18 December 2009
“I know what that one is! It's a Star Wars magnet to wear on your head!!”
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Birth of a Novel: Efforts to Cling. Being in mid birthing process such assessment is no doubt premature, but I imagine that most everyone who's ever been in any birthing process is real excited about being out the other side of it. (Incidentally, my comment upon the glory of Alexandra's birth (experts called in, rushing her from womb to resuscitator); Theresa refusing drugs all the way [I woulda been screaming for 'em, I'm positive] was, “...and they don't want to allow women in combat.”)
After ulrike's weinglas, gudrun's violin I was desperate for something entirely different. It tapped a corner of my personality and psyche, but it had made me focus waaaay too much on all that. just shit and ashes. So I decided to write a novel centered on an asshole, predicated on forgiveness. Not that the asshole would be the biggest asshole in the world, just that his...character flaws...would be those that piss me off the most. Hypocrisy, pettiness, classism. A judge that I'd stood before in the Royal Courts of Justice jumped to mind.
It had been a hearing that, obviously, I'd lost, and appealed with partial but unsatisfactory success. I hadn't presented my position as well as I regularly do, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The judge's analysis and willingness to consider the arguments...were never evident. He was more into, mainly, showing off for his staff, who were justifiably embarrassed by his performance on that day, though to be fair they did seem to be proud of him otherwise. Now it may be that the guy's neither really bad nor especially as shamelessly incompetent as I got the idea that he is...the character's not him...it's my extrapolating what he showed me that day into a fictitious history of a character. And SO, if it turns out that everything I extrapolated is factual, it's not legally actionable because I made it up, neh?
But the point is not to point out that he's probably some variation of unjustifiable clod, that much is evident. The point is to reference the forces that he was unable to counter, that turned him that way; the point is that however lousy one might be at their job they often do have a family, and friends or acquaintances; and that they care about in some manner. The question is-given that he's bright enough to know better-what mutated sense of duty could possess him to stand there making an ass out of himself on a regular basis like that? With no hope of redemption, because he doesn't begin to get it. It has to be someone else's fault, the idiot must be forgiven. Hardly original suppositions, but you can see why it's been a troubling write, my natural inclination is against giving much weight to such concessions even when I make them.
So there's this unsympathetic guy who's been battered by societal expectations and thinks he deserves his societal misinterpretation as hot shit; as someone fit to rule on anything. And, as the narrator, I'm desperately trying to....not like him, but offer some apologia for the existenz, some, any explanation for the....let's face it: poor, dumb clod.
Yes, this is my variation on the gateway to forgiveness. A necessary prelude.
Now, obviously, I'm not going to write about that crap all the time. I need a break, I need a frame of reference. So there's a black janitor from New Orleans or Chicago ( it goes back and forth, the problem being that I can't write Chicago patois, but I would prefer him from there ) who just won the lottery. Heart of gold, protestant work ethic, maybe the spirits noticed. He's an amalgamation of a lot of people that I knew when I lived-incredibly happily-in the Black parts of Baton Rouge, but especially the guy who lived above me when I lived downtown maybe 3000 feet from the statue of Huey P. Long in the park and another couple hundred to the capital itself. That guy was soul incarnate, and not just because he turned me onto Rick James. A few years later I flew back from a hitchhiking misadventure to Mexico (to tell the truth I got stuck in Corpus Christi), doctors telling me maybe my foot has to be cut off. As the fates would have it, that guy was the security guard. He paid for my television for a week. He showed up a couple times a day, being happy, talking shit. He calmed 'em down when I occasionally got in wheelchairs and tried to head on up the coast...I read A Confederacy of Dunces during that hospital stay, too. It was a pretty good one, no one cut my foot off, it got better.
I've never auditioned so many characters for a novel. I bet I wrote and threw out 50, maybe I should have kept the prog rock guy, but he keeps coming back to me in a variation that I may be able to play later.
