.

McSweeney’s is doing a really wonderful thing right now. This word selfish comes up in suicides like the word devoted does in eulogies: selfishness on the part of the suicide, selfishness on the part of the survivors for feeling personally injured, selfishness on the part of the survivors for feeling guilty about the selfishness instead of feeling grief or for simply remembering, selfishness as a kind of hopeless response in general. That human beings sometimes just have to sit in one place and, like, hurt (IJ 203). In public figures this is multiplied by thousands as the word selfish binds onto the news, leading to a feeling of selfishness that this word could even come up, as though it is some right of the public to claim selfish without a real, personal relationship or any kind of understanding of what suicide really means. All the kind of horrible cycle of selfishness and self-awareness that Wallace, better than anyone, could articulate.

The McSweeney’s page is something else. Wallace’s generosity made apparent in all of these words by friends and by strangers on the site is beautiful. Selfish isn’t the question: admiration, inspiration, love, is. This is mine:

The night I saw him read was alarming. The absolute compulsion to read “Good Old Neon” twice in one afternoon was alarming and so, too, was my real, physical reaction to Infinite Jest. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable (204). More than anything else it’s the alarm of someone finding you out, calling you out. David Foster Wallace has meant Truth to me the way nothing else has ever meant Truth, in all the beautiful, complicated, and truly alarming ways he looked after it. Reading Wallace meant underlining every single fear and anxiety while simultaneously proving they couldn’t be possible, because reading his books proved, above all, that I had the capacity to really, truly feel.

This grief, too, has been alarming. I don’t know what we will do without him.

I don’t know.

September 16, 2008 – 9:37 pm
Posted in Uncategorized

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Between a life actually lived and a shadow cast on…

At some point choice became this really bad thing.

There was one room in the Los Angeles art world like Wonderland, where we stood three feet shorter than the table, near chair legs like pillars. What we wanted, what we chose to want, was to feel our feet swing over the heads of the balding, the aging. We saw banality, and femininity, but we chose the biggest choice. 

No but that wasn’t the choice. The choice was can we get away with it, how much can you lift, do your two hands fit around the back of those pillars. 

It’s the same choice. What can we get away with. Not dying. 

 

September 14, 2008 – 11:18 pm
Posted in scenes

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Fourteen August Three AM

There are sixty seconds of 3 to 3:01. In the first ten I think I saw my ribcage move, sort of in the way the sand breaks over ghost crabs. The right leg splits at twelve and the left at thirteen. The trembling of an unstable leg emerging shakes off a black shiny oil, like that on water, upset. New fingers break free from old fingers at twenty-seven, and other hip bones like diamonds tear through bone. The emerging thing now only attached from the neck drips clean at forty-one, until fifty when flesh tears there too. Fifty-eight and fifty-nine I heard the final tear inside the back of my head, like the last few sinews of the tooth to the gum. Anyway, that’s what’s sitting here now. You probably shouldn’t touch me. 

September 8, 2008 – 6:17 pm
Posted in scenes

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When nothing else subsists

The back of the room is a home. So, too, is outside the window. Pick up and settle down where there is something like the smell of smoke. 

He wakes and it’s disappeared, each time. So he picks up and moves on. There is no peeling away, just two bags and several slow steps. Move your feet, old man. Move your feet. 

Once, nearly everywhere would be enough. But there are barriers now—laws and signs. Seek the sadder places and build the chances, but that isn’t the memory. The way it comes is pure and with no perfume of dim red lights and glass. Walk on, then, with only air as guide. 

Each home evoked, not built. What the world provides the old man follows; a spark, a burn, a breath, four walls. With every wind, though, a demolition. 

Light them, then. Light them and it’ll stay. 

September 3, 2008 – 8:23 am
Posted in stories

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Self pity is the least interesting

Two knees to the floor. Scarred, both. Two kinds of falls, and this a third. One bled forever, the childhood one. Off something. The second was adult, and superficial. These scar the worst because they don’t bleed. That was into something, in a way. Carpet burn. 

This is not like that. Two palms together and a head to the bedpost. 

August 31, 2008 – 2:53 pm
Posted in scenes

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oh

It is too hot in Venice in August and there is too much rain in Ireland to live. There are pictures only: the sun, the humidity, a small distant window. In fairness, a holdover from twelve years of Hawaii keeps a heater at her feet in fine, stable weather: marred, always, by the weather of this office, the temporary one.

