h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Re: funk. That's what is so great about P.Funk. Though they obviously didn't make up the word funk to describe the music (I'm not sure who did), they were the first to utilize all meanings of the word. Funk can also mean "sadness" as in "his dog died and he's been in a funk all day." P.Funk, both musically and lyrically, really tap into this rich word and mine it for all it's worth. So complicated does the web of associations get with P.Funk that it approaches the complexity of medieval allegory or modernist literature (think Joyce's juggling of nationalism, religion, personal identity, mythology, and family relations all at the same time, while never dropping a ball, and you get the idea). You could teach a course on the musical and lyrical issues in P.Funk, but you'd have to be really careful not to squeeze all the funk out of it. But I'm not kidding when I say that P.Funk changed my life. On one hand it's cerebral, insanely intelligent, and on the other hand, it's so much fun--just fantastic dance music--and unlike modernist literature, you don't have to work at all to enjoy it. It's art, and it's the musical equivalent of pure fun. Like Richard Feynman, P. Funk are geniuses who just don't take themselves seriously at all, and the result is just incredible generosity on their part: they show you something wonderful, and give you the means to love it, all at the same time. Ah, P. Funk. If you haven't felt the full-on assault of P.Funk, I highly recommend two albums: Mothership Connection, and even more Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Both are fee-nomenal, but the second one in particular, well, there ain't nothin' like it.

Yes, I was throwing a Magnetic Fields quote your way. We be on the Fields tip, yo. Or something like that.

I was just thinking about Kafka today. Here's why--I am finally being exposed to a German theoretician who I really like: Max Weber. Weber's stuff concentrates on bureaucracy, the power it has and its effect on society. It's really smart stuff, and all the more astonishing because he wrote it over a hundred years ago and it seems to be more true today than it was then (he was onto that "power through the control of information" thing way before it was cool). What's neat is that, for years, I had thought that Kafka was the first person to really think seriously about this sort of thing, and it's pleasant to think that he was actually part of a larger group of people who were concerned about the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy--even if Kafka and Weber had never met. All the same, I revere Kafka. Absolutely revere him. Borges (another guy I absolutely revere) put it better than I ever could. He said that, for almost every writer he ever read, he could point to people further back in history that were similar, either stylistically or thematically or both. His point was just that it's silly to try to be "original," that even the greatest writers have always been, in some sense, beholden to people who went before them, and there's no shame in that--and also that if they're original to you, it's probably only because you just haven't blundered across their influences yet. A good point. The one exception to this, he said, was Kafka. Now you know that Borges read--and remembered--far more than most people ever will. And he said that, try as he might, he simply couldn't find someone that was like Kafka. Oh, you can rattle off his influences--you know, the Bible, Jewish folk tales, that sort of thing--but Borges pointed out that nobody before Kafka had produced that sort of tone in literature before, that unsettling combination of humor, horror, and detachment that makes Kafka what he is. Kafka really does seem to be, well, "original"--since Kafka, you can see his influence everywhere, in so many other writers' stuff. And now that the 20th century is behind us, it seems like Kafka is emerging as the writer who understood it best (and so early!)--the chaos, the detachment, the horror, and beneath so much of it, this black humor and people insisting on their humanity. I want to reread him at some point, but it's going to have to wait, I'm afraid.

Actually, it's no problem about Thursday--I was about to write to tell you that it turns out that I can't do it. I have a meeting here at school, and then a gig, which pretty much takes me out of the running. The gig, incidentally, is at the Bistro, so if you two are bored, feel free to drop by. Obviously, you are in no way under any pressure to actually do this. I have been invited to come to every other person's show at the Bistro, and have yet to show up to a single one of them. But that's life for you.

And I very much appreciate the Charles Ives propage. Ives needs all the love he can get--though I have noticed, lately, a slight resurgence of performances of Ives's music. Haven't gone to any of those, either.

I have a question for you: what is your poetry like? Now, you are under no obligation to actually answer this question--I hate it when people ask me what my fiction is like, so much so that when people ask me if I'm still writing, I usually lie and say no--but I am curious all the same. Curious mostly because we seem to have such similar tastes, even though we read different people. Don't worry, I'm not going to get all touchy-feely arty on you--being arty takes more energy than I have. Writing is more like a craft for me; writing short stories is less like sculpture and more like building a nice piece of furniture. They're not subtle, but they are pretty functional, and hopefully the lines aren't too far off. Anyway, I was just curious.

Okay, must study.

