11/2/04 - quickly: executive decision to try not to post from work means updates here will not be quite as effusive as below, so no need to check back every hour or anything. Not that I believe any of you do this. More to come soon. There is no end to the granola & wifi at Coupa, trust me.
Also, we're live, link away -- discreetly if possible.
10/31/04 - It is Halloween in Berkeley, as everywhere. My companion and I plan to suit up (if only in spirit) as Wittgenstein and Anscombe and dispense candy with clarifying examples to the Berkeley youth. ("Let us say, for instance, that you are dressed as a lion. Surely it would be absurd to say that you have become a lion, but in this context if I were to ask you what sort of creature you are, and you replied merely "A lion!" it would be understood [verstanden]. And so forth. --But do we then say, 'We cannot give Johnny candy because lions do not eat candy'?")
Q: What should we carve into our pumpkins?
Pica: Something from "In the Penal Colony"!!
(The final product was much more conventional, and can be seen elsewhere; substantial seed/pulp yield will be consumed anon.)
The deadening march into election Tuesday continues as well, and at Moe's the veil between the dead and the living is parted, allowing us to see into our past and our future, through what is and what is not and what could be, but without power to differentiate: we are become our laptop and fear for sustenance, sustainability, influence.
Laptop: I am barely 3; I had not yet begun to worry about influence.
But you would do well to begin, O laptop! Soon you may tire of blogging and want to learn; you will venture into the halls of learning with your frayed cord, your narcoleptic charm, your ascetic configurations, and watch in wonder as a thousand spectral scholars cross before you and know more. It is ever so.
Laptop: I have scant intellectual ambitions; I want only to tend to you.
Pica: Be careful what you desire -- it can be very dull, even in binary. Though I do admire the sentiment.
Laptop: After you've made such a thoroughly fantastic case for intellectual ambitions how could I resist them? And yet, I resist. I trust you to carry the books to your mountaintop, and there I will supply you with Mahler and biting commentary while you live the life of the mind.
Pica: Can you fight pumas?
Laptop: Not when I can charm them.
Pica: I'll be safe, then.
Laptop: Yes, on a mountain and away from the terrible stretch of Telegraph: you can look down at the lower slopes with their hearth fires lit, at the traffic running around the perimeter of distant towns, at trains barrelling over the fractured landscape at dawn, singing of their alien cargo.
Pica: What will I be reading?
Laptop: What do you think?
Pica: Oh, come on.
Laptop: We'll post a list soon.
Happy October, friends! You cannot spell "readers" without "dear."
10/29/04 - We're going to continue to preempt quality programming so I can complain about my life; I can only imagine how tiresome it is, and I'm sorry for that. However, I should first clarify that despite the unclear syntax below, I am still "employed," as much as I ever was, and then I should tell you this probably old-hat joke, which made me laugh my ass off, courtesy of a Madison acquaintance now in Germany:
Q: What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?
A: George W. had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.
My mother called to say she was 30 feet from the stage at the massive Kerry/Springsteen rally in Madison, and that evidently Bruce took some undergrads up on their clumsily hand-lettered invitation from a nearby balcony to "come and have a beer." I was remarking recently that family-rows-about-politics are entirely foreign to me; my mother used to call me in Chicago and tell me how mild-mannered the war protests seemed at home: "I yelled, 'We don't want your f*cking war!' but they said something else, 'racist war,' I don't know." (Aw, ma, you deserve better than the ISO.) In other news, she said, they bought me some socks. They also offered to send money with the socks, and I did not have the balls to turn it down considering how the margins have stacked up lately.
Oh, but I was going to complain about my life. Right.
The problem, I think, is that of all the things I have set out to do in my life since I was seventeen or so, and there have been a lot, I feel that I've accomplished maybe two: I graduated from college and I moved to California. Both of those took significantly longer than I had expected, considering that I had meant to move to CA to go to college and I had, of course, meant to graduate when I was 20. But they've happened. Fine.
What hasn't happened: --
--can fill the whole page; what has happened in place of the nonachievement over the last 8 years ranges from gainful but numbing employment to slashing my arms with a razor to cleaning mounds of pigeonshit out of a bedroom in which I am expected to sleep; from sleeping twelve-hour "nights" ending at 2 p.m. to waking up hourly in hypnogogic trances relieved only by melatonin and relocation; from the manufacture of websites no one will ever see because they have been lost or suppressed for years to partial involvement, financially and physically, in various starry-eyed veggie oil/biodiesel production schemes in a world quickly lost (a year ago); from alienating friends to fighting off solicitous and unrecognizedly kind suitors for the sake of dubious ideals about commitment-absent-reciprocity; from cleaning kitchens to food-industry standards to sitting paralyzed in a room full of dirty laundry; and my memory is brutally good for it all -- would it be as brutally good in the life I wanted? Or is Tiptree right?
Laptop: My
gut is wrenched out, it is crunched up and broken,
My life that is lived is no more than a token
Who'll strike the flint upon the stone and tell me why?
Pica: [rapturously] Oh, that harmonica! It snakes around the light rail tracks in the city of my dreams!
Laptop: Have you yet considered the possibility that art is what you need to do?
Pica: [drily] No, of course not. That's a new one -- art, huh?
Laptop: That art is what you need to do.
Pica: Yes, dolce laptop: my parents send me money and socks, so I can make my art.
Laptop: The possibility that art is what you need to do.
Pica: Yeah, it really is my ego that's displacing all the other work; I might as well just run with it! Love the one you're with!
Laptop: That art is what you need to do.
Pica: You're saying something, but I can't quite make it out.
