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Dear diary,
I’m half-finished with everything, and everything will remain half-finished. That’s not the truth, but it feels like the truth right now. We got started on a hundred home-repair projects, not because we wanted to make our place look better (that would be impossible: like putting lipstick on a politician) but because we…
Actually, I don’t know or care how we got into this mess. The first paragraph is not the beginning of this entry, I do declare. Since I’m feeling sad right now (for no good reason), this entry has no beginning: it comes into being at an instant of already-going-ness. (I’m trying to avoid using the phrase “in medias res.”)
Yesterday I gave a whole bunch of quotations from books I’ve been reading, so I’ll continue doing that now; maybe that’ll help me get breathing. For some reason I believe that via mental exhibitionism I can pay off this debt, which I owe to the world for the crime of being born. Keep churning out this blog and remain in business.
The findings are in from the marketplace this year – there are three products that the shopping mobs are wild for:
- goat butter;
- sweet rice dessert with green tea;
- and ship log entries from the day after your SHOWTIME subscription expired.
What is the proper amount of time it should take to read a poem? That depends upon its length. Let’s say it’s a sonnet. Then fifteen minutes. Should you speed-read poetry? No.
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I just realized that the first quotation that I prepared to share here is no good. It’s too long, and not enough of it is interesting. I don’t want to misrepresent the book that I’m quarrying: Gore Vidal’s Hollywood. It’s a decent novel; but, you know how it goes, some passages are more dependent than others on the surrounding brouhaha. The literary context. So, if I were to copy the thing out here, the first question you’d throw at me is “Who’s Caroline?”; then you’d ask “Who’s Blaise?” And I don’t want to explain all this stuff right now. They’re just characters in a story. Let the names wash over you, for the present; you don’t have to be in lock-grip control of every last particle of information.
Here, on second thought, I’ll give a few words:
She had learned from Hearst that truth was only one criterion by which a story could be judged . . .
“She” refers to Caroline (I cut the lines about Blaise), owner of the Tribune, which is rival to William Randolph Hearst’s Journal.
Each was a creator of “facts” for the purpose of selling newspapers . . .
I think of the present day’s ruckus about fake news. Apparently this hitch has been with us since the beginning; there was no age of innocence: papers were founded with the predilection to mislead. For me, this is the main attraction of Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire” series: it shows how all the seemingly accelerated uglinesses that the screamers keep screaming about, with regard to the 2017 U.S. presidency, are familiar fixtures to anyone in-the-know: there’s nothing new under the sun. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t point out and FIX all the problems; beautify the ugliness, harmonize the discord; but I draw strength from knowing that we’re not up against some Unprecedented Leviathan of Newfangled Evildom. We’re just finally perceiving more of the symptoms of our disease, because our senses are improving. As much as I hate it for what it’s done to the arts, the Internet brings we the actual people—individual earthlings everywhere—into closer, clearer contact. That’s a good thing; nice Internet, purr. Monopolization of the media means misinformation for the multitudes. I bet the corruptest apes among the power class pine for the days of newspaper-only, radio-despot, or TV-god.
Now the Administration had invited Caroline herself to bully the movie business into creating ever more simplistic rationales of what she had come, privately, despite her French bias, to think of as the pointless war. Nevertheless, she was astonished that someone had actually gone to prison for making a film. Where was the much-worshipped Constitution in all of this? Or was it never anything more than a document to be used by the country’s rulers when it suited them and otherwise ignored?
This chills me because I’m familiar with a lot of the movies that were released during this period of U.S. history, and they’re undeniably, embarrassingly propagandistic. And I love them. I’ll never be able to separate this revolting aspect from their aesthetic allure. I will always watch such films half-admiring, half-wincing.
And that point about the Constitution is pertinent, don’t you think? Sadly, Vidal could have written his novel this morning. Those who want to hoodwink the public don’t even have to invent new tricks; the old ones keep working fine.
OK so that’s that for the Vidal novel. And yesterday I finished Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes. It’s one of those books that you want to tell everyone that they MUST read, but at the same time you don’t want anyone else to have to experience the horrors that its text reveals. My favorite contemporary novel, or EPIC rather, is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I love that book despite its brutal content; almost every page is carnage, carnage, carnage. What’s ultra-terrifying is how much of No Good Men reads like scenes from Blood Meridian, yet Gopal is detailing unembellished events from daily life. I’ll give just one single passage as an example and then I’ll move on:
. . . in the pre-morning dark, the Americans returned. As the soldiers approached a home, a dog growled and they shot it. A villager ran out, thinking a thief was on the premises, and they shot him too. His younger brother emerged with a gun and fired into the darkness, yelling for his neighbors. The soldiers shot him as well, and the barrage of bullets also hit his mother as she peered out a window. The soldiers then tied the three bodies together, dragged them into a room, and set off explosives. A pair of children stood watching, and they would later report the scene.
An old man stepped out of the neighboring house holding an oil lamp. He was shot. His son ran out to help, and he, too, was shot. By night’s end, seventeen residents lay dead. When people came out of their houses to collect their loved ones, they found a body swinging from a tree. . . .
Deliver us this day from the above slaughter, yet let us never forget it until we have ACTED to render it nonexistent; then let us forget it forever.
Now I need something like a palate cleanser for the mind. Here’s a manuscript poem from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I’ll let that verse speak for itself. I’ll move on to Breton. My sweetheart and I are now working through the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. It’s got its highs and lows. Some passages thrill me, some bore me. We read the text aloud at various parks. Imagine, if you will, two middle-aged stiffs riding their pedal-bikes to Corncob Court, or to Dabbling Duck Distances, or (our favorite) Brother Will’s Asphalt Trails. What would you think, upon hearing someone voicing aloud the following text, at the side of a path in the woods:
. . . heaven help, once again, the Surrealist idea, or any other idea which tends to assume a concrete shape, or tends to submit, as wholeheartedly as can possibly be imagined in the order of fact, in the same sense in which the idea of love tends to create a being, or the notion of Revolution tends to bring about the day of that Revolution, failing which these ideas would lose all meaning whatsoever—let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone—heaven help, I say, the Surrealist idea from beginning to progress without its ups and downs.
Passerby, what do you think of this message? Stop and chat with me about it. My favorite part is when he says: “the idea of love tends to create a being, or the notion of Revolution tends to bring about the day of that Revolution.” That’s why, although I put up with it so long as the work is otherwise sublime, generally I’m against violence in art—for the mere thought of it tends to summon it forth—I think that we should depict only what we want to see in our world; be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. That’s why all my books are so goddamned friendly.
P.S.
I must take my leave of you now, fair passerby, for the workday calleth. I gotta go gather leeches. But I will leave you with a token to remember me: I am trying to develop a habit of uploading my old rap recordings (made roughly a decade ago), because I have ninety million of them sitting around offline collecting dust and looking lonely; so here is another track that follows the same lazy formula as yesterday’s affront – keep in mind that these demos were all created on subpar equipment, but I hope that they offset with ingenuousness what they lack in professionalism:
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