11/30/04 - I was right, it turns out, to skewer Mr. Franzen below, because his more recent piece on Charlie Brown was absolutely magisterial.
I think that glancing observation may be all y'all will get from me until the weekend -- I'm off to the City of Iffy Transit and Museums That Close Too Early During The Week to be trained, fed crappy dinner rolls & melon (if memory serves) and put in the general vicinity of enough coffee to make at least 45% of the training modules nightmarish. I know it doesn't bode well that I've spent the last week contriving intricate scenarios for avoiding as much of this networking event as possible, but I need my escape routes. So far, an internet connection doesn't figure in any of them, but L.A. may surprise me. Locals with cars may also surprise me. Or I may sit in my room, read Proust, and call loved ones in the hushed and smoky tones acute loneliness reserves for its non-expression. (Hi. Yeah. Stuff's going on. Nice sunset. How's the kitchen? Clean? Yeah. Yeah, I'll be back soon. The museums? Oh, they were fantastic. I saw a -- is your phone cutting out? Sorry. It's late. I'll let you go. Then you curl up around the pillow and bury your chin in it, under the covers, all your vulnerability in this vast and hectic world safely concealed; then you go and find some caustic drink and write until your hand drops off, and in the morning everything is tolerable and absolutely nothing essential.)
Laptop: But your hand's gone!
Pica: So you come home and the loved ones help you sew it back on, and the world lights up again. They're nice that way.
11/29/04 - The silence, yes, I am sorry: vacation provides a convenient excuse, but really there's just been such a flood of input I can't process it all fast enough to write. My brain is moving like molasses.
Films we saw this weekend: "Sideways," gruesome & funny -- the scene in which the main character attempts to describe his novel to the love interest was designed especially for me and caused much contortion. Later, on tape, "Winter Sleepers," Tom Tykwer's first feature (I think) -- I didn't expect to like it as much as I did; apparently in the end I'm still more aesthete than not, and fancied I could discern Martin Sperr's Bayrische Trilogie behind the physical/metaphorical clash of culture & generation in the mountains of Bavaria. But the pretext for renting it was my need, after going through Kafka word-by-word auf Deutsch, to hear the spoken language -- and for that you don't necessarily want a Bavarian film, although I have now given my companion ammunition to mock my inexplicably süddeutsche Aussprache, and myself ample justification to continue slurring ish kann nisht anduhs, usw.
I saw The Princess & the Warrior whenever it hit the cinema two years ago, determined that Franka Potente can act about as well as I can and that Tykwer doesn't really have the brains to hold a narrative together -- like so many exponents of flashy international new-new-wave cinema (cf. Claire Denis, Wong Kar-Wai, possibly Tsai Ming-Liang although I haven't seen any of his films beyond What Time Is It There?, and no doubt copious similar things in the industrialized world I haven't made time to see) he seems to operate by instinct, which tends to give you about a 75% hit rate at best. I am usually pretty happy to do 25% of the work of manifestation while watching a film, however: seems more interactive that way. The scene with the wood stove in the middle of Princess has haunted me to this day, in any case -- it was just so strange -- and parts of Winter Sleepers have a similar feel: the limits of the camera are the limits of the world.
Man, I'm tired. I don't know if any of this made sense. It was very strange to be in Reno in the snow: I had to keep reminding myself that I was thousands of miles from home, no matter how familiar things looked, or sounded, or smelled or felt. Perhaps I stayed awake believing my waking life to be a dream, & thus too likely to be lost in sleep for somnolence. I'll try to do it all justice tomorrow.
[URGENT UPDATE: order the best granola in creation here. Do it. Do it now. Happy birthday.]
11/24/04 - Profundity. Come on, come on.
Nothing. Let's query the Archives. What have you to say, archives?
...
11/23/04 - Today will be AWESOME. Why?
a) I found ONE (1) relatively long academic paper in my box of horrible writing 1983-2004, on the subject of Milos Forman's 'Loves of a Blonde' and Marta Meszaros' 'The Girl' -- two Central European films from the 60s. If I like, I can rewrite it, or I can just submit it intact with its parenthetical comments about Akhmatova and Zola and how much I hated this philosophy book I had just read off the academic clock, and explain that I had no other papers and anyway I'm applying to this program to improve my "discipline." I suppose if this hadn't worked out I could have submitted some manic screed against Louis Althusser from 1999, but that's exactly what I didn't want it to come to. There were some dark years back there -- interesting, certainly, but dark. Then again, they were the years when I could write a poem in German and translate it into Italian over my daily espresso, and in neither language did it completely, totally suck. I can't do that anymore.
b) My father called to tell me that his mother, now 86 and fundraiser/ office manager extraordinaire for the Northwoods Wildlife Center, was worried that she might have Alzheimer's and so deputized my sister to give her an informal test. Sample question: name an animal beginning with each letter of the alphabet. Apparently for "d" she came up with "dromedary," and my sister wanted to call the whole thing off there, but it escalated to an appointment with her doctor, who presumably gave her the same test, and reassured her that not only does she have no trace whatsoever of Alzheimer's, she registered a pretty high IQ. So that's all well and good.
