Now that it’s summer, we know what you’re thinking: “Finally! No more school to interfere with my drinking!” But let’s be honest. School didn’t make much of a dent in that drinking habit of yours. What school’s really been interfering with is your thinking.
The New Era of Hope demands that we Ask More of ourselves this summer. In this spirit of Hope, Change and Diet Pepsi, we have decided to start a literary endeavor. We realized (after participating in a most excellent collaborative Choose Your Own Adventure project) that we need more projects, we need more adventure, and we anti-social writers certainly need more collaboration.
We want YOU to embark with us on this literary odyssey, this Oregon Trail of Oratory. Let’s circle the wagons, people! Let’s march onward, stake new terrain and call it whatever we want! Let’s run this fucking metaphor into the ground!
The theme of our inaugural issue? Manifesto Destiny.
Let’s think long and hard and deep [1] about the world we always thought we should be living in. Don’t wait for law students and hipsters [2] to define the zeitgeist of the Obama era. Write that manifesto you always assumed would write itself. Manifest, finally, the ideas, the dreams, the visions that drove us to write in the first place. Answer (if not once and for all, at least once and for now) why we do this to ourselves and what we want to say through all of our blood, sweat, and occupational stress injuries.
Why are we here and what do we want to do about it? What did you imagine for yourself when you were 17, before you realized you were too cool to air-quotes “believe” in things? Surely it didn’t include sitting in cubicles and stuffing cash into the couch cushions of what would turn out to be an imaginary 401(k). What, in your wildest moments, do you believe is possible? Let us do all that is possible to remember all that is possible!
Don’t worry. This doesn’t have to be a giant feat-of-strength undertaking. We’re only talking about everything, including the impossibility of talking about everything. But to do so, we require input from everyone. It’s not that we’re lazy, it’s just that we have an honest and humble understanding of our ontological and epistemological predicament [3]. We must put our proverbial heads together to forge one huge reminder of all we can do if we just, oh, I don’t know, do it.
We know, we know. Finishing things is hard. Do you know how long it took us to write this email? [4] But finishing doesn’t have to be hard if we get over ourselves a little bit. Remember how excited we got about reading each other’s Choose Your Own Adventure stories, how cool it was to end up with a perfect little hilarious book of our friends’ work? That was so easy!
Our most important readers are always each other. We don’t have to wait for the New Yorker to notice or for our glorious futures to arrive before shouting our thoughts, however half-baked and dangerous they may seem. We don’t have to wait until we’ve edited the three novels sitting in our desk drawer. We will no longer settle for creating works So Postmodern that they do not Actually Exist [5].
Each of you has been granted two pages to fill with “brilliant, mordant and witty observations about American life,” or “hilarious satire of cultural vacuity,” or “weirdly conceived sketches of urban hipsters,” [6] or any combination of text, image or pop-up storytelling you want the world to be/hold. Be ridiculous. Be emphatic. We are at the border between now and the future. What do you have to declare?
You are here. The Infinite (tm) is just over that next ridge. Walk 20 paces and make a left at the sign. Breathe deeply. Smile. Write something. Then send it to us! It’s time to RSVP for the Summer of Everything! [7]
Here’s to Revolution, The Universe and Everything Else,
Chris and Sarah
[Endnotes]
1. No, not about that.
2. Okay, other hipsters.
3. See our drunken conversation until 4 AM the other night. Oh wait, you weren’t there for that.
4. Too long. Longer even than it’s taking you to read it.
5. See also Bigfoot and the Great American Novel.
6. Who said that?
7. Oh yeah, please do RSVP (ASAP and other acronyms) to us as well. Let us know if you plan to send something along. We’re collecting all your little scraps of everything by Wednesday, July 1. That’s just four short weeks from yesterday, so let’s get manifesting!
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Happy Birthday Truong!
The first time I met Truong he offered me a job,
which goes to show what the standards are
for TA’s at San Francisco State. Thirty seconds,
no questions asked, good luck kid. But I am
very thankful for that opportunity to fight
with unbalanced undergraduates every week,
if only to find out what teaching is all about.
It turns out to be about slowly losing your mind
in six month intervals. Over & over. Forever.
I think we did pretty good that first semester. I only
showed up drunk once, and that was the last
day of class, which barely even counts at all.
I also have to thank Truong for introducing me
to my girlfriend, Sarah. And by “introducing,” I mean
he came over & said, “Watch out for this guy,
he’s trouble. Just look at his hair!” He was wearing
a coon-skin cap at the time, so I don’t know how
seriously she could take took him, but part
of me suspects she’s still not quite over that.
But mostly I think of Truong as ringleader of a circus.
The rest of us work as acrobats & clowns, riding on
elephants and on the rest of the creative writing dept.
faculty, driving them mad with the idea we think
their classes are kind of a joke, which, compared
to the serious fun he manages to have in his, they are.
You all know the players in this big crazy tent
because you are them. An incomplete list includes:
Rick chasing homeless guys down the road,
in a clown suit, on skates, because he thought
they hit Vinh. Vinh burning incredible piles
of weed from his secret garden in Golden Gate Park,
where he picks tomatoes to make Clamato,
which Britta drinks while balancing on a beach ball
& juggling knives in the kitchen, trying not
to drop them on Olive the Super Dog, wrapped
in a pink bandanna she stole from Macy’s lingerie dept.
Ali driving her 20th Volkswagen bus to New Hampshire,
only to turn around & return, unload buckets
of east coast apple seeds & do cartwheels down Haight St.
to the tunes of her very own songs. Dustin taming tigers
in a cage made from dictionary pages, talking
shit to the pile of talking shit he found in Paradise.
Carolyn conducting an orchestral chorus, singing
the Queef poem to hundreds of kindergartners,
their parents trampling over each other to the exit.
Anvhu…Well, Anvhu is on a boat somewhere
after breaking his hand training to box Francois
& couldn’t be reached for comment. Most importantly,
Truong sits at the center of all this, mostly calm,
watching to make sure no one gets (too badly) hurt
falling from the flying trapeze. This is what he teaches
each day by example. How to be an artist, poet,
teacher, friend, mentor, guide. How to live this life
& not just talk about living it someday. How to
do all this without selling out or getting boring.
How to get serious enough to do all he’s done,
but not so serious he forgot why he started performing
his art in the first place. How to make all this happen
for himself &, luckily, for all the rest of us.
Truong is one of the first people I met in San Francisco.
And I am more at home in San Francisco because of Truong
& this circus he was brilliant and brave enough to create.
In other words, I’m Truong Tran, bitches! Let’s celebrate.
which goes to show what the standards are
for TA’s at San Francisco State. Thirty seconds,
no questions asked, good luck kid. But I am
very thankful for that opportunity to fight
with unbalanced undergraduates every week,
if only to find out what teaching is all about.
It turns out to be about slowly losing your mind
in six month intervals. Over & over. Forever.
I think we did pretty good that first semester. I only
showed up drunk once, and that was the last
day of class, which barely even counts at all.
I also have to thank Truong for introducing me
to my girlfriend, Sarah. And by “introducing,” I mean
he came over & said, “Watch out for this guy,
he’s trouble. Just look at his hair!” He was wearing
a coon-skin cap at the time, so I don’t know how
seriously she could take took him, but part
of me suspects she’s still not quite over that.
But mostly I think of Truong as ringleader of a circus.
The rest of us work as acrobats & clowns, riding on
elephants and on the rest of the creative writing dept.
faculty, driving them mad with the idea we think
their classes are kind of a joke, which, compared
to the serious fun he manages to have in his, they are.
You all know the players in this big crazy tent
because you are them. An incomplete list includes:
Rick chasing homeless guys down the road,
in a clown suit, on skates, because he thought
they hit Vinh. Vinh burning incredible piles
of weed from his secret garden in Golden Gate Park,
where he picks tomatoes to make Clamato,
which Britta drinks while balancing on a beach ball
& juggling knives in the kitchen, trying not
to drop them on Olive the Super Dog, wrapped
in a pink bandanna she stole from Macy’s lingerie dept.
Ali driving her 20th Volkswagen bus to New Hampshire,
only to turn around & return, unload buckets
of east coast apple seeds & do cartwheels down Haight St.
to the tunes of her very own songs. Dustin taming tigers
in a cage made from dictionary pages, talking
shit to the pile of talking shit he found in Paradise.
Carolyn conducting an orchestral chorus, singing
the Queef poem to hundreds of kindergartners,
their parents trampling over each other to the exit.