B

Re: funk. That's what is so great about P.Funk. Though they obviously didn't make up the word funk to describe the music (I'm not sure who did), they were the first to utilize all meanings of the word. Funk can also mean "sadness" as in "his dog died and he's been in a funk all day." P.Funk, both musically and lyrically, really tap into this rich word and mine it for all it's worth. So complicated does the web of associations get with P.Funk that it approaches the complexity of medieval allegory or modernist literature (think Joyce's juggling of nationalism, religion, personal identity, mythology, and family relations all at the same time, while never dropping a ball, and you get the idea). You could teach a course on the musical and lyrical issues in P.Funk, but you'd have to be really careful not to squeeze all the funk out of it. But I'm not kidding when I say that P.Funk changed my life. On one hand it's cerebral, insanely intelligent, and on the other hand, it's so much fun--just fantastic dance music--and unlike modernist literature, you don't have to work at all to enjoy it. It's art, and it's the musical equivalent of pure fun. Like Richard Feynman, P. Funk are geniuses who just don't take themselves seriously at all, and the result is just incredible generosity on their part: they show you something wonderful, and give you the means to love it, all at the same time. Ah, P. Funk. If you haven't felt the full-on assault of P.Funk, I highly recommend two albums: Mothership Connection, and even more Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Both are fee-nomenal, but the second one in particular, well, there ain't nothin' like it.

Yes, I was throwing a Magnetic Fields quote your way. We be on the Fields tip, yo. Or something like that.

I was just thinking about Kafka today. Here's why--I am finally being exposed to a German theoretician who I really like: Max Weber. Weber's stuff concentrates on bureaucracy, the power it has and its effect on society. It's really smart stuff, and all the more astonishing because he wrote it over a hundred years ago and it seems to be more true today than it was then (he was onto that "power through the control of information" thing way before it was cool). What's neat is that, for years, I had thought that Kafka was the first person to really think seriously about this sort of thing, and it's pleasant to think that he was actually part of a larger group of people who were concerned about the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy--even if Kafka and Weber had never met. All the same, I revere Kafka. Absolutely revere him. Borges (another guy I absolutely revere) put it better than I ever could. He said that, for almost every writer he ever read, he could point to people further back in history that were similar, either stylistically or thematically or both. His point was just that it's silly to try to be "original," that even the greatest writers have always been, in some sense, beholden to people who went before them, and there's no shame in that--and also that if they're original to you, it's probably only because you just haven't blundered across their influences yet. A good point. The one exception to this, he said, was Kafka. Now you know that Borges read--and remembered--far more than most people ever will. And he said that, try as he might, he simply couldn't find someone that was like Kafka. Oh, you can rattle off his influences--you know, the Bible, Jewish folk tales, that sort of thing--but Borges pointed out that nobody before Kafka had produced that sort of tone in literature before, that unsettling combination of humor, horror, and detachment that makes Kafka what he is. Kafka really does seem to be, well, "original"--since Kafka, you can see his influence everywhere, in so many other writers' stuff. And now that the 20th century is behind us, it seems like Kafka is emerging as the writer who understood it best (and so early!)--the chaos, the detachment, the horror, and beneath so much of it, this black humor and people insisting on their humanity. I want to reread him at some point, but it's going to have to wait, I'm afraid.

Actually, it's no problem about Thursday--I was about to write to tell you that it turns out that I can't do it. I have a meeting here at school, and then a gig, which pretty much takes me out of the running. The gig, incidentally, is at the Bistro, so if you two are bored, feel free to drop by. Obviously, you are in no way under any pressure to actually do this. I have been invited to come to every other person's show at the Bistro, and have yet to show up to a single one of them. But that's life for you.

And I very much appreciate the Charles Ives propage. Ives needs all the love he can get--though I have noticed, lately, a slight resurgence of performances of Ives's music. Haven't gone to any of those, either.

I have a question for you: what is your poetry like? Now, you are under no obligation to actually answer this question--I hate it when people ask me what my fiction is like, so much so that when people ask me if I'm still writing, I usually lie and say no--but I am curious all the same. Curious mostly because we seem to have such similar tastes, even though we read different people. Don't worry, I'm not going to get all touchy-feely arty on you--being arty takes more energy than I have. Writing is more like a craft for me; writing short stories is less like sculpture and more like building a nice piece of furniture. They're not subtle, but they are pretty functional, and hopefully the lines aren't too far off. Anyway, I was just curious.

Okay, must study.

B

Ah well, that is pretty much the same reason I adore Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart or any of his 30 other aliases. He's a tremendously brilliant musician, churning away mostly by himself and creating works that can be powerful/funny/and provocative. You probably have heard of him as Senor Coconut, if at all. For this joke record, he assembled samples of Latin music bands, created Latin covers of Kraftwerk songs, and packaged it all up to look like a real band with the teasing hint "File under: Simulation" on the back being the only thing to give it away. It became more successful than even he imagined. As Lassigue Bendthaus, he singlehandedly defined a lot of the intelligent sound European industrial followed in the 90s. He also was rather significant in shaping the IDM movement, although he rarely gets the same mention as Autechre or Aphex Twin. And he's so prolific to boot. His label Rather Interesting now is pointing out a new CD every month, and in most cases, it's another one of his projects. Now, he has a jazz-styled duo with microtonal dubster Burnt Friedman. It's been interesting to see how many of my former favorites are following along some things he did five years ago, whether consciously or accidentally.

