PK in the Terrarium

An apology

2012-01-26T07:22:00.003-05:00

This book I hold, solid, weighty, with its blue cover and linen case -- I'm trying to measure the actual dimensions of the made thing -- feels as though its printed text could come off in my hands. I rub my thumb over the words. 11.5-point Baskerville type posed properly on the 5" x 7 3/4" page. I shut my eyes and let my fingers play across the paper. Often I simply like to let the book fall open and peruse a paragraph or two. I fall into the reverie of the bibliophile, indistinguishable from reading for content, but really reading just for pleasure (as though that were a mere waste of time) -- the surreptitious, almost erotic, pleasure of slowly raising the skirt hiding somebody else's secrets. In bed, in a darkened room, rain spattering on the window, this book warms me.

I've never read the whole thing from start to finish. Truthfully, there have only been a few memoirs I've followed to the end, Edmund Gosse's Father and Son for one, that remarkable unleashing of the Oedipal collar. I don't know. There's something unseemly about bald assertions of personhood, framed as a coming to terms with one's past. On the rack it lies trussed, the memoirist's fealty to the rhetoric of confession. Confess what? To being human? I shudder at the way memoirists crank up the machinery of hysteria, expecting sympathy. As Quist used to say, "We're all in the same lifeboat, bub." Victimhood my arse.

I remember my grandmother shouting at Bert the mutt in German. The dog didn't understand her. He stood his ground and wagged his tail. My grandmother didn't understand the wagging tail and so kept shouting. Of course, this was very funny, to see the two of them standing a few feet apart in the back yard, anxiously trying to tell each other something. My brother and I couldn't laugh, though. Otherwise we would have been scolded for siding with Bert. At that point in her life, my grandmother had no dignity left so we let her be.

Straighten your back and shoulder this original sin. Take up your cross despite your lack of faith, make something up and blurt it out. The machinery of hysteria, the sound of the German language. Shite, I can't hear the rhyme word coming. And without poetry, anxiety cannot be quelled. It only gets worse.

I read in bed and listen to the rain. The lamp is turned down low. The plumbing is quiet tonight. Could he have been a hero once, the gray eminence who wrote, "I can connect nothing with nothing?" Maybe. Here I am, the privileged individual, somebody who likes fine wines and conversation with intelligent women, living in this secular millennium, an unwilling patient infected by grief. It is always later than I think it is. The book, solid as air, falls from my hand. All lies in this pseudo auto biography.

The misfits

2012-01-16T10:33:00.003-05:00

One of the best things about the emerging e-book business and the digitization of almost everything is that this process -- not necessarily progress, you understand, despite the non-stop barking of the marketers -- has separated the romantics who truly loved books (to their own detriment) from the realists who simply saw publishing as a low-pressure environment in which one could earn a living without working terribly hard, or being especially competent at anything in particular. In other words, the misfits versus the bureaucrats.

I hold myself -- proudly -- among the misfits, remaining steadfastly awkward in the company of bureaucrats, those for whom corporate life is a given set of unyielding circumstances to be met with resentful acquiescence in an endless series of committee meetings. The misfit says, "Listen, beano, if I fall flat on my face, it's because I tripped over my own damn feet." The bureaucrat says, "Some son-of-a-bitch tripped me." Like any self-deprecating romantic -- flat-earther, luddite, poet -- I deny historical determinism, while my nemesis the bureaucrat persists in the delusion that people are capable of creating history (even while they fall victim to it). I doubt if either one of us is right.

Shopping online, reading ebooks, driving SUVs, eating fast food, listening to music through earbuds, watching movies on phones, using a GPS to find a pizzeria -- what arsehole believes that these lazy activities somehow signal the Good Life? Or that they even constitute progress? Making water safe to drink was progress. Enshrining basic rights in a constitution was progress. Pulling ourselves up out of the cesspit of superstition into the relative light of the scientific revolution was big progress. But these addictive idiocies -- things like internet gambling, one-click shopping, and carrying around hundreds of ebooks on a Kindle -- are the mere by-products of progress, like ash left after a fire.

Because bureaucrats are susceptible to the urgings of clever marketers -- hell, many of them used to work in marketing departments themselves -- they confuse the ash with the fire. It's human nature, they say -- we can't have the internet without the porn. Or the militant Christianity. They make perfect consumers. Invent a new gizmo and whether it's useful or not, rest assured they'll buy it.

Misfits don't trust marketers and so we don't fall prey to their shite. We have our own problems. Trying to maintain our sanity in an insane culture.

Most of my waking time I spend dreaming of a world that bends to my unconscious will. It's an effin dream. In this bright and gauzy land, people still read printed books, eat home-cooked meals, dance to live music, and walk to the corner store. Bees abound, cows give milk, and little boys are taught to respect little girls. This edenic world's inhabitants are not luddites nor cranks, although, to be honest, we sound like it sometimes. We are romantic misfits, misperceiving chance for free will, kooks who revel in the human use of language, thinking it somehow distinguishes our species from the rest of the animal kingdom. We're proud of being an elite minority. The kicker is that this world is not real.

Call us tetched, but our stink is our own and we've learned to accept it. That's a kind of liberation, isn't it? We believe that Jesus Christ is the model misfit although we don't necessarily believe in his divinity. He bucked the system and bureaucrats killed him. Bureaucrats write barely literate, jargon-filled memos, set agendas, send Outlook calendar invites, distribute minutes, read business books, study Excel grids, and lay people off. They follow the letter of the law when they have to, keep a human resources manual on their shelf and a mission statement framed on their wall. And their specialty is washing their hands after signing orders of execution.

For them, technology is a great boon. It affords them greater control of their fellow humans at less expense. It amuses them to play with new toys. Best of all, it allows them to ignore the misfits who come to them for jobs.

Breathing exercise

2012-01-08T15:06:00.009-05:00

Yes even here in America
with its great plains and grand canyons
its rocky mountains and long valleys
its declaration of independence and bill of rights
its big sky and rapid cities
its spiritual craving and its jazz vespers
making poems
is struggling to breathe

And even here in New York City
at the beginning of the second decade
of the twenty-first century
where anything your heart desires
is for sale somewhere
and if you have enough money
you can be happy
if you know you can leave
in a hurry you can be happier still

When the rosy sun sets over Newark
and the Norwegian Jewel
heads out to open sea
and the lights come on
in the unfinished Freedom Tower
and all the junk shops with "Going Out of Business" signs
in their windows finally go out of business
it'll be time to catch your breath
and head for the highlands

But even up there in the watershed
where paved roads wind past
protected reservoirs and wildlife management areas
where hordes of snowboarders
descend Mountain Creek's runs
and psychopathic barbers
strop their razors while listening to Limbaugh
and the only way to get warm
is to start a fire
there is no time to breathe

Rarely and reluctantly

2012-01-08T11:49:00.006-05:00

At this stage of my life, I'm amazed by those who can read more than a book a week, although when I was a teenager I could get close to reading one every couple of days. I was an indiscriminate reader back then. Ian Fleming, Albert Camus, Josephine Tey, W. B. Yeats, Allen Drury, G. K. Chesterton, Isaac Asimov, Richard Ellman, Jean Shepherd, Robert Farrar Capon, Dash Hammett. It was all good. Mysteries, histories, aliens, aliases, poetry, belles lettres, nature, politics, theology. I remember writing an arch essay for my college application on Lin Yutang's The Importance of Living -- as if I knew then what living was. A budding middle class white American Taoist. It was embarrassing bullshit but it did the trick. Mine was a consciousness largely formed by the way books accounted for the behavior I saw around me, that of adults and peers alike. Sometimes even my own, usually by way of modeling myself after some thwarted introvert like Binx Bolling, or even more foolishly, Emil Sinclair. Every sensitive teen has an emotional crush on Hesse for a spell.

One summer I read Ulysses on the wide stretch of fine-grained sand down by the West End parking lot at Jones Beach. The "snot-green sea" and "the jejune Jesuit" -- yes, I thought, I know this world exactly. As for Molly's big "yes" at the end -- well, she was unlike any of the girls I knew. Maybe one of their mothers was like that.

A lot of my reading came through my parents. From my father I came to know Archy and Mehitabel, Rachel Carson, E. B. White, Schopenhauer, George Gamow, Father Brown, the Conrad of Youth and Typhoon, Thomas Mann, and, yes, Lin Yutang. Literature of the aggrieved rationalist. My mother was the great fan of mysteries, historicals, and gothic romances. Daphne Du Maurier, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, George Eliot, Katharine Mansfield, the Brontës, Mary Renault. Literature of escape, of the dream of an orderly world and righteous judgment brought down upon the guilty.

Like all bookworms, I've spent too much of my life making lists. Even now, I'm doing it, reviewing the inventory in my mental closet. All of a sudden remembering reading that sharp satiric collection of Dick Gregory's called From the Back of the Bus and thinking what a miracle it was that my mother hated racism in all its forms in spite of her mother, the ur-Nazi. Lists of titles, lists of authors, thinking that soon I will begin to let it all slip away in a haze of mis-remembered words, phrases, events, mistaking those things that really happened to me with those things I merely read about. These lists will die with me and no one will be able to separate the various strands and shape them into a coherent narrative.

But this is not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about Milosz's great poem "Ars Poetica?" from which the words "rarely and reluctantly" come. It's one I know by heart, and have used it variously, sometimes to justify my own inability to own up to the few poems I've written, afraid that unworthy demons held me in thrall when I did the writing, sometimes to dismiss the volumes of confessional verse I've read, so little of which will last beyond the morrow, sometimes to suspend judgment about the psychological wellspring for writing verse in the first place.

But then I realized I was referencing the wrong poem. I was thinking instead of "Readings" -- another Milosz poem, one that begins, "You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospels in Greek." One in which the poet asks us to read slowly, moving our fingers over the text, so that we may "discover the true dignity of speech." He then goes on to argue how little difference there is between our age and the age of the New Testament -- only the terms have changed while the phenomena have remained virtually the same. It's a poem of resignation that ends with an image of the end of the world. Not unlike an earlier poem of his that ends with a man binding his tomatoes.

When I was in Swtizerland back in the early 1990s, I hiked a few kilometers up to Hermann Hesse's villa, now turned into a museum. It's in a tiny village called Montagnola high above Lake Lugano, a serene and picturesque location, perfectly suited to an old soul like Hesse who liked to walk among the chestnut trees there. Though I had long ago given up on his writings, regarding them as an affectation of questing youth, this place of his completely seduced me. The quiet, the beauty of the woods and surrounding mountains, the lovely city lying below, the sense of isolation, of being protected on all sides from the vagaries of politics, armies, poverty, deprivation, and ugliness, it seemed the ideal spot to sit listening to the murmuring of one's own heart and follow the path to self-realization. I didn't want to leave the illusion that if only I could stay, the right words would come to me and my life would change.

We've all heard the Rilke poem about the statue of Apollo's torso -- and laughed at it, sniggering at the notion that a momentary aesthetic thrill could demand that one change one's life. Often I've joined in the laughter, believing myself far too knowing to be taken in by a poem. Even when I knew it was wrong and felt remorse. I've listened to the yawps of my fellow citizens, their tittering, their unthinking dismissal of anything shaped for eternity rather than immediate gratification. I've thought to myself, Rilke got one thing right -- there is no place that doesn't see us. Whenever confronted by a great work, we are exposed, shown to be exactly who we are. Our demons rise to the surface, with their black tongues and spiteful words. And the better angels of our nature? They're up in the mountains somewhere, subsisting on air, in a tower filled with books, needy, immature, waiting patiently for an epiphany, any kind of sign.

Here, in late middle age, it's hard to control the urge to spit on them, to make fun of them, those who can still read a book a day. It won't be long till life crushes them. It won't be long till their demons are let loose upon the world. It won't be long till they too will be unable to remember what exactly attracted them to all those books they've been reading.

Written in 1967

2012-01-05T05:31:00.003-05:00

"Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated. They are the Midwest's open sores. Ugly to see, a source of constant discontent, they sap the body's strength. Appalling quantities of money, time, and energy are wasted on them. The rural mind is narrow, passionate, and reckless on these matters. Greed, however shortsighted and direct, will not alone account for it. I have known men, for instance, who for years have voted squarely against their interests. Nor have I ever noticed that their surly Christian views prevented them from urging forward the smithereening, say, of Russia, China, Cuba, or Korea. And they tend to back their country like they back their local team: they have a fanatical desire to win; yelling is their forte; and if things go badly, they are inclined to sack the coach. All in all, then, Birch is a good name. It stands for the bigot's stick, the wild-child-tamer's cane."
-- William Gass, from the title story in his striking early collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, a book now unaccountably out-of-print. It is the best thing that Gass, born in Fargo, North Dakota, has written. If one updated the names of the countries that Gass's Christian men would like to smithereen, it feels as though this could have been written yesterday.

The piano

2012-01-04T07:11:00.002-05:00

Georgia, thin and black as coal, worked for the S. family in Old Westbury. She wore a uniform and had her own apartment on the top floor of the house above the kitchen. The family, with more money than sense, owned a white Baldwin grand piano that none of them could play. It sat there gleaming and silent in their over-decorated living room. The children were taking lessons but neither of them practiced.

I did yard work there one summer before college -- sealing the blacktop driveway, clipping the hedge, separating the household garbage into 1-, 3-, and 5-year compost piles, cleaning the pool, mowing, weeding, and re-setting a flagstone walkway. Twice a week I'd drive the two kids to summer school. Robert and Allyson were very serious and talkative, six and eight, a boy and a girl, sharing the same short dark hair and big brown eyes. They were curious about the geography of Long Island, the work of glaciers in forming the North Shore near their house, then the flat sandiness of the rest of it. Once they went on an excursion to hunt fossils and arrowheads. "We found the Indian stones. To paint faces with."

I wanted to play the piano but I wasn't allowed on the carpet or near the upholstery in my dirty work clothes. When the family went out, I would come into the house and stand at the far end of the tiled kitchen at the entrance to the living room and ask Georgia to play. She knew a fair number of hymns and spirituals. I've Got Peace Like a River. Oh Mary Don't You Weep Don't You Mourn. The first verse of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. And a chilling version of I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger. She plunked out the basic chords, often flatting the fifth or seventh for a bluesy effect. Her tempos were always slow and she sang with her eyes closed in a deep voice, almost a baritone.

After three or four songs, she would close the piano and say, "Enough of that. Time to get back to work." If it was the middle of the afternoon, she would join me in the kitchen and make a pitcher of sweet tea. We'd stand at the counter and drink it up. I told her about Mrs. Treadwell, who was the first one to show me how to play the organ and she told me about her son, Marvin. He'd been arrested in Hicksville for stabbing a man in a fight over a car and was serving time upstate. She went to see him once every two weeks. "He's almost done -- another eighteen months and he'll be out. I'll be more worried about him when he's outside than I am now."

Earlier that summer, George Wallace had been shot in Maryland. Georgia would mention it from time to time. "I'm a Christian woman. I never liked the man but I don't believe that shooting was justified. It doesn't make me happy to see him crippled. Marvin feels different. He thinks Wallace should've been killed."

Georgia never talked about her employers. "It wouldn't be proper. They take good care of me." But she became very formal when they were around, and never let her guard down. Only when we were alone would she play the piano. "They spend all that money and it just sits there. It's all for show. I learned it early on -- people only care whether you've got money. They don't care how you get it. You could be a streetwalker and no one would criticize you if you made a lot of money." Maybe she was right. I hadn't lived long enough to agree or disagree. Even then, though, I realized that it cost her dearly to appear stoical in the face of her servitude.

The kids liked her. Unlike Mrs. S., who was lax, and Mr. S., who was rarely around, Georgia imposed discipline and took the time to teach them that there was a right way to do things. Robert especially liked to hang around her when she was busying herself in the kitchen. "That little one is going to be a baker," she'd say. "He loves making batter. He watches everything I do."

That summer, I'd go home in the evening and play the piano for hours and hours, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and banging on the keys like I was Pinetop Perkins or Jerry Lee Lewis. I burned a couple of holes in the rug and lost the desire for school. There was no value in it as long as I could pretend to be somebody else.

You stepped out of a dream

2012-01-02T15:13:00.004-05:00

I sat up half the night trying to picture the resurrection of the body. Would it look like the Christ in Raphael's monumental painting of the Transfiguration? Powerful and radiant, white and gold? What of those who die after a long illness, their bodies ravaged, eaten out, hollow? How would they look? Does the eternal soul -- if there is such a thing -- reanimate the temporal flesh? As the clock turned on the New Year, I pondered the brevity of life. It seems too short, doesn't it? And yet, look how much of mine I'd already forgotten. Put away for good.

I'm too old, too rational, and far too much the contemporary man, to believe in ghosts or angels, but my mind refuses to consider the complete extinction of the body, its return to soil, conquered by worms, feeding another generation of organisms. And the soul? I thought to myself, it's true -- the mind is an empty theater. No one has yet measured a soul.

There's a lighting booth at the back of the theater, a cramped space filled with obsolete equipment and a massive control board. Somebody from my past -- a humane priest, perhaps, who used to be an advertising copy-writer, someone who came to Christ late in life -- lurks in there, playing with the switches. Lights go on and off. I see a patch of stage: suspended dust, chalk marks, masking tape on smooth planking. A boy appears. Then the light flickers and goes out, and he disappears along with it. Another light. A woman appears, larger than life, wearing a bright blue dress and matching scarf. I take her to be the personification of wisdom. Athena. Sophia. I have always regarded women as wise, the cause of much of my undoing. Didn't Leda put on Zeus's knowledge before he let her drop? Perhaps this one knows too much. Why else the pained expression? Maybe she knows what she will lose.

For a few breathless moments she dances with herself -- a simple mystery of anima and bodily motion. A choirboy's notion of a goddess gone to seed. Heedless of the deep shadows that surround and threaten to envelope her, she sways from side to side within the slow circles her arms inscribe, the only sound a soft scuffing of slippers against the wooden stage. Then the light goes out again. It's outrageous, really, how unreliable, how scattershot, the light can be.

Performance art -- what does it mean to sashay around the stage for a spell wearing a frown? Big ideas reduced to small representations. Serious intent, banal content. I should've gone over to the Met and seen Tosca instead. Full-throated melodic trash. Sad to say, life is melodrama -- the pieces of it that we remember. Big tremulous scenes. Whereas wisdom and equanimity -- especially wisdom -- is a bore. Performance art -- you can take it or leave it. The theater empties. A woman brushes past you as she exits. Not the dancer. Your mind conjures more metaphors. A dance floor illuminated by strobe lights, a cornfield during a lightning storm. The second movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Serkin playing against Bernstein's New York Philharmonic. A hard-earned victory for hammered melody.

I remember her when she was a blue-eyed girl bent above a coloring book, drawing circles within squares, yellow, green, purple, black. Deep in concentration, humming to herself. Tell me, who wants a hereafter if the body isn't resurrected? I can just make out the tune. Gone away, don't you want to go? My wise one, it's already 2012. It won't be long now.

I predict

2011-12-29T15:27:00.004-05:00

1. There will be a Presidential election next year.
a. I will vote for the lesser of two evils, as I have done since 1972.
b. By the time I cast my vote, I will have been bored out of my skull by the inane and incessant coverage of the campaign, and I will be sad and angry about the state of American democracy.

2. There will be more "books" published than ever before.
a. More than 50% of "copies" sold will be digital downloads.
b. Less than 1% will be worth reading.

3. The media will report on a number of significant new trends.
a. The reports will be thinly veiled advertorials written by educated hacks, boosters, and savants.
b. None of the trends will be worth following.

4. The Olympics will take place in London.
a. Televised coverage will be mawkish, fragmentary, and jingoistic.
b. The games will have no discernible impact on the cultural life of America.

5. It will be harder to remember anything.
a. Very few things will happen worth remembering.
b. And those things I can google.

6. People will continue to debate the existence of God.
a. God will not appear to settle the debate.
b. Most people won't care. They'll be spending their time trying to live in the here and now.

7. The world's population will increase.
a. There will be fewer white people as a percentage of the total.
b. This will make white people even more nervous and xenophobic than they are now.

8. The cost of living will go up.
a. It will still be economical enough to keep going.
b. The quality of life will be, as it is now, almost entirely independent of the cost of living.

9. There will be hurricanes, monsoons, earthquakes, mudslides, eruptions, blizzards, and droughts.
a. Credulous people will regard these phenomena as signs of impending doom. They will ask the rhetorical question, "Who says there's no such thing as climate change?"
b. Rational people will regard these phenomena as variant behaviors of a complex and unpredictable natural system.

10. On December 21, 2012, the world will not end.
a. Most people will hide their disappointment.
b. This will not prevent some people from continuing to make predictions about when the world will end.

Videntes stellam

2011-12-25T10:43:00.002-05:00

Bach won't save you, eating organic won't save you. Voting Democrat won't save you, reading David Foster Wallace won't save you. Go running around the two-lane county roads down in the valley and see if people even know who David Foster Wallace was. The Talmud, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, the Gospel of John -- none of 'em is gonna do the trick. Let Lennon's rant against religion and Dylan's commonplace that you've gotta serve somebody roll off your back like water off a duck's arse. Every day you've been living this life without any philosophical underpinnings except the biological will to survive. Hydrotherapy won't save you, oral sex won't save you either. Superior technique won't save you, but without it you won't score a touchdown. Needless to say, football won't save you.

It's a clear night. Look at the stars. You think they're gonna guide you somewhere? Hell, you're just as dumb as Hardy's oxen, if not as reverent.

Jobs dead at fifty-six, Hitchens at sixty-two, and you thinking that longevity was something greatly to be desired. At least those guys lived. Christ cut down at thirty-three and people still quoting him. Convicted killers on death row've been sitting in their cells longer than that. Hard to shake the Christ question, isn't it? Sometimes you think that fighting against the faith is little more than adolescent rebellion, the child trying to assert himself in the face of the parents, carried on into middle age. Call it what you will -- reason, enlightenment, facing reality -- no matter how you paint your rationalizations, there's something a little embarrassing about arguing against the Holy Ghost. Like shaking your fist at a cloud of dust. The dust to which you will return.

Idly reading Borges on knife-fighting you come across the sentence: "Things last longer than men." Galling, isn't it? Those weapons now safely bedded in museum vitrines for your viewing pleasure -- hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old -- they were used to tear open the flesh of humans and animals. To kill and to feed their perishable wielders. And you down on your knees, still worshipping Mammon, still worshipping Baal.

Quist used to say, "If you're going to build something, build it to last. Build it so they remember the builder." These things -- pyramids, cathedrals, books, creeds, formulae -- won't save you. Craftsmanship won't save you, though it might lessen your need for salvation. The nails that fixed flesh to wood, the clay pots that held the anointing oil -- the hymnody, the signifying objects. All available to us, bereft only of the meaning we are meant to supply. We're played out.

Toward the end of his life, Quist would come out of his fog and talk about the future. "There's one good thing about living at the end of an era. It means you're also living at the beginning of a new one." This is how you go on believing. "You just hope the new one is better than the old. Isn't always the case, you know."

It's quiet, cold, and dark. Above the lake innumerable stars. Go ahead, pick one and follow it. Your choice.

Frankenstein's monster

2011-12-20T07:57:00.003-05:00

It's tough being in the book business these days, what with explosive growth of of digital downloads -- mostly through Amazon, those pricks -- and the demise of brick-and-mortar stores. Managerial types in Manhattan may be looking at the margins on ebook sales, and the efficiency, and start thinking they're gonna make it to the land of milk and money. They're nuts. Every time a consumer buys a book for $1.99, the economic superstructure of the industry teeters a bit more. Higher margins on declining revenue ain't a great prescription for worldly success, poot.

The MBAs don't care. They're not in the business of selling books. They're in the business of delivering payloads. They love exposing the inefficiencies of production and distribution. People? Pain in the arse. Transportation? Too many variables. Warehousing? Ties up cash. IT? Demand that it become its own profit center. They love digital the way Dr. Frankenstein loved his monster -- madly, blindly, self-destructively. The way teen-age boys love their cocks.

Late at night, after making a few dull remarks at yet another desultory industry dinner, they head out to Staten Island to dance on the grave of the Printed Book. A convoy of black Lincolns and Benzes winds through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, down to the Verrazano, up and over into the borough of aging gangsters and unrequited middle-class dreams. There, streaked with paint like savages, naked except for buckskin loincloths, chanting in an incomprehensible tongue, they circle and whirl around the great smoking fire of Freshkills. Their eyes roll back into their feverish heads. They sweat and their faces contort with the mad desire to become like their hero, Jeff. They imagine themselves ruthless, cutthroat, and supremely engaged, just like Jeff. They imagine changing the game, making the rules, spreading the love, and engineering the future. Just like Jeff. They imagine a world without paper or glue, without ink or thread, without board or tape. In their frenzy, they imagine becoming bodiless, lifted up into the ether, neither human nor machine, but a groovy blend of both. Just like the grooviest micromanager of all, Jeff.

These are the same forward-looking individuals who spent tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours on category management for the now-defunct Borders chain. These are the seers and sages who agreed to release ebooks simultaneously with hardcovers. These are the brilliant minds who agreed to agency pricing as a means of leveling the playing field! These are the ones who make pilgrimages to Bentonville to beg for an additional holiday SKU. These are the ones who fire salespeople, then panic when sales go down. These are the hollow men, headpiece filled with straw.

Yup, it's tough being in the book business these days. Hell, it's tough being in any business, excepting maybe trash collection. My neighbor Teddy is in the recycling racket, says he's busier than a one-armed paper-hanger. Cute analogy. Says he wants his kids to take over the business. "I want them to be kings of the shitpile," he starts waxing philosophical, "This industry is only gonna get bigger in the future, not like publishing. You should see some of the stuff people toss."

All you need is a truck and storage space. Teddy's brother Tony claims to have furnished his whole house with recyclables. "Hey, one man's junk is another man's treasure." They watch a lot of reality TV when they're not out working and they take offense if you lump them together with third world ragpickers. "What we do isn't like that at all. We're not out there rummaging through landfills. We're effin connoisseurs. You won't see any books in our backyard."

I used to like Christmas

2011-12-13T07:29:00.009-05:00

I used to like Christmas, before I saw the faces of madwomen pressed up against the glass doors of the merchants in strip centers and retail pads across New Jersey on Black Friday, slobbering and bucking like thoroughbreds, dying to reach the marked-down merchandise, whether they needed it or wanted it or even cared what it was.

I used to like Christmas, before the plastic garland, blinking lights, and holiday signage went up in stores in October and the goddamn secular, saccharine, piped-in jingles started playing. I saw mama kissing Wal-Mart's arse. Before the candy canes and fake trees and spinner racks of gift cards appeared in grocery stores, before Halloween jack o' lanterns started sporting Santa caps, and before composite yule logs glowed electrically in shop windows on Main Street when it was still seventy degrees out.

I used to like Christmas, before I understood the greater ramifications of consumer spending in the fourth quarter for the whole of the U. S. economic system and thought to myself, no mere mortals should have to bear that burden. Before I cut my credit cards in two and said no more double-digit interest payments to nasty institutions of high finance and low morals.

I used to like Christmas, before the Manger became Golgotha. Before Christ was recruited by finance capitalism, lowered from the cross, given a loan, and told to "shop till you drop."

I used to like Christmas, before getting stuck in traffic on Route 17 in Paramus, Route 46 in Wayne, Route 3 in Clifton, Route 22 in Springfield, Route 1 in Princeton, Northern Boulevard, the Miracle Mile, Sunrise Highway, the Turnpike, the Thruway, the Expressway, midtown, downtown, Canal Street, Fifth Avenue, wherever I turned, sucking fumes, developing agita, fending off a migraine. Burning gallons of gas at better than three bucks a pop.

I used to like Christmas, before going to obligatory parties having to buy obligatory gifts for business acquaintances who raised obligatory glasses to toast obligatory relationships under the guise of good will, winding up obligatorily drunk, mushy-faced and sentimental, reaching for the obligatory grope under the booze-stained table, before puking the obligatory puke and taking the obligatory remorseful taxi ride home.

I used to like Christmas, before getting all this fucking commercial spam in my inbox.

I used to like Christmas, before the Fed Ex, UPS, and USPS trucks pulled up bearing parcels of junk wrapped in layers of plastic and cardboard, sitting there idling at the curb, while their harried drivers tried to make deliveries to neighbors who weren't home but expected someone to bring their boxes upstairs.

I used to like Christmas, before tins of cookies showed up everywhere, along with bags of candied popcorn and peanut brittle, boxes of chocolates, baskets of jellies and jams, waxen fruit nestled in beds of straw, brandied plums, fruit cakes, exotic olive oils and balsamic vinegars, boozes of all nations, designer vodkas, single malt scotches, decades-old port, hams, salamis, cheeses, cutting boards, cutlery, crockpots, electric griddles, espresso makers, coffee beans, chocolate-covered coffee beans, vanilla-flavored coffee beans, mugs with darling little messages on them, potholders, serving platters, spice racks, little bottles of stale spices, hard candies, cupcakes, soda bread, babka, aprons with funny little sayings on them, oven mitts, grilling accessories, waffle irons, pasta-makers, and more. Before I had to go out and buy extra garbage bags and a trash compactor.

I used to like Christmas, before the crush of brainless, mirthless movies released about dysfunctional family get-togethers, starring a roster of big-name talent (they must need the money), purporting to be comedies, billed as 'family fun,' produced by cynical studios to make a quick buck, then meant to disappear.

I used to like Christmas, before brutish TSA agents, full body scans, per bag luggage charges, stuffed overhead bins, middle seats on full flights in dirty cabins with no food and stinky toilets, stuck on a tarmac, waiting on air traffic control, knowing that the whole routine would repeat itself on the return trip.

I used to like Christmas, before having to worry about whether or not there was gonna be a year-end bonus so I could afford to heat my house in January, February and March.

I used to like Christmas, before inflatable lawn crèches that blow away in a high wind.

I used to like Christmas, before Tylenol, Prilosec, Advil, diazepam, Librium, and Halcion.

I used to like Christmas, when it really was silent night, holy night. It was once, wasn't it?

Screamin' the blues

2011-12-09T08:29:00.006-05:00

This will be a confused piece because I am a confused man and I'm not even sure where my confusion stems from. I will try not to think in clichés. It won't be easy. Sometimes I'm like the narrator of Jim Thompson's A Killer Inside Me except my apprehending the world in clichés doesn't lead to murder, although I can get worked up into a murderous rage when I see the stupidity around me and, even worse, when I partake in it myself. Which happens all the time.

