If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

I.





Walking outside, creaky door Saturday afternoon with the first crocus poking
through the dirt, way too soft for ground that hard but there anyway -
eating ho hos and drinking coke classic - little miniball you can actually
palm and imagine dunking with, posterizing your brother or cousin or
that kid down the way you hate to admit you want to be.

Two quarters tucked in the small fifth pocket of your jeans, which will buy
a pack of Starburst and nickel gum whose taste comes all sugary and legit
for five chews and then leaves an unforgiving rock in its wake.



II.

RE: Naivete of naivete of cynicism, or some such shit.

See joan didion in NYRB. I implore everyone to leave "Drink the Koolaid"
to books by Toure and other collections with hip-hop emphasis. Otherwise
let's move on.

beyond the push/pull of hedonism, ascetism

Find the melancholy dialectic of concrete and prairie on a campus
full of 20 somethings in sweatpants and inner-directed compasses.

OR


Find the line in the book of poems that states: [Proposition regarding
the existence of fun] / when we weren't sure our lives were worth
surviving.














OR

Find sibilance on reruns of Imus episodes from the eighties, back
when shock jock meant something more: much more, much less.
Do it on a radio with a dial that actually turns.









Beg for conjunction

AND


Get "you dipshit" cute with the typesetting.


AND

Find a story involving characters whose lives are an
obscure reggae song and spread it like syphilis in the
house of De Sade.


AND

Run 12 miles today, tomorrow, the day after that, and the next
day too. Regret smoking for so long. Regret not having that
regret sooner.

Beyond emotional infancy: self-help, suffused with Pink Floyd

****
The tendency to grow comfortably numb, wondering if there really
is anybody out there, becomes an unconscious habit. Like the way things were in the 1970s.






****
Isolation from others begets alienation from a sense of who you are,
in part because who you are depends on being able to interpenetrate
social space. If you can't inhabit that space, if you can't, so to
speak, get outside the wall, you spend your whole life waiting for
the worms. And the worms are death, which you shouldn't wait for.
You can't preempt death, is the thing: you can't preempt, grow used
to, or become accustomed to your own death. You can't experience
that great gig in the sky either.



****
Getting out of your own way means knowing how to avoid pulling
your own strings. Let your strings dangle, let your diamonds
shine - don't dig that hole. Get a good job with good pay, you're okay.


****

Some think hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
Tell that to Henry David Thoreau. He knew something about quiet
desperation - he saw it in those around him, and he tried to overcome
it by going to the woods and writing a long book that was destined
to become cut up into pithy apothegms for greeting card companies.
It goes to show you that when America broke loose of the chains of
English anomie, other constraints stood waiting to be self-imposed.
Thoreau had an axe, evidently, which he borrowed from a neighbor
and returned even sharper for the use of it. Sharpen that axe.
Breathe. Breathe in the air.

Perfidy in Line Waiting, Three Power Chords Ignite A Flame

*****
I live in a town that Sinclair Lewis wouldn't have known
what to do with in terms of easy reducibility. There is
construction, the weakest approximation of a domed sports
facility this side of Eastern Europe, seven restaurants
featuring sandwiches and fries, and sloped sidewalks.


For some reason I have been listening to music that sounds
like Neil Young in a haze of cough syrup.

The biggest thing that happened to me today was a leaky
coffee mug; I still am at a life stage where I study for
tests.


Taking tests is probably what I am best at.

I am the only individual on the upper level of a library, which
is where the heat stays and the old books go to die.
I thought I read this sentence today: "There is no surfeit
of glory" but I had skipped a line.


*****

Tomorrow I will take this to some other place.

naivete of naivete of cynicism

A.

when words speak louder than actions . . . - or how to put things on hold
in order for the lame duck to waddle off the stage to make way for the
Orator and his new declarations.


1) Premise: The West Wing paved the way for the Orator's ascendancy in
creating an appetite for a kind of rhetoric that both looked backward
for its style and forward for its substance (such as it is).

2) Premise: Tom Daschle is 5'7".

3) Premise: Speaking in complete sentences will be the new Elitism.

4) Premise: Osama bin Laden releases video re: Obama-Biden sometime
before February.



B.

Rod Stewart is insufferable.

naivete of cynicism?

Maybe the pragmatists and the wait-and-seers, the ones who won't buy into
all the hype, the clear-eyed and steely-hearted, are really bathing in
illusion? Or enamored with the coolness of naysaying?

The truth is I don’t think I’ve ever found anything as purely ‘moving’ as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit when I first read it

It turns out that having looming deadlines is about the best catalyst for
non-linear writing as a guy like me can ask for. Hence, declarations:


Sports Illustrated is Saturday morning escape-into-the-lingua-franca. To
be consumed with coffee, but no longer cigarettes.


Waiting for a postcard from Italy from one of your best friends, who has
become an honest-to-goodness devotee of the spiritual life with a shaved
head and second vowel-intensive name, is really a taxing kind of waiting.


Having an English major background and being mildly conversant in Theory
does sometimes (for me) catalyze a need to pick up the latest bit of
Continental (or if not the latest, the most readily accessed). It turns
out the love-hate doesn't dissipate.


"Everyone's married and saving or single and slaving," is something I
heard a stranger utter into a cellphone two days ago after a reuben on
rye and very precisely seasoned waffle fries. I did not like the person
doing the uttering, in part because it was uttered with the same kind
of piety that I associate with people in suits standing before cameras
speaking about public safety.

Onward, Frazzled Soldiers

1.


as per expectations, the New Yorker's election coverage
has been quite good. I particularly recommend Remnick's
the Joshua Generation, which begins:

Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.

if you were not aware that the new yorker is a magazine
that can be found at newyorker.com, now you are.








2.

Succumbed, not succombed.

Zadi Smith has a piece in the New York Review of Books.
It seems to be about two trajectories that the novel
is on (it seems weird to put it that way, but . .), one
of which seems to originate with white dudes enamored
with the idea of the avant-garde.

Having spent the last year and a half in libraries downing
Mt Dew and wading through texts that have little to do
with the avant-garde or even novels, I do not feel qualified
to comment. I am reading the Sawtelle dog book from that
woman Oprah and her club, as grist for the conversational
mill with the parents. And Yates Revolutionary Road is
designated hitter re: Christmas break. I need to flesh
out the lineup, and would enjoy any suggestions that
lean away from the traditional/lyrical Realism and
countenance something a bit more fucked up.

If you have such suggestions, please do share.

luminous generalities of constitutional exegesis

Friday night reading of book and listening to music as foreplay
for putting head down on pillow and letting go of consciousness,
having finally (perhaps) arrived at that point where a snowstorm
in November is enough to turn down the volume on self-permissive
blackouts. 28 is the new purgative.

Partially: way to go voters.
Partially: a new shitstorm's on the prowl.
Partially: self-congratulations is a bit rich, seeing as things
got so bad b/c we slept on shit for so long.
Partially: don't ever interrupt my consciousness again - I'm going
back to sleep.