Of course, when it comes to musical influences, nothing beats Kraftwerk. There's just something amusing about the fact that four clean-cut guys from Germany can father techno and hip-hop in one fell swoop. It sounds crazy but it's true. They loved it in Detroit, and Africa Bambataa's life was changed by "Trans Europe Express".

I can't really tell you much about what my poetry is, more than what it is not first. It's political I suppose (everything is), but it avoids the blatant politicizing of many American poets. It is personal, but not confessional to a large degree (I'm no Plath or Lowell). It's observational, but not too stylishly clever. I guess I can tell you my biggest influences are the Polish poets Herbert, Milosz, and Sczymborska with the subtle styles, classical allusions, and intimate knowledge of evil (living in a repressive communist regime is only good in that it suppresses some of the extreme histrionics and makes things more powerful). Of course, I'm a young American, and not an older Pole, so I am influenced by Patchen and Frost. I'm not going to write about rape and incest, why whitey must pay, or how I can seduce women (the typical poetry slam fare). I guess I'm restrained, but I hope it's in a good way, where everything isn't overwhelmed by bathos.

Normally, I would not really show anybody my poems, but I took a seminar last spring, and it encouraged me about my work. The instructor was a poet by the name of Packard for created the New York Quarterly Review and was Bukowski's biggest champion in the earlier days. He seemed to think I had promise and some of the other students were quite encouraging as well. Now, I'm writing more and working on revising works and considering submitting works to certain smaller publications.
We'll see. I guess my most popular topic is my own inability to articulate the things I see in the language I use. Words fail me all too often.

Maybe I'll post a poem here later or something.

This is going to sound crazy, but I have never to my knowledge actually heard Kraftwerk. This is especially weird considering how much I liked that sort of thing for years and years, but I never got any of it. I must have picked up the CD of Trans-Europe Express dozens of time, but I never actually purchased it (I think I always ended up going home with a New Order or a Cure CD instead). And now that my CD purchases are stuck in Africa, Latin America, or 70s funk and soul, I can't seem to get around to Kraftwerk again. Maybe I can make my way there via Afrika Bamba(a?)ta(a?), another band I don't have anything of. Ah, so much music to get.

I tend to appreciate it also when clean-cut guys do good bands. There's something really cool about that, a reminder that you're supposed to be listening to the band, not looking at the band. Talking Heads, even in the big suit days, I thought had a similar vibe. Even in the Remain in Light days, when I would argue they were at their weirdest and most daring musically--before the irony really kicked in--they looked like people who could be working middle management at Sears (which is, incidentally, exactly what I think George W. Bush would be doing if he were born to a regular middle-class family. Not that there's anything wrong with working at Sears--I just think Bush was really made for smaller things than being the leader of the free world; I even think sometimes he wishes he were working at Sears). On the other hand, of course, I would pay an obscene amount of time to go back in time and catch Parliament in their heyday, when they had the Mothership itself and all that jazz.

Intimate knowledge of evil? I'm still curious. If you're in the mood to share, you can email it to me instead (rather than posting it in a public forum). I'm glad a writing seminar worked well for you. I've always thought that I would do very poorly in a setting like that. No particular reason; I think some of it has to do with an aversion to people who are too arty. You know what I mean: people who take it Very Seriously. This is not to say that I don't like reading things with a serious tone; I'm not picky about that at all. I just like to have some sense that the writing ultimately points out, into the world, rather than Into the Depths of the Artist's Soul.

Do you like Derek Walcott? I went through a period about three years ago where I just could not get enough of the man. I read an epic poem of his called Omeros that I thought was astounding. And his short poems rule, also (in my humble opinion). He has a poem called "Upstate" that is the best portrait of Upstate New York I have ever read in print. It's better than anything I could ever do, which is all the more humbling because I spent eighteen years of my life there and he's from the West Indies and apparently collected everything he knows about it from a bus ride. Oh well.

It's okay. Not everybody always understands Kraftwerk and they sound a bit dorky now that it's 25 years later, but at the time it was pretty radical. I thought it was pretty keen (as well as Gary Numan's Replicas) myself when I was but a wee lad. Still, it was like Devo. Inspiring to see, that despite what anybody else thought, you could change the world and still have a dorky haircut.

I realize the phrase "intimate knowledge of evil" is misleading, too bathetic. I guess what I mean to say is that the Polish poets really have a much different perspective than American poets. I think it comes with living in a country that was invaded twice in the last century, then stuck in a totalitarian communist regime for another 50-some years after that. Their fear is not that terrorists will attack or the world will end, but instead that the secret police will one day burst it, their works will be destroyed, or they will be forced into recanting their views. It's a more personal evil, a pervasive fear that strikes gradually, where even friends may be spies, misfortunes are mostly personal, etc. I think this shapes their work (as it did for Brodsky and other Russians). It gives it a more subtle, slightly evasive feel, a love of irony, and they have a real dislike of slogans and manifestos. Plus, they tend to adopt a slight storytelling tone. It's cool.