I read a lot, maybe too much. Reading has certainly made me book smart, but it has also broken my heart and maybe held my attention too long when I should have been focused on living. How many times have I quoted the good doctor of Rutherford, New Jersey, his poem "Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," those lines that read --

I have learned much in my life / from books / and out of them / about love.

sometimes sober, sometimes high, sometimes to someone I loved, as a profession of that love, sometimes in regret? And then a little voice -- that little voice that accompanies me everywhere -- says, "Don't be such a self-regarding arsehole. You are who you are. Live with it." Followed by an image from childhood, Wallace Beery as Long John Silver with an angry Captain Flint on his shoulder looming over a cowering Jim Hawkins. My father and me. And the parrot perched on his shoulder, destined to live a hundred or more years. A cliché but not an empty one.

But that's not why I'm confused, I don't think. The voice in my head, the parrot on my shoulder, the sound of a spade hitting the buried treasure chest, finding the chest empty, and being sentenced to death anyway -- it seems like a dream to me now, as Rhymin' Simon might've put it.

Another image from childhood. I'm with the twins, next door neighbors, a couple of years older than me, and we're digging a foxhole in an empty lot down the block. We're using folding army shovels, the kind our dads had used in the war, cocked as picks. I'm wearing a baseball cap. With a mighty swing the cap falls off my head and into the hole. I jump in after it at the same time one of the twins swings his shovel down. His blade catches me on the back of the head. I feel a terrible shock of pain as I fall forward, face-first, into the dirt. I gag on the taste and smell of it as bright red blood starts pouring out of the wound. The twins immediately go quiet. Still as statues, they're scared shitless as I lay there crying. Head wounds are awfully bloody.

There must've been some other kids nearby, because someone ran to get my mother who, despite being small and squeamish, carried me home and put a towel wrapped around ice cubes to the wound. Though woozy and in pain, I was the center of attention and too young to think about all the bad things that such an injury might entail. Seeing stars (it's true, I did see stars), I let myself go limp. I could hear some of my friends standing outside our kitchen door murmuring. My mom was in a tizzy. But, for some reason, my dad showed up just then -- maybe it was a weekend. There was a short loud debate about whether or not I should be taken to Franklin General Hospital, a five minute drive away. Mom was for it, dad against.

Dad prevailed. He usually did. Ice and pressure had staunched the bleeding. He went and got the hair-clippers. (Yes, he used to cut my brother's and my hair at home. He wasn't the only father back then who did.) He cut a big bald patch all around the wound, cleaned it out with hydrogen peroxide (still the only thing I use to wash out wounds to this day -- effin imprinting), determined that it was only a scalp wound (I don't know how, or even whether it was true or not), and stitched it up. I remember my mother standing by the stove heating something up, afraid to look at my head. I forget if he or she did the bandaging -- a thick wad of gauze taped to the bald patch. I remember smelling the adhesive. I was given aspirin and told to sit straight, to keep my head up.

The stove, the sink, the icebox, Stubby at my feet, a good dog, a beagle, the runt of the litter, my mother holding me, patting my back, the sounds of summertime outside and the little crowd of neighborhood kids (and some parents) dispersing -- and an overwhelming feeling of fatigue, almost as though I'd had a fever. Later, the twins' father coming over and asking how I was and how sorry he was.

I remember how hard it was to wash up without getting my head wet in the aftermath of the injury. And the headaches that came and went in waves. And the wariness I had when playing with the twins. And how nice they were to me, for a while.

Years later, when we were all smoking dope and drinking and doing dangerous things without knowing it, I would sometimes black out or feel the ground slip away. Or I would get lost in a piece of music, something like Oliver Nelson's "The Meetin'," thinking -- if you could call it thinking, those acts of unconscious apprehension, I wouldn't go so far as to call them Joycean epiphanies -- about the blues, its progressions and pain. Imagine a group of jejune white kids growing up in a Plasticville neighborhood singing to each other, "You got to suffer if you wanna sing the blues." And believing it.

Some days I want to jump off a bridge I'm so confused. And it's no longer brought on by pain in my head nor by the things I read. It's watching this life slip through my fingers moment after moment, day after day, just as I'm about to find out something important, or come upon the answer to some big mystery I didn't even know I was meant to solve.

After the rain

2011-12-08T07:19:00.004-05:00

The rain has ended with a flurry. Come with me. No one else around. Come and walk with me in the moonlit woods. Look at your breath, the way it rises into the light. The way the gust of northwest wind takes it away. Try to make out the dark shapes of the cold wet trees. Hold your imagination in check. They're not effin wraiths, they're just a mess of broken and tangled limbs. And they're not shivering. You are.

Feel your feet sink into the mud and wet leaves. A frigid hand from the grave. Be careful of the roots and rocks. You've stumbled here before, haven't you? Thinking you could orient yourself by moonlight alone after living so long in the city. Feels like you're carrying stones in your pockets. Try not to let your mortality weigh you down. Your legs are not as strong as they used to be.

No compass. GPS an effin joke. Just wild running streams where paths should be and thorny underbrush blocking your way. Cold wet shit whipping you in the face, grabbing at your sleeves. This is where you come to get lost, to renounce all the trappings of civilization, the useless books you've read, the language you no longer need. This is where your effin body comes alive to its own discomforting sensations. The erratic pumping inside your chest. The sting of tears, the burning in your nostrils. The cramp in your bowels. You're more fragile than a machine by far, you animal. Thinking you could make it more than a few hundred yards out here.

Come with me. I want to show you something. We're not looking for Jesus. We're not looking for a revelation. You can get all the revelations you want back in town. We're looking for a way out. In front of you black woods. Behind you the woods seeming to come closer. You remember Macbeth. You remember the woman who got lost in Basking Ridge not a half mile from Lord Stirling Village. A panicked mother with her kids. You remember the body the rangers found over in West Milford near the played-out mine. An old woodsman with a bum ticker dressed in new clothes. Covered in frost. You remember your mother's story of running through the witch's woods above the Neckar. Trying to outrun the witch. After living more than half a life, there's always the possibility that there is no way out. You might as well be locked in a closet suffocating. Stop and try to disentangle your thoughts from what is really there. Can't do it, can you?

Come with me and watch your breath rise through the moonlit woods. Move your hand through the little cloud of vapor. Let me know if you feel anything.

Hyperbole

2011-12-01T20:45:00.009-05:00

This morning I saw that The New York Times had posted their "Ten Best Books of 2011" online. I usually refuse to comment on this or any of the other million or so "best of" lists because: a) the lists are endlessly debatable and b) the very idea of anointing a handful of contemporary works "the best" (are they really?) is pure foolishness. Everywhere one turns this time of year, some savant or cabal of tastemakers is churning out a "best of" list, each one an exercise in hyperbole and vanity. Whether the subject is books, movies, music recordings, restaurants, wines, gadgets, apps, games, or whatever else can be grouped, compared, and judged, the end result is a dull sameness composed of tired (and unjustified) superlatives, with more than a dash of ignorance on display. Of course, most sentient beings concede that such list-making is a merely a game but that doesn't necessarily make the activity meaningful or even entertaining. Occasionally amusing? Perhaps.

The only reason that it's difficult to entirely dismiss such a list is its outsized effect on the marketplace. A title's appearance on a prestigious "best of" list sells copies. Which means that we in the book industry watch these lists like hawks, hoping against hope that one of our titles will make it. We dream of big reorders coming in overnight. We dream of going back to press. We dream of a champagne toast and a congratulatory note. Even though we know deep down in our gut that these lists -- like the over-consumption of books generally, and the wanton use of superlatives to describe merely competent work -- are bullshit. (I refer readers to Harry Frankfurt's sprightly little tract on the subject. Bullshit, that is.)

It would be far more honest and realistic to assemble a year-end list and call it "Some Good Books Published This Year" or "A Few of Our Favorite Titles of 2011." For that is exactly what this year's Times list is: ten decent books that appeal to a group of professional readers. I don't think that there are any outright clunkers on it but then I've only read three and a half of the books mentioned (Swamplandia!, The Tiger's Wife, Thinking Fast and Slow, and many of the essays in Arguably). They weren't among my favorite reads of the year, but they were all worthy efforts and I can certainly see how someone might have chosen them.

I feel the same about awards, everything from the Nobel Prize to the Watchamacallit. They really are silly. Yet, again, their effect on sales can be significant, which means they can't simply be dismissed. This is why publishing types -- including me -- are somewhat schizoid about awards and lists: we succumb to the bullshit -- we need it -- although we despise it.

That said, here are a few good books I read this year:

The Information by James Gleick. Not only a fascinating and exceedingly well-organized survey of the development of "information science," but a nicely designed book too. It felt as good in the hands and on the eyes as it did in my mind.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. A true story well-told as well as a cautionary tale. In reclaiming Lucretius by way of Poggio, Greenblatt shows how tenuous the preservation and dissemination of knowledge can be and how reactionary forces (i.e., the Church) are always ready to stifle progress. An entertaining read, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt -- Greenblatt claims far too much for the text of De rerum natura. Hyperbole at work again.

Seven Years by Peter Stamm. A tightly constructed novel set in Zurich and Marseilles showing how tightly wound men and women behave in a cool, empty, efficient, de-spiritualized world. It also contains some nice asides on architecture and male impotence. Other Press published it, so maybe I'm biased, but a lot of good readers also seem to have enjoyed it, even though it is by no means conventionally enjoyable.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Despite an ambiguously rendered scene in the first half of the book, this novel works as a deep meditation on contemporary reproductive uncertainty and the vagaries of memory. The last twenty, thirty pages are stunning. Barnes is a blessedly clean prose stylist.

The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson. An extended essay on violence as depicted in the arts. Often confused and somewhat confusing, I liked it very much nonetheless because Nelson writes something interesting and/or provocative on every page and she is a fount of knowledge about today's arts scene. For example, without this book I would not have known about the fucked-up videos of Ryan Trecartin.

Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi. This longish, rather oceanic novel was given to me by its translator, Michael F. Moore. His was an arduous task. After a bang of an opening, the book meanders seductively, most of it inside the consciousness of the grief-stricken protagonist/narrator, gathering momentum as it heads towards a very satisfying ending. The title is perfectly apt.

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos. It's not really a novel, it's more of a literary stunt but it works well and never bored me. Originally written in 1968, Perec took up a computer lab's challenge to write the way a computer would write, following the logic of a flow chart (nicely reproduced as the endpapers to this well-made Verso publication). Anyone who has dealt with corporate "human resource" departments will laugh out loud at this text, then cry. Bellos' translation is very good. (Bellos also wrote a book published this year called Is That a Fish in Your Ear? It's all about translation -- I'm halfway through it and enjoying it quite a bit, despite the mediocre cover.)

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Another whale of a book, densely packed and argued, about progress, the scientific method, Karl Popper, quantum physics, a little mathematics, and a host of related issues and ideas. It even includes a true Socratic dialogue. Parts of it I did not fully understand (I wish it had a few more diagrams and formulae in it) but I keep going back into the text, gleaning a little bit more each time. It is the most optimistic book I've read in ages, one that made me give three cheers for The Enlightenment.

Memories of nature

2011-11-27T10:40:00.002-05:00

"Where have you been?," she asked me from the shadows. I'd been sitting at the kitchen table, staring out at a couple of crows traversing the lawn, picking edibles out of the still-green grass. Poems were going in and out of my head as the two black birds sidled along to a music I couldn't hear. At the sound of her voice, the spell was broken and I became aware of the coffee and leftover pumpkin pie lying in front of me. "Make a poem out of these," she said, her pale hand pointing to the table. "The quotidian details of your anonymous existence."

It was warm and a silky mist covered the lake. I couldn't make out the islands or the eastern shore. A flock of buffleheads dawdled on the still water about fifty feet off the dock. Yesterday I even saw a couple of dragonflies near the Bassett's Bridge Road canoe landing down in the valley. The watershed has barely begun to recover from Irene -- bridges are still out, whole tracts of forest lie under one, two feet of water, trails are washed away -- including a stretch of the Appalachian Trail -- and woodland debris is scattered everywhere. Walking is difficult.

I came upon a couple of trail cyclists attempting to ford the one of the Wallkill's feeder streams where a wooden bridge had broken in two. They were covered in mud. I commented on the wetness. The younger of the two said, "Depending on the winter, this won't dry out until next summer. You've just got to get used to it." They held their bikes over their heads as they inched forward calf-deep in the rushing stream, trying to avoid submerged rocks and branches. It took a few minutes but they made it. I stood there in my low-top hiking shoes and watched them take off toward Glenwood Mountain.

Then I turned around and headed down the old railroad cut that runs into Kelly Road, a despondent dead end near the boundary between New Jersey and New York. The valley up here has a look of abandonment, as though its human inhabitants had had enough of fending off the encroaching wildness and called it quits. Dilapidated barns, broken greenhouses, leaning houses with mossy roofs and missing shingles. Even the woods are unlovely up here. Near the wildlife refuge parking lot -- still covered in water -- lay half a dozen full plastic garbage bags. Not everyone can afford trash collection.

Just as poetry is man-made, so is the beauty we ascribe to Nature. I got back in the car and drove over to Heaven Hill Farm to buy some burlap so I could wrap the fragile young lilacs and japanese maple against the oncoming winter. Last year snow plows almost destroyed one of my white pine saplings and the lilac closest to the street. It takes work to keep the yard in good shape. You used to ask me, "All the work you do outside -- is it worth it? Why don't you just let it go and live with nature in its natural state?" I thought to myself, because there is no such thing. Entropy engulfs all systems unless somebody or something supplies additional energy to them.

"I don't know. The animals seem to like it. Some of them -- the deer, the groundhogs, the squirrels and chipmunks, the beetles and aphids -- like it too much and eat half of it. But that's okay. Otherwise I wouldn't have the bees, the hummingbirds, all the songbirds, and the butterflies. Otherwise it wouldn't be as beautiful as it sometimes is." I figured, if the animals like it, so should I. "Like today, for instance. Today it is as beautiful as any poem. As beautiful as my memory of you."

Remembering Quist

2011-11-23T15:51:00.004-05:00

"I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." So begins Orhan Pamuk's novel The New Life. I wondered if it had ever been true for me. I listened to a song once and everything about you and me became clear. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now.

I was taking Quist for a stroll on the boardwalk at Jones Beach. Robert Moses' good deed. It was late in the year but unseasonably warm, a dead fish of a day. I got him situated in his wheelchair and wrapped him in a brown wool coverlet that Aunt Martha had made for L. when L. was dying. In the last few weeks of L.'s life it was used to cover her cold legs. She was barely in the ground when Quist laid claim to it. By November, he wouldn't leave the house without it. "It's my security blanket," he'd say. "It comforts me."

We made our way from Parking Lot 4 through the pedestrian tunnel past the main bathhouse and restaurant. Quist was silent. We came out into the sunlight -- the breeze was wet and salty. A tattered American flag flew out toward the east above columns of colorful pennants, its line whipping against the pole.

We headed west into the sun and the breeze. The city shimmered in the distance behind a yellow veil. Teams of gulls hovered above their skeptical colleagues perched on the boardwalk railing. Quist straightened his back and raised his chin. He closed his eyes and let the sun shine on his face. There were plenty of others out taking a stroll -- elderly men and women, young fathers carrying children, a few teenagers horsing around, an occasional family cluster. In the first hundred yards, I must've counted eight or nine different languages being spoken in addition to English and Spanish: Russian, German, one of the Chinese variants, Creole, Polish, Arabic or Hebrew, it's hard to tell them apart at a distance, and one or two indistinguishable others. It was easy to imagine being a member of a brotherhood. I pushed Quist slowly along and closed my eyes too for a few moments. Then someone walked by us carrying french fries -- the smell was overwhelming. All of a sudden I was starved. Quist looked back at me, grinned and said, "Everything tastes better outside. Let's grab some grub."

Our routine meal at Jones Beach was clam chowder, franks, and a shared Coke. The chowder was sandy but hot and it came with oyster crackers, a few of which we left for the gulls. We sat outside near the glass partition that separated patrons from passersby. Quist couldn't raise the plastic spoon to his mouth. I had to feed him the soup and watch that he didn't choke.

"I wish we could get out here more often," he said. "Today is a gift." I wiped his chin. There was nothing spiritual about Quist. He was just happy to be alive. It was the sixteenth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and Carter was in the White House. "Things'll get worse before they get better but I won't be around to see it." He squinted at me. "I hope you will." He swallowed the last of his soup and watched me cut his hot dog into little pieces. "Thanks for bringing me out here, bud. Cripes that tastes good."

I asked him if a book had ever changed his life. He took his time looking around and then he cackled. "Only book that changed my life was The Holy Bible. Remember Mary?" Mary was his deceased ex-wife. "She started taking Bible lessons at an evangelical church in Babylon. Pretty soon she was there all the time. I found out that she and the pastor couldn't keep their hands off each other. A silver-tongued Southern boy -- Jake something-or-other. By the time they got to the New Testament they were screwing like rabbits. She divorced me and they moved to Tennessee. Damn bible." He was winded.

We sat there for a few minutes and listened to the ocean while he regained his breath. "Books are okay," he said, "As long as you don't believe them." Then he winked. "I'm only shitting you. I wish I'd read more when I was young. I wasn't like you -- you're always reading. I wouldn't know what I'd've done with all that education." It was true. I was a bookworm -- but at that point in my life it had done no good. I was more confused than I'd ever been, having settled into a featureless post-adolescent funk broken up occasionally by drunkenness and foolish romance. Quist had lived without books. Like every self-made man he was a botch job but he'd learned enough along the way to fashion a decent life for himself and his kids.

I looked over at him. His eyes were closed and he was breathing through his mouth. There was something ferocious and clever in there that could never have come from a book. You could tell even though he'd fallen asleep. I lit a cigarette and kept watch over him as the shadows lengthened.

In a sentimental mood

2011-11-18T20:50:00.004-05:00

What the fuck is wrong with sentimentality? I'm clutching this shot glass for a reason, poot. It comes down to acting the part of an old dog licking his wounds, thinking, hey, maybe there's not much time left on this bright blue planet. The Cragganmore whispers to me, ain't no such thing as connoisseurship in this culture, it's all about how much cash you can spend on top shelf booze. Look around this joint. I see too many people near me looking back at their lives, trying come up with a plausible account of how they came to be where they are. I hear them repeating phrases, sentences, anecdotes, looking for the right combination of signifiers to settle on. How many times can you listen to the same tall tale especially if it's not your own?

I turn up the effin stereo -- some twitchy string orchestra is playing that tune from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It gets to me. Hell, am I that old? Nah, I was just a kid back then. So was Deneuve. The song is called "I Will Wait for You" and I'm sitting here mouthing the lyrics and letting these tears salt my drink, thinking, nobody waits for you. When I'm like this I allow myself a bit of self-pitying bullshit.

I'll tell you what's wrong with sentimentality. Picture Hitler petting his beloved Blondi just before he gave her cyanide. Or that baby-killer in Auden's poem starting to blubber. We see it again today. Look at the macho policeman with his truncheon keeping order down at the Battery or the drone pilot ensconced in his Nevada bunker delivering a lethal payload to some village in the Afghan mountains. Give these tough guys a tumblerfull of schnapps and some quarters for the jukebox, next thing you know you'll have a big crybaby on your hands, harmonizing with Merle Haggard and belching sour heat in your face. Effin sentimentalists. Singing about babies, kittens, teddy bears, and reformed alcoholics. Chasing after zoftig angels in white robes and golden halos doing the Jesus rhumba. Cripes, it’s hard to avoid becoming sentimental oneself.

Gimme another pull of scotch. Sentimentality ain't much different from patriotism, the way it's practiced on the hill. Old Glory lapel pins. Red, white, and blue boxer shorts. And always the envoi, “God Bless the United States of America.” If I’m not crying over spilt milk then I’m crying over spilt blood. Sacrifice in battle, pro patria mori, always makes my eyes water and my knees go jello.

No, nobody in those cheesy Air Force TV commercials is gonna wait for you, only Mr. Death, standing there on the corner paring his nails, dressed like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat, a rolled-up newspaper stickin out of his back pocket. Silk socks, trifold pocket square, and a soft gray felt fedora. A thug in spats.

Quist once told me that there's nothin wrong with sentimentality, it’s the price we pay for being human. You’ve got to let your feelings show. When you see a dauntless little cripple in a wheelchair trying to roll himself uphill it makes you realize how lucky you are to have both feet on the ground. So cry.

Waiting for something to happen

2011-11-14T20:16:00.003-05:00

"There's so much stuff up here," D. pointed to her head, "I wish I could discard." Then she turned to face the wall. Cheap plasterboard. Prick of a landlord. The whole scene about as romantic as a rusty nail. She started to sob. "Sometimes I get this way."

D. came from somewhere else by way of someplace other. The world had shrunk -- it wasn't terribly difficult to notch experiences in Oregon, Rhode Island, Argentina, Turkey, and the Far East. Even distinctly vivid locales can bleed into each other after a while. A junior year abroad, volunteer work over a summer vacation, teaching English, camped out with other young men and women in the mist below volcanic peaks, eating corn cakes off a hot rock. D. had an easy relationship with animals and a pronounced vision of personal style. Her camera was her truest friend. Keeping an effin eye on things, then posting the results online.

"It'll pass." This was on the eve of her trip back to Portland. The Pearl of the Pacific was going home for the holidays. She couldn't spend it in Brooklyn even though Brooklyn was real, despite the bedbugs, the G train, and the prices down at the bodega. The family who ran the place was nice, but $2.50 for a quart of milk was too much. The only way you could deal with the city was to consider it a test. D. was good at tests, but this one was wearing her thin.

"I thought it would be different. It's not the money, it's the relationships." She hunched her shoulders and sniffled, still facing the wall. "No one wants to commit. Including me." I thought to myself, it's been a long time since anyone paid me a compliment either. "It's easy enough to get laid or to get drunk, but no one wants to be serious."

Maybe there's no reason to be serious. We've engineered a new kind of reproductive society -- babies can come from anywhere, anyhow -- sex, adoption, test tubes, next door or half way round the world. With science triumphant, we can pay more attention to our own happiness. The selfish genes will take care of themselves. D. read books about irrational behavior. She knew that people had no idea why they did the things they did. But it was no consolation. It made everything meaningless.

"I don't know how much longer I can stay here," she said. "I want a different kind of life." I looked at her back, her unruly hair against her sweater, her loose jeans and scabby heels. I touched her neck and felt her tension. I was in the same boat. Too much extra furniture upstairs, too much weight. But there was a big difference. She was just starting out, whereas I'd had a good run and was about to retire.

I said, "I can't help you decide what to do. Sooner or later you'll find out that you can't live somebody else's life for them." We stayed like that for a long time, sitting together quietly, waiting for something to happen.

First light

2011-11-08T06:30:00.003-05:00

All these ideas and not one of them very good. I get up while it's still dark and go to the stone room, wrapped in a blanket. I look out toward the east, waiting for the first light, barely perceptible, sometimes it comes only as an awareness of volume, of the depth of sky. It is still and cold. A line of Stafford's comes to me: "In one stride night then takes the hill." Today the morning tiptoes up the same hill like a lover who's been out all night and, coming home, doesn't want to wake you. The lyric is dead. I put a cold washcloth to my head and make a prayer:

"O self-giving love at the center of the universe, protector of idiots and lovers, divine enabler, trickster who allows us to look behind the curtain only to find another curtain, grant us serenity in the face of uncertainty and help us tackle a few soluble problems at a time."

I breathe a fog onto the windowpane. My brain is fogged too -- such a love does not exist independent of my thinking it. The valley is encloaked in fog. There are no miracles except the one, life itself.

One-click

2011-11-03T07:33:00.003-04:00

Amazon knows its customers. Trained by parents, television, the internet, and schools to be model consumers, aware of the price of everything (but not the value, as my cranky old man used to say), determined that nothing shall come between them and their instant self-gratification, its customers behave like vacuum cleaners with credit cards, sucking up every piece of shit that comes their way as long as it brings a respite from their boredom, even if only for a few moments, like the first bite of a double mocha chocolate mousse or a twenty dollar hand job in a Bronx alley. Amazon knows that life without buying is boring.

It knows that its customers shop price and convenience, and couldn't care less about any other attribute of the shopping experience. Ambience, human interaction, merchandising, civic responsibility, community, status, ideology -- all of it pales beside low prices and one-click convenience. 'Cheap and easy' rules the retail marketplace. Why not? All the shite Amazon sells will turn to dust anyway. Drive around the suburbs on Sunday afternoons and see the crap that people are trying get rid of at their so-called lawn sales. All those bought items, spread out on old blankets like the rejected remnants of an alien culture, not even worth the pennies being asked for them, lie there untouched, unloved, ready for the landfill.

It used to be that lack of storage space limited the amount of shite people could buy but Amazon figured that one out. It stores the shite for them on its servers then sells them a device so they can access it. In the cloud, thousands and thousands of items, many more than these consumers could ever usefully read or listen to or learn from or be entertained by. But who cares as long as they can buy them?

Pity poor Jeff Bezos, all that brainpower and metabolic energy tethered to the soul of a hondler. Who remembers the merchant princes of yesteryear, other than their heirs? Who remembers the carny barker, the revival-tent preacher, the driven executive after they die? And what of the empires they built? Where is Woolworth's now? Where is Sears & Roebuck? Or the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company? Life is unfair (just as big, fierce animals are rare): an impoverished neurotic like Herman Melville who wrote a big queer book about a whale is more famous than ever while somebody like Bezos who merely sells that book is doomed to an afterlife of ashen anonymity. Upon his passing consumers will say, "his prices were low" and "one-click was so convenient." Then they'll fall silent and return to their shopping.

A Halloween curse

2011-10-31T10:28:00.004-04:00

Somebody cover me. Don't pay any mind to the ravens clucking, their greedy eyes looking down at my body from the oak's bare limbs. And the turkey vultures, wings outstretched, gaily hopping about, the scent of putrefaction exciting their dance -- they're only birds: they'll scatter when you come near. I want you to come near so you can detect the last of the warmth leaving my body. I want you to sense how thin is the thread that keeps us alive.

Hold your breath or wear a mask. Look down at this body. If you press on the chest, ash will come out of the mouth and dust out of the nostrils. A foul odor will follow. If you press hard enough the sternum and ribcage will splinter and crack. There is nothing of me left inside this body, just soft tissue in the first stages of rot. The hollow gurgling noise you hear is the sound of escaping gas.

Even so, it will not do to leave me lying here, exposed to the elements. I walked this earth like you, my head full of questions that never bore answers, fully human. Let the birds, the coyotes, and the rats feast somewhere else. Let the insects lay their eggs in another creature's corpse. I would not be food for scavengers. It was this body that served me well. Though it will never dance again, or savor a meal, or ejaculate in the early morning, or dive into the surf on a perfect July day, it deserves honor for the many good years when it did all those things and more. This body was me, inseparable from the thoughts and feelings I harbored. I was not a machine -- I was flesh and blood. So please cover it with the soil of my native land.

Like so many of my fellow citizens, I stitched together a life from necessity and luck and called it grace. I put money away for retirement, stayed on this side of the law, and never deliberately hurt another person. Wasn't that enough to warrant a decent burial? Why should I decay in limbo? My body was not meant to be left on the side of the road like a animal carcass. It belongs in the cemetery with my forbears who came over from Europe and now lie under Long Island sand and Brooklyn loam. There is nothing left of them except the stones that mark their graves.

If you can't cover this body, then cremate what's left of it and scatter the ashes to the wind. Let a nor'easter carry my remains far out to sea. Whatever you do, do it quickly, before this body disappears. If you don't take care of it one way or the other, the memory of my final agony will haunt you till you die. Then your body, like mine, will be cast away like garbage.

Grasshoppers and ants

2011-10-21T07:51:00.004-04:00

It may not be the funniest idea in the world, but it's close, to think that we humans can manage our way out of all the trouble we've been causing for ourselves. The economy ain't entirely subject to the laws of physics, poot. At least not the laws that they talk about at those TED conferences and overfunded think tanks. Some little social scientist writing formulae on a chalkboard and wagging his finger at the college-educated congregation. Maybe somewhere down the line his sleek models will look like our bloated reality. Until then you better hang onto your Ouija Board and keep some cabbage in your mattress.

Shoot, it's getting chilly in here and there's no money to pay for propane. Cold water comes out of the tap brown and there're mice turds all over the kitchen counter. The mailbox is full of fliers from discount retailers, credit bureaus, and insurance companies. Fat-arsed politicians think we hunt deer and squirrel for sport.

Go online and read the first half dozen pieces on the economy you come across. It's clear that nobody knows what to do about the seized-up engine. Should we stimulate it or starve it? Raise revenues or rescind taxes? Extend credit or reduce debt? Manufacture for export or make our own shite? Bolster confidence or scare the bejabbers out of people or, better yet, do both at the same time. The Great Correction my arse.

It's effin embarrassing -- the wankers next door scarf down red meat and chiffon pie while we eat macaroni and cheese out of a box. Only other thing we can afford down at the suprette is soda. We go up to the orchard Sunday evenings, after the tourists have done their apple-picking, and root through the wormy ones they've left behind, us, the Mexicans, and the raccoons. Next thing you know, we'll be sniffing around in the dumpsters behind Shop-Rite, like bears.

The white-coated savants think of the economy as mechanical, subject to technical correction, while the magical thinkers believe it's all a matter of individual entrepreneurship and prayer. Sell enough pizza, Jesus, and you can afford that second home in Naples. The sharkskin suits with degrees say, "Print more money and give everybody a flex card." Pennies from heaven. "Give the poor bastards coupons so they can buy their effin pills. Without their pills, they might get pissed at us."

It doesn't seem possible but you can get fat on sugar and scripture alone. Corn syrup and corn pone. Bury your gelt in a vault and the lord will cut you down. Maybe we'd be better off without bodies. If we were just software. A string of code, a program, an endless loop waiting for some post-doc geek to hit "terminate." Sissy keeps hoping that we'll win the lottery, but the odds are one in fourteen million, poot. Tougher than getting struck by effin lightning. A while back we looked at a burger franchise but it cost too much. Now we're thinking about selling tacos or Chinese dumplings from a truck. If only we could afford a truck. Hell, if only we could afford a taco. What else can we do? Work on a farm?

