1078 pages later

the book is re-re-read. i feel sad. not because i am done reading it, but as a result of reading it i.e. it had effects. I don't consider this "feeling sad" to be bad.

The sleeplessness that dare not speak its name

Consequentialism, as a species of utilitarianism, suggests that it is not a good idea to be clicking and clacking keys at such an early hour. Lyricism, for what worth, begs off all questions other than those birthed by necessity.

It's not always clear which lessons matter. Sometimes the conversion experiences stemming from close encounters with the sidewalk or chance perusals of the "e" section of the dictionary disrupt the decision trees that grant coherence. Sometimes the vibrating cell phone in the front pocket is the vehicle by which a radically different framework will insist on its primacy. Sometimes a rose is a rose is a rose, and other times it's an assemblage of petals, pistils, and other reproductive entities. Which lessons matter may be a function of which prompts can be rendered in concrete terms. Failing that, a function of which teachers you allow to puncture the skein of your world's rotund balloon.

I have a rather involved theory that insomnia can be good for me, under certain circumstances. These are not those, based on the above paragraph. I listened to an argument today about the relative merits of the Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and then had an out-of-body experience that left me with mustard all down the front of my shirt. I don't know how this relates to consequentialism or lessons learned, but it did catalyze the little hamster to run some laps on the exercise wheel of my brain and the squeaking continues. I don't discount the value of mustard based on its potential to ruin articles of clothing, especially since approximately 35% of torso clothing of short sleeved persuasion has holes through which a hummingbird could enter. But I do take issue with discussions of Beatles songs that defy predicate logic and exhibit a fundamental inability to understand chronology. No harm done, as they say, and it's a pity we all have to listen.

The Little Dissembler is Dead, Long Live the Little Dissembler

Mr. Gonzalez's resignation, a long time coming, should be greeted as the good thing it is. It shouldn't be turned into a character assassination, with mandatory gestures to Gonzalez's background and the Algerian upward arc manifested through his striving and hard work. There will be pronouncements about Gonzalez's active role in eroding American ideals in the hopes of being able to protect Americans. I suspect there will be some commentators whose excoriations are laced with satisfaction and even glee. That's fine and expected from someone who's entered into an explicitly adversarial role. What sticks, for me, is this image of Gonzalez encouraging bedrest-bound John Ashcroft to sign off on renewal of the "secret" surveillance program. According to Eggers/Kane of WaPost (5/16/07),

Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought.

Now, I'm not averse to some unexpected fucking character development - Shakespeare was a trenchant guy and he sure has dilated my skull's conceptual grid in terms of recognizing from what far fields tragic opportunities may arise - but not in ten suns' lifetimes would I have pictured Ashcroft, wan and sickly, in intensive care, interceding on behalf of the Constitution (recall, if you will, the creepy lighting of his press conference from Russia as he claimed Jose Padilla had planned to set off a dirty bomb). And I guess I take the Ashcroft episode to serve as a object lesson in the risks that come with relying on, and believing in, the myopic caricatures of public figures as Golem figures devoid of any worthy human sentiment.

To me, Gonzalez was the kind of guy who always talked with his hands behind his back, possibly with crossed fingers, or else just to make you wonder what the hell is with the guy who seems so timid and balls-less and yet who has the brass temerity to act as if he really doesn't recall/doesn't remember/doesn't know the answers to all these questions of material importance to the singularly important department he is supposed to be heading. His testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee is of the career suicide variety, and any lasting legitimacy he may have coveted seems to have a half-life equal to one of the polyps on Bush's colon. That said, despite all appearances, Gonzalez is a person, and without either forgetting his lamentable conduct or succumbing to soft profile idiocies, there is something sort of sad about all this. It's like we are witnessing the downfall of someone who thought he might get away with something he really thought was honorable and worthy, and who did a bunch of dishonorable, unbecoming things to try to protect this other thing.

We'll see how it turns out. One thing is for sure - there won't be a reply of Labor Secretary Ray Donovan's 1987, "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?" Any face-saving gesture went stale and futile a long time ago.

