moses herzog.

herzog wrote, will never understand what women want. what do they want? they eat green salad and drink human blood.

damnit, marion! stop peeking.

fyi : there's a fun thread unfolding in the comments on the previous post. fun, yes. really fun, if you enjoy unhurried conversation about the strengths and shortcomings of popular science writers and their marmot-like readers. what? that doesn't sound "fun" to you? that sounds like less "fun" than "getting tattooed on the inside of your butt"? well guess whose face is tattooed on the inside of my butt. i had enchiladas yesterday. twice.

shut your eyes, marion, and don't look at it, no matter what happens.

the venerable blighty, that silver-haired fox of a cynical gentleman, wrote a post on it's not happening about malcolm gladwell's blink. because i steal from everywhere without compunction, i've transposed the comment i left on that entry into an apsi entry -

i'm a gladwell defender, not that he, very nearly the best-selling nonfiction writer out there, needs one--but i like him as a writer. he's great at creating a juxtaposition, then teasing out the common narrative threads; he doesn't waste space and nary a sentence is over-written; and i've found both books and a majority of his new yorker pieces a pleasure to read. while i won't disagree that the gladwell-as-the-pt-barnum-of-science-journalism analogy could be made, i'm not sure it makes a useful point.

what blink has done is fundamentally enhance my thinking in a couple of ways. in the 2y since reading it, one premise that's proved a boon is the superficial point of the book: that our instictive reaction to something can be superior to a reasoned, balanced reaction. more specifically, that a snap decision can be balanced and actually is wired so it can pull from a robust set of data points. what's proved continually pleasing to my mind, and even affected the way i conceive of my own creative and intellectual ambitions, is the malleability of this pre-awareness-level of thinking: evolutionarily, we developed the ability to pattern match eons before language made the scene. pattern matching, or "have i seen this before," is one of our oldest and most-fine-tuned cognitive abilities. and naturally, we get better at it as we go along--as we see more things and witness more events.

i like gladwell's bit about the tennis pro who could predict a forthcoming double fault before the player had even released his toss: he had no idea why he was right all the time, why he could make those predictions. this guy has decades of immersive expertise in the world of tennis, and those years of attention and work have resulted in this matrix of detail; and thanks to all that data, he can decide something with an efficacy that exceeds his ability to explain the decision. isn't that just so interesting? i mean, yeah, it's a great anecdote, but what it implies is, in some ways, counterintuitive. if you want to be an expert at something, focus on the details. but not so you can write a paper and not have to look up the sources. obssess about the details so that your pattern matching gets better. practice piano and the harmonies will become more complex, the linkages between notes self-evident. read and think about all the novels so that your native sense for story develops a resonance point that gets more and more true. write everyday so that the distance between your voice and the keys will depreciate to nothing. it'll feel as though your eye for detail has become almost effortlessly attentive, crisp. and on one side that's true. but on the other side is the larger truth: detail and meaning coincide in fairly direct proportion; add detail to your mental grid so you can better and more immediately discern the whole. detail is there to help create meaning,

one of my hats writes a song.

some bucks a day have come
and lured, then collared me away
from native greenery and peace
i miss color
my drab environs are confusing and new
lines drawn thickly around me, ink still wet
like fitzgerald said, the dew's
still on her
i must cut away from what looks sharp
or stark, with the light atop the dark;
these ribs won't keep this heart at bay
much longer.

mwhua ha ha mwhuntsman.

this is an email to my coworker matt, a designer i work with a lot. he fly, he cool. why it is that blogging an email is all i've got in me today is evidenced by the email itself. pretty goddam strongly, i think.

from where i sit, here on this friday, some things are apparent to me.

- i can still sleep for 4h and function properly at work the next day

- but doing that 3 nights in a row is really pushing it, @ this point

- seriously, if my eyes could open enough for me to see in the mirror, they’d be demon eyes, i’ll bet—

- like this, [see image at top] only smaller

- your email handle, “maguila”, when you say it aloud, sounds like

o the name of a little-known foreign tennis player who overcomes the odds, or

o the name of a dwarf or witch from Harry Potter, or

o how the teletubbies pronounce “gorilla”

- “mhuntsman” looks okay on paper, but when you say it aloud, as one word like with yours, it comes out sounding like

o count chocula has a crush on me, or

o a warm-weather bacteria that causes swelling and genital discomfort, or

o the noise maria sharapova makes when she hits a forehand, plus the word “man”

- each of our names gets a tennis reference, good for us and our names

- i don’t remember at all how i feel about the copy for the 4 email creatives i sent you eod thursday. are they any good.

