the urge to rearrange

JK Rowling today on Charlie Rose:

"The urge to write often comes from the urge to rearrange reality, the world we're in."

(I scribbled that down on the fly, will have to check for precise accuracy later.)

I don't often like to comment on physical appearances, because they don't mean the same thing to me as they seem to mean to other people... but I think Rowling is just exquisitely beautiful, inside and out, especially the older and wiser she has gotten. Obviously the blonde color is fake, as are the soft, elfin curls she's wearing today on the show... but it's all just a pageant anyhow... costumes, beauty, clothes, the way we present ourselves. It all feels false and drag-like to me, everybody's self-presentation. I just like the way she's doing it. It suits her personality so well (sharp, brilliant, lovely).

I've spent so much of my life chameleon-like, playing different roles while wearing different costumes. Watching her makes me feel even more solidified in my wish to find the skin that really fits me, and finally play myself.

Haha, first world problems.

more consumption-spurred ramblings: joy division, dfw

This album art is actually graphical data from "80 successive pulses of the first observed pulsar."

I first found Joy Division by entering the word "disorder" into a file sharing service at age 19, while in a major funk. I downloaded* the resulting song and it stuck with me. It was exactly what my whimsical fingers had ordered. Appropriately enough, it was the first song on their first ever album.

I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand, 

Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man? 

These sensations barely interest me for another day, 

I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away. 

It's getting faster, moving faster now, it's getting out of hand, 

On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, it's a no man's land, 

Lights are flashing, cars are crashing, getting frequent now, 

I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, let it out somehow. 

What means to you, what means to me, and we will meet again, 

I'm watching you, I'm watching her, I'll take no pity from you friends,

Who is right, who can tell, and who gives a damn right now, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling, 

I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling, 

Feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling.

I didn't learn that Ian Curtis had killed himself until 2008--several years after that little file-sharing foray-- when I had an older acquaintance who was really into Joy Division and went rattling on with band facts whenever he was depressed, which was increasingly frequently, especially after another mutual acquaintance of ours actually went and offed herself.

There's no particular well-thought-out point I'm winding toward in delivering this random life history factoid. I guess JD lyrics--especially combined with the dysphoria of the accompanying music--remind me of the way DFW wrote during certain periods of his life. And he and Curtis did die by pretty much precisely the same means, I guess, although that juicy bit wasn't really on my mind when I started out writing this. Maybe it's just that when I get to thinking about mortality and shit I tend to gambol around with mini shades-of-Proust until disappearing with them into my own belly button.

Anyway.

I never got to be a big fan of Joy Division specifically because of that aforementioned dysphoric feeling--sometimes it's just too much noise on top of the noise I've already got going on, especially at the life-junctures during which those types of lyrics most appeal to me (New Order is far more accessible--probably a common fan refrain). But I always felt that their songs were a good approximation for how it felt to be me, inside my own poor head.

This part (p. 60) of DFW's bio reminded me of that feeling... the feeling conjured up by art that strives to recreate in the consumer/patron/user the feeling of the original, described experience:

Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what it was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquility. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life--indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme than anyone knew--this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.

Bolding mine. I love that phrase: "unease recollected in tranquility." Good job again, Max. You're a stand-up chap.

That impression of bombardment--or total immersion in disorder--is certainly present in Infinite Jest.** It is just more tolerable to me because it isn't auditory, that's all.

Joy Division - Disorder

---

* WHOOP WHOOP HELLO INTERPOL!!!

**Especially in the parts regarding the Incandenzas--particularly Hal and the tennis school--which are (to my recollection) also the parts that Max suggests may have been thought up or even partially composed around the period discussed in the above passage. I guess it's there with the Ken/Kate saga as well, but I don't actually feel that overwhelmed at being bombarded with everything I love (and a half).

excerpts from ELSIAGS: speechlessness, addicts, irony

I've now reached the part where we're the same age. :-)

Page 144:

"...he explained to Franzen, he was no longer an artist:

The problem's details are at once shameful to me and boring to anyone else. I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how 'hard' writing was, and how 'blockage' was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983, I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I'd not dared hope for from anything.