So what else I've kept are:
I mean, yeah! it's a colossal fucking mess!! Every single character is written in a different style, when they meet the styles try and merge...I'm more into dynamics than plots. Most all of the writers that I love have either consciously or subconsciously considered plots secondary and I've always been there, too....writing is about, in no particular order, in some combination of disorder; being entertaining, making someone catch their breath, and making a statement worth making. Anything less is, as the great Truman Capote wrongly said about another genius, “typing.”
So this birth could go a lot of ways. I'd be very surprised if I ever felt as strongly about the literary merit of Efforts to Cling [I had a reasonably bad hangover one morning, and Amelia came home reading the morning paper out loud, about stupid Tony Blair, and the phrase took ground in my cerebellum or somewhere] as ulriike's weinglas, gudrun's violin . It was never meant to be ambitious, it was always meant to be brief. It's my foot into surrealism and see if I like it. It's still very much breaking: it could be a good novel or it could turn out to be such crap that I have to flush it. I've struggled with it for several years for a lot of reasons, not least because I'm not particularly good with plots, and also because I am better at thinking up, noticing, interesting characters, and defining them quickly. It's less on that, more on that.
I say it's a surrealist work, with limited definition. Literaryists may dump it into the “magical realism” of Gabriel Garcia Màrquez. It's not a comparison that I'd welcome, he's the greatest living writer in the world, my stuff is good but it unquestionably lacks his elegance. It's flattering to consider that I use the same letters as him, any comparison after that I'm gonna suffer. Categories are bullshit, if you really think about it. Màrquez writes Màrquez, I write me. I'm sure that we both write for ourselves. Categories are for lazy people, and no important aspect of life is for lazy people....except for hammacks!
http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/texas-parents-battle-school-over-son-s-long-locks-17178226
Don't *MAKE* me come over there and kick all ya'lls dumb wannabe cowboy asses....how you gonna splain thet to ya mama? [aside: fuckin mo-rons ]
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print
I bet that I have more to say about this, but not at Christmastime. I extend my most heartfelt best vibes at the president, and hope that he returns from the break more refreshed, and particularly more like he was on the campaign trail. I wish the first family-including the silly Portugoose water hound- nothing but the best Christmas; and the same to former President George W. Bush, who appears to have found the dignity in retirement that eluded him in office.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091215/wl_nm/us_italy_berlusconi_souvenir
Christmas Italiano style! You crazy fascist sonofabitch don't ever change, don't ever learn to duck!
11 December 2009
A recurring scene around our house these days: me walking through the hallway singing (to the tune of "I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus")....."I saw Lau-rel be-ing siiiiiii-ly dog...."
One of my favorite Christmas memories happened in a small church in Leesville, Louisiana, in 1983 or so....
It was the whitebread congregation for the ages, if there was a token black guy in the choir or somewhere I don't remember....doesn't mean he wasn't there. It was the kind of place that I would avoid, even if I wasn't avoiding churches in general. It was kind of towards the outskirts of urban Leesville, barely a couple feet off the semi-major north-south highway running through all kinds of little towns between the Shreveport and Lake Charles.
But it was also indubitably a well-meaning place, particularly at the moment, Christmas Eve, and I was there....I hate suggesting that I ever did anything after, say '73, for my father, because it suggests that I was a better and more loyal son than I was....but I can't for the life of me figure out why else I might have been in that church on that evening. I guess it was Christmas Eve, and I figured I should be somewhere. My father was playing the organ, as he did for any church that would ever ask, whether he agreed with their dogma or not, any payment refused.
So I was kind of sitting there in this little church that I didn't much care for, however enthusiastically the congregants pretended not to want to imprison me for my hair...and to be fair probably some of 'em didn't....