Non Sequiturs in the form of Declarative Statements

The statute of limitations on sleep has now passed. Pictures of bright beautiful children waiting at bus stops for something significant to begin appeal to the inner after school special producer in all of us. Coffee and curdled milk appeared on the menu. He was a writer who critics sometimes referred to as a superb stylist and he was also the man under the umbrella next to the pool lying in his own vomit. Sometimes painters forget themselves and walk into the pictures they are trying to extend out to you. Usury is not a luxury enjoyed by contemporary Luddite sects. Time has come. Any acts of insistence that dramatize departures from contemporary mores will be lodged as complaints, in fact. He wonders if people who came across monsters in the pre-TV era looked back at the monster as they ran away, or if the looking-back-while-the-monster-is-closing-in is a habit TV foisted on everyone.
Clinical detachment is not a good thing to bring to a marriage, nor is a genetic disposition towards sucking at life.

Remembrance of Things Past

Cultural consumption from the near and distant past, revisited
in incomplete and arbitrary form:

cinema

Movie: Brick
Starring: Little guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun, no one else I recognized.

Characters: mostly high schoolers or high school officials. alluring actress with spiky hair and fetching voice, thespian slut who chews em out and spits em out and is not afraid to talk about it, 3rd rock guy who used to be in the game but now eats alone and ponders, 3rd rock guy's only sort of ally who knows about drug dealers and has a mom with a car, the two drug dealer guys who I don't have the patience to describe or differentiate.

Special Features: slang, noir in high school, alluring actress with fetching voice, pretty good damned film in my opinion


music

song: possum kingdom
artist: the toadies

what the fuck factor: 7.5. I am a sucker for time changes and anthemic buildups, and though I consider this song something of a guilty pleasure, I still Youtubed
approximately 17 times last week and tried to work casual reference about the Toadies into conversation with rock geek friends to see if they'd take the bait.

Other stuff: Whammie bar - check. Bass drum-+-hihat swish - check. lyrics implying creepy older guy murder plot with implied religiousity of the homicidally bent - check.


books

essay - Lester Bangs essay on Van Morrison, the title of which I'm too lazy
to get.

Basic thrust - Don't front on Lester Bangs.

Stuff - I'll fill it in later but now I have to go to a function. Peace out. Have a kickass summer!! 2007 4ever!!!!!

Things I've been doing in lieu of reading three SDSC opinions re: disciplinary infractions for ethical infractions committed by members of SD bar

1. Listening to the Mountain Goats ("I write down reasons to freeze to death / In my spiral notebook") while drinking Michelobs
2. Shaving neck area and upper cheeks, then remembering mention of "beef cheeks" entree in the WSJ review of Mario Batali's newest eatery in LA



3. Contemplating the possibility that Barack Obama exists, contra the fact that his first name rhymes with the name of the country previously referred to as Over There, supra, and last name rhymes with the leader of terrorist organization who . . .
4. Contemplating the possibility that I did not mishear Obama's rival, Ms. Clinton, utter a dependent clause starting with "if you want" something something battle the Republican machinery(I can't remember specific content) and follow it with "then I'm your girl."



5. reading IJ's notion of anhedonia, roughly 692-69?
6. Considering the inevitable forward-looking appraisal of the Minnesota Twins in 2008, Year of Our Lord
7. Folding laundry, then accidentally knocking laundry hamper over with an aggressive opening of the fridge


8. Regarding my spider plant and its soil-depleted container
9. Thoughtlessly tossing medium sized garbage bag into dumpster and thereby enraging feral cat, then jumping back and attempting to both avoid and kick said cat when it lands at my feet and strikes with forepaws at my Achilles'
10. Remembering anecdotes I shared with my friend's wife's friends, most of whom I knew but didn't really "know," which sharing occurred last night as the humidity subsided from "unmitigated suffering" to "vaguely uncomfortable."
11. "I listen to . . . Dance Music/ Dance Music"
12. Doodling on the SDSC opinions mentioned in the title
14. Happily reflecting on the recent inclusion of an article from Ken Tremendous, RE: firejoemorgan.com fame, in this week's Sports Illustrated
15. Reaffirming dislike of Rick Reilly (closely following #14, supra)



16. Puzzling over the ideational content obtaining to this: "Sven Birkerts called it 'internalizing the decentering energies of computer technology.'"
17. Hearing the lyric "I am young and I am good" and just not quite being sure about it
22. And but it's not even about making a list or checking it twice, right? B/c that's not real ("That's not real" my internal digression announcer announcs) - but so even though this took place in like 12 minutes, it didn't take that long. That's the thing.
23. Declaiming that "In The American Grain" should be read more, and more closely.