Anvhu…Well, Anvhu is on a boat somewhere
after breaking his hand training to box Francois
& couldn’t be reached for comment. Most importantly,
Truong sits at the center of all this, mostly calm,
watching to make sure no one gets (too badly) hurt
falling from the flying trapeze. This is what he teaches
each day by example. How to be an artist, poet,
teacher, friend, mentor, guide. How to live this life
& not just talk about living it someday. How to
do all this without selling out or getting boring.
How to get serious enough to do all he’s done,
but not so serious he forgot why he started performing
his art in the first place. How to make all this happen
for himself &, luckily, for all the rest of us.
Truong is one of the first people I met in San Francisco.
And I am more at home in San Francisco because of Truong
& this circus he was brilliant and brave enough to create.
In other words, I’m Truong Tran, bitches! Let’s celebrate.
Fuck Society, Man
Society is just an abstraction
invented by English graduate students
to disrupt family events during holidays.
As in, “I’m not gonna sell
my soul to Citibank
just because SOCIETY tells me to.”
As in, “I am using
my overpriced education not just to incur
debts I can never pay, but also to pretend
this poem has something to do
with politics and not just
my weird subconscious desire
to remain 25 forever.”
This guy I knew once, when I was
in college, had a theory
that everyone went through a phase
of hating their parents. But he also used to drink
NyQuil straight from the bottle
during philosophy exams, so he might be
what we like to refer to
as an “unreliable narrator.”
Speaking of which, I have changed my name
to Connor Oberst. In fact, I am
also that postmodern author he sings about
or, rather, I sing about in that song. I do not exist.
I do however know a lot
about mythology. Certain symbols & tropes
cut universally across all known human cultures.
When I think about this, I dream
about writing the ultimate poem
& starting a new religion. This is,
of course, not
the ultimate poem. Though I do expect it will
get hipster girls to fall in love with me, now
that I’ve got a much more emo-sounding name.
Things get way less interesting
when you lay them out like that, I know,
but I’m not exactly quivering
with fear from offending the MFA mafia.
For god’s sake, one of my teachers translated
“Cosa Nostra” as “tennis elbow”
in a recent magazine no one read,
which shows you the concerns
& general ethical commitment
of tenure-track faculty across the nation.
Yet I also dream of being
one such professor. I mean,
the vacations are just ridiculous.
invented by English graduate students
to disrupt family events during holidays.
As in, “I’m not gonna sell
my soul to Citibank
just because SOCIETY tells me to.”
As in, “I am using
my overpriced education not just to incur
debts I can never pay, but also to pretend
this poem has something to do
with politics and not just
my weird subconscious desire
to remain 25 forever.”
This guy I knew once, when I was
in college, had a theory
that everyone went through a phase
of hating their parents. But he also used to drink
NyQuil straight from the bottle
during philosophy exams, so he might be
what we like to refer to
as an “unreliable narrator.”
Speaking of which, I have changed my name
to Connor Oberst. In fact, I am
also that postmodern author he sings about
or, rather, I sing about in that song. I do not exist.
I do however know a lot
about mythology. Certain symbols & tropes
cut universally across all known human cultures.
When I think about this, I dream
about writing the ultimate poem
& starting a new religion. This is,
of course, not
the ultimate poem. Though I do expect it will
get hipster girls to fall in love with me, now
that I’ve got a much more emo-sounding name.
Things get way less interesting
when you lay them out like that, I know,
but I’m not exactly quivering
with fear from offending the MFA mafia.
For god’s sake, one of my teachers translated
“Cosa Nostra” as “tennis elbow”
in a recent magazine no one read,
which shows you the concerns
& general ethical commitment
of tenure-track faculty across the nation.
Yet I also dream of being
one such professor. I mean,
the vacations are just ridiculous.
A Political Poem
Politics express the country’s collective
psychic disorders. Cable news simply broadcasts
the dreams of unusually powerful senators,
certainly not what the Greeks imagined
when they elected the first openly gay mayor
of Athens, before Socrates began bothering everyone
& people crept back in the closet. No one
remembers anymore. The records burned up
when the original library caught fire, in Alexandria,
at which point we lost all our knowledge
about the approaching centuries. So we make it all up,
again. Across the several dimensions, a mythic gravity
stays constant. I read this in a magazine
two days after staying up all night watching the war
not happen on commercial-free coverage on CNN.
We all were afraid to turn away, not least
the Iraqis searching the tube for clues
or omens, you might call them, falling out of the sky
& into the dawn of the future. Boom.
It is always the desert where these things occur.
The western fantasy acted out, unconsensually,
on a soundstage in the far east. Farther east
than the valley, where Gregory Peck
takes charge in a town held back by lack of water,
where settlers outside Jerusalem hack down olive trees,
plow roots into salted ground, land & destiny
stolen from somebody’s grandfather. No one remembers
his name either, though it is written on the deed
locked up in the vault of a court
that no longer exists. After the return flight home,
a line of flag-draped coffins parades down Main Street
in the Magic Kingdom, to a marching rhythm
beat out on the scalps of the Washington Redskins.
We use these myths to sell Chevrolet trucks
at halftime of Super Bowl 357. Ready, aim, fire
all the immigrant workers who make freedom,
in a very large factory, more free
than it would’ve been otherwise. I bought mine
at a garage sale, half-price. I wear it pinned to my chest,
my freedom, while I sit on the couch. I pore over
photographs of tortured prisoners, scrutinize
the anatomies of dreams deferred. They all look
the same: body parts disassembled,
dissembled from the mouths of the president’s men.
Arms & legs puked through bright shiny teeth.
Fingernails collected, put in a book like stamps,
to be used as tools in a primitive fight
against a shadow attacker at high noon.
In the dead of the night, she conjures
this pleasure again, licking your impotent skin
with fingertips. Hair on your arm a mess of tentacles
sexing the air, pressed against the edge
of whatever separates this heat from the world
it wants to eat alive, consume
the blue blue sky. His blue blue eyes,
a whip-sharp piercing bondage blue, taste
like light on the surface of water, a lake
or ocean heaving in the moon’s orgiastic pull.
Its circular orbit balanced, somewhere, by giant
bowling balls so we all stay suspended
in this disbelief in the life we’ve imagined, exactly
how a hummingbird exerts such perfect control,
spins its own gravity, a certain, sure-
footed grip on the air stood still, its wings
a globe in motion, a world
worlding itself whole.
psychic disorders. Cable news simply broadcasts
the dreams of unusually powerful senators,
certainly not what the Greeks imagined
when they elected the first openly gay mayor
of Athens, before Socrates began bothering everyone
& people crept back in the closet. No one
remembers anymore. The records burned up
when the original library caught fire, in Alexandria,
at which point we lost all our knowledge
about the approaching centuries. So we make it all up,
again. Across the several dimensions, a mythic gravity
stays constant. I read this in a magazine
two days after staying up all night watching the war
not happen on commercial-free coverage on CNN.
We all were afraid to turn away, not least
the Iraqis searching the tube for clues
or omens, you might call them, falling out of the sky
& into the dawn of the future. Boom.
It is always the desert where these things occur.
The western fantasy acted out, unconsensually,
on a soundstage in the far east. Farther east
than the valley, where Gregory Peck
takes charge in a town held back by lack of water,
where settlers outside Jerusalem hack down olive trees,
plow roots into salted ground, land & destiny
stolen from somebody’s grandfather. No one remembers
his name either, though it is written on the deed
locked up in the vault of a court
that no longer exists. After the return flight home,
a line of flag-draped coffins parades down Main Street
in the Magic Kingdom, to a marching rhythm
beat out on the scalps of the Washington Redskins.
We use these myths to sell Chevrolet trucks
at halftime of Super Bowl 357. Ready, aim, fire
all the immigrant workers who make freedom,
in a very large factory, more free
than it would’ve been otherwise. I bought mine
at a garage sale, half-price. I wear it pinned to my chest,
my freedom, while I sit on the couch. I pore over
photographs of tortured prisoners, scrutinize
the anatomies of dreams deferred. They all look
the same: body parts disassembled,
dissembled from the mouths of the president’s men.
Arms & legs puked through bright shiny teeth.
Fingernails collected, put in a book like stamps,
to be used as tools in a primitive fight
against a shadow attacker at high noon.
In the dead of the night, she conjures
this pleasure again, licking your impotent skin
with fingertips. Hair on your arm a mess of tentacles
sexing the air, pressed against the edge
of whatever separates this heat from the world
it wants to eat alive, consume
the blue blue sky. His blue blue eyes,
a whip-sharp piercing bondage blue, taste
like light on the surface of water, a lake
or ocean heaving in the moon’s orgiastic pull.