And the guy finished up yet another of the thousands of uninspiring sermons that I'd been subjected to, as my father's son. I wasn't moody, I wasn't moved, I was just looking for the door, most hopefully soon. I was counting items on the bulletin list, I was looking for typos. And then they came to the part where they inveigh their most particular concerns directly to God Himself, a procedure incidentally that I quite approve of and sometimes imitate in variations on my own (I try to broadcast feelings rather than words, I'm sure I'll go one about it some time).....these are not minor concerns, even in a small congregation of 75 people or so....most of them know someone, almost all of them have living relatives.
And the preacher intoned as only Bible-belt preachers can...was saying something like help sister Minnie in this time of poor health (I did join in the “amen”) and please help Ethyl Wallace's son from the things that torment him (I wanted more information)....and please Bless Us All on this most momentous of nights (and how can you not, really, agree with that, no matter how cool you think you are?)...
“THAT'S A BIG TEN-FOUR!” burst out of the speakers
I guess that everyone was surprised, for one reason or another. I was the only one who laughed, until my little brother chose to join me. I was just near rolling around laughing in the twenty-third row. I've always hoped that no one thought I was laughing at them or trucks or truckers, because I most decidedly wasn't, but it was such a wonderful moment, and my natural reaction to wonder is joyful laughter (I laugh in the middle of Jimi Hendrix solos, I laugh at Van Gogh paintings) .. I was laughing at this moment of Grace where a passing trucker could have said anything on his CB to unintentionally disrupt the service, but what he said couldn't have been more pure gospel and response. I'm positive that Minnie was healed, and Ethyl's son is alright. Stuff like that doesn't just happen.There was a general confusion, at the end, when everyone congregates around shaking everyone else's hand, and the kids are desperate just to go home and get bitten by Santa Claus. No one was rude to me in any way, no doubt in most part out of respect for my father they were mostly trying to be interested, but no one addressed what had happened, either. I guess you don't have to, maybe that's right. What can you say, in the face of such a moment, really?
Bless.
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN ....occasionally quite nearly detect, if you stare long enough.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091209/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bailout_watchdog
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091209/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bailout_extension_15
I never approved of the corporate bail-outs, but they did abbreviate the recession. Whether we were ever “at the brink” always struck me as a bunch of malarkey. If someone's worth ten billion at breakfast and 7 billion at lunch, that's the market adjustment for the “voodoo economics” that have driven America, uninterrupted, since 1980. If they freak out and start cutting jobs because they're horrified to only be worth 7 billion they have a problem (greed), and so do we (which is easily solved through a progressive tax, and pumping their money back into the economy like the rest of us are forced to do). It's time to call President Obama on being a disciple of Reagan's trickle-down economics. His idea of how to fix an economic disaster (no less pending now than three or five years ago, as the bail-outs only encouraged-as opposed to addressing-the greed that caused the recession in the first place) caused by disproportionate distribution of resources is to take money from the bottom and middle, give it to those at the top, and crow what a success it is when some of them pay some of it back.
What happened to the attack on "the culture of greed" that candidate Obama promised?
http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/president_obamas_afghanistan_escalation_speech
Afghanistanis are sick of being colonized: by the British, by the Soviets, now by us. That's why the government that we're propping up can't make any headway, that's why so many simple villagers are complicitous and compliant with the Taliban. They are, from that perspective, at least Afghans.
President Bush's surge in Iraq did not nearly begin to undo the damage that the invasion did, but it did at least temporarily put off civil war. In that limited sense it should be seen as a success. President Obama's surge in Afghanistan is effectively prolonging a civil war, fought on one side by those we armed to fight the Soviets, and on the other by those we've armed to fight the ones we armed to fight the Soviets.
