Robert Anasi

A Northside Robbery

2011-11-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

As he left the Greenpoint Tavern, moments before being invited to leave, James Cassese had an epiphany. The Greenpoint Tavern (or GPT or Rosies as it was known to regulars, Rosie’s for one of the owners with her blue-tinted bouffant and lacquered face that covered maternal booze-dispensing tenderness) on a Saturday near midnight was exactly the place where clarity could sweep over you. Despite the neon palm tree in the window it was always Christmas at the bar – strands of Christmas lights and Christmas streamers and Christmas banners on the wall. At the long bar, a few old Polish men drank morosely and tried to ignore the crowds of bellowing children in odd clothing who had seized Rosie’s and were holding the pool table and jukebox hostage.
James’s rocket of possibility had launched as he’d summoned the last scuffed dollars from his wallet and realized that he couldn’t tip on what it was clear would be his last drink. So then, how to get money for that next drink, and even more importantly, the drinks after that? Rosie had already given him one free drink for old time’s sake and she had more recently scolded him for borrowing the drink of one of the noisy art child who had vehemently complained about theft. Even worse, Rosie had taken the kid’s side although she had known James for twenty years (it didn’t occur to James that familiarity was exactly what had led Rosie to her decision). Cassese was a large man with a thick black moustache worn completely without irony. His bulk had always given him confidence; people thought twice before they shouldered past him on the subway and this made him feel an inherent importance. The loss of his job as a car service dispatcher in the Bronx two years earlier had inexorably directed James back to Greenpoint, where in eleven months he’d worn out the couch welcome of every family member and friend he had left. There it was late on a June night and James had no place to go with his empty wallet. Foresight had led him to wear his long windbreaker – it made sleeping in the park more comfortable.
The loss of his job had given James all the time in the world to do what he desired most – drink – but had taken away the means for him to do it. Rosies was his last stand. James had grown up in Greenpoint and he’d been visiting the bar for thirty years, back to when he was an underage drinker in an era no bartender on Bedford ever said the word, ‘ID.’ Despite the fact that James had just dispatched the final dollar from his last welfare check, he’d rediscovered his confidence as well whiskey-and-soda’s went down. The nine-inch Bowie knife strapped to his ankle in a soft leather case bolstered that confidence, which is why he wore it, of course, but the rocket of insight didn’t explode until he opened the bar door and walked out into June.
Across the street car headlights flung diamonds and shadows onto plate glass shop windows. James looked directly through cars and the people hurrying away from the subway and through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows and saw the barista in the L To-Go exposed behind the counter. That’s when it all came together for. Besides the barista, a gangly kid, the To-Go store was empty and closing, the morning and lunch rushes long past. James decided that he would walk in with his confident bulk, present his nine inches to the puny kid and have him empty the register (James had seen the barista’s pulling the cash drawer from the register and counting the money out on the counter other nights, so perhaps his epiphany was not as spontaneous as it seems). A stroll around the block and he would return directly to Rosie’s; no cop would ever suspect such casual bravado. In the bar, he would tell Rosie that an old friend had finally paid off a loan and he would buy both of them shots and he would even apologize for his earlier misbehavior. It was a happy vision.

Samuel Beckett

2011-11-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Certain questions of a theological nature preoccupied me strangely. As for example.

1. What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam's rib, but from a tumour in the fat of his leg (arse?)?
2. Did the serpent crawl, or as Comestor affirms, walk upright?
3. Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?
4. How much longer are we to hang about waiting for the antichrist?
5. Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterege the podex?
6. What is one to think of the Irish oath sworn by the natives with the right hand on the relics of the saints and the left on the virile member?
7. Does nature observe the Sabbath?
8. Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell?
9. The algebraic theology of Craig. What is one to think of this?
10. Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused to suck on Wednesdays and Fridays?
11. What is one to think of the excommunication of vermin in the sixteenth century?
12. Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself?
13. What was God doing with himself before the creation?
14. Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?
15. Is it true that Judas’ torments are suspended on Saturdays?
16. What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?

A Bar Called Kokie's

2011-10-15T00:17:00.001-07:00

It wasn’t named for coke, the bartender said. That’s the funny thing. I mean, the place opened in the 50s and it sure wasn’t pushing coke back then.
The bartender was thick – thick torso, thick neck, thick skin, fingers like cannolis and that blunt LI accent, Brooklynese tempered by a generation in the suburbs. But he could tell a story.
They got this frog in Puerto Rico, he said. It’s called a coqui because of the sound it makes, ‘ko-kee, ko-kee, ko-kee.’ The guy who owned this place was Puerto Rican. Back then, it was some kind of social club. He used to have card games in here, strippers, that kind of thing. I mean he was half a wise guy anyway. One night he got stabbed in some card game. That was it for him. He was like, ‘I’m seventy years old. I don’t need this shit.’ So he gave the place to his nephew and that’s when it got started. One of the old doorman comes in here and we talk.
The Antique Lounge had opened a couple of months earlier. Its antique flourishes came courtesy of a restaurant catalogue – tin ceiling, exposed brick, classic moldings, and a fireplace. The furniture was so plush you could drown in it. Nothing was left from the long reign of Kokie’s.
I’m forty-three years old, the bartender said. I’m in it for the long haul. This place is my dream. I was born in the neighborhood. When I was four my parents moved out to Lynbrook but we stayed connected.
The bartender was also the owner. Blond salon streaks in his hair and his padded face made him look younger.
They had a great take here, he said. Twenty-thousand dollars for a four-day week. That’s not bad – even if you include the coke. Of course, you don’t know how many people were getting envelopes. I’m sure the police chief got his envelope. And the fire inspector. After 9/11 that all changed. The precinct got a new patrol chief, a woman who used to work narcotics. She said, ‘I’m not having this here.’ It’s hard enough to be a woman in that position anyway – and then have a coke bar under your nose. Right out in the open. I mean, if you’re gonna do that, at least be discrete. But no. They had the salsa band in here. The noise after hours. Still, they didn’t even get busted. That’s the funny thing. They lost their lease. They got some kind of three strikes thing in New York, I don’t know the legal particulars but the landlord was afraid they’d take away his building. So he didn’t renew the lease.
The owner bought me a drink. The way he talked, I figured that he’d been a Kokie’s customer himself and not just once.
The neighbors hated them more than anything, he said. When I took over they came in to check us out. When I told them what I was doing, they thanked me. You know, the Kokie’s crew thought they were being discrete. That’s the funny thing. With the booths in the back and leaning against the wall to put in your order. And the way they used to cut that stuff to shit. Why not have a decent product? But they really stepped on it. What went on with Kokies, I couldn’t have that. Most of my family is cops so…
We looked around the quiet lounge – five or six people on the couches and sofas, classic rock playing on the jukebox. We could have been in any of fifty NYC bars. ‘Antique’ was in.
We did all our own renovations. We soundproofed the ceiling. We put in our own hot water – the guy upstairs used to share it. And it’s working out. Couples like it in here. We got the couches. It’s romantic. Last week we had fifty dykes for a party. Not too many of them were those lipstick lesbians, I tell you. But nice people. Polite. That’s the kind of place I want. The guy who owns Rain came in here last week. You know what he told me?
Rain Lounge had opened the year before on Bedford and North 5th. The ‘urban’ vibe made it an anomaly even on a changing Northside – flash cars parked in front, gangster vines, hip hop thumping, meaty bouncers. The fact that both long-time locals and newcomers disdained the only neighborhood club that catered to African-Americans said something about our tolerance for ‘diversity.’
He told me, the bartender said, ‘I dread going to work. The fights. The girls passed out on E. The guns.’ I told him, ‘You don’t have to do it.’ But he said, ‘No.’ That’s the choice he made. But he probably takes in thirty-five hundred on a Friday night. Me, I’m doing good if I get that in a week. Then again, he’s probably paying eight grand a month for that corner. I pay twenty-five hundred. The authorities have it out for him too. I had the fire inspectors in here, the safety marshals. They told me, ‘We got the inspection list for Rain. We’re going to nail them for this and this and this.’ That’s not the crowd I want. I won’t play hip hop or techno. I’m in it for the long haul.
I went back to the Antique Lounge a few times after that, hoping to commune with the ghosts of Kokies but the bar had nothing for me. But the next winter, it had closed and Rain wasn’t too far behind. Kokie’s business model beat theirs by almost a half-century.

Patrick Bateman: White Negro

2011-08-30T14:22:00.001-07:00

The hipster’s immediate descendent, the hippy, became a figure of disdain, at least if you didn’t like patchouli and the Grateful Dead. Anyway the hippie seems to have very little to do with the hipster qualities outlined by Mailer in ‘The White Negro.’ You don’t really expect some granola-chomping tree-hugger to spontaneously kick the crap out of a store clerk. Bret Easton Ellis’ anti-hero in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, embodies Mailer’s hipster better than any hippie kid, his evolution accelerated by three decades of market manipulations, the individual split between an empty social order and the indulgence of his most immediate desires – for Bateman sexual violence and murder. Ellis’ characters express their individuality through minute concern with gradations of style, and yet remain generally unrecognizable to each other (a running joke in the book). Bateman’s bloodlust is, in part, a reaction to the fact that there are others cooler than him.

Mailer focuses on the most romantic aspect of the hipster – the impulse to spontaneity and violence – and says very little about the elaborations of cool. Thus his hipster is lopsided, no Lester Young there. Mailer is onto something though with the idea of the hipster trying to make real his ‘infantile fantasy.’ What’s changed is the way in which the marketplace has nurtured the infantile fantasy. Nothing is more pleasing to people selling things than customers who can’t resist their most immediate impulse. The social revolutions of the 1960s fell short, but ‘expressing yourself’ by way of ‘lifestyle’ has conquered the world.

The origin of the contemporary hipster has everything to do with Reagan-era America. The manufacturing of a new national consensus in the 1980s left many out. Thrift no long figured into the construction of the American character – the most lasting legacy of the 1960s was comfort with debt – but flag-waving, conformity, and a return to traditional gender roles swept across the country. The corporate raider became a hero. On the outside: baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. On the inside: Patrick Bateman.

A Charitable Case

2011-06-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

This poor woman just wants to give me her money. How can I deny her final wishes?
Like everyone with an email account - that is to say, everyone - I get these letters constantly. There's something particularly charming about this one. Maybe being addressed as 'God's elect' or perhaps 'serious tears'?

From Mrs Sarata Farah

Dear God's elect,

I believe you will do better than I think,

It is understandable that you may be a bit apprehensive because you do not know me, I am writing this mail to you with serious tears in my eyes and great sorrow in my heart, My Name is Mrs. Sarata Farah,Am contacting you from my country Tunisia . I want to tell you this because I don’t have any other option than to tell you as I was touched to open up to you, I am married to Mr. Toyo Farah who worked with Tunisia embassy in Ouagadougou the capital city of Burkina Faso: in west Africa for nine years before he died in the year 2005.We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only five days. Since his death I decided not to remarry again, when my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of US$ 8.2 Million (Eight million two hundred thousand dollars) with a bank in Ouagadougou ,

Presently this money still in the bank there. He made this money available for exportation of Gold from Burkina mining. Recently, My Doctor told me that I would not last for the period of seven months due to cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to hand you over this mission to take care of the less-privileged, you will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want you to take 30 Percent of the total money for your personal use While 70% of the money will go to charity work" helping people in the street.

Because I grew up an Orphan and I don't have anybody as my family member, just to endeavour that the house of God is maintained. am doing this so that God will forgive my sins and accept my soul because this sickness has suffered me so much. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank in Burkina Faso and I will also instruct my lawyer to issue you an authority letter that will prove you the present beneficiary of the money in the bank that's if you assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein.

Hoping to hear from you soon.
Remain blessed
Yours Sister
Sarata Farah.

Where Is He Now?

2011-05-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

Ying was a filmmaker with peculiar fashion sensibility. During the week, Ying wore business casual to his job managing containers on freighters coming from China. On weekends, Ying favored spangled bustiers, dresses with spaghetti straps, and expensive lipstick (I remember one of his girlfriends borrowing a tube of his – was it ‘Harlot Red’? – and saying, ‘This cost thirty dollars!). For years Ying wore a speculum on a cord around his neck; later, he replaced the speculum with a bicycle horn. Like a lot of the other Williamsburg characters in the early days, Ying was an instinctive eccentric. Eccentricity was often the only thing the characters had in common but in Williamsburg that was enough. I first met Ying in San Francisco at a party where he screened a film he’d shot on the Brooklyn Bridge. The film was beautiful and we talked about collaborating, even though Ying’s films didn’t have stories or actors. Still, we became friends: Ying introduced me to off-menu delicacies in Chinese restaurants (crab roe, pig intestines) and wu-xia films – together we watched a young Jet Li flying across the screen spinning and kicking. Ying’s father was an admiral in the Chinese navy [TK] and Ying worked for a Chinese shipping company. His first job had been in the Chinese merchant marine. One night I had to defend Ying from a bunch of Mexican guys who jumped out of a car because Ying was so damn cute in his tight black dress. Ying didn’t like to talk about his past and my questions annoyed him; Ying had fled China for the same reasons I’d run from Catholic school. When Ying’s company transferred him from SF to New York he ended up in Williamsburg.

Ying’s studio in the former Tung-Fa Noodle Factory had a large bed, a folding movie screen, tens of thousands of dollars of film equipment – including a camera with a shutter speed so fast it had been designed to film rocket launches – and not much else. The Noodle Factory was a fourteen-story white monolith that had once housed a lot of small-scale businesses – most of them sweat shops – a central feature in industrial NYC since the Civil War (a feature that continues to this day, if you squint. One night in a Soho dance studio, I looked out the window into a neighboring building. At ten p.m. dozens of Chinese women sat waist-deep in fabric leaned over sewing machines).

Ying had started off in New York delivering pizzas via bicycle but he’d graduated quickly to a big American car. He loved big American cars and in the decade we were friends he was never without one. He loved the automatic windows, the plush upholstery, the leisurely steering. No matter how much Ying drank or how far we were from my apartment on 169th Street, he’d always drive me home. But most nights we went out together we landed at the Noodle Factory. Film canisters, lengths of film and empty cognac bottles covered his floor. Through the 11th-floor windows J-M-Z subway cars clanked over the Williamsburg Bridge. The bridge lights and the headlights made it look like Six Flags. A darker skyscape rose to the south, warehouses crowded together and behind the warehouses the squat towers of housing projects. Like Drew and Stefan, Ying spent most of his time in Manhattan and when he came home, he parked his car and hurried inside. The Noodle Factory was a retreat, cut off from the street, a place to hover near the city.

Watching the bridge and the Manhattan lights from Ying’s studio, I didn’t think about the streets. They were just an obstacle as we moved from the car to the building, fear vanishing only when we sat cradled inside. It a long time for me to realize that you couldn’t have the freedom without the fear.

David Foster Wallace's Cruise to Nowhere

2011-04-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

Kicking a dead writer isn’t a particularly classy way to go; after all, he can’t kick back. This isn’t egregious though (at least I hope it isn’t). When I read this particular essay by this particular dead writer, it – besides pissing me off and making me really sad – turned on all the lights, gave me a handle on my discomfort with a whole bunch of writers a little bit older than me and a lot more successful. The essay is called ‘Shipping Out: on the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise.’ David Foster Wallace wrote it.

In 1995 Harper’s Magazine sent David Foster Wallace on a ‘megaship’ luxury cruise. You have to appreciate the hook: young novelist with straight-razor wit encounters fat, ignorant Americans and starts carving blubber, hilarity sure to follow. It didn’t hurt Wallace that he’d done similar stories for Harpers’s before and was about to publish a chapbook called Infinite Jest. Harper’s was right about the humor but maybe they missed a couple of things.

The piece opens in a mock heroic voice: ‘I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fishes with fins that glow. […] I know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O.’). It’s an invocatory ‘I’, a drumming cadence, witness’s statement to a jury turned to comic effect, as if to say that we live in a world without heroes, or at least that a mega cruise isn’t the place to find one – in case we didn’t know that already. It isn’t until page three though, that the strangeness kicks in, the moment when you realize that all is not sunny in the mega-cruise Caribbean. DFW mentions a kid, sixteen, who ‘did a half gainer’ off the upper deck on another megaship cruise. It wasn’t just adolescent angst that made the kid jump though. No, according to DFW it was something else, some malaise inherent in the cruise itself, something ‘no news story could cover.’ His experiences on the cruise lead DFW to believe that he has penetrated the darkness beyond the news.

So what is DFW’s insidious killer, the asp in his expense-account Eden? ‘Pampered to Death’ is the title of the section that highlights the upper deck leap and DFW claims that there is a horror at the center of the big white ships: ‘…the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay.’ (He’s talking about the ocean). The word DFW uses for this malaise is ‘despair’, despair at the fact of ‘absolutely nothing.’ Not only does DFW witness the despair, he experiences it. Eventually, jumping off the deck becomes as attractive to him as it was to the teenager.

Over ten thousand plus words, DFW chronicles those aspects of the cruise that drive him toward suicide. These include the fascist inclinations of the Greek captain, the sadism of the cruise magician, the stupidity of the passengers, and the suffering of the lower-ranking crew members. DFW aims for laughs in all this and he finds them: fellow passengers catch most of rounds. We learn that Americans are fat, that their menfolk like to play golf, that the bodies of the middle-aged are unlovely and should probably eschew bikinis and Speedos. Rarely do these the victims of DFW’s intellectual drive-bys rise to the level of the fully human. They exist only as lists of physical shortcomings, bad hobby choices, or fashion atrocities. For these other passengers on the 7NC Luxury Cruise, what DFW refers to as ‘hard play’ ‘activities, festivities, gaieties, song,’ keeps their fear of death at bay, renders them infantile with pleasure; DFW however, is the infant who will not be pleased, who squalls, who won’t fool himself and ‘hard play’ the game. Typically, DFW is proud that he didn’t bring a video camera. ‘I’m not like them!’ he wants us to know. As with much of the literary writing of his generation, DFW’s tone combines snark and sarcasm (let’s call it ‘snark-casm’.).

