Eric Loses Bet; Discovers Critical Faculty

Eric, on his blog — ?– posted, what in hindsight has turned out to be a pretty embarrassing piece about who to put your money on in this year’s NBA finals.  Caught up in a fit of passion over his ’sure things’ he made a reckless wager (he works on Wall St.) on the outcome of the Hawks and Heat series.  Whereas his pick was made upon a pile of Ponzi-like assumptions (’the fix is in’, he howled), mine was based on thoughtful and sober analysis.  I calmly reassured myself: the tape doesn’t lie.

No money was to change hands though — Eric (fucking cheapskate) suggested that the loser write an essay on a topic to be determined by the winner.  Naturally, I asked him to write a review of a book of poetry that I wrote (he’s done it for everyone else!).  He seemed delighted at the prospect of taking me down a notch and thus wrote a review so evil it may as well have been forged in the pits of hell.  He wrote it with a hammer.  For the most part his blows land above the belt: I felt pretty thoroughly dismantled after reading it twice; however, I will say that three times he mentions the rag-tag production value of the book — very nearly accusing me of flim-flammery.  I should like to point out that he refers to the first edition (of which ten copies were made) even though I went to the trouble of securing him a copy of the second edition (a handsome edition that Damian Weber had put together) at no charge.  In this light those complaints seem barely shy of triflin’.

One more thing: before publishing this post, I let a friend read Eric’s review.  Her words: “it just reminds me how much i like your poems”

Thanks, Eric!:

Shane Meyer and I made a bet.  And now, thanks to a couple rogue referees, I have to produce writing according to Shane’s direction.  Somebody called an offensive foul on Dwayne Wade, I won’t get into it, but I have to produce, and the subject matter and form are up to Mr. Meyer.    So what does he have me do?  Well perhaps I’m not the most travelled and interesting of souls, but even the most downtrodden of our race is allotted a share of the unique and miraculous.  Meek and obscure as I am, it’s arguable my allotment has been overly-generous: some accounting error in the ledgers of luck. As a result, I’ve hit the roads from Canada to Patagonia, slept atop ancient pyramids, been attacked by a puma, dined with presidents, professors, Nobelists, celebrities. I’ve had my life threatened, I’ve saved a life.  I’ve had visions. Been intimate with the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich: El Basurero to East Hampton; Bulgarian backwater hamlets to the high halls of Oxbridge.  I’ve worked at bars in Guatemala, hedge funds in New York, United Nations headquarters, and call centers in Depew.  Benighted and befuddled as the rest of the race, I nevertheless have learned a thing or two.  And how does Mr. Meyer choose to utilize me?  He’s cashed in his chips for a review of his own “book” of “poetry,” The Current Mood. 

You may have noticed the quotes around “book” and “poetry.”  They’re not there by accident.  I don’t know what to call a wad of badly cut computer papers trapped together by a couple cheap staples — heaven forbid he splurge on that bankbreaking third staple — so I suppose “book” will have to do.  And as for the “poetry?”  I’m afraid that’s what our contract obligates me to examine at greater length, and so here goes, for better or worse. 
 

Let us begin by turning at random through the alphabetically arranged titles to the poem Numb which I’ll transcribe here in full (though without the charming typos and formatting mistakes): 

Numb 

Now, no pleasure

will interfere with shore

the feeling is too even

to be called give or take. 

At birth,

(such simple verse)

or other times unremembered

depth had its form for its purpose

to be heard was the thing.

To be heard like that again!

Then death.

Same song, resung

but this time

within the silence

of experience. 
 

Meyer lucks out: this isn’t the worst he could do.  The notion of being heard as a newborn’s birth-wail is heard: with that rapt attention to a matter of life or death:  is a powerful notion.  The birth-wail’s counterpoint in death is silence, which the poet attributes to experience: the wisdom that all life’s wailing, crying, speaking, singing, laughing, it was all for naught.  Does the poet believe what he’s saying?  Perhaps he does, for if we flip further, we find the book ends prematurely with the poem, Recumbant [sic].  Meyer’s “experience” apparently led him to abandon the project before elaborating such moods as “Sassy,” “Triumphant,” or “Understimulated.”  Yet, he still found it fit to publish the aborted emotional guide-book so as usual there’s no telling what the addled young poet believes.  If a clue is to be found in Numb’s first stanza, it will do this reader no good, for I candidly profess complete non-understanding of its meaning.       

Fearful of infected paper cuts lest I again flip the mangled pages of this ragtag text, I’ll turn my attention to the verso of the already open book, and to the poem Nauseated.  In full: 

Nauseated 

The further away I get from my body

the more it fills

with a less dense element

which when in proper proportion

is the one that spurts me

from the canister

in a fluffy, decorative burst. 

LISTEN HERE:

Trying to explain

my outlandish  organization

is like trying to cram

whipped cream

back into the can. 
 

