A farewell

While we were away, my cat died. His name was BC; he was a great cat (he was, admittedly, less than thrilled with the advent of Mirah). He'd been in steep decline over the last month, though really his health had been such that over the last few years, it had been very difficult keeping his weight up. But nothing like the last few weeks, when he seemed to retreat, as if knowing that his time was up (though also occasionally seeming to give it an effort, as if for me). I am deeply grateful to my dear friends Emily and Michael for being able and willing to take care of business when I couldn't be there for him at the end. So this is a short farewell of sorts, with some pictures.

Here is BC many years ago (at least seven), when he was much healthier and weighed much more than I'd remembered him ever weighing (turns out I was a bit chunkier myself); I'd forgotten how long it had been since he'd been right (check out the stylin' rug in the second picture):




He had a weird insistence on drinking water out of anything that wasn't his dish. While this was often incredibly annoying, it also led to this classic photo:



Anyway, he is gone. I will miss him.

Intermittent Activity

Currently on vacation, reading Laird Hunt's novel The Exquisite. I note this line, from midway through the book:

"When one is in the early, enthusiastic throes of a friendship, one lets a great deal slide."

Which under certain circumstances seems to imply this line from the Mountain Goats song "Game Shows Touch Our Lives":

"People say friends don't destroy one another/What do they know about friends?"

Which is apropos of nothing, really, except to give me an excuse to post this brief entry so people know I've not disappeared. Sometimes you forget that online friends know you only through the Internet, and if you disappear without notice, they worry. I know I have at times wondered to the point of worry about a blogger's extended absence. It's nice that people worry, but it's also nice to let them know you're ok. The above quotes may seem to be in a different spirit than my own lines, but, while I recognize some truth in them, I post them now only because I like them.

I've been getting a lot more sleep lately, and I hope to be able to post somewhat more regularly in the next couple of weeks or so. Thanks for reading, and for those that care, thanks for caring.

Looking Forward, Back

As this opening week of 2010 perhaps suggests, things may be quiet here over the next few months. Not by design or desire but only because of other things. Like, life. I'm a little busier at work than I've been for years; I still have the lengthy commute, which, though it allows me to read a fair amount, does not allow for much time in the evenings. I'd rather take my time on writing than whip something off. But I make no predictions on how much blogging I'll actually end up doing. I do have a few things on my mind that will need some time to tease out into something coherent. I suspect I'll have even less to say about buzz or news than usual.

Looking back over the last few months, it's a bit hard to believe I blogged as much as I did. We had a lot going on. We moved, fixed up the house we had been living in, fucking sold it. (There were a variety of factors leading into this transition. One was the desire to escape the bind of home-ownership.) But anyway: we were extremely busy. I had no business blogging in the evenings, and I pretty much didn't (when do people blog? follow-up question: how many of you bloggers are academics or students in some capacity? am I the only one who wants to do it more but can't?), unless I was by myself for whatever reason, or there was downtime during naps on the weekend. This explains the silences followed by flurries of activity. (I'm sure that same general pattern will obtain now.)

But, hey: reading! I received a nice stack of books for Christmas this year, so I should be set for a while (not likely). Plus, with the sale of the house, and the ensuing debt-cancellation (yay!), I won't be as constrained from acquiring a book I really want (but still, let's not go crazy).

The gift books, then:

First, the three highest on my short list:
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940
The Journal, Henry David Thoreau (the nice new NYRB edition)
After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici

Then the pleasant surprises from my longer list:
The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot
The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James C. Scott
Weapons of the Weak, James C. Scott
Our Horses in Egypt, Rosalind Belben

The total wild card:
The New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors, eds.

This last item was brought to my attention a couple of months back. I wouldn't have bought it for myself (not least because of Greil Marcus, who I have very mixed feelings about), but I have to admit it looks very interesting, and I look forward to reading much of it (it is like 1100 pages or something obscene like that; it's fucking massive). At first glance, I already know I have some criticisms of it, but I'll hold off on saying anything till I've had a chance to read more into it.

I was also given two gift cards to book stores. To date, I've picked up four books with one of them:
Short Letter, Long Farewell, Peter Handke
Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann
Summertime, J.M. Coetzee

With a such a bounty, there is always the problem of what to read next. I feel the compulsion to read several of them all at once. One can only pick one and begin. I expect to be, and in fact have already begun, dipping into Beckett's Letters and Thoreau's Journal over the course of several weeks, if not months. The others as the occasion strikes. I've already read the Handke, and though it's nothing like as great as Slow Homecoming, it was nonetheless a fascinating read, as ever. I feel an intensive period of Handke reading coming on--perhaps Repetition soon? And a pile of others. . .

I'm currently in the middle of Our Horses In Egypt; a peculiar book. It's very English and compressed. The combination of dated English slang and horse and military jargon makes for some unexpectedly thorny paragraphs. And yet there's something charming about the tale, a bit old fashioned, if also not quite like anything else I've read.

I don't really have specific reading goals for the year. Looking back over my list from last year, I see that only one or two of the novels I read even approached 400 pages (I believe Augie March was the longest); most were well under 300, if not under 200. But I have sitting on my shelves many long books I'd like to get to before too long: 2666, The Kindly Ones, um: Don Quixote, er: Ulysses (really!), The Aesthetics of Resistance, several Henry James novels (I forgot to mention that I'd started reading The Wings of the Dove last year; wasn't up for it), even Marguerite Young's enormous Miss Macintosh, My Darling. It remains to be seen which if any of them I find time for.

