The Will for Magical Thinking

Some 

drawn 

conclusions 

based 

on 

basic 

epistemological

thought

processes

are 

just 

easier 

than 

others. 

I Lost A Lot of Blood

I need a literary executor, someone to ensure me that if I die my work will be taken care of. Where's my Max Brod? Where's my Stephen Joyce? My Dmitri Nabokov? But if I can't have a literary executor - and really, why should I? - I'd be satisfied with an automobile-driving populace that wasn't a gaggle of ignorant motherfuckers. That way I wouldn't be cut off so often and, as was the case on Tuesday evening on the way to a workshop, thrown off my bike and sent flying onto the latticework of metal grates in the middle of Market Street that cut flesh like blunt knives and leave strange pot-hole-like punctures on the skin. In all likelihood, I may have "required" stitches according to most doctors, but I had neither the time nor the finances to swing that, so it was galloping off to workshop with boatloads of tissues in hand. Workshops can often feel akin to grueling inquisitions on their own merits, but a workshop with blood leaking out of your knee - now that's a whole new experience. If I suddenly die at the hands of one of these ignoramuses on four wheels pulling some harebrained maneuver that's probably illegal, two things are going to follow: a memorable hurricane of expletives from me before I go and an exhaustive amount of work left in various stages of completion.

The above picture is a rarity if I've ever seen one: Kafka and his best friend and literary executor Max Brod, Kafka beaming and shining with the coy exuberance of a shy child. I say rare because it seems Kakfa is one of those writers to have been crowned with the Haunted, Troubled Writer Award, wherein the majority of the reading public, faced with the lack of evidence into who he actually was as a person, extrapolates from both the fiction and the letters he's written and the occasional states of insomnia, illness, and depression he did indeed suffer from that Kafka was a perpetual nimbus cloud of gloom and misery; forget the fact that his writing is often bitingly hysterical, or the rebellion inhered in his characters, or just the general warmth and tenderness he wrote with irrespective of the subject matter and thematic groundwork. Nearly every picture of his used is one of those staring-the-apocalypse-in-the-face portraits. Forget all that other stuff. This is Franz Kafka we're talking about; it's just implausible that he ever had a joyous day in his life. And that just isn't true - nobody is that one-dimensional. So to see a picture of Kafka smiling of all things warms my heart, the genuine and timeless felicity of that captured moment on the beach with his closest friend.

Compare that picture to the artistic representation of Kafka below; oh, the mania! I'm running out of Neosporin. My knee is glistening with antibiotic creams. Fuck cars.

La Tristesse Durera Toujours

Auvers-sur-Oise. I want to go. Terribly bad. A small rural commune 17 miles north of Paris, this rustic setting is where The Netherlands' own Vincent Van Gogh spent his final seventy days, beginning and completing one painting a day outside with the golden wheatfields spread out around him during what would be known as his Auvers period, before finally shooting himself in the chest and dying two days later in the arms of his doting brother Theo. 

I'd known a good deal of Vincent's life, his tribulations and his struggles, but only recently when I sat down to write and complete a fictional story of his strange and ultimately mysterious final seventy days did I truly immerse myself in some the lush and woeful details of his saga and of these final months, which paradoxically were by most appearances some of his finest and most buoyant, when even he had stated that Auvers would be the pathway to his recovery. A common misconception about Vincent is that he was a lifelong painter; the truth is he didn't start painting seriously until late in his life, and his short but prodigious career, despite the total dearth of critical acclaim, is a testament to his talent and desire. The Auvers period was one of his most productive.  

The region, so quaintly and peacefully beautiful as evinced by Vincent's writings and paintings, as well as from more modern pictures I've been able to get ahold of, seems like one of those places begging for a Writers' Colony Retreat or a seminar or one of those lit-head gatherings. It's long been a haven for artists (Cézanne, Pissarro, Daubigny) most likely due to its proximity to Paris while at the same time maintaining a-world-apart individuality. Obviously, it's a bit more urbanized and developed nowadays but not to a great extent. The charm remains; many of the buildings Vincent painted in his day still stand. Below is one of the final paintings, Wheatfield with Crows. Both Vincent and Theo, who died shortly after Vincent and whose body was subsequently moved from its original burial grounds at the wishes of his widow Johanna - one of Vincent's most devoted fans - are buried side-by-side in Auvers, brothers until the end. 

The story of Johanna Van Gogh, Vincent's sister-in-law and Theo's wife, is amazing in and of itself. Much of Vincent's fame is thanks to Johanna, who after the brothers' death nearly devoted her entire life to the promulgation and distribution of Vincent's work. The letters between Vincent and Theo are also attributable to Johanna's assiduousness. "I am living wholly with Theo and Vincent," she penned in the pages of her diary. "Oh, the infinitely delicate, tender and loving quality of that relationship," and by this point I'm just gushing needlessly. La Fin. 