The distinguishing feature of DFW’s snarkcasm is how distant it is from his targets, so distant you could measure it in light years. He barely interacts with anyone on the cruise, and his putdowns remain broad and indistinct. In fact, his isolation on this cruise is the outstanding feature. We’re seven pages into the article before individual passengers are introduced (or culled for butchering). The only people DFW seems to get to know at all are his dining-room tablemates, of whom he writes: ‘I like all of my tablemates a lot…’ Mostly, it seems, because they laugh at his jokes – although the way they laugh terrifies DFW. One of the people he likes best is Trudy. ‘Trudy…looks – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – rather like Jackie Gleason in drag…’ DFW tells us that her laugh is so vulgar that it can cause heart attacks. It’s a good thing DFW likes her, or he might have been really mean (a typical DFW strategy is to write ‘I really like him/her but…’ as we’ll see later). The one tablemate he doesn’t like, eighteen year-old Mona, gets both barrels: she’s too tall, she has the face of a corrupt doll, she complains too much, she isn’t grateful for the money her parents give her, she lies about her birthday to get free cake, and she doesn’t know the difference between Mussolini and Maserati. Mona seems like a typical spoiled teen but she becomes DFW’s latrine. For DFW, Mona is the human embodiment of the emptiness at the heart of the big-ship experience, as empty as death.

In a very real way these ‘fellow’ passengers aren’t human to the forever distant Wallace. Even their personal tragedies are subjected to the same snarkcasm. The kid who committed suicide ‘did a half-gainer.’ People who are taking the cruise for relief from a death in the family have ‘finally buried’ someone. This inability to empathize is nearly autistic in its imponderability. You can make the argument that sardonic distance is DFW’s way of showing how middle-class American leisure has become an ‘air-conditioned nightmare’ that robs us of individuality and courage. Of course, this contempt tells us as much about Wallace as it does about his subjects. Wallace has an equally distant relationship with the ship’s crew. He hates and fears the bosses, and he has a puzzled admiration for the workers, with whom he can’t communicate. In each case, distance remains the defining feature of all his interactions. DFW claims to talk to people yet no other voice even registers, no personality, nothing except the crudest caricature.
To be fair, DFW doesn’t let himself off the hook: he’s a self-styled uber-nerd, the kid who used to ‘memorize shark-fatality data’, who can’t shoot skeet targets without endangering onlookers, who embroiders his text with the now-famous footnotes (for the book version of the essay, DFW added over a hundred new footnotes). Who spends a lot of time flushing his hi-tech toilet, then develops an irrational fear that it will ingest him…. There is self-satisfaction in this of course. Nietzsche wasn’t wrong to say: ‘Whoever despises himself still admires himself as one who despises.’ The crew, captain and passengers might think DFW is pathetic but he’s securely insecure in the knowledge that he sees through the charade of their lives. It’s cold comfort, and the tone reminds me of no one so much as that J.D. Salinger mannequin, Holden Caulfield, still railing against ‘phonies’.

DFW’s satire takes on greater precision when he doesn’t have to deal with human being: inanimate objects, while also threatening, are not quite as hellish as les autres and therefore can be examined more closely. DFW is especially witty on the cruise brochure and pages of text are devoted to his interaction wit his cabin, where he seems to spend the majority of his time. There is extensive complaint about the ubiquity of towels and how clean his room is kept. It’s meant to be funny, and it is, in a way, but you start asking yourself: ‘Can’t he find something more interesting to talk about?’

The focus and tone of DFW’s critique marks a major shift in literary journalism. Writers practicing the form in the generation before DFW had equally severe critiques of mainstream American society, but their critiques came from very different places. In typically grandiose fashion, Norman Mailer tried to channel an entire country through his voice, as in his book-length pieces on the presidential conventions of 1968 and the march on the Pentagon. Joan Didion never failed to reveal her fragile psychic state, but she attempted to link it to the disintegration of the mainstream consensus that had nurtured her (her articles appeared in places like the Saturday Evening Post!). Who then, is DFW writing ‘for’ as he writes ‘against’?

Although DFW took some ‘conservative’ positions, his audience is without a doubt liberal America, and a very particular segment of it at that. One defense I’ve heard of DFW’s contempt for the other passengers is that he’s castigating the rich. But it isn’t only the rich who go on those cruises. I know a cosmetologist in Fountain Valley who sells her ova to pay for luxury cruises (perhaps not the best use of her earning but still…). My far from wealthy parents took such a cruise to Alaska. For my mother, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Since her feet and knees are ruined from standing as a nurse for forty years, it was impossible for her to do it any other way (I had firsthand experience of her infirmities when we tried to rough it on a trip to Newfoundland and she could barely hobble along in my wake). Those DFW pisses on are members of the only group that NPR liberalism allows to be despised: white mainstream Americans (in another Harper’s essay, DFW displays typical liberal guilt when he tries to correct a student for writing in ebonics, then realizes that no, he, the teacher, is actually the oppressor).

The main reason for DFW’s NPR-approved contempt is that these other people don’t get it, and seem perfectly content not getting it. They didn’t attend a small northeastern liberal arts college or an Ivy League school, and they, poor things, never learned what culture is. They haven’t been raised in the atmosphere of subtlety and nuance that cloaks a college campus, a particular kind of college campus, that is, one that swaddles the upper-middle classes, the rich, and those who possess what Pierre Bordieu refers to as: ‘cultural capital.’ For NPR liberals, stupidity is the only explanation as to why these hippopotami would vote for Bush, live in the suburbs, watch American Idol (in a non-ironic way). By about page ten page of the article I felt as trapped a DFW did. The adolescent self-regard is mind-numbing. It does in fact lead to despair, but despair for the hell that DFW inflicts on you. To experience the world as he does is suffocating.

The reason for the celebration of DFW has as much to do with how he came to represent a particular segment of Generation X – the Believer, McSweenys, This American Life segment, which has now become institutionalized in bohemian theme parks across the country. Along with writers like Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, DFW became the mirror of a generation – a generation that really, really likes to look in the mirror, snickering all the while, but finding nothing else so pleasing to look at . I call them ‘soft ironists.’ ‘Irony’ because everything is fallen for them; ‘soft’ because it doesn’t really matter anyway. Enthusiasm, for anything, is suspect, although the ‘soft ironists’ descend into sentimental mythologizing, as in Lethem’s superhero book or in Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay. In most these cases it feels like you’re reading the effusions of very smart, extremely insecure children. DFW’s inability to interact with people who don’t have a subscription to the Utne Reader explains why he spends so much time in his cabin playing with the various mechanical utilities.

Like most members of this generation, Wallace is an expert bet-hedger. After brutalizing Frank Conroy’s throwaway prose on a insert he wrote for the cruise line, Wallace tells us in a footnote that Conroy is a really, great, guy, a great guy who understand that he’s a whore. If I was Conroy I’d find this passive-aggressive behavior more insulting than a simple dismissal. What is the great lesson from Conroy’s sell out? Apparently, even writers, even good writers, will take on less than virtuous gigs to make a little extra cash. Yet since DFW’s footnotes mention Conroy’s ‘serious’ work, Conroy is being assured that he’s not being thrown under the bus. After all, DFW tells us that Conroy has written one of the great memoirs of his era. This is what’s known in the business as ‘covering your ass.’ With this defense in place, DFW could run into Conroy at a writer’s conference and not be too uncomfortable.

In April of 1932, Hart Crane, drunk and depressed – for good reason, as he’d just gotten a beating for coming on to a male crew member – jumped off the deck of the S.S. Orizaba into the Caribbean after shouting, ‘Goodbye everybody.’ His body was never recovered. There is an appeal to death in the sea, the warm welcome and slipping away. A friend of mine who has a few suicide attempts under her belt said DFW’s death-wish was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Well of course that’s why he went,’ she said. ‘You don’t go on a cruise like that to have your joy in life reaffirmed.’ While Harper’s saw it as a great opportunity for humor, DFW saw it as something else entirely. If anything redeems his work, it’s that frustrated sensitivity, always giving in to the snarkcasm, yet always unhappy with his lack of connection to the people he either lionizes or skewers. The footnote mania becomes a desperate attempt to create meaning that he can’t find in the actual experience, a cry for help: ‘Talk to me, before I add another footnote!’ But can you connect to people you either have complete contempt for, fear, or idealize? In this context, DFW resembles Salinger’s most tragic figure, Seymour Glass, whose Florida honeymoon ended in suicide. It may well be that the flipside of this contempt is despair.

It’s only in the last few paragraphs of the essay that DFW returns to the dead boy and to an empathy with him. For DFW, being on the cruise made him want ‘…to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.’ As too many biographers fail to understand, it’s dangerous to conflate writing with psychology. But given DFW’s unnecessary death (which I will refrain from calling a ‘half-gainer’), it’s hard not to read ‘Shipping Out’ as a suicide note written a decade in advance. The death he saw in the water may have been the one he was looking for.

Entasis: Badlands

2011-04-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of our journal Entasis is up. It includes fiction, poetry, memoir, art and photography from extremely talented artists. Please check it out.

Here's my editorial note from the issue.

150 years ago on April 12th, soldiers in Charlestown, South Carolina opened fired on soldiers in a small masonry fort in the harbor. A few months earlier, both groups of soldiers had been in the same army; they would spend the next four years killing each other. The Civil War may have officially started on that day but the divisions in American society had been obvious, and increasing, for decades. Until they couldn’t be covered up any more.

We weren’t thinking about the Civil War when we picked ‘Badlands’ as the theme for this issue but division and darkness were on our minds. In America today, we see a country that seems increasingly at odds with itself and a media that resounds with rage, mendacity and shrill desperation.

The artists and writers for this issue all explore these growing divisions, separations, cruelties. It’s the dark alleys that draw them. They feel the undercurrents; they can’t overlook the contradictions, even when it’s their own selves that are divided. As Jimmie Dale Gilmore sings, ‘My Mind Has a Mind out of Its Own.’ It makes for compelling work.

White Death

2011-04-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

I've been running on Turtle Rock ridge at dusk. The last couple of days a barn owl has floated over me, its underwings and belly as white as death. The owl is hunting, waiting on the slightest movement of some rodent or lizard so it can drop down and kill. Every time I see that peculiar profile hovering there, I feel incredibly happy.

Women I Have Loved (Part 1 of Too Many)

2011-03-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

The summer before my senior year of college I spent a month at a sublet in Brooklyn Heights on Pineapple Street. Right across the street was the St. George Hotel, which provided cheap rooms to the indigent. There was a subway entrance in the lobby and old black men sat outside on lawn furniture basking in the sun. There was also a strip club in the basement, called, I believe, 'Club Wildfyre.' My girlfriend had moved into the apartment at the beginning of the summer but I went to New Orleans to live with a friend. I visited her on the way south and she asked me to stay but I told her no. 'You won't respect me if I don't go have this adventure,' I said. There I was hit by the thunderbolt and running away from it. Not running exactly...I was 21 and there was so much time, time to do everything.

I didn't have a phone in the former slaves quarters of the French Quarter apartment. So I called her from payphones on the street late at night, often so drunk that I slumped on the ground, the receiver cool on my ear.

One night before I made it back north, she decided to visit the strip club. Feeling like this wasn't a good idea for a woman, She dressed as a man, going so far as to bind her breasts and ink a mustache on her upper lip. The disguise worked. She shared drinks with the lowlifes in the club and even stuffed dollar bills down the g-strings of the dancers. Before she went out, she took mirror photos in her apartment. The photos showed a really pretty girl in a tuxedo jacket with a black smear across her upper lip. Sarah had curves that no binding could hide and I don't know how it fooled anyone but people see what they're programmed to see and boldness can take you a long a way (and she had plenty of that). Ah, Sarah, the memory makes me miss you.

Punk Rock Saved My Life

2011-03-23T03:05:00.001-07:00

'Punk rock changed our lives.' - D. Boone

A couple of years before I went to high school an ad played in heavy rotation on the local rock radio station.
'Hello America,' said a woman with a British accent. 'This is London calling.' A track played behind her as she kept repeating the catch phrase and then the track took over a few seconds before the spot ended. The track had an attack that sounded like very few of the stadium rock anthems that filled the AOR airwaves in 1979. I hadn't heard anyone like the vocalist, either. He had rasping delivery that made Bob Dylan sound like Perry Como and I couldn't understand a word he was saying. I wanted that record though but it was my friend Ray who had the money, so he bought it. It was London Calling by The Clash. Some A&R men had decided that punk rock would be the next big thing in music (boy, were they wrong) and The Clash were going be the ones to break it. Well London Calling didn't sell in America but me and Ray wore that record out. Even with the lyrics printed on the album sleeves every song was a cipher. Who was Jimmy Jazz? What were the guns of Brixton and the Clampdown? It didn't make sense to us but the music did. It was fresh, it opened a way.

My coming to a (semi) adult consciousness took place in the Reagan years when I was on the wrong side of everything. Reagan America turned the world upside down. A song about the sufferings of a Vietnam vet in his indifferent homeland became the anthem of America triumphant. A film about a Vietnam vet hounded by law enforcement became the story of American resilience defeating the foreign menace. My brother watched Rambo a thousand times and hung an American flag and a cross over his bed. He was an Eagle Scout, then a ROTC frat boy, and then a soldier. I didn’t understand. Didn’t they watch the movie, didn't they hear the lyrics to Born in the USA? The Official Preppy Handbook became a primer for dress and deportment to my high school peers. Irony had been chased out of the building. Money mattered again in America. The greatest athlete in the world, a man whose physical genius and ferocity on the basketball court left you gawking, was a bland simulacra off it, the perfect corporate shill. I was quick to sneer at this obsession with money but the preppies had connected to something deep in American culture, deeper than I could understand. Money made America's heart beat, had given the country its biggest sexual charge since Ben Franklin started hopping around his printing press. After a brief interlude of hippie indulgence - and maybe the the wealthiest generation in history anywhere - money had risen again. Yet money meant almost nothing to me (to the dismay of friends who would have appreciated me paying for more of the beer). I was lost in my own country. Yet The Clash gave me something to hold on to, and friends who felt the same way as I did.

Entasis Reading

2011-02-04T22:35:00.000-08:00

A new Entasis blog post about our reading, and the aftermath.

http://blog.entasisjournal.com/uncategorized/death-in-long-beach/

Revenge of the Zombie

2011-01-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIE

I was an ESL teacher in San Francisco when this starts. I think I was twenty five.

It was only when she caught me leaving the school that I first registered her. That pretty Japanese girl with the crooked teeth. She’d been in my class but you didn’t notice most of the Japanese girls: they’d been trained in invisibility. I realized that she’d been trying to make an impression for a while – asking questions, hanging out after class. She hadn’t registered though. That day I think she gave me her number. Walking away I realized that she didn’t even go to the school anymore. At some later point she invited herself to a party in a friend of mine’s warehouse in the Mission. She showed up with another Japanese girl whose hair was always changing color (which was one way to not be invisible). Around midnight, my former student pressed up against me and said, ‘Will you jilt me once again?’ That made me notice Misako, that and the fact that her stockings were tattered and she felt warm and womanly pressed against me, soft and firm. I was drunk and the easiest thing seemed to be to take her home. We got into a cab.

Misako had come from Japan full of vague but powerful hope. All the freedom you wanted in America. She hadn’t known how much she’d been suffocated until she was in SF for a few months. Always knocking against the corners of Japanese society and bruising herself. Being discussed, censured, not fitting into a society where fitting in was everything. In San Francisco she didn’t have to worry about what she wore or what she said or the company she kept. In San Francisco she got invited to parties. In San Francisco it was okay to be different, especially if you were pretty. All she needed to make it perfect was an American boyfriend. There wasn’t any shortage of men ready to take out a pretty Japanese girl but none of them appealed to her. Then she fell for me. I seemed lively and fun but she’d made a terrible mistake. I would have felt bad for Misako if I was capable of feeling bad for anyone: she didn’t know that the boy she’d fallen for was a zombie.
That first party started the pattern. I’d call her some nights when I was bored. Usually it was a Sunday. ‘Come over,’ I’d say. ‘And bring a pint of Hagen Das.’ And she did. We’d sit on my bed listening to music and eating ice cream as I edged closer. It wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted but she didn’t complain. Sometimes I’d let her spend the night and in the morning we’d eat breakfast at a diner around the corner. Then she’d get on the bus and go back home. While mostly dead in an emotional sense, I still had a craving for flesh. Since her flesh was tasty and I didn’t have to waste any energy to get it, I made use of her.

One night Misako followed me home from another party; I was drunk, very drunk, so that was probably the night that it happened. I don’t remember much because I was pretty drunk but I do remember being annoyed because she was following me and maybe asking some invasive question like: ‘Where are you going?’ Anyway, this conversation took place not too far from my house, on Gough I think, and we ended up in bed. I remember the hunger taking over, that need for flesh, and I was tossing her around on the bed and it was satisfying, a way to work off the annoyance. It was deeply satisfying, because here was a pretty girl sacrificing herself to me. I could do whatever I wanted to her. At 25, I wasn’t usually comfortable with abusing women but I was very drunk and I tossed her around. I remember kneeling on the bed, her body arched against me at a forty-five degree angle, nude and smooth. How Misako felt about all this, I don’t know because I didn’t ask.