My non-fiction reading will probably continue to be a rough course through philosophy, political economy, Marx, anthropology (cf. James C. Scott, etc), evolutionary bases for cooperation, arguments against the teleology of progress, and so on. And every year, and at various points within every year, I say to myself, ah, yes, now I will begin to systematically read the classics, Plato, Aristotle; you know, that crowd. I still have this strong desire to become more acquainted with that tradition. We will see how it goes.

On a treadmill

This blog is mired in a serious malaise, one that at times feels terminal. Though I don't have any desire to quit, lately I have been finding it extremely difficult to finish writing posts that I begin. Part of the problem, as ever, is my tendency to link too many ideas together, resulting in so much rambling, bad writing. Just when I think I've gotten the hang of it all, I invariably hit a snag, writing slows down, ideas dry up. Or they come to me, but on the train, in whole paragraphs, good ones I'd like to think, but who can write on the train? (The Marc commuter train is not the smoothest ride in the world, and my handwriting is poor enough as it is.) And if I wrote on the train, anyway, when would I read? (Never, by the way, is the answer to that one. I don't think my reading at home this calendar year has added up to more than a few hundred pages.)

One problem, I realize, is my reluctance to just put it out there. I persist in thinking that I should have read this or that before expressing an idea. When it comes to the actual writing itself, the germ of the idea gets buried, in fact unwritten, as I bog myself down in shaping the introductory remarks or the background. A bog that weighs me down, when what I desire, what I value, is lightness. (God, I looked at my numerous posts in draft status, and there's an earlier unfinished whinge about how I can't write... I'd naturally forgotten all about it.)

All this is to say that I have a lot that I've been wanting, and failing, to say here. Here are just a few topics I hope to get around to finishing posts on in the nearish future, though I make no promises:

J.M. Coetzee (on Diary of a Bad Year, naturally, while everyone else's moving onto Summertime...)

Flannery O'Connor and politics and literature

Evelyn Scott (again)

Art and Ontology

Chomsky, an appreciation, and more

Conservatism and relational political spectrums

Modernism and post-Modernism

a line or two about Gayl Jones' Corredigora (in connection with Modernism)

ideas about primitive accumulation and lost social orders

more on Blanchot, possibly finally getting into his ideas on communism

communism as the original human, cultural state (circling back on Art and Ontology, touching on Chris Knight and Heidegger and more)

the role of play in the former, as well as in art, and what that means for us, moving forward (combining, if possible, Knight and Josipovici, among others; in truth, this feels like my main unwritten book)

Mirah at One Year

I hope to get my act together soon and get some posts up, but in the meantime, we celebrated our daughter's first birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday, Mirah!

Here are two recent pictures, one from last week, one from yesterday's party:

Revisiting the Big Dalkey Get

As is traditional around here, I move from the deadly serious to the irretrievably trivial. . .

When this blog was but a month old, I posted a list of the 55 Dalkey Archive books I'd acquired a couple years previously when a friend and I took advantage of their big sale (100 books for $500). I thought it would be amusing to take another look at this list in the context of my change in focus, shifts in my reading life, and so on. At the time of the original post, I'd read 23 of the 55 books; as of today, I've read 31. But I've also discarded some of them, others are on the edge of removal, and even of those that are relatively safe, a few remain that I wish I hadn't picked.

Here is the list, with those I've read in bold and the discards crossed out:

1. Chapel Road, Louis Paul Boon
2. Rigadoon, Céline
3. Some Instructions to my Wife, Stanley Crawford
4. Storytown, Susan Daitch
5. Island People, Coleman Dowell
6. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
7. Phosphor in Dreamland, Rikki Ducornet
8. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, Stanley Elkin
9. George Mills, Stanley Elkin
10. The Rabbi of Lud, Stanley Elkin
11. Van Gogh's Room at Arles, Stanley Elkin
12. Mrs. Ted Bliss, Stanley Elkin
13. Foreign Parts, Janice Galloway
14. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass
15. Quarantine, Juan Goytisolo
16. Blindness, Henry Green
17. Concluding, Henry Green
18. Nothing, Henry Green
19. Doting, Henry Green
20. Fire the Bastards!, Jack Green
21. The Questionnaire, Jirí Grusa
22. Flotsam & Jetsasm, Aidan Higgins
23. Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley
24. Time Must Have a Stop, Aldous Huxley
25. A Minor Apocalypse, Tadeusz Konwicki
26. The Age of Wire and String, Ben Marcus
27. Reader's Block, David Markson
28. AVA, Carole Maso
29. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso
30. Cigarettes, Harry Mathews
31. Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews
32. 20 Lines a Day, Harry Mathews
33. The Human Country, Harry Mathews
34. The Case of the Perservering Maltese, Harry Mathews
35. Women and Men, Joseph McElroy
36. Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Odile, Raymond Queneau
39. Collected Novellas, vol. 1, Arno Schmidt
40. Nobodaddy's Children, Arno Schmidt
41. Two Novels, Arno Schmidt
42. Is this what other women feel, too?, Jill Akers Seese
43. The Sky Changes, Gilbert Sorrentino
44. Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
45. Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
46. Pack of Lies, Gilbert Sorrentino
47. Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino
48. Under the Shadow, Gilbert Sorrentino
49. Something Said, Gilbert Sorrentino
50. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
51. Annihilation, Piotr Szewc
52. Monstrous Possibility, Curtis White
53. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. one, Marguerite Young
54. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. two, Marguerite Young
55. Marguerite Young, Our Darling, Miriam Fuchs, ed.

