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July 10th, 2005
06:56 pm - Misanthropy for the Masses
Last January I picked up a slim little volume called "On the Suffering of the World," by Arthur Schopenhauer. The little paperback contained the essay entitled "On the Suffering of the World," as well as about a half a dozen other essays. I had read some things about Schopenhauer, but never actually read him outside of an excerpted form.
Anyway, it was pretty good reading. It came from a series released by Penguin in 2004. It's the Great Ideas series. I know Penguin's done this type of thing before. This is the first time I've ever collected a paperback series. I've got a thing against paperbacks, in general. I tend to associate the form itself with light reading. Light mainstream reading. Shit I don't have the time for, basically.
The majority of books that I read are simply unavailable in paperback. The last one I got--not a Great Ideas--was "Pattern Recognition." These little Penguins make some interesting reading available at a low price. I appreciate that. The layout is clean, and the covers are as trendy as sleepingbags in hell. That's what they look like, over there and to the left.
They remind me of the Mathematics for the Masses books the WPA put out, back in the day. I do wish there was a broader range of philosophical discussion back in the States. So I guess it's nice to see Penguin nickle and dime their back catalog for the sake of enlightening public discourse. Unfortunately, this series is released by Penguin UK. Which is to say, American bookstores won't have it.
But for my part, these are easy books to carry around, and they're designed to be read in relatively small doses . . . the chapters and excerpts are either really short or broken up. All of them that I've read have been very pleasurable to read. The editors of this series took care to select readerly translations from those books written outside of English.
And, most importantly, they are easily digestible during the times at which I used to read the newspaper. Convinced that buying and reading The Taipei Times, from front to back, every day was causing irreparable brain damage, I swore it off.
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June 23rd, 2005
01:06 pm - You Used To Be Cool, Man
I finished reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. The long story short is that I don't think he's written a thought provoking book since The Difference Engine.
I read Neuromancer when I was thirteen years old. I have since re-read it at a rate of about 2/3rds a year. That's ten times. I thought, by the cover, that it would be a pretty conventional read. When I was thirteen. By that time, I had read a few Ian Flemming James Bonds and the Douglas Adams Hitchiker series.
The first time I read it, I was baffled at points. I simply didn't understand what was being laid down. Conceptually. The idea behind a hallucination, for instance, took at least a week to figure out. Conceptually. Took me years to get a hold on the reality of it.
Or the idea of Sim-Stim. Simulated stimulation. The thought of Case travelling around in Molly's body, experiencing the phenomenal world as she does, but having his ego totally divorced from the situations she was in was mesmerizing. I recall in particular the scene in which she was trying to steal the Dixie-Flatliner Construct and she broke a leg.
The theological implications of that were staggering, at the time.
It may have been that it was with Neuromancer that I first learned to look at a book as a tool used for thinking.
And then there's Pattern Recognition. I get the feeling that if I had swallowed that bloated, dumb, book whole I'd have a nicer take on it. Sadly, I went through it at about two chapters a day, with a break or two. Most books I read, if I go over twenty pages in a day, I'm in danger of losing the thread. I feel like I'm not reading carefully.
Pattern Recognition does not reward careful reading, in my opinion. And it's sad to recall some of Gibson's better work when reading this novel. It is set in the present day, and he does his best to evoke passages and sentiments and themes from his earlier offerings. The protagonist's name is spelled "Cayce." Neuromancer's was "Case." (Both his first and most recent works focus on one character exclusively, as opposed to the rotation POV's from his other stuff.) The new stuff is like an echo. There's nothing There.
I stumbled on his homepage. It's here . There are a few threads on his blog about Pattern Recognition. He mentions a comparison between that and The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. I think he acually promoted the comparison (I sure as hell would. . .). But I think Pattern Recognition is to The Crying of Lot 49 what The Stand by Stephen King is to The Plague by Albert Camus.
