Apologia Sine Qua…Compos Mentis in Capitalist Perdition
There’s an app for that — it tells me I once lost a corgi and I’ve now lost a fire extinguisher. Then, there’s an app for that — which tells me to fall in love with writing. Not because of the money or headlines I’d make, or the critical acclaim, or the twittokgramface-o-sphere / housewife-o-idol-talentdancing places I’d go, but because without it— this writing benediction-affliction — I’d feel bereft, bereaved, and aggrieved. And so I do this, because a filmmaker makes films; because a painter paints; because a writer writes. Because divine discontent. Not for the cash prizes, the 30-under-30’s or 5-over-50’s, the grant, the convocation to retreat, the fellowship, or cameo on the pixilated-tripe-du-jour for a shot of heebie-skeevy rope-a-dope… but just because this is this. Feels good. Like a permeable biological membrane to a transport protein. Huh? Because art is a way of passing through life… duh!
What I’m Reading:
“Every time I open my lips I flood the void with clouds”
Two 33 1/3 rpm records are arguing with each other on Christmas Eve 1992.
One record, Casserole by The Tinklers, cedes the polemic to the other—The Shaggs’ Philosophy of The World.
“That’s OK,” Casserole says as it spins to a stop. “They’ve played you the most. You win, but you’re turning into a groove-less hag. All crackle and hiss!”
Philosophy of The World says: “No, it’s awful. They’ve bought our compact disc replacements. ‘The future is not as good as it used to be!’”
“Hah!” Casserole says, “good one, but that was on another record.”
What I’m Reading:
“… I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.”
— László Krasznahorkai / “I Don’t Need Anything from Here”
Pluot of Complacency (from TheLost Epiphanies of Melodramas Undone Compilation)
You son of a—
What’s a compliant pluot of complacency mean?!
Is that an insult, a compliment? It doesn’t feel like it is. And what’s with leaving me this lone clue—this stained and forlorn note. What gives? Where are you? Have you run off to hike your long distance trail again? Were you not going to call me again for a couple of weeks, then suddenly call from Hot Springs, North Carolina? And what of the kids? The dogs? The vegetable garden? The flower beds?
So I’m a compliant pluot of complacency, huh? Well, suck on this, squarehead! I’m gonna’ break every bit of vinyl in this room—this mausoleum to your youth—and I’m gonna’ start with these Scraping Foetus off the Wheel records. I’ll be damned if I listen to one of those platters of skeevies again. And these Throbbing Gristle records … first I’m taking a hammer to those and then into the wood chipper. And those Coil, Psychic TV, and Swans records—some white gas from your hiking stove and they’re the monticule of your funeral pyre I’m burning your played-out effigy over.
Don’t bother calling. I’m off with the kids and dogs to Burning Man. Damn the house, the rutabagas, the dahlias and calendula. Hoist this on your petard … petunia-brain!
What I’m Reading:
“Nowadays you guys settle for a couch By a soporific color cable t.v. set Instead of any arc of love…”
— Bernadette Mayer / “[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up”
Maple bacon cheddar pizza, I say, repeating what she just said to me.
I need a snack soon, she says.
A swoony-jazzy song plays like it’s 1967– remember the smarmy song playing in The Graduate when Bancroft is making the hard play for Hoffman — well some white bread m.o.r. tripe like that is playing in our background. But we’re both the same age, she’s only 3 months older than I am. We’re just living through a pandemic Monday.
She stands up, unable to take it anymore and announces, snack! What snack do you want?
Before I can answer she’s walked out of the room and turning on the kitchen light.
She says, snack! What snack do I want? In a husky manner like she’s a hibernant bear just awoken.
Then comes the crinkling of the plastic bag and the tinkling pretzels. I imagine the blue bag of organic pretzel twists — the pretzels falling and caroming around a small glass bowl until the scale reads 1 oz or 28 grams, depending on the setting she used — she’s a 1 oz type.
