Good Days

On good days he flosses. Sometimes he doesn’t. All of the women he dates are obsessed with their teeth; with them, no perversion is more reluctantly revealed than the secret of his high mediocre oral hygiene. Are all women that way? All women in his demographic? (All women, properly understood, plainly a concept that exceeds his grasp; even being glib has its limitations.) Maybe it’s the bad days that he flosses, neglect signifying, rather than torpor, blissful repudiation of the routine.

On bad days, he imagines there are no stories to tell. To imagine that there are stories yearning to be told, entrusting themselves to his care, these are the good days, a sense of purpose, the supple embrace of purpose like a fine leather coat. Stories are like, well, stories – what could be better than that? What metaphor adequate to elevate such an august referent? Sleep on it, and he does. There’s tomorrow, and the stories are in his care. Or, perhaps it's on good days that he imagines that there are no stories to tell. But there are. He thinks.

On On Being Blue

All week, I have awaited a package, a slim volume purchased without photo or much in the way of description from an unknown Amazon Marketplace seller, something I stumbled across while looking for something else, a thin treatise by William Gass from 1975, On Being Blue. I now see that the volume remains available here and there, but at Amazon there was only the one instance, at one rare book seller, and armed with only a two-sentence description I was moved to action by the threat implicit in there being only one copy in the entire Amazon community, the volume seemingly out of print.

Since last week, I have waited anxiously -- either for the package to arrive or for the dreaded email that sometimes follows Marketplace orders, indicating that the item is not in stock after all, so sorry. I waited as though for a distant great uncle on his deathbed to pass, a great uncle by marriage, a great uncle I haven't seen in twenty-five years, but one I love in the strong unquestioning way of family, as a good man who once guided me around his several dozen acres in rural Maine, an undersized boy of seven in bright yellow shirt and burgundy trucker's hat emblazoned with the name of my father's then employer.

The uncle passed this weekend in the rural Maine redoubt he discovered with his family like an unmapped Pacific atoll, rest his soul, at ninety-two years old. Still, though, no book.

Then today it came. Ever so gingerly, I opened the battered manila envelope, stiffened by boards inside, my heart racing. Hardcovered and dustjacketed, two slight tears at the top of the front jacket and the cover otherwise remarkably simple, the paper thick and creamy and textured, like a woven variation on a grocery bag, the endpapers similarly rough, copyright information but no date, no indication whether this is a first edition (although it simply must be), the cover page adorned by a perfectly lovely indigo impress: "On Being Blue." On the last page, however, I learn that this was a limited edition -- 3,000 copies of the trade edition, and only 225 of the "de luxe" edition. A perusal of copyright information and bookjacket identified, by ISBN, my edition as one of the 3,000 trade editions. A limited edition, thirty years old, in fair condition -- for a song.

Inside, under a Roman I on the first page, I found these words:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit -- dumps, mopes, Mondays -- all that's dismal -- low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty; blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity.

There's more, of course, and I am grateful for it. But I'll stop there, because that, ladies and gentlement, that is what I call a sentence.

An impulse buy in search of inspiration. I don't imagine Gass will start disappointing me now, after all these years.

Creo, Creare, Creavi

For Z, who was kind enough to ask.

I don't have a child; presently, it's fair to be skeptical that I will. Not because that's how I intended it to work out, but because we're most credible when we view the world as it is. But tonight, I found myself wondering what wisdom I would have to impart. I would not be young for a father now -- not old perhaps, but not young -- older, for example, by seven years than my father was when I was born. When my father was the age I am now, I was seven. The mind reels; I digress.

The occasion of my wondering was my attendance at a lovely performance at the Hard Rock Cafe (of all places) by young pianist Jonathan Biss, alongside PSO Artistic Adviser Sir Andrew Davis -- a cesspool of commodified music misery, with the usual menagerie of outstated rock and roll onesies, guitars, platinum records, and the like, punctured to its core by a Steinway baby grand and musicians worthy of better environs. I learned of the performance only this afternoon near quitting time, and despite my other plans and the event's fund-raiser-esque pricetag, despite my lack of suitable clothing, despite my recent penuriousness and my lack of interest in Biss's weekend program of Schumann with the greater PSO, despite my lack of companion (and whom would I ask these days, really), something about the event called to me. I negotiated the best of my business casual and bike attire, lingered at the office past six, and finally unreined my steed and headed over the Smithfield Street Bridge into the stinking brownfield of Station Square.