I might have been able to do anything I wanted to her, but I didn’t want to get her pregnant. That’s what happened though. Misako called me regularly but one day she called nine or ten times in the course of a few hours. The folks taking my calls finally got annoyed (These were in the days when housemates shared a land line. I know, ancient history). At the time, I had two strippers staying with me. Their stripper names, the only names I knew, were ‘Otter’ and ‘Squishy.’ They had cosmetically bonded fangs and were performing a lesbian-vampire act at one of the SF clubs. Other and Squishy were friends with one of my housemates, which explained why they were living with me. For months. The pair had hitchhiked to San Francisco from New Orleans, mostly with truckers who were of course thrilled to have two twenty-something strippers sleeping in their cab. (We got along until I went out of town and the roommate let them sleep in my bed without telling me. I found out when I noticed the lipstick stains on my pillow cases).

Squishy, the girl-next-door of the pair, asked my why I didn’t call Misako back.
The more she calls, I said, the less I want to talk to her.

I’ll remember that, Squishy said.
[It’s funny. Six or seven years later, I was reading the New York Observer when I saw a gossip piece about an Irvine Welsh book tour in Manhattan. At one point, he’s in a bathroom stall doing some kind of drug, and the woman he’s with opens the stall door and chases the reporters away. The woman's name? Otter].

When I did call Misako back, she didn’t want to talk about Hagen Dazs and my cavalier attitude about sex. She told me she was pregnant. I felt…annoyed. This person who had inflicted herself on me now had a real demand on my attention. Misako told me she was going back to Japan to get an abortion.

When she returned to San Francisco I met her on Van Ness near her apartment to give her money. We walked to an ATM. She had dressed up for the occasion and I abstractly noticed how good she looked – a blouse with broad blue and white stripes showing her breasts, tights displaying her excellent legs. It had no more effect on me than pretty wallpaper. The zombie felt hunger – that blue and white striped blouse – but even zombies have survival instincts. If I had sex with her again, it would be complicated.

At the ATM, we haggled over money. She told me that the trip to Japan had been expensive. I told her that she could have had it done in SF, and then gave her a hundred dollars. She wanted to talk more but I wanted to leave. I think she called me a few times after that but I didn’t call back.

Not too much later I left San Francisco, bummed around for a while, and ended up in New York City. Somehow, Misako and I stayed in touch (I think I called her late one night when I was on speed. In those days, Doctors were throwing around Dexedrine like Reeses Pieces. After a night of drinking and Dex it would be four a.m. and I’d say – Hmmm, I wonder if anyone’s awake now? Who do I know in Australia?). I put together a picture of Misako – she played cello, had a rich father, was a sensitive reader with a quirky sense of humor. She was a cultured and interesting person, a human being. I fantasized a lot about having sex with her. I fantasized about ordering her to get on her knees and unbutton my Levis with her teeth. At one point she went on a trip to Ireland and I almost convinced her to stop in New York. My friend Ying Guo, a transvestite Chinese filmmaker, had lusted after Chieko and he was in New York now too. ‘If she comes here,’ he said, ‘I’ll make a porno of the two of you.’ I didn’t know how I felt about the porno but Misako ended up skipping New York.

Around the time Misako was considering her New York visit, I was dating another girl. Lisa was a med student who’d wanted to be an artist, but her mother had insisted on medical school. Since her mother had attempted suicide several times, Lisa had obeyed. I’d met Suzanne at Max Phish; Suzanne loved poetry and I seduced her by whispering Yeats in her ear. Then we started making out in a booth. She wanted to give me her number but we didn’t have a pen, so she took out her lipstick, unbuttoned my shirt and wrote the number across my chest.

(Farewell Max Phish! I just read that it shut down for good).

I was living on the corner of 169th and Broadway in Manhattan, right across the street from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. It was loud there, traffic down Broadway and ambulance sirens day and night. It was a Dominican neighborhood. During the day, you heard meringue and shouting from the Dominican markets. At night you saw the cars lined up at off-ramps from the George Washington Bridge. People drove in from Jersey to score crack. The bus shelter at the bridge was designed by an Italian Brutalist architect, Nervi; it looked like a spaceship, and sitting in my room I felt like I was floating over an alien planet. My room had scarred wooden floors and a bedsheet for a curtain. When I brought girls there they’d look at the bedsheet hanging from the curtain hooks and say, ‘Really, Robert? A bedsheet?’ It was a fitted bedsheet, because the elastic clung to the hooks. I turned twenty-nine in that apartment.

One night in my room, Lisa told me that she would have sex with me but that I would have to ‘talk to her’ first. I didn’t know what she meant: we talked plenty. What it meant was that she was going to talk to me.

She said: Don’t you know I’ve met you before? You’re the kind of man I want to be with but this is what I keep getting. Some people get their hearts broken but they get better. You got yours broken and you stayed that way.

I was flattered: she’d cared enough to lift up my rock and see what was crawling underneath. I’d never mentioned Sarah to her but Lisa could tell; she could see the zombie. Her words thrilled me – I was broken, damage you could see from five years away. I didn’t feel broken though. Girls liked me, I had plenty of friends, I had writing. If being broken meant that love couldn’t tear me apart anymore, then it was better to be a zombie. We ended up just going to sleep. I don’t think I saw Lisa again after that night.

From what I could figure out, Misako’s life in Japan didn’t bring her much happiness – she worked in an office and then for a literary magazine. Her father died. Her friends and lovers told her for years that her mind was still stuck on America.
Eventually, we fell out of touch.

It’s been at least five years since I’ve heard from Misako. I feel bad for her. She got badly hurt, by me, and nobody deserves that. I don’t know if I ever felt guilty though. Misako had decided to play in traffic and a hit-and-run driver had flattened her. It must have been obvious that she couldn’t get what she wanted from me but she’d persisted. I’d been broken by someone, and so I turned around and did the same thing to someone else. It was the zombie way and by sacrificing herself to a zombie, Misako had become a zombie too.

Can You Pick Me Up at the Airport?

2011-01-03T11:56:00.001-08:00

I emailed a friend last night to see if he could pick me up at John Wayne Aiport today. His answer, via text, this morning:
'Hit me up when you land. If I'm around I'll come get you. But I may be in L.A. Or with a chick so I can't confirm or promise.'
This made me extremely happy. Really. I'm reading 'A Scanner Darkly' and that is exactly what one of the degenerates in the book would say to one of his friends. 'A Scanner Darkly' is set in Orange County, too.

Formal Feeling, or: Kicking the Jukebox at Heartbreak Hotel

2010-12-15T23:41:00.000-08:00

I found my San Francisco again after I got off the 38 Geary bus to catch the 22 Fillmore, a few blocks from the first place I lived in the city. Looking up toward Pacific Heights for the 22 to see nothing on the way. So I started walking. My city came back to me in muscle memory as I strolled through the Fillmore, still a black neighborhood although much less of one than in my day. All part of the great plan to bleach American’s great cities of their flavor. But the Fillmore hung on, Yoshi’s there amidst the BID signs, and also a rib joint, guys hanging on the street, parked car thumping hip hop. Then up the hill, leaving the Fillmore behind, views into the city center, city hall, the opera, the library, no longer blocked by the Embarcadero overpass. My city came back: I’d walked San Francisco, tramped it, the hill opening the city from a thousand angles, never less than inspiring, I don’t know how many hundreds of miles I laid down those years. In drizzle I walked all the way down to the Mission, where I found myself in Muddy Waters, writing about old grief.

Almost twenty years ago I was pushing a shopping cart through the Safeway near my apartment in SF. I had just gotten my heart broken for the first time in my life (up to three now and counting…). And when I say ‘broken’ I mean I was broken: wheels coming off, systems failure, spewing oil, five minutes to autodestruct, the real Humpty-Dumpty all-the-king’s-horses-and-all-the-king’s-men kind of shit. It was a Shuttle Challenger break up, trail of smoke, screams and pieces spread across half a continent.

And I didn’t acknowledge it at all; couldn’t admit my own raving misery. I hated her. She was a traitor. When she called, which was fairly often, I slammed down the phone (but oh how sad I was when the calls stopped coming). ‘No I’m fine,’ I told myself. ‘It’s all good. Screw that bitch.’ My house was going up in a three-alarm blaze and I kept making breakfast in the kitchen. The smoke? Just the toast getting crispy. But who were all those dudes in metal helmets carrying hoses?

As I pushed my shopping cart down the aisle in dull zombie rage, a song started playing on the PA. It was a song I knew, a radio hit from the 70s, 'She's Gone', the Hall & Oates version. I hadn’t liked the song when I was kid – I was making the turn to rock then and didn’t have much appreciation for well-crafted R&B. But the song had been on all the time, enough to infect my musical DNA, and as it hit the crescendo of:

She's gone, oh I, oh I, oh I
I'd better learn how to face it
She's gone, oh I, oh I, oh I
I'd pay the devil to replace her
She's gone, oh I, what went wrong…

I understood for the first time that she was gone. That she wasn’t coming back. That my beautiful California girl had bolted to LA to enjoy rich-kid life and try to launch an acting career and was already screwing the semi-successful musician she would marry and divorce. That I was left under the fluorescent lights, doing a weekly task that had been a lot of fun with her and was now a zombie plod. I hadn’t cried since before college but tears started running down my face, tears hastily wiped away, because how could I be crying in Safeway to a song I couldn’t stand, a song that wasn’t even cool?

[Part II of this post - the more 'theoretical' part, can be found at the Entasis Blog].

A Great Art Project

2010-11-19T21:11:00.000-08:00

One of my fellow editors at Entasis is doing a fascinating art project in LA based on collaborations between poets and visual artists. Check it out.

Badlands (Call for Submissions)

2010-11-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

Badlands

“Makhóšiča”, (literally ‘bad land’) to the Lakota Sioux, “les mauvaises terres à traverser” (‘the bad lands to cross’) to the French trappers who came for Lakota furs. The Spanish called it tierra baldía (‘waste land’) and ‘cárcava’ (gullied). Wiki tells us that: ‘Badlands form in semi-arid or arid regions with infrequent but intense rain-showers, sparse vegetation, and soft sediments: a recipe for massive erosion.’ And, “…badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand, all of which impede travel and other uses.” Badlands can also be man made after mines play out and farms wash away. Nothing there for the practical to exploit but a place to stare into the sublime.

The English philosopher Edmund Burke defined the sublime as: “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger… Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.” But he also thought there was something pleasurable in the experience, like being held over a cliffside by your ankles. Shelly’s Mont Blanc perfectly captures this feeling of sublimity. I see the sublime in the Long Beach refineries tipped with fire, or in the wasteland around the UP railroad tracks in the City of Industry.

It isn’t just the outside world though, that can bring the sublime. For Burke, Milton’s Satan was a sublime figure. Springsteen (Bruce!) told us that to be real you had to confront the badlands but he wasn’t talking about a park in North Dakota. He meant ruined lives, those days, months, years when your soul looks like Bikini Atoll after the A-Bomb. I think the sublime is all over Cynthia Mitchell’s story from our first issue. It’s these different badlands that I hope we can reach in our next issue.
- RA

Autoentactic

2010-11-17T06:21:00.000-08:00

New posts on our Entasis blog.

Entasis Blog

2010-11-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

Entasis Journal has a blog and my latest post takes on what goes into writing well. Of course knowing what makes good writing - or thinking that you know - is a lot different from doing it.

Golden Eagles at Turtle Rock

2010-11-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been doing seven-mile runs about five days a week. I need the runs: not only do they keep me lean, they calm the devils and the devils have been pestering me. Most of the time I go up the hill at Turtle Rock. The final elevation gain is about five hundred feet and steep, enough to leave you gasping if you push. I usually do two loops on the hill then head back to the domain of traffic lights and SUVs.

One gift of Turtle Rock is the views – Orange County spread out from the Santa Ana Mountains to the blue decline of horizon, all the corporate towers curving roads and golden hills, Long Beach a distant urban mass. The other gift is a touch of wilderness, chaparral plants among the invasives, the shifting tones of gray and brown and dun. The roadrunners, doves, rabbits, phoebes, the rustling in thick brush. I’ve seen snakes and I’ve seen vultures. It’s only a touch, a taste of the wild. The houses lap against the hill, human stain, until the last two hundred feet.

The hill looms as you run up the winding roads, turn a corner and there it is. Yesterday as I came up to the last turn a large bird swooped into the canopy next to me and perched. A few seconds later, another bird lit on same branch, and the first bird hopped to the next tree with a squawk. I stopped to look at the bully. It was a raptor with the signature sharp curving beak. The bird was dark brown, with lighter brown feathers around the neck. Under its wings lay a checkerboard pattern of black and white feathers. These birds were large, maybe two-and-a-half feet long, with wings easily twice that or more. They were the first golden eagles I’d ever seen and I was close enough that I could see them breathing.

In the summer on a run I’d noticed a peregrine falcon perched on a power line. The falcon had arrested me in the same way, close to the life of large animal that wasn’t tame or in a cage, that had an aura of power.

The eagles hopped around in the branches and then swooped off. I saw them again as I crested Turtle Rock, fifty feet overhead, flying with steady powerful strokes. Chasing the eagles were eight or ten crows as frantic as clowns.

Entasis First Issue

2010-11-04T11:30:00.001-07:00

Check out our new literary journal. Fantastic work.

Boxing Vs. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

2010-09-17T21:43:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a fair amount of Brazilian jiu-jitsu over the last eighteen months and I enjoy it. A lot. I like the fact that you can 'lose,' that is, get submitted, and start right over again. In boxing, losing generally involves a lot of pain. I also like the fact that BJJ doesn't give you brain damage.

What I like slightly less is the social atmosphere of BJJ. You always have to deal with other people. Classes are scheduled at regular times and even open mats call for a lot of social interaction. I don't like the structured times and places. In boxing you are alone much of the time, even in a crowded gym. Sparring is intimate but the gloves and headgear maintain a distance, not to mention the distrust and caution you need to show your sparring part.

I love people and hanging out but I've always needed to be alone a lot. Like the cafe, boxing allowed me to be alone around other people. Boxers almost always respect other boxers' privacy. If someone doesn't feel like talking, no one talks to him. You hit the bags alone. You jump rope alone. Roland Barthes called it a Jansenist sport. He was right.

The Harbor Freeway, Wedneday 10:15 P.M.

2010-09-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

A sign flashes: Accident, Left Lane, Carson Street Exit
Traffic slows, shifting right.
A car speeds through the left lane, turning right just before the blinking arrow.
A flotilla of squad cars gleam along the guard rail.
At the center of the squad cars a bulge of motion and shapes:
a paramedic, a broken car, a glimpse of a plastic sheet
Outlining a human body.

[This was an experiment: I wanted to take myself out of my normal first-person narrative voice. Unfortunately the result was bad poetry].

Entasis Literary Quarterly

2010-08-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.entasisjournal.com/

I'm pretty excited to be working with some talented writers on a new literary journal. It's something I've never done before but maybe it's time to join the dark side and become an editor. The other editors are primarily poets so we're short fiction and non-fiction. Check out the website for submission information. We're also about to start running a blog for the magazine.

What My Father Thinks of Me

2010-07-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

Every time I visit my parents, the first time my father sees me making coffee he says: 'You started drinking coffee again?'
I have never stopped drinking coffee.
Yesterday he asked me if I still took a four hour nap every night - from about eight to midnight, he said - and then wrote until morning. He said it like it was something I'd been doing for years. I had no idea what he was talking about.

How My Last Soccer Game this Spring Was Like the World Cup Final

2010-07-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

We were in the playoffs matched against a much better team (we'll call them Spain) and spent most of the game boxed up in our end (like the Dutch). Spain couldn't finish though. They didn't have a really creative forward like Arjen Robben. I'd never seen Robben play before this cup. Holy Haysoos, he just blew by people and made the Spanish seem puny and slow.

I was playing sweeper, holding the back, shouting orders. In the middle of the second half, my team started to buckle from the constant pressure. And as with the Dutch, we lost following a ridiculous series of mistakes. First we gave up a corner kick when one of our players kicked the ball over the end line even though I was following him and shouting - 'Don't touch it! Don't touch it!' Later he told me he'd gotten drunk before the game. Then on the ensuing corner kick, one of our players tried to run the ball out of the box. The ball was in the air and he got under it - and brushed it with his arm. Even though there was nobody within five feet of him. The other team started calling for a PK and the ref gave it. The ref was blocked and it's possible that my friend only brushed the ball with his shoulder. Anyway, they scored on the PK and that was the end of us. In a game like soccer, where scoring happens so rarely, pressure almost takes the place of scoring. The more pressure, the more mistakes. You can feel the tide changing against you, and the desperation growing, and as you're only one of 11, it's hard to do anything about it. That is basically how the Spanish navigated their way through the Cup and a series of 1-0 games.

A side note: a snotty kid kept talking trash throughout the game. This was an intermural game but he kept running his mouth. I've been playing for a long time but never seen some behave that badly. I got so pissed that after the game I tried to get him to fight with me. He wouldn't stand up though, just kept looking at his feet. I guess I should be embarrassed about threatening a kid twenty years younger than me, but... Every time I go out to play a pick up game, I look for him and second chance.

Cobblers of the Apocalypse

2010-06-02T02:54:00.000-07:00

I like my cobbler. He's a Korean-American guy who moved to the OC when he was 11, early enough so that his English is pure Socal. And he dresses exactly like Don Ho, in lurid Hawaiian shirts. His thick hair is swept back like Elvis and he's got great silver streaks in it.

The last time I was there he told me that when he came here, he was the only Korean kid in his high school. 'And there was one Chinese girl,' he said. Things sure have changed in the OC - probably two thirds of my students are first or second generation East Asians.

Then he started asking me if I thought the world was on the verge of a big change.

What kind of change? I said.

I don't know, he said. But don't you see the signs? I mean, all kinds of things are happening all over the place. War, destruction, market crashes, environmental problems. It's kind of like the end of the world.

I guess you're right, I said. Let's just hope it happens when we're dead and gone. [Apres moi, le deluge].

I realized then that I didn't know anything about my cobbler.

No, he said. I want to see it. I want things to change.

