Pons Asinorum

2007-07-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

A dim memory grabbed me today: A yellow, pvc comb with two missing teeth that I used to keep in a secret spot under the bathroom sink at the house on Richmond. It was for putting in my jeans pocket to flatten out the folded pocket between the denim and my thigh. I remember my mom telling me that 'ladies use hangers.' I remembered a secret spike of shame when I realized that the corner of a coat hanger was too wide to fit in my pocket.

My Vote for Faculty of the Year

2007-05-04T14:28:00.001-07:00

Reason

A New Axis Rising

2007-04-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

Tonight, the newest development in German-Japanese fusion cuisine reared its dark and savory head.

On pumpernickel:
three slices of seared Ahi with a peppercorn and sea salt crust
red onion and red cabbage sauerkraut made with mirin and a Page Mill winery Pinot Blanc
wasabi yogurt sauce made with chevre

Top that.

Runs him through with a broadsword--

2007-04-05T00:43:00.000-07:00

List of the "definitive 200" albums that I don't currently own in any format:

1, 7, 10, 12, 17, 18, 21, 23, 27, 33, 52, 53, 57, 60, 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198, 200

I hereby announce a ten dollar prize to the person who can correctly list these albums in descending order of the preposterousness of the album being on the list in the first place.

In the memetime.

2007-04-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Shayda.

The slow, sad sound of unimportant things...

2007-04-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

This Friday, six months of planning come to a head with the grad-student organized Cultures of Violence conference. Check it out here: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/complit/culturesofviolence/.

Keynotes are happening on Saturday, but the panel for which I am responsible--Violence in Representation and Spectation--is happening Friday at 4 in HIB 135.

If you can, I suggest you come check out the film screening that I organized on Friday night--the part of the conference for which I am wholly responsible. The film is Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Here's a review:

"In Funny Games, Georg and Anna, with their son Georgie, are traveling to their lakeside summer home. Upon arrival, Georg and Georgie head off to the lake for sailing while Anna prepares dinner in the kitchen. The serenity is shattered by a young man named Peter, who knocks at the door asking to borrow some eggs. The unwanted visitor is joined by Paul, a brash, arrogant young man. It soon becomes clear the pair have no intention of leaving. When Georg returns and tries to throw them out, physical violence erupts, and the family is held captive. What ensues are highly disturbing and violent 'games' initiated by Paul and Peter with Georg, Anna and Georgie as the unwilling participants.

“Funny Games is a firestarter for post-screening arguments, alight with ghastly images and actions, and essayed by a spot-on cast and storyline that flows seamlessly from one nightmarish incident to the next. It's an uncomfortable, distressing, and altogether provocative take on the global culture of media violence that not only draws in hapless viewers, but also forces them into fait-accompli acceptance, like it or not.”
---Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle

There's free food (really good stuff on Friday night: Taco Mesa), and, as an added incentive: The keynotes I mentioned are Wendy Brown and Cathy Caruth.

Come support your fellow grad students and eat free food.

It's not April Fool's Day Yet

2007-03-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not a shill. I swear.

Check it out: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/snuznluz.shtml?cpg=50T.

Car Repair, the Iron Lotus, and the Restless Panda

2007-03-31T01:14:00.000-07:00

After being in the body shop for four days, my car still isn't finished. I must take it back on Tuesday for an indeterminate length of time.

***

Glenn was kind enough to take me to pick it up at four thirty. I didn't leave with my car until 6:15. What was I doing all that time, you ask? Why, I was reading DUB magazine's latest issue. If you ever want to feel illiterate, I recommend reading a dense technical manual tricked out as a fashion magazine. There was no dictionary present. I recognized most of the words used by DJ Envy and Tony Hawk. Also, apparently, there is some kind of Spike Lee limited edition clothing line.

***

So, one of my highschool classmates myspaced me last week and let me know he was coming into town to present a paper at a marketing conference. We hung out. Went to see Blades of Glory--which is solidly funny--and discussed things I am not at liberty to discuss here, as I will be using them to my advantage against one or all of you at some point in the future.

It turned out that this acquaintance had been intrigued by my mentioning going to the San Diego Zoo with McKenzie on Thursday. Just as we did, he came to the conclusion that the panda is a terrible evolutionary pathway. But he, unlike McKenzie and I, braved the lines of people straining to see one. Apparently, there was a sign reading, "If the female seems restless, don't panic. She's just in heat!"

Which makes you wonder how many phone calls the zoo received:

"Um, hello?"
"San Diego Zoo. How may I direct your call?"
"I'm standing at the panda enclosure. I'm calling you from my cell. Can you hear me?"
"Yes, sir. I can hear you."
"Um. Well, this panda seems...I don't know. Restless."
"I'm sorry?"
"Well, it's pacing around, and I just don't know what it's going to do next."
"..."
"It's like some kind of caged animal, pacing back and forth. Looks like Brando, you know? Dangerous. Unpredictable. Bestial."
"...I'll let someone know right away."

Or how many times someone ran to find a zookeeper:

"You've...huhahuh...got to come...huhahuh...quick...ahuh..."
"Ma'am, what's the emergency? Catch your breath. What's wrong?"
"Panda...uhahuh...restless....secure....in a cage....danger to no one..."
"Oh, that. Right. Well, she's just in heat."
"OH SWEET LORD, NO!"
"Don't worry ma'am--it's completely natural."
"SOMEONE PUT AN ICE PACK ON THAT RESTLESS PANDA!"
"I'm not sure that would work, ma'am."
"WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"
"Probably."

Voyeurism

2007-03-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

The moon is high in the sky, watching me watching them.

Right now, across the parking lot, in a dimly lit window on the second floor of a Palo Verde apartment building, I can see the perfect silhouettes of two young people deliberately, devotedly, with slow and subtly changing rhythms, playing Wii Sports. It fills me with a kind of trembling--an obscure fear before the beauty of human endeavor. A coyote is barking. At a pause in the action, one of the figures slips away, only to return seconds later with a bottle of beer.

Spring has finally come.

This has probably been done a million times, but...

2007-03-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

The following is a list of prepositional phrases identifying places where I have recently found religion*:

Between Asimov's guide to Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.
Behind the Blueberry Zinfandel Sorbet in the freezer.
In a file labelled "2003 Taxes and Misc."
Under the back seat of my car.
In a Jack Chick pamphlet.
In a roadside bathroom.
In the year 486 BC.
In my sinuses.

*You may substitute any of the following nouns or noun phrases for this one: Jesus, one of McKenzie's earrings, corn nuts, change, crumbs, a page from Warminski's exam, mold, or my self-respect.

Thanks, JC!, I haven't laughed this hard in about six days.

2007-03-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

Sister!

2007-03-10T11:33:00.000-08:00

My little sister is in town this weekend.

Yesterday, I took her to class with me, where, despite a lengthy explanation of her presence, my kids took her to be a college senior who might--for inexplicable reasons--be transferring to UCI. I guess we Tanners look old.

Last night we watched 8 mile again. For all three of us it had been a long time coming. I, for one, had never seen the movie in English. Thanks, Marianne.

We also played some video games and watched some Family Guy. Then Jessie went to bed early because she had to be at her Honors College Open House registration at 8:00. I wrote until late, and then I went to sleep.

Now, I will go to work. For those of you who get this on some sort of feed, Sterling and Christal will be in town tonight, and we are thinking of going to a late show of 300. Give me a call on my cell phone if you would like to go. (Offer available in Southern California, only.)

JC Ascendant!

2007-03-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

My friend and co-conspirator on the much-discussed-but-never-before-heard-by-most-living-souls Battle of the Worlds rap opera project, JC!, just got a job blogging at Wii Fanboy and DS Fanboy. So, if you liked his regular work on 20xx Games, or if you have ten minutes to spend checking out video game stuff, then you should leave him a comment.

Update: I have found and recovered about 75% of Battle of the Worlds off of some back-up discs that pre-date my sojourn in Auvergne. Those of you who express interest might be rewarded with some hilarity.

Sometimes you miss your own point.

2007-03-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

Joe, over at The Kugelmass Episodes, recently posted his take on Buffy sexuality as a prelude to a discussion of pop-culture sexuality. If you plan on continuing to read this post after the first two sentences, it might serve you to read that post here. My comment in response follows, and, in re-reading my comment in light of Joe's response (which follows farther down the linked page), I did a double take. Sometimes, it seems, you miss your own point.

I guess I'd start by saying that it seems Joe's point and my point have passed each other in the night without really connecting. You might say they were strangers. Strangers who passed in the night. And couldn't really see each other because it was dark. They might have exchanged glances.

Saying, "Trying to continue holding fast to the shows protestations of romantic feeling creates more problems than it solves," Joe goes on to talk about the romantic choices of the characters as evidence (and, please, correct me if I'm wrong) for the shallowness of sexuality in pop-culture as read through the show.

My point, in evoking Schiller, was completely different from talking about the characters' romantic entanglements as some kind of Tragic Romance that was valuable for the sake of its affirmation of sentimentality. I was trying to evoke the logic of the show itself in Schillerian terms...and I did a terrible job.

Let me try again. After an incredibly long and stupid excursus, I hope to return to Joe's argument on his own terms.

I am going to ventriloquize Schiller for a second. And, since that's boring, I am going to put myself into dialogue with him.

The scene: Jonathan's kitchen, 4 am. Enter Jonathan, hungry.

Schiller: Art is a salve for a wound.
Me (surprised): Who the fuck are you?
Schiller: I am Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
Me(rummaging in fridge for sandwich fixin's): What wound is that, Johann? Er...Christoph? Can I call you Christoph?
Schiller: I prefer Friedrich, actually.
Me (under breath): Could have guessed.
Schiller: What was that?
Me (toasting bread): Nothing. You were saying? A wound?
Schiller: And the name of this wound is "history."
Me (gets out stone ground mustard, decides to go with white wine instead): Oh, so. Good. Heals it right up, then, does it?
Schiller: No. Nothing can heal the wound that is history.
Me (prepares cheddar cheese) : That's a pretty crappy salve.
Schiller: No. For the wound is not a wound.
Me (disinterestedly folds roast beef slices so they will fit on bread): No?
S: No.
Me (retrieving bread from toaster and constructing a sandwich): ...
S: ...
Me (impatiently): So, what is it then?
S: It is the anguish caused by the ironic position of wanting to be original in the face of history, when one is trapped within the march of history.
Me: And art heals that anguish?
S: No.
Me (looks at sandwich. looks at door): Of course not.
S: Art merely holds up the possibility of creating something beautiful. Something that would transcend history.
Me: So, art is a time machine?
S: No. Art is failure.
Me: What?
S: Art cannot transcend history. It merely provides us with the eternally foreclosed possibility of transcending history. The art that remains is a failure, but one that contains within it that possibility for others.
Me: Okay. Nice to meet you. I'm going to go eat my sandwich, now.

Fin.

Okay. So, I was not trying to evoke this as a way of saying that the tragedy of their specifically romantic choices was what was worth holding onto in the show. Rather, in my opinion, all the choices by all the characters (not just the principals), through this same formal construction, seem to be attempts to get out of one situation in order to arrive at another. Even the vampires and demons succumb to the idea that the status quo is hell (the status quo I refer to here is specifically not the status quo held up by Buffy as normalcy/popularity, etc, but I will get to that in a minute). The possibility of change, however, is constantly removed beyond reach. Stake a vampire, there's another vampire. Kill a demon, there's another demon. Blow up a hellmouth, there's always Cleveland. The thing that makes this interesting is that it works both ways. Kill Buffy, you get Kendra. Kill Kendra, you get Faith. Kill Buffy again, you get... Like the attempt to make art, the attempt to change the status quo is merely an attempt, and one that results in failure. This is why making art and attempting change are both inferior to making sandwiches.

This particular logic produces two effects, which coincide with Joe's argument in, I hope, productive (or at lest interesting to read) ways.

The first of these effects is the endless production of irony. In the face of the impossibility of the Slayer accomplishing what it is that she is created for, all of her exploits become ironic. This is what leads, on the one hand, to the ironic hahas of the meetings and the Scooby Gang's overall idiom. On the other hand, this leads to those moments of "total negation," where Buffy is alone in the night with vampires: youth destined to kill ancient things that are already dead. This is futility in the face of history. Perhaps that is a useful way to think through the show, perhaps not. It is clear to me, however, how this conception of the show's irony produces the kinds of desire to which you refer, without needing to bring in the death drive.

The second effect that I perceive is perhaps a simple by-product of the first. After all, the problem of irony is that once it begins, it is difficult to tell where it ends. We must examine the status quo with this in mind.

The status quo of this show is ironically presented (it is here where your reading of the show's lack of insight into highschool might be in conflict with mine). The school is simultaneously every school everywhere, and a very specific location--the confluence of ley lines, etc., the Hell-Mouth, we are told. But then, the specificity of this location is revoked. It is A hellmouth. Any hellmouth anywhere. It has become-- because of its ironic construction--both like and unlike any other school.

The normalcy that Buffy craves is ironic because it doesn't exist. The show points this out over and over again. Find one character that fits the image of the status quo that Buffy longs for, and the whole show falls apart. Those characters that are marked by their lack of supernatural abilities, occult activities, etc., are also those that are torn apart in most unnatural ways. Buffy can never win. To win would be to assert a status quo that is some kind of status quo ante. This is impossible both in the Schillerian sense of the impossibility of transcending history, and because there is no before time within the context of the show. Demons have always existed, and vampires, and humankind has always been on the brink of death, ("Apocalypse. We've all been there.")

This is the element of the show that I find to be insightful. It is not the equation of the SAT and money to college applications on the show--just to take one example among many--that is damaging. It is that equation outside the show. The show is contextualizing this kind of decision-making within a discourse wherein everything the viewer's status quo presents as valuable is made laughable by virtue of irony and the basic questions of survival that the show raises.

Last thing. I promise.

This relates to the "'real' perversions" of the show. The thing that is being shown to be perverted on the show is the perception of high school held by people that incorrectly perceive themselves as holding up a vision of the status quo. This is ultimately why Cordelia, the champion of that vision of reality, is subverted and brought into the fold of the Scoobies. If you believe that SM culture--this example will have to stand in, synechdochally, for others--is not taken seriously by the show--is somehow marginalized or made insignificant by the fact that Spike and Drusilla engage in it (and, here, I am thinking of the suggestion that none of the "principals" engage in it)--I suggest that you take a look at the sex life of Buffy and Spike again. There, if nowhere else, are moments that specifically address your concerns about sexuality. If I have to put it in psycho-analytical terms, and believe me, I do so only as an example of the structures I am trying to suggest, what the show does to the status quo of everyday life is what Freud does to the status quo of sexuality in--and here you have me at a disadvantage--"Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." Please correct me if I have my reference wrong, but it is here where Freud suggests that the norm, when it comes to sexuality, *is* pervervsion--or, if I must qualify, that perversion is present in even psychosexually healthy beings. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the moment of its title, enacts this belief, but not in purely sexual terms.

Wamp-wamp (What it do)

2007-02-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

When I am listening to Clipse, I sometimes think about stupid things. Like which is stupider: Ghost Ridin' the Whip or Ghost Rider?

I was recently pleasantly surprised to learn that the lyrics to E-40's song really were Ghost Ridin' the Whip. And that a whip was a car or something. I thought I was just hearing nonsense where sense was to be had. It turns out I was hearing sense and thinking I was hearing non-sense, which made me feel old.

I don't like hyphy. Have I mentioned that? Perhaps someone can make a mixtape that will make me want to go dumb.

Having said all of that, I should point out that this post should all be interpolated between the beats of Wamp-wamp, and, otherwise, you should not search for it to have something to do with Hell Hath No Fury. You can think of this as my Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge post, and this sentence as the hot snap of my neck cracking at the end of an interminable fall.

The World is Full of Lies

2007-02-26T00:10:00.000-08:00

So, today, after convincing Tomemos to come along to play softball because everyone would be there, no one showed up. Tom and I did some two-man batting practice, and I regretted hitting balls as far as I did. Indeed, held firmly in the clammy scrotal grip of this exercise in futility, I began to doubt the necessity of ever hitting a ball at all.

Despite our predicament, I feel like we had fun. One interesting outcome was the imaginary creation of Final Fantasy Baseball. (This happened when Tomemos suggested that a pop-fly I had hit straight up in the air about a quarter mile was designed to break someone's glove. I immediately thought: glovebreak.) Of course, this opens up a floodgate of SquarEnix possibilities that they have never dared to dream of.

That I could even think such a thing means EAs grip on this reality might be slipping.

Hesitant fumblings toward something awful.

2007-02-22T17:41:00.000-08:00

Over the last month, I began several times a post that talked about grief in terms that made it abundantly clear to me that I was unable to talk intelligently about my own grief. This despite the inclusion of several homilies stolen from Latin and scenes taken from Virgil and Apollonius Rhodius, which technique everyone knows increases your understanding of your own situation through a kind of paratactical organization of time, emotion, and erudition. Everyone also knows (and, here, please read "Everyone knows" as "The author now knows") that it is an empty and symbolic way of dealing with anything, this endless referring to an external locus where supposedly universal scenes are depicted. It is an attempt at vocalizing what is essentially doubly marked with, on the one hand, an introspective silence, and on the other, a kind of continous mental screaming that overawes all thought and becomes just another way of remaining dumb. One camouflages the inadequacy of one's own rendition of events with someone else's inadequate rendering of other events, emotions, times, places...

I suppose that I just want those of you who still read this blog to know that I am planning to continue it as a semi-regular project. I just needed to gain a little distance from the events of early January, because to write about them immediately somehow seemed inappropriate. It seemed to take those events and make them abstract. I felt that the kind of detachment I would need to have to write the post I nevertheless tried to write five or six times would somehow be damaging in the end. Certainly, processing the emotions I experienced was difficult enough, lapsed often enough into confused or embarrassed or abject silence without the added abstraction of text. Now, though, text is creeping back in at the edges.

For those of you who do not know the nature of those events--cannot have known because of the fundamental impediments to the spread of information with such sharp contours despite, or perhaps because of, the intricate intimacy of the social networks in which we are all ceaselessly engaged and with which we are continuously engaging and the extreme reluctance everyone (including myself, cf. paragraphs one and two, supra) feels in the face of this topic, combined with my permanent, shuddering distaste for the telephone and people's (sometimes quite heated) arguments about how "private" a person I am...
I am starting over.

In early January, my wife and I suffered the loss of our daughter, Elissa, who was diagnosed with triploidy in mid-December. Labor was induced, following confirmation of the diagnosis by amniocentesis and doctor's orders, because of the dangers inherent in continuing the pregnancy. Elissa did not survive. She was cremated soon thereafter.

For those of you who did know, and who offered your support (in whatever form), I wish to take this moment to (however (yes, yes) inadequately) express my gratitude. Thank you.

For those of you who did not know, and who might be saddened or angered or...by my reluctance to pick up a phone, or let you know in some more pleasant way than this, I wish to express my sincerest regrets. [I have grown comfortable with regret in the past few weeks--comfortable in a way which is striking to me.] Please know that I made no conscious choices to exclude anyone from the process. I blundered my way through as best I could.

I am sorry.

Video Tour of the New Apartment

2006-12-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

End of an Interim

2006-12-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

Hey. How's it goin'?

Q: ...

Me? I'm fine.

Q: ...

No, none of that.

Q: ...

Well, of course. I mean, there was the one.

Q: ...

I was in a swimming pool, because it was a pool party, and I was standing in a ring of people. We were all handed golf balls. We all were told we had to somehow hit the floating target in the center of the pool. Most people immediately put their golfballs in their mouths. I chose to throw mine. It struck the floating target, which was wearing a little crown of tortilla chips with a die cast metal car hood down in the center of it.

Q: ...

I don't know. It was important for some reason. I could tell you about all the other dreams arranged with this one, but I find that paratactical dream relationships, when they are narratized, become just funny instead of easier to access. The alternative route is to organize the telling paratactically. Like, "I was in a hallway. I was in a swimming pool. Golf balls were coming out of people's mouths. A woman looked like Birdo. My locker combination was a series of smells. Dried blood. Cloves. Peppermint jelly. Marinara. And all the way back around to Cloves."

Q: ...

Sure. I can tell the same dream in a way that makes it unrecognizable. Just a matter of shifting your focus. Just like you can tell two different people about your day.

Un-Blog! An exercise in meta-blogging, brought to you by E398!

2006-10-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Your Blogs
Behold, Rhetorgand!

Description: This blog is intended to fulfill the requirements of E398. As an added bonus, it constitutes yet another glistening electronic coil of the World Serpent that is my internet presence.

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October 15, 2006
From Tadpole to Butterfly
It suddenly (NB It struck me after I read the prompt.) strikes me that I have no idea where my kids are emotionally. Cognitively, they are present and accounted for. I have a few that are extremely slow to grasp what is being asked of them in terms of production (and yes, we do actually require that they produce something, despite our emphasis on process) but exceptionally quick to grasp concepts in class, etc. Politically, they are all new-born babes. Most of them are realizing that they have no idea what they mean when they say, "I'm conservative," beyond, "I'm like my daddy." (Here's a fer instance: "I am conservative, and that means being compassionate. It is the responsibility of the government to take care of everyone who can't take care of themselves. Otherwise, you are just letting them die, and that's not very compassionate." Or, another gem, "I'm as liberal as the next guy, but the only people on welfare are junkies. Why should we pay junkies to get high?")

Emotionally, though, that's a puzzler.

I had a girl and a boy come in five minutes apart. Both crying. The girl put her head down and occasionally sighed extremely loudly, which would make the boy cringe. The girl eventually came to me and said that she needed to leave because she was sick (ten minutes into class). Then, I got a nasty email from her saying I wasn't at my office hours and I really should have been because, since she missed class, she was really behind and really needed my help. This was, of course, untrue--so untrue that four people from her section and three from the other two sections managed to find me right where I always am. So, what does any of that mean, emotionally?

I don't think it means anything.

At least, I think it means more rhetorically than it does emotionally.

It being all impossible an' all to tell what is going on in this person's head, I can only surmise what she is feeling based on her behavior. And her behavior is sulky--that is, designed to draw attention to her apparent emotional state and inflict pain on any that observe her. She cast a wide net--like a new space cadet laying about with a pain ray. Everyone was imposed upon. This is a rhetorical position that is provocative in its very provocativeness. "My personal issues are way more important than the progress of this discussion section," it says. "And you should all be aware of the intense amounts of soul-searing pain that I am in and share in it to the degree that you are able," it adds, after a thoughtful pause.

So, I don't know precisely what she's feeling, but I do know that a part of what she's feeling is rhetorically motivated/performed.

The email, though, was the best part. As if she could somehow make me feel guilty for being where I said I'd be when I said I'd be there and the very tool she could use to do this was the fact that she was not where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there in an incredibly melodramatic manner. Hoisted by my own petard!

Of course, all of this is a ritual. There is a certain charm to watching someone of that age sacrifice dignity on the altar of convenience in order to get one last gasp out of a stand-by tool from childhood: the tantrum.

2 Comments (Most Recent: October 15, 2006)

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October 10, 2006
The Power of Metaphor for the Labor-Shunning Personality, Wherein certain references are made to the gnostic and cabalistic traditions via the names, ranks, and dominions of the principal thrones of..
... the host of heaven before the creation of those infernal regions first adequately described by so noble a mind as Miltonius' and preserved by so popular a mind as Mike Carey's, wherein the author's failure to import his writing practices to the classroom is elucidated, and wherein an inappropriate Lockean metaphor for the operation of the mind is put forth...

It begins: Calling something a "writing practice" implies that it is something one practices. That is to say, it is making it seem as though there was some kind of continuity between writing something at one moment and writing something else at another moment. This does not seem to be the case for me--if, indeed it is the case for anyone beyond the most superficial similarities of routine. There is an almost infinite slippage/breakage/separation between papers, between drafts of papers, and between modes of writing. I mean by "routine" all those things that are behaviors that surround writing that are not writing themselves. Some (I think the idea is most) professional creative writers write at the same time every day. Those who do not write for about the same amount of time every day. I understand this practice of reinforcement helps them. Similarly, when I write, I have a routine. I avoid writing. I find this very helpful. Nothing is written until it absolutely must be written or the entire free world will drown in a tide of fire--the clear consequence of my continued negligence. I stress about writing. Then, I don't do it with every fiber of my being. Eventually, I begin to talk. [NB: I have had recourse to speak to my fiancee about this process as it is as opaque to me as is the UI of the Writing Studio. The description in so far as it actually describes what an eyewitness reports of my writing practices is hers. The purple prose, of course, is mine.] I apparently talk ceaselessly about the central nexus of ideas that are forming the kernel of the paper that is yet to be written. [NB: Incidentally, one of the worst things about the Writing Studio is the irregular boundaries in text windows that make it impossible for one to view all of one's work at the same time, which leads the writer to avoid re-reading for grammar/spelling and organization because of the constant irritation of messing with scroll-bars.] Imagine, if you will, that I steal TS Eliot's infamous metaphor about poetic imagination. Imagine that I put it in here. Imagine, then, this bullshit session as me forming that platinum filament by sheer force of will. If I had to liken this part of the writing process to any one thing, it would be to the power demiourgos given by Yahweh to his son Michael. Of course, Lucifer's power is needed, too. The lightbringer, among the Sons of Man, has a very important role to play. Once the filament is formed, it must be heated in order to cast forth the light of reason! Poesis, is after all, a making and a raising of a lamp! No, but seriously. I talk it out first. Sometimes I write it out, if, say, I'm broody that day. Then I write for about ten hours. I then read what I have written and determine if it actually has a point. I spend an hour reconfiguring what is there around the absent or present point. Then I make my fiancee read it. She says something like, "Mongooses fighting over the corpse of a cobra make more sense with their gibbering clicks and high-pitched yips than you, sir, manage to make in twenty-five pages of so-called Academic English." Then, she gives me a few suggestions for organization. These usually include telling me to move the last paragraph to the front. Then I print it and turn it in. Last Spring, she, being a behaviorist by both training and inclination added positive reinforcement to the mix. For every ten pages of rough-draft or rewrite I produced I received a reward. Common decency requires me to refrain from spelling that out. Rest assured, the reward scheme reduced my writing time to an average of 6 hours a paper and improved the response received from my instructors. Now. How can I bring this into the classroom? I cannot. I cannot tell people to wait until the night before. I cannot explain to them the reward system that has brought me such paroxysms of bliss. I cannot tell them to write first and to think of a thesis last. Or, if I do, I go against the entire motto of process over product. For we explain process as a series of re-writes, but graduate school is without the possibility of rewriting. Or, to be more precise, grad school is about the constant deferral of re-writing to some future epoch where everything is time and wine flows like slightly less viscous wine. In conclusion, I can think of no metaphor that would adequately describe the process of writing. I can, however, think of one that describes what I have already described. My mind, when engaged with the threat of imminent deadlines, is a member of the species dionaea muscipula. Slowly, slowly, slowly the ideas begin to leave my lips with the delicacy of drosophilia pullipes or musca domestica alighting on my mind's sensory hairs. Mechano-sensory response is initiated by the stimulation of those hairs, and the mind begins to close around the spoken idea, slowly, at first, until hairs in both hemispheres sense the same increasingly benighted idea. Then, swift as the adult swift-footed crab, the mind slams shut and begins to digest the idea. Of course, it all breaks down because what is produced is not a chemical sludge that powers the mind, but printed wood pulp with my ideas smeared all over it.

1 Comment (October 10, 2006)

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September 29, 2006
On the first day of classes, my teacher gave to me:
One lesson on the formal characteristics of haiku. This turns out not to be as ridiculous as it sounds. It took place after an in-class attempt to write about a moment that involved the exertion of power. The haiku served to narrow focus, alert them to what was essential about their moment, and think very carefully about word choice and sensory description. It was a wild success. The model haiku I wrote for them was about returning from a party--I showed it undergoing revision. Remember, kids! It's all about process:

Walking home after,

the sprinklers dampened my pants,

under the new moon.

This became:

Stumbling home after,

sprinklers wetted my pants, a

heavy autumn dew.

I explained to my kids the reasons for the changes, stronger verbs. Association with "wet" and "pants" to allude to another reason why my pants might have been wet despite the claim about sprinklers. Replace "the new moon" which is very specific, yet recurring, with the more formalistically appropriate, but heavy-handed "autumn." "Dew" allows another opportunity for humor, as in other areas of the country, there would be actual autumn dew, not water from sprinklers. Of course, heavy speaks to that as well as to the physical feel of denim soaked with water. Their mouths dropped open as they gradually realized that you had to choose each word for a reason. Then they got started. There were some gems, but not as many of them went for the comedy, and that was unfortunate. They have a tendency to think that "My mother takes my power" is an understandable seven syllable line when removed from all context.

The other two classes went great. There was 100% participation in all sections--even from the frat kid who said "I hate writing because it takes too much reading. I don't read. That's why I like math. Because you don't have to read. You just look at numbers and see what they tell you." When I said that that sounded an awful lot like reading to me, he actually blushed.

My first office hours were a little strange. I brought a Zola novel, all set to do some reading for fun, as everybody assured me that no one ever made use of the office hours. I had seven people show up, and this meant that I didn't really have time to get into any kind of detail with any of them.

One of my students had a really sophisticated moment for her paper draft--they were supposed to write about a significant moment in their lives that concerned communication. She picked a moment where an apparent crush had picked a song out of his playlist for her to listen to. She tried to navigate the differently mediated levels of what was being communicated by a) the selection of the song as a demonstration of taste, b) the lyrics in the song as they applied to her, and c) the implication of those lyrics beyond the communication of listening preferences. This seemed to me ambitious in a way that reminded me of 398. Asking people to perform rhetorically in a space that purports to be about the instruction of the instruction of rhetoric is like painting a self-portrait in which you are teaching a class on self-portraiture with several competing portraits occupying the frame.

Overheard on the way back from teaching...

2006-09-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

"Yeah. I mean, as soon as I heard she was Catholic, I proposed to her. I was like, I mean, really Catholic, and she was all, yep."

The Summation of Human Compassion

2006-09-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

You ever get that crawly sensation on the back of your neck?

2006-09-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

Your Band Name is:

The Pink Officers

Band Name Generator

I accidentally swatted a ladybug that was crawling on my neck. Reflex action. It was more of a brushing, really, and it seems that the victim will recover. It was touch and go there for a while, though.

Exotic Dancer Name Is...

Tiger

Exotic Dancer Name Generator

Have you ever been having a conversation where both you and the other person seem to be completely convinced that you're talking about the same thing, but secretly you think that you are talking about something different, and you can't shake the idea that maybe the other person is also talking about something completely different? Perhaps speaking in code?

You Are the Very Gay Velma!

She might not even realize it...
But Velma is all about Daphne... not Fred!

What Gay Childhood Icon Are You?

I have become convinced that internet quizzes are the new I Ching.

You Are Royal Blue

People find you difficult to understand. In fact, you often find it hard to understand yourself.
You think so much that sometimes you get lost in your own thoughts!

What Color Blue Are You?

Here's a joke: A woman from a noir detective film goes to a 1960s psychiatrist and says, "Doc, I think my husband's a refrigerator." The psychiatrist leans back in his leather chair--which squeaks a little--and asks, "What makes you think that?" The woman brushes her spit curl out of her eyes and says, "When he sleeps, his mouth hangs open." The psychiatrist closes his little spiral notebook with a flourish and says, "That's perfectly normal. I'm told that I sleep with my mouth open as well. Does that make me a refrigerator, too?" The woman says, "I don't know. Does the little light that comes on keep *your* wife up all night?"

You Are 52% Gross

You're more than a little gross, but probably no more gross than the average person.
Maybe it's time to drop some of those disgusting habits that could eventually embarrass you!

How Gross Are You?

So far, the entries to the sweepstakes are few. The next person to enter has a 25% chance of winning.

Sometimes it's a piece of cheese, suspended in the air.

2006-09-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

The photo is for Edward.

The title is an incredibly obscure reference to one of Edward Monkton's cartoons that I once saw--one that purported to explain the meaning of life with a little rhyme:

Sometimes it's a chicken,
Sometimes it's a chair,
Sometimes it's a piece of cheese...you know the rest.

Today, for me, life is exactly like that piece of cheese. [Jonathan's editors have proposed a sweepstakes-style competition. Whoever finds the most apt justification for Jonathan's use of Monkton's wildly provocative simile will receive a shiny nickel in the mail. Seriously. Jonathan's editors have your addresses. Send entries via comment in the format: Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because...

Here are some helpful examples: (1) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because it is slightly damp to the touch and swings back and forth with a subtle and difficult to master rhythm while managing a series of antithetical, almost- revolutions. (2) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because it hangs from a string connected to something no one is sure of, over a drop of indeterminate length, the end result of which drop being uniform in its finality and various in the amount of mess made upon impact. (3) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because you can always eat cheese, but, then, really, what's left to do after that--play with string? (4) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because, even though you are relatively safe from some things, (i.e., being stepped on) you are incredibly vulnerable to others (i.e., bugs finding the string in their interminable wanderings along the ceiling and then, due to some unfathomable twist in the decision tree that begins with finding pieces of string hanging from the ceiling, crawling down it, finding the cheese at the end and making a sort of cheese house for themselves in which they will breed new generations of bugs, all living, rutting, and dying in the house that is their only food source, until all the cheese is gone and the last, cautiously curious scions of the House of Cheese crawl back up the now nearly slack string to reclaim the nomadic ideals of their forebearers...) (5) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because if you put on a blindfold and slice at either (the life or the cheese) with a knife, and, somehow, make contact, then both the life and the cheese are going to undergo irreversible changes at the physical level. (6) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because it is not suspended in a vaccuum. &c.]