I was not surprised to find the event relatively uncrowded, and I was only vaguely unsettled when Sir Andrew and Biss walked in like any other attendees, Biss in shirt tails and corduroy and funky hipster sneakers, Davis in tweed and dungarees, and began to mingle with the distinguished guests. I sat at the bar and minded my beer, my rough and tumble bag stowed out of sight along the bar's footrail. Around me was a smattering of older symphony patrons, who speak as though knowledgeable but I wonder (my own ignorance of the classical canon, admittedly, makes me a poor ombudsman, but my suspicions remain), and younger musicians self-possessed and silent. My $40 bought me a ticket good for some specialty drink involving pomegranate that I refused on principle to accept, preferring to pay cash for a good beer, and granted me access to a buffet of cheese cubes and mustard and fruit. These were the refreshments I was promised in the promotional materials. I spoke to no one, straining to find hidden meaning in the thin literature handed me at the door concerning public radio and TV, and listing the program for the evening, which was as follows:

Sonata in c minor, Op. 13, "Pathetique," first movement, Beethoven;

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, second movement, Schumann; and

The Dolly Suite, first and second movement, Faure.

Finally, a WQED DJ explaining that some delay was in order given a disparity between the number of tickets sold and the number of attendees in the house, I wandered to the front row, where an unoccupied seat beckoned. I tucked my bag beneath it, silenced my phone, and waited.

Biss finally emerged, casually, and with little fanfare turned to his labor. His Pathetique seemed sloppy, but in a most forgivable way. If I'm hearing missed notes, and more than a few, surely you're missing, but Biss's touch was light and vigorous and his pacing was merciless. The performance was riveting, Biss so close to my seat I could contemplate the peculiar irregularities in his breathing and the sound of his left foot thrusting to and fro beneath him in rhythm with the music. If anything, the errors merely served to emphasize the singular intimacy of the performance, the humanness of the performer, the wisdom in my decision to attend. By contrast, I am now listening to the same movement as recorded by Richard Goode, whose entire cycle of Beethoven's thirty-two sonatas I am in the process of moving from CD into iTunes, and it has an almost clinical polish to it that is at once admirable and alienating.

Kreisleriana I found less compelling, perhaps for the same reason I was unmoved by the prospect of the Schumann-heavy program associated with Biss's weekend visit to the PSO. I appreciated the discussion about Schumann's torment that the DJ and Biss engaged in before Biss took up the piece, and so educated I appreciated some of what Biss said about the movement's nascent passion, but overall I found myself nonplused.

For Dolly's Suite, Davis joined Biss at the lower register of the piano, and the two engaged in a playful and delightfully well coordinated bit of play, in engaging this piece for children, the second movement of which, I learned, is aptly entitled on some scores, "Meow."

But this isn't about the music, or at least isn't about the particular performance detailed.

I do this sometimes, wander off to things by myself, and I've written about it here before, though I'm too lazy to hunt down an example. For serious art, really, solitude seems necessary to unfettered appreciation. One can't very well immerse oneself in magnificence while chatting with an idle companion, who more often than not is more or less interested than one is in the work presently at issue. Better to disappear into it, into art, leaving everything behind, trusting in one's return but at the same time indifferent. Should I find myself forever imprisoned in any number of Picasso's blue period pieces, would I grieve? Perhaps -- but I'd look good doing so, hanging on a wall at MoMA or the Louvre, eyed hungrily by a multi-ethnic smorgasbord of jealous onlookers: this is me here, and you there -- have fun getting through customs, coaxing your children to eat strained peas, balancing your checkbooks.

Biss is a third generation world-class musician, son to two violinists, grandson to a noted cellist, inheritor of lifetimes' musical wisdom. With that pedigree, that he is an alumni of the prestigious Curtis Institute (Lang Lang among his handful of classmates) seems almost an afterthought.

I have been reading prodigiously of late, prodigiously for me, prodigiously for law school and post-law school me, as though in preparation for something. Fiction, all fiction all the time, until a recent left turn into non-fiction for purposes of research, but even so still in fiction, immersing myself in others' creations, worlds and psyches alien and familiar, constantly leaning into the buffeting caused by demanding an exit, however temporary, from all of this. The trend goes back further, but since Thanksgiving alone, my reading list includes (but is not exhausted by) the following:

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
Mary McCarthy, Birds of America
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Paul Auster, Oracle Night
Paul Theroux, My Secret History
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Banville, The Sea

In addition, I am currently reading, if reading is the word, Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions.