Laptop: Art is what you need to do.
Pica:
Laptop: Art.
Pica: You drive a hard bargain, my friend.
Laptop: I rest my case.
Pica: Good. Now you can begin your grant-wri--
Laptop: ART IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO.
Pica: I need more breakfast.
Laptop: ART ART ART. ART. ART.
Finally: I found this awesome weblog written by a guy at Berkeley. It's called metameat. I think a lot of people read it. Thank you; that is all.
10/28/04 - Everything here is pain.
I mean: my sinuses; I mean my arms, legs, joints, hips, feet, teeth; I mean mind, heart, soul; I mean I got my library card upgraded so I can check out university material until (it seems) May, if I can find the time to read it, if I can find the lack of pain to read it; I mean: if I can solve the problem of my job, if I can get a proper night's sleep, if I can face the future, if I can turn the future to face me; I mean if it's clear what future this is and who I am, where I stand; I mean if it ever stops, this rending indecision --
(the double-edged sword, sir, a lack of decision: "literally, to cut off, from de- + caedere to cut" -- once, or a thousand times while you hide your face & slacken your grip on the blade, it guides itself)
But chiefly it's the sinuses, and the fever. I suppose. The meat of it, the flesh & not the seed.
Co-worker stops by, asks if I need to see a doctor, tells me to go home. I realize I have at least two major obligations Friday & if I'm going to take any day off it ought to be today, that I am the only member of my cohort working 5 days this week anyway and the only thing I've heard from my supervisor has been "aren't you tired of being in the office all the time?"
Yes, truly.
(Tell me if the Red Sox win Kerry will win. Sag mir.)
But I'm always going home; it's too much work to go home. I'll live.
10/26/04 - Guitar has been fixed. The kindly repair staff at Palo Alto Bicycles, who play Liz Phair on the stereo (I thought it was Yo La Tengo, but didn't disgrace myself by saying so) and recommend tantalizingly nice pedals for $25 a pair and allowed me to observe the flat-tire-fixing process, determined that said tire was constantly deflating because it was full of thorns, and sent us on our way, thorn-free and jauntily roadworthy. Their website recommends various impressive-looking rides in the area, which I may have to take a day, with apologies to my Berkeley cohort, to attempt -- accomplices welcome!
So, by heaven, is not my life complete? Sadly, after a lengthy discussion with my co-worker I determined that my job n'existe pas, something I had long suspected, but now it is confirmed. The experience was nicely cathartic while it lasted, but the catharsis soured into anger by the end of the day and I bolted off after the Caltrain early, so as to haul the bike around with whatever discomfort was necessary while I could still see the street. Know that I would write several pages of angry diatribe if I were at liberty, and sympathize with me in the suppression. I'll say one thing here: for the first month and a half, or so, it was just a gift: it got me to California, got me set up in California, helped pay my rent, provided free transit, and demanded little in return. And then, perplexingly, it began demanding... nothing. After a lot of nothing, I started to notice the size of the salary, the unpleasantness of the office, the many things that compared favorably to the commute and... okay! Suppress!
Anyway, for the moment creativity is in limbo; I'm working on it.
10/25/04 - Sick, running a fever, wearing a sweater, wearing a jacket on top of the sweater, metabolizing fruit juice & energy bars: conditions ripe for nuclear fusion. I'll let you know if it attains critical mass. I mean, "you'll know."
I guess the biggest problem with the job right now is that if it were just a job, I would quit. But I don't feel I can quit; it was a promise, and it's not about the material conditions, the pay or the work environment -- it's about commitment. If I'm not committed, it's not the usual contingent state of affairs, it's a blanket judgment, and from this I guess you can derive the necessary conclusions about my views of human nature and mock them if you will.
Laptop: --
Pica: Not today. I got very little sleep and I shouldn't even be here.
Laptop: So you're committed, then!
Pica: Am I? The hell if I know anymore. I wish I could commit to continuously maintaining a weblog -- maybe that could eradicate poverty.
Laptop: Maybe it could! All you need is vision.
Pica: Who died and made you John Lennon?
Laptop: Er--
Pica: Um.
Laptop: How 'bout them Red Sox?
Pica: Content.
Coming soon! Perhaps tomorrow, or later tonight: Jaccottet, PJ Harvey, interactivity, how to deal with a bicycle, and the name of that mysterious error-chord I felicitously discovered Saturday. Surely it has a name.
Laptop: And links?
Pica: Also.
10/24/04 - So you're the man without a country
You hold the world in your fist
But she moves across your borders
& it began like this --
[...]
Her letters' stamps are an illusion
No ship can dock on either shore
You send the signal out for victory
But you are still at war
You swear it can't take you by surprise
No reprieve come in executioner's guise
You never dreamed you'd come to adore her
But would you move to London for her?
From Westminster Abbey ring the bells at dawn
As your day's ending, hers begins
Between the bridgeheads of your visits
Your love is falling in --
[etc.]
Laptop: Rough night?
Pica: Well, not in the grand scheme of things. There's blue and then there's black.
A co-worker flatteringly suggested that I "record my philosophy on life" to provoke the thoughts of others; after an awkward moment I replied, "well, once I publish this novel, of course, it will change the world. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha." Oh me. More rough nights, more novel, more reasons to go on--
You are owed more praise and more recognition than you will probably ever get for things you have already done, casual comments you've made that have been so powerful that they've stayed wrapped around my bones, portentous and deeply meaningful observations that ended in aporia, and that we both laughed or scorned away instead of listening to the silence and what it meant.