Its circular orbit balanced, somewhere, by giant
bowling balls so we all stay suspended
in this disbelief in the life we’ve imagined, exactly
how a hummingbird exerts such perfect control,
spins its own gravity, a certain, sure-
footed grip on the air stood still, its wings
a globe in motion, a world
worlding itself whole.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Why You'd Want To Live Here
nixa, missouri
everyone here was born somewhere
else, in a different country,
even if that place was named
the same as this one. it is changed
now. the horizon much more crowded
than you last remember. the suburbs
huddle nearer each year. bunch
in overplanted crops that bear diminishing
yields. the future is shrinking. salt ruins
more soil out by the coasts every day.
I approach the town I grew up in
from two angles. it is never the same
twice. and never changes.
you can’t go home again, no
shit. but, remember this, neither
can you ever leave.
everyone here was born somewhere
else, in a different country,
even if that place was named
the same as this one. it is changed
now. the horizon much more crowded
than you last remember. the suburbs
huddle nearer each year. bunch
in overplanted crops that bear diminishing
yields. the future is shrinking. salt ruins
more soil out by the coasts every day.
I approach the town I grew up in
from two angles. it is never the same
twice. and never changes.
you can’t go home again, no
shit. but, remember this, neither
can you ever leave.
I Don't Actually Have a Daughter
on the occasion of my daughter’s graduation
I also only wanted
a home, like you
seem perpetually to be seeking,
running in circles, always
& never finding yourself
where you started or thought
you would ever end up. This disguises
some other desire. Your need to be right
about something. To locate a certainty,
attach yourself to it & pray, each day
for the rest of your life, to never be left
alone in the woods again. No matter
how many times I tell you bears don’t live
around here, you refuse to close your eyes
in the daytime. This is a matter of trust.
Not in me, or yourself, but in the upcoming
seconds of time, the possibility the world
might cease to exist if we stop willing it
to behave in exactly the fashion we need.
Does this sound ridiculous? I admit
nothing. There’s no telling how
long this search will continue. How you
may someday find yourself exhausted
in the face of the impossible. What then?
Then you will read this
again.
I also only wanted
a home, like you
seem perpetually to be seeking,
running in circles, always
& never finding yourself
where you started or thought
you would ever end up. This disguises
some other desire. Your need to be right
about something. To locate a certainty,
attach yourself to it & pray, each day
for the rest of your life, to never be left
alone in the woods again. No matter
how many times I tell you bears don’t live
around here, you refuse to close your eyes
in the daytime. This is a matter of trust.
Not in me, or yourself, but in the upcoming
seconds of time, the possibility the world
might cease to exist if we stop willing it
to behave in exactly the fashion we need.
Does this sound ridiculous? I admit
nothing. There’s no telling how
long this search will continue. How you
may someday find yourself exhausted
in the face of the impossible. What then?
Then you will read this
again.
Friday, May 15, 2009
I Like John Ashbery
[title]
I often think of that imaginary time
when it was much more clear
how I should go about living in the world, or better
not think, just follow an invisible
yet unmistakable plan through the heart
of the city, a road laid in golden light
direct from the setting sun that leads
right up Broadway to the steps of the library,
its bronze-domed roof tinted red and the names
emblazoned there, Plato & all the rest, floating as shades
of purple and gray, their marble façade throwing a long shadow
getting longer, clamming the air with knowledge
cool as a tomb & just about as useful
when the pressure drops a thundering rain,
obscures even the night within a fog, here
everything once so clear
to Descartes – who saw,
really saw what he knew,
what he was – ducks into hiding
behind the surface of things, into apartment buildings
where the party continues, you know the one
we meant to attend but missed
again
last weekend when we arrived at a different
address, went the wrong way down 4th Street,
and got caught in crosstown traffic for hours,
stuck in a cab, with a jackknifed semi,
immobilized, blocking our view of the water.
I often think of that imaginary time
when it was much more clear
how I should go about living in the world, or better
not think, just follow an invisible
yet unmistakable plan through the heart
of the city, a road laid in golden light
direct from the setting sun that leads
right up Broadway to the steps of the library,
its bronze-domed roof tinted red and the names
emblazoned there, Plato & all the rest, floating as shades
of purple and gray, their marble façade throwing a long shadow
getting longer, clamming the air with knowledge
cool as a tomb & just about as useful
when the pressure drops a thundering rain,
obscures even the night within a fog, here
everything once so clear
to Descartes – who saw,
really saw what he knew,
what he was – ducks into hiding
behind the surface of things, into apartment buildings
where the party continues, you know the one
we meant to attend but missed
again
last weekend when we arrived at a different
address, went the wrong way down 4th Street,
and got caught in crosstown traffic for hours,
stuck in a cab, with a jackknifed semi,
immobilized, blocking our view of the water.
This is Very Long
2666 and the Pursuit of Everything
The question’s inevitable: is 2666 a bad book? In more than one respect it qualifies. Long stretches of boring writing. Seemingly irrelevant or meaningless major characters. Nazis. An ambiguous ending of suspicious literary value. At times it feels more like a test of wills, an endurance contest or existential challenge, certainly not what fools call a pleasurable reading experience. But a better question might be: is it possible to write a good book about dead hookers and Nazis? The answer would seem to be obviously not, so perhaps the joke is on us. Or perhaps Bolano sought out the most absurd constraints possible, plot mechanisms sure to doom any story instantly to pulp fiction. Perhaps. Any attempt at writing about this book is necessarily in the realm of speculation because, despite the assurances of the executors, one never knows what the book would have been had he lived. Now does one. Then, too. But let’s go over the specifics.
This book only intermittently can be said to have a plot. Who the fuck is Oscar Fate and why is he here. Same question re: Amalfitano (though, honestly, I like that guy). For that matter Archimboldi? His name is Reiter. Get it? But what are his books about and why do we care? One of them is about seaweed. The others? Presumably they have something to do with Nazis. And possibly a Prussian baroness. That’s about all we get. Even the critics talk only about talking about the novels. And what is the meaning of their joint appearance? Perhaps the book should be read as a collage of genres. We begin with romance, continue through variations on the overpopulated Dostoevsky-esque madman motif, a brief sports episode then onto the serial murders in the mystery section. Then, history with our friends the German fascists. One could be excused for wondering: what the fuck. And also for yawning at the exhaustion of it all. But this brings us no closer to getting it, if there is something there to get.
Which we must assume there is. For sport if for no other reason. We are all in the same boat (sorry) in having no existing thought or literature to guide us in encountering this book. Not to mention Bolano is no longer alive. He must be watching us with a serious amount of hilarity. The afterword from the executors is a piece of inadvertent genius. I’ve never read its equal in the category of blind stabs at meaning from those nominally in charge of a work of art. It’s clear they have not the slightest idea what to do with this book. And yet they did well! Certainly better than me. Because it means something, that much is clear. Bolano has not done nothing. He frontally attacked one of the more sick and outrageous crimes of the current world (there are many) and attempted to make something out of it. Or not make something out of it. Which gets at one of the deeper questions the book raises: how does a person write about the world, meaningful things in the world, the vast fields of death in the world, and what is the responsibility (to hazard a highly pretentious word) of the writer, the Reiter (again, sorry), and the writing in shaping, naming and saying this has meaning, this is not as senseless as it seems. Or doing exactly the opposite. Saying this is exactly as senseless as it seems except much more so than you currently believe. The meaning is that it’s much worse than you think, and you’re horrible for not realizing this earlier. Wake up, goddamnit, it’s later than you think. Bolano is no doubt doing this, saying this, screaming this as loud as can be done in a 900-page novel. But of course the direct evidence has been lost while shuttling between cities in the desert.
But if he is doing this, he is doing hundreds of other things. Let’s consider the epigraph. “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Is this a real Baudelaire quote? Does it matter? Either way it’s the best possible description of the book. What more can be said? It preempts any attempt at plot summary or characterization. I’m not sure why he bothered to write the thing after that. Need I say more about it? This indicates whatever boredom the reader experiences is wholly intended. Bolano seems to have a pessimistic view of things, to understate it a bit. He believes life is a not-very-interesting curse only occasionally punctuated by episodes of disgusting violence. This violence being a salve of sorts to our bone-crushing ennui. He is out to mimic life as he finds it, not pretend it is something better than it is. The idea of literature acting as a means of transcendence, a precious search for meeeeeeaning for Bolano is not naïve so much as it is the worst kind of despicable lie. Something not worth spitting upon. A crime. The sort of game engaged in by craven hucksters without the dignity to sell snakeoil or run for Congress. How do these people live with themselves? he wants to know. How indeed. The idea of wresting meaning from the small genocide of women in Juarez more than mocks the idea of meaning itself. But the idea of not trying is morally abhorrent.