New explanations create new problems

2011-10-17T09:28:00.002-04:00

My head is broken, sinuses, migraine, call it what you will. Last night's searing pain is now a throbbing ache behind the brow. My nose is running, my jaw hurts, and I can't taste this coffee. I only know that it's warm and soothes my throat. Honey is an effin lozenge.

Maybe it's soul-sickness, if there is such a thing. I've been trying to reconcile Kierkegaardian despair at the complete, irrevocable secularization of human culture with a learned optimism at the triumph of science. Look at our unhappiness, then look at our steady progress in rationally explaining natural processes. How can hopelessness and hope coexist in one person simultaneously? Maybe quantum mechanics explains it: the electron is here, there, and everywhere in between, at the same time.

Maybe this pain is due to too much reading. I have tried, god knows, to forswear the religion of my youth, but the language won't leave me alone -- the vocabulary and cadences in The Book of Common Prayer (1928), the rhythms and tropes found in the 1940 Hymnal and the fabulous parallel constructions in the English Revised Version of the Bible. I was programmed early on to chafe against unbelief. Even as my old man, the computer expert, instilled in me a love for the scientific method. Subtle is the lord, but not as subtle as nature, unless you confuse the two.

My head thus deadlocked wobbles this morning. I read the news online. It's getting better all the time. But it feels worse. We primates have leapt across a burning pit and landed safely on a man-made platform that looks a lot like a modern office -- air-conditioned, machine-tooled, modular, CAD-drawn, efficient, exposed. The paintings on the wall are like the music playing in the elevator -- purely decorative. Paint peels, rugs fray, plumbing leaks. But it can all be repaired. Private acts performed in public are encouraged as long as they service a brand. This is written without irony. There is no secret self worth holding on to and soul-sickness, if it is real, merely helps identify the brand. The windows do not open.

You want the news? This world is better than anything that's gone before. We live longer, healthier lives. We are stronger, taller, cleverer. We are less violent, less prone to dogma, less superstitious. We are capable of solving ever more difficult problems. We are, compared to our forbears, enlightened. Pain is no mystery. We can determine its causes. This should make me cheerful but it doesn't.

I wonder if bewilderment can cause headaches? I tell myself that secularization doesn't necessarily imply demystification. If anything, the mystery of human existence without a causal god is deeper than it is with one. Walking from the kitchen to the bathroom, talking to myself. Let be be finale of seem. A sneezing fit comes on suddenly -- the body desperate to rid itself of some vexing substance convulses upon itself. For a few moments, I can't see straight. The pain infuriates me. Would it be best to lie down and let it work its way out of my skull? Or shall I dance, clickety-clack, like a Dutch peasant, on wooden clogs?

My head is broken today. The windows do not open. Tell me, o great coroner, who will commute my sentence?

The poet quits the party, but does not renounce his spiritual freedom

2011-10-11T08:43:00.004-04:00

For a long time, I paid close attention to whomever the Nobel Prize committee awarded the literature prize, especially so when they honored a poet. In the year I graduated high school, the award went to Pablo Neruda. His little book of love poems, translated by W. S. Merwin and published by Penguin, was useful when trying to get serious girls to surrender their sweet hearts. I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire. Hard to resist that shite.

But Neruda's fame was problematic in those years when Communism was still taken seriously. The poet died two years after winning the Nobel, just a few days after Chilean President Salvador Allende was murdered by fascists with the backing of the CIA. Nixon and Kissinger were still fucking around in southeast Asia and elsewhere. When I went to college, I found that many of my contemporaries knew of him but did not know his poetry -- a common occurrence when a writer becomes a symbol of resistance against oppression. This was only forty years after his political awakening during the Spanish Civil War, when he hung out with Lorca and Vallejo. His very career was an indictment of American hypocrisy. We supported the jackbooted bastards who ground the poor into dust, all the while singing hosannas of freedom. Revolting youth.

From Neruda I learned that surrender to love meant resistance to oppression. Or vice versa. (I was still a practicing Christian back then.) Years after his death, Neruda showed up in that likable Italian movie Il Postino, once again a helping the boy get the girl.

Four years later, the Italian poet Eugenio Montale won the Nobel. What I knew of him would not have filled a thimble, so I sought out his work and gave myself over to the few poems then available in English. They were sensual, tentative, ruminative, sad, almost defeated. After a cataclysm like the two world wars, human speech had found itself crawling back out of the slime from whence it came. Silences in which one watches/in every fading human shadow/something divine let go.

I knew a little Dante and Petrarch despite growing up on Long Island, and Ezra Pound pushed Guido Cavalcanti on me, but Montale was the first contemporary Italian poet I'd heard of or paid attention to. Such roiling emotion presented with such great restraint, a kind of old world courtliness that one could still see in the aged Italians who sat on their stoops in the early evenings, watching the world darken around them.

In the mid-eighties, Random House published a collection called Otherwise, translated by Jonathan Galassi. I carried it around with me for a while even though it had a remarkably ugly gray and purple cover. I liked the fact that Montale titled his first collection Cuttlefish Bones (Ossi di seppia) and I kept these lines close in my mind for a long time:

“In the future opening ahead/ the mornings are moored (anchored) like boats in the harbor.”

I was in my mid-twenties, at loose ends, wandering around New York, soured on love yet incurably romantic, dutifully yearning for the One True Soul, and I felt desperate to embark on a long voyage. (Any voyage would do except the one I was on.) Would the future ever open, or was I destined to stand on the shore, squinting at the horizon, watching the boats bob on their lines? Walking head down into the wind toward the Montauk lighthouse -- grasses, dunes, a vast impenetrable immensity out there -- I eyed the cold grey-green Atlantic. It was easy to believe that there was nothing but poems, filled with sunflowers, eels, bones, and a longing, like mine, for that which lay just out of reach.

Another Nobel Prize

2011-10-07T08:00:00.005-04:00

I don't know why I am not a fan of Tomas Tranströmer's. Perhaps because he looks down from a high perch, like a gyrfalcon, smothering the life out of earth with his pitiless gaze, perhaps because I have no access to the music of his native language, perhaps because he is a cold Swede whose images lie static on the page, like simple snapshots in a stranger's photo album, over which you find yourself feigning interest, perhaps because so many of his poems end unfinished.

I came to him through Robert Bly's Leaping Poetry many years ago which cited the justly oft-anthologized poem about the stopped train. (You can read it here.) But Bly is such an insistent proselytizer that he sometimes turns me off. I also find some of his translations slack.

Even so, there is one poem of Tranströmer's I carry with me all the time:

FROM MARCH 1979

Weary of all who come with words, words but no language
I make my way to the snow-covered island.
The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!
I come upon the tracks of deer's hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.

(Translated by Robin Fulton, from The New Collected Poems, published in 1997 by Bloodaxe Books.)

Tremors in the morning

2011-10-05T08:12:00.002-04:00

I get up in the morning on a clear day. I tell myself my head is clear too. Maybe it's true. The body is its own master, taking comfort in the routine senseless repetition of events -- grinding the coffee beans, heating the water, filling the carafe, shuffling around the kitchen like an old man. Sometimes I feel old, but that was true even when I was young. In high school, one of my teachers caught me sitting with my back to her fireplace. "When you're young," she said, "you should face the fire and see in it your dreams. Old men sit like you."

I sip the coffee and read some of Zagajewski's poems, loitering in the translated verse like a bystander witnessing a live birth. I lose track of which words are his and which are mine. Curiosity outlasts love. I nod in agreement.

Earlier this year, the FAA altered the flight patterns approaching Newark, now the first planes taking off today roar overhead. Why in the world do people still write poems? Why do I still read them, now, forty years out of adolescence, citizen of a world dominated -- no, created -- by science?

Only sometimes, and often by accident, does art transform pain into beauty, Adam, as you well know. But it does not cure the illness that causes pain. Clear moments are so short. I hear his voice, the reedy sing-song lilt of his heavily accented English. There is more ocean than firm land. A sensation comes back to me, barely strong enough to qualify as a memory. I was in Krakow, sitting outside in the Rynek Główny, drinking a beer, eating pierogis filled with mushrooms and cabbage, watching innumerable young people heading somewhere else, dragging behind them long shadows. It was a day like today, clear, cool but not uncomfortable, and the rest of the family had gone to the station to take a train back to Warsaw. This that lies heavy and weighs down. I felt it but I could not tell if it was a stone or an anchor.

Not a day has gone by without pain or beauty. I wash the dishes and wipe the counter, watch the sky lighten in the east, and listen to the school buses coming up the hill. I put the book of poems back on the shelf. It is time to get ready and go to work. And these useless hours of my life, when you and I converse across the years, outside time, beyond the geography of the moment?

My back hurts and my heart is racing. I don't know what will become of them.

Nature must produce a man

2011-09-27T07:11:00.008-04:00

Where I was last night I couldn't tell if someone was banging on the door or not. Maybe it was just the water conditioner or Lowell's skunk in the garbage can. Whatever it was, it was loud. But by the time I got up the noise had stopped. I opened the window and looked up and down the street. There was no one there. Just some clusters of leaves blowing around.

Standing there peering into the darkness, stray thoughts went flying through my head, too small to catch, like electrons or neutrinos. Pretty soon our physics'll be out of date, along with our morality and our politics. The word autumnal came into my mind like a newspaper headline. Western civilization hunkering down for a long winter.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I get up and watch TED Conference videos on my laptop. They don't reassure me, all those telegenic, articulate people delivering their stand-up slideshows. Their ideas are entertaining (even if a bit over-rehearsed), but if they're so clever and compelling and compassionate how come the world feels like it's spinning out of control?

I watched Niall Ferguson give a talk on 'the six killer apps of prosperity' and how they had enabled the West to out-perform the rest of the world for 500 years. He cautioned that the dominance of the West is drawing to a close because the killer apps have become available to anyone in the world. The Chinese and Indians have downloaded them, so have the Chileans and Brazilians. And this is happening just as we in the West are behaving as though we're no longer convinced of the apps' worth.

Ferguson called his fellow Scotsman Adam Smith, "The smartest man ever." He then made a joke of his Scottishness by imitating Sean Connery. The white college-educated audience laughed. This was what they had come to Edinburgh for. He told them that they should go and bow down before Adam Smith's statue in the Royal Mile. He said a lot of other things about competition and modern medicine and the work ethic. His was a good routine. The guy is a persuasive performer. But all it did was give me a headache. The middle of the night is no time to think about killer apps and the rise of the East. I took a couple of Advil and lay down on the couch. I must have fallen asleep though I'm not sure. Perhaps an hour had passed. It was still dark. My eyes were open.

Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year the colonies declared independence. It was also the year David Hume, another Scotsman, died. I find his thoughts congenial in the nighttime, his subordination of reason to passion, his skepticism toward religion and received ideas. Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken. He took the world as it was.

I laid there listening to the wind rustle the leaves. There's a severe shortage of pumpkins this year. I read online about how the crop was decimated by the hurricane and all the rain. I'm glad I'm not a farmer. Farming is hard work, contingent on complex natural systems. Not like philosophy nor the brain work I do during the day, trying to publish a few good books a season.

The American dream in prime time

2011-09-22T08:13:00.002-04:00

These days, darkened by indecision and dread, it's difficult to think clearly about politics except to observe that the men and women in government truly represent the aspirations and anxieties of those who elect them. If our leaders are petty, avaricious, and credulous, it's because so are we. Democracy -- government by the people -- works. If we're disappointed in the results, we're probably disappointed with human beings generally, certainly our fellow consumers and maybe even ourselves.

I live in northwest Jersey, good, green land criss-crossed by roads, dotted by commercial development, some offices and warehouses, mostly shopping centers. The architecture is abominable, the construction cheap -- these developments won't last but a few years past my lifetime. When I was a kid growing up on the Island, there still were adults around who bemoaned the spread of suburban ticky-tack. Those days are gone. By now we're inured to it. It's part of the "environment." Humans, like cockroaches, are adaptable -- we can live with most anything after a while, even the omnipresent smell of shit. Or the sound of white noise. As long as someone is turning a profit.

Most people who live around here want to get rich -- and believe they can. Maybe if they pray hard enough. Maybe if they cut enough corners. All around them, they see people who have made it. They ought to be able to make it too. They're just as good as anybody else. Sure, they'll work if they have to, assuming they can find a job, but the men would rather fish or watch football, just as the women would rather dress up and go out. And the jobs they do find are not particularly enriching. Retail, healthcare, social work, administration, security, logistics, maintenance, cleaning. Service jobs, putting out fires. Twenty-five, thirty thou a year tops.

They seem happiest when they're doing something with their hands that doesn't involve conscious thought, like yard work or shopping. They like it when the kids are old enough to go to school so they don't have to put up with them all day long. They're tired and anxious most waking hours and when they sleep, they don't sleep well. No one knows why, but a lot of theories are advanced: bad food, too much stimulation, moral relativism, the environment, chemicals, terrorism, failed schools, fluoride.

Just like their representatives, they believe a lot of the crap they see on TV or the internet is important, even if they suspect it isn't true. Talk radio blowhards rile them up. Even the weather report gets on their nerves. They're not part of any community -- they could be living anywhere housing is cheap, on their own, acting out a parody of cowboy individualism in their overpowered automobiles.

There's one now, sitting in traffic on Route 23 talking to himself. He's thinking about setting up a hot-dog stand just beyond Paradise Road. Be my own boss. Plenty of traffic up there. Just need a little seed money. The car in front of his starts to move. He's still talking to himself, drumming on the steering wheel, shaking his head from side to side. If I could only get the goddamn government off my back, I'd make some real money.

Walking without thinking

2011-09-13T07:11:00.003-04:00

J. comes tumbling down the Appalachian Trail just above High Breeze Farm. The path is muddy, strewn with rocks, washed out near the road. Wet boots, wet socks, wet pants below the knee. It'd be easy to slip and fall on the scree. He comes to a stop on Barrett Road, looks northwest, out across Vernon Valley, still much of it under water, even the black dirt fields over in Pine Island. The sky is pale and cloudless. Buzzards hang in the trees waiting for the day to warm up. J. feels lightheaded -- it takes concentration and a few deep breaths to stay upright.

After the dizziness clears, he takes a swig from his water bottle and wipes his forehead with a cool, damp hand. His armpits are wet and he feels a little chill at the small of his back. He needs to urinate. He leaves the road and heads into the woods. The path runs flat for about a hundred feet along the edge of a cornfield, then enters the woods. He pisses behind a cluster of stunted maples, the breeze drifting by him like an animal presence. Empty, he turns and heads back to the road.

There is iron in these hills. For more than a century, furnace fires ran hot throughout northwestern Jersey, making shot for troops, from the revolution through the civil war. J. hiked past the ruined forges in Hewitt and Wawayanda, those long-abandoned settlements where men mined the ore, chopped down the trees, and fouled the streams. These days it's no longer even spooky in there, where the tangled second and third growth vegetation has gone and reclaimed its hold on the soil, and the well-worn paths are maintained by members of the Appalachian Mountain Club. It's not wilderness but it's as near to wild as you can get this close to the city. Men like J. can lose themselves for a few days and take a measure of liberty out here.

He has left behind politics and religion. He's got no use for that shite. And he's free of his wife and kids. Let them fend for themselves. He's even chased his dog away. He carries little with him -- apples and jerky, a couple of ounces of weed, a bear horn, a poncho, water, and a 9 mm pistol made in the USA. He looks strong with his pipe fitter's forearms, but his back is bad and it hurts like hell to hike over these rocks and roots. He'll deal with the pain. His buddies are waiting for him in the Union Cemetery and they're not going to wait forever. It's time to get going.

He looks down at the valley again, this time with a clearer head. Ribbons of mist rise above the watershed. Christ the river did some damage. He looks for a good place to cross the flooded Wallkill. He smooths his shirt over a cast-iron gut and blows the snot out of his nostrils, one at a time. This walking without thinking is a good deal, it gets rid of the poison. I still got a ways to go.

He heads downhill, parallel to the road. There's no turning back on the trek to Edenville.

Animal spirits

2011-09-11T12:54:00.002-04:00

Look at the chipmunk sitting on the retaining wall by the alder. Funny guy. Curved into a tawny question-mark, as still as the stone he sits upon, he contemplates the size and scope of the world, the scented pathways across the mown lawn over the septic field, from the woodpile under the maple to the slate patio, all the way down to the brook. He hears the bees in the sedum, is aware of the wet soil underneath the pine-bark mulch, filled with edible bugs. Robins and jays fly in and out of view. I have no idea what his world looks like, so I imagine mine in his little head. It's the best I can do, lacking his beady black eyes, his elfin ears.

He clears his throat and scratches his shoulder, falls into stillness again. He appears content. In this place, he scampers and plays, he prowls (or seems to, inching forward like he's sneaking up on somebody) and mates, he digs and he eats, and at day's end he dives into a tailor-made crevice in the stone wall with a flourish. Like his cousins the squirrel, the groundhog, and the field mouse, he fills the yard with life. He is what he does, the little acrobat.

Ascribing human feelings to these creatures is dopey, I know. A child's fancy. But I can't help myself. Their antics give me pleasure and remind me of people I know. The hoarder, the rake, the athlete, the stoic. The epicurean, the poet, the paranoiac, the solid citizen. Even one person can be all these things. Therein lies the awful comedy of being human, trying to figure out which persona fits. This is not a problem for my little friend. He is a chipmunk at all times, his brief life a fullness unto itself, complete and indivisible.

With each passing year, I grow less confident that the difference between animals and humans amounts to much in the end. Whether the chipmunk is caught in the talons of a hawk or the jaws of a cat, whether he dies in a flood or in drought, whether he misjudges the distance to his burrow or loses a step due to age, he will leave behind the same sensual world as mine. The little heart will stop and in an instant he will cease to be a chipmunk. He'll be a corpse, nutritious, finite, gone. Nothing will remain of him, not even a memory, though the yard will still be full of life -- the other plants and animals, green and noisy, will attest to it.

That's all to come, for him and for me. People I have known and loved are gone, leaving the world to be remade. The chipmunk is well-suited to this place. He sits there in the middle of things, surrounded by nourishment and peril. Today I am willing to read his animal quietude as contemplative joy.

A warning

2011-09-10T08:07:00.003-04:00

Quiet, not the quiet after trauma but the quiet of just waking. No planes, no cars, just cold water rushing in the brook. The sky, a pale rose-yellow, drawn tight above the dark woods. Silhouettes of crows, a heron standing on the dock, three mallards floating by. Last week, after the storm, W. saw a large male black bear -- wearing a radio collar -- go through our neighbors' yard down to the lake. Silent, the massive head swaying side to side. "You know, the way bears walk, you don't hear them coming, they just appear."

A city couple pace-walking around the lake heard us talking. "A bear?," they asked. "Which direction did it go?" W. said, "Seemed to head toward the lake. We only saw it for a couple of seconds. A big guy." The couple took off in their white shorts and new shoes, talking loudly and whistling. We could see that they were spooked. W. followed them with a contemptuous stare. "You come up here, you're gonna live with animals. What the hell were they expecting?"

He's old and a son-of-a-bitch, only keeps the house so his grandchildren can spend summers here. "It's great for the kids. They're outdoors all the time, swimming, hiking, sailing. They may even learn something. They're not like the ones who live here year round. Those kids behave like animals. Fresh. And their parents don't care."

W.'s got one of the biggest houses on the lake, his yard is professionally landscaped, he drives a Mercedes, he's been married for forty-some-odd years, goes to Our Lady of Fatima every Sunday, has three sons and two daughters and countless grandchildren, and yet there he was, working himself up into a full tirade about the shitty world he was living in. What was wrong with it? Christ, everything was wrong: the behavior of poor kids, schools, parents who don't care or aren't there, the mayor, the town council, the governor, the President, the media, taxes, computer games, lack of respect, the internet, drugs, cell phones, the gangs who come up from Paterson, judges, bankers, New York City, immigrants, the list went on and on. "The world has gone crazy," he spat.

I left him muttering to himself. I couldn't stand listening any more. Anger can be as contagious as a virus.

He's probably awake already, puttering around his designer kitchen, having made a pot of strong coffee. Even he is quiet at this hour, waiting for his wife to get up so he can turn on the radio. I imagine him walking out onto the deck with his mug. He takes a deep breath and smells the lake, surveys his little kingdom, the kayaks and Sunfish, the yellow-and-blue inflatable raft, the old rhododendrons, the birches and white pine, the stone wall, the swing set. The Adirondack furniture and blackened citronella torches. The heron and the ducks. He sees it all but he doesn't see it at all. He's too full of himself. He just stands there breathing.

Maybe he left his garage door open last night. Maybe there's a bear in there. He descends from the deck, walks around the side of the house to the front, and checks to see if the garage is secure. It is. I see him from my living room window. He is walking stiffly and talking to himself. There's no one else about. He bends down and pulls up a couple of weeds growing near the mailbox. Wild carrots. They're all over. Tough plants with deep roots, harder to pull than dandelions. He only gets the stems. He throws them into the street and walks back around the other side of the house. Still talking to himself, all alone.

I stand there in my own quiet house and watch him disappear from view. His life is like a warning. And mine? What have I made of mine?

What poetry means to me

2011-09-01T09:42:00.002-04:00

I wanted to write a poem about a man writing a poem but when I got around to it the man was no longer writing a poem. He was so busy making a living he'd forgotten all about poetry. I figured I had better make a living too, although I did not know what that meant. I mean I was already alive. What was there to make except poems?

I was callow and awkward but I survived. When I got hungry I always found something to eat. When I was cold and wet someone was always there to invite me inside. When I was thirsty, Sami let me take an old carton of milk or juice out of his refrigerator case. It wasn't stealing. He was being charitable. I could've gone on like that for a long time but a little voice in my head kept telling me that I wasn't making a living, I was just being alive. To be human, the voice said, is to be a maker. Go ahead, poot, nail some shite together and see if it stands.

I learned that making a living was really just making money, though you don't really make it, you earn it. Living by working, like an ox, like a mule. Got a room, got a bed. I loaded frozen food onto trucks in Secaucus, I sealed blacktop in Farmingdale. I separated compost into one-year and five-year heaps. A rich man's garbage. I stocked shelves in Westbury, I fed chickens in East Lansing. Mean peckers. I played the organ in Franklin Square, ghosted articles in Hoboken, gave lectures in Tokyo, sold books in New York, cut grass in Rutherford, directed a choir in Passaic Park. Sold blood when I had to. Pawned useless shite. Made do. Made doo. Sliced meat, mopped floors, brewed coffee, took out the effin trash. Making a living. Forty hours of sweat, some little Napoleon wearing a backwards baseball cap hands you a wad of twenties. Then you've got to give some back. Play the numbers, boys, if you want to eat next week.

Little Joe from Garfield would stare into his locker, shake his head, and say to me, "You're looking at a walking miracle, man." Juan from Union City was a miracle too. Ed from East Rutherford. Pat from Clifton. Bobby from East Meadow. George from New Berlin. Terry from Bellerose. Mikey from Washington Heights. Everybody I ever worked with was a miracle. They had managed to stay human in a system that tried to turn them into beasts. Henry from Hollywood. Bob from Florida. Al from god knows where. He showed up when he was supposed to and put his shoulder to the wheel. At the end of the day he split. Leroy from Baltimore. Ephraim from the Bronx. Tony from Co-op City. A regular parade. I see them now shuffling onward, bone-tired, smoking, talking about the Giants, talking about pussy. Making a living. Eating cold pot roast on store-bought bread. Farting for fun. Picking their teeth with a penknife. There was no camaraderie, no politics, no romance. An awareness perhaps that those things existed.

I survived and got a job in the knowledge industry [sic]. I've had enough of this, I thought. Maybe I ought to write a poem about a man making a living if I ever get around to it. Or before they lay the old boy in the ground.

Pure luck

2011-08-31T08:07:00.008-04:00

I listened to the commentary before, during and after Irene, the vast majority of it uninformed, nothing more than the nervous tittering of the masses in the face of something they don't understand, displaying in starkest terms the terribly slow evolutionary progression from cave-dweller to contemporary human being. Some of the blather was unaccountably cruel -- one so-called pundit opined, "At least this'll be good for the economy, what with all the rebuilding that needs to be done." Another mean-spirited clown somehow married the words "Irene" and "God's judgement" together in a feeble attempt at humor. I live among a coarse and superstitious people, unbearably noisy at times, trying their darnedest -- like me -- to figure out how best to retain their humanity and some species of decency in an indecent age. They can't buy it. They can't eat their way to it, or fuck their way to it, or speed their way to it, or fight their way to it, or, worst of all, pray their way to it. And they can't count on the experts because the experts are full of shit.

We've had fifty years of TV schooling and it's caught up with us. Everything is reality TV until a natural calamity comes along and destroys a life, or a livelihood, or a neighborhood, or a home, and the tittering begins. How can one not feel pity and terror at the plight of being human in a half-lit world?

Here is my backyard this past Monday morning:

And here is my backyard Monday afternoon:

I was a lucky bastard, again. I've been lucky most of my life, riding the wheel of fortune into a state of irrational calm, pronouncing the whole trip a wonderment so far. Some day my luck will run out. It's as simple as that.

Chopping wood while chopping wood

2011-08-30T06:45:00.003-04:00

When I got laid off by Random House at the beginning of 2009 and spent almost a full year out of work, I came to see publishing as hopelessly mired in outdated processes and policies, presided over by an unholy alliance of autocratic dinosaurs and clueless MBAs. (In my self-righteous and self-justificatory mode, I conveniently forgot that I'd been part of the system for twenty some-odd years.) It all seemed wrong to me, especially the parts we couldn't fix -- stupid anachronisms like the returns privilege (dating back to the Great Depression), co-op advertising pools (subsidizing the growth of the chains), bidding wars for supposedly hot manuscripts, unattended author events at venues that couldn't care less, an inefficient distribution system resulting in an acceptable returns rate of 25%, kowtowing to ignorant buyers at mass merchandisers because of the financial power they wielded, absurdly high advances for celebrity properties, and on and on. It was like being married for twenty years, then waking up one morning and realizing you'd been sleeping with a hag. A hag whose faults were all too easy to identify and enumerate.

In the depths of my depression, angry and resentful as hell, I saw the whole thing as problematic, broken, and unworthy of reform. Best to let the publishing industry die an ignominious death and hope for a literary rebirth in a new mode of being, one in which all the bad shite had been left behind. I looked around me and found that I was not alone on the doom-laden island of Manhattan where ex-publishing folk roamed like a wild pack of dogs, snouts buried in each other's arseholes. When you're out of work and licking your wounds you don't care that the kids in Brooklyn are playing games, even if you secretly wish you were on the field with them. You think you're too old, too set in your ways, too tainted by years of "I tole you so, bud," so you start walking the memory plank and declaiming like a prophet.

There goes Ezekiel, late of Random House, walking through the Valley of Bones. Give the geezer a consulting gig, will ya?

So what did I do? I joined another publishing company, this one operating on a much, much smaller scale than the Beast of Broadway. Yet we do the same thing -- we try to publish good books successfully. So I'm back in the game. Chopping wood. And, from this vantage point, publishing doesn't look like it's dead, or even dying. All those processes and policies that so irritated me when I was out of work, that appeared so foolish and antiquated, now seem to me to be a part of a wonderfully evolved and intricate filtration system, one that is working as hard as it can to maintain a certain level of literate culture in a country that can ill-afford to lose it. This is not to turn a blind eye to its faults. Like any true lover, I can tell you in detail what is wrong with the object of my affection. But I am again a lover, not an outside (and often bitter) observer. She is my hag, largely unchanged, but these days I don't mind her snoring.

It is a wonderful thing that it is so difficult to publish a good book, one that edifies, informs, gives pleasure, revives an art, does whatever well, whether it speaks to a niche or to a whole society. Good books are rare, like home runs, fine wines, tropical orchids, or hurricanes. A good book originates with its author but it also runs through the hands of many talented, caring collaborators before it makes its appearance to the world of readers. (And once readers get a hold of it, it becomes something else again.) These collaborators are not cynical, sinister gatekeepers, seeking to protect a tiny (mostly unprofitable) piece of turf. They too are lovers -- seekers, dreamers -- who want to find something rare and beautiful that they can present to the world in the best possible way, even if they have to discover that way anew.

Uh-oh, it sounds like old Ezekiel has done morphed into Pollyanna. The laid-off crank become the dewy-eyed employee of the month. Okay. So what? I know which picture is true for me right now. I can't help you determine which picture is true for you. My friend PT once said, "The way you view publishing -- it's attitudinal, not rational. Like the way you view life." It's hard to give a better explanation than that.

Sure, I've still got that list of faults that desperately need reform: returns that are stupider than ever in a digital age, payment terms and advertising dollars that favor retail behemoths who couldn't care less whether they sell soap or noodles, bidding wars on manuscripts that are wasteful and demeaning (and do nothing for authors except get them that first check, after that -- nada), pricing policies that are dictated by online retailers, celebrity properties that crowd the marketplace with junk, co-op advertising for placement and discounting that doesn't work (especially now that the one chain is dead and the others are floundering), author "events" that take place in empty back rooms, and on and on. Plus confronting the transformational idea of what a book really is and whether or not its format is intrinsic to the reading experience.

Because I love this industry these things don't cause me to despair or wallow in bitterness. They make me happy that the hag is still alive. For I know that she is capable, though rarely and reluctantly, of producing a good book every once in a while, as difficult as that is to do.

Memory speaks above an abyss

2011-08-19T11:27:00.007-04:00

Falling in love is a favorite pastime of exiles, those for whom "home" can only be visited in memory, not topographically. Whenever I go back to Long Island and see the house where I grew up I get all shook up. The frame of the building may be the same but I am forced to reject the actuality of it. The image I carry in my memory overwhelms me. The structure I see in the present is emphatically not the house I remember. I stare at the modest Cape Cod, the vinyl siding, the two dormers, the professionally landscaped front yard. Hah! -- professionally landscaped, the realtors' phrase. No, it is not the house I grew up in. That house no longer exists.

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and carried that place with him all his life, kept in his pocket like a vial of earth. Where it could be fingered like a rabbit's foot. Exiles have to re-plant themselves in the soil of their youth. Even Dracula brought Transylvanian dirt to England so he could rest his casket in it. We love the homes we are forced to leave, hence we memorialize them. Then, of course, we allow our memories to play tricks with them, on us.