There were a few people who annoyed me in the seminar. First, there were those who were too stuck on structure. Things had to rhyme or scan just right, but there was nothing much said. There were those who also were too "hungry for stink" as I liked to term it. Everything they wrote was so over the top, so extreme, even Bukowski would've blushed. These were the people for who poetry was a form of extreme therapy. I never much liked them. But most people were cool and supportive. It was nice. I might take it again sometime.

I always feel a little bad when conversations go in the direction where I get to sit around and ask the simple questions with complicated answers, meaning that the other person has to work harder than anyone should in casual company. But I see what you mean, when put in the Eastern European and Russian context. It sounds like stuff that I would like very much. What are some good guys (full names) to check out? I don't have much time for pleasure reading, but poetry and short stories are obviously still fair game.

It reminds me of Bulgakov (do I have that name right--I mean the guy who wrote The Master and Margarita), or one of my most favorite writers, Daniil Kharms, whose work was anthologized very recently. The older, out of print version of his stuff (same translation) was called Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd; the newer edition has a less histrionic title, but the same wonderful, wonderful stuff. I'm really excited, too, that it should be back in print and thus readily available.

Sounds like you had a good group--but some of the people you are describing in it point to my worst fears, which is that I would sign up for such a class and have the majority of the students be people who read too much Bukowski and Burroughs, and then people who just didn't read enough of anything and thought that fiction = autobiography with the names changed. Because I tend to state my opinions too bluntly, I think I would soon earn the animosity of many of the people in the class. Fortunately, I have no time to take such a class in any case, so I'm off the hook in having to prove these points. (Oh yes, and incidentally, I asked what your stuff was like mostly because I really am curious and want to read it, not because I thought you might be looking for a critique. If you gave to me, I really would just read it; I wouldn't get all editor on you. I fully respect your right to say, as the guitarist in our band would say, "when I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you.")

When you say "things had to rhyme or scan just right," what does "scan" mean? It sounds like it has a more precise definition here that I'm unaware of. Does it have something to do with rhythm or meter? And what did the structure people say if the poem was free verse? Or would they just disdain such things as prose with a few extra carriage returns?

All right. Must get coffee.

B

Well, I'm just working so hard because I'm not saying the right things. I'm just stereotyping wildly here, but I have a problem with some contemporary American poets because basically there are a lot of solipsist, a lot of people who just love confessional poetry too much not for any catharsis or any subtle explorations, but because it seems like they want to have problems so they'll be interesting. And there's a lot of bad poetry about sex, bad poetry about politics, bad poetry about working, in general a lot of the self-absorbed flailing our generation is renowned for. I know I sound like a grumpy old man there, and I suppose I am, but you can pick up many student publications to see what I mean.

In one of Zbigniew Herbert's poems, he writes about the execution of five men, and basically asks how people can write about beauty and poetry in the face of such horrors (Adorno said something like "To write poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric")? To resolve this dilemma, he presents synopses of what the five men talked about the night before their execution (things like girls, drinking, food, etc, not philosophy, politics, utopian or dystopian visions) to basically argue why poetry is important, because it "offers to a betrayed world a rose." In Wislawa Scyzmborska's poems, she has works trying to look into the mind of a terrorist, looking at the death of animals or against living like nature. What I like about these poets is that they're not really interested in telling about their first sexual experience, but they're willing to wrap in myths, philosophy, ontology, etc. And they're well aware of anything that's ironic or unresolved. Plus, they both understand the meaning of voice, and aren't afraid to write different poems in different voices (eg, mythological characters, anonymous country residents, terrorists, etc.). Zbigniew Herbert even created a recurring voice called "Mr. Cogito" (hmm, that looks familiar) which resembled him slightly, but was quite firmly not him and not autobiographical. For starters, I'd recommend Zbigniew Herbert's "Notes from a Beseiged City" and Wislawa Scyzmborska (1995 Nobel Lit winner) has a nice volume of collected poems out. Kafka would understand these people. He basically predicted a lot of the absurdity of living under totalitarian regimes, and the way they can totally destroy the best of human nature. They're just trying to find what's left standing in the rubble.

When I say scan, I'm really talking about meter or scansion or vaguely just formatting. We had one person who was so intent on getting these twee little rhymes, everything sounded like it was stictched onto a little sampler, not a poem. On the other hand, you had the radical experimentalists, who like to turn in things that looked like e.e. cummings on acid, but ultimately were just filling out a page with very little to say, instead of expressing much to say in a very few words (like my homey William Carlos Williams could do. Peace!) A lot of us liked free verse though, although it is much harder than it looks. Even if it's free, it's often desirable to establish a certain rhythm with iambs or trochees. A few also experimented with syllabic poems where you have a certain number of syllables on a line. And then there are villanelles. Ultimately form can make your job easier in some ways, but you have to always remember who is driving.

