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Friday, October 21, 2016
Loosely.
I wrote some poems today. I have not written any poems in a long time.
Let me remind you that I use this word “poems” pretty loosely and with no concern whatsoever for quality.
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On Tom Waits.
On Tom Waits
By James Bezerra
Implacable American lovechild
Bukowski and Dylan
and gravel
lonesome;
growly ash
and noise gourmet
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On Smoking.
On Smoking
By James Bezerra
As with many things
it helps
if
while doing it
you are beautiful
and young.
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On Sloths.
On Sloths
By James Bezerra
Sloths are quick
swimmers.
This is not
a poem,
but a delightful
fact.
but a delightful
fact.
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On Applying Karma as a Luxury Tax.
On Applying Karma as a Luxury Tax
By James Bezerra
Yachts
may not
carry
lifeboats.
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Haunted.
I had to do a writing exercise for one of my classes. The prompt I went with basically required writing something that is “haunted by cinema”. This phrase “haunted by cinema” sums up an idea that is commonly discussed in writing classes: that movies have had a dramatic effect on the way that narrative writing works. There are things that movies do very well, like convey motion and action and the visual, things which written words do not do as well. Sometimes narrative writing tries to adapt itself to the strictures and functions of film and a lot of people would say that doing so undercuts the things writing can do that movies can’t (interiority, history, examination, etc.). So that is where this phrase “haunted by film” comes from.
The exercise below is not terribly good, but I tried to steer into the skid by invoking the logic of movies while using language that movies normally don’t have access to.
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The Building in 6 Scenes.
The Building in 6 Scenes
By James Bezerra
In reality, the building is old.
Two stories of damp brick resting on a story of gray stone and masonry.
Pre-war.
Which war?
Who could know these things?
Which wars?
Twenty small units inside. The wood floors still original, largely. Inartful patchwork ribbons of wood around the radiators, which were replaced after one of the wars, but before one of the others. In 205, the second floor at the back corner, facing out at the rainy dog park, an obese cat like a roly-poly panther, weighs enough to make the floors creak as she trumbles over to the window, focuses up at the windowsill, tenses her girthy body. Leaps. Lands there, skitteringly. Plops her body and gazes out at the dogs; dashing, darting, leaping. Dogs. Idiots.
In the French New Wave story of the building, the aluminum sink - clearly not original - leaks. It drips. It drips. It drips.
It drips.
It.
Drips.
Drip.
The woman who lives in this entirely black and white apartment - 306 in the back, also facing the park, but in the center of the side of the building - is a typical femme. She leans against the soft old wood of the window frame. She gazes out, her small mug of black coffee in one hand. A hand-rolled cigarette in the other. Her silk robe drawn only loosely across her body. She is looking out at a man playing with his dog as she might once have with a child. He is simple in is good looks. He looks up and sees her looking at him. They share this gaze together. Because rain is tittering the glass of the window, he can not tell if she is crying, but he thinks that she is. He calls to his dog and he leaves the park.
In the Noir story of this building, the men wait in 301, third floor at the front right corner. From there they can peer down into the street at the parking spots below. The men have the lights off, so that she will not know that people are in her home. One of the men is tied to a chair. His own desk chair. He is bleeding from his face, which is pulpy, but this scene is not violent. All the violence has already happened or is about to.
The other two men - one of them has big bloody knuckles, the other has a gun - are smoking the cigarettes they found in the desk. “When does she normally get home?” One of the men asks.
“She’s not coming home tonight,” the man in the chair tries to weakly lie, which is brave in its useless way, because he knows it means they will hit him again.
In the Horror film version, the camera is low on a dolly and moves frictionlessly around the halls, looking slightly up. It is the glide of a small ghost around the building. The shot moves through a door and into 108, first floor at the front corner of the building. Bars on the windows because these windows are at street-level. The building having been built back when such a thing was not terrifying.
The ghost shot comes slowly to rest on a blacked out corner of of the closet where there are small skittering animal noises. Rats fighting there in the darkness. Shrill little squeaks, aggressive. One rat dashes away. Slowly a larger, grislier rat wanders out of the dark corner. It is dragging something, a wet tendril of some kind. It wanders further from the darkness. The tendril is an optic nerve, a small pretty human eye dragging at the end.
In the American romantic comedy, the building always smells like cookies.
