LAURAL'S DISH
Laural is our dog, my dog. Everyone else heads off to school, "people like me and Laural" stay home. He's a fine companion, but you have to understand. If he's having a really good time he tries to bite you, me, anyone. Not hard, just…similarly, if you're scratching his belly real good, but then shift to his (apparently less preferable) ears, he'll growl at you. The irregular spelling of his name results from the time that Alexandra and I were mulling the possibilities, in a tunnel in Newton Abbot, when we came across the graffiti: Laura L is a dog.
Laural loves to eat more than any living being ever created, and he will eat absolutely anything. We've weaned him from rocks but he once tried to eat an unopened can of Carlsberg Export. surprise! So his dish frequently has unusual things in it, bits of this or that, absolute treasures that others might consider slightly unfit for human consumption, for whatever stupid reasons.
Beneath please find my literary reflection of Laural's Dish:
27 November 2009
Steven Tyler was my first real rock 'n' roll hero. The evolution of my favorite band-from the age of 9 or thereabouts-would read: Glen Campbell & Bobbie Gentry (based entirely on their undeniably brilliant cover of the Everly Brothers "All I Have to Do Is Dream [still a fixture in my jPOD] > The Carpenters > The Stylistics > ABBA > Heart > Bad Company > Aerosmith....by now I'm maybe 15 or so. The big break would appear to be between ABBA and Heart, but baseball players were still my real heroes then, I could name the members of Heart but couldn't tell you anything about them beyond that the Wilson sisters were great-lookin' and they were a killer band from Seattle. I could tell you what Tug McGraw's license plate number was [Tug 45], I could tell you the name of Tom Seaver's dog [Slider].
But by the time we get to Aerosmith I'm reading Rolling Stone (with its then-incredible stable of writers) religiously and starting to try and figure out what songs are actually about, and wondering what it might be like to stand there while they're launching these historic audio assaults on tens of thousands of true believers...an impossibly unrealizable dream as I'm stuck on the United States Naval Base on Guantanamo Bay, and they'd never let anyone like Steven Tyler anywhere near it, even though it was not, at that time, harboring hundreds of alleged (and no doubt at least a few real) terrorists. To be fair, some of the bands comprised of naval and marine personnel were actually pretty good, I clearly remember an entirely groovin' an' dusty rendition of "Crossroads." (the guitarist was horrified to hear that my best friend and me thought it was a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, but then he loosened up when he recalled that he'd first thought Clapton wrote it). It's also true that when the Zeppelin concert flick The Song Remains the Same played the main theater (all of them were outdoor, in Cuba), adjacent to the only traffic light, the "cool" naval personnel ("squids") and marine personnel ("jarheads") unprecedentedly joined forces and effectively rioted, running a military police vehicle into the ditch, from whence its occupants were too terrified to remove themselves. I don't blame them, it was very strange. They called for back-up but apparently the radio was on the fritz, so they just stayed there for an hour or so with all of these bare-chested warriors jumping around yelling and singing....it was a helluva place to spend my secondary formative years-Time Magazine described the base as "a walking fistfight" at the time, and that was neither entirely fair nor inaccurate...
So rock 'n' roll really didn't come upon me as an immediate and powerful spirit until late 1975 or 1976 in Germany, and by 1977 in Cuba Steven Tyler was unquestionably the man. When Rolling Stone reported that he opened his day with a large line of cocaine off of a mirror inscribed with "Steven Tyler kicks ass!" I guess I probably figured that was pretty cool, something that was clearly working for him. And it was.
In fact after the post-junkie collapse of the band, and its spectacularly improbable resurrection as a recruiting poster-child for 12-step programs, Tyler was quite honest in saying that however many albums they sold they weren't nearly as good, and probably never would be again.