I don't have much for you in the way of...let's see. Oh! I know. Here's a list of the screennames from Place4Friends.com that have recently flirted with me:

spicy_bun
ever1luvzastar
purejae
love4life20004
luckycharms82

Which one do you think likes water polo?

O lente currite equi noctis!

2006-09-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

I had a nightmare the other night wherein everything I touched dried up and blew away...The dried husks of all things were crumbled bits of beetle carcasses blowing in a funeral wind. I was choking on my own blood. Then, right as I realized that the ground, too, was crumbling like baked filo dough, my hands twisted and the bones burst from within them, hot strips of flesh pelting my face and body as I reached out to keep myself from sinking into the desiccated Earth. A bird screeched the lyrics to pollywolly doodle, and I awoke.

My mouth was so dry it had cracked in three places. I was bleeding into the back of my throat. Somehow, my hands had both been folded almost against my wrists and were pressed against the bed under my belly--once they woke up again, the pain was crystalline. "Well, that explains the dryness and the pain in my hands, but what about..." I realized I had sneezed all over my pillow and face. It was a most loathsome morning.

Current thinking...

2006-09-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

For various reasons, I vacillate daily on the topic of whether or not I want to be an academic for the rest of my life. I just sent an email to a contact of mine to try and get some info about how one goes about seeking literary representation. If any of you have a clue how to begin that process, please send it my way.

I am also thinking that parts of Project Zero Sum, my secret codename for my juvenile novel, Kanjangaroo, can be salvaged and repackaged as honest-to-gods sf. I am playing around with various hideous schemes to make it part of a novel cycle--the kind sf publishers love--and the best candidate so far is something incredibly high-concept. Those of you might remember my dangling just the very tippy tips of my toes in quantum theory-esque concepts in that piece, and my understanding has certainly gotten better. The multi-book arc would be called something preposterous like, "The Book of the Shattered Earth," that would get some publisher's little whiskers all a-twitch. Then, the first volume's name would become "Coherence." You see? Multi-level punning of the kind that built the book, playing off of John Lyly's inherent (teehee) lack of coherence, the masturbatory moon/Earth shattering thing--which, incidentally, has since become the premise of a sitcom/soap opera--and the reverse of what is, as far as I understand--and Dave can correct me if I am wrong--a concept called decoherence, which is, simplistically, the reason why extremely improbable things don't happen at the macrostate level, namely that the interaction of large numbers of particles at the microstate level makes the extremely improbable on a small scale almost infinitely improbable on a large scale. Said reversal being somewhat what drives the improbable powers that John Lyly develops, leading to the shattered Earth and all the Earths of the Palimpsest...I say somewhat, because I also liberally borrowed from the mystically powerful but theoretically kinda ridiculous many worlds idea. The second volume would be, then, "Decoherence," and it would chronicle Epiphany's attempts to save the oneironauts spread throughout the dreamtime when all of those probability waves begin to collapse--if "collapse" is even an appropriate word--and force all realities back into the one doomed by John Lyly's insane act of indifference. The final volume would need to be completely overblown and hopefully nihilistic--in keeping with the tone of the last part of the first volume--and it would therefore be the incredibly pretentious attempt at a really moving account of godlings faced with mortality, that is to say, the human condition. I dreamt last night of Nabokov's "Lolita," and I thought something stolen from him would be reeking with appropriateness. Isn't there a phrase toward the beginning of Part Two that goes something like "a violet paradise wherefrom death and truth are banished"? Let me look...Okay, I can't find it at the moment. But even if he didn't write that, I'm going to say that whatever title I come up with for the third Book of Shatterearth was taken from Nabokov. "Wherefrom Death and Truth are Banned, Volume Three of the Book of the Shattered Earth." That has a nice, hefty pomposity to it, don't you think?

In Time of Emergency

2006-09-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

I recently found this old Department of Defense handbook called "In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook on...Nuclear Attack...Natural Disasters." I have only a vague idea of how I happened upon this, but I do know that it is from March of 1968, and therefore a perfect countertext to the Revolution. For those of you who collect such things, this is Office of Civil Defense handbook H-14.

There is nothing specific about it that is hilarious in the way that one hopes such things are going to be. But the tone of the thing itself is amazing. Unbelievable. Every page has something designed to convice one that one can survive a nuclear attack if one is properly cautious. A random example from the text:

"The fire departments of some communities in the United States conduct free training courses for citizens interested in learning how to fight fires at home or in becoming auxiliary firemen. If such courses are available in your community, you can acquire firefighting skills which may save your life or your home either in peacetime or in a period of nuclear attack" (Emergency, 54).

Dum de dum dum dum...oooh, free courses? Why would I...let's see...oh, I could save me! Or house! I could save house! Let's look outside...kinda peacey. Peaceful, that's the word. Serene, even. I guess it's peacetime now. Huh. Period of Nuclear Attack. Wow. I guess I never considered that Nuclear Attack was going to keep coming for a whole, like, period. I guess I just thought that a nuclear fireball was going to annihilate me and leave a greasy shadow on the wall. But, now, I guess I know better. I guess I better be prepared to fight fires while mushroom clouds bloom and an ever-thickening veil of ash composed of human, animal, and plant remains mixed with the powdery particles of minerals shorn from their intricate chthonic matrices is drawn between me and the sun. Jeez, I wonder what kind of...I wonder how one puts out a nuclear fireball. Let's see...ah:

"Remember the 3 basic ways to put out a fire: Take away its fuel. Take away its air (smother it). Cool it with water or fire-extinguisher chemicals" (ibid.).

Well, that about sums it up. Seems easy enough. But this is a special type of...oh, how convenient. There's a whole table of special kinds of...hmmm...electrical...oil or grease...gas...That's odd. Nothing here about how to quench or smother the promethean fire that results when matter is converted into energy released at the speed of light. Well, maybe they covered...ah, here we go:

"These special fire," okay, special, here we go, "special fire precautions should be taken in time of nuclear emergency," I guess periods of nuclear attack sure would qualify as emergencies, yessiree bob, "especially if you plan to use a home shelter: (1) Keep the intense heat rays of nuclear explosions from entering your house by closing doors windows and venetian blinds" (53). Whillikers, who would have thought that the venetians would have been so clever. Making blinds that stop the intense heat rays of nuclear explosions. Imagine. I guess that's what comes of being in a semi-tropical environment. Weren't the venetians traders? Have to be pretty crafty to control the trade routes of the Mediterranean, I guess. Huh. Counter-intuitive, though. I always kinda like to throw the windows open when it's hot out. It gets so stuffy in here. Anyway, I don't have venetian...oh goody: "If windows are not fitted with venetian blinds, cover the inside or outside of the windows with aluminum foil, or coat the glass with whitewash, household cleaning powder, or even mud" (ibid.). Well, I'll be. I have some mud right out in the yard. Guess I got nothing to worry about.

The impossible...

2006-09-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

has happened.

Requiescat in Pace.

The ten minute mile.

2006-09-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

I bought new, anti-bacterial tank bombs for the toilets in a fit of rage that was started by a drain being clogged again. Now, the smell from the toilets is painfully fresh. It cuts into your eyes and makes your nose squint. It comes up out of the bowl with a kind of sideslant authority and walks up slowly with its arms up-raised, even though you can clearly see the gun on its hip, just so you understand who's in charge. I don't like it.

Minor sucess at the gym today as I completed just over six miles on the elliptical trainer in an hour. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come. My goal? 7 miles in an hour, and 1000 calories.

Soldier Vs. Ram

2006-09-01T19:20:00.000-07:00


In what way is this a good idea?

Did I mention...

2006-08-31T17:38:00.000-07:00

...that I was walking down the street the other day and saw a flyer seeking a roommate for a woman who claimed her name was Poonam Contractor?

No? Well, now I have.

I keep the end out for the tie that binds...

2006-08-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

So, there was karaoke (My Charona [passable to good], Addicted to Love [spotty], Round Here [what was I thinking?] I Walk the Line [perhaps my best yet, judging from crowd reaction]) a resurgence of honest-to-god tennis (with Jeff Clapp, who will be better than me very soon), a sweeping poker victory, and a trip to Florida since I noodled around on here last. Apart from that, I have been fretting over not doing work I should be doing for school and partly shirking my duties in the creation of certain super-secret databases. Those of you who know me well may have translated "fretting over not doing work I should be doing for school" as "re-reading the Wheel of Time series." If you are one of those, kudos. If not, see translation provided above.

Warning: The following may be too nerdful for some to abide. It also may or may not be part of a years long conversation with one Kendall Jackson and, as such, of varying interest for those of you who just don't give a damn. In fact, just skip the next paragraph.

By the way, K, reading book ten is not nearly so painful as I had imagined. Now, before you do that little chortle-scoff-laugh thing and say something you'll regret, just think of it as a really long prologue to "Knife of Dreams." Really long. And mostly worthless. But still, if you can do that...if you can't, well...really the stuff you needed to get out of 10 is there in 11 as exposition in the...you guessed it!...prologue.

Do do doo. Oh! Hey. Sorry. Didn't mean to zone out there. What else? Right. I woke up with a Britney Spears best-of medley in my head. World Jellyfish populations are on the rise. Some of you might reflect that that would present a disturbing proof of industrial over fishing. Some of you might reflect that that would present disturbing portents of an event to come: The Stinging.

Songs for the Def

2006-08-04T18:37:00.000-07:00

It has begun! I sent Pat the first attempt at a little rap ditty that will hopefully kick off my first MC collabo since 1999-2000's epic "Battle of Da Worldz." Big ups to my man Jay-C, the only person who would have consented to participate in that madness. Except Zack, who does a mean backwards version of the TOS theme song on the hidden track. Big ups, also, to my Honors Introduction to Theater teacher, who gave me an A+ for a rap album made from scratch (Get it? It's a pun. An intended pun. A play on "scratching," the hip-hop term referring to sometimes virtuosic, sometimes impromptu, but always awesome performances using turntables and vinyl records played at varying speeds to achieve musical or rhythmic effects and "from scratch" an idiomatic expression meaning "with no pre-made materials." Do you get it now? God, what do I have to do, spell it out?).

Also in the news today, I took shipment on the bookcases I ordered and put together the six-shelfer that I think constitutes the absolute limit load for this room of the house. I don't think we will be buying more storage for books any time soon, and, hopefully, this prophylactic measure will prevent actual book purchases. Yeah, right.

A long time coming...

2006-07-30T15:19:00.000-07:00

So. In addition to the many hours I have spent on Table Tennis, I have also spent too much time on young adult fiction (The first four books of the Keys to the Kingdom series, the first few from A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Thief, Queen of Attolia, King of Attolia, etc.), Elder Scrolls IV, and dreaming of writing projects I will probably never start, let alone finish. But that is not all.

In that time, I have also been to Santa Cruz, San Diego, and the moon. Except for the moon. I didn't really go there. It's just this desperate urge welling up from my heart that makes me say these things. I need to leave low earth orbit. I also and perhaps paradoxically need to create lists and start reading for my exams and pick up basic German grammar.

Those of you who are wondering where I have gone are now satisfied. Those of you craving souvenir moon pies are now thwarted.

I got a call from Edward. He made the announcement that he will be moving out to LA permanently in August. So, that will officially be a shit ton of people I went to highschool with heading for the coast. This can only mean one thing: the ground is about to open up and devour Oklahoma entire. Only those accustomed to the ULF vibrations produced by tornadoes moving across scorched wheat fields have been able to sense the rumble of the formation of a new tectonic plate which will subside and bathe Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Lousiana, Arkansas, and Missouri in a terrible tide of fire.

360 Degrees of Ping Pong

2006-06-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

So, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360 last night. Sterling came over, and we were chatting. I decided that playing Rockstar's Table Tennis was just about all I wanted out of a Saturday night, and I went and made an impulse purchase of an aggregious (egregious + aggressive = aggregious) kind. I was not disappointed. Table Tennis is awesome. I haven't been this excited for a sports game since I brought Virtua Tennis home with me for the first time. I haven't been this excited about a game, period since, well, since Skies of Arcadia came out for the GameCube. I kept getting sad about how McKenzie might enjoy this game.

Perfect Dark Zero was kinda fun, but hard. We played until we spent an hour on a single level because I was unable to find a bright orange fire alarm against a grey wall.

Today, I must set down my paddle (Look! Look! Wireless ping pong paddle!) and get to work on all the stuff that I have to do this week.

Followed up!

2006-06-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

So, I had my follow up rheumatologist's appointment. She said that the MRI didn't show any erosive bone loss, which is a big plus. She also said that she still thought all my symptoms were suspicious, but that the risk of aggressive treatment far outweighed any possible benefits. She then said I should come back the next time something was swollen and told me to lose ten pounds and wear sensible shoes.

The basic summing up is that she thinks I've got it, but it's not bad, and probably won't be bad for a while. In the meantime, I'm too fat. Which is fair.

McKenzie is in Maryland, visiting her parents and her best friend. That should be good for her.

Meanwhile, the house is very quiet. The cats are moving through the shadows, and their tails occasionally intersect with my skin in strange ways. Tails on the back of the neck when I least expect it--that kind of thing. This morning, after I had dropped McKenzie at the airport and was back in bed, sleeping, Seker (alternate spelling "Sokar") licked my hand. I woke up just in time to see him tear-assing away in fear. Belial blinked at me about thirty times, as if to say, "What can you do? He's a walking cliche," before shutting his eyes with authority and beating me back into sleep by a good three seconds.

For those of you concerned that everyone has lost their goddamned minds...

2006-06-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

One good thing.

A New, Singular Sensation

2006-06-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get the feeling that you want to drop out of school and become a mason? Or a cryptozoologist? Or a Zen calligrapher? I do.

On a whim, I went to see An Inconvenient Truth instead of eating dinner tonight. Perhaps it was my low blood-sugar level, but I was actually moved to tears by that big, monotonous mandroid and his moral commitment to his environmental stance. It made me wonder whether I have any moral stances worth speaking of. Any grand, sweeping moral gestures that could even be on the same scale as that of preserving the chunk of rock that is the determining and constitutive foundation (currently) of any possibility of such gestures or stances or postures. I guess it just hit me that when I toy with doubts in the form of playful rhetorical questions like the above (yes, yes, I know you all secretly want to be zombie disposal technicians, or orchid farmers, or bootleggers, or brewmasters, or vintners, or neuro-genetic bio-mechanicists--but, let's face it, we just can't let go of a certain deep connection to culture) those doubts do not serve the function of somehow reaffirming my choice of lifestyle. I guess I realized tonight that every time I think, "I could just go make serious money doing something, anything else...naaah," I am really underscoring a commitment that is certainly politically and, ultimately, morally important in a way that I, perhaps naively, never considered before. I don't want to be a teacher, but I do think that teaching is one of the most important functions that can be. Don't get me wrong. It is not that I am morally committed to teaching because I believe somehow that I will single-handedly transmit that last cultural puzzle piece that will change the world. No, it's rather that my commitment has a particularly cynical flavor. If I am not teaching, then someone else is. And, to be quite honest, I don't trust anyone that much.

Yes! Yes!

2006-05-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

Do you know what it's like to try to tell people about a cartoon that you saw as a child and never ever have them know what you are talking about? Indeed, to have them look at you as if you are spouting barely comprehensible and almost completely content-devoid sentences of purely syntactical language? To look into their faces and read in them consternation at being able to find nothing grammatically wrong with sentences that ne'ertheless have somehow ceased to *mean*? Well, I don't know who LJ user OrmondSacker is in the not net-world, but I have my suspicions. In any case, he or she has unwittingly led me to the name of a cartoon long buried. I was first aroused by the comment about the revived corpse of Sherlock Holmes taken into the future in the DiC feature "Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century." I knew this was what I had been searching for for sooooo many years. Then, I saw that it aired in 1999, and I was crushed. How could the beloved memory I had of the revived corpse of Sherlock Holmes deducing that Moriarty had hidden the transceiver in plain sight--THE EIFFEL TOWER!?!--have anything to do with this Scottish latecomer? Well, it couldn't. However, over the course of the Wikipedia article, they, too, noted that this had been done before, but instead of the hyper-detailed reminiscences of Jonathan Tanner--said hyper-detailed reminiscences being stripped of any possible context in which to situate it such as air-dates, time of day, channel, cartoon studio, etc. (except perhaps for the insertion into the memory-nexus of a weirdly zomboid cowboy with bionic implants and a distinctive gun that I tried to describe to Szteve and Adam on at least two drunken occasions and a giant, brawling, horse companion)--instead of these, they had actual information! Lo! It has finally been revealed to me. Behold the face of BraveStarr!!! You have no idea how many different fragments of memory were finally made whole, here. No, it is more significant than any oblique reference to the reconstruction of potsherds could ever convey. It is like brushing away the intervening years with a fine-bristled brush and revealing the original sacred topography of the temple of memory intact beneath the overwhelming detritus of years.

Aaaaaah....

2006-05-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me say an emphatic "Yes" to this: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051206Y.shtml

Yes!

Second of all, I don't know anything about my MRI results, yet. I can say that doing the MRI was the most torturous experience of my life. I would have sworn up and down that there was nothing wrong with my shoulder joints going into that goddamned machine, but now I can tell you that that is absolutely not the case.

If you want details, I can probably provide them.

Let me say again. Yes!

Cystic Changes in My Bones

2006-05-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

I went in for my rheumatology appointment today. She said that in 20% of cases, the rheumatoid factor is not present in the blood, even though the patient has rheumatoid arthritis. 7% of people with psoriasis have psoriatic rheumatoid arthritis. The good news is that it affects fewer joints than reg'lar. The bad news is that it is still arthritis. The doctor wants me to schedule an MRI and some more bloodwork. The MRI because there is no test to confirm the diagnosis, but an MRI will show whether there is any erosive bone loss. My right hand was described as "osteoporitic." The bloodwork will determine whether I am HIV+, and if I am not, the doctor would feel better about giving me immuno-suppressants. First, though, we must see if I need these last.

I hope not.

Coachella Sun in the Unforgiving Valley

2006-05-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

Lo! I am returned among you.

Coachella was painful and amazing. In that order. Here is a breakdown.

Day 1.

I picked up Tom and Pat, and we got on the road around 1:30 on Friday. We arrived at this condo all of us had rented in Palm Desert at around 4. Pat and I commenced to drinking the emergency beer I brought with me in case there was no beer when I got there. Everyone else (except Mia) went grocery shopping. They took my car to somewhere in Mexico, because they were gone until like 7:45. When they got back, Sherwin made some pasta. We ate and began playing seven card stud. This went on until stupidly late in the morning. The good part is that I more than doubled my five dollar buy-in, finishing up seven dollars. I went to sleep on a little nest of couch cushions, thermarest, and a sleeping bag at 3:45. People that had dropped out of the game earlier in the evening began getting up at 7:30, which, because I was in the living room, meant that that was how and when I began

Day 2.

People ate breakfast and continuously talked about how we should totally, like, leave soon, from 8:15 until 11:30. My mission was to see The Like opening at the outdoor theater at 1:00. Traffic prevented this. I didn’t actually set foot in the festival until after 2:00. I caught The Walkmen at 2:30, which was a no-brainer as far as choices went, because the other people playing were absolutely not on my radar. It was a really good set. I got little shivers because the stage-presence of the lead singer (he played a stage show, looking into the sun, in the desert, in 96 degree heat, in a suit) led me to some insights into the way certain lyrics ought to be interpreted. They played the only Walkmen song I included on my mix, thus justifying its presence. That song = We’ve Been Had. Then, I stayed at the main stage and caught The Duke Spirit. That was pretty good. The sound quality was better than during The Walkmen’s set, and the lead singer was really interesting. Their bass player had sprained his strumming elbow on the tour and played the whole set in a sling. I stayed put and checked out Common and Kanye, and was more or less glad that I did, even though it meant skipping out on CYHSY. At this point, 6:35, I was completely exhausted and still had five and half hours of music to watch. I went to the last half of TV on the Radio’s set, but watched it sitting down. Which basically meant that I saw people’s asses for twenty minutes. The twenty minute break between that set and Ladytron was relaxing. The sun was down by the time they came on, and I was almost delirious the whole time they were performing. They were probably the best out-of-nowhere (for me) surprise after one act on Sunday. They were so high energy that I actually went against the grain of my heart and skipped Cat Power. Some of you might say me nay, others might say aye, but the fact is, Ladytron was such high energy and I was so tired that I didn’t want to stay and watch them since I still had to watch three hours of music after that, and it would have meant such an anti-climax. Plus, after the fabulous set by Ladytron [Begin digressive interpolation: While leaning on the soundbooth, fascinated by the great electronica being pounded out in minimalist monotone on stage, a couple who were visibly on E squeezed up next to me and began to make out. The woman began to rub her ass on me. I moved a couple of feet away. She extended her ass in an Inspector Gadget impersonation and commenced to rubbin’, y’all. This process was repeated twice before I managed to get out of reach of her ass and she turned her rubbing gesture into a wild, rave-tent maneuver that began a series of gyrations that did not stop for the next half-hour. End digressive interpolation.] I didn’t want to risk the very real possibility that Chan Marshall might deconstruct on stage and make me cry. So, I slid on over to see the Eagles of Death Metal. I pushed rapidly up to about the center of the crowd and eventually regretted it because Damien “Jr. Gong” Marley had gone over time and the ripple effect made EoDM more than a half-hour late getting to the stage, and I had no way of getting out to get back to Cat Power or of sitting down. I was forced to wait, shifting back and forth from foot to foot with my legs, knees, ankles, and lower back burning and aching. Then EoDM came out, and I did the same thing while dancing. It was a home-coming for them (Homme is from Palm Springs (Paaaaaalm Sprriiiiings!)) and the crowd was extremely enthusiastic. They played the only song of theirs that I put on my mix, but they mostly played stuff off of Death By Sexy, which I don’t have. Still, it was incredibly entertaining, and probably the fourth best act I caught. They had two drum kits going, and the female drummer’s kit had a fan hidden in it that continuously blew her hair straight out and back from her head like she was drumming in a wind tunnel. She was amazingly sexy. They switched kits, they threw and broke sticks, they stood up and drummed, they did everything you could want out of a drummer duo, really. I stayed to watch Atmosphere because, quite frankly, I don’t give a damn about Depeche Mode. Atmosphere’s whole set was great. High energy, entertaining. It started out amazing and then actually went a little down from that level when he brought his band out to play while he rapped. It was still good. At one point, he actually stopped all the music and brought some lights up because someone had collapsed in the crowd. [Begin digressive interpolation: There were eleven hospitalizations and fifteen arrests on Day 1 of the festival. End digressive interpolation.] I then stayed to watch She Wants Revenge—which was the plan—instead of trying to squeeze in to see Daft Punk or The Rakes. I thought their set was really uninspired, but I honestly don’t even know what I was expecting. Everybody met up at the tesla coil, and team Tan ‘n’ Black trekked through vast wildernesses where the blowing dust of the desert had coated everything and made the parking lots look like an elephant graveyard filled with strange ghosts inscribed with various benedictions drawn in their layers of grime by wanderers to and from the festival. A fog had moved in, making everything surreal. Or maybe that was exhaustion plus dehydration plus extreme joint pain. In any case, we got back to the condo pretty quickly and munched on some grindage while everybody wound down. We all got to bed at 3:45 or 4:00, with Team Black ‘n’ Tan agreeing that, since missing the only act I wanted to see for the first six hours of Sunday was unconscionable and because Sterling needed to be at the non-existent will-call window by eleven (I’ll let him tell that one), we would leave at 9:30 the next morning, which meant that everybody needed to be awake by 7:45. This is, more or less, what happened, bringing us up to

Day 3.

The combined effects on my digestive system of two days in a row with less than eight full hours of sleep—two whole days in which my total amount of sleep did not indeed exceed seven and a half hours—notwithstanding, team Black ‘n’ Tan was launched upon the venture at t-plus sixteen minutes. I was in time to catch The Octopus Project, which was a band I had looked up for the trip and listened around in. I actually liked their live performance quite a bit, and I was surprised because it just hadn’t sounded like something that could be reproduced live. I began Day 3 in serious pain and decided that there would be infinitely more sitting and sleeping than there had been the day before. This is why I watched Octopus Project from the bleachers. The bleachers are important. Sterling and I stuck around on the bleachers while Pat went closer in to see The Giant Drag. I slid over to make more room on the bench. When pat came back, twenty minutes later, as I slid back the other way. As I did this, I felt my shorts catch on the bench and an incredible stabbing pain shot through my leg. I realized I had just gotten a splinter. I said, “Ow. I think I just got a splinter.” I thought, well, I should get that out later. Then it started hurting really badly. I thought about the shape of where it hurt and thought, this is a rather large splinter. I reached into my pant legs and tried to grab at it with my fingers, but I couldn’t, as it was just at the juncture of my hamstring and right glut, stuck parallel to the muscle and under the skin. As my fingers fumbled around down there, the pain got more and more intense (ask Sterling if he has any memory of my verbal process as I did this, because I can’t remember) and I realized I needed to have this looked at right away. This is how I ended up limping an eighth of a mile to the first aid tent, how I ended up having to repeat that I had a splinter in the back of my thigh like sixteen times before shouting “There is a splinter in my ass!” at the idiot at the table at the front of the tent. To which she replied that I should have a seat. To which I replied “I can’t sit down because THERE IS A SPLINTER IN MY ASS!” She started to giggle and jumped up to get a med tech. I had to repeat myself a few times. He had me lean on a chair and bend over. I pulled up my shorts to show him the splinter. He whistled and ran and got another med tech. The two of them disinfected me and pulled the splinter out. They both laughed in amazement. The supervising director walked over and laughed out loud and said, “What a pain in the ass.” Then the medtechs stopped laughing as blood welled out of the puncture. They shoved some anti-biotics around it and told me how lucky I had been that it went in parallel to the muscle instead of into it. I filled out a medical form. They warned me of the really horrible things that could happen with this wound, and I hobbled back over to show Pat and Sterling the thing they pulled out of me. It was officially 2.5 centimeters long—that is to say a full inch—and between an eighth of an inch and a quarter of an inch at its widest. We walked over to see the Dears, and it was so mellow and good and relaxing that I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until James Blunt was starting. Halfway through that, Sterling and I walked over to see The Magic Numbers. They blew me away. They were the best thing I could have imagined at that moment. Then, I saw Minus the Bear. They were blah. They grew on me, but the sound was all screwed up compared to the Magic Numbers clean mixing on the main stage, and it was just a come-down. Anybody would have been, though, to be honest. I then went over and bought some advil and waited for Tom to see Sleater-Kinney. Very high energy. They had some technical difficulties with the drum kit, but they were really professional and kept things movin’ and groovin’. I had expected to like them, but not as much as I did. I opted for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs after them over the Digable Planets. This was partly because I had such good stage position already (not very many people were at Sleater-Kinney when they started, because they were up against Bloc Party in the outdoor theater and Paul Oakenfold in the dance tent) and partly because I didn’t want to get mellowed out after the energy Sleater-Kinney threw at me. I then just sat around for a half-hour before meeting Sterling and Tom for dinner [Begin digressive interpolation: Water in the desert was two dollars a bottle. Any kind of food was seven dollars a unit. On Saturday, I took one bite of a burrito that was so awful I immediately spiked into the ground like Steve’s Juevos Carnitas. I didn’t eat out of fear for the rest of that day. Sunday, I was basically eating and drinking Gatorade constantly because I had had so little sleep that I was converting food and electrolytes directly into the will-power I needed to stay alive and keep moving. End digressive interpolation.]. We all went to see the Go! Team. All ten people in our group. And for good reason. I said as we were leaving to see Tool that the Go! Team really showed me something eye-opening about what live performances could be. I told Sterling that if they had had a live horn section, I would have put them directly into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame on the Strength of one album and one performance. I then finished the thing out with Tool. They were amazing, but not as good as The Go! Team. The visuals were a little disappointing, too, though it was good to see all the old videos again. New AV stuff was mainly fractal masturbation and kaleidoscope stuff. It took an hour and half to get to the car and two hours to get back to the Condo. Sterling left for Studio City at four in the morning. I went to sleep in the sure knowledge that our car was leaving at seven thirty, which meant that I had to get up at 6:30 in order to shower and do my part of the cleaning. We got everybody up and on the rode by seven forty. Everyone in Team Black n Tan was home by the time Team Two was even eating breakfast. I ate cereal and waited for McKenzie to get back from subbing for Tom. Then, I slept for an hour. Then I went to class. Then, I got home and ate dinner. Then I went and did an hour of limits on about eleven hours of sleep since Friday morning at 9:30. I came home, ate a sandwich, drank some 16-year-old Lagavulin and went to sleep. I woke up eleven hours later without having dreamt at all.

The whole experience is essentially indescribable.

Coachella Valley And the Unforgiving Sun

2006-04-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

If you have a vote for a band that you want me to see in your honor, or in your stead that is appearing at the Coachella Music Festival then you have approximately twelve hours to make that desire known in a post, here.

Part IV, Chapterlet 5

2006-04-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

At the exact moment that Tino’s hammer’s claw pierced the crown of Ray Chang’s skull and buried itself in his brains, Ray Chang’s spirit crossed the barrier, and Kennedy finally got her head all the way around her idea.

Part IV, Chapterlet 4

2006-04-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

When Tino chickens out and walks back to the car, he sees Kennedy’s skipped. He doesn’t really care. He mostly doesn’t care about much, actually, which is why its interesting that this kid’s got him all riled. He gets in the car and pulls the door shut, sitting in the dark and looking mostly at the apartment complex. The hammer, too. It’s a Vaughan no. 9. Not heavy. Says 10 oz on the side.
Tino’s unsure where he picked up the carrying around a hammer thing. He’s got a bunch of like hammers, now. It’s the kind of thing that mostly just gets carried too far, with everybody having like a signature item. It’s mostly like that, but it’s also like a hammer’s got a use. It’s not just flash. That kid that runs with Billy, Jay something, he uses knuckles. That’s just ignorant. Under the tape, the hammer’s wood is mostly white with the dark parts of the grain running up parallel and evenly spaced.
If the cops find a hammer in your car, it’s not like a big thing. Keep some vise grips and a couple screw drivers and a old ratchet set, too, makes it look like your ride’s a piece of shit and you need to like work on it. Which isn’t stretching it. On the opposite tip, they find knuckles in your car, your going in, just on probable. Suspicion.
His dad’s the one told him how to look for the direction of the grain. He wonders where the Chang kid gets the sheer balls. He remembers picking this one out of a drawer at the hardware store. There was a bunch of the same kind of hammers and he looked through until he found one he liked. And the rest, as they say, is mystery.
He misses Kennedy. She’s good for filling up space, making things less quiet. The radio’s broken or he’d turn that on, and he’s been listening to the same fucking CD for weeks, now, since probably Joey borrowed his cds from the floorboard without checking to see if maybe he wanted to change the CD.
The handles are always curvy in a way that makes him think about them like girls. Not think about them like he thinks about girls, but think about them as if they were girls. Not in a sexual way, he doesn’t think.
Because Chang doesn’t really run with anybody. There’re a couple cars there, now, but that’s like a unique party situation. Chang probably wants to set up a more kind of upscale, people come to him kind of place, instead of having people out on the street pushing. Which to Tino sounds mostly like waiting for cops to kick your door in.
He’s never named one or anything like that, but he mostly thinks of this particular hammer in terms of like how he thinks about a girl, and that freaks him out a little bit. But isn’t it like common to give your item a girl’s name. BB King’s got a guitar with a girl’s name. So it’s not perverted. Billy’s .45’s named Marta, which Tino personally thinks is a stupid name. It’s the lightest hammer he’s got. Maybe he’ll ask the philosopher.
He lights a cigarette, thinks about quitting. Unless, if you buy off the cops. Then it would be way more comfortable.
The thickest part of the hammer is the very end of the handle. Tino thinks of this as the butt. Then it gets a little bit narrower and goes back out in a bulge in the middle that’s not quite as thick as at the very end of the butt, and then it gets really skinny at the neck.
He’s calmer now, seeing the angle. Set up in a more upscale apartment type place in a good neighborhood and give the cops a piece. No more standing out in the cold. No more getting busted for like loitering by cops sure he’s holding as if anybody’s that stupid anymore. The Chang kid used to call him Tin Man in middle school. Like if I only had a.
The neck is so skinny it looks like fragile, like a pencil. On both sides of the tape there’s smut from where the glue of the stickers it came with gets dirt and crap stuck to it. Lighter fluid’d get that smut off. The head has a round sticker still on it that says Proud to Say Made in USA which Tino thinks isn’t very catchy on your scale of one to catchy. He picks at it with his non-smoking hand.
Tino can see the like couple of cars that were probably there to party with the Chang kid are filling with laughing people and about to bounce. He always smokes with the same hand. It was, he’s thinking now, probably not a good idea to yell at the old man.
The front of the handle—Tino knows the front part of the head that he calls the nose is for hitting nails and the back, vee-shaped part that he calls the claw is for pulling them out—the part that’s toward the nose has two places where the grain comes together and makes almost shapes like rings when you skip rocks.
He would’ve known which side of the hammer was forward even if his dad didn’t tell him. You can like feel it when you hold it with the weight all out front. But Tino mostly likes to swing the hammer so that it hits with the claw part. This is good for lots of carnage with little to no work. There’s Chang going back in to his place, alone. It could totally work, but not with two crews running the same game in South Tulsa—too many cops to buy, too many people would know. More people knowing means more people wanting in on the action, more people talking and the like. But more talk means more business.
The weight makes it awkward to hold with the claw forward though, so he always holds it with the nose forward and does like a little spin thing when he pulls back to throw down. No. Better to just have one crew running it. Simple is better. The old man’s mantra.
He looks down. Some ash has fallen on his pants while he’s been picking at the sticker.
Is the old man really out? He shouldn’t have yelled. That’s going to come back to bite his ass. His temper is like his worst enemy. It’s why he hasn’t tried to start his own crew before now. He knows that the temper makes a truly business-like crew difficult to work.
It’s irritating when the hammer slips. That’s why the tape. That and this is like Billy claims no-print tape, but Tino’s not sure he buys it. It’s on all the grips of like Billy’s boys’ guns, but, for real, if the tape worked, wouldn’t cops be out of a job? So it’s mostly for the slipping.
The worst is when the hammer half spins because of the slip, and it comes down sideways like a tee. It goes right up your elbow, and you can feel it in your teeth. Tino throws the cigarette out the window.
“Fuck it,” he says.
He opens the car door and closes it with a creak. His breath puffs out bright in the apartment complex light. He slides the hammer up the sleeve of his coat. The points of the claw poke into his palm, and one cuts him a little making him say fuck as he walks and tries to hold the hammer up his sleeve like he’s not holding anything. The weight makes it difficult.
Sometimes, when he’s pulling back to throw down, the weight makes it feel like the hammer wants to hit him, it comes back so smooth. He dreamed about it once, about the weight shifting in his hand until he lets go, and a little crab like thing with a claw and a cartoon nose jumps at his face, scuttling around on one leg that’s moving too fast to see, kicking little bits of bone into the air that rain down all around with a sound that sounded like hail as it came. He can remember waking up from that one yelling with like sweat all over, absolutely soaked, his head aching and the sheets just stuck to him, and when he looked in the mirror all he could see was that the whites of his eyes were mostly showing, so it looked like his eyes were just loosely hanging there in his head, about to fall out. He had thrown up, shaky and holding onto the toilet with both hands and his face in the bowl making it sound like the ocean.
He holds his coat closed with his smoking hand and adjusts the hammer. Sweat pours into the cut, and it stings like a bitch. He feels adrenaline hit his head so hard it makes his face flush, and that makes it burn and tighten in the cold. His scalp pulls back and he can hear that little tiny creak from his ears being pulled up with the scalp. If you asked him right then, standing there outside Raymond Chang’s apartment about to throw down on him, asked him what he would name the item right then, and said that you would blow his brains out if he didn’t, like if you held a gun to his head, he would probably say to fuck off. But, right then, with his personal blood making little drips on the concrete in front of the door, the name he was thinking was Veruca.

