Thursday, June 23, 2016
Thursday, June 09, 2016
Bernadette 1
Bernadette rides next to me in the Fairmont, not speaking. We're traveling at speed along the freeway, and she’s in a rare contemplative mood. She often jabbers away like a relentless engine about different things—real estate values, bus schedules, the foolishness of young women she knows—mostly things I’ve heard many times, but we’ve been apart for two weeks and she's quiet now. I'm content that she doesn’t fill the humming ambience with her staccato rhythms. She just sits there, potato-face forward, harboring her private thoughts as I harbor mine. Miles follow silent miles as we sail along in separate realms through the overripe green of August. It seems good to have her back. I’m cautiously optimistic.
“What are those flowers?” she asks suddenly, piercing the demilitarized zone between us, finding her range. We're passing through lowland meadows where patches of purple wildflowers stand out vividly against the leafy background of trees and grasses. “Loose Strife,” I say with a foreboding that doesn’t seem justified since she’s only asking about flowers, and anyway I’m pleasantly elated that I knew the answer—shocked, actually.
But the ping-pong has begun, the familiar volleying that leads directly to open conflict. “Please stop the car,” she says, in full disarming simplicity. “I would like to pick some of them.” We proceed to have an absurd argument about the dangers of stopping along the highway, where non-emergency stopping is illegal in any case and even the breakdown lane is full of charging SUVs at rush hour, but she doesn't see the difficulty. “They're just wild flowers,” she says, “and you are afraid.”
So there we are, the match is over, and once again I remind myself of her many charms—her funny little ears, her nose that looks like it’s made of clay, the little spikes of hair that frame her face when she's sleeping—but we're only ten minutes from the airport and already I can feel the rings contracting around my arteries. Doctor Rasmussen explained that they become like high pressure fire hoses. At first I thought he was over-dramatizing when he told me how damaging that can be. “You could die,” he said, the tone of his voice falling an octave on the word “die.” But I followed his advice, changed my diet, even switched careers, and now I walk to the stores instead of running errands in the fusty old Fairmont. I no longer spend as many hours at the computer and live a more physical life. There isn’t much more I can do short of taking medication, which of course I’m also doing since that is what everyone does now. It’s the state of things in the medical business. Health is intangible, like happiness, so what’s needed is a product, a physical commodity, and now doctors are not much more than drug dealers who receive a fat bonus for every new prescription, every addict. I know this, yet I reach into the glove box for an Atenolol and wash it down with saliva, doubling my daily dosage and wondering if I can afford one of the newer, sexier drugs.
Sunday afternoon, we're getting ready to go out. I walk into the bedroom in my boxers and sit down on the bed to cool off in front of the Vornado, making some remark about the heat, but she's apparently not listening, because she bends down and turns off the fan. Then she opens the curtains, exposing my striped underwear to eighty or ninety windows around the courtyard. We live in a diorama, like specimens in a museum. “Did you hear me?” I say, jumping up to grab my jeans from the bureau and pulling them quickly over my legs. She has three times the testosterone of the average Caucasian female, which I know with medical certainty since I’ve seen the printout of her blood analysis.
The first thing to go is the phone. I stop paying the bills, and after receiving several dire warnings from the phone company, the line goes dead. Of course it means that nobody can reach me and I find myself cut off from things, but Bernadette can't call me every few minutes from work either so some ground has been gained. Naturally she’s offended. “You don't want to help me,” she says. Eight years of helping her escape from her dangerous crook of a husband and then acquire a green card plus unlimited use of the Fairmont and dozens of repair jobs in the buildings she manages—all that might be considered helping her, but that's an old story.
These are not forgiving times. We now know the truth about history, which is that it was full of bloody and horrifying injustice, with dominant groups subjugating others based on race, sex, religion, hair color, shoe size, every imaginable difference. So now the time has come for those who have been wronged to call in the chips, to step up and correct the accounts. There has been an equalization between the sexes, for example, and maybe I'm a neanderthal since—god help me—there are aspects about the old days I long for, but it has been my experience that women are often unreasonably demanding. First they want your job, which is no great difficulty since most jobs that pay decently are torture, then they want other things and now scientists are working on procreating without sex so it's possible to imagine a world without men. And what is our response to all this? All we can do is run around smashing things like spoiled children. I'm not saying I wasn't around when the shoe was on the other foot, though I was young, and maybe I have forgotten or never knew the meaning of “normal behavior,” but it is now clear that the day will never arrive when I’ve helped Bernadette enough.
I lied. In fact the phone was not the first thing. Several years before, I had denied her physical intimacy—of any kind—and it was when she adjusted to that cozy disaffection that things started to go in a funny direction, to get out of hand, as it were, big time. I understand rationally how this occurred. I had low tolerance for guilt and wanted it to be her decision to leave, but when I flew into a rage and lugged the bed out to the street and leaned it up against a tree for the trash trucks, was that not definitive?
I don’t know, but what she did was to haul her massive sewing table into the bedroom where it took the place of the bed, and of course then her other sewing supplies and fabrics started accumulating. Before I could object, the bedroom became her work room and we started sleeping on the L-shaped couch downstairs in the living room, lying at ninety degrees to one another, with her on one leg of the L and me on the other. It's hard now to believe that I went along with this, harder to understand why we continued sleeping in that arrangement for over six years.
Bernadette specializes in garbology, and never buys anything new. She routes her daily errands through the local streets to pick up discarded items. She knows the trash schedule and goes prospecting on the days when large articles will be waiting out on the sidewalk for the trucks to pick up. Right now she's upstairs, running the big industrial sewing machine that she found down on Fourth Avenue and asked me to cart back home on a piano dolly. The machine rumbles intermittently like a snoring rhinoceros as she masterfully zips together a new outfit from cast-off clothing she found hanging on a fence. My house overflows with fancy broken shoes, short ends of fabric, rained-on self-help books and semi-functional appliances that she has gleaned from the streets. I have four sewing machines in various states of repair sitting in the upstairs hallway, three bread machines stuffed into the little galley kitchen, dozens of pots and numerous extra telephones turning up everywhere, and various other unrecognizable gadgets hiding in the corners waiting to be fixed. All the horizontal surfaces are covered with little piles of worthless treasures. My wonderful apartment, which I spent three years remodeling to accommodate all this clutter, adding two mezzanines in the high-ceilinged rooms and dozens of built-in shelves, drawers, closets, once again feels like one of those junk shops full of third-hand items. I keep telling her this is a problem, over and over, but she must have grown up in a messy house and is comfortable living this way.
“I don't have time to put things in better order,” she explains in a tired voice. I point out that she seems to have plenty of time for sewing. “That's my relaxation, Malcolm,” she replies in a rising tone, using my full name as if she were scolding a child. “I work hard all day while you sit at the computer.” She's not quite yelling, but her raucous staccato can be heard out in the courtyard, and she's got me dead to rights. The tech downturn left me jobless, and I'm now at a point where I should probably move to Bangalore where, with luck, I might earn enough to avoid dying of malaria. It isn't that I mind the handyman jobs I do now, patching holes, fixing things, but the money isn't the same.