So what?, who cares about great rock albums, especially as they'd already made more than their share and were probably too burned out to ever do another anyway...! You want 'em alive and having happy families of models and clothing designers, or you want 'em in the irrevocable Kurt Cobain drain? I've always applauded Aerosmith (it was literally the entire band necessarily in detox, just that Steven and Joe Perry were the worst and most famous) for dealing with serious problems in a serious manner. If they want to be a straight kind of pop band of survivors, and still put on live shows of blistering brilliance (I witnessed this from the straight band, they're better and particularly more consistently great straight than the junkie shows-though some of them were also incredible-as tapes witness), who loses? They'd gone from being symbols of decadence (the Toxic Twins) to icons of recovery...and whatever glory there is in the former, only a fool doesn't know that millions of people need the latter a lot, lot more.
The songwriting seemed to suffer the most, though that may be from the loss of brain cells necessary resulting from...I'm not trying to be coy or salty or stupid, it's just an observation and I'm wondering out loud and it's something I've wondered about a lot. The junkie songs were not only stronger and consistently stronger, but by a hyperspace magnitude. Tyler's lyrics were often brilliantly disjointed in a wonderfully unique and artsy way, and that part probably was in some part chemical influence (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who has a street named after him a few blocks down, right next to Churchill Road....NO, I did not just compare Steven Tyler and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lyrically, I merely noted that they may have had similar inspirations; though comparing them IS tempting, now that I think on it...)
The straight (comeback) albums were wildly popular, but when they finally did Honkin' on Bobo after something more than fifteen years of recovery, and maybe five years ago - almost entirely composed of blues covers, with one original that had that classic blues feel-I thought that was probably what they should have done as their first album back. They struck me as finally being, almost, back, or at least as close as they were gonna get given their age and the totality of the circumstances...I've been eagerly awaiting the follow-up that hasn't come...
So it troubles me more than a little bit and for all kinds of reasons that Steven's comrades in arms fear he may have fallen back into the bag. I think most anyone who's spent any unreasonable amount of time with any drug-legal or illegal-understands that there is a pull. For everyone. That's just part of it. The more fortunate have neither the genetics nor the psychological disposition to cave in, and can ride the promontory without struggling too much, at least for the most part save the odd occasional scramble back up...but Steven has a well proven disposition for running OFF the edge in a (quite literal, at least once) 200 mph Ferrari, and demanding to jump. And, however he's feeling at the moment, he's not a young man anymore.
He should, he better, have years left with grandchildren. But will they believe any of grandpa's stories...ain't it better if they can't?
I'm watching, less fascinated than horrified. But yeah, ok, half fascinated, too. Dammit Steven, kick [that monkey on your back's] ass!!!!! Again.
P.S. In one of the wittiest commentaries on law that I've ever heard, upon being informed that American tax law includes a fundamental Arrowsmith Doctrine, a friend of mine asked, "What's that? That you can spend all your money on drugs and then use it as a write-off?"
BIRTH OF A NOVEL: Snap Once
Choose Denial wouldn't sell, which shocked me to the extent that I banged around in straight jobs for awhile, a couple of newspapers. I even turned back towards law, working for more than a year as an archivist and then research lawyer on environmental issues for the official, lawfully elected government of San Juan County. It wasn't bad work and it paid regular, and I have to say that the people who worked in the county courthouse were all wonderful, but I was never confused about whether it was what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I would drive the old warhorse '75 Camaro (with a 350 and a 4-speed Hurst, and 75 watts per channel) from one end of Orcas Island to the other (about 45 minutes), and then catch the inter-island ferry to Friday Harbor, San Juan Island. In the winter time I left when it was dark and the girls were asleep, and got home hours after dark when only Theresa was awake. In the summer time tourists would fill the ferries and make them run hours behind schedule, sometimes I wouldn't get home until after ten o'clock. As I say, I never considered it anything resembling a permanent commitment, but the regular paychecks were nice.