So Bolano doesn’t try exactly. That would be too easy. Nor does he not try. The book contains an implicit imperative – that literature, if it is to maintain its self-respect, must at least try to confront real events and create a world adequate to that world. It must not take refuge in fantasy or become lost in the imaginary problems of the first world middleclass. Such novels wither when held next to the events 2666 portrays. But what is the nature of those events? Despite the fact the first and last sections only glance at them, the book’s center of gravity is certainly the killings. Amalfitano (?) at one point even claims that the killings contain “the secret to everything,” which is as obvious a statement of purpose/mission/theme as it is vague. But this phrase is so clearly striking the executors also pulled it out in the afterword, if only at that point to marvel at its obscurity. But is it so obscure as it seems? I admit I was waiting for Bolano to eventually tell me what the secret is, but by now it should be clear that would defeat the whole point. And in any event, it’s not as hard to fathom as one first assumes. What are the killings? Mass murder of women with impunity. What do they suggest? A misogyny so casual and so thorough it’s invisible. Many women are also migrants, maquiladora workers, refugees of the global economy trading one kind of desperation for another, and if they are lucky, they will have the opportunity (no sick pun intended, really) to trade that desperation for another in the kitchen of a restaurant in San Francisco, where they will merely take residence upon a different lowest rung. But only if they are lucky. Which most of those we encounter in the novel are not. Most of them are dead.
And if justice eludes them in life, it dances on their graves in death on the orders of the police commissioner whose “old friend” is a well-known drug trafficker, Pedro Rengifo, who himself survives an assassination attempt by a judicial policeman who in turn may be moonlighting as a professional assassin. Viva la Mexico, says Bolano, and here the killings begin pulling strings within the government and the economy, both of which are dominated in unclear degrees by the narcos. The police are bought and sold, and the only murders that are solved are those that are committed by angry husbands, boyfriends and the occasional low-level gang member. These killings occur frequently enough to suggest a serious problem with gender relations, but the majority of crimes suggest something much more insidious – that the hunting of humans has turned into a national (or at least regional) sport. It should be no further surprise that the major suspect must be considered the son of Dean Guerra (it’s possible his name should have given that away – Bolano is simultaneously opaque and almost comically transparent, see: Reiter), who, in addition to being seen driving the kind of black car conspicuously observed at many crime scenes (and also outside Amalfitano’s house as Rosa leaves through the back door), is protected by dint of his connection with the most powerful people in the city, including the university rector and that man’s brother, the police commissioner. So don’t expect breaking news out of northern Mexico. The genocide is by definition a gross moral outrage, but the most soul-deadening facet is the broken record refrain of “and then the evidence was lost” or “then the police gave up” or “everybody at that point lost interest in [insert name here]” or “Juan de Dios held out no hope of solving even one of these murders.” The scale of corruption Bolano must have observed in Mexico demanded he write Part 4, which as emotionally brutal as it was only covered the first several years of the crimes. He could have gone on much longer.
But he made his point. The secret to everything is there are certain people who are below the law, who do not exist with full human rights, who are even more ignored in death than they were in life, which even they would not have believed possible. The secret (how bitterly ironic does Bolano mean to be?) to everything is that social forces in Mexico conspire to perpetuate these circumstances – though “conspire” is not forceful enough in that it implies secrecy when nothing could be more blatant than the collusion between the authorities, organized criminals and a generalized apathy as ubiquitous as air. The secret to everything is this is more the rule than the exception. The secret to everything is the longer one stares this fact in the face the more one forgets anything else exists.
Hence the title, which Bolano stole from himself and which suggests a sense of drowning by overattention. An attention that cannot be broken, however, because to ignore reality would be a worse crime than the suicide this attention implies. Sort of a Catch-2666. And it is here that Bolano’s project overlaps with Archimboldi’s undescribed novels, which we can safely assume carry the burden of coming to terms with horror – but which consequently circles us back to the unresolved question (which Bolano likewise did not resolve) of what literature can really accomplish. The passage at the end of Part 2 in which Amalfitano laments the dearth of ambition among not just novelists but readers indicates Bolano favors the ambitious, if flawed, Hail Mary fight-the-devil approach to writing as opposed to the assiduous polishing of minuscule diamonds. But his faith wavers. Writing is an act of semblance – a concept that possesses the book’s final few hundred pages – which is an act of fakery, which undermines literature’s claim to seriousness.
Bolano’s goal, among others, is the end of semblance. This is what Ansky loved about the original Arcimboldo’s paintings. Bolano sees most literature as a hazy curtain upon which phony images, scenes and emotions are projected, a haze that obscures the life (and death) occurring behind it. Semblance is the lie we tell ourselves (and more criminally, writers tell readers) about the world and what it’s really all about. Bolano disdains metaphor. He wants the book to be lived, not read. To be sufficient to life by being “everything in everything,” as Ansky again notes of Arcimboldo’s work on 734 – with of course the small caveat that some of his work is a trick, paintings that can be hung either rightside-up or upside-down, portray either a meal or a mercenary with a mercenary grin. And obviously this caveat could easily be applied to Bolano as well.
But it’s the end of semblance that’s important, which Reiter begins to realize as he begins to make himself a writer. “Semblance is an occupying force of reality,” the opposite of which is the impulse “toward freedom, toward sovereignty” as Reiter experiences in one of his periods of desertion. Yet the escape from semblance may prove impossible for all but the most committed dreamers, he thinks at the same time. Domestic love. Pain. Youth. National Socialism above all. Even willpower. All semblance, Reiter decides, and simultaneously resigns himself that he will never escape semblance himself – concluding that the only things that are not semblance are his love for his sister and Ansky’s wandering, Ansky’s 14-year old commitment to the “one true revolution.” Only refusing to grow up is not semblance because growing up, by definition, is the acceptance of certain realities (read: semblances) – economic facts, received ideas about the limits of the possible, boundaries for dreams and behavior dictated by the socially influential – as defining obstacles to what, for example, the 14-year old Ansky believed the destiny of the future, the early modern, adolescent yearning for total revolution that everyone desires and nearly everyone casually or hurriedly discards in exchange for the reception into adult society – a welcome that is really a thinly-disguised contempt.
Reiter’s later life though begins to resemble (no pun intended) Ansky’s, which begs the question whether this means he discovered a way around or through semblance (and by extension did BOlano, whose life was similarly, if to a lesser degree, peripatetic) by becoming a wanderer, by avoiding the settled domestic routine. Or if because he was insufficiently committed, because he didn’t really believe, the end of semblance was denied him. The only thing required is a faith in the end of semblance, but Reiter lost that faith and knows it impossible to recover.
Reiter lost his faith in the war, of course, along with the rest of Germany and much of the world, “for once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse was achieved, everything else was unacceptable theatricality.” Everything after is semblance because a certain extremity had been reached and left far behind. No one enjoys themselves in postwar Germany, yet life inexplicably continues, drenched in shame and self-loathing. Everyone fucks even as if sex is but a slightly more interesting game of tiddlywinks, as if to take any pleasure at all, to feel passion or desire would be such a phony pose, an act of such unwarranted fakery or stylized playacting that it would be not simply absurd but beyond conceiving. The idea of it defies belief.
Of course, even as he assaults pervasive fakery, Bolano (engaged as he is in writing a novel) necessarily works in the realm of metaphor. The post-Nazi theme is an allegory of sorts for the insulation from the deep hard bones of reality (the long list of dead women, corruption, etc.) he sees free-floating in the air in northern Mexico (and presumably elsewhere). What Bolano calls for is a raw belief, a stripping of the velvet curtains of literariness (in, well, literature), phoniness and convention (in the public world) in the name of a more profound, full-bodied engagement, a two-handed clutch on the bars that imprison us and separate us from the revolutionary world at the end of the imagination. But this idea is not unproblematic, implying as it does a purity of will – as if a writer or work is self-justified by dint of its heroic intent and the coherence of its ultimate form, an idea made just slightly more problematic by its context here in Germany, 1945. So Bolano distances himself from this as he is drawn toward it. A last word, of sorts, is reserved for the old man who rents Archimboldi his first typewriter. So having considered the book’s thoughts on the purpose of writing, we might leave the rest to the old man, who has a lot to say about how writing lives in the world.