Like the mystifying initial stanza of the previous poem, the first lines remind me of the scholastic obscurity which brought power and fame to the likes of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas just 750 short years ago.  I’ll hazard a prediction here to say that the modus dominicus is unlikely to do the same favors for Mr. Meyer.  However, the poet redeems the piece by using a startlingly humorous image rather than theological prose to culminate his thought, in a rare and welcome victory for phanopoeia over logopoeia in Meyer’s I can’t believe it’s the 21^st century opus.   

It’s worth pausing here to consider the incongruity of Meyer’s gimmicky (and therefore ultra-contemporary) premise and his own obvious predilections for musty texts written in dead languages.  Take these lines from Geeky: 

Therein hung,

hic et illic

(with harmless emphasis)

tituli

sprung from . . . 

a conceit he continues in the very next poem Giggly which beings with the line “Hiccup, gulp” and includes the Latinate “flocculent” (having a fluffy or woolly appearance) along with “Whoops” and “ohhhh!” and ends with “phew.”   I know the poet and his taste (and ability) for Latin, Greek, German; his abiding interests not only in the poetry, but in the philosophy and history of that great span of time labeled “Classic.”  For all the poet’s many  faults as both a man and as a writer, I don’t think he’s attempting anything so gauche as a “commentary (read satire) on our times.”  For in fits, Meyer sounds downright “hip”, as in the two poems quoted in full below: 

Anxious 

The future me has a chainsaw

and a telephone bill. 

And I think he’s standing

right behind me. 

Artistic 

Loose on the straightaway

tight in the corner

criminal at the line

nothing left over 
 

But before you know it, he’s gone back to some mishmash of Anglo-Saxon time and what? early Christian gnosis and/or its theophany? you tell me: 

Frustrated 

Damn the man-heart;

it sighs meaningless with stone

and remains lodged

between each edge of the interior One.

Over here,

a blind pause,

blank as blink

and over there,

the heavy pre-glance

whose absent instant

was the tilted blur.

Later it said what it saw

but what it saw was before. 
 

Indeed, the entire myspace mood repertoire stuffs a medieval fanaticism for abstract taxonomies into glib little emoticons which by their semi-ironic and ultra-ephemeral nature are eminently contemporary.  Here today, gone and forgotten tomorrow. 

Era-bending anachronicities are not the only inconsistencies which pervade The Current Mood.  There is also a conflict between a myspace culture of auto-apotheosis and a poet who is no stranger to self-loathing.   

Productive 

Certainly there must be something

to read or write

but I hafta insist on a beer first

for, if there’s one production

I cannot stand sober; it’s me. 

The poet hardly stops there.  Like some parody of rappers’ braggadocio, Meyer again and again brings up his own inadequacies in love, money, and self-control; he goes so far as to mention his bed which is empty –alas — except — alas — for his own alcoholic faux pas.  The very slipshod ramshackle flimflam of the book-as-object, with its typos, sloppy photocopy production, and lack of any cover let alone colophon, reinforces the sense of a poet who thinks himself unworthy.  And it all begs a question: for indeed, what is the good self-hating artist to do in a culture where one is expected to build a shrine/page to oneself, complete with digital candles and bullet-point hagiographies.  When I was a child, my father used to hang Greek Orthodox luminaries of the saints around the house.  Now, saints are replaced with self-portraits. 
 

Take the final stanza of Quixotic 

Oh well, here I am

stuck here with the self division

and within-body-weirdness

erected first by my penis

and redoubled by my wallet

Broke with a hard-on

and always just hoping

something will be in there

(. . . nam tui poetae

plenus sacculus est aranearum)

b/c it’s just no use

being all literary these days. 
 

Poor, poor Shane Meyer.  No, no use at all.  Maybe it’s the fundamental incompatibility of the pre-enlightenment philosophy which orders the poet’s thought and the trashy moodscape of disposable emotions in a one-click culture.  The incompatibility of an artistic tradition founded upon ethics with a world of congratulatory narcissism.  (Amazing how quickly regard for self-esteem gave way to ubiquitous self-worship, and how humility went from being a virtue to a vice.)   

It’s almost as if Meyer would rather be writing about anything except himself, but by splendid coincidence of birth is compelled to write about nothing else.  So he compiles his moods, like santa’s selves hammering and sawing away in an assembly line of the SAINT SELF the undivided fully realized One.  In Quixotic, Meyer says that castration and the lottery can put you well along the path: it’s hard to argue with that.   

In any case, in poem after poem we have a poet trying to come to grips with himself, and failing.  God forgive me for mentioning The Current Mood in the same sentence as Augustine’s Confessions, and I mean that honestly: God, please forgive me.  But, it’s as if Augustine had been born at some future time, and rather than being instructed in the ways of the Christian Church, he was given a smattering of religious and philosophical ideas from all over the world and all throughout time, and then tried to sew this Frankenstein’s monster together in an autobiography so ambiguous the author doesn’t even know whether his confessions or worthy of praise or blame.   
 
 

By way of most merciful conclusion, this reader would like nothing more than to bring Shane Meyer down to size, but much to my chagrin the poet has beaten the critic to the punch.  Furthermore, I too suffer from a modern vice, honesty (which only gets in the way of the supreme modern virtue: intelligence, especially vis a vis self-interest).  Honesty forbids me from downgrading The Current Mood to being a mere “document.”  Yes, The Current Mood is of slight historical interest as a document of a bibliophile errant in the beginning of the post-literate age, but the book is of greater interest (and irrelevance) because of its occasional literary value.

