at the level of the sustenance and neither kvetches nor pines for leaving its readers’ nails bitten or heart a-palpitating, is but a taxonomic attenuation of the philosophic proposition-making mood, not a different species altogether. See for example Tumble Home, to which I have flipped at random in this collection of Hempel’s stories.
I am that overexposed light, that awkward angle, that angle of repose between the moldy but redoubtable Stegner oeuvre and the coiled kink of wayward but deep exploration that the certain class of Stegner fellows have kicked out over the decade and a half that marked three straight Republicans administrations and the onset of a Slick Willy era that is simultaneously more callow and more polished than what immediately preceded it.
In which the older wiser more PR-savvy future stand in wonders how to artfully disavow a borrowed sentimental posture baldly inhabited as a room of one’s own
Alive and achingly so. Reading Vollman’s Whores for Gloria and chain smoking Camel Wides, stopping momentarily every now and again to jot down a particular metaphor or invocation of a color - this was what 18, 19 years ago - some time after it became necessary to unplug the N64 from the wall and throw it out the window, down three stories to the molten black stew of a Chicago parking lot, to explode like a denuded dream on a stiff therapeutic couch, just so my roommate from Paris would stop playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater and go to class. At which point I no longer had a roommate. The abandoned carton of Gauloise like Camus smoked works in a pinch if the corner store was closed and no food was in the offing. Acrid cigs to make the eyes redden and well up, the better to keep up with William the Blind’s lustful portraits of broken and broken-down lives would stave off sleep and make me almost shaky with envy as each aria of authenticity hit a new high note. It made no sense why the rooms i occupied were always so silent while the rooms in my head were a Modernist novel’s party scene of Bahkinitian dialogic intrigue. Solitude, no; loneliness, yes. Quality No! Energy Yes! Good grief, I yell back across time, go out and talk to a stranger. Manufacture an experience for your ownmost self. Take leave of the crack-smoking auteur whose carpal tunnel is a real deal testament to a work ethic you won’t be able summon until much later, when money starts to matter much more, too much more. End the alienated majesty, take stock of the feeling that the story line leaves you as it vibrates and shimmers in all its pilfered mediated splendor. Don’t you see what you have - waste it, yes, but savor the wasting more.
The very idea of being onstage revolts against itself
Ok, so: It turns out that one true measure of success is being able to define the measure for success - its constitutive parts, its criteria - for oneself. And that’s so easy to say, for me, even if I can’t quite latch onto what its enactment, out there the world beyond this screen, might mean.
Not that we lack for exemplars.
Excerpt from a writer posing as journalist for whom journalistic scruples was something to which one must subject an exacting gaze
In a charming and artful essay of 1908 entitled “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes about taking some brown paper and colored chalks to the Sussex downs on a fine summer day to do Chestertonian drawings of “devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.” But as he begins drawing Chesterton realizes that he has left behind “a most exquisite and essential” chalk—his white chalk. He goes on:
One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is that . . . white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. . . . Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Since Chesterton wrote these bubbly words, the world has seen two world wars and a holocaust, and God seems to have switched to gray as the color of virtue—or decency, as we are now content to call it. The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral.
Janet Malcolm thing on the zeitgeist in the Potemkin art world village whose child all involved it took pains to raise.
a sort of culminating aria, sung from the ground with the knife in the chest
We are back. Back with a vengeance. Why vengeance? Why not back with a bad case of ennui? Bathed in demotivated disaffection. If we are going to be back, we mine as well have some score settling in mind.
The scroll circulating throughout the underground pop up galleries in Mitte Berlin is comprised of Wraths and vendettas and miscellany trivia crawled on toilet stalls of biker bars in the tri-state area. Not like the staked claims of teenage couples who defile a tree with a carved declamation of name plus name. The scroll is not a palimpsest and yet all the bright young men like to show that they know what that means by saying it is. As though pronouncing a modish word correctly could cover up the fact that they cannot make enough money doing what they love for long enough to do it while they still love it. As though it all isn’t just compensation, in one form or another.
Vengeance, tho. Somehow it strikes me as plausible, if not logical, defensible, if not persuasive, to keep delaying slipping back into sleep and drawing comfort from the idea that no matter what I will rise with the sun. As though taking vengeance on tomorrow’s self as a kind of extending the debt forward for the shit yesterday’s self pulled in putting me here right now.
“ - Screw you “
“ - no screw you “
that kind of thing. And that is not logical but plausible, the deferral
of sleep
as a continuity of self-sabotage and abasement.
we are back. In the full indefensible regalia of scatterbrained insomnia.