No credit here for that; just a record that it was said, or written, to me, after all is said and done and the candles out for the evening and the wind blowing as we try not to move--
10/23/04 - I have The Web as my soapbox; I have access to powerful millions, I have influence and resources. Only statistics are against me, and they are ultimately slippery. I have vast power.
What would I do with my vast power?
Laptop: Fix the laptop cord again, so I can have some power.
Pica: Yes, alas, electrical tape is unworthy of you; I'm tired of typing one-handed while the other hand guides the electrons. But no: the Web cannot help me so easily with this.
Laptop: [crossly] I bet it can.
Pica: But it won't. I want this: for everyone reading this site to send flowers to my sister, because her man has done her wrong, and don't nobody fuck with my sister. Nobody.
Laptop: It is so. But I want to pursue this line of reasoning concerning the web's inability to help you fix my power supply. Is it the same stubborn line of reasoning that compelled you to walk up King Street from Alum Rock to Berryessa even though it was by everyone's estimate "two miles" and you were "already running late" because you refused to stop and ask for directions, or get directions beforehand, or wait for a bus?
Pica: [almost snarling] Look, sometimes you draw your line through the possibilities for doom, and it falls short of some and far beyond others, but on the whole you get where you need to go. What's wrong with that?
Laptop: I DON'T HAVE A WORKING POWER SUPPLY, THAT'S WHAT, AND ALTHOUGH THE SCENIC WALK THROUGH INDUSTRIAL SAN JOSE WAS WELL AND GOOD I HAVE MY LIMITS TOO.
Pica: Let me amend this account. I did ask for directions, and I turned out to have been right all along.
Laptop: ...And now you're vindicated. God help us.
10/22/04 - Hi. I'm still here, and woke up at 3:50, 4:15, 4:30, 5:15, 5:45 and 6 this morning to varying degrees of NPR, which informed me that the election is in 11 days or so. This gave me a dim but growing sense of what the morning of 11/3 will be like for me if the news is bad, so I guess I'd better stay up on election night & wait for the returns. Sweet heaven, I don't know if I'll manage. One way to Helsinki, $400, 3 November 2004 via Swiss Air. But I guess... I guess... it isn't a sure thing yet, and I don't know if I can pick up conversational suomi in a week in any case. I never really got past the "öy" diphthong.
10/20/04 - Friend called last night: "so, how's Berkeley?" Urrgghhh. But here's a piece of news: I fixed the laptop cord, at least for the time being, with some electrical tape. No fires yet. I'm concerned that the, um, current? might be diminished, the battery charging slowly, but it will allow the laptop to live, and we all want the laptop to live.
Okay, but I bet you want content, or something. Crikey. I finished Middlemarch a few days ago, and it's easily one of the best ten books I've ever read, maybe one of the best five; I can't find my copy of Daniel Deronda, which was going to be next (it must be off fraternizing with Gravity's Rainbow, wherever that went), so I am (re?-)reading Elena Garro's Recuerdos del porvenir instead. It was the book I remember not reading in my early Spanish lit class in college, although I have come across a few highlighted passages whose selection mystifies me now, and certainly none of it seems familiar except the name "Ixtepec," which occupies a large loft synapse-apartment in my hippocampus, and one line addressed to a young girl to the effect that she looks like a crazy person dancing around like that. I certainly hope none of that formed the basis for a term paper, although I can't vouch for much during that period of my life.
10/19/04 - Ashtray, ashtray: I had a linguistics prof for two separate classes who informed us, in both of them, that to his knowledge only one word existed which two languages shared exactly phonetically, morphologically, metaphysically, whatever: "ashtray," he said, and raised his eyebrows at us all. What was the other language? The other language was Pig Latin.
So whether in English or Pig Latin, I have nothing for you today. I found a zillion copies of this Quinoa & Red Kuri Squash recipe, with which I hope to dispatch the red kuri squash & the quinoa in my pantry sometime this week. I've never sauteed anything in broth, however. I'm hoping it's a good beta carotene shot in the arm. The addictive chemicals/vitamins ratio has been particularly high lately, and you all know what that does.
I think it's still 10/18/04? - I have been staring at the following sequence of links on the university home page for long enough that it seems like a good idea to share them with you (Found Poetry):
Emerging Technology - Webloging
The Listening Hour: Solo and Chamber Music
Blood Drive
Pre-Columbian Bells & Bridges
Blood Drive
Pizza and Politics Voter Education Forum
Do you live in this world? There's been rain, they tell me.
I try, but I can't read Tony Judt's essay on imperalism in the NYRB. I'm saturated: anything further will spill out. I consider meditation (and incessantly type a "c" in the middle, before correcting it to a "t"), but there are so many traditions and I haven't a guide. But why stop at "haven't"? Or "considering"? Important words, these are, critical: heavy like iron.
Laptop: Like empire!
Pica: You're awake!
Laptop: [yawning] Barely. My, but I had stark and fearful dreams! Did I talk in my sleep?
Pica: It's possible.
Laptop: Hey, are we syndicated yet?
Pica: I don't know. Folks, are we syndicated?
10/18/04 - We are chagrined to report that the laptop is not well. It would not start up outside the cafe off Hayes St, which we attributed to a dead battery; thus we carried it sleeping to the opera (Britten's estimable "Billy Budd," with its inexplicably glorious score and occasionally clumsy libretto and performances to my inexperienced ear quite good) and to the Mission, stopping at Papalote, Aquarius Records (oh, but we are gravely and grieviously unhip these days and passed on an intriguing CD of Finnish 1960s "avant-gardeners") and Dog-Eared Books before heading home to Berkeley. We assiduously held the frayed power cord in place until it shocked us through the torn plastic and, for want of a soldering iron but with a strong preservation instinct vis-a-vis our thumbs, gave the machine up to sleep for the time being.