Part IV, Chapterlet 3

2006-04-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

“See, it’s like this: I met Star through her uncle, Henry Lee. Henry Lee isn’t—I guess wasn’t really her uncle. He just happened to be a like business acquaintance of her own really real family in Japan. I know I’ll catch hell from my rep, but I figure a little goodwill goes a long way with the Finest. Usually…and so you’ll probably hear it all anyway…As in, like, the kind and level of business that is more like a multi-national corporation than like a bullshit cosa nostra like family kind of business…All I know is, she ran away from there, ended up here, and it wasn’t far enough because Henry Lee found and “adopted” her…No, she’s independent…What do you mean, Reason? We were—I mean we are...he’s my friend. My rep get here, yet?”

Part IV, Chapterlet 2

2006-04-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

When they pull up outside of Ray’s apartment—‘the Chang kid’ has a first name that she knows and knows that Tino knows because they played foursquare together for Christ’s sake—when they pull up, Tino turns the car off and just sits there in the dark with the headlights off and Kennedy listens to the engine ticking and rattling in the cold. Her mom said once that that sound was made by a fan or something that was still spinning. Kennedy herself is superstitious about causes and avoids pinning things down with causes. This serves her lateral thinking well, the Sad Man says, but he always says it like there’s something funny about lateral thinking, and then he normally says that with a little focus, she could be a great strategist. Anyway, getting pinned down by causes is a good way to end up playing defense—which is something she pretty much despises in chess, especially the top-level, nationally ranked speed chess that she plays. She’s currently ranked number 12 nationally, in under 16s. It’s something of a riddle to her why speed chess players aren’t as good as regular players, or why the Sad Man can beat her at whatever kind of game easily, even tiddly winks she’s sure, but always takes as much time as he can—there’s never anything left on his clock at the end of the game. A riddle, sure, but the kind of riddle that pins you down, gets you thinking about causes instead of now, and now is definitely when Tino is reaching over her and opening the glove box and pulling out this claw hammer. The hammer is a regular hammer but it has weird, discolored tape on the handle. Tino’s holding it, looking over into the apartment complex. Kennedy thinks about saying something. Then something kind of clicks, and she realizes that her best bet is to let him go and do this completely stupid thing that he’s going to do and also that her best bet is to not be fucking there and witness/ be an accomplice to this incredibly ill-advised action, as Bones would no doubt say. But the idea is much bigger than that. She can’t quite get hold of it, but she can hear that clicking echoing around inside the idea and she doesn’t know what to think.

Part IV Motion Without Cease? Chapterlet I

2006-04-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

IV. Motion without Cease

Ginger peach wild honey cedar flavor making her swallow, Kennedy presses her whole face into the darkness of Star’s pushed up skirt and gives a little shake as she hears a voice calling out Star’s other name in the nighttime behind her. This little shake was more to catch her breath, actually, and break the seal, but it seems to have done the trick because Star’s belly is jerking like ah, ooh, ah, and Star—Kennedy can tell without even having to look that Star is making her O face, the one she only makes for big ones, with those weird tapering but plump lips with their smeared lipstick like eating each other up and writhing against her face like snakes mating somewhere up overhead. Then Star’s pubis bumps Kennedy’s upper lip in a really satisfying way like she knows she’s going to have a fat lip from it, but even though it’s satisfying Kennedy’s not sure the gesture was automatic like the spasming belly was and can imagine that it was probably dismissive, like her cue to stop. She lets go of the thong she’s been holding to the side and watches it not quite slide back into place as she rocks back on her heels and then up, aching. Knees, neck, back, lips, fingers, lips. Aching.
Kennedy tries to kiss Star, but Star turns so she only gets her on the cheek and tries not to pout as Star wipes off her kiss. Sometimes she likes to be kissed on the mouth after, sometimes not. Anyway, it’s no skin off Kennedy’s dick as she roots around in the damp at the base of the creepy statue with the slack like O face that statues sometimes have, especially statues of women, or maybe that’s just Kennedy. She thinks of the ecstasy of St. Theresa. She finds her purse and brushes some dew off it before looking in her bag. She checks the time on her phone. No messages. Star’s not even making eye contact, looking over Kennedy’s head. Kennedy knows she’s thinking about Her, so she just leaves. She’s got to meet Henry and Tino anyway. And maybe later play Go with the Sad Man.
She always feels really weird and cramped and generally unpleasant when she thinks about Go and the whole Go situation after she’s just Xed Star, but then she thinks about how amazing Star is and gets all desperately clammy in her head and her thighs get all tense and thinks that there’s no way in hell she’ll give any of it up. She’ll die first. Anyway, she’s gotta get paid and complicating the whole Star, Sad Man, Henry, Tino situation would be bad news for everyone involved so she just shoves everything down and just boxes it and thinks about getting paid and moving product.
Downtown, she gets to Henry’s and takes the freight elevator up the fourth and gets out. She can hear Tino yelling before the elevator even stops. He’s yelling his usual bullshit about turf and expansion, and she can tell that Henry’s not even listening by hysterical Tino’s getting. Sure enough, she turns the corner into the office and the Sad Man’s sitting there, playing Go, and Henry’s kinda watching him play by himself with that sickly smile that makes his lips disappear even further into the burnt parts of the skin around his mouth. Tino’s forehead is bright purple, and if Kennedy couldn’t hear him yelling, she’d probably think that he was choking, she thinks, looking at how the color pushes all the way around the forehead and makes the tips of his ears wildly differently colored before disappearing down the neck of his shirt. Tino’s spitting, he’s so angry. Kennedy can tell this is pretty much it. But, right then, of course, The Sad Man notices her, making some crack about how Tino’s secretary is there and maybe could she take dictation because the Sad Man does not want to feel the sadness of these words being lost in the ceaseless flow of time. That’s pretty much how he always talks.
But then so Tino turns around and tells her to get her shit they’re leaving, and she says “I just got here,” but he doesn’t even slow down, he just grabs her arm and heads out into the hall. His grip hurts Kennedy’s arm, but she doesn’t complain. She has like a cartoon like image of her coming along behind Tino like a balloon on a string as he charges toward the stairs. The echoes in the room are wild with his almost running and her stumbling to not get pulled off her feet. She manages not to fall as he drags her down the stairs and through the parking lot and into the car.
He puts the keys in the ignition but doesn’t start the car. He rolls his window down and lights a cigarette. She can see he’s calmer now. He takes a long drag and talks out the smoke. “Henry’s retiring.”
Kennedy says, “That why you were so pissed?”
“No.” He takes another drag. “He won’t front me the cash to buy in with his supplier. Thinks the business should go to the Chang kid.”
“Well, ‘the Chang kid’ is in the family.” She knows that they went to school together and that calling him kid is just one of Tino’s ways of trying to assert control over a seemingly random universe, is Kennedy’s private take on the whole epithet.
“And I’m not?” He’s working himself back up again.
“Hell, no. You’re not even Chinese.” She shivers a little. It’s getting colder in the car because of the window being down.
“Neither is the philosopher.” The philosopher is what everybody calls the Sad Man. Kennedy only calls him the Sad Man when no one’s listening.
“The philosopher isn’t looking to buy into a Triad franchise while not being a Triad—let alone not being Chinese.” This is, looking back, probably what got Kennedy started thinking about how she could make her own move, really.
“I’m gonna go see that Chang kid.” Tino’s not even listening anymore. Kennedy thinks he probably stopped listening to anyone else a long time ago.
“Whatever,” she says, “drop me at my house.” Kennedy knows what going to see someone normally entails and decides that she’d rather be home reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles for her chapter quiz on Monday. Not to mention that she’s got the Trig/Stat/Functions test review to finish.
“No, you’re coming. You want to be a part of this or not?” He doesn’t even hear her say no, not really, she doesn’t really want to have anything to do with him or his “moves” or his “visits” and most of his not hearing could be put down to not caring, but probably some of it is caused by his diesel Mercedes’s engine waking up.

The Irvine Post Dispatch

2006-04-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

I am going to slap up a couple chapterlets, here. Be warned that, since you have read them, some of the previous chapterlets have been changed in significant ways that mostly concern the timeline. These changes are not reflected in the currently available online materials.

The Adventure Continues

2006-04-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

New links over there to your right. These people are worth your time. I know this because I have evaluated your time.

No, seriously. I get this report, and it tells me how much time you spend looking at this.

Then I run it through a complex set of algorithms that I have loosely designed after a cat's skull, and, in the end, I know what your time is worth.

Some words that don't concern history or class consciousness...

2006-04-22T23:07:00.000-07:00

I seem to have passed my MA exam. I am now tentatively Master of Arts. The next step is to get together a list committee and start creating lists which will be used to create my qualifying exam questions.

My advisor turned out to be a good man to have at the exam. He directed things very well. Which I thought was surprising considering that he's pretty--what's the word?--somnolent most of the time.

I translated another movie pitch today, or, rather, last night. I'll put the finishing touches on it tomorrow. I like doing these things. For one, because it gives me a sense how little of an idea it takes to actually get something read. For two, because it takes my mind off of why in the hell I ever thought reading Lukacs ever again would be a good idea.

Don't know if Evil Dave reads this, but, if he doesn't, somebody should tell him just how funny that Secret Wars Reenactment skit was.

I've started futzing around with the novel project from November again. If you guys want to, I can slap another couple chapterlets up. I'll leave it in your hands.

Relief

2006-04-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

Good news: no lupus and negative for rheumatoid factor. Bad news: I have cysts on the bones of my right wrist and hand that are the apparent cause of my pain in that area. I am being referred to a rheumatologist.

They moved my MA review, again. This time only to Friday. More as it develops.

The formless fears that haunt my flesh

2006-04-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the brevity of the last post. It seemed funny at the time; indeed, it still amuses me, but I can recognize how some of you might have found its effect to be the production of a certain amount of anxiety. For that last, I apologize. By way of a larger explanation of that cryptic bit of humor, let me say that I feel modern doctors are not content to treat every problem one has unless they may treat those problems as symptoms of something larger. My evidence is that the last three doctors I have consulted have all found it to be worthwhile to hunt for a far-fetched, single, systemic cause to my various life-long complaints. Because I have recurring apthous ulcers and a mild case of psoriasis (two conditions which I developed simultaneously during the summer before seventh grade), combined with chronic joint pain (that I remember as far back as the age of eleven, then chalked up to "growing pains"), my doctor suggested that these problems could all be caused by lupus which is a genetically inherited systemic auto-immune disease that manifests itself in joint pain and lesions of the skin--apthous ulcers and psoriasis are not major skin diseases, but apparently they are adequate as signs of trouble. Alternately, I could just have recurring apthous ulcers, psoriasis, and joint pain--the cause of which could be tendonitis. The not-so-funny, downer side to the story (from my admittedly unique point of view) is that the joint pain could be the result rheumatoid arthritis, a far more likely condition for me to develop as both types of the disease are present in my parents (Mom has osteo- and dad has rheumatoid). So, they took my blood, screening me for the rheumatoid factor, for lupus, for triglycerides (because of the pancreatitis alert that you might remember from last year), for h. pilori (because of the acid reflux I have been experiencing more often in the last two years), and for lymphoma of the stomach (for the same reason), as well as for gout and one other mysterious test so vague that the answers I received when I asked about the reasoning behind it made me suspect that the Doctor had some arcane reason to get the total number of vials of my blood taken up to the alchemically and cabalistically important total of 7.

The comedy recap is: I could have gout! Only effetely aristocratic males of the 19th century like De Quincey get gout! Oh, how the world would seem gay if I had the gout! What's that? Gout is a horrifyingly painful disease that sometimes results in bony protrusions from the joints that will make me resemble some of Marvel's grittier mutants? Freude! Nay, how glorious it would be to have gout and lymphoma of the stomach!

Christ. So, you can maybe sorta see why I decided to think that it was funnier to sleep uneasily because of the threat of lupus instead of just kind of sob silently while considering cancer.

My doctor's advice was to lose 15 (more) pounds. I have begun that process in earnest.

On an unrelated--except that it is also an update on a previous post--note, my MA review is scheduled for April 19th at 1:00 in the afternoon.

Updates in haiku form

2006-04-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

So, my computer

died. Those dicks messed with my car.

I might have lupus.

Quarter's almost over...

2006-03-21T15:58:00.000-08:00

One paper down, one more paper and one exam to go.

Master's review is in the administrative works for the 2nd week of the Spring quarter.

Important philosophical questions addressed by 5th-11th grade ESL students in my Junior Writing III class.

2006-03-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

Q: In what ways do knowledge and power serve to constitute the post-post-modern conception of the body-qua-material object?

A: I agree with this "knowledge is power," stament because, when I was little my mom and dad said that knowledge is as powerful as your body. Knowledge also helps you think focus and everything you do relys on knowledge.

Q: It's interesting that you give knowledge power equal to that of the physical body. Is this power subject to death in the same way? That is to say, is your conception of knowledge drawn from a revival of neo-Platonism (i.e., is knowledge the true form of the mind, pure knowledge, of which mind is just the epiphenomenon and knowledge the immortal soul?), or does knowledge ultimately bring paralysis in the face of death before being annihilated by death? Are knowledge and the physical body linked through the ineluctable fact of all knowledge being knowledge of mortality, an idea that would naturally lead us into an existentialist vein?

A: In a TV show called Tom and Jerry. Tom is a cat who wants to eat Jerry for snack. Jerry uses his knowledge to survive and do tricks on Tom.

Q: So you see prostitution as one site of resistance to the hegemonic conception of the death/knowledge dichotomy?

A: Because that if you had all the money in the world but didn't have the knowledge to spend it what would the point of being all the money in the world? I mean what would you do if you had not gone to class but had money with knowledge you could do anything. If you had brains but others had money they would look up to you for the knowldge of guldance. Like in the book Freak the Mighty a boy who had brains teams up with a bulky guy. They are more powerful togetherbut the one with brains is not stronger that the other one is stronger. They are more powerful together.

Q: I'm not sure I see the connection between economics and physical strength. Unless this is a radical Marxian view of the body as commodified means of production. Even then, you would have to sidestep the mind-body dualism debate to even consider the body as the site of production of knowledge, which, as far as I can tell, modern philosophy is unwilling to do. Current philosophy is behind psychology in this respect. Certainly, the economics of brain power is something that every tenure jockey has to deal with sooner or later, but what does this have to do with power for the reader not surrounded by high ivory walls? How does it help us solve the problem of knowledge/death?

A: Knowledge has more power than anything else, especially strength.

Q: So, you are saying that this dichotomy is a false dichotomy? That knowledge can transcend death? Is this an epistemology that denies death altogether, or is it one that coopts the presence of death and uses it to re-inscribe knowledge in differently constituted mental states--such as the state of mourning?

A: Knowledge can let you win, stay alive and happy and succeed in your tasks if you use it. In one series of funny Chinese stories, a clever boy becomes a high judge because he is intelligent and very smart. He was requested to get a stolon fan and a rebel to the king. Through his adventure he uses poems and readings to help others while figuring out where the stolon and where the rebel fan was. Soon he realizes thatthe rebel was among his protectors for the journey. Alsohe has to hunt down and great and brutal crook. He soon realizes that the crook was impersonating a great judge through that discovery the clever boy found who the rebel was but still had to retrieve the sacred fan.

Q: In other words, you see a connection between the intellectual community as the keepers of knowledge and the revolutionary community as those who punish the abusers of different forms of oppressive authority. Why does the boy still have to retrieve the sacred fan? Is religious power another form of power that can be transgressed against through this childlike community? If so, how do you feel about the refutation that certain students of history could make by citing the atrocities committed by Pol Pot's use of revolutionary child armies? Is the violence that is inherent to a childlike manipulation of knowledge and forms of control an acceptable violence in the face of unknowing power?

A: In the movie, Winnie the Pooh, Owl is very wise and has a love of knowledge. Everyone comes to him for advice. He gives good advice and he makes most of the decisions.

Q: I guess I'm not following. You seem to be presenting the philosopher's position as an ironic re-formulation of power. Owl was not smart. That's the whole point.

A: This shows that "knowledge is power" is not true.

Q: I think, rather, that it shows that false claims to knowledge can create a basis for power that is maintained by the community that is not committed to reason and accountability over authority and useless links to traditions.

A: ...

Q: Should I rephrase that in the form of a question?

A: Knowledge is power. It has been said for a while, but why knowledge is power? How could knowledge by powerful?

Q: Okay, now you're just fucking with me.

A: I agreee with the satment. I had once accidentally started a fight with my brother. I don't know what I said to get him that angry. We started fighting.

Q: Goddammit. Do you believe that knowledge is power or not?

A: For many years, people have agreed and disagreed on weather or not knowledge is power.

Q: And what about you? Where do you stand?

A: Finding out wather or not it is or not.

Q: So, you're like the Fisher King of the knowledge v. power debate. Forever questing? Or are you suggesting that the point of investigation is bad? That it leads into aporia and doubt and errance forever and ever in all directions?

A:...

Q:...

A: In The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, Milo, the main character, gets stuck with the doldrums and cannot get out of the place.

Q: Allow me to show you the door. Good day, sir.

A: You should be able to understand why you don't need knowledge really for everything.

Q: Okay, you stay. I'm leaving.

Developments

2006-02-28T19:27:00.000-08:00

So, the guy who called me an atheist basically deconstructed in a coffee break during class, today. I think. Victory for the forces of religious oppression.

Also, my adviser sent me a note asking me to meet him on Thursday to "schedule the M.A. session," which means that he approved the paper that you guys read. So, soon I shall be called Master of Arts.

And, last, my dad sent me a photo of me dancing in my pajamas. I would show it to you, but I hear it's super secret.

Rain today, and Satan's pride

2006-02-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

I started reading Paradise Lost, but, more importantly, it is raining. But some of you might be asking, what has Satan done lately? Well, first he raised his head, then he looked around. Then he stood up and walked off a lake of liquid fire to stand on a shore of solid fire, and then he, well, he called a meeting is what he did.

In other news, Fabrice Giger emailed me today and asked me to do a translation of a treatment. So, that's pretty cool. I will be doing that this week.

I'm thinking of drawing more often. I also want to start playing tennis more than once a week. Is this selfish of me? I'm afraid I don't even understand the question.

Well again.

2006-02-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

So, I was terribly ill starting on like Wednesday of this week, and I finally am at full strength this morning. This blows, because I missed both Jake and Eddie being in LA, and I couldn't physically walk to two of my classes. But, now I am better. In the spirit of conformity, here are some of the results for googling "Jonathan looks like":

Jonathan looks like he is about to lose the game.

Jonathan looks like he's fallen.

Jonathan looks like Boris Karloff. (I think this was spelled with a 'v,' but I doubt anyone knows what Bulgarian accordion legend Boris Karlov really looked like.)

Jonathan looks like Doug Savant KC Sunshine.

Jonathan looks like a hot power bottom.

Jonathan looks like the Tungsten will do well in the business environment.

Jonathan looks like he might beat a few ppl up but only ppl who try to hurt u.

Jonathan looks like a little jamacan (sic) guy.

Jonathan looks like a man who has killed 12 people.

Post-Poker Night Update

2006-02-19T21:01:00.000-08:00

So, played poker on Saturday night. It was the first time we had eight people at the table. It was crazy. It took me all of five hours to lose all ten of the dollars I took. Which is still a better entertainment value than a night at the movies. Yeah. I got beat hard. The Wild Turkey might have had something to do with it. But, trend-wise, I am also in the negative for all time.

In other news, it's Dad's birthday.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

Buena Vista

2006-02-17T18:44:00.000-08:00

I was driving to work this evening, and I looked up to see actual clouds. Astounded at this sight, I realized that my leg has been hurting for like two days. I concluded that it would finally finally finally rain. As I was, by will alone, thus setting my mind in motion, I realized that I was running a red light. I made it to the other side of the intersection in one piece, only to realize that there were two cops pulling up alongside of me. The first cop pulls up even with my windows, looks over, and shakes his head at me before turning on his lights and peeling away to the right. His friend follows him. They were Irvine cops, so I can only assume someone saw a homeless person on a golf-course. I have no doubt that my crime was among the city's most heinous for the week.

And because not all of you care...

2006-02-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

Here is a nice picture for you to contemplate. "Contemplation" is actually a very funny word to do a google image search for. If you like this guy's work--and who could blame you?--you can purchase digital posters of that stuff online. I know that the prospect of digital wall hangings thrills some of you in ways you would never dare admit.

Because I have decided to post something every day.

2006-02-15T19:06:00.000-08:00

Grad school is legitimately soul-wasting. I can feel flakes of my soul whittle off whenever I try to understand why I am being told to read Derrida.

So, on a grad school note, no word back on my MA draft yet. Because I feel like changing the pace from talking about my dream images of big SG's lingham, this is what the current draft looks like:

Fever of Itself:
Figurative Self-Generation in The Fall of Hyperion
By Jonathan Tanner

The Fall of Hyperion is, from a reader’s perspective and from the very moment of its title, in a strange relationship to its precedent, Hyperion. Keats began Hyperion by November of 1818, and abandoned it in early 1819.[1] It, together with the death of Keats’ brother Tom, ushers in what Walter Jackson Bate refers to as Keats’ “Fertile Year,”[2] a period that sees the production of The Eve of St. Agnes; Lamia; the odes Psyche, Nightingale, Melancholy, and Grecian Urn; The Fall of Hyperion; and To Autumn. The abandoned Hyperion was taken up again in the reconceived Fall in July or August of 1819, during a visit by Keats’ friend, Charles Brown, with whom Keats had agreed to write the verse tragedy Otho the Great.[3] Keats ends up abandoning the Hyperion project again in September of the same year.
In a letter to J.H. Reynolds dated the 21st of September, 1819, Keats gives the following reason for this abandonment, revealing the self-critical stance he held toward the project: “I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour.”[4] The apparently “artful” construction of the Hyperion project’s second installment (Keats would have abandoned the original poem eight months earlier) is criticized as overly poetic and unnatural. In a letter written over ten days, from September 17-27, (thus simultaneously with the letter to Reynolds), Keats claims that he prefers “the native music of [Chatterton’s language] to Milton’s cut by feet.”[5] Milton’s presence again stands in for the negative aspect of Poetry-as-Art, with versification opposed to the less-mechanical expression of natural language. Continuing his point by saying that “life for Milton would be death” to him, Keats makes clear what seems to be at stake in the abandonment of the Hyperion project: a turn toward a more natural approach to poetry. His examination of poetry is already at work in The Fall of Hyperion. The Fall is inherently an examination of all poetry because it relies on a central metaphor that calls not only its genre within which it is operating into question, but, through it, the genre of poetry. That central metaphor is given by Moneta at the beginning of Canto II, and it continues an interrogation of Hyperion that begins with its title.
Hyperion, an unfinished poem, was published with the subtitle, ‘A Fragment’ in the volume of poems put out by Taylor and Hessey in June of 1820.[6] The title The Fall of Hyperion not only suggests a re-centering of the poem on the tragic defeat of the titans, but, by way of the original text, also suggests a supplementary positioning in its echo of the original. Not only does The Fall already suffer, in its title, from the mediation of being a secondary text, but its own subtitle, ‘A Dream,’ relegates it to an even more obscure relation to its source. The poet-narrator’s movement from dream banquet to the vision of Saturn’s tomb to Moneta’s vision within that tomb re-casts the actual content of Hyperion in terms of the sequel. All of the new narrative motion of The Fall is used as a framing device for that content, pushing both poems into the almost irretrievable distance of a dream within a dream. This distance, however, is not solely the product of the supplemental nature of the sequel but is equally the product of the figurative nature of The Fall as a text. Textually, The Fall of Hyperion is figurative in that the whole work stands in a figurative relation to its source poem. Moneta’s metaphor is a figure for The Fall’s relation to Hyperion.
I use the term “figurative” as a hinge to suggest two distinct but related ideas that run through The Fall of Hyperion. First, The Fall is emblematic of what the Hyperion project could have been—the turning away from unnatural poetry toward something new. It is only or merely emblematic because Keats’ statements about his reasons for abandoning it show that, despite its obvious concern and vigilant self-criticism, The Fall fails, for Keats, to be completely representative of that potential. Second, The Fall figures Hyperion in a more metaphorical sense; it carries the substance of the original within it, as the poet-narrator of the second poem dreams the contents of the first. It may not be immediately evident that The Fall of Hyperion is figurative because it is in a particular figurative relationship, like that of metaphor, to the original, but this is one of the senses in which The Fall is a figurative text.
It could be said that The Fall is the vehicle for the tenor, Hyperion, but this would not be entirely accurate. The Fall, understood as “vehicle,” lends to Hyperion as “tenor” the qualities of a dream through framing the narrative and verse content of the original as a source within mediating layers of dream-visions. It would be difficult to point to any particular aspect of The Fall that comes to light as a result of this conception of a figurative relation between the texts. While the mechanical relationship vehicle-tenor does not seem to point to anything of immediate interest, it might be helpful to my illustration of the term “figurative” to say that, in the same terms, the examination of the “tension,” or points of dissimilarity, between the two works is what is at stake in this argument.[7] In a large sense, the relationship between the two is metaphorical in the etymological sense of a “carrying over” or a “transfer” of meaning from one work to another.
The Fall is, then, in some respect, the figure of the content of the originary poem. It constantly alludes to and repeats Hyperion, carrying over large portions of that text without ever managing to tell the same story. The meaning of Hyperion is transported in The Fall, which seems as much a metaphor for the narrative of Hyperion as Hyperion is a narrative. A brief look at a few attempts by critics to suggest readings of The Fall will allow us to see how important it is for critical projects concerning the two texts to address this figurative nature.
Paul de Man, early in The Resistance to Theory, follows the dream within a dream as far as the title and stops. The attempt to describe (or reduce to grammatical legibility) the figurative boundaries of any text is not feasible in his terms. He does not go to the text of The Fall of Hyperion, but stops at the impossibility of interpreting the genitive in the title—the encroachment of the rhetorical and figurative prevents reading any further. He asks whether the title should be read as
‘Hyperion’s Fall,’ the case story of the defeat of an older by a newer power, the very recognizable story from which Keats indeed started out but from which he increasingly stayed away, or as “Hyperion Falling,” the much less specific but more disquieting evocation of an actual process of falling, regardless of its beginning, its end, or the identity of the entity to whom it befalls to be falling?[8]

One implication of his discussion is that if the second text is, as he suggests at one point, really the story of the fall of Hyperion as text, then we begin at the level of not first, but second-order discourse, an issue we will address a little later. In broader terms, our difficulty in squeezing meaning from the distinctions between poet and dreamer or poem and dream in The Fall’s famous induction would, to follow de Man’s argument, be a part of the inherently indecipherable figurative nature of the text, and a manifestation of the impossibility for Keats as much as the reader of interpreting even the title. This is not entirely satisfying. We will explore further not only the central, figurative structure of the poem, but also the questions raised by the induction shortly.
De Man continues by saying that “one could hardly expect to find solace in this “fearful symmetry” between the author’s and the reader’s plight since, at this point, the symmetry is no longer a formal but an actual trap, and the question no longer “merely” theoretical.”[9] The result of his investigation for our present discussion is that even the “unfinished” nature of both texts becomes fraught with meaning—one more term in the chain of figures leading from Hyperion down into the dream.
While it is true that most critics concentrate on the relationship between the two poems and their unfinished nature, some do not. Grant F. Scott does not put the two fragments in some kind of developmental schema with regard to Keats or his poetic project, but treats them together, not as epic poems or even as poems but as ekphrases. The description of these two poems, not as belonging to one genre or another but as tropes writ large, manifests the idea of the figurative that much of the criticism skirts—addressing its relationship to pictorial or plastic representation. At the same time, Scott calls the two poems the “verbal representations of another verbal representation.” [10] This is an attempt at getting at the figuring that underlies The Fall and its relationship to Hyperion, one that manages to get to the text itself, but only by calling the poems by a different name—ekphrases and not poems. It is interesting to note, but only in terms of the generic problems of The Fall, which we will be an issue later, that Scott claims always to investigate the genre to which Keats’s ekphrastic poems belong before going on to discuss them as ekphrases. He does so for To Autumn—in his argument, the covert perfection of Keats’s ekphrastic technique—in the same chapter as his discussion of Hyperion and The Fall, but he fails to perform that kind of investigation for the Hyperion fragments.[11]
Terence Hoagwood, taking another approach, calls The Fall of Hyperion “a sequence of surrogates; a chain of figures; metaphors of metaphors; ultimately a dream within a dream.”[12] Hoagwood’s argument is that the figure of the fictive relationship of credit to any real value based on the means of production haunts The Fall. It is this disconnect between the fictive term and the absent substance it supposedly represents that is at the bottom of the dream within a dream.[13]
My argument concerning The Fall’s figurative underpinnings does not originate in paralysis before the title or the incomplete nature of The Fall or its predecessor. It instead stems from the fact that the poem has, inscribed within it, a central metaphor which marks the text as even more deeply mediated than its oneiric nature might suggest. This figurative center does indeed result in the poem’s appearance as a “chain of surrogates,” but, in order to understand The Fall’s slippery nature, we need to look at it textually, taking as granted the self-reflexivity that de Man’s reading of the title provides and the elusiveness that most critics perceive in The Fall’s constant motion from frame to narrative frame.
At the beginning of Canto II, Moneta tells the narrator:
Mortal, that thou mays’t understand aright,
I humanize my sayings to thine ear,
Making comparisons of earthly things;
Or thou might’st better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.