The Present and History of My Loves

“Do you believe in God?” she asked as she slipped her shirt back on.  The phrase curled curiously at its end, pulled me toward it, and stealthily removed the contents from my mind.  My smile asked her to please give me a break.  Had I known then that woman does not negotiate importunity — indeed, certainly not a religious woman — I wouldn’t have bothered with the appeal to her sense of civility — to a sort of unwritten sexual ethics.  Consequently, I fumbled around through my past experiences, found a few exemplary moments which had shaped my attitude in regard to theology and its practical applications; then I pasted these together into a wily-nily Bildungsroman and wrapped around them the following bow: “…I am pretty thoroughly dedicated to an authentic application of  Enlightenment values; furthermore, I have nothing but the greatest respect for those moments where religion has profoundly affected that project…”  If it is true that every relationship is destroyed because of the initial trauma of meeting (the fact that no two people are compatible; and that this indisputable fact is violently shoved from the scene) then it may be fairly said that the above described instance was the one that incited every fight to follow.  Every relationship will eventually devolve into an odd match where the opponents deliberately attempt to wear themselves out through beating the other and taking a beating in turn: you must be covered in blood before you tap out– lest your opponent suspect treachery and cry for a rematch.

Needless to say, my half-hearted attempts at theological prospecting convinced nobody.  A few times at dinner I bravely declined to eat pork; suddenly I found myself convinced that pork had always been my favorite food: at least I understood what getting banished from the garden was like.  And that was the sum-total of my religious experiences; just as in my childhood: nothing more than me being forced to assert the very lamest version of my freedom.

Another example of life teaching me a lesson and not providing a subsequent opportunity to deploy my hard-won wisdom.

But, now that she has turned her back to me, I am able to hear the question resonate:

“Do you believe in God”

“Before I met you, I didn’t.  I thought life was meaningless; this thought was a kind of an anasthetic, I can see now.  But, yes, now I do believe in God.  I believe he made you, and he made me.  Life is no longer meaningless.  Life has meaning and it shows itself through pain.  I can see how cleverly God ordered our fate; because the fact is,  I have never felt pain this unique; this exotic. I am compelled to believe only an omnipotent force, with infinite resources, could have arranged something so hellish.”

Books We Have Not Read

Some time ago, on this very blog, there was a row over whether or not the editorial policy — in regard to book reveiws — of reading only secondary materials (reviews, press clippings, etc.), while disposing of whatever happens to be between the covers of the book in question, was intellectually responsible.  We the editors came away from the ordeal more entrenched in our original view that given our historical and cultural situation it would be downright silly to review a work on ’its own merits’ because we would have to do so in a near-delusional state, a state that hopelessly (and cultishly) fetishizes The Book, and in any case represents the terminus ad quem that the publishing industry engendered within itself already at its outset; that is to say, the publishing industry –which for so long  bombarded the public with trash — and its complaints that the public has found better pickings in slicker receptacles, were quite inevitable.  While we take no pleasure in this inevitability, we refuse to pout winsomely; for, that attitude will end in a predictable scenario: an old pedagogue berating some poor youth for the youth’s inability to appreciate what he deems worthy of appreciation.  Nevermind that the youth’s confusion is due to the fact that he cannot understand why any-given-thing should be so hard to love.  Today, our prevailing attitude will have to be stoicism, as there’s still nothing quite like falling on ones sword to prove the point.

For the pleasure of the non-reading public, we shall, in the future, be presenting more reviews of BOOKS WE HAVE NOT READ.

Book of the Month Club

If you want to be a member, you have to go a month without reading a book and then share your experience in the comment bin; if it approaches Tawrin-level insanity I may even bump it up into a post.

During April I didn’t read a book.  Not one.  To me it’s kinda funny that supposedly serious people make a distinction between Literature and Escape Reading.  Here’s a scenario:  Strangers on a train.  One woman reads a trashy novel about the bond between Mother and Daughter (it ought to be titled ‘Securing A Lifetime of Resentment’).  Another woman reads a book about The Creative Class (Let’s call it ‘10 Things to Think about to Distract You from the Class War; or, Interior Decorating Around Exposed Ventilation Units’)  .  Reading either book is little more than the act of giving oneself over to an irrational power arrangement .  One book just happens to be more insidious than the other.  There is no escape.

