A Simple Question, Part III - Don DeLillo

'Against the force of history, so powerful, visible and real, the novelist poses the idiosyncratic self. Here it is, sly, mazed, mercurial, scared half-crazy. It is also free and undivided, the only thing that can match the enormous dimensions of social reality.' - Don DeLillo, "The Power of History"

What is it about Don DeLillo? It could be the humor - wry, assholish, familiar, biting, as in the line in 'The Angel Esmeralda' about the junkies who wear dead men's Reeboks, an observation so precise that it's difficult to stifle a laugh, and if someone asks you what made you laugh, it's even more difficult to admit that Don DeLillo's evocation of the pathetic refugees of the bombed-out Bronx tickled you so. It could be the method by which he alchemizes street speech, formal grammar, the anti-language of bureaucratize and the shorthand patois of marketing, advertising, military banter into that very peculiar dialect of English - American. It could be his obsessions - cities, paranoia as a state of mind and a reaction to the conspiracies that do exist, the circling dance that Art, Capital, Sex, Death perform that, when viewed, passes for culture. Who knows? DeLillo himself doesn't seem to. He has said in interviews that he views his sentences as sculptures periodically, and will rearrange the meaning of the sentence based on the aesthetics of the rise and fall of the letters as the reader progresses. His view of human nature alternates between dim and completely irrelevant. He is the most modern of my favorite living writers, has been hailed as a prophetic novelist who foretold the Age of Terror by critics, yet he rarely participates in the modern world.

When I am feeling particularly good about myself, I like to think that he reminds me of me.

Recently The New Yorker published a review of The Angel Esmeralda, DeLillo's recently released short story collection. Martin Amis, who expands learnedly about DeLillo's interest in Terror, that group Fear so distinct from personal Fear, but the best thought in the whole essay is the first, when Amis says that when we say we love a writer, we really mean that we love about half of that writer's work. Not necessarily half of what we've read, but half of the works. DeLillo hits about .500 with me. I haven't read Americana, End Zone, Ratner's Star, Point Omega. I could stand to have back the time I spent reading Players and Cosmopolis. The Body Artist has fantastic prose wed to plotless noodling while Falling Man puts one of DeLillo's unemotional blankmen through the World Trade Center attacks and though there is some irony in the juxtaposition of the flat, affectless narration and the horror that it details, I don't think irony was DeLillo's intention. Either way, I would file them under Interesting Failures - worth reading, if only to see what happens when certain enjoyable artistic sensibilities overwhelm the contexts that define them as strengths and become weaknesses indulged.

Which leaves us with White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld. Combine them with the Interesting Failures, and I love about half of DeLillo's writing. As individual works, my overwhelming preference is for Underworld. I'll get to a defense of that in a bit, but first I want to unpack why I think the best way to understand and appreciate them is as one colossal text.

White Noise is often held up as DeLillo's best work. I disagree, but I don't think it's germane in any case. Even those who dislike Underworld, and there are plenty of people who find it a turgid, pretentious slog, wouldn't argue that it's DeLillo's magnum opus, and that he intended it as such. White Noise separates into two neat parts: Before the Airbone Toxic Event and After the Airborne Toxic Event. Both parts cover most of the same thematic territory, but the first plays as high satire while the second shows the tragedy that arises because of the weaknesses that are the objects of such fun in the first. It's a smart method of organizing the novel, but I think the comedy plays much better. Here's why: Jack Gladney, the professor of Hitler Studies at an unnamed liberal arts college somewhere in America, is a milquetoast. He is married to Babette, and together they do nothing and raise their kids. Gladney is ensconced in a safe world of classrooms and lecture halls, studying the most dangerous politician in history. He spends hours roaming through the supermarket, where he admires the bounty of freedom and ponders which peanut butter he'll try today. He and Babette stay awake and talk about how their mutual fear of death is a wonderful bond. They are boring. Gladney may be the most useless human being on Earth, and DeLillo skewers him mercilessly. Gladney as an object of satire is ripe. He's inherently funny (one doesn't become the head of Hitler studies without a sense of humor) and he's the sort of person most of us like to see mocked. Once the plot kicks in to gear and Gladney ineptly deals with the fallout of the Airborne Toxic Event and the revelation that Babette is cheating on him, we are exposed to the tragic consequences of Gladney's consumerism, academic detachment and fear of death. Unfortunately, tragic consequences require a tragic hero and Jack Gladney is a shitty hero. White Noise is mainly about consumerism and the pernicious effect of media, but the meandering comic first half is much more effective than the dark, plotty second.

Consumerism: Theme 1.

Some dipshit once said that Libra was an act of bad citizenship. It is a novel that follows the efforts of a researcher with the Central Intelligence Agency who is writing a history of the Kennedy assassination. Every other chapter is devoted to a close-third person narrative that tracks the life of Lee Harvey Oswald as it moves him toward Dallas. The remaining chapters follow completely fictional right-wingers within the national intelligence operations who conceive and execute an assassination of John F. Kennedy with the aid of Oswald, Ruby, Ferrie, Shaw and other real-life characters. DeLillo did massive research for the book, but was inspired to write it because Oswald grew up near DeLillo in The Bronx. That is to say, he imagined the life of a boy not unlike himself, from a similar milieu, whose circumstances eventually diverged in all particulars save that shared upbringing. He used his imagination to concoct a plausible, though fictional, explanation for what happened on November 22, 1963. DeLillo used known facts to create a reality slightly apart from the one that most people inhabit. Which, of course, is what most fiction writers do: alter the details of daily existence to expose truths hidden within the quotidian. All novels are poor history and bad citizenship, given that their whole purpose is to transform our accepted perception of reality.

History: Theme 2.

My suspicion is that Mao II is only interesting within the cycle of novels that begins with White Noise and culminates with Underworld. The characters are thin, constructs that DeLillo uses to explore themes. Action within the novel is scant, and the most interesting event is an affair between two of the thin characters that has few repercussions. The main theme of Mao II is the diminished role of the artist in public life. DeLillo contrasts an aging novelist with a young radical and demonstrates the greater impact that the anonymous would-be terrorist has on the broad consciousness of society than the famed writer. Personally, I think that DeLillo overestimates and romanticizes the capacity of art to shake the world and his thesis that violent young men have displaced educated older men in the public mind falls apart when you examine any historical epoch. It was Odysseus and the Aegeans who razed Troy, after all. Not Homer.

Art: Theme 3.