Moneta’s metaphor [wind is legend-laden language] consists of the idea that her story, (and consequently) the narrator’s, and the reader’s, however it may drip with meaning, will be but ‘a barren noise,’ if the events and language are not humanized for the listener, or compared to earthly things. The events that must be compared in such a way are the events of the fragmentary Hyperion.
The text of The Fall of Hyperion, through the revelation of Moneta’s metaphor, becomes a comparison of the kind she mentions. Humanization is achieved in the second text through the introduction of the strong narrative subject and the narrative frame of the dream vision, allowing the barren noise of Hyperion to be available to the human ear. As Michael O’Neill puts it, The Fall of Hyperion “wants to tackle issues that lean profoundly on ‘earthly things’—the verb ‘humanize’ illuminates a central ambition of The Fall—yet the ‘barren noise’ of self-concern has its part to play in the poem’s chastened music.”[14]
“Self-concern” is apt, indeed, as the poem’s principal concern is how to be concerned with both Hyperion and itself. Large chunks of the Hyperion text are re-staged and re-used, but they are buried beneath three frames: the first frame is that of the dream-vision, the second is that of the dream within a dream, and the third is that of Moneta and her revelatory visions of the Titans.
If the text of Hyperion is dimly heard echoing through those layers of narrative structure, it is not perceived as clearly as those moments where the text echoes itself. The structure is suggestive of a self-conscious narrative, pursued at a surface level, certainly, but even lines of verse new to The Fall are echoed within its verses, as when the narrator describes “the tall shade veiled in drooping white.”[15] Compare “…that the breath/ Moved the thin linen folds that drooping hung/ About the golden censer from the hand/ Pendent” to “…that her breath/ Stirred the thin folds of gauze that drooping hung/ About a golden censer from her hand/ Pendent.”[16] These verses are less 30 lines apart, and they reflect one another strongly enough to suggest that the poem might be worrying about itself at least as much as about its purported content—the fall of Hyperion.
Indeed, O’Neill identifies this as the poem’s “essentially undignified, even shaming, theme: the ‘fever’ of self-consciousness, subjectivity, reflexiveness.”[17] Self-consciousness, reflexivity, and subjectivity are present even in the choice to make the poem’s voice that of the narrator who is engaged in writing the poem. Unlike Hyperion, the second poem is not presented as the fragment of a poetic construction, but as a tale related and written at the same time. It is, in a sense, a demonstration of poetry that writes itself, where artifice has become a concern of the poem and the narrator-poet alike.
Reflexivity is the engine that drives Moneta’s central metaphor. Though the reader knows that it is a dream from the very beginning—the signal of the subtitle being a major clue—
even the “Methought I stood” of line 19 which begins the first frame of the narration is patterned so as to signal the start of a dream-vision. Nancy Goslee notes in passing that the OED’s references for the word ‘methought,’ all occur in dream visions, going back to 1300 or 1400.[18] If the signaling of the sub-title and the genre-specific ‘methought’ were not enough to let the reader know that dreams were the matter, the dreaming narrator takes a drink of ‘transparent juice,’ which rapes “unwilling life away.”[19] That juice is said to be “parent of [the narrator’s] theme.”[20] The parent of the theme, on the one hand, is the tragic fall of Hyperion—and Keats’ failure to bring Hyperion into being, and, on the other, the dream that The Fall of Hyperion pretends to represent.
The idea that an element of that dream could generate the dream itself goes hand-in-hand with the pun on trans(parent), signaling the starkly plot-driven causality of drinking the draught in the first place and thereby reinforcing the problem of self-concern. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are the fever that inflicts the poem, just as Moneta’s visions, which are enwombed behind her hollow eyes, seem to be the cause of her withering away—the same sickness that has her “deathwards progressing/ To no death.”[21] The content of those visions is the content of Hyperion, the content that must be recuperated to write The Fall of Hyperion.
If we take as evidence that Hyperion opens in the shady vale of Saturn’s defeat and that the destination for the narrator-poet of The Fall is Moneta’s vision of that same vale, then the figure of the-poem-Hyperion as the legend to be interpreted, the absent/present heart at the center of The Fall (of Hyperion), can be analogized to a concept in Keats’s famous bit of marginalia to Paradise Lost: “There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale…It is a sort of delphic Abstraction, a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a mist.”[22] The concept of a ‘beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a mist’ is central to The Fall of Hyperion. O’Neill suggests that this statement could be read as “an artful treatment of Saturn’s misery” in Hyperion.[23] It seems even more apt when used as a figure for The Fall as a whole, especially when we consider that the word ‘vale’ evokes the narrative setting of Hyperion’s text while ‘delphic’ evokes the cause of Hyperion’s fall, namely, his replacement by Apollo.
The beginning of Hyperion is built around the image of a “vale.” The poem opens “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,” where Saturn lies defeated.[24] The Fall buries it within Moneta’s vision of the titans’ defeat. The narrator recounts:
No sooner had this conjuration passed
My devout lips, than side by side we stood
(Like a stunt bramble by a solemn pine)
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star. [25]

The vale is the scene of representation. The stationing of a realmless, defeated Saturn takes place there, and the story proceeds from that inaugural gesture of defeat. At least, this is so in Hyperion. The use of the vale in The Fall of Hyperion is mediated, not just by the mirror reflections of the revealed vision within the dream within the dream-vision, but also by the syntax of the re-staged scene. In The Fall, the conjuration and the parenthetical simile are given equal importance to the vale. Soon after, this placement is echoed (or reflected again) with another use of the term, at lines 110-11: “No stir of life / Was in this shrouded vale.”
The vale has come to be shrouded as well as shady in fewer than twenty lines, obscuring the ostensible source of the narrative with a mist evoking both the menace of death and the “Shadows” that plague the narrator-poet’s conception of Poesy from the induction. The reflections grow mistier. The word ‘vale’ is used but once in Hyperion, and that in the first line. The vale is the setting from which the entire work of the first poem unfolds. The Fall of Hyperion makes use of the word four times. The first two have been mentioned.
In the third instance, the narrator, forced to watch the stillness of the scene for quite some time, confesses that “Oftentimes [he] prayed / Intense, that Death would take [him] from the Vale.”[26] The proximity of “death” to “vale” results in certain biblical resonances; the vale’s shrouded and shady nature elevates the “Vale” to the same status as “Death.” It seems compelling that the two words are set off textually through capitalization, although we can’t be sure how the printed poem would have looked at completion had it made it to publication in Keats’ lifetime.
Shortly after Moneta’s humanization speech at the beginning of Canto II, the final echo of the vale comes, as the narrator reveals another change of scene: “Now in clear light I stood / Relieved from the dusk vale.” The vale of Saturn’s failure is thrown back into obscurity, but it is suggestive that that this happens only after Moneta confesses her act of translation by metaphor. It is as if the narrator, warned about the mediated nature of Moneta’s revelations and distanced from the vale by Moneta’s act of removing them from the scene, is able to recognize the dimness of his vision. The light that casts the “Shadows of melodious utterance” seems at the beginning to be the light that throws the vale into shade. The shade becomes a shroud, and the shroud is revealed to show Death. When the mediated nature of Moneta’s presentation of Hyperion’s content is revealed by way of the metaphor at the beginning of Canto II, the sourceless light emanating from the original text dims to twilight, while the light of the more immediate dream grows brighter.
It is important to note that the space to which the two retreat is that of the chastisement of poets and all the “dreamer tribe,” another critical space. The move out from the frame of the narrative proper and back to the frame of the dream within the dream is not an escape toward immediacy, then, but a turn back inward to the place of the narrator-poet’s debate about poetry.
It seems, having considered this movement, that an inability to escape the reflexive inward-turning of the poem that is to be compared to earthly things is what prevents The Fall of Hyperion from becoming more than barren noise. This is not by way of saying that the whole thing has deconstructed itself, or that some sort of straying away from any possible meaning has led the whole project into aporia. Nor am I suggesting that the text is dialectical after a Romantic Ironic model like McGann’s—it does not create and de-create itself by unwittingly carrying the seeds of its own destruction.[27] What happens in The Fall of Hyperion is more intentional than the first allows room for, and it is less eager than the second requires, more plagued by doubt.
Even before entering the meaning of the figurative Fall, the narrative that has been carried over from Hyperion, the reader is confronted with an induction to the poem that deliberately frames the whole effort in terms of doubt and self-reflexivity. An examination of that induction will help us to find out what is at stake in the nature of the text and how the narrator-poet comes to understand his function as simultaneously that of the poet and the critic, thus forcing the poem to overlap both the genre of poetry and the genre of criticism.

The Falling Sickness: Genre Trouble

The first eighteen lines of The Fall of Hyperion present a narrator-poet concerned with what distinguishes a poet from a fanatic or a savage:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not
Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The Shadows of melodious utterance. [28]

It seems at first that the simple distinction to be made between poets and the other two categories is that of writing.[29] But Keats elaborates:

But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment.[30]

It is somewhat clear that two distinctions mark poetry as different from dream that are quite separate from poetry’s written quality. The first is “telling” and the second, recognition.
In the first instance, it is the act of utterance which is poetry, “for Poesy alone can tell her dreams.” This seems contradictory at first, until we notice that what is traced upon vellum is not the poetry itself, but merely the “Shadows of melodious utterance.” Utterance is somewhat recombined with writing in the pun on the word “spell,” but further emphasis is placed on the act of speech in the lines that follow: “Who alive can say,/ ‘Thou art no Poet—mayst not tell thy dreams?’/ Since every man whose soul is not a clod/ Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, / And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.”[31] More layers of conditional mediation are placed between man and poet. Love is needed, and nurturing in the mother tongue, whatever that entails.
In the second instance, however, ‘Poesy’ is equated either with ‘laurel’ or with the tracings of the ‘Shadows of melodious utterance.’ ‘Laurel’ seems to mean the crown of Poesy which comes from recognition. If this is so, the lines that follow indicate not a pure self-recognition in the mode of the narrative portion of the poem, but a recognition of, by, or in history:
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.[32]

This is the common reading, and is certainly reasonable. But what is at stake in the test of time seems not to be whether what is being written will be recognized by history as poetry or not, but as either the dream of a poet or of a fanatic. There is yet another layer of mediation between the poet and the Poesy.
To put it another way, it is not necessarily that the worth or historical interest of the work will be determined by/is related to time or history outside the poem, but that the kind of dream the poem turns out to be will be so determined or understood. If it seems clear enough that poetry is meant to be a kind of dream that somehow manages to become poetry where others fail, then the warm scribe’s cold test is about, precisely, whether what is being written is poetry per se or whether it is what poetry is being distinguished from.
The last three lines of the induction are engaged in a critical act; they call the genre of the work into question. Paul Hamilton states the problem in both historical and critical terms, saying that “if the poem will only be recognizable as poetry by a later age, it is not poetry, now.”[33] The central question of Hamilton’s “now,” as it relates to the test of the warm scribe, is the problem of Keats’ “when.” The time when it “will be known” becomes any time after the moment when the “when” is uttered. It is, thus, a problem of continued deferral, as each utterance pushes that time into the future.
The incomplete nature of the poem and the self-critical look at the test itself conspire to forbid us to say that the moment of testing is, so to speak, at hand. Exactly what kind of History can be contained in something forever in the future of the moment of its reading is, it would seem, unknowable. Moreover, if it is ‘not poetry’ now, that is to say, at the moment of writing, or at any moment at which the text is engaged, then it would be difficult to call it anything but writing about poetry. If “not poetry,” then criticism. It is engaged in second-order discourse.
Under the terms of my argument, a poet may be said to be engaged in writing first-order discourse when he writes a poem. At the same time, a critic writing about a poem is writing second-order discourse. One produces poetry, the other describes poetry and produces criticism. The moment when a poem becomes critical of its own project, or self-critical, it is no longer strictly first-order discourse, but partially second-order discourse.[34] A level of abstraction exists between the two orders that puts pressure on the text. The poem becoming both poem and criticism of its poetic project does one of two things: it either forces the critic up a level of abstraction automatically or forces the critic to share the same critical space with the poet. The mediations and negotiations of layers of abstraction in some cases force strange effects, as the connection to the first order of discourse and the primary text become ever more attenuated.
The narrator who begins in this manner stands in a different place than the narrator of Hyperion; he stands in a particularly critical relationship to the text and to the act of narrating/composing the text. Hyperion unfolds and remains unquestioned in its happening by the narrator. The Fall of Hyperion is related from a human perspective, namely that of doubt. Some have suggested that that doubt is doubt about history or the specific place or status of the poet as it relates to history, but, certainly, in this instance, it is doubt about what it is that is being written, and what it means to write it.
In a discussion of the German romantics, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy demonstrate that this tendency toward critical discourse is by no means unique to Keats. Criticism was viewed by the German romantics as being instrumental in the constitution of literature in a fundamental way.[35] A narrator-poet engaged in a project of criticism would be in some measure constituting the grounds against which his poem would be read both as poetry and criticism. In this manner, such a poet-critic would have concerns beyond the bounds of his poem that put pressure on both the text being written and the reader. A narrator-poet who seeks to combine such disparate elements into the work he is himself engaged in writing is caught in a auto-poetic process that threatens to exceed him.
Jerome McGann, while talking about Moneta’s tragic understanding of the events of Hyperion in his The Romantic Ideology, makes the point that “the Romantic Imagination does not save, it offers…a tragic understanding…The judgment which it passes on the world is therefore always justified—if it is to be justified at all—by the depth of the poetry’s self-criticism.” [36] That this is necessarily the case is clear from the way the Romantics put the individual subject at the “determining center of the world.”[37] If this is an attempt at a first principle, it should be applicable here.
Certainly, the poet-narrator is the determining center of the world of The Fall, much more so than in Hyperion, and certainly, in this case, the depth of the self-criticism is not lacking. It is the tragic understanding of the self-critical role of the narrator-poet in The Fall that separates it from its predecessor. The tragic understanding in The Fall, by these terms, would be an understanding of the impossibility of a poetry-criticism that founds itself as it is written. It seems to be saying that the preceding fragment was a piece of a conjectured artifact—this poem that followed it does not have such grandiose claims.[38] Its title told of the first poem’s failure, and its induction, justifiably unable even to be certain of its genre, proleptically doubted its own success.
Nancy Goslee sees the shift from the first Hyperion fragment to the second as being one from the statuesque, ekphrastic, Miltonic voice of the Hyperion to the picturesque or pictorial “Romantic” vision of The Fall. The development of the poems, as she sees them, can be situated along the lines of the history of Romantic aesthetic theories and within the debates concerning Schlegel’s or Hazlitt’s belief in the inferiority of the plastic arts to a Romantic picturesque vision. Goslee seems to do more than this, however, treating Hyperion almost as if it were sculpture and analyzing The Fall in scenes corresponding to the tableaux as if it were the presentation of a series of paintings.[39]
These kinds of re-positionings, the kinds of generic tools that critics bring to bear on the text raises the question: what is the genre of the piece? Is it a poem? Is it something else? It is perhaps no surprise that genre should trouble the poem. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy suggest that the project of Keats’ German romantic counterparts was, in a certain sense, to produce something new, called ‘literature,’ “beyond the divisions of classical (or modern) poetics and capable of resolving the inherent (“generic”) divisions of the written thing.”[40] The necessity of getting beyond traditional or modern poetics in order even to describe the project in which the German romantics were engaged seems to have its reflection in the narrator-poet’s predicament. The test of the warm hand, considered in that light, is a way to escape beyond those inherent generic divisions—and the responsibility of creating something ‘new’— by the expedient of time and the continuous motion of time beyond the reach of the narrator-poet. The inability of the narrator-poet, however, to transcend in such a way is already doubly foretold—in Keats’ inability to describe the birth of the “modern consciousness”[41] that Apollo might have represented in Hyperion—and in the fragmentary nature of both poems.
The attempt to describe The Fall of Hyperion in terms of generic delimitations forces us to consider the implications of the poem’s figurative generation on a wider scale. As Goslee puts it, Keats “chooses a conceptually detached intellectual and analytical frame” which “he uses…to question not only the conventional modes of dream vision, but poetry as a whole.”[42] Putting an ample distance between “dream-vision” and “poetry” sets up distinctions for Goslee that reflect Keats’s divisions between “dreamer” and “poet,” but the questioning of poetry as a whole, is, broadly taken, the questioning of literature as a whole. Thus, the genre of The Fall of Hyperion is something like the genre of the “literary work,” as conceived in the opening remarks of the Strasbourg Colloquium on Genre—that is to say, the self-reflexive and self-instituting genre that entails its own rules of production and its own theory—the genre of self-generation.[43] The Fall falls into just such a category.

Or thou might’st better listen to the wind
The figurative nature of The Fall and the self-critical stance of its narrator-poet echo each other in Moneta’s metaphor. Moneta describes the figurative wind (for the wind which is the vehicle for the metaphor is itself an absent term) of Canto II as “legend-laden.”[44] The word legend combines within it the two conditions to ‘Poesy’ set forth in the induction: telling and recognition. The legend-laden wind is at once sound to be heard—the melodious utterance of Poesy—but not understood, and a sign to be read, as the humanizing of the scenes entail a possibility of interpretation. The interpretations of Moneta’s translation and the narrator-poet’s understanding of the comparison are like the traced Shadows that plague the distinction of Poesy from Dream. A ‘legend’ is both heard and read, as the legend near a work of art in a museum or as the key to unlocking the arcane symbology of an ancient map.[45]
The word ‘legend’ also contains the denotation of a story grown larger in the telling—which certainly speaks to the burden of Hyperion’s antecedent relationship to The Fall—and a figure who receives recognition for great deeds, recognition very much like the laurel which sometimes distinguishes the poet. The word ‘legend,’ then, seems to echo the generic trouble of the text, as it, too, presents a number of possibilities of reading, and it is placed at the center of the comparison to ‘earthly things’ which sits at the heart of the text’s figurative nature. Genre and figure become fevers of each other, and it is the difficulty of reading these figures methodologically and textually which put both the narrator-poet and the reader-critic into, as Paul de Man put it, such “fearful symmetry.”
It is not merely circumstance which brings the induction of The Fall and Moneta’s humanizing metaphor together. Keats does it himself in yet another letter written during the same period in September. In the letter to Woodhouse dated 21, 22 September 1819, Keats writes part of the induction out, breaking off at what we have as line eleven, “And dumb enchantment—.”[46] What is remarkable about the letter as it relates to my argument is that Keats has written across these lines of poetry, at ninety degrees[47], the following: “My Poetry will never be fit for any thing it does n’t cover its ground well—You see he she is off her guard and does n’t move a peg though Prose is coming up in an awkward style enough—Now a blow in the spondee will finish her—But let it get over this line of circumvallation if it can. These are unpleasant Phrase[s.]”[48] Here, Keats narrows the gap between the Keats as author and the narrator-poet of The Fall of Hyperion.
The mock-criticism of his poetry on the grounds that it fails to react to lines written at cross-purposes elevates the order of his circumvallation automatically. The pun on “covering ground well” does not entirely cover the self-critical tone of “My poetry will never be fit for any thing” though it is easy to read in a humorous spirit. Here, Keats, and not the narrator-poet, assumes the comic mantle of self-commentator, thus becoming a part of the second-order discourse defined above. He pushes this further, however, when he describes the “style” of his prose in the same half-humorous way.[49] Keats has simultaneously become the author of the narrator-poet, the Critic of his own Poetry, and the Critic of his Criticism. In much the way the narrator-poet of The Fall of Hyperion pushes the level of critical response until it becomes but a reflection of a reflection, a figure of a figure, a dream within a dream, Keats has, through his letters, placed even more abstraction on the shoulders of the textual critics of The Fall. Ultimately, Keats abandons his authority and leaves the induction to its own devices, saying, “But let it get over this line of circumvallation if it can.” The The Fall of Hyperion needs no warm hand to guide it—for, fragmentary as the poem is, the self-reflexive, figurative nature of its verse has succeeded in creating a literary space of self-generation where Poesy can tell her dreams alone.
[1] Stillinger gives October, 1818 as a possible window for the beginning of composition in John Keats: Complete Poems. John Mee (John Keats: Selected Letters) suggests November, while Walter Jackson Bate’s biography points to mid-September.
[2] Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963) pg. 562.
[3] Bate, pg. 564-5.
[4] John Keats, Selected Letters, eds. Robert Gittings and Jon Mee, (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2002), pg. 272.
[5] Letters, pg. 303.
[6] John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972) pg. 488.
[7] The terms “vehicle,” “tenor,” “ground,” and “tension” are I.A. Richards’, cf. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).
[8] Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1986) pg. 16.
[9] Ibid. 17.
[10] Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover: The UP of New England, 1994), 156.
[11] Scott, pg. 164 and following.
[12] Terence Allan Hoagwood, ‘Keats, fictionality, and finance: The Fall of Hyperion,’ in Nicholas Roe ed., Keats and History (Cambridge: The U of Cambridge Press, 1995) pg. 131.
[13] Hoagwood, 127.
[14] Michael O’Neill, ‘‘When this warm scribe my hand’: Writing and History in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion’ in KAH, pg. 149
[15] The Fall of Hyperion Canto I, 194
[16] The Fall, Canto I, 195-198 and 217-220, respectively.
[17] O’Neill, pg. 149.
[18] Nancy Moore Goslee, Uriel’s Eye (Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 1985), pg 220n.
[19] The Fall, Canto I, 51.
[20] --, Canto I, 46.
[21]--, Canto I, 260-261.
[22] Taken from “Keats’s Marginalia to Paradise Lost,’ in E. Cook (ed.), John Keats, Oxford Authors Series, (Oxford and New York: 1990), 338.
[23] O’Neill, pg. 155.
[24] Hyperion, Book I, 1-2.
[25] The Fall of Hyperion, Canto I, 91-96.
[26] Ibid. 397-8.
[27] Anne Mellor, English Romantic Irony, (Cambridge, MA: 1980), 5.
[28] The Fall, Canto I, 1-6.
[29] It does not seem to me immediately clear why one would lump everyone into Poets and Other guys. Keats does not exactly do this. Is it the same, for example, to weave a Paradise for a sect and to guess at Heaven? One would seem to be fabricating a reward in the one case, and blindly attempting to describe an actual place in the other.
[30] The Fall, Canto I, 7-11.
[31] Ibid. 11-15. “Every man whose soul is not a clod” is problematic because of the way it appears to be an inverse echo of Ode to a Nightingale’s sixth stanza: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die…/To thy high requiem become a sod.”
[32] Ibid. 16-18.
[33] Paul Hamilton ‘Keats and Critique,’ in Marjorie Levinson et al., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford and New York: 1987), pg. 136.
[34] If it is difficult to imagine a poem that does not somewhat inhabit such a self-critical moment, that is, so to speak, purely first-order discourse, then allow me to suggest that, for the purposes of this argument, pastoral poetry does not typically engage in the kind of self-questioning to which I am referring. At the same time, Spenser’s Shephearde’s Calendar would be an example of hybrid first- and second-order poems within an understanding of the pastoral.
[35] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), chapters 3 &4.
[36] Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1983), pg. 132.
[37] Ibid.
[38] McGann, talking about Swingle, asks the question, “Can the mind in fact establish a relationship with something eternal?” (64) This question seems suggestive of what might be at stake in the different approaches to the two fragments.
[39] Goslee, chapters 3-4.
[40] Absolute, pg. 11.
[41] Bate, 564.
[42] Goslee, 102.
[43] J. Chartin, S. Weber, J. Nancy, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Pour situer le colloque ‘LE GENRE,’” Glyph 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), pg. 236.
[44] The Fall, Canto II, 6.
[45] I know I did not think of this second denotation on my own, but for the life of me I cannot find what suggested it. The context of museums makes me suspect Grant F. Scott.
[46] Letters, pgs. 273-278.
[47] Ibid. 411n.
[48] Ibid. 276.
[49] This could—if stretched—perhaps be applied to his handwriting—but seems to be commenting on the Prose itself, which gets equal status with Poetry in terms of capitalization. Certainly, identifying the writing as circumvallation could play either way, as commentary in the act of writing in which he was engaged or as an engagement with the material nature of orthography. Either way it would still constitute a higher order of discourse than just Poetry or
just Prose.

The Guttenberg Bible

2006-02-14T14:10:00.000-08:00

No, that's not a typo. Let me explain. I had this dream where I was at the cabin, and I heard someone humming really loudly. I picked up a book that was sitting on the nightstand near me to throw at that person. I realized that the book was the Bible and that the person humming was Steve Guttenberg. He was outside the window, in only a beach towel, humming obnoxiously. I lean out the window. He looks at me and lifts up his towel to reveal his penis. He then proceeds to tie it into an elaborate series of balloon animals, and his final trick is to shape it into an approximation of the caduceus. I then threw the Bible and told him to shut up. He let go of his towel and yelled, "I'll be famous one day!"

Some sort of nexus...

2006-02-13T10:41:00.001-08:00

So, this week, I'm out tutoring one of my kids at a coffee shop near where I live. I'm wearing a hat that says "Evil" in a pink, gothic font. The word is accented in rhinestones. It is a Disneyland hat. My student is writing a paper where he must compare the Epic of Gilgamesh to Bruce Campell vs. Army of Darkness by way of the monomyth structure. As he says the word, Army of Darkness, this guy walks up and says, "What are you guys doing?" I say, "We're writing an essay." "For what?" he asks. "For English," my pupil responds. He says, "Oh. Do you know what these are?" He points to his arms, where he seems to have been cutting himself with a sharp implement in some sort of pattern. I say, "No." He says, "This is the left hand of Moses, and this is the right hand of Aaron." I say, "Oh. Really?" His hebrew sucks, then. He says, "Yeah, they're forbidden." "Forbidden by whom?" I ask. Really. I talk that way to strangers that make me nervous. "By god," he says. Blank looks from both of us. He says, "Okay. Nevermind, just you were wearing that 'Evil' hat." "Oh, right," I say. "It's supposed to be ironic. I bought it at Disneyland." "Oh," he says, lighting a cigarette. "Nevermind." Then he leaves.

True story.

Crap-a-doodle-do.

2006-02-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

I know I shouldn't be as bummed about this whole Order of the Phoenix rumor situation...but I am. For those of you who do not know, Gary Oldman still has not been given a contract for Harry Potter 5, even though photography has begun.

What will happen?

Creature from the Black Lagoon

2006-02-10T00:58:00.000-08:00

I'll swim next to you...

in silent humidity...

Considering the Lobster; Monster Ballads

2006-02-08T18:36:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Edward's heads-up, I realized there was a new book of DFW essays out. I've been reading that today. I also realized that for some reason, there was no link to his particular blog over there on the right. I have remedied that.

On another, unrelated note, I am sure you have all seen the ads for the re-issue of the Monster Ballads Comp. The other day, on my way to watch some Deadwood, I suddenly fell victim to the image of a Hannah-Barbera-style cartoon vampire singing "Is this Blood that I'm Stealin'" to the tune of the (looking left, looking right) Whitesnake song. You know which one.

This made me laugh very hard. So, I wanted to challenge you, Fickle Readers, to create more Monster Ballads. Using, of course, only the finest of hard rock ballads and the most easily recognizable monsters. This is not limited to your Frankenstein/Wolfman genre, but it could be. Especial love goes to those who can do this without forcing. And Adam M., nothing on Rubberneck is about the Universal Monsters.

"If I haver, I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who's havering to you."

2006-02-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

"So I have been hearing second-hand stories about there being someone in a seminar with me who had been making "ignorant" and "anti-religious" comments in lecture. This was from a friend of mine who has recently begun hanging out with the person making these claims. The friend kept questioning me as to what the nature of those comments had been and the atmosphere of the class. I told that friend, jokingly, that since I couldn't remember anyone with even remotely an anti-religious tone (it's a class on Milton), it was probably me. I mentioned that I was one of the only people that ever responds (in an unusually large class) and most of the questions I respond to are of the nature "What meter is this in?" In other words, factual questions. Break time comes, today, and someone comes back in with a cup of coffee from this place on campus that I haven't gone to, yet. I ask if the place takes cards. He says, do you need to borrow money, too? I say, no, I just want to know if that place takes cards because I might go there sometime for lunch. I never carry cash. He says in this extremely put-upon tone, look, a dollar's not a big deal--I'm generous even with atheists. I say, did you just call me an atheist? He said, well, you are. I said, no, actually, I'm not. He said, well, you have a tendency to say things about faith that make me a little bit uncomfortable. As if everyone's beliefs across the board can be measured against his comfort level. I say, Oh, okay, well, I'm sorry. I say, it wasn't my intent to make anyone uncomfortable. He says, in an extremely bitchy voice while narrowing his eyes at me: Good to know. I say, whatever, let me know if I say anything that makes you feel uncomfortable--just point it out to me. I'm pissed, now, though, because of the tone and the way this guy's looking at me. So, now, I, being me, try to ease the tension by saying--"Just for the record, I'm not an atheist. I am totally convinced there's a god, and I think he is a dick." Classic Dan Tanner move that doesn't help anything. And then I chuckle. Class starts back up, and about fifteen minutes later, I look over at this guy's notes--because he writes with this old fashioned fountain pen that's really nice, and it's fun to watch the ink run all over and get all over his fingers--and see that he has written, "I believe in God. He is a jerk," with the tag "--so said the atheist." Not only was I misquoted, I was then labeled with the thing that started the whole thing. I was angered beyond all reason. I mean, to a point that I haven't been for actions directed against me in, say, 4 good years. The misquote and the assumption just about drove me out of my skull. I don't know why, but I guess it's because part of me made the connection that I was probably the one this guy thought was making ignorant comments. And I can't do anything about it, because it's none of my business what he writes in his notes upside down and across the table three spots down. I'm sorry if describing the function of mirror neurons to the class made you feel "uncomfortable" about your faith, guy. If you like to be comfortable, you should find people that care whether your comfort level is being stepped on in the course of reading a canonical poem. If you like to be comfortable, you shouldn't take a class at one of the most skeptical universities in North America. If you like to be comfortable, you shouldn't be in grad school. And you sure as hell shouldn't be in a room with me--especially now that I know that I make you uncomfortable. If you like to be comfortable, you should get comfortable with discomfort or your snarky notes will be a very cold kind of comfort at the end of the day." --so said the atheist.

The Crown of the Blemish

2006-02-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

So, a couple of people came over to watch the Superbowl. Sterling did not make it because he was defeated by Trafick, a new, gritty Marvel superhero whose powers include the ability to make you sit still in the middle of a freeway for indefinite periods of time.

After the game, Mike A.D. and I went to Corona del Mar--which as the more language savvy amongst you know is Spanish for the Corona of the Sea--where there was a bonfire until about eleven at night. It was fun. I was the fire-tender. At one point, I was called upon to help a middle-aged woman light her fire. That is not a euphemism. I got it lit and returned to the root beer and cookie feast that we were engaged in.

To my surprise, people were fascinated by the fact that I a) would help a stranger or b) could get that stranger's fire lit better than she could.

However many times Troop 22 took away my Fireman's Chit, they always gave it back. Always. Why? Because there is probably not anything I do so well as I burn things. Whether or not my dissociation from that body left me with a whole and intact Fireman's Chit, I re-earned it, spiritually, last night.

For K--

2006-02-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

So, instead of finishing up my new Keats draft, I was obliged to work on a presentation for my Mallarme' class. Mallarme' just might be the most difficult thing I have ever read. Any given poem ranks up there. I come out of that class, and I think, "Holy crap. Reading is hard." That's how hard it is.

So, I was nervous about my presentation, which was supposed to be on this poem called Le Sonneur--or, The Bell-ringer. But it went fine.

Anyway. I thought to post it here. On the one hand, I'm going to post it just to see whether you guys appreciate this kind of thing--I know most of you don't ever see me in "trying-to-be-a-scholar" mode--and, on the other, because one of the last IMversations I had with Kendall--maybe fifth-to-last--I was trying to walk him through my way of reading a poem. That poem was Keats' ode on melancholy. I've been thinking about Keats a lot, so I thought of that conversation, and how it didn't really go very far. I think that's because I had to go to work. Anyway, this presentation is more or less written conversationally and at the same time as I did my reading, so you can see how my process goes, Kendall, if you're still interested.

Before we start, know that this shit is hard, and the final, or definitive version of Le Sonneur was too tough for me to attack head on. I came at it from behind, with the first published version of the text, one written almost a quarter century before the final version--the idea being that I could maybe jiggle something out with the differences between them.

So, this is the text of the first, 1862 version in French:

Le Sonneur (1862)

Cependant que la cloche enivre sa voix claire
De l’air plein de rosée et du matin,
Et fait à la faucheuse entonner, pour lui plaire,
Un Angelus qui sent la lavande et le thym ;

Le sonneur essoufflé, qu’un cierge pâle éclaire,
Chevauchant tristement en geignant du latin,
Sur la pierre qui tend la corde séculaire,
N’entend descendre à lui qu’un tintement lointain,

Je suis cet homme. Hélas ! dans ardeur peureuse,
J’ai beau broyer le câble à sonner l’idéal,
Depuis que le Mal trône en mon cœur lilial

La Voix ne me vient plus que par bribes et creuse.
--Si bien qu’un jour, après avoir en vain tiré,
Ô Satan, j’ôterai la pierre et me pendrai !

And these, here, are two of the strongest possible readings of these lines in English (translations are for meaning, not for aesthetics--so no calling me to task):

1.
While the bell intoxicates its clear voice
With the young, dew-filled air of the morning,
And makes the harvest-girl sing, to please it,
An Angelus that smells of lavender and thyme;

The breathless bell-ringer, illuminated by a pale candle,
Sadly riding, while grumbling some Latin,
The stone that tenders the centenary chord,
Hears nothing descend to him but a faraway ringing.