With 31 books read and four discarded, that leaves 20 books. Why did I get rid of the four? Well, the real question is, why did I pick two Aldous Huxley books?!? I've never read anything by Huxley, including Brave New World. At the time of the purchase, I was smack in the middle of what I have been calling my "days of despair", but the period wasn't always despairing. I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature, of what I thought I wanted to read. (I'm not saying I don't now believe in diversity, but my approach is markedly different.) I also had--still have--a tendency to read the less famous book(s) by an author first. This has paid off handsomely in many cases, but it has its pitfalls. One of which is making you not want to read the more famous book at all. Anyway, this is partly what happened with Huxley. I figured I'd read Brave New World at some point, and, hey, Point Counter Point was also on that Modern Library list, so... It is in this spirit that I'd acquired a used (Dalkey) copy of the latter, and included the other two Huxleys as part of my selection in the big purchase. I suppose I should have paid more attention to my previous passes at the first page of Brave New World. In retrospect, I realize that I found the prose unreadable at worst, uninteresting at best. It turns out the same is true of these other Huxleys. Nothing interesting about the prose at all. Off they go. (I'm sure I could elaborate some more, but these are books I've not read and will not read, right?)

I'm not surprised I included the Ben Marcus volume in my pick, but after several attempts at reading this book, I decided that I simply couldn't. I couldn't make sense of it at all, nor did I relish the work needed to unpack its mysteries. Away!

As for Céline, here is another case where I should have read the more famous book(s) first before acquiring any others. I've kept my copy of Journey to the End of Night (a New Directions book, of course), so I may yet read it, even though my early passes at it have not kept my interest. And Rigadoon, and all the other Céline books I've looked at, is much the same. The style looks irritating. I know writers I admire have sworn by Céline, but I just don't care. (I still think that Death on the Installment Plan is a first-rate title, however.) Sold!

Ok, that accounts for the four discards; what about the remaining 20? One book in particular is on the chopping block: Joseph McElroy's Women and Men. Read my earlier Dalkey post for remarks about McElroy and this book. Here, I'll just say that this mammoth novel survives only because I hope to read some of the sections explicitly mentioned by Garth Risk Halberg in his year-end post (and comment) at The Millions. If those sections don't work for me, it's gone.

Others: Unexpectedly, I've been unable to make it through William H. Gass' (incredibly short) Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Gass is one of my favorite writers, but this book is rather too cute (Gass plays here with fonts and type sizes and the shapes of words and I don't think it's nearly as interesting as he does). I've tried several times to read Goytisolo's Quarantine. This novel is also short, but the writing strikes me as vague and unfruitfully obscure. I'll give it another pass, but if I can't make it through, it'll have to go. I wish I hadn't selected Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!, if only because I don't think I care enough about the shittiness of newspaper reviews, or even the review reception of Gaddis' The Recognitions, more than 50 years on. I still expect to read one of the Dowell books and the Aidan Higgins (a collection I began but never finished for no good reason). Carole Maso's AVA is in the current TBR pile. She's always a keeper, but she requires slowness and attention I don't always have to give (plus, I wanted to have read some Beckett before reading it, which I now have). I'm sort of out of my Nicholas Mosley phase, so The Hesperides Tree has languished and isn't likely to be read anytime soon. The lone remaining unread Stanley Elkin book on my shelves, the three novellas making up Van Gogh's Room at Arles, will get read. Elkin's another favorite, but I just haven't been in an Elkin place in the last couple of years. Same with Sorrentino. I was mildly disappointed in his Mulligan Stew (still a very funny book), and that may have put me off reading Pack of Lies and Blue Pastoral. But also I simply wasn't there. I sort of wish I hadn't included the Curtis White (non-fiction) book, but it's slim enough and probably not without interest, so I imagine I will read it. Arno Schmidt...it was the over-the-moon enthusiasm of The Complete Review that moved Schmidt onto my radar. I'd had some good success with Complete Review recommendations up till then, but since then I've become aware that my tastes are very different, so I wonder if the Schmidt selections (three of them! how insane am I?) were a mistake. I've thought about trying one or more of them a few times, but the layout of the words on the page is odd enough to have distracted me. I wasn't up for it. Two of these books are hardcovers and thus very expensive, so if I decide to sell, who knows, I may do OK on them. But I still hope to give them a decent chance. (Meanwhile, I've seen very few references to Schmidt anywhere outside The Complete Review. I'm not sure if that tells me much of anything.)

That leaves Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Marguerite Young's two-volume Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (plus the small critical volume about Young and her book; I probably didn't need this book either). I leave these for the end because of their length, their perceived difficulty, and the fact that both writers were women. We think of men as being the writers of difficult literature, do we not? I certainly do, I have to admit. One clear exception is Gertrude Stein, who is famously difficult, in particular The Making of Americans. Marguerite Young's enormous novel doesn't appear to be difficult to read, at the level of the sentence or paragraph, but it does appear to be hugely ambitious. With either book, I will need to psyche myself up for a serious attempt at a reading that does justice to the material.

Interestingly, when I took part in this big purchase, I was madly in love with the Dalkey Archive. To me, it was the ideal press: attractive books, excellent mission, and a massive stable of interesting books by underappreciated authors. My opinion has shifted. It still is all those things, and I still think it's an exemplary publisher. But its considerable focus on the self-consciously experimental or post-modern, however one chooses to define those terms, is, let's say, not quite in line with what I want from literature anymore, what I think is valuable or interesting about it. But of course that's what this blog is about, when it's about literature, so I won't expand on the point here.