-isms in my opinion are not good.

here : another email i wrote. this one to lotta; it was a reply to her rather fierce comments on the list i clipped from amazon (see 2 posts ago, about dawkins' book getting shelled by harry and oprah).

the sad thing about dawkins is that he's a good scientist. the selfish gene is, from the excerpts i've read and accounts i've heard, tremendous, and played a big part in helping to change the genomic game. just this weekend i had my brilliant scientist friend recount this to me and demand that i memorize it (this is the dude who's taught or pointed me to most everything i know about evolution, also a brilliant christian (by which i mean not that he proselytizes, but that his spirit is effervescent, his cup doth run over)) so it's just dumb to have dawkins fall of the edge like that. i don't get why he chose that route.

were we ever to take up a legit point-counterpoint stance, though, the core of my response would be similar to my complaint with christopher hitchens, which itself would read something like,

dear ladydawkins : you're not allowed to assault the objectivity of something without being objective. maybe when you're out for a fag, but not in an even slightly formal critique; not at book length. you're just not. and you know this—fuck, man, let's stop fooling and announce that you know or once knew it better than i know it. and you're not the forgetful type. so you're a fucktard, one who's been swallowed in the fleshy wet lips of his own ego, and now whenever i hear your name i'll have to quash the mental picture of one of those molly-mouth fake vagina deals they sell at the porn store. nice work.

ok, so the similarity with what i'd say to you ends after the 1^st sentence. how i'd continue, though, is to point to gw bush. the man is as good a face as any for the current-day regime of people and policies and –isms that make me not want to call myself a christian, or not want to state it as such. and christ surely knows that i've got my own struggles with trying to square my shoulders and heart up to him; i'm not in a position to be defending the retardedness of anyone else. so we don't have to call me a christian; call me a dude who's trying to follow christ. who despises everything focus on the family has done after about 1986. who thinks christian politics should be confined to the church (since she is the one best equipped to carry out the single verse in the new testament that explicitly describes the conduct of christian society (from early in james): take care of the orphans and the sick; and try to have a noble heart). whose sense of mystery and wonder has increased with every revelation about neuroscience and evolution and physics.

that's the other thing about dawkins, the thing that perhaps irks me most: the incompatibility of faith and science is the terrain of the biblical literalists, for whom metaphor is deceitful – when, in fact, metaphor is the primary framework by which we approach higher truth. (that sounds didactic and i'm sorry; what with it being the subject of 2 recent essays for grad school, i jump to the task of defending metaphor, which is unnecessary and lame.) the dawkster hems himself in and tweezes himself down: he's a recently brilliant and skeptical scientific mind who has reduced himself to the level of the kansas school board.

don't fall for that shit. blame the organization, blame the –ism (as ferris, years ago, wisely gave us permission to do) blame the inevitability of humans in significant power becoming corrupt and doing hateful shit. but it's a band-aid of an argument to fault any faith of any credence for the (inevitably vast) sins of its members. humans in power do bad shit, and religion will always be a prime motivator for rallying the masses; it's perhaps the best way humans have to trick other humans into excusing their individual selves while they rape de horses and ride off on de women. but it's a human trick played on other humans. my personal faith (which, fetal-alcoholic and prone to holdups though it may be, i'll never desert, having felt god's love rest on my own head) didn't sign up to defend anybody's pope, or anybody's –ism. to discount the legitimacy of all faith at all levels is to discount most of the wisdom gained and given by most of the wise people we've ever had.

in the 1^st excerpt on slate, hitchens calls cs lewis dreary and absurd. "…religious apology … some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming cs lewis…" it's crazy, but that was the lightest line in all the excerpted pages—that was hitchens being funny, smart and light and a leettle bit sassy. no, it's true, hitchens! one cannot avoid naming, can one! egads, the dreariness! if you do not desist i may chortle.

the fat lady is jesus.

this little bit is an email i wrote to meg, my floridian friend & co-student, who mentioned franny & zooey briefly. i have a very hard time being brief in this regard.