“I love my new building,” she says into her cell phone as she checks her mail, “it always smells like cookies.” She is exactly as young and vibrant and charming and plastic-perfect as she is supposed to be.
She reaches back into the metal shoot of her mail box and a quizzical expression passes across her face, “Did you send me a package?” She says into her phone.
She removes a small box.
“Oh,” she says, “you didn’t. It isn’t for me. It is for my neighbor.”
She knocks on the door of 205. The man who opens the door is exactly as young and vibrant and charming and plastic-perfect as he is supposed to be. The fall in love, experience some initial difficulties, then overcome them and everything is perfect, more or less, forever.
In the documentary, they open with an establishing shot of the building. It is two stories of damp brick resting on a story of gray stone and masonry. Cut to a lingering shot of the front door of the building. The door opens, a French woman steps out and puts on her very dark sunglasses. She moves left out of frame.
The door falls slowly closed behind her.
A young couple, clearly in love, enter from the right side of the frame, carrying grocery sacks brimming with fresh and colorful things. They pull the door open and go inside.
The door falls slowly closed.
It goes on like this for awhile.
Two large, hulking men exit the building, hands in their pockets, and shuffle hurriedly away.
The door falls slowly closed.
A couple of rats skitter through the corner of the shot.
The voice over begins:
In reality, the building is old.
Two stories of damp brick resting on a story of gray stone and masonry.
Pre-war.
Which war?
Who could know these things?
Which wars?
Twenty small units inside. The wood floors still original, largely. Inartful patchwork ribbons of wood around the radiators, which were replaced after one of the wars, but before one of the others. In 205, the second floor at the back corner, facing out at the rainy dog park, an obese cat like a roly-poly panther, weighs enough to make the floors creak as she trumbles over to the window, focuses up at the windowsill, tenses her girthy body. Leaps. Lands there, skitteringly. Plops her body and gazes out at the dogs; dashing, darting, leaping. Dogs. Idiots.
CUT
In the French New Wave story of the building, the aluminum sink - clearly not original - leaks. It drips. It drips. It drips.
It drips.
It.
Drips.
Drip.
The woman who lives in this entirely black and white apartment - 306 in the back, also facing the park, but in the center of the side of the building - is a typical femme. She leans against the soft old wood of the window frame. She gazes out, her small mug of black coffee in one hand. A hand-rolled cigarette in the other. Her silk robe drawn only loosely across her body. She is looking out at a man playing with his dog as she might once have with a child. He is simple in is good looks. He looks up and sees her looking at him. They share this gaze together. Because rain is tittering the glass of the window, he can not tell if she is crying, but he thinks that she is. He calls to his dog and he leaves the park.
CUT
In the Noir story of this building, the men wait in 301, third floor at the front right corner. From there they can peer down into the street at the parking spots below. The men have the lights off, so that she will not know that people are in her home. One of the men is tied to a chair. His own desk chair. He is bleeding from his face, which is pulpy, but this scene is not violent. All the violence has already happened or is about to.
The other two men - one of them has big bloody knuckles, the other has a gun - are smoking the cigarettes they found in the desk. “When does she normally get home?” One of the men asks.
“She’s not coming home tonight,” the man in the chair tries to weakly lie, which is brave in its useless way, because he knows it means they will hit him again.
CUT
In the Horror film version, the camera is low on a dolly and moves frictionlessly around the halls, looking slightly up. It is the glide of a small ghost around the building. The shot moves through a door and into 108, first floor at the front corner of the building. Bars on the windows because these windows are at street-level. The building having been built back when such a thing was not terrifying.
The ghost shot comes slowly to rest on a blacked out corner of of the closet where there are small skittering animal noises. Rats fighting there in the darkness. Shrill little squeaks, aggressive. One rat dashes away. Slowly a larger, grislier rat wanders out of the dark corner. It is dragging something, a wet tendril of some kind. It wanders further from the darkness. The tendril is an optic nerve, a small pretty human eye dragging at the end.
CUT
In the American romantic comedy, the building always smells like cookies.
“I love my new building,” she says into her cell phone as she checks her mail, “it always smells like cookies.” She is exactly as young and vibrant and charming and plastic-perfect as she is supposed to be.
She reaches back into the metal shoot of her mail box and a quizzical expression passes across her face, “Did you send me a package?” She says into her phone.
