his dark materials.

the golden compass & the subtle knife & the amber spyglass -- by philip pullman




you may have noticed by now that i’ve a thing for list-making. by hook—eg, a first-person narrator who likes to chunk up his story with lists and quizzes—or by crook—eg, a short riff with a central analogy around which features are listed—i’ve managed to work in my affinity for listing throughout my grad school program. here i’m going to be absolutely overt; my normally top 5 all-time format (borrowed, you may or may not know, from nick hornby’s high fidelity) has been further pared down:

top 2 all-time literary trilogies
2. his dark materials
1. the lord of the rings

and that’s it. turns out, i like thinking about trilogies more than i like reading them; i thought i’d read several, but last night i combed through my memory and my shelves, and was astonished to see that i haven’t read nearly so many as my brain presupposed, and never mind the dystopian parlor trick involved with my mind presupposing its own memory. that’s what’s happened.

the good news is that i’m not going to compare and contrast the two items on my little list; that would be tiresome. what i’m going to do is simply talk about why the trilogy works as a whole, and, at the end of the day, that comes down to two words: lyra belacqua.



the main character of this trilogy, all of age eleven at the start, lyra is stuck to more or less closely throughout the trilogy, and, frankly, the sections for which her perspective and emotion are off the stage don’t have the same luster. or, rather, they do—the subtle knife, for example, opens with the introduction of will, a boy lyra’s age who lives in one of the countless world’s parallel to hers (and quite possibly in ours), undergoes the trauma of his home being invaded and some goons coming after him, and, since he so closely parallels to lyra, and will in fact turn out to be her budding love interest, will’s tale is definitely compelling—but for all the delicious verisimilitude and the terrifically extractable social implications of the books, the heart and blood and meat of the trilogy is lyra, and the meta-parallels and human themes i was most eager to extract all had their starting points with her eye and ear, her stubbornness, temper, utter lack of pretention, and, via the alethiometer (golden compass), her ability to peer through eons of confusion with a distinct clarity.



the amber spyglass, the concluding title in the trilogy, is necessarily big in its own britches, as the grand metaphors must all come to a conflictive head, and the individual lyra’s story must turn out to be not only a metaphor for eve’s descendent returning to the garden and re-encountering the serpent, but also for the grandly unnecessary evil of organized religion, and for the shattering of its biggest presuppositions. those things are neat, and pullman renders and points to them with a high level of craft and care; i look forward to returning to them. but it’s lyra i keep thinking of—her irascibility, her clever boldness, her persistence; her as eve, her as holden caulfield, her as frodo baggins; her as me; her as us.

let's both get undressed right here.

an interview with boba fett

..is up on the work blog.

WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME.

Tony Hoagland’s book has a great title, there’s no doubt. That it’s the title of a poetry collection, rather than a bramble of youthful, quasi-confessional memoir, cements it as such.

Hoagland is exactly my speed of poet, and, given my inconsistent but undying aspiration of writing dialogue that fits within the Jesus paradox--fully human and fully literary--it’s difficult for me to imagine a set of poems coming any closer to clearing its throat and saying ahem, this is for you, hello. Hi. Example One:

COMMERCIAL FOR A SUMMER NIGHT

That one night in the middle of the summer
when people move their chairs outside
and put their tvs on the porch
so the dark is full
of murmuring blue lights.

We were drinking beer with the sound off,
watching the figures on the screen--
the bony blonds, the lean- jawed guys
who decorate the perfume and the cars--

the pretty ones
the merchandise is wearing this year.
Alex said, I wish they made a shooting gallery

using people like that.
Greg said, That woman has a PhD in face.

Then we saw a preview for a movie
about a movie star who
is having a movie made about her,
and Boz said, This country is getting stupider every year.

Then Greg said that things were better in the Sixties
and Rus said that Harold Bloom said that Nietzsche said
Nostalgia
was the blank check issued to a weak mind,

and Greg said,
They didn’t have checks back then, stupid,
and Susan said it’s too bad you guys can’t get
Spellcheck for your brains.

Then Greg left and Margaret arrived,
and a breeze carried honeysuckle fumes across the yard
and Alex finished his quart of beer
and Boz leaned back in his chair

and the beautiful people on the tv screen
moved back and forth and back,
looking very much now like shooting gallery ducks.

And we sat in quiet pleasure on the shore of night
as a tide came in and turned and carried us,
folding chairs and all

far out from the coastline of America

in a perfect commercial for our lives.



That one’s great and I love it. It’s so easy on the ear, yes? Deceptively so, you might say. The stories he paints in his poems are very much scenes, drawn so precisely they seem entirely casual. ..And that’s largely what I have to offer, in terms of insight about Narcissism. I’m not super good at talking about poetry. God, though, this was a nice switch, to just have this slender book to pick up now and again, read a poem, and feel immediately comfortable.

Honestly, that’s my full analysis; and I don’t want to fall into a stumbling praise of his lines and themes and the sounds of his words, because I admire all those, but why would I talk about it when I can just show it here. Maybe the MFA poets can show me some annotations and I can see how it’s done. Until then, let me leave you with Impossible Dream, which I’ve read many times and have yet to hit the summit of adoration for it. (One thing I love, again blatantly relevant to my own tiny world, is the tense-shifting.)

IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

In Delaware a Congressman
accused of sexual misconduct
says clearly at the press conference,
speaking
right into the microphone
that he would like very much
to do it again.

It was on the radio
and Carla laughed
as she painted, Die, You Pig
in red nail polish
on the back of a turtle
she plans to turn loose tomorrow
in Jerry’s back yard.

We lived near the high school that year
and in the afternoons, in autumn,
we could hear the marching band rehearsals
from the stadium,
drums and off-key trumpets, brass
smeared weirdly by the wind;

a ragged Louie Louie
or sometimes, The Impossible Dream.

I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,
like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on.

Sitting at the picnic table
carved with the initials of the previous tenants;
thin October sunlight
blessing the pale grass--
You would have thought we had it all-

But the turtle in Carla’s hand
churned its odd stiff legs like oars,
as if it wasn’t made for holding still

and the high school band played
worse than ever for a moment
as if getting the song right
were the impossible dream.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Imagine you’re a shy, quiet boy growing up in a large quiet place. You have among your biggest heroes men of physical action, both real and not real—Robin Hood and Aragorn; Larry Bird and Dennis Rodman—but you know in your gut from early on that what sets you apart is your mind. You’re content there, can always find things to do in there, where others seem to not. Going into the woods with a long stick, a pen knife and a dog doesn’t cease to pass the time well as early as it might, because you can make the forest a frontier, an escape, a place to lay a trap.

That’s enough empathetic exercise—it’s not a particularly difficult or rare one. My point is that this is the kind of boy I was, and, though I had no tremendous affection for chess, Bobby Fischer became on of the most intriguing heroes I had almost from the moment I first heard his story. Bobby Fischer Goes to War concerns itself with the war that was Bobby Fischer versus Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. When I heard stories about this ’72 battle, with the variety of big, unblinking demands made by Fischer—his refusal to play, his demands for more money that, coupled with his disallowance of TV or film coverage for the event and the revenue stream that went with along with it, practically bankrupted Iceland—I struggled to make sense of them, to find some noble ethic of resistance that was consistent, and would’ve failed at, but for the fact of his disappearance. He was in hiding.

Hiding, see, was where the best kinds of heroes went—the misunderstood men who had to bide their time and lay low, waiting for their moment of redemption. I knew of these themes even as I loved them—I enjoyed finding the common threads in my heroes, and one thread that ran through all of my most highly held characters was that of being thrown out, excommunicated, on the run.

So Bobby Fischer took a seat in that pantheon of mine, and stayed there for some time, until he unavoidably showed himself to be something not at all like a hero, or a relatively sane person. Now, years later, that hasn’t ended up being a bad thing for my idea and estimation of him — Hunter S Thompson’s body of work and life practically demanded his eventual shotgun suicide, if you know what I mean.

here comes the gravy pipe.

(from patton oswalt's first stand-up album)

..and i like the high end steak houses like lowry's and ruth's chris. but i'll also go to the shitball steakhouses like outback and black angus. i'm there. it's steak. not so much black angus though, 'cause remember how friendly the ads for black angus used to be? they were, c'mon in have a steak! how about a baked potato?

and you're like, fucking how about yeah!? see you tomorrow night. table for two, 7:15.


..we'll start you off with our appetizer platter. featuring five jumbo deep fried gulf shrimp, served on a disc of salted butter with fifteen of our potato bacon bombs, and a big bowl of pork cracklings with our cheese and butter dipping sauce.

um, we're all gonna split that...

oh you'll each get your own! Then, we'll take you to our mile long soup and salad bar featuring bacon and cream soup and our fine iceberg lettuce he-man salad, served in a punch bowl, with 18 pounds of ranch dressing, pork stuffed deep fried croutons and what the hell, a couple of corn dogs.

uhhhh hey man, i tell ya what. i'll just get a mixed green salad.

hey! i'll suck a cock on the golden gate bridge before i'll bring ya a mixed green buddy!!
then we'll wheel out our bottomless trough of fried dough!

what? wait a minute, am i gonna get a steak?

oh you'll get a fucking steak!!! cause then we'll bring out our 55oz. las mesa he-man steak slab, served with a deep fried pumpkin stuffed with buttered scallops and 53 of our potato bacon bombs.

ohhh dude i don't think...

and then bend over abigail mae, 'cos HERE COMES THE GRAVY PIPE!!

what?!

black angus, doors are locked from the outside, faggot!

at black angus your name is peaches.

we'll do it live. FUCK IT! WE'LL DO IT LIVE!

if you ain't seen the lately-uncovered clip of bill o'reilly blistering his own sausage (as they say in the infoporn business) behind the news desk, well, please do.



what can you say; the man knows how to pepper his sauce. FUCKING THING SUCKS.

the point: go here and have a listen to the remixes that one dude has made. my favorites are DO IT LIIIIIVE!!! and Fuck It (Revolucian Mix), which are now on my workout mix. really brilliant stuff.

bitch kneed my nuts.

#4 on the top 5 all-time monologues list.