My friend T. grew up in Queens Village in a neighborhood that no longer exists, despite the fact that the names of the streets are the same as they were fifty years ago. 223rd Street, 222nd Street, 101st Avenue. Go on Google Maps. Click on satellite view. From the sky you can see that the streets are still there. So is Belmont Park, the Belt Parkway (or is it the Cross-Island? -- we used the two names interchangeably back then), and Hempstead Avenue. I loved that place, the smoky attic full of music, the delicious smells from the kitchen, the Baldwin Organ on the enclosed porch. Falling in love is a favorite pastime of exiles. "Be careful," said Quist, "It causes poetry even as it staunches the flow of blood to the brain."

Nabokov, nearly a scientist, so good at identifying butterflies and moths, superb at languages, exacting in his prose, busied himself constructing characters out of words, oddballs for whom identity proves to be a puzzle, or, worse, a mistaken case. They slip and slither across time's greased causeway, get waylaid at tourist traps, in hot pursuit of their obscure objects of desire, en route to falling flatly in love. Once love is captured, it's all over. You sit on the edge of a unmade bed in a rented room smelling vaguely of disinfectant staring off into space. The shower is running. The radio is on. Nothing can make you whole.

Years ago, I walked around Queens, a middle class savage from Elmont one generation removed from poverty. I wasn't quite at home nor was I a complete stranger. But I knew that I couldn't afford to take a touristic approach to the world I was passing through. I didn't have the will. Nor could I go back and be the untamed boy tripping over the surface of things -- not only unaware of death, but unmindful of others -- coddled by parents who told him how great he was, how great he would be. No one ever kicked me out of my home. (The one that no longer exists.) But I didn't need to be told that I couldn't stay.

T. and I still read slowly, parsing each sentence, plumbing the depths of meaning. We haven't reached bottom yet. We believe that all things carry a message, even if we don't get it at first. If you're as impatient (and homeless) as Nabokov, you translate what you see into your own symbols, whether they make sense to others or not. You create an international style, carefree, despairing, modern. You live in Switzerland. You dismiss Dostoevsky, Freud, Faulkner, and the rest. And you seduce others into agreeing with you in believing that self-created puzzles are the only ones we can expect to solve.

When T. refers to himself in the here and now as opposed to the man he was years ago, he points out, "In the most real and philosophical sense this is not the same person." For us, words are tools, the pliers one uses to extract the living heart from a dying animal, again and again and again. Quist laughed at me when I used that metaphor. "Don't make it sound so dramatic, poot. Life will go on without you understanding it."

Lolita

2011-08-14T15:23:00.002-04:00

In school, at the mall, online, sashaying down a summer street, out on the Island, down at the shore, pouting sirens in their little come-on costumes call out to the American male, who whistles and snorts, rearranges his equipment, talks big, elevates his snout. He takes in the scent of freshly shampooed hair, the pink dazzle of lip gloss, the tattoos peeping out from the waistbands of those black lycra running shorts. The sportive sirens raise their arms and rearrange their hair. The American male can't tell if they're squinting or winking at him. For the briefest moment he loses himself, then totters on, hot and bothered, unable to relieve himself. It's a man's world, but it wouldn't mean nothin without a woman or a girl. He's a figure made of clay. What about the girls?

I'm ashamed how it entertained me, the way American manhood was portrayed, the awful thwarted throbbingness of it, herky-jerky from head to heel. Marty Scorcese in the back of Travis Bickle's cab -- "Do you know what a .44 Magnum can do to a woman's pussy?" Nice talk, huh? Remember Harvey Keitel, playing Jodie Foster's pimp Sport, the way he danced with her, just the two of them in a cheap shit hotel room, so close, the way he whispered in her ear, "I only wish every man could know what it's like to be loved by you..." He wasn't telling no lie -- he meant it, the sentimental corrupter. It's not just business with me.

We've outgrown that animalistic talk. Today, on the front page of the TBR, there's Nicholson Baker outvoxing himself -- candy corn indeed! -- whilst gleefully tugging at his writerly member, his wit extolled by Sam Lipsyte. Literary unicorns locking horns in the locker room. Measly plumbers. U & me.

So tell me, poot, what place does Lolita have in this screwed-up culture of ours? Here is this novel about sex, the kind of sex that upends most Americans, sex between a middle-aged pervert (forget his effin language skills) and a nymphet -- nice coinage that -- dimly aware that what she's just awakened to between her thoughts and her thighs drives older men crazy. You'd think it would be consigned to the long list of proscribed texts, unfit for adolescent consumption, to be read only by middle-aged perverts. But no. It's a classic, a backlist bestseller, a book that's read and taught -- taught! -- in high school and college, the subject of innumerable learned lectures, of undergraduate essays, of book discussion groups. Professors take it apart and (occasionally) put it back together, if they can remember how the pieces fit. Contemporary novelists feel compelled to contend with it. It's been annotated, made into two movies, and set to music. Such an exquisitely crafted, witty piece of meta-fiction, begging to be taken seriously so as not to be taken literally. J. claims that Nabokov was a sadist. "Lolita is a literary lap-dance. You'll wet your underpants but you won't be satisfied."

We can make other claims about Nabokov's novel -- that it is a critique (and a celebration) of the vulgarity of American popular culture, a love letter to English prosody, an allegory of ideological imprisonment (fervently denied by Nabokov himself), a morality play (also denied by the author), a work of literary criticism, a jaundiced view of the corruption of the New World by the Old, a chimp painting the bars of his cage on the blank canvas of his rage, a cautionary tale warning the Old World aesthete how easy it is to succumb to the rude charms of the New World seductress -- but it is, first and foremost, about sex. The little death. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Humbert Humbert knows something and he wants to impart his knowledge to little Lo. (Zeus had some terrible knowledge to give to Leda too.) I was too young when I first read the book. I didn't understand it. Now at fifty-seven I think I do -- most of it.

Humbert's like the rest of us -- what he knows is not worth much. It'll fit in a teaspoon. The old prick will only get as much out of this affair as he puts into it. As for Dolly, she knows something too, but her time is short: soon she'll grow up, get married, lose that girlish shape, die in childbirth. After a while she'll be shorthand for jailbait. The Greeks had knowledge they wanted to impart to young boys. What kind of knowledge is that? Maybe Nabokov wanted to teach us men something about ourselves: that we really yearn for young girls. Then he rubs our noses in the truth and consequences of our lust -- innocence turns to rot the moment we violate it, even with our minds. The worm in the bud.

Quist still reads the papers, sees how parents push their daughters into the limelight. He watches the kids parading up and down the boardwalk. He tells me he's happiest since he became impotent and stopped thinking about girls. "You know, Bud," he says, "These Lolitas will never learn. And neither will their men."

Books entered my life

2011-08-10T11:24:00.004-04:00

When I hear the cicadas sing, I am drawn back to the endless August days of my boyhood, waiting for school to start again, overtaken by the heat and boredom, living like a savage without clothes or custom, when I could pretend to be anyone, standing at all the open doors of the world. In my lassitude, my dreaminess, I'd lie on the lawn under the silver maple and read books. Ian Fleming, Mark Twain, Alistair MacLean, Isaac Asimov, the Golden Nature Guides, Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, Madeline L'Engle, Agatha Christie, the Alfred Hitchcock Mysteries, Robert Louis Stevenson, and so many more. Of the abridged classics, my favorites were Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, The Man in the Iron Mask, and Ivanhoe. On lazy Sundays, I'd pester my old man to read aloud -- I can still hear him declaim the witches' spell from Macbeth, Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain," and Emily Dickinson's "A narrow fellow in the grass." Snakes scare me still, in poems and in real life.

Was I born to read? It certainly felt as though reading was in my nature. My mother called it an inclination. But there was surely more to it than nature. I was surrounded by books, my parents were readers, books were discussed at table, and they were taken seriously. My father fancied Camus and Nabokov -- I heard those names long before I could read anything they'd written. He loved the Russians Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy and the sea stories of Joseph Conrad. One of my earliest experiences of literature was listening to my father read passages from Typhoon while I sat on the armrest of the living room couch and watched his pipe smolder in the ashtray. Conrad -- like Chopin -- was a hero to a Kozlowski. Is it any wonder that I too am drawn to those two Poles?

My mother went to the library once a week and began taking me along before I entered kindergarten. Her favorites were Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Renault, Josephine Tey, historicals and mysteries mainly, with the occasional bestseller or current literary sensation thrown in for good measure, books by Michener, Cheever, Irwin Shaw, Capote, Salinger, Malamud. Books like The Group or The Agony and the Ecstasy or Fail-Safe. Paperbacks with racy covers like Faulkner's Sartoris or John O'Hara's Butterfield 8. Occasionally, we'd take the Bee-Line bus to Hempstead and shop for books at Womrath's, followed by BLTs at a coffee shop on North Franklin Street. Those were the only times I was allowed to drink Coca-Cola.

Those books of my parents had such allure, from the cover art to the smell of the paper and binding glue, from the pride of place they were accorded in the design of the living room "wall units" to the sense of accomplishment I earned upon learning new words, new ideas, and new ways of understanding relationships between people and the world. The invisible was made visible even as my vocabulary got bigger and more complex. Often such knowledge was a burden -- sometimes it made me cry, or get scared -- but it was still better than ignorance.

No one has yet unknotted the two threads that form the mind -- nature and nurture -- and definitively pronounced which is the longer or stronger. Perhaps I was born to read. Perhaps my upbringing had everything to do with it. I know that my life would have been different without books. They are essential to me, like air or water. But because they are, I cannot see past them or through them to objectivity. I know plenty of people who live without them, good people whose world is different than mine. I will beckon to them and invite them into my world of books. I will tell them that there's plenty of room for all kinds of readers here. They don't have to read what I read. Still, they will often decline the offer -- reading is slow, it takes time and patience, it's a habit harder to acquire as an adult than as a child, and they are busy trying to make a living. How can I reproach them?

William Carlos Williams wrote, "I have learned much in my life/from books/and out of them/about love." He goes on, "Death/is not the end of it." Love, that is, not books.

Written in 1955

2011-08-05T09:18:00.003-04:00

"You write? Everybody is writing nowadays. I myself have written a novel. I: Really? She: Yes, and I even got some pretty good reviews. I: Congratulations! She: Oh, I'm not saying this to fish for compliments, I merely wanted to emphasize that everybody is writing nowadays. It's something that everybody can do." --
Witold Gombrowicz, in his diaries (this entry from 1955 appears in Diary: Volume 1, translated by Lillian Vallee, published by Northwestern University Press). A most extraordinary work by one of the great Polish writers of the 20th Century, exiled in Argentina, destined never to return to Poland, who also wrote, "...as much as one is an alien, one is also painfully oneself." It is the word "painfully" that sticks in one's craw.

Speak, Memory

2011-07-24T09:12:00.004-04:00

Nabokov the lepidopterist, the butterfly chaser, the aristocrat. I didn't know anything about him until I was in my late teens, after I'd read Despair. Years earlier, sometime during the summer between fifth and sixth grades, I became obsessed with butterflies. Our backyard and Elmont's empty lots were filled with them -- and not just the ubiquitous white cabbage variety. We had hairstreaks, admirals, skippers, monarchs, question marks, mourning cloaks, commas, glassywings, black and tiger swallowtails, fritillaries, American ladies, duskywings, and azures, each possessing remarkable strategies for staying alive, from the larval stage, through the pupal, to magnificent adulthood. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes of his passion for butterflies, "I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception." A game at which he was expert.

Once I was similarly hooked, the hunt for beauty occupied almost all of my waking hours for the next three summers. There was a trick to flipping the net fast enough to trap the dodgy creatures. Their flight path was so erratic -- you had to anticipate in which direction they would turn and at what velocity they would accelerate. After netting them, it took a lot of experimentation (and dead butterflies) before I learned to apply just enough pressure to stun the caught creatures and not crush them. I had to be careful, otherwise their color would come off on my fingers. It fascinated me, the composition and texture of that magical, slightly sticky dust.

I'd punch holes into the lids of pickle jars so live specimens wouldn't suffocate when I held them captive. Their delicate antennae, six spindly spiky legs, a proboscis that unfurled to sip nectar, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes not, I'd watch them for hours, on the grass, in the shade of the rose-of-sharon, seated on an aluminum deck chair. Once in a while, I'd uncover a jar and let one out. I loved to watch the female black swallowtail open her wings -- that's when the bright blue spots on her hindwing were fully visible. I would move my head back and forth and squint to catch their iridescence. It tickled when she walked on my forearm and when she curled her abdomen down toward the earth, I imagined she knew I was watching her.

I hear a woman's voice calling, coming from the land where we never shall die. A kind of narcolepsy overtakes me in the afternoon heat, under the utterly still, limp foliage. I was cruel to those beautiful creatures -- I'd freeze them, then pin them through the thorax and mount them under glass. It gave me physical pleasure to do it. Though you could learn how to do it from articles in Boy's Life, it was better to have a mentor. Quist had the touch -- a combination of patience, a steady hand, and sharp pins. We stored the boxed mountings in mothballs. I can imagine the camphor smell that permeated the old chest of drawers downstairs into which my precious butterflies would go.

Insufferable, I thought I was good at catching butterflies. I would carry my net with me whenever I was taken on expeditions far afield -- Bayard Cutting Arboretum out in Suffolk County, Clarence Fahnestock State Park up the Hudson, Macedonia Brook in Connecticut. How those names thrill me even now! The very words were talismans, leading to the mystery of human language. Those were the years I called every nose I saw a "proboscis." Whenever an object shone it was "iridescent." And, of course, I clung to the word "fritillary" -- as lace-like as the butterfly itself -- writing it over and over in the spiral-bound notebook wherein I recorded my finds. But I was lazy. I never learned the latin names, nor did I study the internal characteristics which distinguished one species from the next. For me, the obvious visual differences were enough. I bridled at strict taxonomy even though my father said I had a natural aptitude for it. His aptitude.

My butterfly collecting adventures were encouraged as long as my mother was alive. She loved to read to me from The Little Golden Book of Butterflies whenever I came home with a new species. My father was neutral but he did help me fashion a handle extension out of a bamboo rod for my net. The extra length enabled me to sneak up and swoop down from further away than I could with a regular net. It gave me an advantage over the other kids in the neighborhood for whom butterfly hunting meant only one thing: to see how many you could bag in one outing.

I was told never to trespass on a stranger's property, even if my intended prey flew there. I violated this iron-clad rule a couple of times and was suitably punished -- slapped once, hard, and once put to bed without dinner. That was the only law I had to follow. Other than that, I was free to chase away. It was a delicious pastime for a while, but new varieties were hard to find, and the familiar ones began to bore me, despite their unfathomable beauty.

I was too young to know that I was no Nabokov, especially when it came to butterfly collecting. His learning ran far deeper and he followed his pursuit for as long as he lived, wherever he lived. By my early twenties, I'd stopped hunting butterflies altogether. My genius was for laziness and procrastination, not entomology. And Quist the amateur was a lousy role model. He'd drink his way into a semblance of Long Island eloquence and grouse, "There's so little beauty in the world. We'll never make it ours." I was disappointed in him and the whole adult world. Could it be that grown-up resignation was the proper response to reality? By then, I'd convinced myself to let the butterflies fly free, so I let them go and got rid of my collection.

Despair

2011-07-17T10:13:00.008-04:00

The St. John's Wort, in full bloom this week, boils with bees. I can hear them buzz thirty feet away, bumbles of varying sizes intensely focused on the pollen-laden stamens in the bright yellow flowers. It's a miracle how big the two plants have grown this summer. After the mourning doves make their quick visit to the birdbath, the blue jays take over the yard, squawking as they dart from the maple to the oak to the birch and back again. Saturday mornings before eight are the quietest times of the week up here -- most folks work long hours at thankless jobs and relish being able to sleep in. Occasionally a small private plane will make noise overhead -- the Sussex County Airport isn't far -- or I'll hear the slap of a runner's sneakers on Lakeshore Road. The cardinal is especially talkative today but the rest of the birds ignore him.

I've been thinking of four men and their autobiographies. Or should I say "memoirs?" Memoirs are baggier than autobiographies; their subject need not be restricted to the writer's own life, they can be about anything or anyone an author has experienced or known directly. Which makes "autobiography" a narrow subset of "memoir." I prefer reading well-written, serious autobiographies rather than memoirs: it comforts me to see another human being trying to come to grips with this life, the strangeness and waywardness of it, to give it some shape and find meaning beyond mere biological existence. As I struggle to do the same, I take heart in the company of those who have written unflinchingly about themselves. I think, maybe it is possible to be honest. Maybe there is some value to self-consciousness. Maybe all is not lost.

The four men whose autobiographies continue to haunt me so are Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory), Stanisław Lem (Highcastle), Luis Buñuel (My Last Sigh), and Ingmar Bergman (The Magic Lantern). Two writers, two filmmakers, all four European, all exiles (for different reasons and for different lengths of time), all supremely accomplished in their fields. All intellectuals, although Buñuel and Bergman less so than Nabokov and Lem. All sensualists, fabulists, pessimists, and atheists. Their four autobiographies are, to my mind, among the finest books written in the last century. Each is a rebuke to the half-assed notion that great art can be explained by recounting the simple facts of an artist's life. It takes genius to transform experience into art. Nevertheless, these four lives too are compelling, in and of themselves. You read them with a shock of recognition: my god, these men are just like me! The same joys and fears, the same complicated familial relationships, the same estrangements and passions. Except, of course, that they are not the same at all.

Part of my love and admiration for these autobiographies comes from my partial identification with the men who wrote them. Their works were held out to me, first by my father, then my teachers, as exceptional and exemplary. Even if I was not able to emulate their work, I was encouraged to acknowledge the truth of their vision and strive to make something beautiful out of life's shit, just as they had done. Nabokov the Russian émigré who wrote magnificent English prose, Lem the Polish science fiction writer who disdained the genre and philosophized, Buñuel the Spanish surrealist who savaged the Church and bourgeois morality, and Bergman the Swedish dream-maker whose unforgettable films were discussed at the dinner table. Wild Strawberries, anyone?

I remember my introduction to each one.

I was fifteen, filled with the big cloudy emotions of adolescence, eating poetry like watermelon pickles, listening to Dylan, Die Dreigroschenoper, and Miles, having all that shite conflate in me the way it did in a million other middle class white kids back in the 1960s. As Quist used to say, that there's some serious enjambment goin on, poot. My old man was a defeated intellectual, done in by his own obviousness, blaming it on his upbringing. But he never stopped reading. I used to rifle through the contents of his briefcase: banded stacks of punch cards, a slide rule, a flow chart template, his date book, a couple of three-ring binders filled with instructional manuals -- FORTRAN, COBOL, the IBM 360 -- a tobacco pouch and then, of course, the books. One day I found a paperback in there called Despair. A pocket book. It had a blue cover with two photographic images of a man's profile from the shoulders up, the smaller superimposed on the larger, an unremarkable though nearly recognizable man. A cousin? An uncle? The author was Vladimir Nabokov. I asked my old man if I could read it when he'd finished. Why? Because my father was reading it. Because he told me how difficult it was thereby making it a challenge. Because Nabokov had an exotic name and a reputation for being risqué. Lolita was in the air back then. Because it was there.

I think it was the cover that attracted me. The head inside the head. Despair is a relatively short book and quite accessible. The story couldn't be more simple -- Hermann, a businessman with writerly pretensions, stumbles upon a tramp who looks just like him. He conceives a plan to commit a perfect murder -- he will kill the tramp, collect the insurance money for his own 'death,' and free himself to live a new life. But there's a catch. In reality, the tramp -- supposedly Hermann's doppelgänger -- looks nothing like him. The resemblance is all in his head. A perfect story for a sensitive teenager trying to establish his own identity, overly concerned with appearances, matching likeness to likeness, a prince of similes. A boy also seduced by the idea of starting everything over, from scratch, on his side of the mountain.

And then the most arresting thought of all -- if I were to meet my double, of course I'd want to kill him, insurance payoff or not. Just as there could only be one Hermann, despite his deluded efforts to convince the world that there were two, there could only be one me. I certainly wouldn't want my doppelgänger walking around! To construct a double life, that's art, if not Art. You can only go so far before you're found out.

When the kids read Nabokov today, most likely in school, they talk about Lolita, Pale Fire, the lectures on literature, perhaps Ada. They rarely ever mention Despair. I fell under its spell when I was fifteen and still remember the experience of being inside Hermann's (Nabokov's) head and mistaking his thoughts -- his aestheticism -- for my own. Cripes, it's still hard for me to separate the things I've experienced directly from those that others have experienced for me...

Years later, I found myself at the old Carnegie Hall Cinema, in the space that has since become Zankel Hall. I think it was summertime -- I know I was feeling a bit "off." The movie was, of course, Fassbinder's version of Despair, starring Dirk Bogarde. It wasn't a bad adaptation, perhaps slightly gay, the predominating color brown. A muddy film. Whereas Nabokov was never muddy. I had the eerie feeling I was being watched by somebody in the audience behind me. The air was close.

When the movie was over, I sat in my chair for a while and let the theater empty. I felt flushed. Maybe there was something wrong with the air-conditioning. After a few uncomfortable minutes, I got up and exited through the fire doors which let out onto 56th Street. There was the dirty city, filled with others just like me.

Sunken Meadow

2011-07-09T11:36:00.002-04:00

An image comes to me, of you, dancing in a yellow dress, slightly tipsy, wearing no make-up, your head thrown back, giggling. A straw hat upturned in the sand, afternoon sunlight through leaves, the scent of seagrass and salt air. Your shadow dancing too. Our shadows dancing with one another the way they used to. I forget if we were drunk or stoned, or both. I figure what's the use of words if I can't use them to conjure you. Shite. Isn't that what words are for? That's how I use music -- as my effin drivin' wheel. I wanna tell ya bout my baby.

I shut my tired eyes - too much daylight, too many hours peering at toxic screens -- and saw those kids, scruffy, heedless, not giving two turds about worldly matters. Money was worthless, authority sucked, politics was a whore's game. Wear a white shirt and tie? No way José. Own a home? Not in effin Plasticville, bub. I look back at those kids, the immortal ones, climbing their ladder to the moon, reaching for the poet's silver apples. They could smoke a pack of cigarets and run a mile, drink a quart of hooch and perform like effin princes. They could come all night long and eat cold pizza for breakfast. Sons-of-bitches.

I open my eyes in Sussex County, New Jersey. The cliché slides into mind -- the past is another country. I'm supposed to be living in the here and now. Yeah, right. A couple of weeks ago, Walker told me about the drunken girls at J.'s summer solstice party, gathered round the punch bowl, daring the guys to drop their pants and dip their meat. It was too much fun, the sloppy impersonal blowjobs, the spitting, the coughing, the laughing. J. told her, "I tried so hard I had tears in my eyes, but I couldn't get off. It was like it was happening to somebody else. These were all women I knew. Who cares? We were all shit-faced anyway." Walker, whose son is the same age as J., adds, "It's so sad, the inability to connect." I think to myself, maybe someday the drugs they use to treat loneliness will work.

The moon ain't silver, it's a balloon. Effin poetry -- don't believe any of it. Let's go back to Sunken Meadow in the late sixties, the palm of your hand on the flat of my back. It was so warm. Looking for shark's teeth and those flat red stones that bled against your fingers when wet. There was a story about those stones, how they were used by the native tribes of Paumanok to paint themselves before combat. Probably an apocryphal tale, maybe some truth to it. Just like most stories. I can tell you one thing -- I remember putting my lips to the birthmark on your brown shoulder and leaving my breath there.

What words? What music? The kids may be listening to the same tunes we used to listen to but they aren't hearing the same thing. They know more than we did. They know that we failed to change ourselves even as the world changed. They see that we didn't keep the faith. They've come to recognize our bullshit. When we tell them that we tried to love one another, they have no idea what we're talking about and couldn't care less.

High cotton

2011-07-04T10:43:00.008-04:00

I'm sitting under a gray Jersey sky, watching the robins cock their heads as they traverse the wet lawn, listening for worms. The oak-leave hydrangeas bow under the weight of their white blossoms, the St. John's wort has grown three times the size it was last year, and the sedum I just transplanted is thriving in the silver maple's shade. A big chipmunk munches the soft middle out of daisy blossoms. A couple of weeks ago I saw a groundhog strip the bark off the base of the three-year-old river birch on the far side of the slate patio. I set out a couple of traps, but only caught a raccoon. I let her go and she ran back to her brood under Sweet Lou's shed.

The catbirds have gone -- my neighbors trimmed the underbrush by the creek, upsetting the nest. A mixed blessing. I admire these fearless loud birds, but they behaved like they owned the yard and drove the other birds away. Today, in the morning quiet, I miss them. The light blue-gray clematis has wrapped itself entirely around the trellis, those ecstatic tendrils.

None of this is mine. I don't know to whom it belongs. There aren't any gods in this part of New Jersey, and the rule of law only pertains to relations between humans. I'm not smart enough to suss out Nature's laws, though I remember a few of them from my school days. Force = mass x acceleration. Newton's apple, Galileo's feather. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. The hypotenuse equals the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a triangle. The sun neither rises nor sets, the earth spins. The speed of light is a constant -- 186K miles per second -- and nothing can go faster. G, B, and D form the tonic chord in the G major scale. Chlorophyll enables plants to photosynthesize light. When you hit somebody hard, they cry and bruise. When you lose somebody, you lose them forever.

I daydream for a spell -- some days this green world merely seems a prelude to death. Last night, a group of delinquent teens played with cherry bombs and roman candles over by the little lake. The humid air filled with the smell of gunpowder. Dogs barked, car horns bleated, the jobless and disaffected danced around their bonfires shrieking. Wearing mad masks for a few minutes' relief from their dull routines. Hot dogs, cheap steaks, mealy corn, burgers, soda pop, cans of Bud. They're out there in the morning picking up the trash.

The groundhog has spared one echinacea and one black-eyed susan. The rest he's clipped down to the very stem. Sometimes I want to kill him. Other times, I simply grieve for my lost blooms -- who am I to counter Nature's laws? He eats what he eats -- he can't help himself, just like most humans, excluding the saints. I turn on the radio, Janis Joplin singing "Summertime." The cotton is high. Baby baby baby no don't you cry. These people, take away their appetites and you're left with vast uninteresting legions of zombies. They chatter about the weather, television shows, traffic, prices, their weight, their teeth. Exercise routines, celebrity gossip. First they tell you where they're going, then they go, then they tell you where they've been. It all sounds the same. Yellowstone, the Smokies, Disney World, Cape Cod, the French Quarter. It's their country and the livin is easy.

If you flat the dominant fifth in in a twelve-bar blues, those little nerves in your groin will go gaga. You'll sniff sex everywhere in the wet garden. The dogwood straining against its guidelines, the spreading rose-of-sharon, the fragrant fading blossoms on the upper limbs of the sweetbay magnolia. I'm sitting here, daydreaming. And for a few blessed minutes I don't worry what it means that it's Independence Day today.

Compassion bids me to go on reading

2011-06-28T07:11:00.004-04:00

I keep on reading but it appears as though I've read these stories before. The one set in the suburbs following the dissolution of a marriage. The one about the kid growing up poor. The one about sexual predation, an older man who abducts a young girl. The one about alienation, lovelessness. The one about a crime without a motive and a cop without a conscience. The one that would make a good movie. The one about two grandparents who live on a farm. The one told in the first person who is, of course, unreliable. Aren't we all, in the end?

I listen to Victoria's Requiem, surrounded by noise.

I get lost. These stories blend together, begging for attention like someone else's kids. This one is set in Northern California and it's about three boys. This one takes place in Afghanistan, one girl. This one happens somewhere unnamed but recognizable in upstate New York. Why not name the town? This one takes the reader from Edinburgh to Zanzibar, episodically. This one's in Adelaide, this one New York. Ah, good old New York. In the mornings on the ferry the old line comes to mind: "The city lay before me like a silver turd." Michael Palin, wasn't it? As the Hudson's greasy waters churn behind us, we turn away from the lavender bands of sky above Jersey. One place becomes another place in the imagination. London, Paris, Tokyo. Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans. Austin. Brooklyn. Postmarks on a bundle of letters stashed in a rotting trunk. Cairo. Oz. This little narrative is set in Zurich, then it moves to Berlin. This one takes place in Canada, unfortunately -- Canada's a hard sell.

"Convergence" by Jackson Pollack, a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces strewn across the dining room table. I was eleven, my brother was five. Johnson was in the White House. The kid across the street had blown a hole in his gut with an M80 to get out of the draft. We loved puzzles. Pollack was difficult but not impossible. Our mother would join us, bringing a pitcher of fresh-made iced tea, and try to fit a few pieces together. The strategy was simple -- start with the outer edge and work in from the corners. This was out on the island, when ordinary people could afford to live in Montauk.

I keep on reading these stories. They come via email in an endless stream of PDFs, Word docs. The one with the lyrical voice, the author a poet. The one that sounds like Beckett. The one without punctuation whose author likes to employ big words. The one told in dialogue. The one hammered out in short paragraphs. The one that goes on in purple prose for pages. The one in which the writer shows us how extended metaphors collapse under their own weight, exhausted. The one that wants to be artless and reads pretentious. The one that is truly artless, meaning unreadable. The ones written in workshop prose, undercooked and overspiced. Everywhere competence, learned behavior, and good manners. Their syntax moves me. Their voices bring tears to my eyes. Striving for authenticity, shown how to inject little doses of verisimilitude into the proceedings whenever their imaginations run dry, they struggle to make something out of words. Something that might last.

I look at a reproduction of a Turner watercolor, "Norham Castle on the River Tweed." I can barely make out the figures in the foreground, on the riverbank, under the shadow of the ruined tower. The picture's overall effect is sad, that I can tell, or is it me? Turner painted this castle often, in varying light, at different times of the day. That was his life. There was nothing else to it. The reproduction is lousy. You know, sometimes when going through these manuscripts, I'll stumble on the easiest words -- what does it mean, to "replace" or to "last?" To "love" or to "make?" What does it mean, to "lose" something, or to "be lost?" In New York City, the epitome of civilization, in the half-light, not knowing whether it is dawn breaking or twilight fading, I keep on reading.

Written in the Fourth Century BCE

2011-06-24T08:15:00.002-04:00

"The point of a fish trap is the fish: once you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. The point of a rabbit snare is the rabbit: once you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. And the point of a word is the idea: once you've got the idea, you can forget the word.

