Not really back just yet, but.
I spent an hour I don’t have clearing 400-some-odd pieces of comment spam off the pier. We run Jay Allen’s invaluable MT-Blacklist hereabouts, but this stuff all got past it. —I’m wondering if we have some smarter monkeys in the house.
The comment text was all scraped out of an article on how memory stacks work. The names were all first names, common enough to have been lifted off a popular baby name list. The email addresses and IP addresses were all different. And there were dozens of URLs linked, none of which had made it onto the MT-Blacklist master list yet. Some of them were misspellings or variant spellings of others. I didn’t bother trying to visit any, but I’m thinking most of the URLs were the equivalent of chaff, thrown up to waste time and effort so that maybe somebody would sigh and throw up their hands and just leave the 400-some-odd links up till tomorrow, maybe, giving Google enough time to register the link.
Jay’s currently travelling, and anyway I’m not too sure how to verify which of my entries aren’t on his master list yet to submit them officially. (I could figure it out, but there’s work yet to do, and sleep.) I haven’t seen anyone else hit with a chaff attack yet—at least, no one on my short list of usual suspects who’ve shared spam attacks with me in the past—but if you do suddenly find yourself with 400-some-odd new pieces of comment spam full of chaff, here’s my updated blacklist.
Oy.
Oh, while I’ve got your attention: the Fiery Furnaces and the Books.
Might as well make it official.
So the computer died, and then the transmission decided going in reverse was too much of a bother, and then there was the car crash (different car), and then the 103-degree fever, and then the flying to Newark with a head cold, and the resulting black eye from the sinus pressure, and the Christmas spent mostly unconscious, and the Rockettes I didn’t in the end get to see, and, well. It’s been a couple of weeks.
(When you die, and you end up in hell—as we all will, of course—and they get around to offering you your choice of torments, and one of them is taking off and landing for an eternity with a head cold pulling a nastily proxigean spring tide through every single one of your sinuses, take whatever the hell else they offer. It can’t be worse. Trust me.)
I’m trying to put everything back together again, or at least the bits I can find and scrape together and recollect, on Jenn’s old iBook. It’s a sweet little machine, and I’m finally getting to play in the wonderful world of OSX, but it’s still got Jenn’s old filing structure kicking around and a bunch of Jenn’s old files to boot and it doesn’t even have a name yet. And I’ve been meaning to revamp Long story; short pier as it is—the look, but also the structure, and maybe even the how and the why. And I’m trying not to think about the work that’s been lost on City of Roses—less than you might think, but still: there’s a lot to be done before I can get it back on track. And the rest of me, which is long past overdue a thorough dusting and reorganizing. And. And.
I don’t so much heave as lob a sigh at the thought of it all.
It’s going to be quiet around my various web enterprises for about a month or so, is the basic point, except for the sounds of pounding and splintering and hammering and drilling and sweeping and cursing when a thumb gets pounded instead of a nail, or a line of CSS fails to work as advertised. Surf your way through the linchinography to the right there in the meanwhile. I mean, all I can say for myself at the moment is that I finally got to see Eddie Izzard (canned, but), who is as brilliant as everyone (who is anyone) says, and I got to see enough of the American Queer as Folk to wonder why on earth they bothered, and it was cool meeting up with Paul and Scott even if we did end up missing Julia and HM, and New York City is still pretty much New York City. Not that I was all that worried, but I still shudder to remember when Unique New York got ripped out and replaced by a Nobody Beats the Wiz™ (long since gone), so my cockles were nicely if trivially warmed to see that the Sock Guy is still on St. Marks Place. (But when on earth did Forbidden Planet jump across the street and lose all its books? Management does not approve.) —Other than that? It’s snowing, and I’ve got a malingering cough and a cat in my lap, and my feet are cold, and there’s a lot of work to be done. So.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
I’m a moirologist, not a miracle worker.
It’s dead, Jim. —Still not funny, though. Pardon me, there’s something in my eye—
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walk into a bar—
As I’m still waiting to hear and all, here’s what’s doubtlessly the strangest and most particular Google request to come over the transom in a while:
read stories about people getting naked then still alive getting into a furnace without surviving
The irony I did not need.