(I recounted this tale to my companion, who asked, naturally, if I knew of any animals for "x." I waved my hands and said there must be something in China, then left research up to him: and voila! The Chinese xenosaur, which is indeed unequivocally the coolest thing ever.)
c) I will soon finish correcting the papers I was supposed to have corrected yesterday. I realized that it's difficult not because I'm incompetent to evaluate written work but because the mechanical flaws in a few of them are so dire that I don't know where to start criticizing -- do I let the incoherent sentences slide, do I focus only on the positive, or do I actually go through the whole paper and point out every instance of poor grammar or unsubstantiated claims? If any humanities teachers at iffy universities happen to be reading this, you can feel free to drop me a line with advice...
d) All that's left of the M.A. app is the personal statement, which I will try to finish today or tomorrow, then I'll be good to go and free to spend the next 8 months maintaining my financial position so grad school doesn't ruin me. So far, so good. Tomorrow, however, I fly to Reno.
11/22/04 - Happy November 22nd, all: I feel this date is significant somehow, but aside from being x/2x the relevant birthday boy/girl, anniversary, historical catastrophe or private epiphany escapes me. (Note: poem brought to my attention by a housemate this past Memorial Day, by way of his posting it in the kitchen; I somehow kept my appetite and never forgot it.)
All the same: the mysterious date finds me hard at work planning excursions during my upcoming training in Los Angeles, for which I will be boarded up near LAX with recourse only to Metro, the odd taxi, and my magic shoes. Can I reconcile these limitations with the area's many art museums, all of which seem only to be open late on Thursday night, leaving me twiddling my thumbs on Wednesday? This is probably the thing I'd go furthest to see, but it all looks pretty seriously awesome. And I have to confess that my deep childhood/teenage affection for L.A., which never joined up with any adult (viz. "practical") affinity later on and so has always hung suspended in my psyche beside things like "faith in democracy" or "intellectual/artistic community" or "true love," should make the trip inherently meaningful. I'll have to steer clear of the La Brea tar pits, however -- they were a frequent destination in my youth and I remember vividly staring into a black morass in which, I believe, some genius of illustration had placed a lifelike mammoth calf reaching vainly out towards a parent as it sank into the slough of sticky despond. Great entertainment for kids, I tell you. Combining that with ten thousand repeat viewings of the "Neverending Story" movie probably didn't help matters much either -- depression bound up in apocalypse, wonder and beauty. Still, adventure stories are all about thinking on your feet, and hopefully I've been well enough trained by them to avoid any sabre-toothed cats on the subway no matter how crushingly awful the "business" segment of my sojourn is -- or how lovely the art.
Laptop: How's that suspicion of the metanarrative?
Pica: It's dandy! And how are you?
Laptop: Scurvelicious!
Pica: Alas. We juiced half an orange last night; I should have offered you the other.
Laptop: But then you thought, no, no, giving the laptop an orange would be absurd. I should drop it on the Caltrain and give it a bad concussion.
Pica: I am very sorry. You really don't know how sorry I am.
11/21/04 - I don't miss the Sem every day*, and particularly in Berkeley there are reasonable substitutes for it, but it is the only place I ever found the one-volume edition of A la recherche du temps perdu. It's fairly amazing that I didn't buy it then; I often blamed the lack of oxygen in the Seminary for a few things that ended up on my shelf, but the idea that I should buy-it-now in anticipation of the long dark night of my uncertain future was usually the real driving force, independent of any concerns about my lack of French.
In any case I've been trying to write more than read, but I've been interrupted in both tasks by a slew of papers I need to grade (and not by the standards I long to apply, probably -- "poverty has been a problem in the U.S. for over a hundred years," claims one -- do I ask for a citation or issue a ten-page smackdown? -- ooh, in the latter case killing two birds with one stone by producing an "academic writing sample" of appropriate length for the M.A. program!), and by visits to other bookstores and the Ph.D. program in the sky, whose faculty post on their doors very cheap but unpardonably funny shots at Heidegger and enticing book jackets. Oh, Ph.D. program in the sky! My life has only just begun.
I think I'm winning the War on small-t terror, indeed, and I honestly never expected to. Never.