Latterday Auvers-sur-Oise:


The view from Van Gogh's window at L'Auberge Ravoux, where he lived and died:

That Old Purgatorial Beckett

Doing some rereading of Beckett's early fiction and being reminded why I fell helplessly in love with his work a few years back. A couple quotes from one of his first published pieces of fiction, the story "Dante and the Lobster" from the collection More Pricks Than Kicks, when the influence of his fellow countryman, friend, elder colleague, and literary torch-bearer Joyce were most evident and where he had already begun to lay out and mine a lot of the stark thematics he'd go on to so powerfully cultivate later in his brilliant career: 

"Where were we?" said Belacqua

But Neapolitan patience has its limits.

“Where are we ever?” Signora Ottolenghi asks Belacqua. “Where we were, as we were.”

"Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.

It is not."

¿Tienes hambre?

Try nostalgia. Sometimes it's delicious, substantive, a fountain of aqua vitae from which to slake; other times it's poisonous, corrosive, a supermassive black hole.

The differences between an overdose and poisoning are nugatory.

Transportation Woes

So not only does France at large thrash the United States in terms of transportation options available, they also make it look much more enchanting. They, and many other European nations (Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, this is a dead horse I'm kicking) use this attractive lawn track to bring more greenery into the town or city these trains and trams traverse daily, which can do away with some of those unsightly elevated rails chewed away by rust and weather that crop up off the ground; not to mention it can provide opportunities for rapscallions to mow fun shapes and patterns into the tract, as pictured above. This certainly isn't a major issue in terms of nascent transportation planning, but this is demonstrative of that fact that other places around the world care more about widespread, nationwide integration for quick, reliable, and afforable transportation than these Disunited States. As excited as I am for the passed, proposed, and hoped-for future transportation plans drawn for San Francisco and California ( Transbay Terminal to become city-changing, major Union Stationesque hub of intermodal transport featuring at least seven transit providers, high speed Japan-style bullet trains from SF to SD just under 4 hours and for a bargain of $70), there's so much still to be done without even bothering to consider the worrying thought that some of this, as history here has proven, might not ever be accomplished with all the sadly expected political onanism that's bound to come in tow. 

I yearn for a day when I don't have to contemplate eventually emigrating. Or I yearn for the day when I finally do emigrate; that way whenever my name appears in print they'll call me an exile or use that fancy, so-very Nabokovian "émigré."

Oh, Holidays

Three 

cheers 

for

righteous 

imperialism!

I'm by no means a "holiday person." My favorite days are those in which holidays don't occur. That said, Thanksgiving might possibly be my least favorite drudgery to lug through. While that has plenty to do with the tarnished history, embarrassing behavior of early Americans, and the historical inaccuracies, my distaste also has to do with finding the idea rather glib; why do we need a designated day to recognize to whom and for what we're grateful for, and why do we need to conflate gratitude with overindulgence and insatiability? Is there a reason you're practically bathing your chow with globs of gravy? No matter how you arrange it, your food is not a dried canyon; it doesn't need its crevices filled with rivers of slop. Don't you find two slices of pie celebratory enough? Perhaps that last mound of turkey actually was a touch too much? I'd sooner hope to see a holiday where we give our arteries, our cholesterols, our hearts, and our waistlines a much needed respite, treat them all sweet and kind for a day like the deserving honey-babies they are before sending them back to the gastrointestinal hell we've consigned them to. Happy is the man when thanksgiving has gorged itself and left the table. 

The Monogamous Relationship Betwixt Nose & Grindstone

I've been doing mountain ranges of research lately. For this, I've no real attributable reason; it's a task I've been doing, no more, no less. Call it "fun". I can comfortably declare research has become a strange hobby of mine. From the SF Public Library to the bottomless, black-water regions of Google and online research tools I somehow retain access to thanks to either a liberally giving or profoundly inept undergrad technical administration, I've been spending many of my off-writing hours researching for none other than the sake and enjoyment of researching. Just in the past week alone I've studied and read up on the following, spending a few days on each: Pinochet's stranglehold in Argentina; the Shoah and the horrors of WWII in way too much harrowing detail; Indian Removal Act in America and the ensuing Trail of Tears; occultism and Christo-mysticism; random newspaper clippings form the early 1900s, odd, touching, quirky, frustrating and often heartbreaking stories and advertisements found in the Chronicle's library-preserved pages; nuclear fusion and recreating dinosaurs from blood cells, the two of which have nothing to do with each other but are equally as fascinating; and the Greatful Dead. Somehow, all of the above has been influencing my work at large, sometimes in subtle and other times in more conspicuous ways. But that's neither here nor there.

The only reason I provide such a self-important preamble is to equip the following quotes with a context, to answer the likely question that even I myself began to to wonder, which is in fact what prompted this entire post: how on Earth did I stumble upon quotes about Jon Weir, the Grateful Dead's inventive rhythm guitarist, a band whom I've never had much interest in listening to much less learning about? And I'm quite thankful for the discovery.

"He's not a trouble maker as much as he's just different from other people. He was definitely then, as now, marching to his own drummer, and it may not be a drummer."

"Using a commonplace object with a specific tradition differently from how everyone else has used it is an indication of a singular mind."

