new year’s eve sonnet

(for MKI, as always)

Hey Omicron: the letter of the hour!
You’ve brought another covid Christmas: who’d
have thought lightning could strike again so soon?
but never mind, we’ve foiled your plot to sour
our Stollen — hopped the last of the outbound flights
to paradise, where naked hugs and sweaty
dancing are de rigueur, the restaurants ready
for parties of ten plus, no rez required!

’course we’re not all so lucky: lockdown wounds
are here to stay; while absent friends on screens
remain; let’s hope tonight to drown our blues
in toasts to family lost, who flock our dreams
like larks at dusk, ’til waking see anew
the chance for change in twenty-twenty two.

new year’s eve sonnet

All my brothers locked down, the sound of lighters,
of bottle openers, bottles popped alone
that foam and spill across the empty wide
expanse of kitchen floors unmopped. A home
in name but not in deed, indeed a jail
that native sons know well, a reservation
held in reserve, revisiting the names
inscribed on birth certificates, a nation
of orphans stumbling in twilight. Is hope
obscene to our imagination, or can
we dream a fiery green without dull smoke
and scour clean our hearts, as we have our hands,
’til double twenty penitence is done,
emerge absolved in twenty twenty one?

bhh on shakespeare garden / end of world

mach on academia

Similarly, esprit de corps, class bias, national pride, and even the narrowest minded local patriotism may have high value, for certain purposes. But such attitudes will not be shared by the broad-minded inquirer, at least not in moments of research. All such egoistic views are adequate only for practical purposes. Of course, even the inquirer may succumb to habit. Trifling pedantries and nonsensical discussions, the cunning appropriation of others' thoughts, with perfidious silence as to the sources, the metaphorical dysphagia suffered when recognition must be given, and the crooked illumination of others' performances when this is done, abundantly show that the scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure quest of knowledge in our present social conditions is still an ideal.

~ Ernst Mach (1885) Contributiosn to the Analysis of the Sensations

life

What is life, if not lived?

all is not right with the world

snow in may . . . .

martyrs . . .

fascists . . .

a roof

on reading unfinished novels

There's no reason to read an unfinished novel if the author is alive. He just might finish it, for instance, and then that finished product would have the stamp of approval from an artist (presumably) one is already interested in, or at least, one has heard is worth being interested in. If that artist has produced an unfinished work worth consuming, one might as well wait until he/she is dead before consumption in order to ensure that one doesn't eavesdrop on notes and ramblings when a mature work is imminent.

[Exception which proves the rule: the recent trite crap "completion" of the Star Wars saga. nuff said.]

[Of course, in media other than the written word, unfinished status can be conferred by situations other than the writer/creator's death: go watch post haste if you have not already, Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe, the greatest unfinished movie of which I am aware—and be moved.]

There are, of course, famous examples here, e.g. Kafka's Amerika or Nabokov's Dying is Fun—although in both cases an ethical question arises since the respective authors requested their unfinished works destroyed upon their deaths.

In the case of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, I know of no such request. The question does, nevertheless, arise: what legitimates publishing this unfinished work and distributing it widely?

Apparently, upon Wallace's suicide from depression, he left behind on his desk "a neat stack of manuscript, twelve chapters totaling nearly 250 pages" and "hundreds and hundreds" of additional pages and notes for the novel scattered about his office. (There was, however, no outline, or explicit description of the novel's intended structure and ordering of events / written sections.) His editor on Infinite Jest, Michael Pietsch, was tasked with assembling this chaos into something that could be published, and make money for the publisher / the estate.

Graciously, the details of these circumstances are described in an introductory editor's note.

So, when reading the book, there are many questions: is this the right order of the information? Would this chapter have even been included? In this form? Questions which, when reading a completed work, are not raised. And worries (questions / confusions / imaginations) about the structure of the work are no longer criticisms of the author (and, perhaps, only on some occasions criticisms of the editor), but rather merely circumstances under which one might imagine one's own perfect version of the work, or extrapolate its completion into the ideal work for you, the reader (even if not one that's realistic for the author to have produced, editor to have approved, etc.).

Was it right? ( . . . to publish this unfinished, to charge $27.99, etc.?) In the case of The Pale King, I know of no countervailing demands expressed by Wallace, and I emphatically agree with Pietsch's assessment that there is plenty here for the reading public to enjoy / value. (Even if there is some sense in which the dead are being taken advantage of, you, the $27.99 reader are not. I say this only a fifth of the way through the book, and already having earned back the cost through insight, amusement, and beatific and sublime experiences.)

The first chapter (only a page and a half) is almost worth the price of admission alone for sheer beauty. There are ups and downs, but chapter 9, the "author's forward" definitely confirms the value and insight of the work, no matter how disjoint, and (ultimately, despite the fact that only Wallace's name appears on the title page) collaborative the work in this form is. (Look, chapter 11 is just notes, it would not have appeared in a finished novel by Wallace. And the influence of its content on the novel would not have been felt at the precise place in the ordering in which it was placed. Pietsch knows this. But he acknowledges it and, more importantly (consequently?) you the reader know it as well: this affects your processing and interpretation of chapter 11.)

I have to admit, however, a spooky feeling, when reading passages like

. . . this right here is me as a real person, David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012, addressing you from my Form 8829—deductible home office at 725 Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont 91711 CA, on this fifth day of spring, 2005, to inform you of the following: All of this is true. This book is really true.

Of course, even in this "autobiographical" section, there are deliberate obfuscations and falsities. But from the style, from the circumstances, we know that one day Wallace sat down and wrote these words, and he wrote them from a perspective in which the novel was finished, and published, and it had only taken 3 years to write. We know that he put himself in that frame of mind, and "talked" to the potential reader. But within 3 years he had become so completely unable to find this frame of mind in which the novel was done again that he committed suicide.