24. Confirming that "Apostate" precedes "apoplexy" in the Websters' I happen to own, but let's not put to much stock in that.
25. Resurrecting a central tenet of Modernism vis a vis a Google search for V. Woolf AND dissertation AND Central Washington pulp mills.
26. Saying adios and thinking of how I met Pablo on Thursday at the Prairie Inn and now have an entry for "Pablo" in my cellular phone apparatus
27. Wondering about byzantine excursions into anthropologically tone-deaf exercises in self-reflexive positioning, e.g. "Having spent two years with the [culture X], I began to realize more and more about how they saw me as an outsider in their midst, which itself allowed me to reconsider the initial observations I had made. In short, a radical recalibration was called for." and then, after actually paraphrasing said excursions in print, being very disappointed with all involved, self included.

It's always that everything always speeds up and slows down both

8/9/07, 15:12 - p. 614 - fight scene, elaborated in frame-by-frame detail.
A real ample dessert for the narrative-starved, at this point in the book.


Things to note, at random, in the last three hundred pages

- Conversations contained in the footnotes are vital. Cf. Hal and
Orin, Orin and Steeply, Arlis and Pemulis after Arlis and Schtact,
etc.

- Avril creeps me out. Always and forever.

- Sections dealing with Mario's emotional engagement with the world and
his basic decency, though few and far between, give the narrative a
bit of ballast and dilutes the feeling that you've begun to consume
something that's more enamored with its own clever depiction of suffering
and loneliness and dealing with fucked-upness of the world than it is
responsive to the characters' navigation of said suffering/loneliness/etc.

- Failure is sometimes just bound to happen.

- Bruce Green's father's psychic collapse and evolving turn to lethal
modification of ACME pranks, eventually leading to state-prescribed
lethal injection - I didn't remember that part at all.

More to come. I'm still about 70 pages from the trenchant analysis
re: cynicism and naivete in the US arts which will be excerpted in
toto, eventually, here.

Title:

12:16 am

p. 475. Eric Clipperton, gaspers, Lyle licking sweat, Pat Montesian's stroke-induced physical liabilities, Gately and the Nothingness product of a Higher Power search, Gately giving off signs of "Street" and "Jail" to the residents of the homeless shelter where he works as a janitor responding to incontinence in resident showers and schizoid stench in interpersonal reactions, Calvin Thrust, Eschaton disasters (the snow is the weather, which is not actually real in Eschaton's game-theory-driven ontology), Bob Hope, Marathe and Steeply on a ridge overlooking Arizona desert like an early 21st century reincarnation of Waiting for Godot but with "deep cover" intelligence organization connections, why don't I remember how Axford lost a finer and a half, and does Schtitt listen to opera, and so on.

All this has something to do with the book, but it tells little about what occurs at the level of the sentence.

I am listening to Chet Baker, Live at Colorado, 1966, and drinking can after can of Budweiser Select. Ravioli in the stomach is quietly digesting and my face's reflection in the mirror has the late summer sheen of years gone by. Roger on the Marlboro Lights and the strange satisfaction following a shift to nocturnal patterns.

For the ten weeks I lived in London during autumn 01 I roomed with a Europhile history major named Rowan who cheated on his girlfriend in our room with a girl named Leslie and led me to issue threats of physical violence, which I would have realized, when he turned the channel from 8th inning, Game 6, Diamondbacks-Yankees, to check on a Premier League soccer score. Rowan waxed poetic about the historical character of the streets we roamed and got a strange glint in his eye when he talked about how easy it was for him to imagine the historical epochs towards which our collective academic energies were directed. From his discursive mutterings, I got the idea that he could actually picture the past in something like precise detail, which ability always eluded me. I write this because it seems easier for me to imagine the particular world incarnated in these pages than it does to imagine, say, the world that existed during peanut farmer Carter's reign. Anyway . . .