I really don't like Walt Whitman I must say. For reasons, I suggest the earlier discussion of Transcendentalists. He just gets stuck in my craw.

Ooops, I was being a bit unclear about Adorno. He was really arguing against any aesthetic representations of the horrors of the Holocaust, since no matter how negative they may be, they would still diminish the utter evil of the events that actually occurred. Adorno would be really miffed at Spielberg's and Begnini's work over the last 10 years, and it could be argued that his fears are becoming true, and more people don't believe the Holocaust was a bad as it was and/or that all it would take would be the plucky determination of one man to stop such future systems. On the other hand, it could be seen as a sort of irrational fear of depiction/duplication weakening the essence of the original, and the depcition does ensure that even those not directly affected learn some part of the evil that occurred. You can think about that one yourself. In any event, this arguments extends quite readily to the notion that poetry should never talk about anything bad or serious, for fear of that same diminishment. It should all be sunshine and rainbows and lollipops.

But I don't know. I like it when poems tackle the hard stuff. When they gaze unflinchingly into the abysss and distill the essence of the problem. Many people have been turning to poetry in light of the Sept. 11 tragedy, and it's easy to see why. Even although it was a different conflict, Auden's "September 1, 1939" still was eerily relevant for our age today. And there are other such poems both contemporary and older that address the grief, the shock, the need for hope, etc. To ignore that would be to suck the very essence out of poetry. All we'd have left is empty poems about sex or pizza or commercial products.

Wow, Jake. I have never met someone whose aesthetic sensibilities (as least, early Elvis Costello-like, as far as what we don't want) match mine. So now that we're being open: yes, the thing I dislike most about contemporary fiction is the constant relevance of the author's own life, own experience, this sense that one should dwell on the subjective nature of observing things and all that stuff. The thing I don't like about it what I've started calling pointing inward as opposed to outward. Everyone likes a little navel-gazing (and sometimes a lot of navel-gazing is fine, too), but I find that I get very, very tired of that very, very quickly. It's the whole premise behind it--that is, that the author actually matters--that bugs me. It makes the story sort of collapse in on itself. For my money, I want the stuff that points outward, that looks at society, politics, capitalism, religion, people other than themselves, experiences other than theirs. It's what I like so much about Pynchon, Gaddis, and E. Annie Proulx, about Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, and Donald Barthelme: their stubborn insistence that you don't look at what the author is doing or thinking, but at what the author is talking about, what issues they're taking on. I like it when authors go for social criticism, for satire. I like it when authors would rather write about the adventures of a watering can than the physical abuse they suffered as a child. I like it when authors try to understand people that they're not: women who write about men, old people who write about young people, that sort of thing. Of course, a little personal interjection is okay, but I like it best when it's just happy accident. E. Annie Proulx put it very well: "The piece of advice, 'write what you know' is one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever heard. Write abut what you're interested in." I may be misquoting her, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

None of what I'm saying is very radical, obviously; in some ways, it's really old-fashioned: it describes people like Jonathan Swift more aptly than people like Dave Eggers (although I really like Dave Eggers). The point is that having decided what kind of stuff I really like (and want to try to produce some of myself), I realize that I have placed myself in a very small camp. Self-effacement in fiction is not cool these days, especially not unironic, unself-aware self-effacement; as far as I can tell, it has not been cool since the nineteenth century. Maybe this will change in our lifetime, but for now, I'll just stubbornly go along as I please, as you say, like a grumpy old man.

It sounds like we have a rallying cry: Down with Omphaloskepsis! I actually don't like Dave Eggers much (he likes writing that points out too much what a clever guy he is), but I do like some of his contemporaries who know how to write about things besides themselves. As far as I know, Jonathan Lethem is not an orphan with Tourette's who works as an amateur mob detective which has a limo service as its cover, but he creates the character so well in "Motherless Brooklyn." I hate it when authors use characters who are basically them. If I wanted to know about their days, I'd rifle through their diaries, not read their novel. This is why I get a little bit wary of lit-crit that looks at the author's personal life.

Maybe we should write a manifesto...?

I agree with you entirely about Dave Eggers--though we should also keep in mind that he's not writing fiction, he's writing a memoir, so we know going into it that it's going to be all about him. I like Eggers mostly because he's so funny, and so disarmingly candid. The self-self-self-reflexive-reflexive-reflexive pomo stuff got to me after a while, but the brutal honesty (like his unflattering depiction of himself being selfishly annoyed that his mom is dying of cancer) more than made up for it.