Bernadette is obsessed with assembling her special outfits, and I must admit she looks good in them. She knows all about materials and weaves and can even create her own patterns. I have no problem with that, but she applies the same authoritative energy to everything she does, insisting on doing things her own way and criticizing everything I do, especially in the kitchen, where it seems I can't even boil water properly. She doesn’t trust the washing machine either and stands over it like a dictator, turning the dial back and forth to prevent it from following it’s own program. Almost everything she says to me is some sort of critical remark or complaint and I live in terror of what she will say next. My friend Laverna tells me this is just the way she is and I should understand and put up with it, and I do. I clearly do put up with it, but why?
I’m living with a hyperactive policewoman named Bernadette. She’s a member of an elite unit of the Homeland Guard. She gets up every morning and puts on her green uniform, hangs the strap of her impressively compact weapon over her shoulder and goes out in search of infiltrators. She’s fully indoctrinated in the Manichaean dogma of security and fires without hesitation or remorse. With several notches already on her belt, she’s in line for promotion, so there’s a new ambitious edge to her ferocity. Due to the dangers of nuclear terrorism the authorities have loosened requirements for verification, so I must watch my step or she’ll come after me.
“What are those flowers?” she asks suddenly, piercing the demilitarized zone between us, finding her range. We're passing through lowland meadows where patches of purple wildflowers stand out vividly against the leafy background of trees and grasses. “Loose Strife,” I say with a foreboding that doesn’t seem justified since she’s only asking about flowers, and anyway I’m pleasantly elated that I knew the answer—shocked, actually.
But the ping-pong has begun, the familiar volleying that leads directly to open conflict. “Please stop the car,” she says, in full disarming simplicity. “I would like to pick some of them.” We proceed to have an absurd argument about the dangers of stopping along the highway, where non-emergency stopping is illegal in any case and even the breakdown lane is full of charging SUVs at rush hour, but she doesn't see the difficulty. “They're just wild flowers,” she says, “and you are afraid.”
So there we are, the match is over, and once again I remind myself of her many charms—her funny little ears, her nose that looks like it’s made of clay, the little spikes of hair that frame her face when she's sleeping—but we're only ten minutes from the airport and already I can feel the rings contracting around my arteries. Doctor Rasmussen explained that they become like high pressure fire hoses. At first I thought he was over-dramatizing when he told me how damaging that can be. “You could die,” he said, the tone of his voice falling an octave on the word “die.” But I followed his advice, changed my diet, even switched careers, and now I walk to the stores instead of running errands in the fusty old Fairmont. I no longer spend as many hours at the computer and live a more physical life. There isn’t much more I can do short of taking medication, which of course I’m also doing since that is what everyone does now. It’s the state of things in the medical business. Health is intangible, like happiness, so what’s needed is a product, a physical commodity, and now doctors are not much more than drug dealers who receive a fat bonus for every new prescription, every addict. I know this, yet I reach into the glove box for an Atenolol and wash it down with saliva, doubling my daily dosage and wondering if I can afford one of the newer, sexier drugs.
Sunday afternoon, we're getting ready to go out. I walk into the bedroom in my boxers and sit down on the bed to cool off in front of the Vornado, making some remark about the heat, but she's apparently not listening, because she bends down and turns off the fan. Then she opens the curtains, exposing my striped underwear to eighty or ninety windows around the courtyard. We live in a diorama, like specimens in a museum. “Did you hear me?” I say, jumping up to grab my jeans from the bureau and pulling them quickly over my legs. She has three times the testosterone of the average Caucasian female, which I know with medical certainty since I’ve seen the printout of her blood analysis.
The first thing to go is the phone. I stop paying the bills, and after receiving several dire warnings from the phone company, the line goes dead. Of course it means that nobody can reach me and I find myself cut off from things, but Bernadette can't call me every few minutes from work either so some ground has been gained. Naturally she’s offended. “You don't want to help me,” she says. Eight years of helping her escape from her dangerous crook of a husband and then acquire a green card plus unlimited use of the Fairmont and dozens of repair jobs in the buildings she manages—all that might be considered helping her, but that's an old story.
These are not forgiving times. We now know the truth about history, which is that it was full of bloody and horrifying injustice, with dominant groups subjugating others based on race, sex, religion, hair color, shoe size, every imaginable difference. So now the time has come for those who have been wronged to call in the chips, to step up and correct the accounts. There has been an equalization between the sexes, for example, and maybe I'm a neanderthal since—god help me—there are aspects about the old days I long for, but it has been my experience that women are often unreasonably demanding. First they want your job, which is no great difficulty since most jobs that pay decently are torture, then they want other things and now scientists are working on procreating without sex so it's possible to imagine a world without men. And what is our response to all this? All we can do is run around smashing things like spoiled children. I'm not saying I wasn't around when the shoe was on the other foot, though I was young, and maybe I have forgotten or never knew the meaning of “normal behavior,” but it is now clear that the day will never arrive when I’ve helped Bernadette enough.
I lied. In fact the phone was not the first thing. Several years before, I had denied her physical intimacy—of any kind—and it was when she adjusted to that cozy disaffection that things started to go in a funny direction, to get out of hand, as it were, big time. I understand rationally how this occurred. I had low tolerance for guilt and wanted it to be her decision to leave, but when I flew into a rage and lugged the bed out to the street and leaned it up against a tree for the trash trucks, was that not definitive?
I don’t know, but what she did was to haul her massive sewing table into the bedroom where it took the place of the bed, and of course then her other sewing supplies and fabrics started accumulating. Before I could object, the bedroom became her work room and we started sleeping on the L-shaped couch downstairs in the living room, lying at ninety degrees to one another, with her on one leg of the L and me on the other. It's hard now to believe that I went along with this, harder to understand why we continued sleeping in that arrangement for over six years.
Bernadette specializes in garbology, and never buys anything new. She routes her daily errands through the local streets to pick up discarded items. She knows the trash schedule and goes prospecting on the days when large articles will be waiting out on the sidewalk for the trucks to pick up. Right now she's upstairs, running the big industrial sewing machine that she found down on Fourth Avenue and asked me to cart back home on a piano dolly. The machine rumbles intermittently like a snoring rhinoceros as she masterfully zips together a new outfit from cast-off clothing she found hanging on a fence. My house overflows with fancy broken shoes, short ends of fabric, rained-on self-help books and semi-functional appliances that she has gleaned from the streets. I have four sewing machines in various states of repair sitting in the upstairs hallway, three bread machines stuffed into the little galley kitchen, dozens of pots and numerous extra telephones turning up everywhere, and various other unrecognizable gadgets hiding in the corners waiting to be fixed. All the horizontal surfaces are covered with little piles of worthless treasures. My wonderful apartment, which I spent three years remodeling to accommodate all this clutter, adding two mezzanines in the high-ceilinged rooms and dozens of built-in shelves, drawers, closets, once again feels like one of those junk shops full of third-hand items. I keep telling her this is a problem, over and over, but she must have grown up in a messy house and is comfortable living this way.
