At the mattress place today ("AllFoam" brand, the store nothing more than a dusty room in the side of a building, a dirty wooden desk on the left, mattresses stacked on the right) the man with the triangle scarring between his eyes would not leave us alone. Luckily, while he'd been showing the others around a store across the street, I'd been able to talk with the patron. "Monsieur, ca c'est combien?" A two-place mattress, foamy, soft enough to drop an egg on, hard enough to last two years. "Quarante-cinq mille." 45,000 FCFA. I don't bother doing the conversion anymore; just because something's cheap in American dollars doesn't mean it's a 'bon prix.' "C'est cher," I said, "Diminuez le prix, s'il vous plait." He said maybe he could work it down to 40,000. A GEE volunteer had told us yesterday at the beach party that a good mattress would run about 37,000. "Je peux payer trente-cinq mille," I told him, 35,000. "Probablement les autres acheteront aussi, pour le meme prix." I got the okay before triangle-head returned.

Mensah, our driver, said the price was good, if I liked the mattress. I told the others, and twenty-minutes and much confusion later, five of us bought. L tried to diminuer the prix to 30,000 but the vendor wasn't having it. Triangle-head, who we're pretty sure worked for nobody, and was just trying to skim a tip out of the silly Yovos, kept interjecting the discussion, saying he'd give us the mattresses for just 40 mille. The patron, a tired-looking young man well over six feet, stayed faithful to ourprice, though he did nothing to throw triangle-head out.

When we got back to the hotel, we saw that the mattress guys (the legit ones wearing yellow t-shirts with "AllFoam" written in red across the left breast) had done a poor job of tying our purchases to the roof. Any more bumps and the two on top, which were now just barely beneath the ropes, would have been lost. Most everybody, after unloading the mattresses, hopped back into the cars to go to the grand market. Too tired to care about plastic buckets or straw mats, I headed to the bureau.

These past two days since swearing-in have been decadent. Instead of fufu or pate, I've eaten Lebanese, Chinese, and Italian cuisine. Move-in money, which others are spending on cutting boards and wall-mats, goes toward my stomach's pleasure. The furniture I will have made at my post, and pots and pans are readily available at the markets in the neighboring villages. While others have slept, I've spent hours at the bar, or here at the bureau, writing these posts. Every time I sit down to write those mass emails, my will fails me, and I end up here instead. So I apologize.

My Speech From Peace Corps Swear-In

Excellence mesdames, messieurs le ministre,
Excellence Monsieur l’Ambassadeur des Etats-Unis au Togo,
Messieurs les représentants des corps diplomatique,
Madame la Directrice sous-régionale du Corps de la Paix à Washington,
Madame la Directrice Nationale du Corps de la Paix au Togo,
Madame la Directrice de formation,
Honorables invités, Monsieur le Chef traditionnelle,
Chers collègues, nouveaux volontaires,
Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles, Messieurs.

C’est un grand honneur pour moi de m’adresser à vous en cette soirée solennelle en Français. Quand nous sommes arrivés au Togo le 22 Septembre 2007, à peine je pouvais dire une phrase en Français. Pour la majorité de mes collègues c’était pareil. Par exemple, André, les quatre premiers jours de notre arrivée, demandait aux gens, « Avez-vous un lit pour mon cigarette ? » Mais aujourd’hui, voilà, il peut demander une allumette et aussi peut enseigner le réchauffement de la planète. Et pour nous autres volontaires de la Gestion des Ressources Naturelles, nous pouvons répondre à la question « Que puis-je faire dans la gestion de l’environnement ? » Et les volontaires du projet Education et Promotion de la Fille peuvent parler d’une femme émancipée, ce qui n’était pas facile à notre arrivée.

Grâce aux formateurs de langue nous pouvons parler Français. Mais ça ne suffit pas. Il faut savoir les concepts et les pratiques de nos programmes. C’est là où la contribution des formateurs technique et des volontaires formateurs a commencé. Ils nous ont donné les connaissances dont nous avons besoins pour être des volontaires efficaces. Pour les volontaires des ressources naturelles, notre travail est plus ou moins concret : nous pouvons voir les cultures en couloirs, par exemple. Alors que pour les volontaires de l’éducation de la fille cela parait plus abstrait : ils traitent avec les droits des femmes qu’ils ne peuvent pas voir concrètement. Mais, à la fin de notre service, notre récompense sera un accomplissement équitable : un meilleur Togo. Grâce aux formateurs techniques nous sommes plus prêts que nous ne le pensions.

Pour vivre en harmonie avec les Togolais afin de bien mener nos activités nous avons été sevré avec la formation en adaptations culturelle, aliment de base pour bien vivre au Togo et en même temps un ingrédient passe-partout. Il est en formation de langue, en formation technique, et surtout dans les familles. Au premier contact avec nos familles nous ne savions pas comment nous intégrer. Mais après onze semaines tout le monde a une nouvelle famille. Golda et sa mère ont dirigé même ensemble une entreprise des biscuits. Maman AFRIKIKO n’a cessé de nous souhaiter la bienvenue à longueur de journée. David et André ont eu à tuer des poulets eux-mêmes. Et une nuit Ruthia a dormi à l’hôpital à côté de son frère, qui était malade. Au nom de tous les nouveaux volontaires je remercie très sincèrement toutes les familles hôtes non seulement pour nous avoir hébergé, mais pour avoir fait de nous leurs enfants. Nous ressentons beaucoup de tristesse à quitter autant nos familles Américains que les familles de Kumawou et de Nyogbo.

Avant de finir, je voudrais parler un peu de mes amis du stage. Ils sont les plus authentiques gens que je connais. Avec leur énergie et enthousiasme, il n’y a aucun doute de leur réussite pendant les deux ans à venir. Je sais que nous serons sérieux à propos de notre service, en même temps que nous garderons notre bonne humeur. Je sais que ça c’est vrai parce que quand nous avons demandé à Monsieur Adri, notre formateur de technique, « Est-ce que notre stage est le meilleur du monde ? » Il a dit, « Je ne peux pas dire. Mais, je m’amuse bien maintenant. »

And Now We've Reached the End of the Beginning

Before you know it eleven weeks go by and people back home are shoveling snow and thinking about Christmas break. You've been in stage (pronounced stahge, long 'a'), and December is the beginning of the dry season, and when you wake up at night to sweat, the thought of winter seems like just another Mefloquin dream. While everyone you know is looking forward to the holiday break, you, on the other hand, are just beginning to work.

They say the first three months at post are the toughest. No host family to cook for you, no other Americans hanging out at the tech. house, spending the better part of every day with you, speaking your language, talking coherently about the things you want to talk about. Now it's toothless farmers and tchouk-drunks and a chef who doesn't speak French. It's rowdy CEG students, and weather too hot and dry to cultivate. Do you start sensibilisations? What do you know well enough to gather your villagers together and try to teach them? Sure, you could try soap-making, but without an in-depth feasability study, you'd just be pissing money away if you can't sell it for the right price. So what do you do?

Here's my plan: I'm gonna paint my house. And order my furniture. And travel around the prefecture, taking my bike along the Route Nationale. My region is like a mix between Florida and Kansas, and for some reason this combo makes me feel like I'm in Ohio. The tall grass plains are dotted with oil-palm trees, banana trees, mango trees. Sorghum, dancing in the Harmattan wind, rises like oversized corn, and the red-tipped stalks stoop like old Togolese women.

I'm gonna talk to my community. The best way to be an effective volunteer is to be bien intégré, and that requires knowing the people you live with. My house is in a compound with three other families, so I'll start there. And one of the mamas sells tchouk Wednesdays and Fridays, bringing in many of the toothless farmers, who happen to sometimes be tchouk-drunks as well. I could talk to them about vitamin-rich Moringa powder, Neem pesticide, or alley-cropping with Albisia, which is less labor intensive than Lucuna. We could all buy each other a round, a callabash per man, and by the end of the night we'll love each other, and I'll be too drunk to care that I have to take my shits over a cockroach infested latrine.

It is now 0642h and I'm in the Peace Corps bureau in Lomé. In ten hours my fellow stagiaires and I will become official Peace Corps Volunteers. Anna, from GEE, will be giving a speech in Ewé, one of the most prevalent local languages in the southern part of Togo. I'll be giving a speech in French. I'm as honored as I am nervous.

I must go, since diarrhea is calling, but I want to say one thing first: I am incredibly happy here. The past eleven weeks have been spent with a group of individuals I can only think to describe as genuine. We are Peace Corps Volunteers, not hippies or raging tree-huggers. We are here to work, and we know it, and we've talked about this for over two months now, and we feel lucky. With the energy and enthusiasm that I've seen from these people, there's no doubt in my mind as to our success over the next two years. Naturally, this will be a pleasure as well. As Adri, our lead tech. trainer, told us when we asked him if this was the best stage ever: "I can't say anything except that I'm having a lot of fun right now."

Updates on Tony

Hi everyone who reads this, it's Anna, Tony's little sister. He has just sent us a letter from Togo telling me that he wanted me to update his blog, so here it is.