I began writing Snap Once on the inter-island ferry. I'd catch the ferry at 6:20 a.m., and it would get to Friday Harbor an hour or so later, depending on the weather and whether or not we stopped to catch a breaching whale. If I was writing well I'd get a few pages in, and of course I was always throwing pages back out. I started writing on the ferry home, too. I think that the first 60 pages or so were written on the ferry. It starts like this, even before the title page:
Oh wow it's Friday. yee haw.
Kind of a bourgeois holiday, except you have to work. Still I guess people are generally so disgusted with the way they have to spend 71.4 percent of their life that it's exciting enough just to be on the threshold of the other 28.6 percent.
We even give praise to our deity for it not quite being the day that we want it to be, although no one can agree on who that deity is, other than various cliques of obvious and utter lunatics. Thank God it's Friday. Not that anyone wants it to be Friday you understand, everyone wants it to be Saturday. Seems a bit insulting, if you ask me, to thank The All Powerful for making it something you don't really want
By Christmas 1999 the county had fortuitously lost its funding for me and I'd been let go in a tearful hail of well wishes and presents for the family, I'd subsequently and nearly immediately won a lawsuit against one of the newspapers that had previously employed me; the Camaro had spit up oil for the last time and I'd bought a Porsche that I never ended up loving half as much, though it was a funner on the curvy hills between Eastsound and our house. I went into writing full-time, for the first time, freelance stuff and the novel nearly every day. Looking up from the computer at the deer that were always wandering around in the yard if Blackberry was inside, actually getting to see family members during the week when they were awake and alert! I don't know what it would have taken to drive me back into an office...I'd pretty much found what I wanted to do.
Somewhere in mid 2000 (my epiphany at Cascade Lake!, and I'd just asked the Santa Claus who arrives on Orcas each year via Canadian naval vessel for one two Christmases earlier!! ) we decided to head off to Europe "We don't know, maybe a whole year, maybe three!" and I intensified my efforts to finish up Choose Denial before we went on the road in April 2001. Towards the end of 2000 I finally sold Snap Once, which was encouraging.
I'd started writing Choose Denial with the sense that I should make the first 50 pages as boring as possible, so that the publishers and big-time agents would "get it," and be "sucked in" but within 30 pages I'd already engaged illegal drugs, secret societies (working in some part, and referencing, the same body of work that Dan Brown would ride to other-worldly royalty checks for The Da Vinci Code a few years later), and engaged the high hopes of an ornithology convention and alternated between contemplating and debunking Marxist mythologies...I don't remember exactly when I abandoned the boring strategy, but I settled for keeping my protagonist somewhat dull-witted, which I figured they would relate to.
I must have made some efforts to sell Snap Once during the six months between Orcas and Exeter, but I don't remember doing so, and assuming I did I definitely didn't have any luck. It was a much quicker sell than Choose Denial though, I remember eventually getting the email and the offer for it very clearly....and I'm never going to forget opening a package and a few copies of my novel falling out.
It pushes limits, it staggers around, it froths at the mouth and does something in some ways akin to metaphorically speaking in tongues; it has graffiti about Jimi Hendrix and Ronald Reagan in morse code spilt between some of the later chapters, it finds me starting to realize alternating rhythms as one of my strongest points as a writer. For all that, it's way more lucid and organized than Choose Denial . It just got renewed by the publisher, so it's well positioned to spike in readership over the next seven years if ulrike's weinglas, gudrun's violin catches fire like it deserves to.
Fate of Snap Once: Still in print in the States and in Europe. Both sides of the Atlantic! It's sold well enough to bolster my claim of being a worse-selling novelist, and it's not entirely unusual to get a weird email from some place or another from someone who's suddenly become excited about it.
next week (probably): ulrike's weinglas, gudrun's violin
------------------
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-ap-us-ri-bishop-kennedy,0,7788669.story?track=rss
First let me say that the personalities involved do not in any way affect my views on the Catholic Church refusing communion to Congressman Patrick Kennedy because of his pro-choice voting record.