Ernest Bloch wrote a little essay about a fellow named Alfred Seidel who was a doctorate-level student in Weimar-era Germany.  Mr Seidel, Bloch writes, hung himself, but beforehand managed to scribble a strange suicide note titled (it is not common for suicide notes to have titles) “Consciousness as Doom”.  Life seemed for Seidel as though Hegel’s dictum ‘The rational is real; the real is rational’ had come true — however, it had been stripped of its utopian content and presented as a pastiche of power relations, blind libidinal force, and repressive ideologies; it had become irrational.  Hegel’s dream had become for Seidel a waking nightmare.  Bloch makes an unconvincing argument (or rather, an argument that does not seem to respect the dignity of Seidel’s intuitions); you might call it an apology for not killing oneself; Seidel, Bloch says, belonged to a generation that had neglected love and hope.  Whereas Young Werther had expired himself due to frustrated desire Seidel expired himself after failing to desire anything at all; he was a nihilist.  This seems like an argument against itself: it’s difficult to imagine pining for a time when people killed themselves for respectable reasons.  Schopenhauer seems apropros at this point when he wondered sarcastically why two frustrated lovers (let’s say Romeo and Juliet) would kill themselves when really all they have to do is wait out whatever is coming between them.  Spoken like a man who never loved anything.  He knew all too well that this bit of supposed common sense was useless given the irrational force of the will — which in any case only wants to blindly reproduce itself: the attraction between men and women is little more than that and the vain desire to make a copy of one’s ideal self.  In this case, despite the claims of Bertrand Russell (and despite the fact that Schopenhauer admittedly had to lay aside his entire metaphysics to write an ethics) that Schopenhauer was a fraud, it isn’t hard to detect the authenticity of the claim:  the inability of Schopenhauer to conform to his own standard reappears as the impossibility to do otherwise for Seidel.  Bloch reminds us that Seidel’s claims for consciousness qua doom were too large, ahistorical, etc. but ignores the fact that consciousness as doom is historically particular… to a fault; that is to say that you can’t just step outside of it (Here Russell got owned by Schopenhauer – he neglected to remember the epigram to Book II of ‘The World as Will and Representation [whose author, incidentally I cannot recall]: “He who takes note only of his own age will influence only a few”).  Besides, it’s downright masochistic to chastise someone for not being able to love.  Love as an injunction has all the gross trappings of Christianity;  hoping is for people who make stupid bets.

The Incomplete Works of Adolphus Meyerholz

Per my duties as executor of the literary estate of Adolphus Meyerholz and editor of the authoritative edition of his complete works, I shall be publishing here, serially, (as a sort of build-up to the release of the ‘Works’) a selection of A.M.’s drafts, sketches, and false-starts, alongside of which I shall provide brief commentary.  If it is a quirk of our generation to be unsatisfied by any partial account — to see beneath the varnish of a final draft a veritable ocean of unresolvable conflicts — then it may be fairly said that this series should go a little way in playing upon that urge; even if, in the end, the urge plays itself out.

On Disliking Everything

It is not my desire to promote the naive sort of skepticism that may seem to be implied in the title of this essay; let it be said straightaway: the ability to dislike everything is not to be exercised in a general way toward a false whole; to the contrary, it must be the ability to dislike each thing on its own merits so that the only whole thus constitued is inner unity of one’s critical faculty; that is, the ability to constantly employ a dissolving gaze when confronted with anything whatever.  It may have been guessed by now that this gaze of dislike is set firmly against what one immediately likes.  A moment’s pause will suffice for one to look over the multiplicity of judgments past and find one such judgment that was handed down reflexively so that even the pretense of deliberation was forgone in favor of having the whole matter settled at once and forever.  The reflexive nature of such a judgement ought not to dissuade our attempt to examine this phenomenon; for, it is exactly those moments taken most for granted that hold for us the key to our experiences generally; that is, we are able, when examining something taken for granted, to explore in reverse order the process of coming to understand.  Usually, we approach this process inductively and have to feel our way through the farrago of guesswork, error, and restarting before the tortuous path to knowledge can be cleared; by beginning at the point we think we have the thing most firmly in hand, we can see it as it becomes foreign to our understanding, thus the conciet that we knew it is bedeviled and the thing now takes on the quality of being at once familiar and foreign — the latter condition necessary because it brings along with it the integrity of the thing in question: that it cannot be known, that it has an existence outside of whatever conciet we may have in regard to it — the former condition equally necessary as its familiarity forms the foundation of its difference.

A.M. noted in the margins of this partial draft that ‘it is a difficult thing, at the end of the day, to distinguish between liking and disliking… if the latter is attended by a critical instinct, then that seems to doom the former to naivety… this won’t do.’  An interesting passage if only for the implication that employing a sort of epistemological heirarchy does not move the critic an inch towards understanding the thing as it is.  A.M.’s method is, then, Socratic — an admission of ignorace is the first step, which is, of course, a step back.  The essay grinds to a halt 63 pages later, whereupon A.M. admits that disliking — despite multiple provisions — is the same as liking, or “retains its essential feature while inverting it’s content: a mere transvaluation”.

UPDATE

Now that I’ve stopped expression-based writing I have time to focus on my first love: penmanship.  I write randomly generated sequences of letters and numbers; practice them day and night.  My sense for kerning is impeccable, you might even say natural.  Right now I’m only using capital letters.  Since I use a similar motion for 6’s, 0’s, and O’s there have been times when those characters have resembled one another.  I tried putting a backslash through the zeros, but it seems ostentatious — like a hyphen through the leg of a seven, or  a tail on the number one.