Underworld brings together the three themes that DeLillo explored separately in White Noise, Libra and Mao II. Its opening sequence, which recounts the experiences of a few people in attendance at the single-game playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to determine the National League pennant in 1951, is the first and best of Underworld's many great setpieces. Theme 1, consumerism, is everywhere. People pay to attend the game. They purchase hot dogs and peanuts. Advertisements for cigarettes and magazines and grooming products abound. History provides both the backdrop and the foreground action. The game DeLillo portrays actually happened, historical figures like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover, all of whom he weaves into the narrative, were actually in attendance. Russ Hodges actually called the game. The Soviets did in fact detonate a hydrogen bomb for the first time on the same day. Check for Theme 2. The third theme, Art, is subtly integrated, but definitely present. Hodges is the most obvious example of an artist at work in the historical context. He comments on the action, projecting his own sensibility on the unfolding events, but also narrates the feel of the day and the sound of the crowd for the listeners at home. There is an obvious corollary to the story that DeLillo is constructing. Other than Hodges, and deeper in terms of Underworld’s internal logic, is the painting The Triumph of Death, from which the section takes its title. The Triumph of Death depicts a dark army of skeletons and corpses overrunning revelers and townsfolk in a burned-out landscape. After Bobby Thomson hits the so-called ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’ to win the game for the Giants, fans in the upper decks tear apart newspapers and magazines and send a celebratory rain of confetti down onto the box where Hoover sits next to a puke-covered Gleason, having just been informed of the Soviet bomb. Printed on one of the fluttering pages is The Triumph of Death. Hoover catches the page and contemplates the historical event in which he is participating against the historical event of which he has just been informed. He wonders which will win out. DeLillo spends the remainder of the book depicting artists grappling with the violence, despair and death of the forty years between the game and the present while the mass of the country distracts itself from these forces with goods and consumer culture. More than a few critical assessments of Underworld love the opening and closing sections and discount the meat of the book. While there is some validity to these complaints (the first and last sections are the best parts of the novel), skipping the middle means missing the fantastic, and entirely fictional, Lenny Bruce stand-up sets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, missing the evocation of New York during the summer garbage strike of 1974, missing the advertising executive who takes the last train to Westport, where he is accompanied by men who are bound by nothing, save ‘the evilness of their dreams.’ The themes recur as the population of the novel increases, but this never seems redundant. Rather, DeLillo is positing that we are all bound by the culture we share, and he explicates how that culture is created and destroyed, and how the destruction feeds the creation. Klara Sax, the main artist figure of the novel, collects mothballed B-52 bombers, the deliverers of destruction in the desert for a large art installation. DeLillo is unwinkingly serious about the feedback loop between death and art.

Put a bit more simply, Underworld is the strongest and best of Don DeLillo’s works, and therefore one of the strongest and best books of the last thirty years. To use one of the master metaphors of Underworld, Caro may have a better batting average than DeLillo, but DeLillo, when he connects, hits the ball a lot harder.

A Simple Question, Part II - Robert Caro

"I came to see that I wasn't really interested in writing a biography to tell the story of a famous man. I realized that what I wanted to do was to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times-particularly political power. I was interested in political power because in a democracy, political power shapes all our lives. We were taught in Political Science courses that in a democracy power basically comes from the ballot box, from elections. But Robert Moses was never elected to anything. And yet for almost half a century, forty-four years, he exercised more power in New York City and New York State than any official who was elected-more than any mayor, more than any governor." - Robert Caro

For a guy whose output consists of one-and-three-fifths biographies, Robert Caro sure does get a lot of attention. He has published four books - a one volume life of Robert Moses and three of five proposed studies of the years of Lyndon Johnson - and been awarded the Pulitzer for two of them, along with two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize in History... you get the idea. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has never been out of print and is required reading for any one interested in the city, its history, and how politics works, for better and for worse, in the daily lives of the citizens who ostensibly are the greatest force in the process of government. Head down to the Strand and you will see it on one of the main display tables, thick as a Peter Luger porterhouse and very nearly as expensive. Why does a biography of a man who built things in New York, written 37 years ago, continue to fascinate?

This is part of a larger question that I want to spend more time thinking about, but is worth posing here: why is the shelf life of non-fiction works generally so much shorter and narrower than that of fiction? Non-fiction outsells fiction and has for as long as those numbers have been tracked. The long tail of successful fiction can be extraordinary - J.D. Salinger famously was able to comfortably live as a recluse for fifty years off the residual checks he received each year for sales of The Catcher in the Rye - while works of non-fiction seem to fade as soon as the author has finished their interview with Jon Stewart. What works of non-fiction have lasted beyond the generation in which they were written? Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (though I know of no one who has actually read the fucking thing), Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the essays of Montaigne, Walden and Civil Disobedience. If you want to count treatises, throw in Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, Utopia, The Federalist Papers. If you want to count fiction, The Bible outsells all these books combined. I don't pretend to know the answer here. Perhaps we aren't curious about old times. Perhaps the prose is clunky or stilted. Perhaps the subjects actually have become irrelevant.

Robert Caro has written four books. One of them is about Robert Moses, a high-ranking bureaucrat in New York City from the early 1920s until the late 1960s. The other three are about Lyndon Johnson, a largely-reviled politician who was active during the same time period. Caro is 76 years old now, and while he plans to finish the last of the Johnson books in the next two to three years, it is very likely that he will die with an oeuvre that consists entirely of life studies of two men whom most Americans either do not or would rather not think about. These facts should make him quixotic or obscure, but instead his works are not only best sellers, but remain vital years after their relevance should have faded. Only David McCullough can rival Caro for long-term interest and success, but McCullough also (ably) writes pretty standard biographies of famous men and events that are notable for the liveliness of the prose but also tend to be borderline fawning. When McCullough writes that Harry Truman used to begin each day with a small, bracing shot of bourbon, he interprets it as evidence of Truman's vitality. When Caro writes about Johnson dictating to his aides while simultaneously moving his bowels, he notes that this is evidence of Johnson's technique of bullying underlings into submission.

Works of non-fiction are true and factual, but there are many artistic and aesthetic conventions that make them feel less real, less alive than fiction. Subjects are often described using the sorts of code words that we use when speaking about the negative traits of loved ones. They are 'stubborn' or 'temperamental' or 'passionate' or 'driven' or 'earthy' rather than 'arrogant, abusive, self-absorbed, ambitious vulgarians.' Nods may be given to how a great man displays the 'attitudes of his time' towards minorities, women, lower classes, but to call such a leader a racist, sexist or classist asshole is just simply not done in the world of biography. Caro, however, trusts the reader enough to put his subjects on display and let the reader see how the ambition that made Robert Moses want to build something like Jones Beach or the Triborough Bridge is deeply entwined with the arrogance that drove him to bulldoze across the South Bronx to construct an expressway that has been congested since the day it was completed. This is different from some sort of journalistic 'show don't tell' type of writing, where the facts are presented and the reader is left to her own judgment. Caro is constantly editorializing and guiding the reaction of the reader, but he is constantly editorializing from both sides - showing us how a vision without power makes no improvement in the lives of the people that the visionary wishes to aid, and how that power to improve, once attained, isolates the visionary from those people he once helped.