* which is why I didn't discover until now that they've signed onto the Booksense branding scheme, to my deep, deep chagrin -- I violently opposed the same decision at another collective bookstore at which I volunteered six years ago, and I still find it aesthetically and (mildly) morally offensive -- but hey. If you want the brand monkeys to encourage you to read The Life of Pi, go ahead, and if you know that you want abstruse books about Kant and Spinoza or the Austro-Hungarian Grotesque or both instead, then it's unlikely that the brand monkeys will stop you.
11/19/04 - The level of discourse I'm good for at the moment: um, maybe I'm drinking too much caffeine. [stares]
You wave your hand in front of my eyes: nothing. You wave the arts pages of today's NYT with all those MoMA photos before my eyes: vaguely more irritable stare. You email me pictures of Prague: oh, Prague, the stare says, I'm so sure. You email me "work": nothing.
11/18/04 - Every month around this time I start to poke around in search of commuter rooms in the southeast Bay; I imagine actually living in Fremont or Milpitas and my heart sinks and I don't pull the trigger. Then I empty my bank account to pay the rent on a room I see for maybe 24 hours in a given week, resolve to make more coffee at home and take the Caltrain to work less often, accept weeknight invitations to go up to the city, crash in Berkeley, take the East Bay Loneliness Express down to San Jose and work and go home and fuck up and miss my Cal Ave stop and end up in downtown Palo Alto instead, where I sup on fine granola and gaze into bookstores with unfathomable longing in my heart; occasionally I do this in the morning and don't make it into work until 11 or so, and on these days it's fair to say I do not change the world.
It's a nice set of antagonisms -- I couldn't really ask for more elegance in intricacy -- but it does wear me out a bit. Fortunately there's an expiration date; after that I will simplify things by moving up to the city, most likely, and be rent only slightly asunder by BART. This state of affairs will last another year or two, but the likelihood of my being able thereafter once more to enjoy my granola at leisure (or be overcharged routinely for berries) is not exactly high. It is thus worth taking a moment to reflect on the past year -- or for that matter on past years of being split between Madison & Chicago, or Chicago & Cambridge, etc.
But -- alas for all of you -- that's going to happen offline, or if it happens online it won't all happen today. I'm too busy trying to figure out why my eyelids sweat so much, to give you some idea what you're missing. (I mean, if you know then for God's sake don't hold back; but...)
Update: leading theory on the eyelid problem: I Am Tired.
See, if I were to go into the sciences there would be all these stringent criteria I could apply to the graduate programs -- what sort of funding they get, what kind of labs, what relationships with industry or major donors, what institutional collaborators, etc. But I want to go read a bunch of books & write a master's thesis. For that I need a library card, a French press pot, an upholstered chair or small couch, a laptop, a good pair of headphones, a clean well-lighted place, and proximity to Culture so I don't go mad. The black pointy-toed lace-up boots, austere fitted black wool jacket, case of Gauloises, and alluringly dark-toned translucent scarf for my red-tinted hair, well, sure, but those are part of the average first-year fellowship at any reputable university these days, so they make a poor discriminant.
Anyway, it looks as though I could wrap up the one I'm applying to in a year, leaving me liable only for clean well-lighted rent and coffeebeans and, okay, one fine on borrowed CDs kept through the paper crunch. In the short term, however, my failure to find a single academic paper I have ever written will probably drive me to compose a hasty study of books chosen at random from my shelf. Please drop me a line if you would like to review the fruits of this labor or suggest subject matter. Should I ingratiate myself to the local Proust scholar by writing about Swann's Way, thereby adding to my reasons to finish it quickly?
11/17/04 - Safire calls Colin Powell on his use of the word "fulsome," claiming it "means 'offensively excessive,'" but I checked this myself yestiday and the definition is more complex. Uh, so there.
I thought further about no-win situations, game theory, insurgency and terror and concluded that I need to know more about Vietnam. Book recommendations welcome. More in time. Meanwhile, I cannot stop reading this site, which encompasses a variety of types of convergence (social, intellectual, temporal, geographic, zeitgeistig, etc.) and is primarily authored by people Who Unwittingly Saw Me At My Worst And Were Kind Anyway -- strike from the register of the lost, and joyfully.
[N.B. I do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed on any linked site, it ought to go without saying, nor oftentimes my own. I assume this is not why anyone is reading, but if you do expect guidance from me, I suggest you pay a visit to the library instead. Not that I'm trying to weasel out of responsibility for moral integrity, just that you gotta play the odds.]
11/16/04 - Laconic/hedonic today. This looks neat; this is a known necessity; this has gotten more extensive; this is the New Directions catalogue, which you can check for favorite/desired titles & authors; this is still here; I cannot find any trace of the collection of Belgian surrealist writing I once received felicitiously in the mail -- oh but everything's lost now; lost is the new black.
11/15/04 - Oh sweet heaven. No entry today.
