26 September 2007

herzog : saul bellow.


Ah, Herzog.
I’ve made a surplus of notes on the book—it’s Proust-like ratio of action : meaning; the blurring of the line between funny and desperate; the letters that frame the fragmentary passions of Moses Herzog. MH, as I took to referencing him in my notebook. As I read through it, my part, the part of reader, became more and more complicated; my note-taking began to borrow a non-sequential tendency from the narrative, and I let it tend as it would, a half-intentional effort to more closely feel the pulse of Saul Bellow’s prose. I would disqualify no train of thought from my notes, not even the trolley cars, which are just for fun. That way, I would really get into MH’s dilemma.

MH,
I wrote again. These initials are mine, as well. That’s right. This makes sense, my note-taking continued, given the complex layers of patience I’ve had to develop. like MH, people in this world have heedlessly thrown trials in my direction, and i’ve countered with tribulations of my own creation—at my most heedless, i’ve mocked them by thinking myself to a standstill and making the situation worse than they ever could. Bless his complicated, initials-sharing soul, MH understands this--he set the damn bar for it. In the world where everyone has a kindred spirit on television, Herzog’s is George Costanza, who, during a previously muted break-up conversation, hollers, You’re giving me the ‘it’s not you it’s me’ routine? I INVENTED ‘it’s not you it’s me!’ nobody tells me it’s not them it’s me. if it’s anybody, it’s me. George is legitimately hurt in that moment, but it's what hurts him--not being dumped so much as having his own hollow line used on him--that parallels exquisitely back to the inclinations of Moses Herzog, his way of dialing in on a set of variables that may seem incidental to the uninformed eye. The thoughts and travails of Herzog are testament to nothing if not the likelihood of meaning in the minutiae. Although it may take some looking, during which there’s sure to be crises of cyclical analysis and general doubt. But doubt is the toothpick to the samurai sword of self-awareness, and, getting back to my point, I understand this. I, MH, understand better than some the burden of Moses Herzog. I’m not a Jew, I'm a commitment-phobic protestant, but even still.

The other day I read an entry in FreeDarko, an NBA blog a handful of writers have reserved as a space to put strangely compelling pictures and write unevenly about pro basketball, in whatever terms they happen to encounter, but always erring on the side of meta-. Sometimes with a nifty under-note of common narrative. The mention of Herzog came right at the outset of the piece, but well before the really juicy existential bit; so, sorry, it’s a long quote.

Silverbird’s promising academic career was not built on this sort of celebratory posturing... Yet somehow, FreeDarko brought out the booming rector in him.

There’s a good reason for that: since its inception, FreeDarko has been rife with overtones of prophecy, revolution, imminent change, and apocalyptic fervor. Hence the preoccupation with Futurism, the Old Testament, Islamic extremists, the Black Panthers, Heidegger, the First Continental Congress, and Herzog. I can’t exactly say what draws me to these things, other than ennui and impatience...

History’s over in art and music, but maybe basketball has yet to ride out that tide. The ripples of team destiny are what every fan’s truly after, and I’m stuck trying to do this for the league writ large...

That raises the question, though, of whether FreeDarko-ness beckons because we hate stuffy NBA thinking, or whether we hate that thinking because of a strong allegiance to FreeDarko-ness. I honestly couldn’t tell you; it’s a bit like asking if revolutions are motivated by hatred for the present or hope for the future. FreeDarko walks like it does in part because it needs to dignify its hit-list, but also because we want to believe in basketball’s future. And the only way to do that now is to hope for change, to aggressively note it at every turn. If we sometimes force the issue or appear delusional, it’s because someone has to camp at the vanguard for when reality’s caught up.

The sentiment the writer expressed at the end—the deflective call-out that hey, I might look crazy to people, to you, but “someone has to camp at the vanguard for when reality’s caught up”—bound itself back to Herzog; it drew a neat picture of Herzog’s ultimate ennui and impatience, to borrow a phrase. The language, “camp at the vanguard,’ struck me as something he’d be comfortable with. What Herzog vaguely stands up for as the story opens is this definitive sense of being ahead of the rest—not ahead in the sense of lengths on the racetrack, but something more intellectually effete and important and as-yet-ineffable than that. His stumble and stop with his critical masterwork is a black-sounding drum note in his internal narrative, and the other parts of his life—his lack of a life at home in which to invest, his listing and recording of hesitations with people (and aspects of himself) he wants to trust but no longer does—all these are tin notes sounding the loneliness that descends with the dark, out here at the end of the long peninsula, at the campsite on Vanguard Point. It’s cold, and we’re running out of matches. But of course it’s nice to stand bravely alone, too.