“I don't have time to put things in better order,” she explains in a tired voice. I point out that she seems to have plenty of time for sewing. “That's my relaxation, Malcolm,” she replies in a rising tone, using my full name as if she were scolding a child. “I work hard all day while you sit at the computer.” She's not quite yelling, but her raucous staccato can be heard out in the courtyard, and she's got me dead to rights. The tech downturn left me jobless, and I'm now at a point where I should probably move to Bangalore where, with luck, I might earn enough to avoid dying of malaria. It isn't that I mind the handyman jobs I do now, patching holes, fixing things, but the money isn't the same.
Bernadette is obsessed with assembling her special outfits, and I must admit she looks good in them. She knows all about materials and weaves and can even create her own patterns. I have no problem with that, but she applies the same authoritative energy to everything she does, insisting on doing things her own way and criticizing everything I do, especially in the kitchen, where it seems I can't even boil water properly. She doesn’t trust the washing machine either and stands over it like a dictator, turning the dial back and forth to prevent it from following it’s own program. Almost everything she says to me is some sort of critical remark or complaint and I live in terror of what she will say next. My friend Laverna tells me this is just the way she is and I should understand and put up with it, and I do. I clearly do put up with it, but why?
I’m living with a hyperactive policewoman named Bernadette. She’s a member of an elite unit of the Homeland Guard. She gets up every morning and puts on her green uniform, hangs the strap of her impressively compact weapon over her shoulder and goes out in search of infiltrators. She’s fully indoctrinated in the Manichaean dogma of security and fires without hesitation or remorse. With several notches already on her belt, she’s in line for promotion, so there’s a new ambitious edge to her ferocity. Due to the dangers of nuclear terrorism the authorities have loosened requirements for verification, so I must watch my step or she’ll come after me.
Agency Sells Shaved Apes as Human Babies
I question the value of all this exercise of language when everyone else is yelling equally loudly. We are all in denial about the terrible things that are carried out daily in our name, such as the drones that are right now circling above watching your every move and sending information about your entertainment choices and refrigerator contents to violent children who sit in front of high resolution screens waiting for you to reveal your role in a terrorist organization. Their judgement is informed by behavior analysis systems and the certainty that all things are resolved by an elderly white man with a long flowing beard who sits on a golden throne.
The drone program that Obama has augmented so drastically beyond what now looks in comparison like Bush's relative restraint is a shocking national disgrace. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be diminished when and if Hillary inherits the title of Commander in Chief. Both President Obama and future potential President Clinton are subject to the same pressure to prove that they're one of the boys.
Bernie Sanders would shut it down.
*
*
*
*
*
The drone program that Obama has augmented so drastically beyond what now looks in comparison like Bush's relative restraint is a shocking national disgrace. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be diminished when and if Hillary inherits the title of Commander in Chief. Both President Obama and future potential President Clinton are subject to the same pressure to prove that they're one of the boys.
Bernie Sanders would shut it down.
*
*
*
*
*
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
Letter to Giulietta Masina as Cabiria
Your misery out along the Ostia Road is unrelieved yet you remain hopeful, until your boyfriend throws you into the Tiber to steal your purse, not bothering to stay and watch as you drown. After that moment of extremity, your life is no longer livable. You take small solace in the company of a scruffy chicken, whose feathers you stroke with the consoling affection nobody will offer you, while deep in the valley behind a train rolls smoothly along its way to the happiness of others.
You are so desperately unhappy that you are driven to look for something larger and more genuinely valuable than anything you've ever known, something that will sustain you through life's travails and allow you to enjoy living again. Your desperate search leads you to a fresh discovery of the low-hanging fruit of glamour and celebrity that was as inescapable in the Italy of 1957 as it is in the America of 2015.
No wonder that you conclude that the elusive element that gives life the peculiar value you long for is to be found in the glamorous world of money and class. What choice do you have but to believe in the authoritative promise of Lazardi’s American convertible and the palatial labyrinth of his house? Dogs bark as you enter his earthly paradise and he later seems to favor you as he sits on the edge of his bed in slippers and smoking jacket, but then his bombshell paramour arrives unexpectedly in the wee hours and you end up hiding in the bathroom, forced to escape like the low-class prostitute you're afraid you'll always be.
After the collapse of the illusion of wealth and privilege, what remains is religion, so you join a pilgrimage to the holy shrine, where bells of heavenly promise toll unseen through loud-speakers hidden high in the steeple. You wait patiently for your turn at redemption, your heart full of earnest and holy faith, only to watch in dismay as a cripple throws down his crutches to fall on his face in the dirt and the crowd of anxious supplicants erupts in aggravated rebellion, their hysterical pleas for cures unsatisfied, while peddlers shamelessly hawk religious gee-gaws.
Finally, the cycle of desperation comes around once again to the irresistible possibility that love is the answer. Having sold your little concrete house and everything you own, you walk with the miraculous Oscar through the trees toward the promised land of love and family, but you are moving unavoidably towards the river, and the trees pass by like mile markers on the Via Dolorosa, each tree a discrete increment toward the ultimate realization that love is another illusion, created by a seedy sideshow hypnotist.
You arrive to stand once again on the precipice where your life has no value, begging Oscar to push you in just as your former boyfriend had done. Oscar takes your meager life savings and his cowardly exit leaves you in terminal misery, inconsolable and ready to throw yourself into the water below, but then the faint sound of an accordion arouses your curiosity and last remnant of hope.
Wandering miserably and with great reluctance back toward the road of life, you discover a group of mourners walking slowly in acknowledgement of life’s sadness and distress and the reality of death. A young boy wordlessly invites you to join the procession, and your smile as you fall in beside him is brighter than seems possible for anyone in the world let alone for you, who were desperately suicidal only moments before. Happiness doesn't require money, fame, celebrity, religion or love. It exists in spite of all those things in the way you choose to relate to the world.
You are so desperately unhappy that you are driven to look for something larger and more genuinely valuable than anything you've ever known, something that will sustain you through life's travails and allow you to enjoy living again. Your desperate search leads you to a fresh discovery of the low-hanging fruit of glamour and celebrity that was as inescapable in the Italy of 1957 as it is in the America of 2015.
No wonder that you conclude that the elusive element that gives life the peculiar value you long for is to be found in the glamorous world of money and class. What choice do you have but to believe in the authoritative promise of Lazardi’s American convertible and the palatial labyrinth of his house? Dogs bark as you enter his earthly paradise and he later seems to favor you as he sits on the edge of his bed in slippers and smoking jacket, but then his bombshell paramour arrives unexpectedly in the wee hours and you end up hiding in the bathroom, forced to escape like the low-class prostitute you're afraid you'll always be.
