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Very Good Paragraphs

From the 7 Feb 2011 New Yorker‘s Briefly Noted review section:

Bird Cloud, by Annie Proulx (Scribner; $26). Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know where things went wrong or even if they did go wrong,” she writes. Among the litany of setbacks: a “fishing room” must be combined with a laundry room; a floor is stained an undesirable shade of adobe; a mover packs boxes of manuscripts incorrectly. (If she sees this man again, she vows, “I would kill him.”) Proulx, who winters in Santa Fe and vacations in Capri, does not mask her contempt for the locals, many of whom go to astonishing lengths to indulge her whims. At certain moments—as when she casually drives into a five-foot snowdrift and has to be shovelled out—one imagines that the feeling is mutual.

Having once met Ms. Proulx I feel a nice accuracy in all that this review implies. That woman is something dire. A vulture.

Very Good Paragraphs

From Richard Selzer’s Diary, on pain:

One purpose of these cries of pain, then, might be to summon help, to notify fellow members of the tribe of one’s predicament so that they will come running. But I think there is more to it than that. For the sufferer, these outcries have a kind of magical property of their own, offering not only an outlet for the emotion but a means of letting out the pain. Hollering, all by itself, gives a measure of relief. To cry out ow! or aiee! requires that the noise be carried away from the body on a cloud of warm, humid air that had been within the lungs of the sufferer. The expulsion of this air, and with it the sound, is an attempt to exteriorize the pain, to dispossess oneself of it, as though the vowels of pain were in some magical way the pain itself. It is not hard to see why the medieval church came to believe that a body writhing, racked, and uttering unearthly, primitive cries was possessed by devils. Faced with such a sufferer, authorities of the church deemed exorcism both necessary and compassionate. “Go ahead and holler,” says the nurse to patient. “You feel better. Don’t hold it in.” It is wise advice that has been passed down for millennia of human suffering.

The Authentic Animal – now streaming!

Some of you may recall that my pal Steve makes great mixtapes. They are essentially all I’ve been listening to in the car since moving to Alabama. Steve favors a good 50/50 mix of UK and US music—at least, he does on the mixes he sends me. From them I’ve discovered such now-beloved acts as The Incredible String Band, Vic Godard, Orange Juice, Pants Yell!, the Soft Pack, Comet Gain, and many many others.

Now, there’s a The Authentic Animal mix, full of cover songs, the taxidermy of the pop-music world. I’m listening to it now and you have to, too, now.

Loving the Dictionary

Looking up stern this morning. Found this:

stern2
noun
the rearmost part of a ship or boat : he stood at the stern of the yacht.
• humorous a person’s bottom : my stern can’t take too much sun.

I’m still getting some writing done, so I won’t take a half-hour to come up with some ideas for what utterance could have prompted this latter one (“They’re holding tryouts for the Coppertone girl” is the first thing that comes to mind), but here you are. From my Mac’s New Oxford American.

Don V. Lax, Where Art Thou?

Anyone in Maui can hire Don V. Lax, a violinist, to play music at events like weddings or dinners or I guess bat mizvahs. He’s got a Web site you can go to to contact the guy and book him. In his biography, he has this to say:

Since moving to America, he has performed and recorded with numerous jazz, folk and rock musicians, and also with symphony, opera, ballet, and chamber groups. His credits include playing in orchestras for such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald and Pavarotti, opening for Rickie Lee Jones, recording on CD’s with Airto, Paul McCandless and Michael Manring, and many others.

Fitzgerald and Pavarotti, sure. Everyone knows them. I don’t think I know who Rickie Lee Jones is and I’ve never once in my life heard of the other folks.

Did you know that Don V. Lax is the same Don V. Lax credited with “additional violin” on Camper Van Beethoven’s flawless and incredible Key Lime Pie album of 1989? Morgan Fichter was the woman put in the actual band’s lineup, but other than the rather grating violin on “Pictures of Matchstick Men” and the mostly forgettable violin on “Flowers” she was just a young fresh face.
Continue reading Don V. Lax, Where Art Thou?

Very Good Paragraphs

From Ken Silverstein’s “The Tale of the Cables: Reading WikiLeaks as Literature” in the Feb/Mar 2011 Bookforum:

The WikiLeaks cables, in other words, read more compellingly as a kind of literature. True, they don’t exactly evoke Tolstoy, Graham Greene, or even John le Carré. But diplomats are trained to chronicle the same tics and quirks of character that masters of fiction carefully record—and often with the same aim, of penetrating the surface equanimity of the characters they depict in order to win through to some more essential truths about their motivations. There’s a reason after all, that the fictional world, like the diplomatic one, is governed by plots—and that both fields share a comfort with moral ambiguity and casual deception that you don’t find in most other endeavors. So it’s probably a good idea to approach the cables not as the work of grand strategies like George Kennan, but rather as something akin to the chill, satiric portraits brought off by Patricia Highsmith, who famously said she was principally “interested in the effect of guilt” on her creations.