This is not to pat myself on the back. I could have read far more in that span, and probably should have. Rather, it is in service of a larger point that I enumerate. I haven't just been reading these books, but scrutinizing them, immersing myself at once in their narratives and their manifestations of craft. I didn't consciously choose to do this; it just happened. My readings, thus oriented, may sound in discussion like those of a critic, an academic, and that is my training. But I am reading differently now. I am all technician these days, never affected by a passage that I don't ask, Why? It's a thrilling way to read, an engagement that makes everything else pale by comparison, but it's instrumental as well.

This development coincides with, or arises from, my growing sense that I ought to be writing. Not writing, in the elementary sense -- I do that every day -- but composing, creating, writing with a real sense of purpose, writing like graffiti, writing like those handful of words you'll never forget, whether you found them in a film, a book, a seminar, or crossing a lover's lips in the darkest hour of night. It's thrilling, this sort of reading, ennervating, terrifying.

Which brings me back to where I began. I don't feel terribly wise, or even as knowledgeable as I'd like. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time feeling inadequate to whatever task presents itself, confident in my competence but entirely unconvinced of my excellence, and unsatisfied with anything less. Nothing is more tragic than a lazy perfectionist.

But I know one thing I would say to my child as often as I might, no matter his age or inclination or peculiar ability, my one grasp at wordly wisdom, my sole excuse for myself. I would say, "Create." Make something new. Create. Create.

Create.

If there is a God, a Heaven, a meting out of judgment, surely creation will be valued most high and destruction villified. There's nothing new in this thought, which is surely derivative of any number of sources I might name were I not so weak of memory, but in that, at least, they were right. To create is everything.

And by this I think in larger terms. Snob though I may be, I would not intend that my child should take me to mean that he must create something that would assume a place in this or that canon, only that he create rather than obey, for obedience is not creation, it's survival. I would have my child be proud, and defiant, and undaunted by the thought of the billions who have preceded him, each trying to add something to the human mosaic in one way or another, courageous before the inevitable fear that there is nothing new to add, unwilling to accept mediocrity even if it is -- or precisely because it is -- the rule.

(And then my child, being a child, would sigh and turn on his heel to storm from the room as though I'd insisted that he eat brussels sprouts, but the memory would linger.)

I have been an absentee blogger, and for those who drop by with any sort of regularity I apologize -- not so much for the silence as for the lack of explanation. My dedicated readership may be passing small, but I know you're there, and for all your patience with my erratic maundering you deserve more than implacable silence.

But this is not to announce my return. Rather, this is the explanation I have owed. I have liked a few things I have written here, more than a few perhaps, but the medium does not lend itself to the discipline necessary to the sort of thing I would like to create, at least not in my hands. I lack the patience for revision, here, and it frees me from the complication of sustaining my confidence in the face of creative adversity, which in turn impoverishes the work itself.

I can, in short, do better. And it's about goddamned time.

So I'm retreating to meatspace for the time being, turning my undivided energy to a larger project I hesitate to call a novel but (for want of a better word) might as well, something I've been playing with in my head for quite a while, and toward which I've been researching of late. I don't assume I can do this, that I'm technically adequate to the task or tenacious enough to stay with it for as long as it takes to find out, but I'm so very sick of wondering, of fancying myself something I take for granted but refuse to vindicate in deed.

I won't officially wrap this up, because I'm not convinced it won't serve some purpose as a sort of overflow valve when I've been writing long enough on my own to create some momentum. And those of you who really care for my brand of blather might come back every month or so for a while to see if there's anything new. But this is, if nothing else, a substantial hiatus I'm announcing.

Thank you for reading. Perhaps I'll have something more substantial for you in the distant future. But that's the question when it comes to writing anything with literary pretensions, isn't it -- for how long can one delay gratification before tearing oneself apart, like Van Gogh, like Schumann?

Let's find out, shall we?

Lolita, the Great American Novel?

I hate that phrase: Great American Novel. It's no different than any other attempt to apply abosolute superlatives to art of any sort, and as such it's an intrinsically silly exercise. That's not to say it isn't fun, though.

So who are the usual suspects, generally? Gatsby, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn? Maybe we should throw Roth's Great American Novel out of respect for his hubris?

I submit, and I'm sure a Google search would reveal that I'm not the first, that it's eminent emigre Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's brilliant novel, his third composed in the English Language, Lolita.