25 September 2007

ba da ba ba baa ... i'm lovin' it less and less.

i've had only crap coaches in my life, from pee-wee to high school, so i've had a lot of time to imagine my dream coach, then idolize him. looking back, i can say i was selective in my imaginings; i didn't want the part where gene hackman or kurt russell makes the team work out for hours after a devastating loss; what i wanted was the part where gene hackman or kurt russell's collected rage steams out into the open and explodes at someone who marginally if at all deserves the barrage of merciless gypsy insults. when coaches like gene hackman or kurt russell show themselves in real life, i'm awed; in boyhood-fantasy terms, it's akin to ariel splashing up where i walk, up where i run, up where i play all day in the sun and wandering free with me, part of my world--you won't need those seashells up here, baby. let me get those for you. after football practice one day last week, navy coach paul johnson felt ready to remind us of a simpler time, a time of hard work and honest pay, down at the docks.

Reporter: Can I ask you something without making you mad?

Johnson: Maybe. I don't know.

Reporter: I was talking to a Navy fan and he said he follows the coverage and that he noticed something and I'm just going to put it to you. He says that it seems like when Navy loses you blame the players, i.e., we can't execute fundamental plays, but that the success of the team the last four years has been attributed to brilliant coaching. How do you respond to that?

Johnson: Whatever he thinks. I don't go down to McDonald's and start second-guessing his job so he ought to leave me alone.

Reporter: But do you feel like it can't be both ways?

Johnson: You know what? I could care less. I'm old enough where I could give a crap what the fans think or what you think to put it in a nutshell.

Reporter: Wins and losses are evenly distributed as far as credit and blame, right?

Johnson: If you could ever find one time that I said we won the game because of brilliant strategy I will kiss your butt at city dock and give you two days to draw a crowd. Find it and bring it to me.

22 September 2007

bradshaw shrugged.



when all's said and done, carrie bradshaw will have played midwife at the birthing of the same number of defiantly confused and pointless writers as bukowski. and ayn rand. i just watched an old episode of sex & the city with laura, thank god for syndication. things were going along fine. at the end, after a long phone conversation where either she or samantha or both were in the bathroom, second-guessing the fuck out of shit, carrie thoughtfully decided to wrap things up with a voiceover. she'd realized some important things, and she announced them into the ether, using the wafting, nasal tones of someone being made to wait--and it was priceless. just breathtakingly bad.
a roll of pennies in the fat fist of shittiness. if you're going have a character ingest the obvious and barf it back up for the chicks to eat, if you're going to do that, don't make her an artist, man. we do enough of this type of shit to ourselves, please, i mean it. there are people who jump on, mis-identify it as artistic, and they have something to say, too, and that's how the yuck gets born. i'd sooner pardon you for reading fear & loathing in las vegas and concluding "mescaline will always be my friend" than i would for watching episode 8 of season 5 or whatever and having your big epiphany: "when you call me a bitch, it hurts my feelings! because you're right."

20 September 2007

tips? i got your tips right f'ing here.



a bit i wrote for work went up on the yahoo! main page as a featured article. just for an afternoon, but it generated a ton of business. this lead to dudes at work coming by my desk, flashing me the thumb and saying quietly, huntsman. nice work. i was reminded of senior year, when i asked sydney shuck to prom and she said yes; the next day at school dudes who'd never looked me in the eye were crossing the hall to shake my hand. at the end of prom i got a hug; here i get paid; it all works out in the end.

19 September 2007

this is what it is like.


from the inner eye, by nicholas humphrey -


when an atom bomb goes off on a pacific island, this is what it is like:


albatrosses will fly for days, skimming a few inches above the surface of the water… beautiful creatures. watching them is a wonder… we were standing around waiting for this bomb to go off, which we had been told was a very small one… and the countdown comes in over the radio… and suddenly i could see all these birds… and they were smoking. their feathers were on fire. and they were doing cartwheels… they were being consumed by the heat. their feathers were on fire. they were blinded. and so far there had been no shock, none of blast damage we talk about when we discuss the effects of nuclear weapons. instead there were just these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted birds crashing into things. (interview with an observer of a test at christmas island.)


and when an atom bomb goes off over a city, this is what it is like:


the appearance of the people was … well, they all had skin blackened by burns. they had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them front or back. they held their arms bent like this .. and their skin – not only heir hands, but on their faces and bodies, too – hung down ... wherever i walked i met these people. many of them died along the road – i can still picture them in my mind – like walking ghosts. they didn’t look like people of this world. they had a special way of walking – very slowly … i myself was one of them. (interview with a survivor of hiroshima.)


and this is how men talk about atomic weapons, a speech by senator mcmahon in 1952:


some people used to claim that a-bombs, numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands, were beyond our reach. i am here to report to the senate and the american people that the atomic bottlenecks are being broken. there is virtually no limit and no limiting factor upon the number of a-bombs which the united states can manufacture, given time and given a decision to proceed all out… we must have atomic weapons to use in the heights of the sky and the depth of the sea; we must have them to use above the ground, on the ground, and below the ground.


in terms of the story i have been telling about the evolution of human social intelligence and the capacity for insight, something has gone very badly wrong. alone in the animal world we are capable of knowing what we are doing, and the effect our own actions may be having upon other human beings. such insight and imagination ought to provide the greatest restraint possible on human acts of cruelty, or blindness or indifference to the suffering of others. yet again and again, human relationships go up in smoke. after six million years of human evolution, there are just, it sometimes seems, these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted human bodies crashing into one another.