The old man is a writer who quit writing and found his salvation in reading. Writing is a trap, a hopeless and narcissistic quest, in most cases, an exercise in the limitless vanity of petty humans chasing their own inflated visions of themselves. But even as writing is folly, someone must do it, for otherwise there would be nothing to read and the old man would have no reason to live at all. The trouble is, he says, the only writing worth producing is masterpieces, which are few and, worse, are sometimes hard to see for all the lesser works crowding the view. And here it’s worth thinking about the novel’s critical reception. 2666 has been universally hailed, nominated for awards, brought its author a rare posthumous glory, but no one in the invisible atmosphere of literary decision-making seems to know why, in fact, this book is good or not. the reviews are laughably vague and often profess their own confusion. In their defense, it is a large book, with plot tendrils spinning in various and not-entirely-connected directions, and one gleans a sense of purpose and worth even if one does not understand why. This finally might be its profoundest lesson – and its most comic about the operation of literature in the world. I imagine Bolano laughing and stamping his feet at these critics who embrace him without really knowing why, without bothering to think the book through. Just as he at times mocked the narcissistic critics in Part 1, their jockeying and performances at conferences with self-important names, and their work – which is reduced to a missing persons search they end up being too lazy to actually prosecute, a vacation of whiskey-drinking (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and sex with minors. Minors they, critically, abandon to the abyss of violence they are too self-involved to see ripping the skin of semblance before their over-trained first world eyes. They come and go, leaving only empty promises, hard currency and the sentence of death they could hardly be bothered to face when the opportunity for (an albeit inadequate) redemption was offered, never to be heard from again.
Not that they would have been saved had Espinoza taken Rebeca to Spain or Pelletier insisted on finding Archimboldi and learning whatever secret drew him to Santa Teresa. That is not an option given us to choose. But to do other than try, and this is Bolano’s essential approach to the world – while trying is but guaranteed failure – is to sin against life and one’s fellow prisoners of war in thie ongoing losing battle we fight against death everyday. So this is our choice: we must tilt against windmills or submit to being even more compromised than we already are. Bolano doesn’t need to opine on how most people choose for us to know what he’s talking about.
The question’s inevitable: is 2666 a bad book? In more than one respect it qualifies. Long stretches of boring writing. Seemingly irrelevant or meaningless major characters. Nazis. An ambiguous ending of suspicious literary value. At times it feels more like a test of wills, an endurance contest or existential challenge, certainly not what fools call a pleasurable reading experience. But a better question might be: is it possible to write a good book about dead hookers and Nazis? The answer would seem to be obviously not, so perhaps the joke is on us. Or perhaps Bolano sought out the most absurd constraints possible, plot mechanisms sure to doom any story instantly to pulp fiction. Perhaps. Any attempt at writing about this book is necessarily in the realm of speculation because, despite the assurances of the executors, one never knows what the book would have been had he lived. Now does one. Then, too. But let’s go over the specifics.
This book only intermittently can be said to have a plot. Who the fuck is Oscar Fate and why is he here. Same question re: Amalfitano (though, honestly, I like that guy). For that matter Archimboldi? His name is Reiter. Get it? But what are his books about and why do we care? One of them is about seaweed. The others? Presumably they have something to do with Nazis. And possibly a Prussian baroness. That’s about all we get. Even the critics talk only about talking about the novels. And what is the meaning of their joint appearance? Perhaps the book should be read as a collage of genres. We begin with romance, continue through variations on the overpopulated Dostoevsky-esque madman motif, a brief sports episode then onto the serial murders in the mystery section. Then, history with our friends the German fascists. One could be excused for wondering: what the fuck. And also for yawning at the exhaustion of it all. But this brings us no closer to getting it, if there is something there to get.
Which we must assume there is. For sport if for no other reason. We are all in the same boat (sorry) in having no existing thought or literature to guide us in encountering this book. Not to mention Bolano is no longer alive. He must be watching us with a serious amount of hilarity. The afterword from the executors is a piece of inadvertent genius. I’ve never read its equal in the category of blind stabs at meaning from those nominally in charge of a work of art. It’s clear they have not the slightest idea what to do with this book. And yet they did well! Certainly better than me. Because it means something, that much is clear. Bolano has not done nothing. He frontally attacked one of the more sick and outrageous crimes of the current world (there are many) and attempted to make something out of it. Or not make something out of it. Which gets at one of the deeper questions the book raises: how does a person write about the world, meaningful things in the world, the vast fields of death in the world, and what is the responsibility (to hazard a highly pretentious word) of the writer, the Reiter (again, sorry), and the writing in shaping, naming and saying this has meaning, this is not as senseless as it seems. Or doing exactly the opposite. Saying this is exactly as senseless as it seems except much more so than you currently believe. The meaning is that it’s much worse than you think, and you’re horrible for not realizing this earlier. Wake up, goddamnit, it’s later than you think. Bolano is no doubt doing this, saying this, screaming this as loud as can be done in a 900-page novel. But of course the direct evidence has been lost while shuttling between cities in the desert.
But if he is doing this, he is doing hundreds of other things. Let’s consider the epigraph. “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Is this a real Baudelaire quote? Does it matter? Either way it’s the best possible description of the book. What more can be said? It preempts any attempt at plot summary or characterization. I’m not sure why he bothered to write the thing after that. Need I say more about it? This indicates whatever boredom the reader experiences is wholly intended. Bolano seems to have a pessimistic view of things, to understate it a bit. He believes life is a not-very-interesting curse only occasionally punctuated by episodes of disgusting violence. This violence being a salve of sorts to our bone-crushing ennui. He is out to mimic life as he finds it, not pretend it is something better than it is. The idea of literature acting as a means of transcendence, a precious search for meeeeeeaning for Bolano is not naïve so much as it is the worst kind of despicable lie. Something not worth spitting upon. A crime. The sort of game engaged in by craven hucksters without the dignity to sell snakeoil or run for Congress. How do these people live with themselves? he wants to know. How indeed. The idea of wresting meaning from the small genocide of women in Juarez more than mocks the idea of meaning itself. But the idea of not trying is morally abhorrent.
So Bolano doesn’t try exactly. That would be too easy. Nor does he not try. The book contains an implicit imperative – that literature, if it is to maintain its self-respect, must at least try to confront real events and create a world adequate to that world. It must not take refuge in fantasy or become lost in the imaginary problems of the first world middleclass. Such novels wither when held next to the events 2666 portrays. But what is the nature of those events? Despite the fact the first and last sections only glance at them, the book’s center of gravity is certainly the killings. Amalfitano (?) at one point even claims that the killings contain “the secret to everything,” which is as obvious a statement of purpose/mission/theme as it is vague. But this phrase is so clearly striking the executors also pulled it out in the afterword, if only at that point to marvel at its obscurity. But is it so obscure as it seems? I admit I was waiting for Bolano to eventually tell me what the secret is, but by now it should be clear that would defeat the whole point. And in any event, it’s not as hard to fathom as one first assumes. What are the killings? Mass murder of women with impunity. What do they suggest? A misogyny so casual and so thorough it’s invisible. Many women are also migrants, maquiladora workers, refugees of the global economy trading one kind of desperation for another, and if they are lucky, they will have the opportunity (no sick pun intended, really) to trade that desperation for another in the kitchen of a restaurant in San Francisco, where they will merely take residence upon a different lowest rung. But only if they are lucky. Which most of those we encounter in the novel are not. Most of them are dead.
And if justice eludes them in life, it dances on their graves in death on the orders of the police commissioner whose “old friend” is a well-known drug trafficker, Pedro Rengifo, who himself survives an assassination attempt by a judicial policeman who in turn may be moonlighting as a professional assassin. Viva la Mexico, says Bolano, and here the killings begin pulling strings within the government and the economy, both of which are dominated in unclear degrees by the narcos. The police are bought and sold, and the only murders that are solved are those that are committed by angry husbands, boyfriends and the occasional low-level gang member. These killings occur frequently enough to suggest a serious problem with gender relations, but the majority of crimes suggest something much more insidious – that the hunting of humans has turned into a national (or at least regional) sport. It should be no further surprise that the major suspect must be considered the son of Dean Guerra (it’s possible his name should have given that away – Bolano is simultaneously opaque and almost comically transparent, see: Reiter), who, in addition to being seen driving the kind of black car conspicuously observed at many crime scenes (and also outside Amalfitano’s house as Rosa leaves through the back door), is protected by dint of his connection with the most powerful people in the city, including the university rector and that man’s brother, the police commissioner. So don’t expect breaking news out of northern Mexico. The genocide is by definition a gross moral outrage, but the most soul-deadening facet is the broken record refrain of “and then the evidence was lost” or “then the police gave up” or “everybody at that point lost interest in [insert name here]” or “Juan de Dios held out no hope of solving even one of these murders.” The scale of corruption Bolano must have observed in Mexico demanded he write Part 4, which as emotionally brutal as it was only covered the first several years of the crimes. He could have gone on much longer.