Paralytic disturbances on the order of like nuclear winter

I am in the Roman Empire of my mind, urging ever more elaborate engineering projects and allocating ever increasing numbers of plebes to combat the fires. Large fires make their own weather systems; everyone out there better stay hydrated.

The eunuchs in the courtyard of the Roman Empire of my mind eat grapes leisurely and rehearse the Latinate dirges until all the echoes become self-sustaining. All is well in their world; it must be a strange one, structured around the idea of being put under the knife.

I leave the Roman Empire of my mind because this phrasing reminds me of Last of the Mohicans and Michael Mann’s cinematography. Collateral was kind of a motherfucker, wasn’t it? That scene when Jamie Foxx’s character has to play the part of the assassin, and he acts all hard and threatening - a convincing portrait of Vincent, really - reminds me of the scene in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive when Naomi Watts tries out for a part and shows - surprisingly, to me at least - that her character Betty really can act and is not just a raw bundle of affected Hollywood fantasy.

Associative matrices, from here: Naomi Watts - > Australia - > Great white sharks.























Infinite Jest related notions:

1) Initial set of aesthetic and ethical/moral concerns laid down here continue to haunt, yes haunt, later work.
2) This is an essentially conservative book; the formal innovations tend to obscure this.
3) Some rooms have five walls.
4) Currently on page 317.
5) I wonder if he took notes when he went to the meetings or if he spoke or what exactly.

AR closes the distance between Long Island and the SoDa

"I'm from Long Island, and it's the suburbs. And when you're from the suburbs, you hang out in parking lots a lot. And then I moved to the city, and people were just in awe that I grew up hanging out in parking lots, because it's kind of stupid. But there were all these parking lots that we hung out in every night [laughs], probably because I skateboarded a lot too. But it was like "Well, which parking lot are we going to go to tonight?" And you kind of just stand there and don't do shit or cause trouble and do what you do, and then you go home-- It's kind of trying to capture weird things like that. That's what I think about when I remember high school: I know I skateboarded a lot, and most of the time I was in some weird grocery store parking lot or something like that. It seems like a mundane thing, but at the same time it stood out as special. I hung out in parking lots. For like, years and years and years. So there's got to be a song in there somewhere."

Universal themes are not the bugaboos your English profs alleged.

Chunklette Devoured 1

day one: pgs 1 - 204. Increasingly, the re-re-reading project (hereafter RRRP) looks to be insane. 1000 pages in five days is not the problem, which indicates quite a lot about both the number of responsibilities I have and the manner in which I dispatch them. The problem is getting something out of it . . . anyway: a few observations, replete with quotes that slay me every time. substantive propositions will be covered in another arena.

1. For me, the book starts to really hum at 172, which is the "Here is how to" section - Mario makes a film with Hal narrating the text we encounter here. It's like four pages or so, and segues into the unattributed comments from Emmet House residents during one-on-ones with Pat Montesian, another favorite of mine. Here are two snippets from Here is how to . . ., neither of which capture how thoroughly enmeshed self-discipline & like willful repression are in Hal's world.

Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is a sort of dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to
his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expctations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own dead father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.

And

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

2. Hal is reading Hamlet when Pemulis calls to confirm acquisition of the potent DMZ (171). This is, to my mind, the relevant Shakespeare text to overlay on top of IJ, despite the surface appeal of Henry V. I'm not sure what the basis for aristocracy is (talent?), but that's another story.

3. Thematic stuff: nightmares (Hal, Orin, Tracht (?)), bugs, the logic of achieving a cure through excessive exposure to/consumption of the thing that makes the cure necessary, and the byzantine connections and name droppings that never quite cohere but grow ever more tantalizing when you think something new's been discovered about the Entertainment or the interrelationships between the different plotlines and the characters driving them.