So I’ve been bad about backups, yeah. I have an old tangerine iBook. I have a 250 meg Zip drive and some disks. I have 14 or 15 gigs of music and writing and graphics work and freelance stuff on it. It’s a relatively new 20 gig drive. I’m cocky and careless. You do the math.
But, cockiness and carlessness aside, it was eating at me. So. I found a lovely LaCie 40 gig external drive. Ordered it. Loaded the driver for OS 9.2. (My tangerine doesn’t quite have enough oomph to run OSX. Sigh.) Plugged in the drive. Watched the arrow go all wonky when I tried to move it about the screen to close windows. Pulled the USB plug to the drive. Restarted.
Whir-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!
Oh, fuck.
I think in a couple of days I’ll find it terribly funny, and we’ll have a jolly laugh at the irony and the folly of it all, ha ha, and the speed with which the potential loss of what in the grand scheme of things is really little more than prettily patterned 1s and 0s has reduced me to a blubbering supplicant desperately bargaining with whatever Powers might possibly be that if everything turns out to be okay or at least salvageable then I’ll mend my ways, I’ll back up religiously every night and say my prayers, I’ll floss, I’ll stop wasting so much time on the internet with egosurfing and troll-baiting and “research” and googling for unmentionables and—
And—
It will be funny. Someday. Right?
Right? Ha ha? Someday?
But. This moment here. Right now, as I’m typing on the Windows box at work and staring at the blank black screen of the tangerine iBook I’ve used as an outboard brain since 1999. That I write on. That I design on. That I read the news on. That I keep track of friends with. That holds all of my prettily patterened 1s and 0s.
Right now, not so much.
Now why didn’t I think of that before?
On this long night of unexpected work at the “day” job, on a weekend which was to have been devoted to catching up on totally buggered deadlines and procrastinated household chores, I at least have this simple idea to console me:
A gin martini softened with single-malt Laphroaig rather than the more typical vermouth. A couple of olives, and—
Well. Two of ’em set me up quite nicely on the dinner break.
The life you save could be your own.
Look, I like a Weetzie Bat book as much as the next fellow, but I’m not about to start waxing rhapsodic over the City of Quartz. There’s a place for it in the collective unconscious, I suppose—gracelessly aging screen queens of whatever gender still need shady bungalows where Nancy Drews and Walter Neffs can tumble headlong into stories they won’t suss out till the final moments of a posthumous voiceover, and the world would be a poorer place without the Dude. But (what little I’ve seen of) the there that’s there all too often leaves me wretched, retching on all fours.
In a metaphorical sense, anyway.
There’s the heat and the sun and the fact that you’re driving for hours to get anywhere and the sheer number of movie billboards makes getting around the city feel like those obnoxious DVDs where you can’t fast-forward past the coming attractions. There’s the prefab megaburbs, fœtal Neal Stephenson atopias that spring forth fully paved from the knotted foreheads of urban planning committees, settling the Mandlebrot fronds of their culs-de-sac around big-box nuclei of Home Depots and Bed Bath & Beyonds, and if you think it’s tacky to blame Venice for the sins of Thousand Oaks, well, tough. There’s more than enough to go around. And sure there’s wonder there, and beauty—you can’t put that many people in one place without some deliriously amazing things being done and said and built—but it takes too much money and gas to enjoy them properly. I am a callow, petty, cruel man, and for these sins: heat; sun; annoyance; urban blight; profligacy; bad planning; and one of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had in my life, I could easily write the whole festering mess off without a backward glance—Bats and bungalows, screen queens, Dudes and all. Except—
We were in this minivan, Scott and Ivy and Winter and Sky and Jenn and me, and we were somewhere between Thousand Oaks and Culver City and having a hard time getting any closer to either of them, and it was hot, and the sun was flinging daggers off the chrome and glass all around us, and even though there’s something to be said about improvising Pythonesque skits with a couple of disarmingly precocious kids in the back seat of an elderly minivan on the 101, you’re still stuck in the back of an elderly minivan on the 101, and even disarmingly precocious kids can get squallingly cranky. (Hence the Pythonesque skits.) Are we there yet?