I consider Democratic lawmakers, loosely, in terms of either (a) bearers of a brave and historic political standard that I'm proud to march behind, or (b) wishy-washy gerbils of men whose most distinguishing characteristic is that of getting in the way. Rep. Kennedy falls squarely in the second group: can you imagine receiving the many-splendored legacy that he was given on a silver platter, and deciding to major in fundraising???!! Not campaign finance reform, mind you, fundraising. Joey did way better with "cheap electricity."
To fairly/unfairly subject the Roman Catholic Church to the same sort of sinfully oversimplified analysis, I consider the Catholic leadership to loosely fall into being either (a) wise and gentle spiritualist keepers of the Eternal Flame that my soul feeds upon and can never get enough of, and (b) closet (or in some cases out-of the closet) fascist control freaks so dejected in the light of existenz that they spend most of their energy flitting about in (what would be comical, were they not so often successful) efforts to denounce everyone else. Bishop Tobin might appear to belong in that second lot.
So I'm not taking sides based on personality or political allegiance.
To the extent that I care about this particular matter-and it's likely to be deep shelved in the "throw out as soon as possible to leave room for something important, like a Zippy comic strip" section of my memory-...I'm of two minds.
First off, the Catholic Church should do whatever it wants, so long as it doesn't bother anyone else. If they want to have a pope and pretend he's got a mainline to God, what's the harm in that? People either believe it and get happy, or don't and either get amused, or think it's a good idea and make into the underbrush to establish a mainline of their own.
That position is tempered by the reality that as a Christian who feels more in common with Catholics than any other denomination (I love the miracles and the emphasis on Mary; I may be a sucker for the grandness and drama of it all-----but none of that helps me get around the virgin priest nonsense or the pope or some of the other dogma)...the simple reality is that every time the leadership of any religious hierarchy (or any other group) gets something wrong, they move the truth a little or a lot further from their....flock? parishioners? from the people who believe and rely on them.
Still, if I want to get all sanctimonious and pontificate to the Vatican about how they should run their church, I should at least become a member and do it from inside. And I will not.
So, my first mind is that it's really a Catholic issue that has nothing to do with me or anyone else.
My second, prevailing mind is that Jesus never refused communion to anyone, not even Judas.
20 November 2009
ON TELEOLOGOGY AND EVOLUTION
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091116/ap_on_fe_st/as_odd_new_zealand_antarctic_whiskey
It's really a good thing that no one knew that you could do this before! Imagine, everyone would have drilled for scotch instead of oil...actually, once they found enough scotch there'd be no need for oil because no one would be in such a big hurry to go someplace else....
--------------------------------------------------------
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-titans-adams&prov=ap&type=lgns
Jefferson wept. Now rich people can't have free speech either? I mean, what's the point of spending hundreds of millions of dollars purchasing a Southern sports franchise if you can't even make fun of a buncha dumb Yankees? Unbelievable. I'm sure that the entire and demure city of Buffalo was offended, and learned something new and awful, and now all those upstate New York sophisicates (ya'll seen Buffalo '66, ain't ya?) are going to turn into loutish Texans...
If Bud Adams was a real Texan, his response would have been "Yeh? Waaaal, that Roger Goo-dell can jes' kiss mah ace...." Whatever happened to rugged individualism, what do these people think when they see John Wayne?
How about, "You ever been to Buffalo? Ain't a damn one in Buffalo shouldn' be flipped awf...." There must be a million things that Bud Adams could have said that would have made him a folk hero.
-----------------------------------------
My third novel, and first masterpiece, ulrike's weinglas, gudrun's violin has finally found a publisher enthusiastic to print it replete with sentence fragments, willfully horrid punctuation, language and content to shame a sailor
Let me tell you a little bit about how novels get born. I've given birth to three, now, and I'm deep into labour on a fourth. I like giving birth to novels, I like to take a little bit of time between.