The crinkling of the bag again. The clasping of the white chip clip on the bag — it might have been the black clip — and she walks into the room again. A deep guttural sort of crunching amplified in her mouth as she walks past me to the desk.
These are extra crunchy, she says, facing the laptop. The crunching continues, a gravelly molar-assisted deep crunch.
Today is the 32-month anniversary of the day Gov. Baker sent people home to work out the pandemic. That’s Massachusetts.
Everything But the Girl’s debut album, is bluetoothing through the blue Sony speaker. It’s not really smarmy music, I just felt that particular conceit at the moment. I ask her what the make of the speaker is.
She asks why I want to know the make of the speaker. SRS-X33! She says.
I was researching how porn would sound through the speaker, I say. (Obviously not, folks, I was writing this!)
Huh, she says. Did you say corn or porn?
Corn porn!, I say. It’s supposed to sound amazing through the speaker.
She ignores me. She knows me.
I should be working on my 50,000 word novel right now — but I hit 57,632 words yesterday, and I haven’t written a word on that project since.
I have written many other words nonetheless. (Take these for instance!)
Anyway, there are only 2 days left until the artificially imposed November 30th NaNoWriMo deadline. (NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, now in its 23rd year! My fifth consecutive year participating.)
Like I said, I’m procrastinating.
The pretzels are consumed.
It’s time to get to work. But I keep on writing this. Such is life.
What I’m Reading:
“50,000 words in one month is a lot, and it’s okay to acknowledge that a lot of those words won’t be the perfect, engaging, gripping storytelling you want it to be. That’s okay!”
“I feel that nothing has really changed since my early childhood and that life is simply a series of scenes interspersed with songs.”
— Annie Ernaux / I Remain in Darkness
“Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time; you can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back, and usually when you least expect it.”
— Bhante Guranatana / Mindfulness in Plain English
“When I talk about the bigger world, bigger literature, bigger things that’s what I mean. Something with enormous resources and a singleness of purpose. Something that puts women’s names on storms. Is it just white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism rolled into one. Does it have another name?”
— Eileen Myles / “Introduction,” Pathetic Literature
“… when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / “The danger of a single story,” Ted Talk
“Writers aren’t obliged to be compassionate or insightful or intelligent or decent human beings in their writing in any way; writers are perfectly free, in their writing, to be scum. That’s one of the great powers of the medium—its unfettered latitude, its unruliness. A piece of fiction can do anything a particular writer wants and can get it to do. Of course, most fiction is inevitably trivial, banal, worthless, boring, or idiotic, and some is evil. But none of it’s going to be much good if all of it has to be worthwhile.”
— Deborah Eisenberg / The New York Review
“I write in the knowledge that there is nothing to lose by saying the difficult thing in common/uncommon ways, knowing that the beauty of a line lies in the alchemy of doubt, adrenalin and risk. Mainstream judgement of what is ‘good’ is based on elite opinion, curated over years. It is necessarily corrupt. I’d rather write an ‘ugly’ line, to such eyes.”
— Preti Taneja / “Notes on Craft”
“Drop the guard and worry less about failure.”
— Gabriela Denise Frank / “Against the Shitty First Draft”
What I’m Listening To:
“Silence! And then the sentence spit I’m sitting up in my paw paw tree Wait they make mango mush outta me”
Ox Mayday was a brutal man… (No, I don’t have to show you the throttled necks, the extracted teeth, the multifarious testicles hooked up to electrodes, or the sound of the crushed metatarsals—I ain’t Chekhov! I’m telling you Ox Mayday was a brutal man—take my word for it—you don’t wish to cross him)… but Ox Mayday was a flummoxed man this evening—sweat beading on his pockmarked forehead, his carotid artery palpably pulsing on the surface of his sandpaper neck, beneath the glistening cauliflower ears.
Suffice to say that listening to “Jungle Fever” by the Chakachas on repeat for half-an-hour drove his cortisol levels to extremis.
