sadness

It rather pisses me off that Trump took all the attention space from Sanders. That's the breaks, but it is very sad, nevertheless. Clinton needed a good competitive race. It would have moved the ball on the issues Sanders has been raising. Now we are going to go back to ignoring them. Sad.
I must admit, I find it especially funny when commenters bemoan the fact that Clinton has competition because of MONSTER TRUMP. As if you become a champion by being coddled. It is literally a fight, and if the idea is that your fighter will be better for never having practiced, than you don't know fightin'.

dogwhistles, from Reagan to Trump

Last week, the NYT published an oped by Jacob Weisberg, the contrarian liberal - that is, not liberal at all, but for liberal reasons! - which presented a truly funny image of Ronald Reagan as a moderate president. It sorta skipped Iran contra, or Reagan's economics plan, or the tax raises on the bottom 80 percent for fica paralleled by halving the tax rate on the wealthiest. 
But the funniest thing that Weisberg skipped was Reagan on race. Sure, he was friends with Sammy Davis, Jr. But basically, Reagan on race was the guy who went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been killed in 1964, and spoke out straightforwardly for.... state's rights. The same shit Goldwater shoveled when he voted against the Civil Rights bill of 1964 (that's the Goldwater that was Hillary Clinton's first political enthusiasm, by the way), In retrospect, the establishment does not like American presidents to be monsters. It so disturbs the cucumber sandwiches and tea. But of course, Reagan was a very big monster.
Trump playing the dance with the KKK - an organization he apparently never heard of - is just following in the great Ronnie's footsteps. It will be fun hearing establishment GOP types playing the game of walking the razor's edge between overt racism - of which they wholeheartedly disapprove - and covert racism - which they wholeheartedly like to generate. For a moment, though, they have all put down the dogwhistles and gaped: doesn't the Donald know how to play this game?.

the stick

They came and killed the trees today.

Or at least they seriously lop-otomized them. If spring is i-cumen in in Santa Monica, the sap in our trees won’t be rushing to the edge of the foliage to see it, for we aint’got any. More seriously, the sunlight that filters through the leaves as we have breakfast on the patio will now fall on us without intervention.  

Such is the downside.

The upside is that our tree barbers left behind a rain of stick.

Adam soon spotted the sticks including a long, tapered, easy to grasp number, which he promptly seized. And thus he was inducted into the four dimensions of stick-ness.

The four dimensions are, as every child knows: a. the sword; b., the drumstick; c. the gun (or as Adam thinks of it, one of those things that goes pu ew pu ew and shoots out balls, his interpretation of a paint ball gun ad he saw); and d, the poker.

Adam began by flourishing the stick like a  sword, and followed in exactly the above order. Actually, there is a fifth dimension – the cane – but Adam has not figured this out yet. Or perhaps he is not interested. He did have a model in me, when I was hobbling about on crutches all last summer. Maybe Adam, like his Dad, had enough of that nonsense.

I remember the sticks of my youth! To find just the right stick was one of the scouting talents you picked up if your home was anywhere near a stand of trees broad enough to be called a woods or a swamp. Our neighborhood in Georgia was furnished with both the woods and a swamp, and I spent many a happy afternoon in one or the other, building big muddy dams, pacing along trails, climbing trees, and playing the games: hide and seek, treasure hunt, pirates, and other, jungle-themed ones. It seemed that a lot of children’s tv was set in jungle locales back in those days. Inevitably, sticks played a large part in all of these games.

In Northern Georgia, at the time, there was an abundance of pine. I’ve heard that some beetle borne plague is steadily de-conifering Georgia, which is a shame, even though the conifers are surely an invasive species, which came in after the first cutting. Pine sticks usually had rough bark on them, and you had to strip it off. This usually left your fingers sticky with the reisen residue. Sticky fingers and that green coniferous smell form a leitmotif of my spring days in the fifth grade in Georgia, and I imagine it was the same for many another small child.