Eventually whatever was blocking the traffic popped free and it began sluggishly to move, down out of the dry, scrubby hills through cool green suburbs toward the apocalyptic orange haze at the bottom. Somewhere off thataway, that grey mass that wasn’t quite sky and yet wasn’t quite anything else? That has something to do with an ocean, apparently. And for all the skyscraping high-rises jutting up at alarmingly random intervals, none of them quite stick in the mind’s eye, you know? (Quick! Draw LA’s skyline!) —We didn’t go quite that far; we found instead a nondescript corner with only a couple of movie billboards looming over it and parked. (Climbing out, I discovered I had suffered a Sartorial Indignity; I do not want it to be said that I blame anyone, as any fool knows one shouldn’t wear white pants in an elderly minivan frequented by disarmingly precocious children. But: nonetheless: I had, and it was.) One door down from that corner was a nondescript storefront. Scott leaned on the nondescript buzzer. The door opened. And, ladies and gentlemen, as God is my witness: all of Los Angeles was redeemed.
We were in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
For one thing, it was cool and dim. But! I don’t know that I have ever spent any two hours more totally immersed in awe, stumbling about through such a lovely, druggy haze of presque vu. I— I—
Trailer parks! Rotting luck! Athanasius Kircher! Mice on toast! —Aw, fuck. Words fail me.
(There was a book. Words kinda failed him, too.)
Which makes this part of the post mildly moot: it has come to my attention that, like so many other enterprises which depend upon the kindness of strangers, the Museum of Jurassic Technology could use a little more help than usual, these days. Memberships start at $35 per year ($25 for seniors and students), and you get stuff and discounts and free admission and so on. And if you know about the Museum then you know, but if you don’t—my inability to articulate the hows and the whys and wherefores does none of us any good, now, does it.
Think of it this way: one day, you, too, will be in Los Angeles. And you, too, will be hot and sun-stricken and stuck in traffic. When you finally pull off the 101 into the City of Culver City, well—you’re gonna want a there to still be there. Know what I mean?
No one may ever have the same knowledge again.
What happened, you mooks.
Oh, there were circumstances. (There are always circumstances.) There was that holiday. (I made my usual goyishe challah and a black bean and chocolate chili.) I’ve been so distracted from other writing tasks that I can’t work up the gumption to procrastinate those by tossing off something here. (They ought to come first, which means this usually does, unless I’m over some other rainbow entirely.) I’m going through another one of those periods where my normally fecund outrage lies fallow; overwhelmed by the effort to keep my head above this river of shit, for some perspective, I’ve instead curled up in a little ball and sunk to the bottom, where at least it’s cool and dim and quiet—pleasant, really, as long as you don’t try to breathe. (It’s a heartsickness. I read the news and I sigh and shrug and turn away to burrow deep within the flannel sheets we just bought and I turn out the light.) We lost a cat we never really got to know all that well. (She reached out for something as the shot went home, the most she’d moved in hours, and then she stopped breathing. We got a paw print and a clip of fur in the mail from the clinic and I suddenly found it hard to speak. Chris ’shopped a silly composite image from these silly snaps that Jenn took, and now I have a mental image of Kitty Heaven that’s going to be hard to shake. But at least it makes me laugh.) And of course, there’s the day job—
I don’t talk much about the day job, do I?
I work in litigation support, basically, a field I never even knew existed until Aaron, the Demented Lawyer, snagged me a part-time job here. When the freelance writing and graphic design market started drying up, I stepped up to full time; now, I’m a Project Manager, with a corner office and everything. —Basically, when two companies hate each other very much, they come together in a lawsuit. And the lawyers for each side want to see all the pieces of paper the other side has in its filing cabinets and desk drawers and bankers’ boxes stashed away in the unused office space on the sixth floor, memos and financials and correspondence and telephone messages and test results and printouts of every half-baked Excel spreadsheet and ill-conceived Power Point presentation stuffed onto the harddrive of that laptop Bob hasn’t used since the ill-fated trip to Nova Scotia. And they argue back and forth about what’s pertinent and what’s privileged, but in the end all this paperwork is boxed up and dropped off at our offices, where we scan it all in, number every page in sequence, print (“blow back,” in the parlance) a fresh, numbered set, break that up into discrete documents, code the particulars of each document into a database, and then hand the whole shebang back, neatly boxed up and easily and quickly searchable in any of a number of ways. —We sort haystacks, in other words, so that needles—howsomever defined—might more easily be found. And on the one hand, this is cool: if a lawyer is getting ready to depose Bob about that trip to Nova Scotia, and she wants to see every memo he wrote before he went, she doesn’t have to send her paralegal scurrying down to the sixth floor office to search all those bankers’ boxes for any memo that he might have written before the date of the trip; instead, the harried paralegal can scurry over to the computer, run a simple database search, and print out all the corresponding documents. Time and money are saved! The invisible hand of commerce lubricates the exceeding fine if slowly grinding mills of justice! Huzzah!
On the other hand, you also have clients who get a mite peevish when you try to tell them it’s a wee bit difficult to print 60,000 pages in chronological order in 12 hours.
I think I’m figuring out why I don’t talk about the day job much. —Oh, there’s something new to learn with every project, and there’s scads of fun terminology (blowbacks, Bates numbers, redwelds, bankers’ boxes [which, thanks to my days in comics retail, I can assemble with alacrity], etc. etc.), and I get to see all sorts of juicy behind-the-scenes stuff, going through other companies’ dirty laundry every day, but since I sign a non-disclosure agreement with most of the projects I take on, well.
So: day job. We work for lawyers; there’s the concomitant stress level that that entails. —November was a month, in other words; still, peevish clients and appalling actions taken in my name and good food with friends I haven’t seen in years notwithstanding, I’m most rattled here on the other side by the death of a cat I knew, what, two months? Less?
Stupid death. It’s a really dumb way to run things, you know? —Oh, sure, “They will come back—come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Why should He squander souls?” If it floats your boat, I guess. But rake my yard, first. Then talk to me about squandering.
The incredibly strange referrers who stopped living and became mixed-up zombie-blogs.
So I’ve been getting these weird pings over at City of Roses. A blog of nothing but airplane news. A blog of LA news. Technical something-or-other blogging. —They’re each of them nothing but simple links with a brief summary scraped off a newsfeed, each laid out differently, each with a not-entirely-random, vaguely evocative name. Each of them linking, under “Referrers” or “Incoming links,” www.thecityofroses.com, along with a bunch of other sites, with almost nothing in common except—like City of Roses—they don’t actually have a link to the blog in question.
And each of them has, at the bottom of the page, the following code:
“Zombieblog.com,” of course, being the URL of the blog in question.
Sebbo did the detective work. —Me, I’m puzzled, too. I’m not seeing how this is driving traffic to “adult-webcam”; certainly not enough to justify the effort that went into setting up these templates and newsfeeds.
Anyone?
Stable’s gettin’ kinda full, ain’t it?
As Horsemen go, it’s a small one, but a tinny echo of the Last Trump blatted through my bus this morning. —I’m sitting there puzzling out a bit of dialogue when some strap-hanger clinging behind me gets into it with an underling on his cell phone. I missed the particulars, but then he got agitated: “Yeah, well,” he says, “hurry it up! You’re late as it is.” And then he’s listening to whatever the underling is saying about how my car won’t start or the bus blew me off or the idiot at Kinko’s used the wrong foam-core or what am I supposed to do about how IT misunderstood the email and rebuilt the database for Lotus and I can’t get anybody to tell me where the backup tapes are or maybe my cat that’s been the family companion for fourteen happy years is walking funny and leaking something and I can’t put off taking her to the vet it would kill my kids, I’ve just got to fix this one little thing, that’s all, and then I can, and in the middle of it all this guy snaps with no hint whatsoever of self-consciousness: “There is no I in team.” And then he slaps his phone shut and shoves it in a pocket.
Ah, well. At least I got to snicker to myself at how his utter lack of irony made the whole thing rather ironic.
(Confidential to, oh, just about everyone: yes, there’s been a dearth of posts and less back-and-forth than usual and missed emails and I’m really sorry I didn’t get around to installing MT-Blacklist until last night, Barry, but I’m glad it’s going gangbusters for you now. —There’s been stuff. In the interests of reducing my workload, then, I’ll mention that I want to do something with the stuff dredged up by Jeremy’s meanderings, prompted by the infamous Messr. du Toit: the short answer, Mr. Pinkham, is you’re wrong, but. The problem being I’m finding it really hard to pontificate breezily on pop culture without access to what passes for it on the cable channels, and I’m not about to let that beast back into my house for nothing more than a blog entry, and yeah, world’s smallest violin, cry me a fuckin’ river, suck it up, close your eyes and think of the children, what would your mother say, and anyway, you see an I in this team, shithead?
(In the meanwhile, a non sequitur: Mark Lakeman!)
Shipbreaking.
The most recent edition of Granta has an arresting cover, one which takes some close examination before you’re convinced: no, that isn’t a false color trick, a Photoshop filter effect, an art director’s whim. (At least, not much.) Those are nickel tailings—waste material from the mining industry: “As ore bodies are extracted the valuable mineral is surrounded by gangue (uneconomic material) that needs to be separated in a concentrating process. Crushing and grinding methods are used to reduce the mined ore to sand and silt sizes, and then the concentrating process can begin. The most common technique used today is ‘flotation’ which has been used to separate minerals since the early 1920s. The process treats the ground ore in a bubbling mixture of water and chemical constituents which the sort metallic minerals stick to and rise to the surface of the flotation tank.” —The river really is that ghastly, gorgeous color. (Just about.)
The photo’s the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer who specializes in industrial landscapes—“the industrial sublime,” he says. The brief article by Noah Richler introducing his gallery inside opens like this:
In 2001, I travelled with Edward Burtynsky to the beaches of Chittagong, in Bangladesh, where many of the world’s old freighters go to die.
He’s talking about shipbreaking.
On his first trip, briefer than he would have liked, he had photographed the Bangladeshi workers cutting up the ships, some as large as 60,000 tons, with little more than hammers, and acetylene torches—remarkable, Lilliputian, work.
I didn’t know shipbreaking existed until I read this introduction. I know a little more, now: the appalling labor conditions, the sheet metal dorms scavenged from ship parts, the constant din, the fumes and chemicals, the waste, the miles of beach churned into sludge. That it will affect England perhaps not as much as it affects India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Viet Nam and China, but still: $17 million to scrap 13 US Navy ships, a bid that undercut American firms despite the expense of towing them across the Atlantic (and the legal battles to determine their seaworthiness). That the second-largest ship ever built, the Sea Giant, 10 storeys high, longer than an Eiffel Tower is tall, was just run aground on the shipbreaking “yards” of Gadani to be whittled by hand into scrap. That the ILO is doing what it can to promote guideines for responsible ship-dismantling, but.
I live in a working port city; there’s four very active terminals loading timber and grain and unloading cars and electronics even as I sit here typing. There’s been some industry up and down the river along the way, and ship construction and ship repair, but nothing so appallingly messy as whittling a disused oil tanker down to scrap by hand. Nonetheless, in December of 2000, the Willamette River was designated a Superfund site.
As he worked with his camera in Chittagong, a line of shipbreaking workers walked past us barefoot in the oily muck. Burtynsky pointed out that the beach was rife with toxic waste.
Just about every day bussing over this bridge or that I can look out and see one of these monster freighters, so big that the crew keeps bicycles to ride from stem to stern. From all over the word, and in every sort of condition. I might give them a second thought from time to time; they’re big, and there’s enough of the kid left in me to marvel at their size, and wonder what it’s like to drive one of those things across the ocean.
Now I know where they go to die, and how.
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
Snarking at Lars Von Trier aside.
Maybe it’s my mood and maybe it’s the bourbon, but right here, right now, that particular song called “Unison,” being the last track of Björk’s Vespertine, is without a drunken doubt the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. —Oh, wait: now iTunes has started “Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven…” Oh—oh, my—
Elevator pitch.
It’s Joanna Russ meets Emma Bull for a Babe the Blue Ox show at Satyricon. No? Okay—Chris said it was like Bruno the Vampire Slayer, which is cool. Except that Jo and Bruno are kinda different. And there’s no vampires. (Yet.) I mean, I was gonna say it was like Utena the Goblin Slayer, which is maybe closer, except that actually sounds like a real anime out there somewhere. And anyway, it isn’t animated. I mean, it could work if it was animated, sure, but like I have the budget, you know? Look, if you’ve got a minute, I could maybe read you this passage from Lanark—
Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
But that’s kinda dry, actually. Come to think of it. Out of context like that. Um. There’s this line, from Yeats—
The visible world is merely their skin.
But that’s even more out of context, and anyway, it doesn’t really capture the, you know. Flavor. Of what’s going on.
Crap. We’re almost there.
Okay. Deep breath: it’s called City of Roses and it’s about this girl named Jo and what happens when she meets Ysabel, only it’s also about what happens when Ysabel meets Jo, except it’s also about Portland which is where I live these days, and it’s big and it’s unwieldy and it’s a serial with installments posted every Monday and Wednesday and Friday and there’s some work yet to be done on the website but there’s also the usual slew of oracular pop culture namechecks and also snarky jokes and the occasional sword fight, and it’s just gotten underway.
So.
Hosing down the pier.
So I’ve been having a fun morning and afternoon, squeegeeing up the spooge left behind by a couple of commenting spambots named “Lolita” and “Preteen”—the minions of one Guy McFarland, 4009 Dancing Cloud Court, in sunny Destin, Florida, 32541, 850.269.2814, who is considerably further along than his teen years, one imagines, and rather long in tooth to play Lolita. (Instead of a plague of boils on his tenderest parts, one could wish Acacia [notably vile in its own right] would take notice of his video-lo.com enterprise and sue him into oblivion. Oh, hell: in addition to. I’m in an expansive mood.)
If you read a Movable Type blog regularly, you’ve doubtless seen the fallout. If you have a Movable Type blog of your own, you’ll want to load for bear. Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light is an excellent port for this storm: good cheer, gruntled commiseration, hot tips and sandbags handed freely to all comers. —Unless, of course, you’re hosted by SISNA, Inc. Since Lolita Long-in-Tooth is using a slew of their servers to spam comments threads, just about everybody’s blocking a whole range of their IP-number thingies. (Technical jargon. Don’t worry your pretty little head.) If you try to make a comment hereabouts and find you’re blocked, send me some email. (Offers to enlarge my penis will be responded to in kind.)
Also deserving of kudos and a mention: Joseph Duemer did the legwork on this perp; a round of applause and a virtual beer, sir. And: Jay Allen will tomorrow release what is sure to be the year’s most popular Movable Type plugin, by far. As well: the intrepid Erik V. Olson, who all-unbidden dug up a related Malaysian spammer (the IP to ban: 219.95.14.69)—be on the lookout for sudden approbation for your deathless prose from www.zipcodesmap.com, y’all. It’s not “Lolita,” but it is an evil as banal.
Mistah Zevon, he sleepin’ tight.
The rains came yesterday, and I’m in a chipper mood. They started coming Saturday night: we stood on the balcony, rudely startled out of character, as a callithumpian band went rattling away down the street a block away from the one that had the fair, and I was startled to note that the air was chilly. The heavy heat was gone and the leaves began tossing restlessly in a rising wind, and I wanted to wrap up in something. Yesterday, it actually fell: the gutters overflowed and there was lightning and thunder, too, which almost never happens around here. I couldn’t stop grinning and I kept leaking squiggly little dance steps. (You ever try not moving to the boogie-woogie Ben Folds gets going in “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” when you’re in a mood like that?) Tonight I’m wearing a sweater and I’m drinking a cup of hot tea. Fuck you, summer; the new year’s begun.