I am this man. Alas! In my fearful ardor,
I have crushed the cable that sounds the ideal,
Since Evil sits enthroned in my lily-white heart,

The Voice no longer comes to me except by morsels and void.
--So well that one day, after having pulled in vain,
O Satan, I will lift the stone and hang myself!

2.
[While the bell makes known its ecstatic state with its clear voice,
Filled with dew and young from the air of the morning,
And makes the reaper begin to sing (and set the tone) to please it
A prayer that smells of lavender and thyme;]

[The stalled (unable to continue his progression) bell-ringer, made to understand by a pale candle,
Sadly superimposing himself while muttering a prayer
On the stone which tenders the centenary chord,
Only a faraway ringing descends to his ears.]

[I am this man. Alas! In my ardor,
I did well to break the cable to sound the ideal,
Since Evil sits in honor in my blameless heart,]

[The Voice no longer comes to me except in morsels, digging.
--So well that one day, after having abused the situation (your patience) in vain,
O Satan, I will cast off the stone and hang myself!]

Obviously, these are lego readings. Match as you want to. And never assume they are the only ways the lines can be read. Mallarme' was smarter than me--so just know there's more in there.

Here, in case you are wondering, is the text of the Angelus in Latin and English, courtesy of wikipedia:

Latin text of the Angelus:
V/. Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ,R/. Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ. Amen.
V/. "Ecce Ancilla Domini."R/. "Fiat mihi secundum Verbum tuum."
Ave Maria, gratia plena...
V/. Et Verbum caro factum est.R/. Et habitavit in nobis.
Ave Maria, gratia plena...
V/. Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix.R/. Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.
Oremus: Gratiam tuam quæsumus, Domine, mentibus nostris infunde; ut qui, angelo nuntiante, Christi Filii tui Incarnationem cognovimus, per passionem eius et crucem, ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

English text of the Angelus:
V/. The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,R/. And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
V/. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord."R/. "Be it done unto me according to your Word."
Hail Mary, full of grace...
V/. And the Word was made flesh,R/. And dwelt among us.
Hail Mary, full of grace...
V/. Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.R/. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Grace into our hearts; that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross, be brought to the glory of His resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Okay. Sorry for the long build-up to what will assuredly be a let-down. My 15 minute oral presentation (if you care about references, just ask me):

Formally, Le Sonneur is a sonnet. It is divided into two quatrains and two tercets, corresponding to an octet and a sextet, respectively. The versification is Alexandrine. First, an overall look at the narrative of the poem as it appears in the 1862 version.

In it, a bell rings out in the morning air, and causes a harvest girl (perhaps in the middle of harvesting lavender and thyme) to sing the Angelus, which when it is capitalized refers to the Catholic prayer by the same name. As the bell rings out, we move to the bell-ringer, who is breathless—perhaps from climbing a bell-tower, perhaps from ringing the bell, perhaps for some other reason—lit by the pale light of a candle, sitting astride the stone that tautens and holds the rope leading up to the bell. The sound of the ringing bell is distant as it descends to him. Up until the first word of the first tercet we are in an impersonal descriptive mode.

At that moment, the “je” of the poem makes itself known, with the speaker claiming identity with the bell-ringer. After an interjection expressing lament, the voice claims that in a fearful ardor, it has in some way broken the cable that sounds the Ideal. It is easy to jump into an allegorical mode, here, since the word “ideal” is so open to polysemy. But since there has been only one rope or cable in the poem, the one that leads to the bell, it might behoove us to take some advice from Ellen S. Burt, or from Paul de Man’s Lyric and Modernity, and stay with the symbolic reading for a moment, supposing that ‘ideal’ and ‘bell’ have here become the same thing. The poetic voice continues, saying that ever since Evil has been in a place of honor in the heart of the speaker, the Voice, or—again, staying within the symbolic—the sound of the bell from the first quatrain only comes in morsels, and when it does, it is empty. The speaker then says that one day, after having pulled in vain—that is to say, having pulled without hearing the voice of the bell at all—he will remove the stone and hang himself. In doing so, he invokes Satan, revealed to be the addressee of the sonnet.

If, moving quickly, we outline an underlying progression in the poem, we can see that the first quatrain shows us a pastoral scene, with a girl working in the fields hearing the sound of a church bell that calls her to a morning prayer. The second quatrain is one of enclosure. The bell-ringer’s difficulty in drawing breath is indicative that he does not smell the lavender and the thyme that mix with the voice of the bell and the song of the girl. The “dew,” playing on “pink” in the first quatrain, and the use of “clear” and “air” as well as the presence of “morning” give a sense of the burgeoning light of dawn, and all of this is contrasted to the pale candle that lights the bell-ringer’s quatrain. Youthful song in prayer and the clear ringing of the bell are answered with grumbling and muttering in Latin. (Do the harvest-girl and the bell-ringer speak the same prayer?) The loud voice of the bell is muffled for the bell-ringer, either because it must descend through a tower of stone (if he rings his bell from the bottom of the bell-tower) to reach his ears, or because he has grown deaf, like Quasimodo, through proximity to the noise. In either case, the sense of enclosure is more present. The underlying progression in the octet, then, is one from exterior to interior, from openness to enclosure, from a mélange and intoxication (enivrement) of the senses to their flattening and dulling. At the sextet, another move becomes apparent: the movement from the concrete world to the abstract. Rapidly, Ardor, fear, the ideal, evil, Satan, and future action replace description and present action. The movement away from the scene of morning is finalized in a future suicide. (Another way to regard the shift could be from the explicitly symbolic (i.e., if we read lavender and thyme as symbolic of the sensuousness of Poetry, for example) to the allegorical (i.e., if we read the lily as the stand in for Christ, or purity even without a motivating connection).

The identification of the voice of the poem (I will call him the narrator-poet) with the bell-ringer provides a logical place to read a passage from the symbolic (or representational) to the allegorical (or emblematic) within the poem, since it is a definite break. There are two possibilities for reading, “Je suis cet homme,” here: A = A, or A @ B. That is to say, either the narrator-poet is the bell-ringer, in the tautological sense, and the thoughts of the sextet are the thoughts he has as he rings the bell in the second quatrain or at any other time for which the second quatrain stands, OR the narrator-poet is the bell-ringer by metaphor, that is to say the narrator-poet is like the bell-ringer. Either there is complete identification, or there is only partial identification which allows for a widening of the gap between the word and the representation, a place where we could suppose the production of excess meaning. For if the narrator-poet is like the bell-ringer we must complete the comparison ourselves, and determine the ground of the comparison and the tension, or dissimilarities, that such a comparison would imply.

A move like this allows us at long last to attack the word “ideal” in more of an allegorical mode. If, through comparison, the narrator-poet has grown more and more insensible to the clear voice of the ideal-as-bell that speaks in the first quatrain, that is, deaf to the voice of the ideal-as-pastoral-poetry, deaf to the mixture of the senses, deaf to the future promise that poems invoking morning typically suggest, even so, he is still able to employ that voice. He did, after all, write the verses that contain the ideal to which it points.

The narrator-poet shows us, however, that in his fearful ardor he has “broyer le câble à sonner l’idéal.” While remaining in the symbolic mode, the mode of correspondence between the thing and what it represents, we were forced to read this as something like, “broken the cable that sounds the bell.” That would be a reading that leaves us, appropriately, with a length of broken cable, which is ideal for hanging. However, in a passage from the symbolic to the allegorical, it is not stretching too far to say that the poet has crushed or ground the cable to sound the ideal, suggesting that it is the act of sounding the ideal that breaks the connection to it. The narrator-poet’s sense of the ideal is broken by his attempts to employ it in writing.

This process is enacted by the poem itself. The ideal’s presence in the first quatrain is what sheds light on the cost to the narrator-poet in the second. He has become breathless—in the sense of winded. He is unable to draw breath, let alone to sing as does the girl at harvest—but he is breathless also in the sense of stalled, or unable to follow a rhythm of progression, the other definition of essoufflé. The act of writing poetry—ringing the bell—daily has resulted in the stagnation of the narrator-poet’s progression and leads to the belief that one day he will be unable to hear poetry’s voice at all. The mere exercise of that which is sensible in the presentation of the sensuous is desensitizing. Another way to look at this is as the hollowing out of language. The use of language itself grows dimmer and dimmer to the narrator-poet’s ear by the end of the octet. The use of language renders one deaf to its Voice. This leads to thoughts of suicide.

As the rope is still present in the final word however, as the thing from which the hanged man hangs, the chord that links the narrator-poet and the ideal is not at all ground to pieces or broken or crushed: it merely undergoes changes. As Blanchot suggests Mallarmé to be first of all a poet of changes, it might benefit us to follow such a line of thought.

First, that cable is the unseen rope that rings the bell in the first line. Next, it is the centenary chord that, in a representational mode, supports the bell’s weight and keeps it from ringing in the wind. At the same time, it is also the centenary rope tendered by the rock, allegorically, of St. Peter. The Rock that tenders the chord is the Catholic Church, as well as a stone. The rope, then, could simply be the belt that cinches the monk’s habit—if, like Marchal, we read the bell-ringer to be the mauvais moine—or it could be the representation of the Church’s function as marker of continuity between past and present. Séculaire means many centuries old, and the Angelus is the prayer that marks the passage of the day, as it has for centuries. In the first tercet, the rope becomes le corde sensible that is the vulnerable link between the narrator-poet and the peak of his art, and, in the last one, it has become the rope around the neck of the hanged man. The last line would seem to reinforce the reading of the rock as Catholic Church, as the church hath ever fixed its canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. It would be, effectively, a casting off the burden of the Church’s laws in committing the sin of suicide.

The movement from pastoral to suicidal is not a straight-forward progression however, and may, in some measure, be ironic. Death is not absent from the first quatrain. It is present in the form of La Faucheuse, the reaper. The reaper intones (fait à la facheuse entonner) the poem in the choral sense, from within the heart of the ideal situation of the first quatrain; it comes at the beginning to set the tone for the poem. Obviously, if the reaper’s presence isn’t enough, the harvest also takes place in preparation for winter. The “Angelus” is an important word as well for the structure and meaning of the poem. “Angelus” refers to the prayer, but the “angelus” is also the ringing of the bell that precedes the prayer or calls it forth from the listener.

The text of the Angelus-as-prayer affirms the declaration of the angel to Mary, and her conception by the Holy Spirit, and requests intercession on behalf of the speaker. The Hail Mary occurs within the Angelus three times, just as the voice of the bell is heard in the first line, in the eighth line, and, mutely, as the future incarnation of the Voice in the thirteenth line, when the bell-ringer will, one day, have pulled in vain. The Angelus recalls not only the conception of Christ, but also the passion of the cross, the death of Christ, and the resurrection in its final supplication for the redemption of the speakers. The effect, then, of the repetition of the Angelus first clearly, then faintly as from a distance, and finally in a prophetic mode of future silence is a wasting away of hope and a foreshortening of the time until the hanging day that seems to ironically parallel the Ave Maria’s in hora mortis nostræ.

Le Sonneur as an apostrophe to Satan, then, acts parodically, but not in a simple mode, as mockery, for the faint possibility of redemption is inscribed within the poem as the presence of recurring presence of the Angelus always repeats the call for redemption. I say it is not simply a parody, also, because the “clear voice” in which the narrator-poet calls on Satan in the last line will be as effectively cut off from speech as the sound of the bell when the rope that at one time sounded the “ideal” strangles the narrator-poet or breaks his neck. Even the Satanic mode—the so called “simplistic” Satanism that Marchal thinks is borrowed from Baudelaire—is defeated by time. It will be time that executes the final transformation hidden in the poem. The bell-ringer will hang himself on the rope that sounds the bell, and in doing so, will sound the bell again. The moment of death will cause a re-sounding of the bell, and the narrator-poet will find the ideal again. The sense remains, however, that this is not victory, as the narrator-poet will be beyond hearing its clear voice. The poetry of Le Sonneur as it exists in its first version, then, is a poetry that uses itself up through expression, that enacts its own disparition, and that falls continually from song into silence.

Local Man Rejects Ishtar, Embraces High School Chemistry

2006-01-30T17:51:00.000-08:00

Being an all-purpose tutor to a high school student is bewildering and wildly entertaining.

Behold the two things I wrestled with today: the wild man of the woods and Mass-Mass conversions. It is a really strange boost to your confidence to remember that it was Gilgamesh's rejection of Ishtar's advances that sent her running to her daddy to unleash the Bull of the Heavens. It also makes your heart swell with pride (or is that just fluid from an infection of the pericardium?) to know that you, for some strange reason, remember the atomic mass of ANYTHING AT ALL. When was chemistry class again? Freshman year at Edison? 1995-96? Requiescat in Pace, Davenport.

Now, I must move on to my ongoing war on the Master's paper: the struggle to prove that I, too, might one day be known as someone who knows some shit about Keats.

The Most Meticulously Clean Amusement Park on Earth...

2006-01-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

I took McKenzie to Disneyland for her birthday, yesterday. Of course, it was more like she took me because she had been there before, and I hadn't. She ran our excursion with the precision of a military campaign. The following is the list of everything I experienced at Disneyland, and my observations about their comparative merits. This is the Tall Nerd(tm) 's guide to Walt's dream:
Main Street, USA:
1. Disneyland Railroad: 3 bruised knees (out of five). The DRR is relatively comfortable as attractions go. It moves at a stately 20 minutes per lap of the park proper and is recommended for those with weary feet. Things to avoid: asshole acting student at UCI lamenting his few "leading roles" and telling you what the best song in Singin' in the Rain really is. Things to see: T Rex's kingly, unbending knees in the Primeval World; Porcupine in a tree for no good reason on the rim of the Grand Canyon.
2. Refreshment corner: 2 bruised knees. Quite the spacious store. Hosted by Coca-Cola, refreshment corner sells such essentials as Hot dogs, Chili and Cold Coke. Things to avoid: telling the woman behind the counter that she looks exactly like the woman that runs the Penny Arcade. Things to see: blissful looks on guests faces as they begin eating approximately 100 feet into park.

New Orleans Square:
1. Haunted Mansion: 3 bruised knees. The walk up to the Mansion was comfortable, as is the opening elevator ride to the main attraction. Things to avoid: avoid trying to concentrate on the narrative poetry--the sound is awful and it will diminish your enjoyment of the lushly designed interior. Things to see: Giant pumpkinheaded angels blowing the cruel horns of blackest hell; tasteful Edwardian costumes.
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: 1 bruised knee. Physically as comfortable as Disney rides get. Things to avoid: Having friends tell you that the pirates at one time chased the women when they weren't holding plates of food; 1960s documentary about Pirates of the Caribbean; having teenage jackasses in back of boat force ride control to stop the ride twice while climbing into other sections of boat and shouting at the people trying to dine in the Blue Bayou restaurant. Things to see: The amazingly realistic facial expression of the pirate drinking and leaning over the bridge above you.
3. Blue Bayou Restaurant: 0 bruised knees. Downright luxurious after cramming yourself into rides meant for the pygmy white-collar class of the 1950s and 1960s all day. Things to avoid: The pork loin is dry, but savory. Things to see: all three of the black employees that seemed to be working that day were waiters in the Blue Bayou; the neat fake bayou horizon and fake fireflies (of which most Californians have never seen the living counterparts).

Frontierland:
1. Big Thunder Mountain Rail Road: 4 bruised knees. Plain uncomfortable. Things to avoid: waiting in line behind borderline retarded choir groups that participated in Weltjugentag 2005. Things to see: Three solid feet of piled specie in the well; projected cave-in effect; animatronic goat calmly chewing on stick of dynamite.
2. Tom Sawyer Island: 0 bruised knees. There are no rides here. Consequently, your knees, feet and shins are safe. Fake rock overhangs will threaten your brainmeats, however. Things to avoid: Trying to pull concrete plugs out of holes; looking directly into aperture of laser disguised as bird house under Tom's treehouse due to danger of cancer-causing doses of radiation; trying to get into Fort Wilderness. Things to see: Look on "Indian Guides" faces as they try to explain yet again to fat middle-aged people on Davy Crockett's Explorer Canoes that "If [they] don't row, [they] don't go. There are no rails or pulleys."
3. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: 4 bruised knees. This ride was made with small people in mind. Things to avoid: Snarling at people that are forever smiling. Things to see: the Heffalumps and Woozles nightmare room puts all the other art design for the entire park to shame; dead-on lifesize pvc sculpts of Winnie and Friends under black lights.

Adventureland:
1. Indiana Jones Adventure: 0 bruised knees. One comfort caveat, however, is that you should not, under any circumstances, actually tighten your seat belt when they tell you to. This ride drops and jolts and turns so quickly that you will experience acute intestinal stress from the pressure your tall body exerts on your nylon safety strap. Things to avoid: screaming like a girl in the delicate bloom of toddlerific youth as cleverly concealed blowguns pelt you will concentrated puffs of harmless air about the face, neck, and groin. Things to see: walk up to ride surprisingly richly conceived and executed; The skull's right eye--apparently the only non-simulated fire in the park.
2. Tarzan's Treehouse: 5 bruised knees. The level of discomfort you will experience during your visit to this attraction will depend upon the time of day you attempt this blatant excuse to call climbing stairs an attraction and the length of time you have been on your feet and or exhausting yourself in an attempt to have constant fun. Things to avoid: hitting head on numerous obstacles; climbing stairs; listening to people attempting to make music on the fake steel drums on the ground level. Things to see: Tree as a structure is actually a very compelling design showing the benefits of applied concrete sculpting.

Mickey's Toon Town:
1. Gadget's Go Coaster: 6 bruised knees (of five). Your femur length must be < or = 0 in order to ride. Things to avoid: Keeping arms, legs, hands, and feet inside car; trying to carry a backpack on board; riding two to a car. Things to see: cute little hand cranking gear to sharpen giant pencil; Gadget's sexy ass just almost falling out of that little blue jumpsuit.
2. Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin: 3 bruised knees. Things to avoid: having little kids doing something disturbingly like frottage to your calves as you wait in line. Things to see: the way Disney blatantly caters to the average fanboy by hiding Jessica Rabbit's smokin' form all over the park, usually amidst tastefully chaste characters from another, more sexually repressed time.

Fantasyland:
1. Alice in Wonderland: 4 bruised knees. Things to avoid: riding this one twice. Things to see: teeny little caterpillar shoes only visible from the ride as you pass outside and look down on people waiting in line.
2. Dumbo the Flying Elephant: 4 bruised knees. Things to avoid: physically shoving a small child out of the way so you can be the one to ride in the golden Dumbo. Things to see: that childlike glee can still be attained, no matter how black and twisted your thoughts become; the less than one-inch of clearance between Dumbo's belly and the hard concrete when you crank him to the lowest altitude the ride will permit.
3. Mad Tea Party: 5 bruised knees. This ride will thrill and physically exhaust you. Things to avoid: making the "I'm totally not drunk face" as you stagger out; spewing vomit in a copious and highly pressurized stream that would make something like the cycloid curve on a Cartesian axis. Things to see: the changing pallor of your companion's face as you use your bulk to continuously increase angular momentum for the entirety of the ride.
4. Matterhorn Bobsleds: 0 bruised knees (if alone). Things to avoid: punching in the face of young girl engaged in rapturous discussion of Disney Pin-trading with other season pass holders and her oddly-coiffed father; kicking in the head of said father as he calls someone on his cellphone from the ride. Things to see: cool snow-falling-in-the-night effect dating to the first years of the park; the abominable snow man.
5. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: 5 bruised knees. Things to avoid: thinking about the pain required to ever ever ride this ride again; being a bad driver or disobeying the law. Things to see: the emerging moral pattern of the early Disneyland rides (i.e., bad driving and other forms of civil disobedience will lead directly to Hell--some Wild Ride!).
6. Peter Pan's Flight: 4 bruised knees. Things to avoid: being handicapped and an amusement park fan; being female or a savage. Things to see: extremely skillful scale shifts and modeling as your pirate ship leaves J.M. Barrie's London; Peter rescuing the stupid savages and hapless females tied to posts; people trying to make elegant transfers of basically inert children out of wheelchairs and into rides.
7. Pinocchio's Daring Journey: 4 bruised knees. Things to avoid: being wooden; being an actor; being a gypsy; playing pool; smoking; drinking; being a child. Things to see: the almost comical looks of fine-grained longing on the faces of the other wooden dolls as you pass through back into the real world after witnessing Pinocchio's apoanthropoesis.
8. Snow White's Scary Adventures: 4 bruised knees. Things to avoid: being a woman; being beautiful; wanting to be beautiful; being vain; eating red apples; being a dwarf; being struck by lightning. Things to see: the effect of the beautiful Evil Queen turning into the Hag; the neat glockenspiel-style Evil Queen who looks out at you from the second story of the ride.

Tomorrowland:
1. Astro Orbitor: 0 bruised knees (if riding alone). Things to avoid: sticking your fingers in the exposed machinery; straining your back to reach for the lever that changes your attitude. Things to see: the darkening mists of paralyzing adult fears lifting from your eyes in the wake of all of this glee; all of Tomorrowland spinning wildly around you, alternating with Sleeping Beauty's Castle and the Matterhorn.
2. Autopia: 4 bruised knees. Things to avoid: paying one dollar to have your Autopia Driver's License personalized at the photo booth at the ride's exitl; waiting in line for what is essentially the Calvinist version of a go-cart track. Things to see: the amazing assortment of bad puns that is the jumbotron of Autopia; children slamming into the back of parked friends and siblings while repeatedly being told not to step on the gas; full-grown adults incapable of following the same instructions.
3. Buzz Light Year Astro Blasters: 3 bruised knees. Things to avoid: shooting the same target again and again; playing with someone who's never held a gun before; being colorblind. Things to see: the look on Zurg's face when you blow the ass out of his secret weapon...priceless.
4. Disneyland Monorail: 0 bruised knees. The Mark V is the latest installment of the first daily monorail transport system in the Western Hemisphere and, as such, is a testament to the ability of the American people to go to vast lengths to develop ways to entertain ourselves at amusement parks without actually causing innovation in other areas. Things to avoid: listening to the voice-over announcements in Spanish and English--just like every other ride. Things to see: the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo finally being honored; justification for the commands to keep arms, legs, hands, feet inside the vehicle at all times; the look on people's faces as they try to decipher the Spanish and realize that, yes, caballero does mean cowboy.
5. "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!": o bruised knees. Things to avoid: seeing this presentation. Things to see: used diaper discarded in the middle of a row.
6. Innoventions: 0 bruised knees. Things to avoid: getting your hopes up. Things to see: the outside of the presentation room for Honda's Asimo robot with the following presentation times: "The Show Just Started," "Not for Another Three Hours," and "We Were Just Kidding about There Being a Robot Here."
7. Space Mountain: 3 bruised knees. Things to avoid: death by starvation while waiting in line; death by dehydration from waiting in line; just stepping into line without considering the people who would be queuing next to you. Things to see: the stylishly metal and futuristic trashcan on the floor of the platform that is not too futuristic for you to be able to figure out that it is a trashcan; photo number 3316, or, a picture of you and your companion with tears streaming down your face in the purest possible demonstration of happiness and concentration, respectively.
8. Starcade: 0 bruised knees. Things to avoid: the crushing uncertainty about the worthiness of all human endeavors that is represented by the existence of a Dance, Dance, Extreme machine; looking like that guy over there playing Initial D. Things to see: people ripping DDE a new one; people required to hold onto the bar and contort themselves around while playing DDE because gravity and the muscles of your legs are not enough to dance that quickly--you must push yourself continuously towards the floor in order to attain sufficient speed; people watching people playing video games with the same reverence they would give a fire-juggler.
9. Star Tours: 0 bruised knees. Things to avoid: being on the same ride as five highschool girls on acid, shrieking "I'm going to miss you!" at the poor middle-aged man in the bad toupee forced to wear that mechanic's flight suit to work every day; dwelling on the fact that that same toupeed man's holding up of the traditional Vulcan gesture of peace and prosperity while calmly saying "Nanu, Nanu" represents more ironic distance than you ever could have mustered in the face of the withering disdain of young, idiotic womanhood; trying to reconcile the ride's frame narrative with Canon, vis-a-vis what it suggests about the battle for Endor's moon.
10. Red Rockett's Pizza Port: 0 bruised knees. Things to avoid: eating there. Things to see: the number of people happily eating there without regard to the many better restaurants scattered throughout the park.
11. Club Buzz--Lightyear's (sic) Above the Rest: 0 bruised knees. Things to avoid: the band's cover of "Turning Japanese"; the band's cover of "Boys Don't Cry." Things to see: the band's cover of "She Sells Sanctuary"; the band's pastiche of costumes from the eighties.

Alloverthefuckingskyland:
1. Remember...Dreams Come True Fireworks Spectacular with Julie Andrews: 0 bruised knees. Things to avoid: standing, walking, and carrying a backpack for 10 hours; thinking about how insultingly white the music accompaniment is. Things to see: this display. Amazing.

So, in answer to the question that might or might not be fully explored that should be germinating in the back of your mind: yes, I did really do all of those things in one day. McKenzie's organizational skill and maniacal single-mindedness in the perhaps literal--in some cases--explication of the land called Disney resulted in not only all of these achievements, but also the possibility for more. We had two hours left before the fireworks began when all of these things (save the monorail) had been experienced. We could have done Splash Mountain and the Jungle Cruise as well. We could have ridden the Mark Twain. It was merely my obstinance that prevented transcendence.

Epistolero.

2006-01-15T12:29:00.000-08:00

A letter one of my Junior Writing II students turned in as homework:

Dear E-n:

You are fat like a girl named Lilac. Thank you for being my friend. I will give your 6o cents back next week, I promise.

Yours,
Eric

Oklahoma

2005-12-29T09:07:00.000-08:00

So, alive and well--er, sick--in Oklahoma. Yesterday, we went to the zoo and about an hour into the trip I started getting this horrible achiness in my entire body. It was awful. Then, I started running a fever, which finally broke this morning. I feel like hell, but I still feel better than I did yesterday. Let's see...we did some mini-golf. That was fun. The wind was blowing so hard that you couldn't take the time to line up your putt or the ball would blow away.

I had a gross sandwich from room service at the Marriott Southern Hills. Szteve called me and left a completely incomprehensible message--not because he was drunk, which I am privately sure he was--but because whatever phone he was using (his cell) was buzzing. I think I made out the phrase "C'est c,a?" The buzz was so bad I couldn't tell what was going on, and my head was hurting so badly that I didn't really want to try. Sorry, Z.

McKenzie got us massages--that's at one, and we have to go run some sickly, shambling errands first, so, I'm going to sign off in order to have time enough to do everything.

Affectionately yours, etc.,

Jonathan

Fun time post!

2005-12-18T09:15:00.000-08:00

Done with papers required of me for this quarter. I have to translate a comic book by Christmas Eve. I have to get a re-write of my MA paper done soon.

So, instead of those things, I will create a New Rapidly-Abandoned Pons Asinorum Tradition: The Catalog of Frequently Misused Theory Words!

Of course, I use "Theory" to mean "Literary Theory," but that is just a stand in for "English and Comp Lit grad students talking at seminars."

Today's word is "imbricated": as in, I just find it fascinating how [D.A.] Miller manages to reinscribe...no...that's not what I want to say...Somehow the strong paranoid reading that he wants to create somehow imbricates or becomes imbricated with the disappeared social, making the rhetoric the kind of the site of the collapsed social. Is this making sense?

From the OED: 1. (See quot.) Obs.

1704 J. HARRIS Lex. Techn., Imbricated is used by Mr. Tournefort, and some other Botanists, to express the Figure of the Leaves of some Plants, which are hollowed in, like an Imbrex, or Gutter-Tile. 1727-41 CHAMBERS Cycl.
2. Composed of parts (leaves, scales, or the like) which overlap like tiles. Also, covered by overlapping leaves, scales, etc.
1753 CHAMBERS Cycl. Supp., Imbricated shell,..any species of shell-fish, whose shells are elevated into transverse ridges, lying over one another at the base, in the manner of the tiles on a house-top. 1759 B. STILLINGFL. Econ. Nat. in Misc. Tracts (1762) 79 On this earth the imbricated liverworts find a bed to strike their roots in. 1858 GEIKIE Hist. Boulder iv. 46 Imbricated like the cone of the Scotch fir. 1882 Garden 1 Apr. 212/3 Another beautiful variety, having large and finely imbricated flowers.
3. Of leaves, scales, etc.: Arranged so as to overlap each other, after the manner of roof-tiles.
1753 CHAMBERS Cycl. Supp. s.v. Leaf, Imbricated leaf,..leaves placed over one another in the manner of the tiles of a house, or like the scales of fishes. 1777 PENNANT Zool. IV. 101 (Jod.) Pecten with about thirty echinated imbricated rays. 1806 J. GALPINE Brit. Bot. 20 Glumes, imbricated on every side. 1861 HULME tr. Moquin-Tandon II. III. i. 70 The Common Wood-louse... The body is oval..composed of a number of imbricated rings.
4. Resembling in pattern a surface of overlapping tiles: = IMBRICATE a. 3.
1875 FORTNUM Majolica iii. 32 Sometimes ornamented..with chequered, ‘chevroné’ or imbricated patterns.

Driven as a Salmon II: Not for the easily depressed.

2005-12-14T17:49:00.000-08:00

So, a big shout-out to Dan E. Tanner, who, I recently was informed, occasionally tunes in. Just so you know, Dad, the link to the zombie game works fine, now.

I am supposed to be writing a paper, but my brain refuses to do anything that anyone might even remotely call work, so I thought, "I know! I'll work on the novella-thingy!" I don't really internally punctuate with exclamation points, people. Calm down.

I'm at this place where I need to flesh out Kennedy, and in a different way than she was presented by Bones, because, obviously, her relationship to Yuriko is hugely important to the plot and of a completely different character than his vision of her would permit her to have. My problem, of course, is that I'm not a girl. And Kennedy needs to be pretty laser-accurate to match the translation from Barnes that is Allison, but I want to take it somewhere else, tonally. So, I decide to do some research. It seemed a little inappropriate to mine info from the females I know of the blogging community--because I know them. That would be strange. Since I need Kennedy to have a writing voice for my current plan, I asked myself, "How do I find out how girls write?" I went to Friendster, and got distracted. Then, I saw the ad for Mate1 dating services, and I did the unthinkable: I clicked on it. In doing this, yes, I am aware, I reinforced the completely unfounded internet marketer belief that people click on ads. But it needed to be done. I was going to go through and find someone exactly like Kennedy, and then steal her writing voice. The following are some unedited text samplings of the search for a woman between 18-35 in the OC, in their own words:

Elle_gurl:
I am 19, so i am a freshman in college. i go to Brooks college, where i am majoring in fashion. i love walking to get coffee from campus, then spending like 20$ on coffee and mints!! hehehe. i love talking to people, but not on the phone. i dont know why! aim is like my other life! my life also revolves around my friends and figure skating. i practially like live at the pepsi center! i am there every saturday! sometimes my life really sucks. i am put under alot of stress to be like my sister, but honey that aint ever gonna happen! so my parents have high expectitations for me!

Justajezabelle:
I'm a single and loving it yes still in hopes of finding my special someone. Right now all I'm looking for in life are the simple things. Food, shelter, and an income to support myself with, lol. I have a wicked sense of humor, and I am brutally honest but that does not mean that I lack respect or consideration for others when it comes to speaking my mind. My requests are pretty basic and I will lay them out for you... No smokers...no former wife beaters ( I don't care if u hit her only once!), no alcoholics or players, no one that still lives with their mom, and there's also no hope for the unemployed. If you are still interested and DO NOT fit into any of those categories, then please, by all means...BRING ON THE CONVERSATION!!! :))

HiDesertMasala:
I am very outspoken but I have a tender side.

blissLOVE:
Who Am I ? One who is smitten by your beauty eyes. A creature of light wandering a world of shadow. A woman. Nothing more. Nothing less. I have suffered my trials and tribulations, tasting both the sweet nectar of victory and the bitter fruit of defeat. I am wise and strong enough to carry my own cross. Still, I seek the wisdom and strength of others. Possessing a predilection towards the eclectic and the intense, I am drawn as a moth to the flame, driven as a salmon against the current, towards the extraordinary. Possessing a disdain for the half-hearted and the mundane, I am repelled, as identical magnetic poles, from the ordinary. I am the painter whose pallet contains an infinite number of hues, constantly swirling in the kaleidescope of color which is my SOUL. I am the jeweler carefully cutting the countless facets, searching for the optimum balance between brilliance and clarity, in the precious stone which is my SPIRIT. I am the gardener, cultivating the soil, planting the seeds, watering the sprouts, weeding the rows, and savoring each resultant sweet, sweet bloom that is my WORLD.