After the collapse of the illusion of wealth and privilege, what remains is religion, so you join a pilgrimage to the holy shrine, where bells of heavenly promise toll unseen through loud-speakers hidden high in the steeple. You wait patiently for your turn at redemption, your heart full of earnest and holy faith, only to watch in dismay as a cripple throws down his crutches to fall on his face in the dirt and the crowd of anxious supplicants erupts in aggravated rebellion, their hysterical pleas for cures unsatisfied, while peddlers shamelessly hawk religious gee-gaws.
Finally, the cycle of desperation comes around once again to the irresistible possibility that love is the answer. Having sold your little concrete house and everything you own, you walk with the miraculous Oscar through the trees toward the promised land of love and family, but you are moving unavoidably towards the river, and the trees pass by like mile markers on the Via Dolorosa, each tree a discrete increment toward the ultimate realization that love is another illusion, created by a seedy sideshow hypnotist.
You arrive to stand once again on the precipice where your life has no value, begging Oscar to push you in just as your former boyfriend had done. Oscar takes your meager life savings and his cowardly exit leaves you in terminal misery, inconsolable and ready to throw yourself into the water below, but then the faint sound of an accordion arouses your curiosity and last remnant of hope.
Wandering miserably and with great reluctance back toward the road of life, you discover a group of mourners walking slowly in acknowledgement of life’s sadness and distress and the reality of death. A young boy wordlessly invites you to join the procession, and your smile as you fall in beside him is brighter than seems possible for anyone in the world let alone for you, who were desperately suicidal only moments before. Happiness doesn't require money, fame, celebrity, religion or love. It exists in spite of all those things in the way you choose to relate to the world.
Giulietta Masina in the role of Cabiria in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria
Science hotline review (gray-scale version)
In the beginning there was this
dog that barked & did not bark. (Or
maybe it was a cat?) Some number
of years later (I forget), a tiny
object (in Michigan?), a million
times smaller than the width of an
eyelash, was observed doing the
mashed-potato with another small
item somewhere really far away,
like Osaka, or maybe it was Utah.
So like, now it turns out that the
expansion of the universe, Doppler-
gangered to form the bedrock of
latter-day cosmology, is, itself,
actually, like, accelerating?
...at which point someone way in the
back jokes that Republicans are just
Democrats in decline (or maybe it's
the other way around?) and even the
shocking dissonance of the New Music
becomes predictable before modernity
"shits the bed," leaving us with all
the same-old same-old unanswered
questions about life/death & etc.
You might wonder (adding human
dimension to the mystery) how all
this could be remotely tangential to
the price of tomatoes in Pancake Flats,
not realizing that this, too, is among
the prickly issues confronting cutting-
edge (future Nobel-laureate) researchers
in the field of Paradoxical Anomalies.
Speculation, with no further information
available, is most certainly moot, but
your call is important to us! Please
do not be dismayed. Simply allow your
curiosity to flap its stubby little wings
in the face of overwhelming immensity.
Press 1 for more options, or say the
word "macaroni" into the handset of
your telephone.
dog that barked & did not bark. (Or
maybe it was a cat?) Some number
of years later (I forget), a tiny
object (in Michigan?), a million
times smaller than the width of an
eyelash, was observed doing the
mashed-potato with another small
item somewhere really far away,
like Osaka, or maybe it was Utah.
So like, now it turns out that the
expansion of the universe, Doppler-
gangered to form the bedrock of
latter-day cosmology, is, itself,
actually, like, accelerating?
...at which point someone way in the
back jokes that Republicans are just
Democrats in decline (or maybe it's
the other way around?) and even the
shocking dissonance of the New Music
becomes predictable before modernity
"shits the bed," leaving us with all
the same-old same-old unanswered
questions about life/death & etc.
You might wonder (adding human
dimension to the mystery) how all
this could be remotely tangential to
the price of tomatoes in Pancake Flats,
not realizing that this, too, is among
the prickly issues confronting cutting-
edge (future Nobel-laureate) researchers
in the field of Paradoxical Anomalies.
Speculation, with no further information
available, is most certainly moot, but
your call is important to us! Please
do not be dismayed. Simply allow your
curiosity to flap its stubby little wings
in the face of overwhelming immensity.
Press 1 for more options, or say the
word "macaroni" into the handset of
your telephone.
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Richard Henry Hypnagogia
Two Years Before the Mast, a memoir about a period of Richard Henry Dana's boyhood that was spent aboard a ship, is an extraordinary piece of work. A striking aspect of that memoir is the rhythm of the language in which it was written and the effect it can have on the reader.
I haven't read Dana's book lately but I remember with some accuracy some details about my immediate surroundings when I last read it, including the approximate hour of the day, the season of the year, the feel of the room in which I was lying in bed reading it, as well as the quality of the sounds coming in through the open window behind my head. I even recall some of the things I'd been thinking about before picking up the book. It occurs to me now that the reason that my memory of these details is so vivid might be the curious condition induced in my mind by the rhythm of the writing . (It might be worth noting that the book was also written from memory.)
As one progresses through page after page of description about life at sea in the early part of the nineteenth century, the rhythm of the writing starts to take over and the sentences and paragraphs become like the periodic waves of the ocean. One might even begin to feel a rocking sensation as the boat rises and falls while it moves through the water.
I remember reading that book and falling into a kind of trance in which I stopped actually reading the words on the page and started inventing them instead. There was no perceptible threshold between the act of consciously reading the book in my hands and allowing the flow of language to emerge from a different source somewhere in my own imagination. The story just continued seamlessly on and on for paragraph after paragraph as I watched myself rewriting Richard Henry Dana's account using exactly the same kind of language in the same meter and style and every other aspect of the writing.
Now here's the weird part. That the writing might induce a hypnagogic condition in the reader is comprehensible as an experience one might have that might be reminiscent of the state of consciousness we tend to experience just before falling asleep. What was different about the state that Dana's book produced in me, however, was that I was able to observe myself in the process of having that experience as it was occurring. It was almost as if I had been split into two people, the one that had the hypnagogic experience and the other one that observed it, and the two of these characters existed and worked together in a kind of schizophrenic synchronization that I would like to be able to achieve, as it were, on my own.
Some mysterious aspects of this experience remain opaque to me, but in fact I believe this is what good writers actually do, and the discipline of writing requires that one learns how to perform such self-bifurcation. This aspect of writing might be what Artur Rimbaud was referring to when he wrote the following tiny and brilliant line,
Rober Frost said there has to be some accomplishment, and in his case such accomplishment would certainly include the use of rhyme. His poems provide a demonstration of the way in which rhyme can add a kind of punch to a poem, maybe because poetry has more in common with music than ordinary prose.
Meter, or rhythm, is obviously similar, and of course Frost uses it as effectively as he does rhyme. It is probably the way in which he is able to integrate meter and rhyme that makes his poems so striking and easy to memorize. (It's that music thing again.) So, for example:
But for me, something else about Frost's requirement for achievement is that the effort to comply with it might itself be actually helpful to the process of writing in a way that is not immediately apparent. First, it forces the writer to focus his/her conscious attention on the craft of writing to the near exclusion of all else, and now once again here comes the weird part.