Who wants a world where the guarantee of freedom from starvation means the risk of death from boredom?
By word and deed, I do, apparently.
And we must imagine that Sisyphus was joyful
“I have heard,” Camus tells us, “of […] a post-war writer who, after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was judged no good.”
It is in the adamantine fact-bound groundedness - which to me is morning stiffness, the making of coffee, the wayward form of drifting thought-clusters and transitions as I stand in the shower with my hand on one of its interior walls, still idling and not yet wakeful - that it seems clutchable, solid, intact. And it is in the surprising abrupt statement of truth, the zigging and zagging acceleration to something revealed, that I tend to find myself laughing.
Hours worked Sunday to Sunday: 73. Dinner soirées attended: 1. Books started and finished: 1. Books picked up again after a break and finished: 1. Books started and mulling over: 1. Books started and hooked like a soft-mouthed, pea-brained bullhead: 1.
I heard it said today that a but-for reason why there is a unit on Mars beaming back images of a helicopter in flight is because Hitler wanted to be able to drop bombs on London and planes weren’t an adequate tool for the job. Hence rockets. A wag would emphasize the confounding path of complicity. I am not that wag.
also this:
The Dark Encroachment of Old Catastrophes
It turns out producing a subject-self is not too far off, if approached as a project, from being subjected to production as a labor minion. Except who holds the lash - that’s different. Ask a Scandinavian.
optimizing is a disease caused by venom, not a virus caused by self-mobilizing cellular mutation, and the shambolic virtues of a loud animated conversation in a crowded, bustling diner with a clear-eyed visionary new friend are its antidote. All the yellowed-eyed cunning coyotes in the world can’t convince me otherwise.
Inbox zero is an infection caused by non-linear ambition that masks a fear of moral turpitude and manifests as a titanium-alloy linchpin holding back the possibility of devolution into the disaffected class that treats the mess of life as the problem to be solved, not the table stakes to be tossed casually as a condition of sitting down at the table. That possibility of devolution is like a salve of wet concrete into which I place my scalded hand.
To say and mean in the inner-head voice I was gloriously productive today on behalf of my own commitments is to be weaned from the need to say anything out loud and also who in the world talks to themselves like that and would you ever have any desire to audit that consciousness. That is, the key would be to utter death is the mother of beauty in a way that rhymes with perspiration is the kissing cousin of disemboweled anomie without sounding like an asshole.
Read more Mark Twain, the crotchety chain smoking professor of aesthetics advised. Read more Bud Smith, the arc welder rejoined. Travel safely, the long distance lover threatened.
Sententious caprice and all that jazz
I will sit in bed, picking then flicking
Psychic scabs,
not from a sense of duty, but only to keep time
and faith with the lucid grim shadows
on the inside wall.
so much for insomnia. I won’t let sleep creep
up on me, overcome or stun me.
Feet that fret the next blind step, I’ve learned,
will like sweaty boots they call home.
Well appointed turned out and slick,
more than ready and roaring to be in
the automatic mode in which we roam.
As long as I can complain about what happens
I’m ok with what happens.
Color me purple and defer the slow saunter
for now. It is the kind of transit in which the
third step forward after the words back
subsists in this, and only this ——
submit and lesson and learn.
Not just mouth the stupefied message,
nor just chew the cud of the pat facts.
Closing in on the delusion of closing in on
Anything full-stopped definitive.
Having picked and scraped and itched,
The scab levered up like
an attic door propped up
into the stale waiting darkness
The vivid red flows
and I couldn’t quite tell, and wouldn’t dare ask
what were the stakes.
Liberation through indifference
It occurs to me that the next 15 years, if pursued down the line, will make of time a slow acting but steadily settling embalming fluid. To write this off as melancholy misses the mark. Fight, spit, claw, punch, scream, agitate, but don’t spawn more concentric circles within the domain-specific sphere. Walden-ponding and sharding are not antipodes. It occurs to me what I meant to say more directly is the headless torso of Apollo’s attempt wrap up in order to induce a leave-taking from the page to the world. Try to keep up, he says. You’re welcome, he menaces.
Be that as it might not be
Do professional people still go on junkets? Has that concept grown tired and emptied of its use? I had wanted to start with the idea of this being the opposite of humbling - having no readers or users gives a kind of terrible freedom in not being bothered by typos and unintended elisions, but it’s more than just a comfort with grammatical aberration - it’s being able to get it down without concern as to whether anything is actually being said. The opposite of humbling here being something more like fatuous self-license. Better to imagine a curious type, who happens upon this without an iota of purpose, a smidgeon of inclination to gather up intel and proceed with a japing open-minded saunter in and across the contents of this, which has been to this point fully accepting of unintelligibility. Accepting is too weak. Embracing - nay cultivating. Be that as it may.