I’ll be moderately upfront, since I haven’t been yet: I don’t know if I’ll make the (charitably loose) September deadline for getting City of Roses off the ground. Rather, I know I can make it: what I don’t know is if we’ll be in October and already muttering about how reruns have started. It somehow fits the generally feckless air of the whole enterprise thus far—cobbled together, catch-as-catch-can, and yet. It’s still more than it isn’t. I’ll take it as a good sign, I guess. Better than the alternative.
I have a new article up at Comixpedia: interviewing the spouses of webcartoonists and asking them about that Cyril Connolly quote about the pram in the hall, and what it was like being married to an artiste. It’s all terribly tongue-in-cheek, on everyone’s part, even if Ivy doesn’t think she said “What a load of crap!” —I was wryly amused to discover when I’d jotted down a shortlist of interviewees, I’d come up with a wife, a husband, a fiancé (as opposed to fiancée), and a long-term girlfriend (long-time companion?); this I took as a sign that something or other is better now than it ever has been before, so I ran with it.
Bruno’s back, and I owe Chris and Bethanne email. They’re in Olympia now, former home of Sleater-Kinney; wave hello as you zoom up I-5 past Evergreen State, the Oberlin away from Ohio, as some of us old Obies knew it. —While Bruno was gone, Chris was running several weeks of his new project, his latest attempt to pan for gold in the mines of syndicated commercial dailies: Little Dee, which I hope I do not diminish in your eyes by pointing out that, of all his attempts up and out, it’s the most likely to succeed—fiendishly cute, with enough of the wicked cynicism of necrophagic humor and the judicious schmaltz of an adorable moppet to deftly walk the fine line of entertaining the jaded while remaining perfectly apropos for refrigerators everywhere. Hie thee hence, and then bounce back out to the main page: after all, Bruno’s back.
While we’re discussing that fine line and those who walk it, might I also encourage you to check out Sheldon, the pig who can’t stay put? (An egg-shaped pig, a robin pulling a Casey Stengel, and rabbits. How can you lose?) —Also, I would be so thoroughly remiss if I didn’t point out that the Pants Press crew has gotten Wary Tales up on the web: the latest product available under the BitPass beta test. Which is going swimmingly, so far as I can tell; so much for the barrier of mental effort. (The soft bigotry of low expectations?) (And do note I’m knocking wood as I so smirkingly take someone who’s so much less of a dilettante to task.)
And it’s been long days at work lately, which is maybe why I stood over the latest copy of The New Yorker today after I got home for what felt like ten minutes: on the left-hand page, a full-color, full-page ad for Ruth’s Chris Steak House. “Life’s too short to eat anywhere else,” says Ruth. On the right, a sixth-page vertical black-and-white for Warren Zevon’s last album; “Includes performances by Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Springsteen, David Lindley,” and so on (in alphabetical order by first name, you see). Both of them in the middle of an advertising circular for The New Yorker Festival (September 19, 20, and 21, 2003). The whole thing had a nagging oracular quality to it, that presque vu that I usually cherish, that I spend a great deal of time not so much chasing as hanging out in places where we’re likely to run into each other: but today it was just annoying. It was trying to tell me something, but what? —That I’d been at work too long. Next question!
(I never did get a new pair of seersucker pants.)
The rains are back. Grey skies and wind from the west, extra blankets on the bed, sweaters and tweed and whiskey in the tea, and the cats are that much friendlier. —Virgos everywhere, with their innate love of order (and here you have to imagine me looking around the jumbled wreck of my office to get the joke), look back fondly on the incipient order of the new school year (or, granted, ahead, with no small amount of fondness amidst the teeth-gnashing): the new velcro and zip-up binders, the untrammelled packs of paper, the complete sets of colored pens, the waveform of all those perfect schedules and plans that has yet to collapse into all those discretely messy particles. (Usually by two weeks into it it’s all a lost and hopeless cause: contingency is king.) But between that and their birthdays, and the change in the weather, it’s not hard to see why Virgos might consider September to be the start of something new: the high hot timeless haze of summer’s gone, and with it the beastly heat; the air is crisp again, and something wicked will be along in about a month or so. Time to finally get some work done.
So: happy new year, and presque vu. Raise one to whomever; kick up a callithumpian moment. And then let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to cases.