Well, er, actually you ought to read this -- conditionally endorsed; we do need more free clinics and food co-ops, although I'm not sure the way to voters' hearts is through their stomachs, and I remain skeptical that Christianity can provide a model for the organized resistance of Empire. It just isn't binary: sometimes the government seems like a basilisk, its apparent power paralyzing its staring opponents, who ought to have the sense to look elsewhere and strategize. If you can't stop them, can you not clean up diligently in the aftermath?
Hmm. Reading this again I'm pretty sure my line of reasoning is unclear: what I meant, or thought, was something about the number of terrible ideologies I could easily see overthrowing the government: opposition not being binary (Empire vs. Not-Empire) in that sense. But in any case.
And is it more offensive that Bush is stupid, or that the U.S. army is (yet again) committing war crimes (would you rather be humorless or frivolous)? The culture war, boys and girls, has never been the problem here.
11/14/04 - Time for the Sunday Andronico's roundup! What has Andronico's done to us today?
a) moved down the block into a yawning chasm in the earth
b) refused to stock any cereal not made with lard
c) employed a staff of thieving howler monkeys to plague shoppers
d) demanded, for something like a third of a pint of blueberries, the
princely sum of $7.99, thus thwarting our well-laid plans to have
blueberries with breakfast yet again
Answer: well, d), but I think it's no more plausible than a) - c). The official grocery store of the coming apocalypse also exacts $8.99 for a similar quantity of raspberries. I am not kidding.
After an experience like that, one needs badly to unwind, and there's no better unwinder than Wilfrid Sellars' Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind, if by "unwind" we mean "remind us again why we don't love reading rigorous epistemology." A far better antidote to the blueberry tariff must be Chimes at Midnight, which combines Orson Welles and Henry IV, two of my favorite things on this earth, and was moreover combined with three favorite people last night. And the laptop, thank goodness, is back from the dead and singing quiet hymns of praise in the heretofore unseen back room of L.B.I., ganz zufriede. (?)
11/13/04 - GRE score report report:
Verbal: as expected, more or less.
Quantitative: hey, when did I completely stop being able to do math? After (hmmm... 28 + 28...) 56 humiliatingly easy questions about rectangular solids, inequalities, etc. I began mentally composing the hara-kiri notification list (should I buy stationery, or is that gauche?); I considered cancelling my scores for a good four-and-a-half (of the five allotted) minutes, because who needs these terrible numbers to follow him/her through an already checkered academic career? But obstinacy won out and I submitted them in the end, and it wasn't the bloodbath I had predicted, I don't think. I don't understand these things.
Composition: pending. They gave me some pretty lame questions, and I did what I could: that has never been the ideal state of affairs for me, but I don't think I spent the whole time insulting the testmakers. I've made some progress.
Finding the San Bruno BART station in the dark on the basis of half-remembered Mapquest directions which fell out of my pocket halfway through the bike ride: 800! I nailed this one through sheer pluck, instinct, and a smattering of logic (San Bruno is south of South SF, so I shouldn't be heading north; if I had been meant to turn here, that would be 270 degrees and there surely would have been an easier and more direct route; etc.), and to the best of my knowledge my poor bike's tires are not completely flat after their trek through the post-industrial land of broken glass. The whole area reminded me distinctly of the midwest, so I felt quite at home, at any rate. I'd happily do it again. It does bother me a little that the hoodlums who stole my bike light while the bike was locked up (I assume) near the Caltrain station just snapped it off the handlebars and left the mounting ring alone, thereby rendering my bike unsafe and the light useless to them -- I feel about this something like what I felt when the kids grabbed a massive handful of Halloween candy and ran away two weeks ago ("you're engaging in antisocial behavior for Snickers bars? What kind of lives do you lead?"). It isn't so much the violation as the dismal payoff that bothers me.
Quick political question: everyone realizes that, as far as the question of withdrawing troops in the face of kidnappings/deteriorating situation in Iraq or elsewhere is concerned, it's a no-win situation, right? Do arguments proceed under other assumptions?
The no-win situation is essential, maybe even central, to a coherent ethical position. Take an archetypal silly question, e.g. "What number of people would have to be saved by your actions to justify the sacrifice of one of your children?" You can't expect anyone to be content with any response -- the situation is already as bad as it's going to get regardless of what choice gets made. Ask yourself: how well can you reason under pressure? At what point does it cease to matter?
I know this ain't serious philosophy, but I make notes to myself, and the hope is that someday they will turn into serious arguments. I called my old site "the Napkin" to reflect its provisional nature; I guess I've become more cocky in recent years.
11/10/04 - Some old tricks.