I think also that I liked Eggers's memoir because, like The Education of Henry Adams (to which it bears more than a passing resemblance), I thought that he really was trying hard to pull a lesson from his own story, trying to point the book ultimately outward. Whether he succeeded or not I think is up for debate, but I think he gets massive points for trying. Incidentally, The Education of Henry Adams is a great read, an autobiography that seems bent, ultimately, on effacing the subject as much as possible, which is really weird. He writes about himself in the third person all the way through, makes fun of himself constant, belittles his own intelligence, and bafflingly, skips over about twenty years of his life. If you took Adams's version of his own story, you would never know that he was married, had children, that his wife killed herself, that this put Adams into a funk for years, during which he travelled the world aimlessly (feeling bad, meanwhile, about partially squandering the Adams family fortune in this way). Adams doesn't include it, I think, because it doesn't fit the point of the book, which is to show the education of a young man--but the question of "what did he learn from his wife's suicide?" going unanswered--and requiring the eradication of twenty years to show that there was no answer--is very quietly heartbreaking.

I should say that I tend to like just about anything where I think that the writer is excellent (David Foster Wallace's essays, for example, especially this fantastic book review he did a while back where he skewers John Updike); it's when they become less than excellent that my prejudices against certain styles kick in. And the first prejudice is the one against the writing where the purpose ultimately is to show off how clever the author is. As if we gave a rat's a**.

Okay, so that's recommendation number whatever for Jonathan Lethem. I'll have to get around to him after I emerge from grad school's gullet.

Good God, I'm almost late for class.
B

Well, we were planning on perhaps showing up at your gig last night at the Bistro, but we both just felt so dead tired we had to go home, watch the Buffy premiere on tape, and call it an early night. Sorry about that, but I hope it went well. I'm just amazed at what a long and trying week it's been.

Perhaps we could do something this weekend. I have your phone number I think, so if you get woken up at 3 am by someone making clicking noises into the phone, that's probably me.

Otherwise, I don't have much to say. This weekend, I'm going to visit the local library, so maybe I'll pick up some more books myself.

If you have a web browser and some time to kill, I recommend searching for the "Arcata Eye" newspaper online and reading the Police Log. Extremely entertaining descriptions of minor crimes (eg, "Midnight-hour elegance knows no better definition than a scuffle in a mini-mart parking lot."). Clearly, somebody is bored and has a lot of time on their hands. And yes, this is the same town that we stayed near in Northern California.

No worries about not coming. I got there late myself as a matter of fact--I had an editorial meeting at school and had to shuffle on down there as fast as I could. The editorial meeting was for the Journal of International Affairs, a quasi-academic journal put out under Columbia's auspices but actually done by SIPA (that's the school I'm at--the School for International and Public Affairs) students. Doing editorial work for this journal will actually be very similar to the job I had back at the foundation, where you half-edit, half-rewrite some mildly important person's piece for them, it's published in its readable form, and then everybody feels good about having their name on the masthead. The cynical side of one's personality is also assuaged by the realization that many people who should be able to write very well--academics, journalists, policy people--actually can do nothing of the kind, and have come to rely on editors to make their thoughts coherent on paper. It feels a little like a sham, but it's a sham where everyone benefits--reader, author, and publication alike--so who's complaining?

This weekend, actually, is probably going to be a wash for us. Tomorrow, I have classical music rehearsal in the morning, then a private party gig at night (this promises to be fairly crazy). On Sunday, Steph is on call, and I'm hanging out with my international law study group in the evening, where we get to eat stuff and hopefully go over cases. I think you'd find international law really interesting. It has this neat combination of pretty intense logical rigor, and also the sense that everyone is really flying by the seat of their pants. And there's lots and lots and lots (did I say lots?) of politics involved. Plus, it gives you all kinds of ammunition for showing how childish the US of A acts on the international level. There are a couple of cases in particular that are fascinating and kind of infuriating at the same time. They're a little too complicated to summarize on this post--it takes more than a few minutes just to set up the situation so that the weirdness and absurdity can be fully appreciated--but I'll tell you about them some time if you're interested.

Maybe we could get together next week sometime? Hows about we have y'all up for dinner. Or whatever.

We have the Buffy premiere on tape as well, but I haven't watched it yet. Steph is also taping the old Buffy episodes as they are broadcasted on FX. She plans to buy a DVD player once the first-season Buffy DVD comes out, which I think is sometime in January. I really like watching the old Buffy episodes--it's impressive to me how high-quality the show was right out of the gate, and how much it already leaned on the writing and actors. In many ways, it's a lot funnier than more recent Buffy shows. My favorite lines generally come from Giles, but the new principal's lines, good God, they are some of the funniest things I've heard in a while. While talking to Giles: "Kids need discipline today. Oh, my predecessor would never have said that. Kids need understanding, he'd say. Kids are human beings. That's just the kind of woolly-headed touchy-feely liberal thinking that gets you eaten."