You can read the whole of it here.

An Old, Old Journal Entry on Vegas Which Basically States Everything I Thought I Came Up with in Class Last Week while Discussing D’Agata’s “What Happens There”, Excerpted from His About a Mountain

From June 2004:

The tagline on the new ad campaign for Las Vegas as a tourist destination is something along the lines of: “Vegas — What happens here stays here.” In other words, Vegas is presenting itself as a kind of anything-goes Eden of hedonism, a place for young & old alike to visit and let off some steam, at best, & at worst, marry someone you just met & spend the extended weekend fucking in public places, sometimes with an audience.

Now, if the people that I knew who had been to Vegas, & if the people the TV-commercial’s actors are portraying, were all ascetic responsible people, then maybe I could get on a side of this campaign. But is there any restraint left in contemporary American culture, at all? If Vegas didn’t exist, would anyone have to look very far for an excuse to act self-indulgently on a weekly basis, if not every day?
Continue reading An Old, Old Journal Entry on Vegas Which Basically States Everything I Thought I Came Up with in Class Last Week while Discussing D’Agata’s “What Happens There”, Excerpted from His About a Mountain

Very Good Paragraphs

From Vollman’s “Homeless in Sacramento” in the March ’11 Harper’s:

I sometimes seek to categorize whatever freedom it is these people have that I do not, a freedom that I also do not want. I don’t know whether they wanted to work and couldn’t, or chose not to work, or needed or expected anything. For their part, the only need most of them expressed to me was this: a place from which nobody would move them. Could it truly be that they had everything else they required? They were healthy, watchful, and at ease with what you or I might consider discomfort. You will quickly see that I am foolish to try to describe them or their surroundings at all, since these changed more rapidly than I with my homebound concerns could follow.

Problems in and Elicited by Homes’s “Do Not Disturb”

Opening lines of this story, in case you don’t know it: “My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end she could be dead.” So you know you’ve got a pretty solid story. We have to watch this man watch his doctor wife be sick and maybe die. Complicating this initial conflict: this marriage for a while now hasn’t been going well. The wife’s an admitted bitch. “I am not going to be able to leave the woman with cancer,” the narrator says at one point. “I am not the kind of person who leaves the woman with cancer, but I don’t know what to do when the woman with cancer is a bitch.”

It’s not to say the story is perfect: “My wife is sitting up high in her hospital bed, puking her guts into a metal bucket, like a poisoned pet monkey. She is throwing up bright green like an alien.”

This is a mixed metaphor. She is like a monkey. She is like an alien. A monkey isn’t much like an alien, other than it’s not human. What’s funny is that these sentences are just like right next to each other. Later in the story, as the characters are pushing each other to their utmost limits, they go on a Ferris wheel and get stuck at the top. It’s almost a literal precipice. “How is it going to end?” the narrator asks. And then he says, “We’re a really bad match, but we’re such a good bad match it seems impossible to let it go.”

And then she says. “We’re stuck.”

And that’s when the ride gets stuck.
Continue reading Problems in and Elicited by Homes’s “Do Not Disturb”

More on Farces and ABC’s Wednesday-Night Lineup

I’m able only to blog about two things: TV and things I don’t like.

Which means I’m fully allowed to blog about what I blog about.

You may recall that a while ago I quoted Friends‘ Chandler Bing as a way to define farce:

It’s a staple of farce, best summed up by Chandler Bing in reference to an episode of Three’s Company: “Oh, this is the one where there’s some kind of misunderstanding.”

…is what I wrote. Have you seen Mr. Sunshine? It’s Matthew Perry’s new show. He plays Chandler Bing working at an arena. Allison Janney is his boss. Every phone in their offices’s rings sound precisely like my cell phone’s.

In this episode, the first I’ve seen, his maybe assistant girl lies about Chandler getting to meet Tony Hawk* to get him to go on a date with her sister. When Chandler arrives at the date (which may be in the arena itself, depressingly) he is slow to realize that he’s not meeting Tony Hawk. Then it dawns on him: “Okay,” he says. “It seems we have some kind of misunderstanding. You stay here and I’ll go check with the Ropers, maybe go to the Regal Beagle and sort this whole thing out.”