BIRTH OF A NOVEL: CHOOSE DENIAL
The first novel that I ever gave birth to....well, several were aborted, of course...I don't know how many for sure, three or four I guess, something like that. None of them got much past the first ten pages or so....past conception but nowhere near viability.
The first novel that ever went to term, that I gave birth to, was Choose Denial. I remember typing the first lines (on a typewriter that clacked so hard it shredded the ribbon every 70 pages or so) clearly, I had a great sense that something momentous was afoot:
The small grey, weathered beat up ferry boat bumped against the landing, reversing gently as the tide, then finally inching forward, and sideways, like an experienced drunk on his way to the next bar to make sure he has too many.
Omigosh it was so perfect! I took another hit off the bowl and looked around for my beer. I would manage to write nearly a page and a half that day. Where did I write such a thing?
It was when I was working for Jerry Brown (about to become governor of California again! there's been a disturbance in the force all these years he wasn't), we (only me and Theresa and Kasmira then) were living on the land that was the original site of the Zendik Warriors Commune in Topanga Canyon, back in the '60s or early '70s. There were cool wooden airplanes hanging from trees and sculptures all over the place. We had the much smaller of two houses, but on our part of the grounds there was a big treehouse full of graffiti: "LSD" and "Revolution" and stuff like that. No, that's not where I wrote those immortal lines. I didn't much like the vibe of the treehouse and it always felt like it was about to fall off, and there was always the possibility that I might manage to fall out of it anyways.
There was also a shed immediately adjoining our house. It was wooden and had a little tin roof, and was maybe 15' x 8', but it had a little window overlooking the canyon and there was something about it that I really liked. So I strung a couple Guns N' Roses banners across the ceiling, and put up a Led Zeppelin poster and moved the rake and hoe into the corner and decided to write a great American novel in my spare time. I worked very hard on the Brown campaign (70-110 hours a week), and when we left Topanga Canyon about six months later I had maybe 15 pages.
I finished it during our four years in Oregon, and did a major re-write our first couple months on Orcas Island. I still couldn't get anyone to publish it, despite my fervent representations of how brilliant it was, until just before we left Washington after four years. A Canadian publisher bought it, and promptly went out of business (prior to publication) the same week we blew our VW van engine on the road from Lourdes to Paris, where I was to cover the French Open for Zoom Tennis (a publication that went out of business the same week, owing me serious money; my two other regular sources of work, Discovery Travel and Neighborhood America also went out of business that week; leaving me with a family on a French campsite and tennis gambling as my primary source of income—we all recall it as a wonderful summer, actually, someone's always bringing up something about it and laughing).
I wasn't particularly discouraged about the plight of Choose Denial because I already had an even more brilliant novel (Snap Once) completed, and in my back pocket so to speak. But before we move on, was Choose Denial just as brilliant as I believed? Waaaal, J. D. Salinger's agent praised the "high octane prose" in passing on it...and that's both right. It has some very funny scenes, but it's not put together well. I think it was Vladimir Nabokov said how first novels are just blowing out whatever's in your exhaust pipe. Certainly, I thought that every brilliant thought I had belonged somewhere in the work, and overestimated too many thoughts as brilliant. I still go back and read parts of it, every once in awhile, but I wouldn't want anyone to judge me as a writer by it.
Fate of Choose Denial : Rights have reverted to me, but it's not something I'd want anyone to read unless they already considered me a great genius, and understood that it was a very early work. That being the case, after I sell a few million books maybe I can give it to Greenpeace, and they can market it as that and collect enough to harpoon a few whalers.
next week (probably): The birth of Snap Once
-------------------------------------------------------------
Yeah, I mean, see? they did it again, this is ridiculous
http://omg.yahoo.com/news/johnny-depp-wins-his-2nd-sexiest-man-alive-title/31404?nc
I've been 18 or over for, what, 29 years now. Nearly a third of that time these impudent morons consider Pitt, Depp, Clooney or some other idiot-I forget who, I'll look it up again...Gere.... the sexist man alive.