One might think that such a narrow focus on the details involved in the craft of writing would necessarily be at the expense of the content and meaning of the piece one is writing, but maybe the intensity of the technical focus actually liberates a different part of the mind existing under the radar of conscious awareness to freely wander around in something akin to a hypnagogic state, which is, once again, the condition we experience immediately before falling asleep that is so very imaginative and fertile.
So here we are once again where I is another and the two of us work in unison with one unconsciously roaming around the universe and feeding thoughts and feelings and images to the other one who is wholly occupied with writing, writing, writing with an intensity of conscious control that is narrowly directed toward the bright little letters and words appearing on the page (or screen).
I think this might be actually how it works. The discipline of writing involves all sorts of technical knowledge and productive habits that include an acquired sensibility that allows bifurcation of a monolithic personality into separate entities that proceed to cooperate in releasing the flow of precisely controlled language onto the page.
That, in any case, is how I see it, though I'm not a psychologist or neurologist (nor was I an English or French major) and really have no freaking idea what I'm talking about.
I haven't read Dana's book lately but I remember with some accuracy some details about my immediate surroundings when I last read it, including the approximate hour of the day, the season of the year, the feel of the room in which I was lying in bed reading it, as well as the quality of the sounds coming in through the open window behind my head. I even recall some of the things I'd been thinking about before picking up the book. It occurs to me now that the reason that my memory of these details is so vivid might be the curious condition induced in my mind by the rhythm of the writing . (It might be worth noting that the book was also written from memory.)
As one progresses through page after page of description about life at sea in the early part of the nineteenth century, the rhythm of the writing starts to take over and the sentences and paragraphs become like the periodic waves of the ocean. One might even begin to feel a rocking sensation as the boat rises and falls while it moves through the water.
I remember reading that book and falling into a kind of trance in which I stopped actually reading the words on the page and started inventing them instead. There was no perceptible threshold between the act of consciously reading the book in my hands and allowing the flow of language to emerge from a different source somewhere in my own imagination. The story just continued seamlessly on and on for paragraph after paragraph as I watched myself rewriting Richard Henry Dana's account using exactly the same kind of language in the same meter and style and every other aspect of the writing.
Now here's the weird part. That the writing might induce a hypnagogic condition in the reader is comprehensible as an experience one might have that might be reminiscent of the state of consciousness we tend to experience just before falling asleep. What was different about the state that Dana's book produced in me, however, was that I was able to observe myself in the process of having that experience as it was occurring. It was almost as if I had been split into two people, the one that had the hypnagogic experience and the other one that observed it, and the two of these characters existed and worked together in a kind of schizophrenic synchronization that I would like to be able to achieve, as it were, on my own.
Some mysterious aspects of this experience remain opaque to me, but in fact I believe this is what good writers actually do, and the discipline of writing requires that one learns how to perform such self-bifurcation. This aspect of writing might be what Artur Rimbaud was referring to when he wrote the following tiny and brilliant line,
"Je est un autre."the direct translation of which is
"I is another."Note the change of perspective from first person to third that happens immediately after the "I." There are two people existing together in this line.
Rober Frost said there has to be some accomplishment, and in his case such accomplishment would certainly include the use of rhyme. His poems provide a demonstration of the way in which rhyme can add a kind of punch to a poem, maybe because poetry has more in common with music than ordinary prose.
Meter, or rhythm, is obviously similar, and of course Frost uses it as effectively as he does rhyme. It is probably the way in which he is able to integrate meter and rhyme that makes his poems so striking and easy to memorize. (It's that music thing again.) So, for example:
The witch who came, the withered hag,Nowadays there are categories of poetry that don't bother with such formalism, let alone things such as iambic pentameter and the difference between a sonnet and a ballad, etc. (This is not to say that such new forms are devoid of accomplishment.)
to wash the steps with pail and rag,
was once the beauty Abishag,
the picture pride of Hollywood.
too many fall from great and good
for you to doubt the likelihood.
...
But for me, something else about Frost's requirement for achievement is that the effort to comply with it might itself be actually helpful to the process of writing in a way that is not immediately apparent. First, it forces the writer to focus his/her conscious attention on the craft of writing to the near exclusion of all else, and now once again here comes the weird part.
One might think that such a narrow focus on the details involved in the craft of writing would necessarily be at the expense of the content and meaning of the piece one is writing, but maybe the intensity of the technical focus actually liberates a different part of the mind existing under the radar of conscious awareness to freely wander around in something akin to a hypnagogic state, which is, once again, the condition we experience immediately before falling asleep that is so very imaginative and fertile.
So here we are once again where I is another and the two of us work in unison with one unconsciously roaming around the universe and feeding thoughts and feelings and images to the other one who is wholly occupied with writing, writing, writing with an intensity of conscious control that is narrowly directed toward the bright little letters and words appearing on the page (or screen).
I think this might be actually how it works. The discipline of writing involves all sorts of technical knowledge and productive habits that include an acquired sensibility that allows bifurcation of a monolithic personality into separate entities that proceed to cooperate in releasing the flow of precisely controlled language onto the page.
That, in any case, is how I see it, though I'm not a psychologist or neurologist (nor was I an English or French major) and really have no freaking idea what I'm talking about.
Afterthought: Might this be an example of right-brain/left-brain cooperation and is therefore nothing out of the ordinary?
Monday, June 06, 2016
A very brief conversation with Mohamad Atta
Step right up ladies and gentlemen to HEAR the horrifying story and SEE the spectacle of a man who played an infinitesimally microscopic role in the background of the background of the dramatic events that occurred on September 11, 2001. I have an oddly ephemeral connection with those terrible events that I've never actually told anyone about because nobody would believe it since it's exactly the sort of improbable story that one would expect to hear from a garden-variety motormouth bar-room braggart in the wake of such a calamity.
As an example of the kind of thing I'm referring to, one of the claims that would not be at all surprising to hear from such irritating characters would go something like this:
I might stop right there and forget about posting this ridiculous story, but now that I've started I do at least want to get it down properly because I suspect that it might relieve me of the feather-weight burden of having kept it to myself for so long, so let's just get it over with. The absurd facts of the matter are these:
First of all, I did predict the destruction of the towers, and did so in the company of a coworker as we were walking up John Street toward the WTC one afternoon. He was already in awe of my programming prowess (which actually wasn't so hugely impressive by any professional standard), and I can only imagine how his estimation of me might have been augmented by virtue of my prediction having come true.
It's really not such a big deal, however. I worked downtown for 8 or 9 years and ever since the first attempt to bring down the towers had occurred in 1993 I hadn't been able to look up at those Monstrous Monolithic Monuments to the victorious ascendancy of Homo Economicus without wondering if I was in range if one of them fell over in my direction, and I can't have been the only one.
So that's the easy part, but then there's the other little oddity, and that's really all it is, which is that I'm quite certain that I met Mohammad Atta some weeks before the attacks.