He will not be able to update this himself very often, if at all, so dont be expectant on much. He is doing quite well in Togo, although he does miss a lot of things back home. He loves his host family, he has two brothers and two sisters, and his French is doing much better. If you would like to send Tony letters and are not sure how to get them to him, email me at raspberry1791@hotmail.com and I can give you the address and instructions on how to package and title them so they wont be opened or lost. Oh, and title them "TONY" so I know that it is not junk mail. I will update this probably whenever Tony send a letter, just so I can give everyone a bit of an idea of what's going on. If you have any questions, just email.

-Anna

The Jena 6

I had no idea what the Jena 6 was when somebody invited me to join the facebook group, but now that I've read about it, let's do something. The petitions we signed for the BP thing worked marvelously. So let's not slack off for this. The case of the Jena 6 is straight up racism. I hate racism. I would love for all kinds of violence to be delivered upon those who would harm others simply for the color of their skin. Yet, as we know, violence only breeds continued ignorance.

If you don't know: currently, in Jena, Louisiana, six black individuals are being held with attempted murder for beating up a white kid. This was a response to the white kid's racists taunts following a DA-busted protest led by the black students. The students' protest was itself a reaction to two nooses that had been hung from the limb of a tree after a single black student had sat under it the day before. So, click on the link below, sign the petition, and let others know about the state-led injustice in Louisiana.

Sign this petition.

Badminton Before You Go

As I get closer to leaving for Togo, I become more frightened, sort of. I once had a dream where I was afraid to fall asleep, because I knew I would see something so beautiful I would never want to wake up. In some way, this is the feeling I have now.

For the first three months I will be in Pre-Service Training, in-country experience, the last step to becoming a full-fledged volunteer. PST takes place in the "beautiful green and mountainous Plateau Region," according to Togo's country director. This thrills me.

What doesn't thrill me are the details. During the summer I read the first few chapters of Village of Waiting a book about a Peace Corps Volunteer's two years of service in Togo. Descriptions of service, or speaking exclusively in French or a rural language did not scare me. But when the author mentioned buying a stove, I freaked out. How do you buy a stove in Togo? I don't even know how to do that here.

Lists surround me. What to take, what to wear, what to say, how to act, where not to go at night. I've read everything they've given me, and forgotten it all. Cousin Jim, currently serving in Malawi, is my most reliable source of information. Unfortunately, I only hear from him once a month.

Andy and I were talking yesterday, drinking beer, waiting for Nick to finish mowing the lawn so we could play badminton. Our deck chairs were back from the neighbor's house, and the evening was light pink, dipping into the cool degrees. "It's not the friends like you I'm worried about," I told him. "But I'm so afraid of all the people I'll never talk to again." Such is the price, I guess, for this kind of experience.

That's not to say I'm having second thoughts about the whole thing. It is the singular thought in my mind, the only thing I can consider between those moments when I'm forced to listen to my co-workers (forced is a strong word; I like listening to them) or am watching Samurai Jack. Like the day I left for Wyoming two years ago, I know the moment will come when I realize, "I actually have to do this."

There is comfort in fear like this. In the film Tigerland, Colin Farrell's character says that true courage is knowing just how shit-scared you really are. I don't really think that going to Togo is courageous, but I am certainly proud of the fact that I can add "Joining the Peace Corps" to the list of things I said I'd do, and did, despite any reservations.

The fall is beginning. The air is still muggy, but the heat breaks sooner, and a long-sleeved shirt is a hug at night. Andy, Nick, and I play badminton, and the mosquitoes are only an afterthought. When the sun dips low, I pull my A2Z Ranch hat down to my eyebrows, and squint around the visor. I'm leaving this place, I think, sipping beer on the porch with Peppercorn in my lap. I wonder what the sunsets are like in Togo. I wonder if the air in the mountains is crisp and green, if the dew snaps off the grass like a bite into a cucumber. I am so happy that I get to find out.

Un Monde Sans Les Hommes (ou les femmes)

This here website's real cool.

Dark Humor

1. Half-naked and sweating, his body the pale almost-yellow of his Spongebob boxers, my father pleaded, through gasps and about-to-vomit gurgles, that I call the doctor who treated him in the ER on Friday. The secretary answered, and I asked for Sherry. "Hold please," she said. And while Dad begged for Dilaudin [sic?], or morphine, or a pistol, I listened to "I Will Survive," waiting for the doctor to pick up.

2. Nick and I were watching "TV's Funniest Moments," and had just finished laughing at number 2, the Family Guy song about the ridiculous censorship of the "Freakin' FCC," which won't allow the word "penis" on television. The last commercial before the show returned started with a black screen, and a close-up traveling shot down what looked like a thermometer. Digital music announced "The world's most advanced pregnancy test" while a virtual stream of urine slow-motioned onto the end of the stick.

My Jew*

His shoes were the color of his shorts, like they'd been washed in the same dust. They matched the tan of his legs. This made his socks, a rusty magenta, stand out. If I had to give you one reason why he seemed obscenely Jewish, I'd probably say the socks.

There is something about the supremely ethnic that dissuades stereotypical discrimination. Maybe it's that the supremely ethnic satisfy most of the criteria of the stereotype that attacking the person seems about as effective as assaulting a dolphin with a Super-Soaker.

I nodded, he nodded, the poofy mushroom of his hair moving independently of his head. "Nice socks," I said. He looked at his feet as if to say, "These old things?" and nodded at me again. Didn't stop. Half-smiled. I've seen him twice since.

Late afternoons of an Indiana summer are hot. The humidity eases off its midday peak like a beached whale being pushed into the ocean by the African Children's Choir. I usually see the strange-socked Jew around five or six, mostly near the library, on a corner between the two entrances that doesn't inform me if he's coming or going.

I make a right angle with the library, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, and the Post Office. Then over to 2nd Street, past the K & S Country Market, where I grab a 35 cent Faygo from the machine outside. Last summer its only company was a half-filled Coke vendor, with regular, Diet, and Sprite. They added an Adrenaline machine in late May. Adrenaline is an energy drink, each flavor named after a situation where somebody'd be likely to have a heroic 'rush.' My favorite is "Hip-Shot," though "Bungee Snap"'s berry flavor is nostalgic, with a taste like the fence where Grandma's vines twirled.

The sun doesn't really set till after eight, and the sky is light till around nine-thirty. Between six and seven-thirty the air is thick orange, a color I like to think is exclusively midwestern. It is early August now, which means leases are changing hands. It is difficult to determine who is moving in and who is moving out. The scents of marinated meat and ripe corn mix with the warm taste of charcoal in the air. In the last thirty minutes of daylight, I go running.

Despite the immunity of being supremely ethnic, I subject the Jew to private speculation. He's here for med school. Law school. Works for his father. I imagine his mother making matzo balls while asking why he never brings a nice girl home.

What would it take to know the Jew? I've never seen his eyes; he always wears long-lensed reflective sunglasses, the sporty kind that were big in the '90s. Somehow this confirms what the socks only hint at. I wonder if he ever recognizes me, or if the nods are just polite gestures toward a stranger.

A midwestern university town is a good place to live. A transient, impermanent student body allows for the distinct anonymity of a big city, while the small neighborhoods bordering farmland house the midwest's hospitable residents whom grandmas adore. I can be aloof without seeming queer, or I can be friendly without seeming handicapped. This duality often leads to having an Anonymous Friend, a person I see often enough to know**, but have never actually interfaced with. The Jew is my Anonymous Friend.

A commonly tricky relationship move is going from Friend to Lover or vice-versa. An equally common, but less acknowledged move is going from Anonymous Friend to Acquaintance to Friend. Acquaintanceship is never a desirable level. The Purgatory of human interaction, Acquaintanceship means you don't know a person well enough to care about him/her, but you know enough to have to pretend to.

After the run I walk through the park, counting fireflies***. The temperature is down to the 70s, and back at my subleased room the AC goes off, the window up. A fan is turned on, power level one. Crunches are done with shoes still on; dinner is cooked in nothing but shorts. I spend most of my waking hours in silence, as there is no one around to speak with. Aside from summer classmates, the Jew is the closest friend I have.

There is a definite difference between loneliness and solitude. Without reaching for a dictionary, I'd say intent is the dividing line. Loneliness falls upon a person, whereas solitude is his choice. The line is sometimes blurred, and staying in, reading, on a Friday night seems more like a capitulation to circumstance than a conscious choice.

There are many lonely people. The boom of virtual lives, of networking web sites, indicates a noticeable lack in interaction, not the other way around. They are empty plates on which we spill drips of ourselves trying to create desirable personae.

The Jew seems to be a complete person. I feel entirely removed from him, unable to identify in any way. I've never seen his favorite movies, never heard his favorite music, never listened to him explain his favorite books. I can't predict his tastes, whether right or wrong. Maybe this is what draws me to him.