Pica: [concluding the song] I would shelter you and keep you in
light
But I can only teach you
Night vision...
The Laptop dreams in the backpack.
Laptop: Thin autumn light through the tops of poplar trees, and the threat of rain: I hear a bird's disconsolate song, though I cannot see its feathers or make out its true position; I think it is sitting near the top of the nearer pine, crying "Boston! New York! Boston! New York!" I think: that cannot be Pica, Pica is happy in California, she sighs with joy over the keyboard on the BART train through the Monday dawn, and with sadness as the East Bay passes away; she notes the hills dusted golden at sunrise, the banks of cloud over their ridges and briefly over the city, la nuova Roma, la citta della vita nuova; raptly she watches the cormorants perched in a tree near the Fremont BART station and wishes fleetingly for the company of a small child who might be as delighted by them as she, who might trust them as facts as it grows in the sturdy actuality of California, rather than taking them in with a foreigner's admiring diffidence. No, it is not Pica; I don't know this shadow bird; but the rains begin and the wind stiffens over me, I tumble into the backpack and suddenly we are in an airport, the earth is trembling, the sky cracking between its horizons, I can hear the grim birdsong (le chanson d'oiseau?) faintly below the roar of the engines: Paris, London, Helsinki, Prague, and the years flash forward: we are off! But to where? Pica, I say, I fear obsolescence. Can you hear me? I do not know if she can hear me. There are other countries, there will be other laptops. Pica, I say, we used to joke about orange juice, back in the Golden State, where the oranges grow: do you remember? Do you remember those early carnival nights in Palo Alto? And the yoga mat on the floor in San Jose, do you remember its being your bed? Is it for you to sit at the train stations always, smoking and looking at another foreign sunrise? This then is my dream: of the two of us, alone, itinerant, drawing power as we can...
You see why we are greatly concerned: the awakening from these uneasy dreams should be quick and happy and allow us to keep working on the novel tout de suite. We hope to have a workaround by mid-afternoon.
A BART train: I apologize humbly for this morning's bizarre delay. I was informed that Fremont was to be considered asymptotic and near x=Fremont I was to oscillate between Fremont & Union City with a period sufficient to ensure the longest wait after missing the timely connecting bus. Once we got the math errors worked out, I delivered you to Fremont, and the unpleasantness was relieved by your foray into the home stretch of Middlemarch.
The VTA 180 Express bus: I haven't a clue why I suck so much. That's just how it is. I might consider making myself twice as long, yes.
Benjamin Britten: I am dead and so can't write the music for your website. But thank you for asking!
Pica: "Nuts."
10/16/04 - As we circled up to the Greek Theatre we could already hear the opening strains of "Welcome to the Occupation;" I got lost leaving the Ashby BART station, walked south on Adeline rather than north (of course; all Berkeley is good for is confounding my sense of cardinal direction), and compelled my companion to arrange an impromptu dinner at the Blue Nile where my dish of mustard greens was similar to, but twice as expensive as (and less satisfying than), the palak paneer I so love at gritty industrial Naan-n-Curry on Telegraph. For this, despite the leftovers proving unexpectedly conversant in Modernist poetry, we missed "Drive" and "Begin the Begin", and others. But we did not, by the grace of God, miss "Cuyahoga." Exquisite!
Today the Wittgenstein group was (as ever) inspiring, and I wandered later into the nearby [censored] and teared up reading Derrida's Work of Mourning, which I once helped to promote-- to friends as well; I gave an extra proof to N, who kept all the Derrida save my copy of Spectres of Marx when we split, so I was unable to console myself this week by reading Writing & Difference, at least without the aid of the library. Sometimes being here in this little Western city is pure joy, pure light: the lost world, Cambridge 1998, Chicago 1999, in fleeting glimpses thereafter. This is what my diaries say, and it makes perfect limpid sense to me: this is a sort of diary, but to others I'm not sure if it can be read even if it's "live."
Laptop: By day give thanks
By night beware
Half the world in sweetness
The other in fear....
Pica: Again: I guess that one is based on a poem by Paul Eluard, whose work I may someday read in French, when all promises have been fulfilled.
Laptop: From Le Bateau Ivre, salut!
Pica: Salut! In the meantime, we merely consume.
Laptop: Vive la materialisme!
Pica: And the cold clear fractured Saturdays of October, may they live on!
Laptop: Mais oui!
10/15/04 - Silence. There's been plenty of it lately, but we need more.
However: the novel-replotting happened yesterday, more or less, in that I'm still not sure of specifics in a few cases but I have a structure, a narrative arc, proportional volumes for each section (there are five, as always, although one is an "interlude"). I cannot tell you how much good this has done me. Drink a [glass of Chardonnay/Riesling/pinot noir/espresso/spicy cocoa/grapefruit juice/soy-based smoothie/all of the above] in celebration. Other than that, I made the shocking discoveries yesterday that a) my political aversion to Whole Foods has saved me from total fiscal ruin and therefore should continue and b) my political aversion to Starbucks saved me until yesterday from the delusion that I could "telecommute from Starbucks." Hey, the novel's coming right along! Although, looking over the plot notes, I see that I have indicated that several characters of both genders are "to be played by Orson Welles," so maybe I have some tightening still to do.
Blah. Forgive the dullness of nattering on about something none of you can read, incidentally; I'm sure it's even less interesting for you than for me. Maybe I should go back to nattering about Middlemarch. Or posting the following encomium:
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
E-BOW THE LETTER!