franny & zooey is a strange little book, there's almost no plot, and less action; you can stop reading now if you want 'cos i'm incapable of talking about this book in passing terms; franny has her "little green book" that she carries around with her throughout; for several years, this was my version of that; i called it my hip-pocket book. one of the tensest scenes happens w/zooey in the tub and his mother on the other side of the curtain. you get to see them try and have a conversation, each in turn trying to connect just as the other retreats, over this whole mountain of historical prejudice and mother-son expectation and learned roles. (it is perhaps my most-loved scrap of dialogue.) the whole book is centered on franny's college-aged crisis, her professors and favorites all seeming phony. she has this crisis and flees home. ultimately the story is zooey's as much as hers, 'cos it's him trying to help her, to talk to her in a way that is generous and not self-centered, and he's not good at it, in many respects, so he's figuring stuff out too. ...sorry, miss meg, i'm not at all meaning to go into a synopsis-style defense of it, here. all of that is context for the larger point, which is that you're right, zooey does come out with a christian thing near the end, recalling how seymour used to make him shine his shoes for the radio show they were on as kids, which didn't make any sense, and then they talk about the hypothetical fat lady who is christ (in a as-to-the-least-of-these-you-do-unto-me kind of way). and sure, we can all chalk up seymour as a tremendous christ figure, and blah, blah blah that's exactly what my 11th-grade lit teacher taught us to look for. yay for us, we see that seymour is a christ figure, only he killed himself instead of being killed, how ironical. (i actually do love that christ-figure element, but it's more robustly centered in other glass family stories; i especially like raise high the roofbeam, carpenters.) here, seymour's burden is only superficially the point---it's pointing to the point. the point is franny's little green book, the pilgrim's way, which is about a nameless, lame, 14th-century russian wanderer who is trying to do as st. paul instructs (in ephesians or somewhere), and learn to pray without ceasing. franny is so taken with this idea; she wants to do this. she's...christ, she's halfway through college: she's bright and beautiful, has just dumped her boyfriend, and is positively doubtful of her ability to love, to honestly care for anyone, about anything. she wants to sacrifice herself to this noble abstract: pray without ceasing. franny's at a point that i experienced at exactly that time in life, in college but with graduation in sight. the sum effect is to be absolutely insecure about herself and absolutely cynical of the skills and ideas of others. she's lost and skeptical of all the intellects and influences she so recently trusted, and so she has the book with her in the very first scene when she gets off the train; and also in that beautiful scene where she has lunch with her hatefully conceited college boyfriend, where she takes it with her into the bathroom stall, sets it on her lap, and has a panic attack severe enough that she passes out. and later, as she recuperates at home, where zooey sees it, and he speaks of it knowingly but somewhat caustically--enough that she's quietly very affronted. zooey, at least with his sister and mother, is sophisticated without being tactful. but that's when the book begins to come down off the pedestal for franny, and it's the set-up for the fat lady/christ thing. i too remember being disjointed by the ending, the first time through it, and even still a little bit the 2nd. but the entire story serves to make it's last point; or, no, rather, as i've come to perceive it, the ending serves to point my eyes backwards over the story i've just read: love is all that's left. without love, the ability to pray without ceasing has little point, and none that christ cares about; without love, seymour's suicide remains too selfish to see how lonely he was, too selfish to be forgiven; without love, the idiosyncratic neediness of your family is enough to suffocate you. ...that's my franny & zooey ramble, part I. you don't have to like it, i promise. after i recommended it for the reading list last year, my professor trashed it to me---without demonstrating that he'd ascertained anything, or even that he'd finished it---and i had to work a bit to retain my opinion of him. but i did, and now i'm fine.

richard dawkins fights the lonely fight.

Certain items on amazon's topseller list caught my attenti on today. it's fun to discover themes on amazon, like a found poetry sort of thing. But what the list currently offers is not found poetry so much as found decade's worth of shit to be worked over in psychotherapy for richard dawkins.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
by J. K. Rowling
2. Little Green Book of Getting Your Way: How to Speak, Write, Present, Persuade, Influence, and Sell Your Point of View to Others
by Jeffrey Gitomer
4. The Secret
by Rhonda Byrne
9. Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success
by Russell Simmons
12. Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude: How to Find, Build and Keep a YES! Attitude for a Lifetime of SUCCESS
by Jeffrey Gitomer
13. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) (Deluxe Edition)
by J. K. Rowling
17. The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World
by Lynne McTaggart
18. Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don't
by Michael Losier
20. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
by J.K. Rowling
21/ The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins

poor dawkins. he knows perfectly well that he overshoots the conclusions of evolutionary theory by about 100 yards; he's briefly interesting in the way he does it; but he knows goddam well he's set himself up for the hand-wringing and the anger and the gay-sex-on-south park episodes. And grabbing your ankles for harry, along with whoever's momentarily suckling at oprah's golden tit (cormac mccarthy), those are givens of circumstance. but still, he has standards for himself, expectations. and this list has to be just demoralizing. doesn't it? harry takes him behind the shed no less than 3 times; and oprah's grasp has, via the bleeding loudness of the secret¸ constricted the public's attention such that they're reading 6 books with the exact same thesis (think happy while you shop!) before they even think to pay money for his poor little bumper sticker disguised as a book. i mean, russell simmons, for fuck's sake.

deep in my heart i am warrior.

(here is another bit i wrote elsewise, posted here just to give apsi a half-reviving half-breath. things are busy and don’t look to get less so for some time. (i got a job, a writing job, with an actual desk, and a laptop and a salary and responsibilities. also the job has artwork on my desk, 3 big pieces, placed there by the “senior vice president of non-value-added activities” which will remain there until someone else gets hired, probably a few months out. Among these pieces is an 18” x 24” full-color glossy tour book, entitled Bette Midler - Da Tour, and it is breathtaking---is proud and joyful and relentless in its celebration of mid-80s bette. even as i type she lurks, just beyond my monitor, primping her short perm, cooing at me, staring at me with those salacious eyes, equal parts manatee and sucubus. it's a good job.))

The first bits I really connected with in brief interviews with hideous men the title stories, of which there are several installments, and are structurally similar in that one (hideous) man talks and another party’s queries go unstated:

Q.

‘It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it wasn’t so totally fucking weird. If I had any clue about what it was about. You know?’

Q….

‘God, now I’m embarrassed as hell.’

Q.

My initial fascination was so strong because it related to me: the opening pages of my story Dear Fat Kid, employ a similar device when Hal, the narrator, is on the phone with his father, who speaks only in em dashes. Most of the interviews are short, less than five pages, and the longer ones began to lose me. As a whole I felt the interviews came up short, not for their context-free nature but because any one interview was weighed down by the context of the interviews on either side of it—these are not happy or joyful dudes, and with the exception of the one guy who involuntarily shouts “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” every time he comes, they’re pretty hateable. But they’re interesting has hell.

This is because David Foster Wallace is a goddam virtuoso. In the end, that’s much of what I have to say about these pieces as a whole: he vamps with a mixture of ambition and clarity and ethic that brings to mind Charlie Parker or Miles Davis (both of whom I’ve been pretty newly introduced to, and whose structural expertise is so strongly if implicitly at the base of their improvisations that I’ve been playfully but recurringly taken with the idea of the framework that must underlie any significant creative work), and though almost every time I pick up Wallace’s writing I regret that he sets the bar for connecting with his work as high as he does, when the time comes to put the book down I don’t want to—the connection has formed (given his penchant for medical analogy, Wallace might say metastasized. Given my own penchant for picking up an analogy and wringing every last bit of life out of it, I’ll note that Miles Davis has become a staple accompaniment in my intellectual life—some of his work, that is. Kind of Blue and Live at the Plugged Nickel and Birth of the Cool have tirelessly sustained my attention, but I can’t listen to Bitches Brew while I’m writing, or reading, or riding on the rackety city bus—the sounds are unrelenting, fully harsh, and require not just focus but an acclimation period, a willingness to throw my hat in the ring and sit till I’m ready).

As taken as I was by the Brief Interviews stories, the mountaintop moment of the book came for me in Octet, a series of five bits of “belletristric fiction” each labeled as a Pop Quiz, in which a scenario is related to me, the reader, and at the end a question is asked (eg, “Q:(A) Is she a good mother. (B)(optional) Explain whether and how receipt of the information that the lady had herself grown up in an environment of unbelievably desperate poverty would affect your response to (A).) It’s in the final part of this piece, PQ9, that he does two alarming structural things: he goes off the deep end in terms of “S.O.P. metatext”—it has 17 footnotes; and he puts you in his shoes—the first line is “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer.” It’s a crazy and difficult piece, and it caused me to start taking notes before I’d read its (seemingly) modest 12 pages through for the first time. Not until after I’d digested it some did I see the neatest trick of the whole bit: Wallace actually succeeded not just in getting me to care about the central human theme of Octet, nor just to sympathize with his struggles in writing the piece, but too he successfully put me in his mind at the time of writing more than any writer has ever done—more than Lamott with boy and her birds, more than Dillard with her squirrels and trees and windowless rooms. I’m excited to dig in to his essays when I get the opportunity.