Finger taps at her temples are conspiratorial, because she only likes the clever ones. Television television televison, she says, while she practices the parts from her Native American flute lessons during meetings. No one should ever stop learning.

Keeping afloat seems like trying to keep the rest from sinking, but there’s little to do. It’s the television; where else do they go at night? A solid connection with the delivery man: familial, geographical, and the world does seem small. It was a tiny town on Maui, but the view isn’t bad from this desk either.

Please tell them to dust the bunnies from underneath. She makes it to Venice.

August 23, 2008 – 3:22 pm
Posted in scenes

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Good reasons, I think, to go places

You have these parameters for judging people that in most cases stop making sense when you aren’t where you’re used to being. You have these parameters for judging situations that in most cases stop making sense when they aren’t situations you’re used to. Most people who leave their homes are with you, parameter-less as well, and with stories. There is one spot in untrained brains for foreign languages, and losing typical language defenses makes you desperately reach and makes you friendlier. There are these really breathtaking places in the world. There are these really remarkable women in the world, a lot of them. Enthusiasm is easy. There’s no reason to distrust sincerity, particularly from boys so good looking it’s like being punched in the stomach. You find out most people were wrong about where you were going. A lot of things stop being important, but decisions, life decisions, are easy, until the parameters return. 

August 11, 2008 – 3:52 pm
Posted in travels

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Viva la Vida

 Did you read this article when it came out? I think you probably did. I read it here in Buenos Aires, on a friend’s computer I borrowed while she went to tango class. It’s what I was trying to say about Death Cab and Foer only regarding Coldplay, which as far as examples go is a good example.

They’ve become the sonic security-blanket for millions of fans, their tracks sweeping by with the epic solemnity of state funerals, their huge, heartbreaking chord changes sucker-punching you with emotional logic while sapping any anger or political engagement – in the existential sense – that you might otherwise experience.

Something I was not expecting about Buenos Aires is that it sounds like American music: in clubs, in taxis, in internet cafes, on the colectivos. You hear the cumbia and the tango music and the deafing techno, of course, but our music is really the strongest American presence here.
Sidenotes are for when you realize how annoying you are without deleting things
I have, then, heard an alarming amount of Coldplay in the last month (blahblahBritishblahblah). Musically I don’t feel about Coldplay; it is usually the whitest of white noise, sounding the way communion wafers taste. Here, though, it makes me feel things – things like the kind of phantom nostalgia that can’t actually be nostalgia as there are no orginal memories for it to be tied to, magnetizing emotions in the way only the best kind of music does. I would be lying if I told you I didn’t find it intensely irritating, as there is obviously an elitism tied to my indifference to Coldplay: I don’t want to feel about Coldplay because it doesn’t mean anything. To me, or in general. And like the article says, the most dangerous thing about Coldplay is that it pretends to mean something to create the illusion of engagement, which, for me, is the worst kind of art.

I think, though, this explains my current Coldplay reaction. Immediately after reading the Coldplay article, I read this, an expat’s account of the smoke from the campo strikes in Buenos Aires. The last sentence:

We, bleary-eyed tourists stumbling about in Neverland, could only imagine what it feels like to be an unconscious part of something like that.

This is what being here now has been for me. Do you hear in the news about Argentina? I think probably not, and if I weren’t here now I would never have known about the strikes and what this country is going through and has been through, the way we heard nothing about what happened in December 2001 here as we were slightly distracted. Being a tourist in Buenos Aires makes you moderately aware, but it is very distant and easily ignored, if that is what you want. But even if you wanted to know everything – if you read every article on the export taxes and about the different sides, if you brought your pots and pans and marched in the strikes – you could still never, ever know what it is to be a part of something like this. It is not my history.

I think this is what hearing Coldplay reminds me of, though that’s pretty cerebral and very likely more of a way to explain away my embarrassment of having Coldplay make me feel something. But for me their music has always meant disengagement, and hearing it here makes it doubly so, like losing something I never could have had in the first place. This beautiful city has a history I can never be a part of, and that is a sad thing to feel.