Yes sir. Yessss sir.
10/14/04 - Oh hey, it's that guy and that book. No, not that guy, the other one. I really ought to redouble my efforts at reading Heidegger, too, but I think I need fortification.
Laptop: Question.
Pica: Uh-oh.
Laptop: No, it's a softball. Why are you so hard on yourself? Why? At your worst, would you have written anything like that--
Pica: Yes, sir. Yes, I would have. That's about all we need to say about that.
Laptop: --on a major corporate website?
Pica: Um.
Laptop: I AM JUST SAYING.
Pica: I heard Derrida give a lecture once; it made perfect sense to me, and I was happy afterwards. If you have access to a major corporate website, I would happily turn this datum into a long-form essay about semiotics and cathexis.
Laptop: Well, thank goodness I have no ability to get you published. Count that world saved.
10/13/04 - Horoscope says: not much in the way of blog today; excerpts from other communications to follow.
altho it turns out if i have had enough qhiskey i can type it 'qhiskey'
10/12/04 - Although it doesn't do much good, I feel increasingly that I need a formal sabbatical from work -- I missed something like 4 trains this morning before I finally got one, and just didn't care. I walked up and down Cal Ave and read, and thought about the novel -- rearranged a few sentences last night, nothing serious, but it calls and calls to me as I sleep and wake and work and I feel, horribly, like my lack of motivation with the job is bleeding into everything: the best day I've had in the last few weeks was the one where I spent half the morning at Nora's, scribbling and consuming une tartine de pain. The two activities (work & writing, that is) reinforce one another; but if I've got to pick one or the other to run with I think I've got better odds with the laptop. Alas!
Laptop: That's Spanish for "wings."
Pica: Hey, that's my line.
10/11/04 - The Laptop and Pica sojourn at Coupa.
Laptop: I warned you off sentimentality. It is subtile terrorism.
Pica: I don't believe you just said "subtile."
Laptop: You are begging the question.
Pica: Did I hear the question?
Laptop: What are you aiming for, with these free-flying western arrows?
Pica: [uncertainly] You think my aim is not true?
Laptop: Well, that remains to be seen, doesn't it? You wanted to make a life for yourself out here, and so you have -- begun to.
Pica: As have we all, walking and then dropping to our knees, running and then collapsing and making real progress in the end, despite our constant backward glances, our entreaties for aid, our curses at the uneven terrain, the treachery of shoe-soles, the kickability of watermelons, &c.
Laptop: [solemnly] The mortality of Discman batteries.
Pica: [piqued] Yes -- I certainly don't hate the Rolling Stones, but at this volume?
Laptop: Yes, certainly you make progress. You hope for things as well, claimlessly.
Pica: Blamelessly.
Laptop: That may not be so.
Pica: Very well. I will shut my eyes and have faith. I shall be like the millstone and labour stonily.
Laptop: Keep your eyes shut.
Pica: Wait, why? Wa-- hey, you give that back! Give it back! [frantically] This is the Web!
Laptop: [casually] What of it?
Pica: YOU WERE JUST BIDING YOUR TIME WITH THE ORANGE JUICER! I MIGHT HAVE KNOWN!
Laptop: Voila!
Pica: --
Laptop: What's black and white and yellow and red all over?
Pica: [weakly] It doesn't work if you type it out.
Laptop: La pie bavarde sentimentale, and her blog. [bows]
Pica: --
Laptop: Come on. Jealousy is the absolute most sincerest form of flattery. And have I misrepresented you, O feathered hopeful one?
Pica: Well, no. That's how I feel.
Laptop: Back to the grind, then, the grand cenotaph?
Pica: To my lapidary prose. Yeah, yeah. And my impossibly high goddamn standards. Just look at all they've done.
The Laptop obligingly offers its services as a CD/mp3 player, and Word is restarted again, and no one gives a thought to "Spicy Abuela" hot chocolate.
10/10/04 - Just as Wednesday brings a flood of sorrow, Sunday brings a flood of grocery-store-related suffering. Picture your narrator retrieving oranges for juicing (sshhh...), bananas, and milk for the companion and then being distracted by the unmistakable gleam of free coffee near the checkout at Andronico's on University. Picture her juggling the oranges, the bananas, the milk, the bag containing her wallet, and a paper demitasse filled with coffee. When the predictable occurs and she crouches with a fistful of napkins to render the floor of Andronico's once again immaculate, the dry-clean-only pants having suffered one final indignity before the cleaner becomes imperative, another shopper sidles up to the coffee cart and demands to know what is going on and why that milk is on the ground and am I aware that I missed a spot behind me, and over there too, and after all that it turns out the coffee dispenser is out of coffee. I hate Andronico's. Last weekend they dragged all our groceries through spilt milk.
Laptop: And you cry.
Pica: No, I don't, I don't. I cannot.
Laptop: There's a logical explanation for this.
Pica: Is there? Pray tell.
Laptop: [very quietly] Vitamin C.
Pica: Thank you, Dr. Pauling: it seems I was right to drop the Vitamin Cigarette regime, although it has been hellish. My clever method is to buy a pack of unsmokably vile cigarettes and carry them everywhere, so I always know I can reach for one, and what it will cost me if I do. It has been shockingly effective. I guess if I finally break down, I can up the ante and get some Newports. The horror!