This is a man talking directly to you, the reader, from beyond the grave, yet it was not him who decided that you would hear him, but his estate and publisher and editor. Again, not that that's wrong (this is the start of the aforementioned chapter 9, well worth the price of the book alone in terms of insight and depth), but that it's certainly spooky. And you allow yourself to imagine Wallace cutting it, or rephrasing it, or (more likely, my imagination), dropping the conceit that the work is real, and introducing the (admittedly, startlingly profound) discussion of the history and nature of American taxation into it in a more organic way. To imagine that this was an exercise in the style of his popular nonfiction essays to bring together information that ultimately would be more effectively (?) conveyed through fiction.

But then that's just my fantasy of David Foster Wallace, and what he might have done. But to even take the first tentative steps on this staircase, to even find a direction in which to look, is not only worthwhile, but strangely creative as a reading experience.

reflections on woodstock

I hate hippies. I hate the aesthetic, the lack of personal hygiene, the naivete, the self-righteousness, the simplistic mouthing off of communalist ideals without any sense of the realities of what a real follow through would require. I hate hippies.

If there's anything I hate more than hippies, it's the overblown and dishonest nostalgia for the 60s that one finds in old hippies, some young hippies sober enough to have read a book, and any frat boy who's ever had an argument about "greatest guitarist of all time" (to my knowledge, this is all frat boys, but I don't want to be dogmatic). If there's anything worse than being a hippie, it's aggrandizing the hippie movement as if something were accomplished, or somehow the 60s were a better time.

But there's something about Woodstock, there's something about naivete in its pure form, there's something about ideals innocently followed, even without a hint of possible realization, there's something about that hope and faith and aspiration that just gets me.

As a cultural event, Woodstock is unique in so many ways, and this even the detractors must recognize. It was a planned event, that deviated radically from that plan (number of people, from commercial event to charity, lack of appropriate facilities, etc.), and this deviation was captured extensively by media (not least of which being the masterful documentary).

But unlike most deviations from plan (or like them?) the result was not catastrophe, but beautiful success. Where riots, starvation, and filth might have resulted, instead there was peace and beauty. And that isn't just propaganda, it's what the people who were there (even the straights) thought while it was happening. And surely thinking makes it so.

The most profound statement of this sentiment was recorded in the documentary when Max Yasgur himself, the farmer who provided the location for the festival, takes the mic. He graciously acknowledges the achievement of Woodstock as a demonstration to the world that "a half a million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it."



And this is indeed an accomplishment, one that subsequent Woodstocks, with their rapes and chaos failed to achieve.

But the accomplishment here is twofold: not just hoping that man can rise above, can be better than the morass that is well-familiar "human nature," which hope is in itself unique enough when expressed sincerely, but also the doing, the openness toward a brotherhood of man which, frankly, is lethal in most practical contexts. The essence of the spirit is captured in the absentee song-poem "Woodstock," stirringly rendered by Joni Mitchell at Big Sur:



In the words of the chorus, which she so touchingly emphasizes:

We are stardust,
We are golden,
and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

The idea here, at the time, is not one of achievement, but of attention and attempt: we've got to get ourselves back to the garden, back to the innocence of Eden. Not that we are there, not that we can assume it, but that if we see what is within ourselves, then we can achieve.

Of course, hope and effort are better than the empty nostalgic complacency of the elderly hippie and Woodstock worshipper. But are they empty? Are these seeds really within us? And if so, is there any value in the efforts made by those at Woodstock, and keeping the memory alive, as in Mitchell's performance at Big Sur?

Perhaps what is so striking about Joni Mitchell's performance here is the sense of possibility, of earnestness - if only the audience can hear and understand (why else explicate the chorus beforehand?), then something can be achieved. And it was only at the start, as such attempts were made for the first time (at least as far as any participants were aware) that such earnestness could be sincere. After the crash of the 70s, and the violence of Altamont, the hope for a change in human consciousness based on the right combination of music, willpower, and drugs was demonstratively misguided.

A too little emphasized strategy for bringing about true radical social reform, and one unfortunately at which many hippies failed miserably, is the instillation of progressive values in one's children through attentive and careful rearing. Of course, any failure here on the part of the hippies is probably not due to a lack of good intentions, but more just a lack of skill and insight—to say nothing of the selfishness which comes from engaging in one's own consciousness expanding drug odyssey. The essence of the problem is perhaps captured by John Sebastian's touching performance at Woodstock. He clearly recognizes the importance of imparting the new values to the next generation, and his eyes are glassy with the beauty of childhood, but his lyrics clearly confuse the strategies for consciousness expansion appropriate to the self-conscious adult with appropriate strategies for effective child rearing.



Not to mention, of course, he's so out of his skull on something he can't even remember the words to his own song.

6:00 pm

I will inquire into no man's reasons for taking a drink at any hour except 6:00 P.M. They are his affair and he has a rich variety of liquors to choose from according to his whim or need; may they reward him according to his deserts and well beyond. But when evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost, or, if lost, then not altogether in vain. But it cannot make the grade alone. It needs help; it needs, my brethern, all the help it can get. It needs a wife (or some other charming woman) of attuned impulse and equal impatience and maybe two or three friends, but no more than two or three. these gathered together in a softly lighted room and, with them what it needs most of all, the bounty of alcohol. Hence the cocktail. After dinner you may, if you like, spend an hour or so sipping a jigger of whiskey diluted to any attenuation that matches your whim with soda or branch water. But at 6:00 P.M. we must have action. When we summon life to reveal forgotten benisons and give us ourselves again, we do so peremptorily. Confirm that hope, set the beacon burning, and be quick about it. So no water.

~ Bernard DeVoto (1948) The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto

life imitates art