How can I find someone who's forgotten words, so we can have a few words together?" --

Chuang Tzu, translated by David Hinton, appearing in the introduction to a Counterpoint book published in 1997, The Inner Chapters. I would like to believe the first paragraph, but don't fully -- how can we moderns separate words from ideas? (How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?) But the question he ends his parable on is worthy of deepest consideration.

Written in 1973

2011-06-17T10:14:00.003-04:00

"It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten." --

Graham Greene, at the beginning of his fine late novel The Honorary Consul. I often find myself going back to Greene when I crave a dose of clean English prose and superior storytelling.

What do I do now?

2011-06-14T21:52:00.002-04:00

"What am I supposed to do?," said the young woman who had raised her hand first. The lecturer looked at her and tried to make a sympathetic face. I remembered what Pasolini said of Gadda, "His anguish is without remedy..." The audience was feeding on the lecturer's discomfort. This woman spoke for all of us. "What am I supposed to do?," she repeated, "I vote. I follow the issues. I shop my convictions whenever I can. But it's not enough. Those bastards are still in power." She was referring to the financiers working for Obama. Who knew that we had elected a black Reagan?

The lecturer finally spoke. "I'm an academic and a journalist. I'm not a leader of a movement. I can't answer your question. I will tell you this, though. After World War Two, back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the other side -- the Milton Friedmans of the world and his fellow conservatives -- who were in the minority and felt that their voices weren't being heard. They persisted in making their case and when events forced people to take them seriously, they were prepared to take over. It may be the same for you. Persevere, organize, don't give up. The pendulum will swing back. It always has."

This was more than a night out listening to a renowned economist expound on the fallacious reasoning and pure criminality that's caused our present woes. A frustrated audience murmured. They didn't want to believe that the individual, sacrosanct, asserting her will, acting as an individual, could not make a difference. No, these times called for collective action, something most Americans are allergic to. Unions, co-ops, committees, collectives -- we can't give ourselves over to them, can we? We'd rather sit in front of our little screens jerking off. It's true, there's a certain freedom in being left alone, knowing the cops won't come and take you away with your pants down around your ankles, but it's hardly the freedom of a citizen whose actions will build a better society.

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves. That’s one of Nietzsche’s big ideas. I thought to myself, responsible to ourselves for what? Isn’t that conscience, enabling us to look ourselves in the mirror and not puke at our own cowardice? Sure, there’s the inner freedom of consciousness, to move incorporeal among virtual worlds, but it’s a freedom hobbled by a necessary servitude to the body and its desires. Try being responsible to yourself. Good luck.

The young woman asked, “Isn’t there anything I can do now?” The lecturer replied that, while he understood her frustration, he couldn’t recommend immediate action. “Work for the long term,” he said, then asked for the next question. It was a lousy moment. Here we had been told a convincing story about the disgraceful behavior of financiers and their puppets in government whose cupidity and mismanagement led to hardship and despair for so many of us. We believed that this story would not be over until we got rid of the scoundrels and convinced a majority of our fellow citizens that the Free Market is a false idol. But the plot wasn’t headed that way -- it was headed the opposite way -- things would remain the way they were, only more so. The lecturer was provocative, he made us think and feel, but he couldn’t tell us what to do, so we sat there and stewed.

I thought to myself, this story would never be over. The struggle would go on forever, as long as humans inhabited the planet. The powerful few would prey on the plentiful meek. Occasionally the tide would turn but the new order wouldn’t last long. Too many people would be too busy being responsible to themselves to act for the greater good. A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article buried somewhere in its internet grave. It was a cri de coeur from Alain Badiou, written shortly after Sarkozy the preener got elected in France. In it, he wrote, “...if ordinary citizens have no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics." That’s a nice word, “emancipatory.” How true.

It's not all in the genes

2011-06-11T06:47:00.004-04:00

Sometimes it’s the city that gives me a headache, its sidewalks shining in the afternoon sunlight, bright as beach sand. J. is behind me, I hear her say, “It’s hard to breathe.” I don’t know if she’s talking to me or to herself. Around the corner a couple of delivery boys leaning on their hand-trucks make faces and drink sugar water. Blocking our way. They watch a boy and a girl tumble off the curb and head across the street, bare brown arms glistening. On days like this in the city nothing comes together. It’s too early for drinks upstairs in the cool lobby of the Kitano, too early for the weekend bus ride across the river. I’ve been trying to stitch some of the pieces of my professional life together but they want to stay apart, ragged remnants of a long week. The big picture has gone out of focus. Nothing but pixels up close, blobs of color, maybe people, maybe cars or trees. I’m beginning to see book covers in my dreams blend together. Why should I give a damn what people read? Look at the shite they put in their mouths...

Last weekend was a bust, a couple of spiritless days driving around New Jersey gathering evidence that our civilization is choking itself to death. Shop-Rite, A & P, Home Depot, Target. Fat-arsed Americans sitting in their air-conditioned cars waiting for an asteroid to land on their heads, their silly dogs slobbering all over the windows. Idling in the great clogged arteries of Bergen County, Passaic County. J. tells me that psychiatry has gone all wrong, with its emphasis on biology, on treating misidentified syndromes with drugs, on evolution. "The sociologists and cultural anthropologists won't even talk to them. They know that not everything is in the genes."

The rains will come but no god. The rains will wash the poison out of the air and the air will cool. But that still doesn't mean we'll be able to breathe. I think to myself, relying on purely biological explanations for human behavior is a neat way to absolve us from working to change and improve. There was a time when psychiatry scolded Americans for our repressions. I was a kid, it was a conformist society, a restive generation wanted to be free. It lasted a couple of years, proving too scary a pursuit for most of my fellow citizens.

Listen, poot, I don't accept this history. There must be another history. There had to be more to it than dope, rock 'n roll, chafed elbows and a couple of chipped teeth. There had to be more to it than personal gratification. Try stitching these things together that want to stay apart -- movements, ideas, events, personalities -- into something whole, something that fits. It's damnably hard. This history is as fragmentary as jarred memory, as messy as your little shite life. Sadly you desire to see the whole thing, laid out before you like a clearly marked map, one on which you can trace every step of the journey you've taken, from that tacky Cape Cod in Nassau County to a cottage in the wilds of New Jersey. Slowly move your dirty fingernail along the red highways, the black roads, the green rivers. Some trip. And, always along the way, there you were, wanting to apprehend the big picture, see it all from stem to stern, desperate to believe it had meaning, taking those baby steps that turned into adult stumbles. You wanted to take the Kierkegaardian leap but you could never step away from your effin shadow.

Big clouds piled up in the west head this way. Rain and hail throttle the tense traffic on Route 80. Some drivers pull over onto the shoulder to wait it out. A daredevil bored with his life in the left lane hydroplanes off the road into the center divider, bounces against it a couple of times, spins around, then comes to a crashing halt against a signpost. Miraculously, everyone avoids the accident and drives on. There must be another history.

Pickles

2011-05-31T21:04:00.007-04:00

Anybody who knows me knows I like pickles -- sour, new, kosher, dill, sweet, bread & butter, half-sour, gherkins -- the whole gamut. I can hardly eat a sandwich or a burger without a pickle on the side. It's in my nature -- call me Pucker, call me Sourpuss. Gimme salt, vinegar, allspice and dill over chocolate any day of the week.

So at lunch today I walked over to Lex and 35th, a few blocks from the Other Press office. It was a gorgeous early summer day, cloudless, and a Tuesday no less, Monday having already passed in peace. Pedestrians were strolling easily, as if their very legs knew they would only have to work a four-day week. The long weekend had been a joy. As for Memorial Day itself, forget it. An American Idol caterwauled for the cameras while the dead lay in the ground, unmoved. Sometimes I can't believe the country I was born into, its tasteless celebration of death, its commercialism, its warmongering.

But today I wasn't thinking thoughts like that. I was headed to D'Agostino's, that cramped, overpriced simulacrum of a modern American supermarket chain indigenous to New York. I usually go there to buy bottles of seltzer since they're still a lot cheaper than at the delis and corner variety stores around midtown. I had brought a sandwich from home for lunch -- thin slices of barbecued marinated London broil on a yeasty roll -- and thought that I'd get a small jar of pickles to go with it. D'Agostino's devotes about six linear feet of shelf space to pickles with a predictably lousy selection. I hemmed and I hawed. I had never tried the B & G brand "Sandwich Toppers New York Style" before, and everything else looked worse, so I added a jar to my basket and went to check out. This store hires the friendliest women to work the registers. They make you feel like you're in a small town general store. It's a little like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I paid for my water and pickles and sauntered back to the office.

I sat down at my desk, opened the windows -- yup, I can open my windows on the 24th floor and almost reach out and touch the Empire State Building -- set out my lunch, and took a big bite out of my sandwich. Mmm. Then I opened the pickle jar, extricated a slice, and bit into it. Shite. It tasted like nothing that had ever grown out of the earth. Oh shite. It glowed an iridescent yellow-green. This nasty shite was meant to kill things. A radioactive salt-lick. My throat constricted and tears came to my eyes. "New York Style" my arse. No pickle ever made in New York tasted like this. I spat it out, took a long swig of seltzer to cleanse my palate, and closed the jar. It took me a while to settle down.

I studied the label on the jar. In small print it read "Product of India." What? They're manufacturing this shite in India and shipping it here? B & G, a firm headquartered in New Jersey, a brand that we used to buy when I was a kid out on the Island, they're the bastards perpetrating this culinary crime? Indian kirby cukes? Indian toxins? Not to mention the amount of carbon it took to transport them here.

I sat their seething. A pox on globalization. "New York Style" pickles made in India for sale in New York is an effin insult. Screw you B & G, screw your pickles and your relish and all the other crappy condiments bearing your label. Screw you. I finished my sandwich, walked over to the window and looked westward to New Jersey. If people hadn't been walking on the sidewalk below, I would've thrown that jar out as far as I could.

Instead, I scratched another company off the list of those I'll buy products from. It's getting to be a long list but I don't care. Life is too short to eat shite, especially when it comes from 13,000 miles away.

BEA 2011

2011-05-29T09:47:00.003-04:00

Here are a few of the takeaways I got out of this year's BEA (Book Expo America):

★ Carry three full flasks with you into all meeting rooms -- you never know when an emergency will arise.

★ How a book works in the imagination is far more important than how it feels in the hand.

★ You haven't had a good time dancing unless you've wet your pants.

★ Bookselling today: the wisdom of age, the energy and fearlessness of youth.

★ Ignore prophets, heed practitioners.

★ If you lose your voice, don't worry -- most people aren't listening anyway.

★ Avoid foreign journalists.

★ Only talk technology with a stranger after they've told you what books they love. By name.

★ Savor the moment, it will not keep.

★ If publishers don't stand for something, why are they in the business?

★ Paper is a glorious substance. Plastic is not.

★ Don't criticize others if you can't empathize with them first.

★ This abundance of good books won't overwhelm us if the curators do their job.

★ Jonah lived inside a whale, not the other way around.

★ Everyone is beautiful but Tyra Banks is more beautiful still.

★ Publishers can't manufacture genuine buzz but they can exploit it.

★ Go app yourself.

★ If you love books you're my ally even if we disagree.

★ The savants opining about the future of the book -- remember that their balls are brass, not crystal.

★ It's all about sex. Isn't everything?

★ Information wants to be free but people need to get paid.

★ Don't ask me how my show is going if I'm standing here talking to you.

Written between 1330 and 1332

2011-05-20T06:48:00.002-04:00

"...People often say that a set of books looks ugly if all volumes are not in the same format, but I was impressed to hear the Abbot Kōyū say, 'It is typical of the unintelligent man to insist on assembling complete sets of everything. Imperfect sets are better.'

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, 'Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.' In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters."
-- written by the Buddhist priest Kenkō, appearing in Essays in Idleness: the Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō, translated by Donald Keene.

My soul thy name would laud

2011-05-19T16:46:00.003-04:00

This is how the mind works. I was walking through the tunnel underneath New York’s Grand Central Station that connects the Lexington Avenue subway with the Times Square shuttle. It was mobbed at three-thirty in the afternoon because of the downpour outside. Hot and humid. Close and gray. The mind closed off, tense, imperceptive of anything except its own discomfort.

Sitting at the end of the shuttle was an aged black man making music by drawing a bow across a saw held between his legs. He was bending the saw to achieve the melody, accompanied by the ethereal sounds of a synthesizer coming through a little Peavey amp. He was playing the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

I didn’t stop walking -- the train was there, its doors open -- but something happened. I choked on my breath and tears welled up in my eyes. I felt the sweat in my armpits. I saw myself as a young boy, sitting on the living room rug, watching the black and white TV. The Billy Graham crusade was on. My mother and grandmother were sitting on the couch. It was raining then too. My wrinkled shirt, my open mouth. The dog’s blanket next to me.

The boyhood image faded. It came to me then, the effect of that hymn on my mother a few days before she died. She turned to the sunlight in the bay window and whispered, “I don’t understand how God could care about a little soul like me.” The sentence that has dogged me for years. Effect, not affect.

I turned my back to the other passengers on the train and stared straight ahead. I saw my face in the window, with its tears. I wiped them away with the back of my hand. Sentimental, superstitious fool. The old man was still playing on his saw. How great thou art. My reflection looked back at me and nodded. Lichtenberg’s quote in Auden’s commonplace book: “A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it...” What was it called? A Certain World. In an uncertain world, I far prefer the autumn to the spring with its hopeless rain. Oh this flood of tears. How great art thou?

The doors closed and the music ceased. A volume of ragged air pressed against my eardrums. Some big guy with curly hair wearing a black jacket loomed over me from behind. His pale face wore a beatific smile in the window above my left shoulder. Had he heard the music too? The sighing of the saw soloing above the celestial electronic meanderings of the synthesizer. The martial Billy Graham. Nixon likee Chinee food. There’s nothing wrong with faith even if it’s not my faith, a love benign that sustains life. My mind slowed down. I thought to myself, I can go now.

I left the train behind and walked through yet another tunnel, this one lined with preachers handing out leaflets proclaiming the impending Judgment Day. Haitians, Koreans, Dominicans, whites, old and young, one shouting in Creole. I thought to myself, this poverty, it will never end. All these people, including me, each one alone for the time being.

Written in 2011

2011-05-11T07:54:00.002-04:00

"Quantum information is like a dream -- evanescent, never quite existing as firmly as a word on a printed page. 'Many people can read a book and get the same message,' Bennett says, 'but trying to tell people about your dream changes your memory of it, so that eventually you forget the dream and remember only what you said about it.' Quantum erasure, in turn, amounts to a true undoing: 'One can fairly say that even God has forgotten.'" --
from The Information by James Gleick, a writer of great clarity and imaginative depth, published by Pantheon, edited by the brilliant Dan Frank. In this passage Gleick cites an article by the IBM information scientist Charles H. Bennett.

Bats

2011-05-08T09:30:00.002-04:00

When I was a child growing up (they call it growing up!) on the Island, I would sip clover honey on summer afternoons, lie under the rose 'o sharon abutting the Paterson property, muster my imagination, and fly up into the white oak that stood guard above Laurie's garage. There, amongst my brother crows, I'd sit during the hottest hours of the day, looking down upon the fences and hedges that kept our properties private. Water shimmered in above-ground pools and chrome-plated grilles blazed in the sun. Once in a while, I would leave my perch and soar back and forth above three or four yards at once, not once flapping my limbs, instead relying on the rising currents of warm air, like a circling hawk. I could see far, from the water tower on Arlington Avenue to the Capobianco's corner property, with its fig trees and vegetable garden. I could see a pack of dogs running over the double-lot that had been cleared to build new homes. I had no past to encumber me. The smells of mown grass, roses, chlorine, mock orange, gasoline, and barbecue rode the air that held me aloft. I saw everything and smelled everything. When the air got too thin, I glided back to the oak's shady branch to catch my breath.

Back then, there was never any fear of falling out of the sky. My mother looked up at me flying and waved encouragement. My friends swam and played ball, ignoring me. All of the neighborhood kids were blonde, except for Rosie, but I was the flyer, the one who could swoop down and shake the tops of the fruit trees. The others were grounded. When the summer sun moved west toward the tall dark city I grew chilly and gently flew to the ground near the back patio to retrieve my gray sweatshirt. Like a flicker, I watched ants follow a trail of crystalized honey across the walkway between the stoop and the trellis rose. They moved like little men.

At dinner time, my mother called my brother and me to come in and wash up. The dog always showed up first, panting, crying for hunger's sake. The two of us followed, asking, "What are we having tonight?" Four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie. Cling peaches. A salad called miseria. I ate fast, wanting to go back outside where the fireflies hovered in the strawberry patch by the back fence. My abdomen was aglow under the translucent skin just like theirs. I was burning. I could see the blood pulsing through the veins and capillaries surrounding my full stomach. My mother put her hand over my navel and my belly gradually cooled and dimmed. Then it tickled. My mother's hands were very small. She smiled with those small teeth of hers but in the darkness I could barely see her. Bats darted and dipped above the pool, filling their mouths with insects. I wasn't frightened of them but my mother was -- one time a bat had skimmed past her head and brushed against her hair, now she couldn't bear being outdoors when they were around. She used to say that my brother and I drove her bats.

I asked her if I could fly one more time before bed. I could tell she didn't want me to, but she said yes anyway. I leapt up, held my arms open wide, and, with a great arching of my back, took off into the solid air. I ascended maybe thirty, forty feet above the ground and looked back down at my mother's silhouette as she went into the lighted house. In those days, I wanted to live with her forever.

Another belief system

2011-04-23T19:55:00.002-04:00

I'm glad no one else believes like I do. After all, my beliefs change all the time. Sometimes I believe in a kind of Marxist Christ à la Pasolini, the emaciate reciter of the beatitudes, befriender of the poor. Sometimes I believe in the Christ who wields a sword, the judge who will separate the condemned from the elect and put an end to endless ambiguity. Sometimes I forgo believing the divinity bit and see Jesus as Jefferson did, a charitable sage, a philosophe par excellence. Someone whose words exceed his deeds. Sometimes I believe Jesus too was seduced by the Devil and returned from the desert to rule this earthly realm, only to fail. Hunger and thirst will do that to you.

I'm hopeless. Sometimes I believe the world can be perfected, if only I could eliminate all the arseholes in it. Sometimes I believe that the world is what it is and everyone is mechanically living out their genetic destiny. It's all code. Sometimes I believe in free will, the Great Man theory of history, and the Declaration of Independence. Other times, I believe we're mired in randomness, that there is no choice, just happenstance, and to pursue happiness is a sham junket. Sometimes I believe in mathematics. Other times, I believe numbers are just a form of poetry, a way to describe beauty, hopelessly idealistic. Sometimes I believe in predestination, but then I realize I don't believe in heaven or hell. Sometimes, I believe that we are merely a mess of biological urges -- feed, fuck, fear, and flee. Other times I believe we have an eternal spirit, one that will come back to haunt this place.

Sometimes I believe money will make me happy so I play the lottery, cheat my neighbors, stockpile cash in a 401K. Sometimes I believe money is shite, the root of nearly all evil, a waste, mammon, Baal. Sometimes I believe in sex, other times I believe in chastity. Neither has made me happy for long. Sometimes I believe that love conquers all, that love outlasts death, that love can move mountains. Other times, I believe that love is as fleeting as the scent of a rose on an early June breeze and can only be experienced in rare epiphanies. Sometimes I believe in Spaceship Earth, other times I believe we are grounded, the world is flat, and there is no place else to go. This trashpile is our only home.

Sometimes I believe I'm an ignorant son-of-a-bitch and sometimes I believe I know it all. Makes no difference if I talk loud enough and carry a weapon. Sometimes I believe in the inevitable March of Progress -- that androids are the next logical phase in the evolution of our species, that men and machines were meant to mate. Sometimes I believe humankind will eliminate itself in an orgy of warfare and lizards will rule again. Sometimes I believe the Internet -- the hive mind -- is superbly analogous to the individual brain's wiring. Other times, I believe the internet is a modern Tower of Babel and will lead to the disintegration of the self. Sometimes I believe that work is good, that it gives me a reason for being. Other times I believe the yoke is too burdensome, that I should shirk it and live like the lilies of the field. Sometimes I believe that the fundamental things all peoples hold in common can overcome superficial differences. Sometimes I believe that there is no way to bridge the chasm between cultures, religions, languages, world-views, and that we are doomed to everlasting conflict and competition. Sometimes I believe in music, Bach, jazz, effin rock 'n roll, but after I've sated myself, I fervently believe in silence.

I believe I will live forever under the earth. I believe in getting lost, never turning back, stubbornly moving forward like U. S. Grant at Cold Harbor. I believe there is no way to avoid tragedy even though my day-to-day existence proceeds in farce. I believe in the Nicene Creed unless asked to recite it, then I see its absurdity and believe I was brought up in a certain church and that's all there is to it.

I believe that others are steadier in their beliefs and I believe that makes them dangerous. I believe in community, that life cannot be sustained without mutual respect, a shared vision of the common good. I believe every individual is unique and belongs only to a community of one. I believe in the primacy of pain as a motive force. I believe in grace, healing, compassion. I believe we can ride off into the sunset together. I believe we'll never see the light.

Ofttimes I believe in nothing. I follow the brook back up the mountain to its source, stumbling over rocks, roots, fallen limbs. I get stuck in boot-deep mud and slip. It's raining but I get up and keep going. I'm not aware of anything around me, anything overhead. Maybe emptiness. My emptiness. Sometimes, as the poet said, it's only nothingness that can comfort us. I believe that.

Vigil

2011-04-22T22:03:00.003-04:00

We're supposed to keep watch tonight like the disciples in the garden. No falling asleep on the stone floor, and no kneeling cushions either. The nave is cold and damp. A row of columns screens the flickering candles. I know this space intimately -- even so there is something eerie and unsettling about it. There's an old man standing stock still in the shadows beyond the columns at the doorway to the sacristy. His eyes follow me. I couldn’t make out his features when I came in, all I could see were his shiny black brogues, but something about him was familiar. There must be something wrong with his body, the way his legs are locked and his trunk bends slightly forward. A stiffness and a silence. I can't even hear him breathing. Perhaps I should be afraid of him.

I haven’t been here in decades. But it's all the same, like the contents of a childhood reverie: the Paschal candle, the wrought-iron lectern, the Christus Rex hung above the marble altar, the wound in the statue's side, red paint for blood. The pew where our family sat, halfway back on the right-hand side, neither conspicuously forward or back. The carved wood stations of the cross set under the narrow stained-glass windows. The latin inscription "Ora pro nobis." I think to myself, who’ll do the praying now? And for whom? May the souls of the departed rest in peace.

I once wanted this life, the unwavering performance of the sacraments, filled with psalmody, adorned with the outward symbols -- chalice, wafer, lavabo, chasuble. Here is where I fell in love with the English language, repeating those spells from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. Here too is where I fell in love with music, the boy with his ear to the organ chest, the thrum of moving air like the breathing of a god. Not God. It was sensual place, a place of arousal. The vivid floral arrangements, the sweet smell of incense, the swish of shiny fabrics on the floor as the erect and earnest boys and girls marched slowly by, affecting the appearance of innocence, carrying candles, crosses, garlands. There was no innocence in church, only cleanliness. It was sexier than a brothel, more exciting than a dance club. You closed your eyes to pray but your eyes didn't stay closed for long. You opened them a hair's breadth and peered at those praying nearby. The one in front of you with chestnut hair and a navy pinafore. Your secret.

You'd think we could keep watch for one night. Read from St. Augustine's Prayer Book, ponder death and resurrection, reach out toward the limits of endurance and understanding. You'd think that the callow youth, the young man on the make, the roller of big cigars, they would have folded by now, those impostors, leaving you alone with yourself, here in the semi-darkness, abandoned and helpless. I hear the sound of a footfall, followed by something hard and hollow scraping against the stone steps. It's the old man treading across the chancel into the sanctuary, dragging a cane behind him, swaying from side to side. Still no sound out of him. "Father," I say, aloud, "Is that you?" He stops. He turns his head so I can make out his profile. It could be him. It could be me.

Holy week

2011-04-17T06:10:00.001-04:00

The city stands for nothing. Dissipation, sex-for-cash, noise. You can’t play loud enough and god knows you don’t have the cash. Inside the Greek diner it’s bright but the countertop reeks of disinfectant. They serve a thin brown coffee that doesn’t do anything to warm you or wake you. No one comes to the city thinking of failure. It just effin happens, poot. With these hands I will cling to you. A chilly mist is being blown sideways down Thirty-second Street pushing you westward. Hey, failure can happen anywhere, kiddo. With this heart I will sing to you. You trudge toward the Hudson head down, keeping your eyes on the sidewalk like an animal tracker. A group of high school kids in hooded sweatshirts ambles in the opposite direction laughing. The city is too safe despite all these strange people living on the same island.

You head uptown on Broadway to Forty-fourth, maybe to go over to Birdland -- it’s five o’clock, the big band is about to play. Mercy, mercy, mercy. There won’t be any New Yorkers at the bar. Sure, the snub-nosed latina hostess and the bartender with his throwback pompadour and polished nails, they’ll recognize you, but the rest of the crowd will let you slip into your imagined cloak of invisibility. You’ll look around, clutching a bourbon and water. No, Birdland ain’t no church, nothing here is gonna confirm your belief in the power of love, even if the music takes you out of yourself for a little while.

Romantic attachment is weak, real love takes work. You get into a scuffle with the powers that be, you’ll find out who comes out on top. There’s more to it than buying a girl a drink. There’s more to it than walking the dog. Too bad our bliss has to miss out like this. Go to sleep in your solitude, wake up with a sourness in your soul. Turn to music, to drugs, to stuffing your face full of food. You get fat and ornery, but who cares? Nobody’s running after your arse any more.

More than anything you want to talk to someone who understands your plight, who’s been through the same thing, a religious upbringing. A loss of faith. You wanna go down to the pier and get on the ship that’s sailing for home. Wherever home may be. Somewhere else.

Won’t be Bermuda, won’t be Ghana. Won’t be Fiji, won’t be Rotterdam. You wanna sing to your mother, “Your little boy is coming home.” As though that would somehow dispel the mystery of the life she gave you. Won’t be Jerusalem, won’t be Rome. Your mother’s dead, she can’t hear you. It’s cold and gray outside the club. Across the street is that little Italian bar where you used to wait for someone just like her. Your little boy is coming home. You go inside, there’s one seat left. Perhaps you should wait some more. They pour a Primitivo you’re fond of, but wine won’t make much difference. This waiting won’t lead you to a philosophy of life. Neither will television or the movies. Books used to, but not any more.

You’ve arrived at the end of the world. Nothing to do here but try to objectify your life. List the things you’ve done and seen. The places you’ve been. The people you’ve slept with. Look at the list. It’s a joke, isn’t it? This is the shite that’s gonna get buried with you, assuming you get buried. More than likely you’ll go up in flames, leaving nothing behind but a little pile of ash. Kept in a canister on a shelf for a few years, then tossed. Go ahead, be objective. Remember o man, from dust thou art and to dust that shalt remain. Now that’s verifiable -- unlike the rest of your childish theology.

Treasure island

2011-04-16T11:48:00.001-04:00

I’ve taken a break these past two weeks. Too much stimulation can be just as boring as too little. I was sick and tired of so-called professionals making statements about the book industry. They sounded dumb. I listened to them present data -- random bits of suggestive data -- then watched them throw up their hands in the face of it. “We don’t know what it means yet.” No, we don’t know what it means yet that half of genre fiction is now being purchased in ebook format. “But we suspect it means something.” This was a big meeting of big minds. Thank god there were windows and outside the windows pigeons, a city, and, toward the west, the sky above New Jersey. I was moved to tears by my own inadequacy.

Perhaps everything will turn out okay. All those unfortunates who have lost their jobs will find new ones. All those empty storefronts where bookstores once thrived will be converted into homeless shelters. Every one of those hapless college-educated middle class Americans with a story to tell about their interesting and unique experiences will find an online self-publishing service to manufacture a couple of hundred copies of their “book.” And the earth too will heal -- I think it’s a safe bet that the rocks and minerals will be here long after we humans are gone. Effin bone meal.

It was such an unpleasant experience -- like a visit to the dentist, the one with oily skin who peers into your rotten mouth and grins -- to have a committee of MBAs present data as holy science. “We know exactly who downloads our books, what they’re reading, when they’re doing it, and how much time they’re spending doing it.” And what will the MBAs do with all this great data? Pitch bestsellers to their consumers at the optimum times of the day via email. In their minds, this represents an advance in the art of publishing. “We now know who is buying our books. We never had this information before.” This was said with a straight face to a room filled with publishing professionals, many of whom nodded in assent. The ones who weren’t asleep or checking their email.

I sat and doodled on the little white pad that had been provided. More speakers came and went. I thought to myself, this is what it has come down to -- a series of bad decisions and procrastinations masquerading as progress. Who among us is in charge of his or her own fate? During coffee break we chatted. “How is business?” A few were honest. “Business is lousy.” No one could say why. Perhaps it was the weather, or gas prices, or tsunamis, or the Middle East, or the inaction of Congress. Maybe it was the repeated recitation of headlines (as though they accounted for something), an activity that absolved one from thinking.

But that’s not why I took a break from writing this blog. The real reason lay inside me. I was being stubborn with myself. Books sickened me, just to look at them, their covers holding such promise, but their insides a blank. I wondered how I had gotten into this business. And how it had led to that big meeting of big minds. I wanted the world of books to be simple, like it had been when I was just starting out. I wanted to crawl under my bed with a flashlight and read Treasure Island again, while the rest of the family watched television. It was summer, the window was open. I could hear crickets. The dog lay in the opposite corner of the bedroom. The air was still. I was Jim, our next door neighbor was Long John Silver. I could smell the saltiness of the sea. When the flashlight grew dim, I’d shake it a few times so that it brightened for a few more minutes, enough to finish a chapter. My childhood was a happy one. I will always take joy in the created world.

There were other books, of course. Gulliver’s Travels, The Iliad, Ivanhoe. As I list the cherished texts of my boyhood, I come to realize how little I have traveled in fifty years. And how much of the imaginative capital those books bequeathed me that I’ve gone and squandered in the hawking of lesser works. This regret made me pause.