*Most of this is made up, and, admittedly, incomplete.
**As in, during conversations when said person is mentioned, though you've never conversed, and have no biographical information w/r/t said person, you will inevitably say, "Hal? Goofy guy with mushroom hair? Yeah, I know him."
***Actually, I try to follow one firefly for fifty blinks.

Try Not to Take it So Hard

My teeth are sore in the mornings. Sometimes I remember dreams; starving, thirsty, my mouth unable to open. When nervous, I clack my teeth together, try to feel every protrusion as they slide into every groove. The tops are mostly flat.

Every dentist for the last five years has tried to sell me a mouthguard to wear while sleeping. No thank you, I say, that's all from when I was a kid. Honestly, as far as I can remember, my teeth have always been like this.

Mom says when I was young she could hear me grinding my teeth in my sleep. Molar on molar. The canines have remained untouched.

Is this nerves? I am frightened by the lock-jaw dreams. I wake up stressed, ill-rested, my face like the wrong end of a punch.

I was a paranoid child. Anxiety attacks occurred weekly, if not daily. We once ran out of gas on the way to soccer practice. No more than a half-mile from the Citgo, I wept in the back seat.

In fourth grade I asked to be sent home often. In junior high I would close my eyes and clench my hands, digging my nails into the palms, trying to feel what had just gone numb. Anxiety was a floating feeling; my limbs were skinny balloons. Eventually I learned how to stop the attacks through distraction. Nights now, when I feel one coming, the lights go on, a book is opened, no matter how tired I am. Eventually I pass out, and in the morning the pages are wet with drool.

For most anxious people, the very hint of a panic attack gives them the howling fantods. They have a strange thought, of something that, after several bad incidents, they now associate with panic. Then the fear of having a panic attack takes over. At that point, they're lost, stumbling to a corner to babble and hold onto the walls. Squinting eyes, touching the counters, reminding themselves that everything around them is real.

My panic attacks most likely started when I was eight. I can't say for sure when the first was, but my guess is the night I realized I was going to die. A world lit professor sophomore year of college told me the mid-20s are the years when most people understand the finality of their own mortality. So I was a little early. No real surprise. I'd gone fishing and learned how to ride a bike before my older brother.

I usually freak out while thinking about dying. It's like one of those shots you see in epic movies, where the camera focuses on a single leaf, then an entire forest, then a whole state/country, then a continent, the earth, the galaxy, infinity. It's like my head tries to fit the image of eternity inside. Everything explodes, and the attack lasts as long as it takes to glue the pieces back together. But I end up grinding away the top layer of my teeth.

Dostoevsky says that man is a constructive animal. We build staircases of knowledge, all going up, all without a destination. The closer we get to finishing our staircase, the more often we branch to the side, or double back on ourselves. For some reason, D says, man always avoids finishing his project.

Nietzsche believes that man searches for a meaning to his life. Nietzsche also says there is no meaning. Even a fly believes he is the center of the universe. When we die, we are forgotten, and eventually no one cares. I think this truth is what keeps us building our staircases forever. Who wants to finish at the door to that kind of knowledge? We tell ourselves everyday that we matter, that we exist for a reason. We invent gods and morality and laws; we procreate and do everything we can to survive. The inevitable question is Why? Nobody wants to hear that the answer is No Reason.

I'm not trying to be pretentious or didactic. I don't think I know any better about life than others. I want a purpose just as much as most people. I'd like god to come down and tell me there's a reason for everything that happens. I'm not saying there is one, but I hope like hell a universal truth exists. If you want to know how uneasy I am about the whole thing, just look at my teeth.

Double Whammy

Seriously, dumping toxic shit into a lake isn't cool. I myself have always been a fan of boycotting. Political activism doesn't have to be radical, reactionary, or hot-headed. So take fifteen seconds to fill out this boycott petition, and let's see what we can do.

Click Here to help Lake Michigan.

Help Lake Michigan

Click here to sign a petition against the proposed dumping of 6,500 pounds of harmful waste into Lake Michigan.

Singing Tesla Coil at Duckon 2007

The sounds are being made by the high voltage sparks. The Tesla coil was built by Steve Ward, a student at the University of Illinois.

Why Infinite Jest is the Most Brilliant Book You'll Ever Read

David Foster Wallace won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, the year after Infinite Jest was published. The M.F. is more commonly known as the 'Genius Grant.' DFW like deserves it.

Infinite Jest is 981 pages of narrative. Endnotes take the book to 1,079 pages. It is dense, highbrow, hilarious, and like heartbreaking.

The title comes from Hamlet, in relation to Poor Yorick, known well. In the novel, Infinite Jest is the name of the final film of James O. Incandenza, father of slowly unraveling protagonist Hal, seventeen-year old tennis/lexical wiz. The film is so entertaining it's like lethal. Anyone who sees it loses all interest in life, and wants only to see the film again. They will not eat, sleep, or get up to go to the bathroom. After several days, anyone who watches the movie dies of sleep/food deprivation, in a puddle of piss and a pile of shit, happy as a clown on stilts.

While initially confusing/off-putting due to the cut-and-paste timeline, the strange near-future world, and the myriad of characters, the novel carves for itself an emotional peg in your heart. Don Gately and Hal Incandenza are people whose lives I felt a need to witness.

The novel overflows with detail and verisimilitude, and the language is as tight as a well-strung tennis racket. I thought about the book daily. I dreamt about it. I traded sleep for reading time. I even missed class. The novel proved to be so entertaining that at times I would not stop to make dinner.

And when it was finished I wanted to start all over again. I reread the first three chapters, then collapsed with like exhaustion.

I'm sure most of you can see where I'm going with this. My point falls under the 'form = function' category. A novel about a movie so entertaining people watch it with zeal then re-watch it when done, is itself so entertaining that readers go through the same circle. Luckily, you won't like die.

Infinite Jest is genius. Not just an ego-satisfying think piece, it still has (so) much for the reader to consider. Not a mindless pleasure-filled bestseller, it still will make you laugh, and keep you in that strangely satisfying state of emotional suspense, like that feeling below your breastbone just before the roller-coaster falls. It is involved fiction. It was work for the author, and so it makes sense that the novel should be work for us, like, too.

Maps

Writing is a wild thing, for me. It's independent of me, a black-and-white jungle. Non-fiction interests me, but fiction intrigues me. Non-fiction can be creative, can be structurally unusual, but it is constrained, for the most part, by something we call the truth. Invention must be acknowledged, imagination is tongue-in-cheek*. But fiction is different. While the goal--imparting truth--is the same, the means of coming to it are as different as a lizard and a kangaroo in a sports coat. Non-fiction is crawling through the dense jungle seeking the light which means escape. Fiction is seeking the light by making the jungle more dense. Fiction is the piling on of untruths to get to the truth. Fiction is like being trapped in an oubliette; to escape we must build a ladder of shit.

I've always been a fan of the Modernists, for whom Truth, if it exists, can never be arrived at using language. There is no direct route with words. The road does not cease so much as fall off, like that illustration on the cover of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. So to inform you of their inability to inform you, the Modernists write, after declaring that writing is useless. This notion is oxymoronical. This notion is a cold-rain headache.

When I think about it, I feel lost. But if you wanted to know what I really meant by that, I'd have to tell you something completely different. Fiction writing is not saying, "I feel lost, and this is why," but "I feel unfound, and this is why not."

*Whatever that means.

Family Guy -

Je pense que c'est drôle.

Prison Thriller

The guy dressed as a chick weirds me out, and the ending looks like the beginning of a gang rape, but other than that, this video is pretty cool. I think we should start programs like this in all US prisons. Maybe they could do the Macarena.

Infinite Jest

Am currently reading Infinite Jest, DFW's leviathan novel. One of the funniest, most compelling books I've read in a long time. Keeps me up late, gives me headaches, rarely absent from my thoughts. I can't remember when reading a book has so consumed me. Three hundred forty-two plus pages in, yet I've got nearly seven hundred pages left to go. Thrilled.

I swear by God and sonny Jesus

In the past, I never cared for bloggers. Lonely, soft-skinned boys and middle-aged men, I thought, resigned to live out their days with online gaming and endless searches of obscure literary music blogs. While I see that this stereotype is not inclusive of all bloggers (though, undoubtedly, many), I still hold a distaste for the business in general.

Call me a hypocrite, I suppose, since I am now one of the legion of online writers from whom I choose to remain aloof.

The blogs I detest are those written by "anguished/suicidal" teens in tight black clothes listening to any number of cynical, ironic musicians (with whom I am so ill-acquainted that I can't even insert a band name). But if there is anything to be learned from all this Bible-reading I've been doing lately, it's that I am in no place to judge the people I make fun of. And, more importantly, I should make all effort to be kind to those whom I would sooner cast-off.

I don't want anyone to get confused with my mentioning the Bible in this post and Jesus in an earlier post. I am not a Christian. I cannot convincingly say that Jesus was the Christ or divine in any way, because I believe that his divinity/non-divinity is totally irrelevant in regards to his impact, both in his time and in ours. The only time his divinity is necessary is when you try to support the concepts of Heaven and Hell and the Eternal Afterlife. Since I don't believe in those things, Jesus can just be Jesus.

