Bibliography 2012

11/22/63 - Stephen King
On Writing - Stephen King
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke
Mrs Paine's Garage - Thomas Mallon
Reveries of a Solitary Walker - Rousseau
Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK - Mark Lane
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkein
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking - Susain Cain
Under the Skin - Michel Faber
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
From the Corner of His Eye - Dean Koontz
The New Evolution Diet - Andy De Vany
The China Study - Colin Campbell
Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
Wilson - Daniel Clowes
David Boring - Daniel Clowes
Death Ray - Daniel Clowes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Reread) - Dave Eggers
Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
The Wolves of Calla - Stephen King
The Song of Susannah - Stephen King
The Shining - Stephen King
Keeping a Rendezvous - John Berger
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Danse Macabre - Stephen King
The Dark Tower: Book VII - Stephen King
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

A Confession

I have a jealousy of those who possess the kind of laissez-faire friendship I had growing up and of which I am now sorely missing.  This is a lasting problem.  I am well met by a culture of effortless camaraderie come together for the love of movies but do not feel in any lasting way belonging to said culture.  Cinephiles, on the whole, are a gregarious, the more the merrier, bunch.  It has taken me years to finally come to terms with the fact that I do not belong with these people in anything more than an occasional pass-by.  It doesn't feel like a home, but a continual on the road carnival experience.  A home would be nice.  Strangely I miss what it was like to not talk about film, and just enjoy the experience.  My job goads the agitation as I have so much time to listen to people announce their all-too-healthy social lives.  I'd rather the party stay out of my room, and I am working towards that happening.  Writing feels like a way to sap the longing and not bleed out entirely.

My Position

All the tearing down at the behest of my position is largely cribbed from Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche.  All the building up, the emphasis on being or anything in the vacuum left over, that is personal, inspired a great deal by transcendentalists like Walt Whitman.  I see the vacuum as a blessed gift.  Philosophies need not stick anymore, they are aesthetics, you use them as accents to your life, not prescriptions of some higher order.  There may very well be a higher order, something underlying being perhaps, but it is not knowable, we got only a hierarchy of hunches to build upon to be pragmatic.  There is more to life than being pragmatic.  Pragmatism allows the dream to continue on, but you still got to dream.

In Washington

In the cognizant stillness of a hurricane freshly passed and the appointment of a President soon to come, Lina and I took to walking and marched upon Washington. A city carved from the wilderness and laid out monumental as if for a race of giants. Dwarfed by its riches and likewise short on time, we elected to divide and conquer: museums by day, memorials by night.

In Washington, there is a curious echo to footsteps.  In part this may be attributed to the grand scale of the design, but consider also, underfoot, the culmulative weight of history.  The city carries itself like a memorial, a time capsule, a necropolis. A place where Walt Whitman is still a civil servant, and Watergate, a hotel.  One can almost smell the gas-lamps down stately corridors with their bone-white facades, picked clean.  A smug confidence chills the air born of some half-remembered Golden Age, every urban space clicked into place without a seam.  Perhaps the echo is the conquering of time, with but a defiant flock of pigeons to blunt the inlaid precision of it all.

Into the sky like the gunshot scatter in Dallas. For here Kennedy slept, and there, some say, the rifle that got him (a must-see exhibit), and over there, across the bridge, beyond the Potomac, where I could not reach - his body. In the gift-shop of the National Archives a book by Mark Lane accuses its host of collusion in the assassination it presently profits from. Beside it, a book by Bill O’Reilly soothes in support of the official record; only crazy people kill.

A November wind struck home as we turned past the obelisk onto the west Mall. As forgetful tourists we marked the memorials with our uninspired photographs -all but the one paying tribute to the fallen soldiers in Vietnam - here we walked wordlessly and reverently past names that meant nothing to us at all, to hang meekly by the binder of registered names as if intent on finding some long-dead relative.  How many pages did we turn before we moved on?

Before long we reached the Lincoln memorial and found in its temple some reprieve from the cooling evening air.  Lina read the inscriptions on the walls dutifully; bused-in kids darted through the crowd; a mother fed her newborn on a stoop; and I, slurping a Dr. Pepper, stared blankly at the statue of Abraham Lincoln, inventorying in my mind the movie backdrops it had served.  Outside the sky was blushing. As if cut from the draping clouds there broke an oblong circle of sky.  Winking in the dark of the wooded edge, it seemed undignified; a blemish to the otherwise postcard symmetry of the horizon-tipped monument.

As night fell we retreated from the Mall in search of food.  Just up the street from the theater where Lincoln had been slain, I savored a birthday meal of sea scallops, sauteed spinach and crab-meat hash.  I would later learn that a childhood acquaintance was dying right then, perhaps dying as I took dessert. He had been 36, like me.  Our last correspondence occured a week before his death, in the thread of a Walt Whitman quote I had posted on Facebook; his epitaph was short and unsweetened: "Pretty deep!".  I offered no reply. Outside of the restaurant a civic sign reminds the passerby that this is "The Street Where Lincoln Lives On".  O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done... O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells.

Deposits of a life leftover come back and ring.  That echo again, perhaps chilled of the dead expanse that memory edits out: the construction scaffolds outside of Union Station, the salvageable goods of homeless occupiers strewn by statues, the crooked old newspaper box that ate my loose change. For all of this is Washington too. In the unrehearsed symphony of nothing much happening one bids the moon to be more luminous.  What is happening and what has happened never quite meet: the memory rewrites itself; history is carved in stone.

the spiral

spark ignite the disobedient mind

burn away the conscience grown fat and fallow
burn away the prodigies clearing their throats in dusty books
burn away the critics as they skulk from the arena floor
&
burn away the writer
that bygone bundle of prestige/pettiness/fear
                                                     to summon
                          in the panic heat of language     a most savage poetry
      into its steely fire fed a labor of sentences
         to goad the hunger or starve of fullness
                                                     amidst the crackle-hum of creation
                                                     a fuse lit
                                                     no amount of unthinking can snuff out
             where
        once a
   circle
    now
       a spiral
         leading where
            I know not yet
               vertigo’d by nerves
                   the architecture
                        of my words
                             provide the only
                               perspective
                          keep hidden
                   the aborted works 
             and the finishing
          school of
            slush piles
                stammer
                    the rigmarole
                        of some loose end
                            and set ablaze
                               the whole edifice
                                   to leave but
                                       page and ash
                         
 I will be patient               and recognize the text when it appears
                   postpone the crisis
                   and begin anew
                   incarnate
     
the smiling father on some kind lawn
sunlit squinting 
cliched heart and all

The Year of Figuring it Out

It's about writing novels sentences

It's about making a living

It's about living in order to write sentences

It's about writing sentences in order to live

Writing is Easy

I believe (perhaps a superstition) that there is nothing heroic about writing.  To lay down sentences well is not prize-worthy, nor evidence of some hard-won dominance; here we neglect the stealth impact of favorable circumstances and happy accidents.  Craft might be little more than the distillation of properly attuned priorities so aligned, and with circumstances so calibrated, that the act of dreaming through language gushes freely.  If only we find a way to siphon out our daily lives and its seepage of deadlines, quotas, commercial aspirations and the smack of erudition; the less those things matter, the more simply the writing comes. They are the bane of the unfortunate writers who ascribe duties beyond the bricolage pleasures of language. To be a writer at all, makes up half the battle.  With the scaffolds of self and industry dismantled and the door to distractions firmly closed, with ample time and patience to perform, the writing of writing comes easy.  As heroic as a watermelon ripe and round and ready under optimal conditions.