I don’t know why this is worth blogging about. It’s like when I realized that OPRAH backward is HARPO which is not only the name of her production company but also the name of the character her character in Spielberg’s Color Purple was married to.

In the end, I won’t be watching more of this Mr. Sunshine. However, I’m currently downloading the other Friends‘ Matt’s new show: Episodes, which has been getting good reviews. Hooray for Matt LeBlanc! Because he played the dumb one he (like Lisa Kudrow) got passed off as the least talented of the group by people who know even less than I do about what acting requires.

And, Jesus, look at him now!

Maybe this is the beginning of LeBlanc’s Clooney-esque Act II. I mean: remember season one of Roseanne?

===

* Your guess is as good as mine, here.

More Words about Harper’s Magazine

I’m behind. Oh, just way behind on all my magazines (pay no attention to the New Yorkers buckling N’s midcentury endtable in the corner). I read the second half (story onward) of the January 2011 issue. I’d like to come back to the story by Mark Slouka in a future post. It’s incredible. Well, here, lemme just quote the part of the story that contains most of its awesomeness—wherein the narrator’s father goes every day to a rabbit hutch in which his family is hiding a man during wartime. I’ll do that at the end, because here, from Lopate’s little fawning essay on Emerson:

For several months I have been camping out in the ind of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a companionable, familiar, and yet endlessly stimulating place, and, since his mind is stronger than mine, I keep deferring to his wisdom, even his doubts, and quite shamelessly identifying with him. All this started when I came across in a local bookstore the new, two-volume edition of his Selected Journals, published by the Library of America, and decided to give it a whirl. Some 1,900 pages later, I am in thrall to, in love with, Mr. Emerson. If this sounds homoerotic, so be it.

It’s like he just learned the word last week. No, Phil. No.
Continue reading More Words about Harper’s Magazine

Whose Birthday Is This?

Yesterday was N’s birthday, which he spent on the road and with some friends in Arkansas (thanks, Jaegers!), who bought him a cake, kindfully. But today? Well Facebook tells me it’s my pal Daryl’s birthday. But then how does this account for the two gifts I got?

GIFT ONE
N now lives in Alabama with me. Like: forever.

GIFT TWO
The Authentic Animal, in bound galley form.

Yes, it’s all just awesome. Yes!

Endgame

I’ve uh…I know I’ve written about this before. Consider it a kind of therapy to get myself in some sort of “Zone” wherein I can just finish the damn book I’ve been writing without any more dickering.

But as you may remember, I did NaNoWriMo last November, getting 50K words written in 30 days. Turns out novels are longer than 50K words. Or this one is, at least. So without the arbitrary deadline looming over me, I wasn’t able to keep up the pace. Plus holidays, graduate applications at the school I teach for.

But it’s not just the time. It’s way easier to bang out 2000 words a day when you’re starting a novel. It’s much harder to do when you’re ending one, provided you want to conclude the thing and not just stop it. Yesterday was day 42 of the drafting process. Not consecutive days—42 days of sitting down to write. I’m just past 70K words. Here’s the problem: the draft is structured alternately around one man’s goings on in a southern college town and one woman’s goings on in a Washington D.C. suburb. It became clear around day 35 that this structure won’t work and will be changed on revision. I was writing two novels that tried feebly to connect, and each ended up paltry by not getting my full attention.

So I have to end this draft with an ending that won’t work for a future version of the novel. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I’ve been all: just get it down, idiot. But now I can start to see an ending that’ll work for the revised novel. So I’m just going to try to write that ending. Okay? Who cares if it doesn’t make sense. Also: I think in revision I’m going to steal Schutt’s structure in All Souls. If you haven’t read this book yet, you’re missing something new, I think, about a way a novel can get made without drawing attention to something new getting made.

I think it’s that liar Zadie Smith who said that at a certain point writing your novel is all downhill. Maybe this has been her experience, but for me it’s all uphill. Like the Cosmos Mystery Area. Survive it!

Some Confessions Are Tinged with Vanity

Right? Anyway, one thing I used to do “a lot” of is record beloved records track for track on Apple’s iLife’s Garageband. This was a way to not write that taxidermy book I was supposed to be writing. I did, um…well before the book I did Smog’s Wild Love and then I did Bee Thousand and then I did Camper Van Beethoven’s Key Lime Pie and then I started working for a living and that was sort of over. Plus I couldn’t think of another record to do. I was this close to doing Palace’s Arise, Therefore but who wants to listen to this froggy voice aim too stalwartly at replicating Oldham’s warbles?

At any rate, I found myself trolling through Key Lame Pie recently (that’s the naming convention: self-disparagement) and heard this, and I got really, really proud.

Interlude
Continue reading Some Confessions Are Tinged with Vanity

Promotional Consideration

I.
The Authentic Animal‘s got an ISBN now: 978-0312643713 if you use the new ISBN-13 designation, and all authorities tell me you’d better. This means the book’s pre-orderable through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble and other online vendors. I’m still deciding whether to use DAve Madden as some groundbreaking nom de plume. The big letters spell “DAM”, which is what you’ll be thinking as you turn every page.

II.
Pure Products is a well named reading series here in Tuscaloosa organized by very good guys Ryan Browne and Carl Peterson. They invited me to read this term—or maybe I just volunteered actually—and I’m doing it Wednesday night. I’m hoping to read brand new stuff no one’s ever read or heard before, but this depends on the kind of work I can get done tomorrow and Wednesday mornings and you know AWP’s draining effects still linger.

At any rate, the reading is at Little Willie’s in Tuscaloosa and starts at 7pm. I’m reading with some very great people. If you are in Alabama, please try to come out for it. I promise to wear something visually interesting, as a kind of dazzleflage tactic.

UPDATE: So owing to a lack of Customer Discussions on my book’s Amazon page, Amazon has decided to suggest related discussions interested buyers of the book may want to browse. They are as follows:

  • Men and infidelity
  • a selfish request
  • Global warming is nothing but a hoax and a scare tactic
  • Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
  • The torrent of global warming denialist postings on this and other forums is being directed and financed by fossil fuel-related firms
  • Miller/Urey experiment proves that life evolved… or not…
  • Any good anti-troll slogans?
  • Anyone has a theory of the symbolism of PI 3.14 ?

These will be probably infinitely more entertaining than anything my book might muster up.

Some Hackneyed Ideas about Tech Use

So: everyone knows about the flow from early adopters to late adopters and if you haven’t read Gladwell’s The Cool Hunt from 1997 that details this whole progression just go read it, if anything for details about what was cool among NYC street kids in 1997. But here’s something I’ve been thinking about.

I.
Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is, well let’s just say it’s my album of 2010 because it may have been the only album released in 2010 that I bought in 2010 (and I didn’t like The Suburbs). And there are all kinds of tracks that use auto-tune. And the auto-tune use is incredible. One track (I don’t know the names yet) ends with what sounds like this droning synth, changing notes every bar or so. But this sound is cut up with the distorted intake of breath. And yer like: Oh, that’s Yeezy just like humming while auto-tune is on. And putting the distortion on, proverbially, eleven.
Continue reading Some Hackneyed Ideas about Tech Use

Advice Needed

It has recently come to my attention that I’m good at singing non-B-52’s songs in the voice of Fred Schneider. Favorites include X’s “White Girl” and Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair”. (Career! Career!) What’s not been made apparent, however, is how this talent may be rendered profitable. Ideas welcome.

In other news I’m allergic to cats, but if I had to get a cat, I’d go and get this cat:

Tim Pawlenty – Latest 2012 GOP Hopeful – Hates Gay Folks

Today’s NY Times has a story about new-ish political blogs already getting a jump-start on the 2012 presidential elections. Turns out Tim Pawlenty, the conservative governor of Minnesota, has some dude trailing him daily with a Flip cam. It’s likely he’ll run in 2012 (or, well, run later this year for 2012, the way these things go).A recent New Hampshire straw poll has him beating Sarah Palin as a top presidential candidate.

I’d never heard of the guy until yesterday, when I read that anti-gay Christian organization Family Research Council was named a “hate group” in December by the Southern Poverty Law Center. From the SLPC’s report:

Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight […] along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”

Angry at being called out as a “hate group” and not as an organization “advancing faith, family, and freedom,” the FRC published an ad which listed dozens of U.S. elected officials who supported the work they did to publish fabricated pseudo-science about gay people.

Tim Pawlenty was one of three governors who pledged support. (The others were Huckabee and Jindal.)

Pawlenty, it goes without saying, is against marriage equality for same-sex couples (as, still, is our current president). But did you know he’d also repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”?

Not that any of this is a surprise. Anti-gay GOP candidates? Pawlenty, though, seems to be one of the most fervent. We’ll see, if he does run, whether his anti-gay rhetoric amps up or gets toned down. What does the Tea Party want?