Those of you unable or unwilling to learn German or Hungarian to read Imre Kertesz's "other" novels may safely continue your English-only policy for another 144 pages. Furthermore, you don't need to learn Hungarian to determine whether that godawful translation of Embers really does justice to Sandor Marai's work, as I am convinced it did not, because they gave the new one to George Szirtes; not that it's an obvious masterwork, but it will surely be better than the American Embers. But, you say, when will "they" translate War and War? Alas, I cannot tell you that.
I woke up fearing the day to come; I haven't justified it yet; the fear, that is. Is it Wednesday? Is it a lack of clearly-defined tasks? Poverty? The upcoming exam? Or am I forgetting something crucial? It may be time for some Emergency Chai Rations, as it seems to be getting worse in any case.
Yesterday evening: I am interrupted on the home stretch of the Castle by a phone call.
Caller: Hi, how are you?
Me: Pretty well. I'm almost done with The Castle.
Caller: Oh -- I can let you go, if you need to finish it.
Me: No, no, I'm happy to delay further. I don't want it to end!
Caller: It doesn't.
Silence.
Me: Right.
I will go out on a limb, now that I'm done, and say that the scene with Bürgel is one of the best in all literature. Just thinking of it keeps the desperate need for chai at bay. I will dutifully uphold my senseless policy of informing you all of Times-based confirmations of my espresso snobbery, all the same, although that $4 figure at the end has me terrified of New York.
11/9/04 - Good morrow to our waking soules, sez the Times: consider the supernova, before the train and The Castle and the bus and the espresso and Work. Due tribute to the Flash center, which actually does offer "news flashes." Heh.
It has occurred to me that by the standards of late 2001 this election was remarkably civil -- there were accusations of treason, sure, but it wasn't constant, and one side or the other's being in league with bin Laden wasn't actually a leitmotif of campaign rhetoric, at least not as far as my sources revealed. I don't think I could have hoped for that much around the last time I got a therapeutic dose of Chekhov, in January 2002. (2000% RDA here -- !!)
11/8/04 - All quiet on the shiny objects front. All quiet on the writing front, too: deafening. For most of today, freeshell was hosed, and I made use of my clandestine gmail account; I also ripped a hole out of the side of a carton of soy milk by accident and had to consume an emergency bowl of granola. Dear me, it was painful.
I didn't get a chance to say much about Le Grand Macabre, Gyorgy Ligeti's comic apocalypse-opera (I'm still taking this as further evidence that I was right to move to the Bay Area, but I'm good for a few more of this season's productions). I'm sorry to say that it triggered the old knee-jerk reflex, conditioned by exposure to countless bad Czech films, bad Gombrowicz novels, not-funny Kundera novels and not-intentionally-funny Kundera essays and a thousand sex farces at which the audience still seems to laugh unironically -- the same one that led me to slam the door on M.S.'s grand seminar on East-Central European Avant-Gardes and cease much to mourn my poor command of Slavic tongues. But reflexes aside, I derived amusement and mild delight from the score, the car-horn fanfares and the remarkable vocal performances. I am neither humorless nor heartless; promise. But I am busless. I will never go home; I will sleep in the office with Guitar. It always comes to this: bike grease in my hair at dawn. Or, well, it threatens but it never really comes, I suppose. It may come to the Caltrain, and that's not good, because the Caltrain costs money and money's what I need.
11/7/04 - The weekend was full of amusement; none of it will be shared with the world. Instead, I will trash Jonathan Franzen's recent story in The New Yorker.
[clears throat]
If I wanted to make a name for myself as a curator of high culture and high art, as I damn well do, and keep up appearances as best I can, and push the light of the English language a little further against darkness, and I had written the recent story by Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker, I would burn it and hide my face and be very reluctant to talk to my friends about my writing for a period of not much less than four months, I would take long walks, I would reconsider my beliefs and my foundations, I would travel and reread Shakespeare and Dante and Joyce and favorite poems aplenty, I would look at the world without trying to interpolate language until the language came on its own and directly. If somehow it turned out, while this restorative period was underway, that someone had sent a copy of this burnt tale to a major publication and it was to be unleashed upon the world in due time, I would slit my wrists.
Thank you. I am done. I could be more specific, but I really only have a limited amount of time to devote to these exercises; but since the laptop fell ill it seemed warranted in the ensuing vacuum.
Do I "really mean it"? No, no. Writing well is very hard. I have never succeeded at it. Writing humdrum mediocre fiction is also very hard. I may never even have succeeded at that. I'm honestly trying, in light of these facts, not to be so damned vicious. I must extinguish ressentiment. And thereafter may my hostility be terrible indeed.
11/6/04 - Brief hiatus expected; laptop cord finally fell apart. Only the Internet (in the form of eBay) can save us now.
11/5/04 - I live for Fridays, and my class; I'll be taking the GRE in 7 days (wish me luck &/or send advice!), to what end I do not yet know, but they may make an academic of me yet. We'll see. Meanwhile I'm holed up with the Kafka and the laptop, avoiding the glare of politics.
