To be divine

Swinging

It was here it ended. In a humble city park with a prefab playground and paint chipped picnic tables--a slice of Bermuda grass supposing to make a bunch of houses a community. My wife found the first clue a year prior and had by then in-person seen me here with Liz three times. Liz and I met at work; she was initially drawn, she says, by the curious pairing of my young, kind face with my old man's ways, me being 44. Her telling me so was enough for me. Light flirting, then a few lunch dates, then a walk in the park followed by other walks in the park. After a while I held her hand. We walked, slowing and stopping here and there as if oaks and a few pines strewn amid scrub trees and dry weeds were something to look at. We also ran errands together. Sometimes we just drove. We went to hotels. We even arranged to meet in the evening five times. Five, despite my being a dedicated homebody, despite my sensing how the absence of your mate makes rubber of your skin and demolishes a home save for its shadows and corners. This sense drove my wife who drove her Prius to my job and then to the park, pulling up to the curb behind the scrub trees lining the man-made runoff creek where water moved ambivalently to its grave. It was here it ended, with my wife waving to Liz and me from the swing set.

Francois Hollande

In covering Francois Hollande's victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, American and British mainstream media discussed market reaction. The headlines were different variations of Markets to Drop on Fears of European Elections. What the market does, how it reacts, is now one of the main angles for any news item. Investment is the domain of the wealthy, and these headlines emphasize their interests and opinions. From now on, who you elect, how you regulate, what you earn, what you pay, when and where you war--everything you do should satisfy those interests.

Something about "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq

This novella begs comparison to Camus' The Stranger. But the 21st century is a subject in Whatever. Contrary to reviewer consensus, I imagine the story making a temporal statement more so than a generational one. In this reading, the hypothesis that unfolds is that Camus' mid-20th century model French Existentialist would today be a Nihilist, his banner of authenticity battered, beaten to shreds by the perceived ceaseless normalization of personalities and scripting of roles, the sweeping away of the work-life balance, the abandonment of intellectuality in favor of "being informed," and the overall digitizing of experience and of perspective.*

Whereas Camus' man suffered the conditions of Absurdity and Freedom and the indifference of the Universe, Houellebecq's suffers needlessness, minor inconvenience, and isolation (that is self-imposed to a degree). Here, the main character, almost subconsciously, and unconsciously, articulates in writing the need for human connection:

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance...It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, provided he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolute inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

Camus' The Stranger is, to my mind, a work of literature, then a work of philosophy. Houellebecq's Whatever is literature, and secondly a work of social or cultural commentary. This was thoroughly enjoyable.

Notes:

• * My describing those trends doesn't quite capture the totality (or maybe lack of totality) of the Modern that Houellebecq cynically evokes.

• I felt considerable empathy reading this book.

• The prose isn't elegant—not in the traditional sense, anyway, but this is nice:

  Doubtless I have some vague existence today in a doctoral dissertation, alongside other real-life cases. The thought of having become an item in a file calms me. I imagine the volume, its cloth binding, its slightly sad cover; I gently flatten myself between the pages; I am squashed.

Copy, and Paste

THE GREAT HUNT
 -by Carl Sandburg

I CANNOT tell you now;
  When the wind's drive and whirl
  Blow me along no longer,
  And the wind's a whisper at last--
  Maybe I'll tell you then--
                    some other time.

When the rose's flash to the sunset
  Reels to the rack and the twist,
  And the rose is a red bygone,
  When the face I love is going
  And the gate to the end shall clang,
  And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"--
     Maybe I'll tell you then--
                    some other time.

I never knew any more beautiful than you:
  I have hunted you under my thoughts,
  I have broken down under the wind
  And into the roses looking for you.
  I shall never find any
      greater than you.

How it was

I was never closer to him than during those few weeks, weeks that exploded like moments, when the language he had heard since birth promised to realize from his lips into our world as humidity will from stirred up air some dark April nights in North Texas. Those days he'd watch how my mouth formed words, inch his fat little hand to my lips, (so close right then), him believing it was just a matter of getting the mechanics right, making the jaw and teeth and tongue do their work. But communicating was more difficult than that, obviously, and he would learn that lesson most sincerely for having known me.