"He added, "I have in the last two years been struck dumb. . . . Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic. It's more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams."

---

Page 156:

"America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied."

...

"Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say.... But irony got dangerous when it became a habit... He continued:

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing... [I]rony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

"That was it exactly--irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. For Wallace, perhaps irony's most frightening implication was that it was user-neutral: with viewers everywhere conditioned by media to expect it, anyone could employ it to any end. What really upset him was when Burger King used irony to sell hamburgers, or Joe Isuzu, cars."

[My note: See again the essay "The Joke's on You" by Steve Almond, to which I linked on 7/23; this reminds me of it.]

every love story is a chicken story

"He was still battling to make a movie 

when snapshots were all his newly-sobered mind was offering."

It arrived two days ago in the mail. If I hadn't been so busy, I'd have made it mine on the day of its release.

I can't attest to the quality of the whiskey book, but all the rest are--at worst--decent enough.

When I read it (present tense: reeeeed it), I read it with iPod in hand, looking up all the references and words I don't understand, wondering why, exactly, it was that my father always discouraged my reading Derrida. Off and on listening to Brian Eno. It's a testimony to the book's wholesome and satisfying denseness that I am only on page 142 after two days with it in the house. I read Infinite Jest itself much faster than this.

DT Max, ya did good. Your love for the subject is evident on every page and I have not a single complaint.

Brian Eno - Everything Merges With the Night

I've been waiting all evening

Possibly years I don't know

Counting the passing hours

Everything merges with the night

I stand on the beach

Giving out descriptions

Different for everyone I see

Since I just can't remember

Longer than last September.

"The Big Ship" is far prettier, but I couldn't resist the lyrics and title of the above, which seem straight from my dreams of late--especially a certain long one I've not yet shared with anyone, but may.

On an unrelated subject (but not really), I was tickled by David Sandlin's anxiety art on Monday in the Times. 

Click here to see the rest. It's well worth the jump.

Judging by the comments, a lot of people didn't like it, found it depressing. Fuck them, this is hilarious!

I remember once an older woman confronted me about my writing and by extension my personality, called me "lugubrious" and said I brought down all the people around me, who would all be so much happier if only I would spontaneously begin instead to chirp merrily "like a well-fed chickie." Possibly she hadn't actually seen many real life chicks, because I'm pretty sure they chirp more out of hunger, loneliness, and distress, not with the warmth of contentment as she supposed. Furthermore, one really has to wonder about people who tell other people that they ought to behave as if their empty tummies were actually full. I have noticed that such individuals almost always self-conceptualize as kind, nurturing types. Curious, that.

But, really, who's to say I'm not laughing as I write this nonsense? Sometimes I rightly am. And this comic cracks me up. I want it on my office wall. I'd laugh every day.

Well, until it seemed trite.

the warehouse where we store the parts to build our hall of doom

I've been slowly, slowly reading bits of Thomas Carlyle's Characteristics over the past couple weeks. I find his style a wee bombastic and his conclusions at times altogether wrongheaded. Perhaps those bits are the satire and I'm only misunderstanding them--I am uneducated, after all. But he does deliver me clear-cut diamonds again and again, when I am willing to wade through the haze of windbaggery and the trappings of religiosity (which I mention because generally I am unwilling and that's why I've had this tab open part-time since early October).

Once I've waded in, though, I don't even see the windbaggery anymore, only intriguing ideas packed in lovely, orderly sentences--sturdy and economical where need be, gilt in all the right places. Very Scottish, I suppose. (Or very just-about-anything you'd like to stereotype as such, conveniently enough.)

Underlining is mine. I'd prefer bold, but it doesn't show up as well in my blog as it does in the feed (as viewed with black on white, that is), and I don't want to do a redesign just for this!