But he made his point. The secret to everything is there are certain people who are below the law, who do not exist with full human rights, who are even more ignored in death than they were in life, which even they would not have believed possible. The secret (how bitterly ironic does Bolano mean to be?) to everything is that social forces in Mexico conspire to perpetuate these circumstances – though “conspire” is not forceful enough in that it implies secrecy when nothing could be more blatant than the collusion between the authorities, organized criminals and a generalized apathy as ubiquitous as air. The secret to everything is this is more the rule than the exception. The secret to everything is the longer one stares this fact in the face the more one forgets anything else exists.
Hence the title, which Bolano stole from himself and which suggests a sense of drowning by overattention. An attention that cannot be broken, however, because to ignore reality would be a worse crime than the suicide this attention implies. Sort of a Catch-2666. And it is here that Bolano’s project overlaps with Archimboldi’s undescribed novels, which we can safely assume carry the burden of coming to terms with horror – but which consequently circles us back to the unresolved question (which Bolano likewise did not resolve) of what literature can really accomplish. The passage at the end of Part 2 in which Amalfitano laments the dearth of ambition among not just novelists but readers indicates Bolano favors the ambitious, if flawed, Hail Mary fight-the-devil approach to writing as opposed to the assiduous polishing of minuscule diamonds. But his faith wavers. Writing is an act of semblance – a concept that possesses the book’s final few hundred pages – which is an act of fakery, which undermines literature’s claim to seriousness.
Bolano’s goal, among others, is the end of semblance. This is what Ansky loved about the original Arcimboldo’s paintings. Bolano sees most literature as a hazy curtain upon which phony images, scenes and emotions are projected, a haze that obscures the life (and death) occurring behind it. Semblance is the lie we tell ourselves (and more criminally, writers tell readers) about the world and what it’s really all about. Bolano disdains metaphor. He wants the book to be lived, not read. To be sufficient to life by being “everything in everything,” as Ansky again notes of Arcimboldo’s work on 734 – with of course the small caveat that some of his work is a trick, paintings that can be hung either rightside-up or upside-down, portray either a meal or a mercenary with a mercenary grin. And obviously this caveat could easily be applied to Bolano as well.
But it’s the end of semblance that’s important, which Reiter begins to realize as he begins to make himself a writer. “Semblance is an occupying force of reality,” the opposite of which is the impulse “toward freedom, toward sovereignty” as Reiter experiences in one of his periods of desertion. Yet the escape from semblance may prove impossible for all but the most committed dreamers, he thinks at the same time. Domestic love. Pain. Youth. National Socialism above all. Even willpower. All semblance, Reiter decides, and simultaneously resigns himself that he will never escape semblance himself – concluding that the only things that are not semblance are his love for his sister and Ansky’s wandering, Ansky’s 14-year old commitment to the “one true revolution.” Only refusing to grow up is not semblance because growing up, by definition, is the acceptance of certain realities (read: semblances) – economic facts, received ideas about the limits of the possible, boundaries for dreams and behavior dictated by the socially influential – as defining obstacles to what, for example, the 14-year old Ansky believed the destiny of the future, the early modern, adolescent yearning for total revolution that everyone desires and nearly everyone casually or hurriedly discards in exchange for the reception into adult society – a welcome that is really a thinly-disguised contempt.
Reiter’s later life though begins to resemble (no pun intended) Ansky’s, which begs the question whether this means he discovered a way around or through semblance (and by extension did BOlano, whose life was similarly, if to a lesser degree, peripatetic) by becoming a wanderer, by avoiding the settled domestic routine. Or if because he was insufficiently committed, because he didn’t really believe, the end of semblance was denied him. The only thing required is a faith in the end of semblance, but Reiter lost that faith and knows it impossible to recover.
Reiter lost his faith in the war, of course, along with the rest of Germany and much of the world, “for once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse was achieved, everything else was unacceptable theatricality.” Everything after is semblance because a certain extremity had been reached and left far behind. No one enjoys themselves in postwar Germany, yet life inexplicably continues, drenched in shame and self-loathing. Everyone fucks even as if sex is but a slightly more interesting game of tiddlywinks, as if to take any pleasure at all, to feel passion or desire would be such a phony pose, an act of such unwarranted fakery or stylized playacting that it would be not simply absurd but beyond conceiving. The idea of it defies belief.
Of course, even as he assaults pervasive fakery, Bolano (engaged as he is in writing a novel) necessarily works in the realm of metaphor. The post-Nazi theme is an allegory of sorts for the insulation from the deep hard bones of reality (the long list of dead women, corruption, etc.) he sees free-floating in the air in northern Mexico (and presumably elsewhere). What Bolano calls for is a raw belief, a stripping of the velvet curtains of literariness (in, well, literature), phoniness and convention (in the public world) in the name of a more profound, full-bodied engagement, a two-handed clutch on the bars that imprison us and separate us from the revolutionary world at the end of the imagination. But this idea is not unproblematic, implying as it does a purity of will – as if a writer or work is self-justified by dint of its heroic intent and the coherence of its ultimate form, an idea made just slightly more problematic by its context here in Germany, 1945. So Bolano distances himself from this as he is drawn toward it. A last word, of sorts, is reserved for the old man who rents Archimboldi his first typewriter. So having considered the book’s thoughts on the purpose of writing, we might leave the rest to the old man, who has a lot to say about how writing lives in the world.
The old man is a writer who quit writing and found his salvation in reading. Writing is a trap, a hopeless and narcissistic quest, in most cases, an exercise in the limitless vanity of petty humans chasing their own inflated visions of themselves. But even as writing is folly, someone must do it, for otherwise there would be nothing to read and the old man would have no reason to live at all. The trouble is, he says, the only writing worth producing is masterpieces, which are few and, worse, are sometimes hard to see for all the lesser works crowding the view. And here it’s worth thinking about the novel’s critical reception. 2666 has been universally hailed, nominated for awards, brought its author a rare posthumous glory, but no one in the invisible atmosphere of literary decision-making seems to know why, in fact, this book is good or not. the reviews are laughably vague and often profess their own confusion. In their defense, it is a large book, with plot tendrils spinning in various and not-entirely-connected directions, and one gleans a sense of purpose and worth even if one does not understand why. This finally might be its profoundest lesson – and its most comic about the operation of literature in the world. I imagine Bolano laughing and stamping his feet at these critics who embrace him without really knowing why, without bothering to think the book through. Just as he at times mocked the narcissistic critics in Part 1, their jockeying and performances at conferences with self-important names, and their work – which is reduced to a missing persons search they end up being too lazy to actually prosecute, a vacation of whiskey-drinking (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and sex with minors. Minors they, critically, abandon to the abyss of violence they are too self-involved to see ripping the skin of semblance before their over-trained first world eyes. They come and go, leaving only empty promises, hard currency and the sentence of death they could hardly be bothered to face when the opportunity for (an albeit inadequate) redemption was offered, never to be heard from again.
Not that they would have been saved had Espinoza taken Rebeca to Spain or Pelletier insisted on finding Archimboldi and learning whatever secret drew him to Santa Teresa. That is not an option given us to choose. But to do other than try, and this is Bolano’s essential approach to the world – while trying is but guaranteed failure – is to sin against life and one’s fellow prisoners of war in thie ongoing losing battle we fight against death everyday. So this is our choice: we must tilt against windmills or submit to being even more compromised than we already are. Bolano doesn’t need to opine on how most people choose for us to know what he’s talking about.
Another California Poem
lost coast
clear-cut vaginal canyons split open,
slice into cliffs like legs matted with moss
wet & green & beating the waves with screams
in the mist amidst the California coast.
sword ferns poke their tips off hillsides,
fuck the air. this forest, studded
by broken totems of an uninvented faith,
no longer whole, still oozes humidity.
rain makes curlicue streaks in the mud,
fingers a pattern of letters. black sand
smeared with water spells desire.
salty, thirsty siltstone heaves
with graywacke so slow, so hard
pressed together gives
an intuition we might live
like geologic processes, or trees,
a giant redwood in a hidden grove:
open to sky, light
as kites in wind, wings bent, cut under clouds
to branches blind to everything
& nothing. all its history
written on skin speaks
the only adequate language. Braille
tongues into bark. a thousand-year record
scribed on its neck, naked, tall, exposed
to the blade, regrows itself. the roots
reach out, intertwine another
trunk like human ribs
seem sometimes fused in the morning,
sweat on the sheets, trees through the window
breathing summer heat, limbs knit, the smell of sex
sticks its wet red sap to the walls.
clear-cut vaginal canyons split open,
slice into cliffs like legs matted with moss
wet & green & beating the waves with screams
in the mist amidst the California coast.
sword ferns poke their tips off hillsides,
fuck the air. this forest, studded
by broken totems of an uninvented faith,
no longer whole, still oozes humidity.
rain makes curlicue streaks in the mud,
fingers a pattern of letters. black sand
smeared with water spells desire.
salty, thirsty siltstone heaves
with graywacke so slow, so hard
pressed together gives
an intuition we might live
like geologic processes, or trees,
a giant redwood in a hidden grove:
open to sky, light
as kites in wind, wings bent, cut under clouds
to branches blind to everything
& nothing. all its history
written on skin speaks
the only adequate language. Braille
tongues into bark. a thousand-year record
scribed on its neck, naked, tall, exposed
to the blade, regrows itself. the roots
reach out, intertwine another
trunk like human ribs
seem sometimes fused in the morning,
sweat on the sheets, trees through the window
breathing summer heat, limbs knit, the smell of sex
sticks its wet red sap to the walls.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
see post from Friday
I forgot the most obvious one:
California is a facebook status update and so am I
Duh.