"And it's hard to explain what I was doin' or thinkin' before you"

I've written some here about how my interests have evolved over the years and have occasionally wondered at the time lost when I was younger. How they've evolved beyond "interests" in my mind to now being crucial areas of study and writing and politics. Naturally, what I read has influenced this development, as have blogs, including some that are over my head, introducing me to writers and thinkers and concepts, as well as threads leading from one book to the next.

But the truth of the matter is that the major influence in my evolving approach to things has been Aimée, my beautiful and brilliant wife and my best friend. In our life together, I have learned more about what it is that I want and believe than I ever knew or understood before, and Aimée is a big and necessary part of that. Partly this is simply through engagement with her on an intellectual and emotional level. Aimée is very intelligent and passionate and can argue with the best of them. Unlike me, she has some grounding in philosophy and political theory. She also comes out of an activist background. (So she was in this sense both more theoretical and more practical than me. Ha!) I'm still the same person, but I'm more fully who I am than I ever was before. Her encouragement has been crucial (she encouraged me to start this blog, for one). I'd had encouragement before, of course, from friends and family, and I don't wish to deny it. But it turns out that the kind of love and trust we share was something that was necessary for me to be able to recognize my own self, and to be able to embrace and think about and write about the uncertainties.

I can wallow in my frustration at all the lost or seemingly wasted time, when I could have been doing this or that. I can and do complain about not having sufficient time now to read what I want to read and to write and think about it. And it's true that much of what takes away from my current time reading and writing is my responsibilities to her and to our daughter Mirah. It might be easy, when frustrated, to imagine having that time and not having those responsibilities. But of course these are not mere responsibilities, but the joys of my life. And, in fact, not only would I not be the same person pursuing these interests were it not for Aimée, not only would those interests not be the same, since they have developed and evolved in large part within the crucible of our relationship, but those interests take on added importance and urgency because of her presence in my life and because of Mirah.

Today is our third wedding anniversary. It's hard for us to believe that three years have already gone by--or indeed nearly five years since we met--but at the same time, it seems as if we've been together forever (in the good sense). We've been struggling with balancing our time together since Mirah was born eight months ago (also: !). And lately the major part of that struggle has been with sleep, lack of which has affected us both negatively. It can be easy to lose sight of each other through this kind of thing, and we've been sort of on hiatus in recent weeks especially as Mirah's sleep has been particularly bad. (Happily, it appears that things are finally getting better on that front.) I can't imagine my life without Aimée, and I can't imagine me without Aimée.

Happy Anniversary Aimée!

Harry Kalas: R.I.P.

Sitting on the bus this morning, in a daze, on my way back to work after an extended weekend of brutal sleep training, I noticed over another rider's shoulder the news that Harry Kalas, long-time play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies, had died. Entering Penn Station to await my train to DC, I made a beeline for the newsstand to see if any of the papers had anything on it. The USA Today did; I read the longer-than-expected article and somewhat unexpectedly felt a big lump in my throat, tears behind my eyes. Some of my most pleasant childhood memories involve listening to Harry and the late Richie Ashburn call Phillies games on the radio. Biased I may be, but I never thought anyone did baseball better than they did. They were enthusiastic, fair, knowledgeable, funny; I always felt a certain pride in them. That Kalas was also the voice of NFL Films somehow seemed to confirm for me that that pride was not misplaced. People knew he was good. I've increasingly lost touch with baseball over the years, in particular the Phillies, since I live just far enough away that I don't have much opportunity to catch their games (though I did take a childlike delight in their surprising World Series victory last year). I enjoyed noticing Harry's voice in commercials over the years. I guess, like many others, I felt his voice would always be there. I am saddened by his passing and thankful for the many happy memories.

Notice

After Mirah was born, we encountered a variety of surprising difficulties with breast-feeding. As part of that often painful process, we learned a lot about how nursing does and does not happen, about pumping, and about breast milk and formula. Ultimately, before Mirah finally did learn how to nurse, we entered into relationships with other women seeking to donate their excess milk.

All of which is a preamble to announce that my beautiful wife Aimée has written and published her inaugural free-lance article, for Babble.com, in which she discusses the phenomenom of donated milk, in part through the prism of our personal experience, with some history thrown in for good measure.

Please do, check it out. (Also note at the very bottom a nice picture of Aimée with Mirah. Yay!)

Top Albums of 2008 - A Comprehensive Survey

. . . and my favorite albums released in 2008 are:

1. Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna
2. Juana Molina, Un Dia
3. Matmos, Supreme Balloon
4. The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Hm. Right. Turns out these are the only four I have! The first three would have been contenders for a real top ten or twenty list, if only I'd listened to any new music last year, whereas Heretic Pride is the least essential Mountain Goats record ever. Which is not to say it's the worst, or even bad, but it feels decidedly unnecessary.

I post this half-list to highlight the change in my attitude towards music, including its relative absence on the blog over the last year-plus, as noted. This change might be worth investigating. I have a huge amount of music at my disposal. More than 2400 cds (down from a high of over 2700), more than 12,000 songs on the iPod. A few years ago I was averaging 250 cd purchases per year. Of course this is insane. There is no way to absorb such a quantity of music. I was vaguely conscious of this at the time of my greatest indulgence, but something was driving me, an urge, an obsession, a fear that I would miss out on something, not necessarily on something cool or hip or whatever, but something that I felt I needed, something that would be just around the corner, in the next batch, the next new cd or three, some sound that would hit me just right, something.