Terrorists with bombs and guns in New York are an American national security concern. A bunch of guys with rifles running around in the caves and deserts of Afghanistan are not. We are justifying their existence in the eyes of many, by our very presence. It is long past time to allow, demand, that Afghanistan take care of its own problems. It is long past time to allow them to do so. President Obama's solution of alienating the general populace of both countries by sending thirty-thousand more (mainly poor) Americans to risk their lives in support of a corrupt regime that can't even hold an election without debilitating fraud is not a satisfactory solution.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091209/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul
On the campaign trail candidate Obama said that his administration would have “missed the boat” if he didn't deliver “universal healthcare.” He later qualified that by explaining that what he had in mind was something less than universal healthcare, but something in which the government would enter the health insurance market (a real free market!) to discourage the health insurance companies from continuing to rip people off. Now he's decided that "healthcare reform" is fine without that public option, because the health insurers will now do better at keeping themselves from ripping us off, as bad. He invites us to join with him in celebrating this historic victory.
Anything in Obama's healthcare reform that turns out to be beneficial in practice (I see loopholes, and I see aspirational commands without teeth to back them up)...is more than outweighed by the fact that healthcare reform has now "been addressed," and is off the table for the foreseeable future. As a constituent wrote on Senator Russ Feingold's page, "Healthcare reform turned out to be a present to the insurance industry. What a surprise." The audacity of selling out.
It is becoming very, very difficult....to imagine that there won't ....be a moment of terrible irony in which the president feels absolutely betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm for his re-election campaign. I suspect that at that lonely moment a shrill TOOT! TOOT!! will issue from the Potomac.
4 December 2009
I don't like winter all that much compared to spring and summer, but I love Christmas, just like everybody else. One of my favorite parts is snuggling up with Theresa and a big blanket and a bucket of popcorn and watching the old Christmas movies again, some of them, and finding new ones. These are my favorites that jump to mind:
and a few to avoid unless you're a very mean Scroogist who likes laughing at other people in bad Christmas movies:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/shirin_ebadi_nobel_seized
Just in case you thought the Iranian government isn't an idiot, or that everyone in Iran is up to no good...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20091126/sc_livescience/americanstossout40percentofallfood
this is a disgrace...I'm not saying we never waste food, but I'd be shamed by 2%...of course we do have Laural's dish to dump damn near anything in to....but we also do.
I'm not saying that I was always this good about it, Santa....as a kid I was horrible, I probably wasted 70% of anything that wasn't doughnuts or bran muffins or cucumber or Pepsi...my parents' appeals relating to the "starving children in China" met dumber than deaf ears....but my mother moved me to the heart with her insistence that "the Brussels Sprouts will cry" if I didn't eat them....I obviously had animist tenencies...didn't work for anything else but I did eat the Brussels Sprouts, which I guess I pretty much liked anyway
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091129/wl_nm/us_venezuela_banks_chavez
Well! Finally some semblance of common sense. It's the gateway to the incredibly obvious solution to not ever having the same kind of recession that President Obama rather aptly led us out of (you think a Bush could have done that? shame on you, they led us in, along with Clinton and Reagan).
We need, the United States of America desperately needs a national bank, actually at least two. There should be a Democrat Bank and a Republican Bank...the underlying and fundamental reality would be that the major parties could run a bank in competition with the bankers themselves, and in accordance with their own (or lack of) policies and ideals....they could get it right or not, and if they didn't they could explain why. If their policies favored one demographic or another, they could explain why. It would be better than economic litmus paper! Meanwhile the competition would keep the bankers honest. Excessive greed would run Wall Street out of business as account holders turned to the national banks, and it could turn out that we never needed those boring bastards anyway. If the national banks turned out to be as incompetent as the Streeters would like us to believe, of course, they would have nothing to fear from the experiment. That's why we can safely assume that they'd oppose it with everything they've got.
It's that or keep standing by with billions in bailout bags for whenever we need it next: very soon I'd guess as I don't see the leeches learning much from their most recent disaster (sorry we stole your money ma'am, now we won't be able to give you nearly as good interest rates for you to borrow it back), though they do seem to have latched onto the concept of public funding for their self-serving largesse. As a famous economist very recently said, "If a business is too big to fail, it's too big."