i said i don’t need this; i do really well

so i wrote a poem the other day. it is very beautiful.

i had a dream this morning
insurance was adequate
contact was documented
surveillance was adequate
heart was heart
that the know about
you might get screwed on this thing
code cobra was employed
to see what they were doing
and after two years i go,
and like i said, and, yeah,
i’m pretty good,
i can go sit on my hill somewhere
and really zoom in on my work projects
the sun’s zooming in behind me
(people are in public places)
and you’re not assuming privacy
(and you’re looking into someone’s shower)
in idaho you can even assume that a reasonable
expectation of privacy is still a headache,
a gray area, not useful
the biggest one in the world is in las vegas
you’re not gonna get a fix if it breaks like another one
do you think you’re a good read of people
the thing is i’ve realized
there’s enough transcendental-ish reports, 560 dollars,
it’s gonna be hard enough to document,
you’re still going to have a hard enough time,
all those things –
probably they still see themselves
(in bushes)
well, yeah, and the next day the safety comes out,
and the next day in his backyard the hole comes out
and the guy says he’s, ya know,
nobody’s wife wants to say he’s disabled
he is partially paralyzed, but
that’s just it, you know, i don’t like going back
and forth – i’ve had a girlfriend for a while but in the next
few days we're going to alaska
but a year ago i went to career-ab-holding
and there not very many
huge companies, and they tried to have me farm…
to cut me short, and have me clip me 12 years ago, so,
i said i don’t need this; i do really well
we don’t charge for an hourly rate,
so fuck this,


with the exception of the truncated final line, which in full would read something like -- so fuck this, beer before liquor and the answer is none ... none more blacker -- i'm happy with it. see, it was my first day off in forever; b.mac and i ate a late breakfast, played pool, drank a few pitchers; and it was great. then i went to bernard's, downtown, where i remember drinking two happy hour martinis, which were only $2.25 each, were not a good idea,

you might get screwed on this thing

but still were better than the ones i had after that, of which i have no memory. poor, poor etling had an f'ing task getting me out of there and home

code cobra was employed, to see what they were doing

one of the only things i remember is pulling my hand away from etling's so as to point to the black ice she should watch out for, on which i then immediately fell, hard enough that she claims to have felt the reverberations through her shoes.

i can go sit on a hill somewhere, and really zoom in on my work projects

but no sooner was i there than i began to spin myself in circles, crying, wee! spin-spin disco time!

in idaho you can even assume that a reasonable expectation of privacy is still a headache

i don't remember are getting home, sitting down on the floor and hugging the corner of the bed frame; not eating my tacos; not watching the debut of 24; and passing out at 7:30. but that's what i did,

the thing is i’ve realized there’s enough transcendental-ish reports, 560 dollars, it’s gonna be hard enough to document

apparently when etling joined me at the bar, she'd told me of half-waking me that morning and asking me if i was dreaming. i said, "i am a garden vegetable." and how is that going? she inquired. "well, it was pretty rough for a while, but, now we have a few customers." so this is the emotional crux of what i set out, there at the bar, to evoke through poetry. now, a day later, the matter is simpler yet hopelessly more blacker than before.

all those things – probably they still see themselves (in bushes)

the dystopic redundancy of my blacking out one line into the composition of a poem inspired by a dream wherein i'm an organic cucumber nobody wants to buy is not lost on me, and if it is lost on you, well then, no hard feelings, you can stop reading and go ahead to the green room, where elmo and david lynch are making bumperstickers out of recycled hymen, and i'll see you there in a minute.

and the guy says he’s, ya know, nobody’s wife wants to say he’s disabled

when i was well into my poem and etling was actively conversing with the dude next to her, i grabbed her arm, swung her chair around, and told her (she says) that i was "99.9 percent sure you are really really going to love it." but then my laptop battery died.

i do really well, we don’t charge for an hourly rate, so fuck this.