I'd hit a fruitful vein. Starting with a purchase of Built to Spill's then-new Keep it Like A Secret in 1999, when I truly encountered indie and the underground, I went nuts. I'd missed a lot, for one thing, and I wanted to catch up and, worse, keep up. And I could afford to. I was, at the time, flush. Lucky me. So I consumed. I bought in huge quantities. I wasn't exactly indiscriminate--I didn't buy everything--though in a sense I was, within a highly discriminating range. If something seemed like my kind of thing, I didn't hesitate. If there was buzz around an interesting sounding cd, I was on it. Pretty soon, though I had a lot of fun, I felt obligated to keep it going, this amassing of a library, this consumption, this keeping up. Eventually, much of the fun was sucked out of it. I'd already slowed down massively before I met Aimée, after which I was confronted with the basic truth that I had too much music to listen to. And that I no longer had the time to simply sit around listening to music. I fretted about this a bit, after all I had all of these cds, surely I should be using them. Plus, I still felt the need to keep abreast of new music, to keep up with the conversation, reading the music blogs. As noted by Scott at Pretty Goes With Pretty recently, most of the prominent music blogs are written by professional music critics. So attempting to keep up with a conversation with people who get most if not all of their music for free is a fool's game, a prescription for massive debt. And yet I felt compelled to do so.

Then, almost suddenly, there was a release, a great release of pressure. With a baby on the way--before this really, but it's a convenient enough time marker--I had to face up to the fact that I could no longer afford to buy new cds. And I had to acknowledge that I couldn't keep my beloved wall of cds continually on display in our tiny house. So I began systematically, as well as arbitrarily, selling some off; I decided I could only acquire new music if I got it on store credit. Finally, I put 85% of the rest of the collection in storage. As the year wore on, I still checked in with some of the music blogs, had a general idea what the big records were, even downloaded some tracks here and there, but by the end of the year, when the big best-of lists were announced, I noticed both how drab the music seemed and how little I cared. More to the point, I found that I liked that I didn't care.

I have more to say on this, touching on consumption, over-availability of cultural products, and so on, and how all of this actually contributed to the diminishment of music as a topic of interest, for writing or otherwise, but I'll leave that for another post.

(Oh, yeah, I do have Animal Collective's new album, Meriweather Post Pavilion. It's taken me a few listens to adjust to it, but I think it's phenomenal--I'm particularly partial to "Summertime Clothes" and "Brother Sport". Part of me still mourns the path not taken, from the Here Comes the Indian days, but no one does what they do, and what they do is beautiful and amazing.)

Notice

Speaking of friendship, I'd like to give a somewhat belated shout out to a friend of mine from way back, Mitch Rosenwald, who edited and contributed to a book on conflict resolution, titled One Paradigm, Many Worlds: Conflict Resolution across the Disciplines, published last year by Cambridge Scholars. Congratulations, Mitch!

Allow to see

Some months back, I wrote here about my own memories, awakened physically it seemed to me. At the end of the piece, I appended a passage from Proust. In a comment to that post, Lloyd Mintern argued that the truth value of my own writing was, in sense, negated, or at least undermined, by my inclusion of Proust's writing. I had to conclude that he was right: as writing of its own, as writing qua writing, it works better without the Proust passage, the addition of which feels like a strange appeal to authority, as if Proust could authorize my own memory, as if he were proof that the memory weren't bogus. I recall that even at the time, it felt tacked on, and the transition awkward, at best.

Why did I include it? I considered possible explanations: I was showing my work; or, I had had a larger piece in mind, in which Proust played a key part, which I never got around to finishing, but like the novelist who doesn't want to waste all that precious research, I felt the need to leave it all in. These reasons are part of it. But more than that, I was making a claim, I think. My experience was not a subset of Proust's, but in a very real sense, I was able to take note of it, to think about it, in part through having the experience of reading Proust. And, in a way, through this taking note, I was able to in fact have the experience at all. Instead of a fleeting, forgotten moment, it becomes a memory, something I take the trouble to record, which recording allows me to perhaps pursue the line of thought further, to facilitate further experiences, further memories. Isn't this in part what the experience of literature is for? One of literature's uses, so to speak? To allow us to see?

This experience, once written, what becomes of it? Does it escape me? Is it too literary? Does it, by existing, misrepresent the experience as I experienced it? In a sense the piece was an attempt to bring the personal to the fore, in the context of, or under the influence of, my reading. But is it mine anymore? I can tell you that I still have the memory of the experience of having the memory come to me--but in the telling, does it become something else? Does it become other than fact? Not false, but a truth separate from fact? A literary truth?

Mirah at two months

Mirah was two months old yesterday; here she is this past Sunday, trying to figure it all out, entranced by the leaves and sun and sky (that's me holding her, lying back on a picnic bench):

Coming Day

I've had very little time to devote to this blog lately, just as I predicted, though in truth the frequency in posting isn't much different than it has always been. Recent posts haven't been exactly doing it for me. I don't mean that I shouldn't have posted any of them. I mean that they haven't quite scratched the itch to speak. About what? About so much. They--these recent posts--are placeholders, in a sense. At best they merely touch on larger issues. And they fill some superficial need I feel as opposed to that deeper need, if only the superficial, vaguely pathetic, need to not go too long without a post.