After midnight, before sunrise

2011-04-02T05:54:00.004-04:00

She haunts me, she does. A Japanese woman -- in her late seventies, early eighties -- walks alone across a field of debris. In front of her is the ocean, behind her the mountains, around her nothing but ruin. Small and wrinkled, she wears a blue parka, black pants. Her eyes are open, tears run down her cheeks. Is there any clearer portrait of human fate? This was where her life took place, but it has all been washed away. It exists now only in her mind. What should she do? Look for some scrap of evidence that it was real? Start over? How can one start over at her age? So perhaps it is best she give up. Maybe commit suicide and get it over with. Nearby, the photographer aims and shoots just at the moment when the woman, unprotected, opens her mouth to let out a sound.

Ah, the photographer. The one who is not in the picture. So the woman is not alone. He cannot be that close to her, to have gotten so much of the surrounding debris in the frame. Why is he here? He must be a professional photojournalist -- a local person, someone who knows this woman and lived in the place that used to be here, would not intrude on her so. A neighbor would be too stunned, too grief-stricken, to frame a picture as formal as this. For the photojournalist, this is the assignment of a lifetime, to root around the remains of human habitation after an earthquake and tsunami for scenes of devastation. Of desolation. He is a lucky man -- his pictures will be seen all over the world.

I look at her, caught there at the end of life, and think of the fate that awaits us all. It is early morning here in New Jersey and the half-mad mockingbird is trilling for all he's worth, looking for a little love. After two days of rain and intermittent snow, I can smell the earth. I can smell spring. I think to myself how all living things want to keep going. Half a day away, the survivors of the disaster in northeast Japan are eating dinner if they're lucky, or preparing for sleep. I wonder if the woman in the blue parka is still among them. I wonder if they can sleep. Remember sleep? I wonder if it matters, if any of it matters.

The thing with two heads

2011-03-27T20:38:00.005-04:00

Call it what you want, "artificial intelligence" or something like that, but it's really boring and it's leaking out of my iPhone, seeping through my consciousness, and settling like a pool of toxic sludge at the base of my central nervous system. It's certainly not news. On a beautiful early spring day like today here I am, trying to keep up with it, the chatter about technology, getting more and more bogged down under the falsity of it, while the returning mergansers and goldeneyes court out on the cold lake, as they have each year at this time. It's Sunday, it's Lent, and part of me remembers when I used to believe that I could partake of Christ's passion and get saved. Those days are gone. Unlike the ducks, I stopped knowing what I used to know.

A great unbalancing heaviness between my shoulder blades pushes down on my spine, making it hard to breathe and difficult to get up and walk. I can barely put on my shoes. I want to shout out, Lord, make me an effin pallet on the floor. Don't tell me that robots and harlots pray to the same god. It is unseasonably cold, I need a hat and gloves. Under a cloudless sky, the water is sapphire.

This stultifying pitch for technology, as blank and unbudgeable as a beige wall, oozes out of the Apple app store and the innumerable files stored in Google's cloud, it bleeds from sounds and images hawked on the idiot box, across video screens and out of earplugs, fixed in memory, messages so multitudinous as to become monotone, virtual projections of two worlds -- out there and in here -- made indistinguishable and boring by their ubiquity and frequency. This river of shite flows newly minted from public sites and private sources but the novelty wears off quickly, even if it leaves its mark, burning out the retinal nerves, short-circuiting the neurons behind the brow. This morning I've got a problem with my fingertips, they're numb and discolored and I can't feel things the way I used to. I run them along the cold deck railing and they scarcely tingle. What's happening to my body? Maybe I'm turning into a gadget, like Lanier warned.

The techno-savants and apologists for progress call it "intelligence," but the word only underscores how unintelligent we have become. They pronounce that a singularity is on the way, when humans and machines will become one. They must not feel things anymore either. Maybe their bodies are dead. Why else would they want to shed them and live disembodied forever? Why remake The Thing With Two Heads?

At the urging of our priestly caste, these effin machines don cloaks of faux-kinesis and parade around as though they were going to force an essential change in human nature, alter the way we communicate, improve the way we think. Hah. After decades of planning and refining, millions of dollars invested, and thousands of man-hours spent by some of the best programmers in the world, humans were able to create Watson -- a machine just "intelligent" enough to answer trivial questions on a TV show. Let us praise its speed and accuracy, even as we ask ourselves: is this triumph cause for celebration or worry? Only among those with graduate degrees. They made the thing and they're the ones it'll replace. As for the uneducated, they're hungry and don't care while the merely literate are dazzled for a couple of minutes before forgetting what they've seen and going back to ESPN or Glee. Me, I'm headed off into the woods, where the Wallkill flows north into New York. I have so few beliefs left, I can't help clinging to this one -- that knowledge begins in the body, and the body is part of the world.

I would rather live in a cave talking to shadows than break bread with an effin robot. When a computer bends over, spreads its cheeks, and dares me to wipe its dirty arse, then I'll consider the singularity is upon us.

This lunar beauty

2011-03-19T17:26:00.008-04:00

I'm sitting in Dante's, a flabby pizza parlor out on Route 23, listening to Sinatra sing "Summer Wind" -- my fickle friend -- thinking that there's no way to get away from The Voice, not here in the Garden State. The silk mills may be dead but the American songbook goes on. Yesterday it was an oppressive seventy-seven degrees in Teaneck, sitting in traffic on Route 4 behind a five-car fender-bender blocking the left lane, the heat a harbinger of hellish days to come. I saw three Chrysler vans and two Japanese sedans, families with children, cops and EMS personnel, two of the drivers Orthodox Jews talking on cell phones, no one seriously hurt -- thank god -- just dazed and confused. Maybe it's that old devil moon at work. Last night, I walked around the pearlescent lake watching this lunar beauty keep watch over the homes of the working class, their lights turned down low, too many men and women out of work, those who have no history, just appetites and emotions.

It was warm enough for a barbecue. Another one of A.'s boyfriends came over and started a fire in her backyard grill. This one drives a Ford Explorer, the last one rode a Harley. They've all been soft-spoken and polite. He waved and invited me over for a Corona. "Name's Tom. Beautiful evening, huh?" We talked about an accident that had happened Thursday morning on Route 515 -- a girl crossing the road to board her school bus was clipped by a car coming up the hill. "People drive too fast up here," he said. "You know they wanna put speed bumps on Breakneck Road? But it keeps getting voted down. You know what the excuse is? It'll slow up emergency vehicles."

I told him, yes, I had heard something about the council's deliberations. I'd also heard that Tennessee Gas Pipeline wanted to pump water out of our lake to use in their drilling operation. They're building a segment of their 300 Line Project less than a mile south of here "to serve the growing demand for interstate natural gas transmission service in the northeastern United States." What corporate bullshit. The pipeline runs through some of the last undeveloped tracts of land in the whole state -- including the Wallkill National Wildlife Refuge, the Kittatinnies, the Newark water supply reservoirs, acres of farmland, Stokes State Forest, and a handful of so-called refuge areas, all supposedly protected by the Highlands Act. Who cares? Apparently "our" need for gas transmission is "growing" and we need some big profit-making enterprise to "serve" that need. This is the gas extracted from "newly accessed" Appalachian and Marcellus shale. Forget wind, forget solar, forget nuclear reactors, especially now with the crisis unfolding in Japan. Our need is growing. Forget conservation. Our need will always be growing.

Tom was poking around the charcoal, he had a good fire going. He started talking about the earthquake and tsunami. "Those poor people. It just goes to show you never know. You live your life like it's always gonna be the same and a wave comes along and washes you away." A. came out of the house with two more beers but I didn't want any more to drink. She made an offhand comment about not knowing god's will. I asked myself: to whom should we pray? The effin god of tectonic plates? After what he did, the bastard?

Historians claim that the massive Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shaped the Enlightenment. How will the feeble-minded respond to the calamity in Japan? The right-wing governor of Tokyo Prefecture called last Friday’s earthquake and its resultant tsunami "punishment from heaven" because the Japanese had become greedy. Two hundred thousand years of human evolution and this is what you get -- idiocy. This from the same politician who denied the rape of Nanking.

Okay, the world is contingent -- you remember: we walked out one fine morning and our world too changed for no good reason. It happened in New York on September 11, 2001. One minute the sky was blue, the next minute people were falling through it to their deaths. Sure enough, within hours some punk preacher was scolding us, claiming that a handful of terrorists toppling the World Trade Center was the Lord's payback for our transgressions -- homosexuality, abortion, drunkenness, materialism, whatever. How easy for the deranged to believe that an angry god had rained fire down upon us, and not a bunch of fanatics with box-cutters and their own vision of heaven.

I told my neighbors about Rie who lives in Tokyo. She's been keeping tabs on all my friends in Japan -- emailing daily reports of deprivation, heartache, confusion, but no deaths among our immediate circle, even among the booksellers of Sendai. After the quake, I went and took Susan Neiman's often brilliant Evil in Modern Thought off the shelf and started reading it again. I'm a human being. I need to account for these events that destroy lives, that kill fellow humans, whether caused by a band of savages or by the slippage of one continent under another. I was looking for the motive in the rock, the dance in the circumstance, the intention in the act. I figured effin philosophy has to got to have some usefulness, even if it can't help me live. It has to explain something, doesn't it? Shite.

I took another beer from A. and drank. My thoughts were no concern of hers, she was just being neighborly. In a few weeks, she'd probably have another boyfriend and Tom would be hanging out at the OK Tavern looking for a Friday date. The moon had risen above the treeline to the northeast as he arranged a bed of white-hot coals for cooking. "We've got an extra steak -- you wanna join us?," he asked. "Thanks, but I've got plans. Much appreciated." I thought to myself, everyone has a history just as every place has a history. I bade them goodnight and headed up the road toward a dark house.

A failed education

2011-03-13T23:15:00.004-04:00

I tried a bunch of different things to get out from under the mundane shite. I traveled overseas. I smoked dope and drank. I ate and ate and ate and ate. I buried myself in a woman and flung myself into the salty sea. I watched animals intently for a clue but they weren't meditating, they were just being themselves. I took painkillers, antidepressants, blood pressure medicine. I developed an exercise regimen. It began with a walk down by the river. The walk depressed me. The river flowed southward toward the Atlantic carrying garbage. I smoked two, three packs of cigarettes a day. Then I rolled my own -- that was pretty cool. I drove around the rain-slicked towns of northern New Jersey -- Garfield, Passaic, Totowa, Hawthorne -- looking for poetry in the ugliness. I sat in front of my computer staring at amateur porn and played with myself. I went to school, wrote papers, took tests, got good grades. I still don't know what I learned. When I had to, I learned to cook. After a while, I bought expensive cookware and installed an industrial-grade range in my kitchen. Pea soup tasted the same. I got a pet dog, a mongrel named Bert, watched him sleep, listened to him snore. It looked like my mundane shite had gotten inside him. I got a job loading freight onto trucks, boxes of frozen turkeys and lobster tails. I gave half my check away to Johnny Stash who played the numbers for me. I went to the movies, I watched the idiot box, I went to Broadway musicals and Shakespeare festivals. I frequented jazz clubs and bought season tickets to the New York Philharmonic. I read and read and read and read. I put on vestments and carried incense in midnight processions through shadowy St. James, an effin thurifer who thought he wanted to be a priest. I figured I was qualified. "I'm human," I thought, "I can do this." It didn't work out. Maybe I didn't have the right degree of frailty.

Finally I got a job selling books. I learned that there was no difference between Sidney Sheldon and William Faulkner. Two novelists, one a Jew working in television, the other a Southern squire working in movies. You could read one or the other, depending on the weather. People came into the bookstore on their lunch break, people who read for pleasure. Some liked Robert Ludlum, others Graham Greene, some Jane Austen, others Barbara Taylor Bradford. Sergeant Beef was just as good a detective as Porfiry. I learned that books didn't change people's lives. Secretaries looking for the latest Judy Krantz, ad account executives buying Trevanian, penurious New York intellectuals saving up their shekels for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, all of them looking for a few hours out of the shit-stream. Pricks or saints, they would always stay true to themselves. Selling books, I made just enough money to buy peanut butter and pay the bus fare. I caught glimpses of happiness back then, but mostly I just felt virtuous, above the shite. I wasn't.

I tried bookselling and it was a good try. But it had its limits. I wasn't ready to be an organism, I wanted to worship something. I sought "meaning" wherever I went. A girlfriend pressed on a vein in my neck and I passed out. Afterwards, we split a bottle of blackberry liqueur and went to see a movie. Fellini's Amarcord, traipsing through the snow to get to the little theater on the edge of town. When the snow melted, the mundane shite was still there. I tried getting away from it on Long Island, in New Jersey, in Connecticut, upstate. The city was full of it. I saw people carry it with them, in their coats, in their bags, in their effin fanny packs. When I rode the ferry I smelled it coming across the river like a low fog. I tried closing my eyes and picturing a tropical island, rum and girls, a steel band playing Jimmy Buffett songs. I squeezed my eyes as tight as I could, but when I opened them, nothing had changed. I volunteered at the soup kitchen on Third Street, I helped paint the parish house. I danced to Al Green, I boogied to Neneh Cherry. I tried sports: tennis, golf, soccer. When my knees gave out and my achilles tendon snapped, I bet on sports. I gambled. I went down to Atlantic City, out to Vegas, up to Mohegan Sun. I played the ponies at Belmont Park and Aqueduct and the trotters at Roosevelt Raceway and Monmouth Park. I tried living well is the best revenge and let's get lost. I tried how to win friends and influence people and the seven habits of highly effective people. I took notes out of Zig Ziglar and Deepak Chopra. I rode the Cyclone in Coney Island after which I staggered down the boardwalk and threw up. Pale red-headed people strolled by speaking Russian. I couldn't believe how many immigrants were moving to Brooklyn.

I stood there and crossed myself. I tried to articulate exactly what it was that ate into my heart. I wrote verses, manifestos, love letters. I painted little watercolors of sailboats and fishing trawlers docked in Freeport. I got a pair of binoculars and studied birds, their habitats and habits. I went to Cape May and counted hawks. I started compiling a life list. It's in a drawer somewhere. I tried gardening, like my mother before me. Roses, dahlias, peonies. Marigolds at the base of the stoop. I wept at the beauty of the blooms. I wept at their fragrance recalling the perfume of weddings, funerals, life's big moments. The scent of everlasting love. A vase on the end-table, a wreath on the door. Mint, basil, chives in a window box. I turned over the soil and raked cow manure into it. Earthworms wriggled over my bare feet. Songbirds sang. Real shit was good. Living things fed on shit. "This is where it stops," I thought. "I can't do this any more. The world is shite, accept it and go on." So I did. I can't say it's done my heart any good.

What time is it?

2011-03-10T06:38:00.004-05:00

I was having drinks with J. last night at the 'inoteca between Park and Lex. It was good to be out of the damp evening staring into a glass of Italian wine. We were talking about the book business. Again. These days there's a helluva lot more talk than business. Maybe that's the way it should be. She told a story about a friend of hers who had written a book -- she sighed, I sighed -- and gotten it "published" by one of those shyster outfits that claims to be a publisher even though all they do is post your unedited manuscript on a website and wait to produce an on-demand trade paperback when someone actually orders a copy. Maybe a relative, or a friend. J., who knows how hard it is to get people to pay attention to any kind of book, was aghast at her friend's naiveté. "She actually thinks they're publishing her book. She said to me, 'They're so supportive.' So I asked her how they were marketing it, and she said, "They've got it up on line and they're very supportive.' I feel bad for her, but, hey, everybody's a writer these days. You can't save people from themselves."

M. joined us. He works a block away and looked tired. Another day of dealing with the shite: the Borders bankruptcy, Baker & Taylor's stupidity, the effin inefficiency of Books-a-Million. He ordered a wine and poured out his guts for a spell. When his wine came, we toasted old friends and the happy demise of crap accounts, dopey companies that deserve to go under. What can one do? I took pity on M. Here was a deeply sensitive reader, an intelligent and morally-centered man, a real mensch, who now spends his days dealing with clowns and apes pretending to be bookpeople and businessmen. What a way to spend the twilight of your career.

We talked about disorientation and adaptation -- how the industry has changed so much in the last few years, especially for old dogs like us who grew up in the days of brick-and-mortar expansion. The days before Jeff Bezos showed up at an ABA Bookseller School out in Washington.

J. told another story. It took place at a hotel on one of her business trips. She was sound asleep when the room phone rang and woke her up. Some woman with an indeterminate accent on the line sounded irate. "This Citibank? This Citibank?" J. said no, you've got the wrong number. "No no. This Citibank. I need to talk to someone at Citibank." After half a minute of listening to this crazy shouting about Citibank, J. simply told the woman off and hung up. It was still dark out but she was now wide awake. "So I figured I'd do my morning work-out, half an hour on the treadmill, fifteen minutes Pilates, a couple of weight routines. Don't laugh. It keeps me sane and it keeps me in shape." M. and I said not a word. "After I work out I usually go and get my first coffee of the day. So I went down to the street, still dripping sweat from the exercise, and walked over to the Starbucks a block away. Guess what. They weren't open yet. And this is a place that opens at 5:30 AM. I walked back to the hotel lobby and asked the desk clerk what time it was. He stared at me and answered, 'Three fifteen in the morning.' Very calmly, just like that. I couldn't go back to sleep, so I spent the next three hours reading."

M. had had a similar dislocating experience recently. "I was out on the West Coast and had to get up the next morning to catch a 7:15 flight back to New York. So I set my iPhone for 5:15 and went to sleep. Slept like a log. The alarm goes off, I get up, take a shower, dress, pack up the rest of my stuff and go downstairs to check out and grab a cab to the airport. I get to the desk and there's nobody there, so I ring the bell and this guy comes out of the back office. I ask to check out and he asks me where I'm going. I tell him the airport and he says, 'You know it's two-forty-five in the the morning, don't you?' Of course, I had set my alarm for 5:15 but the phone was still on East Coast time, so it really went off at 2:15! What could I do? I was already showered and dressed, so I didn't want to go back to bed. Like you, I stayed up and read. Caught up on my New Yorker articles."

We talked for a while about Larry Wright's terrific piece on Scientology and Louis Menand's fine essay last year on depression and psychopharmacology. J. asked M. what time he had -- M. was the only one of us wearing a watch. He said, "Twenty after." J. roused herself and said she had to get to a dinner date in ten minutes. "Lovely to see you guys -- let's do it again soon." We paid, walked over to Park, kissed and hugged, then went our separate ways. Here it is, in the middle of the night, and that's all I remember.

A good coffee in New York

2011-03-05T21:25:00.002-05:00

J. is an intellectual but she knows how to laugh. We were having breakfast the other morning up at St. Ambroeus on Madison Avenue with Alessandra and Sylvain, the New York-based correspondents for Corriere della sera and Le Monde. The discussion turned to the madman Qaddafi and how the various European countries were responding to the revolt in Libya. After some cracks about the London School of Economics having to be renamed the "Libyan School of Economics" and the undocumented but widely suspected business partnership between Qaddafi and Berlusconi, Alessandra said, "He's a psychopath."

Sylvain asked, "You know what is the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic?" We looked at him. He continued, "Some French comedian put it this way. He said, a neurotic is someone who thinks two plus two equals four and it drives him crazy. A psychotic is someone who believes two plus two equals five and is perfectly okay with it." At this J. let out a gleeful howl. "He's so right. Bravo!"

We ordered four more Americanos and let the talk drift to John Galliano and his anti-semitic tirade, the one that got him fired from Dior. Alessandra was from Hungary and Sylvain is French, and they're both Jews. She asked him if he wasn't outraged by Galliano's "I love Hitler" outburst. "No one cares, do they?," he responded. J. added, "Perhaps we should do a book called In Defense of Anti-Semitism. Written by a Jew, of course." Part of this was pure impishness, part was serious. "We need Jews to become critical thinkers again." But Alessandra couldn't quite allow her indignation to subside. "If nothing else it gives me something to rage against. I admit it feels good." Since I was the only non-Jew at the table, I figured I'd let this bit of conversation roll on without me. Either that, or tell a Catholic joke. Too bad I didn't know any good ones.

An older woman sitting at an adjacent table glared at us, frowning with typical Upper East Side hauteur. I stuck my tongue out then grinned at her and she quickly looked away. Alessandra had just written a little piece on her blog about Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking With Einstein. It seemed as though we were going to get into a debate about the value of memorization. "They don't teach by rote anymore, do they?" "But there's no reason to. I call my children all the time but I have no idea what their phone numbers are. Not with this." Sylvain took his cell phone out of his pocket and placed it on the table. He pointed at it and said, "This is my memory now."

They began complaining about their younger colleagues' ignorance. "They don't know anything of the world. No art. No history. No culture at all. They seem to be smart and they work hard but they are empty." I thought to myself, so much is changing, we're in our late fifties, early sixties, the world of the young is not our world. Not worse, not better, just different. Alessandra turned to J. and asked her if she knew the Yiddish expression "alter cocker." J. said that she did not. "Well I don't want to sound like one, but I can't help it. An old fart. Complaining about everything." J. laughed again. "Not you, not ever." She was laughing at herself too, at all of us, retreating into a kind of benign nostalgia. How easy it is to talk about one's childhood -- it gets easier as you age -- and claim that there is no desire to return to that particular Eden, the one before television, computers, space walks, and nuclear warheads. We may have been here before, but no two mornings have ever been the same, no matter how poorly we remember them.

Facing the sun

2011-02-27T12:44:00.003-05:00

This morning I look at my hands and think of all the things they've touched, all the things they've held, and I wonder how it is that I came to these riches, to this fortune in experience.

This cottage lies on an east-west axis: the front faces south, the back north. Two different climates, two different worlds. The front is bright and dry -- the roof is clear of snow and ice, the gravel driveway is wet with melt. Bare azaleas and lilacs peek through the shrinking snow bank abutting the road. A couple of weeks ago, a red-tailed hawk snatched a squirrel off the maple stump near the living room window and flew off across the lake as crows protested in the limbs overhead. This morning, cars go up and down the short block between County Road 638 and Lakeshore Drive West, as neighbors in wool caps walk their dogs and wave. Across the street, Sweet Lou is out assessing the damage to his roof from last Saturday's windstorm. The flashing around the chimney was torn off and some tiles are missing. Human beings are always doing something worth watching.

The backyard is cold and private. It lies in shadow -- on that side of the cottage, the roof still carries its burden of snow and tall icicles hang off the sagging gutters. They will need to be repaired come spring. I cleared a path off the deck around to the front walkway, but the rest is under at least a foot of glazed snow, hard-packed, impossible to budge.

It's not a big back yard -- let's say forty by a hundred-twenty -- but it never ceases to show me a new face each day: the oaks and locusts, the end-of-winter woodpile, the raccoon and deer, the stone wall with its ever-widening crack. The magnolia, the winterberries, the frozen birdbath. The metal hammock frame greener than a pine tree. Sometimes a curious jay will perch there. The canoe lies partially covered in sunlight at the far corner of the yard, out of shadow -- while in my mind, I glide across the sunlit water of June. I like to watch the wind get caught in the tarpaulin-covered patio furniture and the view of the lake through the pergola.

Now that the little red house on the adjacent property beyond the back fence is vacant, there is no human activity to be seen or heard. The young family who lived there were renters, they left more than a year ago and no one's moved in since. The squirrels and chipmunks prefer it that way. So do the cardinals, titmice, blue jays, and sapsuckers. And, in some ways, so do I. For no one can see me, lost in my thoughts, sitting at the window, just breathing. No one cares whether I have any thoughts at all.

I have tried hard to avoid the oncoming simile, but what else do I have but language to grip reality with? It's true, I am like the cottage -- wearing two faces, one outward toward the world of men, one inward toward the enclosed world of mind. I've tried not to make too much of a mess of it, the knitting together of these two dimensions, hoping to wear the appropriate expression on the proper occasion, depending on the direction I'm facing. But for you, you who have seen me in shadow, for you I have tried to turn and turn again, and face the sun.

Written in 1950

2011-02-26T09:47:00.006-05:00

"My own (moral) program can be chiefly stated. I send it for what it may be worth to you: To write badly is an offence to the state since the government can never be more than the government of the words.
If the language is distorted crime flourishes. It is well that in the unobstructed arts (because they can at favorable times escape the perversions which flourish elsewhere) a means is at least presented to the mind where a man can go on living.

For there is in each age a specific criterion which is the objective for the artist in that age. Not to attack that objective is morally reprehensible--as evil as it is awkward to excuse.

Bad art is then that which does not serve in the continual service of cleansing the language of all fixations upon dead, stinking dead, usages of the past. Sanitation and hygiene or sanitation that we may have hygienic writing." --

William Carlos Williams's letter to Robert Creeley, dated March 3, 1950, reproduced in the book Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, edited by James E. B. Breslin, published by -- who else? -- New Directions. I've been reading an excellent new book by Wendell Berry on Williams, which has driven me back to the poems and remembering the years I walked aimlessly around the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, stopping across the street from the First Presbyterian Church to gaze upon the house where the good doctor lived.

Fallin' off the floor

2011-02-21T11:59:00.002-05:00

Let's follow the craven twenty-year-old, with his long stringy hair and smelly clothes, sniffing his father's razor, taking in the awful sweet perfume of dessicated flesh, the tiny specks of his old man, now dead, rubbing his thumb along the blade, feeling for a flaw, then finally nicking the tip of his ring finger, letting the blood run out into the sink. Let's watch him as he stares into the mirror and makes faces at himself, looking for the essential soul inside the plastic frame. He rubs his temple, squeezes a blackhead, rubs a growth on his lower lip. The vanity light is severe. His eyes are red -- from sleeplessness? from crying? Let's watch as he runs the cold water and douses his face. It looks like he's trying to come to.

When you're young you can't be honest about this shite, the fact that the life you imagine and the life you lead are two separate things, far apart, and there really is no way to bring the two together except in art. Effin art. Philosophy is something you try for a while. Sex is a wonderful ameliorative, but it leaves you lonely. Food, sports, drunkenness -- it's best to test them all and be convinced that each is wanting. Then you're free to realize the absurdity of being human -- a creature called to sing, dance, paint, recite poetry, to celebrate the very fact of being alive, while the house goes up in flames, protesters die in the streets, patients cry out in the cancer ward, and an old man stares uncomprehending at bondage porn just days before his death.

Let's watch the kid -- he's not yet a man -- rummage through the old man's chest of drawers. Let's see what he finds there. There's a gavel inside a felt sack, inscribed "President, NYC Chapter, DPMA, 1964 - 1966" and a beat-up copy of Roberts Rules of Order held together with a rubber-band. A flashlight and two spare "D" batteries. He clicks the switch on the flashlight but it doesn't work. The batteries inside have leaked, the contacts oxidized. Another useless piece of equipment. Some bound volumes of falling apart sheet music -- Czerny, Dvorak, Chopin, Studies for the Pianoforte. Flannel shirts, saggy underpants, yellowed handkerchiefs. A bar of soap. The kid looks at each item in its turn, then puts it back in its place in the drawer. Little does he know how much these things matter to him, these effin totems. A scene from a movie comes into his head, the funeral procession in Fanny and Alexander. It takes only one happenstance to change a life completely. A letter unanswered, a violent storm, a third martini before a ride home.

I never had control of my life, he thinks, I only thought I did. This is what will become of me. The blood pounds at his temples again -- the fear is back, the fear that he is falling into a deep depression. Not just the ordinary sadness and disappointment of everyday living, but the black abyss of despair. We watch him gather his coat and hat and gloves. He runs to the back door, flies out, stumbles down the stoop, and grabs the garden gate to hold himself steady. Dry heaves. It snowed again, another six inches. The world is white and cold. He gags and spits. He wanted his life to be different than this.

Pieces of silver

2011-02-20T11:13:00.004-05:00

The week after New Year's my house was burgled. I came home, saw the damage, called 911 and some blond thirty-year-old uniformed cop came by. His boots were muddy and his cheeks were flushed. He walked around with his chest puffed out, leaving dirty wet footprints on the wood and carpet, then took out a little spiral-bound notebook. "What did they take?" As best as I could tell -- the place was a mess, mattresses and pillows thrown in a heap, drawers opened and contents scattered, the closet emptied -- the only thing they got was a chest of silver flatware. It was old, mostly brought over from Europe by parents and grandparents, and I had no idea of its value. "A box of silverware," I said. Whoever broke in must've been disappointed -- I don't have a TV or stereo, no jewelry or fancy optics. My neighbors, whose cottage was burgled too, lost their big flat screen job and some speakers.

The burglars tried to jimmy the front door, then the sliding glass doors in back, but I've got a deadbolt on the one and keep a rod in the slider's track. You can't get in that way unless you break the glass, something the crooks were unwilling to do. I was glad of that: wintertime is no time to have to repair a glass door. Instead, they -- who knows if there was more than one? -- came through the bathroom after breaking the crappy plastic lock on the little double-hung window there. Why is everything plastic these days?

The cop looked up and asked how much the silver was worth. I said I had no precise idea, but that the lot had to be worth a few hundred dollars, maybe even more. It was solid silver, not silverplate. I said, "It's value is mainly sentimental. They were family heirlooms." He said it was probably druggies from Paterson who did it. "They look for something they can sell or melt down easily. It's probably someone we know." Of course, when he said Paterson, I knew he meant blacks or hispanics had done it. As though there weren't enough white drug addicts within a ten mile radius of Highland Lakes to fill a pool of suspects. If you read the police blotter in the local rag, you realize pretty quickly how deeply drugs have taken hold up here among the young whites -- heroin, methamphetamines, coke, prescription pills. Arrests are routine. But for the cop, the problem was dark-complected outsiders who had to come from Paterson, up Route 23 to the otherwise safe suburbs, and then back again. Bullshit. I found myself silently defending the burglars, who, after all, had only taken the silver and not broken any windows. I gave the cop a couple of clipped answers, then watched him get into his cruiser and read from his notepad into the two-way radio.

Sweet Lou came over to commiserate. He launched into one of his tirades about the way the world was going to hell in a hand-basket. "I heard your house was broken into," he said, "What did the cops say?" I told him the cops said they would get back to me in a few weeks. He looked up with a crooked smile, "Don't hold your breath, John. The cops up here couldn't catch a cold in an epidemic." He told me that he kept a gun in the house, just in case something like this happened to him. He ranted for a couple of minutes then sputtered out. He looked old and spent. This winter has been hard on Sweet Lou, trying to keep the driveway clear of ice, having to rake heavy snow off his roof, needing to stock up on staples before the big storms. "In the old days, kids would come around the neighborhood with shovels looking to make a couple of bucks. Nowadays, they're off doing their own thing. That's why everybody's got a goddamned snow-blower. Otherwise all the guys my age would keel over with heart attacks."