About losing heroes

According to a piece of crap Forbes article,

If Hulk’s successful turnaround continues, Gitter says Marvel “will spin him off to a stand-alone program next year,” supported by a big budget franchise movie in 2015. The entertainment studio is also exploring ways to promote Hulk as a “corporate icon,” similar to MetLife’s usage of Peanuts’ Snoopy, where The Hulk’s image conveys a message about channeling strength to overcome workplace challenges.

Great.

Something on "Seize the Day" by Saul Bellow

In Bellow's novella, Tommy Wilhelm unleashes all the self-loathing and regret you can stand. He's a recently unemployed (nearly unemployable) middle-aged man who's separated from his wife and children and currently fixed under the critical gaze of his snobby father. We find him on a loose regimen of uppers and downers and at wits' end, dwelling on his mistakes and the disapproval and disappointment given from within and from his wife and his father.

All his life, Wilhelm impulsively grabbed at the first and closest opportunity--kind words from a talent agent grew into a misguided quest for movie stardom; a kind girl was taken for a wife and mother of his children; and now a market tip from a stranger offers his last hope to avoid bankruptcy. These mistakes, we are to learn, follow from his immaturity, his aversion to responsibility and effort.

Even though he's now trapped under a crush of self-reflection, I like to think it was in part the lack thereof that got him here. And besides that, he's doomed to unhappiness because he's fixated on getting happiness though approval--approval sought through financial gain, mostly. This was a good read, and I very much like the ending in which, finding himself amid a swell of people on the street, his choking anxiety suddenly gives way to a rush of emotion. Beautifully written, that.

Low

About "I Love Lucy"

I have never been able to watch more than four minutes of "I Love Lucy" and I think this is why: the show never tells a story; instead, Lucy puts on a show. This inevitably leads to her acting out, hamming it up, taking the production over the top. There is no arch, no moral, no lesson learning; there is no character development, no growth in the show, its production or its talents. There is nobody to sympathize with or relate to. All you see is a comedienne trying to meet expectations or out-do herself comically with exaggerated crying and bumbling, facing the camera all the while.

All this is to state the obvious: that how you feel about the show hinges on taste, one's expectation and preference. If Lucy isn't funny, she's just pulling gags.

Notes:

• Television was still young.
• This means nothing.

About "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan

As much as an intellectual can, Marshall McLuhan caused a stir when he proposed that "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media (1964), the thorough analysis of media--not its content but media itself and its effects on how we think and act and make culture. It's a big, heavy subject, and McLuhan chips away at it on a great many fronts. Too many. For me, Understanding Media reads like a brilliant, nearly consumed man's mind dump rather than an organized argument. Gets tiresome.

Not to mention that often terrible writing style so prominent in the 1960's when authors of all stripes employed a scientific-ish vocabulary, needlessly obscuring their ideas in the bid for legitimacy. (Lots still do this!) For example: "Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially" (chapter 12). But sometimes one of McLuhan's many crackerjack wisdoms splash water on your face, like this gem: "Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech" (chapter 8).

In summary

In the dialog/play "The Critic as Artist" by Oscar Wilde, a witty provocateur named Gilbert spins off art-related value positions with his foil, a human sounding board named Ernest. In reply to one of Gilbert's most eloquent expositions--a take on Robert Browning as process--Ernest says, "There is something in what you say, but there is not everything in what you say." So true.


Applicable if you've:

• tried summing it up
• taken stock
• thought something was important
• felt something needed to be said

Notes:

"Porphyria's Lover"
      -by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me — she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

What is one to do with his evening

Another day--maybe I should say, a new day--begins when my bag folds down on the desk in the morning. By then I've dressed and passably groomed, slurped coffee for the weatherman and led myself to the office, but none of these welcomes a pause, not in the way a small transition can, like that moment of unburdening yourself and reckoning at the same time. Sure, would rather something somewhere else but when thinking what that might be, nothing comes to mind. Try as I might.