I haven't read the book in four or five years, have not in any way been prompted to consider it as a candidate, but damn if it didn't just pop into my head, as I contemplate my own incipient project, that the answer is obvious.

What does Lolita have that justifies the brazen compliment / epithet? Let's consider, shall we?:

We'll begin, out of respect for the author, by noting that it is a celebration of the language, a travelogue if you will of what Nabokov characterized, in precisely this connection, as his "love affair with the English language." That's a healthy start, but of course every author cited above would have confessed to a love of the language, so that's not enough.

What else? Well, the book, textually, contextually, and philosophically seriously games this nation's paradoxical obsession with the prurient, its persistent inner conflict between its baser urges and its puritanical origins, its embarrassed celebration (ongoing) of sex and violence and its latent guilt over its pleasure in same. These factors take it somewhere Gatsby never aspired to reach, somewhere Melville wouldn't have dared to go. Both of those books principally concerned themselves with American striving. And of course striving is a critical ingredient in American-ness, to be sure, but it is only one ingredient, and there are many.

Next (and I recognize this point is debatable, but I'm not a scholar and don't have to deal with peer review), Lolita, better than any of the other novels named, explores quietly the nature of the sort of immigration that forged this nation. Not the refugee aspect so much -- although Nabokov was that, in at least some sense -- but the aspirational sense of it -- give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses -- coming to this nation not to escape appalling oppression or genocide, but merely for capital-O Opportunity, an open-endedness that is peculiarly our heritage, if somewhat more in word, in mythos, than in fact.

Then of course there's the veneration of youth to the point of pathology. Everyone loves their children -- there's nothing peculiar about that. But the celebration of youth, the veneration of it, the singular terror at the thought of aging and the ludicrous lengths we go to forestall and deny it, these things are American, and long before this country succumbed utterly to youth's thrall Nabokov wrote about with brilliant clarity. The book, notwithstanding its censors' protests to the contrary, was no defense or rationalization of pedophilia of any sort -- rather, it was a metaphor for a deep unsettledness most of us share with the thought of aging. And the cycle that reflects is self-perpetuating -- we are terrified of aging because we are all too familiar with our own discomfiture at people aging around us. Reification, to leverage a scholarly sort of term.

Finally, at least among encompassing aspects of the work, there is the on-the-road aspect. No country so celebrates its spaciousness as this country does, and of course in the past hundred years this has manifested in a perverse obsession with the automobile. In this regard as well, Nabokov's sense of this place was ahead of its time. Of course, the road novel aspects of Lolita (and couldn't one argue that his was the first true road novel?) reflects more than mere transience, itself a hallowed American tradition. It reflects precisely the aspirational facet so critical to this culture's sense of itself, the idea of escape and reinvention, which I won't dwell on since it's the subject of too much thought already -- it's become a truism of sorts, and I won't pursue it here.

Then there are more fragmentary aspects of the work that further qualify it for the ridiculous title: the celebrity culture emblematized by Quilty; pop culture refracted through the prism of Dolores, a teeny-bopper entirely in the sway of commercial pop impulses, submerged in the tropes of pop culture that now bombard our children with frightening force and persistence; the preternatural obsession with the One Who Got Away, and so on.

So there -- the case is made and I've persuaded myself. If any novel composed in the English language deserves the title Great American Novel, it is Lolita, by V.V. Nabokov, Russian emigre extraordinaire (by way, of course, of France), who saw us ever so much more astutely than we see ourselves.

Taking Stock, 2006

Another year ends with the requisite lists and accountings, the arbitrary grouping of events and developments into a 365-day unit, the looks backward and forward, and so on. I would offer links, but the sources are, as we say in legal documents, passim, too numerous to identify specifically.

As a warm-up to posting something this afternoon, the last of 2006, I reviewed where this weblog was, where I was as a quasi-public being, at the outset of the year. In the dawn of the year, I read and commonplaced in this space Anthony Swofford's Jarhead. After explaining my frisson at one of his more notable sentences, I observed, "In a million years I could never write that sentence or any like it. And if I accidentally happened upon a sentence so laced with potential, I could never set it in its due context."