In each of Caro's works, there is a single chapter where he goes out of his way to impress the reader. The narrative essentially breaks for a few dozen pages and Caro lays out the themes, his thesis, his research and paints a portrait so effective and complete that the reader is compelled to keep reading, almost like a cliff-hanger in a good piece of genre fiction. In The Power Broker, it's 'One Mile;' 'The Sad Irons' in The Path to Power; Means of Ascent has 'The Story of Coke Stevenson'; for Master of the Senate, there is 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia.' What is fascinating about these episodes, and important in understanding why Caro's work has remained relevant is that the main characters of the biographies don't appear in them at all. 'One Mile' is a portrait of the South Bronx neighborhoods that Robert Moses destroyed when he put in the Cross Bronx Expressway, with special emphasis placed on East Tremont. It establishes the stakes involved for a group of people who were not even aware that they were players on the public stage. It shows what they had, what they lost, and why that mattered, even if such considerations were never important to Moses. It places the consequences of Moses' exercise of power in a context apart from the standard biographical recitation of accomplishments and their cost and size. 'The Sad Irons' spends twenty some-odd pages putting the reader into the daily life of a Texas housewife in the days prior to rural electrification. Caro's thesis in The Path to Power was that to understand Texas was to understand Lyndon Johnson, and in 'The Sad Irons' he makes his case that in order to understand Johnson's importance as an historical figure, you had to understand what he did for ordinary people in Texas. Caro doesn't imply that Johnson was wholly responsible for rural electrification. He gives most of the credit to FDR and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. He does, however, point out how hard Johnson fought for the bill, how much it meant for him during his sad time as a member of the House, and how immediate and vast the improvement was for the lives of the women out in the hinterlands from which Johnson had come. 'The Story of Coke Stevenson' gives the background of Johnson's opponent in the 1948 Senate race in Texas. Blake once described Coke Stevenson as 'what Reagan played on TV,' and that theme animates much of Caro's prose in the chapter. The 1948 election marks one of the first modern political campaigns in Caro's telling. Substance, embodied by Stevenson as a man of principle and accomplishment who is stoic and wishes to run on his record, is overwhelmed by showmanship, as practiced by Johnson in a series of radio jingles, broadcast speeches, helicopter leaflet dumps and other carnival tricks. That Johnson eventually wins the election through outright thievery and then proceeds to the Senate, where he rises to Majority Leader and shepherds the first civil rights bill to completion only adds to the irony. Finally, there is 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia,' which is essentially a mini-biography of Richard Russell. Like 'The Story of Coke Stevenson' in Means of Ascent, 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia' presents us with an historic character that the reader can use to measure Johnson against. If Johnson in Means of Ascent is slimy and amoral, in Master of the Senate, he emerges as the hero. Caro spends sixty or so pages on Russell, who was a clever tactician, an effective Senator, a patriot in the truest sense (his high point comes when he plays Cicero to Douglas MacArthur's Antony and condemns the general as a demagogue bent on dismantling the republic), and a virulent racist. Without this portrait of what a Senator, particularly one from the South, could accomplish, and what he would not lift a finger to attempt, and in fact actively opposed for his entire career, the bravery and wit that Johnson displays during the 1957 fight to pass the first expansion of civil rights since Reconstruction exist without context. By spending so much time on Russell, Caro gives us insight into what Johnson could have become, which makes his eventual repudiation of that role seem transcendent.

There is much more that I could say about Caro's abilities as a writer and as a biographer. I'll settle for just pointing out a couple of things that convince me that he is one of our greatest living writers and that his works will continue to matter long after the BQE is replaced and Johnson's guns and butter economics have faded from the fore of American politics: first, when you read Master of the Senate, pay attention to The Dam - it begins as a metaphor, then becomes a literal thing, which in turn becomes a key bargaining chip to the deal that causes the metaphorical dam to give way and be swept aside by the twin forces of justice and power - the writing is so careful and elegant and fun that you may find yourself laughing out loud as Caro unfolds the tale; second, the announcement that the fourth volume of the Johnson biography would be published during the spring of 2012 has me looking forward to a book with an enthusiasm that I haven't felt since the announcement of The Pale King. I know the books are really long, but you have to trust me people - reading the 1400 pages of The Power Broker is a more valuable way to spend your time than just about any combination of smaller volumes you could finish during the same time period. Besides, the next Johnson book is allegedly going to be only around 700 pages. That's less than two Thomas Friedman tropes on how great everything is in India and could be in the United States if we all obeyed the precepts of Friedman's newest acronym.

One quick note: the quote up top is from an interview of Caro by Vonnegut. It's a long read, but it keeps one warm on cold dark nights.

A Simple Question, Part I

"You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That finally, the door opens... and it opens outward - we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch." - David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed"

Not too long ago, Brett and I were discussing The Pale King and he mentioned how strange it felt to him to not have an easy answer to the question, 'Who is your favorite living author?' This of course set off my listmaking instinct, and I've compiled some candidates for the title of My Favorite Living Author.

Somewhat arbitrarily, I have restricted the list to American authors. Really, though, my favorite author would be American no matter what. I am American. I like to think that I am interested enough in the rest of the world to care about international events and incidents and the authors who chronicle these changes, whether in fiction or no, but as much admiration as I have for Naipaul, Walcott, Coetzee, Heaney, Saramago, I admit that their emotional impact is muted for me because I don't share their cultural sensibility and therefore lack the shorthand necessary to take an intellectual appreciation and turn it into gut-level excitement at the prospect of another book by one of those authors. It's surprising to me how much of what I enjoy in modern literature is rooted in national identity. Cormac McCarthy writes about the American West in a style that is nearly biblical. He says less about modernity than Naipaul, but because I have been to (some of) those places and understand the cultural myths that he is criticizing or outright destroying, the tangled emotions that he causes me to feel are greater and more immediate, despite Naipaul's seemingly more relevant subject matter.

So here are the candidates, in alphabetical order: Robert Caro, Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

Here's why some of the other heavies of modern American literature aren't on this list: I haven't read enough Neal Stephenson; David Mamet last published something really worth reading and thinking about some 15 years ago; Jhumpa Lahiri is treading water; Jonathan Franzen has talent insufficient to his ambition; Billy Collins writes poetry, which is just about dead as an art form (writes a guy who loves writing poetry); Colson Whitehead has ambition insufficient to his talent; Junot Diaz has only published two books (though both are fantastic); Richard Price kicks a lot of ass but is rarely surprising; I haven't read enough Joan Didion.

What the answer to my simple question will be, I do not know. I suspect that in the writing of my thoughts on their work, the answer will emerge. My basic criteria for deciding on a champion will be those qualities I most loved about David Foster Wallace, as captured in the quote above: language and style, as seen in Wallace's ability to set a simple image and scenario - the door and the frustrated person outside it - and then deliver a mixture of insight, humor and a sort of pathos with just a few sentences, one of which isn't even English; curiosity and breadth of subject matter, as seen in the fact that Wallace is writing not just a paean to Kafka but a rumination on what makes Kafka not only special, but unique, how Kafka's unique sensibility makes him difficult to teach, what the limitations of Wallace's ability to teach Kafka effectively have to say about Wallace, his students and the broader culture, and finally the active moral takeaway from all this ruminating - and all of this in one essay in a collection that includes literary criticism, political commentary, food writing, and a mind-blowingly funny essay/journalistic feature on pornography - and all of this by a writer whose reputation mainly rested on his fiction; and, finally, that intangible connection that our favorite writers are able to establish, where we read their words and feel a moment of recognition, that they have somehow gained access to our thoughts and published them for us, before we realize, with a pang of envy, what a gulf of wit and articulation separates what they wrote from what we like to believe we thought first.

White Alba Truffles, French Playwrights and Participation as a Requirement of Democracy

"All the past history of the world goes to show that continued peace and prosperity produce luxury and idleness, which in turn corrupt the morals and deteriorate the character of the people." - Thomas Mellon, Thomas Mellon and His Times

Truffles are one of those ingredients that every self-professed foodie idealizes past any sense of proportion. You never forget the first time that you smell them in the dining room, the way that the perfume of simultaneous fecundity and decay wafts through a whole section of tables and everyone's head turns toward the table that is luxuriating in that uber-mushroom aroma. The only other foodstuff with a smell of similar transfixing power is a big, old bottle of red wine. Much like big, old bottles of red wine, truffles have become fetish objects in our culture, and much like big, old bottles of red wine, the quality of the truffle bears tangential at best relation to its final cost to a diner.