The next hours bring small labors: like this one character I could do without: call him Joe. If you're going to be lazy, at least be good at your job. Or be likable. Joe frequently rubs his palms together as if he's just sat down to a fine meal; given his extreme laziness, this habit is all the more offensive. And he says things about "illegals" or about how "they do things weird in California" but, sadly, he isn't from Texas where you can say such things without bitterness. Any one of his habits in isolation should be grounds for termination. But even at all that, he's easily enough ignored. Soon the hours have passed tolerably and the day's pre-existing agreement resolves itself. And then it's off.

Notes:

• In college pursue a career you think will provide the stability and money you need, then find the industry unsatisfying and after several starts fall into one that works. Marry at age 30 someone who respects you, with whom you can share affection. Have your kids, argue with them about vegetables then friends, mutually idolize each other until there's mutual respect. Feel guilty for the child who struggles into adulthood before you find relief in knowing you tried. Exchange calls with old friends twice a year, see their kids grow up in a series of postcards from 2012 to 2022, then sporadically after that. When you're older, enjoy talking to your parents. Die first.

Something about the fim "Invincible"

This Werner Herzog-directed film tells the true-ish fable of Zishe Breitbart, a Jewish strongman who performed for Berlin audiences circa 1932 before returning to his Polish Jewish village to warn of the growing Nazi menace. The plot: after his strength is noticed by a talent agent, Breitbart journeys from a humble blacksmith's son to brief stardom as a sideshow in a successful clairvoyant's act that caters to Nazi-friendly audiences. The clairvoyant is Hanussen, an intense showman who claims mystical powers.

The film makes a motif of identity. Breitbart briefly loses himself, allowing Hanussen to "Aryan-ize" him to best appeal to the Berlin audience. After briefly reconnecting with family, Breitbart publicly rejects his fictional identity, revealing himself as Jewish. Breitbart's strength--originally imagined by Hanussen as a draw to the humiliated, identity-less German people, remains in the show as a draw for threatened Berlin Jews.

Hanussen is revealed as a con-man. Though born Jewish, he has adopted a series of identities through his life in pursuit of status and power. By trying to ingratiate himself with the rising Nazis menace, he has become the very caricature of the stereotypical Jew--sneaky, dishonest, and money hungry.

I enjoyed this. The acting is mostly terrible except for Hanussen, played by a reliably intense Tim Roth.

A thing about "Conquest of Abundance" by Paul Feyerabend

In the posthumously released Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend conceptually explores reality. This might be a poor introduction to Feyerabend because the tract veers from his usual writing style and was unfinished when he died. Maybe because it was unfinished, the man's thoughts didn't often process readily on the page despite its sequentially numbered points and other organizational strategies. Still, putting in the effort to read was worth it.

Feyerabend promotes relativism and the importance of worldviews and perspectives; he says animism, objective realism, etc., are all just different ways of understanding the World. He is, though, softly critical of the kind of objectivism found in "hard" sciences which, characteristic of the Modern Age, have minimized interpretive possibility (and, possibly, ability) via extensive categorization, modeling limited sets of alternatives, and narrowing any given subject to either this or that.

But Feyerabend isn't longing for the ancient past--at least, not openly. I enjoyed it enough to look into him more later on. Someday.

Something on the autobiography "It’s So Easy (And Other Lies)" by Duff McKagen

Duff founded and played bass in Guns N' Roses. But while that may be his autobiography's top billing, events before and after life in that seminal band offer comparable value from the side stages. Humbled by experiences and anchored in the spiritual and physical disciplines that brought him sobriety, Duff offers an uncomplicated version of a band's rise and unsatisfying end (more of a suspension, really). On Guns' demise, Duff faults the band's inability to confront each other about problems rather than the problems themselves--everyone's drug use and lead singer Axl Rose's volatility and musical takeover.