What I've come across while reading the gospels is an inconsistency in Jesus, and a frustrating ambiguity in some of his parables/exhortations. Like in Luke 14:26, when he says, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." I assume he's trying to be a dick on purpose, to drive his point home: because all energy must be devoted to God, none can be devoted to earthly possessions or relations; these fade, and will one day end, whereas God will not.

Even if I did believe in Heaven, I wouldn't agree with Luke 14:26. My general belief is that God doesn't create anything without a purpose. I conclude from this that everything must be valuable. Therefore, my father and mother, etc. are incredibly valuable, and, as products of God, deserve any kind of love I want to give them. Even if their only value is in getting me to the afterlife, why can't I love them? It doesn't add up to me. And I don't want to hear any Christians retaliate with, "God's plans don't have to add up to you, for humans will never understand him." I can't imagine that a god would give us minds and logic and deductive reasoning and free will if he intended for us to be fooled by them persistently, even if he more closely resembled Descartes' Evil Genius than the universally accepted concept of the eternally beneficent God.

But my gospel experience isn't all negative; it isn't even mostly negative. Jesus was a man trying to affect people in an incredibly significant manner. I can understand if he was moved to extremism every now and then. I just wish he had had the foresight to see what kind of extremism that would breed in followers throughout the years, who lacked the capacity to understand his most important teaching, to use it as a check in regards to their own dogma: question the authority surrounding you.

I don't understand how a religion based upon a man who openly defied the leaders of his own faith can be followed by people who, for the most part, refuse to question the words and actions of their religious leaders.

My favorite teaching so far in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (I haven't gotten to John yet) is the concept of loving your enemy. Since I'm on Luke, and since the gospels all repeat each other, I won't bother to quote from more than one source. Here's Luke 6:32 - "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them." In case it isn't obvious, the main theme surrounding Jesus' teachings and death is Sacrifice. Your comforts, your wealth, your family, your body, your Life, amongst other things. If we expect to be good, if we expect to be rewarded, we must sacrifice our pride and our prejudice, and maybe even our safety, so that we might extend our hand to those who would strike it down. I think this teaching gets ignored all the time, and yet it's the most important thing Jesus says. It's so much more than love those who hate you. It's love those who are indifferent towards you, who reject you, who would punish you, and who simply are not like you. This love leads to understanding, of the differences amongst us, and of the similarities we share in spite of those differences. A good Christian is no different from a good Muslim. Both seek righteousness and a reward in the afterlife. In the same vein, a radical evangelist is no different from an Islamic fundamentalist. Both are violent in their beliefs, and ignorant as to the true virtues they claim to possess or extol. Both disgust me equally. Yet I'm doing my best to love them.

Another important teaching is altruism. I can't remember where it is, so I can't quote, but basically Jesus says that when you perform a good deed with no expectation of reward, you will be more blessed than those who seek something in return. What's interesting, though, is that Jesus is giving this advice to people who are going to follow it because they believe it will help get them into Heaven. If the expectation of an eternal afterlife isn't the expectation of a reward, then I don't know what is. How would Jesus explain this catch-22? I have no idea. But the reason I mention it is because I saw a sign on a church the other day that said, "Even if God doesn't exist, do you really want to take that chance?" I thought, "Great. Now religion is nothing more than a contingency plan." I don't know why I said "now," it's been like that since it began.

Who becomes a Christian because being Christian enables them to be good to others? No one. If you become a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or whatever, you do so because you don't want to be left behind when you die. You can't stand the thought of your own insignificance and oblivion. So you join a group that promises an eternal Red Carpet Club, and you pay your dues in good deeds. I'd say the most virtuous man on earth is the kind atheist. Every good deed he does is for, at most, the person he helps and his own conscience (provided he's not expecting the favor to be returned).

So put that in your bread and leaven it.

Shiny Rocks

Diamonds are shiny rocks. They only have value because women, for some reason, are attracted to shiny objects.

Read This

I'm a link. Click me for something worth two minutes of your time.

Stunning

This is cool.

men in toilet

Funny.

Mankind, pt. 1

After a while, you have to wonder whether all that tension between Israel and Palestine is religious in nature anymore. You ask yourself if anybody is actually following an ideology, or if they’re simply doing everything they can to deny the other side what they want. Why, when seeking autonomy, does one group wish to deny the same thing to others? That’s like when people who have been discriminated against pass that discrimination onto somebody else. Everybody must establish themselves above others, it seems. But that makes no sense to you. Someone who has experienced discrimination knows how awful it is, and should therefore not want to subject others to that kind of treatment. It seems that the concern is always for the individual, though. A man hates to be derided, but does not care a whit if others are derided. Man’s basic instinct is hypocrisy, because man cares not for the well-being of others while he is comfortable.

I’ve thought about Jesus, and the whole Lamb of God thing. He was the shepherd, too, right? How can he be the sacrificial lamb as well as the one guiding the lamb to the sacrifice? I think that it’s possible because every one of us is simultaneously sheep and shepherd. We are the shepherds of our own lives, yet we are part of the flock of mankind. It is our responsibility, as shepherds, to guide our fellow human beings when they err, but it is our privilege, as sheep, to be able to rely on others to help us when we are lost as well.

As a former wrestler, and as a writer, one who thinks in metaphor and symbols, I see that wrestling, as a team sport, is the perfect analogy for humanity. During an individual’s match, it is solely up to the individual to win. Yet his skill level, and even his drive for victory, is a direct result of the interactions in the practice room with his teammates. Also, for those that don’t know wrestling, each individual match contributes a certain number of points to the team, depending on the outcome. A loss, of course, contributes nothing. A decision, a win where the margin of victory is less than 8 points, gives the team 3 points. A major decision, where the margin of victory is between 8 and 14 points, gives the team 4 points. A technical fall, where the match is stopped because one individual has outscored the opponent by 15 (or more) points, gives the team 5. A pin, forfeit, or disqualification (those should be self-explanatory) give the team 6 points.

There have been many situations in my experience where the outcome of a meet rested upon an individual match. I think that we (Carmel) once beat Portage by one point. I don’t remember the matches exactly, but if one of our guys had only gotten a decision instead of a major decision, we would have ended in a tie. So, while each match is up to the individual, the individual’s performance in that match affects his entire team, and the context of the match (i.e., you're the last match, and your team is behind by five points) will influence how you wrestle, and the outcome you seek. I loved to tech. fall people, and rarely went for the pin; but if my team was behind by five, I would adjust my style during the match so that I could pin my opponent and win the meet.

The same can be said for society. This is simply another way of describing that thing from A Beautiful Mind, when Nash declares that Adam Smith was incorrect. You get the best results, Nash says, not by doing what is best for the individual, but by doing what is best for the individual in the context of what is best for the group.

Hamas Captured Gaza

How many of you have heard about the capture of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the radical Muslim political party in Palestine? It happened on June 15. Hamas has forced Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas into the West Bank, where he has promised to set up an emergency government. He 'fired' Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, putting in his place Salam Fayyad, an economist who's spent most of his adult life in the US. Nevertheless, Abbas' actions will likely have little impact. Even before Hamas seized the Gaza Strip, Abbas, leader of the rival Fatah group, was seen as a weak leader. Hamas has ignored Haniyeh's 'dismissal.'

On Wednesday, Israeli troops raided Gaza City, killing at least twelve, in what has been the bloodiest fighting since the Hamas takeover. President Abbas condemned Israel's actions, while also condemning the agressions of Hamas, which, since the takeover, has fired five rockets and three mortar rounds into Israel.

For more information on the rise of Hamas, read this article.

European Racism

Think racism is a concern of the past? Watch this. And don't just dismiss it as a soccer thing, or a European thing.

POUND (a short film by Evan Bernard)

I remember doing this in elementary school. My friend Sullivan Kahn and I had a really elaborate one worked out.

Videos are Great! Watch this.

Triumph Insult Comic Dog - Star Wars Nerds Movie Premiere

Add to My Profile | More Videos

found this on another blog

Children

I'm amazed at the number of blogs on blogspot devoted to the blogger's child/children.

"Today, little Tate, Jr. Threw Up..."

What the fuck?

On and On

Please don't cry
We're designed to die

-Wilco

Isn't that weird? As soon as we're born, every minute is one closer to being dead. Is that a pessimistic perspective? Or a realistic one?

Book Review

Here is a book review I wrote for Blogger News Network.

By the mid 1950s Ray Bradbury had established himself as a premier science-fiction writer. The success of The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) had seemingly launched his career in that direction. But in 1957 Bradbury released the novel Dandelion Wine, an homage to youth, innocence, and belief, whose only fantastical elements are strictly in the minds of the young protagonist and his friends.

Dandelion Wine is a semi-autobiographical novel set in Green Town, Illinois, a loosely veiled mask for Waukegon, where Bradbury was born. It centers around the summer exploits of Douglas Spaulding, a twelve-year old with the energy of a lightning bolt. In 1974, Bradbury wrote the essay “Just This Side of Byzantium,” which became an introduction for new editions of the book. In the essay he reveals that Doug is based on himself, and Tom, Doug’s ten-year old brother, is based on Bradbury’s brother, and that John Huff, one of Doug’s best friends, was a real person (named John Huff).