-
Birth of a Novel: ulrike's weinglas, gudrun's violin
Yeah that one, the one due for publication some time between summer and autumn, 2010. The very, very long one, the absolutely insane, so often angry one. The one that isn't anything like me (or much I hope, anyway). The absolutely brilliant one. How'd I give birth to that?
Looking back on it, I'm not even sure. I'm certain that it was largely but not entirely George W. Bush's fault.
I had my second birthday in Germany, and all of the other ones up to the age of 14. This covers 1964-1977, the period of time in which the principals of the Baader-Meinhof Gang/Roten Armee Faktion (Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin) went from being churchgirls involved in the peace movement to corpses in the highest security prison in the world, having been convicted in one of the most spectacular trials in history for terrorist acts including multiple murder. American kids in Germany were always being told to watch out for those Baader-Meinhof people, but the reality is that they were relatively good about trying to ensure that their efforts would not result in civilian casualties. Of course it didn't always happen that way, and later incarnations of the RAF were less concerned about "collateral damage." There were always roadblocks going up out of nowhere, or waits at train stations because the Polizei had an idea that there might be bomb-throwing revolutionaries about. So far as I know I never saw one, though a poll in the early '70s (before the casualties started piling up) found that nearly 25% of the population had at least some sympathy with their (esssentially communist, though the media more often portrayed them as anarchist) aims. So I must have seen a lot of sympathizers.
In the spring of 1977 I was attending Stuttgart American High School-naturally located in Ludwigsburg-not too far from Stuttgart. Once the weather turned warm one particularly and increasingly popular student (no, not me) would phone in and say "Ziss iss Baader-Meinhopf! Zere iss a bomp in ze skool!" and hang up. You had to take anything having to do with the Baader-Meinhof Gang seriously, so we'd be released from the tedium of algebra and predicate nominatives, and go hang out on the football field flirting and talking about bands and throwing frisbees the rest of the day. The "Baader Meinhof Gang," I'm delighted to say, never called in a bomb threat when it was raining. So it would be wrong to say that I don't have any positive associations with the group.
I'm not exactly sure what triggered it, another member was murdered in cold blood by the cops on a train track with his hands behind his head, and various other members were being released from prison, and a cease-fire was eventually called....but some time in the mid- 1990s the RAF came to my attention again, and I started banging around on the internet trying to give it all some perspective. I definitely wasn't thinking of them in terms of writing anything about them, they were just something I'd look into if I was up late at night and couldn't think of anything better to do.
It didn't take long to start dawning on me that the central figures in the group were people that I would probably have liked, particularly if I'd met them in my younger, wilder days. They were hip, intelligent, partyers; they were politically motivated, they were people who spoke their minds, they were individuals who were not even slightly intimidated by the social conventions of either society at large or their own peer group. They were courageous, they didn't take shit from nobody. I've never considered myself any stripe of Marxist, but the things that drove the gang members to do the things that they eventually did-opposition to the Vietnam War, the destruction of the environment, corporate hegemony over the global economy, apartheid in Palestine-have long been issues close to my own political heart.
I started...not identifying with them so much, but trying to get into their heads to see where the tragic error was made. Was it violence against people? Definitely somewhere, but during the days when they were peaceful demonstrators....was it wrong for them to defend themselves against the cops? Obviously not, and that's where it all started. Were they wrong to be outraged that the Communist Party (KPD) was outlawed in West Germany, while neo-fascist parties were allowed to operate openly, and the country was literally being run by ex-Nazis? There was a bit more to the story than the black & white tales of good guys and bad guys that the history books have passed down to us, and it didn't hurt that the gang members themselves were intellectually well beyond such simplistic, dualistic perceptions: they had nothing good to say about East Germany or the Soviet Union, for example. They liked the Palestinians but found their sexual taboos reactionary. They were more polititically sympatico with the great political thinker Herbert Marcuse, who said that he wasn't interested in any revolution "that doesn't dance." (It's fair to note that Marcuse, like fellow Communist Jean Paul Sartre, ultimately denounced the group)
So after I'd sold Choose Denial, and finished Snap Once but hadn't sold it yet...late one night Theresa and I were settin' outside having a few glasses of wine as young lovers often do, and I was once again babbling about Baader-Meinhof, and she just looked at me and said, "You know, you really do have to write this." And it was one of those crystal moments-I'd considered it before but never particularly seriously-in that moment it became obvious that I would. So I probably started a few days later. Maybe a week or two before 9/11.