How changed in these new days! Truly may it be said, the Divinity has withdrawn from the Earth; or veils himself in that wide-wasting Whirlwind of a departing Era, wherein the fewest can discern his goings. Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of Necessity embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic Action is paralysed; for what worth now remains unquestionable with him? Aye the fervid period when his whole nature cries aloud for Action, there is nothing sacred under whose banner he can act; the course and kind and conditions of free Action are all but undiscoverable. Doubt storms-in on him through every avenue; inquiries of the deepest, painfulest sort must be engaged with; and the invincible energy of young years waste itself in sceptical, suicidal cavillings; in passionate ‘questionings of Destiny,’ whereto no answer will be returned.

For men, in whom the old perennial principle of Hunger (be it Hunger of the poor Day-drudge who stills it with eighteenpence a-day, or of the ambitious Placehunter who can nowise still it with so little) suffices to fill-up existence, the case is bad; but not the worst. These men have an aim, such as it is; and can steer towards it, with chagrin enough truly; yet, as their hands are kept full, without desperation. Unhappier are they to whom a higher instinct has been given; who struggle to be persons, not machines; to whom the Universe is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy-bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom. For such men there lie properly two courses open. The lower, yet still an estimable class, take up with worn-out Symbols of the Godlike; keep trimming and trucking between these and Hypocrisy, purblindly enough, miserably enough. A numerous intermediate class end in Denial; and form a theory that there is no theory; that nothing is certain in the world, except this fact of Pleasure being pleasant; so they try to realise what trifling modicum of Pleasure they can come at, and to live contented therewith, winking hard. Of those we speak not here; but only of the second nobler class, who also have dared to say No, and cannot yet say Yea; but feel that in the No they dwell as in a Golgotha, where life enters not, where peace is not appointed them.

So in Carlyle's view you can be:

1) A calculated user of religion, miserably oscillating between a devotion to a pure lifestyle and repeated descents into hypocritical failure.

(Perhaps he is saying that's the best you can do at religion when you do not truly believe it can deliver you? This is a clever hypothesis, and one supported nowadays by a heap of psychological research.)

2) A semi-hedonistic absurdist. Different from a straight-up hedonist, due to the knowing wink.

3) A glorious, beautiful, eternal... angsty waffler! (More like a principled fence-sitter, here in Carlyle's imagining... but we all know what that amounts to in real life, played out.)

"You", here, are the person who is both smart and sensitive (one without the other, really, and I think a person's good to go--not precisely happy, but fine enough). You are not capable of viewing the universe as a warehouse or bazaar of pleasing possibilities for sating your animal appetites. You have another appetite beyond those ones--an appetite without object(ive)!--an accidental byproduct of natural selection, the possessor of grotesque, perverse exaggerations of the curiosity, pattern-recognition, and problem-solving drives that allowed us to depart, as a species, from monkeyhood.

The Hall of Doom

You are a freak, in short. But just barely. People not so very different from you have emigrated over mountain ranges and driven armies, at least, and thereby spread their seed. They've amassed security for their progeny in the form of large fortunes won through a few shrewd maneuvers combined with a painstaking vigilance over the underlying structure of their chosen game. But you, you're a step beyond that. You've been twisted so far, you've bent and coiled over yourself like a snake and begun to eat your own tail.

"You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real 'Waller': 

an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit."

-David Foster Wallace, letter to a friend

---

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

 -Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

---

"But you didn't get that because you already got it
And you do not understand
Take a drive
Black hole talking about nothing
You can't get the chicken or the stuffing
Going around and you think you're tough
When you can't kick ass"
-Modest Mouse, "The Fruit That Ate Itself"

You are an errant protein, folded wrong. You are sickle cell anemia, the thing that happens when a person has too much of a quality previously found advantageous. Your kind will be weeded out unless the winds themselves change their nature and come to support your strange wings. This is in part why Nietzsche himself--an angsty waffler of the highest order--said his Superman wasn't you or any other like you, that the Übermensch is more like a conniving, politically-minded cardinal than any holy Percival. And then he collapsed in his own footprint with schizoid grief.

We are weeding ourselves out, really. That is transhumanism, maybe the real revenge of the nerds (even if unwittingly, subconsciously served up). Disguised as mere technological progress, designed only to serve us, our continuing advance doubles as an admission that we cannot continue as we are, nor return to where we came from. For us there is no right place in either scenario. We must become as gods or perish. And truly, the transformation is a death unto itself. We are either a transitional species or else we are extinct in just a few more generations.

Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place

Which is funny, you know. Our "selfish" genes are selfishing themselves right out of existence. They don't know any better, poor little things.

"And the Serpent said unto the Woman: 

Ye shall not surely die. 

For God doth know in the day you eat thereof, 

then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, 

knowing good from evil."

I am not optimistic about this, make no mistake. I am no Kurzweilian, awaiting the rapture of the scientifically-minded. I only acknowledge that, unless we are prevented by a shortage of necessary resources, we will almost certainly engineer ourselves into something else, because we have already engineered a non-trivial portion of humanity into something ill-suited for our present AND ancestral environments.

(Not to mention the fact that we have simultaneously engineered our environment to be ill-suited for the majority of humanity, which is another interesting subject.)

Shit, I wanted to talk more Carlyle. But that's clearly enough for now.

look on my works ye...

"Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds,

and I have come here to destroy all people...

all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain."

A recurring theme in my dreams is the appearance of an old man who lectures me. Usually he is a monk of some Eastern tradition. Sometimes he is a wizard or a priest. Once he was Ted Kaczynski, another time Gregory House.

Last night, he was Walternate from Fringe. AKA Defense Secretary Walter Bishop.

Walternate could time travel and he took me to the far future. We were merely observers and thus exempt from the effects of time, but I was forced to watch everything and everyone I knew waste away and vanish. "Time destroys all," he kept repeating.

(((Side note: that part reminds me of Raistlin Majere, from Dragonlance, who was cursed by the head of the mages guild and thereafter had pupils shaped as hourglasses. He could behold no beauty in anybody, as he saw everyone as the dried out husks they would one day become.)))

She apparently needs to pick up a copy of He's Just Not That into You.

"Time will destroy everything you love," Walternate continued, in the dream. He took me to the far, far future next, and I could see time whittling away at the mountains, drying up the seas.

In my pocket I had hidden a ring with a bright center stone like a diamond in the shape of a star, surrounded by tiny red and purple gems that reminded me of ripe currants. The ring felt very important to me, and I clenched it tight in my fist to keep it away from the effects of time, and from Walternate.

Nonetheless, as he wound forward the clock, I could feel the metal band of the ring begin to disintegrate between my fingers, the bond between the stones vanish, the stones themselves come loose like milk teeth and fall into the creases of my palm. My heart sank and my stomach clenched.

Still I kept the stones hidden, thinking to myself I would reset them in another ring, once Walternate released me from this terrible demonstration. But he smiled at me, knowingly, in a chilling way. And the stones themselves began to shrink and rot from the core at once, as if they were merely sugar crystals under a stream of water.

Stars flickered out in the distance.

"Everything," Walternate stressed. "Everything."

SECRETARY BISHOP: Do you know what it's like... to wake up and just for a moment... think that everything is as it was? And then to realize it's not... that the nightmare you had was real. Soon everyone here will experience loss the way that all those over there did. Air, water... light, even. But you... you will experience loss the way I did.

I don't know... 

Sometimes I miss just showing up to classes in the nude.

if you meet him...

Fringe spoilers follow, up to 3-12ish. They start out subtle and then get very spoilery indeed. Just to warn ya. I'm not rot13ing this stuff, either. Deal with it.

I would ask that potential commenters not spoil anything beyond this point. Please, please, please.

---

So many reasons why I love this show. I'm currently partway through season 3. Alas, I have a life... or else I'd have watched it all in an obsessive marathon and be caught up by now. 

I keep meaning to post about the character Olivia's background as revealed in season 1, too. Major identification with her origin story.

I am not a big Olivia/Peter romance supporter, though. They have a lot in common but I'm not feeling the chemistry between them at all (which is funny, given it's supposed to be the crux of the show). In spite of being an ex-conman, I actually think Peter is too polite for Olivia. In her present state, she is making self-defeating choices that are the opposite of what she actually wants, and unless she spontaneously learns how not to do that on her own, she would need her potential love interest to pierce through the bullshit and call her on it. My opinion is that, given what's been revealed of her character so far, Olivia is unlikely to open up emotionally in any visible way unless provoked by someone who already has a leg in by intuitively understanding things about her that she did not intentionally reveal (though she appears to be inspired to be more outgoing as of late....so, who knows?). 