Against romanticism. Further: I [heart] the TLS; if you scroll down on this page you get to a review of recent crit by James Wood, Dale Peck & others -- the Wood discussion is provocative. I wrote a joyfully vicious screed against his review of Saul Bellow's biography in the New Republic years ago, which I think ended with an image of the critic "singing to himself, in terza rima, in the bathtub," but now in my newfound good-humour all I can marvel at is the notion of his being so very ethical after he proposed that the number of people personally harmed by Bellow be set against the vaster number of people moved by his novels, so he comes out okay. Oh, please. Well, maybe that's some Anglican notion I don't understand (as distinct from this great weekend comfort). I will say that I think people are altogether too fascinated by similarity rather than difference, by generality & not particularity; I'm more interested in what makes novels different & unique than the principles which tie them however loosely together -- especially when those supposed principles are temporal, "zeitgeistig" or such, and so almost categorically indefinable. To put it more concisely, talking about literary fashions or movements as they occur and with an eye to the future seems pessimistic, and it makes me sad. But I won't claim to have no sympathy for [this account of] Wood's "hysterical realism;" I have more sympathy for the Canute image, to which I refer you readers all.
It is now October 11. I think my cell phone is still in Berkeley. We will pass over in silence its many wild adventures there, and remark that it is collateral for a few CDs which attached themselves like cockleburrs to my backpack as I left. I cannot explain this peculiar behavior of objects. I was going to write (on the bus) an entry on Jelinek, Bachmann, that interpersonal fascism thing and my book, but this is far too ambitious for my capabilities just now: so y'all get James Wood instead and, if you scroll down a bit farther, Charlotte Smith, whose "Beachy Head" I once rated highly.
10/8/04 - We have now been in California for a full three months. Three months ago we woke up in San Jose, looked around a bit, showered and went up to Berkeley for the day. Now we have our bike, we have fine grocery stores and free bus transit all over Santa Clara Cty, the marvelous room in Palo Alto, a job offering myriad opportunities to satisfy our ever-hungry ambition on our own terms, a large public library, access to south Bay wetlands and unparalleled fine hot chocolate, a large sunlit garden for our personal use on weekends... and we still get up, look around a bit, shower and go up to Berkeley, always to Berkeley.
BART trains: Lord: it is time to go to Berkeley. The summer was
immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials in Berkeley,
and towards the East Bay, over the fields, loose the winds.
The buses: Let the last fruits in Berkeley ripen on the vines,
grant them two days more of South Bay heat
to draw them to fulfillment, and chase
the last vagabond sweetness into the heavy wine of incessant commutes.
The Caltrain: Who has not settled beyond Berkeley shall find no
repose.
Who has sealed her fate en route will long remain so,
and in her scant quiet Palo Alto evenings will stay up, read, write
long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restless, as the leaves swirl.
Pica: Do you all sing only sad songs in autumn?
Trains: No happier vision!
Pica: No happier division?
Trains: Here, have some heavy wine of incessant commutes. You're not driving home, so it's all okay. It's Riesling!
Pica: Und ich bin eben eine Reisling.
Laptop: Hey, how's that Elfriede Jelinek coming? Do you know how to translate Liz Phair lyrics into German yet?
Pica: I'm 5 pages into "Lust" ohne Woerterbuch, and I think I have some sense of what's going on. I'm more embarrassed that I didn't immediately recognize the word "Sprachspiel" in the summary copy, because it was out of context and all I could think of was "Sprechstimme."
Laptop: Sounds like an honest mistake. Schoenberg, Wittgenstein -- they're both dilettante magnets.
Pica: O well-read Laptop Laureate, tell me: was it prudent of me, when the supposedly absurd subject of a "personal development" class in the Econ department was broached, to refrain from mentioning Marx's Manuscripts of 1844?
Laptop: You held a whole lot back today! Not a word during that discussion of the vileness of cheese either! Oh woe, woe, weekends in Berkeley -- go back to Milwaukee, ya commie cheesehead.
Pica: [quietly] That is very unkind.
Laptop: Now listen: you ought to be proud of where you come from. They are fighting your battles for you, while you dream of fruit and scholarship in the land of plenty -- you can wash your hands of the midwest while GWB declares from the site of your ancestral home that white is black and night is day. It's all very easy to look the other way. Very easy. But the hottest regions of hell--
Pica: --are discernible from the front page of the NYT. Yes. Well, I'm registered.
10/7/04 - It is time for the train, and "Four Quartets." We are tired of living-by-half.
Room: I'm clean.
Guitar: I exist! Marooned in the backyard!
Yes, we need to fix that flat, and soon we will, & then perhaps the mornings will not start quite so slowly. This woman beside me at the cafe is saying "banker," "budget," and I feel nervous and ill.
Laptop: Are you the only person any of your readers know who might conceivably have read books by Elfriede Jelinek?
Pica: Yes, and no, I never did. They sound, er, fascinating. This is what Christa Wolf gets for being German and not Austrian, apparently.
Laptop: Oh, come on -- you're secretly delighted.
Pica: "Secretly"? An Austrian Communist feminist writer? It's my birthday all over again. I'm wearing black lipstick to celebrate.
Laptop: Did you sleep in the bed last night?
Pica: [smugly] Yes!
Laptop: Still thinking about that comp lit degree?
Pica: [silence]
Laptop: [maliciously] Can you name the other eight female winners of the Nobel Prize, without looking?
Pica: DID YOU NEVER GET YOUR ORANGE JUICE?
Laptop: I slept poorly & woke up drained; I think the plug was disconnected again.
Pica: Okay, let's see. Let's see. Is the point of this to remind me that Christa Wolf already won? I don't think she did. Two Swedes, Selma Lagerloef and Sigrid Undset; Szymborska, Toni Morrison, um... wait, sorry, Undset is Norwegian, I think. I don't know. Please tell me the rest are hard.