As recently as last week, the wild white truffles harvested around the town of Alba in northern Italy were selling for just under $5000/lb. Wholesale. Let's unpack this, because it's more than a little mind-boggling that anything that one eats could possibly be so expensive. There are enormous legitimate costs intrinsic to the harvesting of truffles. First, a trufflehunter must either train a dog to seek out the mushroom spores, which grow underground at the bases of certain trees (not just certain types of trees, mind you, certain individual trees) or use a sow, who will be relentlessly attracted to the smell of the truffle because it contains pheromones similar to those found in the saliva of her mate but will also attempt to eat the truffle once she has unearthed it. So spend weeks training a dog or trust in your ability to corral the appetite of a horny hog. Cost #1. Second, as noted, the truffles are only found in the forests surrounding a small town in northern Italy. Even if your well-trained dog or unstoppable sexed-up pig find all the truffles they possibly can, there are only so many out there, and plenty of other trufflehunters looking for the lucrative little bastards. Also, the harvesting season lasts only a few weeks, so it's not like you can show up in May and hope that no one else with a dog or pig is out that day. Cost #2. Third, once unearthed, the truffles begin to decay almost immediately. As with most non-green vegetables, they have a relatively long shelf life, but it's still imperative to get them to market as quickly as possible. Cost #3. Finally, and again as noted before, the white truffles found around Alba are sought out by discerning gourmands the world over, so there are enormous costs related to transport and storage, because even if you can keep your swine from devouring the precious tuber the moment she finds it, she is unlikely to show such restraint during a Trans-Atlantic voyage. Adding to these costs is the fact, to reiterate, that the white truffles found around Alba are in demand across the world. There are only so many truffles in the world and anyone who has been near their enchanting smell can attest what a special treat it is. Scatter enough truffle enthusiasts around the globe and eventually their testimonials increase worldwide demand for this native food, with its inherently limited supply. Limited supply and unlimited demand will always equal outrageous price.

There really is no reason this should be, however. Despite the fact that truffles will not grow at the base of every single sycamore or cypress tree, a sycamore or cypress (or pecan or red maple or whatever) that has produced truffle spores in the past will 1) continue to produce them for a good 30 years and 2) yield nuts or saplings that predictably attract the truffles spores on down through the generations. In other words, the cultivation of truffles would be relatively easy. Of course, ease of cultivation would increase supply and therefore cause the price of white Alba truffles to decrease. Guess how the people who currently make their living hunting/harvesting/distributing/serving white Alba truffles feel about the idea of increasing the supply on the market. A bigger and maybe more important reason that the price of white Alba truffles need not be so outrageous is: they are actually not as rich aromatically or as complex in flavor as their less rarefied (though still plenty expensive) cousins, the black truffle. To beat a dead horse, wild white Alba truffles are found by either well-trained dogs or desperate housewife hogs during a brief period of time in a tiny area of northern Italy, and therefore are rare. Black truffles are more easily and widely cultivated, they keep longer and lose less flavor if they are dried and their harvest season is longer. Once I went to the Museum of Natural History and spent a while in the room with all the gemstones. To my mind, the sapphires were the prettiest and the opals the most interesting. But, of course, the diamonds get the best placement within the room and fetch the highest prices in the jewelers (and in the world of natural history museums, no doubt), but for only one reason that I can discern: they are rarer. So, too, with white truffles. The scent that they blast out in a dining room is unmistakeable and unique, but it is not necessarily that elegant or even appetizing. Where black truffles smell of rich earth with a hint of pepper, white truffles always smell like money congratulating its own existence to me.

Tartuffe, the titular villain of Moliere's most controversial comedy, is a well-perfumed dandy and charlatan who masquerades as a pious holy man in order to relieve the aged and wealthy Orgon of as much of his fortune as possible before the old man dies. Tartuffe has convinced Orgon that it is only with his (Tartuffe's) sage advice that Orgon will stave off ruination and death. By casting himself as the sole supply of that which Orgon most demands (like all of us, Orgon is fixated on not being a dead homeless person), Tartuffe is able to very nearly beggar the old man before the inevitable comic reversal by which Orgon's fortune is saved and Tartuffe's ragamuffinry is exposed.

Hopefully without coming across as too hoity-toity, I will confess that I am deeply suspicious of direct democracy and the capacity of the people to govern themselves. My home state of California provides an object lesson in the dangers of allowing those citizens who have a great interest in the outcomes of governmental action but very little interest in the work (another word for compromise) by which those outcomes are achieved to take control of public policy. Hence California has an incredible system of state universities and parks and prisons (people love schools and nature and hate criminals) but insufficient revenue to actually pay for their operations (people hate taxes even more than criminals). In California, everyone is Orgon, susceptible to the suggestions of Tartuffe, who may take the guise of an environmental lobbying firm or an anti-immigration group but whose underlying message is always "make this decision that I am suggesting that perfectly aligns with your worldview and all will be well." Of course, Orgon is only attractive to Tartuffe because he is such an easy target. Were Orgon hale or less wealthy, there would be no Tartuffe. If Californians were better educated or possessed fewer exploitable natural resources, they might well be more capable of governing themselves well, without the interventions of the various Tartuffes.

Transforming a preference into a fetish requires a psychological leap that is both entirely understandable and clearly defiant of basic logic. To wit: pesto is a food that makes me happy; therefore I will only order pesto when I eat in Italian restaurants, in order that I might find the one that has the finest pesto, so that I can find out where their purveyors source the basil and pine nuts and cheese that composes this pesto, and then I will buy up those farms and brush my pesto-stained teeth with pesto after a long day at the pesto dispensary before I turn in and sleep in my pesto-filled waterbed next to my wife who is constantly scented with pesto perfume. Even my pesto dream makes more sense than the suckers who blow all that cash on white truffles, though. Lots of people like pesto, after all. I could finance my pestotopia by selling whatever excess pesto there was to the masses. White truffles are kept at artificially high prices by people with a vested interest in doing so who are enabled by a class of people who consider themselves to be successful and blessed with good taste simply because they have the means to afford a delicacy so rarefied and refined that the only other creatures who seek it out are, again, trained dogs or sows in heat.

True good taste is defined by questions like: What am I hungry for? Where is the best place to satiate my hunger for that thing? Can I perhaps supply it myself or via the help of friends/neighbors/family? My preference for republican (note the small r) governance rather than democratic lies not in my belief that people are fundamentally incapable of making decisions on their own behalf. Indeed, I am friends almost exclusively with people who know what they want, how to get it, and how best to engage the other interested members of their community in those same issues. Rather, it is my continued observation of masses of people who allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that white truffles are worth more than basically any other legal substance despite the fact that they will shit it out within the day or that 3 Strikes and You're Out is good public policy despite no discernible decrease in felony rates and the bankrupting of the state prison system that makes me suspicious of granting further power to the people. Maybe I would feel differently if our citizens were better educated, but that would probably require additional tax money.

Oh, and in case it wasn't already clear, tartuffe is French for truffle.

Subconscious Political Cave Art

"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,--nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,--her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,--that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,--not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,--rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common." - Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

There is an extraordinary moment in Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams when the camera pans over a number of drawings of ancient buffalo all layered over one another and Herzog, in that marvelous Teuton drawl, tells us that the artists who painted these near-identical images lived over a span of thousands of years. Of course, none of them knew that. They had no carbon dating systems. They had no concept of art history. The last participant in the graffiti oneupsmanship that Herzog documents had no idea that he was marring the record of his ancestors and changing the perception that later generations would have about the cave. What the ancient men and women who left those records on those stalactites lacked is known to us modern motherfuckers as the anxiety of influence. Obviously anyone who drew atop the previous buffalo felt that he was adding something to the depictions, but with no other permanent records, that anonymous artist was oblivious to the fact that thousands of years and untold development had occurred between the first charcoal buffalo and the last.