She removes a small box.
“Oh,” she says, “you didn’t. It isn’t for me. It is for my neighbor.”
She knocks on the door of 205. The man who opens the door is exactly as young and vibrant and charming and plastic-perfect as he is supposed to be. The fall in love, experience some initial difficulties, then overcome them and everything is perfect, more or less, forever.
CUT
In the documentary, they open with an establishing shot of the building. It is two stories of damp brick resting on a story of gray stone and masonry. Cut to a lingering shot of the front door of the building. The door opens, a French woman steps out and puts on her very dark sunglasses. She moves left out of frame.
The door falls slowly closed behind her.
A young couple, clearly in love, enter from the right side of the frame, carrying grocery sacks brimming with fresh and colorful things. They pull the door open and go inside.
The door falls slowly closed.
It goes on like this for awhile.
Two large, hulking men exit the building, hands in their pockets, and shuffle hurriedly away.
The door falls slowly closed.
A couple of rats skitter through the corner of the shot.
The voice over begins:
V.O.
It is a pre-war building ...
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Monday, October 17, 2016
In Need of a Patron Saint.
I have been having a few difficult days.
Only in my head though.
It is a kind of vicious irony. For so long one of the only things I knew I really wanted was to get into an MFA program. AND I DID IT! I am in one and it is a good one and it is in Portland and that is awesome and - therefore - I am awesome.
But being here has been hard. It is hard to move very far away to a very different place and to do it alone. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I am someone who has had to restart his life more than once. Turn-it-off-and-turn-it-back-on. For some strange reason, I feel like that is what I am doing here right now.
I heard a TED Talk the other day with a writer named Lidia Yuknavitch and she was reflecting on her success - or lack thereof - over the course of her life and she said something like, “How many times I have had to reinvent myself from the ruins on my choices …” and because I was in a sour and blue Hamlet sort of mood I thought to myself, “You tell ‘em sister. I know what you mean.”
It occurred to me almost right away though how much of a self-involved idiot I am. From the back of my brain came the voice of that part of me that actually has goals and stuff and it said, “You are not here all sad and lonely because of the ruin of your choices, you dumb shit. You are here because you are one of the relatively small percentage of people who got accepted to one of these things. Of course you are feel isolated, you don’t know anyone in this state and you have been here less than a month. Stop being such a self-pitying jag-off.”
I had to concede that all of those were good points.
Now, that does not mean that the clouds parted and the shown down upon my face and I smiled. Let’s be clear, much of my difficulty is external. To make a long story short - and say it with me if you have heard this one before - : there is never enough money.
I am not starving (yet), but I’ve had constant struggles with the admissions, housing, and financial aid offices, I have not yet been able to find a job, I feel like the other people in my program have figured all this stuff out already (although objectively most of them clearly have not), I’m kind of pissed that this program has not (thus far) given me the support (financial, emotional, or professional) that I was expecting, and - because I am given to flights of geopolitical grandeur - I look at these problems and at most of the chapters of my life and see that the source of most of my life stress has been money - just normal fucking money - and how the hell does it make any sense to build a society where such a thing could be true?
A couple of years ago, when I was in a similar predicament while getting my MA, I tweeted, “This starving artist thing looked a lot better on paper.”
On top of everything else, I had a terrible and nasty cold about two weeks ago (it knocked me on my ass for several days) and I just have not been able to kick the sniffles and the cough. So it has been two weeks now that I have been some amount of sick.
There should be a patron saint I can pray to about these things.
I walk around downtown Portland when I need to clear my head and downtown Portland is full of homeless people. They are just all over the place. Recently I had a conversation with a native Portlander who was complaining about the population boom of homeless people and he said, “I hate them. I just hate the homeless everywhere.” And he explained why and I guess I could understand where he was coming from, but I do not hate them, in fact when I wander around, they make me bashful and a little afraid because I think about how easily I could become one f them. There is some hyperbole to this, but not much. I may not be living on the knife edge of poverty, but I live close enough to it that I can peer over the edge.
So like I said, this starving artist thing looked better on paper.
I know that this raincloud I feel like I’m living under is a combination of being alone in a distant place, being somewhat disappointed by the reality of my program (as opposed to the fantasy land I’d imagined it to be), worrying about money every third thought, and then feeling generally as though my life has been a series of violent, disaster-averting hairpin turns rather than a steady and progressive movement forward.