Tom Paine Wouldn't Go to Their Tea Party

2010-04-28T00:46:00.000-07:00

AMERICA AS THE NEW THING

(Approach shamelessly heisted from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature).

Common Sense dares Americans to take the next step. In thought and action. It was written during a time of rebellion. Lexington. Concord. The military occupation of Boston. Colonists, not yet Americans, wonder what they should do. They resent the invasion. They resent the taxes and rough treatment by the British government that preceded it. Yet they don’t know what form their opposition should take. Even though they are Swedes, Irishmen, Germans, Dutch, Frenchman they feel a connection to Great Britain. It represents the world they or their parents or their grandparents left. They read its books and treasure its crafts. In the French-Indian War a decade earlier Britain was the older brother and her redcoats fought side by side with the colonists in their homespun. Yet Britain is now treating the colonies like a resource, something to be used, to be exploited. The redcoats now point their muskets at those they fought beside, brothers no more. The colonists cannot decide what to do though. Reconciliation? Capitulation? Or…something else?

Thomas Paine has no doubt as to what that something is. Paine is not the first person to see the possibilities of his New World, specifically the 13 colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. He is not the first person to imagine an independent country there. Nor is he the first person to wish for an end to the bewitchment and privileges of the old order with its kings and lords. What he is, is the first man to say that there is no other option, no other option for the brave. Thomas Paine didn’t invent the idea of a new America but he makes us feel it. What he does is tell his fellow Americans, all American for the first time, that the idea of America is no longer an abstraction but something that has to be realized. Immediately. That there will never be a better chance than the one before them.

Common Sense has an edge. Paine wants to sever ties, to chop through knots of temporization and doubt. The method of argument that Paine uses comes out of the skepticism of Voltaire and Montaigne. In his hands it is acid. It burns through the moldy notions of the divine inheritance of kings. It corrodes the supports that still connect the old and the new. Custom is his enemy as much as the British. Custom and the constriction of free thought (Paine talks a lot about commerce but his most important commerce is a commerce of the mind). Paine says: we are not like them, the citizens of Europe, not anymore; this place has changed us. They don’t understand us so how can they rule us? His weapon was made by the Enlightenment but it is not Enlightenment skepticism alone. Paine believes that men are born good. For Paine men have been deformed by custom, by habit, by the crowded nations of Europe and their ideas of heredity, by history. What he opposed were, in the words of his friend William Blake, ‘The mind forg’d manacles.’ There was a hell for Paine, but we had created it. America was the place where we could escape it. He doesn’t talk about America as country but as a continent. A continent big enough for difference.

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated

- The Crisis (1775)

Paine, the son of a corset-maker, can write. This is prose that draws on Shakespeare and the Bible, with a directness that comes with a new American vernacular. He is writing in a language that any person of soon to be countrymen could understand. Even people who weren’t literate – and many weren’t in 1776 – could appreciate Paine’s sweep and dramatic oppositions. Common Sense could be read to indentured servants in a storehouse. A man could stand up on a beer cask in a tavern and sway the hearts of rough workers. All the binaries are there in his ferocious attack: old/new, monarchy/republic, crowded/open, despair/hope. These are the terms that would come to define the promise of United States.

Common Sense is propaganda. High level propaganda but propaganda still. Paine doesn’t dwell on the issues that would threaten his new country: slavery, Indian wars, states rights, growth. He hints at them but it is his belief that the revolution, now, will give the only chance of overcoming them. It was left to others, writing for different audiences, to explore the threat of America to itself. Blake, like Paine working-class, the son of a stocking maker, confronts the horrors of slavery in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. St. Jean de Crevecoeur does the same in his ninth letter.

In later life, Paine referred to himself as ‘a missionary of world revolution.’ Forced out of America he returned to England, where he was hounded out of the country by government agents. In France, he became a deputy after the revolution, only to nearly lose his head in the Terror (the American Embassy did not try to save him: he wasn’t an American citizen!). Finally he was allowed to return to the new country he had helped to make. Like Blake, his brother in temperament and idealism, Paine died obscure and alone. That’s what happens to permanent revolutionaries, ones who are lucky enough to die in bed, anyway. Only six people followed his hearse, including two freedman and a Quaker. The cause for his ostracism lay for the most part is his deist beliefs. To Paine, God was a distant abstraction, at best (in this he was most unlike Blake, for whom God was a reality that burned in us all).

American exceptionalism has been debased many times in the last 220 years. After the Iraq War it’s hard not to see America as so many millions in the world see her: as an oppressor, a colonizer, a country that sees the world as something to be used. In 2010 it is difficult to understand just how astonishing the revolution was. Just how important the American contribution was to world history. Paine helps to see again the possibility in America. Common Sense, 235 years old, can still make America new. A country that still accepts immigrants by the millions. That offers, in its internal logic, if not in its reality, the possibility of justice.

A Scene from My Second Novel

2010-01-21T23:42:00.001-08:00

One of the only ones I can still read without getting depressed.

Isn’t this stuff great, D? Jimmy said.

He nodded. He couldn’t move his tongue. Or maybe he could but only thought he couldn’t. What if he tried to move it and it wouldn’t move? That would be even worse.

Do you want another hit?

He shook his head, no. He had never noticed how truly strange Jimmy’s face was, a face compressed and gone bulging out in a dozen directions. His mouth - filled with hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth. Alligator smile.

They were on break on their guard shifts at Columbia Presbyterian hospital. The hospital buildings dominated Washington Heights. He could see their flags from the window of his apartment – enormous American flags rippling in a stainless blue sky. The hospital ambulances kept him awake, at all hours racing Broadway in motorcade for the fallen. Through Interstellar, he had taken odd shifts at the hospital for years.

Jimmy rolled down his window and tapped his pipe on the window ledge. The pipe was painted flat black and carved into a death’s head. Jimmy loved the pipe; it was all Damien could do to keep him from showing to the nurses.

I was telling you about that scene from Evil Dead II, right, D? At the end it turns into this kind of…circus of horror. The main guy, he’s chopping up the dead with a chain saw that he attached to his arm where his hand got cut off. Remember, I was telling you how the hand got cut off? That he had to cut it off, cause the dead took it over and it kept trying to kill him? And it still kept trying to kill him, even cut off. Anyway, he uses this chain saw to cut up the evil dead that were actually his friends once and this…stuff, comes spraying out of them.

He looked at Jimmy’s eyes as he spoke, doll eyes, ebony and bright. James Reilly was a long-time Interplanetary guard and the reason the company couldn’t keep a regular on the shift. James was the borderline type you so often see in security work, famous for his acts of random violence and stupidity. He came from the old Irish neighborhood around Dyckman Street and had graduated from cruising the Heights blowing out windshields with a wrist-rocket to shooting rats and pigeons on slow guard shifts with an automatic. He was ordnance happy and took pleasure in discharging a shotgun into holes he dug in his backyard. James had flunked out of the police academy, been institutionalized twice and drank whiskey on the job from a silver flask. He rode the subway at night with a pistol in his jacket hoping someone would trouble him. Although he made Damien nervous, Jimmy liked working with him because he was Irish, as well as the only other white guard under fifty at Interstellar. And it was only a few blocks from his apartment.

So after he kills the evil dead demon/god (but he doesn’t really kill him) he gets thrown into another dimension which is like a King Arthur world but...

We have to get back, Jimmy, he managed, This has been a long break.

Actually, he had no idea how long the break had been. A different, much younger man had stepped into the car.

Yeah, you’re probably right. I’ll loan you the movie though, D. I have it on tape.

He left the car on shaky legs.

I have Visine, D. You want some Visine?

Yeah, he croaked, I need it.

They split up at the door to the Emergency Room. Jimmy liked to work the ER for the horror and bonded with the cops circled around the disasters. That left Damien to make rounds and do the escort services for the pharmacy and subway. The arrangement suited him. He didn’t like the ER. Once he’d seen a paramedic lift the hand of a burn victim and have the skin peel away from the hand like a glove. The attendant doctor had convulsed with hysterical laughter while the paramedic fell to his knees and vomited beside the dying man.

At his guard post, a nurse stood leaning against his desk. She glared at his approach. He hoped that she was looking at someone behind him.

I’ve been waiting for you for over twenty minutes, she said. The criticism caught him like a club between the eyes. He resisted an impulse to crawl under his desk. Then one to grab her by the throat.

I was on break lady, he said, slavish and sullen.

Break? You guys don’t do anything. What’s the break for?

She was young and pretty, Spanish, with brown hair tinted gold and skin the color of creamed coffee. Her good looks made him hate her all the more.

Okay. Walk your own ass to the subway tonight.

Look, just forget it. I need to go to the pharmacy.

Okay.

If one of the nurses wished to fill a scrip after the hospital pharmacy closed, she had to call for a guard. The logic of this regulation baffled him but he did not question his good fortune. She signed his log and he followed the nurse down the hall. With hate and lust he watched her hips wagging in white. He heard her rubber heels smack tile. She was small but her body stretched the fabric of her uniform. He had a sudden fantasy of pulling his gun on her in the pharmacy, of lifting her white skirt and raping her on the cold floor. He imagined that she would like it.

After he unlocked the pharmacy door, the nurse went into the shelves to fill her scrip. He went to shelves on the other side of the room to fill his order, quickly cramming his pockets with D’s and V’s (Demerols and Valiums), Percodins and Percosets. Downers mostly, downers scored him points with Clark, nothing better to cut the edge at four a.m. He knew right where to go, had mapped out the situation years before. As he worked, he was careful to keep aisles between him and the young night nurse.

Two hours later, the same nurse stood before him asking to be escorted to the subway. He pretended that he hadn’t been dozing. The confusion of his early high had become a drooling stupor.

Okay, let’s go, he said and lunged to his feet.

Look, she said, I’m sorry I snapped at you before. We’re understaffed and I’ve been on for twelve hours.

It’s okay, he said. Her voice had a street singsong that made him ready to forgive her anything.

They went through the main entrance into a humid night. The subway station stood only two blocks and one avenue away from the hospital but a nurse had been attacked on the way home the year before. He no longer thought of his neighborhood as dangerous but he’d never been a woman. At night, cars from the Jersey side clustered around the tenements near the George Washington Bridge in search of the forty-dollar grams of high quality cocaine. He saw the kids on mountain bikes with pagers and the burly enforcers outside the hot houses but it was only a fragment of the neighborhood and it didn’t touch him. For him, the Heights was at its summer best in the Dominican men sitting in chair circles that spilled from courtyards and the line of laughing teenagers on the park wall with forties in their fists.

A tough shift, hunh? He asked. He saw how tired she was, face taut beneath her fine young skin.

You don’t even know. I have exams coming up and I’m here four days a week. They cut one full-time nurse position so now the rest of us have to do even more.

They walked in the night and concrete. His eyes sandpapered dry. She barely came to his shoulder and he wanted to talk to her but his brain was clouded. He felt the electricity of her. He couldn't talk to her. He was wearing polyester and his pockets were stuffed with prescription drugs. There was nothing he could offer her. He was thirty years-old and what did he have? Nothing.

Irvine Voodoo

2010-01-15T02:18:00.000-08:00

Last night someone knocked on my door around 11 p.m. As I was idling around in my boxers, I didn't hurry to answer it. When I did, I saw a tiny neighbor of mine with her even tinier daughter, and a thick-bodied middle aged one. My neighbor started talking in her clear high voice. She doesn't have an accent but is obviously not a native speaker.

I know you have a cat, she said. We see her in your window. I was wondering if we could use your cat for something.

I stared at her, wondering what exactly she wanted to use my cat for. The middle-aged women nodded and smiled.

My daughter has this problem with her eye, my neighbor said. I looked at her gurgling daughter and saw a sty over her left eye. My neighbor kept talking.

My aunt is visiting us, she said. My aunt says that if we rub a cat over my daughter's eye, this thing will go away.

The aunt continued to nod happily.

I shrugged and went to get my cat, which I handed over to the aunt. She took Wheezy's tail and began to rub it over the child's eye while chanting rapidly in Spanish. When she finished chanting, she returned Wheezy.

My neighbor laughed.

I don't think it will hurt anything, she said. And who knows?

We said goodnight.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

2009-12-26T02:11:00.000-08:00

Does that make anyone sad? Not likely.

For the past five years, Ernie DiGiacomo has been able to count on parents to guarantee the $1,500 to $2,500 rents he charges for the 15 apartments he owns in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he called renters who had missed payments, he often heard, “My parents will send you a check.”

But in the past six months, the parents are pulling back financial help, he said, and as a result, he has watched more renters move out.

“Most of them are moving back with parents,” Mr. DiGiacomo said.

Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements.

“They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?’ ” Mr. Illades said. “There is a bubble bursting.”

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses.

For 18 months after graduating from Colby College, Jack Drury, 24, lived the way many Williamsburg residents do: He followed his passions, working in satellite radio and playing guitar. He earned money as a bicycle messenger and, on occasion, turned to his parents for money.

But as the recession deepened last fall, his parents had to cut the staff at their event planning company to 30 workers from 50. Asked for his help, Mr. Drury cast aside his other pursuits and started work as a project manager for his parents. But he still plays the guitar in two bands, Haunted Castle and Rats in the Walls.

“My future is in the family business,” he said. “Music is just for fun.”

The real estate market, too, is shifting as wealth evaporates. Ross Weinstein, a managing partner of the Union Square Mortgage Group, has worked with hundreds of Williamsburg apartment buyers in the past two years.

“A lot of the money came from family,” he said. “That piece, it’s gone for a lot of people.”

In the boom years, Mr. Weinstein said, 40 percent of the mortgage applications he reviewed for buyers in Williamsburg included down-payment money, from $50,000 to $300,000, from parents. About 20 percent of the applications listed investments that gave the young buyers $3,000 to $10,000 of monthly income.

But in the past two months, Mr. Weinstein said, he has handled two to three deals a week in which the parents cut back their down-payment help.

The number of sales in Williamsburg dropped nearly a quarter in the first three months of this year compared with the same period a year ago, according to HMS Associates, a Brooklyn appraisal firm. And in three recent cases, Mr. Weinstein said, owners sold their apartments in short sales — selling for less than the bank is owed, to avoid foreclosure — because they were no longer receiving parental help.

Mr. Weinstein has been advising two brothers in their late 20s who wanted to buy a $700,000 apartment with $250,000 from their parents. But their parents’ investment portfolio has lost so much value that they now can give only $50,000. Since the brothers make about $45,000 a year each, they are now shopping for a $500,000 apartment.

The parents still wish they could help, Mr. Weinstein said, but “right now, they’re in a situation in their life where they need to ensure their own security.”

It is an adjustment that many have to deal with. Eric Gross, 26, a construction worker, was going to buy, with help from his father, a $600,000 one-bedroom condo with city views at Northside Piers, a luxury building, he said.

But his father, who works in the auto industry, said he had to reduce his contribution. “He’s pulling back the lifeline,” Mr. Gross said.

So Mr. Gross is scaling back, shopping for a $300,000 apartment, said his real estate agent, Binnie Robinson of AptsandLofts.com.

It can be hard to see the signs of financial troubles in Williamsburg because residents are so loath to show that they had money in the first place. Robert Lanham, author of “The Hipster Handbook,” said in an interview that many newer residents tried to blend in with the area’s gritty history and dressed “half the time like they’re homeless people.”

But parental help was obvious in the intersection of residents with low-paying jobs and $3,000-a-month apartments.

“You can put two and two together, that they have money coming in from somewhere else,” Mr. Lanham said.

The culture of the area often mocks residents who depend on their families. Misha Calvert, 26, a writer who relied on her parents during her first year in the city, now has three roommates, works in freelance jobs and organizes parties to help keep her afloat while she writes plays and acts in films. There is a “giant stigma,” she said, for Williamsburg residents who are not financially independent.

“It takes the wind out of you if you’re not the independent, self-reliant artist you claim to be,” she said, “if you’re just daddy’s little girl.”

The cutbacks for the more privileged residents are a welcome change for locals who have struggled to support themselves without parental help.

Katie Deedy, 27, an artist, works two bartending jobs to shore up her designer wallpaper business. Gazing out from the bar at the patrons playing darts and sipping bloody marys during a Sunday shift at the Brooklyn Ale House, she described how refreshing it felt not being the only local resident trying to live on less.

“If I’m going to be completely honest, it does make me feel a little bit better,” she said. “It’s bringing a lot of Williamsburg back to reality.”

A Ha Ha Ha Ha

2009-12-26T02:00:00.000-08:00

This made my Christmas.

20 Bayard condo files for Chapter 11

December 04, 2009 07:30PM By David Jones

20 Bayard

In a move that stunned real estate executives and residents of the building, the sponsors of 20 Bayard Street in Williamsburg filed the condominium into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late this afternoon.

According to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Brooklyn, the condo by North Development Group owed more than $10 million to more than 50 creditors.

The reason for the filing was unclear, however bankruptcy is often used by developers to prevent a property from being foreclosed on. Records with the city Department of Finance show that Istar Financial inherited the building loan from subprime lender Fremont Bank. However, court documents show that Manhattan-based hard money lender W Financial among the listed creditors.

The creditor with the largest unsecured claim was Add Plumbing, a contractor at 120 Evergreen Avenue in Brooklyn. The claim was for $325,000.

North Development Group had previously parted ways with the Developers Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman at the Karl Fisher-designed property, after the brokers argued for lower sales prices at the building. Streeteasy data shows units have been selling for $825 per square foot.

After selling about 50 percent of the 64-unit building, the developer began offering apartments for rent, officials said.

"We sold close to half the building, then we had differences with the developer and we parted ways," said Lior Barak, a senior vice president at Elliman, who represented the building in 2007.

Unit owners at the building were shocked at the move, because there were no visible signs that the building was in the amount of distress that would force a bankruptcy filing.