Memory, records, truth and time are humanity's great survival tools, and the reason that people have become so good at staying alive and remaking the planet in our image is the continued refining of these skills. They can also be terrible burdens, curses against individuals and bludgeons against society.

Here are two examples of what I mean, one personal and the other societal.

Personal: How much of my self am I aware of, and how much of the self of which I am aware am I able to control, and how much of my self is simply a reaction to stimulus? I am aware of my tendency towards self-righteousness and aware of my good humor. I am aware of my historic attraction to well-read women about my height and weight or perhaps a bit larger who have long, curly, walnut-colored hair, athletic bearing and a whiff of sadness. One would imagine that all this awareness would have allowed me to develop, over time, a touch of humility and a sense of gravitas and an appreciation for happy, straight-haired blondes who enjoy bad television and move carelessly about the world. The presumption that the memory of negative reactions to my wrathful condemnations of those who think differently about the world than I or my clowning or my disastrous relations with the opposite gender would allow for an evolution in my personality is based on an understanding of the role that time plays in the evolution of a species that it cannot play for an individual. Human bodies experience linear time much more acutely than does the human mind. We grow. We age. We break bones and bear scars. All the while our mind works on unifying the current moment with all those it has taken in before, which it does, needfully, based upon those same prior experiences. Like the fractal image in the caption, the picture grows larger and more complex, but does not deviate from the founding shape or equation.

It's worth mentioning here that I do not believe in fate and I do believe that people can change and change for the better. But I believe that those changes are of degree rather than kind and that they occur after repeating the pattern time and again - that life is not shaped in a Modest Mouse-like "lifelong walk to the same exact spot" but is akin to a spiral, with a person finding herself on the same vector, but with the ability to look back, in memory, and see how the behavior pattern played out previously and tinker with the course to hopefully affect an improved outcome. I also believe that the forces that set us on those spirals are largely outside of our control. Am I innately sarcastic and self-sufficient, or are those reactions that I then cultivated because I valued sarcasm's ability to deflect disappointment and self-sufficiency's capacity to create a remove between myself and the unreliable mass of humanity? Where is the chicken and where is the egg? For that matter, if the chicken (my conscious self) is getting more experience and growing larger, does the egg (my unconscious/subconscious/personality/soul) grow correspondingly huge alongside it? I had one of my usual end of the world-type dreams recently, and I recognized I was dreaming when I looked back on the white smoke wafting from the city out on to the river in which I was swimming and realized that it was nearly identical to the cover of The New Yorker on the 10th Anniversary. New symbol for an old fear, perhaps, but it was comforting in a way to see a familiar emotion in a different guise. Like falling in love again and you know it's real because it feels as fresh and raw as it did the first time, but with huge sublimated fear in place of love.

Here is the societal example, which I promise will be simple and less vague: What does the Constitution of the United States mean and/or represent? If you consult the memories of the men involved in its debate, drafting and adoption, it means wildly different things. It was a codification of the union that the Declaration of Independence created. It was a betrayal of the spirit of independence through the codification of that union. If you consult the record, that is, the thing itself, you can find it to be equally perplexing and self-contradictory. Within one hundred years of its ratification, the Constitution had proved so maddeningly elusive in its definitions of the rights and responsibilities of the various governments it created or enshrined that the country tore itself apart for four years to resolve those ambiguities. How about the truth of the Constitution? We know from the preamble that it is intended to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity." Justice for whom? Justice by what standard? What is the proper weight between domestic tranquility (which would seem to provide a framework against divisive politics) and the blessings of liberty (which include the right to cacophonous disagreement)? Is the general welfare the general welfare of the country as measured in GDP or the general welfare of the country as measured in class mobility? How many of the Constitution's goals are provided by the Constitution itself and how many are supplied by the workings of other institutions that exist because we have respect for the rule of law? Finally, crucially, there is our perception of time as it relates to the Constitution. Could this document have been produced by different men in a different place in a different time? How reverent should we be of the Founders' accomplishment, and can that reverence include revision? Can we be aware of how special and important the cave drawing is and still have the chutzpah required to add our art atop it in good conscience?

Economies of Scale

"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water." - William James

For most of my adult life, I've worked in restaurants. There are two strategies restaurateurs employ in order to turn a profit. 1) Reliance on high volume/popularity. 2) Systematic yet disguised price gouging. Strategy #1 is best exemplified by your local diner. They don't have loss-leaders, they don't price competitively and their chief concern is getting you in and out as quickly as possible. They probably only make a few cents of profit on every transaction, so their business strategy is to conduct as many transactions as possible. Strategy #2 is best exemplified by your local mid-market chain restaurant (think Applebee's/Outback, etc.), where you get a steak for perhaps a dollar or two less than you would at a joint with one outlet rather than several hundred. The quality of the food is in all likelihood lower but more consistent than any independent place, and this is because the chains are making purchase arrangements with large-scale distributors who supply them with product at a much lower price than any independent can negotiate. But because the price is set by the surrounding market, the chain is able to charge a price comparable to the independent and pocket the difference as profit. Think of it this way: were I to charge $18 for a steak, you would wonder about the quality of the beef, because you are used to paying more for your meat; so I charge $24 to meet your expectations, despite the fact that I only needed to charge $18 to make a profit. The reason I am able to charge $18 and still make a profit is that not only my restaurant but my whole chain buys in bulk and gets substantial price breaks from the slaughterhouses contracted to supply all that red meat.

Americans are used to the benefits of large economies of scale. Our goods were less expensive than the rest of the world even before we started contracting our labor to other countries because our market was both enormous and integrated. Every town had a Macy's, every Macy's had the same lines of clothes, and because of the scale of these operations, Americans were able to have better shoes at lower prices than other, smaller countries. Moreover, because nearly all Americans speak English at least passably and the national infrastructure is continuous and functional, there is less of a risk of disagreement in cultural taste and less time lost moving goods around.

Slowly, finally, the citizens of the United States have begun to grasp the limitations of these large-scale enterprises. When Robert Rudin and Larry Summers conceived the expansion of individual banks' scope of operations, the intent was a reduction in borrowing costs that would allow for reduced risk and a corresponding increase in the supply of loans for Americans with limited capital. By granting Citibank access to insurance and investment equity, the Clinton administration hoped to make the bank less reliant on the repayment of each loan, less reliant on the interest paid on the loans being repaid, less reliant on the down payment to secure a loan and therefore more willing to lend to the lower and lower-middle classes, who could then secure property that would allow them a higher standard of living. What no one in either the Clinton or Bush II administrations ever seemed to consider was a problem in one of the enormous, multi-sector banks that rose out of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other banking regulations. When the bankers fucked up, the consequences were no longer limited to their depositors or even just other banks with which they did business, but spread out in to all the large-scale economies to which they had been allowed access. Insurance, investment banking, commercial and residential real estate, municipal bonds, retirement and pension funds all suffered.

