No Service

"Their prayers will not be answered. Connecting. . . . will flash impotently on the screen, but they will not connect. In the meantime, something “white nights” will be happening out there; the sun has set and yet it has not. With the animal safely in our stomachs, with single malts and beers before us, we can read or talk softly about what we’re reading, about the glory and sadness of finding ourselves this close to the middle of our existence (cue the Chekhov, cue the Roth) and as we do so the most important purchases we have ever made in our lives are snugly holstered in the pockets of our shorts, useless, as we commune in some ancient way, laughing and groaning, passing around lighted objects and containers of booze while thoroughly facebooking one another for real in the fading summer light."

-Gary Shteyngart, from Only Disconnect

Jews confirm existence of Jews, scientifically

A new study has confirmed that Jews are as genetically similar as they look and sound.

"The shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City, Dr. Atzmon said."

A bit of a strange example: the chance that two people chosen randomly off the streets of New York would both be Jewish seems high.

Names of people who worked on this study:

Gil Atzmon
Lawrence H. Schiffman
Harry Ostrer
Aron Rodrigue
Doron M. Behar
Richard Villems
Shlomo Sands (seriously.)

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

Zizek gets real with us.

Why we want children

credit: John

How we are happy

Eaarth

Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth

"If you are, like McKibben, a grudging optimist who believes that human society can willfully transform into a better version of itself, you might be persuaded by his arguments, some of them new, others a little old hat. Arguments that a smaller, diversified agriculture could add stability to our compromised industrial food-production system. That “growth” as an economic model is inherently flawed and will no longer be viable. That an “uptick of neighboring” will spread the sharing and implementation of practical, Eaarth-friendly how-to-ism. That the Internet could alleviate the rural boredom so many of us dread when we contemplate chucking it all and going back to the land, as he argues we must."

The class side of the whole thing:

"But many of these proposed solutions inadvertently resemble the list of things Christian Lander lampooned in his 2008 best seller “Stuff White People Like”: “farmer’s markets,” “awareness,” “making you feel bad about not going outside,” “vegan/vegetarianism.” It’s not that these things aren’t important. But in the absence of some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin, they will remain hipster lifestyle choices rather than global game changers. Which I suppose in the end is part of McKibben’s point. Eaarth itself will be that ecological Lenin, a harsh environmental dictator that will force us to bend to new rules. The question is whether we will be smart enough to bend ourselves first."

Do we really need an oil spill to get a (crappy) energy bill on the floor of the senate?

So we fall in love with ghosts

"Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out the seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens. When thunder shook the house and horse stalls, I’d see Claire in her bed, during the brief moments of lightning, sitting upright like a nervous hound, hardly breathing, crossing herself. There were days when she disappeared on her horse and I disappeared into a book. But we were still sharing everything then. The Nicasio bar, the Druid Hall, the Sebastiani movie theatre in Sonoma, whose screen was like the surface of the Petaluma reservoir, altering with every shift of light, the hundred or more redwings that always sat on the telephone wires and chirruped out loud before a storm. There was a purple flower in February called shooting star. There were the sticks of willow that Coop cut down and strapped onto my broken wrist before he drove me to the hospital. I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross."

- "Divisadero," Michael Ondaatje

SB 1070

An inspiring article by Joel Olson on the situation in Arizona

Dos grandes

credit: Jaimeeeeeee

Opus 40 or David Foster Wallace with a penchant for historical research

"He believed because an artist must believe as easily and deeply as a child cries. What's creation but self-enacted belief? - Now for a cautionary note from E. Mravinsky: Shostakovich's music is self-ironic, which to me implies insincerity. This masquerade imparts the spurious impression that Shostakovich is being emotional. In reality, his music conceals extremely deep lyric feelings which are carefully protected from the outside world. In other words, is Shostakovich emotional or not? Feelings conceal - feelings. Could it be that this languishing longing I hear in Opus 40 actually masks something else? But didn't he promise Elena that she was the one for him? And how can love be self-ironic? All right, I do remember the rocking-horse sequence, but isn't that self mockery simply self-abnegation, the old lover's trick? Elena believes in me, I know she does! How ticklishly wonderful! Even Glikman can see it, although perhaps I shouldn't have told Glikman, because...What can love be if not faith? We look into each other's faces and believe: Here's the one for me!"

- William Vollmann, "Europe Central" (92)

-his latest: "Kissing the Mask," a 528 page meditation on Noh Theater
- "The David Blaine of Literature?" A somewhat shortsighted but widely read and generally interesting critique at Lit Kicks
- non-fiction piece on Afghanistan
- If you want to know what he thinks about prostitutes (among other things)

ps. hi everyone! back in the us - back posting on this thing.

The world is built on this

"It is rational to believe propositions that structure our lives, even if they are not rational things to believe."

- G. A. Cohen, via Nozick

Num Num New Comic

A new series of masterworks from the inimitable minds of HF and JRH.

Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,

I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.

This hour, for example, would be like all the others

were it not for the rain falling through the roof.

I'd better not be too explicit. My night is careless

with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra

in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.

Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight

drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life

doing no more than preparing for life and thinking.