As well as the scratchy ramble through the underbrush, and the looking for gold nuggets in the creek (we must have seen some film about gold panning in the North Georgia mountains). Also, catching crawfish in jars.  I also remember a long vine which hung above a hillside that descended int o a ravine, which you could, nerving yourself, swing on.

That was the world in which the stick held a great importance. Still, today, when I go hiking, I like a good stick. I keep a watch for them. When I find one big enough, I use it to walk with. Of course, it is not really necessary – I’ve never been on a trail where I had to use a stick to pull me forward. However, it is psychologically necessary. I like the nice familiar feel of the point of the stick coming down on the soil, perhaps indenting it a little. And I like, most of all, the companionship of it. In the stick, I am allied to all of nature.

I rather envy Adam his coming discoveries in the stick department. Although… he is bound to be a Paris boy, and we don’t come by sticks so easily in the streets, there. In the park, yes. And when he is visiting his relatives. At the moment, here in California, this is one of the perks, I guess.

puzzling as an art form

There’s a story Dorothy Parker told about herself in an interview in the Paris Review. It concerns one of her first jobs, working as a theater critic at Vanity Fair, with Robert Benchley:

“Both Mr. Benchley and I subscribed to two undertaking magazines: The Casket and Sunnyside. Steel yourself: Sunnyside had a joke column called “From Grave to Gay.” I cut a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk until Mr. Crowninshield asked me if I could possibly take it down. Mr. Crowninshield was a lovely man, but puzzled.”

The two parts of this anecdote are perfect. The first part, of course, comes from the undertaking magazine. The picture of the corpse showing how and where to take embalming fluid could be the icon of modernism – it was the patient etherized upon a table taken to the next degree. It replaced piety with a cold and probing curiosity; it looked at our ends, and subtracted the transcendental purpose.

The second part comes from the response. “Mr. Crowninshield was a lovely man, but puzzled.” I think that sums up the critical afterlife suffered by Dottie Parker: a puzzled receptiveness. Such cruelty, or coldness, stemming from a woman. Even today, when there’s been a large shift in gender perceptions, Parker is often dismissed as a woman who refused to grow up. She was witty, we all agree, but in the end too disagreeably puzzling.

Of all effects, the one that irritates the puritan conscious the most is that of ‘puzzling’. We want identity. We want positions. We want the ism and we want it now. Puzzling, which delays the immediacy of intellectual gratification, might be allowed as a start: we have the problem, yes? And we have the solution. But the problem for its own sake? The puzzle as the answer? Forget it.

These reactions depend, of course,on the cultural currents. In the twenties, as consumerism replaced the great American economic force – agriculture – and the cities grew in tandem with the stock market – when the combine of organized crime, forbidden substance, and the expansion of the police became established as  one of the basic forms of governance – writers took up the puzzle, the tease, and the wisecrack as valid responses to life within unclear parameters. Perhaps this is why of all decades, I love the twenties, a miraculous decade for literature across cultures. Parker was alert to all of it. She spotted Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner. She understood the Mencken canon in which Dreiser figured as a great novelist and at the same time as an idiot when it came to general ideas. And in her greatest stories – like Big Blonde – she put in the pick and pumped in embalming fluid, destroying the mirror as the archetypal instrument of realism.

You can never be cold enough if you are going into that line of work. 

suggestions for black history month

I'm thinking that for black history month we should imagine equality among the races. That would mean, for instance, that black median household income would have to triple - triple - to be on parity with white median household income. That means black unemployment would have to drop a whole 5 percent. If white unemployment were at the same level as black unemployment, we would be talking about a depression. That means that at a minimum, of the eleven million people per year who are served with warrents or have to spend a night in jail or make bail or are otherwise processed through the American gulag, only 10 percent, rather than 40 or 50, would be black. Wow, what a picture. America without apartheid. It is only a dream if we don't demand it, speak it, and talk about it 12 months of the year.

so much depends upon

So much depends, in the William Carlos Williams poem, on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water. Lily Briscoe, in To The Lighthouse, thinks “so much depends… upon distance.” The echoes here are arbitrary – and yet not entirely so. These are both modernist promts, both programmatic and surprisingly inside the programmatic space, in the art, which is no longer, if it ever was, innocent of the frame that it knows it will eventually bear. The innocence of the past is, of course, a construct of nostalgia, but it is, as well, a necessary fiction for getting us started, for the project of being contemporary. At some point in that project, retrospectively, we know we will have to dismantle that innocence, expose its never-was. But so much depends upon timing, here.