So now I've said it, and it's out there in the world, wafting around the wilderness like a helium balloon released from the hand of a child. Everybody has their own personal 9/11 stories and this happens to be one of mine (and it's not over yet).
There I was, boys and girls, on my way to a pizza parlor during my lunch hour, crossing Fulton Street near the intersection with Gold Street when an American-made car that might have been light green in color pulled up beside me and the youngish driver leaned out to ask for directions. There was something distinctive and memorable about his face, and as I leaned toward him to listen to his query I could see three other young guys in the car and I recognized immediately that all of them were of middle-eastern origin, which struck me as unusual. It may not seem strange to anyone who knows that New York is probably the most diverse city on the planet and there are all sorts of people running around all over the city, but I was familiar with that area at that particular time on a normal workday and a car full of young Arab guys did not fit the pattern. To the contrary, it stuck out like a fluorescent elephant trudging along Broadway, but I also felt a twinge of guilt for perceiving them as being strange in some way and I instantly decided to compensate by being as obliging and friendly as possible. All of this ran through my head in an instant as I heard the driver ask in an unmistakably middle-eastern accent,
But in spite of my heightened wariness, I was still resolved to be friendly and, not being an ardent admirer of those towers, I responded in a way that might have expressed the complexity of my sensations at that moment. What I said to him in reply was this:
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. What interests me now is the thoroughness with which I remember both the sequence of events as they occurred fifteen years ago and the nuances of my thoughts and sensations throughout the entire interaction that took place in the space of a few seconds.
As for the question of whether I actually did come face to notorious face with Mohammad Atta in the weeks before 9/11, I think I did, but now that I've taken the step of writing about it I don't think it matters one way or the other, and I don't plan to revisit this topic ever again.
As an example of the kind of thing I'm referring to, one of the claims that would not be at all surprising to hear from such irritating characters would go something like this:
"I saw it comin', remember? I told you it was gonna happen that night when we were in the Blarney Stone and you tripped over that little dog and my second wife started screaming at that guy..." et cetera, blah, blah, blah...Another, and considerably rarer, such hindsight-inspired confabulation might be about something far less likely, such as having come into direct personal contact with Mohammad Atta, the apparent leader of the group that (allegedly) crashed United Airlines jets into the twin towers, such highly unlikely meeting having occurred before the tragedy, obviously, because Atta would have been multifurcated into a number of small organic elements when the light materials of the plane and it's squishier contents encountered the stainless steel structural members that formed the exoskeleton of those buildings.
I might stop right there and forget about posting this ridiculous story, but now that I've started I do at least want to get it down properly because I suspect that it might relieve me of the feather-weight burden of having kept it to myself for so long, so let's just get it over with. The absurd facts of the matter are these:
First of all, I did predict the destruction of the towers, and did so in the company of a coworker as we were walking up John Street toward the WTC one afternoon. He was already in awe of my programming prowess (which actually wasn't so hugely impressive by any professional standard), and I can only imagine how his estimation of me might have been augmented by virtue of my prediction having come true.
It's really not such a big deal, however. I worked downtown for 8 or 9 years and ever since the first attempt to bring down the towers had occurred in 1993 I hadn't been able to look up at those Monstrous Monolithic Monuments to the victorious ascendancy of Homo Economicus without wondering if I was in range if one of them fell over in my direction, and I can't have been the only one.
So that's the easy part, but then there's the other little oddity, and that's really all it is, which is that I'm quite certain that I met Mohammad Atta some weeks before the attacks.
So now I've said it, and it's out there in the world, wafting around the wilderness like a helium balloon released from the hand of a child. Everybody has their own personal 9/11 stories and this happens to be one of mine (and it's not over yet).
There I was, boys and girls, on my way to a pizza parlor during my lunch hour, crossing Fulton Street near the intersection with Gold Street when an American-made car that might have been light green in color pulled up beside me and the youngish driver leaned out to ask for directions. There was something distinctive and memorable about his face, and as I leaned toward him to listen to his query I could see three other young guys in the car and I recognized immediately that all of them were of middle-eastern origin, which struck me as unusual. It may not seem strange to anyone who knows that New York is probably the most diverse city on the planet and there are all sorts of people running around all over the city, but I was familiar with that area at that particular time on a normal workday and a car full of young Arab guys did not fit the pattern. To the contrary, it stuck out like a fluorescent elephant trudging along Broadway, but I also felt a twinge of guilt for perceiving them as being strange in some way and I instantly decided to compensate by being as obliging and friendly as possible. All of this ran through my head in an instant as I heard the driver ask in an unmistakably middle-eastern accent,
"Where is the world trade center?"At this the sense of strangeness I'd been feeling turned sinister and became something more like shocked recognition. My suspicion was at least sharply enhanced if not confirmed, the more so since any idiot or newly arrived terrorist in the downtown area could easily locate those towers by merely inclining his head upwards, and that is what I proceeded to do by glancing west over the roof of the car and up along Fulton Street. What I remember discovering, however, is that the towers were obscured behind the surrounding landscape of buildings and could not actually be seen from where I was standing, which would not have been shocking though I was still slightly surprised.
But in spite of my heightened wariness, I was still resolved to be friendly and, not being an ardent admirer of those towers, I responded in a way that might have expressed the complexity of my sensations at that moment. What I said to him in reply was this:
"Do you want to knock it down? Let me help you!"But then I pointed up Fulton Street and said something like, "It's right over there," at which point the driver thanked me and must have turned right in the direction I'd indicated though my memory of that departure is less certain than the startling fact that when I later saw a picture of Mohammad Atta some time after the day of the tragedy, I instantly recognized him as the driver of that car.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. What interests me now is the thoroughness with which I remember both the sequence of events as they occurred fifteen years ago and the nuances of my thoughts and sensations throughout the entire interaction that took place in the space of a few seconds.
As for the question of whether I actually did come face to notorious face with Mohammad Atta in the weeks before 9/11, I think I did, but now that I've taken the step of writing about it I don't think it matters one way or the other, and I don't plan to revisit this topic ever again.
THE END
Friday, June 03, 2016
Language spoken at night
Choosing our table away from the noise, we loosen our clothes and fill our lungs like fish returned to the sea, and gradually let ourselves go—to venture across the unknown terrain of themes not talked about anywhere else. We speak of the things that matter most to the highest version of ourselves, the essence of what's left when we're no longer crushed by the weight of concerns or the force of daily coercion. Surprised by our surprise that there's anything there, where fears fall away and truth can emerge whether it's lovely or not. Unconstrained by anything at all, we speak in the language of flame.
Three phases of Quixote
Long ago, possibly as far back as fifty-nine years, we started imagining the characteristics of the people we would have become by now and the places where we would now find ourselves. There was expectation and desire behind our dreams and projections, but whatever it was or might have been, we ended up as something else and someplace other than we'd hoped and imagined.
Is it impossible to imagine we are artists whose highest creation is ourselves? Wisdom of libraries and works in museums might be nothing compared with the magnificent accomplishment of self creation, which seems a wishful observation but in fact might even be factual, the difference between fact and observation being a problem for imaginary Doctors of Philosophy, who chose extended neotony over the terror of useful employment.