Maybe it is all of us, or maybe it is just me, but I have this thorough feeling of un-accomplishment. Of disappointment in myself for all of the things I have wanted to do but been unable to do, so far. This is different than imposter syndrome (which everyone loves to talk about now). It is just run-of-the-mill disappointment. So common it is barely even worth commenting upon, which is kind of heartbreaking in its own way.
Now all that being said, there are cures for all of these ailments. Obviously perspective is one (I’ve been here only about a month and I should chill the fuck out about rainclouds and disappointment). Another is exertion (a week from now I should be able to start running again and until then I should knuckle down and do all this schoolwork instead of feeling sorry for myself). Attitude is probably the final cure for what ails me (Yes life can be difficult sometimes, but feeling sorry for yourself just makes it harder. So turn that frown upside down, asshole).
Anyway, I am going to go do stuff now while attempting to maintain a positive attitude.
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Saturday, October 15, 2016
LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF ME DOING A READING!!!
I look terribly fat here and I was SO nervous, but it was a fun night.
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Thursday, October 13, 2016
I Know a Fancy Word!
For one of my classes I had to write an ekphrastic exercise. It is a pretty standard writing prompt. You take as your subject a particular thing (often a piece of art) and you use that as a starting point or as a central theme or as a structuring device. Basically you use the first thing as a jumping off point to do something else. Ekphrastics are pretty common in poetry (“Ode to a Grecian Urn” anybody?).
I’ve had the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch on my mind lately because there is a documentary coming out about him and I keep reminding myself that I need to catch it when it is in town. And because he was a super weird fucking dude. Kind of a mash-up of Dante and Salvador Dali.
So I decided to start with Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights". The results are below.
By no means am I claiming this is any good. It just happens to be a thing I wrote today.
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Earthly Delights.
Earthly Delights
By James Bezerra
Hell as television. This is the thesis.
We find the sins of others titillating, erotic even. We also like it when they’re punished for them.
I had to fly all the way to Madrid to see this thing.
Let’s look at it:
It is a triptych. A three-part painting on three wooden panels. Left, center, and right. The center panel is twice the width of the first and third panels. The first and second panels are odd green landscapes populated by many long naked figures as pale as ghosts. We take it all in from a distance, as if we are watching from a hot air balloon, something which didn’t exist in in 1490 when Hieronymus Bosch painted these. The first two panels are strange. In the background, something like a submarine rises from the water of a lake. At each corner of the lake sprouts a pink castle shaped like a lung, or a maybe gallbladder. In the foreground, a nude man and woman sit in a clear bubble that seems to be formed from the mucus membrane of a flower. His hand rests on her abdomen, below her belly button. Her hand sits restlessly on his arm. Elsewhere, a creature like a white giraffe with a bird’s head looks down into another lake, at the center of the lake stands something that is either a spacecraft made of meat, or an armor-plated sea creature. The panels are very busy and border on indescribably weird.
The third panel is different than the first two. It is darker both in color and in tone. There is no blue sky here, no rolling green landscapes. At the black horizon there is smoke lit only by the glow of distant fires. In the center of the third panel is a figure my professor used to call “The Tree Man”. He is only the torso of a man. Oriented away as if doing a push up. His arms plant into the ground like tree trunks. His chest has been cleaved open and inside the dry cavity three red figures sit at a table while a milk maid tried to open a barrel of milk. The Tree Man looks back at us over his shoulder. His expression seems to ask, “Who are these people inside of me?”
Below him are scenes of bizarre and intriguing torture. A naked man flayed on a giant harp. A naked man whose throat is being eaten by cats with lizard tails. A naked woman being grabbed from behind by a demon that might be a tree - it is hard to tell - as it drags her into the darkness.
For most of humanity’s time on this planet, we did not have television.
That is the first most important thing that no one teaches in any history class.
The second most important thing that no one teaches in any history class is that for most of our history, water was a dangerous thing to drink. Beer and ale and mead and wine were much safer. During virtually every moment of our modern history, the key players were drunk. We make so much more sense once you know that.