California is a facebook status update and so am I
Duh.
this is a poem
isn’t it grand
shouts into the canyon refuse return flights rimside,
batter off walls at the bottom, await a transformation
into a top-heavy metaphor for spiritual barrenness,
a change that never arrives, of course, so against its will
it remains unfull, the air within vibrato with a measured
lack of movement, not unlike an empty concert hall
that never really empties: curtains, stage, seats & cellos
left unstrung yet humming with potential symphonies
one frequency beyond the ears — this hard desert labors
to birth new prophets, Abrahamic cowboys on the trail
west, who cart stone luggage along the river, board long
canoes and point them at the gulf, not knowing the flow
no longer goes there, that their message will never reach
the coast, that only a trickle down a ditch gives evidence
a god once cut this whole in earth before it was a grave.
shouts into the canyon refuse return flights rimside,
batter off walls at the bottom, await a transformation
into a top-heavy metaphor for spiritual barrenness,
a change that never arrives, of course, so against its will
it remains unfull, the air within vibrato with a measured
lack of movement, not unlike an empty concert hall
that never really empties: curtains, stage, seats & cellos
left unstrung yet humming with potential symphonies
one frequency beyond the ears — this hard desert labors
to birth new prophets, Abrahamic cowboys on the trail
west, who cart stone luggage along the river, board long
canoes and point them at the gulf, not knowing the flow
no longer goes there, that their message will never reach
the coast, that only a trickle down a ditch gives evidence
a god once cut this whole in earth before it was a grave.
Friday, March 13, 2009
A poem in search of a title. For extra points, guess what it's about.
on the trail of the sun, the border
in Sonora Desert disappears, an empty intersection
late at night where traffic lights flash
red& green at once, a signal meaning
yellow, which itself is understood to say
some word with meaning everywhere
but here, the morning bears a tinseled cactus
Christmas gift of freedom -- Freedom, Arizona,
floats upon the dead sea, paling dawn
mirage, night’s last star of wonder-
ing what dreams may come upon a midnight
clear of roadblocks to magnetic north,
a quick trip over sagebrush hills into haze
where oases bend the cacti into palms:
broadleaf trees the size of hands, a paradise
so close it feels like dirt – or sand
that tries to pass as water in this garden,
flowing down the throat to choke us
in Sonora Desert disappears, an empty intersection
late at night where traffic lights flash
red& green at once, a signal meaning
yellow, which itself is understood to say
some word with meaning everywhere
but here, the morning bears a tinseled cactus
Christmas gift of freedom -- Freedom, Arizona,
floats upon the dead sea, paling dawn
mirage, night’s last star of wonder-
ing what dreams may come upon a midnight
clear of roadblocks to magnetic north,
a quick trip over sagebrush hills into haze
where oases bend the cacti into palms:
broadleaf trees the size of hands, a paradise
so close it feels like dirt – or sand
that tries to pass as water in this garden,
flowing down the throat to choke us
Pick a title. Please.
California Dreamin’, or, The Dream of Arrival, or, Something like Life
as tough as it is to recall the details of events
ten, fifteen years later, there is burned into me
the image of your eyes beneath fast-moving lights,
on Broadway perhaps, when my fingers tingled
when I touched them to yours and felt New York
at last – or was this just in a movie starring you
know who, whatshisname, from that television show
when we were kids? meaning the idea of being
here stays one step removed from things in front of us,
cloaked in the mystery of itself like dead skin
yet unshed, this whole state camouflaged by a dream
of its own creation, self-creation, saying we are
more than what or where we have been, or can be
more, once we have obtained the necessary degrees,
personal experiences or at the very least a profile
on Sunday in the New York Times, as only this seems
sufficient to the day’s demands, might actualize,
self-actualize us in the public consciousness,
bestow a dignity or better posture others will see
fit to admire and discuss when we’re not around,
at the same time we walk down an aisle or street
to a soundtrack composed of crazy applause. but
nothing hollow about this certainty: upon arrival
further exhaustion remains, not a moment to waste
in the sun along our parade route – though gilded
trees along the way will be showered by jubilant
champagne teardrops, ahead a prize awaits us,
something real that would allow us, finally,
with all the humility we have saved for such a day,
to disavow our previous deeds, laurels we’ve earned
but wore lightly, put down with a graciousness
of even higher order, while everything, even our words,
fragile as the newsprint they love, burn quickly
in memory, the evidence of our triumph destroyed
by the arrival of what we wanted all along (it wasn’t
fame?) and the beginning of everything else to come.
as tough as it is to recall the details of events
ten, fifteen years later, there is burned into me
the image of your eyes beneath fast-moving lights,
on Broadway perhaps, when my fingers tingled
when I touched them to yours and felt New York
at last – or was this just in a movie starring you
know who, whatshisname, from that television show
when we were kids? meaning the idea of being
here stays one step removed from things in front of us,
cloaked in the mystery of itself like dead skin
yet unshed, this whole state camouflaged by a dream
of its own creation, self-creation, saying we are
more than what or where we have been, or can be
more, once we have obtained the necessary degrees,
personal experiences or at the very least a profile
on Sunday in the New York Times, as only this seems
sufficient to the day’s demands, might actualize,
self-actualize us in the public consciousness,
bestow a dignity or better posture others will see
fit to admire and discuss when we’re not around,
at the same time we walk down an aisle or street
to a soundtrack composed of crazy applause. but
nothing hollow about this certainty: upon arrival
further exhaustion remains, not a moment to waste
in the sun along our parade route – though gilded
trees along the way will be showered by jubilant
champagne teardrops, ahead a prize awaits us,
something real that would allow us, finally,
with all the humility we have saved for such a day,
to disavow our previous deeds, laurels we’ve earned
but wore lightly, put down with a graciousness
of even higher order, while everything, even our words,
fragile as the newsprint they love, burn quickly
in memory, the evidence of our triumph destroyed
by the arrival of what we wanted all along (it wasn’t
fame?) and the beginning of everything else to come.
this might be a bad title
somewhere over the rainbow
myth rolls up the California coast, a cold front
fogs the tinderbox hills around the city,
freezes their dreams into nightmares of lightning
& fires – whose smoke, seen from afar, appears
golden, a special effect projected off mirrors
east of the valley, still showing the way west
where it leads to what was believed to be the sun
when the state remained the only daytime star:
a destination etched on fences in Texas, final
highway exit sign embossed in gold, a secret
unmarked milepost west of San Francisco,
a floating stage made just for us to play ourselves,
a point beyond now, in the glow of a spotlight
sunset, an overripe orange under grey
inflated clouds the color of war – the weather
turns suddenly worse, beacons recede into dark,
capsize the dream beneath cumulonimbus
that wave like a flag over ocean, an ultimate
sign from the site of the wreck, where armies
of poets reassemble, sunk to the sea bottom,
breathing through each others’ mouths bubbles
filled to bursting with words of assent, a violent
yes to becoming more than strangers here,
washed up on shore, each in our own California.
myth rolls up the California coast, a cold front
fogs the tinderbox hills around the city,
freezes their dreams into nightmares of lightning
& fires – whose smoke, seen from afar, appears
golden, a special effect projected off mirrors
east of the valley, still showing the way west
where it leads to what was believed to be the sun
when the state remained the only daytime star:
a destination etched on fences in Texas, final
highway exit sign embossed in gold, a secret
unmarked milepost west of San Francisco,
a floating stage made just for us to play ourselves,
a point beyond now, in the glow of a spotlight
sunset, an overripe orange under grey
inflated clouds the color of war – the weather
turns suddenly worse, beacons recede into dark,
capsize the dream beneath cumulonimbus
that wave like a flag over ocean, an ultimate
sign from the site of the wreck, where armies
of poets reassemble, sunk to the sea bottom,
breathing through each others’ mouths bubbles
filled to bursting with words of assent, a violent
yes to becoming more than strangers here,
washed up on shore, each in our own California.