Funny you mention the police logs of local papers: I actually waxed prosaic about them recently to a French student in my program. They were saying that it's pathetic how little the average American seems to understand the world. While I agree, I found myself defending my country just a bit: I said that it makes sense because, to a farmer in Iowa (and indeed, for most of the world's population), the goings-on at the international level are really not much of their immediate concern, since they have little say in what goes on at that level and are usually relatively unaffected by what international actors do (the argument holds particularly well for American farmers, who are so protected by domestic policy that they are living in an economic dream world compared to other industries). Politics in America, I said, is geared much more to the local level; that's where things really get done, and that's where political and social interests usually go. Take a look at a local paper in a small town sometime and you'll see (I said to the French student): there is a column and a half--maybe--devoted to news abroad, and that column is usually a good deal shorter than the local police blotter, which I then praised as the highlight of any local paper. The local paper's police monitor in Williamstown was hysterical. It was the one part of the paper that I read religiously. Even when the writer isn't trying to be funny, they are: "Sun, 2:30 am: Police respond to a call regarding indecent exposure in the Cumberland Farms on Route 2. Suspect apprehended in parking lot, released without bail." Priceless.

So I checked out the Arcata Bee police log. Fantastic.

Just in case you missed this one (it was on a Wednesday a while back):

1:35 p.m. A McCallum Circle resident was reported running a power saw "just to make noise." He agreed to quiet down, and a relative was arrested and jailed on charges of public drunkenness and probation violation.

Excuse me. Arcata Eye.

Gramps,

I hope it was a fine weekend for you and not too crazy. The International Law stuff does sound interesting, but I can't help but recall the Simpsons Model UN Episode for some reason whenever I think about it. And then I have mental images of Martin Prince doing Finnish dances and Ralph Wiggum singing "Oh Canada!" as a fight breaks out. And that's usually about as far as I get.

I've been reading a book this weekend, thanks to that miraculous resource known as the library, that you might like. It's by Robert Calasso and it's called the "Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" and it's a vibrant exploration of the Greek myths and the underlying tensions/symbolism that runs beneath them. Wow, these myths were so much more complicated and interesting than what we were taught in grade school (as well as much more sexualized). Not only that, they do provide a glimpse of the various cultures that arose around the Mediterannean. My personal early favorite is a look at the story of Admetus, a king known for his hospitality, sexually beloving Apollo, who will die unless someone takes his place. His wife Alcestis volunteers, and dies but is rescued from the underworld by Heracles. It's a neat little story, but what's cool is that it might be from an older tradition. All that is mentioned about Admetus is that he's hospitable and his name means "Indomitable." What Calasso pieces together is that this may actually be an older story about the Lord of the Underworld about to die. After all, who is more hospitable and indominable than he? He then makes a case for this that's quite impressive and beyond me to recount from memory here. He also looks into religious attitudes, nature, sex, incest, politics, etc. And the myriad metamorphoses that occur both in the myths and they way they're told. The result is a living and breathing glimpse at myths. To the ancient Greeks, the Gods were not abstract entities sitting far away but present whenever one felt pulled by history or possessed by intense feelings. He has another book on Hindu myths "Ka" I'll have to check out next.

Thinking about Greek and Hindu myths actually made me think about how disappointing the monotheistic desert religions we know (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are to me. I guess I always find it offputting the way that sex and nature have been abstracted away in them. It's something that creation is not a procreative act but more a sorting of existing elements with the Old Testament God. This bothers me, because it seems to discount the world being born around us every day. There's also a different attitude towards Death. To be sure, in all religions, death is seen as the unavoidable endpoint of life. But I like the way that the polytheistic Greek and Hindu myths seem to downplay the notion of their being only one correct way to live. Zeus can't lay down the law because he doesn't live it. And I find it fascinating that the gods of death in both religions are there only through accident (Hades is lord of the underworld because he drew the short straw, Yama in Hindu mythology is the god of death only because he happened to be the first person to die). And I love that their inconsistencies sound more like different ways of looking at things rather than errors in didactic instruction.

Sounds like a good one. In college, I studied a good deal of Greek myth and Greek attitudes, and ended up studying rather intensely Celtic mythology and Old English stuff. There were of course far more differences than similarities, but in each of them, the thing that I identified with was each culture's embrace of chaos. That sounds snobby, but here's what I mean. Where one God (I was raised Catholic, so I should know) offered one right perspective on the world, one blah blah blah you know the rest, I liked that a polytheistic religion like the Greek acknowledged not just that there are different viewpoints, but that these viewpoints can come in conflict with each other and create chaos. When some calamity happened in ancient Greece, a deeply religious person would not have wondered why a good God would allow such things, or some other intrspective, paralyzing lines of thought of that sort; they would have attributed it to a conflict among the gods. Chaos, spiritually speaking, was okay; disorder was okay. And the havoc that it created on earth wasn't cause for your inner faith to be shaken, it was cause for outrage against some gods, succor to others. It spurred the Greeks to action, rather than meditation.