The book takes place during the summer of 1928. The summer truly begins for Doug while picking wild grapes with his father and brother. During the course of their outing, Doug feels “a vast tidal wave lift up behind the forest.” When it crashes, Douglas Spaulding realizes for the first time that he is alive.

The plot of the novel isn’t entirely linear from that point on, but this isn’t a detriment. At times the book seems more like a collection of interrelated stories than one cohesive novel, and indeed, many chapters were previously published as short stories. Each chapter (or group of chapters) deals with the various goings-on of the people of Green Town. There’s Leo Auffmann, happily married father of six, who builds a happiness machine with unforeseen consequences. There’s old Mrs. Bentley, who realizes what it means to be old. There’s the heartbreaking love between Helen Loomis, 95, and Bill Forrester, 31. There’s old Colonel Freeleigh, the human time machine. There’s Lavinia Nebbs and the Lonely One. There’s Miss Fern, Miss Roberta, and the Green Machine. All the happenings of summer, to which Doug is a proud and grateful witness.

For those that dislike too much happiness, Bradbury balances all this joy with an appropriate amount of sadness. After all, a novel about life could not be complete if it did not also address death. While Doug gains awareness of his life, he also loses things which have made that life beautiful. Friends move away, loved ones die. Doug even sees the strangled corpse of a woman, latest victim to the town menace, the Lonely One. These events build up, and by the end of the book, Doug has a realization equal to his life-affirming epiphany in the beginning. Douglas Spaulding, 12 years old, will someday have to die, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Style-wise, Bradbury couldn’t have written a more fitting book, in terms of relating the content to the theme. Doug is alive, for the first time, for a limited amount of time, and because he knows it he never wants to take that for granted again. He has a nickel tablet and a yellow Ticonderoga pencil with which he keeps meticulous record of his summer. Because of this, Bradbury’s always keen eye for detail shines forth like the light from a firefly lamp. He can masterfully set up a scene:

“He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked on the calendar on the wall…. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock.”

Or he can describe something like the Green Machine in painfully beautiful simile:

“It glided. It whispered, an ocean breeze. Delicate as maple leaves, fresher than creek water, it purred with the majesty of cats prowling the noontide…. The machine, with a rubber tread, soft, shrewd, whipped up their scalded white sidewalk, whirred to the lowest porch step, twirled, stopped.”

He even made my mouth water:

” ‘Green Dusk for Dreaming Brand Pure Northern Air,‘ he read. ‘Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April, 1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one day in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.’”

Throughout the book, the prose never relaxes its grip on detail and imagery. And when combined with the joys of summer and the heartbreaks of life, seen through the eyes of a boy who wants so badly for things to be beautiful and perfect, but who realizes that sometimes life is beyond his control, you have a novel about growing up that never seems contrived, that never panders to cuteness or gimmick. You have a novel that resonates long after you put it down. If you haven’t experienced summer yet, you must pick up this book.

Hemingway

"Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action."
-Papa

Science!

Learning is the new underage drinking. Everybody's doing it.

Click Me!

Academic Freedom

Below is a link for an article at Inside Higher Ed about Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who made a lot of people angry when he said that the 9/11 victims were "little Eichmanns." He's recently been found to be "academically dishonest," and this article is a good starting point for a discussion on the nature of "Academic Freedom." I suggest that everybody read this article (it's not too long, don't let the small scroll bar fool you).

Academic Freedom Needs Defending -- From Ward Churchill

Blogger News Network

I'm writing news articles and book/music reviews for Blogger News Network. The more people visit the site, the more money me and other writers make. So check it out.

www.bloggernews.net

My Knife - A True Story, Part 1

I've got this knife, a springy Kershaw blade of stainless steel. There are small chips in the smooth part of the blade; the serrated half looks like two McDonald's bat puppets from commercials in my youth. I found the blade half-hidden in dirt on the corner of Gilbert and Greenwood. Thanks to the knife, I no longer had to use my Buck tool to cut the baling twine around the hay; the Buck tool required two hands, and often times gloves had to be taken off, which was digital (as in fingers) suicide during the winter. But the knife, the knife was wonderful.

Growing up I had lots of knives. Dad used to give them to my brother and I, and we'd whittle a few sticks till they were pointy enough to slide through marshmallows with little resistance, then the knives would sit in our desk drawers until a neighbor got one and told us how cool it was. We even bought pocket knives in Italy once, with an engraving of a gondola ride on the side. I traded that knife to my friend Peter, but I don't remember what I got in return.

The only time I'd ever seriously used a knife before the stable was my summer on the ranch in Wyoming. After seeing how often Vern and Newt used their blades, I went into Cody on a day off. The Yellowstone gift shop was having a special on knives that day, two for one. The first one had a gray rubber handle that curved like a banana, the second had a thick black rubber handle and a blade as tall (from keen side to dull side) as half my palm. I think they cost me nine dollars.

The first blade fell apart quickly thanks to a loose screw that had lost the thread. The second blade, the thick one, became my partner during those days on the ranch. The knife acted as blade, saw, screwdriver, scraper, shovel, and nail cleaner, and once or twice I used it to scrape a splinter out of my thumb. The days spent entirely on the lawn mower were filled with thoughts of how to kill a bear if I had the bad luck to run into one with no weapon but that knife.

I lost that blade shortly after returning from Wyoming. It was the first of many losses that would take me farther and farther from the ranch, and from the best summer I'd ever had.

Rube Goldberg

I was supposed to leave for Carmel at two, but the Nintendo emulator I just downloaded has kept me distracted. I have five levels of Kung Fu to play, and they won't beat themselves.

It was three-thirty before I saw a clock again, and If I'd left then I would have hit rush-hour traffic on 465. Indianapolis is a meager traffic town compared to what I've seen in Chicago and New York, but still, if I can avoid it, why not?

Most of my days involve planning like this. Set the alarm for seven, wake up at eight, study till nine, shower and breakfast till ten, walk to class and in the door by ten-twenty. Since I have no job, anything after class ends does not require structure, and I fill the time with emulators, books, and the occasional hard run.

But there are bigger things than just my days. There's the coordination of my future at stake, and in my mind it's all a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Rube Goldberg machines, for those that don't know, are those really complex devices that cartoon characters build to scramble eggs, or pour pancakes, or flip a light-switch. If there is anything out of place, the objective isn't achieved. The candle has to burst just under the balloon, the brick has to land right on the catapult, the parachute must carry the scissors right across the fishing line. And if everything works, your shoes get tied.

My objective is the Peace Corps. Specifically, my objective during these last few months in the United States, is to ensure that I am actually leaving for Africa. To do this I've had to schedule doctor appointments, get blood work, have cavities filled, obtain an eyeglass prescription, send in reimbursement forms. On top of that I have to finally get my diploma, a task which has brought me to IU, taking two French classes, in which I can get no lower than a C (B- right now in F200, we'll see what happens when the final's graded). When the second session finishes on August 10th, I'll have fourteen days to transfer my credits and get my diploma. This, of course, is assuming I'm definitely leaving, and I can't definitely leave until I get this stuff taken care of.

I was just on the verge of writing, "When did my life become like this? Hinting of serious responsibility?" I'm glad I didn't, because I hate questions like that. Another thing I don't like is when people say they need a vacation from their lives. I'm reading Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez right now, and one thing he mentions before he and his shipmates cast off is that so many people stand on the dock with this look of envy in their eyes. They are saying, "My life is nothing but boredom, and I wish I were going with you." Steinbeck says that these people are fools, because a bored man is bored everywhere. If you feel victimized by your life, do not blame the circumstances, blame how you've reacted to them.

I understand that that's an easy thing for someone like me to say. I've not gone bankrupt, or had a drug problem, or grown up in a dysfunctional environment; but I've known people who have, and those kinds of people can be divided into two categories: those that blame the state of their lives on their problems, and those that leave their problems behind and take responsibility for themselves.

I won't give away any names, but two women I've dated have had undesirable childhoods. Absent, abusive, or unfaithful fathers, discrimination, poverty. You name it. All the ingredients for a best-selling memoir. I won't go into any details either, but each girl takes a different approach to the Rube Goldberg machines of their lives; one has modified a flawed design, while the other designs around the flaw.

I wrote in an earlier post about Ulysses that, thanks to language, every man is an artist. One could say that every man is also an inventor. Our lives rest upon a Lego-block foundation built in childhood. Sometimes the foundation is unsound, and it is up to the inventor to build his machine to accommodate those weaknesses. Some machines are simpler than others, and some never reach the main objective. Some build machines all their lives, hoping an objective will eventually be discovered. I feel like I'm building many small machines that will someday be connected. Years ago, the machine took me to Wyoming. Another machine made me fall in love. Now, I'm trying to get to Africa, and I feel like I'll be building this damn thing up to the day I leave. But I don't mind. I like to invent. It gives me something to fill the days.