So, I'm rooting for mystical bowling alley guy, even though I know it'll never happen. Or I was, until last night's reveal in 3-12 (Sam Weiss as author of the books about "die ersten menschen"). Seems far less plausible now. Probably a bad idea to date someone you've threatened with a gun, anyhow. Haha.

I guess all the confusion and mixed good/bad choices are what make the drama appealing to watch. 

---

My seven year old was watching an Arthurian legends show for kids yesterday (he picked it out). At one point he came running to me from the living room. "MAMA! This show is maddening! Everybody keeps doing stupid things, over and over, and then they say they don't know what to do about it, but they do know what to do. They're just not doing it!"

"Do you want to turn it off then?" I asked. "You can turn it off, you know."

"No. I gotta see how it ends."

*ten minutes later*

"GAAAAH. I feel like kicking the television! These PEOPLE!"

(Cracked me up that he actually said "maddening". I guess he picked that up from us grown-ups.)

---

Anyhow. This scene (the first half, I mean) really struck me. In how many shows these days do characters bond over books? And not just that.... but interesting books that actually seem worth reading in the real world?

Chapter list from Part II of the book:

Tale of a Man Against the Gods
Tale of a Spoiled Identity
Tale of a Discontented Disciple
Tale of a Quest for Love
Tale of a Power Trip
Tale of a Mad Knight
Tale of a Descent into Hell
Tale of a Search for Belonging
Tale of a Holy Warrior
Tale of the Eternal Jew
Tale of a Journey into the Darkness of the Heart

...'bout sums it up, huh?

And a quote (something of which we can't do without around here, lately, if you haven't noticed):

And remember, too, you can stay at home, safe in the familiar illusion of certainty. Do not set out without realizing that "the way is not without danger. Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things." It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.

The quote within the quote is Jung. Which was probably as bleedin' obvious to you as it was to me, if you've read him before. His own unique personality shines unmistakably even after the rough indignity of being translated to foreign tongues. (Just watch--I'll be proven wrong now after saying that, though an initial Googling said I was right.)

---

Olivia's plight is striking, too, in a metaphorical way. Somewhere in the past few episodes, I recall that she came right out and described her alternate universe version of herself (Fauxlivia) as "better". Fauxlivia did not lose her mother and was not subjected to abusive psychological experiments and so is "quicker with a smile" than "our" Olivia is. She is more sociable, more capable, more flexible, more talkative, more loving, and even prettier, due to the fact that she is more comfortable tinkering with her appearance through different styles of dress and makeup. And what's our Olivia better at? Well, she has a very narrowly focused super power that is in most situations utterly useless, and she has a better memory. Wow.

This makes me think of how we have ourselves and our idealized, hypothetical version of ourselves. As Kate Harding famously wrote in her blog, that's the version of you who struts down the beach not just looking decent and acceptable but making men weep as you pass by. This may be our residual self-image in some cases, our admittedly never-realized wanna-be-self-image in others.

Olivia is literally in competition with herself, with Fauxlivia, for the guy she wants--and her other self actually does, objectively, measure up better on a lot of counts. The things that Olivia herself is better at are mostly qualities that the world doesn't find very useful. Frankly, she is mostly just better at being a heavily scarred version of Fauxlivia. But maybe we're all in competition with our other better selves... the selves that we think would actually deserve our mates, our jobs, our friends, our houses, our only chances.

I got nothin' past that. No answers. Just thinking.

where is the crossed signal?

From Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch, (Section: "Obstacles and Openings"; Chapter: "Vicious Circles"):

Some habits may appear in both addictive and nonaddictive (normal) forms. Some habits may seem addictive, such as physical exercise or practicing a musical instrument, or doing some other labor of love, yet we may consider them to be positive and beneficial. There is a fine line between the pathological and the creative, between addiction and practice. What actually is the vital difference between "I'll just have one more drink" and "I'll just try that Bach fugue one more time"? 