( Enlarged cover of Neuromancer )
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June 21st, 2005
11:47 pm - Like Dolores Day
This morning, I woke up early. About half an hour early. One of the few pleasures of my morning is waking up to piss a half an hour early. The BBC comes on at eight o'clock. It's an hour-long broadcast. Somehow, listening to English people helps. Especially the feeling of cultural superiority I get when they attempt between-segment banter. When you were raised hearing Bill Bonds ask Don Shane "Didja break your wrist playing tennis, faggot?" you can't get into the BBC's banter.
But this morning, one of their features was the impact of existentialism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. June 21st being Jean-Paul Sartre's one hundredth birdthday.
The feature took the form of an interview. What struck me wasn't so much the content, which was pretty tame and predictable by anyone familiar with Sartre's work. But the idea that such a segment might inspire some people to go out and start reading the man's books cheered me up considerably.
Of course, the insufferable comments made by the hosts after the feature quickly brought me to my senses.
But I almost thought I was dreaming for just a second.
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June 14th, 2005
11:12 pm - Haruki Murakami
So Murakami's got a huge new novel out. I don't intend to read it for another three or four years. I've read about seven of his books, numerous times. I used to like his work a lot more than I now do. However, I feel like I owe him some kind of debt for taking me to Kenzaburo Oe. And that goes beyond liking his work.
But this is the thing. There's mention of Japanese critics hostile to Murakami. Murakami doesn't help matters by claiming to have created a new prose style in Japan--that is, the use of the personal-pronoun "I." It's a fair guess that the bulk of these critics are conservative. And it's an equally fair guess that they hold Oe over Murakami as, crudely put, the better writer.
It's funny to me that Murakami shuns the establishment and embraces the public back home and, abroad, is totally embraced by the establishment and the public.
Anyway, I have a joke. Some of you have heard it before. It goes like this.
What is Haruki Murakami's wet-dream?
To have a son born with three brains!
New York Times Article.
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April 17th, 2005
04:45 pm - Cold Mountain Meditation
The name Han Shan means Cold Cliff, or Cold Peak, or Cold Mountain. This is one of his poems, from the collection *Cold Mountain," translated by Burton Watson:
When people see the man of Cold Mountain
They all say, "There's a crackpot!
Hardly a face to make one look twice,
His body wrapped in nothing but rags. . .
The things we say he doesn't understand;
The things he says we wouldn't utter!"
A word to those of you passing by--
Try coming to Cold Mountain sometime!
Han Shan probably wrote somewhere in the eighth century, in what is referred to as the Golden Age of Chinese poetry and at the apex of Zen Buddhism in China.
It's still a source of dispute, among his commentators, whether he is talking about himself or the mountain hermitage he calls his home. Those of his readers who come from the East typically vote for the former. Those from the West, the later.
It should go without saying that I have my own reading. If that doesn't interest you, at least scroll down and read the poems of his that I've posted. I think they're pretty good, and if I can turn at least one person on to Han Shan, I'll be happy.
I would be very receptive to criticism on any of what's to follow. Let it be known, however, that I am fully aware of the breadth of the strokes I am using, here.
Literature in the "West," really didn't get off the ground until five hundred and twenty-nine, with the foundation of the first Benedictine monasteries. So says the W.W. Norton company, anyway. I find this date agreeable with my take on things.
But this historical point assumes the view that Literature--strictly speaking--must be written down. Personally, I add to that that it [the work, that is] must have been written down with intention of having it [the work] read at a later date. Another assumption is that Literature serves some function different from writing on anything ranging from the natural sciences (including physics) to philosophy (including metaphysics). E.M. Forrester has suggested that Literature's foremost aim is to establish some kind of mood or "atmosphere" in the mind of the audience and I find this attitude highly suggestive.
Most anthologies of Western Lit. begin with Beowulf and--subordinately--lyrics, saints' lives and histories. The Greeks get skipped over primarily because they were churning out plays and songs.
Writing in China has its roots in divination, beginning around 1700 BCE. The very first writings were on fortune-telling tortoise shells and in the form of inscriptions on bronze vessels.