"If anything, that's what is such a surprise," said Robin Ottoway, a unit owner who bought his apartment in August 2008. "Any problems that we had they came up and they fixed."

Ottoway said the building is nearly full of either unit owners who closed on their apartment contracts or renters, who have moved in since earlier this year.

However, attorney Rob Braverman represented a buyer who filed with the New York State Attorney General in 2008 to get out of a contract at the building. Braverman said the case stemmed from an alleged mold problem at the property. He said the case was settled about two months ago.

Porzio, Bromberg & Newman attorney John Mairo, one of the lawyers representing the North Development Group-controlled sponsor, 20 Bayard Views, in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, was not immediately available. The other attorney, Leslie Berkoff, of Morrit, Hock, Hamroff & Horowitz, was traveling and not scheduled to return until next week.

North Development, led by Isaac Hager, is facing litigation over a $17 million loan made to Kent Wythe 9th Street, another entity of Hager's created to develop a site at 421-431 Kent Avenue and 464-474 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg.

The Sorrows of Utah

2009-12-18T02:53:00.001-08:00

Even the microbrews are alcohol deficient.

Alone And Drinking Under The Moon

2009-11-11T02:33:00.000-08:00

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,

and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon

accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are

friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

- Li Po

Translated by: Rewi Allen

2009-10-28T02:37:00.000-07:00

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

The funny thing is the 'is said to be.' A way of avoiding legal issues. What the article says is that the CIA tried to buy this election and, because of 21st Century technology, it didn't happen. In the way it happened, say, in Latin America in the 50s. Stuffing the ballot box just ain't what it used to be.

A few howlers from the piece.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai’s role in the drug trade were not conclusive.

“There’s no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court,” said one American official familiar with the intelligence."

Two examples of damning with faint praise.

Eight Thousand Words

2009-10-14T16:44:00.001-07:00

I have a long article in the Fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2009/fall/anasi-game-over/

From beginning to end, this piece was tough on me. The phrase 'the torments of the damned' comes to mind. But it's out and I'm pretty happy with it. Of course, I think it should be twenty thousand words.

Many thanks to Bill Wasik for all his help and to Ted Genoways for giving it a home.

Flat Foot Floogie'

2009-10-05T01:42:00.000-07:00

'In penning his biggest hit, "Flat Foot Floogie," the sly Gaillard perpetrated a monumentally mischievous prank on the American pop music public. The whole first line read: "Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy." As it happen, a flat-foot floozie (Galliard substitutes "floogie"). in the African American slang of the period, is defined as a streetwalking prostitute and, in the same lexicon, the floy floy is defined as gonorrhea. In other words, America was unwittingly singing along to a song celebrating a streetwalker carrying the clap.'

Not my prose but a great joke, the 'YMCA' of its day. Slim Gaillard was a bad-ass.

Observations from the Late Shift

2009-10-03T03:40:00.001-07:00

William T. Vollmann is a genius.

Dear Jon

2009-09-30T01:27:00.000-07:00

A long-time friend of mine - almost 30 years! - died unexpectedly last week. He was in a coma at the end and I got to spend time with him in the hospice. I was alone there and I knew it was the last time that I would see him. It was disorienting to see Jon lying there but also powerful. In this society we are all too often kept from the deaths of the people we share our lives with - by distance, by accident, by queasiness. Yet I wouldn't have been able to honor Jon's life in the same way if I hadn't been close to his death. I wouldn't have felt it.

We were angry, energetic, trouble-making teenagers together. When we were about seventeen, we broke into every single private school on the East Side of Providence. Partially this was because we resented rich kids, but mostly because it was convenient. Later we found out that the schools had put out a bounty on us. Jon and I were delighted.

Led Zeppelin

2009-08-16T01:36:00.001-07:00

I'm reviewing a bio of the dread Zeppelin and realizing that they were my first foray into sophisticated music. Laugh if you must but they went far beyond the simple textures and orchestrations that I'd been listening to up until then. They, more than Pink Floyd, were the Radiohead of the 70s. Except that they were so much better than Radiohead (Wait, maybe that means Radiohead was the Pink Floyd...).

The Abrasion of Formless Time

2009-08-04T02:21:00.000-07:00

Robert Stone has a particular American story that he keeps telling in all his books. There's always an idealist, a drug-fiend, and an enlightened realist, although sometimes the realist and the drug-fiend are the same. The idealist dies; the realist suffers but makes it. Meanwhile we get a dirty version of America and environs over the last half century.

'An expectation of deference.'

2009-07-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

“When he has the uniform on, Jim has an expectation of deference. But when he’s not in uniform, he’s just a regular guy.”

I don't care much about the Henry Louis Gates arrest. I have a feeling he's pompous and I also am completely sure that the cop give him a harder time because he's black. But the idea of a cop expecting 'deference', that bothers me. Last time I checked, cops are public servants, paid out of taxes. Servants, as far as I can tell, are supposed to give deference, not receive it. Instead, all-too-many cops seem to feel that wearing a badge gives them the right to swagger and push people around. I don't recall signing that particular contract.

Birth Control Pills Made You Cheat on Your Girlfriend

2009-07-05T01:05:00.000-07:00

I was fascinated by this article from 'Psychology Today' about how strippers who were ovulating made much more money than those who were on the pill.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070920-000007.html

It made me think about the number of times women have told me that the pill killed their sex drive. They told me that it was confusing to find themselves no longer attracted to men who they'd been in complete sexual harmony with, like having a lover turn into a brother. Men talk about it less but it seems the boyfriends felt the same way.

This would seem to provide an excuse to the wandering male - and yet another source of anxiety for women - but I think it speaks to the danger of the all-too-easy promotion of the pill as a form of birth control. For example, female track athletes on entering college are immediately put on the pill by coaches who don't want them to get dangerously thin. And most health care will put women on the pill if they ask for contraception - women actually have to ask for an alternative, safer method
like the IUD.

Given the health risks of the pill, this is obviously insane. We're willing to let pharmaceutical companies control our very make-up as human beings. From sheer convenience, women let themselves be talked into altering who they are on a basic animal level. And what does it mean for relationships when this takes place? Are we willing to agree to have diminished attraction in a relationship to suit some vague, long-term goal? It seems both flippant and dangerous.

The Hunt

2009-06-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

I run and play soccer on a field near my apartment. Starting at dusk the edge of the field near an overgrown meadow is carpeted in rabbits feasting on the well-watered grass. Rabbits are pretty bold here - you can run within a few feet of them before they even move. A few nights ago I saw bobcat there with a dead rabbit in its mouth. I got close to him before he slid away.

Last night I was on the field again. In the distance, close to the fence, I saw the bobcat stalking. He'd creep close to a group of rabbits and then lope toward them, not fast, just a smooth pace. I started running toward that side of the field. The bobcat saw me running near him and froze, eyes flashing green in the dark. He seemed pretty unconcerned and started stalking again. I stopped and watched the cat dash forward and heard a shrill squeak. When the cat turned toward me I saw that it had a rabbit in its mouth, only this one wasn't dead yet. Its hind legs kicked, the bobcat holding it nonchalantly. The other rabbits keep grazing, although I thought they started running just a little bit sooner when I moved near them.

A naturalist friend told me that there aren't that many bobcats around UCI - there isn't enough habitat left and they tend to be extremely territorial. They also get hit by cars all time.

Fables of Faubus

2009-05-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago Mingus Columbia released 'The Fables of Faubus', Mingus' condemnation of Governor Faubus' attempt to stop the integration of Arkansas schools.

http://www.jazzwax.com/2009/05/charles-mingus-fables-of-faubus.html

In a bit of family history that I'm pretty proud of, my uncle was there as part of the 101st airborne unit sent to protect the African-American students.

Red in Tooth and Claw

2009-05-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

tonight I went running on playing fields near my apartment. It was just before nine but the stadium lighting made everything visible. I came to the darkest corner of the fields where a fence separates them from an undeveloped expanse thick with brush. As a ran, a large animal ambled toward me, rabbit limp in its mouth. The rabbit dangled nerveless, probably just killed body much longer without the tautness and compression of life. At first I couldn't tell what the predator was, the body thick with smooth muscle over squatty legs. I thought fox, then coyote, then dog, but it didn't have the pointed ears or muzzle. As I got closer I saw that it was a cat, a bobcat, had those side-whiskers that look like mutton chops and a cat's lope. It was big for a bobcat. A website said they can way up to thirty pounds and this animal was all of that. The bobcat let me get pretty close, slinking along through the grass, then sliding under a set of bleachers with its dinner. All around on the field other rabbits grazed peacefully, only hopping away when they were in danger of being stepped on.

Postscript
On that same night, and the next, I kept running by a bloody rabbit skin near the same place on the field. I guess the hunting is good.

The Story of Bigfoot

2009-04-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

This work of Bigfoot scholarship was emailed to a California newspaper by a man calling himself 'Hillbillie Bill.'

I have a real hot news tip for you. The film that Roger Patterson made in 1967 in Northern California of Bigfoot, was real. Here is what Bigfoot really is. Long before Jesus was born there were thousands of slaves who ran off around the world and started their own countries. When these slaves ran off there was a large group of men and boys who took off and ended up in Africa. Some of these men and boys caught female Orangutans and took them to South America and had sex with them and created the American Indian. The men and boys who stayed in Africa caught female Gorillas and had sex with them and created the Black man. When scientists found the bones in Africa they thought we evolved from a female Chimpanzee. But it wasn’t a natural evolution it was a man made evolution. That’s where Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Orangutan man and the Skunk Ape comes from. They are half man and half Gorilla and half man and half Orangutan. They use to call the American Indian the red man. The Orangutan has redish hair. When those men bred out the hair the Indian’s skin remained red. The Gorilla has black hair and skin. When those men bred out the hair the Black man’s skin remained black. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Orangutan man and the Skunk Ape are not prehistoric creatures from millions of years ago but they are man made creatures from several thousand years ago. The creature that Roger Patterson filmed in 1967 was half man and half Gorilla. Otherwise known as Bigfoot. Man created his own evolution. Hillbillie Bill

Land of the Teletubbies

2009-04-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

Irvine is the anti-Brooklyn. When I first got here I was describing it to a friend of mine. I talked about the sunny days, the bright colors, the sculpted green landscapes, the happy polite undergrads, and of course the bunnies hopping about everywhere.

Ir sounds like the teletubbies, she said.

What are teletubbies? I said.

[a capsule history for other uniformed souls]

The programme features four colorful characters: Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po, who live in a futuristic dome (the "Tubbytronic Superdome"), set in a landscape of rolling green hills. The environment is dotted with unusually talkative flowers and periscope-like "voice trumpets". The only natural fauna are rabbits (although birds are often heard, particularly blackcaps and wrens). The climate is always sunny and pleasant save for occasional inclement days, with rain and puddles, and snow at Christmas time. The Teletubbies are played by actors dressed in bulky costumes, although the sets are designed to give no sense of scale. The Teletubbies don't normally wear real clothes other than the colored suits they wear. They have metallic silver-azure rectangular "screens" adorning their abdomens. These screens are used to segue into short film sequences, which are generally repeated at least once. When the series is shown in different countries around the world, the film inserts can be tailored to suit local audiences, or default to the British ones.

They even had bunnies? I said.

They had bunnies, she said.

Thanks god I was too old to be subjected to that, I said.

Another more sinister way to think of the students here is as Eloi, wandering through a Brutalist landscape built by Morlocks (played by the U.C. Regents). Someday the Morlocks will devour the witless happy Eloi.

They're Not in Any Hurry to Get to Heaven

2009-03-19T03:06:00.000-07:00

I still haven't quite figured out why God wants you on a mechanical ventilator.

Religious Belief Linked to Desire for Aggressive Treatment in Terminal Patients

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: March 17, 2009

Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive, a study has found.

The patients who were devout were three times as likely as less religious ones to be put on a mechanical ventilator to maintain breathing during the last week of life, and they were less likely to do any advance care planning, like signing a do-not-resuscitate order, preparing a living will or creating a health care proxy, the analysis found.

The study is to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“People think that spiritual patients are more likely to say their lives are in God’s hands — ’Let what happens happen’ — but in fact we know they want more aggressive care,” said Holly G. Prigerson, the study’s senior author and director of the Center for Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“To religious people, life is sacred and sanctified,” Dr. Prigerson said, “and there’s a sense they feel it’s their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible.”

Aggressive life-prolonging care comes at a cost, however, in terms of both dollars and human suffering. Medicare, the government’s health plan for the elderly, spends about one-third of its budget on people who are in the last year of life, and much of that on patients at the very end of life.

Aggressive end-of-life care can lead to a more painful process of dying, researchers have found, and greater shock and grief for the family members left behind.

The new study used both a questionnaire and interviews to assess the level of reliance on religious faith for comfort among 345 patients with advanced cancer. The patients, most of them belonging to Christian denominations, were followed until they died, about four months on average.

A vast majority of patients, religious or not, did not want heroic measures taken. Still, 11.3 percent of the most religious patients received mechanical ventilation during the last week of life, compared with only 3.6 percent of the least religious.

The most religious patients were also more likely than less religious ones to be resuscitated in the last week of life and to be treated in an intensive-care unit as they died, although those differences may have been due to chance.

“Doctors don’t always acknowledge, and I’m pretty sure patients are telling us, that God is really important in their lives,” said Dr. Gerard Silvestri, a cancer specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C., who has studied end-of-life decision making.

A study by Dr. Silvestri in 2003 found that while cancer patients listed their oncologist’s recommendation as the most influential factor affecting their decisions about medical care, their faith in God was the second-most-influential factor, ranking higher than the recommendations of their family doctors, their spouses and children, and even information about whether treatment would cure the disease

Radio Radio

2009-03-11T01:37:00.001-07:00

http://www.thejefffariasshow.com/stream.php

I'm going to be doing a live broadcast on this guy's show today, 7 p.m. EST. Supposed to be talking about why martial arts are good for society, something like that. I should have no problem running my mouth; I so rarely do.

Sorry that I haven't been blogging. I've been deeply engaged in the best and the worst aspects of life. And writing. And writing. But I should be back in circulation soon, and also looking forward to reading y'all.

Peace

Read My Salon Piece, You Bastards

2009-02-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/02/04/mixed_martial_arts/

Ellen Miller, 1967-2008

2009-02-01T19:48:00.000-08:00

My long-time friend, the author Ellen Miller, died just before Christmas this year. I'd gotten an email from her on December 13th saying she hoped to meet over the holidays. When I didn't hear back from her, I assumed that she'd been caught up in the chaos that had hounded her for the past few years.

Ellen was one of the most talented people I've ever met. She had an intense feeling for language - for word play, metaphor, style. Her first novel 'Like Being Killed' did well both critically and in sales - a rare combination. Ellen reminded me of two of my best professors from college. Like them she was from New York, Jewish, very left, both earthy and intellectual, and not particularly crazy about Israel's treatment of Palestinians (Grace Paley also comes to mind, although they were very different writers).

Job had nothing on Ellen. In the last few years, she'd been afflicted by severe health issues that nearly killed her a number of times (her doctors almost did her in also with their clumsy attempts to figure out what was wrong with her). Her landlord kept trying to evict her from her beautiful apartment, a typical New York story. All of these issues kept her from focusing on her writing, and working, which only made things worse. She did have a very long manuscript in process and hope I'll get to see it some day.

Ellen never gave up. I'd talk to her and be astounded by the suffering she'd gone through. I think it would have broken me. To see this vital, intelligent, kind friend being tortured was almost unbearable. Apparently she collapsed in a local deli and couldn't be revived quickly enough. I include her obituary below. I will miss having Ellen in my life.

Obituary
****
Ellen’s life and work will be remembered by friends and family at a memorial service scheduled for February 8, 2008. Details below. All are welcome.
Ellen grew up in the Carnarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, in a working-class Jewish environment. Her vivid experience of this upbringing formed an important element in her second (unfinished) novel, Stop, Drop, Roll, an excerpt of which appeared in the anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (2003). She also contributed stories to the anthologies 110 Stories: New YorkWrites After Sept 11and Brooklyn Noir, among others.
In addition, Ellen taught creative writing at New York University, Pratt, and the New School, where she was admired by her students and colleagues not only for her mastery of the writing craft and dedication to teaching, but for her remarkable courage and honesty both on the page and in the classroom. Notwithstanding years of chronic illness and other hardships, which she faced with superhuman strength and determination, Ellen lived a rich and creative life and deeply touched many others. In the terminology of her favorite hobby, boxing, Ellen had “a lot of heart.”
She received her BA from WesleyanUniversityin 1988 with Honors and Phi Beta Kappa and later earned her MFAfrom the New York University Creative Writing program where she was the recipient of the NYU Creative Writing Fellowship for Fiction. She was also awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony, among others.
Drafted in a six-month creative burst and published in 1998, Ellen’s novel Like Being Killed enjoyed many critical accolades, including a brief appearance on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list (after a cover review). Kirkus Reviews noted that “[the narrator’s] voice is authentic in unsparingly illuminating the link between self-protection and self-destruction, revealing a tender inner life that persists despite addiction, depression, and descent into squalor. A bleak, bracing debut.” Meanwhile, her teacher and mentor Annie Dillard wrote: “Ellen Miller hurls herself, along with her readers, into a world that resonates with moral complexity, startling anecdote, humor and good humor, brutality and compassion. Her prose is uncommonly clear, compelling, unaffected, and strong. The range of her narrative concerns--from Primo Levi, Nietzsche, and dead languages to bagels and peach pies--proves that she can make anything interesting."
She is survived by her devoted partner, Christopher Rowell, her step-father, Scott Hyde, her two brothers Steven and Michael, and her beloved god-daughter, Olivia Francesca Foster. She will be missed dearly by all.

A memorial service in honor of Ellen’s life and work will be held on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 from 4:00 to 6:00 pm at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street (btw 5th and 6th Aves.), New York, NY. All are welcome.