I doubt it.
13 November 2009
hope you know a lot more
than you believe in
-- Gram Parsons, A Song For You
How's that for a lyric to be stuck in your head on a day so dripping gray that you can't even subject audible music to it?
I mean, I'm not complaining about English weather. This is nothing. When we lived in the McKenzie River Valley, Oregon, the sun didn't show itself for a period of 39 days beginning the first week of January, 1993. Literally, not a single drop of sunshine, not a hint that the sun existed, gray, gray every day. Theresa was pregnant was Alexandra, and a guy that I was trading Rolling Stones bootlegs with wrote me an email "Your child is going to be a mole."*
*She obviously isn't, to the point of sometimes being irritated that I wouldn't agree to name her Summer Tangerine.
So I'm not complaining about where I am, or what is or isn't going on, or anything like that. I'm just trying to work with the foreign pscyhological landscape of autumn. If I was a bit more artistic-and could really get into morose-this would be an extraordinary opportunity. Instead...I can't get past the change of seasons to rejuvenation at the moment. I'm thinking of the end of things, rather than the little neutrons and electrons of the fallen Phoenix realigning themselves.
In its absence, I'm thinking about music. I'm thinking how cliche it's become to suggest that the '60s ended at Altamont (I applaud a writer who recently consulted a calendar to demonstrate the fallacy of that particular belief)...I don't know, I was 7 years old on New Year's Eve 1969, I didn't have much sense of anything ending until at least 1996 when a Neil Young audience was sitting around babbling in ignorant ignorance of a brilliant opening set by Patti Smith...I left, I didn't even stay for Neil-church was out forever-that was my personal Altamont.
I'm thinking of two other final acts. One is the song "Skyway" by the Replacements, and the other is the Emerson, Lake & Palmer (supported by the Works Orchestra and Choir conducted by Godfrey Salmon) performance of June 12, 1977, at the Veteran's Memorial Auditorium, Des Moines, Iowa.
When I got to LSU in 1980, my cousin there was studying classical piano. She was very good, and very hip, and most of her hip, classical friends were into progressive bands like ELP, Yes and Genesis. They'd bust out some Stones or Neil Young every once in awhile, but the path from their studies rarely led them much beyond ELP or Yes. Both bands had wildly successful tours in the '70s, sold out arenas all over America, theatre in the round, stuff like that. The taming of the jean-jacketed masses, I remember a rather simple young lady telling me that seeing Yes was "the closest thing to a religious experience" that she'd ever seen.
ELP-characteristically-took it a step further and a step too far. A better explanation of it than I can give can be found here, but it comes down to something along the lines that they were carrying a full choir and orchestra cross-country with them, but the financial ledger never quite stabilized, and it all came to a grinding halt in a city surrounded by corn fields. Our friend blames it on unions and scheduling and travel arrangements, but we really know it was those Sex Pistols.
About a decade later the Replacements had made several brilliant records, established themselves as a unique and beloved live act, and drawn favorable comparisons with the Rolling Stones at a similar stage of development, from no less than Rolling Stone. They were, in fact, what the Stones and the Faces and more professional bands had only postured at being, live: absolutely wasted to the point of falling in the gutter and never getting out.
They would play 75 songs in two hours, they would play songs they'd never played, they would play songs some of them had never heard, they would get bored in the middle of playing their own songs and stop, the first time I saw them they closed with a single-note guitar solo of "If I Only Had a Brain" from the Wizard of Oz. Bob Stinson performed that solo.
