A bon vivant kind of life

Axioms and apothegms make everyday thinking seem like it suffers from a kind of stutter. You might prefer maxims but we all have our pretensions. La Rouchefoucauld is who they summon in the seminar rooms. Rakim is who they rock in the streets. Pull a string taut and measure once, then make it a loop and measure again. Not that the mumble rappers could appreciate it, or the crank turners in tweed any better.

The inability to switch codes and follow each across the leap - the inability or unwillingness? - is a blinkering loss. Is it really the case thar 50% of people walk around without an inner monologue? When the doubting thomases shudder. It is good to be struck dumb and left with your bones reverberating in the wake of a coruscating insight. I am as close as I’ve ever been to solving the insomniac’s dilemma. Fail. Fail best. Forebear.

I sing to you my ineptitude and in exchange I deserve but do not demand sustained unremitting applause

I sing to you my ineptitude

and in exchange

you clamp down on happiness

trapped and squirming, but

signed and delivered, too.

in acceptance of what

i had wrought, clumsy as

swollen tongue

and as scintillating, maybe,

as dryer lint collected in the bottom

of a wire waste basket in the dark corner.

but true, squared away, with not even a nub of pretense

and above all, for no one else.

in acceptance, that core exchange,

you hand over your heart and

I am

without recourse, slayed.

which is why I deserve, but do not demand,

your unremitting and sustained applause.

color us both seduced.

yes, you. To you I sing.

We want to want what we want to want and waste what is there for the taking. Declaim and repeat.

I do not pine after every paean to the explanatory power of mimetic desire moldering in the drafts folder of a West Coast would be hustler. I pine after the idiosyncratically generous voice of the niche-regional autodidact who tried but failed to teach himself Latin or made a point of getting through the how to code in RubyOnRails not to disrupt anything, but because conversancy in many languages is the currency that giving a fuck cashes out in. Because encompassing multitudes and gazing on the nude bathers is just how one rolls. Because minding the gap between being the person who knows that what gets measured is what matters and becoming the person who gives voice to what is zipping around one’s soul is what used to get called integrity and now just oscillates around in object-oriented ontological ether. Which may be better, in what presently passes for the long run.

Big in Kenya. Huge. Insatiable desire for this there.

A little Roman a clef of critical putsch:

I think autofiction’s problem is also the reason for its popularity, or the reason for its popularity among critics. Autofiction gets to the heart of why people read. Why do you sit on a train or a bus with a book? Are you pursuing knowledge, or self-knowledge, or are you using the book as a type of mating call, or as a sexual- or class-signifier? Autofiction answers the question of why people read in a very direct way: people read for sociology, or anthropology – people read to make comparisons, between their own lives and the life of the protagonist-writer, between the ways they’ve handled or not handled the issues of love and marriage and fidelity and money and child-having and child-rearing and so on, and the ways the protagonist-writer has handled or not handled same. It’s all just literacy-as-anxiety: how am I doing compared to how this published author is doing? How do I stack up? In that sense, autoficition combines the, in my opinion, deadly impulses of the religious and the bourgeois, in that it’s part Classical wisdom literature (how to live, how not to live), and part Victorian novel of “information” (providing data on how people – privileged people – dress, eat, have sex, and manage to pay for all of it). This depresses me. This need for guidance. This need for models. The constant craving and tracking of status that bespeaks an alienation from family and friends, that delicate but necessary democratic equilibrium of individual ambition and common culture. Autofiction is what comes after that: scorekeeping, a metric.

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Deleuzian century says what?

From head to toes in Acronym and pegged to the prose of one William Gibson

Street style as a kind of legible enactment of a higher purpose that only matters to an inside few and that feels, outside a ping of the cash register, purposeless to all who do not share it and do not belong to it. Pockets of intrigue, cut throat and hidebound. No to the runway, as it existed when street style was still held back, behind the roped entrance. The exclusive walled off domain: not that the walls came crumbling down, but were vaulted over, made permeable, a pole vaulter’s inner confidence that the springboard of cool, that which need never explain itself, would bend back to true and transfer its terrible leverage so the up and over came to be.

yes and yes to kinetics and concealment, yes and yes to a closet of instantaneous transport.

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Land is wealth, vague as Luc Tuymans

Say the author is dead all you want, and sustain the pleasure of the text as a reverie. But the painter is not dead. The painter’s trace is something else

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Hoods and arrows, the hot wind of an inclement mind

in the beginning of a painting everyone's in the studio—like all of your thoughts and people who are on your mind—and little by little everyone leaves and finally the painter leaves too, and then the painting happens, and it becomes a painting.

• someone not famous, in the wider sense of the word

To be on-kilter, go unplugged; if not loved, be scarce at least

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OF all the greatest minds of my generation, so many were making a go of it by pitching self-development to an audience of others pitching self-development and sitting in an expanding tent of self-congratulatory irrelevance. Great faith in finding sustenance in the productivity and time management practices. Go forth and prevaricate, picking among the desiccated husks of ideas that have been repurposed and refashioned to a new sheen. So long as new vocabularies can still connect to the old cliches, the fashionable tripe of today will rhyme with what was being passed off as original thought 20 years ago. Even if the accelerationists might demure. Perhaps the efficiency of type setters is not the great dirge I might want to make it out to be, or perhaps I’m just tired of having such dispiriting little faith in the idea that this self has the capacity to be disciplined about developing itself. The scarcity mindset and the soft dignity of low expectations have their place. Indifference is the skeleton key of the misunderestimated resistance to the dominant ethos of the age. Color me neutral, in other words. Mark the stage of grief that follows from Kafka being all the rage and Knausgaard being all the belly button lint. All the great teachers, having been taken out at dawn and shot, are haunting us with the sense of insecurity and meager accomplishment they helped to inspire. Ride out the rhetorical filigree in the future rake’s gleeful dismissal of all that we, here in the now, amounted to.

Add sad in the wake of a cascade of calamities; so many first rodeos to come

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insurance companies are going to make adjustments, and reinsurance companies are going to write (and pay out on) more policies. Poets are going to be called upon to consider what words are appropriate to capture the attention of an Audience that did not act when it knew it should and more than fair warning, as expressed and confirmed in multiple lines of evidence, of what havoc would wreak if It did not rise to the occasion. Wreckage is a new kind of bricolage. Add sad again and again.

The trouble with being born and the black hole of August

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Excerpt from a writer posing as journalist for whom journalistic scruples was something to which one must subject an exacting gaze

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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

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“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: