True that

July is the month of big hits, skin flicks, and lupine track tips. (Wolves, motherfucker – big uns, coming your way, all green eyed and intelligent, nipping at each other’s heels and curling lips back to snarl that half-menacing, half-endearing smile.)

July is the month of the rodeo, the odious dust, the consecrated grass, the big booming thunderstorms roaming through the sky, and minor league baseball. (I heckle better than I do most things)

July is the month of weddings, wine from a box, sycophants with ulterior non-sycophantic motives – be careful lest they seek to help you, rhapsodic frog utterances, 3-flat stoop sitting, summit ascendancy, expansive skin, exegetical maneuvers by teens in handcuffs who were not as fast as they thought they were, articulate glances from tongue wagging dogs, daisies, and introspective horizon glances. (Oh SoDak, where extension into every direction finds a horizon that is near uniform, except when cottonwoods on creek banks leave you with only 350 degrees upon which to feast.)

July is the month of drying out, scorched earth, rampant promiscuity, eviction notices, acquittals, anthems, epics, marital infidelity, dashes through sprinklers, acquisitions of enervating but non-life-threatening viruses, fiscal irresponsibility, blow jobs in megastore parking lots, belly button sweat, and irascible young boys wielding devastating one liners like lances. (Don’t front and act like your world hasn’t been shattered by a tossed off insult from a 90 pound kid, ‘cause you’re lying.)

If I had a band, I would call it the Insincerity . . . .

The scariest ones are those that say I love you

1) It was just after he was released from jail in the early 1990's that Johnson, a former self-described ''big time'' cocaine dealer, turned to evangelical Christianity and clown dancing more or less simultaneously. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/magazine/19CLOWN.html?pagewanted=print

2) Dear Thomas Friedman,

In regards to yesterday’s op-ed piece, what the fuck? The VP is not the master signifier of Presidential decision-making; it’s like you’re talking . Stringing together adverbs ending in –ly does not raise the dramatic stakes of one’s polemic; it’s just clumsy.

3) QUESTION: Thank you. Senator, in his pen and pad briefing this morning, House Majority Leader DeLay said, regarding Iraq, that, "The strategy is working. It's an incredibly fast schedule. Nobody gives anyone any credit. The quality of life and the economy is improving every day."

And he went on to say that, "Everyone that comes back from Iraq is amazed at the difference they see on the ground and they see on their TV sets."

Could you address why the House majority leader would have such a different view of what's going on in Iraq from you?

BIDEN: No.

QUESTION: Thank you.

4) I said Spurs in six or Pistons in seven, so I’m hoping to see the latter realized. It’s been a weird series – it’s hard not to like the Pistons. Every time I see Ben Wallace’s face on the screen, I think his is a face that would look fantastic on an album cover. 42% free throw shooter, though, which is worse than the average 2^nd grader, I’m guessing. Tim Duncan looked like he was having spasms in his hands when he shot free throws in game five, and holy Christ Robert Horry is all I can say.

julio, you are not serious

julio franco stole two bases today, back-to-back. i dont know whether to laugh cry or shit myself. dude's like twice my age.

a politician

This guy is easy to deal with. Notice the joint in his mouth, and his "professional experience."

So today I came across an argument that pro-choice abortion positions and pro-free market positions bear a familial resemblance in the rhetoric they marshal and, to the degree this is true, they share a premise constellated around the sanctity of individual choice over and against other considerations. As someone who at this point is a might bit skeptical of modernity, this resemblance gave me pause, not because it’s spot on (a uterus is not a commodity, though Richard Posner, I believe, was the proponent of the idea that rich fallow people should pay young uncertain women to carry the pregnancy to term) but because it’s been awhile since I’ve taken the time/made the effort to parse out the vicissitudes of “choice” as such. This is not new ground – the apposite Gaddis quote “there has never been the opportunity to do so many things not worth doing” – but new ground may not be all it is cracked up to be.

Obviously, on the flip side, one can begin a critique of a discourse ostensibly directed at defending “a culture of life” by noting how exclusive that culture is. If you’re poor and starving, but not in the womb, then it’s tough luck for you chump – you got of that womb, that’s all that you can ask for. Or if you are in a civilian in a country we are pre-emptively liberating from its backward ass desire to maintain “sovereignty,” tough shit: culture-of-life does not extend to you or the culture out of which you and yours have emerged. Ironically, as far as foreign policy goes (how far?), an exclusive culture-of-life mentality is the closure of “choice,” an overly determined this-is-how-it’s-going-to-be-because-this-is-how-it-has-to-be ethos disdainful of surprise and the unexpected. Our hand is dealt, and we don't really want to be part of the "We" that signifies strafing runs and close-quarter searches, but - at this point - there is no other option. Resign yourself to something you adamantly oppose, and then - how brave or courageous or hungry are you? - read another headline, day by day, and add up the significant abberation that mortality asks of you.

But foreign policy is only one contradiction-in-waiting. You want to turn away, and so do I, because we don't understand the insurgency and if we did it would be a series of sleepless nights - the economy can't countenance THAT. So look at something else, something we can bring into focus, something that makes a me and you out of "we." Individualism allows for – in fact demands – that consumption be a primary means of how we become who we are. A further irony is that there is no respect for the idea that the becoming is significantly intertwined with the being – that how you get rich, how you become successful, how you become esteemed, is hand in glove with being rich, being successful, being esteemed.

I guess I am saying: Be cautious about having what you want, and be satisfied with wanting what you have. We will die before simplicity comes back into favor out of necessity, but it is not too early too scorn what you cannot have. Anyway. Good night or good morning, wherever I find you: holy happiness don't be false.

Boutique environmentalism/conservation/ecology, or how deeply hypocritical am I?

There is a passage in an Aldo Leopold book that describes the history of a molecule, as it passes through various life forms in the natural world (animal, plant, etc.). The point is that we’re all going to die, and our bodies will eventually disperse into fine particles and become part of something else, and something else after that, and something else after that, and so on. You are divisible, in essence, and I am too, and there is nothing to be done about it, both of which facts make it kind of hopelessly beautiful. The passage is moving, despite my limpid attempt to paraphrase, and it proves strangely disorienting for anyone who has not come to terms with the death of the subject and the erroneous notion of a stable ego. All of you poststructuralists have moved to bigger, greener pastures without horseshit or objects even. (Also: If that sentence makes it sound like I have a solid conceptual grasp of the consequences stemming from an embrace of poststructuralism, it’s semi-pseudo-misleading)

I bring this all up because I am a hypocrite, and baldly so, in part because I think I am an I, and I act like one, without regard for much else, rather than thinking that I am transitory and inveterately a fragment. Sources of my hypocrisy are legion, but lately I’m been stuck on things over which I have responsibility in some way related to the health of other living things. My vehicle guzzles gas; my meat comes from factories; I take long showers and who the fuck else knows, but I also would like air to be clean and rivers not to catch on fire plus I think it would be nice to keep certain areas in this country roadless, exercise discretion when logging, not make shit we don’t need, not waste shit that others are going to perish if they don’t have, and so on.

I was a vegetarian for five years or so, and then kind of just folded into protoplasm during the summer of Excess without thinking through why I behaved in that fashion. In hindsight it wasn’t so much a moral failing as a moral forgetting or erasure. So now there has been an uptick in my emotional attachment to land and health and game, and a similar uptick in my disparagement of pollution and waste and excessive appetite and torpidity. I presently send some $$ to organizations that advocate for wilderness protection and land easements, and have written letters to politicians who supposedly represent me on agriculture policy and other banalities that nevertheless are significant. But my actual behavior, the practices out of which I make a life, represent sheer human laziness and an inability to reconcile things I truly I believe in w/ actions I ontologically initiate.

So the fuck what? you say. I shall try to change. I hope I can. But that’s my business.

The point is, as this is not the only instance in which my hypocrisy and I sort of arrive at an uneasy mutual peace (like I did Ben Buckley, my fascistically arrogant roommate first year) there is something going on here. Knowing that there is a disconnect between what one believes and the arena of praxis in which those beliefs take life is one thing; not really caring about it is another. And obviously anyone who’s read the Gourmet article on lobster knows I’m biting off it, but – oddly – I think I repressed the entire question of taking a self-inventory vis a vis food choices, consumption, waste, etc. issues. It is one thing to say: “Who the fuck cares?” in response to veganism or PETA or whatever, but it is another to say “Well, I care” and do nothing about it.

duck duck goose

The incestuous circle of dorkitude (which enthralls me) continues . . . thank you kirt

1. How many books do I own?

A couple hundred. Maybe.

2. Last book I bought:

Um, that would be Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Selected Poems of Richard Hugo.

2b) Last book I pilfered from my employer:

TIE: Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. [Something with “wolf” in the title], Farley Mowat.

3. Last book I read.

Jesus’ Son.

4. The book I’m reading.

Curriculum & Assessment

5. Fiction or non-fiction?

60-40 fiction.

6. First book ever read.

No idea. The roly-poly puppy, perhaps.

7. Largest impact.

God, I don’t know.

8. Most read book.

Where the Red Fern Grows or To Kill A Mockingbird.

9. Fav. scholarly book.

Must We Mean What We Say? Stanley Cavell. Imagining the King’s Death. John Barrell. I can’t say enough about either of these, although half of the essays in the Cavell book wont do much for you unless you get off on Wittgenstein.

10. Sexiest book.

Nah.

11. Biggest disappointment.

Finding out George Eliot was a woman.

12. Five important books.

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks/Libra by Don Delillo – fiction & history & creative renderings of actual things, etc.

American Dreams: Lost & Found/Working. Studs Terkel.

The Recognitions. Gaddis. (don’t know why, necessarily, but it was an important book for me)

Winter in the Blood. James Welch.

FUP. Jim Dodge.

13. Who’s next?

Coghlan.

Gopal goes deep

Here is a lucid account of the post-political, and some thoughts on Machiavelli, from that Indian guy with the tinted glasses and vintage clothes who went to Jimmy’s a lot and seemed more graduate student than prolific leftist provocateur.

Hey friends, and those to whom my promises have not quite met the mark:

Wow. Every season now, winter included, seems to leave me looking backwards at a duration of time that tricked me in its foreshortening. I hope to write you all without a trace of hesitation and free from that internal editor inside my head (Wittgensteinians amongst you allow me that euphemism, please.) But time is our subject. I was reading this book of letters by a man named Diedrich Bonhoeffer by whom I am quite taken. Who he is, and why I am drawn to him, is for another time, but the quote that I’ve had running through my head stems from an essay he wrote, which begins thusly (I write “thusly” because I hate that word and its trumped up bootstrap-pulling aura, and this is a good place to poke fun at myself and my serious letter to all of you, most of whom will never see it):

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s life. As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time lost is time in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty.

One of my weaknesses as a person is to encounter statements like this with suspicion and an overwhelming desire to decipher what trick a speaker who says such things may have under his or her sleeve. Rather than face something on, I look on its profile, gauging the degree to which it is permeable, penetrable, or simply thin. But maybe not here (I am not telling you I’m born again or anything religious or spiritual like that, I say this because you yourself may be like me and suspicious of speakers who try to soothe you with claims of transparency-as-goal or honesty-as-means or even sentimentality-as-nothing-to-shy-at. I simply want to talk some things out, and I have neither the time nor fortitude to contact every person I care about and love and am amazed by, plus I am terrible on the phone: I pace up and down the entire time, mumbling and repeating myself and interrupting you in mid-story with little grace or subtlety.)

So it’s been a long time. About a month ago, I saw some friends with whom I cannot imagine not being friends. It was brief, and great, but afterwards it was back to the daily grind for me after a half-dozen hours wandering airports and bumming Camels off a guy with a thick golden wristwatch who wanted to talk politics. And I was on the plane thinking about these friends and my thoughts sort of exfoliated outward into a list of people in whose lives I wish I could re-immerse myself and make tangible or palpable again, for the sheer expansive mindfuck it would be to become reacquainted with the new selves you are now and hook them to the old selves I knew, and vice versa.

Is this nostalgia then? I think not, but could be wrong. I saw two moose, a deer, and two elk on the drive to work this morning. I saw all of these animals from a distance that allowed me to see their facial expressions. The elk were the first to appear, a few hundred hundreds before the first cattleguard, and they leaped over a fence and took the sleep out of my eyes in the process. But then I saw that one of them left her baby elk behind (baby elk: think bambi but a bit bigger I guess) and I stopped by car, my animal-attracting car, to watch how the baby would deal with its mother’s absence. Too small to leap the fence at the point where its mother did, the baby elk ran parallel to the road and I fell behind it with my car, probably scaring it shitless, and then it reached a point in the fence where someone had installed a gate, and at this point the fence was about three inches shorter than at all previous points, so the baby risked it and barely cleared the gate, springing back into the woods beyond my vision. And I knew in that moment I am about to leave something again, about to strike out for new waters to see if they taste any different than those I sampled last but never quite savored, and I hate the leaving but need it at the same time. I know it is just an animal, just something I saw, but will I ever see it again and if not does that matter?

I do not know, and what was a grand plan indeed at the beginning of this letter has devolved into question marks.

I am tired of current events. We never run out of current events, never put them past us: as a species of information in our lives, they are everpresent and always asking for our attention. I have suffered for a long time from wrongfully directed attention syndrome. I remember on my 2nd or 3rd day of college, I breakfasted with an old high school math book rather than people I knew were interesting, because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t placed in the lowest math section. What a waste, what a pitiful waste! Funny, though, isn’t it: me with my orange juice and eggs, in the sad parallelograms of light that came through the windows of Pierce Hall, with an algebra book spread out before me trying to re-memorize certain formulae that may appear on this little placement test?

So summer has arrived. I have my hikes planned, and my calendar filled with baseball games in Missoula or Helena, and my bank account – fuck it, I’ll run up debt on the credit card, debt is just an absence among absences, which means i am your debt and you mine – I would love to go to the top of a three flat in Chicago and watch the street at twilight, or go to the Bay and try to run out and touch that rock just before the next gush of tide comes in, which I would race and maybe beat but enjoy regardless, or sit on a hood of a car on a gravel road and bullshit, or go some place new to see someone from olden times.

At this point I have lost steam and direction, but that may be the point. I am an early riser these days, and it is late, so I shall cut it short now with the wish that these words find you unstressed and happy with the modicum of suffering you endure alongside your ecstasy, and that you are not alone inside the vastness of your thoughts and feelings. Do not despair – I am not soft, nor old, nor quite responsible yet – I still swear and drink too much and swallow loudly at inappropriate times – but I do miss you, and would like to hug you or if that would be gender inappropriate engage in a fierce handshake and head nod combination that is cool and tender and meaningful all in the same stroke.

W. V. O. Quine: "Yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation" yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation.

Movies I watched as a kid because my dad liked them and I wanted to be like my dad who at that time was invincible:

Movie: Cool Hand Luke.

Thoughts: I still like this movie. I remember being impressed with the older fatter guy who befriends Luke, mostly because of his voice. I also liked the guard with the sunglasses, not the character – I despised the character – but the attire and attitude that came with it.

Movie: Die Hard.

Thoughts: Pretty hard to incriminate, even now that I’m all neo-anti-violence. Not. Hearken back to the sophisticated terrorist cell, European nonetheless, that had no ideology but greed, and a nearly invincible blonde German who turns out to be dying-capable thanks to Carl from Family Matters. Those terrorists were the shit (the germans even had that black computer/breaking-into-safes guy)!!! Plus you got John MacLean (Bonus points: which rapper, in what song, calls himself the black John MacLean?) – bruce willis should just change his name to john maclean.

Movie: Stand By Me.

Thoughts: Not sure if dad really like this one, or if he feigned interest because I liked it. Stands the test of time.

Things I’ve done today to avoid white collar anomie:

Looked at a field guide of animals in Montana, then left the office to go outside and look for scat and tracks. Did find coyote tracks at lunch. (Remember, my office is located on a ranch in country that the government classifies as “wilderness.”)

Did pushups in the bathroom. Three bathroom trips = three sets.

Wrote this piece of shit (which reminds me, does anyone know of that Quine quote that is supposed to accurately express the notion of self-referentiality? Something like: “‘quotation . . . appended to itself’ appended to itself.” Nevermind found it. is now title of this post.

As long as we’re here:

Grelling's paradox: A word is autological if it applies to itself. Short is autological. A word is heterological if it does not apply to itself. Long is heterological. Is autological autological? Is heterological heterological?)

Read chapter, verse from Jeremiah, in the online Bible

Excerpt from the internal newsletter of the organization for which I work:

“As always thanks to Alex for his continued dedication to the Historic Key Votes Program, and for his eagerness in allowing me to use him to brush up on my wrestling moves.”

Explanation: I got my ass bodyslammed last night. I had a few Budweisers, and thought it would be fun to tackle my co-worker/friend/former wrestler/guy who outweighs me by 60 pounds. I did tackle him. Well, trapped him against a wall, picked him up and kind of dropped him. Problem was I ripped his shirt. He came at me, chest-to-chest, wrapped me up, and just drove me into the floor, back first, with most of his weight following quickly. The entire bar stopped talking – my wind was outside me – stars were sparkling – time slowed – etc.

I got up in about five seconds, went to the bar, did a shot with my attacker (whoops), and this morning woke up with a bruise the size of my foot right above my kidney. It is somewhat purplish, as best as I could tell from looking at the fogged-up mirror after showering this morning.

Picks to Click

1) “16 Military Wives,” the Decembrists. Say what you will about reaching a saturation point on bands with kooky/baroque lyrics, sincerity qua authenticity, and eccentric instrumentation – I myself shake my knees underneath my desk to this song, and occasionally push my rollie chair back and do a quick 360 (luckily the headphones cord is long enough to enable this maneuver) with my knees pulled up to my chest for maximum velocity. I think may just have a thing for songs-by-numbers, or songs-with-numbers, or whatever. See also “The Engine Driver,” which contains the lines, “if you don’t love me let me go” and “I am a writer / writer of fictions / I am the heart that you call home / and I’ve written pages upon pages/ Trying to rid you from my bones”

2) The EU debacle.

George Will gets to intimate that the French are [insert pejorative Willian adjective,] CS Monitor compares capitalistic oranges with socialistic apples, and Mr. Buckley peers into the mind of the “French working man” the better to understand the extent to which nationalism lives, breathes, and determines electoral behavior.

3) Whoa, Derek Lee! What the fuck have you been eating for breakfast? If Derek Lee were an animal, he would be Afleet Alex, but not really. Also, when does Vegas start coming out with over/unders on the number of games Prior and Wood combined will play each season before enduring an injury that involves appendages?

4) Derrida from the grave, in the Village Voice for God’s Sake (Dude’s got street cred from here to Algeria):

If, as I believe, the concept of crime against humanity is the count to be answered in this self-indictment, this repentance, and this forgiveness-seeking; if, ultimately, the only justification for this concept lies in the sacral nature of the human (from this point of view, there is nothing worse than a crime against the humanity of the human being and against his or her rights); if the principal—if not indeed the only—resource of the meaning of that sacral nature is to be found in the Abrahamic memories of the faiths of the book and in a Jewish, but above all Christian, interpretation of the terms "neighbor" and "fellow man"; and if, accordingly, a crime against humanity is a crime against that which is most sacred in the living world and hence against the divine in humankind, in God-made-man or man-made-God-by-God (the death of man and the death of God would in that case result from the same crime), then the "globalization" of forgiveness resembles an immense scene of ongoing confession, and hence of a virtually Christian convulsion-conversion-confession, a process of Christianization that no longer has need of the Christian church.

5) Also, what’s with hip-hop’s fetish with skits? I dug “I’ll sew your asshole shut and keep feedin’ you” as much as the next person, but WU TANG FOREVER aside, are there any skit-type intros or whatever worth keeping? I’m on the fence with the skit on the Biggie album when the orgasm-reaching female calls him a Kentucky Fried Chicken eatin’ motherfucker. Ditto for the answering machine motif, which is hip-hop’s equivalent of the-blurb-on-the-back-of-the-book. (Cf. Soundbombing III)

6) Prediction: Rickey Henderson comes out of retirement just to spite Oil Can Boyd.