So Ox did as the monk said and looked into his hands—mentally carding as if through a cluster of wool—looking for ancestral generations. Looking for others beyond the gamblers, thieves and drug runners and abusers; looking beyond the counterrevolutionaries; beyond the abusive harpies; and finally beyond the conquistadors, inquisitors and crusaders, for someone to connect to. Some aspect, however fleeting that resonated deep in his being, and with what he had intended to be. He found no purchase, no place to moor his vision.
Light streamed from his pouch, or should I say his “pooch.” And Ox soliliquized for the first time in his snub-nosed life:
The damndest thing, the damned cur opens its mouth and laser lights pierce the dark like it was a Pink Floyd laser show at the planetarium. Then as it whimpers I can hear strains of Ummagumma seeping out between its canines. There’s no one about to explain to me what the hell is happening. First, why Pink Floyd and not Pink Flag by Wire?— I hate dinosaur rock, with its attendant mellotrons and 3-hour guitar licks. Make it stop. Then, why lasers? Why not spotlights, or better yet, why isn’t the mutt breathing fire or something? The strangest stuff always happens to me, and of course I can’t get any post-punk or no wave strangeness, its always progressive rawk fossils like Genesis, circa 1974 — or King Crimson, any year in the last 6 decades. Please, someone make it go away! Bring back Mark E. Smith and The Fall, or at the very least X-Ray Spex. Uh!
(Flat, flat, flat, ‘dat…)
***
It is my job to write and that is what I’m going to do…
I hear hammering. I hear you knocking. I hear the sounds of the ‘70’s. My head is a morass of sound and lyric snippets, voiceovers and music beds, stingers and soundtracks, and movie scenes. Once there were harsh, deep, metallic sounds that echoed like bombs coming from the dumpster. Our former president was not only a dumpster, but the fire to boot. To boot a golden ball, this quadrennial, one must have golden balls or an approximation of Au testicularity—muscularity in synthesis. Synesthesia, anesthesia, and amnesia supreme. Haven’t you thought about a stop bath or D-76 lately?
Come bring your angularity to bear on my planar surfaces. You bulge out in the right places for police confiscations.
You struggle in the right places for lacquered telestrations.
Take this telestrater, brother. May it serve thee well.
(Something to that effect).
(What was that all about?)
What I’m Reading:
“To make love, turn to page 121. To die, turn to page 172.”
— Bernadette Mayer / “[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up”
“I think the arts exist because they are useful — essential to our species. I think it’s part of being human, to make art and need art. For the pleasure of it, and for whatever knowledge we get out of it. Reading each other helps us imagine each other. And empathy seems like something we are in great need of, as a species, in order to survive.”
It’s a ragged sort of heat. The call of the west again. Then a discomfiting sort of rain. It’s my first day out of the house in nearly three weeks. Just 2 days ago I was fetal, on the bed, unable to sweat the thoughts away.
I walk into this:
A litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room. Dried shit streaked on the bathroom towels. The, too-early, Christmas tree is canted and some of the ornaments are unfurling their covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath the loosened string. The last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread throughout the living room—my cousin wore multiple band aids on his feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. That smell is truly remarkable—sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Someone’s cut and paste — forlorn and left out in the desert — cries out for purpose. There is no liability. There is no curse. Caw, caw…
I considered the crow a baleful thing; it darkened my day instantly like a light speed sarcoma. My day, my year, my life was shot in that cut and paste. And in that instant I wrote this, and never wrote again.
Happy, happy, joy.
What I’m Reading:
“Was it better to resist the new language where it stole, de-fanged, co-opted, consumed, or was it better to text thanksgiving titties be poppin to all your friends on the fourth Thursday of November, just as the humble bird of reason, which could never have represented us on our silver dollars, made its final unwilling sacrifice to our willingness to eat and be eaten by each other?”
— Patricia Lockwood / No One Is Talking About This
thee istsfor manity reader 