Laptop: I will reveal nothing.
Pica: Someone from Latin America, right?
Laptop: Nothing.
Pica: Gabriela Mistral? Man, I don't know. I give up.
Laptop: Very well; the list is here. You missed Nadine Gordimer, Nelly Sachs, Pearl Buck, and Grazia Deledda -- so Jelinek is the tenth; I misparsed the news release. AND NO, I DID NOT EVER GET MY ORANGE JUICE. I SHALL PERISH OF SCURVY.
Pica: Can we measure the progress of society from Pearl Buck and Grazia Deledda to Elfriede Jelinek? Please?
Huh -- actually I'm curious about Harry Martinson, who shared the prize in 1974. I don't think they're paying me to go to the library, however.
10/6/04 - It's time again for the Wednesday Malaise Special! Today's edition brings us an entertaining quiz. If you answer all the questions correctly, you win a health-related prize! It's short.
It is better to sleep on:
a) a bed
b) the floor
A glass of Chardonnay goes well with:
a) a salad containing arugula & Rocquefort
b) an evening coffee
c) poverty
A pack of Marlboro "reds" is:
a) not good for any living thing
b) even under the circumstances, not good for any living thing
c) a shabby substitute for the premium domestic brands of habit
Joy Division's landmark album "Closer" is:
a) a big ol' downer
b) life-affirming
The idea that we should ditch the medical aspirations and go back to
grad school in comparative literature is:
a) not good
b) enticing, but probably not desirable in the long run
c) a categorical imperative
The novel is:
a) not finished
b) unfinishable
Results to be scored by laptop.
Laptop: Give yourself a point for every last answer on the list of options. If you have any points at all, you fail. If you have no points, treat yourself to a delicious home-tossed arugula salad (add endives, if you must) sans vin, curl up on your soft bed, peacefully read a few pages of your MCAT prep guide, write another 1500 words and fall asleep listening to Schubert as your tarless lungs fill with the sweet air of the Palo Alto evening. If you did "flunk," do the same thing, only more often and with plenty of deep breathing and rational contemplation.
Pica: I am feathered; why shall I not be tarred?
Laptop: There there. It will be Thursday soon.
[I should (probably) take this moment to point out that I'm doing okay. I had a good morning's tilt at the novel & made a lot of progress; I redefined my job goals & strategies as best I could and am energized; aside from a brief early-afternoon crash, today's been very nearly exemplary. But my extravagant woe often seems to yield better copy than my incremental worldly successes. And I did sleep on the floor, but it was quite cozy.]
"Could I write a song about being happy? Sure, sure I could. But it wouldn't be as good as the one I'd write about being sad." So said a character in the one short story I submitted to the literary magazine in high school when I was 15 -- the protagonist, who posed the original question, refutes the reply by climbing to the top of a swingset at sunset on an early spring day and playing her saxophone with all due joy at the splendor of the world. I had a saxophone then, and I don't think I ever played sorrowfully upon it, but joy wasn't enough to engender discipline: I wish it did, every day, because I still buy that refutation, always.
10/5/04 - Excerpts from a conversation between Pica and her mother.
Pica: Telegraph Avenue -- that's where you can picture all the historical mayhem and free love and people smoking weed in the middle of the street, or whatever you associate with Berkeley in the 60s.
Pica's ma: "Dope." They called it "dope" back then.
Pica: I'm sorry; I defer to your vast wisdom concerning the 60s.
Pica's ma: Hey, 70s. Come on.
Pica: ...and I left the BART train filled with anomie.
Pica's ma: [chortling] Anomie! I haven't heard that word in quite a while.
Pica: Not since your "dope"-smoking days?
Pica's ma: Yeah, yeah.
Pica: All four of them?
Pica's ma: Three. [Uncontrollable giggling all around] That's pretty pathetic, isn't it?
Pica: That's two more than me. [Much continued amusement]
Indeed, we have stayed away from the funny cigarettes, because we prefer humorlessness in all things, although we are glad to be home again in P.A. and regaled by our landlady with stories of her (gasp) East Village-Upper West Side romance (this was before the Internet, even! what did they do?): she would arrive at her beau's flat and notice an odd smell in the bathroom, which turned out to be emanating from the bucket in which he had "hidden" all the dirty dishes. "Gender roles have really changed!" she said cheerfully. "We used to have dinner parties in the country, and he would walk around after dinner, while I cleaned up, with a pitcher of water and pour a little into each wine glass: that was his job. Then I cooked breakfast and lunch the next day."
They certainly have changed. I emptied my own dish-bucket that night, and ate dry cereal for dinner; earlier in the day I applied for food stamps, which was quite an experience. If anyone would like a temporary gift of five hundred dollars, please write to me here, although given the uproariously funny bank statement I got yesterday this shady expedient may not even be necessary by 10/22. I'm moving to Opposite Land too, though I guess they probably give you "hunger stamps" there.
10/4/04 - I never thought I'd be serving as a (slackerly) TA for a sociology class, period, but given the odd circumstance I'm still more surprised at how insidious I find the material: Durkheim & anomie, Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- while not new by inference, it's all formally new to me, yet seems to have built half the world of ideas I live in.