Bob was the embodiment of a certain rock 'n' roll archetype. Short, stout, bald, markedly older than his little brother and everyone else in the band....it's difficult to imagine that there was ever a party where Bob wasn't the drunkest one there. A friend of mine witnessed an event in Hollywood, recounted reasonably faithfully in keg conversation in my first novel, Choose Denial .*
so they came out just fucked up drunk like Hemingway meets Bukowski and the crowd is already yelling covers because they know they'll play anything, "Toys in the Attic" and "When the Levee Breaks" and "Freebird" and shit, no matter if they've ever played it, or even fucking know it, and then the Man, THE MAN, Bob Stinson comes out, balding and overweight and wearin nothin' but his strat and starts playing and yelling some beach baby song, and the crowd is going crazy like they announced free drinks and pussy for life, but the management starts yelling and turns off the power, and the bouncer is chasing Stinson across the stage, so, still running away, Stinson dumps his guitar and trips up the guy and grabs an acoustic and comes running back across the stage flapping and yelling, with no mike how now they're gonna play an acoustic set and he starts strumming some beatnik thing and goes down under three, like, godzilla guys as the curtain closes..........God, it was great, I mean I've never seen anything else, we fucking screamed for over an hour and finally they started giving away drinks to try and get the people back on their side, and we took the drinks and all, but dude, there was a lot of shit broken that night..."
*Written from 1991-1995, purchased by VanGoach Books of Canada in 2000, but never published as they went out of business prior to publication. I like to think that there's a warehouse full of stacks of the first 35 pages out there in the prairies somewhere....
Obviously a band that great is eventually going to get a lot of attention, but it took too long for the major labels to figure out what to do with it. The 'Mats success was fueled by enough alcohol to bring down thirty bands [and cocaine for two], and by the time that the corporatos started realizing how promising the concept really was, full-blown alcoholism was the only thing left with any foundation. The moment had passed by the time that the spotlight got thrown on it. What the spotlight found was a sick band trying to straighten up, too late, play a normal set without getting bored, and a rock icon going down for the last time. The band-including his little brother-threw Bob Stinson out, but not in time to save his life.
The band that Paul Westerberg led into the promised land of multi-million dollar record deals and big audiences and cover story interviews and Saturday Night Live was barely firing on two cylinders. On the heels of masterpieces, millions of dollars of promotion were wasted on "Pleased to Meet Me," an album that vaguely resembled some bored and sober frat boys pretending to be the Replacements before the housemaid called them to supper.
The album contains a single gem, "Skyway." A plaintive, acoustic ballad that finds Paul flying somewhere else, too fast to meet the girl that attracts him from the ground. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep, as I did last night, I can hear him singing
in my stupid hat and gloves at night
I like awake
wondering if I'll sleep
6 November 2009
A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
--Hermann Hesse speaking from the future in Das Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game, 1943]
Welcome to my doing my part....THIS IS LAURAL'S DISH!!!!
Secondly, no I haven't read Hesse in German. I tried to read Siddhartha in German for a few minutes one day, thinking that I'd lived in Germany for 13 years and got a very high score on my German III final at LSU (though a D in the course, due to my turning in 0 of 33 homework assignments). I couldn't do it, and I've read Siddhartha five times in translation
Next it must be said that not only is Hesse my favorite writer of all time, he connects with me on a level....the only way to describe it is saying that everyone else, even Hunter S. Thompson, when I read them it's this great stuff coming from outside; Hesse feels like it's coming from inside. I once did a reincarnation test: I picked up a bunch of Hesse short stories that I'd never seen, and without looking at one of them I decided to guess the opening line. Stupidly I came up with something like "It was a very sunny morning...", which isn't how Hesse wrote. I opened the text, which was something along the lines of "It had been a cold, dark night..." I laughed very well at myself and went out drinking, mainly at The Sunshine Company, an establishment in Ocean Beach. I awoke, as one might suspect, somewhat worse for wear and tear. I took a glass of ice tea and walked a moderate way down the pier into the Pacific Ocean that quite nearly adjoined my shack. When I returned I returned to the Hesse, which continued "...but it was a very sunny morning."