In Celtic mythology, this sense of utter chaos was even more pronouced. There, the higher powers aren't even gods, they're folks who inhabit the Otherworld. These, um, otherworldly beings visit Earth and are generally known mostly for their unpredictability. Humans who encounter Otherworldly beings could find themselves transported to a mead-soaked paradise, or turned into a miniature horse, or both. Both good and bad things happen to people all the time, sometimes because the Otherworldly being is mischievious, sometimes through bad luck, and sometimes through no reason at all. A cosmology like that seems much more healthy to me than the Christian tradition America labors under. If you were a Celt, you grew up with the sense that the world is a wild and crazy place, and as a lowly human, your best shot in it was to approach it with a combination of humor and cunning. Where the Christian faiths, as I perceive it, enjoin you to subject yourself to the barbs of the world, Celtic mythology tells you to outsmart it. As much as I like learning things about the world, I like the attitude of Celtic mythology a lot. There's an irreverence there that also somehow displays a very profound acceptance of the crazy things, good and bad, that can happen around here. It's like they threw their arms around the world to pull the wool over its eyes. Or maybe it's the other way around. I should learn not to mix my metaphors.

And don't even get me started on Old English poetry and the worldview it espouses. The study of Old English poetry means the study of Old English (which, regretfully, I've mostly forgotten--which means I won't be able to talk to *anybody* when I go to Old England), and let's just summaize by saying that there is no future tense in Old English, and more important, no way to express the passive voice. Think about *that*. The conversation "What happened to Olaf?" "He was killed." can't happen--the person has to say who killed him. Think of how different politics would be without the passive voice (a concept imported to English from Latin, incidentally--go figure). Think of Pentagon spokesmen.

At any rate, I'm with you. Compared to those rowdy polytheistic religions, monotheism is a real snooze. And it doesn't explain the world nearly as well as the idea that there are tons and tons of forces constantly influencing it, generating chaos.

Heh. The Simpsons as usual is dead on. In reality, international law cases are almost that absurd. Some of the arguments in world courts--and it's telling enough that there are more than one of them--boggle the mind with how obtuse and elliptical they are. The United States has come up with some real doozies, just masterpieces of logically consistent absurdity that would be funny except that they use it to defend, say, the funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, who, as you will recall, were fighting against the first Nicaraguan regime in decades that was actually supported by the people. Spreading democracy throughout the globe. Hmph.

Brian yclept Slattery,

Let's just say, mistakes were made... In any event, I was wondering if I was the only person who found it troubling that our solution for Afghanistan after the Taliban involves setting up a king on the throne. The largest democracy in the world supporting monarchy? But I suppose it's preferable to the rule by warlord, but I'm still a bit vexed.

Reading more now about politics and Sparta. One thing that's striking about many of the sacrifices is that they're not really for the Gods that much as they are for legitimizing State power. And reading about Sparta as Thucydides describes it, it's scary to see how that State functioned in reality behind the myths of the noble laconic hero it constructed for itself. And what's ironic is that Athens itself became one of the biggest believers in the image Sparta projected.

I think monotheism would be less of a snooze if modern Christianity could abandon one of its biggest sticking points, that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good. Then, we can rightly ask, what kind of God would allow these things to happen? And why exactly should he be so concerned about our succumbing to evil when he still hasn't conquered it? And how is it much free will if we're only allowed to live our lives in a narrowly defined way? Rather, if the pope had the cajones to say that God is powerful, but he has these mood swings, or God is all loving, but he's not as strong as he used to be, then I'd have more respect. But I can't really understand how anybody could believe in the giant teddy bear.

What I like is what Calasso describes "that the most terrifying aspect of the Homeric afterlife is its apathy". Unless you were extraordinarily great or extraordinarily bad, you wound up in the same place. This may seem bad at first, but I like it, precisely because it avoids a lot of the heavy moralizing that keeps people from following their own path. And it prevents some holier than thou posturing; would those guys in the park be so obnoxious if they weren't convinced they're headed for a better place than everybody else eventually? Of course, I suppose it also permits much as well, and it should not be followed without forgetting Achilles' claim: "Fat sheep and oxen you can steal; cooking pots and golden-maned horses you can buy; but once it has left the circle of his teeth, the life of a man can neither be replaced, nor stolen, nor bought."

The problem I have with these monotheistic religions (and Calasso has as well) is that they are written to encourage a detachment from the self and a flight from nature, which paradoxically seems to encourage a disregard for others and an exploitation of nature. But then again, it's not entirely a given. Buddhism also encourages such a detachment and flight from the world of illusions, but it still wants to keep the world of illusions and temptations intact.

Ah well, I'm rambling incoherently. Yay chaos!

Or put another way, I really respect a cosmogeny where the rules are set by a God who's the biggest rulebreaker of them all and knows it. Any system where those paradoxes are right out in the open rather than hidden seems cool by me. Peace.

The Force as per Star Wars would be a better explanation of the power behind all the religions of the world.