Addiction consumes energy and leads to slavery. Practice generates energy and leads to freedom. In practice, or in creative reading or listening, we obsess in order to find out more and more, as in the Twenty Questions game. In addiction, we obsess in order to avoid finding out something, or in order to avoid facing something unpleasant. In practice the act becomes more and more expansive; we are unwinding a thread outward and building more and more implications and connections. In addiction we are folding inward, into more sameness, more dullness. 

Habits are addictive if that mysterious acceleration factor is present, when enough is never enough, and what was enough yesterday is not enough today. Habits are addictive if the reward and the work are inverted. Samuel Butler joked that if the alcoholic's hangover preceded the intoxication, there would be mystical schools teaching it as a discipline for self-realization. So practice is the reciprocal of addiction. Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions; therefore it is sometimes painful. 

Addiction is what computer programmers call a "do-loop." Self-regulating beings, whether animals, people, or ecosystems, spend much of their time performing repetitive routines. Built into the structure of such routines are end-conditions or exits. We keep performing the routine until the end-condition indicates that the job is done. Pouring tea, we monitor for the condition "Is the cup full?" That condition turns off the act of pouring. Eating, we continue until certain autonomic signs (stomach bulk, blood sugar, and so on) feed back the message that we are full. Normally, we then stop. But it is possible for the end-condition to be omitted, misplaced, or for the signals to be switched, so that the routine is carried out indefinitely, compulsively, until all sorts of disorders, explosions, or breakdowns bring the whole system to a halt. 

If addiction is a form of do-loop, from which there is no exit, procrastination is a don't-loop, which consists of nothing but exit. In a circle of addictive feedback, we believe "The more the merrier." Under stress, such a belief can accelerate into a do-loop, which drives us into an explosive runaway, such as an eating or drinking binge, a population explosion, an arms race. In procrastination we believe "The less the safer." This, under stress, drives us into a don't-loop, a cycle of compression or blockage, like a muscle spasm, writer's block, sexual impotence, depression, anomie, or catatonia. In this kind of vicious circle the exit condition fires off continuously, never allowing us to maintain the activity. This state gives rise to procrastination, and all the other inverse addictions, the addictions to not-doing, the blocks, the allergies. 

Procrastination is the mirror image of addiction; both are disorders of self-regulation. We are stuck in these cycles unless and until we can find the crossed signal and switch it back again.

Goya, Figures dancing from Los Disparates

---

I like typing out passages from books that I want to study. With my fingers moving, constantly checking up on whether I'm accurately transcribing a given sentence, I am forced to pay closer attention.

Also, Wood Mouse, if you ever do read this, here... I love you even more for your having loved and dog-earred that page long ago. :-)

october 4 in the year of the chevy spark

I'm on a Dream Theater binge lately. I have to be in just the right mood for them, so even though they're one of my favorite bands (seems like a diss, somehow, to refer to them as a mere "band")... I haven't listened to everything they've put out. I hoard their songs like something for special occasions. If hitting the bottom of your energy sine wave counts as a special occasion. ;-)

It was with some amusement/delight that I saw some internet-eer recently refer to Dream Theater as the musical equivalent of DFW... I don't think the comparison is especially apt. For one, the guys in Dream Theater are a lot less afraid of occasionally coming across as cheesy, I think (a virtue we should probably all aspire to). but the mood is similar, at least for me. And the Twelve-step Suite is strongly reminiscent of the AA arc in Infinite Jest (my favorite part). Was listening to "Repentance" off of Systematic Chaos last night while building my Imperial rogue a new house in Skyrim: Hearthfire and talking with someone (a friend? I dunno...time will tell).

Sometimes you've got to be wrong
Learn the hard way
Just when you're through hanging on
You're saved

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development
We will be amazed before we are halfway through.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace
No matter how far down the scale we have gone.
We will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not.
They have been fulfilled amongst others
Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
We will always be true to our principles.