Also, the other night I dreamt that I had a hole in my hand through which I could see the floor.  It didn’t hurt.

My ride to work this morning. What I didn’t know, thought I knew…A rant, a review!

Teodor Lazer

February 26, 2009.  I am well and am currently on my way to work…and by that I mean just getting out of bed at 7 PM, not feeling quite yet like a human, on lay off, and loving life.  Work now consists of shaking hangovers, making coffee, fumbling around my apartment, reading, and eventually finding new and exciting ways to get hung-over.  Unemployment is a beautiful thing.  “It’s a beautiful thing” is phrase that I picked up from this guy I work with.  He just might be the most content human being I have ever encountered.  He looks around him at all times and is blinded by beauty.  Everything to this guy is a beautiful thing.  This cup of Tim Horton’s and that glazed donut are a beautiful thing, a completed job is a beautiful thing, pushing cars out of snow banks is a beautiful thing, hanging gutters with his brother-in law this weekend is surely going to be a beautiful thing.  I almost envy this man’s vision.  There isn’t too much time for small talk during the day, but what little I have been able to gather from my co-worker is that he is just happy to be breathing, even if it is through a half-face respirator.  I have to admit that his outlook is infectious.  I would rather contemplate the aesthetics of drywall than listen to another rant on race relations from another co-worker who everyone calls the “Missing Link”.  He is a thirty-something man-child who falls asleep with his mask off in a crawlspace while the most harmful of asbestos pipe insulation is being removed.  For Missing Link, calling anybody and everybody a nigger is apparently a “beautiful thing”.   For the time being, not going to work means spending less time with racist Italians, which by me certainly qualifies as a beautiful thing. 

At first it didn’t feel quite right, being the creature of habit that I am.  What a pleasure it is not have to wake up and go fuck around somewhere to make a buck.  Not that I mind manual labor.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy deconstruction, it is just the after effects of a marathon day of work that leaves me in an exhausted, sometimes vegetative state. At 8am I finish my coffee, get out of my car, take clothes off, put on suit and mask, go in house and the next thing I know it is 2:30.  We skip lunch and breaks so we are able to work 6 and 1/2 hours and get paid for 8 (yes, Bob says that unions are a beautiful thing).  Everyone on the crew agrees to this arrangement even if we do get to our cars a little slower at the end of the shift.  Besides being a little weaker when I arrive home, I can’t complain.  Another side affect from work is that sometimes it comes home with me.  Asbestos doesn’t come home with me, rather the mindset of walking into a house and figuring out the most efficient way (if there is one) to remove any asbestos.  I was visiting my mom around the holidays and while she showed me recent pictures of step cousins and other people I don’t know, all I could think about was the quickest way to saw and pry her kitchen floor up. 

Work sometimes does this to you.  It isn’t specifically this job either.  I once provided direct care as mental health specialist at a secure home for juvenile offenders.  Yeah, that last sentence looks great on a job application but the description could have been changed to:  Violent teenage boy gladiator needed to work 12 plus hour shifts, in understaffed, overpopulated arena of combat, which would not look so hot on a resume, or anywhere else in print.  What a job that was! I would finish a shift in Lackawanna and from there, life’s inevitable conflicts would turn into full-blown Therapeutic Crisis Intervention sessions.  Arguments started with assessments of feelings, diversion techniques, time and space allowance, and when these steps almost always failed one of my friends or family members would find themselves in prone position, wrapped up in a regulation TCI hold, struggling and pleading for some kind of sanity.

A life without the framework of school and or job can be overwhelming.  A wide-open, barren, intolerable field of freedom waits for all of us.  The painful realization is that we have always wished for free time but sometimes have no idea what to do in its vast expanse.  It is difficult not to have been unalterably conditioned by a life of schedules and routine.  Unalterable in that: from the time we are born we are forced to split our time between things that we want to do and things that we have to do.  This mandatory allocation of our time begins shortly after we do, at elementary school.  This life of obligation varies between individuals and unless you fell in a river and were raised by wolves is ultimately inescapable.  It isn’t even a question of right and wrong, it just is.  I know, some might say “Fuck that! School ruined me and taught me what they wanted me to know.  Taught me how and what to think!” Okay, fair enough, public education can certainly be lacking in the promotion of independent thinking but there is truth in that some history needs to be learned in order to be altered, and if people of all ages decided to start doing whatever it is that they desired to do, little would get done.  I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the only first grade drop out.  My days would have revolved around cereal, cartoons, and tormenting my old fat ass neighbor Mr. Wilson.  Everything would be at our disposal, and the sharp beauty found in our freedom would be dulled to a flat point.     

A common misconception that seems to be pushed as far back as elementary school is that we, The American Children, are special; that we are unique.  Our potential is infinite and we exist in a vacuum.  Maybe it is necessary for the dominant culture to kneecap the potential disaster of premature freedom.  Of course, the economy would be crippled if every single student in America excelled in school, made the very most out of college, and competed for the most high paying jobs in their field.  This generation of super students would demand more and more money until companies could no longer afford to pay them, and progress would come to a halt.   The reality is that a large portion of the free time of our youth has been spent watching television, which has given us countless examples of what happens to smart students.  You can get good grades, be intelligent, just don’t get carried away.  When I was in junior high the ABC hit Family Matters taught me that if I was to follow the Steve Urkel path I’d better be prepared to be proverbially gang-raped in the shower of life. 