Here's another (hypothetical) example: imagine what would happen if Wal-Mart went out of business. Wal-Mart's enormous economies of scale have allowed it to demand lower prices from its suppliers and undercut its competitors' price for all goods sold. Wal-Mart now dominates the markets for electronics, clothes, groceries, gardening, home improvement and even books in much of the United States. More than a few towns and small cities are beholden to Wal-Mart for access to many of the necessities of life, as the superstore has used its capacity to increase profit by lowering price to put all local competitors (who do not have Wal-Mart's leverage over manufacturers) out of business. Were Wal-Mart to falter, millions of people would suddenly be without basic daily needs, including, of course, employment. When a small business fails, that sucks for the community in which it is located and the handful, or even hundreds, of employees. When a steel mill shutters, that sucks for a whole town. When a national enterprise goes under, the repercussions are so severe that the impact generally outweighs any positive benefits that the scale of the operation was able to impart. The economic boom that came about with the easy credit terms offered by the balloon banks won't be remembered half so well as the simultaneous collapse of several national economies when those balloons burst.

William James' quote above continues with a screed against national enterprise, whether the results are good or ill. He believed that lasting triumphs were small, limited to individuals. Certainly he felt that other individuals could sway one of their fellows, and would have been somewhere between skeptical and amused by Randian notions of individual primacy. He was the sort of person who listened when his friends spoke, thought about what they had said, and either rebutted or agreed based on his experience and the dictates of his conscience.

Kel's brother Kramer has been down documenting the Occupy Wall Street movement, which got me thinking about the root cause of those protests and on to the whole economies of scale thoughtline, but I chose my favorite photo from Kramer's collection 'Til Human Voices Wake Us. The photographs are of swimmers at New York City beaches, men and women borne by mammoth amalgamations of salt and water that break, as in the photo above, into billions of constituent parts. Most of the time the person rides the mass back to shore, but every now and again the tidal force is overwhelming, and that very last line of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" really resonates.

Softness in Literary Fiction

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” ― Ernest Hemingway


Dumping on people is not really my thing. I have my tastes, and they align with some folks' and diverge from others'. There is a growing tendency in literary fiction to not judge one's characters too harshly that has led to soft, inexact language that may not rely as heavily on ten-dollar words as Faulkner once did but makes up for simplified vocabulary with fanciful description and endless sentences that are invariably described as 'discursive' by reviewers.


Pictured at right is Joshua Ferris. My use of his photograph is completely arbitrary. He could just as easily be Jonathan Safran Foer or Colum McCann or Gary Shteyngart or any author whose books are full of people who 'make love' rather than engaging in anything so quotidian or dirty as sex, intercourse, fucking; who 'desperately seek' love or salvation and never are manipulative or callow except when attempting 'soul transference' with some other person whose 'desire' happens to align with their own.


On the last page of McCann's Let the Great World Spin, the author explains that the title comes from a line in Tennyson, and that Tennyson in turn was inspired by an Arabic verse that translates into a lovely description that could very easily be read as somehow evocative of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Since Let the Great World Spin is framed around Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, it's very easy to see where McCann is going with all this intertextual classicism. There's a soothing element to the whole book, an effort to make sentences into balms that a reader might use to ease the pain of existence. There's a character who reminisces about her home in Missouri and later dies the moment she reaches the riverbank to which she so longed to return. The hookers in the book are good-humored and articulate about their anger against God. A coked-out trust funder is able to find redemption in the arms of a man who most of the other characters consider a bit of an asshole. People in this world do things like find one another.


Big words and complex ideas are fine in fiction, not that I want to side against Hemingway in any fight. Hemingway wrote books before flickering images robbed simple words of their power. Suddenly all simplicity did was say in a page what a filmed image could tell you in a second. Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen both pack their books with ruminations on science and art and consumerism and neurology and biology and the difference between, say 'run-on' as a hyphenated construction of four letters and that construction's capacity to describe this sentence, and, better, to evoke it.


Most of this is predicated on my view of the world. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner builds these fantastic characters who keep fucking up their lives because they are haunted by memory and ruled by emotion. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway builds admittedly rather shallow characters whose lives are fucked by external circumstance and seek moments of grace through their present actions. I prefer Hemingway and that preference is tied up more than a little in my belief that action trumps emotion.


To put this in a more direct way - the characters in the books of these soft-handed MFA holders are constantly feeling a course through life and then reflecting on how the course they muddled on to has given rise to other, equally interesting feelings, while the characters in, say George Saunders' writing are acting (or not acting, but in a weak-willed rather than reflective manner) and these actions (or inactions) arose from considerations like economics and loyalty and tribalism rather than some need to 're-capture the wild narrative of my life.'


For the record, none of the quotes come from the writings of the authors I am criticizing, though I feel they easily could have. Also, Ferris' sweater in the picture is ridiculous.

Springsteen

"Now those memories come back to haunt me/They haunt me like a curse/Is a dream a lie if it don't come true/Or is it something worse?" - Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

One of my earliest musical memories is of hearing "Badlands" one night in the bar with my dad. There's not a lot of specificity to the memory, but I can hear the charging piano line and the bluesy bottoming out of the guitar and see his mustache very clearly. Is there anyone my age who hears a Bruce Springsteen song and doesn't think of their father?

Now I'm not going to get all mopey and Tony Soprano-reminiscing-about-the-glory-of-Johnny-Boy hagiographying about either my dad or Bruce. Go read Joe Posnanski's blog entry on the song "The Promise" if you want that flavor today. Nor am I going to give you a cynical post-modern reading on the photo above, pointing out how the Darkness on the Edge of Town back cover photo uses familiar symbols (the faded wallpaper, the V-neck undershirt, the door that Springsteen's slouch says he's about to use to go out for a ride and never come back) to convey blue-collar existential dread to an audience whose lives Bruce's stopped resembling around his 21st birthday. Chuck Klosterman covers that somewhere in Sex, Lies and Cocoa Puffs, I think. No, what I want to talk about really quickly here is how Springsteen has tricked a huge fan base into listening to the most depressing shit ever to tumble out of a jukebox.

Dylan is an adept at setting sad songs to upbeat tempos as a method of disguising the content. If the title didn't give the game away, I'd bet many people could be fooled by the pace of the song and the lightness in Bob's voice into thinking that "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is a love song. In Dylan, it's a bit of a game, though, one of the dozens of obfuscations and roadblocks that he throws in front of his audience to force them to engage with the content rather than just shout along. For Springsteen, the despondent lyrics and anthemic music are interconnected. I read once that the message of Bruce Springsteen is that Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. I think a more accurate read is that Nothing Will Save You But It's Okay To Try And Find Something Anyway.

Born to Run made the anthem a safe form for rock and roll. I don't think that's hyperbolic. As massive as Pink Floyd songs are, you don't really sing along to them. The biggest Zeppelin songs are more like dance tracks or jam sessions than verse-chorus form songs. The Who probably came the closest to what I would define as an anthem, but as much as I love them, there's something impersonal about The Who. Springsteen always seems like he's reaching back past all the big rock acts that preceded him and channeling Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison, even Ray Charles, guys who sang what sounded like very personal stories that were also very relatable. Everything about their voices made you think that they'd lived those songs.

Let's take "Backstreets." This is about as huge a song as any in Springsteen's setlist, with big, yelling choruses and a backing piano that sounds possessed by the ghost of Jelly Roll Morton on barbituates. My reading of the lyrics is that Bruce watched Midnight Cowboy and decided to write an uplifting song about Rizzo and Joe but not gloss over their lives at all. There's absolutely no redemption at all in the lyric, as near the end the narrator cries out to his long-lost friend/lover/partner, "Remember all the movies, Terry/We'd go see/Trying to learn to walk like the heroes/We thought we had to be/Well after all this time/To find we're just like all the rest/Stranded in the park/And forced to confess/To hiding on the backstreets." I don't care how Romantic a view you might have on the ability of pain to bring out the sweetness in life, that's just fucking bleak. And I'm not cherry picking. "Badlands" is about an auto mechanic who wants to "find one face that ain't looking through me." "Hungry Heart" is about a guy who abandons his wife and kids. "Born in the U.S.A." is about a Vietnam vet betrayed by his country. AND THOSE ARE THE FUCKING HITS!