I hope that I was wrong, at least insofar as that sentence was a broad lament about my ability rather than a narrow observation about each writer possessing unique and inimitable gifts; in the next two or three weeks, as something like a resolution, I intend to begin blocking significant chunks of time into my schedule to write, and to write. And to write. And to ignore the voices in my head telling me to stop, voices like that reflected in my Swofford post. And to write still more. Until June 31, at least, when I pause to take dispassionate stock of my progress. This is not idle, not this time -- I've designated an entire room in my house, presently occupied by nothing more than a roll-top desk, a (not terribly comfortable) period-appropriate hardwood desk chair, and five lovely volumes of Edward Gorey, as a distraction-free zone, a studio, my fortress of solitude. There, the computer's wireless will always be turned off, the room always silent but for the sounds of cats padding around, my murmurings, and my fingers abusing these keys -- no music, no adornments of any kind . . . maybe a space heater, but nothing more lavish.

But that's next year; this is an accounting of the year poised to expire. This year was exhausting, as I wrestled with a few very difficult realizations about myself.

I am lonely. I don't mean this in its broadest sense. I am blessed with a loving and supportive family, and too many friendships to count, each of which I treasure. But I lack a deep spiritual connection with the fellow traveler I persist in believing I can find. Not only do I cope with this very poorly, my efforts at changing it are largely misguided and wasteful in ways that should be predictable enough to avoid. But I don't avoid them.

I'm no longer young enough to write off my complaisance. Knowing this doesn't seem to make it any better. I am diabolically inventive with regard to diverting myself, not that my diversions are all that creative in themselves. Rather, the invention comes in convincing myself, albeit subliminally, that manifestly unproductive activities (or inactivities) are more justifiable than they really are. Whole tracts of time disappear, as into an alcohol-induced blackout. Hours, days, Seasons.

I have lost the tremendous momentum I carried into and out of law school; I am treading water. The water is temperate; I am the fortunate residual beneficiary of the mighty effort I put into accomplishing the quantifiable goals that are the privilege of formal education. But I fare far worse in the real world's unboundedness. I seem incapable of choosing among several visible shores to swim toward. Once, I flung myself at new opportunities with reckless abandon in my personal and professional lives. But I have grown tentative. Choice and sacrifice are inexorable aspects of lives well-lived; an inability to choose, to commit, to take risks, characterizes the most unhappy people I know. Sometimes I wake in the early morning terrorized by the prospect that I am becoming one of them. I question whether the person I have become would have taken the chances I have taken -- moving to Pittsburgh, leaving a promising career for law school, falling in love -- that have led to my most gratifying moments. How disorienting to fear that you are no longer the person that brought you here.

I am lazy. Like "lonely," this requires qualification, since my occasional comment to this effect among intimates usually is resisted with an enumeration of those things I have accomplished and the various things I continue to do. That in objective, absolute terms I keep myself occupied, participate in non-work-related projects, socialize reasonably well, read steadily, is no comfort to me when I confront almost daily vast tracts of unredeemed time. For me, "lazy" isn't vitiated by crossing some threshold, after which it is my privilege to loll about in self-satisfaction -- it's about making the most of the array of opportunities I enjoy both as an accident of birth and a product of my strivings and effort. I am so fortunate in this regard that it seems sacrilegious to fritter it away.

Perhaps I am a servant of my own arrogance, deluded in my desire to do more, to make an impress on the surface of things, to validate my time here, the air I breathe, the space I occupy. There is humility, to be sure: I no longer imagine that I will write the Great American Novel, that I will reinvent constitutional theory, that I will star in the movie of my life story and get the girl in the end.

But if living lies in the effort, in the undaunted aspiration, it seems necessary to remind oneself that there is more to do, more fibres to weave into the fabric of things, and that each of us is responsible for being a better person -- more humble, more loving, more involved, more productive by whatever definition suits the context and the person.

2006 wasn't a bad year for me, not really. It was a necessary year. 2006 will only reveal itself as wanting if I fail to heed all that it has taught me. That said, I'm happy to see it go -- better things lie ahead.

Thus, I raise a glass to all of you: may the next year bring you all health, prosperity, and happiness by whatever definition you choose.

Housekeeping in Progress

So the three of you who have continued to visit after my long hiatus might be interested to learn that I'm not going anywhere. I don't pretend that I'll post as frequently as I used to, or that I'll post as frequently as I have been of late. I am, however, building up to updating the template with some of the handy new tools Blogger is providing. Before I do so, however, I'm working my way through my old posts, applying categories to each.

My new template will include categories, by Gawd, and feature a radically reduced and updated blogroll, among other improvements. I'm approaching my two-year anniversary, after all, and it's not like I have nothing to say. Not for the first time during this blog's tenure, but in a far more systematic and determined way, I'm about to begin writing more seriously outside the blogosphere. So once again I return to the original idea of this blog as a repository of annotations to myself, a collection of observations and ephemera -- in general, as an annex to more dedicated writing. Or so the story goes.