Among the first Chinese poems is the I Ching, the Book of Changes. It seems to me, from what I've read, that the I Ching could be rightly considered the foundation of Chinese literature (in the same way in which the Bible could be seen as the foundation of Western literature). I don't put much stock in arguments of this variety, either way, but I only mention it to illustrate the apparent magnitude of its significance to poetry in China.
And all of this is just to say that the history of literature is tied to the history of religion. Intimately tied. Walk into any Introduction to the History of Art course on any campus anywhere in the world on the very first lecture and the instructor will tell you that the very first human contact with any art whatsoever was religious in nature. I would advocate adopting a similar chestnut in terms of studying Literature.
Are you bored with this? Yeah, fuck the preliminaries. Here, here's another poem:
Have I a body or have I none?
Am I who I am or am I not?
Pondering the questions,
I sit leaning against the cliff while the
years go by.
Till the green grass grows between my feet
And the red dust settles on my head.
And the men of the world, thinking me dead,
Come with offering of wine and fruit
to lay by my corpse.
Now, this is a major aspect of his work. The celebration of his contemplative mind. It's a song of himself he often sings. It's not hard to see how Chinese and Japanese sects caught on to what he was doing. By a cursory look of things, Han Shan gets a bit more respect in Japan than he does in China. That's only a superficial take on things, though.
I still wonder how they (those of the Zen community, that is) ever got a hold of his writings.
I can, however, tell you that Han Shan--and many other "Zen" poets--gained a wider audience in the English-speaking world through two vessels. The first, more popular strain of transmission would be the so-called Beat movement. *The Dharma Bums,* by Kerouac, is dedicated to Han Shan. And, in the preface to Cold Mountain, [the translator], warmly acknowledges Gary Snyder's contributions to the task of translating Han Shan's work.
Apart from the work of Snyder (and others), Han Shan made his way into 1950's America through the Japanese Zen-scholar, D.T. Suzuki, as well. He was one of the--if not the--first Zen apologists that gained a wide a wide-readership in the West. I would place Suzuki's introduction of Han Shan as one more intimately familiar with his work. I would place the Beats' introduction as one with a wider audience.
And the reception in the states--even with Suzuki as a conduit--is vastly different from the actual Zen communities in Japan (and maybe China, still?) where he is still revered as a kind of saint. Now, let's have another look at his work. I don't have commentaries readily available, but it should be pretty easy to see two very different interpretive strands arising from this poem. Here. . .
“Han-tan is my home,” she said,
“And the lilt of the place is in my songs.
Living here so long
I know all the old tunes handed down.
You're drunk? Don't say you're going home!
Stay! The sun hasn't reached its height.
In my bedroom is an embroidered quilt
So big it covers all my silver bed!”
One secular interpretation might run along the lines of—Here's a fond memory. It seems to be a very enticing memory, you'd definitely want to linger on it for awhile. It is titillating in it's own, quaint way.
The more religious-minded take on it renders the above interpretation unintelligible. In the East, and especially in the Zen tradition, once your perception of reality has been fundamentally altered (that is, once you've hit upon satori), you don't go back. The more sexually suggestive passages in his work, and there are a few, are largely--it is said in the introduction--viewed as allegorical in nature and can only be truly appreciated through proper exegesis.
My interpretation begins with the fact that nobody really knows who the hell Han Shan was and the very widely-held assumption that "Han Shan" is, in fact, a pseudonym. With that as my starting point, I suggest looking for what motivated the writer to adopt the name.
Wouldn't it be so very Zen to attribute the authorship of a poem to--literally--the environment that produced it? Taking it for granted that this mountain would express itself through human hands, in a medium only to be understood by humans? As if the mountain were to take possession of him and only be able to compel him to write. As if whatever was on his mind at the moment inspiration took hold fell from his brain to the parchment. As if the writing were not a volitional act.
As if the composition of these poems was the result of a religious experience.
And that's as far as my synthesis of two wholly different strands of interpretation goes.
Another Han Shan poem.