The Last Words of Lasantha Wickramatunga

2009-01-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

Wickramatunga, a Sri Lankan newspaper editor, was assassinated last Thursday. His newspaper was critical of government conduct in the war against the Tamil Tigers. Gunmen had tried to kill Wickramagunga before, and he knew he was a walking dead man. He left a letter to be opened on his death. In it, he names the government as his murderer (even though he'd been a long-time friend to the president)and mourns the loss of democracy and human rights on the island. The text of the letter is at the address below. It's moving and disturbing.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2009/01/letter-from-the.html

When Home Isn't

2009-01-01T12:59:00.001-08:00

In the week or so I've been back in NYC I've managed to pick up two police summonses. The first came when I was leaving a warehouse show where some friends were playing. Free cans of Colt 45 and empanadas, the best Christmas party in a while. I'd just cracked a Colt when my crew decided to leave. I walked outside with my can.
'You're going to get a ticket for that,' Cindy said.
'Yeah whatever,' from yours truly.
Twenty feet from the club door a squad car pulled up. Busted.
'What's that?' the cop said.
I showed him.
'Pour it out,' Cindy said.
'You can keep it' the cop said. He was young, twenty-five maybe, handsome, African American. Had a certain suavity to him. As he was writing me up, he took a call from a woman and flirted with her. Then he said, 'Sorry baby, I'll hit you back later. I'm writing a ticket here.'
Overall, the cops were pretty decent about it.
'I knew that had to either be a Colt or a coconut drink,' the black cop said. 'No other can looks like that.'
I'll take the blame: that summons was on me but still it was a sign how the Bburg waterfront has changed. The empty streets among the industrial buildings were the last place you'd ever see a cop, even as recently as a year or two ago. But there are some big money highrises going up there and it seems the developers have put out the word that they want the rabble kept in line, even though the highrises are still mostly vacant (and given the economy, just might stay that way).
As I stood sipping my Colt the cop reassured me that I would beat the summons easy.
'Just tell them you were drinking coconut juice and I wouldn't listen,' he said. They'll throw it out. Happens all the time.
I thanked him and they drove away.

A few days later I was talking a late night walk down the same empty waterfront streets. I passed the big development for 'The Edge' a condo-tower complex promising 'edgy' living for millionaires at the edge of the East River. They'll even have their own water taxi to Manhattan (how nice for them). I saw a cop car cruising but I was sober and up to no wrong. I reached the waterfront park that had long been an afterhours hangout for all kinds of strange characters to do strange things - especially Hasidic men, who smoked pot there, cruised prostitutes and had gay flings with each other (I kid you not; I've seen them on the benches, making out like mohels). The park was empty though; because of the cold, I thought. I walked in and stood staring out at the water. A few minutes later, I turned around to see two cops running at me like I was raping a four year-old.
'You know you can't be in here at night' they said.
'I don't know,' I said. 'It's not posted.'
'Do you have anything sharp on you?' One said. He was another handsome young cop, Asian-American this time. Looked like he was about twenty-three. Bburg must be where the send the rookies to make their bones.
'Sharp?' I said. 'All I got is my cellphone and keys.'
'I'm going to pat you down,' the Asian said. 'It's for my safety. You could decide to beat me up and throw me in the water.'
'You never know,' I said. I didn't say that them beating me up was a lot more likely.
'I like your jacket' he said as he frisked me. 'Biker jacket right? Nice leather.'
Another lame summons. Another cop slightly embarrassed at writing it (although it didn't stop him from writing it - quota to fill).
'This is worse than the Giuliani days,' I said.
'I was a kid back then,' the young Asian cop said. 'I don't remember that.'
'Trust me,' I said, 'It sucked.'
And it did suck, but not in Bburg. Even in Giuliani's most delusional 'Il Duce' days, cops weren't harassing people in the Grand Street Park at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday night. Williamsburg had still been low rent and therefore below the radar for 'quality of life' complaints. I wanted to lecture the cops on the injustice of it; I wanted to ask them how they felt wasting their time locking down a neighborhood to make it more appealing to people who earned a hundred times more than they did. I kept it simple.
'You couldn't find a cop here in the old days when there were gangs and rapes and muggings every night. I wish they had you guys doing something more useful.'
'I wish they did too' the young Asian cop said. 'Don't worry about it. When you show up, they'll just dismiss it.'
'But that's the problem,' I said. 'I have to take time out of my day for complete bullshit.'
He shrugged. He had a quota to meet and I was helping him fill it.
And me? I was only doing exactly what I'd been doing for years; but the new Williamsburg has no place for it.

Sublet Surrealism

2008-12-20T20:54:00.000-08:00

Last year I got a screenwriting gig - a project that I actually want to write - and headed out of town for a month to get started. The cavalcade coming through to sublet the apartment was the usual motley lot, mostly film production people in their spring migration to NYC.

I had three of them in the living room at once, including a gigantic African-American man who made the apartment seem like a doll house.

'Most hipsters are scrawny and small,' I said, watching him closely in fear that he would turn too quickly and smash a hole in the wall.

So why are you going? the slender camerawoman sitting on the couch said.

I need to be somewhere quiet to write the first draft of a screenplay, I said.

You will write the screenplay in one month? said the black guy's friend, a short, bald man with a heavy mitteleuropa accent.

A first draft, I said.

It took me five years to write my screenplay, he said.

I felt guilty.

Well, I said, Your screenplay must be good.

When Miramax calls you back in four hours, he said, You know it is good.

What's it called, the camerawoman asked.

It is called, 'Twin Souls', he said.

Oh, she said, There hasn't been any good twin things in a while. Now is a great time to pitch twins.

No, he said, They are not twins. It is about two people with shared souls who manage to find each other across the world.

That does sound wonderful, I said.

A Ramble on the Internet

2008-12-09T01:09:00.000-08:00

So I'm listening to jazz on last.fm (what a great invention), when a soloing pianist starts to riff on the Flintstones theme. Quite charming. The listing says it's Ornette Coleman's Congeniality off the Ken Burns jazz set. I want to find out who the pianist is so I start poking around but can't find a Congeniality that's 13:59. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it's Ornette at all. I wasn't paying that much attention when the song was playing but Ornette didn't pop into my head. So I ramble a little further and come to a much more likely candidate - 'The Egg' by Herbie Hancock. What does it mean though, when music is being so casually mislabeled in the Interverse?

I did discover that the composer of the Flintstones theme was a man named Hoyt Curtin, a commercial jingle composer before his big breakthrough with Hanna Barbara - and that musicians often riff on the tune.

Jock Genetics

2008-11-29T13:09:00.000-08:00

Article in today's NYTimes on genetic tests that might allow families to determine what sports their kids are suited for.

Read about the eagerness of parents to start programing their kids for a jock future. Marvel at statements like: 'What if my son could be a pro football player and I don’t know it?' What if indeed, mom? What if he could be like star wide reciever Plaxico Burress who accidentally shot himself in a nightclub over the weekend?

See a coach praise the Chinese system that identifies athletes at an early age and drags them off to special camps for the rest of their childhoods. A lot to admire over there in China, coach.

So disgusting and so sad on so many levels.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/sports/30genetics.html?hp

The Altamont of Big-Box Store Capitalism

2008-11-29T12:34:00.000-08:00

Temp worker trampled by mob trying to get into a Walmart on Black Friday. Walmart of all places.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/11/28/national/a080140S70.DTL

That kind of thing only used to happen at Who concerts.

Gimme Sales (to the tune of 'Gimme Shelter')

Oh, the economy is threatening
My holiday shopping today
If I dont get some credit
Oh yeah, Im gonna fade away

Walmart, shoppers, its just an exit away
Its just an exit away
Walmart, shoppers, its just an exit away
Its just an exit away

Ooh, see the downturn is sweepin
through all the box-stores today
Burns like a variable-rate mortgage
Ikea lost its way

Walmart, shoppers, its just an exit away
Its just an exit away
Walmart, shoppers, its just an exit away
Its just an exit away

Discounts, bargains!
They're just an aisle away
They're just an aisle away

Layoffs is threatning
My kids' Christmas today
Gimme, gimme a discount
Or Im gonna fade away

Discounts, bargains!
They're just an aisle away
They're just an aisle away

>
> In a message dated 11/28/2008 2:09:12 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
> walker.cynthia@gmail.com writes:
>
> what a bunch of fucking pigs:
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/11/28/national/a080140S70.DTL

At the Dermatologist's

2008-11-25T00:37:00.000-08:00

I went to the dermatologist's today for my annual exam. It's the exam you need if you spent your teen years - and beyond - working as a landscaper and are as Irish as a hangover. I have atypical nevus - renegade moles - but am in no immediate danger. Just the annual trek to the clinic.
I have health care now, in a new part of the country, and visited a new office for the first time. It was pure David Lynch. I stepped into an office with a dozen grandmas and grandpas crowding the seats. They were all fixated on the TV screen, which was showing old episodes of the Johnny Carson Show. Johnny wearing a dress, Johnny joking about Ed's drinking, Johnny holding a kinkajou. At one of Johnny's excruciating jokes they'd all start cackling like the witches in Macbeth. Now either there's an Alzheimer Channel or the office was playing DVD's of Johnny. I don't know which is worse.
In that office, the only folks not collecting Social Security were me and a tweaker metal chick covered in scabs. She also had a bandage going all the way up one of her arms. She looked at me and smiled. I looked at my shoes. A minute later she turned to the old lady sitting next to her.
'Hey ma' she said in a cigarette-scarred voice, 'You can go if you want. Joey will pick me up.'
Her mom, a little old white-haired lady from Pasadena murmured that no, she would wait. I considered the possibility that Joey might be the last person she wanted picking up her daughter.

Weather Report from Irvine, California

2008-11-16T22:16:00.000-08:00

62.8 °F / 17.1 °C
Smoke

I can smell the wildfires through my bedroom window.

Is This the Story of Johnny Rotten?

2008-11-07T23:37:00.000-08:00

The Ritz Carlton Hotel case
On 23 January 2008 Lydon was reportedly involved in a string of offences, including battery, sexual abuse, sexual assault and physical assault. Ms Davis (Lydon's employer on his television program) was punched in the face by Lydon after being called a "cunt" several times. It is believed that Lydon wished for a door between his hotel room and his male friend's room at the hotel Ritz Carlton, but was given a separate room without a dividing door. Lydon reportedly became infuriated with the hotel staff, before assaulting his own employee who was staying in the same hotel. Upon being questioned by journalists over the incident, Lydon was unavailable. Davis has taken legal action against Lydon, her lawsuit is underway in a San Francisco court room.

I think the key lines here are: '...wished for a door between his hotel room and his male friend's room...'

Anyone You Know?

2008-11-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

The most agreeable vocation for psychopaths...is business.
- from The New Yorker (11-4-08)

Nietzsche Sez

2008-10-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress.
- F.N.

Trolled

2008-10-24T01:04:00.000-07:00

So I started getting flamed on my blog with really nasty, rather personal comments along the lines of, 'My friend read your book and said it was junk. I played college football for year and I sucked, but I didn't go out and write a book about it.' And 'So what are you, in your mid-40s now [not quite], but still living in Williamsburg banging that 30-year old pussy. Who do you think you are, Che, or Hemingway?' Pretty rude stuff, and somewhat creepy as I realized that I must have met this guy as he kept referencing my height (Hey, I’m short. But fierce).

Then I got this comment.

"btw, sorry about the recent assaults. Had a rather rough time with you some day. No fighting. Just something that ailed my liking of you. I get wild too much so. I'm the first to admit it. Get carried away w. my drinking & writing. And i apologize. I'm sure you're a descent fellow.......Keep those gloves raised high, Rob."

It started me thinking about what the ‘rough time’ had been, and when I combed over the previous few weeks of my life I realized that it could have easily been a half dozen incidents. I’d gotten into a fight on the soccer field; I’d had words with a jerk who almost hit me riding his bike the wrong way up Bedford Avenue; a neighbor had gone crazy and started shrieking at me on the street. The conflicts were due to my obstreperous nature, but also to city living with all its tensions and proximities. The flaming made me feel vulnerable, to know that some brief disagreement'outside' could so easily follow me back home.

I finally decided on the most likely conflict. I was sitting in my café catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in over a decade when I noticed a guy sitting at the next table eavesdropping. Every time I looked up, he was looking right at me – and I was pretty sure he wasn’t cruising me. He was a burly guy, late 30s, kind of professional looking, very tense. So as we were getting ready to leave, I said something, loudly, about people who listened to other people’s conversations. He took offense, we had a loud exchange then and there, and then and I left.

Obviously, I thought, he had been eavesdropping, since I was filling in my old friend on my life and career and he’d picked up enough details to track me down.

Our exchange on our blog continued. This after I was conciliatory (because I've been a drunken lunatic once or twice myself):

'thanks man. Very noble of you. And, believe me, it's definitely a two way street. I can be an utter nightmare given the time of day (especially when it's drinking time). Truly, no harm meant, although i know i come across as crazy vicious, throwing as many low blows as i can manage. That's just me. I fire off a lot of blanks at a wide array of targets when i'm exploring one of my glamorous 75 beer weekends. You could say i'm a rather self loathing dick head way too much of the time. And, believe it or not, i'm also working on being more respectful. Mr. Hyde on the other hand.....Funny thing is, is that you seem to lead a very cool lifestyle & i admire the boxing you did. Growing up i always wanted to box & play hockey, but given my limited options in the sticks, football was what i had to work with. So, long story short, i'm a pretty easy read; obviously jealousy rears it's head a lot with me. Maybe i'll drop you another line, some day. For now, i gotta' get the fuck back on course. Truly sorry to have tossed some refuse in your direction during my most recent storm. Gotta' a lot more apologizing to do...later dude.’

We had another friendly exchange in the following week.

What made it all interesting, I think, was how it resolved. It was a very old-fashioned masculine sense of disrespect transferred to a new medium. As soon as my enemy felt he’d been acknowledged, he backed off. We had recognized each other has people.

The Agon

2008-10-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me on the occasion of Red Sox's loss in the ALCS that losing has its beauty. Our culture only cares about the winners but has little to say about losers who fight until the end. Winning isn't even interesting if you don't beat someone good but we treat losers, even when luck plays a role, like pariahs.

The struggle has its own beauty. I lost my last fight as a boxer - to a pretty good kid who turned pro - but I felt satisfied afterward. I'd left it all in the ring, I just happened to be matched against someone who was more experienced. I learned more losing that fight than I did from my victories.

No Country for Old Men?

2008-10-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

Who had B-Hop beating Kelly 'The Ghost' Pavlik? Not me.

Yet not only did the old man take the decision, he dominated, winning almost every round and nearly knocking out a celebrated fighter seventeen years younger than him and the heavy favorite (Hopkins is forty-three which is like eighty-four in boxing years).

As I sit here nursing my strained oblique, my fractured wrist, my torn MCL, I lift a pain-killing glass of bourbon to an old warrior who can still thump the kids.

Thank you, Mr. Hopkins.

Civilization Don't Come Cheap

2008-10-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

"I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Airhead

2008-10-12T23:16:00.001-07:00

We all know the the airhead, that girl who forgets what you told her five minutes, who is oblivious to all chaos around her - fistfights, hurricanes, head on collisions. In fact, we've dated her.

All things being equal, there should be male airheads. But while there are plenty of male idiots, the male airhead almost doesn't exist (except for some dudes I went to high school with who took several hundred hits of LSD).

What I never considered though, was how being an airhead was a defense mechanism, passive resistance. Young women are taught to be nice, not to say 'no', to agree with group, while men are allowed to be surly, obnoxious and poorly groomed.

Faced with these obstacles to expressing her feelings, the young woman turns to the 'airhead' defense. She's smiling, polite, agrees and then proceeds to do exactly what she wanted to do. If you get angry at her, she smiles, apologizes, shrugs. She's young, she's charming, ninety percent of the time she gets away with it.

As woman get older and more assured, they tend drop the airhead defense. After all, the downside of being an airhead is that nobody takes you seriously.

A Few Thoughts on Raging Bull

2008-10-10T13:52:00.001-07:00

Scorcese doesn't use a lot of close-ups on DeNiro, except during the fight scenes. It seems to help maintain the distance from the character. We're watching this character from a certain remove.

When DeNiro gets angry or is fighting, Scorcese goes to slow-mo, to show the speed of adrenaline through its opposite (because adrenaline slows time). You think that adrenaline and pain speed things up but it just speeds you up, so that you're moving faster than the world around you.