In any event, as it stands, starting from the beginning, I've categorized something like 60 of nearly 700 posts. It's a start, and an unsurprisingly engrossing task for the obsessive-compulsive. It might take a couple of weeks for all of this to come to be, so be patient.

Shelter Island

28 August, 2006 (as scrawled on a legal pad by the muted light coming through the windows behind me as I sat on the porch in the rain)

The night is saturated and raw, a rude awakening from summer, but the peach hue reflected against the undersides of the clouds across the bay warms the sky. Runoff drums in the downspouts while baysurf sips at what's left of the beach afoot the seawall, insatiable, its mouth full of salt.

Drifting through the night come the sounds of two boats playing tag in the fog like children of sound cavorting behind parents of light, father first, his searchlight caving the mist in sweeping whorls, fixing the opposite shore for a moment before turning to pin me to the porch moist and still, mother steady in his wake, an emerald perched in her tiara?

As mother and father are eclipsed behind the point, their children still play over the sibilant white caps, which climb over their own backs to surf their bellies, and as their game dissipates higher surf visits the beach like a rumor of their passage.

Beset on all sides by water,
we leap from womb to womb
like sunfish breaking the surfact
to thrill in the gasping
before slicing back into the darkness.

** The photo was taken in 1989 from the top of a dune only slightly down the shore from where I sat when I scribbled the above musing. I remember sliding down it on my belly all the way to the beach as a child. FLICKR has many photos of Shelter Island.

Fat Free Milk

So stumbling around the blogosphere, as I do entirely too often, especially at work, I came across a new-to-me weblog that I love and I'm not sure why.

Anyway, I like this post most. Excerpt:

You spend most of the day doing things that you don't want to do. In between bouts of busy madness, you keep yourself sane by thinking of porno-type things that make you happy and that you'll do when you get home finally.

When you get home. Activities are road-blocked, slow, or just make the clock go at a spasmodic rate. Then it too late and you should probably be in bed. You accomplish nothing. You wake up tired, fuzzy-headed and with no focus except for getting to your car. You arrive at work. I like vegetables. You spend most of the day doing things that you don't want to do. In between bouts of busy madness, you keep yourself sane by thinking of all of the things that make you happy and that you'll do when you get home finally. How did Thanksgiving come so quickly? You spend most of the day doing things that you don't want to do. In between bouts of busy madness, you keep yourself sane by thinking of things that make you happy and that you'll do when you get home finally.

I'm not sure I can tell you why this piece -- and it really can't be appreciated compositionally unless you read its repetitions, involutions, and subtle variations in full -- satisfies me so deeply. It sounds almost silly to say, because the author, Kevynn Malone, sort of mocks this as a non-serious effort. He does that a lot, in fact. But something of the quotidian, workaday rhythms of most of our lives is distilled here in a way that's quite precious, quite true. And elsewhere, the site gets at something of the frustrated underperforming underachieving writer that resonates rather powerfully with me, also a frustrated, underperforming, and underachieving writer.

Not really sure. But it earned FFM a permanent link under MoonOverWords.

Nights Like These

Nights like these, the poetry won't come, the cigarettes burn and singe and yet there's always one lit, sitting in the ashtray, mocking your presumption to health, the occasion is tainted by the lingering knowledge that the new car needs to go into the shop tomorrow, early, thanks to what manufacturer's understate as a "road hazard," thus avoiding liability under the warranty. The lawyer bristles and knows resistance is futile; the consumer wants to scream and remonstrate and insist and turn blue in the face at the injustice of it all.

Nights like these, the checkbook doesn't balance; the apartment doesn't clean or rearrange itself in anticipation of guests tomorrow; and you don't know anything more than you did yesterday.

Nights like these, from your desk you watch the receding taillights of yet another car hurrying the wrong way up your one-way street, and cringe in anticipation of the bang that in five years has never come, but one of these days . . .

Nights like these, a Norton's Anthology, a Dictionary, and a yellowing Dylan Thomas collection lay atop each other in a way that does not conduce to spinal health, lexical lovers in frolic, and fail in their fervor to remember that they are here to serve you, and so their distraction prevents the words from coming as they writhe and groan and get in the way of your elbow when you reach for your cigarette, which shouldn't be burning in the first place since you just had one ten minutes ago.