We can barely manage to crawl around the course once again before arriving, exhausted and bewildered, at the festive occasion where we allow ourselves to feel lucky that life is good and worth living, even if unobserved due to the familiar obligation and the irresistible regulation of breakfast, lunch and doing the laundry.
Is it impossible to imagine we are artists whose highest creation is ourselves? Wisdom of libraries and works in museums might be nothing compared with the magnificent accomplishment of self creation, which seems a wishful observation but in fact might even be factual, the difference between fact and observation being a problem for imaginary Doctors of Philosophy, who chose extended neotony over the terror of useful employment.
We can barely manage to crawl around the course once again before arriving, exhausted and bewildered, at the festive occasion where we allow ourselves to feel lucky that life is good and worth living, even if unobserved due to the familiar obligation and the irresistible regulation of breakfast, lunch and doing the laundry.
Wednesday, June 01, 2016
A Canterbury Tale 1944 (film review)
This is a propaganda movie, pure and simple, intended to address the resistance of the British populace to the presence of over a million American soldiers on British soil in preparation for Operation Overlord, the long-awaited allied invasion of Nazi-dominated Europe. Every single scene and shot in this movie and every line of dialog is tailored to the purpose of persuading the target audience, the ruffled British citizenry, to go happily to war in defense of glorious British traditions and to accept the dirty and uncultured American soldiers (from places like Brooklyn and Oregon) as jolly-good comrades in arms. It couldn't be more blatant or obvious, and the movie is of interest only as a textbook example of British propaganda. Otherwise, it's complete drivel.
I enjoyed it enormously.
I enjoyed it enormously.
Long Live the Lady! 1987 (film review)
This is the kind of Art-house flick that people will tell you is a masterpiece even though they don't actually understand it. I don't think there's really anything there to understand and even Olmi himself didn't know what the film was about.
The only other Olmi film I've seen was "The Tree of Wooden Clogs," which seemed to me rather plodding and predictable but worth watching for the period and setting and also for the political and social insight into feudal class arrangements. I enjoy the spectacle of period pieces, but this film doesn't bother with that kind of realism. It's more of a long drawn-out fantasy nightmare with maybe some of the same elements of class distinctions transposed into the modern world. There's a thin storyline about the young protagonist who participates in a training program to become a servant at a grotesque banquet celebrating the glory of some monstrous old lady. He has flashback memories from childhood about some sort of religious imagery that seems related to present events, but all that was lost on me.
This movie is intriguing at first but then it drags on and on and never arrives at a coherent story, which becomes very aggravating about half-way through. In the end it all seems rather dated and facile and not very interesting. It's supposed to mean something deep and hidden-meaningful about society (or whatever) but it's not clear at all and by the end I was so bored I didn't care any more and was just glad it was over.
The only other Olmi film I've seen was "The Tree of Wooden Clogs," which seemed to me rather plodding and predictable but worth watching for the period and setting and also for the political and social insight into feudal class arrangements. I enjoy the spectacle of period pieces, but this film doesn't bother with that kind of realism. It's more of a long drawn-out fantasy nightmare with maybe some of the same elements of class distinctions transposed into the modern world. There's a thin storyline about the young protagonist who participates in a training program to become a servant at a grotesque banquet celebrating the glory of some monstrous old lady. He has flashback memories from childhood about some sort of religious imagery that seems related to present events, but all that was lost on me.
This movie is intriguing at first but then it drags on and on and never arrives at a coherent story, which becomes very aggravating about half-way through. In the end it all seems rather dated and facile and not very interesting. It's supposed to mean something deep and hidden-meaningful about society (or whatever) but it's not clear at all and by the end I was so bored I didn't care any more and was just glad it was over.
Le Boucher 1970 (film review)
This film is a work of such blatant charlatanry that it calls into question the meaning of the word 'auteur' as it is applied to the French new wave directors. Such is the awe with which Chabrol was and continues to be regarded (including by Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby) that he apparently felt he could get away with anything. Le Boucher is a film so utterly devoid of dramatic interest that it would be charitable to regard it as a failed experiment that attempted to push the limits of cinematic exposition to an extremity of emptiness. I might forgive Chabrol for writing and producing it if his intention was to demonstrate the boring predictability of bourgeois culture in a place like Perigord, but I'd prefer to spend an hour and a half doing my laundry.
-------------------
Reading over the above, I'm shocked by my ferocity. Was it really that bad? I like a lot of stuff from the Nouvelle Vague, but when it's bad, it's really, really bad.
Margaret 2011 (film review)
This is an extraordinary psychological story that explores the strange way in which guilt turns into anger, a process that is not necessarily straightforward and is therefore beyond the comprehension of just about everyone who hasn't been through a similar experience. Such understanding even tends to be inaccessible for those who have actually been there unless they're very perceptive or very lucky. I am deeply impressed with both the conception and the execution of this film, especially the writing, but all other aspects are beautifully done: the direction, the acting, the music, the cinematography, every element is worthy of the depth of the story. I'm tempted to call it a perfect movie. What more can I say?
My own personal history of blogging
I think I might reconsider this whole blog thing.
Fluorescent Elephant was born eleven years ago for a specific journalistic reason. There was at least a consistent topic, but the postings drifted in non-journalistic directions to other topics. For me there's nothing wrong with that except that the archive of former posts is indexed by month and year and not by category, which makes locating specific elements difficult. It's necessary to traverse the entire chronological listing of months and years to find anything, which might be ok if I had stuck to the original intention, but I didn't.
My focus broadened and become more random, too much so to continue posting to a chronologically-indexed FIFO format. I like the simplicity of Blogger but it isn't flexible enough to be converted into an arbitrarily indexed content management system. Drupal might suit me better but its complexity would distract me from writing. Many people use Wordpress now but I suspect it has the same problem. I have programming skills to use these tools but I don't want to get into PHP coding or anything similar, so I'll have to do research to find something more appropriate. Meanwhile I want to recall the original motivation for all this, which requires an overview that locates Fluorescent Elephant in the proper historical context.
The short version begins with the inauguration of the Bush administration, which resulted from the supreme court decision that awarded illegitimate victory to the Republican candidate in what can properly be regarded as a coup d'etat that denied the will of the American people. That fundamental event set in motion forces that proceeded to create the conditions that enabled the 9/11 airplane attacks, which, with malice aforethought, aligned the country behind an irredentist fantasy of American exceptionalism that a powerful group of latter-day conservatives inherited from the triumphalist contingent of the WWII generation and projected forward in a (desperate?) campaign to maintain postwar American sovereignty over a changing world.
History proceeds from one stage to another, each stage creating the conditions for what follows. To be really clear about the backstory against which Fluorescent Elephant came into being, maybe I should more precisely locate the neoconservative agenda in a historical context of its own that can't be viewed in its proper dimension without a helicopter. Always remembering the requirement for brevity, which can be challenging, let's rise up in our helicopter to see if we can achieve a windy perspective.