4. Toomy Doochy, the harelipped snake-owning chicken-screwing pot dealer, has become a shudder-inducing feature in my interior life, to an extent I have trouble understanding and even greater trouble eradicating. For all the love I have in my heart for Don Gately, Bruce Green, and other members of the IJ coterie, I'm not sure it's not bested by the cringe factor that comes with Doochy and other characters who haunt the story. One of the worst is the foster father who puts a Raquel Welch mask on his . . . I don't even want to describe it. Is this just par for the tragic course i.e. being dosed with significant amounts of masochism that assault you and make you cringe is part of the larger strategy of making you work, think, and feel in ways that sugar-coated, purely entertaining or "shocking" aesthetic experiences only mimic? Big question, poorly formulated, but perhaps the impetus of it translates.




5. The vignette involving Himself and his father in like 1956 is one little nugget of Wallace's ability to completely inhabit a voice, a perspective, and render it so artfully that you almost wish you could encounter it again just to get to know it a little bit better.





Music listened to during this post: Mob Deep, The Smiths, Le Tigre, Bloc Party, Black Flag, TV on the Radio, Clipse, Beta Band, Frank Sinatra ("My Way").

she said "you're pretty good with words but words won't save your life"

1.
I still believe in apartment parties and esoteric conversations involving
the demise of Rod Stewart's libido. I still have impatience with the
suggestion that it's time to start getting serious, though Peter Pan
never seemed to get to do the things I wanted to do. Unfulfilled longing
gets as much traction as it ever does, as does the implication that
holding grudges against modernism is an exercise whose effects and
machinations are best held close to the vest. All this aside, there
comes a time, and that time hasn't come quite yet; its intimations are
slick with anticipation. It turns out this thing doesn't just happen
as a course, an unfolding or unpeeling, as it were. Steps are required,
and the manual has lots of symbols ^&*(##~~~~ with cultural resonance.
[Loading customized self-improvement program . . .]

2.
In the next eight days, I'm going re-re-read the largish novel, Infinite
Jest. Or large parts of it, at least. Aside from drinking largish amounts
of coffee and sucking down Marlboro Lights like a banshee on California
crystal meth, I have little to do except grow a beard like this guy




and enter a state of bliss like this




Endorsement of participatory democracy: if you read the book and have something to say about what I say about it, or if you are human and respond to the psychological terrain of being human in these times and have something to say about it, please do so, in private or out here in cyberspace. Good day.

Just Dont Be Numb: Part I

I'm trying to keep track of those ephemeral anxieties that ebb and flow
throughout the day at the lowest order of consciousness and then randomly
emerge, clear as still ponds, to be recognized for what they are.
My new fear is becoming one of those middle-aged men who live in a fashion that prioritizes stability over everything else and who cringe at other people pursuing happiness in ways they do not understand. Also I fear the possibility that
you all have some privileged piece of information pertaining to navigating reality, which piece of information I threw out with the broken down microwave and the
first pamphlet my high school counselor handed to me on the Select Service act.
I do not fear the Pekinese on the corner of Carleton Ave. that descends the
eight stairs from the deck to shout at me and launch a faux attack. One day
I will pick it up and punt that little rat bastard into the street.


Someone should do a history of terror-stricken moments when you realize you've
just done or said something you swore, at some point in the past, you would
never do. Those moments tend to be incisive slashes through the day-to-day
illusion that life can be managed. To work well, it would have to be like guerrilla
attack-style, with a camera crew and a close acquaintance of the person who's
just done the thing they'd never do appearing just after the act was done. Maybe the Real World style confessional plus an anchor as easily indignant as, say, John Stossel (who I loathe with Old Country vehemence). It might not work if it's too enmeshed in the lives of vile people who abandon ideals for selfish motives freely followed because there are only so many of those people; the interesting (and possibly heart-wrenching) version would be instances where people offer up their own accounts of abandoning ideals in the face of necessity (like maybe that pro-choice
advocate whose teenage daughter/son is involved in pregnancy and who can't bear the thought of his/her daughter/son being involved in abortion or switch the situation and make it pro-life - I don't know why abortion is always the fallback dramatic situation but it seems to be). Maybe this is all too much . . .

What else? A history of awkward conversation between supervisors and the people they've just fired, with lots of primary evidence, would also be a welcome addition to that category of art which exists on the margins of being art or just stuff that makes you uncomfortable. "Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted" and so on.
Just don't be numb. That's the new credo: just don't be numb.