Nebraska was the first album on which Bruce dropped the artifice of rock and roll and gave us the lyrics unadorned. Jason once described it as "the album on the stereo when you walk into the garage and find the body." It's not an easy listen and the songs on it don't often make it into the live shows, which I think is rather unfortunate. There's nothing in the lyrics of a song like, say, "Atlantic City" that makes it any less uplifting than a song like "Glory Days." If anything, "Atlantic City" is less cynical. Why not slap a few power chords and a Max Weinberg back beat on that bitch and get Chris Christie to bellow along to it at the next concert he attends?

My suspicion is that, by 1982, Springsteen was coming to grips with what he'd unleashed upon the world. Boston, Journey, Billy Joel, Night Ranger, Bon Jovi, eventually even Guns N Roses would succumb and blast out something larger than a power ballad - an Anthem, laden with screeching guitars, breathless vocalizing and stultifying drums, like a many-winged early airplane trying to take off from under its own weight. And so Bruce gave us Nebraska, the distillate of his worldview. It's easily my favorite of his records. I've been told that shows how sad my tastes lean. I think most people are too busy shouting along to the chorus to pay attention to the verse, and that Nebraska takes away that crutch. I also think it's his most strangely uplifting album. You endure nine tracks of acoustic guitar, harmonica, wailing and shit and then you get "Reason to Believe," which is equally awful (quick summation: dead dogs, dead babies, dead love) but saved by a bounce in the harmonica and the vocal that is otherwise missing from the album. It's not an anthem, and it's barely even a jaunty-tempoed-sad-song, but it stands out because of the context and teaches the listener how to properly hear a Bruce Springsteen song - enjoy everything that's there, be it a single moment of grace in a river of shit or the enormous promise of dawn on the open road, because this is the life you've got and "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."

Charlie Kelly, Totemic Objects and Me

"Stop the hardwood floor's lopsided grin/Leave the dirt and dead flowers in a brown coffee tin/Let your hand melt a hole in the frost/Peer out under a sky that looks just like a shirt I lost." - The Weakerthans, "Leash"

There was a very sweet moment in the recent episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Sweetness and Sunny seldom align, so it was noteworthy. Resident whipping boy Charlie ends up spending a night on the beach with The Waitress. The Waitress had taken a bunch of Ecstasy before she encountered Charlie and therefore has no recollection of what transpired, so Charlie attempts to jog her memory by showing her first the dead sand crab that they dug up while they were exploring the wonders of marine life. The Waitress doesn't remember anything, and instead heaves the dead animal away, as any sensible person would. So Charlie breaks out the cool jade-like object that The Waitress gave to him during her drug-induced euphoria. She correctly identifies Charlie's precious jewel as the bottom of a broken beer bottle and storms off in a huff.

My question here - is it weird that I relate to Charlie's attachment to what could only very generously be described as emotional junk?

Impulsive collecting of trinkets and the assignation of emotional content to them is not usually considered healthy behavior. Serial killers like to keep hair or bits of clothing from their victims, after all. Still, a certain level of sentimentality isn't harmful. And so I wore the pair of jeans that Kim bought me until I literally couldn't walk in them because the knee was so badly blown out that half my shin would protrude through the hole. At my next job, I exclusively used the silver mini-tray that all my friends at Dos Caminos had inscribed with their wine keys on my last night there, until I left it in a cab a year later. I kept a single brown argyle sock that I wore mismatched because it was the survivor of a pair that Tara gave me for my birthday. For years I wore a bandanna that I found at the bottom of a lake. That, too, was left in a cab. In a box next to the envelope with my undergraduate diploma that I never opened is a child's watch with Pinkie and the Brain on the face and a busted band that hasn't ticked in a decade. Sometimes I think of getting a safe deposit box just for that.

Why do we bestow such memorial power on stupid shit? Every item that I've wanted to retain and eventually lost or misplaced or replaced or finally thrown out didn't take the emotions or the memories that I associated with it. The impermanent world that our brain struggles to comprehend as it flashes past us doesn't suddenly become fixed within some shiny bauble or faded stitch of cloth.

Charlie is actually kind of a great role model for someone who wants to be rid of the power that totems can hold. He lives in a perpetual present that makes complete sense to him and is defined by simple parameters: Gang=good; Waitress=love; Food=necessary. Of course, serial killers also live in perpetual presents that make complete sense to them and are defined by simple parameters.

Looks like a future of hoarding for me!

Stockholm Syndrome

"It turns your skull into a cage and your brain into a rat, and the city is just a stick poking the rat all day." - Patton Oswalt

Were someone to ask me to sum up my attitude to life in a single word, I would say, "more." Time has always struck me as patently unfair, as it constantly wakes me when I am dreaming, prevents me from attending two concerts simultaneously, limits the number of conversations I can have with my friends.

New York City both exacerbates and soothes this need to experience the muchness of life as richly and often as possible. There are so many neighborhoods whose architectural oddities I've yet to discover, so many diners whose ability to make a grilled cheese with bacon and tomato I've yet to sample, so many people whose capacity for humor and wonder in the face of existence I've yet to appreciate, but the amount of stimulation I receive any given day in New York can fulfill any demand I built up while asleep. Conversely, as anyone with who exercises or ingests substances will tell you, a tolerance builds up and there is a greater baseline required before one can reach The Zone.

There are people who can see the city's flaws. They see the lumpy sidewalks, the flooded intersections, the broken bottles of malt liquor, the homeless man asleep on the subway platform, the graffitoed construction awnings, the rats and roaches and say, "this place is fucking filthy." They hear the unending babble of other people reporting the details of their sex lives or pontificating their views on the Whitney biennial, the rumble and screech of the subway erupting from the sidewalk grate, the blare of horns up and down Canal and say, "this place is a fucking cacophony of misery." They smell the clouds of cigarette smoke, of exhaust fumes, of restaurant Dumpster soaking in the heat and humidity and say, "sweet fucking Christ, Hell has actually broken out on Earth." They see the disciples of capital jabbering into their Bluetooths or the chain-smoking men on the Chinatown corners or the medallioned guineas tooling around Bay Ridge in SUVs or the tense mothers cheering at soccer practice in Prospect Park or the hipsters in their dark jeans and bright sunglasses or the pale and fat-faced Orthodox with their endless broods of little rituals and ask, "who here is not hateful?"

Me, I just chalk all the inconveniences and horror up as The Price of Admission. But I know that's not quite right. Because there's something so wonderfully honest about the city. About the way that it confirms and destroys stereotypes, forces you to confront certain realities about capitalism, democracy, authority and the primacy of day-to-day interaction over theory, and above all its focus on sharing - shared streets, shared transportation, shared parks, shared eateries, shared beauty, shared shame. Not that the city is socialist in its politics, but rather that there is constant exposure to the best and worst of what humanity can create, on both the individual and societal levels.