This got in, however: "In some places history is written by the winners but in South Africa it tends to be written by the thought-police." Perplexing statement rendered strangely elegant by parallelism; I think I'll call my new band The Winners and the Thought-Police; it will play all the old songs.
11/4/04 - The future looms; I registered for the GRE next week and it turns out not to be necessary. Well, I can start changing my life by planning better, I guess. Wells Fargo allows you to add comments to your online transfers between accounts, which means my bank statement says things like "Hail Mary Pass 11/3/04." Also, everything I wrote as an undergraduate is on a now-infamous hard drive last seen in a bedroom in an odd little house in Madison, Wisconsin in which I will never set foot again, so it looks like it's going to be a bit difficult to come up with a writing sample as well. In other news, I hate "online applications" and it is the season in which my back curls up and tries to protect me, nobly but bizarrely, from the deadly threat of good posture.
What's that you say? An election? Recently?
Laptop: www.marryanamerican.fi!
Pica: I can foresee objections to this plan.
Laptop: Why? You like vodka!
Pica: Yeah, but I have to stick around and take the GRE, and then I have to read every book in existence.
Laptop: How can you read every book in existence without going to Finland?
Pica:
Laptop: Marriage confers ample leisure time.
Pica: As does a welfare state.
Laptop: The shipyards of Riga are not far.
Pica: Autumn light slanting through yellow birch leaves.
Laptop: Praaaaaaaaaaaague.
Pica: You stop that.
Laptop: Oh, okay. Don't think about Prague. Think about how George W. Bush won the election and is really honestly going to be president of the U.S. for the next four years, both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, and the judiciary is set to turn over soon, and the man has said he's going to make destroying Social Security a "priority."
Pica: Praaaaaaaaaaaague!
Laptop: It's the tortured cry of the left-coast bourgeoise.
Pica: [paralyzed]
Laptop: But you know you've got to stick around now, don't you?
Pica: I know.
Laptop: Good luck on the GRE, by the way. I'll put in a good word for you. 010010101110.
Pica:
Laptop: No, it isn't funny. But good luck anyway.
11/3/04 - In place of the 300-page dissertation I could offer you today, by popular bitter-secessionist demand: the United Blue States of America Post-Election Blues Flag. Cheers! More uplift to come.
[removed; it ceased to amuse me, day after day]
One thing: I didn't expect to feel relieved, or this particular mixture of emotions at any rate -- 4 hours sleep, sliding off the coffee high, chocolate & apples and a sense of connection amid disconnection. Maybe. Provisional all this. Half-remembered lines from Habermas: "We have arrived at posthistoire: count up your supplies" -- it always conjures up images of, I think, a Commodore 64 game called "The Oregon Trail" which we used to play in elementary school, which was definitely posthistoire. Mountain lions, dried fruit, and the end of the Constitution. I am ready.
Do you long for links, you greedy people? A North Korea blog; "It is highly unlikely that Franz Kafka could boil an egg." (But could he use a toaster?) Kinoeye, etc.
Okay, I can't hold back any longer: now that I've plied you with my serene blue palliative and retreated from the constant temptation to post on "company" time, I have to say a few things, clumsily and coarsely. First: the bright side, for me, was the voter turnout. "They all came out for Bush," people have been saying. Yes. But people lined up to do this thing, in spite of the horror: there was an investment. Second: people are talking constantly and openly about the divided electorate, which is the first step towards detachment from the division's blinding passions -- even if the next steps are not taken, this is all to the good.
About those next steps, and the division, and you souls united beneath the flag below, I say: it's not them, it's us. We're the ones hurting America.
I mean, this shit is finished: Bush has a mandate, the Republicans control the House and the Senate, gay marriage has been made unconstitutional in 10 states (or so; I forget the number), with resounding margins. Here is what I hear people saying: "can't we just secede? Can't we cut ourselves off from the rest of the country?" It's 1855: are you saying the same thing? I mean: are you? How easy -- how much easier, even -- a conclusion would that have been to draw? How much more odious was the Confederacy than the Red Bloc?
At some point on election night I turned to my companion and said, "Do you know who the real winner is in this election? David fucking Brooks."
It is so. I've hated him for years, and I still think he's an idiot, and wicked, and his mother's ugly and his feet smell, but when I try to make sense of the election results I find myself traversing uncannily familiar terrain: the residents of all but a few states in this nation came out in force to cast their votes for George W. Bush as president, and they have to live in this country too. What do they think they're getting?