"I was impressed by their applying themselves so dilligently to finding new ways of handling familiar material, by their responsiveness to each other, their inventiveness, their belief that form would emerge from a context that was still unfocused, and their faith in the music as a means of invoking an intensified and elevated version of experience."

All three of these are interesting to me as examinations and portrayals of an artist and that artist's approach to art. Echoes of Pound's "Make It New" declaration, for sure. Weir wasn't an accomplished guitarist when he began; he wasn't even all that formally trained. He learned to play guitar, and he learned to play in what I imagine was only the most natural way for him to approach the instrument. That's originality, is it not? Devoid of pretense, simply an individual taking his or her own individual approach to their craft and making blissful magic out of it as a result.

Hemingway, when asked to discuss his iconic style in an interview with The Paris Review in 1954, said this: "I might say what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardness in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people can only see the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. " Or consider Faulker's revered style in The Sound and The Fury, where he used four entirely different narratives to tell one story and was heralded as a genius for it, when his own thoughts on the matter were less congratulatory: he tried to write a short story four times and, succeeding none, lumped them together into one. After some serious editing and consolidation and the implementation of compelling interior dialogue to link everything together, voila - masterpiece. What's generally regarded as an artist's brilliant style is none other than that artist's only way, his or her most natural, immediate, necessary, honest, and, perchance at first, ugly means of expression.

"Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom"

Change the Guard

Inspired by what seems now to be weekly streams bearing disgraceful news on the front of America's debilitating fear of homosexuality, I'm proposing a bifurcated solution: One, we admit that the refined, domestic, self-righteous, and overtly didactic heterosexual project of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century has been a colossal failure; two, we make it illegal for heterosexuals to get married and instead only allow gays to wed. Those of whom are already married will be allotted six months to rubbish those vows and separate. Rings will be confiscated and promptly liquidated. Wedding dresses, may they enjoy their newfound form of burnt ashes. Pictures burned as well. If we could obliterate your memories of married life, we would. And when all of this is put together and simultaneously destroyed, we're going ritualistically dance and pirouette like bacchic pagans spurred by wine honoring the earth, lifting our feet off the dirt and throwing our ecstatic hands high, higher still into the sky while the giant conflagration sends up smoke signals to celebrate what we hope will be a landmark victory in the ongoing battle against stupidity.

Marriage statistics aren't glamorous, nor are they comforting. Divorce now appears to be a condition of marriage rather than a deleterious side-effect. And then, as if divorce were a pernicious disease that once established within a particular host persists somewhere inside the body's cells, the rates of divorce increase for those who've already had the pleasure of telling a lover to shove off. On some absurd level, the new American family seems to consist of at least two mothers and two fathers. This is why I have such a hard time swallowing the pill that conservatives and religious fanatics try to force down our throats that the "sanctity" of traditional marriage is under siege, that traditional marriage is being eroded by the malicious gays and their desire for their love to be recognized as equal to that of their straight counterparts, or in the recent Rhode Island case, their desire to have legal sovereignty to arrange funeral proceedings for a domestic partner's deceased love one. That's right; heterosexual marriage is being attacked by dead gays. Traditional marriage, the very idea of it, is nothing but a myth. Marriage has always changed as culture's have changed. There's nothing wrong with divorce. There's nothing wrong with deciding like two adults that at some point things stopped working the way they used to, but to do this and then to at the same time rail away from their lectern about the sacrosanct state of marriage and equate it with something along the lines of a private, inviolable club only open to a very certain privileged group of people is simply dishonest and grossly un-American; furthermore, it's cruel. And if we as a society can do one thing and one thing only, it's avoid cruelty to others at all costs.

If heterosexual marriage were a student, we would have flunked him years ago. We would have given him a few second and third chances, extra credit, tutoring, but ultimately we would have flunked and expelled the sorry patriarch for his shortsightedness. If this were the early 1940s we would have gripped him by the ear and slammed his hollow head against the chalkboard for being so fucking obtuse. Sorry heteros, you failed. You no longer deserve to be married. Had your rhetoric not been so inflammatory and your opinion of yourself not so haughty and moralistic, so deludedly off-base, we may have allowed for exceptions. But no. In addition to being dysfunctional in your attempts, you've also been enormous tyrants. The time has come to allow someone else a try.

We Go Down

Robert Cameron, famous for his Above Series of photography which included cities as far and wide as London, DC, Paris, Mexico City, New York and, both his home and love, San Francisco, died on Tuesday in Pacific Heights. The above picture is possibly one of my favorites, taken of San Francisco's SOMA, South Beach and Financial District, with the rest of this beautiful and raw city smothered in its characteristic dense morning fog at sunrise - notice the sun off in the western distance lifting its groggy little head - a fog that looks like the surface of an entirely alien world. 

His son had this to say about Cameron's final decision to leave the East Coast, a quote I wholly identify and concur with: "He said, 'I'm tired of the frozen winters and the steaming summers. I'm in love with the city of San Francisco, and I want to move there. Who's in?'"

Cameron's work as a photographer and clearly as a lover of this fractured world will be missed.