Prior to the invention of television, we had inferior forms of distraction. Books, but you had to know how to read. Paintings, like this one, but that’s not what this really is. It is called The Garden of Earthly Delights and there is so much to it, some many small vignettes - so many people naked or suffering or prancing or touching - that the eye can’t help but move, to flit from scene to scene, to experience this moment then that one, then that one, then this one. It tricks the brain and conjures the quality of movement and you realize that Bosch invented the first television. And you are here in the Museo del Prado watching it and the only thing on TV is a Christian horror flick.
That churches and theaters have essentially the same floorplan is not a coincidence. Your living room is aimed at your television for the same reason.
We find the sins of others titillating.
And we like to watch them punished.
In the center of the center panel is a round lake and dozens of very pale, very young women stand knee deep in the water. A human figure as black as night makes them balance apples on their heads.
At the bottom right of the right panel, a pig in a nun’s habit tries to kiss a nude man studying scripture.
At the top of the third panel a set of floating human ears wields a large knife.
On the plane crossing the Atlantic I watched a cop show about a man who murdered female joggers in Central Park. Then I watched a movie about a man who abducted a woman and wore her skin around his house.
In the center of the left panel the pre-incarnate Christ is presenting a kneeling naked Eve to Adam, who lounges leisurely on a hillside.
My hotel TV offers incredibly expensive American porn films that have been dubbed into Spanish. They have English subtitles.
The right side of the third panel depicts a blue bird-like figure swallowing humans whole and then shitting them out through some sort of pale amniotic sac. They pass through the lining of the sac and fall through a hole in the ground. Anguished and barely visible faces gaze up through the hole.
I sit here in this gallery staring at these three panels.
I can’t turn them off.
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Monday, October 10, 2016
On Fancy Bags.
When I was properly college-aged I spent about zero time on college campuses. Later in life, having abandoned my adulthood to be a properly starving artist, I have spent a lot of time on college campuses.
I am always envious when I see the Art students moving purposefully across campus with their big black portfolio cases slung over their shoulders. Quite automatically an unreasonable thought always zings through my mind and makes me want to holler after them, “I want to do a thing that requires a big special bag!”
Now I’m sure that those bags are a huge hassle and pain in the ass, especially if you have to take the bus or if there is a gust of wind, but still, they are kind of cool, right? I also like those long black (or sometimes ever dark leather) tubes that (in my mind at least) carry to transport blueprints and stuff.
At first I thought that maybe I have some secret desire to be a visual artist (like a painter), but now that I am being honest, I think that what I really want is just a really specific bag. I mean, I’m a writer. I always carry a good pen and a little notebook, but those don’t exactly scream, “LOOK AT HOW FANCY I AM!”
There is a great scene at the end of the movie Naked Lunch where Peter Weller (sort of playing William Burroughs) gets stopped at a quasi-Soviet border and the borderguard asks him what his business is. Weller says, “I am a writer” and the borderguard asks him to prove it and so he holds up a pen and says, “I have an implement of writing.”
I can’t just go around saying that to people. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.
Shortly after I moved to LA a million years ago I saw a guy in the Starbucks near Melrose and Fairfax wearing a black ballcap and that said in white letters: Writer. Man did I mock the crap out of that guy in my head while I waited in line and he pretended to work on his screenplay. Keep slinging that buddy, one day we will all believe you.
This why I need a fancy (but not ostentatious) bag to announce me!
(If you can’t tell yet, I am writing this post so that I can put off doing other work that I need to do.)
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Saturday, October 8, 2016
Friday, October 7, 2016
A Very Boring, But Largely Accurate Poem.
A Very Boring, But Largely Accurate Poem
By James Bezerra
I am sick
and waiting for
rice to boil.
My life
this second inspires
uninspired poetry.
It is raining
and that affects my mood
not at all.
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An Odd Rainy Wonderland.
An Odd Rainy Wonderland
By James Bezerra
This odd and
rainy wonderland
of
sudden sidewalk
tent cities,
of
oddly expensive milk,
gas station attendants,
of
old pretty peaked homes
glimmering wet all day,
of
dense and ubiquitous forests
of tattoos on white skin
of
this place I feel
as I feel about Millennials:
envious, hopeful
quietly doubtful.
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I Think My Cat is Depressed.
I Think My Cat is Depressed
By James Bezerra
My cat
spends all day
sleeping.
My cat
experiences violent, rapturous
mood swings.
My cat
does not want
to talk about it.
My cat
glares at me,
claws back at my affections.
My cat
may be depressed.
Or is just a cat..
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