Jesus of Montreal

This movie came out in 1989, but I've just watched it for the first time this afternoon. It's stunning. You should watch it now. For anybody that has any interest in truth, the purpose of life, Christianity as a religion, or Christianity as a (more) modern mythology, you need to see this.

Morality

Sometimes I wonder if morality is nothing more than not acting on our impulses. I've just finished The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck's last novel. The main character is Ethan Allen Hawley, a man of integrity, whose honesty has prevented him from receiving the wealth that people have offered him. Yet a bribe he refused in the beginning is accepted at the end, and Hawley's deceits are at times nothing short of betrayal (or even murder, in a way, in the case of his friend Danny Taylor). It was Hawley's intention to rob the bank behind the grocery store he clerks, but his plans are compromised, not by his own integrity, but rather by an honest act performed by his boss Marullo, who is being deported, and whose deportation he owes to none other than Hawley. A government man comes to tell Hawley that Marullo is giving him the store. Because Hawley is a good man. An honest man, the government agent repeats several times. And here he was about to rob a bank. The only thing that kept his morality intact, in that specific instance, was his immorality in another instance.

I was talking to Laura yesterday, or maybe it was Scott, about how I sometimes consider myself a bad person for the thoughts I have. Oh, the people I'd love to swindle, back stab, cheat. But I never do it. So is morality noble thought or simply noble action? And is noble action really action, or simply the passivity of one lacking the guts to follow his impulses?

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), the government has solved the problem of dishonesty and emotion and passion by 1) strict conditioning, and 2) allowing the masses to indulge in their every impulse. The conditioning is essential to keeping part 2 from exploding into chaos, because people are conditioned to only have certain impulses, depending on their caste. In this world, orgies are condoned and monogamy criminalized. For them, morality is based on impulse.

I think it is generally considered that an essential part of morality is honesty. Honesty is generally advocated as, not only the telling of truths, but also of "being true to oneself," of not allowing the wishes or actions of others to shape you into a person you don't want to be. But how can we be true to ourselves if we don't follow our impulses? By denying the things we want we are allowing ourselves to be shaped by the majority vote of society, whose morals are drawn from nothing more than tradition, which is a proud way of saying the consensus of the powerful. It seems, then, that we have two choices: be honest, or be moral. But never the twain shall meet.

Wilco

Read reviews of Sky Blue Sky here.

Mine will be up soon.

John Steinbeck, voice of warm sand and chewed-up glass

It was my intent, after finishing Ulysses (and then Brave New World, which I'll write about later), to pick up Dave Eggers' What is the What, which I'd started reading in January while Grandma was dying. I couldn't get into it then, but thought that was just a result of reading it in hospice. Well, I opened it on Tuesday, and have advanced from page 86, where I'd left off, to page 122. Not bad, though since Tuesday I've also started and finished Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and John Steinbeck's 1942 novel The Moon is Down, a total of 467 pages.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was good, but not remarkable. A funny book, Vonnegut states the moral as often as he lights up his Pall Malls. While enjoyable, there is no surprise, and the ending feels abrupt. Nonetheless, I wish I could write like Vonnegut.

What I really want to talk about is John Steinbeck. Not only The Moon is Down, but the man in general. I guess it's fitting that I mentioned Vonnegut, because, while Vonnegut is the most famous humanist in contemporary literature, Steinbeck was no slouch when it came to believing in mankind. But where Vonnegut's humanism is slightly sarcastic and blatantly realistic (mankind's repeated failures don't surprise him), Steinbeck maintained an incredibly passionate, idealistic sense of what it meant to be human. Both believed that mankind was deeply flawed, but while I get the feeling that Vonnegut was resigned to these flaws, Steinbeck thought that man had the ability to save himself. He was a strong proponent of independent thought, of the arts, of writing, and of his writing. To say that he believed in his writing is not to say he was an egoist. I think Mr. Steinbeck says it best:

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

My ex-girlfriend believes I'm an incredibly arrogant asshole. One of the reasons is because I really want to write something that significantly impacts people. She probably thinks I want this because impact means fame, which means lots of people will claim to like me and lots of women will sleep with me because I'll be rich. No. I just want to be able to affect people the way I have been affected by literature. I think this is exactly the motive that Steinbeck had as well.

A collection of his journalism and selected non-fiction, America and Americans, is divided into sections based upon subject matter. In the intro to the miscellaneous section, the editors remark that Steinbeck "loved to address his prose to a particular audience...." Much of his Vietnam journalism comes in the form of letters to a woman named Alicia. Who she is, I don't know. An actual person, or simply a name to put on a paper, it doesn't matter. So many writers, usually pricks, say that they write only for themselves, and that writing for anyone else isn't as noble or pure; it is artistic compromise. But those are the kinds of writers who roll their own cigarettes for style, wear sunglasses in the dark, drink red wine and praise Nietzsche without having read him. I don't see how anyone can consider himself a writer, or at least how a writer can desire to be published, if he doesn't believe he has something to share with others.

I read The Moon is Down in two hours, no kidding. Only 188 pages, but I was still proud of myself. The book is about hope, perseverance, never giving up, even in the face of great odds. Sounds cliché, but Steinbeck succeeds with this theme where a weaker writer might fail. Read this book and tell me if you ever see the author in it. Steinbeck's style is there, but in no way would you imagine him sitting down telling this story, whereas, with Vonnegut for example, it is easy to see that Vonnegut is pleading through his characters. The Moon is Down is like a Gus Van Sant movie; detached from the text, the camera simply floats, and does not judge. This detachment allows the characters to be completely independent, actual beings in an actual world, and not the product of someone's thoughts. You might call this believability the 'ficitonal dream.' Never once does Steinbeck break from it.

The point of view is third-person omniscient. Though it stays fairly objective throughout, occasionally the narrative dips into internal monologue, and it does this for multiple characters. It would be safer to call it third-person objective with forays into omniscience. This narration allows for every character to be a human being. The reader can sympathize just as much with the invading army as with the conquered villagers. Mayor Orden and Colonel Lanser, though enemies by circumstance, are emotional equals. Even Captain Loft, the easiest to hate, is a human with needs and desires and vulnerabilities.

This novel is also a wonderful example of an essential setting. Thematically, it could take place anywhere, because mankind shares a certain kind of spirit. Nonetheless, Steinbeck pays careful attention to the layout of the town. The winter backdrop is fitting to the cold emotions between the army and the citizens. And what better setting for the low point of man, war, than the low point of the year, when all is dark, cold, wet, drab? And what better metaphor for the eternal shine of human hope than snow, which falls pure, and glints just as well at the height of day as it does in moonlight?

The more I want to say abou this novel, the less I can think to write. Read it. It is not a demanding book. Never does Steinbeck ask you for your understanding or your interest. He simply presents a story to you. But the story is like a lone bird flying into a storm; you can't help but to care for it, and be moved.

Dispatches From Iraq

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is an all-around great website, but these are a few of my favorite things. Check out Dispatches from Iraq first, as Roland Thompson just posted another one today.

Dispatches From Iraq
Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University
Philip Graham Spends a Year in Lisbon

What do you think? Right or Wrong way to protest?

Read this.

Ulysses

I've finished Ulysses. Conquered the beast in less than a year, which I consider pretty good, since nine months of school interrupted the initial reading with the final sprint to the end.

I'd like to tell you that things are clearer for me now, that I understand the world on a different level, that there are things I know now, things you need to know. But I'm as confused as when I started.

While doing some very minor research, I found a short summary of each of the chapters on Wikipedia. And truly, in eighteen short paragraphs they were able to tell me just what the fuck I'd been reading about for 783 pages. The only thing I really take from reading Ulysses is that James Joyce was a genius.

For example, episode 14 takes place in a maternity hospital where the character Mina Purefoy is giving birth. So here's what Joyce did:

"Joyce organized this chapter as three sections divided into nine total subsections, representing the trimesters and months of gestation.

This extremely complex chapter can be further broken down structurally. It consists of sixty paragraphs. The first ten paragraphs are parodies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon language, the two major predecessors to the English language, and can be seen as intercourse and conception. The next forty paragraphs, representing the 40 weeks of gestation in human embryonic development, begin with Middle English satires, the earliest form of English; they move chronologically forward through the various styles mentioned above. At the end of the fiftieth paragraph, the baby in the maternity hospital is born, and the final ten paragraphs are the child, combining all the different forms of slang and street English that were spoken in Dublin in the early part of the 20th century" (Wikipedia).

Joyce was a master of languages, fluent in (at least) English, French, Italian, and Latin. My guess is he probably knew Irish, German, and Greek as well, amongst others. His final novel, Finnegans Wake, which will be my next major undertaking as a reader, supposedly combines over 100 different languages in various forms. When asked the point of Finnegans Wake, Joyce responded by saying, "It's supposed to make you laugh." The same can easily be said for Ulysses, which, if nothing else, is wretchedly amusing on a strictly language level.