You're only as sick as your secrets
But the truth shall set you free.
The truth is the truth.
That's all you can do is live with it.


My dark secret with Infinite Jest is that I loved best the parts with bit character Ken Erdedy. That's not got much to do with the above song, actually, besides the fact that he went to rehab in the book... but, come on: Ken. Erdedy. Therefore anything is justified. Because. He is the "linchpin and plinth" of my emotional connection to the book, though it seemed like it was supposed to be Don Gately serving that role. I just wanted more Ken and Kate. And that's sooo DFW, isn't it, to make up something exquisitely beautiful, give you a glimpse, and then practically hide it under a thousand bushel baskets, really make you work for your tiny glint of candlelight. Maybe to prove how bad you really wanted it.

People are weird like that.

I chased off a friend of mine repeatedly, year after year. I don't think it's a good idea for us to hang out together, this hurts too much, etc. etc. You know--the sick-cycle dance of the battle-weary-but-hungering. We all do it, on some count or another, so march your moral superiority over to the docks and drown it, okay? He didn't believe I wanted him gone, so he kept coming 'round anyhow. Maybe I didn't really want him gone. Sometimes I'd flutter a little closer, but always spooking and fast-returning to the getting-gone talk and I'd vanish for months or years at a time. There were some good reasons. He wasn't always a trustworthy person, for instance. And other times he was completely honest but the things he confessed to me were pretty scary. And he liked running from reality into a haze of self-destructive comforts, mostly of the pharmaceutical variety, which I found heartbreakingly annoying. (cuz I'd never myself do anything analogous to that, right? ...cue the wink and knowing sigh and such) But those probably weren't the only reasons, eh?

So. In 2010 he finally gave up and obeyed me, stopped trying. And in spite of the fact that I brought it on myself times a million... and even though he tried for 14 years (we met as kids over a shared love of Nintendo) and only gave up for two.... and walked away saying things like "I will never be a father now, as I can't imagine anybody else as the mother of my children" and then he kept that promise...

There's nonetheless this tiny (I can't stress how very tiny), psychotic (not really) voice inside me that occasionally (I mean hardly ever) pipes up to say:

"See? See? You were unlovable after all."

That voice has a shit-eating grin, like the Cheshire cat, by the way. You will probably recognize it. Pretty sure everybody has one. Um. Right...?

I feel the need to add here that I am a completely normal and sane-seeming person who pays bills on time and doesn't have public meltdowns and is always polite to sales clerks and helps children with homework and is indistinguishable on the sidewalk from any other well-adjusted individual.

Ken Erdedy:

She'd promised to come at one certain time, and it was past that time. Finally he gave in and called her number, using just audio, and it rang several times, and he was afraid of how much time he was taking tying up the line and he got her audio answering device, the message had a snatch of ironic pop music and her voice and a male voice together saying we'll call you back, and the 'we' made them sound like a couple, the man was a handsome black man who was in law school, she designed sets, and he didn't leave a message because he didn't want her to know how much now he felt like he needed it. He had been very casual about the whole thing.... 

Now just one of the insect's antennae was protruding from the hole in the girder. It protruded, but it did not move. He had had to buy soda, ice cream, a Pepperidge Farm frozen chocolate cake, and four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten with a large spoon. He'd had to log an order to rent film cartridges from the InterLace entertainment outlet. He'd had to buy antacids for the discomfort that eating all he would eat would cause him late at night. He'd had to buy a new bong, because each time he finished what simply had to be his last bulk-quantity of marijuana he decided that that was it, he was through, he didn't even like it anymore, this was it, no more hiding, no more imposing on his colleagues and putting different messages on his answering device and moving his car away from his condominium and closing his windows and curtains and blinds and living in quick vectors between his bedroom's InterLace teleputer's films and his refrigerator and his toilet, and he would take the bong he'd used and throw it away wrapped in several plastic shopping bags….  

…everything was ready to be shut down. Once the woman who said she'd come had come, he would finally shut the whole system down. It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question. It was now almost three hours past the time when the woman said she would come. 

…he would force himself to do it anyway… even if he didn't want it. Even if it started making him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforth modified, he'd never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terrible emblazoned in his memory. He'd cure himself by excess.