Starting with the gradual decline of American influence that became undeniable toward the end of the 20th century, a powerful cabal of neoconservative desperadoes needed to come up with a way to restore the American hegemony that had been established by their forefathers. Endless streams of capital and privilege were directed toward this purpose, resulting in a radical new strategy called the Project for a New American Century, which harkened back to the principal event that established a national consensus for American involvement in WWII, namely the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was deemed that another such event was necessary to manufacture a similar consensus and gain the political power to go to war once again for the reestablishment of former American dominance. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were conjured out of the existing world situation in which the Soviet boogeyman had been vanquished and the formerly impotent Islamic militancy was being inflated as the new national enemy.
Incredible as it seems, the project succeeded. Domestic political opposition was crushed. The overall push for war overwhelmed the responsible elements in the news media, which abdicated its responsibility to present an opposing perspective and to tell us the truth about what our cynical government was really up to. It was the most irresponsible and disheartening failure of nerve I'd ever witnessed occurring on such a massive scale in the drearily spectacular landscape of American journalism.
There was an elephant in the room and it was glowing. The major news outlets submitted to the will of the executive branch out of sheer and unforgivable cowardice, just as the democratic congress also did. The only journalists out there who were reporting the actual truth were found in the blogosphere, where brilliant young writers like Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and several others were inventing a new kind of journalism that went straight to the heart of the matter in a stylistically warm and abbreviated format appropriate for web presentation. I was deeply excited by this new trend and threw myself into blogging with passionate intensity. Fluorescent Elephant was born.
Unfortunately, the motivation based on my political outrage tends to subside after a while, maybe because I'm also interested in other kinds of writing. A large percentage of my youth was dedicated to the absorption of the best writing I could find in the Paperback Booksmith, the first bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts that carried only paperbacks. I was exposed to a great deal of the sort of beautiful language that is found primarily in fiction, and specialized in literature from distant parts of the world. My selections tended to be somewhat exotic, maybe because I had a predilection for the unknown. I read a lot of classic Russian material, for example, and was fascinated by the new crop of Latin American writers. I don't know why it was that I seemed to be less interested in British, French and American writing, though I digested a fair amount of that as well. Maybe I was a poor student and tended to prefer my own literary discoveries to what I was told were the Great Writers of the Western World. (I don't last long in museums either.) However that may be, an ocean of wonderful language became lodged in my head and stayed in there for a number of silent decades. Ultimately, it needed to come out, and the holy political and journalistic purity of Fluorescent Elephant became corrupted by something else.
(Probably none of this is actually true but it's the best explanation I can manage.)
Fluorescent Elephant was born eleven years ago for a specific journalistic reason. There was at least a consistent topic, but the postings drifted in non-journalistic directions to other topics. For me there's nothing wrong with that except that the archive of former posts is indexed by month and year and not by category, which makes locating specific elements difficult. It's necessary to traverse the entire chronological listing of months and years to find anything, which might be ok if I had stuck to the original intention, but I didn't.
My focus broadened and become more random, too much so to continue posting to a chronologically-indexed FIFO format. I like the simplicity of Blogger but it isn't flexible enough to be converted into an arbitrarily indexed content management system. Drupal might suit me better but its complexity would distract me from writing. Many people use Wordpress now but I suspect it has the same problem. I have programming skills to use these tools but I don't want to get into PHP coding or anything similar, so I'll have to do research to find something more appropriate. Meanwhile I want to recall the original motivation for all this, which requires an overview that locates Fluorescent Elephant in the proper historical context.
The short version begins with the inauguration of the Bush administration, which resulted from the supreme court decision that awarded illegitimate victory to the Republican candidate in what can properly be regarded as a coup d'etat that denied the will of the American people. That fundamental event set in motion forces that proceeded to create the conditions that enabled the 9/11 airplane attacks, which, with malice aforethought, aligned the country behind an irredentist fantasy of American exceptionalism that a powerful group of latter-day conservatives inherited from the triumphalist contingent of the WWII generation and projected forward in a (desperate?) campaign to maintain postwar American sovereignty over a changing world.
History proceeds from one stage to another, each stage creating the conditions for what follows. To be really clear about the backstory against which Fluorescent Elephant came into being, maybe I should more precisely locate the neoconservative agenda in a historical context of its own that can't be viewed in its proper dimension without a helicopter. Always remembering the requirement for brevity, which can be challenging, let's rise up in our helicopter to see if we can achieve a windy perspective.
Starting with the gradual decline of American influence that became undeniable toward the end of the 20th century, a powerful cabal of neoconservative desperadoes needed to come up with a way to restore the American hegemony that had been established by their forefathers. Endless streams of capital and privilege were directed toward this purpose, resulting in a radical new strategy called the Project for a New American Century, which harkened back to the principal event that established a national consensus for American involvement in WWII, namely the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was deemed that another such event was necessary to manufacture a similar consensus and gain the political power to go to war once again for the reestablishment of former American dominance. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were conjured out of the existing world situation in which the Soviet boogeyman had been vanquished and the formerly impotent Islamic militancy was being inflated as the new national enemy.
Incredible as it seems, the project succeeded. Domestic political opposition was crushed. The overall push for war overwhelmed the responsible elements in the news media, which abdicated its responsibility to present an opposing perspective and to tell us the truth about what our cynical government was really up to. It was the most irresponsible and disheartening failure of nerve I'd ever witnessed occurring on such a massive scale in the drearily spectacular landscape of American journalism.
There was an elephant in the room and it was glowing. The major news outlets submitted to the will of the executive branch out of sheer and unforgivable cowardice, just as the democratic congress also did. The only journalists out there who were reporting the actual truth were found in the blogosphere, where brilliant young writers like Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and several others were inventing a new kind of journalism that went straight to the heart of the matter in a stylistically warm and abbreviated format appropriate for web presentation. I was deeply excited by this new trend and threw myself into blogging with passionate intensity. Fluorescent Elephant was born.
Unfortunately, the motivation based on my political outrage tends to subside after a while, maybe because I'm also interested in other kinds of writing. A large percentage of my youth was dedicated to the absorption of the best writing I could find in the Paperback Booksmith, the first bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts that carried only paperbacks. I was exposed to a great deal of the sort of beautiful language that is found primarily in fiction, and specialized in literature from distant parts of the world. My selections tended to be somewhat exotic, maybe because I had a predilection for the unknown. I read a lot of classic Russian material, for example, and was fascinated by the new crop of Latin American writers. I don't know why it was that I seemed to be less interested in British, French and American writing, though I digested a fair amount of that as well. Maybe I was a poor student and tended to prefer my own literary discoveries to what I was told were the Great Writers of the Western World. (I don't last long in museums either.) However that may be, an ocean of wonderful language became lodged in my head and stayed in there for a number of silent decades. Ultimately, it needed to come out, and the holy political and journalistic purity of Fluorescent Elephant became corrupted by something else.
(Probably none of this is actually true but it's the best explanation I can manage.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)