BeachBabe101:

Hey Bitchesss My name is Savannah and I'm from Lagunaaa Beach itss amazingg! I LOVE TO TAN! obviously cause im reallytann..and I love to shop and model and hang out by the beach.. Im really a beach girl... I like live at the beach. I attended the unviresity of south florida and i loveeed being on the east coast its really nice theree! any way now Im home and im looking to pursue my modeling career! I've been in mutiple magazines, ads, and runway shows but I really want to turn professional.. So now i am taking modeling classes..Other then school in my free time I like to hang out with my gorgeous friends tan go to clubs, party, dance, and shop of course. Im really the typical 22 year old. I swear im not a stupid whoree...so I.M. me and we can have a little gang bang!

joiejann

well i am 35 i have made lots of mistsakes in my life..... who has not? i am in a marriage that we both want out of,we went to vegas a month after we met got pregnant and here we are. we live together, play together. but we know that the love we have for eachother is not enough.. we want sparks.. we never fight, we actually get along really well... our friends cant believe were just waiting for the righ time to get the divorce together.. he actually helped me put my photo on this thing.. i am due with this little boy in 3days... i cant wait.. his name is kody james.and at least his parents are really good at being friends. but i am bored and cant wait to get on with life.. i feel like its been on hold for a life time... but atleast my son will be very healthy..

At this point, the gulf between writing and life yawned so vast before me that my head actually split apart in its attempts to comprehend this stuff--this is by no means the worst/best of it, simply the most legible of the first three pages-- and formed itself into two heads: good head and bad head. The two heads had an argument as to whether I should mock these poor people or sympathize with them. I chose to present them as unironically as I could manage, factoring in local weather and my rather cruelly sadistic leanings. There's more if you want it.

On that note...

2005-12-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

If you're into shredding cutlass-wielding, molotov-cocktail chucking zombies with a shotgun while death metal thrashes and an urban hellscape thrashes by in time to the music--and if you're reading this, then I bet you fuckin' are--I suggest you check out this little linky-poo.

For your viewing pleasure...

2005-12-09T00:29:00.000-08:00

Ignore the homophobia, and you will have an hilariously good time:

http://ruthlessreviews.com/top10/10blackmetal.html

http://ruthlessreviews.com/top10/10blackmetal2.html

Zaireeka

2005-12-06T22:16:00.000-08:00

www.yourmusic.com just gave me 11 full-length, new cds for 65.00, plus tax. Included is shit from bands with singles currently out. Free shipping. Subscribing was perhaps the smartest music decision I made in 2005, and I owe it to Christina. I can't believe it. It's insane.

To Be Read in a Super Smash Brothers Melee Voice:

2005-12-01T09:53:00.000-08:00

FAILURE.

I will be finishing this rough draft over the next few weeks/months. I will post it as it comes, rightchya.

Expect a procrastination post from the moments when paralyzing fear of my papers causes me to avoid them until the very last second, possibly by engaging in this act of glorious futility.

Love and failure,
Jonathan

Part III, Chapterlets 16, 17

2005-11-27T21:52:00.000-08:00

16.
The strangest mansion in Texas belonged to Allison’s grandfather. It was hunched like an animal in the midst of a tangled patch of weeds and briars. Before Allison had inherited it, it had been in the family for generations. The whole thing looked as if it had received no maintenance in all that time. In truth, every generation that had lived there had put their own unique architectural flourish on the façade, and every generation had given it one coat of white paint.
The house had its own small plot in the back, where the faded grey and green tombstones stood in the shade of a spreading blackthorn. The whole of the house was protected by ancient withered trees that fended off light, wind, heat, and cold alike, leaving the interior a pale reflection of the season outside. Under Allison’s care it had become somewhat of a poor man’s resort for poets, the occasional radical liberal, artists, or lovers too conspicuous for the tastes of Amarillo. All manner of religious cooks could be found there, too, from Faith Healers to Hoodoo practitioners. They were either out beneath the branches of that ancient blackthorn or one of its sentinel companions, or they were in the sitting room or parlor, causing the whole house to chatter and creak with the shuffling of their shoeless feet and bootless ideas.
Allison divided her time equally between her home in South Tulsa and this rambling structure outside Amarillo, and she could normally be seen in the parlor, one hand on the head of Bernadette, her chocolate brown Labrador, whose eyes never left the face of her mistress, with a fire pushing their shadows high up onto the wall behind them.
Despite all the characters that blew threw the house, Allison was the only one that truly stood out. There was something in the calm, unreserved attention she gave that marked her as the center of a vast wheel of compassion. Her shoulders were broad, and she was above average height for a woman. Her skin was unblemished and unwrinkled despite her middle years having come and gone. But over and above this delicacy of complexion, or perhaps because of it, there was something carved in Allison that was immediately apparent to all that met her—in her gaze and in her posture were the very figure of patience, of abiding time.
She had something vaguely old-timey about her that seemed only to come forward in her West Texas setting, something that shouted about covered wagons and long drives and animals pausing to lap cold water from iron-rich streambeds, something that spoke of terrified children making up stories about Indians in the dark, and the women in the fields as large and hardy as their men, crushing the crops down as they sprung up from the worked ground, something that spoke to a time before the petty religion of her day, when God was so large and palpable in their minds and lands that the people thought they could build the world in his image once again, given equal time.
At these gatherings and discussions, Allison was the silent center. Allison was immune to the fall that other bodies described in space as time accreted upon them. She abided, keeping privately and endlessly at bay a world of fear and frenzy by her refusal to acknowledge it. It was such a world that all these others fled, and it was to be in her presence that they came.
Allison gave relentlessly of herself. And those that came to visit her always took away something vital, something they lacked, something she had and didn’t know was being given. The poverty that Allison was becoming was visible in the house, in the ruinous tangle of thorns and briars, in the faces of those who came to stay with her.
Allison did not have a sense of humor. She had a smile. It was quick and agile, but it never reached her eyes. Her eyes seemed to absorb and refine what went on in front of her without ever really approaching it. She would occasionally laugh at a joke, but it was in a way that seemed more to indicate her acknowledgement that she had noticed a joke being made than to signify any special overflow of delight that it might have caused.
Neither was Allison a cynic. She listened to the thousand little admissions of guilt that those around her flung at her in an attempt to break her equanimity—listened to them without accusation or recrimination. This was the reason people came to her, and it was often the reason that they left. They seemed unable to deal with her inability to recognize injustice in their behavior or evil in their natures. She was always already outside their stories even at her moments of most sublime empathy. She was, therefore, incapable of being embroiled in their quests for redemption or companionship.
Then she met Yuriko. Her agent, whom she kept in her capacity as a published poet, had told her over coffee that the Kanze Noh troupe was going to be performing in Houston. They were performing a program including both Kyogen and Noh pieces, chief among them Aoi no Ue, a piece that Allison was using as a sort of central figure in a novel-length prose work she had supposedly been working on for the last six months. Allison went alone. She arrived early and took her seat in the second row.
The Kyogen went ahead with reserved, masterful comic timing. Kimono and masks in yellow, white, and red flowed by over the hard boards of the stage, with master and servant recriminating each other and bickering as the lights shone sedately down on them. Allison watched it all absently, amused when master and servant both ended up taking advantage of the thunder god.
Then, the kyogen was over. The first clackings of the wooden blocks caused the girl sitting next to Allison to shake in apprehension. She took out a cigarette and fumbled in her purse until Allison put a hand over it and gave a little shake of her head. The girl gave a start and turned to look at her. Allison watched her looking out of the corner of her eye. Eventually, the girl turned her eyes back to the action.
As the wakizure began the slow exposition relating the Lady Aoi’s illness, Allison returned the examination. Every slight gesture of the court official’s fan pointed toward the folded robes of the absent/present Lady Aoi made the girl’s trembling start again.
Before she knew it, the sorceress Teruhi was summoned, and when she approached the center of the stage, she turned and seemed to face the girl directly, song welling up from behind the mask with an implacable cry of the soul. The sheer emotive quality of the performance caused the girl to stand up, visibly shaking from head to foot. Allison took her hand, trying to pull her back to her seat. “Let’s get out of here,” the girl whispered, and, still holding her hand, Allison led her out of the room.
In the lobby, the girl lit her cigarette under a no smoking sign. Allison said, “My name is Allison Meyers,” and she waited.
After a moment, the girl said, “I’m Star.” She gestured with the cigarette. “I don’t want to be here.” But that was all. She didn’t say if there was any place she would rather go.

17.
Yuriko had stayed with Allison in Amarillo until mid-winter. Allison felt that there were two principle aspects to the girl. Love and terror. They were so bound up with each other that neither would ever get out.
Allison closed up the house when she found out that they both had reasons to go to Tulsa. Yuriko related only parts of her life, but she kept saying again and again that she wished she could find a place where she felt like she belonged. She mentioned and uncle in Tulsa, and it seemed to Allison like a good opportunity to help the girl find some sort of way to get stable. Allison was chilled at the thought that the constant repetition made it seem as though the girl was saying that she belonged to Allison, with Allison, wherever that happened to be.
Allison let Yuriko stay with her until she managed to make contact with her relatives. Looking out into the garden, you could see the carved granite figure in the little shady area that adjoined her neighbors property, a woman bending forward with one hand extended as if to offer it to someone below.
As they lived their lives together, every object in the house, every syllable that graced the air between them gave proof to the growing sentiments of love and attachment between them. Allison’s house was decorated as only a poet could get away with, with broken animals from carousels exchanging pride of place with Indonesian Buddha heads and Mongolian cabinets of strangely grained wood, eaten by worms. There were small candles on every conceivable surface, and the floor was littered with cushions and books.
When it happened that Allison was alone most of the time, she felt very strongly the presence of this house, their house, and she admitted that this must in some way be part of the punishment meted out to those with the hubris to think that they could build lives together when they had been given lives apart. She would go around, trying not to disturb anything, unaware that her caution was driven by a fear that if she disturbed the smallest thing that Yuriko would be unable to find her way back.
Love was what remained at the end of the day—all the scattered furniture and discarded clothing—the overwhelming by-catch resulting from trawling their lives together. The image of Yuriko standing in the second row cast a permanent shadow onto Allison’s mind. Yuriko was the solid center of Allison’s being, and around her moved the limbs and body, moved the heart and bowels of a great machine whose only purpose was to maintain that center. Yuriko, inasmuch as she was now become a part of Allison, was now beyond time, as Allison was untouched by time’s relentless flow. All that remained to touch upon Yuriko was incident—the appalling possibility of Yuriko’s path coinciding with a truck or a stray bullet was the constant obsession of Allison’s lonely hours. This possibility had such psychic weight that Yuriko became enormous, a gravitic body swirling objects and disasters equally toward her yawning event horizon. Crying out, Allison would wake in the middle of the night and try to sift through the dreams of a broken Yuriko to find some prophetic fragment, some truth about Yuriko as she was then, and the weight of her anxiety would carry her back down into nightmare.
Sometimes the little ghosts of Yuriko’s undisclosed past would flit about the house in Yuriko’s wake as she moved. Little snatches of song in Japanese or Mandarin. Little refrains of rhymes unknown to Allison that would stop as suddenly as they began, pieces of a past working their way to the surface like pieces of glass pushing out of an old scar.
And sometimes, walking about the house, Yuriko would come upon Allison engaged in writing and would throw her arms around her in a terrible embrace, and they would stare at each other’s pupils, their eyes quaking back and forth as the objects of their gaze also fluttered from place to place, looking for somewhere to land, two heads in four hands, pushed so close together that the space between them was the only thing keeping them apart, keeping them from crushing into the same space at the same time in defiance of the laws of physics and the discretion of their bodies.
And sometimes, in moments like these, Yuriko would be borne up on a rogue wave of grief that rose for miles, and, in her distraction, she would slip. The slip would be a slip of tongue or gesture that revealed a wholly alien dialect, making Allison even more conscious that Yuriko had come from a life to which she would have to return. The inevitable call from the desperate uncle must one day see to that. “In order to keep her,” these moments seemed to say, “there is no way but death.” It was only somewhat true, Allison reflected, that in death Yuriko would belong to her. Death went along with each of the living, in company and alone. If death took Yuriko, she would belong as much to memory, to death, and to time as she belonged to Allison. The idea of this loss made her shudder.
Deliberately staring out at the sun to have an excuse for eyes so full of liquid, Allison would track Yuriko by the sounds of her dressing the progress of her leaving. The low grating of the closet opening and the shrieking shove of hangars pushed to one side for the selection of the outfit. The woody rumble of the underwear drawer opening. The satisfied slap of the elastic of her thong hitting one pale hip one room away—probably black, most of them were. The almost imperceptible snip of the bra being clasped. And here—Allison knew Yuriko always put her bra on backwards before turning it around and mashing her breasts into their cups and sliding on the straps—the halting slide of fabric on skin as the bra was adjusted. She saw in her mind Yuriko’s hair being pulled through the hole in her blouse by the handful, rising up along the slope of her shoulders to form a bridge with the nape of her neck and up to the back of her head. Half paralyzed by the sounds and their signaling of departure, Allison would say a little prayer: “In the day of judgment, when our bones come up looking backward for our spirits, I will know only you of all the host of sinners assembled before heaven’s seat. My ears will know only your voice of all the voices lost in the hymns sung before the name. My eyes will scan that ashy expanse and they will not stir until they light upon your face. My feet will stand by the side of your grave until Gabriel is red in the face and his horn drops from his exhausted hands.”
In the doorway, Yuriko would stand. “Don’t wait up,” she’d say.
In the years that they lived together on and off, Yuriko’s leavetakings became persistently closer together. In the beginning, Allison went out when Yuriko did, to watch her back, but it grew difficult. Watching Yuriko move from table to table, drink to drink, man to man, Allison learned that it was important that Yuriko have her somewhere to go back to. Yuriko’s absence became difficult to bear—she was a phantom limb.
Eventually, when Yuriko’s absences became absences of weeks and months rather than days and hours, Allison took to wandering. The doctor, seeing her out alone one night, said to himself, as the tall broad woman passed ahead of him under the streetlights, “There goes the dethroned—Love has fallen off the wall, and not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men…A religious woman without the joy and safety of the Catholics. Take that safety from a woman,” he said, moving faster to keep her in sight, “and love gets out and into everything. She sees that girl everywhere. Out looking for what she’s too scared to find. Fuck, but it seems strange to see the mother of mischief running around with her head cut off, trying to get the world back and into bed before curfew.”
Allison was looking, it was true. But not for Yuriko. She was looking in parked cars and squats for traces of the things that influenced their lives. Sometimes, knowing that sooner or later Yuriko’s oscillation would snap the tether and that they would be strangers forever after, Allison would sit down on a stair or on a curb or a bench in a park and put her hands in her lap and cry out to god, expecting nothing in return.
One night, after waking from a dream of her grandmother, Allison was drawn by a whimpering sound to the picture window above her desk in the study. She rose and put her dressing gown over her nakedness and went to see what the sound was. Looking into the garden by the obscuring totality of the floodlight, Allison saw a double shadow falling from the granite statue in the corner. Thinking that it might be Yuriko, she opened the window and called out. But there was no answer. She peered into the overdetermined black of the shadow under the statue and saw the gleam of Yuriko’s eyes there, looking back at her. They gazed at each other. As if the floodlight and their gaze could have lightened even the shadow that cloaked Yuriko, Allison saw the body of another woman come into focus in the obscurity. The woman was kneeling in front of Yuriko with her face in yet another pocket of darkness created by Yuriko’s skirt, while she leaned against the statue, one leg over the shoulder of her attendant.
Incapable of looking away, Allison’s vocal chords withered and dead, experiencing the blackest feeling of hatred and foreboding, the shadows of her study seemed to swell up around her and pierce her with a profound despair so thoroughly that she, too, dropped to her knees. Her eyes, then, were torn from the scene not by any act of will, but by the simple motion of a body falling through space. She knelt with her chin on the desk, and thought that if she turned her mind away from what Yuriko was doing, the whole illusion would shatter and leave Yuriko standing alone underneath the statue. Allison shut her eyes tight and felt a fierce happiness. Yuriko was protected. The succession of bodies that clasped against her was protection, but even as she shut her eyes, Allison said, “Ah!” with the unutterable finality of the “Ah!” of a body stabbed through with a knife, a body struck at the moment of the last breath by the weight of the world leaving it. “Ah!”

Part III, Chapterlets 12-15

2005-11-27T11:50:00.000-08:00

12.
As the days of their strange engagement went by, they spent many hours together, in museums, parks, coffee shops. Yuriko could tell that this pleased Reason more than words. She was surprised at his taste, sometimes. How he would turn from something truly beautiful to something kitschy and cheap—and still be moved by it. When he touched something, his hands seemed to do his eyes’ work. She thought to herself that he had the touch of a blind man. His fingers would move through space quickly and then hesitate an inch from the surface of something, shaking. Afraid to touch whatever might be there in the imagined dark. When his hand stopped shaking it would close, like he was muffling a shout made by his palm, or like he was that old, drunk television Superman, unsteadily pantomiming catching a bullet. At this point he would turn away, and she would ask him what he had felt. Often he would say, “Nothing,” and stride away. But sometimes he would smile. The grace of his hands frightened her.
His clothes were from a season she could not place. He wore sturdy, dark fabrics of the kind her adopted mother had worn, but of more elegant cut. His pants were molded to his hips and fell down loosely without pleats, sagging a touch at the crotch, but his shirts and waistcoats were always formfitting. She had owned a book of costumes in college—pictures of military uniforms from different ages to use as patterns when putting on a play. Sometimes, reason looked like a somber version of one of the bright, painted soldiers of the steppe. He seemed new and ancient.
As time went on, she found that, if she loved Reason, her love for him was not one that she had chosen. It seemed as if the weight of him was such that she had been pulled in his wake, a body in space orbiting a distant star—sometimes spending years in darkness, sometimes passing near enough that it could be seen against the backdrop of other bodies, other spaces. The relief of the thought was immense. If she was being pulled along, then she could be betraying no one.
If she confessed to herself her motive for pursuing the relationship was pragmatic. She had often dreamt of making a life for herself without relying on her family’s old money—which meant a return to an old way. She had visions of making herself comfortable through hard work and sacrifice. When she looked at Reason, she could see comfort and more standing in front of her, without any effort required. When he had asked to marry her, she had been taken aback. What was more shocking was the eagerness with which she anticipated the formalization of their contract.
When they were married, Reason took her first to Vienna. To reassure himself that he tried to satisfy the curiosity about the old world that she had confessed during their museum visits. She kept saying to herself, in this garden or that palace, I will feel something that will transform me; I will suddenly become as easy with Reason and this marriage as he is; I will feel Allison sheared off of me by the grandeur of these old buildings, and the weight of her will no longer be mine to carry. If Reason sensed any of the anguish that she felt moving through the haze and confusion of such an old place, she could not see it. He seemed as much the sightseer as the guide. With a mechanical efficiency he took her through the city, sometimes smiling and saying, “You are a member of the Destry family, now.” Like that would make her feel something other than twice a foreigner in that foreign place.
He said things to her in German, which she forced herself to memorize. When Reason wasn’t around, she asked their driver their meanings. The driver treated it like a flirtation game. This saddened Yuriko, though she understood it. “Das Leben ist ewig, darin liegt seine Schönheit,” he translated to her in his brashly inelegant English as “The life is eternal. In it lies its alreadyness.” This had confused her more than ignorance. Only once had the driver stomped off without replying.
One night, when they were discussing books over heavy schnitzel and dumplings, she told Reason she hated the Romantics. He laughed and said that by that he supposed she meant the English Romantics. She asked if there was any other kind. He was quiet for a while, squeezing those hands around the handle and body of a beer mug, then he said, shaking his head, “Yes. But it is not fair to speak of them as if they are in the past in any case. Die Romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden. Ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daβ sie ewig nur warden, nie vollendet sein kann. How does it go? Eine Philosophie der Poesie überhaupt…” He moved off toward the bar of their suite still muttering in German. When she related what she remembered to the driver, he was unwilling or unable to translate.
They walked along together in front of the Imperial palace in an unseasonably hot sun that pounded down all around the clipped hedges and tinted the statues brilliant white and gold. They went to the Kammergarten and talked, into the Gloriette, still talking, moving from bench to bench, Yuriko realizing in a moment of profound horror and cheesiness that they had a great deal to learn from each other. They looked at every tree and statue from at least two angles, confused by the sun into a kind of permanent awe and restlessness.
Back at the hotel, Yuriko went to the window and pulled aside the velvet hangings, and opened the window despite the night’s cold. He talked to her of the history of Vienna, of Emperor Francis Joseph, of Charles the First, on and on. Yuriko could hear a certain strain in his voice. His words were heavy as if they were supporting the combined weight of their new life and their old hotel. Looking around after this inexhaustible flow of information had begun to ebb, she noticed Reason sitting with one leg thrust out, his head pressed back against the cushion of his chair, just falling asleep, one arm dangling down—his hand somehow more awake and alert than the rest of his being. She realized somehow that she was not entirely what he had hoped she was. This realization was a happy one. Here was something else to distinguish Allison from this man. This man had expectations of her—however small—and she could break them. The different quality of Allison’s feeling for her grew large in that moment and threatened to crush her. She retreated to the bedroom and closed the door on Reason’s silent sleep.
Two days later, they were in Paris. She made him take her into church after church, where she lit candles and murmured her little prayers. In the months that followed, she took comfort in the fact that he did not prevent her from doing this small penance at every church that they passed. He didn’t even comment on it. Just waited, content to study the paintings over each altar and breathe in the stony air. Yuriko could tell that he had resigned himself to her seeming faith as someone might resign themselves to the eventual discovery of a secret too large to glimpse all at once.
As far as she could tell, Reason was looking for the way to be with her, as if being in her presence was clumsy. He was constantly listening with his head to one side as they walked, as if he could hear the echo of her, and that a precise knowledge of echoes would lead him to a manner of being with her in the world that would make all the facts and secrets the new nearness and the irretrievable distances between them somehow less important. As if he was looking for a different foundation to base their new, permanent intimacy on than the removal of loneliness. There was something admirable in it that had Yuriko looking for little churches with an eagerness that almost scared her.
Their eventual return to Oklahoma was marked with Yuriko’s strange premonition of bearing a child. She believed herself to be on the verge of pregnancy, somehow, and she related this bizarre feeling to Reason while they were seated in the library, looking at a late spring fire. He did not seem to hear. He responded, “A child? Yes. A child,” and leaned in to give her an expert kiss before returning to his book. Yuriko had become aware of an entire land inside her mind that was unfolding beneath this new pressure of an expectant husband. She started going out into the country in her car or by cab.
She wandered through the small towns and stared through small, streaked windows onto dusty bits of wood and crumbling furniture labeled antique, alone and wrapped up in this new interior landscape. Once, not having returned for three days, she walked in to find Reason standing, immobile at the window in the master bedroom. When he saw her, he seemed to melt, collapsing onto the hardwood floor in a thumping tumble of sweating flesh. She moved halfway across the room toward him, filled with a terrified pain. He looked up, asking where she had been. She said that she had been all the way to Omaha.
Soon after that, she went to the Boston Avenue Methodist Church and demanded baptism by immersion. She entered the presence of the man performing the ceremony quietly, and the few who were scattered amongst the pews did not cease their prayers or look up. Then, as if some wish for salvation, something even more hideously impossible to fulfill than those wishes that had burdened them throughout their lives had somehow crashed upon them, like a wave breaking over their heads—as if the shadows in the pews had thrown themselves at their bent backs with palpable weight—they looked up and saw her, saw her body moving resolutely down into the water and back up, nude beneath a clinging white baptismal robe, a tall woman with the body of a courtesan.
Despite the quiet protests of the staff, she wandered, dripping to the middle of the aisle where she knelt, conspicuous and alone at the center of every gaze. When a puddle had formed around her, she rose, found her clothes, changed and left.

13.
When Reason came home that night, Yuriko was curled up on a windowseat, one hand supporting her head and one hand on her immense belly. A book was open on the seat next to her. The book was Le Secret, and a whole paragraph had been underlined. The page was stained with tears. As Reason read the sentence, “L’étrange sollicitude des adultes à l’égard des enfants est cruauté pure: obliger quelqu’un qui depend d’eux comme ils ont dépendu eux-mêmes de leurs parents, à refaire le chemin d’obstacles, à se cogner aux mêmes barrières, à peiner sur les memes problèmes, le tout, évidemment, par amour,” he came to the conclusion that something was wrong.
She opened her eyes but did not move. He tried to take her by the arm and lift her toward him, but she resisted with one hand against his chest. She appeared frightened, her mouth opening and closing in silence. He released her and stepped back, trying to articulate something of the concern he was feeling, but they moved away from each other with nothing said.
That night, the contractions came. She began to swear loudly. He tried to make her comfortable.
“Fuck off!” she yelled. She moved unsteadily, leaning away from their mutual center of gravity as he held her up. She was drunk—her hair was swinging behind her and her grey eyes were livid.

14.
Yuriko was delivered of twin boys amidst identical roars of affirmation and despair. Trembling in rage and pain, she rose up in her hospital bed and looked about her, the orbits of her eyes dancing as she searched the faces in the room. She cried, “Allison, Allison!” her eyes wide like a lost child in a darkened room.
A week after the delivery, she was desperate, convinced of the irreparability of her crimes. This act of birth had evoked long shuttered feelings of betrayal and anxiety that flooded over her and seized her attention with a force that nothing could pry loose.
One night, Reason came home to find the thick nurse restraining her with the nanny looking on sadly. Her arms were behind her head in a classic full-Nelson. The nanny calmly said that they had entered to find the missus holding one of the boys over her head as if about to smash it on the side of the crib. They had taken the child and restrained the mother, who even now writhed quietly, not looking about her as Reason watched.
Reason looked in on his sons in their crib. They were healthy, fat, squat, and pink. Unconcerned. They gave a simultaneous mewling cry. He instructed the nurse to release his wife. She drifted over and latched on to him. He walked her up the stairs and put her to bed.
Yuriko began wandering again. Little trips, from which she would return days or hours later, with no account of where she had been or what she had seen. The staff grew uneasy around her. They avoided mentioning her name when they spoke with Reason. Something was coming. The shadows that Reason had felt since Sifu Chang had left were growing denser. They were obscuring everything in a dim mist. It nearly blinded him in the mornings, but most often he could see by the time he returned from work, late at night.
On one such occasion, coming home around four in the morning, she was standing in the dark with her back toward the window, most of her lost within the half-circle of the curtain. He could tell from the line of her posture that she was angry. As he came toward her, she yelled, “I didn’t want them!” and punched him in the eye. He allowed her to hit him three times before he took control of her arms.
Once she was still, he waited to a long count of ten before he said, “You didn’t want them? What am I supposed to say to that? You had a number of options at your disposal. Why have them if that was the case?” Reason loosed her arms and stepped away.
“Why does everyone have to talk about them all the time? Does the whole world know?”
“Not even a significant percentage of it.” Reason waited. When she said nothing further, he asked, “Who’s Allison?”
“I’m leaving,” responded Yuriko. She grabbed a jacket off the bed and left.
For a few months, Yuriko’s acquaintances called the house looking for her. No one knew where she had gone. When she was seen in Tulsa again, it was with one Allison Meyers. She did not tell anyone where she had been. She seemed vague on the details when her friends called her. And when she seemed vague they called him to express their concern. The vagueness was no impediment to some.
“She’s been in Amarillo. That’s where Allison’s family is. I delivered her, so I ought to know,” the doctor had said when Reason had wondered aloud in front of him. “Now, buy me a drink.”

15.
Aka, despite his sadness, had felt real rage at his brother’s abandonment of their home. As he watched the waves, day after day, he grew resentful. His brother had been lonely, even the birds that bathed in his spring could attest to that, but, in the end, his brother had been selfish, too.
It felt to Aka as if his brother had lightened his burden by increasing that of another. Ao had been lonely, but now Aka was alone, without the comfort that Ao must have found for himself out in the world. Aka thought that perhaps his brother and he were not so alike as they once thought.
Aka climbed to the peak of the blue mountain and sat with his brow furrowed. He sat there, seeking stillness, but it would not come. He grew more and more resentful of his brother. He decided that his brother must come back to their home. He had sought his solace in the world. Now, it was time to be home.
Aka reached up and grabbed a handful of the storm cloud rolling by overhead. He hefted himself up and over the side of it. Once he was settled on its broad back, he whispered to it. It ponderously turned in the direction he had indicated, the direction Ao had taken when he left. The storm cloud began to carry Aka out to sea. As he moved over the surface of the water, whitecaps bunching beneath him and lightnings trailing in his wake, he thought how best to convince his brother to come home.

Part III, Chapterlets 9,10,11

2005-11-22T23:04:00.000-08:00

9.
It was perhaps fortuitous that Reason was looking out the window for once as they turned down Lewis. He signaled the driver to pull over. Reason hopped out and crossed the street dodging cars and holding the front of his coat closed with one hand. He reached the sidewalk on the other side in time to step in front of Miss Ashikaga.
She was walking with her head down, and she was nearly engulfed by the sweater, overcoat, and scarf that protected her from the northerly wind, but Reason had not doubted it was her for a moment. Her head down against the cold, and her arms dragging down to her sides under the weight of the paper shopping bags depending from the plastic handles cutting into her bare, clenched hands, Miss Ashikaga almost hit Reason in the chest before he could muster a greeting.
As it happened, she stopped short, but the pale daylight shadow of her breath plumed out and broke against the four black buttons of his coat like the ghost of that aborted impact. She looked up, and her eyes were a shocking grey. Reason realized that he had never seen them open before at the same moment that the lack of decorum in his approach occurred to him as a monstrous affront. The greeting he had been on the cusp of articulating receded again and he was left struggling for words. She spared him with a simple, “I remember you.”
Reason was taken unawares by this pronouncement, but it was quickly forgotten as she handed him one of her burdens and began walking again. Reason took it and fell into stride next to her, waving away the driver, who instantly signaled and accelerated smoothly into the burgeoning mid afternoon stream of traffic.
Reason gathered his thoughts and managed a weak, “I hoped you might.”
Miss Ashikaga did not even turn her head at this. She kept walking—she was moving a little faster now that she was divested of half of the weight of her purchases. As Reason noticed this, a little moment of synchronicity occurred, and she sped up, shifting the remaining bag to the other hand and clenching and unclenching her recently freed hand, pale from the cold and livid where the plastic handle had impressed itself into her flesh. As they walked, he watched her face.
The line of her profile had something very resolute about it. Her expression in wakefulness was altogether different than it had been in the demi-consciousness in which he had first encountered her. Reason was surprised to notice that though this wakefulness seemed weary and was almost quantitatively less attractive, it seemed to fit her so well that it rather enhanced the features he had previously admired. There was no doubt that Miss Ashikaga lived her body fully. She wore it comfortably and loosely, taking in her own beauty with no more or less concentration than she seemed to put into walking.
As they rounded the corner to the left, the hotel came into view, and she spoke again. “Why do you keep sending me those cards? What do those mean?” Reason turned slightly away, affecting to study the sign on a business offering adult toys, uncertain how to proceed. She filled the silence: “I remembered your…I remembered you from the security tapes Dave showed me. The cards are sad. Just your name. No telephone number. Just my name, written in. Like the cards had no purpose at all. And the Doctor said you were there, before. At New Year’s. That you met Henry. What do you want?”
Reason was prepared for this question: “I would like to buy you dinner.” She shrugged at this. They walked the rest of the way to the hotel. She took her bag back in front of the sliding automatic door. She stood there, looking at him. Her face was unreadable. “I’m pretty much stuck in the hotel for the next week or so. But if you come to the front desk, they’ll let me know. We could get a drink in one of the lounges. Or there’re a couple of restaurants in-house. They’re overpriced. Room service isn’t much better.” She shrugged again and turned toward the doors. They hissed open. Warm air rushed out and over Reason.
He turned, wondering how long it would take the driver to pick him up, but the car was waiting in front of him. He reached out and grabbed the handle, already thinking about calling Henry Lee about that job offer. He reflected, not for the first time, that Mr. Lee might have liked to meet Sifu Chang. As he sat, pulling his coat out of the way of the closing door, the heated seat came to life with a soft purr. As they pulled away, he resolved to see if the offer still stood.

10.
Yuriko handed her bags to Steve. He had given her the little mock salute that he usually did. Apparently, some of the younger staff believed her to be the owner of the hotel. Yuriko considered that it might be worth buying, if she could convince her grandfather to give her a start-up advance on her trust. As Steve slipped the embossed black key card into the slot, Yuriko imagined how the old man was getting along. She got her own key card out of her pocket. When the elevator stopped, Steve tried to help her out, just as he always did. Yuriko dismissed the effort with an impatient wave. She took her bags back, thanked him, and turned away.
When she heard the doors slide closed behind her, she walked to her room and put the card in the lock. When the light blipped, she turned and levered down the handle with a practiced move of her hip. The door bounced off her shoulder as she rolled in.
She moved her elbow up to bump the rocker panel for the The wall had been repaired from the damage that had been done to it, but the paint was a subtly different color. Yuriko had half a mind to switch rooms again. She put her bags down side by side on the bedstand and removed her hat, scarf, and coat. She walked to the closet and put them away. A small corner of fabric hung down from the shelf above. She tucked it back up absently, but her fingers lingered on it. It was Allison’s. Had been Allison’s. As she moved back toward the bed, the fingers on her right hand caught the lip of the door and pulled it noiselessly closed behind her.
As she pulled out the individually wrapped candles she had purchased and arranged them around the room, she became aware of the memory of the scent of her pushing forward. She turned out the overhead light and struck a match. The ache was coming back. She lit the candles, reciting the little, childish prayers her mother had taught her as the flame caught each one. She used the same match until it burned her thumb. Each match could only light two or three new wicks. She burned her thumb again and again, giving body to her little rhymes.
The pale flesh of her orisons was illuminated in her mind by the light of the candles and the burns on her thumb, and, just as it always had, the combination of the ritual and the odor of cheaply perfumed candles pushed Allison—the inexhaustible expanses of skin, the tight curls, the wild honey, the cedar shavings and scotch the smell of her—back into the dark.