Insomnia is a hell of a drug
Yes. I roil under the comforter. Think that a heavy blanket isn’t as innovative as the youth would claim. To say that I won’t regret being unable to get past not being able to let go is not to say I hold on to the utility of having regrets in the first place. A web of lightning arouses the thought that we know very little, almost nothing, in the way of fundamentals. Wind shear and funnel clouds and the lord of the ionosphere. Seidel would not warrant the elk being such a dick. A sickly dick, though, he might. The rash on the earth’s surface like a skein of oil in the puddle: yes a beautiful rainbow and also the transmission may soon throw a rod. Both and. Mining for metaphors, i come across the claim that the new new thing takes a sum of energy to find in an indecipherable hash that exceeds the harm inflicted by the flatulence of cows, which have four stomachs. Say this with dourness in your hear for long enough and its upper chamber turns black. We used To make chimpanzees smoke in labs to test the efficacy of our ability to test the harm of smoking out there in the wild. That may not be strictly true but it seems dead right as something we would do, huh? It fits us as an indictment. Even if we were to be punished for what was alleged but not proven, coming out in the wash and all. Being damned seems a tight fit for our predicament. Always already inherently guilty. I chew gum that delivers chemicals. I chew nails until blood arrives. I slept well once back when the epidemiological amplitude of the plague was first being sounded. Our models take their own pictures now. Call that obsolescence of the subject object bugaboo. Soon I will be the kind of tired where psychopathology aids but does not abet. Boo but not hiss, screw but will not kiss.
Unloaded guns
She prayed and prayed and prayed, and would tell people that the only travel companion she needed in her life was Jesus Christ, Son of Man, who, it seemed, had never heard of her.
she prayed on her knees with steel wool in her hands, trying to rub out a stain that had glommed into the floor and accreted into a sticky solid mass with ambitions to hang on. She prayed in the shower and in line to get on the bus. She prayed while her food spun slowly in the microwave, and she prayed at night as her head hit the pillow.
she prayed away the day and could not have it otherwise
Not content to lavish more abstention on the obdurate slab of stubborn
There ended up being a few surviving words that I might utter and then grab out of the air before they land on their target. At times I will feign the act of bringing them back to my mouth, as though they could be planted back into the fertile soil of black-hearted resentment. But more often I cup them in my hands and look for the right time and place to lay them on the listener, as a capstone at the business end of an argument that I’ve waged with rage enough for both parties. Timing is everything, and it’s not worth sharing a word unless you can be confident it might be the last one.
Some say it’s natural to be vigilant in cultivating the slights and wrongs that make it possible to keep enduring long after self-discipline wants to lie down, let things be, and declare a halt to the dispute. Vehemence is venom, not poison, and counting coup on the words that can’t be held onto, much less taken back, is just one way in which winning this fight at this moment is a surefire, can’t-lose, fully warranted means of never having to be heard from or seen again. You’d like that of course and I would too. #winning. But even here, at the stage when a post-mortem might be graciously given, I am standing in a half crouch, shadow-boxing with the splintered monologues that voices both parts of an exchange, not asking the questions after having seized on the answers fully-formed. Comes up empty-handed, fork-tongued, a blasphemous sermon to oneself.
What’s past help is past grief
Somnolent nights, listening to Arthur Russell’s corn fields grow in the aftermath of the seething July heat, some weeks behind the aftermath of the first cutting of the hay that is baled in what might pass for mobile ovals. Abundant summer, no longer endless, and it’s not as if she’s the first to utter nothing ever happens here or the first to feel, without yet gaining conceptual purchase over, a kind of fated projection outward from this moment. Being repelled from this nothing, as far away as can presently be conceived, is where and how she will find herself. And in that years-long arc from this place, as the sense of self formed from it and wanting to be done with it hardens like a shell, she will venture recognition of a softening loss growing out from the inside. what seemed at the time a necessary casting off will come back and grow roots. It has not rotted through, this soft centered core, it is an anvil that still sings when struck. The chores will come too soon tomorrow whether she goes in now or stays out and counts stars for another hour. Justification not needed.
The light from the wifehouse and the angular array
Don’t forget how much time that the Son of God spent with prostitutes and tax cheats and outcast misfit fucked-up fundamentally forsaken and irrevocably broken sinners. see also this from the committed:
