Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Monday, December 29, 2014
Penthouse Letters Mad Libs.
I mentioned on here awhile ago that I was reading a weird ass little book called “Doggy Bag” by a weird ass man named Ronald Sukenick. Well I finished that awhile ago, but it has stayed on my mind. It is not a book for everyone. I would even be hesitant to recommend it to people who like weird ass books by weird ass little men, but I’m comfortable enough to say that I enjoyed it (or, more honestly, I occasionally really enjoyed it, but generally I appreciated it as a sort of post-modern exercise. When I say “book” I am saying that it was an artifact with a front cover and a back cover and some pages in between and on those pages was printed some text which had originally been written by a man named Ronald Sukenick. The thing wasn’t a novel and it wasn’t a collection of short stories and it wasn’t essays or poetry or travelogues. It was all just a whole bunch of writing. It was occasionally SUPER PRETENTIOUS and occasionally it was boring as all fuck, and occasionally it was needlessly confusing, and occasionally it was just a waste of time. However, when it wasn’t those things, it was great. It is the kind of “book” that starts with what seems like the travel thoughts of the author but then it becomes too weird to be real and then later somehow morphs into this allegorical detective story about “vampires” trying to cure the disease of “zombie-ism”, but really that is about capitalism and how consumerism breeds thoughtless ness (the pun-y wordplay in this section is really lame). Then there was a whole middle section that seemed to be a story that moved between different tellers randomly. One of the latter sections was this ... (I’m choosing my words carefully here) … well-crafted section that is complicated to explain. Essentially it is about this young couple that has a lot of sex and then starts getting into some kinkier stuff (strangers on airplanes, group stuff at fancy tropical resorts, you know the usual) only the writing itself is fragmented. Like, the sentences themselves are fragments. They are not complete. It functions sort of like a dirty, sexy fill-in-the-blank, except once you get the hang of it and you start to think, “Oh, cool, this is just sort of like a Penthouse Letters Mad Libs ...” then some very weird and not-at-all-cool stuff starts to happen. Only it still has all of these broken spots and gaps, so you (the reader) become complicit in this really weird way, with the things that are “happening”. It was a strange and intense read and I don’t think anything I’ve ever read has been that dirty (and occasionally revolting) while simultaneously describing so little. The words that actually appear on the page are not remarkable or dirty at all. They wouldn’t even push a movie into PG-13 territory. All that being said, I’m not sure if that is just a neat trick, or if there is a deeply meaningful lesson there about how our brains construct stories. This is the basic premise behind all of the really good horror movies, right? Show the monster as little as possible, let the audience fill the dark with whatever frightens them. I will say that the “book” has made me think about it quite a lot. I guess that is a good thing. If you ever come across it - maybe in your friendly neighborhood independent bookstore - you should pick it up and hold it in your hand and remember that it is the book I told you about. I am not comfortable recommending that you read it. Let’s be clear about that; you’d can’t come back to me and be all like, “Why did you make me make my brain go through that?!”...
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Being at the airport made me think about this other time I was at the airport.
I saw a Buddhist monk in full-on bare scalped, flowing Saffron glory, smoking a Marlboro upwind of the baggage check the first time I ever flew out of Burbank airport.
That was maybe seven or eight years ago — which I am totally not cool with — and in those seven or eight years I have been living in/around greater LA and I have still yet to come up with a better metaphor for this town than that monk/Marlboro man. Though I guess you could — sorry, this is going to be the fancy-as-fuck-grad-student part of me talking now (sometimes I drop off into gulfs of my own astounding pretentiousness, like, just watch all this trainwreck of grammar that has to happen now ... ) — say that the Marlboro Man himself is just the embodiment of the imagined and idealized American “cowboy” of “The West” and that he has always been a kind of monk, but that of the quintessentially American sort: stoic, strong, with calloused hands from all that pulling he is doing on his bootstraps, and with that unimpeachable moral fiber that good Americans are supposed to have as long as you don’t look too long or too closely. This is all nothing to say of the 10,000 mile stare. I think we ascribe that to monks of every stripe, but the dude I saw puffing away at the airport that day wasn’t staring off into all of eternity. He was just standing there, just like the rest of us, getting one last fix in before going through security, just like the rest of us. So what’s that tell us about our monks?
Anyway.
LA is a weird place and this one time I saw a monk smoking.
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Just to Clarify.
Despite how much I talk about it, I would like to put you at ease and tell you that I am not one of those people who thinks that LA is the center of the solar system. Honestly, I don’t think LA even matters very much at all to anyone who isn’t in LA. I don’t hate the place either though. It would be a pretty cool town if the population was half what it is right now. And this is being said by a transplant and, yes, I get both the irony and hypocrisy of that. Sometimes honesty is hypocritical. Sometimes the way we feel is stupid. Or unfair. Or just dumb. No one you have ever heard of has ever effectively made the case that any moral imperative to be not a hypocrite is biological. That’s just my fancy way of saying that the way you feel and the way you are supposed to feel, are generated by completely separate and unconnected systems. Anybody schooled in Psychoanalytical literary theory would say that that’s wrong and what about all that stuff Freud said about cannibalism and castration?!
Well look, Freud was a weird dude.
Try to argue against that.
Man. I am rambling a lot.
I haven’t even been drinking.
Yet.
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Goals.
In preparation for the new year (2015), I am trying to get in the habit of writing more frequently. The golden rule is to write everyday, but setting that as a goal would be like one of those half-ton-rescued-by-the-entire-fire-department-cutting-a-hole-in-the-wall-people setting the goal of winning a marathon by the end of the year. Which is to say: unreasonable. However, I am trying to write more. I have even started occasionally writing in a little notebook again (which I have not done in awhile). I wrote that part at the top and this part below in that little notebook:
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At the Bar. Money on Dicks.
I’m sitting at a bar at Burbank Airport as I write this. I’m waiting to board a flight to JFK. Today some crazy man in Brooklyn gunned down two cops as they sat in their squad car near the “Tompkins House Public Development” in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Apparently online he said that today he was going to “put wings on pigs” which is actually a fairly complicated statement, from a semiotic point of view. It is actually kind of a cool statement down at the semiotic level. Here “put wings” means to kill, right? Which comes from this cartoon idea that when something dies its ghost soul leaves its body dressed as an angel, in a sort of neo-classical Roman toga and playing a harp. And clearly, “pigs” here just means cops. That is not a complicates association if it is one you already know. I just looked around on my phone for five minutes and couldn’t reliably figure out how it is derived, so like all of language, it makes perfect sense once you no longer have to think about it. Anyway, I like to try to write-off crazy, violence-obsessed, gun-loving, douchebags (of every sort and regardless of which side of the badge they stand on) as plainly and simply stupid, but as an English major I am saddened by this “put wings on pigs” thing because it is actually a pretty successful turn of phrase. I have always contended that a really good phrase is one that we feel like we already know. I feel like I already know this one (really good songs are this way too, I think that is what makes them stick in your brain: they stick in your brain because they lock into empty slots that have always just been waiting there. This is how proteins work too.). I really hope that it does not end up on t-shirts.
The last thing we need is more people being dicks to one another.
I am, by the way, in favor of using vocabulary like “being a dick” or “acting like a douche-bag” in intelligent conversation when it is used to point out that someone is objectively no longer participating in a larger dialogue, but rather just being pedantic, reactionary, stupid, or simply whoring for ratings.
In this way, FOX NEWS is usually just behaving like “a bunch of moist douchebags”. Similarly, the Reverend Al Sharpton is generally “just being a big’ol dick all the time”. I keep trying to explain to my professors that I feel it is perfectly acceptable to write my research papers this way. Quite often though they respond by being “douchey dicks” about my grade.
It is completely true that all this cop-on-not-a-cop violence needs to stop, just as it is as completely true that all this crazy-person-on-cop violence needs to stop. But how much do you want to make a bet that over the next couple of weeks we aren’t actually going to be talking about any of that? How much do you want to make a bet that we’re all just going to be “dicks” to each other?
My money is on dicks.
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Still at the Bar.
There is a girl across the bar from me with bottle blond hair that looks more like metal than sunlight. She’s wearing black tights and a red, blue, and black flannel, but she’s too young to actually remember that flannel was a socio-political statement once — in so far as anything for which one has to pay can really ever exactly be a socio-political statement other than “Yay Capitalism!” — and she just noticed me looking at her and now she is aggressively not looking at me. It makes me want to be all like, “No! But I am not one of those guys! I’m okay! I’m all about the #yesallwomen thing!” But, alas, that is the point, isn’t it? We judge other people based on their behavior but we only judge ourselves based on our intentions.
So. I am a creepy guy at the airport, I guess is the point of this post.
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Still Still at the Bar.
The grown man in the backward baseball cap who just sat down to my right ordered a Jameson and ginger ale and chicken parmigiana. I don’t know that it would ever occur to me to order those two things together, much less in an airport bar.
Also, now he is looking at that blond girl and he is being WAY creepier about it than I was.
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Saturday, December 27, 2014
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Saturday, December 13, 2014
The Art of Daily Life.
Right now I am reading a strange
little collection of what can only generously be described as “stories”. The
collection is called Degenerative Prose and it takes its cues from the “Avant-Pop”
movement which apparently was a thing back when it looked like the rise of the
internet was going to make the world into a peace-loving intellectual commune
of anarcho-hippie. Little did they know back then that the internet was really
just going to be the most effective means of distributing cat videos and
porn that mankind has ever devised.
At this moment I am reading
something like an “essay” by a woman calling herself “Eurudice” and I just came
to this passage which I really enjoy:
There is no greater art than the art
of daily life. The talent for living well is the most substantial; so I try to
fashion my life as I would create a text, driven by sheer desire and
imagination, with no regard to rules, limits or fears, feasting on this
bottomless world.
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Desultory.
Last
night I worked until midnight in a part of the college library where I don’t
normally work. It was a strange and quiet and desultory experience. I kept my
four Twitter followers up-to-date on it in real time. Below are my notes. And
below those is a picture of what it looked like as I walked to work.
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Notes from the Late Night Library.
Notes
from the Late Night Library
by james
bezerra
Notes
from the late night library, hour 1: finals stress smells like sweaty coffee. A
girl bought a calculator from the vending machine.
Notes
from the late night library, hour 2: a febrile, moist-eyed psych major borrowed
our scotch tape. He has not been seen since.
Notes
from the late night library, hour 3: So quiet here I can hear the ASL students
signing. I think they're talking about me.
Notes
from the late night library, hour 4: Fatalism sets in. An escalator stopped
working, two students just stood there, marooned.
Notes
from the late night library, hour 5: No one is saying there are mimes hiding in
the stacks. That isn't a rumor. Don't look for them.
Notes
from the late night library, hour 6: As I'm leaving, see a pizza guy
delivering. People he passes look up, angry and envious.
Friday, December 12, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Friday, December 5, 2014
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
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