For a brief moment I wanted nothing more than to be done with school by the time the 7^th grade came around.  Popular culture taught me that school was a place where curly haired kids named Screech whose only real friend was a robot were to be stuffed in lockers for getting A’s on math tests.  Yes, the Missing Link probably knocked many a book out of some poor kids’ hands in the glory days of high school, and he is doing just fine.  The reality is that if most junior high students obtained the free time that they wished for we would end up with a generation of quick to answer, slow to understand, black holes.  We would be overrun with large mobs, hordes, all hopped up on Monster Energy drinks roaming the streets in packs, that would be lucky to eventually stumble ass backwards into a job that would allow them to slumber, unmasked, in all of the asbestos filled crawlspaces of the world.  It would be a real cutesy world where every sign to every Doritos factory and ice cream shop would have a couple of backwards letters and nothing would be as it seems.  

No, this allusive free time has to be counterbalanced by our not so free time to be thoroughly enjoyed.  If we all woke up hung over at 7pm who would send my unemployment checks? The real blood and guts of the matter is that in a state of freedom we are left with ourselves, which, after a life of school, work and whatever other institutions we have invested our time into, often proves to be some real uninspired and vacant company.  A quick glance in the mirror and your reflection retorts with a quip about how random you are.  You walk around your apartment rolling your eyes over all of your own books and records.  I’m going on month two of unemployment and I couldn’t be happier.  I avoid talk radio, could give a fuck about apps, I-phones and can tell you why each book, and record are on my shelves.  What can really fix you is to find that you have touched many things but never once actually held them.  We are dabblers in all fields and experts in none.  Spend some time with yourself one day and this becomes clear.

Jobs do provide a frame for our more worthy personal endeavors.  The first week I was still waking up bright and early, checking my phone for messages, hoping for the not unusual last minute word that our crew was able to get into one of the demo houses to rip up the floors.  No word came, the days turned to weeks and now it is has been over a full month and I finally find comfort with the whole situation. Unemployment checks help, too.  It has been a dream of my adult life to ride the unemployment train.  You don’t make quite what you would if you working but you don’t have to leave your house and I don’t have to work outside in the middle of winter. So much free time, ample time to continue where I left off on my novel.  It’s a heart warming tale of two men, a head-strong confused dandy and his bumbling half-wit side kick, who in the end teach each other (and all of us) how to laugh, love, eat cakes, lift free-weights on the beach, fuck, and let loose the Victorian bonnet of his mind.  There will also be some time travel, and the half-wit might only exist in the protagonist’s mind, and they might also be an extra-terrestrial.  I digress, I don’t want to give too much of my masterpiece away, and telling someone how you do something is like telling someone about how excellent of a swimmer you are when you’re miles from the beach.  I want to send a copy to Chuck Palahniuk when it is finished to see if he’ll write a forward for it, or at least send it to whoever it is that produced his novels turned movies. 

Yes, my newfound freedom through unemployment is a beautiful thing.  Sure I’ve put on about 50 pounds but who’s counting? I can’t even remember how to.  As the spring approaches, my days of being laid off are drawing to a close.  I will soon be back to work to hear the comments and brief stories of my co-workers’ that reveal what they have and have not done with the free time in their lives.  I keep busy.    

The Limits of Irony

In his book Rhetoric in Antiquity Laurent Pernot briefly discusses the Menexenos, the second half (along with Georgias) of Plato’s attack on the Sophists.  Menexenos has two characters — Socrates is the one who is not named in the title.  The dialogue is brief –  most of the text is filled out by a virtuoso funeral oration given by Socrates which is meant to mock the form of the epitaphios logos, the style of the Sophists, and Menexenos himself.  Plato employs all the techniques of the genre to create a pastiche of it.  

Pernot claims that this irony was lost on Greek and Roman readers and thus Socrates’ oration was found to be a splendid example of the form.  I had trouble believing this to be true and my disbelief was only compounded on rereading the text and coming across the following line of Menexenus’:

“You are always making fun of the rhetoricians, Socrates.”

Add to this line the closing exchange between Menexenus and Socrates wherein Menexenus is plainly portrayed as the victim of a thorough hoodwinking, and it remains hard to take Pernot’s assertion at face value; unfortunately, you have to, as he offers no citation.

Due to the lack of citation — that we may know which Greek and Roman readers missed out on the irony (and how) — we are permitted to assume that those unnamed readers and interpreters were in fact deploying their own brand of irony: of course they knew Plato was being facetious — by pretending not to know they were redoubling that same irony in a way that anyone reading them would have immediately recognized, but which is lost on today’s reader.