11.
Yuriko stared across the table at him. He was fidgeting. She reflected that ‘Reason’ was no kind of a name for anyone to have. She sipped her vodka seven. It was better than ‘Star.’ He had started calling her that when she asked that he quit with all the “Miss Ashikaga” formality. He had just said it again. She interrupted him, “You can call me Yuriko. This isn’t work.” He looked at her and gave a small nod. Something in his face made her pay closer attention.
“I guess what I’ve been circumlocuting, Yuriko, Yuriko, is simply a proposition that I have been wanting to make to you ever since we…became acquainted.” As he finished, he looked up from his own drink. He was waiting.
“What sort of proposition is that?” asked Yuriko. His awkwardness was somewhat charming.
“Well, I suppose it is a sort of contract.”
“I’m not following you, Reason. Do I have to call you that? Seems silly.”
“You may call me what you like.” As Reason said this, he seemed to grow brighter in the dimness of the lounge. Yuriko looked at the polished grain of the two-top they were at.
“I’ll call you Mannfred, then,” she said, trying to make him smile.
“As you like,” he responded. She waited. He sat there. Looking.
“What kind of a contract, Mannfred?”
“A marriage contract,” he replied. She cast her glance around to see who might be watching, waiting to jump out, pointing and laughing.
“That’s not a very good joke, Manny. And in any case, it’s not very romantic. Putting the cart before the horse a little bit. I don’t know you.”
“You know me as well as anyone does. As to romance, you’ll have to forgive me, but my understanding was that love at first sight was the height of romance.” He said this with a dismissive air, reaching into his coat pocket. “Yuriko, will you marry me?” He brought out a small velvet box. He pushed it across the table to her with a gravity that took all the mocking things she had lined up right out of her head.
She looked around the room again. Zouhair, the night guy on weekends, was watching Behind the Music with his back to them. There was nothing to give her a sign.
“Okay,” she said, without opening the box. She left it sitting on the table between them. Reason, seeing nothing odd about any of this, began to question her about her family, friends, past, future, and she found that she had finished her drink. She rattled her drink at Zouhair’s back and began telling Reason everything he wanted to know, a growing sense of unreality pushing at her thoughts. She never once thought about Allison.

Part III, Chapterlet 8

2005-11-17T19:10:00.000-08:00

8.
When the demon arrived at the center of the village and stood with the soles of his feet on the baked clay of the square which was still hot from the sun’s day-long embrace, he found it deserted. Everywhere, torches and paper lanterns were lit, and the shaking of the flames in the light caused his various shadows to writhe all around him. His throat tight with fear, the demon rushed into the nearest hut, but he found it empty of people. Little wooden bowls and palm leaf mats were strewn about, as if the owners expected to come back, but the demon, looking around the village by fire light, could see that all the fishing nets were gone, and all the boats missing. They had left the island, sealing him in with the child’s corpse.
Tears making everything stretch and shift before him, the demon ran to the beach on the far side of the island with a terrifying speed. He moved over obstacles and open stretches with equal ease, his steps growing farther and farther apart. He dove into the water and swam against the shore-bound current’s push until he felt it change, pulling him out into the night. When he was no longer in sight of the beach, or any of the lights that burned on the island, he sank.
He sat upon the black, coarse sea bottom, feeling his fur pushed back and forth with the large, invisible motion of the water that had disappeared around him into only the barest sense of being surrounded by a dimness beyond night and the salt sting on his face—the natal taste of the water making memory and gorge rise equally in a sickening symmetry.
Whole segments of time opened up to him in the roar and silence of the water, and he sank through them to previous moments, moments before the loneliness had come upon him, and he was almost peaceful. He knew that he did not have much time remaining before he needed to return to the surface or his lungs would force him to take a saline breath. He waited. A seemingly endless succession of moments passed, filling him with more recollections and experienced objects than he would have believed that he contained, and the pain in his lungs increased all the time. Still, the demon sat on the ocean floor without moving. One of the little crabs he preferred could be felt moving over the horny contours of his feet, somewhere very far from the pain in his chest and head. Still, he waited.
Eventually, his stomach began to heave, and his lungs forced him to draw in a breath. In addition to the horror and bodily disgust the inrushing water evoked in him, he felt a sense of relief that was beyond his ability to understand in those terrible moments, his whole chest spasming and his lungs dying to stillness in water that seemed as thick as blood.
As his mind’s light dimmed to something like the darkness in which he was now suspended, he experienced one final agony. A pain pushed its way in behind his ears, and another pale memory of his brother rose before him in an instant. He was swimming in a mountain pool that seemed without bottom.
Carp swam below him, the largest ones barely shadows, their distance below him apparent despite the translucency of the water. His brother stood on the beach, warning him not to dive too deep. When he asked his brother why, the answer came that diving too far was as deadly as staying under too long. When he asked his brother how he knew, his brother said that a fisherbird had told him. When he asked his brother what distance was too deep, his brother replied that he had no answers. The demon had later sought the counsel of a fisherbird, who, mocking his ignorance of facts that every new-hatched fledgling knew, smugly told him that pain in the head was the sign that you had gone beyond your depth. The greater the pain, the greater the danger.
At that moment, with the black salt water blending with the coruscating surfaces of the mountain pool, the demon came to the conclusion that he had gone beyond his depth. Abruptly, he realized that the pain in his head was dissipating. Amazed that a doorway to his mother’s domain, the pure, painless realms of the West, could be found in so unlikely a place, the demon took stock of his situation.
Clearly, he had come to the lands of death, for no being could die and fail to proceed thither. His father had told them that much when they were children. And yet, the water around him, the sand beneath him, everything was the same. There was no directionless light, no mountain, no ubiquitous lotus. Most of all, his mother’s face was not smiling upon him. No, everything was the same in death except the pain.
Reaching up to touch the spot where the pain had entered his head, the demon received a shock: a warmer jet of water moved over his fingers and cooled as it swirled in the depths around him. He touched the formerly tender spot and found a quivering opening. He was not dead. He had grown gills. The demon was amazed and heartsickened with this new development, the reality of the storm, the deserted island, and the gruesome offering of the corpse crowding back amongst his thoughts in a great confusion of bitterness, grief, and surging up through it all was a frustration that the surcease he might have had in death was denied him.
Cursing the proud wisdom of the fisherbird, the demon began walking slowly along the bottom toward the place where the underwater mouth of the grottoes must have been, his every step buffeted by the waves that rolled overhead. On his walk, he considered what he knew. Everything he knew, he knew from others. His brother had told him not to stay under too long or he would die, the fisherbird had mocked him and told him not to dive too deep. Certainly, his brother was old and wise—but how much older and wiser could he be?
The demon considered that his thoughts were not properly humble, and this concerned him until he remembered what humility had brought him so far. Out of humility, and the desire to free his brother of his burdensome grief, he had fled the island of his home. He was in a strange land when he had sought consolation. He was alone when he had sought companionship. He was filled with grief when he wished an end to grief. He was accounted a monster where he brought only compassion. And how could the villagers have judged him any differently, when he had waited with humility in the shadows to be invited among them?
His father had taught them to shun the carrion birds that picked the bones of dead creatures and kept their distance from the living. He must have seemed kin with such, wretchedly slinking from shadow to shadow and sleeping so uncouthly in a cave. To imagine that he had been eating with his hands and sleeping on bare rock simply because he had not dared to shape wood or work stone for fear that his own arts would surpass his father’s. Humility had, in this respect, made him live like an animal, when he was descended from gods.
Was not his father the smith born of the sun, the smith who shaped the sword that killed the world serpent? He batted away a fish that nibbled at his cheek. And was his mother not the daughter of the moon, that held court both in the mirthless realms and the valleys beneath the moon? And why consider his parentage? Surely, his own strength was not to be denied. It had been, after all, sufficient to swim across the ocean from his former home to this, his current one.
Surely, a being that could not drown, who, when drowned grew gills and lived still, surely such a being deserved the carvings and lanterns they had placed outside his door. They had meant it as a warding, but the demon now thought that it seemed only to be his due. He laughed as he moved through the dark beneath the waves.
As the demon walked, his passage through the water grew easier, but he did not notice, caught up, as he was, in the snarl of his own thoughts. The water around the demon began to roil and surge with his passing. By the time he reached the entrance to the grotto, the steam rose above the surface of the water over him in a pillar that reached half way to the stars. When he climbed out of the waters, the rocks under his feet began first to hiss and crack, and then to run.
Hot streams of rock flowed from his footprints to pool in low places, and the glow from the caverns around him seemed to reflect his resentment from the thousand faceted teeth that depended from the caverns, thrusting their jeweled lengths into the heat that blazed from him. The parlors and secret pockets of stone warped around him as he seethed, but he did not notice.
He noticed nothing until he came once more to his sheltering cave. He noticed the wall. Snarling, he breathed and pushed the wall out into the night. Bright streamers of molten rock exploded outward to land in the sea, and clouds of mist billowed in on the perpetual breeze. Something caught fire at his feet. Looking down, the demon’s pain and anger faded in the flush of grief that overcame him. The body of the little boy was burning candle bright in the yellow-orange wash, the semi-darkness of the cooling stone.
The demon gave a pitiful yell, and, scooping the fickly burning body up, he rushed out amidst the tumbled remains of the wall and the crude statue to wade into the breaking waves and douse the flames. The demon cried out again as he realized that the water had extinguished the flames but that he was binding the broken thing’s skin to his own simply by touching him.
The demon was almost overcome when he saw the skin coming off in sticky sheets as the boy’s body moved and shifted in his grip, with clumps of his own fur sticking to the burnt and pitted surfaces. The demon knew that the boy would never wander in his mother’s halls; the rites that had ensured his passage had been disturbed and the body defiled by fire and water and salt. The body was desecrated beyond any hope of redemption.
A different kind of anger grew in him then, one textured with grief and loneliness and pity. The feeling rose in him until it seemed the sky broke and crashed upon them both like the waves around them, and when, after it felt as if the world was going to heave them up or crush them into a point, the demon finally looked down, the boy was feebly prying at his hands and desperately trying to raise his head above the choking water, his yellow eyes gleaming palely in the night. The demon seemed to shrink then, and grow tender. He carried the boy out of the surf, his body falling limp as soon as the danger of drowning was past. He placed him on a slab of still-warm stone and knelt down to watch him sleep. Kneeling there, while the world wheeled on toward day, the demon decided that no harm would come to the child through inaction on his part, and he resolved to keep the boy close until one of them died or the stars went out.

Part III, Chapterlets 5,6,7

2005-11-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

5.
For the first few moments of waking after the night of the storm, the demon believed that light had gone out of the world. Then, he realized that the sound of the surf had grown distant. Pushing himself up, he walked toward the cave mouth, stumbling over unseen things as he went.
He reached the entrance to the cave, reached out a hand and was shocked to feel stone through the calluses on his hand—stone and not sand. He had expected sand, believing that the storm’s fury had made a little hill of it and placed it between his sleeping and the sea. He slowly ran his hand over the stone in wonder. The wonder did not last long. There were little cracks in the stone that he could push his fingernails into. The villagers had bricked him in.
More dismayed than angry, the demon put his back to his home’s new wall. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the cave, he thought that the villagers must have been planning this wall for a long time. Whence the stone? Where the knowledge of how to cut it and place it? After all, did not the villagers still weave their homes from reeds around tall posts cut from trees on other islands and floated there alongside their little reed boats? Did they not stamp their earthen floors flat with their feet? How came they to place it without waking the sleeping demon? Or place it so swiftly?
The demon had watched his father build the house that became their home, and the stone foundation that it sat upon had taken the greatest part of the labor. The answers to those questions did not trouble him as much as wondering why they might have sealed him in that night of all nights. It was then that he noticed the smell.
Under the smell of salt and rock and decomposing fish, the demon could smell the faintest hint of more profound decay. His eyes fully adjusted, he looked for the source and quickly found it. The dead boy was there, on the floor, with a fishing net and a little reed basket filled with hard bread. One of his arms seemed disarrayed compared to the order of his other limbs. The demon realized that he must have stumbled upon the boy on his way to the cave mouth. For some reason, this filled him with anger and sadness. Then, it came to him. They had chosen this night because they felt that he had brought the storm and with it the wind that had killed this child.
Sadly, he turned from the body and walked deeper into the caves, turning from gallery to gallery in the warrens under the island, feeling his way deeper into darkness. Eventually, even his adjusted vision could not pierce the shadows that pooled in the low parts of the earth. When his sight failed, he proceeded with touch, deeper and deeper, until his feet encountered salt water. He waded into the black water to his waist, then took three ponderous breaths and dove.
He emerged back into air, spluttering, out past the tide line. When he turned back toward the shore, the demon could see torches and paper lanterns hanging on the new wall, framing a large statue that in his likeness. The demon was astounded. Not only had they learned to work stone--but carve it, too. Turning slantwise to the pull of the tide, the demon stroked silently for the shore. Determined to let the villagers know that he was not an enemy, the demon waded onto the beach, shook himself off, and made for the center of the village.

6.
Reason made sure that Star was as comfortable as possible under the doctor’s care before exiting the bathroom to see the source of the commotion. A large, square man in a business suit pulled the remains of the broken door out of his way with massive, gnarled hands and stepped into the room, moving through the doorway sideways, his shoulders being to broad to allow passage had they been square to the threshold. The night manager, seemingly enraged or frightened beyond his ability to control himself, stepped around the corner of the bed and began shouting at the large man. The large man looked around the room, apparently unconcerned by the night manager’s proximity and volubility. Not seeing what he was looking for—Reason’s guess was that he was looking for Star—he attempted to move around the night manager as another man stepped through the door.
The second man was wearing a brown linen suit with a white silk cravat. His bowler hat was chocolate brown. He carried a walking stick tipped in silver in one hand. The second man appeared to be extremely old, but he walked upright. The stick did not touch the ground. He carried it more like a scepter or seal of state than he did like an aid to locomotion. The large man had turned toward Reason. He began to walk forward, but the night manager had interposed himself. The large man backhanded the night manager so hard that the night manager left his feet and landed on the other side of the bed, groaning. The large man was quick, Reason decided. He was also explosively powerful. Reason subtly shifted his stance to an open attitude and smiled.
The large man approached him. Reason took off his glasses. Without moving his eyes, Reason watched the second man over the huge shoulder of the one who faced him. The old man was leaning against the door frame with one hand in his pocket and a strange expression on his face. Reason felt as though they knew each other somehow. The large man moved his lips slightly and suddenly Reason’s attention was all on him.
“Do I have to hurt you?” asked the large man in a very hoarse voice.
“That would depend on a number of psychological and physiological questions that I am afraid I am, at present, unqualified to answer,” responded Reason as glibly as he could. The large man’s brows came down slowly. He shifted his weight slightly. Reason said, “I wouldn’t.” His tone laughing, Reason subtly bent his knees and stretched his neck to his full height, nostrils very slightly flared—he concentrated all his energy in his hairline. The large man turned to look at the second man.
“Do I hurt him, Mr. Lee?” he asked. His hoarse voice never changed tone. The one addressed as Mr. Lee’s face registered the smallest flash of surprise so quickly that Reason almost missed it.
Then, the night manager staggered to his feet. He put his head down and slammed into the back of the large man in what seemed to Reason a clear example of a perfect football tackle. Not being a sports fan, Reason could still imagine that the only thing lacking was protection for the night manager’s head and neck. The method looked painful to all involved. The large man grunted as he was pushed face first into the drywall with a dull boom that shook the mirror behind Reason and rattled the objects sealed to the secret rites of Star’s toiletries couched in their hidden spaces.
The large man pushed off the wall and reached behind him, trying to get a grip on the night manager, but the latter backed up, lowered his head further, and speared the large man again with the top of his skull right in the kidney. The large man was quick to spin around when the night manager backed up to do the same thing again. He opened and closed his enormous hands with an audible creak as the night manager moved forward.
The large man was pushed into the wall again, back first, this time causing plaster to shower down over them both and a roughly circular section of the wall to cave in around him, but by pushing against the night manager’s shoulders, he managed to absorb most of the impact into his arms. The night manager snapped his head up, then, catching the large man on the chin and driving his head back against the wall with a resounding crack.
The large man released the night manager’s shoulders. The night manager delivered three quick punches then, one with his right fist into the large man’s crotch, one his left fist into the large man’s short ribs, and one to the large man’s exposed neck, again with the right fist curled and blurring. The large man gave a soft, rattling sigh and went to sleep, sliding down the wall in a sitting position with one hand on his groin and one on his throat. A fat ribbon of blood slipped over the front of the large man’s right ear and crawled quickly into the collar of his blued Oxford button-down shirt and out of sight.
Reason gave a quick glance back into the bathroom. The doctor now seemed to be actively talking to Star in muted tones. When he looked back, the night manager, blood dripping from scalp, nose, and both lips to make little flowers on the white carpet, was advancing on Mr. Lee.
“Excuse me, sir,” Reason said, “but this gentleman has not provoked you in anyway. I imagine that his intentions are entirely appropriate with respect to the lady. Am I right?”
Mr. Lee coughed and said, “That’s quite true. I have only miss Ashikaga’s welfare in mind. If I can be assured of her condition, I will be on my way.”
The night manager, who seemed to miss the exchange entirely, took a wobbly step toward Mr. Lee. Reason stretched out and put a tentative hand on his shoulder. The night manager spun and charged, yelling. Reason stabbed out with his right hand grabbed the night manager’s lower jaw. Simultaneously yanking down and turning his body into the path of the assault, Reason dropped to one knee, and, using the night manager’s sternum as a stable point for the fulcrum Reason had made of his own elbow, threw the night manager by his jaw headfirst into the mirror, spiderwebbing it and causing the can lights above the sink to blink on and off for a moment.
Reason watched, but he could tell by the way the night manager bounced off the marble countertop and landed with his full weight on the arm behind him that he was unconscious. More plaster dust fell from the ceiling, reminding Reason of the cold promise of snow outside. Reason examined his thumb. There was a small cut on the back of it where the night manager had clamped down. He would have to ask the doctor for some disinfectant, for the human bite was a filthy thing and dangerous to leave untreated.
Behind him, Mr. Lee was saying, “To what do I owe the pleasure of that particular intervention?”
Reason felt foolish saying that he felt Lee to be a kindred spirit, familiar to him in some way. Instead he responded with, “There was no particular cause for my intercession beyond my feeling that any justification for violence ended when he,” here, Reason gestured to the large man in the corner, “became unconscious.”
“I see,” said Mr. Lee.
The doctor chose to step out and give a report just then. “Star’s over the worst of it, now. I think the EMTs should be able to handle it without having to know I was ever involved.” Zweistein patted his jacket pocket.
“How were you involved, exactly?” Lee asked.
“I might ask the same of you,” said Zweistein, “but since the answer to that question seems obvious in your case,” Zweistein looked meaningfully at Lee’s walking stick and around the recently disarrayed room, finishing with the unconscious form of the large man, “then I should tell you that Star asked me for a prescription, and I was imprudent enough to write it for her. Good night, fellows. Destry, I’ll expect you for lunch on Tuesday.” With that, the doctor left.
Mr. Lee strode rapidly to the sleeping figure of the large man. He slapped him lightly a few times. When he groaned, Mr. Lee leaned in close and said, “Mr. Papatoa, I regret our relationship has come to an end. I will no longer require your services.”
As Mr. Lee turned, straightened and walked for the door, Mr. Papatoa shook himself and stood. He croaked, “I’ll hurt you, Lee.”
Mr. Lee turned and said, “I rather doubt it. It was a pleasure doing business, Mr. Papatoa. All things come to an end.”
“Then I’ll hurt the girl,” said Mr. Papatoa, smiling.
“You won’t,” said Reason. Mr. Papatoa opened his hands. Reason smiled. Mr. Papatoa looked at the leg of the night manager protruding from the alcove to his right. Reason said, “There will be no more violence. Too many have been hurt already. Go home and get some sleep.” Reason said this last with the air of dismissing one of his household staff, hoping that the man was so accustomed to taking orders that he might just take one or two more before he resumed thinking for himself. Mr. Papatoa brushed the white powder from his shoulders and left, his blank face looking straight ahead.
Mr. Lee walked to the bathroom. He said some words to Star that Reason couldn’t quite make out. She laughed weakly. Then Mr. Lee approached Reason. “Do me the pleasure of walking me out,” said Mr. Lee, “I think I hear sirens.”
As they walked down the hall, Mr. Lee slipped his arm through Reason’s, and, as he did so, leaned heavily on him. He became, in short, an old man. Reason said, “Star’s family name is Ashikaga?” asked Reason.
“Yes. Poor thing. My niece, you know.”
“I wasn’t aware that you were related,” said Reason.
“We’re not,” said Mr. Lee, “and I imagine that there is quite a lot about Miss Ashikaga of which you are ignorant.” After a slight pause, he continued with, “I’ve never seen anyone get Mr. Papatoa to talk when he is on the job.”
“Oh?” said Reason.
“I’ve never seen him question whether or not he should apply force, either,” said Lee. “He certainly never looked to me to make that decision before meeting you.”
“The Kensei once wrote that if you can beat one man with your hands, then you should strive until you can beat ten with your spirit.” Reason pressed the button for the elevator.
“So you beat him with your spirit?” asked Mr. Lee, smiling.
“No,” said Reason. “But I tried. He went the rest of the way by himself.”
Mr. Lee chuckled. As the doors to the elevator closed, he turned to Reason and said, “A position recently became available in my organization. I was wondering if I might convince you to fill it.”
“I would take any offer of employment seriously. What would be my title?”
“Executive Assistant to Henry Lee, panderer, importer of exotic goods, and narcotics trafficker,” said Mr. Lee.
“I will think on it,” said Reason as the elevator car lurched downward, but Reason knew that all thought had become impossible when he entered the fight.

7.
It was through Mr. Lee that Reason learned the superficities of Yuriko Ashikaga, but he did his wooing in his own way, and in person. Every day for the entire month of January, Reason left a card at the concierge’s desk at the Southern Hills Marriott, addressed to Miss Ashikaga, but he received no response. Calls for her from an outside line were always turned away with a “I’m sorry, but we have no guests registered under that name.” Reason’s plans came very close to ending in frustration.
He expressed his feelings on the matter at a luncheon in early February with the doctor. The doctor listened for about a minute before interrupting to say something like: “The sadness of a man runs away from him, ever away; it is a verifiable truth that it is hard, very hard to bear up under it, but it is also hard to keep it in sight. As a practitioner of medicine, I know in what parcel of the human meat a man keeps his heart in, or rather say ‘soul,’ and this knowledge also allows me a glimpse of what a confusion of those parts—a sudden spike in serotonin or a general flooding of endorphins—what the growing shape of a conditioning based on the chemical signature of a woman or a boy can do to find that parcel secreted in the blood dark recesses of the body to push it into the day. There is no transcendent sadness. Fuck no, there isn’t. Why? Physical response proceeds emotional response, that’s why. A smile makes one happy more than being happy makes one smile. To say you are sad is to say nothing but that you have the impression that a certain bundle of nerve fibers in your brain has been stimulated. A simple confusion of parts. You think your soul has been moved, but I tell you it’s just your cock and your serotonin reuptake inhibitors that are affected. It’s a pretty pickle, with those of us trained to be attuned to the highest strata of human feeling also most aware of the pitfalls, snares, tripwires—you get the general thrust of the image, no?—of the same sentiments. You task yourself with keeping your eyes on the heights. Well, be careful where you put your feet. That girl is quicksand, one way or another. Make no mistake.”
“What do you mean?” asked Reason.
“Did I tell you that I was in the oil field fires during Kuwait? Hell on Earth—” and, then, the doctor was off on another tangent. Reason knew that the doctor had said everything he was going to say on the topic of Miss Ashikaga. The luncheon finished in its usual way, with the doctor rushing off on an imaginary page and leaving Reason alone in the little café to pick up the bill. This time, as he waited for his car to be brought around, Reason decided to persist in his efforts until he had received a clear dismissal. He had not heard anything positive to encourage the pursuit, that was true, but he had heard nothing to the negative, either, notwithstanding the reference to quicksand in the doctor’s diatribe—the doctor not being the most impartial or reliable of character witnesses. Reflecting that he was faced with his own version of Pascal’s wager, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, he stepped into the back seat and slid across the leather, instructing the driver to take him once more to her hotel.

Correction, Updated Word Count and Self-deprecatory aside, Surgery

2005-11-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

I noticed that the third to last post contained an error in the title...It was actually Part III, Chapterlets 2 and 3, in case some of you skipped it because you thought it was a compromise second draft...

Of course, that assumes that anyone is still reading after 46 pages and 12,533 words.

I have my--hopefully--last wisdom tooth surgery tomorrow at three in the afternoon. This will either really help the third section or really hurt it. Those of you who know the overall schema will recognize that the promise of yugen is greater when I am on painkillers, but you also know that there is no promise of plot. I must find a balance.

Part III, Chapterlet 4

2005-11-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

4.
Reason’s decision on a partner was almost exactly coincident with his acceptance of a job. He was familiar with seduction rituals and contractual exchanges with women, but he was uncertain how to actively seek a permanent relationship of what was considered the conventional sort, having never been in one where some form of commodity or currency was not exchanged. He was convinced that the most logical course of action was to announce his matrimonial intentions in the Tulsa World. A full-page add or a series of classifieds. David Branch, his lawyer, advised him against calling out “the crazies” or posting any personal information that would make him more of a target to social climbers than he already was, but, “just in case”, assured him that he would be preparing an iron-clad pre-nuptial agreement.
The public announcement method having been frowned upon by his advisors, Reason could not, however, bring himself to go to bars—the method his household staff assured him was common practice in Tulsa. “It’s either the bar or the prayer meeting,” Lucas had said late one night in his sitting room in what Reason was sure was a beleaguered tone, “and I think you would prefer the bars, or what passes for them around here.” Unconvinced, Reason sought information from the women on his staff.
That proved strangely uncomfortable in the long run, but he did end with the piece of information that social events were one way for men and women to find one another. Then there was so-called “blind” dating, a thoroughly unappealing process. Unwilling to play the Gatsby and offended at the very idea of being “fixed up”, Reason disseminated word amongst his staff that they were to procure him an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party somewhere, the more reliable sources assuring him that it was the next social event of the season that did not require already having family, close friends, or a country club membership—an option that Reason had foreclosed years earlier by calling one of the Ladouane family a repulsive, corpulent bigot on the 14th green at Southern Hills. He could always have bought his way back in, but Reason did not think his future mate was to be found amongst the starved, manicured, or desperate alcoholics that flirted and schemed in the club rooms, and pouring money back into such a system seemed a violation of Wiener’s noble principles of cybernetics. If garbage was what that system produced, then he sure as hell wasn’t going to feed value back in.
His staff had, without any delay, procured for him an invitation to what they assured him was an extremely exclusive end of the year party at the Marriott Southern Hills, the hotel overlooking the golf-course where he had been blackballed years before. The host was a man named Rickard Zweistein. He had apparently taken up temporary residence in the hotel, renting out every room on the top three floors.
Reason made the faux pas of arriving to the party on time. Zweistein was holding court in his suite on the top floor. As Reason hesitated in the threshold, Zweistein stopped what he was doing, pointed directly at Reason and shouted, “For God’s sake, get the fuck in here before the Fire Marshall comes and fines me.” As the night, and his relationship with Zweistein progressed, Reason noticed a tendency for the doctor—for Doctor he insisted upon being called, though Reason very much doubted the legitimacy of his “practice”—whenever he felt himself to be on the verge of losing the attention of those gathered around him to remedy the situation by the rapid introduction of several of the worldlier Anglo-Saxon verbs into his discourse. This usually had the desired effect. Reason immediately knew that this despicable man was going to be his friend.
That night moved quickly for Reason. Unable to find something to drink that would not destroy his palette, he decided to err in the other direction, adopting a bottle of Wild Turkey as his charge for the evening. Soon, it was 4:00 in the morning. The sofas, armchairs, and beds of all of the rooms were covered in sleeping forms or copulating pairs as Rickard and Reason walked around, putting the final touches on everything with a well-placed comment or an observation of some kind. Reason had come to understand that the doctor was, if not in love with the sound of his own voice, then at least very fond of it. He said the most bizarre things with the same gravitas that others used to discuss moral philosophy or the depredations of this or that art movement.
At arguably the most important moment in Reason’s life, for example, Rickard was saying: “—a social class that has fled its generations from city to city has not had the time to accumulate that toughness which produces the necessary obscenity, nor, after the crucifixion of its ideals, enough forgetfulness in—what?—a little over two centuries?—to create legend. Not legend in its proper sense. That is why the Golden Driller strikes me as the most vulgar misappropriation of iconic status that should belong to the Indians that still own this land in a way that these disenfranchised redneck farmers and nouveau riche can not—what?” Zweistein had finally acknowledged the bellboy who had been tugging at the black worsted sleeve of his jacket.
“Dr. Zweistein?” asked the bellboy in a relieved tone.
“Yes? What is it?” Zweistein said, rounding on him in the middle of the hallway. Sounds of vomiting and moans of pleasure or excess mingled with the three of them where they stopped.
“One of the guests is deathly ill, sir,” said the bellboy.
“Quite a few of the guests are ill, lad, what the fuck does that have to do with me?” Zweistein turned on his heel and began to walk away.
“I don’t know, sir, but the night manager told me to tell you that it was Star, sir. He said that you’d know what that meant.” This was relayed with confused glances back and forth between the departing doctor and Reason.
“Of course I know what it means,” snapped the doctor, turning back. “Shit. You call security and tell them that I want all of these assholes out of my rooms. And tell the night manager we’re on our way, right Destry?” Reason gave a small nod. He was not yet tired and approaching sober.
The bellboy looked hesitant, then said, “He said only to bring you, sir…”
“I know where it is, goddamn it, so you’re not bringing me anywhere. I told you to get security and get these people out of my rooms. Now, git.” The boy was already running for the elevators where the angle of the two branching halls had its vertex before the doctor had finished speaking.
“What’s this about, Doctor?” Reason asked, rocking back on his heels slightly. He couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice.
“Wipe that damn smile off your face and come. I’ll tell you as we walk.” Turning back the way they had been walking before the interruption, Zweistein began to explain. Star was the name of the house girl. Apparently, whatever was going on was bad enough that the night manager wanted to avoid logging an emergency call. They walked in silence down stairs and around several corners. Soon, they were admitted to her room by the same bellboy. He was pale. As they passed into the room, he whispered something to Zweistein, who smiled and slipped him some money. The door was closed behind them.
The lights in the room were on, and a large, bluff man in a black tie and khakis was kneeling on the edge of the bed. The back of his neck and the skin of his scalp were red and the sweat stain spreading across his broad back seemed to be more from distress than any kind of physical effort, as the girl he was leaning over seemed to be peacefully asleep. The side of her face in the fluorescent light penetrated Reason, obliterating him. He backed away from the bed, flushed, nearly panting with desire, and kept backing until the backs of his thighs were pushing and rubbing against the marble counter next to the bathroom. He could feel the cold stone through the thin material of his slacks. He tried to fade into the mirror he knew was behind him as he watched the doctor go to work.
There was muffled conversation between the manager and the doctor that Reason might have been able to work out if he had been able to tear his gaze from the girl on the bed. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or three. She appeared from this difficult angle to be Asian—Japanese unless Reason missed his guess—and she was wearing a thin, white linen robe that seemed to flow out from the shadow under her chin like a direct response to the light eating blackness of her hair. She was perfect. Meanwhile the doctor roughly lifted an eyelid with his finger, moved his lips violently in what Reason might have recognized in another situation to be a curse and started to check her pulse.
The doctor looked around the room. His eyes alighting on the trashcan in the corner behind a small wooden table, he leaped at it. He emptied the contents out onto the floor and pushed through them with his toes until he found a large pill bottle, picked it up, read the label and put it into his pocket. A distinct “fuck” pushed through to Reason, and he managed to tune in on what the doctor was saying to the night manager: “Call an ambulance. I’m taking this with me. Destry, help me pick her up.”
Between the two of them, they picked her up. Halfway to the bathroom, her robe slipped open and Reason could not help a little shudder of disappointment when he saw that she was wearing a thin silk shift beneath it. He felt shame and stamped it down. There was no reason he shouldn’t be disappointed. She was beautiful.
They put her down in a sitting position, facing the tub. Zweistein opened her mouth by pulling down on her jaw with one hand, and Reason felt inclined to try to describe it. His first impulse was to describe that mouth as delicate, since its pale coloring so perfectly matched the paleness of her skin, but, upon close examination, he had to admit that the shape of the lips, the way they so suddenly thinned at the corners despite how thick and full they were made him suppose that the best way to describe her mouth was “hungry,” as long as the quality of the hunger connoted was sexual.
At that moment, Reason began to hear the confused sounds of some kind of confrontation in the hallway. The bellboy was refusing someone entrance, by the sound of it. Star’s teeth were even and sharp, which he had occasion to observe when Zweistein shoved the first two fingers of his left hand unceremoniously into the back of her throat, while slipping the thumb of his right hand over the lower teeth and hooking the tongue with his forefinger. It was an erotic sight for Reason. The edges of her mouth were stretched almost to tearing, and the lips drew up until it seemed they almost seemed to be kissing the meat of Zweistein’s palm for an instant before she bit down hard on the doctor’s fingers, the muscles in her temples bulging, causing him to curse under his breath. She shook her head slightly, her nearly paralyzed body trying to shake free of his grip, but Zweistein held her firmly over the edge of the tub. Reason pulled her hair back over her shoulders, where it hung to the floor. She then began retching, little protestant noises quieted by the fingers blocking her mouth. The doctor removed his hands just as three things happened simultaneously: the door to the room was kicked in, causing the night manager to bellow like an enraged beef; Star began to vomit copiously, whole pills plopping wetly into the marble tub in a pink, semi-viscous medium; and Reason decided that Star was the woman that he wished to marry.