Why did I feel the need to write a post about David Foster Wallace in the wake of his suicide? I'm not sorry about the post--that's not it--by what was the need? Like others, I was saddened. Like others, I read post after post, remembrances and tributes, trying to make sense of it, perhaps; really just wanting to keep it alive, keep him alive, through the words of others, leading back to his own words. I wanted to record that Wallace was, literarily speaking, affinity-wise, Friend of The Existence Machine, just as our favorite books are friends. I'd written about his work before, once in the form of a defense. I wanted to speak out, again, for the much-maligned and, I feel, misunderstood later short stories. I wanted to say a little bit--very little--about how I viewed his literary project. I wanted to say he would be missed. Was this necessary? With each passing day, blogging being what it is--that is, blogging being whatever we want it to be, and yet there still being the pressure, however resisted, of the timely, even for a blog as rarely updated as this one--with each passing day I felt the gratuitousness of such a gesture would be more apparent. As if one could not wait. So I pushed out something which only touched on what I'd wanted to say. Though perhaps by touching on it I'd said all I really could say.

Why did I feel the need to post something about the financial crisis, the bailout plan? Here we have a topic close to this blog's (this blogger's) heart: financial collapse, the inherent wrongness of capitalism, the irrationality of money, the destructiveness of the system, the arbitrariness of power, etc. Close to this blog's heart, yes, but it's not as if I consistently blog about such matters, and it's certainly not as if I have the time, have ever had the time, to keep a timely--there's that word again--political log. I can't do the kind of thing done so well at American Leftist, Lenin's Tomb, Left I on the News, etc., though sometimes I think I want to, there being so much wrong to address. As I wrote then, things move so quickly and are so complicated, that, I suspected, given my inability to blog in real time, any post of mine would immediately be rendered suspect, dated, pointless. Perhaps I simply wanted to record, recognize, add my voice, however muted, to the din. (As if for posterity's sake?--illusory posterity, where there might be an intelligence capable of making note of who said what when, not to mention interested in the collective babble of millions of bloggers.) Though it's not as if I'm going to post consistent follow-up entries, with links to further up-to-date analyses. Unless of course I do.

Whenever something happens in the news that I want to speak about, I feel a time pressure. If I don't say something within a certain (undefined) period, I will have missed the window of acceptability. Hence, I either pass over things occupying my mind, saying nothing, or I cobble something together, which just barely addresses my concerns, possibly also saying nothing. Plus still I am weighted down by the need for thoroughness, the need to cover all possible bases. Paralyzing. I continue to operate as if it were true that, if I find the right combination of information, I'll be able to persuade people, people will see. But that will never happen, not because of anything I do or say.

Meanwhile, other items get pushed aside, remain sketches, blog fragments, half-essays awaiting my attention, awaiting time, waiting. There are all these books I've been reading. . . deferred posts, deferred writing . . . there is absurdity after absurdity . . . there is life as a new father, the child's being in the world . . . there is America in decline, Americans in denial, and the crash-landing to come, to come . . . Coming day, coming day, come.

Welcoming Mirah

I am in love: This past Saturday morning, August 9, 2008, at 9:28 AM, Aimée gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Mirah. Aimée was amazing and strong, and both she and Mirah are in excellent health. We are spending our time getting to know this new little person and beginning to figure her out, so let's just say that things will be a little slow here for a while.

In the meantime, take a look at a couple of pictures (that's yours truly in the second one):

On what basis do we choose?

In my junior year of high school, I took a course called Research Seminar, in which we were supposed to learn how to do research and write papers. The class was intended to prepare us for college (it did not). Pretty basic stuff: we researched topics, wrote papers of varying lengths, culminating in a fairly large research project and paper. (It was in the context of the last that I was later accused of plagiarism. A long story, not worth going into, except to note here that it contributed to my deepening sense of the arbitrariness of power.) We took class trips to the research library at the nearby University of Delaware. I remember thinking to myself, as I observed college students working in the library, looking things up, doing research, that I would never have the personal resources needed to put in that kind of effort.

Early in the semester we were assigned a relatively simple task. The teacher had a collection of articles, I think, or print items of some kind. We were to select any one of these items and write about it. I don't remember much more about the task. What I do remember is that I couldn't do it. I sat there, and I watched the other students make their selections. I watched them begin writing. And I sat and sat, sorting and re-sorting the collection, getting nowhere. Did I not understand the task? It was fairly straightforward, so it's not that, not quite. Here's what it was, I've only recently realized: I didn't know on what basis we were to make our choice. How were we to decide? How did the others know? What was I missing? How would I find out?

Bloggers of the No

Apropos of this post, Aimée asked me about this "bloggers of the No" business. I replied that the novel I'd just finished, Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co., is all about writers who refuse to write, writers who have stopped writing, and so on. "If they've stopped writing, how are they still writers?" Ha! I paused before saying something vague to the effect that it had to do with the Blanchot and Heidegger I'd been reading. Ugh. Forgive me for the glibness of this answer. I was tired and fading fast and unsure how much to say before falling asleep. Which is not to say that the Blanchot and Heidegger is not related. But the point I would have tried to get across, were I more awake and able to find the words, is that it's all related, all that I've been writing about here. But this is somehow still unacceptable.

My next post was a passage from Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady. Lloyd Mintern commented that the book has been "as much an influence on [his] personal history, as when [he] first read Alain Robbe-Grillet". I feel I know what he means. Though my reading of Montano's Malady was far from ideal. It took me three (very) sleepy weeks--a long time for a short book--so it was choppier than I would have liked. Even so, I found much to like in the book, as in Bartleby & Co. But more than anything, they made me think of my own problems writing--my own refusals. I feel an urge to write about this, along with a strong reluctance to do so. A voice tells me that I shouldn't write about this, shouldn't blog about it, shouldn't give in to the solipsistic impulse. (I know, it's a blog.) I've gotten away from writing whatever it is I was writing, in favor of writing about myself in terms of the books I'm reading. Or so it seems. Maybe it's just my imagination. I think it's that writing about this enables me to write about other things--existence, politics even. It's that, reading what I've been reading, the Vila-Matas books mentioned above and, of course, Proust and Beckett, I recognize possibilities. I recognize myself, in some sense.