Nights like these, the city is damp and chilly to an extent the mercury can't explain, and everything whispers conspiratorially about your failings and restively awaits the overnight blanket of another Pittsburgh fog, which will obscure everything but your own insistent malaise. Sherlock Holmes would be comfortable here. But you're not. Not tonight, anyway.

Nights like these tapping away at a filthy keyboard doesn't solve any of these problems -- indeed, it becomes a new problem in highlighting the aggregate effect of the myriad others. And the cats sleep or chase cellophane around the apartment or miao plaintively while you ignore them, ignore yourself, ignore the damp and the drizzle and the fog, the ache in your lungs signaling an incipient cold, ignore the stubbornly noncompliant checkbook and the lascivious menage a trois, and whatever else you might otherwise consider, the incidents and erata of another day dealt with dubiously, another sunrise and sunset unseen, a few more wasted hours on your aching buttocks before a glowing LCD screen, the ailing whirr of a cooling fan the size of your zippo buried deep inside obscure machinery, the various pools of light and scraps of paper and detritus of a mind as scattered as seed in an April breeze too remote to imagine.

Nights like these, sleep is the only solution, and yet . . .

Nights like these, the temptation to stand tiptoe and try to see over the darkness to the coming dawn is as overwhelming as it is impossible even were you willing to stand. And you're not. Dozens of empty bottles won't carry themselves to the curb, nor will the newspapers; the garbage won't tie, extricate, and remove itself from the apartment. Dishes won't dance to their own melody in the sink before diving, clean, into the drainer to await their next tasks.

And you won't sleep. Won't clean. Won't write. Won't learn a goddamned thing or effect the slightest bit of change. Not on a night like this.

Nights like these, your past mistakes crowd you on the occasion of their recurrence, and they laugh . . . they laugh until you weep. Nights like these . . .

UPDATE (the next morning): Okay, so the apartment is clean enough for company, the dishes washed, the checkbook balanced, I still feel vaguely sickish but probably better than I did yesterday morning (Thank you, Thera-Flu, thank you), and I seem to have slipped the recurrent mistakes' bony clutches at least for the time being. All of which is to say [/self-indulgent high school literary journal maundering]. Thank you, drive thru.

String Theory

So at last, I believe it's time to introduce all four of you to one of my favorite blogs out there (again with the apologies for not yet stealing the code to put permanent links to these places somewhere on this site), Zulieka Unstrung. In this post, Zulieka takes on the Big Bang itself, highlighting what she finds to be a breakdown in the intuitive framework of the theory. Like hers, my physics, especially my astrophysics, is entirely too deficient to wrap itself around various conundra and dilemmas implied by the discovery at the heart of this not entirely current story. I should probably acknowledge that my physics, notwithstanding two years of it at a top college, appears to be far more deficient than hers, even though she's entirely too humble about her own ability, for it seems to me that she's made a compelling case for some pretty sophisticated problems with the new(ish) data. Anyway, since a few of you have your moments with such things, perhaps you can drop by and try to answer her questions. God knows I can't.

(Fair Warning for those of you who work for Big Brother or have delicate sensibilities (and if you do, please go away): Zulieka occasionally posts racy photos, often of herself (or so I presume, though how can one really know online?), so you probably don't want to call up her blog on your monitor when someone might be looking over your shoulder. That said, she's also quite beautiful, so those of you inclined toward women will probably find something to like on her site once in a while, even if you don't find the tremendous appeal I do in her elegant and eloquent musings about art, music, sex, and her incipient motherhood (in which, if she happens to encounter this post, she should know I wish her well).)

New Blog Discovery (for me)

This successful author, who is married to an even more successful author (depending on how you measure success, but he's pretty damned good, and pretty damned appreciated on pretty much any index you can come up with; hell, even I like him, though I'd be happy to tell you what I perceive to be his authorial weaknesses -- and no I won't tell you who it is, because his wife deserves her own attention and you can do your own legwork), is all kinds of interesting in her own right. In just a quick perusal, I'm convinced I'll be visiting this site fairly often. Here's a representative excerpt:

I'm on a new [medication] regime again. Lucky for me I'm back on the skinny pills (Topomax). The Trileptal wasn't supposed to make me fat, but it did. It also wasn't supposed to make me as stupid as the Topomax, but it made me stupider. These meds all make you lose words, proper nouns in particular. Terrific side effect for a writer. I spend a lot of time leafing through the thesaurus looking for words like "individual" or "omelet." Those are two words that I actually found myself unable to remember within the past few weeks. Egg-thingy doesn't cut it when you're writing a novel.