"Is this all there is?" Thus, I am here where poets come

to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,

something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables

of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words

and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say

about the way we live. I'd rather have what my daddy calls

"skrimp." He says "discrete" and means the street

just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:

that's poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement

of derangements; I'll eat you to live: that's poetry.

I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.

I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us

Molly Bloom's soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,

sometimes I taste her caution. But let's not talk about that.

Maybe Art's only purpose is to preserve the Self.

Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires

upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction

of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word

like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.

All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet

the flowers don't quit opening. I am carrying the whimper

you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom

of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities

the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.

Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights

out on a limb, there's a chance you'll fall in your sleep.

-Terrance Hayes

(Thanks, Michelle)

Ah Pook Is Here

A grotesque old favorite brought to my attention again by Colin.

Also, at approximately 70,000 views, a tribute to Danny's theory about the "sweet spot" of You Tube.

"Death needs time for what it kills to grow in..."

New York City, among Other Things

"We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that kinda shady Chinese restaurant and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone’s hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea. There are unheralded tipping points, a certain number of times that we will unlock the front door of an apartment. At some point you were closer to the last time than you were to the first time, and you didn’t even know it. You didn’t know that each time you passed the threshold you were saying goodbye.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. The kid on the uptown No. 1 train, the new arrival stepping out of Grand Central, the jerk at the intersection who doesn’t know east from west: those people don’t exist anymore, ceased to be a couple of apartments ago, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy."

-Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

Then Time

In winter, in a small room, a man and a woman
Have been making love for hours. Exhausted,
Very busy wringing out each other's bodies,
They look at one another suddenly and laugh.
"What is this?" he says. "I can't get enough of you,"
She says, a woman who thinks of herself as not given
To cliche. She runs her fingers across his chest,
Tentative touches, as if she were testing her wonder.
He says, "Me too." And she, beginning to be herself
Again, "You mean you can't get enough of you either?"
"I mean," he takes her arms in his hands and shakes them,
"Where does this come from?" She cocks her head
And looks into his face. "Do you really want to know?"
"Yes," he says. "Self-hatred," she says, "longing for God."
Kisses him again. "It's not what it is," a wry shrug,
"It's where it comes from." Kisses his bruised mouth
A second time, a third. Years later, in another city,
They're having dinner in a quiet restaurant near a park.
Fall. Earlier that day, hard rain: leaves, brass-colored
And smoky crimson, flying everywhere. Twenty years older,
She is very beautiful. An astringent person. She'd become,
She said, an obsessive gardener, her daughters grown.
He's trying not to be overwhelmed by love or pity
because he sees she has no hands. He thinks
She must have given them away. He imagines,
Very clearly, how she wakes some mornings
(He has a vivid memory of her younger self, stirred
From sleep, flushed, just opening her eyes)
To momentary horror because she can't remember
What she did with them, why they were gone,
And then remembers, and calms herself, so that the day
Takes on its customary sequence once again.
She asks him if he thinks about her. "Occassionally,"
He says, smiling. "And you?" "Not much," she says,
"I think it's because we never existed inside time."
He studies her long fingers, a pianist's hands,
Or a gardener's, strong, much-used, as she fiddles
With her wineglass and he understands, vaguely,
That it must be his hands that are gone. Then
He's describing a meeting that he'd sat in all day,
Chaired by someone they'd felt, many years before,
Mutually superior to. "You know the expression
A perfect fool," she 'd said, and he had liked her tone
Of voice so much. She begins a story of the company
In Maine she orders bulbs from, begun by a Polish refugee
Married to a French-Canadian separatist from Quebec.
It's a story with many surprising turns and a rare
Chocolate-black lily at the end. He's listening,
Studying her face, still turning over her remark.
He decides that she thinks more symbolically
Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,
For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.
She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,
Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure
In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.
It moves her-- in the way that earnest limitation
Can be moving, and she is moved by her attraction to him.
Also by what he was to her. She sees her own avidity
To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate
From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road
A startled deer running across an open field in the rain.
Wild thing. Here and gone. Death made it poignant, or,
If not death exactly, which she'd come to think of
As creatures seething in a compost heap, then time.

- Robert Hass

(Thanks again, Leora)

The Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,

driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

- Tony Hoagland

(Thanks, Leora)

Some good things, they fade

"Our hottest arguments were always about how we would contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest. We never kidded ourselves that we had the political gifts to reorder society or insure social justice. Beyond a basic minimum, money was not a goal we respected. Some of us suspected that money wasn't even very good for people -- hence Charity's leaning toward austerity and the simple life. But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life."

-Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (1987)

Doesn't this sound like it could have been written by Dave Eggers?

Everything

No doubt in Holland,

when van Gogh was a boy,

there were swans drifting

over the green sea

of the meadows, and no doubt

on some warm afternoon

he lay down and watched them,

and almost thought: this is everything.

What drove him

to get up and look further

is what saves this world,

even as it breaks

the hearts of men.

In the mines where he preached,

where he studied tenderness,

there were only men, all of them

streaked with dust.

For years he would reach

toward the darkness.

But no doubt, like all of us,

he finally remembered

everything, including the white birds,

weightless and unaccountable,

floating around the towns

of grit and hopelessness--

and this is what would finish him:

not the gloom, which was only terrible,

but those last yellow fields, where clearly

nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,

but the insensible light.

- Mary Oliver