June 27, 2008 – 5:11 am
Posted in travels

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What I meant

Was it Dad?
Maybe.
Whoever it was, it was somebody.
I ripped the pages out of the book.

— Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, two pages before the Flipbook of Redemption.

Write me the history of magic realism and it will be good, but it will not be fantastic. The spread from German coinage to its Latin American versions did not involve sparrows or men who carried it through the world with their secrets of ice. It was, reductively, the creation of an autonomous Latin American literary style, which does nothing to diminish its worth and does not change the fact of its having a history: a history, that is, of a larger Latin American past that was often unable to account for its own origins, as Brett Levinson writes, and used magic realism to reveal “mythos as a means to explain the beginnings which escape history’s narrative.” With the translation of Borges, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa to English, what follows are their traces in Toni Morrison, Pynchon, Barthelme, Murakami, Robbins, and then Foer, Eggers, Krauss, Plascencia, etc. to degrees and applications so varied this list is fairly useless.

There are, though, similarities in recent strains of U.S. magic realism, in particular the Foer/Krauss/Eggers group, mostly in their undercurrent of complete and utter pleasantness. Their characters hurt, certainly, but always shallowly and always in lovely, lovely sentences. This maybe isn’t bad, and it’s usually entertaining. But what happens when these books take on history—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, 9/11—is, I think, bad. Latin American magic realism created history where there wasn’t enough, and used the fantastic to take part in the realities of their current and historical political situation. We, though, have plenty of history, and in these books instead of expanding it escape it. This version of magic realism is one where we can violently rip the pages from history books or from personal histories and rearrange them to be nice, as Bukiet says here in far too many words. In my opinion, magic realism is usually best in short form anyway, and also when not taking on the entirety of 20th/21st century tragedy.

“It’s not true,” DeLillo says, “that modern life is too fantastic to be written about successfully. It’s that the most successful work is so demanding.” The problem with this current U.S. version of magic realism is that it seems the easy way out. The U.S. is well versed in escapism enough as it is already.

In conclusion, the Death Cab/Foer analogy isn’t exactly what I was trying to say, but it stands, and Narrow Stairs still sucks.

May 20, 2008 – 2:49 pm
Posted in Notes

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The Library of Manifestos

Anarchist to Zapatista.

Early in the morning, this is how I find them, as I have found you sleeping on the floor, a night spent reversing my work. We argue mainly about systems: alphabetically, you say, people can come here to find what they are looking for. But I tell you no one comes here with something in mind; they come here looking for new beliefs. This is why I order them by effect and by issue. Symbolist, Ultraist, Modernist. The sections of deadly manifestos, the Unabomber’s Manifesto. Whole shelves for communism. But you will not agree, and this is how we spend our nights, reshelving.

I have tried to remove Futurism from our library because its placement here is a cruel joke on its creator: each time we dust its shelf we mock the eleven tenets of the dead Italian’s declaration. You argue, though, for history—for the purpose of the catalogue and for our library. We cannot remove the works that proved failures; our shelves would be empty. The purpose of our library is to give the people the words of the past and the foundations of our movements.

But if someone needs this, I tell you, I can recite it, aloud—the way it is meant. In my mouth it has movement. You say nothing.

‘We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness,’ I say, number one.

You have gone back to the shelves.

‘We want to demolish museums and libraries,’ I tell you firmly, number ten.

This is when you know that I will disregard the walls and pages—the course of our history—for the violent words of fascists.

I will write a manifesto for our library, I say. And the last tenet will not allow manifestos that call for the destruction of libraries. I think, foolishly, this is how I will appeal to you.

I will write a manifesto for betrayal, you tell me. It will contain only one command: Devour hearts.

I take the Cannibal’s Manifesto from the wall. It has already been written, I start to tell you, but you take the book from my hands and begin to carve into its cover.

Then I will write a manifesto for revenge, you say.

I find the empty pages of other books and begin to write. This is your manifesto for ignorance, and cowardice, I say, but it will be too big for our library.

And I will write a manifesto for whores, you spit.

We grab the blank pages of the backs of books, of the fronts, then the pages themselves, until we have rewritten the manifestos of history as the manifesto of our bitterness. When we are done we are left with no systems, and no one has written a manifesto for rebuilding.

May 18, 2008 – 1:30 pm
Posted in stories

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