Y'know, I'm not an addict in the conventional sense. I've never even touched a bong or anything else of the kind. And I can easily go without drinking until 11 am or so most days (kidding, kidding). I don't lower the curtains and hide for anything anymore. None of my addictions or foibles are recognized and societally approved to qualify as life-ruining, and there aren't any clubs to join for support with it. Nor could I really stomach anymore a club that makes you believe in a higher power (that's part of the problem, see).

But, daaaang, I have grown tired of making the same mistakes. Tired of the Sisyphean load itself as well, but also tired of the way I'm always veering off to the left with it after hundreds of not-entirely-dissimilar goes at this goddamn hill. I am tired of rounding the bend and seeing that same, old fucking tree again, that same old rust-stained crack in the stone wall. I want Don Gately to feed me some goddamn brownies and then take a bullet for me so I can live again.

Sometimes I think we are all dry drunks, excepting the drunkards.

(((You should read this all in a very blasé tone, btw. I am actually feeling as tranquil as a bodhisattva, even if I've not got the wisdom of one. People always think you're mad or something when you vent like this, even if you're really just rolling your eyes and faintly smiling. I am rolling my eyes and faintly smiling, goddamnit.)))

But, anyhow, there's no Don Jesus Fucking Christ Gately.

I actually prefer the Marilyn Manson video.

I keep returning to Franny and Zooey for moments like these (it's practically a part of the repeating scenery, after the bit with the tree and the crack in the wall)... the part at the end where Zooey has been caught trying to impersonate their brother Buddy, and then goes on to impart the wisdom of their older brother Seymour instead (who of course has previously blown his brains out in another story, because that's what all our real modern sages do, while meanwhile folks like the Dalai Lama and Joyce Meyers take tea with people like Karl Rove or Alduin the World Destroyer and then proclaim everyone to be equally swell and non-disappointing which is so obviously untrue as to be laughable--and that should be a very, very dark laugh indeed), while trying to comfort his sister, who in reaction to finding herself on a shitty fucking planet has been having a breakdown, focusing all her rage and disappointment into the monomaniacal desire to become a perfect reciter of the Jesus Prayer.

(Could you parse all that? No? Work harder for it, then.)

Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense... 

...I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady... Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

Or maybe this bit:

Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? 

Of course, Salinger, who produced that, died an explosively cranky old loner, obsessed with the minds and vaginas of underage girls. So...

So.

Great job, old man. Real inspiring. I mean, from the grave, you're making me into a better absurdist right now.

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

Have a nice day, ya fellow morons. :-) Live it out.

<3

six songs - part 4b: the nearly perfect love song

Stars - Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It

There's been a lot of talk of love

But that don't amount to nothing

You can evoke the stars above

But that doesn't make it something

And the only way to last

And the only way to live it 

Is to hold on when you get love, 

And let go when you give it... give it.

It's a pretty melody

It might help you through the nighttime

But it doesn't make it easy 

To leave the party at the right time

If I'm frightened, if I'm high

It's my weakness. please forgive it

At least I hold on when I get love, 

And I let go when I give it... give it... give it

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love, 

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love, 

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Let go when you give it.

What do I do?

The world won't listen to this song

And the radio won't play it

But if you like it sing along

Sing 'cause you don't know how to say it

Take the weakest thing in you 

And then beat the bastards with it

And always hold on when you get love, 

So you can let go when you give it.

Take the weakest thing in you 

And then beat the bastards with it

And always hold on when you get love, 

So you can let go when you give it... give it... give it

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Let go when you give it.

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love

What do I do?

I know it's true, at least I think I do

Nothing that you say or do will make you love me

Forget the song, life will go on

I keep sayin' it from the dark, with you above me

I know it's true, at least I think I do

Nothing that you say or do will make you love me

Forget the song, life will go on

I keep sayin' it from the dark, with you above me

Take the weakest thing in you 

And then beat the bastards with it

And always hold on when you get love, 

So you can let go when you give it. 

Give it... give it... give it... give it... give it... give it.