I invited him in for a quick brandy but he demurred. "I'd like to, John. But I've got to drive down to the vets' to pick up Rosie." Rosie is his daughter. She's been working the reception desk at the animal hospital part-time after being laid off by the school district. She had to get rid of her Acura in December and now lets her father drive her to and from work. Last time I saw her, she was still hopeful. She said, "This craziness -- laying off teachers, shutting libraries -- is only temporary. People will see what's happening to their kids and the pendulum will swing back." I said, "I hope you're right." Neither she nor I could say why people were acting so stupidly or how long the cutting madness would continue to grip our so-called leaders. I once asked Quist, which is harder -- interpreting the past or predicting the future? He said, "It's the same damn thing, poot. It's the same damn thing."

Borders plight redux

2011-02-15T20:44:00.003-05:00

The other day I gave ten reasons why Borders should go under, all of which remain valid. Even so, there is always another side to a story. Here are some reasons why Borders’ demise is bad news:

★ Loss of jobs. It is shocking and depressing to contemplate the human cost of having so many people thrown out of work, especially those hourly employees who kept faith and took pride in their individual stores even while management was selling them out. They deserve sympathy and aid, especially given the high number of unemployed already out on the street. Then there are those poor souls who have been selling and servicing the account for publishers. What will become of them?

★ Loss of common space for readers to gather. Borders' superstores had become community social centers, where people from all walks of life, united by their love for books, could sit together, drink coffee, read, write, converse, and enjoy each other’s company. Despite the rhapsodizing of the techno-savants over the creation of an “online commons,” it is nothing compared to the real thing -- a shared physical space and a shared physical experience. Shuttering these spaces will impoverish the communities who depended on them.

★ Lost sales at healthy retailers due to the dumping of inventory in a liquidation sale.

★ Loss of diversity in the retailing eco-system. As poorly managed as Borders was, it did provide an alternative for those who didn’t like Barnes & Noble’s cookie-cutter merchandising or live near an independent bookstore. Borders did bring physical books into the otherwise barren wasteland of American big box retailing.

★ Loss of tax revenues for local jurisdictions.

★ More power accruing to Amazon. Amazon already owns the largest slice of the retail book business pie by far, a condition it exploits to extract favorable terms from publishers and bully states into backing down on sales tax collection initiatives. Amazon is a big, efficient virtual selling platform but a lousy marketer (except for their own products, i.e. the Kindle) and it couldn’t care less about the content it hawks, only the profits it generates. It adds nothing to the browsing experience and relies on algorithms to make customer suggestions. It has the personality of an ATM. Who wants Amazon to control half of the trade book market?

★ An increase in vacant storefronts, those filthy eyesores strung along America’s highways.

★ An increase in the odds that Books-A-Million and Hastings will survive and limp along doing what they’ve always done. That these two backward-looking and unappealing retail chains are still in business is a sure sign that inertia is the most powerful force acting on the marketplace.

★ Loss of display space for the fine handiwork of all the talented cover artists and designers who make books look good. Jacket art is still one of the most compelling factors in getting consumers to pick up a book. A thumbnail online doesn’t come close to the real thing.

★ A substantial ratcheting up of the fear about the future of books and a new wave of mournful, or celebratory, articles, blog posts, and ‘think pieces’ stating that physical books and bookstores are dead. Ugh.

10 reasons Borders should croak

2011-02-13T10:18:00.002-05:00

1. To remind publishers that their industry consists of making books first, spreadsheets second.

2. To allow a host of talented book people to get back to work in adapting to new technologies and financial terms, instead of nursing a sick and contagious retailer.

3. To serve as an object lesson in the consequences of bad management.

4. To reduce the amount of linear shelf space devoted to books in dozens of overbuilt markets across the country.

5. To vindicate all of the fine book people who originally built Borders and worked for the company during the first three decades of its existence. They are the ones who watched in horror as a succession of greedy fools and outside operators -- men and women with no feeling for the culture of books -- presided over the company's decline, with no thought except for their own compensation.

6. To give independent booksellers a chance to reestablish beachheads in communities that were overrun by chains.

7. To prove, yet again, that repeating the retail sloganeering of the day -- "category management," "just-in-time inventory," "synergistic merchandising" -- accomplishes nothing unless you actually do what you say you're going to do.

8. To show exactly how worthless a highfalutin mission statement really is. (One sure sign that a corporation is sick at the core -- the bullshit mission statement. An honest mission statement would read: "Our mission is to make a profit, pure and simple." Unfortunately, Borders couldn't even carry out that mission.)

9. To illustrate the pernicious effects of untrammeled growth, the same "growth is good" ideology that led to the mortgage meltdown and financial crisis of the last four years.

10. Finally, to end the silly speculation, the enervating news stories, and the distracting pronouncements of impending doom. We don't need to be reminded these are tough times -- we're living through them. But it's bracing and ultimately inspiring to see the wheat properly separated from the chaff.

The pursuit of happiness

2011-02-12T17:28:00.003-05:00

We sat there in some nondescript Irish pub in midtown in the middle of a cold January afternoon working on a neon tan, reading the close-captioning on the TV over the bar. Some pale dude wearing a toupee was interviewing our fellow citizens. Funny to see New Yorkers complain about the weather, how Bloomberg had failed to clear the streets. He spends too much time in Bermuda, not enough in City Hall. He should never have been elected for a third term. When was the last time he picked up a shovel? I was drinking a Bushmill's neat, J. nursed a whiskey sour. Neither of us was particularly happy. What the hell was effin happiness anyway?

We should have been back at work, but work was boring. Putting out fires eight hours a day and every two weeks the Corporation deposits a couple of thousand dollars into your checking account. Doing time just like the Bible said we would. In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread. With just enough money left over to buy a little fun.

J. told me how she'd misheard Lucinda Williams sing, "Once you were obsessed with me, you wanted to pay my bills." I guess it's true that good sex is less important than positive cash flow. I sympathized but Hoboken is my town and Sinatra is my man -- "A world without love is a world without life." Cripes, I've heard enough about money these last few years to last a lifetime. Unless the arseholes in DC muster enough votes to return us to the gold standard, money will remain a system of belief, the only one we've got that everyone subscribes to. "I can't afford love," J. said, "Everyone in New York sleeps around. It's worse than fickleness, it's like there's a wall of boredom out there everyone's trying to scale with sex. It's gotten so I hate going out." Maybe resignation is the key to happiness. If you rein in your expectations, you won't be disappointed. Live a small life, poot, and no one will notice you.

Happiness is the shite they sell you when they sign you up for your first tour of duty. After you've been deep-sixed more than once, you learn your lesson, you practice your all-purpose ironic pose, and retreat into the shadow world of scripted reality. You tell yourself, I can do this, I can climb the mountain beyond this mountain. You convince yourself the mountain is real.

J. wanted to know why she'd fallen so far from the world of her parents. "They were happy. Not perfect by any means, but they kept themselves together. They really liked to be with each other. It's funny when I look back -- by our standards, they had so little money then and yet they had everything they wanted." They were showing demonstrators on the TV, somewhere in Africa. Where the hell was Tunisia anyway? I remembered Dizzy's tune and wondered whether or not he had written it there. Those rioters looked a helluva lot happier than the boozers sitting around us. They knew what they wanted. They wanted to get rid of a corrupt tyrant. I bet the ones that had jobs made less in one year than we did in two weeks. What were we complaining about? Snow on the ground.

J. looked at her watch and urged us to go back. "I've got stuff to do." I paid the tab and glanced again at the TV. "You know," I said, "I hate it when somebody else wins the lottery." J. was already out the door fumbling in her bag for a cigarette.

The Winter Institute is not an institution

2011-02-05T14:28:00.006-05:00

When journalists characterize the state of book retailing in the U. S., it sounds dire: bully Amazon reigns supreme, Borders is croaked, Barnes & Noble is desperately trying to reinvent itself, mass merchants have captured the bestseller business, and independent bookstores are a Lilliputian piece of the market, a mere shadow of what they were scant decades ago. Worse, printed books are going into the dustbin of history – soon everyone will read digital files on an electronic device, thereby upending the tried-and-true business model (whatever that is). In other words, paradigms are shifting, the sky is falling, and experienced bookpeople have become fossils. I read it in the newspapers, in blogs and online journals, in tweets from conference floors and corporate halls. Everything is utterly transformed, from acquisitions to production, from contracts to distribution, from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Do the prenatal crouch, baby, and suck your thumb.

If this story is true, why were five hundred independent booksellers gathered in Washington, DC the third week in January and why were they in a good mood? I saw some of them dance late into the night, high on their own animal spirits, singing karaoke, feeling their oats. Were they nuts? Others were more guarded, taking to their hotel rooms after late dinners, curled up with dreams of the Next Big Book, happy to be amongst their own kind for four warm days. Those days were full. They petitioned their lawmakers, they celebrated a strong holiday season, they taught each other and learned from each other, they looked unflinchingly at the new technology -- and decided it would help them, not hurt them. I thought to myself, it's a good thing that these guys aren't reading their obituaries. They don't know that they're obsolete.

And why were there so many young people there? These twenty and thirty somethings, with their Blackberrys and iPhones, their fearlessness and optimism, their talk about curation and community, trying to tell me there's a future in bookselling. The graybeards I understood -- after all, I'm one of 'em. You come to hoist a little shot of nostalgia, talk about the old days, see if you can still stay up past midnight and get dixie fried. But the young people weren't there to rehearse the past. They might've be standing on their elders' shoulders, but they were looking ahead. When the elders looked up, they laughed and sang and kicked the nostalgia bit. "Save the reminiscences for another day," they seemed to say, "there's work to be done. We've got books to sell."

Even more improbably, why did three-dozen publishers -- including all the majors -- show up with their ARCs, sponsorship dollars, and a host of authors to show off at the Thursday evening cocktail party? Was it only because they were scared shitless that Borders was about to go belly up, leaving them with even fewer places to shove their books under the public's snout? Clearly the indie presses were at home amid the scruffy crowd. Hell, they thrive on idiosyncratic individualism, and had given up on Borders long ago, when there were still some real booksellers out in Ann Arbor. But it was fairly instructive to see Simon & Schuster, Random House, Harper, Penguin, Hachette and Macmillan playing the courting game after years of giving preferential treatment to the chains, those dying behemoths. Nothing like a crisis to remind you who your real friends and allies are, is there? Take another little piece of my heart, now, baby.

Listen. The reason we nerds and crazies are in this business is because of the joy we take in discovering something on our own. Ecstasy. We know it to be real. The rest is commerce, neither good nor bad, necessary yes, and meant to be conducted honorably and honestly, but no reason for celebration. We celebrate the books, the authors, the voices that give us voice. We came to Washington, DC at the end of a 'low dishonest decade' to give lie to conventional wisdom. We had our moments. Now we can go to work for another year.

A publicist's lunch is never free

2011-01-30T10:42:00.002-05:00

K. looked at me with those big mahogany-colored eyes and said, "That's the way it is, you stop having sex, you get fat." In the restaurant's back room, a fire crackled in the hearth. There was a big holiday party back there giggling and squealing. "Lately I've been getting these nosebleeds, I think there's something really wrong with me." She looked a little like Rosie Rivera in the seventies, Kewpie doll cheeks, honey-haired and freckly. She'd been fired almost a year ago and still hadn't found work. Human resources, an effin joke.

"It's the principle of the thing." Now she was talking about being a vegetarian. "I saw this documentary on chickens. It's unbelievable what they do to them." I thought to myself, one should not be considering the welfare of livestock when sitting down to eat lunch. There are already too many moral decisions to be made during the day. I couldn't take having to make one more. "My brother agrees with me that it's wrong to eat meat. He tries to stay vegetarian but it isn't easy in the Army. He's stationed in South Korea." She showed me a photo of the young lieutenant. The Korean War ended the year I was born. I'm fifty-seven. We're still there. Amazing what we citizens accept as normal, the reach of the American military.

K. loves her brother. What we have in common are books, the odd intimacy of reading the same authors. Woolf, Murakami, Sebald, Geoff Dyer, Alice Munro, John Berger. A mutual befriending. Inhabiting adjacent rooms in the same imaginarium. It's not easy to make an articulate case for the authors we love -- too often we resort to gushing, hyperbole, or bald declarations of fealty -- but K. has got the knack. She can make a pitch as literate and subtle as the work she's pitching. How many book publicists are capable of that? Maybe a handful on the whole island of Manhattan.

"I've always felt there's a direct inverse relationship between the amount of hype surrounding a book and the quality of the book itself. The worse something is, the more bullshit you have to use in selling it." I agreed. "That's not just books you're talking about. It takes a huge marketing budget to get consumers to buy a certain brand of toilet paper."

We'd been through this before. The publicist's lot is difficult: too many books, not enough time to read them, unrealistic expectations, egotistical authors, a distracted, fractured media, a grim lack of resources. "We can't compete with Hollywood. It's a miracle that books get noticed at all, given the public indifference and the miniscule sales we generate. When I was with the big house, we had to lick our own stamps, for goodness sake. Most of the books I worked on got a galley mailing with a pitch letter written in less than half an hour. That was it! The whole department had one assistant. There was zero follow-up." K. needed to talk through her reconciliation to the fact that she was no longer doing the thing she loved doing. There wasn't room for her passion in the job. Clumsy middle managers were able to exploit her, then sack her, just as they have so many genuine book people.

"People think things have to be this way. That's there's some Darwinian imperative at work. Some force of history. That it's all technology's fault." I thought to myself, how many of those people have read even one word of Darwin, let alone Hegel? I said, "These people are boors and dolts, but they've got the culture of profit-at-any-cost on their side. The pendulum has swung in their direction and they're riding high. Even the Democratic President is talking like Reagan." Paradigm shift, my arse.

K. ordered the wild mushroom ravioli, I ordered salmon. We split a pinot blanc. The crowd in back was still making merry. Outside another snowstorm was gathering over New Jersey. "I'm thinking of going to law school. I don't think there's a place for me in publishing any more. I'll have to find something else to do with my love of books." It was sad, but there was no way I could disagree with her. All I could do was pick up the check and thank my lucky stars for the fat years back in the nineties.

The state of the union

2011-01-28T07:45:00.004-05:00

Turn on the TV, turn on the radio. (Try not to.) Go online. Read the papers and flip through the magazines. Here's what you'll hear and see: it's all about business, jobs, the economy, housing starts, GDP, interest rates, China, debt, out-sourcing, trade imbalance, currency fluctuation. Bingo, it's a competitive world out there, it's raining Euros and Yuan, open your umbrellas, gang, and re-tool yourselves. Ride the elevator up to the 24th floor of your office building, look at the little video screen above the panel of buttons. The Dow is up, the S&P is flat, and Nasdaq is slightly down. This is what I want to see when I'm going up to work? The effin market? You know what the Dow is? A thermometer shoved up the economy's rectum telling us that the patient's got an effin fever. I could've told you that, poot.

The President did go on the other night, didn't he? I'm glad he's bright and articulate, so much sharper than his predecessor and light years ahead of his opponent in 2008. But he's not made much difference, has he? We're still at war. A lot of us are still out of work. We're still in the grip of fear. Look at his economic advisors -- the same haughty pricks who got us into the present mess, those greedy sons-of-bitches who don't give a shite about the commonwealth, only their own. These guys may be rich but they're boors and operators. Garbagemen. I wouldn't want to have them over for dinner, that's for sure. So why are they still sitting there? It looks like the President is making the same mistake that most of us make: believing that wealth is a sign of brains, or competence, or character. It's not. Wealth tells you exactly nothing about its possessors except that they're wealthy. Pity those poor souls who strive to become rich, they oughta play the lottery instead.

Our rhetorician-in-chief, he talked and talked. He made a joke out of smoked salmon -- everybody heard that one. In his speech, planes fell out of the sky, teachers became nation-builders, miners were saved. He scanned the big room and tried to conjure up the Next Big Thing. The whole world watched and listened as his words fell like cold bricks from a crumbling edifice: "infrastructure," "education," "energy." The trained seals shifted in their congressional seats and clapped. The President told us that we must "win the future" by seizing another "Sputnik moment." I thought to myself, I was a scruffy four-year-old kid when Sputnik was launched into space and let me tell you, Mr. President, this is no Sputnik moment. We've been up to the moon and taken our garbage with us. The Soviet Union went belly up two decades ago. Ike -- who warned us about the military-industrial complex -- has been dead for more than forty years. Hey, Slim, why you living in the past?

Yet I tried to be sympathetic -- I want to like the guy. I believe his heart is in the right place. He's sincere and he's thoughtful, fit, a man of substance, a true American pragmatist, an exemplar of the type. He's even a bit of a Democratic forward, looking to deke out his Republican opponents by sidling up to them then cutting slightly to the left at the last second. I suppose I should cheer. But he's given himself over to the constricting notion that America is all about making dough. Money honey. Cash on the barrel-head, son. Open for business. The process of turning America into a league of corporations that began in the post-World War Two years, soared under Sunshine Reagan and Hot Pants Clinton, has reached its apotheosis. Jesus can't oppose it, so what are we to expect from a mere human? Welcome to USA, Inc., delivering goods and services to a nation of consumers not citizens.

The President talked and talked. After he was done talking, others started talking. Turn on the TV, turn on the radio. Go online. Read the papers and flip through the magazines. The talk is still going on.

Written in 1791, cited in 1981

2011-01-22T09:10:00.002-05:00

“Nay, Sir, harmless pleasure is the highest praise. Pleasure is a word of dubious import; pleasure is in general dangerous, and pernicious to virtue; to be able therefore to furnish pleasure that is harmless, pleasure pure and unalloyed, is as great a power as men can possess.” -- Samuel Johnson, in response to questioning from John Boswell, appearing in Boswell's Life of the great man, as cited by Christopher Ricks in a review of Philip Norman’s Shout! The True Story of the Beatles. It's a thought worth keeping mind when deciding whether or not to acquire a book for publication.

At least BK is somewhere

2011-01-17T12:55:00.004-05:00

The sun was shining off the snow and I was lonely so I drove down the hill to Burger King. It's not food, it's shite, but I needed to be around people like me, overweight and white, dressed cheaply, a little bit lost, driving around Sussex County in our dirty little cars, passing the occasional dairy farm -- "look at the cows!" -- and ubiquitous strip centers with their bagel shops and liquor stores. Some of them come from the ski resort on Breakneck Road, slopes for cheapskates and people like me who can't afford Vermont or the Adirondacks, let alone Colorado, Utah, Tahoe. Beggars can't be choosers -- we've got to make do with the thousand-foot hills of northwest New Jersey. Hey, just because we're overweight doesn't mean we're well-fed.

It's a three day weekend and I've run out of dope. Ian Buruma reviewed the Bernard-Henri Lévy - Michel Houellebecq thing in the Times Book Review. A waste of effin ink, the book and the review both. The whole issue is stale. There's such a surfeit of sensitive, competent writers composing short stories these days -- look at the cover: Toibin, Baxter, Pearlman -- how can anyone expect to keep up with their work, or their careers? How hard does one have to work to stave off the boredom? Characters live lives of quiet desperation, people are strange, sadness spreads like a stain on Aunt Lou's white tablecloth. Yawn. I prefer the effin Burger King, where I can watch some sullen kid mop the wet floor like a robot, trying to keep it clean. It's a losing cause on a day when everybody's wearing boots, having traipsed through the dirty snow to get their Whoppers and fries. The dirty little rat-faced git behind the counter taking orders looks like Houellebecq. There you have it: rodents and frogs, every one of them an incipient short story.

Down the street at the Inn they're serving eggs benedict for brunch, with mimosas and bloody marys. The eggs are stiffer than the drinks but the floors are clean. I prefer the flourescent lights and plastic seats at Burger King to the faux wood paneling and Naugehyde booths at the Inn. It's easy enough to figure out where the Inn's denizens stand on Obamacare and gun control. Funny to think that they have a holiday because of Martin Luther King. I listen to the conversation waiting for one of the patrons to break out of their assigned role, stop stuffing his face, and say something original. I hear nothing but clichés, slogans, the silly shite heard on TV. Come to Burger King, poot, celebrate the Age of the Individual. Just think: all those choices!

Earlier this morning in the woods I watched a pileated woodpecker hammer at the topmost segment of an old, bare oak. Black-capped chickadees fooled around in a small pine below. The air was sharp, the temperature around fifteen degrees, the sky overhead clear as a bell. You can see a long way in the winter, but neither the birds nor the view could assuage my loneliness. I thought of Robinson Jeffers high above the Pacific in his Hawk Tower. I could never live like that, with the big country behind my back, forsaking human fellowship for the company of animals, rocks, trees, surf. I watch the traffic out on Route 94 through the big Burger King windows. People going places. The piped-in music features Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, two aging musicians trapped in Burger King too, singing their lonely lyrics.

Sam Spade wanders into an Edward Hopper painting and the weekend pundits pronounce the scene emblematic of the American Dream. It's funny -- I used to pay attention to their columns. No more. The opinion pages are even more boring than the book review. I pick up my Coke and toast the family two tables over -- here's to competence, eating together, taking a half hour off the road. A thirtyish couple and their two young daughters enjoying their fast food, dressed in their cheap winter coats, laughing and talking about skating. Apparently, there's some kind of competition coming up. The girls' eyes sparkle. Behind them the kid is still mopping the floor. A horn blares in the line outside leading up to the drive-in window. No high tragic thoughts here. Just the ordinary human interest in human things -- games, relationships, bodily functions. Civilization. These are my people, poot, I suspect they're gonna march out of here and have themselves a good day, out where the sun is shining off the snow.

Our big hearts pounding

2011-01-14T17:13:00.000-05:00

We do grief well, with these big hearts of ours. The tears, the hymns, the clothes, we’re responsible for making sure they all fit the occasion. Someone will have a videocam going -- see how it zooms in on a pair of trembling lips, a little golden down around the philtrum. God in heaven carries the souls of the departed to his sacred grove, high above the clouds. It’s not critical that we believe it as long as we maintain the right attitude. Here in the gathering darkness, we light candles, hang heavy curtains, and place dozens of vases with stunning arrangements around the room. See the freshly washed faces of the children, their shiny shoes, their little overcoats. The children watch the adults cry and try to make sense out of what's going on. It’s scary. They don't realize that the adults are also trying to make sense out of what's going on. The scent coming off the flowers is overpowering, almost sickening -- in the close, warm room, it causes a few of the attendees to choke. Here in the hushed darkness, stuffed animals would not be out of place, placed next to the framed photographs and strings of beads. Some little signs of life.

This is why we're here: inside the casket, draped in an embroidered white cloth, lies a body. It used to be alive. It used to be a person, the person whose spirit is said to be in the room, here among the mourners, a palpable presence like a breath of wind or a shaft of light, something that comes and goes, but more substantial than a fleeting memory. Because we do grief well, we are graced by this spirit’s presence. It asks us to consider how we’ll be remembered.

We have no idea how we’ll be remembered. It’s out of our control. We sob, anguished and bewildered, yet still determined to grieve authentically, shaking our fists at the nothingness all around us. We beg, "Don't take our grief away from us. It is all we have." Oh my people who wander in the wilderness, thirsty and weary, I will comfort you. Here in the vale of death, performing the attendant ceremony, what are we to make of the mystery of our own lives -- the very fact that we are still here, praying for the soul of the body in the casket? The one who is no more.

People die of bullet wounds or cancer, broken hearts or old age, foolhardiness or excessive caution. There is no plan, there is no appointed hour. We don't know in advance when we will die. We don't know where it goes, our consciousness and the world that it carries. It is 2011 and we still haven't a clue. You hear the same platitudes coming from the pulpit as you do in the hallways at work, insufficient words concerning the character of the deceased and the degree of our grief. We the living shuffle through our memories and regret how we’ve wasted our time. This regret adds to our grief.

Standing here in the gloom, it’s obvious that we do grief well, with these big hearts of ours, with this need to ascribe meaning to the plain fact of death, bringing to it our spiritual dimension. This is what separates us from the animals, our ceremony and words, our signs and symbols. Stare at the casket -- it really is a terrible thing to contemplate extinction while you're still alive -- and then look around the room at the other mourners. It’s sad but this is probably the closest we'll ever get to one another, with our big hearts pounding and our shared grief.

The system cannot be fixed

2011-01-12T07:38:00.003-05:00

It's a series of moral binds. Here's one: I despise the consumer culture that drives our economic system, the over-indulgence, the "never enough, never enough," the waste, the wanton destructiveness of it, burning up non-renewable resources, the selfishness that leads to bloat, remorse, and, finally, boredom. The overwhelming lassitude that inevitably follows gorging oneself. It is disgusting to observe, from my own position at the feeding trough, the behavior of my fellow citizens, mirroring my own. It makes me sick when the ass in the glass grins.

I am dependent on this system, the system I so despise. I need people to spend money heedlessly, in my case on books. I need people to buy books for themselves, to buy books for others, as gifts, as decorations, as filler, as signs of their good taste. I need them to buy more books than they can ever usefully read. I need to have people consume books, I need waste. I need the big fourth quarter, the aggressive discounting, the shark-like retailers who'll run come-on promotions, I need as much advertising and publicity as I can afford -- I need the whole contemptible marketing machine running at full tilt to induce consumption. I also need to sell my books in places I would never shop -- Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Amazon, the soon-to-be-dead Borders -- the big retailers for whom books are merely another category of product. I know they don't give a shite about content, but I've got to deal with them, boors though they may be: we're talking volume here. I'm a publisher -- I need to move lots of "units," especially given the amount of money I spend on advances. Some bubbles haven't burst yet.

I want to deal only with independent booksellers, those who love what they do, care about content, and haven't lost their self-respect, even though they too are in the same moral bind, dependent on their fellow human beings behaving like consuming machines. They too have to push the new at the expense of the old, to cope with a raft of new titles coming down the pike every week. They too need to overpraise the competent, to make hyperbolic claims for the merely good, in order to sell as many books as possible. I know they share my dismay at the sad and wasteful spectacle of our American consumer culture and publishing's ugly little corner of it. I know their hearts are in the right place, doing their best to ignore the spectacle of self-immolating publishing houses pumping out junk to fill (still) bloated seasonal lists and to keep overpaid executives fat.

The moral bind is real. The system is brutish, dehumanizing, profoundly sad. I know it, most of my friends and acquaintances, in and out of the business, know it. But we're dependent on it: we're in the business of peddling books, the more the merrier. We may congratulate ourselves on the nobility of our profession, on the essential seriousness and moral fitness of our enterprise, but, at bottom, we are contributing to, and helping perpetuate, an unsustainable and vicious economic system, dependent on zombie consumerism. Thus we find ourselves in a moral bind.

So we amuse ourselves with the big lie -- that one can change the system from within. That one can put on a human face on it: yes, it's possible to wean people off the inflated consumerist teat, lower profit expectations, and live in a sustainable relationship with the marketplace, only generating enough revenue to keep the enterprise going, eschewing double-digit profits and shutting off the overheated marketing rhetoric. Sounds lovely, doesn't it, poot? But what about those hard-nosed realists who warn us, "If you're not growing, you're shrinking. If you're not wresting a gilded future from the leaden present, you'll be facing extinction." If you've been in the game for any length of time, those voices live inside you. And the ass in the glass smiles.

Written in 1893

2011-01-07T08:38:00.004-05:00

"It is of the very nature of oratory that the orator should make his hearers feel he is convinced of what he is saying, and, therefore, he is for ever tempted to assume, for the sake of effect, a show of sincerity and vehement conviction, or, what is worse, to become really sincere and vehemently convinced about things of which he has no adequate knowledge. In the world God made are none but probabilities, and, as the Persian poet sings, a hair divides the false and true; but too often there are none but certainties in the world of the orator. If once a nation is thoroughly stupefied by oratory of this kind, she loses all sense of proportion, all sense of reality, for has she not discovered that her orators can convince themselves and her of anything at a few minutes' notice, and bring both, by the pleasant pathway of a few similes, a few vehement gestures, to that certainty which the scholar attains after years of research, and the philosopher after a lifetime of thought?"
-- William Butler Yeats, in a letter to the editor of United Ireland, dated 30 December 1893, appearing in The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1, 1865 - 1895, edited by John Kelly. Yeats has been my companion for more than forty years, the great lyric genius, the shy one of the heart as well as the smiling public man.

Another new year

2011-01-01T11:51:00.002-05:00

The New Year turned over last night right on schedule. Amazing how that works. Fireworks exploded. Balls dropped. Corks popped. Strangers kissed each other. The usual tunes were played: "Auld Lang Syne," "What a Wonderful Life," "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." In Times Square they played Sinatra's "New York, New York" and Ray Charles's "America the Beautiful." I guess it was supposed to be moving, that big empty ritual, with its confetti, its grinning out-of-town celebrants wearing foamy Nivea hats making repeated gestures of comradeship and courtship. I get it, we're one big happy family. Up here in the wilds of New Jersey someone set off firecrackers a few minutes after midnight, followed by the barking of the dogs. I looked out over the shimmering lake and saw about half the homes still had their lights on, their occupants poring over bills, staring at their laptops, looking for signs that relief would come soon.

As they say, the weather cooperated. It was relatively warm -- a few degrees above freezing -- and partly cloudy, wonderfully temperate after the blizzard at the beginning of the week. I had spent most of my time off in the woods, avoiding the year-end "news" roundups -- so little of that tripe matters beyond the moment. People misbehave or simply get along, driving around from job to market to domicile and back again. Who cares what they believe? Every so often an extraordinary act of heroism is performed and one takes notice. But most people don't want to be put out. For all practical purposes the earth is flat.

Earlier yesterday, I had to go grocery shopping at the Shop-Rite over on Route 10. No matter how often I encounter the spectacle, it scares the bejabbers out of me to watch untold hordes of consumers on the move, crossing the vast unpoliced parking lots of Succasunna. Unquestionably, the shite they buy and eat accounts for their size and shape, their imperturbable mass. They get out of their big vehicles and waddle across the macadam, unaware of cars backing in or out of the spaces around them, horns blaring. I suppose accidents occur regularly. Some of these shoppers are so obese that they need electric carts to move around in, followed by their embarrassed offspring. Maybe it's something chemical, something in the air or water out here. I was taught to be charitable but it's near impossible to imagine what goes on inside these people -- they appear almost to be another species of hominid than the one I'm acquainted with back in the city. I think to myself, love thy neighbor as thyself. Cripes, it's effin hard work.