Sometimes it seems easier to just stop--it comes so slowly, and I'm so often so tired. But I still feel that need to get something across, to myself if no one else.

Unfinishable

I began the last post in a burst of excitement. Having read the Kabat-Zinn passage last night, I immediately felt the urge to write about it in the context of my other reading. Then I was reminded of one thing and then another, and before I knew it I had a mammoth unfinishable blog post on my hands. I was led to Thomas Merton and Blanchot and Heidegger and then Josipovici and I was quoting passages and writing connective paragraphs and getting far away from the original thrust, though it all felt, and feels, intimately connnected. . . but it doesn't have to all be in one place, does it? Of course not. So. . . spreading it all out. . . (Incidentally, this is one of the many reasons--lack of time being another--contributing to the erratic schedule here of late.)

Wake Up

In Everyday Blessings, the book about mindful parenting which I mentioned previously, there is a chapter called "Live-In Zen Masters". In it, co-author Jon Kabat-Zinn talks some about his Zen training: "It's all about mindfulness and non-attachment, knowing who we are at the deepest levels, and knowing what we are doing, which paradoxically includes both not knowing and non-doing." He compares Zen training to parenting: "They both appeared to be about waking up to life itself. . ." and sees babies as akin to "live-in Zen Masters":

Zen Masters don't explain themselves. They just embody presence. They don't get hung up in thinking, or lost in theoretical musings about this or that. They are not attached to things being a certain way. They are not always consistent. One day does not necessarily have to be like the next. Their presence and their teachings can help us break through to a direct experiencing of our own true nature, and encourage us to find our own way, now, in this moment. They do this, not by telling us how, but by giving us endless challenges that cannot be resolved through thinking, by mirroring life back to us in its fullness, by pointing to wholeness. More than anything Zen Masters embody wakefulness and call it out of us.

Children are similar in many ways, especially when they are babies. The older they get, the harder it may be for us to see it. But their true nature is always present, and always mirroring our own, if we are willing to look, and to see.

Children have what might be called "original mind"--open, pure, unencumbered. They are undeniably and totally present. They are constantly learning, developing, changing, and requiring new responses from us. As they grow, they seem to challenge every place that we might be holding an expectation, a fixed opinion, a cherished belief, a desire for things to be a certain way. As babies, they so fill our lives and require so much attention to their physical and emotional needs that they continually challenge us to be present totally, to be sensitive, to inquire into what is actually happening, to risk trying something, and to learn from their responses to our attempts. They teach us how to be attuned to them, and to find joy and harmony in our connectedness with them. There is little time for theory, and it doesn't seem to help much anyway unless it is connected to practice.

Of course, children are not really Zen Masters. Children are children and Zen Masters are Zen Masters. But if we are able to look at our children with openness and receptivity, and see the purity of life expressing itself through them, at any age, it can wake us up at any moment to their true nature and to our own.

I read this passage last night, and a few things struck me about it. For one thing, the language about "knowing" and "not knowing and non-doing" reminds me specifically of Thomas Merton's essay titled "Love and Solitude", collected in Love and Living, an essay I had particular trouble with. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of "Love and Solitude":

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and the peace that is "heard" when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say where there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

I remember having trouble with this essay and that it reminded me of those kinds of writing that have given me the most difficulty--the kind of writing I've been struggling with recently, for example writing by Blanchot and Heidegger. It strikes me now, in copying out the passage above, that another pass at this Merton essay may be helpful to understanding Blanchot's "essential solitude". And words in the Kabat-Zinn passage, words like "fullness" and "presence" and "wake us up", also remind me of Blanchot and Heidegger (in my admittedly limited experience with each).

Of course, many people in the West have been drawn to Eastern traditions, such as Zen Buddhism, because they are dissatisfied with the spiritual life of the West. The West is often seen as spiritually bereft, as overly analytical or "rational", and so on. I'm sympathetic to this charge, though I am neither inclined nor prepared to enter into a detailed treatment of the topic in this space. As someone about to become a father, I am thus far persuaded that there is great wisdom in the approach to parenting described in Everyday Blessings (how well I will do it remains to be seen). What interests me here, however, are the ways in which the language at times reminds me of that language used in the writing I find difficult (but which in this context I do not find difficult), and what that might tell us about the philosophical and literary project of these writers--which matters to me because of how I conceive of its importance in the grand scheme of living in the modern world, including the ongoing project of living my own life, and the importance of art, literature in particular.

It seems to me that, among the reasons Blanchot and Heidegger are difficult, is that they are writing about ideas and concepts for which we lack either the sufficient vocabulary or the sufficient kinds of experience, or vocabulary for noting experiences, which perhaps amounts to much the same thing. It could be that we lack the vocabulary because we have been, for centuries, falsely employing concepts carelessly borrowed from our ancient predecessors. And it could be that the vocabulary we do use is confusing because it is unable to properly express the concepts under discussion (much as, in English, we lack a word sufficient to express the French jouissance).