The Land That Time Forgot

2008-10-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

What I need to know, says the handsome teenager, Is if you’ll marry me.
He's proposing to a short, round woman who’s about twenty years older than him. She can’t believe what’s she hearing. We can’t believe it either and start laughing. The woman buries her hands in the pockets of her MTA jacket and stares at the ground. But Handsome isn’t finished yet.
Listen, he says and takes her by the shoulders, then starts to sing in a wavering falsetto:

When the visions around you
Bring tears to your eyes
And all that surrounds you
Are secrets and lies
I'll be your strength
I'll give you hope
Keeping your faith when it's gone
The one you should call
When standing here all alone

We’re in the shadow of elevated train-tracks and Handsome is wearing a black sleeveless t-shirt. The visuals, along with the doo-wop crooning, make me feel like I’m watching an old movie – The Lords of Flatbush, maybe, or West Side Story or something about Dead-End Kids. Except that everything here is in color.
When you get off the subway at the Myrtle/Wyckoff stop you’re in the heart of modern New York City: bodegas, Chinese-Spanish restaurants, beauty shops. Walk east though and you start going back in time. At first the neighborhood is racially mixed – black, Latino and some Asian – but the further east you go the lighter it becomes until, after about ten blocks, you’re in a mostly white world. The strange thing about finding all those Caucasians on the borough border is that they’re not all immigrants, like, say, the Poles in Greenpoint or members of insular religious sects like the Hasidim. No. A lot of the white folks in Ridgewood, maybe most of them, were born there. It’s like discovering a lost tribe of stone-age hunter-gatherers in the rain forest. You keep telling yourself, ‘I thought these people became extinct a long time ago.’
The little round woman tells Handsome she has to get back to work and heads for the bus depot under the M tracks. Handsome isn’t discouraged; the show must go on. He flexes a lean bicep for our edification and then walks down the street striking body-builder poses in store windows. Handsome’s older, quieter brother shakes his head. Out on Fresh Ponds Road the time shift is almost complete. The storefronts on the street are of the mom & pop variety and all the signs are in English: Krystal European Bakery, Alan Discount, Rainbow Gift shop, Henry’s Department Store. Ice coffee costs a buck, a loaf of bread, sixty cents. Most of the lettering over the shops is in archaic fonts and dingy with age. The signs are decades old and missing letters.
The two brothers don’t exactly fit the Ridgewood motif. They’re extras from more modern movies – Boyz in the Hood, Colors and Dead Presidents, movies from the era of the crack wars. My friend Joe has just introduced us. He met them a few years back while driving the B56 bus through Bushwick. When they told him they wanted to box, he brought them to meet his boxing trainer. The interview didn’t go well: the trainer made fun of their boxing skills and the brothers threatened to shoot him (To this day Joe believes that only his intervention saved his trainer from death). The brothers never did start boxing but they remained on good terms with Joe.
The boys want ice cream and Joe leads us to a Carvel where we take seats in the back. Within seconds the manager is on top of us, saying that we have to buy something if we want to stay. Joe gets up and treats us all to cones. I wonder why the manager is so uptight and decide it might be due to the quieter brother’s t-shirt, which reads Murder in big letters. The manager has seen the movies too and the TV cop shows and the nightly news and to him these Puerto-Rican brothers are advance guard for a nightmare, a nightmare spreading up from Bushwick to swamp his store.
On its border point between Bushwick and Glendale, Ridgewood is a divided neighborhood: half in Brooklyn, half in Queens; half urban, half suburban; half in the 30th congressional district, half in the 34th; half Democrat; half Republican; half white half…‘other’. Like all contested borders, it’s been a flashpoint for controversy. When she was a state senator in early 80s, Geraldine Ferraro pledged to change Ridgewood’s zip code from one in Bushwick to one in Glenwood (property owners in Ridgewood claimed the Bushwick code raised their insurance rates). More recently, a redistricting plan to move the southern, heavily-Latino section of Ridgewood into the Bushwick congressional district brought protests and local headlines.
So the Caravel manager can’t tear his eyes away from the nightmare sitting on his benches, the Ridgewood that could come to pass. We take our ice cream and leave. I ask Quiet about the T-shirt. He tells me that it represents his gang, ‘The Murder Posse.’ His gang name, he says, is ‘Optimus Prime’ leader of the Transformer ‘Megabots.’ I tell him I know some Cripps up in the Bronx. ‘We don’t like Cripps,’ he says, ‘We run with Bloods. We’re not violent though. Only when we have to protect ourselves.’
Handsome butts in.
‘We run with Bloods sometimes,’ he says, ‘But a few weeks ago a Blood cut one of our guys with a razor. Gave him a buck ten [he meant stitches]. Cut him here to here.’
He drew a line from the top of his cheek down under his chin.
‘So we caught the Blood,’ Handsome continued, Held him down and did the same thing. ‘See what you did? See how you like it.’ Gave him a buck fifty.’
Joe tries to lead us on a tour of the bus depot. The MTA security guard has other ideas and Joe can’t sweet-talk him into changing his mind. Security, Joe tells us, has been a lot tighter since 9/11. I try to imagine Al Qaeda swooping down on Fresh Ponds Road.
‘Terrorists wouldn’t care about this place,’ I say.
‘Oh no?’ Joe says, ‘With all buses and diesel fuel? Those guys would love to get in here.’
Joe shakes his head fiercely. ‘They would love it,’ he says.
My girlfriend wants to go to a restaurant a few blocks away so we start walking. Well-made, six family row houses of tan brick line the street in every direction. They give the neighborhood a strange but pleasing Old World appearance. I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in the city (In 1983, 2980 of these buildings were designated the largest historical district in the country). The owners live in about half of the buildings and they take care of their investments. The sidewalks are clean; trees shade the sidewalks and flowers fill yards and boxes. Of course, resident-owners have an easy time keeping out the ‘bad element.’
On the stoop of one of the buildings a fat woman is talking to a kid. ‘Well, when you decide, she says, ‘We can talk.’ Except that ‘decide’ sounds like ‘de-soid’ and ‘talk’ is ‘tawk.’ It’s Brooklynese, something I didn’t know existed anymore until my girlfriend moved to the neighborhood. Ridgewood is the last living link to old Brooklyn, a Brooklyn I’ve sensed the wreckage of in my own neighborhood of Williamsburg when seniors tell me how it was before the factories closed. The past is alive in Ridgewood; the neighborhood built up by German and Italian immigration in the 20s and 30s. Some churches still have Sunday mass in those languages. We walk by a restaurant called ‘Hans Gasthaus’ with a ski-lodge façade and a menu that includes weisswurst and schnitzel. Old Brooklyn has endured out here, decades after people stopped paying attention it, stopped representing it on television and in films (as the people who make television and films don’t grow up in places like this anymore).
It’s an insular world: Archie Bunker land. One my girlfriend’s neighbors has an army of cats that swarm through the backyards. The neighbor told me that two of her cats had disappeared. She pointed across the yard to a new development, all Chinese. ‘I think they ate them,’ she said, stone serious, ‘They do that you know.’ Other long-time residents show the same suspicion. There have been screaming matches in the street over the shoveling of snow and an old man who has lived here all his life watches a Chinese woman walk by and whispers: ‘None of us like them.’
Yet the future of Ridgewood belongs to the immigrants, to kids like Quiet and Handsome. The old-timers in Ridgewood are just that, old, and while some of their children stay, the majority move further into Queens or out to the suburbs. Every few months on my girlfriend’s block someone dies after fifty years in the same apartment and the debris of a lifetime is cast into a dumpster (how old would Archie Bunker be now?). There are shuttered businesses on every street. We pass the Ridgewood Democratic Club. It’s in a pretty corner brownstone with stained-glass windows but some of the panes are broken and plywood backs the glass.
On our way to the restaurant, we pass a school complex just as the day is ending – big brick building, blocks of blacktop playgrounds and basketball courts. There are hundreds of kids, most Latino and black. They head toward Bushwick while the handful of white kids go deeper into Ridgewood.
We end up at a burger joint under the train tracks. The Bosnian owner talks about hamburger in rough tones.
‘I tried to buy meat in American grocery store but is disgusting, brown and grey. I would not feed to rat. I go to special butcher shop.’ He takes one of his beef patties and presents it like a newborn baby. The disc is the size of Frisbee, blood red and speckled with fat.
‘This,’ he says, ‘Is real meat.’
His tiny restaurant stands in an Eastern European enclave: there’s a Polish butcher, an Albanian café, a Montenegrin social club. These are the immigrants that old Ridgewood prefers.
Boxing photos fill the restaurant walls. This excites the brothers and Joe tells the owner he used to fight. ‘My son is boxer,’ says the Bosnian. A few minutes later the son walks in, a cruiserweight with a blonde crew cut and a square head. Everyone starts talking about boxing and that too seems like a scene from an old movie. Quiet asks my girlfriend if she has a rubber band. The one he was using for his red ponytail has broken. She gives him a scrunchie and explains that they’re better for hair. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he says, wrapping his ponytail. Looking at Quiet I realize that my perception makes the biggest difference between the teen gangsters of the 1950s and those of 2003; that one person’s urban predator is another’s troubled youth, what matters is the lens you look at them through (and whose kids they are). Of course things have changed since the 50s: Handsome points to the long scratches on his neck and tells us that his mother’s lesbian lover put them there. ‘She and I don’t get along,’ he says, ‘She’s jealous of us. I don’t like to hit women but she hit me first.’
Handsome notices some teenage girls across the street and runs up to the window to stare. He tells Joe to go get his car – a 1982 Cadillac Caprice – so we can cruise by and impress them. Joe is amenable and we head back toward the depot.

Writers and Cats

2008-10-05T01:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wake up thinking that my cat, Scratchy, is walking on my bed. But she's in Brooklyn, far away. This poem by an early Irish monk brought her to mind.

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

-- Anon., (Irish, 8th century)

- Written by a student of the monastery of Carinthia on a copy of St
Paul's Epistles, 8th Century. Tr. by Robin Flower.

My Brother the Fed

2008-09-20T00:34:00.000-07:00

I went surfing today with the older of my two brothers. I haven't seen him in over a decade and, up until last month, hadn't spoken to him in at least five years.

We met outside a Carl Juniors south of San Clemente. It's a pretty well-known surf spot and the streets were filled with surfers on bikes, surfers with dogs, surfers sitting in cars, all porting boards of course. We weren't surfing there but heading to a more isolated beach further south, Trails, past the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

My brother was driving his brand new, government-issue black Suburban. It doesn't have license plates. Built into the back are two heavy steel cases with combination locks. When I got in, my brother had to take a clip of ammunition off my seat. Federal regulations state that he isn't supposed to carry passengers but we weren't going far.

The beach was down an arroyo between steep bluffs colored rust, orange and yellow. The shore break stirred small rocks back and forth. It sounded like a subway train passing when you're on the sidewalk.

The surf wasn't that steep, maybe 2-4 feet, but a strong breeze made it choppy. My brother had brought a long board for me because I hadn't been out in years. I got caught inside the surf line and pounded for a while. Still, it was good to be in water again.

One of the guys surfing with us claimed he saw a big shark. There had been great white sightings on the beach before. The park bulletin board even had a posting about it.

We huddled on the beach deciding what to do.

Ah, my brother said, It's probably down there by now.

He pointed to some other surfers a quarter mile down the beach.

We paddled back out together.

Saigon Sarah

2008-09-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

Maybe right-wing book-banning religious kooks aren't all that bad.

To the Rogues

2008-09-08T22:26:00.000-07:00

A regular reader of my blog asked me, tone suspended between fascination and disgust: Who are these people whose blogs are linked to yours? They seem like a bunch of degenerates!

I love you all.

The Naked Spur

2008-09-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not a huge fan of westerns but Anthony Mann's 'The Naked Spur' with Jimmy Stewart (one of three westerns they made together) is brilliant. Stewart plays a morally ambiguous character, something that seems eerie against his all-American personae. I'd thought that only Hitchcock had utilized this aspect of Stewart, but Mann does just as good a job. The end, far from being triumphant as is normal in the genre, is strangely ambiguous, with the couple riding off through a clear cut forest.

Lost in Translation

2008-09-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

There is a certain charm to literal translations of these terms from Spanish.

en la sala de estar
in the parlor, in the living room
(literally, 'in the room of being.' How cool and philosophical is that? I want a room of being).

la sala de profesores
the staffroom
(Room of the professors. Where professors gather to exchange lofty ideas, or, a la 'White Noise', throw rolls at each other).

la sala de espera
the waiting room

('Room of waiting' sounds very existential. Also translates as 'The Room of Hope' or 'The Room of Fear).

Can I Sue?

2008-09-02T21:12:00.001-07:00

I was just poking around the web looking for the James Baldwin quote that I used to open my book, when I found a financial blog that has adapted the first couple of pages of 'The Gloves'. It's written in the first-person, like my book, and the writer uses a number of my best sentences. Uncredited, needless to say. It's having an actor play you. It's like I stepped into an alternate universe.

http://www.smartfundit.com/modules/news/newsitem.php?ItemId=82

‘The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it. It obliterates him. All men know this about each other, which is one of the reasons that men treat each other with such a vile, relentless, and endlessly inventive cruelty. Also, it must be added with such depthless respect and love, conveyed, mainly, by grunts and blows.’

James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen

The gym becomes a way of life. Arrive at 4.30 am after just a couple of hours sleep. Park the car, on with hooded top over 3 t shirts, lace trainers, find the torch. No one about – today is ‘roadwork’ day. That means 5 miles through wooded terrain at pace. Roadwork is a boxing euphemism for running at pace interspersed with sprints, hill climbs, shadow boxing.

It’s tough. Tough enough at -5C temperatures to make the sweat freeze to your scalp and burn your eyes whilst you squint through tears. The torch is a poor substitute for daylight, holding it distorts your natural running rhythm, there’s no street lighting where I’m running this morning, the local council don’t see the need for it in Bracknell forest which is where I’m headed.

Check running watch, deep breath, here we go. The freezing air greedily sucks oxygen from your lungs, hamstrings lengthen, abductors, gluts, and quads all start to protest, aching from yesterday’s sparring. The rubbery sheath of my skeleton is fatigued, just not up for this today.

I start a debate in my head, figuring out whether my opponent is going to be out at this time. No matter, I am, I have to be, I’ve got my fight date and now all that stands between then and now is what is known as ‘boxing twilight’, a world of punishing yourself for up to four hours daily at a level you would find in an Army Paratroopers selection process.

The 5 miles that I’m doing now is the precursor to meeting Matt the guy who trains me, schools me, and mentors me in the art of the ‘sweet science’. He’s a professional boxing coach, intelligent, articulate, and street tough. He’s fought a few times too, there’s intensity about his personality and economy in his movement that suggests he could have been a very good fighter.

Matt specialises in ‘taking you to places you don’t want to go’, for once the spiel lives up to the reality. Today is Tuesday, which means 90 minutes of being in the ‘don’t want to go’ zone, it’s brutal but effective. The highlight is 3 minutes on the punch bag, interspersed with 30 seconds of all out punching followed by 30 seconds of non-stop jabbing and head movement. Every muscle fibre screams for oxygen that isn’t coming anytime soon, hyper ventilation takes over after the first 60 seconds, sweat runs and streams and pools in your eyes so you see double and your hands and arms are like anchors, breathing in gasps, there is no air. In between this Matt is shouting commands, ‘get your hands up, ‘left hand back to chin’, ‘hit it harder‘, ‘you gonna hit your guy like that he’ll laugh’, ‘work harder like it’ s your last round’. In between at the ‘rest stages’ as I am bent double trying to catch breath Matt looks on dispassionately whilst uttering ominous sounding sentences like ‘we’ve got to get you fitter for this fight’.

An old boxing maxim is that ‘power thrills but speed kills’. We’re working on speed today, the innocuous sounding ‘foot drills’ which involve excruciating power jumps , sprints, Matt’s speciality the ‘duck walk’ and of course the infamous burpees.
All that after the run and I mean run that I am on at the moment. Four miles to go, three months to the fight, and thousands of boxing rounds ahead of me. You don’t play boxing

The Highlight of My Boxing Career

2008-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

I was working on an article about a prison boxing team maybe five years ago. For the article, I visited the maximum security prison a good half-dozen times. On one trip, I got to spar with the head of the prison boxing team. Shadell was my size but about forty pounds of weightlifter bulk heavier.

We sparred in the prison gym and it was just me, the prison boxers, and the director of the prison recreation program. No guards.

At one point, Dell and I met in the center of the ring. He jabbed, I slipped it, and threw a quick one-two. When my left missed, I slipped under his counter and spun out of range, rotating on my heel. It's a common boxing move but it was very smooth.

He's one of us! Shouted Edrick, a baby-faced twenty-three year old from Puerto Rico who'd already been inside for six years for murder.

I savored his words on the long drive back to the city. I was one of them.

R.I.P. Bear Stearns

2008-08-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

A good twelve years ago, I worked at Bear Stearns. At Bear Stearn's I was a 'print lane manager.' Which meant: I printed documents for lackeys. Thus I was a lackey of lackeys, although I often had hours of peace and would write and trade jokes with my equally over-qualified fellow lackeys. I also made about twenty-five bucks an hour, no mean wage in 1996 but dot com was coming on strong.

On the window of my office where the first-year associates came to collect documents for the Masters of the Universe, I would post quotes such as 'Adversity makes men; prosperity makes monsters.' (Victor Hugo). Or, 'Everything belongs to me because I'm poor.' (Kerouac).

This confused the associates to no end. They were kids, just out of college. One out of ten probably made the cut there. Some of them still had values, god bless them.

'I work really hard,' one of them said after reading my 'quote of the day' pissing on the rich.

'I'm sure you do,' I said. 'But do the rich people you're trying to suck money out of work hard? Maybe, the ones who haven't inherited gazillions. And do they work harder than peasants in Bangladesh or drones in a poultry-processing plant in Louisiana? I don't think so.'

Would it surprise anyone if I admit that I did not keep that job for long?

Go West, Old Man

2008-08-28T14:51:00.001-07:00

So I'm driving cross-country for the first time since - well, let's just say that Reagan was president and I wasn't of drinking age.

The first two times I went for a woman - to be with her, and then to be without her. This time is for a fellowship at UC Irvine, which is not quite as bad as getting a job.

I took the northern route the first time, Highway 80. Nebraska, I recall, is really long and flat. The second time, on Greyhound no less, I went through the Southwest and then up through the Midwest. It was high summer and I drove with a tattooed redneck who fed his three year-old brandy to make it sleep.

This time I'm thinking maybe via Nashville and the Southwest again. I've never seen the Grand Canyon.

Wondering if anyone has thoughts on sights along the way.

Le Plus ca Change

2008-08-25T09:55:00.001-07:00

England's populace is "second to none that the Earth nurtures in her bosom for being disrespectful, uncivil, rough, rustic, savage, and badly brought up."
- Giordano Brun0, late-16th Century

Giving Frat Boys a Good Name

2008-08-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

This article is so entertaining, on so many levels, that it's almost a highlight reel.

Some of the choicest moments.

This perhaps: “They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview.