Do I believe that I'm Hermann Hesse reincarnated? No, that doesn't seem right. Do I believe in reincarnation? Possibly, it's a strange universe and all. It makes more sense than the alternatives. Edgar Cayce believed in it when he was in a trance (though not when he was "awake"), which is about as good an endorsement as you can get. Do I have specific recollections of reincarnation? None, but Theresa has some strong senses about herself, and if I had to guess I'd say she's right.
It's fair to say-I think it is-that Europe has very little sense of Halloween. I spent Halloween in France a few years back, where it's just starting to take off. It has a stronghold amongst American pop-culture worshippers everywhere (frequently the same ones who take to the streets protesting American politics), but in France it suddenly gained critical mass when an unpopular official of the Catholic Church denounced it for the usual stupid reasons. Suddenly all of the anarchists, and Marxists and agnostics and atheists and fun-loving Protestants love it! A relatively minor problem being that they don't really dress up as anything....that is to say that they all dress up as variations on the same thing....kind of a vampire-lookin' thing with all kinds of make-up. But they really mean it, there were still supermarket employees wearing their Halloween garb well into the first week of November.
The Church of England, being a bit more liberal, has never denounced Halloween but it's caught on a little bit here anyway.
Every year we do our own variation of the same thing. Really loud Pink Floyd blasting rafters miles away, and me hanging out of the second floor bathroom window yelling strange things and pelting the trick-or-treaters with something....usually rice ("Beware of falling bat braaaaaaiiiins!! eeeeee-ahahahahahah!!! " in Wicked Witch of the West voce). This year I wore a balaclava and did a Darth Vader voice: "Who dares knock upon the Door of Dooooooom?!!" I challenged. I was so good at this that several of them didn't want to, so I had to improvise stuff like "Fear not!" and "A brave warrior approaches!" Still-and I don't think that this is because I got carried away or anything-one little boy freaked out and ran off, dropping his skeleton glove in the driveway and refusing to return and collect it. One young teenaged girl almost fell down, and another stood petrified in the walkway pointing (at me) "There's a man up there!", and (at the van) "and someone in there"-of course Laural considers any knock at the door a threat to his very existence and is going off in his major baritone the entire time-"and a mad dog in there..." at which point Myles snuck up on her from behind with a box of live rats....
As I say, Europe's got some catchin' up to do with Halloween.
I love it that this guy's name is Professor Nutt.
Reminds me of a few years back when a famous but increasingly senile baseball manager exposed himself to the hotel maid. And that man's name was....Dick Williams.
Subsequent stories reveal that several of Dr Nutt's learned colleagues, distressed at his fate, have resigned in protest. I support them, but wonder at their naiveté in terms of whether they were political appointments/pawns/peons in the first place. Their positions [appointed and scientific] are not exactly new...
I served the San Juan County government as an archivist for a few months, back in maybe '98 or so....looking at case files and throwing out anything past its due date. After just a few, I started keeping count. There were....it is my recollection and I did pay attention....that there were about 358 cases involving violence. 355 of them involved alcohol, three involved marijuana, and maybe one or two involved any other drug. Several involved multiple drugs, and I believe that only one involved no drugs at all. One of the marijuana cases was because a guy [allegedly!] stole another guy's stash, so no one had been smoking it at the time of the hostilities.
I've conducted some empirical research in this area...really just the relationship between liquids and sound waves these days, but I did cast a broader intellectual net in my youth. My conclusions:
• we have to legalize all drugs,
• the money we save on interdiction and stakeouts and payoffs to lame-ass narks will cover the cost of the far more humane and utilitarian and necessary rehab many times over,
• It's also true that there's no point rehabbing anyone who doesn't want to, see the Swiss model,
• everyone knows how I feel about corporate geeks and governmental bureaucratic pencil-necks, but I'd rather see them get the money than violent criminals.
Nice shootin', Tex! Two guys with one bullet!
Archive
go back home, Laural! Go see what's in your real dish!