 

Thinking further on the topic I came to the conclusion that such a widespread and diachronous dissemblance would be impossible.  This implies that the ironic attitude is unable to become the dominant mood through which thinking occurs; that is to say, a pragmatic attitude will always be alloted 51% of the stakes in reality (it is the major shareholder).  And that delineation would mark the limit of irony.  On this assumption it would seem brazen to think that those readers Pernot mentions were in on the same joke and furthermore had a similar means of repeating it.

On a side note, I should like to add that it is probably a cruel trick of history that once allowed certain Germans to sally forth under the banner of ‘thinking Greek’, whereas nowadays that very slogan is nothing more than an embarrassing curiosity.  Instead of presuming to think Greek, we think everything but Greek and call the unimaginable remainder our ‘heritage’. 

 

 

 

It’s Not Worth It! Don’t Do It… Here

By now I think it’s a safe assumption: if your train has been delayed due to ‘police activity’ then somebody has decided to hop in front of it instead of on it.  I understand the temptation.  Trains are never used as transportation to anywhere very exciting.  Take the SEPTA system as an example, it covers three states: Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — what a line-up!  If pregnant teenagers are a socio-economic indicator of how early a person is willing to give up on life, then it may be said that people in this area give up early and often.  Perhaps children, in this case, are little anchors that keep their mothers tethered in even as she drifts further and further out to sea; that sounds a little romantic — what I meant to say: before she hurls herself under the unforgiving chassis of the R5, local to Airport.

This is all by the bye.

What I’m struggling to say is that I wish (or it would be nice, if you prefer) that people would find a way to exit the stage of life concerned with things in their corporeality and proceed on their way to the next stage without inconveniencing those who have not yet lost interest with the first-mentioned stage; that is, that their mode of egress (to use the SEPTA-preferred term) did not find its path anywhere near a functioning train track.

If you’ve ever had to take a bus from Marcus Hook to 69th street station, then you’d understand that there are much more serious offenses to ones sense of civility than someone else exercising their God-given right to off themselves;  that they do it in a manner that doesn’t make another’s life more unlivable ought to be the sine qua non of the equation.

Do not fret, I have a suggestion.  Take a bottle of whiskey and combine it with a bottle of pills, stir.  If you fear that you will wake in the hospital the next day with your stomach pumped and disappointed-looking family members hovering over you, then try jumping in the Schuylkill about an hour after swallowing the infernal concoction.

I should like to add encouraging words here, like ‘you ought to just try to make it another day… things will work out,’ etc.  But, besides being insulting, I can offer no proof that those propositions are veracious in the least.

Upon Further Review: Bon Iver

In 2006 Sasha Frere-Jones, the pop music critic for the New Yorker, wrote an article titled Reassessing Radiohead.  Not at all familiar with his take on the band (and assuming it would be in concurrence with the reverential opinion of others in his profession) I imagined this ‘reassessment’ would begin with his recounting the favor in which he had once held them and proceed along a path of enlightenment – at the end of which a jarring condemnation would be stored.

 

Things began promisingly:

 

“…catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than its fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album everyday.”

 

The implication – that the band’s obscurity is willful; indeed, that lacking the ability to produce honest music with some degree (on a lyrical level) of logical stringency, the primary gesture which constitutes their act is sleight of hand.  They make pop music then tweak it: a syncopated drum machine here, a dissonant note there – now you’ve got a pop song that doesn’t immediately pronounce its stupidity and decadence and simultaneously hoist upon you that all-too-familiar choice: enjoy with your ever-attenuating faculty of irony; or declaim as inferior, thus accepting the superimposition of a tyrannical model upon your aesthetic faculty. 

 

Thom Yorke’s lyrics, as Frere-Jones noted, are the place where Radiohead’s appeal to artistic and political radicalism reveals itself as phony:

 

“His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan.  On early Radiohead albums were somber expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work.”

 

A couple of paragraphs later Frere-Jones attends a few Radiohead concerts and concedes not much other than that their music is powerful in a live setting.  Also, at times, Yorke’s groaning does, in fact, work to a certain effect.  As concessions go, these don’t go very far in refuting his initial complaints.  The essay closes ambiguously, and doesn’t end-up being a reassessment so much as an adjustment of temper, like meeting somebody for the second time and deciding they’re not quite as bad as you initially thought.

 

The ambiguity of Frere-Jones’ conclusion regarding Radiohead takes on a different complexion in a recent essay on Bon Iver: here those same complaints about Thom Yorke’s vocal compositions (either they are inchoate, or, if fully formed then regrettably so) are reconstituted; now they are compliments:

 

“It is easy to believe that his lyrics are ‘sounds that eventually turned into words,’ as Vernon once told and interviewer.  In ‘Flume,’ the language works best as sound – I listened to the album a dozen times before I looked up the words.  Among other things, the chorus contains the sequence ‘only love is all maroon, lapping lakes like leery loons, leaving rope burns – reddish ruse.’  Starting the album with some word salad turns out to work just fine, as it gives you time to adjust to the power of the singing.”