As events gathered a momentum and direction of their own and we headed off to invade Iraq under false pretenses; thereby creating at least one more generation of anti-American terrorists, and giving immediate and entirely undeserved intellectual cover to the jackasses who had always lurked in the corners of the Arab market darkly muttering about the United States being "the great satan"...I became more and more angry, because all of these clods (al Qaeda, effectively being advertised-and justified in the minds of increasing numbers in the Arab world-by the far more dangerous lunatics in the Bush Administration and Blair government....I'm not saying that Bush/Blair are worse people, I don't believe that, but they were far more dangerous. They certainly did a better job of recruiting and PR for al Qaeda than Osama bin Laden ever did) were fucking up the world to the point where it was becoming clear that it wouldn't be safer during even the lifetimes of my children.
So I was getting madder and madder, and more and more disgusted, and the things that were making me angry and disgusted were in large part continuation of the things that had made Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, and Holger Meins, and Ulrike Meinhof angry and disgusted....and so I sublimated my anger into the novel, told from the perspective of a fictitious gang member who started out just trying to live up to his his own perception of his big brother.
That's how it got so angry, that's where the gallows humour and hopelessly insane idealistic optimism and the dark cudgels of reality and hate and delight in any any opportunity of revenge mix, that's why it's so massive...there was a lot of that stuff going around. That's how I gave birth to a novel that begins like this:
My father was a Nazi. Not for long, and probably not a very good one, but what's that mean anyway?
He wasn't a terrible father, he wasn't even a bad father, just a human one like all the others. He provided for us, often at the expense of the luxuries that make life bearable for an aging man with an unforgiven past. He beat us, sometimes, yes, but never enthusiastically. He thought that he was supposed to.
There really wasn't much about him at all. I don't remember him ever saying anything bad about Jews, or even mentioning them in passing more than once or twice. The only times I ever heard him discuss his role in the war he gave conflicting accounts. I don't know if he honestly knew what happened either. He certainly didn't want to.
Trying to sell the behemoth is tens of stories in itself. Suffice to say that one small, respected publisher in New York told me that it was the greatest work that had ever been submitted to his house, but he wouldn't publish it because he didn't want people ever looking at him and thinking about it. One publisher was so taken with the German-speaking-English tone of it that he thought I was a German and was excited about it if I would just let someone who'd grown up speaking English edit it, one publisher only wanted it if I'd give it a happy ending, one editor in London was fired for refusing to stop recommending it....hopefully that young man will land on his feet and establish the publishing house that I'll glorify a few novels down the road....one of the most successful agents in Britain told me that he loved it and would buy copies for his friends and thought that comparisons to James Joyce and Louis Ferdinand Céline were in order but that “I'd have no idea how to market them today either, I'd have to turn them down, too...the book buying public is so largely comprised of women of a certain age who aren't particularly interested in politics, and especially not in politically motivated violence”...and of course there was no shortage of people who couldn't stand it, hated its arrogance and lack of conventionality and willfully disorganized approach to itself, and generally think that I'm an asshole for even thinking of it in the first place.
I'm terribly proud of it, and hope that I never write anything vaguely like it ever again.
next week (probably): Efforts to Cling
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/dec/01/steiner-schools-cambridge-review
Yeah, that should fix those morons who think of Steiner Ladies as a bunch of etheric, esoteric, fuzzy-brained dreamers....a little bit of Prescott, Arizona common sense right at ya!
Archive
go back home, Laural! Go see what's in your real dish!