I live here
California is a limp dick john on Hollywood Boulevard
California is the Central Valley high on pesticides & meth
California is Big Sur overrun by tourists jerking off their RVs in the sunset
California is Los Angeles
California is San Francisco
California is Las Vegas
California is a schizophrenic waving an assault rifle in a bank just wanting a friend
California is tomorrow
California is nostalgic for a past that never existed
California is money, baby, money
California is a furious Titan throwing lightning bolts in summertime
California is Walt Disney’s bad acid trip
California is thinking its butt is too big but will shake it anyway
California is trying to get water from a stone to grow artichokes in Death Valley
California is one exit too far down the highway
California is desperate to be liked
California is your favorite isn’t it?
California is the gardens of Babylon and the desert that’s left
California is a wife-beater and a strung-out junkie who likes teddy bears
California is gansta raps of children’s day care
California is the religion of smokestacks and gold-plated condoms
California is the curve of the earth on the horizon turning into the future
California is anorexic & angry about sunshine
California is too fat for its own good – would you like fries with that?
California is money in the bank for Central American dictators
California is the Tower of Babel in negotiations with itself
California is what?
California is Brad Pitt on billboards smiling into our vacant subconscious
California is psychotically possessed by long dead conquistadors
California is the communist dream of certain Berkeley intellectuals
California is choking on the nocturnal emissions from its own erect tailpipe
California is hills not so much like white elephants but more like dirty ones in back alleys
California is shaved head no teeth angel dust glory hole soaring
California is dead wildflowers that stink like skunks
California is a prophecy starring Christopher Walken
California is unprotected sex with strangers you just met at the Chinatown library
California is marriage for a green card but not for homosexuals
California is a pre-nup and a quickie divorce from Donald Trump
California is the undefended fortress of dreams in the eyes of Canadians, eh?
California is not what it used to be
California is only what it always was
California is maybe a little narcissistic but, c’mon, isn’t that awesome!
California is a pre-nup and a quickie divorce from Donald Trump again
California is my latest screenplay, will you read it?
California is
California is whatever you say it is
California is faulty
California is boldfaced words on a hillside and trees made of broccoli
California is the Statue of Liberty covered in sunscreen
California is doomed
California is the color of God at the end of time
California is real as it gets but how real is that
California is where America reaches the border of heaven and folds into sky
California is the golden state in flames
California is the Central Valley high on pesticides & meth
California is Big Sur overrun by tourists jerking off their RVs in the sunset
California is Los Angeles
California is San Francisco
California is Las Vegas
California is a schizophrenic waving an assault rifle in a bank just wanting a friend
California is tomorrow
California is nostalgic for a past that never existed
California is money, baby, money
California is a furious Titan throwing lightning bolts in summertime
California is Walt Disney’s bad acid trip
California is thinking its butt is too big but will shake it anyway
California is trying to get water from a stone to grow artichokes in Death Valley
California is one exit too far down the highway
California is desperate to be liked
California is your favorite isn’t it?
California is the gardens of Babylon and the desert that’s left
California is a wife-beater and a strung-out junkie who likes teddy bears
California is gansta raps of children’s day care
California is the religion of smokestacks and gold-plated condoms
California is the curve of the earth on the horizon turning into the future
California is anorexic & angry about sunshine
California is too fat for its own good – would you like fries with that?
California is money in the bank for Central American dictators
California is the Tower of Babel in negotiations with itself
California is what?
California is Brad Pitt on billboards smiling into our vacant subconscious
California is psychotically possessed by long dead conquistadors
California is the communist dream of certain Berkeley intellectuals
California is choking on the nocturnal emissions from its own erect tailpipe
California is hills not so much like white elephants but more like dirty ones in back alleys
California is shaved head no teeth angel dust glory hole soaring
California is dead wildflowers that stink like skunks
California is a prophecy starring Christopher Walken
California is unprotected sex with strangers you just met at the Chinatown library
California is marriage for a green card but not for homosexuals
California is a pre-nup and a quickie divorce from Donald Trump
California is the undefended fortress of dreams in the eyes of Canadians, eh?
California is not what it used to be
California is only what it always was
California is maybe a little narcissistic but, c’mon, isn’t that awesome!
California is a pre-nup and a quickie divorce from Donald Trump again
California is my latest screenplay, will you read it?
California is
California is whatever you say it is
California is faulty
California is boldfaced words on a hillside and trees made of broccoli
California is the Statue of Liberty covered in sunscreen
California is doomed
California is the color of God at the end of time
California is real as it gets but how real is that
California is where America reaches the border of heaven and folds into sky
California is the golden state in flames
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Frederick Seidel and the Possibilities of Transcendence, Part I
I do not write like Frederick Seidel nor do I desire to write like Frederick Seidel. Anachronistic or reactionary as it may be I hold onto a belief that writing can (should?) possess an aesthetic grandeur, that sentences can reflect a tint of magnificence with a potential to if not redeem then at least make tolerable an ugly world more often flooded with the vomited pollution of mediocre language. The question of aesthetics hinges upon how one decides to respond to this world and what one believes poetry can do. Take Seidel’s poem “Home,” published in the newest n+1, a poem that is something of a political advertisement in its own way. It’s about New York homeless, and it’s probably best to let it speak for itself:
The homeless are popping like pimples.
They’re a little dog’s little unsheathed erection sticking out red.
It makes us passers-by sing.
Ho ho. It’s spring.
Pretty much all of Seidel is contained in these four lines. Disgust for the world. An affinity for the dainty, delicate image. The world’s tritest rhyme. Doggerel as anti-art. Two stanzas later he writes, “Uncooked hamburger / Erupts when he lowers his trousers.” It would take a while to come up with a more revolting image. When I initially read him, this sort of thing bothered me. Why write this way? It is almost as if he is not trying, but that misses the point and begs the question trying what. The more important question is how one writes about the urban homeless who are both spat upon and consciously ignored individuals deserving of pity as well as more than a little gross. I have a friend who lives at the corner of Haight and Ashbury who has found shit on his doorstep on more than one occasion, which has exhausted his patience. I’ve read other poems about the homeless that are merely sentimental. Seidel gets around this by rubbing the reader’s face in it, almost literally, but he also implicates himself and everyone else walking around upper Manhattan. “I bathe in their screams / I dress for the evening.” This is a more conventional indictment of public callousness, an act of advocacy to some degree, which is a point Seidel acknowledges by closing the poem “I paid for this ad.”
He covers multiple angles of the problem of writing about “society.” He checks off appropriate outrage, confronting the uncomfortable facts and creates a compelling aesthetic sense—rooted as it is in overpowering disgust—but he doesn’t manage to transcend the reality. This is the point at which he and I diverge, because as much as the entire idea of transcendence has been assailed as a false solution or even a bourgeois narcotic, I can’t think of any point in making art that does not attempt to make something new, something better out of the obvious repugnance that clings to the world. Seidel believes no such thing. And he could be right. But I don’t see how it’s possible to live in that world.
The homeless are popping like pimples.
They’re a little dog’s little unsheathed erection sticking out red.
It makes us passers-by sing.
Ho ho. It’s spring.
Pretty much all of Seidel is contained in these four lines. Disgust for the world. An affinity for the dainty, delicate image. The world’s tritest rhyme. Doggerel as anti-art. Two stanzas later he writes, “Uncooked hamburger / Erupts when he lowers his trousers.” It would take a while to come up with a more revolting image. When I initially read him, this sort of thing bothered me. Why write this way? It is almost as if he is not trying, but that misses the point and begs the question trying what. The more important question is how one writes about the urban homeless who are both spat upon and consciously ignored individuals deserving of pity as well as more than a little gross. I have a friend who lives at the corner of Haight and Ashbury who has found shit on his doorstep on more than one occasion, which has exhausted his patience. I’ve read other poems about the homeless that are merely sentimental. Seidel gets around this by rubbing the reader’s face in it, almost literally, but he also implicates himself and everyone else walking around upper Manhattan. “I bathe in their screams / I dress for the evening.” This is a more conventional indictment of public callousness, an act of advocacy to some degree, which is a point Seidel acknowledges by closing the poem “I paid for this ad.”
He covers multiple angles of the problem of writing about “society.” He checks off appropriate outrage, confronting the uncomfortable facts and creates a compelling aesthetic sense—rooted as it is in overpowering disgust—but he doesn’t manage to transcend the reality. This is the point at which he and I diverge, because as much as the entire idea of transcendence has been assailed as a false solution or even a bourgeois narcotic, I can’t think of any point in making art that does not attempt to make something new, something better out of the obvious repugnance that clings to the world. Seidel believes no such thing. And he could be right. But I don’t see how it’s possible to live in that world.
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