Things to remember:
Tiger Crouches at the Front Door; Boatman Rows a Skull; Paint a Red Dot Between the Eyebrows; Brush Dust in the Breeze; Dragonfly Skims the Water; Turn Around and Hang a Golden Bell; Pick Up Stars with an Unerring Hand; Black Dragon Stirs its Tail; Wasp Flies Through a Hole; Capture a Legendary Turtle in the Ocean Depths; White Snake Flicks its Tongue; Hold the Moon in Your Arms. —Names of maneuvers in classic Chinese swordplay. From a footnote in By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions.
Plus c’est la meme chose.
Gail Armstrong is seeking some little comfort. And so I went looking for that marginal note Ada makes to Van: “If we all remembered the same way, we would not be different people,” I think it goes, but I can’t find it, not tonight; it’s a terribly frustrating book, after all—appalling, heartbreaking, beautiful, vicious. This is what it offered up, tonight, instead:
An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”
See? Tedious. Pedantic. Ferocious. Utterly necessary. But ultimately useless. Damn!
So instead I pick up one of my recent obsessions, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, picked up at Powell’s for a song, and I flip to the passage that first caught my eye:
We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.
The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we had lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene yet. The affluent post-Korean–war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
And it’s not that the disaffected we will always have with us, and it’s not that these grim ugly battles have always been fought and look! We’ve largely come out okay. Those are crap lessons, New Age pablum, mealy morals for people who don’t want to listen to older, colder fairy tales. —No, it’s the sharp shock of deja vu: I know this place, though I have never been here before. It’s a backstage pass; a Golden Ticket. It isn’t History, it’s a story you feel in your bones. The world sits up and opens its dead eyes and tells you something three times, and the hairs on your chin stand up. Diane di Prima’s glued to the radio, paranoid, listening as Eisenhower kicks Stevenson’s ass, and I’m on a futon in a second-floor bedroom of a ratty unheated house in Boston watching the bombs fall on Iraq for the first time, and maybe this doesn’t ring true for you at all, but that’s okay, because if we all remembered it the same way, we wouldn’t be different people. Would we?
Comfort. —We all need comfort, but suddenly I’m thinking of Ann, so very tired, who lay down in the Martian snow to die, and then Simon came up out of nowhere and kicked her helmet and turned her suit’s heater back on, dragging her back to the world as it was, as it is, and she kept asking him why, why he wouldn’t just leave her alone and all he could say was because, because, because. It’s not that sort of comfort, where you’re so tired of fighting you just lie down and wait till you stop shivering. (Though they do say freezing to death is a comfortable way to go. —They also say that about drowning.)
Where do we turn for comfort, then? Sometimes I turn to David Chess:
Last year I told y’all about how in my vanished youth I used to go square dancing every few weeks with a certain bunch of people, to a certain caller, and how that caller had had this great handsome house big enough for three or four squares, and I wondered if he still had it? Well over the weekend we went across the river and square danced with roughly those same people, to exactly that caller, in that same house.
A house where some of my fondest childhood memories were formed, and a house I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was just the same, and completely different. Same woods, same rooms, same chairs and benches, same stairs down to the bedrooms downstairs, same livingroom big enough for two squares, and a posible third over in the alcove. But not as enormous as when I was little, not as mysterious, not as filled with that amazing unconscious kid-sense of being cupped in the warm palm of the universe, with everything being taken care of for you by other people, and nothing to do but dance and sing and run around shouting.
It was great fun, and (but) I was all melancholy all night after we got home.
What a world.
Because the trick of it, of course, is that you can’t just order up one of these moments, these bridges and towers, whenever you suddenly need one. You have to have built them out of the stuff you’ve got lying around, or picked up from what somebody else made once, or found, and told you about in a book or a conversation or a song, and so you tucked it away in your pocket and forgot about it until, and you have to have left them just scattered haphazardly across the floor of your memory, and you can’t ever stop; you never reach a moment when there’s finally enough. You have to keep building them and scattering them like bread crumbs, these booby traps benign and otherwise you stumble over when you least expect them but most need them, and suddenly oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
What a world.