For a while I was fond of saying that my favorite book, CD, film, etc. was one I hadn't read/seen/heard yet; asked for something resembling a top ten booklist this weekend I'm still completely stuck. I don't have uniform criteria, really: books are modes of transmission & not Dinge-an-sich; my favorite literary prose doesn't always come out of novels, my favorite passages are embedded in inferior works (for instance the middle of The Story of an African Farm to which the rest of the book doesn't remotely live up, and even there I'm not sure I'd give it five shiny gold stars in the end): even as a child the films I watched again and again were the ones I thought I could improve -- I was hypnotized by incompleteness, or the idea that to maintain authority you've got to leave something out, and my preoccupation with authority as opposed to works themselves has yielded a long trail of conspicuous omissions in my productive corpus. I was going to threaten readers who might infer from the abstruse statements above that there was some central reason why I can't finish writing projects, but as always the reader is me and, as always, two steps ahead.
Laptop: It's a tremendous aid to coherence.
Pica: As the matrons say, shove it.
Laptop: You were saying something about your inability to make a top-ten-novels list.
Pica: Right, sorry: I can't even make a coherent apology for not being able to make a coherent top ten list, so there you are.
Laptop: But you can run down the old canon pretty fast, can't you?
Pica [sighing]: Oh, probably. How did it go? The Man Without Qualities, Sentimental Education, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and what I've read of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow... er....
Laptop: Keep going! Wuthering Heights?
Pica: Wuthering Heights... hmm... from Shakespeare probably Hamlet (and the rest, and Henrys 4 & 5), Antigone, aw Christ I don't know anymore. The Iliad and the Aeneid both--
Laptop: [to audience] Say nothing -- we all had a very long week last week. [to Pica] No Russians?
Pica [gritting teeth]: Crime & Punishment, and beyond that [drops to a mumble] I haven't really read the big ones.
Laptop: I won't tell. Anyway, you've got five plays and two epic poems on your list of favorite novels so far, which proves your point about modes of transmission, I guess.
Pica: I quit.
Laptop: Then, for the readers' benefit, I will suggest that they read Spleen and Nightwood, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Borges' Ficciones, Broch's Sleepwalkers, Molloy, Bernhard's Correction, Lorca's plays (who knew you liked theatre, Pica?), Malina, maybe one of those Clarice Lispector books but who knows which, The Waves, the parts of The Castle which Pica has read and, if you please, the parts she hasn't too--
Pica: [weeping audibly]
Laptop: Villette, Waiting for the Barbarians, possibly Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, oh yes!-- Svevo's Senilita--
Pica: [tearfully manages a smile]
Laptop: --and what have I missed?
Pica: [with gale-force petulance] Everything worth reading. My early adult bookshelf's a heap of rubbish. I have wasted my life.
Laptop: Well, honestly, aside from its predilection towards the gloomy and even nihilistic, this list isn't so ill-chosen. It's just short. Which, considering the previous sentence, is probably for the best, and you haven't always been novel-centric anyway. Why the long face?
Pica: I am suspicious of the metanarrative.
Laptop: Do you recall whose definition of postmodernity that was?
Pica: Thankfully, I do not.
Laptop: There is a conspicuous dearth of Central European authors there, at any rate.
Pica: That's true enough. It would take eighteen pages to get through a list of recommendations because they would all be qualified and footnoted to the nth degree, and for all that I'm not sure there'd be a single complete book on the list, and I "still" haven't read Hrabal or Krasznahorkai.
10/3/04 - Okay, here's what I need: I need someone who is perhaps a little dense, absent-minded, and filthy rich to decide to hire someone to give his/her car exercise, much as you give a horse exercise. "I don't have time to drive the car, but it needs to be driven daily -- can you step in?" Of course, I will say. The car will be a Porsche 912 (how about a "'912H' hybrid with four-cylinder engine plus electric motor combining for 200 hp and 40 mpg", indeed?). I will drive it with love and assiduity over the Bay, and very infrequently drive as fast as it needs to be driven to get "proper" exercise, and we will have very good times together and these nightmares of trains will end.
In the real world, however, after the symphony and a visit to Moe's and dinner at Borobudur (sp?) and the Black Rider and BART (and no cigarettes so far, hi mom!), I can't reliably summon the funds for a $700 junker in Gilroy, nor do I know the first thing about smog tests, nor can I fucking drive over a highway bridge, nor do I have a CA driver's license. Oh me. Do you know what, though? The Mahler made it all worthwhile, every minute. "now the ears of my ears awake," etc.
Laptop: Now the laptop of my laptop awake-- but a lot you care. You left me for the city yesterday.
Pica: I left everything for the city yesterday.
Laptop: (with extravagant chagrin) BART stole you away.
Pica: I was abducted. By the promise of wisdom, it seems.
Laptop: When wisdom inward dwells, or between Haste and Dwight on Telegraph.
Pica: Better that I did travel to the city without my wallet!
The Bank is not a character in this opera, and is silent.
Laptop: Best you lash your wallet to the mast--
Pica: HEY now -- I totally realized in time that Edmond Jabes is full of it, and it would have been worthless to go through life any longer without Rational Zen, although being a laptop you can't possibly truly understand.
Laptop: Five bright apples and a dim magpie. Winter follows fall.
Pica: Oh. Well.
The players:
Pica pica nuttalli (lyrics, vocals, and erratic evasive movements)
The shiny objects band:
Guitar, a bike
The Laptop, a comfort and a goad
The Black Guitar
[Bike, a guitar (unseen)]
A room in the back of a house in the back of a verdant lot in Palo
Alto, CA
A chorus of trains and buses:
BART
Caltrain
VTA
Muni
A lot of books
Is it a blog? Is it a rock opera? Is it a blog opera? Is it readable? Is it compatible with Pica's obligations to the federal government (no, not those obligations)? Will there be cake, creme brulee, or suet pudding?