Kindreds
An appreciative essay on Charles Bukowski
Tom Waits
Quick one on Jack Kerouac
Hunter S. Thompson
An Advertisement for Bill Laswell
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March 23rd, 2005
11:57 pm - This Is What We Read In Class Today
My mind is like an autumn moon
Shining clean and clear in the green pool.
No, that's not a good comparison.
Tell me, how should I explain?
--Han Shan
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March 22nd, 2005
01:02 am - Three Years by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov wasn't known as a novelist. He was a dramatist, and his novel is dramatic at points. It's about an aging man marrying a younger woman. He loves her, she doesn't love him. The marriage is without love or joy for three years.
I picked this up because I wanted to read some Russian literature. I really fucked up.
This is not a good book, in my opinion. There's none of the authority of Tolstoy, here. There's no psychological insight in the fashion of Dostoevsky. No Gogolian goofiness. No Nabokovian naughtiness. None of Pushkin's puns. And it also lacks the passion of Turgenev.
It's hard to say what, if anything, this damn book has going for it. There's certainly no drama, the scope of the story and the length of the book (about ninety pages) prevent that. This is a draft to a play in the form of a novel basically.
My guess is, the publisher, Hesperus Press Limited, is scouring the vaults looking for shit that's fallen out of copyright and then paying off academics to translate (if need be) works that just aren't out on the shelves right now.
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March 13th, 2005
10:55 pm - From *Slouching Toward Nirvana* by Charles Bukowski
cicada
writers love to use the word
"cicada" in a poem.
it makes them believe that
they are there, that they
have done it.
every time I see this word
in a poem, I think, damn
it, haven't the editors
caught on yet?
that it's a con?
a way to milk the game?
and look at me:
here I'm using it:
"cicada."
well, that means that
this poem surely will get
published.
see?
it works.
Essay on Love Is A Dog from Hell
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06:42 pm - Kingdom of Fear
I'd read precious little from Hunter S. Thompson before his death. Exceprts from Hell's Angels, a few famous Rolling Stone essays, and some bits from ESPN. It was only a day or so after hearing of his suicide that I decided to pick up a book of his and see what he could do with an entire book.
Page One was out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas so I decided to pick up Kingdom of Fear. This is supposed to be his memoir. It was first published in 2003.
The cover is a photograph of Hunter S. Thompson giving the camera the middle finger with one hand and holding a drink in the other. He's got an unlit cigarette in his mouth and he's standing in front of a NO SMOKING sign.
Ballsy.
There are, in fact, over twenty photographs of Hunter S. Thompson in this book. Most of them are pictures of the man without a shirt, brandishing a gun. There're also a few shots of him with celebrities. I can't say the photos detract from the writing, but they make me feel a little uneasy.
The book opens with a story about getting grilled by the FBI when he was eight or so. This pretty much sets the tone for the book. It's all one long ramble about his brushes with the authorities and his dealings with the legal system.
What makes this book such a drag is that Hunter S. Thompson spends the majority of the time trying to convince us of who he is. He's an outlaw, he maintains. Not only that, but an outlaw within the ranks of Jack kerouac and Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs. He can't tell you enough how badass he is.
So, then, he truly is an American writer.
And, there's some really great writing in here, but it's in such small doses that when you stumble across it, it seems shocking. Shocking that this tired old man can drag his eye from himself and look at the world outside.
When he gets down to telling you stories about what he has done, and where he has been, you're happy. You think--"Alright, he's really on the move now." And then he comes off it and lets you in on what these stories mean, and what a rebel he is. And then you think "Great, more of this shit."
I have no doubt that if I'd been reading anything at all before I was born, coming across a piece by Hunter S. Thompson (in it's natural setting: a periodical), I'd have been delighted. His prose must've seemed self-assured and raging mad.
But reading him toward the end of his life, I get the impression he wasn't so sure of himself. Kingdom of Fear is a volume in which a tired old writer tries to convince himself that he was once important.
Image stolen from Monkeysvsrobots.com.