Another way to put this: I like having my rat-brain prodded with a stick. The response shows that the old mainframe is still booted up and working, that I have not gone somnolent and retreated behind the soothing repetitive images of a screen-saver. I can hear and smell and see and taste and even when my senses are repulsed by what they encounter, they still want more.

Moral Absolutism

"But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor, to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from My altar, that he may die. And he who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. He who kidnaps a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, shall surely be put to death. And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death." - Exodus 21:14-17

Me, I'm a pretty reasonable guy. I can negotiate and compromise, because I understand that my desire to change a situation is built upon dissatisfaction with things as they are, and while I may have a conception of the best possible way that things should be, some movement towards that goal is better to me than ideological purity and immediate total victory.

Except for the death penalty.

Two men were executed earlier this week, one in Georgia, the other in Texas. The inmate in Georgia, Troy Davis, drew international attention prior to his execution because of questions surrounding his guilt in the killing of an off-duty police officer. The inmate in Texas, Lawrence Brewer, drew an AP reporter who dutifully transcribed his last words, 'I have no final statement,' and received that publicity because of the headlines the crime for which he was convicted generated. Mr. Brewer, you see, was one of the three Klansmen who chained a black man to the bumper of their pickup truck and dragged him until his raw corpse was scattered along miles of roadbank.

With all due respect to the many activists who unsuccessfully tried to prevent Mr. Davis' execution, the protests should have centered around Mr. Brewer.

No one supports the execution of innocents. However, we have an appeals process, trials by jury, lengthy sentencing hearings, layer upon layer of protection against the lethal injection of a person who does not deserve to die. What about that word, 'deserve,' though? Later on in Chapter 21 of The Book of Exodus, The LORD commands that a guy who owns an ox that has a history of swinging its head around should be put to death along with the ox should the beast gore some innocent. The Romans rather famously and unsuccessfully attempted to quell a rebellion in Judea by employing capital punishment against the ringleader. The Breaking Wheel, pictured above, was popular in France for use against those who badmouthed the aristocracy until people began questioning its brutality. That led the French royalty to develop the more humane guillotine, which gentility was tested on them. Until very recently, the United States permitted execution of rapists and the mentally retarded. Not so very recently, but recently enough, it was considered permissible to drag a black man from the back of your truck by a chain tied around his neck. Obviously, human standards of what the phrase 'deserve to die' permits have changed over time.

Which brings me to Mr. Brewer. Not to mince words, but he was a piece of shit. Very, very few people are going to miss his presence on this earth. There might even be some solace available to the family of his victim, given the knowledge that they no longer have to share oxygen with their loved one's mutilator. The problem with meting out Mr. Brewer's richly deserved punishment is that it leads to more dubious situations like that of Mr. Davis. As long as we insist on killing the worst human beings our society produces, the option will continue to exist that we execute someone who is not guilty.

Rather than protest the questionable cases, I'd like to see more people protest the executions of slam-dunk confessed killers. Organize marches with placards bearing the blank eyes of a sociopath and talk openly about how this man disgusts you but you don't want him to be killed in your name.

Just consider this. If we allow that 99.99% of the convicts who have been put to death in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 were guilty, and frankly, given the potential for error in any system that is wholly dependent on humans for its operation, 99.99 is a generous percentage to allow, then we've killed 13 innocent people.

Context and Greatness

“Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.” ― 
Robert M. Pirsig


For a generalist like me, specialization always presents problems. Genre is maddening, because it somehow implies immediately lower or raised standards. Gangster movies and Westerns can be great, while Rom-Coms and Sci-Fi are limited; fantasy fiction can never be as good as literary fiction, or, even worse, mediocre literary fiction is more worthy of analysis because it shows greater ambition than even the best fantasy fiction. I actually believe these tropes, because, for the most part, they are borne out in the record. There are more stone classics in the Gangster and Western genres than there are in the Rom-Com or Sci-Fi genres. If an author has ambitions towards canonization, she will usually write literary fiction rather than fantasy. What about the exceptions that prove the rule? Does one just use that old line and write off Annie Hall or A Song of Ice and Fire? What about other masterpieces that arise from disreputable genres? Calvin and Hobbes, London Calling, The Wire, are these also rule-proving exceptions or is there something wrong with the rule?


This has been on my mind because of Mariano Rivera and Terminator 2. Mo just broke the all-time saves record. Terminator 2 just happened to be available On Demand the other night when I was bored.


Saves are probably the stupidest statistic in baseball, which is a sport rife with stupid statistics. In order for a pitcher to earn a save, he must record the last out having entered the game with a lead of no more than three runs (if he pitches a full inning) or with the tying run on deck (if he pitches less than one inning) - to put that a little more simply, you earn a save if you get more outs than you allow runs. If starting pitchers were given a reward for the same criteria, they could pitch two innings and give up five runs.


At the same time, Mariano Rivera is the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball and if the metric we use to rate him is flawed, that should take nothing away from the consistent and singular greatness that he has shown over the years. He is a joy to watch, because despite the fact that the service he renders the Yankees is wildly overvalued and ridiculously measured, he is the best at it. There is a grace and an economy to his performance that we associate with greatness. It is not only his success, but the ease with which he accomplishes it.


Terminator 2 should not rank very high in my esteem. It is a straight action movie, which is not a genre that produces films with interesting themes or artistic ambition. Included in the required suspension of disbelief is the good-killer-robot-from-the-future's Austrian accent. The movie was marketed to children and teenagers despite its stupefying violence. The video games based on it were pretty fucking dogshit. Danny Cooksey's insufferable mullet was given star status on Salute Your Shorts because of his three-minute appearance in T2.


That's a litany of sins to have to live down, but fuck if Terminator 2 doesn't remain one of the absolute best movies I've seen. The last 40-45 minutes is basically a single sustained action sequence, consisting of three bravura setpieces (the CyberDyne break-in, the highway chase and the steel mill finale) that develop the characters, advance the plot, are clearly staged, shot and edited and culminate with the most ridiculously wonderful action movie catchphrase and pathos for the Austrian-accented-good-killer-robot-from-the-future. In addition to that astonishing third act, though, we also get Cameron's extended and relatively subtle layering of metal and machine and technology as aids to violence (think of the strangely-accented Terminator mangling the payphone to get John Connor some quarters or the T-1000 ripping apart the elevator in which Our Heroes are escaping), some fun visual puns (John playing Missile Command in the arcade, the T-1000 taken aback by the silvery female mannequin) and Sarah Connor's Vision of Judgment Day. The movie works its themes into every level and holds up to repeated viewings not because it Blows Shit Up Real Good (though truly, Shit has never been Blown Up quite so Good as it is here) but because it has compelling characters and has so much layered in to every visual that it can be analyzed as microscopically as Citizen Kane.


So is Mariano less excellent a baseball player because of his role or Terminator 2 less amazing a movie because of its genre? Well, yes, I think so. A great closer in baseball can only become great if there is a great baseball team playing in the innings prior to his entrance. Without a lead to protect, a victory to preserve, a closer loses his perceived value and aura. Mariano Rivera does a very specific job better than anyone ever, while Derek Jeter, say, does a more general job better than quite a lot of people. Nevertheless, if you were assembling a baseball team, you would pick Derek Jeter before Mariano Rivera because the job that Jeter is less dominant at is way more important than the job at which Rivera is transcendent. Similarly, Terminator 2 is the best action movie ever made, and I wouldn't dispute its inclusion on any comprehensive list of great films, but even if we grant that Cameron pulls it off in the moment, no one can step back from "Hasta la vista, baby" and not find it laughable.