This election is the Revenge of the Apolitical: my companion lulled me to sleep last night with comforting visions of the withering-away of the state -- nice dream, eh? But it's everyone's dream. In contradistinction to every candidate the Democrats have run since... Kennedy?... Bush doesn't trouble the people with policy. He says he is going to make America safer, does a variety of asinine and incomprehensible things, marches around declaring America safer; end result: no politics, no worries. The Democrats, being the opposition party and the party which "cares about issues," exist as a perennial reminder that politics are necessary for governance. Liberal voters just want the Republicans to go away; conservative voters are more dissatisfied with political parties as such.
This might not be so if schisms were allowed or encouraged to develop within the conservative power structure, but the fantasy of apolitical governance is so potent and overwhelming that it has to date superseded any other modus operandi. Do voters in the hinterlands particularly care about the differences between Rumsfeld and Cheney? I say no. If they want things kept simple, it is because complexity is, generally, weakness.
Kerry tried to serve two masters (or more) and failed: set the "moral values" voters beside the "sane foreign policy" voters and you have completely incommensurable orientations -- one is political, therefore complex, one is apolitical and not. One cannot move from complexity into simplicity, against entropy: you can consider that an axiom for campaign rhetoric, and position-taking. Bush could get millions of people who do not give a shit about politics to vote -- and we've all talked to these people at one point or another -- because he almost never talks about politics; if he did, the whole thing would collapse immediately. But he's very canny on this point, and stays mum. I don't see an end to it that isn't flatly catastrophic -- and no matter how many times, for how many decades, liberals try to call him out on this point, he knows it's a trap and he won't come, and he doesn't have to; this drama can be reenacted by any players at any point, till it's numbingly familiar, till it has no power to sway anyone but the hoarse cajolers.
This is why we need smart people to take the reins, mesdames et messieurs: liberal pundits, having been made aware of this "moral values" business and its hold on the election, suggest that the Democrats can run under a "moral values" banner as well, although the moral values will be different -- as long as you alter the rhetoric, you can keep your policy goals intact. Just keep flogging it, boys, because if it ain't dead yet the suffering is aweful to contemplate. I swear to you, the triumphalism of the go-to-Canada, keep-the-coasts rhetoric is the final litmus test for the liberal mindset, which has been painted into a corner not merely of being defined by its own beliefs, but of being defined by beliefs at all. If you are going to run a political campaign, hypothetically, you can hardly do more to assure success than to ally yourself with a fixed and unchanging position within the electorate, whether or not it has anything to do with political goals: it just needs to be a strong enough fantasy, held devoutly, cherished, identity-forming. That's the high card.
What we know now is what we suspected in 2000: politics is dead in this country. But democracy lives on; vive la republique.
11/2/04 - They're handing out "I VOTED TOUCHSCREEN" stickers, to my astonishment -- do you want to walk around all day with your cardigan declaring that your vote didn't count? The smart people voted absentee, my landlady among them; I took my chances with the touchscreen machines, but I think I'll have nightmares for the next week about voting for the wrong presidential candidate. After satisfying myself that I'd wreaked enough havoc with the ballot initiatives I pedaled serenely away and over to the cafe for a victory biscotto. As far as I know, it's out of my hands now, although it may have been out of my hands as soon as I registered here. I plan to spend the rest of the day at work and/or reading The Trial, because I looooove Kafka and I always forget this, and because it should have happened years ago; if my resolve shatters I'll catch the terrible Fremont bus and pass the hours of darkness watching the election returns.
I have to admit that I actually can't imagine why anyone would vote for Bush -- I know there are reasons, and I've seen eloquent cases aplenty made for it, but that last drop into madness is beyond my ken. I think if I felt the way the typical intelligent conservative feels about the state of domestic & foreign policy I'd spend all my time agitating for a better Republican candidate. You vote Bush, you get nothing: a reflection of your adoration or your hatred, a machine with three or four programs. The incredible cynicism required to throw your ideological weight behind him isn't at my disposal, I fear, even were I to turn conservative; I've stopped being disturbed to see it in others, but I remain as perplexed as ever.
At my polling place, the Grace Lutheran Church, we voted in the Sunday School room under the watchful eye of the Decalogue. The kids had been exploring the notion of faith, judging by the wall decorations: "What is faith?" "Knowing that your pet is going to die and it will be okay," suggests a precocious youngster: I suppose that's pretty close to the mark.
But cynicism. For a long time I have believed that most ideology and rhetoric is misleading and the real driving force behind 99% of events in American politics is the players' lust for power, which tends to be my answer to "how can they do that?" questions of all sorts: a little Machiavellian calculus goes a long way. The trouble is that I tend to discount the role ideology really does play. It isn't as simple as people voting their values and not their pocketbooks: on a wide scale power-hunger is more trustworthy than a fervent expressed desire to Save Old-Growth Forests because in the former case, you can be fairly sure the person is thinking on his/her feet, and if s/he fails it will be through personal error. If, on the other hand, s/he is trying to make a complex issue into a personal crusade, a ridiculously wide variety of things can go wrong, catastrophically, and if s/he is blinded by ideology there will be no checks on it.