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February 17th, 2005
11:21 pm - Arthur Schopenhauer: On the Indestructability of Our Essential Being by Death
"If now, instead of looking *inwards,* we again look *outwards* and take an objective view of the world which presents itself to us, then death will certainly appear to us as a transition into nothingness; on the other hand, however, birth will appear as a coming forth out of nothingness. But neither the one nor the other can be unconditionally true, for they possess the reality only of the phenomenonal world. And that we should in some sense or other survive death is no greater miracle than that of procreation, which we have before our eyes every day. What dies goes to where all life orginates, its own included. From this point of view our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on the loan. Death announces itself frankly as the end of the individual, but in this individual there lies the germ of a new being. Thus nothing that dies dies for ever, but nothing that is born receives a fundamentally new existence."
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January 11th, 2005
09:53 pm - Book Report: Love Is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
 The last poem I'd read would've been Dante's Inferno and Purgatario. I'm pretty sure the best poem I ever read was the Bhagavad-Gita. This, Love Is a Dog from Hell, may be the first collection of poems by a single author I've ever read. I sampled a bit of Kerouac's, but never took the plunge. Henry Miller's poetry is shit. Goethe has passages that still resonate today, depending on the translation.
Any living poet, I'd say, has his or her own band backing them. Factually speaking, I know precious little about what's going on. In terms of contemporary poetry. I guess if I can say anything at all about it, it's that there's entirely too much of it.
I've read my fair share of contemporary anthologies, though. One of my favorites is called A New Geography of Poets (edited by Edward Field, Gerald Locklin, and Charles Stetler). There's some amazing work in there. It's a book I should have brought with me. The editors decided on taking a region of the U.S. and compiling work by the writers in each, arranging the book in terms of "Midwest," "North Paciffic," and "East Coast," and so on. Sounds interesting. The funny thing is, you don't really get much out of it because everyone is living in the city and everyone is morally bankrupt. (One poem in there is about an amateur pornstress.)
Not that there's anything to be held against moral bankruptcy. Shit, most've the people I know filed chapter eleven before they hit their teens. My point is that there's not much variety in terms of subject matter or in terms of voices.
You might suspect that all of this is leading up to how influential Bukowski is. You'd be half right. If he is underappreciated in the United States, and plenty say he is, it's precisely because he was so influential. His style (granting that it had its antecedants) permeates much of what is still being written . And by style I mean a terse deadpan, I suppose. Yeah, terse deadpan does it for me, for now. His ability to accept himself fully and write without the least bit of inhibition should serve as an inspiration to any artist, is another point I'd mention.
But Bukowski is one among many in a long tradition going back to the earliest traces of poetry. And what's more, I'd say that if Bukowski had been less influential contemporary poetry would probably been better off, provided I don't have to define "contemporary poetry."
I'm not so interested in who influenced who, to be quite honest. But I am interested in *why* Bukowski was influential. I'm pretty ignorant on the subject of his biography, and plan to keep that way until I read through more of his stuff (currently, I've read about four of his novels and three collections of short stories, and one anthology--by far the best reading experience). I read through Love is a Dog From Hell and the first section of the book is called "one more creature dizzy with love." The subject is a relationship (more likely a composite one) that fizzles out. I guess Bukowski had a rep for being dirty. He advertised himself as such at one point in his career.
The first section--the whole book, really--has it's fair share of blowjobs. But their usually pretty funny situations. Or sad situations. I'd throw all of the racier elements aside, though, and
I'd wager that Bukowski's still read as widely as he is for passages such as this, it called "a gold pocket
watch:"
my grandfather was a tall German
with a strange smell on his breath.
he stood very straight
in front of his small house
and his wife hated him
and his children thought him odd.
I was six the first time we met
and he gave me all his war medals.
the second time I met him
he gave me his gold pocket watch.
it was very heavy and I took it home
and wound it very tight
and it stopped running
which made me feel bad.