Maybe it's a result of his singular drive to make and play music, or maybe it's the functional result of his focused narrative, or maybe it's a social strategy employed to fit in the scene, but on paper Duff exudes a real simplicity of character, despite his having since undergone a kind of spiritual and physical rebirth. The pre-soberiety Duff is a former self whose problems, in his words, "seems to have hinged on a failure to grapple with a few basic definitions--of what it meant to be successful, of what it meant to be an adult, of what it meant to be a man".

Although much less lurid and infinitely less indulgent than Nikki Sixx's autobiography The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star, I found It’s So Easy (And Other Lies) to be the better read.

Young love

They came to a settle on the sidewalk there in front of the house. Freshmen, maybe sophomores. He held her hand walking home from school and now, having reached her block, they look around bashfully to figure their discretion in saying goodbye. I keep still and watch from the couch, wanting them to express things I will not. He was readily handsome, trim, and rightly confident; she was cute, unworried. They extend their hands, press palms, spread arms out to the sides, keeping the most gentle resistance; she gives. They hug, then their lids drip downward, their vision extinguished for better understanding the other's breath, their kiss flavor, better learning how the tip of her nose finds his cheek and the urging of his hand on the small of her back. Fade in. They negotiate a goodbye, just for now, and let go, parting dandelion snow in the breeze. Their love was the vampire's, relived through the ages, unburdened by its persistent reflection in these two mirrors, only reckoning its passing on waking with a heart chiseled in half.

About a so-so book review in "The New Yorker"

"The Disconnect" gives a sloppy discussion while reviewing Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg. First the writer hazards that "Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitude". Whoa--what about people with kids they can't afford, or medical bills from ailing children and spouses? Wrecked and loveless marriages, and stifling alimony and child support payments? Or even smaller, more subtle miseries, like silent, nightly dinners with children you can't relate to, who hate and resent you? Are those things more welcome than protracted solitude? What about never being alone? How is that liked?

Next, the article poses the question: "as a rule, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?" Subsequent passages suggest aloneness is usually a choice: (1) "Things changed when she made the decision to buy an apartment, committing to a future alone." (2) "Some people remain single out of a disinclination to settle." But the idea that aloneness is a a choice is casually abandoned in the next section, wherein the piece's most interesting part is revealed:

In a landmark study, “Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abraded—even destroyed—by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.

That last sentence is key, where the emphasis should fall on economic changes--changes so huge we can only begin to appreciate them. For starters, economic changes now mean people move around more, spend less time in one city or neighborhood, work several, maybe dozens of jobs in their lifetimes rather than one or two, and that unions have been dissolved, and on and on: all this, just for starters, is related to economic change. But this significant nugget, contained in a single paragraph, goes painfully unexplored by the author, who sums up the aforementioned study, saying, "Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness."

So now the rise in aloneness is driven by larger forces, and is no longer a choice. The original question, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?, is now sort-of rhetorical. From here the article briefly, un-insightfully discusses online social interaction, confusing the original topic, aloneness, with something else--loneliness. But then the author pretty much dismisses the entire conversation by saying, "The truth is that lonely people at home typically contact friends, loiter in bookstores, work in cafés, take on roommates, open OKCupid profiles, or dance Tecktonik at a rave."

Oh, ok. Then what the hell are we talking about?

... but not on this one

About "Rampart"

Woody Harrelson exudes simmering, desperate rage as David Brown, a formidably intelligent but sparsely controlled bad cop living and working and risking and cratering in 1999. Our window into this volatile character's folding life rattles in the wake of the abuse and corruption scandals that shook the real LAPD at the time. When not in pursuit, Brown is at the ready because he knows he and conflict are joined at the hip. He welcomes it, he's a risk-taker. But when he unravels and we see him cracking and haunted, it's still tragic.

Notes:

• Woody Harrelson is why I saw this.
• I saw "Rampart" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" the same day. Both these movies show an investigation, a quest for the truth. Both have characters whose quest arises from suspicion, and whose suspicions cause others to doubt the sanity of the quest.