David Brooks publishes a new refinement every few days of his flawed red state/blue state theory (who knew the humble weekly column would lend itself so well to the publication of a working draft?): liberals are academicians, conservatives entrepreneurs, etc. etc. I get the impression that he's driving at some form of the argument that in conservatives, the lust for power is more aligned with ideology, and that this is a good thing, a better recipe for virtue.
But enough of politics. Ask yourself whom you love enough to go into the city for brunch at Pomelo, on a misty Sunday morning in the dead zone between All Saints' Day and Thanksgiving, humbled by sleep, leaning gently against one another as the Muni bucks and lurches.
11/1/04 - Read Death in Venice last night -- it packs a punch, and I haven't got the time to write a 40-page paper on it but I wish I had half Mann's command of narrative structure. Lukacs' essay "The Ideology of Modernism" has been more insidious and will take longer to unpack.
Meantime, belated minor literature: How to Make a Pumpkin Pie, with special guest Andronico's on University!!
1. In deliberations over the proper use of pumpkin-carving byproducts, allow the weaker case for pie over pumpkin ravioli to be made the stronger.
2. Steam assiduously chopped pumpkin pieces and nutritious-looking stringy pumpkin pulp together using available materials. Blend until the break of dawn with Cuisinart hand blender. Spend 20 minutes removing pumpkin fiber from Cuisinart hand blender with fork and available materials.
3. Collapse.
4. As night falls the next evening, consult pumpkin pie recipe and count up supplies; draw up list of needed materials, viz. ground ginger, half and half, whipped cream, pie crust and a pie tin, and allocate a small portion of money earmarked for "fun" to the bill at the nearest grocery store, Andronico's on University. Determine that a borrowed bike will get you there and back faster. Empty backpack, say your prayers, and embark.
5. Call associate from Andronico's for consultation about $11 pie crusts. ("ELEVEN DOLLARS? Are you sure you're not off by a factor of TEN?" "I'm so glad you feel that way." "I hate Andronico's!") Ascertain that there is no other pie crust anywhere in the store. Add "flour, rolling pin, and pie pan" to list, mentally.
6. Fail to locate either rolling pin or ginger. Call associate again; inform him that you will have no further dealings with Andronico's and, because you had the foresight to bring that bike, will hightail it instead to the Berkeley Bowl. Consider, dimly, asking him to check the hours of the latter market, but discount this as regrettable paranoia.
7. Speed south on Sacramento, unable to bend the derailleurs to your will, then east on Derby, and in a dizzy circle until you find the Berkeley Bowl. Observe that it is closed.
8. Reflect that you may have discovered the one bad thing about Berkeley. Undaunted, pedal for all you're worth up an arbitrary cross street (Oregon?) to Telegraph, to the "other" Andronico's near Le Bateau Ivre, where you earlier sat so peacefully and wrote into the afternoon. Stagger around until you find an aisle that might have pie crust. Jackpot: two Pillsbury "Pet-Ritz" crusts for about 10% of the "Picnic en Provence" flaky pastry markup product. Next, ginger -- they have ginger, but you think the pie would be better with oregano, so grab a bottle of that and proceed to checkout.
9. Scamper back to spice rack, abject, and exchange oregano for ginger. Collect twenty cents and smirks from children in line behind you. It's all downhill from here as far as the bike is concerned, however, if you can get through the Andronico's parking lot; tear down Derby to Milvia, the "bike boulevard," and roll through every stop sign like a pumpkin-pie juggernaut.
10. Place bike in basement. Stand at back door for 10 minutes before realizing there's a front door.
11. Follow pie recipe, reducing by 1/4 as instructed to yield one pie rather than two. End up with two pies anyway. Watch them closely. Reserve for election night: four more years of this.
earlier entries: September 2004 | October 2004
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
The unsuspecting masses:
mm
gg
pm
w
pp
fg
ez
kc
pi
#!
pj
NYT
Google news
NYRB
LRB
TLS
Die Zeit
more soon...
schedule 12/04 - 2/05
12/1 - 12/3 : Los Angeles
12/6 - 12/10 : [busy work week]
12/15 - 12/20 : B&J visit
12/21 - 1/2 : AZ/MX (?)
1/6 - 1/8 : Glagolitic Mass @ symphony
1/12 : more symphony?
1/15 - 1/17 : possible WI trip (if not following wknd)
1/25... : NY visitors?
[february]: possible NY trip!
to add: art shows, music, Europe, novel deadlines, designated Days of Joy and Pilgrimage