Eat what's on your plate

graffiti in Miami

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

What Ari Fleischer and Scott McLellan wake up to at the 4 am nighsweat time


1. For the second time in five years, I have booked a flight departing at 6 am, having thought I was booking a flight departing at 6 pm. Perhaps a reason I have only booked three flights in the last five years. Fuck me running.

2. Here is the person behind the series, "The Wire." Am I suggesting that this is worth minutes of your life? I am. Do I know you? Not in the Biblical sense, no, but I think he has things to say that you should hear.







3. Cant Stop Wont Stop
Out Stealing Horses
God's Pocket
I am not Jackson Pollock


What are the books on which the cup of coffee precariously sits?





4.
"It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme — I am tempted to say evil — genius . . . It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself, but it’s been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares."


What NY Times Critic A.O. Scott, with whom my friend Scott wants to be entombed, says about Johnny Depp's new joint, Sweeney Todd?

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.

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.