"Egg thing." A serious post on a serious topic, but it's still pretty damned funny.

Checking In

Work sneaks up on me, gets impossibly close undetected, then a floorboard creaks or a nearly imperceptible draft of lungwarm air raises the down on the nape of my neck, and I turn, startled. It will not be denied. I haven't the time to post as I'd like to just now, but I'm congenitally incapable of not looking around from time to time. Accordingly, I bring you this morning's find, like my cat brings me her fake mice while I sleep, and set it on the floor at the foot of your bed:

sometimes in weird nightmares the shadow just wants to
chase not catch you
the dark wants to scare not kill you
evil wants to play not eat you
and girls want to sex not love you

I like that. It's nice. I enjoy tonypierce a lot, even if i can't quite imagine ever reading his book: somehow, the idea of being told "How to Blog" takes the fun out of it.

[revised, 12/29/06]

Two Questions

There are two questions, but there is only one answer. Who is Moon, and what, is MoonOverPittsburgh? To answer the former is to hint at the latter, and inasmuch as this synopsis predates MoonOverPittsburgh's genesis, a hint at the latter is all you get.

Moon is a man who transplanted himself to Pittsburgh from the New York suburbs (read, New Jersey) lo some six-plus years ago because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Moon is no longer entirely sure why it seemed like such a good idea, but when ends are inexorable the means pale in relevance. Moon is 31 as of this writing, but only barely. Moon is lithe and reasonably fit, and at once educated and scatterbrained, and he is possessed of his vices. Moon is an attorney, but you won't hear much about that here, where he would subordinate the lawyer he plays on television to the artist afire who is God of his dreamscapes. Moon likes cycling and cigarettes and cats and Pittsburgh's radiant sunrises (when he is unfortunate enough to see one), as he loves his family, his friends, and most aspects of his protean, often prosaic, life.

And Moon loves Pittsburgh devoutly -- by sunlight, by winter gloom, by bracing Grant Street winds, and perhaps most of all by Moonlight.

Love his life and its innumerable circumstances and contingencies though he does, Moon has suffered for want of an outlet, an audience. An audience held captive by his words inchoate rhythm, the cadence of his cogitations laid bare, his plunge into utter exposure, a captive audience of his own devising, transfixed, if at all, by no magic greater than that he can conjure with the stroke of a pen, the tap of a few keys.

For above all, Moon loves words with an inarticulable ardor, in an ineluctible infatuation that turns in on itself and would -- indeed, might -- devour everything in its path were it not necessary, in so doing, to imperil the very words that constitute its raison d'etre, its modus vivendi, and other qualities so transcendant as to require the use of pompous foreign phrases borrowed by English and (a fortiori) never returned, with punitive late fees compounding.

Moon long has called himself a writer. Indeed, his daily bread might not have been broken but for moneys earned with his words -- first in management consulting, then in marketing, and now in the ephemera of the law (not that Moon, in his lawyer hat, would ever concede the ephemeral nature, in geologic time if in no other, of the law).

But for all of that, all of his many words, Moon has merely circumscribed rather than penetrated, eluded rather than engaged, his nascent passion for pure invention, for a lyric life, he once knew beyond cavil would govern his every breath until the grave. He suffered for want of dedication, for want of education, for want of funds, but most of all he never decyphered which switches corresponded to the lights that required extinguishing before he couold follow, however falteringly, the path he once called Destiny. Distraction, and the irresistible passage of time, dismantled in pieces his loftiest aspirations and sold them for scrap, a pound of flesh.

Moon realizes now the fundamental flaw in his founding scheme, as he has before, though he has struggled to retain it, internalize it, accept it as guiding truth: he cannot write beyond the sentence that looms, the instant thought; he cannot craft language worthy of even his own attention unless he sublimates all of his grander aspirations into the discovery of the next word.

To write is to write is to be.

And so here he is, here I am, Moon, if not your friend than merely one more narrator in a world of them, seeking to share himself for no loftier reason than the intrinsic satisfaction of doing so. Writing to write, to have written.

The details remain obscure, the path uncertain. All this is, MoonOverPittsburgh, is a cultivated admixture, or a guided confluence, if you like, of Moon's dual loves: for words, and for the first, and to date only, city he has called Home not by accident of birth or in virtue of circumstances outside his control, but because he chose to do so -- for, in a word, Pittsburgh.