Or this: “I’ve never seen anyone get stabbed the whole time I’ve been here,” said Chris Robinson, 21, speaking outside the Loft bar, which had a special deal: four drinks and two shots for $8.

Some Britons Too Unruly for Resorts in Europe

By SARAH LYALL

Published: August 23, 2008

MALIA, Greece — Even in a sea of tourists, it is easy to spot the Britons here on the northeast coast of Crete, and not just from the telltale pallor of their sun-deprived northern skin.

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

Malia is the latest and currently most notorious in a long list of European resorts full of young British tourists on packaged tours offering cheap alcohol and a license to behave badly. In Magaluf and Ibiza, Spain; in Ayia Napa, Cyprus; and in the Greek resorts of Faliraki, Kavos and Laganas as well as Malia, the story is the same: They come, they drink, they wreak havoc.

“The government of Britain has to do something,” Mr. Lagoudakis said. “These people are giving a bad name to their country.”

They are also hurting themselves in the process. A recent report published by the British Foreign Office, “British Behavior Abroad,” noted that in a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, 602 Britons were hospitalized and 28 raped in Greece, and that 1,591 died in Spain and 2,032 were arrested there.

The report did not distinguish between medical cases and arrests associated with drunkenness and those that had nothing to do with it. But it did say that “many arrests are due to behavior caused by excessive drinking.”

So it would seem. Reports of scandalous incidents rumble on regularly here and elsewhere, helping to cement Britain’s reputation as the largest exporter of inebriated hooligans in Europe.

Earlier this summer, flying home to Manchester from the Greek island of Kos, a pair of drunken women yelling “I need some fresh air” attacked the flight attendants with a vodka bottle and tried to wrestle the airplane’s emergency door open at 30,000 feet. The plane diverted hastily to Frankfurt, and the women were arrested.

In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part, the authorities said, in an alfresco oral sex contest.

More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth. Her companions say they returned later to find the baby dead; she has been charged with infanticide.

And in Dubai, also this summer, a British man and woman who met during a drinking bout were arrested and charged with having sex on a beach, after repeatedly shouting abuse at a police officer who ordered them to stop.

All of which leads to a natural question: Why?

“I think that in their country, they are like prisoners and they want to feel free,” said Niki Pirovolaki, who works in a bakery on Malia’s main street and often encounters addled Britons heading back to their hotels — “if they can remember where they are staying,” she said.

David Familton, a Briton who works in a club here, said that it was a question of emotional comfort. “It’s because of British culture — no one can relax, so they become inebriated to be the people they want to be,” he said.

Worried about the increase in crimes and accidents afflicting drunken tourists, the British consulate in Athens has begun several campaigns, using posters, beach balls and coasters with snappy slogans, to encourage young visitors to drink responsibly.

“When things do go wrong, they go wrong in quite a big way,” said Alison Beckett, the director of consular services. “What we’re trying to do here is reduce some of these avoidable accidents where they have so much to drink that they fall off balconies and are either killed or need huge operations.”

As much as they depend on the tourists’ money, the resorts are balking at their behavior. Last year, shopkeepers, residents and hotel owners in Malia held an angry anti-British demonstration. Now, 20 officers patrol the notorious 1,000-foot-long strip of bars and clubs catering to tourists in the center of town, keeping the peace, breaking up fights and making arrests.

Local officials say the blame lies not just with the tourists themselves, but also with the operators of package tours promising drinking-and-partying vacations, and clubs offering industrial-strength alcohol at rock-bottom prices. For about $50 in Malia, tourists can go on unlimited-drinking pub crawls.

“British tour operators present them with these packages that promise a wild holiday in Malia,” said Brig. Fotis Georgopoulos, the police chief of Iraklion, which takes in Malia. “This predisposes them. They are automatically put into a wild and lawless mind-set that is beyond them.”

On the strip late one recent night, downtown Malia felt like a nonrainy version of downtown Birmingham, as young Britons in skimpy clothes moved in herds from bar to bar, drinking, boasting and shouting as they went.

The tourists confessed to drinking a lot. One 21-year-old man from Essex, for instance, said that his consumption the night before had been five beers; six specialty drinks combined with Baileys, tequila, absinthe, ouzo, vodka, gin and orange juice; five vodka and lime drinks; and then five cans of Stella Artois, all of which, he said, emboldened him to pick up a woman to spend the night with. But they said that the lurid stories are media exaggerations.

“I’ve never seen anyone get stabbed the whole time I’ve been here,” said Chris Robinson, 21, speaking outside the Loft bar, which had a special deal: four drinks and two shots for $8.

Similarly, Eleanor Seaver, 20, said that she had been in Malia for two months, working in a club, and that she had never once been in a fight. On the contrary, she said, people are comradely and helpful. “If there’s a girl being sick in the streets, you see people helping her out,” she said. “We watch out for each other here.”

Paul Fisher, a 49-year-old Welshman who runs a bar and a motorbike-rental shop, said the stories both depressed the tourist trade and, perversely, drew the sort of visitors for whom drunken anarchy is an attractive prospect.

“We don’t like you lot coming in and ruining the place,” Mr. Fisher said, referring to reporters. He opened a drawer and produced a copy of the celebrity magazine Closer. An article inside featured a young female British tourist’s “booze-fueled orgy with four men” in Malia.

Things like that give Malia a bad name, Mr. Fisher said. “This is wrong and it’s overexaggerated,” he said.

On the other hand, he conceded, “for 10 weeks, this place is littered with kids being sick and unconscious in the streets.”

Just then, several young men who had the pale, queasy look that suggested the end of hangovers not yet muted by new infusions of alcohol, passed by, and Mr. Fisher asked them why they drank so much, night after night.

“It’s what everyone wants to do,” one young man said.

His friend said: “We have stressful jobs, and we don’t get much time off, and we like to enjoy ourselves and have a good laugh. And we love a bargain.”

Catholics Will Get This

2008-08-22T23:25:00.001-07:00

The mystery of communion in the tedium of the mass.

I remember being in church at age six or seven waiting for that moment, when the altar boys rang their bells and bread and wine became body and blood.

A Love Letter to Jack Vance

2008-08-21T23:45:00.001-07:00

Jack Vance is one of the more graceful of the post-war American writers. Unfortunately, since he works in the slum genre of science fiction, he's received nowhere near enough credit. The author of over ninety novels, Vance has some of the drollest dialog since Jane Austen and is a remarkable stylist, with a touch of mauve decadence. Early Wallace Stevens, if Wallace Stevens had churned out SF for paychecks. Vance also was one of the first SF writers to introduce anthropology, and travel writing, into SF. Think Douglas Adams but more understated and inventive. I laughed out loud reading him as a kid and I still do today.

I posted about Vance in my old LJ but I can't find the entry. Hating LJ these days.

The Dark Ages of Pugilism

2008-08-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

I was playing soccer today with a bunch of Mexican guys. I wanted to talk about Cotto/Margarito.
Did any of you guys see it? I said.
I think so, one said, Margarito won by knockout, right?
By knockout in the 11th, I said.
The rest looked at me blankly.
What happened? Another said.
Truly we live in a fallen age.

O Coen Brothers, Where Art Thou?

2008-08-19T00:45:00.000-07:00

I'm watching the Coen brothers 'Ladykillers.' It's mediocre! I didn't even know they could make a mediocre film! (this from a guy who sat through 'O Brother'....). When I first saw the trailer for it, I thought, 'This movie surely sucks.' Because Tom Hanks is the bland, ex-urban Angel of Death.

Sizing Them Up

2008-08-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

Every time I find myself sizing up an opponent on the street - and in NYC, this happens several times a day - I look at how large and muscular they are. It's automatic. Sometimes I think, 'That would be easy.' Other times I tell myself, 'He could just fall on you and you'd be dead.'

I'm ashamed to admit it but if a guy is really big, I won't be as righteous as I would be if he was Peewee Herman. I rarely worry about women that way and when I do, it's some enormous bull dyke. And even then, I'm not all that worried.

I thought like this before I ever started boxing. It's natural, I'm afraid, something I remember as far back as the second grade (before the second grade I would just hit anyone, boy, girl, large, small, adult, child. And bite). Actually, I think every man has the same impulse, more or less repressed. With women, it seems to be about who is the prettiest one in room.

Boxing has only expanded the range of those I think I can take. Nowadays, even if he's seven feet tall and his knuckles are scraping the ground, I think, 'Yeah, but he probably doesn't even know how to fight.'

Prison Boxing Blues

2008-08-11T18:34:00.001-07:00

Trickhouse, an online quarterly, just published a piece of mine on the Greenhaven Correctional Facility boxing team, the last prison boxing team in the state of New York. I wrote the piece a few years back but this its first official appearance. It's an impressionistic essay with a little analysis thrown in.

http://www.trickhouse.org/

Visions of Cody

2008-08-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a Jack Kerouac bio and realizing - yet again - how he's gotten a bad rap as a writer, trampled by his devotees. Yeah I know, we all wish we could be killed by success but it's amazing how forty years after his death, he still gets so little respect. Even avant-gardists who celebrate Burroughs tend to sneer at drunk Jack.

Visions of Cody is kind of a literary anodyne to false impressions about Kerouac. It was written at the same time as On the Road and works as its companion volume, as it covers the same subjects, Neal Cassiday most of all (I would definitely teach them together). It's a mishmash of experiments in style - tape transcripts, automatic writing, fantasies, multiple narrators, false narrators, you name it. You can smell stale benzedrine sweat and pot smoke when you read it. That said, it also has some of the most beautiful passages and scenes in American literature. There are pages where he so perfectly captures a mood, an immediacy - high in a subway station at 3 a.m., a touch football game on the street, a film shoot in San Francisco - that he recreates what life is like at its most intense moments. Kerouac was no mere primitive - he consciously draws on Joyce but the debt to Proust is more interesting. His fascination with jazz is evident as well. If On the Road is a bop novel, than Visions is 'The Shape of Jazz to Come.'

Kerouac's experimental techniques were very influential on the following generation of writers - Pynchon's prose style comes to mind, or the Cormac McCarthy of Sutree. He's always had a huge effect on me and not always in a good way; with my novels I leaned to much on journal entries. I wanted my life and the lives of the people I know to matter. I guess there's a romantic born every minute.

The Ship Sails On

2008-08-02T23:42:00.000-07:00

Near the beginning of a long summer twilight a sailboat moves across the horizon. The white sails and white hull reflect the shifting colors of the changing day. Blue tints the sail, soft blue of sky, blue of clearest ocean, yet there is a translucency to the sail, something like the nacreous luster of pearl. The hull is more opaque, the gleaming fiberglass more stable, but that too takes on some of the mutability of August twilight, everything shifting with the night. The sailboat slides paralell to the shoreline, moving across my beach. I go out to swim and follow the same line. Every time I look up to breathe the ship is there moving with me. My beach ends with a heap of boulders, glacial till, and I stop before I leave sand for dangerous rock. I stand waist deep in the cool water watching the ship sail on.

Back at the Beach

2008-07-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

Just got back to the beach from three days in my hometown where I stayed at the house of one of my oldest friend (25+ years). Her boyfriend is a socially- retarded semi-lunatic who is incredibly jealous and possessive of her. He kept storming out of the room in a frenzy every time me and my friend started talking (dude, I can't help it if I look good without a shirt). Twice he said he was moving out and took some of his junk back to his mom's house. But he was always back a few hours later. It got so bad that he'd bolt out of his bedroom to make sure I wasn't sneaking into her bedroom when I came down to use the bathroom in the night.

Yet she is often involved with these isolated losers and I finally figured out why. They don't challenge her or compete with her - she's the leader and they follow like needy puppies. Not one of them has ever had a career or a steady job. But they are all hers. If I sound angry it's because I am - that lunatic gave me nightmares on my one trip home this year.

The first thing I did after driving through ungodly traffic back to the beach was put on my swim trunks and jump in the ocean. There is nothing more relaxing than floating a few feet underwater where the light is dim, where all is quiet and cool. After a swim I lay back on my towel in the sand and looked out over the water. Skim boarders made their swift runs at the waves. A fisherman stood at the small breakwater, casting. At the deepest point of the breakwater a double-crested cormorant dove and rose and dove and rose, flipping over like a seal on the way down. I love the beach in the evening - it's almost empty and it's so quiet, so perfectly quiet.

The Joys of Fighting

2008-07-28T23:08:00.001-07:00

I sparred for a half-hour today with one of my oldest friends. Si is out of shape and has a sizable Buddha belly but he's also 6'2 and 240, plenty of which is muscle. We agreed to try and to restrain our blows to the head, the groin and the joints, but everything else was fair game.

Si isn't a boxer, he's a martial artist (Indonesian kung-fu) but he isn't afraid of contact. We had some great exchanges on a field in a kiddie park while the bemused mommies looked on. It's good practice for me to go against his skills because he's always looking for kicks and throws, while I'm much more focused on striking.

As normally happens, he pushed me around the field with his reach, weight and height advantage. But it wasn't so one-sided as to be dull. I landed some good combination on his body and danced away from all but one of his throws. Since I'm about a hundred times more fit than him, I began to score more frequently as the fighting went on. Towards the end we forgot about our restraints and were going close to full, fists and feet flying. Sweat made a bib on the front of Si's blue oxford.

I ended up with some bloody cuts, a fat lip and the beginnings of a black eye. Yet I was blissful when we finished. I loved mixing it up - in a friendly sort of way - when I was seven and I love it now. It brings flavor to life.

For Boxing Fans Only

2008-07-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

Some Thoughts on Cotto-Margarito

A really gripping fight between a talented boxer-puncher and a force of nature. The analysts did screw the pooch on this one by making Cotto such a heavy favorite. Cotto's chin is a bit suspect - even a four round fighter with a 'B' punch like Judah stunned him a couple of times. Also, Cotto was on the run at the end of the Mosley fight, only his excellent jab saved him from a past-his-prime Sugar. Cotto has good boxing skills but not great ones, which is what he would have needed to keep away from Margarito for twelve rounds (plus that's not his psychology). He also lacks one-punch KO power. None of this is to say Cotto isn't a top-shelf fighter but it should have raised some warning signs when he took the match against 'My Head Is Solid Bone' Margarito. Teddy Atlas disappointed me the most; he really should have known better. Still, two talented warriors beating the spit out of each other for eleven rounds - what could be better?

College Graduates: Then and Now

2008-07-25T23:49:00.000-07:00

A College Graduate in 1955: I guess I better grow up, have some kids and get a good job.

A College Graduate in 1970: Growing up means exploring the world and discovering who I really am.

A College Graduate today: I don't ever want to grow up!

Butterflys in the Jungle

2008-07-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

When I was on expedition in the Andean rain forest, the butterflies were probably the most varied and numerous species that I saw. The range of colors was astonishing - they were orchid with wings. For years, I wondered why the butterflies would hover around the urine puddles our horses left on the trail. Now I have my answer (see posting below).

Just in Time for Summer!

2008-07-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

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"The minerals and sodium in urine are appealing to the butterfly!" CHRIS PACKHAM "InsideOut" BBC	"Quite a few butterflies prefer urine... to flowers." New Jersey Audubon Society
Up front, it's probably worth noting that butterflies have an eclectic type of diet... (ok, they are attracted to urine and other types of wildlife excrement). Green Nature Buy ButterflyPee Now	"A butterfly drinks by uncoiling its proboscis and laying it in the crevices of the mulch, or along the edge a water droplet, drawing water through the tube shaped tongue. Butterflies can often be seen drinking, or puddling, from mud puddles and areas of concentrated urine in order to obtain required salts and minerals as well as water. " Butterfly Gardening in Florida
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Christopher Smart Loved His Cat

2008-07-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

A talented eighteenth century poet, and a bit of religious maniac, Smart is best known today for this remarkable poem about his cat, which he wrote while confined in an insane asylum.

"For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry"
(from Jubilate Agno)

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacous of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Savior.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

Why Do You Call Her Scratchee?

2008-07-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

On this vacation I've been separated from my one true love, Scratchee Rascal, aka 'Scratchee the Cat' a tuxedo cat of 'a certain age.' Recently, Scratchee had a falling out with my sublettor, leaping up to the top of the couch and clawing his face. The next night as the sublettor came in, Scratchee sprang upon his nude thigh and sliced him again. Now the sublettor is afraid to be alone with her. I find this charming in a way, as Scratchee weighs about twelve pounds. My sublettor spoke darkly of 'not wanting to hurt Scratchee.' I spoke with equal force of not wanting to put various parts of the sublettor's anatomy in cake boxes and post them around the country.

Wolbachia

2008-07-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

A fascinating bacterium that has a profound effect on the reproduction of insects - in some cases killing all male eggs (since they don't pass on the germ) or making it impossible for females to reproduce with other insects that are infected with a different Wolbachia strain. Natural selection in all its creepy and profound glory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia

My Life Aquatic

2008-07-16T00:17:00.000-07:00

After two weeks at the shore I'm finally starting to find a rhythm with the ocean. I go out in the late afternoon to my beach and scan the waves for surf. The hurricane winding through the North Atlantic has brought fairly regular swells so there's something to paddle out for. The surf isn't West Coast dramatic - 3-5 feet - but it makes for some good rides. My beach is mostly nasty shore break but there's one sandbar and when the tide is right you can fly for a good hundred yards. I have a decent boogie board up here and so I swim out and do what I can without flippers (which I might buy tomorrow). This is WASP territory, a lot of blonde teens with surf shorts, but today there was a guy near sixty out there moving beautifully.
In the first days the ocean was alien and disconcerting. Getting wet and seawater in my nose felt unpleasant. But now I lust for it. Paddling out through the surf line, bobbing at the edge of the break waiting for one good wave. After a severe wipeout today I found a a horseshoe crab the size of my fingernail on the board. Oily black cormorants dive in the water around us. Surfcasters come out at dust and work the rocks near the sand bar. You want it to go on forever.