But why is that significant, the language? Novels are supposed to have plot, a beginning, middle, and end that makes sense, that leaves us with a feeling of some kind of change, whether physically or emotionally. Right?

Remember, while Ulysses is considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time, it is also considered "one of the most important works of Modernist literature" (Wikipedia, emphasis added). One of the major tenets of Modernism was that language is an insufficient form of communication. Language would never get us closer to a higher truth; in fact, it might even take us further away from it.

Ulysses can be seen as the prose equivalent of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, an incredibly beautiful, and almost as incomprehensible poem. When I studied The Waste Land in American Literature, I learned that Eliot wrote the poem almost as a challenge to people who felt that language could communicate truth. Every section is Eliot saying, "This is how I feel. Can you understand that? Of course not. But I'll try again." It is the use of precise imagery and figurative language to show that, while those things might produce a relatively specific image, they give you no insight into the nature of truth, whether that truth be universal, or personal. We can never understand another's emotions, no matter how similar our life experiences are; neither can we understand the universe, if there is anything to understand.

What Joyce does is slightly different. While arguably as well-educated as Eliot, Joyce wasn't quite the snob that Eliot was. When he looked at the insufficiency of language, he didn't despair, he laughed. And why shouldn't he? Just think of how many languages exist in this world. None are any closer to the truth than others, and for something that is supposed to bring people together, language, on a global scale, actually serves to separate people of different cultures. It's absurd. And since there's nothing we can do about it, we might as well laugh about it.

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," (1946) George Orwell talks about how convoluted language has become:

"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

Joyce does this same kind of thing in Ulysses. Here's how he describes Leopold Bloom undressing:

"He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hair extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae, thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete."

Language is supposed to be specific, and this passage is very specific. Yet specificity is supposed to bring clear meaning to an idea, and this passage is rendered nearly incomprehensible by its specificity. As an English major, and simply as someone who enjoys the complexities of language, I can appreciate the irony. For Joyce, who knew so much about so many languages, it's easy to see why he had so much fun lampooning this kind of specificity and complexity.

After reading the summary on Wikipedia, I said, "Joyce was a genius." Laura was with me, and asked, "But is it really genius if nobody can understand it?" I'd say that's a pretty good question, but the answer is simple: of course.

Vincent Van Gogh is considered by pretty much everyone to be an artistic genius. Yet in his lifetime he never sold a single painting. Nobody understood him either, but Laura had to admit that yes, he was a genius. Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man, yet I don't know enough math or theory to understand anything that he's talking about. The difference with Van Gogh and Stephen Hawking, though, is that most people know what they were/are trying to do with their art (yes, theoretical astrophysics - and all mathematics - is an art). With Joyce, or with language in general, people don't consider the art behind it. Not everybody can paint, nor can everybody understand the kind of math Hawking does, but everybody understands some kind of language. Because of this, language is dismissed as an art form.

That's why the only people who love Ulysses are scholars and critics and writers like me. That's why the bestseller lists are filled with books by James Patterson and Dean Koontz and David Baldacci. Books driven by plot. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, the end. Events. Occurrences. Those are what matter to people, while language takes a backseat.

Yet for me and my fellow writing students, Language is part of the triumvirate of a good story, the other two branches being Plot and Theme. And just like a three-legged stool, a good story cannot stand without all three legs. But, apparently, a story does not have to stand in order to sell.

Ulysses has all three legs. There is a plot, no matter how complicated it seems, and there is a theme, no matter how dubious or ambivalent it may be. But the real thrill of Ulysses, the reason it is still in print, is still the unbending idol of incredible literature, is because it takes language on its own unbelievable odyssey. That's a trip everybody should be willing to take at least once in their lives. Like I said before, everybody speaks a language. Therefore, in some way, we are all artists. While we may not be able to paint a still-life, or solve complex equations, we can all take ideas floating around inside our head and condense them into words. Every single day, with every word we speak, we are creating an image. Every time I say "tree,' I'm drawing you a picture. But common language, i.e. communication, is nothing more than drawing upon the pool of images that have a universal resonance. But the words "tree," or "cup," or "panther," are just monotonous whispers compared to the shouts that good language is able to accomplish. And Ulysses is the longest, loudest scream I've ever heard. It's difficult, almost painful, but god is it refreshing; like jumping in a lake in winter, it turns your insides to glass, stops your heart, and lets you know the pleasing shock of something you've never felt before.

Waiting

It is hot now in Indiana. Beginning around ten in the morning and not breaking until well after midnight, the heat sits upon everything as the sweat sits upon the foreheads and upper lips of the people I see. The window-unit AC stays off, and I suffer the nights beneath one thin sheet, the window open, a fan humming at its slowest speed. Getting ready for Africa, I tell myself; I lose the last of my clothing and kick off the sheet.

There is too much time to wait. Insurance company mistakes have once again postponed my required dental work, which means that my invitation (and therefore definitive statement of departure) for Africa remains in limbo. A job interview yesterday yielded only the possibility of a drug test, which they'll let me know about in a week. And I've been summoned for jury duty, but that, too, will have to wait.

Right now I'm killing time waiting for a friend to arrive to spend the weekend here. I've spent all day waiting, walking twice to the post office to send out: check for utilities, check for rent, juror questionnaire and reasons why I can't serve during the term specified by the US District Court. I've gone to the library, two computer labs, and walked past the same newspaper racks, restaurants, and bookstores at least three times. My armpits have been damp since I stepped out the door.

Times like these not even music will cheer me up.

In Ulysses, which I am so close to finishing it's almost frustrating, Leopold Bloom, or the narrator, or whoever it is, mentions that, in a life aged 70 years, 20 are spent in sleep. That's 2/7 of an individual's life spent sleeping. The longer you live, the greater the fraction becomes. I've even heard that 1/3 of our lives is spent in a somnolent state. These figures don't bother me so much, because I like sleep, and, while glancing through a random book at the little cornershop on Kirkland today, I learned that sleep is more important than food when it comes to a person's health.

What bothers me is the waiting. How much life do we spend doing that?

Here's what I did yesterday:
1000: woke up, performed waking duties, i.e., urination, cleansification, food-preparation, mastication
1045 - 1300: waited to go to dentist; filled time with: dog-playing, book-reading, tan-getting, mail-retreiving, newspaper-perusing
1300 - 1330: drove to dentist's office
1330 - 1340: waited for dentist to announce name, upon which speaking of said surname, was informed that insurance company, i.e. Aetna, had chosen to drop us at some point in the two-and-a-half (2.5) weeks since I'd been there last
1340 - 1342: punch car in frustration
1342-1346: drive to local location of secondary education
1346-1350: wander through halls in search of paterfamilias
1350 - 1403: explain to padre the gist of what hath gone down
1403 - 1427: immemorable
1427 - 1600: drove to Bloomington
1600 - 1800: waited for job interview
1800 - 1822: drove to job interview
1822 - 1846: filled out another application, pre-employment survey, laughed
1846 - 1900: person-to-person interview
1900: told to wait another week
1901 - 300: waited for sleep

What was accomplished? Some money was spent, some gas was wasted. All debits, no credits. And still, I wait.

And once I do get a job, once I get my teeth fixed, once I graduate, once I go to Africa, won't I still be waiting? For lunch, for dinner, for another drink, for something exciting, for a night with a woman, for what's next? And when I get to what's next, then what?

My grandma lost two husbands in her lifetime. Grandpa Buck in 1984, Jerry in either 2003 or 2004, I can't remember. She wasn't left with nothing, but she'd lost so much. All that came next was more cancer, the usual Christmas celebrations, a surgery or two, chemo, again and again. I would visit her as often as I could, because she was my grandma, and I loved her more than I've ever loved another human being. We would sit, first in the house I'd always known, her house, Grandma's house, and then in the condo her children picked out for her when it was decided that Montpelier was too far from Toledo, that the five acres and the basement stairs were too much for an 81-year old woman. We would play cribbage on the back-porch of her house while corn sizzled in butter and aluminum foil, or in the sunroom of the condo, watching her neighbors move in and out of their garages, or trying to spot hummingbirds, the occasional American goldfinch. It was our way of waiting. For dinner, for dark, when we'd put on the Dean Martin tapes, or for bed, when she'd kiss me goodnight, and I'd watch her walk to her room, floating inside a nightgown, her bones and skin no more than a collection of marrow and dust. She was so tiny, so old and weak, so much in pain, so tired. I would lie awake at night wondering if she was waiting to die.

And then we were told, for the fourth time, that Grandma had cancer. Was it before she went to Florida? It must have been. But while there, visiting Aunt Teeny, Grandma was taken to the hospital. Fluid in her lungs. Totally incoherent. Falling fast. Uncle Pete and Aunt Denise flew down to Florida, spoke with the doctors, and decided to hire an Air Ambulance, a small private jet to fly Grandma back to Toledo.

An Air Ambulance is not cheap. Luckily, the doctor at St. Luke's agreed to accept the transfer, and arrangements were made. The nurses and doctors in Florida were being difficult, saying little to my aunt and uncle, shooting patronizing looks of pity towards them, repeating, over and over, that what they were doing was very expensive. Aunt Denise, nearly in tears, couldn't take it.