I know I've made some claims that are both vague and grandiose, but I hope to be able to make at least some headway in future posts in articulating what I mean, along the way towards my understanding of it myself. I'll finish by saying that I hope it will become clearer why I insist on writing posts that are about some combination of babies and writing and philosophy and politics, and why most of those posts that seem unconnected are in fact connected, and in certain ways about the same thing.

The possibility of being self-propelled

Back in March, at his Black Mirrors site, Lloyd Mintern posted a fascinating piece called “Bridle” in which he writes about Piaget and the necessary egocentrism of children. Here's just part of it, towards the end:

Everyone was a child. There is a universal. What the child does not understand at first is just how incomparable life is; that is what he has to learn, why he wants constant explanations. The big discovery is that he is a person on his own. He does not start with himself, but finds himself among the others. He does not start out with the idea that he [is] unique, and adapt to a disappointing reality in which he is only one among others, all equally downtrodden and dull. No, he starts out believing others are more real than him, totally interesting, knowledgeable, and he has to find himself among this group. He has to disassociate from the others, who are threatened, it seems, by dullness, for after all, what do they know? It is like they are all children! So they should, and must, cooperate with his exciting adventure of creating a self–it is vital that he, the discovered center of attention, thrive! He grows more and more vivid to himself and excited by the prospects of a unique existence. In fact the building of a self is the consummate unselfish activity. He is astonished if adults accuse him of being self-centered. In fact, he is doing it for them, and they should be pleased with his progress. The child sees the possibility of being self-propelled, but he does not arrive in life with it, he finds it in the world that is a novelty. Babies come into the world prepared from afar, supplied, they are not weak, they are not undeveloped, but they are vessels . . .

Earlier in the post, Lloyd writes that "the child is in the middle of something when he is born, not at the beginning". He's not really talking about the same thing, but this line reminds me of the Bernhard passage that gives this blog its name:

No one ever cast a more damaging light on his relatives than Wertheimer, described them into the dirt. Hated his father, mother, sister, reproached them all with his unhappiness. That he had to continue existing, constantly reminding them that they had thrown him up into that awful existence machine so that he would be spewed out below, a mangled pulp. His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his son to pieces. Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about it cruelly by having children and throwing into the existence machine, he said, I thought. (The Loser, pp. 43-44)

It isn't necessary to hate our parents as Wertheimer did for us to recognize the truth of what is said here. We learn how to behave in the world, we learn what is "acceptable", how to be, through the actions and non-actions of our parents and the other adults in our lives. This much is obvious. But what does it mean? Maybe our parents were simply very busy and were unable to be attuned to our needs, moment-to-moment. Enough of this and perhaps we learn that no one will listen to us if we cry, so perhaps we learn not to cry. Or we learn some other way of avoiding the practice of allowing our true needs to become known. We might learn this about ourselves, that we tend to be emotionally distant, or that we tend to avoid expressing emotions. We might be able to take steps to overcome this in ourselves. Yet, still, when we have children of our own, how easy is it to fall back on what was done when we were children? And then to rationalize it away! ("This is what my parents did, and I turned out ok." Sure you did.)

It will come as no surprise that, along with the Proust and Beckett, Josipovici and Blanchot, I've been dipping into a variety of baby books and parenting books. (It may be more of a surprise when I say that I find the latter related to the former.) But before I get to a couple of those, let me talk a little about this matter of being born. We are born! What the hell! Where do we come from? There are the basic natural facts of it, of course, but then we have our own experiences and consciousness and we are here. Being. A calamity! A calamity? Why is this a calamity? This idea--that being born might be a calamity--is relatively new to me, on the face of it. And yet, when I identified something true in Bernhard's "existence machine", was I not to some extent recognizing this? I think so.

One of these books I've been reading is called Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Myla, incidentally, is Howard Zinn's daughter). (The idea of a parenting guide or book is an odd one. Parenting is hard enough as it is without having to hear from some strangers the right way to do something. This book isn't really like that, but the mere existence of such a book, as valuable as I'm finding it, somehow nags at me.) The argument is that the best way to approach things is through mindfulness--being mindful of our own responses to situations, mindful of the child's actual needs. Easier said than done, to be sure. One of the key concepts is "sovereignty"--recognizing the child as a sovereign being with his or her own "way". Anyway, they ask us to imagine what it is like for the child, from the beginning:

We might start by imagining what it is like in the uterus, in a place that is warm, wet, and protected, with constant, rhythmic sounds, a feeling of being contained, held, rocked . . . a world of undifferentiated wholeness, where there is nothing wanting, nothing missing. [...]

When we are born, we leave this harmonious world and emerge into a new and totally different one. There might be harsh light and cold air. We may hear loud, unpredictable noises and feel roughness or hardness against our skin. We feel hunger for the first time. All of this is occurring as raw, pure experience, with no filters of knowing anything. Imagine being thrust into this foreign environment, where you depend entirely on the inhabitants' ability to understand your language and to be sensitive and responsive to your whole being, and to what you may need in any given moment.

What might that be like? How do we, as parents, approach this situation? How are our possible approaches constrained by the amount of available time we have? How do we understand this other being? Given that we have problems of our own, how do we avoid perpetuating them through the child?

I imagined this post, as I unfortunately tend to imagine all posts, as a massive, wide-ranging one, in which I try to fit in everything on my mind touching the topic at hand. But that's not possible. There is much to say; there are implications. But I will close here by noting that, in my view, this basic situation--the fact of being born, of being (oh! how I throw this word around, as if I understood it!), and what that really entails for the child and the parents--this situation suggests a certain political response. And a literary one.