It's the religious training I grew up with, believing that every junkyard dog is all bark and no bite. It took half a dozen stitches and a tetanus shot to prove me wrong. Now I carry a strong stick with me whenever I go out, especially in the suburbs, especially down at the supermarket. I watch the pimply kids smoking out back, taking a break from cashiering and bagging. They look like they were born yesterday, despite the tattoos and piercings, the weirdly colored hair and low-rise jeans. I have this unaccountable urge to take them away from here. We'd head for a white tablecloth restaurant, eat real food, drink a decent wine and talk about the future. The real future, not the fake shite they see in advertisements. The real future of struggling to earn money, of falling in and out of love, of failing at close relationships, of unsteadiness in the face of a constantly pummeling need to compete with one's neighbors -- the bastards who will always be better off than you. The real future of layoffs, bad debt, constant property upkeep, of buying and selling, selling and buying, of boredom and fatigue. The real future of pursuing happiness, that inalienable right.

These kids stand around the empty pallets and rusting dumpsters, smoking and chatting, squinting against the bright sun as their eyes follow the chaos in the parking lot, the randomness of the traffic, the given situation they find themselves in, trying to discern a pattern to it. No need to get sentimental -- I can't take them anywhere. They feel these things they can't name but the years will grind them down. Big emotions, important ideas. The years will take their toll.

There's nothing futile about celebrating the passing of another year, ripping the old calendar off the wall and pinning a new one in its place. Listen to the savants: it's all good, even the suffering, if you know how to use it to your advantage.

Snowbound and reading

2010-12-27T12:42:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I get tired, enervated, restless, thinking it's all here, in my library: history, romance and psychology, the state of the environment, philosophy. News that pretends to be new. Chronicles of events that keep repeating themselves over the decades, over the centuries. The lives of others. I've read enough to come to believe that I possess, or am possessed by, a spirit of some sort. Is it inside me somewhere, this spirit? Perhaps it resides in memories or in the community, or in these books, my companions. Christmas has come and gone. Saturday morning, the four-year-old, having opened all her presents, surrounded by torn gift wrapping, looked up and implored, "Is that all there is?" I don't know -- perhaps so. But don't worry, darlin, you'll have your memories. As somebody else said, "It's the thought that counts."

Though I love books I can only read so much, then I need to go out and walk in the wordless world. It might be up here in the winter woods or down there along the crowded city blocks, in the Highlands or New York. In the right mood, it feels the same, life teems in both, even on a day like this, with more than a foot of fresh snow covering everything and a sharp wind gusting near fifty creating dunes and drifts, bringing tears to my eyes, stinging my cheeks. This is my break -- to walk and revel in pure being. But the damn words follow me outside like a tiresome obedient dog: the word "white" suggests the Buddhist symbol of death, the blood drained from a corpse's face, the absence of color. Winter is the white ghost who walks among us. Over the frozen lake little tornadoes of powdery snow skip and bounce from north to south. Erratic skaters.

I will try to lose my words here, walking fast, breathing hard, letting my eyes take in the scene without naming a thing. Walking northward is difficult because of the wind, it slaps me and beats against my chest. My nose runs and little ice crystals form inside my scarf around my mouth and chin. Thirty, forty foot trees bend in the wind like great blades of grass. Some of the windward surfaces have been scoured, blown clean, and lie bare in the cold. The living can never get that clean. Living is a dirty business. I walk faster over ground as hard as granite but those words stay with me, faithful partners of consciousness, panting and skidding but right on my tail. They give me the shivers.

The living mind is never empty of words. I should be grateful I'm not in the grave. But I can't help feeling I'm missing something essential as soon as I start to think, that some traceless shred of the Real vanishes like the wind, never to be caught. I can give it no name, nor spell out its qualities. I don't know if it's there, it may not even exist. But because I can only think in words, I will never be sure, one way or the other. This walking into the wind, trying to clear the mind, mindful of mind, the mind in daylight dreaming a real dream. Watching the dogs play in the snow. Wiping my nose, adjusting my sunglasses. Here is the sky turning blue as the storm heads northeast, here is the dead cat lying by the side of the road, here is the culvert leading to the lake, here is the frozen stream, icicles hung up in mid-air. Here is a dead branch ripped off the maple. I walk through the world the same way I walk through the words in books, registering sensations, trying to memorialize them before I forget them. I pick up the branch and take it back home with me.

Back in the house, warming my cold-bitten hands at the fireplace, I wonder how I will ever assuage this hunger for the real. Consciousness curls up on the couch. I heat water for tea. The day is already filled with forgetting. Christmas means less and less each year, an engine of commerce, a way to mark time, a hash-mark on the calendar. The others who live around here -- I wonder if they feel the same as I do. Outside the bay window, blue shadows move across the white snow. The kettle whistles. I will settle in for the afternoon and read some more.

Looking for Jesus

2010-12-24T08:20:00.005-05:00

I'm looking for him. Jesus the Christ child, they call him. Got pictures of him all over the place, like wanted posters. I'm just another oblivious human, but these days I'm on the case and I ain't gonna quit. Well, first I checked out the obvious places -- hospitals, daycare centers, car trunks. Nothing, no sign whatsoever. Then I tried a host of churches of various denominations fancy and plain, but all I got was an earful of awful singing and tons of self-righteous bullshit. Then I visited the public and parochial schools and the adjoining parks and playgrounds. Again, I found nothing. I figured I'd better try a different tack. So I drove along the interstates that run through north Jersey -- I-95, I-287, I-78, I-80 -- staying in the right lane, scanning the shoulders and meridians, the drainage ditches and the space under the guard-rails, looking for Jesus. I saw many strange and wonderful forms and shapes, teddy bears and plastic flowers, the abandoned debris of our choked-up civilization, but not a single living thing. The only bodies I saw belonged to dead animals. I did see many children strapped into the seats in the cars crawling around me, watching videos, eating, or sleeping. Some appeared angelic but not one wore the sign of the Christ.

I looked up at the faces staring out of the windows of Creedmoor, of Bellevue, of Meadowview, of Greystone, and a dozen other psychiatric hospitals, but there was no Jesus among them. Just imaginary devils and medicated demons, terrified hearts and blown-out minds. I was sad to see them behind bars, these agitated souls of Bedlam, but you've got to protect the sane ones walking and driving around outside, don't you? Nearby, I watched the workers leave the great warehouses of Secaucus and Cranbury, the Bronx and Netcong, Elizabeth and Kearny, Maspeth and Plainfield. I watched and waited, I saw their slumped shoulders, their bowed heads, their cheap cars and drab clothes, their sad, slow gait across the broad parking lots behind barbed wire and stacked pallets. Some say these people should be grateful they've got jobs. That menial labor is the first rung on the ladder of success. That they too will someday live in Westchester, or Bergen County, or the North Shore. Maybe that's true -- call me a doubter -- but one thing's for sure -- no Jesus among them. I tried the truckers too, but they ignored me and drove on.

I was getting frustrated but I had to soldier on. This was December, after all, and I was supposed to find Jesus before the month ran out. I checked in on the homeless shelters, the soup kitchens, the libraries, McDonald's and other fast food joints, places where you find the poor and dispossessed, the old and infirm, or the just plain unlucky. No Jesus among them but lots of lookalikes. I looked heavenward and asked the sky, "These are his followers. Surely he must be near, no?" The sky didn't have much to say. It never does.

I drove through ritzy neighborhoods where big houses wore big wreaths illuminated by big lights. No Jesus there, just barking dogs and clinking glasses. I searched down by the river, walking northward into a bitter wind, watching the black water swirl around the pylons and docks where flotsam collects. No Jesus. I checked out the dumpsters behind the Shop-Rite and the piles of cardboard trash behind Target. I got down on my hands and knees and shined a flashlight into the storm sewer at the corner of Adams and Sixth. I rode the subways for hours, from Jamaica to Coney Island, from Pelham to the Battery. Plenty of humble people but no Jesus.

It was looking futile, I was having no success in city, so I decided to head out into the countryside, where preserved farmland lay tucked between the strip centers and parking lots. Maybe Jesus had found his way onto Nature Conservancy land. I checked out the woods and wetlands, the frozen ponds and rocky outcrops. I asked the crows and the goats, the squirrels and the chickens, whether they had seen him anywhere. No answers, no Jesus. I came to High Breeze Farm on Barrett Road, looking northwest at the lights of Orange County, and listened to the breathing of the cows. Deer jumped across the trail, their white tails disappearing into the tangled wood without a sound. An immense quietude enveloped us all. I looked out at the vast earth and imagined it holy, something more than mineral, something greater than a stage-set for the wee doings of humankind. I imagined that this world was a place that a god would stoop to inhabit and walk upon, working miracles and serving up proverbs and parables. Where he'd be more than just another god telling stories. Chastising sinners. Holding out hope for those who have none. Inspiring some, infuriating others. I tried to imagine it, I closed my eyes and tried as hard as I could.

I opened them and watched the Wallkill flow north and the traffic snake along Routes 94 and 517, all those people going god knows where. There was no Jesus anywhere in the picture. No Jesus at all. The sun was going down and the night was coming on cold and furious. I had to go and look somewhere else. Tell me, poot, where should I look? Tell me, where in god's name is this Christ child hanging out these days?

What day is it?

2010-12-19T15:49:00.003-05:00

You visit some of these nursing homes and you get to thinking that the best thing about life is that it ends. Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, human beings finally die, thank god. You think it's fun lying around, the television on, waiting for someone to visit? And when they finally show, they have nothing to say. You live in a picture show. I used to fall in love with all those boys who mauled the young cuties.

Some days the ageless Filipino caregiver comes in and opens the window a crack. Without turning to face you, she asks, "How are we today?" She's not really looking for an answer. A fresh breeze blows in to remind you that there's another world outside. Tantalized by the sound of traffic, the bright streaming sunlight, your eyes go to the window but you can't get out of your chair. You press the buzzer but no one comes. It's getting cold in here. Reruns. Plastic cups filled with pills. An overly sweet pasty muffin. Your children see you and get scared -- they're beginning to resemble you in middle age. Now you're shrinking and they're getting fat. Meanwhile, they're having a tough go of it financially and could use the money you're burning up by staying alive. They won't say it but they'd be happy to see you dead.

In the lobby, a corpulent man sits grooming his Border collie, Stitches. He comes twice a week on therapeutic visits. He says, "Stitches was hit by a car and needed two operations, one on her hip, one on her leg. I didn't think she'd be able to walk again. But she made it. I think her suffering has helped her to be sensitive to the needs of the residents here." He minces his words in a theatrical sing-song way. He also carries a Bible. "They pet Stitches and I read to them. I think it's a comfort. We've been doing this for three years."

An attendant comes along and announces that it's time for your physical therapy session. You look at his black face, his black arms, his bright pink palms. What does it mean, this word "rehabilitation," here, in this context? You will never be restored to a healthy life. The big black man picks you up and places you in a wheelchair. Your armpits hurt. Everything aches. But you keep your mouth shut. You don't want to bore your children with your endless complaining. Life is aches and pains. They have to go shopping. No one gives a shite if you can't taste any more. "It's Christmas mom, we've gotta go shopping."

"Could you shut the window before you leave?" You've got a terrible itch around your waist. The doctors get paid, don't they? They ride your flabby arse all the way to the bank. MRIs, blood tests, x-rays. Somebody's paying for all this. Tomorrow the middle-school kids will come by and sing carols in the cafeteria. So sweet -- there's no shortage of good works, is there? The idea is to get to the cafeteria early so you'll have a choice of desserts. And there is no shortage of the need for good works. Your roommate rolls over and throws off her covers and stares at you in a wild panic. She pleads, "Tell me -- what day is it?" You're about to tell her that it's Sunday, but then you realize you're not really sure.

Written in 1967

2010-12-19T10:01:00.002-05:00

"The public, an invention of nineteenth-century gentility, laid it down as one of its working maxims, once it took up Culture, that it doesn't know anything about art but that it knows what it likes, thus assuming as its own folk wisdom what the emperor Caligula had assumed for it. On the first Sunday that the public was allowed into the British Museum, a portly greengrocer backed into the amphora that inspired Keats's ode and smashed it to rubble. With a discarded cigar the public burnt all of Frederick Catherwood's drawings of the Mayan cities of the Yucatan. The public has scratched out the eyes of paintings in the Uffizi, and one fine day a member of the public put the Mona Lisa under his arm, carried it out of the Louvre with great cool, and hung it at the foot of his humble bed." --
Guy Davenport in his celebratory essay "Tchelitchew," appearing in the 1981 collection, The Geography of the Imagination, a book of surprises, provocations, and beautifully articulated erudition. Davenport was a fine poet and translator, as well as a master at making connections between artists, movements, poems, and the history of ideas.

Sunday is a wash day

2010-12-12T14:46:00.003-05:00

Indoors just like the house spider living behind the electrical box in the washroom. I want to be reconciled to the world as I find it, as mysterious as a glowing rock. Across the street, an American flag flutters in the rainy breeze as the brothers' German Shepherd paces in her fenced-in run. She's left out in all kinds of weather, unless the temperature goes down below zero. At night she barks at any movement in the bushes -- could be a possum or a coon or one of the feral cats that prowl around here killing birds for sport.

They've got their fire going -- blue-white smoke pours out of the stone chimney -- against the cold and damp. I call them the Brothers Grimm because they never smile. They're completely gray, their complexion, hair, and clothes. Even their house is sheathed in gray shingles. The older one is rail thin. He lives on cigarettes, Chinese takeout and Bud Lite. Every once in a while he'll give a half-hearted wave of greeting when he spots me going down to the mailbox. His younger brother has got a little more meat on his frame and a mouth like a cesspool. I can hear him curse in the otherwise peaceful and cold predawn mornings when his car doesn't start right away. It's a silvery gray Chevy Aveo; it looks like every other compact car on the road. I think his name is Jimmy. That's what the guy next door calls him, but then again the guy next door calls me Bud.

The skinny one drives a red Chevy Colorado. He also leaves for work before the sun comes up, even in the summer, sometime around four-thirty. Maybe they do maintenance work or maybe they're deliverymen, wearing their gray uniforms and black work shoes. One of them has a daughter who often stays for a few days as she recovers from one of her relationships gone bad. I caught her one morning standing in the middle of the street in red pajama bottoms and a sweat shirt screaming at a mustachioed young man sitting in a beat-up black Nissan Altima. She swung her arms around and kicked at his fender. He was pleading with her to come back. She was having none of it. "Go to hell. You'll never see me again. You wanna screw somebody? Go screw yourself."

She's an attractive brunette in her mid-twenties, a little pudgy and pale, but she can't seem to settle on a man. I guess it's slim pickins up here -- the guys she hooks up with don't have any money or manners. Is it their fault? Jobs are hard to come by. The schools suck. Families rarely stay together. Maybe they used to be able to make a few bucks hanging around construction sites doing odd jobs but that business has dried up. There's a surplus of laborers around these days. She works in the registrar's office at the Community College over in Newton, but that doesn't mean she's got enough money to support a man as well as herself. And these guys are so needy -- you give them some cash and they'll go out and get stoned. Losers. There's nothing romantic about neediness, constant bullshit, or the inescapable boredom of sitting around doing nothing. She stands there out of breath as the Nissan pulls away reluctantly. The Brothers Grimm sit inside the little gray house watching the NFL Game. One gets up, looks out through the living room window to make sure she's alright, goes over to throw another couple of logs on the fire. Silently I urge her on -- I'd love to see her pick up a rock and throw it through the back window of the retreating car. Instead, she crumples and starts to cry. Something is melting down in her brain.

The dryer's buzzer goes off -- the load is done. As I collect the white clothes and take them to the folding table, little Miss Spider comes out from behind her box to look at me. Noiseless, patient. Hers is the kingdom. Outside the rain picks up again. I keep wondering, poot, who amongst us is actually living the life they deserve?

Written in 1984

2010-12-08T07:58:00.002-05:00

"Two hundred years before us and before our quarrels and questions, in the Tibet of the eighteenth century, under the Fifth Dalai Lama, a notable event took place. One day His Holiness saw, from a window of the Potala, his palace-temple monastery, an extraordinary sight: in accordance with Buddhist ritual, the goddess Tara was circling the wall surrounding the building. The next day at the same hour the same thing happened, and again on the days that followed. After a week of watching, the Dalai Lama and his monks discovered that every day, just when the goddess appeared, a poor old man also walked around the wall, reciting his prayers. The old man was questioned: he was reciting a prayer in verse to Tara, which in turn was a translation of a Sanskrit text in praise of Prajnā Pārāmitā. These two words mean Perfect Wisdom, an expression that designates emptiness. It is a concept that Mahayana Buddhism has personalized in a female divinity of inexpressible beauty. The theologians had the old man recite the text. They at once discovered that the poor man was repeating a faulty translation, so they made him learn the correct one. From that day forth, Tara was never seen again." --
Octavio Paz, in his wonderful essay, "Reading and Contemplation" appearing in Convergences, published in 1987. The superb translation is by Helen R. Lane, to whom the essay is dedicated.

Written in 1985

2010-11-28T11:51:00.003-05:00

"Symbols rise out of reality like methane gas out of garbage. The moral here is that it's dangerous to think methane gas arises out of some parthenogenesis or spontaneous combustion. Never forget that the garbage comes first. Or to select a less odorous metaphor, don't assume that you can deal in shadows without having substantial things to cast them." -- Wallace Stegner in a letter to James Hepworth, appearing in The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner, edited by Page Stegner, published in 2007. As my friend Steve Wallace has pointed out, these letters are a treasure trove for anyone interested in the book business in the second half of the 20th century, among other things.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T10:38:00.002-05:00

It's a gray morning up here in the highlands of New Jersey. The lake looks like rippled lead. Goldeneyes bob just beyond the near island where Canadian geese yank at weeds. On Lakeside Drive, blue jays squawk at an old man walking his gray-muzzled lab. Arthritic, stiff, leaning forward, the only other ones out. A nutty squirrel digs in the front flower bed, sniffs at the hole, somersaults, raises its tail and marks the spot. I take great comfort in the commonality of our creaturehood, the gratuitousness of it all. In great matters I have no choice but to live out the story of my life: it comes as it comes. Titmice flit among the brambles down where the brook enters the lake. Wisdom says be thankful. Juncos flash white tails, bright on a gray day, as they lead me toward the woodpile. Wisdom says be thankful.

There is only happiness here amongst family and friends, in the zone beyond bickering and petty rivalries, the childish need to be always in the right, or to prove that one has out-done everyone else. In this kitchen everyone has a place, even Republicans, even evangelical Christians. There are those who prefer rutabaga to sweet potato, green beans to brussels sprouts. Let them eat together today -- we're cooking something for everyone -- and then let them sleep afterwards on the couch or the floor as grown men play football on the big TV. Some prefer riesling, some pinot noir -- let them all drink together today.

A flock of common dusky starlings descends on the lawn, chattering and pecking at the damp earth. These birds are not symbols. They lift in a great sheet at some unseen signal that curls upon an axis once and vanishes like smoke. I too have tried to empty my mind this morning, to revel in being, aware of the least little thing. To sit still and avoid thinking in clichés about sitting still.

Yesterday a family of wild turkeys flew in front of the car on Canistear Road about half a mile up from Route 23 in a great clatter of wings. I just missed hitting them. Further on, a dead raccoon and a murder of crows eyeing a smashed squirrel. I like walking in the woods around here, sixty-some-odd miles from midtown Manhattan, the air cleansed of its noxious urban funk, the only sound a private plane headed toward Sussex Airport. I stop being a bookman, a publisher, a sales person. I let myself run out of words until there is nothing on my lips except silent grace.

Wisdom says be thankful. I look around me at this wonderful life, the men and women whose love upends me daily. I think to myself, somewhere along the line I lost god but, oddly enough, that hasn't stopped the miracles from coming. My mother used to say, "Let miracles never cease." I know that she wasn't referring to day-to-day living but I like to think she would have, had she too taken a walk this morning in the gray woods of northwest New Jersey, this quiet corner of creation.

Sometimes I venture into town

2010-11-24T17:38:00.002-05:00

It's okay to live inside, away from the heat and cold, the acid rain and blistering sun, close to the indoor plumbing and wiring, the local area networks, the password protected portals to another life, the second life, it's okay to live like a mouse in the wall, only to come out through the HVAC vents at night to filch stale crumbs off the kitchen counter, leaving little droppings as evidence, scurrying back to your hiding place before the humans get out of bed to go to the toilet. They won't mistake those effin pellets for caraway seeds. It's okay to live like that, furtive, alien, afraid of other creatures except as mediated by expensive software, through earphones, via pixels, deep inside yourself, a mechanical owl whose retinal membrane is baffled by daylight. Gotta carry eye-drops with you wherever you go, puffy cheeks.

It's okay to get ripped, bent over the sink, dependent, weak, your legs barely holding up that jelly gut of yours, unsteady and filled with bilious rage, the burning liquor that eats you up from the inside. The ancient rehearsed tirades blow through your brain -- you hate this, you hate that, some bastard did you wrong, the world is a hell-hole, there is no god only a devil, etcetera etcetera. Your whole being quakes. Pools of light explode behind your eyes. You want to reach way down past your throat and through the esophagus to rip out the soft sick tissue festering below your ribs. You want to be somewhere else, anywhere but here, inside this swollen body with its tremors and its stink. You want to soar above the messy life of sweat and piss and shite. Good luck. Go ahead and try, waxwings.

Living inside, you're a bloody bore, even to yourself. Drugs don't make you interesting, you know, they just make you duller. Even the effin mirror yawns at you. You've got a cramp in the arse from sitting so long, reading the news, letting the rage build up, the news from Washington, the news from Wall Street, the news from the other side of the world, the side that lies in darkness, where the men wear turbans and the women walk veiled through unsanitary markets. Ah! -- the news: earthquakes, terrorism, falling currencies, volcanoes, the war on drugs, the war on sanity, the war on consciousness, the war on sex, the war on civility, the war on intelligibility, the endless effin war, the real war and the imaginary war, nothing but war in the news. The dirty little war between your head and your heart. You think to yourself, how will it play out, this war. Who will win? Will there even be a winner? The war inside. You sit there losing the war against boredom.

If you live inside long enough you'll forget what it is to walk uphill out of breath, red-faced, perspiring, a creature just like any other filling its allotted time on earth. Or what it is to listen to the titmice chitter in the underbrush as the sun sets over Holland Mountain. The smell of wet leaves and pine needles, of wood fires. The sound the wind makes in the rafters of the dilapidated barn on Walling Road in Amity. Amity -- nice name for a town, if only it were true. If you live inside long enough you won't remember how to smile when someone passes you in the street and says, "Hello, have a happy Thanksgiving!" You'll open your mouth to say something in response, but you will have forgotten the words "thank you" and "you, too." You'll stand there, heaving with the effort of breathing and remembering, dumbfounded, staring at the back of the friendly figure walking away from you. Yes, poot, life outside is very difficult. It's okay to go back inside and cut yourself off from the rest of the world. It's really okay -- lots of your fellow humans are doing the same thing. Listening to muzak, sitting there in their underwear, bored with themselves, bored with you.

You can never get away from yourself

2010-11-21T13:30:00.003-05:00

I'm reading as fast as I can, those books that everyone's talking about, even if I have to skip over certain passages, you know, the ones that slow me down because they're full of big words and complicated thinking. It wasn't always this way. Before I got into the book business, I used to read for comprehension -- but there's no more comprehension for me, comprehension is too costly in time and attention. Comprehension is a gift. Nowadays, I don't have a moment to spare, especially for a book I don't publish. So I fake it and move on to the next item. Execute, execute, execute. Let someone else read for comprehension, some ambitious retiree down in Scottsdale puttering around his air-conditioned casita. I can't do it any more: it takes all my mental energy just to string clauses together in a plausible sequence, half believing the author intended what I take her meaning to be.

I hate hate hate compound sentences, especially ones with difficult words in 'em, like reading Heidegger, that deliberately obfuscatory Kraut. Who the hell wants to read a prick who makes you work for meaning? I'm too tired to think when I read, I want the essential shite handed to me on a silver platter. What they call sound bites, or slogans, aphorisms if you like, those little dancing memes that infect generation after generation. I want easy answers coming out of fast books. That's all I have time for.

I want reduced-fat books, sugar-free prose, big margins, loose leading, lots of white space between letters. Perfect for skimming, a happy intellectual meal. And they've got to be short too. None of these big 800-page volumes, with their painful insistence on being Important. I don't have the time to get tangled up in all those effin words. If someone can't tell a story in less than 200 pages, either they're being deliberately self-indulgent or their overwrought imagination has failed them. Same thing with big ideas -- hasn't anyone these days heard of the old saw, "Brevity is the soul of wit?" One damn idea at a time, please. I opened a book by this Danish crookback Kierkegaard -- who the hell does he think he is, taxing my brain like that? Fear and trembling my arse.

I was bummed out at the lack of intelligibility around me. I couldn't grasp meaning for nothing. So I went to hear this Slovenian dude Žižek down at the Cooper Union, you know, that venerable school in New York where Lincoln delivered his famous speech back in 1860. Looking like a bearded prophet in a sweaty tee shirt and jeans, Žižek ranted and spat, feinting and bobbing around his arguments like a spastic pugilist. I couldn't understand half the words he said, even though people sitting around me insinuated that there were some big ideas rattling around inside that impenetrable accent of his. Impossible to tell. I took a little comfort from the crowd, mostly NYU types lapping up his schtick like kittens licking cream. I feel for these kids -- who amongst my generation would want to trade places with them? I tried reading one of his books once but it had way too many disconnected assertions in it along with a whole lot of gargantuan words, heavy as lead. Made my head hurt after a couple of pages. No time for that shite. I figured I'd get the gist from his lecture but the live delivery was equally opaque. Ninety minutes should've been five. Capitalism is bad, globalization is a crock, and so on. Yeah, okay, so?

I used to listen to Mahler, now it's the Beach Boys for me. I used to read like my life depended on it, now it's an effin job. I buy notebooks, start writing, and give up after a couple of pages. I don't have the time. I can't give anything my undivided attention for too long. Of course, Žižek is right, the way we live is not sustainable. Even worse, it's not enjoyable. It kills joy, the ceaseless chasing after cheap goods, and the exercise of power for capital's sake. But tell me, poot, when can I do something about it? When am I gonna have the time to address the issue? I've got manuscripts to read, books to skim, errands to run, email to answer. I've got to buy some groceries and make dinner. I'm reading as fast as I can, hoping to find the pearl in the prose, trying to keep my eyes open. I want more caffeine. I want to go to sleep, but I'm paid to stay awake. It's gotten to the point where I say, dear God, the least you can do is stay awake with me.

Indian summer

2010-11-14T22:53:00.002-05:00

I’ve been struggling with the hours of my life wasted on the road, trying to come to grips with the way they disappear like faraway cars over the horizon. Listening to the Jersey traffic, the radio news, killing time, wanting to speed. The announcer says there’s been an accident on the approach to the GW Bridge, under the apartments, some poor soul got out of his car, was hit and killed. Now I-95 is backed up past Lodi, lanes of big ugly trucks belching fumes into the vile air. My body is tensed from sole to scalp. No deodorant can cut the smell of anxious rage. Out here in Bergen County, rage is normalcy, rage is sanity. Rage eats away at the cells in my stomach, my intestines, my lungs. I scream obscenities at those who can't hear me, watching the guy behind me tearing at the collar of his shirt, swearing too.

Leaves swirl around just above the slick pavement. A neighbor gets killed on the Route 23 ramp to I-287 when her Durango hits a tractor trailer and flips over. Another neighbor's house is smashed into when a car careens around a downhill curve on Route 638 and goes spinning out of control. The damage is so great that the house -- a modest log cabin -- is declared unsafe for human habitation by the town building department and the family is forced to go look for a place to live for the next few months. The historical society erects a marker at Mastodon Lake the same day an 87-year old man is found sleeping in the cemetery on Glenwood Road, a stone for his pillow, surrounded by squirrels, chipmunks, and crows picking at the frayed ends of his wool cap. He is tired of lying awake in his monster bedroom.

He is dreaming for all of us, this sad old man. The curtain goes up on a high school musical, the chorus girls and boys kicking high and singing loud. They are brimming with life. He is shown to his seat by a tall thin blonde wearing a black dress and pearls. Her hair is held up by a sparkling gold tiara. She touches him on the shoulder as he lifts his head to take her in -- she smells like rice pudding, milky and sweet. He bows. The music plays. The auditorium is hardly full yet she says, "Your seat is taken, I'm sorry." He scans the cavernous room, then turns back to her to complain but she is no longer there. Instead, he faces his father, who looks to be asleep. The eyes are closed in the middle of the emaciate, pale-green face. No, they are sewn shut -- he can see the stitching, the purple bruising around the brow and temples. The music has stopped, followed by the hum of an electrical motor. He is scared of his father's form, the caved-in chest and skinny hairless legs. The dark shriveled penis. The motorized contraption that is helping him breathe. His chest feels hot. "Is this really a dream?" he wonders as the animals scamper around his body.

How long can we keep it up -- the traffic or the rage? Another few years? Perhaps this is why we came into the world, to get stuck in traffic, just as other generations were meant to be struck down by plague or marched off to die in a war. It takes no special skill nor superior intelligence to be a driver, a patient, a soldier. It makes no difference if you're sitting in a Bentley or a Chrysler: you're a nothing, just part of a machine, filling up with acid, hastening to your demise, an idiot, a zero, an occupant, hurtling along the interstate or stalled at the mouth of the tunnel. Inured to ugliness, heedless of your health, reduced to a sad symbol of our broken system. Let them reengineer Route 3 in Rutherford, let them widen Route 17 in Wood-ridge, let them shore up the approach to the Holland Tunnel from the Turnpike. It won't make a difference. Your driven life will still be shite.

In the hush of the museum, the sage lays his head on the ceramic pillow. He will dream of mountains in mist, two horses, a crane. He will see the tiger and dragon devour each other and moonlight glint off rushing water. He will welcome conversation with his ancestors and carry a basket of fish on an overnight journey to the next village. We can see his dreams carved in jade, ivory, marble, wood. There was a time when the earth was endless and humans and animals lived in harmony. It lasted centuries but now all of it is past. Now we have our roads and our madness, the unhappy vehicles of our desire. We have an old man asleep in a cemetery on a bright November day. We have our Indian Summer, the last warmth before winter.