"Will you stop looking at my brother and me like we're idiots? We know it's expensive. We know she's dying. We just want her to die at home."

At St. Luke's, she was in pain, and when I visited she slept while I watched television with no sound. She would do her breathing exercises, or try her best to answer the questions the nurses and doctors asked, or bug anyone she could for another pain pill. Aunt Denise and Uncle Pete worked rotating shifts, feeding Grandma as much as they could, asking doctors questions, writing down the answers. The weekend I was there I went in for breakfast, so they could rest a shift, get some sleep.

When it was decided there was nothing they could do, Grandma went to hospice.

In the hospital we were supposed to get her to eat as much as possible. The goal was to make Grandma better. But in hospice, things are different, as we learned when given the standard informational packet, which included the pamphlet The Dying Process. Nobody would force her to do anything. The weekend I was there I watched the nurses give her as many pain pills as she wanted (provided she wouldn't OD), and take away her untouched food trays with no admonishment. Why yell at her? She was there to die.

Aunt Patti had done Grandma's hair, but still, it was thin, and the skin was tight to her skull. She slept most of the time, her mouth open, her hands held tight in the air in front of her chest. The breaths went in slow, held. We waited, wondering who to call first. Exhale. We sat back in our seats. She twitched occasionally. Aunt Teeny said, "I wonder what she's thinking about." I wish I knew. Growing up. Raising her siblings. The way her mother used to sing to her father, that song she'd told me so many times, the song whose name I can't remember, and now will never know. Hopefully she thought of me, of all her grandkids, of washing us in the sink in Montpelier, of rides on the four-wheeler, of Christmases in her living room, when we were young and Jerry was still alive, when nobody thought about anybody dying.

Guests would come in, all tiptoes and whispers, asking, "Is she sleeping?" It's okay, we told them, you can say hello. They would sit on the side of the bed, grab a hand or a shoulder, nudge her awake. Don't push too hard, I'd think, there's not much there. Her eyes would open, adjust, widen. "Oh my God," Grandma'd say, "I can't believe it."

And then, two weeks later, with Uncle Tim back from Australia, with Aunt Teeny flown in just that day from Florida, Grandma died. All six kids were there, holding her hands, telling her how much they loved her. She took a breath and never let it go. I like to think she held onto that breath like she held onto their hands. The last piece of them she could take with her, all their breaths swirling around inside of her; she swallowed it whole, made it a part of her, and when it was complete, she left.

The only time I cried was at the funeral. Standing in the front pew while Aunt Patti sang "Amazing Grace." I was a pallbearer. It felt good to carry her one last time. It was like dancing.

I miss her. No similes can tell how much. I'm waiting for the day when I can finally erase her number from my phone book. I'm waiting to cry again, because I know it's not over. I'm waiting to hear from her, in a breeze, in a song, in the sound of a kitchen sink, or a too-loud television, or a laugh, or the pfth of a BB gun. I'm waiting to see her again, and I know I'm going to be waiting a long time.

Danny Deckchair

"Imagine you go away
On a business trip one day
And when you come back home,
Your children have grown
And you never made your wife moan"

-Regina Spektor

I like that song, because of that part, and also because of Regina's advice to people who are too caught up with worries, etc.:

"Maybe you should just kiss someone nice,
Or lick a rock,
Or both"

In the past twenty-four hours I've watched four movies:

Rushmore
Solaris
Rezervni Deli (Spare Parts)
Danny Deckchair

Of these, Rushmore and Danny Deckchair are my favorites. Both are quirky, funny, and have a love story. And both have happy endings. Everything works out for everyone, pretty much.

Normally I'm against that kind of shit, because too often a happy ending = cliché. But these pull it off. Kudos.

I think most people give a thumbs up to happiness. Isn't that what everyone spends their whole life looking for? Some method of living that leaves them lying in bed at the end of every day saying, "That was real good"?

And isn't that why we like books and music and movies and art and all these other forms of entertainment, whether mid-day snack or American Idol? They're like gift boxes, or microwave dinners; pieces of life telling us what it might mean to feel, everywhere and all the time, that everything was real good.

But who wants a Healthy Choice alfredo over some homemade spaghetti?

Here comes my happy ending. Let's hope it's not cliché.

If we're not content to settle with a frozen dinner, we shouldn't be content to settle with TV shows and movies and books. Sure, they can be a part of the whole of what makes things great, but if we don't have our own actions supporting those tidbits, we've got nothing. It's Yeats' question all over again: Life of Action or Life of Contemplation? We have to find ourselves somewhere in between.

Why do I like movies like Danny Deckchair, or music like Regina Spektor's? For one, because it feels real good. But also, because it makes me want to go out and do something on my own. Something first-hand, that I can call mine. It doesn't have to be entirely original. Ride a fucking bike if that makes you happy. All I'm saying is don't sit around all day watching the Tour de France.

Kiss someone nice. Lick a rock. Tie helium balloons to a deck chair. Start a club. Fly a kite. Fall in love.

But make sure to do it all the way.

Like Lincoln said: "Whatever you are, be a good one."

A Glass Half Full

I am drunk. Standing in Ballantine Hall, at one of the Macs that, apparently, is here simply for student convenience. Listening to Badly Drawn Boy. Wishing I had more wine, or some beer, at home. Just finished Haruki Murakami's book "A Wild Sheep Chase" (which is in quotes because I can't figure out how to put shit in italics on this Mac). A good book, extremely entertaining, with enough "deep" dialogue to give a seeker of truth enough scraps to munch on for a few weeks.

It seems my whole life has been a search for God.

I've yet to find him.

What have I found? Love, good music, plenty of sex and desire, alcohol, literature. What will I do with it? Go to Africa, tell people about their farmland, educate some about the danger of HIV. Hopefully teach some creative writing, if all goes well. Am currently tutoring a South Korean student in conversational English and formal writing. I love it. He asks questions, unlike my Philosophy students (except you, Rebecca!), and he seems to genuinely want to learn everything I have to teach him. I wonder how to tell him that all I have are hopes. The study of literature is the search for truth, at least in my experience, and I haven't found it yet.

This weekend, at Adam's graduation party, I entertained three children, all under five, by sitting on a porch swing with them. There was a trash can in front of us, and one of the kids tried to kick it. I grabbed it by the handle, and said, "You should all kick it together, see how high you can get it." When they kicked, with their toes no bigger than baby shrimp, I would launch the trash can from the bottom with my own foot. It would hang in the air like a bubble, a heavy cloud. They were oblivious, thrilled at their strength. They could have kicked that can all day, and I love them for that.

Jesus, Etc.

Standing at the corner of Woodlawn and Third, I was listening to Billy Breathes, waiting for the traffic to clear. I glanced at the light to see if it was still green, saw something out of the corner of my eye, wheeled around, surprised. Just two people, waiting to cross as well. A guy, a girl. Friends, maybe more. I felt like an idiot, and was glad when they passed me crossing the street.

Outside the last building I pass before walking up the ramp into Ballantine, some construction workers were taking a cigarette break. I was thinking about my ex-girlfriend, something I've been doing since I came to Bloomington, as the town and campus here remind me of my two months living in Boulder. I thought of how the construction workers would look at me and say, "Rich prick. We work while he listens to his iPod." My response, internally, was, "My ex-girlfriend bought this for me." Not much of a comeback, but it reminded me that, yes, she had bought it for me, had even engraved something on the back, the words that, someday, I would like to title a book with: You Were Right About the Stars.

It's a line taken from the song "Jesus, Etc." by Wilco. Anyone who knows me realizes that I consider Wilco to be the greatest rock group history has ever seen. Though The Beatles may have done more to push music in a different direction, Wilco never sold out the beginning of their career with radio-friendly love songs designed to get them on the charts. Not that those Beatles songs aren't any good. I just don't like them on principle.

To understand the engraved line better, here is some context:

Jesus, don't cry
You can rely on me, honey
You can combine anything you want

I'll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun

One of the things I love about music is its malleability. Music can change shape based on the individual experiences of each and every listener, and since those experiences change, so does the impact of the music.

I don't like getting sentimental, but I need to to explain my point. I loved that girl. In a way that has not been recreated, and is still not forgotten. She was, so to speak, a bright, shining star for me, around which everything I did revolved.

Upon this mini-thought supernova, I played the song. Tweedy introduces it on the Kicking Television album as a mid-tempo rocker, which it is, but it's not something you'll hear anywhere on that kind of radio station. The easy drumming, the strings, Tweedy's cigarette and candy voice. And those words.

It's taken a long time to get over the ex. And this sounds so silly, I know, but this makes sense to me now, like the advice that Allen Ginsburg got when he went to India looking for the same kind of enlightenment he got from his vision of William Blake: If you see something terrible, do not hold onto it. If you see something beautiful, do not hold onto it.

In other words, everything in life is a star, and each one is a setting sun.