Word Count

2005-11-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

10,470

Part III, Chapterlets 2 & 3

2005-11-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

2.
In the first month of 1970, despite the warnings of her doctors and the urgings of what passed for friends and perhaps to some degree because of the somewhat distressing vogue of backroom abortions permeating the circles she moved through, Marianna Destry, last daughter and sole heiress of the Tulsa Destries gave birth to a seven pound, 4 ounce boychild whom, in a sort of falling gasp, she named after the one thing that seemed to have most eluded her during the long string of events leading to the child’s conception and construction and, as a by-product, the destruction of self that the baby’s difficult birth signaled and that she could feel surging up infinitely within her, both a void and a ground for her slow fadeout due to her hemorrhaging.
Reason Destry survived his mother’s fate, inheriting a large amount of money at the tender age of one hour and sixteen minutes, the principal of which he was protected from in any way diminishing by a large system of trusts and legal barriers to access which girded and upheld the swollen vastnesses of his real, mineral, and monetary rights and properties. This large, invisible structure spun fine webs out from his fortune that established and protected his absurd rights over the rights of more mature relatives of the Dallas branch and generated servants and caretakers, lawyers and stockbrokers, trustees and legal guardians that ushered him from infancy into adulthood with surprisingly little graft or deception.
This meant that, at the age of thirty five, on a warm autumn night of the year 2000 CE, Reason had managed, by the observance of a strict laissez-faire principle of economy, to increase his holdings at a rate which could only be accurately described by a rather strict application of logistic growth formulae, arithmetic no longer being adequate to encompass his worth or the rate at which that worth tended toward infinity. He had no need for gainful employment, and yet idleness weighed on his days, infecting his thought, and his need for activity was like the hot sun on his shoulders, casting long shadows that narrowed toward him sharply, maliciously as he sat in his garden while the oaks changed. That night, inspired in some way, he thought, by a cold wind that suddenly closed the page he was contemplating in the faded red book in his lap, Reason decided would do two things: find a job, and find a wife.

3.
Reason had, as a very young man, decided to live his life according to the only precept that his mother had given him, which was buried in the structure of his name. In honor of this decision, he managed not to become a wastrel or a profligate member of the elite stratum of society through which he moved. Catholic private schools, the decadent oubliettes where the disinterested amongst the Tulsa rich let their children go to “figure things out for themselves,” became distasteful to Reason quite before he was out of primary school. He sought private tutors for an isolated education, and, to the surprise of his caretakers, was in truth running his immediate household with precision and rationality by the age of twelve, devoting the bulk of his time to one on one study and leaving the management of his more abstract estate to those better equipped to deal with it by inclination as well as by training. Basic mathematics were not beyond his capabilities, but the overt presence of accountants in his life led him to see that he would never have a practical need for it, barring betrayal. His capacity for delegation was breathtaking.
Perhaps owing to the influence of those years of primary school, Reason’s choice of tutors had a classical tendency from the very beginning. He was taught Latin and Greek at first, but found little or no interest in the learning of languages it seemed to him were long dead. Translations being, then, more than acceptable to be moving forward, Reason was able to quickly absorb the Loeb library and move on. At fifteen, an unsettlingly informative encounter with a dusty history of the Ottoman Empire left him curious as to what else might be out there to learn that was not readily or easily visible in the Western Canon. He hired a small, humorous man with graying hair and a PhD in Western Philosophy who had defected from the University of Beijing in 1983 and was making a living as a proofreader for various Chinese restaurants and tailors in Tulsa. Michael Chang, a man of Chinese birth and parentage, had liberal leanings—something as difficult for Reason to define as it was to find, even amongst the educated in Oklahoma—and was extremely well-read in several languages, including five contemporary, non-romance languages, and three dead ones. In short, he was just what Reason was looking for.
Their relationship was odd. Chang insisted on being called Michael, and he refused to teach Reason anything unless Reason consented to learn everything. Contractual obligation being a concept with which Reason was familiar, he agreed in bona fide. This meant that, surprisingly, Reason found himself studying an alien calligraphy, an alien poetry, an alien system of thought, and undergoing a strenuous program in calisthenics at the same time. His teacher insisted that this ridiculous hopping and flailing be referred to as the Technique of Force on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and on the weekends, however, Reason was sharply reprimanded for not using the term the Force of Technique for the same exercises. Reason’s initial doubts about the usefulness of these classes when compared to their readings of Li Po, Lao Tze, or Confucius, melted away at the same time as the chubbiness that had clung to his face and body from his infancy. He came to realize the movements as the stylized extension of his thought in space and time and began in earnest to relish the hours spent in personal contemplation of sets of motions he now understood as forms.
On Reason’s eighteenth birthday in January of 1988, Michael assisted him in arriving at the extremely difficult understanding that what Reason had now mastered by dint of physical and mental training for eight hours a day, every day, for three years was at its heart a practical system of physical defense and not a ritual of dance or physico-mental expression as he had been indirectly led to believe. Michael did this mostly by attempting to hit and kick Reason about the face, head, and torso in earnest for the better part of an hour while Reason’s body executed—with greater speed, precision, and force than he had known he was capable of exhibiting—the stances and forms that it had had drilled into its very muscle fibers.
At the end of this demonstration, Reason was forced to admit that, once these motions had been re-described, it was easy to see them as divided into distinct modes of attack and defense and not just a method of being towards your partner in motion. The implications of this redescription staggered Reason. Not only was the change difficult to come to terms with, so was the ease with which Michael had overturned an entire system of thought. Also at the end of this demonstration, Michael gave Reason his birthday present, a little book bound in red cloth, and printed on creamy, seventy pound paper with the strange title Book of the Five Rings. To the book was tied a folded paper note. The note said:

This is both my resignation and the proof copy of my latest published translation from the Japanese. Let me know if there are any punctuation problems or typos. It’s due back at the printer next week. To this point, I have been the needle, pulling you after me. It is past time for me to set your considerable weight aside. I have carried you far enough. Now, walk, you fat, lazy guai lo.

When Reason looked up from reading it, Michael was gone. Reason had the faint, preposterous notion that somehow his shadow had stayed behind. The space of their training room was all angles and planes. He looked at the little mirror on the wall. Reason walked to the master suite, tossed the book in his secretary drawer and got in the shower. He didn’t mind the sting of the hot water pelting his face beyond noticing it. When he got out, he sat on his bed and called in his major domo with the little black button on his night stand. He gave Lucas instructions that would help him to prepare the household for a trip to Japan while he toweled dry his hair.

Second post of the day: Part III, Chapterlet 1

2005-11-05T16:52:00.000-08:00

III. The Caress (a translation from The Possessed)

1.

When Yuriko, accompanied by Kennedy Charleston, returned to Tulsa, she seemed preoccupied. She wouldn't listen to Kennedy's suggestion that they should run away and make a life together somewhere else. She said prison was "adequate." Kennedy couldn't get her to do anything; it seemed as though the impetus that had directed Yuriko's life, governing her nights and days, had been badly damaged. For a couple of weeks, she refused to go out, then, finally thinking herself solitary, she began haunting the cab companies, taking taxis to different parts of the countryside, wandering without a plan, going into ramshackle one room church buildings, sitting in the corner on a metal folding chair or leaning against the wall, feet turned towards each other, her hands sometimes gripping each other, sometimes stroking each other, her head inclined to one side. Kennedy followed her. As she had been baptized long before, now she returned to church like he was turning her back on something filled with pain or sin; her hands in front of her eyes, she would kneel, her teeth sometimes seeking the flesh of her palms, frozen in an unreflective cessation of movement, as if she had been told of the death of a loved one; the death that could not take shape until the frozen tongue gives its chilled permission to the heated brain. Moving like a temporary maid called to straighten the disorder in a house filled with rich strangers, she walked to the pulpit as if holding a lit candle against the dark, and receiving the laying on of hands, she turned, putting her ridiculous white mittens on gravely, and with her newly burdened step, left the Pentecostals to their worship. Kennedy, making sure she was herself unobserved, darted up to the pulpit and stopped, working her hands, as if trying to undo what had been done. She, to, received the laying on of hands, and left.
Yuriko walked through the sunlit fields of winter in the same somnambulistic way, tugging at long, dried sweet grasses, muttering in a low voice at the occasional rustle of an unseen bird. The stray dogs that braved the cold to come near her she caught with her hands, pulling the fur of their necks back until their eyes were pulled wide and their teeth bared. She showed them her own teeth, lip laid back as if an unseen hand was upon her neck as well. Because Yuriko's conversations were with the invisible air, because in her cadence and the thought she expressed mutely through gesture there was a desperate view of oblivion, Kennedy became frantic. She accused Yuriko of "sleeping with—no, fucking the entire world." And by putting her anger into words, she gave herself more injury than she did her lover. She did not understand anything Yuriko felt or did anymore, which was more unendurable than the times she disappeared with Her. Kennedy walked back and forth in her darkened apartment, cursing, weeping, stumbling, while Yuriko made circuits in the night.
Yuriko now headed up into Allison's neighborhood, but Kennedy was not fooled by the gradual nature of Yuriko's approach, though she was uncertain if Yuriko herself knew her ultimate destination. She circled like a turkey buzzard suddenly deprived of a thermal, tighter and tighter, with one wing tip pointed always at the carrion unseen below the treetops. Sometimes, Yuriko slept in the park near her house. The stillness that she caused by her entering the rec center was broken by the tide of activity moving over her intrusion, which was forgotten in the quiet way she sat her place on the bench, its return destroying her as a single grain of wheat is lost in a great silo. Sometimes the park bench was given up for a cot in a rundown religious shelter adjacent to it (she had even taken some of her things there), but she somehow never got closer. One night, she woke up to the yelping, in the distance, of Allison's chocolate lab. As she had frightened the rec center into silence with her own, the yelping brought her to her feet, stiff and immobile.
Yuriko now headed up into Allison's neighborhood, but Kennedy was not fooled by the gradual nature of Yuriko's approach, though she was uncertain if Yuriko herself knew her ultimate destination. She circled like a turkey buzzard suddenly deprived of a thermal, tighter and tighter, with one wing tip pointed always at the carrion unseen below the treetops. Sometimes, Yuriko slept in the park near her house. The stillness that she caused by her entering the rec center was broken by the tide of activity moving over her intrusion, which was forgotten in the quiet way she sat her place on the bench, its return destroying her as a single grain of wheat is lost in a great silo. Sometimes the park bench was given up for a cot in a rundown religious shelter adjacent to it (she had even taken some of her things there), but she somehow never got closer. One night, she woke up to the yelping, in the distance, of Allison's chocolate lab. As she had frightened the rec center into silence with her own, the yelping brought her to her feet, stiff and immobile.
Half an acre away, Allison, sitting at her computer screen in a blue wash of light, raised her eyes to the wall above. Bernadette was running about the yard; she heard him first on the one side, then on the other; she whined as she ran; barking and yelping she heard Bernie farther and farther from her. Allison bent forward, listening; she began to shiver. After a moment, she got up, opening the French doors to the back yard. Then, she sat down with her hands in her lap, but she couldn't wait. She went out into the yard. It was heading towards midnight, and she could see little to nothing. She walked toward the hill which sloped down to the street and, beyond that, uninterrupted by fences all the way to the park. She no longer heard Bernadette, but she kept walking. She heard the rustle of the leaves along the street and amongst the leaves. A small briar bush tripped her, but she did not call to her dog. At the bottom of the hill, she could see a dim outline stretching against the ground and rising into the sky of the broad white wall of the shelter; there was the tiniest suggestion of light in the doorway. She began to run, cursing and crying, and blind from the tears, without warning ran into the jamb of the shelter door.
On a make-shift stand, below a holographic image of a blue-eyed blonde Jesus, a candle was burning next to a battered, gilded Bible. The light fell across the floor and the dusty, empty cots. At the foot of the Bible stand were flowers and abandoned toys. Standing next to them in her pajama pants was Yuriko. Her position, alarmed and broken, was fixed at a point where one hand had almost reached to the shoulder, and, at the moment that Allison\'s shoulder hit the painted metal door frame, Yuriko began to fall. Slipping down she went; down, her hair swinging, arms to each side, dark streaks of almost color in the half-light, falling with her, running down her arms, and Bernadette stood there, rearing up onto his hind legs, hackles up and body trembling. The blood rushed to the surface of Allison everywhere all at once, the cold of the outside unable to prevent the thrill of seeing her and the confusion of escaping life it from springing to the front, making her throb in her fingertips, her forehead, and her thighs, as she leaped forward to try to catch her.

Part II, Finale

2005-11-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

6.
It was even colder. Bones checked the backlit clock on his iPod. 1:47. He must have been out for a while that first time. Stopping to scan for streetsigns, he tried to get his bearings. He was still downtownish, but close to the river. He opted against going back for the bike.
He pulled his hood up, wondering why he hadn’t done that before. As he rounded a corner, he thought he heard the sound of foot scraping on sidewalk behind him. Not wanting to be that guy who turns around to see who’s coming up behind him, Bones accelerated his pace. The clouds were scattered, but the wind off of the river a couple of blocks away smelled like snow. Not that that was very likely. Too cold for snow.
This time, Bones definitely heard the click of wooden soled shoes behind him. He decided to take a quick right turn. As he turned down the next street, he swiveled his head slightly, looking over his right shoulder, careful with his left hand not to let the hood turn, giving away his motion. Paranoia served him well; someone was back there. A guy in a business suit and overcoat on the other side of the street.
Bones speeded up again. At least being cautious was getting his blood up. He was starting to shiver less, and the moisture that curled back onto his cheeks where his breath was turned back by the wind did not sting as much as it had a few minutes ago. He took two lefts and a right in rapid succession to get back on the quickest course downhill to the park. He had checked. The business suit guy was gone.
Paranoid, then. But at least he was warm. He wasn’t going to start second-guessing himself, though. He’d already been jumped once tonight. A little relieved, he decided to get out his phone and call Kennedy. See if she was surprised to hear from him. Or maybe glad. That was always a possibility. A remote possibility, now. But Bones couldn’t help hoping.
As he began to thumb in the number with his left hand, his right still firmly fisted in his pocket because of the cold, something made him glance back over his shoulder. The suit was back, further back now. He stopped dialing and put the phone back in his left pants pocket. They were almost to the park. It could be coincidence. The guy had fallen back when he sped up. But then, why hadn’t Bones ended up behind him when he’d taken the detour?
His left hand gripped the handle of the knife in his pocket. Stupid, thinking he’d be able to do anything with a knife. What if the suit had a gun? He’d never used a knife in a fight. He’d messed around with them a lot. He was even pretty good throwing them. He’d probably stick himself before anybody else. Still, the rough divots in the bone of the hilt felt comfortable. Eased his mind. He glanced back again. The suit was gone.
Bones stopped and turned. There weren’t very many places he could have gone. The other side of the street was one wall of a brick warehouse for two blocks in both directions, blank of any opening. He turned and started trotting toward the park. As he hit the next intersection and crossed the street, he thought he glimpsed the movement of a large shadow paralleling him one block over. He couldn’t be sure, because the hood blocked most of his peripheral vision. He wasn’t sure. Sure, hell. The impression had been distinct.
Ahead on his side of the street was the parking garage of a small law firm. The repointed building of the firm itself stood next to it. He sped up, letting his feet pound loudly. He could hear his jogging tread echo off the vertical spaces operating, along with the sudden decrease in wind, the dry coldness of the air, to produce a suddenly clear soundscape. Those wooden soles were clicking along nicely, over to the left, behind the parking garage, now. Bones’ breath was growing too loud for him to hear everything. He suddenly needed to hear absolutely everything. He stopped short. His twin’s footsteps stopped soon after. But not soon enough.
Uncertain why he had needed so much proof, Bones slipped off the sidewalk and against the low partition of the parking garage’s ground floor. The parking garage was well-lit and the front of the law firm, too. He looked up and saw a video camera pivoting smoothly towards him. His first instinct was to jump over the low wall and into the parking garage with its vertical columns and climbable surfaces. He didn’t want to be caught on camera.
He stopped himself with his hand on the wall. Why shouldn’t he be seen? He was the one being followed. Thinking in all directions, now, Bones ran back to the last corner, where he found a trashcan. There was a green glass bottle on the top. He stood there, feet apart, listening to everything, trying to find the rhythm of his own thoughts between his overburdened breath and his heart racing.
Where there’s a camera, there’s a security guard watching it. Well, not always. Don’t they usually just run to tape, so the cops can find whoever it is, later? But a parking garage would have some sort of patrol, right? So the cars don’t get vandalized or broken into during the day time, let alone at night. The lawfirm had to have computers and crap that needed protection of some sort. An alarm would probably work as well for that…
Bones grabbed the bottle and ran to the middle of the street in front of the camera sticking out from the corner of the parking garage. He looked over at the law firm. The front door was made of glass. He hefted the bottle, looking at it closely. It was a Heineken bottle with some grunge in the bottom. Backwash and what looked like cigarette ash or dirt. He gauged the distance, and threw. The arc was beautiful. He had found some kind of inner calculus that fit into the secret spaces of the night air and revealed them completely as it described the bottle’s flight.
The planes the bottle created before his mind as it spun end over end flashing in the false light of the parking garage were unlike anything he had ever seen. He wondered if he was dying of exposure. If the rich texture of this flight was the truth of it, or if his body was interfering on a basic level, raw animal perception squeezing out his reason in the face of the twin terrors of the cold and his pursuit. He decided that it was a false distinction. Both body and mind loved that green, flashing missile because they were the same thing. It hit the glass of the front door and exploded.
A high, faint ringing began. The alarm. As he turned back to look at the camera, he managed to catch the suit looking at the door to the law firm. He was not surprised or frightened. He was just looking. Bones couldn’t make himself move. The man was his height. He was looking at the glass on the ground and the still quivering front door. He was very still while Bones watched the side of his head. The head turned. Its eyes were shining. Or maybe, maybe those weren’t eyes.
The man in the suit took a step forward. A little black terror entered the center of him and stood there, putting a hole in his thoughts. Uncertainties mingled there with fear and inchoate plans of action. Another step, and intentional thought drifted up and out of him. He could feel the strands clinging to him and yet spreading out. He laughed as the image of his brain as the sole root of some kind of kelp forest of thought pushing out in every direction—radiating from his head and slowly swaying in the thick night—stole across the moment. As the man took another step, he smiled, too. Like Bones had told a joke.
Bones listened to the miraculous silence of his footfall. There was no chance that he had been heard. The figure…Bones was unsure, now, whether it was quite a man…was a hole in the sharp sounds all around. Cars moving on Riverside Drive were loud whispers and rhythmic thumps, the wind, returning, moving trash and leaves across the sidewalk rustled and scraped and moaned through the alleys and over the parked cars lining them. But the suit…
The suit moved at right angles to sound, stepping off the curb and into the street. Bones’s hand spasmed in his hoodie pocket and found the hilt of the knife. He pulled it out, the blade catching the seam a little as it jerked free, and screamed as he ran at the suit. He pushed himself into a ball of terror and pain and anger at the tip of the blade, pushed himself into a single, bright hot point. He saw the figure in the suit raise a hand, but the gesture held no meaning for Bones. He felt something, then, almost like gravity yielding before the irresistible new pull of his knife, and then nothing.

Part II, Chapterlet 5

2005-11-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

5.
Bones stirred, his limbs filled with slow numbness, his heart keeping quiet time. He could hear a low, sweet voice speaking to him. In the seconds before he became fully alert, he realized that it was the voice of Henry Lee. The voice was beautiful. He realized that this was a man who would never harm him.
Henry Lee was saying: “—are not the one my assistant the philosopher was sent to find. Tino’s young friends being there, however, it was not difficult for him to come to the conclusion that you might know something of her whereabouts. Though why I should really care at this point is quite beyond me. Nevertheless, he has been persuasive. It is unfortunate that you cannot meet him, but he is rather old-fashioned. Retiring and unobtrusive. Good qualities in a man, but bad qualities for making good introductions. You do know where she can be found.” His voice drifted higher as he finished. Bones found the former horror of the face draining out of him. The man was impeccably dressed. He could tell that even in the low light.
“Was that a question?” Bones asked. The pain in his mouth and face was receding into the background of the scene he found himself in. He lifted himself onto an elbow, craning his neck to examine that face again.
“Of a sort.” Henry Lee had a little smile. The corners of his mouth seemed to disappear into the pale pink slickness of his cheeks. His lips did not seem to have a color at all. If anything, they had the same tone as his bald head, where the skin seemed so thin and translucent that he imagined he could see the architecture of the man’s skull. It made him seem either incredibly old or not-quite-finished. Bones examined his lapels as he answered.
“Kennedy?” Henry Lee nodded. “She was supposed to meet me. I guess I know why she didn’t.” Bones looked around. He sat up the rest of the way.
“Why didn’t she?” Bones noticed that Henry Lee was holding an old-style walking stick of a dark wood with a tight grain and a silver head in the shape of something he couldn’t make out, partly because it was somewhat obscured by the man’s hand and partly because the parts he could see of it didn’t seem to go together.
“I guess because she knew Tino’s boys would be there,” Bones paused. To be unafraid was one thing. Recklessness was another. “Or maybe she knew about your…philosopher? A weird thing to call somebody like that.”
“Like what?” Henry Lee seemed confused. Oh, yes. Full of reck. Reckful, even.
“I don’t know…It just seems like people that do philosophy…Professors of Philosophy are philosophers, I guess, but they’re more teachers. I don’t know. I just think it would be interesting to meet someone that calls himself a philosopher. It’s just such a loaded term. Or…out of place. Archaic, maybe. Especially in your line of work.” Bones decided it was time to stop talking.
“What line of work is that?” Oh, yes. Past time.
“I don’t know.” Bones made himself think about the lost art of listening. The silence stretched, and his palms itched.
“That seems to sum up your position, nicely.” Those eyes were smiling again. Bones chuckled a little, weakly. Henry Lee continued by saying, “I’m retired, actually. So the point is moot. It is only our philosopher friend who thinks I should be involved in this business.”
“What is this business?” Questions don’t really count as talking.
“The salient point is that it ought not have touched on you at all—”
“—but it did,” Bones interrupted. He fell silent again.
“So it did.” Henry Lee moved the walking stick from one hand to the other. Bones was starting to ache from being on the floor for so long. He shifted and stayed quiet. “I assume that Kennedy knows you well, or she wouldn’t have arranged to bring you into the middle of it.” Bones said nothing. “It hardly matters. Kennedy worked for Tino. Tino worked for me. I have retired. Kennedy no longer relishes working for Tino. She wishes to work for herself. Tino seems to think that that is unacceptable. That is the short version. It is enough to be getting along with.”
“Why am I here, then?”
“That is a question for Kennedy, if you can find her.”
“I can find her.” Henry Lee laughed.
“I doubt that,” he said. He seemed genuinely tickled by the idea.
“She’ll meet with me if I ask her to.” Henry Lee tapped his walking stick on the floor. The tip was silver, too.
“That seems much more plausible. Good luck.” Henry Lee was rising easily from the chair. Bones scrambled up.
“What?” said Bones, genuinely confused.
“Do you play Go?” Henry Lee asked, gesturing to the far corner. A crosshatched board glowed faintly. A dim spot was pointed directly at it.
“What?” This guy was suddenly all over the place.
“Go? No?”
“Not really. I mean, I think I know the rules.”
“You must forgive my disappointment. There’s been no one to play with since Kennedy left.”
“What about…” Kennedy plays Go? Kennedy? Bones was suddenly feeling the weirdness of the whole thing pressing sharply in his gut. He might have something broken, internally. He tried to remember if anyone had kicked him. The feeling wasn’t unbearable, but it was distinct.
“The philosopher?” Henry Lee shook his head, but his ruined face didn’t seem to move with it. “No point.”
“Is he that bad?” Bones’ Dad didn’t play chess with him anymore. Said there was no point.
“Something like that. It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr…?” Henry Lee held out his hand to shake. Bones took it.
“Noland. Deforrest. Likewise, Mr. Lee.” The man’s grip was strong, and the palm of his hand was rough and callused. The contrast with his features was strange.
“A pleasure. I trust you can find your own way out.” Then, he slipped through a door by the Go board and was gone. Left alone, Bones turned in a circle in the middle of the office, examining everything.
“Fucking Henry Lee,” he breathed. As he turned to the other door opening onto the office, he noticed a small, two-shelf bookcase. A neat stack of returned letters, all addressed in Chinese characters to an address in Arabic numerals somewhere in California caught his eye. Next to the stack was another stack of opened correspondence, weighted down with a letter opener.
Bones picked up the letter opener, intending to set it aside to snoop through the mail—who does a guy like Henry Lee write to?—when the weight of it surprised him. It wasn’t a letter opener.
It was a little blade, almost a stiletto except for the very slight curve of the blade to one side that was unnoticeable until you looked closely. The point was razor sharp, and so was one edge. It was about the length of his hand from the tip of his middle finger to his wrist. The handle was of carved bone or antler, Bones couldn’t tell. He balanced it on his palm, bounced it up and down. The grip felt good in his hand, unlikely to slide when his palms got slick. He slipped it into his left pocket, moving the DS into his right and the iPod into his pants pocket. He zipped up his hoodie and found his way to the street.

Part II, Chapterlet 4.2

2005-11-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

4.2
Once, a demon came to the island. At first, the demon tried to talk to the people who lived their. But they were frightened. The demon thought to himself that it was reasonable for them to be frightened of strangers. He was sure that he would be afraid of them, too, if they were not so small. He decided to wait. He thought that eventually, they would stop being so afraid.
He waited in a cave in the rocks on the leeward side of the island. The wind came each day from the south and carried its insubstantial body over the entrances to the grottoes that moved through the belly of the island toward deep darknesses under the water and sand. When the tide was high, the caves sang as the moved down over the faces of rock and over and through their openings. The caves sounded like a pipe being played slowly when the wind blew fast. Their song was sad.
The demon hunted for tiny crabs among the rocks when the tide went out. Sometimes, he opened mussels and felt their small lives slowing on his tongue with some regret. The crabs, at least, fought fiercely and died fiercely, their little claws gripping and tearing at the demon’s lips and tongue. The demon felt something like love for the crabs.
From time to time, he tried gathering eggs from the seagulls nests that dotted the high blank faces of rock above the cave mouths, but the birds swarmed around him, pulling at his hair and horns and pecking at his eyes. They did not wait and watch with cold black eyes like the mountain birds of his home. They came furiously, and he often held himself back from destroying them completely. Eventually, he stopped trying to pillage their nests. He preferred the single combat of the crabs to the dangerous swirling clouds of birds stooping out of the sun without warning.
The demon waited and watched the villagers go about their business, making nets and building little reed boats from which to cast them into the darkling sea. The villages fished at night, with orange lanterns that bobbed and floated like watery stars inelegantly slopping against the sides of their boats. The fish they brought in were small, and they flashed silver as they poured from the nets into shallow pools dug along the windward shore.
Days came and went. The demon would sometimes walk to the edge of the village, but the people would stop and stare. Some would come and try to shoo him away. He sometimes talked to them and sometimes he stayed silent, gesturing, encouraging. But every time, the children shrieked in fright. Eventually, the sound would push him back to the caves.
One particular day, the wind shifted. The waves visible from his bed grew large and terrible. The sand built up around the mouth of the caves and came pelting at the demon, needling his skin and blinding his eyes. Yelling in pain, the demon scrambled up over the rocks and toward the village, hoping to find some shelter. As he ran, the wind and the stinging salt and sand drove him faster and faster.
As he reached the edge of the village, he stopped. He could feel the wind pushing and pounding into his back with a thousand malevolent hands. He watched as the invisible hands of the wind tore the roof from one of the huts and threw it up into the sky. As suddenly as it had risen, the wind died. The roof of the hut came down hard on a young boy who was just staggering to his feet, having fallen when the wind’s sudden cease had caught him leaning into it, halfway between the tide pools and the open space of beaten earth around which the village huddled. The nearby adults all ran to the boy, but he was dead. The whole village began to make a keening noise as they lifted the roof off of his body. The wind rose again, coming from its normal direction. The demon turned and walked back to his cave, the sound of the villagers mingling with the sound of the still-violent surf and the mournful pipes of his underground spaces. That night, the storm came in truth, bringing awful lights in the sky.

Part II, Chapterlets 3.2 & 4

2005-10-31T11:04:00.000-08:00

3.2
The coroner slaps the light back on before he is fully into the room. He moves to the side of the body at a trot. He puts gloves on, latex snapping against his wrists. He feels the sides of the head again. There. He had almost made it to the break room before it even registered.
He turns the head slightly, so that the sinistral aspect of the skull is uppermost. He moves his thumbs and forefingers carefully, slowly parting the thick hair covering the scalp. He clucks his tongue. There is a shallow, bloody groove running for six centimeters along the side of the head, terminating behind the left ear. No one saw it, hidden as it was by the hair. The state of the wound makes it seem to have been made at a time consistent with the injuries prior to time of death.
He taps the mike switch with his left foot and makes a note. He tugs off the gloves again, grabs a clipboard, and heads out to the hall way, the hydraulic door hissing as it jerks halfway open. He waits for it to glide the rest of the way before he steps out. Not just two altercations, then, but two attempts on the boy’s life. One simply more successful than the other. He follows the receding reflection of the overhead light along the basement corridor, heading for the elevator. He tongues a cut on the roof of his mouth, trying to remember who works the night desk over in Homicide.

4.
Bones rolled over and spat out the blood that had almost made him throw up in his sleep. He hacked up small bits of bile and spit those out, too. Then, he realized that his arms and legs were burning, little picks and pins of fire from the blood finally reaching his extremities again. He was no longer cold. So, he was inside somewhere.
His face and head were pounding. He reached up behind his left ear, remembering the blue arc of light that had connected him, however briefly, with the superstructure of his life. His hair felt cold and tacky. Blood. He shuddered. Tino—or somebody—had shot him in the head. And fucked it up. Suddenly, the room seemed all angles, high and away somewhere.
He tried to push up to his knees and nearly fell. Realizing he was inside was one thing, but now he forced himself to think about exactly what was going on. He was halfway up on his knees, balanced inelegantly on a desk. He winced as he saw the blood and flecks of filth and dark spittle he had sprayed onto the leather blotter pad in front of him.
He was in an office, dark wood paneling all around. He got to his feet slowly and tried to stretch. The blood moved to his brain in a flood that left him tingling and ragged as the lights dimmed further and came back up. He winced as his head began pounding some more.
Someone was watching him from the leather armchair in the corner of the room. He should have been startled, but he wasn’t. Perhaps it was the shock setting in, but he was more fixated on the eyes that stared out at him from the armchair than frightened of them.
As he refocused, Bones could see that it was in his interest to look only at the eyes. The rest of the face might have made him throw up. He wasn’t normally prone to it, but with his stomach still twisting because of the blood trickling down the back of his throat he didn’t know if he could help himself.
The skin of the watcher’s face was slick and pinkly gleaming on the brows and the bridge of the nose. Bones decided it was a very old man. The face was a mass of half-healed scar tissue. He concentrated on the eyes. The whites were yellow. There seemed to be a trace of an epicanthic fold in the corners. Certainty shot through him, giving him violent shakes that came near to making him black out.
It wasn’t until he managed to open his mouth that he realized his jaw was clenched so tight that he could feel the roots of his loosened teeth moving in little twitching jerks in his gums. Bones forced a quaking breath and licked his lips. He tried to smile. The eyes seemed to return the sentiment.
As his knees gave out and he moved quickly back into sleep, Bones managed to say this by way of greeting: “Fucking Henry Lee.”

Damn.

2005-10-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

Lookee here.

All Hallow's Ween

2005-10-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I am Lex Luthor. Pictures will follow, somehow, some way. In order to do this, I did, of course, shave my head bald. Like, shiny. And I gots no beard.

I have also added Lex's new Black Kryptonite ring to the ensemble, by way of Matt and Anette's suggestion. You heard me. Mainly because the normal variety clashes with my suit. In any case, as long as it's in Supergirl and not just on Smallville, it's canon. Q.E.D., bitches. It just so happens that my Black Kryptonite ring is made of Gold Kryptonite. It also has White Kryptonite insets.

Literary posturing will probably resume on Sunday.