I never saw him again
and my parents never spoke of him
nor did my grandmother
who had long ago
stopped living with him.
once I asked about him
and they told me
he drank too much
but I liked him best
standing very straight
in front of his house
and saying "hello, Henry, you
and I, we know each other."
You'll notice right off that in all of his poetry, he only capitalizes proper nouns while shouting and screaming take place in capitals. I only mention this as an aside. Now, you'll get the drift maybe ten poems into this set that Bukowski isn't what you'd call a socialable man. In fact, every failed love affair that is touched upon in this work (and his greater body of work)--as well just about any foray into the public sphere--just goes to drive the point home that much further.
Moments like the one above, particularly with the line "Hello, Henry, you and I, we know each other," tend to make me think that Bukowski accepted this--no better word for it, but God how I hate using it--alienation. That, perhaps, everything he ever wrote was an expression of his desire to carry on in spite of this fact, may be one of his motivations in writing (though we'll never really know, will we?). He writes to a public that he knows will never accept him. I think he finds the courage to "carry on" in moments such as those described in "a gold pocket watch."
Other lines, such as:
people are not good to one another.
people are not good to one another.
people are not good to one another.
. . .
who put this brain insde me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
"no."
. . . seem to bolster this point. The goal for Bukowski, the ethical goal, at least (what not only saves him from bankruptcy but leaves him with a little to put aside) is to carry on *in spite of.*
The payoff? What do I get in return? What makes it all worthwhile?
Here, this is called "A horse with greenblue eyes."
what you see is what you see:
madhouses are rarely
on display.
that we still walk about and
scratch ourselves and light
cigarettes
is more the miracle
than bathing beauties
than roses and the moth.
to sit in a small room
and rink a can of beer
and roll a cigarette
while listening to Brahms
on a small red radio
is to have come back
from a dozen wars
alive
listening to the sound
of the refrigerator
as bathing beauties rot
and the oranges and the apples
roll away
What makes it all worth the while? Little things, mostly. The day to day things that constitute simple pleasures, and the small amusements of becomming absorbed in the sound of the refrigerator as your fruit spills out onto the kitchen floor. Lest you think I'm trying to make Bukowski into something that he's not, check this out. I don't reprint this last excerpt to support anything that I've previously said. I throw it down here to sort of point to a crossroad where Bukowski the Good Read and Bukowski the Good Laugh intersect. This poem is about a buddy of his, a childhood buddy, named Eugene. The title of the
poem is called "the bee."
This Eugene always seems to best the narrator in anything they compete in and he has a tendency to overdo it, to boot. He wound up as a commanding officer in the Navy. Bukowski writes:
I imagine him an old man now
in a rocking chair
with his false teeth
and glass of buttermilk. . .
while drunk
I fingerfuck this 19 year old groupie
in bed with me.
but the worst part is
. . .
Eugene wins again
because he's not even thinking
about me.
Another Poem by Charles Bukowski
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January 5th, 2005
10:52 pm - *The Magic Mountain* by Thomas Mann
"A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivical givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired b the lack of critique, All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal--then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him--even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why--he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word."
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January 4th, 2005
November 28th, 2004
11:35 pm - Book Report: H.G. Wells' *A SHort History of the World*
So I finished *A Short History of the World* written by H.G. Wells. I actually picked it up after reading about Kerouac reading it in his hometown library in *Vanity of Duluoz.* Well, okay, actually he was reading *Outline of History.* I doubt he ever finished it because it's fucking huge. Huge.
This is what H.G. Wells says about the *Short History* in its preface:
"From it the reader should be able to get that general view of history which is so necessary a framework for the study of a particular period or the history of a particular country. It may be found useful as a preparatory excursion before the reading of the author's much fuller and more explicit *Outline of History* is undertaken. But its special end is to meet the needs of the busy general reader, too driven to study the maps and time charts of that *Outline* in detail, who wishes to refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventures of mankind."