I’ve been working on my novel this month, trying to finish it up at least to the point of sending it out with a few chapters uninhabited, but planned – and I’ve been immersed in Woolf, from the diaries and letters to the novels and the esssays.  My materials in my novel are Williams, that corruption in the American grain, but certain formal ideas keep going back to Woolf.  For Williams, the poem was a machine made of words. I think Woolf would reject that description, finding it too obscuring, too foreshortened, too denotative. At the same time, she would have appreciated, or at least placed, the gesture, the intended shock. She, too, was out to shock the genteel tradition. Woolf’s sense of the distances that so much depends upon is, I think, to use the vocabulary of the time, more organic than mechanical. This is the scent Wyndham Lewis, that piggish misogynist, picked up.

This isn’t to say that Briscoe’s aesthetic is Woolf’s m.o. So much depends upon what the novel is supposed to do. Woolf is a novelist of networks rather than monuments – of dispersed inspirations, with their elliptical, filamental connections, rather than of focused worldviews, with their concentrated centers, their Blooms always departing and always coming home. For her, I suppose you could say, as much depends on the rain coming down to glaze the red wheelbarrow as on the wagon itself. Distance is a matter of a shift of attention that is both part of the scene and fashions it – it is part of the way, in the current of revelations in which things light up or darken, we capture the state of attention and its exterior referent without ultimately privileging one or the other. She has, accordingly, less time for the crowd – for the voice of the people which flows through Williams – given the fact that the multiple voices can only be handled through an intolerable simplification of their grains and aspects. Complexity, in Wolf’s terms, requires a more simple grouping in order for art not to muddy its insights entirely.  Proximity is achieved, but at the price of completeness.

And yet .. there is the marvelous city scene in Jacob’s Room, which certainly attempts and succeeds in the same way that Joyce’s Wandering Rocks succeeds – in the city as a sort of multi-tasked, alive scene.

That is something, a means, that I want to steal for myself. 

Mr. Fuck Fuck

I haven’t heard Mr. Fuck-Fuck today, but it is still early.

He’s become a part of the neighborhood. There is a colloquialism – “tear” – which means to move forward rapidly. He tore off in the car. When Mr. Fuck-Fuck goes down the street, I think of that word, and how he literally does seem to tear the air as he is avoided by all passerbys. Is it Tourettes syndrom? I’m not sure. The linguistic agenda doesn’t seem to vary as it does, or so I’ve read, with Tourettes. It is always a stream of fuck. Motherfuck Fuck. Sometimes bitch. Fuck that bitch. Then back to Fuck. At the top of his voice. The voice is powerful, especially when you see the scrawny man who emits it.

To judge by his clothes and grooming, Mr. Fuck-Fuck is cared for by someone. He is not dressed in the dumpster rags that the street people wear. He is dressed, even, rather nattily, and his beard has been trimmed. It makes me wonder about his private life. Is it a sister, a brother, a mother, an aunt who takes care of him? Most likely the caregiver is female. And most likely she is in tears part of the day. I would be. But what is she going to do?

As he tears down our sidewalk, he scares Adam. That’s normal. He scares me. It is the violence of the stream of gros mots which emerge from his body. Not just from his mouth or throat. It is as if the words rose from his very heels. He is bent, slightly, under the violence of them.

I have never seen a stronger case of language literally  seizing a person. Perhaps there is even something sacred about it. Doesn’t all poetry aspire to the condition of tourettes syndrom? Inspiration, that much derided concept, seems to me to be amply justified by the data of neurology. It could befall any of us – to take care of such a person. To be such a person. We are all God’s children, and fragile vessels at that. I salute the unknown hand that lays out Mr. Fuck-Fuck’s clothes. It is better, more patient, than mine.