..that's the first pages of the book’s closing chapter. at 177 pages, it’s a slender volume: a science book at the start, and at the end, too, but by that time it’s revealed itself as something more--an investigation, a philosophy of us. it is supremely elegant.

14 September 2007

ivan the terrible and his son ivan.















i don’t even know what to do with this. other than maximize it so the image fills the screen, and i can stare and stare. it’s by ilya repin, (the 19th-century russian dude who painted they did not expect him, of which i wrote briefly and terribly last summer, in trying to explain why i’ve a deeper and more complex attachment to it than any other painting.) this one is called ivan the terrible and his son ivan on friday, november 16, 1581, though it’s better known as


ivan the terrible killing his son.


i marvel at how much emotion is right there. this is a guy, ivan the t, and t is for terrible. it seems likely that, at some point, he laid out a map, circled all the places where people will never ever give up, no matter how grim the odds, and started wars with them. really early on he did some good things: he was made tsar at 16, and he destroyed the world’s biggest slave market, which he then balanced out by making it illegal for peasants to go places.


(ivan the t at the appetizer table in hell: likewise, it’s nice to meet you, george. what kinds of things did you do during your career? oh, you co-sponsored a failed bill to make it harder for the mexicans to get in? bet that was real fun, yeah. guess what: i co-sponsored serfdom. introduced it on the motherfucking block, so suck it. have a baby carrot.)


there’s a lot of info out there about ivan the t's near-death illness and loss of his first wife, and it was after this that the schizoid stuff began in earnest. the painting moved me, and i read several pages about him; but i didn’t really come closer to knowing what emotion it is i feel for this man when i look the work. i—i cannot help but feel his despair: it’s right there, alive; and punishing. i have a glimpse of empathy for this man. ivan the t. who, according to wikipedia,


beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, causing a miscarriage. his son, upon learning of this, engaged in a heated argument with his father, which resulted in ivan striking him in the head with his pointed staff, causing his son's (accidental) death.


repin put it all therewild, full cognition of all he's done, up to and including that moment. just in his face. i've found that when i look at it for long, my heart rate bumps up, then i keep looking, still longer; and my pulse cycles back down, till i'm very calm, and aware of it. i want to pray.

07 September 2007

i love this breakdown so FREAKING MUCH.

listen. i'd like to tell you there's something more satisfying than being the crowd favorite at the karaoke contest on the east-river booze cruise with a hundred and fifty people you mostly don't know. and of course in some circumstances, there is--maybe you had a really satisfying time at your wedding, for example. but, if you happen to have nimbly tossed back a dozen whisky-and-gingers before picking over a charred lunch and heading back to the bar; if you're delighted by a wide view of the manhattan skyline you're seeing for the first time; if you're pleasantly tripped out by the way the liquor in your blood amplifies the boat's motion as it rolls over the waves; if wearing a pink plastic lei in your hip pocket was a conscious style choice; if you are, in fact, too sexy for your shirt, so sexy it motherfucking hurts, well, then. congratulations. you've found some supreme satisfaction. spread the love.

05 September 2007

picasso v cheetoh.

yesterday at my office, someone forgot to feed the fish. this morning, as i came in, there was a shriek of horror, and i turned to see cheetoh wildly gnawing the last bits of his friend, picasso. the other fish and even the eel were nowhere to be seen, and for a moment i had the thought that cheetoh had devoured them all. but they were all there, hiding behind the lava rock; peeking out from different angles at cheetoh and then retreating back into darkness; cowering like the scooby gang in the middle-part of an episode. only this monster was real, and his name is cheetoh. he's my favorite fish, and he looks like this -















scary, huh? he's a fricking blowfish, and he's the cutest thing ever. he's always smiling and looking at you with his unlikely eyes; i didn't really think he had teeth. and then he's just devouring his friend, the artist, picasso, shaking his huge head frantically back and forth while his tiny tail stays still, until all that's left of the artist is an inch of white filmy fish-skin, like a bit of sunburn you peel off your shoulder. not a great way to go out. picasso, bless his watery cubist little soul, used to look like this -












and, i know, right? once again, to recap, this
















ate this

























and i'm feeling a bit unsettled. it's one less smile i can trust.