That's pretty much what sold me on this book. The "Fragmentary conceptions" bit hit close to home. A couple of years ago, I read D.H. Lawrence's *Movements in European History.* After that, I started working my
way through histories centered around a particular epoch, or a particular country. I started reading more biographies. After awhile, I lost sight of the larger picture. And by larger picture, I mean the larger picture with the left margin being at the big bang.
Think about that picture for just a moment. How does the history of everything appear to your mind?
It was a sped-up montage, to mine. And that was all well and good, But what disturbed me was that this montage fell all to shit when I slowed it to down to the point where I could see any detail.
Well's *History* doesn't dwell on particularly small details. What it does manage to do--quite well--is give you the timeline you need to place those details of your own that you've picked up over the years. I imagine the shelves are full of books that serve this same end. There's no doubt in my mind that books such as this (not many like it have been written over the past twenty years) are written for exactly this purpose.
What sets Wells' attempt apart from the rest is the potboiler bestseller attitude he brings into the writing of it. He keeps the story moving at just the right speed. Not once does he lose his momentum, not once did I feel that he should slow down or speed up. What I'm saying is, the experience of reading this is simply joyful. His presentation of humanity's lower points are tinged with a sadness most scholars wouldn't fess up to feeling. And his eye is always trained on the light he believes all organisms are drawn to.
And like a good scientist, Wells makes a host of predictions at the end of his little book. Almost all of them turn out to be accurate.
I don't want to spoil anything for those who I know are going to read it. I will throw down one passage I've selected at random:
"And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century BC was in the history of humanity. For not only were these Greek Philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe and man's place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its sublimest levels, but as we shall tell later Gautama Buddha was the teaching in India and Confucius and Lao Tse in China. From Athens to the Pacific the human mind was astir."
On average, I'd say you get one passage like this every two pages or so.
Another excerpt from this book.
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November 12th, 2004
11:50 pm - Book Report
So I finished *Vanity of Duluoz* by Jack Kerouac about a week and a half ago. Decent read. It's a tirade against his wife. It gets pretty funny. We're not privy to what occasioned the argument. Not the particulars, anyway. We know early on that Kerouac's motivated to defend himself and resort to the appeal to his "vanity." He goes about establishing his right to this "vanity" by an appeal to his boyhood days in Lowell, Massachusetts. He tells us a lot about his football days.
I don't particularly like football. Maybe you don't, either. Who fucking cares what we make of football. What he does well is establish a nostalgia for Saturday morning football games at the local park. Didn't have those? Yeah, me neither. Funny how he does that, huh?
And he goes up and goes to high school. He attributes his success to a liberal dose of truancy. Where does he go? Why, to the Lowell Public Library of course! Where would you go?
And it comes to pass that his coach has this thing against him and won't let him open the games. Suffice it to say, for the sake of brevity, he's held back in football because he's French Canadian. Somehow, a talent scout catches wind of his performances (and they're backed up by the newspapers, he could play). He goes to Columbia, encounters the same kind of discrimination, and then joins the Merchant Marines.
World War II is on and he goes around the world, through mine fields, dodging sub patrols, and generally acting like an antisocial asshole in the kitchen and then getting shitfaced on shoreleave. He climbs a mountain. He fears for his life. He wakes up in some family's livingroom unaware of how he got there.
When he finally gets back to the states, he marries some rich chick, moves to Gross Pointe, MI, and then hangs around White Lake and Milford on the weekends. He gets a job with GM and spends his days in the accounting office reading literary criticism.
He gets fed up with being domesticated, gets the fuck out of Dodge, winds up on another Merchant Marine ship. Writes some astounding passages regarding walking around on an empty vessel that had carried five hundred tons of explosives through a Nazi minefield (which he piloted, mind you).
He gets back to New York, hits old stomping ground at Columbia. He meets up with William S. Burroughs, gets fucked up a lot, gets in one really good fight, and then gets involved in theis quasi-Dorian Gray murder. He goes to a jail while the lawyers clear him of being an accessory after the fact, hangs out with some Italian mobsters doing life, his father dies, and then he buries the old man.