 

It is not my wish, by comparing these two reviews, to point out some inconsistency in Mr. Frere-Jones’ thinking.  It is the business of pretenders and hacks to go searching-about for contradictions and discrepancies in a writer’s works as if, when discovered, prove forever that same writer’s incompetence.  To begin with, this premise places far-too-great an emphasis on reason’s internal unity and so fails (or refuses) to accept any element of difference into a thought’s processes – (which if in a healthy state are in an active state, a state in constant confrontation with what is unfamiliar) – as if all one needs to do to discover truth is remain unswerving.

 

Rather I should like to explore the line of thinking that comes to the conclusion that logical stringency is not required in the lyrical arts because music is precisely that that is opposed to such demands of reason.  In other words (and as much is implied by Frere-Jones), if you want the emotional force of your work to increase, all you need to do is remove any barriers created by thinking, i.e. narrative, logic, and soundly reasoned sentiment.

 

These subtractions performed, all that remains is a passionate interplay of emotion — in Frere-Jones’ term ‘intimacy’:

 

“In the dark space of Bowery Ballroom – a room that is not small – it felt like several hundred of us were sitting in Vernon’s head.”

 

The possibility for a plurality of responses is forgone.  He continues:

 

“The intimacy of his songs was matched by a focused performance that collapsed the space around us.”

 

Intimacy becomes, not a seductive space where the many experience an exchange of desire, rather it becomes the oppressive demand where the one asserts his irrationality on a banjaxed crowd whose only option is to acquiesce, in a sort of muted passivity.   An intimite feeling ought to arise from the complex of emotions shared by at least two people.  Contradictory sensations intertwine, tangle, and are loosed.  The structure of these sensations is socially determined; for example, in the right setting, a feeling associated with shame, or embarassment will reveal its obverse: a feeling of freedom.  This latter sensation is a result of the dual nature of the instincts: on one hand, they are blind forces, on the other, they are socially conditioned.  Their mediation is brought about where there are two or more sentient beings.  Here, then, reason isn’t percieved as a cold, lifeless procedure, instead it is the faculty whereby we organize and make communicable these experiences whose dual nature is evidenced above. 

 

Aristotle was quite right when he attached the lowest importance to the spectacle of a given production in his Poetics.  If an analogy is permitted between a visual spectacle and an aural ’spectacle’ (a spectacle appeals to the sense of sight qua sense while ignoring that the senses do not lead a one-sided existence — their existence is tied to the demands of reason – so it is with lyrics that only appeal to the bare fact that a person with ears can hear them…), it follows that Bon Iver’s lyrics fulfill only the spectacular demands of a performance while neglecting any wish the audience might have to participate in what it is witness to by means of thinking. 

 

Perhaps a lyric is inseparable from the music it is composed alongside of.  If this is true, all attempts to exact from it coherence – the prospect of yanking it from its natural habitat (the song, with all its attendant shades of meaning) and dropping squarely into the unforgiving light of text – are doomed due to the fact that it is essentially bound-up with music, thus we are persuaded to forgo all critiques that draw attention to the insufficiency the lyric sans music.  On the contrary, our critique seeks to loosen, and even untangle, the knot of emotions that is not inherent only in the relation of the lyric to itself, but also in the relation of the lyric to the music.  That is to say, a rational critique does not partition off music from lyrics; rather it attempts to examine their complicated interactions, which the myth of their individual natures had itself smoothed over with its insistence on the identity of words with reason, and of music with passion.

 

This examination is able to take the lyrics ‘out of context’ and judge them on their own merit while keeping in mind their necessary interplay with the whole in question.  And when it finds assertions made toward the complete identity of lyrical and musical content it cannot help but scoff:

 

“’And I told you to be patient, and I told you to be fine.  And I told you to be balanced, and I told you to be kind.  And in the morning I’ll be with you, but it will be a different kind.  I’ll be holding all the tickets and you’ll be owning all the fines.’ Vernon spits out each “told” louder than the words before it – it does not appear that skinny love is something to hold on to.”

 

The ‘told’ of the lyric is in agreement with the accent of the music.  The music is reduced to the role of a re-enforcer (accompaniment) and so relinquishes its ability to be anything other than the reproduction of the obnoxious statement already made verbally: Mr. Vernon stands at the head of a relationship wherein he manages to make himself the victim.  If skinny love is not something to hold onto, it is because the one who has defined its terms at least has the option to cast it off. 

 

It is no coincidence that Frere-Jones cites the religious aspect of Bon Iver’s work.  But, it would be useless to claim that modern music takes over the positive aspects of religious experience and brings them into the secular realm where they are stripped of their imposing moral principle and enjoyed in a New Ageist light.  To the contrary, their moral principle is reinstantiated in a shaman figure who entrances the audience and imposes on them his nonsensical will. 

 

So what?  The audience is down for it; what’s the problem? 

 

The appeal I made earlier for logically stringent works of art will hopefully not be taken as a reactionary posture by the reader.  It is this very appeal that ensures the co-existence of the audience and performer, a co-existence that is sorely lacking on the scene today; not only on the music scene but also on the lit scene, the visual arts scene, and to a greater extent, the political scene.  If we do not demand of works of art that they take us into consideration then we end up in a sort of no man’s land: “a combination of the secular and the religious in one cloudy mass” to put it in Mr. Frere-Jones’ words.