Now, this goes on for 268 pages. He constantly refers to "wifey." He also has a few running jokes that I don't want to spoil but, well, they're there. There's also several anti-hippie rants which are choice, as well disparaging remarks towards acid-heads. His scorn for Communism, and Communist art in particular, is fucking priceless. He's in top form, there. Here's a guy who, as one guy put it, never said a bad word about anyone. But man, get him going on the Bolshevik Revolution and you start to feel sorry for the poor bastards that pissed him off.
And let's not forget the passages where he must've been drunk and starts feeling sorry for people. That's where it starts getting a thick, for my tastes. Although, it'd be unfair not to mention the fact that after his sympathetic jags, he usually chronicles, in bemused detail, how he winds of either fucking the person over or witnessing the person fucking him or herself over. Comedy with a capital K, people.
What brings me in to *Vanity of Duluoz,* what kept me coming back and back, again and again, was the level of maturity present in the work. He's plenty self-disparaging. And it's funny. It's not just him dumping on himself so that he might dig himself back out into the light of day. No, it's more the tone and timbre of one guy saying to the other "Listen to how fucked up I was as a kid."
Anyhow. This was my return to Kerouac. I'd read five of his books. Reread three of them. I'll reread this one. *The Dharma Bums,* that's where I started. His novels so consistently entertain me that I've found it best to go back to my favorites again and again as opposed to seeking out new writings.
I was worried that I might not like this one. I do. I think it might be his very best. He tells the simple story of how he became a writer.
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November 9th, 2004
12:11 am - No Shit
"We do not know how this disaster occurred. The excavators note what appears to be scattered plunder and the marks of the fire. But the traces of a very destructive earthquake have also been found. Nature alone may have destroyed Cnossos, or the Greeks may have finished what the earthquake began."
H.G. Wells
*A Short History of the World*
At about twelve o'clock--I won't say "midnight" because the official numbers aren't in, yet--I was reading this. I was listening to Can: Live (1971-1977) and reading the above passage. I noticed that the floor was actually moving beneath my feet.
It was the largest, longest earthquake I've yet experienced.
In case you're wondering, The Can: Live discs are fucking incredible. The best Can release I've ever heard.
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November 4th, 2004
12:36 am
S'posing you're a soldier who gets the diarhetic runs just as the enemy is attacking and you're supposed to crawl up already smelling of death in your pants to take a look at somebody else's poor pants, do you blame that on society? Do you blame it on society that a seventy-year-old woman lies in bed paralyed as if a great stone was on her chest even after ten months of hopeful waiting and perfect care from her children? Blame it on society that a New Bedford fisherman is caught in ice-cold water in raging seas afloat in his life belt in the night, crying to God, to Stella Maris, forgot to bring his razor blade in his watchpocket (as I'd done throughout the sea war) so he could at least let the blood out of his wrists and faint before choking, before choking like my German boy, alone, forsaken by his father in both ways, weeping for mother mercy that ain't there in your brute creation sea?
No, blame it on poor hunks Sprintime Bud with the rain dew on it. Blame it on the 'sticky little leaves' that Clause daid was the first thought that made him cry in the reformatory.
--Jack Kerouac
*Vanity of Duluoz*
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February 18th, 2003
06:55 pm - American Writers
There is one thing American Writers do better than anyone else in the world: Writing about driving. NO ONE, ANYWHERE does it better. You will not find a rewarding passage on the pleasure of operating an automobile in the works of Kenzaburo Oe. Nor will you find one in the pages of that Hungarian guy who lost his right nut when he was four. I have yet to see anyone tackle this subject better than an American. I will leave the Europeans to their joys experienced through trains and other forms of public transit, to be sure, I will not take that away from them. If you want to read an exciting story about sitting in an infants vomit while on the city bus, there are hundreds of Polish short stories out there for you. Chinese women write great stories about walking away from their abusive husbands on bound feet. Russians tell great anecdotes about horse-drawn sleighs, but NO ONE outside of those writers born and raised on American soil can write a sustained piece on driving. Think about that, asshole.
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